Out of morbid curiosity for whatever foul monstrosity still lurked beneath the musty tomb for dust bunnies, I eyed the bundle of fuzz and teeth that glowered hatefully back at me. Crawling on my belly seemed like the least intelligent option, but there was little choice in the matter.

I never liked Opalescence. The mangy ball of quiet, seething rage leering back at me from beneath my sister’s desk looked to be nearly as constipated as a hydra with one of its heads stuck up its own bum, and only about half as cheerful.

“Come on out, Opal,” I sighed for the umpteenth time, wriggling my hoof uselessly toward the venomously hissing cat. “You need this bath, we both know it. Let’s both be professional here, hmm?”

The cat mrowled with what I think was probably an unrepeatable insult in cat-speak, and looked at me as if I had just suggested that he jam something unpleasant where Celestia’s sun does not shine. He batted me back again with one furious swipe that nearly cleaved my hoof off at the joint, and I jerked back reflexively to avoid being sliced open again. I was still nursing wounds from the last bathing, and each one was still fresh in my memory.

“Rarity?” I whined in exasperation, not taking my eyes off of the devil’s fuzzy spawn for a single second lest he slip out of my grasp once again. “Does it have to be today?”

The sound of a humming sewing machine answered me, and I let out a quiet sigh through my nostrils. Clearly, this was going to be another one of those days. I would have expected to spend my summer afternoons playing outside at the very least; not exactly my first initiative, but I at least expected to hear as much from my elder sibling. Too much time indoors is bad for a growing mare, blah blah blah. But the constant chores Rarity gave me were beginning to grind on my nerves, and I was beginning to look forward to the prospect of doing what Rarity hated me doing most of all.

Absolutely nothing.

“Come here, darn you…!” I wriggled a little further under the desk, squeezing myself between floor and the hard wooden bottom in vain attempt to tackle the angry hell spawn. Opal yowled in rage when I slammed the bottom of my hoof onto his puffy tail as I made a swift swipe for the back of his neck with my other hoof. Hoping that I could pin him and drag him all the way to the upstairs bath was proving to be a rather fruitless and stupid exercise, as the moment I grabbed hold of him he turned violently around on himself like the world’s least professional contortionist, bit me hard, and scampered away on his fat little feet the second I dropped him on the floor.
Fwump!

“Damn!”

“Sweetie Belle?” I heard Rarity’s cautious tone echoing from upstairs at my failure, and I instinctively kissed tenderly at the stinging fresh cut to stem the bleeding. “What did you just say?”

“Darn!” I shouted even louder, although I betted that it was pretty unconvincing. “I said darn, I swear!”

“Don’t swear, Sweetie, I’m not deaf!” she shouted back.

“Sorry, what?” I feigned the same deafness that I hoped she had, eyeing the room for the dreadful servant of darkness and mouse toys. “I didn’t hear that, trying to catch Opal!”

“Still?”

There comes a point when one starts to take really stupid advice from friends when you’re growing up. It’s unavoidable for most colts and fillies. Unless you’re one of those hidey types that never make any friends and waste all of your time inside writing terrible stories, or Diamond Tiara, then chances are pretty high that you’ve heard one of your friends say something really, really stupid. And at one point or another, you thought about that unbelievably stupid thing and thought ‘hey, yeah, that’s brilliant!’

Scootaloo’s advice that I assume the guise of supreme incompetence in order to avoid being asked to do the same chores again had backfired so hard that I might as well have been hammering my own head into the wall under the pretense that I was repainting the living room, but not quite as successful.

You see, with every menial task that I ‘failed’ mysteriously at, Rarity simply gave me three more to make up for it. And every time I failed one of those, she gave me alternate tasks to busy myself and stay out from under hoof until I was asked to retry. She reminded me of an angry Miss Cheerilee on those occasions, calling out Snips from the back of the room and asking him to try again when he drew a picture of a rabbit on a math equation instead of a numerical answer.

I once even set a bowl of cereal on fire, although that was mainly by accident. Whereas a unicorn, my magic still was not quite developed enough to properly abuse to my amusement, which meant that I was doomed to flail about with my prepubescent limbs until the time came when I could wreak magical havoc down on the unfortunate head of Beelzehoof’s pet.

Did I display a certain level of disdain toward Opal that bordered on malevolence? Certainly.

Did Opal reciprocate at every turn in attempt to make my life as miserable as possible? Most certainly.

The first time I ever met that wretched thing, I thought that it had merely been an accident that he had vomited on my pillow during my ‘extended stay’ with my sister while my parents undoubtedly played cricket on a cruise ship. It was the twelfth time that he relieved himself inside my dresser that I began to wonder if perhaps the cat did not like me.

