• Published 1st Nov 2020
  • 720 Views, 78 Comments

Mare Do Well: Rebirth - MagnetBolt



It's been years since Mare Do Well was last seen. Equestria has changed since then, and what should have been quiet retirement ends when a new threat comes to life in the city of Seasaddle. Is Mare Do Well up to the task, or is she outdated?

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Foal's Play, Part 1

Loopy groaned, face-down on the mat, undisguised and entirely at ease, every part of her body aching. She’d been taking a beating lately, and today was no exception. Hooves pressed into her back, pressing along her spine, sore muscles and chipped chitin aching under the pressure.

“What have you been doing?” the pony practically standing on Loopy’s back asked. “You look like you’ve been wrestling yaks and losing.”

“I sure feel like it,” Loopy said, her voice muffled by being face down on a cotton mat. “It’s just wear and tear. Normal work stuff.”

“Oh yes, normal work stuff,” the pony laughed softly. “You know you shouldn’t lie to your doctor.”

“When did you become a doctor?” Loopy asked. She raised her head up to smile at the pony massaging her back. “I didn’t think you went to college, Star Thistle.”

The yellow earth pony had her shaggy mane up in a loose bun held together with chopsticks. She snorted and returned the smile. “I’ll have you know the Guild of Buskers, Entertainers, and Escorts is well-known for sponsoring members in higher education.”

“Of course,” Loopy conceded. “Teleportation is a difficult spell to learn. The Escorts need the continuing education credits to keep their licenses, after all.”

“Exactly,” Star Thistle agreed.

They were in a small, private room. The curtains and beads and potted plants and paper screens were arranged in a way that the masseuse had claimed was some kind of ancient kirin tradition of luck and the flow of energy, but Loopy was sure it was more to disguise the fact they were in a cheap hotel.

“This wing is really messed up,” Star Thistle noted, as she stretched it out. Loopy winced as the mare tugged on it. “Some of the veins are broken.”

“Yeah,” Loopy agreed, the pain growing as Thistle rubbed it, trying to smooth it out. “I had a run-in with a few thousand tons of concrete.”

“And then came right here?” Star Thistle asked.

“Well…”

“Or did you wait for days with a broken wing like it was going to get better on its own?” Thistle continued, obviously already knowing the answer. “You’re tough, but you’re not that tough. If you abuse your body too much, it isn’t going to heal.”

“I know,” Loopy muttered.

Star Thistle sighed and hugged her from behind, careful not to pin Loopy’s damaged wing between them.

“I worry about you,” she whispered. “You remember when we first met? You were lost, starving, and about two-thirds of the way to going feral.”

Loopy groaned. Star Thistle had one of the most powerful auras she’d ever felt in a pony. It was a shroud of universal love and acceptance that had been practically blinding in its radiance when they’d run into each other for the first time. Loopy had been barely conscious, and Star Thistle had been the only pony that didn’t pretend the changeling didn’t exist. City ponies could be remarkably blind when it came to ponies in need - they’d literally stepped over her like she was trash on the street.

Most of them, anyway. Star Thistle had picked her up, carried her away, and nursed her back to health. All for a very reasonable finder’s fee. She was a professional, after all.

“Did I ever mention that you’re basically my best friend?” Loopy muttered.

“Mm. I can sense you’re making more friends, though,” Star Thistle said. She smiled. “It’s all over your personal energy.”

“Sure, personal energy,” Loopy said, dismissively.

And I can tell you got a new job.”

Loopy paused. “Really? How can you tell? Is it because I don’t smell like coffee? Or--”

“Because you paid your tab in full when you walked in,” Star Thistle interrupted. “I’m not psychic, Loop d’Loop. I’m just in tune with the universe, and the universe tells me that you wouldn’t have that kind of spending money if you were still working in a cafe.”

“It seems like cheating to use logic.”

“I’ll pretend it came to me in a dream next time.”

“If you say that I’ll be worried Princess Luna is spying on me!” Loopy complained.

