Chapter 1
***
Sunset Shimmer had a problem. Really, she had more than one, which you could even say was her problem in an almost-but-not-really tautological way, but at the moment, one particular problem stood out.
You see, Sunset Shimmer hadn’t had a whole lot of expectations for what she would find on the other side of the mirror, but being spat out of the base of a statue into the path of some kind of mechanized carriage hadn’t been one of them.
Well, no, that was a lie. She’d had a lot of expectations for what she would find, the carriage thing just wasn’t one of them.
Back to the carriage thing, though—it was kind of a problem. Now, if she’d popped out of the mirror in immediate possession of the wings the mirror had shown her having, maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem. Maybe things would have gone okay. She didn’t though, so, again, problem. It was actually a rather big problem, too—bigger than it sounds, and being in the path of a carriage wasn’t really a small issue to begin with.
The thing was, regardless of her lack of wings, she didn’t actually come out of the statue at ground level. That might seem odd, but it was a direct result of the statue itself not being at ground level. The statue where the mirror portal was anchored was, in fact, in the back of another of these mechanized carriages which was itself moving down a vast black road at somewhat of a greater speed than Sunset Shimmer had ever seen a carriage go.
Unfortunately for Sunset Shimmer, it was also at somewhat of a greater speed than she was able to react, and while a timely teleport might have been able to save her or at least reduce her problems to the reduction of speed via friction with the ground—a nasty enough proposition to begin with—she instead had to contend with something rather more dire: the sudden and uneven distribution of kinetic energy in disparate parts of her body, which is to say, impact.
Of course, if Sunset Shimmer had actually been hit by an automated carriage going automated carriage highway speeds, her path to ascension would have been rather short. Whether it would have been successful or not, nopony could know, but given that she was, colloquially, kind of a bitch made it rather unlikely, though she wasn’t consciously aware of the fact. Regardless, Sunset Shimmer was subject to one particular lucky break that saved her life, if you could call an aspect of physics lucky.
The thing that saved Sunset Shimmer’s life was the rather necessary and non-negotiable fact that she exited the statue portal in the same frame of reference as the statue portal, and so the difference in velocity between her and the surrounding mechanized carriages was in fact rather small, initially. Of course, though it was against her will and something she intended to fix as soon as possible, Sunset Shimmer was a unicorn and therefore not overly familiar with wind resistance. The two became acquainted, though, and became fast friends on account of having so much in common—that being, mainly, that wind resistance was almost as much of a bitch as she was.
So, yes, Sunset Shimmer had a problem and it was a rather large one, but not, perhaps, as large as it could have been or large enough to preclude her from ever having problems to begin with. She was not the only one, however, though she wouldn’t particularly see it that way herself.
It was Neighton’s third law, though, that said that she was about to be as much of a problem to the people in the mechanized carriage as they were about to be to her. More than that, though, and entirely beyond her knowing, she was also about to be a problem to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures and several other departments of the British Ministry of Magic.
In the end, while she didn’t remember the actual impact, the problems involved would be felt far into the future.
Mostly by her.
***
Sunset Shimmer was in pain. Ponies were tough creatures—even unicorns—but there was still only so much abuse they could take and Sunset had gone rather far past that. She tried to move, but her body was offended at the very idea. She persevered, though, just enough to take stock of what had happened to her.
Just about the only bright side was the fact that her head was relatively clear, if you could call it a bright side. On one hoof, it meant that she was immediately aware of the situation that she was in, including the large crowd of towering whatever-they-weres that were surrounding her, but on the other hoof, it meant that she was immediately aware of all the different parts of her that were screaming out in pain.
Honestly, though, calling them different parts was kind of missing the point. Sure, the pain in her hooves was a special kind of burn that told her that she must have landed at least briefly on the pitch and gravel mixture that the road was made of and similar abrasions were scattered over her coat like leopard spots, but it was all tied together into one throbbing mess by the single all-encompassing bruise that made up her left side.
Oh, and her horn hurt. Everything else aside, that was a special spike of pain with a direct line to her brain—literally. It was like every annoying horn-flick from her childhood had all come back for a second round, so there was that.
All in all, Sunset was not enjoying her first moments in this new world, nor did she think she was going to enjoy the immediate future. The sounds coming from the crowd surrounding her were not happy sounds; that wasn't surprising. She had, after all, caused quite the commotion and likely some damage upon her arrival.
No, the concerning things were worried whispers like "What is it?" and "Where did it come from?"—the sounds of a crowd building up a head of paranoia and fear. Entirely aside from being referred to as a thing, these people had apparently never seen a pony before, which was not a position she liked being in given her state and how much larger they were than her.
Sunset did not like feeling vulnerable. She liked being vulnerable even less.
Naturally, things got worse from there. It started with several sharp cracks that sent fresh jolts of pain down her horn. It felt like teleportation magic of a sort, but not even the sloppiest teleport should have felt like that to her.
For all that the teleportation spell hurt, though, and maybe gave off the impression of someone careless with their magic, the next thing was a little more alarming: a heavy curtain of lassitude fell over the entire area, pushing the throbbing of her horn into a constant ache, which was worrying on multiple levels.