Perhaps that was why Rarity made me give him regular baths, and she was secretly just as evil as he surely was. That certainly would explain an awful lot.

“Hey, Rarity,” I asked as she tiredly trumped down the stairs. “Did you buy Opal from a mysterious shopkeeper that asked for your soul?”

“No,” she deadpanned as her magical blue aura emanated from her horn and expanded to encompass the entire room before dissipating in a little sparkly puff. “Nor did I get Opalescence from Tartarus, I did not ‘create him with wicked science’, he is not an eldritch abomination in disguise, and before you ask for the seventh time, my kitty is not darkness incarnate.”

Opal purred lovingly as he trailed around her legs, leaving me utterly baffled as to where he had even been hiding. I hadn’t even seen him come out, it had been so quick.

“Isn’t that right, baby?” Rarity cuddled him in one hoof, nuzzling his furry belly lovingly and cooing disgusting sentiments toward the minion of evil. “Poor little Opalescence is always getting picked on.”

“Poor little Opalescence almost severed my jugular vein,” I stated flatly, rubbing the sore spot on my neck where he had clamped on with his jagged little teeth before.

“Oh, pish posh,” she frowned, pursing her lips. “Come along, Sweetie, I’ll get some bandages and disinfectant for that. And then we can get little Opal-wopal a widdle bath, yes!” Rarity resumed her cooing, although ‘Opal-wopal’ seemed to have stopped purring.

For as much talk as there is of animals not really understanding sophisticated equine speech, there were times that I really felt that the cat could understand everything that we said around him. Even one of my sister’s friends seemed to be thoroughly entranced enough with animals to convene with them, which said amazing things about her level of patience. I could barely deal with one Opal. I don’t think I could manage an entire forest of them, but there Fluttershy was.

The sound of running bath water seemed to shake Opal out of his reverie, and his malicious howling and thrashing resumed just in time for Rarity to clutch him neatly in a magical grasp, far away from her face. I tucked away a hint of jealousy at her level of magical mastery – at least, in comparison to mine. I could barely keep a telekinetic grip on a pair of scissors, let alone an entire living creature. Using magic on living things, like angry spitting cats, is especially difficult since it takes much more effort to keep it properly still without breaking any body parts.

Not that I didn’t try, of course.

I don’t think Opal ever really forgot about that.

The scratching and furiously frothing ball of hate and anger still bobbed in the air, and Rarity looked at me expectantly as the water was running from the tap and filling the claw foot tub.

“Door?” she said, as if stating the obvious.

“Oh, right,” I said swiftly as I backed out. “Well, thanks for the help, have f-”

“Oh-ho ho, no you don’t.” Rarity’s unamused expression somehow kept me locked in place until my will broke and I shuffled sheepishly back inside, latching the door firmly behind me. “This is the third time you’ve tried to skip out on giving Opal a bath, Sweetie. It won’t kill you to help out.”

That was another thing that I was sick and tired of hearing.

“Yeah, well, what if it does?” I scowled as I tested the water, which was far too hot. I was tempted not to tell Rarity that, but she seemed to have suspected as much and automatically added more cool water. Which was a shame, because at this point I was really in the mood for watching to see how long it took a cat to boil. Although I doubted anything less than the fires of Mount Moredoom would be enough to destroy his evil permanently.

“Don’t say things like that, Sweetie Belle, it jinxes them. Now, make sure to lather his fur with the shampoo – no, the special one in the blue bottle, that’s aloe – there we go, and into the water, Opal!”

Rarity gave me the ‘honor’ of transferring the sudsy abomination manually instead of simply dropping the little beast in. Or better yet, hold his head under the water, but I didn’t think that Rarity would like that suggestion much. His roiling anger seemed to have cooled with time, leaving him only partially foaming at the mouth, but it all seemed to return with gusto the moment I gingerly picked him up between my hooves, gritting my teeth the whole time in fearful anticipation of the next cut.

Which would probably have really stinging soap in it for good measure, which would be just my luck.

I tried to place him carefully into the tub of steaming soapy water as Rarity watched to ensure that I was ‘learning’ but I was thoroughly unsurprised when Opal’s little claws latched onto the side of the tub, preventing me from lowering him any further. I tried tugging but to no avail, and Rarity frowned.

“Sweetie, dear, just put him in the water,” she sighed as if I were doing it on purpose.

