“Hey, quit shoving me!” yelled one stallion.
“You started it!” retorted the second, kicking a hoofful of sand at the former. The two combatants gnashed teeth, and before long they were screaming and charging each other in random displays of power. Or intolerance, as Big Mac thought.
But his smile was undying as he walked through the heart of Fillydelphia. The towel perched atop his head had since dried beneath the newly rediscovered sun; the dust storm had departed, yet the fine grains of sand now settled over every inch of the city. The townsfolk were already up and about, busily doing what they could to clean the streets, even though the occasional brawl did hinder progress some.
He sighed through the midnight blue sock held firmly in his teeth, giving it an annoyed glare. He had no intention of letting the thing wander from his sight after seeing what it was capable of, let alone try to tap into its raw power. He began thinking on ways to properly store it, and the rest of them for that matter, but every idea that entered his mind left just as quickly. Should he toss it inside an obsidian safe, and then put safe inside another? Perhaps bury it deep underground in some inconspicuous spot? Surely, there had to be something that would work. How does one lock away something capable of bending quite literally all of reality to its very whim?
Big Mac blinked. He briefly considered asking Pinkie Pie, but after their last encounter he quickly shoved that thought aside; no one must know the details of his mission save himself and the Princess. Two souls already know what he’s up to, and that’s company enough. There was no need to crowd a third into the mix of things. Admittedly, he had been rather careless so far, and although his actions might have seemed justifiable at times he could no longer risk it; from here on out he had to be more vigilant, more unassuming, and above all just play smart.
He continued his musings up to and through the Delicious Orchards. Before he could even consider securing the next sock, wherever in the world it could be, he made it his first priority to find a safe place to keep the one he already had. His mouth was not sufficient, and it was starting to get soggy.
“Told ya’d need a towel,” a voice teased from down the path ahead. Big Mac looked up, seeing Uncle Strudel sweeping sand off the dirt trail with a broom. He shot him a bemused expression, but that quickly faded with a small chuckle. Just Uncle Strudel being Uncle Strudel, he summarized.
Yet Uncle Strudel was doing his best to suppress a fit of giggles of his own.
Big Mac gave him a look, before realizing what he was laughing at and his face fell into a cold stare. “Don’t say it,” he deadpanned.
But Uncle Strudel said it nevertheless. “Boy, I’d tell ya to stick a sock in yer mouth for talkin’ to me that way, but ya beat me to it!” he yelled, falling over into the sandy dirt, clutching his sides in a fit of laughter.
Big Mac grunted at the horrible joke, and with a flick of his strong neck the used towel on his head went sailing, smacking his uncle right in his stupid face. The stallion quickly gagged, finding the fabric made its way into his own mouth, and spat it out onto the ground as he twisted in the dirt.
“It’s sweat,” Big Mac said with a straight face. “’Least you better hope it is.”
The two stared at each other, sharing an awkward silence before Uncle Strudel reeled again, rolling around uncontrollably. Big Mac only grinned through the fabric in his teeth, waiting patiently for his uncle to eventually get a hold of himself.
“Whew, boy!” Uncle Strudel said with a cough, standing back up. He picked up the towel and threw it over his back, and once more returned to sweeping the dirt. “Take it ya were successful?”
“Eeeyup,” Big Mac responded. “Any idea where I should keep this thing? It’s too dangerous for any conventional means.”
“Ya mean ya didn’t bring one?” Uncle Strudel raised a brow. “What of that saddlebag ya carried here?”
Big Mac looked like he was about to speak, but then froze at the feeling of weightlessness over his back. He grimaced, letting loose a low growl in frustration. “Must’ve left it with the seaponies,” he hissed at his own negligence. Everything he got from Zecora, everything he took underwater with him was gone, and there were no hopes of getting any of it back. Heaven forbid if the seaponies started messing with any of them, let alone that Sea Shimmer. Would an ever-burning torch work underwater? What if a creature who doesn’t breathe air to begin with eats something that would make them not need to breathe air? He shuddered at the thought.
Uncle Strudel tilted his head. “Seaponies?”
“Eeeyup.”
“Thought those fellers were just mythos,” he muttered. “Ya know, like that zombie alicorn of the underworld or whatnot.”
