DECEPTION

by Christian Harisay

Chapter Ten - Everypony Wants to be Part of a Heist

Twilight and Rarity stood in front of a wide, onyx fountain on a crowded sidewalk of a bustling business district deep in the heart of a metropolis where towering buildings scraped the sky out of the very atmosphere. Twilight was bedecked in a black trench coat and pitch dark sunglasses, periodically checking a watch on her left pastern, while Rarity wore a satin dress that clung to her body, emphasizing her curves.

Twilight looked again at her watch, which actually held several sets of miniature layered clocks, one within the other. One ticked away time at normal speed, while the ones above it trudged along at a torpid pace.

Twilight raised her head, ears twitching towards the sound of an ambient Prench horn filled the air, followed shortly by the disembodied voice of a singing mare.

“Non, regrette rien… non, je ne regrette rien..."

At that, Twilight consulted her wristwatch once more. “Five… four… three… two… one...”

Rarity exhaled an unenthused sigh. “I’ve always hated this part...”

The water in the fountain began to churn, then a monstrous wave erupted up from the shallow pool, engulfing the entire world. Twilight instinctively closed her eyes and held her breath until light began to creep through her eyelids and the water began to drip from her face.

Twilight sat up, snorting out excess liquid as she blinked, taking her surroundings back in. Rarity, Rainbow, Applejack, Fluttershy and herself all sat in the center of a square dojo. Diagonal beams of light poured into the wooden room through the paper windows high above their heads, lending the interior a slight tint of green. Her friends were all wearing white kimonos, while Twilight herself wore one in black.

A delicate prod alerted Twilight to Fluttershy, who was holding out a pair of towels towards both herself and Rarity.

“Thanks, Fluttershy,” Twilight said as she took the offered cloth and began to dry her face, removing the waterproofed earbud speakers from her ears.

“Must it always be an entire bucket?” Rarity complained as she began to wrap the towel around her wet mane while Rainbow Dash snickered at her. “Couldn’t we use something like a spray bottle, or a little squirt gun? Anything?”

“No,” Twilight answered. “Those wouldn’t disrupt the electro-magic fields fast enough.”

Rainbow was still chuckling. “Besides, it’s more fun this way.”

Rarity grumbled in return. “When the time comes, I am so going to take advantage of you being asleep to style your mane.”

Rainbow glared back at Rarity, but Twilight interjected before the conflict continued.

“Save it, you two. We’re here to help Pinkie, remember?”

Rarity and Rainbow immediately quelled their bickering, and the circle became silent. Twilight cleared her throat, gearing up for lecture mode.

“Now then, tomorrow is when we put our plan in motion to help rid Pinkie of her nightmares… and that involves what, Fluttershy?” Twilight asked, point a hoof towards the pegasus.

“Oh, um… we go into a dream together...”

“Whose dream?” Twilight drilled.

“Mine,” Dash interrupted.

Twilight turned to the other pegasus there. “Alright, since you’re so eager, what are we going to do when we get there?”

Rainbow titled her head forward, her expression becoming aggressive. “We find Discord, and we clobber him.”

“No,” Twilight sternly rebuked. “Would anypony like to correct her?”

Rarity raised a hoof. “We locate the projection of Discord, then use our projections of the Elements of Harmony to blast him to kingdom come.”

“Yes,” Twilight nodded. “And if for any reason that doesn’t work—“

“Come on, how could that not work?” Rainbow again spoke out of turn.

Twilight grumbled a little before regaining her composure. “Because they aren’t really the Elements, just our subconscious projections of them. At best, a direct reminder to Pinkie of the power of our friendship should override whatever is bothering her with a hard reset. At worst… they’ll hardly be more than a pretty light-show. And should that be the case, what are we going to do, Applejack?”

“You’ll take Pinkie into a second dream, which you just made certain is possible, to see if you can find the source of what is troubling Pinkie while Dash, Rare, Shy and myself hold off Discord until we can wake you two back up.”

“And how much time is that going to be?” Twilight asked.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Correct.”

Rainbow leaned in. “Then can I clobber Discord?”

Twilight turned to her. “I’d prefer if you used direct confrontation as a last resort. Remember, you have to keep Pinkie and I asleep that whole time. It may just be a projection, but it will try to stop you from keeping the two of us in that second dream. You cannot let that happen under any circumstances, so as much as you might hate to do so, you’ll be better off running, hiding, or distracting it. But whatever you do, you have to be able to adapt quickly and creatively, because the projection will be on the same playing field as you.”

Twilight turned back around to address the whole group. ”Now, should we get separated, everypony: what is the question to validate anypony is who they claim to be?”

“It’s a bright, cold day in April,” everypony chimed in.

“And the proper response is...” Twilight asked.

“And the clocks were striking thirteen,” came the answer in chorus.

“Perfect,” Twilight complimented, that looked at her watch again. “We’ve got about fifteen more minutes before Pinkie wakes us back up, so let’s put everything I’ve taught you in the last few days to the rest.

“Rainbow,” she turned to the pegasus, “do you want to pound Discord’s face in?”

“Heck yeah!” Rainbow proclaimed, standing up and trashing her tail.

“Alright then, I want you to do me a favor.”

“Anything.”

“I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

Rainbow reared back in surprise. “What?”

 Twilight emphasized her words. “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

“Why?” Rainbow asked.

“You have to prove that you can fight in a dream world. Now hit me, if you can.”

Rainbow looked away and rubbed her foreleg. “But do I have to fight you? Can’t you just summon a dummy projection or that pony-thing—“

“Thing-pony,” Twilight corrected.

Applejack sighed. “Why do I still not know what that is?”

“Whatever, yeah. Can’t you just have me beat that up?” Rainbow asked.

“I can’t just summon the thing-pony at will. And all of you need to be able to fight something that will fight back. But even if it’s a projection that looks like our worst enemy, it’s really just some part of our friend. If you can defeat me, then it’ll be easier for you to beat some anomaly in Pinkie’s subconscious.”

“But you’re not something that’s causing one of my friends pain, Twilight,” Rainbow argued. “You’re my friend.”

Applejack let out a little huff. “You’re my friend too, but we fight all the time.”

“That’s different,” Dash retorted. “Those aren’t, ya know, fight-fights.”

Twilight sighed. “I’m sorry for doing this, Rainbow Dash...” She reached out into the Dreamscape matrix, and made a slight change that would alter the way she sounded.

“Still don’t feel like hitting me now?” Twilight challenged, her voice now a perfect imitation of Discord.

Rainbow’s eyes went wide. Her mouth pulled tight, her nostrils sucking in a razor-sharp breath.

“No?” Twilight continued to taunt Rainbow in Discord’s voice. “Well, I guess if you’re just fine with leaving your friend twisting in the wind, I’ll just have to be the one to keep her company...”

Rainbow clenched her eyes tightly shut and scrunched her face up in anger. She took a deep breath, flared her wings, then launched herself at Twilight with a flurry of punches. The other three retreated to the walls as Twilight and Rainbow sparred, up on their hind legs as they traded blows.

Rainbow’s attacks were very fast and straight-forward, with little thought but to strike her target. Twilight blocked and deflected them all with ease, making Dash have to correct her stance for almost every attack she threw.

Rainbow jabbed at Twilight’s face. Twilight ducked to the side, caught Rainbow’s extended hoof, then jumped and bucked her right in the gut. Rainbow skidded across the floor, clutching her stomach.

“Come on, you’re going to have to do better than a foal trying to hit a piñata,” Twilight gibed, still sounding like Discord.

Rainbow growled and lunged Twilight. This time she adapted her stance with every hit that Twilight blocked, allowing her to string her attacks together. Twilight retaliated with strikes of her own, which Rainbow blocked and followed up with kicks from her hind legs, setting up more distance between them.

Rainbow swung a Twilight with a roundhouse kick. Twilight caught her hoof and twisted, sending Dash spinning through the air. She corrected herself in mid-flight and landed on her hooves, assuming an offensive posture.

 “Much better,” Twilight said in her own voice as she gave Rainbow a slight smile. “But you’re still forgetting a crucial technique...”

Rainbow tensed her muscles again, and charged Twilight. She began mixing up the varieties of her strikes, countering Twilight’s moves, and following up each hoof thrown at her with a counter attack of her own.

Dash threw a punch at Twilight. The unicorn deflected it down, and reared up to stomp down on the pegasus’s head. Rainbow extended her wings and took to the air with one powerful flap, instantly taking an aerial advantage and putting Twilight on the defense. She assaulted the unicorn below her with a barrage of flying hooves. Twilight countered every single one.

Rainbow growled, flew up a little higher, then bolted towards her target in a dive-bomb. Twilight dodged the attack, redirected Rainbow’s momentum, and took advantage of the opening to leap up into the air and hit Rainbow in the barrel. With the wind knocked out of her, Rainbow could do little as Twilight remained suspended in mid-air and bucked her right in the chest, sending her crashing into one of the wooden pillars, cracking it in half upon impact.

Twilight slowly descended to the ground, trotted up to Rainbow, who was still keeled over and barely able to stay on her hooves. She held out a hoof to refrain Fluttershy from galloping up to check on her bruised friend.

“How did I beat you?” Twilight asked Rainbow.

Dash wiped her mouth with a hoof, then spat upon the floor with a grumble. “You cheated. I know you, egghead. You’re not anywhere near that fast in real life, and you can’t fly or levitate yourself without magic, either.”

Twilight trotted up closer to the downed pegasus, her face straight. “Cheated? In a place where the rules can be bent and broken, and entire worlds can be reshaped at will? I may not be that fast in reality… but we’re not in the real world, are we?”

Rainbow didn’t say anything; she just remained in her position on the floor, still trying to catch her breath.

Twilight leaned in, wearing a sly smirk. “Did you just spit on a real floor, or do you need to check your totem to make sure?”

Rainbow looked to the wet splatter on the floorboards. She let out a little grimble as she got back to standing, shaking off the pain from Twilight’s hits. Twilight trotted back to the middle of the floor, awaiting her opponent.

“Let’s try that again, but with more of what I’ve been teaching you this time,” Twilight instructed.

With a flap of her wings, Dash was back on her rear hooves, taking a passive stance that could immediately switch between offense and defense. Twilight did the same, then lunged at Dash with a series of quick attacks. For each strike Dash blocked she threw a hoof of her own at Twilight, which she blocked and countered with another attacked.

Twilight started aiming her attacks higher, at Rainbow’s face. Dash moved her forehooves up to protect her head. Several blocked high attacks were made before Twilight struck low, hitting Rainbow in the gut. She flinched and instinctively clutched the bruised area. Twilight lashed out with another hoof right at Dash’s face, stopping just in front of her muzzle.

Rainbow’s eyes went wide and she flew back, reevaluating her posture for anything that Twilight could throw at her.

“They call you ‘the fastest pegasus alive,’ Rainbow,” Twilight firmly stated. “Prove it.”

Rainbow tensed up, then darted at Twilight. Hooves were thrown and halted from both mares as they moved about the arena. Dash jabbed at Twilight, which she countered by crossing the attacking leg across the pegasus’s barrel and holding it. Rainbow tried to strike with her free foreleg, which Twilight pinned in the same fashion.

“Come on,” Twilight reproached in Discord’s voice, “stop trying to hit me and hit me!”

Rainbow broke free of Twilight’s grasp and redoubled her efforts with a variety of punches and kicks. For each one Twilight blocked, the speed of Rainbow’s strikes increased, until her hooves where moving so fast that they began to blur.

Twilight jabbed at Rainbow, which she deflected to the side, leaving Twilight open. Rainbow tensed her hind legs and performed a backflip, striking Twilight on the jaw with her rear hooves. Twilight flew up into the air like a rag doll thrown by a foal. Rainbow flew underneath her in an instant, and pounded Twilight’s exposed midsection with a barrage of jabs so rapid and fierce that they held Twilight suspended above the floor, completely helpless.

Rainbow flew above Twilight, and bucked her so hard that she shot back down into one of the pillars. It shattered on impact as Twilight crashed through it and slammed into the ground. Rainbow bolted back down to the beaten unicorn and raised her hoof to stomp down on Twilight’s face, only to stop inches away from the muzzle.

Twilight’s eyes were wide open as she gasped for breath. Rainbow’s hoof was so close to her nose that she could smell the scent of perspiration mingling with dander. She looked up and Rainbow, who glared back with furious eyes, her ears bent back at a hostile angle.

Twilight calmed her breathing, and softened her expression of shock for a smile. “Using manipulation to alter the physics of the dream world, allowing you to accelerate to abnormal speeds… now that is how you fight in a dream world. Well done, Rainbow.”

Dash didn’t reply. She remained speechless as her chest still heaved, and her scowl intensified.

Twilight frowned in concern. “Rainbow… you okay?”

Rainbow’s hoof began to quiver as disconcertion broke across her face. “Don’t… ever… talk like that again…”

Twilight’s frown deepened at the pain in Dash’s voice. “I won’t. I promise.”

Only then did Rainbow withdraw her hoof and back away, allowing Twilight to stand back up. Twilight got back on her hooves, repaired the damaged arena with her mind, then looked to Rainbow. The pegasus was staring at the ground in anger and dismay, her ears folded down.

Twilight felt a chisel chipping against her heart. Without even thinking she trotted up to Dash and pulled her into a hug. Rainbow reared back in surprise, but didn’t retaliate to Twilight’s embrace.

“I’m sorry, Rainbow,” Twilight apologized. “You know I didn’t mean a single word of it, right?”

Rainbow let out a heavy sigh. “I know, just… don’t get me too riled up before tomorrow.”

