Material Unaccounted For

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“I’m wondering…” Spike asked, as he sat beside a newly de-petrified Twilight Sparkle at the Golden Oaks’ big central table, “I don’t think you ever got around to telling me what you were doing out in that part of the Everfree to start with. Daycaller’s still trying to straighten out everything you did to the Lapwing, and there’s this pile of journals you left out that I haven’t been able to make any sense of.”

Twilight nodded, and poured herself another cup of strong tea. “I was going to talk about that once we’d unpacked again and you’d had a chance to get a decent night’s sleep, but since you asked… Spike? Get my notes…”

One Week Ago

“Okay. Let’s… just start at the beginning.” Twilight sat on a blue silk cushion across from Major Forward March, in Princess Luna’s book-filled study at Fillydelphia Harbor. The Princess herself occupied the cushion equidistant to both, and the low table in between them held an elaborate silver tea service and a few scattered manila folders. As per Luna’s preference only one lamp was lit, discreetly, in one corner, leaving most of the study outlined in dim silvery-blue radiance from the full moon outside. The big bay windows making up most of the back wall were open, admitting warm early-autumn air scented with wet grass and the far-away saltiness of the ocean.

“We’ve been… having some unexpected trouble in determining how the Oath- sorry, that’s the transformation process the Night Guards went through- actually works,” Forward said, “That was always a major objective of our work here, but… just as it’s gotten a lot more urgent, we’ve completely hit a wall.”

Princess Luna continued, “I wish to be able to restore any of my Night Guard who so desire to their original appearance; that they may live more comfortably among the ordinary ponies of thine era. Simply administering the same ceremony that once released our un-transformed fellows from service seems to have soothed the restless spirits at Hardfr- erm, Froggy Bottom Bog, but alas, it seems living bodies are not as easily convinced.” She paused, and took a careful sip from the teacup that floated next to her in a bluish telekinetic aura. “My sister has also made a number of very reasoned arguments that we should seek to induct new recruits into the Oath. She feels that the Night Guard are an important, and gravely unappreciated, part of Equestria’s military history, and that their tradition deserves to carry on.” The corners of Luna’s mouth turned upwards ever-so-slightly, “She also spoke quite eloquently about how useful the Guard’s various skills might be on the modern battlefield- especially if they could be properly deciphered, fused with modern magics, and expanded upon.”

Forward March chuckled, somewhat bitterly. “The problem is, right now, we have zero idea how to do any of that.” She fished a few sheets of paper out of one of the folders with her wing, and slid them across the table to Twilight. Each sheet described a spell in standard functional notation. Copious annotations explained the operation of various components, although more than a few sections remained alarmingly blank. “The verbal, material, somatic, and runic components of the Oath ritual are all pretty simple to the point of being unimpressive, but all they accomplish are basic, temporary physiological changes. All of the persistent transformation is performed -somehow- by the potion that’s administered along with the Oath, and we have no idea how that functions. We can’t even begin to speculate about an antidote, and we also can’t manufacture any more.”

Twilight nodded. She’d read Forward’s earlier reports. The potion and the Oath now joined an alarmingly long list of Lunar arcana -including the “spylon” pillars dotting Froggy Bottom Bog, the illusions covering Nightmare Moon’s redoubt at Mount Hydra, the hippomorphic constructs that defended both, and the bizarre spell Applejack had been asked to perform to “convert” Sweet Apple Acres to a nocturnal ecology- which simply had no comprehensible method of operation.

“How much of the potion do we have on hoof?” she asked aloud.

“Fifteen doses. That is all,” answered Luna. She dipped her muzzle downward and shook her head. “Once those are gone… someday, all of the Night Guard yet living will be gone as well, and our traditions will once again be consigned to the pages of history.”

Twilight turned to face the Princess more directly, slipping Forward’s notes back onto the table. “Where did this potion come from, originally? It… it couldn’t’ve just materialized out of thin air… could it?” Stranger things had been alleged of Lunar practices, after all- and Twilight had witnessed some firsthoof.

“My Guard tell me I was the sole provider of it, but try as I might I cannot recall what I did to produce it, or when.”

“You know I have to ask this…” Twilight swallowed hard and continued more gently. “Have you and Forward… tried any additional memory-feedback probes?”

“Yeah, ‘we’ have,” the pegasus medic shot a pointed glare at Luna, “But even priming with exposure to the Oath potion, other Lunar spells, and modern magical concepts that should be similar, it’s been a mess. Luna’s able to write down things that look like spells and alchemical formulae, but they’re all ill-formed and never consistent. There’s an explanation going around with some of the psychomancers who’re big on your headspace theory, that the way Nightmare Moon encoded abstract knowledge is completely different from the way she encoded events.”

“Something I would have liked to explore,” Luna hissed, “If somepony had not shut down the psychomancy labs. Doctor Sparkle would never have-”

“Doctor Sparkle left the decision up to me,” Forward March snapped back before Twilight could reply. Then she turned to the unicorn scholar and continued more gently, “and I canceled the tests because Luna was logging close to five times the maximum safe limit for psychoresonance exposure. I was seeing muscle spasms, hearing impairment, tachycardia…the whole nine yards.”

Luna seemed about to reply, but Forward kept on going. “Your Grace, you might not be bedridden anymore, but internally you’re still recovering from what Nightmare Moon did to you- whatever it was.”

“Major, I can survive a few tremors, or I will be able to, soon enough that-”

“No.” The pegasus said, quite calmly, “No, you won’t.” She grabbed another folder from the table and winged it over to Twilight. “Listen. The rate of Princess Luna’s recovery is slowing down, much more quickly than we’d anticipated.”

Twilight looked from Forward, to Luna, and then back again. “Wait, what?”

All of the tension seemed to drain out of Luna’s posture at once. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, nodded once, and whispered “Aye.”

Forward opened the folder and extracted a full-page chart, covered in curved lines of various colors. “We’ve been monitoring Luna’s bone composition, muscle mass, biogenic mana capacity, and other indicators of maturity throughout her recovery and… well…”

“I will spare you the complexities, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna spoke up again, “as now that we are speaking freely of it, the truth is quite simple. At the time of my banishment, I was ninety-seven years old. When Nightmare Moon returned, she looked much as my sister does now. Yet by my doctors’ measurements, I will never be much stronger than an alicorn of perhaps seventy.”

“The Nightmare Moon data point has an error margin of plus or minus about ninety years,” Forward March added, quietly, “since we never got the chance to run a detailed exam on her or even accurately measure her height aside from a few crappy photos from the town hall. But… basically, yes, Luna’s summed it up pretty well.”

Twilight just nodded, mouth half-open, unsure of what to say. Even though much about their initial genesis remained unclear, the development process of alicorns was well understood- Princess Celestia’s stupendous patronage of the sciences frequently extended to volunteering herself and her proteges as test subjects. Alicorns grew rapidly, in physical stature and magical power and a host of other abilities, for about two hundred years. Then, the process began to decelerate. It continued, but at an ever-slower, effectively infinitesimal rate; out presumably to eternity. Celestia had doubled in height between the years 100 and 200 CE, and only gained an additional ten centimeters in the entire period since.

According to those models, Princess Luna’s capabilities should either be continuing to grow at a rapid rate, or already be nearly comparable to Celestia- depending, of course, on a very rough estimate of whether her time as a host for Nightmare Moon “counted” or not. But according to the graph in Forward’s wing, she was destined to plateau somewhere far inferior to Princess Cadance.

“That’s not why I called you up here, though,” the medic continued, letting the chart slip out of her wing and back onto the table. “As hard as it might be to believe, I actually do have some good news. Or, at least, it started out as good news.” She flicked a wing back towards Luna.

“Tia visited us not long ago,” the alicorn said, “And, naturally, wanted to inspect the mages’ progress. When she heard of the troubles they were having with the Oath potion, she recalled a line of study long ago abandoned by other scholars as inconsequential, but which she thought would be of use to us. From those theories, our mages were able to divine the presence of at least one active ingredient. It produces a faint shimmering, akin to starlight, on certain prepared glasses, and so they have named it ‘radion’.”

Forward March chuckled. “After finding this stuff in the potions, some of the mages kind of went on a little bit of a scavenger hunt with their detector glasses. Turns out that ‘radion’ exists everywhere in minute quantities, or at least everywhere we can reasonably reach, including inside ponies and other living things; but there’s higher quantities in the Lunars’ bodies and Lunar-manufactured artifacts. The usual background is one or two parts per million, but some of the Shadowbolts are pushing fifty p-p-m. We were even able to pick up a radion signature in the spylon we’ve got in storage, in the daytime, while it was invisible.”

That was interesting. Thus far, they’d been completely unable to penetrate the cloaking spells that hid the pillars in daylight- a matter of frustration for many on the project, since said spell should have been over one thousand years old. Twilight took another sip of her tea. “Do you think that means radion is somehow related to the cloaking spell’s operation?”

“I dunno, maybe? The radion detection system isn’t that precise, and while there’s different concentrations at different spots on the surface of the pillar we haven’t found anything resembling a rune or a spell circle. It’s possible there’s different kinds of the stuff, some arcanetically significant and some not, and we just can’t discriminate between them yet.”

“Do you think the spylons might be creating it, like they create those constructs?”

“Doubtful. The scintillation effect shows up in some photography, especially thaumophotographs, so we were able go back over some of our older data and see if any radion existed in the recent past. When we did, we found that everything that’d been present at the Castle of Two Sisters when Nightmare Moon was… killed? Dispelled? Whatever… was absolutely covered in the stuff. That included you and your pals from Ponyville.”

Twilight was about to ask why she hadn’t been told of this earlier, when the Major held up one hoof.

“Now, before you ask, we don’t think radion has any harmful effects- we’re not quite at the point yet where we can separate it out and inject it into mice, but the Lunars seem okay with it and there’s a little bit in everypony already anyway. More to the point, based on what we could dig out of photos, your levels all decreased back to normal over the course of a few days.” Forward extracted another chart, this one featuring a set of wobbly primary-colored lines that quickly swept downward to approach -but not quite touch- the zero axis. Twilight, however, was more interested in one much higher, dark blue line.It flattened out at almost exactly twenty-seven percent of its original value, eerily similar to the factor by which Luna’s recovery was expected to come up short.

“What’s that?” she asked.

The Major closed her eyes for a moment and pulled in a deep breath. “I’m afraid that’s the level of radion in Princess Luna’s system. She experienced the highest exposure we’ve ever seen, but what’s more alarming is that, while it’s been decreasing just like yours, that decrease is also slowing down. There’s probably going to be a sizable percentage of her original radion exposure that will, as best we can predict, never go away.”

Twilight took another long, slow sip of her tea. “Do we know what that means?”

“Not really.”

“Do we know why it’s happening?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Do we know where this radion content is coming from?”

“We think it’s the same radion, that’s been trapped in her tissues this whole time. How it got there in the first place? That’s anypony’s guess.”

“Do we know if it’s affecting her recovery?”

“I don’t know, maybe? Probably, actually. But I also don’t know if taking the radion out -if we even knew how to take it out- will help.”

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut, and leaned back against her cushion. “Who else knows about all this?” she finally asked.

“Celestia, Luna, me, the three alchemists and an MD who ran the actual tests, and now you,” Forward answered.

“Good. Let’s keep it that way. With all of this other nonsense that’s been circulating about Princess Luna, the papers really do not need to know that she’s experiencing difficulties with her recovery and is contaminated with an unknown substance.”

There was a long, heavy pause. Then the Princess nodded, ever-so-slowly. “Agreed.”

“Wow.” Spike took another sip of his tea, quietly glad that his claws had stopped trembling a good long while ago. “That’s all… well, it’s a lot to think about, I guess. Mostly to be concerned about. So, all those weird scans you were doing with the Lapwing were to look for… radion? Radions? What is the plural of that, anyway? In the Everfree Forest.”

“Correct! And Forward was using it like a mass noun, so there really isn’t a plural.”

“And then you went out on-hoof and decided to check out a weird noise in the bushes because… radion might’ve made it?”

“Actually, it was Chamomile who insisted on checking that out; I just wanted to keep moving, but, you know,” Twilight tilted her head back and stuck out her lower jaw in a passable impression of some of the less competent Supermare cover art, “‘A Royal Guard Never Backs Down From A Fight – Hoo-RAH’. And I certainly wasn’t about to let him charge off and leave me alone out there.” She shook her head. “Actually, if Luna’s any indication, that cockatrice very well could have been the source of my radion readings… but I’m pretty sure it was the bits of potion bottle Fluttershy discovered- the Oath potions are positively… uh, radiant with the stuff. After that,I was going to scan the sites where the pillars had been, the day after, but I never got the chance to.”

“That makes sense, yeah. And those old papers you were piling up… I’m guessing those were the methods Celestia pointed out?”

“Right again!” Twilight raised her teacup in a little mock-toast. “But there’s actually a little more to them than that. Major Forward thought radion has always existed, but based on the digging I did that’s actually not the case. The original studies Celestia referenced were started because, back in 1019, weather stations and a few precision alchemy experiments all over the world started picking up a plume of unknown matter spreading out from central Equestria. They were able to identify what we’re now calling radion in about a third of the samples, and the composition of the rest was never conclusively determined.”

Spike held up a claw. “Wait, wait, wait. If they could detect this stuff sight unseen back in the 1020s, how come we never could with all the tests we were running on Luna and the pillars? Was their approach really that much better than yours, eighty years earlier?”

“I was asking myself the same thing, at first. What clued the early alchemists in was the presence of essentially pure radion in particulates, the kind of thing you could just see under a microscope. The material in Luna’s tissues, and the pillars, though, is… compounded, somehow. I think we were the first to ever detect it in that form; the papers I found just theorize about possible compounds. So we’ve actually come at least a little ways farther.”

“But not far enough to figure out how any of it works. In fact, while we know it exists, we currently actually know basically nothing about radion.”

“Pretty much. Further experiments could take decades with dedicated teams of alchemists, and all the existing studies are dead ends. There just weren’t any foreign mages’ groups with the resources necessary to conduct studies like that at the time, and nopony in Equestria seemed to think it was worth pursuing.”

“I’m not sure.” Spike stood up, and loped over to Twilight’s desk. Operating more off of a gut feeling than any specific memory, he began leafing through the stacks of documents again. Finally he extracted a systematic review by a group of hippogriff druids, modeling the early days of the material’s spread. “Doesn’t this ‘plume’ thing start out awfully close to the Great Canterlot Fire?” he asked, “Within, like, a few days, even?” He wasn’t surprised that Twilight hadn’t made the connection herself- if there were any facts she tended to miss, they were usually the most obvious ones. It likely didn’t help that, despite being a disaster that had ended up killing nearly five hundred ponies, leveling sections of Canterlot Castle, and forcing the Equestrian government to relocate its operations to the lower commercial district for nearly a year, the Fire had received extremely little press coverage. As far as Spike knew, there hadn’t even been any sort of official Ministerial inquiry, or a published report- and Twilight usually consulted those sources first.

Twilight gently pulled the page in question from Spike’s claws in her telekinesis, and scanned over it herself. “Spike, you’re right. I wonder…”

“Once everything’s settled out here, do you think we should head up to the archives in Canterlot?” Spike asked.

“Yeah, I think that might be a really good idea.”

“Here’s that editorial from the Times I remember hearing about:”

“The divergence of views between the Defense and Interior Ministries, and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the affair, have touched off a vigorous public discussion. The considerable public excitement and confusion caused by this disaster, as well as its spectacular official accompaniments, demand a careful explanation. We at the Editorial Board concede that military authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert, but deplore the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. Indeed, the more the incident is studied, the more incredible it becomes. There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair, and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter…”

“Check this out:”

“… The suit alleges that plaintiffs, all survivors of the Great Canterlot Fire, were subjected to medically unnecessary memory removal therapy by the Equestrian Hospital Service. Patients initially consented to the procedures, which wereadvised to treat post-traumatic stress, and were never made aware that less risky and time-intensive therapies were standard for their cases. Damages total between three and four million bits, intended to address neurological side-effects, lost productivity due to overextended medical leave, and various emotional damages. ‘There’s a three-day blank space in my life, where other ponies had to tell me that four of my mares died, and now I feel like I wasn’t there for them,’ said plaintiff Silverkey, a former sergeant in the Canterlot Watch, ‘If I’d seen them go down, I think I could’ve eventually made peace with it and moved on, but now there’s just nothing. What can I tell their buddies? What can I tell their families?’ Memory specialists consulted by the Times stated there was ‘a slight chance that experimental techniques could restore some limited recollection’. The Ministry of Health has thus far declined to comment, citing standard policies on ongoing litigation…’”

“This is interesting. The head of the Canterlot Fire Brigade went on record saying the source of the explosion was actually beneath the Royal Academy, a significant distance underground. Then she walked that back in a press conference a week later and said the origin couldn’t be determined, but… didn’t present any of the evidence like what she’d shown to back up the original statement.”

"… it is the conclusion of the Equestrian Union of Firemares and Fire Safety Officials that large portions of Canterlot Castle were in fact deliberately demolished or set aflame by emergency personnel or the military. While the establishment of backfires and fire-breaks is entirely normal procedure in firefighting, we find the degree of destruction inflicted by Canterlot’s authorities unusually severe, bordering on indiscriminate. In addition, the continued insistence of the Interior Ministry that all damage to the city was accomplished by accidental fire, and that deliberate destruction played no role whatsoever, is troubling…"

“And then there’s a footnote mentioning that back-burning is generally only used to combat wildfires, not city fires… and describing how this means the whole Canterlot Fire was a false-flag operation perpetrated by a group of donkeys operating inside the Government…”

“Wow, Spike, there’s a lot of different letters from different ponies in here who are all claiming that the collapse of Dockyard Terrace Three was due to some kind of spell, not fire damage at all.”

“Do they… have any kind of proof of this?”

“Not really, but they all come back to the same idea eventually- that airship fuel can’t melt adamantium beams.”

“… at least three witnesses, including a Lieutenant in the Canterlot Weather Patrol, observed a Royal Navy cruiser hover over the Castle district between the hours of four and six AM, and fire between ten and twelve cannon rounds straight down…”

“Does it say why?”

“No, the quote just cuts off and then the newsletter says this is proof that Princess Celestia called in an airstrike to assassinate her political opponents. Under orders from, of course, the international confederation of donkeys.”

“Oh, no, not this again…”

“Whatcha’ got?”

“Copies of coroner’s reports.”

“How in Tartarus did some accountant in Vanhoover get ahold of those?”

“I’m not sure, maybe they’re fake, but they look genuine and they’re really actually kind of weird. This table here was supposed to be part of an internal investigation run by the Ministry of Health, which of course nopony’s ever heard of because ‘it never saw the light of day’. Take a look.”

“Twilight, this can’t be real!”

“Of four hundred and ninety-six (496) sets of equine remains in possession of the Canterlot division of EHS, twenty-two (22) have not been turned over to next of kin despite no stated legal or practical justification being provided to withhold them. An additional one-hundred-and-four (104) sets of remains were stated in initial release documents to have been incinerated during the course of structure fires, but instead show alchemical indications of artificial cremation. Of these, sixty-six (66) sets of remains were described as containing complete skeletons in initial logs, but are in fact incomplete. A further sixteen (16) sets of remains are accompanied by coroner’s reports identifying ‘anomalies’ in the skeletal system and blood serum, although no further investigation appears to have been initiated. Additionally, the EHS currently retains a collection of fifty-one (51) sets of remains which ‘could not be conclusively identified as equine, or belonging to any known species’ and which are not included in the official death toll."

“… are they donkeys?”

“Nope! They’re part… let me see here… of an ancient race of reptile ponies that live deep underground, impersonate political figures, and eat equine flesh!”

“Oh. Well, that’s so much better.”

“I found some astrologer who’s pointing out how many magically-significant astrological combinations occurred on the night of the explosion. More than any other night for two years in the past and three in the future, even.”

“Hmm. The actual calculations look pretty solid, but… give me a minute to read the rest… there we go, here’s a section on how the whole thing was predicted by Princess Luna. I was worried I might have to take some of this seriously.”

“Here’s an interesting paper. It says ponies all over Canterlot spotted a ‘large, shadowy, owl-like figure, possibly metallic in composition,’ which matches depictions in an obscure illustrated text called the Thievius Abyssinius dating back easily two thousand years. There’s even pictures!”

“Let me see that.” Twilight peered at the badly-copied pages. As far as she was concerned, the artist’s depiction looked less like a mechanical owl and more like an obese, balding stallion with a handlebar mustache covered head-to-tail in black garbage bags. “Just stick it on the pile with the Mothmare sightings, and the Headless Horse sightings, and the Nightmare Moon sightings, and the Slendermare sightings, and-”

“Wait, was that the one where the supposed ex-Army captain… sergeant… whatever… kept asking if the mare in the suit was actually wearing a suit?”

“No, you’re thinking of the pale mare in the blue-gray suit, with a briefcase,who was spotted more than a dozen times, all over the city, within an hour. This one’s the faceless mare in the black suit, who was supposed to mess with photographs.”

“Oh. Right. There’s so many of these, it’s getting hard to keep them all straight…”

“This mare’s convinced that changelings started the fire.”

“Not ‘The Donkeys’?”

“Nope! Changelings. She says she saw ‘four black, silent, equinoid figures climb vertically up a wall in the Fountain District’.”

“Well, that’s dumb.”

“I don’t know, she’s the only one who mentions changelings but there’s all sorts of reports of creatures crawling and flying around in lower parts of the city. And the Army was sending troops out to deal with them! I think there might be something to this.”

“Something more than just mass hysteria, you mean?”

“If these sightings were just caused by mass hysteria, then I’m not sure how it spread so quickly. The reports show up within minutes of each other, halfway across the city- that’s way too fast for just word-of-mouth suggestions to travel, and all the firelinks and messenger services had been commandeered for official use…”

“It does seem kind of strange… so many elite military units just happened to be in the area to render firefighting assistance so quickly…”

“Yeah, the kind of ‘firefighting assistance’ that needed a lot of front-line combat troops and consumed a lot of crossbow quarrels and blasting crystals…”

“These reports are such an absolute mess it’s hard to make sense of anything, though… look at this, the Army Engineers Sixth Corps is assigned to three different districts of the city within minutes of each other! There’s no way the military could get away with recordkeeping this sloppy. Something’s wrong here.”

“What’cha got, Twilight?”

“Weather reports. The 1015-1020 Central Mountain Dominion Almanac, specifically. Look at this; for a period of ten days before the fire the astrological and meteorological records go out to five significant digits instead of the usual three. Measurements that precise usually have to be ordered by some authority, for some reason, but there’s no footnotes. And all rainfall is rescheduled to the weeks afterward- then they went ahead and dumped it all at once to put the fire out, of course, but why would they make changes ahead of time?”

“Does it say who ordered these changes?”

“Nope. The weather schedule itself is a public record and has to be published, but there’s no obligation to disclose why a specific change was made…”

“Twilight, I asked Jade Singer for some of the invoices from 1019, and a lot of them are missing, but the ones she could find show very large shipments into the Academy from different instrumentation and reagent suppliers right up to the day of the Fire. Who was buying this stuff, what they were buying, and where it was ultimately going are all blacked out, but I recalculated the total cost and it’s something like twelve and a half million bits.”

“Okay, so, where did it all end up?”

“I’m not sure, but there’s no records of any of it being disposed of or released to any ordinary department.”

“So, I’ve been doing a little more research into the theoretical alchemy and liminology literature that might be related to radion, and I found something weird. Some of the sources I’ve been consulting have checkout cards going all the way back to the turn of the millennium, and all of the ones where records exist were also loaned or copied to the Royal Academy in 1019. That got me thinking, and I sent some letters out to other academic libraries with key works in the field, and some of them were also loaned and some of those just went missing- some got checked out by the Academy just before the fire, and never returned, and some got checked out afterwards, by ponies from the Ministry of Defense!”

“What’s in the envelope?”

“So, Spike, you know how Shiny has tea every week with Fleet Admiral Gyrfalcon and his wife?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I asked him, to ask Gyrfalcon, to ask the head of records for the Navy to send me the deployment reports for the first half of 1019. And not only were twice the usual number of combat airships stationed in Canterlot the day of the Fire, but there were a dozen of what were described as VIP passenger runs in the week leading up to it. Nine were within Equestria, and three outside.”

“Do you know who ordered them, or who the passengers were?”

“Nope, that’s all redacted. Shiny says it was all Gyrfalcon could do to get a hold of the airfields the ships went to.”

“Actually, let me see those…”

“Twilight?”

“Yeah, Spike?”

“I took a look at those airfields, and… well, they didn’t go to airfields. This was land-on-your-lawn official service. So I started going through some of the old address books, and it turns out every one of those flights touched down within a kilometer of the mailing address of a leading astrologer, liminologist, or magical theorist.”

“That’s… that’s a little concerning, actually.”

“There’s more. Four of those mages had obituaries written within two weeks of the Fire, even though according to the official records, they’d died of natural causes and hadn’t been anywhere near Canterlot at the time.”

“Spike?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you get me everything those mages published?”

“Bingo.”

“Twilight?”

“Look at this. Astrological Cross-Correlation In Multiversal Object Substitutions from 1018 cites ‘Bittersweet and Leadwing, 8^th Issue, Hearth Fire 1013.’ But there is no 8^th issue of Bittersweet and Leadwing’s reports, in that month or any other!”

“Isn’t this the report series that got Doctor Ball to quit her job? The one with her name misspelled on the cover, and those really weird figures?”

“Yeah, but at least that’s actually in official records, complete failures to accurately depict basic skeletal anatomy and all. There’s an Issue 7, and an Issue 9, but 8 just… disappeared.”

“I’ll add that into your report for Celestia.”

“Good thinking. And I’ll fill out a request to the Academy’s high-security archives, and see if they might have any information.”

“Dr. Twilight Sparkle:

Your disclosure request number 1098/15422 to the Royal Academy High Security Archives has been forwarded to the authorization committee under Section 14 of the Destructive Arcana & Techniques Act 972,” Twilight read the very next day.

The Destructive Arcana & Techniques Act was brought into force whenever a magical discovery’s potential to cause widespread destruction -and make doing so easy- was deemed to outweigh the benefits of further study. It would not serve the public good, the argument went, if any madmare with an elementary magician’s circle was able to conjure up virulent diseases, permanently sterilize great tracts of farmland, or simply make a very large explosion. Instead, such developments were forbidden by law from being disclosed. Knowledge of their inner workings was only made available to select researchers that a committee of public-safety officials and magical experts deemed sufficiently trustworthy.

The fact that the Act had been invoked at all already told Twilight a few very important things. First, there was indeed something responsible for the horrible events of late 1019. Second, information about that something was sufficiently detailed that there was a very real danger of those events being reenacted. Third, that something had to be of immense magical power: the Destructive Arcana & Techniques Act was not invoked whenever somepony invented a sharper sword or a more efficient formulation of blasting-powder.

She read on.

"We regret to inform you that your request has been rejected on the advice of the Archmage of the Royal Academy. Please be aware that the DATA Authorization Committee receives a very large number of disclosure requests each day, and must carefully weigh the potential risks of further study into dangerous areas against the possible insights and applications gained.”

That was all.

Twilight released the letter from her telekinesis and let it fall back to her desk. She had, over the course of her career, submitted three previous Authorization Committee requests. Two had been accepted, and one denied. All of them had spent a little more than a week in deliberation; a decision in under twenty-four hours was, as far as Twilight knew, completely unheard of. It was also unheard of for the Archmage of the Academy to take the slightest interest in the proceedings, to the degree that Twilight hadn’t previously had the faintest idea it was even allowed, or why the Archmage would even care. Finally, every single rejected request she’d heard of included a brief summary of why it had been rejected, including some basic information on what made the sought-after documents so dangerous. Here, there was nothing of the sort.

She stood up from her chair, scribbled a quick note to Spike, and set off for the Academy grounds.

Twilight had visited Archmage Inkwell’s office some dozen times over the course of her academic career, and it never ceased to impress her. The room was half-circular, occupying the east side of one of the Academy’s larger towers; leaving a curved outer wall to alternate between imposing bookcases and tall, arched windows. Inkwell’s surprisingly small, unadorned desk sat in the center, facing the door. On the interior wall hung an impressive number of framed awards, and a floor-to-ceiling tapestry depicting the seal and motto of the Royal Academy: ‘Nihil Est, Quod Non Sciendium Equii’.

The Archmage herself was not in attendance when Twilight arrived, despite the younger mare having gone through all the proper channels to make an appointment. Inkwell also kept a smaller office down among the other faculty -the same one she’d been assigned when she was first hired, seventy-eight years ago- and only used the Archmage’s tower for official meetings. Only after Twilight spent a few minutes in one of the stiff, high-backed chairs Inkwell had provided for the dubious comfort of visitors did she appear; staggering with a not insignificant effort across the plum-colored carpet from the staircase and reception area that occupied the other half of the tower.

At one hundred and four years old, Archmage Inkwell looked less like a live unicorn mare than some sort of necromantic construct- a patchy gray coat stretched taut over an unsteady skeleton and not much else. In fact, with her dark mane pulled back in a decidedly old-fashioned flat bun and her scarred-shut left eye, she could probably have passed for a Lunar revenant; but for whatever reason she always wore a pair of gaudy, black-and-purple striped leggings over her forelegs. Rival scholars underestimated her at their peril, however. In addition to carrying out the sizable administrative duties of the Archmage, Inkwell still taught Introductory Dynamancy each and every semester, as well as a number of advanced seminar courses on subjects as diverse as golemancy and theoretical astrodynamics.

“Hmph, blasted stairs…” she muttered more to herself than to Twilight, in a voice that seemed to be generated entirely by vigorously rubbing small rocks against each other somewhere inside her barrel. She hauled herself into the chair behind her desk and continued, as if by way of explanation, “Hospital switched out my arthritis medication, for some newfangled formula that’s supposed to be easier to process, but it just doesn’t work as well.”

Twilight opened her mouth to reply, but the Archmage continued talking without giving her a chance: “You may dispense with the usual pleasantries, Doctor Sparkle. I know why you’re here.”

The younger mage let her jaw shut again with an audible click. Then she nodded.

“I’m afraid my decision is final. I have good reasons for the instructions I sent to the Approval Committee, and they won’t be altered. However, I also won’t hold this… transgression against you if you need anything from the Academy in the future.” Inkwell leaned forward, with some apparent difficulty, and braced her forehooves against the desk. “You have an unusually bright future in front of you, Doctor. Please don’t fritter it away on Princess Celestia’s behalf, chasing down all of her old mistakes.”

Twilight swallowed hard, and then asked “Can you at least tell me why you vetoed my application?”

Inkwell shook her head, producing a very faint series of clicks and pops in the process. “I wish I could, Twilight, but you’ll have to trust me that doing so would be just as… catastrophic as releasing the files themselves.” She paused, looked over Twilight’s shoulder at the banner hanging against the far wall, and then gazed back at the scholar with a renewed, almost fearful intensity in her sole functioning eye. “Believe what you will, Doctor Sparkle, it doesn’t matter to me. But listen well. There are indeed things in this universe that ponykind was not meant to know. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’m afraid I’m going to be late for my next lecture. Good day.” She carefully dismounted her desk chair and trotted back out the door, this time -Twilight thought, at least- with a noticeably surer step than when she’d arrived.

The next train back to Ponyville didn’t depart for an hour and a half after her meeting with Inkwell. Twilight hadn’t expected the meeting in question to be anywhere near as short as it was, and now she was left with nothing better to do than wander around the Academy campus and speculate.

She was making her way down the skywalk between Pasture Memorial Lecture Hall and the Fair-A-Day College of Theoretical Evocation, when she heard Princess Celestia’s voice behind her. “I’m sorry, Twilight, but I’m afraid this falls under the category of secrets that aren’t mine to tell.”

Twilight came to an abrupt halt, then spun around to find the Princess standing some ways back along the corridor, looking out through one of its many windows in the rough direction of the Archmage’s tower. She didn’t even bother to ponder how Celestia had already learned the outcome of her meeting with Inkwell, or for that matter found her over the expanse of the entire campus. After working for the alicorn for as long as Twilight had, one simply got used to such things. Instead, she trotted back over and rested her hooves on the railing. “So, you know about… whatever happened in 1019, then.”

Celestia nodded, and squeezed her eyes shut for just a moment longer than a blink. “Of course I know, Twilight. I was there.”

“Then tell me what happened!” Twilight snapped, “Or, better yet, just order Inkwell and those Committee ponies to cooperate. Ultimately, they work for you, don’t they? Inkwell’s granddaughter is your Chief of Staff, for Starswirl’s sake!”

If Celestia was at all bothered by Twilight’s outburst, she gave no immediately visible sign, although when she spoke again her voice was just a fraction of a degree colder. “Twilight, you know I can’t do that. The position of Exarch exists to serve and uphold the laws of the Imperial Republic, not the other way around. That’s true whether the law in question is a murder statute, or an information approval process. To even consider stepping outside of it would be to betray everything I’ve spent a thousand years building.” She paused, and then knelt down to look her younger student in the eye. “I’m sorry, Twilight. But simply by speaking to you about… these events, I’ve already pushed up against the absolute limits of what Equestrian law allows.”

She stood up again, and set off down the corridor, rapidly vanishing from sight when she turned a corner just inside Pasture Hall. By the time Twilight found the sense to follow, the alicorn was already gone.

“I don’t get it,” Twilight told Spike over dinner at the Golden Oaks that evening, “I’m sure Celestia was trying to tell me something important, but I don’t have any idea what it might’ve been.”

The dragon continued absentmindedly subdividing his ruby-dust-and-daisy casserole into smaller and smaller squares with a butter knife, until some of them began to grow top-heavy and collapse. “Honestly? I’d just leave it alone for the time being.That mare from the candy shop across the street was asking what you were up to… I think she was worried you’d disappeared on us again. Maybe it’d be better to focus on the leads we’ve already got here, in Ponyville, at least for a while. Maybe Celestia was counting on your already having discovered some other clue that we’ve actually missed so far.”

“Okay,” Twilight nodded. “Any luck tracking down the survivors?”

“Oh, I’ve been tracking them down just fine, the only problem is, they’re all dead.”

Twilight froze with her water glass hovering just in front of her muzzle. “What?”

Spike waved his claws in front of himself in a quick negatory gesture. “No, no, no, not like that. I did find a Ministry of Health report that said the survivors of the Canterlot Fire showed an elevated incidence of some otherwise extremely rare lung and bone diseases, but nothing particularly drastic or lethal. What I meant was, the Fire was almost eighty years ago. If a pony was old enough to remember anything substantial in 1019, they’d be pushing a hundred, now. Or past it, in most cases, unless they were super-young.”

“Yeah,” Twilight nodded again. Like Inkwell…

“Inkwell?” Spike asked.

“Yeah, you know, the Archmage?” Twilight hadn’t realized she’d said the last part out loud.

“Wait a minute.” Spike turned away from the kitchen table, casserole seemingly forgotten for the moment, and disappeared back into the main room. He returned a moment later with a newspaper clipping held in one hand, which he slid across the table to Twilight. Underneath the headline “CANTERLOT FIRE HEROES HONORED”, the entire page was taken up by a photograph of Princess Celestia, standing in front of the office building that had served as the provisional headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. On her left stood a young, tired-looking unicorn mare. Her dark mane was pulled into what would have, at the time, been considered a perfectly fashionable flat bun; she wore a somewhat torn and abused Royal Academy graduate assistant’s sash; and her forelegs and left eye were covered in thick bandages. On the Princess’s right, what appeared to be a male griffon wearing a pair of thick, black-framed glasses was half-visible and half-out-of-frame, one talon outstretched as though warding off the camera.

I’ve already pushed up against the absolute limits of what Equestrian law allows…

“Wait… who’s that?” Twilight asked aloud.

Spike peered at the tiny caption underneath the image, slit pupils wide in the dim light. “‘From left to right: Junior Researcher Inkwell, H.G. The Exarch Princess Celestia, and Junior Researcher Gordon… of… Innsbeak…”

Author's Notes:

I swear, someday I will write an EC story that gets right into the redone canonical content and doesn’t have a big long lead-up of original “arc glue” material.

This, however, is not that story.

Most of the influences of the “conspiracy theories” Twilight encounters should be obvious. The only one that is directly quoted from external sources is assembled piecemeal from the official report on the imaginary air raid that occurred over Los Angeles in 1942.

In Slender/MLP crossovers (which are, sadly, more than numerous enough to get a good solid sample size), a ponified Slenderman is usually called “Slendermane”. This is stupid, though. The etymology of the original “Slenderman” comes from “the slender man” and not “the slender hair” or whatever, and in any case Slenderman is bald. Thus, I’m keeping it as “Slendermare” now and if it should ever come up in the future. I dearly hope it does not.

Mind the Gap

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The quickest route to Innsbeak was by way of the big rail hub at Bathhorse, New Brunswicker, with an overnight stop at Trottingham in the Griffish Isles. The first leg of that trip would take about fifteen hours on a nonstop express- one departed Ponyville at two in the morning, which in fact suited Twilight Sparkle just fine.

This time, she shared her first-class compartment with Rarity and Rainbow Dash. At the moment, she wasn’t sure if arranging an interview with the mysterious Gordon would require the light touch of an experienced salesmare, or a more… ‘direct’ approach- this was Griffonia, after all. In fact, she would've preferred to bring along all of her friends, but Dash and Rarity were the only ones both willing and able to leave Ponyville on such short notice. Fluttershy preferred to avoid long-distance travel if at all possible; Pinkie Pie had her hooves full preparing for some sort of local harvest festival Twilight had never heard of before; and Applejack was both enmeshed in the festival, and reluctant to go off adventuring to leave the rest of her family in uncertain circumstances. If she was being entirely honest, Twilight felt a little more at ease relying on the sleek, deadly pegasus than Applejack’s blunt practicality, for reasons she couldn’t quite put her hoof on.

It was commonly said that thanks to the sophistication of the international rail system, all a well-to-do gentlemare needed to traverse most of the Known World was a train ticket. It was also commonly said that a true proverbial gentlemare would have no desire to traverse most of the Known World. Just about everything that civilized tastes could desire would in fact be found within the borders of Equestria, after all, and the international rail system was mostly pony-built.

Twilight, for her part, didn’t feel particularly inclined to comment, considering herself rather poorly traveled. She had only ever attended two scientific conferences outside of Equestrian borders: one in Siam, and another in Ornithia. Generally, foreign scholars with discoveries worth presenting came to the Royal Academy, as was only proper. In contrast, her mother had visited nearly every city in Saddle Arabia, where her Under the Abyssinian Sun series had for some unknown reason become wildly popular. Her father frequently attended medical conferences and missions in the disease-ridden eastern tropics. Shiny had, like most ambitious young officers, spent a good portion of his life shuttled between more trouble spots and garrisons than Twilight could count, doing his part to uphold the worldwide Pax Equestria.

Then she’d arrived in Ponyville, and met ponies who had never left Equestria at all.

Rainbow Dash confined herself almost entirely to a narrow line connecting Ponyville and Cloudsdale, with a few childhood detours to visit relatives in nearby Drayton. Rarity had never been further than Manehattan. Some of her new neighbors had never left their home Governorate.

She parceled out her theories about radion, Lunar artifacts, the Canterlot Fire, and Gordon of Innsbeak to her friends in little fragments, amid other inconsequential conversation and several extended naps. With such a long trip ahead of them, there was no need for a crash course, and Rarity’s daunting pile of Midnight Crew novels could only count for so much. Twilight hadn’t initially thought much of those, but she was starting to appreciate their complexity- especially the convoluted temporal-mechanics puzzles that developed whenever Shadow Spade took on the cabal of extra-dimensional gangsters calling themselves The Felt.

Finally, the fields and forest outside their compartment window dropped away, and the train began its long journey over the Channel Point Bridge- a massive, multi-tracked, multi-leveled series of ornate steel arches stretching across the Griffish Channel to the Isles and Trottingham. It had been built in the 750’s at the cost of over eight hundred million bits, and was the longest such structure in the Known World by a substantial margin.

It was easy to forget that over her long life, Princess Celestia had accomplished more than just a political career and copious patronage of mortal luminaries in the arts and sciences- she’d also found time to personally become an accomplished architect and civil engineer.

Not long after, Rainbow Dash folded up the issue of Sapphire: Equestrian Commando that had occupied her attention for a good portion of the trip. The cover depicted the titular Sapphire knocking several teeth from the jaw of an Abyssinian gangster wearing bloodstained formal wear, and above that the title: “HARMONY’S TERROR!! In THIS issue, Sapphire must CLAW her way out of SEEDIEST, grimiest underbelly OF the seediest, GRIMIEST city in the KNOWN World: KLUDGETOWN!!!!”

“So, who is this guy, Gordon?” the pegasus asked, slipping her comic back into her saddlebags, “and how do we know he’s even still alive?”

“Well, the most up-to-date bulletins from the University of Innsbeak still mention him as a member of the faculty, and he published a paper about three months ago,” Twilight explained, “I mean, I guess it’s possible he died recently enough that no information made it out to Equestria, he’s over a century old after all, but I doubt it. If that is the case, though, the University should be going through his records. Getting hold of those is my backup plan.”

“I… actually didn’t know there even was a university in Innsbeak, of all places,” Rarity interjected. “Is it at all like the ones in Equestria?”

“Well, it’s no Oxenford,” Twilight continued, “but it’s a well-respected technical university.” She paused. “Or, well, I wouldn’t say respected, but… actually, I guess I would, in the same way that a thunderhead or a blasting-crystal requires respect when you’re handling it.”

Rarity’s eyes went a little wider at that statement.

“Whaddaya mean by that?” Rainbow Dash demanded, comic book now completely forgotten.

“Innsbeak is a Griffish free port, so the university’s where a lot of scholars go to conduct research into things that’d be… frowned on, at other institutions. It’s a world leader in necromancy, psychomancy, ‘medicine’,” here Twilight waved her forehooves in a loose approximation of quotation marks, “and certain areas of high-powered liminology, dynamancy, and evocation; but very little of their research is ever made public, and it’s all either self-funded or funded by equally shady interests. Basically, the University of Innsbeak is the world’s biggest hangout for mad wizards.”

“And the guy we’re after works there,” Rainbow Dash muttered, “Great.”

Rarity looked at her and nodded. “I’ll be honest with you, darling, everything you’ve told me about this place sounds positively dreadful. I do hope we won’t have to stay there long?”

“Actually, we won’t be staying at the University at all,” Twilight paused and took a sip of her complementary Equestrian Rail Service tea, “I’ve made arrangements for us with one of the local nobles, Lord Goldstone. He’s actually the cockerel who sold me the Luna Bay Fragment, which started me on my way to Ponyville.” She set the tea aside and planted her forehooves on the compartment’s little fold-out table. “Now, Innsbeak still technically uses the old Imperial Guilder as its official currency, but pretty much everygriff should be willing to accept Equestrian bits- proportionally, they’re worth a lot more. You should all be fine with just pocket money, and I’ve already paid ahead for our stay with Goldstone. It’s a griffon custom, you see, to charge guests rent.” Twilight leaned back against her leather-cushioned bench again. “Actually, it’s kind of interesting- old guilder coins are worth more on the foreign collector’s market than they are as currency in Griffonia, so there’s a sizable black market counterfeiting and alchemically weathering them. That’s done even more damage to the real currency’s value, of course, and also made it much harder for the antiquities trade to bring legitimate bits back into Griffonia, which in turn is a serious problem because…” she paused again, noticing Rainbow Dash’s glazed-over stare and Rarity’s suspiciously-perfect attention. “Sorry, sorry, I just read the most fascinating economic paper, and… look, just, you now what they say, keep your bits about you.”

“Mmm. Right,” the tailor sniffed. “I do think it’d be worth mentioning something I read in a society magazine just after you told me we’d be traveling to Griffonia. ‘Hen’ and ‘cockerel’ only refer to griffon commoners; a cockerel noblegriff is called a ‘tiercel’ and the equivalent to noblemare is a ‘formel’.”

Twilight nodded. “Yes! You’re right. I completely forgot.”

Across the compartment, Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Crap, I’m starting to feel a little bit left out, here. Twilight being all over that weird Old Griffish stuff I can understand, but… you, Rarity?”

The tailor simply smiled, demurely.

“Actually, my Griffish is extremely limited, pretty much strictly confined to technical topics,” Twilight clarified. “I even had to look up what the Middle High Griffish term for ‘alicorn’ was.”

“Oh. How dreadfully embarrassing for you!” Rarity chided, “I mean, who doesn’t know that?”

Dash shook her head. “Still. The only Griffish I know is about a dozen curse words.”

“Good, so, together, if we ever need to instruct somegriff on exactlywhere to insert their crystal waveguide, we can make it work,” Rarity cut in, as casually as though she were discussing next week’s weather schedule.

Both Rainbow Dash and Twilight stared at the tailor for a moment, silently agape. All they received in turn was another society-mare smile.

“So… umm… anyway,” the pegasus continued, shifting awkwardly in her seat, “I still think it woulda’ been a good idea to bring a couple of the Guards along. You know, as backup.”

“I… really actually don’t particularly want Royal Guard troops who could be compelled to answer questions by a commanding officer along while we’re doing this,” explained Twilight, “I really hope we can keep a low profile?”

