• Published 28th Feb 2018
  • 727 Views, 76 Comments

Lure of the Flower - Impossible Numbers



Daisy dreams. What of, no one can tell. Only she's spending longer and longer in a world of her own. And one day, she won't wake up at all…

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The Lily, White with Fear

Soon, the party was so stifling that Lily gagged and scurried for the exit. Sweet relief when the door slammed shut behind her, taking with it all but the loudest of beats and laughs. Outside, the raindrops immediately settled on her coat, and her mane was slick within minutes.

She ran hooves down her wet face. “What is wrong with me!?”

And let them both slap down over her.

And sagged.

And sat down. With a squelch.

Virtuously, she tried to pretend this was because, well, she was worried about Daisy. Obvious, really. Her friend was acting weird. Anyone would be put out by that.

Truth was that she just felt annoyed by it, as though Daisy were doing this on purpose. All things considered, she may well be doing this on purpose. Perhaps to spite her, Lily, for something she’d done.

They were normally like sisters, and then once a month the pressure would mount and they’d end up shouting. Somehow, Roseluck simply never got into the shouting matches they both did. Over who’d sent Goldengrape the other Hearts and Hooves Day card. Over who’d wasted money on another round of acting classes, which Lily had quit anyway because one look at the audience had made her faint. Over who’d gotten them all in a flap when really the chrysanthemums were not falling apart, it was just that someone had knocked a petal off walking by.

The whole shouting match wasn’t fair, but they dealt with it. Every rose had its thorns. Even Roseluck could be prodded into getting catty, were her cowardly silences not enough to get on the others’ nerves.

But…

She’d never wanted Daisy to be like this. Shouting was better. It made her panic and shout back, but she’d gotten used to shouting by now. These days – these weeks – Daisy slumped and sighed instead. Lily had no answer to any of that.

The clouds covered only half the sky. Under the sunset beyond, she glowed orange. Her hoof did when she stretched it to inspect it. Muffled yelps gave way to muffled chortles as whoever had gaffed now laughed it off. The party had gotten to that stage.

Any other day, she could’ve walked back in and laughed and sang with them. Today, she felt her stomach lurch at the thought.

Roseluck had said it was social anxiety, and sometimes the condition was strong, sometimes weak.

Daisy had said Lily was born with more panic than the average pony. Even compared to the other two mares of her Flower Trio, Lily was a nervous wreck. She was a nervous fleet of wrecks.

Thank goodness Ponyville was just the sort of place for a pony like her. It was the kind of place where she could get used to “Good morning” being sprung on her by random strangers, where ponies like Pinkie Pie were walking encyclopaedias, except every entry read like a who’s who of the town, regardless of who they were or even of whether they were a “someone” at all, instead of no one.

Apart from the occasional rabbit stampede, last-minute order, and snapped stem, life in Ponyville was as gentle as it was possible to get in a world where hundreds of things could either eat or blow up an unwary pony. She’d liked it, in her trembling, teeth-on-edge kind of way.

But it was not without risk. There’d been the case of Mister Greenhooves. Everyone had wondered why they hadn’t seen him around lately…

She didn’t know him very well; unlike Pinkie, she had difficulty knowing anyone outside of Daisy and Roseluck. From what she’d heard, though, he’d been a quiet stallion of the “hayseed” breed, happy watering flowers and raking leaves and being inoffensive to everyone. He’d lived in the retirement home and bragged about working in Canterlot ever since he were knee-high to a mouse.

No one was clear on what had happened. He’d started taking longer sleeps and resting, and then one night had gone wrong, and…

Merely to think it made Lily jolt with shock.

Nurse Redheart had dealt with it. He was still alive. He just wasn’t Mister Greenhooves anymore. It was Nurse Redheart who’d watched over him, and then Nurse Redheart who’d sent him to the Ponyville General Hospital. No one visited him, not even his relatives. They said they’d wanted to remember him as he was –

Lily slapped herself round the face and yelped. What is wrong with me!? Why can’t I ever think about nice stuff!? I’m morbid. I hate being morbid. Nice girls shouldn’t be morbid!

Inside the house, Pinkie yelled something about an announcement. The music stopped. Nothing else made sense through the patter of raindrops and the muffling door, but from snatches of words here and there, it sounded like she was making the big birthday announcement.