“Who knows?” Big Mac shrugged. “Digressions aside, do you know of a secure location where I can store this?”
Uncle Strudel scratched his chin, and after some thought he pointed off into the orchard. “The Cantatas in Albuquercolt can probably help ya with that. ‘tain’t far from here, just a few somethin’ miles inland across the plains.”
Big Mac followed his hoof, turning to take the first steps on the next leg of his journey. “Thank you kindly,” he said.
“Couldn’t here ya boy! Sounds like ya got a sock in yer mouth!” he heard the voice of his uncle cry, before that was overtaken by crude cackling. Big Mac rolled his eyes, wasting no time to put as much distance between the two of them as possible.
Big Mac’s pace was steady, his hooves simply pushing aside the underbrush of the Saddleback Plains. The cityscape of Albuquercolt slowly came into view after cresting one of the many hills, silhouetted across the setting sun. A gentle breeze raced over the tall grasses, swaying it like the bristles of a brush. He decided then to take a second to rest and enjoy the picturesque view, falling back onto his haunches on a soft pad of dirt.
Then a shadow passed over him and he looked up to the cloudless sky. His brow furrowed in concern as the form of a pegasus moved above him, but then it lightened at seeing exactly who the pony was.
Ditzy Doo haphazardly landed in front of him, almost falling face first.
He couldn’t help but chuckle.
Eyes spinning, Ditzy looked back up to him with a big smile. “Hi there, Big Mac!” she happily greeted. “I got a letter for you!” With those words she hastily scrambled onto her haunches, tossing her mailbag on the patch of earth between them and began to feverishly sort through it.
“Hehehe, swell acting Ditzy,” he complimented. “You sure are good at not breaking character—” Big Mac froze. He would have continued but sucked his lips in when Ditzy gave him an angered glare.
“Don’t use my real name, Sir Apple!” Ditzy looked up and frowned. “I’m on a mission right now as are you, so the name’s Derpy!”
Big Mac shuffled uncomfortably and Ditzy went back to rifle through her mailbags. “Oh, sorry about that Derpy. Didn’t realize you were—”
Head completely consumed in canvas, she spat, “Forget it,” thus ending the conversation.
Big Mac sighed, opening his mouth to let the soggy midnight blue sock fall into his hooves. He should’ve known the other division members were likely on covert operations as well; in fact, he couldn’t think of a time when a division wasn’t on an assignment. While the Knights of Apple are an Order of earth ponies, there’s also the Cavalry of Feather which is an Order of pegasi and the Mages of Cantata being unicorns. The “Triple Trotente” as they were called, being a collective of three select and prominent families of the three pony types, tracing their lineages back millennia to the very three tribes that first founded Equestria.
Nowadays, even though the families do keep in touch, so much so that there’s one member of each order designated to live in every Equestrian city, such times were infrequent. Direct contact on assignments between them weren’t unheard of either, albeit they were extremely rare and oftentimes only involved very important matters. Whatever reason Ditzy was here for, it had to be of dire importance.
“Here you go,” she finally said, dragging a large brown envelope from the pits of her mailbags. With an expressionless face she handed it off the Big Mac, who fidgeted.
“Erm, can you hold this for a second?” he asked, offering her the saliva-riddled sock.
Ditzy gave the article a curious, somewhat disgusted look, but she obliged and let him set it on an outstretched wing.
“Is this what I think it is?” she questioned. “One of the legendary Improbable Socks?”
“Eeeyup,” Big Mac answered, tearing open the envelope. “Princess Luna has assigned me to seize and return them to her.”
Ditzy whistled, one of her eyes going askew. “Lucky! I wish I could get a mission as awesome as that. All I ever do is rescue missing foals and search for fallen constellations,” she sighed, hanging her head.
“At least you haven’t combated leathery demons before,” he said with a hint of annoyance before laying his eyes on the letter. It was stamped with the royal seal, directly from Celestia’s office for sure, but something was wrong. His head tilted in confusion as he tried to decipher the hidden message of the parchment in his hooves.
“It’s blank,” he deadpanned, presenting it to Ditzy as if he expected her to know why. But all she did was shrug.
“I’m just the messenger, so don’t look at me! Princess Celestia had me deliver it,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve got to get back to work then. Hey, you want a muffin?”
