I didn't wake up until well into the next morning. My head throbbed with the after effects of last night’s booze binge, but that was more than made up for by the warmth and content filling me. It took a few moments for me to see where I was through squinted and blurry eyes. I was inside of Trixie’s cart, lying on the fold-up bed with a light-blue leg wrapped around me. I could feel Trixie’s warm body curled up against me. Memories of the vigorous activities we’d gotten up to the previous night flooded back. Things had definitely escalated far faster than I expected. But I didn’t mind that at all. Right then and there, I was happy. Happier in so many ways than I had been for a long time.
Trixie murmured in contentment as she lightly squeezed me. “Mmm, that was a fine night in.”
“Yeah, I liked it too.” I yawned, in no rush to get moving. “Thanks.”
“There's no need to say thanks.” Trixie chuckled, nuzzling the back of my neck. “It was my pleasure as much as yours.”
I snickered. “I noticed.”
Trixie coyly nibbled my ear, sending a wave of pleasure through me. “I hope you've got a clear schedule for the day, because I'm not done with you just yet.”
I shifted around so that I was facing her. The vague feeling that I was forgetting something swirled in my head, but that was probably just the haze from just waking up from an exhausting day
The moment was ruined when there was a knock on the cart’s door.
Trixie groaned and glared at the door like it had slighted her. “Fans. My work's never done.” She called out to whoever was at the door. “The Great and Powerful Trixie isn't available right now! Come back later, please!”
“Trixie?” asked the last pony in the world I wanted to be on the other side of that door right at that moment. “It's Twilight. Is Starlight here? Spike said she didn't come home last night.”
Trixie faintly, almost petulantly, groaned. “What are you, her mother? Can't you come back later? We're busy.”
“I just want to make sure she's okay,” Twilight pressed. “I heard some stuff happened while I was gone, and I wanted to check up on her.”
My eyes widened as I realized why she must be here. Twilight wasn’t supposed to have returned from the Crystal Empire for another few days. If she was back, it had to be because she heard about what happened with the committee and my blowing off helping with the preparations. That meant she was back with a doozy of a lecture. Could she be mad enough at me that she no longer wanted me to be her student? Not that I’d exactly been the best student to start with, and I did just manage to flop the biggest assignment she’d given me yet. Then there was the fact she didn’t like Trixie. She wasn’t going to like hearing we were special someponies. All of that together could mean really bad things, like getting kicked out of my new home, get sent to prison or worse for failing her over and over again.
“Hide me,” I squeaked to Trixie.
Trixie quirked an eyebrow. “Wait, what?”
“Do you have any idea how much she'll freak out over this?!” I pulled the bedsheets over my head, because that would surely keep me hidden. But I wasn’t sure what else to do. I really, really didn’t want to see Twilight under these circumstances.
Trixie groaned, barely keeping her voice at a whisper. “Trixie knows she wasn't that loud, no matter how good last night was.”
There was another knock at the door, and this time Twilight sounded less patient. “Trixie?”
Trixie sighed and got out of bed. She opened the door a crack as she came face-to-face with Twilight, while still preventing her from looking into the cart.
I couldn’t see Twilight, but I could hear her gritting her teeth as she spoke. “Hey, sorry for waking you up, but I'm just really worried about Starlight. I heard she had a big argument with the Hearts and Hooves Day Committee, and ended up not helping out with the holiday. I’d feel a lot better if I could just talk with her for a bit.”
Trixie scoffed. “Yes, well, Trixie's not interested in the ramblings of a few old farts. How does this affect Starlight, exactly?”
“Look, I just want confirmation she's okay and nothing serious happened to her last night,” Twilight said, her patience fraying at the edges. “That's all. She was last seen with you, so I thought you would know where she was.”
“The Great and Powerful Trixie can confirm that she's perfectly fine.” Trixie haughtily brushed her hoof against her chest. “Now if you'll excuse Trixie, she has coffee to imbibe and a make-up show to prepare. And also some laundry to do. Coffee, then laundry, then show.”
“Well if you could just tell me where she is—”
I sighed. I’d come to know Twilight well enough to know she wasn’t going to give up easily. Hay, she’d probably cast a tracking spell to follow me here. At the rate Trixie was going, she was going to get herself into trouble on my behalf. That being the case, I teleported a safe distance from Trixie’s cart and then trotted towards Trixie’s camp. Maybe we could at least go with the fiction that I hadn’t been up half the night banging around with Trixie.