Rainbow pulled away from Twilight’s hug and walked back in the direction where she’d been sitting, her vexed wings shifting as her tail flicked. She took a seat against the far wall and stared off into the distance, never looking at her friends, even as Fluttershy trotted up to check on her.

Twilight still frowned at this, but she knew that she had little time to dwell, and that Dash wasn’t a pony to come around quickly. Just give her some time, she thought as she checked her watch.

“Alright Applejack, are you ready?” Twilight asked.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Applejack replied and she got up and trotted into the light.

Twilight nodded. “Then let’s go.”

Applejack charged straight at Twilight with her neck craned down to headbutt the unicorn like a battering ram. Twilight caught her with a roundhouse kick. Applejack took the full brunt of the strike with little impact to her momentum. She smashed into Twilight, sending her skidding across the floor. Applejack rushed her again. Twilight lept into the air and vaulted over Applejack, delivering a kick to the back of her skull and another to her back as she cartwheeled over her opponent.Applejack stumbled about in a daze, then she shook her head and attacked again with quick jabs.

Applejack’s fighting style was much more ground based. She always had at least two hooves on the ground, making her stance as sturdy as it was obstinate. Twilight was forced onto the defensive as she attempted to block Applejack’s powerful strikes while countering with low kicks to try and stumble her. The effort failed to work effectively, and Applejack countered with high attacks. Twilight tried to circle around AJ to take advantage of her unguarded sides, which she would respond to by twirling around and bucking out with her hind legs, forcing Twilight to dodge.

The violent dance carried on like this for several cycles of attack, defend, counter attack, buck, repeat. Then Twilight flittered around Applejack and jabbed. Applejack spun around and bucked at Twilight again, only for Twilight to pull her punch, grab Applejack’s hind legs and deflect them upward. Applejack stumbled forward, exposing her undercarriage. Twilight took full advantage of the opening to deliver a fierce uppercut to AJ’s gut, sending her up into the air. Twilight levitated herself into the air again and bucked hard at Applejack, knocking the mare through a large set of double doors leading to another room.

Applejack crashed into the opposite wall, slumping into the corner where she lay inverted as her eyes spun in circles and a nasty bump began to rise on her forehead.

The doors were still swinging on their hinges as Twilight descended to the ground and began trotting towards them, momentarily obscuring her view of Applejack. Another swing: Applejack was clenching her eyes shut as she held a hoof to her head. Another swing: her eyes had gone wide, like she’d gotten some sort of epiphany. Another: Applejack had scrunched up her face in concentration. Another: the room was empty.

Twilight did a double take, then galloped through the double doors, only to find she was the sole occupant.

”Applejack?” Twilight called out. “Applejack, where are you?”

No reply came. Twilight concentrated on the matrices of the spell, looking to see if Applejack had used manipulation to make herself invisible. Her search revealed that Applejack hadn’t just made herself transparent; she had disappeared entirely. Twilight looked around in confusion to spot her other friends looking in through the threshold.

“Where did Applejack go?” Fluttershy asked.

“I don’t know,” Twilight answered as she trotted back into the arena floor, beginning to get worried. “Okay, seriously Applejack, where are you?”

“Right here!”

Twilight only have enough time to whip around before Applejack blasted back through the doors, shattering them, and crashing into Twilight with the force of a freight train. The impact sent Twilight crashing through the floorboards, ripping up the surface-level planks in a craterous rift.

When the haze of her vision cleared and her senses returned, she found her friends surrounding her with various expressions of concern.

“Twilight!” Fluttershy gasped as she extended a wing. “How many feathers am I holding up?”

Twilight groaned in pain as her eyes tried to focus. “Uh… three...”

Fluttershy exhaled a slight sigh of relief. “Okay, that’s—”

“You’re both holdin’ up three,” Twilight slurred.

“Uh, close enough?” Fluttershy remarked as she went up to Twilight and began inspecting her  thoroughly for signs of a concussion.

“Must you have used such an excessive amount of brute force?” Rarity admonished Applejack.

“Hey, it was enough to get the job done, wasn’t it?” she replied.

Rarity just huffed in condescension al looked back to Twilight. “Bet seriously, darling, do you need assistance or aid?”

“I’ll be fine,” Twilight grunted as Fluttershy helped her back on her hooves. “What did you do back there, Applejack?”

AJ looked back and forth between Twilight and the splinters scatters across the destroyed floor. “Well, uh… I ain’t rightly sure myself...”

Twilight looked at her in confusion. “But… then where were you hiding?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Then where were you?”

Applejack rubbed her temple with a hoof. “Well, I, uh… wasn’t in that room. I made up another one in a different place entirely, if that makes sense.”

Twilight’s head was starting to hurt from more than just her concussion. “So… you manipulated the dream world to create a pocket dimension separate from the dream world we’re in right now?”

“Uh… yeah, that. Whatever you said...” Applejack shrugged.

Twilight blinked in surprise. “Wow, Applejack. That’s… actually pretty ingenious! How’d you come up with such an innovative approach to manipulation?”

Applejack massaged her forehead again. “Well… I don’t really know myself, to be honest. After y’all bucked me right into that there room, I hit my head somethin’ fierce when I crashed into the wall. I was seein’ things—different places, talking stars, a blackbird in a hood or somethin’—and then that idea just popped into my head, and I went with it.”

Now Twilight was the one to knead her cranium. “Okay… well, try to remember that for the future. A trick like that will almost certainly come in useful.”

Focusing past the dull throb inside her skull, Twilight turned around and began repairing the extensive destruction inflicted upon the dojo. When there wasn’t so much as a stray splinter, Twilight returned her attention back to her friends.

“Now then, are you ready, Rarity?”

Rarity put on a little frown. “Oh dear... I suppose this was inevitable, wasn’t it?” She let out a sigh. “Well then, what shall be my motivation? If I am to do something as barbaric as raise my hoof against a dear friend, even if it’s for a greater cause, I will need some type of catalyst. Just so long as it’s not as brazen as—” Rarity glanced at Rainbow Dash, then looked away.

Dash flicked her tail in agitation as her brow furrowed, only for her expression to give way to a devious smirk. “Pretend Twilight is one of those jerkwad dragons from the migration, and they just touched a scale on Spike’s cute little head.”

Rarity’s face went stiff as she snapped her head to Twilight. She then closed her eyes in concentration, and let out an aggressive snort.

“Yes, that will do. HIYA!”

Rarity leaped into the air with a foreleg raised to stomp down on Twilight, who jumped back from the offense into the center of the floor. Rarity’s hoof left a small crater in the floor. She reared backwards from Twilight’s counter attack, and the two began to spar.

Rarity’s technique was far more fluid and graceful than Rainbow’s or Applejack’s styles. Her every movement was a smooth transition, allowing her to effortlessly switch back and forth between offense and defense, as well as adapt to Twilight’s moves. The tradeoff was that her circuitous motions weren’t as solely strategic as they were implemented for show, allowing Twilight to modify her own techniques just as easily. Rarity’s attacks also had far less strength behind them than Dash or AJ, making what hits she did land more condescending than debilitating.

Rarity swung at Twilight with the backside of her hoof. She hit nothing but air when Twilight pulled back and took advantage of the opening to blast Rarity with a beam of raw mana, sending her crashing into the wall. Twilight teleported over to the dazed mare and jabbed a hoof at her muzzle.

“Ah! Not the face!” Rarity blurted.

Rarity instinctively covered her head with her forehooves, leaving her soft belly completely exposed to Twilight’s assault of strikes that left Rarity a crumpled heap on the floor. She growled in frustration, lit her horn, and ripped up the floorboards from right underneath Twilight, sending the unicorn tumbling through the air.

“Uncouth ruffian!” Rarity yelled, then proceeded to smack Twilight around with the planks.

Twilight tried to defend against the collective of improvised cudgels, but their numbers proved too great. She grunted in aggravation, and fired another blast at the wood, reducing each plank to splinters. Then Twilight pounced at Rarity, passing over the hole in the floor. Rarity returned with a crooked grin, lit her horn again, and launched a salvo of gemstones she manipulated into existence up at Twilight, thoroughly pummeling her as the weaponized rocks ripped up the ceiling.

Twilight growled, corrected her stance in mid-air with levitation, then ignited her own horn and enveloped every gem in her magic. She looked down at Rarity, and grinned deviously.

“What goes up...” Twilight sniped.

Rarity’s eyes went wide. “Oh, heavens no...”

Twilight reared up from her airborne position, then threw her forelegs downward as Rarity’s own bombardment of gems came crashing back down upon her, completely burying her under a pile of colorful stones.

Twilight slowly descended back down to the floor, and mended the gap as she addressed the heap of jewels.

“Well Rarity, your techniques are a bit too theatrical to be efficient, but your methods of improvisation and adaptability are very creative. So, not bad, really.”

The stack of gemstones didn’t reply back.

Twilight frowned. “Rarity? Are you okay?”

Still no answer.

Worry took hold of Twilight. She couldn’t tell if Rarity was legitimately hurt or if she’d taken a leaf from Applejack’s book, so she concentrated on the matrices of the dream to discern Rarity’s condition. The first thing she picked up on was a stone the size of her head launched at her face. Twilight ducked out of the way of the gem. Then Rarity burst out from the trove and rammed Twilight with such force that she bounced off the opposite wall.

When Twilight managed to get her head to stop spinning, she looked back at Rarity, who was clad in an ornate, immaculate suit of armor crafted from the precious stones, covering her entire form save for her mane, tail, and triumphantly smiling visage.

“What was that about my techniques being too theatrical for practical use, deary?” Rarity asked, conceited.

Twilight opened her mouth to reply, but Rarity cut her off with a raised hoof.

“Could you hold that thought for a moment? I want to check something...” Rarity closed her eyes and concentrated. A floorboard next to her turned to silver and liquified, then a full-length tri-fold vanity mirror emerged from the fluid. Rarity opened her eyes to look at herself, and her face lit up like a prom princess.

“My stars, I look gorgeous!” She remarked as she turned to admire herself from different angles, then giggled to herself. “Somepony remind me to look into recreating this after I’ve finished with my newest project.”

“Save it for after we’ve finished helping Pinkie,” Rainbow retorted.

“I will,” Rarity countered. “I still have my priorities in order: help Pinkie, finish new line, plan for future projects. And if all goes well, my magnum opus should be finished before the morrow, so I’ll have no other side projects to detract energy from helping relieve a cherished friend of her torments. So, it’s a win-win-win, as they say.”

“Nopony says that, Rares,” Applejack commented.

“Well, I say that,” Rarity said.

“Just focus on winning instead of looking good while doing it when we’re fighting.” Twilight instructed. “Got it?”

“Understood… but the gemstone armor is still acceptable should the occasion arise, yes?”

“So long as it helps us cure Pinkie, whatever anypony of you can bring it the fight is fine. Speaking of which, that just leaves you, Fluttershy.”

Fluttershy sucked in air as she stiffened in alert, pupils like pinpricks. “Oh, um… I’m not so sure about this… can’t I just act as like, support, or a field medic?”

“Field medics still know how to engage in combat, Fluttershy. We need everypony to be able to pull their own weight as much as we need to be able to operate as a team.” Twilight said.

“Come on, Flutters,” Rainbow interjected. “You’ve down-talked a dragon and beat a cockatrice in a staring contest! You can take Twilight in a little hoof-to-hoof.”

Fluttershy ducked behind her mane. “But I only faced those creatures when I had no other choice. I can’t just fight anypony whenever I want.”

Twilight looked at her watch and sighed. “I’m sorry Fluttershy, but we’re running out of time.”

Twilight lit her horn. Fluttershy let out a little ‘Eep!’ as Twilight picked up Fluttershy, flung the pegasus toward herself, and swung a hoof at her. She ducked, and Twilight’s hoof went over her head. Twilight altered her stance, and continued her offense.

Fluttershy’s defense proved to be near impenetrable. Every attack from Twilight was either blocked, deflected, or dodged, but Fluttershy made absolutely no attempt to get in a counterattack. Every move she made was just to keep herself from taking a hit, and she wore an expression of panic as she flittered around her opponent.

Twilight jabbed, and Fluttershy sidestepped. She whirled around and bucked, and Fluttershy took to the air and flew over Twilight’s head. Twilight concentrated on the ground in front of her. Fluttershy landed, and her hooves sunk into the liquefied wood.

Fluttershy tried to pry herself out by tugging at her hooves and flapping her wings, but she still remained in place, like she had stepped into quicksand. She looked up and gasped as Twilight lit her horn again, and a gigantic padded hammer materialized next to her.

“Sorry! Nothing personal!” Twilight quickly blurted, and then bludgeoned Fluttershy with her weapon of cushioned doom.

Fluttershy sailed across the dojo and crashed into the wall opposite from Twilight, leaving a crater in the perfect shape of her body. She remained embedded in the wall until gravity took hold, and she fell back down on her hooves. Fluttershy stumbled to and fro as her eyes spun and a little flock of birds circled her head, twittering in concern.

“Oh, no thank you, I can’t eat sunflower seeds. They make me gassy,” Fluttershy slurred.

Twilight dematerialized the softened sledge and trotted toward Fluttershy. “Are you okay? Can you still fight?”

Fluttershy shook her head with a sound like a bit rattling in a tin can. “I’m fine, but I’m sorry. I just can’t be forced into fighting one of my friends.”

“This isn’t about fighting me, Fluttershy. It’s about making sure you’re ready to fight the projection of Discord in Pinkie’s subconscious.” Twilight said.

“Yeah, but you’re not Discord,” Fluttershy replied. “We’ve been over this. I’m sorry.”

Twilight frowned a little. For a moment, she contemplated adopting her imitation of the draconequus, but quashed the thought a moment later upon remembering her promise to Rainbow. That still didn’t keep her from glancing at Rainbow out of nervous reflex, who seemed to have discerned what Twilight was thinking, as her brow furrowed at the unicorn.

