Foreign Nationals of Unusual Importance

by Dave Bryant

Dialogue

Sunset and I sat quietly, knees drawn up, on one of the rolling grassy hillsides surrounding the amphitheater where the Battle of the Bands had seen its, well, dazzling climax. Beside us small piles of crumpled waxed paper and cardboard gave mute testimony to dinners supplied entirely by vendors strategically spotted along the park’s winding concrete paths. The rich, and not entirely healthy, food combined with the surprisingly strenuous day of touring the city to leave us pleasantly lethargic.

The sky was a bowl of deep blue edged with the last hints of red and gold and, away from most of the city lights, spangled with stars in profusion. Faint snatches of music wafted to us on the cool breeze. Summer fireworks were yet to begin. Somewhere in front of us, across one of the valley’s creeks, Sweet Apple Acres lay shrouded by nightfall at the foot of the mountains. One of the tiny lights echoing the stars above undoubtedly shone from the windows of the homey red-and-white farmhouse.

After a few minutes Sunset climbed to her feet, prompting me to look over at her, and in a soft, wistful voice, began to sing a cappella.

Things may come and things may go

Some go fast and some go slow

Few things last, that’s all I know

But friendship carries on through the ages

She shivered once and bent to retrieve her jacket. “They wrote that for me after the Battle of the Bands. It was a surprise, and it’s one of the most amazing gifts I’ve ever gotten.”

After donning said jacket against the falling temperature, she sat again, crossed her forearms on her knees, and put her chin on them. “Those girls are the best thing that’s happened to me—maybe even better than Princess Celestia choosing me as a student.” In the gloaming I just caught a glimpse of her brushing at her eyes.

“This is the real reason you called me bright and early this morning, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. If it weren’t for me, none of this crazy stuff would be happening to them, and you wouldn’t be here to—to spy on all of us. No offense.”

I had to laugh. “None taken. They don’t seem to be put out by all that crazy stuff, though.”

She snorted. “They weren’t too thrilled at Camp Everfree, but they got over it.” I knew for a fact she had a lot to do with them getting over it, but I didn’t interrupt. “Most of the time they think it’s all a big adventure, and I gotta admit sometimes I feel the same way. But . . . who knows what’ll happen next? And when? It could be something a lot more dangerous.” I couldn’t see the expression on her face, but her troubled voice let me picture it easily enough.

“Have you written to Princess Twilight about it?” I asked curiously.

“Some. But she hasn’t written back about it yet.” Hurriedly she went on, “It hasn’t been very long, and she’s been at least as busy as we are. Part of it is, she’s promised to enchant another pair of journals, since the ones we have now are running out.” She turned her head to look at me. “Come to think of it, you’ve never asked to look at mine. Why not?”

My reply was prompt and automatic. “Because it’s privileged diplomatic correspondence; even if you’re not a government official, both Princess Twilight and Princess Celestia are. It doesn’t matter that we’re talking about an exotic magical artifact communicating with another dimension, the basic principle is the same as any diplomatic pouch or sealed envelope.” I shrugged. “That’s the practical reason. It’s also just plain private.”

“Thanks,” she murmured absently. I waited silently and a bit uncomfortably, letting her chase down the thoughts I was sure were racing through her head. Finally she took a deep breath.

“I’m scared, Cook. The magic that’s getting loose isn’t working the way it does back home, and it’s hard to get a handle on it and what it’s doing, even to us. Now you’re here, which means there are people, powerful people, who know about me—about us, and about that wild magic. I like it here. I love my friends, really and truly. I even like CHS. It’s a little tough being treated like a kid again, but all the rest of it makes that worthwhile.” A barely audible sniffle escaped her, involuntary I was sure.

I sighed. “Sunset, nobody’s going to come to your door tomorrow, grab you by the scruff of the neck, and bundle you back through the portal, okay? For one thing, it could be seen as a mortal insult by your friends the princesses, and I guarantee you the Foreign Service has that firmly in mind.” In reality, the situation was much more complicated, primarily because no formal relations existed between the two nations, but I wanted to keep things simple, and the net effect was the same. “For another, don’t think those powerful people haven’t noticed how hard you’ve worked to become a good person; heaven knows I’ve written enough reports on that. Yes, they have to be hard-nosed and pragmatic about national security, but a lot of them are parents—or grandparents—too. As long as you keep your nose clean and do your best, they should leave you alone.”

