If anypony noticed Twilight’s continued lack of oneness with the magic of the Everfree, they didn’t mention it to her. In fact, the very next day after they’d come back from the Crystal Empire, it was as if they had never left. Applejack was selling apples at the market, Rarity was talking about her fall lineup and Rainbow Dash was bucking clouds in the middle of doing loop-de-loops in the sky. It wasn't as if she expected her friends not do those things—they were their jobs, after all, and it was likely that they had to make up for their absence when they were all in the Crystal Empire, but all the same, the sheer normality of everything going back to the status quo while she was still at a loss for what to do about her situation… well, it galled a bit.
Not that she was in any way immune to the lure of the routine. She genuinely had work to do in order to keep the library running, and while it was easy not to schedule the various maintenance tasks and delegate a reasonable amount to Spike in order to make time for what were, to her, more pressing issues, it was harder to just switch modes from one to the other at the drop of a hat. One would think that this would mean that she would be driven to distraction during her normal everyday work, and to an extent, she was, but the opposite was also true. As much as she enjoyed research, she wasn’t really getting anywhere with it and her library work at least felt productive.
Of course, part of that was her own fault.
“What’s wrong?” Spike asked, peeking at the blank sheet of parchment that Twilight had in front of her. “It’s just a letter to the princess. You’ve written hundreds of those. You want me to do it?”
Twilight dropped her quill back into the inkwell and leaned back in her chair, letting out an explosive sigh. “She lied to me, Spike. She’s supposed to be my teacher and she lied to me. This whole situation is because she left it until we were thousands of miles away in the frozen north with her crazy ex-student watching to admit that she knew what was going on the whole time, and now that everything has gotten complicated, she’s more concerned with pretending Sunset Shimmer is just going to trot back into her life than she is in actually helping resolve the issue!”
Spike considered Twilight for a moment, then asked, “Are you… jealous?”
Twilight gaped. “Jealous? I—what? Spike, I hardly call expecting my mentor—somepony I've trusted all my life—the ruler of Equestria—to support me against a criminal who wants to steal my magic jealousy!”
“Well, she’s not technically a criminal…” Spike pointed out.
“Which is part of the problem!” Twilight shouted, then forced herself to calm down. “So, you can see how it might be a little awkward to mail her saying, ‘Hey, it’s me, your maimed alicorn student trying to un-amputate the other half of her magic. Remember that research you promised to send me about that? I realize that you’re super busy pining after the daughter you never had who exiled herself to another dimension rather than remain your student, but I’d kind of like to not spend the rest of my possibly-immortal life as half an alicorn.’”
“Well, if you’re gonna say it like that,” Spike said with a shrug.
“I just…” Twilight struggled with a way to express how disappointed she was. “…I can’t believe that this is the same mare who taught me right from wrong and all but raised me. Raised us.”
“Hey, speak for yourself,” Spike said. “Maybe she taught you all that. I, on the other claw, learned how to sneak pastries from the kitchens.”
“I’m so glad you received an education that will send you far in your chosen field,” Twilight deadpanned.
“I know, right!” Spike beamed, little bits of sapphire in his teeth from breakfast. “But okay—if you don’t want to ask Princess Celestia, why not ask her sister?”
Twilight blinked. Ask Princess Luna?
Well, why not?
After penning the letter in question and getting Spike to send it after receiving several confirmations that it would go to Princess Luna and not her sister, Twilight watched the silvery smoke as it drifted up and out of the library window.
Well, that was one thing taken care of, at least.
Another day, another twenty-four hours of deceptive normalcy. Twilight wasn’t sure what that meant in regards to Sunset Shimmer. She doubted that the princess’ ex-student would waste any time in coming for her magic, so the continued lack of anything happening concerned her.
Either Sunset had been delayed and could even have been injured—they still didn’t really have any idea what had actually happened on the train—or worse, she might already be here, working on stealing the magic of the Everfree right out from under her nose.
Twilight frowned.
Was it callous to call that worse? She didn’t want Sunset to be hurt or anything. She had actually developed quite a bit of empathy for her since the revelations of that night—which was a little ridiculous, she did realize. She hadn’t even really actually met the mare, yet she seemed to have somehow decided that she could understand her.
Still, her likely incorrect assumptions aside, there had to be a limit, right? She felt that she was a fairly selfless pony, but it only made sense that she should value her own well being over that of a mare who was actively set on causing her harm. That was just how it was, and the fact that she didn’t like it was a good thing.
