It's a simpler time, if simple could have ever applied after that fateful Summer Sun Celebration.
Twilight Sparkle is still far from taking the throne. Her transformation is still recent, as is her discovery of what she's the alicorn of. The Tree of Harmony has yet to ask much of her, to start sending her across the country and beyond, and so her adventures still mostly take place in the little town where Princess Celestia once sent her with the instruction to make friends. She and her friends have transitioned from writing letters to writing down their findings in a journal, one that they will almost publish.
Celestia has tried very hard to let them all have normal lives, for as long as possible. That will be steadily harder as the years go on.
For now, however, barring the ascension and a handful of clashes with ancients evils, it's a simpler time. Her friend Applejack has a problem, and in trying to help her, Twilight has made a mistake.
Fruit bats are curious creatures. One of many animals that is magical in nature, it sustains its appearance by feeding on fruits. A starved fruit bat starts to slowly change back to something more like its less magical cousins, its bright colours fading away and its recognizable features shifting. A lemon fruit bat will turn from yellow to a dull grey or brown, or an orange one will see its rind-like ears turning to soft fur and flesh.
If saved before it can starve to death, its plant features will manifest again, but it may not end up looking as it did. A grape fruit bat starved to the point where all grape similarity vanishes and then given apples will quickly become an apple fruit bat, as its magic has been told that grape camouflage is now useless to maintain and it must adapt to a new food source. This drastic shift will usually only happen when food is scarce, however, which is why Applejack's orchard hosts so many varieties in its colony, such as something so foreign to the orchard as strawberries. The mismatched appearance to their food source hasn't harmed their survival, and so, they stay as they are.
Vampire fruit bats are different.
Few have done research as to why and how they evolved, their own branch splitting off from the same trunk as better-known fruit bats. They are closely related, but look entirely different, the vampires looking much more like ordinary bats save for their long fangs. Their magic is more subtle, swapping the ability to blend in with their food source for something more symbiotic. As they drain the fruits of juices, they grant vitality to the seeds and supercharge the parts of the fruit left behind to make them into more potent compost. An orchard they make into their buffet will see stronger trees and greater harvests for years to come, ensuring that the colony can return at a later time and have even more to drink.
It's a subtle magic, but it is magic. And therein lies the seed of Twilight's mistake.
Her first plan had been to cast a spell on the bats to make them disinterested in the apples, but that hit a snag immediately. Namely that she needed the bats' full, undivided attention, and to demand such a thing from a wild animal was like asking a cat to bark. She'd thought she had the perfect solution, however, in Fluttershy's stare. It was a strange talent, one rarely seen in pegasi, and save for the notable immunity of a certain draconequus, had never failed to get results.
Then Fluttershy had flat-out refused to use her stare to this end, and her foolproof plan fell apart at step one. There had been begging, pleading, cajoling, and the constant reminders from Applejack and Rainbow Dash both about harvest sizes and cider season. Fluttershy had been firm that trying to change the fruit bats' nature was wrong and she would not be part of it. She would do her best to learn the nuances of the bats' language and encourage them to move on to another source of food, but that would be all. She had put her hoof down, no was no, and she would not be budged.
She had also reminded Twilight what had happened when she had tried changing the parasprites' appetites, and that stopped even cider-thirsty Rainbow from continuing to badger her.
So Twilight had tried something else, casting a spell on the trees instead. Starting with the one holding Applejack's prized giant apple, and moving on from there. The spell was simple; if a hungry bat got too close, it would repel them, making them suddenly decide that the apples didn't look appetizing. Nothing that would change their nature, just a proximity-triggered illusion that fooled their senses into thinking the fruit wasn't ripe. Simple yet effective, and she'd been a bit embarrassed over not having thought of that first.
The mistake of it comes in two parts: Vampire fruit bats are magical, and vampire fruit bats aren't very smart.
Fluttershy is trying to herd them away from the affected trees, but try is the key word. She's still learning how to talk to them, and communication doesn't equal control. They haven't been eating the apples, but they keep seeing them, smelling them, diving for them, then setting off the spell and losing interest. Over. And over. And over. She's trying to encourage them toward the Everfree and the wild fruits that grow there, but their increasing hunger just sends them toward the food source that seemed unripe a few minutes ago, but is clearly good to eat now, until it isn't again.
Magical creatures, doused with a spell from a powerful alicorn over and over. Hungry animals who'd started nesting in the trees with their young, increasingly irritated by the pegasus trying to get them to move along. Vampire fruit bats aren't aggressive, usually, their primary way of defending themselves being to spit seeds, hiss loudly, and then fly away. But Fluttershy's been coming close to them, increasingly desperate to help them get to a food source they can actually eat, there are pups...
