I swore again.
“Will somepony tell me what the hey is going on?” Lyra demanded. “Why was Twilight acting like that? She can’t really believe that Rarity and I would do that… could she?”
“Spike…” I said, ignoring Lyra, “How did you miss this? I mean, you’ve lived with Twilight for years! How did you not see this coming?”
Spike looked taken back for a second, then he glared at me. “You’re one to talk, Rainbow! You spent practically every day with her when she was sick. So tell me, how did you not see this coming?”
“Listen, twerp, she spent most of the time resting, so there wasn’t anything to see!”
“Right. That actually reminds me, who was the one who was supposed to get rid of her old medicine bottles and put the new ones on the shelf? Oh, that’s right, you! Tell me how you managed to screw that up!”
“Why, you little—“ I began, but a sudden shout interrupted me.
“Enough!” Lyra yelled. “I don’t know what’s going on, but hoof and claw pointing is not going to solve it! Rainbow…” she said, turning to me, “if what you said about Twilight resting most of the time is true, then there wouldn’t be any warning signs of whatever for Spike to miss. And Spike…” she said, turning her attention to the small dragon, “Unless Twilight can’t tell the difference between empty and full bottles, I don’t think Rainbow could have messed that up. So let’s stop fighting, and actually do something useful, okay?”
“Right, sorry,” I said at the same time Spike said “Of course, you’re right.”
“So, for the first step… will somepony please tell me what is going on?” Lyra pleaded. “I assume that it has something to do with those medicine bottles that Spike mentioned.”
“Later,” I said, clenching my eyes shut as I tried to think up a plan.
“But—“ Lyra protested
My frustration boiled over again. “LATER!” I roared.
“Actually, I can bring you up to speed quickly, Lyra,” Spike said, ignoring the glare I was sending him for interrupting my thinking. “I’m going to make sure that Twilight got the right meds, and Lyra can come with me while I tell her what’s happening. In the meantime, Rainbow, I want you to head to the guard station. Get them to spread out and search for Twilight. And keep an eye out for her on your way there. Can you do that?”
“Can I—yes, of course I can,” I said. “But are you really going to tell Lyra everything?”
“Just what she needs to know,” Spike assured me. “Now go!”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I flew out the front door as fast as I could, making it rattle on its hinges.
Unfortunately, even with the bright afternoon sun shining down on the town, I didn’t spot Twilight as I raced to the guard station.
This wasn’t the time to be cursing my luck, however. I skidded into the guard station, narrowly avoiding crashing into the front desk.
“What in Equestria!?” the receptionist, a pale mare with at blue mane yelled as I struggled to catch my breath.
“No time… I need to talk to the captain… quickly!” I managed to get out between great big gulps of air.
The receptionist just stared at me.
“Now!” I yelled, and that seemed to startle her out of her trance.
“Rainbow? Rainbow Dash? What’s going on?” she asked, and the last of my patience snapped.
“Did I stutter? I said I need to talk to the captain now! Or do you have wax in your ears?” I snapped at her. It wasn’t the best thing to do under the circumstances, but I was panicking and frustrated.
The receptionist bristled. “Now see here—“ she began, but I tuned the rest of her sentence out as I turned and rushed into the heart of the station.
“Captain! Captain Stone Wall! I need to talk to you!” I yelled into every open door I could find, hoping the captain would respond to his name at least.
I finally got lucky and found him in some sort of break room, sipping at a cup of what I assumed was coffee. He set it down slowly and sighed. “Can I help you, Rainbow, or do you want to yell at Miss Files some more?” the stereotypically white coated and blue maned unicorn asked in a tired tone.
“Listen, Captain, I need you to set up a search party and head into the Everfree Forest! Twilight is in there, and she needs help!” I said, thankful that somepony was listening to me.
Captain Stone Wall frowned. “What makes you think that? From everything I’ve seen about that pony, she wouldn’t head into the Forest without making a plan and at least two backup plans in case of trouble. Besides, isn’t she powerful enough to handle anything that comes her way?”
“Yes, normally, but she isn’t in her right mind right now!” I said desperately.
The captain raised an eyebrow at me. “Not in her right mind? What do you mean?”
My mind ground to a halt. What was I supposed to say here? I didn’t want to spill Twilight’s secret, but she could be in danger…
“I can’t tell you,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t push the matter further.
His other eyebrow raised in surprise. “You… won’t tell me?”
“Can’t,” I corrected through gritted teeth.
The captain stared at me for another beat, then looked over my shoulder and spoke to the receptionist that I hadn’t noticed following me. “You heard her,” he said. “Get the rest of the stallions ready, and make sure that they are trained in submission holds, and get them to bring the anti-teleportation net. We have a possibly violent pony lost in the Everfree.”
