Two and a half seconds of Mick Gordon's BFG Division sounded off from Sunset Shimmer's cell phone.
A pair of turquoise eyes blinked. Sunset minimized a browser window full of photographs of race horses paired in aerobic positions. She swiveled her chair away from her personal computer while her gaze fell on her mobile device.
She had received a text message. A text message from Wallflower Blush.
Sunset's heart fluttered slightly. Okay, perhaps a little bit more than “slightly.” The feisty redhead was already grinning with bubbly excitement.
With swift fingers, Sunset swiped the phone off its charger and flipped past the lock screen. Selecting her text app, she read the incoming messages from her beloved verdant-hair'd companionette.
Hey sun butt. Wanna hang out again soon?
A warm hum escaped Sunset's lips. The teenager playfully pivoted left-and-right-and-left-and-right on her desk chair as she typed in a response.
Your noose or mine?
There was a pregnant pause. Sunset's gaze lingered anxiously on the text window. It eventually filled with animated ellipses—which sent the young woman's heart rocketing. It then reached the moon when the dots transformed into a textual response:
Actually, I was thinking we could go see a movie. How do you feel about kaiju films?
Sunset licked the inside of her mouth. A few seconds later, her fingers blurred forth a response:
That sounds great. I can't remember the last time I saw something featuring Godzilla.
Sunset had barely sent the message...
...when Wallflower retorted with a new line of her own.
Yeah. It's been a long road.
Sunset Shimmer blinked in confusion.
Her eyebrow slowly raised as nebulous question marks appeared above her head.
A golden thumb hovered... lingered... then finally came down upon the digital keypad:
A long road?
Wallflower was already prepared with:
Gettin' from there to here.
Sunset Shimmer paled over. Her blood ran cold. Teeth gnashed to the point of creating sparks.
~It's been a long time. But my time is finally here~
“Grrrrrrrrrrr...”
Visibly shaking, Sunset slapped a response with a pair of angry digits:
You and I are donion rings. Don't ever text me again.
~And I will see my dreams come alive at last—~
Sunset Shimmer blocked Wallflower completely from her contact list, deleted the texting app, removed the lithium battery from her phone and finally chucked the device into the nearest waist basket.
“Goddamned crazy greenhouse harpy,” Sunset groaned. Fuming, she pivoted back to her computer and opened it up to horses-on-horses once again. “What was I ever thinking? Looked like a CG Dr. Seuss muppet from day one...”
“~Hey, Fluttershy~” Sunset Shimmer waved at her friend in passing while hugging a few books to her ample bosom.
With a brisk and bouncy pace, she cavorted through the crowded chambers, following the elongated path towards her locker.
“~Morning, Rarity~” Sunset smiled and gazed aside, eyelashes fluttering. “~Hello there, Trixie! Lookin' Great and Powerful as always!~” As she walked along a few more steps, her brow furrowed as she belched quietly out the side of her mouth: “Snowy-Hair'd Cuck...”
At last, she reached her locker.
The young woman's fingers tickled the circumference of her combination lock...
...and that was when she noticed a strange slip of paper peeking out through one of the horizontal vents of her locker's metal door.
“Huh?” Sunset Shimmer blinked, mouthing off like a guard unaware that Agent 47 was crouching nearby. “What's this?”
Tentatively, she reached two fingers up. She clasped the edge of the paper. She pulled.
It was a sheet of paper—with white and lime bands—colored similarly to a certain girl's turtleneck sweater. As Sunset tugged and tugged, faded gray text appeared in dotted ink.
It's been a long road
Sunset Shimmer's heart iced over in sheer terror. Her mouth hung agape. “What the...?” Against her better judgment, she pulled and pulled some more...
The paper spilled words vertically up the page like a post-industrial fortune cookie message:
Gettin' from there to here. It's been a long time, but my time is finally here
Sunset Shimmer growled. At last, she yanked and tugged and tore at the printer paper, unraveling its full contents like one might disembowel a crucified lemur:
“Rrrrrrgh—Aaaaugh!” At last, Sunset had eviscerated the message for all its pulpy content She tossed the ribbon-note down onto the floor and stomped repeatedly upon it with all her cavewoman strength. Grrrr-grrrr-grrrr!!!”
