Who Needs the Sunshine

by Atuhor Name


CH. 02 Uncertainty

Uncertainty

"Girls." Twilight Sparkle said, trying to be heard over the racket made by her five friends gathered in Sugarcube Corner this early morning.

"GIRLS!" she shouted.

Now everypony in the room was staring directly at Twilight.

"As of right now, Celestia is not sure yet if Princess Luna has been replaced or not," Twilight glared at her friends, who moments ago had been arguing based on the assumption that Luna really was a changeling in disguise. "And it’s our job to figure out whether or not she has been replaced, IN ADDITION to helping teach her about modern Equestria."

"But Twilight," Applejack spoke up. "If she is a spy, we'll be teachin’ her how to infiltrate better!"

"Yeah!" Rainbow Dash butted in. "I don't see why we don't just burst in, tie her down, and have you cast your anti-changeling magic on her!."

"Well for one, Rainbow, that would be a breach of trust," Twilight scolded. "And if the princess is genuine, what then? Do we just tell her 'Oh, sorry, you were acting so out of character, wanting to redeem yourself, that we just had to check if you were actually a changeling?' "

Rainbow and Applejack looked noticeably taken aback at this.

"Besides," Twilight went on, "can you imagine the panic it would cause, just knowing that the changelings might be back in Equestria?"

If Rainbow and Applejack looked taken aback before, they looked noticeably regretful now. The changeling scare from the assault on Canterlot had taken three months to die down. Applejack herself had actually met the wrong end of that when she came into town exhausted from working on the farm.

Three months of suspecting neighbors, wild accusations and paranoia. It had only recently begun to die off with heavy pressure from the guard. None of them, not even Rainbow with all her brash talk, wanted to go back to that.

"Ok then Twi," Applejack said. "I know you called us up here with a plan, so what is it?"

"Well.. Pinkie Pie, I need you to..."

----------------

Twilight returned from Sugarcube Corner tired, her very early morning rendezvous with her friends did not meet up well with her late night studying with Luna. It was times like this when she wished she still drank coffee. But after more times than she could remember staying up too late and having a caffeine headache from forgetting to drink the stuff she broke herself of the habit.

Twilight didn't want to wake the princess up. After all, Luna looked so peaceful right now, as if nothing could disturb her rest. Twilight shook herself, realizing she had been standing for over a minute, groggily watching the Goddess of the Night sleep.

After another minute of polite requests and mumbled excuses, Twilight decided to just poke Princess Luna in the ribs.

Several confusing seconds ended with the Princess tripping over the sheets and landing face down on the floor. Twilight had to stifle a giggle as Luna tried to shake off the sheets tangled on her legs and maintain her usual dignified poise at the same time.

“I’m sorry, what did you want, Twilight?” Said Luna, rubbing her nose.

“Oh, well umm, Princess, I was wondering if you wanted to go out and meet some of the residents of Ponyville,” Twilight said.

“Yes, Twilight. I think that would be a great idea.” Luna said, brightening up immediately.

----------------

Twilight lay in bed, unable to sleep, trying to gather her thoughts as to where today had gone.

They had been to one of Pinkie's surprise “Welcome to Ponyville” parties and...

Luna had taken it altogether better than Twilight had expected.

Twilight was never one for parties, but since she'd moved to Ponyville she'd learned to enjoy them, after a fashion. Still, she had always felt out of her element in them. Like she didn't quite belong.

Somehow, though, with Luna there, Twilight felt like she had somehow caught the groove of the party in her wake. She couldn't remember the last time she’d had that much fun. Luna had even managed to pull a prank on Pinkie Pie. Well, it was more reversing a prank and Twilight wasn't entirely sure it was intentional. Rainbow Dash was definitely giving her points for that one either way.

Then they had lunch, and buckled down for studying Equestrian history. This part worried Twilight the most. Most of Twilight's friends in Ponyville didn't seem to have much time for books. Not that they didn't respect them- as the resident librarian of Ponyville, she made very sure that they respected books.

But Twilight always found that when she started talking about books in general she ran out of listeners long before she had run out of things to talk about. Twilight didn't hold it against them but nowadays, she had gotten to the point that she was in the habit of stopping herself discussing obscure Equestrian history with her friends before they completely lost interest... usually only seconds later.

Now Luna was here and she seemed just as happy as Twilight to plow through two hundred years of Equestrian history in one night. She had managed not only to keep up with Twilight on it, but in fact the two had some interesting discussions about the post-Griffonic-war era of Equestria.

