//------------------------------// // Searching the Stars // Story: Legends Never Die: The Search For Sunny // by bookhorse125 //------------------------------// “Urgh,” Pipp muttered as her hoof sank into a mud puddle. She pulled it back out again with a satisfying sound and wiped it on the grass, wrinkling her nose. “Are we almost there?” she asked with a hint of a whine in her voice. Her sister sighed above her. “For the last time, Pipp, I did a scout a few minutes ago, and it looks like another day’s walking at least,” she reported, executing a flip. “And trust me when I say that it isn’t going to get any easier than this.” She eyed her younger sister as she sighed and grumbled. “You could fly, you know.” “But my wings are too tired,” Pipp moaned. “I’ve been flying all day, and if I don’t let them rest, then I’ll get cramps!” “You are impossible,” Zipp muttered, and Pipp flung a bit of mud up at her. “Calm down, everypony,” Flurry tried to console them. “I’m sure it’s not as far as it looks, right, Zipp?” The pegasus shrugged, and Flurry glared at her. “We’ll make it there tomorrow, I’m sure of it, and then we can look for Sunny. She’s gotta be around here somewhere.” She squinted through the fog and tried to identify the murky shapes in the distance. “I hate this,” Hitch grumbled, stepping lightly around a puddle. He shook his head to try and clear it of all the water that his mane had collected over the past couple of days, but it made no difference, except that Sprout got drenched. The red earth pony managed to keep the map from getting wet, and he gave Hitch a dirty look, which the sheriff shrugged off. “You do not hate this,” Flurry contradicted, “you’re just tired. And wet. Besides, this is the only way to find Sunny, so-” “It’s not the only way,” Hitch retorted, “we’ve got magic! One spell, and poof, Sunny’s back, everything’s fine, la-dee-la, happy ending.” He glared at Flurry. “Or is your magic just above helping your friends?” “It is not,” Flurry said hotly, drawing herself up. “I’m not trying because I know it’ll be useless! They wouldn’t kidnap somepony as important as Sunny and leave her so that a simple magic spell can sort the matter out. Trust me, I know these guys and how they think-” “Do you really?” Sprout interjected, sliding the map into his bag where it wouldn’t get wet. “Have you ever tried being one? Because it really puts everything into perspective for you.” “I’ve heard stories-” “So all we’re going off of is a few stories, not actual experience?” Pipp said, rolling her eyes. “I’m so glad we’ve got such a capable pony in charge.” She hissed as her sister dumped a load of water on her head by shaking off her wings. Flurry spread her wings and shook the water out of her mane. “I know a lot more than you think!” she told Pipp, her voice growing louder with anger. “Believe it or not, I was born into a world of chaos where evil kept trying to destroy the forces of harmony, and everything didn’t always end so quickly that awful things didn’t happen! Have you ever had your friends and family nearly freeze because of you and something you couldn’t control? Have you ever been kidnapped and separated from your parents when you weren’t even a year old? Have you had your kingdom overtaken by a pony of pure darkness that infected every citizen with his mind control and forced your parents to bow at spear point? Have you ever been given the burden of being Equestria’s last hope that friendship and harmony might still make it through? Do you have any idea what it feels like to wake up some hundred years into the future where everypony you love and care for is gone?” “Have you ever had your friend mind controlled by a group of evil villains unlike anything you’ve ever dealt with?” Hitch snapped, taking a step forward. “Have you ever had to lie to your entire kingdom, giving them false hope that maybe things weren’t as bad as they actually were?” Zipp added, giving a frustrated growl as a leaf full of water dumped on her back. “Have you ever had your own mother only care about you because you go along with everything she says and can sing some good songs?” Pipp retorted, shaking out her wings. “Have you ever had ponies avoid you whenever you walked down the street, not knowing whether or not they could trust you because you made a mistake that any of them would have made?” Sprout said, his green eyes full of exhaustion and anger. “Maybe we wouldn’t be here if you had done more for Sunny than lie to her!” Zipp said. Flurry opened and closed her mouth, temporarily at a loss for words. She shook herself and said, “Well-” “EVERYPONY STOP!!!” They all turned to see Izzy, standing a little ways ahead of them, looking exhausted, sad, and even a bit heartbroken. The unicorn lit up her horn and created a transparent purple bubble around them that sent waves of heat wafting over them. “Look,” she said in a tired voice as