Cadance decides to help those most in need of her expertise, whether they want it or not
In an effort to find the couple that truly needs her help to find some romance in their life, Cadance develops a spell to send her to them.
It's just that when she gets there, neither of the creatures seem that interested in her help. They want to talk about silly stuff like her magic, the existence of other dimensions, stupid government conspiracies meant to keep aliens under wraps, and whether she is a winged unicorn, or a pegasus with a horn when they should just KISS ALREADY!
Cadance looked at all the letters in front of her with a little frown as she sat on the edge of her bed while Shining Armor laid down behind her. Every year, it was the same thing. Right before Hearts and Hooves day, she would get a mountain of mail, asking for her help in romantic matters.
While she had enjoyed helping ponies, and the oddest couple of griffons that one year, things in the love department had just become...too easy.Not that there was anything wrong with easy. Despite the idea that love needed to be worked for to make it worth it, couples that fit together easily stuck together easily.
And if they fit together easily, they didn’t really need her help, did they?
Cadance sighed. “What I need is a challenge.” Not just to shake up the monotony that was the activity her cutie mark drove her to participate in, but because the half of the future couples that were writing to her didn’t really need her help. She needed to help a couple that actually needed her assistance in romance.
“What?”
The pink princess turned her head back to look at Shining Armor. “Hearts and Hooves Day, Shiny. The day that everypony knows is about finding love with your special somepony. My day,” she said. “The day that everypony looking for love sends me requests for help despite the fact that they don’t need it, when I should be looking for couples that belong together but for some reason don’t acknowledge that fact!”
Shining Armor sighed. “Sweetie, are you having another one of your episodes?”
“I don’t have episodes, Shiny,” Cadance told him with a little frown. That was Twilight. And to a lesser extent, Celestia. Although, Luna’s last mental problem had almost destroyed Equestria, so… Wow, am I the most stable Princess?
Instead of agreeing with her, as he should have, Shining Armor sat up and gave Cadance a tired look. “Yes you do.”
“No I don’t.”
Shining Armor’s expression became a slight frown. “Cadance, remember when you went to the Crystal Fair last year and saw that all the foals just wanted to buy Princess Celestia, Luna, or Twilight merchandise and not yours?” he asked. “Then you started freaking out about how you weren’t a good princess because nopony wanted to buy-”
“That wasn’t freaking out!” Cadance exclaimed. “That was a crisis of self-worth! Which was also completely valid and also completely unrelated to my current problem. Which is that fact that as the Alicorn of Love, I am unable to search for the couples that need me the most because of my position as ruler of the Crystal Empire.”
Once again, Shining Armor let out a sigh. “Cadance, it’s really not that big a deal.”
Hearing the most awful words that ever came out of her Shiny’s mouth made Cadance jump back in a loud gasp that took in so much air it left her feeling a bit lightheaded. “Love is too a big deal!” she exclaimed. “The biggest deal ever!”
“What?” Shining Armor asked before his eyes widened a little. “No wait! That’s not why I-”
“Shush!” Cadance commanded before she headed for the bedroom door. “And since it seems that I won’t being any support from my loving husband on this, I’ll be taking matters into my own hooves. If you want me I’ll be…” Cadance paused, unsure of what to say next.
Because she had no idea on how to approach the problem.
Which was the fact that she didn’t have time to find a pair of ponies or other creatures that obviously belonged together, but were not married due to some stupid reason or another. Although, after thinking about it like that, the solution became clear.
“In the library,” she said before trotting out in a huff.
“Love you,” Shining Armor’s voice called out from their bedroom.
Cadance stopped and turned around to stick her head back in their bedroom. “Love you too. Despite the fact that I am still miffed at you for saying what you did, even though I know it’s brought on by a combination of your tired mind and being a stallion.”
Then, she turned back around to trot off, still in a huff.
After getting to the imperial library, thinking just how she needed to accomplish her task of being able to locate the couple that was needing to be together, but by some cruel twist of fate weren’t while on the way there, Cadance knew the best way to find a solution to her problem. All she needed to do was combine a teleportation spell with a locating spell.
Which...made her a little nervous.
She remembered Twilight sending her a letter asking for advice on how to remove a convoluted mind control charm that Starlight Glimmer had placed upon her friends without completely melting their brains. Because of that, Cadance knew that newly-made combo spells were a bit...tricky. If she got something wrong, one part could end up overpowering the other to the point of making her spell do something completely unintended.
Then again, those spells were dealing with the same basic area. What I want to do is...only somewhat related, Cadance told herself. Teleportation spells needed a destination programmed into them, after all.
She quickly found the tomes she needed that detailed advanced teleportation as well as several spells that dealt with finding things, from dowsing spells to ones that involved scrying. Then, after a bit of thought, Cadance also got some spells dealing with claivorance, as the couple she would be dealing with were going to be getting together in the future.
Then came time to coble spell together, which was a frustrating task in and of itself. Although it might have limited her options a bit, she decided to have her spell target not-couples that were in close proximity, as that would allow her to get started immediately. After all, if she ran into a stallion who didn’t know what he wanted like the vast majority of them did, Cadance would have to waste a great deal of time having him go over one mare after another until he led her to the one that was meant for him. She also decided for the spell to plant her in the path of the future couple, as just popping in around their general location could lead to Cadance missing them completely if she got mobbed by a bunch of ponies asking for her help. On top of which, she made sure that the couple her spell would bring her to would be the most in need of her talents to overcome the challenges and get married.
After hours of careful crafting and several rewrites, Cadance finished the teleportation magic that would send her to the couple of creatures, as she was also more than willing to help out more than just ponies, that belonged together more than any other not-couple ever. Once she was done, the pink princes looked out the window just in time to see Celestia’s sun being raised.
The whole night had passed since she started her project, despite the fact that Cadance didn’t feel all that tired. “Have I really been down here that long?” she asked herself in surprise. It must have been the fact that she was so excited about the prospect of finally helping a couple who really needed it.
For a second, Cadance thought about galloping back to Shiny in order to make up from their disagreement, but if he was still going on about the same thing he was last night...or worse, started supporting her to the point of overcompensation, he might insist on accompanying her. Which would have been bad. Cadance had learned in the earliest stages of their relationship that Shining Armor was absolutely awful at romance.
However, she didn’t want to just disappear. It would worry him to death. With that in mind, Cadance simply took a quill and some parchment to leave him a note. Dear Shiny, the pink princess thought to herself as she wrote. Gone shipping. Be back in two weeks.
After signing the note and leaving it in the middle of the table with the books she needed to make the spell, Cadance lit up her horn and let loose the magic she had just designed. Like every time she teleported, the world disappeared behind a bright wall of white. However, unlike all her teleports before, there was an odd lurching sensation followed by a strong pull that had Cadance crying out in surprise. She tumbled around through the space between and got the strange sensation of being twirled around for the last bit of the journey before landing on a hard surface.
Face first.
Cadance let out a groan as she picked herself up and looked around. The teleportation spell must have taken a lot longer than normal to complete, because it was nighttime. She was on a road of some sort just below the top of a hill. After looking closer, she saw it was wider than the average Equestrian road with two yellow lines running down the center as far as she could see, which wasn’t very far in one of the directions it went, what with how it crested the hill.
A strange growling sound made Cadance look behind her to see a bright glow cresting the hill. She looked back down at the road a smirked. “Right in their path,” she said before looking up right as the source of the light crested the hill and...found herself blinded by the light that filled her eyes.
Cadance closed her eyes and looked away on instinct to protect her vision before a loud blaring sound rang in her ears. Then, something hard struck her in the chest and Cadance fell forward to something else that made a loud cracking sound before she rolled over whatever struck her and fell down to smash into the road...again.
Completely discombobulated by the experience, Cadance was only left with a dull pain in her chest and little air in her lungs. She let out a low moan as there as a loud screeching sounded behind her from the direction the...metal thing had went after striking her. The beams of light returned overhead as she heard a pair of doors open and two ponies talking.
“A dog? Did I just hit a dog?” a female voice asked. "A...pink dog?"
“I don’t think that was a dog,” a stallion Cadance couldn’t see replied in a nearly monotone voice.
“Well what was it then?”
“I don’t know, I was talking to you. This is why I don’t like having to talk and drive at night,” the male replied, his voice growing louder as his oddly muted hoof-steps came closer to Cadance before another bright light completely blinded her. “Yeah...that’s...not a dog.”
