The next day, with Twilight's help, Pennington and Moonstone made their way to Sweet Apple Acres, where the majority of the ponies who had been in Ponyville had taken up shelter from the storm.Supposedly, he only wanted to be in a place where Sure Shot would find him easily, but Twilight couldn't help but wonder if he had ulterior motives. When the two of them had arrived, Applejack had immediately ushered them inside, where they were met by two steaming mugs of hot cider, and the two cousins had exchanged everything that they knew about the storm's origins and where it was coming from.
"Well, turns out that we weren't the only farm to take in folks for shelter," Applejack sighed, shaking her head, "but there ain't been much we can do other than that. Some farms have been completely washed away, blown over the horizon, or even burned down!"
Pennington nodded, taking a thoughtful sip. "Any news from Appaloosa?"
"Flooded. All the rivers broke their banks after just a couple days of the rain."
"San Palomino?"
"Frozen. They had to start chopping down their own trees just for something to burn!" Applejack shouted, slamming her hoof against the table.
Pennington took a quiet moment to think before speaking again.
"What about my parents?"
Applejack looked as if she were about to speak, but closed her mouth again, stumped.
"Well, I'm not sure where Aunt Celia was when the storms started... She could have been at any of the farms!"
Pennington looked down, disappointed and worried.
"Aw, come on, Penn! I'm sure they're fine!" Applejack tried to grin, giving him a friendly punch on the shoulder. "Come on, we Apples are a tough bunch! Yer makin' us look bad!"
This finally eked a chuckle out of the unicorn, who nodded and picked up his posture.
"Yeah... I'm sure they're fine!"
Moonstone, who was quietly curled up inside of their fireplace, opened one eye to look at Applejack.
"Hey, AJ, do you play any instruments? A little music might lighten the mood for all those ponies out in the barn. It should only be another day before Sure Shot gets here, but a mass exodus is going to need high morale..."
Applejack's expression brightened and she gave an eager nod. "Ah can play a mean banjo when I wanna! And I know we got a few ponies out there who can play! That ain't a bad idea, Moonstone."
"I try..." Moonstone grinned smugly before shutting her eye again, seemingly going back to sleep. She had hardly left the fireplace since they'd first arrived, far more comfortable among the flames and ash than anywhere else.
"Well, Applejack, thank you for your help in letting everypony stay here, but Spike and I should really get back to trying to find some kind of spell to break through this weather control," Twilight smiled, looking between Pennington and Applejack. "Penn, you wanted to stay here for when Sure Shot arrives, right?"
Pennington nodded, then gave her a questioning look. "Aren't you..."
"I'll make it to the Cliffjumper when it gets here. For now, I need to be trying to find every solution to this, myself!" Twilight smiled, walking to Pennington and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. "I'll be back before you go, so you better not dare try to skip saying goodbye properly!"
Pennington chuckled, returning the kiss on her own cheek. "I was just going to tell you the same thing. I'll see you tomorrow. Be careful, okay?"
Twilight nodded, then turned to Applejack. "Thanks again, Applejack. I know that this is putting a real strain on your family..."
"Don't worry about it, Twi! You and Spike just go get workin' on some kinda spell to get us outta this pickle!" She smiled, giving her friend a quick hug.
With a stern nod, Twilight cast a shield around herself and Spike, and the two of them were out the door and gone. Once Twilight had left, Pennington turned back to his cousin with a chuckle.
"I guess this leaves me at your mercy, huh AJ?"
Applejack rolled her eyes, smiling and putting a hoof around his shoulders. "All these years I wanted to hear you say that, and Ah finally miss out on the chance to abuse it by somehow learning to like you!"
"Why would you tell her I was here?" Pennington hissed, his voice a mix of anger and fear.
"Well, Ah didn't know that you made her mad like that!" Applejack replied. "The last time ah saw you two together, y'all were gettin' along like peas in a pod!"
"And now, we have an absolutely livid unicorn on our hooves because you couldn't keep your big, honest mouth shut!" Pennington quietly peered over the edge of the hay loft, down into the large crowd of ponies that had gathered at Sweet Apple Acres for safety.
