Night Light groaned and looked at his bit bag. Just an hour ago it had been full of bits, each one representing a not insignificant amount of his savings. Now it was all but empty, a single golden coin at the bottom only serving to stare up at him with an accusing golden glare, demanding to know where its siblings had gone, what vitally important errand had been worth spending them.
“You know, this airship is a lot nicer than the one we came here in,” Velvet offered, gamely trying to improve his mood. Under their hooves, the deck gleamed, flakes of gold worked into the lacquer over heartwood in such a warm shade it almost seemed to glow. Silk flags and banners decorated almost every surface in white and teal stripes, so impossibly clean they had to be enchanted. The gasbags overhead were large enough that it almost felt like the ship hung down from the sky itself instead of merely balloons.
“Of course it is,” Sunset scoffed. “This is the Merriweather Post Pavilion. It’s one of the finest luxury airships in the world.”
“One of the most expensive, too,” Night Light muttered.
“Don’t complain, I let you call me your foal again so you could save money on my ticket,” Sunset said. “You can’t imagine how embarrassing that is for me.”
“Couldn’t we have gone on a smaller ship?” Velvet asked. “There were other airships going this direction. Most of them were faster, too.”
“I’m Princess Celestia’s personal student,” Sunset said, her high-pitched voice carrying an edge. “I am not going to travel on anything less than the very best ship available.”
“Does Princess Celestia’s personal student get an allowance they could use to pay me back?” Night Light asked.
Sunset rolled her eyes. “Once we save Equestria I’m sure you’ll get a reward or something.”
“Save your receipts,” Velvet joked.
“It’s just that we could have chartered a ship for how much the tickets cost,” Night Light said. “We could have gone directly where we need to go. Wherever that is.”
He looked sideways at Sunset. She sighed, deflating slightly.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell anypony, and if the monsters show up they might be able to force you to tell them everything you know. Besides, I’m worried we might be being followed. If we hire our own ship, they’ll know exactly where we are. A big ship like this we can hide in the crowd. They might not know which airship we’re on.”
“You know what’ll make you feel better?” Velvet asked. “A hot meal after almost freezing to death. We never actually managed to finish lunch.”
Night Light’s stomach growled.
“At least the tickets included meals,” Night Light said, his mood already starting to improve, in no small part thanks to the wine they’d brought to the table. Nopony had bothered asking if he and Velvet should actually be drinking, and consequently, they were on their second bottle in less than an hour.
“You’d have known that already if you bothered treating yourself once in a while,” Sunset said. “Whenever Princess Celestia travels, she gets the best everything. This would just barely be acceptable.”
“I don’t know, I think it’s more than acceptable,” Velvet said. She took another sip of wine before cutting into her food, artichoke hearts battered and deep fried and served over wild rice with a lemon-butter sauce. Slices of toasted baguette topped with gruyere rounded out the dish, giving her something to sop up the sauce with.
“It would be better with mushrooms instead of artichokes,” Sunset said.
Velvet shared a look with Night Light and they drank at the same time to avoid commenting on the way the filly’s special talent was obviously finding something to complain about no matter the situation.
“So what do you two actually do, since you’re not part of the Night Guard?” Sunset asked. She reached for the wine, and Velvet slid the bottle away to keep her from getting it.
“My father is one of the directors for the Canterlot History Museum,” Twilight Velvet said.
“That’s what your dad does. What do you do?”
Velvet sighed. “I guess I sort of… don’t do much. I help out at the museum and I’ve been trying to break into the writing market but it’s hard getting published.”
“What’ve you been working on?” Night Light asked.
“I was writing a historical romance but after all this maybe I’ll write about monster hunters.”
“Good,” Sunset nodded with approval. “Romance is dumb. Ponies go on about the power of love like it’s actually important, but it’s not! What’s important is power and making ponies respect you!”
“Well, romance is important too,” Night Light said. “I’d love to read your story, Miss Velvet. If you do write about all this, maybe you could make me taller and a little more, um…”
“In shape?” Velvet asked, smiling.
“I’ll have you know I’m one of the fittest ponies in the observatory,” Night Light said, with mock offense. “When they need a junior researcher to move piles of books they call me because they know I can easily lift dozens at a time.”
Velvet giggled. “Very impressive!”
“I’ve been working on my thesis project for my doctorate,” he said. “You know that the stars slowly drift over time, right?”
Velvet nodded. “It’s not really visible to the naked eye but they touched on it in school.”
“Well ancient star charts show them fixed in place for entire centuries. Every record is identical until about a thousand years ago. The common reasoning is that ponies didn’t really record the movement of the stars carefully until then, and once astronomy was invented they began measuring stellar drift.”
“I take it you disagree?” Velvet asked.
Night Light leaned forward as if sharing a dire secret. “I think they’ve got cause and effect reversed. The records are extremely fragmentary, almost like they were tampered with, but I’ve found many passages suggesting that astronomy was invented because the stars started moving and ponies needed to start keeping track of them.”
“How would you prove it?”
Night Light leaned back and sighed, pulling the wine bottle away from Sunset before the filly could pour herself a drink. “I’ve been estimating the positions of the stars at the time ancient star charts were made. There are definite discrepancies between where backtracking along their path shows they should be and where the charts show they actually were.”
“You could just ask the Princess,” Sunset said. “She was there a thousand years ago.”
“I wrote her a letter. All I got back was a form letter from the Palace that basically said it was cheating to ask her instead of doing the research myself, but, you know, phrased very politely. I have it framed in my apartment.”
Sunset snorted. “That definitely sounds like Princess Celestia. She hates giving ponies a real answer to anything. She likes making them figure everything out for themselves.”
