//------------------------------//
// Chapter 9 
// Story: A Taste of Her Own Medicine 
// by origami 
//------------------------------//

The room remained quiet for a moment as Starlight took in the sight of her long lost friend.  He was orange and white, just as she had remembered, with cyan blue eyes and the cutie mark he'd gotten in her father's living room the day before he'd left.

What was new to her was his somewhat unkempt hair, and the goat strap he sported on the end of his muzzle.  He'd also taken to wearing a cloak covered in stars, and was wearing a set of spectacles.

"Hi Starlight," the stallion answered, returning the greeting she'd given him moments before.

"What are you doing here?" she asked him.

"I heard about a village where ponies were wanting to find the true essence of friendship, and the ones that I spoke to about it seemed well and truly happy, so, I decided to come check it out for myself."

Upon hearing that, Starlight was a mix of emotions.  Seeing her childhood friend for the first time in many years, and now as an adult, gave her all manner of different feelings.

The biggest of those, however, was apprehension.  Sunburst had just told her that he came here to see what her village was about, but would he want to stay once he actually learned everything about it?

"Double Diamond was just telling me that you were the one who helped start this place," Sunburst continued, now with a more sincere smile.  "I always knew you would go on to do something like this."

Starlight didn't respond, or rather, she couldn't; her brain was still processing that this specific stallion was here and in front of her.

Double Diamond, however, saw that the mare needed a moment alone to talk with the new stallion, so he stood up and excused himself to some imaginary task.  As he walked by Starlight, he shot her a whisper.

"I'll get everything ready for his initiation ceremony."

Starlight turned and watched the white stallion walk out the door.  Once it was closed behind him, reality began catching up with her.

"So, how did you come up with this-"

Sunburst's question was stifled by a hoof pushed against his mouth.

"Sunny, we need to leave, now!"

Pushing her hoof away, Sunburst looks at Starlight with confusion.  "What are you talking about?"

"Sunny, they're gonna take your cutie mark!" she explained.  "The fact that you came here and seen all of this means they won't let you leave!  They'll take away your cutie mark and you'll lose all your magic talent!"

"They'll... take away my cutie mark?"

"Yes, Sunny, they'll take it right away.  Put it in a glass case and store it in a vault, and you'll never get it back!"

"But... why?  Why take my cutie mark?"

Starlight let out a sigh, ashamed of what she would have to tell her friend.  "They'll take it because that's the price of being a part of this village."

"What do you mean?  I still don't really understand this."

"...I'll explain it all to you.  Just have a seat on the sofa.  Let me brew some tea for us to have while I explain everything."

Sunburst agreed and took a seat on Starlight's sofa.  Heading to the kitchen and coming back later with a kettle and two cups, she set it down and poured her old friend a drink.

"It started after you left to go to Princess Celestia's school," she began.  "I was the only foal left around here, and I was feeling really alone.  I started to become really resentful, and especially of cutie marks, since you left me after you got yours."

"As I got older, I wanted to create a world where cutie marks never separated ponies, and everypony was just as special and important as the next, or at least, by my way of seeing things."

"Some ponies I met that shared my view helped me to create this village, and recruit some other ponies to follow us, and then we created a spell.  It would take a pony's original cutie mark and replace it with a new one.  This one would represent the cause behind our village, where nopony was more important or special than another; where everypony would be equal."

To emphasize her point, Starlight gestured to the equal sign on her own flank, but grimaced at it, for it being both a fake and a symbol of wrongness in her newly altered view of things.

"So, whenever a new pony joins our village, we have a ceremony where the new pony has their cutie mark removed and gets it replaced with one of these."

"I get it," Sunburst then said to Starlight.  "It's kind of like a village uniform, but just a little bit more involved than putting a shirt on.  Honestly, the whole process kind of has my interest now."

"Well, it shouldn't!" Starlight told her friend, punctuating her tone by planting a hoof against her coffee table hard enough to shake the tea set sitting on it.  "That process is... horrible, Sunburst.  It's like it's taking a way a piece of your soul; a part of you that leaves a big empty hole when it's gone.  You don't want to know what it feels like!"

"But if it's so horrible, why do you make new villagers do it?"

Starlight looked away, the feelings of shame welling up in her again.  "Because I never knew how bad it was until recently."

"Recently?" Sunburst repeated, clearly confused.

"I only just experienced the spell for myself, felt the horrible effects of it."

"But why only recently?  Didn't you have the spell performed on you as well?"

