//------------------------------//
// Chapter 9 
// Story: Friendship 101: Final Exam 
// by Sixes_And_Sevens 
//------------------------------//

Starlight stared, mouth agape, at the commotion. Her new friends all squished into the back of their shared booth, terrified, but they seemed to have been left more or less alone. Around the restaurant, though, protesting diners were hauled out into the streets. A pair of unicorns in suits there, a burly earth pony there, and there--
“Sunburst?” Starlight gasped.
Sunburst’s ear flicked, and he glanced around. The pony carrying him, a tall unicorn in a hoodie, gave him a shake. “That’s enough of that,” they admonished.
And then they were both out the door. “Two-Chairs, watch this door,” the same pony ordered. “I want to know if anypony leaves these premises.”
“Right,” a hefty green pegasus grumbled, settling himself in front of the door. “You’ll want me to keep a roomful of unicorns from teleporting away, somehow?.”
“Took the words right from my mouth,” the first pony said, lighting their horn. The building lit up with a ghostly green glow. “That should keep everypony in there secure for questioning.”
The pegasus nodded. “Right.” He watched the unicorn, the donkey, and the earth pony trot along, herding the patrons from the bar off into the night. Then, he turned back to the dead-silent bar, a scowl writ deep on his features.
The silence lasted for a few minutes. Then Starlight said, “What the HAY was that?” and the bar broke into general pandaemonium.
She and Twinkleshine shoved their way back to the others, who were huddled up in the booth, terrified. Moondancer pulled Twinkleshine close and hugged her tight, silent. “What just happened?” Lemon said, her voice high with fear and confusion.
Starlight took a few deep breaths. “I don’t know,” she said with forced calm. “But I saw my friend-- my oldest friend-- being dragged away.” 
She stopped for a moment, lips tightening, horn igniting. “So I, for one, am going to find out.” She glared across the bar. “And I think I know just who to ask first.”
She stepped back out of the booth, silencing the bar. That she did this not by the sheer force of her presence and rather by sweeping half the patrons present out of her path ought to be irrelevant. The pegasus at the door stood up, glaring at her warningly. She stormed over. “Alright, that’s enough. What the actual rut is going on here?”
“Sit down,” he grumbled, spreading his wings menacingly.
Starlight gave what might have been a smile, for a very generous definition of the word. There were certainly teeth involved. “Attack me,” she said quietly, “and I promise you the entire bar will go nuts. How long do you think you can hold off all these ponies if they really want to leave?”
The Chair of Lower Mathematics glanced around the tavern, did some quick sums, and calculated the average time in seconds. He didn’t much like the sound of the answer, so he converted that to minutes. He chewed his tongue. “Alright, fine,” he growled, leaning in. “There’s been some sort of plot-- a scheme, that is to say. Some sort of plagiarism ring, trading underground articles before they’re published, and we were tipped off that they would be meeting here. Those ponies we hauled away were the most likely suspects present.”
Starlight’s lips pursed into a straight line. “I see,” she said. “And the rest of us? What are we, more suspects? Hostages, maybe?”
“Persons of interest, at the least,” the Chair replied. “Now would you please be a good suspect and go sit down?”
“Fine.” Starlight stormed away back to her booth.
The others looked at her expectantly, and she relayed what she’d been told. Lyra scowled thoughtfully. “I’d heard rumors about underground plagiarism. I’ve even been under suspicion once or twice myself, ‘cause of all the time I spend off-campus. But this… this is a whole new level.”
Lemon smacked the table. “I thought I recognized th one in the hoodie! They’re the Dean of Academic Honesty! They’re on the Ethics Committee!”
Moondancer eyed Starlight. “And your childhood friend is their prime suspect?”
“One of them, apparently,” Starlight agreed, having calmed herself to a low simmer. “Which is ridiculous. He’s the Royal Crystaller! He saved the Crystal Empire, and he’s Flurry Heart’s foalsitter.”
“None of which means he’s not also a plagiarist,” Minuette said.
She flinched under the force of Starlight’s glare. “But, uh, I guess you know him better than I do,” she backpedaled.
