Pinkie Pie had messed up really bad. No, really, really, really bad. She wasn’t sure how, or where she’d gone wrong, but she had seriously messed up. She wasn’t even supposed to talk about that bad thing that happened to her. It was a terrible accident, a once in a generation catastrophe! Other ponies didn’t need to worry about that. Even Princess Celestia visited Pinkie Pie because Pinkie was so upset that she needed the princess to help her sleep. Pinkie’d only ever accidentally started to talk about it with the other orphans, but they couldn’t understand. Even Lost Star who both her parents had died, it hadn’t been like... this.
Pinkie only had to tell the princess, and Nurse Sweetheart who Pinkie Pie could talk to any time she needed, but she hadn’t talked to her in a long time because Pinkie felt better about it, and she’d gotten better, but now Pinkie was talking with her again because... you know... yeah.
“I just don’t get it,” Pinkie said in frustration, “Aren’t I better? I’m the funniest pony in all of Equestria now or something! Did my element pick wrong? I thought I was better, but then I saw them and...”
She covered her eyes with a forearm, shouting, “And I’m done crying! I’ve cried a lot already! I just don’t know what—” her voice started quavering then and she had to lay there whimpering into the couch cushions just... getting ahold of herself for a while.
Pinkie Pie was back in Sweetheart’s office, the nurse pony who helped Pinkie sometimes once she moved here. It was a pretty office, with wood panelling and beige walls, though it wasn’t a very exciting office. Pinkie Pie had sat on this velvet couch before, that now pressed its soft surface up against her belly and legs.
Nurse Sweetheart was a pleasant pink earth pony, with purple and white striped hair and dark blue eyes. She usually wore her nurse’s hat, but when she was talking with Pinkie, her head was bare, her mane merely tied up in a bun. She still had her story mark of course, that granted her the status of nurse, but with Pinkie she was as informal as possible. Plumper than Pinkie Pie, but not quite on the level of Mrs. Cake. She stood beside the couch Pinkie lay upon, a clipboard laid nearby in case she had something to write on, but now the nurse only had kind words for the poofy haired party pony.
“You are better,” Sweetheart assured her. “You’re one of the... happiest, sweetest ponies I know.”
“Because all the ponies you know have problems,” Pinkie replied with a bitterness that surprised even her, turning onto her side to look at the nurse pony.
Sweetheart took it in stride though, saying, “You are a good pony, even among the ponies I know who don’t have problems. I know it’s hard to believe, but hear me out. Even ponies who are better can get sad again. If they go a long time without remembering, and then something reminds them, it can all come rushing back too fast for them to deal with. That’s what happened to you, Pinkie Pie. It doesn’t mean you are getting worse, or that you don’t deserve to live as a happy pony. It’s just something you will always have with you. Sometimes things will bother you, it will pass, and then you can still be the happy pony you’ve always wanted to be.”
“But what about my friends?” Pinkie asked, “I just lost it! They probably all think I’m crazy now. More than usual, I mean.”
“Maybe you should talk to them about it?” the nurse suggested.
“I don’t want to talk to them about it! I don’t want to talk about it at all!”
Closing her eyes, the nurse gave a calming sigh, then said, “If you don’t talk about it now and again, then the next time something reminds you, you’ll freak out just as badly. I think you’ve come a long way from the filly who couldn’t talk about it. Maybe it’s good for you to think about the ones you have lost, just for a little bit, every day. It should help keep you from freaking out again, so you can deal with it on your own terms.”
Pinkie Pie looked down at the upholstery, her hair drooping as she said quietly, “I just want to forget about it...”
“Do you really want to forget about your sisters?” Sweetheart persisted, “Your mother and father?”
“No...”
It wasn’t fun to know that a little alien could show up one day, and you’d just fall to pieces on the spot. Pinkie Pie wanted it to not hurt as much. She wanted to be happy again. The nurse was right. Pinkie was going to have to talk with her friends about it. And she knew just who to start with.
“Perhaps you’re going about it the wrong way, darling,” Rarity stated, staring evenly at her Canterlot friend’s obsession with the human world. The other world, or “verse” as Twilight liked to put it, was a fascinating place to be sure, but Rarity was more fond of their cultural innovation. What Twilight was doing here was more along the lines of smashing atoms together, in an attempt to recreate the environment of human particle accelerator projects.
“I just don’t get it,” Twilight said as she pored over the splatter diagrams. “How do the humans know of us? How could they have crossed over into this dimension? We’re not even remotely parallel to them! It may seem like it, but their Manehattan came about through an entirely different process from our own. I’m thinking that this rift had to have been a freak accident, but if so, how did they gain insight into our lives?”
“What I mean to say is,” Rarity replied, not really looking at the notes Twilight was proferring for her, “Perhaps you should be focusing on what the researchers have learned about Rosy. You’ve been focusing on the human verse’s interaction with ourselves, but the crux of the matter here is Rosy. I think you should investigate her life, to find out if there is any reason she might not want to return.”