Big Mac’s stomach grumbled, realizing the only thing he’s eaten recently was sea water and magic seaweed. “Eeeyup,” he answered with a smile, releasing the blank paper to the wind. He eagerly reached over into Ditzy’s mailbag and after some brief searching pulled out a steaming piece of confectionary delight. His mouth salivated as the scent of baked goods flooded his nostrils—
Ditzy slapped the muffin out of his hoof and onto the ground.
Big Mac looked at her speechless, but his expression faltered at seeing the serious one she held.
“You can’t just go about eating things willy-nilly like somepony’s first published work being something they never wrote!” she yelled.
“I don’t think that’s a correct analogy, and it’s just a muffin!” he defended. “Why, what’s in it? Neurotoxin?”
“Aunt Jemima,” she answered swiftly and picked the muffin back off the ground.
Big Mac scrunched his nose. “What, the pancake mix or the syrup?”
Ditzy looked at him as if she didn’t know what he was talking about, her irises spinning.
Big Mac gulped. “D-did you cook your…”
“It’s plastic explosive.”
“…Oh.”
Ditzy dropped the apparently edible bomb back into her mailbag and pulled out a different one. “Here, this one isn’t dangerous: neurotoxin-free!” she assured with a smile, tossing it through the air.
Without hesitation Big Mac grabbed the thing, afraid for his life at what might happen if it hit the ground. Skeptically, he raised it to his mouth and nibbled. It tasted like bananas, which made him cringe, but it was still food. Content it wasn’t short circuiting or exploding, and that his internal organs weren’t shutting down, he glutinously shoved the rest of the muffin in his mouth. “Thank you kindly,” he said, spitting chunks. Ditzy giggled, flicking her extended wing and tossing the sock back at Big Mac, where the soft fabric landed gracefully on his head.
She stood upright, threw the mailbag back over herself, and began stretching her wings. “Well, I have to go find my sister before she kills herself,” Ditzy said with a slight groan, as if it were a regular chore. Even though he was still chewing Big Mac raised a hoof to call her out on it, but before he could so much as speak she was gone.
A sudden realization crossed his mind right then: yet another pony now knows about his mission. And considering where he was going and what he intended to do…
“Horseapples!”
Big Mac trotted down the dark and empty streets of Albuquercolt. His hooves clicked and clacked on the hard cobblestone, echoing off the silent buildings on either side of him. He clenched his teeth, affirming that the sock was still grasped tightly between them, and pushed himself forward, absolutely certain that the Cantata family would be more than willing to assist him with his mission.
By the Dog’s Bollocks, he wished he brought a map.
He paused in his steps, taking a quick look down either side of the street. Before he could even let the following thought develop, he had to get out of plain view. Thinking fast, he bolted down an adjacent alleyway and scrambled inside a thankfully empty dumpster.
Surrounded by silence and overwhelming dark, he could finally think his thought. Should he dare put on the Improbable Sock? If he recalled correctly, which to his disappointment he was having a hard time doing, the current sock he had didn’t just act on a whim. It had to be manually manipulated as the seaponies did. Unfortunately he didn’t have a shark statue to place it on, but he did remember that one of the seaponies had asked it to summon him, and it did, although in a rather impromptu fashion.
So, should he just ask the sock where the Cantata family lives? But it’s so dangerous and improbable, there’s no telling what could happen! But if he didn’t find where the Cantatas live and get help soon, he may never figure out where the other socks are. He assessed his options, not liking either of them, and after much thought he reluctantly turned to the article in his grasp.
“Uhm… where does the Cantata family live?” he asked the sock.
The sock did not respond.
“Of course that didn’t work,” he muttered. Once more he thought about slipping the sock over his hoof, but such improbable power could easily get out of control. It was too great a risk, especially in such a populated area.
Suddenly his world was torn asunder.
Big Mac flew forwards, slamming his head into the metallic wall of the dumpster with a residual clang. Then the world tilted and he fell back, smacking his skull into the backside of the dumpster. Then he was falling straight up, except he had no idea where up was at this point, and crashed face-first into one of the dumpster’s many walls. Big Mac yelped in pain as the next direction he went tumbling was straight out of the dumpster’s top, landing in a heap of something on his back.