Yep: right on cue, everyone joined in. A jubilant, flat-footed birthday song, stumbling between the giddy goodwill of overexcited guests and the fact that Pinkie had clearly improvised the tune on the spot.

Lily imagined herself on the dance floor among them, and her head swam and the world blurred and she had to grip her head to convince herself the sunset and the rooftops weren’t ebbing and flowing like tides.

She’d even tried getting in on the gossip around town, but she’d only ever managed it with Daisy and Roseluck. Sometimes with Pinkie Pie, but she was exceptional.

Lily never got into it. Half the time, they talked about the nasty things, like rude words between offended friends, or how someone had gotten a cold, and Lily was the sort of pony who thought of gossip as a kind of contaminant. Every time she tried agreeing that so-and-so was putting on weight or neglecting their hair, she gave in to her own urges and went to look for a bath, or failing that a scrubbing brush. Anything to feel clean again.

It was like merely thinking about bad things had poisoned her.

But she wanted to join in so badly. Already, her hoof swung up to push the door open.

Any other day, she was sure, it would have worked. Not today. Daisy’s drooping eyelids floated past her own inner eye.

Through the brief crack, the chorus swelled and threatened to crack. Laughter and applause broke out. She sighed and closed the door again. Not while she was in this state. The talk with Roseluck had drained her enough.

The chill of the rain seeped through her skin. Lily started pacing.

What she needed, she thought, was Doc. Or someone like him: Twilight, maybe. Doc never got scared of anything for long; even when he was fleeing the latest Everfree monster to stumble into town, he’d run a few yards first and then stop and turn round to watch. He even said things like “What a magnificent brute!”

Roseluck was right. He knew things.

Take that talk about contaminants, for instance. Roseluck had borrowed a book off him, written by some bigwig called Golden Bough. The next day, Roseluck had cornered her and Daisy in the florist’s and gone on and on about Golden Bough’s magic laws, and how clever he was to have come up with them.

Sadly, Lily didn’t have her giggly mindset, and even now only remembered one of the rules. A contaminant rule, or something. No: an imitative rule, but it sounded like a contaminant one. Like, like how eating nuts made you tough, or eating milk made you a milksop, or eating cheese made you an over-the-top actor. Some essence got in.

Apparently, magic had worked like that once, long ago, even before unicorns. Earth ponies had drawn symbols or made dolls or other effigies, and then the magic had to shine on them and water them for a bit. Lily approved of this arrangement, though it made as much sense to her as the idea of someone baking teleology into biscuits.

Then the spell in the symbol controlled whatever it represented. Psychosomatic, or so Roseluck had said. All unicorns had done since was move the symbols into their imaginations and pretended earth ponies had gotten too big for their horseshoes, but the rule lived on, a stubborn weed that refused to die.

Lily grimly bared her teeth. Well, anyone who finds out stuff about that for FUN is probably worth talking to. Huh. Maybe they could teach me to NOT stammer at ponies.

So it had to be Doc. Roseluck was keen but unwieldy, and the student was not a patch on the master. Occasionally, she’d considered Twilight, but the princess was busy on diplomatic missions these days, so presumably had to be met by appointment. That left Doc, who treated appointments as some rare species of parrot on some island in some ocean far, far away. And he had the right obsessive mindset; days could go by before anyone saw him burst out of his house shouting “Eureka!”

Inside, the murmur and the laughter and the beatbox music resumed.

She’d ask him. Not right now, but… maybe in a few minutes. Or, at this rate, a couple of hours.

Lily sighed and pushed her way through the door. Surely, sheer erosion would get rid of her nerves? She liked talking to ponies. She just wanted to know ahead of time she wasn’t going to offend them, or scare them off, or blurt out something about how the world was likely to end because the Ancient Pegasus Empire had prophesied it in a little chronicle only she’d heard about.

As she went in, she shook herself down like a wet dog, spraying nearby guests who grunted and yelped.

On the dance floor, Roseluck and Doc were attempting a waltz. On four legs. It was quite a sight.

Almost enough to distract her from the sight of Daisy, in her imagination, being led away from the florist’s by Nurse Redheart –

Lily slapped herself again. WHAT is WRONG with ME!? How do THEY manage it, and not ME?