The Last Illusion

by ScientistWD

A Dispute Between the Two Heroines, and Their Compromise Beside the River

Drooping her head and lagging a few feet behind Trixie, Miss Doo drew a long yawn from her throat. “Did we really have to leave so early?”

“Humph. Yes, Miss Doo, for her show in Canterlot comes soon enough, and Trixie intends to have at least a few days to prepare. At this rate, we will arrive tomorrow morning.”

She looked around, groggy, at the morning path they had been taking for only a few minutes now. A yawn escaped Miss Doo again, this time as more of a sigh as she spoke. “Ooooh kaaaay….”

Miss Doo had not accomplished much sleep last night. Twinklehoof’s birthday party ran late for a hoofful of ponies. For her, the gentle blue of morning sun had come a little too soon, pushing through the gray clouds to kiss her on the cheek and poke her in the eye. Now, it dolloped the tops of the trees, coaxing wind from their leaves. In turn, a few fluttered to the ground, floating on the cold wind. This early, the weather was chilly. It cut through fur, and surfed through Trixie’s cape. She was much more of a morning person, it seems, because her eyes were just as focused as ever on their daily crusade.

“Keep your head up, Miss Doo,” came Trixie’s cheerful charisma. “Trixie will extend her offer again; she is perfectly willing to carry your saddlebags.”

“No, no,” she snored. “I can. Carry them myself. It’s not that heavy. Mostly just snacks and s’more stuff anyway.”

“Ah, plenty good then. Trixie could not store your food for very long.”

“Hm? What do you mean ’store'?”

“Trixie travels all on her own. She takes only non-perishable foods.”

“Wha? Bu—“

“This much considering,” Trixie continued, pointedly evading for a second time. “We will need at least one more meal today, and a bit of a boost for breakfast tomorrow. Trixie has a few essential ingredients, the clever and well-prepared mare that she is. You have potatoes, correct? She recommends stew?” she asked like a question. Though, she still did not look back.

“Oh!” Miss Doo perked. "I like stew! I make it all the time.”

“Very well, then. Keep an eye out for wild vegetables. Trixie has the rest.”

Miss Doo eyed Trixie’s person for a few lingering moments. The showmare's only inventory was a cape and hat. “Um, okay. Ooh, and I’ll look for peppers, too…!” Miss Doo stretched out her wings, working out the morning kinks, before pulling into a hover just a few feet above.

At that, Miss Doo was first to see that the path they had been following soon started to run alongside a gently flowing river. It was a cold gray, like the weather. Small pink flower petals were floating on its surface. Probably not roses or cherries. It would have been late in the season for those. But it did not matter too much; they looked quite beautiful.

“Aw.” Miss Doo smiled, crossing the path to get a closer look. "Check out these flowers, Trixie!”

“Hm?”

Trixie had not noticed because she was staring straight ahead as she usually did. So, she wandered over to her right to see for herself, walking along the river’s edge. The petals were like very small, fragile sailboats. Some got caught on the wind awhile, but fell back down delicately. They were always smiling, which must have been hard in this crestfallen weather. They left tiny ripples as they skipped along. But it seemed that Trixie was not impressed.

“Those flower petals are late. The plants they came from are probably long dead,” she said. But as she was looking at them, she slowed down her pace, distracted. “Although, Trixie does suppose…” She raised an eyebrow as a few dozen more passed by on the river’s slow current, like a gentle caress. “They look a little like confetti…”

“Oof!”

Trixie turned her head, watching a few upturned leaves settle along the opposite side of the path. Miss Doo had crashed. “Goodness, Miss Doo, how is it that you managed to lose control at such a low altitude?”

“Ha. I dunno,” she said, quickly recovering. “It’s kinda happened all my life, you know?”

Trixie brushed Miss Doo of the upturned leaves and twigs. “Ah. It must be your strabismus.”

“My… what?”

“Your eyes, Miss Doo.” She helped the confused mare to her hooves. "The natural mana that enhances your flight is skewed by your distorted vision, causing what would be consistent lift to sometimes destabilize.”

“I mean, yeah,” she muttered, shying back a bit. "It’s always been like this.”

“Understand, Miss Doo,” she began, conjuring magical arrows and diagrams to illustrate her explanation as she continued. “Your natural mana is misaligned because the meta vectors you project are misaligned because your perception is misaligned because your eyes are misaligned. You see the world a little differently, but your mana is still made ‘confused’ by it, which has an unfortunate effect on your trajectory.”

“Um…” Miss Doo avoided Trixie’s advancing conversation. “Okay.”