Twilight’s face dropped to the surface of her desk, and she mumbled around the books and papers, “I know, I know. It’s just...” she sighed, and lifted her head. Smiling at Rarity, Twilight said, “You know what? You’re right. I have been stalling.”
“Well I wasn’t going to say anything,” Rarity said somewhat discomfited.
“Thank you, Rarity,” Twilight said much more brightly than she had a moment ago. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I know just who to talk to!”
Twilight left a warm feeling in Rarity’s breast as her friend trotted back out into the world. Rarity lingered in the library a moment longer. She was vaguely eyeing the shelves, but her thoughts drifted more towards a certain gentledrake. Perhaps if he was available, they could spend some time together today.
Twilight trotted onto the rift site, or the rift facility rather, now that there were fewer tents and more buildings. The permits alone for this project were a miracle, but there were good, professional ponies working on it, and the deer seemed agreed that ponies should deal with pony problems, as long as they stuck to the paths, and kept their construction within zoning regulations. She looked around until she spotted the pony she was looking for. “There you are!” Twilight said happily, trotting up to the mare, a greyish blue unicorn with a lustrous purple mane and tail, who was obviously the pony Twilight needed to talk to.
“Princess!” the mare said joyfully, sticking her head out of whatever mountain of paper she’d been working through. Her horn lit up with a strong magenta and all the paper cleared itself out of the way for her to step out of the pile and run up to Twilight, “They say you came to see me, personally?”
“Yes, Whatnot,” Twilight told her, glancing at the mare’s helpfully informative story mark of a question mark followed by an exclamation point, “I need to find out what you’ve learned about the Traveller. You were cataloguing that information, I’m told?”
“C’mon, let’s... I mean, right this way, your highness,” Whatnot said, clumsily bowing and trotting off to her current living/studying quarters. Twilight followed right along, a little uncomfortable with Whatnot’s open adulation, but it was useful for getting answers, and Twilight was glad for any opportunity to get answers quickly and easily for once.
“Alright, Princess Twilight,” said the delightfully excitable graduate student known as Whatnot, poring over her materials. This blue unicorn mare was something of a genius at memetic physics, and more importantly a huge fan of Twilight Sparkle. Of the graduate students working on studying the rift, she seemed the least upset with the actions their princess had to take. She was a bright, young unicorn, just bursting with eagerness to have the chance to assist a real princess. Which Twilight totally was.
“I’ve gathered all known info on the Traveller,” Whatnot gushed, “And I think you’ll find I’ve dug up some pretty juicy stuff.” The mare levitated several charts and bookmarked journals for her presentation in such a way that made Twilight want to hop around like a little filly. This was going to be so fascinating!
Twilight took in and let out a breath though. It wasn’t her place to have such reactions anymore. She was a princess now, and there were certain expectations she had to live up to. Twilight knew full well how disturbing it was when a pony didn’t act as expected, and the last thing she wanted to do was make this bubbly bluish mare feel that kind of tooth grinding frustration. No, Whatnot expected a princess, and a hero, and Twilight was not going to disappoint her by squealing like a schoolfilly.
“Firstly,” Whatnot stated, holding up a deed of some sort, “We were able to scry out the rental agreement for the apartment. And from there we were able to get a true name, and from there, a picture!”
“A picture?” Twillght asked curiously, “One she drew?”
“No, a photograph!” Whatnot said cheerily, rooting through a very thick binder to pull out a rather... grainy photograph. In it was depicted a very unamused ape.
What little of a mane this creature had was just a swatch of dog brown fur. The color of her coat wasn’t really apparent. Her expression was uncannily like that of a pony, though her figure was entirely alien. It was fascinating. How did she express that level of disdain, when she had no muzzle to speak of? And why was she so disdainful of the photographer?
Twilight couldn’t fathom it. Rosy’s face as a human was flat... ridiculously so. It was kind of adorable even. There was something... off about her appearance, but with that short muzzle, combined with her beady little foal eyes, she looked like an unamused and very distorted toddler.
“Yes, apparently she is missed, because this photo is from something that roughly translates to ‘missing pony report,’” the student went on. “We hardly had to translate at all of course because the portal intersects at an oblique angle with the linguistic plane. Their writing system came over scrambled, but it’s actually a very clever alphabet of about BC characters, with only a few redundancies.”
“This is all terribly fascinating,” Twilight interrupted, “But back to the Traveller. Was there any reason she might not want to return to her home world? Some sort of abuse, criminal intent, or suffering?”
“We haven’t found much yet,” the student admitted. “It’s a very slow process, since we can only send magical probes through with the iris of the portal closed. There doesn’t seem to be much wrong, outside of the fact that people seem to miss her. We haven’t managed to track down her family, to see if she has an evil stepmother, or a scheming younger sibling, or anything like that.”
“If we could at least eliminate possibilities,” Twillght pondered, “I’d like you to focus on that, if possible.”
