Cut, Color, Carat, Clarity

by Estee

Minor Flaws

She'd gone for a trot after closing the Boutique for the night. The mist had been cleared and it had seemed necessary, somehow, to get out of the shop for a while. She'd been spending far too much time there over the last few moons. If it wasn't a supply run or a negotiation session, if her rest times hadn't taken place during the days before she'd moved into that too-big, still uncomfortable space on the upper level, she'd been in the Boutique. That was what had been necessary, what she'd had to do. Before that, it had been getting ready for the trade show: just about a full moon of that labor, with a different deadline pressing against her fur. And to set all that off, the first two days after her official and rather final return to Ponyville, which had largely been spent in fighting with her mother.

Rarity had been back in Ponyville for moons now, and the last few of those had been spent in getting ready to become the newest part of the town's shopping scene. But with nearly all of that time spent in labor...

It had taken the arrival of Mrs. Voyeur and -- the other one -- to make her fully realize it. Rarity had come home, yes. But she hadn't spoken to her old schoolmates, because there hadn't been time. With the exception of the few who'd come to check out the Boutique, she hadn't seen her neighbors (old and new) for more than the seconds it took to gallop past them, because there hadn't been time. She'd just barely found a few days for reconnecting with her father and hours for getting her little sister away from her fabrics before everything was ruined by a fast-rolling body which liked to wrap itself up in what Sweetie apparently saw as a mix between swaddling cloth and one-pony play fort, but for everything else...

She'd come home. But when it came to gossip or actual news, the flow of life in the settled zone -- in so many ways, Rarity was now an outsider. Almost a stranger in her own town.

Rarity had missed things, and one of those was currently somewhere behind the lit attic windows of the otherwise-darkened bakery.

She stared up as she stood under Moon on that warm summer night, looking for the movement of shadows. Nothing.

---

[/hr]

"She's the Cakes' daughter," Mrs. Voyeur had begun, just a few hours earlier.

"Who?"

"You haven't been in the bakery? The new one -- well, it would still be new to you, I suppose. Sugarcube Corner?"

Her budget had been -- tight. Decidedly so, especially with those emergency first payments put aside. It had reached the point where a few of Rarity's meals had at least partially consisted of grass gathered on the way back from her favorite gem hunting ground: it wasn't particularly nutritious or tasty, but at least it was decidedly free. "No."

"Well, you must have seen the couple who runs it," Mrs. Voyeur had declared, and then quickly described them.

And in fact, Rarity had seen them, a few times: it only took a moment to bring back those memories.

Then she silently calculated their rough ages, and compared those numbers to the same estimated total for Pinkie. Some rather distressing subtraction occurred.

"Errr..."

"Adopted daughter," Mrs. Voyeur quickly clarified. "She came in a few years ago, a little while after they did."

Rarity's head had briefly dipped from the weight of empathetic sorrow. "So her birth parents --"

And Mrs. Voyeur's expression had cruelly sharpened.

"Nopony knows."

---

[/hr]

When you lived in a boarding school, the sorting of gossip was a survival skill. Rumors traveled around the little environment at something slightly over the speed of the words themselves. Every tale distorted in the telling, putting an exponentially increasing distance between itself and the actual events with every set of ears it passed through. Reach the limits of the small world, bounce off the barriers and gain force as the stories somehow took strength from the walls. In her youth (well, deeper youth), Rarity had simply been cautioned by her parents against believing too much of anything Mrs. Voyeur said, although such had never seemed to prevent her own mother from seeking that dubious counsel time after time. But five mostly-wasted years at secondary school had brought a scant number of useful skills. Rarity didn't think she had the whole story: Mrs. Voyeur would have needed to possess that in order to change it, and she'd gotten the impression that the Cakes were very careful when it came to any true information about their daughter. But some knowledge inevitably escaped, and Rarity believed there was a good chance she'd managed to sort that wheat from the chaff.

Not that there was still much to work with.

The scant story, as best she could distill it, was this: an earth pony filly had been brought into the settled zone in the company of a unicorn stallion, with the younger body showing some signs of recent injury. The male had spoken to a number of ponies, then gone into the bakery. Some talk had apparently followed and then the unicorn had left. He visited every so often, checked on how she was doing -- but the filly had remained in Ponyville.

