(♫)
Twilight woke from a deep and dreamless sleep to the sound of somepony knocking none too gently on the Golden Oaks’ front door. The clock hanging from one of the loft’s walls read 11:15 AM.
Spike’s basket was empty, and she could just make out his distinctive voice filtering up from below. One of the benefits of eschewing clothing and keeping her mane cut reasonably short was that it took Twilight virtually no time to ready herself in the morning. She made it to the stairs just as Spike headed up to rouse her.
“It’s that rainbow pony from the farm,” he muttered as they passed, “she’s… well, you can just see for yourself.”
That was always reassuring.
There was nopony in the main reading-room, but the front door had been left ajar. Twilight trotted over, pushed it the rest of the way open with her telekinesis, and then immediately backpedaled- her first thought was that the Town Council had somehow taken umbrage at yesterday’s expedition to the Sweet Apple Acres Cairn, and ordered the local militia to place her under arrest. True to Spike’s word it was indeed Rainbow Dash waiting for her outside, but instead of the Weather Team vest Twilight had been expecting the cyan pegasus was kitted out ears-to-hooves in a suit of light chainmail barding, complete with a sabre sheathed within easy reach on her right shoulder and a pair of extremely well-polished and extremely sharp dogfighter’s wingblades. Her night-vision goggles had been flipped upwards onto a mount on her helmet, still glowing a brilliant green, and she had populated the bandoleer strung across her chest and the equipment belt wrapped around her barrel with what very much appeared to be a matched set of throwing knives. Someone- very probably Dash herself- had tried to obscure the original metal and leather with a crude layer of flat black paint, although the pegasus’s thunderbolt cutie-mark had been duplicated with marginally more skill on her left flankguard.
Twilight’s initial jolt of panic died down quickly, however, when she saw that Dash was grinning and also entirely alone. “Hey, uh… Breaking Dawn, was it? I got that survey you wanted done, and when I was on my way here Derpy asked me if I could run some mail to you from the Post Office.” She twisted her head behind her and after much rooting around and fiddling managed to extricate a slim leather messenger’s satchel from her armor’s equipment webbing.
“Twilight, actually,” Twilight corrected as she took the satchel in her magic. What kind of a name is ‘Breaking Dawn’, anyway? “Wait… you went and did that whole survey already!?”
“Well, yeah,” the pegasus puffed out her chest and mock-casually flicked out one bladed wing as if to stretch, “I get more done by 5 AM than most ponies do all day! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta get the weather ready for the Celebration. Wouldn’t wanna leave Ponyville hanging!”
She flew off with an alarming rattle of blades.
Twilight opted to review the documents she’d been given over lunch at one of the cafes off of the town square, specifically the one with the delicious-smelling spiced oats. Ordinarily she would have preferred the relative solitude of the Golden Oaks loft, but it was a genuinely lovely day -the weather team had truly outdone themselves for the Summer Sun Celebration- and more to the point the energy she’d burned over yesterday’s adventures hadn’t been fully replaced by just one dinner. The square outside was filling up rapidly as local ponies put the finishing touches on their display stalls and out-of-towners wandered hither and yon trying to locate this or that amenity, but relatively few of them crossed over the wrought-iron fence to Twilight’s section of the patio. That suited her just fine. She set to work on the contents of the messenger bag spread out in front of her and a bowl of lentil soup tucked discreetly off to one side.
She probably should have gone right to Dash’s map of the Cairns. That was why she was in Ponyville to begin with, after all. But Twilight found herself much more curious about what the Interior Ministry might have been able to unearth on the village’s inhabitants. Evidently there had been a fair bit of it, as under the brown paper wrapping Dusty Pages had split the records into five different folders for each pony-of-interest.
Rarity’s was the thinnest by far, containing only a business license for the Carousel Boutique. Twilight was, however, somewhat surprised to learn that the other unicorn had only been in business for a few years.