she trotted over to them. “We’re all tired, we’re all wet, and we all want to find Sunny - but we’re not going to do that by arguing. Yes, we all have parts of our lives that we don’t love as much as the others, but that doesn’t mean that some of us are better or worse than everypony else. And we’re all friends here - that means that we stick together, no matter what.” Her voice broke and became a little more than a whisper. Izzy took a deep breath and wiped at her eyes. “Is this what Sunny would have wanted us to do?” Zipp landed next to her sister and looked at the ground as she pawed at it with her hoof. Everypony else looked elsewhere, not sure how to speak. Flurry took a deep breath. “You’re right, Izzy. And, guys… I’m sorry for how I acted. You’re right, I have no idea what we’re really up against other than stories I’ve heard… and that scares me. It’s bad enough that I’ve lost just about everything - I don’t want to lose anything else.” “I’m sorry, too,” Hitch and Sprout muttered at the same time, and Pipp and Zipp also gave their apologies. They all turned to look at Izzy, who in turn looked up at the sky. “I think it’s going to start raining,” she said, and everypony groaned. “So… maybe we should set up camp right…” The unicorn frowned, scanning their immediate surroundings. She spotted a break in the trees and pointed to it. “There.” Izzy led the bedraggled ponies into the small clearing, barely big enough for the six of them. As it was slightly uphill, the ground was drier and the fog lesser. Hitch, Sprout, and Zipp went to go find somewhat dry firewood while Izzy, Flurry, and Pipp set up a shelter. Well, Izzy and Flurry set up a shelter. Pipp pulled out her replacement cell phone and tried to get a signal. A single fat drop of water plopped on Flurry’s muzzle, and she looked up at the cloudy sky with a worried expression, saying, “At least we’ll be getting out of this rain.” The unicorn levitated a few logs and stuck them into the mud, forming a large rectangle, as well as a few more along the long sides of the rectangle. Flurry added more branches as crossbeams, and the two balanced thick, leafy branches on the top. The alicorn picked up some vines and tied the roof down. “There,” she said with a proud voice, she and Izzy stepping back to admire their work. “Oh, thank hoofness,” Pipp said in a relieved voice, dashing under the roof and huddling in the corner. She sighed and said, “It’s so much warmer in here.” A little more work had some more branches stuck along the sides, perpendicular to the ground to act as walls, with a hole for a doorway. Not much longer after, Hitch, Sprout, and Zipp came back with firewood, and Flurry shot the small pile they had made with a magic spell that set it aflame. The six ponies sat around the fire, feeling their exhaustion catch up with them. Zipp stretched and yawned as she lay down beside her sister, mumbling, “This is much better.” Pipp leaned into her and murmured her agreement as she closed her eyes and fell asleep. “Eh, it’s not perfect,” Flurry said, using her magic to adjust one of the sticks. “I would have liked to have something that we could use to secure it better, but…” “It’s fine,” Izzy told her, gently putting her hoof on the alicorn’s. “You’re too hard on yourself.” Flurry gave a rueful smile. “Guess it runs in the family.” That night, as Izzy had thought, the rain came, icy sheets of it, pouring down and flooding the path that the ponies had originally been taking, making the temperature drop from warm and miserable to just above freezing and miserable. Their little hut didn’t keep out all the leaks, so Flurry and Izzy took turns casting protective shields around the stick house during the night and into the morning, as the rain showed no signs of stopping. “It’s too unsafe,” Sprout protested. “If somepony walks by and sees something magicky and glowey, they’ll know where we are, and we aren’t exactly on the good side of the law right now.” “Who would be walking around in this weather?” Pipp asked, growling at her phone. She managed to get a signal, but it was incredibly weak, and it took about five minutes for any one pixel to load. “I’m just saying,” Sprout said, spreading his hooves. “He does make a fair point,” Hitch added. “There aren’t a lot of ponies who know how to do complicated magic yet - or any magic at all. But everypony knows about us, and they know that we can. Anypony with a brain could put together that magic usually means us.” “But nopony is out here,” Pipp said again, emphasizing every word. “Why would they be?” “They could be a bunch of creepy villains that want to take over the world and have brainwashed our friend and are supposedly out here as well,” Zipp pointed out, getting a wing swat from her sister. “Or any kind of strange social-outcast creature.” “Not helping, Zipp,” Pipp muttered under her breath. “Besides, it’s either that or