Bonbon and Lyra try to deal with the latest holiday, the issues of so many customers who are only interested in buying during the day-after "Half Price" sale, and the ongoing topic of prospective parenthood.
Read it here
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Tropes Include:
- The Bully: Bonbon used to be a rather nasty bully; she got her mark when she was made to stop beating up other foals for candy and so turned to making her own.
- Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Part of what makes Lyra's falling so nasty. She can never be completely free of her addiction, not when the thing she's addicted to is etched into her very soul.
- Functional Addict: Lyra has recovered enough that her talent no longer consumes her life, but that is as far as she will ever be able to get. "The mark cannot be denied", and so the best Lyra can manage is to keep indulging her talent enough to retain her mental stability, without letting it consume her once again.
- Homosexual Reproduction: As per general Continuum canon, The Most Special Spell allows lesbian mares to have biological daughters together, and Bonbon & Lyra have been discussing having a daughter.
- Mythology Gag:
- Caramel's serial dating and break-up cycle, his clumsiness and his eternal debt due to the aforementioned tail-chasing.
- Bonbon repeats Applejack's assessment of the cuteness of lambs from chapter 3 of A Duet for Land and Sky almost word-for-word.
- Lyra is established as having divorced her parents due to their abusive treatment of her, and she has suffered from Falling Into The Mark.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Considerable detail goes into just how terrifying it is to be on the end of Lyra's personal trick, a bubble of absolute silence.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: Lambs are treated as this in-universe. Ponies even have a holiday, Lambvent, dedicated to celebrating the Spring lambing.
- Super Gullible: The reason sheep are a tenant species in the Continuum. As the narration puts it, the lambs start out believing whatever they're told, just like the young of every species... but the adults never grow out of it.