First, Sunset did not like having her emotions controlled. Of course, no one liked having their emotions controlled, and while she didn’t believe much in the rights of other people, it did reinforce the image of carelessness she’d already developed.
Second, though, was that this was the second spell that had felt unusually raw to her horn, and while it could have had something to do with the world or how these whatever-they-weres do magic, Sunset had just been rather traumatically injured and her mind immediately went to the part of her body that was most directly connected to it: her horn.
The idea that she might have injured her horn sent chills down her spine.
Horn injuries were… bad. They were bad for the average unicorn and they’d be even worse for somepony like her that lived and breathed magic. Horns grew slowly for the life of a unicorn, enough that filing and polishing were part of proper horncare, but deep cracks and damage were another matter entirely. Some injuries could be filled with certain magical metals, but an outright broken horn… there wasn’t much that could be done about that.
Sunset would never have admitted it, but she was getting scared. She’d come to this world through a magic mirror chasing after an ascension that her mentor and mother figure had denied her. Laying broken in the street surrounded by strange and imposing creatures was not how this was supposed to go.
Then, she felt the first memory spell being cast on the crowd and her vague creeping dread turned to bright searing terror. There was definitely something wrong with her horn, because she didn’t think that she was supposed to see the flashes of imagery showing the site of the crash, only instead of a beautiful and powerful unicorn with a red and gold mane, there was a goat.
A.
Goat.
Sunset didn’t have time for indignation, though, because soon the memory spells were going off one after another, filling her head with the same images over and over—except for one time when instead of a goat, it was a fawn.
Sunset wasn’t sure if that was better.
And then the magic users reached Sunset.
“The hell is this?” one of them asked. “I thought this was supposed to be a unicorn sighting? That ain’t no unicorn.”
Oh Celestia, Sunset swore in her head. Was her horn so far gone that they couldn’t even tell she was a unicorn?”
“It’s got the horn,” another answered, much to her relief. “Sorta.”
Sort of? Sort of?! Curse it, that was not helpful.
“It’s a tiny, chubby yellow thing with a Gryffindor mane,” the first voice drawled. “Are we sure someone didn’t just animate a stuffed toy?”
Chubby? Chubby?! Sunset didn’t know what a ‘Gryffindor’ was, but the way it was sneered implied that it was an insult, too, which meant that these were idiots because her mane was perfect.
Also because they apparently didn’t know what a unicorn looked like, which was almost as strong of an argument.
Sunset wasn’t ready for the wash of static-y magic that set her teeth on edge.
“Nope,” said one of the magic users. “Not charmed or transfigured. Someone’s been violating the ban on experimental breeding. What do you think? They cross a unicorn with a puffskein?”
Excuse you?! Sunset wasn’t fond of the parents that had given her up as a foal, but they’d both been unicorns!
“Something like that” another one said, clearly not caring, though he continued after a distinct pause. “Red blood, so probably not all that magical.”
They did know that ‘blue bloods’ don’t actually have blue blood, right? And that they weren’t actually any better at magic than anypony else? Sunset added ‘classist’ to the list of reasons she wanted to be absolutely anywhere else but at the mercy of these creatures, but an attempt to get up only confirmed that it wasn’t going to happen.
“Listen to that wheezing,” another one of them said. “Think we should put it out of its misery?”
Sunset tried harder and managed to reassure herself that she still had a horn—mainly by managing to bang it on something metal behind her.
“Petrificus totalus,” someone intoned, briefly confusing Sunset until she felt the magic squeezing in on her, locking her in place. “Nah. DoM’ll want to see it first at least, and Macnair gets bitchy if you take his work away from him since there isn’t much call for an executioner with the dementors and all.”
Domme? Executioner? Yeah, no, Sunset wasn’t going to stick around for that. Heart hammering, she strained against the spell holding her in place, but it wasn’t just a physical binding—there was a paralysis aspect to it, too. She’d have to dispel it first.
Assuming she could.
Assuming her horn still worked.
The prospect of being trapped, mentally controlled, studied and eventually killed was a pretty good reason to find out, though. Still, it wouldn’t matter if she couldn’t actually get away. That was what magic was for, though. If she could cast a dispel, she might be able to cast a teleport, and self-levitation was theoretically an option, too—not an attractive option given her current condition, but, again, it was that or a string of horrible equine rights violations followed by death, so there really wasn’t any contest.
Sunset prepared herself, took a deep breath, then lit up her horn—
“Stupefy,” one of the magic users said, and everything went dark.
***
Sunset awoke in slightly less pain.
She was also in a cage, which wasn’t really a fair exchange in her opinion, that being the only one that mattered. Still, she was able to actually sit up, if gingerly, which was a vast improvement to being too hurt to move and was going to be important in the immediate future.
Not the most important thing, though. Carefully, Sunset brought a hoof up to feel her horn.
It felt solid at first, which was a relief, but that relief was short-lived. As she ran her hoof along the length, she felt the last thing any unicorn wanted to feel: something uneven. Further exploration revealed a bit-sized chip missing from the side of her horn, and the other side had been ground raw against the road, bringing the tip almost to a point.
