> Equestrian Celestial Forge
>  by TheDriderPony
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Prologue - A Tad Off-Target
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Aetheral Plane was truly a wonder to behold. It existed separate from the normal physical world in a direction not quite covered by the standard six options.

There existed no matter in that place, no substance, just a vast and endless plain of hazy magical energy. A thin fog made of rainbow and starlight.

Nothing, that is, save one particularly bored alicorn.

Princess Celestia, High Ruler of Equestria and her Territories, was honestly surprised to learn just how bored she could become in a dimension where thought and memory held just as much substance as earth and stone. With an idle thought, she manifested a grandfather clock.

It was a beautiful thing, all lacquered wood and polished brass. The platonic ideal of what a clock should be, birthed into flawless being from pure thought. No greater clock would ever exist in the material world below.

It was also totally incorrect, seeing as it had come from her mind and she didn't know what time it was anyway. She allowed her focus on it to lax and it quickly dispersed back into glittering mist. Such was the nature of the realm.

Honestly, she wished she'd brought a book. Alas, that would have been a distraction when more than anything she needed to be ready and attentive when the moment finally came.

It wasn't everyday one could be present for the ascension of an alicorn, let alone one who held such a dear place in her heart.

Celestia herself could not make somepony an alicorn, despite the claims of old rumors and the belief of certain overly ambitious apprentices. Such power was left in the hands of forces greater than her; destiny, perhaps, or some fundamental force of nature, or perhaps the Will of magic Itself. In any case, it was out of her hooves. What she could do was sense when someone was at the threshold of achieving it themselves. It came as a sort of pressure on her horn, not unlike the feeling of holding a powerful spell at the brink of release.

She'd felt it before when her sister ascended to alicornhood a half-day after she had, then again centuries later when young Cadance (though she knew not her name at the time) had achieved a worthy enough feat of her own.

And now it was Twilight's turn. Long overdue, in the princess' private opinion. Her most dedicated and faithful student more than deserved it after all she had accomplished. Defeating Nightmare Moon and returning Luna to her senses. Resealing Discord in his stony prison after his brief escape. Preventing King Sombra from retaking and enslaving the Crystal Empire. All noble and songworthy feats... and yet despite all her accomplishments, for some reason the mare had been sitting on the brink of ascension for weeks.

Celestia manifested a slice of cake and a glass of wine. At least she could eat her anxiety away without worry. Only in this realm were there truly empty calories.

Twilight more than deserved alicornhood, as well as the elevation to Princess status that naturally came with it. In time, with her friends by her side, she would no doubt become a fair and just leader. The kind of princess that would bring nations together through the bonds of friendship and harmony, like she had tried to do for a thousand years... with middling success.

She created (and subsequently consumed) another slice of cake.

With such a worthwhile potential princess sitting on the sidelines, would anyone blame her for trying to... help the process along, just a bit?

Sending her the most potent of the legendary Starswirl the Bearded's unfinished spells was hardly even a risk. If anypony could complete it after a thousand years of frustrated researchers and puzzled scholars, it'd be Twilight. No doubt with the help of her friends; something Starswirl had always had difficulty accounting for in his calculations.

She had no doubt Twilight could solve the puzzle. No doubt that it would push her past the threshold. No doubt that Twilight deserved the honor.

The only question was what was taking her so long?

As in answer, Celestia felt a change in the pressure on her horn.

"Finally," she sighed as she vanished her chair and snacks. As the spike of magic down in Equestria continued to grow, she quickly set about shaping the realm as she'd planned in order to ease Twilight's transition as smoothly as possible. She worked the mist into a wide, starry road. Affixed an illusion of a distinction between "sky" and "ground". She plucked dozens of fragments of memories from her mind and displayed them along the path like paintings in a gallery, showcasing her student's finest moments and triumphs.

Just as she finished the final touches, the power bloomed and fired towards the Aetherial Plane like an interdimensional firework.

This was it. The moment she'd been waiting for. She mentally rehearsed her speech for the final time. Was it too much? Too ostentatious? Perhaps Twilight would be put more at ease if she were casual about it. No. Such a momentous event required proper gravitas. Formal speech it was, then.

A microcosm of magical power pushed its way through the boundaries of the realm, nearly knocking Celestia off her hooves with the force of its arrival. She hadn't remembered her own arrival to be nearly that rocky.

She pushed the thought from her mind and fixed a satisfied smile on her face as the web of magic that represented her student approached.

"Congratulations, my dear Twilight, I always knew you could—  wait, what is this?"

There was another beacon of power approaching. It punched through the walls of their reality with as much force as the first, this time actually sending the alicorn tumbling to her hooves.

A second ascension? How?! She hadn't seen any signs of it! Perhaps... maybe... one of Twilight's friends? They were as much a credit to her successes as she was, and if they'd been instrumental in solving Starswirl's spell...

It wasn't impossible but...

Before she could gather her wits, her worldview was rocked once again as a third spirit entered the plane. She watched in slack-jawed astonishment as another presence followed that one. Then another. Then another.

Six glowing vortexes of power—the mystical sum total of a pony’s magic, soul, and being—shot through the non-matter and not-quite-space of the Aetherial Plane. It was impossible! Unprecedented! Absurd! The number of alicorns in the world had just tripled.

The plane rocked again and then there were only five.

The nexus that represented Twilight was gone.

Then the second vanished and she managed to catch a glimpse of its departure.

It went beyond. There was no conventional name for the direction, but much in the way that the Aetherial Plane was beyond the material world, the spirits of six of her ponies were transcending to somewhere beyond the Aetherial Plane.

Some sphere of existence that even Celestia herself had never even begun to fathom existed.

In moments, she was once again alone, save for the looming existential knowledge that this was not the highest Plane.

"Well then..." her voice felt flat and underwhelming as her carefully practiced speech faded from her mind. "This might cause some unexpected changes to my long term plans."
> Chapter 1 - Just Sign on the Starry Line
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stars.

The first thing Twilight noticed when she woke up was the Stars.

Well, technically speaking, the first thing she noticed was that she was no longer in her library, surrounded by her friends and the satisfied feeling of having corrected a thousand-year-old spell. Instead, she was floating in an empty black space, weightless and directionless.

Empty, that was, except for the Stars.

They surrounded her on all sides; hundreds of them. Some as small and delicate as fireflies while others burned as bright and furious as Celestia's sun. They danced in binary and trinary and higher group orbits, putting on a cosmic show that put Princess Luna's best work to shame.

All the words of all the books she'd ever read felt insufficient, insultingly insufficient to try and capture even a fragment of the stellar majesty that she bore witness to. Twilight floated there at the edge of eternity for what could have been minutes, hours, years; a fly on the wall witnessing the universe's greatest orchestra weave a symphony of joy and despair, life and death, creation and decay.

She felt like she could have spent a lifetime there just watching the stars dance, studying the intricate byplay between the elements of a thousand-body physics problem.

It was beautiful. And terrible.

"Sweet Celestia," she murmured, her voice all but nothing, "it's full of stars."

The dance came to a sudden halt, and with it, Twilight underwent the profound realization that she was not alone.

Such a grand orchestra, of course, had a Conductor, and Twilight had just become the sole focus of its attention.

Her thoughts froze in place as the very space around her seemed to twist and look at her. It was enormous. A being so large she couldn't see all of it and once (and that which she could seemed to slide out of her mind's eye like oil) made of space folded unto itself so many times that it gained depth and definition. Gender and anatomy were foreign concepts to it, yet it had a mind so powerful that Twilight felt like an insect, a microbe, nothing more than an atom beneath the pressure of its direct awareness.

It was like getting teleported to the bottom of the ocean. There was no pain, no physical sensation she could put into words. Just the constant, unyielding pressure.

A long moment passed, for as much as time meant anything there, as Twilight and the immensely more powerful entity regarded each other like two strangers who'd rounded a corner and nearly collided.

'When in doubt', her Granny Sparkle's words echoed in her mind, 'it never hurts to be polite'.

Well, Granny’s advice had never steered her wrong before.

"Ah, hello there," Twilight greeted with the kind of awkwardness of someone who just unlocked their hotel room and found a stranger inside. "Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude on your... outer space." The celestial being said nothing. "It's a lovely space you have. Very beautiful stars."

[CURIOSITY]

It didn't speak—not in words or sounds like she knew them—but it conveyed its thoughts all the same on some deeply fundamental level that she felt through every fiber of her being. Twilight's mind and soul shuddered under the weight of its question. It was like being hit face first by the Royal Canterlot Voice, but with a speech's worth of connotation and subtext compressed into the single not-word.

[UNFAMILIAR], it continued, [QUERY: ORIGIN]

"Origin?" she asked, "Oh! You want to know where I'm from. Canterlot, originally, but Ponyville as of the past few months... though I don't suppose you'd know of them. No, of course you wouldn't. Equestria then? Still too small? Equus? It's a mid-sized planet with a yellow sun orbiting it." She hesitated and gave a look to the star-studded void around her. "I'm... not exactly sure how I got here from there, but if you can point me in the right direction I'll be on my way and out of your... starscape?"

The waves of sensation that came off the Conductor weren't quite emotions, but she got the general impression that it was mildly amused with her. Which, as far as she cared, was much better than things tended to go in most stories she'd read about meeting fantastically alien intelligences.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENT] [QUERY: PURPOSE]

"My... purpose?" There was a depth to the question that left no question over whether it was asking why she was there in that space. It clearly wanted a deeper answer. Twilight hesitated in momentary confusion, but still continued to speak unbidden, as though the barrier between her thoughts and words had grown thin. "If you'd asked me a few months ago, I would have said learning without a second thought. That's what I did, all day, almost every day for years. I read every book in the library, every scroll in Princess Celestia's vaults, learned every lesson she could teach me. I sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But now..."

Her words slowed as memories came unbidden. Traveling to Ponyville. Meeting her friends. Saving the world. Lunches spent laughing over silly inside jokes. Rainy afternoons of quiet companionship. A thousand little moments that shone brightly in her memory like stars themselves.

"I guess I'm not sure what it is now. Can friendship be a purpose, or is it just a lifestyle? An outlook? Maybe it's only a philosophy. Am I even making sense? I feel like I'm just rambling on."

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENT], it conveyed, [UNDERSTANDING] [CAMARADERIE]

Valid purpose or not, her answer seemed to satisfy the cosmic Conductor.

[JUDGMENT]

Twilight gasped as the pressure on her redoubled. For a moment, she felt like the center of the universe in the worst possible way. Like she was a filly again, unexpectedly standing before a symposium of Princess Celestias and being asked to present a dissertation she hadn't prepared on a topic she'd never heard of.

And then the pressure eased off and Twilight felt once again as weightless as she had before she'd garnered the Conductor's attention.

[JUDGMENT: ACCEPTABLE]

A wave of relief washed her over her soul, taking away with it her growing anxiety. She'd passed. Whatever kind of spiritual test or soul-weighing or hallucinated introspection that was, she'd passed. That was good.

The Conductor was no easier to perceive than it had been before, but for an amorphous being of stellar energy, something about it seemed friendlier than it had before.

[QUERY: DESIRE DIRECTION]

"Directions home?" she asked, "Yes, thank you very much, that would be a great help. I really should be getting back. I'm sure my friends are getting worried about me."

[CONTRACT] [ESTABLISHING CONNECTION]

The dance of the stars changed. A finer degree of control impressed upon stable chaos. Thin tendrils of starstuff reached from one to the next, connecting them like branches on a tree, forging loose stars into clusters, then webs, then a dozen or so constellations. The glittering bands thickened as more and more of them intersected, merged, reached down closer and closer to where she hovered and then— 

{request}

The dance stopped as another presence, still incredibly powerful yet nothing compared to the Conductor, piped in from somewhere not-quite-behind Twilight.

"Is someone else here?"

[QUERY]

Twilight twisted and turned, expecting to see another impossible being occupying the whole of her field of view outside the first. Instead, what she saw behind her was, for lack of a better word, a tether. From the center of her back trailing off to a point in a headache-inducing direction was a thin stream of glittering magic. Now that she was aware of it, she realized she could feel it as well, tugging at some transcendental part of her.

{apologies} came the not-voice, carried along the tether and radiating out from the pony at the end of it like some kind of strange antenna. {humble suggestion}. It wasn't quite the same not-language the Conductor used. More like a pony speaking a foreign language with a phrasebook and a bad accent. {request: integrate established framework?}

What followed was a dense pulse of information, too complex for Twilight to parse, but which sounded to her senses almost like chimes.

[AMUSEMENT], replied the Conductor, somehow softer than before, [DEVIATION ACCEPTABLE] [IMPLEMENTING VARIATION]

{gratitude}

The constellations shook and twisted like a grove of trees caught in a crosswind. Something fundamental about them shifted and the constellations began a new dance, twirling and spiraling through infinity. A single star, one of the smallest motes, slid down the beams of light and sank till it sat just in front of Twilight's eyes.

It was beautiful.

Some element of the Conductor that was almost a face twisted into something that was almost a smirk.

[PROSPECTIVE AMUSEMENT] [GRATUITY]

It was around that point that Twilight got the strangest feeling that she may have agreed to something bigger than just a lift home from a charitable alien.

The star parted the space between space and, without a moment for her to raise any sort of question or objection, lodged itself deep within Twilight's soul. It nestled in and sat there like a burning coal in the core of her being, warming her from the inside. A handful of other small motes traveled down other paths of light and disappeared in directions she could not perceive.

[DEPART] the Conductor instructed, its voice reduced to almost bearable levels. Or was it just farther away? [ADDENDUM: GOOD LUCK]

Twilight felt a tug on her tether, and her awareness slipped away into a foggy dream.





Twilight awoke with a splitting headache, a general ache in her everywhere else, and a dragon yelling in her ear.

Which meant it was two-thirds of the way to a normal morning.

"Alright, alright, I'm up!" she said as she shook her head to clear out the lingering fog. "There's no need to shout."

"But you're back!" came the voice of her number one assistant, sounding equal parts excited and relieved.

Awareness came more quickly than usual as Twilight rapidly realized that she was not, in fact, in her bedroom. Nor was she in her house at all. Instead, she was standing full and upright in the middle of the road in the early evening moonlight.

"Spike? Where am I? What happened?"

"What happened?" he repeated, "What happened is you cast a spell, everyone disappeared and I've been freaking out for the last eight hours trying to find you!"

The little dragon certainly looked like he'd been on his feet in a panic all day. His scales were dusty and dirty like he'd run down every last one of Ponyville's uncobbled back streets and his ear frills drooped with exhaustion. As the panicked energy drained away, it looked more and more like the only thing keeping him upright was the sheer relief in seeing her back safe and sound.

Which left the question. Where had she gone?

Her memories of the morning were disjointed. She remembered casting Starswirl's spell and accidentally swapping around her friends' cutie marks. Then she rounded them all up with a Heartsong, recast the corrected spell, and then... and then...

There was something else, but the memory seemed to slip away the more she tried to bring it into focus. Something with... stars? And an agreement. A dream? Probably not important. If it was, Princess Luna would remind her.

"That's strange," she said, "maybe the spell had some kind of delayed teleport effect? Or maybe an incomplete casting due to magical exhaustion." Though she didn't feel exhausted. If anything, she felt rather mentally refreshed. Twilight shook her head. "Whatever caused it, we should get back to the library."

"No argument here." Spike yawned and rubbed his eyes. "I'm glad you're okay, but boy am I tired. Next time you decide to cast an untested spell from some thousand-year-old journal, let me know first? I had half the town out looking for you and the girls."

Twilight stopped in her tracks. "The girls?"

"Yeah. When you went poof all six of you disappeared together. But now that you're back, hopefully they won't be far behind."

As it turned out, Spike's guess was thankfully correct. As the pair made their way back to the library they met up with other groups of ponies who'd been part of the search efforts. While most just expressed their thanks that she was safe or made a few harmless jokes about casting while reading, some ponies brought news of her friends being found.

According to Derpy (who'd been the only one to actually witness the event) the six of them had just suddenly appeared in the sky as 'glowy soap bubbles' before drifting down into various parts of town.

While nopony was injured, none of the victims of the spell had any more of an idea where their lost time had gone than Twilight did.

By the time all the missing ponies had been accounted for and the search party officially called off (much to Pinkie Pie's dismay for having missed it) it was well past evening and into the night.

After agreeing that it had been a very long day already, Twilight and her friends decided to put off figuring out what in the world happened till tomorrow. Alongside meeting up for a late breakfast.

That night, Twilight dreamt, oddly enough, of wood and chisels and dovetail joints.





Twilight woke later than usual, in a much more normal fashion than the previous two times she'd been roused from unconsciousness. A pleasant return to normalcy, even if it meant she was still half-asleep and groggy.

She rolled out of bed, grimacing in the bright sunlight from the window, and stumbled her way down the stairs. Like usual, she half-slipped on the bottom step that wasn't quite level and barely managed to catch herself. Annoying as it was, the tiny jolt of adrenaline made for a reliable pre-coffee jolt.

As she made her way to the kitchen, the thought crossed her mind that it'd probably be more worthwhile to bite the spearpoint and just fix the step already. It wouldn't be all that hard. In fact, the more she thought about it, the easier it seemed. It was just a matter of twenty-four discrete and easy steps to go from removing the old stair to replicating the engravings around the edges of the new one. Practically foal's play.

It'd be the work of... ten minutes? Twenty at most. She even had some spare planks in the basement. Why had she never thought to repair it before?

She continued to muse on matters of home repair as she pulled out her key to the fridge. It was an annoying impediment, but a necessary one. Neither she nor Spike wanted a repeat of the 'Sleepwalking Buffet Incident".

She turned the key in the lock and opened the door to a rush of warm air.

Much time later, she would look back at that moment as when her day, and perhaps her life,  was flung from normal into the realm of the truly strange and absurd.

"Okay. There is no way my fridge was this big yesterday."
> Chapter 2 - Housewarming
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fluttershy's eyes turned wide as saucers as she beheld a breathtaking room of glittering crystal where there was supposed to be four cramped wooden walls and a few sacks of animal feed.

Something was definitely wrong with either her, her shed, or whatever she'd eaten for breakfast.

The room-that-was-supposed-to-be-her-shed was also occupied, so in the face of unexpected social interaction, she defaulted to old habits.

"Oh! I'm so sorry, I'll come back later."

"Hold up Fluttershy. It's just me." Familiarity made her stop and look back. A second glance let her relax completely as she realized it was only Rainbow Dash.

She walked back in with a touch more surety. Whatever redecorating urge had seized her longtime friend, she'd clearly done a very nice job of it. The walls and floor were all made of the same glistening blue crystal that felt surprisingly warm underhoof. Each of the eight walls was set with a door (also made of crystal) and engraved with the cutie marks of her friends as well as two more symbols she didn't recognize. A low table filled the middle of the room (again, of the same crystal) with enough space for two or three pegasi to fit between it and the walls with their wings outstretched.

All in all, it was very nice, very pretty, but also very unnecessarily extravagant for a room where she stored extra sacks of animal feed and old gardening tools.

Also, maybe it was just morning drowsiness, but the space seemed rather bigger than the outside walls of her shed should allow.

"I don't mean to sound rude," she ventured, once the initial oddness of the room had passed, "but what are you doing in my shed?"

Rainbow Dash gave her a confused look. "Your shed? I was about to ask what you're doing in my gym locker." She gestured behind her to an open door. Through it, Fluttershy could clearly see a room made of clouds along with several racks of weights and resistance bands.

Which was definitely strange. Fluttershy glanced out the door behind her and confirmed that, yes, she could still see the back of her own house. A sudden wind marked the passage of Dash over her head and through the door.

"Huh. Yeah, this is definitely your place." She landed and stamped the ground a few times, as if to check if it was real. "Weird. I guess if anything this'll make getting over here a lot faster. You think Twilight set this up?"

"She didn't say anything to me," Fluttershy replied. Then again, had she? Fluttershy had been understandably distracted after yesterday's events. Maybe she'd nodded along and agreed to have a portal installed in her shed without listening? But if that was the case, what else might she have agreed to unknowingly? Her breathing quickened as increasingly dreadful and unlikely agreements started to bubble through her imagination.

"Hey, when'd you get such a fancy key?"

The question broke the spiral of panic and pulled her from her thoughts. She followed Rainbow Dash's pointing hoof to the lock on her shed door. Or rather, the ornate golden key sticking out of the rusting five-bit padlock.

It was terribly fancy, all polished gold and swirling filigree, with a handle shaped like a butterfly.

She'd never seen it before in her life.

"I have no idea, but that's definitely not the key for this lock." That key was visibly still hanging from its hook on the doorframe, its sheen of morning dew untouched.

"Even weirder," Dash said with a sage nod.

They both turned their heads at the sound of a door opening from behind them.

"Okay. There is no way my fridge was this big yesterday."





The addition of Twilight to the group led to several rapidfire discoveries. Firstly, that she was not behind their unexpected renovations. Secondly, that she'd never seen magic quite like this before. And thirdly, that Twilight really got into new magic.

Not that the latter was any surprise.

"So what it looks like we have here is a set of variable portals linked on one end to a shared extradimensional space superficially resembling the Crystal Empire and linked on the other end to a set of magical constructs emulating keys which are somehow bound to our unique magical signatures via some kind of magic I can’t even identify." She paused only a moment to take a breath through a smile that threatened to split her face in two. "At least that's what it looks like. I can't say for certain without a lot more testing, but what I can say is that I've never heard of a spell that could do this. The combined effort of a dozen spells, maybe, pulled from several different schools of magic and somehow integrated together could pull off most of it, but even then the sheer mana cost to keep it stable would be crazy! And yet here we are! It works and it's stable! Isn't it just amazing?"

"Yep, totally." Rainbow Dash tossed a pair of wing weights through her door. About five minutes into Twilight's monologue, she'd retreated into her room and returned with a few pieces of workout gear, declaring that she was going to continue her morning workout as planned, regardless of any unexpected additions to her gym. It went completely under Twilight’s notice as she gushed over the spellwork of her Key. "If that's what you say it is, then I believe you. All I know is now I've got a handy shortcut to your house."

"And no more excuses for crashing through my windows at Mach Four," Twilight added with a pointed look.

Dash rubbed her head with an awkward chuckle. She was thankful that Twilight accepted unusual books as valid currency for damage repayments.

“Now then, before I really start studying this, have either of you experienced anything else odd?”

Rainbow Dash shook her head. Fluttershy started to do the same before a memory from the night before flickered through her mind. “Ah, what kind of odd?”

“Anything really.” Twilight shrugged. “This is new and uncharted magic, so anything that might be related could help me figure it out.”

“Alright. Can you, um, wait just one second please?” Without waiting for an answer, Fluttershy hurried back out towards her cottage. 

She returned in barely a minute, breathing heavily and with something clutched tight in her wing.

“Sorry," she gasped through deep lungfuls of air, "I should have remembered these earlier, but I’m still a little sleepy and this is all so new and I—”

“It’s okay, Fluttershy, just take your time and tell us what happened.”

She took another deep breath and steadied herself. “Okay. Alright. So it all started last night. After I left the library and went back home, I still wasn't very tired. I tried reading and cuddling with Angel Bunny and making a cup of chamomile tea, but nothing helped. My body was tired but my head was just so full of ideas. Very strange ideas, too. About plants and animals and all sorts of trinkets and machines. After a while, I decided to go down to my crafting room for a few hours and see what I could make."

“Wait, you have a crafting room?” Rainbow Dash interrupted. “How come I’ve never seen it?”

“In my basement, yes, and you never asked. It used to be just for knitting, but then Harry wanted to try pottery and Mr. Hoppington wanted to pick up watercolors and Angel got interested in wire sculpture and it grew from there to have a little bit of everything. Oh! Just the other day he made the more adorable—"

“Fluttershy, focus. You were saying something odd happened?”

“Oh, right, I'm sorry. Anyway, I made these.” She opened her wing and a few colorful bits of metal and plastic clattered to the table. “I wasn't really trying to make anything in particular, the steps just came to me naturally and I made them before I even realized.”

Dash landed and gave Fluttershy's creations a curious poke, spreading them out on the table and flipping over a few that had landed upside down. "Okay. Yeah, I guess they're pretty cool, but what's so weird about you getting crafty with a couple of pins?”

“Badges,” Fluttershy corrected, “and... I think they're magic."

"Magic?" Twilight replied. "But... you're a pegasus. You can't cast magic."

"That's why I thought it was odd. See?"

Fluttershy selected one from the assortment—a simple purple hexagon emblazoned with a white R—and pinned it to her mane. A brief flash of light hid her from view, but faded just as quickly to reveal a startling change.

“Rarity!?”

“No, just her colors,” said the hornless winged version of Rarity in Fluttershy’s voice. She flipped her un-coiffed mane to show the badge still securely attached. “This one’s called the R Emblem. I have another one called the A Emblem that does Applejack's coat and mane.”

"Fascinating." Newly interested, Twilight gave the pile of badges her full attention. She gathered a few of them in her magic field and brought them up to eye level. "There's definitely something there, but it's not any kind of magic I'm familiar with." She set them back down aside from one: a vaguely bush-shaped badge with a minimalist smiling face and curling ram's horn. “Who does this make you look like?”

“No one. That’s a Sleep Stomp badge. If you kick someone while wearing it, it’ll put them to sleep.”

Rainbow Dash gave her a concerned look. “Uh, not to burst your bubble Flutters, but most ponies call that getting knocked out and you don’t need a badge to do it.”

Fluttershy offered a small shocked gasp in reply. “Oh no! Not like that! It doesn’t have to be in the head; that’d be awfully dangerous. Just a little tap anywhere will do. I thought it'd be helpful for animals that are angry or hurting.”

"Yeah, that sounds more like something you'd make. Lemme try one of these." Dash grabbed one at random—a square badge with a little heart—and clipped it to her mane. Almost instantly she fell to her knees, then collapsed outright.

"Rainbow Dash!" Twilight cried, abandoning her inspection and rushing to her side. She started charging her horn with a diagnostic spell, but before her corona could so much as glow, the tension disappeared as the downed pegasus let out a low, contented moan. She stood slowly and with Twilight's help, stretching out like a cat as she rose with a dopey smile on her face.

"Whoa..." Her voice shuddered with the word as she leaned heavily on the table. "That feels good."

"Fluttershy, what badge did she use? Is this normal?"

The pegasus peered into her friend's bangs. "It looks like... the Happy Hearts badge. It's supposed to promote healing and restore your energy."

"Oh it's restoring me alright," Dash crooned. "I was kinda feeling a little sore from my workout, but now I feel like I just got the deluxe service at the spa!"

Rainbow Dash suddenly went rigid. Quick as a wink, she snatched the badge from her mane and tossed it back on the table. Her eyes danced frantically between her friends, wide and panicked. "Not that I'd know what their deluxe service feels like or anything! Or their normal service! I've never been to a spa in my life! Ask anybody!"

Her eyes darted around the room, desperately searching for a distraction.

"Hey! You think these other doors lead to everyone else's houses?"

"Probably," Twilight agreed, accepting the obvious change in topic without objection, "but there doesn't seem to be any way to open them from the inside. I—"

As if on cue, the door marked with three apples burst open.

The familiar stetson-ed head of Applejack crested into the crystal room. She managed two and a half hurried steps inside before she froze. Her head twitched this way and that as she took in everything before her pinprick pupils latched on the occupants.

"What the- the hay ya'll doin' in mah outhouse!?

"It's actually—"

"Nevermind! I'll kick Big Mac outta the indoor one. He's been showerin' too long already."

Her frantic gaze locked onto Fluttershy. "Rarity! Ah want mah commode un-gussifed by the time Ah get back, y'hear?"

Not-Rarity managed a startled squeak in reply.

Her piece said, Applejack spun on a heel and ran out, leaving her door open behind her and letting the fresh scent of apple trees waft in. Silence reigned for a long, awkward moment as everyone waited for someone else to acknowledge the implications of what had just happened.

"Okay, ignoring a lot of that," Dash finally said, "why does Applejack have a lock on the outside of her bathroom?"

"Wait a minute," Twilight said. She walked over to the door and peered through it. "If this is Applejack's door—" She pointed to the three across from her. "—those three are ours, and we assume the ones with gemstones and balloons are Rarity's and Pinkie Pie's... then what's behind those doors?"

The two unidentified doors that divided the room remained impassively and enigmatically shut. One bore a mark of a three-by-three grid of squares inscribed within a circle. The other across from it had a pair of offset arrows crossed over each other and pointing opposite directions. 

"I dunno, the tic-tac-toe room?" Dash supplied with a shrug.

Twilight sighed. "Just one more part of the mystery, I guess. Are either of you free to help me run some tests?"

"Can't, I got morning cloud clearing duty."

"Sorry, but with the inside of my shed gone I need to go and buy some more breakfast for my animals."

"That's alright, I can test on my own while Spike takes notes. Still, it'd be useful to have somepony else here who can use a Key."

"Hey!" Providence arrived in the form of a pink party pony. "Who went and remodeled my party cave without telling me?"

"...That'll work."
> Chapter 3 - Letter to the Princess
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


From the Desk of Twilight Sparkle
Apprentice to HRH Princess Celestia
Golden Oaks Head Librarian

Notes and Observations on Anomalous Magical Event
Dictation taken by Spike the Dragon, 20th of Summer
Page 7 of XX


...which sums up my initial observations on the subject. I can already tell that the extradimensional space and its attached Keys are something I'm going to spend a lot of time studying. It's only been a few hours since this was discovered, but I've learned several important things about these Keys. First off, they're magically bonded to each of us, one per pony. I've only been able to run tests on my own Key so far but current evidence implies what I've learned should be true to all six. A Key left alone will disappear after a few minutes, only to reappear in my hoof with just a thought. My Key can open any locked door I've tried it on, from my keepsake box to the library’s front door, even if the keyhole should be too small to fit it. Obviously some of these make an opening too small to pass through, but even lockboxes and windows always open to the same crystal chamber and the same space between Pinkie Pie's door and Rainbow Dash's. However, so long as the door is open the Key cannot be removed from the locks by any means I've attempted, nor can a door be fully closed while the Key is inserted.

I can imagine this will be incredibly useful for cutting down travel time, but I doubt that's its intended purpose. I'm sure I've only scratched the surface of what we've discovered, but there's just so much to investigate and study.

Which brings me to the main focus of this scroll: our strange new abilities.

My current working hypothesis is that, through some manner of magic still unknown, my friends and I have somehow each acquired a second Special Talent in addition to regaining our original ones.

--yes Spike, I am serious. No, don't write this part. Look, just cross it out and remind me to do an ink-lifting spell before you send it--

It's common knowledge that everypony has a Special Talent, something they are preternaturally good at, signified by the Cutie Mark they earn when they discover it. Aside from a few famous historical outliers (such as Plain Sight, a former Royal Spymaster whose Cutie Mark was the same color as his coat, and Sheer Bluff, a con artist whose Special Talent for improvisation let her fake having multiple Talents) for thousands of years there have been no verified cases disproving the fact that every pony gets one Cutie Mark, one Special Talent and that they are an intrinsic and immutable part of a pony's being.

At least that was true until yesterday morning. Starswirl's final unfinished spell (new name pending now that it has been finished) was capable of altering a cutie mark, specifically swapping them between ponies. Even if this wasn't the intended effect, the fact that it's even possible means we need to reevaluate everything we know about the topic on a fundamental level.

I'll put that aside for now though, as it more than deserves to be its own research paper. For the time being I'll instead focus on the effect experienced by my friends and I.

Without access to his other journals, I can't say whether gaining a second Special Talent was the intended goal of Starswirl's spell (it certainly sounds like something a peerless wizard of his caliber would pursue) or a side effect of my attempts to modify his work to undo the swap.

--You're right, one does seem much more useful than the other, but who are we to question a genius like Starswirl? Where was I? Right.--

My theory is supported by the changes evident in my friends and I.

Mostly. -Don't write that-

Personally, I appear to have acquired a Special Talent for woodworking. Though I've previously never made anything more complicated than a Mother's Day picture frame, today I managed to make several complete pieces of furniture with nothing more than the scrap lumber in my basement.

I contacted Wicker Mare, a local pony with a carpentry Talent, and had her appraise some of them. Her assessment was that they looked like the work of somepony with both a niche Talent and a few years of experience. Her specific comparison was "a mid-level apprentice: somepony decently skilled and trained, but who hasn't broken out of the basics and found their own style yet". She left with a chair for personal use.  

It's more than just skill, though. I know how to cut the wood, how to spot defects in it, the best way to join it together, how to add flourishes and details without compromising strength. I can see the finished product in my head before I start working with a step by step checklist of everything I need to do to achieve it. It all feels as simple as plugging variables into an equation.

Rarity's experience has been similar, though more difficult to detect. Aside from her normal skills as a seamstress, she claims to have a new Talent for weaving. Testing has been... less than thorough, due to her only having a hobbyist loom, but the results are promising.

Fluttershy has been harder to identify, but far easier to notice. My working theory is some sort of enchanting Talent. Overnight, she crafted a collection of pins with a variety of minor magical effects (though they don't seem to follow the common conventions of enchanting as I learned them as CSGU), and claims to be able to do much more but lacks the proper tools and materials.

Applejack and Rainbow Dash have had much subtler effects, but the former claims that repairs around the farm have been significantly easier than usual and the latter that clouds she's made herself are easier to bust. More testing is needed.

Spike's Note: Twilight got a little distracted and went on a rant here about not having enough time in the day to study everything she wanted to. I'm pretty sure she didn't want me to include it, so I didn't.