The female sighed and approached with her own lightsource. “Well, what is...oh,” she said as she took a place next to the male.
Cadance’s eyes adjusted to the light a little, letting her see a blurry outline of the creatures that were definitely not ponies. They were bipeds wearing...Cadance thought that they had on robes before realizing the open nature of the clothing told her they were long coats of some sort. The clothes kind, not body hair.
The male had a mess of black hair topping his otherwise bald face and a tie hanging from his white collared shirt. The female’s mane was a mass of red that went down to her shoulders.
“Mulder...did I just run over a unicorn?” the female asked.
Being a medical practitioner that worked for the FBI and got stuck in the X-Files, Dana Scully had run across a plethora of odd phenomena that most of the world at large would have classified as ‘weird shit’ with the briefest of glances. However, as she had been originally partnered with ‘Spooky’ Mulder for the purpose of debunking his crazy theories and discrediting him, it had been her job for several years to find a rational explanation for the weird.
So, while Mulder busied himself with checking over their rental car and cracked windshield to make sure it wouldn’t shatter before they reached some semblance of civilization, Scully took out her flashlight and an analog voice recorder after taking a few pictures of the creature to get a closer examination.
“This is Dr Dana Scully speaking, conducting a roadside examination of an animal I struck with my vehicle while heading South West on Interstate Highway Ninety-Five. The time is currently eleven fifteen, on the first of February, nineteen-ninety-”
“Hey Scully,” Mulder called out. “About how fast would you say that you were going when you hit the horned pegasus?”
After taking a moment to press the stop button on the recorder, Scully looked back to her partner. “I don’t know, maybe a mile or two over the speed limit. Why?”
Mulder looked back to the car that had the large dent in its front end. “Just curious.”
Scully let out a sigh and turned her attention back towards the pink equine-like creature, putting the question out of her mind as best she could. Although Mulder never asked such questions without a reason, she had her own job to do at the moment. “Subject is equine in appearance for most of its body, with the exception of its head. Body is approximately fifty two inches in height from the top of its head to the bottom of its hooves, with an eight inch long horn protruding from its forehead, and approximately six feet long from muzzle to tail. Note, although I am aware horses are measured in hands, I cannot make a proper estimation of the correct form of measurement, lacking enough expertise with it,” she recorded before moving on to examine the area beneath the tail after taking a second to inspect the odd coloration of hair on her rear that looked like a heart made of crystal. “Subject is female and-” Scully stopped when she noticed a slight rise in the mare’s chest and minute flutter of her wings.
The movement made Scully step away from the creature with wide eyes. “Mulder!”
“What is it Scully?” the male half of her partnership asked as he looked under the car’s hood.
“I think she’s still alive!” she called out.
Fox Mulder had seen many things in his life, starting with the abduction of his sister by aliens. Since getting involved with the X-Files, he had run into monsters about every two weeks on average. These encounters ranged from creatures that hid under the bed and stole children to vampires that lived in a trailer park.
However, the creature that his partner had struck was a whole different kind of weird from what he usually dealt with. Which was the explanation he used to justify the fact that the usually composed and skeptic Dania Scully was looking at the back seat of their rental with a face that most people would have before throwing up. “I can’t believe I just ran over a unicorn.”
Seeing that he would need to nip all of this in the bud, and feeling a bit odd that it was him doing it instead of her, Mulder cleared his throat to get Scully’s attention away from the unconscious equine that was currently laying in the back seat of their rented car due to the fact Scully had crashed into it not an hour beforehand. “It’s not a unicorn. And you didn’t run over it, you ran into it and flipped it over the car.”
“Mulder, first off, it’s a she. And she has a horn and the general shape of a horse. I checked the appendages while moving her as well as her horn, it’s not glued on and protrudes from the head,” Scully replied as she looked away from the creature. “Therefore, until we can ascertain its actual species, I think it would be prudent to at least say she’s a unicorn due to her obvious similarity to the mythological creature. If just to make it easier to classify.”
“Scully,” Mulder told her, a little disturbed by the fact that his partner, the supreme skeptic that the FBI had assigned so many years ago to debunk all of his investigations into the paranormal was so quick to jump on the supernatural train. “It’s not a unicorn. It has wings.”
After twisting around so that she was facing forward again, Scully looked at the man with a frown. “While I do admit that isn’t in keeping with the unicorn mythos, a horse with a horn is generally classified as a unicorn. Unless of course, you have some sort of precident to discount that fact in your wide array of knowledge pertaining to all things weird.”
A sigh came from the man’s lips. “It’s a pink horse with wings and a horn, Scully. I didn’t bother researching stuff like that. Unicorns are for girls,” he said before frowning a bit. “Wait a minute. Why are you so quick to label it as a unicorn?”
“What?” Scully asked. “I told you, it’s just for convenience.”
Mulder glanced over to the other agent while doing his best to keep his eyes on the road as well as the occasional building near it as they drew closer to civilization. There was a small town up ahead, and small towns meant motels. While the plan had been to drive through the night, switching off as needed so they could investigate the latest case because the FBI wouldn’t spring for air fare on Mulder’s latest investigation thanks to all the trouble he had stirred up recently, it didn’t look like they’d be going to that high school to check out rumors of demonic possession during a homecoming dance.
“Usually, you’d start going on about mutations or a highschool prank where a bunch of kids spray painted a shaggy dog pink and glued a horn to its head to make you think it was a unicorn,” Mulder said. “For that matter, why do you insist on calling it a magical unicorn? How do you know it’s not a winged pegasus?”
Then, before Scully could give him a reply, it dawned on him. “Do you want it to be a unicorn, Scully?” he asked. “Is this one of those things that you said I have all the time? With the wanting to believe something so badly that you jump to that conclusion despite all of the evidence to the contrary and numerous other possible explanations that are much simpler than it being a magical unicorn?”
“Alright Mulder, for starters, I never actually said magical, just unicorn. It might very well be a mutation. Calling it a unicorn doesn’t make it magical. And Pegasus was the name of the flying horse in the Greek Myths, not its actual species. Just because I am using a common moniker for a horned equine doesn’t actually mean I think there is anything supernatural about it,” Scully told him.
Mulder frowned as they approached edge of the small town of Hollow Shades, Virginia. “So, now you’re saying that despite seeing a creature that you’re calling a unicorn with impossible hair pigmentation that matches its hooves to the point you can barely see where one stops and the other starts, and an even more impossible pattern on some parts of its body, you’re refusing to add the classification of magical?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied simply before stubbornly crossing her arms.
“Scully, how many supernatural phenomena have we witnessed over the years?” Mulder asked.
The question made Scully frown a bit. “Well, we’ve seen a few things that were a bit outlandish, but I’d hesitate to label anything supernatural, Mulder.”
“The vampires in Texas,” Mulder said, bringing up one of their more recent cases.
Scully took in a deep breath, as if mentally preparing herself for an argument they’d had a doen times before. “Mulder, I saw a man with glowing eyes after being drugged by something he slipped in my drink, and a body went missing from the corner’s. That doesn’t make anyone in that trailer park a vampire.”
Knowing where this was all going, Mulder decided to switch tactics. “Aliens, then. We’ve seen plenty of proof that the government is covering up the existence of aliens, we can at least agree on that, right?”
“It’s the government, Mulder,” she replied stubbornly as they fell into their age-old argument. “They cover up a lot of things. That fact doesn’t mean that there is some conspiracy to hide the fact of aliens from the general public. And what does this have to do with anything?”
Mulder pressed his lips together in agitation. “Well, since we literally just smacked into a creature you’re calling a unicorn-”
“Only because it fits the moniker of a horned equine.”
“-without saying it’s magical. I was just wondering what it would take for you to believe in aliens,” he finished. “Would I have to be abducted for you to believe, Scully?”
After actually thinking it over for a second, Scully frowned. “Wait, why would your abduction prove to me that aliens exist?”
“Because you’ve already been abducted, and still refuse to believe,” Mulder pointed out.
“That wasn’t aliens, it was a rogue arm of the government,” she argued. “But, I’ll concede that if you should ever be abducted by aliens, then I might actually start to believe in them. If just in thanks for giving me some peace and quiet.”
