And Then There Were Ten: ACT 2:
Sunny Starscout was not okay. Unlike earlier in her walk through the woods though, what ailed her now was purely, or at least primarily, of the external, physical variety. Her entire body felt as though it’d been trampled underhoof by the preposterously prodigious troop of ponies that lined up before her store during free smoothie day. Without even having to look, she could tell much of her fur was singed by the smell wafting into her nostrils, memories of her first few dozen failures as a filly making creme brulee flooding back to her. She bristled in self-consciousness despite her best efforts to store those embarrassingly ignatius experiences back in their properly labeled boxes.
As if she hadn’t enough, far more pressing, problems.
“Oooooh… why’d I have to go and think about Mrs. Cloverleaf’s cooking classes?” she grumbled wobbly to herself, hooves just as wobbly raised in abashment to cover her face from imagined fellow students pointing and laughing at her humiliation.
Remembrance, thankfully, did not hold her for much longer. She soon found herself snapped back to coeval conditions by, fittingly enough, the snapping of many, many trees around her followed the equivalent cacophony of them crashing upon the ground. Eyes shuttering open, she gasped at these sounds of arboreal collapse, and then gasped again in more troubled a fashion when she realized it hurt to even breathe. She shuddered at the thought of actually moving herself in any major way, though only inwardly as outwardly doing so would, of course, lead to more pain she wasn’t quite ready for.
Yet on the subject of shuddering, she struggled to remain still as she saw and truly appreciated the scope of the devastation surrounding her. Without ever having to tilt her head, she discovered what must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of trees either standing but on fire, lying broken on the earth in so many vast splinters, or some synthesis thereof. From those that were alight, embers of burning bark, leaves, pine needles, and other such plantstuff were lifted up by the heat and blown away by the cool breeze running through the locality like enkindled dandelion seeds. The smoke was so thickset and cimmerian that the sky, its moon, and its stars were blotted out in their entirety.
Sunny struggled to set the scene to words. The closest touchstone she had was the account recounted to her by her father concerning the climactic clash between Princess Twilight Sparkle and Tirek The Terrible early in her regal reign. The one where her first home since making the move to Ponyville, a really cool library built into an enchanted tree the princess sadly never did quite get over, was tragically destroyed along with hundreds of acres of a forest titled Everfiree. A close enough facsimile, she surmised, at least concerning scale. But the way dad’d told it, the way she’d always vividly picture it in her head, the trees in that part of Everfree were assailed so severely and swiftly that they had not the time to burn before being blackened so. Perhaps strictly rationally that was much the worse, but given that Sunny was not wholly given to rationality in the moment, the present portrait was naturally painted in far more striking trepidation.
Speaking of striking, she soon felt something strike the top of her head, something scaldingly hot. In terms of impact pain it was actually pretty picayune, her reactionary flinch doing more to harm her given the state she was in and her frenzied dash to brush whatever-it-was out of her mane before it started to burn like everything around her accomplishing the most harm.
“Ooo ow ow! Gah! Oh that smarts!” she rasped, which only made her hurt more which in turn made her groan out her woes some more which just made her hurt again in a never-ending feedback loop of pain. She only just managed to alter course and still herself once again when she saw what’d hit her and realized what it was.
A pinecone. On fire.
Sunny hadn’t much time to ponder where its origins rested when a half dozen or so more fell and pelted the ground around it. Looking up, she noticed many things she hadn’t since awakening from her slumber of agony. For starters, that she sat within the shade of a great sugar pine. For middlers, that the firmaments and tips of its branches and the pine needles and yes, pinecones, thereon blazed brightly. For enders, that the old tree, probably a sapling before Princess Sparkle was even a yearling, possessed very many cracks crisscrossing its surface up, down, left, right, and center that though seemed only bark deep, Sunny knew was anything other than by the way the pine suddenly screaked and listed significantly forward.
It was going to fall. The ancient, ignited tree was set to fall on her. Verily, because of her, she swiftly ascertained. Yes, age and flame were to blame too, yet with the fact that she must have been flung into the pine with no small measure of force if the roughly her-shaped depression imprinted in it she realized her back rested in was anything to go by, Sunny could not escape responsibility.
Regardless, she needed to move. Yesterday.
Gritting her teeth, Sunny’s immediate inclination naturally was to sidestep catastrophe as it were. Simple and effective on paper, strenuous and inefficacious in practice. The persistent pain she still felt didn’t help, but that wasn’t the preeminent problem. The debris to the left and right of her, all the burning logs that were once majestic firs and the titanic upturned stones the size of sailboats and the patches and piles of grass that still miraculously remained rooted to the ground or else had been plucked and sent billowing away with so much else that all the pinecones from the collapsing sugar pine had set aflame with them, were.
Between these three things she couldn’t find a safe or speedy enough route, any gap at her lateral axis at all. The only avenue of advance as she sorely slithered on her stomach was the narrow path ahead. Were it the shadow of any other tree casted over her, she might have been able to get out of the way in time. Not a capital course, but one she felt confident she had at least a fifty-fifty, maybe a forty-sixty, chance of clearing before fiery lumber was upon her. By points of comparison, there were no prospects she could spot where she could escape the sundering of the sugar pine. Not a tree that tall. Not via the line of its downfall.
Sunny’s only real hope was to fortunately find some passage somewhere through the refuse at her sides someplace downlane. When the steady snapping of the tree picked up in pace and power and its shadow oh so suddenly darkened, her optimism, meager as it was in the moment, shifted to maybe catching an opportunity by the wind, which blew the opposite way, altering the trajectory of the pine’s plummet somewhere away from her in these last few precious seconds. Miniscule as that happenstance was, it still seemed far more likely than the crawl onward. And yet, the latter was the only outcome she’d any direct control left, so through the fire and flames she continued ceaselessly. Through the torment and tumult, she kept moving forward. Even when the fracturing of the sugar pine attained crescendo, even when silence fell briefly alongside the tree, and even when she saw the crackling wreckage crashing down on top of her at the upmost of her periphery, Sunny kept. Moving. Forward.
