Sharing the Nation

by Cast-Iron Caryatid

Chapter 12

— ✶ —

It took most of the morning for Twilight to free herself from her already loose obligations to the deconstruction effort, but it was a welcome distraction from the events earlier in the morning. Part of her was happy to move on, but the rest… “I just feel like it’s giving up,” she told Spike, bent over a desk in the depths of Rarity’s tower, triple-checking the paperwork.

There was a distracting flash of orange fire before Spike responded, but a quick glance revealed that the fire was constrained to a small metal trash bin in the corner.

“Well, I don’t know about the whole exposure-therapy side of things,” Spike said, glancing nervously in Twilight’s direction as he continued filing copies of the work orders she’d just finished. “But ignoring that, I don’t see the problem, really. The fact that they weren’t letting you do what you can actually do means that the job that you were doing is easily replaced, right?”

“Well, I don’t know about easily…” Twilight prevaricated.

Spike waved his hand in dismissal without even looking at her. “Sure, maybe you were doing the work of a dozen ponies lifting rocks, but I know for a fact that we have a dozen ponies for lifting rocks, since you just passed me the hiring orders.”

“Yes, but—” she began, but Spike interrupted her.

“—And it’s a dozen blue-collar ponies, too, not the three or four university-trained mages we could have hired instead,” he added. “And since you’re better than any regular mage…”

Twilight gave up with a heavy sigh. “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” she said, checking a few last boxes on the next set of forms and passing them on to Spike for him to sign for her. “If you look at it like that, though, I’m wasted everywhere. It’s not like I can do a better job than twelve librarians.”

“That just means you can do whatever you want, though,” Spike reasoned. “And it sounds like you’ve got that covered?”

“I suppose. I do like the idea of getting a new library up and running,” she admitted. “I just wish it didn’t feel like a step backwards.”

Spike just shook his head, took the next stack of papers and continued filing. “Sometimes I’m reminded why it took a royal decree to get you to move out of the castle and make some friends.”

— ✒ —

“Well, at least that’s done,” Twilight remarked, stretching her legs out as the two of them left the temporary government building.

“Do you feel better about it now?” Spike asked. Listening to Twilight waffle over things hadn’t been as good of a distraction as he’d have liked. Sure, it had kept him too busy to dwell on the details of his own mess, but the subject matter was a little too close to home to let him completely forget about things.

“You know what? I think I do,” she answered after some thought, sounding more content than she had in a while. “In fact, that gives me an idea.”

Spike winced, muttering under his breath, “Please don’t say anything about harems… please don’t say anything about harems…”

Twilight lifted her hoof and pointed dramatically into the sky. “Let’s go see how Rainbow Dash is doing.”

“Oh thank Celestia,” Spike said, relieved.

A moment later, there was a familiar flash of teleportation, and… Twilight disappeared, leaving Spike standing in the street blinking.

A moment later, there was another flash, and Twilight was back again. “Huh. That’s never happened before,” she said, looking up and down his tall, wiry form with curiosity. “Well, dragons are fairly magic-resistant, but that was more what I’d have expected from somedragon ten times your size. Maybe excessive magic exposure as an infant and the accelerated molt caused a multiplicative adaptation?”

Spike shuffled in place, trying to look like he had no idea what Twilight was talking about. He found it exceptionally easy, as he had quite a bit of experience with the real thing.

“Oh well,” Twilight said, lighting up her horn again, twice as bright as the last time. “I’ll have to look into that later. For now, I’ll simply adjust the power.”

Before Spike could express any concerns with the phrase ‘more power,’ the world went white and he smelled smoke. This, he also had plenty of experience with. The thundering echo was new, though.

Spike spent a moment brushing soot off his scales. By the time he was done, there was an irate, bleary-eyed Rainbow Dash at the door. When she and Twilight finally came face-to-face, they both hesitated. Spike had gotten the general gist of the story of what had happened with Rainbow Dash and the Wonderbolts from Luna, which was enough to convince him to stand aside, keep quiet and watch.

Eventually, the tension slipped away. “Hey, Twilight. Um. How’s the work on the palace going?”

Twilight glanced off to where the large brown slab remained in the center of Ponyville. “I quit, actually,” she said, dredging up a little of her remaining guilt. “They wouldn’t let me really do anything and it was getting frustrating.”