“Don’t even think about it,” Rainbow growled, then smirked. “Besides, I’ve got an idea...”

Rainbow Dash closed her eyes and scrunched up her face in concentration, her tongue sticking out one side of her mouth. Twilight was about to prod Dreamscape to observe what Dash was up to, but then she heard Fluttershy gasp, and instead looked to her. Fluttershy was staring at something on Twilight with eyes beginning to sizzle.

Twilight looked down at herself. Rainbow had manipulated a rather graphically detailed picture of herself maliciously abusing a bruised and bloody Angel bunny onto her robe. Twilight lit her horn and tried to rip the gruesome image off her kimono, but it was more firmly affixed than her own coat.

Twilight looked back up and Fluttershy. The normally yellow pegasus was going red in the face, and she snorted out heaving, ragged breaths of hot air like an enraged minotaur.

Now it was Twilight’s turn to contract her pupils in fear. “Uh-oh...”

Fluttershy bellowed out a terrifying, adorable roar of primal fury. She reared up, slammed her forehooves back down with a force that shook the entire building, and bull-rushed Twilight.

Fluttershy’s vicious assault was so relentless that Twilight couldn’t even get in a retaliatory hoof in edgewise. For every attack she blocked or dodged, there was another immediately following it, putting Twilight completely on defensive to Fluttershy’s inexorable, withering strikes.

Fluttershy reared back and put all of her weight into a right jab. Twilight dodged, caught the hoof, and redirected its momentum to cross the leg over Fluttershy’s barrel. Seeing an opening, Twilight moved to finally get in a hoof of her own.

Fluttershy growled, and head-butted Twilight right in the face. Her vision blurred and she stumbled back, utterly defenseless. Fluttershy went in for another strike. Twilight could already feel her stomach flinching from the inevitable impact.

Fluttershy grabbed Twilight by her robe, then ripped the picture right off. Twilight fell back down onto all four hooves as Fluttershy threw the picture across the dojo, flew over to it, and began trampling it into the floor. She growled, glaring at the tattered and torn image. Her eyes began to glow a fearsome orange, producing a high-pitched noise of a charging diode, and laser beams shot out of her eyes, setting the crumpled illustration ablaze.

Fluttershy flew back up into the air and struck her forehooves against each other, generating a spark. She held out her hooves for it, and the spark became suspended between them, where it quickly grew from a little flame to a fireball. Fluttershy lifted the fireball above her head, and it rapidly expanded into a blazing sphere twice her length in diameter. With one last war cry, Fluttershy hurled the giant orb of flaming death down onto the burning picture. It exploded upon impact, hitting all ponies present with a scorching heat as the detonation blasted a giant hole into the floor.

Fluttershy slowly descended to the floor, softly landing in front of the smoldering crater. She stood, stiff and motionless, breathing in smoke, then whipped around to glare at the other pegasus.

“That was very mean of you, Rainbow Dash!” she fiercely admonished.

“Hey, it got you to fight, didn’t it?” Rainbow said in her defense.

Fluttershy’s piercing glare became even sharper.

Rainbow sighed. “Alright, I’m sorry. I’ll make you a mixed salad when we wake up, okay?”

Fluttershy titled her head forward, not abating her glare in the slightest.

Rainbow groaned. “Okay, I’ll make a salad for you and Angel. Happy?”

Fluttershy softened her glower. “Will you include sliced apple and a light vinaigrette on mine?”

“Whatever makes you happy,” Rainbow mumbled.

Fluttershy returned with a slight smile, and began walking back to her original seat. “Okay, apology accepted… and be sure to include extra carrots for Angel bunny.”

Twilight stepped forward. “Will you be able to bring that ferocity tomorrow night, Fluttershy?”

Fluttershy sat on her haunches, and nodded. “Yes, I can. For Pinkie.”

Twilight nodded. She looked to the rest of her friends. All their eyes gleamed with the same resolve, and her heart swelled with pride.

“Well, then it’s settled. Tomorrow night, we go into a shared dream together, and we stop Pinkie’s nightmares for good.”

“Heck yeah!” Rainbow hollered, taking to the air. “Discord doesn’t stand a chance! We beat him once, and we’ll beat him again!”

“Darn tootin’!” Applejack exclaimed.

Twilight’s ears twitched as she began to hear the ambient swell of an orchestra, followed by the ubiquitous voice of a singing mare. “Non, regrette rien… non, je ne regrette rien...”

Twilight turned her attention back to her friends. “Alright, that’s our cue.” She glanced at her watch and began to count down. “Ten… nine… eight…”

A distant roar began to fill the air of the dojo.

“Seven… six...”

Rarity sighed. “I will always hate this part...”

“Three… two… o—”

Twilight was cut off as a tidal wave crashed through the thin walls of the dojo, sweeping them all away into its blackness.

Twilight sprayed water from her mouth as she came to, turning her head to one side and knocking a hoof against the other to clear the water that had gotten into her ear. She wiped the water out of her eyes, and was met with the sight of Pinkie: eyes still downtrodden, mane still limp and listless.

Pinkie set aside a large, empty bucket, then turned off the record player next to her. She picked up a towel from the stack next to her, and offered it to Twilight.

“I didn’t mess up and wake you too earlier again, did I?” Pinkie meekly asked.

“No, not at all. Your timing was perfect, in fact,” Twilight answered as she took the cloth and dried her face with it.

Pinkie’s expression bore no indication that she took solace from the compliment. Her eyes drifted away, then she gathered the towels and began giving them out to everypony else present, her composure subdued.

Twilight flinched, and had to restrain a hoof from darting back to her burning sides.

“Could you girls excuse me for a minute?” Twilight asked as she got up and began trotting away before anypony even replied. “I need to… go check my totem.” Then she cantered up the stairs and into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

Rarity finished blinking the excess liquid from her eyes and peeled a velvet shower cap from off her mane. “Well, I may be at odds with that procedure, but at least I can do something to keep from taking the worst of it.”

Rainbow grumbled at Rarity’s persnicketiness. With her face still dripping, Rainbow got up on all fours all vigorously shook her head back and forth like a wet dog, spraying water all over to the unicorn beside her, making Rarity shriek

“AH! Rainbow!”

Applejack let out a hearty chuckle at the routine, only for her laughs to go weak at the sight of Pinkie, watching Rainbow harassing Rarity with a deepening frown. Pinkie turned away, only to catch sight of Applejack looking at her, to which she tried to conceal her miserable face behind the heavy curtain of her mane.

“Hey,” Applejack gently said. Pinkie recoiled like she’d just been scolded.

“Pinkie,” Applejack spoke again, her tone even softer, “how ya’ holdin’ up, girl?”

Pinkie didn’t say anything, and just keep her eyes on the wood beneath her hooves now that everypony was looking at her.

Fluttershy slowly approached her despondent friend. “Pinkie, are you still having nightmares?” she delicately asked.

Pinkie didn’t respond, but the her subsequent whimper was enough of an answer for Fluttershy to walk up to Pinkie and wrap an empathetic foreleg around her. Pinkie buried her face into her friend’s nape, and began to softly weep.

Fluttershy gently ran her free hoof over Pinkie’s flat mane. “There, there,” she cooed.

Rainbow Dash walked around to face the crying pony, and lightly prodded her with a hoof.

“Hey, we’re gonna help you get through this. Come tomorrow night, that thing in your head won’t be able to hurt you anymore.” Rainbow gave Pinkie a confident little smile. “So, cheer up. We’ve still got that ‘freed of a tormenting projection’ party to throw for you.”

Pinkie looked at Rainbow, momentarily regarding her words. She sniffled, then loosed herself from Fluttershy’s embrace.

“I, um… want to go ask Twilight something. Excuse me,” Pinkie mumbled, then slowly turned to plod upstairs.

“Oh… okay… want me to come with you?” Rainbow asked.

“No, thanks, I’ll be alright,” Pinkie lethargically replied.

Rainbow nodded, then looked off into nowhere in particular as her expression hardened.

“I swear, come tomorrow night, when we meet Discord, it’s gonna get ugly.” Rainbow growled. “We’re gonna bust into his house, break his face, smash all his stuff, and track dirty hoof-prints all over the floor.”

“Easy there, girl,” Applejack spoke up. “We ain’t out for blood. We just go in, deal with Discord, and we get out. Quick, clean, and easy.”

“Unless, of course, Plan A goes kaput, and we have to resort to Plan B,” Rarity included.

Rainbow responded with a stiff nod. “Right. We deal with Discord while Twilight breaks into the safe and steals what we need.” She grinned mischievously. “It’ll be just like a heist flick!”

Rarity raised a hoof in objection. “I don’t think that’s an entirely appropriate analogy.”

“And why not?” Rainbow protested. “We’ve got an opponent who we beat by stealing something from right underneath their nose. We’re not just helping a friend, we’re gonna be awesome while we do it!”

Fluttershy softly cleared her throat. “But, well, Twilight won’t really be stealing anything, just going deeper into Pinkie’s mind to learn more about what’s troubling her.”

“Okay, so it’s like a mind heist.” Rainbow’s eyes lit up. “Actually, that sounds really cool! Am I right?” She asked looking around them room. “Come on… everypony wants to be part of a heist.”

Rarity turned away and snuck her nose up in the air. “Well, I don’t.”

“Please,” Rainbow scoffed, “like you’re really going to sit there and tell me you’ve never once fantasized about going somewhere like Itaily or Prance, running into a dashing thief, taking part in his scheme to rob the biggest bank in the province, escaping the cops after a high-speed chase, getting back to the hide-out, and then making love on the pile of bits.”

Rarity didn’t answer: she just scrunched up her face as her cheeks blushed. Rainbow chuckled.

“Gotcha.”

Rarity hissed in spite. “I am soooo going to take advantage of you being asleep to make your mane fabulous...”

Twilight urgently shut the bathroom door behind her and darted over to the sink. She hurriedly slammed her totem down onto the counter and spun its internal gimbals without even looking at the contraption. She ripped open the medicine cabinet over the sink, pried the lid off the ibuprofen bottle, chucked an indeterminate number of pills into her mouth, and downed them with a hastily poured glass of water.

Twilight closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, ears twitching to the harmonic trill of her little gyroscope merrily spinning on the countertop. The whir of her magic momentarily joined the crystalline chime as she cast the illusion spell on herself. Already the burning lightning coursing through her began to subside as she formed a mental image of herself, propped up on the edge of counter with her head hanging, her eyes closed, and a pair of wings affixed firmly to her.

She dismounted from the counter, finally opening her eyes to observe her artificial wings. She turned her head from side to side as she inspected both mirages, admiring how the feathers moved and interlapped and the muscles underneath rippled as she flexed her limbs.

Her ear twitched to the brief sound of a wobbling knell, the a soft chink. Twilight turned away from her wings to look at the gyroscope, which lay motionless on the porcelain.

Twilight blinked. The gyroscope had completely slipped her mind until she had heard it fall over.

Letting out a little sigh, Twilight turned away from her trinket, then closed the cabinet door above the sink to clear away the last of her pain. Her reflection in the mirror met her with a scowl.

“You are full of things that would make mom wash my mouth out with soap if I said them out loud,” Reason chided.

Twilight’s ears folded back in shame. “I know, it’s not really the most ethically sound plan to help a friend that I’ve come up with...”

Reason scoffed, incredulous. “Really?! This is the most morally ambiguous ‘plan’ that you’ve come up with since Mare Do Well!”

Twilight flinched. “But at least Rainbow learned a lesson in humility then, right?”

Reason leaned forward. “So the ends justify the means, huh? Is that what you’d tell everypony else if they found out that ‘Plan B’ exists partially to test that if Dreamscape can be used to plant ideas, it can be used to steal them?”

Twilight gulped. “I explained to everypony, even Pinkie, that we can’t let her know what’s going on to keep the anomaly from adapting to it. And I already told the others what I’ll be doing to find out how we can help Pinkie. And if I can, I can uproot the anomaly from the source. That’s what this is all about: helping Pinkie.”

Reason’s brow furrowed as she continued to glare at Twilight. “I know. And I’d understand perfectly… if that was the only thing you’d planned on doing while you’re in Pinkie’s subconscious...”

Twilight sat down on her haunches and looked away, too ashamed to respond.

“You want to see if you can do it again,” Reason reprimanded with a glower. “Pinkie, our friend, has been suffering from terrible nightmares for weeks now, and you want to see if you can use this as an opportunity to secretly perform an inception on her!”

“That’s not why—I don’t...” Twilight stuttered. “It’s just a completely innocuous thought, alright? ‘My second favorite color is blue,’ that’s it. If… if Plan B fails, then… we might have to look into more… radical procedures, to free Pinkie from her constant nightmares.”

Twilight hung her head. “I just need to know everything that I can do to help fix Pinkie… and I still need to learn how to fix—” Twilight extended her holographic wings— “this… and it’s something I might need to know if I want to fix… you know...”

Reason nodded in understanding, but her glare hadn’t subsided. “Yeah… Spike’s problem. And that’s another thing: how long has it been since you last checked up on his dreams? Almost a week now? Can you even imagine what it must be like for Spike to have… him, stuck in his mind?”

Twilight fought to keep the sudden chill from making her shudder. “Yeah, I can… but it’s not like I haven’t been trying to help him. He’s just so disinclined to talk to me nowadays, and... I don’t know. Using Dreamscape this much during the day seems to be wearing me out more than I thought it would, because we can barely stay awake past dinner. But it’s not like I’ve abandoned Spike, it’s just...” Twilight sighed in dismay. “I think this is too much to handle by myself.”

