Rarity made her way from the train station into midtown where ponies who had enjoyed their sleep now also enjoyed the tarrying sun in Ponyville Square. The smell of spiced haycakes sizzled her nose and made her rue the early morning she had spent in coach; that ordeal made her feel tired and sallow as an old seminarian, and she found a spot by the plaza fountain to set down her satchel and check her complexion in the reflection of the water.
"No use stopping at the boutique now," she thought, making a quick adjustment to the checkered ascot she had worn from the city. "Sweetie Belle and I can swing there on the way back."
She reached into the bag and drew out a parchment form with some writing scribbled on it and scrutinized it. Past Bo Peep's Paint Supplies, it said. If you reach the joke shop, you've gone too far.
She tried to recollect what Ponyville First Universalist Church looked like. "First and only Universalist Church in Ponyville, they should call it," she sneered as she struggled to form a picture. "Goodness knows I've heard about that cursed building enough times from Dad. I wonder if he's still working there—he must be. Will I have to see him, too? Dad and Sweetie Belle at the same time—now that is not fair. I really need to make notes to be prepared for this sort of thing." She sidled herself onto the ledge of the fountain to enjoy the warmth of the sun and to savor the plight of a gregarious homecoming, and, looking across town, remarked the oddity of the tree line. "Oh yes, I see what they are talking about. A race of caterpillars has found them. Completely bald like infants grown too quickly, not ready for the world. Fresh but a few months ago. Now it's as though someone has flipped a record."
She let herself back down, re-saddled her bag, and headed in the direction of the old part of town, a dilapidated historic district. It was founded by the original merchant-settlers of the area and was on a small rise from the plain, protecting it from the occasional flooding which menaced the river side of Ponyville. It had, paradoxically, become a haunt for younger ponies, who revived its saloons and tight square window shops with cafes and curiosity boutiques, and who were attracted to its ambiance of regenerative vigor. It was difficult for the visitor to discern between the functional, the derelict, and the chic, which seemed fused into one expression; the only clue to the building in question for Rarity was its stature above the far end of the village.
Luckily there could be no mistaking the address, though there were few signs of life outside the church. It was a stucco affair with two stories slumped against the foot of a hill. There was no entrance on the ground floor, the main doors being boarded off; instead, an unduly steep pathway beckoned the visitor to a balcony where a heavy metal door gave the impression of a receiving bay rather than a call and entryway to the Seeker. The smell of the place was old paint and garbage, and it was impossible to see through the small blackened stained-glass windows which lodged along the church's sides.
"Perhaps I will have to sever my left leg and cast it on the doorstep of the Holy One to gain admittance," Rarity thought as she ascended. She noticed sweat under her pits. Even worse to her than calling on a deserted building was the confusion caused by an indecorous arrival, disrupting the work of young ponies who—no doubt—must have had very big souls be toiling away in such a hermitage. Not more than a day ago she had been coordinating a marketing initiative for the coming fall line-up in the city, but now she felt like a raisin, climbing the pathway by the recycled building, listening intently for any activity or speech on the other side of the wall which might have been happening in regard to her presumed arrival; but there was nothing but dead, stony silence.
She pressed a buzzer by the old door—nothing happened.
After a short wait she gave herself permission to go back down to the street and look for a joke shop, when of a sudden she heard the clack! of a latch, and standing before her in the metal doorway was a crisply clad ashen colt in a black turtleneck, smiling at her saccharinely. A vine of red hair tumbled rebelliously over the left side of his half-shaved head, sabotaged in its purport by the youthful and expectant face of its owner, which recoiled from offering any offense to the intruder.
"Can I help you?" asked the overfed boy.
"Oh, thank goodness," said Rarity, regaining her composure. "Yes. I'm here to see Sweetie Belle."
His features brightened. "Oh! Miss Sweetie Belle? You must be her sister. She told us you would be coming."
"Why, yes!" she answered.
The boy nodded and made a gesture for Rarity to pass—but then corrected himself.
"Oops! Almost forgot. I can't let you in at the moment—the company is in the middle of a dress rehearsal. Almost done."
