The bare lightbulb flickered as it warmed up. Lyra couldn’t think of the last time she’d been down to the basement of Bon Bon’s candy shop, but she was sure it had only gotten mustier in the time she’d been away. Not even Bon Bon cleaned down here.
“I know I had one somewhere…” the candymaker said, sifting through a pile of things leaning against one of the walls. “Aha!”
From the pile, she dragged out a corkboard, half an inch thick and wide enough to accommodate even the most enthusiastic of conspiracy theorists, which made it perfect for their needs. She wasted no time putting it up against one of the clearer walls.
“There. Perfect!”
“What’s this for, Bonnie?” Lyra asked, walking over to her. She liked being allowed to walk again; the previous few days spent confined to a hospital bed had heightened her appreciation for it.
“This,” Bon Bon said, “is our war board. This is how we’re going to stop Hollyleaf.”
“Really? Because it just looks like a normal corkboard to me.”
From another pile, Bon Bon pulled out a stack of paper, a few pens, and a box of thumbtacks. “We know next to nothing about Hollyleaf right now, so we’re stuck on the defensive. We can only react to what she does, and that’s not how you win a war."
“So,” she continued, “we need to learn as much about her as we can, and this board will help us to organize that information.”
“That makes sense. Is this something you learned from the agency?” Lyra asked.
“Sort of. Alright, first of all…”
She took a sheet from the pile. On it, she wrote the word “HOLLYLEAF”. She stuck it to the top middle of the board. Under it, she placed three more sheets: “GOAL”, “ABILITY”, and “LOCATION”.
“There; these will help us focus on what’s important: what she wants, how she intends on getting it, and where she’s holed up.”
“What makes you think she has a home base?” Lyra asked, but a moment later she came up with the answer to her own question. “Oh, the bloodleaf!”
“Right. She said she had more, so she has to be keeping them somewhere.” Bon Bon ripped off a smaller scrap of paper, wrote “Bloodleaf” on it, and tacked it under location. “We should ask Vinyl if bloodleaf requires any specific climates."
─────
No, not really, Vinyl said. I think it prefers warmer climates, but it’ll grow anywhere with enough maintenance. As long as it gets sun and water—and, uh, blood—it’s good to go. Which is great if you have horn rot, but not so great for figuring out where it came from.
─────
“Let’s move on to goals, next,” Bon Bon said. “What does Hollyleaf actually want?”
“Life,” Lyra said. “At least, that’s what she told me.”
A piece of paper with “Life?” written on it was added to the board.
“That doesn’t tell us much.”
“Yeah,” Lyra said. “What about what she was doing in Ponyville? We still don’t know why she was here—or what she was trying to do the first time!”
“Let’s ask around, find out what she did while she was here.”
─────
“What did she do? Well, mostly she just talked to ponies,” Pinkie Pie said. “Interviewed them, I mean. For her story! She must have met half the town, at least!”
Lyra frowned. “Did she interview you?”
“Yup! She asked me all about Ponyville, and about Sugarcube Corner, and about Twilight… nothing suspicious, though.”
“What about the first time she was here, the Missing Morning?”
“Twilight tried to figure that out,” she said, frowning. “She didn't, but she did say she had a theory—she never told us what it was, though.”
“Could you ask her for us?” Lyra asked.
“Sure thing!”
─────
“I talked to her,” Ditzy said. “I was picking up Dinky from school, and she was walking down the same path as us. Asked me about what I thought of Ponyville and what it was like being a mailmare here. She seemed really nice, though. Maybe a little too nice? It’s hard to say sometimes. I guess I was right this time, though.”
“And you didn’t see anything odd in her future?” Bon Bon asked.
“No, nothing. Just a lot of talking.”
─────
“She interviewed my whole class,” Winter Bell said. “And Miss Cheerilee! She didn’t ask us anything weird, though. Just stuff like what street we lived on, what we liked to do for fun, places we liked to hang out, that sort of stuff.”
“And you didn’t recognize her?” Lyra asked. “You and I were the only ones who saw her the first time.”
“No? She looked and sounded completely different.”
“She did?”
“Yeah,” Bell said. “Didn’t you see?”
“She looked the same as she did the first time to me.”
“Weird. She must have been in disguise or something, right?” Bell said.