Mulder decided to take the win. He was silent for several seconds before an oddity in their conversation cropped up that he couldn’t explain. “And how does someone like you know something like the specifics of the name, Pegasus?”
“High school history class. My professor was very through when it came to the Greeks,” Scully explained before Mulder heard her shift around in her seat. “Also, I examined her when we found her on the road. The horn and wings aren’t some taped on plastic, and the color of the creature’s coat and mane go all the way to the roots. Even the little, uh...design...on...her…”
Mulder frowned as Scully slowly stopped talking but kept his eyes on the big Motel 6 sign that promised respite was near. “What is it, Scully?”
“Cutie mark. It’s called a cutie mark. Oh, and pegasus is the name of a species.”
Mulder looked away from the road for a second to see why Scully was so distracted. “A wha-” he tried to ask before realizing two things that were rather odd. The first of which was that Scully had gone back to looking at the strange creature with her mouth hanging open, and the second was that the last thing spoken in the car had come from behind Mulder, not beside him.
Using the utmost caution not to look back too quickly and find the horned pegasus had changed into something horrifying, Mulder turned his head towards the back seat to see the creature Scully had hit on the road sitting up and apparently none the worse for wear, staring at them with extremely large eyes that actually seemed to twinkle just a bit.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. But now that I have, I guess I should tell you that I’m closer to a horned pegasus than a winged unicorn. Although, that’s not what you would actually classify me as. Oops! I really shouldn’t be taking sides in an argument. Please, continue. Don’t mind me,” the creature said in perfect English before making a shooing gesture with a hoof. “Go back to what you were talking about before.”
“It...talks…” Mulder said in a daze of confusion as the...whatever it was continued to try and shoo them back into their conversation. He took his foot off the gas at let the car roll to a stop.
Scully looked back to Mulder. “It’s a she,” the doctor told him before crossing her arms and looked forward as if she was pouting over the existence of a magical talking horned pegasus. “And the ability to talk doesn’t make her magical.”
“How long have your people been coming here? Why do you look like that? Are you related to the short gray humanoid type of aliens? Are you really one of those types of aliens that just looks the way you do because...um...okay, well I can’t actually think of a reason why you would be, and there does seem to be evidence of another race of creatures visiting our planet from before, going by our old myths and legends from ancient Greece. Scully, you’re the mythology expert, are their any legends about pegasuses talking?”
Cadance wanted to sigh at her own foolishness. When the strange creatures had knocked the wind out of her with their vehicle, she had been a little worried. That worry increased when they started talking about maybe taking her to a doctor, which then became a vet at the suggestion of the girl with the red mane, before going on about something called a Fohicky, followed by their suggestion to stay at a motel for the night...whatever that was. But, they had appeared to be concerned about her, so it was only right that she had gotten up to thank them for at least taking her to some kind of medical specialist. Only, with the boy’s reaction being what it was...maybe it would have been better to play at being unconscious.
The girl reached up to rub the bridge of her nose. “Mulder, just because I remembered one little class in high school doesn’t mean I’m an expert on the Greek mythos,” she said. “If anything, you’re our expert, considering all of weird stories you can just remember offhand from files and books you read years ago.”
“Yes!” Cadance exclaimed. They were doing what she wanted. It seemed as if any hope of trying to get a grasp of their relationship had been lost once that Mulder boy had started asking her questions, but it looked like that had only been a temporary problem. “That! Go back to doing that, please.”
Without enough information on the creatures and their interaction, there was no way Cadance could craft a plan that would end with the two of them being a couple without the use of love magic, which she didn’t even know if these beings would approve of. So, it was just better to watch their exchanges for the time being.
Both of the bipeds looked back at her with nervous expressions before Scully frowned at her. “Are you saying that you want to watch us argue?”
Before Cadance could correct her, wanting to just watch the two of them interact, a bright light appeared behind their vehicle. Mulder immediately turned back around and there was a light roar before the three of them started moving again. “On second thought, maybe we should get a room first,” he said before glancing back. “You’re not going to run away or something, are you?”
Cadance cocked her head to the side in confusion. “Why would I do that?” she asked. The couple of...whatever they were was obviously the pair of creatures that her spell had chosen. She wasn’t about to go anywhere until they were set on a course that would end with the two of them enjoying a happily ever after together.
As Mulder turned his attention back to the road, Scully continued to look at the pink princess with an expression that told Cadance she was trying to figure out something she didn’t want to. “By the way, what’re we supposed to call you?”
The question made Cadance realize how rude she was being. “Oh my gosh, I completely forgot to introduce myself, didn’t I?” she asked before sitting up a little straighter and clearing her throat. “My name is Princess Mi Amore Cadenza. But you can call me Cadance.”
If anything, the look Scully was giving Cadance became even more disturbed after the introduction. “...Princess?”
Cadance nodded. “Mmmhm. Although, you don’t have to worry about using my title,” she said before waving the girl’s fears away with a hoof. “I don’t really like hearing it outside of formal affairs.”
“Mulder?” Scully asked as she turned around to look forward while their vehicle pulled into what what obviously an area set aside for parking. “This is going to be one of those cases, isn’t it?”
“...we’re not actually on a case, Scully.”
“But, why do I have to hide?”
Dana Scully took in a deep breath through her nose to at least continue her facade of calm as the...creature looked out of the open car door to the door of the first floor motel room not ten feet away, then to the coats belonging to both Scully and Mulder that Cadance was supposed to use to cover herself. With luck, any onlookers would think that they were just trying to sneak a dog into the motel room. “Because, your appearance might disturb someone if they saw you.”
Please buy it, Scully mentally begged the ridiculously cute looking creature that looked up at her with overly expressive eyes and a face that would have frightened nobody ever.
“Well...I don’t really want to scare anypony,” Cadance said, making Scully have to fight to school her features.
She put her long coat over Cadance’s head and impossibly small wings, then used Mulder’s to hide the horse’s rear end before leading her out the door of their car with a hand on the back of the clothing. Thankfully, the coats went down enough to hide most of the equine’s form so that anyone looking on would just see Scully leading what she hoped would be thought of as a dog into the motel room. If anyone came looking, a flash of the FBI badge would turn them away.
Once she was inside, Mulder drove the car away so quickly Scully was afraid he was going to cause the tires to squeal and wake everyone at the cheap rest stop. It was just another effect of the man’s obvious giddiness that anyone that truly knew him could see as plain as day.
It was also something she couldn’t really blame him for. All Mulder’s life, he had searched for the unexplained, the paranormal, the extraterrestrial, or just outright weird. So far, his quest had only led him to a lot of dead ends, several disappointments, and a a few X-Files that while odd, were explainable by the proper application of science. But now, he had come across something completely out of the ordinary that didn’t resist being asked questions. So, Scully could forgive him for acting like...well, a giddy little girl that wished for a magical pony from Santa and woke up on Christmas morning to find a talking winged unicorn in her bedroom.
Which...considering what Scully had seen, might have been a possibility that Mulder was considering. She was certain there was some kind of story somewhere about dolls coming to life at some point that didn’t consider the fact that little girls grew up one day and the talking toy from their childhood that they had brought to life with the wish on a star was no longer wanted.
Scully wasn’t so enthusiastic about Cadance. Perhaps it was the fact that she had served as the counter to Mulder’s way of thinking, but her mind couldn’t help but focus on the several things that simply didn’t make sense about the creature that had been presented to them. Which there were plenty of.
Like the fact that it could talk perfect English in a pleasant voice that could have come from any young woman off the street. Even if it had a mastery of the language and the ability to properly form the correct sounds, the size of the equine’s throat and mouth said it should have fallen in a completely different range than a human’s. If anything, she should have sounded much deeper, if not a man.
Then there was Cadance’s name. She introduced herself as Mi Amore Cadenza, which Scully believed was Italian. While a mythological, or alien, creature knowing English wasn’t actually that unbelievable, an English speaking unicorn that gave a French name was a bit...odd. Especially considering the fact she didn’t have an accent. The consideration of which was odd in and of itself.
But the oddest thing about the talking horse was her body. Eyes that were far too large adorned a head that was equally mismatched to Cadance’s body. On top of which, her wings didn’t look nearly large enough to support the weight of the creature Scully had needed Mulder’s help to get into the back seat of their rental thanks to her weighing so much. To add to the strangeness, the alien’s use of her forelegs to make gestures showed that her skeletal structure must have been far different than what an Earth pony possessed, and her colored hair suggested either a very recent dye job, or that the pattern on her butt was somehow natural.
