The Day the World Forgot Me

by Bomber

Act I - Part IV: The Filly Troupe

Morning arrives faster than I originally anticipate, the sun’s repulsive glow catching my ocean blue eyes off guard. An arm instinctively shoots upward to block the bothersome glare. My skull throbs, my muscles ache, my wings done in. The memories of the last night are fuzzy, passing me by like a vivid blur. I desperately stimulate the banks of my passive memory, trying to grasp at least a few glimpses of what happened. Only select visions come to mind — and I puzzle together the events the best I can — but to no avail.

With the feeling of hope slowly draining throughout my system, I awkwardly wiggle out of the sickeningly pink sleeping bag, not wanting to head out for another day on the streets. An offensive stench wafts my nostrils, my throat slightly gagging in reflex. Although I’m unable to tell if the aroma is emanating from my B.O. or the saddlebags lying idly in the corner, I figure a quick dip in the shower wouldn’t hurt anypony a bit.

I sluggishly leave the bedroom and gently shut the bathroom door behind me as I enter, careful not to alert any of the neighbors that there’s an uninvited guest crashing in a nearby apartment. I twist the handle, arctic water pouring all over my body. Stifling a yelp, I immediately leap out of the chilly liquid like a frog. It’s so cold…

The feeling of the frozen water triggers a memory, and the events of last night replay in my head like a motion film you’d commonly see in a theater. Anger, disgust, abhorrence. There are only a scarce number of adjectives that could be used to describe my mental state of the previous night, and each one relies on revolving around the word hate. None of those words portray me. I’m simply not that type of pony. It’s almost as if some other entity took control of my body, leaving my former self far behind in an endless ocean to drown.

But when did I start acting unlike my true self? If that playback serves correct, I’m certain that it was around the time I noticed the imaginary Cutie Mark. Could the obscure vanishing picture plastered on my flank have any connection to these unwanted mood swings?

Looking at my disheveled reflection in the mirror, I can’t help but be frustrated with my half-baked imagination. I legitimately believed that after eighteen extensive years, I finally earned my rightful Cutie Mark. It was only illusion. I should’ve known better. But that image of the pair of wings encircling a planet looked so real. It was there. I’m sure of it.

But it was only just an illusion.

A heavy cloud of steam rises from the moldy shower, signaling that it’s hot and ready for use. Returning to my former position, I scrub as much dirt and grime from my luminous orange coat as I can with only the assistance of a pair of hooves. The absence of soap and shampoo bothers me, but the relaxing sensation of warm water entices me to remain inside the tub for longer than fifteen minutes. This is the first time since yesterday that I truly feel at ease, like the world is melting around me.

Content with my semi-clean mane/coat, I proceed to turn off the stream of water. There’s only one towel to greet me, and it looks like it hasn’t been washed in years. Filthy muck covers the polka-dot patterned cloth, so I elect to allow the air to dry me off. Using that tarnished thing would solely be counterproductive.

I leave the grimy bathroom behind me, my stomach aching for something to digest. Fastening the dilapidated saddlebags around my waist, I noiselessly part from my temporary residence. My muscles groan in agony with every step I take, but I force myself to ignore the constant pain. What use is there to fuss about something when there’s nopony to hear the complaints?

Princess Celestia’s sun welcomes me anxiously with its warmth wrapping around me like a snuggly blanket as I enter the rooftop. My mood immediately enhances. I know that hope lies somewhere within this endless, ragged metropolis. It’s now my goal to find and extract it.

Here we go wings, don’t fail me now.

I canter as fast as my sore legs will allow me, creating a steadily increasing portion of momentum. Springing off the hard concrete of the Bronx Apartments, my tender wings uncurl, and I perform a little backflip for nothing other than my pure enjoyment. There’s no other feeling that can compare to flying. It’s like a whole different world apart from the ground-stuck ponies. Unicorns may have their fancy magic tricks and earth ponies may have superior strength, but nothing beats the adrenaline rush that you receive from accomplishing flips, loops and dives in mid-air.

