“Wait, wait, are… You’re serious?” Twilight asked disbelievingly while struggling to contain her laughs, looking at Rust Bucket like he had just grown seven new heads in as many seconds. The aptly named stallion leaned back and grunted dejectedly.
“Yes, I’m serious. Couldn’t sit right for a week when I got here. Can we please be done with my story now?” he grumbled out, trying to look anywhere but at the assembly of four other ponies that were sitting around the campfire with him.
It was night time, now, and Twilight, Rust Bucket, Daymist, Sweet Breeze and Topaz Rune were all seated inside of the water park, which was not fully active right now. Aside from the wave pool very gently moving in the distance, everything was still and silent in the enormous chamber. The light outside, like Topaz had pointed out, had dimmed to the point of being total darkness. As the water park was one of the only places in the entire Hotel with little to no flammable material, the group had set up a fireplace in the middle of it all. Combined with the sounds of the wave pool, it created a very gentle, relaxing ambiance.
“You kinda skimmed over the Puckwudgies part!” Daymist pointed out with a teasing grin on his face. “You need to tell her more about the Puckwudgies!”
“You listen here you little sh-” Rust Bucket seethed, pointing at the kid, then faltering at the harsh looks everypony else was giving him. He lowered his hoof and scowled. “...For the love of… Why did I agree to come to this stupid meeting?”
“Because Twilight needs to feel more comfortable, you know?” Topaz replied simply, smiling over at the unicorn in question, who shrunk down a little under the attention. “Plus,” he continued, looking at Rust Bucket a bit more firmly. “Weren’t you the one to start this tradition?”
Rust Bucket snorted. “Yeah, but if I’d known every time it happened I’d have to go on about the freaking Puckwudgies, I’d have never started it. And besides, I started it because Kale and I were the only ones around when I showed up. We needed to get to know each other if we wanted to avoid killing each other.”
“So you’ve said,” Sweet Breeze commented before shrugging her shoulders noncommittally. “Well, you’ve given your story, Rust. If you want to go, you can. None of us are gonna stop you.”
Rust Bucket snorted and shook his head. “Nah. I’m here now. Might as well spare my rickety old legs the pain of climbing the stairs a little while longer.”
“Actually,” Twilight suddenly cut in with a curious frown on her face. She lifted herself up a little and looked around. “Now that you mention her, where is Kale? Shouldn’t she be here?”
Nopony spoke for several seconds, and the once jovial mood instantly plummeted into a somber one. Twilight looked around at them all for several moments before slowly lowering herself back to the ground. It was Daymist who broke that silence. “She’s… sad... all of the time.”
“Can you honestly blame her?” Topaz asked solemnly, shaking his head and lightly pulling on the collar of his vest with a hoof. “She’s been here for three centuries. Hay, she’d been alone for an entire hundred and fifty years before any of us ever showed up. That much time on her own…”
“And being away from her son,” Sweet Breeze continued, looking down into the fire. “...She didn’t take it well, I heard.”
“It broke her,” Rust Bucket bluntly summarized, his eyes glazing over as he thought back on it. “Heh. I barely really remember it, it was so long ago, but when she first saw me, she thought I was a hallucination, that she’d gone mad or something. She didn’t think I was real for a good long time, telling herself that ‘she’d finally cracked.’ Ignored me for weeks… Took me deciding to stop trying to talk to her that got her to actually communicate with me.”
“Wait… she has a son?” Twilight choked out, looking at them all with wide-eyed shock and her ears drooping against her head.
Nopony spoke, plunging the entire room into silence yet again. A wave gently crashed somewhere in the background, echoing softly in the enormous chamber. Daymist shook himself slightly, though it was Sweet Breeze who spoke. “Uh… yeah… she does.”
“Did would probably be more accurate by this point,” Rust Bucket grumbled, idly poking the floor with a hoof. “I doubt that even if the little trotter’s still alive outside of this stupid place that she’d even recognize him…”
“Rust!” Topaz scolded with a harsh glare. “Come on, that’s uncalled for!”
Rust grunted and said no more, opting to look into the fire. Before any of the ponies there could say anything else, somepony cleared their throat, and everypony but Twilight went rigid. All eyes turned to the new arrival, and just at the edge of the firelight was Kale Sow, looking at them all with an unreadable expression. “...Sorry I’m late,” she managed to say in an equally tired and unreadable voice before trotting up to sit down directly across from Twilight.
“Kale?” Breeze asked in disbelief, looking at the green mare with confusion in her eyes. “I thought you weren’t coming? You… didn’t come to mine.”
