What kept Cameo going, through all of this, even now, was the possibility that perhaps not even Mosely had planned this far. That, now that she’d chipped away at his calm sense of reason, maybe she was just as powerful as he was now. That she'd become so unpredictable that not even he could planned for her.
Perhaps even he didn't realize what she could do to him. Perhaps the stupor he was in now wasn’t an act to begin with.
Could it be that he was still so blasé to what he had done, to the point of not even really knowing how much the public would turn on him if they knew? Did he even comprehend why she was putting him through this?
Reason melted once more inside Cameo’s heart, surrendering itself completely to the anger that’d consumed her for too long. If he was really so incapable of understanding the pain he’d caused everypony around him, then she would force him into it by any means necessary.
“Keep going,” Scene spoke from the other headset. “I can back it up after you’re done. If you’re not able to convince them, I can give them a second opinion. As can many of my friends here. You’re doing all of us a favor, trust me. You’re doing fine.”
The two unlikely allies gave each other a quick nod in response and braced themselves to face the audience once more.
“Now, all of you might have noticed that I have yet to bring up any criminal offenses against Mosely Orange, and that was not without reason,” Cameo explained. “That is to say that, up until Flynn and I were married for several years, he had yet to commit any severe wrongdoings. In fact, other than antagonizing the two of us, his opposition didn’t get too dirty until Flynn was diagnosed with an incurable illness that took his life within a year. Yet again, I was left in much the same state of solitude as before, but with one very significant difference this time around—I had a foal I needed to provide for. By the time I divorced Mosely, the filly I’d had with him had already grown up and no longer depended on me to live. As a matter of fact, just about as soon as she left my side, she returned to her father to become his greatest accomplice.”
Looking straight across the seats surrounding them on either side, the Apples could just notice Bambi turning her eyes away from the stage for the slightest of moments.
“She’s already gone against him so much,” she whispered to herself. “Through this whole thing, I’d almost hoped she’d gotten over that accusation, too.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll set it straight with her as soon as we find an opening,” Applejack replied. “We do owe it to ya after all.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Bambi asked. “The doors are all locked.”
“Coco showed me a route through backstage that should get us to the stage,” Rarity chimed in. “We sneak out of here while she’s still telling her story and corner her about it once she’s done. She’s still got a lot of explanation left to do, so that should buy us time.”
“I’m down for that,” the newsmare replied. “At least, so long as Babs stays here with everypony else.”
Just as she said this, and as per her predictions, the filly was already moving out of her chair in protest, stretching out her hooves towards her sister.
“I still don’t have a lick of an idea what this is about,” she admitted, “but let me come with you, Bambi. I’m sure I can help.”
“And I’m sure you can, too. But this is something you really need to hear, even if it’ll be hard for you to deal with. Once you know, maybe everything can finally be set right again.”
Before Babs could protest any more, Rarity and Applejack had already cantered towards the secret opening with her sister. All she could do now was listen to the message that everypony around her thought was so urgent.
“—rest assured,” she could just hear Cameo say, “I tried everything within my power to care for Babs just like I would have in any other time. I never would have abandoned her willingly, especially not if I would’ve known what would become of her otherwise. But the years and the losses were starting to take their tolls on me, and those close to me advised me to get clinical help. They no longer believed I could live with all this pain within me, and wanted me to find a way to manage it before I tore myself apart. It was the first time I realized that I wasn’t supposed to feel this way, so I decided I’d start things over again. The first step, I figured, would be to talk with Mosely again.
“He’d always wanted another foal, but I had never been able to give birth to one until I was with Flynn. Therefore, I figured that he would accept Babs just fine and that leaving her with somepony I knew and had grown to trust again would be far better on her than to continue being with a mare who had become a shell of herself. For safety’s sake, I chose not to tell him her full parentage, just that she was an orphan from my side of the family. While I still held few feelings of ill will towards Mosely, I knew that he could still be a judgmental stallion from an old-fashioned family. I figured that someday, should he find out the truth, he would have become so attached to my daughter that it wouldn’t matter to him anymore. That, above all, had been my greatest mistake.
“I went back and forth between facilities for a while, and eventually, they figured out that my issues weren’t biological in nature. After further questioning, the doctors finally ended up transferring me to a place for ponies who had been mistreated in their marriages. As soon as I ended up there, I wanted to leave, but not because of anything in the clinic itself. I didn’t belong there, and I kept telling them that Flynn never lifted a hoof against me, that they couldn’t understand how a pony from an ill-reputed family could be so kind. They told me that the issue went deeper than just him, asked me if I’d ever had another husband before him. I said yes and told them everything that made me think of Mosely. They were able to trace it from there.
