contacts
Sunset Shimmer was no stranger to awkward situations. While still a filly she’d come to the conclusion that something about her magic acted as an amplifier for Marephy’s law and she had yet to find any proof to the contrary. In fact, it was this very tendency to end up in situations where she wanted to sink into the ground and disappear that had led her to master teleportation a year earlier than Twilight. She wasn’t even a stranger to awkward situations involving Alicorns, actually now that she thought about it all of the of the most extreme situations had involved at least one of them.
There’d been that time with the plant. Celestia had spent the day acting as an intermediary between an ambassador from the Yaks and one from the Griffons. The two nations had been arguing over which of them owed a very small, and utterly worthless, piece of land and both were despite for any excuse to declare war on the other. While she had somehow managed to settle the matter without starting a war, she had been too tired to give Sunset a lesson that day, instead, retiring to her chambers and lowering the sun an entire half hour early. Sunset had taken the opportunity to go to her lab, one story above Celestia’s rooms, and put in some work on a project she’d been hoping to surprise Celestia with.
It had always seemed unfair to her that Unicorns, even those with farming-based cutie marks, were unable to compete with Earth Ponies when it came to anything agricultural. A cutie mark was supposed to show a Colt or filly what it was they could excel at, but for Unicorns who happened to have a green hoof, it doomed them to a life of failure and poverty. To fix this, Sunset had finally managed to create a hybrid formed of plants and pure magic that, if planted in the center of a farm and fed with unicorn magic, would be able to compost organic material put in designated areas, enrich the soil of the entire farm, and speed the growth of all plants. Unfortunately, she had yet to figure out how to make the plant only eat what was in the designated areas and not try to eat anything organic. Still, she was hopeful she’d be able to solve that problem, and until then she was keeping it sealed in a magic circle. As she reached for her magic and pushed the door to her lab open she was felt she’d be able to solve it that night and show it off to the princess in the morning.
As the door opened, her hope vanished, replaced with horror, as she realized she’d made a mistake. The magic circle created a dome of force that prevented her creation from leaving, but she’d assumed the stone floor would be enough to prevent it from escaping downwards, an assumption that was now being quite conclusively proven to have been in error. The plant must have been slowly dissolving the floor for the entire day, and now, as she watched in abject horror, the last paper-thin layer of stone dissolved, and her creation fell out of view through the newly created hole. Rather than galloping to the hole, Sunset walked to it as slowly as she could, praying to Celestia that she was wrong about what was directly beneath the hole. As she reached it, one of her forelegs rouse involuntarily and covered her eyes. It took an effort of will she was sure no lesser pony could have managed to slowly uncover her eyes, though the moment she had she wished she hadn’t. The solar princess had not answered her prayers, in fact, she was laying on her bed, her rear end already engulphed by the hybrid that was currently trying to open its amorphous mouth wide enough to fit over her spread wings. Sunset would never forget the look on Celestia’s face as her eyes slowly fluttered open and she looked from the creature trying to eat her to the hole in her sealing and the Unicorn poking her head through it.
Not that that could even compare to that time with her only previous marefriend. She’d turned out to be even more adventurous in bed than Sunset, a fact she had just spent an extremely enjoyable half-night proving. After that, they had both been too exhausted to even put their toys away, and Sunset had contentedly fallen asleep under her lover’s wing. She had been woken up by the sound of her door opening and the realization that she’d slept through the start of her first lesson with the princess. Her eyes started to dart back and forth between the still sleeping form of her marefriend and the sadly less somnolent form of her teacher.