Unicorns had long evolved past goring other creatures with their horns, but it was technically an option for Sunset now, and she was sorely tempted to see how well it worked on the people who had captured her, no matter how sensitive her horn was at the moment.
Regardless, her horn was in bad shape, but only in a scarring and possible nerve damage sense. It would affect her magic, possibly for the rest of her mortal life, but she wasn’t planning on spending too much more of her life mortal. One of the very few things that her mentor, the alicorn Princess Celestia had told Sunset about her ascension was that the transformation into alicorn had essentially given her a new body out of magic alone, so this was just one more reason she needed to reach ascension herself.
One of many.
Expanding her explorations beyond her horn and the cage she was in, Sunset found herself alone in a dark room housing several other cages and a desk with an inkwell and a smattering of papers on it. The cages were empty, and the desk was large enough that she might be able to put her hooves on it if she stood up on her back hooves and stretched.
As intimidating as the giant desk was, the empty cages were more ominous. Normally, Sunset wouldn’t think anything of them; it would have been unusual for the dungeons in the Canterlot palace to have not been empty, for instance. Normally, though, governments did not have a dedicated executioner on staff.
Fortunately for Sunset, though, the emptiness was the only thing noteworthy about the cages; they weren’t even magically reinforced, which was just embarrassing. These cages couldn’t hold a foal, and they wouldn’t hold Sunset.
Slowly, carefully, Sunset began to charge her horn up with magic. It was messy, producing the occasional arc across the damaged portions of her horn, but other than a bit of wasted energy, it seemed to be functional.
Pushing just a bit more, Sunset channeled the magic into a teleport spell, let it go and reappeared just outside of her cage with a sizzling pop and only a slight smell of ozone. Finally able to reassure herself that she wasn’t crippled, Sunset felt a knot in her heart relax.
Now she just had to find a way out of this place.
That would be easier if she had any idea where she was. With years of experience living in the Canterlot Palace, Sunset would have said she knew her large structures pretty well, and while it was possible that she was merely deep in the structure, the particular clamminess gave Sunset the impression that she was also underground.
That was going to make escape a little annoying, but it did give her an immediate goal: heading upwards. Before heading out, she checked the desk for anything interesting, but it seemed to be just a generic workstation with blank parchment and other stationery.
The door was her next stop, and it wasn’t even locked. Briefly, Sunset wished she’d learned an invisibility spell at some point, but her studies had always been about being seen. Sure, she’d occasionally done some underhoofed things to make other ponies look bad, but she hadn’t made a study of it.
That, clearly, had been a mistake.
Sunset listened at the door for any sort of sound, but no matter how long she waited, she didn’t hear a single thing. In Sunset’s experience, that would normally mean that they possessed a soundproofing spell that activated with the door closed, but after cracking the door open, nothing seemed to change.
In hindsight, if there had been a soundproofing spell, she probably would have felt it with her horn when she’d pressed her face against the door. After the completely unenchanted cage, she was really not impressed by these magic users. They were terrifying in the kinds of magic they did use—mental effects, paralysis, memory editing and the like—but as far as actual practical magic went… well, she’d yet to actually see any.
That gave her an idea, actually. As quietly as possible, she closed the door, stepped back, sat down and began to concentrate.
Normally, sensing magic didn’t have much of a range, especially in a place like Canterlot Palace where pretty much every door and wall was layered with enchantments but it wasn’t limited to unicorns and enchantments. Even earth ponies put magic into everything they interacted with, if in a less directed manner.
Here, though, and with her horn scraped so raw that it throbbed at the slightest twitch of magic? Sunset did what she could to calm her mind and open herself up to it.
She actually felt more than she’d expected to. As she’d guessed, the actual structure was only minimally enchanted, mostly with something like the magic that had been used to detain her. It wasn’t quite proper structural magic, but instead just seemed to be holding things in place, which was… a weird way to go about it.
Other than that, though, she actually did feel several sharp spikes of magic. Her horn didn’t give her a three-dimensional map or anything, but as she craned her neck this way and that, she could pick out a number of things quite nearby that were notable and one or two that were actually impressive.
What was almost as noteworthy was what she didn’t sense, because beyond the immediate structure there was… pretty much nothing. There might have been one slight glow from a distance away, but if not for that, she almost would have concluded that she was in some kind of pocket dimension. She wanted to say that her captors weren’t nearly advanced enough to have that kind of magic, but with the eclectic mix of war crimes she’d seen so far from them, she didn’t want to rule anything out.
Fortunately, the most useful thing her meditation provided was some idea of how the rest of the structure was laid out, which also gave her some idea of where to go. Unfortunately, since she believed herself to be either underground or, doubtfully, in a pocket dimension, then most likely she had to go to the center rather than the edge to find her way out.
Once again, Sunset approached the door and hesitated. The corridor outside was silent, which might mean it was night or it might just mean she was in a less used wing of the structure. Either way, the closer to the center she got, the more likely it was that she’d run into one or more of the creatures, be they workers or guards.
What was she going to do when she did?
Obviously, the best thing to do would be to sneak past them, but with the yellow red and gold of her coat and mane, a thestral she was not.
She could just run if she was spotted, but without knowing where her goal was beforehoof, that would be a mistake.