“In a way, that hurt even more, because deep down, I still loved both of them. I always thought that he’d been doing the right thing by trying to mold me into a better pony, and I wanted to become the mare he wanted me to be. I soon learned that what I’d always thought of as improvement could look a lot like manipulation to anypony else, but I still didn’t want to believe it. When I finally decided that I just couldn’t take it anymore and that I could live on my own without them telling me that everything I knew had been wrong, I knew exactly where I was going to go. I knew then that, while Flynn hadn’t been a mistake, leaving Mosely certainly had been. I showed up at his door one night and told him just that, frantic and nearly in tears. He didn’t hesitate to let me in, said that he’d never stopped loving me, and promised to treat me so well I’d never leave him again.
“And we got along well enough for a few months. We were even talking about remarrying already, but even then, I knew that something didn’t seem right. All this time I’d lived with him, and I didn’t see Babs once. Now that I finally felt like I had my life sorted out, I wanted to be there for her again, and especially now that she would have a new father figure around. When I asked, Mosely told me that he’d sent her off to a private boarding school, and for the longest time, I’d believed that. I had done the same for my other daughter when she was Babs’ age, and he promised me I’d be able to see her on Hearth’s Warming Eve. It was only a few months away, so instead of questioning it, I believed everything. Most days up until then, I lay in wait of finally getting to see my daughter again. That, and Mosely’s support, was how I was able to cope with the other feelings that were still in my heart.
“And then she never showed up even then. Mosely tried his best to calm me down and told me that her school had suddenly decided to cancel its break. Since I had never heard of any place that doesn’t let foals see their parents on Hearth’s Warming Eve, that was when I began to wonder. I had made friends with some of the teachers at my eldest daughter’s old school, so I did some asking around with them and got the response I dreaded most.
“There was nopony by the name of Babs Seed in their database. I went to other private schools, figuring that Mosely must’ve sent her someplace else, but was met with the same response. Eventually, I was able to come across a database of every school in Manehattan, and my daughter wasn’t on a single one of them. He’d already told me that he hadn’t sent her to another city, and it was then that I finally decided to confront him.”
Shocks of emotion once more shot through Cameo’s face as she prepared to tell what was, in her mind, the worst part of the story. It had been the part that she had rehearsed the most for, but no matter how good she got at telling it, the truth always hit her just as hard as it had back then.
“After hours of goading, he finally confessed that he’d lied to me. It turned out that, during the summer I first left her behind with him, all had been well, but just before he could manage to place her in a school, she had been foalnapped. He said that he tried everything possible to prevent it, but I knew better. The place we lived in had ironclad security, just like all the other rich families in Manehattan have. The system was impossible to break; I had seen ponies try before. I left him for a while, checked to see if there were any witnesses, and finally found that one of our neighbors had seen the whole thing.
“It was then that I learned that the foalnapping was no accident. The neighbor was never one for prying into other family’s affairs, but he noticed a disturbance one night at my old house. Since Mosely was typically never the sort to raise his voice towards other ponies, even with me, he went over to investigate. Of course, Mosely didn’t want to cooperate, but my elder daughter told the neighbor that he’d just found out about Babs’ parentage, and that he considered her to be illegitimate. A few nights went on without anything happening before the foalnapping took place. And while many of the witnesses said that Mosely’s only wrongdoing was to let the criminals take her away, this one said otherwise.
“There are many things you can do here in Manehattan if you want to get rid of somepony for good, and the neighbor told me that he’d seen Mosely sneak out with shady characters before. One night, when nopony was looking, he saw my ex-husband handing these ponies bits, more of them than you can imagine. All he could hear him say was ‘take her someplace where she can be off my hooves forever.’ The next night, the witness said he saw those very same ponies running away with Babs.
“That, obviously, was when I finally decided to leave Mosely for good. I confronted him one last time, asking him how he could possibly do such a thing, and just like before, he denied everything. When he finally gave into pressure, he had the gall to say it was the only thing he could do. That his family would find out eventually and everypony else would, too. Even then, deep in my heart, I wanted to give him one last chance to redeem himself. But then he said that he’d gotten my other daughter involved in it, that she had become so jealous of her younger sister that she urged him on to this.
“I told him then that I wanted nothing more to do with him, and that if he ever crossed me again, I would consider him like the enemy he truly was. From there, the rest of my time was spent back in the clinic, rebuilding myself while trying my best to gather any more information about my daughter. The only tip I’d ever gotten was that somepony had seen her working in a textile factory, looking as if she was half-dead on the inside already. The place was shut down several years ago, and Babs has been adopted by somepony else, but that shouldn’t erase what happened. Mosely, you might say that it ‘ended well,’ but you still tortured an innocent foal just because she didn’t fit your miserable standards. You complain about how you have no heir, and yet there was one right in front of your face all along.”