Star Thistle laughed and let go, getting up. “She's retired! I think she's got better things to do than spy on ponies like you. Does your wing feel any better now?”

“Hm?” Loopy tried moving it experimentally. “Oh hey, that’s much better!” She buzzed it faster.

“Good. If I actually knew anything about changelings I’d probably tell you that you need to molt to heal it the rest of the way and fix all these scratches on your chitin, but like you said, I’m not a doctor.”

“I’m getting too old to just molt on demand,” Loopy groaned.

“Oh! Maybe this’ll help!” Star Thistle got up and rummaged around a paper screen. Loopy sat up to look, curious. The earth pony returned with a small jar.

“What’s that?” Loopy asked.

“It’s skin cream,” Star Thistle said. “We’re supposed to be giving out free samples anyway, and it’s full of minerals and other healthy… stuff. It’s supposed to reduce wrinkles and make you look younger.”

“You realize I can look any age I want, right?” Loopy asked.

“Just try it, and if it doesn’t help buff out the scratches, give it to a friend,” Star Thistle sighed.

There was a knock on the door. Star Thistle put the jar in Loopy’s hooves and walked over, pausing at the door to make sure Loopy had time to get into her disguise. Once she was safely looking like a pony instead of a midnight-black chitinous horror, Thistle opened the door.

A pony ran in, weeping, grabbing Star Thistle and hugging her like she was a life preserver and she was lost at sea. The wave of fear and sorrow coming off the weeping mare was enough to make Loopy flinch, as intense as a thunderclap of emotion going off right in front of her.

“I don’t know what to do, Thistle! He’s gone!” the white unicorn mare wailed. “He’s gone!”

“Who’s gone, Sweetclover?” Star Thistle asked. She helped the mare over to the bed and sat her down. Loopy shut the door behind them, but didn’t leave. Something told her she needed to stick around.

“My son,” Sweetclover whispered, on the edge of breaking down and being unable to speak. “H-he didn’t come home for the holidays, and I thought it was just b-because he was mad at me for sending him to the boarding school, but when I went down there with a present a-and I was going to apologize and try to talk to him, he wasn’t there!”

“Did he run away?” Star Thistle asked.

Sweetclover sobbed. “They said he wasn’t a student there! They wouldn’t even talk to me! They tried to have me arrested because I didn’t want to leave without seeing him! Even the police won’t listen to me! They all think I’m crazy!”

Loopy frowned. She brushed herself off. “Which school was this?” she asked.


“Miss Sweetclover said her son, Sweet Potato, went missing from Mountain Laurel Boarding School,” Loopy said. “I was able to get a picture.”

She gave Bon-Bon the photo. Sweetclover looked happy, but exhausted, with bags under her eyes and a teenaged pony standing next to her who had an obvious family resemblance along with some of the usual signs of rebellion at that age - a filthy shirt for some local band, badly dyed streaks in his pale mane, and a look on his face that said he didn’t care about anything.

“She sent him to a boarding school because she worked long hours and she didn’t want him to be unsupervised that whole time,” Loopy said. “She didn’t say it exactly, but I think he was sort of a problem child.”

Everypony is a problem child at that age,” Bon-Bon muttered. “And the police won’t look into it at all?”

“They wouldn’t let her make a report. When she tried to get help, they trespassed her and told her she’d be arrested if she came back,” Loopy said.

“Hey, does this cream have aloe in it?” Lyra asked, holding up the pot of skin cream. “It really smells funny.”

“Worried that you’re going to get wrinkles before your classmates?” Bon-Bon asked.

“I’m not jealous about any hypothetically immortal classmates,” Lyra mumbled, putting the pot of cream down and blushing.

“So what are we going to do about this?” Loopy asked, interrupting them. “That mare was completely broken. I can’t just leave her hanging.”

Bon-Bon sighed. “It’s going to be difficult to find much. The problem is, records on foals are protected by law, even from official inquiry. I’d need to get a court order to make the school cooperate…”

“...And if they’re hiding something, they’ll fight it as much as possible,” Loopy guessed.

