Pinkie Pie flopped on to her bed, lying on her back. Ahh, comfy. She'd barely had time to sit down and properly process all that had gone on in the last two days. Around her friends, she'd been trying to keep a brave face, for them as much as for herself. After all, if Pinkie wasn't laughing, something was really wrong. She sighed, and her mane wilted a little as she stared up at the ceiling. A thousand years? Mr. and Mrs. Cake weren't kidding when they said this place had a history. Gummy floated by on a slightly deflated balloon. There were a few around the room, but no fresh ones; she hadn't been around to blow up more. She turned over and tried to distract herself with a party popper. With a few deft movements of her jaws and tongue, she picked it up and just managed to tug out the cord. With a bang, streamers shot into the air and rained down over the bed. As she spat out the husk, she couldn't help but make a few observations. Who even makes stuff this way anymore? Has nopony ever figured out that something is wrong with like, ninety percent of everything?
She shook her head, trying to dispel the thoughts. Why did the truth have to be so awkward, so upsetting? Why couldn't it all just go away? She turned over and buried her head in her pillow. Laughter, dammit, laughter, Pinkie! Element of...
"... augh!" Every thought she tried to console herself with led right back to uncomfortable territory. She turned back on to her back, just in time for a balloon to bump into her flank, upending its passenger on to her belly. She sighed and couldn't help but smile a little. "At least I have you, Gummy." The alligator just blinked vacantly. His nonplussed gaze seemed to strike some chord within Pinkie; it inexplicably brought her to a minor epiphany, by way of the incomprehensible system of Pinkie logic. "Y'know Gummy? You're right..." Pinkie backed up a little, lifting him gingerly between her forehooves and placing him on her head. With a careful side-flip, she vaulted out of the bed while balancing Gummy, and started towards her bedroom door. "Our friends are counting on us! Let's go!"
With the baby alligator on her head, she trotted down the stairs with a renewed spring in her step. She looked around the front room, which doubled as the shop. Mr. Cake was still out back, busy baking, and Mrs. Cake was dealing with a customer, so she decided not to interrupt. Applejack and Rarity, however, were gone. After the last time her friends ran off without her, she knew better than to assume the worst - something important probably came up, or they just decided to let her stuff her face with cake at her own leisure, and returned to Fluttershy's cottage to help Twilight. In any case, she wasn't going to hold it against them. In the mean time, she could do some snooping around. She was always finding stuff she didn't know was there around this place, and according to the story it was real old, so she figured it probably had a few secrets left to spill - secrets she wasn't looking for until now.
Using their distraction, she darted across the room to the basement hatch and slipped inside. The Cakes barely batted an eyelid. Pinkie cautiously continued down the wooden steps. They were creaky and musty, and this old cellar was cold. She shivered and tried not to think about it. The half-light made it difficult to pick out details in the clutter, but her eyes slowly adjusted. It was largely barrels, boxes, lots of ingredients. No, no, this was all too recent. She nosed a couple of crates out of the way and started to dig into the older stuff, left here by Cakes of generations gone by. With customers coming and going and the kitchen firing on all cylinders, she was reasonably confident she could make a bit of noise without rousing suspicion, so she began to chuck things out of the way. Empty boxes nested within each other thumped against the floor as she hauled them out, followed by the clatter of loose planks and a few tools. It all seemed to be junk back here, and all she was doing was getting covered in dust while Gummy watched from the banister, until...
Buried under the decades of abandoned miscellany was a fairly large, slightly rotted crate, marked simply 'FIREWORKS'. The paper label was frayed and stained, and looked like it would disintegrate at a mere touch. Pinkie hooked her hooves in the top of the crate and pulled on it gingerly, sliding it a short way across the floor before the top board crumbled under the pressure. She huffed, but it was just about far enough out to take a peek inside. It largely contained much of the same junk as was around the rest of the room, with only a few actual fireworks inside. They too were greyed and corroded, and a couple had been split along their seams, their powder long since rotted to nothing. However, one of them was in particularly good condition. She blew some dust from the pile (making herself cough in the process) and pulled it free. It was particularly large, about the thickness of her head, and the colourful nose and shaft were jammed into a rough wooden tube. There wasn't any obvious place for her to pick it up, so she nosed it over to the bottom of the stairs, where rays of light from the hatch could illuminate maybe some trace of identifying detail. When it rolled over a narrow shaft of light, she jumped back and gasped. The light revealed the insignia of a familiar balloon painted across the nosecone. Well that was quick...
The Everfree forest, even in its deepest parts, was quite bright in these conditions. Most of the trees were missing their leaves, letting light through to the forest floor, and the omnipresent snow reflected it around. Gone were the creepy shadows of the summer's night they last set hoof here together. The two pegasi were making good time, and Twilight, with a sock pulled clumsily over her horn, did her best to keep up. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy stopped at a steep hillside, waiting for the unicorn.
"What are you doing with that thing on your horn anyway, Twi?" Dash chuckled, landing next to Fluttershy on the crest of the hill.
