Sweetie Belle gave the taut rope an experimental twang, and the contraption didn’t collapse. It did, however, creak and groan; this concerned her. “Are you sure this is safe?” she asked, eyeing the hulking pile of flimsily assembled wooden planks and aged, frayed ropes.
Scootaloo shot her friend a devilish grin. “Not even close,” she said, pushing Sweetie onto the platform. “But we never will be if we don’t give it a test run!”
“Aw, don’t be scared—we’ve done worse and come out alright.” Apple Bloom patted Sweetie Belle’s trembling back, but made sure to keep her own hooves off the launchpad. “Plus, Scootaloo’s got the wagon all greased up and ready to roll if’n we need to tug you down to the nurse,” she continued, gesturing back toward Ponyville and the little wheeled deathtrap that would take them there.
“And Rainbow Dash says that your family’s made of marshmallows, so I’m not even sure you need to worry in the first place!” Scootaloo beamed.
Sweetie chuckled nervously and gulped. “Still... you like stunts and danger and stuff a lot more than me, Scootaloo. Why can’t you do it?” she asked, trembling in place while stealing glances at the board nailed to the wall.
“Seriously?” Scootaloo rolled her eyes. “How does that make any sense at all? I don’t have a horn, and I have no idea how you’d play darts without something sharp.” She steadied her hoof. “Ready?”
“No—”
“Fire!” she shouted as she yanked the lever.
Sweetie screamed, sailing through the air. She took no solace in learning that she hit the target dead on—face first. Her body bounced several feet back from the impact and rolled to a stop in the grass below. Then, surprised by how little that had hurt, she stood up and brushed herself off. The other crusaders had already begun galloping toward her, and as she stepped forward to meet them halfway, a sharp pain shot up her leg. She brought it up to her eyes for inspection and squinted at the strange white object that had embedded itself in her hoof.
“Sweetie Belle? Y’allright?” Apple Bloom asked.
She didn’t respond.
“Hey, are you okay?” Scootaloo held up a hoof. “How many hooves am I holding up? Or I guess a better question,” she said, turning her hoof to point at Sweetie’s, “what’s that you’re looking at?”
She blinked. “I have no idea. It looks almost like a—”
Scootaloo gasped. “What happened to your tooth?!”
“Huh?”
“Your tooth!” Scootaloo repeated, thrusting her hoof into her friend’s mouth to touch the empty space on her gums. “It’s gone!”
Sweetie’s eyes widened as she stared down at the item she was holding. “Erh sheef shupshd dho comout?”
Apple Bloom glared at her two friends, then pulled Scootaloo’s hoof out of Sweetie’s face. “Try again, Sweetie.”
“Are teeth supposed to come out?”
The three friends stood in silence, staring at the tooth and pondering the greatest mystery of the modern age.
“So I did like Rarity said and I left it under my pillow, and when I woke up I found two bits instead of a tooth!”
Apple Bloom’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding... you mean there’s somepony breakin’ into our houses at night?”
“No no no,” Scootaloo said, shaking her head. “Weren’t you listening? It’s a fairy! She probably doesn’t even have to come inside if she knows some crazy tooth/money conversion spell.”
“But that don’t make any sense!” Apple Bloom threw her forehooves into the air. “Why’s the tooth gotta be under your pillow if the magic can go through walls?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to,” Sweetie Belle offered, her voice cracking. She earned confused looks in return. “What if that’s the deal? What if the tooth fairy doesn’t just go around stealing ponies’ teeth and they have to agree to trade, but the fairy’s too busy to talk to everypony face-to-face?”
Scootaloo tapped a hoof against her chin. “Hmm... I guess that makes sense.”
Apple Bloom nodded. “It’d be rude to just go takin’ teeth without askin’.”
“So since nopony ever just puts teeth under a pillow, that’s the sign that it’s okay for the tooth fairy to do her magic. And so every time you put a tooth under a pillow, the fairy will come take care of it and you’ll have money in the morning,” Scootaloo said.
“Yeah,” Sweetie confirmed. “And the best part is that my tooth is gonna grow back! Rarity told me so!”
“Wait, what? That’s ridiculous! Other body parts don’t grow back! You’re left with scars and stumps and junk if you lose something.”
“Well,” Sweetie’s face scrunched up for a moment, “your mane grows back!”
“Totally different. A mane isn’t even really a part of you. You can cut it off and it doesn’t even hurt. Have you ever hit your teeth on something? It hurts.”
Sweetie blinked across the horizon, toward the wall she’d rammed her face into yesterday. “I dunno... I didn’t think it was so bad. Lots of times when I hit my head I barely even notice.”