“Or any of ours after Rust,” Topaz furthered, a curious look also in his eyes. “...What changed your mind about Twilight?”
Kale ignored Topaz and looked directly into Twilight’s eyes as if searching for something. “I… don’t know, really…” she sagged and looked down at the stone floor under her hooves. “But… locking myself in my room all the time… It’s a good escape, but…” she glanced up at Twilight again. “...it doesn’t do the ponies who have to share this place with me any good.”
“Can you try and be happy while you’re here?” Daymist asked hopefully, standing and trotting over to Kale. “Because I don’t like it when you’re sad.”
“None of us, do… I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile in my entire time here,” Topaz nodded along slowly. “And let me tell you… it’s not a good feeling.”
Kale sighed and looked away towards one of the distant windows on the back wall, near the large water slide, studying the darkness beyond the frames. She scoffed. “I’m so… tired and sick of this place...” she said bluntly, closing her eyes. “The fact that every time I wake up in the morning without hearing my little boy’s eager voice asking about breakfast before he runs off to school is enough to make every morning miserable… The fact that I wake up to find that my husband isn’t sleeping next to me makes the bed feel like the frozen north’s coldest blizzard… it’s taken a toll on me, and it shows. And you all hate seeing me like this, don’t you? You wish there was something you could do but you know that I’m beyond help.”
“Hey, I never once believed you were beyond help,” Sweet Breeze rebuked with an almost offended wince. “Kale, it’s not a good feeling that you won’t let us help you, even though we want to.”
“What would it change?” Kale demanded, looking into Breeze’s eyes with the most emotion Twilight had seen in her so far. “Would it bring my little boy back to me? Would it let me wake up to my husband’s loving embrace? Would it let me leave this stupid Hotel if I let you ponies try to help me?!”
“Hey, hey,” Topaz quickly stood up and gestured calmingly to Kale Sow. “Easy. We understand… you don’t want our help... But, uh… this isn't the time to talk about it, okay? Can we just…” he glanced down at Twilight, who was now looking awkwardly down at the floor. Sagging, Topaz slowly sat back down. “Can we get back to the arrival stories? Please?”
“Oh, can I go next?” Daymist asked, eager to lift the mood around the campfire. Nopony seemed to object, and with an excited little chortle, he lifted into the air above the campfire with a quick buzz of his wings. “So, it had been a perfectly normal day! I had gone to school, had a good lunch, aced my tests and went home! I played hoofball with my dad in the backyard for a little while, ate some dinner and went to bed!”
“Riveting,” Rust Bucket muttered under his breath, just loud enough that everypony heard him
“At least I didn’t have a Puckwudgie stuck to my-”
“Kid!” Rust barked, his cheeks tinting a little red. “I will invent a clobbering device and clobber you with it if you bring that up again!”
“Heh, sure, whatever you say, Wudgiebutt,” Daymist shot back before doing a little backflip in the air while launching back into his story. “So, there I was, waking up the following morning. But it wasn’t my bed I was waking up in, oh no, it was a stranger’s bed! I remembered what mom always said; don’t talk to strangers. Being in their bed, I figured I’d probably overstepped that boundary a little bit. No idea where I was, I decided to bravely explore my new environment to find a way back home to my bed. School would be soon!”
Daymist gave a dramatic wave of his hooves over the fire, almost reminding Twilight of Rainbow Dash whenever she told campfire stories, except smaller and cuter. Relishing the approving looks of the rest of the ponies present, he kept on telling his story. “So I went out of the door and found the long hallway with all the rooms. All alone, nopony around, just me. I tried to find stairs, but when I did, I heard voices talking! Strange ponies in a strange environment: Stranger danger if ever I’ve heard of it!”
Twilight held up a hoof to her muzzle to try and stifle an amused little laugh, resulting in an adorable snort. Everypony looked at her with a mixed assortment of expressions ranging from mildly disgruntled from Daymist to deeply amused from Topaz to slightly offended from Breeze. Now blushing a little from all of the incoming stares, she smiled bashfully up at Daymist. “Sorry… uh, continue.”
“...That was not one of the sounds I heard,” the pegasus colt in question continued before doing a little twirl over the fire, the wind generated by the movement making a few fading sparks circle around him on their journey upwards. “But stranger danger is no joke, so I ran back to the room I had woken up in and his myself away from who I thought were the bad guys. I heard them talking to each other, on the way, one of them mentioned dinner, and it clicked!” he gave his wings an extra hard flap to make the flames distort and billow out. “I had been foalnapped by a cult of cannibal ponies, and I was next on the menu!”
