7 Months Later….
The cave walls slid open and a red fully-grown dragon walked inside of it, groaning audibly. He had a blue crystal in his claws that was delivering some sort of message. An hour ago, Dragon Lord Spike had asked him to decipher who was behind it as the image resolution of the speaker was so blurry that nobody could make it out.
He had accepted his task, of course, but that didn’t mean that he was happy about it by any means. In his mind, he had better things to do with his life than to waste his time deciphering messages from foreign nations. Unfortunately, his job as the official scribe meant that he had to do it whether he wanted to or not.
He walked towards the end of the cave, where a large supercomputer stood with many videos running all at once. This was the way that the dragons could keep watch over all of Equestria and gather information from them without anypony from the land knowing. Many other dragons stood behind the keyboard, all typing at once and scouring different locales.
“Hey,” the dragon called out to his peers. “I got the crystal.”
A female pink dragon turned around upon hearing his voice. “Lava! There you are. How are you doing? I realize we didn’t get to talk much this week considering our tasks.”
Lava blushed, but quickly shook his head to get rid of the feeling. “I’m…fine, Blaize. Just doing the job as always. Here’s the crystal. The speaker delivering the message looks like a pony, but none that any of the history books have shown us.” He handed her the crystal, which she took.
“Maybe they’ve evolved.” a tan dragon called Tumble off-handedly commented. Upon receiving glares from the others, he shrunk back in embarrassment. “What? It could happen. You know, how ponies from the Celestia-Era had their cutie marks on one side removed in exchange for new-“
“Okay,” Blaize interrupted, putting out her other claw in order to stop him. “We…don’t need to go into that again, history buff.”
Tumble rolled his eyes.
“I don’t get why this message is so important to Spike,” Lava told them. “I mean, so what if we haven’t gotten any contact from ponies in hundreds of moons? This could be nothing.”
“So everything!” a blue dragon with purple scales from the far right exclaimed. “Do you know what this could mean? They could be requiring our assistance for some impending disaster!”
Blaize scoffed. “You mean like the time Princess Twilight still tried to ask for our help after unleashing her racist apprentice on us? Yeah, never again, purple head.”
“Only one way to find out, I guess.” Lava said, shrugging.
Blaize plugged the crystal into the outlet and watched the message slowly load onto the screen. The video then popped up, showing the barely recognizable image of a pony speaking into a computer. “Hello, is this thing working? Hi, my name is…pp…m…asking for your help.”
The dragons all facepalmed, after which they slammed their heads face first into the table in frustration, groaning loudly.
“Seriously?!” The blue dragon raged. “For this?! We get a crystal recording and it’s glitchy?! What the heck does ‘my name is pp’ even mean?!”
“Besides the obvious.” Tumble joked with a dirty smile. He was promptly smacked upside the head by his colleague after saying that.
“It seemed to start glitching at the pony’s name,” Blaize reasoned. “I figure if we all blow our dragon fire at it, we can increase the video’s resolution.”
“You think?” Lava asked skeptically.
“How should I know? Let’s give it a go just to be sure.”
All five dragons proceeded to take a deep breath before unleashing their fire at the supercomputer monitor. The combined force began increasing the resolution as the pixels began to rearrange themselves in real time. The video cleared up and soon the pony speaking was fully visible.
“…Our magic does make us different,” the pony spoke, her voice more clear. “And that’s something we should embrace…both in ourselves and in others. Our powers let us be the best versions of ourselves…”
Lava opened his eyes and gasped upon looking at the screen. “I…I-I don’t believe it. Spike was right. That’s a…that’s a…”
“It’s a…” Tumble added, his eyes wide in shock. “It’s…”
“…a pegasus…” Blaize finished in amazement.