"I see," said Rarity, taking a step back. Discreetly, she tried to see what was happening in the darkness behind the massive boy, but resigned herself to ignorance. "My name is Rarity, by the way."
"I'm Free Hoof," said the boy. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Rarity."
"Forgive me for asking a silly question, Free Hoof," Rarity said, peering with greater exaggeration behind where he was standing, "but what is it exactly that your group does?"
Free Hoof leaned his heavy frame against the door. "Think of it as an approach to improvisational theater. Are you familiar with the work of Fritzel Fussbudget?"
"I'm afraid not."
Free Hoof exhaled like a skier at the base of a tall slope. "Well, then. Super famous director from Allemaneia. He pioneered a method of object-based storytelling alongside Rhineland Rover, under whom our own Miss Bon had the good fortune to study in her early years."
"Object-based storytelling? Is that where an ensemble of characters has a common dilemma embodied in the form of a magic object?" Rarity asked quizzically. "Like monkeys trapped in a room who have to learn to stack crates in order to reach a banana?"
"Like that," replied the boy, "but take away the monkeys."
"Well what are the actors supposed to do?" rejoined the lady in despair.
Free Hoof smiled. "We get so many ponies who ask that question. To understand Fritzel Fussbudget's vision, I think it helps to be acquainted with his dark background. His father was a minor noble of the old principalities who had friends in the courts and who fell in love with a stenographer. They say Fritzel Fussbudget inherited his legendary obsession with storage spaces from her—who am I to say, though? Whatever the case, his parents' marriage was ill-fated from the beginning."
"Oh dear," said Rarity.
"Yes. Believe it or not, many customs which originate long before modern Canterlotian aristocratic reform still persist in the provinces, and the coupling was not looked upon favorably by his father's blue-blooded contemporaries."
"They certainly maintain some strange traditions," she agreed.
The boy scratched his big chin. "Indeed. His father's noble house fell into such low standing that he gradually was ceased to be invited to the soirees that comprised the social life of a noble pony in those times. The greatest insult came when his family was left out of consideration for the Great Gala, an annual fête parallel in lineage to the Grand Galloping Gala in Canterlot."
"What a business it was to get into that," said Rarity, knocking him on the shoulder. "I could tell you a story of my own."
"Why, that'd be lovely! Always happy to swap yarn with a fellow traveler," Free Hoof replied. "Anyhow, as a young stallion, Fritzel Fussbudget became so disgusted by the culture of the aristocracy that he framed a scathing condemnation of it in his first major stage play as a budding dramatist, La Meilleure Nuit de Tous Les Temps. Since it was dangerous to openly criticize the nobility in those days, he wrote the satire entirely in Pony French, couching his acerbic views in a story about a baron who maintains the prestige of his estate by gathering wigged ponies and having them flog each other, perform quadrilles in tar, what have you—all to compete for the privilege of attendance at his parties, to build into it what Fritzel derisively referred to as éclat. Unfortunately, in composing his early masterpiece, he had forgotten that Pony French was in fact the lingua franca of the upper class."
"Oh my," said Rarity. "I'm sure that didn't sit well with the lords."
"To put it lightly. The nobility got together and trumped up a sedition scandal against him, and he was taken away to a forced labor camp in Neighberia."
"You don't say!"
The boy blushed. "Uh-huh. During Fritzel's time in the camp one of the other inmates discovered a disposal area where the wardens would discard household objects. Fritzel Fussbudget was fascinated by the idea that the jailers would allow themselves to be so indolent in this one respect. He began to retrieve these objects and place them in certain innocuous places around the compound in such a way that only the prisoners were cognizant of their location and purpose. He set up a trail of pins and beer bottle caps which led from behind the document storage facility to a broken cooking slab cordoned off in a patch of brush which he called 'The Great Cairn of the Snails'. Other inmates were inspired to make trails of their own, and the act of assemblage was imbued with emotive suggestions by Fritzel—for example, he would say to a prisoner leading buttons to a piked ashtray by the woodshed, Sunfall on the dead corpse of a possum!"
As the boy spoke, a cacophony of shuffled chairs and hoof steps sounded from within the dark vestibule.