“Oh, we did get her name!” the greyish blue pony declared, her eyes lighting up. “Bruce Connell,” Whatnot said proudly.
Twilight raised an eyebrow at that. “What on earth is a Bruce?” she asked.
“It might be a scrambled translation,” Whatnot said sheepishly, “It’s pretty common for names to skip the refraction.”
“Well, for an untranslated name, it sounds vaguely draconic,” Twilight speculated, squinting at the unreadable scrawl in these mysterious documents they were working on translating. “But really there’s nothing to say these creatures will follow any naming convention that exists on our world.”
“They’re from a different world entirely, so their culture could be completely uninfluenced by our own!” Whatnot declared excitedly.
“Except for the phenomenon by which they can peer into other verses,” Twilight replied. “That may explain why they’re so similar to us, without any causal connection.”
“Oh! I have a theory that they were harboring a realm of time burrowers,” Whatnot cut in, “And the rift formed during a retroactive cultural migration down their abandoned tunnels.”
“No way!” Twilight said, having never even considered such a possibility. “Have you written anything up on that?”
“Would you like to see my thesis?” Whatnot asked, with wide pink eyes. “It’s still in the revision stage, but I’d be honored to show it to you!”
Twilight couldn’t believe how lucky she was to see such a thing, as she squealed in excitement and danced in place.
“Twilight, we need to talk,” Pinkie Pie’s voice cut in.
“Ah’m Applejack, not Twilight,” Applejack said, looking sideways at her perturbed pink friend.
“That’s what I meant. Applejack,” Pinkie Pie replied, rubbing the bridge of her nose with a pastern. “Sorry, I’m still a little out of it from... last week.”
Twilight couldn’t hear Pinkie Pie speak, because Pinkie Pie wasn’t anywhere near her at the moment. Why would Pinkie Pie be over by Twilight, when it was Applejack she wanted to talk to? Anypony would have to be pretty silly to think that she was. A bunch of miles away from Twilight Sparkle, Pinkie Pie had tracked down Applejack relaxing in her very own apple orchard, as Applejack sometimes did on nice days, as Pinkie Pie sometimes did on nice days.
“Ah can understand if’n you’re a little out of sorts,” Applejack said, her eyes softening a tad. “Ah’d understand a lot more if you would just talk to us about it, though.”
“That’s... what I’m here for,” Pinkie said in an unnervingly defeated tone.
Applejack just had to reach a hoof forward and pull her friend’s chin up. “You wanna come inside?” she asked with a smile. “We can fix up some vittles for ya, get you a warm drink, and... talk.”
Pinkie smiled back, if weakly, and said, “Thanks Applejack. That would be terrific!” a bit too quietly for comfort. Applejack had chores this afternoon. Plenty of crops still to be planted, and the early apples needed awakening, but she put them aside for this. It was clear Pinkie had something heavy to get off her chest, and Applejack had a good idea what it was. But not as good an idea as what Pinkie needed.
So Applejack fixed up some vittles, and bribed Apple Bloom to go out and do the planting, way out of earshot. Then over some cider and crumb cake, she got to hear Pinkie Pie’s story.
Several minutes later, Pinkie Pie got to stand there awkwardly patting her friend on the back while Applejack lost the cider and crumb cake she’d eaten, right into the bushes outside.
“How are you sane?! ” Applejack asked, once she could talk again, staring at Pinkie like—well, like doctors sometimes did, but not since Pinkie Pie moved to Ponyville and met Nurse Sweetheart.
“I dunno,” Pinkie said unsurely, “I’m not crazy? I thought I was kinda crazy. Don’t ponies say that I am?” She didn’t really think that, but it was kind of true.
“You’re not—” Applejack flustered to speechless, crouching low on her hooves. “Ah thought you lost your folks, but not like that! ”
“I’m sorry, Applejack,” Pinkie said, her ears going down of their own volition. “I just thought maybe since you lost your family too, you wouldn’t get too upset...”
“Ah didn’t lose mah family!” Applejack protested stridently. “Ah lost mah ma, and ah lost mah pah, but mah family was with me there, supportin’ me the whole way! Ah didn’t lose mah—oh, Pinkie.” Her ears dropped down. “Ah’m makin’ a fool of myself. You ain’t... that sorta stuff don’t happen in Equestria. They stopped those minin’ practices a generation ago, on account of what it was doin’ to the land! You... really went through that?”
Pinkie Pie couldn’t answer, but despite still having some puke on her, Applejack’s fierce hug did a lot more for Pinkie Pie than a hug had done for her in a long time.
“...ah think you need to water it down a bit.” Applejack said seriously, all cleaned up of vomit, and cautiously munching on a fritter.
“What do you mean?” Pinkie queried, stuffing another apple fritter in her mouth. “Water them down? These fings are good!”