By the time I reached the cart, I could hear that Twilight was losing her patience with Trixie. “Trixie, I swear, I don’t really need this right now. If you’ll just—”
I did my best to sound surprised to see Twilight. “Twilight! There you are. I've been trying to find you all morning.”
Trixie blinked in surprise as she looked around Twilight to see me. “Oh, there you are, Starlight! Trixie was trying to tell somepony that you were okay, but that we didn’t know where you were at this moment. Not that somepony believed us, despite Trixie always being honest and trustworthy.”
Twilight turned to face me. “Starlight! I finally found you!” She wrinkled up her nose as she frowned. “Is everything okay? You don’t look great.”
I looked up to realize that my mane was a mess. That, and I probably smelled of certain activities from the previous night. Ugh, not the best start to the conversation. Once again I’d leapt before I looked. “Sorry! I-I got right up and started looking for you the moment I woke up.”
Twilight’s head tilted as she studied me. “Wait, you were looking for me? I just got back home a couple of hours ago. I wasn't supposed to come back until the end of the week. Why were you looking for me?”
I said the first thing that came to mind. “Um, I heard you were looking for me?” Was my voice always this high-pitched?
There was the slightest hesitation from Twilight before she chuckled. “Right, it's probably been one of those days where we kept missing each other.” She groaned and rubbed her forehead. “Sorry, been something of a long day. And long night. And a few long days and nights before that.”
Now that I got a good look at Twilight, she didn’t look so great herself. There were bags under her eyes, and her mane could have used some touching up. She must have gotten on the first train back to Ponyville after she heard what happened with the committee. “I think I can understand that,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. Twilight hadn’t started the conversation by yelling at me or directing her guards to arrest me and drag me to a dungeon, so this could’ve gone worse.
The brief flash of mirth extinguished when Twilight frowned. “Though there were a few things I wanted to ask you that I’m ... concerned about.”
Here it comes. My throat suddenly felt very dry. “Like what?”
“I heard you got into an argument with the committee, and you got kicked out of the preparations. It’s why I raced back to Ponyville on the first train I could get on today.”
I cleared my throat. “It's not that big a deal.”
Twilight’s ear flicked. “I think it's a pretty big deal. Especially when they told me that you wanted to change the entire holiday at the last minute. What happened? Were my notes not clear? Was there something I forgot? Normally everypony's easy enough to work with.”
I shuffled in place and didn’t meet her eyes. “I had a few ideas for how to make the holiday better. They were close-minded and kicked me out.”
“And inferior,” Trixie piped in as she combed her mane. “And boring, as Trixie recalls.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow. “'Make the holiday better'? What do you mean? I don't remember you bringing this up before I left.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, wanting to be anywhere else but here right at that moment. “I ... kind of used my best judgment?”
“Spike said you set all my notes and checklists on fire.” Twilight’s eye twitched in the way that never promised anything good. “Was that your best judgment as well?”
The words had sounded like an accusation, and I winced. “I didn't set them on fire. Fire just ... happened near them.”
Twilight’s twitching intensified and her words became icy. “If you objected to my scrolls so much, maybe you should have said something ahead of time. I put a lot of work into those for them all to just go up in flames, you know.”
I hunched my shoulders. All the work Twilight put into making those scrolls wasn’t something I'd really thought about. “I didn’t think I needed them.”
Twilight rubbed her forehead. “Maybe if you had followed my instructions then the committee wouldn't have given you the boot for wanting to change how the entire holiday worked.”
Something inside me started to burn when I was reminded of the committee and how they had treated me. “Hey, they didn't even give my ideas a fair chance! How’s that fair?”
Twilight met my gaze without flinching. “From the way they put it, you tried to bully them into doing away with all the romance for a romantic holiday. I get it you might not be happy with every aspect of the holiday, but there's addressing a problem, and then there's throwing the foal out with the bathwater. What's more, you didn't discuss any of this with me, which is a huge problem when you start trying to throw around royal authority in my name.”
I let out an annoyed huff. “So I can't do anything without your permission?”
Twilight groaned and pressed her hoof to her face. “You didn't do something without my permission! You threw away all my instructions and then went off to do your own thing! This was a serious breach of trust, Starlight!”
I stomped a hoof. “You're acting like I'm the bad guy here!”
“Not to mention you're a bore,” Trixie imputed as she put some coffee on the fire. “Really, don't you have any faith in your student?”