I will be the first to admit that my hypothesis of second Special Talents is not perfect. As usual, Pinkie Pie is the oddball exception to an otherwise sound theory.

Unlike the rest of us, instead of a new Special Talent Pinkie seems to have gotten a toolbox.

We found it inside the Crystal Nexus— 

--no, scratch that out. We need a better name for that place. Maybe... perhaps... no. Spike, help me out here. Sure, that'll do. Why are you still writing? Fine, it's a first draft anyway--

We found it inside the Hub behind the door marked with crossed arrows. No one was able to open the door until she arrived, and after the toolbox was removed it sealed shut again. At first glance it looks like a perfectly ordinary toolbox available at any hardware store (aside from it being customized with Pinkie’s colors and Cutie Mark) however the interior is what makes it special. It appears empty to any outside observer, yet Pinkie can pull out tools from within, far more than should fit inside the space.

Normally I'd say this wasn't unusual for her, except she started to pull out tools even she didn't recognize, yet still knew the name and function of.

This brings me to the biggest hole in my theory: knowledge.

A pony with a baking Cutie Mark will have a much easier time cooking and whatever she makes will be better than the same dish made by a pony with a different Talent. However, she still has to learn the recipes. Merely getting her Cutie Mark doesn't mean she suddenly knows how long a soufflé should bake or what a croquembouche is.

For whatever this phenomena is, that's not the case. I know what kinds of wood are best for different projects, despite only a passing interest in botany. Rarity offhandedly wished she had some Jade Cocoon Silk to weave, then when asked admitted that she had no idea what it was. Fluttershy has brought up several plants and creatures that I can find no reference to in either textbooks or mythology.

Something is different between our new skills and normal Special Talents. Either Starswirl was on the brink of breaking through some sort of threshold to an unprecedented kind of Special Talent, or my own spellwork has discovered (or created?) something wholly new.

Seeing as my assistant, Spike, has just told me his wrists are getting tired, I'll end this scroll here. My next one will cover the specific data I've gathered on my new abilities, followed by that of my friends.

Spike's Note: Princess, could you please send her the instructions for a dictation spell or something? I'm sure something like that exists. I don't think my poor claws can take much more of this!





Princess Luna lowered the scroll as she acknowledged that the rest of it was just inky claw marks. "And she has sent you how many of these?"

As if in response, a puff of green smoke swirled its way into the Throne Room through the cracks in the windows. It made a lazy wander through the air till it arrived just above the throne where it materialized into a new roll of parchment, bound by a ribbon and wax seal. It fell as Spike's draconic magic faded, dropping into a hastily erected metal chute through which it clattered and banged about until it landed atop an overflowing basket of identical scrolls beside the throne.

Princess Celestia swept up the errant scroll in her magic and swapped out the basket for an empty one. "I admit I've lost count, but I fear she's winding up to a publishable paper."

The Royal Throne Room of Canterlot was empty save for the pair of them. Day Court had been cancelled in preparation for dealing with the ramifications of Twilight's ascension, though the pair of diarchs found themselves with a totally unexpected dilemma to fill the day instead.

"Such curious fortune," Luna mused as she plucked another scroll. This one appeared to be a more in-depth description of Fluttershy's emblems. "And she's yet not an alicorn?"

"Not in the slightest." Celestia rifled through the basket for a moment. "Even if I thought her tunnel vision was so great that she could somehow manage to completely overlook a pair of wings, there's a scroll—Ah, this one—where she attached a medical evaluation of herself courtesy of Dr. Horse at Ponyville General. Nothing odd for a healthy unicorn of her age."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Luna pondered as she silently lamented the minor fortune she'd lost. Now what was she supposed to do with a warehouse full of collectible Princess Twilight merchandise and memorabilia? Not to mention the additional cost to buy the silence of the craftsponies who'd made it all. "But she still has the potential?"

"Oddly enough, yes. I would have thought that whatever she did would have drained it, but she feels just as primed to ascend as she has for weeks."

Small mercies then. She could keep all the new princess paraphernalia in storage until the filly finally reached her destiny. She thanked the stars she hadn't had any of it dated.

Luna set aside the scroll and turned her attention to the pile of... experiments Twilight had also sent. To be honest, she would have never pegged Twilight as a woodworker, or any kind of artist, really. Such arts took patience and a willingness to incorporate mistakes on the fly. Not exactly the prominent qualities of her sister's student.

And yet, the talent in the pieces she had sent was indisputable. A sturdy but simple bookshelf. A rough but recognizable filly-sized model of a Royal Guard in armour. An alicorn-sized wicker rocking chair, laced with still-living ivy. It was skillful, but not in a thousand years would she have guessed it to be the work of Twilight "neurotic perfectionist" Sparkle.

"My student's over-attention to details aside, that's not what I wanted your opinion on." Celestia's tone brought her attention back to the present. The frown on her sister's face said much more than her words. She held out another scroll, indistinguishable from the rest. "This is what has me concerned."

Luna took it and gave it a quick overview before frowning. "Strange dreams during their lost time?"

"All slightly different, but following a clear theme," Celestia nodded. "For Twilight, it was constellations of stars and a being she could only call indescribable. For Applejack, it was a grove of titanic trees bearing golden fruit and a bearded figure made of stone and wood. For Fluttershy, a massive spider web and a grandmotherly millipede. And so on and so forth with the others. Their recollections are dim and half-forgotten, but the truth shines through."

She shook her head. "I don't think I need to explain why this troubles me."

Luna nodded. "Tis impossible. I know not what realm they went to, but wherever they were, it was not in the Dreamscape."

"I thought as much. That was no dream. When they transcended the Aetherial Plane, they met something there. Something that has granted them power for a price they do not remember."

Dark memories rose to the surface of Luna's mind. Memories from the early days of their rule, when the world was wild and lawless and the safety of their little ponies hinged on alicorns keeping the monsters at bay.

And what monsters there had been, in those days, and not all of them inequine. Even in the past few months, the return of Discord, the Changelings, and King Sombra had proven that long gone threats were not nearly as defeated as they were thought to be.

But there were supposed to be warnings.

"The prophecies said nothing of this?" For something powerful enough to interfere with an ascendance, there surely had to have been some signs of its coming.

"Not a word. I checked the records myself." Celestia gave her sister a look that forestalled her interruption. "Yes. Even Cornerstone's journal."

Luna held back a flinch at the name of that madstallion, then her eyes widened in realization of what it meant. "But to access that, you must have—"

"Yes." Celestia's voice was tight and grim. "I went to the vault and accessed the sealed archives."

She gasped. "Mother and Father's—"

"—and the rest. For something of this magnitude, I deemed it necessary. Don't worry, I reinstated the wards before anything could activate. But Twilight is important. Her role to play in the coming years is crucial."

"Agreed. We must take precautions." Losing young Twilight to darkness would be catastrophic. "But we must not be hasty and overreach ourselves."

"What do you mean?"

"The return of so many old foes as of late may have us seeing threats where none exist. The being or beings the Bearers encountered may not be dark whatsoever."

"You would have us take that risk?" Her sister's stare turned hard.

"As opposed to turning on our most powerful weapon against such threats based on nothing more than suspicion? Yes I would." Luna leveled an equal stare back. "You asked for my counsel and this is it."

The battle of wills persisted for a long, tense minute before Celestia let out a breath and turned away. "Perhaps you are right. Maybe I am jumping at shadows."

A blue wing found its way around her shoulders. "I would not fault you for it. These are strange times and more dangerous than they have been in centuries. But if Twilight has, in fact, discovered some grand revelation in magic, we would be remiss to crush such a boon in its infancy over imagined threats."

The solar diarch remained silent for a moment as she digested her sister's words. Then she smiled. "I missed this."

"Missed what?"

"This. Us. A spirited debate over the right course of action. Somepony daring to call me out on a plan that may not be the best. It's incredible how hard it is to find good advisors that aren't yes-mares."

Luna gave her sister a shove. What did decorum matter when they were alone? "Someone has to keep your head out of the sun and on the ground." They shared a good-natured giggle. "So what will you do about Twilight?"

"For now? Observation only." Celestia summoned a quill and parchment and began preparing a missive. "I'll make an excuse for her and her friends to come to Canterlot and bring the Elements of Harmony with them. I know a few discrete spells that should assuage most of my worries, if they are indeed still untainted. But even if they pass, I might assign an Agent of the Crown to keep an eye on them in Ponyville, but take no direct action otherwise. We'll watch and we'll wait. If Twilight has truly sundered what we thought was a fundamental law of magic, then I don't doubt that sooner or later we'll be needing that stockpile of new princess merch you paid for out of the royal treasury."

Luna made a sound that caught somewhere between an indignant squawk and a surprised yelp.

"But if she has become a conduit of some dark patron, even unknowingly, then I will be prepared to do what is necessary for the sake and safety of our kingdom."

The sisters nodded in a moment of solemn agreement.

A moment which was swiftly ruined by another scroll popping into being, bouncing off the rim of the chute, off the top of the throne, off both their horns, and landing onto the ground in front of them. The wax seal broken by the fall, it unrolled across the carpet, bearing its short message in Spike's hurried scrawl for all the world to see.

APPLEJACK JUST GOT ANOTHER ONE!!
> Chapter 4 - MMA in the SCC
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Applejack had been presented with a slice of cake, but it remained untouched aside from a single courtesy bite. As much as she appreciated Pinkie's talent and sentiment, she disagreed with the party mare that this was worthy of celebration. Heck, she hadn't even done anything.

But Pinkie was persistent, so a slice she had. The rest of it had been wolfed down by Rainbow Dash and Pinkie herself, which at least meant there'd be no leftovers to take home that would tempt her siblings into snacking before dinner and ruining their appetites.

She'd rather have been home in general, cleaning up the mess Pinkie Pie had made of her farm when their Cutie Marks were swapped, then spending the afternoon reassuring her family that everything was alright after the fright of her disappearing for the better part of a day. But she also wanted to be a good friend, which was why she was at Sugar Cube Corner instead, explaining to Twilight for the third time something that really didn't seem all that complicated.

The unicorn in question sighed and massaged her temples, not that it seemed to do her much good. "Let's start over. Tell me what happened from the top."

Applejack shrugged and resigned herself to another recitation. "Ain't much to tell, but alright." She pushed her plate towards Dash, who took the hint and happily added it to her own. How that mare stayed so skinny was a mystery.
 
"Ah was mindin' my own business, whippin' up a quick lunch for the family when all of a sudden outta nowhere Ah get this tinglin' feelin' all up and down mah legs like Ah just bucked the clocktower bell."

Twilight nodded in understanding and scribbled a quick note on her page of mostly scratched out notes. She'd felt it too, as had their other friends, though she'd described the feeling like someone had strung a piano wire to her horn then plucked it. But that was it for them. All they'd received was a surprise and a spot of dizziness. Applejack, on the other hoof...

"It felt like mah head was clearing up after a cold," she continued. "Like Ah'd been walkin' around half-asleep and somepony dumped a rain cloud on me. That's when Ah started rememberin' things. Stuff Ah know Ah never learned but... now Ah did? Gives me a headache trying to figure it out."

"You felt a surge of unfamiliar magic," Twilight summarized, "awoke memories that both felt real yet are impossible, and now, apropos of nothing..." There came the bit Twilight couldn't seem to grasp.

Applejack nodded. "Ah know Kung Fu."

Dash snapped to attention. "Show me," she commanded.

The fight was swift and brutal. Rainbow Dash was a karate blackbelt (earned mostly for bragging rights, but her skills were no less real) compounded with years of intense aspiring Wonderbolt training along with practical experience fighting monsters. In speed or technique, she could hold her own against anyone in Ponyville and probably anyone outside the competitive circuit.

And Applejack...

"Okay," Dash wheezed as she pulled herself out of a Dash-shaped dent in the dirt and stumbled back through a pegasus-shaped hole in the wall. "You got some solid moves. For a beginner."

"No fighting in the bakery!" Pinkie called from across the room and behind the counter. "Not without a certified Kung Fu ref and signed safety waivers!"

"It ain't strictly Kung Fu. Actually a combination of several schools of fightin' and unarmed takedown techniques." She offered Dash a hoof and helped heave the punchdrunk pegasus back into her chair. "Yer lucky most of what Ah learned at the Academy was designed for throwing two-legged folk around."

"And now we're back to that." Twilight jabbed her quill into the page so hard the tip snapped off and left an inky smear. "The Academy."

Just so. The Academy. Even for Applejack it was strange to think about. She remembered it fondly, even though she couldn't actually 'remember' it. It wasn't like the memories were faded or foggy; they just weren't there. Like she'd been given a book with pages torn out. She gave Twilight an apologetic look.

"Sorry, but Ah can't tell you what Ah don't know. Ah can name you the seven different standard submission holds, or how to do a combat roll, or do tricks with a bat'leth that'd give mah rope skills a run for their bits, but when it comes to where Ah learned it, who mah classmates were, heck, even the name of the place... Ah got nothing."

"So you've said, but maybe if you really focus—"

"What's a batlength?" Dash interrupted.

"Bat'leth. Kind of a ceremonial blade. Picture an elephant-sized horseshoe stretched out as long as a pony, stick an unstretched one in the middle, then sharpen everything that's not the handle."

Twilight grimaced even as she noted down the description. "It sounds really violent."

"I think you mean awesome! Can you teach me?!"

Applejack thought it over for a moment. "Sure. Ah don't see why not. But we'll need to find somepony who can make us a practice set. Maybe out of wood for safety's sake."

"Oh!" Twilight perked up. "I think I can help you with that if you can give me more specific dimensions."

Before any further plans could be made, Spike entered the café with a scroll clutched tight in his claws. "Message for you from the Princess, Twilight!" he announced. "She says she wants everypony to come to Canterlot and to bring the Elements."

"You think she knows something about what happened to us?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"It's possible. I've been keeping her fully up to date on my discoveries." A curious glimmer entered Twilight's eye as a smile grew on her face. "And I think this is perfect timing for an experiment!"
> Chapter 5 - Trains, Training, Trades, and Technique
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twilight sat onboard the train, alone. It was a three-hour ride from Ponyville to Canterlot, but she'd packed a book to entertain herself.

And in the event she finished it (which was more likely than not), she'd also brought a knife and some scrap wood to give whittling a try, just like she'd read about in books about life in frontier towns.

Twilight's feelings were... mixed, regarding her new skill. It was handy, certainly, and opened her eyes to so much about the furniture and materials around her that she'd taken for granted. But that wasn't enough to drive out the underlying concern. This was not how Special Talents worked. Applejack's recent gain had only further weakened her hypothesis of secondary Talents (especially since this would be the mare's third).

She was a little worried, but the thought was balmed by the knowledge that she was soon to receive Princess Celestia's guidance directly. The princess would know what was going on, definitely, and then she could put her fears to rest and enjoy her newfound hobby in peace.

In the meantime, she hoped that her friends would be wise enough to keep their new skills to themselves until they understood exactly what was going on.

As Twilight whiled away the hours of her trip, her friends back home were quite busy themselves.





"Step right up, step right up!" Rainbow Dash barked in her best impression of the Flim Flam brothers. "Try your might against the toughest mare in Equestria! Two bits gets you in the ring and getting her out of it wins you the pot!"

Bon Bon put her shopping on pause to take in the crowd that had gathered at the edge of the market. She considered herself a considerate mare, not overly obstinate or abrasive to change as was the usual Earth Pony stereotype, but even she couldn't help but frown at the display. It was a raucous group, disturbing her peaceful grocery run with their cheers and blocking the quickest route to her favorite oat vendor. Honestly, what kind of ponies had the free time to hang around in the middle of the day and— 

"Serpentine, Raindrops! Serpentine!"

...aaand there was her marefriend, in the thick of it. Of course.

She wove her way through the crowd and climbed atop a bench where a green unicorn who'd never fought a day in her life had taken it upon herself to yell out advice like she was a veteran coach. "What's going on?"

Lyra's shout died as she spun in surprise. She grinned and pulled her marefriend in close. "Bonnie! You're just in time! Applejack's charging ponies a fee to fight her!"

"What? Why?"

"Who knows! But it's wicked entertaining! You win ten bits if you can pin her, and half the take if you can get her out of the ring. Two bits buy in, five if you want to tag-team her."

For a moment, Bon Bon actually considered participating. She had quite the bevy of hoof-to-hoof combat skills from her previous employment so victory was practically guaranteed. Besides, it wouldn't hurt to get ahold of a few extra bits to treat her marefriend to a nice dinner. "What's the jackpot up to?"

"Don't know." She tossed some popcorn into her mouth. "Been too focused on the fights. Get her, Carrot Top! Give her the twister punch!"

"Where did you get popcorn?"

"Over there." She gestured in a vaguely leftward area of more crowd. "Pinkie opened a stand."

Bon Bon stole a hoofful of the crunchy treat (to half-hearted protest) and turned her attention to the makeshift arena. Credit where it was due, Lyra had picked a great vantage spot and she could see the fighters clearly despite the three-body-deep wall of spectators between them.

Her eyes narrowed as she watched Applejack take down Carrot Top with a tricky maneuver that turned the farmer's weight against her. Her narrowed eyes evolved to a thin-lipped frown as the next three challengers all failed to so much as unbalance her. The mare was good. Too good. She wasn't just taking them down, she was playing with them. Drawing out the fights for a spectacle, then ending it without causing more than light bruises. Those were not the skills of a farmer. If anything, she fought like a trained Agent.

Was it possible that Applejack had also been a part of...

She shook her head, banishing the idea. It was impossible. The Agency's internal infosec was top-notch, but that hadn't stopped her from piecing together the identities of most of her colleagues. So unless Applejack was some sort of Tartarus Black Security Level asset who was risking outing herself with a public demonstration of her skills, she wasn't part of the Agency.

Though that still left the question of where an apple farmer had learned to execute a perfect Minosian sleeper hold.





"Fluttershy, I must inquire,
as to these plants which you desire.

While I would gladly aid your quest,
to some of these, I must protest!"

Zecora slammed the sheet of paper onto her table, setting her various potion bottles and jars of mystical ingredients rattling. She grabbed a charcoal stick and began underlining different items as she read them off.

"Sapphire Hemlock, Chest-popper Pods,
Snarling Ivy, Fool's Goldenrod?

Poison Joke and Heaving Lily,
Six-leafed Crimson Weeping Filly?!

All you've missed is Razorbow,
For 'Everfree Hazard' Bingo!

What task of yours could truly need,
such a host of dangerous breeds?"

Fluttershy did her best to suffer through the rant, holding back her reflexive winces as best she could. She knew Zecora wasn't angry at her, not really. Just concerned and with good reason. Asking for any one of those plants would raise eyebrows. Asking for samples of all of them must have sounded like she'd lost her mind.

It's for a good cause, she reminded herself as she steeled her will. Her zebra friend hadn't even refused her. She just wanted an explanation. "I know it seems strange, but I do have a good reason. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that these are the most magical plants in the Everfree Forest."

Zecora nodded.

"And poisonous, and some hungry.
The risk is great, even for me."

"I know, and I'm sorry for asking you to put yourself in danger. There's... a long story behind it, but I recently learned about some new exotic plants that could do a lot of good for a lot of animals and ponies. But to cultivate them, I need some very magical compost."

Zecora gave her a disbelieving look.

"You want these hazards just to rot?
Surely your shops, compost has got?"

Fluttershy shook her head. "I did check, but theirs isn't strong enough. I need— It's hard to explain, but I just know exactly what I need to make these grow. I can make some substitutions, but anything less won't work.”

She reached into her saddlebag and pulled out a small drawstring bag.

"And because I know it's so dangerous is why I'm not just asking it as favor. I'd like to make it worth your while."

"I have no need for bits you see,
I forage all my meals for free."

"How about a magical badge that makes you immune to confusion, vertigo, sleep, petrification, shrinking, electrocution, and poison?" She pulled from the bag a round pin with a Pinkie-Pie-worthy smile on it followed by a square green badge with a big swirling starburst. "And a second one that makes it much harder for monsters to hit you."

If Zecora had worn her mane in any style other than a mohawk, her rising eyebrow would have vanished from view. She eyed the badges with an appraising squint, turning them over and even giving one a curious lick. After a minute of consideration, she passed the first one back to Fluttershy along with a corked bottle.

"If true, these would be an invaluable creation,
but would you oblige me a brief demonstration?"

Fluttershy smiled and her worries eased. That was nearly as good as an agreement. She swapped her current badge for the Feeling Fine and downed the bottle of mystery fluid without an ounce of her usual reservation. There was nothing to fear, after all. Not when she had an absolute, unshakable confidence in her creations. They couldn't not work. She knew it as surely as she knew gravity was down.

After five minutes, Zecora checked her temperature and the color of her tongue before declaring her poison-free. She gratefully accepted the Feeling Fine badge as well as the Lucky Day and attached them to either sides of her mohawk.

"That toxin should have left you quite giggly and high,
I thank you for this priceless gift, my dear friend Fluttershy."

“So, is that enough for you to consider getting my plants? I have more badges, if you want, I just thought those would be the best fit and—”

She was cut off  by a raised hoof and a smile.

"With these in hoof, I must admit, you’ve made my home much safer.
So worry not, by weekend next, I'll have finished your labor."

“Thank you Zecora. Oh!” Fluttershy shivered as a growingly familiar tingle ran up her primaries. “I think one of my friends just got something new.”





It was a great day, a fantastic day, a stupendous day to be Pinkie!

After all, how often was it that she got to sell popcorn and crackerjacks off to the side of a homemade arena where her friend Applejack was delicately folding ponies into pretzels? Not often at all! In fact, if she had a gold bit for every time she'd sold concessions for a vaguely-legal fight club, she'd have one bit, which wasn't a lot but it was enough to buy a small popcorn for foals under ten.

The only thing that could reasonably ruin such a fine day would be if Mayor Mare decided she had a problem with their little venture and sent the local Guard in to shut it down, but that didn't seem likely. They were more a public spectacle than a nuisance, and they even had a first aid tent off to the side, not that Nurse Redheart had seen so much as a single patient. Whoever had taught Applejack to fight had made her really really good at doing it without hurting ponies.

She passed Roseluck her order as a strange feeling ran up her legs. It was like her body was slowly filling with pop rocks and diet soda, a rising crackly pressure that built and built till it bloomed out of her head.

And with it bloomed new understanding.

She could fix things. Well, she could always fix things but not like she could now. Being a professional party planner was more than just baking cakes and blowing balloons; big events had a lot of logistical and infrastructural issues to deal with. And the bigger the party, the more likely something would go wrong. Poorly hung decorations falling, wet matches to light the candles, broken music systems. Pinkie always did her best to fix those sorts of things when they happened.

But now, her best was so much more.

She took in the world with a newly trained eye, appraising the faults and failures around her. The chalkboard menu on her little thrown-together bodega was hanging a little wonky. Easy-peasy. She didn't have any nails, but her handy-dandy new magic toolbox had an unlimited supply of hammers and drill bits. What was a drill bit if not a screwy nail?

She thought of the kitchen back in Sugar Cube Corner, of the one oven whose timer was always a few minutes off. Another easy fix, all she needed was some paper clips and a rubber band.

She grinned as more and more solutions came to her. The world was a cracked oyster and she'd just been given a bottle of superglue.

"Uh, Pinkie? You okay in there?" came the voice of the next pony in line. "Is my order gonna take much longer? Bulk Biceps is fighting soon and I want to get a good seat."

"Sorry! Got distracted!" She took his bits and wedged them next to the hinge of the popcorn kettle, sealing them in place with a bit of caramel. "Righto! That oughta fix it. Just step to the left please, Davey, and it'll be ready in a sec. Next pony, order up!"

It was indeed, a great day to be Pinkie.
> Chapter 6 - Reflecting on "Conclusive" Results
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

So?” Luna asked the moment they were alone. “What did your spells tell you?”

“Not much,” Celestia admitted. “Or rather, not much that I didn’t at least partially expect. No signs of dark magic on any of them aside from the expected base trace from the spell I taught Twilight to access Sombra’s sanctum. None of the tell-tale signs of corruptive magic. No mind control either, at least nothing fundamentally similar to changeling manipulation or compulsion spells.”

She gestured to the ornate box that contained the Elements of Harmony. “And their connection to the Elements is as solid as ever.”

Luna sank back into her chair, relief evident on her features. “So they are clear then? Our worries were for naught?”

Celestia pursed her lips. “Not quite. There is definitely something present. Something that was not there before. Unfortunately, whatever it is is too deeply entangled with their own magic for my surface-level spells to identify. If I didn’t know Twilight’s magical signature as intimately as I do, I probably would have missed it.”

Which meant they’d hardly progressed at all. Suspicions with little evidence. Luna sighed as she felt some of the worry she’d just released creep back in. “Still, it was an impressive trick, I will admit. For Twilight to arrive alone then have her friends appear through the broom closet. If we could harness such a spell, we could deploy armies as quickly as our fastest pegasus.”

“Not that there’s such a need these days,” Celestia gently reminded her. “Equestria has not been at war for nearly four hundred years. Besides, I managed a glimpse at the spellwork behind their ‘keys’ and the realm beyond it and I doubt even Starswirl could tease out its secrets.”

“Alas, more’s the pity.” After a thousand years of boredom, the lunar princess was practically itching for a good war to get the blood pumping again. “So, what now? More observations, I take it?”

“Precisely. I plan to immediately send Twilight to visit Cadence up north. She’ll be able to detect any changes in Twilight’s behavior or emotions too subtle for my spells. At the same time, a much more powerful scanning spell will be checking her magic as deeply as possible to root out the truth of her new ability.”

Luna tapped her hooves in thought. “Perhaps I am out of date with modern casting, but wouldn’t such a spell take hours, even days to fully render its results?

“That’s why I’m casting it as an enchantment on the one thing I know she won’t let out of her sight.” She opened the box and extracted the singular tiara amongst the jeweled necklaces. “The Element’s natural magic will overpower it in a few days, but so long as she keep it close, that should be more than long enough to tell us what we want to know.”





"Are you sure that was a good idea?" Shining Armor asked as he watched his little sister and littler dragon bro disappear through the mirror that had formerly graced his dressing room.

"Positive," Cadance replied with a confident nod. "I may be the youngest princess there is, but I think I'm starting to get a handle on Celestia's schemes. This is one of those subtle tests she likes to spring on Twilight."

Shining Armor gave his wife a skeptical look. "How is someone breaking into our castle and burglarizing her room a test? Seems more like bad luck to me."

"I've got a feeling that that's exactly what she wants Twilight to think, but there's a few too many coincidences for me to fully believe it."

Cadance gestured to the mirror. "For one thing, this isn't just any old mirror, it was a wedding gift from Celestia herself. There's no way she didn't know it had magical properties."

Shining nodded. It was a security concern at the very least. Like gifting someone a doormat that said 'look beneath for house keys'.

"Second, even though she arrived in our personal quarters, the thief ignored my crown, your medals, and all the priceless artifacts in every room and hallway to instead make a beeline for the guest quarters where Twilight was sleeping. And that's despite Twilight only arriving earlier today. She had a target that she knew where to find and when. Sounds like someone with insider knowledge, no?"

She made a good case, he had to admit. It was very strange behavior

"Then after the alarm was sounded, despite the many windows, countless possible infiltration spells, and our admittedly threadbare border security—" Shining winced at that, but what was he supposed to do? Deplete Canterlot of the guards he'd trained? The remainder of the original Crystal Guard was a fraction of the size it'd been before Sombra. "—when it came to escaping, the thief chose to run through the castle with nothing more than a cloak to hide her identity and leave back through the mirror, letting us know exactly how she got in.

"Finally, and most indicative of Celestia's hoof in this... I recognized her."

"You what?!"

A wan smile flitted across Cadance's features, one tinged with regret. "It was just a glance, but I'd know that fiery mane anywhere. It's been a long time since I sensed that particular blend of angst, arrogance, and snark, but there's no mistaking her. You probably remember her. Celestia's former student?"

"I think so." His brow furrowed in thought. "Sunset... I want to say... Simmer?"

"Shimmer. She was the one who got jealous easily and tried to break us up out if spite?"

"Right. Her. Didn't she just up and vanish one day?"

"Essentially. I thought she and Celestia had a falling out, but maybe the princess just sent her away to study abroad." She shrugged. "Or at least they didn't part on such bad terms that she wasn't willing to play burglar for a night."

"So... Twily's not in any real danger?" Shining Armor's posture started to lose its tension for the first time since his sister had stated her intention to chase the thief through the mirror.

Cadance laughed, a trilling bell-like sound that eased the rest of the stress from Shining's body. "Hardly. It's a stageshow. I'm sure she'll be back in a day or two with a story to tell and a deeper understanding on some aspect of friendship. It's so obviously a test, Celestia might as well have given her a number two quill sent her straight to highschool."





"It's been a week and Twilight has returned to Ponyville. Are you satisfied with what your spell had to say?"

"Yes Luna, and it seems we can rest easy. The spell detected a brief surge of demonic energy, but it was almost immediately vanquished by a powerful burst of Harmony magic. Twilight is clear. Anything that happens now is entirely of her own merit."

"Good. Then I'll be sending your student a message posthaste."

"Whatever for?"

"Because I find myself rather fond of the wicker chair she sent, though I'd rather one made to fit my svelter frame."

"...what are you implying?"

"Nothing, dear sister, other than the fact that she clearly designed the original with your need for additional width in mind."
> Chapter 7 - A Thorny Situation and an Unlikely Collaboration
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The eve of the Summer Solstice Celebration was a beautiful day in Ponyville.

It was also a beautiful night in Ponyville.

No one was quite sure which term applied when both the sun and the moon hung in the sky, splitting Equestria down the middle between light and darkness. But most ponies had bigger concerns on their minds than the technical nomenclature of stellar phenomena. Concerns such as the sudden and rapid expansion of the Everfree Forest into their cities and homes.

Gnarled black vines with thorns like razor wire burst through dirt and cobblestone alike, growing at an astounding rate and ensnaring everything in their path. Trees, houses, ponies. Everything was fair game for the clutching tendrils. Their very presence made magic flicker and go haywire, reducing even powerful unicorns to beating back the vines with sticks like savages.

In the midst of the chaos, six ponies trotted determinedly through the madness; single-minded mares on a mission.

"Strike as far as you can from the thorns!" Twilight called out to whatever ponies they came across who were actually trying to fight back instead of just panicking. "That's where they're weakest!" Her new intuition for plant life kept feeding her information about the invading vines' strengths and weaknesses (so long as she kept considering them as a potential crafting material. It was a very springy wood, apparently, better suited for sports equipment than furniture).

Her friends helped out where they could, beating back the plants and freeing captured ponies, but with magic on the fritz and an endless tide of vegetation replacing whatever they destroyed, hope was dwindling fast.

The group twiched in near-unison as the tingle of a new ability ran through their various magically-sensitive appendages.

"Who got that one?" Twilight asked.

"It was meeee~!" Pinkie cheered.

"Anythin' immediately useful?"

"Perhaps some kind of horticultural ability?" Rarity added hopefully.

"Nope!" Pinkie replied, popping the 'p'. "But I get super duper extra good luck if I ever need to go to the hospital."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that," Twilight said grimly. The disaster was hitting her harder than the rest. While her treebrary was mostly safe from the vines, the mismatched sky above had immediately set her anxiety bubbling over Celestia and Luna. Their following total lack of response to any of her letters twisted the anxiety into a deeply unsettled feeling. This was exactly the kind of disaster you called in a princess for, and yet she couldn't get ahold of either of them.

Which meant she had to handle things on her own.

A sudden hoof on her shoulder and a small smile helped push back the clouds of worry, if only a little. She wasn't truly on her own. Not so long as she had her friends by her side.

With that thought in mind, she steeled her determination and passed out the Elements among her friends. "Alright girls, it’s time we got some answers and we're going right to the source."

A beam of rainbow light shot from her to Fluttershy, and from her to Rarity, to Applejack, to Pinkie, to Rainbow Dash, and back to Twilight closing a circle of powerful harmonic magic. The air crackled as a whirlwind of colorful energies spun in the space between them, rising high into the sky. It reached its apex and held tantalizingly still for a moment before crashing back down like a wave, the rainbow magic disappearing as it passed the boundary of their circle, and leaving behind the interdimensional flotsam and jetsam it'd picked up.

"Winter wrap up, winter wrap up~" crooned a painfully out of tune voice from beyond the barrier of a flimsy shower curtain. A lion's paw pulled it aside as Discord, reformed (self-proclaimed) Lord of Chaos (also self-proclaimed) stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around his midsection.

"You know, Twilight, I do believe you're supposed to give me prior warning before firing off that little summoning spell Celestia taught you." He pulled the plug on his bathtub and the entire apparatus spiraled down the drain and out of existence. "It's common courtesy, you know. After all, you never know when you might catch me in a... compromising position. Be thankful that this time I was merely enjoying a delightful soak in the tub."

"E-Enough! Release Princess Celes—"

"Hullo," he interrupted, suddenly very interested in something. "What's all this?"

He snapped away his remaining shower accessories with a snap of his claw. "My, my, my. What in the name of the Nine Tenets of Chaos have you been getting up to while I was away?" He vanished only to pop up a moment later draped around Applejack's shoulders like a feather boa. He popped off the top of her skull and peered at her brain through a jeweler's loupe. "Now that's interesting." Before she could throw him off he was gone again, flickering between the six of them and violating every rule of personal space in the book as he inspected Rarity's horn, Twilight's back, Fluttershy's teeth.

Twilight had had enough of his shenanigans. "Discord! We demand that you return the princesses and call back the Everfree's advance!"

