Lure of the Flower

by Impossible Numbers

The Rose, Red with Embarrassment

While Doc gabbled on – faster and faster, and over the objections of Princess Twilight Sparkle – about some hazardous prophecy stuff that was probably way over his head anyway, Roseluck tuned out the beatbox music to focus on Lily. She was twitching in the corner.

Again.

“Now really,” said Doc from the other side of the table, “I meant, and Hazardous Prophecy agrees with me, that the impossible is often far more comprehensible than the merely very improbable. No, listen a moment. Turning invisible by magic is simple enough for a child to understand. So, the reasoning goes, turning invisible by the clever use of mirrors, projection technology, and some special shiny fabric must be the more difficult task to pull off!”

Showing off again, thought Roseluck, but in an absent, dreary way, as of one who picked up the thought without thinking, simply because the trigger had been pulled and the trap had snapped shut in her mind. Part of her was proud for him, sure, but he’d left her far behind again, and after a while of this she’d given up hope of catching up.

“You misunderstood his whole point!” Twilight patted the table, where a less self-controlled mare might have hammered it. “Magic isn’t easy to understand. We’re just familiar with it. Once you peel back the surface, what looks simple is actually really, really complicated. The impossible, if it’s actually possible, is just another kind of improbable!”

On the other hoof, Lily was the sort who wouldn’t even make it to the starting line. Roseluck sighed and her heart wept. The pink-coated blonde was stuck in the corner, too terrified to even say hello in case she fluffed it. And at a Pinkie Pie party no less!

With Lily hanging around the back of her mind, Roseluck wished her good luck and tried to focus on the conversation again. They’d been going on about this latest book for some time.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said, smiling and warming up for the big run. “The rules are out there. You just have to find out what they are, right?”

On her left, Twilight lowered her cup; the lemonade sloshed and fizzed inside. “Well, yes, there are the empirical observations to consider, but without a testable hypothesis or a null hypothesis to compare against –”

“Ah,” said Doc triumphantly, “there’s the conundrum, Miss Sparkle. How do you decide ahead of time what’s a valid hypothesis and what’s not?”

And… Roseluck tripped. The race ran on without her. Still, she glowered and focused as best she could. Doc was only getting carried away. She could catch up sooner or later.

“Obviously,” said Twilight, smirking at him, “the principle of scientific investigation is to have a phenomenon to explain. Either Nature provides, or previous scientific works will.”

Roseluck took a stab at it. “You mean experts?”

“Well, yes,” said Twilight, who reduced her smirk to a friendlier smile. “For exactly the same reason you go to a doctor for medical advice or a lawyer for legal advice. When they’ve distinguished themselves in the field, what they say carries tremendous weight.”

Not entirely sure if Twilight was talking down to her, but at least happy they weren’t arguing again, Roseluck nodded over and over. “Of course. That makes sense.”

“Now now now, hold on,” spluttered Doc opposite. “I think Hazardous Prophecy had something to say on that front, hadn’t he? One of his three laws, in fact?”

“The one,” said Twilight, blinking innocently, “that everyone forgets because it’s logically dubious?”

“The one that says what you said… and then adds, ‘But if the expert should declare something to be impossible, then it is all but certain that they’re talking through their hat.’ I happen to know for a fact that dozens of scientists who said something was impossible have been proven wrong sooner or later by some upstart tinkering in his basement.”

Roseluck groaned with sheer embarrassment. Sometimes he was so obvious.

Under cover of their next round of cheerful argument and counterargument, Roseluck checked behind her. Lily stood in the corner, fidgeting and eyeing up the drinks table.

Poor Lily. Her nerves must be playing her up again. Maybe I should go over and talk to her. Oh, if only Daisy was here…

Still, she didn’t actually get up. Maybe later. Upon hearing the other two settle down in a ceasefire, she turned back to the conversation.

“I quite like the second law,” she said. “Of Hazardous Fallacy –”

“Hazardous Prophecy,” corrected Twilight, but gently.

Inside Roseluck’s head, a little Rose smacked herself. She knew she’d start blushing now; Doc had commented on it a couple of times before, and then made a point of not correcting her in future.

“Yes,” she said to the tabletop. “It’s what makes science so wonderful. ‘Go as far as you can, and then go further.’”

She saw the words forming behind Twilight’s lips: Logically impossible, or Another law that makes no sense. But Roseluck wasn’t the Doc, and the shifting lips stopped and smoothed themselves down. This was always the way; Twilight and Doc were heavyweight champions of science, and happy to deck each other in a friendly spirit of polysyllabic competition. However, they were less happy about doing the same to a pinweight like Roseluck.