Sweet Breeze burst out into a fit of giggles. “Yeah, sure, we’re all cannibals. Next thing you’ll tell me is that Twilight is a literal worm that eats books like a clothes moth!”
“Was that a bookworm joke?” Twilight asked with her cheeks puffing up in irritation. “I feel like that was a bookworm joke.”
Topaz chuckled sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. “Eh heh, I may have told them about how excited you were in the library earlier…” he admitted, not quite willing to meet Twilight’s gaze.
Twilight frowned and smacked him on the back of the head.
“Hush lemme tell my story!” Daymist wined, crossing his forelegs over his chest and pouting pathetically.
“Sorry, sorry,” Topaz, also chuckling slightly after the smack he had just received, gestured at Daymist. “Keep going, bub. We’ll be quiet.”
“Speak for yourself,” Rust stated snidely before also going quiet.
Daymist groaned in frustration but went back to telling his story regardless, with that little bit of extra flare to try and make up for the decidedly not-macho pouting he had been putting on display a few seconds ago. Of course, Twilight already knew the rest of the story, more or less. Daymist hid and hid and, despite his best efforts to spin it like he was being cool and brave and stuff, it was clear that he had just been afraid. Eventually, hunger had forced him out of hiding and he had asked the others to feed him; which they did.
And around they went, each one telling their story. Sweet Breeze’s was pretty short-lived, as she didn’t exactly try to add much narrative flair to it like Daymist had done. She was content with a simple retelling of the events. As seemed to be the trend (with the exception of Rust Bucket), her story more or less amounted to a regular day in her life, then waking up in this hotel after going to bed.
Topaz, of course, had already relayed most of his story to Twilight earlier, and so only gave the highlights; how his roommate had thrown an impromptu party in their university dorm room and, after a few dares from some of the party attendees, how Topaz had gotten absolutely wasted. He admitted to losing memory of the night somewhere around the time he got trapped in a closet with a guest he didn’t know. He at least recalled managing to thump down onto the couch in the aftermath to get some sleep, and then he woke up in the Hotel.
Kale Sow, much to everyone’s disappointment, abstained from contributing her story, citing that ‘she didn’t want to talk about it until she knew Twilight better.’ In fact, aside from being there, Kale Sow was remarkably quiet the entire time, barely offering any commentary or thoughts on what was going on.
And eventually, everypony’s stories were done. Then, all eyes fell on Twilight. Topaz nudged her in the shoulder with his elbow. “This is the part of the night where the newcomer tells us about what they were doing before they got here.”
Twilight made an ‘o’ with her mouth and stood up from her resting position. “Okay, I can do that. Kinda wish I had some notes prepared or something, but…” she took in a deep breath, let it out, and began. “I woke up one morning to discover that the cutie marks of all of my friends had been… switched. Moved around, altering their destiny’s and their true selves. Ponyville, our home, was falling into disarray, as each of us had a big part we played in the town. Rainbow Dash was the head of the local weather teams, but when Rarity, the fashion designer in the town, started trying to do her job, the sky was covered in square-clouds making checkerboard patterns and depositing random weather types all over the place. Frostbite on top of your sunburns is… it was painful, I heard.
“And that was only the beginning of the problems. The local Apple Family, Sweet Apple Acres was falling into chaos because Applejack had just kind of run off and left Pinkie had taken her place. Rainbow Dash wasn’t cloudbusting, having taken up residence in Fluttershy’s shack and upsetting the local wildlife to the point they were prepared to cook her alive in a really big cauldron! It was just one piece of chaos after another... I eventually discovered the source, but couldn’t see a way to put things right, at first. Luckily, my baby dragon, Spike, gave me the pep talk I needed. I brought my friends what they needed to remember who they were and restore their true selves, and spent a good long while putting things right. Once everything was saved…” Twilight paused and looked down at the floor beneath her. “...I mentioned that I’m Princess Celestia’s student, right?”
Everypony slowly nodded their heads in acknowledgment.
“Well, the Elements of Harmony did something. I don’t know what, but when they did it, I saw my friends' faces filled with shock and horror, and then I was waking up in a strange, star-filled abyss. Princess Celestia was waiting for me there, congratulating me on doing something that Starswirl the bearded had been unable to do. She said it was time for me to ‘fulfill my destiny’ and cast some sort of spell on me. I was engulfed in blinding light and…” she sighed and gestured around. “I woke up here.”
“That’s rough,” Topaz said in a quiet voice, slowly nodding while his eyes flicked away from her to look into the fire.
Twilight nodded and lowered herself back down onto her belly, also looking into the fire.
“Yeah… it is…"