As he walked, Pokey wondered just how he had managed to get himself into this.

It all started when one day his cousin, Ponet, gave him two tickets for a movie premiere in Istakhr - he said that he and Derpy had been invited by one director friend of hers, but then Dinky fell sick and they couldn’t go. There was no way he was going to let the tickets go to waste, so he had to find himself a date. He first through of his boss, Rarity, but when he went to ask, she said she had to go to Spahan for her grandfather’s funeral, and not knowing many people in Ævrefreodeh, he had to go to the only other single mare he saw on a regular basis - Pinkie. Besides his usual job as tailor assistant for Rarity, he usually volunteered as a herbad at the local fire temple, since the days where Pinkie’s grandmother was the mobad there.

Of course, she accepted, the date was nice, but after that, she began acting as if they were already a item. At first, he didn’t have the heart to tell her that that date didn’t mean anything, so they kept going, but over time, he began realizing he did like her.

They had been at this for about two years when the Summer Sun Celebration happened, and that’s when things got weird - first, there was that incident where a black alicorn went into Town Hall and proclaimed that the night would last forever only for the sun to rise anyway after a couple of minutes, but in the meantime, Pinkie disappeared, and when she came back a few hours later, she was saying she had become a Saoshyant. She tried to explain just what had transpired in the previous hours (but at the speed she talked, he didn’t exactly understand all the details) and that her new status didn’t mean that anything was going to change about their relationship.

Then, two weeks later, she decided to take him to meet her family way out in Korchayk, since she had already met his a couple of months back. They liked her, but he wasn’t going to get the same reception. Her parents were as dour as they could be, and her sisters… one just seemed to hate him as soon as she laid eyes on him, the other was just plain creepy, and the only one that seemed normal was a mute who could only communicate in Armenian sign language. And the place was even drearier than she warned him it would be. Just constantly cloudy, like it was always about to rain, but it never did. The visit was supposed to be for a weekend, but they told them they had one very important thing they had to do before they went, and it had to wait until the clouds broke.

And that’s how he found himself being marched by the rest of her family to let a rock choose the fate of their relationship. Presumably, they were meant to drop a rock into another one and if it didn’t break, it meant they weren’t completely incompatible. Not that they were soulmates or anything, just that their relationship wasn’t going to be a total disaster. Not the most comforting thought, and her sisters glaring or staring at him the whole while didn’t help matters.