For the first time since the discussion began, Reason softened her expression. “You still need to tell the rest of your friends about… you know… him.”

“I still need to tell Spike,” Twilight replied, still not making eye contact. “I haven’t even fully disclosed what I know to Celestia...”

Reason tapped a hoof to her chin, suddenly ponderous. “Speaking of which, why haven’t we heard from Celestia? This is the longest time we’ve ever gone without hearing a reply back from her.”

Twilight cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t know.  It’s not like her to be so quiet… Maybe she’s busy with something so important, she can’t be bothered?”

Reason shrugged. “Can’t really know for certain, can we? But we should try writing her again. Regardless, you’re still going to have to come clean with Spike eventually.”

Twilight sighed again. “I know. I’ll tell him after we’ve taken care of Pinkie, I promise. Fixing her problem should reassure Spike that we can help fix his.”

Reason leaned back a little, her expression more level. “I’ll take you word for it,” she said, her tone still stern.

Twilight sat still, letting a few moments go by in silence before she responded. “So which is worse: Plan B, or Mare Do Well?”

Reason looked off into the distance. “Jury’s still out on that… but I’m leaning closer to Plan B.”

A sudden knock came from the bathroom door, making Twilight and Reason both jump.

“Twilight, may I talk with you about something? Alone?” It was Pinkie.

Twilight put a hoof to her heart. “Oh, sure. Give me a minute,” she replied, dispelling her wings. The image of Reason left the surface of the mirror before Twilight opened the door to her friend.

“May I come in?” Pinkie asked, her sad eyes cast in shadows from behind her mane.

“Oh, sure,” Twilight replied, opening the door further and stepping back so Pinkie could enter.

The depressed pony trudged over the threshold and shut the door with a rear hoof, her eyes never leaving the floor in the process.

“So what did you want to talk about?” Twilight asked.

Pinkie didn’t immediately reply, letting a few seconds of pawing and the floor pass before answering.

“You’re all going into my dreams tomorrow, right?” Pinkie asked the tiles on the ground.

“Yeah, that’s the plan,” Twilight answered.

Pinkie drew a shuddering inhalation. She was already in the office, and Doctor Twilight had a stash of needles with her name on them.

“Is something wrong?” Twilight inquired.

Pinkie’s mouth pulled tight. “No, it’s just… well, I was thinking, since we’re all going to be together tomorrow night, do you think, maybe… can we make it a slumber party?”

Twilight smiled back. “Of course, Pinkie. That’s a great idea.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Pinkie’s mouth, only to disappear a moment later. “Actually… no, never mind. That was a stupid idea. I know I won’t be that much fun to be around, and I know I’ve been nothing but a burden to you all—”

Twilight cut Pinkie off by placing a hoof on her shoulder. “No Pinkie, you’re not. Don’t ever think that. We took it upon ourselves to help you, because you’re our friend, and we care about you enough to do whatever it takes to correct your problems. We always will. Okay?”

Pinkie sniffed, looking at Twilight, who just answered with another warm, compassionate smile.

Pinkie’s frown softened. “Okay,” she sniffed again, reaching up to hold Twilight’s hoof with her own. “I just wish it could’ve been at a better time. This is going to be your first slumber party since coming to Ponyville. It should have been special.”

Twilight frowned a little. “Oh, uh, Pinkie, this isn’t going to be my first slumber party.”

Pinkie’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Yeah, actually. I had my first ever slumber party with Applejack and Rarity just a few weeks after I moved here,” Twilight explained.

“WHAT?!” Pinkie screamed in fury, her hold on Twilight’s hoof becoming a death grip. “You had a special moment like that, and you chose to have it WITHOUT ME?!”

“I didn’t mean to!” Twilight urgently replied. “We got rained in during a thunderstorm!”

“Oh, well that’s a convenient excuse! Gotta make sure there’s enough pouring rain and lightning to keep out the psychopath, right?!”

“Pinkie, please!” Twilight pleaded as she backed away, trying to pull her hoof out of Pinkie’s iron grasp, feeling her horn automatically activating. “Get a hold of yourself! This isn’t you!”

“IS IT?!” Pinkie shrieked, pulling Twilight back in, her eyes burning with hate. “So I guess who I am is whatever you say it is! That’s what you really care about! THAT’S WHAT TRUE FRIENDS ARE FOR!”

A sphere of water smashed into the side of Pinkie’s head, breaking her hold. Twilight backed away in fright, wincing when her sore hoof stepped on the floor. Just then the bathroom door burst open for Rainbow Dash, her tense face on high alert.

Pinkie shook her head back and forth, clearing it of water. She blinked rapidly, then horror arose on her grim face. She looked back and forth between Twight’s expression of terror and Rainbow’s visage of concern before eventually looking straight at the unicorn.

Pinkie’s eyes quivered like a penitent sea after a tsunami had ravaged the coastline. Tears started to bubble in the corners while an agonized frown began to carve itself out of her contrite contenance. A pained whimper escaped her, and then she fell to the floor, face buried behind her hooves as she wailed.

Twilight and Rainbow just looked at each other, both worried and visibly shaken. Twilight eventually broke away to approach Pinkie, still sobbing on the floor. Twilight reached out to Pinkie with a hoof, only for Pinkie to swat it away.

“I… I’m losing it...” Pinkie wept. “I… I-I almost… I w-was g-going t-to...”

Whatever Pinkie was going to say next was lost to another wave of tears and miserable howls, curling up into a tortured ball as she cried.

Twilight looked up at the door. All of her other friends were at the threshold now, their expressions of worry matching her own.

Twilight sat down next to Pinkie, and scooped her up to cradle her head in compassionate hooves. Rainbow flew into the bathroom, landed next to Pinkie, and put a hoof on her shoulder, the rest of her friends not far behind. Pinkie just cried even harder with each act of sympathy.

From inside her head, Reason prodded Twilight to get her attention.

I’m sorry, Twilight… I didn’t mean to spontaneously take control again. It just… happened.

Spike was only dully aware of Pinkie’s latest hysterical collapse as he lay in his basket bed. The mare’s pitiful, heaving sobs were muffled by the door and Spike’s own eroded senses. Even his jealousy at the thought of her friends fawning over her had simmered down to smoldering embers as opposed to the scorching envy he used to feel towards her. Whatever was registering felt like a blurred piece in the collage of memories that kept him from getting any rest: his consciousness never fully setting below the horizon into slumber, creating a perpetual evening witching hour for his regrets to haunt him.

He’d been like that for the last four days.

For four days, he’d hardly eaten, barely slept, and never had a single intermission of respite from his agonizing remorse. By now, he had been an accessory to so many crimes that part of him doubted he’d ever be able to sleep peacefully again.

Sometimes, things went off without a hitch. That usually only happened when they broke into an abode when nopony was home, like several nights ago when they trespassed into an apartment that turned out to be a bachelor pad if he’d ever seen one. All Avarice had surmised as worth taking was a bowling trophy, an unopened suitcase, and a rug from the living room, stating that it really tied the whole room together. They had ended up spending the rest of the night robbing from whatever counted for the more haut monde side of town after that.

Other incidents were much less uneventful, such as one night when they broke into a quaint little abode near the post office. Avarice had apparently gotten wind that the homeowner would be away for the night and saw a perfect opportunity. He had only been inclined to agree because there would be less of a possibility for somepony to get hurt.

Unfortunately, the house turned out to be anything but unoccupied. Only after they had gotten inside did he realized that while the owner might have been away, they’d left their foal behind. They had also apparently called in a favor from a friend to watch over her for the night, who they had found passed out on the couch in the living room.

And if that hadn’t been bad enough, that friend turned out to be none other than Rainbow Dash.

He had all but begged that they go to another house, but his pleas were disregarded as more cowardice to turn tail from what Avarice said had become an even better opportunity, stating that if everything went smoothly, the inevitable case report would be even more bewildering, and that there’d be a chance to have some fun if they got spotted.

He was dragged into the master bedroom before he could denounce Avarice’s violent tendencies, and the next thing he knew, the two of them were digging through a surprisingly diverse jewelry collection, from which he reluctantly took a set of illustrious pearl earrings to honor their deal.

When he again insisted they leave, Avarice had ignored him to rummage through the refrigerator for a snack. That had left him alone in the hall, nervously looking back and forth between the threshold to the living room where his friend slept and the pictures on the wall, wondering to himself why the pegasus mare in many of them was cross-eyed.

Rainbow’s heavy snoring almost kept him from hearing the sound of hoofsteps descending the stairs. The resulting electrocution of his panic nearly gave him a heart attack, and he flew like lightning into the kitchen, desperately hissing the exit phrase. Avarice acknowledged, but the foal had gotten right outside the kitchen by then, prompting Avarice to grab him, leap into the air and perform a split between the cupboards, leaving them just above the head of the lavender coated, blonde-maned unicorn filly as she wandered into the same room and poured herself a glass of water before slowly trotting back upstairs to bed.

The event only lasted a minute, but each second was a serrated edge against his nerves. He had been terrified that the pulsing thunderstorm in his chest would give them away and give Avarice a chance to have his ‘fun.’ The vicious glare that Avarice had been observing the filly with hadn’t helped either.

Only when they heard a door close upstairs and another loud snore erupted from the living room to ensure Rainbow was still sawing more logs than Babe the Blue Ox did they return to the insalubrious sewers, where they promptly got into an argument about pilfering procedures. Thier altercation eventually led to him claiming that Rainbow could have taken Avarice in a fight. Avarice retaliated by gloating in gruesome detail about burning Rainbow to death, followed by speculations as to what her corpse would taste like. He reacted to that by throwing a box of muffins Avarice stole into the silted river of waste, which had earned him another savage beating.

The home they had burglarized next was one of those times when everything went wrong. The house had been modified to double as a recording studio, and despite being home to numerous laser-light projectors and was also far better organized, it painfully reminded him of Vinyl’s place.

Everything had been going well: Avarice had found plenty to take while he stood guard upstairs. Then he heard somepony actively moving around in one of the rooms, then towards the door, and then everything fell apart.

He had sprinted downstairs to warn Avarice, only to suddenly find him missing. He desperately scoured the house only to be discovered by an ice blue unicorn stallion with a scraggly black mane that matched the color of his polo shirt. Their eyes met for a brief second, and that’s when Avarice leapt from the shadows and attacked.

The proceeding fight was viciously intense, with Avarice grabbing anything in reach to use as a weapon while the stallion used his telekinesis to try and rip the impromptu cudgels from Avarice’s grasp for a desperate counter attack. It had ended when Avarice picked up a whole credenza and used it to smash the unicorn through the wall. Then as the pony had fallen to the floor, Avarice brought the entire credenza down on him.

They had left the poor pony there, beaten and bleeding in the hallway under the broken furniture. Avarice had pulled the cart back to the library that night, one claw around the handle and the other holding Spike at arm’s length as he futilely attempted to rip open Avarice’s throat.

When the sun rose that day, he couldn’t bear to be in the house: not with the knowledge of what was under the floorboards or the premonition that Twilight might ask about the palpable guilt dripping out from behind his mask. He had spent that day slunking around town, devoid of direction, until he spotted somepony else that he couldn’t endure seeing.

Vinyl Scratch had been shuffling down the other side of the road, noticeably bereft of her trademark shades. Her hooves barely even left the ground with each step, and her head hung so low that her muzzle was almost dragging across the dirt. The sight of her had stayed his feet, but what came next had made him wish that he had run as soon as he had seen her.

The same grey mare from the night they had broken in galloped up to Vinyl, voicing words up rapt concern. Vinyl looked up at her lover, and the heartbreak on her face became another picture in Spike’s growing album of guilt. He had heard Vinyl mutter something about checking in at the police station for any update on her stolen property, and then she had choked out that they’d told her that her best friend Neon had been hospitalized after he’d been brutally assaulted the night before.

The grey mare had said nothing, just sat down on her haunches and held out her forelegs. Then Vinyl, a tom-colt whose rough-and-tumble brashness was rivaled only by Rainbow Dash, broke down, collapsed into the mare’s embrace, and openly wept like a filly.

He had just stood there watching, with a feeling that his Adam’s apple had been replaced with a pine cone, until something else had overtaken his paralyzing remorse: envy. Burning, spiteful envy.

He had fled quickly as he could without trying to make himself conspicuous. He didn’t care where he ended up, just that he got away from that scene, until he had realized that he ended up inadvertently running all the way to Ponyville’s police headquarters.

Sighed despondently, he had made his way around the building, slumped up against the wall underneath a window, and preoccupied himself with thoughts about barging inside and confessing everything that he knew.

His languid fantasies had been interrupted when he heard a conversation coming from the office on the other side of the wall mention the string of recent thefts and assaults. He had gone alert in an instant, and he caught all the details on night patrols that they had planned to enact, as well as a reference to evidence they had collected from several of the crime scenes.

For the first time in his life, he actually went out looking for Avarice. He eventually found Avarice in the attic of the library, breathing streams of fire onto his own scales that left a shimmering aura just above the platelets before it disappeared. He relayed everything he had just learned, and suggested going inactive, at least until the attention diminished. Avarice then adorned a pensive expression, and said he would consider it, which had given him hope that he might actually get some rest that night.

Avarice later revealed to him that he had only considered the suggestion for five seconds.

While Twilight was again sleeping like a rock as he lay blanketed in insomnia, Avarice had ripped him out of his sleepless bed, citing the contingency plan of raiding the police station to take their evidence that they had talked about earlier. He was overcome with dread at the thought of stealing from the cops. Had that been the only thing they had done that night, then he might have only been just upset.