Twilight was spared her moral navelgazing when Rainbow Dash burst through the door of the library and shouted “Twilight!”
“ I'm right here, you don't have to shout,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes as she got up.
She apparently wasn’t moving fast enough for Rainbow Dash though, because halfway to her hooves Twilight was yanked the rest of the way up and then some and spent just as much time stumbling around as she would have otherwise taken if she’d just been left alone.
“There’s no time for that!” Rainbow Dash insisted, pushing Twilight to the door. “Rarity says that Fluttershy told her that she overheard Sunflower Blossom telling Skydancer and Raisin Surprise that Thunderlane saw a suspicious pony in a brown cloak coming into town from the Everfree!”
“Really?!” she asked, perking up. Suddenly, Twilight was heading towards the door under her own power, leaving Rainbow Dash to crash into the ground at her disappearance. Her instant enthusiasm was just as quickly tempered, though. Her hoof on the doorknob, she stopped to actually think.
“Wait,” Twilight said, scrunching up her face as she went over what Rainbow Dash had actually said. “Fluttershy overheard Sunflower Blossom saying that Thunderlane saw this…?” she asked, hoping that she'd gotten that right.
“Yes!” Rainbow Dash said with some exasperation as she resumed dragging Twilight out of the library. She once again found herself falling over, suddenly without a mare to push, when Twilight teleported out from under her hooves, this time backtracking.
“Hold on—Spike isn’t here, so just let me lock up the library,” Twilight said, but Rainbow Dash wasn’t waiting. Before she could grab the keys from inside, Rainbow Dash took to the air and swooped down on her. Twilight objected vehemently to being picked up like a misbehaving foal, but none of her twisting and turning did any good in the two and a half seconds that it took Rainbow Dash to fly her down the street to the Carousel boutique.
“C’mon, Twilight!” Rainbow Dash said as she set her down.. “I thought you’d be chomping at the bit to catch this mare.”
“I am!” Twilight insisted, brushing her coat down after being marehandled like that. “I’m just not impressed with your sources. These are some of the same ponies who thought that Zecora was an evil enchantress; I’d rather not get my hopes up until I hear it from somepony with a little more credibility.”
“Wait, but we all thought that,” Rainbow Dash pointed out, clearly thinking that she must be missing something.
“You heard what I said,” Twilight deadpanned, heading inside the Carousel Boutique before Rainbow Dash could get her very vocal objection out.
She then walked straight back out of the Carousel Boutique because Everypony else had already been present, and Rarity’s shop was the one place they didn’t expect to find Sunset Shimmer.
As the group asked around, though, Twilight was expecting less and less to find Sunset Shimmer at all.
“A hideous dragon-pony, you say?” Twilight asked the mare, who nodded vigorously from behind the white picket fence around the house she shared with her sisters.
“Yes!” she hissed, glancing down the street with a nervous terror hardly befitting the peaceful, idyllic scene. “I was just coming out of my house to get the mail when I saw it! It had a hunch and was prowling around like something out of a nightmare! At first it was wearing something like a brown sheet to hide itself, but then those fillies came racing by in that devil wagon of theirs and knocked it over! That’s when I saw what it was hiding—great big dragon wings!”
“Which, presumably, this pony used to sinisterly prevent themselves from ending up in the mud like everypony else who falls victim to the crusaders,” Twilight supplied, to which the shaking mare nodded.
“Now hold on a second,” Applejack said, stepping closer and startling the mare. “What happened with the crusaders and this pony?”
“Happened?” the mare asked, stepping back. “They ran, of course!” she said, then proceeded to demonstrate, zipping back inside her house and slamming the door.
“Well, that was helpful,” Twilight said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Devil wagon?” Fluttershy muttered to herself, barely audible and visibly confused.
“Ah don’t like this,” Applejack said, unhappy.
Twilight rolled her eyes. “I really don’t think this is anything to worry about.”
“Of course it’s something to worry about!” Applejack said, stomping her hoof. “Honestly! Not even helping somepony up after knocking them over? Ah thought Ah taught Apple Bloom better than that!”
“Er, right,” Twilight said, followed by several seconds of silence. “Moving on—this pony might not be Sunset Shimmer, but we should probably keep looking for them anyway. It sounds like they could really use a friendly face if this is how everypony is reacting.”
“Not Sunset Shimmer?” Rainbow Dash asked, giving Twilight a dubious look while hanging upside down in the air. “How do you figure?”
