Sweetcream Scoops leaned back, titled her head, and belched. The blast of air extinguished the flaming torch set into the bar wall.
Mares and colts pounded their hooves on the floor and whinnied approval. An unidentified voice from the back shouted "that was so hot".
Sweetcream turned to Derpy Hooves, blood pounding in her ears. "Pay up, filly."
Derpy flapped her wings and giggled. "Okay Sweetcream. You can ask me any question."
Sweetcream struggled to think through the haze of bloody Mares, Gin and Herbal Tonics, and Local Star Cluster Gargleblasters. There were lots of questions about singing celebrities and private addresses, but then, spacy though she may be, Derpy would never break the Mail Mare's confidentiality. Her pickled attention wandered to Blues kissing another colt to the delighted squeals of the crowd. Such an attention horse. Such a lithe, attractive, attention horse. Of course, she had formed a complex friends-with-benefits arrangement out in Canterlot, but that was Canterlot, and it hadn't seemed worth putting down roots again for a "temporary situation."
"Why were you on fire today?" slipped out of her mouth.
"Oh, that," Derpy said, with a dismissive flick of her blond tail. "That was my crazy roommate."
Sweetcream shook her head and signaled for another pair of Bloody Mares. "What is Golden Harvest up to now?"
Derpy looked ashamed for a moment. She pawed the floor while staring at the ceiling and regarding her own hooves. "It's actually really nice. She means well. I told her about how the pegasi have to import all their food, or train harvester finches, and well, she started mumbling about bromiliads and how corn can extract carbon from the air…"
Sweetcream leaned closer, and then found herself banging Derpy's nose with her forehead.
"Oh I'm so sorry, continue," she said, rubbing one of the ice cubes on the spot, then dropping it and grinning sheepishly.
"It's okay," Derpy said, with true understanding in her voice. "Anyway, she gets so excited about hybrid projects. I think it's because her parents talked about how," Derpy assumed a tone of constipated authority, "'we have farmed corn the same way for seventeen generations, and we're not going to change just because you have a few things to learn!'"
Sweetcream laughed loud and high enough to rattle nearby drinks. In her peripheral vision, a pale-blue unicorn with paler-blue hair and a false moustache offered to buy Big Mac a drink.
"But anyway, she wanted the pegasi to have fresh food too, so she tried to make a carrot that could glow, I mean, grow in the clouds."
Sweetcream snorted.
"No, I'm serious. The seeds germinated in a cloudpatch and everything. It's blue and a little too sweet, and it gives me gas, but it's not too bad. The real problem is, er, buoyancy."
Sweetcream tilted her head, sipped her drink, and waited for the world to slow down.
"In order to keep them from falling through, she gave them hydrogen-producing cells. And well, she was baking some as a surprise for me and Dinky…" Derpy gave a helpless little grin and shrug.
Sweetcream tried, and failed, to stop from laughing.
"No, I thought it was really sweet, and I'm sure the feathers will grow back," Derpy said. "There weren't anything worse than second-degree burns."
"So, is she still working on them?" Sweetcream said, in a forced, serious tone of voice.
"…I don't know. She didn't meet me at the spa today," Derpy mumbled. "She never misses her spa appointments. I think she's really upset. She said something about damping the combustive tendencies with seaweed secretions, but she still should have come back hours ago."
Derpy drained her glass and chewed up the celery pensively.
Sweetcream Scoops listened to the music of the bar. The laughter was thinner. The flirts and murmurs were sparser. There just weren't enough people around.
She blinked. The scene refocused in her mind's eye. There was a huge, sucking, void, in the shape of a wild, purple earth pony.
Berry Punch was missing. At the bar. After eleven at night.
Sweetcream slid from her stool.
"Do you need some help?" Derpy Hooves asked.
"No, no, I'm much more comfortable here," Sweetcream said, staring up at her own flank. "It helps me think."
Lyra trotted in. Normally she'd down four shots and brag about how much she ate for dinner that night to nopony in particular, and act really flattered when somepony teased her for being a pig, or she'd complain about Bonbon's creepy obsession with "humans". Instead she stood up on her hind legs and put down a leather mug.