She… didn’t particularly want to kill, even if the world would almost certainly be better off without the kinds of magic these creatures used. No matter the disagreements that Sunset had with her over the matter of ascension, Princess Celestia had convinced her that morality aside, killing only caused more problems in the long run and Sunset had enough problems just then that she couldn’t really afford to plant any more.
That reduced her options by more than she’d like to admit. Again, her specialty was big, flashy magic—especially fire—and that didn’t really lend itself to “minimum necessary force.”
Briefly, Sunset remembered the spell that had been used to make her unconscious, but she hadn’t felt enough of it to be able to reproduce it and she didn’t actually know what it had done. What had the creature said? Stupefy? Saying words when casting a spell was a weird quirk, but that sounded like it worked by reducing the target’s mental capacity until they were incapable of doing anything. That… was about as disturbing as the rest of the magic she’d seen from them and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know how it would work.
That pretty much left Sunset with blunt force as an option. The creatures had looked pretty gangly from what she could recall, and most species needed their kneecaps for something. Searching the room for something she could use as a weapon, Sunset broke one leg off the chair and swung it with her magic a few times, thinking about just how much larger than her they were.
The teal glow of her magic was not subtle, but it would have to do.
***
Finding empty corridor after empty corridor of black stone and cold blue-flamed torches, Sunset was pretty sure that it was night, or whenever these creatures slept. That wasn’t any proof that no one was around, but it was reason enough to trade a little care for expediency to ensure she found her way out before any of them came back to do horrible things to her.
Mostly, this meant not stopping at every doorway to ensure that the coast was clear before entering a room since no matter how hurried, she was still conscious of the echoing clip-clop that hooves made on polished stone.
Still, it was difficult not stopping to look at things considering the sorts of things she came across. It should have been obvious since it was where she’d been brought, but this was apparently where the whatever-they-weres studied strange and unusual magics. The “DoM” that had been mentioned was apparently the Department of Mysteries, which, well, was better than what it sounded like at first, anyway, though her opinion on being one of the mysteries they were studying hadn’t changed.
She definitely made note of several things, though. The little glowing orbs felt interesting, and she wasn’t sure what the ache in her horn from the freestanding veiled doorway meant.
That said, the area wasn’t huge, so it wasn’t actually all that long until she found the small room that made up the central hub with twelve identical doors, which seemed none too helpful. Neither was it helpful when the floor thrummed with magic and began to spin until Sunset had lost track of the one she’d come out of like something out of Oubliettes and Ogres, only this was some place that people were actually expected to use every day to get to work. True, Sunset knew some ponies who would build such a thing, but this was a government building.
No, wait, Princess Celestia was absolutely one of those ponies. It was actually surprising that Castle Canterlot wasn’t full of secret passages.
Moving on, Sunset wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do here, exactly. There had to be some logic to it, but it wasn’t clear what that logic was, which she supposed was the point. Still, she wanted to hurry up and get out of here, not just because she wanted to stay alive, but because the room itself was… uncomfortable.
Wait, why was the room uncomfortable? It was just a room, slightly more magical than the last. Sunset took a breath to calm herself and tried to examine her feelings—not one of the skills and habits that Princess Celestia had successfully managed to teach her. It had something to do with magic, though, so Sunset eventually figured it out.
On the surface it looked like a vocal trigger, but deeper in there was something in the magic that was reading her intent, as if reading ponies’ minds was a perfectly normal and sane thing to do so long as you used it for a building directory.
Sunset really, really did not like these creatures or their magic.
“Exit?” she announced self consciously to the room, to which the room obliged, revealing a short corridor to a brass-caged elevator. Sunset wasted no time in rushing to it, only slowing enough as to not make too much noise rattling the mechanism.
As quick as she could, Sunset shut the door with her magic and propped herself up on her hind legs so she could see the controls.
According to the elevator, there were ten floors labeled zero through nine, going from "deep," "deeper" and "extraordinarily deep" down to "even deeper again" and finally just "bottom." Obviously someone had had fun labeling them, but Sunset wasn't really in the mood to appreciate it just then, considering she was on the deepest level.
Without hesitation, Sunset slammed the controls with her hoof, starting a cacophonous rattling as the cage began to ascend on its way to level zero.
She was therefore rather confused when a voice announced, "Level Eight: Ministry Atrium, Public Floo and Visitor's Entrance," as it passed by a large room with a large fountain and scores of gilded alcoves that looked almost like fireplaces.
What was the point of having your mysterious research lab on the bottom level of an underground complex if the public entrance was right next to it?
Annoyed at the questionable planning abilities of these creatures and not willing to waste any time searching the upper floors when she had an exit right there, Sunset slammed the controls again, but as expected, doing so failed to change the course of the elevator which was on its way to the top floor.
It was fortunate that the elevator was made of brass because the backlash of Sunset's teleport down to the atrium as it passed by was rather more hot and violent than it should have been, leaving it sizzling.
She appeared at a run down in the atrium, wasting no time jumping the security desk and making her way to the travel... they really looked like fireplaces for some reason.