Rainbow Dash just stared at her. “Okay, that’s a bit contrived, even for you.”

Twilight blinked in confusion and Spike was right there with her. “What do you mean?”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes and led Twilight into the living room of the cloud house. Spike hesitated, then bent his neck to fit through the door, trying not to draw attention to himself.

“Come on, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said, throwing herself onto the sofa where it looked like she’d spent a considerable amount of time lately. The place was a bit of a mess, littered with takeout containers and several boxes from Sugarcube Corner. “You can’t really expect me to believe that you just happened to come to an appropriately sympathetic epiphany of your own while I’ve been grumbling about how much I screwed up my chances with the wonderbolts.”

Twilight was flummoxed. Spike was just surprised to hear Rainbow Dash use a phrase like ‘sympathetic epiphany.’

“Err, now that you mention it, I suppose the situations aren’t too different,” Twilight admitted, mostly thinking aloud. “The wonderbolts probably wouldn’t appreciate being shown up in their shows, but that’s why I was thinking we’d need to build up your reputation as a goddess first.”

“Build up my reputation as a goddess?” Rainbow asked, continuing to be suspicious. “You… really didn’t come here to convince me I’m better off without the wonderbolts and write a friendship letter about it?”

“Well, honestly, you probably are better off setting your sights a little higher…” Twilight demured, receiving a sour look from Rainbow Dash for it. “But actually,” she continued, “I just wanted to see how you were doing and bring you something that I thought would cheer you up.”

Spike frowned. He didn’t think that Twilight had brought anything with her. Maybe she meant that she was bringing some kind of news that would make Rainbow Dash happy? He was still trying to puzzle it out, when he was surrounded by a pink glow and levitated out into the open.

“Ta-da!” Twilight sang, holding him aloft like a piñata.

Rainbow Dash casually turned from her position on the couch to see what Twilight was doing and did a double-take when she saw Spike’s floating form, reflexively taking to the air to bring herself level with him. “Woah!” she exclaimed, then turned back to Twilight. “Does Spike have an older brother?”

“Nope!” Twilight beamed. “This is Spike!”

Rainbow Dash backed off, frowning, then proceeded to give Spike’s miniature adult body a more thorough examination than he was comfortable with.

“Twilight…” Rainbow Dash groaned, wiping her hoof down her face in exasperation. “Please tell me you didn’t decide it would be a good idea to shove a bunch of stars inside your assistant.”

Twilight was about to respond when Rainbow Dash continued, interrupting her. “Or let him eat them, or find some other way to make your own draconequus without the -equus.”

Twilight clicked her open mouth shut then pursed her lips in consternation. “You know, you really don’t seem to have much confidence in me today, do you?”

“Nope!” Rainbow Dash said, popping the ‘p.’ “And since you didn’t say no…”

Twilight stomped her hooved with a huff and also managed to plant Spike halfway into the clouds that made up the floor of Rainbow Dash’s house in the process. “No,” she emphasised, glaring at Rainbow Dash. “I did not do anything of the—” Twilight paused, looked at Spike and her eyes went black for a second. Apparently satisfied, she continued as if nothing had happened. “I did not do anything of the sort.”

“Well, then what happened?” she asked, gesturing at Spike in all his adult Spike-ness.

“Well, as it so happens, dragons apparently go through a process known as The Molt,” Twilight explained, then went on to regurgitate some bullshit story she’d apparently come up with about him going through some sort of heightened molt that had resulted in his becoming bonded to his harem of five dragonesses.

Spike only managed to keep his mouth shut because it being complete and utter nonsense made it no less embarrassing. In fact, having his life cast into the mold of some sort of teen fantasy drivel was probably worse.

Spike froze as things finally clicked.

For the first time in his life, Spike fully understood that Twilight Sparkle really was her mother’s daughter.

— ✶ —

Rainbow Dash looked at Twilight. Then she looked at Spike. She looked at Twilight then at Spike again, her uncertain look making it all too clear just how much Twilight had damaged her relationship with all of her friends. Eventually, though, she shrugged and stepped forward to offer Spike a hoof bump and said, “’Grats on the harem, I guess?” glancing at Twilight for direction.

Spike raised a resigned claw into a fist and accepted the hoof bump, all the while doing his best impression of a porcupine with a stomach ache.