The collection of evidence put a disturbed frown on Scully’s face as she closed the door behind her. While Mulder would undoubtedly start pointing at things like European mythology that spoke of similar creatures, the more Scully thought about the odd shape of the equine’ body and how it might have been possible to possess in a low gravity environment, the more she wanted to point to the sky and say ‘an alien did it’ as Mulder was prone to.
“Okay,” Scully said before she closed the door. “Now that we’re here, maybe you could explain…” The rest of the sentence died in Scully’s throat as she turned around to see Cadance’s horn surrounded by a nimbus of pale blue light that was also surrounding both her coat and Mulder’s as they floated in the air next to the floating hangers that were also held by the blue glow, next to the motel room’s closet.
Cadance looked over to the FBI agent and gave a little gasp. “Oh, I’m sorry! You probably want this back. It doesn’t seem to be that cold to me, but I am wearing a coat of my own,” she said before the clothing floated over to Scully. When she didn’t take the clothing back, the pink pony tilted her head to the side a bit. “Ms Scully?”
“How are you doing that?” Scully asked after several seconds.
The confusion on Cadance’s face intensified for a moment before the light bulb above her head clicked on, which was apparently also due to the little blue glow surrounding the light switch next to her. “You mean the floating coat?” she asked with a little smile. “It’s my magic.”
Scully’s inner scientific critic that ran on all things rational jumped up to shout, THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE, while Cadance went about setting Mulder’s coat down on the little couch by the door. Despite any good levitation trickster knowing how to avoid such things, Scully reached out to wave her hand over the material in a search for wire or...something to explain what she was seeing. After finding nothing, she snatched the article of clothing from the air right before the light went out.
At that moment, the door opened and Mulder quickly stepped in. “She still here? She’s still here, right?” he asked before looking over to the pink horse and untensing. “Good, you’re still here.”
It was a question and fear Scully understood. All too often, Mulder had said he got proof of aliens or some other impossible thing, only to have it disappear. The fact he had left Cadance’s presence at all was surprising.
Then, Mulder studied Scully’s face for a moment. While Scully believed herself to be a woman in complete control of her emotions, Mulder had been with her in so many unnerving situations that she knew he would be quick to pick up on any unease despite how well she hid it. As was quickly evidenced by his next question.
“What’s wrong? Did I miss something?”
Scully fought to keep her face neutral as her mind shouted a resounding YES to Mulder’s question. Despite the exhaustion creeping in from the late hour, Scully’s brain worked to untangle the mystery of both Cadance’s trick with the coat and how she had made both her horn and the material luminescent in a way that didn’t originate from the items, but surrounded them. Which was the true mystery of the act, since Scully’s mind had already worked up half a dozen explanations of how Cadance accomplished her feat which ranged from magnets, to a sudden shift in the Earth’s gravitational field that only happened because God just felt like screwing with a tired woman. As he was known to do from time to time.
“I think I upset her,” Cadance said before she lowered her ears and put on a look that made Scully feel as if she had just spent the last thirty minutes kicking a puppy. “Do you not like it when other ponies, or...um, what exactly is the name of your species?”
A question that also didn’t make sense, seeing as how she spoke English!
Mulder looked back to the horned pegasus. “Humans.”
Cadance nodded. “Thank you. Do you not like it when somehuman handles your clothes? Is it some sort of cultural thing?” she asked.
Instead of just ignoring the ridiculous question from the TALKING PEGASUS WITH A HORN that CLAIMED to have used magic, Mulder actually took it under consideration for a moment. “Well, it was considered good manners for a man to take a woman’s coat when she entered a room until recently.”
And that was it.
Admittedly, it was a small thing. Minuscule, really. Having been expecting to sleep for half the drive south, Scully’s body was sore from needing to be up past midnight. The sudden reversal on top of meeting an alien, the alien displaying impossible phenomena, and then Mulder talking to the alien about taking a woman’s coat as if it was normal...that was the straw that broke the cammel’s back.
Scully turned to Mulder. She almost, almost asked Mulder if he was actually serious about asking her that. She was going to blow up at him, demand to know why he wasn’t freaking out over the existence of whatever the hell Cadance was.
But...if what she was experiencing really was true, and with Mulder looking like a kid who had been given his parent’s credit card before being let loose in Toys R Us, despite how calm he made himself look...made her stop. She wasn’t about to ruin this for him or the Earth if it turned out Cadance really was the Princess of some intergalactic whatever who had just gotten a flat tire or something on her way to Risa, or Remblor, or whatever the hell the name of that fictitious planet Mulder always joked about when aliens were mentioned in a non-serious way!
“I’m going to...take a bath,” Scully said in defeat before slinking off towards the restroom at a tired pace. IF she stayed in the same room as Cadance any longer, she was going to lose it.
Right before she shut the door, Cadance’s voice reached her ears. “Is Scully one of those territorial females that doesn’t like it when you play with other girls?”
Mulder stared at what might possibly be his almost but not quite holy grail as the pink little horse let out a loud yawn, showing a complete lack of carnivorous teeth. While not a little gray man, or whatever gender the miniature humanoids that always seemed to walk around without pants and nothing between their legs were, the little pink horse in front of him was something fantastic that defied rational explanation on looks alone.
Which was probably why Scully looked as if she was ready to have an aneurysm after spending more than three minutes with the little thing. Hopefully, a little time by herself in a relaxing environment would allow her to wrap her head around the idea of something like Cadance.
The time spent apart from the horse had also been good for Mulder. Before the panic that Cadance was just going to disappear in a poof of pink smoke, he had been able to think of a line of questions that the cooperative equine could answer. It also gave him time to find the camcorder he had learned to bring along whenever going on a case, which he quickly plugged in while the little horse watched with interest.
“What is that thing?”
Mulder looked up from the tiny screen on the side of the modern recording device. “Oh, this is just a little camera that will create a video recording of our conversation,” he explained before his manners asserted themselves. “You don’t mind being videotaped, do you?”
The question visibly peeked Cadance’s interest. “That’s a visual recording device?” she asked in surprise. “It’s so small!”
Cadance’s comment put the brakes on Mulder’s train of thought. “What do you mean, small?”
“Well, we have things like that in Equestria, but they’re about five times bigger,” Cadance explained before she spread her wings to flap them the tiniest bit. Despite the fact that Mulder’s passing knowledge of science said the little horse shouldn’t be able to do more than glide on a very windy day with her wings, Cadance’s movement lifted her into the air so she could look at Mulder’s camcorder up close and from multiple angles. “It even has a little screen to show you what you’re recording! That’s so neat!”
Mulder’s train of thought that was carrying his hopes and dreams of finally getting information on extraterrestrial life teetered on the edge of a abyss. “You...don’t have this level of technology, where you’re from?”
“Well, we have recording devices to make movies with, but they’re not like this,” Cadance told him before landing on the carpet and folding in her wings. “Are you okay? You look a little sad. Did I say something wrong?”
Desperate for some kind of comfort, Mulder let loose with the only question that could give an answer he needed. “Then how did you get to Earth?”
Cadance put on a slightly disturbed frown. “You named your country after dirt? Well, guess I shouldn’t be the one to judge,” she mumbled a second after asking her own question. “And I teleported here.”
The mention of teleportation suggested an advanced society, which did wonders to alleviate Mulder’s fears of that Cadance wasn’t in fact an alien with technology far beyond anything he had ever seen. “Actually, the name of the Planet is Earth, the country is America.”
For the first time since meeting the quadruped, she looked rather stunned. “Wait, the planet is named Earth?” she asked before frowning a bit. “I must have traveled further than I thought.”
Mulder had his mouth half-open before he could stop himself. No, stick to the script, he told himself. If he asked every new question that would come with one of Cadance’s answers, then Mulder knew he would never get to ask one of the important questions he had thought of in the car. After deciding to keep what had already been recorded, Mulder set his camcorder down on the dresser, facing Cadance.
“Okay, before we begin, could you please state your name and title for the record?” he asked, falling back on procedure in the wake of Cadance’s disturbing remark.
Cadance smiled and nodded. “Sure,” she said before facing the camera and lifting her hoof to wave. “Hello. I’m Princess Mi Amore Cadenza. But my friends call me Cadance.”