She's far away from the farmhouse, and so nopony hears her yelp of pain when the mother bat bites her.
There are hasty apologies given as she lands, for having gotten too close, with assurances that she'd meant no harm and they're very cute babies and she'd love to show them all where some juicy blackberries are to feed them. She ends up flying home and tending the bite, just like any other she's gotten while working with animals. She's up to date on her shots, has a stockpile of disinfectant, and despite how frightening the large teeth are, it was really a warning nip, not too deep.
She decides not to tell her friends about it, because Applejack's already angry at the bats and she'd likely blow a bite, that was Fluttershy's own fault for being careless, out of proportion.
The nightmares for the next several nights, of her being chased by a bat-like beast, are easy to dismiss. She's stressed, and she's no stranger to stress-induced bad dreams.
Shedding feathers can be a stress response, too, and besides, she's due for a molt. It means being grounded for a week or so, but she travels on hoof more often than by wing anyway.
The hunger pains... probably just mean that she's been working too hard and forgetting to eat enough. She can pick up some food at the market and make herself a big dinner.
Food like... big... sweet... juicy... apples...
"That's not Fluttershy... That's Flutterbat!"
"Within a couple of weeks, the bats had moved on, but then she was doing nightly raids on Applejack's orchard herself." Princess Twilight's ears drooped with a deep sigh, followed by a small shake of her head. "We ended up calling it Chiropteran Equine Disease, when all was said and done."
It was just after sunrise in Cantlerlot, and the two were seated around a table piled high with doughnuts. Princess Twilight had always sworn that Pony Joe's was the best place for doughnuts and hot cocoa in the city, and even after the original Pony Joe had long retired, the establishment kept up its high quality. Alicorn physiology required a lot of food, and so while Luster nibbled at her one jelly-filled confection, Princess Twilight had been pausing between parts of her story to steadily pick off close to a dozen, with several more awaiting a similar fate. It wasn't the healthiest of breakfasts, but given that Luster was intending to collapse into bed the moment they returned to the palace, she figured this counted as more of a midnight snack.
"Chiropteran..." Luster breathed the word in disbelief. "So... bat ponies are real, not some kind of old pony tale?"
"Bat ponies as a secret tribe of pony or a creation of Nightmare Moon? Are just an old pony tale." Despite herself, the princess gave a nostalgic sort of smile, her mug of hot cocoa--it had extra whipped cream and sprinkles, just like every time they visited--floating up to allow her to take a sip. "Trust me, I asked Celestia and Luna a lot of questions before I took the throne so there wouldn't be any surprises they forgot to tell me about. It would be just like my old mentor to neglect to tell me about a whole demographic until a representative was walking into the throne room." She gave a chuckle as she set the mug down again. "A lot of the wilder stories are just that, stories. But as a form of vamponyism? They are absolutely real."
That begged a question, and since her mentor was full of answers right now, she let it slip out. "...How many types of vamponyism are there?"
"We'll get there in your education," Princess Twilight said with a wave of her wing, and breezed on as she lifted several fritters. "At any rate, the disease is incredibly rare, because it takes a lot of unusual circumstances happening with exactly the right timing to set off an outbreak. Vampire fruit bats so rarely bite ponies, they need to have been exposed to a lot of outside magic in a short period of time for it to do anything, and the bites only affect pegasi, not anypony else."
One of the fritters, separated from the herd, vanished with a few bites. "So few studies have been done on them, but our leading theory is that it's meant for transforming other types of bats into vampire fruit bats. Turning what was a rival for territory into new blood for the colony instead. But the extra magic makes it able to jump the species barrier to ponies. I did research afterward and found some old stories that might've been accounts of previous outbreaks and fed into the bat pony myths.
"When it comes to Fluttershy, we managed to catch her and..." Princess Twilight paused, the fritters left to hover in the air next to her as she seemed to be lost in painful memory, until she shook her head again to banish it. "Anyway, once it starts changing a pony, it's a lot easier to transmit between ponies. A bite's not necessary, just proximity. A few other pegasi started to get the same symptoms, so once my friend Zecora and I put together the cure, we gave the potion to everypony in town just in case."
Another fritter vanished in the face of the princess's appetite. "Fluttershy does still have a couple of remnants. I don't think you've seen her fangs, because she's good at hiding them when she smiles or talks, and her wings...They typically stay feathered now, but when she's hungry enough for fruit, they start to revert to bat-shaped, quickly."
