A completely understandable situation.
Sunset dashed down the halls of Canterlot High School, offering a half-hearted apology to some dude she accidentally shoulder-checked because she hadn’t put her contacts in yet. Because she woke up late. She wasn’t sure if it was because she closed at the sushi shop last night or due to the ever-present exhaustion that follows teenagers around like Yersinia pestis on a flea that also follows a rat, but she missed her alarm and was not too happy about it.
She finally made it to her locker, luckily locked with a key lock because past-her was smarter than present-her, and opened it, seeing the rough shapes of stuff and thankfully the mirror she put on the back of the door. The mirror was there as part of her self-affirmation routine, but right now she needed it to shove her eyes into her eyes. Sunset dropped her bag on the floor, pulled out her contact case, and proceeded with the delicate maneuver of poking her eyes with a thin piece of corrective vision gel.
Everything was going to plan. One contact, then the other, and she should be able to see again.
But if things went to plan we wouldn’t be here right now, which is why at this point she herself got accidentally body-checked and offered a half-hearted apology… and her contact lens was forced off of her finger and onto the floor.
Sunset’s heart dropped into her stomach. She didn’t think to bring an extra pair because that would be sensible, and if anything her life had not proved sensible up to this point.
She took a breath. She then placed her contact case in her locker. She took another breath. She mentally flipped through her courses of action until deciding one one.
“Listen,” she said, speaking from her gut which luckily put a lot of heart into her next utterance, “everyone stay the fuck still so I can find my contact.”
Everyone froze as she got on her hands and knees and felt around on the floor for what could be a contact lens. Sunset felt the peace she had created as everyone recognized the severity of the situation at hand. If she couldn’t find her contact lens, she’d be walking around school half-blind, and what if a… um… tea strainer got a spark of Equestrian magic and started trying to strain the students. Especially from her blurry eye, because of course it would attack from that angle. It would be a lot messier than that toaster robot debacle, which Micro Chips keeps insisting on calling “The Liberation and Sacrifice of Jean Valjeanny Five.”
Idiot didn’t understand that her and her friends were the only thing preventing an innocent business from filing a liability lawsuit against the school.
Man, this floor was dirty. Not like dirty-dirty, but like thin-film-of-granules-and-particulates dirty. The kind you don’t notice until you touch it with your—oh she might have found her contact. She picked up the sliver of whatever it was and glanced at it.
She guesstimated that it was a dime.
Sunset uttered an unpronounceable curse and continued feeling around on the floor for her contact.
What she failed to see, however, is that by pronouncing the unpronounceable, the students around her felt a fundamental uneasiness as the very fabric of existence threatened to shred All That Is into a million little pieces.
The discomfort intensified as reality warbled and jostled itself in a hopefully successful attempt to restrain the forbidden soundwave.
Luckily, it succeeded, or else we wouldn’t be here. Reality has a funny way of not wanting to constrain itself to one dimension. But still, everyone was now very uncomfortable and afraid to move, except for that one kid who was super into the sixties and blacklights. He didn’t move though, because no one else was and he didn’t want to be seen as socially nonconforming or else people would start expecting—
I’m going down the wrong story here.
Anyway, Sunset finally found the thin circle of gel that gave her her much needed vision buff. She rinsed it off in her contact solution, then carefully placed it in her eye. She repeated the process with the other eye, without the dropping and the fumbling around and the vibrating reality because if that happened we definitely wouldn’t be here right now.
Sunset tapped her head a bit. Calculus, Ponish, Current Events. She grabbed the corresponding books from her locker, then looked into the mirror and smiled.
“I am important.
I am you.
No one else can do the things you do.”
She looked beautiful. She still had some trouble telling herself that because of society’s self-deprecation fetish, but she read online that it was important to ignore that and bolster her own mental well-being. She was better now, but she remembered that maintenance can prevent any relapses into self-hatred.
Enough people hated her that she couldn’t afford to be one of them.
Damn toaster robot.
Anywho, with her sight and peace of mind restored, she was feeling a bunch better, so she kind of skip-walked down the hall, waving and greeting her classmates that she unwittingly paralyzed.
And she skip-walked straight to home room, which was strangely empty except for Mr. Doodle Donkey, who just kind of sat there looking like he had many regrets in his life. You know the look.
Sunset tapped her desk rhythmically, looked at the clock, and her heart skipped a beat.
She was late.
She looked around the empty class.
Everyone else was late, too.
Wonder why that was.
Eventually, kids started filing into class, shooting awkward glances at Sunset except for sixties kid who gave her a double thumbs up. Sunset, being bound by unwritten social contracts, returned the double thumbs up without being aware of the intended purpose of said thumbs up.
Mr. Doodle Donkey eventually noticed that the students were in and started taking attendance.
Microphone feedback emitted from the P.A. system.
“Hello students, Principal Celestia here. There appears to be a wild tea strainer roving around the kitchen and—”
Sunset popped her jaw, slammed her hands on her desk, and stood up.
She glared at Micro Chips.
Then she left class.