Is it still a perfect day?
Cadance was speaking with the zipline manager, discussing the peculiarities of alicorn density and weight. Shining Armor watched, distracted, as a family was strapped into place, a father and his excited colt on one line, and a rather timid looking mare on the second. While the mare hadn’t exactly said no, or refused, it was clear that she was a bit worried about this whole experience—but she was trying it and Shining Armor admired her courage in the face of danger.
Of course, his own mother would do it without so much as a blink of hesitation.
The breeze picked up, causing the tandem ziplines to rock a bit and Shining Armor turned his face into the gust so that it could wash over him. Unbeknownst to him, his daughters did the same, mimicking his behaviour, having learned from him, they were just teenier, tinier versions of him. His windswept mane tickled his ears and for a brief moment, he had the perfect wild look about him.
While the wind sculpted him into the perfect, hunky stallion with a wavy mane, Shining Armor came to a worrisome realisation that he had spent pretty much the entire morning with Skyla and was about to spend even more time with her on the zipline. Fearful of what Flurry might be feeling, his head swiveled upon his neck so that he might have a better look at his oldest daughter.
“Fluffalump”—his words caused his daughter to jolt to attention—“I just realised that I might’ve been accidently neglecting you this morning. Are you okay with Skyla going with me on the zipline? I mean, Skyla’s been practically glued to me all morning and I just thought you might want some time with me too.”
A look of awkward vulnerability crossed over Flurry’s face and for a second, she became a yearling once more—a yearling with wide, wild, fearful eyes, afraid of what the dark unknown might bring. “It’s been nice catching up with Mom, actually.” She shuffled on her hooves, squirming, and gave her sister a nod. “Skyla is little and scared. She needs you more than I do. Mom and I aren’t fighting. Now that I think about it, you and I aren’t fighting either. It feels nice.”
Skyla said nothing about her big sister’s comment, but stood blinking with an owlish expression behind her eyeglasses. After a moment, she leaned up against Flurry and Shining Armor studied the both of them while thinking about how precious this moment was. Everypony seemed to be at peace with one another and he couldn’t recall when things had felt this… good. All of the tension was gone, all of the pent up frustration, the anxiety, the suspicion, and all of the antagonism that went with those feelings.
“Sometimes it feels like I am trying so hard to be a princess and prove myself that I don’t have time for much else. It feels like everypony is out to get me, like they’re all watching and waiting for my next big screw up so they can laugh and point and say, ‘I told you so.’ To be honest, this vacation has been great. No need to prove myself. No need to be a bigger, better alicorn. It feels good to be a big sister and a daughter again. It’s like… as alicorns, Mom and I don’t get along, but as mother and daughter, we’re fine.” Turning her head around, Flurry cast a glance over her withers back at her mother, who stood behind her.
“This is part of why I chose to remain as a unicorn,” Shining Armor said to his daughters, both of them. He sighed, a heavy huff, and shook his head from side to side. “For the moment, I have life figured out. I have a plan that I am following. Everything is mostly going according to plan. As things currently are, they’re working. But if I became an alicorn… I’m scared that everything would fly out of order. See, girls, even Daddy gets scared.”
“But you say you’re staying a unicorn for other reasons,” Skyla replied to her father. “Are you lying?”
“No.” Shining Armor looked into Skyla’s eyes. “I have many reasons and I just don’t share all of them. I’m allowed to keep some things private. Yet another reason to stay as a unicorn, I suppose. Too bad that all of Equestria is gripped with alicorn fever.”
“Yeah, the pressure, Dad. I feel it too.”
“I know you do, Fluffalump. That’s why the Crystal Cotillion became a debacle.”
Flurry did not become angry, but rather, she slumped and sighed in agreement: “Yeah.”
Shining Armor was about to respond, but Flurry it seemed, had more to say: “You know, if the commoners had their way, Mom would just stay pregnant at all times and shoot out foals. I’d be married to Sumac the moment I had my first heat. I’m pretty sure that Skyla would too. I have really good hearing, you know. These amazing ears of mine, I hear everything that gets said around me. When I hear these whispers, when I hear all of this talk, it drives me crazy, Dad. I can’t not hear it. Nopony cares about who I am, or what I am, or what I want to do. To them, I’m just the means to make more alicorns and I am nothing else.”
At a loss for words, left aching by what his daughter had said, Shining Armor stood in silence, his mind racing with an untold number of thoughts. What did this do to poor Flurry’s self esteem? How did she cope with it? What was this doing to her long term growth and development? How could he protect her? As Emperor, how was he supposed to serve these ponies that threatened his daughter’s well-being? This was quite a predicament and one with no easy answers.
“Sometimes, I wear earplugs to block it all out,” Flurry confessed, her gaze falling down to the platform they all stood upon.
