“Maybe that one? No, no, that won’t do…” Twilight Velvet was sweating, and not entirely because of the hot summer day. She was trying to make one of the most important decisions of her life, and there was incredible pressure on her to make it perfect.
“Lady, just pick something,” the pony on the other side of the cart sighed. “There’s a line!”
“I know there’s a line!” Velvet looked up to glare at him.
“Do you want a suggestion?” He offered her a smile. She hadn’t been happy with anything else, so it wasn’t a surprise that this didn’t work either.
“Listen here,” Velvet said. “I need to pick the right flavor or else the rest of my day will be thrown off! What if I get vanilla but what I really needed was pistachio?”
“You could buy two,” the vendor suggested. “They’re only five bits each! Or you could let somepony else go ahead of you while you decide.”
Velvet closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. “Mmph. Fine, get me chocolate.”
The tension was released and the ice cream vendor started scooping.
“No, wait! Not chocolate! Make it rocky road!”
“Fine. Rocky road.” He started scooping again.
“Wait!” Velvet gasped. “Maybe it should be chocolate peanut butter instead!”
“Lady, I ain’t even got that!”
“You don’t?” Velvet paused, as if going over a mental checklist. Before she could say anything else, he quickly scooped it up into a cone and thrust it into her hooves.
“Here! Five bits!”
Velvet huffed and tossed the bits onto the cart, taking the cone and stomping away.
“Mares,” the ice-cream vendor said. He shook his head and looked down to grab the bits, pausing in surprise. All of them had landed heads-up. “Huh. What are the odds of that?”
It was good ice cream. Not great, very little sold out of a cart like that would ever be great, not even in Canterlot where the price was a few bits higher than anywhere else. It was good enough, though, to satisfy the urge for something made of chocolate to smooth over a headache that’d been plaguing Velvet since she woke up.
Her grip on the ice cream was tenuous, her telekinetic field wobbling with the same pulse as her heart and the migraine she’d been nursing for the last few days. It would have been easy to blame her dad for the headache, but he’d at least made an effort to make her comfortable in the short time each day he wasn’t at the Canterlot History Museum.
She walked out into the street without looking. Her first few steps took her through a crowd, slipping between ponies without breaking stride. She licked at dark chocolate and marshmallow and tried to find walnuts in the melting treat, too focused to even notice as one cart rushed by inches from her face and another nearly brushed her tail as she stepped into and past a line of rushing cargo carriages.
A pony bumped into her, and the ice cream cone tumbled out of her weakened grip. This was exactly what she’d feared, the terrible fate she’d tried to avoid!
She grabbed the rocky road barely a hoof-width from the real road, breathing a sigh of relief.
“That was close.” Velvet sighed in relief and stood up. “Now listen here, how dare you run right into a delicate mare like me!”
“Sorry!” The thin grey stallion backed up, looking intimidated. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. You’re not hurt, are you?” He helped Velvet up, brushing dirt off her shoulders. “I’m just so clumsy sometimes. Really didn’t mean any harm.”
“Uh-huh.” Velvet frowned.
“Anyway, I’ve got to get going, hopefully we won’t run into each other again! Haha, that’s a little joke I like to tell when I’m clumsy.”
He started backing away before turning and almost running, pushing through the crowd. Velvet took a step, and felt a yawning emptiness where the reassuring weight of her bits had been.
“That little…” she growled. He turned like he could feel her gaze boring into the back of his head. “You’re not getting away!”
He bolted. Velvet’s horn lit up, and the world dropped away.
Precognition was more of an art than a science. Every choice a pony could make branched out, some of them dark, leading to disaster, most of them flat grey, just going from one place to another. A very few shone with possibility. Seeing the future was about spotting the light at the end of the tunnel before it passed you by.
Twilight Velvet kicked a loose cobblestone free and threw it in a high arc, sailing past the thief. He laughed, and she could see on his face that he thought she’d meant to hit him and missed.
The rock hit the ground in front of him, and his hoof came down on it, the old, loose stone worn smooth and slippery. He cried out in alarm, tumbling into the street, crashing through the ponies around him.
Somepony shouted a warning, but it was far too late. He fell into the lane of oncoming carriages just as a cart rounded the corner, too late for the pony pulling it to come to a stop.
Velvet licked her ice cream cone and smiled as wood crunched and cabbages sailed into the sky in an explosion of green and purple leaves.
“Hm. Definitely the right flavor,” she decided, giving her cone a few more licks, the marshmallow swirl finally releasing a crunchy walnut. She started pushing her way through the crowd that had stopped to watch the spectacle.
The thief was half-buried under what had to be hundreds of cabbages, and an earth pony had him by the ear and was well on his way to helping him go deaf by shouting right into it.
“My whole harvest is ruined! Do you know how hard it is to grow cabbage and cart it up a mountain?! They don’t grow on trees!”
“No,” Velvet agreed, stepping through the crowd. “I think they grow on the ground. Sorry, I’ll just be a second.”
She tugged her pouch of bits free from where the thief had stashed it.
“Let this be a lesson to you about trying to steal from a young lady,” Twilight Velvet said. “Especially one who can fight back.”
“You’re no lady,” the crook muttered. Unfortunately for him, Velvet had seen that coming, too. Her hoof cracked across his cheek with a report like thunder.