For her efforts, she was privileged with a plunge.
Not of the tree, no.
Herself.
In a second and a half, Sunny tumbled into a depression of sorts, cartwheeling a surprisingly great deal in her brief air time before colliding onto the ground on her back. She yelped in surprised pain at this development, yet when she heard and then looked up at the sugar pine smoldering parallel with the earth now, covering over half the pit’s diameter from side to side and spanning its entirety from top to bottom, she counted her blessings. Letting loose the breath she’d forgotten she’d held, Sunny permitted herself a short respite that was greatly welcomed, punctuated as it was many times by her coughing out all the ash dripping down from the tree above. Upon securing enough oxygen to calm herself as well she could given the circumstances, she inclined her head as far back as equinely possible till her occipital rested on the soot surfaced floor, eyes shut for a bit. After the passing of a solid minute or two, she’d recuperated enough mental clarity and energy to contemplate copious questions. Yet while all were very good, there stood one whose pertinence shimmered just a little more lucent. Really two, but they were so well linked they might as well have been one.
“What… what happened?” Sunny asked aloud. “Why… why did it happen?”
She tried to think. Tried to remember. Tried to imagine how her night’d taken such a terrorful turn. She kneaded her temples with her hooves, thankful that the movement either didn’t hurt as much as it would’ve when she’d awakened or that she’d merely acclimated adequately to the agony already, and relaxed. She believed the answer would arrive to her rather than her having to go to it if she could just relax.
She was right to a point.
Sans any sweat from her brow, Sunny’s mind conjured forth the photo album of neoteric events in sequence. There were many that weren’t important for the line of inquiry she pursued, however, so she soon had to actively focus in on the last page of that scrapbook. She saw herself traveling sunnily along through the woods back to the cave that served as homebase for her and her friends till morning. She saw her face grimace in disquiet and discomfort at the rapid uptick in temperature in the vicinity and a bright light illuminating where she trotted. She saw herself stopping in place, twisting around, and beholding up in the night sky–
“Sunny! Sunny!”
Sunny gasped at what she thought sounded like a familiar voice calling her name, contemporaneously opening her eyes with the same surprise.
“Sunny! Sunny! Where are you!? Are you okay!?”
As the voice, Zipp it seemed, kept attempting to establish contact with her, Sunny gasped again. Yet not at anything she heard, at what she’d sighted.
There, a good thirty feet or so in front of her, sat a sphere mostly of murky gray with some strange pattern of black lines over the bottom, at the precise center of the hole.
No.
Not hole.
Impact crater.
For there was no doubt in her mind that the meteorite she’d just recalled seeing, the one around the size of the Smoothie carts she owned, the one whose descent from on high was faster than any pegasus she knew or knew of, the one wreathed in a halo of intense orange-red fire that rendered her frozen in its heat as it approached, was one and the same with the gray-black sphere before her.
Sunny was staring right at the thing that’d caused her and the forest so much trouble of late.
As she broke into a shivering sweat at this understanding, she wondered briefly what it was. She settled mostly on the belief that it must’ve been some sort of satellite that’d somehow gotten knocked out of orbit and dropped to the world below if the metallic sheen and the quite clearly unnatural nature of both its perfect circularity and the black line pattern were any indication. Then she figured it was probably better to hypothesize after she’d been found and brought to safety.
Thus, as stentorian as she could–which was a lot by her calculus–Sunny screamed, downright screeched, to get Zipp to locate her.
“Zipp! Zipp! Over here! I’m down here! In the crater! Beneath the tree! In the crater! Beneath the tree!”
Over and again she shrieked out this message to acquire her friend’s attention, putting absolutely all she had into this cry for help to the stage where she did cry with her eyes considerably. Yet even with such resolution, all that powering through the pain, her voice still lost ever more of its distinction and decibels with each passing repetition, growing ever fainter on the acoustic horizon. This trend extended steadily till, eventually and inevitably, if either pony still did speak, they were such minute things that not even the diamond dogs of old would be able to hear.
Sunny refused outright to slump down in defeat and stay despondent, however, wiping away the tears in hardy defiance. Every which way and that way, she angled her head on the lookout for anything, anything at all around her, any firm root or rock or anything that the sphere’s crash had uncovered that was usable for climbing out of the crater. From where she lay, she found nothing to fulfill the bill, but that was okay. Perhaps, she reasoned, if she could get to the other side she could discover what she needed. Her initial idea had her avoiding the sphere entirely to accomplish this since she was still quite shaken by its aire of imaginably menacing mystery and the prodigiously possible possibility that it was radioactive in some manner. It was in space presumably for a long time, after all.
Two tentative feet of painfully creeping on her belly later though, and Sunny decided just to crosscut the crater to save herself the hassle. The enigmatic rondure may’ve been releasing radiation, yet if she hurried, it wouldn’t have enough time to affect her.
Hopefully.
Gulping down her apprehension for the moment, Sunny shifted and slid towards the sphere, remaining cautious to keep at least a foot, foot and a half, between her and it at all times no matter what. Despite how achey she still was, this stratagem went swimmingly, and she made it to the crater center at record pace compared to her early estimates.
Yet, of course, something just had to make her drift off course.
A symbol.
An emblem.
A royal seal.
