"Ah, smell that! Now that's how you make spiced haycakes," mused Rarity, stepping onto the hot cobbled streets of Ponyville Square. The aroma made her forget the morning train ride she had endured in coach, where she had felt as tired, sallow, and poor as an old miser, sunk down by concerns about the store under her charge in Manehattan—here, mercifully,the world seemed to have taken a siesta from everything. 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 Carousel, now," she thought, making a few quick adjustments to the ascot she had worn from the city. "Sweetie Belle and I can swing there on the way back from Ponyville Gravitationist."
She reached into the satchel and drew out a parchment. Past Bo Peep's Paint Supplies, it said. If you reach the joke shop, you've gone too far.
She scrutinized it for a punchline.
"Goodness knows I've heard enough about that old church from Dad. I wonder if he is there today, working on his windows. Will I have to see him too, at the same time? Dad and Sweetie Belle—now that is not a fair welcome to the weary traveler. They're so awfully alike."
The sun tarried in the sky. Rarity put the paper away and leaned back on the ledge of the fountain to take in the warmth and familiarity of the environs; she noted the tree line over town. "Oh yes, I see what they are talking about. A new race of caterpillars has found them. Completely bald like big infants. Should be fresh and green by now. Oh well. One can make do without leaves, I suppose."
She gathered herself and went in the direction of the historic part of Ponyville, where the event would be taking place in the evening. 'Black Box Theater', Sweetie Belle had called it—though, typically sly, leaving out any explanation as to what 'Black Box Theater' really meant. All she knew was that it was the culmination of Sweetie's many weeks spent in Rolling Oats, studying acting under an obscure director—'Miss Bon', whom she always referred to with great and mysterious affection.
"Quite a curious alternative to that," she thought, espying the Friendship Academy campus on her way. "And to Mom and Dad, maybe. And Yours Truly."
She crossed a bridge into the old district, where a restoration project was underway as an initiative to generate tourism. That's how her father, Hondo, had gotten the gig at the church—and, in turn, how Sweetie Belle had managed to pull a venue for her theater troupe, which had travelled from the swamps to put on a performance for the small town. The area was becoming a haunt for younger ponies, who had reopened its saloons and quaint shops; the functional, the derelict, and the chic, all seemed fused into one peculiar phrase. The church was given away by its stature above the other buildings, and a half dozen or so carriages which were waiting along the premises.
Ponyville Gravitationist was a stucco affair with two stories slumped against the foot of a hill. The entrance on the street was boarded off; instead, a steep pathway beckoned the visitor to a side entrance fitted with a heavy metal door, an arrangement which, altogether, reminded Rarity of a legend she had heard about the Second Patriarch of Pen Buddhism during a visit to Yakyakistan. "Perhaps I will have to sever my left leg," she observed to herself as she marked the ascent, "and cast it at the doorstep of the Holy One to gain access to her wondrous Enlightenment." The place smelled powerfully of new paint and garbage, and it was impossible to see through the blackened windows on the church's broadside. She listened intently for any activity or speech she might catch coming from inside, which might give her a hint as to what was happening with the troupe and how best to proceed; but she met with nothing but the stony silence of her father's unfinished windows.
She hit a red buzzer by the big door—nothing happened. She noticed sweat under her pits, and felt her pockets unsuccessfully for a compact mirror. "I feel like fried dough," she thought. "For goodness' sake, I wish we could get on with it. Ah, here we are, finally."
The door opened with a loud clack! from the latch, and standing before her was an overfed, saccharine-looking boy, smiling through a woolly black turtleneck and exuding a tremendous odor of perspiration. He was ashen with an ember-colored mane which tumbled down one side of his head, but which was shaved on the other, and brandished a youthful, eager face. He was half as wide as the door frame, making it impossible for Rarity to see what was happening in the darkness of the vestibule behind him.
"Can I help you, Ma'am?" he asked cheerfully.