"Me?" he asked with an offended gasp. "What makes you think I have anything to do with it? Twilight I'm reformed, or haven't you heard? All thanks to my dear friend Butterfree here." He clutched the pegasus like a teddy bear.

"Wrong one," Rainbow Dash growled into his elbow.

He dropped her and grabbed Fluttershy instead, his interest in the gag already fading. "Cutiefly, then. Whatever. Either way, the only thing I've done to your precious princesses recently is give them a stress ulcer wondering if I'm really reformed or not."

"What about these plants? It's clearly your work."

"Pish posh! Priorities, Twilight. Whatever it is that's happened to you is far more interesting than these overgrown dandelions.

A ripple of twitches went through the group as another ability made itself at home and Twilight’s eyes went as wide as saucers. “Oh… oh wow. So that’s what Applejack meant.”

Discord’s eyes flashed. "Interesting indeed. But enough about me, let's talk about you. You've had some work done since we last met and let me be the first to say that I love it. Simply divine! You must tell me where you found a hook-up for such a delightfully chaotic glow-up."

Twilight's determination, already weakened by the rush of new knowledge into her head, faltered further as it warred with her curiosity. "Wait, do you mean our new Talents? What do you know about them?"

He paused, then the draconequus' grin grew so large it stretched the sides of his head, warping his face to little more than teeth and eyes gleaming with cruel mischief. "Oho? Could it be that you don't even know what you have? Ha! Ingenious! They give you a shiny new toy but not the instruction manual! Inspired! Oh, I simply have to meet the fellow that set this up; the kind of art we could make together, why it'd blow your mindscape!"

"Hey! Stop trying to distract us!" Rainbow Dash said, scowling. "We know you're behind this; it's got your cloven hoofprints all over it."

"As much as I love your new jungle deco look, I'm afraid I can't take credit for it. I haven't done any large-scale chaos since the last time we all got together like this."

Applejack frowned as she stomped out a vine trying to steal her hat. "Ah don't buy it."

"Please, would I lie to you?"

"Yes!" said five ponies.

"Um, maybe?" added Fluttershy, a little late.

"Hmph. Only one out of six. How far the standards for friendship have fallen these days. Whatever happened to the benefit of the doubt? Innocent until proven guilty? Faith, trust, and pixie dust?"

"Um," Flutterhsy fiddled with her mane. "A little help fixing it might go a long way in proving you're not behind it."
 
"Hm, yes, perhaps a bit of give and take might be in order." He chuckled. "Seeing as you all seem to have made steps to embrace chaos yourselves, I suppose it's only sporting that I return the gesture. Here's a hint." His body, aside from his eyes, stretched rail thin and twisted into a paperclip-like spiral. "Have you tried following the vines back to see where they come from?"

Twilight shifted her focus from Discord to the vines themselves. They were coming from the Everfree, clearly enough, but that hardly helped. The forest covered hundreds of acres with only a few safe paths through it. Trying to find the source of the plants in there would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Then again, to continue the metaphor, didn't she have something of a magnet?

As long as she thought of it in woodworking terms, her new Talent guided her not just in how to work with trees and plants, but how to find the best portion of the material to use. While the vines were all absurdly healthy (and would make excellent boomerangs or archery equipment) some parts were more ideal than others. If she tuned her thought to finding the most ideal portion of vine...

She concentrated, driving the totality of her focus into finding the best vine, the thickest and strongest piece of heartwood.

Then, like a spinning compass needle stabilizing into place, she had a heading.

"I've got it!" she cried, "I know exactly where it's coming from!"

"Wait, that helped?" Discord asked, nearly falling out of the sky in flummoxed shock. "And here I was trying to be obnoxiously vague in a way that would only prove helpful looking back."

Twilight ignored him. "Come on, girls! It's right near Celestia and Luna's old castle!"





Their journey through the forest was, thankfully, without trouble. The native monsters were either wise enough to wait the disaster out in their dens or otherwise tied up elsewhere. There was a brief scare when it turned out the full-grown flowers of the invading vines were both ambulatory and aggressive, but a bit of teamwork was enough to put them to rest.

Soon the sextet found themselves at the edge of the gorge that kept the Castle of the Two Sisters protected from the rest of the forest. A gorge from which all the thickest and sturdiest vines grew from.

Applejack took a peek over the edge, but it was so clogged with vines she could scarcely see the bottom.

"Looks like the place, alright. But how are we supposed to get down there?"

They all jumped at the sound of a boom, a rolling crash, and the noise of an accordion wheezing.

"I found the stairs!" Pinkie's voice echoed from below.

They followed her down at more conservative speed.

The bottom of the gorge was so dense with vines that the sky above was nearly blocked out. There was almost a path between where the largest of the vines had choked out the growth of any smaller ones, but even then every step was a careful dance of weaving and balancing to avoid the myriad thorns.

It led them to a cave in the far wall and it was there that they finally found something noteworthy.

"It's a tree?" Fluttershy asked.

"A crystal tree," Twilight corrected. Her woodworking intuition didn't register it as a plant, at least. But crystals were known to exhibit many organic traits, especially in areas of particularly dense magic.

But even if one was to compare it to a tree, it didn't look like a healthy one. The crystal was dull and discolored, the branches thin and sickly. And the entire thing was strangled by the vines. They grew thickest around the base, curling and coiling over themselves into lumps and hills.

"It doesn't seem to be the source of the vines, though. Just another victim of their advance."

"Whatever it is," Applejack said, "Ah can definitely tell ya that it's broken."

That got the group's attention. "Broken?" Twilight asked. It looked intact. Dull and lackluster and overgrown, but whole.

"I second that deduction!" Pinkie added. "I got a jury-rigging Talent the other day, and I agree that whatever that thing's supposed to do, it's not doing it."

"The first one of these extra Special Talents Ah got was an intuition for repairin' things and it says the same." She considered the tree with an appraising eye. "Might be outta juice."

"Can you tell what kind it takes? I got orange and unleaded apple." Pinkie held up a pair of jugs.

"No, I mean it's outta magic."

Twilight could only watch in surprised disbelief as her friend bantered over repairing a crystal tree (which was probably some kind of ancient magical relic) like a couple of mechanic ponies trying to fix a cart.

"A good jumpstart should do it, or leastways be enough we can figure out what it does."

"But we'd need a really really strong source of magic to do it."

"This is gonna sound crazy, but hear me out: what about the Elements?"

"What?!" was Rainbow Dash's outraged shout. "Are you crazy? How are we supposed to keep Discord under control with the Elements?!"

"Actually, she may be onto something. Look." Twilight gestured to the branches of the tree where five indentations sat empty and a mark in the middle the same shape as her own Element of Magic. "I think this tree is designed to work with the Elements."

"But we need them," Rainbow Dash pressed.

"Of course we do," Pinkie said. "Nopony's saying we leave them there forever. Give Applejack and me some time—"

"—and some better parts—"

"—and we'll figure out a way to make it work without them."

"Oh. I guess that's different then."

With everyone in agreement, Twilight removed the gems from their accessories and levitated them towards the tree.

"Still feels weird giving them up..." Dash muttered.

"You'll get yours back soon enough," Applejack assured her, "Besides, we barely had them a year and we used them, four, maybe five times?"

"Yeah, good point I guess."

The tree shifted around the Elements, growing closed to seal them into place. They began to glow, one after another, brighter and brighter until the whole tree shone like the sun itself.

With a burst of concussive force that threw them off their hooves, a pulse of magic surged from the tree and sought out the roots, dissolving them away until nothing remained but an empty cave.

The Tree shone now, radiating Harmony Magic like a beacon. And amid its roots were two alicorns, slowly rousing.





Far away (but dimensionally quite near) in a door-filled chamber of crystal, a sheen of rainbow light passed across the table accompanied by the subtle sound of something unlocking.

With no observers present to witness it, the room swiftly returned to the pseudo-corporeal state it resided in when none of the Keys were engaged.





When all was said and done, Celestia and Lune teleported back to Canterlot to set the skies in order (and quell any attempt of Blueblood's to seize power in their absence) leaving the non-alicorns to walk home. Even the normally-oppressive Everfree Forest felt bright and cheerful without the overwhelming vines.

"There's only one thing left I don't understand," Twilight mused as they crossed the forest's threshold into the plains between it and Ponyville. "If the Tree of Harmony was keeping the vines in check, where did they come from and why did it fail now?"

"A very good question," Discord said as he appeared lounging on a branch above them. "One I'm afraid we may never know the answer to. Such a pity. Speaking of pities..."

He disappeared then reappeared in miniature on Rarity's back. "You seem to have returned rather de-accessorized. Bandits on the trail? Perhaps you were short of change at a toll bridge?"

"If you must know, they're gone," Rarity said, shaking him off.

"Gone? Gone? You mean those nasty little trinkets that open and close access to my extremely uncomfortable stone prison are out of the picture?"

"Only for a bit!" Rainbow Dash declared.

"And our friendship remains," Fluttershy added sternly. "And if you want to remain friends you'll stop thinking whatever it is you're thinking and help clean up."

"Fine." With the sound of a raspberry he remanifested himself in a maid's uniform. "But I don't do windows."

He raised his claw to snap himself away, but found a hoof holding him back. "Actually, before that, I was hoping I could talk to you privately for a minute. Please?"

"Fluttershy?" Dash asked with evident concern.

"It's alright," she said, "We'll just be a minute. You all head on into town."

The five remaining ponies shared a look, but quickly reached a silent agreement that if anypony could keep the draconequus under control without the Elements, it'd be Fluttershy. Still, Rainbow Dash flew backwards, watching him with suspicious intent until the path rounded a hill. Once they were alone, Discord sunk down into the earth to match his companion's eye level.

"I must say this is a surprise, even from you. What is it you want? No, wait, let me guess. A promise to not start any trouble? Some kind of confession?"

"You did make those vines, didn't you?"

"Plunderseeds, dear, you could at least use the proper name. And how dare you accuse me of such a thing. I thought we were past all these baseless slanders and accusations. Do you still think I lied to you?"

"No. I don't think you've lied once today." She gave the poleaxed Lord a small smile. "You never said you didn't make them, just that you hadn't done anything to the princesses recently."

"You're more perceptive than ponies give you credit for,” he begrudgingly admitted. “So perhaps I did make them, long ago. I'm very old, you know. Us relics can get quite forgetful. But what do you plan to do with this information, hm? Run and tattle to Twilight?"

"I was wondering if you could make another one."

"Well... yes. Easily." He reached behind her ear and pulled a large seed from nowhere.

“That’s very good, but can you make it red? With white polka dots?"

“Ha! A mere trifle."

“Can you give it teeth?"

He paused, claws prepped to snap. "I’m sorry, did you say teeth?"

“You can't?"

"I didn't say that. But why would a good upstanding pony like you want a toothy vine in clown colors?"

She smiled again. An odd sort of thing that Discord was entirely unused to being directed his way. “Just an idea I had. I think, in miniature, it might be rather cute. Would it be asking too much to make it breathe fire?"

Discord looked at her with new eyes. "Fluttershy, my dear, at the risk of falling prey to cliches, I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
> Chapter 8 - Flavortext
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"No... no can't be. It just simply cannot be!"

Deep in the heart of Carousel Boutique, Rarity trembled as she fell to her knees. Shock and horror warred across her features. It was a tragedy, an unimaginable travesty! The world was unraveling before her very eyes as truth and falsehood became as one, leaving her rudderless in a murky sea of disbelief.

The fiend was known to her; known all too well. It sat with smug innocence on her vanity, mocking her with its deception, sneering at her naivete through mother-of-pearl eyes. She had trusted it. Loved and cherished it. Which made the betrayal sting all that much deeper.

For the sixth—or was it the seventh?—time, Rarity activated the strange new Talent she'd woken up with and turned it on the object of her ire. Just like every other time she’d used it, a small box of pale blue light flickered into existence, looking for all the world like somepony with a blue magical aura was levitating a window pane just above and to the left of the turncoat. Words tickaticked into existence on its surface as though from an unseen typewriter, spelling out the same ugly truth they’d said before.



<<Imitation Dewy Bütton Necklace>>
A decently made replica of name-brand jewelry. Makes the wearer seem elegant to those who cannot spot the inferior workmanship, and a cheapskate to those that can.



“I can’t believe it!” Rarity sobbed as her world crumbled around her. "It's a fake! A knock-off! And he promised me it was the genuine article!"

She cast her new Talent around the room, desperately searching for proof that it spoke anything less than the objective truth.



<<Lovingly-maintained Marche Sewing Machine>>
A robust sewing machine made by the Marche company. Used to stitch fabric together.





<<Sheer Satin Curtains>>
A set of slightly worn curtains with ties. Used for decorative purpose as they block very little light.





<<Replica Element of Generosity>>
The necklace that once held the Element of Generosity, currently set with a mundane amethyst. Used to make Rarity feel better about defacing a beautiful piece of jewelry.



Rarity sniffed and frowned at the hovering box of cold analysis. "That seems rather personal, don't you think?" She got no response, as the visual representation of her ability to appraise things was not an independent being.

She sighed and collapsed onto her bed, no longer concerned that she might wrinkle the, as her Talent had apprised them, "discount bed sheets".

"What a rotten ability," she muttered. "Applejack gets years of Guard training in an instant, Fluttershy can make magic accessories now, and Pinkie has unlimited tools, but what do I get? A floating placard that tells me I can't tell luxury goods from well-made fakes. There's no fairness in the world."

She sighed again, wishing she had an audience who would nod solemnly and agree with her. Even Sweetie Belle would suffice, as much as the little dear tried to fix problems (in her own way) when all Rarity wanted was a sympathetic ear.

With little conscious direction, she cast her appraising eye to an unfinished project in the corner.



<<Rarity Original Joie De Vivre series Gown>>
An incomplete dress handmade by rising fashion icon Rarity Belle. Used to make the wearer look absolutely fabulous.



She blinked, then sat up and read it again. "A rising fashion icon, am I?” She tittered lightly as her sour mood evaporated. “Perhaps there's something worthwhile to this after all. At least it will save me from making the same mistake in the future. Why, I can think of quite a few ways this might be useful." She hopped out of bed. "And I'm certainly not going to be able to make the most of it moping like some tragic heroine!"

She left her bedroom behind with more  of a spring in her step. There was work to be done!





Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms Current Resident,

We've been trying to reach you regarding your wagon's extended warranty. You're missing out on great deals and even greater savings available this weekend only at Fillydelphia Wagonathon! Preregistering now for only a small few could potentially save you hundre— 

Authentication Gem recognized

Magical signature... Matched

Decrypting...

Displaying message

Agent 8011

We regret having to contact you in your retirement, but the Crown requires your services once again. Our intelligence suspects that several residents of your current town may have been witness to or participants in a Thaumial-class Event. Information on the nature of the Event is minimal, but the risk has been deemed Level Yellow based on current findings. The targets of this operation are as follows:

Target 1: Twilight Sparkle
Target 2: Applejack Apple
Target 3: Rainbow Miriam Danger Dash
Target 4: Fluttershy [REDACTED]
Target 5: Pinkamena Diane Pie
Target 6: Rarity Belle

The Event was investigated and marked 'closed' on all official records, however certain high-level authorities wished it to be investigated further. Your mission is to become close to your targets through whatever means necessary without arousing their suspicion. Once there, monitor them for any abnormal behavior and keep track of any strange abilities they may manifest. Reports are to be sent in the usual way, using the Blue Sky cipher.

Good luck Agent 8011, and Celestiaspeed.
Your nation is counting on you.

-Mission Control

This message will self-destruct in fifteen seconds.

Bon Bon, formerly Agent Sweetie Drops, tossed the letter into the unlit fireplace moments before the paper burst into flames and crumbled to less than ash.

Her favorite chair caught her slumping body, but did little to comfort her. She rubbed her eyes and groaned, bleeding out all of her frustrated exasperation into the sound. It was far from the most dangerous mission she'd ever been on but...

"Hey Bonnie! You gotta come see this! Twilight’s leading a crew in adding an addition to Town Hall and Pinkie’s turned it into a hardware-themed block party! Anyone who comes to help gets a free blowtorch! I need a free blowtorch!"

...but how was she supposed to tell what was normal for those six?!
> Chapter 9 - Bureaucratic Blues
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three days after the Summer Sun Celebration, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, a package arrived on the desk of Dean Sigil, head of the Department of Arcane Runes at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.

At 2:15, an emergency meeting was called among all the Department heads and professorial staff.

By 2:25, battle lines had been drawn and the conference room of scholars and intellectuals were a hair's-breadth away from full on hostilities.

Dozens of voices clamored for attention, but it was only the few that were attached to the biggest personalities that really were heard and carried the debate, as much as the term qualified.

"It's absurd!" bellowed Archmage Anvil, a corpulent stallion whose prodigious jowls were only obscured by his even more outrageous mutton chops. "A joke at best and a mockery at worst! A breakthrough I could accept. A new runic sequence would be laudable. But some fool claiming to present an entirely new sub-branch of magic?! Preposterous!"

"And yet here it is," countered Dean Mandrake of the Department of Magical Botany, a reedy mare more akin to a bundle of kindling than a living pony. She tapped her copy of the thesis and let the pages splay across her desk. "This spells out everything from the most fundamental concepts to higher-order advanced constructs. I daresay I could give this to one of my apprentices and tell him to use it as a lesson plan. It's that comprehensive."

"Comprehensive, but that doesn't mean it's right," Anvil spat back. "I could write a comprehensive guide on growing sunflowers on the Moon and drop it on your desk but that doesn't mean you'd find it worth anything more than the ink it's written with."

"B-but all the math works," came the cautious contribution of Professor Eigenvector of the Department of Mathemagical Studies during a rare moment of silence.

"I couldn't give two of Princess Celestia's golden road apples about the math! You can't make a magic array out of crystal. They store spells and nothing else. It's the Third Law of Enchanting for star's sake!"

"Stop moving the goalposts, Anvil!" An anonymous voice shouted over the din.

"The crystal's beside the point," added a second voice. "Read the part where they derive it from first principles. You could carve this in a tree and it'd work. 

“Not very well,” a third added, “but it would."

The vaunted chamber descended back into chaos, with every pony shouting their opinions as if volume alone was the deciding factor. Sitting above them all, two ponies remained silent.

The first was Deputy Headmaster Minimum Erva (a true Headmaster in all but name, as Celestia herself had very little time for the actual day-to-day management of school business) who sat stoically at her raised pulpit, sketching out something on a scrap of parchment.

The other observer, seated even higher, was less patient.

"Why are we even arguing this? It's a useless spell!" 

The chambers fell into shocked silence at the voice that came from the very top of the room, the only occupant of the pegasi seating area. Downbeat Draft, head of the practically non-existent Pegasus magic department, flew from her seat and landed in the center of the symposium, a copy of the research paper in her hoof. "Real or not, can someone explain to me why we even care? I've skimmed through this brick of paper and best I can tell, all this does is give a unicorn longer range. There's a section on applying it to different materials—" she tossed away a few pages of the report "—one on spells that won't work with it—" another section fluttered to the floor "—a big boring section on why it works—" half the remaining papers escaped her hoof "—and the rest is, for some Celestia-forsaken reason, construction plans to build a giant range amplifier so tall it's literally a tower." She tossed the rest of the pages into the air. "Why!? Why do we care? Are we really squabbling like a bunch of foals arguing about their favorite Power Ponies character because you want to levitate a book from an extra twenty meters away?"

The silence that followed her speech was deafening. Not even Anvil seems to know how to respond to such an impassioned speech. Eventually though, it was timid Professor Eigenvector, the youngest pony present by almost two decades, who responded.

"Ah, Ms. Draft, I think you may have, ah, read the units wrong. That particular construction would extend a single unicorn's spell range by twenty miles, not twenty meters." When no one seemed about to interrupt him (a rare and pleasant change from the norm), he adjusted his glasses and continued. "And yes, there are other spells that can extend range, but that's beside the point. The important part is that it extends the range nonegocentrically."

Draft frowned. "What does that mean in terms that don't require a specialized degree?"

"It means," Dean Mandrake continued, "that a unicorn linked with one of these relays could cast a spell from it as if it were their own horn, regardless of the distance between them. If it works as these documents describe, a pony with the skill to teleport across this chamber could just as easily teleport to Fillydelphia; so long as there was a linked relay at the destination. It means a Guard resting in his barracks could cast a stun spell at a purse-snatcher on Restaurant Row as easily as if he were standing next to him. It means that the former Captain of the Guard Shining Armor could recreate his famous city-wide bubble shield around Canterlot without leaving his throne room in the Crystal Empire."

"Which is why the whole thing is obviously preposterous," Anvil concluded with a satisfied smirk. "That is why I say we track down whatever prankster thought this waste of our time was funny and strip them of whatever academic merits they may have." He shuffled back in his chair, brow still gleaming with sweat from his earlier excitement. "Who did submit this, anyway? My copy came without a cover page."

Deputy Headmaster Erva spoke up for the first time since the meeting began. "That would be Twilight Sparkle of Ponyville, formerly of Legacy Tower on the East campus." A piece of paper floated down in her magic field, which flickered out for a moment as it passed the normal edge of her range before it quickly returned, allowing her copy of the cover page to land neatly on the ground before Archmage Anvil’s seat. A simplified magic circle had been written overtop the title and author’s name that glowed faintly with magic. “I, for one, seem to have no trouble performing the spell in a practical application.” 

Anvil paled so fast, one would have been forgiven for assuming he'd died on the spot and become a ghost.

"Ah. Well. Perhaps we shouldn't be so hasty to dismiss the new and groundbreaking claims. After all, the first unicorn to invent invisibility was called a fraud at the time."





Meanwhile, Twilight Sparkle was at home, unaware of the disturbance in the status quo her earnestly written report had caused. Her woodworking skill and repository of Wizard Tower enchanting knowledge worked in glorious concert as she happily engraved the walls of her Treebrary with as much runescript as she could fit between the shelves, singing a little ditty to herself as she did so.

“Oh the Hetz rune’s connected to the— Jyan rune. The Jyan rune’s connected to the— Urgle rune. The Urgle rune’s connected to the— Raj rune. Then we start again down on the next shelf!”
> Chapter 10 - A Spar A Day Keeps the Agent Away
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Applejack watched as the clock ticked over to the appointed time and the last few ponies trickled into the Ponyville Community Center. When it finally seemed that no more were coming, she stomped twice to gather everyone’s attention.

"Howdy, ya'll! Welcome to... uh... Applejack's Fightin’ class? Whatever. S'not important. Ah'll figure out a name later."

There were more of them than she'd expected to show up, even given how many ponies had personally come and asked for lessons after her public demonstration a few days ago, but still it was no more than thirty present. A few normal folks from town whose jobs took them into the Everfree for one reason or another, a good portion of the local Guard contingent, and a small party of foals who now thought she was 'awesome' (including, of course, her little sis and friends). Also Bon Bon, for some reason. She never would have pegged the docile, if often exasperated, mare for someone interested in self defense.

"Now all ya'll are here for your own reasons,” she started with her hastily prepared speech. “Maybe you want to learn to defend yourself. Maybe you're hoping to find a cutie mark." She sent a smile to her sister's group. "Or maybe you're just itchin' for a good tussle." A few of the guards chuckled at that, one shouldering their partner with a knowing look.

"Whatever your reason, Ah'm gonna do my best to teach ya what ya want to learn. Now Ah ain't a teacher, but Ah was one of the top of mah class at the Academy, so that oughta count for something. Ah ain't gonna teach you everything Ah know—" A few groans of complaint came from the younger section. "—mostly because most of it won't do ya a lick of good unless you're fighting a minotaur or some kind of yeti. But Ah will teach you what Ah can."

"For those of you looking for something a little more intense," She made eye contact with as many of the guards as she could (as well as Rainbow Dash, who was not-so-discreetly waiting just outside the window). "Come see me after this and we'll talk weapons. No, not you, Applebloom. Yer lucky Ah'm letting foals learn this at all and besides, you got homework to do after."

Not that she expected many of the foals to last more than the first few classes. She'd planned a rigorous course. Not nearly as in-depth as her own training had been, but most of that was irrelevant in Ponyville and she didn't have a few years to train them all besides. Still, it was going to be very physically demanding and she doubted there’d be many left who weren’t already in the Guard by the time she reached the end of what she’d planned out.

"Everypony pair up with someone about your size. First thing we're learnin' is how to safely fall."





“Say, you ain’t too bad.” Applejack launched a three-strike attack that was blocked, blocked, and dodged in turn. “You ever take lessons before?”

“I grew up in Manehattan.” Bon Bon turned a duck into a rolling leg sweeper. “A mare’s gotta be able to keep herself safe.”

Both were technically true statements, even if neither had anything to with the previous question. No sense taking any chances with the Bearer of Honesty. She spun on one hoof and flipped back out of the farmer’s range. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“What do you think’s going on with you and Twilight and the rest?”

“Tryin’ to throw me off with philosophy ain’t gonna work.”

“Not trying to get an edge, just curious.”

Applejack grunted as she broke through Bon Bon’s leg lock. “To be honest, Ah don’t know what to think. Twilight’s got her theory about second Special Talents, but Ah never put much stock in it. Especially after I got more than one extra. Ah’ve met a lot of ponies and Ah’ve seen mah fair share of Special Talents, but Ah’ve never even heard of one that gives you years of training overnight. Heck, we didn't even get extra Cutie Marks. That ain’t a Talent; that’s something else.”

“Something else?” Bon Bon probed her defenses with her words as much as she did with her punches. “Like what?”

“Ah’d like to know that as well. But until I learn somethin’ that tells me otherwise, Ah’ve decided to chalk it up to Harmony. There’s something comin’ that we need to deal with and Harmony’s giving us the tools we need just like it did with the Elements.” She shrugged and slid away from a cross-punch. “Ah can’t imagine what kind of problem would need repair skills, button-makin’, and furniture-carvin’ to fix, but a year ago Ah never thought Ah’d need to fight off anythin’ more than a rogue Everfree monster in the orchards.”

“But you do think there’s something coming? Some kind of threat?”

“Ah’d be a fool not to. Why, the past year alone we’ve had Nightmare Moon, Discord, Sombra, the changelings, and a dozen minor threats between them. Why would Ah think they'll stop comin’ now?”

“Sweet Celestia, how can you keep talking like normal when you’re fighting like that!?” Scootaloo exclaimed from the side of the room where the rest of the class was watching with rapt attention. “I can barely even see what you’re doing, you're moving so fast!”

Both combatants came to a halt, each distracted just enough for their last punch to fall just short of the other one’s muzzle, freezing them in an oddly beautiful moment of symmetry. Applejack cleared her throat as she dropped her battle stance and coughed awkwardly.

“Ah, right. Sorry, got a little caught up there. Thanks Bon Bon for volunteering to help with the demonstration. Though it feels more like you oughta be teachin’ this class than me.”

Bon Bon shook her head. “I know a few useful tricks. Nothing like what you have, sure, but I- Applejack are you okay?”

The apple farmer had frozen with an odd glassy look in her eye. She quickly shook it off. “Sorry, felt like Ah was gettin’ somethin’ new, but it was a dud. One of the other girls must’ve gotten it. Now, where were we? Right. Basic holds and throws.” 
> Chapter 11 - Don't Eat Magic Anime Rocks
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“You know, Spike. I’m beginning to suspect that my hypothesis of second Cutie Marks might not be as accurate as I’d originally hoped.”

He shot Twilight an unamused look. “Really. What gave it away? The fact that Pinkie Pie’s up to four now, or was it when it gave you a big box of shadow gems instead of a new skill?”

“The gems are a pretty firm hint. Additional Talents just meant my theory didn’t go far enough, but I’m not ready to abandon my hypothesis yet. This could be some new unexplored aspect of it.”

Spike just shook his head and turned his attention back to the newest addition to the strange new aspect of their lives.

He’d seen the inside of the Room With The Two Arrows (name pending) only once before, when Pinkie had retrieved her toolbox, and it looked much the same now as it had then. A long hall made of the same kind of crystal as the main room with rows and rows of empty shelves. This time, instead of a toolbox, one spot on the shelves was occupied by a heaping basket of dusky grey gemstones. They ranged in size from as small as a peanut to big enough that he’d need both claws to pick one up. They gleamed in the sourceless light of the room like smoke trapped in ice, some tinted slightly darker or lighter, but all sharing a similar translucent luster.

A quick little taste would—

“Spike!” He flinched back at Twilight’s voice and dropped the sample he’d grabbed. “What have I said about eating mysterious gems?”

“To ask you first.” He paused a beat. “Can I eat this?”

“What—no! Of course not!” 

“Oh come on, Twilight. They’re probably fine. Looks like some kind of smoky quartz. I haven’t had a good smoky quartz since we moved out of Canterlot.”

“But what if they’re not that? They’re rocks that literally appeared from nowhere. For all we know that could be refined evil essence trapped in glass!”

“I believe I may be able to help with that.” They turned at Rarity’s introduction. She entered the Arrow Room and appraised the basket of rocks with a gimlet eye. “I received the most surprisingly useful new Talent recently. One that tells me the name of anything I choose to look at as well as a brief summary of what it does.”

Twilight’s ears perked up like prairie dogs as she slipped into what Spike liked to call her Researcher mode. “Really? That’s incredible! And it’s always true and right? A limitless source of objectively true information would shake the foundations of the scientific and magical  communities! Oh, I’m going to have so much fun working out double-blind tests to prove its veracity.”

Rarity tittered and patted down some of Twilight’s mane that was starting to spring up and curl in her mania. “Easy, Twilight, easy. It only tells me a little and I swear some of its descriptions have a bit of sass to them. Besides, wouldn’t you like to know about these gems?”

Twilight shook herself into a calmer state (which also took two repetitions of a breathing exercise). “Yes, of course. What are they?”

Rarity picked up one of the smaller gems and rolled it in her hoof, letting it catch the light. “According to my new Talent, it’s called Originite. Specifically, this is pure, highly refined Originite. It’s a highly potent energy source and an important catalyst in the use of Arts.” She paused. “What that means I have no idea, though it does explicitly say that it should not be eaten.”

“Aw man,” Spike griped. “Does it say why?”

“No, but I can’t imagine eating anything called ‘highly potent’ would be a good idea.”

Both unicorns twitched as the pings of a new power vibrated up and down their horns.

“Yours?” Twilight asked, after it passed.

“Not mine. Perhaps—”

A rumble passed through the crystalline floor, accompanied by a worrying grinding noise that rattled their teeth in their skulls like nails down a chalkboard. It passed as quickly as it arrived, leaving two ponies and a dragon unsteady on their hooves.

“What was that?” Spike asked.

“I don’t know,” Twilight said, “But I have an odd feeling. Follow me.” She led them back into the main hall of the Hub.

The central room was unchanged. Same table, same doors, same light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. As far as Spike could tell, they’d had an earthquake and nothing more.

And yet, his unicorn companions seemed drawn towards one particular door. The one that no one had managed to open yet with the weird grid on it.

Twilight pushed and it opened as easily as if the hinges had just been oiled.

“What in the—”

“Oh my!”

“What? What’s in there?” He squeezed his way between the two door-blocking ponies until he could finally see inside.

It looked… kind of like a workshop. The walls weren’t even crystal, but worn wood like Applejack’s barn mixed with weathered stone columns. There were three work stations spread across the room that ranged from normal to unsettling. The first looked no different from the kind of home DIY repair stations he’d seen at various farms across Ponyville. A simple worn table with a rack of normal looking tools like hammers, screwdrivers, blade sharpeners, and bottles of polish and oil.

The second workstation was cleaner, with a table made of polished black stone and surrounded by complicated and precise tools that looked more like what a jeweler or dentist might need. 

The last stretched the definition of work table to its limit. If anything it looked more like some kind of shrine, its surface cluttered with dozens of candles and roughly-forged tools whose use defied casual inspection.

“What is this place?”

“Hunter’s Workshop,” Rarity replied as she entered. “Used for maintenance and upgrades of a Hunter’s tools.”

“But what does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m quite literally reading it off a little hovering panel of text. What I say is all I know.” She gestured to the first table. “For example, for this I get, verbatim: ‘Worn Hunter’s Workbench. A simple and sturdy workbench equipped to help a Hunter maintain and repair their tools.’ That’s it. As opposed to this other one which reads: ‘Hunter’s Upgrading Workbench. A clean and well-equipped workspace with tools to upgrade a Hunter’s tools with’… oh my… it says ‘with Blood Stones and Blood Gems.’ And not a hint as to what those dreadful sounding things are.”

“What about the last one?” Twilight pressed, a quill scratching away behind her as she wrote down, more likely than not, every single thing Rarity said.

“That one says—” Rarity froze in place. Only her eyes moved as they read lines visible only to her.

“Rarity?”

“Caryll Rune Workshop Tool,” she said slowly, “A set of hand-forged tools used to inscribe or remove Caryll Runes from the mind of the user.”

The room was silent for a long moment. 

“So.” Spike’s voice broke the silence like shattering glass. “How’s this fit into your extra Special Talent theory?”

Twilight groaned, a soul-wrenching sound known to all those who dabble in the fringe and cutting-edge aspects of academia. “It’s back to the drawing board then.”

Just as she spoke, the room began to rumble once more.
> Chapter 12 - Magic Portals Make Moving A Breeze
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

'It's not fair.’

That was the prevailing thought in Rainbow Dash's head as she walked through the decaying halls of the old Castle of the Two Sisters and listened to Spike's rambling and excited story about how the new workshop had changed right before his eyes.

