GTP Episode 1: Wake Night Roof Diving (Scene 2)
Miss Pinkamina and I stumbled together into the darkened living room—it’s actually pretty impossible to see in our house if you come in from daylight. I yelled, “Yeah, I’m coming!” in the general direction of the front door.
Ruby had stopped knocking. She called back, “hey, uh, the door’s unlocked; would you mind if I came in?”
Miss Pinkamina stopped cold and whipped her head around the room, surveying, I suppose, the general state of everything around her. I don’t think she could tell any better than I could what that state was, so she was probably just looking to try to remember what it had looked like most recently. She answered, as we maneuvered past the random lab equipment in the living room and into the front room, “uhh… okay. Just, uh, duck when you come in.”
“Okay,” the voice through the front door answered. A sound of brass on wood, and then the door swung open, casting hazy red daylight into the entryway.
“Why is it so dark in here?” Ruby’s silhouette said, treading slowly into the entryway. There was a silence… and then a loud screeching snap. My eyes shot wide, which almost hurt, staring into the red light. A tiny, tight line of black was pulled taut inches above the black outline of Ruby’s head. Miss Pinkamina was coughing and holding her chest, her own eyes looking a more than a little buldged-out. I ran toward Ruby, grabbing her by the elbow and pulling her in. I almost hissed, “she told you to duck, you… gah!”
Ruby stumbled a bit as I pulled her forward, both on her hooves and vocally. “But, I… huh? But there was nothing to hit my head on or, or any… did I do something wrong?”
Miss Pinkamina stopped me. Without realizing it, I had almost begun dragging Ruby up the stairs like a drug-dazed victim.
“It’s okay, Ruby,” she said, smiling, but with a definite nervous strain. And to answer your other question, I’m, uh… making isosafrole—licorice flavoring, I mean. The process needs complete darkness, according to my cookbook. So I can’t really turn on the lights right now, sorry.”
Ruby dropped her worried demeanor and returned in an instant to what seemed to be genuine perkiness. I noticed then that she was, uh, decked out—she was wearing a rose-colored silk dress with subtle pearlescent trim, little gold beads and accents hanging off it on various points, and a wide-brimmed, floppy white hat with pink and lavender accents. The combination looked a bit silly, but I guessed that the hat was on for the sun, while the dress was on for the night.
She must have noticed me at about the same time; she made a faux-dramatic gasp, allowing her mouth to hang slightly open for a moment, and said “You aren’t even ready at all, Scootaloo! You’re not dressed!”
“But I… I don’t really, uh, have… I, uh, didn’t know there would be dressing?”
“Ack! Of course everypony gets dressed up, it’s a party! But, good thing for you, I figured you wouldn’t be, um… I don’t want to be rude…”
“Fashionable?”
“Uh, no, that’s not… nevermind. I brought you a dress to wear! I think you’ll like it, too. I think it’s your size…”
Miss Pinkamina now had a smirk I couldn’t really place the cause of. She swept her hoof around in a grand fashion, indicating the stairs. “You shall be wanting to retire to Miss Pie’s room, then,” she said, “to ready yourselves for this most formal of occasions, yes?” (I could swear I saw a lock of her hair pull itself into a curl as she said that.)
“Oh, yes!” Ruby said, and suddenly she was the one pulling me up the stairs. “Let’s see your room!”
“Oh! It’s so… so small…”
“Uh, it’s okay… it’s the first room I’ve actually had to myself in a long time, you know, so I, I like it…”
“Oh, I’m, uh, I’m sorry. I just… well, you’ll see. But it is nice, yes! It’s so bright, and warm-feeling… it feels like… like this room cares about you, very much. Like it will be h-here for you, whenever y-you…”
Ruby paused, staring blankly into space for a moment, then lit back up. “But your dress! Here, let me take it out and show it to you!”
She had a large bag, similar in pattern and texture to her own dress, elegantly concealed between the folds of fabric on her right hip. She pulled from it a… well, I was expecting it would be a “bundle,” but correctly, it was actually a pressed-and-folded-and-wrapped-in-plastic module of fabric. It looked like it was ready to be shipped to a store somewhere.