Judging the sun’s relative position as it slowly drifts across the cloudless morning sky, it can’t be any later than nine o’clock. This will allot me around twelve hours to explore before the night arrives. Manehattan nights are notorious for their freezing temperatures, though pegasi aren’t too effected by the cold unless it’s well below zero. Wait, if this is really true, why did it feel like I was transforming to a pony-popsicle last night? Ugh, I guess this is yet another dreaded question to add on my overgrowing list of notions that need to be answered.

Alright Sunny, let’s just take these things head-on one at a time.

---

I spend the majority of the morning searching for anything remotely edible to consume. After several hours of consistent probing throughout the Kings borough, my crosshairs target a lone donut stand with not a passerby in sight. “Perfect,” I inaudibly say to myself as I land in a darkened alleyway near the shop, my hooves creating a soft thump on the cracked pavement below. Fortunately for me, the vendor remains unsuspecting to anything in the near vicinity of him.

A plan begins to formulate, but before I can act, a nagging voice in the back of my mind brings up a good point. During the pursuit last night, my doppelgänger actually wished to end the lives of those bandits for trying to steal. Am I being hypocritical if I’m about to attempt the same?

My mind engages a civil war on itself, weighing the good and bad consequences about this. I’m so close to turning away with my conscience harassing me to leave the donut vendor alone, but the hollow pit in my stomach begs for something to eat. Eventually, my final decision is made. This isn’t a matter of ethics. This is a matter of survival.

So this means either two alternatives. Option A: Steal bits from another pony to purchase the food “honestly." Or Option B: Create a diversion to lure the vendor out of sight, leaving the stand unattended and ready for easy pickings. Choosing the lesser of two evils, I hesitatingly pick the latter idea.

My eyes scan the alleyway behind me, checking for something viable to use. My brief search finds a considerable quantity of secondhand baseballs and baseball bats tossed aside in a dirty garbage sack. “This will do,” I whisper, vigorously squeezing the top of the sack. My wings then start beat at a progressively faster pace. Although all the items combined must have to weigh at least fifty pounds, I’m finally able to become airborne with an extreme amount of effort put into lifting this dang thing into the sky.

I hover close to a nearby rooftop, double-checking to make certain there are no pedestrians directly below me. Feeling confident that this street is still as dead as a ghost town, I drop the bag, letting gravity do its work. Knowing that this will inevitably create a lot of attention to ponies who may be peaking out their windows, I dart into the alleyway for a second time. My sight catches the shape of a cardboard box large enough to hide two ponies inside, lying idly in a dumpster buried in a mountain of trash at the end of the alley.

Realizing that time is of the essence, I propel to the dumpster and back in less than a few seconds, the box clasped in between my hooves. As I suspect, the donut vendor neglects his stand to investigate the random equipment seemingly falling from the sky. Three boxes of donuts are piled neatly in a shelf behind the stand where other ponies standing in front of it wouldn’t be able to detect. I proceed to shove all three packages inside my saddlebags, quickly electing to hide under the cardboard box in case the vendor has already finished his inspection.

I barely lift the box, peeking under it with one eye. The vendor scratches the back of his neck, still seemingly confused as to what recently occurred. “Some kids have gotta be pullin’ a prank,” he surmises, departing from the bats and baseballs now strewn across the street. “Still scared the livin’ daylights outta me though. I should call the MPD once my shift’s over, tell 'em to get those idiots who think they’re all high and mighty pullin’ pranks on lone ponies.” My reflexes kick into action when his eyes shift to my direction, and I shut the box faster than anypony could ever hope to dream of. But it’s not like anypony has a box closing Cutie Mark, right?

“Coulda sworn that wasn’t there before,” he states, causing my blood to run cold. Well, this is it. I’ve been caught. I’m such an idiot for thinking this would ever work. It’s now just a matter of moments before he lifts the box and catches me shivering underneath as I plead for forgiveness.

