Octavia's life had—as ridiculous as it felt to say—gone by astoundingly quickly. Why, it felt like just yesterday that she'd been sitting on her recently purchased black sofa with a glass of hard wine on the coffee table before her; twenty-five whole ounces of sorrows drink that certainly wouldn't have been enough for her tall and fancy glass, if the white envelope sitting back-end skyward next to the two held any immediately recognizable sign of denial. Her throat, achingly dry and just crying for prissy alcohol, quivered and stuttered as she had simply stared at the life-stakingly important document surely tucked neatly inside the envelope's folds. It had been a long few months trying to work her way up to even looking at the item laying in front of her, and yet she had all but pushed it away and quietly drank her anxiety away.
As luck had had it, in the witching hours cramped inside that apartment in lower Canterlot, Octavia Philharmonica had been welcomed as a new member of the Canterlot Symphony, and was to head over to the admittedly distant concert hall to start her first day of rehearsal. With an ear-to-ear smile on her face, her bass in its case towed next to her by a hoof, and her posture straightened in preparation, Octavia had walked out her door to continue what she was born to do: play the bass, and play it well. She'd been twenty-one at the time—and actually on her way to twenty-two—and so there had arisen one very little problem, she realized, heading into her new career.
There had been many an internal fight waging in her head, one side supporting being a nice newbie and arriving at rehearsals on time, and the other side belittling such a thing so that she could go and get incredibly drunk. One could very easily bring up both factions in their hooves, hum a nice tune, bring them up and down like some sort of dumbbells, and press their lips together to say very simply, "Octavia, are you ill?" Of course, why would anypony in their right mind decide that drinking was a lot more important than the job they'd worked so hard to get? Octavia did in fact value the Symphony a lot more than unnecessary debauchery, but it really hadn't been called an "internal fight" for nothing.
So it seemed to Octavia, and so it was that she just had to prod a hoof at and question the employee walking past her table.
"Excuse me?" The aproned mare's ears perked up as she slowly trotted back to face Octavia with a new grin on her face. Showmanship and politeness, Octavia knew, but this wasn't a time to go and ridicule such... convenient establishments. Placing a smile of her own on her lips, she brought a hoof up and asked, "Do you have the date and time?"
"Of course, ma'am!" Turning around and staring at the clock, she droned, "Uh... well it looks like it's about eleven forty-five right now..." She about-faced and tapped a hoof to her chin in full view. "So, about eleven forty-five on the seventeenth of May. Saturday."
Octavia's eyes bugged out of her head, but the Pegasus apparently didn't seem to even notice.
"Was there anything else, ma'am?"
Octavia, deciding to pause for a brief second or two before answering, slowly leaned her head forward and rubbed her eyelids with a pair of hooves. Oxygen coming out in heavy bursts out of her nose, she continued this motion of hers unopposed for the span of five unintended seconds, leaned back, dragged the appendages down her cheeks and exposed bright red to the bakery's inhabitants, blinked rapidly, turned her head back to face the employee, and, with her hooves pressing against her jaw and forming a pocket of heat around her lips, quietly replied, "No thank you."
With a way-too-friendly-for-what-she-had-just-witnessed, "You're welcome," the mare retreated further into her wonder of a bakery with its fine lineup of cheese-filled bread rolls and herb-ridden pitas.
Octavia's attention reverted back to her coffee and bagel, but the realization of where she currently was in the tunnel of time was still fresh and haunting in her brain.
"You alright, Octavia?" That question seemed to come up a lot, didn't it? It was more than troubling, but, well, what else was there to expect when Octavia really didn't want to be out and about out here in the first place?
She cleared her throat and steadied her stuttering chest with a hoof. "Not really, but I'm getting there."
Lavi turned her way, brow fixated in a curious position. "Why's that?"
"I just realized what day it was."
Valkyrie chimed in from next to Lavi, her incredibly-acclaimed cup of joe cradled in her claws. "That a big deal or something?"
Octavia fiddled with her lips thoughtfully, eyes staring down at the table's interestingly fine-crafted surface. "I've been away from home for five days."
Lavi sucked in a breath. "Ooh geez, when did you leave?"
