Wanderlust
“Starlight? Trixie’s doing...well, I don’t know what she’s doing, but she’s making a huge mess on my lawn. Do you know what she’s doing?”
Starlight looked up from her book at Twilight, who was looking out of the window. “Huh? What kind of mess?”
“I don’t know! She’s just dragging things out of her wagon and dumping it outside my front door. I think she’s cleaning, but why is she doing it right there?”
Starlight set the book down, and joined Twilight at the window. This time, the library windows faced the front door of the Crystal Castle, allowing the both of them an excellent view of the mountain of...calling it “supplies” was being charitable. There were props from a hundred different magic tricks, preserved food for travel, and entirely too many fireworks—and those were just the items that Starlight could identify. There were piles of little knick-knacks and souvenirs, magical artifacts, plant clippings, and at least three brooms poking out of a tall wicker basket, none of which were actually in use.
After staring at all of it for a second, Starlight sighed. “I’ll go see what’s up. Maybe she just needs a hoof?”
“She could just ask for help, though.”
“I...don’t think Trixie’s ever asked for help in her life.” Starlight said with a chuckle. Twilight nickered in annoyance, and Starlight saw her glance back at her own book—but only for a moment. She couldn’t take her eyes off of the pile in front of her door, and Starlight knew that Twilight was already trying to categorize and organize the mess that Trixie was making from up here.
Today, the castle was lenient; Starlight only had to leave the library, turn left, go up a short flight of stairs, and then cross the entrance hall to reach the front door. There had been days where the building had seemed to be in an almost playful mood, and it had a particular fondness for corridors that doubled back on themselves too many times, or staircases that ran upside-down, or doors where you opened them up and saw yourself pass through a door at the end of the hallway. This castle was both fascinating and incredibly frustrating sometimes, especially those times when Starlight just needed to find the damn bathroom.
She cracked open the front door of the castle, and found herself staring at a stack of crates, all marked with Trixie’s cutie mark. “Uh. Trixie?”
“Oh! Starlight! Let me move those, that wasn’t meant for you.”
“Meant for…?” Starlight muttered, as a pink glow surrounded the topmost crate and lifted it away. “Hey Trixie. What’s, uh, what’s going on?”
“Come on through!” Trixie said with a wave of her hoof. After a moment, Starlight carefully began to climb over the crate still in her way, while the topmost crate was kept floating weightlessly above her. Trixie seemed too preoccupied with a folding table to lift any of the others, but she did give Starlight a smile as she clambered over the wood and onto the lawn. “Just shuffling things around inside my wagon so there’s a little more room. It’s been years since I last did this, you know that? I’ve been finding stuff I’ve completely forgotten about!”
“That’s-that’s great Trixie—” Starlight jumped, as the crate behind her dropped unceremoniously on top of the other one, where Starlight had been only seconds before. And blocked the door, once again. “—But, uh, you’ve kind of gotten Twilight’s attention, doing this right outside her front door like this.”
“Oh, have I? That’s a shame. Anyway, how are you?” If Trixie cared, she didn’t show it. She started folding up the table, only for it to collapse midway through. The two halves were split by a seam that looked as though it had been sawed through, but a moment later, Trixie clicked the two halves back together like they’d never been separated at all.
“I’m fine, aside from my mentor’s OCD being set off in the middle of a discussion about the finer points of dragon scale composition?”
“Hmm.” Trixie made a sort of non-committal humming noise, as she looked up at the window of the library. Twilight was still staring at them, but she was too far away to read her expression. After a moment, Trixie turned back to Starlight. “Did you know that one of the old folk methods to distract a vampire is by throwing a hoof-full of grain across the ground?”
Starlight blinked at her. “Huh?”
“It’s true! Because as the legend goes, they had to stop to count every grain. Rice and seeds work too, supposedly.”
Starlight blinked at Trixie. Then she looked back up at Twilight, and then back down at Trixie. “Twilight isn’t a vampire.”
“Trixie never said she was,” she said with a smirk. “But it does come to mind when I think about how much she hides up in that castle, away from the sunlight…”
“Trixie, she's literally standing at a window right now.”
“And everypony thinks she’s so charismatic, and they can’t help but be friends with her, almost like a vampire enthralling the minds of the weak…”
“...She is the actual Princess of Friendship—”
Trixie stepped closer, her face serious as stone, and placed her hoof on Starlight’s breast. “And some of the ponies that she enthralls never leave her domain! Like you! Have you been enthralled, Starlight? It’s okay, you can tell me, but you have to break past her vampiric charm first. I know it’ll be hard, but Trixie is here for you!”
