Counting the Seconds
"I'm counting off the seconds until you die," the domineering redhead said coldly. "One. Two. Three. Four. Five..."
Twilight believed her.
Fifteen minutes earlier, the small, dark girl had told the taller redhead, "I'm so glad you're willing to talk about changing your ways."
Sunset Shimmer unlocked the door into the deserted, half-dark cafeteria kitchen's back room. "For privacy. After you?"
Twilight went in first, and Sunset followed her. Metal shelves held industrial size packages of different food products, from applesauce to canned yams.
"Don't you see how much happier you would be, if you embraced the ways of friendship?" Twilight said cheerfully as she turned around. When she saw an eerie red glow in Sunset's eyes, Twilight's mouth went dry, and her throat seemed to constrict.
Sunset smiled cruelly. "Do go on."
"I...um..."
"How about this, Twilight? I'm curious how I seem, from your point of view. What do you think I want? What could my plans possibly be? What kind of person do you think I really am?"
"Um...misguided? I mean, lonely and sad?"
Sunset growled, "Guess the REAL reason I asked you to meet me here this afternoon." She locked the room's one door.
Twilight glanced up at the room's small, high windows. No way out, she thought.
"Come on, Twilight. Guess. I know you were a personal student of Princess Celestia, just like me. You surely have a brain in that head. Use it."
"I...um...I don't know."
Sunset snorted. "For as long as you keep trying hard to guess the reason, I won't kill you. Probably."
Something inside Twilight felt that her enemy really could and would take a life, if she wanted to. Twilight told herself she didn't have any logical evidence, but she still believed it, like a rabbit cornered by a predatory snake.
Maybe that feeling was a clue. But would Twilight ever figure out what it meant? While she lived?
Sunset's hand slammed the wall. "Answer me!"
"Ok." Twilight laughed nervously. "You...sow conflict wherever you go. Like how you sent a message to Pinkie Pie, pretending to be Rainbow Dash, insulting her party invitation. You like to lie and be dishonest, and you wrecked their friendship."
Sunset nodded. "Mmm-hmm. And does that really make sense to you?"
"Um...I guess so?"
Sunset shook her head. "You really ARE a fool. Do you think that's all it took? One nasty little note, and no one even tried to talk to each other ever again?"
Twilight looked up at the windows again. All the same size, all the same height, all facing the same direction.
All facing east.
Twilight wondered, why does that feel important somehow?
Sunset pulled a tube of sunblock out of her purse, a habit Twilight had noted before. She shook a glob out into her palm, and smeared it on all her exposed skin.
Sunset always seemed so cool and in control. Why would she have this ONE nervous habit?
"Um...you like to take good care of your skin?" Twilight ventured.
Sunset chuckled almost silently. "You really are a nerd, Twilight. Give you a puzzle, pose you a riddle, and you can't help but try to solve it, can you?"
Twilight blushed. She felt transparent. Easy to manipulate, easy to control.
If only she could get a handle like that on Sunset.
Maybe Sunset was vain. Could Twilight admire her fashion sense, as a sort of compliment? A way to find a little common ground? "Um...your sunglasses are really cool. Can I borrow them?"
Sunset frowned. "No."
"Ok, sorry. I just thought...if I could learn to be cool like you..."
"You're an idiot."
"I was trying to understand you!" Twilight pleaded. "I just wanted to--"
"Time's up!" Sunset said. She stepped towards Twilight, who flinched. As Twilight tried to turn and run, her shoulder rammed a tall rack of shelves, shoving a large bag of rice. The burlap sack scraped against a rough metal edge on the shelving unit and tore open, spilling out pounds and pounds of rice onto the floor.
Myths and Legends, Twilight thought. A book I read when I was looking for clues to Nightmare Moon.
Vamponies are dangerous, blood-sucking creatures. But they're hurt by sunlight, and...when they encounter a pile of beans or peas or rice, they have to stop and count each grain.
Sunset visibly struggled, but couldn't keep herself from looking down at the spilled rice. "You prissy little pony. But this will only stop me for a little while. As I count these grains of rice, I'm counting off the seconds until you die."
Twilight believed her.
