…Detecting Frustration
From that first day through several rowdy years and unsold flowers to the present, Roseluck's idle mind shot forwards and she woke out of her daydreams with a snort.
“Hm? Whazzat? Sorry? What?”
Strong hooves which had been shaking her now drew away. “Just saying we’re finished, love.” Quickfix backed off; her unicorn horn shimmered, as did the hovering spanner beside her head. “Doc wants you off the tenterhooks.”
“Wow.” Roseluck yawned, not even bothering to hide her gape or, she presumed, the dangly bit at the back no one knew the name of. “You work fast.”
“Trust me on this, Rosie; we are never going to set the temse alight again!”
“Eh?”
“Oh, come on, come on. Time for you to inspect the work.” Quickfix winked and scuttled back through the door with a slam. Raised voices asked questions at each other.
Sitting on her comfy armchair, the cup of coffee long since bereft of its steam, Roseluck wondered what on earth Doc had been thinking when he’d roped that nutcase in.
For everyone knew Quickfix; her real name was Silver Spanner, but “Quickfix” had been her own choice, and she’d used it so often that it stuck. Lots of things stuck to Quickfix.
Everyone, sooner or later, had seen her ferreting around in trash cans, and for this reason no one ever shook her hoof. Equestria didn’t know what a “dumpster” was, but they certainly had their “dumpster divers”. Or “garbage grubbers”, to be technically accurate.
Roseluck didn’t move for a while; she was trying to figure out where she’d been shaken awake. In the end, she simply resolved to have a very thorough scrubbing in the bath.
For Quickfix had a dream.
According to her, all kinds of useful things got lost in the trash. Her job was to retrieve them as close to their pristine forms as possible, before Equestria’s trash collectors simply loaded the stuff up and shoved it into a magically charged recycling plant. She’d said that was “cheating”.
And she had a bigger dream, of a sort: to get rich off rubbish. Free as it was in the trash cans, the stuff she retrieved suddenly had a price tag attached, in honour of the effort she went to. An effort, she pointed out, that others wouldn’t. Since an awful lot got thrown out, and since she’d read the idea in a book once, she was determined to build her fortune out of reused parts.
“Where there’s muck,” she’d told the crowd once, “there’s brass.”
Idly, Roseluck supposed she might have been successful if, say, she lived in a city. Out in the country, the only workers likely to benefit from most of the scraps were farmers, who alone were as happy to wade through waste as she was.
Except for Doc…
Roseluck chilled herself to the bone.
Something like that would appeal to a dreamer like him, wouldn’t it? Yes, she imagined their meeting now; Doc would have caught the unicorn elbows-deep in his bags of waste, and one sharp question would lead to a hundred questions like bouncing rubber balls, and wouldn’t a stallion who tinkered with the universe just love to meet someone who could supply the choicest scraps and gears and cogs? Besides, Quickfix had taken a course in engineering once, though Roseluck had no idea where. It wasn’t as if fixing toasters featured much on Cheerilee’s curriculum.
Ah… now it made sense.
Roseluck stared gloomily at her untouched coffee.
Why was she still here, then? It wasn’t as if she’d contributed anything beyond Doc’s abilities. Reading a book, for pity’s sake. And she’d been no help at the hospital, save possibly for the fact that Redheart might have thrown him out if he’d gone alone.
Drifting along through an unseen wake, Roseluck rose off the armchair and shuffled towards the door.
Were they even doing the right thing for Daisy?
She stopped. The image of the mare lying unsmiling on the bed gave her pause. And all that stuff about the Dream Lotus sent her mind spinning.
She wondered if Daisy remembered that day at all. Probably not. More likely, she’d dismissed it as nothing important. Serious work had beckoned them onwards.
But Roseluck squirmed under the memory, even today. She had the horrible feeling Daisy had tried to tell her something profoundly important, if only she – Roseluck – hadn’t been too dumb to understand.
Maybe, just maybe, the best thing to do wasn’t to act like Daisy was at death’s door. After all, correlation was not causation; Mister Greenhooves had been really, really old and he really, really didn’t count as a gardener anyway.
Perhaps they’d made things worse. Perhaps she, and Lily, with the best intentions in the world, had pushed her too hard, and then pulled when she’d tried pushing herself away from it all.
“Poor Daisy,” she whispered.
Well, yes, Doc and she had to check just in case, but…
What had they done to leave Daisy asleep for days on end?
No, that was the wrong question. Perhaps if they set aside the accounting and the bookkeeping and the stall-holding and that stuff with the tax returns forms, then possibly somewhere in the remains lay enough wriggle room to ask what they hadn’t done to her.
It made no difference that Daisy always pulled papers towards her, be they the latest invoices for begonia deliveries or the collective restaurant bill. The fact was: they’d let her. Every time.