Apple Bloom broke her silence. “Now hang on, maybe there’s somethin’ to this after all. I think I remember my big sister tellin’ me a story about losing a tooth, but she definitely has a full mouth’s worth of ‘em. She ain’t missing any at all.”
Scootaloo rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but your granny sure is. Why haven’t those come back?”
“What are you talkin’ about? Granny Smith does so have teeth!”
“Yeah, maybe half the time! I’ve seen those gums a little too up close for my taste.”
“Well... she is kinda old and fragile and forgetful... maybe she keeps losing them over and over and they keep growing back?”
“That... makes a lot more sense than it should,” Scootaloo mused, stroking her chin and squinting into the distance.
“I always thought her teeth were fake,” Sweetie said. “Lots of ponies put on fake parts they don’t have. Like cancer patients who have fake manes since theirs fell out, or Rarity’s nighttime friends who wear those funny...” she bit her lip. “Umm... I don’t know what they’re called. Snips has one, and so does Snails. I think I do too, but I’m not sure? It’s hard to see without a mirror, and Rarity breaks every mirror in the house two or three times a week when she cries about how ‘impure’ she is and calls herself a horse.”
Scootaloo and Apple Bloom both blinked, very slowly, at the information before Scootaloo slapped Sweetie upside the head. “Don’t be dumb. Teeth are like a zillion times stronger than steel. There’s no way we could make fake teeth with the primitive technology we have today. Our buildings are still pathetic enough that one pony can wreck a whole school in less than an hour,” she said. Her eyes darted back and forth. “I mean... less than one day. Because it happened at night and we don’t know who did it or how long it took and it wasn’t me.”
“Remind me why I’m friends with you two?” Apple Bloom asked, rubbing at her temples.
Sweetie raised her hoof. “Ooh, pick me! I know!”
Apple Bloom frowned and pointed at her.
“Because everypony else in class has their cutie mark, so none of them want to hang out with blank-flank losers like us!”
With a groan, Apple Bloom smiled at her friend. “Yes, Sweetie. Thank you,” she hissed. “We’re gettin’ off topic, here. Let’s suppose teeth do grow back and we understand this situation half as good as we think we do. Why the hay would the Tooth Fairy bother doin’ all that? What does she get out of it?”
“Does it matter?” Scootaloo shook her head. “Look, I get that it’s a good idea to understand stuff or whatever, but this fairy’s been at it for basically forever. I’m not sure the reason matters, and it’s definitely not what we should be thinking about,” she said. She wrapped her forelegs around her friends and brought them close, then smirked, the sunlight glinting off of her grin. “I think we need to knock out a whole lot more of Sweetie Belle’s teeth.”
Apple Bloom tossed an incredulous glare at her.
Sweetie Belle’s head bobbed back and forth in place, eyes shut and humming a merry tune.
Scootaloo sighed. “For the money.”
“I dunno. I’m not sure I’m okay with hurting ponies for money.”
“Dentistry cutie marks?” she offered.
Apple Bloom shrugged. “Works for me.”
“I like having friends,” Sweetie chirped as she opened her eyes again.
“That’s... either real ignorant, or real sad,” Apple Bloom said.
Scootaloo chuckled. “My money’s on both.”
“You don’t have any money.”
She smiled. “Yet.”
“It’s a load of baloney is what it is!” Scootaloo shouted, kicking the burlap sack behind her in frustration.
The bag toppled over, spilling hundreds of teeth ranging from pristine to thoroughly rotten—some even far too large or too small to have come from equines at all. The wave of enamel, plaque, and dirt washed over the floor beneath the table, painting the cheerful tiles of Sugarcube Corner in terrible, filthy shades of yellow and brown.
“Whoops,” Scootaloo murmured before shaking her head and turning back to her friends. “Okay look, both of you got money, right?”
The two fillies nodded.
“Apple Bloom, you had a couple of teeth from every colt in class. All of those were fine?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I woke up to the sound of Applejack yelling at Rainbow Dash about something or other, and there were a few dozen bits right there under my pillow.”
Sweetie Belle cocked her head to one side before staring at the floor. “Where’d you get all those teeth, anyway, Scootaloo?”
“Does it matter?”
“Probably not,” Sweetie said before falling over. A gust of pink wind had knocked her out of her seat.
“That was you?” Pinkie blurted, jaw hanging low in front of Scootaloo’s face.
“Pinkie, how or why do you know or care about an assortment of teeth of unknown origin?” Apple Bloom asked.
Pinkie’s face lit up and she hopped onto the table. “It’s my business to know! Me and the Cakes—and Bon-Bon, I think—all get totally sweet kickbacks for our anti-contributions to anti-dental anti-health! With all the smiling I get ponies to do, I tend to have a really good idea of the condition everypony’s mouths are in, too.” Her beam melted into a sympathetic frown as she climbed down to the floor. “Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but the teeth need to be fresh. They gotta go under the pillow within a couple of days to be valid. If you want, I can probably trade you something for those.”