"Oh, yes," said Rarity, "I'm here to see Sweetie Belle."
The boy had a flash of recollection. "Oh! Miss Sweetie Belle? You must be her sister. She told us you would be coming."
"Why, yes!" Rarity answered.
"Can't let you in, though," he said. "Not at the moment, anyway. The company is wrapping up a dress rehearsal. Almost done."
"I see," she replied. "Do you know how much longer it will be?"
The boy shrugged.
"In that case, my name is Rarity," she said, taking a step back and folding her mane behind her ears. "It is a pleasure to meet you… er…"
"Free Hoof," said the boy. "And likewise, of course."
"Charmed. I will admit, Free Hoof, that you were not the pony I was expecting to see. But we will make the most of this, you and I! Will you come with me into town, and we can get ice cream and a hooficure and we can talk about boys and how your life is going? I do so very much look forward to that sort of thing."
Free Hoof's large mass heaved with a chuckle. "Why, that'd be lovely, Miss Rarity. I can see that you and your sister both have that Ponyville sense of humor."
"Oh, goodness, is that what they call it?" Rarity peered with greater exaggeration into the room behind where he was standing. "Forgive me for asking a silly question, dear, but what is it exactly that your group does? I can't seem to get a straightforward answer from my sister because… well, you know… she has that famous 'Ponyville sense of humor'."
A look of consternation crimped the boy's soft features. "Gosh, Miss Rarity. Let's see… Where to begin? Hmm! Well, are you familiar with the work of Miss On Scene?"
"I'm afraid not."
Free Hoof exhaled like a skier at the foot of a tall slope. "Okay, then! Super famous theater director from Boar-doe. She pioneered a method of object-based storytelling as a response to traumatic events that divided her from the old aristocracy, into which she had been born."
"Object-based storytelling?" Rarity interrupted him. "Are you referring to the realistic depiction of ponies and settings, as a protest against the sentimentalized high mythology of provincial nobility?"
"Oh, no, no," answered Free Hoof, "very far from it, in fact. Miss Bonn likes to describe Black Box as 'the pursuit of the verb'. It has nothing to do with positing ponies or things of any kind."
"Very well," Rarity replied, "so we shall dispense with nouns. Not a problem. Then, if I understand you, Free Hoof, Black Box Theater is concerned with bold expressions—the cries of a sensing subject who seeks liberation from and within a process which invariably wraps itself up, as it were, in the tattered clothing of form and figure."
"We get that a lot," the boy said demurely, "and I can see why you might think that. But once you've been doing this a while, you realize that what we are after lies underneath the level of abstraction, indeed, in a very continuous sense of the concrete."
Rarity puzzled for a moment. "It sounds like a bunch of monkeys trapped in a room who have to learn to stack crates in order to reach a banana."
"Like that. But take away the monkeys."
"Well, now we're getting somewhere," Rarity said with a sigh. "And this is what my sister does, you say?"
Free Hoof smiled. "I think it may help to be acquainted with Miss On Scene's backstory to better understand what we 'do'. That will get you up to speed—if you have a moment, Ma'am."
"Please," said Rarity, taking a seat. "I've got all the time in the world."
"Oh, excellent!" Free Hoof let the door shut behind him with a bang!, and proceeded, "Her father was a minor noble of the old principalities, who had friends in the courts and who fell in love with a stenographer. That coupling was not looked upon so favorably by his blue-blooded contemporaries, who saw it as a conceit to the middle class. Believe it or not, many customs which originate long before modern Canterlotian aristocratic reform still persist in the provinces."
"They certainly maintain some strange traditions," Rarity agreed.