She'd had a mysterious accent: something nopony had heard before she'd (shyly) opened her mouth for the first time, and the years Rarity had spent working on a new group of intonations had been used by the new arrival for getting rid of her own. She'd had to attend remedial classes, because she appeared to have never previously attended a formal school of any kind. She'd apparently had no real concept of what a true settled zone was, much less how it worked. Everything had been new and strange to her, and as far as new and strange went... well, there had been plenty of that coming back the other way.

But eventually, she'd settled in -- somewhat. The adoption had been legally formalized. She worked in the bakery during many of her afterschool hours. She'd made at least one good friend that Mrs. Voyeur knew of --

-- the somewhat-derisive snort was instinctive, and almost as instinctively softened.

Applejack.

A name Rarity hadn't heard in years. She'd seen the young farmer during the interval, but only briefly: Rarity had occasionally gone home for the holidays and trotted through the town's market square, where the familiar (and desperately in need of a severe redecorating) cart might be set up for fruit selling. But that had been it. Rarity would trot by, notice that yes, the earth pony had become visibly larger and stronger during the last few moons away too, and move on. Neither would ever say a word to the other and Rarity wasn't sure Applejack had ever truly seen her, much less knew just how much the other adolescent remembered.

They had never truly been enemies. Being enemies would have required an emotional connection with the other which neither was capable of forming. Rarity regarded Applejack as an alien life form: something she understood to exist, but didn't truly comprehend how it could -- and had suspected that the farmer, for some strange reason, regarded her the same way. There had been a perpetual, permanent disconnect between their viewpoints and worlds. Never truly enemies, and there had in fact been one successful (and decidedly temporary) alliance of necessity against a common foe. But they hadn't been friends. Rarity felt she had a better chance of striking up any degree of true relationship with a dragon than she did of ever befriending Applejack.

The young baker was apparently Applejack's best friend in the world and as far as Rarity was concerned, Pinkie could have her.

I shall not hold that against her. She clearly needed friends and Applejack -- this was now more times than she'd thought the name in several moons -- provided one. It was a gracious act towards somepony who truly needed to see a foreleg being outstretched towards her own. But...

She'd listened to Mrs. Voyeur. Carefully, so as to pick out the pieces of the story which should not be believed, and that had turned out to be most of it. Some of it wasn't just not worth believing, it had been outright unbelievable. But at the core...

An adopted daughter from somewhere nopony's heard identified. A talent for party planning, and so she apparently throws them for just about everypony in the settled zone, which sounds quite frankly impossible given that she has both school and work hours for most of the year, and even the summer demands that she put in her time at the bakery. Another exaggeration. She likely exercises her talent for the benefit of her friends while asking a few acquaintances if she can practice with them as well.

But as for how she came to be here... not even Mrs. Voyeur can track the truth of that, because it would mean looking through the rumors she likely started in the first place. Lone survivor of a monster attack, or the only pony who failed to fall to the illness which wiped out the rest of her family. A runway, a foundling, somepony raised in the wild zones or who somehow raised herself from infancy. Sarcastically, I can likely rule out the one concerning her having been brought up by sapient pony-shaped insects. But...

There had been rumors and stories, most of which couldn't possibly be true and with the majority of the remainder so exaggerated as to make Rarity wonder if they had gained strength from having bounced off the continent's coastlines. But there had been a common theme to every last one of them, and Mrs. Voyeur had finally summed it all up.

---

[/hr]

"She's strange. There's always been something strange about her. Not in a bad way." With surprising thoughtfulness, "I think most ponies understand that she's still catching up. That wherever she came from, it's almost too different, and she's still trying to fit in. Figuring out how. I've seen griffons adapt faster, but you know most of them grow up with ponies around. Not our kind of ponies, of course. She's just... strange, Rarity. She's been strange since the day she was brought here."

"Strange like -- the streamers?"

And Mrs. Voyeur had frowned.

"Weren't those here when I came in?"

---

[/hr]

At the best of times, Rarity was detail-oriented. (At the worst, overly focused to the point of obsession. She knew it, and possessing that knowledge didn't seem to provide any degree of solution for the problem.) She'd planned out every aspect of the Boutique's appearance, sometimes over and over again. Just about every last tenth-bit of it had been placed by her, excepting the few times her father had managed to come by and offer his field to the cause.

She hadn't placed streamers. She was sure of that.

Maybe Dad...