“Promise?” The note in her voice told me she knew full well I couldn’t do any such thing.

“You know better than that. All I can promise is to be as straight with you as I possibly can. Like right now.”

Sunset fell back onto the slope, arms spread, and looked up at the stars. “You can’t even do that, if they tell you to keep quiet about something, right?”

“Don’t get paranoid,” I told her, sharply enough to bring her head around for another glance at me. “I know, you’re worried to death all these wonderful people and things you’ve discovered, this new life, will be taken away at the drop of a hat. It’s all right to be concerned, but you can’t let it run your life—or ruin it, more likely.”

She lay there, her only movement the slow rise and fall of her breaths, for a long moment before musing distantly, “I never used to worry like this. I’d get angry, or jealous, or entitled, but not worried, usually. Ever since the Fall Formal, though, I’ve spent almost every day worrying about something.”

“Oh.” It was my turn to be struck by blinding enlightenment. “I never thought of that. I’m sorry, Sunset. Of course you would. Overnight you went from lording it over everyone, never bothering to consider how they felt about it, to pretty much the opposite, and that’s got to be rough.”

“Everybody hated me. The girls were the only ones who treated me like anything but dirt, and the worst part was, I couldn’t blame anyone for feeling the way they did. They were right to.” The words poured out of her like the tears I suspected were clouding her eyes. “Even Principal Celestia and Vice-Principal Luna didn’t trust me, at first anyway. An-and then last winter—”

“That smear campaign by, um, Apple Bloom and her friends?” I asked gently.

A groan answered me. “I was ready to dive back through the portal, or something worse. It was almost as bad as the crown hitting me with a rainbow sledgehammer. Y’know, there was a little part of me that felt like it was nothing more than I deserved. I’d done things just like that to so many other students. But the rest of me was desperate not to lose the progress I’d made, to slide all the way back down the stairs, and not be able to climb up again.”

“Bump-bump-bump,” I acknowledged with a wince as I raised a hand and mimed a body bouncing down a staircase. “Ouch. But surely they wouldn’t have abandoned you that easily, not after the promise they made to Princess Twilight?”

“We’d been friends for—what?—two months, Cook. Before that we’d been enemies for two years! It wasn’t that hard to believe maybe I’d fallen back into my old ways, that I’d just been faking it so I could gain their confidence. After all, who changes that much in a flash, even a magical rainbow flash? We all felt terrible about it afterward, even AB, Scoots, and Belle, but the silver lining was, we all learned a heck of a lesson about ourselves and each other.”

I pondered briefly. “That’s twice you’ve mentioned how quickly you turned around.”

“It didn’t seem quick at the time. I don’t know how much of it was the thing that happens when your mind seems to slow down time—”

“Tachypsychia,” I put in helpfully, then shut up again.

“—Yeah, that. Or how much really was the magic stretching things out, but it felt like it went on forever. A long time, anyway.” I could tell Sunset was struggling to put into words an inherently visceral and nonverbal experience. The least I could do was keep my bloody trap zipped and listen. “It was like . . . a kaleidoscope, not just images but emotions too. I knew exactly how the girls felt about me, about each other, about what I was trying to do.” Sheepishly she added, “I also realized just how stupid my plan was, trying to herd a few hundred hypnotized high-school students through the portal, into unfamiliar bodies, and throwing them against a professional army.” She paused, as if inviting comment.

“I did wonder about that,” I responded as mildly as I could. I hadn’t been the only one, but this wasn’t the time to remind her of that.

A sigh drifted out of the darkness. “I was just too mad to think straight—seeing red, I think they call it. There was the high-and-mighty Princess Twilight Sparkle, who had everything I should have had, and what did she do to deserve it?” A note of self-loathing crept in. “I wanted to smash her, and Celestia, and anypony else who got in my way, if that was the only way to get what I had coming to me.” Her laugh was bitter. “I sure got it, didn’t I?”

“You got some of the best friends anyone could ask for,” I pointed out quietly. “You got a hard, hard lesson you took to heart, but too many other people—and ponies, I’ll bet—never learn, thanks to the power that gave you the gift to see yourself as others see you. You got the chance to build a new life in a place you’ve fallen in love with. You even wrote to Princess Celestia and reconciled with her, right?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed a little more brightly. “That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but all the girls were with me. I cried for a solid hour afterward, but I felt so much better.” She sniffled again, but in a stronger voice continued, “I think she—Princess Celestia, I mean—did too, from what Princess Twi said later. Of course, she probably didn’t bawl like a baby, which is what I did, but—” I had the impression Sunset shrugged, and she really didn’t need to say any more, after all. Every impression of the ancient princess I’d gotten suggested she was a creature of immense dignity.