“Oh, yeah, of course!” I said with enough enthusiasm to make it clear that I was very, very unenthusiastic about the entire ordeal. “Golly, I wish I’d thought of that.”

“There’s no need to be a smart aleck about it,” Rarity frowned again, magically hauling the screeching demon from the side of the tub and plopping him with a quite satisfying plunk! smack dab in the middle. His usually pristine white fur was matted against him, and the fur over his head hanged over his eyes like a ridiculous bowl cut. I smirked in smug gratification at him, victorious. I swear, though, the way he looked back at me almost screamed ‘I know where you sleep’ and I was determined to keep my door thoroughly locked that night nonetheless.

Much to my pleasure, I received many fewer cuts and scratches from Opal that I usually did during bath time. Mostly because I was letting Rarity do all the heavy work with her magic while I stood back under the pretense of ‘learning’ more from her numerous wise ways. I was whistling optimistically now that the daily torment was nearly out of the way, the alluring touch of the summer rays leaning in for me through the windows. Visions of how I was going to spend the rest of my day running free with Apple Bloom and Scootaloo danced through my head, and it became a little harder to whistle through my smile. I was really hoping that we could all gather up for the carnival coming to Ponyville in a few days time, the scent of my favorite cotton candy already tickling my nose.

“Hey, Rarity, going out now!” I called, tentatively leaning around the corner and peering into the living room, where Rarity was carefully braiding the sullen and damp cat’s fur into little pink bow ties, which he scowled at with enough hate to set lesser cloth aflame.

“Hmm,” she hummed aloud as she looked at me, and the pit dropped out of my stomach. That was the kind of ‘hmm’ that she usually reserved for either times when she was clearly dissatisfied with my level of ‘assistance’ and insisted that I remain behind as a form of cruel, cruel, punishment, or when she just wanted to screw around with my head for a little bit. I was sincerely hoping it was the latter, even though Rarity never had been much of a jokester.

Don’t be fooled by that, though. When my sister plays a prank, it almost always works, because it comes from somepony that no being, pony or otherwise, in their right mind would ever see coming. Maybe it was the ‘classy’ air.

“Is that a ‘hmm’ I’m thinking or ‘hmm’ okay?” I asked hopefully.

“You’ve already cleaned your room?”

“Yes,” I answered promptly, inching subtly toward the door in hopes that she would get the message from my body language that I really, really wanted to go see my friends now. “And got underneath the bed.”

“And the closet?”

“Cleaned and reorganized,” I said firmly, squeezing a few more inches from myself and the door.

“And-”

“And I swept the attic, did the dishes, bathed Opal – uh, sort of – and it’s summer so there’s no homework and I really really really really want to go outside now,” I said all in one breath, practically dancing back and forth in front of the door.

I was a little ashamed of myself, to be honest. For a moment I was reminded of the Apple family’s dog, Winona. Now, that was a pet that I rather liked. She was a really pleasant sort of dog, the kind that never bit or mauled anypony unless it was within reason, or pooped in anypony’s dresser drawers. I even fantasized about getting a dog just like Winona to chase away cats and sic on Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara, but Rarity was against that, too. Something about ‘young adults not being adult enough, why I never, harrumph harrumph harrumph.’ My dad sometimes has coughing fits that sound a bit like that, but Rarity made it into an art. I can respect that.

“Well,” Rarity said slowly, stroking her chin absentmindedly with the same comb that she had been using on the sulking cat’s head. I was almost reminded of a super villain from comic books like that, with the evil cat and all. She was just missing an eyepatch. “I don’t see why not…”

I took that as invitation to leave, and was giddily prancing out the door when I was heartlessly stopped from my freedom.

“On one condition,” Rarity added, magically levitating my hooves nearly an inch off the ground before they finally realized that they weren’t going anywhere and relayed the message to my confused brain. From as needlessly cruel as her stopping me was, I was almost tempted to give her cause to use an eyepatch.

“Oh, geez!” I rolled my eyes in irritation. “You don’t want me to give mushy letters to that one stallion at Bits and Bobs again-”

“No, no, no!” she interrupted unexpectedly loudly, a pink tinge in her cheeks as I was carefully placed back on the ground. “Of course not, of course not, that never happened – I mean it Sweetie, that never happened! – I just need you to pick up some cobalt ribbon for me.”

I blinked, rather surprised. There had to be some kind of catch, as Rarity was rarely one to give me such a seemingly simple task. Unless this was because I had botched the bathing again, and she was just trying to give me a passive aggressive punishment for it since she didn’t believe in whacking fillies about the head with a stick. I’m pretty sure that’s why Snips is so bad at math, but I generally keep that to myself.