Twilight growled deep in her throat. “Several ponies are angry with me because of this! I said everything would be fine with Starlight in charge, and the whole situation blew up! Now I've got ponies throwing around rumors that I'm trying to ruin Hearts and Hooves Day, or even threatening to cancel it forever! Not to mention Mayor Mare and several 'concerned citizens' wrote me a very unhappy letter over this. This is probably going to be in the newspapers soon.”
“Oh good gracious!” I slapped my hooves to my cheeks in mock horror. “Not a letter! Was it sternly worded? Did they even use three exclamation points?!”
I all but heard the cracking as Twilight ground her teeth together. “I'm being serious here. As a princess, part of my job is to try and keep everypony happy. Now a bunch of ponies are questioning if I lost my mind appointing you to head the celebrations.”
My ears flicked and I turned my back on Twilight. “They're the ones who were wrong, not me. And I’m kinda hurt you’re not even considering my side in this.”
Trixie scoffed. “Besides, if it's your failure appointing the head of celebrations, doesn't that mean it's your failing?”
Twilight groaned again and ran her hoof down her face. “Okay, fine—you clearly aren't going to budge on this, so I’ll just call it a wash since everything worked out fine in the end. But it's going to be a while before I can trust you with anything like this again.”
That announcement caused me to wince. That one hurt. I’d thought I’d been making progress as her student. Her not wanting to give me this type of authority again stung a little. “But I—”
“No buts!” Twilight cut me off. “If you're going to cause big incidents like this, then I can't trust you with something as important as the Hearts and Hooves Day festival.”
Trixie tsked as she shook her head. “Oh no, how horrid. Hearts and Hooves Day didn’t go off without a hitch. Really, Princess, don't you have something better to do than ruin a nice morning?”
Twilight scowled at Trixie. “Trixie, now really isn't the time for more of your snide little comments, okay?”
That did it. “Hey! You can't talk to my girlfriend that way!”
Twilight blinked as though she’d been slapped. “Wait, you two are…?” She looked between us.
I felt my cheeks start to glow. It hadn’t exactly been my plan to just put that information out there like this. “Uh ... um ... yes?”
“You have the privilege of teaching Trixie's marefriend, yes.” Trixie wrapped an arm around my shoulders while glowering at Twilight.
Twilight groaned as she rubbed the sides of her temples. “I really don't need this...” She took a deep breath and gave us a very shaky smile. “That's ... nice. I’m happy. For you two. Maybe I should leave you two alone for now?”
“That would be great, thanks,” I said. I wanted this conversation over. Just being reminded of yet another one of my failures wasn’t what I needed in my life.
“Perhaps you should, yes,” Trixie agreed. “At least until breakfast is over. And lunch. And dinner. But Trixie would love to host you at the evening show.”
Twilight frowned as she studied Trixie. “Actually it's more lunch by now, but whatever. I'm going. We'll talk later, Starlight. I'll think about the evening show if I can straighten everything out before then. Bye.”
“Bye, Twilight,” I answered dully.
Twilight turned to go, but only made it a couple of steps before she turned back around. “Oh! One thing before I go. Spike seemed really down today when I spoke with him. Did something happen yesterday? Normally he's a bit depressed after Hearts and Hooves Day but some crystalcrisp usually helps with that.”
Trixie shrugged. “Trixie hasn't the faintest idea. Maybe you let him down too?” My fillyfriend muttered to herself, “As if that would narrow it down...”
Dread descended over me as I realized what I’d forgotten. “...horseapples.”
Twilight’s brow furrowed. “Starlight. You didn't forget to make Spike a very special something to help make him feel better, did you? You know, something else important I trusted you with? Something you said you could handle? Especially considering the fact you didn't actually help run the Hearts and Hoove Day celebrations?”
My ears wilted. “Okay, I bucked up on that one.”
Twilight clenched her teeth. “Starlight! That was important!” She covered her eyes with a hoof and took several breaths. “Look, I can understand things didn't work out with the holiday—things happen, I once tried to organize the town for a royal procession for Celestia, and long story short, the whole town got eaten by parasprites. But you should have been able to handle this one thing. Don't you care about Spike and his feelings?”
“No,” Trixie answered with exaggerated boredom. “Unless we're getting paid to. Were you getting paid for that?”