“It is no trouble, Miss Doo. Shall we continue?” Trixie resumed a saunter down the path, eschewing the river or path-side shrubbery. Miss Doo lingered only a moment before following, her eyes slightly downtrodden.

Trixie talked on as they continued. “Trixie is sure that, given the proper time and prescription, corrective lenses might have the world rightside-up for your magic and meta vectors. But, then again,” she weighed, more to herself than anypony else. “Not only would the process of creating such lenses be redundant as years of your own life have likely led your mind to correct the error such that just as many years would be needed to re-correct it, but,” she resumed, “there’s no way any ordinary optometrist would be able to manage the sort of mesophysical mathematics that would be required. Why, between metaspace mapping, establishing a compass, and engineering the proper material… it would take weeks to prepare these lenses! Even a sorceress as talented as Trixie would have difficulty! Though, perhaps with the texts by Gibbous—“

“Queen’s lace!” Miss Doo interjected, diving off the side of the path to a party of flowers nearby. Several of its patrons, aside from daisies and daffodils, were lovely white inflorescences, looking like pretty doilies. Miss Doo pawed at the base of one's stem with her hooves, uncovering a plump orange root. It was not unlike a common carrot. “Lucky!” She gestured her find to show Trixie, who was quizzical. Quizzical, but still she nodded.

“Good find, Miss Doo,” she conceded. “Trixie, um, missed that one.”

Miss Doo readied herself, working her wings back and forth before digging messily at the plant’s roots. This left Trixie in the momentary predicament of... watching. Bits of grass and dirt flung up as she did so. Rather haphazardly.

“Do you need… help, Miss Doo?” Trixie asked, a bit off-put.

“Nope!” Miss Doo shouted cheerfully. “I can do this!”

Trixie’s inquiring gaze wandered past Miss Doo, to the dozen remaining laces. With a small “humph” and a flick of her horn, the wild carrots were lifted from the earth, quite neatly. She shook the dirt from them, and floated them to Miss Doo’s side.

“That’s quite alright, Miss Doo, for Trixie’s motions are effortless and we ought keep pace.”

Miss Doo resurfaced, dirt balanced on her muzzle, with the carrot she was working on. It was her turn to wear the inquisitive glance.

“But please do carry them, if you would,” she added, telekinetically opening the pegasus’s saddlebags to drop the plants inside. “Now, where was Trixie in her story…?”

Miss Doo lagged behind, peering at the neatly ordered, bulging vegetables in her bag. With a sigh, she placed the one she’d unearthed herself among them, and trotted to catch up.

“Ah yes," Trixie resumed. She had taken a peek at the scribe to re-compose her train of thought. “Gibbous Glass of Eleven Dials. She wrote several good works concerning practical time magic and bookkeeping, but Trixie has not had the pleasure of reading her works on magical glassware. Still, she devised a reading spell that works wonders for Trixie on all of her scholarly ventures, scarce as they tend to be with her so busy so often.”

Twisting her mouth a little, Miss Doo spoke. "You’re really smart, huh Trixie?”

“Oh yes!” she boasted, still oblivious. “Trixie has been a clever and intelligent pony all her life! She graduated from Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns two years early, studied meso- and metaphysics alongside thaumathematics at University for a short while before deciding to venture on her own.” A hoof proudly held to her chest as she continued. “She has won numerous awards for prestige and excellence, has had many shows all across Equestria, including Applelossa, Baltimare, Manehattan, among many others. And on top of it all, she innovates and invents powerful, magical spells of her own! To this day, there is nigh a pony as accomplished as the Great and Powerful Trixie!”

A brief silence followed, as Trixie had finished her speech with a touch of flair and her proud smile. It was half a pose she had used on stage, no doubt in anticipation of applause. But there was none; Trixie’s slow hoofbeats were all there was. An odd anxiety passed her face as she noticed that then, Miss Doo was nowhere to be seen. A look to her right, however, and she spotted a blonde tail stuck up behind a few bushes. Trixie approached to investigate, “Miss Doo?” she asked.

“Oh!” the pegasus exclaimed, once again covered in soil. “I found some onions.” She held up a few small bulbs. “Not that big, but you don’t need that much, huh?”

Trixie gave a short stare. “Uh… no. Correct, Miss Doo.”

“Let’s go then,” Miss Doo said, shaking the dirt from her body before rejoining the path.

Trixie followed, slowly at first before regaining her pace. “Yes, let’s.”

Gold streamed down the sky. The sun, now having meandered along the horizon long enough, was beginning to truly show itself between the opening layers of clouds. Early morning was becoming mid-morning. Light like this made the river glow, its petals being long gone. Aside from this, the two mares continued their journey to Canterlot.