And now Lily was running around inside the girl’s head.
“My gosh…” Roseluck breathed.
Pain bit into her head. Ow! she thought. This is stupid! Why does everything have to be so complicated!? Why can’t it be something simple, like a depression-eating monster!?
With that, she threw herself back onto the chair, bounced, settled, and groaned.
The door opened. Doc said, “Are you coming, Roseluck?”
“Give me a sec! Give me a sec!”
He shrugged and shut the door again.
Her mind cast about, a child looking for a lost teddy. Sitting there doing nothing was an exercise in torture; worse, because the only other choice was to stand there doing nothing. She needed something. Something!
What was it Hazardous Fallacy said? Maybe he’d know what to do. The second law: what was it? Stupid memory! Come on! Something about things being possible?
“Anything is possible”. Oh, Daisy. Is that what you were trying to say? And I didn’t listen. Why didn’t I listen?
“Anything is possible”.
She gave it some more thought.
She shuddered.
Amazing: ponies actually said those words as though they were encouraging. They didn’t grasp what “anything” meant. Not truly.
Oh, Daisy… what would make you that desperate…?
Willing herself not to be terrified, Roseluck got out of her chair and strode over to the door. Clanks and whirrs told her Doc was still at the fine-tuning stage.
Patiently, Roseluck waited for him to make the last few adjustments to the… to the device.
“Darn and blast!” He picked up the wrench between his teeth and whacked, whacked, whacked the thing until it pinged. With a clatter, he dropped it again. “There. That’s better. Just the right amount of scuff.”
“What?” said Roseluck.
“Scuff marks. No super-advanced homemade device is complete without a little wear and tear on it. Makes it look authentically shoddy.”
“That’s what you’ve been spending time on?”
“The device works. Believe me. But if it looks fresh out of the box, then my credentials –”
“Our credentials,” said Quickfix, levitating the device.
“My credentials and our credentials,” said Doc without skipping a second, “would be impugned somewhat.”
“So to look authentic,” said Roseluck, trying to keep up, “you have to fake it?”
Quickfix tapped the side of her own muzzle. “Engineering is a fine art, love. You’re not supposed to understand it. Just enjoy the mystery of it.”
“I’m sure that’s wrong.”
“That’s why I’m the one holding the spanner, love.”
Roseluck regarded her in the manner of a queen being cheeked by a street urchin. “I think I’d like to know what you two have been up to.”
“Up to our eyeballs in fun, love,” said Quickfix, who winked at her.
That wink was downright offensive. A street urchin wouldn’t dare give it to a shiny penny, much less a monarch. Roseluck’s jaw cracked with the crushing pressure.
“Yes, indeed!” said Doc, plucking the device out of the air between his hooves. “Many’s the time young Quickfix here has helped me out with gadgets and gizmos aplenty.”
Roseluck’s teeth almost shattered.
“Of course, modesty forbids me from mentioning that I did a lot of the work, but it’s always bountifully helpful to have such a keen assistant to rub elbows with.”
Now her skull began to quake and rumble under the stress.
“And what a one we’ve made between us! Honestly, I could do this all day, but it was tricky enough to tune just the three, and I gather we’ve wasted enough time. Roseluck, it’s extraordinary! I do believe we’ve cracked it!”
For a moment, the crushing rage subsided; she could almost hear the skull joints pinging with release.
“You have?” she said.
“Yes! And it’s all credit to young Quickfix here! While she’s no scientist, she certainly has the heart of one. I’m absolutely sure I couldn’t have completed the device without her essential input.”
So much scream rushed up Roseluck’s throat that she pressed a hoof urgently into her mouth and was sure she’d explode under the pressure. For Daisy, remember! For Lily! You’re doing this for them!
“That’s… nice…” Roseluck swallowed it back down. She might as well have swallowed a bowling ball. “OK, so… so what is it?”
He held up a mishmash of glass tubing and twined helixes, and yes, there were the diodes sticking out of it. Always the diodes: he seemed to think they added just the right amount of futuristic to a design, even when they took up battery power. A hoof-sized square dominated the centre, and when the switch at the back clicked on, a single line ran through the middle. He’d probably ripped it off an oscilloscope.
“This,” he said with his booming show-off voice, “is how we clinch it.”
“It’s a dream creature detector?” Roseluck tilted her head. The thing was so ungainly that she half-expected the lot to collapse piece by piece.
“You might call it a contaminant detector, after the great Golden Bough. This little display here reads off the brainwave patterns of the subject, whatever stage of sleep they’re in. Next, observe these helix-shaped loops coming out the side? All you need is a piece of the subject – skin, saliva, anything with DNA – and via the principle of like-affecting-like –”
“Golden Bough’s Principle of Homeopathic Magic,” added Quickfix happily.
