//------------------------------// // Epilogue // Story: Power Pony Adventures: El Taco Loco vs. The Red Menace // by CoffeeMinion //------------------------------// A world away, a cool midday breeze blew past a strip mall not too far from Canterlot High School, stirring the voluminous hair of two girls perched upon a picnic table, and rustling the small plastic bag that lay between them. “I guess this’ll do,” Aria Blaze said. Next to her, Adagio Dazzle sighed and started digging through the bag. “Here,” she said, handing a trio of wrapped packages to Aria. “You had the double-deckers?” “I had two double-deckers and one regular… but what’s this other one?” Adagio scowled, looked down, and teased the wrapping open. She let her expression sink into a deep frown, and then threw the package back into the bag. “I can’t believe this; they messed up our order! If only we still had access to our magic, we could make these worms beg for sweet release from the suffering that we could mete out to them.” Aria gave her a flat look. “Or if Sonata was still here, you could just make her take it back. Or she probably would have noticed to start with. She wasn’t bright, but there were one or two things that she…” A chill silence fell over them. Adagio fidgeted with the small package in her hands, but then eventually raised it, gave it an experimental sniff, and took a bite of it. A burst of hot spices suspended in a tomatoey delivery system assailed her taste buds. “Ugh.” She set it down on the table, then fished around in the bag for a napkin. “I hate to say this, but we really do need to come up with some more ideas for how to get her out of that thing.” Aria reached back around herself and pulled the rolled-up and half-squished comic book out of her rear pants pocket. “Yeah. Leave it to Sonata to get herself sucked into a comic.” “I told her that merchant she bought it from looked sketchy.” Adagio shook her head and picked back up the… whatever it was she’d been eating. She eyed it, trying to decide if she was hungry enough to take another bite, or if she'd rather throw it at a passerby. All at once, the gentle wind around them began to pick up. “Hey, Adagio,” Aria said, sounding alarmed. Adagio looked at her just in time to see the comic fly up and out of Aria’s hand. There was a flash of light, and then a shape came falling out of it, face-first onto the ground next to the table. “S… Sonata!” Adagio said, jumping down off the table. And indeed, there on the ground lay their blue-skinned sister, groaning and trying to raise herself on shaky arms. “Give me a hand,” Adagio said to the unmoving, wide-eyed Aria. “Come on, Sonata, sit down… there… now what happened to you?!” Sonata’s mouth worked itself open and closed and she turned her mildly concussed gaze between her two sisters. A moment later, that gaze landed on the bag. “W... what’s that?” Adagio gave her a small, quick, rare smile, then reached in and produced one of the wrapped packages. “We were… thinking about you, and so we got some of your favorites for our lunch.” She started to unwrap it. “Here, this one’s a—” Sonata’s eyes focused with crystal clarity on the item before them. She drew in a lungful of breath, then started screaming. She went over backwards in her seat, scrambled back to her feet, took another look at it, and set off running away, continuing to scream at full volume. “What is it?” Adagio called, setting off after her. “Sonata, come back; what’s going on?!” Aria sat staring incredulously for a moment, but then shrugged, reached over, and retrieved the taco that Adagio had tried to offer Sonata.