Starlight blinked at her again. “...Trixie, what the actual hay are you talking about?”
The magician’s expression broke as she started to giggle, and she turned back to the wagon as her horn lit with magic once more. “Trixie has been thinking! About our last road trip together, specifically. She’s had a lot of time to think while traveling this last week.”
Starlight shook her head, as fresh confusion joined the old. “You’ve—wait, you’ve been out of town this whole week?”
Trixie paused, and a bucket of lockpicks fell down the steps of her wagon. “...Yes? Starlight, have you not even noticed? I was kidding before, you know that, right?”
Starlight blushed in embarrassment. “Um. Yes! Yes, I absolutely knew you were joking, and I wanted to joke too! Isn’t it a funny joke?”
Trixie eyed her for a moment. Then she raised an eyebrow. “Starlight, what’s the date?”
“Is...shoot, is today an important date? It’s, um, it’s the fifteenth, right? Friday?”
Trixie continued to stare at her. After a moment, she shook her head. “Starlight, it’s the tenth.”
“...Oh.”
“It’s a wednesday.”
Starlight paused. Then she looked down and started to tap her hooves, counting days silently. “But that’s…”
“Starlight, you didn’t even guess the right month.”
Starlight sat down, blushing bright crimson. “I, um, maybe we’ve been kind of getting really into our research, and maybe I don’t really have much of a social life outside the girls, and they mostly come to me, so I don’t really go out all that often since Spike does all the cooking—”
Trixie wrinkled her nose at her. “Starlight. Do you remember to eat by yourself, or does Spike bring you food because you keep forgetting?”
“I...I don’t have to answer that question.”
“Okay, so I was gonna be cute and coy about it, but seriously, you need to get out more. What I was going to work my way around to saying was that you should come with me again, because I’ve been using the time since the last time we traveled together to look up solutions to those problems.”
Starlight perked up immediately. “Wait, really? I mean, I know I wasn’t the best travel buddy before, so you didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”
“I know I didn’t have to, but I wanted to.” Trixie admitted, though she looked distinctly uncomfortable doing so. “I...look, maybe you snore, and maybe it’s kind of cramped in there, and maybe you tried to sell the wagon last time to some Saddle Arabian salespony, but this last week out on the road…”
Trixie trailed off, and Starlight tilted her head at her. “Yeah…?”
“It’s been way too quiet.” Trixie stated bluntly, as she stamped her hoof. “Trixie walks the same route, the same roads, every time. Between major cities along boring roads, all by herself, and nothing interesting happens, and the ponies in those cities know all of Trixie’s tricks. It’s time Trixie found herself new audiences, and walked new roads, and she…”
Trixie swallowed, and looked away as she mumbled quietly, “Trixie doesn’t...I don’t want to do it alone. So do you want to come with me? Because I always like coming back to Ponyville, but I don’t actually like Ponyville all that much, mostly it’s because you’re here, and if I bring you with me, then...”
All was silent for a moment outside the castle, aside from the wind ruffling a stack of posters stamped with Trixie’s face.
But then Starlight smiled, and nuzzled Trixie’s shoulder. “That’s really, really sweet, Trixie.”
“Is that a yes?” Trixie asked nervously.
“It’s a…” Starlight paused. “Well, I want to, I really want to, but…”
“But…?”
“Well…” Starlight looked back at the castle, and the Princess of Friendship still staring at them from a window high above. “I have research here, and I’m still Twilight’s student, and she’s been thinking about putting together this school…”
Trixie blew a raspberry. “A school? You’re not old enough to be an old teacher trapped behind a desk, glaring disapprovingly at little fillies who didn’t do their magic homework!”
“I’m six years older than you are...?”
“That’s still too young to get tied down like that! That’s a boring lifetime commitment! That’s not you, I know you! You’ll be bored within a month, teaching the same students the same lessons, day in, day out!”
“Well, I’d actually be a counselor instead of a teacher, and she’s been thinking about making it multinational, so there’d be creatures from all across the world, not just ponies—”
“Starlight, what’s better: sitting in an office listening to teenagers whining about their feelings, or actually going to the places where they came from and seeing those places with your own two eyes? Getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, maybe getting chased out of town a few times?”
Starlight tilted her head at Trixie. “Does that happen...often?”
“Sometimes!” Trixie cried, throwing up her hooves. “And that’s what makes it interesting! Can’t you feel it in your soul, Starlight? That wanderlust, that hunger for the new and unexplored, for finding places where ponies have never been, for meeting cultures you’ve never heard of, and doing magic tricks for them?”
