Cadance let out another yawn at the strange request. The little burst of energy she had gotten from her rest in the back seat of the human vehicle had worn off a good ten minutes ago, and having been up for more than a day and night cycle already, she was feeling the effects despite the earth pony in her. “Alright, but then I need to go to bed. I’ve been awake for far too long already.”
“Of course,” Mulder quickly agreed.
There was a turn of the knob on the bathroom door before Scully peeked her head out. “Wait a minute, if you’re going to do anything, I want to be there to observe it,” she told Cadance before looking over to the closet. “Now, can one of you get my bags and hand them to me?”
In an effort to make up for her previous mistake that unnerved the human female, Cadance picked up Scully’s luggage with her magic before floating them over to the door. As she did, Mulder’s eyes went wide for some reason, and he jumped over to snatch his video camera off of the dresser to use it to follow the movement of Scully’s bags before they got to the door. Then, Cadance opened the door for Scully, since she doubted the hairless female wanted to be exposed to the only slightly warming air of the human’s version of a stable just after leaving the bath.
And that’s where everything went wrong.
When Cadance opened the door for Scully, the human female let out a startled cry a few seconds before Mulder quickly turned the camera away from the open door where the girl was standing before Scully grabbed her things out of Cadance’s magic and slammed the door closed.
“Mulder!” Scully yelled from behind the door. “You better not have gotten any of that on tape!”
The human boy looked up from his device with an uneasy expression. “But Scully, Cadance was transporting your luggage-”
“Mulder! I swear that if you do not rewind and tape over the footage you just got, you won’t have to worry about a bunch of Men in Black showing up to take evidence of alien life,” she said. “Because I will have already smashed that damn camera!”
The threat made Mulder flinch. “But Scully, if we just cut away from the display halfway through, that will just give anyone wanting to discredit the footage that much easier a-”
“MULDER!”
As the boy stopped talking and looked down at his device, Cadance lowered her ears in apprehension “Did I do something wrong?”
Mulder looked back towards her. “Your species never invented clothes, did it?”
“We have clothes,” Cadance told him. “I just don’t like wearing them outside of formal occasions.” After moving to Canterlot and meeting the type of pony that went around dressed all day, Cadance did as little as possible to emulate them.
Mulder raised an eyebrow. “And everyone's okay with you…” He stopped himself and frowned. “Then again, every alien abduction story I’ve heard says they’re naked, maybe we’re the odd ones,” Mulder mumbled before looking back to Cadance. “In our culture, it’s taboo to be seen naked by someone of the opposite gender outside of...certain interpersonal relations. When a man sees a woman accidentally like that, its a source of great embarrassment, usually for the woman.”
The odd custom made Cadance ask for clarification. “So, you only get naked with a female you like,” she reasoned.
“Pretty much, yeah,” Mulder before his eyes darted away from Cadance.
“And you haven’t been naked with Scully?” she asked for perfect clarification.
The door to the bathroom flew open before Scully came out in a sweatshirt, with pants made of the same material. “Okay, let’s see a demonstration of your magical powers,” with a slight twitching at the corner of her mouth.
Cadance looked back and forth between the humans. If they had been ponies, she would have called them uncomfortable. But, ponies had a saying about assumptions, and Cadance was no donkey. On top of which, determining the status of their relationship and level of attraction was key to plotting out her plan of setting the two of them up.
So, she forged ahead. “Answer the questions, or no magic,” Cadance told them.
“N-No, I haven’t...been naked with Scully,” Mulder finally told her.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
Scully covered her face with a hand. “Oh God.”
After a few seconds of silence, Mulder looked down at his camera, then over to Scully, then back down to Cadance. “You know what, it is pretty late,” he said before closing the little screen on his device. “I think we should go ahead and turn in for the night.”
Despite the late hour, Scully forced herself to stay awake as she typed on the portable computer that she had set up on the cheap motel room’s desk as Cadance fidgeted on her bed. While Scully had been surprised at Mulder’s abrupt end to the interview, it was actually very gratifying to know that when presented with a real live alien that was willing to give full disclosure of everything she knew in return for an extremely lewd conversation involving Scully, he had actually turned her down.