“Just sayin’ that you can tell ‘em the gist of your story without getting into the specifics of it,” Applejack went on. The two were seated at the sturdy oaken dining room table inside the farm house. A resentful Apple Bloom had come to tell Applejack to get out here already, but one look at the atmosphere between these two ponies, and the filly quieted down. Applejack wasn’t gonna shoo her off again though, because hopefully the two of them could avoid any sort of conversation that would give a lil’ filly nightmares for the rest of her life.
If only Applejack could be so lucky.
“The specifics,” Applejack said to Pinkie, “Like how she... uoh Nelly ah cain’t get that outta mah head, ” she said, clutching it as imagined visions plagued her.
Pinkie Pie leaned forward worriedly, asking, “Sorry, what do I do? What do I tell them?”
Applejack released her head, looking up. “Take Twilight for instance,” she said, “You tell her there was a tragedy, and you were just scared you would lose her trust if she knew it unhinged you a little bit. She wants to know why you were keepin’ it from her, and what she did that put you in a bad spot. Mostly she just wants to hear you accept her apology. She don’t wanna hear about how your mom... eugh... smelled.”
Pinkie frowned, saying skeptically, “But isn’t that like... lying?”
“Sure as sugar,” Applejack said with a half smile, “It’s what she needs that you oughta worry about, not just throwing the truth at her like it don’t matter who she is. But that brings me to your biggest problem... Rainbow Dash.”
“Oh, she knows already,” Pinkie said, glancing aside with a blush.
“W—really?” Applejack blinked.
“It’s really hard to keep a secret from her,” Pinkie made sure to emphasize.
“Yeah, ah... noticed,” Applejack said leerily, “But what... how’d she react?”
Pinkie shrugged. “She yelled at Rocky, beat him up, then dragged me to the party.”
“...what?”
“He’s a rock.”
“Uh...”
“Three rocks, actually.”
Applejack tilted her head in bemusement, asking, “But she didn’t get all... uh... horrifiedlike?”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly telling her the story, but I did sorta imply that I sorta was all alone forever because I sorta killed my own family,” Pinkie speculated, “But she just told me to stop lying to myself and enjoy my birthday party.”
“Tha—hm.” Applejack pondered, then chuckled, “Heh heh. Rainbow Dash sure don’t mince words.”
“But I wasn’t lying,” Pinkie whined, leaning forward, “She just couldn’t believe that it was possibly true!”
Applejack raised an eyebrow as she regarded the pink pony dappled with the shadows of the house from the sunlight streaming in through the south window. “You were, an’ you are lyin’ to yourself, Pinkie Pie,” she said with confidence. “You didn’t kill none of them, and you know it.”
“But it was my idea to—”
Applejack cut Pinkie off before she could even get started, saying, “It don’t matter whose idea it was. You were just a filly. Hay, a grown mare wouldn’t have been able to predict it’d go that far south.”
Pinkie didn’t seem convinced though, and stared down at her hooves, mumbling, “I guess.”
“Was your ma a full grown mare?” Applejack asked slyly.
“...yes?” Pinkie said, looking up in curiosity.
“And if she could predict it, would any of this have happened?” Applejack continued.
Pinkie’s baby blue eyes grew hard, as she said, “No, but she didn’t even know about—”
“And neither did you!” Applejack cut in, feeling like a right heel in stomping all over this pony’s personal problems, but Pinkie needed this. Pinkie needed her. “You knew it was against the rules, and it was wrong of you to disobey them,” Applejack told Pinkie Pie soberly, “But what happened because of that was not your fault. It’d be like... if ah was lazy and didn’t milk a cow, then the whole barn burned down ‘cause she kicked over a lantern. See what ah mean?”
Pinkie kind of broke down at that point and started blubbering something about how “Abbleag” was the “behehehest” friend ever. Applejack wasn’t worried about whether she was a good friend or not, but as she held her friend close while Pinkie let it out, Applejack felt with relief that she maybe finally got through to her. Pinkie Pie had been downright absent in her own body these days, and Applejack was glad that she might be coming out of her shell. It was hard to help somepony when they didn’t want to help themselves, but Pinkie it seemed, was finally past that.
Once she’d calmed down, Pinkie asked into Applejack’s shoulder, “...what about Rarity?”
Took Applejack a blinking moment to change gears there. “Tell her...” Applejack tapped her chin, “Tell her you worked things out with Twilight, and you do have some issues, but it was a long time ago and you’re gettin’ past ‘em. Don’t tell her what happened.”
“But—”
“Alright,” Applejack admitted, pulling the pink pony to arm’s length. “Tell her you’ll tell her what happened if she really wants to know, but there’s no danger anymore, and it was so awful that your friend Applejack lost her lunch over it. Then let her tell you she doesn’t want to know.”
Pinkie squirmed uneasily, saying, “Okay that seems... fair enough. Oh, but what about Fluttershy?”
“Tell her everything,” Applejack said in a deadpan.
Pinkie’s eyes widened in fear, “But what if she gets scared, or hates me or—”
“Just trust me on this,” Applejack said, releasing her friend and turning her face down in grim resignation. “She don’t look like it, but Fluttershy’s got the strongest will of all of us. She’s as fierce as a momma bear. Why else do you think she puts on that whole ‘shy’ act all the time?”