“…”

“…”

In silence, apparently.

Birds had begun to chirp. They accompanied the swift run of the nearby river, trickling like a tiny xylophone. Though there was not much wind, if one were to listen very carefully with their ear to the sky, one might hear the clouds snoring. Even the morning insects were humming along their routines. But dusty hoofbeats were the only sounds the two ponies could muster.

Miss Doo, walking a pony’s length behind Trixie as usual, was once again confined to peer at the back of Trixie’s head. Perhaps there were words caught in her mouth, for she was twisting it shut. But no, Miss Doo gave in and turned away. Trixie did not say anything either, such as “How are you?”, “Why are you going to Canterlot?”, “How do you like your stew?”, or anything similar. No “Did you have fun at the dance, Miss Doo? Trixie was busy being standoffish and bland”. Instead, this trip was condemned to additional reticence.

The story had suddenly become quite mundane, had it not?

The scribe, lowering itself to pony eye level (as it was capable of doing so with its own magic) began meandering between the mares as its quill kept scratching. It was nearing Trixie’s field of view, though it dare not enter. It floated instead just outside her vision. How cross a mare like Trixie would get should a scribe prove so admonishing. No, instead it changed its direction, slowing speed until it caught pace with Miss Doo. She noticed after a short while the book that was presented to her. “Hm?” she softly wondered, prying at its most recent updates.

“Hee, hee…!” she giggled like a cheerful sparrow. Her quiet romp continued through the paragraph previous this one; the scribe’s quill jittered through it just as well. She held her whispers close to its pages. “You’re kind of silly, aren’t you?”

But Trixie heard. “Hm?” she asked, her head ajar in inquiry. Their walk did not stop.

“Oh, um…!” Miss Doo startled. “Nothing. Your book is just really funny.”

“Oh? What has my scribe wrought this time?”

“Nothing! Just…”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Yes, Miss Doo?”

“It’s kind of making fun of you!”

“What!?”

Trixie gripped and pulled the book to her, those piercing eyes scanning through words like “standoffish”, “cross”, and “admonishing”.

She scoffed, and a bit of red stained her cheeks. “W-w-wretched thing! It is a wonder how it writes so lavishly one moment and so daftly the next!”

“It’s just making a little fun, Trixie.”

“A scribe should not 'make fun' of its heroine!” she huffed.

“Well… what’s it supposed to do?”

“It’s…! Hm…” The so-called “Great and Powerful” mulled a moment, hoof on her chin. “A scribe ought treat its heroine with respect, admiring her features and complimenting her actions. There is a grand beginning, where we join her on her quest and learn of her name and talents. Then, there is rising action, where the readers feel the increase of tension or pressure building up, slowly. And the best part: the epic climax!” Trixie’s hooves hopped a bit here. "Our heroine faces off against a powerful enemy, such as a mighty beast or even time itself, and emerges wholly victorious! And lastly, in the falling action, the heroine gets her reward and her recognition. And she lives happily for ever after.”

“Forever after?”

“For ever after.”

“But real life isn’t really like that.”

“Ha! On the contrary, Miss Doo…" The showmare galloped ahead a few trots, swishing her horn a touch to dim the lights. "life is really like that for Trixie! She, on a monthly basis, leaves fierce foes and vanquishes horrors too unseemly to speak of rent in twain! She’s traversed the wide wide world, from the lands of Dragons to the kingdoms of the Griffons! She’s made ponies, houses, entire freight trains vanish into thin air! She’s conjured symphonies, homesteads, and mountains to her bidding! Trixie’s life is magnanimous, sensational! Positively ludicrous! Why, the Great and Powerful Trixie is nothing short of Equestria’s mightiest extraordinaire!” At the tip of her words, little pink sparks jumped from her horn to sing praise. She put on her infamous grin, and again paused to give Miss Doo a chance to respond.

And she did. A little foalish snicker snuck past Miss Doo’s teeth, curling up her lips. It bloomed into a chuckle that fluttered like a dandelion. “Whatever you say, Trixie,” she teased, playfully trotting past her. “You’ve got a lot of fancy speeches like that, huh?” Miss Doo smiled, warmly and kindly.

Trixie smiled a little, too, with a face half grinning and half pouting. The showmare had moved her audience, if nothing else.

Author's Note:

I took a class on H. C. Andersen. And then I wrote this chapter. Can you tell?

Comments

[Nimnul]

I am really enjoying this, and I'd give you my like, but the script behind the thumbs up does not work right for me right now. Perhaps later. Eagerly awaiting more chapters!