When Rainbow finished her lunch, her friends were still eating, if it could even be described as that. Most were just poking at their meals, while Fluttershy wasn't even touching her food and was staring into nothingness.
Rainbow tried to suppress a groan. She knew what they were thinking about. Heck, every one of them knew what topic they wanted to talk about, but no one said a single word. They couldn’t, not at school.
When Applejack yawned, Rainbow took another look at the bags under her friend's eyes. As she had predicted, her friends were chatting the whole night; while they were mainly talking about the dragon, Rainbow could read here and there implications about their new discoveries.
She could understand the silence of her friends, especially the paranoia they currently had — not like she herself wasn’t of her own surroundings — but she couldn’t just watch them passively like that.
“Hey, uhm…” Rainbow scratched her head as their eyes were immediately on her. How should she even offer them her help? “So, it looks like you were up all night.”
“You don’t say,” Rarity muttered, her facial expression the most fierce of all.
“Rarity, please,” Sunset responded.
“Sorry,” Rarity sighed. “I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
“It’s okay,” Rainbow replied. “I understand you all. Maybe you want an open ear? Someone to be with you?” She gave a weak smile, but it vanished when all of them looked back down to their meals.
“Come on! Don’t act like that!”
“All I want is to go home and lie in bed,” Fluttershy said. “Or work at the animal shelter. It distracts me.”
“All alone? Don’t you want someone beside you?”
Fluttershy shook her head in response; barely enough to make it out.
“Doesn’t anyone else want to meet up today?” Rainbow asked.
When her friends remained silent, she picked up her tray and stood up from her seat.
“Fine, do your own things then!” With stomping steps she left them alone.
“—today will be sunny weather—”
“—He takes his time. This shot will decide the—”
“—will never leave you! I love—”
“—give me all your—”
With a groan Rainbow turned off the TV and threw the remote control into the corner of the sofa.
She had to do something, and not out of boredom. She wanted to be there for her friends, but not one of them even said goodbye when the school bell rang for the end of the day. Sure, right now they just needed time to digest what they had found out, but she knew that she could help — somehow.
What should she even do? They somehow got away with their memories still intact, but as the scavenger hunt had proven, they had to keep their findings a secret.
And she hated it.
How did that organisation have so much control? How did they have a gas erasing memories? How were they able to contain a whole city? A bunch of wasted money, if one would ask her. Did they expect to keep that state of control forever? It had to break!
She stood up and went to her room. Opening her wardrobe, she took out her motorcycle suit and was about to put it on, when her phone received a message from Twilight.
“Already?” Twilight asked.
“I ran immediately when I read the message. How can I help?”
“Come in.”
Rainbow grimaced at the ignored question, but followed her friend into her home. Seeing the lab coat, she already could guess where Twilight was heading to.
Sure enough, they entered Twilight’s lab, where her computer was already on, random letters appearing over and over again on the screen.
“Want me to help you in your experiments?” Rainbow asked and took two test tubes from a table.
“Put these back!” Twilight jumped at her and ripped the tubes out of Rainbow’s hands.
“Oops, sorry,” Rainbow muttered.
Twilight put the tubes back on the table and went towards the computer screens. Her eyes were staring at the random letters. If Rainbow wouldn’t know Twilight better, she’d assume that she understood the random strings, but seeing her worried face she knew that something wasn’t working.
“And?” Rainbow asked, breaking the silence between them.
Twilight sighed.
“Can’t figure out how to decode it. But let’s get to why I have called you.“
She took a small device and pointed it at Rainbow’s head, before lowering it over her other body parts.
Going over the right lower arm, it beeped.
“What does that mean?” Rainbow asked.
“Well, uhm…” Twilight scratched her head, looking for words. “I guess we kept the chip on you.”
“A chip?” Rainbow raised her eyebrows.
Twilight took Rainbow’s arm and fumbled it.
“Here.”
Rainbow felt around the place Twilight pointed out. Once she felt a square thing inside the skin, she was baffled.
A chip? Inside of her?
Suddenly a detail from her night chase popped up in her head. The green crystal in the other world sticking out… Was it that?
“According to my notes it only sends data when scanned.” Twilight waved a paper in demonstration. “If my past self is to be trusted, no GPS signals or anything similar is used, so no location tracking like your past self assumed.”
Rainbow sat down on a chair and put her head on her hands.
The organisation went too far. Who did they think they were? How dare they treat her and her friends like that? She took a deep breath to suppress her anger.
“Is anyone else having it?” Rainbow asked.
“Yes. Well, at least, I have too, so I assume it’s all seven of us.”