“Is that all?” I asked, foolishly tempting fate.

“I’ll get some bits for you,” Rarity nodded with a pleasant smile. “And a little extra in case you want to grab some sweets for us on the way back.”

Which was basically code for ‘and bring me back some candy while you’re at it’ but I held my tongue.

“Now, it needs to be cobalt,” she said very seriously, dropping a small brown bag of bits into my hoof, tied off with a threaded pink string at the top. “Not azure, not sapphire, not cerulean, not robin’s egg, and certainly not indigo. Cobalt.”

“Got it,” I nodded calmly. “Get some cobalt ribbon. And candy.”

“Sweetie,” she looked me dead in the eyes, giving me her very rare super serious tone. “I need this ribbon by four this afternoon.” I resisted the urge to eye the clock, though I knew that the cutoff date was over three hours away, giving me plenty of spare time. “It’s very important that I get it by then. Understand?”

“Sure thing,” I nodded again impatiently. “Cobalt, candy, four. Gotcha.”

She frowned a little, like she always does when she thinks that I’m not taking her seriously enough, and gripped my hoof a little tighter.

“It’s for a project of mine that’s deadline is very soon, for a nice rich couple from Canterlot,” she explained. It was amazing how many implications she could slip into a single stressed word, but still she managed it.

“I won’t let you down, Rarity. I promise, ‘kay?” I beamed at her, standing a little straighter. She seemed fidgety for a moment before giving me a loving peck on the cheek and patted me on the head.

“Then you best be off, and don’t dilly dally!” she raised her voice slowly after me as I trotted off as swiftly as possible without galloping, eager to finally break free. “And stay out of trouble, Sweetie Belle!”

“No promises!” I called back laughing over my shoulder, grin crawling onto my face as the bright and sunny day graced my eyes. And although I could hear Rarity’s warning tone behind me, I could still sense the smile in her words as I left to cross the street.

And then I was then struck by a runaway carriage. My neck was snapped like a twig, I was immediately crushed beneath it with a sound like crumpled paper and chips that went quite well with the screaming in my ears before it went mysteriously silent, and that was the first time that I died.

Death can have a rather serious impact on a pony’s view of the world. It can be a harrowing experience, obviously; it’s death that I’m talking about here.

I heard that when you die, everything goes all white and you see this bright light at the end of a tunnel. I saw nothing of the sort, but there was a certain ephemeral glow in the surrounding darkness. It blanketed me comfortably, like a mother tucking in her foal for the night. The glow surrounded me completely, with a tender warmth that penetrated my soul with such a caring caress that I felt as if I were one with the light, looking back on myself with as much love as it had for me. I ascended rapturously, each tugging pull on my aching heart strings longingly reaching back out for that wondrous, loving light.

Invisible sighing and singing seraphs called me higher and higher, and higher I flew. Without wings, amazingly enough, although that seemed so trivial now. It was almost as if I were ascending to a new plane of existence, one where the trifle pittances of the world below were nothing to me, nothing compared to the all-encompassing, omniscient and loving light. For that perfect, heavenly singing golden glow, I would have done anything. I would have given the entire world, were it mine to give. For that light, that perfect touch that I basked in, that consumed me and filled me with a joy beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, I would have given anything. It was heart-filling, it was eternal, it was peaceful perfection. For what might have been the first time in my life, I knew what true contentment was like. Absolute, infinite perfect peace, and love.

And then some asshole went and brought me back to life.

I coughed and spluttered in terror, snapping almost instantly back to reality. For a split second, I was completely blind, and I was stricken with the sudden irrational fear that I had somehow been buried alive. But then my vision crackled right back into place, my chest rising and falling heavily as I attempted to process the most recent events.

“What the ass just happened?” I blurted, scaring the living daylights out of the pony straining to dig me out of the rubble. Which is a shame that those were my first words upon reentry to the land of the living. Considering the circumstances, I could have gotten away with saying quite a lot more. I had some real choice swear words all lined up, too.

Not for this exact situation, obviously. But I’m pretty good at improvising.

“SWEETIE BELLE!” screamed Rarity, her tear streaked makeup jarring me badly enough to remind me that I had just technically sworn right in front of her, but she didn’t really seem to mind all that much. She pulled me swiftly from the wreckage, quivering and shaking like a leaf in the wind as she clutched me as close to her body as she possibly could without absorbing me like a big amorphous marshmallow monster.

