For a while everything was good. Charlie never really warmed up to Ponyville, but things were good. He would hang out and drink with Jake some nights. Jake was Twilight’s human. He had been sent to Ponyville by the human ambassador in Canterlot, Silver Lining. Mostly he just played test subject for Twilight and followed Rainbow Dash around. Charlie found the whole thing unsettling and avoided Twilight after he found out what was going on. I told him he was being silly, after all Jake didn’t seem to mind, and I told Charlie Twilight just wanted to learn more about humans, but Charlie never really trusted her.
Things didn’t get weird until the thrones activated. When I told Charlie, he went absolutely manic. He said it was the spoilers. He was terrified. I told him it wouldn’t matter. Jake had been there for months, he wasn’t going to break anything just by being there. He hid in the Pinkie Cave from the time we left for our first mission until we got back. He calmed down a little when I told him what happened and it matched up mostly with his spoilers. It was always weird, even to me, when a human knew the future like that. But Charlie was too super scared to tell me anything about what was going to happen. He said if Celestia found out he had spoilers she wouldn’t stop until she found him. He made me Pinkie Pie Promise that I’d never tell Twilight. He even lied to Jake and swore that he had only seen up to Season Four (that’s when we fought Tirek).
The trouble came from the Cakes. His new paranoia scared them, and I couldn’t tell them what was happening without breaking my promise. In the end they said he couldn’t stay at Sugar Cube Corner anymore if I wasn’t there to supervise him. I thought about stepping down and passing my Element on to some other pony. I’m pretty sure Cheese Sandwich could handle the job. I thought Charlie would be happy when I told him. We were really good friends, more than friends really. I told him we could go to Canterlot, maybe open our own shop. We could call it “Sweet Surprise”, and we’d be the only bakery in Canterlot with a real human serving sweets. Just me and him. I thought he would be happy. He wasn’t happy. He was terrified, and crazy, and not the good kind of crazy either. He laughed like a maniac and then broke down in sobs and cried for hours. He said he was going to break everything. He said it would be better if he just wasn’t there anymore. I knew what he meant and I was scared.
That was the first time I’d ever been afraid around Charlie. I was scared for him. I was scared of what he might do to himself to stop from dropping his stupid spoilers. I was scared and I was angry. I was angry that he thought his stupid, stupid spoilers were more important than me, more important than us. And… I said something I shouldn’t have. I told him that if he was so scared that he was going to ruin everything maybe he should just leave. I told him if he really thought he was going to break everything in the world just by being with me, and if being with me was so terrible that he would rather throw his life away than spend it with me, then maybe he should leave Ponyville. Then he’d never have to worry about dropping his spoilers. I shouldn’t have said it. But I didn’t believe in the spoilers. Not really. What did it matter if he knew some things that I was going to do? The world wasn’t just going to break just because he told me something that happened in a stupid little filly’s show on his world. The world wasn’t going to break. The world was always going to be there. It wasn’t just some stupid dream! And he left. I heard later he found a job in an outlying town at a warehouse. That was the last time I ever saw Charlie.
After that a lot of things happened. Celestia came to visit unannounced, and she asked a lot of questions about all the humans in town, and especially about Silver, and she seemed really super interested when the Cakes wanted to tell her about Charlie. She said she needed Twilight to go with her to Canterlot. It was then that I started to find out just how dirty my little world really was.
I couldn’t believe what Twilight did to Silver Stars. Nopony could. Jake was mortified. After that, he was almost as afraid of Celestia and Twilight as Charlie had been, and he followed Dashie around a lot less after that. He was still totes in crush with her, but he kept a very careful distance. From that day forward there was always a glint of fear in Jake's eyes whenever he spoke to Twilight. Oddly enough, Silver wasn’t nearly as mad at Twilight as you might think after she magicked off his wing-dang-doodle, because she totes ran off with him after that, and all of you ended up forming a herd, and there were going to be foals and everything.
It was around then that I decided to take a train out to Twiggs Depot. That’s the town where Charlie worked, by the way. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, but I guess I should have sent a wire to let him know I was coming, because when I got there he was gone. His roommate said he was a super good manager and sometimes he drove deliveries on weekends to make extra bits. She was really sweet on him, I could tell. We talked for a long time. I was super jelly, obviously! This changeling had totes stolen MY human. After all the time I spent putting him back together, this interloper, this changeling mare was making pancakes and having muffin parties with MY Charlie. Sure she said there weren’t any muffins, and that he just fed her because he liked her, and she didn’t even have to take any other shape. She didn’t even take any specific gender. She didn’t know if he liked colts or mares, so she just didn’t pick a side. I could have totally sabotaged her. I could have told her Charlie was cuckoo for colts, and told her to tell him that Pinkie Pie wanted to hear from him, and she would have believed me. But I couldn’t do that to her. And I couldn’t do that to Charlie. She really liked him, and he really liked her, even if he didn’t know she was a her. Even without him being there, I knew he really liked her, because I knew all his secrets. And I wanted him to be happy. So I told her I’d do something special to help her catch his interest. Something that would help him to notice that he really liked her. Because Charlie could be really dense like that sometimes. So I told her to expect a Hearth's Warming miracle and to be ready to roll with it. And that was the one and only time I ever met Z-978 in my world.