Princess Twilight had gained a lot less attention in her disguise than she would have thought. Sunset's house was only three blocks from Canterlot High School, which was thankfully not too far. The only problem was the door to her loft apartment was locked and there was a For Lease sign on it.
"I don't get it. Isn't this where she lives?" Apple Bloom asked.
Scootaloo, who had been typing away on her phone practically the whole walk, lifted her head and looked around with surprise. "What gives? This isn't Pinkie Pie's place."
Princess Twilight and Apple Bloom both stared at Scootaloo (Sweetie Belle was still trying to pick the right moment to tie a bow into Twilight's mane).
"Pinkie Pie?" Princess Twilight asked.
Scootaloo nodded away. "Uh, yeah. Sunset moved in there about a week ago. Why are we at her old place? Hold on, I'll tell Rainbow Dash where we are."
Seconds after Scootaloo's fingers poked the words in and hit send, a blue streak of movement practically ran over the four of them. Clopping to a halt on her hooves, her wings sweeping air forward to assist, Rainbow Dash stopped just before she actually ran into any of the girls. "Where's Twilight? You said—" Her own jaw fell open.
"Uh. Hi," Princess Twilight said. "Surprise…"
The sound of Fluttershy's voice, way louder than she was ever likely to be heard outside a concert, approached the five. Of course Fluttershy was singing Shake Your Tail, and of course it was coming from Pinkie Pie's stereo.
Screeching tires did nothing to help Princess Twilight's efforts at stealth, nor did the loud music that she recognized. She watched a very ponied-up Pinkie Pie vault out of the Jeep only a moment before Sunset Shimmer did.
Big, burning wings spread to catch Sunset as she landed on the sidewalk, but she wasn't prepared for what she saw. "Not you too!"
Princess Twilight Sparkle had had enough. There was clearly too much going on for her to pick it up as she went. Energizing her horn, she executed a perfect teleport to stand just in front of Sunset Shimmer. There was a sense of towering height. "We need to go somewhere we can talk."
Sunset tried not to stare at Princess Twilight, but it wasn't easy—it was one thing to imagine a friend as being an alicorn, and quite another to see wings and a horn. Old prejudice, old habits, assailed Sunset in equal measure. She didn't know whether to curse or bow. "All right then. Everybody get in the back. Except you, Rainbow."
"Pfft! Like I'd get in that slow, old jalopy. You wait until my new car's almost done, then I'll show you fast." Despite wearing cuffs on her ankles, wrists, and a collar around her throat, Rainbow Dash felt more free than ever before. She spread her wings, crouched, and shot into the air with a jump and a flap.
"You weren't kidding about there being a little more magic here, huh?" Princess Twilight asked. "Can I get some help?"
Twilight had tried to jump up into the Jeep's back, but it had been a little too high without actually flying—and she still hoped to keep a low profile.
"Of course!" Pinkie Pie vaulted across the hood of her Jeep and slipped around and into the driver's seat. Reaching to a set of switches on the dash, she flicked two of them down.
Jerking back, Princess Twilight gasped as the vehicle got lower and lower until it finally stopped at a more pony-jump-in-able height. Which she did.
"Do you want to see it dance? I can make it dance to the music!" Pinkie's hand was reaching for the switches when Sunset's stopped her. She lifted her head to look with forlorn sadness at her girlfriend. "Please?"
"You can show Twilight your fancy car when we get home,"—Sunset quickly held up a finger to keep Pinkie Pie from jumping in right away—"and once we've explained everything to Princess Twilight."
"Just Twilight's fine, Sunset," Princess Twilight said.
"Sorry, it's the whole—whole alicorn thing. I guess you can take the pony out of Equestria, but you can't take Equestria out of the pony." And, at that exact moment, Sunset Shimmer had to hold on.
Tires screeched and the Jeep spun in a circle on the road to quickly face the opposite direction. Pinkie Pie laughed as the next song came on, and slammed the car up a gear.
Princess Twilight had done many crazy things involving stunts that had left her head spinning before, but she had never been thankful that the world stopped spinning so much as when Pinkie Pie pulled into her parent's driveway and turned the engine off in her car.
Pulling herself over the side of the Jeep, Princess Twilight didn't care about falling—she just wanted to touch the ground. Tumbling face forward, she watched the beautiful, unmoving ground get closer and then—stop. A purple field of energy wrapped around her, a unicorn's magic.
Snapping her head up, Princess Twilight located the unicorn in question immediately. "Twilight?"
"Hi, Twilight," Twilight Sparkle, normally human, said.
The magic field winked out and Princess Twilight dropped to her hooves. She studied her doppelganger while trying to put her hoof on the exact thing that was wrong. That Twilight Sparkle was a pony was obvious—there was something else.
