“I’m telling you, this is an emergency!” Twilight shouted at her brother and the alicorn that was responsible for him being away so much.
After the fiasco at the Crystal Heart, she had galloped straight to the palace from where Cadence and Shining ruled. The Guards did try to stop her, what with her frizzled mane and psychotic stare that made them draw their spears in defense, but she teleported right past them. By the time they had arrived into the Great Chrystal Hall, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza and Shining Armor were already talking to her; looking surprised, but not threatened. The look Shining gave the Guards for their failure to stop the potential intruder, on the other hoof, made them know their jobs very much were in danger.
“Calm down, Twilight,” Cadence said in her most soothing voice, as she gently put a hoof to Twilight’s shoulder, sending an icy chill down the smaller alicorn’s spine.
Twilight shook it off and retorted, “No! You don’t understand!”
Even Shining jumped at that, not that anypony in the Hall was surprised. He wasn’t the bravest warrior. Or the smartest. In fact, Celestia herself never really knew why she had made him Captain of the Royal Guard. All she knew was that she felt inexplicably happy about it when Cadence brought forth the idea. It was such a strange coincidence that Cadence announced him as her coltfriend a few days later…
“It’s everywhere!” Twilight continued in her usual panicky demeanor. “At the Heart, at the stadium, near the cathouse-”
She paused as her brother and sister-in-law cocked their heads back and stared at her. Without losing a moment, she nervously pointed her hoof at the clicking device strapped to her side.
“In here, even!”
Her bewildered stare and gasping for air combined with the panic in her voice to finally exceed the Twilight Threshold. In that exact moment, even though they had agreed on no particular way to measure it, Shining and Cadence simultaneously dropped their gentle smiles into concerned frowns. Whatever was bugging Twilight, it wasn’t just her OCD. The two exchanged a brief glance to confirm what they were thinking before Shining took a step forward.
“I’m sorry Twiley, I don’t understand. What’s happening?”
He leaned down to look her in the eye and calm her down with his soothing, charming stare, completely forgetting that he was looking at his sister. The Guards thought it was creepy. Cadence had stopped thinking altogether. She zoned these kinds of moments right out. As for Shining; all the screaming Twilight had done as soon as she burst into the hall came back to him in fragments. He didn’t understand her then, and all the noise about radios and activity flashed through his mind to confuse him further.
“We have radioactivity everywhere!” Twilight said out loud, just stopping herself from shouting, before nearly whimpering, “You have to get everypony out of here!”
“Out of where?” Cadence asked as she came closer.
“Out of the Chrystal Empire!”
The desperation in her voice was matched only by the absurdity of her request and the psychotic look on her face. Shining straightened himself back up and stared at her blankly. Cadence cocked an eyebrow.
Twilight looked at them, lingering hope in her eyes that they would finally understand. This was her only option – what else could she do? A nuclear contamination on this scale must have come about at the same time as the Empire reappeared, but that meant the ponies here had been living in it for two years! But then, just as Cadence opened her mouth to ask another trivial question, Twilight’s eyes popped open. Her irises grew smaller and her fidgeting stopped altogether. The thousand-yard stare was only complete once her ears perked up ever so gently, and a trace of a smile drew itself on her lips. A sequence played out in her mind.
The Chrystal ponies had been living in a nuclear contamination area for two years. Maybe more, if the initial disappearance also had something to do with nuclear physics. And they were still alive. She couldn’t call them normal – there’s nothing normal about a see-thru pony – but they were still kicking the glowing dust after all these years. The gold and purple adorned Doctor’s thesis imprinted itself into her mind, followed by the sight of Celestia giving her the Starswirl’s Swirly Beard Award for her research into the innate biological resistance to radioactivity possessed by the walking ornaments. Esteemed academics bowed down to her as the mastermind that she was. Her future was there for the taking!
“Twiley?” Shining poked her gently, as if she was a delicate vase and he wanted to see how far it would lean. “Twiley?”
“Huh?!” Twilight snapped out of her daydream and glanced around.
The worried faces of Shining and Cadence greeted her from the front, and if she had eyes on the back, she would have seen the two Guards standing close by, muscles tense and faces drawn in fear and confusion, ready to intercept her, restrain her or rush her to a hospital. Maybe all three if the need arose, but until she made a sound they weren’t sure if she was going to transform into a Changeling or drop down to the ground unconscious. Cadence cleared her throat just in time to mask their gasps of relief.
“Uhm…” Twilight eyes jumped between Cadence and Shining. Then came the idea. “Radio activity! Yes. Pinkie Pie is running around with a boombox! We need to get everypony out or they’ll get the disco fever!”
Her frantic panting added a nice touch. No way was anypony going to stop her research now! Cadence and Shining again exchanged looks, with the latter adding a know-it-all smirk to tell Cadence that he had known all along what his sister was saying, even if he never voiced his thoughts. This time, Cadence was the confused one.
“Don’t worry, Twiley,” Shining said, full of pride for himself, “We’ll stop her before anypony gets hurt. Guards!”
The two Royal Guards that were keeping an eye on Twilight flew forward to greet their master. They bowed their heads. They’d get the hose if they didn’t.
“Find one Pinkamina Diane Pie – a pink F3 with blue eyes and a pink mane, believed to be rampaging through our great Empire,” he said in a surprisingly commanding, masculine tone that would have made Cadence swoon had she not gotten to know Shining better. At least Twilight was impressed, if her slack jaw was any indication.
The Guards saluted and were already flying out through the doorway when Shining noticed his sister’s admiration. Only it wasn’t enough – the jaw wasn’t all the way down. He had to do better than that! So he narrowed his eyes and raised his hoof menacingly.
“And Guards!” He snapped at them, making them stop and hover in anticipation, with every pony in the room looking at him. “Bring me her head!”