By now, a flock of students had gathered in a loose circle. They pointed and giggled and took cell phone photos of Sunset's plight—
“Back off! All of you!” Sunset Shimmer cackled, beyond all measures of “pissed.” She shook a fist while a few of the onlookers scattered, laughing. “It's not funny! Who even uses a dot matrix printer these days?! Honestly! She's a complete psychopath! Aileen Wuornos 2.0 with a side of pickled ginger! And I'm sick of it!”
Clang! The teenager's golden fist formed a dent in the locker, and she hollered upon the coattails of its thunderous echo.
“Do you hear that, Wallflower Blunt Force Trauma?!? It's all over between us! Stop with the frickin' diarrhea meme already and get fornicated, you absolute ostrich!!!”
With the eye wall of the cyclone having been thoroughly vented from her system, Sunset sighed long and hard. Calm and collected, she turned the combination lock and opened the locker...
...only to have a veritable tsunami of used thrift-store-bought Rod Stewart CDs spill out and slam her to the high school floor.
Sunset Shimmer waved to the webcam on the computer desk pointed at her. With expert skill, she flicked her attention back and forth between her dual monitors, paying attention to both her game and her stream's chat with equal fervor.
“~Tonight's another exciting evening of Shimmer Code!~” Sunset adjusted the mic in front of her while smiling pleasantly. “You know the drill: I'll be getting to thanking donations at the halfway point. But for now, I figured we'd cut to the chase and get this session started! As we all know—the latest Sigma patch sucks goose gonads... goose-nads? Anyways—I figured we'd take a teeny-tiny break from Overwatch and chill with some Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Nintendo Switch. Now, some time has passed since I last played the game. Sooooo hopefully all of my villagers haven't totally forgotten about me. Friendship is magic—after all. Even if it's digital and ever-so-slightly-bestial.”
As she spoke, the game booted up. An anthropomorphic dog appeared on screen, announcing the date and hour before rambling off some dialogue with high-pitched autotuned babble.
“~Say hi to Isabelle, everyone~” Sunset Shimmer winked to the web-cam. “I always wondered whose job it was to sit down and localize one-hundred-plus instances of dialogue to fill in for Isabelle not having any 'exciting news' to announce for Tom Nook's island on a given day. That she-puppy reallllllly loves her soap operas and trivia shows. Hmmmm... I wonder if Spike would enjoy this game.” A beat. Sunset blushed slightly. “That last one's an inside joke. Anywhoooo...”
She rapidly button-pressed her way through the dialogue tree. The game capture faded to black, then soon opened up on Sunset's cozy little cottage. A cute super-deformed avatar frolicked out of the tiny house's front door, posing before a mailbox with a blinking white light.
“Heh. No shit I've got a lot of mail,” Sunset Shimmer mused. “Guess I should check that out and then it's on to pulling weeds and earning bells.”
Fingers on the controller, Sunset pivoted her character towards the mail box and “opened” it. After connecting to the Nintendo Online network, a window representing her character's inbox was displayed. The array of unread messages was a digital mile long.
“Whoah.” Sunset blinked. “Okay.” She blinked again. “Heh... that's waaaaaaay more letters than I was expecting. I wonder if they're all from Gulliver, explaining in nautical puns how he and his shipmates had to resort to cannibalism in the South Pacific...”
Her words trailed off.
As did her eyes.
About ninety-five percent of the messages came from one source. A user. A human being who had to have been on Sunset Shimmer's Nintendo friends' list.
“'Greendahlia?'” Sunset's face twisted as she scrolled and scrolled... … … and scrolled-and-scrolled-and-scrolled-and-scrollllled down the gargantuan list of messages—all sent from the same player. “Uhhhhhh... Lovelies? Is this one of you guys? I mean, I appreciate fans of Shimmer Code, but this is a bit... … ...b-bordering on Ricardo Lopez territory...”