Starlight paused, and looked down at her hooves again. After a long few moments, she chewed on her lip. “Did you...Trixie, did I ever tell you that I grew up as a Hedge Mage?”
“Trixie never took you for a topiary.”
“No, not—Mage, Trixie. I did a lot of that wandering when I was a filly, after I, um...well you know. Ran away from home, and everything…”
“Exactly! I know you have experience with this too, it’s not like I’m pulling some undergrad from Celestia’s school into the dark and spooky woods on a whim!”
“I remember it’s dangerous, Trixie,” Starlight said, quietly. “There’s reasons ponies haven’t explored some of these places, why a lot of the roads between towns can’t stay paved. I was a filly before, but that taught me a lot about the world around us as I was growing up. You’re sure you wanna go exploring like that?”
“More than anything else in the world.” Trixie swallowed again. “Even if you don’t want to go with me.”
“I do! I do want to go with you.” Starlight said, as she nuzzled Trixie’s shoulder again. “And..well, maybe I should. Besides, you’re...you’re not wrong, not really. I do miss those days sometimes. Whenever I have questions about magic, Twilight just goes hunting for a book, for something somepony else wrote. There’s no fun in that. I miss the days when I found something weird, and I had to work out what it was by myself. I want to be one of those ponies that she reads about, instead of just reading about them.”
“See?” Trixie crowed, as she pulled Starlight into a tight hug. “I knew you’d be interested!”
“Also, I need to keep you from being eaten by monsters. There are so many monsters out there, seriously, you have no idea.”
“Also good!” Trixie laughed. “Let’s do it! Today!”
“Today?” Starlight asked, looking at Ponyville around them. “But I should tell everypony I’m leaving, I need to give them forwarding addresses and work out a schedule—”
“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t! They’ll want you to stay, or they’ll want to do a party, or Twilight will say it’s too important that you stay here and be a boring teacher. I say, the sooner we get all of this packed back into my wagon, the sooner we can leave!”
Starlight mused on that for a moment, while Trixie juggled crates in her magic. Being effectively ponynapped by Trixie...didn’t sound like a terrible idea. “Why’d you pull all of this out, anyway? I mean, I gathered you wanted to annoy Twilight, but this is a lot of work, even for that.”
“Well, I had to make room. And before you start going on about how you should go get Twilight so she can sort all of this out for us, I’d prefer if you didn’t.”
“Because she’d organize everything according to her own system and completely forget that there needs to be enough space left over inside the wagon for us to sleep?”
Trixie cackled, like a witch from the old nag’s tales who wanted to revel in how evil she was. “Haha, no! Because she’s still watching, and I’m going to pack everything in to make space, and not according to any system of organization. It’ll drive her nuts, it’ll be great!”
Starlight’s hoof met her face. “Of course. What are you making room for, anyways?”
“This!” Trixie set down a barrel of explosives—not fireworks, just actual explosives, which Starlight was sure that Trixie absolutely had a legitimate reason for having which she wasn’t going to look into—and picked up a roll of canvas that had been sitting atop one of the longer crates. Her magic unrolled it fully, and she grinned expectantly at Starlight.
Who didn’t actually understand what she was looking at. “It’s…a hammock, right? You’re upgrading, that’s great, but I don’t…”
“Starlight. It’s a larger hammock. A hammock made for two, if you will.”
Starlight blinked. Blinked again. And then blushed. “Oh. Oh! That’s...instead of two separate hammocks, right? So we’d be, um, sleeping together, on the road…”
Trixie grinned. “There we go! Whatcha think? Snuggling up on those cold nights on the roadside, listening to the wind rattle the rooftops as the hammock gently sways from side to side...or maybe sways a bit more actively…”
Starlight was blushing so brightly that she could feel her face heating up, and she saw Trixie blushing too. She was adorable when she blushed. “Awwww, Trixie, heh...and you said you’d been thinking of ways to solve the other problems?”
“Well, so long as you agree not to try and sell the wagon out from under me again, yeah. The snoring and my line recitals, they’re easily solved with illusion magic, I just didn’t know the spells at the time. I’ve been practicing!”
She’d put a lot of thought into this, Starlight realized. Trixie must have really missed her over the last week. And the thought that Trixie missed her…well, in the simplest of terms, Starlight realized, in that moment, that she didn’t want Trixie to miss her like that again.
Starlight looked back up at the window, where Twilight was still watching them, probably with a mix of curiosity and anxiety on her face. Where Starlight had been losing time, and where her life had kind of been breezing past in that library, looking through those dusty old books.
Yeah. It would be nice to get out and start traveling again. And she’d be happy to go anywhere and everywhere across the world, so long as Trixie was with her.