"Growing up, Miss On Scene witnessed her father's moral deterioration as a result of his estrangement from the nobility. His house gradually fell into lower standing. The old baron, having no recourse, discovered that he had luck with dog fights, and spent his days recovering his sense of reputation in the seedier parts of Boar-doe. He eventually became a heavy drinker. As a young mare, Miss On Scene became so disenchanted with the culture of the aristocracy that she framed a scathing condemnation of it in her first work as a budding dramatist, called Optimum Nox Semper. It combined her childhood love of puppet shows with the story of a group of officials who get together to flog one another, perform quadrilles in tar—what have you—all to compete for the privilege of attending the soirees of a wretched old magistrate.
"Unfortunately, in composing her early masterpiece, Miss On Scene seemed to have forgotten that the language in which she had couched it—Pony Latin, a traditional favorite for satire—was in fact the lingua franca of the upper class."
"I imagine that didn't sit well with the lords," said Rarity.
"You imagine correctly," replied Free Hoof. "The more literate nobles got together and trumped up a sedition scandal against her, and she was sent away to a prison camp in the mountains of Neighberia."
"You don't say!" Rarity interjected, trying to keep from giggling at her own associations. Sweetie Belle's participation in the theater camp—as Rarity had deciphered it, from the reports of two parties—had been a compromise between her sister and her parents, at the tail of a year of poor grades and truant behavior at Friendship Academy. And that was just how everyone referred to it in their correspondences—a 'camp'.
"It happened one day," Free Hoof continued, "that a fellow inmate discovered a disposal area where there were large caches of discarded household objects. It fascinated Miss On Scene that the wardens, who were charged with keeping the prison running like clockwork, could be so indolent in this one respect. She began to retrieve these objects and set them in places around the compound in such a way that only the prisoners were cognizant of their correlation and purpose. She set up a trail of pins and beer bottle caps which led from behind the document storage facility to a cordoned-off patch of brush and cookware which she called 'The Great Cairn of the Snails'. The other inmates were inspired to make their own assemblages, which were imbued with emotive suggestion but still beyond the apprehension of any of the guards. It was then that Black Box was born in the mind of Miss On Scene, with whom our own Miss Bonn had the good fortune to study before the old lady passed."
A cacophony of shuffled chairs and hoof steps issued from behind the door where Rarity and Free Hoof were speaking. The boy recollected himself, and said, "Excuse me, Miss Rarity. I got a little bit carried away—it sounds like the troupe is wrapping up right now. Let me check to see what's going on."
"I would appreciate that," Rarity began, "even though I am really enjoying listening to you, I do have to—"
Free Hoof disappeared back into the church before she could finish her douceur, letting the gate shut thunderously behind him. Rarity sighed again, and, with the thought of encountering her sister revived, began to preen her mane. It must have been in a disastrous state, she thought, after standing outside talking to security in the sun and wind.
"Blast it, what I wouldn't do for a mirror right now," she said, quietly to herself. "Dear, dear… Now, what am I going to talk about with Sweetie Belle, again? Not business. No, anything but business, it's been so dreadful, lately. Maybe we can talk about Enlightenment instead. Mountains and all of that."
"Come on in, Miss Rarity!" Free Hoof hollered from the dark.
Rarity passed through the shroud of the vestibule into a low, vaulted chapel. Softly lit on the walls were murals of ponies gathered around wells, swinging on vines, and showering under the long arches of rainbows, all in a flattened, fresco style. Everything appeared freshly painted—probably by a previous youth group—and evoked photographs she had seen of ancient artwork from Maze Island. There were two or three squadrons of teenage ponies working in the main hall, moving pews into a hexagonal formation. They fleered and shouted orders at one another, laughing loudly with the reverberation of the church, but with no sign of Sweetie Belle.
Rarity heard Free Hoof's voice once again, this time resounding from the back of the chapel. He came out from one of the accesses with a stunning old mare by his side: she had a tan hide with lustrous, sagging, golden eyes, which made nodding replies to Free Hoof's indecipherable declamations. A bright blouse clung to her neck as though it had been laundered in the Fountain of Youth. As she creaked over, her eyes caught Rarity's, and in the glimpse the latter sensed a wave of icy inspection; then, with a smile that pinched the rest of her face, the old mare began:
"So you are Miss Rarity, how very nice to meet you. My given name is Bon Temps, but my students—and my friends—simply call me, Miss Bon."
