- Chapter Two -
Rarity awakes with little awareness that she is doing so.
In some senses of this fact, Rarity is just existing, but on a somewhat lesser form of doing so. Or maybe she has banished herself from thought, simply because she does not like to think.
She stumbles through the makeshift morning routine of breakfast in the expansive, empty living into kitchen into dining room that the house possesses, and stares numbly as she finishes off her last few bites.
It's really afternoon.
And what little semblance of a schedule she had ahold before of has dwindled into inconceivable specks of nothingness a long time ago – or what she perceives as having been a long time ago – but there is a distinct feeling, a voice, in her mind that tells her it has been too long since her last visit to Sweet Apple Acres. A sort of nostalgic air pervades those lands, but it has also been too long since she has been in welcome company. Give or take a few days.
Most importantly, it'd be nice to see Granny Smith again.
Sweet Apple Acres has lost a lot of the apple trees over the past few years that used to dominate the winding, endless yarns of landscape – which had probably earned the land its given – and somewhat innocuous – name.
Rarity takes languorous strides as she traverses the ground mottled from now deeply marred chunks of soil digging into the path. It has been like this for months, maybe a year at least. Perhaps as long as Applejack, and to a lesser extent Granny Smith, have been complaining of the 'problem with the plants'. Not the exact way it was worded, but alliteration is pleasant to listen to.
Finally she arrives at the door of the rundown but sturdy, and readily fading, red barn-house. She steps through the worn front doors and almost trots straight into the face of long-time friend and former close companion Applejack. She doesn't know what to think.
Applejack only blinks.
"Hey Rarity," she says semi-distractedly. "Nice to see you again. Saw you at the meeting."
Rarity nods blankly – this feels just about to the limit of what she is emotionally capable of at this sudden moment.
Applejack only nods back. "Hope yer feelin' alright. Got some juice in the fridge if that's all you can manage. Just going out to get somethin'." Rarity pulls to the side slightly as Applejack calmly makes her way past her and out the door. It shuts naturally behind her. Rarity vaguely remembers something about her having put in a mechanism so that draughts wouldn't be so easily let in during the winter months. Rarity lightly shakes her head. She's letting her thoughts get to her again.
She steps further inside.
Granny Smith is jovially rocking back and forth in a worn blue rocking chair – though it must not be that worn down from the gentle yet unmistakable vigour with which she is currently rocking it – until she close to absentmindedly catches sight of Rarity at the entrance of the room and immediately stops, crinkled expression brightening somewhat considerably as Rarity watches. Rarity nods, and blinks a little tiredly.
Granny Smith amiably returns it, then resumes occasionally rocking to and fro.
"Yer doin' okay, Rarity?" she finally says.
Rarity properly looks at her at the emergence of an open line of communication. "Mm," she nods singly, jerkily; "M–hm." Her true, measured response. "Sort of. And you?" The attempt is mostly half-hearted.
Granny Smith picks it up swiftly. "Survivin'. Doing good. You don't have to ask me that, you know, Rare."
Rarity feels this too intensely, maybe all of the time – maybe too many times. But never never at all. Never feels too infinite. Too… unnervingly endless. A whole, echoing void.
Emptiness always has nothing that can fill it at all.
"Thank you," is all she says – for now. And, "But sometimes I feel the need to say something anyway."
They fall into staring at each other in the quiet comfort of the room. Rarity sleepily looks into the – thankfully? – only slightly scuffed floorboards. Granny Smith's gaze jumps up at one point to Rarity's blank stare, and still carefully structured manestyle, but otherwise for the entire while nothing settles gently over the peace and expands the faint breathiness of homeliness into the familiar curves of furniture and internal enclosed space around them.
"Want anything from the cupboard?" Granny Smith offers kindly.
"I don't feel hungry. Well, I had breakfast."
"That's important. That's good." Granny Smith nods decidedly. "Well. Then you must be sorted."
Apple Bloom immediately rushes down the steps from upstairs. "Hey Gran! Hey Rarity! Meetin' Scoots and Sweetie Belle at the end of the road! Tell big sis we're gonna work on the big'uns at the end this afternoon!"
"Don't strain yourself! That's an order!" Granny Smith hollers as Apple Bloom high tails it out of the room.
The door closes. Granny Smith spares a glance for Rarity once more, then back to staring across the room. Or maybe at nothing in particular.
Rarity mentally settles in for another bout of silence, except Granny Smith unexpectedly interjects it before it can start.
"I saw a rabbit, several days ago. Right on the acre. Picked something up between its front paws, a seed probably, something it must've dug up by itself, and was nibbling on it hungrily fast."