Instead, after avoiding the patrols, they had broken into somepony’s house, where Avarice dragged a mare out of her bed, took a picture of her before knocking her out, and dragged her into the sewers with them, where he realized with horror that the mare was with foal. Then they snuck into the police station, then Avarice incapacitated all the officers that were still there, then locked everypony, including the expectant mare, in separate holding cells, and took all the sets of keys. Then Avarice stole all their evidence: everything, save for one collection of trace evidence intentionally left in plain sight.

Spike had raised such a furious ruckus in protest when they got back underground that Avarice had actually resorted to knocking him out as well. He had awoken some time later under the steamy jets of the shower.

That just been just this morning. And even though he awoke feeling beaten, bruised, and with the sensation that a searing knife had been pludged through his sternum, it had been the most rest he had gotten in the last four days.

Now Spike lay in his bed, as he had been since he finished his chores. He was too lethargic to otherwise occupy himself with an entertaining pastime, and too poisoned by apathy to try. Nothing was fun or cheerful anymore, anyway.

His ear frill twitched at the sound of the window opening, then it fell in dismay as he clenched his eyelids tightly shut.

“Now what do you want?” Spike whispered, drained and despondent.

“You keep asking that, even though my answer never changes.” Avarice let out a devious chuckle, then strode across the room until he was just a few paces from Spike’s bed, his shadow looming over the little dragon. “I just came to inform you that we won’t be going out taking whatever I please tonight.”

Spike’s heart lept, then vertigo set in when he remembered who he was taking to. “You’ve got something else planned...”

Avarice smirked. “Now you’re starting to catch on.” He began admiring his deadly claws again. “We’ve got an appointment with the chief of police tonight.”

Spike felt his throat go dry. “Haven’t you done enough already? You already stole most of the evidence they had against you.”

“That was just one move. No, in a game like this, taking your opponent’s most utilized power pieces or obliterating their board position in one fell swoop is just part of strategy and planning. To truly win with an annihilation victory, your next play has to be even more devastating than the last. Crush someone’s resolve hard enough, and they’ll concede just to keep what little they have left… if they’re smart, anyway.”

Spike’s countenance hardened. “Well, do it by yourself. I can’t go with you tonight.”

Avarice let out a chortle. “Why, are you grounded?”

“No,” Spike growled back. “Twilight saw how tired I am after I finished putting away her notes, so she told me to go to bed early tonight.”

Avarice cocked an eyebrow at him. “So she made your bedtime six in the evening...”

“No! I’m in bed right now because I’ve barely gotten any sleep recently, tsk tsk. But she said I have to be in bed by eight, while she’s going to be up late tonight making sure everything is in order for Pinkie tomorrow. And she’s probably going to check on me to make sure I’m at least trying to sleep, so she’ll probably notice if I’m not in bed anymore.”

Avarice just waved a hand. “Pfft. That won’t be a problem.”

“Why, are you going to stuff extra pillows under my blankets?” Spike sarcastically replied.

Avarice’s smirk never faltered. “Nope. Won’t need to. In fact, Twilight will be out cold long before you’ll ever be.”

Spike glared back. “We have a deal.”

“I know, and I’m still honoring it. Trust me.”

“I don’t trust you,” Spike spat in return. “Everything is just a game to you anyway, so I wouldn’t put it past you to be playing word games with me.”

Avarice chuckled. “You have caught on...”

Avarice turned and began to walk away, but Spike threw off his covers and stomped after him.

“I don’t have to go with you. I only agreed to tag along to keep you from hurting anypony. If you’re just going to harm somepony anyway, then there’s no point in me being there.”

“Yeah, there is.”

“And what’s the difference if I go or not?”

”The difference between hurt and hospitalized.”

Spike’s scowl grew ever deeper. “Fine then, we’ll play it your way. I’m not going with you tonight unless you tell me exactly what you intend to do to keep Twilight out of it.”

Avarice just looked at Spike for a moment, then responded with that cocksure grin that never failed to agitate him. “Cagey... alright, fine.”

At that, Avarice turned around, walked back to Spike, got down on one knee and looked straight at him, eyes unblinking. “Twilight will not be a problem tonight.”

Spike’s scrutinizing leer remained vigilant. “Why not?”

“Because she’ll be out cold for the night from the sedatives I’ll have put in her food.”

Spike jerked back, blinking in surprise.

Avarice was grinning now. “And after I tuck her in again, we’ll have the whole night to ourselves. Hey, maybe we’ll have some time for a theft after all!”

Spike was practically burning with anger. “We had a deal!”

“I know. Dragon of my word, and all that.”

“I keep your secrets, you don’t hurt my friends!” Spike hissed, jamming a finger into his palm. “You said not a claw! You gave your word that you wouldn’t hurt them! That includes lacing their food with potentially harmful things!”

“Oh, tosh,” Avarice replied with another wave of the the hand. “She’s been unknowingly ingesting them for almost a week now, and she’s still fine.”

Spike’s mouth fell open.

“In fact, they’re the same pills that she’s been giving to Pink—actually, no wait...” Avarice tapped his chin. “No, she just thinks she’s been giving them to Pinkie. Yeah, I replaced all her dream-repressing sedatives with visually identical placebos. Gotta make sure the psychopath has plenty to keep Twilight busy with to prevent her from tempting fate, don’t we? Especially when fate comes in the form of a little dragon with secrets that he’s just been dying to share.”

“WE HAD A DEAL!” Spike yelled.

“Pinkie’s severe anxiety and distress are the result of self-inflicted damage to her own abnormal psyche, and are in no way the result of my actions, either direct or indirect. Her subconscious, her problem. Our deal still stands,” Avarice touted.

Flames like boiling spittle dripped from in between Spike’s bared teeth.

“Yeah, try to light the inflammable dragon on fire while we’re in a library made from a tree,” Avarice remarked. “You know, if anything, I’ve been doing the two of you a favor. For one, I’ve been making sure Twilight gets her rest every night. Not getting enough sleep isn’t healthy, you know...”

Most of Spike’s view of Avarice was obstructed by his furrowed brow.

“And for another, I’m making sure she never gets the chance to use Dreamscape on you. She’s so inclined to using it on all her friends, so what’s keeping her from using it on her favorite, number one little slave whenever she wants?”

Spike was glowering with such intensity that it was starting to make his face hurt. “Twilight would never invade my dreams like that. Not without my permission.”

Avarice just stared at Spike for a few silent moments, his expression somewhat blank. Then an amused snort escaped his nostrils, then several more, then he burst out laughing. He turned, and kept laughing as he opened the window, left the bedroom, and disappeared from sight.

Spike still remained in place, now glaring at the closed window. He relaxed his leer only just, then whipped around and stomped back to bed, yanking the blanket back over him as he lay down> He was still fuming from the scorn and contempt that was ringing sour in his ears.

He’s full of it, Spike thought to himself. Twilight would never do that. She would—

A memory bolted from the stormclouds in his head. A charred corpse. Lifeless eyes. Despar. It struck him with searing pain, and he tried to bury it back into the shadows, but a realization boomed like thunder in its wake.

Things haven’t been the same between us ever since then…

He banished that thought back to the darkness of repression just as quickly.

No, he’s just trying to mess with my head. We both just suffered really bad dreams on the same night. Separate bad dreams. She would never use that spell on me without telling me. She would never… not Twilight…

Steel Shield, a hefty, blue-coated earth pony stallion and Ponyville Chief of Police, sat behind the desk in his still office with one foreleg resting on the surface and the other supporting his face, sculpting him as a statue of stress.

The sun had fallen long ago, arresting Equestria in shadow. Now he just sat and stared at the piles of paperwork before him: copies of case files that had to be rewritten after just about everything except for one particular piece of trace evidence had been either lost or destroyed last night. Ponies were contacted for second interviews, stories were retold, and scabs were ripped open.

His eyes had adjusted to the harsh light of his desk lamp long ago, his only company besides the stacks of case files, the sentinels of metal cabinets along the walls, the empty chairs in front of his desk, and the incessant tick of every single second that passed on the clock. He wasn’t just alone, he felt empty, and the siren song of the two-liter bottle of whiskey some jack-off kept leaving in the mess hall refrigerator to yank his chain wasn’t helping.

Steel glanced up at the grating clock: the time was ten fifty-seven. He shifted uneasily in his seat. He’d sent an officer with their trace evidence to an advanced forensics lab in Manehatten in an attempt to finally get an identification on a prime suspect. Her train should have gotten back at ten thirty though, and the station wasn’t that far away.

His gut twisted at the idea that the Celestia-damned thief might have gotten to her again. His mind mapped the streets, attempting to estimate how long it would take to trot to his office from the train station. A memory barged to the forefront of his thoughts like a wrecking ball through the wall.

The faint smell of wood soaked with gritty oil wafted through the air. The steam engine hissed in anticipation, yearning for the approaching moment when it would get to gallop away. The sun hung bright on this pleasant summer day, one that had no right to be so cheerful while the mare with the pastel pink coat and spring green mane before him looked at him with an agonizing frown and tears falling from her gorgeous emerald eyes…

Steel pushed the thought aside, exhaling heavily as the engorging sense of emptiness swept back in and the sinister whispers from his old friend Jack began tickling his ears again.

A knock on the office door interrupted the solitary silence. Steel jerked his head up immediately, eyes widened and ears alert.

“Come in.” Steel’s hasty reply betrayed his urgency.

The door swung open for a uniformed unicorn mare with a deep red coat and steely gray mane. She trotted inside and shut the door behind her with a hind leg, the movement sending small ripples through her toned flanks adorned with a red jousting spear imposed over a black and white circle.

“Crimson Lance,” Steel greeted her, straightening his posture and gesturing for the mare to take a seat. “How are you holding up?”

“Chief Shield,” Crimson replied, snapping a quick salute before pulling back a chair and sitting down at the front of the desk. “I’ve got a slight headache, and the back of my head still hurts, but I’ll be okay. Never mind that, though. How are you?”

“Fine,” Steel forced out.

Crimson nodded, then her eyes began to flicker away. “How, um… how’s your wife?”

Steel’s body tensed up as the pendulous wrecking ball swung back around.

“I’m sorry, Steel… I’m so sorry,” the pink mare whispered as she held on him the station platform, her tears dripping onto his cobalt blue coat, “but we have to leave for now.”

The whistle on the steam engine bellowed, shrill and piercing, making him wince. The mare pulled him in close one last time before reluctantly letting him go. A protective forehoof instinctively found its way to the contours of her distended abdomen.

“You know where we’ll be and how to get a hold of us,” she choked out. “We’ll come back when it’s safe, I promise.” Then she leaned back in to give him a pained farewell kiss.

“I love you, Steel.” she whispered.

“I love you too, Daisy,” he replied with a slight quiver as he fought to keep his voice controlled. “Both of you.”

“She’s safe now,” he replied, his words blunt. “Tell me you brought some good news with you back from Manehattan.”

Crimson’s eyebrows arched upward and she looked away nervously. “About that...”

Steel’s shoulders fell, like weights had been chained to them. “Don’t tell me...”

“Well, I’ve got good news, and bad news,” Crimson said as she withdrew a manilla folder from her saddlebag. “Before I left, did you get a chance to read the files on the evidence?”

“No. Refresh my memory,” Steel muttered.

“Well, it was our collection of foreign mana residue—leftover energy on objects that have been influenced by magic— taken from each scene,” Crimson explained. “It’s what first clued us in that our suspect is almost certainly a unicorn.”

Steel nodded. “Yeah, stuff’s supposed to be as good as a hoofprint if it matches somepony in the database… or it’s supposed to be. We couldn’t make an ID off of it. One of those lab coats find something we didn’t?”

“Not at first. They were having the same problem we were. The energy signatures in our samples were too complex to get an identification. But then one of the colts got the bright idea to take a sample from each separate scene and combine them to get a bigger readout. And that’s the good news: we got a match.”

Steel leaned forward, eyes wild with anticipation, straining for Crimson to offer something to unleash him. Just a name, that was all he needed: a positive identification, and then he and his team would be dragging that Tartarus-spawned thief into their darkest interrogation room within fifteen minutes, preferably after they’d turned the thief's door to splinters and ripped them out of their bed.

“Who is it?”

Crimson sighed in dismay, and reached into her saddle bag again.

“I’m afraid that’s the bad news, Sir,” she said as she withdrew a scroll. “Here’s the list of everypony that we got a match to.”

Crimson undid the seal on the scroll. Its bottom half rolled across the desk and onto the floor even while Crimson still firmly held the other end.

The emptiness in Chief Steel’s heart had moved to his head. His gaze darted between on end of the paper in Crimson’s magic and the other on the floor next to him before looking back at his subordinate with a glare.

“This supposed to be some kind of joke?” he brusquely inquired.

Crimson shook her head “No, sir. That’s what they first thought, but then we ran the test three more times. Each result was exactly the same.” She leaned back in her chair with a humph. “Accused me of trying to play some senseless joke on them.”

“Was the evidence tampered with?”

“No, sir,” Crimson repeated. “The seal on each container was perfectly intact.”

Steel’s bewildered gaze feel back down to the scroll, eying the wall of ink that had collapsed on top of him. One name in particular caught his attention.

“Dominus Cob? The fugitive?” Steel proclaimed, then did a double take at the name underneath it. “Mal Cob?! But… she’s dead!”

“Yeah,” Crimson muttered, “and she’s not the only one on that list with six feet of earth for an alibi. That’s not even the worst part, though.”

Crimson produced another stack of papers from her saddle bag and presented it to the chief. “We got numerous readings for signatures we couldn’t identify because some of them predate the database’s creation by years, others by decades. There are a few that appear to be from unicorns who died centuries ago. There’s even a notable amount of pegasus magic mixed up in there.”

Steel glossed over the complicated charts and graphs, his mind swimming in congealed discombobulation.