"It is nice to meet you, likewise," said Rarity, shaking hooves with Miss Bon.
"Miss Rarity is a fashion designer from Manehattan," said Free Hoof.
Miss Bon raised an eyebrow. "Manehattan? Well, it's been some years since I've been there, myself, but I know that it is certainly a very difficult town to be successful in. Good for you, m'baby."
Rarity sighed, and said, "Yes, one day at a time, as they say. Though, I'm afraid you may have misheard something my sister said. I'm not from Manehattan at all, but grew up here in Ponyville. It is a very sleepy town, I know."
"Oh, I adore little places like this!" replied Miss Bon. "With antique customs and affectionate churches." She laughed, and added, "Saint Clyde's in-the-bowery is quite pristine, I'll give you that, but—well, I don't mean to battle you on our first encounter, Miss Rarity."
"Be my guest, please."
"A building like this one," Miss Bon said in a low voice, "has a little bit of yellow from the sun. Dy'hear? It is an old book with torn and earmarked pages, and one knows straight away that ponies have lived and died here. It has an authenticity that one rarely finds in a city like Manehattan, where they're always cleaning everything up. I believe, Miss Rarity, that it is to the credit of you and your sister, that you were both born and raised in a town like Ponyville, and have an appreciation for the artistic portent of things in a state of decay."
"Right… Well, I'm afraid that I'm usually so busy that I rarely have time to stop and smell the sepulchers," Rarity answered her. "But I see your point."
Miss Bon flashed her another pinching smile. "I am glad you do. Manehattan is hard, m'baby. Rolling Oats can be, too. But you and Miss Sweetie Belle may always remember what home is like."
Rarity glanced uneasily around the room—the young ponies had mostly retired from the chapel hall, and the headmistress seemed in no hurry to follow them. "Speaking of whom," said Rarity, "you wouldn't happen to know where the little bugger ran off to, would you, Miss Bon? I haven't seen mane nor tail of her, and I'm beginning to worry that she got lost—looking for objects, perhaps?"
Miss Bon winced and lingered on the remark like a long drag of a cigarette, then said with sidelong eyes, "What a keen and understanding young mare she is. No, I am not her keeper, Miss Rarity. And, as I extend her good qualities to you, her sister, I would ask that you refrain from referring to our work as 'looking for objects'. It is a degradation of the vision of Black Box Theater."
"Why—goodness me!—perish the idea, Miss Bon!" Rarity replied with a nervous, conciliatory laugh. "I assure you, I intend only to convey respectful curiosity. Humor is a form of praise with me. Why, we are looking for things all the time, aren't we?
"Just last week I lost business with an important client who claimed that he had been issued the wrong tailored jacket for an executive dinner, and therefore had nothing to wear on that occasion. And, what's more, when it came to a point of business dispute between the two of us, I was unable to find the original order invoice anywhere in the system that I ask my assistant, Coco Pommel, to keep. Can you believe—when I asked her about it, she said she might have discarded it as part of an operation to keep the back-office tidy. Well! I tried to convey to her, as gently and cordially as I was able, how unprofessional we appeared to be in that moment, and how now is not the time to be making such mistakes. It's never the time—but, as an enterprising mare yourself, Miss Bon, I'm sure you understand me perfectly well."
Miss Bon nodded, but refrained making a reply. Rarity let out a breath and continued. "Coco was rather upset with my tone and ran off in a blathering huff, as my friends are sometimes wont to do. I thought I would not see her again, and that it would be best to go on without her. Oh, but I missed her after the first day. She is a hard little worker, and comes from little means, you know. She is always looking out for me when I get stressed, and is my partner in crime when it comes to coffee and doughnuts. And it turns out, I'm not exactly a natural when it comes to keeping invoices—or designing methods for doing so.