“Is that so?” Velvet asked. “What did she have you doing?”
“I already told you it’s a secret! But I guess I can tell you a little, so you understand why it’s important.” Sunset wiggled in her seat with the excitement only a foal with a secret could manage. “I already told you there’s another alicorn. She’s a total idiot and barely even knows how to use magic. Princess Celestia sent me to teach her the basics because I’m a genius and it’s gonna take a genius to get through her stupid pink skull.”
“So you’re sort of a royal tutor?” Velvet asked.
“She’s not really royalty. She hasn’t even been elected or… crowned, or whatever the word is.”
“Coronated?” Night Light offered.
“Yeah, that. She doesn’t even do anything important but…” Sunset looked to the side. “She’s an alicorn, and even if she can’t use her magic right she’s got a lot of it. Princess Celestia thinks she’s special but I don’t think she’s nearly as great as everypony says. It’ll be better once things are normal and Princess Celestia gets back to teaching me.”
Velvet smiled a little. “I’m sure everypony will be happy when things get back to normal.”
“Yeah,” Sunset muttered. “Hey! I know what we should do!”
“Get another bottle of wine?” Night Light asked.
“No. I’m basically a royal tutor like she said. You two are useless right now. But I bet I can teach you to be less useless.”
The cabin was bigger than Night Light’s apartment back home. There were only two beds, and Sunset had claimed one of them as hers. Night Light hadn’t asked yet if he’d be sleeping on the floor, because he wanted to pretend otherwise for a few more hours.
Sleep wasn’t going to happen for a while, though. Sunset Shimmer probably wasn’t going to let them rest until they passed out.
“Usually if I was trying to teach a pony combat magic I’d start with fireball spells but we probably can’t actually teach those here,” Sunset said. “Fire is really good for fighting monsters because evil stuff burns really well.”
“Trust me, using magic on them isn’t a great idea anyway,” Night Light said. “When we fought the ooze monster in Canterlot, it started eating my magic.” He shuddered. “It was really, really awful. Like swimming in sewage while it melts you.”
“It couldn’t eat my magic, though,” Velvet said. “What was up with that?”
Sunset narrowed her eyes and looked closely at Velvet. “Hm…”
“Is there something on my face?”
Sunset effortlessly lifted Velvet up, rotating her slowly in the air and passing a beam of magic over her body.
“The pookas are creatures of chaos, right?” Sunset asked.
“Put me down!” Velvet said. Sunset apparently heard this as a positive response to her question, because she acted like the mare had said ‘yes and I am very excited to be levitated against my will.’
“Some ponies have a faint connection to harmonious magic,” Sunset explained. “I do, obviously, and Princess Celestia’s is the strongest of anypony, but maybe one in ten thousand ponies has the potential. You can usually spot them when they start singing. Everypony ends up singing along with them.”
“I thought that was just a normal thing,” Night Light said.
“If it was normal, everypony singing in the shower would turn into a parade in the streets. You probably get magical surges, right?”
Velvet nodded.
“That’s pretty normal. Harmony magic leaves a kind of… of beat or pulse in your magic aura. It can kind of echo and build up like, um… like how notes can turn into chords. If you’re not expecting it, you get a resonance effect and bam! Magic surge!”
Sunset dropped Velvet without warning. Night Light tried to catch her and ended up merely being a softer landing zone than the floor.
“They probably can’t handle the harmony magic. That’s good. At least I don’t have to worry about you making them any stronger.”
“I can see why Princess Celestia sent you out as a tutor,” Velvet said. “You’re really a great teacher.”
“Even the best teacher can only do so much with the raw material she’s given,” Sunset retorted. “I’ll try and go more slowly so you can keep up.”
A bit over an hour later, as night fell, Night Light was trying to keep a magical shield up while Sunset bounced a ball against it over and over again, and Twilight Velvet was unsteadily keeping herself in the air under her own power, the aura around her body wavering and pulsing and threatening to fail at any moment.
“See? That’s getting better already,” Sunset said, putting the ball down. “I mean, they’ll just eat your magic and then you, but if you can convince them to have a pillow fight maybe you’ll survive long enough to scream for help.”
“Should I stay behind?” Night Light asked, lowering his shield. “I don’t want to end up making things worse by being there. That whole last fight, Velvet had to protect me the whole time.”
“There is one thing I can try,” Sunset said. “It’s possible to sort of force a connection to harmony magic for a while.”
“Really?” Velvet lost her concentration and fell onto the bed, having learned her lesson about fall safety.
“It’s um…” Sunset bit her lip thinking. “Like a tuning fork! Yeah! If I set up the resonance inside your magic, it’ll stick around for a couple hours before it fades away. If we do it before a fight, you’ll be safe from being eaten.”
“That… actually sounds like a good plan,” Night Light said. “How does it work?”
“Stand still. I’ve only sort of invented this now,” Sunset said.
“I’m sorry, you only what?”
Sunset, instead of answering Night Light’s excellent question, fired a blast of magic into his horn. His whole body vibrated like a bell and he fell to the floor in a shaking heap, shivering uncontrollably.
“Maybe a little less force next time,” Sunset noted, watching the stallion twitch. “It probably still worked.”
“I smell burning toast,” Night Light said, from the floor. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“No, I smell something burning too,” Velvet said.
“It’s not my fault!” Sunset said. “I don’t care what anypony told you, I don’t always set everything on fire!”
“I don’t think it’s you,” Velvet said, pointing to the cabin door. “Look!”
Black smoke trickled through the gap. As if on cue, fire bells starting ringing all over the ship.