"Well, I guess I can't stay here! What would you say are my chances of getting through the orchard and into Everfree alive?"
"Without protection from the lightning? Slim to none, cousin..." Applejack shook her head.
Pennington sighed, shaking his head hopelessly. "I'm going to have to confront her, aren't I?"
Applejack's eyes grew wide as her gaze shifted over Pennington's shoulder and past his head.
"Somethin' tells me she's gonna save you the trouble, Penn..."
A wave of fear washed over Pennington as the familiar burning sensation of unbridled rage tingled on his skin, radiating out from the pony behind him like heat from a bonfire. Swallowing loudly, Pennington made eye contact with Applejack for what he supposed might be the last time of his life.
"Cousin, I just want you to know: If she kills me, I'm blaming you." Slowly and full of dread, Pennington turned around, finding himself nose-to-nose with a particular pink-coated unicorn, strands of her aqua-and-green mane brushing against his muzzle.
"Lily, I promise... I can expla-" Pennington's poor excuse was cut off before it could start as her hoof flew up, bashing against his head and sending him careening off the edge of the hay loft, landing on his back with a loud grunt.
"You didn't call..." Callalily growled, jumping down on her own and landing on all four hooves. Without waiting for Pennington to speak again, she ran over and plowed her front hoof deep into his stomach, knocking any and all air from his body and leaving him gasping. "You didn't write!" Spinning around, she leaned forward and kicked him with both of her back legs, sending him tumbling across the floor as the other ponies in the room made way for the fight. As Pennington coughed and let out a low moan, Lily jumped up and landed on his back, forcing the low moan into a pained grunt. "I had to request an audience with Princess Luna, herself to find out where you were, only to find out that you had left the country and DIDN'T TELL ME?" Nearly screaming at the top of her lungs and breathing furiously through her nostrils, Lily pounded her hoof into the back of his head once again, knocking it harshly against the ground. "Pennington Honeycrisp Inkwell, you have got a LOT of explaining to do!"
Moonstone and Applejack were both watching this unfold from above, each peeking over the edge of the hay loft. Applejack was chuckling to herself while Moonstone cringed at each blow.
"Ya know, it's hard to believe that those two have been best friends since they were foals..." Applejack muttered, still grinning. It wasn't often that she got to see her bravado-filled cousin getting a beating, let alone a beating by someone other than herself.
"Seems more like a case of 'crazy ex-es' to me..." Moonstone whispered in return.
"Well, there's a bit of that, too... They made quite the couple back in the day!" Applejack turned to Moonstone, giving a mischievous wink. "Lily made the choice for them to split, but that never meant she gave up on him!"
Looking at Applejack's smugness, Moonstone raised an eyebrow of suspicion. "You knew this would happen, didn't you?"
Applejack's grin was all the answer she needed.
"HEY!" In a rainbow-colored blur, Lily was picked up off of Pennington's back and tackled against the wall, Rainbow Dash having come to Pennington's rescue. In a flash, Lily was pinned to the nearest wall of the barn, and Rainbow Dash remained hovering in the air, the full strength of her wings keeping her there. "Who do you think you are, treating Penn like that? Don't you know who he is?"
"He's an idiot! The biggest idiot in the entirety of Equestria!" Lily cried, struggling to try and move herself away from the wall that she was pinned to.
"You take that back!"
After an intense coughing fit, followed by a moment to catch his breath, Pennington finally stood up. Shaking his head, he walked over to the two mares, finally striding up beside Rainbow Dash and looking up at Lily with a melancholy sigh.
"It's okay, Rainbow. I quite honestly deserve the beating."
Looking between the author and his enraged attacker, Rainbow Dash's jaw dropped. "Of course you don't! Why would you ever think that you-"
"Just please, let her down, Dash." Pennington sighed, a resigned tone taking the pegasus's defensive fury down a notch. Cautiously, Rainbow backed away from the wall, allowing Lily to go back to standing on her own hooves. As she backed away, however, she made a quick motion with her hoof, pointing first to Lily, and then to her own eyes, indicating that she would be ready to stop any continued violence.
