There's More to Life than Books and Cleverness

by Quill Scratch

An Arrival in Ponyville

The roof was thatched, just like the other houses around it. There were wooden beams in the walls, standing out of the pristine white surface like veins under some wild animal’s skin, jutting off from one another and branching, inorganically symmetric. And below one of the windows, there was a basket: flowers flowed out of it, cascading over the edges like molten petals, vines of green spiked with deep, pointed leaves twisting and turning around the soft, wicker case.

The house was, in other words, just like any other in this town: built in the style of the early 500s, a classic architectural scheme that mixed practicality with aesthetics in a way that the magical constructions of Canterlot could never match. Yet the strangest thing about it all was this this town was not nearly old enough for these to be originals: no, these were a recent fabrication, a modern recreation of an ages-old style.

At least, that’s what it said in Equestrian Architecture: The Designs and Styles of the Sixth Century. And the author of that book had written their dissertation on the uses of thatch to support aesthetic charm in the central Equestrian towns, so clearly they knew what they were talking about.

Moondancer sighed and knocked on the door, her hoof clashing against the metal panel that sat just below a heart-shaped peephole in the light pink wood. There would be time to admire the local architecture later—for now, Moondancer was more concerned about finding a place to stay for the night.

Losing your home in the city you had grown up in, even if only for a few nights as the district was rebuilt after yet another disaster from the unfortunately-released Spirit of Chaos, was never an easy thing. Fortunately for Moondancer, she had contacts in other, local towns. Ponies she had grown up with had settled all around Canterlot and the nearby suburbs, but with the Canterlot Library closed for the very same maintenance that was keeping her from her bed, Moondancer needed to go somewhere a little further afield.

“Just coming!”

Oh, that voice. How long had it been now? It must have been a good two, maybe even three years since she had last saw the mare who was even now trotting to the door to let her in. Lyra Heartstrings, her name was—Moondancer had double-checked an old journal for the name, just to make sure she avoided any embarrassing mistakes while she was here.

Apparently, Lyra had once been quite close to her, or as close as anypony ever had been. She had even been one of the ponies that she had invited to her party, all those years ago…

Moondancer snorted. Parties. What a dumb idea.

The door opened with a creak as a pale turquoise mare peeked out of the gap. For a second, she frowned, as if not quite sure of what she was seeing, but after not very long a wide smile graced her face and she threw open the door with glee.

“Moondancer?!” she cried, and it was both a question and a statement. Moondancer had always struggled with that idea—surely it could be either one or the other?—but upon discovering the interrobang in The Art of Modern Equish Punctuation had grown more and more fond of the concept. To see it now, in real, actual conversation, was almost enough to bring a smile to her face.

Control yourself, Moondancer. You’re not here to have fun. You’re here to find a place to stay for a few nights: nothing more, nothing less.

“Hello Lyra,” she replied politely, inclining her head in a gesture of recognition. “It’s been a while.”

“You can say that again!” A stupid phrase. She could say it again? Of course she could, but it wouldn’t affect the validity of the statement. It had been a while: that was a fact. Unless, of course, one measured time on a geological timescale—why, then it had been but a blink of an eye (or whatever passed for an eye in a geological analogy. That was hardly the point.) Perhaps Lyra was merely asking her to confirm that she was looking at a similar timescale? “How have you been?”

Or not.

“I’ve been very well, thank you,” Moondancer said, keeping her voice calm and collected. Politeness, she had decided some time ago, was the best way to get what you wanted out of ponies. “Unfortunately, the recent troubles with plunder vines have rendered me without a place to sleep for a few days. Would you, perhaps, know of somewhere I could stay?”

Lyra chuckled to herself.

“Moondancer, you’ve hardly changed at all,” she managed at last, when her laughter had subsided. “You’re always so keep to get to the point as quickly as you can. Why don’t you come on in, and tell me about what you’ve been up to?”

“I’m afraid I need to find a place to stay,” Moondancer replied. “Until I have, I don’t have the time to waste on unnecessary catchups.”