He gritted his teeth and rolled his tongue around, confirming that the midnight blue sock was in his possession. Smiling through his newly acquired migraine, he opened his eyes, blinked at seeing Luna’s moon high above, and then swiftly turned around to see where he was and exactly what was going on.
Bananas. Thousands of them.
“Aaugh!” he screamed, kicking the yellow fruit away from him. But his attempts were futile at best, as it suddenly became clear that he was having no effect at displacing their numbers. Big Mac grunted, taking a quick glance at his surroundings and seeing he was still inside the alleyway from before. The dumpster was currently serving as an island in the sea of fruit he was swimming in, and then the moonlight above was lost to a sea of black. Big Mac sighed, at this rate rather in annoyance if anything, and glanced up. His face fell, his breath escaped him, and his nerves rattled to the bone.
A literal tidal wave of bananas came crashing down on him. There was not enough time to even gasp for air as the sudden potassium-enriched flood engulfed him, drowned him, and washed him out of the alley and into the street.
Big Mac spun and wriggled, completely submerged beneath the cascade of fruit, doing his best to find some sort of footing. Until finally, his hooves found solid ground and he scraped at it for dear life, doing his best to stand tall against the onslaught.
Then as soon as it all began, it was over. Or at least it had lessened to a manageable degree. Big Mac smiled wearily at seeing the bananas levels had lowered to about chest-height. Then he glanced up, back at the alley where this whole banapocalypse had begun, and shuddered.
A very hauntingly familiar green sock hovered nonchalantly above the alley, spewing bananas like a water hose with no foreseeable end in sight.
Thinking quickly, he waded through the forming sea of fruit towards the near side of the street. A streetlight somehow appeared unharmed and he grabbed onto it, doing his best to shimmy to the top of the pole. From there, Big Mac readied himself and leapt to the adjacent building, grasping the bottom of an attached fire escape. He heaved himself up the escape, all the way to the top of the building, and before long he was jumping from rooftop to rooftop until finally he reached his destination.
Big Mac leaned over the edge of a building, smiling through the midnight blue sock and at his own cleverness. The green sock, completely unaware of his presence, continued to spit bananas while hovering above the alleyway below. Big Mac grumbled; somehow he never even expected to make it this far. But nonetheless, right here right now, a second sock had presented itself to him and could easily be acquired. Surely it was the work of improbability if he’s learned anything over the past few days.
Backing up to get a running start, Big Mac sprinted across the rooftop and leapt, intending to come down on and grab the sock before any more shenanigans could happen.
However, much to his chagrin, the sock was gone. As was the ocean of bananas that would have cushioned his three-story fall. Instead he wailed, shaking his limbs helplessly through the air until he belly-flopped onto the hard concrete below with a sickening smack.
There was pain. Oh, there was a lot of pain; a type of pain that could only be described as belly-flopping onto hard cement after a three-story fall. Specifically it was in his limbs, which felt like they were being stabbed with various pins and needles every time he tried to move them. Coming back into consciousness Big Mac gave a seething growl, realizing his vision was engulfed in complete blackness and that the rest of his senses were ringing in utter disarray. Somehow he had the feeling he was hearing out where he thought his nose should be, which even though he was no medical professional he could easily deduce that that should not be happening.
“Oh hey, you’re awake!” a voice suddenly chirped, its happy tone echoing off the inside of his snout. Big Mac held his breath, relieved that at least he was still alive, although by his estimates badly broken. Finally he found the strength to say something.
“Whaaaazaaaah?” he moaned and then coughed. The voice giggled at his incomprehensible whimper.
“Don’t you worry, mister!” the voice spoke again. “Mommy’s going to take good care of you!”
He could feel his face pale as a cold spike ran down his back. He stuttered, “…Mommy?”
“Yuppers!”
“Mom…” Big Mac gulped. He tilted his head the best he could off in the direction of the voice. “Am I… am I dead?”
At first there was silence, but then the voice returned with a flabbergasted yell, “What?! No! You’re in bed, silly!”
Big Mac gave the nothing he could see a stare and followed up with an exhausted sighed, not entirely sure if he should feel relieved. His tongue slowly brushed across the inside of his mouth searching for any trace fibers of the holy launder, and then feverishly when he couldn’t find it.