“It’s not an act!” Pinkie gasped in surprise and outrage, “She gets really scared of things!”
Applejack thinned her lips, glancing Pinkie’s way and saying, “Pinkie, please don’t tell her ah told ya, but there’s only one thing Fluttershy’s afraid of.”
“What’s that?”
“Herself.”
She was just getting ready to follow Pinkie quietly out the door, when she stiffened, hearing her sister say behind her, “Apple Bloom. Y’mind if I talk with ya a minute?”
Trying to ignore the cold pit in her stomach, Apple Bloom said, “Okay sis,” crept over to the dining table, and reared her forehooves on it since she wasn’t quite big enough to be comfortable just sitting at it.
“Ah bet you wanna know what happened to Pinkie’s folks,” Applejack said evenly.
“Ah was curious but well, you know,” Apple Bloom said nervously, “Ah swear I won’t spread no rumors about her! We made a promise, you know?”
“Ah know,” Applejack answered, “And you’re a good filly for bein’ true to that promise. I just want you to know that she wasn’t actin’ that way for no reason, but the precise details don’t matter so much. She’s still the same Pinkie Pie she always was, and nothing bad that happened to her can change that.”
“I cain’t even imagine what could’ve happened,” Apple Bloom said sadly, “I didn’t even know anypony could get that upset.”
“Well, it was...” Applejack frowned, her gaze distant a moment before she said, “You remember the time y’all went lookin’ for your story marks out in the Everfree Forest?”
Apple Bloom blushed with shame at that. It had definitely not been a good idea, in hindsight. Especially after seeing it on Twilight’s magic movie thing. How could they have been so stupid? “Yeah, why?” she asked testily.
“It was pretty dangerous, wasn’t it,” Applejack said, “An’ things were mighty tight for a while, before Fluttershy saved the day.”
“Yeah,” Apple Bloom said resentfully, looking away from her sister. “Y’all saw what happened,” she grumbled.
“What happened to Pinkie was like that,” Applejack said seriously, “Except everything went wrong that could’ve gone wrong, and nopony saved the day.”
Apple Bloom looked at her sister again.
“Not sayin’ they were cockatrice chow or nothin’” Applejack clarified, before adopting a puzzled look and adding, “Not all of them at least. But it was that sort of thing. So if Sweetie or Scootaloo are havin’ a hard time understanding, tell ‘em it was like that, but it didn’t go well.”
Applejack looked at the door, probably after her friend, repeating, “Not well at all...”
Ponyville was peaceful and calm after the Pinkie Pie incident, which gave Twilight Sparkle plenty of time to obsess over the Traveller. There were a lot of things to study from this human world it seemed. For instance Twilight had once been going on about using lightning to move magnets, which seemed like a silly idea to Applejack, but apparently the humans could pack those little magnets so tight that they could store a whole library of information in the crook of your hoof, just by arranging the magnets like the letters.
Twilight also said they had these tiny little cameras that also used lightning, and Applejack didn’t really see what was wrong with your traditional stand camera, but being able to study it really helped give Twilight something to do. Twilight Sparkle had been kind of set adrift by her princesshood. Without her studies for Celestia, the poor filly had nothing to do with her life, and this rift helped fill that gap.
But enough about those ponies. Let’s focus on Rainbow Dash now. Yeah! Rainbow Dash! Equestria’s fastest pegasus was blazing off to her next destination, after an uneventful afternoon of herding clouds. The winter storms liked to act up sometimes right after wrapup, and it was her team’s job to make sure that everything kept melting, and the sun kept shining. They did an awesome job though, because she did an awesome job. Dash was just awesome like that. She was a hero to everypony, and an enemy to one. She had friends who loved her and a town that adored her and she really wanted to see the rest of those episodes.
They were awesome is the thing! Rainbow Dash loved seeing herself swooping and soaring, doing things that surpassed her limits and even all the stupid stuff she got up to. It was just so much fun seeing things from a new perspective. She’d never even thought about how wing biased the latter half of the Iron Pony competition had been. And the way Applejack said “I’m just better” and she’d just been joking about that? Rainbow Dash thought that Applejack really meant what she said!
Rainbow Dash would never say she was better unless she really thought she was better. It was something she hadn’t learned from those competitions, that watching them as a show had taught her. Rainbow Dash could say “I think I’m the top athlete in Equestria” and Applejack could say, “I think I’m the top athlete in Equestria,” and it’d mean two different things. Knowing that just changed the whole... feel of that memory, and made Rainbow Dash respect Applejack even more than she had before.
Rainbow felt kind of bad about when she did stuff like that. It was easy to see what was going on, when you were the one watching it, but when you’re the one whose friend just flicked her tail in your face, it was too easy for Rainbow Dash to take stuff too seriously, until they were both taking it too seriously. She felt like a better pony for knowing those things, even if it was a hard lesson to learn. And that’s why Rainbow Dash wanted to see the episodes.