That reason, her horn revealed to her, was that apparently these alcoves were designed to use some kind of magical fire to burn a hole between two points in space, almost like a wormhole, but without the actual wormhole. At first, Sunset thought this was absolutely insane as there wouldn't be anything to ensure that the traveler actually reached their destination in the space between spaces, but on second examination, there appeared to be a spell tied to a network that directed them to the right one.
It was still insane, of course, though for once in Sunset's experience with these creatures' magic not really immoral, probably. Burning holes in space didn't sound like that great an idea, but unicorns had been poking holes in space for ages and it was fine. Besides, if it did eventually let in horrors beyond comprehension from the space between, well, that sounded like a them-problem, or at minimum a later-problem.
Still, there were better ways to send things to other places with fire. Sunset herself was perfectly capable of unburning things and Princess Celestia could do it at a distance. Admittedly, that wasn't something you'd do to a person, but it was just what Sunset could think of off the top of her head.
Immolation transportation aside, what actually mattered was figuring out how to use one of these fireplaces to get out of this place. Well, triggering the magic seemed simple enough, as it greatly resembled the carousel room down in the Department of Mysteries. This one looked a lot more complex, though, since presumably there was an entire network of these things.
The result of that complexity was that the intent portion of the enchantment was extremely sensitive. So sensitive, that it almost ceased being intent-based at all. If someone misspoke the destination, they might be fine so long as they didn't actually realize it. If they realized that they'd misspoke, though, the enchantment would pick up on that and misfire, sending them somewhere else nearby the intended destination.
It was, essentially, the magical equivalent of saying, 'at this location, but not actually at this location.'
Unfortunately for Sunset, she didn't actually know of any locations, except, well...
First, she cast a magical fire into the alcove, then poked the enchantment in just the right place. Normally, there seemed to be some other component to trigger it, but injecting the right blend of spatial magic into it worked fine. The magical fire turned green and Sunset announced, "Exit," as she'd done down below in the Department of Mysteries.
The fire flared red and then slowly went back to orange. Presumably that was what happened when you gave it an invalid destination.
Well, shit.
Sunset spent more time that she liked just sitting there, body aching, anxiously examining the enchantment, but there wasn't actually much to it—the actual targeting of other locations on the network must have been done at some centralized location, leaving her little to examine. She could start saying random words into the fire, but even if she found one that worked, blindly showing up in some random place was a chance she didn't want to take if she could help it.
If only she had access to the directory where all the locations were defined.
Sunset blinked, then looked back behind her at what was clearly the security desk of a government building. The elevator had said this was the Ministry Atrium, right?
Already feeling like she'd spent too long in her escape, Sunset didn't waste any more of it facehoofing and ran back in the direction of the elevator. She did waste a few seconds looking at the statue in the center of the atrium, however. She couldn't help it—she hadn't really seen it properly on her way out, but on her way back in, she got the full effect and... wow.
Just 'wow'. The statue was a gleaming golden abomination showing one figure representing one of the creatures she'd seen so far surrounded by four other figures of other species who were all looking up at it with awe and reverence. Not even the worst of the Canterlot nobility would have dared to suggest such a thing, and here, they had it in the entranceway of their government.
Sunset did not like these creatures.
It took effort for Sunset to tear herself away from the Fountain of Magical Brethren as it was labeled, but she really was in a hurry. There were at least twenty elevators to choose from and several plaques in the area offering a directive of the floors. Immediately, Sunset's eyes went to 'Level 6: Department of Magical Transportation' under which in smaller letters it listed the 'Floo Network Authority,' 'Broom Regulatory Control,' 'Portkey Office' and 'Apparition Test Centre.'
'Floo Network Authority' had to be it, so she dashed into the closest elevator and hit the control for level six. "So, 'Floo' is what they call those things," she reflected as the elevator took her up two floors. "Like a chimney flue?" The similarity to fireplaces wasn't accidental, then, she guessed. Given Equestria's penchant for equine puns, it wasn't the worst thing she'd ever heard something called. Actually, it wasn't even the worst thing on the list.
If these creatures actually used brooms to fly like a Nightmare Night witch, she was going to go home and find her ascension in some other authoritarian nightmare world; this one was too literal.
Sunset pointedly did not think about the fact that she had no way back home—not for the two and a half years between portal activations, and not even then given that the statue where the portal was anchored to could be anywhere.
The elevator opened up into a short corridor with four doors and one thing she hadn't expected to see—a window at the end of the corridor that she immediately galloped to. She almost didn't mind being wrong about this place being underground if it meant that she could escape immediately without having to take a chance with the Floo Network.
She had at least been right about it being night, it seemed, though she wasn't entirely sure what to make of the sight she saw. It was dark outside, yes, but also absolutely pouring rain like she'd never seen before. It was like the entire Cloudsdale weather factory was pouring its entire output down over this one window, with a team of Pegasi letting off lightning bolts every ten seconds just for good measure.
The strangest part of all was that it was all completely silent, yet as she reached the wall and propped herself up on her hind legs to look through the window, she didn't feel anything like a silencing spell that would be necessary to keep the sounds of such a cacophonous storm out. What she did feel was—
Oh.