Actually, that was a possibility. Her father had his merits (and a surprising number of them), but a professional hoofball player really couldn't be expected to possess much in the way of decorating skills. She'd had to supervise every effort he'd made, and there was still the possibility that he'd managed to sneak streamers into the mix when she wasn't looking.

Which would have meant I'd overlooked them for days. At a minimum.

And failed to take them down with the rest of the Grand Opening touches.

Additionally, this would require that my rather unexpected guest ultimately chose to comment on the lack of something which was already there.

Pinkie was... strange.

She could have just head-tossed streamers from out of her saddlebags. With perfect accuracy. Well, that could be part of a party mark, I suppose. Always carrying supplies, just in case they were necessary. Yes, that makes sense.

Or it would if...

Had the earth pony even been wearing saddlebags?

---

[/hr]

Deep under Moon now, and Rarity continued to wander throughout her settled zone. Her settled zone again, with so much more space to travel through than the school had ever offered. But the school had become familiar, and even with her scant time home during the holidays to consider, time during which she and the apprentice baker had somehow managed to completely avoid each other... Ponyville was not.

Here a new building, there the loss of an old one. A family gone, another moved in. A new room added to an house which had been there for years and the sound of muffled crying which indicated the nature of its easily-upset occupant, now waiting to be fed.

Rarity was home. After years of waiting for the crucial birthday which would make her attendance at the hated facility into her decision, the prisoner with only a single, perfect, and painfully long-term plan for escape holding out for her chance, she was home. But...

...there was a lot of living space on the upper level of the Boutique, really. She'd recognized that on the first day, during her initial trotthrough of the property. She'd even told her father that she'd been thinking about getting a pet, just for the company. But there had been dresses to make and advertising to buy, supplies to acquire and decorations to plan out, which now apparently (and inadvertently) included some level of thankfully color-matching streamers. Hours dedicated to all of it, and so no pet had ever been sought. She simply hadn't had the time.

She could cease her trot and go home any time she liked. She lived alone, and that meant she set her own hours. Her responsibility: waking times and number of hours spent in rest prior to them. Food and shelter and budget. All things she was now taking care of alone.

Completely alone.

So much living space on the upper level. She had yet to fill it with much of anything. She'd tried to transfer the contents of her old room, and... she was too big for that bed now, didn't have the money for a new one yet. She was sleeping within a nest of blankets on the floor. Cooking equipment for her very own kitchen had meant scavenging stable sales: she didn't have a full set of anything, not from a single source: any company she hosted would require a two-tone serving arrangement on the table she was still trying to clean, and additionally would have had to deal with the fact that Rarity was still very much learning how to cook. Her current pride was in having managed a decent arrangement of fourthhoof towels which didn't clash with each other.

At her parents' house -- well, her mother might try to renew the fight, or see her older daughter's visit as some temporary level of surrender. Her father was currently on the road again, and would be for weeks to come. But her sister would be there. A sibling she'd hardly seen for years, a little filly whom Rarity barely knew.

There were a few nightlife facilities in Ponyville: she was passing one of the more lively ones now, paused as she listened to the music which vibrated through the walls, turned to face the door --

-- stopped. She was too young. She didn't have the years required to enter most of them and when it came to the remainder, she didn't want to spend the money for a cinema this week and had never taken to bowling.

Back to trotting. It felt as if her hooves were beginning to drag, which was certainly a logical outcome from their slowly increasing weight.

She wasn't dating. She didn't know whom she could date. She'd been completely out of the social scene for years, missed the time of first attractions. No idea who might be interested in her, not a single clue as to whether there was a single pony she could look to in return. And even if she did locate somepony... there were always parents to consider, and the idea of having their child dating a minor who lived alone might not sit well with any elders.

She could go to a friend's residence and visit --

-- five years.

I spent five years at that school. It took days to travel back and forth. I had a little vacation time in Ponyville, and that was time when others traveled or had already set their own pursuits, along with deciding whom they would pursue them with. I barely saw anypony from primary school for more than a few minutes. I got off the carriage, and somepony was waiting for me. I'd go home. There would be things to do there, and by the time they were done, it was back on the carriage and...

Ponyville wasn't the smallest settled zone. There were times when it had seemed so, mostly during the deepest of Rarity's dreams, when the world of fashion beckoned to her and home turned into something very close to another kind of prison. But after the failure of the trade show, she'd chosen to make her stand here. She didn't have to deal with the nightmarish store rent costs and label snobbery of the capital. It would be possible for Ponyville to host high-end shops, especially once the trains began to run. She would prove it. The sales traffic would eventually come to her. In the end, she'd chosen -- home.