I wait. I wait. And I wait, but nothing happens. My ears perk when they detect the vendor poking the outside of the box a few times, then deciding to trot away without so much as a glimpse to see what’s inside. This is indubitably convenient, but nonetheless, I slowly start to creep towards the alleyway in small increments. Though it eats up at least a half-hour of my time to crawl just a few feet, I eventually reach the familiar confines of the alley.

I toss the box off of me. It glides through the air for a swift moment before settling where it originally remained inactive before. Still not believing my luck with the vendor, I embark off the ground, obliging my wings to do their work. What a day this has been.

---

Sweat beads down my face as I enter Room 501. I’ve been exerting my poor wings to the point where they refuse to unfurl, and I had to trek six blocks to arrive at the Bronx. The doorpony at the front had asked me to state my name and business at the apartments. I truthfully informed her of my full name, but lied that I was only visiting a friend. She let me in without a fuss, which I was grateful for, but the glare she gave me sent chills down my spine. And on top of the terrorizing doorpony, the elevator ride up was awkward without a doubt. Two elderly ponies insisted that I told them all about everything that the “youngsters were into nowadays," to which I politely declined to say anything and left without speaking another word. Because of evacuating the elevator before it was even remotely near my floor, I was then tasked with marching up several flights of enormous staircases. Needless to say, I’m in the need of a long snooze to recuperate all of my expended energy.

Three pairs of eyes connect with mine as I dopily trot inside the room. “Haven’t ya ever heard of knocking?” Babs Seed asks incredulously, lifting an eyebrow behind her crudely constructed podium.

“Oh, uh, sorry about that,” I say, faking a smile. I mentally kick myself in the shins for forgetting that this is the filly's clubhouse, and that they would probably hang around here during the daytime. “I haven’t been thinking straight today.”

“Uh-huh,” Babs says cautiously, hopping off the cardboard podium. “Ya wouldn’t happen ta know anythin’ about the pony who decided ta crash at our HQ last night?”

“Um… uh… I-I-I…” I try to formulate words, but the only thing that escapes my lips is stutters and incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo.

Babs intimidatingly walks up to me, grabbing the back of my neck and aggressively forcing it down so that we meet at eye level. “Well ya better hope that Ah’m feelin’ generous today, Sunny, else the CMC might have ta teach ya a few lessons about trashing our headquarters.”

“I’m really sorry… I got caught up in some stuff last night and had to sleep here,” I apologize, my brain desperately trying to reason how a little kid can look so tough and daunting. “I promise it won’t happen again.”

“Ah’m glad ta here that,” Babs says, releasing my neck from her iron grip. “But yer gonna have ta pay the consequences fer comin’ here uninvited.”

I glance at her, a befuddled expression beginning to form on my face. “Wait a second; didn’t you invite me here yesterday?”

“That’s not the point!” Babs snaps, my legs instinctively backpedaling a few paces. “Give us two of those boxes of donuts, and we might let you walk outta this room alive!”

“Okay, deal, take them!” I say, giving in to her demands. I quickly push two of the boxes from my saddlebags across the floor. Babs stops their movement with a hoof, opening each box and inspecting each and every donut with utmost care and precision. She waves the other two fillies over with her hoof and they both proceed to do the same as their leader, glancing up and down, making positive that everything is neat and orderly.

"Everything looks good, boss," a pink-coated filly says, levitating a sprinkled donut with her golden-colored magic. She immediately digs into the delectable treat, electing to take gargantuan bites out of the pastry. Once she's through chomping every crumb of the donut into pieces, she lets out a satisfying, "Yummy!"

The third filly of the group, however, stares at the delicacies tentatively. "You absolutely sure that these aren't like poisoned or something?" she cautiously asks me, jabbing at one and flinching as if it's about to explode like an active volcano.

"From one pegasus to another," I say, noticing the filly's pair of wings, "you can trust me when I say that these aren't poisoned... or something. I just picked these up at bakery nearby."

"Why'd you bring them here?" the pegasus filly continues to question, still not looking convinced.