Applejack’s file was somewhat thicker. Apparently the Apple family’s ownership of Sweet Apple Acres had been a direct Act of the Day Court in recognition of Councilpony Granny Smith’s ‘long and valorous service to Equestria’ (whatever that meant). As a result there was an official writ of succession on file which would pass the property on first to a brother named Big Macintosh, then Applejack, then a younger sister named Applebloom. Twilight was sure there were a million explanations for it, but she still found it odd that Smith's title would pass over her own child(ren?) and directly to her eldest grandfoal. She’d look into that discrepancy when she had the time. Under a small stack of utterly mundane licenses and approval forms from the Ministry of Agriculture she also found a Manehattan City Watch report mentioning Applejack’s arrest for drunk and disorderly behavior. The farmer had pled guilty, paid her fine in full, and even personally repaired the storefront she’d destroyed. Twilight found all of that oddly commendable, especially when she saw the listed date-of-birth of 1077 and realized that the earth pony had been all of fourteen at the time.
Twilight was briefly mortified to learn that Pinkie Pie was currently wanted for a string of bloody train and wagon robberies all along the Saddle Arabian border, until she read that the pony in question was a unicorn last sighted a week previously in Fillydelphia.
Somewhat surprisingly, many of the documents in Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash’s files referenced each other. Apparently the two had grown up in Cloudsdale together and been enrolled in the same youth flight-training camp which eventually fed into the Equestrian military. Fluttershy’s scores were middling at best and a number of instructors had left notes wondering why she had bothered to enroll at all when her interests clearly lay elsewhere. She was mentioned in a number of disciplinary reports, never as in instigator and always as a target, and it seemed that after a particularly violent incident which had placed her life in serious danger- the specifics were redacted with a note explaining that the camp instructors wished to protect her privacy- the teenaged Fluttershy had decided she’d had enough and politely announced her departure for Ponyville. There was mention of her potentially seeking out a formal education in zoology, druidcraft. or veterinary medicine, but apparently nothing had come of it.
Dash, on the other hoof, had shown truly exceptional scores counterbalanced by an equally exceptional number of demerits and infractions. Nonetheless she had managed to keep a top position through what, to Twilight’s experienced eye, looked to be a combination of genuine love for flying and sheer Minotaurean stubbornness, and seemed to have been well on her way to an early spot in the Wonderbolts.
Then she’d attacked another student, and left him injured badly enough to need hospital treatment.
The dates seemed to line up to within a few days of the mysterious incident that had resulted in Fluttershy’s departure, and Twilight wondered if they were related. That made her suspicious. While the Wonderbolts were nowhere near as debauched as the more salacious of the Canterlot broadsheets made them out to be -if they spent even a tenth of the time they allegedly did in wild twelve-way rutting parties, they'd never have a moment to eat, let alone practice or fly missions- they and the other EUP platoons were highly sought-after with exclusive recruiting standards. That led to no small amount of underhoofed competition among young prospects.
On any other day she would have found the prospect of uncovering a potential conspiracy involving a promising young recruit getting drummed out of flight camp so hard she bounced off the runway to be enticing, or at least worth passing on to Shining Armor to resolve. Today, though, there was the more pressing matter of a possible demon of the night returning to Equestria, so she let the matter lie. The remainder of Dash’s file consisted of Weather Team pay stubs, fines and official warnings for trying to purchase weapons not available to civilians, and declined applications to five different special-operations-track recruiting programs.
In retrospect, that explained a great deal.
Feeling vaguely uncomfortable and more than a little sorry for the mare, Twilight turned to the chart that she had prepared. Rainbow’s mouthwriting was nigh illegible and Twilight very strongly suspected that the locations she’d marked on an old Naval Ordinance Survey map of Ponyville and its environs had more than the officially permitted error bounds, but nonetheless exactly seventy-two of them were shown.
Twilight supposed the positional errors didn’t matter. She’d seen that pattern of stars enough times recently that it was very probably etched into the backs of her eyeballs.
She slid a few bits onto the table for her meal and stood, intent on heading back to the Library to get a hold of a more accurate and detailed map for comparison, but before she could get far she spotted a telltale brilliantly-pink mane out of the corner of her eye.
“Hey, Pinkie, can you come over here for a minute? There’s something you might be able to help me with.”
“Okie-dokie!”
Twilight tapped a hoof against the empty spot on the map where the Moon would rest in Equestria’s actual sky. The projection was different from that used on the Cairn ceiling, and not all of the same stars were represented- it cut off most of the Northern sky, leaving the bulk of the Cairns deep in the Everfree and the ‘Moon’-spot closer to Ponyville proper. “Do you know if there’s anything of… well, historical or magical significance located right around here?”