It just wasn't fair. All her friends were getting crazy superpowers like they were taking free samples at Barnyard Bargains, and yet she hadn't gotten any. Okay, she'd got one, but the ability to make things that fall apart easily barely counted. And sure, she'd been ahead of the pack from the get-go for being the fastest pegasus in Equestria, but that was all hard work and talent. She hadn't just been given it out of nowhere. Her skill was real.

It was frustrating to watch as Fluttershy wove magic out of crafting supplies. As Applejack took down trained Guards like they were foals. As Twilight—who was already way up there in the most powerful unicorn category—got gifted a whole new branch of magic.

Meanwhile she was stuck making cloud formations that busted apart in one kick.

Why was she the only one who got left out? What had she done to offend this mystical granter of superpowers? Didn't she deserve its gifts as much as the others? Everyone except for her had more than one now (not counting Fluttershy, but her oldest friend had quietly shared with her the true depths of what her power let her make, so Dash knew Fluttershy's one skill put everyone else's to shame).

She didn't want to admit it because she knew it was nothing they had control over, but she couldn't help but be a little frustrated at her friends for getting all the powers while she got squat. Even the not-so-cool ones like Pinkie's 'always-survive-surgery' and Rarity's weaving.

Not that she'd ever tell that to her friends! She wasn't jealous or anything. She was Rainbow Dash! The supermare extraordinaire with the awesome flair and the rainbow hair! 'Rainbow Dash' and 'jealous' didn't belong in the same sentence.

...unless it was someone being jealous of her, that was okay.

So she stamped down the envy simmering in her chest and put on a brave face as she tuned back in to Spike's story just as he was wrapping up.

"...so she's been up all night long playing with her new toy. Making it take enchanted trinkets apart and put them back together, testing just how much damage it can repair, pushing the limits of what counts as ‘reagents’. Apparently that origin-whatever rock is like candy for it. It was fun for a while, but she's determined to test every possible thing it can do and I just had to get out of there."

"I feel ya," she said. She too knew of the pain of being trapped in one of Twilight's egghead research sessions. The sheer amount of times she'd been asked to build a tower of blocks over and over and over in the name of 'sufficient data' made her shudder even at the memory.

She noticed Spike starting to jog and slowed down to match his speed. His stubby legs had trouble keeping up, especially when she got distracted and started flying too fast for him. “I'm glad she had a job that needed doing outside of the library so I could catch a break." He gave Rainbow Dash a friendly shove. "And thanks for volunteering to help me. You're gonna make it way easier."

"No prob! I had some free time." Time not spend squaring off against Applejack in a competition they'd had planned for ages, because what was the point now? "So what's actually the plan?"

"Okay, so since Twilight's theory about second Special Talents didn't pan out—" As if it'd held any water from the start. "—she wants to start fresh for her new theory. No assumptions, base everything on hard references. That said, there's no books in Ponyville that mention anything like what's going on with you all. She knows, she checked them all."

Rainbow Dash ducked under a dangling spiderweb. "And we're here in the Princess' old castle because...?"

"Because there might be something in the old library here, if any of it's still intact. Maybe even some of Starswirl’s other journals if we’re really lucky."

She groaned as she finally realized what she'd agreed to. "This is a research mission? I'm not gonna have to read a bunch of dusty old books am I?"

Spike chuckled. "Nah, we just need to gather together anything that doesn't look like it'll fall apart at a touch and bring them back to Twilight."

That wasn't too bad. A few trips back and forth between the castle and Ponyville, less if she could find a tarp or something to carry them with. After all, how many books could really survive a thousand years unattended and still be readable? Ten? Twenty?

"Here we are!" Spike pushed open a pair of double doors to reveal a massive library, three stories of shelves with sweeping walkways and the withered remains of ladders. And hundreds of intact books.

"Oh hay no. It'll take a week to fly all these back to Ponyville!"

Spike gave her a look. "Yeah. It would," his look melted into a cheeky smile, "if someone didn't have a magic key to a big storage space."

Oh. Right. She did have one of those. She reached under her wing and grasped at the smooth piece of gold that hadn't existed there until she wanted it to. "In my defense, I never use the thing." They stepped into the library, shut the door, then reopened it into the crystal Hub.

Dash grabbed an armful of books from the nearest shelf. "Where does Twilight want these? Straight into the library?"

"That's what she said," he looked out at all the closed doors that faced them. "But it looks like she forgot to open the door on her end. Whatever. Just put them in the warehouse for now."

"In where?"

"Sorry, that's what I call the room with the arrows. All the empty shelves make me think of a warehouse, and we did get a delivery there."

Alright. She could do that. She could collect musty old books faster and better than anyone else. And she didn't need some freebie power to do it. "You take the low shelves, I'll take the high ones?"

Spike grinned. "Sounds like a plan."

They worked in genial companionship for about an hour, passing the time with small amusement like mispronouncing titles written in dead dialects and racing to clear a shelf. It was almost enough of a distraction to keep Dash's mind from wandering back to sulking over the unfairness of power distribution.

But a reminder soon came as another of the doors opened.

"Easy, easy. Careful with those tassels! Annnnd... set it down in one, two, three!" A long roll of blue and silver fabric settled down on the main table, a pegasus on one side and a unicorn on the other.

"Splendidly done, Fluttershy," Rarity said as she brushed some dust from her hooves (even though she'd been using her magic to help lift it). "Now let's go get the other- oh! Hello Rainbow Dash, what are you doing here?"

A hot spike of anger surged before she could shove it back down. "What? Am I not allowed to be here or something?"

Rarity offered her a look of innocent confusion. "Of course you are, darling, it's just that I've hardly ever seen you use the Nexus."

"I thought we were calling it the Hub?" Spike piped up.

"Twilight calls it the hub, whereas I felt it deserved something a bit more grandiose."

Dash forced the undeserved anger back down and tried to answer the question without inventing any mean-spirited subtext from it. "Spike and I are clearing out all the books from the old castle in the Everfree. Twilight's trying to research this whole—" she gestured loosely at everything around them, and themselves "—thing."

Rarity's eyes lit up and she laughed. "Really? Why, we're in the castle as well! What are the chances?"

Fluttershy (who'd finally caught her breath after lifting what looked like the lion's share of the weight) nodded. "We're salvaging--"

"Thrifting, darling, thrifting!"

"...thrifting some old royal banners and tapestries Rarity wanted to restore."

"Any historically significant ones of which I will, of course, happily give back to the Crown after their restoration," Rarity added slightly too quickly. "Oh, but have either of you had a chance to try these darling new Jump Boots Fluttershy made?"

She posed, showing off her brightly colored and kind of foalish-looking booties. "They're a marvel. Perfect for helping you grab those pesky things just a few dozen feet out of reach."

'And what's that compared to flying?' Dash shook the negative thought from her head before it could reach her lips. This was Fluttershy's work and she should be happy for her friend's accomplishments.

"Of course, it was only sensible to use this handy magic room to get them back home." She turned to Fluttershy. "Though, in hindsight, perhaps one of us should have stayed at the Boutique to open the door from the other side."

Fluttershy gave her a steady look through half-lidded eyes. "That's what I was trying to tell you all the way here."

"Ah, well, yes. What's done is done. I'm sure we can find somewhere in here to store them for the time being, no?"

"There's always room in the warehouse!" Spike offered, eager as usual when Rarity was involved.

"A fine idea!" She gestured to the far side of the banner. "Fluttershy, if you would?"

The pegasus made a pained face, but was saved the effort by Spike, who ran under the far side before she could move. "I got it, Rarity!"

"Thank you Spike, you're such a wonderful help." She batted her eyelashes at him and the lovesick dragon nearly swooned.

"If we're swapping," Rainbow Dash turned to Fluttershy, "you want to help me carry some books instead?"

Fluttershy’s thankful smile was a balm on her soul. "I think that'd be much nicer. Thank you."
> Chapter 13 - Dear Diary
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You want us to keep a journal?"

"That's right." Twilight reached under the crystal table and pulled out a set of six identical books that she then passed out to her gathered fiends. "I can see now what the problem was with my initial theory."

"It was wrong?" Rainbow Dash said through a smirk.

"It ignored very obvious contradictions?" Applejack added.

"You never came up with a catchy name for it?" was Pinkie's contribution.

Twilight gave them a level look. She loved her friends, dearly so, but stars above did they know exactly how to push her buttons. "The problem was that it wasn't broad enough. I tried to analyze each individual ability as a singular anomaly, when I really should have been looking at the event as a whole."

As always, the problem was tunnel-vision. She'd thought she'd found a reasonable (not to mention ground-breaking) solution early on, then tried to force the new data to fit it. Only the arrival of a complete workshop and all its tools had managed to finally convince her that her second Special Talent theory didn't cut the mustard.

Which brought her back to the drawing board. No more assumptions, no more wild conjecture. This time everything would stem from the three fundamentally true facts that she knew.

One. Starswirl created a spell for an unknown purpose, but could not complete it.

Two. She completed the spell by incorporating friendship which led to a wildly different result when cast.

Three. On an irregular basis, she and her friends compoundingly receive new abilities, objects, and tools.

Everything else had to stem from those facts. Logically, the next step was research.

"One of the fundamental truths of the scientific method," she said, "is that if you collect enough data, eventually a pattern will emerge. That's why I'd like to request everyone's help in recording as much data as possible."

"Sounds like a fine idea by me." Applejack rifled through the pages, letting them whisper past the edge of her hoof as a clever bit of spellwork added new pages when she got near the end. "What exactly should we write?"

An expected question, and one Twilight was ready for. "Anything and everything. Details of new abilities you get. How they interact with your existing ones. The weather and what activities you were doing when a new ability appeared. I'm happy if you just use it as a normal journal and write down your daily thoughts." She rather hoped they would, in fact. It'd be an excellent record to see if there were any subtle mental changes going on that they might not notice otherwise. "There's no such thing as too much data."

"You say that now," Dash said, idly tossing and catching her book. "But that's just ‘cause Pinkie and Rarity haven't filled theirs up with party plans and dress sketches."

"No worries here," Pinkie countered, "I have whole filing cabinets of party plans. This little book wouldn't even hold the ones I have for Fluttershy alone!"

"If you flip to the back," Twilight instructed, "You'll find a handy reference guide with a list of all the abilities we've documented so far along with a brief description of them. Please use the listed names for each power when writing about them so we don't mix up similar ones."

The sound of pages turning filled the air as they all flipped to the relevant pages, followed by a shout of surprise.

"My skill's supposed to be for making monster traps!?" Rainbow Dash exclaimed. "That's… actually kinda awesome. Why didn't anypony tell me? Wait, why did someone else know and I didn't?"

"You'll find the answer in my section." Rarity visibly preened in anticipation of oncoming praise. "Page vii, subsection two."

"Perk: Hoarder's Eyes," Pinkie Pie read aloud, "’The ability to manifest textboxes containing the name of any object along with a short description.’ Neato! What do I have?" She flipped a page. "Huh. MacGyver, Medaka, and Tool box. The last one makes sense, but what are those others? They sound like pastries from Fleece."

"We're not sure, but I think they're words in some foreign language that don't have an Equestrian equivalent," Twilight answered. "For some reason Rarity's identifying ability acts differently when trying to perceive other abilities."

Rarity nodded. "It's hard enough to pin them down as it is—like trying to focus on the shimmer of heat haze in the distance—and when I do the color of the text is different and some of the words are difficult to read."

"A Mushroom Kingdom..." Fluttershy mused quietly as she read her own entries. "That's why it's so big."

"In any case," Twilight continued, "I've enchanted the journals so whenever Rarity or I make an edit to the index, either to add a new listing or fill in more details as we discover them, the change should propagate into your copies as well."

"Cool. Yeah, sure, I'll make sure I write stuff in it or whatever." Rainbow Dash tossed her journal through the door that led back to her house. "More importantly: who wants to help me trap a monster?"

"That may be the plum stu—"

"I haven't the time for—"

"Hey, if no one's up for it, I'm sure the Crusaders would be more than willing."

Dash grinned. 

Rarity and Applejack sent her dirty looks.

Dash grinned harder.

"...Consarnit Dash."

"Fine. But nothing more ferocious than a pukwudgie."
> Chapter 14 - Test Log 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------




From the Desk of Twilight Sparkle
Apprentice to HRH Princess Celestia
Golden Oaks Head Librarian


Research notes and test logs for Unidentified Magical Artifact no. 001 "Horatic Cube"

Object Description: UMA-001 is a metallic cube measuring approximately 0.5 meters on each side. It is composed of an unknown golden-brown metal with minor evidence of green corrosion. Each of the six sides is decorated with a unique pattern of unknown pictograms and symbols, primarily involving intersecting triangles and circles.

UMA-001 has four identified functions. Synthesis, in which materials with some shared aspect are combined into a single item of higher quality. Deconstruction, in which an object is broken down into lesser versions of itself (Addendum: Or in some cases, base materials). Repair, in which damaged items are combined with raw material or base magical reagents to restore defects or flaws. Refinement, in which an undamaged item is combined with magical reagents to produce a version with improved performance or empowered effects.

Activating UMA-001 is done through twisting one of the four corners of the top face (each corner selects a different mode of use) and placing the materials to be utilized on the top surface of the device. Materials are either rejected (see attached list of recorded conditions for rejection) or are absorbed into UMA-001 and replaced with an output after a period of time which scales with complexity of the task.

Transcription of Hoarder's Eyes Information:


Horadric Cube
A replica of a replica of an ancient alchemical artifact. Its purpose is the synthesis, deconstruction, repair, and refinement of magical and mundane materials on a conceptual level.










Testing log
Primary Researcher: Twilight Sparkle
Consulting Researcher (for output identification): Rarity Belle


Test No. 001
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: One (1) standard sheet of white paper
Output: N/A
Additional Notes: A test to determine the device's baseline limits. No change occurred after ten (10) minutes of waiting. APparently it needs at least two inputs to activate.

Test No. 002
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: Two (2) standard sheets of white paper
Output: One (1) sheet of slightly higher quality white paper

Test No. 003
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: Three (3) standard sheets of white paper
Output: One (1) sheet of higher quality white paper

Test No. 013
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: Thirteen (13) standard sheets of white paper
Output: N/A
Additional Notes: Device failed to activate after ten (10) minutes of waiting. Papers returned unaltered. I think I might have hit some kind of limit, though whether it's a limit of volume, mass, quantity, or uses-per-hour, I don't know.

Test No. 014
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: Two (2) mass produced plain white coffee mugs
Output: One (1) plain white coffee mug of higher quality ceramic

Test No. 078
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: Thirteen (13) bottles of "Quik-Dri Ink"
Output: N/A
Additional Notes: It seems to have a hard limit of twelve distinct input items at once. No limit found yet on mass or volume.

Test No. 079
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: One (1) stamp-sized ruby, one (1) stamp-sized sapphire
Output: One (1) stamp-sized purple gem of unknown variety
Additional Notes: Rarity has confirmed that the gem is a purple corundum, which is technically still a type of ruby under the Equestrian Gem Grader's Guidebook. She noted that it is of very nice quality, but otherwise not particularly special.

Test No. 080
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: One (1) stamp-sized citrine, one (1) stamp-sized sapphire
Output: One (1) green gem of unknown variety
Additional Notes: Rarity says this one is just an emerald, which doesn't make any sense. I can understand the logic of the previous test, since rubies and sapphires have very similar chemical structures, but emeralds are nothing like either of the gems I inputted. Is it valuing color theory over chemistry? Or maybe there’s something more symbolic going on. More testing is needed.

Test No. 081
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: One (1) stamp-sized citrine, one (1) stamp-sized sapphire
Output: One (1) green gem of unknown variety
Additional Notes: Another emerald, though this one's in a pear cut instead of a square. Neither of the input gems were cut that way.

Test No. 220
Test Type: Synthesis
Test Material Input: One (1) half-eaten sandwich (Rye, mayo, roses, swiss), One (1) "Quills & Sofas" brand writing quill with snapped nib
Output: N/A
Additional Notes: An important discovery. Some items do not have enough in common to be combined. This will need further testing to determine the exact limits, but I’m running out of prepared materials to test with as well as quills and scrolls to record the data. 
*Testing to resume at a later date*

Test No. 221
Test Type: Deconstruction
Test Material Input: The output of test No. 012
Output: Twelve (12) standard sheets of white paper
Additional Notes: So it can also uncombine what it made before. That's good to know. Spike wants his Power Ponies issues back.

Test No. 245
Test Type: Deconstruction
Test Material Input: One (1) wooden hoof-carved figure of a royal guard enchanted with a low-power Come to Life spell
Output: Three (3) smaller carved figures of similar quality
Additional Notes: The original was provided enough magic to animate its marching for one minute before the spell collapsed. Each outputted figure marched for exactly twenty seconds. Further testing on subdivision of magic power?

Test No. 277
Test Type: Deconstruction
Test Material Input: One (1) "Sleepy Stomp" badge provided by Fluttershy
Output: Two (2) unknown badges of similar design
Additional notes: Rarity was able to identify the output as "Drowsy Stomp" badges. Fluttershy claims that they "feel" like her other badges, but that she does not know how to make a Drowsy Stomp badge from scratch like she can her others.

Test No. 311
Test Type: Repair
Test Material Input: One (1) 245g lapis lazuli (cracked) enchanted with a basic mana storage charm, five (5) lapis lazuli pebbles totaling ~10g (unenchanted)
Output: One (1) 252g lapis lazuli (undamaged) enchanted with a basic mana storage charm
Additional notes: It repaired it as expected, but where did the additional mass go?

Test No. 345
Test Type: Repair
Test Material Input: One (1) very damaged horseshoe (heavy rusting, multiple cracks, multiple missing fragments), 100g Originite crystal
Output: One (1) pristine steel horseshoe containing a significant unstable magical charge
Additional Notes: Horseshoe was safely disposed of via defenestration before it detonated. Resulting crater measured approximately 1.4 meters across, 0.4 deep in packed earth. An important discovery, but greater safety measures are needed before testing can continue. Given it doesn't seem to take the stability of the material into account, I'm especially hesitant to test the Refinement feature.









Twilight, I found this sticky note stuck to the back of your notes when I went to clean this morning. Thought you should see it first thing.
-Spike






Head Researcher: Pinkie Pie!
Assistant Researcher: Gummy

Test No. My First one
Test Type: Upgrade
Test Material Input: My party cannon and two big hunks of originite
Output: FUN!!
Additional Notes: Pinkie wants Big Boom 


> Chapter 15 - A Less-Than-Helpful Speed Boost
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rainbow Dash groaned as the tree-shaped bruise on her side made itself known with every movement. She could faintly hear the sounds of combat across the clearing as Daring Do, her hero, her idol, fought off Ahuitzotl's wildcats.

Alone.

At her insistence.

She needed to get up. To get back in the fight and help but just trying to stand made her bite back a hiss of pain.

There was nothing she could do. She was just useless baggage to the adventurer after all. Just a danger and a liability.

The tingling in her wings only added insult to injury, a sure sign that just when she needed it most, another one of her friends was getting a superpower instead of her. Typical. But the feeling continued to grow, swelling up far past what she'd felt before and her spirits rose with it.

Was it finally her time? She crossed her hooves, mentally begging for something awesome like time travel or ninja skills or even just a sweet sword to help Daring Do fight.

The power surged as it seeped into her skull, filling her mind with knowledge and an awareness of power. Subconscious knowledge on how to move swiftly and efficiently, how to ignore obstacles and just keep working, and overall a overwhelming sense of speed which all came together in the form of—

"The hay? That's it? That's all I get!?" She groaned as she rolled over, her vision getting hazy as she watched Daring Do get carried away, trussed up in ropes, towards a distant temple.

"Lousy stingy power-giving space thing."
> Chapter 16 - Snacks Do A Body Good
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fluttershy's shed was not a structure designed to draw attention. It was small, simple, functional. Meant to blend into the background and perform in its capacity as weather-proofed storage unobtrusively.

But if, for some reason, a stranger happened to decide to intrude upon it regardless, they'd find the interior far less mundane.

To the mycologically uninformed, it looked like some massive nest of spiders had turned Fluttershy's shed into their own personal palace. Thin strands of white covered every surface so completely it appeared as if every table, every shelf, even the very walls and floor had been transformed into fuzzy silk.

In truth, there were several spiders working under Fluttershy's employ, but the expanse of white was not their work. They merely kept the mycelium free from pests and invaders.

For that's what it truly was. Mycelium. A thick and healthy spread of it that plunged deeply beneath the surface into the wood, the soil, and the myriad bags of fertilizer. It filled the room like an early snowfall, leaving clear only a carefully maintained path to the back and the large hole that resided there.

Fluttershy had started her little mushroom farm in a series of four window boxes placed as far away from the sunlight as possible and filled with a rich mix of decaying magical plants.

In three days she realized the boxes weren't going to be enough and transplanted them into a large tub. Two days later, the floor itself. It took three more days for her to really comprehend just how vastly she'd underestimated how much root space these mushrooms needed.

Thus, the hole.

Most mushrooms grew just fine straight through the dirt, but the particular strain that the ideas in her mind insisted upon as a base material for other creations spread most quickly along the surface. The work of expansion had begun with her animal friends who were skilled in digging. The moles, the badgers, the rabbits, and even Angel with a custom tiny hammer she made for him. They dug out tunnels and warrens beneath her shed, linking it up to any old abandoned burrows and also the deep furrows that had been left behind when the plundervines disintegrated. Anything to make more room for the mush.

And yet even that seemed insufficient for the space-hungry mycelium. 

Luckily, that was about the time Fluttershy met Discord.

The draconequus' help had been surprisingly easy to acquire. After whipping up a custom seed on her request, he admitted to a passing interest in any other ideas she might have, deeming her "a skosh more interesting than the usual boring pony". A snap of his claws was all it took for the animal-sized tunnels to expand into earthen caves wide and tall enough for a pony to walk through. Though to remain true to his nature, he'd insisted upon a few chaotic concessions, including having the tunnels link up in non-euclidean routes and occasionally shifting of their own accord (as well as a few 'special surprises' that he refused to elaborate on).

The mycelium took to the caves like parasprites to a buffet, quickly subsuming the walls with more roots through which to sup the magical nutrients of the rich soil at the Everfree's edge.

With finally enough room to expand, it wasn't long at all before the first red-and-white speckled caps started to push their way out of the soil.

The farmer had been dutiful and the harvest would be bountiful in response.

Fluttershy, however, was not present to see the first of her crop breach the surface. She was currently otherwise occupied with a task she'd been putting off longer than she'd meant to.





"Is this some kind of joke?"

"...No? I don't think so." Fluttershy glanced back at the cart of baked goods and treats she'd brought to the hospital. None of them looked funny at all. But then why did Dr. Horse seem so suspicious of them?

The good doctor eyed her offerings like he had some personal skepticism against the existence of free food. "This has all the markings of a prank. Did Rainbow Dash put you up to this?"

"No."

"Is Pinkie Pie going to jump out of that and proclaim that laughter is the best medicine?"

Fluttershy regarded the completely normal sized cake. "I don't think she would fit in there."

Doctor Horse snorted. "I wouldn't put it past her. I watched that mare crawl out of an air vent once. Body like a cat, that one."

This was true. Fluttershy had once caught her stuck inside a birdhouse, stalwartly determined to give a trio of eggs a zeroth birthday party the instant they hatched.

"There's no prank, really," she insisted as she pulled her cart a little closer to waft the scents in his direction. "I just wanted to do something to help all the poor ponies still recovering from the plunderseed attack."

It had taken a lot of time and effort (not to mention quite a few promised favors in return for borrowing Mr. and Mrs. Cake's kitchens and ovens for the better part of a day) but the finished goods spoke for themselves. Her cart was absolutely brimming with all kinds of tasty treats made from the myriad recipes that had filled her mind after coming across a bag of cake mix.

Decadent three-layer choco cake and rich mousse cake with cream and fresh strawberries. Big cookies filled with berries and small sweet ones shaped like cute lizards. Apple pies, their fruit fresh from Applejack's orchard and still steaming in their pans. A big bowl of hard candies for patients with more sensitive stomachs, in flavors ranging from lemon and lime to spicy and chocolate. But what was a feast without drinks? A wheeled cooler lashed to the back of the cart held all manner of tonics and teas and shakes and sodas galore to help wash it all down.

Dr. Horse's eyes fluttered and his whole body shuddered as the myriad smells washed over him. "Well... alright. Since it's you Miss Fluttershy, I suppose I can accept these in the spirit they were given. I'm sure our patients will appreciate a bit of variety in their meals."

"So long as they don't have any mushroom allergies."

He hesitated and glanced at a pie, a taste of his former wariness returned. "Mushrooms?"

"Just a little," she admitted. "For the protein and to help promote healing."

"Ah, yes. Very well then. Can't say it'll do much on the healing side, but there's a lot of good to be done through raised spirits."

Fluttershy gave him an odd smile. "I think you might be surprised just how healing a few treats baked with love can be."
> Chapter 17 - Toolbox Spatials and Table Appraisals
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Are you ready, Pinkie?"

"Aye aye, captain!" She gave a sloppy salute that would have made Shining Armor wince. Her toolbox clattered as she dropped it onto the Hub's table, the lid already open to an inky void. “One question, though.”

“Shoot.”

“How come you’re doing this and not Twilight?”

Spike leaned back in the wooden chair he’d dragged through Twilight’s Door. There was no shortage of them in the library these days, and one wouldn’t go amiss if it ended up breaking or disappearing through someone else’s Door or accidentally falling into that fancy alchemy box that made really tasty gems. It’d be a terrible shame, but what can you do? Accidents happen.

“Because Twilight got all excited about Dash’s new thing so now they’re having a wood-off.”

“A wood-off?”

“A wood-off,” he confirmed. “And that’s probably going to take all day so she asked me to handle some of her easier research projects that have been piling up.” 

‘Asked’ was a strong word to use. What she’d done was set up a corkboard with dozens of projects she planned to research but that kept getting pushed back every time someone got a new power. Each task had a list of the specific data she wanted to collect and, more importantly, a listed reward he’d get if he helped out. Sure, it wasn’t polite as actually just asking him to help out, but the chore wheel never had rewards on it and half the crazy stuff that was going on had him just as interested as she was. Win-win, in his opinion. 

Plus, it never said he couldn't farm out the research to others either. 

He glanced again at the ripped page that had the instructions for his current assignment. It was one of the simpler ones, and also one that involved hanging out with a friend. 



Investigate the limits of Pinkie’s tool box. 
Reward: One triple-refined gem per new discovery



He dipped his quill in the ink and hovered it over the top of the scroll. "Let's start with some easy ones. How many tools does it have?"

Pinkie shrugged. "I dunno. A lot? I've never managed to take them all out."

“Okay. Let’s start with the screwdrivers and we'll go from there. There can’t be that many."

"Okie Dokie Lokie." Pinkie reached in and pulled out a normal-looking flathead screwdriver with a rigid red grip. "One." Spike marked a tally on his sheet. She tossed it onto the table and pulled out another, similar, but slightly shorter and with a textured blue grip. "Two."

Then she pulled another. "Three."

And another. "Four."