Bon-Bon nodded. “And if the Seasaddle Police Department doesn’t want to open a case, breaking in is going to end really poorly for us.”

Loopy huffed, folding her hooves. “That sounds like you want to give up on a missing foal.”

“We just need to figure out the right way to approach it,” Bon-Bon said. “It’s not like we have anypony on the inside we can talk to.”

“A pony on the inside, huh?” Loopy asked, smiling.


“Remember, be on your best behavior,” Bon-Bon said.

“Do you have to--” Loopy groaned. Bon-Bon hugged her. Loopy couldn’t stop herself from blushing. She tried to push the earth pony away, but she had a couple of inches on her at the moment.

“Are you sure you can keep that disguise up?” Bon-Bon whispered. “I thought changing size was difficult for you.”

“I just got a fill-up,” Loopy hissed back. “Are you sure your paperwork is good enough to keep them from figuring out I’m older than half the teachers?”

Bon-Bon pulled back and put her hooves on her hips. “Young lady, I’ll have you know I’m a professional. I know you’re worried about being on your own, but you need discipline. I better not hear about you getting into trouble!”

“Yes, Mom,” Loopy groaned.

“Now, here comes one of your new teachers. Greet them properly.”

Loopy turned and looked up at the pony walking out of the school. She had a very similar look to the building itself, blocky and humorless and made entirely out of grey stone, at least emotionally. She looked down at Loopy like she was a particularly distasteful mess on the sidewalk that she had been asked to clean up.

“Hello, ma’am,” Loopy said. “I’m Buttercup Cream.” She held out a hoof to shake.

The mare ignored the hoof. “You will refer to me as Miss Coal, not ‘Ma’am’,” she snapped.

Loopy raised an eyebrow. “Okay.”

Bon-Bon cleared her throat.

Loopy rolled her eyes. “Okay, Miss Coal.”

“I can see this one will need extra discipline,” Miss Coal said. “Don’t worry. We specialize in teaching young troublemakers exactly where they fit into society. Foals need to be molded into useful members of society.”

“Thank you for taking her in this late in the school year,” Bon-Bon said.

“Of course. Now, I find it’s best not to drag things out or else foals get too attached to their parents. As long as she remains on good behavior she’ll be allowed to write to you once a week. At the end of the school year we will send you a report on her behavior. Hopefully we will not need any other reports until then.”

Bon-Bon nodded. “Right. Thanks again.”

Miss Coal put a hoof on Loopy’s shoulder and forcibly turned her, pushing her towards the doors.

“Oh I can tell this is going to be fun,” Loopy mumbled.


Loopy had never been to an actual school. Changelings didn’t really do the classroom thing and she’d always mimicked an adult before. She was quickly learning two very important things - one, classrooms had a lot of unspoken rules that she was expected to have absorbed by the time she was a teenager, and two, she had some really significant gaps in her education.

Right now both of those were coming to a head. She was standing up in front of the class, staring at a chalkboard.

“Is there a problem?” the teacher asked. She had a ruler for a cutie mark, a ruler in her hoof, and a face with so many sharp angles it also could have been made out of wood.

Loopy hesitated. She didn’t want to admit she didn’t know what to do. She was really an adult. The math on the board was for foals. It should have been easy for her. It was about the area of a circle, and a circle was the easiest shape, right? She could reason this out.

“No, no, I can do this,” Loopy said. “Uh…”

She hesitated. Why were there letters and numbers? Math wasn’t supposed to have letters! But with common sense, she could work it out.

“Seventeen?” Loopy guessed.

“Maybe you need to be in a less advanced class,” the teacher sighed. “Go back to your seat.”

Loopy had never felt humiliation in the same way she did walking back to her seat, foals looking at her like she was an idiot.

“What’s pie got to do with it anyway?” she mumbled.


“Repeat the question?” Loopy asked.

The teacher sighed. He was a stallion that looked more like a prison guard than an educator, with the same attitude towards the ponies under his care. “Miss Buttercup Cream, I do not like repeating myself.”