Not to mention the trust he was placing in Scully. The female agent had fully expected Mulder to stay in the room they had rented all night, if just to watch Cadance while she slept to make sure she didn’t disappear. Just the idea of which was pretty creepy.
Now that I have time to adjust to the phenomena that Cadance is able to produce, I find myself focusing more on the odd differences in our language and cultures, rather than the fact she is apparently a magical unicorn with wings, Scully thought as she put the words on the screen in front of her.
Despite speaking perfect English apart from a few grammatical oddities like the word anypony and calling the motel a stable, which she says isn’t the product of a translation spell after being questioned by me moments ago, Scully typed, she has next to no knowledge about our culture and possesses huge gaps in what anyone would think to be universal common knowledge even to a being that’s only been on Earth a grand total of five minutes. The greatest instance of which is not being aware of human dress, but having working knowledge of a switch to turn the lights on in the motel room that we are currently staying at.
The sound of Cadance rolling around on the bed stopped before she spoke. “Are all human beds this uncomfortable?”
Scully had to pick the chair she was using up to turn it around to face the pony. “Well, motels are pretty much the bottom of the barrel when it comes to sleeping accommodations,” she admitted. “Which I doubt is up to a princess’s usual standards.”
A few seconds passed in silence, and Scully’s curiosity got the best of her. “So, if your a princess, your country is a monarchy ruled by your mother and father?”
“No,” Cadance answered with a shake of her head. “Equestria is ruled by a group of four princesses, although it’s my adopted aunt, Princess Celestia, that makes all the decisions. My only real duty as a princess has been to catch the Crystal Empire up with the rest of the country because the area was banished into the shadows for the past thousand years.”
Scully felt as if she should have turned on her tape recorder to pick up the alicorn’s answer. “Are you saying that your society has been around for over a millennium?”
The question got a nod from Cadance. “Yes,” she said before standing up on the bed. “I’m sorry, but can I do something about my sleeping arrangements?”
“Well, as long as you don’t do anything to the room that would void our deposit,” Scully told her. She didn’t know what it was Cadance planned, but as long as Scully held no expectations, then Cadance couldn’t blow them out of the water.
Before she could say anything else, Cadance’s horn lit up and she disappeared in a flash of light that also filled the air with the sound of an odd popping sound. A tense dread filled filled Scully as she looked at the empty bed that had held the alien being not moments before.
Oh no, Scully thought in a panic. No no no no no!
Mulder was going to kill her. Partner or not, Scully didn’t think her losing the only real evidence that had ever been found of alien life and the existence of the paranormal all wrapped up in a single being would be taken well by a man so in need of finding something miraculous, he had seriously looked for a Loch Ness monster in the continental United States.
Well, it’s not as if I could have stopped her, the woman told herself as she tried to come up with a defense for when it came time to crush Mulder’s hopes and dreams. She had teleported! Even if Mulder had stayed around, put a leash on Cadance and took every possible measure they had in constraining the pony, she would have still gotten away.
But...Scully doubted that would keep the FBI man from...doing something very stupid.
She took in a deep breath and...did about all she could in this situation. Okay...God, I know I haven’t been paying much attention to you as of late, and I’m really sorry for that. But if you could somehow find it in your heart to bring Cadance back here, I-There was a soft bang as Cadance appeared in the middle of the room, along with with a large mass of fog.
“This should do,” Cadance said before actually pressing parts of the low cloud together with her hooves, then jumping atop the thick mass of moisture to curl up in a fashion similar to a dog before looking down at the gapping woman. “Goodnight Ms Scully.”
Scully tentatively reached forward and ran her arm through the cloud, feeling absolutely no resistance from the thing that was holding a pony who weighed nearly twice as much as her currently slept on. But...that’s not…
To avoid her brain from completely shutting down, Scully took in a deep breath, turned around, saved the document on her computer, shut it off, walked under Cadance, and fell on the bed like a tree that had been cut down in a single swing. Her head hit the pillow and she closed her eyes.
I’m never going to get used to this.