I dimly heard the pony behind me leave, but all of my focus was on the captain. “Submission holds? Anti-teleportation net!? What in Tartarus are you thinking!?” I shrieked.
“Some drugs can make junkies violent, you know,” he said casually, as if he was discussing what he had had for lunch.
“J—junkie!? You… you son of a—“
The captain cut me off before I could finish telling him to buck himself. “The first thing I’m going to do when we do find Twilight is order a drug test. I don’t care how many times she’s saved the world, illegal is still illegal, do you understand me, Rainbow?”
Calm down, Rainbow. Count to ten. Take in a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Stop fantasizing about rearranging his face. That won’t help Twilight. “You know what? Fine. Do your stupid drug test. As long as you get Twilight back safe, I don’t care.”
“Just so you know,” Stone Wall said, still in the same infuriatingly casual voice, “depending on what the drug test results are, you could be charged as an accomplice. However… if you come clean now and tell us what Twilight was having some…’recreational time’ with, I can put in a good word for you.”
“Just shut up and find her, okay?” I growled.
Stone Wall sighed. “Fine, play it your way,” he said as he brushed by me, yelling at every pony he could to follow him to the briefing room.
I, meanwhile, just stood there, incredibly angry at Stone Wall, incredibly frightened for Twilight, and at a complete loss for what to do next.
I mean, I did do the right thing, didn’t I? Twilight’s drug test would show… show what? I didn’t even know if the meds that Twilight was taking would show up on a drug test. And what if they did? Would they still be trying to claim that she was some sort of druggie? Or would they be understanding? And what if—
Just as my thoughts were spiraling out of control, there was an incredibly large bang, and Lyra and Spike appeared in a flash of pale green light, both looking singed.
“Absolute last time I teleport with an amateur,” Spike mumbled, swaying on his feet.
“At least I got us here,” Lyra retorted, her eyes unfocused.
“Lyra! Spike!” I shouted, partially out of surprise, and partially out of relief. “Did you two find anything?”
“We, uh… we think so?” Lyra said, shaking her head back and forth hard. When she stopped, she looked much less dazed.
“What do you mean, you ‘think so’? Did you find anything or not!?”
“What we found, Rainbow, is that it looks like she did get the right drugs,” Spike said. “But—“
“Looks like?” I said. “Could you two stop dancing around the question and give me a straight answer?”
“Calm down, Rainbow! We’re all on the same side here, so stop snapping at us!” Spike yelled. I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could, he continued. “When I looked at the meds that she had, I didn’t see anything immediately out of the ordinary… but then Lyra looked at them and… well…”
“I take the same magic suppressor as Twilight, this thing called Merlinite, but at a much lower dose. Just enough to prevent some headaches. But when I looked at the suppressor that Twilight took, they looked completely different,” Lyra said, picking up exactly where Spike had left off.
“So somepony did mess with her drugs!” I shouted, feeling anger surge in my chest.
“Rainbow, will you just calm down!? All we know is that it is a possibility! Maybe Twilight’s drug was a generic, or maybe different doses look different. We don’t know!” Spike said, frustration coloring his voice.
“But I bet I know somepony who does,” I said, an idea flying into my head. “Do you have her drugs with you right now?”
“I do,” Lyra said. Her horn lit up and a trio of medicine bottles floated out of the saddlebags that I had just now noticed she was wearing. “What are you going to do with—hey!?”
I didn’t even wait for her to finish. I grabbed the bottles and flew out the nearest window.
“Doctor Hooves! Are you in here?” I shouted as I nearly knocked down the door to his office.
He was, but he just stared at me. “Rainbow… I’m with a client right now,” he said, pointing to a brown mare who looked like she had just stopped crying. “Can’t this wait?”
I shook my head. “No, it can’t! It’s about Twilight!”
The doctor just raised an eyebrow. “Listen, I’d like to help, but I haven’t seen Twilight in the last couple of weeks. I was out of town, and when I got back, she sent word that she wasn’t feeling well enough to see me. So I can’t really—“
I practically shoved the medicine bottles down his throat. “Shut up, and just check to make sure that these at Twilight’s meds. It’s really important.”
“All right, all right,” he said, then turned to the mare sitting on the couch in the room. “Polaris, do you mind waiting for a moment?” he asked, and, after she nodded, he turned his attention to the bottles that I was holding. After studying them for a moment, he nodded. “Well they all have her name on them, and those are the doses I prescribed. I don’t see anything obviously wrong.”
“You haven’t even opened them! Check the pills!” I all but shouted at him.
“Fine!” he snapped back, and opened one of the bottles. He frowned. “This doesn’t look like… where is… aha!” he said, turning the pill over in his hoof. I followed his gaze and saw that he was looking at a series of numbers and letter imprinted on the pill.
