Smoke and Mirrors

by Baby Boo

5. Catch That Filly!

WHEN FLUTTERSHY returned to the rotunda, she didn't come alone. After one too many incidents, staying overnight at the Crystal Palace had given Twilight's friends (or at least, the more uptight — ahem! responsible of them) a mild, but unshakable, sense of paranoia. The slight commotion of Spike's voice in the hall was enough to bring Applejack and Rarity out of their rooms. Naturally, when they saw Fluttershy wing past toward the royal bedroom suite, they rushed after her to make sure nothing was about to destroy Equestria, shroud the world in darkness, or worst of all, wake the baby.

Applejack had her hat on, all the grooming she ever needed. Rarity, regretfully, was caught in a state of intolerable mess, with rows of pink curlers rolled into her mane and tail, and traces of hastily-wiped green facial mask on her cheeks and forehead.

The three of them arrived at the rotunda to find Luna so wound up she seemed slightly blurred, and upon seeing Fluttershy, she wasted no time pointing an urgent hoof downward and then taking off in the indicated direction. Fluttershy gave the other two a mild shrug and followed Luna down, leaving the two wingless ponies to find their own way down.

Fortunately, nearly everypony with a horn in the palace had been taught the simple locator spell, so Rarity was able to ping the baby's location. Groaning under the weight of duty, she and Applejack bolted for the nearest staircase.

---

At least Dreamsweet wasn't teleporting so frequently anymore. Beryl and Garnet were able to pursue her in the manner of conventional space, though her speed through the air was astounding. Garnet found that she was somehow evading the grasp of his horn-glow as well, which he wouldn't have believed if he weren't experiencing it firsthoof. When he tried to seize her, it felt as though he were trying to grip a million jittering grains of rice, and his telekinetic grasp slipped away each time.

They followed the flying foal around a section of the rotunda balcony until she veered off to another of the radial hallways. As they swung round the corner, Beryl saw motion to the side, and he skidded to a startled halt while Garnet ran on. His eyes weren't playing tricks; Princess Luna was barreling down on him, Fluttershy sailing in her wake.

He yipped and jumped off to the side, but Luna halted just before him anyway, with a look of startled horror. Beryl broke out a wide harmless grin and squeaked apologetically. But she wasn't looking at him.

Parked beside an open door, midway down the corridor, was a metal cart loaded with bags and baskets of cleaning supplies, hooks for spray-bottles and rings for mops. It was stained and dented with years of use, but its wheels rolled smoothly and didn't wobble.

This became a problem when the flying Princess landed on it at a substantial speed, sending it racing over the short-pile carpet down the hall. Dreamsweet gave a steam-whistle shriek of delight and buzzed her wings even faster, digging her hooves in among the guest-service dishes piled on top of the cart and taking off like a racer.

Garnet kept galloping valiantly, but fell further and further behind. Luna was stunned for a moment, and seemed to be having trouble breathing even as her hooves, thinking for her, began walking and then charging forward. Fluttershy, though she had a similar look of horror (on the slim crescent of her face visible past the shaggy thicket of her mane), kept a cooler head and swooped past Luna, picking up speed as she went. Beryl unfroze to run after them, hoping to accomplish something.

Shortly behind him, Rarity and Applejack came charging along as well. They were just looking at a bunch of backsides and couldn't really tell what was going on, but it was obvious which direction it was going on in.

Twilight Sparkle got a much better view, though not for very long. As Dreamsweet's giggling voice swiftly approached the T-intersection at the end of the hall, Twilight leapt out from around the corner, taking a wide-blocking stance and shouting "AH —"

Rather than her intended followup, "— HA!", she ended up simply scaling up and extending the "AHHH!", for although she had correctly guessed that Dreamsweet would be heading toward her, she had not guessed about the cart, nor accounted for its velocity. On reflex she dodged aside, a mere tail-hair's width out of danger, and rolled quickly over to her hooves. She clearly, thankfully, saw Dreamsweet's magic aura flare again as the baby teleported away, just before the cart hit the wall.