A six-pointed, magenta star over a six-pointed white star ringed by a constellation of five smaller white stars, all upon a backdrop of purple.
The cutiemark of Princess Twilight Sparkle.
Ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten questions streaked into and through her mind. They animated her such that she broke into a scurrying crawl, incapable of feeling pain even if somepony’d accidentally dropped a piano on her, and circled around to the other side of the sphere to find the same perspicuous image emblazoned there too. She was so overwhelmed that she had to massage, really paw, at her eyes to ensure they weren’t dismally mistaken.
They were not.
Faded as both instances of the cutiemark were by either time or the calidity of re-entry or both or whatever, Sunny Starscout could recognize it from a million miles away in her sleep back when she was two.
Yet even though she was a big filly now, an expressly girlish squeak couldn’t be helped from escaping her muzzle. Something similar could be said for the font of foalish–justifiably foolish–inquisitiveness her face just couldn’t hide. A fountain that intensified in her soul until, with strength she’d have thought beyond her mere moments prior, she stood upright on all fours without even an inkling of instability, and walked closer to the sphere.
Sunny, a lone inch away, halted, pondered what exactly was her next step, and then like any curious kid much her junior would, gently tapped her hoof against the mark.
Boop.
A lot of things happened seemingly all at once, though there was a proper progression, difficult to fathom as it may’ve been to an onlooker.
The mark’s stars shone like the stars above from which they drew their inspiration.
A masculine voice, monotone, yet decidedly unmachine-like and more like someone composedly reciting a script, said, “Pony DNA detected. Commencing unlocking protocols.”
Sunny, taken aback by the abruptness of these two incidents, fell back onto her back in a startled jar. “Ah!”
She didn’t have long to complain and recover however before a horizontal seam, previously totally nonexistent to her sight, appeared over the middle of the sphere, followed by a vertical seam at the peak. The loftier half of the sphere then split open like some odd, orbicular flower to reveal Sunny knew not what since she couldn’t see anything from her vantage point on the floor.
To correct this, Sunny’s inquiring mind gave her power again to get up and go without feeling like she needed a month’s vacation. She permitted herself a deep breath, took a couple steps forward, and craned her head into the opening of the sphere, really a pod now she guessed, to discover–
–the mirror image of the pod, yet in miniature, laying in a hole midpoint in said larger pod. Mostly gray, black pattern on the bottom, and Princess Sparkle’s cutiemark on either side.
“Huh,” Sunny said simply, grabbing the smaller pod from the top with one hoof and carefully resting it onto her other. “Hope there’s not more of you in here. That’d just be ridiculous.”
She examined it more closely, rotating it around a bit before her scrunched up–mental note taking–mien like a metallic basketball. Eventually she stopped on one of the sides with a mark and again, though much more certainly, lightly pressed her hoof against it.
A similar series of events to what’d just played out occurred.
The stars of the mark glowed like real stars.
The same unknown and unemotional male voice said, “Pony DNA detected. Commencing unlocking protocols.”
The smaller pod opened in the same way, horizontal seam appearing over the center, vertical one appearing at the peak, loftier half splitting in two.
The primary departure from earlier, aside from Sunny not being particularly jumpy this time, was what lay within.
Inside the smaller pod was not an even smaller pod as she’d half seriously hypothesized.
No.
“A watch?” she whispered.
What Sunny could only describe as a high-tech looking wristwatch sat snugly in a rectangular depression in the pod’s interior.
It was a rather cumbersome seeming thing for what she surmised it was, with an unwieldily grandiose wristband made of black and dark gray metal more than likely to make the simple act of cantering at a meek twenty miles an hour an athletic achievement in and of itself let alone a normal sustained speed. Four equally metallic yet white external tubes almost intersected in an X pattern before disappearing into the more black area in the middle. At the exact center of the watch was its most eye drawing feature. A mostly dark gray faceplate with a trail of black running over the top and ringed by four, spherical, tiny light emerald green light bulbs. A faceplate within which was a translucent screen beneath which began to glare stunningly the electronic image of an darker emerald green background upon which rested a black hourglass possessing a light emerald green interior. Right of center and to the side, off the faceplate and on the blacker metal, between two of the white tubes, she further noticed what seemed to be a big light emerald green button upon a cylindrical prominence of dark gray.
To say Sunny was a little weirded out at this development would’ve been like saying the larger pod had hit the planet kinda hard.
Tilting her head as far to one side as it’d go, brow upturned as far up as she could, she asked aloud, “What was a watch doing all the way out in outer space?”
Before she could even begin to arrive at an answer–let alone a decent one–for the question and the bajillion others she had, something even stranger and far more frightening happened. The watch’s wristband, which’d seemed so given to stillness as any other metal, started to shift, basically running like bubbling clay. Then the bottom parted completely like the yawning maw of some small, yet menacing, creature. Then, the watch leapt at her as though it had a mind of its own.
Then, Sunny screamed.
10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10
Having barely regained the requisite energy to hoofle with conversing with the purple mare, Zipp heard Izzy suddenly gasp and yell out, “Oh no!”
“What!?” asked Zipp, back to being super nervous again rather than super soporific.
“I just realized that because you two snoozed through Sunny’s lesson that you probably don’t know anything about the early Harmony Era!” A look of tenacious determination overtook her features. “In the name of being a good friend, it is my sacred, solemn, ecstatic duty to remedy this horrible situation with utmost haste!” she declared as though reciting an important line that’d been imparted to her school and doing so flawlessly.
“That’s cool and all, Iz, but right now I don't think it's the best time for–” Zipp began.