“Should we remove them?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Since they don’t track us with them I think we should… you know, to be safe…”
Twilight didn’t finish her sentence.
“I see,” Rainbow muttered. “This is… ugh, how are you so calm?”
“To be honest,” Twilight sat next to her, “I’m also overwhelmed by it. I’m just distracting myself with the note I have found and trying to crack the code of my own chip. No success, as you can see on the screen.”
“So why did you call me specifically?”
Twilight eyes stared to the ground, which she kicked with her foot.
“You seemed to be calm and know more than us, so I kind of hoped for…” She sighed. “I don’t even know.”
A warm feeling got over Rainbow. At least Twilight seeked out for her support, which she was glad for. And if Twilight needed her emotional support, she shall be it for her.
“Hey, Twilight. Look at me. We’ll get through this together. Everything will turn out fine, even if we have no idea how yet. But how many times did we have what seemed like dead ends before us? And yet, we found a way every single time!”
Twilight smiled. That’s all Rainbow needed.
“By the way,” Rainbow said, “don’t we risk getting overheard? You know, with the order to not talk about it and all that.”
“There’s nothing to worry about in this lab. I checked it myself.”
“That’s a relief,” Rainbow exhaled. “I guess they don’t listen to us every time, considering we were able to plan and do the scavenger hunt.”
“I hope so,” Twilight sighed.
They sat silently. Rainbow took a glance at the screen, which still spit out random strings of letters and numbers.
“May I see the paper?” she asked.
“Sure, but there’s not much on it.”
Reading through the notes, it turned out to indeed be not much. The entire focus was on the chips inside them and what function it had, plus some crossed out words apparently related to decoding.
“You’re right.” Rainbow gave her the paper back. “I hoped for something about the space rifts.”
“Speaking of, how did we know about them?” Twilight asked.
“I have no idea. Kinda hoped you were the one who discovered them.”
Twilight stood up, as her eyes were staring in surprise at Rainbow.
“You don’t know anything about them?”
“I know the same about them as you.”
Twilight raised the paper before her face, taking another close look at it. Suddenly, she let it fall and went towards a corner of her lab.
“Twilight?” Rainbow asked worryingly.
“If neither you nor any of us know about them, that means only one thing.” Twilight took a cardboard box from a shelf, before returning back to her seat and placing the box on a table.
Rainbow followed closely how Twilight opened it and took out one of the hard drives that were inside it, closely examining the serial number on it. To her dismay, Twilight seemed to be deep in her thoughts.
“So? What does it mean?” Rainbow asked impatiently.
Twilight took out another one and compared it with the first one, before she finally replied.
“Someone else told us about the space rifts.”
Rainbow’s eyes widened. This was so obvious, that she felt dumb not getting it on her own. But who?
Wait, was it…?
“Derpy?” Rainbow asked.
“Huh?” Twilight looked up from her hard drives.
“In the morning after the night chase, Derpy told me to know how to pretend, because their ears…”
Rainbow jumped up. Now it all made sense.
“Twilight, the neon sign! It’s her!” Her voice was almost screaming.
“Quiet, Rainbow!” Twilight said. “What neon sign are you talking about?”
“When I talked with Derpy, a neon sign had fallen out of nowhere next to us. She said she’d take it to ‘bring it to the lost and found’, but warned me about the organisation. She’s probably the one who knows about the space rifts!”
As Rainbow was talking, Twilight closed the decoding program and connected one hard drive to her computer and looked at the data it contained.
“But why didn’t we mention her in our recording?” Twilight asked, as she shook her head when the hard drive was shown to be empty.
“I don’t know, maybe she’ll contact us later?”
“Or she took a hard drive from me,” Twilight responded. “Three are missing.”
“Uhm… What?” Rainbow scratched her head in confusion. “What does that have to do with space rifts?” Sometimes Twilight was a riddle for her.
“We have an organisation that contains anomalies, right?”
Rainbow nodded.
“If they do, they must have files of each, describing them, what they do etc. I was confused about the purpose of our plan to get our memories erased. Why take the risk? Just to see how far they can erase memories?”
“Huh, now that you say it…”
“To be fair,” Twilight continued, “we probably also wanted to see that, but I assume that we also did something that would reveal immediately that we know about them.”
“Like what?”
“Hack into their system to get the files of their anomalies. If space rifts appear here, we should know how to deal with the things coming out of them.”
As Rainbow was processing her words, she got more surprised, but also more impressed by their past selves. The plan was way deeper than she had anticipated. Of course they let them erase their memories, because then they could keep the possession of the files a secret, while the organisation thought they were clueless.