"Excuse me, Free Hoof," Rarity interrupted him, "I am really enjoying listening to you, but do you know how much longer the company is going to be?"
"It sounds like they're wrapping up right now," he replied, collecting himself. "Hold on—let me go check to see what's going on."
Free Hoof disappeared back into the church letting the sentinel door shut thunderously behind him. Rarity picked a portable mirror out of her satchel to inspect her mane, which must have been in a disastrous state, she thought, after the train and the crowd and standing outside talking to the boy in the sun and wind. In fact, it had maintained just fine: her resilient tresses curled about her temples and neckline and vaunted in the fetid breeze that was sticky like fried dough and crusted milkshake cups. She put the mirror back as she heard movement behind the door.
"Come on in!" Free Hoof hollered from the dark.
Rarity passed though the shroud of the vestibule into a vaulted chapel which seemed to rise from the earth itself. Its murals were dark-hued, claustrophobic, and cracked ubiquitously like veins that run through a hollowed mine; the art depicted flattened ponies gathered around topaz wells and vines, and others which rode down on clouds or came out of the pistils of flowers to catch flung rainbows in the chipped ether. They all had the same penetrating side eyes which gave lie to bent postures of supplication and the spirited frivolity of a suspended noon; they hung about the room rather more like the bright points of unseen constellations. Moving amongst these ancients were two or three squadrons of teenage ponies working in the main hall. Toward the center there was a group arranging pews into a hexagonal formation, with exits on the quadrantal sides. Altogether there were four concentric figures arranged this way; Rarity surmised that this must have been where the audience was intended to be seated, amidst the stars, facing outward from the center of the space.
To the right near the entrance was a dais where another group was testing a panel of drum kits. There was to be no snacking while work was happening in the kitchen: the students were diligent, playing only what was necessary to check the sound and assembly of the kits, and discussing quietly the layout of the mismatched percussion stations with regard to the audience entrance and seating. It was all as precise as a cocktail for a hot date. There was a choir where some others were standing over piles and assortments: stacks of antique books; long winds of colored acrylic tubing; a boulder-sized styrofoam dragon's head; buckets of doorknobs. A writing desk had been placed in the opposite corner which was borrowed from the facility; in the middle of the circled hexagon of pews stood a flagpole with a patchwork banner flown at the top—it brandished a skeletal pony, reclined like a serene mendicant in dishabille lace over the slogan La petite mort séduit le massacre public.
Rarity heard Free Hoof's loud voice resounding as he approached from one of the accesses to the chapel. She did not see her sister in the room, and caught a gasp in her breath at the thought that she might suddenly appear; but instead, the boy had returned with a stunning old mare with sagging, golden eyes who made nodding replies to Free Hoof's excited declamations. A blouse clung to her bronze neck like it had been washed in the Fountain of Youth, and beaded necklaces bobbed with her as she acknowledged her protégés in her own antique time.
As she creaked over her eyes caught Rarity's, and in the glimpse the latter sensed a wave of icy inspection; then, of a sudden, with a smile that pinched the rest of her face, she began:
"So you are Miss Rarity, how very nice to meet you."
"Likewise," Rarity replied.
"My name is Bon Temps, but the students call me Miss Bon."
"Miss Rarity is a fashion designer from Manehattan," Free Hoof interdicted.
"Manehattan? It's been some years since I was there, but it is certainly a very difficult town to be successful in. Good for you, m'baby."
"Thank you," Rarity answered coolly, "but I'm afraid you may have misheard something my sister said. I'm not from Manehattan, but rather grew up here in Ponyville. It is a very sleepy town, I know."
"That is not a problem at all, Miss Rarity. I adore little places like this. This church—well, I want you to think about the kind of affection this little church has to offer. One can drink it in, the way it sits here outside town untouched by the demands of modernity. Saint Clyde's in-the-Bowery is quite pristine, I'll give you that—I don't mean to offend, Miss Rarity."
"Not at all," said the latter.