"Five... Six... Seven... Eight... Nine... Ten... Eleven..."

~~~

Spike woke with a start, the faint memory of a dream about being adopted by a Timberwolf already fading from his mind. A small avalanche of screwdrivers fell away from his head as he shook himself back to total awakeness. 

"Two thousand three-hundred and forty one... Two thousand three-hundred and forty two... Two thousand three-hundred and forty three..."

The table was full. So was his lap and a good portion of the floor. An ocean of screwdrivers in a rainbow of colors had consumed the room, leaving him adrift amongst the metal.

"Pinkie?" he ventured tentatively.

“Yep?” She remained seated where she’d been what felt like a minute ago at screwdriver number one and looked, surprisingly, not bored in the slightest. “What’s up? Lose your place?”

“Uh… maybe.” He’d lost his entire scroll. And his quill. And the ink. “How long have you been counting?”

“About twenty minutes, maybe a little more. You wanna keep going? There’s more in there—” She pulled out a decidedly weird screwdriver as long as her foreleg with two flexible joints, three gripping areas, and a head that looked more like a diecast inkblot test. “—but I think we’re starting to blur the line of what counts as a screwdriver.”

Spike groaned and rubbed his eyes. So much for that being an easy task for an easy reward. He started to reply but stopped as he noticed how still Pinkie had gotten. Then she twitched, a slow vibration that ran up her legs through her body and dissipated out of her mane and tail in tiny little whip cracks. He’d never witnessed Pinkie get a power before, but he’d seen it often enough in Twilight to make the connection. “New power?”

She shook her head. “Not me, but I caught a whiff of it as it went by. Felt like an odd one.”

His ear frills perked up at the sound of a potentially reward-worthy discovery. “You can feel them? Or, I guess, smell them?”

“Sorta, kinda, iffy-whiffy.” She waggled her hoof. “It’s a lot like when I was just figuring out my Pinkie Sense. Lots of new feelings but I don’t know what means what yet.”

Spike shrugged and mentally tossed the idea aside. If it was anything like her Pinkie Sense, it wouldn’t be worth the headache. “Whatever. You wanna just toss some stuff in the alchemy cube and see if we get anything fun?”

“You had me at ‘fun’!” she grinned before gesturing to the still very-much-present-and-door-blocking ocean of metal and plastic. “Just let me clear a path.” She grabbed an armload of tools and dumped them back in the toolbox.

“Cool. I’m gonna go get a snack. You want anything?”

“Cupcakes if you have ‘em, anything else if you don’t.” Spike shot her a pair of finger guns then hop, skip, and jumped his way over the landslide and out the door into the library. 

Pinkie continued to toss her tools back into storage with the kind of reckless abandon of someone who didn’t have to pay for them if they broke. As she pulled a load-bearing pile from the lower level, a portion on the table were able to slip off and bounce and roll beneath. "Whoops! Get back here you little scamps!" She hopped out of her chair (further disturbing the delicate pile) and shimmied her way underneath.

"There you are! Now I—  Ooh, that's neat. I wonder what all these carvings mean?"





The life of a carpenter was a straightforward one, or so was the philosophy of Wicker Mare. Furniture was not a heavy-turnover market. She got by day-to-day making simple, functional pieces to supply Barnyard Bargains and other resellers and when she had the time she made more artistic pieces (though no less functional for their beauty) which she sold out of the first floor of her home. Once in a blue moon she’d get a commission for a custom piece—usually by a neighbor or friend of a friend who needed a peculiarly shaped table to fit an awkward corner of their home or a chair made in a particular outdated style to replace one of a set that had broken—though those were few and far between.

She wasn’t rolling in wealth, but neither was she destitute. She got to do what she loved for a living and had never made the mistake of working for a furniture manufacturer (unlike her cousin Birch who had spent six years making identical cupboard doors for home-installation kits day after day).

What was unusual was the amount of consultancy gigs she’d found herself getting paid for in recent days.

Consultancy was not the realm of the woodworker. If you wanted an expansion for your wooden house, you called a contractor. If something broke, you hired a dedicated repair pony. Rarely was she needed to look at a piece of furniture that had already been sold, let alone to look at something that somepony else had made.

And yet, she’d been asked to do so three times in the past two weeks. And paid handsomely for it too.

Today, there were three objects awaiting her appraisal. End tables all, but they couldn’t be more wildly different.

The first was finely made. The lines were clean, the sides straight, the chamfering was smooth and even.  A fine piece of work that nopony would mind having in their home.

…but that was it. It was simple. Straightforward. There was nothing particularly special about it; just a fine, serviceable end table. There was no real spark to it. No sign of passion from its creator. It reminded her rather a lot of Birch and his factory-made parts. There was nothing wrong with it, but nothing terribly interesting either. Like someone took the pony out of the design process and just gave them a set of finely detailed instructions.

The second table was different. There was a style to it. All the technical details were just as finely applied, but this one took some bold design choices where the first kept it safe. The asymmetric trim should have looked poorly cut, but combined with the bowed legs and detailed carving, it gave the impression that the whole table was somehow lighter than air and about to float off. It was the kind of piece only particularly eccentric ponies would be interested in buying, but aside from that she would put it on par with her own experimental pieces.

The third table was undoubtedly the odd duck out. A shoddy replica of the second, riddled with shortcuts and questionable design choices. It still looked decent: to the untrained observer. But to Wicker’s eyes it was clearly inferior. She doubted it could take the weight of more than a book or two. She could practically see exactly which pins would fail and predict how it would collapse into a neat pile of loose timbers.

The only really impressive thing about it was how she’d personally watched a mare that she knew had zero history in woodworking craft it from a raw planks into a finished (if questionable) product in the time she would have needed to properly measure and cut the pieces.

She sighed as she took a long draw from her doctored coffee and thanked the stars that she was an earth pony. Magic had some truly crazy depths if it could teach a pegasus to do that in no time flat. She took another slurp and wondered just how she was supposed to summarize all her assessments up in a way that would satisfy Twilight. 

And also if Rainbow Dash would mind dropping by to give her apprentice a lesson or two on how to properly bevel corner pieces. His always ended up uneven while hers (when she wasn’t rushing) looked like a single carved piece.
> Chapter 18 - Thank You Notes
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Dear Miss Fluttershy,

I wanted to take a moment to express my thanks for those splendid treats you donated to the hospital recently. I had several of your cookies as well as a slice of cake, and I can positively say they were absolutely delightful!

I don’t know what kind of magic you worked into the dough, but I haven’t felt this fit in years, certainly not since before I retired! Not only did it fix up my cold, it even sorted out my bad knee I’ve had ever since I took a bad fall six winters ago. I don’t even need my walker anymore! Thanks to you, I’ll be able to give my grandcolt a few more piggyback rides before he gets too grown up for them. You’re a real miracle worker, child, and I’m sure you’ll be getting a dozen more notes like this one (guessing just on how many ponies I saw getting discharged alongside me that day).

So thank you Miss Fluttershy for your kindness and making me feel twenty years younger (and probably a pound fatter! That chocolate cake is to die for! Better not let Miss Pie find out lest she think you’re out for her job!)

Sincerely,
Pearly Stitch

P.S.  I help organize a bingo tournament every Thursday in the amphitheater down at the park. A lot of our regulars are folks of my generation, and while nopony’s really sick or injured, you tend to gather up a lot of little aches and pains that don’t quite go away when you make it to our age. I was wondering if I might impose upon your generosity a little more and ask if you’d be willing to provide some treats for our next meeting? They’d be greatly appreciated and I’m sure we can work out some sort of fair compensation for your time.

P.P.S. Speaking of compensation, you’ll find included with this letter a hoof-knit tea cozy from my collection. Just a small token of my thanks and appreciation.










Ponyville Town Hall


From the Desk of Mayor Marilynn Mare


Dear Twilight Sparkle,

On behalf of my staff, I’d like to thank you for that marvelous new addition you graciously donated to Town Hall. I will admit, I was skeptical to your claims about it increasing magical range and the boost to efficiency that would provide, but it has proven itself to be Harmonysent! No longer can any of my interns claim that they can’t get things done in a timely manner because the files are “out of their magic’s range” and they “can’t find the ladder”. No more can they claim an extra-long lunch with the excuse of traffic, or stampedes, or natural disasters barring their path back to the office now that I’ve ensured that all their unicorn coworkers can use the most basic of teleport spells (which, I’ve been told, was practically a useless spell without your booster). Though admittedly most spells that they use on a day-to-day basis require line-of-sight which your relay does not circumvent (perhaps in a future version? Circle back to me on that when you get a chance). 

Aside from thanks, the real reason I am writing to you is that we’ve had inquiries from a number of ponies around town asking if they could have access to the relay. I told them, as you told me, that every user has to be magically keyed in individually and that it’ll only boost their spells’ range to the extent of Town Plaza, but it seems that that is enough of a convenience to garner interest regardless. The current plan in consideration is to offer temporary access for a small fee (for those only interested in the novelty) and longer-term access for a recurring subscription. Before we implemented it, my assistant advised me to check in with you in case there were any magical limitations we should be made aware of (maximum number of users, potential failures from overuse, etcetera.)

Please get back to me as soon as you can, in pony or in writing, as we’d like to roll this out before tourist season starts.

The public’s faithful elected servant,
Mayor Mare.


> Chapter 19 - Power Ponies Problems (and Spike's Simple Solutions)
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spike groaned and rubbed his head as the gentle sound of blaring traffic roused him from his slumber.

"Did anyone catch the number of that chariot?"

He stood, brushing loose gravel off his knees from the rooftop where he'd been laying. When had he gotten up there? The last thing he remembered was reading a strange passage in the back of his comic book and then...

He gasped when realization hit and he finally took in his surroundings. Around him was an ocean of skyscrapers and high-rises as far as the eye could see. An endless maze of unnaturally clean streets and filthy shadow-filled alleys, erratically lit by a dramatically oversized moon and flashing neon signs that clung to the larger buildings like rainbow caterpillars. In the distance, he could just make out the faint but iconic shape of the globe-topped Maretropolis Daily newspaper building in the skyline just before the edge of the horizon faded into a faint pointillistic haze.

"Is this... Maretropolis?" He scarcely dared to ask it aloud, lest it make him wake up from his dream. The city of superheroes, of supervillains, of ponies rising to the occasion to save the innocent civilians from chaos.

The city of the Power Ponies. And he was there.

A familiar groan reminded him that he wasn't alone. "Twilight! I think we're— whoa..."

Words caught in the little dragon's throat as his literary heroes made flesh rose from the graveled surface of the roof. "You're... the Power Ponies." Or at least, his friends and family wearing the most realistic costumes he'd ever seen, more accurate than even his imagination... aside from a few obviously poor casting choices. Pinkie's coat color was completely wrong for the speedster whose outfit she wore.

"The who?" Applejack asked through Mistress Marvelous' iconic identity-obscuring mask.

"The superheroes from my comic book! It zapped us inside and now you're the Power Ponies!" He pointed at the first of the roster as the words of the comic's classic introduction page rolled through his mind.

"Zapp and Fili-second!" Rainbow Dash grinned as she checked out her Medallion of Power while Pinkie vibrated in place before whizzing off in a streak of pink light, circling the block in the blink of an eye, and returning right where she started.

"Radiance and Masked Matter-horn!" Rarity posed as she realized he was talking about her, though with her natural grace she always seemed poised as if waiting for a photographer to snap a candid shot. Meanwhile Twilight was looking slightly less photogenic as she blew a lock of impractically coiffed mane out of her face.

"Mistress Marvelous and Saddle Rager!" Neither Applejack nor Fluttershy looked like they'd quite recovered from their unexpected portaling yet, the former looking seasick while the latter was just shaken in general.

"And that means I'm—!" His spirits plummeted almost instantly as he looked down and recognized his blue boots and red cape. "...Hum Drum. The powerless sidekick."

Twilight’s brow furrowed. “Transported inside a comic book? That’s impossible.”

Pinkie zipped over to her side. “Unless somepony got a new power that let them do it. Lot of impossible stuff been happening in that department lately. Hooves up ladies; who here’s got an inky heart?”

“I got a new one just a minute ago, but I don’t think this is it.” Dash shook her head with a frustrated expression. “It’s… something about learning, I think? It’s not super clear.”

A sudden explosion on the streets below cut their conversation to an unexpected close. They looked over the building’s edge just as the front doors of the building across the street blew open in a cloud of dust and debris. 

Wild laughter was the first thing to come from the destruction. A manic cackle, wild and careless. Then came the tentacles. They shot out of the rubble like ropes made of seaweed, long enough to reach across the street and thicker than a pony’s foreleg. Five, six, a dozen or more snapped out with faint whip cracks as they carried aloft their mistress. 

She was tall and slender, with a figure that models would kill for and the kind of face that would have been gracing magazine covers if it weren’t for the manic glee in her rarely-blinking eyes and the disdainful sneer that settled across her lips whenever they weren’t parted for another heaving giggle. And also the ambulatory mane in sickly green that did all her walking for her.

Her eyes immediately locked onto the opposing rooftop. “Wahaaa, the Power Ponies. Just as I expected,” she chortled. “How kind of you to join us. Now the mane event can begin! Wahoohoohohoha!”

"Holy Horsefeathers!" Spike cried, "It's the Mane-iac, the Power Ponies’ archnemesis! And she's stolen the Electro-Orb from the Maretropolis Museum to power her doomsday device! Quickly, you've got to stop her!"

“And how exactly are we supposed to do that?” Rarity asked.

“With your superpowers! You can— watch out!”

A mailbox crashed through the edge of the roof, peppering them with debris and nearly smashing into Pinkie who was saved by her quick reflexes.

“You know what? Fine.” Applejack approached the edge of the roof without fear. “Maybe Ah am in a comic book. Maybe this is just a weird dream and Princess Luna’s gonna show up any minute. Either way—” she cracked her neck to one side then the other “—Ah think it’s high time Ah see just how much Ah can do with these fightin’ skills when Ah don’t have to about not hurtin’ somepony. Yeehaw!” 

With her people’s battlecry on her lips, she lassoed a lamp post and swung her way into the fray. Her friends were barely a moment behind her.

Except for Spike.

He stayed on the roof because he was painfully aware of the fact that he, much like the Hum Drum character whose boots he was filling, had no superpowers. When it came to fighting or anything else really important, he was just as useless and unhelpful here as he was back home. 

And so he carefully made his way down the fire escape. As he did, he was forced to bear witness to the worst beatdown he’d even seen.

Heroes of Equestria though his friends were, experienced superheroes they were not. 

It was painful, physically painful, to watch them try and fight without any idea how their powers worked. He’d thought for sure that Twilight must have read a few of his comics at least once, if only for having run out of books in the rest of the library, but even she failed to so much as lay a hoof on Mane-iac. Their only competent fighter managed to try herself to a lamppost with her own lasso, and Pinkie couldn’t dodge a hair-tacle without overshooting by whole city blocks. He winced as Rainbow Dash managed to successfully activate her Medallion of Power… only to totally lose control of it and summon a tornado that sucked up everypony but the villainess and allowed her to make her cackling escape.

He arrived at ground level just as the defeated heroes managed to gather back together, their bodies battered and their egos thoroughly bruised.

“Nice going,” he said flatly, “Way to put those superpowers to use.” Was it mean? Maybe a little, but he’d just seen them bring shame to the names of his favorite superheroes, so he was feeling a little vindictive.

“Might have helped if we knew how to use them,” Applejack retorted with a half-hearted glare.

“This isn’t the time to be arguing,” Rainbow Dash cut in. She flicked her wind-swept mane and it snapped back to its coverpage-worthy style. “We gotta follow her! She made us look like a bunch of foals!”

“And what are you going to do when you get there?” Spike pressed. “You don’t know how to use your powers!”

Dash waved away his concern. “We’ll figure it out as we go. Even forgetting revenge for a minute, you said she’s got a doomsday machine, right? So if we’re supposed to be superheroes then we’ve gotta go save the day by laying the smackdown on her before she activates it!”

“Do we really though?”

All eyes turned to Fluttershy, who wilted a little under their weight but kept talking despite it. "I mean, you said we're inside a comic book. So all this is just make believe, right? None of it's real, it's all just a story. There’s no real ponies in actual danger if we do nothing.” She offered an unsteady smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “We don’t have to fight that scary laughing mare again.”

Spike shook his head. “Unfortunately, I think we do. There was something my comic book said just before we all got pulled in. It said the way to get back to where we started was to see things through to the end. I think our only way back to Ponyville is if we finish the story.”

“Not… necessarily.” Twilight rose and began to pace. “There’s something that might work, but it’s only theoretical. It’s not everyday you get the opportunity to the interdimensional capabilities of spells, and I don’t even know if this comic book world counts as a subdimension or if this is just a portioned off part of some magical plane, but strictly speaking it should work either way unless there’s some kind of esoteric effect that the original spellwork wouldn’t know to account for…”

She trailed off into quiet mutterings as she continued to pace, her horn lighting and dousing at random, until finally—

“Aha!” Twilight grinned in triumph as her horn flared and a book popped into being in front of her. Pinkie Pie dashed forward to grab it first.

“The Material Gains of a Domestic Wallaby?” she read off the cover. “How’s that supposed to help?”

“It’s not. But it proves that I can still connect to the magical relay I carved into the library. I just happened to be reading that yesterday so I knew exactly where it was on my nightstand. It’s a very bad idea to try and teleport things to you without a visual.” Twilight flashed her horn again and the book vanished. “Teleporting things to a known destination is much easier. I believe I should be able to get us out like this—” there was an audible sigh of relief from Fluttershy “—but I think we should try and stop Mane-iac anyway.”

She continued to talk over the sound of burgeoning protests. “There’s no denying that we keep getting strange new abilities. So far they’ve been mostly mundane things taken to a high level, but there’s no reason to suspect that we might never get abilities that qualify as actual superpowers. I think this would be a great way to practice using powers in a safe way, especially ones that we get unexpectedly and don't understand right off the bat. And if it does prove too dangerous,” She lit her horn. “I can have us back at the library in a flash.”

“I’m up for it!” Pinkie was the first to answer. “I barely got to do anything in the last fight at all, and I’ve always wanted to be a superhero ever since I first heard about the power ponies!”

“Wait, you’ve read them?” Spike asked.

“No, I meant when we woke up ten minutes ago!”

With Pinkie’s enthusiastic support, the others were quick to agree as well. Aside from Fluttershy, that is, who still asked to sit this one out at home. Once she was safely away, Twilight turned to Spike. “Alright Spike, what’s the plan?”

He looked at her for a moment as though she’d asked him if he was up for a quick flight around town. “What do you mean?” A small ember of hope sparked to life within him. “You mean, you want… me to take charge?”

“Of course!” she replied with a laugh, “It's only natural. You're the comic expert here. When we have an animal problem, we turn to Fluttershy for advice. For fashion issues, Rarity. You’ve said it yourself, no one knows the Power Ponies like you do. This is your show.”

A slow grin worked its way across his features as his chest swelled with pride. He was useful after all, in a way no one else could be. In fact, he had the greatest superpower of all: meta-knowledge.”

“Okay, first off. You all need to know exactly what your powers are so we don’t have a repeat of last time. There’s also a couple of key weaknesses to look out for. Exploiting them’s usually Hypno-Iris’ gimmick and not Mane-iac’s, but we’d better not take chances. Then a quick review of her weaknesses, and then we can make a plan to finally take her down once and for all!”
> Chapter 20 - Wardrobe Malfunction
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fluttershy arrived in the Ponyville library with no more fanfare or spectacle than if she'd been teleported in from anywhere less remote than a magical comic world. That is to say, she still displaced enough air to rustle a few loose papers on the table, but not much more than that.

As soon as she opened her eyes to the comfortingly familiar space, she sighed and let her body slump to the floor.

Finally, she felt like herself again.

She laid there for several minutes doing nothing but breathing in the soothing smells of wood shavings, dragon, and owl. Letting her heart slow down from its panicked pounding. Slowly but surely, as she slipped into a near-meditative trance, the bottomless pit of red hot anger inside her began to fade away.

Waking up in the comic book world had been one of the singularly most terrifying experiences of her life. Nightmare Moon, Sombra, the Changelings; they'd all been scary and dangerous monsters for sure, but not since her bad experience with Iron Will's assertiveness training had she been so terrified of herself.

From the moment she'd woke up on that rooftop she'd been furious. Not at anyone or anything, just mad in general. Every breath was a struggle not to snarl, every word a fight not to snap at her friends over completely reasonable questions and suggestions. It pushed at her body from the inside, a surging tide of wrath ready to break out and rip and tear until it was sated. A raging beast that fought to be released.

It'd felt like her body was a runaway train, and she merely a conscripted passenger trying desperately to slow it down and warn ponies off the track.

It was worse than the time Discord had inverted her personality to make her cruel and petty. At least then her mind had also been warped enough that she didn't know anything was wrong.

With a few more minutes of deep breathing, the last of the anger dispersed back into whatever comic book magic had created it and she rose as normal, ordinary Fluttershy once more.

But before she could do much more, there was a knock on the library door followed almost immediately by it opening.

“Hey Twilight? Is the latest issue of Scootering Weekly in yet?” A familiar orange figure slipped through into the room. “Oh. Hey… Fluttershy.”

“Ah, hello Scootaloo.” She plastered a smile on to hide her surprise. It mostly worked, but there was still something strange in the filly’s expression that felt off. “Twilight’s not here right now, but when she gets back I can let her know you stopped by, if you like?”

“Nah, that’s okay. I’ll come back later. I don’t wanna… interrupt anything.” Scootaloo shook her head as she slipped back through the door. “Sweet cosplay, by the way.”

A farewell froze on Fluttershy’s tongue even as the door clicked shut, leaving her alone once more. She turned around with glacial slowness as her anxiety slowly climbed through the roof.

There, reflected in perfect detail in the library’s meticulously polished dedication plaque, she saw herself. 

Still clad in a near-scandalously skintight green bodysuit.

She nearly fainted right then and there as most of her blood rushed to her cheeks. She could only thank her lucky stars that she hadn’t actually gone outside and walked through town before she noticed. But even then, once her embarrassment finally died down, the pegasus found herself faced with a new problem, one that comic book artists had never bothered considering.

“How do I take this off?!” 
> Chapter 21 - The Magic of Delegation
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Golden Oaks Library, while a marvel of earth pony magic and one of the most recognizable buildings in Ponyville, was not a particularly big structure.

The ground floor was almost entirely one large room, originally a parlour but which was later converted to the main publicly-accessible space when the structure underwent the transformation from private residence to public library. Stuck onto the side was a compact combination kitchen-dining-room, scaled down to the needs of the sort of pony who viewed food as an annoying necessity rather than a passion.

The second floor consisted of private spaces. A bedroom, closet, small personal library, balcony, and a bathroom whose magical plumbing was best not contemplated in any great detail.

Aside from that, there was also a basement which had been dug out some years after the original owner passed on and thus lacked the artistic flair of shaped living wood present in the rest of the house. While just as big as the first floor (if not a little larger on the southern side) in practical terms the basement actually had less space than any other level thanks to it being stuffed with the neglected and abandoned possessions of the last three to five librarians-in-residence.

The small area of free space (that which was not occupied by scratched furniture, forgotten tchotchkes, and enough Hearth's Warming decorations for a tree thrice it's size) was where Twilight had set up her laboratory and research space to plumb the depths of new magic and continue the projects she'd already been working on in Canterlot before moving to Ponyville.

Though one would be forgiven, these days, for mistaking her workspace as just another part of the general clutter.

A pile of documents and scrolls floated through the air in a parade of paper, sorting themselves between piles that were only slightly less disorganized than the ones they'd come from (and getting worse as each pile's edges grew, shifted, and overlapped).

At the center of the organized snowstorm was Twilight, her horn alight and a frustrated frown on her lips.

"No. No. No. Initial Analysis of 'MacGyver' Ability? That needs to be in the Pinkie section. No. No. Woodworking notes. Is this for mine or Dash's? Testing was.. incomplete due to lack of materials. Great. Another for the to-do pile. Notes on Fluttershy's healing cookies. That's for the Fluttershy file. Measurements for Applejack's bat'leth. Still need to make that. To-do pile two. Rarity's analysis on the output of Horadric Cube tests four hundred through four ten. That needs to be transcribed onto the main test log. Which means it goes... temp pile number nine."

The page flew off and landed on what she'd previously been calling 'Re-sort Stack Five'. One by one documents were lifted, skimmed, and sent flying to new homes across the room. A few slid into the single rusty filing cabinet, some stacked themselves on old furniture, but most just made room on the floor.

"Wait… is this my letter to Enchanted Comics about their novel Haycartes spell? What is this doing here? This was supposed to be mailed days ago!" It went on the top stair. "Notes on the magical breakdown of Fluttershy's comic-sourced costume. Now should that go under Fluttershy or does the Haycartes research merit its own subsection?"

That had been a real disappointment. The idea of a spell variation that could let her extract items from books was enough to make her mentally squeal and start drafting another full write-up for the Academy Heads. But much to her disappointment, Fluttershy's supersuit had only lasted a few hours before it dissolved back into inert magic. Still, the spell itself was a remarkable achievement (though whoever created it needed to work out that bug with the cascade failure that made the comic self-immolate right after they were ejected from it).

She decided to give the paper its own pile, placing it...

Twilight blinked several times as she looked across the room for the first time in many minutes with senses beyond her magical proprioception. There was nowhere left to start a new pile. Papers and scrolls covered every surface, making the basement look like it'd been subjected to an early snowfall.

She groaned and set the still floating papers back down onto the "unsorted pile" from which they'd come. "This isn't working. How am I supposed to be able to plan what I need to focus on when I can't even tell what's already been done?"

Twilight loved studying. There was no issue there. She loved studying and researching magic in all its forms. There was always something new to learn, some new discovery to make, a new boundary to push. She'd never expected to have the problem of there being too much to study.

What was more important? To watch Fluttershy bake and figure out how she could turn normal cake batter into snacks that healed better than most medicine? Or have Rarity inspect unidentified artifacts to learn the truth of them? Did history have more value over healing? Or should the synthesis function of the Horadric cube take precedence with the advances it could make in materials science? What if there was some revolutionary material hidden behind the right combinations of ingredients? And that’s before she even got into considering all the possible interactions between them!

She'd been given an unprecedented opportunity. A plethora of new magic that could change the world... if only she had time to properly study it.

Was it even possible, let alone practical, to try and study it all? She closed her eyes and started to draft a timetable in her mind. A full month broken into fifteen-minute segments. She added her earthly requirements first. Time for sleeping, eating, and socializing with friends. She blocked out traveling time then trimmed it down where coordinating Keys and Doors was a viable shortcut. Then came the blocks for research. A section for the Cube, a section for the Originite. Portions for focusing on Rarity's abilities, on Pinkie's, on her own. Time to collect data and time to analyze it. A day to write up her findings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. A break day to alleviate mental strain. A little flex time in case of unexpected disasters.

She studied the completed sheet in her mind’s eye; a patchwork quilt of a dozen colored squares. It looked doable. Tight, but doable. Coffee was an acceptable substitute for sleep so long as she limited it to no more than three all-nighters per week. So long as nothing unexpected happened, she could still study everything. And make the most of these strange circumstances.

As if to mock her efforts, not a moment after thinking that Twilight felt the tingle of a new ability playing an arpeggio across her horn. It danced down the length from tip to base before plunging into her mind and blossoming into new knowledge.

Runes. Runes filled her mind. Twilight knew runes, both from her education under Celestia and also the unique strings needed to power her “Wizard Tower” magic relays. These were different. A whole alphabet of new runes, ones made of perfect circles and right angles. Runes that interconnected into long strings of complicated effects. But this was more than mere knowledge. While simple in design, the grammar of these runes was bafflingly complex; each addition to the chain changed the meaning of the whole string. And yet Twilight knew, with a thought, how they would interact. How to use those runes to make tools that would channel magic far more easily than the material should allow. How to make a building that would improve the performance of any spells cast within. How to custom build these things to sync with an individual pony’s magic so well that it’d work better for them than anyone else.

It was a Master’s degree and years of practical work experience rolled into one precise brain blast.

She blinked slowly as visions of rune strings disappeared. The knowledge settled into her mind as if it had always been there, leaving her back with her mental schedule.

A schedule that now seemed laughably incomplete.

“It won't work,” she said. “It’s impossible.”

It wasn’t so much the new runes themselves that spurred the realization, but what they represented. She’d only accounted for the abilities they already had. Her schedule was packed to bursting with research already and she hadn’t even considered all the new things that might appear in the coming days, weeks, months. There literally was not enough time in the day for her to cram in everything she needed to research.

But unless she discovered some kind of time travel magic, there was only one way to squeeze more research out of the same amount of time. 

“I need help."

But it wasn’t as easy as just that.

She’d tried enlisting Spike’s help already. But while posting “Research Quests” had seemed like a good idea at the time, it hadn't quite panned out like she'd hoped. He was more than eager, but while his penmanship was fine, his actual data collection was... less than academic standards. 

And as much as she loved her friends, the thought of trying to draft them into proper rigorous research felt doomed to fail even within her own mind. She knew from personal experience it was tricky enough to coax some of them into cooperating as test subjects, let alone researchers. She cringed at the thought of Pinkie handing her a research paper that was nothing but colored pencil pictograms. Or Rainbow Dash just writing the end result and none of the steps it took to get there. Not to mention they had their own lives and interests to occupy their time.

She needed ponies who would understand her need for rigorous scientific and magical discipline.

Something in the phrasing of that thought caused a memory to bubble up to the surface of her mind. One that sparked a rather novel idea that made her grin amidst the storm of loose research.

After all, they weren't her only friends.
> Chapter 22 - Amending Fences
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Well well well, look what the cat dragged in! Twilight Sparkle, you old so and so! It's been too long!"

Twilight smiled at Minuette's infectious energy. "Good to see you too. Sorry it's been... such a long time."

"Pssht! What's a few months of unexpected silence between friends? Come in, come in, before Miss Petunia next door starts to get nosy about who's standing on my front stoop."

Twilight crossed the threshold of the cozy little house in the "well-off but not old money" part of Canterlot. The interior was a reflection of its owner: mostly blue, but cheery.

Minuette was a pony that Twilight had once thought of as "competent, but annoyingly hyper". Seeing her now, Twilight realized she'd misjudged the mare. She was just energetically extroverted. A social butterfly with the personality of a runaway train. A city-born Applejack with a side dish of a more mature Pinkie.

For a moment she mused on the oddity of considering a pony she'd objectively known for much longer in terms of her more recent friends.

She soon found herself seated at a small breakfast nook sized for two, snacking on store-bought cookies paired with a brand of tea that had been her favorite a year ago until Rarity had introduced her to a custom Lapsang Souchong blend.

"So whatever happened to you?" Minuette finally said after the smalltalk had run dry. "You don't write, you don't visit. One day you just disappear outta nowhere and then suddenly I'm seeing your name in the papers every other month."

With her new perspective on life, the memory of her hasty exit from Canterlot nearly a year before now rankled in Twilight's mind. "It was supposed to be a short visit to Ponyville. No more than three days to help set up the Summer Sun Celebration. Then Princess Luna happened and that led to Princess Celestia suggesting I stay there to better learn about friendship."

Minuette nearly snorted her tea. "Wow. Lot of confidence she had in us, didn't she?"

"To be honest, I'm not sure she even knew about you and the others. We didn't exactly do much outside of classes and I didn't bring you up in conversation. I realize now that I wasn't exactly a good friend.” She took a sip of tea to wet her drying tongue. “And I only compounded that failing by never once coming to visit after I moved even though Canterlot was only a quick train ride away." Twilight took a deep breath and sighed. "But that's why I'm here now. To apologize and ask for your help."

"Just me?" Minuette smirked. "You sure know how to make a mare feel special. Should I swap out this tea for some wine glasses?"

"You and the other girls," Twilight clarified. Stars, how had all of Minuette's innuendos gone completely over her head before? They weren't even subtle either like she remembered. "Once I figure out where they live. The only house I ever visited was yours."

"Well, you're in luck cause I can help you there! I'm having lunch with the old gang this afternoon. Come along, it'll be a great surprise and you won't have to do your painfully rehearsed apology speech twice."

"Am I that obvious?"

"No, but you are Twilight."





The "old gang" (as Minuette insisted on calling them) had, much to Twilight's relief, welcomed her back with open hooves. They'd hardly changed at all in the year she'd been gone, and yet they almost seemed like entirely new ponies to Twilight's newfound social skills.

Twinkleshine presented herself as the epitome of the Canterlot nouveau-riche. Elegant, but not haughty. Trendy, but not a fad-chaser. Articulate, refined, and deferent to social status. Or at least until she relaxed or got excited enough to let the façade crack, revealing her hot Manehattanite blood still pumping strong just beneath the surface with all its grit and gravel. Twilight could scarcely believe she'd only ever remembered her as "the prissy one with a short temper".

Lemon Hearts, Twilight was aghast to find, she'd had almost no opinion on whatsoever. In most of her memories of the mare she'd been labeled merely as “Twinkleshine's friend” or "the sometimes lab partner who excels with potioneering but struggles with runes". A filler character in Twilight's school days. Painfully forgettable. In reality, she wasn't so much quiet as she was taciturn, speaking only when she had something worthwhile to say. Jumping in and out of conversation with a poignant remark or cutting insight.

Greetings were had and fond memories revisited amid laughter and light snacks (though Twilight had needed some prompting to actually remember most of the events).

An hour (and two platters of fancy cookie assortments) later, the conversation meandered its way back to Twilight and the prickly issue of her sudden exodus and prodigal return.

"So what was the deal with all that anyway?" Twinkleshine asked through a mouthful of macron. "I read the papers. I visit Ponyville now and again. You went and left us behind for a new group of mares, huh? Got yourself some fancy new friends to share adventures with?"

Despite the teasing lilt to her words, Twilight couldn't help but wince at the accusation. "I wouldn't put it like that. But in a way you're right. I made friends in a new city, got caught up in a whirlwind of new experiences, and forgot about my old friends. I didn't understand friendship enough to appreciate what I had with you all before I left. And for that I'm sorry."

Twilight bowed her head as she awaited the coming recriminations. Instead she got snickers and a playful shove from Minuette.

"Wow. You got real sappy too, dincha? Here I was expecting a five-point presentation on why you never reached out, and instead I get an actual heartfelt apology."

"Maybe you weren't the best friend," Twinkleshine agreed, "but you pulled through in a pinch. I'd have failed Professor Infinite Intrgration's Mathemagics course without your tutoring."

"You helped me get over my bad breakup with Malachite," Lemon Hearts added.

Twilight blinked. "I did?" She didn't remember that and didn't sound like her either. Past her, that is.