“What are those? “ I asked.
“That’s the serial number for the pills. Some medicines look the same, so you need to look at the serial number to tell some apart,” he said.
“So, is that the right pill?”
“I haven’t actually memorized all the serial numbers for every single medicine and dose out there, Rainbow. Give me a second, and I can check my book,” he said, turning to the bookshelf in the corner of the room. He grabbed a book off the shelf, and after a moment of looking at the pill, began flipping through the pages.
I stood there, anxiously shifting my weight from leg to leg.
Suddenly, the doctor’s eyes widened. “What the hey!?” he shouted, sounding shocked.
“What? What is it!?” I asked, trying to peek over his shoulder. All I could see on the page he was looking at was a bunch of codes in a list titled ‘placebo’. “What in Equestria is a placebo?”
“It’s just a sugar pill,” Doctor Hooves said, sounding numb. “It’s used in medical testing because it has absolutely no medical effect on its own.”
My stomach dropped. “Check the other two, check the other two!” I urged him.
“Right,” he said, and he popped the top off of both remaining bottles. After taking the time to look at the codes printed on the pills, he glanced back at the book. “These are placebos too! How did this happen?”
“Never mind that right now, doctor. I need to know what this means for Twilight!” I demanded.
Doctor Hooves didn’t seem to hear me. “So that’s why she was feeling sick! The withdrawal! But… oh no…” He turned to me and asked “Her sickness, did it get worse? Is she in the hospital now?” There was panic in his voice.
“I think she’s fine, at least physically,” I said. “But mentally she’s—“
I suddenly remembered that we weren’t alone in the room. I glanced guiltily at the mare sitting on the sofa, who had been watching the exchange with wide eyes.
“Don’t worry, I can guess,” Doctor Hooves said. “Did you get her under control?”
“Um… no. But I got the town guard to organize a search of the Everfree, so…”
“A search!? Of the Everfree!?” the doctor shouted. He turned to the mare on the couch. “Polaris, I’m very sorry, but I need to go. Our session was almost over, I know, but I won’t be billing you for this session. In fact, as an apology, I won’t charge you for the next one as well.”
“Oh, okay,” the mare on the sofa said in a hesitant voice. “This sounds important.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said. “Now, Rainbow, where is Spike at? And for that matter, does he have the magic suppression stone with him? Why didn’t he use it? And—“
Oh, I so do not have time for twenty questions. “Everypony is at the guard station! Spike can explain more when you get there. I’m going to go join the search!”
“Rainbow, wait!” Doctor Hooves cried, grabbing my tail before I could fly away.
I whirled around, ready to murder him if he didn’t have a good reason to stop me. “What is it?” I growled.
“At least try to coordinate with the guard! That way you can cover more ground than if you just fly around randomly,” he said, and I had to admit that that was a fair point.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the station. Now let go!”
He did so, and I zoomed off to find the captain and make myself part of the search team.
“Absolutely not,” Stone Wall said.
Of course it wouldn’t be that simple. “Why not!? I can cover more ground faster than any of your fliers, so why can’t I be part of your—“
“First of all, because you’re a civilian who doesn’t know our search pattern at all, so you would just get in the way,” the captain replied, speaking to me as if I was a child. “And second, because I don’t want to give you the chance to hide any evidence of wrongdoing. The whole town knows you and Twilight are an item, and in my experience, ponies are more than happy to circumvent the law to keep their loved ones out of trouble.”
I nearly kicked a hole into the wall of the briefing room. “But she shouldn’t be in trouble! If anything, she’s the victim here!”
The captain just sighed, and rubbed his forehead. “Listen, Rainbow, until I get information otherwise, I tend to go with the simplest explanation. You said Twilight needs to be found and helped, but you won’t tell me why. The fact that you said she’s not in her right mind tells me that something mind altering is at play, and the fact that you won’t tell me what it is tells me that it is probably illegal. Unless you want to tell me what exactly is going on, I can’t let you help.”
Great. Bucking perfect. Now I have to choose between sitting on my plot and doing nothing, and betraying one of Twilight’s deepest secrets. Fun, fun, fun.
Still, the captain did bring up a good point. I looked over at the other pegasus in the room, who was studying some papers, presumably on his search area. I had no idea what sort of search they would be conducting. It would probably be from the air, but I had no idea if they divided the forest up into units, or started at one end and went to the other, or even some other pattern I hadn’t thought of.
I stalked out of the briefing room, feeling defeated. Spike and Lyra immediately ran up to me.
“How is the search going?” Spike asked, worry clear in his voice.
“It’s just getting underway, but they won’t let me in on it. They think that Twilight might have been taking something illegal, and that I’m some sort of accomplice,” I said, and I was surprised how tired my voice sounded.