"You're probably wondering, with all this bungling, how it is that I managed to get through that week without pulling the rest of my hair out?" she went on, picking at her mane. Miss Bon was silent, still, her golden eyes probing, until Rarity was obliged to resume, "Well, it so happened a few days later that Coco had left a few things at the boutique, and had come to retrieve them and end things formally. But she saw how it was going with me. She took charge, the dear, and gave me a moment to have a good cry. Then—boom! boom!—we were superheroes once more, sweet sisters in the industry of fashion!"
Rarity straightened her ascot; then, casting a glance back at Miss Bon, said, "And wouldn't you know? That night we found the invoice which belonged to the influential customer from before. Coco tried to apologize—but I stopped her. I told her that I was the one, indeed, who should be apologizing to her, for treating such a close friend so poorly. And I observed as well—quite brilliantly, I might add—that, although I had been searching for an invoice to resolve my original dilemma, that the real invoice had been right beside me all along, sharing doughnuts with me in the morning."
"And what would you have done," asked Miss Bon, breaking her vow of silence, "if Miss Coco had not returned to retrieve her belongings that day?"
"I suppose," Rarity answered after some thought, "that I would have had to carry on with my business in the state that it was in, and eventually hire someone else."
"It wouldn't be exactly the same, though. You might wonder, in fact, late at night over a glass of wine, whatever became of your 'sweet sister in the industry of fashion'."
"That's correct," said Rarity, blushing at being reminded of how she had framed the relationship between her and Coco Pommel.
Again came the pinching smile. "What I love about you—that is to say, about young ponies, is your excitement for life. At the same time, Miss Rarity, it seems to me that you missed the point of what happened to you entirely. Let me tell you a joke. My grandfather was a city planner in Boar-doe—really. He became quite well-known there. Well, one evening he went into a café in a neighborhood for which he himself had been the architect. Imagine that! A young waitress, knowing his reputation, approached him. She asked, 'How would you like your coffee this morning, Monsieur?' and he answered, 'Without sugar.' Whereupon the young dear gave the most natural reply—"I'm sorry, Monsieur, we are out of sugar today. Would you like it without milk?'"
Rarity waited for the punchline.
The old lady gave her a cracking look. "Your long-lost assistant came back. Who cares? It seems to me you are looking for your sister." Miss Bon paused. The clamor in the chapel had died down, and the light on the walls had gotten brighter, illuminating the fresco. "If you understand me, Miss Rarity, I think you will have grasped something about the essence of Black Box Theater."
"Miss Bon," Rarity rebutted as sweat began to prickle about her hairline, "I do appreciate your coming to speak with me and your attempt to help me to understand your art. But, really, I cannot abide by your insinuations. You want me to 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. You say that it is a separation which cannot be fixed. Well, that is modern Enlightenment for you—to parley with determining conditions. We are ever to roll our tumbling Tom uphill in monological contentment, and yet the whole question of bondage is dialogical. The 'who' that comes to Fate's bargaining table is formed in relationship to others, in the reflection of other minds. Our inner world is not only labor, but communication. And, if you cannot grasp that, then you have a very confused notion of freedom, indeed."
Miss Bon laughed into the echo of the chapel vault and gazed back at Rarity with her sad, golden eyes, but made no reply.
"I think she's downstairs putting chairs away," Free Hoof interceded. "Sweetie Belle, I mean. She's been our point pony for this project, since it was largely her initiative."
"Yes," Miss Bon chimed in, "we are very grateful to your sister for arranging to have us play here. She has proved ardent and reliable in that capacity. We all look forward to seeing you and your family at the performance tonight, dy'hear? Please remind Miss Sweetie Belle that we would like to begin the silent cleansing at four o' clock." She smiled again. "It has been nice meeting you."
Rarity wiped her brow. "Will do. And it was nice to meet you, as well."