That, and all the cool stuff she didn’t get to see because she wasn’t there. She had never even got to see Winter Wrapup from the ground before. And Fluttershy beating that cockatrice was exactly the kind of story Rainbow Dash would have loved to hear, that Fluttershy would never ever tell.
So the guard schedule in Canterlot was pretty predictable. It’d been a while since the last attack on the city, so guards were falling into their old patterns. At least that would remain the case until Luna brought back those weird bat ponies as guards, but Dash was pretty sure that it was still a bit unacceptable for the princess of the night to begin building up an army in Equestria’s capital. So that meant there were a lot of holes in the patrol schedule at night, and while Rainbow Dash was technically a day pony, she really wanted to see those shows.
In the cool blue of night, she flew low on her approach to the castle, staying close to the rocky cliffs to help conceal her from any searching eyes. It was hard to dampen the rattle of film reels in her left saddle bag, but at least the pigeon had stopped giving her trouble. Rainbow Dash was allowed in Canterlot, totally allowed, but she wasn’t scheduled to be here, so it’d be suspicious if she was seen. Far as anypony knew, Dash was sound asleep in her cloud bed, and if she had her way, it would stay that way.
Rainbow Dash had been to Canterlot like, three times, so she had a pretty good mental map of the castle’s layout. There were high security areas toward the mountain deep within, and on her way there, she mentally went over where each one would be, and possible ways to get in unseen. She perched on a roof light as a feather, looking around with owlish eyes, until she saw the guards change shifts. She saw the one hesitate before waving the two others on by, and their gait seemed to be listing slightly to the left, so they were probably going to patrol the north wing first.
Slipping in a window in the south wing, Dash prepared herself for any security she might run into. Hoof dial combo locks were a piece of cake, but magic wards would be pretty hard to get by undetected. She was most worried about running into patrols though, because she really didn’t want to do the thing if possible. It wasn’t reliable against groups, and it really wasn’t a lot of fun, so she avoided the presence of other ponies, stalking through the shadows.
There was one close call, but as Dash’s sensitized ears picked up hoofsteps, she zipped up to the ceiling. Pegasi would stand a chance of spotting her, but they didn’t work this part of the palace at this shift. The unicorns that did pass under her never thought to look up right at that moment, and didn’t see Dash flattened against the ceiling up there.
There was a magical barrier between Rainbow Dash and the high security halls, and teleportation was out of the question in the strongest defended building in Equestria. But if you avoid detection, it doesn’t matter what a hornet’s nest you’re walking into. To circumvent the barrier, Rainbow noticed that there was a vase beyond it that matched with one on this side. A bit of sympathetic charm later, and Dash was at the location of the far vase, without having passed in between.
That was pretty easy though, and the vault itself had a guard standing in front of it, and a hoof lock. Dash had a plan, but it was risky. The best kind. She was headed down the hallway when two guards spotted her. They wouldn’t recognize Rainbow Dash in her black sneaking suit hopefully, especially with her wings folded. It was hard to balance with effectively no tail, but she was up to the task, and well trained in such practices. So she let them spot her, just a shadow moving in the shadows.
“Hey!” one of the guards shouted, “Who goes there?”
Silently, Dash darted away with them in hot pursuit. She lost them by taking a left at a T-intersection, and waving her wings to blow the sounds of her hoofsteps into the right passageway. The guards ran down there, and she trotted after, matching her hoofbeats to theirs. They came upon the vault Dash wanted to check, and were talking with the guard there, asking him if he saw anypony pass by. Perfect.
Rainbow Dash tossed a rock down the far corridor, and at its noisy scraping clack, the guards spun around, saying, “There, down that way! It’s a dead end!” They all charged down the corridor, while Rainbow Dash glided in to fiddle with the hoof dial. She had it down to about a dozen possibilities when she heard them start to come back, and hurriedly cycled through them all with a mechanical accuracy, until the door clicked open. Sticking her head in the vault—she... saw nothing other than scroll shelves and some wicked swords up on stands. Darn!
Rainbow Dash crept away while the guards returned, and opened up the vault themselves to make sure nopony was in there. Nopony, and noshow was in there. The second vault she tried wasn’t as high security, but the lock could be overridden by a simple sliding puzzle that dumped you in the dungeon if you got it wrong too many times. Dash got it right on the first try and... nope, still nothing.
She had a good feeling about the third vault, and crept up to it. Of course there was another guard in front of it, but the mare didn’t look like she was even half awake. Dash was awake of course, every sense honed to a crystal clear precision. She’d be able to crash once she had secured the film back home. This time, Dash let her hoof tap the stone just loud enough to catch the guard’s attention.