“Trixie,” I growled. “Now isn’t the time.” I’d been so wrapped up in my own stuff that I’d completely forgotten about Spike; that wasn’t fair to him. I could have taken some time between hanging out with Trixie and her show to have made Spike his crystalcrisp, but I’d been so wrapped up in my own horseapples that I hadn’t even crossed my mind.
Way to go, Starlight.
Twilight’s ears twitched. “It's important because Spike's my family. And I thought Starlight would feel the same way when we all live together.”
Ouch. Just … ouch. Of all the things I’d worried she would say, that one hurt the worst. I didn’t have a sufficient reply to that one. ‘Sorry, I’m a massive screw up who can’t be trusted with the smallest thing when you’re gone’ didn’t make up for hurting Spike.
The wheels turned in Trixie’s head as her gaze shifted from Twilight, to me, the Friendship Castle, and then back to me and Twilight. “Oooh. Trixie understands now.”
Twilight shook her head and turned away from me. “Okay, fine, I'll deal with that on top of everything else. Are there any other fires I need to put out now that I’ve returned way ahead of schedule?”
“That should be everything.” I rubbed my leg. What had started out as a great morning had taken a pretty craptacular turn. “I think I need to have a talk with my girlfriend.”
“Soooo … perhaps you should go so we can have those talks. Privately.” Trixie shooed her away with a flick of her hoof. “With Trixie and her special somepony.”
“Right, I'm going to leave you to that. We'll talk later.” She made that last word sound incredibly ominous before she teleported away.
Once she was gone, I turned on Trixie. “Are you trying to get me in trouble?!”
Trixie’s ears wilted. “I was just trying to help...”
I stomped a hoof on the ground. My patience was completely used up. “Don’t you get it? One word from Twilight, and I'm in jail for the rest of my life! Or worse!”
Trixie snorted. “Over my dead body.”
“There are ponies who'd be okay with that,” I groused, my gaze shifting away from Trixie. I’d made some enemies in my past. Plenty of them, honestly. You always made enemies when you tried to change the world, and I hadn’t went about trying to accomplish my goals in the nicest ways possible.
Trixie grimaced before recovering, straightening herself, and putting on a dramatic flair. “Well, feather them! If it's that dangerous, let's just go—you and me, Trixie and Starlight: Mares of Wonder!”
“Dammit Trixie, this isn't one of your shows!” I stomped irritably around her. “And I’m tired of running. I’ve ran across half the world, from Equestria to Freeport and Northmarch, and all along Equestria’s frontier. I’m been exiled from at least half those places, and made a mess of my life every step of the way. Running doesn’t help me.” My ears wilted. “After all, I can’t run away from myself.”
Trixie shoulders hunched. “Sorry.”
“Just ... ugh.” Great, now I felt terrible about attacking Trixie. Just perfect. All I could do was slink to the ground and sit. I just felt so tired.
Trixie stood there, shuffling in place before she slowly approached me. I let her, and she sat beside me, wrapping a leg around me to hold me close. I sniffed and tears started welling up. It felt dumb for me to cry over ... whatever it was I was crying over, but I did anyways. I couldn’t stop myself, I didn’t know why. Trixie just held me as I cried.
We sat there in silence until I was done bawling. I didn’t know how long, but eventually Trixie spoke up. “I just wanted this day to be special for us.”
I sighed and nodded. “It was. I just ... I really messed up. Again.”
Trixie squeezed me. “It’s okay. I’ve had my fair number of screwups in the past too.”
“Nothing like mine,” I groused.
“Still enough to know what it’s like,” Trixie quietly insisted, her ears nearly flat against her head. “It took a lot of work for me to pull my show back together again, especially after the incidents with the ursa minor and alicorn amulet. I’m still not allowed in some towns. If Princess Twilight wasn’t so forgiving, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to perform in Ponyville either.”
I frowned as I thought about how Trixie always acted around Twilight. “Then why do you always give her such a hard time?”
Trixie fidgeted and turned away from me. “I don’t know. Sometimes it just feels good to tweak her nose. Being with you is wonderful, and it feels great to be with you when it ticks off the pony whose ... well, not ruined my life, but been there when everything kept going wrong. When something went horribly wrong, there she was in proximity. That, and I don’t want her driving a wedge between us.”
I grasped her hoof and squeezed. “She won’t, I promise.”
Trixie put on a smile tinted by sadness. “You sure you don’t want to run away? The world’s a big place. We could get away from here, away from anypony that knows us, knows what we’ve done. Start a new life. The Great and Powerful Trixie and her Amazing and Glamorous Assistant Starlight Glimmer. We’d make a killing overseas.”
