Another day in the brave new world of magic, another lunch break among the mutated masses, not that Dual Nature gave it much thought.

Sure, her fingers looked weird, but weirdness had been a part of her family life since long before a displaced unicorn-girl had altered reality. As she sat beneath the birch tree closest to CHS's front gate, her one and only friend was digesting one such example of that weirdness along with her lunch.

“So, let me see if I have this straight,” Cherry Crash with her salad in her lap, back to the courtyard, “your sister, the poster girl for the Neighponese Genki Girl trope, has holed herself up in her room for nearly a week now and you've yet to successfully get her to leave, because...”

“She can fly now, Cherry,” Dual Nature frowned, back resting against the tree's trunk. "Trying to keep her standing still was difficult before, it's next to impossible now.”

“And yet she's doing just that, all on her own, in her room," Cherry pointed out. "Have your folks noticed the change?"

Shrugging, the earth aspect girl pulled the second half of her sandwich from its plastic wrap, eyes downcast. “Dad's workload has gotten bigger this month and Mom is off in her own little cyberworld. I mean, Dad thinks the whole 'flight things' is cute, but—" Dual Nature nearly squashed her sandwich as she glared at it. "It's like nobody cares anymore, ever since all this magic stuff happened. So now I have to ride herd on Abby, who is totally ignoring everything outside her room, and no amount of death threats from me have convinced her to get out and see daylight.”

Raising a carefully penciled eyebrow, Cherry watched as Dual Nature slowly unclenched her fingers from her innocent sandwich and take several deep breaths to calm down. “Wow. You really are concerned about this, huh?”

Sandwich forgotten, Dual Nature sighed and looked up. “She's working on something with Dad's old whiteboard.”

“Another science project?”

“No. Cherry, she had Sunset Shimmer's icon drawn on it, surrounded by a bunch of other icons. And she was writing words down next to them all.”

For a few seconds, Cherry couldn't compute her friend's sentence properly. "Uh...."

“Nothing creepy or anything like that,” her friend quickly reassured her. “You know she's not into Shimmerism. That's what makes this whole thing so.... strange.”

Potential religious blasphemy averted, Cherry let out a sigh of relief, getting back on track with the conversation. “Have you, uh, asked her what it's all about?”

“Of course I asked her!” Wincing, Dual Nature quickly dropped her volume. “That's what I did on Day One when I first walked in on her... Well, technically I asked her after dinner.”

“Wha—?”

“She was having a moment.”

“Oh.”

“So, after I asked her, she got this really stupid grin on her face and told me that she figured everything out, that it all made perfect sense, and then zipped up to her room. Dad paid attention long enough to call her Zipper and Mom didn't even look up from her phone.”

Both friends looked at one another for several tense seconds.

"And?" Cherry leaned closer to her friend, expectantly.

"That's pretty much it," Dual Nature shrugged again, looking down at her sandwich. "Whenever I barge in and drag her out long enough to eat three meals a day, I ask her what she's doing and she keeps telling me the same darn thing and nothing else."

"Tells you what?"

"That she's working on something."

Cherry knew Abby was a good kid, but the lack of proper context for the scenario that Dual described made the lime-skinned girl feel even more confused than when the conversation first started. If it wasn't a science project or some creepy occult crap, then what was going on in that bedroom?

Author's Notes:

It's just a theory. A game theo film theo Er...

Well, it's something, that's for sure. I'm pretty sure Abby isn't sculpting monuments out of mashed potatoes, though Speckle may need to confirm that.