When Celestia said, "Hikuro has been made", Bright Black expected something different, but nothing occurred that he could notice - he was still in the Canterlot solarium, with Beachberry, Sweetsong, and Celestia.
Celestia went on, "Well! You are welcome to visit any time, but I think you're done here for now."
Bright Black raised a hoof. "How... ?"
Beachberry said, "Remember how you got to Chelyabinsk? Same way."
Bright Black remembered a doorway and some stairs and it had been sort of as if Chelyabinsk had been under the village and off to the side. But he followed Beachberry as she led off through an archway, down a hall, and into a vaulted chamber with lots of stairways in every orientation. "The House of Stairs. Connects lots and lots of shards - not all of them, but a great many. What's here changes from time to time, depending. It's grown a bit since you were last here."
Bright Black followed Beachberry along the wall and through another door. He asked, "House of Stairs, as in Escher?"
"Right. And now we're in the basement below town hall, our shard. So, what do you say - we get you settled in to your new home?"
Right. That. A weariness settled over him, as it already seemed to have over Sweetsong, and they headed out to Coconut Cream's home.
As they approached it, Beachberry continued, "I'm not sure what sort of clues we'll find. It's not like we haven't seen it before, and she probably just asked to be whisked off. Doubt she took the House of Stairs. It'll probably just be..."
She trailed off - Sweetsong had pulled the door open and they saw a large gray cube balanced on one point taking up the middle of Coconut Cream's front room. They rushed in and examined it. Bright Black pointed out, "There's a dim grid. Five squares by five on this face."
Sweetsong circled around. "Same on these two, too. There's a bright square in the middle of this side over here. Looks like a picture of a telescope."
Bright Black found another oddity, pointed it out. "This square isn't solid gray. A little mottled. I can't quite make out the image."
As Beachberry examined the telescope, Sweetsong speculated, "I wonder if this is a map of shards. We are here. She might be in that other one."
Beachberry backed up, looked the cube over, and squinted. "Probably not. The shards we can get to through the House of Stairs don't really map onto a cube very well. At all. And there are a lot more of them than this."
Bright Black tapped the mottled square with his hoof. That square became outlined in dark black. After bringing this to the others' attention, they tried pressing other squares, and soon found that each of them could select a square, giving it an outline of their color and deselecting their previous selection. Aside from that, nothing appeared to happen. They could not select the bright square.
So they sat down and thought. What is going on here? I mean, in general. What am I going to do with my life? I can't go into the office anymore. I can spend all my time on this very artificial task, to save someone who isn't even the same person as I knew before. I'm not going to be with Kimiko. I feel cut loose. I guess I can keep doing some of the old things... His eye moved over to Coconut Cream's table, where a short stack of papers lay... alongside the remains a few crafts projects, forgotten teacups, and some sheet music.
A few seconds later, Sweetsong took note of his wandering gaze and proposed, "With that thought in mind, how about we search the place as we originally intended to?" You intended to. I still don't understand what this is all supposed to accomplish.
The search was half cleanup - the home was even more messy than usual. Partway through, somepony knocked.
Beachberry answered the door. "Hi, Ray. Are you all filled in on the situation?"
A male voice replied, "Mostly, and I want to help."
Bright Black took a moment to recognize the unusually saturated blue Earth pony as Ray Glass. He'd been helping Coconut Cream with the observatory, but as Bright Black hadn't been terribly involved with that, they hadn't spoken much. Ray took a look at the cube and raised an eyebrow. "Huh. Anyway, wanted to remind you not to stay out too long. Town meeting at 7."
Beachberry nodded. "Not leaving on a grand quest quite yet. Thanks."
Ray asked, "So... what is it?" and took their silence and general mystification as an answer. "All right. What's the quest? What's the plan?"
Bright Black replied, "That's our real question, yes."
Beachberry took a deep breath and cautiously said, "I could learn a spell to locate Coconut Cream," After a few moments, she added, "which would be a lot more useful if there were one of her. But I might be able to exclude specific Coconut Creams."
Seems like cheating, or missing the point. Actually, any sort of quest seems like it would be missing the point. Some colossal waste of time, a set of arbitrary hoops to jump through.
In the mean time, Sweetsong had said, "Would it help if we found the others in advance?"
Going through some sort of pointless puzzle quest would make me unhappy. But... suppose instead that Celestia has made the quest something that I would not see as wasting my time.
Beachberry replied, "Probably."
Point: Celestia said we can't find Coconut Cream before she will have changed her mind. That's equivalent to saying, "She has to change her mind before you can find her." Is there anything we can do to speed that up, without finding her first?
Sweetsong said, "I suspect there's another Coconut Cream in my hometown, since we had Sky Wishes, Gardenia Glow, Peachy Pie, all of the mane 6 including short-hair Fluttershy, and a Beachberry."
Beachberry nodded. "I think that's my great grandmother. And yeah, it'd be kind of odd for eleven of the twelve collection set ponies to have lived there. Shall we?"
Bright Black closed his eyes. What is the point of this? To help her, sure. Why is that so difficult? To give me a sense of achievement? Keep me busy while she works things out on her own?