"A building like this one is like an old book with torn and earmarked pages, stains from morning coffee, a little yellowing from sitting in the sun. One knows straight away that ponies have lived and died here, do you understand? It has a viscosity that one rarely finds in a city like Manehattan. You see, Miss Rarity, that it is to the credit of you and your sister that you were both born and raised in this 'sleepy town'."
"Of course you are right," Rarity answered her. "I'm afraid I am usually so busy that I rarely have time to stop and smell the roses—especially the wilting roses of a sepulcher. But I see your point."
Miss Bon flashed her another pinching smile. "I am glad you do. It is so hard to be successful in Manehattan, I know. Good for you, m'baby. Good for you. I've had close friends who have gone crazy doing it. But you and Miss Sweetie Belle may always remember what home is like."
Rarity glanced around the room—the young ponies were beginning to retire from the chapel hall. The headmistress was in no hurry to follow them, and lingered like the drag of a cigarette as Free Hoof stood beside her with head hung in what appeared a solemn exercise of self-restraint.
"Miss Bon," Rarity began, almost out of pity for the huge boy, and in the hope of indirectly inquiring about her sister, "why is it that all the performers dress in black? I don't see what that has to do with finding objects and all that."
Neither the boy nor the old mare replied. Miss Bon inspected a front hoof languidly, and took so long in coming about an answer that Rarity could not tell whether she had now made reticent enemies or whether she found herself in the presence of well-wishers that were condescending to give her an opportunity at redemption.
"Miss Rarity," Miss Bon said at length, "notwithstanding my appreciation for what is humble in a pony's life, let me assure you that I am well-accustomed to the speed at which things come and go in the life of a young city mare. And, seeing as well that I am acquainted with your sister, who has such a keen understanding and openness of heart, I think I may also trust that the stick is not so far from the branch, and therefore extend those good qualities to you?"
"Of course," said Rarity. "I would even consider it a ringing endorsement."
Miss Bon grimaced. "From now on, I would kindly ask that you not refer to our work as 'finding objects'. It is a degradation of our vision and of the sufferings of those who have strived to bring it into the world."
"Why, goodness me, perish the idea!" Rarity said. "When I speak of 'finding objects' I intend only to convey a respectful curiosity—virtually praise! I certainly don't mean anything by it. Why, we are looking for things all the time, aren't we? Just last week I received a complaint from a very important client and was subsequently unable to find the invoice for their order anywhere. Now it turned out that my dear friend and co-conspirator, Coco Pommel, had discarded the invoice in a haste as part of an operation to keep the back-office tidy. I was very cross. 'Coco!' I said to her, 'the invoices are a record of what we do! Now we have no way of resolving the difficulty that has come up with this influential customer.'"
She broke off and straightened her ascot as a gesture of rapport with the older mare. "Coco was very upset with my tone and ran off in a huff, as my friends are sometimes wont to do," she resumed. "I thought that I might have to carry on without her. Oh, but as the days wore on I began to miss my dear Coco—the way she keeps the store just the way I like it, her little morning donations of coffee and doughnuts to get the day moving. Then the same irate and all-important guest came around again. By a stroke of luck, I found the prized invoice under a desk in the office—but I had become so stressed and disorganized in the basic operations of the shop that I couldn't find anything in supplies to rectify the complaint! It was not my finest moment.
"Now, you're probably asking, 'Rarity, how is it with all this professional bungling that you're not out on the street selling pirated merchandise of comic book characters? How will you get out of this corner you've put yourself into through bad judgment and stubbornness?" She put a hoof on Miss Bon's shoulder. "Well, who should appear with a joke and a solution by my dear, sweet sister in the industry of fashion, Coco Pommel! She had come to apologize because she had so much respect for me as an entrepreneur and designer, and I tell you, she saved my hide in doing so! And when the dust settled, I told her that it was indeed I the one who should be apologizing, for treating such a close friend so poorly. And I told her as well, that although I had been searching for an invoice to resolve my dilemma, that the real invoice had been right beside me all along, bringing me coffee."
Miss Bon bristled at Rarity's touch like a mourning dove. "Please contain yourself, Miss Rarity. I am sure that such tales are very pleasing indeed to certain mares of your old acquaintance—perhaps the kind one would meet over tea at the patisserie—but we are concerned here with serious art. Please grant that I may ask you a question regarding your wayward friend, if you would be so kind."