Flattering? Or insulting? Not that Roseluck wanted to get verbally decked, but the problem with going easy on a pinweight was that it meant she was a pinweight.

“Definitely,” said Doc carefully, “important. Yes, one must always… uh… push back the limits as far as one can.”

“Discover the limits, yes,” Twilight corrected, in that special bright tone she used to pretend she wasn’t actually correcting anything.

“It’s like detective stories,” said Roseluck.

“A good analogy!” said Twilight, trying too hard.

“Uh, yeah… because they test each idea and then see how far each one goes.”

And that law says: nothing’s impossible. If you think it can be done, then try your hardest, because no one has the right to shut you down before you’ve even started. She didn’t dare say this, though. Should she do so, they’d probably shuffle where they sat and avoid her eye, and she knew what that meant.

Take it seriously. BE the scientist. Come on, Roseluck! Think about what you’re saying.

“In fact,” said Doc, bracing himself against the table as though about to gallop for a joust. “That leads quite nicely into my point, Miss Sparkle! Any technology that’s too simple by far is just magic on a detour. No, the future belongs to the more complex devices, and that’s where I intend to place my bets.”

“And I say,” replied Twilight, likewise bracing for a countering joust, “that on this one, I’m with Hazardous Prophecy! The third law clearly states that anything seemingly simple, studied deeply enough, reveals itself to be a profoundly complicated phenomenon! That’s why magic will still be around; it’s not simple, any more than minds are! We just think they are because they’re… Well, we deal with them all the time. We have the illusion of familiarity, and a scientist cannot afford to overlook that. And that’s where I intend to place my bets.”

“Magic will be replaced by sufficiently advanced technology! The revolution is happening right now! I have the data to prove it!”

“Magic is sufficiently advanced technology! I have the theoretical underpinning and philosophical treatises to prove it!”

Doc barked a laugh. “Air and words!”

“Raw data!”

“Your theoretical principles are, and ought only to be, the slaves of empirical observations!”

“No! Your undisciplined jumbles of numbers are, and ought only to be, the slaves of rational and reasonable organized thought!”

Oh boy. Roseluck slipped out of her seat and let them get on with it. The weird part was that they both had the rich honey smell of two ponies in a good mood, which in her mind was hard to square with their shouting.

She wondered if two ponies could be happily angry with each other, or if this was that “academic debate” stuff he’d been touting a few weeks back. Apparently, it was a marvellous thing.

At times like this, she didn’t blame Lily at all. But the poor girl couldn’t stand in a corner forever.

They had to stick together. Even though Daisy wasn’t here, they had to, got to, ought to stick together.

Anyway, an “academic debate” could get a bit too stuffy for her liking. Sooner or later, she needed a breath of fresh air. Around her, ponies that she’d pass in the street and occasionally wave to were dancing and stinking of sweat and talking far too loud, their murmurs and shrieks and laughter overcrowding even the beatbox blares of the DJ.

She stopped to let Derpy go past. The mare was thrashing her way through a dance. Someone had stuck a lampshade onto her head, and either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care.

Everything was just too much. A changeling looking for some love to snack on would drown under the tidal wave.

And that was fine, she thought hastily. Really. I love… going to town… and boogeying… and all that other exciting stuff. In moderation.

Derpy finally moved on. As soon as Roseluck took a few more tiptoeing steps, however, Pinkie Pie sauntered into view, leading an entire pony conga line. Roseluck beamed along with them and knew better than to interrupt.

Actually, her chest fluttered with envy, along with her stomach’s more familiar butterflies.

But it was OK, because she’d found Doc. He was all right once he had his science fit. If anything, though, she reserved her envy for him most of all. He knew so much. He talked so breezily about chemical this and space-time that and fundamental force the other thing. He was showing her a bigger world, far beyond her garden of experience.

Not that she didn’t love her gardens, of course. Just nice to know there was this big world beyond the fence, and she could go out and explore it at any time.

Finally, she got impatient and “excuse-me’d” her way between Shoeshine and Lemon Hearts, earning glares from both of them, winding her way, finally, towards Lily.

By which point, someone had beaten her to it. Goldengrape, a smile with an earth stallion attached, leaped out and seized Lily so suddenly by the shoulder that Lily squealed and hit the wall behind.

“Heeeeey, beautiful!” He winked at her. “What’s a lovely lady like you doing hanging around the margins? Little vixen ready to do the foxtrot, or get spicyyyyyyyy with a salsa?”