“Yeah, I guess. Oh, hey, I have an idea! Thanks, Bloo!”
─────
“Hey Featherweight, wait up!”
The little pegasus turned around, the camera around his neck swinging slightly from the motion. He waited patiently as Lyra ran up to him.
“You know that mare from the newspaper who was asking everypony questions last week?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You took a picture of her, right? You take pictures of everything.”
He nodded again, smiling this time.
“Can I see it? It’s really important.”
He nodded once more, then reached into his bag and pulled out an album. He sifted through it for a moment, then pulled out one photograph in particular and passed it to Lyra, who levitated it up to her face.
That was most definitely not Hollyleaf.
“You’re…” Lyra swallowed the lump in her throat. “You’re sure this is her, right?”
Featherweight nodded.
“Hmm…”
─────
Bon Bon frowned. “That… certainly explains why no one else noticed a dead mare walking.”
“Yeah,” Lyra said, pinning the photo to the board. Featherweight had made her pay four bits for it, but she hadn’t been in the mood to haggle. “It means we can’t rely on anypony else being able to spot her coming.”
“But, at least we know. Now, back to her motives.”
Lyra sighed. “Right. So, all she did was talk to ponies?”
“It looks that way. She must have been after something, but if all she did was ask generic questions…”
“Unless she asked somepony else something really specific?”
Bon Bon snorted. “Unfortunately, we can’t quiz the entire town on what she asked them. Something tells me it wouldn’t have helped much, anyway.”
A scrap for “Interviews?” went onto the board. Featherweight’s photograph had already been put up under “Ability”.
“Oh, and I also have this,” Bon Bon said. “I’ve looked through it a few times, there’s nothing we don’t know in there, but it might help for context.”
She pinned an old newspaper onto the board next to the scrap. It was the article the local paper had printed about the Missing Morning. Hollyleaf’s picture, printed in black and white, took up a third of the page.
Lyra looked at the picture. A frown settled onto her face.
She still looks weird, she thought. There’s definitely a resemblance, but—
She looked over to the photograph of Zigzag, then back to the newspaper, then back again. Her eyes widened.
“Bonnie, I need to check something.”
─────
“What did Hollyleaf look like?” Winter Bell repeated.
“Yes,” Lyra said, panting. She’d run all the way to Bell’s house for this. “She was green, right? Green coat, white mane?”
Winter Bell looked at her like she was stupid. “Uh… no? Red coat, light green mane.”
─────
“She’s a different pony?” Bon Bon said.
“I—I don’t know!”
She looked at the photographs again. In black and white, the mare in the newspaper looked similar enough to the mare she had met, at least enough that Lyra had been willing to write off the differences as the fault of time or perhaps emotion. But now, she knew better. And, looking at it now, she could see lots of smaller differences: the ears were shaped differently, the horn was shorter.
“But this isn’t Hollyleaf—and that isn’t either!” Lyra said, pointing at Featherweight’s photograph. “I’m sure of it now! And it fits with something she said to me in the inn, too! When I told her I knew she was Hollyleaf, she didn’t know who I was talking about at first! ”
“Sweet Celestia,” Bon Bon whispered. “Then the pony we’re dealing with isn’t Hollyleaf at all…”
“She’s something else, Bonnie! Hollyleaf had an entire life before she suddenly disappeared and showed up in Ponyville, and I bet Zigzag was a real pony, too!”
“Then—then she’s not disguising herself as different ponies—”
“She’s possessing them!”
A noise from upstairs interrupted the moment. “Lyra!” a voice called down from above. “Lyra?”
“Down here, Pinkie!” Lyra called up.
Pinkie descended the steps to the basement in a flash. “Lyra, I asked Twilight about her theory—nice board, by the way, very conspiracy theorist—and it’s not good!”
“We’ve figured something out, too,” Bon Bon said. “It’s not good either.”
“No, you don’t understand!” Pinkie said, “This is super-duper-goliath levels of not good! Twilight says that when she was going through the castle after the attack, she only found one thing out of place: an old notebook! So, she checked the castle for spell residues, and what she found matched a spell inside!”
“Okay, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Lyra said.
“Nonono, you still don’t understand! That notebook belonged to Starswirl the Bearded, and that spell? It was the one that gave Twilight her wings! Twilight thinks Hollyleaf was trying to become an alicorn!”