A/N: I know it's a short chapter, deal with it. I made it the length I needed it.


Wednesday

I woke up with a slight hangover the next morning but wasn't cold surprisingly. Twilight had come in to my room to wake me up for work at around half past nine and said that my room was colder than hers and she had a broken window.

I just waved it off. I have always had a high tolerance for cold, many a time going to school in shorts and a T-shirt on days where it was below fifty. I was also very glad when she told me that she could perform a spell to lessen hangovers and with my simple one, eradicate it.

I got up and went to the shower and washed up. I came out about twenty minutes later and went down stairs. Twilight had made me breakfast for my first day at work. We ate in silence and I left at around ten to.

I arrived at the clock shop just before ten and walked inside.

"Hey boy. Cutting it a little close on your first day aren't we?" Asked my boss. He was a large, grey, Earth stallion with white hair and a slight beard. Before I had met him I didn't even know that ponies could get beards. I really needed a shaving kit, I myself was starting to sport a decent beard about an inch long.

"Sorry, got a little drunk last night on a date."

"Not a problem boy. Let me show you around the shop and your personal bench." He said while gesturing me to follow him.

We went through a door to a back room filled with dozens of tools on corkboard walls with one entire, seemingly, singular work bench wrapping around the walls of the room with random stools and lamps everywhere. The room was about twenty by twenty feet.

He gestured around the room "This... is your workbench."

"The whole thing?" I asked dumb struck

"Yup, but try to keep the projects you are working on from building up and cluttering the entire thing. I have to make the clocks remember? You just fix em. Every tool you could ever need to fix a clock, and many other things, is in here. I will also be giving you a key to the store when I trust you enough so that, if need be, you can use any of the tools here for personal projects. You will be payed twenty bits everyday you come in but I won't be paying ya nothing till you work off the advance. I would prefer it if you came in on Mondays since that is my busiest day, ponies seem to break their clocks a lot on the weekends. We aren't open on the weekends and you can come in any day you want to work. But if you only come in two days one week I expect you to make it up by coming in for four the next. Eventually I will teach you to man the front while I am out-of-town or in the back working on something that needs to be done. There are schematics for every type of clock in Ponyville on the bottom tables of the workbench. They are organized alphabetically and I would prefer to keep them that way. If you need help identifying what type a clock is and come to me and I can tell you. You got all that boy?"

I just nodded.

"Good now get to work. We have fourteen clocks that need repairing and I want at least three of them done today."

I just nodded again. He left to go man the front. I spent the rest of the day, till about five-thirty, repairing the clocks. I was glad there were only about sixteen different types of clocks, so that made finding the right schematic fairly easy.

It actually was pretty hard to repair clocks. The first one I tried to fix had a gear out-of-place. I thought that this would be a breeze, until I found out that it became out of place because another gear had pushed it because a third gear had been rattled and moved. It took me half an hour to figure out why the gear wouldn't shift back into place and another ten minutes of trying to get the faulty gear out. It took me about fifteen minutes to finish repairing the clock.

The second needed some new springs put in and those little shits were tiny. They were like ants and my fingers had a very hard time picking them up, I had to resort to using tweezers which just made it all the harder. If I had three hands I would have been fine but I eventually had to use my knee, almost breaking the damned thing completely in the process. All in all that took me about an hour and a half.

The third one pissed me off the most. In multiple places gears, springs, and other mechanisms were either broke, out of place, or missing completely. I basically had to make a new one in the shell of the old. This altogether took three hours.

I had started on a fourth but only got about half way done replacing the outer plating when I heard my boss call and tell me it was time to go home. I was ecstatic, I knew I would eventually come to like this job but today just sucked.

I left after saying goodbye to my boss and headed towards Rarity's. I wanted to know what happened between her and Derpy. I eventually arrived and went in.

The bell chimed and I heard Rarity say that she was closed for the day.

"Rarity, it's Caine! I need to talk to you!" I yelled to her.

She came down a few minutes later.

"Hello darling, what did you want to talk about?" I knew she was playing ignorant.

"Cut the act Rares, you know what I want to talk about." I told her.

"Alright fine, follow me." She said as she started walking towards her living room. We sat down on the couch and got comfortable.

"Derpy is...how do I say this... distraught, yes that's an adequate word." She told me.

"Why? What did I do to her that made her like this?" I was worried about her, she took a lot of things in stride, even her almost getting raped she brushed off like it was nothing.

"She would prefer me not to tell you. All I can say is that it isn't something thing you did to her, but something you did with somepony else."

"What? That doesn't even make any sense. What I did with somepony else?"

"Oh Caine, you really are dense, aren't you?"

"People say I am." She raised her brow at this but then realized what I meant by people.

"Just go talk to her, and don't argue. It will just make things all the harder on you both." She told me. I could tell from her tone of voice that it was more of a demand instead of a suggestion.

"Alright. Wish me luck Rares."

"Good luck Caine. And please don't make her anymore upset with you then she already is."

"I'll try." I told her as I walked out of her living room and out of the boutique.

I started my walk to Derpy's house and arrived a few minutes later and knocked.

"Coming, just a sec." I heard her call through the door.

A few minutes later she opened the door to reveal myself. Her expression went from one of happiness to one of sadness and irritation.

"We need to talk." I told her, cutting to the chase.

"Have you figured it out yet?" She asked without her expression changing.

"No, I haven't. And I don't think I ever will. You know by now that I don't pick up on things Derpy. If something is bothering you the only way I am going to know is if you or someone else tells me directly or if you do something that clearly communicates your m-" I was cut off as she reached out to me and kissed me on my lips. After a few seconds she disengaged with a frown and closed her door on me.

I held my hands up to my lips in shock that my most recent best friend had just kissed me. I didn't know what to do and I didn't know how to handle this. No matter how much this society said I could have both Twilight and Derpy, all three of us knew that I would only pick one and now I wasn't so sure I wanted Twilight. I wanted Derpy just as much now.

I staggered off while the sun was going down, thinking about what to do and how to address this.

My train of thoughts eventually left me with one conclusion: My original plan would save both the girls and myself from heartache.

I needed to leave Ponyville.