“And I don’t like not hearing questions,” Loopy said.

The stallion frowned. “Don’t talk back to me. You get smart with me, you’re going to regret it.”

“I regret a lot of things,” Loopy admitted. “Please, repeat the question. I know you want to move on, and I want to at least try to answer it.”

“I asked you for the name of the pony that designed Equestria’s national flag,” the stallion said.

Loopy hissed through her teeth. “The current flag?”

“It hasn’t changed in almost twelve centuries. Yes, the current flag!”

“I have no idea,” Loopy shrugged. “Probably somepony with ‘flag’ or ‘banner’ in their name. It always works out like that. Anyway, shouldn’t you be telling me? If I already knew I wouldn’t have to be in school.”

The stallion gave her a flat look. “Detention.”

“What’s detention?”


“I hate detention,” Loopy huffed. “Why do I have to write the same thing a hundred times? What’s that going to teach me?”

She scribbled another line down on the paper. She was somewhere between forty and fifty and had totally lost count, largely because she didn’t care about her special assignment of writing ‘I will not talk back to my teachers, who are smarter than I am’ a hundred times in a row.

“It’s supposed to teach you not to get in trouble,” the student next to her whispered. “You shouldn’t make the teachers angry.” She looked up to the front of the room and the teacher there, who was doing some kind of paperwork. When the teacher looked up, the other student looked away, obviously terrified to meet her gaze.

“Why?” Loopy frowned.

“...Because we’re only kids, and they’re grown-ups, so they can do anything they want,” the filly said. “Don’t talk so loud or else--”

“No talking in detention!” the teacher at the front of the room snapped. “Next student to speak is missing dinner!”


Loopy sighed, staring up at the ceiling. Once classes were over, they’d been herded into dorms like criminals being returned to their cells for the night. The lights had been shut off, and the doors were locked like they’d try to escape.

“I don’t like school,” she mumbled. She’d learned one thing already. She was glad she’d never gone to Equestrian schools for real if they were all like this. It was almost as bad as the hive had been, in the bad old days. Older changelings shoving ponies around, constant hunger, watching each other for weaknesses, and that constant threat that the Queen might notice you for the wrong reasons.

“Hey,” whispered another pony.

Loopy sat up to see the pony that had been in detention with her. She waved from her bunk, leaning over the side.

“Your name is Buttercup Cream, right?” she asked. “Sorry about dinner.”

“It’s fine,” Loopy promised her. “I wasn’t very hungry anyway.”

“I’m Pastel Palette,” she said. “I just want to warn you, you really don’t want to get into too much trouble.”

“Why? I’m not all that impressed by detention, and it seems like a lot of students end up there.”

“The teachers like to punish students for anything they can,” Pastel said. “As long as we’re in trouble it means they can treat us however they want. Even when they let us write home or talk to our parents, we’re not allowed to tell them what this place is like.”

“Yeah well, that’s not going to fly with me,” Loopy said. “What are they gonna do if I just won’t cooperate? Tell my parents I’m too much trouble? Keep me from ever having dinner again?”

Pastel shook her head. Loopy could feel the fear coming off of her. “If you cause too much trouble, they’ll take you away to the special classes.”

“Special classes,” Loopy repeated. “What, more of that stupid math with letters in it?”

Pastel didn’t laugh at the joke. “When students go to the special classes, they usually don’t come back. I don’t want anypony else to end up disappearing like that.”

Loopy hesitated. “Do you know a pony named Sweet Potato?”

“Why? Were you one of his friends?”

“Something like that.” Loopy didn’t like the past tense Pastel Palette had used.

Pastel’s ears dipped. She looked down. “I’m sorry. He kept causing trouble, and he just wouldn’t listen. He got taken away two weeks ago. You should just give up on him, and keep your head down, and try to get through it.”

A shadow passed by the door, and Pastel threw herself into bed, pretending to be asleep.

Loopy kept staring at the ceiling. “Sounds like I need to get myself into these special classes,” she whispered.