Deciding it would be better to keep this professional, Mulder kept his voice even. “Princess Cadenza, would you mind answering some questions involving yourself and your civilization?”
“Not at all,” she said with a little smile. “As long as you’d be willing to do the same.”
Mulder blinked. The tradeoff was unexpected. “Well, I don’t see why not,” he replied.
“Okay, you first,” she offered.
“For the record, what is the official name of your species?” he asked.
Cadance frowned a little at the question. “Hmm, that’s actually a little complicated,” she said. “You see, I used to be a pegasus before getting my horn and joining the alicorn tribe. Although, we’re all ponies, wings, horn, or neither.”
After stopping the knee jerk reaction of asking just what the hell an alicorn was, Mulder just filed the question away for later. “Alright, your turn.”
“How long have you known Scully?”
Mulder blinked at the question. Considering Cadance’s comment about teleportation and the light air of confusion she seemed to have a moment ago, he had been expecting something more along the lines of a question pertaining to her surroundings. “Well...about five years, give or take a few weeks.”
“It’s closer to six,” Scully said, her voice coming through the closed bathroom door.
Mulder looked towards the door. “Scully, you can hear us?” he asked, his voice a little louder than conversation volume.
“Mulder, we’re at a Motel Six, walls made of paper would be thicker than what this place is built of,” she called out.
Mulder cleared his throat. “Okay, going on six years, then,” he corrected before moving onto his next question. “Now, aside from the obvious similarities in appearance, is there any genetic connection between you and an Earth species called horses.”
The pleasant look on Cadance’s face became a pensive frown. “Mr Mulder, while I’m almost certain that question was made in ignorance, I should tell you that it’s very insulting for a pony to be called a horse,” she said, practically spitting the word out. “So, no. Ponies are in no way related to horses at all.”
“My apologies,” he said before a thought occurred to him. “Wait, you have horses where you’re from?”
Cadance’s frown became a little confused. “Why wouldn’t we?” she asked. “And that’s two questions.”
Considering the ancient stories about unicorns and pegasai, that were now known by Mulder to be in fact an alien species, it made a strange kind of sense that they had taken a few animals from ancient Earth for study. “Okay, then, I guess that means you get two.”
“What exactly do you and Ms Skully do together?” Cadance asked.
Mulder took a moment to think on his answer. While he felt it was a little dirty, giving the little pony a leading answer would allow him to move onto her next question and get it out of the way before moving onto important matters. “We work for the FBI.”
And, just like Mulder had predicted, Cadance’s follow-up question pertained to that. “Which is what?”
“It’s an organization that investigates crimes,” he replied simply. “Scully and I specialize in the mostly unexplainable cases and ones that most of the other agents hit a dead end.”
After giving Cadance a moment to digest the information for the sake of being polite, Mulder moved onto the next question he had thought of before. “What is it that you are doing on Earth?”
“Don’t you mean in Earth?” Cadance asked with a tiny frown before shaking it off. “Nevermind. As to what I’m doing...well...I guess you could say that I’m doing my job.”
All of a sudden, Mulder felt that giving Cadance a leading answer had been a bad idea as the pony took on a thoughtful look for several seconds before speaking. “Is it normal for humans with opposite thought processes and approaches to situations to work together?”
Mulder raised an eyebrow, unsure of just where the idea for that question had come from. “Well, not really. If you’re talking about me and Scully specifically, she was assigned to me in order to debunk several of my theories and basically get me fired.”
Once a good five seconds had passed, Mulder moved onto his next question. Despite it not being on his list, Cadance’s non-answer made him revise his previous one. “So, Princess Cadance. What exactly is it that you do back home?”
A little frown appeared on Cadance’s face. “That’s actually a little complicated,” she said. “If you’re referring to my duties as a princess, I rule over the Crystal Empire, which is more of a province of my nation than an actual country unto itself. If you’re referring to my calling in life, I help ponies find happiness with each other.”
While not as detailed as what he would have preferred, Mulder took what he could get before Cadance asked her next question. “What is the normal family dynamic for your species?”
It took a few moments for Mulder to digest the question while at the same time, wondering just where the hell it had come from. “Um...it’s a bit different from country to country, but in America, a man and a woman generally form a couple in order to reproduce,” he said before remembering other types of relationships. “Although, there are couples of the same gender as well, but they can’t have children.”
Mulder decided to modify his next question, as Cadance had already half-answered it earlier. “Can you explain the process that you used to get to Earth?”
“Okay,” Cadance told him before becoming thoughtful. “I combined a teleportation spell with a divining spell to determine my destination.”
Although he had taken steps to avoid doing what he was about to do, Mulder couldn’t stop himself. “Are you saying you can use...magic?”
“Yes,” Cadance confirmed before blinking. She turned her head around to look at the bathroom door for a moment, then looked back at Mulder, asking her question without pause. “What does bullshit mean?”
Mulder blinked. “Um...it depends on the context,” he told her. While the question of how a creature that spoke perfect English didn’t know one of the more common terms occurred to him, Mulder decided against asking it. “Where did you hear that term?”
“Scully said it when you mentioned magic,” Cadance explained. “What does it mean?”
“You heard that?” Scully called out from the bathroom.
Cadance looked back at the door. “Yes,” she answered, drawing Mulder’s attention to her extremely large ears.
“It’s a general statement of disbelief,” Mulder told the pony before pausing. He had many, many more questions to ask Cadance, some that he had thought of out in the car and others that had come up after hearing her responses.
But, if there was one thing that Mulder knew from personal experience, occurrences like Cadance never stuck around for long. Plus, judging by the fact she was yawning again, probably meant that she was going to want to wrap up their little interview sometime soon. So, he could either get more answers, or have actual recorded evidence of supernatural phenomena.
It didn’t take a single second for Mulder to decide on the later.
“Would you mind demonstrating your magic for the camera?”
Cadance let out another yawn at the strange request. The little burst of energy she had gotten from her rest in the back seat of the human vehicle had worn off a good ten minutes ago, and having been up for more than a day and night cycle already, she was feeling the effects despite the earth pony in her. “Alright, but then I need to go to bed. I’ve been awake for far too long already.”
“Of course,” Mulder quickly agreed.
There was a turn of the knob on the bathroom door before Scully peeked her head out. “Wait a minute, if you’re going to do anything, I want to be there to observe it,” she told Cadance before looking over to the closet. “Now, can one of you get my bags and hand them to me?”
In an effort to make up for her previous mistake that unnerved the human female, Cadance picked up Scully’s luggage with her magic before floating them over to the door. As she did, Mulder’s eyes went wide for some reason, and he jumped over to snatch his video camera off of the dresser to use it to follow the movement of Scully’s bags before they got to the door. Then, Cadance opened the door for Scully, since she doubted the hairless female wanted to be exposed to the only slightly warming air of the human’s version of a stable just after leaving the bath.
And that’s where everything went wrong.
When Cadance opened the door for Scully, the human female let out a startled cry a few seconds before Mulder quickly turned the camera away from the open door where the girl was standing before Scully grabbed her things out of Cadance’s magic and slammed the door closed.
“Mulder!” Scully yelled from behind the door. “You better not have gotten any of that on tape!”
The human boy looked up from his device with an uneasy expression. “But Scully, Cadance was transporting your luggage-”
“Mulder! I swear that if you do not rewind and tape over the footage you just got, you won’t have to worry about a bunch of Men in Black showing up to take evidence of alien life,” she said. “Because I will have already smashed that damn camera!”
The threat made Mulder flinch. “But Scully, if we just cut away from the display halfway through, that will just give anyone wanting to discredit the footage that much easier a-”
“MULDER!”
As the boy stopped talking and looked down at his device, Cadance lowered her ears in apprehension “Did I do something wrong?”
Mulder looked back towards her. “Your species never invented clothes, did it?”
“We have clothes,” Cadance told him. “I just don’t like wearing them outside of formal occasions.” After moving to Canterlot and meeting the type of pony that went around dressed all day, Cadance did as little as possible to emulate them.
Mulder raised an eyebrow. “And everyone's okay with you…” He stopped himself and frowned. “Then again, every alien abduction story I’ve heard says they’re naked, maybe we’re the odd ones,” Mulder mumbled before looking back to Cadance. “In our culture, it’s taboo to be seen naked by someone of the opposite gender outside of...certain interpersonal relations. When a man sees a woman accidentally like that, its a source of great embarrassment, usually for the woman.”