“No, seriously, what just happened?” my voice was muffled against her chest, and I tried to pry away from her weepy iron grip to discover that the wreckage I stood in happened to be the remains of the exact same carriage that had hit me. Moreover, the same carriage that had broken my spine. Also, quite a few other delicate things inside my body, all of which appeared to be in perfect working order, no worse for the wear.

It was utterly baffling, to say the least.

“Oh, Sweetie, I was so worried!” she sobbed hysterically as a group of about four or five red uniformed pegasi attempted to pull apart the wreckage. “I thought – oh, thank goodness you’re alright!”

I was really too stunned to tell her that I had just come back from the grave, or that she was going to break my spine again, but I think the shock of everything started to set in right about then. I knew for a fact that I had just died. The memory of the precious golden heavenly glow, the singing of angels calling my name in a hundred thousand different loving tongues called me back. Even looking at the ruins of the carriage and the remains of the mare that had been inside of it when the stallion pulling it had lost control somehow, it seemed as if everything about my vision was… wrong.

Like it had been dulled, somehow. It was all the same, I knew that, but… different. Like the whole world had been dipped in a very thin layer of grey. Oh, I still saw everything perfectly, even though I was also pretty sure that part of my head had been crushed. But for the strangest reason, all of the colors were subdued somehow. The greenery was less green, the sky was less blue, even my sister’s and my own alabaster white coat seemed tinged with the same unhealthy, dirty grey. Unclean.

Imperfect.

I suddenly became aware that Rarity had been speaking to me rather extensively for about five minutes now, and all I had been doing was dumbly nodding my head and quavering like one of Fluttershy’s frightened bunnies when she was asked to watch Opal. I waved my hoof in front of my face experimentally a couple of times, the glorious music long gone and only the dull, empty tones of the working ponies pulling the dead from the wreckage in my ears. It all sounded so pitifully less, so hollow. It was almost comparatively silent to what I had heard before.

Well, and Rarity’s hysterics, but that was pretty much background noise at this point.

“-efore your parents find out I’ve never been so worried in my entire life, I think I almost had a heart attack! You’re lucky you weren’t killed, that alone is amazing enough, don’t you ever frighten me like that again! Didn’t anypony ever teach you to look both ways before crossing – oh, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m upset and angry and it really isn’t your fault that they lost control, I just can’t seem to stop crying!” Rarity waved a hoof in front of her face as she ranted, trying to stop the onslaught of tears as she gripped me around the neck with her other hoof. “I just can’t believe you’re really alive, it’s a miracle!”

That last part actually managed to grab my attention again, as I think I’d started to wobble in and out of focus quite a bit.

“Miracle?” I asked aloud. “No, what would have been a miracle is if they never crashed.”

Rarity pursed her lips, trying not to look at the sheets pulled over the dead pair and clearly straining very, very hard not to think about it as she pulled me in close for another tight hug.

“All that matters is that you’re safe.”

The poor ponies that were scraped off of the sidewalk were never even given names.

I mean, they probably had names, but I never got to find them out. It was mainly out of morbid curiosity than anything else, but nopony would let me near them to find out. Apparently it had been particularly messy for one of them. Beneath the cotton blanket that one of the paramedics had been kind enough to give to me and my sister, I flexed and stared at my own hooves again and again, mystified.

I was still very much alive, and that was probably the strangest thing I have ever been disappointed by. Tentatively rubbing the base of my spine let me know that it was still there, that it really wasn’t shattered and broken. The gaping wound that I’m pretty sure had been around my left lung just wasn’t there anymore. I was horrified, yeah, but not a lot. It was more of the kind of restrained terror of discovering that a very small spider has been perched on one of your legs for over an hour, even though it hasn’t moved or done much of anything at all. My confusion and curiosity was greater by far.

A sudden thought occurred to me.

“… Rarity?” I asked after a moment, when she was finishing up between rabidly ranting while nearly ringing my neck and dabbing neatly at her eyes at the same time. “I think I lost the bits you gave me.”

She stared at me for a moment, her robin’s egg blue eyes not quite as bright as before. Or maybe it was just a matter of perspective.

“Forget the bits,” she hugged me again. “We’ll worry about the party later.”

That gave me pause for a moment, before I furrowed my brows.

“Hang on, what party?”

“Later,” Rarity repeated. “I was planning on… er, on something else, but there’s been a change of plans. I don’t want you out of my sight.”

I felt a little bit angry about that, but not very much. It surprisingly faded into grumpy apathy before long.

The paramedics gave me a once over, stating pretty much the same thing that Rarity had. That there was nothing wrong with me whatsoever, no physical injuries or maladies. Not even a single cut or scrape, and barely a single hair out of place. No broken bones, no missing organs, no crumpled spines or shattered limbs, not so much as a single bruise.