“What!?” Lily darted about for an escape. “What!? I didn’t – I said – I never –”

Roseluck slapped herself. Trust Goldengrape to throw himself at someone looking to bolt. One day, Daisy would simply have to teach him the “gung-ho” approach wasn’t the solution to everything.

Evidently, Goldengrape was picking up the mood too; his smile vanished behind his brow-furrowed concern. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to put you out, Lily. I just assumed, since you were at the party and everything, you know, you’d be, uh, getting into the spirit of the thing?”

“I thought you were with Daisy!” Lily blurted out in panic.

“What? I am, I am.” Goldengrape’s lips fumbled with the words, and Rose could just imagine him trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. “I-I thought you needed a bit of cheering up, that’s all. Thought you were waiting to dance.”

“In my own time, in my own time.” Lily smoothed down her blond mane, tilting the lily blossom she always kept tucked behind an ear. “Good grief. You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Goldengrape looked so pained and lost that Roseluck took pity on him. She patted his shoulder.

“It’s OK. I’ll take over from here,” she said.

He gave her a last helpless look and then backed off grimly, nodding before he turned away. Once or twice, she saw him glance back at them.

“How are you, Lily?” she said.

“Did I offend him?” Lily craned to see over her. “I offended him, didn’t I? Everyone keeps staring at me. I know what they’re thinking.”

“Well, you are standing there not talking to anyone. Either you stay at home or you join in. Normally, at least.”

“Oh, I’m so jumpy my legs feel like they’re inches over the ground all the time!” As she spoke, Lily paced, swivelled her head, rubbed herself, and kept cocking her ears. “I only came ‘cause I didn’t want everyone saying I was a shut-in like Daisy.”

Roseluck sighed. “Yes, Lily.”

“I heard them talking about her.”

“So did I, Lily.”

“She’ll go the same way as Mister Greenhooves, you know. He turned into a shut-in, right at the finish.”

Roseluck clamped her mouth shut. No wonder Lily hardly ever spoke to anyone these days; in her current mood, she had the same tact and calmness as a frothing evangelist raving at a funeral. They Did Not Talk About Mister Greenhooves.

Still, she had a point.

“Daisy won’t end up like that.” Roseluck giggled, but nervously; she was half-wondering about it herself.

“No? He started sleeping more often too! And he was a gardener!”

“He was really old.”

“Yes, well, that’s what they think.”

Groaning, Roseluck stood and resisted the urge to move away. Another reason no one talked to Lily was because sometimes she got these… ideas. Last week, she’d said the Wonderbolts were going to break the sound barrier and shatter the world. The week before, she’d gone on about secret yak invasions to smash the country. And the week before that, she’d insisted someone was stalking Princess Twilight Sparkle, which just went to show how badly Lily had gone loco. Everyone knew someone was stalking Twilight Sparkle. She was a princess. It came with the job. Someone somewhere would always try their luck for a royal autograph. That was business as usual. Nothing to get worked up about.

However, Roseluck knew what was going on. She had to make allowances. These were trying times.

“Lots of ponies get hypersomnia,” she said gently. “Doc explained this to me. It could be all sorts of things. She won’t end up in a coma.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, but it’s a reasonable guess. Why should she go into a coma?”

“Aha,” said Lily with a horrified glee that widened her eyes and her grin. “No one ever found out what made him go into a coma, did they?”

“Well…” said Roseluck, swept along by the madness in spite of herself. “No.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“I’m sure Doc knows what he’s talking about. He’s very good at this sort of thing. And Nurse Redheart said it sometimes just happens, and she’s got loads of medical experience.”

Lily grunted. It was supposed to convey doubt, but that implied thinking. Roseluck increasingly believed that the grunt was a signal, indicating that Lily’s brain had jammed on the bits that didn’t fit and had merely spat them back out again.

Not that this paranoiac – Roseluck beamed at having remembered such an important-sounding word – not that this paranoiac didn’t trust experts. To Lily, the experts were often what stood between them and total collapse. But she had the same view of experts as she had of police officers who, say, only investigated crimes that didn’t threaten the apocalypse, no matter how patiently Lily spelled it out to them.

Roseluck’s hoof swung across and tapped Lily’s own. “I’m sure Daisy will be fine. She’ll keep an eye on the florist’s, just like old times.”

Such a cruel phrase: against those words, Lily had no defence. Her face – taut under the stress a moment ago – now slackened and drooped.

“I guess,” she murmured.

