Fluttershy walked away slowly from the Golden Oaks library. She always liked meeting new animal friends, and that was a wilder and more fantastic creature than she'd ever seen. What kind of beast could walk on two legs without a balancing tail? It could talk too! It was just like meeting Spike all over again.
She stopped to see a poster stuck to a post just outside the library.
“MASQUED MYSTERY PARTY! Come in costume! Stay the night in the Big Maze! Enjoy Cake and Cocktails, Games to Play, and meet Ponyville's newest visitor from afar!”
She sighed. Pinkie Pie always made these parties sound so fun and inviting. Fluttershy avoided any get-together with more than her five closest friends, but a Pinkie Party was so good.
Sometimes she even tried to go out to one. The laughter and music sounded so good, but they sounded a little scary at the same time. The closer she got, the harsher the lights were, the less friendly the voices sounded. Sometimes she'd even force herself to go up to the table, grab a cracker with cheese or a sip of cider, and try to talk to somebody. She could hover near them, look at them, then mumble something about going to the bathroom to nobody in particular, then fly off as soon as she was out of sight, shivering and hating herself.
Fluttershy was disturbed from this reverie by something calling her name. She turned around and saw the human running up to her.
“C-could you take me home? Just for a little while.”
Fluttershy blinked. She pawed the ground. “Oh, hello human! I thought you were staying with Twilight Sparkle.”
The human looked over its shoulder. It was sweaty and its eyes were wide when it looked back. “Not anymore.”
She waited. The human didn't elaborate.
“Well, I suppose I could take you in for a little while,” Fluttershy said, trying not to sound to excited. Excessive enthusiasm could scare away vulnerable animals, and this human reminded her of a lemming in a grove filled with foxes. “Would you like that?”
The human wrapped its arms around her and almost lifted her off her feet.
The human let go of her, straightened up, and coughed nervously. “Um, yes. That would be very nice. Maybe you could just, not tell your friends about it? For a while?”
“Oh don't worry, it's nice and quiet at the edge of the woods.” She reached up a hoof and patted the human on the small of its back. “Just please get on if you don't mind.” She knelt down. “You know how to ride, don't you?”
The human sat awkwardly on her. “Maybe?”
“Please hold on tight," she said. She straightened up and flapped her wings.
A warm, wet feeling spread down her back. Fluttershy heard the scream and felt her burden grow much lighter.
#
Reiko cut the eye-pattern for the last indigo paper chain.
“Thank you so much,” she said, with a long sigh.
Pinkie cocked her head. “Why are you thanking me? You're helping me with this.”
Reiko nodded and picked at her bite scabs with the reptilian arm. “Yes. I'm helping you, Pinkie Pie. I'm helping you plan a Pinkie party. That's what I'm grateful for.”
This human was very strange. “Well, thank you for helping me to help you help me.” She giggled. “Fingers sure are handy for preparing parties.”
Reiko snickered. “I get it.” She scratched at some of her stitches and surveyed the assemble bright balloons, streamers, and games. Reiko sure was an eager worker when it came to fun things.
“Sure you don't want to visit nurse redheart to have that looked at?” Pinkie Pie said, gently.
“I'm used to doing needle and thread work on myself,” Reiko said with a laugh.
She looked up at Pinkie expectantly. “Can we ice the cupcakes now?”
#
Applejack groaned, turned over, and covered her ears. She'd just been disturbed from a very nice dream involving a pair of royal geldings, an all-male cheerlading squad, and a swimming pool full of applesauce.
Pots and pans were clanging. Granny Smith was shouting something, but it didn't include the words “timber wolves”.
Applejack swung her shutters open and poked out her head.
“Granny, what in Tartarus are you catterwalling on about?”
“The carrot-heads is at it again! Ah knew it, I darn-tooting knew we couldn't trust them! Hide her husbands! Arm yerselves! The war of Canterlot aggression is happenin all over again!”
Applejack trotted out in front of her grandmother, and gently removed the apple corer from her grip.
“Now Granny, just calm down and tell me what yer caterwallin about. Maybe ah can help.”
Granny snorted and kicked at the air. “If'n I told you once, I told you a hunnert times, you can't trust them inbred high-and-mighty beef-eatin' lilly-livered hexenmiesters!”
At this point, Applejack wondered if Granny had gotten the small cider bottles confused with the distilled eight-year-old apple brandy, again. (Last time Granny had scared away a visiting group from the Fillydelphia Gay Colts Chorus and then worn down her dentures trying to eat Carousel Boutique.) “Who's inbred and lilly-livered? This isn't about the Apple Family Disease, is it?” Applejack said, trying to steer the conversation into more lucid waters.
Granny Smith garrumphed loudly and pawed the ground. At least she wasn't actively charging off to fight some conflict that had ended decades before Applejack was born. While her fury had temporarily choked up her voice, Applejack fetched her a little cup of iced ginger tea to sort out her senses.
“Now, Granny, ah did tell you that tha phantasm-flowers are just for keepin out jackalopes, and you shouldn't mix them into the carrot green salad,” Applejack said, trying and failing not to sound condescending.
“I know well enough what's a carrot green and what aint, ye uppity whippersnapper!” She took a resentful gulp of tea. “I was sorting out defensive hallucinogens from good food crops before ye'd learned to stop stickin anything shiny into yer mouth!”