“So, no smashing beaks in?” Rainbow’s ears turned downward in disappointment.

“Not if we can possibly avoid it.”

After a few seconds, Rarity spoke up once again. “I must admit I am a mite concerned about leaving Spike behind again so soon. Are you sure you want to throw him back into running the Station just after… well, everything that happened with you, and that cockatrice, and all?”

Twilight nodded. “This time I made sure to sit down with Forward and Marigold and make it clear that while I’m gone, he’s my designated replacement and has full executive authority. I’ve also had myself keyed into the firelink spell, so he can contact me for advice if he needs to, and I’ll be sending him nightly reports. More to the point, whoever’s been stealing from us has been pretty quiet recently, so I don’t think he’ll have a lot to worry about.”

That seemed to satisfy the tailor, at least temporarily. She tutted softly, and then said “Well I do hope Spike’s not rubbing Marigold’s face in it too hard. It’s not really her fault she’s… well, a bit of a blockhead sometimes.”

Twilight laughed out loud at that. “Okay, yeah, but she’s an efficient blockhead, and that’s what we need in Ponyville right now. We’ve already fallen way behind on excavating the Castle of the Two Sisters and other important sites in Everfree proper, and all this coverup nonsense isn’t helping.”

“Hmph.” Rarity shook her head. “If Applejack or Pinkie’d had time to come along, I’d frankly be a lot less worried about our chances. No offense meant to this Goldstone fellow, but where we’re going doesn’t sound particularly reputable.” She jumped slightly in her seat at the sound of movement in the corridor outside, and slid open the compartment door a crack. Spotting a meal cart on the other side, she reached out with her telekinesis and deftly switched a one-bit coin for a hot buttered scone. Then she continued, “What if whoever hired that dreadful cameramare sends somepony else after us?”

“Actually, I’ve already taken steps to deal with any problems,” she waved a hoof across the compartment, “Rainbow?”

“Oh! Yeah! As soon as Twilight started putting this trip together, I wrote ahead to an old flight-camp buddy, a griffon who’s spent some time in Innsbeak. She’s gonna be our guide, interpreter, and some extra muscle if things get bad.” The predatory grin on Rainbow Dash’s muzzle suggested she would not, in fact, consider such a situation bad at all. “Her name's Gilda, she's good company. I've known her for years. Trust me, we're all gonna get along just fine!”

Not long after, the stark white cliffs of the Griffish Isles slid into view outside the compartment window, followed by rolling fields and grasslands so brilliantly green that they seemed almost luminous in the late afternoon sun. Every so often the fields were dotted with quaint little timber-beam-and-stucco buildings, which gradually grew closer together and more elaborate until there could be no doubt that their train was speeding through Trottingham itself. The style was extremely similar to Ponyville’s -indeed, here was where the term “Trotter-style architecture” had originated- but these winding streets felt older, classier, and more established in a way that Ponyville would frankly probably never be able to achieve.

Purchased from some now-forgotten griffon warlord less than a year after the First Hearth’s Warming, the Griffish Isles had been subject to continuous pony habitation for a little under thirteen centuries. Aside from Canterine, Canterlot, and -arguably- Vanhoover, no currently extant Equestrian city could claim as long a period of simple uninterrupted existence as Trottingham.

They disembarked on a broad open-air platform a little after five in the evening. In the square in front of them stood a broad marble pillar easily three stories high, topped by a statue of Princess Celestia in repose, wearing a helmet, with the shield and trident representing the Isles at her hooves. The Princess’s sixth husband had built it, in honor of their Diamond Jubilee some five centuries ago, along with the sprawling Trotter Court Palace some ways further to the northwest. Celestia had never deigned to inhabit the palace herself, and instead spent the next half-millennium quietly renovating and re-purposing it: first into apartments for ponies deemed of sufficient accomplishment to secure a lifetime pension from the Imperial Republic, and later as a museum. The traditional hedge maze in front was supposed to be particularly impressive- symbolizing the unity of the three pony tribes, it was constructed of equal parts greenery, solidified clouds, and paths of luminous concentrated starlight. Further beyond still sprawled the massive racecourse at Sandown Park, while overhead passed a steady stream of airships bound to and from the massive Hoofrow Aerodrome complex to the northeast.

Some of Twilight’s academy colleagues had once floated a theory that the close proximity of Trottingham to foreign territory subconsciously compelled its inhabitants to great feats of industriousness in order to show off. Twilight herself had never put much stock in it before, but now she was beginning to see its logic.

She slipped a map out of her saddlebags. “Alright. I got us all rooms at one of the local bed-and-breakfast places, somewhere reasonably discreet. The Ember Place Inn, on 1-A Canterton Close, just off of Ember Lane.”

“Gilda said she’d meet us there,” Rainbow Dash added.

Twilight picked up her solitary leather suitcase in her telekinesis, and they all set out on hoof.

The winding streets of Trottingham were already packed with locals wrapping up their workday, and more than a few of them proved to be griffons. The big Reinsbury’s Grocery they passed even boasted rooftop access, and fresh cuts of beef were illustrated on a street display.

Twilight, for her part, fought to control her nervousness as she checked the winding alleys and ample green space for lurking pegasi with cameras. At one point, she spotted a beige-coated mare with a pink-and-blue mane who seemed very much to be following her, but after a block or two the mare turned a corner and did not reappear.

Before long, they arrived at yet another embarrassingly picturesque little Trotter-style red brick cottage- the Ember Place Inn.

The door swung open in Twilight’s telekinesis, and the interior proved to be exactly as charming as the outside; complete with a roaring fireplace beneath a coat of arms depicting an armored earth-pony knight against a brilliant blue background. In the tiled sitting space in front of it, several tables already contained the remains of early dinners. Slouched at one of them was an imposing, somewhat blocky tan griffon hen with a leonine tail. Her eyes were yellow and her head and neck bright white, with a purple-tipped crest swept to one side at such a gravity-defyingly rakish angle that had to be due to some variety of product.

She looked at Rainbow Dash at almost exactly the same time as Rainbow Dash looked at her.

“Gil!”

“R-D!” The griffon surged up from her table with enough careless speed to send silverware clattering and overturn an empty water glass. “We’re doing this, Dash…”

“We’re making this hapen!” Rainbow Dash and the presumable Gilda both sprang forward from opposite ends of the lobby, and slammed bodily into each other with a resounding thud. Rainbow’s hoof drove repeatedly into the griffon’s shoulder, and she swung right back with a clenched right talon an equal number of times, laughing all the while.

Both Twilight and Rarity turned away from the spectacle, to share a bewildered look with the stallion running the reception desk- a stocky cobalt-coated earth pony with a thick full beard and thicker glasses. “Welp. I’m… guessing you’re wif’ ‘er?” he asked, in what Twilight guessed was an… Estuary accent?

Twilight nodded, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “… yeah.”

By this point, both fliers had separated, and were staggering back to Gilda’s original table. “Holy shit, how long’s it been, Dash, a fuckin’ decade?” It took Twilight a few seconds to realize the strange throat-clearing noise the griffon had made was supposed to be profanity, but aside from that she spoke Ponish with little detectable accent- only a few odd clicks and inflections.

Without being prompted, Rainbow Dash sat down beside the griffon. “Yeah. Decade and a half, actually, I think!”

Gilda laughed, nervously at first and then loud and heartily. “You… you still look good! You look ready to kick ass!”

“You too! How fast are you pushing off these days?”

“In ten seconds from a standing start? About one-thirteen K-P-H.” Gilda looked away from her friend, briefly. Apparently, whatever that meant, it wasn’t especially good. “But you know it’s never been just about speed- I’ve got more stopping power in that one-thirteen than a wimp like you’d ever squeeze out.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure…” the pegasus’s eyes narrowed and her ears folded downward, and then she seemed to realize Twilight, Rarity, and the innkeeper were all staring at her. She waved one wing back at the reception desk. “Oh, and Gilda, these are those ponies I told you about, Rarity and Twilight Sparkle. Rarity helps me out with some of my gear, sometimes, and Twilight’s that crazy mage who blew up Nightmare Moon and fought off a full-grown hydra!”

“He-heeeey!” Gilda removed herself from her chair once again and padded back over, extending her clenched right talon and holding it in place expectantly. After some consideration, Twilight cautiously jabbed her right forehoof against it frog-first. Rarity carefully followed suit. That seemed to satisfy the griffon, and she continued. “Oh, wait a minute, you’re that Twilight! I read about you in the fuckin’ newspaper!”

Twilight shifted awkwardly from one hoof to the other. “Well, then probably everything you know about me is wrong…” She was relieved to see Gilda chuckle slightly, and continued all at once “Nightmare Moon didn’t really blow up, I ran away from the hydra, and Rainbow left out the part where I got myself turned to stone for a week mostly just by being stupid, but… other than that, yes, I guess I’m ‘that’ Twilight?”

Rarity looked from her to Gilda, and then side-stepped a little bit closer. “We can all introduce ourselves properly on the train to Innsbeak tomorrow morning,” she suggested gently, “but for the time being Twilight and I can leave you in peace to catch up with Rainbow Dash.”

Gilda and the pegasus both nodded. Twilight turned back to the desk clerk and asked “Hey, do you know if the palace stays open this late?”

He nodded. “Til ten, so you’ve go' a while yet. I’ll 'ave your bags sent up to your rooms if you want.”

“Excellent,” said Twilight, “Oooh, we’ve got to check out the favour residence Princess Celestia awarded to Doctor Fair-A-Day.”

“And the historical textile collection!” added Rarity, “I hear the Golden Fleece is truly a sight to behold. Did you know that King Trotter tracked it down as a wedding proposal?”

Twilight removed one of the brochures sitting on the desk and rapidly unfolded it in her telekinesis. “They also have an early astronomical clock… and an early psychomancer named Sandy Ford took inspiration from the Court Maze to create tests for laboratory rats to study learning…” She scanned over the small map insert in the bottom left corner. “It’s just a shame we don’t have time to detour to the University of Manechester and visit the mathematics department…”

Behind her, without turning around, she was fairly certain she heard either Gilda or Rainbow Dash contemptuously mutter “Nerds…”

“I do wish Applejack had come along,” Rarity continued, either oblivious or doing a typically good job of faking it, “Garson’s Farm sounds positively lovely…”

Twilight turned and shot the tailor a skeptical look. “Why would Applejack come this far to see a farm? She lives in a farmhouse, made out of a barn. Her back yard’s a farm.”

“So, now that I actually gotcha here we gotta get in a couple rounds at the racecourse,” Gilda continued behind them, “and then grab a pint at the White Horse Pub.” Twilight considered opining on the outdated units of measurement such places made use of, and then decided discretion was the better part of valor. “Oh, and the Plough has the best tuna sandwiches, but their bangers-and-mash looks like a pile of shit. It tastes fine, it just looks like shit.”

Beside her, Rarity whickered quietly. “And I thought Rainbow Dash and Applejack were a deadly combination…”

“Yeah,” Twilight nodded and passed a few additional bits to the clerk. “Let’s get out of here before they start smashing beer cans on each other’s foreheads or something…”

Rainbow Dash knocked back another pint of ale, finishing most of it in a single swig. She slammed the glass back down on the bar counter with a satisfying thud, and turned to her erstwhile companion. “Aww, damn, you’re right, this stuff is better warm.”

“It’s supposed to be warm!” Gilda chuckled. “All that weird alchemical preservative shit Equestria uses in your food's taken away the… umm… the joy of drinking a fine mug of warm ale, or whatever. So what if it goes stale faster? It tastes better!”

“Yeah…” Dash gave her another brief slug on the shoulder. “Especially when I’m drinking it with a buddy.”

“And now we don’t gotta convince anypony that, yeah, we’re both totally sixteen… honest!”

Rainbow Dash took another bite of her tuna sandwich. It was, true to Gilda’s word, extraordinarily good. “Kinda’ takes some of the fun out of it, though, really…”

“Yeah, but now none of the drill instructors can come after us, so it all works out, right?” The griffon swept out a theatrical wing over the empty stool to her right, “Do you wanna wake up hung-over to that fuckin’ roc screechin’ at us?” She twisted her beak into a rough approximation of an Appleloosan accent, “‘RISE AND SHINE, FILLIES! MY NAME IS SENIOR FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR BARNSTORMER! THE FIRST AND LAST WORDS I WANNA HEAR OUTTA YER STINKIN' HOLES IS 'SIR!' DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?!’”

Several other patrons stopped to stare at her. A few laughed.

Rainbow Dash shook her head, the warmth of the ale in her stomach suddenly replaced by a familiar twisting. “I… I guess.”

“Hey, hey, hey…” Gilda shook her head, “I didn’t mean it like that…” Then she paused, and looked up past Rainbow’s seat. “Boreas, check out that longbow on the wall up there!”

The pegasus followed her gaze, and found herself staring at what was essentially a two-by-eight with string, mounted on a richly-decorated wooden plaque. “Wait, that’s a longbow? I thought it was a quarterstaff or something when I sat down!”

“Uhh, no!” Gilda squinted at the tiny bronze label below it, golden eyes narrowing. “This says it was made for one of Celestia’s kids, Trotter something-or-other, the son of the guy who built that nerd palace. He was an earth pony, and the gormless twat used to rock back on his hind legs, then aim and fire that fucking log before he lost his balance.”

Rainbow Dash shook her head, and downed another pint immediately after the bartender had refilled it. “Bullshit.”

Gilda’s eyes took on a predatory glint. “I betcha’ it’s true.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“It’s totally true, and I’m gonna show you!”

“Oh, you are on, little miss ‘stopping power’…”

“Fuck you, Dash.”

“Fuck you too, Gilda!”

“Where in Tartarus does that mare get off on kickin’ patrons out, anyway?” Rainbow Dash demanded as she and Gilda staggered down High Street.

“Yeah, she got somethin’ against griffons, or somethin’?”

The pegasus bobbed her head in agreement. “I mean, why’d they have a target on the wall, and a bow and arrows, if they didn’t want anypony to use ‘em?”

“It’s not like we broke it or anything…” Gilda added.

Rainbow shrugged. “Yeah, what kind of dart board can you not shoot at?”

“Well, there’s always another pub. Come on, you gotta try the Hen ‘n Hounds down the street…”

“You gotta introduce me to that Pinkie Pie mare, she sounds like an absolute fuckin’ riot to hang out with,” Gilda declared around a beak full of salted peanuts.

“Yeah, she’s pretty clever,” replied Rainbow Dash, “Sort of like Surprise, but, you know, actually funny, and smart enough to know when it’s time to quit. Sorta looks like Surprise, too, just an earth pony. And a little skinnier, actually.”

“Yeah,” despite the fire blazing in the fireplace opposite the bar, Gilda shivered a little. “I still think it was creepy how she used to follow us around everywhere even when I told her to her face to fuck off.”

“I meant when to stop with the pranks thing, but… yeah. That too. Remember when she swapped out all the ink in the alchemy lab for that disappearing shit?”

“Yeah, that was a dick move. Like half the upperclassmares lost their notes. I think the instructors rode her pretty hard for that. Didn’t she bum around down in Ponyville for a while?”

Now it was Dash’s turn to shudder. “A while, yeah. She was still up to that same shit when she was twenty-five years old! Around… I dunno, three years ago they threw her in jail for a week for unpaid fines and generally just being a nuisance to everypony, and she skipped town a little after that.”

“You know, Dash, I’d like to say I’m surprised, but… I’m really not.”

“Eheheh. Surprised.” Rainbow chuckled, then ducked to avoid a clenched talon swung at her head.

The griffon also laughed after that, then her expression grew more somber. She downed another swig of ale. “And… uhh… do you know whatever happened to that wimpy yellow filly you were always tryin’ to get us to hang out with? Butterscotch, or something? After, well… you know, they only ever told us she was alive and in the hospital.”

“Oh. Uh…” Rainbow took another drink of her own to counter the tightness that had formed in her chest. “Her name’s Fluttershy, and she’s actually… she’s doing fine. Really good, even. She stuck around in Ponyville with me, too, and we’re good buddies. She taught herself all that fancy druid shit, just like she was always going on about, and got a job as the town ranger. Helped us fight Nightmare Moon.”

Gilda’s expression relaxed a little, and she crossed her talons on the bar in front of her. “That’s… uhh… that’s good to hear. She was kind of a weirdo, but I didn’t want her to… you know, die, or be paralyzed, or anything. It’s kinda’ impressive, actually, going from some wimp who almost got literally bullied to death, to kickin’ some crazy moon-monster’s ass… that's… a long way to come.”

The tightness in Rainbow’s chest redoubled, and she anxiously cast around for another topic of conversation. “Yeah, don’t worry about it, she’s fine. I wanna know what you’ve been doin’.”

“Well, you know, a griffon in the Equestrian Army’s gonna be lucky if she ever gets above Sergeant, Junior Fliers’ ace or not, so I didn’t even bother talking to the recruiters at graduation…”

“Hey, hey, you know, Twilight says the new round of brass are really trying to put a stop to that shit, right?” Rainbow cut in, “The Royal Guard in particular, and I guess the Army and Navy too. That was one of her brother’s big plans when he took over- oh yeah, and did I mention Twilight’s brother’s Commander of the Royal Guard?” She downed another few gulps of ale. “My point is, you might wanna give it another go.”

“Nah,” Gilda continued as though the pegasus hadn’t spoken, “I couldn’t deal with all that spit-and-polish shit every day anyway. Ponies tellin’ me all the things I couldn’t do, where I couldn’t go, and who I couldn’t fuck… and the pay’s shit, on top of that.” She leaned sideways on her stool and lowered her voice slightly. “So, I’ve been workin’ on a lotta different… operations, special projects, you know, way up north near Rainbow Falls, and sometimes they send me over here to the Isles. That’s how I was able to get out here to take this gig with you and your pals. Like, you know the new heavy rail line that’s gonna run coal up to Canterine? I was there when they were building it.”

“So, private security, huh?” Rainbow Dash leaned forward to match her friend’s posture. She was genuinely interested, but also hoped she was putting up an appropriately hard-boiled impression. “Lotta monsters up there in the north… and things that aren’t legally monsters but’re gonna try and kill you anyway…”

Surprisingly, Gilda shifted uncomfortably on her stool. “Something like that, yeah. Sometimes, though, they just need somegriff to pick things up and put ‘em down again.” She paused, then amended “Whatever’s around, whatever the weather.”

“Yeah, that sounds pretty hardcore,” the pegasus replied, although she wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince Gilda or herself.

“Pays good enough, I guess,” the griffon muttered, something bitter creeping into her voice. Then she paused, took another drink, and puffed out her chest feathers. “And let me tell you, the shittiest job in Equestria’s still a lot better than any gig you could try to get in a shithole like Griffonstone.”

Dash just nodded. “Yeah, I know.” This had, in fact, been a frequent topic of discussion back at Flight Camp.

Gilda seemed to recover from whatever was bothering her, and continued. “So, enough about me… what’ve you been doing?”

“… Weather. I’m captain -well, co-captain- of Ponyville’s weather team,” Rainbow muttered, muzzle tilted down, the familiar tightness in her chest reaching its peak.

“That’s it, just… weather?” Gilda was clearly trying to sound sympathetic, and doing a pretty good job of it, too, but underneath Rainbow thought she almost seemed… relieved.

The now somewhat ale-soaked recesses of Rainbow’s brain finally managed to put together an acceptable justification. “Well, weather, and clobbering ancient alicorns and everything…”

Gilda, too, now looked much more relaxed. She leaned back on her stool and looked Rainbow in the eye. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. So, you know how when Nightmare Moon showed up, she had all those zombie rebel soldiers with her and they took over the whole town?”

“Oh damn, you saw some of that action?”

“SAW it?” the pegasus scoffed. “I did a lot more than see it.” She drained the rest of her ale. “So, Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, Pinkie, Rarity the tailor, who you just met, and another buddy of mine named Applejack, we all got together and decided we had to do something about it. First thing’s first, we needed somepony to take out one of the squads patrolling the road so we could all exfil and move into the Everfree. That’s a story by itself, but it’d be a tough fight even just to get there. So, I grabbed my gear, and headed out for the north road, and right away I spotted six of those zombie guys all kitted out, and a couple of ‘shadowbolts’ in the rear to watch over them. Those are the kind who could turn invisible and teleport, real tough sons-a-bitches. I pull out my saber, check my wingblades, and charge right down the middle…”

Rarity woke around eight o’clock as usual, which gave her a few hours to lounge in the inn’s dining room and add some new designs to her sketchbook before Twilight joined her for tea around ten.

It wasn’t until half past twelve that Rainbow Dash stumbled her way downstairs, bleary-eyed and unwashed. Gilda followed a full fifteen minutes later, in similar condition. The big griffon hen squinted at the clock in the lobby, and then lurched backward as if hit. “Aww, fuck, we’re gonna miss our train, aren’t we?”

Twilight looked up from her copy of Who Lies Sleeping. She’d picked up the text when they’d passed an open-late bookstore last night, claiming it might’ve had something to do with the events of the Great Canterlot Fire. She’d shown a few supposedly crucially significant passages to Rarity over their coffee; the tailor had for her part had found the ramblings about reptile ponies and subterranean cults largely incoherent.

“Actually,” the scholar said, “Rarity thought this might happen, so even though I told you the train to Innsbeak leaves at one, it really leaves at three.”

From her spot by the window, Rarity made sure to produce an appropriately disapproving huff. She would very much have preferred if Twilight had claimed credit for the tiny plot; a lady such as herself did not lightly indulge in such deviousness. Instead, she settled for addressing the pegasus and griffon directly. “Go ahead and get some lunch, and a coffee… or three. And, now that Rainbow’s had a chance to fill Gilda in on exactly what we’re trying to accomplish…” her eyes narrowed and her ears pivoted forward, “You… did tell Gilda what we’re trying to accomplish, right, Dash?”

The pegasus waved a wing at her friend.

“Ponies up in Canterlot are covering up something that happened during the big fire in the twenties,” Gilda said matter-of-factly, “Which Twilight figures has got something to do with the weird Lunar shit going on around Ponyville. The only survivor who’s not in on it is a wizard named Gordon who lives in Innsbeak, and we’re gonna try to find him and talk to him. If he’s alive, of course.”

Rarity nodded, briefly impressed. Then she continued, “It might also be a good idea to make use of this time to pick up any additional supplies you think we might need. We’ll meet back up with you here at the Inn at two-thirty.”

Rainbow Dash peered out over the expansive shopping area of Garson’s Farm, a quaint Trotter market transplanted underneath a vast, steel-and-glass arched vault to protect it from the frequent Isles rainstorms. Garson himself was either a second- or third-generation Equestrian resident -Rainbow hadn’t paid much attention to the information plaque at the front entrance- who’d grown wealthy enough to employ a predominately pony workforce and make a sizable contribution to the food supply of the Isles.

She turned back to Gilda. “So… what’re we doing here, again?”

“Grabbing supplies,” the griffon shrugged, and adjusted the empty set of saddlebags on her back. “I’m guessing your pals thought they could just buy food at the markets in Innsbeak, because they didn’t pack anything. But it’s gonna be hard to find any pony food that’s decent, or, well, edible, even. So we should stock up here.”

Rainbow cocked her head as they both set off among the neat rows of market stalls. “I figured we could just try some of the local stuff? It’s not like I’ve got anything against carnivores or whatever.”

Gilda looked up from inspecting a collection of different varieties of bread, and laughed. “Yeah, well, a lotta’ ponies I worked with up North used to say that too. They all changed their tune after they ended up bent over a toilet all night. And that’s with good meat. You never know what you’re gonna get from a butcher in Innsbeak. I’d suggest not drinking the water, either; I’ll see if this place has any bottled rainclouds sitting around.”

“Good idea.” Gilda struck off in one direction and Rainbow, at her unspoken suggestion, wandered off in the other. Not much later, the pegasus did indeed find a stand selling somewhat overpriced bottled raincloud, which promised “farm-fresh, authentic sea breeze flavour”. A clever bit of magic, each stored approximately two gallons of clean, potable water in a form compact and light enough to be comfortably carried in one hoof.

She grabbed four bottles for sixty bits, and then spotted another stand selling carrot cake at almost exactly the same time as she realized she’d completely skipped lunch.

She waved over to Gilda with one wing, and shouted “Hey, Gil, if it’s okay with you, I’m gonna grab some lunch here, too.”

“Sure, you go on ahead,” the griffon shouted back, “I’ll find something in a little bit. They’ve got a whole stand of different kindsa’ pies over here, though, if you’re interested!”

“No thanks, I was never actually that much of a fan!”

“Sure!” the griffon ambled off towards the dry goods section.

“See, now was that so hard?” Rainbow muttered to herself as she grabbed a slice of cake and tossed a few bits back onto the counter. Some ponies -who would remain nameless but who had been run out of Ponyville after spending a week in jail for unpaid fines- made a national rutting issue out of the most mundane things.

Already tucking into her cake, which was in fact excellent, she sat down at a nearby table and watched Gilda haggle with somepony selling unidentifiable herbs. “This stuff ain’t fresh,” the griffon growled, surprisingly loudly, but as soon as the salespony seemed to finish parsing her decidedly Mainland Equestrian phrasing she turned around again. In the process, she slapped the green earth mare behind her with the end of her leonine tail.

“Hey, watch it!” the mare shouted. As the salespony turned at the sound, Gilda slipped two full packets of beef jerky into her saddlebags from an adjoining stand.

Rainbow Dash guessed that Gilda figured the salespony would be too busy dealing with the irate mare to notice- they’d pulled the same trick dozens of times at flight camp, after all. This time, however, the unicorn stallion behind the counter immediately spun back around and pointed an accusing hoof in Gilda’s direction. “Oi! Where d’ya think yer goin? Give tha’ back, ya fief!”

Gilda flinched in surprise, just for a moment, then rounded on the salespony in turn. “Hey, what’s your problem, you got somethin’ against griffons or somethin’?”

She shoved past the still-irate green mare and strode off at just a bit faster than an ordinary walking pace, even as the salespony continued to shout. “Oi! You ge’ back 'ere, ya daf’ bint! C’mere!”

Feeling vaguely appalled, Rainbow Dash abandoned her lunch and began shouldering her way through the rapidly-forming crowd of onlookers. There were already too many bodies too close together for her to be able to take off, and even if she could get in the air the mess of steel arches overhead would’ve limited her altitude to a few yards.

She managed to make it almost within reach, just as Gilda roughly shoved another mare aside.

At almost the same time a yellow earth stallion wearing the traditional checkerboard-trimmed barding of the Trottingham Watch -or constabulary, or whatever weird thing they were called over here- appeared seemingly from nowhere. “Righ’! Wot’s all this, then?” he asked.

Rainbow finally managed to shove her way to the front of the crowd. “Sorry, listen, I’m sure there isn’t any kind of-”

“Tha’ griffon jus’ swiped 'alf my stock!” the grocer cut her off abruptly. Ponies looked from him, to the constable, to Gilda, and then back again.

“Look, we’ll pay for whatever-” Rainbow tried again.

“The fuck I did,” Gilda shouted, somewhere in between the grocer and the constable, “Racist sonofabitch just-”

“I’m sorry we bothered anypony, we were just-” Rainbow said, louder this time.

“Well, if you could bof just step over here and-” the constable continued, his voice clipped and serious.

Gilda took a step towards him, puffed out her chest feathers, and tensed her hind legs to spring. “Nuh-uh. No way-”

“Listen,” Dash shouted, “We can-”

Gilda stretched her wings halfway-open. As soon as she did, the constable turned his head to reach for the baton strapped at his side.

Rainbow Dash took another step forward and snapped her own wings out to full extension. “Look!” she shouted, “We’ll pay for it, okay?” Both Gilda and the grocer turned to look for her, although the constable didn’t take his eyes off the griffon or let go of his baton. “We’ll pay for it.”

The pegasus reached into her saddlebags, slowly and carefully, and extracted a wingful of the first bits she could get her feathers on- random denominations, almost certainly far more than the stolen jerky was worth. “We’ll pay for it.” She stepped over to the counter and carefully set them down. “Okay? We’ll pay for it.”

“Mmm-hmm.” The grocer stepped back behind his stand, the crowd began to disperse, and the constable finally replaced his baton in its holster. He remained lurking nearby, however, as Rainbow Dash stuck a wing under the strap of Gilda’s saddlebags and somewhat roughly guided her back towards the market entrance.

“What was that all about?” the pegasus demanded.

Gilda shrugged, her indifference seeming more than a little forced- her head stayed on a swivel, tracking the constable and any other shoppers who happened to get too close. “What was what all about? C’mon, Dash, we used to filch shit from the cafeteria all the time! I don’t know about you, but this griffon needs more than one meal a day. Maybe you’re just out of practice…”

“Yeah, but, I mean…” Rainbow Dash stammered, before redoubling her focus. “We were twelve, and we didn’t have anything better to do! And we just stole from the mess hall, not… other ponies’ lockers or anything…”

Gilda shrugged again. “So what?”

“So, that was for real!” the pegasus snapped, “That cop -constable, whatever- wasn’t just going to make you take a lap! You’re gonna make for a pretty crappy guide if you’re costing us bail money and can’t leave the city!”

This time, Gilda just roughly shrugged herself out of Rainbow’s grip and headed through the exit under her own power. “Aww, come on. If we don’t hurry, we really will miss our train!”

“Hey, I’m not done-!”

“Whatever, mom!”

They strode in awkward silence back to the inn through the gray, cloudy afternoon.

Author's Notes:

Griffon the Brush-Off is actually one of my least-favorite episodes of all time in the main show, coming in just above the much-reviled Mysterious Mare-Do-Well and just below Power Ponies and Over A Barrel. Like a lot of early-season episodes, it’s just incredibly rough in the way it’s written and animated, and contains a lot of cartoony screwing-around (usually by Pinkie Pie) unrelated to the actual plot. Here, that screwing around is directed at Gilda, who gives me a very strong vibe of just wanting to be leftalone and catch up with the pony she’s known since she was literally a child. Of course, the episode treats Pinkie is in the right and everybody with a less than infinite tolerance for her LOLZANY antics as in the wrong. I have had relatives, friends of friends, and coworkers exactly like this, and they are insufferable, especially when the person defending them is someone I genuinely like. Gilda does eventually prove to be kind of a douchebag, what with the petty theft and screaming at Fluttershy and all, but that hardly justifies having the Pony of Tindalos (as Serketry called her) haunt her for her entire stay.

I had, briefly but seriously, considered making Griffon the Brush-Off EC a fix-fic in the usual sense: It’d be very similar to the original episode, except that at the end it’s Pinkie who is called out and Gilda justified. However, I decided not to for a number of reasons:

With very few exceptions that will likely remain brief side stories if I do them at all, I have always wanted EC to enhance the original show, not kick at it. I have LOTD to do the latter more time- and wordcount-efficiently.
There just isn’t much there to work with in the original episode that could be reframed into material interesting for Extended Cut. What would a fix-’fic version of Brush Off EC even look like? Pinkie bothers RD’s friend for a few days, and then gets yelled at and possibly fined for vandalism? Not every EC has to be an epic Cascade-scale battle for the fate of Equestria, but I do like them to have some level of serious stakes. I could make Pinkie’s hounding of Gilda more serious and dedicated and basically turn the whole thing into a platonic(??) Fatal Attraction or whatever, but that would take Pinkie further and further out of character and leave her with legal/reputational baggage that would dog her for the entire rest of the project.
EC Pinkie is a lot more subdued and capable of being serious, more in line with her characterization in later seasons of the show if not extending that same trajectory beyond. I can totally see her buddy-stalking a random griffon hen to make her life utterly hellish. But she’d have a reason- both why she needs to do it, and why she couldn’t just call her more direct (and fairly influential) friends to boot Gilda out of town and/or into jail.
For later events, I will want Gilda to be on the outs with the Mane Six (and Equestria in general) and had a hard time imagining how that could happen if she’s proven right at the end of this episode. (Yes, this does mean Gilda will be having a somewhat greater presence in EC than she does in the show, but you will have to wait until at least Season 2 for the first indications of that).
Gilda does do a few bad things, and in an episode that’s about holding characters to account for their strange canonical actions she’d need to be held accountable for those too. I realize this gives me a way out of the above “Gilda being griffona non grata can’t happen” issue. However, “Pinkie’s being arrested for stalking and vandalism, but you also stole an apple. I’m going to have to revoke your green card” is not a very satisfying ending in what would already be a pretty unsatisfying story.
Editor's Note: Also, just in general, fix-fics kinda blow.

Instead, I decided to layer the events of the original episode over a more intrigue-focused story. The previous ECs were more mystery- and discovery-driven, and while there’s of course overarching mysteries of the very investigation-focused Season 1 being advanced here, I wanted this episode to resolve more around persuasion than revelation. How exactly that happens, we will have to see in later chapters.

I went ahead and made Equestria’s legal drinking age sixteen, at least for beers and ciders. This is not because I have any particularly strong feelings on the topic, but because I think it fits with the general sort of European/Commonwealth vibe of much of the country. It also makes it a little more plausible that RD and Gilda, who were at the time eleven and thirteen, respectively, could actually pass, instead of trying to claim they are twenty-one.

Just like Ponyville, there is not yet an “official EC” map of Equestria or the Known World, just a pair of canonical and fanonical maps that I kinda-sorta follow. One major problem with the canon map is that the rail network it portrays isway too sparse, and includes much longer detours where quicker routes would do. For instance, there is no rail connection to Trottingham at all, and the access to Griffonia is through this huge loop passing through the future site of the Crystal Empire (which has not yet become the actual site of the Crystal Empire and has no reason to have rail access anywhere near it). Also like Ponyville, I plan to some day rectify this problem and create an official map of everything in EC’s “Known World”, as it is somewhat more expansive than what canon shows but not as expansive as most fan-made world maps.

I actually was initially reluctant to include the “bottled raincloud” water sources that RD purchases at first, because I thought they were too high-magic for the setting. However, I talked it over with Serketry and he had no problem with them, and I realized that my reasons for thinking they even needed high magic were grounded in relatively specialized scientific knowledge that had no bearing on the setting. IRL water is virtually incompressible and relatively dense. This makes it very hard to create dense long-term storage for usable quantities of it like you can with, say, breathable air or most medical drugs. However, none of these things are necessarily true in MLP physics, where the conservation of mass is already hopelessly broken and materials are to some degree transmutable.

He then came up with the idea of the storage mechanism being a cloud. My original version was a pellet or block of some incredibly hygroscopic material, which one could chip a few flakes off of and mix with a small amount of preexisting water as a catalyst to make it release much more. However, I think his fits better with the setting. Mirroring real life and the paradoxical densities of ice and liquid water, I think MLP clouds actually expand in both mass and volume when converted into liquid form.

“Formel” is the proper term for a female hawk or eagle. “Tiercel” is the male version. I have no idea why these words exist.

Editor's Note: And to round out this mammoth of an AN, two things. First, dissenting opinion! I actually didn't mind Griffon the Brush-Off all that much. I also don't fully understand the Admiral's loathing towards Power Ponies, but whatever, that's a Season 4 problem.
Secondly, lacking any canonical features, we modeled Trottingham off my old hometown, more or less. If anyone can figure out which little British town that is, I'll be impressed.

Innocents Abroad

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Their train to Innsbeak arrived at the Trottingham platform nearly ten minutes late. It consisted of a collection of drab wooden passenger cars and a rusty engine, all models that had been taken off of the Equestrian lines well before Twilight was born. Boarding revealed its interior to be in no better shape than the outside. Twilight wondered if the patchy leather seats in what was generously called their “first class” compartment had seen the attention of an upholsterer at any point since they’d been installed. There were no other passengers that she could see, and no visible staff.

The four of them sat in their compartment for a further five minutes after the train’s scheduled departure time. Gilda and Rarity were just concluding -in Gilda’s favor- an argument about whether or not to wander up to the engine compartment and bang on the door, when the entire train wheezed into motion.

The rolling green hills surrounding Trottingham blurred past for only a few minutes, and then their train set off across a much narrower, shorter, and less impressive bridge to the properly griffish half of the Griffish Isles.

The fact that there was a Griffish railroad system at all was only due to the most convoluted of events. In the early 760s, much of northern Griffonia had fallen under the control of the powerful House of Goldstone. Unimaginably wealthy, and possessed of a valid if remote claim to the throne of King Guto; Baroness Geraldine Goldstone III had also come to consider herself something of an amateur architect- and, as was just beginning to become fashionable in those days, a consummate Equestriophile. Observing the tremendous economic boons the nascent Equestrian Rail Service was already beginning to bestow on Griffonia’s western neighbors, and having witnessed the construction of the Great Channel Bridge on one of her many visits to Trottingham, she approached Princess Celestia with an ambitious proposal. If Equestrian engineers and equipment were sent to extend the Trottingham Line through the rest of the Griffish Isles and into a proper Trans-Griffonian Railroad, House Goldstone would cover the entire cost. In return, certain favorable trade agreements would be made between Equestria and the Baroness’s substantial holdings.

Construction went surprisingly well, at first, but as the rail line wound its way further and further south it became more and more clear that pony engineers- and the garrisons of pony soldiers who came along to protect them- were simply not welcome in the Griffish heartland. An offer by the Baroness to supplant the Equestrian Army with her surprisingly numerous, well-trained, and well-equipped Goldstone house troops was politely but firmly refused. By 780, all the track laid south of Buckbeak was neglected. By 781, nearly all of it had been hauled away by scavengers.

In Canterlot, where the program acquired a reputation as a pointless imperial exercise mocked for the next twenty years in assorted broadsheets, it became an embarrassment to Princess Celestia. Across the Channel, after the Baroness ignored the shouts of a horrified foremare and flew down to personally inspect an explosive-rigged hillside, it was the end of Geraldine III. It just so happened, of course, that the whole adventure also saw the reduction of House Goldstone’s fortunes from staggering to merely notable. Its failure, indeed, also avoided leaving Geraldine III at the helm of an ambitious public works project that would put her literally at the steps of the Great Aerie and, perhaps, only a short jump from the crown and sash of the Queen of All Griffons.

Nonetheless, very few of Celestia’s critics seemed able to put the pieces together.

The bridge took less than five minutes to cross, and then their train was rocking and shuddering over grassland again- rougher, browner, and generally of poorer condition than Trottingham’s, at least to Twilight’s untrained eye. An unofficial agreement existed to allow Princess Celestia’s influence over the sun and moon to spread across the Channel over the Griffish Isles, into mainland Griffonia where it met the likewise unconstrained influence of Zebrica’s Anyanwus. This conveniently relieved the griffons of any need to manipulate the heavens over their territory themselves: in both Canterlot and the Great Zebrabwe, it was generally agreed that they lacked the organized civil service necessary for the task. However, the individual Griffish states remained responsible for their own weather and land management- or, as the view from Twilight’s window suggested, the lack thereof.

“Everygriff who actually knows a damn thing about farming uses the bits they earn to hop the border into Equestria,” Gilda explained is if she were reading Twilight’s thoughts. “Like that Garson fucker. Leaves the rest of us high and dry. And hungry.”

Rainbow Dash seemed like she was about to speak for a moment, but then leaned back on her bench and settled for giving Gilda an unreadable look.

Outside, Innsbeak itself had become visible as a low, messy, brownish-gray lump on the horizon, from which protruded the spires of a very few taller buildings.

“I stayed here for about a month before they let me into Equestria,” Gilda continued, “The pony consulate had to verify I was the same griffon who’d gotten their scholarship, or some paper-pusher shit like that. I had the advance sent to me in Griffonstone, though, at least, so I didn’t have to go hungry. Most of the griffons who come through here have to pay their own way, though, and a lot don’t make it.”

The brownish mass on the horizon grew larger with daunting speed, breaking up into defined buildings of wood and stone. After a few more minutes they were surrounded by it, and the train gradually began to slow. By Twilight’s estimate, they had waited longer at the platform, and then for the train to start moving, than they had spent actually in transit.

“Just… well, you know what they say, keep your wits close and your bits closer,” Gilda finished.

Their train finally ground to a halt with a squealing of abused machinery. After a minute of awkward silence, it became clear that no conductor was present to declare it safe to disembark, and so Twilight took the lead in doing so herself. As a tight file, with Gilda at the front and Twilight just behind, the four of them stepped out into something resembling an Impressionist painting of the Grand Central Station in Manehattan- all hazy, grimy, and generally ill-defined. Seemingly every track, of which eight were visible and three appeared to be functional, passed by the same great, open, indoor platform. The ceiling above had once been a complicated, many-gabled geometric affair of steelwork and glass, although now the majority of panels were replaced with sagging plywood or tattered blue canvas tarps, or simply left open to the damp air outside. Likewise, Twilight was fairly certain the floors had once contained some variety of ornamental tile; but now so many tiles were removed -and covered by so much unidentifiable filth- that no recognizable patterning was visible.

There was intelligent life here, in the form of griffons and a few scruffy-looking ponies, but very few of them appeared to be other passengers. Rather, they busied themselves unloading pallets of canned something-or-other from the rusty flatcars on the other two functional lines. The only creature who looked to be heading back out was an oddly cheerful-looking griffon, wrapped neck-to-tail in strips of ragged gray cloth, and wearing a set of saddlebags stuffed full of letters and parcels. She'd pulled her gray crest-feathers back into a sort of loose, three-tipped feathery ponytail that Twilight had never seen on a griffon before.

“Huh. I… wouldn’t’ve guessed Innsbeak had a mail service,” the unicorn said aloud.

“They don’t,” Gilda answered. “That’s a mainlander, one of the Peregrine Mendicants- they’re the only ones who wear those weird raggy-looking uniforms. Don’t ask me what all they do, delivering mail’s the least of it. If I hadn’t gotten my scholarship, though, I was actually looking to sign on with ‘em. They like good fliers, and the pay’s not much but they’ll make sure you don’t starve.”

“… Ah.”

It was at that point that Twilight realized none of their luggage had materialized. She led the way back to what she presumed were the baggage cars. There, a wiry gray hen and an even leaner brown-and-orange-spotted cockerel lounged on crates, doing apparently nothing much.

“Excuse me?” the unicorn called out, “Would either of you happen to speak Ponish?”

The cockerel just stared at her uncomprehendingly, while the hen called back something incomprehensible.

“Ummmmmm… [beneficial planar synapse]?” Twilight dredged her memory for any relevant Griffish vocabulary, no matter how tangential, “[benefical backscatterly thoses them objects-which-are-attuned]?”

This time, the hen laughed out loud, and the cockerel muttered something Twilight was reasonably certain had to do with her central nervous system.

“Stop making an idiot of yourself and just let me handle this,” Gilda muttered, and Twilight stepped aside to let her advance to the front of their impromptu formation. What followed was an exchange of talon gestures and rapid-fire Griffish the scholar had absolutely no hope of following. After a few seconds there was a brief lull, and Gilda turned back to her charges. “They say they’ll give us our bags after they’re paid.”

Silently, Twilight wondered if she was in fact being shaken down, but outwardly she just nodded. Gilda reached into her saddlebags, pulled out two shiny yellow one-bit coins, and dropped them on one of the crates. The porters sprang into action immediately afterward, disappearing into the dark interior of the compartment and reappearing not much later with a cart full of Equestrian-tagged baggage. The hen smartly tipped an imaginary hat and shouted “Ah [beneficial planar synapse] da i chi hefyd!” before dissolving into decidedly corvine laughter once again.

“Alright, now which way outta here?” Rainbow Dash muttered as she shouldered her bags.

Twilight opened her mouth to respond, and then realized she hadn’t the faintest idea how to answer. There were no turnstiles or ticket booths or any of the other expected elements of a pedestrian entrance in view. Instead, grimy glass corridors extended out from the central platform in seemingly random directions, and what little signage existed was faded to the point of illegibility- as if Twilight would’ve had much chance of reading it when it was new.

Supposedly, the station had been one of Geraldine III’s greatest architectural achievements. That fact made Twilight rather reluctant to see her failures- assuming any were still standing.

With no better ideas she simply followed Gilda down one of the hallways, stepping gingerly over puddles of only-Starswirl-knew-what.

Without any particular change in design, the corridor in front of them opened up into a sort of covered cobblestone patio, facing out across one of Innsbeak’s nameless streets. Crumbling brick edifices dominated the other side; whatever coloration they might once have possessed was reduced to a uniform charcoal gray by ages of caked-on smoke. Griffons passed by in either direction, and hawked unidentifiable wares from pull-carts, cursing and squabbling incomprehensibly at one another beneath a faded gray sky. The air smelled of smoke and grit with an undercurrent of raw sewage- Twilight found herself wondering if the city’s drainage system had also been designed by Geraldine III.

Beside her, Rainbow Dash surveyed the warrenlike alleys with a wary eye. “So… how’re we even supposed to find this Goldstone rutter, anyway?” She asked.

“He said he’d be sending somegriff to meet us at the station,” Twilight answered, suddenly feeling very uncertain indeed. She looked around and failed to notice any griffons obviously waiting, but with the thick fog that hadn't burnt off from this morning she wasn’t able to see much more than a dozen meters up or down the street. Younger griffons in rather garish attire lurked around the few functional streetlights, and Twilight cast them a wary glance- Equestria took a dim view of prostitution, or at least the parts of Equestria she was used to navigating did. They didn’t seem to be attracting many customers, but Twilight supposed that might change once the cargo workers got off shift.