Well that explained a lot of things. Flurry wasn’t just ignoring ponies, or zoning out, or not paying attention, she was intentionally deafening herself so she could cope with the pressure. Suddenly, a great many things made a whole lot of sense. He felt his heart clench, but had no idea what to do. Clearly, Flurry needed help and something needed to be done about this.
“Ready to go?” Cadance called out. “Get ready already. It’s go time!”
The attendant tugged the straps tight and said, “Keep your wings in, young Miss.”
Shining Armor was slung from the line with Skyla below him in a special parent-foal harness. Her head poked out from between his forelegs and her stubby horn seemed dangerously close to his neck. Beside them, Cadance and Flurry were also trussed up in a similar rig, and an attendant was double checking their straps.
“The line is a little over three-thousand feet in length and at its highest point is just a little over one-thousand feet off of the ground. Depending on your weight and how you hold yourself, you might exceed speeds of eighty miles per hour, but most ponies reach speeds of forty to sixty. You’ll be flying right over the city and the line ends at Gallow’s Inlet. Now, Gallow, I’ve done heard it said that he was a fine pony, and he had a noose for a cutie mark. You can’t fault a pony for doing what they were born to do, says me. I have a stevedore knot cutie mark and somehow, that put me here, in this place. Having a knot cutie mark really restricts your life choices, says me. It really ties one down.”
“It’s knot so bad,” Skyla said to the attendant. “It’s a real cinch figuring out what to do.”
Shining Armor groaned while the attendant chuckled.
“Okay, I’m gonna pop the brake and you’re going to soar like the wind. Are you ready?”
Shining Armor barely had a chance to nod before he started moving.
Below, ponies looked like tiny toys and the buildings were dollhouses. Skyla was shrieking, not with fear, but with excitement. The wind tore at Shining Armor’s face and his eyes blurred over with tears. The sound of the pulleys on the metal cable joined the wind to create a dull roar in his ears and all of his senses screamed at him that he was in danger.
Danger was fun, except for all those times when it wasn’t.
Ears flapping like windsocks, Shining Armor reveled in the sensation of flight and thought to himself that maybe, just maybe, being an alicorn might not be so bad. The offer was still on the table—it would always be on the table—and whilst he soared a thousand feet over the city below, he couldn’t help but think about it. Thoughts happened, wanted or not, and they could not be stopped, only entertained.
Cadance, riding on the tandem cable, was truly majestic. Her mane and tail whipped about in the wind and Shining Armor couldn’t help but think that she looked at home here, hurtling through the sky at breakneck speeds. She was still a pegasus pony where it mattered, it was her nature, it shaped her thoughts and her worldview.
It occured to Shining Armor that his daughters were truly strange to him; they were alicorns, three tribes in one pony, and having been born as such, they had known nothing else. They had never known being a unicorn, or a pegasus pony, or an earth pony. They only had an alicorn’s perspective and existed with three distinct natures within them.
Were alicorns three tribes in one body or four?
As Shining Armor zoomed towards Gallow’s Inlet, his mind thought about a great many things all at once.
The expression on Cadance’s face was priceless and totally worth the cost of a tacky, tourist shirt emblazoned with a witty slogan. One ear twitched, as did her left eye and the left corner of her mouth. Using his magic, Shining Armor smoothed out some of the wrinkles in his bright blue shirt and grinned at his wife. When a nearby tourist snapped a photograph, Cadance’s facial tics ratcheted up to something almost epic.
“Shining Armor.” Cadance’s words were monotonous, calm, the utterance of an Empress schooled in diplomacy and statecraft. “Shining Armor, Shining Armor. What am I to do with you, Shining Armor?”
“I don’t know, my big fluffy Cotton Candicorn—”
“Shiny, we talked about you calling me that.”
“I don’t recall agreeing to anything,” he said. Smirking, his voice filled with the suggestion of lurking laughter, he resumed his previous sentence: “My big fluffy Cotton Candicorn, I think my brilliant shirt suggests what can be done with me.”
“Yes,” the big fluffy Cotton Candicorn replied, “your shirt suggests that I go bungee jumping.”
Flurry Heart, her eyebrow raised, eyeballed her father’s shirt and the bright green letters. “I don’t get it. Something is funny and I don’t understand it. Dad’s shirt says—”
“Flurry, hush!” Cadance stomped her hoof for emphasis.
“Well hung.” Flurry shook her head. “What’s the big deal? Let’s go bungee jumping. I want to be well hung too.”
At this, Cadance facewinged and let out a pained groan.
“We’ll be a well hung family!” Skyla’s chirpy exclamation caused her mother to groan again. “I’m excited. And thirsty. And hungry. But mostly thirsty. I need a drink. Can I get a drink? Why is Mom groaning and looking at me like that? What’d I say?”