“Last I checked, Sunset Shimmer was a unicorn, not a—whatever that mare just described,” Twilight pointed out.
“Really?” Pinkie Pie asked. “I thought she was a crystal pony the last time we saw her.” Pinkie Pie gasped dramatically. “Have you been seeing her behind our backs?!”
Rainbow Dash just gestured at Pinkie Pie, indicating that the slightly loopy mare had been right on the mark this time.
Well, Rainbow Dash probably didn’t think that Twilight had been clandestinely dating her predecessor.
Probably. Ever since the excitable mare had started reading Daring Do books, she had started to get the strangest ideas about things.
Still. “I—err—”’ Twilight would have a response to that in just a second.
“They do have a point, dear,” Rarity chimed in with the rest on the side of seeing drama where there likely wasn’t any. “This may yet involve Sunset Shimmer! Why, who knows what ancient magics she may have enacted since we last saw her.”
“You do realize that nine times out of ten, ‘ancient magics’ are lost because they’re bad, right?” Twilight said. “It’s like digging up a toaster from thirty years ago.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Applejack said. “We’ve got a toaster back on the farm that’s nearly as old as granny and it’s better than any of that flimsy junk that Filthy Rich sells. Ah keep telling him, too, but he insists that nopony wants cast iron any more. It’s gotta be stainless steel, even if it’s so thin that Apple Bloom could put her hoof through it without even trying.”
“I’m not sure if ‘things that Apple Bloom can destroy without trying’ is exactly the best metric to go by,” Rarity opined, then hurried up to say, “But we are getting off track.”
“Look, I’ll be very happy if we catch up to this pony and it turns out to be Sunset… and very interested in learning how she made herself into some kind of frightening half-dragon hybrid,” she admitted. “But I think there’s a much simpler explanation for all this. Now, the last few sightings were back that way, so they should be headed… down that street.”
The rest of the group all looked where Twilight was pointing.
Rarity gasped. “But that’s…!”
It was the road leading to the Carousel Boutique. The six of them all shared a look, then began galloping down the street as a single unit, eager to see things proven one way or the other.
Sure enough, there was a pony in a brown cloak in front of Rarity’s business, looking up at the sign. As they approached, the pony turned and… it wasn’t even a mare, let alone one with as striking a palette as Sunset Shimmer.
“Ah!” the thestral stallion beamed, cheery despite his muted gray coloring. “Princess Twilight Sparkle! There you are! If you’ll just sign here, I have a package for you from Princess Luna.”
Twilight’s five friends all stood around stunned as she casually walked forward, took the clipboard that she was presented with, flipped over several pages, nodded and finally signed where indicated. Once she was done, the stallion bent over, reached underneath his heavy cloak and retrieved a small, locked chest the size of a loaf of bread and set it down in front of the Carousel Boutique. A moment later, he also produced a letter with an indigo seal that was conspicuously heavy and lopsided when he handed it directly over to her.
“…Really?” Rainbow Dash asked as the disguised night guard confirmed with Twilight that there was nothing else she needed him for and began to leave. “That’s it? We chased a mailstallion all over Ponyville when he was coming here anyway?”
Applejack scratched her chin in thought. “You know, now that you mention it… Hey, you!” she shouted, getting the stallion’s attention. “How’d you know to come here to deliver that, anyway? I’d’ve thought you’d’ve been told to take it to the library!”
As jovial as ever, the stallion nodded in confirmation. “Oh, I did!” he said. “It was the mare there who told me that Princess Twilight was out.”
“Mare…?” Twilight said, confused for a moment. Abruptly, she then turned to scowl at Rainbow Dash. “I told you you should have let me lock the library.”
“I wonder who it could be,” Fluttershy said.
“Well, let us look on the bright side,” Rarity said. “If it’s a mare, not a filly, then it isn’t the crusaders.”
Twilight shared a shudder with her friends at the idea of those three fillies in the library unsupervised. As the stallion was turning to leave again, though, Twilight had to ask. “This mare, who was it? I’d like to at least know who’s been in my library, if she isn’t there when I get back—which I should be doing.”
The stallion thought back, then shook his head. “She didn’t say what her name was, but you can’t miss her—not with that red and gold mane.”
One frantic gallop home later, Twilight burst through the library door, not sure what to expect. An empty library, ransacked, all her research gone and everything else destroyed?
Whatever she expected, it wasn’t to find Sunset Shimmer lying casually in the window alcove with a book in her lap and a smug smile on her face.
“Hey, Twilight. ’Sup?”