At that exact moment Pinkie Pie flicked on the headlights of her Jeep. The beams of light pouring from the front of her car were no match for sunlight, but when they touched Twilight Sparkle's hide, the white light refracted into deep indigo and purple in a wide spray, with purple radiating outwards in all directions.
Princess Twilight had seen the same effect before; it had involved a burst of magic from the Crystal Heart and her very own hide. "You're a crystal pony?!"
"Is that what this is called? I was thinking like 'refracting pony' or 'dark side of the pony'." Twilight Sparkle stepped sideways to get out of the beam from Pinkie's headlights, and thanks to her uncoordinated movement started to fall.
Acting quickly, Princess Twilight used her own magic to cradle Twilight Sparkle just before she fell on the ground. "Just returning the favor. I guess this is why you called me?"
"We've actually got a list. Twilight turning into a pony is the first, although it is probably related to another." Sunset Shimmer gestured to her wings and ears. "We seem to be turning into ponies more and more."
"Oh-kay. And I assume that me being a pony is related." Princess Twilight mind had been trained for dealing with magical problems since a young age. She quickly cast a magic-detection spell and nodded at what she saw. "Ambient level of magic is non-zero, and individuals are showing elevated magic—"
"Right. But the thing is I have almost the same magic in me now as I did before," Twilight Sparkle said. "A little leaked into Spike, but otherwise I have the same magic as when I was only part pony."
Magic problems called for magic solutions. Princess Twilight cast a more powerful detection spell and turned it on Twilight Sparkle. "You definitely have more magic in you than anypony (that's actually appropriate right now) else. And you say this was the same as before?"
"That's right." Twilight Sparkle used her magic to manifest her glasses and turned to look at Princess Twilight. The spell immediately darkened her vision to protect her, yet still there was a bright flash as her eyes were given a glimpse of the power of an alicorn.
"Are you alright?" Princess Twilight asked.
"Just realized how stupid it was to look at the sun through a magnifying glass." Twilight Sparkle's sarcasm was mostly aimed at herself. "Maybe we should go inside?" She dispelled her glasses and tried to blink away the white-purple blotches in her vision.
"Took the words out of my mouth." Sunset Shimmer, one arm around Pinkie Pie waist, urged everyone toward the Pie residence.
Rainbow Dash checked her phone—getting the time. "I—uh—have to go."
"Oooh!" Pinkie Pie said. "Rainbow Dash has a date!" Her guess was immediately proved correct when Rainbow Dash blushed. "She does!"
"Y-Yeah. I'm going out tonight, with Spicy." As Rainbow Dash spoke, the sensible part of her brain chanted, Don't tell them you're going to a gay bar. Don't tell them you're going to a gay bar. "We're going—" That sensible part of her yanked on her reins. "…out."
Princess Twilight's eyes widened a little—she didn't need Cadance's special talent to see her friend was in love. "Have fun, Rainbow Dash!"
"Thanks, Twilight." It was a surreal moment for Rainbow Dash. She looked over the friend that had practically stormed into her life and saved her friendships, and smiled. "Good luck on working all this out." She waved a hand to indicate her legs, fur, and pony features.
"Thanks! I'm sure we'll have this figured out and fixed in no time," Princess Twilight said.
"Uh. Yeah." The assurance caused Rainbow Dash to look down at her pony legs and remember how fast she could run with them. Walking over to her bike, she climbed on and felt herself pony down to their new normal. Tucking her wings back, she started the bike and kicked it into gear.
Princess Twilight turned to the house and followed the others inside. There was a surreal feel to everything, even as she walked through the doorway it was obvious that the door handle was above her head.
The living room was even stranger than the doorway to Princess Twilight. There was plenty of couch to sit on, but it was all so far off the ground she had to actually jump up (or fly). It wouldn't have been so bad except it derailed her train of thought. Struggling to recover the wrecked cars, she used her wings to fly onto the couch and sit up. "So if your magic level didn't change, how come your body did? And how come everypony,"—she tried not to giggle—"hasn't changed and has much lower levels of magic?"
All eyes turned to Twilight Sparkle. "Well, I tried to suck all the magic out of me." She looked around the room, hoping that was enough—she was sadly mistaken. "It worked. I sucked all the magic out, but then it rushed back in again."
"There's ambient magic everywhere here now. No wonder it came rushing in again—it would have been like making a bubble of air underwater." Turning her head in thought, Princess Twilight noticed something that almost completely distracted her from the current problem: books.
Looking at the books on the Pie family bookshelf, Princess Twilight noticed a huge single book on sedimentary rocks, and beside it was a cluster of magazines that took up the same space. Despite the fact she wanted to read all the books, the juxtaposition of the different works tickled at something in her head.
"Bigger book, more words," Princess Twilight said.
Sunset Shimmer, who had Pinkie Pie practically cuddled up beside her, looked at the pony she thought of as her own mentor. "Uh, what was that, Twilight?"
