“So, do you have room for me on the panel?” asked Minty Fresh.
“No,” said Cloud Hop. “I said you could join if somepony else dropped, but nopony did.”
“Oh.” Minty Fresh was sad. Sadness radiated from him like a blanket of depression as he slowly turned around and laboriously found his seat again—as though his entire life’s purpose had been denied to him, and he no longer found any point in existing.
At least, that’s what Cloud Hop liked to think. In reality, his panel was not actually very important at all, and nopony really actually cared all that much about it. Most ponies cared about a panel discussing the engineering behind weather manipulation the same amount they cared about that one potted plant on the porch they occasionally remember to water every two months. In comparison, the potted plant on Minty Fresh’s porch had withered into nothingness sometime last year and showed no signs of being noticed anytime soon.
Satisfied that everything was now in order, Cloud Hop waited for the one last remaining panelist.
… and waited.
… and waited some more.
“Does anyone know where Pixely is?” The panel was scheduled to start a scant two minutes from then, and Cloud Hop was getting worried he might actually have room for Minty Fresh on the panel, which would have been problematic given that he had just told him he did not have room on the panel. Once again, Cloud Hop was massively overestimating the amount of shits ponies had to give about his panel because nopony really cared. Like, at all.
“I don’t know, and I also don’t know why I don’t know,” said Berwyn, who was adjusting his notecards. “Because he was right behind me while we were walking up the stairs, and then we turned a corner and he was gone.”
“Pixely does have a strange habit of just vanishing into thin air,” Minty Fresh called out from the audience.
Cloud Hop idly wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that Pixely was a changeling. Then again, he hadn’t actually seen any of the new changelings change in the first place and wasn’t entirely sure if they could change so perhaps it was all hypothetical anyway and— oh crap the panel starts in one minute.
At that very moment, Pixely poked his head inside the room.
“Heeeeeyyyy—” began Cloud Hop, before he was promptly interrupted.
“Does anyone have a spare teleportation enchantment?” asked Pixely, ignoring all the confused faces now staring at him.
“No, why would anyone have a spare teleportation enchantment and why would you even need one?” asked Berwyn, raising an eyebrow.
“Well my university requires that I put an enchantment on my backpack to keep it secure when I’m using their teleportation grid that looks for malicious materials, but it decided that my presentation was malicious so it may have kind of vaporized my presentation, and the only spare copy I have is at home but that’s not on the university teleportation grid which wouldn’t really help anyway because it would just vaporize it again because I guess it thinks a stack of notecards is a threat to national security or something.”
Berwyn’s eyebrow was now raised so far that Cloud Hop wasn’t entirely sure how it was still attached to his forehead.
“I still have my old presentation though,” offered Pixely, pulling out his notecards from last year’s con.
“Just… use that,” said an exasperated Cloud Hop.
And so they managed to start the panel on time, and Minty Fresh still wasn’t on it, and he still didn’t really care all that much. Unfortunately, Cloud Hop’s presentation was first, and it was so boring that it put the entire room to sleep, so the whole endeavor wound up being kind of pointless anyway.
Oh well, there’s always next year.