Sunset was the first to whom the sense of hearing returned. As soon as the swirling and disorienting spiral of sensation that accompanied traveling through the portal settled, she made out Princess Twilight’s voice: “Spike! What did you do?!”
“It’s not my fault! I was trying to get away from Starlight! She’s gone crazy again!”
“Crazy?! I’m not the idiot who set fire to my prized kite collection!”
“I told you, it was an accident! Dinner last night gave me mild indigestion! It’s not my fault you can’t cook!”
“I can’t cook?!”
Sight was the next to return, and it offered Sunset a strange shot: Starlight Glimmer was chasing after Spike, carrying in her magic what could only be described as a burnt-up mess of string and paper. Princess Twilight, meanwhile, stood off to the side, near a set of machines that beeped and whirled with reckless and alarming abandon. From a printer emerged a long sheet of paper with a red line doing the tango in violent strokes. Princess Twilight seized this paper and read it quickly. A worried look came over her face.
Just then, Sunset heard six other bodies emerge from the portal, all letting out groans of their own. “Oh, heavens,” Rarity mumbled. “No one told me it’d feel quite like that… Why didn’t you warn me, Rainbow?”
“Because we didn’t go through the portal this way last time!” Rainbow grumbled.
Princess Twilight looked up and saw Sunset standing there. Her face broke out into a beaming smile. “Sunset Shimmer!” Dropping the paper and leaving her spot by the machines, she raced over and embraced Sunset. “Oh, it’s so good to see you! And you and the girls are just on time!”
Sunset laughed. “You say that as though we were ever going to be late. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had authentic Prench food? Like, actual pony Prench?”
Princess Twilight nodded and stepped back to regard her. But then that befuddled expression returned to her face.
Sunset tilted her head. “Um… Something up? Hello?”
At that point, Starlight and Spike had stopped their chase, and collectively turned to face Sunset. Two sets of jaws slackened, and Spike murmured, “Oh, horseapples.”
Sunset had been in the human world for so long, she’d forgotten about pony idioms and profanities, such that it took her a moment to realize the implication behind Spike’s statement. But for the life of her, she couldn’t understand what was the problem. She looked down at her front, thinking she’d perhaps gotten something on her, but saw nothing.
“Whoa, nelly,” she heard Applejack drawl, “Pinkie, that’s… is that what I think it is?”
“Ha ha, yep! But, that’s not what I usually get! Oh, look, Applejack, you have one, too!”
Slowly, Sunset turned around.
Applejack and Pinkie sat on their haunches, staring at the protrusions coming from their foreheads. Horns. But they, by themselves, weren’t the most striking feature. It was their color. Applejack’s, as opposed to her usual orange, was an exquisite white, while Pinkie’s was a disturbingly familiar shade of lavender. Applejack gaped at the sight; Pinkie played with it, poking and prodding like it was some new toy.
Then Sunset’s gaze turned to her other friends. Twilight and Rarity helped each other up, then stepped back with gasps, each pointing to the other’s sides. A pair of wings sprouted from their torsos, but, as with Applejack and Pinkie, they were a different color from their coats. Twilight’s pair was a butterscotch yellow and Rarity’s was lithe and blue.
“Oh, dear,” Rarity mumbled, giving her wings an experimental flap. “That is… not at all what I expected.” The human Twilight, meanwhile, didn’t say anything, but was craning her neck around to get a better look at the extra appendages.
Only Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy seemed unperturbed, but as they, too, got onto their hooves, Sunset realized with a start that that was because they were without either wings or a horn. Fluttershy didn’t appear bothered by this, but Rainbow took one look at Rarity’s pair and let out an impressively dismayed whinny. “Are… Are those supposed to be mine?”
“They do look a lot like you,” Fluttershy said. Then she looked at Sunset. “Sunset? Didn’t you say you were a unicorn in this world?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, darling, you certainly have the horn for it,” Rarity said, “but, ah, forgive me, but that isn’t usually part of the package deal, is it?”
Sunset didn’t immediately answer. Already she was starting to put the pieces together. Glancing down at herself had yielded nothing, but this time she craned her neck to look around, and that was when she saw them: a pair of impressive wings. They, like the others, were not the same color as Sunset’s coat, but instead, were a deep cobalt, almost as dark as a starless night sky. When she unfurled them, she was in for another surprise; they were easily the largest pair of wings she’d ever seen.
I’m an… alicorn?
A clinical part of Sunset—one that had been nurtured back when she had been Princess Celestia’s personal student—was already filing these observations away and making inferences on the fly. She had heard something just before finishing the jump over. Something that sounded vaguely like an “Oops.” Something, then, had gone wrong with the portal.
She gave another experimental shrug, watching as the individual feathers recoiled and curled. Amazing, she could not help thinking, but also she was beset by considerable curiosity. Limb displacement was not an unheard of concept. The earliest practitioners of teleportation had suffered from it, and the occasional forays into transformative magic had, more often than not, resulted in one’s leg or tail exchanging places with another point on the body. But those were rudimentary and sloppy accidents perfected through careful logistics and an understanding of the thaumaturgical field; what happened here was somehow in defiance of that, for Sunset knew of no magic that could not only displace and re-place limbs from one subject to another, but do so without any apparent issue. That she could control these wings so easily meant that the neural pathways in her brain had been magically rewritten near-instantaneously. Not even the best surgeons were capable of such a feat.
More than that, they seemed remarkably similar, as though she’d seen them before. She brought one wing to her eyes, trying to place them. Nearby, Princess Twilight was muttering something to herself, and Starlight glanced with no small amount of trepidation between the former humans and the portal.
Another door to the castle creaked open, and the sound of metal hooves clinking across a crystal floor could be heard. “Princess Twilight, I am hoping you will tell me this is the result of some asinine prank and not, perhaps, a magical misstep.”
Princess Twilight and Sunset turned, and Sunset let out an involuntary gasp. Starlight chuckled nervously. “Oh, um… Now would probably be a good time to mention that Twilight—er, Princess Twilight—added an extra reservation? Le Pâturage was offering them at a discount, surprisingly enough.”
Princess Luna stood morosely before them, dressed in her usual royal regalia. She glared at them all, but not from anger, it seemed, but rather bewilderment. “When my sister suggested I accompany you to your luncheon, she said it might open my eyes to some new experiences.” She glanced over her own torso. “I did not anticipate what that would truly mean.”
Sunset didn’t need to follow Luna’s gaze to understand. Where there should have been a pair of wings, now there were none—for now they were, apparently, grafted to Sunset’s sides. Tentatively, she raised both and flapped them once, and a strong gust of air blew through the castle, dispelling the sheet of paper that Princess Twilight had dropped, as well as the burnt remains of Starlight’s kite. Princess Luna appeared troubled by the act, though Sunset could understand why, and when she met Sunset’s gaze, it was with a questioning gleam.
“Sunset,” the human Twilight said. Sunset turned around to face her. Twilight trotted over, her yellow wings fluttering almost with a mind of their own. She cupped Sunset’s face, then brought her in close. Her pupils were the size of pinpricks, and though she spoke barely above a harsh whisper, her fear was as evident as the wings themselves.
“Why are all my pony parts wrong?!”