EThrough the Well of Pirene
MLP: FiM
Adventure
[Now EQD Featured!] A young girl must travel to Equestria to rescue her kid sister from the clutches of a terrible magician.
Human
Lyra
OC
Main 6
CMCs
Lightning Dust
Ether Echoes · 358k words · 1,510 94 · 26k views

What Were the CMC Doing in the Everfree Forest...? (Pirene) · 11:44pm Jul 28th, 2014

So those of you who have read Through the Well of Pirene may notice one very large question that went unanswered throughout the fic. In Chapter 10: The Chase, Amelia and Wire come upon the Cutie Mark Crusaders in the Everfree Forest, finding them by following the light of their lanterns in the dead of night as they just about finish disposing of something which they are inordinately embarrassed of – to the point of dousing the grave in lighter fluid and setting it ablaze when Amelia makes herself known, then dumping dirt on it to cover the evidence.

So the question that goes completely unanswered throughout the Well of Pirene and was meant to be answered in a followup story was: what in the world were they doing there?

Well! Essentially, this was a planned story that will sadly go unwritten. Its genesis began in another story of mine, A Mile in Her Shoes, and migrated to Pirene when I abandoned the former story in later of the latter. In that fic, the Mane 6 swap races, and it was intended that, throughout the fic, the CMC would be running around in the background collecting strange items and making odd requests.

The upshot of this was that I was going to write a standalone (but related) sidefic to first A Mile and then Pirene in the fashion of a black comedy, where the Crusaders essentially found an ancient tome that described the terrible magical process of grafting organic parts to other living beings. A little bit of Young Frankenstein and the like, with the Crusaders being charmingly blase about their work. Eventually, after some madcap antics, they manage to barely cover up their activities, destroy their lab in a heroic battle, and dispose of the book and the evidence just in time for Amelia to come upon them. In the original A Mile version, they were going to come to the Mane 6 after (most of them) they had turned back bearing one another's relevant racial parts, to better match their sisters.

Quite possibly, Diamond Tiara and a few other foals would have been involved as well, but I never got to finish planning. Ah well! It's nice to get that one off my chest in any event.