She was just about to ask Gilda to advise them on their next move when, seemingly from nowhere, a rail-thin cockerel appeared beside her. He looked more like a cub, really, fifteen or sixteen at the absolute maximum, all gangly limbs and patchy gray-green coat, but he spoke with a rough, adult voice. “Gentlemares. Things? Your -keeah- things?” he said in heavily accented Ponish, in between sharp wheezing coughs, “I here to -keeah- helping though the -keeeaaah- streets?”

Gilda shot Twilight a rather skeptical look.

“I… I’m sorry, I’m not sure if you’re expecting some bits, or if I should call a doctor?” Twilight muttered.

He cocked his head. “Bits for doctor, see?” Then he dissolved into another fit of coughing.

Rainbow Dash shifted uncomfortably from one hoof to the other. “Yeah, I can tell you've been hittin' the medicinals pretty hard…”

“Oh, you poor dear…” Rarity muttered, and began reshuffling the bags in her telekinesis into a more carriable configuration. Then, as she lowered one towards the scrawny griffon, he snatched it in both talons and sprang away, wings unfolding to take flight.

“My purse!” the tailor shouted, and before he could make it off the ground, she’d backhoofed him hard just under the wingjoint.

He crumpled like a pile of dry sticks, and Rarity jerked her purse out of his claws in her telekinesis once again. “Oh, what nerve!” she shouted, seemingly on the verge of panic, “Guards? Guards!” A few of the griffons in the street paused what they were doing, and stared suspiciously.

Gilda strode over and placed a warning talon on the smaller unicorn’s shoulder. “Quiet!” she hissed, “You do not wanna bring the guards over here.”

Rarity paused, seemed to settle herself, and then asked “Whyever not?”

“This isn’t Equestria,” Gilda continued, “there isn’t a Watch here, just a buncha’ local nobles’ house troops. If they can be arsed to bother with you at all, which I doubt seeing as you’re a pony accusing one of their own, they’ll charge you through the nose for it, and probably take that bag as ‘evidence’ too. You’re better off without ‘em.”

Wordlessly, Rarity nodded, and Gilda turned back to the young griffon. He was just about done with the process of hauling himself back onto all-fours, when she grabbed him between the shoulders and half-lifted, half-dragged him a few meters away. That didn’t seem to require any appreciable effort on her part, and looking closer Twilight realized the other griffon was basically nothing but skin and bones. Then Gilda produced another stream of rapid-fire Griffish, although this time Twilight was able to understand a few words here and there. “Ydych chi'n [stupid]? Pam ydych chi'n [fishing in front of] yr [station] reilffordd? Rydych chi'n [scare] y [tourists] hawdd! Yn ôl i ffwrdd ychydig, [let the ponies] wasgaru [all over the city] cyn dwyn i ffwrdd.”

Whatever she’d said seemed to have been effective, as the younger griffon bobbed his head and staggered off into the fog once more.

Looking a little guilty, Rainbow Dash waved a wing at Rarity’s bag and matching wheeled trunk. “This wouldn’t’a happened if somepony knew how to pack light…”

“Well,” Rarity waved in turn at the set of somewhat intimidating, military-green duffle bags hanging from Rainbow Dash’s sides. “You’ve packed light enough, darling, but that doesn’t mean you know how to pack compact.”

“I’m just glad there doesn’t seem to be any customs enforcement out here,” Twilight cut in.

Gilda rolled her eyes. “Why would they stop anypony coming south out of Trottingham? If you wanna see customs, stop by the port authority. They’re shoot you right outta the sky before they bother to check your passport.”

Twilight sighed, and picked a direction at random to advance into the fog- left, as it turned out. Before long, something glittered up ahead- a large, wood-and-gold air chariot of vaguely archaic Griffish design. “Girls? Girls! I think our ride’s this way!”

They hustled towards it as a group, Rainbow Dash continuing to give the crowded street beside them wary looks.

Seen up close, the chariot no longer seemed to be in particularly good shape- sizable scuff marks along the base and side panels revealed its gold construction to be no more than foil covering a wooden chassis, and their placement suggested more than a few hard landings. Surreptitiously, Twilight muttered the cantrip to her favored magesight spell, to confirm that the lifting-and-balancing enchantment underneath it was still functioning. As near as she could determine, it was.

Hitched to the front of the vehicle stood two griffons wearing the yellow tabards and dented steel kettle helms of Goldstone house troops. One was a fidgety little tabby cockerel, the other an enormous tan hen- tall, wide and padded out like a sofa with too much stuffing, as Shadow Spade might say. Both turned at the sound of hooves on the cobblestones behind them, and sized up Twilight and her friends with uncomfortable directness.

“Doctor... Twilight Sparkle?” the hen practically growled.

“Umm, yes, and these are my... associates-”

She didn’t get a chance to finish before the cockerel waved a silent claw towards the back of the carriage. Twilight unlatched the chest-height side door and stepped in first, followed by Gilda, then Rainbow Dash, then Rarity. Whatever else could be said about the vehicle, it was sizable, and the four of them plus bags fit with little difficulty. Twilight sat as comfortably as she could on the hard wooden bench in the back, and waited. The chariot resolutely refused to take off.

Rainbow Dash tapped her hoof, briefly stretched her wings, and said “Um.”

“They’re waiting for us to pay them, too,” explained Gilda.

“Isn’t Goldstone already paying them?” Rainbow asked.

With some difficulty, the hen twisted around in her harness and made a quiet little “Heh” noise.

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut for a second or two. “Fine.” She undid the catch on her saddlebag and floated two five-bit coins over the front of the carriage. Both were snatched out of the air by waiting talons, and not a second later the carriage bumped, shuddered, and slid across the cobblestones before mercifully lifting off.

As the fog-choked streets fell away beneath Twilight, she and her friends were treated to an increasingly broad aerial view of Innsbeak in all its rambling, grimy glory. Bands of griffon cubs wandered the streets between crumbling rowhouses and measly little storefronts, brandishing faded scraps of cloth that presumably communicated some kind of neighborhood or gang affiliation. Off to the east, the train station swung back into view again, sprawled out like a dissected tortoise made from steel and scummy glass. Past it, in the harbor, a few airships shared multi-purpose berths with screw-propelled, mechanical sea vessels and honest-to-Harmony sailing ships, no doubt part of the fishing industry that made up most of Innsbeak’s official income. What water was visible bore more of a resemblance to thick sludge, although that did little to impede activity atop it- from big industrial trawlers, to rowboats, to individual griffons diving down below the slime-topped waves.

They passed over a sprawling, rusty belt of canneries and warehouses, all open smokestacks and canals choked with effluent, presumably churning out the cans they’d seen earlier for shipment back to Equestria. Further still was an actual red light district of illuminated signs identifying what might charitably be referred to as ‘nightclubs’. More itinerant griffons in outrageous costume prowled the streets, despite the early hour; even from the air Twilight thought she could pick up a sort of worn-down desperation in the way they moved from corner to corner. Somehow, the smell seemed to become worse as they gained altitude- Innsbeak’s port was lower than the surrounding countryside, and smoke inevitably got trapped in the normal fog; without a proper weather corps to generate sufficient airflow, it hung in the air as a steel-blue dome.

Twilight promptly decided a shower was in order once they arrived at their destination, and wondered if her bottled raincloud contained enough water to make that possible- using the local supply would in all likelihood defeat the purpose.

In the seat across from Twilight, Rarity wrinkled her muzzle. “Tell me, darling, is everywhere outside of Equestria this... rustic?”

“No, no, absolutely not!” The scholar shook her head. “Siam and Panthera and so on are pretty much like any Equestrian city, and when Shiny was serving down in some of the former Centaur States he said they were at least organized enough to deal with street crime and put together weather details and things!” She paused for a moment, thinking. “Okay, yeah, rustic actually is a pretty good way to describe Ornithia, but the water was clean, the skies were clear, and I enjoyed my trip.”

Gilda shrugged. “Griffonstone’s actually even poorer than this place, but... honest, I guess. We don’t have shit like that,” she waved back towards the red-light district,“ and we don’t knife working-griffs in the alleys for whatever bits they mighta’ found. So, everygriff who can’t even make it down South, ends up here. Some claw their way to the top and manage to afford passage to Equestria or Hippogriffia or wherever. The rest just kinda... stick around and fester.”

“How dreadful,” Rarity muttered, “Isn’t there anything ponies in the Government could do about this place?”

“Like what?” Gilda asked, “Invade, maybe, I guess. Didn’t figure you for a bomb-their-beaks-off type, though.”

The next minute or so passed in uneasy silence. Their chariot pulled into a wide circle around an area of the city surrounded by a high stone wall, featuring most of the taller buildings they had seen on the train ride in, centered around a single monolithic tower. It looked decidedly less filthy than the rest of Innsbeak- rather ancient and dignified, even- and it contained the first significant green space Twilight had seen since entering the city.

“That’s the University down there,” Gilda explained, “But I don’t think I can be too much help if you need to go poking around in it. They’ve got their own guard outfit that actually works for a living, and one of their jobs is to keep street trash like I was off their fancy campus.”

After that, it was back over the slums, leaving Twilight to wonder silently about the somewhat circuitous nature of their flight path. It had begun to drizzle, just enough to be noticeable. Twilight projected a small amniomorphic shield over the front of the carriage, tilted like a windscreen. The vehicle seemed to lack any such enchantment of its own- or even just an ordinary glass windscreen, for that matter.

Slowly, the ground below them rose up out of the omnipresent fog, and the buildings there grew larger and grander. Every so often, however, Twilight spotted piles of rubble and burnt-out shells among them, some quite substantial in area. Even many of the surviving buildings showed no signs of actual, recent habitation.

“Why doesn’t anygriff from the lower city move into any of those empty lots?” Rarity asked, “Any one of them could probably hold a whole tenement.”

“You don’t just ‘move into’ a noblegriff’s estate,” answered Gilda, “Those are all still private property, even if there’s nogriff actually living in one, or around to claim it. You can get away with a lot of things in Innsbeak, but not pissing off the noble families.” She shook her head. “These places do get looted pretty quick if they don’t have round-the-clock guards, though. The ones that are still in one piece just have better security.”

The carriage pitched downward, diving into the glittering heart of the estates. They resolved themselves into a patchwork mosaic of different properties and architectural styles, chaotically intermeshed. Twilight’s imagination quickly filled in a history of long-running survivor families buying out their defunct neighbors and fusing the properties with their own; the Law of the Jungle, as acted out by realtors.

The largest such property sat at the very top of the broad, gentle hill, well above the smog layer, and out of all of its competitors seemed to be the only one to have remained perfectly square. Idly, Twilight wondered if the owner had thought ahead and made purchases with the express goal of maintaining a neat perimeter; or had simply been wealthy or fortunate enough to be able to buy everything at once.

They dove towards it, pulled up at the last moment, and landed with a resounding thud on the forecourt, inside of its tall, wrought-iron fence. The gate in front was a complicated mechanical affair with components sculpted to resemble interlocking talons; some patches of gold plating still clung resolutely to the metal. Constructed of red brick in a vaguely Neoclassical Equestrian style, the manor itself could probably have passed for an older, modest estate in Trottingham or perhaps even Canterlot, if it wasn’t for the security. As soon as their carriage touched down, easily half a dozen more house troops seemed to materialize from the overgrown gardens and the shadowy recesses of the building itself. Without waiting for any sort of confirmation, they busied themselves extracting luggage from the wagon and shipping it off out of sight.

The fidgety cockerel who’d helped bring them this far unhitched himself from his harness, and gestured towards the front door. “This… way?”

He kept pace alongside them as they climbed the short staircase leading up to the front portico, then jogged a few steps ahead to haul open one of a pair of massive oak doors. There was a spacious foyer on the other side, easily twenty meters across and twice that deep, decorated with oak paneling and hideously yellow carpet. Much of the back was shadowy and indistinct- the massive crystal-and-gold chandelier up above was currently not lit. The structure stretched upward a good two stories, but there was no visible way up to the upper balconies. Based on Twilight’s reading, that was a distinctly Griffish architectural feature. Pegasi in the modern era typically confined themselves to ordinary floor plans with, perhaps, a rooftop landing area, but griffons were expected to fly as much as they walked or climbed.

Their guide stepped forward again and lead the way to a passage tucked away against one of the walls, and then into a maze of twisting, dimly-lit corridors, all of them two stories tall.

At one time, Twilight supposed the dark wood paneling and rich yellow carpets would’ve looked rather impressive, in a dour sort of way, but cobwebs and dust had long since overtaken them. The air smelled of mildew and disuse, and was uncomfortably humid. Trottingham had acknowledged its miserable weather, set up fireplaces in every room, and worked to make itself as cozy as possible; Innsbeak, apparently, simply tried to muddle through as best it could. Some distracted part of her brain dredged up a passage from A Hearth’s Warming Carol more or less of its own accord- Climate spells cost money. Dampness was cheap, and Lord Goldstone liked it.

They encountered no other inhabitants, griffon or otherwise, and little decoration other than a periodic series of closed doors.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Rainbow Dash muttered quietly, “Why’s it all so empty?”

“Well, the big halls of any estate like this are usually empty, even during parties and things like that,” replied Twilight, equally quietly, “I never understood the point of all this open space.”

“This is empty even for a big estate, though,” added Rarity, “I’d’ve expected to find somegriff sent around to deal with all the dust by now, at least. And it isn’t as though this Goldstone fellow doesn’t have staff...”

Twilight was certain they’d walked for a solid ten minutes in total and made at least five left turns in a row when she spotted an open door up ahead. Their guide paused in the corridor just past it, and motioned inside with one talon. Then he set off again and vanished around another corner.

Tentatively, Twilight and her friends stepped inside.

They found themselves in a rather comfortable sitting room, better-lit by modern crystal lamps and an entire back wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Innsbeak’s harbor sprawled below and beyond, hazy and dim. Despite the fire roaring under the ornate wooden mantlepiece there was a noticeable draft, but at least that kept the dampness at bay. Nearly every horizontal surface was covered in a wide variety of what Twilight supposed she could call knick-knacks, ranging from archaic maritime navigational equipment to weird little statuettes of unclear origin; the walls were jammed with indecipherable paintings.

A male griffon sat hunched over on one of the yellow velvet couches scattered throughout the room. Twilight had communicated with Lord Goldstone entirely by letter and never actually seen him before; her imagination had filled in the gaps to create a scruffy, heavyset, bespectacled, owl-headed old tiercel, possibly with a missing eye or talon or some other obvious old war wound.

In fact, virtually every element of her theory had turned out to be false.

The real Goldstone was tall and lanky, not scrawny or half-starved like so many of the other residents of Innsbeak, but naturally quite light just the same. He was mostly leopard-like in patterning, yellow with black spots, although his head and neck were pure white. While Twilight sometimes had difficulty figuring out how griffons aged, she’d be very surprised if he was far past thirty. She supposed his face could technically be considered hawkish -and certainly wasn’t owlish- but it was dominated almost completely by a wide yellow beak and big, round, muddy-brown eyes. He’d slicked back his short crest-feathers with some sort of soft wax -Rarity would probably know the proper name for it- exposing something darker underneath. Twilight wasn’t entirely certain exactly what the material was: another underlayer of feathers, maybe, or possibly some sort of maneplug-analog -crestplugs?- but it looked odd regardless. In fact, everything about Lord Goldstone looked odd: gangly and uncoordinated, a skeleton too big for his skin.

“Ahh, Doctor Twilight Sparkle!” he said in clear, almost completely unaccented Ponish, although his inflection was strange and overly precise- more like a stage actor than anycreature actually holding a conversation. He unfolded himself from his weird curled-up posture and stood, placing one talon over his narrow chest in a theatrical little half-bow. “Gen-tle-mares! I am Gerald Goldstone the Thirteenth, Marquess of the Northern Territories and Lord of this fine city.”

Unsure of what else to do, Twilight mirrored the gesture. “I’m… glad to meet you as well! And... umm... these are my... colleagues: Rainbow Dash and Rarity, from Ponyville, and Gilda of Griffonstone.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintances!” Goldstone clambered back up onto the couch, all elbows and knees, and sorted himself into a slightly more natural-looking, vaguely feline posture. “Please, sit down! I must apologize for the drizzle on the way here,” he waved a talon out the windows, which revealed the rain had since intensified into a true and proper downpour, “The University handles the city’s weather all by itself with magic... when they can be bothered to, anyway.”

Twilight and her friends picked out nearby couches more or less at random, and followed their host’s example in sitting down. For a moment or two silence reigned, except for the continued rattling of raindrops against the windows. A few strong gusts of wind slammed into the side of the manor at intermittent intervals, and the whole structure rattled alarmingly, but Goldstone didn’t appear to care- or, for that matter, even notice.

Eventually, Twilight opened her mouth to speak, but Rarity made a surreptitious little ‘hush’ gesture with one hoof, and continued instead herself. “So... Lord Goldstone...”

“Oh.” The griffon shook his head, “You’re all more than welcome to call me Gerald.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Rarity continued with perfect equanimity, leaving Rainbow Dash and Gilda to sit in awkward, fidgety silence. “Gerald! What does a quiet scholar like Doctor Sparkle here have to do to earn such distinguished company?”

“Well, Doctor Sparkle has been one of my more... discerning customers in the antiquities trade. You see, my father passed when I was very young, and my dear old mum always considered herself something of an adventurer. I’m afraid that perhaps... five years ago, she set out on an expedition to the Dragonlands, and... well, never came back.”

He waved one talon at the largest picture in the room, an oil painting of a leopard-spotted formel in ornate golden armor. She leaned against a stack of thick books, one elbow resting atop it where -ironically enough- there sat the skull of a juvenile dragon. Twilight thought the whole thing was rather overwrought. The colors were bold to the point of eye-searing, and either the artist had traced her armor and face from two very different sources, or Geraldine XII had been born with a bizarrely small head. There was a big katzbalger broadsword at her side, even though clearly a pike or hammer would’ve been far more effective against a dragon, but her armor tabard was a correspondingly anachronistic 5th-century slashed-and-puffed Landsknecht design.

Rarity briefly dipped her muzzle downward and muttered. “Oh, dear, how tragic…”

Goldstone just shrugged, and rolled his eyes. “Hardly. What was tragic was that she kept from getting herself eaten until after she’d pissed away most of our remaining funds on her nonsense, and filled up so much of the estate with her ‘collection’ of, quite frankly, junk. I’ve been trying to sell off as much of it as I can ever since- before the good doctor wrote to me, I was ready to burn that strange old parchment as worthless.”

“Wow. She sounds like a right berk,” Gilda muttered, seemingly more to herself than to Goldstone.

“Actually,” Twilight began, “I’m interested in doing business with you again, but for a recommendation, not an arti-”

Abruptly, Goldstone cut her off, his buttery-warm tone suddenly curt and businesslike. “You all must be tired after traveling all the way here.” He reached over to the end table nearest his sofa and rang a large silver bell, which Twilight hadn’t been able to identify as distinct from any of the other seemingly random detritus around it. “Gephardt will show you to your rooms.”

Given the condition of the rest of the place, Twilight had been expecting cobwebs and bare stone in the manor’s guest rooms- however, they proved to be surprisingly livable. She confirmed that they indeed possessed indoor plumbing, and that the water was in fact reasonably clean- at least as far as her scans could determine. Since the manor was on a hill, it was possible it pulled water from comfortably above most of the sewer system, or that some portion of Goldstone’s staff brought in clean, high-altitude clouds. In either case, Twilight seized the opportunity for that much-awaited shower.

She’d barely finished -thank Harmony for her practical manecut- when somecreature knocked on her door. She opened it to find Gephardt, the same fidgety cockerel who’d brought them in, shifting awkwardly from one foreleg to the other. “Lord Goldstone… re-quests your pres-ence at din-ner?” he said, in a strange intonation that suggested he didn’t actually understand what he was repeating and had merely memorized the entire sentence.

“Right.” Twilight stepped outside, and found the others already standing in the hall in varying degrees of wariness. She gave them a collective nod, and everycreature nodded back. There didn’t seem to be much else to say.

Gephardt set off down the hall again, in a completely different direction from how they’d come from the sitting rooms, and unsure what else to do Twilight followed. Her expectations of another meandering trip through endless corridors proved annoyingly correct, although in this wing of the manor more doors were still open. Inside, true to Lord Goldstone’s word, Twilight glimpsed mostly random assortments of dubiously-valuable junk- rusted armor and pitted swords, primitive little sculptures, and glass cases full of common insects or unremarkable stones. Briefly summoning her magesight, she confirmed all of it to be utterly mundane.

They came to a gradual stop, and Gephardt shrugged and pointed at one of the second story balconies, before spreading his bony wings and flying up to perch atop it.

Rainbow Dash looked at Twilight, and then at Rarity, muzzle scrunched up in thought. Rarity looked back at Rainbow Dash and after a long moment of chewing on her lower lip said, “Oh, well, alright.”

Rainbow took wing, wrapped her forehooves around the tailor’s barrel, and hauled her bodily upward. She gave a quiet yelp as soon as her hooves left the ground, and kept muttering directions until she was out of earshot.

Gilda stepped towards Twilight, stretching her talons. “So, uhh… how do you wanna do this, boss?”

“I’m fine,” Twilight replied, then vanished into a magenta flicker and reappeared atop the balcony a moment later. Gephardt leaped backwards a few steps and stared, wide-eyed. Rainbow Dash and Gilda both whistled appreciatively.

Rarity just stared, silently, as she readjusted her manestyle, her expression seemingly asking Well, why didn’t you just teleport me, too?

The balcony’s solitary door opened into another spacious chamber with another set of floor-to-ceiling windows against the far wall. A big oak dining table took up most of the room, surrounded by high-backed wooden chairs. It was surprisingly clean of Geraldine XII’s usual detritus, although the walls practically sagged under the weight of shelves and miscellaneous picture frames. Ornate blue porcelain plates and gleaming silverware had been set out for five, along with a single tall decanter full of a cloudy greenish liquid. That, presumably, was the alchemical concoction marketed to aid ponies and other herbivorous diners in the digestion of heavier protein; Twilight herself had never tried it. The rain had returned to a light drizzle by this point, although clouds still circled ominously over the big central tower of the University campus, looming over the manor some distance away. The ubiquitous Goldstone house troops lurked in each corner, but Lord Goldstone himself was nowhere to be found.

Twilight and Rarity both stayed near the door, shifting from one hoof to the other in awkward silence, as Gilda and Rainbow Dash pushed past them. The two fliers each scouted half of the room and met up again at the far end, apparently having discovered nothing of interest. Gilda moved towards one of the servants as though she were about to say something, then seemed to think better of it. “So, do we… go ahead and sit down, or what?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Oh, certainly nothing of the sort!” chastised Rarity.

With nothing better to do, Twilight ambled over to one of the better-taken-care-of paintings- an abstract piece by the goat artist Menaechmus, consisting of a series of progressively tighter groups of curving lines inspired by isothaumic surfaces. Judging by the quality of the paint and canvas, it was in fact an original, which meant… “Isn’t this the piece that went missing from the Centaur Pavilion at the 1050 World’s Exhibition?”

“Indeed it was!” Twilight jumped slightly as Lord Goldstone’s voice suddenly filled the room. She turned around to find him standing in the doorway next to an equally surprised Rarity. “My dear mother may have had her… faults, but she was a formel of some resourcefulness when she wanted to be.”

Rainbow Dash cocked her head. “A… what now?”

“Beg pardon?” Goldstone began padding over to her at the far end of the room. He was followed in short order by the fat hen from the chariot, who was now wearing a polished steel cuirass, with a captain’s stripes worked into her pauldrons in glossy yellow paint. She silently took up a position in one corner, glaring at the ponies from under her helmet with beady little dark eyes.

“What’s a formel?” Rainbow Dash asked again.

There was a long, painful pause. Then Gilda kneaded at the spot above her beak with one talon. “Would anygriff like to explain to the slow fledgling?”

“Hey!” Rainbow took a false swing at Gilda’s skull.

“It means a female noblegriff, Dash,” Rarity prompted, quietly. “We talked about that on the train ride, remember?”

“… oh. Right.”

“And ‘fledgling’ means-” Twilight continued, before Rainbow cut her off rather abruptly.

“I know what ‘fledgling’ means, Twilight. Pegasi fledge. I fledged. I’m not a total moron.”

“Not totally, no,” Goldstone muttered, as he slipped into the seat at the head of the table. At his unspoken invitation Twilight sat down as well, followed by Gilda, Rarity, and then finally Rainbow Dash. A few of the servants disappeared through a side door Twilight hadn’t noticed, and reappeared pushing a trolley loaded with various ornate shiny containers. They eyed their cargo hungrily, and once again Twilight realized just how incredibly thin everygriff they’d seen in Innsbeak was- aside from Goldstone and a select few of his staff, of course.

Quickly and quietly, the servants unloaded an assortment of candied fruit -the sort of thing a moderately-priced Canterlot eatery might serve as an appetizer. This was followed by several small roast birds of unknown origin: Twilight guessed they were pheasants, although she would no longer put it past Goldstone to serve pigeon. Finally, the servants presented what appeared to be a bowl of jellied eels. Twilight was fairly certain she’d seen the same type for sale outside of the Reinsbury’s in Trottingham, for three bits a tin; now they were being served out of a tin in a port city whose sole legitimate industry was fishing. Twilight wasn’t sure what to make of that.

She ladled a few blobs of fruit onto her plate, and took a tentative bite. The fruit had definitely come out of a can, but at least it’d been cooked in proper butter… or margarine, more likely, judging by the taste. Anyway, at least it was warm.

Twilight could not, however, help noticing that Lord Goldstone was already consuming an entire bird carcass with singular gusto.

Rarity, for her part, seemed mostly engaged in cutting her fruit into smaller and smaller portions. She pushed those around in a complicated pattern with her silverware, producing a fantastic show of misdirection that never actually involved anything on her plate being ingested.

Gilda peered at her portion for a moment, then set about devouring it like a wild animal. Rainbow Dash paused, shrugged, and then followed suit.

The fat hen stayed in the corner, and glared at the servants every time they looked too long at the contents of the trays they were carrying. Gilda eventually looked up from her plate to glare at the hen in turn.

“Oh, don’t mind Captain Grunt,” Lord Goldstone chuckled, “She just takes matters of security very seriously.”

“Looks like she takes matters of dinner pretty seriously, too…” Gilda muttered to Rainbow Dash, earning another withering stare from the larger hen.

The presumable main course followed after a few minutes of uneasy silence: more buttered vegetables, some sort of liver dish, sausages of unknown type, and a big steak-and-kidney pie. Twilight briefly considered sampling either of the latter two, but as soon as she lit her horn to lift the potion bottle Rainbow Dash reached out with a wing, grabbed it, and drained the entire contents.

As Twilight was learning was likely typical of Lord Goldstone, it had been the only one of its kind at the table.

She was thus entirely content to watch as Rainbow waved one wing at the nearest servinggriff. “Hey, what gives? I can’t come all the way to Griffonia and not get a chance to try some actual griffon food. Where can you get me a… a what’s it called, a Mortar-house?”

Goldstone paused from slicing into his pie and cocked his head, a very disconcertingly avian gesture. “A what?”

“A Porterhouse, I think,” supplied Rarity.

“Never liked the Porterhouse, myself. Too much not-meat to meat,” added Gilda.

Goldstone just went “Mmmhmm,” and returned to his pie.

After that, another servant circled the table and filled their drinking glasses with some rather pleasant-smelling red wine, a merlot perhaps. Twilight took a few sips to keep up appearances, but that was all.

Instead, she tentatively sampled some of the hay and bourbon carrots, and found both to be more or less identical to the food Equestrian military caterers shipped out to formal functions. They were edible enough, but not quite what she’d been expecting from a formal reception in a noblegriff’s manor. She was pretty sure that could be construed as an insult, but elected not to say so. Given the state of agriculture in Innsbeak, it was entirely possible that Goldstone was serving them tinned rations simply because he had no other vegetable products worth presenting. In fact, the steak-and-kidney pie seemed to be the only properly-made dish at the whole table- or, rather, what was left of it, since the tiercel had already consumed more than half. She wondered if the entire dinner, complete with the serving of every decent dish to a party that could not digest it, was simply an excuse for the noblegriff to treat himself. Then she realized that despite his apparent food intake, Goldstone was indeed quite thin, and wondered if he’d fallen for the alchemical stimulant fad that had produced similar results in several of Twilight’s Academy coworkers.

After a while, she contented herself watching Gilda devour whatever constituted the liver dish. After a while, Gilda watched back- she looked up, beak smeared with some sort of brown sauce, and shrugged theatrically. “Beef? Good. Kidneys? Good. Liver? Good. What’s the problem?”

At Goldstone’s raised eyebrow, the other griffon continued. “The ponies just slaughter animals for, like, fat and leather and shit. They don’t do much with the organs, so in Equestria that’s all pretty cheap. I hear a lot of it gets shipped out here to the Isles.”

The noblegriff nodded. “Indeed it does! I see that most is sent off to the Mainland, of course, at a reasonable markup, but we’ve also done wonders for the local food situation.”

Gilda looked at the scrawny, greedy-eyed servants, and then at their own overfilled table, slowly and theatrically, as if she wanted everyone in the room to know it. “Yeah. I guess you have.”

“You know,” Twilight interrupted, anxious to defuse the tension that had settled over them like a thick woolen cloak, “my brother Shiny -sorry, Shining Armor-took a liking to this kind of thing when he was serving abroad in the Guard- liver and onions, specifically. My parents weren’t very happy with him for it; they always said they could smell his airship before they could ever see it coming in to dock.”

Twilight chuckled to herself. No one else did.

Gilda reached for the other half of the streak-and-kidney pie, then paused and turned to Rainbow Dash. “Want some?”

The pegasus shook her head. “Not a fan of pie, even… well, this sure isn’t pie pie, but I’m not gonna risk it. I’ll try some of the sausages, though.”

“It was actually my father who went absolutely ballistic,” Twilight continued, “being an M.D. and all,” she tried to shape her voice into Night Light’s reedy Pferdish accent. “’Sohn, do you know how many par-a-zites can be vound in animal tizzue?!’ Mom… well, she tolerated it. She said she herself was willing to try any foreign dish once, but there’s a big difference between trying liver, and requesting it.”

This time, at least Rarity bothered to laugh. Twilight was completely unable to discern if she was faking or not, which meant the tailor probably was.

Goldstone just nodded, and took a drink from his wineglass. “Um. Yes. I… see.”

After that, dessert was brought out: bread pudding, so bland it might actually have just been bread.

Twilight thought she heard Gilda muttering something about ‘banoffee’, but wasn't entirely certain what that meant.

“So… Lord Goldstone?” Rarity asked, as Twilight chewed resolutely on her sample.

The noblegriff clapped a talon against his chest again in mock horror. “Gerald! Please.”

“Gerald.” Rarity amended, “We were hoping that a tiercel of your evident resources might be able to… some time in the next few days, arrange a meeting with some of the faculty from the University?”

Goldstone nodded. “That could easily be arranged… who exactly were you thinking of?”

“Gordon,” Twilight supplied. “The head of the theoretical alchemy division.”

Immediately, Goldstone’s muddy-brown eyes narrowed. For just a moment, Twilight thought that the young noblegriff looked genuinely afraid, or at least a bit alarmed. “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid that’s beyond even my abilities. Beyond anycreature’s, perhaps.”

“And… why is that?” Twilight asked, genuinely confused.

“Well, because it’s impossible to get near him,” Goldstone waved a talon at the windows behind him, where the strange tower in the center of the University campus loomed ominously in the late evening shadows. “He stays holed up in that tower of his all day, every day, and only conducts his business through a very few trusted junior scholars.”

“I’m sure that once he hears about what we’re trying to do…” Twilight offered.

“My dear Doctor Sparkle.” Goldstone interlaced his talons above his now-empty plate. “I have been trying to find a way to entice Gordon to do business with me for the last five years. He’s had none of it. History isn’t his field, the acolytes say! He only even sees correspondence from a few other theoretical alchemists, and if I recall correctly your reputation is mostly established in other areas.” The griffon’s tone grew more serious. “And he's especially concerned about -ahem- Academy types looking over his shoulder, and trying to spy on his studies. I'm sure you understand, Dr. Sparkle.”

“Well, we could always just try flying up and knocking on his window…” Rainbow Dash spoke up.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” the tiercel replied, “They’re hard to see from this angle, but those spikes on top of the tower are enchanted to shoot down anything at all that gets too close. Gordon himself fires on anygriff who manages to get through. Or, sometimes, anygriff further away, if he happens to be feeling particularly threatened at the moment. Or frustrated. Or bored. Since I was a cub old enough to watch, I have never once seen him miss.”

Rainbow Dash whistled. “Wow. I bet he’s, like, some evil wizard who drops ponies down elevator shafts, or collects equine skulls, or something.” Then she rolled her eyes. “Actually, never mind. He’s probably just some egghead.”

“Actually… Rainbow Splash, was it?” Goldstone continued, “You jest, but you’re right about the skulls. He supposedly has the largest private collection in Griffonia, possibly in the whole eastern half of the Known World.”

“I doubt that,” Gilda muttered, “Kinda hard to beat Griffonstone, and a thousand years of griffons tryin’ to get one over on each other.”

Goldstone continued as though he hadn’t heard her. “In fact, just about the only time he’s come down from that tower in recent memory was to try to buy my ancestor Geraldine III’s skull. He said it had ‘historical value’, being…” the noblegriff paused, and for the first time since Twilight had met him seemed actually upset about something, “Well, it was the only part of her they were able to bring back home in one piece.” He shook his head, and made a strange little slicing motion with one talon. “I told him absolutely not, of course, at least not for the pathetic few thousand bits he was offering.”

“Huh.” Gilda cocked her head, “I sorta’ wish my skull’d be worth a thousand bits someday. Or, really, I’d actually be fine just as long as it ended up someplace where griffons could remember me by it. I wouldn’t even care if some psycho killer had it, just as long as she was a badass mad wizard or something and not, like, some cheesy idiot who hid under a cake shop or whatever.”

“Oh, Boreas, can you imagine Surprise being a psycho killer?” Rainbow Dash snickered.

“I don’t think she’d get around to killing anycreature, is the thing,” the griffon chuckled, “Just tie ‘em up and tell lame organ jokes until they died of boredom-”

Rarity spoke up rather quickly after that, over the two fliers. “Gerald, darling, how much did you say Gordon asked for Geraldine’s remains?”

“Ten thousand bits. He didn’t seem to understand how much such an important piece of Innsbeak’s legacy would actually be worth.”

“Well, in that case…” Twilight struggled to keep her sudden nervousness from creeping into her voice, “I’d be willing to offer eleven thousand bits for it.”

Gilda stopped quietly snickering with Rainbow Dash, and stared at Twilight.

For the first time that evening, Goldstone laughed. It sounded high, light, and oddly childish. “My dear doctor! The skull is easily worth half-again that amount!”

“Fifteen thousand bits, then,” Twilight countered, before she could suffer second thoughts.

Still staring at Twilight, Gilda silently shook her head.

Rarity leaned over and whispered, “Twilight, do we even… have that much money?”

“Barely…” Twilight replied. In fact, she’d likely have to find some sort of a reputable international banking institution in the city to withdraw most of her personal funds- and ask her friends to make donations she might not ever be able to fully pay back. She didn’t relish the idea of writing ‘Eighth Century griffon warlord’s remains, for the purposes of luring a paranoid independent wizard out of a tower to discuss information classified by Equestrian law’ on her operational budget for the Ponyville Expedition. Ironically, she might’ve been able to make up most of the difference if she hadn’t blown eight thousand bits on the Luna Bay Fragment a year ago, before she’d had access to an operations budget at all.

Gilda's expression could peel paint off a wall, but for the life of her Twilight didn't know what the hen was trying to communicate.

Goldstone, for his part, seemed to consider her offer for a few seconds. Then, slowly and quietly, he asked “Surely, anypony who’d pay fifteen thousand bits for the Baroness’s remains… would be willing to pay twenty-five thousand?”

Twilight met his calculating stare with what she hoped was one of her own. “Not necessarily…”

“Twenty thousand, then?”

“I’m afraid that’s… not possible at the moment.”

“Oh, that is unfortunate. Although, should you reconsider, I promise you the dear Baroness won’t be going anywhere…” Goldstone smiled a particularly predatory smile. “In fact, in the spirit of our past business, I’m willing to make you a very special offer.” He motioned for one of the servants to step closer, and quietly muttered something in Griffish. The servant in question vanished through another door Twilight had mistaken for wood paneling, and reappeared less than thirty seconds later. In one talon, he held a dark wooden cube about the size of an equinoid head, each side broken up into nine colorful lacquer inlays. “Perhaps this part of Mum’s collection might be more to your tastes,” the tiercel explained, “It’s a centaur puzzle-box dating back to the early Fifth Century, supposedly one of the last ones ever constructed by the savant Rubek. I’ve never been able to make much headway on it myself, but I’m sure a…” he paused, and shot Gilda a strange look, “a clever berk like yourself would be more than up to the task.” He plucked the box out of the servant’s upraised claw and slid it onto the table.

Twilight shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m here strictly on business.”

“How about a gentlegriffs’ wager, then?” Goldstone asked. “There’s supposed to be a strip of thaumosensitive paper in the center of that box. If, in two days, you manage to extract it without using any sort of magic, I’d be willing to knock a few thousand bits off the price of that skull in the chapel…”

“And if I can’t?” Twilight let her eyes narrow and her ears fold down, although inwardly she was grinning. Smaller and less ornate versions of the same puzzle cube had been sold in Equestrian shops since before she was born. There were a few papers written on the algorithms to solve them most efficiently.

“Well, it always pays dividends to have an up-and-coming academic who just so happens to have the ears of both the Commander of the Royal Guard, and Her Grace the Exarch Princess Celestia herself, owing me a favor, wouldn't you say?”

Twilight circled the sickly yellow carpet in her guest room, which was feeling decidedly more claustrophobic now that all three of her companions had decided to accompany her into it, with an antique puzzle cube floating telekinetically over her head.

“Twilight… boss… what in Tartarus were you thinking?” Gilda asked, almost as soon as the door was shut.

“I don’t know, and I’d appreciate if you could just tell me,” Twilight said, bitterly. It came out more forcefully than she’d intended, and both Gilda and Rainbow Dash’s eyes narrowed. Twilight set the puzzle-cube aside on an end table, and continued more softly. “I… that’s not sarcasm, I legitimately don’t know what I did wrong tonight.”

Rarity looked at Gilda. Gilda looked at Rarity. “Do you want to-” the tailor began, and then trailed off.

Gilda nodded. “Actually, there’s a Rule of Acquisition about this,” she said, mentioning one of the holier griffonic religious texts, “number four or five, I think. Never let them know how much you need what they have.”

Once again, Rarity seemed about to speak, but Gilda held up a talon. “This is Griffonia, Twilight. I don’t know how you do business, or how most ponies do business, but around here… well, in Griffish, ‘customer’ and ‘competitor’ are the same fuckin’ word. Everygriff’s sure that if there’s a winner, then there’s gotta be a loser. And that fucking shitbagger Goldstone doesn’t want to be the loser. I don’t know how, yet, but that bet he made is shit. Somehow, sometime, he’s gonna cheat you on it.”

“So… now what do we do?” demanded Rainbow Dash, “Go home, with our tails between our legs?”

Twilight closed her eyes, and pulled in a deep breath. “No. We stay here, and we regroup. I’d like to at least try to take Goldstone up on his offer… maybe he didn’t realize how well-known the cubes are, maybe I can cheat him first… Maybe if he realizes we aren’t going to pay up, he’ll come back to the table. I don’t know.” Then she shook her head. “Also, Gilda, if you could maybe refrain from insulting both his guard captain and late mother in one sitting, and generally making a fool of yourself with Rainbow Dash, that’d be great too.”

The pegasus bobbed her head and muttered “Sorry?”

Gilda just chuckled. “I kinda got the impression he didn’t like her too much?”

“Yes, but she’s still a noble. You’re a commoner. You’re still expected to treat her respectfully.”

“Actually… I might be able to talk to Goldstone, darling,” Rarity interrupted, “I think he’d be more willing to deal with somepony he thinks has more to offer.”

“Sounds good.” Twilight opened her eyes again, and only then realized how tired she was, and how good it had felt to keep them closed. “We’ll go over the finer details tomorrow morning.”

Author's Notes:

The IDW comics have a city called Zebrat as the capital of zebra territory; it took me a long time to choose between that and Great Zebrabwe. Neither sounds all that great, Zebrat has canon on its side, and Great Zebrabwe has the benefit of referencing some really neat IRL archaeology. Eventually I decided to go with Great Zebrabwe simply because it differs from the “single word horse/whatever pun” structure of most of the other city names.

Lord Goldstone hails from the IDW comics, specifically Friendship Is Magic #62, which I consider criminally underappreciated and also the source of some of my favorite cover art in the series. It is absolutely ridiculous that he doesn’t have a character tag on Fimfiction, Fanfiction, or AO3. This early showing will not be the last we see of him, although I do not yet know how much of a role he will have later on.

While IRL horse foals are what're called precocial, able to move and comprehend the world within minutes, intelligent animals like dogs, cats, humans, hawks, owls, and crows are all altricial. Which is to say, naked and helpless, literally underdeveloped at birth.
As such, contradicting what is seen in the show, we think it makes much more sense for pegasi to be born without feathers (although a downy layer grows in after a few days), and only fledge somewhat later. Similarly, unicorn foals are born without horns, just a soft keratinous patch or bump on the skull which grows into a proper horn during the fusing of the newborn's skull; at eighteen months, the anterior fontanelle seals around the cornual process, completely encasing the brain.

IRL, “classical architecture” does not refer to actual Greco-Roman architecture, but rather attempts to duplicate it beginning in the Renaissance. Similarly, I’d imagine that classical architecture in Equestria began either just after Hearth’s Warming or just after the establishment of the Royal Sisters, resurrecting an even earlier style probably mostly practiced by the pegasi. “Neoclassical” then refers to even later attempts to synthesize the (often archaeologically inaccurate) traditions of classical architecture, with archaeological knowledge about how the ancient Roman-analogues actually built. It’s specifically called “Equestrian neoclassical” here, because I don’t think either the original Roman-analogues or the first classical movement had much worldwide scope. The subsequent neoclassical movement then specifically tried to ape pony architecture, even in foreign settings (developing as it did at a time when the Pax Equestria was just about done solidifying, and the reach of pony culture was becoming truly inescapable).

Berkeley Hunt

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Gilda prowled the manor early next morning. She had no particular reason to be prowling -simply wandering around casually would’ve attracted exactly as much notice- but the dim and dust-choked nature of the place was naturally suited to it. Rainbow Dash followed along beside her, head pivoting this way and that, in companionable silence. There was, in fact, precious little to comment on in any case- either Twilight or Rarity might’ve had something to say about the moldering artifacts they passed in wall displays, but as far as Gilda was concerned they weren’t anywhere near valuable enough to merit her notice. The monotony was broken only when, every so often, the level of the floor changed, accompanied by slanted sections or little miniature stairways, and with it the entire architectural style of the building. Gilda couldn’t be bothered to put a name to any of the styles, of course -although that Rarity dweeb would probably be all over it, Twilight too for that matter- but it was at once painfully obvious and horribly unclear where one building had originally ended and another begun.

They’d encountered only a single other living thing during half an hour of reconnaissance. A wizened old skeleton of a hen, wearing a Goldstone-yellow coverall that might’ve passed for a maid’s uniform, had passed them from behind. She’d been shepherding along a pair of magically-generated whirlwinds with her wings, although the nets she carried were so stuffed full that most of the dust they disturbed ended up right back on the floor again. Rainbow Dash actually thought it was a good idea to wave, but the maid had ignored them both and kept stubbornly on what was probably a designated patrol route. Gilda could sympathize, more than she might’ve liked.

They’d found what were probably the servants’ quarters not long after- little more than a collection of ratty, mildewy cots crammed together in what might've been a long-forgotten guest room in some defunct estate. These, however, had been utterly empty. That was a blessing in that there was nogriff around to seeher and Dash, but also a curse because there was nogriff around to pump for information on where to go. The mazelike interior of the manor quickly became downright disorienting as corridors doubled back on themselves and dead-ended in tiny rooms of unclear purpose.

Finally Gilda shrugged, cursed herself mentally for falling back on her much-reviled Fliers Camp classes, and pulled a quill and a sheaf of paper from her saddlebags. “Aww, shit,” she muttered, “Was the last little staircase thingy five rights ago, or six?”

Rainbow Dash stretched her wings, and stared off into the indeterminate distance. “Oh, yeah, uhh, I think it was left, right-right-right, then the carpet turned from yellow to kind of a plum, then straight ahead past three doors, then they got the gray carpet, then two more lefts.”

Gilda gave a low whistle, and dutifully set about jotting down the path they’d taken when Dash jabbed a wing into her ribs.

“Well, aren’t you Little Miss Filly Scout,” Rainbow laughed, “What, you think Instructor Barns’s gonna give you that cartography badge?”

Gilda was about to reply when the pegasus stopped dead and held a wing in front of her mouth. “Shh! Something’s coming!”