Scootaloo kicked at the overturned sack again. “That’s stupid! What does it matter how old they are? And if they’re no good, what are you gonna do with ‘em?”
“I’m just gonna build gummy an enamel fortress, so I can use any teeth that are still hard, but for whatever reason the T.F. is pretty specific about the rules.”
Sweetie Belle gasped and pulled her body upright. “You’ve talked to her?”
“If Pinkie knows the Tooth Fairy, we can ask her to ask her whatever we need to know!” Applebloom exclaimed, eyes sparkling.
Scootaloo pushed Sweetie back down. “Screw that! Let’s cut out the middle-mare and go have a chat ourselves!” She gave Pinkie her most adorable face. “Can you pleeeeeaaaaase tell us where the Tooth Fairy lives?”
“Hey! No fair using that on me—I already probably have diabeetus, I don’t need it probably twice!”
Turning her cute down about twenty percent, Scootaloo asked again. “Can you pleeeeaaaase tell us where the Tooth Fairy lives?”
“Hmmm...” Pinkie closed her eyes, her tongue probing the various corners of her mouth in thought. “Nope.”
“Why not?” Apple Bloom asked with a frown.
“Because I just can’t. It’s not the kind of thing you can just tell a pony. I could show you how to find her, but that’d be dangerously irresponsible and—”
“I give you the teeth, you show us how,” Scootaloo blurted.
Pinkie smiled and held out a hoof. “Deal.”
Scootaloo grabbed it, shaking eagerly.
“Could one of you scoop the teeth up and bring them into my closet?” Pinkie asked, trotting toward the front door of Sugarcube Corner. She flipped the sign from open to closed. “The other two can help me prepare down here.”
Apple Bloom raised an eyebrow. “Prepare?”
Pinkie just smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh! We need to draw some really fancy looking circles on the floor.”
“Like a dark summoning ritual?” Sweetie asked.
“Okay, one, I’m gonna wanna hear the story of how you know anything about summoning magic,” Scootaloo said, concern painted across her face “And two, we’re after the Tooth Fairy, not an elder god,” she finished with a roll of her eyes.
Pinkie’s smile disappeared. She let out a nervous chuckle.
Scootaloo’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding me. The Tooth Fairy is an eldritch abomination?”
Apple Bloom chewed on her lip for a moment. “Hey wait a sec... why do you know anything about colors out of space or strange aeons?”
“I told you before I’m not legally allowed to talk about what I did in Baltimare last summer.”
“Wait a minute, girls, I’m confused. I thought everypony knew all about Azathoth and Tsathoggua and all the others. Don’t they visit your dreams to talk to you?” Sweetie asked with an adorable tilt of her head.
“Oooh, no no no. This is just a misunderstanding. The T.F. isn’t one of those guys you silly fillies!” Pinkie said with a laugh before leaning down next to Sweetie Belle and placing her muzzle in her ear. “When you’re all done with this, though, come see me. We have a lot of important stuff to talk about,” she whispered.
Thick ropes of inky-black nothingness clung to points in the space beyond, forming a chaotic web that vacillated between maddening impossibilities of non-euclidean design and fractal patterns so intricate as to be indistinguishable from random noise by any but the most studious occult mathematicians. Holes in the fabric of being blinked open and shut in twisted mockery of eyes. Foul ichor pooled in craterous wounds of the fleshy ground.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders skipped forward, all smiles, singing an impromptu song as they blithely moved past wrong after wrong, actually managing to drive back some of the terror lurking beyond space and time with the impossibly bad pitch of two of their three members. They came to a halt before a massive raven whose every feather twisted into a chitinous claw and whose beak was lined with hundreds of thousands of malformed teeth.
Suppressing a tremble, Apple Bloom stepped forward and tugged at one of the claws at the end of its tail. “Excuse me, Mr. Bird, do you know where the Tooth Fairy lives?”
The beast that should not be narrowed six of its eyes and regarded the fillies with a curious sniff. Then its maw snapped open and a shriek bellowed forth, the raw sound sending the girls tumbling backward.
“Oh now that’s not very nice, Poe. Surely you can smell the emblem that brought them here? They are our guests.” A... a THING, a THING that was no mare seeped out of a crack in the air and stood tall beside her pet. If a pony were to be stripped of her coat and skin and her every muscle fiber converted into a slimy, pulsating octopus tentacle, it might resemble the creature standing before the Cutie Mark Crusaders, though with fewer limbs. It might even radiate the same type of fear, but not nearly the same magnitude. The horrible, awful crow took to the air and left the ponies alone with the thing that was most definitely not a pony.