“What’s this?” Steel asked, pointing to two particular pieces of information on one of the sheets.

Crimson huffed in disarray. “Oh yeah, those… That really big one is from a unicorn that isn’t in the system but who wields fearsome amounts of power, and the one that pretty much underscores every single signature on there is something none of us could place. But based on its complexity, one of the coats hypothesized it came from—get this—an alicorn.”

Crimson looked at her superior with concern, contemplating asking permission to leave and go collect some paper towels least her boss’s brain start dribbling out of his open mouth. She sighed, and started flipping through the novella of documentations.

“And finally, one last thing to dump us into crapper creek without a boat, there’s this,” Crimson said, tapping the last sheet with her a hoof. “Just… this.”

Steel looked at the last page. It was a summary of the mana residue, their last hope of getting any sort of direction to finding out who the thief was. Displayed clearly in two boxes were the words:

SPECIES: N/A
RACE: N/A

“What?” The word stupidly tumbled out of Chief Shield’s gaping mouth, leaving an aftertaste of gray matter.

“Yep,” Crimson remarked, perturbed. “All that crap we got is saturated with magic, and the stupid tests can’t even tell what the thing using all that power even is.”

Silence befell the office like the night’s ubiquitous darkness, opening the stage to the ceaseless, wracking ticking gently cutting through the noiseless air.

Crimson looked at Steel, absentmindedly pouring over the almanac of ill reports with a glossy, distant, forlorn look in his eyes. He reminded her of a lonely drunk sitting in the shadiest corner of a tavern, surrounded by empty glasses, empty seats, and accompanied only by an empty wallet.

“Well, we did get at least one new lead,” Crimson mentioned, trying to dissipate the dispondant atmosphere.

“Hm, and what’s that?” Steel asked, spirits only slightly raised.

“Just about everypony on the list of names we were able to match has or had some connection to academia—lots of renowned names in fields of science, magic, zoology, and the like. The majority of them are or were based in Canterlot, and the largest group of identified individuals all tie back to—get this—Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.”

Steel hummed and pensively tapped his chin. “That is something… always a silver lining, huh?” he grumbled.

“Yeah...” Crimson let her sentence hang as she looked over the chief’s shoulder at the window, then checked the door behind her. “Sir, permission to speak freely?”

Steel eyed Crimson for a second, curious. “Granted...”

Crimson leaned in closer. Her voice grew quiet and her expression became deathly serious. “Sir, I don’t mean to sound like some storm cloud or say something you probably already know, but… I think we’re in way over our heads. Every time we make a move, our guy just keeps pushing back harder until we get crap like last night. And instead of taking everything we had, they leave that one piece that should close the case, like they knew what we’d learn from it. And I’m willing to bet if we go where these leads take us, he’s going to have some wicked curve already set up. We’re just small town cops, chief. We aren’t equipped to deal with somepony like this.”

Steel nodded warily. “Right. This needs to be taken higher up.”

“Unless this guy suddenly grows a conscience and turns himself in, that’s what I was thinking we’d eventually have to do,” Crimson agreed. “So where do you have in mind? Detrot? Fillydelphia? Or do you want me to head back to Manehattan tomorrow?”

“No,” Steel said with a slight growl as he picked his quill back up and procured a new sheet of parchment. “I’m thinking the Royal Guard.”

Crimson let out a low whistle. “That is high up.”

“If our investigation is going to take us to Canterlot, we’re going to end up having to play with the home team sooner or later. Besides, if this thief was somehow able to get a hold of magic from almost every prominent unicorn in the last few centuries, and if that pencil pusher was right and the thief was able to get a hold of alicorn mana, after the Canterlot invasion, no less… this thief isn’t just a criminal: they’re a threat to national security.”

Crimson’s brows arched up over her wide-open eyes as she mouthed some curse word. “That’s deep… and that just makes this thief so darn confusing. I mean, they’ve got access to magic from hundreds of unicorns, potentially one of the princesses, and they’re using it for what? Petty theft? Occasional assault and battery? That’s what really scares me about this guy, chief—the thought that for everything that this thief is capable of, they’re actually holding back.”

Steel didn’t move: he couldn’t. The chain on the wrecking ball had snapped, and the forged wrought iron sphere had fallen on him. The thought that the thief was holding back, that they were capable of so much worse… worse than his patrol getting back to the station early that morning, only to hear Daisy’s panicked, terrified screams…

“I’m sorry.”

Steel twitched, looking back at Crimson after her interruption ripped him from the muskeg of his own dread.

“I’m sorry about last night, Chief. I’m no action hero, but I’m still a cop. I’m supposed to serve and protect. I should have been able to do something, but instead, I wake up in one of the jail cells without even remembering how I got there.” Crimson looked down in shame. “So, I’m sorry about last night. About not being able to do more to prevent it. About you… about your wife...”

Steel’s felt his throat star to go dry, and the urge to get something strong to sooth it had reemerged as he silently cursed the intuition of mares.

“Don’t be. Wasn’t your fault,” he forced out.

Crimson looked back at Steel. The empathy pouring out of her eyes hurt him a lot more than he cared to admit.

“Still doesn’t mean I can’t feel sorry for you.”

Steel froze. That stench of oil-stained wood was beginning to stink up the air again.

Crimson exhaled a little sigh, then got up out of her seat, collecting the sheets of paper she had brought in with her. “Well, I have to finish my report for the day and file this new evidence. Is there anything else you need me to attend to?”

“No, officer, that’ll be all. Dismissed”

Crimson bowed her head. “I’ll check back in with you before I leave,” she said, then turned around, trotted back to the door, and opened it.

“Ms. Lance?”

Crimson looked back over her shoulder. “Yes Sir?”

Steel took a moment before speaking again. “Do you know if that bottle of whiskey is still in the refrigerator?”

“Oh yeah, that.” Crimson hacked in distaste. “Don’t know about now, but it was still in there when I checked this morning. Why, do you want me to throw it out?”

“No, I’ll deal with it. Thanks.”

Crimson walked out the door, then performed an about face one last time. “Steel… I know things look really bleak right now, but don’t worry. In time, we will find the thief.”

Crimson Lance departed, leaving Chief Shield alone in his office again, ensconced in a silence broken only the persistent, perpetual tick-tock, tick-tock. Steel looked back down at his blank paper, then blotted out the clicks with the sound of his quill scratching out the severity of the situation in Ponyville and requisitioning aid. As the ink dried, he took out an envelope and addressed it to none other than the captain of the guard himself.

Steel placed the letter and envelope in his desk, locked the drawer, then got up from his chair, stretched his stiff joints, then started walking towards the door with the intent to wish Crimson good night and Celestial speed before he was to make a visit to the refrigerator in the mess hall.

I’m pouring that blasted whiskey down the toilet, he thought to himself.

Crimson’s knock came from the office door just as Steel got within its radius.

“Yes, Crimson?” Steel asked.

The handle twisted, and the door swung violently open, almost hitting Steel in the face. Steel jumped back and stared wide eyed through the entryway. He knew Officer Lance well, and she was most certainly not the dragon glaring at him.

Steel’s mouth fell open in shock. “What are you—”

Avarice punched Steel right in the throat, killing his voice. The chief stumbled back, wheezing, stunned from the blow. Avarice stepped over the threshold and front-kicked Steel on his forward barrel, sending him crashing into his desk on the other side of the room. Avarice looked back at the door while Steel attempted to get back on his hooves, silently ordering a command to follow with a petulant jerk of the head. Spike then entered, breathing rapid and body trembling.

Avarice held a hand up to his face and forcefully blew a puff of fire into his hand. The flames twisted until they formed a rune, then Avarice pushed the burning glyph into Spike’s face.

“Put that on the door, then lock it,” he ordered.

“B-but—”

“NOW.”

Spike whimpered and grabbed the incendiary symbol to do what he was told. Steel had gotten back on his hooves, and observed the two with tense disconcertion. Avarice looked at Steel, smirked devilishly, and held his arms out in proud proclamation.

“I believe you’ve been looking for me.”

Steel’s eyes ripped wide open. Rage sparked within them, and his shock burned away for fury. Steel growled, unable to speak, and charged at Avarice like a rampaging bull.

Avarice’s lips peeled back in a wicked grin. He twisted and swung an arm at Steel, catching the stallion on his jaw and sending him stumbling off course. Avarice grabbed Steel while he still wasn’t on all his hooves and sunk a knee into the pony’s gut, then slammed him to the ground on his back. Steel’s breathing was coming in ragged, desperate gasps as Avarice loomed over him.

“Good evening, Chief Shield.” Avarice’s toxic words dripped from his mouth with such thickness that they could be drizzled onto pancakes and used to poison somepony. “I’ve scheduled this appointment to arrange a deal wi—”

Steel’s pernicious forehoof flew towards his attacker. Avarice deflected the strike with the backside of his hand, then grabbed Steel’s leg just below the knee with his other hand and twisted his wrists. There was a muffed snap as Steel’s cannon bent into an angle. He writhed on the floor, whinnying in pain. The sounds of his agony were muted by Avarice grabbing him by the muzzle, forcing his jaws shut while Avarice’s palm covered Steel’s mouth.

“Now then,” Avarice spoke with annoyance in his tone, “if you would quit with the horseplay so we can get down to busine—”

Steel’s hind leg bucked out. Avarice dodged it with a side step without taking his hand off Steel’s mouth. Avarice growled at Steel, then brought his other fist down on the pony’s extended ankle. There was another crack, followed by more agonized neighs cut short by Avarice grasping Steel by the throat—not constricting the windpipe, but allowing his claws to puncture the skin.

“My claws can dig gemstones out of bedrock. Ripping your esophagus from your neck and showing it to you wouldn’t even take effort,” Avarice growled. “We soundproofed this room before we came in, and that rune I had my ‘friend’ put on the door will keep anyone else from getting in or out so long as I’m still here.”

Avarice looked to at Spike and smirked. “Thanks for the help, Spike.”

Confusion seeped into the anger and pain in Steel’s eyes. He chanced a glance at Spike, who was busy trying to disappear into the walls.

“Enough about him, though. You and I have a one-sided conversation to discuss.” Avarice leaned closer to Steel’s face, muzzle like an executioners axe. “Now then, you’re going to deliver your requisition to my accomplice here at the Golden Oaks Library instead of the Equestrian Postal Service. He will subsequently provide you with a forged reply from the Guard, stating that your request has been denied, citing disbelief over the validity of your claims, and that the Guard is still too busy waging its unctuous inquisition against every shadow within twenty miles of Canterlot out of paranoia that one of them might be hiding a changeling.”

Steel glared acidic daggers at Avarice in a futile attempt to slay him with his hate. Avarice returned with a leer of his own, pushing Steel further into the ground and emphasizing his threats with even more deadly venom.

“There’s something you should know about me. I’ve lived my entire life in a state of repression, and it’s made me rather volatile. Dragons are revered for having a queen’s ransom worth of treasure in their hoards, and here I am, stuck in this shantytown, reduced to taking the things you ponies treasure. But procuring whatever cherished possessions I can get my claws on is the one time I get to live like a real dragon. It means a lot to me. You take that away, and I might just snap, then stomp from building to building, ferociously incinerating property and fellow pony alike into unidentifiable piles of ash.”

The chief struggled in fury. Avarice forced his claws just a little more through the soft flesh of Steel’s throat, making tiny streams of blood trickle down his neck.

“But I’m not above negotiating. That’s why we came here tonight to make you a deal. You do as I instruct and don’t get any more in the way of what I find valuable, and I’ll show indifference to the two things that you value most.” A malicious smirk appeared on Avarice’s face. “Speaking of which, how is your wife?”

Steel redoubled his vain efforts to break free, whinnying in animosity. Avarice just grinned and laughed.

“You should have seen the look on her face when I dragged her out of bed that night. To Tartarus with incriminating evidence—it was worth it to bring that camera along, because her terrified expression was priceless.” Avarice chuckled deviously. “That’s the one immaterial possession I’ve loved taking more than anything from you grass-munchers—your illusion of safety.”

Steel thrashed around under Avarice’s grasp as much as his wounded state allowed him to. Avarice kicked him in the ribs, forcing the air from his lungs.

“Save the knight in shining armor act for someone who’ll be impressed by it. Because it’s not going to work on me if it didn’t even work for Daisy before she fled town for Orange Country like a scared little foal to go hide in her mother’s house.”

Steel froze, his expression cold and calcified. The chief tried to retain an expression of righteous anger, but Spike knew that Avarice’s words had driven a frigid dagger of fear into his heart. He knew Avarice had caught it too, because his vile smirk became even more toxic.

A brief flash of blinding light burned Spike’s corneas. When the afterimage cleared, he saw Avarice putting away his camera before he turned his full attention back towards the chief.

“What? Did you think I orchestrated what we pulled off last night just because I thought it’d be fun? Okay, that was part of it, but knowing what you know now, do you think a predator species like me goes hunting just to play catch and release, or that I would be content to let Daisy take back her incorporeal security blanket of blissful ignorance after I so gleefully ripped her from it? No, she’s not safe: not at her mother’s, not with her sister in Fillydelphia, not in the Haywaiian timeshare beach house where you two spent your honeymoon, not even at the Sophisticate’s Lodge down in the Aegrus Jungles with her uncle Hammerlock. But you can barter for her safety by agreeing to my terms.”

Steel’s cold expression grew even more spiteful. Avarice growled in response, then pulled Steel’s head up by the muzzle and slammed in back onto the floor..

“I didn’t drag your wife here last night just so we could have this little talk. I wanted you to see, to know that I’m more than capable of just taking your possessions, or your life… I can take your reasons to live. So nod ‘yes’ if you agree, or just lie there like a dead fetus and tell me that you don’t care if I go perform a premature c-section.”