Gilda also scrabbled to a halt, and listened closely. Up ahead, she could hear three sets of pawsteps, and the distinctive jingling of chainmail. The ordinary house troops didn’t wear chainmail.

Silently, she made the old pegasus wing-sign for ‘hide’. Rainbow nodded, and slipped behind a suit of ornate minotaur armor rusting away and collecting cobwebs in a nearby alcove. Gilda scanned the opposite wall, spotted a mostly-open doorway, and padded inside to discover a small storeroom almost completely filled with stacks of mildewy fabric- silk, maybe, or some other valuable material. She positioned herself behind the largest pile, with a narrow slit of the corridor still visible, and waited.

She heard a cockerel’s voice first. Gilda had been so used to Lord Goldstone speaking Ponish that she didn’t immediately recognize him now speaking Griffish. His tone was different, more threatening and direct, with an accent that tried to be aristocratic Received Griffish, but had been smothered under so many bizarre little inflections that it sounded more like a misaimed parody of Cockney. “… you will be paid in full, provided that your wards hold up for the duration specified.”

A hen’s voice followed his, old and scratchy, also speaking Griffish, with a proper Received Griffish accent. “If you’d like, we can bring in a second mage to attempt to bypass the wards and demonstrate their effectiveness.”

At about that point, the speakers walked past Gilda’s narrow spy-hole, all more or less abreast. The guard captain who’d flown them up to the manor a few days ago was closest, and proved to be the owner of the audible chainmail. Lord Goldstone himself was in the center, his tail flicking back and forth angrily. Farthest away, a hunched, vaguely griffonoid figure trailed along slightly behind. The figure was covered from head to tail in somewhat disheveled, midnight blue robes decorated with faded golden eye-patterns; the only actual body part visible was a short, wedge-shaped black beak, protruding from the shadows of a voluminous hood.

“Hmph. Anygriff can sketch some chalk circles, wave their talons around, and say they’re working ‘magic’,” Goldstone addressed the robed griffon before all three of them passed out of sight once again, “A demonstration by one of your own confederates hardly counts as a demonstration at all! You should consider yourself lucky you’re even receiving a down payment on such an exorbitant fee!”

“Lord Goldstone, the University tolerates your impositions upon academic affairs because, thus far, you’ve made it worth our while to do so,” the robed griffon rasped, or at least Gilda presumed she did- it strained credulity to imagine such a voice coming from Goldstone’s bodyguard. “If you should decide to persist in this new obstinacy…” the rest of the sentence quickly became inaudible as its speaker rounded some corner, no doubt into yet another section of the labyrinthine manor.

Gilda waited a good thirty seconds in utter silence, and then decided it was safe to leave her hiding-spot and lean around the doorway.

The hallway was empty, as far as she could tell. She stepped out into it, and almost immediately Rainbow Dash joined her.

“What was that all about?” the pegasus whispered.

“I dunno, but that other hen was dressed like one of the University mages, and they were going on about something to do with wards. Goldstone didn’t like them, or didn’t think they were going to work, or something, and he didn’t want to pay the University for them.”

“Wards on what, though?”

Gilda scratched under her beak. “Yeah, and wards against what?”

“Beats me.” Rainbow shook her head, and then flicked out a wing. “But they came from that-a-way…”

They walked along for perhaps another five minutes together, carefully and quietly, checking their corners at each intersection. The first two paths they explored proved to be dead ends, one terminating at an incongruous gable window and the other a brick wall, but when Gilda slipped her head around the corner of the third intersection she found herself looking at an ornate double door bracketed by a pair of guards. They looked fit and reasonably well-fed -which Gilda knew in Innsbeak resulted only from being reasonably well-paid- and attentive; and under their blazing-yellow tabards she spotted the characteristic grid of their brigandines’ riveted metal plates. Small, inset stained-glass windows flanked the doors as well, but from her angle Gilda couldn't see much inside.

Looking up, she next spotted a second-floor balcony protruding from the wall just above her head. As quietly as possible she spread her wings and took off, then glided into a gentle landing atop it. Just as quietly, Rainbow Dash followed her.

The griffon dropped onto her belly and squirmed her way over to the edge- just as she’d hoped, the balcony offered a good clear view of the guards around the corner, while preventing her from being seen in turn. If the doors ever opened, she’d probably have a pretty good sight line into the room beyond, as well.

They observed the other griffons in silence for a few minutes as the griffons, in turn, got up to nothing much. Then, as a clock somewhere in the depths of the manor struck eight, accompanied by a rather tinny version of the Reinbridge Chimes, Gilda heard a door squeak open somewhere further back along the hall. It was followed by the sounds of pawsteps and shifting equipment. She eased away from the edge of the balcony and tried her best to control her breathing. After perhaps ten seconds, another quartet of guards marched past in close formation, and headed down the hallway to the doors.

“Careful. These guys look like pretty tough customers,” she whispered to Rainbow Dash as soon as they were clear again.

“How can you tell?”

“Their helmets aren’t beat all to shit, they’re in good shape, and they know how to move around as a unit. Also, they walked right underneath us, and I couldn’t smell them.”

Rainbow Dash’s muzzle scrunched up in confusion. “I thought griffons had a weaker sense of smell than ponies?”

“We do.”

The new guards spoke inaudibly with the two at the big double doors for a few seconds, and then one of the originals gave it three sharp raps with a talon. It too eased open, and yet another pair of guards stepped out, bringing the total complement to eight.

Inside, Gilda caught only a glimpse of gold and fine wood paneling- a chapel, perhaps. Two chairs and a folding table sat in one corner, presumably for the guards’ use. The floor was broken up by long granite benches and offering tables, and was painted strange colors by the light shining through the stained-glass windows- although, unfortunately, those were far too narrow for a griffon to fit through, and bordered with stone. Something big and golden stood at the far end of the room, which Gilda lacked the angle to see properly.

“Oh. Right. I’m not surprised Goldstone has some kinda’ treasure in there,” she muttered, “I guess I just forgot.”

Then she fell silent as she noticed, directly underneath the structure, an ornate golden box set atop a gilt-inlaid oaken pillar. It was surrounded by concentric circles of bright white chalk studded by some variety of runes, and Gilda reckoned it was almost exactly the right size to hold a griffon’s skull.

Two of the newcomer guards stepped inside and shut the doors behind them. The other pair of new guards took up position outside the doors, as all four of the griffons who had been in the area originally marched back through the halls and became inaudible after another squeaking of hinges. The entire process had taken a little under thirty seconds.

Gilda gently bumped Rainbow Dash with an elbow. “Hey. Did’ja see where they went?”

“Yeah. Sixth door back, on the right. Same place their buddies came from.”

The griffon nodded. “I’d kinda’ like to see what they do if there’s intruders.”

Beside her, Rainbow broke out in a devious grin. “So… how do you wanna do this?”

“Given what a fucking maze this place is…” Gilda thought out loud, “They’d probably believe us if one of us just walked over all casual and said we got lost.”

The pegasus grinned wider. “I’ll go. I figure I’ll be pretty good at playing some featherbrained flunkie of Twilight’s who can’t find her own front hooves.”

“Playing?” Gilda sneered.

"Fuck you, Gil."

"Fuck you too, Dash." Gilda paused, glanced over the balcony again, then continued, "Seriously, though, sounds good. I’ll stick around here and see how long it takes ‘em to do their next shift change. Just like flight camp, huh?”

“Yeah. Just like flight camp. You hold onto the map, in case they walk me all the way back to the guest rooms.”

"Gotcha’." She tapped a talon against the pegasus’s shoulder, and hissed “Okay. Go.”

Rainbow slipped off the balcony and glided around the corner, head pivoting as she looked around slack-jawed at the furniture.

“Oh, thank ruttin’ Boreas,” she half-yelled, landing with an audible thud. “Hey, uhh, can you guys tell me how to get back to the Notus-damned guest rooms? I got lost following this wall with all these really neat weapons on display, but then I think I got turned around after the fifth turn… or, was it the seventh? Or maybe it was that split-level balcony thing?”

One of the guards stepped over to her and looked her up and down, not even bothering to hide his frustration. Then, to Gilda’s surprise, he pulled something small and metallic from the bandoleer on his chest- a whistle, it turned out- and blew three shrill notes. “Georg walk with you,” he said, slowly and deliberately, “follow him, yes?”

She heard the door down the hall open once more, followed again by the sound of movement. After a few awkward seconds, another guard strode down the corridor and motioned to Rainbow Dash with one talon. They set off back down the hall and vanished from sight.

Gilda remained perched where she was, and settled in for a long stakeout. About twenty minutes in, she heard somegriff padding back down the hallway, alone. She peaked over the balcony and watched the guard who had left with Rainbow Dash- Georg, she presumed- rejoin his unit.

It took only another forty minutes before the other guards changed positions again, replaced by the same four who had been present originally in a nearly identical maneuver. That was interesting: Goldstone obviously knew he needed to keep his best guards sharp, but the fact that they were doubling up indicated he could not, in all likelihood, afford an entire roster of them.

She slipped off the balcony, glided most of the way back down the hall, and began carefully padding her way back to the other wing of the manor.

Rarity’s first task was simply to find a servant- surprisingly difficult in the vast, empty, winding halls of this place. Finally, however, she managed to corner a young cockerel, perhaps thirteen years old at the latest, with a tray of hot scones in his talon, heading back towards the guest quarters. Then she asked him whether she could see Lord Goldstone, alone, at some point during the day. His eyes went wide as saucers, he stashed the tray on an end table without a word, and silently lead her to a closed door in another wing of the complex. He knocked on it, quietly, and stammered something through it in Griffish. Rarity heard Goldstone’s voice reply. Then the servant pushed the door open, to reveal a somewhat smaller but no less junk-choked dining room than the one where they had been served dinner last night.

The tiercel himself was the solitary occupant, seated at an elegant little bistro table before a plate full of eggs, baked beans, roast tomatoes, some sort of gray meaty substance, and a few objects that might have been bacon: rashers, Rarity believed they were called. He looked up from his meal as soon as she entered, and gave an odd little wave.

Rarity’s eyes were immediately drawn to the bulky, circular gold amulet hanging from a chain around his neck. A thin outer ring was covered in illegible text; from it two sculpted talons extended towards the center to clasp around a massive, brilliant-cut red gemstone. Rarity squinted for just a moment, to confirm: red beryl, shockingly rare. She wasn’t entirely certain who could wear such an object well, but on a lanky griffon like Goldstone, without any other clothing, it looked especially out of place.

“Rarity, from Ponyville!” he greeted her with surprising warmth, “I’m terribly sorry we didn’t have more of a chance to get to know one another at dinner last night; I’m afraid Doctor Sparkle kept me dreafully busy…”

“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” Rarity smiled, the sort of smile she usually reserved for too-helpful doormares and overly chatty customers, “In fact, that’s why I wanted to meet with you in the morning. There’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you without Twilight being here, and she’s not usually awake until nine-thirty or ten.”

Goldstone leaned forward slightly, his breakfast apparently forgotten for the moment. “Do go on…”

“Well, she’s not usually a morning pony in the best of times, and she spent most of last night puzzling over that wonderful little box you gave her.”

The noblegriff laughed that odd little dry laugh of his. “I meant go on with what you wanted to tell me about. Twilight Sparkle’s sleeping habits aren’t especially newsworthy, although I am pleased that she’s finding the cube a challenge.”

Rarity, for her part, had of course known perfectly well what Goldstone meant, but she would much rather the tiercel thought her warm and shallow and easy to distract- and, therefore, an easy mark. It was a fine line to walk, however, between a vapid socialite and a legitimate businessmare.

She’d also lied about Twilight- the other unicorn had in fact barely started working on the puzzle cube, and Rarity had woken her up early specifically to tell her what she’d be doing. But Goldstone didn’t need to know that.

“Please, do sit down,” he continued, and motioned at the chair directly across from his own. “Trottish egg? Or some pudding, perhaps?”

Rarity slipped into the offered chair, and then peered at the grayish substance Goldstone was currently heaping onto a corner of his plate. “No thanks, a friend of mine once tried making pudding for breakfast a thing, and it... didn't turn out well. Those tomatoes do look delicious, though.” Keep him talking, keep him engaged.

“Hmph. Your loss.” Goldstone rapped a talon against the table surface and muttered some sort of Griffish instructions to the young serving-cockerel, who immediately scampered out the door.

“I… don’t know if you’re aware, Lord Goldstone,” Rarity continued, bracing her front hooves against the table, “But I work as a fashion designer and clothier back in Equestria. Fairly recently, my business received a rather sizable influx of investment, and I’m hoping to move into an international operation.” Hopefully, someday, that would even be true.

She unbuckled her saddlebags and extracted a notebook of some of her older designs- mostly pegasus-centric ones she’d drafted last year, which were now of course terribly out of date. She floated it over the table and Goldstone gently plucked it out of her telekinesis- a strange, awkward gesture even for such a strange, awkward griffon. Rarity noticed he kept his left side angled away from her the entire time.

“I must say, these really are quite lovely,” he muttered as he leafed through it. Rarity wasn’t immediately certain if he was simply being polite, or really did have not the faintest understanding of haute couture. Given the gaudy amulet around his neck, and the fact that luminescent yellow -not even goldenrod, or gold, or a soft pastel, just yellow in its most distilled and awful form- hadn’t been in style since the late 1060s at best, she suspected it was more likely the latter.

“Oh, I’d be honored to commission some of these designs for myself and my staff.”

Definitely the latter. Good. If Goldstone didn’t know a button from a buttonhook, and more importantly didn’t want to reveal that fact, her job would become substantially easier.

“I’m flattered,” was all the unicorn said aloud, “but at the moment I’m afraid I’m severely limited in just how many pieces I can manufacture. I spent an entire week recently filling an order of thirty bespoke dresses entirely by myself, and if I’d had just one other pony to work the sewing machine, or fetch supplies, or watch the dye buckets…” That part was true, at least.

“That could of course be arranged!” said Goldstone.

“Actually,” the tailor continued, “I was hoping you might be able to assist me in moving my business into mass production. I want to be able to stock these designs in every middle-class garment shop from Manehattan down to Tabbytown, and that means three or four full-scale workshops. I have enough initial capital to buy the properties and equipment I’ll need, but the cost of labor per unit is simply too high for me to ever turn much of a profit manufacturing in Equestria.” She leaned forward. “I’d heard that you’re the tiercel to speak to if one wants to do business in Innsbeak, and that the labor market is far more affordable here…”

“I’d imagine!” Goldstone cocked his head in a particularly avian gesture. Sometime during her explanation, he'd pushed his plate aside again and fixed his gaze back on Rarity. “So, tell me, Rarity, just what’s so unprofitable about Equestria.”

The tailor made sure to arrange her features into a suitably put-upon expression. “Well, first, I'd have to join the Equestrian textile workers' union -and pay all of their fees- before I could hire through them, and they set their minimum wage at seventeen and a half bits an hour, with time-and-a-half for anything over an eight-hour shift, or forty hours a week…”

Goldstone set down the notebook and clasped one talon over his chest in exaggerated shock, just above that ridiculous amulet. “Four Winds, that does sound awful! I understand completely why a discerning businessmare like yourself would be reluctant to operate in that… environment. In Innsbeak, though, I can arrange for as many griffons as you can provide sewing machines to be put under your employ, in twelve-hour shifts, for the local equivalent of only ten bits an hour. All I ask in return is, say, a five percent cut of your sales back in Equestria.” Very suddenly, his feigned sympathy evaporated, and his muddy-brown eyes narrowed. “Oh, and I'll want monthly financial reports. I'll know how much product leaves the Isles, so don't do something stupid like under-report your earnings.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Rarity grinned, but not because she found the offer at all appealing. Appalling might’ve been a better word. In addition to the twelve hour shifts in what would likely be sweatshop conditions, she’d be very surprised if her potential griffon employees would actually be getting five bits an hour. In fact it was an open question whether they’d even be paid at all. No doubt the difference, whatever it was, would be shuttled directly into House Goldstone’s coffers. But, of course, Goldstone’s con assumed the workshops would ever actually open in the first place. Rarity did indeed have plans for massively expanding her business should she acquire sufficient capital to do so, but the Free City of Innsbeak certainly did not feature in any of them. She hadn’t built a local landmark out of nothing but an old sewing machine and her parents’ attic by being stupid.

“That sounds more reasonable,” was all she said aloud.

“Exactly!” Goldstone clapped his talons together, and as he did so Rarity noticed there was indeed some sort of small, dark object tucked underneath his left wing.

“It will, of course, cost somewhat more to ship all of my equipment out here to Innsbeak,” the tailor continued, and noticed Goldstone’s feathery eyebrows lift up ever-so-slightly when she confirmed he wouldn’t need to provide any of the machinery himself, “but we’ll be more than able to recoup that cost once the looms start running.”

The young serving-cockerel slipped back in at about then, setting in front of Rarity a plate of scrambled eggs, roast tomatoes, and baked beans; along with a glass of shockingly orange liquid. Rarity made sure to daintily sample each: the eggs were mediocre, the beans and tomatoes surprisingly good, and the liquid might’ve passed for orange juice if she’d never laid eyes on an actual orange.

Across from her, Goldstone leaned forward again, his expression turning serious again. “Of course, I’m sure you understand that importing goods into Equestria opens up the manufacturer to inspections by the Ministry of Commerce. The stated intent is to certify that working conditions and the like are in accordance with Equestrian standards. Sadly, though, griffish businesses are very rarely permitted to pass, however lenient our policies. It seems that some ponies,” he paused, and shook his head, “present company excluded, of course, just don’t want to see griffons engaged in productive enterprise. Why, the last time the Equestrian Consul was visiting here, he was obsessed with denying my servants agency by asking them if they were being overworked- as if they didn’t have a choice about what career to pursue and what hours to keep!”

Rarity nodded along as best she could. “Oh, yes, horribly tragic, isn’t it?” She leaned forward as well, partially to look conspiratorial and partially to try to get a better look under Goldstone’s wing. “But… this is where our mutual friend Twilight comes into the picture. In between her various academic larks, she’s made friends, who have still other friends at the Commerce Ministry. In fact, she sat down with Operations Minister Harshwhinny not a month ago.” Rarity simply neglected to mention the acrimonious nature of that meeting. Some might call that dishonest. She was fairly certain Goldstone would understand if she simply called it ‘marketing’. “She can make sure there won’t be any inspectors coming to Innsbeak at all.”

The tiercel nodded along, eagerly.

Rarity slipped a quill from her saddlebag, and turned her old design notebook to a fresh page. That morning, she’d taken the time to refamiliarize herself with her longer-term business plans; it wasn’t hard to adapt them to Innsbeak’s environment. “Now, we’ll probably want to continue sourcing raw fabric from the wholesaler I use in Vanhoover; transportation is cheap and I can’t say I use certified ‘fine’-grade cloth if it’s produced outside of the Equestrian grading standard. The harbor and rail system here will be excellent for shipping, so I think I’ll want a plant as close as possible to one or the other…”

A clock somewhere in the manor chimed nine, and very abruptly Goldstone held up one talon. “Excuse me, for one moment.” He leaned back, and then held up the amulet around his neck as though inspecting it. Rarity noticed that the gem in the center was now glowing bright red. Goldstone tapped it twice, and the light extinguished. Then, just as suddenly, he was back to looking intently at her and the rough accounts table she was sketching out in her notebook. “Perhaps, my dear, we should discuss some of the details over dinner? Perhaps... three nights from now? I’ll have made some calls of my own by then, and I promise you we’ll be able to give this relationship the ceremony it deserves.”

Rarity had been on too many failed dates not to develop some sense of when a pony -or any other creature, she supposed- was genuinely attracted to her, and she was quite sure Goldstone was not. Not that it bothered her, as she was fairly certain she didn't meet many standards of Griffish beauty- whatever those may have been. But it did make his feigned interest rather curious.

Nonetheless, she smiled again, and said “Oh, I’d be simply delighted. But, until then… I do have one favor I need to ask of you.”

Goldstone leaned forward once more, and this time Rarity caught sight of a tiny metal keyring held in place by a length of chain underneath his wing.

“I know Twilight Sparkle can be a bit of an… acquired taste, but it really is important for her to stay here for at least a few more days. I had to practically beg her to bring me along on this trip in the first place, to have a chance to meet with you…” In fact, it was more appropriate to say the reverse had occurred, but again Goldstone didn’t need to know that. Rarity tried to make her expression as earnest and winsome as she could manage. “I’m sure it would go a long way towards securing her cooperation if you could maybe just shave a few thousand bits off the price of that skull she’s looking for…?”

“I… don’t think that would be a good idea,” Goldstone shifted awkwardly in his seat; just as he had when he’d been trying to conceal the keys under his wing, although at the moment it was in absolutely no danger of being visible. Rarity wondered why. “Twilight has access to nearly bottomless reserves of the Equestrian government’s money; it’s just a matter of making her desperate enough to request it. She’ll come around eventually. You… do want me to have the most funds available to support our new venture together, yes?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Rarity stifled her disappointment.

Goldstone nodded again, that weird little smile back on his face, and rapped on the table again to summon his servant. “I propose a toast, to new opportunities!” then he looked back at Rarity. “Mimosa, or screwdriver?”

Twilight had managed to get the puzzle cube open in a little under fifteen minutes. That was a disappointing showing for her, but the box was clearly designed to make more sense for a creature with hands, as various panels slid around and rotated; her telekinesis and forehooves working together were only barely up to the task. Much as she’d suspected, there was a second, smaller box inside the first, with a four-digit combination lock on the top and ornate number-filled designs on each side.

Rarity returned from her meeting with Goldstone just as Twilight was starting to get tired of peering at the thing. Presently, the tailor was lurking in the corner of Twilight’s room with her sketchbook, while the scholar went over her notes on radion and made a few basic corrections. Her presence wasn’t exactly unwelcome, especially since both Gilda and Rainbow Dash had been missing since long before Rarity had set out.

Eventually, there came another knock at Twilight’s door.

“Go ahead,” she called out, somewhat apprehensively, and then relaxed when the door opened to admit Rainbow Dash and Gilda walking side by side. Twilight peered at them, confused. “Wait, where have you two been?”

“We’ve been scouting out where Lord Goldstone’s keeping that stupid skull,” Rainbow Dash explained, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Good for you, I guess,” Twilight scanned what she’d arbitrarily designated the first side of the cube. There were far more than four numbers present in its design, intermixed with a complicated geometric lattice formed from intersecting straight lines. She squinted, realized that exactly four of the resulting ‘cells’ were regular polygons, and entered the numbers inside of them from least to greatest number of sides- triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon. Something inside the box clicked, but that was all. She returned her attention to her friend’s report. “The thing is, I don’t think Goldstone’s just going to let us poke at the skull, though, unless… you’re not seriously thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we are,” Gilda answered. “I think we oughta’ just take the damn thing and get it over with.”

Twilight sighed, and spun the box in her telekinesis. The next panel consisted of a veritable rainbow of colored numbers, intermixed with other non-number symbols against a swirling abstract background. Twilight spotted four that were the same shade of red, and entered them in the combination lock first from left to right, then top to bottom, then in chromatic order of the background colors nearby. No combination produced any result. “You… want us to rob Lord Goldstone, while we’re currently guests in his mansion.”

“Pretty much,” Gilda continued, “We’ll be in, and out, and on our way to that Gordon dweeb before Goldstone even knows we’re gone.”

Twilight stayed focused on the symbols, unwilling to even seriously entertain such a ridiculous line of reasoning. She realized that the Minoan letter sigma appeared in each corner, always in bright green, and decided to perform a quick mental summation of all the green numbers. The result was, indeed, four digits long, and entering it produced another audible click.

“We scoped out his security,” Rainbow Dash continued, “and he’s only got a couple of guards around the chapel where the skull is, two out in the open and two camped inside. I think Gil and I can take ‘em out quickly enough, and quietly enough, that we wouldn’t have to worry about any more coming.”

“Goldstone was wearing this dreadful amulet when I went to see him,” Rarity spoke up for the first time since Rainbow and Gilda had arrived. “I saw it light up, so I think it’s magical. He was also keeping a set of keys hidden underneath his left wing; one of them was probably for the chapel.”

Gilda nodded. “Yeah, I bet it’s linked up to the magic circles we spotted around the skull.”

“And the key, too…” Rarity added.

“Don’t tell me you’re seriously considering this too, Rarity!” Twilight admonished, as she rotated the box once again. This side featured numbers in a neat four-by-eight grid, with a single space left empty in each row. Each sequence corresponded to a thaumaturgical or mathematical constant out to eight significant figures, but when Twilight entered the missing numbers in order from top to bottom the box failed to respond. “Why would Goldstone even have a lock on the door to a chapel, anyway?” she asked, feeling frustration starting to build just behind her eyeballs.

“That’s where the tithe coffers are, along with a fuckton of other golden shit I didn’t even get a good look at,” Gilda explained, “Fucker’s scarfing down roast pheasant while the city he’s supposed to be running starves. He's stuffed his own goons in the coldest part of his mansion, while there’s what, a dozen different guest rooms next to ours that nogriff’ll ever use? And the only way for an honest griffon to even get away from him is by lining his pockets with their every last rusty guilder. So don’t try to tell me that Goldstone doesn’t have it coming. Whole city’d be better off without him.”

Rarity nodded. “Tell me, Twilight, honestly, that you don’t want him taken down a peg or two.”

“Well, I mean, yes, but we aren’t here to be toppling governments or whatever. We’re just acting as private citizens to gather information.” She stared at the grid design for a little longer, and realized that each included every number from one to eight, save for one- the excised squares would’ve contained duplicates. Instead of the actual values, she tried the missing digits from bottom to top, and then from top to bottom, and was rewarded with another click. She spun the box around a final time, to locate another grid where each cell contained a number and a directional arrow. She grabbed a quill from the table in front of her and began tracing out the various paths- anything to avoid listening to this nonsense.

“Listen”, said Rainbow Dash, “We’re not talking about, like, assassinating the guy here; just liberating him of some of his stuff without paying him to be a massive shitlord about it.”

“I really think we ought to consider the idea, darling,” Rarity added, “I’ve gotten my hoof in the door with Goldstone, but I don’t think he’s going to budge on selling that skull any time soon.”

“I am considering it. I just think it’s way too dangerous- especially when I’m… almost… done with this stupid box…” Twilight’s quill traced a path from one end of the pattern to the other, where a single sequence of four digits repeated four times. She twisted the combination lock into the appropriate position, and was rewarded with another click, but nothing else. “… And I’ll be able to get Goldstone to just sell the damn skull to me…” She turned the object over and over again in her telekinesis, trying to determine if there was any sort of order to the panels- a final code, perhaps. None seemed forthcoming. “Hmm.”

“If you’re really gonna solve the box that quick, then there’s something wrong with it,” Gilda warned, “there’s no way Goldstone’s actually going to hold up his end of the deal.”

Twilight peered at the artifact more closely. The lid did indeed seem to have lifted up slightly, no longer latched tightly in place; rather, it was able to move a few degrees up and down, swiveling from one edge. Through the gap at its widest point, Twilight even fancied she could see something white and rectangular sitting inside. But that was all. “Maybe you’re right,” she muttered, “Or maybe I’m just stuck.”

“Well,” Gilda drummed her talons on the guest room’s small coffee table. “In my experience, when the lock's giving you trouble, check for the next weakest point: maybe you can pull that hinge pin out?”

Twilight shot her a skeptical glance.

“Goldstone can figure out if you used magic to scan the insides of that thing,” Rainbow Dash added, “or just smashed it open or something. But that doesn’t mean you can’t cheat.”

Twilight shook her head, briefly. All her life, puzzles had legitimate solutions, or no solutions at all; cheating had never been in the cards. It wasn’t too long ago that trying to break the rules and outfox one of Nightmare Moon’s sentry pillars had nearly gotten her killed. Then she shrugged. “You know, you might be onto something. Maybe the whole point of this box is to mess with the hinge… like, that it slides apart or something. Rarity, can you come over here and help me with it? I don’t trust my horn to mess around with fine parts like this.”

“Of course, darling.” The purple aura surrounding the box quickly faded to pale blue, and it began to turn this way and that.

“Good thing you’ve got us to do the outside-the-box thinking for ya, boss,” Gilda snickered.

Rainbow Dash jabbed a wing into the griffon’s ribs. “Gilda, why?”

“Twilight,” Rarity muttered, “This hinge is welded closed.”

She floated the box back towards Twilight, hinged-side-up. However closely she looked, the scholar couldn’t discern anything of any particular significance about its construction, until she realized the solid metal bar where a hinge might’ve been had in fact been the hinge, before somepony- or somegriff- had welded it solid.

For the first time, Twilight wondered how, in a sprawling manor filled to the brim with miscellaneous historical garbage, Lord Goldstone’s servants had been able to recover the box within a minute of Goldstone having asked for it. Either by sheer coincidence it had been gathering dust in the neighboring room ever since Geraldine XII had acquired it… or Goldstone had been planning to present it before he’d ever sat down with her and her friends.

“Can you get the hinge open?” she asked Rarity.

“I don’t think so. Not without prying the whole thing apart, anyway…”

“That. Mother. Rutter!” Twilight snapped as she set the ruined box down on the coffee table. “This… is a priceless artifact…” she hissed, and then continued with her voice packed full of sarcastic lightness. “Oh, wait, I’m sorry. This was a priceless artifact…”

Twilight Sparkle strode down the hallway to Lord Goldstone’s last reported location, puzzle-cube floating in her telekinesis, Rainbow Dash and Gilda at either shoulder, and Rarity bringing up the rear. After they’d gotten an approximate location from one of the kitchen servants, the tiercel had proven to be easy enough to find: there was only one door in this hallway that had one of the house troops standing at attention in front of it.

Gilda stepped forward and shouted a few sentences of authoritative-sounding Griffish. The guard gave a funny little half-bow and padded off some ways down the hall.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Gilda explained, “she’s not paid nearly enough to deal with us.”

Twilight nodded. She could hear somegriff through the door, Goldstone himself perhaps, speaking Griffish rather loudly, and so she turned back to Gilda. “What’s he saying?”

“He’s talking about it being stupid to try to sell fish directly in Equestria, I think.”

“Not really my problem, then.” Twilight rapped her forehoof against the door. “Lord Goldstone? I’d like to talk to you!”

“I’m afraid I’m rather busy right now, Doctor!” the tiercel shouted back in Ponish before continuing whatever indecipherable conversation he’d been having previously.

“He’s going on about how he owns the whole fishing industry and it’d be bad to try and go independent,” Gilda supplied.

“Lord! Goldstone!” Twilight shouted.

There was no response.

“He wants somegriff to get back in his good graces by delivering a lot of fish at, like, half price right away,” Gilda continued, glaring at the closed door.

Twilight shrugged. “All right, if that’s how he wants to do this… girls, if you could step a little closer to me, like within two meters… yeah, that’s good.” The scholar set the puzzle box down a safe distance away, grit her teeth and concentrated; all four of them vanished in a muffled snap of wobbly magenta light. Moments later they all reappeared on the other side of the door, along with a neat circle excised from the hall carpeting. Oh well.

This dining room looked largely identical to the one Twilight had visited before, although the big picture windows at the far end now faced an unpainted brick wall. The overall effect would’ve been charmingly rustic, if the rest of the room didn’t look like it had been transported directly from Verneigh- which, given what Twilight knew about Geraldine III, it might well have been. She wondered if Goldstone planned to meet with them in a different room each and every time they interacted.

The noblegriff himself was standing behind one of the chairs, a pair of yellow-barded guards flanking him. Both of his talons were wrapped around the outstretched wings of a mangy old cockerel in a faded blue ship-captain’s coat, effectively pinning him to the chair in an awkward-looking pseudo-bipedal posture. Goldstone jerked backwards slightly when Twilight and her friends materialized, and the other griffon made a strangled little yelp as the torsion on his wings briefly increased. The guards sprang into motion and positioned themselves between Goldstone and Twilight’s party, trading glares with Gilda and Rainbow Dash. Rainbow scuffed at the ground with one hoof while Gilda shifted her wing and shoulder muscles, producing a few loud pops. After perhaps ten seconds, Goldstone released the cockerel’s wings and motioned for the guards to step aside.

“Doctor… Sparkle…” he hissed, “I would’ve hoped that my continued respect for your privacy over the course of your stay here would have inspired you to extend the same courtesy to me. I was just in the middle of a very… important conversation with one of the local trawler captains, but now I suppose that will have to wait for another day.” He sidled back to the only set place at the table and sat down, and true to Rarity’s description Twilight immediately noticed the large gold-and-beryl amulet that now hung from a chain around his neck. She also noticed that the knife sitting next to his plate of filet mignon was both far larger than it had any reason to be, and very, very sharp.

“I don’t appreciate being cut out of the business that’s occurring in my city,” the acidic tone in his voice faded away, and he continued as calmly as though discussing the next week’s weather schedule, “This aspiring privateer here seems to have forgotten that I own the docks down in the harbor. And the registration office. And the supplies and repair tenders. And the health inspection agency.”

Gilda puffed out her chest and looked him square in the eye. “What health inspection agency?”

“They’re the gentlegriffs who show up and break your wings if you don’t play by the rules,” Goldstone answered, perfectly casually. “Very bad for your health, you see.” The corners of his beak turned upwards slightly; grinning at his own joke.

“Yeah, well, if any wings are getting broken today, they’re gonna be yours,” snapped Rainbow Dash.

Goldstone must’ve heard her, but he gave no sign of it. Instead, he waved at the nearly-petrified figure of the trawler captain and barked a short sentence in Griffish.

“He said the fucker’s free to go, but he wants the delivery by four o’clock two days from now,” Gilda turned and whispered in Twilight’s ear.

The captain, for his part, just slumped forward in his chair. He looked from the ponies to Goldstone and back again in abject confusion, and remained exactly where he was.

“Well, I’m sorry to have to interrupt.” Twilight reached out with her telekinesis, unlocked the dining room door, and floated the puzzle cube onto the table from where she’d left it outside. “But I think somecreature was trying to put one over on your ‘dear old mum’ by selling her a defective puzzle box. Rarity, if you don’t mind?”

“Of course.” In the tailor’s deft telekinetic grip, the screws holding the back hinge of the box in place were neatly twisted out, and with a quiet snap the entire artifact separated into its top and bottom halves. The top included the hinge, complete with a solid band of metal running between both wings. The bottom revealed four distinct locking mechanisms, all of them unlatched, and a single strip of glossy thaumosensitive paper- a jagged dark pattern along one side where it had faced edgewise towards Twilight’s teleportation field, but otherwise pure white.

“Oh, now, that’s interesting,” Twilight said, her voice practically dripping with fake surprise, “these things usually darken on their own over the course of a few months, just from exposure to ambient magic, so this one has to be new. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were the one trying to put one over on us.”

Goldstone just sat there silently at the table for a long few seconds, apparently unperturbed. He seemed to have completely forgotten about the continued presence of the trawler captain, who was still hunched down and quietly shuddering in his seat.

“I’m afraid that’s a moot point by now, actually,” the tiercel finally said, “The interest on Geraldine III’s skull is now set at thirty thousand bits.” He paused, glanced at Rarity, and continued a little more softly, “I’m afraid I couldn’t ‘knock a few hundred bits’ off the total even if I wanted to.” Then he looked back at Twilight, and his tone sharpened again, “Also, I never gave up ownership of that artifact, so you’ve tasked your friend here with destroying my property.”

Twilight gave Rarity a discreet nudge, and just as discreetly the tailor began slipping the pieces of the box back into place.

“In light of our previous dealings together,” Goldstone continued after another, longer pause, “I’m willing to offer you one more chance to come to reasonable terms on this matter. If you don’t, I’m sure Gordon himself will- especially once he learns there’s another bidder for the skull, who just so happens to be from the Royal Academy in Canterlot and who has been lurking about my city trying to gather information about him.”

Twilight opened her mouth to reply, when Gilda quickly waved a talon in her direction. She followed the hen off of their circle of carpet and into a corner, where Gilda leaned in close and shook her head.

“I don’t get it,” Twilight whispered, confused, “Won’t knowing Goldstone’s trying to start a bidding war between him and some third party make Gordon less likely to deal with him?”

“Maybe,” Gilda shrugged, “But him knowing that’d hurt you more, and Goldstone knows it. You really don’t get griffons, do you, boss? You’re an outsider, and kind of a nosy one too. A… what’s the word ponies use, a… a busybody. Gordon might not be happy with Goldstone, but he’s gonna hate you for sticking your fuzzy purple pony snout in his business and tripling the price on what should’ve been an easy sale.”

“Ah.” Twilight had always considered her snout more silky than fuzzy, but the griffon had a point. She turned back around to face Goldstone, stepped up to the table, and tried to keep her expression as neutral as possible.

It was about then that Rarity floated a neatly reconstructed puzzle box between them. “There. Good as new!” she explained to a wide-eyed Lord Goldstone, “It was just a matter of a few screws and pins; nothing compared to my regular designs.”

“Ah. Well, in that case!” The tiercel twisted slightly in his seat to look at Rarity, and the ice in his voice was suddenly replaced by honey, “I should probably inform you that I’m going to be hosting some of Innsbeak’s more influential citizens here at the manor two nights hence. I’ll send out a few feelers for property and capable foregriffs. You’re more than welcome to remain here until then, and I hope you haven’t forgotten our dinner date the day after!” Then the flexible sides of his beak compressed into a thin line. “As for you, Doctor Sparkle, it would be a shame to destroy a lucrative partnership such as ours over this sort of petty disagreement… so I’ll provide you with a bit of free advice- Perhaps Gordon might even be convinced to attend, assuming I have something he wants… but don’t try to approach him yourself, at the celebration or anywhere else. This isn’t the first time somepony from Canterlot’s tried to get ahold of his work, and neither he nor the staff he always brings with him on expeditions outside of the tower are very fond of intrusions on his scientific integrity. A good old-fashioned mages’ duel would certainly provide some excitement for my guests, but that trick with the carpet notwithstanding, I don’t think you’d be the one to come out on top. Surely your life and future career prospects are both worth more than thirty thousand bits, yes?” Then, quite unexpectedly, he turned to Gilda. “Oh, and mainlander? A tight little number in scarlet would really bring out the highlights in your crest, should you decide to make an appearance. Just a suggestion.”

Twilight wasn’t entirely certain how to respond to that. Judging by the confused stares Goldstone was receiving from Rainbow Dash, Gilda, and especially Rarity, the others weren’t having much better luck. So, instead, she simply turned around and strode back out into the hallway. Her friends followed a few seconds later, and they set out on what Twilight was reasonably sure she remembered as the path back to the guest rooms.

“So, uhh, why didn’t that seagriff just tear Goldstone a new one and be done with it?” Rainbow Dash asked once they were safely out of earshot.

“Fucker’s tougher than he looks,” Gilda explained, “He’s supposed to be, like, a classically-trained boxer and swordsgriff and shit. And even if that poor schlub could take Goldstone on in a one-on-one fight, without those guards getting involved, striking a noble would mean he's just dead, his family's dead, and his ship becomes just another Goldstone property. Really, he should be thanking Nemesis right now he ain’t limping down the hill back home, dragging his wings behind him.”

“When we’re done here, I think we oughta’ report this guy to somepony,” Twilight spoke the first thought to come into her head aloud, then scoffed, “Oh, yeah, but to whom? This asshole… really has no accountability whatsoever, does he?”

“Well,” Rarity suggested, quite primly, “there’s still the option for Equestria to invade…”

Twilight shook her head, and laughed, bitterly. “Right now, I wouldn’t mind if we did.” Then, after rounding another corner in silence, she spoke up one more time. “Whatever we need to do to steal that stupid skull out from under him, let’s just go ahead and do it.”

Fieldwork

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After his outburst in the study, Twilight was initially worried that Goldstone’s staff would refuse to show her the library, or otherwise look unkindly on her attempts to explore the mansion. However, when she asked the scrawny little serving-cockerel who’d come by to bring her lunch -‘library’ being one of the few words she knew in nearly every language- he’d just set aside his plate of fruit, nodded, and set off down the corridor. Perhaps Goldstone was worried that she’d go off wandering by herself if she didn’t get directions, or perhaps she was simply reading more strategy into the tiercel than he in fact possessed. Nonetheless, she felt safer with Gilda, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash all accompanying her.

She was pursuing something of a hunch, but a strong one. Based on the apparent age and quality of the amulet Lord Goldstone was now wearing, as well as the family crest of interlocking talons that made up its interior, Twilight suspected it was of some historical significance- which meant its properties might be written down somewhere. She just needed to find where.

The servant stopped in front of a door indistinguishable from the several others in this particular hallway, and silently pulled it open.

Twilight stepped inside and whistled softly to herself. The library was easily three stories tall, the last third built into a cupola extending above the rooftops of the rest of the manor. Shelves extended uninterrupted from the floor to the distant four-gabled ceiling- the winged griffons, of course, having little need for ladders or balconies. Above, glass panels vaguely reminiscent of those at Innsbeak Station -but in somewhat better condition- admitted watery sunlight from the gray afternoon sky. She pulled in a deep breath, savoring the musty smell of old paper and leather. Then she paused, and muttered “Oh, rut me, that’s black mold, isn’t it?”

Peering at the shelves more closely, Twilight noticed a distinct and alarming lack of organization. It was suddenly clear to her that the library was in fact several distinct libraries’ worth of books: shoved anywhere there was shelf space, packed in mildewy cardboard boxes, or simply stacked in leaning heaps on the floor.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “All right. Gilda and Rainbow, you’ll have to take the top half- I don’t think my telekinesis can reach that far, not accurately at least. Rarity, it’d be great if you could help me out with the bottom half.” Spotting their servant guide still lurking in the doorway, she lowered her voice, “If you see anything that looks like it might be remotely related to that amulet- a picture or drawing of it, or just a general book of heraldry or whatever, go ahead and bring it down to me.”

“You got it, boss.”

“My pleasure, darling.”

Rainbow Dash took wing, pulling her unkempt mane back into a passable imitation of Twilight’s more practical style. “Don’t worry, the Reading Rainbow’s on the case!”

Slightly, almost imperceptibly, Rarity winced.

Gilda just cackled, already in the air and on her way to the upper level, “Hehe, nerds.”

“Aww, shaddup,” Rainbow Dash admonished as she followed.

“Right.” Twilight began scanning the nearest assembly of titles. Most were in Ponish, luckily enough, and appeared to consist largely of reference books.The Grayson & Webber Ponish-Griffish Dictionary was a fortunate early find; ironically enough, Decline and Fall of the Griffon Empire accompanied it; and that in turn was next to the ubiquitous Encyclopedia Equestria’s 1090 edition. Looking further, Twilight selected a few authoritative texts dealing with the Lunar Rebellions- Princess Luna: A Biography, Mass Hysteria and the Lunar Cults, Equestrian Populism, and Corruption, Paralysis, and Revolution in the Late Council Period. All had been rendered staggeringly out of date by her own recent work, of course. But, after shooting another look at the servant still lurking in the doorway, she settled herself at a reading table and opened them anyway.

It was then that she noticed the pages had never been cut. Nogriff had ever read them. Typical.

She took a few meaningless notes, and then headed back to the shelves. A copy of the Luna Bay Fragment lay crumpled among a pile of other books, next to a vertical stack of art portfolios belonging to some noblegriff Twilight had never heard of. “I paid eight grand for this, and he just pitches it into a heap of moldy… what even are these, young adult novels?” she muttered, “Why are these here?”

Thinking better of exploration, she returned to her table and scribbled a few more notes, trying not to let her telekinesis flicker as her heart felt like it was about to burst out of her chest. It was strange, really, some disconnected part of her mind supposed- she hadn’t been nearly this nervous when she’d been sneaking around Lunar revenants that could easily have killed her back in Ponyville. That, though, was a matter of personal survival first and national defense a close second, and the stakes were incalculably high. This, however, was in preparation to rob a corrupt noblegriff, just to arrange a meeting with a different corrupt noblegriff, and Twilight simply didn’t feel the hero. Rather, she thought her situation was more comparable to Daring Do knocking over a fruit stand rather than paying for lunch. Which, given the explorer’s attitude towards property rights and lawful authority in general, would probably not be unexpected, but that was beside the point. What she was doing was important, certainly, but Twilight considered herself a pony who did things the proper way, and this did not seem at all proper. If her friends hadn’t been so enthusiastically supportive of robbing Goldstone, she doubted she’d even be entertaining it right now.

Looking up from the index of Princess Luna: A Biography, she decided that the servant at the doorway looked suitably bored by her woolgathering, so she turned back to the shelves and began hunting in earnest.

She scanned past Return to Form: Equestria’s Draconian Foreign Policy in the Modern and Pre-Rebellion Eras, Abyssinia on Trial, and Dragons and the Dragonlands, followed by a host of other jingoistic titles that rambled against the hippogriffs, dragons, zebras, and most especially the Abyssinians. She wasn’t sure what else she’d been expecting. Then, to her surprise, she spotted a few undecorated leather covers mixed in among a pile of horrendously overwrought romance novels. Vaguely curious, Twilight extracted one from in between Hoard of the Dragon Prince and A Long Night In Las Pegasus and flipped it open, revealing lines of numbers with brief Griffish annotations- a ledger, or perhaps some sort of logbook.