What she did feel was an illusion. Her heart sank and she dropped her front hooves back to the ground with a soft clop. She couldn't even appreciate the artistry that had gone into the illusion because she'd gotten her hopes up only for them to be immediately crushed, because of course it wasn't going to be that easy.
Sighing, Sunset turned and walked back to the door labeled as the Floo Network Authority, which she then realized was the one door in the hall that was lit from inside, because of course it was.
The emotional whiplash made it difficult to focus, but she forced herself to forget about her brief foolishness and did what she could to walk herself through the situation at hoof: Was whoever was in the Floo Network Authority working late, or was someone always monitoring the system? Ideally, it would be the former, since that would mean both that it was still relatively early in the night, and that whoever was still here might therefore leave. Sunset, therefore, had to assume it was the latter case.
Creeping closer to the door, Sunset did what she could to calm herself and felt for any magic as was becoming habit. Maybe once her horn healed, she would file it more often, because she was finding the extra sensitivity extremely valuable in this world where only the occasional thing contained magic, relatively speaking—though the office she was lurking outside of had more than she'd seen so far.
The office contained quite a few incidental things that were enchanted strewn across desks and the like, which raised her opinion of the creatures just a little bit. They couldn't possibly have come up with terrible, abusive magics to put on quills and parchment, could they?
More importantly than any of that, though, was the person she felt. It was only one, thankfully, but one was more than she wanted to have to deal with.
Muzzle nearly to the door, Sunset paused and found herself looking up into the air at her side, where her makeshift club wasn't. She must have been in too much of a hurry and forgotten it next to the floo down in the atrium.
Sunset cursed herself internally for making that kind of a mistake, but she wasn't used to needing to keep a weapon at her side constantly. She would just have to improvise with whatever was inside.
Carefully, Sunset used her magic to turn the doorknob. Again very conscious of the teal glow and light tinkling sound it made, she pulled the door just until the latch was free, then cut off her magic, using her hoof to open it further—just enough to slip through.
The main room of the Floo Network Authority looked like any other office with reception desk, six fireplaces—three to a wall—and a whatever-they-were sleeping in an alcove walled floor to ceiling with little cubby holes that seemed to fill with balls of green flame at random.
Just slightly, Sunset relaxed. If the creature on duty could sleep through the fires winking in and out, she figured they were probably a heavy sleeper. This assumption was only enhanced when, as Sunset crept closer, she began to hear a low murmuring from the fires in the alcove.
Privacy was apparently not a thing on the Floo Network. That tracked with everything else she'd seen of these creatures so far and she made sure to remember it. She also noted that she'd been right to assume it was someone monitoring the system, not someone working late. Of course, no actual monitoring seemed to be being done, but she wasn't going to complain about that.
The next thing that caught Sunset's attention was something incredibly important that she hadn't even thought of: a large map dominating the far wall next to the alcove. It was closer than she liked to the sleeping whatever-it-was, but she absolutely needed to get some idea of the lay of the land—literally.
It turned out not to be that difficult to approach the map while staying out of sight of the alcove with the typical office clutter of desks and chairs, and approaching from the opposite side of the room reduced her chances of being seen even further. The only real concern was the clopping of her hooves on the polished stone floor, but moving slowly and steadily, she made it to the map, which was informative.
The map consisted mainly of two islands split into several countries and the edge of a larger landmass to the southeast. She couldn't be sure what the scale of the map was, but there was an extremely extensive road system in place and several very large, very dense cities.
It was strange, then, that the tiny pins marking Floo locations were spread so thin, mostly scattered around the countryside except for a few areas where there were small concentrations—one up in the middle of the region labeled 'Scotland,' another two smaller ones in the city of 'London' and the last on an English peninsula south of Wales.
It seemed that the magic users in charge of all of this were a minority, much like unicorns, and given the memory spells they'd cast on all the witnesses to her arrival, they were apparently very secretive, which made sense when you were committing the kinds of equine rights violations that they were as a matter of course.
So where did she want to go? Stomping down a small part of her that said she wanted to go home, she reasoned it out. Briefly, she considered disappearing into the non-magical masses, but decided against it. For one, she couldn't actually blend in with them, and with the way she'd been received so far, any sighting of her was likely to draw the attention of the magic users as well.
The random pins out in the countryside didn't seem like a great idea either. She needed resources and she wouldn't find them out in the woods.
One of the concentrations of magic users, then, but on the outskirts where the density was lower and she could disappear into the countryside if necessary. Not the ones in London, then, and if the latitude lines were numbered the same way they were in Equestria, then being too far north would be an additional headache she didn't want to deal with. She'd be in no danger of freezing with the number of fire spells she knew, but that would be the least of the complications that heavy winter could cause.
Musing over the clusters of pins on the southwest peninsula, Sunset thought someplace in Devon would be about right, which was where the usefulness of the map ended.
Finding the directory of addresses didn't turn out to be too difficult, and in the process of going through the various books, ledgers and parchment she came across in her search, she learned a number of things: that the magic users called themselves witches and wizards as gendered terms, which was weird; that the magical government was called the Ministry of Magic and was in charge of enforcing a Statute of Secrecy from the 'muggles,' which was offensive; that the currency they used was separated into galleons, sickles and knuts using prime numbers, which was moronic; and that the Minister of Magic was breeding his own army of heliopaths in the Department of Mysteries, which was... an article from more than a week ago and couldn't have had anything to do with her.