She stroked her chin in thought. Her eyes narrowed.
“Mmmmm... buck it...”
At last, she flipped to the very first message on the insurmountable list of letters.
“Consider this an unofficial mail-bag stream, I guess.”
Sunset clicked on the letter. A pastel-colored greetings card appeared. There was a near-infinite amount of space for text to appear. But, in a pure waste of digital real estate, only one word materialized in the center:
It's
The young streamer's head cocked to the side. Her cursor blipped over to the “present” attached to the item. Probably a DIY Blueprint that her Animal Crossing toon already knew, but she wasn't prepared to drop it into her inventory.
Instead...
...she backed out and thumbed the cursor up to the next letter within the virtual inbox. She opened it. Once more, the greetings card was mostly blank, except for one word in the center:
been
Biting her lip, Sunset repeated the process.
a
She snarled.
long
She growled.
road
She roared.
gettin'
Sunset backed out and looked up the infernal list of three hundred and forty-four remaining messages. Her yelling reached a fever pitch and she smashed smashedsmashed the Switch docking station to bits with its very own controller. The game feed cut, and all that was left on stream was a very very very angry rectangle featuring a livid redhead who was foaming at the mouth.
“Fuckin' little fuckmeat's fuckwad! I dunno how you fuckin' found me but the fuck buck stops here you fuckin' little fuckle muck! That's it! Shimmer Code's canceled! Now and forever! Don't believe me???”
Nimbly, Sunset bent over and stripped off her shoes and socks. Within the next second, she was reclining heavily in her chair, slapping her bare feet up onto the desk.
Th-Thump!
“There! Feast your eyes, you sycophantic sickos!!”
She shoved those golden sweaty heels up against the web cam.
“Clip this and ban me!” Sunset spat. Her angry face materialized in shutter stop-motion snarls between the flickers of her toes. “Clip this and ban me!!” Her turquoise eyes bugged from afar. “Bannnnnn meeeeeeeeeee—!!!”
There was a scraping sound. A slamming sound. More slamming. Then—
SMASH!
—the front entrance to Wallflower Blush's apartment blew open with a scattering of metal hinges.
Sunset Shimmer lowered her heavy foot and lumbered inside. Breathless. Wide eyes scraped left and right across the dimly-lit interior.
“Wally...?!”
She panted. She dashed inside.
“Wally...!!”
Frantically, Sunset Shimmer looked left and right... up and down... high and low. Her fevered breaths reached a breaking point.
“I c-came as soon as I heard about your group text to the girls!!” Sunset's voice cracked. “Please tell me you didn't do anything stupid! Please—for the love of Goddess—tell me you're still—”
Sunset froze in her tracks.
There was a sliver of cold light peeking in from the bathroom.
“!!!”
On thudding shoes, Sunset charged straight towards the door.
WHAM!!!
She burst through, exposing the pale moist interior. Instantly, she gasped, covering her shocked mouth with shivering hands.
Wallflower Blush lay in the tub. Naked. Dormant.
Dead.
“Oh sweet Celestia...” Sunset gasped.
A bottle of pills was spilled across the bathroom tile beneath the tub.
“Oh sweet Celestia...!” Sunset whimpered.
Rivulets of crimson red juices spilled out across Wallflower's arms, thighs, bosom, and neck. A red-stained kitchen knife lingered on the bathtub's edge.
“Oh sweet Celestia...!!!” Sunset sobbed.
A fried toaster bobbed up and down in the bathwater. Bullet cases lingered in the soap cradle. A tattered noose hung from the shower faucet above. A rubber hose dangled in through the bathroom window, leading straight towards the running engine of Wallflower Blush's parked SUV outside. A deceased stonefish lay in the shower stall's corner, its spines exposed.
