Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.
-Benjamin Franklin
-Pinkie Pie-
"Ohhhhh...but...what if they're in trouble? Heavens knows what horrible, ghastly creatures there are in the Everfree! I won't be able to live with myself if any of them were...were...!"
"I don't think you have to worry about that, Rarity. As long as they're gentle and respectful, they won't have to fear the animals in the forest."
"But what about the cockatrices? Or the dreadful manticores?"
"Well..."
"They could even be attacked by a roving pack of timberwolves! Oh, the sight! Twilight and Applejack and Rainbow Dash, all getting mauled and torn to pieces by those beasts and their terrifying jaws..."
"I...guess..."
"Oh come on, Rarity, calm down! They're fiiiiiine!"
"They are not!", Rarity yelled, temporarily dropping her ladylike manner in a flash of anxiety. Sugarcube Corner's dozen or so midday customers suddenly turned towards the source of the piercing shout, ignoring their meals for a moment as they shot nasty looks at the ivory-white unicorn. The constant chatter instantly faded away into an awkward semi-silence, drawing more attention to Rarity with its emptiness. A nearby pegasus muttered something under his breath before turning back around and resuming his conversation, and nobody doubted it was something very rude. The dozen or so gazes were painfully uncomfortable, and Rarity nervously blushed as she buried her face in her vanilla cupcake.
"It's only been three days," Fluttershy replied. "Didn't they say that they would spend that much time in the woods? Plus, it's not easy to trek through the Everfree, you know that. We just have to give them some time, is all."
"You're right. So," Pinkie Pie asked, "how is Spike doing, Rarity?"
"Oh, he's so well behaved for such a young dragon! Such a gentlecolt. Although, I think he's a bit worried about Twilight (of course, why wouldn't he,) and her friends."
"Hmm... I guess-"
"Holy heck, Princess Luna is here!"
There was a flurry of movement as curious ponies flocked outside, and the ear-grating noise of chairs scraping against the ground was the only thing audible for a brief second. As the mob flooded out the narrow doorway of the bakery, the three friends simply sat and watched through a window as a small mob of people formed around a tall, midnight-blue pony. Princess Luna was indeed there, walking through the thin crowd with an entourage of bat-ponies at her sides. Her glass slippers clopped along the stony cobbles with a tinkling sound, clearly distinct even above the mumbles and murmurs of the gathered spectators. It was truly an odd experience, watching an alicorn stride above the heads of her subjects - and at high noon, too! Luna wasn't completely unable to be out in the sun, but it was certainly a rare sight.
"Why here, though? In the middle of the day, as well..." Rarity mumbled.
The answer came sooner than expected. It was hard to believe at first, but Luna was making a straight beeline for Sugarcube Corner. Each step she made brought her - and the crowd - closer and closer to the bakery until she was through the doors, her silhouette an imposing sight against the bright background of Ponyville's colorful streets. A pair of guards kept the outsiders at bay, blocking the entrance with their short halberds. She paused and looked around for a second, a calm and mystical air about her very being, before finally setting her eyes on the only other ponies in the room.
"Hello there, ponies. Have you seen your friends around lately?"
"Who, Twilight and the others? They went out on a trip into the Everfree forest three days ago," Fluttershy answered. "There were strange noises coming from it a few days ago, and they went to go investigate. In fact, just two days ago, we heard a lot of sharp snaps...like from a whip!"
Luna's poker face was a good one, but Pinkie could tell something bothered her about that statement. She was a master at reading the emotions of ponies, and for all of their power the Princesses were still no match for her natural instinct.
"So my suspicions are well-founded. At least you three are here... Where can we get some privacy?"
"Uh... we can head upstairs...?" Pinkie suggested.
"That'll do just fine. Lead the way, Pinkie Pie."
Pinkie Pie, followed by Luna, Rarity, and Fluttershy, walked past the bakery counter and display, up the stairs, and through the second door on the right. She held the teal-blue wooden door open for the three other ponies before locking it and grabbing a nearby stool.
"That won't be necessary, Pinkie, I can sit on the floor. This is your bedroom, yes?"
"Uh-huh!" Pinkie responded. The cream-yellow walls and pastel-colored furniture gave the room a sense of happiness and warmth fitting for its cheerful occupant. Party supplies were stacked neatly in boxes around the room, and a closet door labeled "FOR SERIOUS PARTEES" suggested that there were a lot more stashed away. Though that day was hardly a special occasion, streamers and balloons festively decorated the walls and furniture.
"We'll be safe enough. I understand that this might be a bit unexpected of me - you know, coming here without warning..."
"It's fine, Princess Luna."
"Just Luna, Pinkie. At least, in private. Anyways, I guess I owe you all an explanation. Where shall I start?"
"At the beginning, please," Rarity answered. "Wherever that may be."
"Hmm. I suppose it started approximately a week ago, when I was dreamwalking. You are familiar, right?"
"Isn't that where you go into somepony's head while they're sleeping and look around inside their dreams?"
"I'm more of an observer, Pinkie. It should have been like any other time, but...I found these odd-...distortions, shall I say..."
"How so?"