As Cameo had finally finished her long explanation, Mosely had finally mustered up enough reason to issue a rebuttal.
“That’s all?” he responded, giving a confident glare to his ex-wife as if he’d planned it all this time. “You aren’t going to pull any more punches with it? Throw in a murder scandal or something? All you’re going to do is play the ‘damaged mother’ bit? I actually thought you could do better than that. With the way you’ve schemed so much about this, I’d certainly expected more to come out of it.”
“So you’re going to keep at your denial routine?” Cameo fired back. “I’d hardly say that’s a good plan, either. You never have been one to keep your opinions to yourself for long.”
“I don’t need to deny something that I never did to begin with. The foalnapping was just a coincidence, and you know it.”
“I knew it,” Babs whispered to herself. “There’s no way he could’ve sold me out to those guys.”
“I dunno,” Apple Bloom replied. “As much as I hate to admit it, this sorta thing seems like it’d be hard to make up. And my sis hasn’t seemed all that fond of him lately.”
“Yeah, but that’s only ‘cause Bambi says somethin’ in him changed after that mare left him, and now he’s goin’ after Coco. If I had to pick between him and her, I’d definitely pick Coco, no question ‘bout it. But he can’t have been this bad for this long.”
“I wanna believe nopony in our family’s capable of hurting you like that, too. But it sure seems like he’s caving already. If he didn’t have anythin’ to do with it, he would’ve been able to say somethin’ by now.”
Babs suddenly stopped responding after this, only looking to the ground underneath her, hoping more than anything that this couldn’t be true.
In the meantime, the clashing between Cameo and Mosely had only continued to heat up, with neither relenting or showing any signs of loss. This battle was one that could last long into the night if nopony else stepped in.
Out of the corner of her eye, Coco could see Bambi rushing to the stage, trying her best to reach her mother again. Even through the other route, it had eaten up valuable time, and she was just about to finally trot up to the microphone stand as Coco finally put all the pieces together.
Cameo’s story had too many terrible details to be a full fabrication, but no one pony could provide enough evidence to convince an audience of adoring fans that their hero had been in the wrong. Right now, Scene was giving his own confessions of how he had been mistreated on the set, and yet not even that was enough. From the way Scene and Cameo had made contact with each other on stage since the beginning, anypony watching without context would’ve thought they were accomplices. That their stories matched up because they were made to do so.
All along, there had been one pony who had been genuinely unaware of the whole intermission scandal and who didn’t have to fake her surprise. One who knew just what Mosely was capable of, who had heard Babs’ story without ever having met Cameo. One who nopony in Equestria would have ever suspected would go against him.
It was time for that pony to step forward.
Grabbing the closest microphone to her, she began, “My name is Coco Pommel, and those of you who know my name probably know me as Mosely’s current marefriend. Well, I’d like to say there’s more to me than that, but over the past few months, there really hasn’t been. Right now, I’d like to take this chance to change that.”
Mosely, about to pull the microphone away from her, was suddenly stopped by Scene.
“What’s the matter?” he whispered to his producer. “Afraid not even your own marefriend has anything good to say about you?”
“If there’s one thing I want to make clear, it’s that the mare you’ve been seeing is the last thing I wanted to be,” Coco continued. “I was the third pony to find out what Mosely had done, and as Babs’ adoptive mother, I felt that dating her greatest enemy was the worst choice I’d ever made. I found out all too late what he had done, but even if I hadn’t, I couldn’t leave him.
“Because he made me stay. He made it so that I was in danger of losing my job and then told me that if I became his marefriend, I wouldn’t be fired. He made no such promises for what would happen if I turned him down. He used me just so he could cause Babs more pain.”
“It may have started that way,” Mosely answered without thinking, “but that was before I really fell for you. That was before I found out what a wonderful mare you were.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Coco replied. “Because you just admitted one crime in front of a group of ponies who would’ve denied it otherwise. Who’s to say you didn’t commit all the rest?”
“They really have gotten to you,” he muttered. “I told you not to trust them.”
“And now you’re telling me that I shouldn’t trust your own daughter? The one who supposedly schemed with you in all of this? Because, you know, she’s been the one who’s warned me the most about you and the one who’s helped me raise Babs more than anypony else. How do you account for that?”
Just when Mosely was about to protest once more, she questioned, “And if you say you didn’t have anything to do with the foalnapping in the first place, then why did you want to interfere in our lives? Why do you claim that you only made the deal with me so you could separate the two of us? What was the thing you never wanted Scene to know? What was—“
“Enough!” Mosely replied, the utmost scorn in his voice. “If it gets this play finally running, if it’ll get rid of the ticket refunds, the bad reviewers, the whole lot, if it means not having to sit through any more of these pointless filibusters, then I admit it. I saved the Oranges and got rid of that trash they call a foal. There. Mystery solved.”