I shook my head. “Tempting, but no. Running’s never worked out for me, and, um... I don’t want to give up what I have here. Yeah, Twilight isn’t always happy with me and what I’ve done, but...” I bit my lip as I tried to find the words for it. “She cares—about me, as a pony. Her, Spike, and her friends. They’ve given me a chance. That’s more than I can say about a lot of the ponies I’ve met over the years. It’d feel wrong giving up on that.”
Trixie frowned but nodded. “I think I can understand that. It can be hard to give up on what you have. At least if it’s something you like.” She shrugged, then grimaced. “I know I’d never want to give up being a magician. That time I had to work on a rock farm just to make ends meet...”
I nuzzled her to try and comfort her. “You’re back on your hooves, at least.”
She nuzzled back. “Yeah, looks like it. So I can relate to you not wanting to throw everything away now that you’re putting it all back together again.”
I nodded. “Everypony’s trying to make me a better pony, even when they don’t have to be one. I mean, it’s frustrating to have all this magical talent and ability to make the world a better place, only for it to backfire horribly.” I scraped my hoof in a circle in the dirt. “And if I’m going to be honest … I’m scared of who I’d become if I left Ponyville. It’s so easy to justify doing anything if I think it’s for the best. I ... I don’t think I can do this alone.”
Trixie wrapped her arm around mine and held it tight. “But you don’t have to. You have me—and, I suppose, Twilight and her friends as a distant second.”
I chuckled. “So I do.” I leaned in and gently kissed her lips. “With you and the others, I think I can do this. One day at a time. Maybe not more than that, but I think I can be a better pony by doing it one step at a time.”
“I believe in you.” Trixie kissed me back, deeper this time.
I returned her kiss, but then a stab of guilt struck me, and I reluctantly pulled away from my special somepony. “... I should probably talk to Twilight.”
Trixie puckered up her lips in a pout. “Must you?”
“Yeah.” I grinned and booped her nose. “Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time together after I’ve talked with Twilight. I’ll be back when I’m done.”
Trixie grinned and counter-booped. “Trixie is going to hold you to that.”
“It's a promise,” I said as I stood.
Trixie sighed, but gave me a slap to the rear to get me moving. “Go on, then. The sooner you leave, the sooner you can come back to my welcoming embrace. Also, you owe me a favor for letting you go instead of spreading more time with me.” She gave me a mischievous grin that promised interesting things when I returned.
I snickered. “We'll see about that.”
It didn’t take me long to find Twilight in her office in the castle. Her door was half open, but I still hesitated as I knocked. No sense being rude and starting everything on the wrong hoof—well, more wrong than they already were, in any event.
“Come in,” she called without a trace of enthusiasm.
I entered the office, my heart picking up speed as I did so. Twilight hadn’t even bothered to look up as I entered. Instead her head was propped up on her hoof as she wrote. I swallowed and forced myself to say, “Hey.”
Twilight finally looked up from her work, the bags under her eyes even heavier than they had been that morning. Her words were carefully neutral as she spoke. “Oh, Starlight. I wasn't expecting you back so soon. I figured you were going to spend the rest of the day with Trixie.”
I rubbed my arm as I tried to think of what to say. “I had something more important to do.”
Twilight leaned back in her seat. “I’m listening.”
I took a deep breath. “We ... I need to apologize.”
Twilight stared at me for a long moment before she sighed and put down her quill. “We did have something of an argument a little bit earlier.”
“I noticed.” I grimaced. “I'm sorry I let you down.”
“It's ... okay.” She rubbed her eyes. “I think I let you down too.”
I blinked in confusion. “Huh?”
“I shouldn't have put you in charge of Ponyville's Hearts and Hooves Day before leaving for the Crystal Empire,” Twilight explained. “That was a lot to dump on you, especially when you hadn't been given nearly that much responsibility as my student before. I should have stuck around to watch over you after giving you something this big for the first time. I was hoping I’d get to cover things both here and the Crystal Empire and ended up delegating too much onto you. I should have known better, and really should have realized how reluctant you’d be to tell me no. I know how easy it is to bite off more than you can chew just to try to please your teacher.”
“Yeah?”
Twilight’s smile was strained at the edges. “I may have completely freaked out about giving Princess Celestia a friendship report every single week. And there may have been a week where I didn’t have anything to report, and a subsequent freakout may have caused the entire town to riot.”