"There was a distinct lack of magic. An emptiness, for lack of a better word. I took a look at them, and they were... mystifying, to say the least. Let's just leave it at that," Luna sighed as she unfurled her wings. She couldn't tell them the truth; at least, not yet. How would they handle it?
"So, is that why you're here?"
"I...suppose so. I'm here on account of a development that occurred just a day ago..."
-Luna-
Luna stopped for a minute to look at the dots in front of her, once again unsure of how to proceed. It was foolish of her to expect no changes, but the lack of mana had led her to imply otherwise. Plus, it couldn't be that silly to expect some kind of event, right?
Where there had been only three colorless minds before her before, six now stood in the vast void of the dreamscape. The three new lights were definitely more vibrant, suggesting some sort of magical capacity in these new beings. She could feel the magic emanating from each of them like the radiant heat of a hot flame. Sometime in the past two days, a trio of magical entities had joined the magic-less ones in both mental - and physical - proximity. How and why were both mysteries to Luna, but she had a hunch as to where she would find the answer. One of the new beings was much, much more powerful than the others - in fact, it was likely one of the most powerful beings in all of Equestria at the moment, judging from its enormous magical emanation.
Entering such a strong consciousness undetected was undoubtedly going to be a daunting task, but Luna knew what she was getting herself into. She had slipped through the mental blocks of similarly powerful beings, and this one would be no different. The familiar, cautious ease of her thoughts between the slips and cracks was routine to her, as it had been for centuries, and she was through in no time at all.
When she regained her focus, Luna found herself in a shabby and hastily erected room in an indistinguishable location. The wooden floor was cold and unpolished, and the walls and ceiling were made of a drab green canvas. It was defintely a tent of some sort, like the roomy ones the southern nomads lived in. Tubes hung from the roof at regular intervals, shining a pure white light on the furniture. Crates and boxes of all shapes and sizes were stacked alongside the far end of the tent, while several cots and mats lay on the ground opposite. Three small tables lined the other side, each of them with a metal folding chair at its side. The tops of them were covered with various artifacts of unknown make and purpose, but Luna could make out several pony-made tools and pieces of equipment. Everything was alien and foreign.
The one recognizable thing she could see, however, was a very familiar purple alicorn sitting on the ground.
"Twilight!"
The lavender pony paid no attention to her surprised exclamation and continued to quietly sit over something. Luna quickly galloped over to Twilight and set herself down in front of her, intent on grabbing her notice.
"Twilight! Can you hear me?"
"..."
"Twilight Sparkle, I need you to look at me!"
"..."
Luna sighed as she watched her look over the papers in front of her. Twilight muttered as her violet eyes swept across the pages, clearly focused on the task at hand. She was in one of her study trances, and Luna remembered how it would be nearly impossible for her to snap out of it when she was truly entrenched in her studies. The only thing the Princess of the Night could do was read the sheafs of paper along with her...
Twenty-six symbols at the top of a page, copied over and over down the evenly spaced, parallel lines, were the first thing to draw her attention. To the left of them, several three-columned tables with a drawing, its meaning in Equestrian, and a series of the symbols again in each row. It was clearly created to translate a language, which meant that the symbols were a sort of alphabet. Luna had seen the letters before in her previous sessions, but she had foolishly glossed over them in favor of the meanings given to them by the aliens. Now that she had looked at them from a pony's perspective, however, they were actually quite similar to a snippet of an ancient script she had stashed back in the Royal Library. It was crudely carved onto a slate, but it was still thousands of years old and rather poorly preserved. If only they had patched that section of the roof up properly...
The corner of another paper, hidden beneath a list of grammatical rules, caught Luna's eye as she cursed herself for her past mistakes. She shifted the other papers aside with her hoof and pulled out the sheet of interest with her magic. It was an anatomical (if Twilight's artistic abilities could be called that) representation of...just what Luna was looking for.
They weren't all that different from minotaurs, if she was being totally honest. Similar torso, hands and arms that were exactly the same, both stood on their back legs... although the aliens had no hooves. Their faces were radically different from anything she had seen but still notably simian, and their leg-hands had stubbier fingers than the monkeys she had seen in the jungles of western Zebrica.
Luna was excited. She had information on the aliens, their language... her dreamwalking had reaped a great reward, and coming to the most powerful mind turned out to be a great choice. Twilight-...
Wait.
This was Twilight's dream.
It had to be. That huge magical potential was clearly hers.
Which meant that she had seen the aliens. And if her speck was close to the aliens...
What was Twilight doing there?
-Rarity-
"Oh dear... Will they be okay?" Rarity asked Luna.
She was right to be worried. Luna had just told them what was going on in the Everfree: several dangerous anomalies had materialized, and it was up to her and her Night Guard to take care of it. Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack were all in the forest, and they were in deep trouble if what Luna said was correct. The princess paused for a second, clearly hesitant to answer.
"Yes. We will do all we can to protect her, and I assure you that your friend will be unharmed. She's an alicorn, she can handle whatever the Everfree throws at her."
"Oh, thank goodness! I was worried for a while."
"I'm glad to hear they'll be safe, Princess Luna."