Throughout this, though, Twilight was watching Luna for anything out of place. Unfortunately, she didn't know Luna all that well in the first place, like she did Cadance. Luna was acting slightly suspicious: there were fewer “thee’s” and “thou’s” in her speech, and beyond yesterday she hadn't used her royal Canterlot voice for anything. There were some inconsistencies with things she knew and didn't know how to use.

All of this though could easily be put down to Luna having some measure of adaptation to the modern world in the time she'd been back. It would be insulting to assume she learned nothing since her return.

Luna was, if anything, much more gregarious and outgoing than before. Which, while out of character, was not a sure sign like that general “evilness” Twilight had detected from the impostor Cadance. There was no trace, not even a hint of an unkind word, or flash of green fire in her eyes. Except when one of the foals tried something with a tack, even Twilight had to give her that one.

Maybe she had just opened up since Nightmare night.

Twilight rolled over in her bed and took out the letter Celestia had sent her, still unsure, and shivered. Today was the best day she had had in Ponyville for a long time. The thought that it might all be a lie made her feel more alone than she had felt in ages. Almost as if the changelings were right behind her plotting and prepared to pull all this out from under her.

Twilight found no comfort in the letter Celestia had sent her, it remained as it was a suspicion carefully worded to be neutral. Now, quite unable to sleep, she decided to join Luna, who was gazing up at the stars on the balcony.

----------------

Naudia sat on Twilight's balcony, unsure of herself. It was clear that she had managed her first day blending into Ponyville, with most of the residents remaining not even faintly suspicious of her. Twilight Sparkle was an exception. All of this brought her back to her life before all this, before Canterlot, before Mother...

Naudia was a sheltered princess, for reasons she had only begun to appreciate. She hadn't exactly lived in an ivory tower, more of a dirty towering hive out in the Badlands. OK, dirty wasn't the right word there. It was dusty, it was dry, and it was surrounded on all sides by wastes filled with magical anomalies and monsters, but it was home to her and nearly a thousand other changelings.

Still, they had to get food, so periodically they sent out patrols looking for ponies who had inadvertently wandered into the wastes. They would briefly imprison them, drain of them of their love, make them change their memories around a bit, and drop them off on the edge of the Badlands.

After finally meeting some ponies in person, she began to feel that this almost made them the bad guys...

Almost.

The Badlands was the place where the term "Scorched Earth" was invented, worn out and stigmatized. It was the place where the previous final battle between Princess Celestia and Nightmare Moon took place. It was the place that Discord was imprisoned in stone.

Such great amounts of magic had been expended in the Badlands that it had seeped into the land itself. Abominations lived out there, magical in nature but very real in terrifying and dangerous ways. They lived off the spent magic, it had it's own unique ecosystem that had sprang up from its own twisted malevolence.

It was where the changelings were banished to 1200 years ago.

Naudia shivered slightly. The young inexperienced Queen of the changelings had never associated her people with the monsters in the wastes. Spending time among the ponies, however, had already brought some disturbing thoughts to the forefront of her mind.

Just then, Twilight came out onto the balcony to sit with her.

Naudia mentally shifted back into the Luna persona she had constructed from reading Luna's memories involving Twilight. That had been an unpleasant business, but there weren't enough healthy changelings that could blend in or go out looking for ponies in the Everfree. As the only healthy changeling with any ability to disguise herself, it fell to her to keep the hive from starvation.

"Greetings, Twilight." Naudia said. "Having trouble sleeping?"

"Well, yes, I was just a little worried. You seemed a bit melancholy, so I wanted to know what was bothering you." Twilight was not very good at lying, and Naudia would have known she was suspicious of her even if she couldn't feel it radiating off her.

"It’s the night, Twilight," Naudia said. "I've almost always been in charge of it, but I've never truly appreciated it before. I guess I've never gotten a chance to sit down and just take a look at the stars."

“Well that one over there, my dad pointed it out to me when I was a foal. That's Upsilon Andromedae, the first star ever recorded to have multiple planets orbiting it.”

“Really? How did they discover planets orbiting something so far away?”

“They call it the 'Wobble Method', they watch the star really REALLY closely with these huge crystalline telescopes and watch for what looks like the gravitational pull of a planet. I've heard they can watch for deviations as small as two yards.”

They sat and talked about the stars for a time until finally Twilight calmed down enough for sleep to almost take hold again. She excused herself to lie awake in her bed worrying, although Twilight didn’t say so in so many words. That was strange, though: Naudia found herself wanting to go inside and comfort her somehow.

There was a... feeling, there, something Naudia hadn't been trained against. In all her Tutelage she was taught to lead, to rule, to hate. And as her world fell around her, so did the comforting illusions of her youth.