“Tabala!” a new voice suddenly interjected over his increasingly frantic searching, this one stern and imposing. “Stop bothering our guest; let him sleep!”
“But Moooom… He’s awake!”
“He is?” the second voice said in apparent disbelief. Big Mac was so engrossed he almost missed hearing the scrambling of hooves and a resonating crash from somewhere nearby, followed quickly by the steadfast hoofsteps of somepony in a rush.
Then whatever had been covering his face came off, and Big Mac found himself confronted with a blinding light.
“Well I’ll be; he’s awake!” the second voice, sweet and obviously female, said merrily over the undaunted glare. “Anything I can do for you?”
“The light hurts my eyes…” he said in almost a hiss.
“Whoops! Sorry about that,” she said, turning the lamp fixture away. Big Mac blinked, bringing his eyes back into focus. As his vision reset, he found himself staring eye-to-eye with a beautiful, cyan unicorn. Her purple mane draped lazily over her green eyes, and she greeted him with a warm smile. Her head craned off to the side and she said, “Tabala, could you be a dear and get our guest a glass of water?”
“Yuppers!” the voice of presumably this Tabala answered, and then there was the sound of giddy hooves skipping off and away. Big Mac sighed again, his brow furrowing in irritancy, and looked back up to the mare who stood beside him.
“Hey—” he began before getting interrupted.
“Oh, where’s my manners! You’re probably wondering who I am, where you are, and all that jazz, huh? Heehee… Jazz…”
Big Mac gave her the best sideways glance he could manage from laying down, still upset over the current turn of events. One second he was pouncing a part of a Royal Deity’s ancient hoofwear, and the next he found himself in a… bed? Sure enough, he raised his head slightly and saw a bunch of blankets pulled up to his neck. He turned to mare with one eyebrow raised.
She took the gesture as a sign to talk. “Well, the name is Pandora, and you are currently in my home in Albuquercolt, recovering from four broken legs,” she calmly stated. Then a thought visibly showed in her head and mischievous grin slowly crept across her face, one that accompanied her fluttering her eyelashes at him. “And you are currently occupying my bed, Mister,” she said melodiously, bringing a hoof up to and playfully dragging it across his chest.
Big Mac, a stallion who has rarely ever so much as felt emotion in his life, could feel the fire erupting out from under his cheeks as she suggestively leaned towards him. And he couldn’t move.
“But you know, it must be awfully cold under those covers with nopony to share them with…” she continued, pressing every closer to Big Mac’s trembling form.
“Mommy, I got some water!” Tabala singsonged, reentering the room. Pandora turned and gave her daughter a blank stare before reeling over, falling onto the ground with a thud and laughing uncontrollably.
“Mommy?”
“Your face!” Pandora wheezed from the ground in response, her hooves pounding on the hardwood floor.
Big Mac did his best to absorb into the mattress he lay on, never to be seen again.
At that moment a little pink filly hopped up onto the bed, a glass of water in her telekinetic grasp. She gave Big Mac a worried face, her large, bright blue eyes blinking from under her equally blue mane. “Did Mommy make you feel icky?” Tabala asked him.
Big Mac only sunk further beneath the covers.
Tabala furrowed her brow and rolled her eyes, settling them on her mother. “Mommy!” she yelled. “Stop making ponies feel icky!”
Pandora snorted between giggles, but stood back up nonetheless. “Heehee, I’m just joking around with you, Big Red,” she said with a wink.
“Big Mac,” he corrected.
“Very well then, Big Mac. I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.”
“Shouldn’t I be in a hospital?”
Pandora couldn’t have misheard him, yet she chose to ignore his simple question. “Tabala, don’t bother our guest too much, please.”
“Hey, wait—” Big Mac tried to interject but was silenced by Pandora slamming the bedroom door shut in her leave. His eyes spoke distaste, and he turned to the filly standing on top of him.
“Are you thirsty?” Tabala asked him.
“No thank you,” he deadpanned.
She sighed and floated the glass away. Tabala looked back to him with an apologetic look and said, “Sorry about Mommy. She tries to be funny but she keeps being icky.”
“Have you seen a sock?” he asked, completely sidestepping her excuse. Despite his condition he could not forget the task at hoof, and he’d be damned to let the one thing he had in his possession slip right through his hooves. “It’s blue, and I had it with me when I… passed out.”