"Likewise, Fluttershy." Luna eased herself up from her sitting position with those two words, then slowly walked over to the single window in Pinkie's room. She stared out into the front of the bakery, watching her Night Guard as they stood at attention in front of the doors. The crowd that had gathered just a few minutes ago had largely dispersed, and the previously excited ponies had returned to their daily errands.
"Pinkie," Luna asked as she pulled herself back from the windowsill, "in a couple of short hours we will be leaving for the Everfree. We'll set up a stockpile right outside of the forest by dusk. By then, we'll be inside of it. I don't need to tell you the Everfree's a big place; even with our current forces, we'll take a couple of days to fully comb the trees. Two or three, I'd wager."
"Okie-dokie! Good luck!"
"Good luck," said Fluttershy.
"I wish you the safest of travels, Princess Luna."
"Thank you three for your blessings. I'm sure we'll all need them in the coming days."
With that, Luna pushed open the bedroom door and stepped out, closing it behind her. The trio of friends stayed to discuss what she had told them, oblivious to the reality of the situation at hand.
-William-
The sprawl of black text on white paper brought stirring memories back to the aged director, of a time where things were much simpler and...manageable. It had only been twenty-something years since he was a junior scientist himself, excitedly working away at his physics experiments with a youthful energy. The papers once spoke to him of a world of discovery, a world of brand new possibilities...
Now?
He sure did find his discovery - a whole two inches of it, sitting on his desk.
From what he had managed to scrape together of the tens of different reports, apparently there was some sort of feedback from the Portgate. It had started two days ago, with the surge of energy that the sensors picked up. Ever since that spike, the energy readings had been two hundred times higher than before. It wasn't a big increase in terms of the big picture, but explaining it to the suits without them panicking was going to be a doozy. Big-wigs always managed to misinterpret scientific data. Nobody knew how; they just did.
William frowned at the tablet in his hand as its screen lit up with a reminder. 4:56 minutes to LEADER MEATING, right beneath 3:55 and above andersonWilliam logged in. He didn't care that the meeting was five minutes away, or that he had misspelled "meeting"; he was in a state of exasperated exhaustion that just barely left him enough energy to slog through the absolute mess that was the Portgate incident. Some of the staff had been referring to the Portgate as the "Ring of Death", which was acually a very apt description of William's situation.
The alarm surprised William, rousing him from his microsleep-induced trance as several papers fell off his desk. He anxiously grabbed the tablet before turning the alarm off and scurrying to make himself look presentable. It only took William fifteen seconds to un-wrinkle his collared shirt out, ten to sort the papers on his desk, and another five to accept the already incoming video call.
"Greetings, Director."
Twenty-four faces covered the screens in front of William, each one the head of one of the twenty-four nations investing their resources in the project. Each one was staring at him and his grubby mug.
"Hello. I, uh, suppose you're here for the briefing, right?"
"What do you think? Ever since we learned you've cut repair times in half, we've been ready to hear straight from the horse's mouth!"
"Actually, that was more of a-"
"So! Any news?"
"Well...not much. Work is still continuing on the Portgate, and we'll be done by fifty-two days, give or take a week or two. Not precise, I know, but it's the best we have. Oh and...and, uh..."
"And what?"
How was he going to say this?
"There's, um...we've had a development recently. We're receiving, uh... feedback from the Portgate's sensors."
"What kind?"
"It's, uh... energy."
The murmurs of the world's most powerful men and women freed up a couple of minutes for William to cringe at his poor choice of words.
"...potential security risk. What else?"
"Um...t-the readings first spiked up just two days ago. and since then...they've stayed up, though just a little bit more than before. And they're...noticeably more regular than before. We're getting a steady rhythm of energy pulses, ranging from about 110 to 130 beats per minute."
More discussion, more regret.
"We can't just be unprepared if the time comes. Anderson, we want more security around the Portgate. I'm sure you won't need it, but just in case... we're expecting a doubling, at the very least."
"I...alright."
"We don't know what caused that, but we want to err on the side of caution if it does turn out to be potentially dangerous. If it's any consolation, we've managed to keep the media off your back so far...though we don't know how long we can keep it up."
"Thank you."
"That is all. Don't disappoint us, Anderson."
Within seconds, all of the faces had disappeared off the now dark screen. William held his head in his hands, aggrieved by the thought of more people around the already-crowded Portgate. They would just be an obstacle to the repair process.
"Assistant?"
A shifting bundle of concentric circles popped up on the tablet's screen."Yes, Anderson?"
"When are the inspectors due?"
"Tomorrow, from 6:00 AM to 12:00 AM."
"Ugh...in the Portgate area?"
"South Wing Scheduled Time of Inspection: 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM."
Embezzlement of the entire project's funding wouldn't make up for the headaches, William thought as he shuffled the papers around on his desk. He poured out his fifth Aspirin of the day into his hand, swallowed it dry, and began the arduous task of ordering the stationing of a whole platoon of soldiers halfway across the facility in twenty-three hours. If anything, he would at least be sharing his troubles with the security head of the Bunker.
Suffering, it is said, finds relief in company, but William was feeling everything but relief that moment.