get soaked, and if we get captured, at least we’ll be dry.” She turned back to her phone and carefully studied the screen. “Oh, great. This says that the lovely weather won’t clear up for at least another hour. So… we’re stuck here.” “At least there’s food?” Izzy said optimistically, reaching into her bag and pulling out an apple, tossing it into her mouth. Flurry yawned and looked over at Izzy, who nodded and lit up her horn a bright purple. Flurry’s own horn went dark, and the alicorn stumbled over to a corner and curled up, asleep within moments. She was taking much longer turns than Izzy was, though the unicorn tried to get her to have equal time. The rain didn’t clear up for two more hours, and when it did, the ponies emerged from their ramshackle hut to find mud even worse than the day before, fog even worse than the day before, and the clearing trashed, with no indication of where they had come from or which direction they were supposed to go, which immediately put all of them in such a good mood, as you can probably guess. Sprout pulled out the map and spread it out on a rock. “I think… we’re supposed to go that way?” the red earth pony suggested, pointing one way. “Or maybe it’s that way,” he said, pointing the opposite way. “I don’t even know which way is which anymore - they all look the same.” Flurry came up next to him and looked at the map herself. “I think it’s that way,” she said, pointing at the direction Sprout had originally pointed to. “Look, you can see that big boulder in there.” Sprout nodded and rolled up the map again, and the six ponies set off in that direction. And after walking for hours and making many directional changes, night had fallen, and they were forced to admit that they were totally and completely lost. “Great, just great,” Zipp muttered to herself. Flurry overheard and turned to glare at her. “Then why don’t you try to come get us… unlost!” she snapped, turning back to the map. “Okay, we definitely took a wrong turn there. Maybe if we backtrack a little bit…” “But it would be faster if we follow the river and make it back to the original path,” Sprout contradicted, tracing out his suggested path on the slightly damp paper. “Faster is better, right?” he asked Hitch, who was standing behind him, and the sheriff shrugged. Flurry shifted her hooves in the muck. “I guess we do want to find Sunny faster,” she said slowly, which Sprout took as an agreement. He nodded to the right and said, “This way, guys.” The mud and grime and puddles left over from the rainstorm made their progress excruciatingly slow, Zipp, Pipp, and Flurry, the only ponies with wings, finally just offering to carry everypony so that they weren’t slowed down by the conditions on the ground at all, but Hitch and Sprout firmly refused while Izzy cheerfully said that she was fine on the ground. After a few more hours of walking, they were no less lost. Sprout’s muzzle was within an inch of the map, searching desperately for a way out, but he found none. “Well, this is fantastic,” Zipp said as she shook out her wings. “Your negative attitude is not helping!” Sprout yelled from the ground. “Could you try to focus on something positive for a change?” “Okay,” Zipp said cheerfully, “I’m positive that we are permanently and forever lost in this wonderful place that you brought us to. What a wonderful day.” As she spoke, her tone shifted from falsely cheerful to sarcastic. Sprout glared at her. “All right, everypony, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Izzy said nervously, stepping between the two, fearing another fight coming on. “Fighting isn’t going to magically teleport us out of here,” Flurry added, swooping over to nudge Zipp. “If it would, then I would tell Sprout that pineapple belongs on pizza-” “It most certainly does not!” the stallion said hotly. “-and we would find Sunny in ten seconds flat,” the alicorn continued as if nothing had happened. Pipp grumbled and looked up, searching for anything above the entire earth other than fog and clouds and gloom. Was that… a darker patch there? But it couldn’t be clouds… why was it glowing? She squinted so that she could see better. “Guys, look!” she said excitedly, pointing at the patch of night sky visible between the clouds, in the opposite direction they were heading. Shining against the velvety darkness of the dark night were six stars, five surrounding the fifth, glowing slight shades of purple, pink, orange, yellow, blue, and white. Flurry took a step forward and tilted her head at the shape - it looked vaguely familiar. “I think we’re supposed to go… that way,” Izzy said slowly as the stars alternately blinked brighter and dimmer - that definitely wasn’t normal star behavior. Zipp tilted her wings, swinging around to face the constellation. “Well, what are you slowpokes waiting for?” she demanded, grinning as she did a loop-de-loop. “Let’s go find Sunny!”