“Harder than this?” I teased, and was rewarded by a wadded-up paper napkin sailing out of the gloom. Needless to say it wasn’t aimed very well, but it said everything necessary. “Have you got everything off your chest?” I asked more seriously.

“I think so.” Sunset’s slow words were thoughtful. “Besides, when you found us at Lectern’s, we told you what happened, but we didn’t always explain why, or how we felt, or anything like that.”

“And you wanted to provide some context for me to pass on in my reports,” I guessed.

“I have to do everything I can to—to help my case. More than anything else in the world, this one or that, take your pick, I want to stay and . . .” Words failed her.

“Follow your new destiny,” I supplied. On the heels of my comment came a rippling crackle and a light in the now fully dark sky. We both twisted around to look up at the colorful starbursts behind and above us.

I stood and brushed off my slacks. “Come on. We can dump the trash, then head over to watch the fireworks. That’ll be a great way to end the day.”

Sunset laughed, which was worth more than the whole rest of the day’s expedition combined.

Author's Note:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (opening line), 1953

Since a new reader might not have seen my postings or comments elsewhere, I’ll reiterate that I disregard the anachronistic hodgepodge Hasbro effectively imposed on FIM’s writers and art staff. Instead I base my writing mostly on Lauren Faust’s original, more self-consistent (and to my mind more charming) world-building, which placed Equestria squarely in the equivalent of the late nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Oddly, Equestria Girls hews more closely to that placement than the main series does! Modern school systems became entrenched later, in the mid-twentieth century, and as a result teens hadn’t made the transition yet from being junior adults—apprentices, journeymen, farm hands, sometimes even heads of households—to their very recent modern status as “senior children”.
   As a result, Sunset is accustomed to the traditional concept of adolescence and chafes a little over being treated as if, from her point of view, she were age twelve instead of seventeen nineteen. (Addendum: according to a tweet from Ishi Rudell, Sunset is a couple of years older than the other girls.) The deleted scenes in Friendship Games hint at this frustration. To be fair, some of the people in her life do treat her as a young adult, but society at large has created an artificial tension between biological reality and legal fictions. There are good reasons for the latter, of course; a post-industrial economy needs workers far more thoroughly educated than apprenticeship can achieve, which takes lots of time and training—and forces a teen into an extended economic dependence. All of this also explains why the pony Mane Six function as adults, while their roughly similarly aged human counterparts don’t, at least fully.
   Chronological order: post-contact 5 (overall 10)

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

"Tachypsychia." Huh. Well, I just learned a new word.

In any case, a lovely chapter indeed. Cook may be a bit young for a father figure, but I 'd say he makes an excellent, supportive sounding board all the same. Hopefully his supervisors won't mind all that much.

And yeah, the Equestrian anachronism stew has gotten a lot thicker over time.

[Dave Bryant]

8282430
It certainly is true Cook’s rather too young to be a father-figure to a bunch of high-schoolers! The role he seems to be falling gradually into is more of an uncle or older brother. The tone of his teasing, for instance, fits the older-brother mold best, I think, though I’m not sure whether he actually is an older brother. (I don’t know much about his family at all, truth to tell.) And like a good older brother, he’s willing to listen and, to the best of his ability, offer counsel.

[redandready45]

She shivered once and bent to retrieve her jacket. “They wrote that for me after the Battle of the Bands. It was a surprise, and it’s one of the most amazing gifts I’ve ever gotten.”

That's a wonderful headcanon for "Friendship Through the Ages". Writing a song for someone that comes from the heart can mean more than something bought in the store.

8282576

Cook in general seems like the kind of person we can confess our darkest feelings too.

[Dave Bryant]

10110712
It seemed a natural explanation for “Friendship Through the Ages”, especially given how many of the songs apparently are intended to be actual in-universe compositions and performances. The music video is more fanciful, of course, but it does at least suggest the possibility.

I definitely am very pleased with how Cook has turned out—and it’s no accident he’s the sort who one naturally feels is someone to confide in.