Lily quietly brushed the dust off of herself, examining for injury before turning back to Pennington, eyes practically glowing with barely-contained rage.
"I ought to rip your horn off and strap you to a chair so you can't go anywhere..." She growled.
"I already beat you to that first part, remember?" Pennington looked up at the pointed tip of his prosthesis, then back to her eyes.
"Why didn't you tell me what you were doing? What was so horrible that it stopped you from sending me a letter now and then?" Lily whispered, eyes beginning to water up as the remaining rage melted into frustrated tears.
Pennington was silent for a moment before taking a deep breath, closing his eyes and releasing the tension in his body. "Would you have let me stay gone? Or let me leave Equestria at all when I had been so badly wounded? I'd lost my horn, gone through devastating trauma, and was weaker than I'd ever been, and my first instinct was to go an risk life and limb! Would you have let me go running around willy-nilly?"
Lily stared at him for another moment, turned her gaze towards the ground, and slowly began to walk away, tears finally breaking free and rolling down her face.
"You could have let me know you were leaving... shown that it was a little hard for you to just leave me behind completely and move on with your life."
As she walked away, an unsettling silence fell. After a few moments, Pennington finally seemed to stop trying to look tough, grimacing and gripping at his stomach. "I certainly taught her how to throw a heck of a punch..." he muttered.
"Who was that?" Rainbow Dash asked, coming down to a landing next to him.
"Just the best friend I could ever ask for."
"You don't tend to ask for very much, do you?"
Pennington sighed, shaking his head. "Worrying about me is just how she shows that she cares..."
"Yeah... cares." She rolled her eyes. "Anyway, are you okay?"
"Yeah, just got the wind knocked out of me." Pennington nodded.
"Okay... Just one more question." Leaning close, Rainbow Dash looked from side to side to check whether or not anyone was listening before she spoke. "Can you PLEEASE tell me about your next Daring Do book?"
Pennington blinked several times before turning to Rainbow Dash, a mixture of confusion and disbelief prompting him to simply stare in silence while she returned the stare with a pleading look of her own.
"Oh, yes. I almost forgot I told you about that..."
Rainbow Dash's grin grew wider.
"Unfortunately, I'm not the one to ask, this time. I've asked a friend of mine to help me by working on the next novel while I was gone on my trip! I haven't had the time to do any writing of my own!"
As Rainbow Dash's smile fell to a disappointed frown, Pennington couldn't help but feel a twinge of responsibility for her sadness.
"But... I had more than a few adventures worth talking about while I was gone! Traps, assassins, secret organizations, and even an ancient curse! Maybe a spoken story will be enough to tide you over?"
"You- you mean it?" Rainbow Dash's smile returned, bigger and brighter than ever. "You mean you'd tell me stories straight from your unwritten adventures! Stories that nopony will get to read? That's SO AWESOME!"
Pennington couldn't help but smile, as well. He'd never thought of his storytelling as a big deal, but Rainbow Dash's perspective was a reminder of his own worth. He'd hesitated to tell her that he was secretly the author of the Daring Do books, simply working under another name, and at the time, the news had caused her to faint from shock. Now, though, Rainbow Dash was a blur to the line that separated his life in Ponyville from the life he lived under his pseudonym, which had always been kept very much apart. Nodding up towards the hayloft, Pennington stiffly walked to the ladder, trying to ignore the bruises that he knew were already forming from Lily's onslaught.
"Besides, a little storytelling will give me the chance to sit down for a while and recover..."
Pennington took a deep breath as he unrolled his sleeping bag. Things were significantly quieter once everypony had gone to sleep, though there hadn't been much room in the barn with almost the entire population of the town there, so Big Macintosh had offered to share his room with Pennington. Moonstone hadn't moved from the fireplace, so they had all assumed she would sleep there.
Opening the door, the stallion in question entered the room with a sleeping bag of his own on his back. The two shared a brief moment of eye contact before Big Mac untied his own bedroll and laid it on the floor alongside Pennington's.
"Big Mac, aren't you sleeping in the bed?"
"Nope."