Pinkie’s eyes lit up and her grin took on a cheerfully diabolic quality that put Twilight in the mindset of a schoolfilly who’d just found a particularly interesting dead animal. “Oh! Yeah, you wanna see where they keep Nightmare Moon!”
“… Wait, what?!”
(♫)
In Pinkie Pie’s defense, it was a very realistic statue.
Whoever had carved the life-sized figure of Nightmare Moon from Ponyville’s blue-gray stone had obviously been an incredibly skilled craftsmare, and more importantly had been able to reference some of the earliest and most accurate illustrations that Twilight had only been able to procure at incredible cost of time and money- or, she supposed, given the obvious age of the site, had gotten a look at the genuine article. Standing rampant as it did on an ornate, Lunar-style square pedestal with one hoof held out and downward at a forty-five degree angle, it almost seemed to be accusing anypony who stood too near in front of it, although of what Twilight couldn’t even begin to guess.
“Well, this is the place,” Applejack muttered from behind her, “Ah just hope you’ll be careful without Fluttershy bein’ ‘round to keep an eye on you.”
“Spike’s an ambassador, you brute!” Rarity replied, “Surely his assistant doesn’t need round-the-clock supervision just to avoid making a scene.”
“Really now! ‘Ambassador’s assistant’, huh? ‘Cause Twilight told me she was some big important muckety-muck from the Antiquities Department.”
Twilight had decided to bring the two locals along because she’d figured Rarity’s eye for craftsmareship and Applejack’s experience with the geology and history of the area were the closest thing she had to archaeological expertise right now. Rarity had been quick to agree and had even packed some of her more delicate tools; the farmer had taken a bit more cajoling, but with a few additional bits and a reminder of last night’s shower over the East Orchard she’d come around soon enough. By that time, Twilight had entirely forgotten that she’d never come clean to either of them about her own actual position in the government. As the mares fell into arguing she decided that, since he seemed to have built up something resembling a rapport or at least tolerance with the townsponies, it was probably best to let Spike handle it while she focused on more important matters.
A quick ambit of the small clearing in which the statue was located revealed nothing more than moss and fiddleheads, although the overgrowth made Twilight grateful she’d finally taken up Rarity on her offer of a sturdy pair of boots. That wasn’t unexpected- the statue wasn’t particularly hard to get to, after all, and if there were additional ruins visible around it Applejack or Pinkie Pie would have been able to tell her. That didn’t mean there wasn’t more to the site, however, and Twilight had come prepared to find it. Finding a reasonably clear and dry patch of earth not far from the structure she sat down, closed her eyes, and began concentrating. If she’d had the full resources of the Academy at her disposal she could have simply called in an earth pony druid capable of interrogating the very stones themselves for actionable information, but even on her own a high-level detection spell was well within her power. Bit by bit, the blackness behind her eyelids began to take on form and structure. First the two ponies to either side of her delineated themselves as luminous equine skeletons; then a blob of green fire became visible through the refractive effect of Spike’s draconic scales; then the entire clearing lit up with a sort of vague blue-green radiance generated by the natural magic of the various plants and small insects that occupied it. Twilight muttered a series of cantrips to blot out the most powerful sources of magic, and as they receded the structure of the statue itself became visible, outlined in a warm, gently-pulsing golden glow.
It didn’t surprise her that the thing was enchanted- after all, something had to be keeping Nightmare Moon’s exquisitely-detailed features sharp despite a thousand years of weathering and probable local abuse- but the quality of the spell certainly gave her pause. It was radiating magic at an incredibly low rate, right at the edge of what her own spell could detect, which implied incredible precision on the part of the original caster. At the time of the Lunar Rebellions, the only way that could have been done at all would have been for the same ponies to reconvene at the site every few weeks for several years, take detailed measurements of the spell as it stood, and reapply a weak version in the hopes of averaging out any imperfections. Even then, the spell should have faded away long ago unless the original casters (and, indeed, there must have been at least three as those sorts of stone-preserving spells required earth-pony, unicorn, and pegasus magic in equal measure) had been immensely powerful- or, she supposed, kept up a tradition to periodically renew it. At this point anything was possible, although she decided not to read too terribly much into the uncanny familiarity of the thaumic spectra she was observing. Quite a few ponies, in fact, had magical signatures similar to Princess Celestia’s simply by coincidence, and the idea of her own mentor and the champion of the Solar Restoration having had anything at all to do with this place was too absurd for even her newly-expanded reality to accommodate.