The Guards saluted again, a shimmer of pride and determination sparkling in their eyes for a brief moment, before they sped out to hunt for their pray. Cadence facehoofed. Twilight followed the Guards with her eyes as long as she could, then looked sideways at Shining.
Shining’s face suddenly changed back to its friendly self and he turned to Cadence to gloat. “What do you think honey, did I show some ass-ertiveness or what?” He smiled broadly.
“You condemned your sister’s friend – the Element of Laughter – to death.”
The monotony of Cadence’s voice was on a dictionary level. She didn’t even twitch an eye, or an eyebrow. The need for monotony was too great, and any deviation would risk a volcanic explosion of emotions that the world of Equestria simply wasn’t ready for.
“Yeah, but it was just a figure of speech, I-” Shining defended, before being cut off.
“Like the time you told them to go unleash Tartarus and they freed Cerberus?”
Cadence wasn’t even angry. Or disappointed. Not in him, anyway.
“I-uhh.”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t fine. “I’ll fix this.”
Cadence spread her wings to fly after the impromptu death squad, when she remembered a little detail of Twilight’s surprise visit to the Empire. She quickly shifted her attention to her.
“Wait. Weren’t you here with a class of fillies and colts?”
Twilight deadpanned.
“Where are they?” Cadence completed her question, already feeling a strangely anticipated sense of dread coming over her.
Twilight gave a weak smile, the kind that revealed that her next words were about to be horseapples, but not lethally dangerous horseapples. She involuntarily bobbed her head to double-confirm that, before she replied.
“They’re… fine.”
The odd break and the strangely fine voice she used at the word “fine” were no longer meant for Cadence – they were there to help Twilight. Sure, she didn’t technically know where the children were, but as long as they were out of the Crystal Empire, everything was fine. And since there was a 50:50 chance of them either being in the Empire or not, she could tell herself she was at least half right.
“Okay,” Cadence said; her eyes narrowing like a hawk’s.
Cadence flew off, forehead scrunched in anger and disbelief, but there was only so much she could deal with at once, and having a regular, non-Bizarro pony murdered by a pair of winged champagne glasses in royal armor took precedence over some missing schoolponies. At the same time, Twilight was already thinking ahead.
Like the brilliant detective that she was, Twilight knew a sequence of events had to have happened a long time ago for the radiation to be so widespread and consistent, but not too long ago since it was still around. If she was going to write a thesis on its effects, or the lack thereof, she had to know where it had come from. As it was now, she had no way of knowing if the Crystal ponies themselves weren’t the ones radiating their wrongness into the world.
“Trying to spread the condition to the whole of Equestria to make themselves feel normal…” she half murmured, half thought, as she pressed a hoof to her chin.
A natural defensive mechanism of that kind wasn’t out of the question, but there was somepony who would surely know where the radiation had come from and whether the ponies living in the Empire had always been radioactive. An alicorn who had to have lived through the initial contamination. There was, of course, an alternative.
Was this Celestia’s doing?
Twilight looked around the garish crystal palace and thought about the Crystal ponies that were living in the Empire. She shrugged.
I couldn’t blame her.
It was difficult to think that Celestia had failed in a quest to rid the world of the Crystal Empire and its inhabitants, but even she couldn’t have known that they would be resistant to radiation - even cockroaches weren’t, no matter how persistent the myth was!
Guess I better go find out.
Just as Twilight raised her hoof to leave, Cadence flew in, as tastefully displeased as the moment she had left. The lack of any clenched teeth and tears of anger spoke volume of her success in preventing the death of Pinkie Pie. Twilight sighed briefly as she felt a tiny ball of disappointment roll from her heart and into her stomach. She mentally swiped a hoof at the ground.
“You’re back!” she nearly squeed at Cadence, who only glanced back at Twilight in passing. “And I – well, I’ve got to go!”
Cadence wanted to mention the kids, but the sight of a happily oblivious Shining Armor in front of her diverted her attention. Wasn’t love also about teaching the young ones about the kindness of strangers in a foreign town and how everypony was good, even if they creeped you out? At least that was what she decided to stick with in case there was a tribunal, although Celestia did always delegate any and all problems to Twilight, so she had that precedence going for her as well. She wasn’t Iron Mare!
Twilight didn’t even consider her class at this point. She was just happy to be left to her own devices and to be free to research the radiation in peace. Nothing was going to stop her now!
“Make sure to stop by the cathouse!” Shining yelled out after her.
Twilight’s cheeks nearly burst from blushing; Cadence felt a bead of cold sweat run down her forehead and the nearby Guards held their breaths for how Twilight would react to this grave insult, delivered in such a chipper tone. Shining’s gleeful smile outlasted their reactions by a good few seconds, though, and Twilight craned to hear to return a smile.
“I will.”
She galloped away and out the gates, forcing her gaze down to miss the eyes and gestures of the ponies around her. The moment she was out of the castle, Twilight summoned the magic of the alicorn princess that she was and teleported out of the Crystal Empire.
“There’s a time and a place for that,” Cadence quickly scolded Shining Armor for making such a poor joke.
“What? I didn’t know Twilight liked cats,” Shining said, astonished that his sister would have grown a new liking.
Cadence shot him an annoyed look.
“That’s not-” she stopped when he turned to face her, completely unaware of the meaning of the word. “Yes, it’s very nice of her.”
It was moments like this that made Cadence reevaluate her choice of a spouse, but she was still banking on the foals and fillies looking like supermodels. Once they had them. If only Shining wasn’t so damn tired all the time. That damn Flash Sentry constantly needed private lessons to help with his training and they really took all the energy out of Shining. He’d always come home limp and exhausted. Walked funny, too.
His dedication to work could really make Cadence furious. But when you’re the princess of Love, you can’t really show it, can you?