In that moment, everypony’s eyes were turned firmly to the stage, all except for the remaining Apples and the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Those ponies knew that the one they should fear the most didn’t have a microphone or a voice. Through all of this, she was completely silent.
Babs continued to stare straight at the ground, unable to mutter even a single cry of protest. All she could do was come to the slow realization that she couldn’t deny this act any longer. Her mother had been right all along, and the one she would’ve stood up for with all her might had never been on her side to begin with.
Intermission time was running out. It had run its course an hour before, and finally, with the case solved, all anypony could do was to let the show go on. Yet they all knew it wouldn’t be the same; it didn’t need to be said. Stealer-Orange was over. Just not in the way Scene would’ve planned it.
A minute after he’d said it, Mosely had already regretted everything. He’d thought there would be at least somepony out there who could identify with his situation, with how much he’d sacrificed to stay on the top. Or, at the very least, somepony who realized all the good he’d done for the Manehattan theatre world in spite of the darkness he held. But the faces he saw looking into the audience now had changed for good. Everything in him was telling him to take his defeat wisely and silently, that maybe if he did that, he could regain everypony’s respect.
But now that it was over, he had the chance to make the Apples regret having ever crossed him. If he couldn’t be one of them anymore, then he would make them realize their mistake. They had traded away the best offer they could’ve had. It was time they knew what was behind the other curtain.
The police had already been informed of the infraction and he could almost feel them getting closer to his theatre by the second. But, as they gained on him, he left the spectators with one last secret to be told.
“Nopony else here needs to hear this,” he spoke as the officers entered the scene, “but those who planned this do. Think long and hard before you admit that foal into your family with welcoming hooves. Because there’s a reason why she shouldn’t have existed.”
All Coco’s guests who were still in their seats huddled around Babs as if to protect her from the impending storm. They didn’t know what he was about to say, only that it could change their lives forever.
“Cameo said she never knew Flynn’s last name, but I did. I found it out when I hired him in the first place. It’s Skim. If you know Flim and Flam, the two stallions who almost conned you out of your farm once, then you know what you’re getting into. You’re trying to make an Apple out of your two worst enemies.”
****
The lights dimmed finally, unsure when they would go on again without a producer.
None of the actors said anything afterwards, and yet everypony knew what was on their minds. There would be no repeat showing tomorrow night, maybe a practice session if they were lucky.
Coco had done all she could to leave the scene as quickly as possible. While she didn’t fear Mosely anymore and hoped he’d finally be out of her life for good, what she did fear was how her crewmates would react to everything. The moment of courage she’d had back there was already drained from her to the point where she didn’t even know where it’d come from in the first place.
Trotting through the empty theatre, she was among the last to leave. Charity Kindheart was calling her over, promising her comfort and support for all she had been through, but the meeting with her was now the last thing on Coco’s mind. Tonight was the night Babs needed her most, after all.
Even so, when she saw Bambi, the once-Orange commented that she could handle the situation on her own until Coco came home.
“She’ll need a lot of love tonight,” Bambi told her, “but so do you.”
Knowing that her roommate had already arranged everything and wouldn’t back down at this point, Coco then chose to change the subject.
“So, did you catch the rest of the show?”
“I wish I would’ve been able to,” Bambi admitted, “but I had something else to do. As soon as the play started back up, the police were about to haul my mother off too. Something about causing a public disturbance or whatever. But I was able to convince them to let me spend at least a bit more time with her.”
She looked back off into the darkness as if looking for something in a sea of nothingness.
“It took me almost the whole second act to explain, but I was finally able to convince her. She couldn’t believe that she’d fallen for one of Mosely’s lies again. By the time curtain call came, though, she couldn’t let go of me. Crying, apologizing, holding me tighter than I’d been held in a while. There was something so sad about all of it, and yet it was nice somehow.”
“So do you think the police is going to keep either of them long?”
“Mosely, hopefully. But I’m not sure about Mom. They’ll probably take pity on her and let her off with a fine or something, but she never stays in one place for long. With the way she finally wrapped everything up and fulfilled her goal here, I wouldn’t be surprised if she left Manehattan for good.”
“But what about Babs?” Coco asked. “Isn’t she going to go back for her?”
“Probably one day,” Bambi replied. “Someday might come sooner than either of us think, for all we know. But I feel like she still has some progress to make first before she can face her.”
Bambi flashed Coco a final smile as she watched her leave the theatre with Charity.
“I just hope that tomorrow, we can all make some progress and start learning to love again.”
CURTAIN
~end of Act Two~