“Utmost haste!” Izzy yelled with enough force in her voice to literally nearly knock Zipp off her hooves. After coughing into a hoof and smiling bigly again, Izzy began, “Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria–”
A firm hoof in her mouth, plus a hastily geo-kinetically constructed ring around her lips, muzzled Izzy’s muzzle nigh instantaneously, the stallion responsible appearing as afraid and as sweaty as the pegasi sister duo just had as he hurriedly said, “Maybe that should wait till at least tomorrow. You know? Until after we get back to town and are safe and comfy under any of the various forms of shelter available there much better suited for a full half-day lecture? Besides,” Hitch smirked and craned his head towards the pegasi, “they haven’t made their Pinkie promise to keep their magic in check yet.”
Izzy immediately expelled Hitch’s hoof from her maw, her lips flexed away the stone around them like it was a dinner mint being crushed by a carriage, and she shouted, “You’re right!”
What?” Zipp asked, as confused as she had been in the now past ten or so minutes. “How is he right? DIdn’t you just say that all this–” she gestured to the dusty cave rubble they stood on, “--was on you?”
“Yeah, but who knows? Maybe next time we’re chillaxing in a cave it could totally be on you and/or Pipp! Like if you see your own shadow, get scared, and accidentally zipped into the walls too hard. Or if she yawned too hard while waking up.”
“Ha! As if!” Pipp said, stretching her legs and back out. “You’d need at least a memory foam mattress to get me to yawn after waking up and not… cave floor.”
“Plus,” Izzy continued, never minding Pipp’s comment, “you’ve never felt the astounding, amazing awesomeness of making a Pinkie promise before!”
“Yes. However did we carry-on?” asked Pipp with an eye-roll, almost as sarcastic as her tone of voice.
A jab to her soft pink neck by Zipp changed her demeanor to something considerably easier to construe as interested, lest Izzy catch onto Pipp’s condescension and get mad again.
The unicorn appeared to remain fortuitously oblivious as she stepped closer to the two and said, “Here, let me show you again!” She crossed her hoof over her heart again. “Cross my heart,” she stood on her backhooves and flapped her forelegs like a bird again, “and hope to fly,” she stood normally and pressed a mud covered hoof against her eye again, “stick a cupcake in my eye!” She then proceeded to recite the oath and repeat its accompanying locomotion to the point the heads of everyone around her spun in dizziness.
“Okay, I think we got a hoofle on it,” Zipp said, interrupting Izzy halfway through the hope to fly part.
“Yeah, Iz. Honestly doesn’t look that hard,” said Pipp.
Hitch sat down and placed both hooves over his mouth, seemingly barely able to contain his snickers. Izzy, still standing on her backhooves said, “I know it might seem easy peasy mozzarella cheesy, but believe you me there’s an art and a science to it that requires stacks of care. If not–” her gaze grew rigid for a brief instant, “Disaster!”
Zipp ‘tsked’ while Pipp huffed a stray lock that had fallen onto the bridge of her nose back into place on her mane.
“Pffft. Now I know you’re just being melodramatic for laughs,” Pipp said, putting her shades down and shaking her head. “And I would know. Accredited drama queen here.”
“Can confirm,” Zipp said, pulling out a plastic card from Pipp’s mane with a photo of the former’s face when she was just a filly on it going all ‘Woe is Me!’ with the words, ‘Uplift Elementary: Accredited Drama Queen,’ emblazoned in shiny, golden, metallic lettering just beneath. When she was sure Izzy and Hitch saw enough, she put the card back in her sister’s mane and said, “And yeah. For once, me and sis here are totally on the same page. Literally so simple pre-k ponies Pinkie Pie probably made it up for could probably perform it.”
“Yeah, I mean, all you gotta do is go: Cross my heart…” Pipp crossed a hoof over her heart, Zipp doing the same but in silence.
“Hope to fly…” Zipp stood on her backhooves, but instead of flapping her forelegs like Izzy, she flapped her wings a bit in light of actually having them. Pipp did the same but remained silent as Zippy had for the first section of the oath.
For the ultimate part of the promise however, both pegasus princess sisters sought to speak at once as they completed the final movement. “Stick a cupcake in my–”
But rather than completing matters sans fault, they both somehow managed to press their hoof far too firmly against their eye. Forcefully enough that they both yelped out in most ungraceful fashion. Where they differed crucially was in what occurred concurrently with said yelps.
In a single, reactionary wing push, Zipp zipped into the air so fast she broke the sound barrier and just kept going, going, going straight up like a bottle rocket into the night.
Pipp’s response, while not resulting in much personal displacement by comparison, was no less… moving. As in, her yelp was so powerful, precise, and projected that it blew away all the leaves and many, many, many branches of the nearby treeline and every other three behind them in a horizontal cone of devastating defoliation measuring some thousand feet in length and half that in diameter. So powerful, precise, and projected, that a veritable bestiary of mundane and marvelous woodland critters flew, glode, slid, crawled, or straight up sprinted as fast as their wings, bellies, legs, or other forms of aeronautical and terrestrial locomotion could carry them deeper into the weald for refuge.
As the various creaturely cries of panic dimmed down where not even crickets could be heard chirping in the immediate area, Zipp, clutching her sore, mud covered right eye finally managed to return to the earth. Just in time to see Hitch fall onto his back, clutching his stomach in a fit of laughter so strong it left the normally mild mannered sheriff crying.
Izzy in the meanwhile, typically as hyper-emotional as she was just plain hyper, merely lowered and shook her head in disapproval as she said, “Tried to warn ya. Told ya, told ya, told ya.”
Zipp and Pipp could not but groan as they did their best to assuage the pain in their eye with their good, non-mud covered hoof. For the former at least, she also groaned because she was so comically wrong she’d driven Hitch delirious with hilarity.