The odd custom made Cadance ask for clarification. “So, you only get naked with a female you like,” she reasoned.
“Pretty much, yeah,” Mulder before his eyes darted away from Cadance.
“And you haven’t been naked with Scully?” she asked for perfect clarification.
The door to the bathroom flew open before Scully came out in a sweatshirt, with pants made of the same material. “Okay, let’s see a demonstration of your magical powers,” with a slight twitching at the corner of her mouth.
Cadance looked back and forth between the humans. If they had been ponies, she would have called them uncomfortable. But, ponies had a saying about assumptions, and Cadance was no donkey. On top of which, determining the status of their relationship and level of attraction was key to plotting out her plan of setting the two of them up.
So, she forged ahead. “Answer the questions, or no magic,” Cadance told them.
“N-No, I haven’t...been naked with Scully,” Mulder finally told her.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
Scully covered her face with a hand. “Oh God.”
After a few seconds of silence, Mulder looked down at his camera, then over to Scully, then back down to Cadance. “You know what, it is pretty late,” he said before closing the little screen on his device. “I think we should go ahead and turn in for the night.”
Despite the late hour, Scully forced herself to stay awake as she typed on the portable computer that she had set up on the cheap motel room’s desk as Cadance fidgeted on her bed. While Scully had been surprised at Mulder’s abrupt end to the interview, it was actually very gratifying to know that when presented with a real live alien that was willing to give full disclosure of everything she knew in return for an extremely lewd conversation involving Scully, he had actually turned her down.
Not to mention the trust he was placing in Scully. The female agent had fully expected Mulder to stay in the room they had rented all night, if just to watch Cadance while she slept to make sure she didn’t disappear. Just the idea of which was pretty creepy.
Now that I have time to adjust to the phenomena that Cadance is able to produce, I find myself focusing more on the odd differences in our language and cultures, rather than the fact she is apparently a magical unicorn with wings, Scully thought as she put the words on the screen in front of her.
Despite speaking perfect English apart from a few grammatical oddities like the word anypony and calling the motel a stable, which she says isn’t the product of a translation spell after being questioned by me moments ago, Scully typed, she has next to no knowledge about our culture and possesses huge gaps in what anyone would think to be universal common knowledge even to a being that’s only been on Earth a grand total of five minutes. The greatest instance of which is not being aware of human dress, but having working knowledge of a switch to turn the lights on in the motel room that we are currently staying at.
The sound of Cadance rolling around on the bed stopped before she spoke. “Are all human beds this uncomfortable?”
Scully had to pick the chair she was using up to turn it around to face the pony. “Well, motels are pretty much the bottom of the barrel when it comes to sleeping accommodations,” she admitted. “Which I doubt is up to a princess’s usual standards.”
A few seconds passed in silence, and Scully’s curiosity got the best of her. “So, if your a princess, your country is a monarchy ruled by your mother and father?”
“No,” Cadance answered with a shake of her head. “Equestria is ruled by a group of four princesses, although it’s my adopted aunt, Princess Celestia, that makes all the decisions. My only real duty as a princess has been to catch the Crystal Empire up with the rest of the country because the area was banished into the shadows for the past thousand years.”
Scully felt as if she should have turned on her tape recorder to pick up the alicorn’s answer. “Are you saying that your society has been around for over a millennium?”
The question got a nod from Cadance. “Yes,” she said before standing up on the bed. “I’m sorry, but can I do something about my sleeping arrangements?”
“Well, as long as you don’t do anything to the room that would void our deposit,” Scully told her. She didn’t know what it was Cadance planned, but as long as Scully held no expectations, then Cadance couldn’t blow them out of the water.
Before she could say anything else, Cadance’s horn lit up and she disappeared in a flash of light that also filled the air with the sound of an odd popping sound. A tense dread filled filled Scully as she looked at the empty bed that had held the alien being not moments before.
Oh no, Scully thought in a panic. No no no no no!
Mulder was going to kill her. Partner or not, Scully didn’t think her losing the only real evidence that had ever been found of alien life and the existence of the paranormal all wrapped up in a single being would be taken well by a man so in need of finding something miraculous, he had seriously looked for a Loch Ness monster in the continental United States.
Well, it’s not as if I could have stopped her, the woman told herself as she tried to come up with a defense for when it came time to crush Mulder’s hopes and dreams. She had teleported! Even if Mulder had stayed around, put a leash on Cadance and took every possible measure they had in constraining the pony, she would have still gotten away.
But...Scully doubted that would keep the FBI man from...doing something very stupid.
She took in a deep breath and...did about all she could in this situation. Okay...God, I know I haven’t been paying much attention to you as of late, and I’m really sorry for that. But if you could somehow find it in your heart to bring Cadance back here, I-There was a soft bang as Cadance appeared in the middle of the room, along with with a large mass of fog.
“This should do,” Cadance said before actually pressing parts of the low cloud together with her hooves, then jumping atop the thick mass of moisture to curl up in a fashion similar to a dog before looking down at the gapping woman. “Goodnight Ms Scully.”
Scully tentatively reached forward and ran her arm through the cloud, feeling absolutely no resistance from the thing that was holding a pony who weighed nearly twice as much as her currently slept on. But...that’s not…
To avoid her brain from completely shutting down, Scully took in a deep breath, turned around, saved the document on her computer, shut it off, walked under Cadance, and fell on the bed like a tree that had been cut down in a single swing. Her head hit the pillow and she closed her eyes.
After a rather horrible nightmare involving a pink pony that seemed to break all the laws of physics and just plain common sense with no effort, Scully found herself waking to a dark room. Once the woman jerked awake, sitting up halfway as she did, Scully took in a deep breath...and blinked.
“Well, that’s interesting,” she mumbled.
“Hmmm?”
Scully jumped at the elevated location of the voice, then looked up to see Cadance laying down on the mass of floating water above her. “Oh, it’s just...my sinuses are clear. I always wake up with a clogged nose whenever I sleep in a rural area,” she explained before the reason why she wasn’t stopped up hit her. “Which, all the moisture in the air helped to negate.” Although, the fact that Cadance’s sleeping habits could clear her sinuses, it did little to put a creature that had completely destroyed all rationality in Scully’s good graces.
The two of them sat in silence for several seconds before Cadance’s horn suddenly started glowing from the tip to bathe the room in a soft blue light before she spoke. “Hey Scully, what do you think of Mulder?”
“What?” Scully asked in response to the oddity of the question.
“What do you think of Mulder?”
Scully frowned. “Why do you want to know something like that?” she asked in response to the question.
“Well, the two of you are only humans that I have ever met,” Cadance told her. “I don’t have a baseline to compare either of you to. I could compare you to ponies, but using the norm for one race never work on others. I tried it with a pair of griffons once and ugh, it was a total mess.”
The casual mention of another species made Scully’s mind work overtime to quickly create an honest opinion of Mulder’s character as an act of survival for her sanity. “Well, I’d say that Mulder is...complicated,” she told the other female. “He’s been educated at Oxford, which is one of our world’s most prestigious colleges, and he’s a genius when it comes to analyzing information.”
Cadance rolled her eyes. “That’s what he can do,” she said. “I asked what you think of him.”
“Oh, well that’s…” Scully thought on it a moment. “Well, he’s driven, smart, although he can get kind of obsessed with trying to prove some of his more outlandish theories, he’s...well, he’s probably the most dependable men I know.” The release of emotions that came with her description of Mulder made Scully clear her throat.
Despite the fog that filled the room, Scully could almost see Cadance’s smile as she asked her next question. “Do you think he’s cute?”
Feeling like she was being put on the spot, Scully fidgeted in her bed. “Well...I guess,” she admitted.
“So, do you want to get naked with him?”
Scully’s back went rigid at Cadence’s question. “That’s...um...Cadance, do you mind if I ask you something first?”
“Go right ahead,” she said.
Since the horse could literally disappear into thin air whenever she wanted, Scully worked her mind to ask what she needed to in the most inoffensive way possible. “How does your species deal with...physical relations?”
Cadance gave her a little frown. “You mean, kissing?”