Tabala gave him a sideways glance, before a spark of realization popped in her eyes. “Oh! Was it really wet and soggy?”
Big Mac scrunched his nose. “Eeyup…”
“Yuppers!” she chimed, bouncing off of the bed and then sliding underneath it. With little choice Big Mac curiously watched the ceiling, his ears twitching to the noise of the filly scuffing beneath him. After about a minute of this, Tabala remerged with the midnight blue sock in her aura. “Was it this one?”
“Eeyup,” he sighed in relief, gently nodding.
“I’ll give it you if you answer a question.”
Big Mac stared at her innocent smile. “Fine…”
Tabala giggled, tauntingly floating the sock above him. “You’re an Apple, aren’t you?”
Big Mac glared at her out of instinct, not entirely sure how else to react. How’d he get uncovered so easily? Beads of sweat formed on the tip of his brow as he did his miserable best to play a straight face.
“Come on, Mister Apple. You can tell a Cantata, can’t you?”
“Er…” he stuttered, mental gears stalling. “Yes…?”
Tabala clapped her hooves merrily with a grin on her face. The aura around her horn faded, and the sock she had held fell down onto Big Mac’s forehead. It was still wet.
“I haven’t met another Order member before!” the little filly cheered. “Well I suppose Princess Luna, but she’s more of administrator so she doesn’t count. Wait a minute!” Big Mac watched as Tabala scampered away to a nearby dresser, practically ripped a drawer out of it, and rifled through its contents mercilessly. He quickly pulled his neck to the side to avoid being hit by flying objects the filly was tearing out, among them being a crude drawing of happy flowers, a pair of scissors, a box of crayons, and vial of who-knows what.
“Ah ha! Found you!” she exclaimed, pulling out a thick book and then slamming the drawer violently shut. She giddily hopped over to him and opened it up to a random page. Big Mac felt his face fell upon reading the title cover.
“’Welcome to the Order: A Newfoal’s Training Guide to Serving the Royal Princess(es) and Protecting Equestria. Series Five, Volume Seven: Inter-Order Interactions,’” she read aloud. Big Mac audibly groaned; his twelve years of training were grueling, his time spent in Canterlot being something he’d rather forget. This poor filly was logically still in training, and for that she had his sympathy. But by reciting some of the worst classes of his life, she was very quickly beginning to lose that respect.
Tabala cleared her throat. “’Chapter eight, Subsection three, page one hundred and sixty-seven,’ she read. “’During the event of a member of one Order asking for another Order member for help, the latter it legally obligated to oblige or else face being banished and imprisoned in the place you were banished.’” She looked up to Big Mac with a hopeful face. “Do you need my help?”
Big Mac looked at the glimmer in her eyes. If he could move his hoof he would probably be dragging it across his face right then. “Eeyup.”
Tabala squeaked with happiness. “Oh! Oh! What do you need help with? Is it some super-secret mission? Oh, I know! You want to use the science of magic and chronicle the double rainbow for when you fall!”
That was the worst jumble of words he ever heard; his blank stare unrelenting. “Eenope,” he calmly said, leaving the filly completely unfazed by his answer. He looked up slightly to the article resting on his brow. “You see this?” he began, fully captivating Tabala’s attention. “It’s one of four socks that belong to Princess Luna, and they are capable of bending all of probability. For instance, if you were to dip a quill in black ink, you might actually write in the color square.”
Tabala tilted her head. “But square isn’t a color!”
“But you see, that is a probable outcome with the laws of improbability,” he explained. “Anything that would not feasibly happen under any circumstance, very likely will happen. Such power is extremely dangerous, and that’s why I’ve been tasked with finding and returning them to Princess Luna. But there’s a problem.”
“And that’s what you need me for!”
“Eeyup. I need something to carry them in for when I get them, something capable of containing such dangerous artifacts.”
No longer to contain herself, Tabala eagerly jumped up and down in place. “I know! I know! I have something that can hold anything!”
With that outburst, she bolted over to the dresser again and this time actually tore the drawer out of it. Tabala hopped inside the newly formed crevice and then popped back out, a nondescript metal box dangling from her mouth. She happily walked up to him and presented the container to him.
