The car passed us by without slowing, and I pushed up on my hooves to look down the road to see if any others may follow. Seeing another car come from the same direction as the first one had, with more headlights trailing behind it, I lowered myself on the soft grass with a deep sigh.
"Well, this is just marvellous," I grumbled to myself with a quick shake of my head. "I should have reached the main road already instead of being stuck here with a hopeless mare."
"Hey!" the mare to my side exclaimed to that, but I paid her no mind. I instead reached out with my magic to tentatively feel for the energy signatures of Discord or Zecora.
"Ooh," the mare cooed, and I flattened my ears. "I didn't know unicorn horns really glowed when they used magic. I always thought it was just a gimmick."
It was difficult to focus with someone babbling in my ears, but I managed to finish my sweep of the surrounding energy. Zecora's was the only energy signature I could find, and she was still two towns out from where we were. I smiled at that, knowing my decision to transform groups, instead of individuals, was making it harder for her to follow behind. She had to go visit each and every single one of my ambassadors, while I could just gallop ahead.
"So did someone transform you too, or were you born like this? It hurt a lot when you transformed me, but I guess that's natural? It's not like I didn't know pain before this; I've always had bad knees," the babbling continued, and I turned my attention to the turquoise mare beside me.
"Do you have an off switch?" I asked, not trying to hide my annoyance in the least.
The mare scrunched her nose and huffed, then looked down. "Well, I'm sorry for just trying to make conversation," she grumbled.
"You'd better think of how you can make this world accept you as an ambassador. Accept the inevitable merger between this world and Equestria. Accept that they will all become ponies before this is done," I stated, lifting myself up from the ground a little to look down the road.
"Or maybe you should just wait until the traffic dies down and return to your home," I added. "I need to be in the next town over before dawn."
"Why?" the mare wondered, looking up at me again. "Can't I tag behind? I have so much to ask you!"
I shook my head at that. "I can't be slowed down by a stumbling mare who doesn't have her proper hoofing yet. I need to stay ahead of things and get enough ambassadors made on this planet to make the humans see there's no stopping this."
"Stopping what?"
I facehoofed. "Didn't you listen? The merger of Equestria and Earth."
"When's that going to happen?"
"When there's enough of you to automate the process, I'd imagine," I sighed. "I know there needs to be enough magical potential on this world to establish the link, and there should be enough ponies to get the desired effect. The last we'd want is to give the changelings more of an edge than proper ponies, right?"
"I'm not sure what you're saying," the mare muttered, looking completely lost.
"I'm saying I'm wasting my time trying to explain this to you while I should have been on the highway leading out of town already!" I snapped, and her ears flopped down low as she looked away in shame.
I turned my attention back to the road, while trying to figure out my next move. This new pony was testing my patience. It was no use explaining magic to a Pegasus anyway, but this one used to be a human. I had yet to see a human wield magic in any of its forms.
The mare beside me coughed uneasily, and I glanced in her direction again.
"Er, if you're trying to get out of town, why are you on this road?" she asked carefully, her ears moving on her head as if she was expecting me to snap at her again.
"Because this road leads out to the main road which leads out to the highway," I explained, but the mare quickly shook her head.
"No it doesn't," she offered, and I frowned at her.
"What do you mean, it doesn't?" I asked.
"The main road doesn't connect to the highway for a while. They removed the overpass that used to be there after a truck flew off of it and into a building last year. They're still busy building a tunnel instead. Traffic has been redirected through town ever since the accident. If you want to get to the highway, you have to use the detour which goes that way." she explained, pointing behind us with a hoof, and almost falling over where she was seated.
I turned my head to look in the direction she was pointing at, and raised an eyebrow. "But every town before this had its highway connected to the main road," I started.
"Yeah, but the accident caused such outrage against overpasses that the town council decided to dig a tunnel instead. Did you use an old map or something?"
I flushed and looked away, frowning at myself. "I can't read your stupid human alphabet."
"Oh," the mare realized, looking away herself but then quickly looking back at me again with a bright smile. "I can!"
I raised an eyebrow at her and tilted my head a little. "So?"
"So, I could help you read things you can't read, duh," she returned.
I blinked as I realized with a shock that she was right. What was the one thing that had stopped my progress in the past weeks? Not my former mentor Discord. Not Zecora. It had been my inability to read up on where I was headed. My inability to read maps.
Sure, I could go stand at one of the maps around town and sort of plot my course on it, but I mostly had to go from the layout of things. The red dot was me, I had quickly figured out, and then there were all those lines that were roads, and the blue things were lakes and rivers... It had not been too different from the maps back home.
The real issue had been the names of places, roads, everything. I could not read any of it. Nor the signs plastered over the maps. Nor those along the road. Considering what the mare had told me earlier, I must have missed something important on the yellow and red and white and blue signs on the lampposts on either side of the road I had been following.
"You know," I started, smirking lightly to myself, "you have a point there."
"Yeah, see? You need me!" the mare exclaimed excitedly. "And I can hang about and ask you questions in return for my help, right?"
I sighed and stared at her. "Don't you have other things to do though?"
"Like what?" she wondered.
"Well, job, school, working to get the humans to accept your new fate?" I mused.
"Can't do my job with hooves, don't have school, and if I show myself like this to the wrong kind of person they'd capture me and dissect me," the mare shrugged matter-of-factly.
I felt all blood pull away from my face and shook my head in disgust. "Dissect you?"
The mare smirked and nodded in shame. "Yeah, humans aren't that good at accepting people or ponies who differ from the norm..."
All of a sudden the disappearances of my ambassadors started to make sense, and I felt my stomach turn. Could this mean that they... No. No, I couldn't think like that. This mare here followed me into hiding within moments after she was transformed. The others would have done the same. I had to think they were still alive, but in hiding.
This changed everything, however. No longer could I just randomly select my ambassadors. If they were to be taken by the humans, and murdered for being the ponies they had every right to be, I had to pick those capable of dealing with it. No longer going for the innocent ones who would be most accepted, but for the stronger ones who could actually make a difference.
A turquoise hoof moved in front of my face and I blinked.
"Hello? You still there?" the mare wondered, looking concerned.
I smiled at her and offered my right forehoof to her. "Yes, I am. If we're going to be traveling together, we may as well exchange names. My name's Spritelight. What shall we call you?"