Standing against the wall was a small, tasteful wooden table, on which stood an heirloom vase holding a thick bundle of daffodils. A few seconds later, they were no longer standing against the wall. Most of the water from the vase, a colorful array of cleaning fluids, and a good thick splat of gravy from the dinner dishes did remain on the wall. Not all of it was on the wall, however, as a good amount had been intercepted by the 600-year-old oil landscape, by the great painter Versatility, which was hanging there.

Clattering dishes, tinkling shards of ceramic, dripping bottles and the whack of a broom falling over played over the relative silence after the clangorous clash, as the cart, front rims crumpled but generally intact, rolled slowly back away from the impact.

The grownup ponies all collected around the wreckage. Silently, Fluttershy passed Twilight the orange stuffed owl. Twilight rammed her muzzle into its belly and gave a long, hearty, muffled scream, then tossed it back. With a very controlled expression, she lowered her head to cast the locator again, then without comment vanished in a burst of magic. Luna quickly followed suit; then Rarity gave a ping and started running, and the rest all followed.

---

Moments later, a pale-blue pony, her pink-and-white mane neatly contained under a lace-edged maid's cap, peeked cautiously out the door where the cart had been parked. The chambermaid emerged into the hallway, peering back and forth in puzzlement, and took on a dawning look of outrage as she drew closer to the crash site and realized the extent of the mess in her cleaning area, the damage done to irreplaceable antiques, the waste of splattered cleaning fluids and soaked paper rolls. Her head shook rapidly, as though hoping to forbid this from having happened, and soft squeals of outrage at fate emerged from her throat in place of words.

Then she spotted the hoofprints. Several sets of them, trailing through puddles of sauce and soap, all headed away in the same direction.

Her eyes narrowed. The corners of her mouth drew down in a taut, vengeful grimace. She picked up a mop, and whipped it around herself in a swift, disciplined exercise of lethal quarterstaff twirls. Then she set off to track down the vandals.

---

About that time, Pinkie Pie came floating up through the rotunda. Her flying contrivance — rigged from a big bunch of balloons, a motorized fan, and flippers on her hooves — wasn't fast enough to catch up with anypony, so she ended up spending most of the time drifting around the middle space, calling out directions. On the plus side, from there she had a great view of everything going on.

The first thing she saw was Twilight and Luna charging along the eight-floor balcony with Dreamsweet buzzing out ahead of them. Luna had picked up an oversized butterfly net, but Twilight knocked it out of her hooves and shook her head. The baby swerved off down a hallway, and they were all long gone before Pinkie gave up trying to paddle after them.

Moments later, Rarity and Applejack came running along on the sixth floor. The stuffed owl floated above them like a flag, glowing with Rarity's magic aura, and Dreamsweet was chasing the owl. But the two guards popped out from a hallway right in front of them, and in the confusion of barely avoided collisions, the foal had gotten hold of the owl and flown across to the other side of the chamber.

The guards and the girls headed in opposite directions around the balcony, awkwardly trying to hurry without looking hurried. The guards only got a quarter of the way around before the chambermaid jumped out from behind a large potted plant with a savage growl, challenging them with her martial broom. Rarity and Applejack kept running around on their side, but the commotion spurred Dreamsweet to buzz up and away, to a hall off the seventh floor.

Fluttershy, who had well and truly lost track of events, bobbed up from under the lowest balcony and swiveled her head around in perplexity, before the sound of something breaking gave her a direction to fly.

---

The royal court jester, Crookshanks, was a bit of a night owl, and liked to practice his acts in the late quiet hours. So it was that he was rolling around the tenth floor balcony on his unicycle, juggling a half-dozen eggs, when Dreamsweet came zooming along, right past his cheek, followed by two frenzied adult Princesses. They hardly noticed him, except as an object to swerve around, and in their hurried wake he was set spinning on his unicycle wheel like a twirling coin, wobbling in a desperate dance for balance.

Crookshanks was, of course, too seasoned a veteran of physical comedy to be thrown entirely off by something like that, and when he whirled to a standstill, he had three unbroken eggs in his forehoof, one balanced on the outstretched tip of a hindhoof, one on his nose, and one nestled in the padded brim of his stuffed pointy hat. He was rather shaken, though, and his course wobbled erratically as he rolled off down the nearest quiet hallway.