She'd thought it had been a Sunday, but, "Middle of the twelfth, I believe." The twelfth was a Monday, if her internal calculations proved right. Had she really been thrown into that wagon on a Monday, though? She could have sworn it was a Sunday; that's why she had thought nopony had been outside to rescue her. They'd all been at church service, right? She hummed to herself, mind racing to try and fit the puzzle pieces together, but Valkyrie interrupted her.
"Five whole days? God, I wish we'd be home after five days..."
"Would you count the day she'd left as one, though?" T asked from across Valkyrie, claw currently grasping the torn end of a baguette.
"Pretty sure you do," Valkyrie replied.
"I don't think so," Lavi piped up, "she was in her house that same day, so that whole day didn't count."
"But it's, like..." Valkyrie began, looking to the ceiling as she counted up with her talons, "...that's how you do it. From, like, twelve on that day, to twelve now, it would be five."
"It's five, Lavi," W said across Octavia, elbows resting on the table to support the evil-mastermind-looking placement of his claws.
"Are you sure?" The griffon in question asked, scratching the back of her feathered head, "I feel like that's wrong."
As the others dabbled in observantly loud banter, Octavia—in the meanwhile—was behaving herself rather nicely, now that her revelations had ended. Though the shake in her hooves as she sipped at her coffee and the small lack of satisfaction that she was met with while gulping it down was still very much there, her quiet demeanor and half-lidded eyes told many promises that she was very content with just keeping to herself at the moment. Here she was, in a random bakery in—what—downtown Baltimare, with a quartet of griffons and a Unicorn sitting down at the same table, and with home miles and miles and a few clattering bits away from her, all of it seemingly fading away with the crunch of her freshly toasted bagel and a swig of her sugared coffee.
Valkyrie as well, as surprising as it was, was still rather downplayed in terms of, well, herself. Even though she was still a tad... rambunctious, it was in no way close to how she usually acted. Perhaps Octavia could try depriving the griffon of her coffee every day...
The sounds of the griffons' still raging conversation/argument about her total away time continuing, Octavia allowed herself a smile, picked up her mug, and drank it of its contents. Sighing into the soothingly breezy interior of the building, she rested her forelegs on the table and balanced the mug with her hooves. A chill running down her spine as she adjusted her position on her chair, Octavia looked to her right to find a rather peculiar sight.
Sesame Seed, his goatee ever-so-slightly waving in the slow wind, was silently staring at the two slices of buttered white toast laid out before him on his plate, eyes wide and posture positively stationary. It was like he was looking at a single, burning candle hundreds of yards away across a nice grassy plain in the night, he was so fixated on it. Octavia blinked first, followed very unintentionally shortly by Sesame, who opened his mouth, waited for a second, and spoke.
"I'm feeling kinda... weirded out."
Octavia smirked. "Why's that?"
"I mostly just ate at, y'know, Breezie's back in Tall tale." Bringing a hoof up to grab at one of his forks, he prodded a corner of his toast and added, "I'm actually eating breakfast food."
As Octavia craned her neck back an inch and silently envied him, Valkyrie suddenly leaned forward in her seat. "I'm surprised you're not fat then, dude," She said, swiveling her head around as if it were a socket wrench and staring straight at Octavia, "unlike Octavia here."
Lavi snorted.
Octavia blinked away the questions and insults that threatened to escape her mind. She wouldn't have another Calamity Mane incident.
"You literally called me skinny not half an hour ago."
"Well," Valkyrie began, sitting back in her seat and grabbing one of her rolls of bread, "I revise my statement."
"How did you even hear that?" Sesame questioned, looking at Valkyrie out of the corner of his eyes.
"We're birds, Sesame," Lavi responded, brushing the feathers out of her sights.
Though Octavia knew that Valkyrie was merely pissing around with her, and possibly only half meant what she had said, the mare still curled a foreleg up and examined it all the same. It looked fine to her. Was what griffons deemed... fat skewed due to their large size? She hoped so. She pursed her lips and pouted. She wasn't fat. In fact, if she was anything, she was a touch strong. Playing the bass came with a lot more than catchy tunes in her head and black notes haunting her nightmares, after all.
