Now you understand how this unfolds a little, don’t you? It’s really quite extraordinary, isn’t it? A siren who found determination so strong she was able to almost bring a girl as strong-willed as Sunset to her knees for a brief moment. It almost makes you admire the girl in a way, doesn’t it?

There is more to know though, and so much left for you to see and understand before you can say you’ve witnessed all that you need to witness. For now what you see is a siren who looked for revenge out of bitterness and hatred, but is that really what is happening? Is the hero really the hero and is the villain truly the villain? Information is always key to unraveling these things, and to act without information is to act foolishly. After all, it was only eight days that you became privy to all that surrounded you.

Choices, decisions, that is what it all boils down to really. One small change can cause an echo heard for centuries, and one choice can change the lives of everyone around you so drastically.

What if Shimmer had not switched places with Sunset? Would Adagio be hunting down a clever scientist with a fear of magic then? What if Shining had managed to hit a vital spot on her during their first encounter? Would the following investigation lead to Sunset being detained as a dangerous alien? Every single thing has a reaction that it can cause. You have come to understand this in our time together, but you need to understand it more before you can say you’re truly prepared.

What lies ahead for Sunset is far from the end, however as soon she will face even more choices that will determine her fate.

Let us look backward, and understand a bit more.

Adagio grunted as she entered her small rented house on the other side of town. The place was hardly inhabitable, and by most would qualify as a hovel, but to her, it was a small sanctuary, a place away from the world outside and how harsh and cruel it was.

She grumbled as she stumbled into the place, the effects of cheap whiskey and bourbon still weight heavy on her. Despite her age, she still found it challenging to consume large amounts of alcohol thanks to her humanized body. She attributed it to the fact that her body had gone through a slight biological change when she entered the human world.

A sigh escaped her as she fell onto the old beat up couch in the living room, the television set still on from days ago when Aria and Sonata were there. In her drunken stupor, Adagio could vaguely remember the group of them having the biggest blowout she had ever known between them. Aria had taken Sonata with her and they vowed to stay far away from Adagio. Half of her didn’t care as she wasn’t exactly keen on their company anyway, and loneliness was not a feeling she previously ever gave into until recently that is.

In the past few months, she had begun to remember that feeling all too well. One that she had suppressed for a good few hundred years, a feeling she had hoped would cease to exist in her mind.

Aria’s words still rang in Adagio’s head.

You’re going to get us all killed.

Killed. That was a word that Adagio previously never really thought about. It was a word she tried to avoid thinking about. Mortals had killed her kind for centuries, millenniums even, but it was rare for a siren to kill a mortal, their mothers always taught them not to. Mortals could be controlled with magic, but they went into a blind rage when you killed another mortal. Through sheer numbers, they had the advantage. Sirens were advised against killing to protect the rest of their kind. They were intended to live in the shadows and feed on small groups of mortals without drawing too much attention to themselves. A siren was not meant to be ambitious.

Adagio scoffed and tried to take Aria and her words out of her mind, she tried to tune it out by lazily reaching around for the remote for the television on the couch. When she found it, she managed to flick the TV through a few channels before giving up and letting it rest on some news station that she wasn't particularly interested in. At this point she just needed noise to drown out her thoughts.

Through hazy and blurry vision, Adagio could make out the date. It was her birthday, and she had gone out to have a few drinks by herself to celebrate, Aria and Sonata be damned. She didn’t look a day older than eighteen in this world, but she knew a few places in the underbelly of the city that didn’t mind, not to mention she had a somewhat recognized name and face in the seedy parts of town. Selling drugs had its benefits as well as risks after all.

It was hard to believe she was turning another year older, though how old specifically she couldn’t say. She had stopped counting her birthdays around when she turned 2,288. She knew she was older than most, and of her small clique of sirens, she was the oldest by a decent margin. Aria was somewhere around 2,000 and Sonata had mentioned before she was turning 2,100 at some point soon, though the exact numbers escaped her. Truthfully, it wasn’t a subject that any of them talked about often, including each other’s past. Adagio intended to keep it that way if she ever saw the other two again.

Truthfully though, Adagio struggled to find a reason to celebrate growing another year older in this hellhole, at the lowest point in her life. There was no mistaking it, this was the worst she had felt in a long time, she could only think of a handful of other times that even compared in her long existence.

It was only made worse by the reminder that she would eventually age, grow old and die now that she was stranded here in the human world with no means to restore her powers. Without the ability to feed off of the energy of others, her eternal life would eventually end and she would join the many sirens who have tasted death. It was difficult to know how many sirens had met their end thanks to mortals, their kind never truly had established cities or civilizations and thus record keeping wasn’t something they did. Living in secrecy for centuries definitely didn’t help.

The truth was, Adagio hadn’t a clue if she was one of the handful remaining of a dying race or there were sirens swarming all over back in Equestria but knew how to stay better hidden than she.

She laughed internally at that second thought, knowing that it was likely untrue. It took too long for sirens to be born, so she knew there couldn’t be many out there.

For a brief second, she wondered what Aria and Sonata were doing.

Fuck them.

She nodded and reached to the coffee table to retrieve a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and stuffed it between her lips as she leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes while taking an inhale. She wondered if she was cursed to live like this from now on, to struggle and cheat the system to survive. To grow old, grow ugly and eventually die a sick disgusting hag that no one will even bother sprinkling dirt over. If she died in this very room it might be months before anyone even notices. No one would identify her, she’d just be a Jane Doe to the police and they’d throw her in a grave marked just the same, that is unless their autopsy revealed she was not from this world, in which case she’d be opened up and anyone who knew anything about her would be sworn to secrecy.