More to the point, however, her scan had revealed just how far down into the ground the statue extended. “All right,” she said, opening her eyes once again and trotting back over to the front of the structure where Spike and the locals were assembled. “There’s a larger… I guess a kind of a plinth under this thing that extends out in front to right about here.”
“Well, ‘course there is, sugarcube,” Applejack trotted over and began unclipping her saddlebags, “If’n’ it didn’t go down underground a good ways it’d get top-heavy an’ fall over.” She extracted a small folding shovel in her teeth and favored Twilight with a skeptical look above it. “They din’ actually teach you too much in whatever fancy magic school you came from, did they?”
Spike and the farmer made quick work of the roughly foot-thick layer of dirt that had accumulated overtop of the plinth; once they had gotten within a few centimeters Twilight and Rarity finished off the rest with softer brushes taken from the tailor’s manestyling kit and precision telekinesis. It took Twilight only a few minutes of work to completely expose the text that had been carved into the structure’s base:
As the sunset fades away, the yellow turns to gray, the moonlight shines across the land, a calling we obey.
“From purest black we shadows rise to fight a greater fight…” Twilight murmured, more to herself than to anypony else. “Our brothers and sisters move as one, we soldiers of the night.”
Deep inside the stonework base, something mechanical clicked.
Spike and Rarity both scrambled backwards as Twilight lit her horn and Applejack brandished her folding shovel like an impromptu poleaxe, but whatever threat they had all been expecting failed to materialize. Instead, the entire top surface of the plinth, Nightmare Moon and all, slid backward with impossible smoothness approximately twenty centimeters to expose a small, dark chamber underneath.
After a moment, Rarity gave a demure cough. “I’m… not sure if I understand. The surveyors scanned that statue years ago! You scanned it just now. How would…?”
Spike stepped forward. “That is strange. A cloaking spell a thousand years old shouldn’t even have had an effect, much less been able to mess with modern magical scans. Maybe the chamber’s a lot more recent than the statue itself, or maybe my assistant’s just off her game.”
Rarity tittered at that.
Twilight glared at Spike and then carefully, cautiously approached the statue. She hadn’t been sure what she’d briefly thought reciting that Lunar verse might have brought forth, only that it had for just that moment seemed ancient, immensely dangerous, and very, very real. She, along with every first-year magic student, knew perfectly well the dangers of reading inscribed spells aloud, but that poem contained nothing but arbitrary, non-magical Ponish words. Didn’t it?
It was a bright afternoon, which was fortunate because Twilight still didn’t want to risk even the magical leakage of a magelight to illuminate the contents of the plinth. Inside were eight square obsidian tablets, four on top of four, deeply inscribed with what looked to be Old Ponish scribal shorthand.
In retrospect it made sense- if she had been one of the last of the original Lunar Rebels, where else would she have hidden information relating to her leader’s return? “Rarity, can you go back to your shop and fetch me some clean silk? I don’t want to carry these the whole way telekinetically.”
“Certainly, darling, but… do you mind if I ask what they say?” Ironically, Rarity probably wouldn’t have had much trouble understanding the words on the tablets if they had been spoken aloud, but the alphabet reforms of the fifth century and the spelling reform of the eighth rendered written Old Ponish more or less incomprehensible to the modern laymare. This particular sample also seemed to be in code, but that wouldn’t stop Twilight for long.
“I’ll need to take them back to the Golden Oaks to get a start on decoding them, but… if I had to guess, this is a prophecy.”
(♫)
Twilight finally released the quill from her telekinetic grip and rubbed her tired, bloodshot eyes with both front hooves. The Old Ponish dictionaries and cryptological tomes spread across the table in the center of the Golden Oaks had taken her and Spike far longer to locate than she had planned -they had, in fact, been buried during Twilight’s search the night before- and as the sun began to set the locals took to singing, playing instruments, firing off rockets, and otherwise making concentration extremely difficult. But she had persevered, and now the original contents of the Lunar Prophecy had been extracted from their archaic, tabular cipher and rendered into something easily comprehensible:
When the Sun crosses one third of its arc below the horizon on the longest solar day of the thousandth seasonal year following Nightmare Moon’s confinement within the Circle of the Moon, the stars will aid in her escape and she will return with the Princess of the Night.
