The moment Aurora opened his eyes, he knew that he had made at least one bad decision the night before. If the throbbing headache and parched throat hadn't been enough to confirm that, the tremendous difficulty of moving any part of his body certainly would have. Aurora had drank to excess one or two other times in his life, but the hangover that greeted him that morning was like nothing he had ever experienced before.
With great effort, he rolled over to see that Velvet Blue was still soundly snoring away in the room’s other bed. Soon enough, he would be waking to the same nightmarish pain that assailed Aurora the moment he opened his eyes. The sight of his friend and fellow researcher drunkenly sprawled on the bed brought back the rest of the previous night, slowly at first but with increasing speed and urgency. The unicorn mare who had kept the alcohol flowing was nowhere to be seen. Aurora couldn’t remember when she had disappeared, but he knew now that she hadn’t been looking for a night of debauchery.
That realization did nothing to ease the stabbing pain in Aurora’s head or the queasy feeling in his stomach. She had been pumping them for information on their research—their top secret research, commissioned by Princess Celestia herself—and they had poured it out to her like the bartender poured mug after mug, shot after shot. The thought was too much for Aurora to bear in his weakened state. He quickly grabbed the first object he saw, which he vaguely recognized as one of his saddle bags, and emptied the contents of his stomach into it. While the purge made for a slight improvement in his physical state, it only freed up more of his mental capacity to focus on thoughts of banishment to a distant celestial body.
The noise from Aurora’s vomiting had been enough to finally wake Velvet, who rolled over and let out a long, mournful sound that Aurora thought might have been words.
“I recommend throwing up,” Aurora said, finally sitting upright. “You’re going to anyway, when you realize what happened.”
“Whhappn’d...” moaned his half-comprehending friend. With a sigh, Aurora set about the delicate business of standing up. When he had managed that, he used a bit of magic to levitate a pitcher of water on the nightstand over to Velvet’s bed, which he then upended on the poor, unsuspecting pony.
In a wild thrashing of limbs and yelling of obscenities, Velvet flung himself out of bed and onto the floor at Aurora’s hooves. As soon as the shock passed, the hangover hit, and Velvet groaned loudly as he covered his face with his forehooves.
“What the hay, Aurora...” he finally managed.
“Trixie is gone,” Aurora replied, surprised by how calm he sounded given the gravity of the situation. “And we told her everything we know about the Wishing Stone.”
Downstairs in the dining room, the ponies enjoying their breakfast were treated to a string of swears the likes of which hadn’t been uttered in Equestria since the legendary pirate captain Salty Swagger lost his cherished ship in a Las Pegasus poker match.