Better than Equestria though.

Was it though? She questioned her own thought. Her mind wandered as she laid there with the cigarette in her mouth, gently sucking in and puffing out smoke.

Adagio’s eyes opened as she heard her phone ringing. She groaned and fumbled about trying to find it. Once she had located it, she put it up to her ear and answered. “Hello?”

“Dagi? Fuck, I’ve been calling you for hours, why the fuck weren’t you picking up?” The voice on the other side asked.

“Sorry… I was drinking, I must have passed out… Was having a little birthday celebration, you know?” She slurred her speech slightly as she answered.

“Really? No fucking way! How old are you anyway? I know it’s rude to ask but you always looked young as fuck to me…” The male voice on the phone asked.

Adagio chuckled and shook her head. “Too fucking old; now can we cut to the chase and you tell me what you really want Skip, I’m sort of not in the mood for small talk…”

“When are you ever?” He asked.

“Cute, now get to the point…” She yawned.

“It’s uh… It’s Pacer…” Skip said.

Adagio shrugged, not really particularly interested in what their boss had to say at this exact moment. “What about him? Did he get us hooked up with new supply chains? I told him I am taking some time off, I’m exhausted…”

“He’s dead, Dagi…” Skip replied.

Adagio opened her eyes again and sat up. “Say what? How?”

Skip sighed over the phone. “Was trying to gain some new territory, and they popped him in the head. The guys just buried him.”

She couldn’t believe it, the man who had helped her actually fund her life after the Battle of the Bands, the man who treated her as a partner in crime, an equal almost after seeing her work ethic was now dead, tossed into an unmarked hole for the sake of keeping a drug enterprise going.

“Dagi? You there?” Skip asked.

Adagio hung up, not interested in talking further. She brought herself to a stand and shook her head. She wiped cigarette ashes off of her shirt and her hand brushed a broken amulet around her neck, all the pieces glued together and ready to be reforged.

She had lost everything now, there was nothing left.

“Now I get it…” Adagio thought out loud. “There is never a world for sirens… That’s why…” She looked into a broken mirror hanging on Sonata’s old bedroom door. “We always have to make one for ourselves…”

Adagio took a puff from a cigarette as she looked out a car window, her other arm hanging out and allowing the cool night air to hit her and soothe her nerves.

The driver of the car looked over at her and gently nudged her shoulder. “Hey, Dagi, you awake over there?”

Adagio took another drag of the cigarette and nodded. “Yeah, yeah…”

He chuckled and returned his attention to the road. “You’re not really much of a talker, I noticed…”

Adagio shrugged. “I guess I’m just so used to people not caring what I have to say…”

“Hey, I do. Apparently, you don’t need to say much because you’re still my top earner.” He laughed.

With a sigh, Adagio nodded. “Yeah… Whatever, Pacer…”

“Hey, you know why people buy from you?” He asked, his voice having a serious tone to it.

“If you say it’s because I have a great ass, I swear…” Adagio glared in his direction.

Pacer let out a hearty laugh before stopping the car as they reached their destination. He turned to her with a serious face, his dark eyes somehow shining in the night. “Nah, though I have seen it and it’s quite impressive. The reason why is because you’re cool, Dagi. You ooze that edgy thing that you got going on. People want to be as cool as you.”

“Yeah, if they actually knew me, they probably wouldn’t want to be like me…” Adagio rolled her eyes.

Pacer smiled. “Hey, I think you’re cool too, but for different reasons. Keep up the good work and you’re going to be my right hand.”

Adagio blinked and turned to face Pacer. “T-thanks… I… Well… No one’s ever really recognized anything I’ve done.”

“Don’t mention it, now this is where you get off, I believe.” He winked.

Adagio nodded and stepped out of the car, closing the car door behind her. Her boss drove off into the night, Adagio just watching. Looking around it looked like it was going to be a slow night, very little foot traffic in the area, which meant whoever she did sell to she would need to capitalize on.

She looked down at her expensive watch and noted the time was 8:08 PM. The night was young and she had money to make.

The gold bangles on her right wrist clattered together as she walked down the sidewalk and leaned against a signpost next to a bus stop. Her eyes looked down at her expensive heeled boots and a small smile came to her face. Adagio had grown some expensive tastes since she had acquired this gig, and due to her performance, she was able to satisfy them. Every piece of expensive jewelry was just a night or two of work away, every designer pair of boots was a drop in the bucket for her.

She had finally found something in her life that she managed to do well outside of stealing energy from mortals. What was stranger was that she was actually recognized and noticed for it. Pacer actually respected her, saw her as an equal. She wondered if she could get used to this life permanently.

Her eyes were drawn to an expensive Mercedes that pulled up next to the bus stop and came to a stop. The car looked far too rich for this part of town, Adagio raised an eyebrow as she approached the window as it rolled down.

There sitting in the driver’s seat was fiery red hair with golden streaks, mascara applied expertly, a pair of designer glasses and a somewhat gothic dress and a face that Adagio could never forget. Sunset Shimmer.

“Hey, how much for a few bags?” She said.

Adagio froze, she didn’t know what to say. There in front of her was Sunset Shimmer.

Are you confused now? :3

Yeeeeeah, Shimmer and Adagio met before. ;)