A Turn Towards The Weird

by smeg

Earmuffs, Defenestration, and a Toothy Grin.

Author's Note:

Due to rampant inebriation the first two chapters are pretty rambly and nonsensical.
This is intentional.
The plot and events will start making some form of sense later.
Probably.

Enjoy.

-smeg

A Turn Towards The Weird
1. Earmuffs, Defenestration, and a Toothy Grin.

---

The school cafeteria was buzzing with life, the background noise levels somewhere between 'annoying' and 'rage-inducing'.
On a normal day, Lyra Heartstrings, high school student of indeterminate age, would already have spent seven minutes contemplating the pros and cons of buying some hearing protection.
The problem she never managed to solve before the end of her lunch break wasn't pro-and-con-related in any way.
It was merely a question of personal taste, but it was a question she'd never managed to answer during any one of her lunch breaks thus far.

Military or construction?

Neither model was particularly pleasant to look at, both were in the same price range, and the differences they offered in protection were minor enough to ignore.
Still, after watching one too many anti-everything YouTube videos during her awkward high school anarchist phase, she couldn't decide between funding the military-industrial complex, or supporting a branch as male-dominated as construction.
Roughly at this point Lyra would turn to her best -some would say only- friend Bon Bon for advice.

But Bon Bon wasn't here. In fact, she was neither here, nor there, nor anywhere.

So Lyra sat alone, which she didn't like very much.
Her high school anarchist phase, while thankfully short, had still left her with more than enough time to sit alone, devising complex plans on the subject of toppling her parents like the authoritarian icons they were, ushering the Heartstrings household into an age of naturalistic individualism.

Fortunately, her lunch break always ended before she could touch upon the ethics of hunting down her family members for sustenance.

Sadly, as her political interests gradually disappeared, so did the joys of sitting alone.
One can only mentally compare different earmuffs and the ethics of supporting whichever aspect of patriarchal jingoist capitalism each represents before one's thoughts turn to what exactly went wrong in one's life.

Hence, Bon Bon came in handy whenever regret-filled introspection seemed too close for comfort.

But she was nowhere to be found.

Sensing an opening to force herself into, Rainbow Dash, all-around all-star and avatar of athleticism, decided that a crowded lunch table in the middle of the hall was the best place to show off her newest cheer-wrestling routine.
She'd practiced it for weeks, non-stop. It was amazing.

Beginning from the scorpion pose, she'd perform exactly one-and-a-half back-flips with her arms extended and palms spread. Upon landing in a handstand, she'd perform a rapid full-body spin and transition into the arch pose, from where she'd execute a backwards arabesque in the direction of the opposing team's flyer before jumping pieds joints upon touching the ground.

If executed correctly, her momentum would -theoretically, at least- launch her across a standard NFL football field straight into the opposing cheer squad's pyramid, allowing her to dropkick the flyer before transitioning into a corkscrew moonsault directed at the opposing team's coach.

The first -and last- time cheer-wrestling was seen in any form of competitive sport was in the 61st annual Canterlot High - Crystal Prep grudge match, where it caused more compound fractures, ruptured tissue, PTSD and chipped nails than all of the CHS - CPS football matches combined.

It was promptly banned from all following games.

Incidentally, usage of cheer-wrestling also constitutes a violation of the Geneva Convention and plain human decency, and according to a Pentagon report regarding the ongoing War on Terror, is the sole reason for Operation Desert Pom-Pom.

War crimes aside, Rainbow's dedication and willingness to give everything she's got has not only carried her through life, but has also won her more competitions, prizes and admiration than she could count.

That is, at least seven.

Now, Rainbow Dash might be the most successful female athlete Canterlot High has ever seen, but a tragic side effect of her attention-seeking ways is a tendency to not think everything through, brain damage and a lust for the limelight rendering most of her plans either outright hazardous or just plain stupid.

Although she'd practiced the routine for weeks and planned everything about it down to the last detail, there was one thing she'd overlooked when choosing the cafeteria table as her stage.

Football fields aren't covered with mashed potatoes and gravy.

The noise in the cafeteria was deafening, and Lyra found herself desperately wishing for a pair of nice, non-oppressive earmuffs. A few decibels later, she found herself less interested in ethics, and more interested in not losing her hearing.
Whether the potential muffs were ethically hand-picked from the finest muff trees in Canada or made from ground Dodo beaks painted with industrial waste using a living baby seal as a brush was the last thing on Lyra's mind.

Rainbow assumed the scorpion pose, and to the thunderous chants and applause of the whole school, slipped on a particularly slippery patch of gravy, failed spectacularly at all one-point-five back-flips, and bailed off the table.

Right into Pinkie Pie's pogo stick.

A cartoonish 'boing' sound, a tomboyish scream of abject terror, the sound of glass shattering against Rainbow's skull and an audible 'tick' as her IQ dropped by another point left the cafeteria oddly quiet.

The prismatic daredevil having left the building by way of involuntary defenestration and their main source of entertainment gone for the foreseeable future, the students returned to their tables disappointed and confused.

This had the added effect of slightly muting most conversations for roughly five seconds, just so Lyra could tearfully remember what lunch breaks might sound like in a better world.
Looking around for anything she could use as makeshift hearing protection, her gaze finally returned to her plate after a long, fruitless search.

What she saw on her plate, however, gave her the familiar I'm-regretting-this-in-advance feeling that she got whenever her subconscious saw a solution that would probably just create a new host of problems.

She almost decided to just tough it out instead.

Finding out Fluttershy brought her chihuahua to school was the straw that broke the camel's back. As the first high-pitched yap ravaged her eardrums, Lyra ground her teeth and swore violent, brutal vengeance upon all dogkind.

As far from on cue as possible, akin to a lonely billiard ball drifting in the endless void of space, Bon Bon walked in, wearing the biggest grin Lyra would ever see.

Bon Bon and her wide grin scanned the cafeteria, and upon spotting her green-haired B.F.F. -some would say O.F.F- she started producing the excited little noises that would annoy Lyra just enough to make her come over ASAP, but not enough to make her friend contemplate the ethics of hunting Bon Bon and her grin for sustenance.

Bon Bon squeaked and squee'd. Occasionally, she mixed it up with little peeps here and there. She waved while bouncing up and down, grin still widely in place, the very picture of wholesome, girlish enthusiasm. She did all of that and more, until she sounded like an ambient recording of an anime convention for small rodents set in a rapidly sinking boat.

But Lyra did not stir.
She would have yelled at Lyra, if she'd been able to. For some reason, she was completely incapable of doing so.

Instead, she was relegated to frustrated squeaks and other assorted noises typically associated with brutal, unfair death and an affinity for cheese.
Meanwhile, Lyra sat in her chair with a completely blissful look on her face and a pair of green, leafy hair decorations on either side of her head.

Bon Bon was going to ruin it. Ruin everything.

Taking quick, determined strides, she drew closer every second, grin still in place, her attempts at making it more like a frown failing miserably. Not for lack of trying.
Mere seconds later, a fuming Bon Bon stood in front of a completely unaware, potentially helpless Lyra.
Her toothy grin felt a lot more fitting now, and even grew a quarter-inch wider.

And promptly shrunk back down when she saw just why her friend didn't so much as look up today, despite Bon Bon making the types of noises that once led Lyra to -in one of her more eloquent moments- describe her friend as a 'noxious scaffolding of human filth.'