Twilight huddled in the corner farthest from Sunset. She thought, Sunset picked this room because no one comes into the kitchen after school. But if I can stay alive until the cooks come to make breakfast...I think I can escape.
Not long after midnight, Sunset said, "Thirty eight thousand, nine hundred and fifty-three." Sunset's growing smile bared her highly developed canines. "And I'm done. Any last words?"
Twilight's left hand dug in her skirt pocket. At the very bottom, her fingers hit an obstacle, like little pieces of sand or gravel.
Rice. When the spilled rice had fallen on the floor, some had fallen into her pocket too. Her fingers dug deeper. Five hundred grains? A thousand grains? Even she didn't know how many her pocket held. Which was perfect. What she herself didn't know, she couldn't tell her interrogator, her captor, her Equestrian opposite and counterpart.
Twilight pulled a partial handful of rice out of her pocket, and threw it onto the first rice spill, between herself and Sunset Shimmer.
"How many are there now?" Twilight asked with a smile. "The new total, I mean."
Sunset Shimmer screamed wordlessly for a moment, until her new task pulled her eyes irresistibly towards the floor. "One. Two. Three..."
Twilight watched a clock on the wall, as she ran through a quick mental calculation of her own. Yes, she was certain. She would live to see the dawn.
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Sometimes it seems that the only one who remembers that part of the folklore is Sesame Street.
this story is a comedy? because the synopsis and the title point to a joke, but it's without the tag... I'll put it on read later
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(Mockingbirb searches to see if the website has a "Sesame Street" tag.)
No!
Vampire(s) + "Crossover" tag + "Sesame Street" tag would have been a nice combination, if very confusing.
Please tell me this is more fandom-made horseapples? Don't remember this ever being a thing for proper vampires. And I know the pony knockoffs share a lot with proper vampires.
Great ending though.
This is hilarious
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Gonna be honest, I either never knew or completely forgot that was a part of actual vampire lore.
Also, HOLY LUNA THAT'S WHY THE COUNT LOVES TO COUNT THINGS?!
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"Proper" vampires are way older than you think, and there's dozens of variations all around the world. The counting compulsion is often forgotten, but well-recorded in some myths. Throwing grain and waiting for daylight is the most reliable, low-risk way most people would have of killing a vampire.
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It's real, and the basis of a Sesame Street character.
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upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/eb/The_More_You_Know_2019.svg
(They changed the logo while the Internet wasn't looking, and I found out about this when going to Wikipedia to grab it)
EDIT:
Well, I guess you could manually copy and paste the URL...
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It is actually some traditional folklore in some regions that vampires have a counting obsession along with an obsession with untying knots and not being able to cross running water which admittedly the not being able to cross running water is something that lets say the wild hunt also suffers from.
Though the idea of beans somehow warding off evil in some way seems to be rather old, in ancient Rome there was a religious festival that involved throwing beans to ward off the evil dead and there is apparently tradition in Japan of throwing roasted soybeans to ward off Oni that takes place as a part of a yearly festival in February.
Traditional folklore of various cultures can be weird and sort of fun.
Oh yeah. This myth.
Glad to see someone else who remembers that part of the old lore.
And also, great job making it not just a joke here. The sheer tension of the wait from night to dawn would be indescribable.
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Barring that what most consider "proper" vampires only came about due to anne rice (i believe it was her who brought up the whole burning in the sunlight thing, or at least popularized it. i know dracula was able to walk freely), the counting is veeeeery old vampire lore. and even if it wasn't, who cares, vampires aren't real
Anyway, fun as hell story
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Technically the movie Nosferatu also had the sunlight thing.
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Probably the vampire-esque monster where it's most well-known is the jiangshi, but there's quite a few vampire myths where it's a thing.
Why would they have to count each grain? What would happen if they didn't?
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Nothing, they're just ridiculously OCD.
I suppose the question is why she can't simply kick some rice under the shelf and hop over sunset while she crawls under to count. Or just open a second bag of rice.
People who run their mouths about "proper" vampires have no idea what they're talking about. There is no "proper" vampire; just about every culture has a different vampire legend and many have three or four different ones. One African "vampire" is a firefly that flits around and eats children.