Apple Bloom and Scootaloo froze in place, quaking.
Sweetie Belle ran forward and wrapped her hooves around one of the thing’s five forelegs. “I didn’t know you were the Tooth Fairy, Thraglanua!” she shouted, nuzzling her pure cheek against the filthy appendage.
“I am many things, child,” it cooed. At least, a coo was the most analogous vocalization to that. Pushing Sweetie back a short distance, it looked her in the eyes. “You know that.”
Sweetie giggled, deep purple slime dripping from her face and hissing when it hit the ground. “I guess so. So, umm, Nua... my friends and I had some questions about how the whole tooth thing works.”
Four of its eyes blinked, slightly out of sync, and three of those eyes and one other swiveled to observe the amazingly un-urine-soaked crusaders. “Ask away.”
Scootaloo gulped and shuffled forward an entire terrifying inch. “Wh-why do the teeth have to be f-fresh?”
“I have no use for them if they are not,” the thing said, only just now demonstrating the fact that its voice resonated out from some unseen cavity and its mouth was unnecessary. “There are many teeth I cannot use, but to be too selective would arouse suspicion as to their purpose.”
Mimicking Scootaloo, Apple Bloom gulped and moved forward a smidgeon. “What purpose?”
All of Thraglanua’s eyes focused on Sweetie Belle.
She nodded. “It’s alright, they’re my friends.”
One writhing glob of tissue jerked upward in a snap and then slowly glided across Sweetie’s back, stroking her gently. The eyes returned to their previous distribution. “Some fragment of a unicorn’s magic dissipates throughout parts of their body other than their magical leylines. It just so happens that teeth serve as surprisingly effective batteries, discharging slowly over the course of a few days. I require unicorn teeth, but am willing to take all fresh teeth to deflect inquiry into what function unicorn teeth serve.”
“So you... collect magic?” Scootaloo asked. “That doesn’t sound so bad. I mean, if it was gonna go to waste anyway, well, then it’s not a big deal, right?”
Apple Bloom’s lip curled into a pout. “I’m pretty sure we ain’t gettin’ our cutie marks from this.”
Scootaloo ran a hoof through her mane. “Yeah, well... can’t win ‘em all.” She paused, eyes drifting slowly aside in thought. “Hey wait, where do you get the money?”
“That’s easy,” Sweetie chirped, “she has some really rich friends. Like the mayor of Las Pegasus or Arncolt Schw... Swarz... Schwartnznsg... the actor who was the Termineightor.”
“Well, now what?” Apple Bloom asked. “We solved the mystery. Did y’all still wanna try to make some money, or can we move on to the next fruitless farce?”
“Sheesh, what’s gotten into you lately? You’re so pessimistic these days!”
Apple Bloom shrugged. “Depression and alcoholism runs in the family, same as Alzheimer’s. Guess I’m just an early bloomer.”
With a sudden lurch, the unreality of the space around them shifted slightly up and to one side, changing to an uneven angle in the process. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo wavered a bit, but stayed standing. Sweetie Belle awkwardly stumbled forward into Thraglanua, who was suddenly wearing a very serious glare and looking upward.
“The rift! But, it is too soon... I haven’t the power yet,” she hissed. Her gaze snapped back down. “How would the three of you like to help me today? ”
Dear Princess Celestia,
Today I learned that ponies really don’t appreciate having their teeth and/or bones removed while they’re conscious. I also learned that my morals are a lot more flexible than I thought, but that doesn’t bring me happiness. It seems joy is always fleeting and sorrow is all too common.
I fear I’m becoming jaded before my time, but at least I’ve found a cider I like the taste of.
-AB
Dear Princess Celestia,
I’m not sure why I’m writing this. I didn’t actually learn any kind of lessons today, and even if I did I’ve never written you a letter before so I’m not even sure how it’s supposed to go. I learned a few facts and I made a few ponies angry, but I’m not convinced I did anything wrong.
I guess I did figure out that I’m not so good with organic stuff and should probably stick to mechanical. I could probably build something wicked cool if I had the bits. Hint hint.
-Scootaloo
Dear Princess Celestia,
Today I learned that sometimes it’s okay to be racist, but only when you’re discriminating against malevolent entities from beyond the stars and not regular ponies or mules or zebras.
-Sweetie Belle
Dear Daddy,
Why didn’t you ever tell me about the ponies whose dreams cross the boundaries? I know things didn’t go as planned today, but maybe I could’ve helped if you would’ve let me.
I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of important stuff because you don’t think I’m up to it. So from now on when I come home, I’m only bringing half as many cupcakes until you start letting me be a part of your plans.
-Lil’ Nyarly