"Uh... they were supposed to be an offering to let me join the Cutie Mark Crusaders," I lie, even realizing that sooner or later, this vast web of fibs are going to bite me right in butt. "And I was going to share them without second thought, but somepony decided to go all gangster on me and threaten to hand the donuts over." I irritatingly glare at Babs who's stifling a snicker by lightly biting on her arm.

"What can Ah say? Ah'm a pretty good actor," Babs shrugs, selecting a donut for herself. "But Ah figured that you'd be smart enough ta realize that Ah was just pullin' yer strings. Ah can't believe that ya thought I was bein' dead serious."

"You are just like your brother," I sigh, rolling my eyes. "Always the one to joke around even if it means scaring the crap out of other ponies."

"How would ya know that?" Babs inquires with a mouthful of pastry, causing me to lose my appetite. "You just met mah brother yesterday."

"Trust me, I know a lot more about your brother than you think," I say, deciding to remove my bothersome saddlebags off my back. They're starting to become vigorously itchy, and I don't know how much longer I can put up with it.

Babs chuckles, eyeballing me curiously. "What are ya, some kind of stalker?"

"No, no, no, nothing like that," I deny, shaking my head forcibly. "I've just seen him do these kind of things before at school, especially in Drama class."

"But Apple Seed isn't takin' Drama this year," Babs notes, diving into her third donut. Geez, that filly must have the stomach of a full-grown stallion.

"This was during our sophomore year, so it would've been a long time ago," I say.

"So what yer tellin' me is that for at least two or three years, mah brother has never noticed ya before?" Babs interrogates, tossing a large maple-glazed donut to the eager pink unicorn filly who stuffs the entire thing into her mouth. "Are ya sure that the two of you go to the same school? Or maybe yer mistakin' mah brother fer somepony else."

"His country accent kind of stands out from the rest of the city ponies, don't you think?" I ask. Babs nods her head in affirmation. "Let's just say that I've been in the background for most of my life. I've always been teased and bullied about not earning my Cutie Mark since I'm almost an adult, so I tend to stay away from everypony else. I'm aloof like that, so it makes sense that we haven't actually met face-to-face before."

"Don't worry 'bout it, Ah completely understand. Yer very welcome ta join the CMC at anytime. We're plannin' on headin' out to Sunset Park over on 40th West in an hour if ya want to come with," Babs invites.

To be honest, there's not much else I have planned for the day. This actually may be a great opportunity to investigate my disappearing Cutie Mark from yesterday. "I'd be glad to come with you guys," I smile. "And if you don't mind, I'd also like to join the CMC."

Babs' expression brightens. She grabs a navy blue foam sword hidden from behind the podium, imitating the march of the Royal Guard. "With the authority granted to me as the leader of the Manehattan branch of the Cutie Mark Crusaders," Babs announces, tapping me on both my shoulders with the fake sword, "I hereby dub you an honorary member — and from this point onward — you shall join the three of us as we search for our Cutie Marks. One day, we will find them, no matter the cost!"

"So I'm a part of the CMC, now?" I ask.

"Yeah, though the initiation speech still needs a bit of work," Babs says. "Oh, shoot! I should probably introduce ya to our other two members. This is Cherry Jelly." The pink filly grins widely and waves, then carefully chooses another donut from the batch. "And that's Spring Meadows, though she prefers her nickname, Jetstream." The forest-green pegasus nods her head in acknowledgment, still refusing to divulge into the food.

"I'm Desert Sun, though most ponies call me Sunny," I acquaint myself.

"Hi, Sunny," both Cherry Jelly and Jetstream greet in unison.

"Hello," I say in return, my stomach growling intensely. "Hope you don't mind if I snack on a few of those myself. I haven't eaten anything all day."

"Well since ya went through all the trouble to buy these for us, Ah say that ya can have as many as you like!" Babs says, slapping her mane out of her face with a hoof.

"Oh, you have no idea," I smile, flavor exploding on my taste buds as I bite into the first pastry.

Donuts, new friends, and a part of something new. I bet there isn't any other way that this day can go wrong.

End Part IV

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[Ignis Mortis et Doloris]

you never say nothing can go wrong