Starlight’s face softened. “Sorry! Sorry. I mean, you might be right. I don’t know everything about Sunburst. But I know this. He’s a good stallion. He’d never use anypony so callously as to steal their work.” She leaned in. “Also, he can’t lie to save his skin. Trust me, I’ve played cards with him, and he’s just the worst. Like, Trixie is really good at misdirection. Also probably she cheats, but I’ve never caught her at it. And Maud just has the world’s best poker face. So I’m basically the second-worst player at the table, right? But I tell you, compared to Sunburst, I’m a Las Pegasus card sharp. He stammers, and he twitches, and his eyes are just everywhere. Trust me, if he’d ever plagiarized anything, they would’ve caught him the next day. That’s assuming he didn’t turn himself in first.”
“Okay,” said Lyra. “So what’s our next move?”
“I-- wait, what?”
“Well, you want to get him out of this mess, right?”
“Well, uh, well, yeah.”
“And you can’t really do it by yourself, can you?”
“I don’t see why--”
“Could you do it without being caught or setting at least one building on fire?”
Silence. “I might,” Starlight rallied.
Lyra gave her a long, steady look. “I might have to resort to mind manipulation.” Starlight admitted.
“You don’t even know where they’ve taken him,” Lyra said.
“I…” she stopped. “You’re all willing to help me?”
A few glances were exchanged, but one by one, they all nodded. 
“Oh,” said Starlight. “Thank you.”
“But like I was saying, what’s step one?” Lyra asked.
“Uh, getting out of this bar, I guess,” Starlight said. “I think that pony-- the Dean, you said? They put an anti-teleportation ward on the building, so we need to find an unguarded exit.”
“Or make an unguarded exit!” Minuette said brightly. “Make a study of combustion, if ya know what I mean.”
“I think that blowing a hole in the bar might draw more attention than we want,” Moondancer pointed out. “But you’re right. We do need another exit.” She looked at Twinkleshine expectantly.
“What?” Twinkleshine asked, frowning.
Minuette dipped her head, looking at her over her glasses. “Another exit, Twinkly?”
Twinkleshine’s eyes went wide. “Oh! Oh, yeah. That could work. That… should work. Everypony, grab onto the table and don’t let go until I say so.”
Starlight glanced around and saw the others doing as they were told. So, therefore, did she. Twinkleshine lit her horn. For a moment, Starlight couldn’t tell what she was doing. And then she saw that the booth, the floor, the walls, the whole bar was just fading away. A little piece of the ceiling plopped on her head and trickled down her muzzle.
“Okay,” Twinkleshine said. “You can let go, now.”
Starlight relaxed her grip and looked around. The world was an endless void, shot through with beams of light in every color. Beneath them, a great purple grid stretched out in all directions, utterly flat. Despite that, Starlight could see vast mountains of the same material off on the horizon. Of course, she thought. Twinkleshine is the Lecturer in Higher Dimensions. “What now?”
“We walk,” Twinkleshine said. “Out of the bar, into the streets, out of sight of our ‘guard’, and then settle back into our normal set of dimensions.”
“Oh, all right,” Starlight said. “The street was that way, right?”
“In our normal set of dimensions, yes,” Twinkleshine replied briskly. “Here, on the other hoof, not necessarily. I took us to one of the more easily understandable sets, where up is down and left is right and so on.”
“That’s easily understandable?”
“Compared to the ones where you’re drawn intractably through space instead of time, or where orange and purple are directions, yes. Yes it is.”
“Oh.”
“I say we go that way anyway,” Lemon said. “We’ll end up in the back alley behind the bar. Nopony will be there to see us suddenly appear.”
“Alright, sounds good. Onwards,” Twinkleshine said, slipping out of her seat.
The ground was… something. Starlight didn’t quite have the words to describe it. ‘Spongy’ was almost there, but it didn’t quite define the ethereal, almost gaseous sensation of the ‘earth’ beneath her hooves, or the strange but not uncomfortable warmth emanating up from below..
The air was off as well. There was a faint smell in in. Not an unpleasant one, actually. It smelled like the seaside, but sugary where it should have been salty. Indeed, she could almost hear the crash of waves against rocks. The mountains never seemed to get any larger or farther away, no matter how long they walked. “Hey, Twinkleshine?”
“Hm?”
“How long have we been walking?”
“Half an hour, maybe?”
“Right. An how far have we gone?”
“In practical terms, about twelve meters. We’re nearly there!”
“How did it take us half an hour to walk twelve meters?”
“Time and space don’t line up nicely between dimensions,” Twinkleshine said simply. “When we come out, only about three seconds will have passed.” She frowned. “Seconds… or months. Always get those two mixed up.”