"Certainly," Rarity replied as she observed personal distance.
"What would you have done if Miss Coco had not returned on that day with the angry customer?"
"I suppose," she answered after some thought, "that I would have had to bite the bullet of the client's ire and carry on with my business in the state it was in."
"The office would be a mess. The operations would continue in free-for-all. You might wonder, late at night over a glass of Pinot, what became of your 'co-conspirator'."
"Correct."
Again came the pinching smile. "What I love about you, that is to say, about young people, is your excitement for life. But—here, let me tell you a joke. My grandfather was a city planner in Swardbonne. He became quite well-known there. Well, one evening he went into a café in a neighborhood for which he had been the architect. A young waitress approached him as he was poring over a new design and asked, 'How would you like your coffee tonight, Monsieur?' He answered, 'Without sugar,' whereupon she replied, 'I'm sorry, we are out of sugar today. Would you like it without milk?'"
Free Hoof snorted, but made no comment; Rarity awaited the punchline.
"What I mean to impart, Miss Rarity, is that the manner in which you have posed your story to me shows that you missed the point of what happened, entirely." The clamor in the chapel had begun to die down. Miss Bon paused and glanced sidelong at Free Hoof, who stood by beaming with hardly contained joy at the disquisition of the headmistress. With this look something was understood between them, and he parted their company in obedient step back to the rear of the church. Miss Bon, using the opportunity of the silence for effect in her speech, waited before continuing. "Your long-lost friend came back. Who cares? You have missed something about life, my dear, something important. And therefore you miss the essence of black box theater."
Rarity listened like she was watching a fly hover around an un-bussed table at an outdoor bistro. "Miss Bon," she began, "I do appreciate your coming to speak with me and your attempt to help me to understand your art. But, really, I cannot sit and abide by your phenomenological insinuations. You picture my reunion with my old happiness as a symptom—a malady no different, perhaps, then if I were preoccupied with trying to crawl back into the womb. But, in my view, the whole nature of bondage is not that we are trying to get back into paradise, but rather that we are trying to get away from some original tragedy of separation. That is the modern enlightenment—we satisfy ourselves to form a parley with determining conditions, to ascend again the nefarious hill of the rolling rock. But who is coming to the bargaining table of the gods? If you cannot answer that, then you have a very confused notion of freedom, indeed."
Miss Bon laughed loudly and looked at back her with her sad, golden eyes. "Very well, Miss Rarity. Perhaps it is something one must see to understand."
"All ready to go!" said Free Hoof returning again. "I left the skeleton key with Miss Sweetie Belle. She's finishing up sequestering the rest of the furniture downstairs." He caught eyes with Rarity. "Miss Sweetie Belle is our point pony for this project. We leave it to her to account for the facility property and to lock up."
"Yes," Miss Bon chimed in, "we are very grateful to your sister for arranging to have this performance. She has proved ardent and reliable in that capacity. Well, it has been nice meeting you, Miss Rarity. We all look forward to seeing you at tonight's performance, hear? Please remind your sister that we would like to begin with a silent cleansing at four o' clock."
"Will do," she answered. "It was nice to meet you as well."
Miss Bon flashed her one more pinching smile and lumbered out the side exit with Free Hoof. With the chapel now empty, Rarity froze a little as she could begin to hear work going on downstairs. There was the sound of chairs scraping on concrete, then a final clank! which reverberated and billowed up over the stars into the rafters. A door wheezed shut. As she heard hoof steps coming up the stairs, Rarity wondered whether she should strike a pose to be more impressive, then remembered the humid air inside the church—she was dabbing her hair to test whether it had become untamed when Sweetie Belle came out of the doorway to the recess. She was sweating and wearing a turtleneck like the others, though it did not quite fit her; she laughed when she saw her sister like the sight of dry land and hurried over to embrace her.
"You stink," said Rarity, fighting for breath in her clutch.