“Wha?” she said, eyes snapping forward. “Who are you?!” she exclaimed, levelling her spear at Dash’s throat. It was still hard to see anything but the gleaming metal tip, and you wouldn’t be able to make a pony out who was wearing a sneaking suit. Only that something was standing there, just out of the light. Dash backed up and the guard advanced, saying, “You are not allowed to be here. This is a restricted area! I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to—”
Before the guard could light the hallway torches, Rainbow Dash pulled out her trump card. Opening her right saddle bag, a very flustered pigeon burst out of it, fluttering noisily forward while Dash threw herself away from the spear into the shadows. Quickly scurrying up the wall, she took notice of the beleagured guard turning on the hall torches, but not looking up. The guard was laughing to herself as they slowly lit up to reveal an empty hallway, “A pigeon?”
Behind the guard, Rainbow Dash had already glided into the vault entrance, and was busily jimmying the door open. In it, she spotted—aha! There was a golden stand, on which a set of film reels had been laid. Fluttering into the vault and avoiding the ground, with an eye out for the bright red dot of any tripwire beams, Rainbow Dash reached the stand, on which was attached a note. “Not for use by the Elements of Harmony. This means you, Pinkie Pie.”
“Heh,” Dash murmured to herself, “Guess that doesn’t mean me.”
In swift wing movements, Dash swapped every film reel for a blank one she carried in her other saddle bag. It was smooth enough, it didn’t even trigger any pressure plates. Then she very slightly cracked open the door behind the guard who had returned from her pigeon chasing, and Rainbow Dash settled down to wait. The shift change came, and the mare guard trotted forward, meeting her replacement who said, “Anything to report?”
Dash was already outside the vault and hidden behind a curtain.
“Just a pigeon,” the first said with a laugh, “Scared the hay out of me!”
The first guard left, and as soon as the second had her back turned, Rainbow Dash dashed for the hall. From there, it was a simple straight shot out to—the first guard had turned around and come back for something, and was staring at Dash, and the hall torches were still lit.
Dammit!
Dash darted up to the mare and whispered “Psst! You didn’t see me! You don’t know why you stopped in the hallway. You aren’t gonna r—remember I was here at all.” Every sentence was like a punch in the gut. She was gonna feel that in the morning, but it was worth it. Dash breezed past that very confused looking guard, and vanished into the shadows again. Her head was throbbing, but she was pretty sure she could make it out without any further incidents. Rainbow Dash hated when she had to do the thing.
Before she could collapse in bed, Rainbow Dash made sure to stash the tapes in a chest she had tied up in a tree just out of town. Just a regular tree, not one of AJ’s apple trees, of course, because that orange earth pony just couldn’t understand when you really, really, really had to know something, even when your friends don’t want to let you in on it. In a way, Dash’s retrieval of the tapes helped lessen her nausea in the morning, and that pounding headache she got when misusing her talents. Because it just didn’t feel right to her, to hide from such an important truth they contained.
Now all she had to do was find a projector.
Twilight Sparkle was not having a good day. First, her projector went missing. Then, Rainbow Dash was nowhere to be found. The whole weather team was in a tizzy over that itinerant mare in fact, and that meant Twilight got caught in an unexpected spring shower. That meant her scrolls got wet, and that meant she had to set them drying, instead of being able to write on them right away. To top it all off, she discovered Whatnot had been reassigned to a different project entirely, seemingly coincidentally, but it was a strange coincidence that the student who was most sympathetic to Twilight’s cause would be the one reassigned.
Fortunately, Twilight already had most of the data she needed to get a working plan. What she needed was information on exactly who her Jane Doe was, on the other side. Having the name Bruce Connell wasn’t sufficient. Any mare in the human world could have had that name. Twilight needed more specific information, so she could formulate a plan to defeat the villains that made Rosy, aka Bruce, not want to return to her home. She needed a birth certificate.
Unfortunately, the limited far seeing they could perform through the pinhole sized portal was not able to reach wherever the humans stored those records. Yet, the humans had ways to request those records, that had many parallels with Equestrian society. The principal difference was the transmission of complex signals down copper wires. Ponies used induction for the most part, but that didn’t work very well in the other verse, so physical wires were needed to get power from point A to point B. The humans exploited that to its fullest extent, delivering not only power and telephony, but data, documents, encoded books and records, even films of cats doing silly things.
The system was very well secured, however. Humans seemed to depend on the lack of any clairvoyance spells, basing a great deal of social infrastructure on total secrecy. Without the right credentials, nopony would be able to request an electron codifed form of Rosy’s birth certificate. It would have been nice if there was any information at all in the missing persons report about the family of this “Bruce Connell,” but with no names for any of the family members, and the apartment quite thoroughly cleaned out by the human investigators, Twilight was at a loss for how to locate them.
If she could get certain documents including the birth certificate, she could find out Bruce’s familial relations, if she had any step parents, or was spending time in an orphanage. Twilight also needed employment history, to see if anypony was cruelly overworking Rosy, and making her want to flee. Twilight didn’t have any way to access these documents herself, but she had a good idea how to appeal to those who did. Employers, in the human world, had more legal rights than employees, if Twilight understood it correctly. They could request private, personal information about the employees, on the arguement that it prevented those employees from getting away with laziness. The vast amount of privacy protection did not therefore apply to employers.