“What!? But Twilight would never take something illegal!” Spike said.
I waved a hoof back at the room I had just exited. “Tell them that.”
“Perhaps… I could…” said a breathless voice.
Spike, Lyra and I spun around and saw Doctor Hooves standing in the entrance to the back of the station, painting for breath. “Rainbow, you… idiot…” he gasped. “You should have… taken me with you to the station… I had to gallop all the way across town.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘you could’?”
“I could talk to them, and clear Twilight of wrongdoing,” he said, his breathing finally back under control.
“Really?” I asked, my chest suddenly feeling a tiny bit less tight. “How?”
“I’ll just tell them the truth,” Doctor Hooves said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “I’ll tell them that there was a mix-up with Twilight’s medication, and that she’s acting this way because of that. I don’t have any reason to lie, so they should believe me.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Thank you so much,” I said.
“Don’t mention it,” the doctor said absentmindedly. He looked over my shoulder, and when he saw the captain, he walked into the briefing room. Spike, Lyra and I followed him.
The doctor started talking to the captain, but my attention was drawn by the chalkboard that had been set up. There was a list of names and numbers on it. I assumed that it was the assignments for searching the Everfree. Hopefully somepony would find Twilight soon.
“She was taking a magic suppressor called Merlinite!” Lyra said suddenly, pulling my attention from the chalkboard.
I looked over just in time to see Doctor Hooves give Lyra a glare. “As I was saying,” he said pointedly, “I am not at liberty to discuss what she was taking or why she was taking it.”
Lyra looked a little ashamed, but Captain Stone Wall looked thoughtful. “Merlinite, huh? Miss Files!” he called. “Could you dig up that case from last week? The one about an overdose on magic suppressors? That might have something to do with what’s going on right now.”
“Understood!” the receptionist yelled back from behind her desk. She got up and trotted purposefully over to a door, unlocked it, and vanished into it.
“Now then, this changes my plan a bit. I see that Spike has a magic suppressor stone over there. I assume that it came from Twilight’s lab, correct?” Stone Wall asked.
Close enough. “Yes,” I answered.
“Good. Here’s the new plan. Rainbow, I want you to wait here until—“
“Now hold on just a minute! I—“ I began to protest, but the captain cut me off.
“Until…” he repeated, more forcefully. “Until one of our flyers spots Twilight. Then I want you to fly in and try to lead her out of the forest. If she really isn’t in her right mind, she probably wouldn’t take too well to seeing a squad of guards run up to her. She might follow you, though.”
I nodded. That plan might work, hopefully. “Okay, what then?”
“Then, when you get out of the forest, I want you to crush that stone. She’s too powerful right now for us to try to subdue her. After that, we get her to the hospital, so they can take care of her. Does that sound good to everypony?” Stone Wall asked.
“Why lead her out before crushing the stone?” Lyra asked.
“Because I don’t want my stallions in the Everfree Forest without their magic. Too many nasty things in there,” the captain said
“That makes sense, I guess,” I muttered. There was too much waiting in that plan for my taste, but I don’t think I could have come up with something better.
“As long as there are no objections… Star Chaser!”
The other pegasus in the room stood at attention. “Yes sir! Do you want me to spread word to the other guards?”
Stone Wall grinned. “One step ahead, as always. That is precisely what I want you to do. As fast as possible, please.”
“Yes sir!” Star Chaser said, then zoomed out of the room.
“Now… we just wait, is that it?” I asked to nopony in particular.
Nopony said anything.
The time passed slowly.
Incredibly slowly.
“Spike,” I said, desperate to have something going on, even if it was just a conversation, “did you send word to Princess Celestia? She might be helpful…”
Spike nodded. “I did, but she’s in the middle of day court right now. I don’t know how long it will take her to respond.”
“Oh, okay. Shouldn’t you have some way to mark it as urgent?” I asked.
“We should, but… I guess we just never got around to it. I mean, last time this happened should have been a wakeup call, but Celestia got down here as soon as day court ended, so we didn’t really think about it much after that.”
“Well—“ I started to say, but I was interrupted by one of the guard pegasi marching into the room.
“We found her!” he announced. “She’s in a clearing not far from the entrance to the forest. She appears to be examining the foliage, for some reason.”
“Oh, thank Celestia and Luna,” I breathed. At least she wasn’t hurt.
“Excellent job. Now I want you to lead Rainbow to her, and then I want you to get the rest of the guard ready at the entrance to the forest. Spike, come with me and bring that stone,” Stone Wall barked out in a commanding voice.
Spike nodded, and I turned to the guard that had just entered the room. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
The guard nodded, and then the two of us turned and rushed out of the room.