If there were actual mystical flaming horse spirits down there, though, she hadn't sensed them, and with her horn in the state it was in, she absolutely would have.
Annoyingly, what she didn't find in her search through the desk clutter was what the whatever-they-weres actually were, other than witches and wizards, so she was going to have to keep calling them that.
As for the Floo Directory, it turned out to be a massive tome twice as large as any other book in the room, which were already rather large to her given her comparative size. The directory was so big, in fact, that Sunset had to use her magic to manipulate it with anything close to care. Fortunately, the teal light of her magic was essentially invisible in the intermittent green light coming from the alcove, though the sound of it didn't quite blend in with the murmuring of floo calls.
For Sunset's purposes, it would have been convenient if the directory was sorted by location, but that wasn't the case, nor had she really expected it to be. Still, it left her paging through at random looking for something in the right area. One of the reasons that the book was so large was because the entries seemed to go back at least a hundred years, with disconnected floos merely crossed out—and there were a lot that were crossed out.
The inefficiency of it all made it take longer than it should have and she had to go back to the map a few times to double check things because "Devon" was apparently not specific enough, but eventually she came across the entry of the home of Xenophilius Lovegood in Ottery St Catchpole, one of a small cluster of floo addresses not too far from the larger cluster that was Godric's Hollow.
Hopefully, if Sunset got caught coming out of the floo, Xenophilius Lovegood would live up to his name—but not too much.
According to the directory, the Lovegood home's floo address was "The Rookery," and while it would have been nice to have a few nearby addresses as a back up, it wasn't really practical and she really, really needed to get going.
Spending one last glance over the room to see if there was anything worth stealing, Sunset stepped up to one of the six large fireplaces in the room and started a magical fire in it as she had down in the atrium. The enchantments on this one seemed to be slightly different—a little more complex—but they were close enough for her poke-it-in-the-right place method of triggering them to work the same.
The fire turned green and, speaking the words, "The Rookery," Sunset disappeared into the flames.
***
It took Sunset a moment to recognize that she'd just walked out of the fireplace in what was clearly a living room. As in, it was just the regular fireplace that a regular living room would have, if maybe several times larger than she was used to.
This did not make sense to Sunset. She'd expected the floo to be outside, maybe out at the property line where you'd expect visitors to show up. She did not expect it to come out in someone's living room.
For Celestia's sake! Not even the most unbearably saccharine, friendship-obsessed pony would put a public portal gateway in their living room! She'd just walked here from a government building like it was the kitchen!
"What the buck is wrong with you people?!" she screamed, throwing her hooves into the air. Immediately, she regretted this and froze, listening for any sign that she was about to be chased out of the house, but there was only silence.
Just when Sunset was beginning to relax, the front door opened, revealing a small blonde child who gasped. Well, she was small in comparison to the doorway, anyway; Sunset still barely came up to her waist.
Immediately, the child's eyes went to Sunset's damaged horn, which only seemed to make her brighten up even more. "You were right, daddy!" the child shouted, amazed. "We did have crumple-horned snorkacks at home!"
"Crumple-horned what?" Sunset asked, offended.
"And it talks, too!" the child added, bounding forward and bending at the waist to get a closer look at Sunset. "I didn't know crumple-horned snorkacks could talk! I'm Luna!"
Sunset's eye twitched. "I'm not one of those whatever-you-just-saids," she said. "I'm a unicorn."
"Don't be silly," Luna laughed, leaning in even closer. "Unicorns can't talk."
"Of course they can ta—" Sunset began, then realized what she was doing. "Whatever," she grumbled. She had been gravely injured, captured and keyed up for an hour during her escape; she hadn't been prepared to deal with children.
Sunset's focus moved to the adult that was still standing in the door who greatly resembled Luna, including the long white hair. Gruffly, Sunset walked around the child and said, "Sorry for showing up in your floo—I'll be going now."
"Wait!" Luna cried, getting in Sunset's way. "You can't go! We've got to take pictures!"
Sunset was just about to teleport outside when a flash went off, blinding her. "Gah!" she shouted, blinking her eyes clear until she could see the adult Lovegood who may or may not have been Xenophilius holding the camera. "No photos!" she growled, yanking the camera out of its hands with her magic. Taking a moment to examine it, it looked like a typical spring-loaded design, so she popped it open and pulled out the last foot of film.
"In the last day I have been denied my destiny, stranded here, hit by a carriage, captured by mysterious and immoral wizards, imprisoned by the same, threatened with death and managed to escape!" she yelled, huffing with the exertion. "I am injured, tired and hungry and you are not going to tell anyone I was here or I will... I'll burn your house down!"
"Lemon?" Luna asked, holding what indeed appeared to be a lemon out.
"What?" Sunset said, automatically taking the lemon, her train of thought completely derailed. The child then produced another lemon and Sunset took that one too. She appeared to be retrieving a third one from the bag at her waist when Sunset interrupted. "Stop! Stop hoofing me lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?!"
