Act 3: Can you have your cake...
Spike paced in circles around Twilight's usual pacing spot. The irony was not lost on him, but unlike her usual study and schedule trifles this was something serious to worry about.
"Okay...okay...this can't be that bad right? I mean, they're generous and kind mares, right? They'll be able to understand right?"
His optimism held for about two seconds before he slammed the top of his head against the bookshelves. "Who am I kidding?!" he cried, arms up in the air helplessly. "I've listened to enough of Auntie's radio dramas to know exactly what's going to happen if I don't do something!"
Rarity sat lovingly upon her loveseat as she leaned into the side of the tall, handsome, masculine drake that held her in tender embrace.
"Ohhhh Spikey...you're so romantic..."
"I'm only half the paramour I am without you to complete me, my fair maiden..."
"You have such a ways with words...I can only imagine how good your lips are at...other ways to please a lady...take me..."
And together they leaned in, lips pursed, when suddenly the door flew open and Octavia entered the scene, swooning in horror!
"Spike! How COULD you?!" she cried, hoof on her heart. "You told me I was your true love!"
"No, wait! Dearest, I can explain!" Spike raised his muscular claw up in protest.
Rarity pulled back, swooning even harder. "Ohhhh!! Dearest?! You...you've been seeing her behind my back? Was my heart just a gumball you could chew up and spit out anytime you wanted?!"
Spike's handsome face flipped back to Rarity, who's mascara was already beginning to run. "No, no! Precious, it isn't like that!"
"Precious?!" Octavia's voice cracked as her lip quivered.
Spike seesawed between each tear soaked faced as his anxiety grew by the second. "Please, sugarplum, let me-"
"Sugarplum?!"
"H-hold on, honeypot, if you could just-"
"Honeypot!?"
"......cupcake?"
"CUPCAKE?!"
A pair of hoofslaps painted both of his cheeks a sore red, and then a rain of salty eye drops poured over his head from two gorgeous fountains.
"I'll never love another dragon again!" the two heartbroken mares sobbed in sync, dashing out of the room in opposite directions.
And with that, the strapping stud of a dragon was left dumbfounded on his knees, waist deep in the tears. A nearby bouquet of roses on the table instantly wilted as a spotlight shown over him in the growing darkness of the room.
Spike raised his fists to the heavens and screamed. "NOOOOOOOOOO-"
"-OOOOOOOOOO!!!"
"Spike!" Twilight's voice came from above."Keep it down! I'm trying to hypothesize here!"
Spike blinked, and looked around to find he was still in the library foyer. He wiped the sweat off his brow in relief to know he wasn't drowning in the broken dreams of two lovesick mares.
Yet.
Spike hopped up onto his feet and began to resume his pacing. "Okay, Spike. Don't panic, you can think of something to avoid breaking those fragile ladies' hearts, you're a smart dragon. You got about 24 hours, that's plenty of time to come up with a plan. I mean, how hard can it really be, dating two ponies at the same time?"
"This is all but impossible!"
The Ponyville fashionista crumpled another sketching into her near overflowing wastebasket as she fumed before her captive audience. At Sherbet's suggestion, Rarity had agreed to bring her clients in to critique her preliminary designs and see if they were to their liking before she actually started doing any physical designing. And while the forethought had seemed useful at conception, when it came to be Trixie's turn...
"I absolutely cannot make such outrageous and loud garments into something elegantly gala-worthy! It simply can't be done! Please, can you just accept my original idea and forgo your usual stage flair just once? I know you'll love it once you look in the mirror with it on!"
Trixie just scoffed. "But it doesn't have the Great and Powerful Trixie's cape and hat! How will ponies at the gala know the full splendor that is the Great and Powerful Trixie if she doesn't have her full ensemble somewhere on herself? The cape and hat stay in the dress design, you'll just have to make it work!"
"For Celestia's sake, mare!" Rarity snatched the edge of her cape and waved it in front of her face. "I'm a fashion designer, not a miracle worker! These stars and moons are by far the most avant-garde pattern I've ever seen, and not in the good way! And this particular purple hue, it makes it look all the more childish! You're not wearing a cape and hat, you're wearing a foal's blanket!"
"Still think this was a good idea?" Honey asked Sherbet as she checked the clock. The pair before them was now into hour three of the debate of the century.
"It they didn't argue about it now, they'd argue about it later," Sherbet reassured. "Best get them used to each other while we still have the time."
"True enough, but let me rephrase the question," Honey said dryly, "Did we have to do her before me?"
"Finicky fortune-teller!"
"Prissy clothier!"
"Ostentatious street performer!"
"Fussbudget fabricator!"
"The way I see it, they're going to be best friends by the end of this," Sherbet surmised wryly.
"I got it!" Spike said with a snap of his claws. "I can go on two dates if there are two of me!"