Nearby, Goldengrape whooped and reared up to jig on his hind legs. Beside him, Junebug walked upright, tottered a moment, and then laughed and imitated his jig. Further afield, Pinkie Pie’s conga line tried to phase through itself, causing much confusion and a general falling down and flailing of limbs. No one seemed to mind at all.

Roseluck winced at the display. Of course, she thought hurriedly, it’s nice to see them enjoying themselves and no one really gets hurt, and it’s all in good fun, but… well, there IS health and safety. That’s important too.

“Remember the first site we went to when we were looking to set up the florist’s?” she said. “And there was no furniture in it and we both hated it and we asked Daisy what she was thinking? Remember when she said how much could be done with a bit of pony DIY? Then she hit the wall, and one of the planks fell out? Remember that?”

“I remember the screaming,” said Lily dreamily, “when it fell on her foot.”

“Exactly! And, and remember the other time, when Twist came over and tried making candy, only it got stuck to the violets, and Daisy – oh my, Daisy went into such a tizzy!” Roseluck chortled.

“Yeah…”

“Hearts and Hooves Days were always my favourite, because –”

“We used to have so much fun arranging the bouquets.” Lily tilted her head as though to rest on her own shoulder.

Growing with the sigh, Roseluck breathed, “Yeah. Those were good days. I’ll treasure them forever.”

Across the dance floor, the other ponies joined up the conga line and sang as one. Goldengrape and Junebug blew kisses at each other, chuckled, and went off to rope other partners for the next dance, since the DJ was changing discs.

“You think something’s eating her?” said Lily suddenly.

Buckling under the annoyance, Roseluck rubbed her own eyes. What she needed now was Daisy. Daisy was always the one who handled Lily’s worst moods.

“Lily, please! Don’t talk about that stuff.” I don’t know how to deal with it! Half the time, I wonder if you’re right!

“Think about it! There’s an emotion-eater for everything else. Changelings eat love, windigoes eat hate, that shadow-nightmare-ghost thing, or whatever it was – you know, the one Luna made –”

A few moments passed while Roseluck adjusted her thinking to Lily’s level. “You mean the Tantabus a while back?”

“Yeah, that. It ate dreams, for Pete’s sake. And Tirek could eat magic.” Lily gave a spasm like a dog drying itself. “Well, why not a creature for eating depression too?”

“Like what? You can’t just say that, or you could say anything.”

“I dunno. Don’t you know? You and Doc know lots of things.”

Inside her heart of hearts – Roseluck never understood the phrase, but it sounded nice and emphatic – she wriggled with glee. Lily had said “You and Doc”. Not “Doc”. “You and Doc”. Her feet almost left the floor.

“If there was anything like that,” she said, trying to sound professionally scientific, “I’m sure we’d have heard about it by now. Besides, it doesn’t change anything. We ought to be there for her.”

“So why are we at a party?” Lily’s question lashed out.

“Me!? Don’t blame me! You wanted to be here! I just came along for support!” And to find someone enjoying themselves for once. I wonder if Goldengrape is game for a samba.

Over by the tables, Doc and Twilight had settled down. At least, their faces were no longer red and they were sipping lemonade instead of talking over each other. In many ways, she was very lucky to be sharing time with them. Twilight alone was supposed to be involved in a conference up at the castle. This might be her last party for a week.

She wondered if she had enough time to ask her…

“Wanna come with me and sit down?” she said. “You know Doc’s all right. Twilight too.”

Breathing heavily, Lily fanned herself. The stench of sweat burned Roseluck’s nostrils.

“Not yet. Give me a minute.”

“You’re getting worse; do you hear what I’m telling you?” said Roseluck, raising her leg to give a friendly pat. “You can’t let what’s happening to Daisy get to you.”

“I said give me a minute, please!” pleaded Lily.

The leg lowered. “OK, OK. Whatever you say. No need for that. Just enjoy the party, or whatever.”

Yet as soon as she ambled away, Roseluck wanted to hit herself at once. Lily was such a trial. It had to be Lily’s fault. But Roseluck should’ve known better. Daisy certainly did, but she wasn’t here.

No, there was nothing else for it. She had to face facts, like Doc always said, though a spat between mares wasn’t what he’d had in mind. Definitely not when he’d been going on about string theory.

The Flower Trio – her, Daisy, and Lily – were breaking apart. Sooner or later, the Flower Trio would be history.

She wasn’t keen on history. Instinctively, she felt it should happen a long way off, not up close. Like an earthquake.

---

Comments

[redmar]

When the Doctor is talking about someone tinkering in their basement proving that somthing is not impossible he's talking about himself. He would also say that he knew all along that it wasn't impossible but that might be a lie.