She nodded. "You broke into my room and told me it was illogical to spend all my time cooped up crying when it was a statistical unlikelihood we'd have lasted more than four months even if he hadn't cheated. Then you brought me to the girls and we got ice cream."

Twilight's eyes widened in recognition. "Right. Now I remember." Though her recollection of the event was tinted somewhat differently. Namely, that she'd been frustrated at Lemon Hearts for missing a planned study session and turned to Cadance to get mathematical evidence that she was in the right.

The ice cream after had been Cadance's idea, as well as her bits.

"Well I'm glad there's no hard feelings," Twilight said as she vowed to be a better, more genuine friend in the future. But there was still a dangling thread in her memories of pre-Ponyville friendship that needed addressing. "While it's great to finally reconnect, aren't we missing a few faces?"

Minuette speared a cookie with her knife and dropped the whole thing into her teacup, letting it melt away as she stirred. "Well, Lyra, obviously, since she moved down to Ponyville too."

"Lyra moved to Ponyville? When?"

"Not long after you did, actually." Twinkleshine gave a disturbed glance to Minuette's rapidly congealing cookie-tea mass. "Maybe a month or two?"

"She caught the eye of a pretty mare and followed her off into the hills," Lemon Hearts added sagely. "Some up and coming chocolatier."

"Bon Bon?" Twilight ventured and received a shrug in response. She knew of the mare through Pinkie, though they'd never really interacted much. There had been a green unicorn with her from time to time, but she'd never made the connection to an old classmate.

"And of course there's Moon Dancer but, well..." Minuette shrugged and spooned out a glob of cookie-tea goo, much to Twinkleshine's horror. "You know how she is."

Twilight thought she did, but her mental snapshot of Moon Dancer didn't provide any clarity to Minuette's dangling statement. "What happened to her?"

Minuette stopped with the spoon an inch from her mouth. "You know? I don't actually know. We kinda fell outta touch after a while."

"I tried inviting her to a few events." Twinkleshine shrugged. "She always said she had studying to do, so eventually I stopped asking."

"She took it pretty hard when you left. She wasn't very social to begin with, and even we were mostly friends by association with you."

Twilight sighed, the sound heavy with regret. "I guess I have another apology ahead of me. If one of you can tell me where she lives?"

"You can always ask Dusty Pages at Canterlot Public Library. If anyone knows where she is now, it'll be the librarians. But first," a wide grin split Twinkleshine’s features as she leaned forward and glanced around conspiratorially, "I got a funny feeling you're here for something more than just making up for lost time. So come on girl, spill. Give us the deets on what's got you so twitchy."

The other two leaned in as well, intrigued.

Twilight looked between the faces of her friends as she realized just how much they really were. "You're right. There is something else. I'd like to extend the offer of a research opportunity on the cutting edge of magic advancement."





"This is where she lives?"

It was a house in only the strictest sense. The lawn was overgrown, the paint faded and peeling, and one of the stairs leading up to the door was so visibly rotten that she imagined a stiff breeze would make it collapse completely. It was like someone had never taken down their Nightmare Night haunted house attraction.

If she didn’t know better, Twilight would have assumed it was abandoned. And yet, it was the address on Moon Dancer's library file and the record showed her checking out books as recently as last week.

Steeling her purpose in her mind, Twilight braced herself for the worst and knocked on the door.

It opened only after considerable delay, hinges that were more rust than not squealing out in protest as Twilight locked eyes with an unflappable disinterested stare.

"Oh. It's you."

"Yes. Me." All of Twilight's prepared apologies died in her throat. Moon Dancer looked terrible. The mare that ponies had once claimed looked like her long-lost sister was practically unrecognizable. Her mane was dull and oily, too-long bangs held out of her eyes by a cheap hair tie. Her coat looked like it hadn’t seen a brush in a month, and her eyes like they hadn’t seen a non-caffeinated drink in longer. Her thick-lensed glasses were held together by tape and her sweater was fraying at the hems.

“What do you want?” she demanded with the kind of tone usually reserved for pushy survey-takers and door-to-door salesmen. “I’m trying to study.”

Twilight tried for a smile, though it didn’t quite fit right. “Hi Moon Dancer. I haven’t seen you in a while and I thought it might be nice to catch up.”

Her face remained impassive. “For what purpose?”

“Because we’re friends?” Twilight offered hopefully.

Moon Dancer frowned, grunted, and moved to close the door. 

“Wait!” Twilight flung her hoof out and the door crumpled around it like a wet cracker. She cringed at the damage. “Sorry…”

Though the door was closed, Twilight could easily see through the new hole that Moon Dancer had yet to actually walk away. She took a deep breath and tried again. “Moon Dancer. I’ve come to apologize… and to ask for your help.”

After a moment the door reopened and Moon Dancer re-emerged. She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Apology not accepted. Will that be all?”

Twilight felt her spirits sink. She’d assumed Moon Dancer might hold a grudge, but the reality was worse than she’d imagined. “I was hoping we could… reconnect a little. Can I come in?”

“No. I have studying to do. There's a new treatise on nonegocentric spellwork I'm confirming the calculations on.”

A small surge of hope ran through Twilight’s falling spirits. “Oh! A Study of Novel Runes Structure and their Application in Nontraditional Casting?”

“You're aware of it. Then you understand how important—” 

“Not just aware, I wrote it!”

Finally something shifted in her expression. One bushy eyebrow rose in skeptical interest. “You what.”

“That's partly why I'm here. Due to... the effects of a currently-unexplained magical event, new magic is being discovered so quickly that I literally do not have enough time to catalogue and study it all. So I need help. I need your help.

“I know I was a terrible excuse for a friend, and I'll do whatever it takes to try and make things right, but I'd like to try and make amends. Start over. Can we move forward, together, as friends?”

For a long and painful moment, Moon Dancer said nothing. Both she and Twilight just remained there, frozen, the latter’s hoof extended forward in a gesture of reconciliation. Just as Twilight was beginning to sweat and her smile starting to hurt, she signed and finally spoke.

“Twilight, when you left it hurt me in a way I'd never felt before. You abandoned me. Humiliated me. On the one day I asked something of you, the one day I decided to risk it and put myself out there... you disappeared. I gave friendship a chance and all it got me was heartbreak.”

She took her glasses off, cleaned one lens with the hem of her sweater, and put them back on with a grunt.

“But, that being said, I'd be shooting myself in the hoof if I turned down an opportunity to research such groundbreaking magic. So I will be the bigger mare and put aside my personal feelings.”

She shut down Twilight's brightening expression with a stern glare. "Let me be clear. We are not friends. I don't know if we can ever regain what we used to have. But we can be colleagues. Co-workers. Researchers sharing nothing more than a professional working relationship. Will that be acceptable, or is accepting your ‘friendship’ a prerequisite to this offer?”

Twilight’s smile no longer felt nearly as strained. “I think I can agree to your terms.”

Moon Dancer nodded. “Then it’s agreed. I suppose I should invite you in. I have a number of general questions regarding the nature of this proposed research as well as several specific technical questions regarding your nonegocentric casting system. Watch your step; there are several books in the hallway and the windows are blocked.”

Twilight made her way inside with a lighter heart than she’d arrived with. It wasn't what she'd hoped for, but it was a start.
> Chapter 23 - Two of A Kind, From Different Decks
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twilight turned her Key in the lock of Moon Dancer's side door and opened it into a room made of crystal. "And here we are! The first step into a world of new research!"

Moon Dancer crossed the threshold with a less-than-impressed expression. "Fascinating. Extradimensional space or some kind of portable portal system?"

"Extradimensional, I think," Twilight supplied as she stepped in after her. "Locator spells give invalid or nonsensical results when cast inside the Hub."

"The Hub?"

Twilight gestured around her. "That's what I've been calling this space. Because of all the doors. Each one of my fr-" She cut herself off from saying 'friends' just before it could escape her lips. That word was dangerously exclusionary now, especially when she was already trotting on thin ice. "-my fellow Bearers of Elements of Harmony has a Key of their own that can open their door from any mundane one."

Moon Dancer nodded, her keen gaze zipping across the room, missing no detail. "Distance limitations?"

"None that I've found, with the farthest test being Canterlot to the far edge of Ponyville."

Again, Moon Dancer nodded. She said little as she explored the strange, if somewhat limited space of the Hub and its adjacent rooms.

"Why is this room so different?" she asked as she looked in on the Hunter's Workshop.

"I don't know," Twilight admitted. "It wasn't part of the original Hub."

"Elaborate."

Twilight decided it was as good a time as any to fill her in on the broader details of the situation. Knowing Moondancer's personality, she kept it trimmed down to only the more pertinent information. "I cast a modified version of one of Starswirl's incomplete spells in an attempt to reverse the effects of when I previously cast it unaltered. The result granted me and five others the ability to summon Keys that access this place as well as a new ability each which I initially classified as second Special Talents.

“That theory was quickly invalidated as we just kept getting more. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern as to when— the longest break so far was three days and the shortest barely an hour —but no matter what, new things keep arriving. Sometimes it's a skill, like Applejack suddenly receiving years worth of combat training. Other times a magical artifact, like Pinkie Pie’s bottomless toolbox or the Horadric Cube. And once, so far, a whole new room appeared that wasn't here before, complete with wood paneling and worktables."

"And sometimes,” Moon Dancer continued, “You receive the complete knowledge of a previously unknown application of magic.”

“Exactly.” Twilight felt like grinning, but held the urge in check, respecting Moon Dancer’s wishes to keep things professional. She hoped she could win her back eventually, but for now she strived to keep things professional. 

It was a relief to see that the social isolation had done nothing to hinder Moon Dancer’s analytical mind. She’d always been good at making logical connections, if not always social ones.

"Have you attempted to recreate the incident? Cast the spell again?"

Twilight paused. The thought of that actually hadn't crossed her mind at all. But it was too late now. "We can't. The Elements of Harmony were involved and we had to return them to the magical source from which they came."

"Hm. That's annoying. This would be much easier to study with additional test subjects."

“I think you’ll find yourself pretty busy even with just us six.”

“Perhaps.” She tapped a section of the wall between the doors then tried to scrape it with her hoof. “What kind of material is this constructed from?”

“Crystal?” Twilight offered, mildly embarrassed that she didn’t have a better answer ready. But that was why she’d enlisted help, wasn’t it?

“I gathered that much. I meant specifically. The high luster suggests something in the alumina family, but there are many possible exceptions.”

“I don't know. I can't say I've done any tests on the walls themselves.”

“You haven’t done any?” Moon Dancer turned to her, frustration writ large across her face. “You haven't even done a basic component analysis to determine just what it is you're surrounded by? What if it's highly susceptible to acid, or has a dangerously harmonic resonation with certain frequencies?”

Twilight’s voice was tense as she replied. “I wasn't exactly eager to perform destructive testing on a who-know-how-thin barrier that keeps reality in and interdimensional void out.”

“Hmph. A valid concern, but not a valid excuse. What about this table then? What is its purpose?”

“...It's just a table. You put things on it.”

If Moon Dancer could have rolled her eyes and sighed any harder, they were liable to fall out and roll away. “It seems that focusing on improving your friendship skills has caused your deductive reasoning to atrophy. I'll start from the beginning then. Like you should have.”

She spread her forelegs as if to encompass the whole space around them. "What you have here is clearly an artificial structure. There are not just entrances, but doors, constructed to visually recognizable pony standards." She gestured to the warehouse. "You have a dedicated storage area. Nowhere is that written, but it's implicitly understood from the structure of the room and the arrangement of the shelves within. And that much is even before I address the clearly ponymade tools in the other room. Because it was created, we can speculate about its origins and possibly even its creator from every aspect they chose to implement.

“In a natural environment, the inclusion or exclusion of any particular element can be attributed to random chance or the end state of long-running natural systems. But in an artificial environment, every element present exists due to an intentional choice. Every design choice was a decision that must have had reasoning behind it. Why are the walls crystal and not wood, or metal, or brick? Why is the storage area the exact size that it is when only one shelf is occupied? If this room's intended purpose is a hub of transportation, as you claim, then why is there a huge impediment to movement in the center of it?”

As Moon Dancer continued on, Twilight was nearly overcome with a warming feeling of nostalgia. Her speech (which was quickly reaching the emotional requirements to classify as a rant) brought to mind a nearly-forgotten memory from their sixth grade physics class. Specifically, a Monday morning where Moon Dancer let loose a similar tirade against their teacher for not clarifying on their homework sheet that she was supposed to assume a frictionless environment in a vacuum at sea level with the forces involved affecting a perfect cube of neutral matter, rather than her spending all weekend long researching and accounting for every possible force that could be acting on the supposed box. 

It wasn’t the extra studying that she’d minded, but that he’d marked her answers wrong.

Twilight allowed herself a small grin. Moon Dancer really hadn’t changed at all, which was exactly why she’d wanted her help. Other ponies would see the obvious effects of the new magics and begin testing those, but Moon Dancer was the kind of unicorn to question their base assumptions about how and why it worked at all. 

In short, the perfect pony to help reverse-engineer wholesale magic back to its first principles.

As the rant seemed to be winding down, Twilight took her opportunity to voice her support. “This is why I'm glad you agreed to join the project. I need someone with your ability to break things down.”

Unfortunately, judging by her glare, Moon Dancer didn’t quite take the compliment in the spirit it was given. “Thanks. Glad to know I'm useful to you now.”

Twilight flinched at the barb as Moon Dancer moved past it. “On that note. Now that I'm onboard, I have some questions regarding the details of this research arrangement.”

“Fire away.”

"Will I be compensated for the train fare needed to regularly commute between Canterlot and Ponyville, or do you expect me to move if I intend to continue regular involvement?"

“Aha! I actually have a solution for that. Just one second.” Twilight darted out through the door that led to her library (helpfully left open during her trip with Fluttershy’s Key) and quickly returned lugging a large crystal. It was a beautiful piece of citrine, a pillar as tall as a pony and as wide as her barrel with a swirling white-yellow gradient. 

And wrapped around it from top to bottom were long strings of minutely carved runes. 

“I’m not nearly as naturally proficient with crystal as I am with wood, but it had to be a higher quality material. Luckily Rarity had some gem carving tools I could borrow. You said you were familiar with my paper on nonegocentric casting?”

Moon Dancer nodded slowly, though her eyes never once left the crystal. 

“Well, here it is in physical form. There’s a lot of practical applications that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of, but one of the biggest ones I’ve discovered is that if you keep this relay at home and link your magic both to it and to one here in Ponyville—” 

“I see.” Moon Dancer interrupted, not rudely, but with a voice filled with an almost reverent tone. “Teleport beacons. With the crystal acting as a casting focus the distance for any teleport becomes effectively zero. That’s brilliant." She pressed her face so close to the curving runes her glasses nearly scraped them. Then she frowned. "This... is incomplete. These rune strings aren’t finished.”

"That's by design. Normally, you'd never be able to get all the necessary runes for the spell to work inscribed on something this small. It's a magic meant for whole buildings, after all. But, there's a second runic alphabet I learned recently that works on slightly different principles. One of the defining specialties of Necron Runes is attuning magical devices to specific users so—” 

"—by combining them you can reduce the overall size of the beacon at the cost of limiting it to a single user."

“Exactly!” A powerful thrill went down Twilight’s spine at the joy of being on the same intellectual page as somepony else so precisely that they could finish each other's sentences. “Let’s get this into your house for now, we can calibrate it later. In the meantime I’d like you to meet the rest of the team.”

Almost instantly Moon Dancer’s frown returned. “Team? You mean there’s more?”

“Yes, but it's all ponies you know. I’m not asking you to be friends with them again,” Twilight said, repeating their earlier agreement. “Though I doubt that’ll stop Minuette from trying to re-befriend you. As much as you say friendship is unnecessary, you have to admit that they are qualified for this kind of research.”

“Fine. But I’m not going to any parties. I’m here to research, not socialize.”

“Understood. Parties aside, how do you feel about brunch?”

Moon Dancer opened her mouth to reply, but her stomach beat her to it with a loud rumble. She blushed and said, “Brunch would be acceptable, so long as it’s short.” 
 
Twilight turned and beckoned her through the door to Golden Oaks. “Come on then, I have a standing reservation at Sugar Cube Corner.”

“How’s their coffee?”

“You’ll have to explicitly order it black, but they do deliver.”

“Excellent.”
> Chapter 24 - She Blinded Me With Science
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Alright ladies, I've got one sparkling strawberry water with a slice of lemon."

"That's mine."

Pinkie slid the drink across the table to her thirsty patron. "A Chai tea with milk on the side." A yellow hoof was raised and Pinkie delivered dutifully. "One double chocolate mocha with extra whip."

"Right here!" A pony that looked an awful lot like Pinkie's dentist raised her hoof and waved. The hoof dropped to catch the sliding drink before it met the table edge. Not that it would have. Pinkie knew exactly how far to push it.

"One Twilight Special with an extra shot of espresso." She didn't even wait for an answer as she passed Twilight her favorite poison. "And lastly, a bl— a blu— a blaagh—" Pinkie nearly gagged as she forced out those most heinous and blasphemous words. “A black coffee. No cream. No sugar.”

"Here," said the mare that looked like she'd decided to go as Twilight for Nightmare Night then got depressed and gave up on her costume halfway through.

Pinkie passed the cup of dark roasted evil to the half-hearted lookalike who received it with a small nod. She sipped at the sugarless void for a moment before declaring it, "Acceptable."

Not exactly high praise, but Pinkie was more than used to dealing with ponies who couldn't quite muster up much positivity before their morning fix. Not so often did she meet them in the early afternoon, but it was probably morning somewhere. Besides, the delighted noises of the rest of the table were more than enough to outweigh one grump's grouchiness.

"Thanks, Pinkie," Twilight said.

"No prob! That's what I'm here for! You want anything from the kitchen? I've got a fresh batch of cupcakes coming out soon that’ll make your manes spin!" She leaned in and stage-whispered, "It's a new recipe, so I need taste-testers.”

Twilight gave her a smile; Pinkie's favorite currency. "I think we'd be up for that. All in favor?"

Three 'ayes' and one indifferent shrug later, the vote was decided.

"Okie Dokie! Just yell if you want something in the meantime." Not that they really needed to. It was far from rush hour at Sugar Cube Corner, so aside from a few foals running in and out as they debated whether to spend their allowances on sweets or something from the joke shop across the road, Twilight's group practically had the whole place to themselves. She could hear them just fine without shouting.

Which meant it was remarkably easy to overhear things.

Now, Pinkie Pie was not a gossip, but that didn't mean she wasn't a superb listener. It was a vital skill in her role as Ponyville's premier party pony! How would she know how to organize a party perfectly catered to a pony’s tastes if she didn't know their likes and dislikes? How would she know who to invite if she didn't keep a record of their friends and crushes? Information was one of the most important party supplies.

Suffice to say, even as she walked back behind the counter and into the kitchens, she could still hear their conversation perfectly clearly.

Most of it was pretty boring. Lots of complicated magical jargon that was all geek to her. Stuff about arrays and runestrings and crystals and yadda yadda yadda, magic, magic, magic. She liked magic as much as the next earth pony, but the nitty-gritty details of it just put her right to sleep. The conversation got a little more interesting as they started talking schedules and Pinkie quickly realized that this was not just a get-together with old friends.

Twilight was putting together a team.

Looking back, she realized it was probably an inevitability. While she was more than happy to go with the flow of life and embrace the fun benefits of all these new perks (as she'd taken to calling them), Twilight was different. She wanted, she needed to know the whys and hows behind things or it drove her crazy.

She'd had a front-row seat when Twilight had forced herself to give up on investigating her Pinkie Sense and seen the titanic mental effort it'd taken her. Yet even now, months later, Twilight’s eye still ticced when Pinkie got one of her twitchy premonitions (though she'd tried to stop announcing it as much when Twilight was around).

And now they were back in that same situation again. A mystery that was driving Twilight around the bend, and Pinkie realized with a small pang of regret that she'd hardly done anything to help her friend out.

Oh for sure she'd tried to help with the research a few times. Throwing stuff into the Fun Cube to see what it would create made for a great afternoon. But it was writing down every little thing that was dull, dull, dull, dull, dull. And doing the same test but slightly different over and over took the fun right out of it. She’d caved to doodling within ten minutes.

But even if research wasn't for her, she could have helped in other ways. Plan study-break parties to help Twilight de-stress and take a break. Be a sounding board for ideas (even if she didn't understand much of it). Maybe even try to bring in an expert of her own, much like Twilight had resorted to.

That final thought lingered in her mind for a minute as she realized that it was absolutely something she could still do. It wasn’t like they were keeping what happened to them a secret or anything. If Twilight could publish a paper on what she’d learned and bring in some friends for their specialized expertise, why couldn't Pinkie? The second part, at least. She knew lots of ponies who could maybe help!

"Conceptual alchemy?! You've got to be joking!"

A shout from the dining area snapped Pinkie out of her revelation just in time for the oven's bell to ring. Perfect timing! The cupcakes were done! It was like the universe itself wanted her to celebrate her brilliant idea.

She grabbed her oven mitts and carefully pulled from the oven a tray of two dozen piping hot cupcakes. They looked a little funny, but she supposed that was par for the course for a brand new recipe. After all, no other chef had ever tried tossing a dozen of Fluttershy's magic baked goods into the Horadric Cube over and over until they turned into a single super-cake, then used the deconstruct feature to turn that back into raw ingredients!

Probably not what the ancient magic artifact was designed for, but if it wasn't meant to be, surely somepony would have stopped her!

But as far as abominations of magic went, they smelled delicious!

As she set them on the counter, she felt a tingle in her hooves. Not the left-twitch-right-tingle of her Pinkie Sense warning her about bad news in the mail, but the much softer and warmer tingle of somepony among her friends getting a new perk. As if reading her thoughts, she heard Twilight call out from the other room, “Oh! It’s happening right now! A new one! Quick, someone cast a diagnosis spell before it ends!”

Unlike the last few times when the sensation had risen up only to fade away, this time the feeling continued to grow and grow. Like a static charge in her blood. Like a thin fabric brushed against her fur. It filled then sum of her being and then—

—her mind e x p a n d e d.

Numbers, formulae, atoms, vectors, systems. It was all connected. The beating of her heart and the blood pumping through her veins was a cycle, one made of dozens of smaller cycles as the cells in her body swapped out oxygen for carbon dioxide, burned glucose, and distributed vital salts. The air she breathed had a weight, a composition, a pressure that exerted force on the rest of the room. The heat bursting from the oven created a pressure wave of expanded gases that, if left alone, would stabilize into a faint breeze as the air cycled. 

Everything was systems. Everything was numbers. And it all made sense.

“Oh well,” she heard Twilight as if from a distance. “Looks like someone else got that one.”

Pinkie launched herself over the table, shifting her center of gravity just so such that she flew through the service window. She landed hooves first and let the friction burn off her speed until she came to a rest at the edge of the only occupied table.

“Heeeeeeey Twilight! Guess who has four hooves and just got way more doctorates than that!” She lifted herself up by her tail and pointed with all four hooves at herself with a wide smile that threatened to split her face in two, even as she acknowledged the anatomical impossibility of it. “This filly right here!”
> Chapter 25 - Easy Bake Pinkie
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"So you're, like, some kind of super genius now?"

"Pretty much!" Pinkie poured the sticky red contents of a test tube into a slowly-filling flask. "Lactic acid, please."

Rainbow Dash had no idea what that was, but she didn't need to. She waved her hoof over the countertops and tables that were heavy with a seemingly endless variety of powders and liquids and focused on an ability she rarely got much use out of, one that Rarity had named [Material Limitations].

It wasn't quite like having a compass in her head, but if she focused her thoughts on a particular material, she got a solid gut feeling of where to find it. A useful ability for a more crafty mare, but it had some limitations that made it nearly useless for everyday life. It couldn't tell her where she lost her preening oil or loose change (it could lead her to gold bits, just not ones that were, strictly speaking, hers) but if a friend needed some uncommon type of crystal or a specific type of wood, she could find it.

Like finding each particular chemical Pinkie wanted from the vast array she'd concocted from the contents of her kitchen, the pharmacy, and the hardware store. Her hoof stopped over a wine glass filled with a murky white liquid. She didn't need to ask and confirm if that was the right one; her power hadn't made a mistake yet.

"Thank you." Pinkie pipetted out a few drops and added them to the mix. "Next, zinc trisodium aspartate."

Dash passed her a saucer of white powder, nearly indistinguishable from the many other plates of white powder. "So if you're a bigger egghead than even Twilight is now—"

"I wouldn't say that. She knows way more about magic than me. I just know science! Sorbitol suspension."

"Whatever. But if you know so much more now, how come you still seem like, well, you."

Pinkie snickered. "Who else am I supposed to be? You can't dilute Pinkie with knowledge. You can only add to me. Monosodium glutamate." Another sprinkle of dust entered the mixture as she stoppered it and started shaking it furiously. "My psychology's a little iffy since is only a social science, but I can't see why there'd be a personality disconnect from an influx of knowledge. My foundational life experiences are the same, I just know a bunch of neat trivia about everything now. For example! Did you know that your stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve razor blades?"

"You told me once your family eats rocks."

"And we do! Nothing beats Mother's homemade rock soup, served ice cold on a hot Summer's day. Glycerin base."

Dash grabbed a foal’s sippy cup brimming with gooey clear sludge. "Fun facts are one thing, but there's a pretty big leap between a bunch of fun facts and whatever all this is. What are you making, anyway?"

"Didn't I say? Last one. Just a hint of chlorified tartrate." She poured out her mysterious mixture into a pan and held the final vial of green liquid over it. "This is just basic chemistry, and when you get right down to it chemistry is just cooking with really really fresh and raw ingredients. So when you know what you're doing it's foal's play to make..." She let a single drop of viridian fluid fall into the pan. At the instant of contact, the whole concoction turned a rich brown and swelled up to fill the pan and release a plume of hot steam.

"...instant oven-free brownies!"

Rainbow Dash's mouth watered as the heavenly smell hit her. "Okay. I take it all back. Science Pinkie is best Pinkie."

"And don't you forget it!"
> Chapter 26 - Germination
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was little that Fluttershy cherished more in life than those rare moments when she was able to help usher new life into the world.

There was something so pure and magical about those fleeting moments as a baby animal took its first breath and blinked its eyes for the first time. Something sacred. She considered it a privilege to help when and where she could, even if she was only a small part of the event. No matter whether it was helping a bear through a difficult birth or simply watching over a clutch of eggs as they hatched into little ducklings.

She even had an official midwifing certificate, just in case. Though the opportunity to help with an actual foal had yet to come up.

While there was a simple joy and satisfaction in helping animals with their daily lives—feeding them, tending their wounds, settling disputes—nothing could beat those breathtaking moments of witnessing nature in its purest form.

And while fate had offered her chances to meet and nurture a wide variety of creatures, she never once dreamed she'd be tasked with shepherding something new into the world.

Thus, Fluttershy was understandably stressed.

She paced in nervous circles around her back patio, circling the table at its center. More accurately, she was pacing around the plant pot at its center. Every so often she stepped nearer to check that the soil wasn't too damp or that no clouds had drifted in from the Everfree to block the sun.

Her animal friends had picked up on her odd behavior and gathered around to watch. Most of them had little to no idea what was going on, but even the ones that had merely followed the crowd had a general understanding that a visit to the cottage usually ended in free food, one way or another.

This time was no exception.

“Popcorn! Get your popcorn here! Peanuts! Soft pretzels! Shaven and bearded ice!”

Discord was also present.

Which was… new. And a little bit scary.

As much as she considered the draconequus a friend (though it was still hard to tell just how much he understood or reciprocated the sentiment) she was truthfully still a little bit intimidated by him. It was hard not to be considering he had more magic than Princess Celestia with Rainbow Dash's level of self control.

But it would be rude to ask him to leave. With everything he’d contributed, he had just as much right to be present as she did. Possibly more.

She hadn’t thought much of it when she’d made her request to Discord for a magically modified plundervine seed. It was just a passing thought. An odd feeling of familiarity that she’d acted on in the heat of the moment. It'd been as much of a surprise how easily he'd agreed (and without even asking for some kind of ominously vague favor in return).

He gifted her the seed with no instructions, so she treated it like any other, guided by an instinctual knowledge that she didn’t quite understand but trusted nonetheless. Loose semi-sandy soil. Slightly acidic water. A cloche made from an old glass pastry dish to keep it hot and humid. Plenty of sun and plenty of fertilizer (the same high-magical mix she'd used for her mushrooms at first, but once those started to bloom she switched to infusioning the soil with a baster of liquidized mushroom).

There were no sprouts, no leaves, but even as the pot appeared dead to the world she could tell something was happening magically. Pegasi senses weren't the best at picking up non-weather magic, but there was something distinctly different in the air just around the pot.

So she watered and waited and kept herself busy focusing on other things, like her many animal-related chores and helping Twilight study her magical badges and healing cooking.

Until this morning, when she awoke to a feeling that it was time.

Time for what she wasn’t quite sure, exactly. She knew as well as anyone that plants would grow slowly and steadily. There was nothing particularly special about the day they poked their first shoot through the soil. But magical plants rarely played by the rules and this one was stranger than most after her and Discord's meddling.

Speaking of whom, the draconequus had abandoned his snack hawker get-up and shifted to hovering over the table like an impatient cloud (one which cast no shadow, she noticed).

"Well? Is it time yet? How much longer do I have to wait?"

"Not much longer now, I think," Fluttershy replied for what was probably the fifth or sixth time.

“Ugh. I hate waiting. Why can’t it just grow already like a good little weed?” He spilled from the sky and collapsed into a fainting couch that looked suspiciously like Rarity's. “My kingdom for some bonemeal.”

“Is it really that bad?” she asked. “I mean, don't you already know what will happen? You created the seed and you’ve grown these before.”

“Yes and no. I do know exactly what would happen if I'd planted it.” A kernel of popcorn stuck in his teeth warped into a plunderseed before rapidly sprouting into a familiar blackish-green vine that wrapped around his neck and shoulders. He slurped it up like a string of pasta. “They’re drawn to magic, feed off it, and in turn it shapes their growth. If I’d planted that seed and let it feed off wild Everfree magic, even with the changes I made it’d turn out just like the original crop but with a fancy paint job. I could plant it anywhere in Equestria and tell you exactly how it’d grow.”

The couch fainted, though Discord remained hovering in the air. He bent over backwards until his upside-down gaze met hers. In the short time Fluttershy had known him, she’d never seen him look so focused. “But you’ve added something new to the mix. Something even I can’t predict. Your seed has been germinating and marinating in that strange flavor of mushroom magic you've got and I honestly have no idea what'll happen.” He giggled without a hint of malicious intent. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I saw something really new?”

He blinked and peered closer, leaning in until she could feel his wispy goatee tickle her nose. “Speaking of new, what have we here? There’s something different about you today, isn't there?"

Fluttershy flinched, nearly revealing her terrible secret as she did so. He knew. Of course he knew. He probably had a dozen extra senses she couldn't even imagine. Why had she even thought she'd be able to keep it a secret? It was a wonder her friends hadn't noticed already.

"There was a bit of an accident yesterday," she started. It was so much of an understatement that her composure nearly broke. But she just didn’t have the words to say it. How was she possibly supposed to sum up the immensity of "Twilight used a spell to try and reform the bats stealing Applejack's apples but it backfired and turned me into a monster vampony who hissed and snarled and attacked my friends and even though Twilight reversed the spell I still don't feel quite normal" in a way that would make sense?

"I wouldn't say that. It makes perfect sense to me."

It took a moment for her to connect what he said to what she hadn’t. "Did you just read my mind?"

"Maybe. Or maybe you just have a very expressive face." Discord swished a cape into existence and draped it over one arm like some noble or count. "Though I regret to inform you that what's happened isn't nearly as interesting as you becoming the progenitor of a new race of equine vampires. All Twilight's spell did was supercharge some bat pony genes that were lying dormant."

Fluttershy blinked in surprise. "I'm half bat pony?" That was… something. She knew that there were more pony tribes beyond the three most populous ones, though she didn't know any members personally. There was Princess Luna's Night Guard, of course (though until she came back they'd been little more than myth and rumors themselves for anypony who didn't live near one of their hidden villages), and practically every long-standing family in Ponyville claimed to have at least one ancestor who was some unnamed chero-kirin princess. She was aware of them; they just weren’t something that’d impacted her life directly.

Until now.

Though it begged the question; which side of her family had it come from? Her mom? Her dad? She tried to imagine either of them looking like she had after transforming, with leathery featherless wings and slitted eyes. It just didn't work. Even in her imagination they looked like poorly cast actors in costumes.

Discord's scoff pulled her from her musings. "Half? Hardly. By my measure you're a sixteenth at best. Probably one of your great-grandparents had exotic tastes."

"Ah." What exactly was she supposed to say to that? Thank you? She hadn't even known her great-grandparents. Still, if he was telling the truth... "So you're saying I'm not going to go feral again and rampage through Ponyville, draining apples dry and attacking my friends?"

"Never say never, dearie." He chuckled and tapped a claw on the tip of her nose. "You could do that any given day; anypony could. You just all keep making the boring decision not to."

She sighed in relief as even as she laughed at his probably-a-joke. It was hard to tell sometimes when he was serious. Still, it felt like a great weight had been lifted from her chest. She wasn't secretly still a monster who might turn on her friends at any moment, she just had an unusual bloodline that the spell had brought to light. She could learn to live with that. The cravings weren't that bad anymore and Applejack already gave her the 'friends & family' discount on apples.

Suddenly Discord pressed himself up against her body, the side of his face squishing into hers. "Smile for the camera!"

Surprise made her comply out of reflex, before a sudden eye-searing flash of light blinded her. She gave an involuntary hiss of displeasure.

"Look at that!" He waved a photograph in her face as the spots slowly cleared from her vision. The full 8x10 glossy photo perfectly captured the scene. Their faces smushed together like marshmallows with Discord's exaggerated smirk reaching a little too far around his face. But it was her own startled smile that grabbed her attention. Namely, a single top incisor, sharper and longer than the rest, poking out over her lip. Not nearly as noticeable as Discord's protruding fang, but still a visual reminder of her change. "We're snaggletooth buddies! Oh that's going in the album for sure!"

Fluttershy was in the process of mentally drafting a strongly worded chastisement—one focusing on the importance of personal space, asking permission, and not probably mind-reading your friends—when something in the background of the photo stole the entirety of her attention.

A tiny green shoot pushing its way out of the soil.

"It's happening! We're missing it!"

Discord was at the table in an instant. Literally. Even before Fluttershy finished whipping her head around he was already hovering over it like a mother hen without even his usual snap-and-flash teleport. Fluttershy was there a breath later.

 Her little seedling grew in the way only a magical plant could: fast enough that she could watch it happen. It took all of a minute for a sturdy green stalk to wind and twist its way a foot into the air. Broad spike-tipped leaves unraveled from the sides in mirrored pairs. The very tip plumped and swelled like a bead of water on the end of a string, forming a bulb the size of an apple.

Fluttershy’s wings twitched as the magic around her patio began to twist and shift, the swiftly growing plant drawing it in like water down a storm drain. She watched with bated breath as the bulb split— 