"Applejack," she said, in a thin, shakey voice.
"She's out on some kind of mission with Pinkie and the others," Fizzy Cocktail said.
"Fermented apple liquor with grain-neutral spirits containing no less than thirty percent apple brandy. Start pouring." Lyra said in a dry, threatening monotone.
The bartender poured for some time.
Lyra drank deep, and her grim face sagged.
"She didn't even say goodbye. She didn't tell me she was moving. She just said she had a surprise, and, and Bonbon left me." Lyra dragged out the words between gulps and shudders.
A chill ran down Sweetcream Scoops, from her hind hooves to the tips of her ears. All of this was happening when the most powerful magic known to ponykind happened to be occupied elsewhere in Equestria.
She rose to her feet. "I'm going to figure this out, by Celestia."
She charged off to find clues and embedded her horn in the wall.
Perhaps her quest could wait until the morning.
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Five days later, Sweetcream Scoops reluctantly looked out her window. Some of the ponies who disappeared had shown up once or twice for short periods of time.
Changelings? Evil enchantment? Nightmare Moon?
All the changelings had been driven off by Shining Armor and Princess Miamora Cadenza. But then, that was the phrase, driven off, not imprisoned or destroyed. Would ponyville be a comfy place to sneak in and lick your wounds?
The mayor hadn't found anything worth investigating. She'd sent a few town guards to the salt grotto and found nothing more than salty water and old left-overs from the prohibition days when it was a secret salt-lick smuggling center.
The logical answer was that this was because there was nothing to find. The answer creeping up from her tail to the back of her neck was that whatever was there to find was smart enough to hide.
It wasn't her problem. Somebody else would surely figure out what was going on. But then, the disappearances had been slow, and limited. A few days ago they'd stopped. The streets she looked on where bright and busy, full of apple selling, chatting friends, and a badly injured pear salesmare lurching out of town.
It was all normal except for Ruby Pinch. She wasn't crying, Celestia knew that little filly was quite a bawler. She was just trotting around in a vague circle, looking lost and dull. Come to think of it, Sweetcream hadn't seen Romana Colgate recently either.
The brave thing to do would be to charge in and explore the cave's darkest recesses, calling out her challenges to whatever menace lurked there.
On the other hand, Colgate was better at magic than her, Berry Punch had more raw endurance and a higher pain threshold, and Golden Harvest was more vicious in a bare fight (she'd seen all these traits on display in a tangle with some timber wolves last autumn).
So maybe "courage" wasn't the area to focus on.
Sweetcream Scoops thought back to the swarms of parasprites eating the stairs beneath her as she ran up away from them. She remembered watching birds scatter before a terrible shadow, and then realizing that shadow was a giant dog's leg. She remembered turning on the water faucet during Discord's Reign and getting part of her hoof burnt off by sticky green fire. She remembered the stories she'd heard of changelings crashing down like thunderbolts, of the hydra on the edge of town, and all the other things that six magical heroines were far more qualified to cope with.
Sweetcream spent the next few hours strategically assessing and singing to herself. She headed downstairs, called for her parents, and fixed herself a daisy sandwich. She kept looking out the windows. Any moment now, the Elements of Harmony would come charging in to save the day. Or maybe Celestia would bring down the full might of the sun against whatever fell power might have snatched away people she knew. Or the Mayor and the royal guards would take care of it.
Her special talent wasn't fighting monsters or creating sonic rainbooms or magic itself. She found her cutie mark by pretending a strawberry sherbet cone was a microphone and singing even higher than the birds could.
As the sun sank and shadows crept, the god-princess, the elements of harmony, and the royal guard failed to arrive or do anything.
Sweetcream realized she hadn't heard her parents downstairs for a while, or seen them this morning.
Sweetcream Scoops grabbed a silver photo frame and hammer. Then she went back under her bed and strategically analyzed while trying to control her bladder.
Outside, she saw, Ruby Pinch was still wandering around in a vague circle. An old brown colt walked up and asked her something. Ruby shook her head, and the colt walked on.
Music drifted in through Sweetcream's bedroom window, calling to her.