Steel was shaking with hate. His breathing came in ragged, deep inhalations. A tear of frustration fell from his eye.

“Three… two...”

Steel let out a tortured whine, then nodded.

Avarice let out a rumbling, victorious purr. “Good. Pleasure doing business with you. Now to tie up one loose end...” He reared his head back, breathing in the deep, flammable air.

Spike’s heart leapt with fear. He darted forward with an outstretched arm. “No, don’t—!”

He was too late. Avarice looked back down at Steel and enveloped him in a corona of vicious red fire, bathing the room in an angry glow.

Spike stared, feet nailed to the floor. The fire dispersed, and Spike sucked in a shocked breath of air to replace the one that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

Steel still lay on the floor, perfectly unharmed, completely still, staring up at the ceiling with cold terror pouring from his wide open eyes. There were no bruises, no puncture marks on his neck nor trails of blood dripping down it. His coat wasted even tussled.

Avarice picked up Steel’s broken foreleg, only now the cannon was no longer bent at an angle that shouldn’t have been there. He tested the bone by prodding Steel’s leg with his fingers, finding no discrepancy and receiving no sharp intakes of breath from the chief. Then Avarice inspected Steel’s hind hoof, bending it experimentally. It functioned just like a hoof without a shattered joint would. Steel just lay there the whole time, completely unmoving, letting the examination proceed uncontested.

“There,” Avarice said with a smirk, “good as new. Can’t have anyone thinking you’ve been coerced with foul play now, can we?” He moved over to the desk and pulled back into it’s original place. “Your paralysis will wear off in a few minutes. Oh, and just to ensure one stipulation of our deal is made abundantly clear, you are in no way to either directly or indirectly disclose any information of me or this occurrence to anyone. Doing otherwise is liable to ignite my primal fury and send me on an omnicidal rampage—one that I guarantee I won’t have subsided from by the time I reach suite 1069 of the New Haven condominium complex on 101 East Park Boulevard, Orange Country.”

The abject dread gushing from Steel’s eyes hadn’t abated by a fraction. Avarice walked back to him, got down on one knee, and patted him on the head.

“Hey, don’t feel so bad. Your wife and that gooey little fetus she may one day push screaming out of her fat ass are now relatively safe thanks to the agreement you made with the predator that you’re powerless to apprehend. I even brought you an old friend to celebrate your menial victory with.”

Avarice unfurled one of his wings and withdrew a bottle of whiskey that had been capped with a shot glass. He smirked devilishly and set the container of old fire water down on Steel’s desk.

“Oh, and congratulations on the foal, by the way. Maybe you’ll get lucky this time and not end up with another stillborn.”

Avarice began walking around the desk towards the window, whistling the chorus melody for ‘Bicycle Built For Two.’ He opened the window, stuck a single leg through, then looked back to the office door.

“Come on, Spike. We’re leaving.”

Spike moved towards the window, slinking along the shadows of the wall with hands twisting as icy bees stung his little legs, sending their freezing venom coursing through his veins.

Avarice ducked through the window, silently slithering back into the shadows of night. Spike followed, slowly hoisting himself up to the window sill. He got one leg through, and found himself at pause, another dry stone forming in his throat. He knew he shouldn’t, but he dared a glance back at the immobilized chief.

Steel Shield was looking right back at him. Loathing still resided in his eyes, but he no longer possessed the strength to express it. In its place was a forlorn misery that Spike knew all too well.

Click. Flash. Another picture for the album.

Avarice grabbed Spike by the arm, pulled him down from his seat on the sill, and yanked the window shut.

Darkness. A mouth filled with cotton. Her cheek pressed painfully up against an annoyed desk and a sudden stab in her spine.

Officer Crimson Lance let out a tired groan as she pulled her head from off her desk and peeled her last report from her face

Celestia, was I really that tired? she groggily wondered to herself, straightening her wrinkled uniform and rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she glanced at the clock. She gasped.

It was well past midnight.

“Shoot!” Crimson hissed. She hurriedly scribbled a signature onto her reports, shoved them into a folder, slapped them down into the file tray on her desk and bolted out the door. All she could think about for the moment was her boyfriend, sitting in her house with all the lights turned on, wearily pacing as he kept glancing at the clock, wondering with mounting anxiety where his little ‘Rubi’ was.

Oh, Scorpio’s got to be worried sick about me! she thought as she cantered down the hall.

Scorpio, a very punctual and pragmatic stallion, was part of the Royal Guard Reserves. He had insisted on house-sitting for her when she told him about having to leave town for the day on business, and that she wouldn’t get back until late at night. She had argued, but eventually caved to his stubbornness: not out of agreeing to his logic, but out of guilt. She knew he wasn’t as concerned for her belongings as much as he was that she might come home to find somepony else already there, and no matter how strong she aspired to be, that frilly little filly in her heart of hearts couldn’t help but adore his honor-bound sense that he had to always protect her… And there she was, unable to bring herself to tell him about what happened at the station not twenty-four hours ago…

Crimson reached the unassuming door of Chief Shield’s office and quickly rapped upon it.

“Chief Shield? It’s Officer Lance.”

No reply came from the other side.

“Chief Shield?” Crimson inquired, knocking again. “I finished my reports. Just checking in with you before I head home.”

Still nothing.

Crimson frowned. “Chief?… Requesting permission to enter, Sir.”

Nothing.

The fur on the back of her neck had begun to stand on end, and her tail twitched in nervous anticipation as she grasped the handle with her magic. Her heart started to pound. She diverted some focus from her horn to the baton at her side should she come face to face with with a certain uninvited guest who had let themselves in again…

Crimson slowly pushed the door open, holding her breath.

“Chief? Are you alri—” Crimson’s question died in her throat with a gasp.

The glow of the lone desk lamp was beleaguered by shadows, cutting the image of Chief Shield from the cold, noir scene. He sat in his chair with the posture of a soggy rag doll, a lackadaisical hoof  wrapped around the half-empty bottle of whiskey.

Steel raised his head to look at Crimson. The low lighting drifted across the contours of his face, accentuating the creases of misery gouged out from it. He met her worried eyes with glassy, bloodshot orbs, the eyes of a pony with a hoof in the grave.

Crimson stood with her mouth open, tears tugging at the corners of her eyes, and a bleeding heart helplessly fluttering on broken wings. She had thought she’d felt sorry for Steel in the dark of the previous night, when she had watched him hold his wife, futilely trying to subside her weeping hysteria. She couldn’t even measure her pity for him now.

Avarice swept up to the shadowy back door of the Golden Oaks Library in deathly silence before turning to scour the sight of the surrounding township, checking for signs of potential witnesses. There were none others than Spike, who followed with a staggered jog, then slumped up against the shed. His breathing bordered on hyperventilation, and his abdominal muscles were visibly convulsing, contemplating disgorging the meal he hadn’t consumed.

“What’s wrong with you?” Avarice asked.

Air was coming to Spike in irregular gasps, his distant eyes lost in the murky past. Several fevered inhalations passed before he responded.

“I feel sick...” Spike muttered, choking back bile.

“I know, right?” Avarice huffed. “Being around ponies for this long tends to have that effect.”

Spike looked back up at Avarice. His perception returned to the present, bring an indignant fire along with them.

“No, no, NO! I’m sick of all this! I’m sick of not being able to talk to my friends about what’s tearing me up inside, I’m sick of taking part in all these crimes, and most of all, I’m sick of you!”

Spike’s breath was coming in heaves through flared nostrils and bared teeth. “I can’t do this anymore, Avarice! I can’t! I’m done! Screw the stealing, and screw you!”

Spike snapped his head away and began stomping towards the door, fuming in his thoughts.

That’s it. If he can use his weird fire-magic-rune-stuff to soundproof a room, then so can Twilight. Next time I have the chance to tell her everything, I’m taking it.

Spike grabbed the handle to the door, twisted it, and yanked back to rip the door open. The door opened a crack, then slammed shut again. He looked up. Avarice had one hand pressed up against the top of the door, effortlessly keeping it closed.

“Hey, let go!” Spike growled.

Avarice said nothing and just nonchalantly admired the claws on his free hand.

Spike was trembling in rage. “I—”

“Applejack wakes up the earliest out of all your friends, doesn’t she?” Avarice asked, not taking his eyes off his claws. Spike didn’t answer.

“This time of year, she’s up at about five in the morning to meet the sun when it rises over the orchards for another day in apple-bucking season… and don’t try to prevaricate. You know it, so I know it.”

Spike remained quiet, hand still on the door handle as Avarice spoke.

“She’ll trot out into the orchard and breathe in to relish the smell of the apples mingling with the morning dew on the grass. She’ll smile, rear up, and buck the first tree of the day with a satisfying thwack, then something will fall from the tree that breaks both her hind legs. She’ll scream in pain and reel around, and through her tears, she’ll see me.

“She’ll try to fight back as I bear down on her, but her loss of mobility and primary limbs for defense will ensure there’s little she can do to keep me from breaking her other legs, maybe even her back for good measure.

“Her screams will have drawn some attention by now, and her brother will come barreling into the clearing. He’ll make the connection immediately, then his otherwise vacant face will contort with that righteous fury that I utterly despise but do so very much love taking away. Applejack might try to dissuade him, but he’ll charge at me, and I’ll extinguish his hero complex with flames in excess of two thousand degrees. Big Macintosh will be dead before Applejack will even have the chance to plead for his life or choke out her last goodbye, but it won’t stop me from catching his conflagrant corpse, hurling it against one of the trees, then scorching it again when I set the rest of the grove on fire.

“At this point, Fluttershy will have seen the pillars of smoke from her cottage and come flying over here as fast as her atrophied wings can allow her. Applejack will scream out for her to fly away and get help. Maybe she’ll listen, but she won’t get far. Or maybe she’ll become so enraged with her moral indignations that Captain Mama Bear will instead swoop in and try to use her stare on me. It won’t work, either. I’ve prepared for that.”

Avarice blinked his secondary transparent eyelids. Small runes of fire appeared around his irises. He opened them back up again, then continued.

“Either way, Fluttershy will fail. I’ll swat her out of the air, break her legs, then put compound fractures into her wings. She’ll try crying out for the packs of animals that she’s become dependant upon to feel good about herself to come save her. But having to incinerate them all would be more trouble than it’s worth, so I’ll just have to rip out the fractured bones sticking through her bloody feathers and puncture her throat with them.

“And with that, I’ll take my leave. But before I go, I’ll take a moment to look back and admire the sight. Fluttershy with be futilely gasping for air while Applejack will hardly be able to focus on me through the stream of tears pouring from her eyes. Their expressions may be varied, though both of them will have the look of hopeless sorrow that comes with the feeling of weightlessness right before plummeting into the abyss of death. They’ll look up at me, and with their silent eyes, plead to know why their lives were so viciously cut short.

“I’ll just give them that smirk of mine, turn back around, and say, ‘We had a deal. I wouldn’t kill any of you if he promised to never reveal any knowledge that he had about the thief… and Spike just broke his promise.’ I’ll take a picture of them, and then I’ll disappear into the flames.”

Spike’s pupils had contracted to razor slits cut from the iris. His mouth hung open, corners pulled down, and his breathing quivered from the terrified shivers that racked his body. His fist was still clenched tightly around the door handle, knuckles having gone white.

Avarice got closer to the ground, burning Spike with his glare. “Say one word, I dare you. Just one word, and I swear I will make it happen. So unless you want to see which one of the dozens of methods I’ve planned to ultimately end Twilight, you will remain SILENT.”

Avarice reached out and grabbed Spike by the ridges between his shoulder blades, opened the door, and carried him all the way to the bathroom upstairs. He dropped the little dragon into the tub, cranked the hot water to full, then turned to leave, forcefully setting Spike’s marble on the counter as he passed.

Spike stared off into the distance. The jets of scalding water did nothing to invigorate his senses, numb with freezing terror. Several tense moments passed with Spike sitting amidst the burning water and steam, still shivering, until a cold needle of thought entered his mind, making him realize he hadn’t heard the door close.

With dreadful slowness, Spike turned his head to look. Avarice was still at the sink, peering into the mirror above it and thoroughly analyzing his reflection. His eyes would periodically flicker over to Spike, scrutinizing him for a second before returning to the mirror. Avarice eventually turned his head to look dead on at Spike, and he adorned an amused, crooked smirk.

“We have the exact same eyes,” Avarice said, then turned and left the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

Spike was left unmoving in the sweltering streams of the shower, still shivering cold. His vision blurred and he began to feel dizzy. At that moment he realized he’d been holding his breath, so he began sucking down air in desperate, shallow gasps. His heart raced like it was trying to escape his ribcage. A ringing trill grew in his ears until it became deafening. Feelings of detachment from his own body swept over him as a tidal wave of anxiety crashed down upon his brain, ripping his mind apart at the seams.

Spike clamped his eyes shut, desperate for focus while his cells were being picked to pieces.

“Twilight, I need to tell you something...”

Another tsunami of despair came down upon him, and in its wake brought a vision.

Avarice went downstairs to the kitchen, equipped the sharpest knife they owned, then traveled back upstairs to Twilight’s bedroom. He walked over to her bed, covered her muzzle with one hand, and then sliced her throat open, holding her down as she struggled and rapidly bled out.

He frantically attempted to push the thought out of his mind.

“Twilight, I… I got involved in… in something terrible...”

Another nightmare overtook his perception.

The four of them were sitting at the table for another forgone meal. Twilight took a bite from her food, took a drink from her glass, then keeled over, falling to the floor. Pinkie, Owloysius, and he rushed to her side as she violently convulsed, foam erupting from her mouth. She exhaled a rattling breath of air, and then stopped moving completely.