Lyra shook her head, and reached out a hoof to grab Moondancer’s shoulders. Moondancer was surprised by the mare’s strength—within just a few moments, she was being pulled into the house, her legs instinctively walking forwards to stop herself from tripping over. The door slammed shut behind her with a tinkle of magic, and Moondancer took a few moments to reacquaint herself with her surroundings.

The interior of the house was in many ways more modern than the exterior. Tasteful wallpaper, in a minimalist pattern of sky-blue, covered most of the walls that she could see. Beneath her hooves, a polished wooden floor shined, a sign of recent cleaning. Her eyes scanned around the hallway—ah, there, just by the staircase, sat a duster and a can of polish. If she breathed in, she could still smell the polish hanging in the air, a sharp scent that almost smelled like home, if it weren’t so clinical.

To her left there was a small chest of drawers, and for a moment Moondancer found herself staring at each one of the little objects that lined the top. There were a few trinkets, and other items of assorted bric-a-brac, nothing that would sell for very much at even the most expensive of second-hand auctions, as well as the expected door keys and valuables. But in the middle of the surface, sat atop a white, lace sheet, was a picture frame, shaped like a heart. In it, there was a photograph of Lyra, smiling widely at the camera, her foreleg wrapped around the shoulders of a short, cream-coloured mare.

“Well?” Lyra’s voice was impatient, the sound of a mare who was uncomfortable with the behaviour of a guest. Moondancer stiffened, twisting her neck to look up at her old friend, and grimaced in what she hoped was apology: Lyra sighed, but smiled, so she hoped she had gotten it right. “Come on through.”

Moondancer followed Lyra into a comfortable, if a little bit smaller than expected, living room. A sofa—very modern, made of faux-leather, black, and styled to have almost rectangular edges, with rounded legrests and a few scattered cushions in red, knitted cases—was pushed up against one wall, a glass coffee table floating in front of it. Beneath the table, a small, brass box was embedded in the floorboards, whirring quietly and glowing with a light yellow aura.

Thaumic Engineering in the Home said that the use of magical storage devices to cast near-permanent spells on furniture for purposes of space-saving had become more and more common among the upper-middle class of Equestria, but Moondancer had never had a chance to see such a device with her own eyes. A part of her wanted to grab hold of it at once: to pick it up and to examine it from every angle; to take it apart and study it, piece by piece, until she could comprehend its working; to find her way to the famous Golden Oaks Library just to research the mechanisms that kept such a device from failing. But a small part of Moondancer told her that this would be a bad idea, especially in polite company, and that perhaps the research could wait until more pressing matters had been seen to.

“Have a seat,” Lyra said, gesturing at the sofa as her horn lit and she pulled a small cushion in from the adjacent room, laying it neatly upon for floor and curling up atop it. “Go on, the sofa won’t bite.”

Ah. She’d heard of that expression before—something to do with an object being harmless, or at the very least safe to touch, or approach. But this was a foolish thing to assume. After all, an object could be very dangerous—fatal, even—without ever once needing to bite a pony. She herself had encountered plenty of exceedingly dangerous items whilst researching a paper on the use and misuse of magical amulets a few years before, and had come across more than enough that could have killed her. Not a single one of them even had teeth.

Still, it was only a figure of speech. Tentatively, she stepped up onto the couch and, tucking her legs beneath her, curled up into a sitting position.

“So…” Lyra began, her voice lingering on the vowel and trailing off into almost silence. “How have you been? Done anything exciting these past two years?”

“I’ve been researching,” Moondancer replied. She smiled at her old friend, no longer quite sure what she had so dreaded about conversations. She was doing perfectly fine now, wasn’t she?

“Uh-huh…” Lyra seemed almost uncertain, her voice not quite questioning but certainly bordering on it. “And what sorts of things have you been researching?”

“Oh,” Moondancer took a deep breath, biting her lip as she tried to recall the various subjects she had read about in the last two years. She knew there were a lot of them, and while she had a fairly good memory for books she wasn’t entirely certain her memory for chronology was up to scratch—she certainly didn’t want to tell Lyra about something she had been researching before they drifted apart.