“Say that to my face!” she demanded. “Do you know who I am?”
“No!” the crook said.
“Unfortunately, yes,” came a voice from above. One that Velvet recognized instantly.
“Great,” she muttered. “Of all the things to miss…”
She forced a smile to her face and turned to the Royal Guard that was flying over the crowd, the big white pegasus meeting the small grin with a grimace.
“It’s been so long, Sergeant Sky,” Velvet said. “So nice to see you.”
“Twilight Velvet, your mother would be ashamed,” the gold-armored guard said as he touched down. “What kind of mess have you made this time?”
“There’s no mess,” she said.
Sergeant Sky looked past her to the overturned cart, the ruined pile of produce, and the pony buried under it all.
“No mess. So what do you call that?”
“Well, you see, this gentleman - and I’m using that term very generously only because nopony has gotten angry enough at him to turn him into a gelding--”
The guard coughed, interrupting her. “Just the facts, please. I’m being generous enough letting you try to explain this.”
“He stole my bits!”
“He stole your bits,” the pegasus nodded. “Okay. So you attacked him?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Velvet protested. “Why, you there-” she pointed at the cabbage merchant. “-you saw everything. You tell him!”
“Well, uh,” the farmer swallowed. “I was just following the line to market like usual and this feller jumped out in front of me. He didn’t look like he were pushed or nothin, just like he was runnin’ too fast and slipped. Probably needs better shoes. You Canterlot types all wear them slippery thin ones that wear out too fast.”
“I wasn’t even there,” Velvet said. “I was down the street shouting for the guards. Of course, you only decided to show up now and accuse me, the victim!” She pretended to swoon, letting the farmer catch her. She tried to ignore just what a diet of nothing but cabbage made a pony smell like.
“I don’t remember hearin’ anypony callin’ for the guards…” the farmer said, slowly.
“Well of course not. I was all the way over there.” Velvet motioned vaguely. “You were still coming down the street while I was yelling.”
A few more guards had started pushing the crowd back, the herd of ponies slowly getting back into motion as they were gently convinced to go about their business. The excitement seemed to be over anyway.
“We need to get this street clear so we stop causing a traffic jam,” Sergeant Sky said, after a few silent moments watching Velvet’s playacting. “Sir, if it’s alright, I’ll assign two privates to help you dig this gentleman out of your produce. We’ll move the cart to the side and assess the damage.”
“That’d be a big help,” the farmer agreed.
“As for you,” Sky turned to Velvet. “A word, please?”
“Just one?” Velvet asked. “I do have places to be.”
“The more you sass, the more words there are going to be,” Sergeant Sky said. “Rack up enough and you’ll end up making statements at the Guard post until your father comes to get you.”
“That could be a week,” Velvet muttered.
Sky took her over to the side, a quiet space between two storefronts, the kind of place that would have been an alleyway if Canterlot had been allowed to have such a crass locale. Instead, it was a scenic walking path lined with wastebins.
“You can’t keep getting into trouble,” Sergeant Sky said. “And before you tell me you absolutely can, I am well aware you are physically capable of getting into trouble. You’ve proven that time and time again.”
“None of it is real trouble,” Velvet retorted. “That stallion is a cutpurse!”
“And that’s why he’s going to be paying for the greenery instead of you. But if he decides to press charges, and you have to stand in a Circle of Truth, are you going to be able to look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t do anything to make him land in those cabbages?”
“...no,” Velvet admitted, her ears folding down. She couldn’t even look him in the eyes now when she was telling the truth. It was too much like the look somepony else had given her.
“Your mom was a great Guard. I know things have been rough, but you need to work through them. We all did.”
“You just got over it in a day and went back to work!” Velvet snapped.
“That’s part of the job. What happened was tragic but she made her choice and I respect her for it. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“I doubt that.”
“Some days, I doubt it too, but she was a good mare and there’s a lot of her in you. Once you get this chip off your shoulder you might even decide to join the Royal Guard yourself. We’re always recruiting.”
“Hah! Yeah right.” Velvet’s horn pulsed for a moment, and she smiled. “I don’t think I can ever see myself in armor like that.”
She tapped his breastplate with her ice cream cone for emphasis. Since it was almost entirely melted at this point, it left a few sticky drips of chocolate.
Sergeant Sky looked down and frowned.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess there’s no point eating this.”
She started to toss it, and Sergeant Sky cleared his throat.
“No littering,” he reminded her.
Velvet rolled her eyes, then opened a bin and put the cone in it with deliberate care before closing the lid.
“I’m going to let you go this time,” Sky said. “Just at least try to keep out of trouble, will you? Eventually you’ll do something we can’t ignore or call self-defense.”
He rubbed the streaks of chocolate off his armor, buffing hard with his hoof. He didn’t notice a tiny metallic ting as something fell to the cobblestones.
“I’ll be good,” Velvet promised, waving and starting to walk away, counting down in her head.
Sergeant Sky nodded and spread his wings, taking to the air. A strap popped under the strain of his flexing muscles, the rivet having come loose and fallen a few moments ago. The breastplate swung to the side, suddenly free. Sky made a sound like a confused chicken as his wings tangled and he slammed back to the earth, overturning a bin full of trash.
An ice cream cone landed squarely on his forehead, sticking there like a unicorn’s horn.
“Velvet!” he yelled.