“There’s a-another me, Twilight. A-an evil version of me n-named… named Avarice...”

Twilight was easing herself into the warm waters of the bathtub with a relaxing sign. Suddenly, fiery runes appeared around the rim of the tub, then bolts of lightning shot out from them. Twilight went stiff as the electricity surged through her, then she fell beneath the surface of the water, and did not reemerge.

“H-he showed up after m-my birthday… h-he used to just be t-trapped in my mind, b-but he got out somehow...”

“Spike, could you get me We Build Our Own Worlds by Dominus Cob?” Twilight asked.

She received the book by getting it violently thrown at her head, making her cry out in pain. Before she could recover from the blow, Avarice pounced upon her, bit down on her neck, and ripped out her throat.

“A-all t-the stealing… a-all the p-ponies getting h-hurt… h-he’s b-behind ev… everything...”

Twilight was leaving the library to go tell her friends that a new villain had appeared in Equestria: one who was personally out to get them. She didn’t even get off the porch before Avarice leapt from the foliage, toppled her over, plunged his claws into her ribcage, and ripped her heart right out of her chest.

“A-and he… h-he’s make… making m-me d-do i-it t-too...”

Twilight’s face was scrunched up in concentration as she used her magic to operate several intricate circles of glowing runes that had inexplicably appeared on the floor. The runes lit up brightly, then disappeared, illuminating the crevices between the floorboards. She pried them open, and gasped at the vast trove of stolen goods hidden within the deep entrenchment.

The door to the kitchen was blasted off its hinges, revealing an enraged Avarice. He snarled and charged at her. Twilight lit her horn to cast a counter-offensive spell, but Avarice cleared the distance and delivered a wicked punch to her face. Twilight’s spell misfired and blasted the nearby shelves. Avarice grabbed her by the horn, and broke it right off of her head.

Twilight screamed ear-splitting shrieks as an explosive discharge of raw mana erupted from the stump. Avarice grabbed her by the head, pushed it down, and plunged her severed horn into the base of her skull. The surges of mana sputtered out, and Twilight went limp in his grasp.

“Please, Twilight…  please help me...”

Twilight looked at Spike, visibly shaken by everything he had just told her, but the resolve blooming in her eyes began to strip away his woes like the sunlight banishing the darkness, and she smiled at him.

“Of course, Spike. I’ll help you.”

“No, you’re only going to die.”

The two of them snapped their attention to Avarice, his shadow looming over them like a demonic executioner. Twilight bared her teeth at him and shot a powerful blast of magic from her horn at him. Avarice roared out an inferno that overtook Twilight’s attack and bathed her in flames that did not relent until her agonized screams left his ears.

Parts of the blackened library floor were still burning as Twilight’s charred, nearly unrecognizable corpse fell into his arms. But her eyes were still intact, bearing with them her final expression: a visage of terror, suffering, loss, and failure.

And it was all his fault.

An anguished cry filled the bathroom as Spike pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his tail around his ankles, buried his face into his hands, and wept bitterly.

No one heard his cries. No one came to help. No one came to pull him close, wipe away his tears, and soothe him with those sweet little lies that everything would be alright.

Spike had no one to turn to. So Spike bitterly wept alone.

Thick darkness smothered her in its warm embrace. Her limbs felt like lead, and to merely open her eyes was to pry open a portcullis. She wasn’t even sure if she was awake or still asleep at the moment: her slumber was stripping away with such a torpid pace that she found herself in an uncanny extended stay in the purgatory of hypnagogia.

With great effort, Twilight stirred, straining to open her eyes. Her head was half submerged into her fluffy pillows, and her blankets had been pulled up to her neck.

She jerked her head up from the plush cushions, and immediately winced. She held a hoof to her head in a measly effort to relieve the pressure from the weight of the brick in her skull. Her thirsty tongue rolled around in her parched mouth, searching in vain for moisture.

Twilight gingerly rubbed her eyes, vision adjusting to the dark moonlight, ears flicking to rouse her sense of hearing. When some semblance of alertness returned, she saw Spike’s empty bed, and heard the muffled hiss of water flowing through the pipes in the bathroom.

Twilight exhaled a defeated, somber sigh, and collapsed back into the soft sea below her.

I let Spike down, again… AGAIN! How many times do I have to keep dropping the ball? 

Twilight let out a tired, frustrated moan. She couldn’t even remember actually getting into bed that night. She had absolutely no intention of doing so. The way Spike had become so quiet and withdrawn over the last few days was a clear indication to her that she needed to start finding solutions to his problem immediately. But shortly after her last session of Dreamscape with her friends and dinner, a sudden wave of inexplicable weariness overtook her, and after that… She couldn’t remember anything after that.

First the death glitch, now thi—okay, this is no death glitch, but now I’ve got to see if a side effect of using Dreamscape this much is narcolepsy. Twilight pulled her blankets back around her, and let out another frustrated sigh. Here I am, letting Spike down on a daily basis, and he goes out of his way to drag me all the way into bed and tuck me in…

A delicate prod at her own cognition revealed that Reason was still fast asleep

I should just leave her be, Twilight thought to herself. I don’t need her telling me things I already know right now.

Twilight felt too weary and drained to use any complicated magic, so she wouldn’t have been able to use Dreamscape even if Spike was in bed. So she just lay there, breathing in the refreshing smell of fabric softener and the stench of her cold, palpable guilt that saturated the silence.

Wait… silence?

With a jolt, Twilight realized the shower had shut off. She lifted her head up again, ears swivelling in the dark. Nothing.

She craned her neck, straining against the silence to hear something. Still nothing.

Twilight held her breath and tried to zone out the sound of her own pulse pumping through her ears, almost desperate to discern any noises.

Then, something. Twilight caught the faint sound of a step, then a gentle scrap of claws against wood. Then another, slightly louder this time. Then another, getting closer to the door.

Twilight forced her head back down into the pillow, pulled the blankets in tight around her, willed her breathing to slow, and shut her eyes. The footsteps were right outside the door now. She stiffened the muscles in her ears, forcing them to remain still.

Several tense seconds passed, then there was a rattle of a twisting handle and a gentle creak of a door opening, then closing. Then silence again. Twilight kept her eyes closed, suddenly finding difficulty in keeping her face placid. She could feel Spike watching her, staring at her. For some reason, it made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

Scraping claws broke the silence again. Twilight fought to keep her ears from following them as she heard them travel over to Spike’s bed. There was a pause, another tingle of electricity as she sensed eyes upon her once more, then there was a rustle of moving fabric.

Twilight cracked open one of her eyes. She could only see Spike’s silhouette through the darkness. He stood over his bed with a slumped posture, slowly peeling away the sheets on his bed, his back to her. Twilight made her move.

“Spike?”

Her ears twitched towards the sound of a sharp inhalation. Spike’s head jerked up in surprise, and his body tensed up at her query.

“What?”

Twilight was instantly at full alert when she caught the tone in Spike’s voice. She knew he must have known it was there to by the way he tried to hide it halfway through his response, but to her, the thick, strained timbre in his suppressed inflection was unmistakable: he’d been crying. Hard.

“Spike, would you come here, please?” Twilight asked, her tone soft and cordial.

She heard a small gulp before he responded. “Why?”

“I need to talk to you about something,” Twilight said, igniting the candle by her bedside. “Please, it’s important.”

“I’d rather not,” Spike mumbled back: words spoken from behind a wall.

“Spike, please...”

A thick silence followed, hanging in the air. Twilight could hear her own pounding pulse again as she waited for an answer.

Spike exhaled a reluctant sigh. His little form began plodding through the darkness to her. He reached the bed, pulled himself up onto the mattress, and slouched back over again, distant gaze never quite meeting Twilight’s line of sight.

“What do you want?” he muttered, distant. “You’ve got no reason to talk to me unless you want something.”

The gasp Twilight had to restrain upon seeing him in the light almost kept her from hearing Spike’s terse inquiry. One look at him made her completely forget what she had been planning on saying. Limp limbs, subdued posture, a poorly concealed tragedy mask where his face should have been, and those eyes... She forgot for a moment how Avarice had a matching set as she really got a good look at his eyes: bloodshot wells of frustration and anguish looking back at her, but never focusing on her, like he was looking past her into another plane entirely. The mere sight of him was heartbreaking. Part of her wanted to forgo words and just pull him in close and hold him until the terrible sight of his pain was gone.

“I—” Twilight’s throat hitched, reminding her how dry her mouth felt. “I… Spike, I’m sorry.”

Twilight sighed, and hung her head in shame. “I know we haven’t been on the best of terms recently, and that’s entirely my fault. I haven’t been there for you the way I should be, and the fact that I know you well enough to know when you’ve got a serious problem just makes my negligence even worse. I… I don’t know what it is, but I know whatever is troubling you is causing you severe emotional pain, and it breaks my heart to see you hurting so badly.

“I promise, from here on out, I’m going to focus more on your wellbeing. And as soon as we’ve finished taking care of Pinkie, I’ll devote my full attention to making sure you can be happy again. I care about you, Spike, and I can’t bear to see you suffering like this.”

Spike dry-swallowed again and looked away. His breath shuddered, and his tail curled into his hand, where he began to fidget with the spade at the end. When he spoke again, there was an anxious quiver in his voice.

“In that case… I want to ask you something… something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now...”

Twilight sucked in a little gasp. Her heart skipped a beat and her eyes grew wide in anticipation.

“Yes, Spike? What is it?” Twilight asked as she leaned in closer, her heart racing. Is he finally going to ask me to help him fight Avarice?

The muscles in Spike’s neck twitched again, holding back something that was fighting to get out.

“I… I’ve been meaning to… there’s… I...” he stammered. Spike clenched his eyelids shut as he looked away and his entire body tensed up. Several agonizing seconds passed as he held his conflicted pose, then his body relaxed as he exhaled a pained sigh.

Twilights heart sank. He’s not going to ask…

Spike opened his eyes, whipped his head back around to Twilight, and blurted: “How did you escape from limbo?”

Twilight reeled back in surprise from the sudden exclamation. The sudden jolt to her pulse subsided, then fell again when the question wasn’t the one she wanted to hear.

“Oh… that. Well, I—wait…” Another red flag sprung up, and Twilight peered at Spike quizzically. “Spike, how did you know about limbo?”

Spike’s throat constricted as he shied away. He hugged his tail to his chest, just like he always did when he’d been caught doing something wrong, and blinked once. “Okay, don’t get mad, but… I looked through your notes today before I locked them back up like you told me, because I wanted to know if that dream spell has something to do with how you’ve been acting around me. That’s when I found this one entry… about an empty world, with nothing but loneliness to keep you company...”

Twilight froze. The warm concern in Spike’s words was opening up the cracks in her heart.

“Is that why you’ve been so nervous and irritable around me lately?” Spike asked.

Twilight sniffed involuntarily. Tears from old wounds had begun to sting her eyes and her throat was almost too dry to answer.

“Y-yes Spike, it is.”

“So how did you manage to escape?” Spike asked again, leaning in closer.

Twilight looked down and sighed. “To be honest, I don’t really know. Based on what I know about Dreamscape and my documentation of its effects, it’s a miracle I ever woke up at all.”

“So what am I supposed to do if you ever got trapped there again?” Spike inquired, his eyes finally focusing on her. “How do I get you out?”

Twilight smiled warmly back at him. Even with as terrible a burden as his, he’s still more concerned with helping everypony else with their problems. Her smile faltered. Or maybe he’s just using somepony else’s problems to avoid confronting his own…

She pushed that thought from her mind when she realized Spike was still looking at her, waiting for an answer. “Oh, Spike… you don’t need to worry about that. I fixed Dreamscape, so that can’t ever happen again.”

“Yeah, but what if it does?” Spike insisted. “I need to know what to do… I can’t lose you again, Twi.”

Twilight couldn’t help but smile back at him. “Well, if I had to make my best guess… to wake somepony from limbo without trying from the real world and hoping for a miracle would probably be to travel all the way down to a fourth-level dream, and use the connections that the spell employs to tie everypony’s mind to the same dream. Then it’s just a matter of using timed kicks to wake everypony up normally.”

“Sounds really tricky,” Spike replied. “But I’d do whatever it takes to save you.”

The cracks that opened in Twilight’s heart sealed back up again when it melted. “Oh, Spike...” Twilight reached out, pulling Spike into a hug. “You really are a wonderful friend.”

Spike hung limp in Twilight’s forelegs for a moment, as if Twilight’s affections had caught him off guard. That moment then passed, and he returned the embrace in full, wrapping his short, little arms around Twilight’s barrel and patting her on the back.

Twilight craned her neck down. nuzzling the dragon in her grasp. “I love you, Spike.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “I know you do.”

Twilight giggled at his quip, then a huge yawn escaped her mouth. Spike pulled away from their embrace to inspect her.

“Tired?” he asked.

“Yeah, unfortunately,” she answered, rubbing her pastern against her tired eyes again as she plopped back down onto the mattress. “Who’d have thought all this dreaming would be so tiring?”

“Well, try get some sleep,” Spike said as he tucked her back in. “You’re going to need it for tomorrow.”

“I know. What about you? Will you be able to get enough sleep tonight?” Twilight asked.

“Yeah, I should now,” he answered as he snuffed out the candle light, then hopped off her bed and began walking towards his own.

“Goodnight, Spike. I love you.” Twilight sincerely bid.

“Right back at ya,” he replied.

Twilight smiled at the much more placid tone in Spike’s voice. She closed her eyes, allowing sleep to overtake her again as contentment lay down with her. Despite her weariness, her smile grew, taking solace from knowing that tomorrow, things were finally going to start looking up from here.