Quietly, she waved a hoof and motioned for Rarity to join her. The tailor cantered over, scanned the text for around ten seconds while idly adjusting the curl of her mane, and then nodded. “These look like accounts books,” she whispered, “quarterly reports on all the intakes and expenditures of House Goldstone. This one’s about two hundred and fifty years old.”

Twilight nodded. “I’m a little surprised these were out in the open,” she whispered back, “I’d think that kind of information could be pretty damaging in the wrong talons… or hooves.”

“Well, we are in Goldstone’s private library, darling. It’s not like anygriff off the street can just walk up and check them out for some easy blackmail… oh, and, Twilight, would you mind passing me that dictionary?”

“Right.”

Twilight waited, shuffling her hooves nervously as Rarity scanned through ledger after ledger, Grayson & Webber floating off to one side, for a little over five minutes. Then she smiled, flipped around the book she was holding, and tapped at one line in particular with a spare quill.

“Wedding… gift… honor… Geraldine the Fifth,” Twilight read, making frequent detours to the dictionary, “Medallion… gold… protective? Is that ‘five thousand guilders’ written next to it an estimate of how much it was originally worth?”

Silently, Rarity nodded.

“Good work.”

“I’ll put these back the way they were when we found them. Keep looking,” the tailor muttered, and set about reconstructing the pile as best she could.

Twilight, for her part, circled the lower levels once more, looking for any texts that might’ve had something to do with Geraldine V or, more specifically, her marriage. The first three books of heraldry and genealogy she consulted proved to be dead ends, although Twilight did learn that Geraldine V had consolidated House Goldstone’s hold over the Innsbeak fishing industry, that she’d died in some sort of jousting accident while entertaining a Chicoltgo industrialist, and had caused some scandal by marrying a commoner- although, presumably, not in that order.

She struck pay dirt in the fourth book: a critical volume documenting House Goldstone’s patronage of the arts, commissioned -of course- by Geraldine V herself. It contained a detailed, full-page drawing of the amulet, complete with a written description of its security enchantment on the facing page.

Twilight copied down both as accurately as she could, and tucked the pages in among some of her notes on radion, counting on the dense technical language to deter casual inspection. Then she returned to her pointless Lunar research for what she thought was a suitable period, and finally asked for herself and her friends to be shown back to the guest wing.

Dinner that night was smaller and much less awkward, consisting of more tinned fruit shared between the four visitors in Twilight’s room.

“Twilight?” Rarity asked, after perhaps ten minutes of dining in silence.

The other unicorn closed her copy of Who Lies Sleeping and set it aside. “Mmhmm?”

“Are you sure it’s… well, safe for us to be staying here? Now that Goldstone really, truly doesn’t like us?”

Gilda nodded. “I think so, yeah. He still wants to set up that textile mill shit with you, and I bet he thinks he can squeeze full price for that stupid skull out of Twilight, too. He wouldn’t’ve invested so much money into us if he didn’t think he could get something out of it. Plus, Twilight's still paying for us to stay here, which includes this... perfectly generic dinner." Gilda poked at her cold curried peaches in demonstration.

Rainbow Dash smiled a school-photo smile, somewhat undercut by the fact that her mouth was stuffed full of apple slices. “Aww, you mean he ain’t fallin’ for your charming personality?”

Gilda visibly lurched backwards, retching dramatically. “Fuck, Dash, I can do better than that! Scrawny fucker’s all beak and no crest, on top of being a complete and utter douchebag.”

The pegasus waved a hoof in front of her and chuckled, “Aw, you'd be perfect for each other!”

Gilda broke into a low, quiet laugh. “Fuck you, Dash.”

“Anyway,” Twilight addressed a somewhat wide-eyed Rarity, “We’re also all Equestrian citizens… or at least long-term residents,” she looked over to Gilda, and the big tan hen nodded. “And that counts for a lot abroad. If Goldstone was going to try to kill us, or lock us up or something else violent, he’d have to be a hundred percent sure Equestrian Strategic Services couldn’t trace it back to him- otherwise, he’d just be painting a target on his back. Ponies’d tryto trace it back to him, too- I don’t remember, like, names or anything, but Shiny’s told me a lot of higher-ups in the military are always looking for excuses to throw their weight around on ‘interventions’.”

She took another bite of apricot, paused to make sure she’d remembered all of her facts properly, and continued, “That’s actually how Goldstone’s maternal grandfather Gerald XI died. He’d had some two-bit cattle trader from Foaledo arrested, I think for starting a bar fight or something stupid like that. The Wonderbolts got sent in to spring her from jail, and the Equestrian Consulate put a bounty on his head.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember hearing about that,” Gilda paused, then chuckled again, “A way bigger force was gearing up in Trottingham to follow the ‘Bolts across the border. Army and airships and the whole nine yards. Equestria probably would’ve invaded, for real, to stay, if a couple of… heroic mainland bounty hunters hadn’t gone ahead and slit the old fucker’s throat. In his bedroom. In the middle of the night.”

There was a moment of incredulous silence.

“This really is a miserable place, isn’t it?” Rarity finally said.

“Yeah, actually I dunno why we didn’t just invade and get it over with,” Rainbow Dash spoke up, “It’s not like anygriff here could put up much of a fight, not against the Equestrian Army.”

Twilight nodded. “There’s a lot of ponies in the government who feel the same way, just for a lot of different reasons.”

“Huh.” Gilda just cocked her head, “I always thought you'd justify it as a way to make everything suck less, you know, ‘equinitarian reasons’ or whatever. That, and whoever holds Innsbeak gets a cut of every customs charge, shipping fee, tariff, and bold-faced bribe for goods coming and going from the mainland.”

“That’s true for some ponies, yes,” Twilight amended, “the sapient rights mission idea, I mean, I don’t think anypony’d admit to wanting to take bribes. But they’re mostly private citizens and activists, not the ponies who actually work in the government. That goes double for the military, where you’re a lot more likely to get ‘ponies first’ types, like Defense Minister Wind Rider. They’re more interested in taking Innsbeak out to cut down on griffon immigration into Equestria.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Gilda nodded, “With the right tailwind, you can fly over here from the mainland… well, if you’re lucky, and if what passes for a harbor patrol around here doesn’t shoot you down first. Then, once you’re here, if you’ve got the money for a train ticket it’s an easy ride into into Trottingham. I mean, what’re ponies gonna do if they arrest you, toss you in a heated cell and feed you twice a day? Lotta griffons’d kill for that kinda’ treatment.” She scratched underneath her beak with one talon. “But turning the whole island into a shoot-on-sight no-fly zone under the military… yeah, that’d shut things down pretty quick. Ponies are better shots, and they don’t take bribes.”

“This is a pretty strategic location, too, if you were trying to push on into mainland Griffonia,” added Rainbow Dash, “Tartarus, not just Griffonia… there’s a pretty straight shot from here right down to the Dragonlands, and a good launching point into Zebrica too.”

Twilight nodded. “Of course, there’s also a lot of more extreme nativists out there who don’t like the idea of occupying foreign territories at all. In their minds, that just means more griffons living alongside ponies, and pony soldiers risking their lives for foreigners. Then the sapient-rights activists are pretty broken up, too- some of them like the idea of ‘saving’ all the griffons here from House Goldstone and its various flunkies, and some of them just don’t like the idea of using military force at all, for any reason, ever. If the different pro-war factions could just work together they could probably put enough pressure on Celestia to authorize military action, but they all hate each other more than they hate the moderates so… I’m rambling again, aren’t I?”

“A little, yeah,” said Rainbow Dash.

“Basically, all of it boils down to shit being fucked,” added Gilda, “and nopony's gonna do anything about it.”

A few more minutes of silence followed after that, not uncomfortably. Then Rarity spoke up again. “Do you think Goldstone blames Equestria? For the whole affair with his grandfather, I mean, on top of whatever political reasons he might have to distrust ponies? Or do you think he respects the, ah, the ‘hustle’?”

Twilight didn't bother following up to clarify if ‘the hustle’ meant Equestria nearly invading a strategic port city under flimsy pretenses, or arranging the murder of Gerald XI; she suspected the answer was 'yes'.

Gilda chuckled again. “I think whatever grudge he might have against ponies, and whatever political reasons he might have too, are inversely proportional to however many bits are coming into his city at any given moment.”

“You’re probably right,” Twilight stood up, and telekinetically assembled their plates and silverware into a neat stack on the end table near the door. Then, she circled the room, muttering cantrips to detect divination and nearby eavesdroppers. When none were found, she stopped in each corner and laid out a simple silencing enchantment. “Okay. Okay, that takes care of anygriff who might walk by. Are you girls ready?”

Three heads nodded in synchrony. “Alright, boss,” Gilda asked, “whaddaya got?”

Twilight stuffed her copy of Who Lies Sleeping into the saddlebags slung over the back of her chair, then extracted her sketch of Goldstone’s amulet. She dropped it in the center of the table. “Based on what I was able to research, this amulet used to be attuned to a system of wards all around the Goldstone estate, to detect burglars and things like that. Any attempt to exert a spell from outside, to affect anything inside, would not only be absorbed and attenuated by the wards, but also transmit a minute amount of power to the amulet. A similar process would occur if anything living passed through the wards’ field of influence. That energy, in turn, would cause the gem in the center to luminesce and vibrate audibly until it was deliberately discharged. A competent diviner could even sample the traces of the spell left on the gem to learn information about the intruder, or magically affect them at range. Finally, a second enchantment was set up to sink the ambient mana the wards would always be collecting, and engage if that ever cut off- a different alarm that went off if the wards were broken. All very impressive for the Ninth Century, if rather unsafe going up against modern high-thauma or fractal replication spells.”

Rainbow Dash shook her head as if to clear it. “So, it sounds like what you’re saying through all that egghead-ese is that you can’t cast spells on the house, you can’t go inside yourself, and you basically can’t mess with the security at all. If you do, it sets off an alarm?”

“Essentially, yes.” Twilight nodded, and smiled her best schoolteacher smile. “Now, the Goldstone estate’s expanded significantly since Geraldine V’s day, and the original wards are long gone- modern magic could get past them without too much trouble, anyway. So I bet, what Goldstone had that University mage do, was rebind the enchantments that were already on the amulet. She attuned it to a new set of modern wards, right around the skull, with the same reception behavior. Those wards are maintained by the chalk circles Rainbow and Gilda saw this morning- if you’d gotten a better look and written down the inscriptions, I could say for sure.”

Gilda opened her mouth to protest, but Twilight raised a hoof in objection, and continued. “However, what I just outlined is also the absolute cheapest way Goldstone could reasonably get the amulet functioning again, so I’m pretty confident that’s indeed what he did.”

Gilda’s beak closed again, and she snickered good-naturedly.

“Rarity,” the scholar asked, “Do you think you could put together a replica of that amulet that’s physically similar enough to fool Goldstone?”

Rarity picked up the drawing in her telekinesis, turning it this way and that. Then she nodded. “I wish it hadn’t come to that; one of them is gaudy enough… and I’ll need some additional supplies… but, yes, I don’t see why not. If we plan to stay here, I’ll need to go down into the city and pick up some raw materials, regardless- I don’t think any of you thought to bring along outfits appropriate for a formal reception like what Goldstone’s planning.” She paused and made a little huff noise. “Tweed and elbow patches, Twilight. Really!"

Rainbow Dash snickered quietly, and the tailor instantly rounded on her. “And I shudder to think of what ‘tacticool’ nightmare you brought, Rainbow!”

Twilight shrugged in her seat, and continued. “Good. Once we have a physical fake, I can apply the same enchantments to it, then attune it to a similar ward circle here. Assuming we can switch out the fake amulet for the real one at some point before we make our move for the skull, we’ll be able to just walk through Goldstone’s original wards, or scratch them out, and he won’t know any different.” Twilight extracted a quill for the specific purpose of playing with it in her telekinesis. “Hmm…Do you think he sleeps with that thing on?”

“If he sleeps at all… but I bet I can get up to Goldstone at the party and make the switch while he’s awake,” Gilda spoke up. She stretched, somewhat theatrically, and her outstretched wing briefly hovered over Twilight’s back. Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, the unicorn leaned forward. “I used to palm food and money offa’ griffons back home all the time…” with a theatrical flourish, she waved Twilight’s copy of Who Lies Sleeping about in one talon. Incredulous, the unicorn looked over at her saddlebags, and found Rainbow Dash’s Sapphire: Equestrian Commando comic where the book had been tucked. “Haven’t lost my touch. Goldstone’s gonna be more of a challenge, of course, ‘cause there’ll be more eyes on him, but if I act falling-down drunk and bump into him it shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Actually, that’s a good way to get us out of there and into the rest of the mansion,” added Rainbow Dash, “Gilda makes a scene, and then I can volunteer to take her back to our rooms. We both know the way back to the chapel, and I bet with the both of us on it we can handle those four guards quick, clean, and quiet enough not to attract any attention.”

Twilight nodded. “Impressive.”

“I’ll stay near Goldstone, and make sure he doesn’t have a chance to notice the amulet, or that anything else is amiss,” Rarity chimed in, “And since I’m already outfitting the both of you, I suppose I might as well sew in a few interior pockets, for the fake amulet and any reasonably compact weapons you might need…” she shot a warning look across the table, “that means no wingblades or charger’s sabres, Rainbow.” Then she turned to Twilight, “But… what do you suppose we do about the box? I don’t want to risk it being too heavy to carry, or stuck in place, and I can’t exactly forge the key for it along with the amulet… unless you want to go back to the library again?”

“I doubt there’s documentation there,” Twilight replied, “but we don’t need it. With the amulet out of commission, if you can just disrupt the wards -scuffing out one of the chalk lines should be sufficient, we’re lucky Goldstone didn’t have time for anything more permanent- then, if I can get just maybe ten or twenty minutes off by myself…” the scholar paused, and looked over at Rarity, who quietly nodded, “with some equipment available at pretty much any magic shop… I can scry on the skull and arrange a long-distance teleport without ever opening its container.”

Rainbow Dash looked at her, wide-eyed, and whistled. “You can do that?”

“Well, usually I can’t. But between having significant prep time, knowledge of the skull’s approximate location to center some basic divinations, and the fact that it’s reasonably small… I’m pretty sure I can pull it off.”

“So, why not come with us, then?” Gilda asked, “An extra blaster’d come in pretty handy, and it’d be way faster to teleport the skull out of the box if you were looking right at it… right?”

“Actually, Gilda, it wouldn’t,” Twilight explained, “The instrumentation needed is the same whenever I’m trying to teleport anything without myself as the departing terminus, and I wouldn’t have the luxury of setting it up in a safe place ahead of time- it’s not something I can pull out of my saddlebags, we’re talking about a mercury-filled scrying dish and calibrated pattern amplifiers here.”

“But we know the… the what are they called, the dimensions, though,” Gilda slid her talons along the flat surfaces of an imaginary cube, “so just teleporting everything inside the box, to a, say, half-inch margin should get the skull, and whatever packing material it's in.”

Now feeling vaguely insulted, Twilight sucked in a long breath. “That’s really not how teleportation works, Gilda. The zero-scale manifolds aren’t uniform, there’s… ‘hills’ and ‘valleys’, I guess you could call them, of expanded and contracted subspace that distort the bilocational envelope. It’s like…” she cast around mentally for her Introductory Liminology notes, “imagine the Material Plane is a stretchy rubber sheet, and the box with the skull is a square drawn on it in marker. Now stretch that sheet over an uneven surface- the square won’t stay square anymore, will it? The teleportation spell will only naturally compensate for those irregularities when the arcanetic barycenter -me, the caster- is inside the envelope. Otherwise, I need my instruments.” Gilda raised one talon and opened her mouth to reply, but Twilight kept on going. “And before you ask, no, I can’t just shear off the pedestal the box is on and teleport the whole thing. That ratty old carpet outside Goldstone’s study is pretty much the absolute upper limit on what kind of solid matter a teleport can effectively sever. You’ll notice I didn’t also bring any of the floor along? Anything too rigidly affixed to any object outside the envelope, or too enclosed in such an object, stays behind.”

Rainbow Dash cocked her head and squinted, mouth moving soundlessly for a few seconds before she asked, “Wait. So… you mean… you can’t just teleport somepony’s head off their body?”

“Believe me, I have tried.”

“Could we just take the box off-”

“Gilda, whatever you’re thinking, it’s not going to work because you clearly don’t have a sufficient understanding of the liminology involved here!” Twilight snapped.

“And even if we could move the box to a safe location, and it isn’t bolted in place,” Rarity spoke up for the first time since they had begun arguing, “we still need twenty minutes at least to open it, and there's no guarantee that nogriff will pass by the chapel and notice the guards are gone!”

The griffon shrugged, seemingly unperturbed. “Okay, so, new plan. I’ll just swipe the keyring at the same time I’m switching the amulet, open the box, and grab the skull that way.”

Rarity shook her head “I can’t make a fake key because I don’t know exactly what it looks like, and Goldstone could easily notice the real one is missing!”

“So, we just leave a ring of slugs or random keys instead!” Gilda shrugged again, “It’s not like Goldstone’s gonna count the teeth on ‘em in the middle of his big fuck-off party or whatever…”

Twilight shook her head. “No, I… I really don’t think that’s worth the risk. The pickpocketing is already the most dangerous part of this plan, and I don’t want to make that two pickpocketings. We need to keep our interactions with Goldstone to an absolute minimum, so we shouldn’t even bother with the key and I can just teleport the skull.”

“Hey, now, boss, I’m sure I can get both.” Gilda braced both arms against the table, pushing herself up to a half-standing bipedal position. It was at about that point that Twilight was reminded how physically large the griffon was. “And you’re saying you’ll need… what, thirty minutes to do your weird magic thing? Twenty at least? The key to a successful burglary is timing. I don't want my ass hanging out in the breeze for twenty fuckin’ minutes.”

“Twilight, I think Gilda’s got a point,” Rainbow muttered, shifting awkwardly in her chair, “All this magic stuff… that’s what sounds risky to me. I think we should go for the key.”

Rarity shook her head. “No… Gilda, darling, I’m sorry, but… I don’t know if we can pull that off. The less time any of you have to spend around Goldstone, the better. I’m sure I can keep him from noticing Twilight’s even gone, but he’ll be paying dreadfully close attention to those keys. I’m with Twilight.”

“Yeah,” the scholar muttered, “and Goldstone knows I’m the one who hired you, Gilda. I know enough about griffons to know that means it’s my ass on the line here if this all goes south.”

“Yeah, well, it’s my ass, too!” snapped Gilda, “You think those guards’re gonna care who hired who when they start swinging swords around?”

“It's all our asses, which just means we can't cock it up!” shouted Rainbow Dash. Rarity arched a single, elegantly-styled eyebrow. “Sorry, sorry, the local slang’s kinda’ infectious.”

Twilight looked from Rarity, to Rainbow Dash, to Gilda as the silence drew out into a long, strained pause. Then she sat back down and crossed her forelegs on the table- she hadn’t even noticed she was standing up half-out of her chair. “Listen, Gilda, I understand your concerns, but if there’s one thing I know about in this world, it’s magic. I think teleportation is our best shot, and I’m the one who’s paying you. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

That seemed to make some impact on the griffon. She also sat back down, and quietly nodded.

“If Goldstone’s even paying attention to me at all during the party, I’ll grab some bacon or something and fake sick. I’ll have everything set up and ready to go right here in my room. Goldstone won’t even know the skull is gone until it shows up in Gordon’s collection, courtesy of his new friends from Equestria.”

Gilda nodded again, and gave a low whistle. “Shit. So, I guess we’re actually doing this, then.”

Grinning, Rainbow jabbed a hoof into her shoulder. “Just like old times, huh? ‘Where making this hapen’?”

“Yeah. Yeah, RD, I guess we are.”

“Are you sure you’re gonna be okay on your own?” Gilda asked Rarity the next morning.

“I think I can handle myself well enough,” the tailor replied, “I’m going back to the upper city, and this time I know to lead with the right hook, and leave the guards out of it"

Gilda, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash stood on grimy cobblestones, worn down by centuries of paw- and hoof-traffic, in the center of Innsbeak’s famous -or, perhaps, infamous- portside markets. Around them stretched a sea of faded canvas awnings separated by freestanding stone walls in no discernible pattern. Griffons hawked everything from exotic liquors to children’s toys- Gilda even spotted a fresh fruit stand, one of only three she’d ever encountered in the city. Even just after sunrise the place was crowded: mostly by griffons and a few desperate-looking ponies, rounded out by creatures from even farther afield. The scent of unwashed bodies, mixed with smoke and spices and alcohol and the omnipresent salty-fishy odor of the harbor, hung in the air under a pearl-gray sky.

“If, uhh, if you say so,” Rainbow Dash told Rarity. “We could probably just grab the stuff you and Twilight need ourselves.”

“No offense, Rainbow, darling, but I’m afraid I’m the only one here who could tell a jeweler's hammer from a rubber mallet. I’d really rather not get us all ripped off… again.” The tailor shifted her saddlebags, which Gilda abruptly realized resembled nothing other than a set of tackle-box containers of the type used by outdoorsponies and handymares, upholstered in a fetching floral print. “I’m halfway to a full toolset anyway. Most of my designs involve threading and setting gems, so I never travel without.”

Gilda reached out with one talon and twisted the notebook floating near Rarity’s head so that she could read it properly. Then she cocked her head, confused. “What even is a ‘loupe’, anyway? I figured a classy mare like you’d at least know how to spell…”

Rainbow Dash snickered, but the tailor just nodded politely. “Oh, and, before I go, I do want to run by you what you’ll be wearing at the party,” she flipped to another page in her notebook, revealing a collection of drawings of what appeared to be ballgowns.

Gilda didn’t feel remotely qualified to say the first thing about how any of them looked, but she realized each would be surprisingly light and allow for considerable freedom of movement. They were, however, somewhat overly elaborate in cut. “Could you maybe make something, uhh… smaller?” she suggested. “And in black. Black’s kind of important.”

“Oh, of course,” Rarity nodded again. “You can’t go wrong with the little black dress. Oh, but, I don’t want us all to be wearing the same thing…” She trailed off, staring at a point somewhere above Gilda’s left shoulder. “Now, what colors wouldn't clash with the highlighter-yellow carpet? And there'll undoubtedly be lots of gold jewelry and accessories, maybe something in silver, to contrast? Twilight will be easy enough, but Rainbow Dash… What in Tartarus goes well with that mane? Black, white, or scarlet, I suppose, but I don't see her going for scarlet…” The tailor tucked away her notebook and set off back towards the hill in the center of town, seemingly without a care in the world.

Gilda shot Rainbow Dash another skeptical look. “You’re absolutely sure she’s gonna be okay on her own?”

“Gil, did you see her take out that creep at the train station?” the pegasus answered, “She beat down a couple Lunar soldiers and a manticore in the Everfree, too, just with her telekinesis.”

“… huh. Your friends continue to surprise me.” Gilda paused, then shook her head. “But she wouldn’t wanna go where we’re going, anyway. She’s probably safer away from it, too. You, uhh, you grabbed your wingblades like I told you too, right?”

“Yeah.” Rainbow tapped the duffle bag slung at her side with one wing, producing a characteristic rattle of steel sliding against steel.

“Then put ‘em on and follow me.”

Navigating as much by intuition and the attitude of the crowd as by memory, Gilda led the way through ever-denser sections of the market. The maze-like stone walls grew taller and closer together, the stalls less colorful, and both the merchants and customers moreso. Along with griffons, and more and more ponies, she and Rainbow Dash found themselves shouldering past zebras, hippogriffs, and Abyssinians. At one point they even passed a strangely-proportioned biped completely covered in a hooded cloak, which Gilda suspected might’ve been an adolescent dragon. Many of the customers were discreetly or indiscreetly armed, and the wares on display had taken a turn from innocuous and cheap to decidedly lethal. Arms and armor were the single most common items on display; although drugs -hard and recreational- were a close second. A collective majority of the remaining stalls offered antiquities of dubious pedigree, gold and gemstones, and assorted magical contraptions Gilda couldn’t even begin to put a name to.

“I guess you could call this the ‘black market’,” she explained to Rainbow Dash, practically shouting to make herself heard over the constant babble of the crowd, “if there was ever a white market in Innsbeak, anyway.” She waved at the occasional flash of yellow barding visible through the crowd, as city troops stood idly on watch or made purchases themselves. “Most of the arms merchants here deal in bulk and just keep a few weapons out to show what they’re offering, but they’ll be happy to sell the display pieces as long as we’re paying good bits for ‘em.”

Rainbow Dash followed along at Gilda’s side, head constantly swiveling from one stall to the next. She whistled as they passed a group of harpies in roughspun militia uniforms, poking and prodding at a collection of old-fashioned Royal Guard helmets repainted camouflage green. Gilda tried to keep up with the papers back in Equestria -as best she could given her itinerant work schedule- and figured they were likely dissatisfied with the recent ceasefire Princess Celestia had brokered between Minos and the Parrot Isles.

“Okay, see, now this is more what I was expecting when Twilight said we were going to Innsbeak to cut a deal with somegriff,” the pegasus said.

“Yeah, I used to spend a lotta’ time down here, looking for fun ways to spend those extra scholarship bits,” Gilda nodded, and then clapped her friend on the shoulder. “Just follow my lead and don’t say or do anything threatening. You’ve got Equestrian wingblades, so nogriff’s gonna think you’re easy to shake down, but that won’t get you too far if you start pissing off any of the serious buyers, like those harpies over there.” As if to underscore Gilda’s point, the leader of the group -a tall green-and-white hen with a Captain’s insignia on her uniform and a funny-looking metal brace wrapped around her left foot- dropped the helmet she was holding, and brandished a wicked-looking cutlass at the skinny griffon who’d been lurking behind her, one talon creeping towards her pocket.

“Gotcha.” Rainbow continued walking in silence for a little while, and then flicked out a wing at a pile of open crates labeled ‘EQUESTRIAN NAVY’, loaded with dogfighting gear. “Hey, I had a set of those flight goggles when I was, like, fifteen!” She paused, and peered closer, “Actually, I mail-ordered a lot of this stuff, outta’ surplus catalogs!” Then she whistled as they passed another open weapons crate. "Wait, is that the IL85? Boreas, it's the A1 pattern, that was a horrible crossbow!”

“Lotta’ this stuff actually comes down from Trottingham,” Gilda explained as she dragged Rainbow away from the display. She didn’t like the look of the gray leopard-spotted Abyssinian running it, and judging by his expression he didn’t like the look of them either. “It’s all outdated- or expired, for the combat drugs. Second-hoof stuff, but if it’s pony-made it always fetches a pretty good price.”

Rainbow cocked her head, “Wait, the what now?”

“This is naval gear, for airship crews," Gilda explained, genuinely surprised by her friend's inability to grasp the obvious, “Bennies for the Marines, dexy for the sailors. I wouldn't touch the stuff, though. Who knows how old it is.”

“Uh huh…”

Gilda gave the stalls one last look, before shuffling deeper into the market. She was convinced that a nearby beige-coated mare with a pink-and-blue mane was eyeing her up, although to what end was unclear.

Finally, she spotted a set of plywood tables arranged in a rough semicircle and filled with various items made from heavy black cloth. It was overseen by a zebra mare covered in equal measure by scars and heavy brass jewelry, who looked up as soon as the griffon approached.

“You got softpaw boots and blackfeather powder?” Gilda asked in Ponish. One tended to get somewhat better deals when one spoke the language used by influential foreigners.

The zebra nodded, mutely. She slid forward first a set of black, thickly-padded cotton slippers, and then a tarnished metal tin- according to its label, it had once held preserved herring.

Gilda cracked it open and confirmed that the powder inside was both sticky enough and dark enough to effectively black out a patch of feathers on her chest, then strapped on one of the boots and found it to be a decent enough fit.

“Seventy bits, or a hundred and thirty ducats if you’ve got ‘em,” the zebra rattled off in a thick South Farisian accent. Abyssinian ducats were accepted just about anywhere in the Known World, but one couldn’t go wrong with Equestrian bits, especially in Innsbeak. Guilders weren’t even entertained in this part of the market, and offering them was a good way to get oneself either laughed out of the district, or sliced to pieces and dumped in the harbor.

Gilda was fairly confident she could haggle the zebra down to two thirds her asking price, and opened her mouth to say so, when Rainbow flicked out a bladed wing and tossed all seventy bits onto the counter.

Both Gilda and the zebra stared, open-mouthed.

Rainbow Dash just shrugged. “Hey, as long as it comes out to less than what it’d take to just buy the skull, Twilight’s gonna be happy, right?”

“Sure. Fine.” Gilda turned back to the still somewhat goggle-eyed pawnbroker, and waved a talon side-to-side in a warning gesture. “None of this better get back to anygriff, you hear me?”

The zebra laughed, brass trinkets rattling. “What kind of shop do you think I run, here?”

“Good answer.” They kept on walking.

“All right, good. Now, what about NVG’s,” Rainbow asked.

Gilda briefly pulled to a halt, and cocked her head in bafflement. “What the fuck are ‘Envy-Gees’?”

“Oh. Night-vision goggles,” her friend explained, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, “I had a great pair of Wizard’s Peak AN/PVS-7 Obsidians, to go with the PEQ-2 luminous sight and PAS-13 mini thaumoscope, but then that creepy Shadowbolt broke them when he headbutted me and the replacements take like six months to ship.” The pegasus grinned, “They’re custom-built and enchanted, you know.”

“Griffons can see in the dark. In fact, the guards’d be able to see those big glowing lenses before you’d see them. Shitcan it.”

“Okay, what about tac-comms? We’ll need-”

“Two taps, corner’s clear. Three taps, quiet retreat. If you hear me running, haul ass too.”

“Alright. Alright. Umm… what else? Weapons!” Rainbow led the way to a nearby stand, and pointed her hoof at an open chest. Inside, Gilda could just make out some sort of monstrous amalgamation of cable, crystal, and rune-inscribed metal tubes that glowed faintly with an actinic blue light. It still managed to be vaguely crossbow-shaped, despite the presence of at least three different sighting scopes, a miniature crystal spotlight, a serrated bayonet, and some sort of big underbarrel cylinder of utterly unclear function. “That’s an ArcSpray 200-L,” the pegasus explained, almost breathless with excitement, “The ‘L’ stands for ‘Landsknecht Issue,’ but most of the ponies who use these are Guard hunter-killer squads in the Arimaspi Desert. It’s guaranteed to put down a griffon, it’s one of the more quiet models, and it’s got a four-charge chamber for extended use. Whaddaya think?”

Gilda shook her head. “Nah, too clunky. Grab a rolling pin.”

“A… what?” Now it was the pegasus’s turn to stare in confusion, “Is that some kinda’ slang or something?”

“Nope, just a solid hickory rolling pin. You know, for baking. And also cracking non-paying customers’ skulls.”

“Um, okay…” Rainbow looked rather nonplussed, but continued, “You know what? I'm me. I fought Nightmare Moon. I won, because I'm that good. I think we can handle some bored rent-a-cops hoof-to-claw. So… camouflage. Gilda, you, uhh, go first.”

“Well, I guess that’s mostly Rarity’s job now, but, a nice flowing black dress would blend in with the party, and also break up our outlines and help out in the shadows. Nothing too poofy, though, and no loud fabrics. The powder’ll cover everything the dress can’t. Oh, and you’ll want a hat, I can see that stupid mane of yours from Hyperborea…”

“… my parents offered me a five-thousand-bit loan, right after I started buying bulk fabric, but I didn’t think it was necessary,” Rarity explained, “although they did insist they pay for college.”

She and Twilight sat at opposite ends of the little dining table in Twilight’s guest room. Twilight’s half was covered in chalk circles, pages full of calculations, and copper-and-glass scrying equipment; Rarity’s with her jeweler's tools and piles of gems and fine gold stock.

“Please be aware I don’t mean anything by this,” said Twilight, “but… I didn’t actually know you’d been to college. What’d you study?”

“Small business management, with minors in accounting and geology.”

Twilight finished another small magic circle, squinted at it critically, and scuffed out a few runes with the frog of her hoof. “Huh. I would’ve guessed, you know, design. Also, can you pass me that red chalk on the end table? And do you know when Dash and Gilda might be coming back?”

“They went off by themselves not long after we got to the market, and that was the last I saw of them. I only had to stop at two or three stores on my way back to the upper district, and I think they were after quite a bit of equipment, so I suspect they’ll be a while yet. Oh, and design always came naturally to me,” Rarity continued as she floated over the appropriate implement and went back to pressing inscriptions into a warm gold band, “so I didn’t really see the point. Ponyville University is quite affordable, especially for locals, so it wasn’t as though my parents paid for Oxenford or Bayle or something… Twilight, can you hold the other end of this?” she asked, extending a length of gold wire in her telekinesis.

The scholar did as she was told, quietly impressed.

“… and since I worked full-time during college, I was able to graduate with enough money to buy the Boutique myself. My parents can be… embarrassing, sometimes, especially my mother, but they mean well. I just wish they’d take more of a hoof in raising Sweetie Belle instead of leaving her at the Boutique all the time -she’s just as much their daughter as I am, after all. They weren’t gallivanting off and leaving me with my grandparents when I was her age, but then Father read some book that said ten-through-twelve-year-olds need space, and that was the end of that… Twilight, have you seen the three-sixteenths needle I had?”

“Oh, sorry, I was using it as a replacement ground probe, here…” Twilight paused, and blinked. “Wait, Sweetie Belle’s your sister?”

Rarity snickered. “Who do you think she was, then? Some street urchin living in my shop?”

“… I actually thought she was your daughter?”

The tailor carefully set her tools down, and then broke into open laughter. “I know it’s been a while since my last spa visit, but, ouch!”

Twilight cocked her head, utterly confused. “What? You’ve been running your own business for years, so you have to be what, twenty-eight or thirty, right? Older than I am, certainly.”

Rariy just grinned a little wider. “… Twilight. I’m twenty-four.”

“… Oh. Well, you… certainly look it?”

Both ponies worked in silence for a few more minutes, and then Rarity spoke up again. “Twilight?”

“Mmmhmm?”

“If you thought Sweetie Belle was my daughter… who did you think her father was?”

Very briefly, Twilight’s chalk paused in her telekinetic field. “I have no idea, and I wasn't going to ask. You weren't bringing it up, and Spike hasn't mentioned anything, but between Everfree Forest, and all the dangerous stuff out in the swamps on the edge of town, and the stress of running a small business..." She trailed off, realizing she had no idea where she’d been taking the conversation.

“Twilight?”

“Mmmhmm?”

“I think it’d be best if you stopped talking now.”

“… yeah, you’re probably right. Oh, and can you pass me the amulet?”

“Of course.”

“Good,” Twilight floated it into the center of the spell circle, “It’ll need to sit here for about three hours, and then it should be attuned. That way, when-” She was cut off by a sudden banging on the door- hooves or talons, it was impossible to tell. “Shit. We need to hide-”

“Already have you covered,” Rarity extracted a bolt of some sort of black, iridescent fabric from her saddlebags against the wall, and telekinetically draped it over the whole of the table. “… so to speak?”

At about the same time, she heard a familiar voice call through the door, “Girls, it’s uhh, it’s Rainbow…?”

The pegasus sounded shaky and nervous. When Twilight slid back the deadbolt and pulled the door open, the scholar noted with some alarm that she was also wearing her pair of stainless-steel wingblades. She stumbled inside and dropped a rather full-looking duffle bag on the carpet. “Look, I don’t wanna, you know, alarm anypony, but there’s… uhh… been kind of a problem. Gilda’s… well, Gilda’s… she kinda just got arrested?”

Author's Notes:

On the subject of dragons and the concealment thereof:

“Pria Jesu Domine, mothafuckas!!”

The Wonderbolts are interesting because they don’t actually have an IRL military analogue. They’re dogfighters without vehicles, so they can go places and do things that IRL fighter squadrons would be completely unable to- a combination of a conventional air force and paratroopers, but also able to leave by the same aerial route they came from. In a hostage recovery like this, for instance, most of them would remain airborne, keeping their airspace clear, while a few go to ground, break out the captive, and get her to safety (on some kind of stretcher or saddle if she was unable to fly herself). Short of an ultra-long-range Academy teleportation experiment, they’re really the ultimate option for rapid insertion or extraction of anything not unreasonably large.

The “marines” Gilda mentions don’t constitute an official Marine Corps, but are instead general infantrymares with additional boarding and landing training- subsections of the Equestrian Army and Royal Guard on the same level as combat engineers, reconnaissance, or other specialized troops. While the Royal Guard takes a lot of inspiration from the United States Marine Corps in terms of its culture, it was never exclusively a naval-infantry force (although Guard marines do exist, alongside Guard sappers, Guard scouts, and a bunch of other specialties).

If one is being entirely pragmatic, there is ultimately little reason for the Guard to exist as an entire branch separate from the Equestrian Army, but its long history of higher standards and tougher training makes it -at least in the minds of its members- quite distinct.

Now that we’ve had a small taste here, at some point I totally want to do a story that’s a full-scale heist in the Extended Cut world. Canonically, Twilight’s Seven, Viva Las Pegasus, and the Nightmare Knights comics all made good tries at the subject, but there’s limits to what you can put together in a 22-minute episode or 25 pages of comic panels. In Extended Cut, though, my wordcount is effectively unconstrained-
Emergency editor's note: within reason, Admiral!
-and so there’s zero restrictions on how elaborate such an operation could get.

Normally, when I address fanon in these author’s notes it’s to complain how moronic it is, but the “Sweetie Belle is actually Rarity’s daughter” theory actually came across as fairly logical in the early parts of the show; given the amount of time Rarity seems to commit to raising her in the absence of their perfectly able actual parents, and the fact that her age is never canonically established.

Editor's note: yeah, that one's on me. When I blitzed through season 1, I thought Sweetie Belle was Rarity's daughter, and continued to do so until season 2's Sisterhooves Social.

I actually sort of briefly considered making Sweetie Belle Rarity’s daughter in EC, but quickly decided it was way more trouble than it would be worth- especially as characters’ ages stabilized and it would’ve ended up with Rarity having Sweetie when she was, like, fourteen. There’s nothing to particularly point to this in the show, but Rarity’s parents always gave me a very strong sort of Jersey-Shore “classless rich” vibe, so it does in fact seem pretty plausible that they’d end up frequently dumping Sweetie over at the Boutique while they flew off to Manecun or whatever.

Straight Outta Griffonstone

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Twilight was, initially, just surprised to discover that Innsbeak even had a jail. It was located midway up the big hill in the center of town, right on the dividing line between what passed for the ‘respectable’ neighborhood and the slums- that made her very glad indeed Rainbow Dash was accompanying her.

It was a low, long building constructed entirely of gray stone blocks, windowless and presenting only a single arched door to the dim, winding street outside. Twilight suspected it might once have been the dungeon of some sort of larger fortification, although no trace of such a structure now remained.

“They hauled Gilda up here, and that’s as far as I could follow her before she told me to just fly back and get you,” said Rainbow Dash.

“… Right.” Twilight stepped through the open doorway to find herself in a bare stone room she wouldn’t dignify by calling a lobby. A rusty iron gate in the far wall, currently hanging open, led deeper inside. Trotting closer, she saw there was another, identical gate just beyond. In between the two a barred window was set into the wall. Behind it sat a bored-looking griffon hen in yellow barding, chewing on something dark and leathery while staring off into space. “Dammit, Rainbow, your wingblades,” Twilight muttered, “We probably shouldn’t be trying to bring those into a prison. Even an Innsbeak prison. Can you stash them?”

Rainbow shook her head. “Twilight, they’re meter-long jointed steel death, and I left my bags back at the manor. Where would I hide them?”

“Good point.” Twilight nervously shuffled her hooves, and glanced at the griffon running the… checkpoint? She didn’t seem to care one bit about the conversation going on in front of her, very probably because she didn’t speak Ponish. “Uh… okay, so new plan, you’re my bodyguard. They probably let those kind of ponies keep weapons…”

“I thought I already was your bodyguard?”

“Well, Gilda was, but now Gilda’s in jail, so…”

“Sweet. Does that mean I get paid?”

“Don’t you start with that too…” Twilight swallowed hard, and stepped up to the gate. The guard looked up as she approached, then went right back to chewing whatever it was she was chewing. Twilight considered asking her about Gilda’s whereabouts, and then remembered that neither she nor Rainbow Dash had the faintest idea how to pose the question in Griffish. Instead, she just trotted on into the dim corridor beyond, unopposed.

The cellblocks began immediately on the other side of the checkpoint- or, rather, the cellmaze began, as if there was any overall organization to the place Twilight was completely unable to discern it. The only illumination was provided by barred skylights in the stone ceiling high above. The cells themselves were exactly what she’d expected- dim, bare stone, and filthy; inhabited by a variety of vague shadowy forms, usually three or four to a cell. Some looked to be sleeping off whatever had gotten them in here, or crashing hard, or already plotting their next adventure; but some seemed alert and reasonably respectable- which, by Innsbeak standards, mostly meant appearing to have bathed sometime in the last week and slept in an actual bed. Twilight wondered if those were the unlucky souls who’d called in the Guard after their robber had called them first, and had been unable to provide the necessary bribes to make their case. In any event, none of them spoke.

“So, what’d Gilda even do?” she asked Rainbow Dash, as they wandered deeper into the complex. It was a lot bigger than it looked from the street.

“I dunno,” the pegasus answered, “we split up once we got back into the main market to find something to eat, and then I heard some kinda’ scuffle, and when I got back over to her everygriff was already swinging.”

“Grand.” They came to a four-way intersection with cells down each hallway, and Twilight pulled up short. There was no signage to speak of, and she doubted she’d’ve been able to make any sense of it if there was- assuming it was even accurate. Briefly she considered splitting off from Rainbow Dash, and then immediately decided otherwise. Finally, after a few seconds, she heard something moving down the right-side hallway, accompanied by the distinctive jingling of keys.

That something proved to be another guard in yellow padded armor, seemingly wandering about as aimlessly as they were. “Umm… excuse me, s-sir?” Twilight stammered.

The guard looked up from staring at his own talons, and his expression immediately shifted from boredom to intense enthusiasm. “Oh! Ponies? Yes! I knows a little pony,” he said, in an odd accent that made him seem to be simultaneously shouting and mumbling. “Pony comed in here… three month away? He getted the drunk, taked boat for a swim that wasn’t his. We play with the cards, talk, I learns pony, see?” Then he shrugged, setting the keyring hooked to the bandoleer across his chest jingling again. “No pony here now, though. You look for griffon? For some griffon?” He made an odd little gesture, sliding one talon back and forth against the other. “Owes you bits, huh? Everygriff knows how says ‘bits’…”

“Uh… not really?” Twilight said, still trying to parse the guard’s convoluted Ponish, “She’s… just a friend. A friend who seems to frequently demonstrate some rather poor judgment, but still a friend.”

“Aaaaa, I sees…” The guard smiled widely and nodded, “Somegriff owes pony judge bits!”

“Yeah, you know what, let’s just go with that,” Rainbow Dash cut in, “It doesn’t really matter. The point is, her name’s Gilda. She’s big, tan… kinda… purplish crest, likes to run her mouth…”

“Hey, Dash? ‘Zat you?” The hen in question’s voice echoed from some ways off down the left-side hallway. Twilight looked at the guard, who shifted awkwardly on his feet, and then set off again, both Rainbow and the cockerel following along quietly behind.

Somewhere in another part of the complex, Twilight heard what sounded like a fight break out- lots of yowling and meaty impacts and shouted Griffish. The guard barely seemed to notice.

“Hey, over here,” Gilda called out again, sounding surprisingly relaxed. Twilight pulled to a halt and looked around. The hen had an entire cell to herself on the right side of the hallway; despite the continuing racket she was sprawled casually on one of the wooden bunks sticking out from the back wall. As soon as Twilight looked at her she waved, hopped off her board, and padded over to the bars. In the marginally better lighting, it was obvious that her right eye was bruised black underneath her feathers, and a line of dried blood trickled down from the edge of her beak, but otherwise she looked in good enough shape.

“Heya, Dash, figured you’d come around sooner or later,” she laughed. “I’m gonna start owin’ you favors if this keeps up!”

For some reason, the pegasus seemingly developed an intense interest in studying her own front hooves.

Finding her companion suddenly uncommunicative, Twilight turned back to the guard. “Alright, let’s get this over with- what’s her bail?”

“Bail?” the guard looked back down the corridor, first in one direction and then the other. “Oh! Yes. Bail. Five hundred bits. To me. Now.”

Twilight scowled, but pulled the requisite coinage from her saddlebag and telekinetically dropped it into the guard’s outstretched talon. He pawed through his overstuffed keyring, jammed one key in the lock, and slid open Gilda’s cell door. The hen stepped out and extended her wings in an exaggerated stretch. “Awww, good, fresh air! Or… fresher, I guess…”

“You’d better have a damn good explanation for what you’re even doing in here…” Twilight warned as they set off back towards the entrance, leaving the guard behind.

“Oh, it’s not, like, anything serious,” Gilda shrugged, “Just decked one of those stupid street guards.”

Twilight folded her ears down against her skull, and summoned the most disapproving expression she could muster. She’d had a lot of practice. “You punched a guard.”

“Okay, well, I guess I kicked him a couple times, too,” the hen briefly lifted up and shook her right talon, “Stubborn fucker just would not stay down.”