“WHAT?”
“She’s kidding,” Moondancer said. “Speaking as somepony who’s had to get extremely used to her sense of… let’s call it humor, trust me. She’s kidding.”
“You’re too kind,” Twinkleshine replied, smirking. “C’mon, we’re over halfway there.”
A collective groan rose from the group as they slogged onward.


***


About twenty minutes later, Twinkleshine lit her horn again. “You might want to sit down,’ she warned. “Reentry can make a lot of ponies feel nauseous.”
Starlight watched as the pale lights and vibrant lines faded into the shadows of a dark alley, felt the soft ground harden into cobblestones. More urgently, she felt her tummy starting to get a little wobbly, and she half-sat, half-fell backwards to the street. And then, it all stopped.
Starlight looked up. They were clearly not back in the usual universe yet. She could still see the lights and void, and if she squinted, even the mountains. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “We’re not stuck, are--”
“Sh!” Lemon hissed. She pointed down one end of the alley. “There’s somepony back here with us,” she whispered.
“What?” Starlight yelped. She covered her mouth. “What?” she hissed. “Who would be back here at this time of night?”
“Probably just a drunk,” Lyra said.
Moondancer craned her neck to get a better look. “I don’t think so. He’s just standing there. Sighing. And he’s not even wobbling, so he can’t be as drunk as all that, certainly not enough to miss the six of us trotting past…”
Starlight followed Moondancer’s gaze, and her eyes went wide. “Hold on. I’ve seen that guy before!”

Nocan wallowed in pessimism’s mire for awhile. He felt like a wad of chewing gum that had stuck itself to somepony’s hoof, the lowest of the low. He glared balefully at his cutie mark, a red circle with a line through the middle. He had gotten it in debate club, where he had been famous for refuting the arguments of his opponents. He could never prove it, but he felt sure that a bitter rival had cursed his mark so that it consumed his every waking moment, turning his life into a waking nightmare of refusals and regrets.
As it turned out, Moondancer was wrong. He was so absorbed in his self-pity that he completely ignored the sudden appearance of six mares in the alley behind him, failed to register the clatter of the trash bins, and tuned out the muted conversation of the slightly-higher-dimensional-than-usual beings behind him right up until somepony shouted, “Lyra, attack!” and he was tackled unceremoniously to the ground by a mint-green unicorn.
When his vision stopped swimming, he found himself surrounded by a crowd of angry unicorn mares. “If you’re going to kill me, please make it fast,” he said, shutting his eyes.
“We aren’t going to kill you,” one of them said, shocked.
“Are you sure you want to tell him that now?” the tall, yellow one asked. “He might be more willing to cooperate if he thinks he’ll die otherwise. Current studies--”
“Celestia’s tits, Lemon! Not now!” the green one-- Lyra?-- said, stomping the ground.
“So… you’ll listen to me talk about psychology later?” Lemon replied, grinning widely.
Lyra looked like she was going to explode, but a short, bespectacled mare stepped between them. “Girls. Not now,” she said sternly.
The pink one stared at Lemon and Lyra for a few seconds more, deeply concerned, but she then turned her attention back to Nocan. “...No, we’re not here to kill you,” she said firmly. “We want information. You were with Sunburst when he arrived at the bar, weren’t you?”
“No.”
That obviously wrong-hoofed her. “Yes you were, I saw you! You were even wearing that same cloak!”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“...So you admit you were in the bar with Sunburst, but wearing a different cloak?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Hold it,” said the white mare. “I recognize this guy. He’s Professor Nocan Neighsay, but most ponies around here know him as Nocan the Contrarian. You won’t get anything out of him, his cutie mark won’t let him do anything but disagree with everything.”
“...Won’t it?” the pink mare asked. She eyed him thoughtfully. “How do you feel about that?”
“Awful. I hate it. Nopony gets along with me, and the closest thing I have to a friend is a raging egomaniac who uses me to inflate his already grossly exaggerated self-worth.”
Starlight nodded. “So, how do you respond to open-ended questions?”
“I can answer them normally.”
“So if I were to ask you what you knew about Sunburst…”
Nocan’s heart leapt. He had, at long last, a chance for redemption. A chance to fix what he had done wrong. A chance--
“Nocan?”
Right. First he had to actually talk. “Then I could tell you everything. And I will.”