Sweetie Belle let go. "Good! The commoner shall know me by the sweet scent of my perspiration. Now fetch me the finest bran mash in the province, fair subject, and for thee I shall set aside a plot of eight hectares to till." She proffered a winking grin as they began walking together.
"Sweetie Belle this is weird," said Rarity.
"Oh, everything is weird to you."
"Practically from the moment I got off the train it's been nothing but dead possums and drum kits and cryptic punchlines. I still don't know what you do and I dare say I am afraid to find out."
Sweetie Belle was nodding as she listened. "Don't worry. You're going to love it. It's way more cathartic than thespian acting."
"And do I strike you as a feverish lady, hungry for whatever pathos is on offer?"
"Hmm. It's not about pathos, really. With pathos you have tension, climax, resolution, denouement, those sorts of traditional things. With black box theater the drama lies in the presence of the object, which facilitates the encounter between the audience and the space they inhabit."
"Well I do love spaces," Rarity quipped.
Sweetie Belle shook her head. "Look—if I see you, we might talk, find something in common, make plans, right? It's all very intelligible. You could get a robot to do it. But think about the act of simply meeting someone. Isn't that astonishing in its own right?"
"Bless your heart, Sweetie Belle. Whence come these pearls of great price?"
"It's like shrining," Sweetie Belle continued excitedly. "Instead of sympathizing with a hero you build a place where heroism lives, and anyone can go there. Does that make sense? You can also think about it like a zoo exhibit with monkeys, a bunch of boxes, and a dangling banana. Only—"
"Only no monkeys. Honestly, I didn't know it was such a sticking point for you, dear."
Rarity shielded her eyes as they made their way out into the sunlight; Sweetie Belle locked the door behind as she left with a soft clack.
"I thought we would stop at Carousel to freshen up a bit before meeting Applejack and the others," said Rarity. "You don't need anything at Mom and Dad's, do you?"
"It's all in the chapel." Sweetie Belle pocketed the key and made her way down the walkway with her sister; as they went, Rarity could not repress a proud smile.
"I have to tell you, Sweetie Belle, how impressed I am that you've managed to pull all of this together. Your director was just telling me what a good job you've been doing in your retainer role. Going to that camp was so good for you, I can see it in the way you walk."
Sweetie Belle blushed like a subject in a Rococo portrait. "Thanks. It was just luck, really. We were exploring possible venues for our end of project performances and I thought it would be fun to come to Ponyville. I told Miss Bon that I knew some of the princesses and that they would come to the show—before I confirmed with them, actually."
Rarity raised her hoof. "Now, now. Don't sell yourself short. It wasn't 'just luck'—that's using your wits and your connections. I know for a fact that Twilight would love to come and see your troupe perform. She really loves theater, you know, and I believe she thinks quite fondly of you."
"Maybe. I've been in correspondence with her about it, and she seems enthusiastic enough. But it won't just be Twilight—Cadence will be there, too."
"Cadence?"
"Cadence, Rarity." She sighed. "I'm kind of nervous about it."
"Well why is that?" But before her sister could answer: "Sweetie Belle, I want you to look at me. We are having a moment, you and I."
Sweetie Belle looked at her.
"I have had the privilege of working with Princess Cadence on a number of occasions, and I have met few ponies capable of such fine discernment under critical junctures—she is the rival of Celestia. It will be good for you to meet her in a 'professional' context, as it were, you'll see. I know it is pressure for you, but you are really very fortunate. And though it seems you are feeling jitters, know that your big sister does not for a moment doubt that you are ready for the challenge. Oh, I am so excited for you! It fills me with joy and inspiration to see that you have finally realized the wherewithal to—"
Of a sudden Sweetie Belle caught her hoof on a small root which protruded out of the earthen path on which she and her sister were walking; she was so fixed on Rarity's speech that she tumbled forward with a "YEE!" and barreled toward one of the sidewalk shops, flailing her limbs and her satchel like a projectile. Rarity cried out in amazement as she chased to where someone had broken her fall; but in the fallout the skeleton key which had nested in the side pouch of Sweetie Belle's bag had been flung from its compartment and arched through the air, where Rarity accidentally swallowed it as it converged paths with her on her way to aid her torpedoed sibling.