It wasn’t much longer afterwards that the team of paramedics and cleanup crew went away, leaving us sitting stiffly on the sidewalk as my sister gossiped about the incident with whoever was willing to listen, which happened to be several bystanders that had witnessed the incident. I just couldn’t quite bring myself to pay attention, though. It all seemed so… pointless. So inconsequential, so meaningless and trivial.

I was still in a haze when I was practically dragged away by Rarity, who seemed to be chewing her bottom lip so hard that I was a little surprised that it hadn’t fallen off by this point.

“You stay right on the living room couch,” she said to me distractedly as she breathlessly guided me back into Carousel Boutique. “I’ll grab what I need, you don’t go anywhere until the party.”

“So, hang on,” I at last snapped out of my haze, frowning hard at her from the plush sofa. “You’re just going to make me stay here while you run off, and you’re still going to throw that party?”

“Well, yes, I-”

“Didn’t you just watch somepony get killed?” I asked with an even deeper scowl. I should have stated myself expressly, although I did recall the others in the accident quite vividly. Why didn’t they come back to life, too?

“It’s not like I can cancel the party!” she threw up her hooves in exasperation, wild look on her face.

“… Yes, you can,” I stated the obvious slowly. “Have you ever heard of the word ‘trauma’?”

“No, no, no!” Rarity shook her head ferociously. “You don’t understand, if I fail to impress Mister Pants one more time, I could be losing a sizeable chunk of my business! I can get over seeing somepony die, but if I lose that much at once, I’m ruined!”

“I was talking about me!” I countered with equal exasperation, and a little bit of anger. Hadn’t she just seen me die? Hadn’t anypony watched me get crushed?

Rarity clapped a hoof to her forehead as it finally dawned on her.

“Oh my goodness, you’re right,” she wiped her face. “I wasn’t even thinking – you probably need a psychiatrist or something now!”

I stared at my sister, my own flesh and blood that I had known for my entire life. I looked at her long and hard, and ever so slowly, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe Rarity might not be living in the real world. I mean, it would explain an awful lot. She still looked like my sister, but there were certain incidents that came to mind that made me wonder if she was really all there. The most recent ‘death’ experience being one of them.

“Rarity,” I said very carefully after an uncomfortably long pause. “I think your priorities are a little skewed.”

The party went about as one would expect parties to go.

Fashionably dressed ponies showed up fashionably early, fashionably on time, or fashionably late. It was like each and every one of the pinheaded, puffed up peacocks were all attempting to outdo each other while subtly pretending to hide behind a façade of humility that was callously overshadowed by their own smarminess. I used to picture what it would be like, dressing up with my sister and having fun parties at expensive galas and such, but to be honest it didn’t really look like any of them were actually having fun.

I missed Apple Bloom and Scootaloo. At least if they were here I might be able to engage in a fun game of ‘guess the potential future magical cyborg ninja assassin’ but doing it by myself just felt silly. The sound of the record player emitting ‘classical’ music screeched on my ears, but nopony else seemed especially tormented by it.

“Oh, hello, there!” beamed a porcelain unicorn with a thin, quiet voice. “How do you do, little one?”

“I feel like I was hit by a runaway carriage,” I responded dryly, to which she tittered and flicked back her pink mane.

“You must be the dressmaker’s sibling, am I right?” the unicorn asked cheerfully, at which I only became even more frustrated. I don’t know why, but something about her attitude just really aggravated me. Maybe it was because the smile on her face looked like it was painted on to a doll and she expected me to buy it.

That, or I was jumping to conclusions and the mare had way too much facial surgery done.

“Yeah, that’s me,” I answered after a moment’s pause. “Sweetie. I was serious about being hit with a carriage.”

She giggled again and patted me on the head before shaking her own.

“Ah, the imagination of youth. I believe I lost sight of my husband, have you seen him?”

I deadpanned, finding that I just didn’t have the energy to tell her that I didn’t know where her husband was. I didn’t even know that she was married. Heck, I didn’t even know who she was. Rich ponies were like that a lot, I found, they always expected to have preceding reputations.

“I’m not kidding,” I added flatly as she walked away. “I was dead. Very dead, all mashed up. It was pretty gruesome!” I made sure to shout after her, but it didn’t seem to do any good. A quiet sigh escaped my lips, and I shrugged as I slowly began to wind my way up the staircase to the higher floors. Maybe I should have considered that nopony was going to take me seriously after the fourth one laughed me off.