“But when did we do it?”
“Probably right after the recording. And then we told everyone at school about them. Two hard drives were supposed to be found by the organisation, so they wouldn’t search for another hidden one, but…” Twilight scratched her chin.
“Why two?”
“That’s how I would do it. They wouldn’t believe I wouldn’t have a backup.”
“I see. But why didn’t we say that in the recording?”
“Presumably a safety percussion in case the recording was discovered by unwanted ears.”
“Makes sense. Hm, so Derpy has the third hard drive with the files?”
“I assume so. At least the hiding spot I would use is empty.”
“No wonder you’re the brain of our group.” Rainbow rubbed her forehead. “I wouldn’t get even close to figuring all that out.”
“I have no proof for any of my claims though.” Twilight grinned nervously as she corrected her hair. “Everything is just what I would’ve done in that situation.”
Typical Twilight, always downplaying her smartness.
“Still, it sounds believable to me,” Rainbow said. “So, do we wait for Derpy? Should we tell our friends about her?”
“Let’s first get any evidence for my claims,” Twilight replied. “See if she even knows about our plan.”
When the school bell rang, Rainbow watched behind her. Derpy and Micro Chips were almost finished scrubbing the table from their failed chemical experiment, as they — “somehow”, as the teacher wondered — made a salt mixture explode.
Usually Rainbow would have left the class immediately, but right now would be the best chance to get to talk with her.
“Hi, Derpy!” Rainbow said. “Sorry to bother, but do you have a minute for me?”
The girl looked at Micro Chips.
“Sure, I’ll finish the rest,” he replied.
Derpy smiled, took her bag and went to Rainbow.
“So, uhm…” Rainbow took a look around. Almost every student had already left and the teacher was gone too. Still, she should be cautious with what she says. “I think I need to catch up with things. You know, chemistry and all that, not my favourite subjects. Could you help me with that?”
She smiled. Hopefully Derpy would understand it.
Said girl raised her eyebrows and slightly opened her mouth, processing what Rainbow asked. Suddenly, her face cheered up and she took out of her bag a written exercise book for chemistry.
“Oh,” Rainbow took the offered object. “Thanks, but I meant rather that you explain a few things. Like…”
Derpy tilted her head, her eyes fixated on her — well, technically her left eye, the right one is staring into somewhere random.
Rainbow sighed, as she feared the inevitable.
“Don’t you understand me?”
Derpy tapped her lips with her finger, before shrugging her shoulders.
“Come on, Derpy!” Rainbow took her by her shoulders. “Don’t you remember? Didn’t you want to talk with me? Or one of my friends? About anything?”
All she got were thinking grimaces.
“Please don’t tell me you forgot,” Rainbow muttered, before she let go of her.
“I think,” Derpy said for the first time, “that I forgot too much.” Her eyebrows lowered and the corners of her mouth were drawn downwards.
Rainbow gritted her teeth. Oh, how much she hated that organisation. Erasing memories left and right, just because someone knew about them. If there was only a way to make them pay for that immediately!
“I… I understand.” Rainbow sighed. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
She gave her back the exercise book, turned and left the classroom. It looked like she and her friends were alone in this now.
After Rainbow left, Derpy’s left eye adjusted to her right one and stared into an upper corner of the room. With slow steps she came nearer towards it, before she was looking almost straight up.
For a while, nothing happened, until suddenly a small ball appeared out of thin air and fell down, before bouncing off and going with doubled speed back into the air. This time, it bounced off the ceiling and fell even faster to the ground. Derpy tried to grab it, but missed and made the ball bounce off the wall. It flew across the room, bounced off the ceiling, then a wall, becoming each time even faster.
On its path it flew towards Micro Chips, who was able to catch it with his hands.
“Ouch!” A sharp breath came between his teeth. “This was too close to a disaster.”
He carefully put the ball on the table and shook his hands from the pain. Derpy came to him and took the ball in her hands, taking a curious look at it.
“What do we do about Rainbow?” Micro asked.
“Nothing,” Derpy answered.
“You won’t ask Wallflower?”
“I avoid asking her whenever possible. This isn’t an emergency case.”
“To be honest, I’m surprised that they were able to—” He stopped when she gave him a threatening stare.
“They’ve planned it all through,” Derpy replied. “But as much as I hate to break a deal, it’s better if they don’t know about any of us.”
“Yeah, yeah, drawing attention to us and all that.” Micro sighed. “It still feels like betraying them.”
“It, well, is.” She sighed and put the ball in her bag. “But let’s go already. The next class is starting soon.”