Another pony took a photograph and then Shining Armor struck a pose that was irresistible to the shutterbugs present. Flashbulbs popped and many pictures were taken while he celebrated this moment of mischief. No doubt, the ponies back home would end up hearing about this, and he wondered what his parents might think. His father would get a good laugh out of it, of this he was certain. There’d be a lot of raised eyebrows later, for sure.
A disappointed and dejected Skyla sat on a wooden bench, drinking a bottle of Cadance~Cola while making the glummest face possible. Shining Armor sat beside her on the wooden bench, unsure of what to say to console her. His daughter clutched her bottle of pop in her fetlocks because she was too upset to use her telekinesis.
“I’m big enough to ride the zipline, but not big enough to go bungee jumping. That’s just stupid.”
Shining Armor half-shrugged and watched the glistening condensation run down the bottle of Cadance~Cola. Skyla’s brokenheartedness made him ache and there wasn’t much he could do about it, except for try to console her. At least the aquarium visit would cheer her up, but she was bound to be downright moody until she could see the fishies.
“Can’t you do something?” Skyla demanded.
“Sproglodyte, I’m sorry. You’re too little and too slight for the body harnesses. You’d slip right out and splash right into the ocean.” He didn’t say anything about how the water was rather deep and he couldn’t understand how bungee jumping over deep water was okay but boating was scary. His daughter remained a mystery to him.
“This isn’t fair.” Skyla was dangerously close to whining. Eyes dark, she wrapped her pouty lips around the top of the bottle and took a careful drink, lifting it with both forelegs. She drank a little more, and then took a few brave gulps of the ice cold refreshing liquid.
Looking down at his daughter, Shining Armor recalled vivid memories of his little sister being upset because she wasn’t big enough to join him. She had bawled her eyes out when she couldn’t go with him on the roller coaster or the log flume known as ‘The Lumberjack’s Lament.’ At the time, he hadn’t thought too much about Twilight’s suffering, only acknowledging that she was upset and feeling sympathetic for her. Now, as an adult, he had quite a different view of the matter and a part of him wished that he had done more to comfort her. When next he saw her, maybe he’d talk to her about it. That day at the amusement park had to be a pretty miserable experience for little Twily, and he had made it worse by refusing to go on the yearling rides because he was a big strapping colt.
“You look sad.”
The words jolted him from his thoughts and he glanced down at his daughter, who was staring up at him. She had dribbled some soda down her chin, but not too much, not enough that Cadance would get upset about her daughter’s face being sticky in public—or so he hoped. Even during her own moment of suffering, Skyla was attentive to the pain of others.
“Daddy was thinking about the time he let his baby sister down,” he said, explaining where his mind had gone. “She wasn’t big enough for the really fun rides, you see, but I was. So she was stuck on the yearling rides while I went on the big exciting rides… and uh… well… looking back on it, I think my sister wanted to spend the day with me. The real fun was spending time with me and I was too busy doing fun big colt stuff while she was stuck crying on the Kiddie Carousel. Daddy was reminiscing and made himself feel guilty, Sproglodyte.”
“Did you have a nickname for Auntie Twilight?” Skyla asked.
“Sure did,” he replied, a broad grin revealing his gleaming white teeth.
“Well, what was it?” Skyla sniffled a bit but some of her good cheer seemed to be returning.
“I called her Twily, of course. I still do. She hated it at first, and complained that when I said it, it made her sound like a yearling baby. Little Twily always got so huffy-puffy. But as the years rolled on, it stuck. Now, if I don’t call her Twily, she wonders what’s wrong and if I’m a changeling.”
“Huh.” Skyla, her glasses a little crooked, clutched her half-full soda bottle and gazed up at her father with unabashed adoration. “I love you.”
“Why thank you, Sproglodyte, I love me too.” Shining Armor gave his daughter a nudge and then added, “I love you too.”
Then, in silence, Skyla continued to sip her soda.
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D'aww, the heartfeels are nice.
I need a picture of little Skyla sipping her cola while sitting next to daddy Shiny. Cute image is cute.
Protocol Shinycorn is in consideration. Please stand by...
Extra dramatic standing, fun for the whole family.
It's peaceful. Too peaceful...
Entertain them, Shining. Someday your family is going to rather have you as a living alicorn than a dead unicorn.
I love the nicknames and I hope Shining never agrees to anything regarding them.
That ending...d'aawwwww.
It occurs to me that Flurry seems old enough to have gone on a separate ride...or did she just want to be close to her mom? She really is in the "go away, don't leave me" stage of adolescence isn't she? That's adorable.
I hope we do get to see the scene someday where Shining apologizes to Twilight for his themepark abandoning.
...This. entire. section. I died. I'm dead. I can't...
Good moments here
They are so cute together...
Well, hnggg