"It's..." Twilight panted as she caught up. "It's an experiment. Seeing if keeping my horn warm makes much difference to my spellcasting ability." Rainbow just raised an eyebrow. Twilight stopped for breath at the hill's edge, looking down at the hillside. It was steep enough that much of the snow had just rolled off it, revealing bare dirt and rocks, with a little grass nestled in here and there. It took a few minutes of observation and contemplation, but before they moved on, Twilight made a connection. "This place... we've been here before." She trotted up and down the ridge, examining a few things in detail; a rock, a tree, the hillface itself... "Definitely."
"Huh? When?"
"It was that night of the Summer Sun celebration, when we went after Nightmare Moon! This is the hillside that collapsed underneath us!" Twilight chuckled, satisfied with her conclusion. Fluttershy peered over the incline to look around, and Dash craned her neck to look for a few landmarks.
"Oh yeah..."
"Which means, we might be able to take a shortcut..." Rainbow twitched an ear to Twilight's reasoning. "The last time we were here, the collapsing hillside brought us off track, so we had to go the long way round, across the river. This time we can follow the original route I'd mapped out! Which is..." Twilight peered across the chasm at the foot of the hill, to the other side, where a similarly steep hill led up to another path on the other side. "... over there!"
"Race ya!" Dash grinned, and bolted for the other side before Twilight had any chance to respond.
"Oh my..." Fluttershy hesitated a little before weakly fluttering after her. Twilight grimaced as she watched the two pegasi sail across the canyon. It wasn't like her to be competitive, but this did give her a chance to test her theory, and a twist on a familiar spell she'd been working on. She leaped off the crest of the hill, and entered a skid down towards the edge. This wasn't the same panicked, chaotic slide she had to be rescued from last time; this was focussed and controlled. Above, Rainbow slowed up a bit to watch what she did. She figured Twilight had a trick in her saddlebag, but she kept an eye on her just in case. Fluttershy might need some help in these conditions too.
About five lengths from the edge, Twilight jumped. There was no levitation behind this, no extra force, just a regular jump, and at her speed it was enough to clear the edge and enter free-fall in the canyon. Dash halted in mid-air and banked around. Twilight, what are you doing! As she descended to reach her, she didn't hear screaming, she didn't see her legs flailing; just a unicorn with an apparent death wish. She steeled herself, accelerating faster by the second... Barely a length before reaching her, and only four or five lengths off the ground, a flash of light stunned the pegasus. She pulled up to stop herself, but in the cold, dry air, she was still headed for a snow bath.
Thump. She pulled her head from the snow and looked around. She stood up and beat her wings once. Nothing felt broken, but something still confused her. Where did Twilight go?
Up above, Fluttershy watched the whole scene helplessly, barely keeping herself airborne. From her vantage point, she could see another flash, between the two cliff tops, and a lilac blur shooting from it, up the hill on the opposite side. It arced across the hill face, coming neatly to a stop in the snow at the top with a thud. Now stationary, she could make the lilac form out to be... Twilight?
The unicorn scrambled upright and replaced the sock, pulled off in the rough landing. She quickly looked around herself to get a bearing on her new position. She broke into a grin when she worked it out.
"It worked! It worked!" She giggled and bounced excitedly, still brimming with adrenaline. It wasn't often she got to do something exciting like that. Fluttershy wheezed and glided in to land next to her, slipping a little on the crest of the hill.
"What... what worked?" the pegasus panted. Rainbow Dash came into view behind them, zipping into the air above the canyon. Her jaw dropped as soon as she noticed Twilight standing on the far hill, perfectly okay. The unicorn chuckled and went straight into an explanation, rather than gloating in her success.
"That was a little variation on winking out I've been working on. Winking out conserves momentum, and normally it conserves directionality too, so when I wink in, I'd still be facing the same way. What I'd figured out, and just managed to test, was uncoupling directionality from momentum, so with a little extra focus, I turned through about a hundred and fifty degrees, and when I winked in, I was catapulted up the hill with the momentum from falling."
"Uhh..." Dash tilted her head, struggling to comprehend the jargon - to her, motion vectors were something more easily visualised than described. Fluttershy was also bamboozled, but not quite as visibly. Twilight sighed and rephrased.
"Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out, normally facing the same way, but I figured out how to flip it around." she explained. The pegasi nodded slowly. "And that is why I needed to keep my horn warm." She smiled and tapped the sock.
"Okay, just... warn us next time, okay Twilight?" Rainbow swooped in behind the two ponies on the ground.
The original route was indeed much shorter, and they reached the ruined castle within fifteen minutes. The dark stone walls stood out prominently from the white snow blanketing the forest floor. Bare trees lined the path to the entrance, and the steps, while slippery, paved the way to the front door.
"This place is huge, Twilight... I never saw how big was in the dark!" Rainbow Dash gawped at the complex. Stone towers wrapped in vines dotted the skyline, and the castle sprawled out before them, keeps and courtyards joined together by arches, tunnels and terraces, some of them still in one piece, but most of them collapsed on themselves to some degree.
"Exactly! There's no way we could have seen it all in the ten minutes we were here last time, so somewhere in those ruins, there's got to be something that can help us!"
"It might not be dark, but it's still... creepy..." Fluttershy gulped.