“What… what just happened?” Pipp askes, giving voice to the crucial query on both pegasisters’ minds.
“Stuck with you on the same boat there, sis,” said Zipp.
“It’s simple,” Izzy began, nose upturned didactically, “you each put your muddy hoof too hard onto your eyes like a couple of Pinkie promise putterers.”
“What? No way!” Zipp declared in downright disbelief. “That makes, like, zero sense!” She pointed at herself with her muddy hoof. “I’ve been a champion athlete since I was five!”
“And I’ve been adroitly applying face masks, face cream, eye-liner, eye-shadow, and all kinds of beautification products for my volto illustre since I was five!” Pipp agreed, in her own way.
“All super cool to know, but entirely relevant and inapplicable if you’ve never, ever, lever practiced Pinkie promising for long enough,” Izzy said, nose still slanted skyward.
“How is–does that–begin to–” stammered Zipp, barely able to form words she was so confuzzled.
“Don’t–don’t take it too personal, ponies,” Hitch said, sitting up criss-cross-applesauce, trying hurriedly to catch his breath as his laughter faded. “That’s just how the Pinkie promise operates. You think you have the best hoof-eye coordination and depth perception in ponydom, then blamo!” He slammed his hooves together for emphasis. “Mud coated hoof in the eye. If I had a bit for every time it happened to me growing up, I’d have paid off the mortgage to my house a full year sooner.”
Zipp’s eyes narrowed in anxiety and zipped from Hitch to Izzy and from Izzy to Hitch several–dozen–times. “Did… did you two plan this?”
“Plan what?” Izzy asked, head to one side. “I was rooting for you the whole way to be the first ponies I’ve ever seen breeze through it on the first try.”
“You got my motive down to the lowercase ‘t’, though,” Hitch admitted, shrugging. Smiling, he wiped away his leftover mirthful tears as he said, “And for the record, thank you both so much for exceeding my expectations so much. Best prank I’ve managed to pull in years.”
Zipp keenly inspected her friends’ faces for fractures, faults, fissures, anything foretoken of facade whatsoever that’d facilitate the notion they were being less than truthful on the subject of secret conspiring. Their considerably earnest sincerity–plus the fact Izzy probably couldn’t even spell the word deception where something involving ancient friendship customs was concerned–inevitably won the day. She sighed in acquiescence, silently promising to somehow prank Hitch back at the nearest opportunity, and asked, “So, uh… did that count? I mean, is the Pinkie promise complete on our side?”
“Because if it isn’t, we’ll keep trying! Mark my words as a virtuosa della cosmetologia, we WILL get this right!” proclaimed Pipp with unwavering venturesomeness. “Cross my heart–” She crossed a hoof over her heart. “And hope to fly–” She fluttered a bit with her wings before landing back on the ground and covering her hoof in fresh mud. “Stick a cupcake in my–”
“NO!” Izzy and Hitch both interjected as they closed distance on Pipp and grabbed her hoof mere calibers away from her eyes so quick Zipp had to jump back on reflex.
“It’s fine! It’s totally fine!” frantically said the unicorn.
“Yeah!” the sheriff hurriedly agreed. “The whole ‘hoof-pressing-to-hard-against-the-eye-thing’ is kinda expected for newbies, ‘case you couldn't tell!”
Zipp set free a huff of relief she hadn’t known she’d been holding till it was gone. “That’s a comfort. Honestly don’t know how many more twists and turns I can hoofle tonight.”
“Think you can manage a big hug?” Izzy asked, moving in a single hop to where everypony could see her, forelegs held wide-open for mostest huggage.
Zipp and her sister eyed Hitch, who shook his head at the voiceless question they’d asked. “No, it’s not part of the promise. Izzy’s just being… well… Izzy.”
“And huggy!” Izzy agreed in sing-song style.
Zipp looked at Pipp who looked back at her and then the both of them shrugged. They turned back to Izzy and, along with Hitch, trotted over to the unicorn.
“Ok. Just make sure not to squeeze us like accordions like you like to do,” Zipp started, smirking. “Wouldn’t want someponies here next to me trying to bring down fall early with their squawking.”
“Or some other ponies I could name, but won’t so they’re not humiliated, trying to become an astronaut in the pegasus space program,” Pipp riposted with an eye-roll.
Izzy was thankfully feeling merciful for the moment, none of the events the two sisters were jesting at the other’s expanse over coming to pass as the unicorn embraced them plus the sheriff. Although, they could do with several hours on a waterbed to rightly realign their backs later on.
The most distinctive thing about the hug, however, was that after a few seconds, Izzy sighed in most un-Izzy-like dejection and hung her head sadly.
Swiftly sensing something amiss. Zipp asked, “What’s wrong, Izzy?”
“Oh nothing, nothing. It’s just that, as great as you guys undergoing your first Pinkie promise is, it’d have been like, totes a bajillion times better if Sunny saw it.”
Zipp ascended a brow at this and began to counter by saying, “Uh, Iz? What are you talking about? Sunny’s been right here this entire–” But, she stopped towards the end when she realized one very little, teeny-tiny, minute detail.
She hadn’t seen or heard anything at all from Sunny since they’d all retired for the night in the cave. Like, at ALL.
Izzy was categorically right.
The look of stunned shock on Zipp’s face was swiftly followed by the same sentiment appearing on Pipp’s and Hitch’s own visages. Like clockwork, the trio’s attention turned to what was left of the cave beneath their hooves, the pegasus princesses shouting together, “Hitch! Sunny! Save her! NOW!”