“No, I mean, why did you punch a guard?”

“He kept trying to pull me offa’ that stupid shopkeeper.”

Twilight was about to reply, when they walked back into view of the exit and she saw that the outer gate was now shut. She trotted up to the griffon at the checkpoint, who had either swallowed or discarded whatever she’d been chewing on, and now seemed to be at least marginally aware of what was taking place around her.

“Whoa there! Hey!” she called out as Twilight approached, and the unicorn was surprised to find that her Ponish was not only intelligible, but significantly better than her cockerel friend’s. “You can not just take somegriff out of here when you feel like, there is a… a… a… a what is it called, a process!”

“Hold up. We already paid her bail,” Rainbow Dash cut in.

“What is bail? Bail to who?” the guard asked, then shrugged. “No matter. You got her out of the cell, but not processed, she does not leave.”

“And… what will that take?” Twilight asked, trying as best she could to hide the frustration gnawing at the base of her brainstem.

“There is… uhhh… there is the processing fee… proof of identity with fee, cleaning, food, retrieval fee, storing the personal effects fee…” The guard extended a talon as she listed off each item.

“Food and personal effects?” Twilight interrupted, “She’s been here an hour, and didn’t even bring a set of saddlebags!”

The guard just shrugged. “Oh, yes, and, she do not go until you give me proof she has a place to stay.”

“And what, exactly, will that take?” Twilight practically hissed.

“Statement, in writing. Ponish is fine, but has to be… umm…" The griffon made a pounding motion with her talon, "with notary, yes. Like me. I can notary. For a small fee, of course.”

Rainbow stepped forward and rolled her eyes, although fortunately she kept her bladed wings tucked safely at her sides. “Look, just give us the total.”

“Seven hundred and fifty bits. Walking away, that is free, but the doors stay locked until you pay up, yes?”

Twilight, briefly, considered simply teleporting all three of them to the other side of the bars, as the jail building didn’t appear to have any of the magical defenses that were mandated by law in Equestria. However, she felt less and less like expending any additional mana on Gilda’s behalf. Instead, she just puffed out a breath of fetid, chilly jailhouse air, counted out exactly seven hundred and fifty bits -using the last of the hundred-bit pieces she had on hoof in the process- and slipped them through the window bars. The guard seemed dead-set on closely inspecting each and every coin, but finally she got up from her chair and yanked on a rusty lever protruding from the wall. The outer gate swung open again.

“Hey,” Rainbow Dash gave an unconvincing forced laugh, “At least we’re still under budget… sorta…”

“Ha. Ha. Ha.” Twilight wasted no time in trotting back through the vestibule area and out into the street. It had started to rain again, a thin little drizzle that hung in the air like fog. Projecting a shield above her head didn’t do much to stop it, so she let the spell dissipate. “Gilda, I know I’m going to regret hearing the answer to this, but… what were you doing on top of a shopkeeper?”

The hen shrugged. “Well, he kept chasin’ after me making a whole big ruckus to try and get his apple back, so I figured I’d give him a couple licks.”

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut again, feeling the pain behind them redouble. “You… stole an apple.”

“Well, yeah,” Gilda told her, as though explaining basic etiquette to a particularly slow child, “Fucker was charging eight bits a pop for ‘em, I ain’t gonna pay that much.”

“I’m sorry, let me just make doubly sure I’ve got the full story here,” Twilight said just as levelly. “You assaulted a city guard, who was trying to break up another fight between you and some shopkeeper, who in turn was trying to catch you after you stole an apple. One, single apple. That’s why Rainbow and I are down here.”

“Pretty much,” Gilda shrugged again, although this time it seemed awkward and forced. She kept looking from Twilight to Rainbow Dash and back again, clearly nervous. “Must… uhh, must be outta practice, I guess.”

“Yeah…” Twilight kept walking for a little while, then looked back at Gilda. “Must’ve been a pretty damn good apple, then.”

“Actually… ummm… well, boss, you see, I needed both talons to deal with the guard, so I… put it down, and I think somegriff grabbed it, or kicked it away or something, and I… lost track of it pretty quickly.”

“I… see.”

The entire rest of the trip back up the hill, and all the way back to their guest quarters, Twilight remained utterly silent. Rainbow Dash didn’t feel like saying anything either, although she didn’t also spend the entire trip glaring daggers at Gilda. They all cantered at a decent clip, looking up every so often at the steel-gray sky already darkening with storm clouds over the harbor.

By unspoken consensus, all three of them filed back into Twilight’s room. The end table was now clean and no longer covered in fabric, but Rarity was nowhere to be found.

Rainbow felt like a teenager again, hauled into Flight Instructor Barns’ office to explain her latest misadventure, but Twilight didn’t seem interested in lecturing- at least not yet. Instead, the unicorn made another circle of the room with her horn alight, muttering what Rainbow assumed were another round of anti-surveillance spells.

“I learned this muffling spell my sophomore year in undergrad,” she explained, with preternatural calmness. “Right around the time I started to get seriously interested in the Starswirl-Clover Thesis. I chose this one in particular because it’s relatively basic wind magic; and also because I wanted to be able to study in peace, but the most comfortable bench in the undergraduate library was right by the door. What sealed the deal was that the muffling effect works both ways, and, as you well know,” she paused whatever intricate magical thing she was currently doing with her horn, and chuckled, “I can sometimes get a little loud when I’m excited, especially while I’m researching something particularly interesting… and… there.”

Instantly the glow around Twilight's horn faded, as she wheeled about with alarming speed. “Gilda, Why! In! Tartarus! Did I ever hire you!” she screamed, her thin frame shuddering with each syllable.

The griffon raised up a talon palm-out, shaking it from side to side. “Look, boss, I’m really sorry I got myself caught…”

“You’re sorry you got caught.” Twilight paced in front of them, tail swishing back and forth as she walked. “You are sorry! That you got caught!” She turned to Rainbow Dash, who was currently standing paralyzed in mute shock, and waved a hoof theatrically back towards Gilda. “She’s sorry she got caught, stealing a eight-bit apple from some grocery stand by the harbor, and not just paying for it with the salary we are providing her to advise us on how not to make trouble in Innsbeak!” The scholar closed her eyes, shook her head, and readjusted her now somewhat-disheveled mane in her telekinesis. “Why, out of all the things you could possibly steal, Gilda, did you decide this was the one? An apple, Gilda. A solitary apple! Which you then lost while you were picking a fight with the guards, because I guess you couldn’t even finish off this hackneyed escapade properly!”

Rainbow had never really heard Twilight Sparkle yell before; at least not right up-close and personal, as opposed to across a collapsing plaza in the Everfree or under similar extenuating circumstances. She found herself surprised by the sheer volume the scrawny little unicorn was able to project, and felt compelled to take a few steps back away. Then she took a look at Gilda, still standing her ground, and stifled the urge to move any further. “Look, Twilight,” she muttered, then continued with more certainty, “Don’t’cha think maybe this isn’t, like, too big of a deal? I mean, it’s not like we weren’t able to get Gilda out, or that she’d, I don’t know, gotten anygriff killed, or seriously hurt, and it’s not like the guards here keep arrest records like the Watch in… Trottingham… would…” She trailed off as the realization of what she’d just said worked its way through her brain.

Twilight turned back to the pegasus, her ears pivoting forward. “Rainbow, what’s this about the Watch in Trottingham?”

“Uhh…” She looked away and pawed nervously at the carpet, well aware it wouldn’t do any good.

“Rainbow…”

Very briefly, the weathermare considered just lying to Twilight. Then she decided that, if nothing else, Twilight didn’t deserve to be lied to. “Look, we, uhh… when we were getting supplies at Garson’s… well, Gilda… kinda’ also tried to grab some… some supplies. Just some jerky. But without… paying for it.”

Twilight’s ears flattened back against her skull. “And you were going to tell me this… when?”

Rainbow Dash looked over at Gilda, who had sat down on one of the dining room chairs and was currently avoiding eye contact with either pony. Then she looked back at Twilight. “I didn’t think it mattered, because nothing happened, really. I paid for the supplies she took as soon as the grocer started yelling, and… well, I wanted you and Rarity and Gilda to get along and be able to work together and shit. It was… I guess I thought it was just Gilda being stupid and making a scene for a scene’s sake.”

“Not relevant,” Twilight muttered.

“Look, Twilight, I’m really sorry, I know I should’ve told you.”

“Yeah,” the unicorn didn’t even sound angry anymore, just tired. Rainbow was surprised by how uncomfortable realizing that made her. “Well, the cornerstone of our whole asinine plan was to have Gilda pickpocket Lord Goldstone- Tartarus, she wanted to pickpocket Lord Goldstone twice,” Twilight snapped. “And now you’re telling me she can’t steal a rutting apple if she’s given a rutting do-over.”

Dash opened her mouth to reply, but the unicorn kept on going. “You know what? No. We don’t actually need that stupid skull, and we’re certainly in no position to get it. I didn’t go into this expecting I’d need to hire a professional thief, and it turns out I rutting well did not! So I’ll just take my chances meeting up with Gordon at the party.”

Gilda spoke up for the first time since the ponies had started arguing. “Look. Boss. It’s not like that. Okay, yeah, I screwed up. But, you know, me and Dash were just screwin’ around, just like old times,” she waved a talon at the pegasus, “Right, RD? C’mon, back me up here. You know I’m not gonna get caught again, we musta’ done a hundred food runs back at camp and gotten away just fine!”

Rainbow Dash pulled in a deep breath, and resumed staring at her hooves because she didn’t really want to look at Gilda or Twilight right now. “Gilda… I… I think Twilight’s got a point. Snack runs back at camp are one thing, but… this is serious. It’s not just fooling around when you can get yourself arrested, Gilda. Why are you even doing this shit?”

"Why am I doing this shit?” Quite unexpectedly, Gilda threw her head back and laughed, loud and long. Only when she was good and finished did she look at the pegasus and shake her head. “Why am I doing this shit? Dash, I'd bet you've never missed a meal in your life."

Rainbow stared at her friend, genuinely confused. "What?"

"Did you ever really look at the griffons here?” Gilda asked, “They're all skeletons. Skin, bones, feathers. And this is the Isles. I grew up in Griffonstone. It's even worse back- back there." Her voice hitched for the very first time since they’d met back up with each other in Trottingham.

“I don't see what this has-” Twilight attempted to interject.

“It has everything to do with it,” Gilda snapped, rounding on the scholar, any trace of humor gone from her voice. “Before I got my ticket to Equestria, stealing an apple here, some jerky there, that was how I survived. Dash, you remember what I looked like when I first showed up at camp?”

“Well, yeah, but you filled out fast!” Rainbow countered, but didn’t feel like her heart was behind it.

“Because we stole so much food!”

Twilight just rolled her eyes, “And that’s why you think stealing apples is helping things now?”

The griffon shrugged again, and crossed her arms in front of her. “That's beside the point.”

“No, Gilda, that's entirely the point.” Twilight started circling again, silently for a few seconds before she continued, “Actually, if that’s all you want to say in your defense, then fine. You've made your case, and I don’t agree. As of right now, you are officially fired. I want you out of my room, and out of my business. You can stay here on Goldstone's dime for as long as he'll let you, but after the party tomorrow, my friends and I are going home.”

Gilda slipped out of her chair and tensed as if to pounce, but then she relaxed and stood up straight. “You know what? Fine. Fuck you, Doctor Twilight Sparkle. I'm gonna steal that skull without you, your lumpy rubber square teleportation shit, or your paycheck.” She turned to Rainbow Dash, who was still intensely studying the faded carpet, “C'mon Dash, let's leave these dipshits behind.”

Suddenly, even the carpet had lost its appeal. Rainbow Dash felt something in her chest constricting, but she forced it down and looked her friend in the eye. “Gil, I’m sorry. But… I can’t.”

Silence settled on the room, save for the soft patter of rain on the manor's roof and the distant thunder over the sea. Right now, Rainbow Dash wanted to be anywhere else.

“Fine. But if you ever get tired of playing errand-filly for the mad mage, just come find me.” She wrenched open the guest room door, causing the silencing spell to dissipate with an audible pop. Then she sauntered past a bewildered-looking Rarity, standing in the hallway with a neatly-folded square of black cloth floating in her telekinetic field. “’zat mine? Now it is,” the griffon snapped, and grabbed it out of the air, “Later, dweebs.”

The tailor just blinked, bewildered, and watched as Gilda loped around a corner out of sight. “What was all that about?”

Rainbow Dash opened her mouth to answer, but found herself unable to.

“So, the basic version is that Gilda’s not working with us anymore because her arrest wasn’t an isolated incident and was entirely due to her own incompetence, and I think she’s so much of liability, I’m calling the whole plan off,” Twilight explained, all in a single breath.

“I… wouldn’t’ve put it like… that,” Dash finally managed to add, “But… basically.”

Rarity looked down the hallway to where Gilda had just been visible. “Will she… be alright? On her own, I mean.”

Feeling some of her strength starting to return, Rainbow nodded. “Yeah, probably. She’s the one who lived here before, and she’s got money with her -bits, I mean. That’ll probably be enough to get her a train ticket or an inn… or a drink, or whatever she wants right now.”

“Well, I was coming over to say I finished her dress, so I suppose that takes care of that?” Rarity sniffed.

Twilight started pacing in circles again, in the middle of the hall. “Dammit, do you think she was serious about stealing the skull for herself?”

Rarity tapped her hoof on the faded yellow carpet. “Well, if she is, she doesn’t have the fake amulet, so I don’t think there’s a lot she can do…”

The unicorn nodded. “Okay, next question- is she heading over to the study right now to tip off Goldstone just to spite us.”

Feeling vaguely insulted, Rainbow Dash shook her head. “Nah, she hates that rutter as much as we do, maybe even more.”

“Besides, whatever would she say?” added Rarity, “That we were thinking about robbing Goldstone, but now we’ve decided not to do anything and play along?”

Twilight sucked in a few deep breaths, and her pacing finally slowed. “Yeah, Okay. I guess you’re right. There’s… nothing to worry about.”

Rarity nodded. Rainbow Dash swallowed hard, tried to stop her still-bladed wings from rattling as they shook at her sides, and followed suit.

“Uhhh… Dash?” Twilight finally came to a halt, looked at the pegasus, and cocked her head. “Are you… are you sure you’re alright?”

“I think I’ll be fine.” She looked the skinnier unicorn in the eye. “But… thanks. I don’t get it, I don’t remember Gilda ever being this reckless… or, well, I guess I do, but now that there’s so much on the line I figured… I dunno. Twilight, do you think we can, you know, try to track her down once all this Gordon bullshit’s done?”

“Yeah. We can do that.” The scholar stepped closer. “And… Rainbow? Thanks for backing me up in there.”

“Yeah. Sure. Any… any time, Twi. That’s what friends are for, right?”

One Night In Innsbeak

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The next day crawled forward, slow and tense. Rarity spent most of it finishing the remaining three ponies’ formal wear. Twilight completed Who Lies Sleeping early in the morning; she found it interesting, in a mad sort of way, and utterly unhelpful. Rainbow Dash paced circles in her room, muttering and cursing, and tried to talk passing guards into sparring with her- to no success. Gilda remained completely unaccounted for.

For lack of anything better to do, Twilight made another visit to the library- given how long the Luna Bay fragment had been left there to gather dry rot, she wondered what other treasures might’ve been buried in among the weather reports, salacious romance novels, and damning financial journals. Although Lord Goldstone himself was, as always, nowhere to be found, his servants were out in force, presumably preparing the manor for the night’s festivities. She even spotted the cyclone-pushing hen Rainbow Dash had mentioned, having bothered to empty the dust bags behind her and put some effort into genuinely cleaning the carpet.

More than a few small, fast airships- private yachts or charter flights, most likely- passed over the library’s big glass cupola, destined for the harbor. Even more air chariots flew back the other way, no doubt ferrying guests up to the manor and past the squalor of the lower city. The sky remained clear the entire day- Twilight wondered if Goldstone had ordered the rain held off specifically for the occasion.

She stayed in the library the whole afternoon, making a conscious effort to avoid bothering anygriff, and in turn nogriff bothered her.

It turned out that there was little of any real value left to discover, but at least searching passed the time. The only text she encountered that seemed of the remotest historical significance was a scroll- an illuminated manuscript, rather- written in a language she was unable to decipher, possibly Proto-Yakic. Assuming it wasn’t some sort of forgery written in gibberish, that would’ve placed it sometime in the pre-Classical era, before the destruction of the Crystal Empire had cut off all but the most treacherous passes into the mountains of Yakyakistan. It was gorgeously but rather abstractly illustrated; depicting an ornately-dressed yak, and something that might’ve been a volcano, or possibly a dragon. Unfortunately, without a properly laboratory setup, there was no way for Twilight to authenticate it, and she wasn’t about to either buy it or take it without asking. Either option meant another possible confrontation with Goldstone, and she hoped to avoid that if at all possible.

It was early evening when another servant appeared, in a yellow formal jacket faded to a faint pastel- which ironically made it far more bearable to look at. In broken Ponish, he offered to escort “the esteem Doctor Twilight Sparkel” to her waiting associates.

Twilight was a bit surprised to find that the manor’s ‘grand ballroom’ was, in fact, actually grand. She’d been expecting the usual Goldstone corner-cutting, but she supposed he wouldn’t have been able to maintain his position as absolute ruler of the city without some sort of genuine managerial skills. The crystal chandeliers up above were dusted and illuminated, if dimmed to an ambiance-friendly soft glow. The many-vaulted wooden ceiling beyond them was clean and appeared to have been polished; and somewhere the tiercel had managed to get hold of an array of velvet-cushioned chairs and tables with matching yellow tablecloths. He’d even established a little bandstand in one corner, playing some sort of waltz that had gone out of fashion around the turn of the millennium. Quietly, Twilight thanked her lucky stars that nocreature seemed to be treating the music as any sort of invitation to dance. All of her previous attempts at the act had only been described as… enthusiastic.

The carpet, clean for once, proved itself to be a blindingly intense yellow, and the polished dark oak paneling came as close to complementing it as wood was ever likely to get. That indicated to Twilight’s historian’s eye that the room had either been an original part of the manor, or retrofitted with some effort to match its architectural style, awful though that may have been. Either option demonstrated some actual willingness to spend bits on upkeep. Shame about the entire rest of the city, the scholar remarked quietly to herself.

She’d been to functions of this sort exactly twice before, during her childhood. Once, when her father’d been accepted as editor-in-chief of the Canterlot Journal of Medicine; and again when one of her mother’s novels had won some moderately-impressive literary award. That latter event had also been where Shiny had met Princess Cadance for the very first time. Twilight had found them both harmless, if overwhelmingly dull- the events, of course, not her brother and Cadance.

The atmosphere here, however, was quite different. For one thing, those functions back in Canterlot hadn’t had nearly so many armed and uniformed guards stationed near the walls. Some were clearly experienced house troops; the majority slouched at their posts, chatted with each other, and consumed alarming amounts of the alcohol offered by the serving staff. Knowing Goldstone, he’d probably hired whatever toughs he could manage off the streets of the lower city to fill out his ranks. The guest list was also proving to be surprisingly diverse- discounting the security and waitstaff, non-griffons outnumbered griffons by a substantial margin, and more were arriving every minute. A surprising number of them were ponies, and Twilight was quietly glad not to recognize anypony she knew from the Government.

She turned back to Rarity and Rainbow Dash, who had been escorted in not long after Twilight herself. “I… think it’s safe for us to split up. We’re not going to have much luck sorting through a crowd this size if we don’t, anyway,” she muttered.

“Gotcha’.” Rainbow Dash tapped a hoof against the red sash of her white belted tunic- a chiton, to use the proper term from Old Pegasopolis, trimmed by a gold geometric pattern. The entire garment was designed to be turned inside-out to expose a black inner lining with several concealed pockets, and the traditional pegasus sandals that accompanied it were padded to muffle hoofsteps. Twilight, admittedly, also found the whole assembly quite fetching.

“Shame we won’t get to use any of this,” was all she said aloud.

“I don’t mind.” Rarity shrugged. Without the need to go sneaking off anywhere, she’d opted for a simple sage-green ballgown embroidered with a few faux-sapphires, with a slim silver necklace and matching earrings. “In fact, I appreciate the chance to test out some new designs. These might be more… practically-minded than my usual fare, but I guarantee we’ll all look fabulous doing whatever it is we need to do.”

“Yeah, these sandals are actually kinda’ neat,” Rainbow added, “I thought I’d have to fight you over, like, stupid three-inch heels or something, but-”

She was cut off suddenly as one of the servants stepped onto the band’s small platform, and called out in magically amplified Ponish: “Honored guests, His Most Honorable Marquess and Lord of this Fine City, Gerald Goldstone the Thirteenth!” Then the servant repeated his message in Griffish, or at least repeated something- it wasn’t as though Twilight could compare. Goldstone himself stepped out into the far end of the room not long after, that strange gold amulet hanging over an eye-searing yellow tuxedo jacket. On his left lurked a strange figure completely covered in faded blue robes; presumably the same mage Gilda and Rainbow Dash had spotted the day before. On his right, in polished full plate, his big guard captain scanned the crowd warily. A good portion of that crowd converged immediately towards Goldstone; Twilight nervously scanned over those who remained.

She fiddled with the strip of pink fabric wrapped around her neck and tucked into her short, barrel-hugging pastel yellow dress. “Rarity, are you sure this cravat is on right?”

“It’s fine. And it’s an ascot, dear.”

“… Right.”

She struck off across the carpet, briefly surveying each group of guests in turn. It wasn’t hard to figure out when she’d found the one she was looking for. She’d only ever seen Gordon of Innsbeak half-in-frame in a grainy, black-and-white photograph before, but his thick black-framed eyeglasses were unmistakable. He proved to be predominately orange and gray in coloration, not unlike a robin, and wore a crisp white jacket; his eyes were a surprisingly bright blue-green despite his obviously advanced age, and his head constantly pivoted first in one direction, then another. He carried a slim black walking-stick in his right talon, despite seeming to have no difficulty moving around, and his sole companions were a trio of what Twilight guessed to be Innsbeak University security guards -identifiable by their crisp blue uniforms, segmented gray armor, and distinctive blue-rimmed, domed steel helmets.

As she circled the group in ever-tightening orbits, slowly and carefully, trying to appear uninterested, she kept an eye on Goldstone and his entourage, as well.

The longer Twilight watched -from a discreet distance- the more downright odd Goldstone's robed mage’s behavior became. While Grunt the guard captain made quick work of any hors-d'ourves that got within grabbing range, the mage never ate or drank anything- she just stood there until the waitstaff lost their nerve and moved on. She also looked out of place, grimy and disheveled like she’d been wearing the same set of robes for a year straight, especially in contrast with the immaculate presentation of Gordon and his guards. Twilight had ended up looking like that before, but she'd always taken the time to at least shower before interacting with other ponies. Finally, there was something profoundly disconcerting about the way the mage moved- her head panning from side to side exactly ninety degrees, every thirty seconds, like clockwork.

Twilight swallowed hard, and continued her spiral towards Gordon regardless.

Then she nearly jumped out of her skin as a mare spoke up right next to her left flank, in a high-class Appleloosan accent. “Wait a second, Twahlight? As in, Doctor Twahlight Sparkle?”

She pulled up short and twisted around, head briefly filled with images of ESS operatives sent out to detain her for attempting to access dangerous magical information. The mare she found, however, looked like she'd just stepped off a westbound stagecoach. She was a short little cream-colored earth pony with a rather elaborately-styled red mane, chubby and just on the far side of middle-aged.

“Ah don’t believe we’ve met, but Ah’ve got a way with faces, and Ah’m sure Ah’ve seen yours before. Cherry Jubilee, pleased ta meetcha’!” She stuck out a hoof, and very cautiously Twilight met it with her own.

“Oh! Umm… yeah. I’m Twilight Sparkle. I was… uh… in the papers a little bit, a few months ago.” Twilight cast a surreptitious glance back at the University griffons. They were already moving back away from her again, as a coordinated unit, with Gordon in the lead. For such an old creature, he was alarmingly fast.

“Yeah, Ah saw.” The strange mare took a few steps closer, almost to the point where Twilight would’ve felt compelled to back away, and whispered “So, word through the grapevine is, you’ve got an angle on gettin’ ‘round them pesky Commerce inspectors…”

“… huh?” Twilight cocked her head, genuinely confused, before remembering that Rarity had mentioned claiming something like that in her meeting with Goldstone.

“Ah, yeah, I hear ya’.” ‘Cherries’ nodded and smiled a strange little knowing smile, “Iff’n you don’t wanna talk about it here, you can always just drop by my slip at the harbor… Ah promise, Ah’m the soul of discretion, and Ah can make it well worth yer-”

Whatever the mare might’ve been about to say was cut off by a peculiar, rhythmic rattling of metal on metal. Then there was another voice, harsher and with an accent Twilight couldn’t place. “So, you’re Twilight Sparkle, huh? Princess Celestia’s newest flunky?” She wheeled around again, to encounter a very tall harpy in a militia uniform identical to the one Rainbow Dash had described at the market. The strange clanking noise had been produced by a brace wrapped around her ankle.

Concerned, Twilight backpedaled slightly. “I’m not- or, well, I mean, yes, I am Twilight, but I’m not-”

“I’ve got a message for your princess.” The harpy -there was a nametag on her uniform, but Twilight couldn’t make much sense of the foreign lettering- advanced another few steps and jabbed a talon at Twilight’s forehead. “We will end the minotaur invasion. We will drive them from our islands. We will take back what is rightfully ours. And we will do it without Equestria’s so-called help.”

“But that’s not-” Looking over the harpy’s shoulder, Twilight spotted Gordon almost within easy speaking range of Lord Goldstone. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Message received.” That seemed to satisfy the harpy, or at least turn her expression slightly less venomous. Twilight quietly thanked her lucky stars that no one at the gathering had yet recognized her as Commander Shining Armor’s sister. Before the harpy could think of any additional demands, Twilight ducked past her and set about weaving her way back towards the doctor’s group, bypassing a half-dozen other clusters of hushed conversation.

“… hoping to get a shot at that big iron vein they just discovered in the Frozen North…”

“… how much is liquor running you these days in Saddle Arabia? …”

“… Tartarus, maybe there’s money to be made down in those southern islands. Nothing but yetis and snowbeasts for competition down there…”

Finally, she was able to slip back into easy hearing range- and close enough to feel the tingly not-quite-vibration of dozens of protective enchantments, all centered on the old griffon in the crisp white coat. The sheer volume of them left Twilight wondering why he even bothered with the guards. Backup or intimidation, perhaps, or proactive crowd control. “Man, I must be getting old,” he was muttering, in rough but surprisingly articulate Ponish, “This modern-day music just sounds like noise to me…”

Twilight swallowed hard and stepped closer. “Ummm, excuse me… sirs? My name is-”

The guards simply stared past her as a unit, but Gordon looked up over his shoulder suddenly. “Is somepony following me?” His blue-green eyes fixed directly on Twilight, or rather at a point somewhere above Twilight’s left ear, wide and somewhat unfocused. “Don’t come near me. Don’t come near me! Personal space, Windsdammit, personal space!” He was shouting, now, and nearby guests were turning to look at him, but he didn’t seem to care.

Twilight backpedaled as quickly as she dared, as the old griffon reached out one talon and began making abortive little spell-casting motions. Just before she lost sight of him completely, he cackled, “Yeah, whether it’s a particle or a wave doesn’t really matter, it’ll still kill you…” There was a long pause, and then he continued, “I wonder if they’re like infants, and think if they can’t see me, that I’ve literally disappeared…? No, I guess they’re more developed than that…”

Well, so much for the direct approach. Thanks, Berries Jubilant or... whatever your name was.

Continuing to back away, Twilight almost staggered into the harpy again, although this time she was lucky enough to avoid notice. Instead the harpy’s attention was fixed on Lord Goldstone, who was heading her way alongside a big gray Abyssinian, with a ridiculous-looking skull and crossbones pattern dyed into the fur on his shoulder. The tiercel was muttering something about “the munitions dealer I’ve been working with, Colonel Zahn,” although since the Abyssinian wasn’t wearing a proper uniform -indeed, he’d decided to wear a muscle shirt and camouflage-patterned trousers to a formal reception- Twilight found herself wondering what exactly he was supposed to be a Colonel of.

Then she entirely lost interest when she noticed the big, tan griffon hen with a distinctively purplish crest and sleek black dress, slowly but surely making her way through the crowd towards them.

Gilda.

Gordon and his entourage forgotten for the moment, Twilight began the tense and laborious process of searching the crowd for Rarity.

Rarity nodded along to the conversation of a strange, short little cream colored earth mare with a strong Appleloosan accent- Cherry something, if she remembered correctly. “You know, Miss Rarity, Ah got an eye for talent ya see, an'-”

Out of the corner of her eye, the tailor watched Twilight Sparkle approach a small group of uniformed griffons- the one in the lead wore a crisp white coat and thick black-framed glasses, and Rarity wondered if this was in fact the infamous Gordon of Innsbeak. Twilight opened her mouth and stammered something inaudible. At the same time, the old griffon’s head snapped around to focus on a beige-coated mare with a pink-and-blue mane who had been lurking behind her. “Is somepony following me?” he demanded, and then he shouted “Don’t come near me. Don’t come near me! Personal space, Windsdammit, personal space!”

Twilight backed away, shaking her head, while the beige mare faded into the crowd.

“Oh! Sorry, that's Lord Goldstone.” Cherry-something-or-other shook her head, “We’ll have ta’ catch up some other time.”

Rarity nodded. “Of course.” She'd been able smell the griffon on his way, well before she’d laid eyes on him; an unholy combination of sea spray, Abyssinian Catchouli, and something overpoweringly sweet. In a formal gathering like this, a tasteful amount of cologne or perfume was proactive deodorant; an excessive amount was proactive body odor, and for whatever reason Lord Goldstone thought he was underdressed unless he could peel paint off the walls by standing in one place for too long. The two hens standing on either side of him were probably paid not to notice. Rarity did note, however, that despite her nearly constant intake of hors d'oeuvres plucked from the trays of any servants who got too close, the guard captain -unlike many of her subordinates- didn’t seem to ever touch a drop of alcohol.

“Rarity?” The tailor heard Twilight’s voice hiss, and turned her head to find the smaller unicorn hunkered down next to her. Neither Goldstone nor Cherry paid her much notice. “Don’t… uhh… don’t act alarmed or anything, but… Gilda’s coming your way.”

“Gilda?” Rarity scanned the crowd as Cherry and Goldstone sidled off together some distance away, and finally caught sight of the griffon heading in more or less the same direction.

“Yes, Ah have the paperwork for the work visas right here. 'Farmhooves'- er, talons, Ah guess." She heard Cherry say.

"That is what you requested, isn't it? 'Quick talons and strong backs'" Lord Goldstone snickered.

"And these griffons’re all clean, you say?”

Rarity thought back to her previous conversation with the mare and shook her head, vaguely scandalized. “Well! 'Talents,' indeed!”

Twilight kept one eye on the tailor and the other on Gilda. “Look, just, whatever you do, don’t let Goldstone notice she’s here…”

With little else to do, Rainbow Dash had sought out some of the more respectable-looking guards. Thanks, no doubt, to their rapidly increasing liquor intake, they proved to be fairly amiable sorts, although very quickly Rainbow found herself running out of war stories to exchange.

“Don’t worry about it,” said an older gray-green hen who had introduced herself in mostly-decent Ponish as Lieutenant Gwynn, “pony sellswords aren’t exactly uncommon around these parts, and they’ve all gotta get their start somewhere. In fact, I’ve got a buddy down in Dore who’s putting together a new company of independent contractors… I’m sure he could find some jobs for ya…”

“Very probably,” a somewhat heavyset older cockerel spoke up. Of their group, he was the only one wearing a tastefully old-fashioned suit instead of armor, and a pair of big round eyeglasses- obviously not a soldier, but the soldiers seemed universally to look up to him just the same. “But while I have no doubt that you’d be capable of great things as a member of Gwynn’s Rangers, I think you’d accomplish still more back home, in Equestria, among your friends and fellows.” He drained a snifter of some sort of some sort of strong, peaty liquor, then refilled it from a bottle he’d stashed on one of the end-tables. Despite this being his fourth such drink, he didn’t seem remotely intoxicated- either there was some sort of magic at play, or he just had a cast-iron gizzard. “Believe me, I’ve… some experience in these matters.”

“Uhh.” Over the old cockerel’s shoulder, Rainbow thought for just a moment that she’d seen Gilda heading back towards them, as ridiculous as that sounded. She craned her neck to get a better look, and then felt her stomach leap into her throat as she realized her friend was indeed present.

“Oh! I’m… terribly sorry,” the tiercel extended a talon as though to shake, seemingly misinterpreting her surprised reaction, “Forgive me for not introducing myself. I’m Lord Gestal of Cargriff. I make it a point to attend functions like this whenever practical, to reflect on the tragic condition to which the venerable House Goldstone has now… degraded.” He shot a venomous glance across the room at Gerald XIII, who was currently standing midway between Rarity and a short, tan-coated earth pony with an elaborately-styled red mane.

“Oh. Umm. Rainbow Dash,” the pegasus answered, while trying as inconspicuously as possible to scan the crowd for another sighting of Gilda.

“Oh, yes, of course.” Gestal chuckled, deep and warm, and remained square in the middle of Rainbow’s sight line, “We do get the newspaper out in Cargriff, you know!” Over his shoulder, the pegasus could see Gilda circling Goldstone like a shark. Goldstone didn’t yet seem to notice her; mostly, he looked busy talking to Rarity and the tan mare, but then he was joined by the harpy and the Abyssinian from the black market.

“But more than another pegasus sellsword,” Gestal continued, “Griffonia needs allies, friends over in Equestria, right now.” He waved a talon at Gwynn, who was looking more and more exhausted by the minute, “While our various house troops might cut an impressive figure in their custom livery, and with… some exceptions-” he glared again at Goldstone, and the fat hen beside him, “- can compose a disciplined and well-equipped force within their home territories, they are not and never will be an army. Should the dragons ever find in themselves the leadership necessary to engage in organized warfare, I don’t believe there’s much we could do to stop them.”

Rainbow nodded, struggling to keep her friend in view as the harpy and the Abyssinian broke out into a full-scale argument. Most of it was inaudible or in such mangled Ponish that Rainbow had no way of understanding it, but she caught the phases “substandard parts,” “overpriced,” and “that stupid tattoo” well enough. Almost casually the harpy slung the contents of her wineglass into the Abyssinian’s face; he yowled and took a wild swing at her with his claws extended. The harpy deftly sidestepped, and sent him crashing to the floor with a quick sweep of her brace-wrapped left leg. She backed off as soon as the yellow-vested guards converged on the scene, although she continued to wield her glass like a punch dagger, the stem held between her talons.

By the time Rainbow Dash looked away from the spectacle, neither Gilda nor Lord Goldstone were anywhere to be seen.

“I bet the zebras’d stop ‘em. The dragons, I mean,” said Lieutenant Gwynn.

“Would they, really?” Rainbow asked, then slipped over to the outer edge of the gathering as quietly as she could- she’d spotted Twilight on her way over.

“Oh, the zebras would certainly stop them… and then keep on marching north…” Gestal laughed again, this time with more than a little bitterness.

“Notus’s breath, if Equestria ever decided it wanted this shithole…” Gwynn continued, “Well, I’m not saying we should just let ‘em have it, but if it’s them or the dragons or the zebras, well…”

Twilight finally managed to slip over beside the pegasus. “What’s up?” Rainbow leaned over and whispered.

“Gilda’s back. She’s been lurking around here somewhere, I think she’s trying to get to Goldstone,” Twilight explained.

Rainbow nodded. “Yeah, I saw her come in, but then I lost her…”

“Now, if somepony were to remove Lord Goldstone, I wouldn’t be particularly upset…” Gestal muttered to the assembled troops.

“There. Over there…” Rainbow followed Twilight’s outstretched hoof, and spotted Gilda once again heading directly for Goldstone. Rarity seemed to be doing her best to keep the tiercel moving away, but she had to look casual about doing it, and casual meant slow. Gilda had no such restrictions.

Gilda called out “Gerald! Buddy!” and Lord Goldstone twisted around to look directly at her, even as Rarity wrapped a guiding foreleg around his shoulders.

“… just don’t see why the zebras would bother, is the problem,” Gwynn was saying, “Neither the Dragonlands nor Griffonia are part of traditional zebra territory, and for them that’s a pretty important distinction.”

“My dear,” Gestal clicked his beak disapprovingly, “Perhaps you’re simply too young to remember the last time ‘traditional zebra territory’ suddenly became much larger…”

Gilda had made it into easy speaking range of Goldstone by that point. Rainbow couldn’t make out what they were saying, both because it was nearly inaudible at this distance and because it was probably in Griffish. Whatever it was, it sent Rarity off in another direction with a rather frustrated expression.

“But I’m sure Equestria would intervene…” Gwynn continued.

“Intervene to accomplish… what?” Gestal chuckled again, and pounded back yet another glass of liquor, “Prevent their ‘civilized’ fellows from doing a bit of ‘civilizing’? Why would they? Ponies are the best at it! Just look at Saddle Arabia!”

Rainbow watched, baffled and a little alarmed, as Gilda circled around Lord Goldstone, laughing and gesturing with her wings and talons. Something she said made him laugh in turn, and she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and leaned in close to him. It was hard to tell, but Dash was fairly certain she’d disconnected the clasp on Goldstone’s amulet with her beak; however it was accomplished, she caught the glint of gold and ruby disappearing down the front of Gilda’s dress. Goldstone laughed again, oblivious to the fact that his precious amulet had just been replaced.

“Damn,” the pegasus whistled, “Gilda’s got game!”

Twilight, for whatever reason, jumped a little in place, and giggled nervously. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess she does…” Then she muttered nearly inaudibly, “Dammit, focus…”

“I thought you locked that amulet in your room?” said Rainbow Dash.

“I did.”

“… shit.”

Gilda returned Goldstone’s embrace, rapped him on the shoulder, and then staggered away, suddenly reeling about as though drunk.

Twilight looked at Rainbow Dash, shook her head, and then set off towards the hen. “I think you’ve had enough, Gilda,” she snapped, “We should probably head back to your room.”

Very much to Rainbow Dash’s surprise, Gilda nodded, leaned against Twilight’s shoulder, and followed her back out to the edge of the ballroom. That made the pegasus suspicious. As she started to follow, though, Lord Gestal waved at her with his half-empty bottle of liquor, and when she looked away again, both of her friends had vanished from sight.

Gilda and Twilight Sparkle walked side-by-side through the dim, winding, drafty corridors that connected the central wing of the manor to the guest quarters.

“Well, I… guess that’s that, then…” Twilight finally said, after a few minutes of awkward silence.

Gilda nodded, but said nothing. Thanks to Geraldine III’s… unique approach to architecture, even the background noise of the party had already faded away, and the silence was making Twilight distinctly uncomfortable.

“What, no big long shouting match about how I just don’t understaaand life on the streets of Griffonstone or whatever?”

The big griffon shook her head. “Nope! You caught me, fair and square. Time to pack it in.”

If that was supposed to be reassuring, it only left Twilight more confused. “I’m… I mean, I’m glad that you’re finally seeing reason about this whole mess, but… I mean, why go this far? If you wanted to put things right with us, you could’ve just come back and talked to us in private, you know. What did you think I was going to do when I saw you at the party, anyway?”

Gilda laughed, briefly. “Actually, I thought you were gonna do something sneaky and overcomplicated, which wouldn’t’ve worked as well. Wander off and try to teleport me away or some shit. You just coming up and telling me I needed to leave… I didn’t think you had it in you. Not much I could do about that.” She slowed down slightly, and leaned in until her beak was just a few centimeters from Twilight’s left ear. “If I’d made a scene, like that dumbass arms dealer or whatever, the guards mighta’ gotten involved, and they coulda’ found the real amulet, and then I’d be really fucked.” She half-shrugged. “I guess, really, I just wanted to show you ponies I could actually do my part… that the whole thing woulda’ worked if you’d just had the gizzard to go through with it.”

“Mmmhmm.” They turned one final corner to the suite of guest rooms. The hallway was completely empty, which suited Twilight Sparkle just fine. The fact that Gilda’s beak was still just centimeters away from her head was less ideal. “That’s good to hear, but… well, I really can’t risk you going around and making any more trouble when I’m this close to just going up and talking to Gordon… you know, like adults. I’ve got a variable-duration sedative spell, so I figure the… cleanest way to do this is just to knock you out for a few hours, instead of, I dunno, tying you up or something…”

Gilda, surprisingly, nodded again. “Yeah, I was afraid you'd try something like that.”

Then she slipped something long and wooden out of the sleeve of her dress.

Twilight lit her horn and began the process of casting her most reliable stun spell, but Gilda was faster. The object -whatever it was- slammed directly into the unicorn's head just above her right eye socket, sending her reeling and staggering in a haze of slurred profanity.

Through the ringing in her ears, she thought she heard Gilda say something that sounded like “Stay down, princess, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Yeah… no…” Twilight discovered it was more difficult than she'd expected to think of a good comeback when suffering from blunt-force trauma.

She almost had her hooves under her again when another impact slammed into her forehead, just to the other side of her horn. The last thing she saw was that awful, awful yellow carpet rushing up to meet her.

Gilda’s first task was to haul Twilight’s insensate form back into her guest room, where she wouldn’t attract attention. Fortunately, the skinny Canterlot mage was more than light enough to drag around by one foreleg. Briefly, Gilda considered taking some effort to actively restrain her; but there was nothing available with which to tie her up, and that wouldn’t be much use against telekinesis anyway. Gilda had heard of ways to disable a unicorn’s horn without causing long-term damage or using special equipment, but had never bothered to read up on what they were.

Oh well, she’s out cold. As long as nogriff comes to check on her, she should stay down long enough to not be a problem.

After that, she stalked through the empty corridors, navigating by memory and the talon-drawn map she’d tucked into her dress; heading for one of the manor’s ubiquitous storage rooms close, but not too close, to the chapel. She'd noted the location back during her departure, and confirmed it was on the other side of the breakroom the chapel guards used, but hadn't had the chance to check inside. It proved to be mostly full of sculptures and carved stone panels, depicting grotesquely overmuscled centaurs doing unspeakable things to each other, although in one corner Gilda spotted a small rack filled with glass bottles. Pulling one out, she found it to be wine, although the labels were written in a language she didn’t recognize.

Perfect.

She’d been hoping to bring some sort of beverage with her from the party, but of course that had been rendered impossible by Twilight Sparkle sticking her fuzzy purple snout into Gilda’s business.

“You know, in any other circumstances, I’d enjoy this,” she muttered, extracting a promising-looking bottle. “Aww, fuck it, I’m gonna enjoy this anyway.” She pried out the stopper with one talon, and then reeled backwards as her nostrils filled with the scent of moldy newspaper. Corked.

She gargled a few beakfuls of the noxious stuff anyway, just to get the scent of alcohol on her breath. Then she grabbed a particularly sizable sculpture of two centaur wrestlers -or perhaps just one horribly deformed centaur with two heads- and hurled it through the window with a satisfying crash. After that, she headed out the door and right for the chapel, making sure to stagger drunkenly with her tail in the air. It wasn’t a particularly difficult task to pull off with a bottle of wine in one talon, pockets full of amulet and blackfeather powder, and a rolling pin tucked under her right wing.

Goldstone had switched out the guards at the door; this time one was a gray-speckled cockerel who looked no older than sixteen, and the other an older greenish pegasus mare with a muzzle that looked to have been broken and reset easily a dozen times. Both glared at her as soon as she staggered into the corridor, and brandished their weapons- a crossbow for the cockerel, and a nasty-looking halberd for the mare.

“Hey, uhhh, can you guys, like, help me find my way back to the ballroom? I’mma lil’ -hic- lost…” she stammered, closing the distance to them.

The cockerel grabbed a whistle from his baldric and stuffed it in his mouth, but Gilda let herself tip sideways against him before he could put it to any use. “Hey, c’mon, it was jussa joke, buddy, you dunneed to freak out… You guysh’re no fun…”

The cockerel, to his credit, stayed standing right where he was and pushed her back onto all-fours. “Hey. Hey. Back off. We got a job to do.”

“Isn’t that one of Goldstone’s guests?” The pegasus asked, in somewhat coarse Griffish.

“They’re all Goldstone’s guests.”

“She’s been here for three days, though…”

Gilda took advantage of the cockerel’s monetary distraction to nuzzle up against him again; this time he immediately moved to push her away and seemed about to bring his crossbow up into firing position. “Oh, shit, you’re ri-”

Before he could finish, Gilda swung the wine bottle into his head with her free talon. There was a sharp crack as it shattered over his helmet, showering his face with glass shards and rancid wine; he hit the ground hard, desperately rubbing his eyes with both talons, down but not out. In one motion Gilda pivoted in place to face the mare, and extracted her rolling pin from under her wing. The mare brought her halberd up into a guard position- a fraction of a second too late to stop Gilda from landing a solid hit in between her eyes. As she collapsed, Gilda wheeled back to the cockerel and clubbed him in the back of the head, underneath his helmet.