Under her shroud of interest, Roseluck sagged. She’d never remembered whole jargon-based terms that well…
“Yes…” Doc gave his assistant a suspicious look, “if you insist. Anyway, via the principle – whatever you call it – the device compares said essential identification with the brainwave patterns. Thirdly, it scans the cutie mark of the subject…” He tapped the glass tubing, which flared with a laser briefly “…to triangulate the exact signature of any and all entities present in the subject’s mind, including during REM sleep.”
“OK,” said Roseluck, hoping this was leading to a simplification. “So… when it does that…?”
Doc blinked at her. “I thought I’d just explained that?”
“I’m sure you did,” she said hotly. “But what’s the result?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Doc popped with surprise like a bubble blown suddenly into a tree.
Roseluck glanced at Quickfix, who was grinning. In her current state of mind, she automatically assumed that grin was aimed at her. Part of her knew it wasn’t, but that part was not currently driving.
“Of course it is,” she said, trying to sound casual. “I just wanted to make sure it actually detected anything.”
Doc shrugged. “Well, we can test it, I suppose. Who’d like to be test subject?”
“Wait a minute! Don’t we have to be asleep to test it?”
“Well, dreaming, yes.”
“That could take too long! We’ve been away for too long already!”
“That’s all right, Rosie.” Quickfix stepped forwards smartly, levitating the device out of Doc’s grip. “Daydreaming’s just as good. Here, let me give it a charge, and work my magic on it.”
“No magic!” Doc made a grab for it, but only got a laugh out of her as she raised it out of reach.
“Whyever not? It’s already got magic in it.”
“Excuse me,” Doc said, rearing up for the device, “but the principle is resolutely, unfailingly mechanical. This device is perfectly capable of operating without magic.”
“Still got magic in it anyway.”
“Give me that back!” Finally, he lunged and plucked it out of the air. “I’ll thank you not to dwell on technicalities.”
Despite herself, Roseluck giggled. “So it really has got magic in it?”
Grimacing wretchedly, Doc avoided her eye and picked up another of those strange soup-strainer helmets with diodes and wires sticking out of it. “Yes, if you must know, but only because we needed a temporary shortcut this one time.”
“Ah. Thought so. Don’t you need big, heavy devices to measure DNA, or something? I’m sure you mentioned it once.”
“Rather regretfully, I don’t recall.”
He placed the helmet on her head and plugged a wire somewhere behind the device. Instantly, the display beeped. The glowing line became a mountain range of undulations.
“Now,” he murmured under his breath, pausing only to hold the device in his mouth for a moment before hitting the side. “I just scan your cutie mark… like so… excuse me, would you open wide? I need a spit sample.”
Roseluck tried to ignore Quickfix’s chortles as she gaped and let him stick part of the device inside. Horrible cold poked the fleshy back of her cheek before he withdrew it.
“Commence daydreaming,” he said.
“What? Just like that?”
She couldn’t tell if his smile was encouraging or patronizing. “Take your time. If it helps, close your eyes.”
Unable to help herself in the throes of scientific testing, she did so. Anything to get this out of the way.
Her cheeks burned with self-consciousness. Roseluck tried not to imagine how she must look, wearing that overdesigned helmet, standing there with her eyes shut. If it weren’t for the chance, that one chance, to see Daisy and Lily rise off the bed or off the floor, blinking, waking up to see her again… Well, if it weren’t for that, she would never have stuck on this helmet and stood with her eyes closed like a dummy.
Even her enthusiasm for science had limits.
Ah, she thought, and that’s probably why he has his precious secret sessions with a mare who thinks rummaging through garbage bags is a good hobby.
She imagined herself coming over one day, toolbox balanced on her back, winking at Doc amid the machine parts and bending their heads together, working on… on… something… Her imagination was a bit vague on the detail –
Beep!
“All clear!” When she opened her eyes, Doc lowered the device and pulled the helmet off. “The display’s flashing green, which means we’ve confirmed that your dreams contain just you.”
“Oh,” said Roseluck. “Is that good?”
Doc gave her a sidelong look. “Yes, I should think so.”
“What good’s that, though?”
“Aha!” said Doc, bravado al fresco. “That’s where we play our ace! Quickfix, my dear Quickfix!”
“Gotcha, wotcha!”
From behind another pile of junk, the unicorn levitated two more devices. They looked exactly the same as the first one.
“Ding dong,” said Doc.
“Eh?” said Roseluck.
“Ah,” said Doc, tapping his muzzle conspiratorially. “You may have noticed something a bit off about my description of the detector. We’ve managed to solve it, but I certainly don’t want to spoil the surprise. Can you figure it out?”