The flower was like none she’d seen before. It barely even resembled the plundervine it descended from. Countless petals were layered so thickly they looked like a solid mass. All their edges lined up so perfectly that the white tips met in a line down the middle.

As she watched, they began to unfurl only to twitch and instead split down the middle. 

The flower had a mouth. 

That actually wasn’t the surprising part. She’d expected the mouth. And the teeth. Fangs, really. All of them. That all felt right and good with the part of her mind that told her how to grow mushrooms and fashion magic accessories. It was the color that threw both her and her power for a loop.

It was pink.

A vibrant pink just a few shades darker than her own mane. It was the smallest detail and yet that was what threw her the most.

“Well that’s not what I expected at all,” she heard Discord mutter. “How marvelous.”

The flower twitched, turned to her, and flexed its petals into what no one could deny was a smile.

“...Priscilla.”

“Pardon?” Discord asked.

“Her name.” Fluttershy nodded as the the rightness of the name seemed to settle into place. “Priscilla Piranha.” 
> Chapter 27 - And They Were Roommates
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Okay, so a diamond, two small fire opals, and a piece of jade makes a round gem with kind of swirly colors and a bit of sparkle. Time for a taste test."

The sound of crunching and chomping filled the still air of the crystal hub along with the scritching of a pencil on paper.

"Mm. This is a nice one. Tasty start. Good crunch. Kind of a fruity undertone. Very smooth flavor."

Shards of a nameless gemstone, the only one like it in the world, rained to the floor as Spike wrote down his thoughts in a little pocket notepad. He chewed for a minute more before grimacing.

"Not the best crumbliness. Gets all weird. Like a mouthful of mulch. Three stars for taste, one for texture."

He grabbed his mug and took a swig of water to wash away the remainder of the offending texture. “What can I add to fix that? What’s a soft crystal? Mica? Could work, if I have any left.”

A bit of rummaging found a stick in the depths of his ingredients box (one of the many quickly made and just as quickly abandoned projects from when Twilight had been testing the differences between her and Dash’s wood skills) and tossed it inside the Horadric Cube along with his gem-with-one-bite-missing and swiped a claw against the squiggly lines that made it start working.

Out of all the weirdness that had happened since Starswirl's spell had turned the world upside down, the Cube was claws down his favorite. Sure, having an unlimited supply of new furniture was neat, for a few days before the novelty wore off and the clutter settled in. And Fluttershy being able to rival Pinkie in dessert making was sweet too. But none of that compared to the crazy stuff the Cube could do.

Not to mention that it was something he could use on his own instead of just watching from the sidelines. Watching his friends perform crazy tricks with weird skills just didn’t have the same appeal of doing something magic on his own. Something like making new gemstones in the dark of night when everyone else was asleep like some kind of alchemist chef. 

It had to be late at night because that was the only time he could be sure no one else was using it. He wasn’t the only one who liked the magic gizmo; that’s why it’d been brought from the Hunter’s Workshop into the main room. Across all the ponies that had joined on to help study and document things, it was easily the most popular mystery to research.

Which was a polite way of saying that everybody loved playing with it.

Oh sure they called it research, but Spike hadn't hatched yesterday. Scientific inquiry could only justify tossing a cupcake into it so many times before it was obvious they just wanted to see it make new flavors. Though when pressed, Minuette had justified herself in a way he absolutely planned on reusing.

'It's only messing around if you don't take notes. If you do, then it's science.'

And he had to admit, she had a point. He'd gotten much better at repeating successful gem recipes after he'd started writing down what worked and what didn't. Midnight improvisational cooking didn't make for a great memory the next morning of exactly what steps he'd taken.

The little lightshow of the Cube’s process faded back and his finished gemstone popped out of the top. He pinched it between two clawtips and held it up to the light.

“Color went a bit grayish,” he narrated, even as his own claw wrote down his words. He wrote better when he was taking dictation. It was a long-ingrained habit. “Round edges got squared-off too.” Crunch. “Crumbliness is better, but it messed up the flavor. Whole thing tastes like an aftertaste even while I’m still chewing. Needs something… with a bit of kick. Do I have any pearls left?” He checked his stash. “One left.” That was disappointing. Pearls had the most incredible salty kick to them, but they were a lot harder to get ahold of than normal gems since he had to get them imported from the seaside. Half a pearl would have to suffice.

He bit the creamy orb in half and tossed it into the Cube, followed by the not-so-tasty rock. A swipe of the claw and the combining process started again.

Of course, no midnight snacking adventure came without temptation. Even as the Cube worked away at making another new and no doubt delicious gem he could feel the itch in the back of his mind, urging him towards the forbidden fruit. The one gem so savory in appearance, so delectable in smell, that he was forbidden from ever eating.

Originite.

And not forbidden without good reason. He'd seen the effects of trying to combine it with things in the Cube, and their resulting craters. He’d listened to the warnings from Rarity's what-am-I-looking-at ability that rarely gave anything more than the bare minimum details yet in this one case explicitly instructed not to eat the originite.

He knew all this and yet... and yet...

It just looked so unbelievably appetizing.

Like a piece of soap shaped like a gooey gummy candy. Intellectually he knew it was dangerous, yet his dragon instincts insisted that there was no such thing as a gemstone that couldn't (or shouldn't) be eaten.

It didn't help either that the box of it was stored just a room away. Only a few steps. He could be there and back before the Cube even finished.

...A quick sniff would be fine, wouldn't it? So long as he didn't actually put it in his mouth. He had that much self-control, at least.





The originite was gone.

Spike knew exactly where it was supposed to be. Second rack from the door, fifteen steps down, first shelf. But instead of a small basket full of crystals, there was just an empty space.

Which meant that someone had been experimenting with them then put them back in the wrong spot.

Again.

He sighed and once again wished that Twilight's Canterlot Crew had as much of a dedication to organization as she did.

Aside from a small bubble of organization that reached a few steps out from the door, most of the Warehouse was a disorganized mess. The dozens of racks had come empty, but the team seemed determined to fill up as much of the gymnasium-sized space as possible.

There were shelves of books and antiques from the Everfree Castle, still waiting to be catalogued and repaired. Boxes of gizmos and gadgets brought from Canterlot to try and measure different magical effects. A whole three aisles near the middle were filled with nothing but stuff made by the Cube that was still waiting for Rarity to find the time to magically identify.

In short, finding anything that wasn't in the small organized section was a real pain. Luckily, in this one case Spike had an advantage. A better-than-pony sense meant he could still smell the originite wherever it'd been moved to.

He'd just begun his search when he nearly jumped out of his scales as the sound of a soft boom echoed through the chamber.

His heart leapt into his throat, as he suddenly and quite vividly remembered that he had no guarantee of privacy here. There were five doors he couldn't control and anybody could just walk right in. Even burglars.

A bright light bursting into being a few aisles down gave him something to focus on. Before his panic could escalate too high, it was cut short by someone else speaking first.

“Who’s there? This is a private facility and I will not hesitate to call the local authorities and have you arrested for trespassing.”

Spike’s heart rate settled down as he followed the source of the light to it’s aisle of origin and tried to put a face to the familiar voice.

“Moondancer?"

The light dimmed enough he could make out the shape of Twilight-but-with-a-weird-manecut and the shelves around her. Shelves that were pretty different from the standard ones. Someone (Moondancer, almost definitely) had sectioned off a small portion of the Warehouse and built a cramped hideaway into the space. Papers and scrolls and books formed a wall around the sides, all easily accessible, with a low table that looked like Rainbow Dash's work set up in the middle. A chest of drawers sat half open, revealing a selection of stationary and a collection of similarly-colored sweaters. Pushed against the back wall was a tangle of blankets and pillows that might charitably be called a bed.

"Spike?" Moondancer asked. "What are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here? I live here. This is my house. What's your excuse?”

Strictly speaking, the whole crystal dimension had been deemed a communal area with no real single owner, but it was really hard for him not to think of it as an extension of the treebrary since Twilight always left her door open and most of his day was spent ferrying supplies and materials through it.

Moondancer allowed her horn to extinguish fully, letting a few crystals placed about her hideaway cast the space in a soft light. She cleared away the remaining surprise from her expression and answered after only a couple false starts. "The common area was too crowded to hold my notes and reference materials. Twilight said I could utilize a portion of the unused space as a personal workspace."

“Even at midnight?”

Moondancer avoided his gaze, looking for all the world like a foal caught on top of a teetering pile of furniture next to the cupboard with the cookie jar. "She said nothing about the permission expiring at a particular time." 

She shifted and not-so-discreetly kicked something under the blanket. Unfortunately, her blind aim was poor and she managed to draw more attention to what looked suspiciously like a takeout box.

“Moondancer,” Spike did his best to not sound too accusatory. "Are you... living here?" he asked. The implied 'in our closet' went unsaid, but understood.

She squirmed beneath his gaze. “Not… technically. I still have my house in Canterlot. There’s just a bit of trouble with some local busybodies kicking up a fuss about it being an ‘eyesore’ and ‘lowering property values’ that brought me the unwanted attention of some local agencies. Once they finish their inspections I’m sure they’ll deem it suitable for equine habitation again. After all, I’ve been living there for years without a problem.”

Spike hadn’t seen her house since he’d moved out of Canterlot, but Twilight had told him enough after she saw it that he couldn’t help but doubt her confidence. Still, even if she had tenuous permission, knowing that somepony was sleeping in their glorified storage room gave him an unsettled feeling. “You know, I’m sure Twilight wouldn’t mind putting you up in the library. We have a spare bed, and you wouldn’t have to sleep in, well…” He gestured around himself.

She straightened up and smoothed any lingering awkwardness out of her voice. "Thank you, but no thank you. I’m quite comfortable with my current setup. I suppose I’ve grown… accustomed to living in compact quarters. And it's not as though I'm merely wasting time here. I've been busy with research."

He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “At midnight,” he repeated.

She nodded. “Researching magical phenomena is not a process that conforms itself to a nine-to-five workday. Experiments take as long as they require and observations should be recorded while they are still fresh." She shrugged. "Besides, this is easier for me since I don't adhere to the standard sleep schedule most ponies use. I find it far more efficient to use the Ubermare variation."

“The what?”

She adjusted her glasses and settled into a pose nearly identical to Twilight’s pre-lecture position. “Most ponies follow a monophasic sleep schedule. Sixteen to eighteen hours of continuous wakefulness, followed by six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. The Ubermare approach is a multiphasic cycle where I take a twenty-minute power nap every four hours.”

“That can’t be healthy,” Spike commented as he tried to grapple with the idea of willingly never getting a good night’s rest, let alone sleeping in on the weekends!

“On the contrary, many famous ponies throughout history have utilized it to great success. Yes, it took some time for my body to adjust, but once it did I’ve seen great benefits. It provides an overall longer active period while still fulfilling my daily needs and making me resistant to unexpected disruptions in the solar-lunar cycle. Over the course of a year it accumulates an extra ninety-one days that would have otherwise been lost. It’s really the most efficient method.”

“Huh. Weird. Sounds like that'd be really hard to make plans around though.”

She gave him a level look. "It's been a long time since I had to concern myself with the schedules of other ponies.”

Spike winced. Right. The recluse thing. He internally berated himself for letting it slip his mind. Still, the whole thing felt kinda weird, even if Twilight had given her permission to basically move in and she had nowhere else to go. "Wait, have you been going out at all or are you straight up in here round the clock?"

"I leave when necessary. To acquire more reference materials or other resources only available in Canterlot."

So, yes, she was living there. Not really ambiguous at all. "That seems kinda... extreme. I know Twilight's excited about figuring all this out, but even she still takes breaks. Are you really learning all that much by being here round the clock?

Moondancer nodded vigorously. “Oh yes. In fact, I've made several discoveries that it's unlikely would have been made otherwise. For example: did you know that the supply of originite is self-replenishing?"

She nodded towards a shelf on her left. Spike noticed several cardboard boxes of the smoky gem, seemingly loosely organized by size and color.

“Once a week, every Tuesday at precisely midnight, the original container will refill to precisely twenty kilograms worth of material. By assuring that the box is completely emptied before that, I've been able to stockpile much more of it than we thought we had access to. We were hesitant to perform research with it before due to the limited supply—”  and also the explosiveness, Spike thought but didn't mention, “—but it seems quantity is much less of a restriction than we originally thought.”

“So as long as we dump the box before midnight, we have an infinite amount?”

“An infinite amount of anything is absurd, but assuming a functionally large quantity then the difference is semantics.” She pulled another box off the shelf, a wooden crate this time. “I've been doing just that during the rare times when the Horadric Cube is not otherwise in use. Refining and condensing the leftover material into a denser, more purified form. There’s a percentage lost in order to fuel the refinement, but it’s a negligible loss.” She picked up a crystal and let it catch the light. It was a much darker shade than the ones he was used to. “It’s astounding how much energy they can hold. If we could find a way to properly harness it… I can hardly imagine the kinds of spells it could power…”

She trailed off with a faraway look in her eye. It was a look Spike was familiar with, just not quite in those colors. He sighed and decided that, even if it felt weird to have a pony living in his closet, it was her choice and really not his problem. He cast his eyes across her work-slash-living-space. If she was going to be a permanent fixture, he might as well help make her “room” the best it could be. The shelves of the Warehouse couldn’t be moved, but there was a lot of furniture in storage he could bring out to help liven the place up. Chairs and a better table, for one. Maybe a cot or at the very least a hammock. Blankets on the bare crystal floor couldn't be comfortable. Some better modular storage for all the junk piled into the shelf-walls around her. 

Peering closer at the vaguely organized mess, something unfamiliar caught his eye.

“Hey, what's that hammer do?”

She blinked a few times to clear whatever fantastic things she'd been imagining. "What hammer?"

He pointed to a shelf near the top of the rack. Nestled between a spare blanket and a pile of scrolls was a hammer that looked like it'd been ripped from the pages of a pulp fantasy novel. The head was nearly as big as he was with a shaft twice as long as he was tall. The whole thing was made of a gray stone-like material save for several golden insignias and decorations. Every inch of it except the striking planes of the head was covered in so many dense carvings and runes that it looked more like an art piece than a functional tool.

"That hammer."

Moondancer's eyes practically popped out of her head. "I didn't- where- how- when did that get there?!

"Maybe it's what caused that boom earlier? There was a similar noise when the originite first showed up."

"But how?! I have five kinds of magical sensors right here—" she gestured to a collection of crystal and brass contraptions on her desk, "—and not one of them picked up anything!"

She grabbed the hammer in her magic and heaved it off the shelf. Almost instantly it ripped itself out of her grip and plunged towards the floor. The table stopped it for a moment before it caved to the weight and the hammer continued on through in a blizzard of dust and splinters.

Spike coughed as the cloud of dust hit him and reeled back a few steps. “Moondancer! Are you okay!?”

“Fascinating!” he heard her through the woody smokescreen, “These runes look just like the ones on the Horadric Cube. I need to document this immediately!”

As the dust cleared Spike was soon able to see again. The unicorn looked unharmed, thankfully, or at least unharmed enough that she wasn’t incapable of taking down notes about the hammer that even now sat in a pile of rubble that had once been her table.

Spike sighed as he realized the inevitability of his situation. Even with their differences in opinion on friendship, Moondancer really was like Twilight in many ways. If he left now, no doubt she'd keep working despite the dangerous mess and eventually either burn herself out or get so distracted as to neglect her crazy sleep schedule and suddenly crash in the middle of something important. It'd be dangerous to leave her alone. He shook his head and cracked his neck. There would be no rest tonight. An assistant's work was never done.
> Chapter 28 - Rarity Shakes Manehattan
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"But I can't!"

"You must!"

"But my research!"

"You have a team now."

"But my own abilities—"

"Are no doubt more thoroughly documented by now than anypony else's. Unless you've suddenly gained the ability to fly?"

"No."

"Control insects with a thought?"

"No."

"Breathe fire?"

"I have a spell for that, actually."

"Twilight."

"Fine. You win, Rarity. I'll take a vacation."

The fashionista grinned in glorious triumph. Victory had been a certainty from the start, it was only a matter of time until she wore Twilight down with her flawless logic. "I'm glad we could come to an agreement. You've been working yourself to the bone with all this research. It's not healthy."

"I've been taking breaks," Twilight protested but the words came out weak.

"Sleep does not count as a break. Nor does writing up research results!" Twilight's mouth clicked shut as Rarity cut off her rebuttal. "What you need—what we all need—is a few days off from all this research. Just a little bit of normality for a change.” 

As normal as things could get when you ran the risk of spontaneously learning new skills at any given moment, but that was beside the point. “Which is why I've arranged a weekend getaway for the six of us at the Manefair Hotel in Manehattan. No research, no experiments. Just six best friends exploring one of the most beautiful cities in Equestria."

"Rarity!" Twilight gasped, "You didn't have to do that."

"I know, but I did!” she tittered. “It was really no trouble at all. I was planning on going anyway for Fashion Week, but the competition portion shouldn't take more than an afternoon or two, so I thought why not splurge and bring everyone along?" She leaned in and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "I even managed to pull a few strings and get us all tickets to Hinny of the Hills!"

Twilight reeled back as though she'd been struck, but with a smile like she'd been kissed. "Hinny of the Hills?! But that show's been sold out for months! Getting tickets is impossible."

"Quite true, but you’ll find that 'sold out' rarely actually means 'full house'. These shows always keep a few seats open just in case a princess or big name celebrity should decide to drop in unexpectedly. Or in this case, a friend of the costume designer who called in a favor."

The wide smile on her face mirrored Twilight’s as she pulled her in close. “Trust me, this is going to be a marvelous trip and you’ll thank me before we’re done. I’ve planned out everything so nothing can go wrong!”





How had it all gone so terribly wrong?

Rarity was unused to the feeling of betrayal. It filled the hotel room like a miasma, thick and cloying, with acerbic flashes of anger and embarrassment. Had she been overly generous? Overly trusting? Perhaps. Had she been naive and let the good-neighborliness of Ponyville color her worldview so much that she failed to recognize that ponies in big cities like Manehattan would be more cutthroat and self-serving than they appeared on their own Bridleway shows? Also perhaps.

She’d been a fool for trusting Suri Polomare of all ponies to keep her word. That was why they hadn’t kept in contact after she’d moved to Manehattan in the first place.

But what hurt worse than the betrayal of her trust was the pain of seeing her hoof spun fabric, the shimmering centerpiece of her entire line, be used in such pedestrian designs. That was a stab to her creative soul worse than the knife in her back. Her fabric deserved to be the show-stopping center of attention; it practically demanded it. While Suri was clearly a competent seamstress, her designs merely followed popular trends and didn't take risks. It rankled to see her prized creation used as little more than a colorful paint job to uplift otherwise mediocre works. Like watching someone put gold leaf on a Hayburger's Double Hayconator with cheese.

The betrayal cut deep. Not just that it came from a mare who'd once been her friend, but a fellow burgeoning fashionista as well. Someone who also knew the struggles of trying to make it in the big leagues without a well-known sponsor. And despite that, Suri had decided that the quickest way to the top was by stepping on every other pony on the same journey.

A small part of her took grim satisfaction knowing that even if Suri managed to win the fashion show using her ill-gotten gains, she had no way to recreate the fabric that had pushed her to victory. Despite that small satisfaction, a much larger part of her just wanted to throw herself onto the hotel bed and bawl her eyes out.

Alas, she'd already been doing that for ten minutes now and it hadn't accomplished much more than make her friends worry and ruin her mascara.

"This can't be legal, right?" Pinkie asked, pacing with a worried energy that had no outlet. "You can tell whoever's running things and they'll disqualify her."

Rarity sighed, sat herself up, and steadied voice with a deep breath. "Perfectly legal, I'm afraid. It's shameless and dishonest and goes against the very spirit of fashion week, but not strictly against contest rules."

"And it's not against the rules to use your dresses with the same fabric, but if ya do they might think yer copyin' her." Applejack nodded in sympathy. "It ain't fair, but it makes sense. Same as if Ah went to a rodeo show and did all the same tricks as the fella before me." She crossed the room and pulled Rarity to her hooves. "So Ah reckon you oughta get yourself some new tricks."

Rarity blinked. "I think you've lost me in the metaphor."

"Ah'm sayin’ you gotta make some new dresses. There's still time, ain't there?"

Rarity snorted. It wasn't ladylike, but she couldn't help it. It was just so ridiculous she had to laugh. "Make some more? Just like that? You think it’s that easy?” She laughed again, the sound dry and humorless. “It’s impossible! Simply impossible! Even if a bolt of inspiration for a new line was to hit me out of the blue right this minute, I don’t have any tools—”

“Wait,” Rainbow Dash interrupted, “you brought, like, a hundred bags on this trip and you're telling me none of them have emergency fashion supplies or something?”

Rarity shot her a glare for interrupting her building rant, but it lost some of its heat as she realized she was right. “I suppose I do have some basic tools. A few scissors, some pins, a basic kit for emergency repairs.” A small spark of hope started to rise in her chest before reality crushed it. “But it’s not enough. I don’t have my sewing machine, my loom, any of my other equipment. I know I’ve been tipping generously on this trip but I don’t have the kind of budget to go out and buy a new professional sewing machine at the drop of a hat.”

“Actually… hm…” Twilight’s muzzle scrunched in deep thought as she pulled out a quill and began to quickly write something on a notepad. "It may be a bit outmoded, but if we have enough scrap wood in storage I should be able to put together a simple loom." She paused for a moment as her eyes crossed, her focus no doubt shifting inward to however her woodworking ability expressed itself in her mind. "Yes. Yes, I definitely can. It's just a series of levers working in harmony."

"And I can rig up a sewing machine!" Pinkie offered eagerly. "It'll be a piece of cake thanks to my PhD in mechanical engineering."

Twilight’s quill froze and she frowned. "What? You don’t— oh right, you are as of recently.” She shook her head. “Pinkie, even if you have the equivalent knowledge of a doctorate, you can't just say you have one when you don't."

Pinkie shrugged. "Eh, tomato, tomahto, it's close enough. But a sewing machine's super simple anyway. You've got the uppy-downy bit where the needle goes, a sideways loopy-loop with the bobbin, a motor to run it, and a pedal to control it." She hopped backwards and landed in an armchair, hoof stroking her chin in a classic thinker pose. "But I'll need some more parts than we have here and I don't know where in the world I'd be able to buy a bicycle chain and an electric blender this time of day."

"Bit Pincher's Thrift and Vintage, seven blocks and some that way."

All eyes turned to Rainbow Dash. "What?" she asked. "One of my things guides me the best place to find materials I'm looking for. If you want a chain and a blender, that’s where you can get it. We passed it on the walk earlier." She twitched an ear. "You could also get them three blocks south, but the feeling's not as strong. I think maybe it's more expensive there."

That spark was back, burning in her chest. A persistent feeling of… possibility. But even if inspiration came, there was still one major hurdle to cross.

“Even if I had all the tools in the world, I don’t have the material. It took me weeks to get the Horadric Cube to make a fabric that was stretchy but not clingy, light but not flimsy, shimmering but not gaudy. Not to mention getting all that and the color too…”

Twilight gave her a sideways look. "You used a barely-understood magical artifact... to make better fabric?"

Rainbow Dash snorted. "It's not like we don't all use it for weird stuff all the time. Sometimes I throw all my garbage and junk mail in it just to see what happens."

"A couple of times I used it to make lunch," Fluttershy admitted.

"I use it to make change." Pinkie pulled her bitpurse out of her mane and opened it to reveal a number of odd-looking coins.

Almost on reflex, Rarity activated her analysis power. She didn't need to say anything to trigger it, but she'd found that using a keyword helped her focus. "Identify."



<<Replica Half-Bit Coins>>
Coins created by the Horadric Cube in the style of Equestrian legal tender, but containing exactly half the gold content. Not recognized by the Royal Committee of Coins and Stamps.



She vanished the informational box with a flicker of thought. "Pinkie, that's literally counterfeiting."

The smile dropped off the party mare's face. "Oh. Uh..." The bag vanished back into her mane as she mustered up a sheepish smile. "I may have a few purchases I need to take back when we get home."

“Pinkie's minor felonies aside,” Spike said, “even if you can’t use some fancy magic fabric, does that really matter? You never needed it before. Not to stock the boutique, not to qualify for this contest, not to start your own brand.” He stomped his foot and raised his voice as it filled with confidence. “Suri whatshername could use the fanciest fabric in the world and you could still make a better dress out of some doilies and a stained tablecloth. You don’t need fancy fabric when you’ve got raw talent! And the Warehouse is full of junk; there’s gotta be some kind of fabric you can use in there somewhere.”

With every word of encouragement he spoke, Rarity could feel the spark inside her surge and grow like an ember before a bellows. Doubt and defeatism shriveled before it. Her friends’ suggestions… had real potential. What had mere minutes ago felt impossible now seemed—dare she even think it?—quite doable. Reasonable, even. On her own, there was no way she could design, draft, and sew a half dozen new dresses in a single night, but with all of her friends working together, supported by the strength of their unique talents, it might just be possible. It’d be difficult—a rush job if ever there was one—but not nearly as impossible as she’d feared. 

Besides, surely if Suri could sew a new line overnight, she could too.

As her confidence swelled, she took a moment to gather herself. Her friends, eager to help though they were, had no experience when it came to making clothes. They'd need a steady and experienced hoof at the helm to guide them in what to do.

She cleared her throat to gather their attention and answered their enthusiasm with a smile. "Alright, you've convinced me. I'll lose nothing for trying so let's show Suri ‘May-she-forever-wear-polyester” Polomare that I am not a mare to be trifled with!" A cheer went up at her declaration, raising spirits even further. “First things first, Pinkie... oh. She's already gone."

"Right out the window," Applejack chuckled.

"She's got the right idea. There's no time to waste." Rarity reached into her mane, as she'd seen Pinkie do many times before and felt for something that wasn’t there. She didn't question how the trick worked but she soon felt a Key in her hoof. "I think this hotel room's going to be a little small, so let's expand our operations."

Luckily, the en suite bathroom had a keyhole that soon opened into the familiar crystal room of the Hub.

A room which was, much to their surprise, occupied.

"Oh... hello," Moondancer said awkwardly as a noodle fell off her chopsticks and landed back in her cup ramen with a quiet plop. "I thought you said you wouldn't be back until Monday."





Things started moving quickly after that. Rarity soon found that the first step to getting started was sorting out who could properly do what. It’d be silly to ask somepony who’d never held a needle in their life to try and stitch vital pieces together. 

The pre-sewing prep work was easy to parcel out. Her friends knew their unique abilities well enough to make it obvious who should do what to get things started, which left Rarity to handle the most daunting task alone: waiting for her muse to make an appearance.

For even if she had tools and material, it’d all be for naught without inspiration.

After nearly ten stressful minutes of thinking, it finally arrived in the form of Applejack,

"Found you some fabric," she announced as she trotted out of the warehouse with a long bolt of something blue balanced on her head. "It ain’t in the best shape, but there’s a lot so Ah reckon you can cut around the worst of it.”



<<Threadbare Lunar Tapestry>>
A tapestry depicting the iconography of Princess Luna that once hung in the halls of the Palace of the Two Sisters. Time and neglect has rendered it frayed and worn to the point of uselessness.



Like a monsoon coming to revive a parched desert, her mind flooded with new ideas. A few ponies had tested the fashionable waters with looks inspired by Princess Luna’s return, but no one had done a line with a historical twist to it! It was brilliant! Daring! Dare she say genius even!

…And with only a small, niggling moral quandary.
On one hoof, the tapestry was a priceless historic artifact. On the other, her own objective analysis confirmed that it was a stiff breeze away from becoming a pile of loose rags and thread. On the third hoof... she did have another two or three more in storage. If anything, being recycled as fashion would expose more ponies to it than if it remained a dusty artifact.

Three hooves beat one.

'I'm sure Princess Luna will forgive me.' Rarity thought as she committed herself to the plan. 

"You'll need to divide that into smaller portions if you plan on using the Horadric Cube to repair it." Moondancer's voice brought Rarity out of her musings. The bespectacled unicorn held a marked length of string against the tapestry and nodded. "Eight pieces will suffice. If you'll carry it over, I'll measure out the exact quantity of originite needed to fuel the alchemical transmutation without overcharging and damaging the material.

"You're going to help?" Rarity asked, surprised. After the initial surprise, she’d rather forgotten that the mare was even there. She was just so… forgettable.

Moondancer rolled her eyes. "Even I can grasp the social faux pas of standing in the corner doing nothing while everyone else is collaborating." She adjusted her glasses. "Besides, this is a novel chance to study the interaction between several of your esoteric abilities."

“Alright then. I’m glad to have your help.” Moondancer nodded and guided Applejack towards the Hunter’s Workshop where the Cube once again resided, leaving Rarity alone again at the Hub’s crystal table. “How's that sewing machine coming along, Pinkie?"

Pinkie poked her head out of the door that led to the hotel room, a splotch of oily grease on her muzzle. “Super-duper! It’s taking a teensy bit longer than I thought. Dashie got me a whole bike to use, so it’s gonna be a ten-speed sewing machine!”

As if summoned, the door with Rainbow Dash's cutie mark glowed briefly before it opened to reveal the mare herself. She flew in blindly, her forelegs laden with a precarious pile of two by fours.

"Got the loom wood!" she yelled, “Where do you want it?"

"In here!" Twilight called from the hotel door. "I've transcribed a step-by-step guide for you to follow and Pinkie’s provided all the tools you’ll need."

"Wait, I'm building it now? I thought you were."

"I can make a perfect plan, but you're literally ten times faster than me."

"Heh. Can’t argue with that!"
Minutes and hours flowed into each other as Rarity fell into a familiar rhythm of creation, her tempo only disturbed when she had to redirect somepony to a new task or request some specific tool or material.

“Buttons!” Rarity cried as the vision in her mind clashed with the limits of reality. “What do we have for buttons?!”

“I think Fluttershy left a box of her badges in here somewhere,” Rainbow Dash yelled from the warehouse.

“Too big and too irregular! I need small and round!”

“I’ve got a chest of gems!” Spike offered. “Some of them have, uh, a few bites missing, but you can use whatever you need!”

She considered it, the image in her head twisting to visualize gems instead of gold. With the right colors, it could work. “Excellent! Bring me any pea-sized ones you have in white, black, and dark green as well as the Blood Gem setting tools from the other room.”

They weren’t exactly a well-oiled machine, but every pony played their part and pulled their weight, driven by the desire to help their friend. Pinkie cobbled together makeshift machines as Rainbow Dash brought spare parts from wherever her power directed her to get them. Applejack and Moondancer worked the Cube to turn junk into raw materials and raw materials into high quality materials (their hotel bill growing steadily as the sheets and curtains were sacrificed to the furnace of creation to become extra thread and lining fabric). Twilight cut and pinned and performed a dozen other simple but time-consuming tasks with her prodigious multitasking telekinesis while Spike kept track of which cuts went with which project. And Fluttershy…

A door opened into the Hub, the sound of a busy hotel kitchen coming through. “Snack break!” she sang out. “Time for a rest to restore your energy. I know it’s not much, but I’ve brought Spaghetti, Yoshi Cookies, and Special Shakes!”

Work quickly came to a halt as everyone gathered for the makeshift meal. Everyone, that is, except Rarity.

“Rares, come take a break!” Rainbow Dash called into the other room. “Food’s here!”

“I can’t.” The reply was more than a little terse as she continued to sew at a furious pace, the needle flashing like silver lightning in her grip. “I’m right in the middle of a very tricky stitch and I still have to cut dresses four and five and number three needs its lace redone and I’m running out of time!”

"Take a cookie," Fluttershy insisted, suddenly by her side and practically shoving the treat in her mouth. "Please. It'll help."

Rarity tried to protest through a mouthful of crumbs, but even as she did she felt a little of the stress disappear. All the little aches and pains that had started to accumulate from meticulous rushed work faded away and in seconds she felt as energized as if she's just awoken from a lovely nap. "Oh. I do feel better. Thank you."

“You’re welcome. You're not you when you're hungry.”

“But I am still running out of time. It’s nearly nine o’clock already!”

“Didn’t we have somethin’ we were supposed to do at nine?” Applejack asked through a mouthful of spaghetti.

Twilight gasped and she leapt out of her seat. “Hinny of the Hills! The show starts in less than fifteen minutes! If we run, we might just be able to make it!”

Panic welled up from the pit of Rarity’s stomach. She was making progress faster than she’d ever made before, but it wasn’t enough. She needed all hooves on deck to get it done; even if they just handled the simple details while she managed the complex work. A part of her also languished over missing the chance to see the hottest show on Bridleway, but even if all her friends went and abandoned her to see the show she’d have no choice but to keep working if she wanted any chance at salvaging her entry.

Fluttershy must have seen something of that fear in her eyes as she quickly spoke up. “Um, I might have an idea.” She half-flinched as all eyes turned to her. “I may be remembering wrong but… where are our seats in the theater?”

Rarity didn’t need to check the tickets to know. She’d only gotten the best. “It’s balcony seating. A private box.”

“Then I think I have a solution.”





The sewing machine—if one was feeling generous enough to count Pinkie’s monstrosity as such—was ugly. It was a piece of junk that took up a whole table and looked like it might fall apart at any moment. Rarity could swear some pieces were literally held together with chewing gum and paperclips.
 
It was... honestly just as good a sewing machine as the one back in the boutique. Even better in some ways. Who could have imagined that controlling its speed with the gear selector from a multi-speed bike would work so fluidly? Despite looking like a trainwreck, it laid down perfect stitches like a top-of-the-line high speed luxury liner.

The cat-like purring of its motor made a soothing backdrop to the chorus of impassioned singing and instruments that blasted through the door to her left. If she leaned back and craned her neck, she even had a decent view of the stage.

The view was briefly interrupted as Rainbow Dash passed through the barrier Twilight had cast that let the sound of music flow in but blocked the noise of machinery from escaping out.

"Intermission?"

"Nah, just a mushy love song. Need any help for the next five minutes?"

"Of course. My silver thread's almost run out."

"Got it." Dash sat herself down at the spinning wheel and brought it up to speed, her hooves and the wheel a blur as she worked six or seven times faster than any mortal pony. So fast it should have torn the wooden mechanism apart, and yet it didn't. "How's it coming? You gonna make it in time?"

"My presentation is going to be fueled more by coffee and Fluttershy's restoratives than sleep, but I'm on schedule.” She chuckled. “If I’m lucky, I might even get an hour’s rest when all is said and done.”

She eyed Dash with a glint in her eye that nearly made pegasus lose control of her spinning wheel. “Speaking of which, after this is all over you and I are going to have a long overdue discussion about your magical ability to detect sales. And we won’t be needing Twilight’s help to test it thoroughly.”

Rainbow Dash shuddered as she felt a terrible premonition of doom wash over her.





Rarity sagged as she cut and tied off the last dangling thread. “And… finished!”

She’d done it. 

Six dresses. Designed, drafted, crafted, and completed in under a day. Her nerves felt like a razor-thin wire ready to snap and her head was filled with cotton batting, but the great work was complete.

Now all she had to do was get them delivered to the contest hall and rehearse her spiel about their design and inspiration.

…a monologue she needed to rewrite from scratch now since her prepared speech was centrally focused on her old fabric.

She glanced to the window where the sun was just beginning to peek between the skyscrapers and turn the silver buildings golden-orange, then towards the pile of scrap fabric where all her assistants had, one-by-one, succumbed to exhaustion and instinctively collapsed into a protective cuddle.

The speech could wait. Inspiration always struck hotter in the heat of the moment. She ambled over to the pile and found a nook between Applejack and Fluttershy. Just a moment’s repose to refresh herself. Ten minutes, no more. Certainly less than an hour…