...
Speaking of strong and desperately needing to be it...
"You should eat your bread, Sesame," she said, lightly flailing a hoof his way as the griffons became too preoccupied with something about trouts.
The Unicorn scoffed with an eye roll directed at the ceiling. "Yeah, I know. I drink my milk, too."
Ass. Octavia tilted her head. "You don't appear to fill that shirt out very well, it seems."
Sesame chuckled, "Oh go to hell, fine." His horn lighting up, a slice of toast levitated off his plate in a mustard glow and flew into his mouth. As he munched and crunched, face contorting this way and that, he spoke through crumbs. "See, this is why I don't eat toast–"
"Well," Octavia began, "some of us don't have daily access to fast food chains." She raised a brow. "Toast is usually all you can fit into busy mornings."
"What's 'busy'?"
Octavia rolled her eyes and looked back at her food, feeling that the conversation was over. Her hoof barely touched her mug when Sesame spoke again.
"So what was that Hail said, earlier?" Octavia turned to him, her cup raised to her lips anyway. "Concert or something, right?"
The mare waggled her eyebrows, shrugged, and spoke into the bottom of her cup, "Yes." Placing it back onto the table, she continued, "I play the double bass in the Canterlot Symphony. We have a concert in Trottingham this Wednesday, hence my wanting to return home as quickly as possible."
Sesame sucked on his teeth longingly, prompting Octavia to look his way. "Oh..."
Octavia smirked at him slyly. Yeah, she knew that he knew what that entailed.
"Okay, now I feel like a dick about what I said at Breezie's..."
"Don't bother. It gets what it deserves."
A wave passed through Octavia in the blink of an eye, catching her off guard just quickly enough for the dropped mug that had once again been in her hooves to instantly be caught. Shutting her eyes and rubbing at her forehead, she shook her head and looked to make sure that nopony—or nobird(?)—had noticed. Sure enough, the griffons were still caught up in one of their own conversations, each participant either laughing at Valkyrie or trying to say that it had been Lavi instead, the latter of which, apparently, consisted of only Lavi.
"Be right back," Sesame called, prompting Octavia to scootch her chair in, "gonna go take a smoke."
Unhealthy, she thought. "Alright," she said.
W, a foreleg in the air as the door clanged shut in the Unicorn's wake, sighed, dropped his claw, deflated, and glared at the ceiling. "Alright, when Sesame gets back, we'll head out and go get your ticket home, okay Octavia?"
"Okay," she replied, a smile gracing her features as she reached for the other half of her bagel.
"But first..." Lavi promised, slyly grinning at the other griffons, "the matter of the check–"
She didn't even finish her sentence before she, W, and T instantly touched the ends of their beaks with a single talon. Valkyrie, a foreleg raised up to just about her chest level, stared straight up at the ceiling and began pulling at the feathers on her head in an apparent attempt to yank them out as she groaned deafeningly. A few ponies turned to look at the aggressive bird, but decided that confronting her about the noise wasn't worth their lives. As the three seemingly victorious griffons gave an uproarious bout of laughter and clutched their bellies, Valkyrie shouted in a hushed tone, "Why the hell do they even have checks?! This isn't some fancy ass restaurant!"
"Doesn't matter!" Lavi giggled, waving the black booklet in front of her friend's face, "It's right here!"
Valkyrie, glaring at her, hissed from behind clenched white teeth and violently snatched the booklet out of Lavi's claws. Throwing it down on the table and flinging it open to a silent crowd of anticipating birds and an amused mare, she threw a talon and ran parallel lines across the receipt's surface, mouthing words and figures as she went. Reaching the bottom, she stopped, craned her neck back, leaned forward again, narrowed her eyes, widened them, and mouthed a very refined, very quiet, "What?"
"C'mon, Val, you're loaded," Lavi spoke, voice cracking on the last syllable as she tried her hardest to not burst out laughing.
"Oh ha ha," Valkyrie feigned, bringing a claw up—essentially balling up her fist—and retracting all but one rather long talon that she directed toward Lavi's head, "shut up."
Octavia could only watch as the table thumped and bumped as three griffons kicked it with hilarity.