“A ‘My Little Person’ lunchbox,” he deadpanned. “Do you, I don’t know, have something a little less… girly?”
Tabala shook her head with a smile. “Sorry. I don’t really like the show, but my mom gave me this for my seventh birthday and she enchanted it to contain the most wicked and vile things in existence. Even nonexistence!” she chimed. “It can hold anything and nothing; she even told me it can be used to capture scary monsters!” Sliding her tongue under the handle in her mouth, Tabala undid the simple latch and opened the box. “See?”
Big Mac’s mouth unhinged, staring deeply into the container. Tabala gave his reaction a quizzical look, and she turned around to see what was inside the box as well. Her face contorted in a similar fashion, and very slowly she reached inside and pulled out the object within.
A bright pink, frilly, laced, knitted, very decorative sock and a tiny notecard.
Tabala nonchalantly tossed the sock onto the bed, causing Big Mac to recoil sharply at her carelessness, and read the notecard.
She recited, “Hello there! I am the Improbable Sock of Convenience! I see you already have my brother, Inflexibility, and I do believe you have encountered Inconvenience twice now. Although, as it should already be known, we can use our powers randomly and basically whenever we feel like it. However! If you wear us, and it’s improbable enough and within our individual premise, we would happily oblige to do as asked. But only if you ask nicely!”
Big Mac and Tabala stared at the notecard, darting their gaze between it and the pink sock that currently lay on the bed.
“Well, that’s convenient.”
“Eeyup.”
Their awkward silence continued for several more moments, both them not sure exactly who or what to look at. Until finally Big Mac said and said, “So, I can have that lunchbox?”
Tabala blinked, going straight to back to her joyful self. “Yuppers!” she acknowledged, quickly swiping to the two socks already in possession, as well as the notecard, and stuffed them both inside the lunchbox. She happily dropped it onto the bed beside Big Mac’s head. “I’m helpful!” she said smiling.
Big Mac chuckled. “You sure are.”
“Anything else I can help you with?”
“Uhm…” Big Mac looked around the room. With Zecora, the seaponies, Uncle Strudel, Ditzy, and now this young filly, it was coming increasingly apparent to him that he couldn’t finish his assignment alone. While he was against revealing the details of mission in every form, every help he got so far was in the right direction. Now, he had two socks in his possession he more than likely would have never found on his own, let alone as quickly. With a reluctant sigh, he turned back to Tabala. “Eeyup…”
Tabala’s smile almost split her face in eagerness.
“Would you happen to know anypony who’d be knowledgeable about these socks?”
“Yuppers!” Tabala almost squealed. “I got an aunt who’s super smart about history, myths, and stuff!”
Big Mac curiously raised an eyebrow. “You do?”
She nodded. “She can be very… crazy, at times, but she’s super sweet if you get to know her! She’s really into… cryptozoology? I think that’s what it’s called. She draws lots of these weird, two-legged things. Oh! And she likes to ramble. A lot.”
Big Mac’s face fell. “And she lives…” he forced himself to say, just for the sake of confirming.
“Ponyville! Her name is—”
“I know who she is,” Big Mac interrupted, his face completely immersed with irritancy. Just about everypony in Ponyville knew who that mare is, and just about all of them would rather forget her too. Not only that, but everypony there thinks he’s sick. To go seen back in his hometown would surely raise suspicions. He cleared his throat and turned back to Tabala. “Any other leads?”
“Uhm…” she pondered, bringing a hoof to her chin. “I know there’s a museum dedicated to the night in Cloudsdale, and I know one of its Lunar Guards are with the Calvary of Feather, but for some reason it’s only open at night. You can check there, I suppose.”
His brow furrowed ever so slightly less. He’d much rather go to Cloudsdale, but there’s the obvious problem of not being able to walk on clouds. Somehow he’d have to find a way, and to the best of his knowledge an earth pony walking on clouds was impossible. He faced a tough choice: either go through what could only be described as Tartarus itself, or do something along the lines of growing wings.
“Anything else?” he practically pleaded.
“You can ask Mommy,” she suggested, “But be careful. She can be icky sometimes. Any other questions?”
Big Mac looked to the lunchbox sitting by his head, and then to his apparently broken limbs. That’s when he realized they weren’t even in casts. “Can I get to a hospital? Please?”