“So, uhh… Is that why you came, then?” Rainbow Dash asked, at a loss for words. “I mean, I’m glad for him, but I don’t see how it’s supposed to cheer me up.”

“Oh, right!” Twilight said, perking up. “Yes and no. Sorry, we got sidetracked on the harem bit.” Lifting Spike back up in her magic, Twilight stretched out one of his wings to what was actually an impressive wingspan. “I figured some flight lessons would help you take your mind off of things.”

“Wait, what?” Spike balked, twisting in Twilight’s magic to look at her.

Rainbow Dash scratched under her chin with one hoof as she considered it. Finally, a smile came to her face. “Yeah, okay. You got me. Hay, you could use a few more lessons, yourself.”

Twilight’s cheerful smile faltered. “Why? I can fly just fine.”

“Twilight, what you do isn’t called flying. It’s falling with style, just without the falling. Or the style.”

— ✶ —

As much as she wanted to, Twilight couldn’t really say anything against Rainbow Dash’s method of teaching Spike to fly by dropping him off a cloud and waiting for instinct to kick in. It was, after all, the way that Luna had taught her, and Luna hadn’t even bothered to catch Twilight when she’d failed.

Assigning Twilight the task of catching Spike as part of her practice, on the other hoof, was a lot harder to excuse. Naturally, Twilight had expected that if she missed, the fastest pegasus in the world would be there to make sure no one got hurt. That might have been the intention, had Rainbow Dash managed to pay attention.

It was a good thing that dragons were as immune to rocks as they were to fire. It was true that even pegasi rarely lost a fight with the ground to any great detriment, but Spike was heavier than any pegasus and left a sizable crater comparable to some of Rainbow Dash’s greater failures just by existing. Very suddenly. At ground level.

Twilight wasn’t entirely sure that the term ‘no harm, no foul’ was appropriate in this context.

Three hours into their improvised game of lawn darts, they were made aware of something they’d overlooked when the rumbling failed to stop after Spike ran a furrow into the ground trying to do one of Rainbow Dash’s simpler tricks.

“I guess we are a bit late for lunch,” Twilight admitted, lifting Spike up out of the ground.

“Is that what that was?” Rainbow Dash remarked, swooping down from above. “Dude, Spike. I heard that from two hundred feet up!”

“Err, well… I’m a growing dragon?” he said, hunching over in embarrassment.

“Yeah, yeah, enough of the meek little dragon act,” Rainbow Dash said, standing in front of him and eyeing him up. “Look at you! You’re, like, several ponies’ worth of lean muscle now! Stop trying to make yourself look smaller—it’s not gonna work, and you just look silly trying. You’ve gotta stand with confidence!”

“But… I don’t have any?” Spike whined, attempting to stand straighter only to wobble a bit. “I have more experience flying now than I do walking around like this. Maybe I should just go quadrupedal.” Annoyed, he dropped down to all fours and slouched, craning his neck to look back over himself. There was no question he was built for it just as much as he was for standing upright.

“Yeah, no, that’s not gonna work,” Rainbow Dash said, circling him. “Upright or on all fours, you’ve still gotta hold yourself right. Lift up your head. Straighten your shoulders. Bring up your haunches and bend your back like this.” With each comment, she pushed and pulled him into position, nudging him back into place when he tried to relax. “There. Like that, see? Now you look good. Sorta like a lizard panther or a griffon with bat wings.”

“Or a dragon?” Spike deadpanned.

“Aheheh,” Rainbow Dash laughed, scratching the back of her neck. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, there are dragons and then there are dragons, you know? I’m not used to seeing you as the cool kind of dragon, you know? I mean, seriously! Have you seen most of the chumps bumbling around Ponyville lately? You’ve gotta be the luckiest dragon alive to somehow skip all those awkward years and not even come out the other end of it with a pot-belly like a pregnant walrus. I mean, I know dragons hibernate and all, but it’s such a waste when…” Rainbow Dash finally ran out of words and just gestured at Spike in general. “I mean, look at you!”

“Are you… hitting on him, Rainbow?” Twilight asked, raising an eyebrow in question.

Rainbow Dash balked. “Wha—no!”

“You do remember he’s got five dragonesses at home, right?” Twilight reminded her.