In her defence, Moondancer hadn’t been expecting a pop quiz mere moments after seeing her friend again. But pop quizzes were something she had always prided herself on her skill at quizzes, and even when she didn’t know the full answer she always had a strategy: right now, for instance, she could simply start by recalling the most recent things she had researched and work backwards from there until she saw some sign of recognition on Lyra’s face. Yes. That should work nicely.

“Well, I’ve been reading about all the different flora and fauna of the Everfree Forest,” she began. “There are a few ancient horticulture journals, from before Luna’s banishment, that described some strange, magical plant life that no recent records have shown. I’ve been trying to find out whether those plants have gone extinct, or have simply been renamed. Or, perhaps stranger still, there’s a hypothesis that some of the plants in the Everfree undergo magically-stimulated, rapid evolution, and while sufficient evidence has yet to be found in support of it, I like to think that it would be easy enough to prove with just a few years and a grant from the…”

Moondancer’s voice trailed off, as she noticed the glassy-eyed stare of her companion. “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying, are you?”

“Huh?” Lyra shook her head, as if trying to shake away drowsiness. “No, uh, I was listening. I just… well, you get quite technical sometimes, Moondancer. It’s easy to get lost quite quickly when you get talking about something you’re researching.”

“Oh,” Moondancer said. She paused for a moment, not quite sure how to react. Was that an insult? It could certainly be construed as one. At the very least, it was an acknowledgement that Lyra found her conversation dull and uninteresting, which was certainly not what she had intended. After some thought, she added, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Lyra said, giggling a little. “It’s good to know that some things never change. Gosh, do you remember all those times when we were fillies and you’d go on and on about chemistry, or some strange psychological—”

“You thought I was boring?”

Forget it, Moondancer. Just forget it. This is why friendship isn’t worthwhile: it’s always just a fake, and it will always just hurt you. The only way you can avoid the pain is to avoid friendship entirely.

“No!” She had to give credit where credit was due: Lyra certainly sounded sincere in her surprise. It almost sounded as if she were horrified that she could possibly have made such a mistake. Almost. But Moondancer knew better than to get her hopes up. “No, Moondancer, that’s not it at all. You’re a fascinating pony: I’ve heard you give the most amazing talks on fields I hadn’t even known existed!

“It’s just that, sometimes, you get a bit carried away in day-to-day conversation, you know? Like, it’s fine for a lecture or some place where we need your help knowing about something, but when it’s just the two of us—or even back then, all six of us—you don’t need to go into that sort of detail.” Lyra had an apologetic mask on her face, her mouth twisted into a grimace of awkward admission. Moondancer was certain, positively certain, that she couldn’t trust that face to be true, but a small part of her still wanted it. “You understand that, right?”

She thought, for a moment. Did she really go into too much detail? What was “too much detail”, anyway? She always told exactly the level of detail that conveyed a good summary of the knowledge she had gleaned from her research without itself requiring the hours of research she had put in to understand. By definition, she considered, that must be the right level of detail, for it was exactly what she intended it to be…

But Lyra was saying that she was hard to follow, and that she went into too much details. So maybe, just maybe, she might have been wrong. Was it really so hard to consider that she might have misjudged an entry-level explanation? It had, after all, been some years since she had spoken to anyone about her research, save for the odd university professor and a couple of research graduates, all of whom were probably more knowledgeable about the field than she was. Yes, that she could have misjudged the level of explanation she needed was not just believable: given the evidence, it seemed almost a certainty.

“Yes,” she said, slowly. “I think I do. I’m sorry, I’ll try to keep the detail to a minimum in future.”

And, just like that, Lyra’s grimace of concern became a smile of relief, her lips and cheeks relaxing. It was a subtle change, but ponies had always been able to discern even the slightest changes in each other’s facial expressions—this ability, after all, was ingrained in a pony’s very psychology, their entire way of thinking built up around…

This was the point Lyra was making, wasn’t it? She’d always been fond of tangential thoughts, following them through whatever knowledge she could recall and down whatever path they might lead. But those paths went deeper: too deep.

Perhaps it was her entire way of thinking that was hampering her ability to converse naturally?

“Is something wrong?”

Lyra’s voice broke through her thoughts. She shook her head, briefly, bringing her focus back to the real world through the sensation of the air brushing against her cheeks.