A home which wasn't the smallest settled zone. A place which she wandered through as something close to a stranger, with everything all the worse for being half-familiar. Voices she almost recognized, laughs she nearly knew, and not a single sound she could force herself to approach.

I haven't truly been back for five years. Not for more than a week or two. And now I live here again, but nopony truly knows me any more, not the me I became while I was away. And I don't know anypony, not the ponies they turned into while I was gone. I was at that school for five years and...

Pinkie, wherever she was from, however she'd gotten to Ponyville at all, had Applejack. She threw parties, and other ponies allowed her to do so on their behalf. Still more ponies attended. To that degree, the adolescent who'd come from somewhere outside the borders had found her place. And Rarity, who'd been born in the settled zone, the native who'd been forced into five years of exile...

I don't have a friend in the world.

Comments

[Georg]

Rarity, meet that strange contradiction in terms occupying the same place as Pinkie Pie.

[wolfstorm56]

Pinkie can fix that, Rarity. I'm half-surprised she didn't pop up right at the end there.

This was pretty sad all around though. It's really difficult to come home again after being gone for a long time and find all these things that should be familiar but aren't.

[FanOfMostEverything]

Never truly enemies, and there had in fact been one successful (and decidedly temporary) alliance of necessity against a common foe.

Well, there's a story waiting to be told...

Sarcastically, I can likely rule out the one concerning her having been brought up by sapient pony-shaped insects.

Not in this timeline, anyway.

Yeah, the boarding school really did Rarity no favors socially. No wonder so few ponies are coming in. All the written advertisements in the world won't mean much in a town that treats careful reading as something that happens to other ponies. (And in Canterlot, an increasingly isolated filly feels a moment of irritation without knowing why.) Rarity's going to need to make some genuine connections to get that hoof traffic going.

Fortunately, there happens to be another social spider in town who's been very busy spinning her web. Never mind that it's made of Silly String, Rarity. It'll serve you very well indeed.

[Dinode]

I really want to know when and why she teamed up with Applejack.

[Lurks-no-More]

Rarity felt she had a better chance of striking up any degree of true relationship with a dragon than she did of ever befriending Applejack.

Yes, I'm absolutely sure that's how it goes, Rarity.

Also -- Rarity, you're trying to make sense of Pinkie Pie. You really like to live dangerously, young lady!

[Whiteout]

8055016

Given what we know about the 'verse's Pinkie, especially her foalhood... well, this is a Pinkie who is still working to match her own offbeat drummer. The amplifiers are not, so to speak, yet at 11.

You almost have to feel a little sorry for Ponyville. Pinkie alone, once in her prime, would be like dropping a depth charge in the local social scene's bathtub. But with Rarity involved as well?

I could almost wish Twi decided to stay in Canterlot, just to see what Ponyville would look like ten years down the line.

[Jordanis]

Oh no, Rarity is trying to figure out how Pinkie Pie Pinkie Pies. Turn back!

[Nyperold]

Mane is best saddlebags. Just like hair is best bottle opener.

[CCC]

8057906

...your avatar really fits with that comment.

[CrystalWaters]

Rumors traveled around the little environment at something slightly over the speed of the words themselves.

They say that a lie can travel around the world before the truth has got its shoes nailed in.

Some ponies skip the middle-mare and try nailing the truth to the wall; but the problem is that truth is a wispy thing of gossamer and oil and almost always slips between their hooves and through their field.

[eraser]

I always imagined Pinkie was distantly related to Cakes — something like a niece or a 3rd cousin.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

A traditional source of income would be to rent the spare room. Maybe her parents pay a little for Sweetie to stay? At least at first. Also, a number of writers assume she does repairs, alterations, cleaning & maybe rentals.

[CrystalWaters]

8055681
8056357
In case you missed it, good news!

[Dorath]

I can likely rule out the one concerning her having been brought up by sapient pony-shaped insects.

I wonder if Rarity will change her mind about that possibility come the Wedding ....

I don't have a friend in the world.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

Rarity felt she had a better chance of striking up any degree of true relationship with a dragon than she did of ever befriending Applejack.

DEPARTMENT OF LIFE'S IRONIES

They arrive more or less together.