It was all over in a little under six seconds, and neither the guards in the chapel, nor back in the ready-room, had likely heard a thing- assuming the latter hadn’t already been dispatched to check on the broken window further back down the hall.

Catching her breath, Gilda considered her options. She hadn’t planned to seriously harm either of the guards- at the end of the day, they were just griffons in need of a meal ticket like any other. The helmets they wore just meant she could hit them harder and they’d still pull through. Probably. But ponies didn’t usually put up with the conditions in which Goldstone kept his staff- for the physical sort, there were dockyards and construction sites and mining operations back in Equestria that offered much better pay. A pony taking a position as a guard, here, was in all likelihood just looking to abuse what little power she could get.

On the other talon, of course, even ponies ran into a streak of bad luck sometimes.

Gilda quickly patted the both of them down, grabbed their keys and the cockerel’s crossbow, and then let them be.

Shit. Really wishing I had Dash with me right now… oh well. If she wants to chicken out, that’s on her. These guys ain’t that tough anyway.

Next, Gilda extracted her tin of blackfeather powder and gave herself a light dusting. She wasn’t invisible in the shadows of the hallway, but she’d gotten as close as she was ever likely to get.

Quietly, she unlocked the door to the chapel with the pegasus guard’s key. She sucked in a deep breath, focused, and then slammed it open and bolted inside.

Two more guards, both cockerels, were sitting not far from the entrance, playing some sort of card game over their little folding table. Gilda dashed forward, leapt, and caught the cockerel facing away from her in a flying tackle. Both of them slid across the table, and Gilda managed to deal him a solid blow to the back of the head with her rolling pin before they collided with his friend. She kept up her momentum, slipped the rolling pin across the second guard's throat, and pinned him to the floor. He struggled and tried to throw her off, making horrible little gagging noises the whole time; but even though he was well-fed by Isles standards, he was simply no match for a hen who’d grown up on a steady diet of prime Equestrian beef. After about a minute, his frantic struggles ceased and he went limp, unconscious.

Gilda sliced the strings on both of the guards’ crossbows with a talon, then dragged the two others from outside over to join them in their corner. Finally, she eased the door closed again, and locked it behind her.

The interior of the chapel proved to be quite ornate indeed, as far as such things went: all fine wooden benches and ornate, abstract stained glass windows. However, the architecture paled in comparison to the statue of Nemesis, placed dead-center at the back. The goddess had many names, and many more titles, but her most common epithet was the Spirit of Retribution. The statue stood easily ten feet tall in a chariot drawn by her two traditional griffon heralds, all sculpted of what appeared to be solid gold. Vaguely griffonoid in anatomy, Nemesis herself possessed great dragonic wings, three different heads, and four different forelimbs, each holding a golden model of one of her four mythical instruments- bridle, measuring-stick, sword, and lash. Her left head vomited coins; her right spat gilded flames; and her center head possessed no fewer than six different exquisitely-detailed eyes. Her leonine tail wrapped around a set of scales, which cleverly doubled as an offering plate. The whole structure was profoundly disconcerting to look directly at for too long, but then Gilda supposed that had probably been the sculptor’s intention.

Beneath that towering figure, the ornate gilded pedestal and box in the center of the chapel almost seemed like an afterthought.

Gilda experimentally scratched one talon through one of the chalk circles drawn on the floor around it. Immediately, the amulet tucked into her dress began to hum and vibrate; she extracted it and slid it under one of the benches, less because she feared the noise might attract attention than because it was simply distracting, and she needed to focus now more than ever.

From her other sleeve, she extracted a slim leather roll filled with lockpicking tools- a souvenir of a second trip down to the Markets after she’d walked out on her pony charges- and set right to work.

The lock, in fact, proved almost comically easy to bypass- Gilda had more trouble scraping away several hundred years of packed dust in the internals than she did with any intentional security. It clicked open after about a minute of dedicated fiddling, and ever-so-carefully she eased back the lid.

There was, indeed, nothing but a griffon skull inside, sitting on a little velvet pillow embroidered with the Goldstone family crest. Gilda didn’t consider herself any sort of expert on skulls -other than having cracked five in the last half hour, anyway- but the specimen in front of her looked decidedly unimpressive for all the trouble it had caused. It was a little bit singed near the beak, perhaps, but that was all.

She pulled a small burlap sack from where it’d been stashed in the front of her dress, and gingerly reached into the box. She slipped the bag over the skull, lifted both back out- and for the very first time noticed a gossamer-thin cord, the same color as the box lining, running from the pillow through a tiny hole drilled in the back.

She’d barely managed to duck behind the stone pedestal when the flashbang crystal hidden in the sculpted offering tray exploded, scattering ancient guilder coins like improvised grapeshot and reducing her world to a faint buzzing and indistinct blobs.

Author's Notes:

Gilda also shows up in the tie-in book Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart, so I read it over to see if there was anything worth including in GTBO EC. Her role turns out to be fairly minor and also not make a great deal of sense, so in fact there was not (although, weirdly, it presages her later implied arc in the show and IDW comics, which is made explicit here in EC). However, the chapter title “Gilda’s Got Game” certainly raised some eyebrows among Serketry and myself. Of course, some of the other chapter titles are just bizarre, like “Drinking the Lily Pad Slime” and “A Foal House” (which sounds like some godawful creepypasta more than anything), so I don’t really know what I was expecting.

Just in general I am not a fan of the titles used throughout MLP. With a few exceptions they are at best just lame horsepuns tangentially related to the content of the episode itself; or at worst either lame horsepuns completely unrelated to the content of the episode itself, or simply utterly nonsensical. All of the Season 1 titles are about in the middle, neither particularly bad nor actually any good. “Applebuck Season” and “Sonic Rainboom” are the only ones that stand out: they are forerunners of a later trend of titles that don’t even try to be punny or jokey, and instead just describe the episode or mention a thing that is featured in it. At least “Winter Wrap-Up” has some measure of consonance to it just as words. I guess standing out due to sheer, unimaginative boredom is still standing out…

Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart is also of interest due to containing a canonical origin story for Princess Cadance, which may also appear in some form later in Extended Cut.

And what’s a fine art collection without some majestic musclebeasts, hmm?

Griffon The Brush-Off

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The first thing Twilight Sparkle did upon regaining consciousness was feel along her skull to make sure that her horn was still attached. The second was to realize that the horrible tinny ringing she was hearing, was in fact not just in her head. Cursing, she hauled herself back onto all-fours and stumbled back out into the hall.

As soon as she could see properly again, Gilda looked to the chapel’s windows- still too narrow for a griffon to fit through, and still bordered in stone.

No good.

She grabbed Nemesis’s offering-plate, ripped it free of the statue, and hurled it through the window anyway. If she was lucky and didn’t encounter any guards immediately after leaving, it was possible they’d waste further time searching for her outside.

She still had her map of the manor, pretty much memorized in fact. She just had to hope she knew the place better than the new hires. She stuffed the skull’s carrying-pouch down the front of her dress, charged out the doors, and found herself staring down another quartet of guards at the far end of the hall- probably the relief shift for the ones at the chapel.

Well, so much for hope.

“That’s her! Get her!” shouted the older hen in front, “Whoever bags her gets a hundred-bit bonus, dead or alive!”

Well, so much for talking this out.

Gilda grabbed the halberd the pegasus guard had been carrying and took off, charging directly for the dumbstruck guards. At the last split-second before they collided, she flipped her halberd lengthwise and caught all four of them with the haft. It lacked the mass to do any serious injury -save, perhaps, to the unlucky cockerel on the far left who caught the flat of the blade with his helmet- but it did its job in getting Gilda past them before they could bring their own weapons to bear.

How’s that for stopping power, Rainbow Dash?

She soared over their heads and kept on going, zigzagging down the dim corridor and dodging a few hasty crossbow shots. She briefly resented the fact that she hadn’t thought to relieve any of the chapel guards of their barding before things had gotten hectic, but then decided the feeble protection it would’ve offered wasn’t worth being colored brilliant yellow. She drew her own pilfered crossbow and fired a single bolt back down the hallway, then discarded it- reloading on-the-wing was a difficult maneuver at the best of times, and she didn’t want to risk shooting herself in the paw right now.

“I gotcha’…” Somegriff growled from just behind her, and to Gilda’s surprise one of the guards actually winged his way forward into her view, brandishing a curved Abyssinian sword. She lashed out with her rolling pin as they both slowed down to take a corner, catching him square on the top of the head, but his helmet actually seemed up to the challenge- he cried out in surprise, and bobbed downward for a moment, but kept up his pace.

Shit. Uhh… time for Plan C?

Gilda ducked under the guard’s sword swing and managed to position herself above him and to the right, just as they passed the intersection where she and Rainbow Dash had taken cover. She pushed her wings as hard as she dared for just a moment to gain some distance, then slowed down briefly to grab hold of the big suit of Minotaur armor in the alcove and tip it forward. The guard followed her with single-minded focus and slammed right into it as it fell, disappearing behind her in a noisy tangle of metal and feathers.

She chanced a look back before banking around the next corner. One of the other guards had fallen behind, presumably to extract his friend from the pile of destroyed armor; the other was still hot on her tail and had found the courage to start loading another crossbow bolt.

Gilda grinned and kept on flying. She’d done overnight courier runs all the way from Canterine up to Everhoof Station in howling blizzards before, when the pay was good enough. She could keep this pace up all day.

The guards stopped paying attention to Rainbow Dash as soon as sirens started ringing deeper inside the manor. That suited the pegasus just fine.

She scanned the perimeter of the ballroom, watching as guests shifted into denser, defensive little clusters. Easily two thirds now had bodyguards of some variety lurking near them, or had revealed weapons of their own. The unlucky few who had come here unarmed, and all of the waitstaff, had more or less glued themselves to Goldstone’s house troops in fearful little clusters.

She caught sight of Rarity heading her way, looking from one group of guests to the other nervously, and trotted across the carpet to join her. “What’s up?” Rainbow asked, suddenly aware of how not-bladed her wings felt.

“I don’t know, I was hoping you knew…” the tailor replied, then pointed to one of the side entrances. “Is that… Twilight?” Indeed, the skinny unicorn was making her way towards them, staggering slightly and breathing heavily, her mane and dress in disarray. The left side of her head was swollen and bruised from her eyebrow up to her horn, and blood trickled from the end of her muzzle.

“Dash! Rarity!” She shouted, and then paused briefly to catch her breath. “I just… I just woke up… -huh- Gilda ruttin’ cold-cocked me on the way back to our -huh- rooms… dunno where -huh- she went…”

Across the room, Gordon and his guards had fallen into a practiced-looking tight diamond formation. Far off, there was a muffled crash of what sounded like metal on metal, followed by the snapping of bowstrings.

Rarity took a deep breath and rubbed the spot below her own horn with one hoof. “I think I have a pretty good idea of where Gilda went, darling.”

“Hmm. Crossbowfire. I’ve changed my stance on that being a happy thing.” Rainbow watched Gordon look around nervously, and then shrug and turn to each of the guards in turn. “Kill anything that gets within… oh, I dunno, how about five meters?”

They all nodded as a unit, and some of the nearby waitstaff immediately scampered off to a safer distance.

Whatever was happening in the corridors outside, it sounded like it was getting closer.

Lord Goldstone strode into the center of the room and muttered something in Griffish to his nearby troops. The rank-and-file guards spread out to the walls, crossbows and short blades at the ready. The fat hen in full plate- Grunt, Rainbow believed her name was- left Goldstone’s side and stepped up to the main double doors, unslinging a gilded steel warhammer and readying it to swing. Rainbow hadn’t seen the cloaked griffon mage leave, but she was very much no longer present.

For a few seconds, nothing at all happened. The pegasus sucked in a few deep breaths and shuffled her wings, dropping into a lower stance ready to leap forward. Twilight and Rarity both crouched behind her, looking nervously from one group of guards to the next. The fat guard captain touched the side of her helmet, barked a few sentences of Griffish, and tightened her grip.

Then Gilda slammed through the doors, and the captain’s warhammer caught her hard just behind her right shoulder. Gilda cried out, and Rainbow as fairly certain she’d heard wingbones snap.

“Oh, no you don’t!” The pegasus kicked off and rushed them both in a single wing-assisted leap, twisting around midair to slam both of her hindlegs into the guard captain’s side. The sensation was akin to kicking a beanbag chair, stuffed inside an oil barrel. Rainbow could tell she hadn’t done the hen any actual damage, but she’d succeeded in her goal of upsetting her next hammer swing enough to narrowly miss Gilda’s sprawled form. The captain cursed in Griffish and twisted around to face Rainbow, leaving her hammer embedded in the floorboards. Sparing a quick look back over her shoulder, Rainbow watched Lord Goldstone reach into his jacket and hurl a long, thin, and extremely sharp dagger at her with surprising dexterity. Rarity’s horn flashed pale blue for just a moment as her eyes narrowed, and the dagger’s trajectory pitched upward ever-so-slightly. It slammed into the wood doorframe just above Dash’s head and detonated in a brilliant blue globe of magical lightning. A few energy bolts colored Twilight-purple followed it, although their trajectories were so wild that Rainbow was unsure what the unicorn had been aiming at- Gilda, or the guard captain.

She dodged a meaty talon swung at her head, darted in close, and delivered a few more quick jabs to the captain’s armored chest. It was rapidly becoming obvious, though, that without her wingblades or weighted sabatons the pegasus was simply in no condition to do serious damage. The captain’s next swing caught her a glancing blow to the side of her muzzle- it was enough to send her reeling for just a moment, but that was all the hen needed to charge forward and slam bodily into her.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Shoot them!” She heard Goldstone shout, as she struggled to roll the much larger griffon off of her.

There was another coordinated snapping of bowstrings, and a single bolt zipped right over Rainbow's head, between her and Grunt; a half dozen metallic pings told her where the others had struck.

“Os ydych chi'n [dent] arfwisg hynny, mae'n dod allan [out of your pay]!” The hen shouted in half-comprehensible Griffish. Rainbow took advantage of the momentary distraction to lever herself forward and up on her wings, then drove a rear hoof directly into the guard’s groin. Searing pain shot back up her leg all the way to the knee, but the guard was no better off. She made a sort of strangled guh noise and slid to the side just enough for the pegasus to wriggle free.

By then, Gilda was already gone.

Gilda’s broken right wing throbbed with each pawstep as she ran, dodging the occasional crossbow bolt, but she didn’t dare slow down. Effectively flightless, her priorities had now shifted from presenting the skull to Gordon and rubbing Twilight’s fuzzy purple snout in the whole affair, to getting out of the manor without any additional injuries.

Rainbow Dash could probably handle herself, and it wasn’t like Gilda could double back and check on her.

She skidded around another corner, wincing as the acceleration pulled at her wing, just as a salvo of bright purple magical bolts splattered the wall behind her.

So fuckin’ much for the altruism of ponies…

Another figure stepped out into the middle of the four-way intersection dead ahead, and Gilda cursed as she recognized Goldstone’s robed mage-for-hire. Slowing down risked disaster, though, and so she kept on running.

She’d made it halfway down the corridor when a pair of brilliant, acid-green beams shot out from the shadowy interior of the mage’s hood- which was odd, since griffons typically cast from the talons or wings. At the last possible moment Gilda ducked, and both beams struck a painting well past her head- instantly the canvas sagged with mold and mildew, rotting in its frame. She dodged and weaved, her zig-zagging course costing her precious distance, as more beams struck around her and filled the already stale air with the odor of decay. Carpet shriveled, floorboards warped… and the entire time, the mage didn’t move an inch, even as Gilda drew dangerously near.

Finally, with nowhere else to go, Gilda slammed into the mage with a running tackle, left-side-first… and yelped in surprise as she felt nothing but hard, smooth bone underneath her robes. There was a moment of odd, stretchy resistance and a soft fizzling noise, before the mage’s body came apart with the force of the impact; Gilda stared, wide-eyed, as a polished white griffon skull fell out of the rapidly-collapsing hood, followed by a talonful of vertebrae and a collarbone. She skidded to the floor, unable to support herself against what had become nothing but a pile of loose bones, watching in alarm as a crossbow quarrel shot over her head. Then she felt the distinctive tearing pain of a glancing hit against her right hind leg as she hauled herself back up. After that, there was a loud yowl and several impacts behind her, and the crossbow fire ceased.

Gilda charged off again as best she could, and did not look back.

Twilight ran until she thought her barrel would implode, struggling to keep in sight of Gilda, and when that failed struggling equally unsuccessfully to keep in sight of Rainbow Dash. Teleportation would’ve made her task much easier, but even attempting the necessary geometric visualizations right now made her head swim; for the time being she was limited to basic stun bolts, and possibly an amniomorphic shield if absolutely necessary. She skidded around a corner leading to a four-way intersection, just in time to witness Rainbow Dash drop one of Goldstone’s guards with a series of precise strikes to the head and neck. Patches of the hallway looked as though they’d been left exposed to the elements for several months, and near the intersection a frayed blue robe was draped over what appeared to be a pile of disarticulated bones. There was no sign whatsoever of Gilda.

The pegasus turned to look at Twilight. “Shit! Which way?

Currently lacking the breath to speak, the unicorn settled for a shrug, and trotted over to what seemed very much to be the remains of Goldstone’s hired University mage. The bones themselves appeared unremarkable, but Twilight’s attention was drawn immediately to the pair of rune-inscribed copper bands that looked to have replaced the skull’s original sclerotic rings- eyebones found in many birds, griffons included. The only inscriptions she could conclusively identify looked to relate to long-range visual and clairaudio spells; the others were clearly necromantic in nature, which unfortunately put them just outside Twilight’s usual areas of expertise. She’d very much have liked to bring them back to Equestria for study, but given how they were currently disintegrating into a noxious greenish puddle and melting their way through the floorboards, picking them up was likely unwise.

Although ESS would still probably be very grateful to learn that the University of Innsbeak is even working on something like this… Yeah, grateful enough to put me in a cell with a window. Oh well.

Rainbow Dash trotted over. “Hey, did that wizard just… I mean, was she always a skeleton, or…?”

“I don’t think the wizard ever left the University,” Twilight explained, as soon as she had the breath to speak again, “Gilda just destroyed the mindless drone that attended meetings on her behalf.”

“Wait. Gilda just killed somegriff’s Spike?”

“Ha. Ha.” Twilight finally located a thin trickle of bright-red blood trailing down the right-side corridor’s carpet. “C’mon, this way!”

Gilda swerved down another yellow-carpeted hallway, guided as much by the sound of guards hot on her heels as she was the map in her head. She’d started out with a sizable lead; but in between her wing and her leg, she was slowing down and they were starting to gain ground. She dug her claws into the carpet to slow herself just enough, ignoring the fresh jabs of pain that shot through both her leg and her wing, and ducked down a narrower side passage. This one. Third door on the left. Behind her, the sound of impacts and crossbow fire once again mixed with the sizzling of magical energy, but she didn’t dare look back now. One door down.

Another crossbow quarrel zipped overhead. Two doors.

Halfway to the next, Gilda found herself wrapped in a wobbly, flickering globe of pinkish energy- a good thing, too, as it immediately absorbed two more crossbow shots and what looked like some sort of lightning bolt, although at visible cost to its own solidity. She didn’t even bother to slow down, and charged headfirst into its far side. Somepony whinnied behind her, distinctly equine and distinctly pained, and the barrier snapped out of existence. Here.

She grit her teeth as she skidded to a halt, and wrenched the door open, splinters of wood she’d torn free from the frame ricocheting off her chest. More magical bolts slammed into the door as she dashed inside, heading right for the big picture windows in the far wall.

Gilda grabbed a spindly Zebrican-style wooden end table and hurled it through the glass ahead of her, even as hooves scrabbled against the carpet just outside.

Then she jumped, stretching out her one good wing to try to turn her half-story fall into some sort of controlled spiral.

The hedgerow down below looked reasonably soft, and she was just about on a good trajectory to intercept it, when a purple glow filled her peripheral vision and a stun bolt hit her square in the back of the neck.

There wasn’t really a sensation of impact; just a burning, tingling numbness that spread out from where she’d been struck, washed over her whole body in the span of less than a second, and left her muscles limp and unresponsive in its wake. As her partially controlled spiral opened out again into an uncontrolled drop and the hedgerow rushed up at her far too fast, Gilda wondered if the numbing properties of the spell would also prevent her from feeling the collision.

It did not.

She landed hard, mostly on her belly, scattering leaves and twigs in a brief plume.

Now everything hurt in roughly equal measure, but as near as she could determine nothing new seemed to be broken- although that awful tingling heat was still omnipresent, and when she tried to raise her head from the awkward slumped-over position she’d found herself in, her muscles still refused to respond. Then again, she wasn’t sure she’d be in any condition to support her own weight right now without the spell.

After a few seconds there was another flash of magenta light and Twilight Sparkle materialized next to her. The unicorn stumbled around as if she were about to pass out again. “I dun need t' come down to breakf'st, Mom, I got a doctor’s dirge now…” she mumbled, then bowed her head and dry-heaved a few times, and finally seemed to regain some of her composure. “Ugh… oh, Harmony, that was a bad idea… right.” Twilight looked up, and Gilda watched Rainbow Dash gliding down to land next to her.

Rainbow immediately trotted over to the ruined hedgerow, reached out a hoof towards Gilda, and then cautiously pulled it back. “Aww, shit… shit… Gil’s not… I mean, she’s not seriously hurt or…”

“I don’t think so, just stunned,” Twilight replied, although Gilda had no idea how the unicorn could possibly know that.

She tried to say so, but her beak wasn’t being particularly responsive at the moment and all she managed were a few inarticulate caws.

“Don’t… uhhh, don’t try to talk,” Rainbow admonished, ears dropping down in concern.

“Please!” Twilight rolled her eyes.

“You’re gonna be okay…” Dash looked at Twilight and cocked her head. “… right?” Then she turned back to face the manor, and her eyes went wide. “Awww, shit.”

With a rustle of feathers and faint rattle of armor, Lord Goldstone alighted on the path some ways away from them, accompanied by his hammer-wielding captain and easily a half-dozen other rank-and file guards. Rainbow Dash and the captain swiveled to face each other, both glaring daggers, as the other guards spread out and formed a loose circle around them.

After a few seconds of tense, aggressive silence, Gilda finally managed to get her beak and tongue more-or-less cooperating again. “Caaawww… cwaaahhh… cnhh.. caaaan shomecreashure gimme outta thish fawkin bush?!”

Rainbow turned away from the fat hen, and very carefully began sliding Gilda out of her saddle of crushed branches. It was a delicate, extremely painful process, but Gilda soon found she’d recovered enough strength in her forelegs to help drag herself forward- although, sadly, not enough to actually stand, as she landed on her haunches with another beak-jarring thud.

“… sorry?” Rainbow Dash muttered.

Lord Goldstone, in the meantime, had made his way over to where his ancestor’s skull had slipped out of its carrying-sack and rolled to a stop in the gravel courtyard. He poked at it with one talon, and then turned back to Gilda and the ponies. “I’d half-expected this sort of behavior from your hirelings…” he clasped one talon over his chest- and his replacement amulet- and lurched back as if struck, “… but not from you, Doctor Sparkle.” He looked back up at the manor and shook his head. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find reliable guards in this miserable city?”

“Four Windsh, I wonder why that might be…” Gilda muttered to herself.

The tiercel rounded on her and cuffed her across the beak. It hurt, but not a lot, at least not compared to everything else. “Ordinarily, I’d just take all of this out of the mainlander’s hide, but it’s clear to me now that her hide isn’t worth terribly much, so-”

“Hardly,” Twilight spoke up, “You do realize I fired her yesterday, right?”

“Twiiiilight!” Rainbow Dash chided, to no apparent effect, positioning herself between Gilda and Goldstone with her wings outstretched.

Goldstone ignored her utterly and rounded on the unicorn, tail swishing back and forth. “Oh, so I’m to believe this gutter trash is just some rogue element? With her trick ballgown and softpaw boots?” He ran a talon through his nigh-nonexistent crest, big watery eyes narrowing suspiciously. “No… I can tell when somepony’s trying to pull the wool over my eyes… I wouldn’t still be here, otherwise. You were in on this hackneyed scheme, Doctor Sparkle, and no amount of retroactive ass-covering is going to protect you now.” He leaned forward, the flexible sides of his beak pressed together in a thin line. “As of tonight, you are no longer welcome in my city. It’s going to be a long walk down to the train station, and assuming you make it there in one piece, I’m sure some of my friends in the Equestrian government would love to make public just what an esteemed scholar of your caliber has been doing over here. As for your friends, I’ll probably need to-”

He was cut off by a soft popping noise, and the sudden appearance of a bright orange globe of light on the lawn, fading to green around the edges. When it disappeared, Gordon of Innsbeak stood in its place, walking-stick clutched in one talon and a solitary blue-uniformed guard beside him.

Gilda was surprised by how normal the old cockerel looked. She hadn’t paid much attention to him during the party, but her brief childhood stay in Innsbeak had elevated him to near-legendary status. She still remembered the local street-cubs daring each other to sneak onto the University grounds and knock on the door to his tower- supposedly he employed a crossbow-wielding butler who shot all visitors on sight.

Almost immediately, Goldstone’s troops backed away. They outnumbered Gordon and his escort by a factor of three, but somehow Gilda doubted that was anywhere near enough.

Gordon stepped away from his guard -Gilda wondered if he needed any at all, and didn’t just keep them around for looks- and surveyed the assembled creatures with a rapidly-shifting, unsteady gaze. Then he laughed, briefly, and said in perfectly unaccented Ponish “First thing’s first, I’m seeing a griffon skull lying out here, so I’m going to assume one of you laid it out for me.”

Lord Goldstone and Twilight both stared, silent and open-mouthed. Finally, the tiercel cocked his head. “… Excuse me?”

Gordon seemed not to notice as he picked his way over to Geraldine III’s skull. He moved surprisingly adroitly for such an old creature. “Thanks, that’s very forward-thinking of you!” He plucked it off the ground with the end of his walking stick, shook off some of the dirt it had acquired, and casually lobbed it undertalon to the guard.

Then he twisted his head back and forth, unsteady gaze wandering over the garden. “You know, it would make this whole day almost worth it if I found buried treasure here. I mean, this is the place for it to be…” For just a moment he focused back on Goldstone, who was currently all but vibrating with restrained anger, “Either that, or some bodies.”

“Now, you listen here,” the tiercel snapped, “The University might be used to letting you run roughshod, but if you insist on toying with my property, you’ll find that-”

“Ah, somegriff thinks he’s smarter than me,” Gordon cut him off. “I don’t have to dignify this.” The mage made a quick, odd little gesture with one talon. “I don’t need to hear your opinion; I already know what it is.”

Goldstone’s beak opened and closed a few more times, soundlessly, and only when Gilda saw his eyes widen in horror did she realize he was attempting to continue to speak- utterly without success.

“I hate awkward pauses like this,” Gordon continued, his gaze still tracking at random over the ponies, the guards, the garden, and the walls of the manor in front of him. “Of course, I’m the one who has to break the ice…”

Gilda wondered if she might be able to say something to the mage in her own defense, but then decided that silence was almost certainly the safest option.

Gordon turned back to Goldstone, who had finally given up attempting to speak and was simply glaring at his own guards. “Okay, here’s how I think this is gonna end. I’ll buy this skull for the original price, what was it, ten thousand bits?” He reached up and poked at Goldstone’s narrow chest with his walking-stick. “In exchange, I won’t cut you out of the University’s profits, even though you pretty much directly caused a major security incident, invited agents from the Equestrian government into the city, and got Gina’s stupid skeleton destroyed. Okay?”

Goldstone nodded, although judging by his expression he was far from happy- furious, more likely.

“Diplomacy breaks out!” Gordon cackled, before swiveling back to face Twilight. Gilda was fairly certain she saw the unicorn flinch backwards a little.

“Now, as for you…” He grinned, and clapped a withered talon on her shoulder. “You got my attention, which is normally something the so-called sane ponies try to avoid. Tartarus, you made me laugh. So I’ll say this nicely.” He looked Twilight square in the eye, even if just for a moment and with his head tilted at a strange angle. “Take your three stooges and fuck off back to Canterlot.”

To Gilda’s surprise, Twilight swallowed hard and looked right back. “Actually, Doctor, I’m not from Canterlot. Or, well, I guess I am in the sense that I was born there, but I’m not working for Strategic Services or whatever if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, I came out here to try and learn some information Canterlot doesn’t want me to find. And I’m really sorry about starting a bidding war over your skull."

For just a moment, her statement actually seemed to give the old griffon pause. “That’s a new one,” he muttered, “and having this whole disaster be an elaborate ruse just to get me to let my guard down- which you didn’t manage, by the way- is a little beyond what some armchair general or stuffed-shirt ESS director could reasonably execute. There was too little friendly fire back there, too.”

Twilight cocked her head, clearly perplexed. “I…guess?”

Then, Gilda’s heart nearly leapt into her throat as the mad mage picked his way over to look down directly at her. She could all but hear magical energy buzzing as he approached, and realized that while she’d been watching him negotiate with Goldstone and Twilight the uncomfortable numbing sensation of the stun spell had dissipated. With much protestation from her various fractures, cuts, and puncture wounds, she hauled herself back onto all-fours.

Gilda then found herself pinned in Gordon’s gaze like a deer in lantern light, and realized that there was something underneath his seemingly manic, unfocused behavior- a clear, brilliant, calculating kind of madness. His scatterbrained appearance was nothing but a front before it. The idea of ever crossing Gordon of Innsbeak had never seemed particularly wise to Gilda, but now it positively terrified her. She wondered if Twilight had noticed that, too.

“As for you… They say you have to play the cards you’ve been dealt in life. I don’t think so. I think if you’ve been dealt a stacked deck, you can knock the table over, pull out a knife, and start swinging at… life, I guess… I don’t know…” he trailed off, and then shrugged. “The point is, you’re free to go. Consider that your payment for delivering my skull. And for getting rid of Gina’s paranoid crutch. I’d been meaning to do that for years, but wasn’t sure I could get away with it…”

He stepped back towards the patch of lawn where he’d arrived, and waved at his guard, who’d been standing there casually over the entire course of the conversation. The guard fished a small blue-cloth sack out of his armor, which produced the distinct sound of rattling coinage as he chucked it at Goldstone’s feet. The tiercel picked it up, peered inside, and then took off without another word, heading back to the manor. One by one, his guards followed, and once they were all gone the blue-uniformed University guard took flight as well.

Then Gordon waved his walking-stick at Twilight in a vague 'come here' gesture. The unicorn looked back at Rainbow Dash, who nodded. She and the mad mage set off down one of the paths, around a corner, and out of sight.

Rainbow turned back to Gilda, her ears pivoting from side to side. “Uhhh… do you… are you okay? I mean, have you got someplace to stay, or…”

Gilda shrugged, and began limping her way down the forecourt to the big iron gates at the edge of the property. They were closed, but didn’t seem to be locked, at least not from the inside. “I’ll be fine. I gotta chariot waiting for me ‘bout a block from here, to get me back to the inn. Figured I might need a quicker getaway, and didn’t wanna risk flying through the lower city solo.”

“That’s… good… I guess?” Rainbow Dash looked back at the front door of the mansion, where Rarity was visible standing in the foyer, looking very confused indeed.

“Not really,” Gilda laughed, then winced as doing so as the motion tweaked her injured wing, “Fucker’s been costin’ me a bit every two minutes this whole night just to sit there…”

Doctor Sparkle, I Presume?

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Twilight rode an air chariot back to Gordon’s tower at the University. He’d come to the party by long-range teleport, but while Goldstone’s manor included its own focus room, it hadn’t been in working order for somewhere on the order of thirty years. Thus, returning by the same method was impossible.

In her weakened state, the acceleration of the tower elevator -the only one in the entire city of Innsbeak, supposedly- nearly brought her to her knees as she rode it to the upper level. Staff were required to take the stairs.

Twilight wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting from the mad mage’s personal quarters, but a spacious, clean, white-tiled laboratory workspace that wouldn’t’ve looked out of place in the Royal Academy was not it. The entire circular floorplan of the tower was essentially one big open room, split up by half-height wooden partitions extending from the central column that held the elevator and staircase. Tall picture windows offered a commanding view of the Innsbeak skyline- which was to say, a commanding view of nothing much, although at least they were above the worst of the omnipresent smog.

The infamous skull collection sat in little individual square cubbies in a wooden shelving unit against one wall; a cabinet next to it was packed with armaments both magical and mundane; and next to that a small alcove held a curious suit of armor on a complicated rack. There was an obvious resemblance to Royal Guard armor, although the gambeson usually worn underneath had been replaced by a full bodysuit that appeared to be made of some kind of treated gray rubber. The armor plates were painted brilliant safety-orange, giving the entire device a marked resemblance to Gordon’s natural robin-like coloration, and the full-face helmet had been outfitted with round glass goggles and a beakguard to accommodate griffon anatomy. Although the suit had obviously been subjected to ongoing modifications both magical and metallurgical, Twilight found the underlying design to be quite reminiscent of the refitted armor used by the Guard in particularly hazardous environments- which, in 1019, would have made it very, very new.

The rest of the tower was taken up by lab worktops, ritual circles, and freestanding blackboards. Most of the work depicted was alchemical, and well beyond Twilight’s expertise, but some appeared to be liminological. Amid the notes and formulae she picked out eerie similarities not just to her research into radion, but also her original models of the spell that brought about Nightmare Moon’s return. A big poster-sized flowchart was decorated with news clippings and names- government and academic agencies, major disasters, and magical developments in Equestria and far beyond. Some of the notes referred to Twilight herself, sharing space with established mages and broadsheet-spewing conspiracy theorists; one of the highest-quality photos of Nightmare Moon taken in the Ponyville Town Hall had been tacked nearby, and then neatly crossed out.

Gordon stood at one of the windows nearby, looking out over the city and its hundreds of wobbly, flickering lights. “Boreas, I still can’t believe it’s night out, it only felt like a couple hours.” He tapped his cane a couple of times on the lab’s tile floor. “Dammit, everything’s like this now. They always say time flies when you’re having fun, but what happens is that time just flies, period, and we all end up older.”

Twilight just nodded, in equal parts impressed and confused. Now that her headache and nausea were starting to fade, it was starting to sink in just how tired she was; she cast around for a place to sit, spotted a wheeled desk chair tucked under a nearby laboratory table, and telekinetically rolled it over.

Gordon picked his way back over to her, pulled another chair out from under the other side of the table, and sat down across from her, drumming his talons on the bakelite resin worktop. “So, I… guess this is it, then. Let’s start with you telling me everything you think happened in 1019, and I’ll tell you all the ways that you’re wrong.”

Twilight scanned over the news clippings on the chart again. Most of them were relatively recent, if one defined 'recent' as having been published within her lifetime. “What makes you so sure I’m looking into anything that happened in 1019?”

“What else would you be looking into? Ponies from Canterlot don’t come around here to learn about the fluxional harmoniodynamic Grangerian,” he shook his head, suddenly looking downcast, “Not anymore, at least.”

“Right.” Twilight pulled in a deep breath, and then continued, “So, I’m pretty sure that the Great Canterlot Fire was deliberately set to cover up some other disaster that took place in or near the northern edge of the Royal Academy campus. This was preceded by, and might’ve been the result of, some kind of major construction or investigation project that had been running for an unknown but sizable amount of time in very close secrecy. It released a plume of unidentified, unique, and mostly undetectable material into the atmosphere, which persists to this day. I’ve been picking up traces of the same, or similar, matter in Lunar artifacts, and I was hoping that if I knew more about it I’d be able to figure out how those artifacts functioned. However, there’s very little information available on its properties, or its origins.”

Gordon nodded, silently, and made a little “go-on” gesture with one talon.

“I know that you, current Archmage Inkwell, and Princess Celestia were all involved in the initial release event, along with a bunch of other leading figures in variety of fields. Who are now all dead.”

“So, you came out here.”

“Well, I tried consulting the Academy archives first, and when that didn’t go anywhere I talked to Inkwell, and when she didn’t cooperate I tried talking to Celestia, and when she couldn’t tell me anything, I came here looking for you.”

Gordon looked at her silently for a second, his gaze, expression, and entire head disconcertingly fixed. Then he threw his head back and laughed, long and loud, and Twilight got the distinct impression that she was being laughed at. Feeling somewhat uncomfortable under the griffon’s wobbly green gaze, she looked down at the table and scanned over a few of the stacks of paper that had been left out in one corner. With a palpable shock she realized they were neatly-collated copies of the documents she’d consulted on radion, along with some of her own most recent reports on Lunar phenomena- and there were corrections written overtop. In fact, the entire collection looked like it had been prepared and set out specifically for her benefit, but when she lit her horn and attempted to lift off one of the cover pages, Gordon’s talon slammed flat against the stack.

“The Equestrian government and I don’t agree on a lot of things, but the one thing we do agree on is that this is dangerous information,” the mage said. His jovial tone never wavered, but there was something about the way he was looking at her that seemed… steadier, somehow; intent and wary. “What you ponies did up in Canterlot wasn’t some freak accident. It was proven, reproducible science, and you look like the kind of pony who might want to reproduce it, just to see what would happen.”

“No, no, absolutely not,” Twilight stammered, “I’m just… trying to set the record straight, historically speaking, I guess. And thinking about this from a risk-management perspective, giving the information over would actually decrease the likelihood that I’d try to independently re-derive any part of it by running experiments myself. But… more than that, the fact that I’ve found materials originally detected in the aftermath of the disaster, at elevated concentrations in artifacts and living ponies from nearly a thousand years earlier, should tell you that there’s more going on here than even you realize. We’ll have to work together if we want to get to the bottom of it- because, right now, I'm worried whatever happened in Canterlot could happen again. It might’ve already happened, a thousand years ago, or just this year at the Summer Sun Celebration.”

She watched as Gordon’s eyes suddenly grew much wider, the whirring gears in his head almost audible. “It must've been... localized, both those times, then. Contained. I didn't pick up anything on my instruments, when… when Nightmare Moon returned, I guess. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?”

Twilight nodded. “I know the substance has an affinity for living tissue, though. In my notes- which you somehow have a copy of- you can see I've found elevated radion levels in Princess Luna, as well as her surviving troops." She planted her hooves on the table and tried to look him in the eye, which was a more mentally daunting prospect than she’d’ve considered previously. “You can trust me, Gordon. I already have a fairly good idea of what the consequences could be if-”

“No.” The mage said, surprisingly quietly, “Ambushing three Lunars in some forest somewhere is nothing. I had to fight my way through dozens of those things with a prybar, before I even found a real weapon. I beat down colleagues and coworkers and random Canterlot citizens who’d just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because it was always them or me. So no, I don’t trust you, Twilight Sparkle. I don’t think you know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Twilight resisted the sudden urge to roll her eyes. “Are you always this paranoid, or is it only when you’re with ponies who really need your help?”

Gordon slipped out of his chair and began pacing out an aimless path near the windows, his eyes narrowing with a focus Twilight hadn't seen before, “You know, everypony’s always told me that I’m paranoid, and I need to calm down. But guess what? I’m alive, and everypony who’s said that is dead!” He suddenly swung his cane through the air, hard enough that Twilight could hear the whistling noise from her seat. “That’s the ultimate proof somepony doesn’t know what in Tartarus they’re talking about. 'Follow my advice and you'll die just like me, hu-hyuk!' I’ve got the Equestrian Strategic Services posting my name on a wall somewhere, setting death traps, and firing fucking artillery pieces at me, and ponies have the gall to call me paranoid!” He stopped and once again looked out the window over the city. “Fuck them. Fuck everypony! Anypony who doesn’t listen to me deserves the fate they get! I should kill everycreature just on principle!”

Vaguely alarmed, Twilight slid her chair back a few centimeters, but the griffon wasn’t finished. He waved the claw that wasn’t holding his walking stick in a vague, theatrical gesture. “‘Monsters aren’t invading, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid.’ ‘The mailmare isn’t spying on you, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid.’ ‘There’s no society of hippomorphic bug-ponies living in the mines under Canterlot, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid.’ ‘Owls can’t read your thoughts, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid…’” Very suddenly, he wheeled around once again and looked directly at Twilight; she immediately abandoned any attempts to move away. “Bet’cha wouldn’t call me paranoid if you were still alive! How about expecting Twilight fucking Sparkle to ambush me at an auction party- is that paranoid?!” he practically screamed.

Utterly bewildered, Twilight spent a second pondering what he might’ve expected the correct answer to be. And what was that about owls? Finally, she settled on “Not… any more than expecting Nightmare Moon to return was paranoid, anyway.”

Very abruptly, the frantic energy seemed to disappear from Gordon’s frame. He sat back down and straightened his jacket. Once again, with growing dismay, the unicorn found herself wondering if what she’d just witnessed was some kind of an act. Then she decided that wasn’t the right question. Rather, she was unsure if his current calm was an act on the part of a deeply disturbed recluse; if the entire diatribe had been an act on the part of the clever and calculating wizard seated in front of her now; or if mage and maniac had long ago attained some kind of equilibrium and both were Gordon in roughly equal measure.

“Good answer. So, where do I start…”

Seventy-Nine Years Ago

Gordon of Innsbeak worked underground, in the Blue Mountain Research Facility tunneled five kilometers into the side of Mt. Maranduin. Here, the Royal Academy of Magic conducted experiments too delicate to risk being disturbed by the everyday activities of the city of Canterlot- or which, for any number of reasons and any number of different meanings of the word, might ‘disturb’ the city or its inhabitants in turn. There was a dedicated rail line running to it from the closed-off little residential district where they’d assigned him living quarters, retrofitted into the old crystal mines to keep it from showing up on public construction budgets, although today -of all days- his train was running late.

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t’ve been overly bothered. However, he considered himself lucky to have secured a position on such an important project at all, and was willing to put in at least a bit of effort to keep it. Prestigious Equestrian research institutions didn’t recruit from the University of Innsbeak every day, after all, especially not to hire new doctoral graduates of his relative inexperience; and especially not for projects that required ‘Special Security Clearance’. Indeed, his entire hiring process had been unusual- secretive was the best way he could describe it, all one-on-one meetings in cramped little rooms, with more concern given to a small mountain of nondisclosure agreements than to the usual visa and residency papers.

Finally his train car slid to a halt, a little more than ten minutes behind schedule.

The primary rail access to Blue Mountain was little more than a platform of bare rock chiseled into the tunnel wall. It was by no means a public station, so there was very little here in the way of creature comforts- just big crystal floodlights high above, crates full of equipment and raw materials, and a very large and very well-guarded metal door. “Couldn’t they bother to set up at least a bench?” Gordon muttered.

“Mornin’, Gordon!,” called one of the Royal Guard MPs who provided security for the complex, as her companion fiddled with the door’s complicated lock. “Looks like you’re runnin’ late!”

“Oh, by all means, please continue stating the perfectly obvious,” the griffon continued, pacing in a tight circle as the doors slid ponderously across their tracks. “Nothing could make me more confident that you have my back during a crisis.”

He slipped through the doors as soon as there was a body’s-width of space between them, into a scene of supremely organized bedlam. The open forum that made up the central hub of Blue Mountain was swarmed by ponies -and other creatures besides- in lab coats, coveralls, and uniforms alike; on their way to adjust this or deliver that. Another squad of Guards sitting behind a ring of desks in the center were at least nominally overseeing all of it. If they found Gordon’s lateness at all remarkable, they were far too busy fielding the constant stream of tactical jargon spat from the clairaudio spells in their earpieces to say so. Supposedly, the same spells would be made standard-issue for combat troops before the end of the year.

Gordon caught a few odd segments of conversation -“… new weather report for Doctor Stone…”, “Mountaintop post reports all clear…”, “… no-fly zone expanded to five kilometers, prepare to land…”- but he didn’t wait around to try to decipher them. Seeing this many troops in one place always made Gordon nervous. There’d been rumors about some traditionalist factions in the military taking a ‘harder line’ against griffons working in government positions.

“Yeah, the Guards aren’t on our side, here, they’re on their side… Is somepony following me?” He ducked past a unicorn technician hauling a pullcart full of amplifier crystals, and headed down the bustling hallway towards the theoretical alchemy section. Built into Maranduin’s natural caverns, the facility’s staffed areas were spacious, tiled, and well-lit- it was easy to forget one was underground at all, and not just working in an unusually windowless building elsewhere on the Academy campus.

The alchemy labs themselves were mostly empty by now. The specialized reagents his team had spent the last two years developing were finally to be put to use; so most of his colleagues were already down in the center of the complex- either to make last-minute adjustments or simply to observe what was promised to be a historic experiment.

“Do you know who ate all the donuts?” asked one of the few remaining researchers as she lurked near Gordon’s desk.

“No! Do you know if æther is really a stellated polyhedron? Fucking donuts…” He strode past the bewildered mare to the workshop at the end of the hallway. A trio of pony technicians stood, shuffling their hooves impatiently, near the complicated metal armature that held his protective suit.

“Oh, there he is,” said the seniormost mare. Gordon had never bothered to memorize their names. “We were just about to try and cram P-F-C Shift in this thing and go on without you.”

Gordon shrugged and stepped onto the raised platform in the center of the room, backing up until the technicians could lower the complicated saddle-piece that contained the bulk of his suit’s systems into place. After that came the gloves, leggings, wing-wraps, neckpiece, and all-important helmet.