“I’m on it!” Hitch bellowed back, standing on backhooves, fronthooves held apart and prepped to slam against the other. “Alakaza–”
“Wait! Stop! No earthpony, earthmoving magic!” Izzy cried out, preventing Hitch from following through and getting his and the two other eye-pairs to fall squarely on her. “Sunny woke up and trotted into the forest, like, half an hour ago or something! Don’t you remember what I said?”
“What?” asked Zipp. “You didn’t say she went for a walk in the woods!”
“Well I meant to! Or… I was gonna,” Izzy defended, if not quite convincingly. “Point is, she’s over there,” she gestured to the forest, “not here!” she pointed beneath their hooves.
Zipp, Pipp, and Hitch all clutched their hearts and breathed out easy.
“Good,” said the sheriff, wiping a bit of sweat from his brow.
“Yeah. You had us real worried there for a sec,” the singing stylist said, readjusting her shades.
Zipp hovered a few feet into the air and asked, “So, you know exactly where Sunny went? Because I’m gonna go get her to tell her what happened and find some new shelter for the night so we can all get back to shut-eye.”
“Hey! I’m perfectly capable of reconstructing this perfectly good pile of rubble to at least cover our heads, ya know,” Hitch said, aggrieved by the unspoken implication.
“Pffft,” Zipp dismissed. “After last time you tried building something with your powers, I wouldn’t trust you with building a pet rock let alone anything a story tall or above.”
“Yeah. I mean, face facts, Hitch. You’re un maestro at pulling the threads, but when it comes to stitching it all together at the kind of scale we need, you’re more like my sis here whenever she even looks at a sewing machine,” sad Pipp before pulling out a blankie from Zipp’s mane that had what was supposed to be a pattern resembling Zipp’s face when she was a filly on it but that looked more like a melted marshmallow with vaguely Zipp-like features. “See?”
Hitch gasped dramatically, hoof over heart in dismay. “Hey now, I’ll have you know–NEIGH–reminded that that castle was as architecturally sound as ANY of the titanic towers you grew up passing on the way to kindie-garten… if it didn’t immediately sink into the swamp… and get wet… and then explode in a storm of mud… and then make the birthday girl cry… and then ruin the party for everypony…”
Not even granting Hitch the chance to look self-conscious at that, Zipp turned to Izzy, smiled friendly, and asked, “So, yeah, Iz, about those directions please?”
“Sorry Zipp, but I’m afraid that’s gonna have to be a big negatory on that one,” the unicorn said, shaking her head.
Zipp didn’t try to mitigate her frustration with how nothing tonight was being simple and straightforward as she exhaled in exasperation and let her shoulders slump down. “Okay… why won’t you just give me the info I asked for?”
“Because my friendship sense was tingling.”
Zipp honestly didn’t know what was weirder: the content of Izzy’s words or the manner she’d delivered them, as though it were the most mundane thing in the world to say you couldn’t tell a friend where another friend was because of a sense specifically pertaining to… friends.
What she could say for certain was that she hadn’t the dimmest of an idea how to respond to that and, honestly, didn’t really want to, her mental fortitude diminished to a puddle’s stature by that point. She so wanted nothing more than to just turn around and fly away at top speed, taking her chances with spotting Sunny without any specific knowledge, but thought it’d be, like, super rude.. Too rude for her unicorn friend to bare without breaking down into a sobbing fit.
Desperately, Zipp turned to Pipp and Hitch, noiselessly beseeching them to put forth the query Izzy doubtlessly was waiting to be asked at what she’d said, but found both their countenances shaking side to side like latitudinal bobbleheads. ‘You no good wimps!’ she thought, even as she herself sweated like she was in a greenhouse in the desert on the sun and struggled to gulp down the apprehensive lump in her throat. Her mind began to wander, and she couldn’t help but inwardly laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation: her, Zipp, gold medalist in more things than she could count–and she could count half the record for pie–withering under the confused gaze of one of the least frightening ponies she’d ever met. In this admitted humor of things, Zipp met the mettle needed to prepare to continue the conversation.
But then, Izzy’s eyes widened and she looked above and beyond Zipp, hoof extended that way as she said, equal parts childlike gree and wonder, “Ooooo! Looky, looky guys! Up in the sky!”
‘Yes!’ Zipp cheered in her head. ‘Hat tip to the convenient distraction!’
Her attention and that of her sister’s and the sheriff’s tilted up to where the zealous unicorn pointed, a bright, orange-red light darting through the night.
“Is it a bird!? Is it a plane!?” Izzy speculated aloud. “Ooo, ooo! Maybe it’s one of the Trotformers from that one movie I saw! If that’s the case, I hope it’s one of the Autobots like Troptimus Prime! Not one of those meenie Decepticons. They’re just so mean! And sneaky!”
“You mean like… deceptive?” Zipp asked.
Izzy looked down back at Zipp for a bit and gasped out before asking, “How did you know!?” Her expression grew suspicious, eyes narrowed as she continued, “I thought you said you haven’t liked going to the movies since streaming was invented.”
“Lucky guess,” Zipp said, brimming with as much confidence as the unidentified, flying whatever illuminated the horizon.
“Actually, I think it’s just a meteorite,” said Hitch.
“Oh! You mean like a shooting star!?” Izzy gasped again. “Let’s make wishes!”
“Well, no. See, Iz, a shooting star would be a meteor, not a meteori–” Zipp started.