Rarity looks at her, eyes slightly widening. Granny Smith continues nodding as if she hasn't noticed. Maybe she hasn't.
A pause, before she goes on.
"Funny thing is, rabbits shouldn't come on the fields at all. There's nothing growing in the ground – no taste in them for apples, either. Why appear at all? Would you have any clue why a thing like that would happen? A rabbit in the middle of the acre? In the strong midst of summer? Except you wouldn't think it with this out-of-turn weather dogging this land. Equestria, in fact. The whole land.. the whole land's changed. Does Equestria still even exist yet, if it's changed this much?"
Rarity doesn't really know what to say, so she just watches. It doesn't take long for the true silence to overtake the slight weight of nullity within the room.
Halfway through it immediately gets interrupted by the hearty presence of Applejack heatedly in the throes of indignance as she rattles out a whole essay of complaint to the hulking – yet undeniably listening – presence of her brother tailing through behind her.
"Ponies don't get it– they just– don't! Why do I have to keep on explainin' that the crops are now always going funny! I don't know what was goin' on with that storm! It just came, and went, no explanation! And then the crops just – don't function any more!"
Big McIntosh, or Big Mac as he's more colloquially known, merely nods his head and a hearty "Ee-yup!" of assent. Rarity blinks unseeingly at his warm, twinkling eyes, then looks back to Granny Smith once more.
"Crops aren't machines, 'Jack," Granny Smith verbally lumps back at her in a huff. "They don't function, they grow. Or.. what darn else. I don't know."
"But the way they – move– it's– it's unnatural, I tell you!"
Granny Smith shakes her head but doesn't answer. Instead she turns back to Rarity. Her eyes soften, somehow – crinkling. "It's somethin' in the air I'm sure. Feels odd – not normal… unless that's just me."
Somehow Rarity feels as though she is the only pony towards whom Granny Smith actually shows any genuine strains of doubt at all.
After a carefully structured farewell, and a hug from both Big Mac and Applejack – though Granny Smith's goodbye is no less reassuring – Rarity makes her way back around the well-worn paths to her own home. This time around the back, as straight from Sweet Apple Acres it's the easiest to reach.
Rarity descends upon the end of the low and only partly lengthy dining table, resting her hooves tiredly against its smooth, polished surface, when a noise, towards the strangely keen prick of her ears, arises.
A semi-timid knock. Rarity turns her head back slightly – towards it – and hesitates. Then in one decided movement lopes off towards the front door and opens it.
Twilight not-Sparkle is right there again.
Rarity finds herself on the same lengthy walk on the same side of the same pony who brought her on the same infuriatingly pointless meander across somewhat depressingly beautiful landscape that seems to mean simultaneously everything and nothing within the same thrush of air. Rarity suddenly wishes she wasn't doing this.
"Rematta," Twilight interrupts her thoughts.
Rarity pauses a step in her wandering pattern, but then continues pushing on, not returning Twilight's sudden attention with head turn or any other reciprocal gesture.
Twilight continues. "I've given it some thought. Do away with rules – I think they don't apply now anyway. In more ways than one.." A bird calls noisily from overhead, from a tree not far in the distance. "So…" Rarity still emphatically ignores her. "–Twilight Rematta. My full name. You deserve to know that much at the very least."
Rarity says nothing – only glances once at the partially jumbled sentences Rematta just uttered to her. Then back ahead. Then straight down, towards the path her hooves seem to be intent on grinding into the stubbornly wild unshorn depths of grass taking place before her very eyes.
Some more silence.
The land shifts some more as they move on, becoming marginally more tamed, still with that edge of wildness to its growth and profusions of life, but the land at some point becomes instantly interrupted with broken down parts of fences, low drystone walls continuing up to a point, and dilapidated, breaking apart foundations of buildings… some of them.. what do they even look like? Rarity isn't sure. A lot of it looks far away.
From beside her Rematta stops suddenly, though it takes Rarity a delayed moment to realise this, as she decides to stop as well, and look back at the overwhelmingly blank expression on the other pony's face.
For a few seconds the quiet overtakes even Rarity's entire consciousness into a strangling hold of something… indistinguishable, but then Twilight Rematta moves again, towards her. She waits for her to catch up before moving on.
The greenness of the land mellows to a dulled monotony of olive, or something more toad-coloured, continuously stretching out further than Rarity can manage to take her hoofsteps, little though she tires – more due to the sleepiness pervading her every thought than her resilience in stamina – when Twilight suddenly cuts across the path right in front of her, around the right-angled clutch of an organised assortment of trees standing menacingly in part unruly fashion, hedged off by the tall, crumbling stone of a thin beige wall. They push on, until the world fades out and they are suddenly surrounded by fields of green, grass and.. probably yet more grass. It hypnotises Rarity almost to the spot, and somehow she finds the strength within herself to keep going. Or maybe she's too numb to stop. It feels so hard to tell at this point. Twilight's steps keep a chronometer of sturdy hoof beats to keep herself anchored to somewhat, at least.