She had, quite honestly, expected a good bit more. Briefly she considered whether she’d somehow missed entire sections of significant text amidst the mixing cipher in which it was contained, but the likelihood of such an error producing any comprehensible sentences at all was incredibly remote. It was simply one of the shortest prophecies she’d ever encountered.
Spike leaned over from the stool beside her and tapped one claw against the final line. “That’s a pretty big corruption at the end there. I can understand Mist Watcher paraphrasing the calendrical stuff, but the last line changes the whole meaning of the prophecy.”
“I don’t think Mist Watcher was the one who changed it, at least not deliberately and not on her own. It might be a translation error.” She slipped off of her own chair and telekinetically rifled through a pile of discarded linguistics texts until she came across the one in particular she was looking for. “A lot of what we know about Nightmare Moon and the prophecy comes from Griffonic sources, and Mist Watcher spent time studying magic in the Griffon Empire.” Pages of the dictionary fanned rapidly past in her telekinetic grip until she settled on the one she had been looking for, “See here! Middle High Griffish didn’t have a distinct word for alicorns or Princesses, they were just called ‘immortals’ or ‘eternals’. So ‘Princess of the Nighttime’ and ‘Nighttime Eternal’ would actually be the same phrase!”
“That’s still odd, though,” Spike continued, “Why would a prophecy describe Nightmare Moon returning with herself? There’s something obvious we’re both missing, here.”
“Well, obviously. There’s still a lot about this prophecy and the events that led to its creation that we don’t really understand. Like why it predicts Nightmare Moon returning at such a thaumically disadvantageous time…” When Twilight had plugged a return date of slightly less than a year from now into her model, she’d found the amount of mana the spell required to be insanely high- so high that even an entity of Nightmare Moon’s approximate power level would find herself effectively crippled upon completing it, if she could pull it off at all. “… and why it doesn’t give that date in a specified timeframe but with actual, physical seasons which are controlled by ponies and can’t really be predicted that far in… advance…” Something between a stormcloud and ice settled in the pit of Twilight’s stomach.
She’d assumed from the very beginning that when it described ‘the longest day of the thousandth year’, the prophecy was speaking of the endpoint of a section of time- the time it would take for Nightmare Moon to assemble the stars into a self-contained spell circle of immense enough power to bring about her physical manifestation on the Material Plane. That’s what her model was set up to calculate. But summoning spells often took advantage of conditions in their environment in order to function more easily- specific astrological, meteorological, or geological formations, typically, but also the natural ebb and flow of magic that occurred at specific times of day or specific times of year. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be easier variations of difficult summons that could only be cast successfully at, for instance, nautical sunrise on the third clear day after a full moon, regardless of how much actual time those events took to come about.
The prophecy didn’t predict when Nightmare Moon would return at all. It predicted the conditions that would allow her return, however long it actually took ponies to bring them about. That explained why even Twilight’s most precise instruments had been unable to detect any directed motion in the starfield. She’d assumed that was because the movement was too slow to observe on timescales of less than a few years, but in fact the relevant stars weren’t moving at all. They had, in fact, been in the correct positions the entire time Twilight had been alive, waiting for the other conditions of the spell to be fulfilled.
And if one of those conditions was the existence of a thousand seasonal cycles since the Nightmare’s banishment…
The paralyzing chill inside of her dissolved, and suddenly Twilight couldn’t move fast enough to satisfy her own racing thoughts. She grabbed the nearest piece of mostly-blank paper she could find, made a few scratches on it with her quill, then quickly reconsidered and extracted another from her pack by the door with a copy of her cutie mark already magically imprinted in the bottom right corner. “CELESTIA,” she wrote, unconcerned with the acute angle her large, blocky script made on the page, “DO NOT MOVE THE SUN BELOW THE HORIZON. Extreme danger! Will explain when face-to-face. Twilight.”
“Spike, send this to the Princess right away!” She rolled the letter into a rough tube and lobbed it telekinetically towards him, relaxing only when it vanished in a bolt of acid-green flame.