“Sorry, I zoned out,” she admitted, sheepishly. “Was something wrong?”

And at that, Lyra laughed: it was a hearty laugh, her chest visibly contracting with each wheezing breath, and it filled the room with noise. For a moment, Moondancer simply sat there in shock, her brain not thinking fast enough to keep up with the sudden change in what her senses were telling her. Then, when she had at last realised what was going on, and that it wasn’t merely her mind playing tricks on her, she frowned.

“What is it?” she asked, as Lyra began to rock back and forth on her cushion, her hooves held tight against her sides. “Did I say something wrong?”

Lyra wiped a hoof at her eye, her breathing slowly coming to a more natural pace, the heavy guffaws that had been spasming through her chest coming to a gentle standstill, like a ball rolling across a field and slowly being brought to a halt by the grass.

“Never change, Moondancer,” Lyra said, smiling and slightly out of breath. “Promise me you’ll never change.”

Her first reaction was to tell Lyra that change was always necessary, that is was an obvious implication of the way that they experienced chronology and, indeed, a necessary conclusion of the laws of thermodynamics. She would certainly never be in true thermal equilibrium…

And then she caught herself, because that sort of thing was exactly what Lyra was talking about, and she had to make a better impression on her host than that. After all, it had been a good few years since they had seen each other, and if Moondancer was going to try and convince Lyra to let her stay the night (although now she was here she was starting to wonder if the small house had any spare room for her to sleep in at all, given the small living room) she would need to make a better impression than that.

“I’ll try?” she promised, weakly. After a moment’s pause, she nodded sharply: “Yes. I’ll try.”

Lyra smiled again at that, warm and relaxed. “It’s good to see you again, Moondancer.”

“You too,” Moondancer replied, without thinking.

Is that true? Is seeing Lyra again really a good thing? You’re getting weaker, Moondancer—since you arrived, you’ve already worried about the pain she could cause you once, and that’s not a worry that you’ve had in over a year…

But it was true. Even though everything she could think of told Moondancer that she shouldn’t be happy to see Lyra beyond her gratefulness to the universe for a potential solution to the somewhat compromising situation she had found herself in regarding sleeping arrangements, Moondancer really, truly was happy to see her old friend. And the worst part was that she had absolutely no idea why.

Friendship, Moondancer was slowly coming to realise, was a lot more complicated than she had always thought. It wasn’t just a matter of two ponies spending time together, and sharing with each other things that they would normally keep private to create a safe haven where they could find help and comfort when they needed it. It was something that bound ponies together—even when she had spent a year in isolation in Canterlot, leaving her house only to trek to the library or the market, Moondancer’s first thought when she fell into trouble had always been “Maybe Minuette could help?” or “Twinkleshine would know what to do in this situation” or “If I asked Twili—”

No. Not Twilight. She wasn’t her friend. Not, of course, that she had really been a good friend to any of the others, and it certainly wasn’t as if they’d been any closer to her than Twilight had been, but at least they hadn’t abandoned her.

Besides, the Princess of Friendship would hardly stoop to associate with somepony who hadn’t even got a place to call their own anymore.

Lyra coughed, dragging her once more out from her thoughts. Not for the first time, Moondancer wondered if it was healthy to get lost in thought quite so often. “You were saying something about a place to sleep?”

“Oh, yes,” she responded, pushing all thoughts of Twilight from her mind. This was the reason she had travelled to Ponyville in the first place: This was important. “My house was among one of the many in Canterlot that suffered serious damage from the incident with the plunder vines, and although Discord was able to reverse some damage he seems to have left some parts of Canterlot… less fixed than others.

“Long story short, I haven’t got anywhere to sleep for at least a week, while they repair the damage to the district.”

“That’s terrible!” Lyra cried, standing up from her cushion and trotting over to sit beside her. Moondancer tried not to flinch as Lyra’s fur gently rubbed against her own—it had been a very long time since she had been even nearly this close to another pony. Yet Lyra proceeded to wrap a foreleg around her shoulders, and pulled her into a tight embrace. “Oh, you poor thing. You simply have to stay here with us!”