“Seals check out… atmospheric pressure nominal… filters cycling…” another technician read off. Gordon pressed the helmet’s front section forward, listening to the characteristic buzz of powerful protective enchantments engaging. The dim and blurry world visible through his mask’s thick round goggles brightened again as the photoreactive crystals adjusted, and a series of symbols projected onto their inner surfaces one-after-the-other: clairaudio spell, onboard camera, impact wards, trauma module, thermoregulatory spells. “He’s good.” The technician clapped Gordon on the shoulder. “But, suit or no suit, I hope you weren’t plannin’ to have cubs after this.”

Gordon considered responding, but thought better of it. Unlike most of the other components of the Project, most of which he considered unclear at best and pointless at worst, he had a vested interest in his suit doing what it was supposed to. He was, after all, going to be inside the experiment chamber when it was in operation- that enchanted rubber would be all that stood between him and a cold, highly ætherized environment capable of killing him in minutes.

The safety team hadn’t been informed exactly why the environment would be cold or ætherized -in addition to being generally reclusive, the Project’s mysterious sponsors enforced compartmentalization to a ridiculous extreme- but the desire to talk about their chosen fields of study was the curse of technical sorts the world over. Word got out. Supposedly, the overarching purpose of their work was to more closely observe the surface of the moon: such observation would be greatly enhanced if the atmosphere in the chamber closely matched what was conjectured about conditions on the lunar surface. Gordon’s task would be to monitor their analytic equipment -thaumographs, photographic plates, and the like- and make sure everything was working even if the observational properties of their target patch of lunar landscape changed unpredictably.

Not for the first time, the griffon mage wondered just what it was about the project that merited such intense secrecy. The properties of the Lunar Plane -and, more recently, the nature of the ‘Mare-In-The-Moon’ phenomenon that covered much of its visible surface- had been the subject of open and vigorous scientific debate since the dawn of recorded history.

Beyond that general statement of purpose, though, the rumor mill got very confused, very quickly. Exactly how the moon was to be observed was a particular point of divergence. There was talk of predictions and prophecies dating back a thousand years; consultations with flaky neo-Lunar mystics; recreations of dubious energy experiments from the depths of the Centaur Union’s secret archives; and military expeditions launched to the distant corners of the Known World, to retrieve the writings of Sombran occultists from the dying days of the Crystal Empire. All of it added up to not much, and none of it pointed to anything resembling any specific motive aside from the most abstract scientific curiosity- which certainly wasn’t worth keeping so secret.

“Somepony lost their keys, huh? Yeah, I’d look up there too, when all else fails.” Gordon muttered to himself, striding back through the alchemy wing and into the main section of the complex once again. It was already beginning to empty out, somewhat: anypony who didn’t have a specific station to attend to no longer had any business being here. He weaved around carts and pallets of equipment, and down the big corridor that led deeper into the complex, where wallboard and drop tile ceilings were quickly replaced by piping and bare rock. The metal cylinder of the experiment chamber dominated the largest cavern dead ahead, easily three stories high and nearly as wide. It was surrounded by catwalks and scaffolding and a few small, stand-alone instrumentation shacks, and bathed in the omnipresent crystal floodlights.

“What, is Princess Celestia looking for her sister up there or something?” Finding the elevator down to the cavern floor occupied by a collection of senior astrologers, he ducked along another walkway, aiming to cut through the observation area- the cavern was filled with enough cables and struts to make flight a distinctly dangerous concept. “Shoulda’ thought of that before she vaporized her nine hundred years ago, and- GAH!”

He skidded to a halt at the door to the observation room- Celestia herself was standing inside, along with the head of the Project, a somewhat heavyset white pegasus stallion named Stormseeker. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen the Princess somewhere in the facility, since she had a sizable role in funding and directing it, but it was certainly the first time she had been this close.

She looked directly at him, called out “Doctor Gordon,” smiled a press-conference-perfect smile, and then turned back to Stormseeker.

“Ah, there he is,” the pegasus said, adjusting his wire-framed glasses with the tip of one wing. “We had a few delays earlier for some… last-minute recalibrations, but that’s all been dealt with. You should probably head down to the chamber as soon as you can. We’ll handle everything up here.”

That was more than the senior mage had said to Gordon over the whole of the last month.

He squeezed past the banks of instruments without another word, and then paused on the open stairway beyond- he could just about hear Princess Celestia speaking through the thin sheet-metal wall, over the constant background hum of ponies reading off checklists and calling out measurements. “… as I was saying, if you have any concerns at all about the sites, you’re more than encouraged to make them known.”

“Not…concerns, exactly, I suppose,” he heard Stormseeker reply, “I’m just a little curious as to why you’re so adamant on choosing them. At such an early stage, I’d figure that one part of the Lunar Plane would be as scientifically informative as any other…”

“Consider it a… symbolic gesture on my part, on behalf of a few very close and dear friends from well before your time,” said Celestia.

“Obviously, that’s… reasonable, and we never would’ve gotten anywhere near this far, this quickly without Your Grace’s contributions, but… if I could just see some sort of derivation for the corrections you supplied, I’d be a lot more comfortable with-”

Whatever else the project lead might have said was cut off as somepony called out from the bottom of the stairwell, “Gordon? Gordon? Is that you up there?”

Gordon nearly jumped out of his suit, looked down, and recognized Inkwell- one of the junior members of the liminology team. He hauled his armored form over the safety railing and glided down to the bottom of the stairwell.

“We’ve been looking for you all over! No time to dawdle, Gordon!” Inkwell chided, as he made his way down another broad, floodlit tunnel bored through the wall at the bottom of the cavern.

The massive doors on the far end were currently open, bracketed by two more Royal Guards in full armor. Both of them nodded at Gordon, and he stepped inside the experiment chamber, then took flight and headed for the balcony that ringed the orange-painted walls, protected on its inner side by big panels of reinforced crystal. His instruments were set up on reinforced tables behind them: thaumographs, materiographs, his precious new color photo cameras, and much more besides. On the floor below, no fewer than seven concentric spell circles had been etched into free-spinning metal rings, which were currently being sprayed down with a fresh coating of magically inert lubricant by another squad of technicians. In the very center sat a pool of extremely pure mercury, also rigged to spin at high velocity; in clear view of both the glassed-in, magically shielded observation deck and the instruments on Gordon’s balcony.

“Convergence minus five minutes. Close surface vents. Pressurize æther tanks. Coolant exchange pumps on standby,” a mare’s voice echoed through the complex, magically amplified.

Gordon had been inside the chamber three or four times already during test runs, and always found it somewhat incongruous with its intended function. “We’re studying the surface of the moon from inside a mountain” he muttered, not for the first time, “that makes about as much sense as deep-sea astronomy, or grounded aviation. There’s telescopes and cameras, but they’re all pointed down, and I’m pretty sure the mercury pool is supposed to be stable, not spinning. This looks more like a summoning circle. I’m not an expert on divination or anything, but this is elementary stuff… I don’t get the feeling we’re in very good hooves here…”

“Dynamancy section to begin active stabilization. Æther tanks to capacity.”

Down below, the technicians seemed to have finished what they were doing, and began wheeling their equipment out of the room.

“Begin cycling coolant. Prep team, clear the central chamber. Engage pressure seals, and open æther valves one, two, and four.”

With ponderous slowness, the chamber doors ground closed, and there was a loud whine as the secondary amplification spell on the observation deck activated.

“All right,” said Doctor Stormseeker. “We’ll begin with the rotors at thirty-three percent of-”

Then, to the griffon’s surprise, Princess Celestia spoke as well: “Before… we proceed, I wanted to… to thank, each and every one of you for your contributions to this venture. Without the dedication, courage, and ingenuity of everycreature involved in this project, from all across Equestria and from the realms beyond as well, none of this would have been possible.” She paused, and through the reinforced glass of the observation deck Gordon thought he saw her swallow hard and blink away tears. “This work means more to me than anycreature alive today could possibly understand. Whatever may happen, all of you have my eternal, personal gratitude.”

“Your grace? The… umm… the stars won’t remain aligned indefinitely…” Stormseeker interrupted.

Celestia nodded. “Of course. Please, proceed.”

“Initiating startup sequence.” Stormseeker picked up a clipboard in one wing, and spent a few seconds looking from it to the instrument panel in front of him and then back again. Slowly at first, gradually growing faster, the metal rings set into the floor began to turn. The whole chamber was suffused with an eerie hum, and the mirror-smooth surface of the revolving mercury pool started to curl upward at the edges and press down in the center.

Another mage in the observation deck began reading off a series of figures that Gordon couldn’t rightly comprehend- or, rather, he understood them perfectly well from his introductory astrology courses, and simply couldn’t comprehend how they could possibly be changing: “Apparent spatial manifold thickness: six hundred thousand kilometers… five hundred and fifty K… five hundred K…”

As the rings continued to spin faster and faster, the symbols on them starting to glow with a faint blue light, and the surface of the mercury pool began to darken until it was pitch-black. In the very center, something like a tiny white star winked into being.

“ASMT, four hundred fifty thousand… overhead flux crystals holding at one-oh-five percent charge… ASMT, four hundred thousand-three-eighty-five! We have passed the epicyclic mean orbit!”

The hum of the spell circles deepened to a low drone that Gordon could feel through the soles of his boots, and the image in the mercury pool began to wobble and shift. The white star in the center expanded into a pale silver circle, somewhat darkened on one side by thick swathes of blackened terrain that somewhat resembled the head of a unicorn- maria, in astrological parlance.

In defiance of all the basic laws of divination, the spinning mercury mirror had indeed produced an image of the moon.

According to the meter readout superimposed on the right lens of Gordon’s goggles, the radiant flux was already immense, far higher than his briefings had suggested. As the image grew larger and larger, he found himself dashing from one instrument to another up on the catwalk, adjusting shutters and shifting lenses by several orders of magnitude before any permanent damage could be done to the sensitive internal components.

“Three hundred thousand K-ASMT… gimbal system locked in…” The mage read off. The luminous markings on the circles blurred into unidentifiable rings of light. Any trace of a parabola in the mercury mirror was gone now, or perhaps the image had simply become so clear that its actual shape was no longer visible.

“That’s odd,” Stormseeker murmured, barely audible over the noise of the machine. “The overhead charge load just increased by about eight kilothaums.”

“Are you sure?” Celestia asked, her voice tense and commanding.

The unearthly hum built to a whine, then a howl of metal on metal. It was hard to tell at this point, but Gordon thought the discs were now spinning even faster than they had been before. “I’m… not sure how long the bearings will hold up at this temperature and this r-p-m…” stammered another mage whose voice he didn’t recognize.

“Well, they’re spinning as fast as they’ll ever go, and holding for now. Increase coolant pressure to compensate.” Stormseeker said.

“The charges are holding steady now too,” replied the first mage, “Do you think we might’ve miscalculated the local membrane permeability?”

“Nonsense,” Stormseeker snapped, “it’d have to be several orders of magnitude lower…”

The mercury mirror seemed to flex again, and the image of the moon slowly began to grow larger. It was a faint wobble on the indicator, at first; and between the vibration of the catwalk under him and the unholy noise, Gordon initially thought that he’d been imagining it; but another glance at his instruments confirmed that the radiant flux was still increasing.

“I… think we should stop, or at least slow down again.” If he didn’t know better, Gordon would’ve thought Celestia sounded worried- or, rather, she sounded downright afraid.

“Your Grace, respectfully, we’ve come this far…” Stormseeker chided.

Through the glare of the luminous spell-circles on the observation deck glass, Gordon could just about make out the Princess close her eyes for a long few seconds, and then open them again. “Very well. Continue.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, two hundred- one hundred and fifty thousand…” the technician read off. The image of the moon grew larger still, easily filling the confines of the mirror. The individual scorch marks of the Mare pattern were easily visible now, the ‘eye’ in its center revealed to be a large patch of lighter surface, rough and indistinct towards the edges. The whole chamber was vibrating, the metal spell-rings howling in their tracks, and as Gordon policed his instruments he realized they were beginning to pick up the emanations of physical matter.

“Capacitance just… just jumped up to one megathaum!” The nervous mage on the observation deck called out, and the mercury mirror shifted again. The eye of the Mare pattern completely filled it now, revealing mountains and gullies and what looked to be patches of cloud cover with almost unreal clarity.

A quick check of the crystal-point polarostat confirmed that the ground in the image had a sidereal moment fluctuating between two and six- all terrestrial matter was confined to a range between positive and negative one, but more positive values were hypothesized to exist on the moon.

Gordon’s fascination turned to confusion as he found the same readings on the reference polarostat aimed at the chamber wall. It was as though the material was airborne, not simply scanned through the image in the floor- or, perhaps, the griffon realized with a strange, uneasy feeling in his gut, what was taking shape in the floor wasn’t an image.

“ASMT’s fallen to... to ten thousand kilometers?” Shouted the perplexed technician.

“That’s not- that’s not possible-” shouted Stormseeker, before Princess Celestia cut him off.

“Shut it down.”

“One thousand kilometers! I don’t understand-”

The mirror shifted once more, and before Gordon’s incredulous gaze its surface began to dome upward into the chamber, even as the terrain visible inside it took on depth and shadows.

Somewhere, he could hear sirens beginning to ring, barely audible over the tremendous din of the mechanism itself.

“Five hundred kilo- wait, no, five hundred meters?” The technician called out.

“Shut it down!” Celestia shouted.

“I’m trying, it’s not- the feed lines are closed but the charge isn’t falling, it’s- it’s not shutting down-” Stormseeker was cut off again as the dome of mercury shuddered and spilled over the lip of its container, hissing and sizzling, releasing wisps of oily black smoke- which didn’t make sense, since Gordon knew mercury vapor to be colorless. “Somepony, get Gordon out of there-”

Celestia’s horn glowed bright yellow, nearly swamped by the glare of the observation deck’s shields. “I can’t!”

“That can’t be right, there’s less than a meter of-” Whatever the technician had been meaning to report, he never got the chance to finish. With a horrific, beak-rattling screech of tearing metal, the outermost spell-circle jumped free of its track. It skipped once edgewise off the chamber floor, kicking up a titanic plume of blue-white sparks, and slammed into the wall just beneath Gordon’s catwalk. The grating bucked underneath him, scattering instruments and shards of broken crystal paneling into the air. He leapt and stretched out his wings, suddenly feeling dizzy and light-headed, struggling to maneuver in the bulky suit- and then realized he simply felt lighter; indeed the ceiling was rushing towards him and he had to flap upward just to avoid slamming into it.

He heard Stormseeker shout something that sounded vaguely like “-from the other side?”

Then the entire chamber seemed to lurch and tilt, and without any input from his wings the trajectory of Gordon’s far-too-slow fall began to bend inward towards the mirror. He felt hot slag and what seemed to be pebbles slam into the plating of his suit, and raised both talons to protect his vulnerable goggles. There was a tremendous burst of yellow light, and suddenly the speed of his fall redoubled. He slammed into the floor -or perhaps the plates making up the floor slammed into him- and even through his armored boots he could feel the searing heat of the metal, but he didn’t dare let go. For just a moment he twisted his head to look back at the mercury pool, now wreathed in black vapor and spitting arcs of blue-white lightning at the walls of the chamber. Then, seemingly in slow motion, another spell circle tore free and sailed overhead. It slammed into the wall just under the observation deck, rupturing a feed line in an enormous yellow-white fireball. Despite his best efforts to hold onto the floor, Gordon was hurled backwards-

- into a cold, airless, interstitial darkness shot through with millions of tiny streaking stars-

- and landed hard on his belly in some sort of thick, soft powder.

He hauled himself back onto all-fours, wiped off the strange material clinging to his goggles, and gaped in shock.

The experiment chamber under Maranduin was gone. In its place, barren dunes of dusty gray soil stretched around him in all directions, lit by a wan, colorless sort of light with no clearly identifiable source. Far off to his left -concepts like cardinal directions hardly seemed applicable here- the dunes hardened into hills, and then vast gray mountains. Atop the tallest peak, something crystalline shone brilliant purple- something almost artificial-looking in its regularity, a tower perhaps. Above, titanic black thunderheads traded bolts of lightning, beneath a smooth, sable sky utterly empty of stars.

He scanned the dunes, searching for anything resembling a familiar structure, and then pulled up short. Hanging just above the horizon, almost directly behind him and opposite the tower, was a globe of brilliant ocean-blue light, stained brown and green and white. Little by little, his horrified brain assembled the patches of color into recognizable shapes- the Frozen North in white, Equestria and Griffonia in green and brown, the Dragonlands in reddish-ochre…

Involuntarily, he staggered backwards at the sight-

-into a cold, airless, interstitial darkness shot through with millions of tiny streaking stars. A slit-eyed, horrible, vaguely equine shape peered at him in bemusement from a long way away-

-and he slammed hard into the buckled metal floor of the experiment chamber, from nearly three meters up. He could still hear alarms, and the sound of wrenching metal, and feel a titanic vibration below him, but aside from a few brilliant flashes his vision was completely obscured by what appeared to be thick, dark smoke.

Then something hard and heavy caught him on the side of the head, a fallen support beam perhaps, and after that his vision failed him completely.

Consciousness returned to Gordon of Innsbeak in drops and fragments, revealing a blurry world of flickering lights and grayish fog. He groaned aloud, rolled over onto his belly, and staggered back onto all-fours slowly and unsteadily. The left-side lens in his goggles had a nasty crack running through it and his head still felt like somegriff had sawed it in half lengthwise, but otherwise he seemed to have escaped major harm.

The experiment chamber around him, however, was in complete disarray- what he could see of it through the smoke and darkness, at least. Entire sections of metal shielding had been ripped from the walls and ceiling, or up from the floor; the spell circles had warped, shifted, and broken apart; and there was nothing but a pile of collapsed stone where the windows of the observation deck had been. It was difficult to tell underneath the rubble, but the mercury pool in the center of the chamber seemed to have evaporated completely. Good thing he was wearing a filtered helmet, then.

Ever-so-carefully, he picked and stumbled his way through the debris- some of which he feared might give way beneath him, and some of which was still red-hot, jarringly cold, spewing magical arcs, or actively on fire. The chamber’s great metal doors hung wide open, dented and half-melted by some tremendous energy, and Gordon doubted they would ever close properly again. In fact, if he didn’t know better, Gordon would guess they’d been pried open from the inside, although that of course was impossible- he himself had been the only living thing inside the chamber.

He hauled himself through, clinging to the bent metal frame for support, and half-staggered-half-slid down a pile of collapsed stone on the other side. The corridor beyond was in no better condition than the chamber- red emergency lighting barely penetrated the mixture of smoke and rock dust that filled it, intermittently supplanted by the orange glow of small fires and flickering magical sparks. Dizzy and nearly blind, Gordon stumbled over fallen racks of equipment and great heaved-up sections of flooring as best he could manage, scanning the wreckage for any signs of life. There were none, although bodies- and pieces of bodies- became increasingly common the further he advanced. Curiously, the presence of Guard-issue excavation tools suggested that somepony had been here before him, but why they had abandoned their work was unclear.

Finally, as the smoke and dust began to clear out up ahead, he spotted something moving at the tunnel entrance. “Hello?” he called out, as loudly as he dared.

“Gordon? Gordon! Is that you?” The voice that replied was Stormseeker’s, but he sounded off somehow- unsteady and stilted, injured perhaps.

Squirming his way past a broken coolant pipe still spewing corrosive, freezing vapor, Gordon cautiously worked his way closer.

“Big day today, Gordon!” Stormseeker called out, his tone oddly cheerful, and stepped out from behind a section of caved-in wall.

Even in the poor lighting, Gordon could tell immediately that something was terribly wrong with the pegasus. The latter half of his barrel was simply missing, his hind legs held in place by a thin length of exposed spinal column protruding past his ribcage, the bone covered in an opaque grayish film that merged seamlessly with his coat.

“Very good. We’ll take it from here,” said Stormseeker, ambling closer still. His head twisted at a nearly ninety-degree angle, and he grinned a lopsided grin around where the frames of his glasses had melted into his face. The eyes underneath, originally blue, were now bright yellow, with slitted cat-like pupils. “Yes, all of this looks nominalllll…”

Cautiously, Gordon backed away, and reached for a prybar somepony had left lying next to the pipe.

“Shut down the equipment and somepony get him out!” Stormseeker yelled at no one, and then staggered forward another few steps.

Gordon wrenched the prybar free, and stopped backing away.

Stormseeker’s rictus grin grew a little wider. “We’re waiting for you, Gorrrrdon, in the test chamberrrr…” He chuckled, slightly, exhaling wisps of black vapor; the griffon was reminded, just a little, of the material he'd seen trickling from the edges of the mirror pool.

“Gordon, do you have any idea who ate all the do-”

The pegasus sprang forward mid-sentence, mouth wide open and fangs -fangs?- bared, heading straight for Gordon’s neck. Gordon was faster- his pry-bar slammed into Stormseeker just as his arc bent downward. There was a wet snap, and what little material was still connecting the pegasus’s head to his neck came apart with the force of the impact; both split off on separate arcs and landed back down the hallway, trickling oily black smoke that moved in ways Gordon couldn’t completely attribute to the shifting air currents.

The griffon collapsed on his haunches, breathing heavily for a few moments, then summoned his dwindling magical reserves and cast a simple lightning spell at what remained of Stormseeker’s head. It slid across the tile floor perhaps a few centimeters, grinning the whole time, and otherwise remained inanimate.

Cautiously and slowly, Gordon climbed over the collapsed supports in the tunnel entrance and onto the cave floor. Little by little, the air cleared, and before too long he fancied he could hear more voices.

He pressed himself up against a mostly-intact dividing wall, and peered around it to discover a small storage area. In the flickering glow of the single spotlight that was still attached to its tripod, he watched a trio of gray-coated, yellow-eyed ponies in tattered lab coats as they babbled to each other, overturned crates, and pawed through scattered papers.

“And now we return to Ethical Dilemma Theater. Do I kill them... or not?” Gordon muttered, as quietly as he dared. “I mean, Stormseeker was making it pretty clear he did not like me, which is a capital offense, I guess…”

He charged out towards them, prybar held high and ready to swing.

Twilight nodded, mutely, and watched the old griffon mage drum his talons on the laboratory table.

“Am I a hero?” he asked, and then continued without waiting for her reply. “I don’t know, I don’t think it’s heroic if the only person you’re saving is yourself.”

Twilight nodded again. “I… don’t really know what to make of all this, either.”

The edges of his beak turned up into a tired sort of smile. “Good answer.”

“I guess… mostly, the thing I want to correct is that what you’ve been calling Lunars, probably aren’t the same creatures as the Lunars I’m working with in Fillydelphia. It sounds more like you encountered what I’ve been calling revenants, or some variant of them. Although how they got that way without exposure to the Lunar Oath, I really have no idea.”

Gordon shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’m not going back to talk to them.”

Twilight wondered if he meant the Lunars at Fillydelphia, or the revenants he'd fought under Maranduin. “I can’t believe Celestia never told me about any of this,” was all she said out loud. “In between this and all that nonsense I went through with my model of Nightmare Moon’s spell, I’m…”

“Not sure you can trust her?” the griffon supplied.

“I was going to say ‘not sure what to think of her any more’, but… I guess you’re right about the trust thing, too.” She waved a hoof out the window of the tower, back in what she hoped was an Equestria-ward direction. “I mean, it’s great that we were able to bring back Luna and her followers safely, and I think this whole project contributed to that, but… a lot of good ponies died when it went wrong. I know that wasn’t something Celestia expected to happen, but maybe if she’d been just a little more up-front about what she was actually doing…”

“It’d’ve been a great achievement if it’d worked, yeah,” the older mage said. “But family entanglements make creatures do dumb things sometimes. That’s why I don’t have any.” He paused, and then continued, his flippant tone just a tiny bit softer. “I don’t think Celestia had much choice about not telling you, though. I didn’t get to hear a lot of the details, but I know that after the whole thing was cleaned up she just kind of… shut down. There were probably a lot of ponies in the government who were able to take advantage of that… get her to agree to things she wouldn’t’ve otherwise…”

Twilight nodded again. “It… wouldn’t be the first time.”

“It was around when they started with the memory modification stuff and some of the other survivors were getting called back to Canterlot, that I decided to catch the next airship back to Innsbeak. I had about ten thousands bits worth of gold buried in the woods outside the city, that I’d put there for exactly that sort of situation. They did get to confiscate all my weapons; most of them were government property anyway, but Celestia let me keep the suit. She said I’d just about earned it.” He shrugged again. “I’ve been hiding out here ever since- or, well, not really hiding, but, you get the picture.”

He waved a talon at the stack of papers sitting on the table between them. Twilight reached for them again with her telekinesis, and this time the old griffon didn’t snatch them away.

She fanned through the documents, some typewritten and some in Gordon’s neat, minuscule talon-writing, interspersed with carefully-drawn figures; all of them referencing what the griffon called “selenite”. Its properties were described with an accuracy orders of magnitude finer than the figures derived at the Harbor; alongside more reliable and sensitive methods of detecting it; and property tables and detection spells for types of selenitic matter that the Harbor didn’t even know existed. There were detailed instructions for safe handling and protective equipment; processes to cleanse the material from a living being; and processes to introduce it again that eerily echoed certain Lunar spells. Twilight’s limited alchemical knowledge identified compounds and transmutations, purification and synthesis procedures, and evocational vulnerabilities by which anything Lunar might be most easily destroyed. Selenitic energies were described, and speculations made about the runes and enchantments that might make use of such a novel power source, and Twilight was unsurprised to find that some of them reduplicated from her analyses of the ‘spylons’ in Froggy Bottom Bog.

“I… this is amazing. I don’t know what to say.” the unicorn swallowed, hard. “I can talk to Celestia about your case, if you’d like. Try to get everything put right with you in Equestria, legally speaking.”

“Why, so I can go back to the Academy that almost got me killed? Or worse?”

“I guess you have a point.” Twilight lifted the stack of documents in her telekinesis again, and this time the griffon made no move to stop her. “Thanks… for talking to me.”

“I’m normally not the sentimental type, but…” He paused, and got up from the table. “No, I’m not. I just figured that if I didn’t get to you first, somepony else would…”

No Regrets, Rainbow Dash

View Online

Rainbow Dash glided beneath the rusting archways of Innsbeak Station, dodging hanging tarpaulins and trickles of filthy rainwater, searching the grimy platform below. It was pushing six in the morning, drizzling again as it usually was, and the rising sun painted the city’s dome of smog a solid, oppressive red, without providing much actual illumination. The station lighting was spotty to nonexistent, but Gilda wasn’t hard to find- she was effectively the only griffon in the building who was on her way out, rather than panhandling or shuttling paltry amounts of cargo. Diving closer, Rainbow saw that her wing was bandaged up in a crude but effective splint, and her right hind leg was wrapped in gauze, but otherwise she looked unhurt.

Dash stepped into a perfect four-point landing on the tile, and trotted over. Gilda whirled to face the sound, and when she saw the pegasus her whole face shifted from wariness to joy. “R… RD?!” she called out.

The sight made Rainbow vaguely sick to her stomach. “Hi. I… uhhh… I brought you your pay,” the pegasus stammered. “for the couple days before… well, you know.”

She unclipped a pouch full of bits from her saddlebag, and offered it to Gilda with one wing. Gilda grabbed it, peered inside, and then tossed it into her own saddlebags. “I don’t think Twilight, like, meant to stiff you, or anything,” Dash explained, “I think she literally just forgot.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Gilda chuckled, “So, did’ja tell her and Rari-dweeb you were gonna meet up with me?”

Rainbow swallowed, hard. “… No.”

“Hot damn!” the griffon took a few steps forward and leaned down, conspiratorially. “So, how’d’ja get the money off ‘em?”

Rainbow, for her part, took another few steps back. “I… I didn’t. It was mine.”

Gilda seemed to physically deflate a little. “Oh.”

“I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find you here, like, that you’d get stuck in the city somewhere, or back in jail or something,” the pegasus continued all in a rush, anxious to discuss absolutely anything else. “So… umm… where’re you going, once you get outta here?”

Gilda looked away, and scuffed a talon on the grimy tiles. “Back to Trottingham, I guess, then maybe down to Manehattan or over to Neighagra, wherever it looks like there’s gonna be work. You?”

“Back to Ponyville.”

“Good choice. You made it sound like a pretty nice place,” the griffon looked up again, “Maybe I could come by and visit sometime, when I’m in the area? Meet up with that Pinkie Pie pony you were tellin’ me about?”

Rainbow Dash swallowed again, the sick feeling in her gut redoubling. “I… don’t really think that’d be a good idea.”

“Hey, all in all though, this turned out… pretty alright, didn’t it?” If she didn’t know better, Rainbow would’ve thought that Gilda’s voice almost sounded pleading, “Twilight got her meeting with that Gordon creep, and only I got hurt.”

“Didn’t you knock Twilight unconscious first?”

“Oh, yeah, shit…” Gilda shrugged, awkwardly, favoring her immobilized wing. “Well, she got better, didn’t she? And she kinda had it comin’.”

There was a long, awkward pause. One of the cargo trains two platforms over wheezed into gradual motion and then disappeared into the damp, ruddy haze outside.

“But yeah, Dash, I think we make a pretty good team.” Gilda’s voice sounded superficially casual enough, but Rainbow could spot the tension underneath. “I’ll be nosin’ around Rainbow Falls over the winter and into next year, there’s a lotta contract labor up there, some big sports thing that they’re tryin’ to set up. You should come join me. There’s gonna be money to be made!”

“I… Gilda, I need to ask you something.” Rainbow tried to look her in the eye, couldn’t bear it for more than a second, and refocused on the ceiling arches.

“Yeah, what?”

“Did you actually have an exfil plan, or were you banking on us stepping in and rescuing you the whole time?”

“Heh. Well, I didn’t expect to have that many guards on me, but I knew you wouldn’t leave me hangin’.” Gilda’s beak curled into a weirdly strained sort of smile. “You’ve always got my back, Dash.”

“Yeah, Gilda, I’m…” Rainbow stared at the filthy tile underhoof. “I’m sorry. This time, I don’t think I do.”

“… what? Whaddaya talkin’ about?” Gilda sounded scared, but not confused. Rainbow realized she had to have known this was coming.

“Gilda, that big guard captain coulda’ killed me back there. She had armor, she had weapons, and I had… some tactical sandals, I guess. But you charged off anyway, following a broken plan without any support, and left me to deal. I had your back, but you sure as Tartarus didn’t have mine.”

“Wait a minute, I did all the hard work…”

Rainbow struggled mightily to bring her gaze back down to eye level. The twisting in her stomach was already starting to recede, but she wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or bad. “If you’d actually spoken one word to me at that stupid party, ruttin’ asked me to back you up when you hit the chapel, I would’ve been so down there with you. But you didn’t, and I couldn’t, and it’s never gonna work.”

“Why? What, you think you’ve got better plans with your new egghead friend?” Gilda scoffed.

“Twilight’s got nothing to do with this, Gil.”

“Then what’s wrong? We won!”

“This is serious shit, and you need to grow up and start treating it like it’s serious. This isn’t flight camp, Gilda. We aren’t kids any more.”

“Don't worry,” Gilda swiped her good wing out dismissively, “I'm not from some broken home, with a dysfunctional family, or anything. I'd have to’ve had a family for ‘em to be dysfunctional. Which means, hey, it coulda been worse!”

“I didn’t think you did.”

For the first time since Rainbow had set down, the griffon’s false confidence seemed to wear away completely. She cocked her head, genuinely confused. “Then whuzzat supposed to mean?”

“It means we can’t just go out and pick fights and play stupid pranks and knock over vending machines all day anymore! There’s consequences to that kinda’ shit! Or do you really expect me to put my ass on the line for you every time you don't think this shit through?” The pegasus sucked in a deep breath, and let it out again. “Well, guess what? You’re not gonna have Rainbow Dash around to take the fall for you all the time anymore!” The only other passenger on the departure platform, a beige-coated mare with a pink-and-blue mane who looked vaguely familiar, peered at them in confusion and backed away a few steps.

“Consequences. Heh, yeah, when you're right, you're right.” Gilda shrugged awkwardly, the movement seeming stiff and contrived for reasons Rainbow suspected had nothing to do with her bandaged wing. “This was actually… kinda supposed to be my big break, Dash.”

Confused into silence, all Rainbow could do was tilt her head.

“I wanted to prove I could get shit done, for the ponies with the money and gear and connections you need to make it in security. That I’m worth more than just a minimum-wage day laborer.”

“Wait, I thought you said you were already working sec-”

“I lied, Dash,” the griffon said, blunt and frustrated, as though she’d expected Rainbow to have known all along. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you made weather captain and got recruited into some super-secret government project and all that shit. But that certificate they gave me wasn’t worth the paper its printed on, because it turns out none of the Equestrian military academies admit griffons, and all the big regional weather services don’t wanna hire griffons.” She continued, seemingly all in one breath, her shoulder sagging lower and lower the whole time, “So I could join as an enlisted hen, get to skip, what, the first week of basic training, and then muster out at the glorious rank of staff sergeant; or I could try and find a small-time weather corps that’d take me on. And let me tell you. I tried. Last ten years, I’ve been workin’ whatever shitty jobs’ll pay me, because I get to stay in Equestria as long as I’m working, and, well, working a shitty job in Equestria still beats anything you’ll find back here….” Gilda finally stopped, not seeming as much out of things to say as simply out of energy. She bowed her head, breathing heavily. “So… yeah. That’s what I’ve been up to for the last fifteen years.”

Rainbow Dash’s mouth opened and closed a few times before she found the words to put through it. “So…what…all this was because you wanted a better job? Gilda, why... why didn't you ever just. Ask. Me?” She wasn’t even sure what she herself was feeling now… regret? Anger? Sheer bewilderment? “I coulda’ found you something on the Ponyville weather team, probably. Notus's breath, Twilight's been scrambling for marepower running all her crazy projects out in the Everfree. If you needed help, you could've just written a letter! You could’ve just asked! But no, you just take whatever you’re after and move on, and damn the ponies you leave behind. No wonder you can’t even hold down a steady job.”

“When did I ever take anything from you?” Gilda looked up and hissed, eyes narrowing. “All our time at Flight Camp, I never took a damn thing. And I coulda’, you certainly got enough care packages from your folks that you wouldn’t’a missed anything.”

“So, what, if I help you get a job, you’ll steal from everypony but me?”

Gilda’s eyes went wide again, and she backed away slightly. Then she seemed to steady herself, and spat: “Fuck you, Dash.”

She turned around and padded off, towards the end of the platform, where there was no place else for her to go until her train came in.

“Fuck you too, Gil,” the pegasus muttered, and turned back the other way.

Rarity was standing about ten yards away, looking utterly baffled. Rainbow strode towards her as evenly as she could manage, even as her legs felt like they might shake themselves apart beneath her.

“You know, I thought it’d be a cold day in Tartarus before you’d be the mature one in one of those arguments,” the unicorn sniffed, and then her muzzle shifted into a pained little grin. “You’ve surprised me, darling.”

“Yeah…” Rainbow Dash nodded, “Yeah, I surprised me, too. Thanks, I guess.”

The tailor cocked her head, ears folding downward in concern. “Are you… going to be okay?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. You’ll know if I’m not.”

There was another long, uncomfortable pause. Rainbow realized she wasn’t fighting the urge to look back behind her anymore.

“Rarity?” she asked, “Do you… think I did the right thing?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. You’ll know if you didn’t,” the tailor repeated back at her, and then after just a moment continued, “Rainbow Dash, if I may, there is one thing I’ve noticed over the course of our little… ahem…adventure, here.”

“What’s that?”

“In the entire time since you arrived in Ponyville, you’ve been loyal, to a fault- to your friends, to your weather crew, and now to Twilight’s search for knowledge. Gilda, though, I’m inclined to say, is only loyal to you.”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “She was.”

Rarity nodded again, and looked off to one side. “Ah, and there’s Twilight with our tickets. I daresay we’ve all seen quite enough of this miserable place, don’t you agree?”

“Yeah. Let’s get to our platform, I… don’t wanna stick around for the three-o-clock again…”

Twilight stepped out onto the Fillydelphia Harbor platform, to find Princess Celestia waiting for her. She reeled back slightly in surprise, and the Princess smiled ever-so-slightly. “You were expecting my sister, I take it?”

“Well… umm… yes.”

Celestia nodded. “She’s waiting in her study, but I asked her if I could speak with you first. I trust your visit to Innsbeak was… enlightening?”

“That’s certainly… one way to put it, I guess.”

“Good. I expect your report on Lord Goldstone’s Equestrian associates forwarded to the Commerce Minister by the end of this week.”

Twilight cocked her head, genuinely confused. “… Excuse me?”

Celestia just laughed. “Twilight, you didn’t seriously think that anything less than a Cabinet-level probe into unethical offshore business practices, which only you possessed both the ironclad loyalty, and the preexisting connections to Goldstone necessary to carry out, would justify pulling you away from Ponyville for so long, did you? I mean, you’ve spent the last five days completely unable to pursue any work related to your Lunar studies, or anything related to Academy business!”

It took a few seconds, but the pieces finally began to fit together in Twilight’s exhausted brain.

“… Ah. Yes, right. Really… a horrible inconvenience,” she said. “In fact, I’ll probably have to abandon my studies of the Great Canterlot Fire just to keep on schedule! I don’t think that’ll be a huge loss, though- all I found were a bunch of groundless conspiracy theories…”

Celestia’s smile grew just a tiny bit wider. “As I expected. Of course, in a broad-ranging investigation like this one, nopony could really blame a mare somewhat out of her depth for conducting a few interviews with other influential Innsbeak residents, which turned out… not to be relevant. Nopony at the Commerce Ministry would want to read those, so there’s no reason to include them in your report.”

“Oh, of course. It’d be… downright unprofessional to do otherwise, in fact!”

“I’m glad we understand each other.” For just a moment, the Princess’s expression changed, somehow becoming harder and colder despite no muscles actually having shifted. “I think you’ll also be pleased to know that I’ve sent a few letters restating that your job for the foreseeable future is in Ponyville. I don’t expect any further expeditions to end up pulling you away again.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Your Grace…” said Twilight, suitably chastised. She made to step past Celestia and off the platform, and then thought better of it. “Actually, I do have one question, though.”

“Go on?”

“Do you think we’ll actually be able to get Goldstone on any of this?”

“‘Get’ as in prosecute?” Celestia laughed- faintly, but she laughed. “He isn’t an Equestrian resident, so I’m afraid our actions against him, personally, are limited to formal diplomatic requests or another military incursion. The former, he will ignore; and coming so soon after the intervention in the Parrot Isles, I don’t think the latter will be politically tenable for some time yet. But he has properties here in Equestria, and business partners, and with the financial data you recovered, we will be able to 'get' them. And without their support, I don’t think he’ll be able to bother anycreature for a very long time.”

“That’s good to hear.”

The Princess nodded again. “It took me a while to learn, but I've been playing the game for a long, long time, Twilight. I have had to agree to abide by certain... restrictions, it’s true. But there's more to politics than just invading your opponents. There are sanctions, protests, proxy wars- and proxy alliances.” Her smile faded, and she dipped her head just a little closer to Twilight’s level. “When a brute-force approach would end up getting my loyal subjects killed, sometimes I've had to wait, make a… subtler attempt later on, one that even those tasked to carry it out might not be allowed to know about… and set right what I can.”

Quietly, Twilight nodded, utterly unsure of what to say. She was used to interacting with Princess Celestia as a mentor, scholar, engineer, and administrator- only rarely was she reminded that the alicorn was, more than any of those things, also a ruthlessly effective politician. The feeling was at once sobering and disconcerting.

“I won’t keep my sister waiting any longer, Twilight.” Celestia stepped past the bewildered unicorn and back onboard the train. “She’d probably like to hear about where you’ve been these last few days.”

Lord Gerald Goldstone XIII staggered back into his parlor in the eastern wing, throat still smarting from the spell Gina at the University had used to restore his voice. He didn’t bother with the lights as he headed straight for the liquor cabinet, and as a result he’d made it a good several yards before he realized he wasn’t the only creature in the room.

“Who are you? How did you get in here?” He demanded, and then slid his enchanted dagger from the pocket of his vest. “Guards!”

“We’re terribly sorry to have startled you, Lord Goldstone,” said a pony perched on the edge of his sofa. “We’ll show ourselves out, but we think you’ll want to hear what we have to offer, first.”

“Forgive me if I remain… skeptical. That last pony who claimed to have an ‘offer’ for me-”

“Robbed you blind and then humiliated you in front of your peers?”

“And how is that any of your business?”

“The group we represent could help you recoup some of those losses.”

“Really now? What could you possibly offer me, the Marquess of the entire Northern Territory?”

“Well, to start with, we also know that your investments in Equestria are about to come under some intense scrutiny by the Commerce Ministry. We can make that scrutiny go away.”

Goldstone’s eyes narrowed, but he slipped the dagger back into his vest. “… and what, pray tell, does this get you?”

“In exchange for our immediate assistance? We would just like you to provide us with information- Twilight Sparkle’s methods and habits, the names of her close associates, likes, dislikes, what she wants out of life, how she responds to pressure… that sort of thing. We’re sure you can understand why we might find that valuable…”

Twilight Sparkle and Princess Luna sat across the low table from each other, on matching blue silk cushions. As per Luna’s preference only one lamp was lit, discreetly, in one corner, leaving most of the study outlined in dim silvery-blue radiance from the full moon outside. The big bay windows making up most of the back wall were open, admitting warm early-autumn air scented with wet grass and the far-away saltiness of the ocean. Even the sea smelled cleaner, here, without the omnipresent bite of sewage and smoke that pervaded everything in Innsbeak.

“… it’ll take our alchemists a while to parse through Gordon’s notes, and then it’s up to Major Forward and the medical team to determine that any purification regimen we use is safe. But in total… I think we can remove any remaining selenitic matter from your system in… maybe four months?” Twilight concluded, a comfortable silence settling on the room.

Luna nodded, and smiled ever-so-slightly. She resembled Celestia particularly strongly when she did that. After what she decided was a respectable period, Twilight spoke up again, “I do have some other questions I'd like to ask, though.”

“You have delivered promising news, Twilight. Please, ask.”

“It’s not the main thing that’s bothering me,” the unicorn explained, “but I suppose the best place to start would be with how you handled your time on the moon. Most ponies, after a hundred years straight without any sort of social contact… they wouldn’t be sane. You were isolated for a little under a thousand.”

“I have seen those sorts of claims circulating in the papers, but I am sorry to disappoint you, Twilight Sparkle. They are untrue. I was not… awake… for the duration of my imprisonment.”

Twilight nodded, and took a sip of her tea. That was consistent with her early understanding of Princess Luna’s condition, before the question of Nightmare Moon’s memories had caused her to temporarily revise her theories. “And none of the memories you’ve recovered contradict that?”

“Nay.” The alicorn’s expression took on a strange, far-away quality. “And yet…”

“Mm-hmm?” Twilight prompted, gently.

“And yet neither did I close my eyes facing Celestia in the Solarium, and open them again in the tower with thine fellows standing over me. Neither did I dream, but my sleep was nonetheless… fitful.”

“Go on?” The unicorn asked, trying not to let too much of her anticipation show through.

“I could never… think clearly, not enough to remember who I was or how I had gotten there, but I remember… images: my sister, the battles of the Rebellions… they appeared before me, disjointed, seemingly of their own accord. I remember feeling… angry, and resentful, moreso even than when I’d first led what would become my Night Guard against the Council Hall to contest Celestia’s election as Speaker.”

“How long would you say you experienced this semi-conscious state? Subjectively speaking, I mean, and in total versus being totally unconscious?” Asked Twilight.

“‘Tis hard to say. Hours… days, perhaps. It… it blurs together, and I cannot say how long I was awake at any one time… save, perhaps, at the very end, I remember you, and the Elements. ‘Twas the first time in… well, I suppose in a thousand years that I felt afraid, not merely angry.”

“I think I might’ve seen you do that, actually,” Twilight said, “Just before we used the Elements, part of the inside of Nightm- no, actually, part of yourhead was exposed. You looked at me, or at least your one eye that I could see was focused on me, and you said ‘No’.”

Luna nodded, but remained silent.

“Do… do you remember sensing anything else, externally?” Twilight prompted again. “Anything at all about the moon?”

“No, I… wait.” Luna paused, seeming to look past Twilight and the book-lined walls of her study entirely. “I remember… cold, it was cold. And the sky… no stars, flat blackness, but… fuzzy, somehow, solid, like smoke. There was… an object, always just out of my view, crystal, perhaps, the light reflected sharply in a dozen different directions. I remember using my hooves and horn, carving something hard. I remember lightning, and the smell of æther.”

Luna fell silent again, her gaze fixed on the door, which Twilight interpreted as her cue to leave. The scholar politely turned to leave, when she heard Luna mutter, under her breath, almost to herself, “And… I was not alone.”

Griffon The Brush-Off - Extended Cut

by AdmiralSakai

Material Unaccounted For

Mind the Gap

Innocents Abroad

Berkeley Hunt

Fieldwork

Straight Outta Griffonstone

One Night In Innsbeak

Griffon The Brush-Off

Doctor Sparkle, I Presume?

No Regrets, Rainbow Dash