Izzy, however, bowed her head, clasped her hooves together, and quickly interrupted by saying, “I wish first and foremost that the reintegration of the tribes has a happy ending, second and secondmost that Briddlewood can be a shiny city on the hill for all ponykind, and third and thirdmost that I get to go on another big adventure with tons of fun and beautiful hearts and faithful and strong friends sharing kindness like it was an easy feat and–”
While Zipp was hoping Izzy wouldn’t just keep going and going, she much objected to the way it happened. Namely, because it involved the meteorite crashing so hard somewhere far distant into the forest that all four ponies were shaken off their hooves and slammed onto their backs upon the ground. As if that wasn’t startling and headache starting enough, all the animals that Pipp had scared away with her sonic crying came running, crawling, sliding, jumping, gliding, and flying back, moving past the equine quartet before a brief lull of quiet followed by considerably more forest creatures frightened by the meteorite alone rushing away from the direction of its crash.
Zipp’s ears had just about stopped ringing when, but of course, Izzy had to shatter her reclaimed peace, if not without admittedly good cause.
“Oh no! Sunny!” the unicorn shouted, raising the top half of herself up off the ground.
Despite her speed, and her apparent difficulties mastering it exactly, Zipp was rather unhurried in the race to the finish line of understanding what her friend meant till she saw the faces of Hitch and Pipp appearing equally as aghast as Izzy as they sat up like her with realization.
Now operating at peak, hundred percent mental efficiency, probably at least twenty-percent more, Zipp only allowed herself to mimic her friends’ and sister’s expressions a moment before looking at Izzy with a strong brow, fixed with fortitude. Zipp got back to her hooves in a single flap of her wings, grabbed Izzy’s shoulder, turned her around, and commanded, “Iz. Sunny. Exact. Direction. Now.”
10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10
“Aaaaaaaaah! Get it off, get it off, get it off!”
Sunny Starscout screamed a lot.
Sunny Starscout was not okay.
Granted, nopony likely would be if a puzzling device stuck itself upon their wrist and just would not let go, yet this truth didn’t detract from the immensity of the significant emotional event Sunny underwent.
The moment the watch did so, she skipped back onto her backlegs like she was competing in a reverse sackrace, flailing her forelegs in frenzy. Especially the affected foreleg, her left. She only stopped when she struck one of the crater walls hard enough to embed herself in the subsoil. This pause was slight however, and after pulling her left foreleg free and slamming it as hard as she could against the wall, she’d inadvertently managed to detach herself entirely from the force and fell face first to the floor. Yes, she was swiftly buried by the micro-dirtslide that followed her, yet she just as swiftly stuck out her hooves, pulled herself free from it, and soon was right on back to hopping on her backhooves, forehooves waving in the air like she just didn’t care, again. The central difference was that this time, in addition to going back, she went forward, sideways, this way, that way, dipped, dived, flipped, cartwheeled, somersaulted, pirouetted, and outright bowed on her knees and beseeched the device to remove itself from her person.
Yet still, nothing she did would get the watch to unlatch.
She hadn’t even felt it loosen, such was how firmly affixed to her wrist it was.
By this point, Sunny’d crawled into an apricot-orange ball on the ground and begun to rock herself gently to and fro. A little more cool and collected, her unkempt mane, wide and needle point eyes, sweat swept countenance, hyperventilating nose, and general jitteriness nevertheless presented the picture of a pony overwrought. She clutched her head and tried to think. Tried to plan. Tried to devise some method to dislodge the device off her left leg.
She considered trying to just grab the watch with her right foreleg and pry it off, yet decided against it because the strap was very much solid metal now and not at all liquidy as it’d been when it’d taken hold.
She considered smashing the watch against the ground, yet decided against it because she’d already smashed it against the wall and failed and the compacted earth making up the ground wasn’t that much tougher.
At the out-and-out limit of her cognition, she considered trying to simply bite off the watch. This option she actually decided to go for after a lot of sighing and shrugging. She opened her mouth, pressed her teeth against the strap, and clenched down adamantly. Tout de suite, she was reminded about her first ever attempt at eating corn on the cob when she was a filly and too silly to realize that the cob part wasn’t in the edible column.
“Ah! Ah! Bad idea! Bad idea!” she yelled, holding her jaw with both hooves as she rolled her head around, doing her best to suppress the titanic toothache she experienced.
When the smarting finally faded, Sunny picked up the pace of her rocking and stared blankly ahead at the larger pod and its smaller cousin beside it that she’d dropped when this latest helping of shock and surprise had commenced.
“Stay sunny, Sunny. Stay sunny. Look at the bright side,” she tried to console herself. “Whatever this watch thingamajig is, it hasn’t actually done anything to you except fasten itself to your hoof.” She suddenly looked very agitated and leaned her head back. “Honestly, you’ve probably given yourself more grief trying to get rid of it.” She leveled her head parallel with the floor again and beamed a little too broadly to be fully bona fide. “Who knows? This could be a blessing in disguise. Yeah. Yeah! Maybe it was Princess Twilight’s own personal stopwatch! Maybe… maybe it was sent to space until such a time as magic returned to equestria for some super important purpose! Maybe it and the two pods it arrived in were actually the key to some long lost, awesome ancient secret!”
Sunny abruptly gasped in epiphany.
“Wait a minute! That’s it!”
Sunny jumped up onto all four hooves and sprinted towards the pods. Halting her forward momentum so hastily the dust cloud she’d kicked up was enough to hide her house within, she placed her left leg flat as possible against the larger pod, grabbed the smaller one with her other hoof, and smiled a little too superciliously at the watch for a passerby to believe all her psychological support pillars were in proper alignment.
“Haw, haw, haw! You’ll be unfettered from me yet, watch!” she declared in a craze. “Both your containment pods just HAVE to be made of sterner stuff than you! I mean, they withstood the rigors of entering back into the atmosphere AND clashing with the ground at hypervelocity!” Her eyes shifted asudden side to side as a metronome. “Otherwise, why else would they send you all that way up there in them if the material they were fashioned from was weaker than you!? Am I right!? That’d just be silly!”