“Are you sure?” Moondancer said, trying to sound more comfortable than she was. Despite her efforts, her voice came out stiff and a little forced. “I don’t want to impose.”

This was a lie, and both mares knew that—of course Moondancer wanted to stay the night, regardless of any inconvenience to Lyra, because if she didn’t then she would literally be sleeping on the streets in the middle of winter, and no sane pony would possibly volunteer for that. Ignoring, of course, the many ponies who did just that on camping trips and the like, particularly that one author who would always write cheap paperbacks about her trips to the wild, the sort that one would pick up in a train station for a hoofful of bits and finish before the train had even gotten halfway to one’s destination. But those ponies were adventure-seekers, and neither Lyra nor Moondancer could in any way be counted among that number.

“It won’t be a problem,” Lyra said, fondly. “Bon Bon will have no problem with it, I’m sure, and there’s a small guest bedroom that you’re more than welcome to use. I don’t think Bon Bon has any guests coming to stay this week… she does occasionally have friends over to stay at short notice, but I’m sure she’d have mentioned by now.”

Lyra sighed, shaking her head. “Look at me: rambling like an old mare. And how long ago was I telling you that you went on at length about things?”

Even Moondancer had to smile at that thought. She even managed a light chuckle.

“Is Bon Bon the mare in the photograph?” she asked, when the laughter had settled and the air became so thick with quiet that she could once again hear the whir of the engine that kept the table floating. “The one in the hallway, I mean?”

“Yeah,” Lyra said, a wry smile tugging at the corners of her mouth and her eyes shining. “That’s Bon Bon. She’s… well, she’s something. She should be home in an hour or so; I’ll introduce the two of you.”

“That sounds nice,” Moondancer said. There was a moment of quiet between them, and this time it looked as it were Lyra who was lost in thought. But after half a minute or so, she smiled and turned to face Moondancer.

“You have anypony special back in Canterlot?”

Special? As in… a special somepony? Well, that certainly explains the shape of the photo frame…

“You really think somepony like me would have that?” Moondancer asked, trying to raise one eyebrow. It was meant to be an expression of almost sarcastic curiosity, but she couldn’t quite keep the other eyebrow in place—it would always tug up alongside the other one, no matter how hard she focused on moving only the muscles on one side of her face. The end result felt more like a forced look of surprise to Moondancer, but Lyra seemed to get what she was going for.

“Of course I do, silly,” she said, squeezing Moondancer’s shoulders once more, a light pressure of comfort. “If I can find somepony—and you know what I used to be like at school!—then I have no doubt that you can, too.”

Moondancer wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that. Romance had never really been at the forefront of her mind (though, of course, she had spent a good four or five weeks researching the evolution of monogamous behaviour in various species, and comparing the behaviour of animals such as swans with those of ponies. Perhaps the most fascinating part of her research was in discovering that swans truly did mate for life: it wasn’t some kind of abstract ideal that they aimed for, but an actuality that they lived.) Besides, she’d never met anypony who she could even want to spend hours alone with, just snuggled up warm by the fire reading books, comfortable in mutual silence…

She’d never wanted that, anyway. Why would she? It would only further distract her from her research, and Celestia knew that these days she was distracted enough, what with the almost unbelievable things that kept interrupting her day-to-day life. Frankly, the changeling invasion of Canterlot the year before should have been a final straw: enough for Moondancer to decide that, really, Canterlot was probably not the best place for her to be living. But something kept drawing her back. And that something, of course, was the vast library.

No other city in all of Equestria had a library quite like it—not even the fabled library of the Crystal Empire had turned out to match the Canterlot City Library for sheer operability. Moondancer could look up a book in the catalogue, and it would be on her desk within five minutes in Canterlot—and she wouldn’t even have to look for it herself. The complicated series of magical devices that lined the rooms effortlessly found and provided research materials with only the lightest of commands from a librarian. It was efficient, it was modern, and most importantly of all it was the kind of system that one almost didn’t notice going on, even when it was right under one’s nose. The Crystal Library, by comparison, was staffed by a few aging ponies who still weren’t entirely sure which archiving system was being used, and was sorely lacking in materials from this millennium—and while that made it a historian’s favourite place, Moondancer had always been somewhat more interested in the sciences, and the idea of books that were a thousand years out of date simply horrified her.