"You said you were hungry," Luna said in a 'isn't that obvious' sort of way. "Don't crumple-horned snorkacks eat lemons?"
Sunset rolled her eyes. "I don't know, do they?" she asked sarcastically. "You should go find one and see."
Sarcasm, it seemed, was lost on the child as she immediately looked at the lemon in her hand, looked at Sunset and shoved the lemon into Sunset's mouth.
"Gak—gah!" she sputtered, spitting the lemon out. "Why in Celestia's name would you do that?!"
"To see if you liked lemons, of course," Luna said, once again giving Sunset that look questioning why she was being asked a question with such an obvious answer.
"Does it look like my name is Lemon Twist?!" she shouted, still spitting the taste of lemon out.
"Huh," Luna said, looking down at the lemons as if this was a revelation. Putting them away, she crossed her arms and began tapping her cheek with one finger, looking Sunset over. "No, you're more of a bacon horse, aren't you?"
"My name," Sunset growled, "is Sunset Shimmer, and—" Once again, Sunset realized she was talking when she should be leaving. "Forget it," said, shaking her head. Just as she was trying to stomp past the child again, her stomach disagreed and made itself known.
Luna considered that for a moment before moving on. "Well, tomorrow we were going to see if crumple-horned snorkacks like quiche; do you want some of that?"
"I am not a crumple-horned snorkack!" Sunset yelled, and so did her stomach. "...But, uh, maybe..."
***
Sunset was not happy with this situation, but her stomach was. The quiche was good, Luna was a girl, Xenophilius was a man and they were humans. Xenophilius published his own magazine known as The Quibbler, and Luna would be going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in just over a year where she would learn to use a wand to cast spells.
They were, by all accounts, much nicer and kinder than Sunset had expected any of these humans to be, and all they wanted was to know about Sunset and the other crumple-horned snorkacks.
Sunset wanted to scream, but it wouldn't help anything. What did finally get them off her case was expressing her need to rest and recover. The abrasions scattered over her body had been scabbed over with a spell called 'episkey'—and it was still weird that wizards spoke the names of their spells out like comic book characters—but Sunset still ached all over and wanted to be done with... everything.
The Lovegood home—or 'The Rookery' as they called it—was a tower with crenelations at the top, named such due to its similarity in appearance to the rook piece in chess, which looked like a tower with crenelations at the top. Sunset thought this was a circular argument, like calling any odd pony a knight because the knight in chess is a pony, but frankly, she did not have the energy to argue, nor did she care. All she needed to know was that they'd made up a bed for her in the form of a pile of blankets in Luna's room, which was on the second floor of the tower, but they called it the first floor for some reason.
At first, Sunset had wanted to argue that sleeping on a couch down on the actual first floor would have been fine, but then she'd remembered how easy it was for someone to just walk right into the room from the ministry and decided that maybe the first-but-actually-the-second floor would be fine.
***
"Sunset, please..." Princess Celestia pleaded, looking pained. "Please."
"'Please' what, Princess?" Sunset said, stomping her hooves on the marble floor of the palace. "'Please' stop researching all the things you taught me to research? Or is it 'please' stop asking about that mirror? Or maybe just 'please' stop stealing your muffins at breakfast? I can't do what you want if you won't tell me what it is that you want."
"Sunset..." Princess Celestia uselessly repeated, receiving a frustrated, inarticulate scream from Sunset for her troubles.
"I can't believe this!" Sunset yelled, fuming at Princess Celestia. "Why won't you just talk to me?! That's what you've been trying to teach me to do for years, isn't it? To talk out my problems? Well, I'm trying! But every time I do anything now, you just clam up and give me that helpless look! Explain this to me, damn it!"
Princess Celestia continued to give Sunset that same conflicted look full of concern and hurt and shame and half a dozen other unidentifiable things. Eventually, she looked away. "Sunset... If you continue on this path, I will have no choice but to remove you from your position as my student."
Sunset grit her teeth at receiving yet another non-answer, but the threat hit even harder, and her head dropped. "If you won't even talk to me about what the problem is..." she said, tears falling. "Then I'm not really your student, am I?"
Princess Celestia hesitated, then turned away and began to leave. "Guards. Please escort Sunset Shimmer out of the palace."
Sunset was poleaxed. This just didn't make sense. "Why?" she yelled as the guards began to lead her out. "Why would you do this to me?! I've earned that much, haven't I? Tell me why!"
The princess didn't answer.
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Now this is some gold right here, loving every moment of Sunset's incoherent bewilderment at wizardly nonsense. And Luna, offering lemons as a bookend to Sunset threatening arson, you've really got her dialed in.
What a lovely Christmas gift!
Yes, that's the Luna we know and love.
Luna is adorable and Sunset’s bafflement at the wizarding worlds magic system and morals is hysterical
Oh Sunset
We’re really in it now
great idea. I have seen a lot of Sunset Shimmer in the Harry Potter universe before but this one is great!
Heh, wow. You're a REALLY good writer. I could TOTALLY empathize with Sunset throughout this entire chapter. Her frustrations were so vivid! This is a VERY promising beginning to the story.
This is a fantastic line.
Typo. Names need to be capitalized.
Otherwise, an excellent start. Have an upvote.