The landed briefly on the four sets of hoofcuffs that secured her lover to the bed before moving guiltily away, only to look away hurriedly from the sight of Celestia’s slightly twitching eyes. They moved onto the blindfold and ball gag, both still fastened securely in place, before drifting inexorably to the to the riding crop and paddle that had fallen off the side of the side of the bed sometime during the night. A slight flickering caught her eye, and before she could stop herself, she turned to look at it, then turned her head back away as quickly as she could, even looking at the suppressor ring on her marefriend’s horn was less worrying than the sight of the flames flickering in Celestia’s mane. After one final glance between aunt and niece she threw everything she had into a teleportation spell. Under other circumstances she would have felt nothing but pride, not only had she teleported further than she ever had before, she’d done it while including not only another pony but an entire bed. Unfortunately, as things stood, the only thing she was capable of doing was hoping desperately that Celestia was too angry to muster the focus needed to calculate the endpoint of a teleport.
And it wasn’t like she expected to stop getting into awkward situations anytime soon either, the moment her current marefriend found out her only other marefriend had been said current marefriend’s beloved foalsitter was one she was truly not looking forward to. Still, right now she’d gladly trade places with that future Sunset Shimmer, or any past Sunset Shimmer for that matter. Well, almost any past Sunset, she was not going through the cake incident again.
She and the palace’s pâtissiers had spent the better part of two days on Celestia’s birthday cake, and the end product had been something they were truly proud of, a giant map of Equestria. Every road and rail line had been marked in chocolate frosting and tiny representations of every city made out of the kind of cake they were best known for. The chief pâtissier’s insistence on making one mountain out of moon pie had confused sunset, be he had refused to explain his reasons. Sunset had helped by regularly casting structural support spells to keep the cake collapsing in on itself, and now she levitated it carefully, casting space warping spells on every doorway just to create the space needed for the cake to make it through them. Finally, she arrived at Celestia’s door and gently shoved it open with one hoof before warping space one final time.
Sunset smiled as she levitated the cake inside her mentor’s room. This was the only acknowledgment of her birthday Celestia permitted, and Sunset was happy to be a part of it, even if just opening the day court an hour late and having tea and cake in her room seemed like far too little. On the other hoof, Sunset decided the fact that Celestia was apparently able to eat more than her own body weight in cake and still only be an hour behind schedule was truly impressive.
As she approached the bed, she felt a weight come down on her back and looked behind her and grimaced as she saw Celestia’s troll of a pet perched on her back. As if in response to her unkind thoughts about it, the Phoenix let out an irate squawk and burst into flames. The sudden pain broke her concentration on her spells, and she had a bare moment to watch the cake float in mid-air before it made the acquaintance of gravity and slammed onto the floor. In the few moments, Sunset had as Celestia began to stir, her part of the imminent conversation ran through her head.
“Why yes, that is your birthday cake splattered across the floor.”
“No, I’m afraid all of the pâtissier’s efforts went into that cake, so there are no more cakes other cakes in the palace.”
“No, after working thirty-six hours on end on that cake they’ve all gone home and to bed so I’m afraid we can’t get another cake
“What do you mean would I prefer the Sun or the Moon?”
Sunset shivered and teleported. She knew that this time nowhere in Equestria would be far enough, but Celestia had recently shown her a mirror, and she hoped that maybe, just maybe, fleeing the entire dimension might be.
Her attempts to escape into her memory collapsed as the woman wrapped in her arms razed her hand to rub at her lips before breaking into a panicked babble.
“I was talking with Pinkie, you know over the phone, when she suddenly went silent for a moment and then said her Pinkie senses had just told her Twilight had come through the portal. I’ve wanted to talk to her again for a while, and I knew you’d be the first person she’d visit, so I rushed right over. It just, Spike must have knocked my glasses off nightstand when he was trying to get on the bed last night because when I got up this morning, I stepped on them. I have some contact lenses I keep for emergencies, even though I don’t like how they make my eyes feel, so I’m wearing them instead of my glasses, and well,”
Her voice trailed off as she looked between Sunset, who seemed to be frozen, to her double, who stood at the end of the street, her mouth hanging open. With a burst of panic fueled energy she wiggled her way out of sunsets hug.
“I’msorryIhavetogofeedSpikebye.”