It struck Twilight as an unflatteringly cruel way to invade someone’s privacy, but that in itself clued Twilight in to what she had to help Rosy defeat in order for her to return home triumphant. By adopting the enemy’s guise, Twilight could slip right past their security like a changeling in the night, and she would be able to solve this mystery once and for all. They couldn’t exactly squeeze bits through the rift, but it was foal’s play to scan certain circuitry for credit cards within the detection zone, and with the money skimmed off of those pooled in an offshore account, Twilight Sparkle was about to establish a web startup.
Sharing a sapphire smoothie with Spike, Rarity carried herself with the utmost tact and poise, watching it covertly from a nearby cafe table. Not a pony, she told herself, she had to tell herself lest she start feeling for it again. If it hadn’t insinuated this rift between her friends, Rarity would never have suspected it wasn’t a pony. It looked like a pony, moved like a pony, and laughed like a pony with a member of its new friend circle, a grey/blonde mare known for her rather gullible nature. Its next victim, no doubt!
They sure did seem like they were enjoying themselves...
Rarity just wanted to know what went wrong, not just with the ill fated attempt to return the creature to the place from whence it came, but with how her friends had all been so... distant lately. Somehow the thing’s mere presence seemed to drive a wedge between the lot of them. If Rarity hadn’t been taking a moment here and there to observe the creature’s activity, she probably would have been trying to patch things up with Fluttershy again, if nopony else.
As much as Rarity loved all her friends, Fluttershy was most dear to Rarity. They shared so much in common, and even if Fluttershy was an animal caretaker, she still lived surprisingly close by. Applejack’s farm work was so different from Rarity’s occupation that they rarely got to even see each other on the clock. Rainbow Dash was exciting, and thrilling, and brave, and bold, and frankly at times somewhat overwhelming. She hadn’t been seen for a while, anyway. For all of Pinkie Pie’s fascinating and boundless creativity, she was something of a slob, and it was difficult to keep a pristine environment whenever she was around. Twilight Sparkle had some wonderful ideas regarding fabric, design, gem harvesting, just about any subject really, but she was so busy these days with obsessing over this... human.
To anypony else, the human would have appeared as an ordinary young mare, with fur of eggshell white, with a light hot pink mane. Her strangest characteristic was the lack of a story mark at so late an age. It was not unheard of for a pony to get their mark late in the growing period, but it was very rare. Rarity only knew of two ponies who went through that: a homely, eccentric stallion who took a long time in learning about some form of odd self moving golem, and of course that whole fantastic scandal with the famous Sapphire Shores. But those were both ponies, and successful ones at that. This mare, this... thing couldn’t possibly be a real pony.
Rosy was one of those strange, icky looking creatures Twilight had shown Rarity, who may have had a wonderful fashion sense, but they looked like some sort of ape-headed scaleless dragons. It claimed it didn’t want to return to its natural form, but Rarity had other suspicions. Something that looked like... that couldn’t possibly appreciate being a pony. Perhaps it was trying to damage the fabric of space and time. Perhaps it was a forward scout for some sort of invasion force!
Still, Rarity couldn’t overlook what Rosy was wearing... what she was still wearing. Rosy had just looked so cold, and hurt, that Rarity couldn’t... just for a moment of weakness Rarity couldn’t deny she was a pony. And now Rosy wore it almost like a trophy of conquest. It made Rarity feel warm and cold inside, unsure of whether to be gratified or disgusted. It was infuriating and intriguing that Rosy had looked at it, and not thrown it in Rarity’s face as expected. Instead, she wrapped it around her neck, and thanked Rarity for thinking of her. As if that were a good thing!
These were strange days, and Rarity wasn’t sure she liked the change of pace. She should have been designing dresses for her friends, not spending time on this adventure that simply would not come to an end! It was truly a devilish rogue, this creature that could appear totally benign while refusing to complete her quest. Rarity was sure her friend Twilight could find a solution, but frankly she thought that Twilight couldn’t find a solution soon enough!
At least Rarity had that retreat to look forward to. Fluttershy had found a wonderfully relaxing place to spend some time away from the hustle and bustle, and Rarity was the first pony she thought of who might be interested in such a thing. It sounded a bit... rustic, but everything Fluttershy involved herself with was a bit rustic. She was not what you would call a high society pony. Nevertheless, Fluttershy had no end of praise for it, so Rarity was quite willing to give it a go. She just hoped it wasn’t a week spent lost in the wilderness without even the most basic amenities again.
“We gazed into each others eyes the whole time. It was the most magical smoothie ever. And it had sapphires!”
“That’s nice, Spike.”
Meanwhile, during the cool night just before dawn, in an undisclosed location somewhere in Ponyville, a polychromatic pegasus was exclaiming by the light of a projector, “Noooo, don’t give up now! Don’t give up Fluttershy, you improved so much! They need your wingpower!”