“That … sounds pretty bad,” I conceded. “And you really wrote a friendship report every week? That sounds like it could get hard.” And here I’d thought Twilight had been cracking the whip when she demanded I give her a report only every so often.
Twilight rubbed the back of her neck. “There's a reason she told me to stop doing them every week if I didn't actually have a friendship lesson to write about.” She shook her head. “Though now that I think about it, it's been forever since I sent one to her.”
I sat down opposite of her. “Nothing more to learn?”
Twilight frowned as she considered the question. “Not exactly—more that I fell out of the practice, I guess. I stopped learning something new every week, then I got busy with different things like becoming a princess. Then I started concentrating on helping other ponies with their friendship problems, applying what I knew, then were the map missions...”
“And now here you are?”
“Pretty much.” Twilight let out a long sigh. “Now I've got more to do than I've got hours in the day.”
“And a student of your own,” I added.
“Life has a strange way of creeping up on you like that.” She gave me a lopsided grin. “Granted, I thought my first student would be a little younger than you turned out to be. Well, my first full-time student, anyway.”
I grinned back. “Sorry to disappoint.” In truth, I was older than her—by a good number of years, which made my status as her student a little bit grating if I was honest.
“That's hardly a major problem.” Twilight’s smile was replaced with a more serious frown. “So, lessons learned then?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“Just try and tell me what you've got planned in the future, okay?” Twilight requested. “I think that would avoid a lot of trouble in the future.”
“Can do.” That sounded reasonable enough, given my track record.
“And perhaps you could write a letter to the Hearts and Hooves Day Committee telling them you're not planning on changing the entire holiday anymore? And also apologize for some of the things you said?”
I wrung my hooves together. “Maybe.”
Twilight’s tone took on a more serious edge. “It would help save me a bit of time putting out that fire. Not to mention smooth things over from the other day.”
I sighed. “Okay. I mean ... I don't think my ideas were wrong, but I didn't pick the best way to pitch them.” Apologizing after what happened didn’t appeal to me at all, but it sounded like I was stuck doing it anyways if I wanted ponies to talk to me again. I didn’t want some big fight with Rarity, and picking a fight with Granny Smith was bound to make Applejack mad at me.
“An easy trap to fall into,” Twilight commented.
“I noticed,” I grumbled. “Since I keep doing it.”
Twilight stepped around her desk to place a comforting hoof on my shoulder. “I'm sure we'll get you there eventually. We just need to keep working at this stuff.”
“I'll keep trying.” I took a deep breath. “ One day at a time. I ... I know I have a long way to go, but I won't give up. I’m trying to be a good pony now, I really am. It’s not easy, but I’m honestly trying.”
Twilight smiled. “As long as you don't give up, there's hope.”
“Thank you, Twilight.”
“It's part of being a teacher,” Twilight said. “I'm trying to live up to my half.”
“I guess I can try to be a better student then.” It was good to hear that Twilight wasn’t giving up on me like I’d feared. She had every reason to, but she still didn’t abandon me. Maybe with time I could be a little more like her.
“Everything worth doing takes effort.”
I nodded. “And this is worth doing.”
“Good to hear.” Twilight sat back down in her seat and let out a tired sigh. “Anything else we need to cover?”
I shook my head. “I can't think of anything.”
Twilight stretched out her limbs. “Good, because I could stand for nothing going wrong for a little bit.”
I let out a relieved sigh. “You and me both.”
And, as seemed to be an all too regular occurance in Ponyville, something happened to ruin a perfectly peaceful day. Outside the window, smoke started billowing up from the middle of Ponyville, followed by the panicky mewling of the residents of Ponyville—a sound that had become all too common in my life. Given the way Twilight’s ear twitched, she knew there was trouble in town too.
A strained smile found its way to my face. “Okay, I am completely—” I hesitated as I thought over how the last few days had gone. “—ninety-five percent sure that's not my fault.”
Twilight groaned and let her head fall to the desk. “I better go out and see what that's about.”
“Probably.” I stood up but then hesitated as a thought plagued me. “Um, one thing before we go. Assuming this latest crisis doesn’t take up the entire day, think we could make some crystalcrisp for Spike later? You know, to help him feel better?”
Twilight smiled, it was a tired smile, but there was still warmth to it. “Assuming the world cooperates, I think that would be a great idea.”