"Sunset! You have wings now, but does Rarity have a horn?" Princess Twilight asked.
"She has a horn. I don't understand what you're getting at, Twilight," Sunset Shimmer said.
"But I do." Twilight Sparkle reached a hoof up to rub her forehead. "I had a horn and wings."
"Exactly!" Princess Twilight jumped to her hooves. "You were an alicorn, you were turning into an alicorn. You had all this energy in you because you were becoming an alicorn. But when you drained all your energy out you—uh—I guess you re-rolled your character."
Twilight Sparkle was too busy giggling at the metaphor to realize how perfect the description fit. Then it hit her. "I was going to be an alicorn?"
"I think so. You said you had wings and a horn, so that fits. See, you had all this magic within you, and it was barely a drop in an alicorn's bucket. But, now you're a crystal pony, that amount of magic is plenty to push you all the way to pony!" Princess Twilight said.
"And Spike all the way to, uh…" Twilight Sparkle trailed off as she realized several eyebrows were raising at her mention of Spike. "He maybe—sorta—jumped into the circle to help me when the magic started rushing back in. He's—well…" She used her magic to float her phone out of the backpack she wore, selected her friends present, and sent Spike's picture to them. For Princess Twilight, she simply passed her phone across.
"He's a diamond dog!" Princess Twilight said.
Twilight Sparkle stared at Princess Twilight in surprise. "A what?"
"They're a canine-like biped. Some of them live not far from Ponyville. I guess he got shuffled too? I would have thought he'd turn into a dragon." When Fluttershy stiffened at her mention of dragon, Princess Twilight turned to look at her. "Is everything okay, Fluttershy?"
A sinking feeling made Fluttershy's flight or fight response trigger, and though she felt like she should want to run, she managed to stay in her seat—after all, this was Princess Twilight. "W-W-What are dragons like in Equestria?"
"They range from baby dragons to huge, ancient dragons." Sensing something was up with her friend, Princess Twilight wanted to keep away from any words that might startle her. "The most common that I've seen seems to be their early-adult stage. They stand about three times my size, have powerful legs, wings, and—" She cut off as Fluttershy nodded to her. "Somepony is turning into a dragon?"
"Y-Yes. Thunderbolt." Fluttershy wanted to shut up and hide, or go out hunting with Bridget, but she had learned that she needed to face things, or they chased her anyway. "Rainbow Dash's pet. He started talking and flying around." An image flashed in her head of Thunderbolt and Tree Hugger. Her first reaction to the mental image was to close her eyes, but that made it worse. Now Fluttershy pictured Thunderbolt screwing Tree Hugger in the same way he did Rainbow Dash. "Eeep!"
"And then there's Bridget." Sunset looked to Fluttershy for help to describe what had happened.
Able to get the latest image (of Thunderbolt tying Rainbow Dash and Tree Hugger at the same time) out of her head, Fluttershy nodded to Sunset Shimmer. "Bridget is—was—a half-wolf, half-dog who was living with me. We—uh—are good friends." Despite how much Rainbow Dash and now Tree Hugger seemed to open her eyes to others playing with their best friends, Fluttershy was uncomfortably aware that it wasn't normally talked about.
Sunset Shimmer could see Fluttershy would take all day to describe half of what needed saying. "Fluttershy and Bridget came to visit two days ago while Pinkie and I were jamming. Like normal, playing music resulted in us ponying up. Anyway, Fluttershy started singing with us, and that's when Bridget got affected by it."
Princess Twilight waited for Sunset Shimmer to pull out her mobile phone and search on it. When Sunset turned the phone toward her, Princess Twilight's eyes widened. "Timber wolf!"
"Uh, yeah. She was half timber wolf." Sunset looked to Fluttershy for confirmation. "What's that got—"
"No, not timber wolf like what you have here. These wooden bits are what an Equestrian timber wolf looks like. Is she—Bridget I mean—acting strange, Fluttershy?" Princess Twilight asked.
"She's a lot more aggressive and confrontational. But—" Fluttershy bit her lip. Not only was Bridget everything Fluttershy just said, but Fluttershy found herself more wolfish while with her—and part of meek Fluttershy liked it.
Just the memory of her time hunting in the forest with Bridget made Fluttershy's heart-rate rise. She could practically remember the smell of prey in her nose, and while her mind hunted beside her lover again, she heard a sound that cut through her little trip down memory game-trail.
"Fluttershy?" Pinkie Pie waved a hand in front of Fluttershy's face. "Wakey, wakey!"
"Ineedtogo!" Already in motion, Fluttershy used her wings, hooves, and hands to speed her way to the front door. Bridget, she thought, I need Bridget!
Princess Twilight stood beside Twilight Sparkle at the front door. "I really don't remember this place being this crazy."