"So this is what the world would be like without humans," Rematta says without warning, "...more quiet. It's nice."
Rarity slides a baffled expression towards her – with marked slowness – from right beside her.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she says finally.
Rematta doesn't reply – for a while. Her head tilts back slightly, and then she's looking right at her. "…Never– …forget what I said. But it is different to what I've seen… before."
"You're still not making sense," Rarity murmurs, almost inaudibly.
"I hardly make sense– to anyone." The only explanation Twilight Rematta manages to supply.
Their journey seems to end when they round the corner of a purposeful gap in a perpendicularly designed wall and Rematta heads straight for a strange broken-tatterdemalion shack within its perimeter. As Rarity looks about cautiously, not exactly on the haunches but more accurately described as on the generous length of a leash, four paces behind Rematta, she realises that the corner they just turned and entered through is attached to four other extended stone-built walls linked to each other enclosing an expansively wide field, all while being balanced on the practically diagonal slope of the side of a hill, or a valley. Or what it is really called. Not a.. what did Rematta, Twilight?, call that long grassy thing? Something with a tail. Only the shack that Twilight has almost disappeared inside, except she has stepped back and now looks towards Rarity's drawn-out approach patiently, is on an agreeably low slope and isn't at any danger of tipping over, or becoming more in several jagged parts, to the dulled hold of her faint relief.
Once Rarity seems to reach satisfactory distance Twilight heads right inside and disappears.
Rarity reaches the open doorway and lingers. There is a surprisingly smooth-looking hallway right in the entrance, and another open doorway immediately down the right-hoof side, otherwise right ahead at the end the hall bends to the right in synchrony.
Rarity takes the doorway before another moment's worth of thoughts can pause her in place again.
She finds a wide enough, long enough table taking up the centre of the room. Paraphernalia is placed in separate parts across its surface: in parts scattered; in parts strewn neatly in sections that seem to visually denote their function, or at least their purpose for being there. A book is sat, on its side, at the far end of the table. Rarity uses her magic to pick it up, and levitate it determinedly towards her. At her face, she magically turns the pages, flipping in turn to interesting parts that she can only manage to skim before she flips to another page, either right next to it, or in a whole other part completely. She.. just doesn't have the energy to read at the moment. She doesn't know where it has gone, where she can find it again, if it'll ever be back – it seemed to have went when Twilight Sparkle went, and continued to avoid, or keep away from, Rarity's presence entirely, waiting for the day that she would return, Rarity thought, but Twilight's back now and it's just somehow.. not returning. Rarity gives up – closes the book, drops it on the table's surface, and lifts up her two front hooves onto the surface to see further. A piece of paper? Lots written on it… She catches some words /What are you doing? I was doing my job until/ and a wild kaleidoscope of colour not to be found in the black and white on the pale grain of paper, but in words, starts swimming unsteadily inside Rarity's mind. She catches a name /APPLEJACK:/ in official looking letters and suddenly she's staring unseeingly at the piece of paper and the light has dimmed just ever so slightly into the beginning reaches of evening. Rarity blinks. She looks to her left, on the table, and sees a strange upright rectangular black object standing there.
"A tape recorder," Rematta answers her somewhat pertinent unasked question from right behind. Rarity jerks back to look at her, wide-eyed. "They shouldn't be here, but they exist now, I suppose."
Rarity just looks at her – somewhat fearfully. Maybe dazedly. She opens her mouth, and says:
"What?"
Rematta looks back at her, unblinking. Then, blinking, she replies. "A tape recorder. You use it to record whatever you want it to say. It's mostly used for official, maybe research purposes – to record official business. Or something they've discovered. I'll. I will show you." Reaching up and extending a hoof, Twilight hovers it intensely over a specific area of the 'tape recorder', and then unexpectedly presses down. A burst of noise jumps out of the wide body of the object, scaring Rarity into a sudden shove of her hooves to the floor.
Before the long drone of noise can fully coagulate into coherent sentences a sudden burst of static blares out and shocks her into rigidity on the spot. A hissing sound accompanies the sudden panicked words: "No– no! No! NO– I don't – I don't have hands any more– why – I don't– why don't I have any fingers any more?!"
Rarity immediately recognises the pony behind these rambled incomplete sentences – why wouldn't she, she'd listened to her, been in the company of her for more than a decade's worth of friendship hasn't she? – the strangled, desperate voice of Twilight Sparkle.