Not including my sister, who seemed bound and determined to forget the entire incident.

I snorted aloud as I passed a few picture frames. She’s the one that needed mental help.

I have no idea why it bothered me so much that nopony believed me; maybe if at least my friends had been around, I could have somepony that I trusted to confide in. But Rarity refused to let me leave, and I doubted that they’d even be let inside if anypony but me were to answer the door should they randomly appear, which I doubted would happen.

It vaguely occurred to me as I stood in front of the attic window, peering down at the lawn as the afternoon sun bathed it in a ruddy glow, that maybe I was being a little pessimistic.

Maybe Rarity was right, and I was just overreacting. Maybe the golden light that had greeted me upon death was something that would remain in my mind for the rest of my life, serving only as a reminder to look both ways before crossing the street. Maybe I was just being grumpy because I couldn’t see my friends, and I shouldn’t take life for granted when I had very obviously been given a second chance. Maybe things weren’t all as bad as they seemed. I took a deep breath and counted to ten, straightened my back like Rarity always warned me of posture for, and blew out all the stress that had been building up.

The party downstairs was a pretty sizeable shindig, and it was experiences like that that made up life itself. The life that wasn’t for me.

Then I unlatched the window and threw myself out before I could change my mind.

The ground rushed up to meet me, and I hit the pavement in front of Carousel Boutique with a sickening crack. Perhaps it was because I had been too surprised the first time, but as it turns out, dying hurts. It hurts a lot.

I must have twisted on the way down, because instead of landing on my head first, I landed on my side. Three stories up is pretty far for a filly to fall, especially onto hard pavement, and my ribs were crushed almost instantly by the impact. I think a couple of my legs, too, but it was at that point that my heart stopped and the world went dark.

If I had been expecting the glorious golden glow from before, I was seriously disappointed.

I did not ascend into the heavens rapturously. I didn’t embrace an all-consuming, loving light that filled me with joy. That much was evident almost immediately, and I knew that there was something inherently wrong with what was going on. The world’s greys had all become more pronounced, even more so than before, and there was a thin field of fog at the edge of my vision.

I just kind of stood there, staring down at my own bleeding carcass. There weren’t any screams from inside, noting that I had just killed myself. In fact, nopony really even noticed that I was bleeding all over the sidewalk, nor seemed to have heard anything over the music. I frowned down at my unmoving corpse, watching a puddle of blood radiate from beneath me in a little pattern. My own ephemeral body outside of the broken one seemed to be pretty ghostly – white and transparent, fairly standard ghost stuff. I mentally shrugged, and shook my head.

“Alright then,” I said aloud, taking in the new developments. “I guess I get to haunt the crap out of everypony. I can live with that.”

I would have chortled at my own ill-timed joke, were it not for the fact that I suddenly realized that I was being watched.

Which was especially strange, considering that I was a ghost and nopony really expects to see those. My eyes flashed over to the side, where I could swear that I saw movement – but every time I tried to look at it, it vanished. I knew that there was something there, I could feel it in my astral gut. When I stared back at my own body, I kept my eyes rigidly on the bleeding remains as my stomach turned a little. This time, I caught a proper glimpse of it, as I did with several more so long as I didn’t look directly at them.

Shadows.

Very pronounced pony shaped shadows were emanating from the fog, at least a dozen of them surrounding me. It was like a veil had been lifted from my eyes the moment I recognized them for what they were, and they didn’t vanish when I looked at them again.

Although from the featureless black faces and looming figures, I was starting to wish that they would.

“Uh… hello!” I said with enough enthusiasm to imply that I really wasn’t enthusiastic. It seemed like I was doing that a lot lately. “Uh, lovely weather… we’re having…?”

The shadows swarmed around me, glaring (I think they were, anyway, they didn’t have faces) at me and pointing back to my body. I felt a strange tugging sensation in the bottom of my chest, that pulled me back to myself on the ground. The shadows menacingly stepped forward again, but didn’t harm me. They didn’t even touch me. They just silently gestured back to my body, jabbing at it like they wanted me to go back.

I didn’t have much more time to agree or disagree with them, because the next thing I knew I was sitting up on the sidewalk and patting my body down.

No blood.

No shattered bones.

No broken limbs, no injuries, no nothing.

My breath came a little faster now, my confusion growing as I blinked. The world’s color scheme seemed to bleed back into normal vision, but the Shadows had vanished again.

Or maybe, an evil little voice popped up in the back of my head. Maybe they’ve been around you the whole time.