“Oh sweet Celestiaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!” Sunset fell to her knees, bawling her eyes out. She buried her tear-stained face into Wallflower's necrotically pale shoulder. Grasping at the beautiful corpse's bushy green hair, Sunset hiccuped and wept: “If only I had arrived here sooner...!” She sniffed. “If only I had paid attention to all the warning signs!” She sniffffffed. “If only I hadn't dismissed all of your random cries for attention!!! Oh goddesssssss!” She punched the wall and howled to the heavens. “I'm the absolute worst-inexplicably-lesbian-girlfriend-of-a-sociopathic-woman-who-mercilessly-mind-raped-me-and-my-friends-without-provocation everrrrrrrrrrr!!!”
Sunset cried. And then she cried some more. Then—after much of the melancholic energy was spent—she broke out of the melodramatic moment to notice a blood-stained envelope lingering halfway between Wallflower, the kitchen knife, and the floating toaster.
“What... wh-what's this...?” Sunset sat up straight, rubbing her eyes dry. “A suicide note...” She grasped the parcel and opened it slowly with shaky fingers. “Her last words.” Whimpering, she stifled another sob as she unraveled the letter and exposed its contents to the bathroom's flickering lights. “Maybe it will have all the answers.”
Sunset read the sincere words of the dearly-departed Wally:
Dearest Sunset Shimmer,
You were my whole world. My everything. I loved you with all my heart. After all, you showed me that there was more to life than petty sorrow, jealousy, and hatred. Thanks to you, I got to feel again—even if that bliss lasted only a short time.
I know that you wanted nothing to do with me in the end. That's okay. If I were you, I'd want nothing to do with me either. That's just the luck I was dealt with in life.
But... for a few wonderful and merry months, you made me feel like I was anything but invisible. I wanted to thank you for that. And don't be sad that I'm gone. There's nothing you could have done about it. I only regret that I couldn't tell you something very important. Something that involves us. You and me. Something that's taken a long... long time for me to put into words.”
Sunset Shimmer's lips pursed. The last paragraph ended at the bottom of the page.
Trembling with anticipation...
...Sunset flipped the note to the other side.
She read on:
Yes... I've been saving this message for a long time.
One might even say a long road.
“... … ...”
Sunset Shimmer slumped against the base of the sink behind her.
Her fingers gripped hard to the edge of the letter.
Starting to tear at its papery surface.
Oh yes...
It's been a long road.
Gettin' from there to here.
It's been a long time, but my time is finally here...
Sunset Shimmer didn't bother reading further.
And it's not like she needed to.
A series of high-pitched giggles raised her glaring eyes up from the letter.
Wallflower Blush rose slightly from the stained tub water. Her eyes were thin and lively above a grinning mouth. In a set of pruney fingers, she raised an empty ketchup bottle. Her other hand waved, its crimson stains dribbling off to reveal unharmed and unburnt flesh.
“Heeheeheeheee...”
Sunset Shimmer was still as a statue.
Wallflower was anything but. She dropped the ketchup bottle into the wash with a splash and hugged herself, kicking her feet with even more sprays of cold water.
“Haa haa haa haa!”
Jaw clenching, Sunset dropped the note, stood up, and thundered out of the room.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh I got you good!” Wallflower chortled and cooed. “Heeeeeee-hee-hee-hee-hee! You should have seen the look on your face! 'Sweet Celestiaaaaaaa!' Hahahaha! You sounded like a Furby underwater! HA HA HA HA HA!”
Sunset Shimmer calmly walked back in, dragging behind her an orange canister. Without saying a word, she uncorked the cap to the thing and swung it upside down, pouring its contents all over Wallflower Blush.
“Augh! Hahaha—!” Wallflower Blush flinched, but still giggled. “Eeek! That stuff is cold!” She made a face as she sniffed the fresh pool being added to the tub. “Huh. Smells just like gasoline! Where'd you get the stuff, Sun Butt?”
There was a series of sharp scratching sounds.
“...Sun Butt?”
At last, a wave of heat bloomed inside the room.
Wallflower Blush looked up. Her blinking brown eyes reflected a tiny flickering amber light.
“... … ...Sun Butt?”
Sunset's fingers parted. That flickering amber light dropped—