Luster nodded in understanding. Transformative magics, caught soon enough, could often be reversed, partly if not fully. Morphic imprints of their true form lingered, and it was just a matter of tapping into that and imposing the old form over the new. An all-at-once enchantment could usually be countered with the right spell, and the more gradual changes tended to require a potion. The flipside was simply that an imprint of the new form could also linger after reinstating the old, which explained the fangs and the occasional return of the wings.
All of it was Transmutation 101, really. It was still a bit mind-boggling that a vampire fruit bat biting a pegasus could set off such a transformation in the first place, because it sounded like something out of those bad weretimberwolf novels that had been all the rage a few years back--she'd ended up explaining, in detail, to her friends all the many magical rules those novels regularly broke--but she'd seen Redeye's wings for herself, and the ravenous appetite for fruit juice.
Thinking about the filly again had Luster lifting her own cocoa--it was exactly how she liked it, no whipped cream and no sprinkles, just a tiny bit of cinnamon added in for extra zip--and taking a few sips as she asked, "And with Redeye?"
Princess Twilight sighed a bit before she said the next words. "Foals are more magically malleable, especially before their marks. Their imprint isn't fully formed, so it's easier to slow or stop changes than reverse them. And she was hiding her symptoms for days because she didn't want to get in trouble for going near a bat-infested orchard her parents told her not to."
There was something melancholy in her voice, like it had been when she'd been explaining the mistake she'd made in exposing the bats to her spell, and it made Luster wonder if the princess considered a simple law of how transformation magic worked a personal failing. "Luckily, the town she lives in is mostly earth ponies, including her parents. She's an outbreak of one, and when she stabilizes, her wings will be permanently bat-like, she'll be living off mostly fluids, and she'll be nocturnal, but..."
A small smile came back, and the last fritter fell to the dread alicorn in a futile last stand. "Otherwise she'll be like any other filly. She'll grow up, get her mark, and find her place like everypony else. Just while having different active hours and a specialized diet."
Luster hummed in thought at that, and took a few more bites of her doughnut. She lifted a napkin and wiped away the jelly before speaking. "But still, being so different from everypony else, that's bound to cause some problems. Especially since bat ponies are so rare."
"That's why she could use some friends to help her along." Princess Twilight's wings opened, gesturing between the two of them. "Like, say, a member of the royal family and her apprentice. I've heard that opens a lot of doors."
That made Luster blink. She had never thought of herself as having much influence. The friends she'd made down in Ponyville just treated her like any other unicorn from the city, and she'd never attended any event frequented by the nobility where she may be able to throw her status around. She could do so--Princess Twilight had made clear that if she ever wanted to attend the Grand Galloping Gala, all she had to do was ask and as many tickets as she needed would be hers--but she'd always been more focused on her studies than any kind of schmoozing.
It did make some sense, though. Princess Twilight herself had been the apprentice of Duchess Celestia, back when they'd been Lady Twilight Sparkle and Princess Celestia. Luster rolled that thought around in her mind, then found herself squinting suspiciously at the alicorn gorging on her mountain of pastries. Was that her plan as well? Take on an apprentice, teach her everything she needed for leadership, and then pass on the crown, as well as the sun and moon, when she was ready? She wasn't sure how she felt about that, if so.
"Something on your mind, Luster?" came the innocent-sounding question, and she wasn't sure how much of her emotions had leaked through in her expression to prompt it.
She sipped more at her hot chocolate, and instead asked, "Is that why you brought me to see her? Helping me make a friend?"
"Oh no, you've been doing just fine on your own." Princess Twilight waved a hoof as she spoke, then devoured a doughnut dripping in maple-flavoured icing while two more awaited their fate. "I asked you because you hadn't told me beforehoof about any plans for the holiday, and I thought you could get away from those dusty old books for a bit."
Luster couldn't help the snort of mirth. "Who are you and what did you do with the princess?"
Laughter broke out from both, and once it'd faded, the two returned to their treats and conversation started to drift. They talked about Luster's friends, and Luster managed to get Princess Twilight to tell her a firsthoof account of Duchess Luna's first ever Nightmare Night, which soon turned into more holiday stories across the years and the calendar. By the time they were leaving, Luster couldn't stop smiling.
Some part of her mind still lingered on the unspoken question, but she supposed if her mentor did have grand plans for her, she'd know soon enough, and she'd only be hoofed over responsibility when she was equipped to handle it. She also decided that if she did become a princess, she liked the idea of being the sort who would take time to go to a hospital and read to a sick filly, even when all Princess Twilight had strictly needed to do was brew and deliver the potion.
Yes, the future would come when it did, and Luster would see whatever came her way through. But first, it was time to go home, and take a long nap.