The spell he used to transfer small documents had originally been developed for use by the Equestrian Navy and only reluctantly picked up by the postal service some two centuries ago. Normally it was applied to a pair of braziers which needed to be kept continuously stocked with enchanted fuel, since if the magical fire on either end were to run out of energy both would need to be rekindled. While outages were rare in the populous, prosperous, rail-crossed Equestrian heartland, portable versions weren’t exactly practical. Twilight, however, had realized early on that Spike’s draconic metabolism naturally produced exactly the raw materials the spell needed to operate- he himself could operate as an always-on living terminus.
They’d run into a myriad of problems trying to link his adapted version of the spell to a brazier, but upon being read into the project Moon Dancer had hypothesized that another living entity might be compatible. After initial experiments on rats and deer had proven safe, Twilight had applied the spell first to a volunteer in the form of Shining Armor, and then after further refinements to Celestia. Thus, unlike virtually every other method of communication, Twilight could be certain her letter would indeed reach the Princess despite the complete isolation in which she usually spent the night leading up to the Summer Sun Celebration.
Holding the sun at one position or moving it back above the horizon wasn’t by any means optimal or even safe, and would quickly have profoundly negative effects on everything from grain prices to the equicide rate. But it would at least buy them time- time to scour Paper Clip’s notes for the location of the Elements of Harmony, or figure out how to redirect Nightmare Moon’s spell, or find some other way to head off the crisis.
It took, by Twilight’s estimate, about five minutes for Celestia to reply. Paradoxically, being acutely and painfully aware of each passing second made a proper measure of the total much more difficult. Then, just as the unicorn began to worry that her racing heart rate was going to have long-term effects on her overall health, Spike coughed up another globe of emerald fire and from it emerged a scroll neatly bound with the Day Court seal.
Twilight could barely focus as she unrolled it with spotty, intermittent telekinesis.
“My dearest Twilight Sparkle,
I trust your time in Ponyville has been enlightening, and as always my heart is warmed by your concern for my well-being. However, I think it’s time you were permitted to know the truth about your work here. Nightmare Moon is not coming back to the Material Plane. Thanks to alterations discreetly made to the calendar system and exemplary performance by the weather patrols she has, in fact, been here for quite some time, and with the help of Shining Armor and our armed forces I have made sure she presents no possible threat. Your research, therefore, will no longer be required and I wish you the best of luck in your future studies.
Princess Celestia”
Twilight and her assistant both stared blankly at the text for a good long while. Spike’s mouth kept opening, staying like that for the space of a few seconds, and then closing with a barely-audible click before he glanced briefly towards his partner, turned away in embarrassment and repeated the whole process over and over again. Twilight… didn’t know exactly what she was thinking at first. One emotion after another flashed through her exhausted brain in a mixture of outrage, dread, relief and fascination that should by all rights have been impossible for a single pony to experience. “She… I… but…” Coherent sentences were briefly beyond her as she tried to marshal her jumbled thoughts, finally settling on a fury more intense than anything she’d ever experienced before.
“A year, Spike.” She stood up from the desk and began pacing back and forth in front of the stairs, “We spent an entire year chasing this prophecy, and the whole time she’d already… does she have any idea how much of the common pony’s money got spent on this project… the other very important work I could’ve been… All the time I’ve wasted?! WHY?! What… possible rutting purpose would she have in keeping this secret?!”
“Twilight…”
“Does she want me to throw away my life, Spike? Does that qualify as a lesson on being a better pony?!”
“Twilight.”
“You know what I’m going to do, Spike? I’m going to publish that journal in the basement. I’m going to verify it, find the sources I need to corroborate it, annotate it, and then I’m going to get it in every paper from here to Zebrica so the whole Known World can see just what a rutting fraud-”
“Twilight!”
“Yes, what?!” She rounded on the smaller dragon, horn briefly flaring with magic before, abruptly, the urge to strike her assistant evaporated as soon as she became fully aware of it.
If the dragon was in any way alarmed, he gave no sign of it. “Twilight, I think that’s an excellent idea.”
“… what?”
“You’ve been busting your tail on this for no reason, and you’ve got every right to be… I was going to say angry, but I think ‘furious’ is really more appropriate. I’m behind you every step of the way… but this is gonna take time, and the important thing is we’ve got time. Nopony’s in any danger right now. We’ll get back to Canterlot and run some tests on the journal to confirm it’s First Century, and see if we can match the writing with other documents that Paper Clip guy wrote. But right now… there’s a festival on. Can we actually enjoy Ponyville, just for one night?”
“Spike… You’re absolutely right.”