I will agree however that there is nothing proper about Twilight Saga, neither in its vampires nor in its basic respect for the reader and for literature at large.
Compulsively counting dropped objects is a distinct trait of Asian culture - almost every single ghost, spirit, zombie, or monster has to stop and do it. This notably includes jiangshi, the hopping zombies once known in English as "Chinese vampires". Jiangshi aren't even known to drink blood, though they do steal life force / qi.
In Japanese mythology, Okiku was a servant-girl who refused the advances of a noble. She was also responsible for counting the royal plates, and the punishment for losing one was death. The noble hid one of the plates and got her killed, and her ghost continues to count nine plates and begin wailing when she can't find the tenth. I think this is probably a huge influence on the whole "ghosts and vampires have to count things" trope.
Asian cultures are rather superstitious and don't like certain numbers, so they may have written their ghosts to say a lot of numbers to give them a weakness. Making a Japanese ghost say shi ("four" but also "death") is usually very damaging to at least their poor ghost feelings and might actually physically injure them.
Oh and the story is funny thumbs up.
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Another interesting tidbit about Jiangshi is the reason they're also known as "hopping vampires": possibly because the Chinese have a long history of medical scholarship, their mythological ambulatory corpses become steadily less ambulatory as rigor mortis kicks in.
Short and simple, if not especially climatic.
Although how can she know she has enough rice to survive the night, if she doesn't even know how much she has?
Ah yes, the soucouyant
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It's possible that she only threw part of the rice she had, so she can keep repeating the same tactic over and over.
The calculations were probably comparing how long Sunset took to count the first batch vs the time for help to come.
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You're completely right, my mistake. haven't seen that movie since high school, and I prefer book dracula over any (even vague) adaptation :P
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It mostly sticks in my head for the hilariously casual stroll with a coffin bit.
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Nosferatu is actually the originator. They'd written themselves into a corner by making Count Orlok too overpowered to defeat, so they had him burst into flames and die basically at random.
Changes from the third person you mostly use for the fic to first person like this was a bit jarring, and happened a few times, but otherwise, it was an okay fic. A bit more suspense would have done it some good, but a thousand words is a thousand words.
Also, I learned a new bit of vampire lore, so kudos for using that.
What if Sci-Twi cooked the rice in some Holy Water...?
This feels like it should include the comedy tag
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Ha, good one
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It's my understanding that people who worked abroad or otherwise died away from home would be transported back home for burial by being tied to long bamboo sticks and moved at night. This caused their corpses to seem to hop along.
I do love the weirder parts of vampiric folklore. It's a good thing CHS is a public school; imagine Sunset having to get someone to invite her in every day.
Great stuff, though I'd argue it would work better if Twilight were less certain about her survival at the end. Still, thank you for it and best of luck in the judging.
ooh, intriguing start!
ahaha yeah, Twilight's naïveté really is a lot, sometimes! or is that what the story wants us to think...
aww, dang, i would really be insulted if i were Sunset, haha
that would be an interesting property for a monster to have inherently
hey, skincare is important, okay?
hehe so true
oof, that is painfully awkward and just too Twilight
aww, the contrast between Sunset's deadly seriousness and just how ineffective she is right now really does combine into the definition of being "pathetic"
oof, that must have taken literal hours!
that really is a very convenient weakness that vamponies have!
a fun interpretation of Sunset Shimmer, which somehow makes her even less effective than her very ineffective canon movie version! though i guess if the other students and adults are not so up on their vampony lore knowledge, that would explain just how Sunset managed to keep herself fed at all. and certainly raises a lot of questions about just what's been going on at this school. thank you for writing!
People think about the little things before they... well...
The beginning and middle of this story felt so macabre but once the "vampires are fascinated in counting"... The Count from Sesame Street sends his regards... there's a tone shift? I don't know what I'm on about- this was a great story!
Uh oh!
That's pretty much how I put Sunset in following her abandoning her studies in Equestria.
Annnnd she's screwed!
You lose Sunset!
I always love when horror protagonists find creative but logical ways to survive any given situation. Spilling a little bit of rice at a time and always asking the new total definitely counts. Good work.