“That is not what I was doing!” Rainbow Dash shouted, her cheeks flushing. “Actually, that’s a good point,” she continued, changing the subject with brute force. “Even if he walks the walk, he’s gonna look really weird on all fours next to these dragonesses you say he has. I mean, uhh, some ponies are into that sort of thing, but he’d get looks.”

“Looks?” Spike asked, not really following. “Why would I get looks? What’s wrong with it?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re—err—I guess you are older, aren’t you?” Twilight said, not entirely prepared to explain innuendo to the little dragon she’d raised from an egg. It was only recently that she’d really properly come to appreciate it beyond facts and figures herself.

Rainbow Dash was less concerned, yet somehow more circumspect than Twilight would have been. “Think pets and collars, Spike,” was all she said, leaving him to fill in the blanks to in whichever direction his mind took him.

However he took it, it made him blanch and quickly stand up again. “Right! Um. So, we were talking about lunch, right?”

— ✶ —

They decided to let Rainbow Dash pick where to go for lunch and ended up at a small deli on the outskirts of the city. It was a nice, quiet place, not really what Twilight would have expected of Rainbow Dash, but then again, she probably came here with Fluttershy.

Of course, even a minimal number of ponies was still enough to stop and stare at Twilight. Honestly, it was getting old, but she supposed that anything like this where ponies were staring at her counted towards getting them used to her, at least in theory. The concept was simple enough, but with the city growing at the rate it was, the idea that they’d all get used to her if she just sat around in public places seemed hopeless.

“So, you’re really giving up on rebuilding the palace?” Rainbow Dash asked as they sat down to eat. Spike, while technically pony-sized if one was being generous, had to make do without a chair, but it was workable.

“Well, I gave up on helping,” Twilight clarified. “They’re still going to rebuild it, but that’s been the problem all along, really. If they weren’t making so big a deal of it, I’d have it done by now.”

“Yeah? How does that work?” Rainbow Dash asked.

So Twilight told her, mostly focusing on how she’d been limited to doing the job of a crane and a team of workhorses when she had dozens of spells that could have made short work of the entire project. “I mean, I’m part of the reason the entire thing was destroyed in the first place. Or part of me is the entire reason it was destroyed. Whatever. The point is, I could have wiped the whole thing off the map two days after I became an alicorn.”

“Oh yeah, the castle in the Everfree, right?” Rainbow Dash remembered. “So why’s it a rock now? That seems kinda backwards.”

Twilight pressed her lips together, not sure if she should repeat yesterday’s rant about the rest of her friends not living up to their demigoddesshoods. Given Rainbow Dash’s recent experiences, Twilight decided not to bring it up.

“I was hoping for a big slab of marble or crystal, but Applejack seems stuck on making mountains,” she said, making light of it. “It’s still an improvement over the deathtrap it was before.”

“Yeah, but weren’t you living in that deathtrap?” Rainbow Dash pointed out. “Where are you living now?”

“Your tower, actually,” Twilight said, already fond of the little space she’d made there.

Rainbow Dash cocked her head to the side in confusion. “My what, now?”

So Twilight spent the rest of the meal explaining to Rainbow Dash about Rarity’s plans to give each of them their own tower and connect them all in some way. Rainbow Dash seemed ambivalent about the actual idea of owning a tower, but she would hardly say no to having a giant monument to her awesomeness rising up above the rest of the city.

They were just about to get up and leave when a great big red dragon head pushed its way through the door, scanned the room and… left, leaving half of the ponies in the room shaking and the rest, who weren’t facing the door, blinking in confusion.

One of the ponies of the shaking variety happened to be their waitress, a sun-yellow earth pony mare still eyeing the door as she brought them the check, chewing her bottom lip in worry. “Oh Princess Sparkle,” the mare pleaded. “Isn’t there anything you can do about them?”

Twilight glanced at Spike and shifted a bit in her seat. “Uh, well, he didn’t actually do anything wrong that I saw. Has somedragon been causing trouble for you?”

“Well, not specifically,” she admitted, sitting and clutching the order book to her chest. “But that’s the third one like that that’s stuck their head in the door today! I’m all for not judging ponies—err, and dragons, I suppose—for things they haven’t done, but all it’d take is one sneeze to clear the room in a pretty permanent way. I’d rather not see this place and the ponies inside go up in flames because a startled pony dropped a pepper shaker.”