What was the point in collecting knowledge if the knowledge itself was flawed? Moondancer was sure, of course, that many of the things she had learned over the course of her life were probably false, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t worth learning. They were, after all, nothing more than the modern consensus, things that ponies were certainly confident might not be wrong. A textbook that was a thousand years old would be missing a thousand years of scientific advances. It was definitely wrong—the things Moondancer researched, on the other hoof, were only possibly wrong.

Many of her old friends had struggled to understand why this difference was so important. But then again, many of her old friends had struggled with the idea that the things that they were learning might, in fact, not be true at all. It was strange that they would struggle with that, of all things: to Moondancer, accepting that she might be wrong lay at the heart of all her research. If anything, it was one of the things that drove her the most.

… Romance. That was what Lyra had been talking about, wasn’t it. She’d said something about how Moondancer should be able to find somepony… but what Lyra didn’t realise was that Moondancer simply didn’t want that kind of distraction.

She opened her mouth, taking in a deep breath as she did so to prepare herself for the response she needed to give, before turning to properly face Lyra and finding that the mare’s eyes were closed, and the gentle rhythm of snoring rose and fell from her throat. Moondancer smiled at the sight of the sleeping mare, before the weight of Lyra’s foreleg on her shoulders registered once more in her mind.

She was stuck.

Ever so gently, Moondancer reached out with her magic and felt around her neck for the weight that was pressing down upon her. She wrapped the leg carefully in her aura, careful not to disturb Lyra’s sleep, and lifted as gently as she could, until there was just enough of a gap for her to squeeze out from underneath Lyra’s leg and step off the sofa. Standing tall and stretching, arching her back almost like a cat, Moondancer looked around the room for a blanket or something similar, and her eyes settled on a small, woven rug on the far side of the coffee table. Hoisting it up in her magic, she pulled it across the room and draped it around the shoulders of the sleeping mare.

For a minute or two, Moondancer simply stood and watched Lyra as she rolled her shoulders, pulling the rug around her tighter and whinnying in her sleep. A small smile played with the corners of her lips as, for a moment, she allowed herself to get lost in memories she had spent two years avoiding—a childhood of memories, and of friendships she had been little more than an observer of. All the stupid little things that they had gotten up to as fillies… and above all, she thought of the time that Lyra had fallen asleep in class, and of how peaceful she had looked, and of how even the teacher could not bring herself to be mad at the filly when she looked so calm. And, just for that minute, Moondancer let herself pretend that maybe, just maybe, she could have those friendships back.

If anything, it made for a nice daydream.

Comments

[Emperor]

You have a pretty powerful grasp of Moondancer's stream-of-consciousness, using her narrative to show how she thinks. Moondancer often responds to actions and conversation by going off on lines of thought that go off track from the original topic matter. I do this often myself, and on the rare occasion when in a multi-sided conversation, can catch myself thinking about something and trace it back to what was going on in the conversation, with five or six different ideas in between. Moondancer is no different, though how much of a tangent she can get on is abridged by it being a two-mare conversation with Lyra.

One senses that she's rather bitter over Twilight Sparkle, not just for the reasons stated as in Amending Fences, but also because of her special emphasis on Twilight being a Princess of Friendship, italicised and all.

I was slightly annoyed, however, when she started to talk about the Everfree Forest and the species of fauna that grow there. I was expecting it to segue into something about the plunder seed, which sprouted from the Everfree (although Discord planted them there), and that never actually happened even though you left a perfect lead-in for that.

[Nemezja]

Oh, I LOVE Moondancer's inner thoughts! They create such a unique narration. I don't know if it's funny or sad, just how much she tries to be a rock and remain impassive, but can't stop the fondness from leaking through...

[PresentPerfect]

Oh boy, I love a well-written Moondancer, and this is tops! :D

[Vaguely Demented]

Definitely get a fun literalism vibe from Moondancer. My first thought (and often statement) when I hear someone say they can’t complain is that they can it’s the validity of the complaint that is questionable.