Roseluck sighed. She was already reaching the end of her tether, and the coffee was doing strange things to her brain. Already, she felt herself lightening on her feet.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said wearily.
“Later, later. We’ve already wasted time, have we not? Here’s a hint to keep your grey matter going: one of the devices merely connects to the other two.”
Now the coffee was demanding to drive. Roseluck swayed slightly, trembling with the new effort of keeping herself at bay.
“Can we go now?” she said.
“Going, going, and soon to be gone!” Doc rounded on Quickfix and bowed. “An absolute pleasure as always. If you ever find yourself on Query Street, don’t hesitate to come and find me instead.”
“Query Street?” said Roseluck, who’d never heard of such a place in Ponyville.
“You’d better pay on the nail, that’s all I’m saying.” Quickfix dropped the devices with a clatter and sauntered over to the window. “Well, toodles! Not fit to hold a candle to you, but at least I didn’t make a pig’s ear out of it.”
“Perish the thought!” Doc waved at her. “There are never too many irons in the fire when you’re around, Quickie! Pip-pip!”
“Ooh, nice. No flies on you, eh Doc? Pip-pip!”
Finally, thought Roseluck, before the unicorn vaulted herself out the window. All the idioms were riding roughshod over her brain, which in any case was cracking under the riot of coffee trying to break in.
Contentment breathed out of Doc’s mouth. “No flies on me. What a wonderful wit dear Quickie has. Oh, isn’t she a one?”
“One what?” Roseluck said, whereas most of her chased after the coffee and prised the controls out of its mouth.
“One mare. One treasure. In fact, one mare’s garbage is another mare’s treasure. Very fond of the workhorse idioms, your basic Quickfix.”
“Sure,” muttered Roseluck. “If you don’t mind the smell.”
“The smell of progress, dear Roseluck. Let it not offend you.”
“How long have you known each other?”
“Oh, ages. Before I met you, in fact.”
“Is that so?” Roseluck kept the warning out of her voice, but only just.
Meanwhile, an utterly oblivious Doc – at least, she hoped he was oblivious, and not doing this deliberately – went over and scooped up the dropped devices. All three disappeared inside a bulging pair of saddlebags.
“By the way, are you quite all right, Roseluck? You seem unusually tense, even for a mare of your position.”
The question hit her. Even the coffee stopped struggling. “What?”
“Natural enough under the circumstances, believe me,” he said, coming over to place a hoof on her shoulder. “I wouldn’t want you to feel overwhelmed, my dear.”
“You can stop calling me ‘my dear’, for a start.”
“Done and done.” He gave her a friendly pat.
“And I’m not a pet, thank you.”
“Beg pardon?”
She glared meaningfully at the offending hoof, which quickly ducked out of sight.
“Apologies,” said Doc, nodding towards her. “I completely understand.”
Alarm flashed through her mind, banishing the coffee at once. “You do? Look, it’s not like I don’t like her – OK, I don’t actually know her well enough to decide that – and I’m sure if we met when she wasn’t cosying up to you here – well, but for where we plant our seeds, I mean –”
“Ah, correction: you’ve lost me there, I’m afraid.” He cocked his head. “What is it, Roseluck? Anything I can do?”
She looked into his eyes, and almost convinced herself she had his full, undivided attention. But she doubted it, in the end. Doc gave the impression of performing calculus while daydreaming, even as his eyes blunted themselves to look at her with concern. The only way she’d get his undivided attention would be if she were made of numbers.
All of a sudden, she felt very, very stupid.
“No,” she said, hoping her cheeks weren’t blushing. “Anyway, we’re wasting time. Let’s go do this test thingy, whatever it is. I just hope I’m wrong about this.”
There was no hope for it; she blushed and burned her face.
Doc saluted. “Allons-y, ma rose de bonne chance! Allons-y!”
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Pretty sure you mean days?
8828950
If it helps, what I was going for was that Roseluck was having the same or similar daydream to Daisy, hence her mentioning the details during the rest of this chapter. It was meant as a minor callback, as the second-to-last line of the flashback mentioned Daisy wishing next year's Summer Sun Celebration was "less rowdy than this year’s" (of course, having seen the show, we know how well that went down).
I could make it clearer, if you think I absolutely should?
8829644
?
Yeah, that could use more clarification. I was like
8829694
OK. Modified the first two lines to make the timeline and perspective more explicit. I'd like your thoughts on how it reads now, if I may request them?
8829703
Rest of it read just fine. I liked the way you handled Rose when Doc and Quickfix were practically flirting right in front of her. Doing it for Daisy... Doing it for Lily... That took a great deal of maturity.
The Doctor doesn't seem to realize that Rose doesn't follow his explanations because of the technobabble. The purpose of his device seems to be to check if anything has entered the dream from outside.