Twilight winced at the thought. “Well, you do have a point.” Glancing at Rainbow Dash, she said, “I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to go give him a talk and see if there’s anything we can do to make his visit shorter?”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Sure, I’m game. Not like I have anything to do.”

Twilight considered that for a second. “Actually, don’t you have a job?”

“Well…” Rainbow Dash said, drawing out the word. “About that… You see, since I was going to go become a Wonderbolt and all, I might have sorta… said some things to the chief weather coordinator that are not really things that you say to ponies in polite company. Or really rude company, for that matter. Think of it like a magic spell that instantly creates an employment exclusion zone around the caster. It was—”

“I get it, Rainbow,” Twilight interrupted. “I get it.”

“So… yeah,” Rainbow Dash said, fidgeting with a napkin on the table. “Speaking of which… um, about the check…”

Twilight rolled her eyes, not terribly concerned about the check. “Yes, fine. Spike—”

“Actually,” Spike interrupted. “With how things went this morning, I didn’t bring anything with me. So the expense purse…”

Twilight pursed her lips, tapping her hoof on the table as she considered her options. Well, what could it hurt? “Ugh, fine,” she grumbled.

Concentrating, she lit her horn and focused her magic on a spot on the table in front of her. That was probably enough, but then she had another idea. She pulsed her magic and formed a small shield bubble to contain her magic and keep it from spreading out. Finally, satisfied with the rising concentration of magic inside the shield, she pictured a pile of bits and clopped her hoof on the table, creating a pile of bits with a teleport-esque flash.

“Spike,” she said, collecting a portion of the pile while leaving a sizeable tip. With a second tap of her hoof, she made a small bag to put the bits in. “Here. Take these and make a note that I minted fifty bits.”

Spike took the bag with some trepidation. “Is that legal?”

“It is if I do it,” Twilight said with confidence, though she wasn’t entirely certain herself. “Look, don’t worry about it. If it’s a problem, I’m sure Luna will… uhh…”

“Make it legal?” Spike suggested.

“Well, I suppose,” she allowed. “I was just trying to think of a way to say she’d handle it without sounding too cavalier about it, but it might be a good idea to get a legal grounding in the works now if I’m going to do stuff like that from time to time. It shouldn’t matter as long as the books balance in the end.”

“I guess?” Spike said. “About that, though…”

Twilight gave him a level look, quickly guessing the point. “You didn’t bring any quills or scrolls either, did you?”

Spike just shook his head.

Twilight looked back to the table where her little bubble of magic had been. Most of it should have dispersed by then, but it wasn’t the easiest thing to judge, nor did she know how much was actually needed. Shrugging, she tried tapping her hoof on the table, and three scrolls, a quill and an inkwell flashed into being.

“Well… there you go,” she concluded, motioning for Spike to collect them which he did.

“Err, Twilight?” Rainbow Dash asked, reminding Twilight that she was there. And she was staring. “Did you just Discord up fifty bits and a caligraphy set?”

Twilight’s eye twitched. “Don’t be silly, Rainbow. Of course not,” she declared, teeth clenched.

“Oh, okay,” she said, sounding a little relieved. “It’s just that it sounded—”

“It was just a regular writing set,” Twilight said, talking over her. “We’re taking notes, not writing invitations—oh! You did get your invitation to the Celestias’ coronation, right?”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “Err, yeah, but back up a second—”

Twilight shot Rainbow Dash her best menacing glare. “Ixnay on the iscorday agicmay,” she ground out without moving her jaw, glancing at the waitress who was standing there dumbfounded.

Twilight facehoofed. “I swear, Rainbow Dash. If this gets out because of you, I will… rrrrrrghhhhh.”

Quickly, Twilight turned her full attention to the waitress, forcing a fixed smile onto her face. “Sorry, miss. My friend here has extremely poor taste in jokes and doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut. As the alicorn of the stars, magic is a natural part of my being, and I am continually exploring multitudes of new and varied methods for expressing it. What you just saw is simply one of those experimental methods, which, I should say, has absolutely nothing,” she shot a nasty look at Rainbow Dash. “Nothing to do with Discord. Who, by the way, is dead. Actually, maybe don’t mention that last part to anyone since I don’t think we’ve said anything about it yet. No, wait, don’t mention any of it. Um. I’m not going to threaten you, but just… don’t.”