Starlight answered by taking a nearby cloth and dipping it into a glass of water, then she moved her flanks so that Sunburst could more easily see them.  Applying the cloth, she began rubbing off the paint and makeup hiding her true cutie mark.

When finished, she tossed the rag onto her coffee table, letting Sunburst see her real cutie mark that had been hiding underneath.  "So, you've been faking it?  Having your cutie mark taken away?"

Starlight looked away and nodded, not able to look at him with the shame she felt.

"So... nopony outside knows that you still have your own cutie mark?"

"No, they don't, but at this point, I don't care if they do find out.  I've been a horrible leader to them, Sunny, asking them to give up their special talents while I keep my own.  I'm nothing more than a great big hypocrite!"

With that admission, Starlight buried her face in the pillow she'd been leaning against and let her sobs come out.  She sat there for a few moments, letting the tears come and stain her pillow.  Sunburst didn't say anything for a few moments, and the lilac mare wasn't sure he should, not after learning what she had done.

Finally, he did speak.  "I'm sorry, Starlight."

The mare looked up at the stallion, seeing regret clear as day in his eyes.

"Everything you've been feeling up to this point has been because of me.  I should've wrote to you from school, told you about everything I was experiencing.  Maybe you could've even practiced and gotten good enough to come and attend school with me.  I never thought to write home.  I'm such an idiot!"

Sunburst buried his face in his hooves, his inattentiveness towards his friend having revealed its fruits to him.

Starlight, seeing she was not alone in her laments, let out a chuckle.  "I guess we've both done things we wished we could take back, huh?"

The stallion raised his head to look at the mare and gave a small smile to her.  "Yeah, I guess we have."

Suddenly, there was a knocking at Starlight's door.

"Starlight," came Diamond's voice, "we're ready for the new villager ceremony."

Both ponies looked at each other with fear in their eyes.

"Um, okay," Starlight answered.  "Give us a moment, please."

"Is everything okay?"

"Yes, everything's fine.  Just need a few more moments is all."

"Okay.  We're all set up out front here and waiting for you when you're ready."

"Very good, thank you."

Hoofsteps were heard moving away.  Once sure nopony was within earshot, Starlight shot Sunburst a terrified look.

"We need to get you out of here, now!"

Sunburst, mirroring her terror, looked around the room.  "But where can I go?"

"There's a place I know where you can hide out, but we gotta get out of here to get you there."

"But how are we getting out of here?"

"I have a cellar with a tunnel that leads outside the village.  Just follow me and don't stop moving."

Starlight rushed into her backroom, Sunburst hot on her hooves.  Once there, she cast aside her bed, revealing the cellar underneath.

"Come on!" she told Sunburst, charging down into the cellar.

Sunburst did as told, keeping no more than a pony's length away from the mare in front of him.

Behind the two, they heard a commotion as the ponies outside came into the house in search of them.  Starlight urged Sunburst to pour on more steam, rushing for the pinprick of light getting larger up ahead.

"Come on, Sunny!" Starlight called out behind her.  "Just a little further!"

Sunburst was going as fast as he could, but clearly, he did not have the endurance of his friend.  Soon enough, the distance between the two began to lengthen.

"Starlight," Sunburst gasped out after her.  "I can't... hah...keep up...hah!"

"You have to!" she shouted back at him.  "Keep-"

Staright stopped dead in her tracks.  At the end of the tunnel stood a shadowy form.  It looked like an alicorn, with long horn and big, feathery wings, but she couldn't make out any features to discern which one it could've been.

The only thing she could tell, though, was that the alicorn was not there to offer her assistance.  The terror inside herself shot up so high that it overrode her normally calm demeanor during stressful situations and caused her to turn around and shoot back down the tunnel, where she promptly ran head first into Sunburst.

Both ponies hit the ground, letting out groans of pain and reaching their hooves to their heads.  Once somewhat recovered, Starlight looked around to see if anypony had caught up to them.

The only pony she saw was the alicorn, who stood over the two as they looked on in fear.

"Starlight?" Sunburst asked, fear clear in his voice.

Starlight said nothing, jumping to her hooves and reaching out to her friend.

"Come on, Sunny!" she implored him, but stopped speaking as she saw a magic aura envelop her hoof, and subsequently felt it covering her body.  She then took notice of the same aura covering Sunburst, the colt watching it wash over him as he then looked at Starlight with pleading eyes.

Starlight looked away in shame.

"I'm sorry," was all she could say before the aura glowed bright and flashed, and the two disappeared from the tunnel.