Looking back and forth between the two sleeping bags, Pennington's brow furrowed in thought.
"Then who is?"
"You."
Pennington shook his head. "Big Mac, you're doing more than enough by letting me-"
"Bed's yours."
The two shared a brief stare, each inspecting the other for signs that he would relent. Upon seeing no such signal from Big Macintosh, Pennington let out a long sigh and rolled his bag back up before climbing under the quilted covers.
"Thanks, cousin."
"Ain't nothin'." Forever the silent stoic, Big Macintosh went and turned out the light before climbing into his own sleeping bag. The two sat in silence for a moment, when Big Macintosh uncharacteristically broke it.
"Good to see you two not fightin'."
It took a moment for Pennington to understand what he was talking about. "You mean Applejack and I?"
"Eeyup."
"Thanks... I guess that time Trixie came back really brought us together. At least, we're not beating the crud out of one another, any more..." Rubbing the sensitive bump on the back of his head, Pennington cringed. "Now Lily just beats me, instead."
There was another brief moment of silence.
"Callalily Curl?"
"Yeah... I guess I made her a bit angrier than usual."
"You hit her?"
"No, of course not! I could never raise a hoof to her!"
"Good. She hit you?"
"Several times, actually..."
"You let her?"
"... Yeah."
"Good."
"Say that to my aching body..."
"... Good."
The two both chuckled again before falling into a relaxed silence in the dark.
"Goodnight, Big Mac."
"Night."
"Penn! Hey, Pennington!"
Pennington moaned and turned over in the bed, Moonstone's voice being an unwelcome distraction from his current endeavor: deep, restful sleep.
"Penn! Wake up, would you? Sure Shot is here!" Moonstone sounded both excited and irritated at the same time, jumping up onto the bed and shaking his shoulder.
"Fine... Fine! I'm up!" Pennington groaned, turning back over onto his back and sitting up. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he looked out the window, seeing that the light outside was as bright as it could get with the sun hidden behind clouds. "What time is it?"
"Almost noon."
"What?" Pennington suddenly felt much more awake from the surprise. "Why didn't anyone wake me up earlier?"
"Because I haven't seen you sleep that well in weeks! Besides, with Sure Shot's crew, we really had all of the hooves we needed! But I figured you wouldn't want to miss everything!"
"Thanks, Moonstone." Pennington smiled and gently ran his hoof through the black spines on the top of her head, much like tousling a child's hair affectionately. Rolling himself out of the bed, Pennington took only a couple minutes to make sure that the blankets were laid back out the way that they had been when he had first entered the bed, then immediately marched downstairs, still walking slightly stiffly after Lily's beating. The rest of the house was empty, with no sign of the remaining members of the Apple family, though that didn't surprise him if Sure Shot had already arrived. Moving the entirety of Ponyville's population was going to be a taxing endeavor.
"Woah..." Moonstone paused at one of the windows, looking outside. Pennington smiled as he walked over to join her, already knowing what she was seeing. Outside was the what many considered to be the unofficial "flagship" of the New Lunar Republic: the Cliffjumper. The Cliffjumper was a massive, six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. Each wheel was kept a small distance away from the massive body, which was tapered to a point on both ends and constructed in a smooth pod shape with a flattened top to form the main deck (which Pennington had lovingly dubbed "the all-terrain almond"). It easily dwarfed the Apples' house at double the length of their barn and almost as tall. Emblazoned on the side was a massive version of the NLR's emblem, an upturned crescent moon with wings spreading outwards from its edges and a massive spire pointing towards the heavens, all tinted in deep shades of blue. The top was crowned by a ring of harpoon guns and other weapons, and the entire vehicle simply radiated intimidation and power.
"Certainly impressive isn't she?" Pennington grinned. "Honestly, from the moment Sure Shot was assigned to captain her, he's claimed he could die happy. He once called her 'a galleon of the shores.' I would say it's more like a massive battleship..."
"Do you think he's compensating for something?" Moonstone muttered.
"Oh, definitely!" Pennington laughed, walking to the door of the house that attached to the barn. "He's always thought that his wings were just a little too small..."