---

Beryl and Garnet crept along the wall on the fifth floor, and quietly nipped into a closet facing the rotunda. The chambermaid came trotting along an instant after, casting her glare back and forth in search of any trace. After she chose a direction to sneak away, the guards slipped from the closet to the next door over, which led into one of the Palace's many small, pointless sitting rooms.

The soft click of the closing door caught the maid's ears and she whipped around. She made a stealthy approach toward the closet door, and flung it open. Finding it empty, or rather half-filled with nothing but junk, she snorted and scowled. Garnet and Beryl popped out of the sitting room and rushed the closet door, bumping her into the storage space and slamming the door behind her. Beryl propped the fallen broom of war against the knob, and the guards ran off to catch up with the baby chase.

On the eighth floor, Luna and Twilight attempted to keep up their speed, but were forced to slow down and then stop to get Twilight untangled from Luna's fishing net, the younger Princess squalling all the while that she'd told the older so. High up on the narrowest balcony, the fifteenth floor, Applejack was running in tight circles, lost in a cloud of dust kicked up by her own hooves from the little-trodden carpet. She was too sleep-deprived, annoyed and half-blinded to form any better plan than keep running until something stopped her, and she didn't really notice how amusing the ride was to Dreamsweet, perched on her back.

Rarity and Fluttershy had ended up on the very dark third floor, and were backing carefully up to keep an eye on the suspicious shadows. Inevitably they collided rump-to-rump and startled each other into a run, which quickly brought them around to the other side of the balcony, where they saw each other coming and crashed into a mutual scaredy-cat hug.

Crookshanks, having gotten hopelessly turned about on the way back to his bedroom, came around the seventh-floor balcony, where he swerved off again down the northeast hallway. He didn't get far before zipping back out in a panic, pedaling like mad to get away from the elephants charging up the hallway.

Respected performers with a visiting circus of international renown, the elephant troupe had been taking a tour of the castle earlier and gotten separated from their guide. Too timid to ask for directions, they had wandered quietly around the castle unnoticed for hours, until they strayed into the rotunda area and Eloise got an accidental smack on the backside with a broom. That started her running, and just like ponies, that got them all going, so they —

---

"Pinkie?"

"Yes, Twilight?"

"Elephants?"

"Well... okay, maybe not a whole lot of elephants."

With a snort, Twilight took the story back. "ANYway! After some running around, we managed to coax you back to your crib."

"But alas," sighed Rarity, "the night was still young."

Author's Note:

Just trying to get this stuck in your head.

Or this.

Maybe even this.

Comments

[Baby Boo]

Chapter 5, published with like 7 minutes to spare to still count as "tomorrow" from the perspective of yesterday's dramatic oath. This chapter suuuuucks.

[ColdGoldLazarus]

This chapter was brilliant. And it all felt very in-character, too.

[Baby Boo]

5152487
Aw, thanks, really? By the time I hit 'publish', all I could see were the flaws in it. Nice to know someone likes it!

[ColdGoldLazarus]

5152991 I quite enjoyed it; one would think it'd be difficult to screw up a Yakety-Sax chase scene, but I've seen other authors somehow fumble such a thing - Meanwhile, I think you aced it.

[Baby Boo]

5153013
Awesome, thank you! It's a bit tricky getting such a visual sort of comedy into text form. A couple of weeks ago I had the rough draft of this chase scene planned to take place in a single long hallway, but moving it to the rotunda made it work a hell of a lot better.

[djthomp]

I for one thought Pinkie's addition to the story was fantastic. The moment the elephants entered the scene I just threw up my hands and started laughing uncontrollably.

I also really liked AJ's take on the situation. Too tired to help, but awake enough to apply the standard earth pony tactic of keeping on running.

[ColdGoldLazarus]

5153054 No problemo! And that's rather interesting; though I agree that your decision to move the locale likely improved the options available to you.

(BTW, I actually winced during the bit with the vase and painting being destroyed by the maid's cart)

[Baby Boo]

5153538
This, as they say, is why we can't have nice things.

[Baby Boo]

5153481
Pinkie Pie tells the best stories; they don't happen to be congruent with the most accurate ones...

I'm really pleased that the Applejack bit came across as an earth pony thing without directly saying so.

[ColdGoldLazarus]

5153550 Indeed so!

[RanmaChaos]

Good