Seeing that tip-toeing around the subject wasn’t going to work, Scully decided to go right to the heart of the matter. “I mean intercourse,” she said before deciding to make it even clearer. “Sex...you know...breeding.”
“Oh,” Cadance replied before her face became a little thoughtful. “Well, that’s actually more than one question, but… Well, I guess I’ll tackle the sex question first. You know how everypony goes into heat about once a month during the warmer seasons and you’re pretty much laid up in bed until you get some relief?”
Scully frowned a little. “Actually, humans are a bit different in that regard,” she told the pony. “Do, um could you explain it all to me? Act like I know nothing about your species.” Which she didn’t, technically.
After nodding in response, Cadance gave her reply. “Sure. Okay, so mares go into heat about eight to nine months out of the year once they rear the age where they can produce foals. During that time, we have a throbbing biological urge to produce offspring. However, this process starts long before anypony is mentally prepared to have foals. So, we usually hook up with a fillyfriend and take care of eachother during this time. It’s not as good as a stallion’s attentions, but it does the job,” she explained without any problems. “When we do get steady coltfriends, usually around the age of seventeen or eighteen, and even ponies who grow up together wait until then, they start having male-female sexual relationships.”
“What about childbirth?” she asked. “Is it normal for your species to have offspring so young?”
Cadance shook her head. “No. Most mares take a potion that prevents conception during their heat when they’re with a stallion until they’re in their mid to late twenties so that they have time to establish themselves,” she explained before smiling a little. “I’ll admit, I waited until I was married for a year to have my foal with Shiny and our courtship was much longer than it needed to be since he’s been mounting me since we were at the academy together, but there were court politics involved. Bleh.”
After putting all that information away till later, Scully thought about how to word her response. “Well, human’s do have a cycle, but it’s not as...sexually involved as the one you go though,” she explained. “In fact, we’re...a little squeamish about intercourse.”
Cadance frowned. “Why?”
“Years of conditioning from a variety of sources, from religious to social,” Scully explained. “And part of having sexual intercourse is being in the nude with another person. So, when you ask if I want to be naked with Mulder, is basically asking…”
The eyes of the pink pony widened. “Oh! You thought I was asking if you and Mulder want to have sex.”
Scully cleared her throat. “Yes,” she admitted before going over the events of last night in her head, now that she was in a much calmer state. “I can see now that you didn’t mean to ask something like that, what with how you don’t wear any clothes and Mulder told you that only people who are really close take off their clothes in each other’s presence...but, that’s how it could be seen.”
“Which would be an embarrassing question to ask a human in front of one of the opposite gender,” Cadance said as she nodded in understanding.
Sighing in relief at being able to finally put this whole thing being her, Scully’s mouth curbed into a little smile. “Exactly.”
“So, do you want to have sex with Mulder?”
Scully’s head shot up to give Cadance an annoyed look. “What? Why would you ask me something like that after what we just got through talking about?”
The reaction got a confused blink from Cadance. “What? We’re both females and Mulder isn’t around, so it’s not against any human social norm to ask you if you want to have sex with him. Right?” she asked before her eyes went wide. “Oh! Or is it that you do have feelings, and you’re embarrassed about them? That’s a very pony thing to do, so I understand.”
“That’s...it’s not...you can’t just…” Scully took a deep breath as she tried to right the thoughts in her brain, which wasn’t easy considering the events of the past twelve hours. After all, Scully had run over Cadance, had the majority of physical laws that the universe was supposed to function on broken by the magical unicorn with wings, and listened to her partner interview the pink pony like…
Scully frowned when she thought back to the interview. Something Cadance had said stuck out when she went over it again. “Cadance...exactly why did you say you came to Earth again?”
“To spread love and harmony among those who need it,” the replied before thinking for a second. “Which I guess I wasn’t that specific about the first time around. Sorry.”
“So, you’re like some kind of ambassador for your species, or something?” she asked.
Cadance shook her head. “No. If any princess fits that description it would be my little sister, Twilight. The love and harmony I spread amongst others is more specific and targeted towards the couple. Nothing universal.”
The explanation did made Scully’s stomach drop out from under her. “You almost make it sound like you’re here to play matchmaker or something.”
“Excuse me,” Cadance said before she sat up on her cloud to cross her hooves and glare down at Scully with a dark expression the human was surprised that a creature so cute could actually pull off. “The crafting of happy couples is a very serious business in Equestria. One does not simply play at being a matchmaker.”
Mulder stood in a white expanse and looked at the giant stone door as it opened, showing him all the secrets of the universe. Beyond it lay information on who really shot JFK, what those little plastic things on the end of shoelaces were called, the autopsy reports from Roswell, and everything else he had ever wanted to know. Information flashed by him so quickly he could only understand the barest fraction of the knowledge. But, he knew one thing above all others. The Truth was in there.
He took a step towards the door, and widened his eyes when it slammed shut in front of him. The tree of knowledge design on the front mocking Mulder with the fact that everything he had ever wanted to know what beyond a door much too hard to open by himself.
“No! No you can’t do this!” he shouted at the door as he ran up to it and tried to pry it open. “Just one more look. Please, the Truth is in there!”
“Mulder.”
The calling of his name made him look around for a second to see that he wasn’t alone. Right beside the gate was a small gray humanoid with an oversized head and big black eyes smoking a cigarette.
“You, it’s one of you,” Mulder mumbled.
“Mulder!”
Mulder moved closer to the extraterrestrial. “You’ve got to let in there. I’ll give you anything you want. You want an arm? You want a leg? I’ll give you anything, just let me see the Truth!”
“MULDER! WAKE UP!”
Mulder awakened from his nightmare and opened his eyes to the glare of the motel lights as Scully stood over him with a frown on her face. “Sc-Scully, what is it?”
“She’s Cupid, Mulder!”
With his shouting partner giving no answers and the light from the door being barely noticeable thanks to the sun just starting to come up, Mulder reached over to turn on the lamp to the left of his bed. “Scully? Wha-wait,” he said before noticing that the pink pony was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Cadance?”
“She’s making coffee,” Scully told him before crossing her arms. “But she and I got to talking a few minutes ago, and do you know why she’s here Mulder?”
Mulder rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Well, considering how she talks about the Earth more along the lines of a country than a planet and a complete lack of information on anything involving humanity, I’m guessing her appearance was a complete accident.”
“That’s what I thought too at first,” Scully told him. “But it turns out, it’s not. Cadance meant to...teleport here...sort of.”
As his brain pushed the remnants of sleep from his mind, Mulder sat up in his bed, making sure the sheets continued to cover his chest. “What do you mean?”
Before Scully could explain, Mulder heard a startled scream coming from the other room they had rented.
Both of the FBI agents were out the door less than ten seconds later, with Mulder still in his undershirt and underwear while Scully still had on the sweatsuit that she slept in. Despite her orders Cadance was standing at the window to Scully’s room with the blinds open so that anyone who bothered to look in could see her.
Since Mulder was the only two of the agents armed, he went in first with his gun out but held close to his chest in case someone was lying in wait by the door to try and take it from him. Scully quickly followed along looked around, seeing no threat.
“What is it?” Mulder asked as he looked around, his eyes focusing on the bathroom.
“What do you mean what’s going on?” Cadance asked “Look!”
She pointed out the eastward-facing window. Seeing nothing of consequence, Mulder put away his firearm to close the blinds while Scully went outside with her badge to discourage anyone else from getting too close. “What is it Cadance.”
In response to the question, Cadance turned around and frowned at her. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. You saw the sun!” she exclaimed. “And the moon, it’s morning but the moon is still in the sky!”
Mulder gave the pony an uneasy look. “Um...yeah,” he told her. “That’s how it’s always worked here...on Earth.”
“No it hasn’t!” Cadance exclaimed. “Celestia never goes so slow raising the sun, and the moon always goes down before she does. Something horrible must have happened!”
With the crowd dispersing, Scully went back inside the room and shut the door behind her. “What’s going on?”
Mulder spared a look at his partner, then turned his attention back to Cadance. “Uh, just let me check something real quick,” he said. “Cadance, you do know you’re no longer on your home planet, right?”
What seemed like several hours after her first panic, which was quickly followed by the fear of never being able to see her family again before realizing that since she left all the calculations for her teleportation spell in the library, it would be a simple matter for Celestia or Twilight to use it as a basis for following her to Earth with a spell to take them both home, Cadance sipped the calming tea as she sat on the lumpy bed the poor creatures that were sheltering her were forced to use.