She unbuttoned the clasp the plastic sleeve formed around itself, and pulled the dress out, unfurling it onto my bed. It was a deep, brilliant cherry red, shot through in clever places with bold black and white lines. And frills—so very uncountably many frills. It was almost blinding. And there were armlets, and shoes, and a subtle little polished-amethyst pendant fastened onto an elegant leather string. It was all rather… overwhelming. And soft. I couldn’t help but pet it after I touched it.
“So, uh, do you like it?”
“Uh. I. Yes! I… where did you get this? Did you have to spend a lot for it? This looks like it comes from some runway in Manehattan, not from, uh…”
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Scootaloo, really. And I, uh, had it made. For you. Um.”
As is pretty much my default reaction to things these days, I just stared at her with a dumb look on my face.
And then, with nothing else to say, I said something equally dumb. “Seriously?”
“Yeah… I… is that okay? I mean, I guess I haven’t known you that long, so, uh…”
“No, no, it’s… it’s fine. And, uh, thanks. Really, thanks; I, uh… I’ve never had anyone give me anything like this before… uh… ever, really…”
“It’s fine. I want you to enjoy yourself tonight, okay? Together with me.”
“I… uh… okay,” I mumbled, then straightened and looked her in the eye. “Yes. I will enjoy myself. And you will too. I will make sure of it.”
Ruby Pinch shone a brilliant, toothy smile at me. It was stunning, especially in that dress; I had a strong urge to kiss that smile from her face. But I also realized then that that was what she looked like when she was happy. And, if that was her happy, then what was she normally…?
In a few agonizingly-long minutes, I squirmed into the various bits of fabric and donned all the numerous glamorous accessories. I was, as one might say, pimped. And, being ready, we stepped back out of my room, and headed down the stairs.
Miss Pinkamina was waiting at the bottom, a look of, uh… I’m not really sure what it was. She was amused, I’m sure of that—but I think it wasn’t so much what she was actually seeing that she found funny, as something that the image of us together reminded her of. “Miss Pie, you look absolutely lovely tonight. Miss Pinch, please take good care of her, yes? And, oh—”
She ran back into the back of the house. We both waited at the base of the stairs, our eyes again adjusting to the dull magenta light, and then she was back, holding a bright turquoise flower, freshly clipped from our garden. “Miss Pinch, would you like to…?”
“Oh, yes, thank you!” Ruby took the flower, and then, without the slightest hesitation, tied the stem of it around my left wrist. I stared at her, then at miss Pinkamina. Neither seemed like they were going to explain. Miss Pinkamina, though, looked like she was about to burst out laughing. Instead, though, she swept us back toward the front door, saying “Now enjoy yourselves tonight! And Miss Pinch—don’t bring her back too late!”
Talking mostly—if I recall—about how pretty we both looked, we trotted along the dusty, one-lane “highway” leading down and away from the concentric culs-de-sac of suburbia (itself placed distantly from the town center), and toward the hilly meadowland where I knew, at least, Sweet Apple Acres was located. I hadn’t really been out here much, other than when I had stayed the night with Applebloom in the quiet-but-creaky applewood farmhouse. There weren’t enough ponies living out this way to have yet brought me out here on, uh, “business,” either.
Coming to a small curve on the trail, Ruby veered off. I followed her onto an almost invisible path, really just a slight thatching of the grass, that wound its way up and over a nearby hill. When we got to the top, I saw something that made me nearly trip on one of numerous (frilly, so frilly) petticoats woven below the visible line of my dress.
Stretching out for miles beyond—bigger and wider than the night sky—was a valley entirely filled with row upon row of neat, trellaced vines: an explosion of green and autumn-orange, with flecks of red gleaming, sultry and hidden, amongst the leaves. And beyond it, rising up impossibly from the grid of leaves, was a huge house—a mansion—in marble white and onyx black, pillars and crescent drive and all. A large crowd was milling around the front lawn, coming and going like tiny ants through the huge, sweeping doorframe of the two-story entrance.
I gawked. First at everything, but then just at Ruby. “You… you’re, uh…”
“C’mon. I want to show you my rooms now!”