The waitress gave a miniscule, jerky nod. If she had been any paler or more petrified, she could have passed for a statue in the gardens of Castle Canterlot.

Twilight’s face fell. “Ugh, now look what you’ve done, Rainbow, you made me scare her. Um… Oh! I know!” Twilight clopped her hoof on the table, creating a large bar of gold, which she quickly levitated into one of the mare’s saddlebags, the heavy weight making it hang awkwardly low. With a frown, Twilight clopped her hoof again and levitated a second gold bar into the bag on the other side, evening things out. “There!” she declared with a smile. “For your trouble.”

Spike scratched his chin in thought. “I’m not sure if that’s considered bribery or—”

Twilight waved it off, turning back to the others. “Don’t be silly, Spike. It’s a tip.”

Spike raised one eye-ridge at the mare, who was still standing there motionless. “You’re really claiming that was just the tip?”

“Actually,” she said, considering it more fully. “Gold bullion is considered a trade good, not currency, so I’m not sure it could be counted as either one.”

“I’m fairly sure bribing someone with apples still counts as bribing them, let alone that,” he said, taking care not to shout any more than necessary that the waitress’ saddlebags were hanging low with twenty-five kilograms of gold.

“Fine,” Twilight said. “But bribery implies I’m trying to get her to do something illegal, immoral or contrary to her contractual obligations. Asking her not to mention Rainbow’s slip of the tongue so people don’t get the wrong idea isn’t illegal or immoral, and if anything, keeping customers’ private conversations private is arguably an implied part of her position. I’m basically paying her extra to encourage her to do an exceptionally good job of her job, thus, it’s a tip.”

Spike scrunched up his face, doing his best to follow her logic. He eventually seemed to decide that it checked out, though, because of course it did. It was perfectly logical. “Alright, but you’ve gotta admit, Blueblood would be proud of you for that one.”

“Wha—?” Twilight thrust her hoof in Spike’s direction. “You take that back!”

“Uh, Twilight?” Rainbow Dash interjected before things could get heated. Pointing at the spot on the table where the various objects had come into being, she asked, “Can you do that with anything?”

Twilight took a moment to switch gears. “Basically, yeah,” she freely admitted then her eyes widened as she remembered something. “Oh! That’s right! Spike, make sure we still have some of those bits at the end of the day and set them aside for monitoring. They shouldn’t be any more likely to evaporate than earth pony gems or the big rock Applejack made of my palace, but you know what they say: scientific rigor doesn’t end until rigor mortis.”

Okay, now everyone was staring at her for some reason. “What? I can’t be the only one who’s ever heard that.”

“Anyway…” Rainbow Dash said, drawing the word out as she glanced around the table. “Um. Yeah. Um. Right. Bill is… handled,” she said, glancing at the waitress. “So we should…”

“T—the dragon?” the waitress suggested, showing the first sign of life in several minutes as she stiffly backed away from the table, the heavy weight in her saddlebags not doing her any favors.

“Yes!” Rainbow Dash said, slamming one hoof on the table and pointing at the mare with the other. “Thank you!” Getting up, Rainbow Dash flew over to Twilight and started dragging her to the door of the deli with Spike following cooperatively along in her wake.

“Come on, Twilight!” she encouraged, dragging the confused alicorn through the door and out onto the street. “We’ve got to go find a dragon!

“And maybe a new place to get lunch for a while?” Spike suggested.

Rainbow Dash visibly winced and looked back to her favorite deli with a certain amount of pained longing. “…Yeah, that might be a good idea.”

Comments

[Lord Dominator]

Lololololol

[Lightwavers]

Okay, that was really, really funny. Bribe the waitress with two bars of gold, why not? It’s not technically illegal!

[Xanni]

"demured" is a typo for "demurred".
"caligraphy" is a typo for "calligraphy".

Those double letters really have it in for you! :)

[Frustration in Excelsis]

Twilight just casually bribing the waitress with a whole bar of gold was funny. Her deciding to deal with the imbalance by creating a second bar of gold and just slipping it into the opposite saddlebag was hysterical.