He climbed the ladder to the top shelf of Twilight's alchemical studies and yanked a few large volumes from the nooks. He then proceeded to flip through the pages with his eyes scanning for particular words. "Cloning potions...cloning potions...cloning potions...hah!"
He stopped his index claw on a recipe that caught his attention.
Double dabble potion
For when two minds are better than one
"And all the ingredients needed are in Twilight's lab, I can get this done in no time!"
In no less than ten minutes, Spike had rooted through the various regents in the basement and blended them together in a beaker over the burner.
"Okay, half a teaspoon of ginsenium, check. Three fourths a whole mugwart root, check. A gram of riboflavin jelly, check. Stir into eight fluid ounces of purified water and heat to 350 kelvin, check. Alright we're ready!"
Hoping that Equestria was ready for double the dragon goodness the was Spike, the little dragon grabbed the beaker and gulped it down. Instantly he felt his body warp and weave, and he oranged out for just a second before being engulfed in a puff of magenta smoke.
"Unnn..." he groaned as his head began to defog. "Did it work?"
"I dunno. I don't see another me."
Spike blinked. Another voice that was his? It must have worked! But where was the other Spike? His question was soon answer as he looked over his shoulder to meet the eyes of another purple head...connected by a neck...TO THE SAME BODY!
Needless to say, the reaction of both heads were obvious and justified: nonstop screams of pure terror*.
"I dunno...can I see it with gardenias?"
Rarity sighed and sketched over the design for...what was her count now? 27 times? The lilacs that ringed around the short cut summer dress of green and white were quickly replaced with yet another floral edit.
"Ooh, that looks nice, but what about if you had maybe...petunias on the left side?"
Rarity tried to smile sweetly at her indecisive client. "Um, Blossomforth? Darling? I do love flowers as much as the next mare, but perhaps it might be best to use embroidery a little less ephemeral? Like, perhaps a wave of topazes around the lower frills?"
Rarity winked the gems into place on the sketching, and Blossomforth ooh'd. "That's real pretty. How would it look like in chrysanthemums?"
Rarity nudged the bridge of her nose, pressing her design glasses deep against her sockets in exasperation. "If you're so unsure what floral pattern is your absolute favorite to augment your dress with, why don't you just put them all on? Or better yet, why don't I just make the entire dress out of flowers?" she muttered agitatedly.
Her rhetoric's meaning was lost on the pegasus as she gasped excitedly. "Really? You can make dresses out of flowers? I've made hair pieces, necklaces, even sandals out of flowers, but you can make them into dresses too? Can you teach me? Maybe I can become a fashion designer!"
Rarity was ready to bang her horn against the board, but before she could Sherbet walked up and whispered something in her ear.
Rarity's face lit up. "IDEEEEEAAAAA!!" With a mad flurry of marks and trims, she edited the draft with lightning speed and stuck it right in Blossomforth's face. "What if we did something like this?"
Blossomforth squinted at the picture, then she broke into a wide grin. "Oh, wow! That's perfect! I never would have thought of something like that! Let's do this one!"
Rarity and Sherbet sighed with relief.
Blossomforth then tapped her chin. "Do you think it would better in carnations though?"
Two pairs of eyes glared into her aqua irises.
"Or...not."
"Yo Twilight, ya in here? Featherweight's got an idea for our next crusade, and we need to look up a book about fly fishing- woah!"
Babs walked in with Featherweight toeing the line, stopping to see the most unusual sight in the foyer. Standing in a tub of water, and with ice packs taped all over his body, was Spike. He took the thermometer out of his mouth and looked at it closely before going 'rats' and stuck it back in.
"Uhhhh, Spike? What'chu doin'?"
Spike looked indignantly at the two foals. "What's it look like I'm doing? I'm trying to catch a cold!"
Babs and Featherweight shared a silent moment with each other before they addressed Spike again. "Oookay...why?"
"So I can get sick, of course!"
"That's generally the reason ponies want to avoid catching a cold," Featherweight reasoned. "Unless, does it do something different for dragons? Like, give you the ability to breathe ice instead of fire?"
"Look," Spike explained, "I've got to have an excuse not to be able to go out by tomorrow or I'm going to end up breaking three hearts this Hearts and Hooves day, Rarity's, Octavia's, and mine!"
"Ohh, I get it!" Babs said. "It's like that time I forgot to study for that test at the end of the week last October. In fact...I think I got an idea of my own!"
She whispered a few somethings into Featherweight's ear. "Are you sure about that? That doesn't sound so good."
"Come on Featherweight, how many ponies have you seen with a cold curing cutie mark?"
"Uh, none, cause there isn't a cure for the common cold."
"That's right! We're not going to just get our cutie marks, we're going to get FAMOUS cutie marks! We're going to cure the common cold! But to cure a cold, we first need to cause a cold. So you get cuz' and Firecracker, and I'll get spit swabs and face masks!"