Not deigning to give the watch the chance to get the last word, Sunny then bashed the smaller pog against the watch, the larger pod serving as backstop to make certain maximal force was transferred into the troublesome timepiece as efficiently inelastically as feasible.
One time. Two times. Three times she struck
“Come on, come on!” she panted, taking a tiny break before beginning anew.
Four times. Five times. Six times she struck.
“Go away you… you… fascinating yet frightful artifact from a golden age!” she said while granting herself another respite.
Seven times. Eight times she struck.
Profusely did she perspire by this count, yet curt was her pause in between, as well as her speech. “Withdraw. From my wrist. Now!”
For the ninth time, Sunny struck. Yet something was different this instance. Perhaps it was fatigue finally moseying on up to her. Perhaps it was the sudor on her face setting her sense of balance at sixes and sevens. Perhaps it was the novel crack of thunder and renewed billow of rain and wind that’d tumbled into and startled her all of a sudden. Regardless, in the critical moment, Sunny’s right hoof brought the smaller pod clattering down onto a different section of the watch not yet hit.
The big light emerald green button upon the cylindrical prominence of dark gray.
As a result, the faceplate popped up half an inch from the centerpoint of the device like a miniature tower of technological terror, black with verticle green lines arrayed about.
Her reactionary measure was as predictable as the seasons.
“Ah!”
For the tenth time, Sunny struck the watch.
The faceplate was pushed back into its casing.
In a flash of light emerald light, Sunny’s person was enveloped and she was rendered visionless momentarily. For what must have been the bajillionth time in however long it’d been since plummeting into the crater, she fell back in scaredness, though just before meeting the ground her legs twisted and she landed front first on her chin instead of the usual landing on the back of her head.
Hurriedly, Sunny made to massage her eyes back to working order, but as she did, something felt a little… weird. Totally off-kilter, even. The tumble to the earth hadn’t… hurt anything like what she’d anticipated. Point of fact… it hadn’t hurt at all. None whatsoever. The pain she’d been saddled with since this whole entire nightmare began was also gone. She wasn’t ignoring it or fighting through it–it’d simply disappeared. Poof. Faded. Into thin air. So too did her pain’s concomitant weariness, and in its place stood a get-up-and-go-ness even a normally vastly vivacious pony like her was rarely accustomed to. Verily, she felt like she could run a marathon between Maretime Bay, Briddlewood, and Zephyr Heights for ten full laps and keep going without any appreciable loss in energy, enthusiasm, or speed.
Sunny Starscout was… okay.
Yet something about that didn’t seem that way.
At least, not to her sense of suspicion.
A sense magnified an order of magnitude when her ‘hooves’ met her eyes. For they were not ‘hooves’. They felt instead rather like… Sunny couldn’t rightly say. What she could tell was that they were quite coarser and warmer to the touch than expected, though not worryingly so.
Yet, where worries were concerned, they could not help but understandably skyrocket once she moved her ‘hooves’ away and opened her eyes to examine them more adequately. Before her were not ‘hooves’ at all, just as she’d inferred, but… hands. Hands most unlike those of any race or species she knew. Each had four very flat, almost rectangular fingers, the ‘skin’ of which appeared to be made of some sort of thermogenic orangey-yellow, nearly golden material. Down center, center left, and center right, patches of deep, dark, brick red, igneous looking rock seemed to jut out like stepping stones surrounded by a lake of molten lava. The settling raindrops nigh-instantly superheated to steam across all regions of both hands they splashed.
Not just her hands as she soon discovered, to her rising horror. But her arms–not forelegs anymore, arms–too.
“Oh no,” she muttered so minutely it couldn’t be echolocated by the world’s keenest eared bat. “No, no, no… it can’t be true. It can’t be! It’s not! It doesn’t make any sense! It. Makes. No. SENSE!”
As though she were Princess Sparkle well before she was a princess, specifically when she was a little filly in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and had accidentally dropped all her stacks of homework papers for an important assignments due in ten seconds, Sunny frantically grasped towards the ground with her hoov–hands–in search of a puddle. Any puddle at all crafted by the recent precipitation with depth and breadth enough to see her reflection in. Yet the rain, considerable though it may’ve been, hadn’t thundered on heavy enough or over a long enough timespan.
Sans warning, she then thwacked the ground with both forehoo–hands–in a moment of pure eureka as she cried out, “The big pod! Duh, Sunny!”
Promptly, she turned around and scurried to said larger pod, resting her forele–arms–upon it from elbow to fist, and leaning her visage down closely against the mirror-esque surface of the mystery metal. She thought everything’d be fine. She thought everything’d be alright. She thought all would be well. She was just imagining things, she told herself. Just an unusually vivid daydream brought on by all the sundry burdens she’d endured till that point.
The likeliness that greeted her was not her own, however. Instead, a countenance rather like her hands stared ahead, a mien and maw of deep and dark and brick red volcanic looking stone suspended upon a sea of orangey-yellow, virtually golden, thermogenic goop.
Except unlike her hands, her heat was quite literally on fire like a prodigious birthday candle.
She blinked. One time. Two times. Three times. Four times. Five times. Six times. Seven times. Eight times. Nine times. Yet no matter what, nothing changed.
No.
Not true.
She’d changed, somehow.
Sunny had changed.
Changed into… whatever in creation she was.
Sunny Starscout was not okay.
Sunny Starscout was the most not okay she’d ever be that night.
Small wonder then that after the tenth time blinking and still finding her new, fiery face gazing back at her, she screamed.
Sunny Starscout screamed a lot.
Sunny Starscout screamed the most she ever would that night.
“AAAAAHHHHH!”