“So...are you good now?” Mulder asked her while Scully stilled played with that telephone thing.
Cadance took in a breath, then imagined all the unease being pushed out as she exhaled. “Yeah...more or less,” she said. “I just...interdimensional teleportation...I thought I just popped over to an undiscovered country,” she said with a shake of her head. “Oh, Shiny is not going to take this very well.”
Scully looked away from her phone device as it continued to play music. “How exactly did you not figure out you are one another planet?”
“Hey!” Cadance shot back. “Has your species explored every inch of your planet?”
“Yes,” Scully told her.
Cadance blinked. “Oh, well...we don’t need to,” she said. “We let the griffons and the centaurs and the dragons have their own lands while we keep to ours.”
For some reason, Mulder gulped down a great deal of saliva after hearing the names of the various species. “Ahem, so...uh, you’re not here to colonize Earth or open diplomatic relations.”
“Nope,” she said. “Like I told Scully, I’m just here to-” Cadance cut herself off when she heard the music on Scully’s machine come to a stop. “This is Director Skinner.”
“Sir, this is Agent Scully,” she said before giving her badge number. “I’m afraid that you’re going to need to reassign some agents to the investigation that Mulder and I were put on.”
“Agent Scully, you are aware that Mulder begged me for this assignment, correct?” a voice from the machine asked. “Literally on his knees. He even said that he would give up bothering me over this kind of stuff if he never found anything, and only work on things that he was assigned to from now on instead of chasing rumors.”
Scully looked over to Cadance. “Oh, we...found something, Sir. That’s why we’re calling, we’ll be heading back to DC momentarily.”
“...are you claiming to actually have proof of...what exactly?” the voice asked.
“Well Sir, I’m a bit reluctant to mention it over the phone,” she told him.
“Do you need me to contact you on a secure line?” Skinner asked.
Scully didn’t respond immediately. “No Sir. However, we do need to meet with you privately to arrange...special accommodations for an unknown period of time. Please Sir, once you meet with us, you’ll understand why this isn’t something we can talk about, even over a secure line.”
“Agent Scully-”
“Sir, I know Mulder can be...well, Mulder,” she said before the voice could finish. “But this is me you’re talking to, and I’m the one saying that you need to see what we found with your own eyes.”
“Is it that important?”
Scully cleared her throat and turned her attention back to the device. “Sir, it is my belief that after seeing what Mulder and I have found, you will agree with the need for absolute secrecy.”
There was nearly a minute of silence before Cadance’ ears picked up the response. “Alright then, where is it you want to meet?”
Deputy Director Skinner nodded at the instructions that told him to meet with Mulder and Scully at the Thai place he had said gave him indigestion a month ago. From there, he would follow them to a more private location. After hanging up the phone, Skinner looked back up at the older man sitting in the corner of his office, blatantly ignoring the no smoking sign that was on Skinner’s desk.
“How exactly was it that you knew Scully would be giving me a call this morning?” he demanded in an even tone.
The cigarette smoking man took a whiff of his cancer stick and blew it out before replying. “Oh, I like to keep track of Agents Mulder and Scully. When they didn’t show up to that little school like they were supposed to, I knew that something must have happened,” he replied. “And that you would have been one of the people they first contacted. Now, would you mind giving me the name of that restaurant so that associates can find out just what it is Mulder thinks he’s stumbled across that’s so important?”
It was almost sunset as the car drove along the highway, the two humans in front and pony in the back. They had said that Cadance didn’t need to worry about being seen as long as she kept mostly still. Other people would look through the tinted windows and just see what they would think to be a stuffed animal.
The drive was filled with questions from Cadance on a few human technological things, which became a discussion of the odd similarities of their world and how ponies technologically inconsistent with what they had and didn’t have compared to humans. However, after several hours, the conversation did eventually get back to something that didn’t seem to upset Mulder nearly as much as it did Scully.
“You’re here to what?”
Cadance blinked at the odd reaction Mulder gave her in response to why she was on Earth as Cadance road along in the back seat of their automobile, her head leaning over the back of their bench seat. “I’m here to show the two of you how much you belong together and lead you into a future of marital bliss.”
In the seat next to him, Scully crossed her arms and smirked. “So, what do you think of your proof about extraterrestrial life now, Mulder?”
“Okay, first off,” Mulder began as they took a right in the car. “Princess Cadenza is interdimensional, that’s a completely different thing. And two…” He looked back to Cadance. “You crossed a dimensional barrier to hook up a pair of aliens? By your point of view, I mean. How exactly did you decide on something like that?”
Cadance brightened at the interest in her talent. “Oh I created a spell that divined the couple that belonged together but had the most barriers to their relationship and put me in their path.”
Both of the humans shared an uneasy look at Cadance’s description before Scully’s face became extremely disturbed. “Wait, are you saying that me and Mulder are the most impossible couple in all of creation?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it like that,” Cadance replied.
“I can believe it,” Mulder replied.
Scully looked over to Mulder with a frown. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The question got an uncomfortable shrug from Mulder. “Come on Scully, when’s the last time you were on a date?”
“Are you putting the blame on me here?” Scully demanded.
“What?” Mulder interrupted before putting on a little frown. “If anyone is stopping the two of us from getting together, it’s you, Scully.”
The accusation made Scully’s eyes widen a little. “Excuse me?” she asked before frowning. “Do you remember the shape shifter?”
“Which one?” Mulder replied.
Scully blinked at the question before she looked down and went back to frowning. “The fact that you can ask me that and I have to take it as a serious question makes me wonder how my life has turned out the way it has,” she mumbled before looking back up at him. “The one that looked like you.”
“That really doesn’t narrow it down Scully. I’m pretty sure they’ve all looked like me at one point,” he said before putting on a frown of his own. “Which is...pretty disturbing now that I think about it.”
“Ugh tell me about it,” Cadance added. “Shape shifters are the worst!”
While Mulder put his eyes back on the road, Scully looked back to Cadance, and the pink pony princesses could see the way the male human kept glancing into the back seat. In an effort to get a bit closer with the humans through a shared experience, Cadance decided to give them a bit of information she’d rather keep private. “I was foalnapped a week before my wedding by a changeling queen after she pretended to be my husband one night before replacing me and attempting to marry him in my stead.”
“Mine pretended to be Mulder and got me a little drunk before trying to make out with me on a couch,” Scully told her. “I really don’t know how far it would have gotten if Mulder hadn’t shown up when he was in the middle of putting the moves on me.”
The car slowed to a stop, and Cadance looked out of the car’s tinted window. The area they had come to didn’t look like it was a restaurant of some sort. It looked like an apartment building. Not that she could say for certian, what with her being an alien and all. But, pony and human architecture wasn't that different.
“Wait a second, this is-” Scully stopped talking and looked over to her partner. “Mulder, what’re we doing here?”
Mulder put the car in park. “Look, I’m not going to meet Skinner in the middle of town with the one piece of evidence that finally vindicates everything I’ve been telling him for the past six-plus years,” he said. “I’m leaving her with some people I can trust to look after her and...continue the interview I had to end abruptly.”
A little frown appeared on Scully’s face. “You know, Cadance doesn’t actually vindicate anything you’ve ever thought of, right Mulder?” she said. “She is her own separate...incident, completely unrelated to every single thing we’ve ever actually encountered, or at least claimed to.”
“...I’m still not taking her with us to see Skinner,” Mulder told her.
Scully looked back at Cadance for a second. “I understand that. But still, your conspiracy buddies?”
“Would you rather we leave her with your mother?” Mulder deadpanned before taking out his cell phone and dialing a number.
After looking back at Cadance for a few seconds, Scully turned her attention back to Mulder. “Point taken.”
“Hey, I’m outside your building. I need at least two of you to come down here with a few blankets. There’s uh...someone I need you to keep your eyes on for an hour or three,” he told the person on the other end of the line.
“Mulder, it’s D&D night. You know Garth doesn’t like to deal with alien and government conspiracies when we’re doing fantasy adventure stuff. It ruins the atmosphere, and we haven't even gotten to the enchanted forest where the guardian is yet.”
The FBI agent looked back to Cadance. “Yeah, I don’t think any of you three are going to have a problem with what I’ve got for you tonight.”