“Uh-yeeeh-hee-hee-hugh-ugh!” I shuddered, rubbing my limbs suddenly. I did not like that idea very much, as viable as it sounded. The music from the party leaked out of Carousel Boutique and into my ears, the afternoon sun shining down just as warmly as it had before my little attempt at suicide.

It was like it hadn’t even happened. Like I hadn’t just died, like I had simply stepped outside instead of throwing myself as hard as I could from the third story window. To be more accurate, it was like when I died, the universe turned around and plugged its ears, going ‘la la la, I can’t hear you now’.

Why couldn’t I die?

I flexed my perfectly working limbs for good measure, frowning at them. Everything seemed to be in working order. It was then that I noticed that there was a stallion standing in front of the window inside Rarity’s shop, holding an untouched glass of punch and staring at me with the kind of look that rabid timberwolves give trespassers. The tan fellow stared at me hard, blinked once, and then slowly backed away before I could stop him.

The music became noticeably louder as I reentered Carousel Boutique, via door this time. My heart was still beating loudly in my chest from my return from death, and I was warily watching for the tan stallion. But he had seemingly vanished into thin air, gone like-

I almost said like a ghost, but I’ve seen those, and he wasn’t that good.

I frowned, and was about to start asking around for him when I felt a hard grip on my shoulder.

“Sweetie Belle,” Rarity scolded me. “Didn’t I tell you to stay where I could see you?”

“Can’t talk now, Rares,” I muttered over the music, but loudly enough that she could hear. “Just died again, looking for somepony.”

“Sweetie, if you can’t behave yourself, you’re going to get sent to your room!” she warned me sternly, which I promptly ignored. That stallion had seen me die, and it didn’t seem like anypony else had. More importantly, he’d watched me get back up, and then didn’t tell anypony.

That set off quite a few alarm bells in my head, and I was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all. Which was becoming increasingly difficult, because Rarity was firmly planting me on the sofa once again, and giving me a glare that could have turned sand to glass.

“Now, would you kindly stay put?” Rarity said in that tone of voice that said that it wasn’t a question.

“Actually,” I asked, an idea coming to me. “I am pretty tired. Can I just go to my room anyway?”

She blinked, a little surprised.

“This early in the afternoon…?” she asked, which I yawned at before she could get too suspicious.

“Yeah,” a nod came from me, which I tried hard to make sleepy-looking. “Too much excitement in one day, I’m pooped. Plus, it’s really noisy down here with all the music and talking and stuff, so I think I’m just going to go to bed early.”

For a second I was afraid that my ploy wouldn’t work, but she nodded after a moment.

“Alright, but make sure to get a bath first, and don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

I instantly agreed to everything that she said, careful not to include any enthusiasm.

Oh, the irony.

No sooner had I traipsed back up the stairs that I locked the bedroom door behind me, and wiped a bead of sweat from my brow.

Now, for the grand escape.

Tying up bed sheets into a rope is about as textbook as escape through a window can get. It’s a fairly simple procedure, and pretty effective. The downside is that it’s also a pain in the ass.

Tying sheets together with only my teeth proved to be very time consuming, and my attempt at magically using a shortcut only managed to turn my sheets blue. Which really wasn’t so bad, even though I liked the pink that they were before, and Rarity was likely going to have a heart attack when she saw that the only pink that remained on the sheets were polka dots here and there. Basic telekinesis for nonliving matter is usually pretty easy, but even tying knots is something that’s still beyond me. That in itself is very disappointing, and gave me pause about halfway through to make me wonder if maybe I had brain damage.

I shrugged. If I got brain damage, all I had to do was die again and chances were that my body would just go right back to the way that it was before.

Which is what suddenly occurred to me as I was carefully shimmying down my makeshift rope.

I easily could have just thrown myself out the window again, died, and then gotten right back up a little bit later. I would have facehoofed, but I nearly lost my grip and again wondered why I was so worried about falling in the first place. I let myself fall the last few feet, falling hard and landing on my flank when I remembered exactly why I was worried about it.

Dying, while not something that particularly worried me much at the moment, was not quite the same as pain. I could definitely still feel pain, and I did not like pain, because duh.

Without another moment’s pause, I scrambled to my hooves and shot off like a little white arrow. Albeit, a slightly disoriented and clunky arrow, but a swift moving one nonetheless.

If Rarity wasn’t going to take me seriously, then maybe it was high time to go talk to somepony that would.

Author's Notes:

Just another one of my little side projects. Don't know if I should actually take it as far as I think I should, but I've got a decently sized storyline set up for it if I do.