This at least reassured Applejack that her close relative was in some state of lucidity. “Then what are all these carrot-headed hexenmiesters you're shoutin about?”
Granny Smith sighed and sipped a little more tea, as if to prove she'd gotten control of her temper. Applejack didn't trust the display.
“You know how the Principality of Equestria began with three squabblin tribes?”
“Of course,” Applejack snorted. “I was Smart Cookie in the big play at Canterlot.”
“Do you remember what happened between then and the founding of Ponyville?”
Applejack blinked. “Between?”
Granny finished her tea and sighed. She pushed the door open with a hoof. “Walk with me, dear.”
Applejack followed her into the western cauliflower field. She wondered breifly why they bothered growing cauliflower. In her view, it was just brocolli that didn't try hard enough.
“Do you know about the Great Buffalo Massacre, or the Flesh Wars, or Chancellor Pieface's Cattle Defense Pact?”
Applejack shook her head.
Granny Smith drew up a thick wad of something from her throat and spat onto the ground. “Of course not! Unless it happened three years back or five eons ago, you youngins think it aint worth knowing. Now shut your trap and listen well.”
Applejack followed Granny past the cauliflower into the oakra patch.
“We earth ponies didn't always have enough food for Princess Platinum's people. That was okay often, by their reckonin', because they had what you might call another source.”
“A food source other than food?” Applejack said, letting her skepticism show. This wasn't going to be like her tall tales about her with the entire Colt Soccer League and Prince Brightmane after winning the swimming championship in a frozen lake, was it?
“You might call it...different food. See, back then the uroc ancestors of cows and buffalo hung around the earth ponies for protection, and because we could make the grass we walked on grow greener and richer. Officially, none of three ponies could wage war against the others, and the people under their protection, but Princess Platinum was pretty crafty...”
It was around then, halfway through the strawberry field, that Granny's saggy face faded away and Applejack found herself walking through the past. There were doppleganger illusions cast, so that a guard like Big Cabbage would keep talking to the bull he was supposed to protect while a pair of unicorns levitated it over the snowy road, bound and gagged. What use where sentries when a single Come Alive spell could send your cheese knives on a stabbing spree through the shed where the nursing calves were kept? It was a good morning when the same number of uroc allies started out to work the farms with you. Princess Platinum denied everything, but there were some royal-grade weapons amongst those “vigilante raiders.”
“I don't understand, how did the urocs help them get more food? Where the unicorns usin' them as slave labor in salt mines or sugar mills? An' why kill some of the urocs? That would just deplete yer labor.” Applejack could see the horror of some creeping magicians using their powers to make your friends disappear, but Granny Smith was leaving something out. Either that or there was something was starin her right in the face.
Granny chuckled an ugly chuckle. She gave her a very sad, very knowing smile. “Don't you understand, honeychild?” She patted her with a hoof and stepped around a protruding root. “Bless yer innocent little heart.”
“What aren't you tellin me?” Applejack said, bristling.
Granny Smith looked away from her, over the gates that kept out tomato thieves.
“My granpappy, or maybe his granpappy, went on one of the Recovery Missions. Chancelor Pieface couldn't say anything about it, of course, because the unicorns would use that as an excuse to cry bloody murder and start a war. But he tried to get back the stolen urocs. He was real worried about them, yah see, even though his lil daughter was seeing a pretty heifer on the sly, but that's another story.” Granny Smith cleared her throat and leaned against the fence.
“He tried to get there in time, but there was a nasty rainstorm obscurin' tha land, and the unicorns had conjured up some willowisps to cover their tracks...”
Applejack pawed the ground, waiting to for her dear old granny to get to the point already. She talked about how long they'd gone, and about a funny smell coming from the unicorn cookfires. It wasn't anything like roast potatoes or hot stew, but it didn't seem burnt either. Applejack expected some nasty description of broken urocs looking up with dead eyes, or a heap of barely-alive mine workers, scored by the whip and broken by exhaustion.
“Cracked bones. Nothing but bones, all gnawed and splintered,” Granny said, with grim relish.
Applejack laughed, horsely. “Now I know yer pullin one of my legs. Granny, why'd you drag me out here for some load of horse apples like that?”
“Hark at me laughin,” Granny Smith said. She looked as serious as slow death.
“Yer...yer not sayin' they made allies with some nasty dragons or chimeras or somesuch and offered up urocs as sacrifices?”
Granny Smith shook her head.
“Princess Platinum denied it outright. Sometimes she e'en had little bits of gristle in between her teeth when she said it. She kept on swearing blind she knew nothing about the raiding parties until the Chancellor brought out her youngest son for a little encouragement.” She snorted. “Well, most of her son. It's dang tough to get a straight word out of a unicorn. But she fessed up pretty quick after that, about the dark silver league and the secret larders. We mighta come to slaughter if the Divine Sisters hadn't made manifest around that time.”
Applejack snorted. “That's plumb crazy! And even if it is true, which it aint, I'm sure that Rarity and Twilight and all the fine unicorns from here to canterlot would never do such a horrific thing! These is modern times for Pete's sake!”
Granny's solemn, knowing stare was worse than any smug grin.
Applejack kicked the gate open and turned her back on her. A dreadful site met her.
“My tomatas! And Rainbow Dash told me there weren't any early frosts down for this year..”
She was too busy mourning a beautiful crop of heirloom vegetable-fruits to notice the chill wind that slammed the gate behind her.