Spike eyes suddenly widened as both of them ran off in their respective directions. Uh oh...
"No."
"I beg your pardon?"
Rarity backed away from the cross archeologist who was frowning at the lacy design in front of her.
"I said no," Honey repeated. "I'm not wearing that poofy, lacy, dainty as glass, snob shirt you've got drawn up for me."
"But Miss Daring, darling! I based it completely off that wonderful gown you wore at that gala in Stalliongrad during your quest for the lost tomb."
Honey flicked an ear as she raised an eyebrow. "Really? Well in that case, DOUBLE NO."
Rarity tapped her hoof hard on the floor a few times. "Oh, what could possibly be wrong with this design? It compliments your tanned complexion completely! The pearls give that more worldly refinement than any gem, and the headdress is actually quite standard in pegasi formal attire!"
"Well for starters, it's just not me." Honey flipped her pith helm off and swapped her jacket for her everyday turtleneck sweater. "I'm going to the gala this year with the intention of showing everypony the real me, museum curator and history enthusiast. It's not the adventuring in my line of work I love, it's the exploration."
She paraded up front, completely overlapping the design. "I want something that shows what I take back from my expeditions, not just what I put into it. Something that professes I genuinely love the different cultures I immerse myself in, nothing undercover, nothing bold. Something that says, 'I am Daring Do, world renown discoverer, but I'm also Honey Do, a pegasus that just likes to study old things'."
The dressmaker took a few moments to ponder this revelation, then heard the brushing of a potted frond against a window outside. Her thoughts turned to exotic lands, then to exotic materials. The pegasus in front of her board faded into an outline as various shapes and objects she could think were only used in other countries were pinned on and shuffled in experimentation.
A sure smile spread across her face finally. "I know just want to do~"
"I have no idea what I'm going to do!"
Spike now trudged the streets of Manehattan by himself, monologuing his grief. His cold solution hadn't been so hot once the crusaders had gotten involved. It went without saying that all their cold causing and cold curing attempts had done nothing but leave a bitter taste. He could still feel that dreadful concoction of lemons, cough syrup, and pickle juice Firecracker had deemed Tantalizing Tonic for the throat on the back of his tongue.
"No double me, no illness, that's all I can think of! Well, maybe time travel, but I doubt there's a spell for it just lying in a library somewhere."
Come on Spike, you can't give up here! There's too much at stake to just surrender! Think about Rarity, think about-
He bumped right into the legs of somepony just exiting a building. "Oof!" Shaking his head clear, he got back on his feet and gazed up at the passerby only to gap. "O-octavia!"
The aforementioned mare gave a warm smile in return. "Oh, hello Spike. How nice of you to visit."
Spike looked to the building she just came out of. He had subconsciously been making a beeline for Octavia's apartment whilst he was worrying!
"Uh, yeah. Just dropping by, since I was free." Spike then suddenly had a spur of the moment idea. "Hey, long as I'm here, why don't we our little recital right now?"
"It would be wise not to put off tomorrow what one can do today," Octavia said, "but I'm afraid I already have my afternoon planned with our designer Rarity. In fact, I'm heading over to her studio right now to discuss my dress."
Spike could only feel the despair welling up in his gut as the name was mentioned. Well, that had been his last chance, guess there was nothing for it but to let it all blow up come tomorrow. "Okay...see you tomorrow...I guess."
As Octavia patted him on the head and nodded goodbye, Spike watched as she crossed the street and...entered the building right in front? He looked to the building his cello goddess just entered, then to the one she just exited. The realization came to him instantly.
They're right next to each other. Rarity and Octavia's buildings are right next to each other's!
That's when another plan started to formulate in his head, one that he was sure couldn't fail to get him out of this mess. A devious grin crept up his face as he rubbed his palms together.
Maybe I can do two dates at once after all!
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Okay, I laughed my own head off, here. This was just too damned funny. :D
If we learned anything from cartoons, it's that trying to be in two places at the same time never work out, even if they're next door.
Ha! Excellent send up of Suited for Success.
Oh boy! The old trying to be in two places at once gag.
You realize she'd be none too happy about calling her worries unimportant, right?
And cue the soap opera.
Ouch...
HEH! Also, Daring Do'S real father.
HAH!
Yep.
I declare that this can only go wrong!
Well then.
Oi...
It's called sarcasm.
Thank you.
Oh dear.
Indeed.
Ouch...
I see.
How?
Oh dear.
This won't end well.
Just what radio shows have you been listening to Spike!
I was originally thinking that Spike was going to take a page from Too Many Pinkies. Either way this isn't going to end well.
I get the feeling that this interaction would've gone very differently if it were written today.
Why do I get the feeling that Starlight Glimmer would be in the background of that scene?