- Prologue -
The meeting is really noisy.
An ideal breeding ground for a massive headache to start spawning aggressively inside Rarity's head whilst the debate everypony is breaking out over heats up into a delusionary crescendo. Rarity holds her head slightly and groans weakly, the sound of course drowned out by the cacophony.
"All I'm sayin' is that the farm just needs to be run, even if–" The familiar twang of her friend Applejack's accent is interrupted by another inhabitant of the town brandishing their hoof directly at her and yelling out an accusation.
"But you don't even make anything at the farm any more!"
"We still needa eat!" Applejack fights back.
Rarity looks sideways at sudden movement in her peripheral vision: Granny Smith sadly and slowly shaking her head. "It's all chaos, nowadays. What's happened to everypony now?"
She only looks at her in response – perhaps a bit sadly; she's not sure. She's not observing her own face from a second pony's point of view. Then Applejack moves again, and her attention is jerked away again.
"It's not my fault the crops sort of die every night! We need those mudflaps to hide them from sight come the sunset!" Applejack wrenches back the skin wrinkling the overarch of her nose in a volatile display of anger. "I don't know what kills 'em, but it sure ain't us! Ever since that strange storm years ago, it's all been nothin' but haywire!"
Everypony in view suddenly blurs violently, somepony a distinctive yellow smear, and Rarity loses consciousness.
When she comes to, she's at the entrance of her own extravagant country house. She blinks tiredly and lets herself in.
The meeting hall had actually been quite scruffy, although neatly manicured at first glance. She sloppily tropes along the well-cured wooden floor, and tiredly takes a seat along one side of a long slinking dining table. Where it connects to a wooden beam that introduces the opening of the clean wide white kitchen right alongside it makes the table seem like an island table, were it not for its stunted height and the fact it's disconnected from the floor. Rarity stares at the grain of the tabletop surface unseeingly for an indistinguishable length of time – she would have no reliable intuition to tell seconds apart from hours. Or at least, it feels like that.
Hours – though she's pretty certain it has only been minutes, minutes, she's sure – later, she looks up, across to the kitchen.. The fridge is closed, but she's not hungry. Not any more. She's not sure how long ago it has been since she last invited all her friends over for breakfast, or lunch, or even dinner. She presumes most likely since all the shenanigans started. She doesn't know. Everything blurs after that.
Shenanigans. It does not seem to do the situation it names justice. More like… destructive chaos. And even then it is easier to see all the damage that entails, all the symptoms in its wake, and not the sole cause. Everything blurs.
She gets up.
She takes a stroll through to where somepony she knew used to live. It's a simple trot, maybe her gait is a little under pronounced here and there on the way, to the hills and soft green roundness of outer Ponyville. She doesn't go here often, and when she does, it's often only on the outskirts.
Other ponies still have hope. She lost that when she was... Lost.
She blinks that from her mind. One hoof in front of another.
The view is nice, at least. It has that faint, nostalgic air where she used to spend entire afternoons with her friends under softened shade, although now there is just strong, obstinate stubbled stalks dominating the landscape immediately outside the outskirts. Promptly about ten hoofsteps outside the safety of the last friendly hilltop. She looks almost forlornly at the sight, eyes roving unbidden over the forbidden leftovers of a once approachable grassland. Her lower eyelids lift up – does she remember that correctly, or was it always this stubborn, tough patch of grassland? Maybe she was mistaken. Nostalgia did tend to do that.
Something alike to heather roams the far outer edges of said grassland, unless Rarity's eyes really require fine-tuning. She's too tired to think beyond how much the land reminds her of something non-existent, perhaps a mythical outline of some long forgotten story. Maybe even the outer reaches of those actual forbidden lands that Rarity vaguely recalls from.. Memory twists and jars from her mind's grasp. She winces more from the shock than physical pain. A pony passes her view.
Oh. Well, yes. This is a frequent spot for ponies to walk by. Many travel to and from this spot without any trouble. Many ponies live on the outskirts of Ponyville, after all.
Many ponies don't know she's gone.
Rarity tiredly continues, and tries not to look inwards at the frankly friendlier lands. Some may think it odd if any noticed, but not many do. She is close, very close, to envying them.
Maybe she should make some new friends. Get over it. She should do it next week. Then maybe she'll feel more up to designing and cutting out and sewing new clothes for somepony looking in the right place. Somepony new, perhaps.
She loved doing that all the time.
She happens to look inwards once, and on the far edge is the dark shadowed outline of somepony standing on the sheltered side of a tall wooden, or brick fence. It's hard to tell from this angle. Something brambly invades the top quarter of its horizontally rectangular length, a melancholic chaos of a beautiful sight, but Rarity frowns. Not at the sight: at the fact that she looked. She did not have to look. And yet the strange pony wrangles her attention and does not let it go, only for quick and frequent intervals where she has to look where she's placing her hoofs on the path so she doesn't accidentally go off-kilter or the like.
Rarity gets somewhat close enough.
She almost went off the path once – her motor skills are not quite the same as they were before – but otherwise she got there seamlessly. With sight. And hoofsteps. She looks up. She's about fifteen hoofsteps away from them at least from the bottom of the hill they're standing on. Their ear twitches, and they look sideways.
Then directly at her.
The lighting isn't improved any from this position. And funnily enough, Rarity just about manages to make out a faint purplish, almost lilac hue on the coat of the stranger. She squints a bit further, straining out what more colour she can tempt from the stranger's appearance. In fact, the closer she looks, the more the stranger looks like –
The stranger shifts.
Rarity stares blankly, eyes widening, throat soundless and yet closing in on itself: choking.
Hooves shift; move restlessly, and suddenly the stranger becomes clearer, becomes closer –
It takes a while for Rarity to realise she's at the top of the hill, staring eyes locked, head on, at that whom she had lost.
Directly at Twilight Sparkle.