As she dozed off, she almost entirely missed the tingling sensation of some new ability arriving, but the feeling soon passed as she slipped away into the land of dreams.





"The inspiration for this line comes from courtwear in the late-unification era. It was a turbulent time in history rife with social and political change; something I believe we can see reflected in society today. As keen-eyed observers will note, the palette is a direct homage to Princess Luna, who herself acts as a bridge across history, connecting the past to the present much as these modernizations of antique styles do."

Soft applause from the panelists and judges, timed so their claps wouldn't be lost beneath the steady pulsing beat of the runway music. Some louder and less-polite clapping came from her friends in the audience (who all looked as tired as she felt but lacked the makeup skills to mask it). Their enthusiasm buoyed her spirits beyond even the approving noises of the panel.

It was a fine speech. Doubly so for having been partially thrown together in the last hour during pre-show set-up (the larger part being made up on the spot). It was just the sort of pseudo-philosophical fluff that high-level fashion moguls loved to hear to justify reviving an old-fashioned style with a daring modern cut.

And it'd remain impressive so long as nopony pointed out her bluff. While the fabric was genuinely a thousand years old, records from that long ago were sparse and records of their fashion sense even rarer. So unless one of the princesses who’d lived through it decided to call her out for historical inaccuracy... who was to say that ponies a thousand years ago didn't use the same patterns on both their tapestries and their dresses? 

But one could forgive a few creative liberties with history when the models looked absolutely gorgeous in her creations as they strutted down the runway.

Blue and black was the central theme of the line, with accents in silver and dark green. Bodices that clung to the chest with exaggerated shoulders with sweeping lines and wide panels to emphasize the intricate embroidery that covered every square inch. Decorative buttons twinkled in the spotlights like stars in the night sky to draw the eye exactly where she wanted it to go.

Were high collars out of fashion? Only until some daring seamstress brought them back!

The judges seemed to agree, if their hushed conversations were any indication.

Minutes or hours later (how funny time became where your veins pumped coffee instead of blood) she found herself backstage with the other designers as Prim Hemline and the rest of the judging panel made their deliberations.

The air was thick with tension, though one mare in particular seemed unconcerned with it all.

"You all can just go home you know, m'kay?" Suri Polomare said with the kind of confidence usually reserved for ponies who already had a medal around their necks. "It's pretty obvious who they're gonna pick so you might as well all leave now and save yourselves the heartbreak."

No one moved (aside from the squirming of the mare's own assistant, Coco Pommel; a nervous waif of a pony who looked like she could give Fluttershy a run for her money in a hide-behind-your-mane contest). 

"As for you," Suri turned her knife-like gaze onto Rarity. "I don't know what kind of trick you were trying to pull, but it won't work."

“Trick?” she asked. “What trick?”

“Don’t try to feign ignorance, the genuine article suits you better. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Baiting me with that fabric then pulling out a whole new line of dresses?” She laughed, a high and cruel noise that turned into a snort halfway through. “A real amateur’s attempt to play the game.”

Rarity ignored the barb. “I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about. Perhaps I was merely stuck with a bolt of inspiration that I simply had to bring to life immediately.”

“Puh-lease. Six dresses from scratch, in one night? Impossible. You had those prepared beforehand. Just admit it, m'kay?”

“No tricks here. Everything I put on that catwalk was made in the past twenty-four hours. Just the product of a long night, a lot of coffee, and a few wonderful friends who graciously gave up their vacation to lend me a helping hoof.”

Coco glanced up with an odd look of surprise in her eyes as Suri snorted. "Ahuh. ‘Friends’. Unpaid interns, more like. I should have guessed.”

“Certainly not!” Rarity snapped. Accusing her of subterfuge was one thing, but to insult her friends was a step too far. “I was treating them to a well-deserved holiday when they saw I needed help and offered to aid in any way they could. I couldn’t have done it without them and I couldn’t ask for more generous friends.”

Despite her stirring speech, Suri’s only response was to smirk. “Wow. So that’s how low you’re willing to scrape, huh? Can't make dresses on your own, can't even get proper trained help.” She tittered (which once more turned into a snort that got stuck in her throat) before heading towards the door. “I’ll make sure to wave at you from the podium when Prim hands me the grand prize. Coco! Follow!”

She exited swiftly, her assistant stealing apologetic glances back with every few steps as she followed behind.

“I wouldn’t underestimate my friends’ abilities,” Rarity murmured to the Suri-shaped hole in the atmosphere as the other contestants quietly began to converse with one another. “They may not be classically trained, but they still bring more talent to the designing table than you can possibly imagine.”





Rarity slept soundly on the train ride back to Ponyville. The complimentary five-star restaurant luncheon in her belly made for an excellent soporific, as did the comforting weight of her pocket rolodex now heavy with the personal contact information for five of the biggest names in fashion (and one shy newcomer who was cautiously interested in new employment) .

And while the giant novelty check didn't make an ideal blanket, she wasn’t about to complain.
> Chapter 29 - Error 404: Fundamentals Not Found
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"This is amazing!" Twilight gushed as she flicked through the folders of the first filing cabinet like a granny searching for a lost recipe card.

"Astounding!" Moondancer echoed as she perused the offerings of the third cabinet out of ten that had taken up residence in the corner of the Hunter's Workshop. The folders bulged with tens, dozens, hundreds of blueprints for strange and fantastical devices the mere names of which sent thrills down the spines of the two unicorns.

"Quinjet Engine VTOL Mounting Gimbal Mark Six!

"Palm Repulsor Version 2.0.3!"

"AI Natural Voice Synthesizer!"

"Augmented Reality Visual Interface Lenses!"

"Iron Man Armor Arctic Variant Mark 7"

"Machete Self-Guided Missile Detonator!"

"I have no idea what that means!"

"Me neither!"

A moment of awkward silence filled the room as they both stopped, hovering blueprints freezing in the air.

"You don't understand these diagrams?" Twilight asked, holding up Jet Boot Mark 5 Fuel Consumption Modulator Circuit. "I thought these might be some kind of obscure spell matrix."

"Not that I've ever seen. Most of these terms are unknown to me. Three point three V could be a measurement of vis, but it's an antiquated standard for measuring magical power. I can scarcely speculate what ten thousand Omegas might represent. Necrotic magic?" She shook her head. "I presumed you had been granted knowledge along with the documents and would instruct me how to interpret it, similar to your 'wizard tower' rune language."

"Not this time. I'll ask the girls, see if any of them were granted understanding, but this is beyond me." Twilight slid the blueprint back into its folder before selecting one at random from another drawer. The blocky white text of the header declared it to be the design for a JARVIS Neural Net V0.1 and the thick stack of papers accordioned out into a single massively long page. "This one looks more like a verbal spell but it's all written in some incomprehensible shorthoof with a totally alien grammar!"
 
Moondancer picked up the dropped portion and read a few meters ahead. "Or maybe it's just a foreign poem. That makes about as much sense as filing cabinets filled with blueprints appearing out of thin air."

"The Cube appeared out of thin air," Twilight reminded her. "As does the originite."

"And I find those mysteries just as frustrating." She straightened the pages and slipped them back into the cabinet before closing the drawer. "At least these use standard Equestrian numerals. I can't imagine how much harder deciphering them would be if I had to account for a new base system and symbology as well." A fierce grin split her face. "This just makes it a challenge instead of totally incomprehensible. When-"

She was interrupted by the chime of a wind-up alarm clock. "Ah. Unfortunate. Time for my rest cycle. You'll get started and I'll return in twenty minutes?"

Twilight shook her head. "I would, but I have plans today. I promised Applejack a few weeks ago I'd make her a bat'leth but I kept putting it off and getting distracted with new research."

Moondancer yawned. Already her eyes seemed to struggle to stay open. "I... see." She nodded and stumbled towards the corner of the room that she and Spike had remodeled into a livable space. "Good... night, Twilight."

"It's ten in the morning."

"The term is... still socially applicable even- even if tempora...lly inaccurate..." Her words trailed off between jaw-cracking yawns and she was out like a light the moment she collapsed atop her bed.

Twilight left the room discreetly, a few blueprints clutched in her magic to ask her other friends about.
> Chapter 30 - The Icy Grip of Bureaucracy
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The sound of heavy knocking on her front door rang through Fluttershy's cottage like the peals of a clock tower bell and sent echoes of fear resounding through her psyche.

There was a reason she'd bought a house at the very edge of town, away from all the main roads, and it wasn't for the scenic view.

She stumbled over herself as the knock came again, heavy with ill-intent.

Probably ill-intent. Nothing good ever came from unexpected guests.

Only two kinds of ponies ever came to visit this far away from Ponyville: friends and strangers. Her friends all knew to do a quick knock then clearly announce themselves. Strangers just knocked and knocked and knocked, offering no clues as to the pony behind the door and no respite from her mounting fear over finding out.

She sidestepped around a bag of animal feed and tried not to let the darker side of her imagination run away from her. Who could it be? A freelance contractor, here to persuade her that her roof was in dire need of repair and it'd cost her hundreds of bits she didn't have? The Manehattan police, come to take her away for not tipping enough at that carrot-dog cart? The postmaster general, here to inform her that, due to a clerical error, no birthday or Hearth's Warming cards she'd ever sent had ever made it to their destination?!

She could feel herself starting to get lightheaded and quickly reached into her mane to tap the Feelin' Finer badge she wore almost constantly these days. As a Cube-improved version of the Feeling Fine badge, the smiley-face-adorned piece of metal and plastic not only protected her from confusion, dizziness, and poison, but dealt with her anxiety too.

A small (mostly anxiety-fueled) part of her fretted that a therapist might declare a button that instantly drained her worries away to be a dangerous and unhealthy coping mechanism... but she'd never had the courage to visit one in person, and the option to silence that voice was just a quick tap away.

A sense of calm spread through her like the warmth from a thick blanket as she took a deep breath and blew the stress out. It probably wasn't nearly as bad as she feared. Almost definitely just a tourist who got lost and wanted directions back to Ponyville.

She reached the door without further incident, but nearly tripped over the last step as an extra-enthusiastic knock synced perfectly with a magical tingle in her wings. She waited with bated breath as the feeling grew and grew... then burst apart, leaving behind a strong impression of... gardening?... but little else. She didn’t feel any different. No new skills or knowledge as far as she could tell. No doubt the blessing had continued on past her to bestow itself on somepony else, just like it had for the last half dozen gifts. She was fine with that: her mushroom-growing, magical-badge-making, medicinal-cooking gift was more than enough strangeness for her, thank you very much.

Another knock pulled her back to the present. There was still a stranger to deal with. Tapping Feeling Finer once more for good luck (even though it was still on cooldown) she composed herself and opened the door.

"Good afternoon." He was a middle-aged stallion in autumnal colors with a flawless goatee that distracted from his prematurely receding mane. He carried a briefcase under one wing while the other dabbed a thin sheen of sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. "I'm looking for the residence of Miss Flutter Shy. Is she in?"

"I'm her. I-I mean, I'm me. I mean— yes. I am. Fluttershy. That is."

He smiled in a way that softened the lines of his face and made her feel even more embarrassed over her stumbled introduction. "Ah, very good, very good. My name is Wolfsbane and I'm here on behalf of the Equestrian Bureau for the Management of Magical Creatures."

He leafed through the papers in his briefcase as Fluttershy's smile grew brittle. On her list of 'worst ponies to show up at her door', government officials ranked worryingly high, right up there with pushy salesponies and aggressive survey takers. Government ponies almost always meant bad news, like someone died or she filed her taxes wrong or was being sued. The one good thing about them was that they were usually very busy, so they'd say their piece and leave quickly.

"As I understand the situation, a few weeks ago you filed paperwork with the National Registry of Exotic Pets to register a new creature under your care. Does this sound familiar?"

"Oh! You're here about Priscilla!" She brightened as her good mood returned for a moment before a new cloud of doubt and anxiety cast a shadow over it. "Did- Did I fill out something wrong? I went over it three times before I mailed it in!"

Wolfsbane chuckled. "No, no. Quite the opposite, in fact. They tell me it was one of the most comprehensive reports they ever received, better than what some veterinarians send in. It would have been approved right away if it weren't for one irregularity." He pulled out a paper that she recognized as part of her application. "Under 'Species' you selected 'New'. That’s something of a specialized case which led to your file getting transferred to the EBMMC, and eventually worked its way to my department, Registration of New Magical Creatures."

“So I need… more paperwork?”

He grinned ruefully and tapped his briefcase. “More indeed. But I’ve brought the forms with me so we can get this done and settled today. Do you mind if I come in? This will probably take awhile." He leaned in closer and she could smell his woody aftershave as his eyes twinkled with interest. "And, just between you and me, after skimming your application I'm just dying to observe this new pet of yours in person. Such a fascinating lifeform.”

Fluttershy hesitated but a moment before stepping aside and letting him in. Though caution warned her about letting a stranger inside, she knew a fellow animal lover when she met one. This stallion was a kindred spirit.

The next two hours were spent in spirited discussion over tea and cookies. They touched on everything from Priscilla's diet (omnivorous with a sweet tooth for magically rich plants), to the steps she'd taken in cultivating her, to the hungry flower’s relationship with the other animals. All of which Wolfsbane dutifully recorded into the hundreds of little empty boxes on his endless pile of forms. After a time, the flower herself even made an appearance after finishing up her midday sun-nap.

“Marvelous.” Wolfsbane smiled as he stroked Priscilla’s lip petals, the plant preening under his ministrations. “I haven't seen a specimen of sentient flora this well-behaved since Professor Jackal out of Mumbray University tamed a wild Tiger Lily twenty years ago, and he needed a whole parasprite breeding program to keep it sated!”

He pulled his hoof back and straightened the last few pages of forms they’d yet to complete. “We’ve just a few more minor formalities left and we'll be done. You've chosen a scientific name for it?”

Fluttershy shook her head. “I haven’t. Do I need to come up with one right now?”

He made a note on his page and waved her off. “It's not a problem. The new edition of the official registry won't be published for another six months, so unless you plan to appear at a scientific conference before then, you should be fine. I'll leave a form you can mail in at your leisure.”

Fluttershy relaxed back into her chair and took a sip of her cooled tea. All in all, the visit had not been nearly as bad as she'd feared.

“Now all I need is the reference number for the Novel Animal Synergy Project application you filed with the Guild of Alchemists and Life Mages before you began this endeavor, as well as your Life Alchemist registration number and we're all set.”

She froze as the tea turned to vinegar in her mouth. “Project application?” The words felt like sand on her tongue.

He frowned for the first time since he’d arrived. “You haven't filed your project details with the Guild yet?” He tutted and started searching his briefcase for something. “Sloppy, very sloppy, but you can technically file later if this is an ongoing project. Still, I'm going to need to see your life alchemist license to verify you're qualified for this kind of work."

She paled. “My what.”

“Registration number. Should be on the bottom of your ID card. Unless you have the older edition where they printed them down the side.” He looked up and noticed her frozen form. “Fluttershy?”

“I... don't have one of those.”

His frown deepened, furrowing lines into his brow. “You're unlicensed? That's... going to be problematic. Bad, but not... We can still work around this." He flipped one of his pages over to the blank side and started reinking his quill. "There’ll be some fees, but if you have your diploma handy, I can use the information there to backdate you a license.”

"M-My diploma?"

"From wherever you got your degree in magical biology. Manehattan University's School of Arcanobiology? Fillydelphia Polytechnic? CSGU? Probably not the latter; even these days they rarely accept non-unicorns." He glanced up expectantly only to see her shuddering in place.

"I have a certificate of competence from the National Association of Pet Shelters and Animal Sanctuaries?”

Wolfsbane dropped his quill, leaving a jagged slash of an ink stain across the pristine paper. "Fluttershy, am I to understand that you went about creating a new form of life, not only unlicensed and unaccredited, but also entirely untrained?"

"I'm self-taught?" She offered meekly, but quailed under his hard stare. "Y-yes. That's about right."

The silence was overbearing. The cuckoo clock in the other room sounded as loud as his knocking hard earlier, with each tick-tock counting down the seconds to her doom .

Wolfsbane blinked several times as his face twisted between emotions. Eventually he settled on a pained expression as he groaned and massaged his temples. 

“This… is not good, Miss Fluttershy.” The lighthearted joviality she’d gotten used to was gone from his voice. He’d even added the formal ‘Miss’ back to her name. “As much as I can acknowledge the remarkable work you’ve done with your creation—” Even Priscilla seemed to detect the change in mood and held somberly still “—in creating her you’ve broken no shortage of statutes, rules, and regulations. Violations I have an obligation to report.”

He sat up and looked her in the eye. “But you seem like a sweet filly and this is transparently an egregious case of overenthusiasm and amateurish ignorance, so I'm going to do you a favor. Normally, I'd write a report of these violations and mail it to the Guild to work its way through their bureaucracy. What I'm going to do for you is send it directly to a friend of mine who works there along with a personal note explaining the situation. He's a bit of an eccentric, but that can work in your favor. He’ll come down in person to verify the situation and that’ll be your chance. If you can catch his interest with something really unique and novel—be it Priscilla... or something else—he has enough seniority and political sway to make all your problems go away.”

“He can?” It was as much a response as she could muster, given she was still in shock from trying to grasp just how much trouble she was in.

Wolfsbane nodded as he gathered his remaining papers and snapped his briefcase shut. “He can turn playing Faust without a license into merely playing Faust without filing proper paperwork. If you can get him on your side, that is. You'll still have to pay for all the appropriate licenses and registrations, of course, but he'll be able to lean on the right ponies to make them retroactive and hoofwave away any jail time.”

“J-jail time?!"

He paused as he stood and gave her a look that could have been carved from stone. “The creation of new creatures is a very serious business, Miss Fluttershy. Do you know what happens when you let any untrained dilettante play Dr. Friesianstein with wildlife?" He stomped his hoof so hard the empty teacups rattled on their saucers. "Bugbears. You get Bugbears. Two hundred years since the queen was exterminated and we're still finding straggler drones hiding in dark corners.”

He recomposed himself and offered her a weak smile. “Sorry. Bad memories.” He pulled out a business card and tossed it onto the table as he made for the door. “I hope this turn of events hasn’t soured your opinion of me too much. You’re clearly a natural talent to have such a success with no training, and I’d love to keep in touch. Get back to me after you sort out your legality issues with the Guild and we'll get your creation registered. If they let you keep her, of course.”

As he pulled the door shut behind him, a voice which sounded very much like Fluttershy’s but not quite from the right direction called out: “Those license and registration fees you mentioned, how much should we be expecting to pony up?”

He paused at the threshold but didn’t look back. “Considering rush charges and compounding membership fees to justify the backdating, I’d estimate around five thousand bits or so. Good luck, Fluttershy.” He closed the door behind him, leaving the cottage in grave silence.

In the stillness that followed, a photograph on the wall twitched. "Seems these days they can put a price on creativity," it said. The smiling Fluttershy made of colored inks pulled herself free of the frame, her body twisting and lengthening into a much more mismatched form as it filled the room.

“You see,” Discord continued, “this is why I rarely tell ponies what I’m doing. It only leads to bothers like this. Much more fun to just let them find out when it’s too late to stop me.” A thump interrupted him. “Oh? Naptime already?”

Fluttershy did not respond, as she’d collapsed in a dead faint.
> Chapter 31 - Notes and Logs 2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Cutie Mark Crusader Quest Log

Crusade Number: 211

Official Crusade Recordkeeper of the Week: Sweetie Belle

Applebloom was away on a family trip today (to see if she's related to Pinkie or something) so today's crusade was just me and Scootaloo. It was drizzly all day, so we decided it would be a good day to try something from the new Box of Indoor Cutie Mark ideas. We threw back the first couple because they're things I know Applebloom would be sad to miss, but eventually we decided on a new one that was just added: mushroom farming!

Or mushroom harvesting. Or really any sort of mushroom-related cutie mark.

I didn't even know mushrooms were a thing you could farm until recently, but apparently they are and it's something Fluttershy does on the side. I guess it helps feed all her animals? Anyway, we showed up pretty early and I think she forgot that she promised to teach us cause she was really surprised when we knocked on the door.

After she stopped hyperventing hypervalenting having a mini-panic attack, she took us down to her basement and through a trapdoor that led to a big cavern covered in white fuzz. It was like being inside a pillow. A very, very dark pillow.

I don't know how Fluttershy was able to walk around in the dark with no light and not run into anything. Scootaloo and I tripped a bunch even with a lantern and hornlight.

After a really long walk through some tunnels, we got to the area where she said the mushrooms were ready to be harvested. I expected it to be those long skinny brown ones you see in piles of dead leaves, but the ones she grows are short and fat and a bit bigger than an apple.

She taught us a lot about mushrooms. Way more than I knew there even was to learn. About how they use spores instead of seeds and store them in gills even though they can't breathe underwater. The craziest thing though is how all the white stuff on the walls was one giant mushroom plant, and the parts we harvested are just like the flowers of it. I bet if you balled it up it’d be bigger than most trees!

Aside from all the knowledge, she taught us some practical stuff too, like how to find the two little black marks on the stem and use them to tell how ripe it is. There's a trick to twisting the mushroom just right to make them pop off cleanly, but Scootaloo seemed to get it a lot easier than me. Mine kept tearing all crooked. Fluttershy just cut the stalks with a fancy golden knife she brought. She let me try it after I begged asked nicely, but I kinda destroyed the one I tried to harvest with it and she took it back.

After we got two baskets full of red and white mushrooms, we headed back up. Fluttershy thanked us for the help and treated us to lunch (she tried to teach us how to cook something with the mushrooms, but no matter what recipe I tried mine ended up a pile of grey sludge). At least what Scootaloo cooked was still pretty tasty.

We didn't get any cutie marks today, but I did learn a lot and Fluttershy gave us a couple of extra mushrooms to take home. I might try planting one in the basement if Rarity'll let me. 









Minuette’s Journal
35th of Summer

Clear weather today. Light breeze from the west. 24 degrees. No clouds.

Last night, somepony on second shift spilled something or other hazardous, so the whole building's shuttered while a crew detoxes the place.

Which means I got a day off with pay!

Thought I'd pop down to Twilight's to see if I can squeeze in some time working with the H-cube.

I still haven't gotten over how crazy that is. That I can just— go and teleport down to Ponyville whenever I want instead of sitting on a train for three hours. I never thought I'd even be able to teleport that far... even if right now I can only to Ponyville and back until I can crack how Twilight manages to cram a building sized runic array into a crystal that can fit on my coffee table. It's probably a good thing only specific registered magical signatures can connect to Twilight's beacons; otherwise the arrival room in the Town Hall would be crammed full like a tin of sardines!

Still, so convenient. If my job didn't pay so much I'd probably teleport down there every day to work on all of Twilight's new toys.

She already got one research paper out of it; I'm sure there's plenty more waiting to be discovered in her weird crystal room of randomly appearing magic.

I showed up after a late breakfast [one blueberry muffin and a coffee, 200 calories] and got to Twilight's about an hour before lunch. Bad news though: I got the schedule wrong and the H-cube was totally booked today. Lemon Hearts and Moondancer testing its deconstruction effect on potions in the morning, and Twilight attempting to synthesize enchantable metal alloys in the afternoon. (Good to see Moonie's interacting with ponies again, even if she was napping when I was there.)

Lemon Hearts' work also gave me an idea to test next time I can book the H-cube. We know if we input an enchanted object and set it to deconstruct, we get multiple objects with either weaker or partial enchantments. But what would I get if I put those reduced enchantments back in again? And again after that? How far can it reduce a spell down? There has to be a limit at some point, but what does it look like? If we keep going down would we eventually reach some kind of fundamental spellform that can't be reduced any further?

I can smell the academic accolades already.

But since they were busy with the H-cube, I just loaded up my saddlebags with a few trinkets from the "figure out what this is" shelf. Rarity's knack for objective identification gets us names, but I bet some of the equipment at work could tell a lot more.

After that I got a quick lunch [rose and daffodil stuffed wrap with honey mustard glaze, 310 calories] and took a stroll around the scenic sites of Ponyville.

Nearly forgot! I had the greatest discovery while I was walking down a backroad.

I found Colgate!

That silly filly disappears for three years and it turns out she was just one town away all this time. I guess that's my little sister for you.

She was still her usual grumpy self (if she smiled I'd get worried she might be a changeling) and responded to my gleeful sisterly embrace with an "Oh no. It's you". Her and her jokes, I tell you.

We didn't have long to catch up—she said she had to get to work (local dentist, good for her!)—but it turns out she never wrote because it just totally slipped her mind! I'd call it crazy, but on the other hoof this is the same filly that left her graduation ceremony while half her class hadn't gotten their diplomas yet, then was completely moved out of her dorm room before we got back to party with her. She forgot to leave a note saying where she was going that time too...

I wonder if I could enchant a notepad that would remind her to leave notes and letters? Maybe Twilight could help. If I'm lucky, she might just manifest a whole magic notepad out of nowhere by the time I ask.

Teleported home after that, listened to the news on the radio, had some dinner [green bean casserole with cheese biscuits and a slice of cherry pie, 750 calories], and logged the day in my journal, finishing with this sentence.

Daily Calorie goal: 1260/1500









Dearest Associates at Velvet Hoof Publishing, 

It is with great regret that I must cancel my subscription to Keepsakes and Tchotchkes magazine. As much as it pains me, I can no longer spare the expense to continue purchasing your twenty-seven part collection of dining ware embossed with the faces of famous figures from history. I only wish that my collection did not have to—

Authentication Gem recognized

Magical signature... Matched

Decrypting...

Displaying message

The mission continues without significant progress from my last briefing. 

While Targets One through Six continue to acquire new abilities and trinkets (none additional since my previous update) they’ve thus far continued to be little more than novelties and skills comparable to average, if unusual, cutie mark talents.

In light of this, I would once again like to formally request that this be reclassified from a Yellow level mission to either a Chartreuse (or possibly even Green), and it be reassigned to a squad of junior agent observers, or even contracted civilian assets. 

None of the targets have shown any trace of malicious or uncharacteristic activity, and in my professional opinion I wouldn’t assign half of them a threat level higher than two. Only Targets One and Two I'd rank higher (the former who has a standing rating of five for her sheer magical talent, and the latter who’d I’d tentatively consider a level three if only for her anomalous hoof-to-hoof combat skills on par with a trained Agent’s) and Target Four is so passive I'd give her a negative threat rating if I could. I doubt she could bring herself to cause something harm even under duress. 

Threat parameters aside, the proximity of this mission to my civilian identity poses a constant and untenable risk of discovery. Any attempt to probe beyond ‘neighborly curiosity’ is likely to bring undue attention.

Please pass my recommendation directly to Overwatch and return her response in all due promptness.

Agent 8011









 Agent 8011

Headquarters thanks you for your recommendation. Overwatch is still unconvinced of the claimed benign nature of the Event and its aftereffects, and has reiterated their orders for the mission to continue as is. Your service to your nation is commended.

-Mission Control

This message will self-destruct in fifteen seconds.


> Chapter 32 - Morning Meditations
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

In. Out.

In. Out.

In. Out.

Applejack focused on her breathing as she slowly moved through her morning katas, bending her body in ways that'd make a contortionist wince and a chiropractor drool. 

Left hoof back, right hoof braced. Shift the weight of an imagined enemy over her head.

In. Out.

It always left her feeling strangely disconnected. Her memories insisted that she’d been doing these stretches every morning for years (but also only for a few weeks). Her muscle memory swore that it knew each move in sequence as surely as she knew how to buck a tree or canter down the road.

And her body itself demanded to know what she was thinking trying to flex in ways the equine body was never meant to.

The feeling made her head swim, but not in a bad way. Doing her morning katas was a lot like poking at a bruise; testing the edges of memory to see what she could touch and what she couldn’t. Because the memories she’d been given (or found? Twilight still hadn’t solved that mystery) didn’t just fade or blur into hard-to-remember details. The edges were as crisp and clean as a jigsaw puzzle. For every memory of learning to leverage a throw, there was a neat hole cut out of who she was throwing. Despite walking into the gym hundreds of remembered times, she didn’t have a clue what the building looked like.

She wasn’t overly concerned about it. At least, not nearly as much as Twilight seemed to think she should be. It wasn’t like she had someone else’s memories and they were changing what she liked and who she was. At worst it felt like she’d taken a hit to the head and remembered a year of classes she’d just forgotten.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t curious, though.

Shift the weight to her front hoof, reverse-twist the other. 

In. Out.

Thus, her katas. Going through the ingrained motions let her probe the edges of the memory and look for any patches where there might be something more memorable than sheer fighting skills.

But introspection aside, it was also a fine way to wake herself up and get her body all limbered up for the day ahead.

The self-defense classes had filled a similar role… for all the four sessions they’d lasted. As it turned out, Ponyville was just too peaceful a place for any of the locals to have any real commitment to the art of self-defense past their initial curiosity.  By the fourth session only two other ponies showed up. Bon Bon, who was already so skilled it was almost pointless to try and teach her anything, and...

“Ooh!” came the sound of air rushing out of a small pair of lungs as their attached body fell over. Again.

”Wide stance, Ah said.”

“Ah was wide! Any wider and I'd be doing the splits!”

Applebloom was the surprising exception. Though maybe not that much of a surprise; the filly had stuck with her karate lessons long after the traveling tutor went on his way and even longer than anypony who knew the filly thought she’d have stuck with a hobby that failed to get her a cutie mark. And yet there she was, every morning insisting on joining in morning stretches, even when she was technically more or less on vacation.

Applejack opened one eye to check her sister’s form. “Forward-back wide, not side-to-side wide.”

“...Oh.” She watched her stand up and struggle once again to find her balance in the awkward two-legged pose. Applebloom winced as her legs failed to stretch beyond a certain point. “You sure this is right?”

“Just takes practice,” she answered as she bent over backward to shift into Warrior VII.

“Now that's just plain impossible!”

She didn’t bother to hide her grin. “Ah’m doing it, ain't I?”

Applejack had only a moment’s warning before her leg suddenly quivered beneath her and threw up its metaphorical hooves at her overbearing demands. She wobbled, she wibbled, she overbalanced, and she tumbled.

Applebloom failed to hold in her giggles, and Applejack was quick to join in.

“Alright. Let's do one more round of set three, then we'll call it a mornin’ and head in to help Goldie with breakfast.”

“Right!”

Meanwhile from inside a cottage that housed several times more cats than ponies (guests included), two elderly cousins looked on.

“You got some mighty peculiar young'uns, Smith.”

“Ayup, but they're good'uns, no doubt about it. Fixed up yer house good, didn’ they?”

Goldie Delicious nodded, dislodging two cats from her head. “I never thought y’could patch the place up jus’ by shufflin’ around the wood that’s already there, but fritters to fruitcakes if they didn’t go and do just that. I didn’t feel a draft all night.” Another cat used her as a platform as it jumped from one pile of ‘heirlooms’ to another. “You sure you don’t wanna stay a few extra days? I know Mimsy, Mr. Catterwall, and Whiskers the Fourteenth would love the company of some energetic fillies a mite longer."

Granny Smith sidestepped a landslide of old records that yet another cat dislodged in her direction, once again reminded of why reunions always tended to end up hosted by her branch of the family tree. “Thank ya kindly, but—”

Her protests were cut short by the sound of breaking glass in the room above them. Followed by a muffled “oh no” and then a much less muffled “Sweet Celestia no!”

Then came the noise, though calling it just a noise was woefully unfair.

It started as a low, creeping cat’s yowl, quickly joined by ten, twenty, a hundred more voices in ear-grating cacophony. The noise stretched and flanged like the moaning of some demon from the pits of Tartarus, coming from everywhere at once as if the very walls were possessed.

“Run for your lives!” Pinkie Pie yelled as she ran downstairs in a blind panic, grabbing Granny Smith as she crossed paths and ferrying her out the door. “Head for the hills! Save yourselves!”

“Pinkie?!” Applejack exclaimed as the earth pony started throwing luggage onto the cart as fast as she could. “Slow down! What happened?”

“I made a terrible mistake! My creation turned against me! Curse my hubris and pride!” she wailed, not halting for a second as she lobbed Big Mac himself over her head and into the wagon’s harness, “I wanted to get all the kitties together in one place for a group picture for the scrapbook, but they just wouldn’t sit still! So I did a little science—a bit of chemistry, a bit of botany, had to make a few substitutions for missing ingredients—”

“Get to the point, Pinkie!” Applebloom cried as she was juggled into the backseat.

“I sneezed! I sneezed on the petri dish and the catalyst spread everywhere!”

The cottage, the ground, and the very bones of every pony present vibrated as the purring of countless cats hit some resonant frequency that put Vinyl Scratch’s best bass-boosted speakers to shame.

Applejack grabbed her by the shoulders. “Pinkie. What did you do? What does the catalyst do?”

“...It turns common dust into chemically pure catnip.”

Applejack’s wide eyes turned slowly back to the cottage. The cottage so filled with dust that it looked like an early snowfall. The same dust that (after spending the night) was so thoroughly ground into her family’s coats that she’d been considering extending their road trip to include a visit to the Ponyville spa.

A cat—one of the gross, hairless ones— poked its head out through the door, its eyes solid pearls of darkness.

She didn’t need a degree to come to the same conclusion Pinkie had.

“Step on it Mac!” she hollered as she flung both herself and Pinkie into the cart. “Before we’re up to our eyeballs in frisky felines!”

“Bye Great-Cousin Goldie!” Applebloom waved back as the cottage swiftly shrank behind them.

Goldie waved in ignorant bliss from the window before she was swept away and lost beneath a wave of cats. 

And she was never seen nor heard from again.

(Until she showed up next Apple Family Reunion, as hale and inexplicably healthy as ever.) 
> Chapter 33 - Move That Bus!
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“You want me to remodel your clubhouse?”

Scootaloo nodded so hard she thought her head might fall right off. She’d worked so hard for this, strived and struggled for so long to convince her friends that out of all possible ponies, Rainbow Dash was the one and only one they needed to fix the Crusader Clubhouse.

It was something they’d been arguing about for a while now. It wasn’t that the clubhouse was falling down around their ears or anything… but it was visibly kinda shabbier than when they’d first gotten it. Crusading tended to take a toll on… everything in the general vicinity of a crusade, and they did a lot of smaller crusades (and pre-planning sessions) at the clubhouse.

She often said that it ‘nobly bore the scars and stains of countless adventures’ (a phrase she’d shamelessly stolen from a book describing Daring Do’s hat).

Sweetie Belle often said it was ‘a growing safety concern and fire hazard’.

Applebloom often said ‘Girls my hoof’s stuck in that hole again, I thought you said you were gonna fix that, Scootaloo, not just put a rug over it’.

Opinions differed. 

But after one particular ill-fated crusade had ended up blowing a hole in the ceiling big enough to fly through… they all agreed that something had to be done.

Sweetie Belle wanted Twilight to fix it, and Applebloom nominated her sister (of course), but the first was so busy she had to call in extra friends to offload some of her business and the other didn’t have any cool new magic skills that had to do with wood. (That wasn’t a requirement but they all agreed it’d be a real letdown to have that option and not use it when they had the chance.)

And thus, with much convincing, Scootaloo had gotten everyone to agree to turn to Rainbow Dash first (which should have been the obvious choice from the beginning without needing to be explained, but for as awesome as they were, her friends weren’t perfect).

The only slight hiccup in the plan… was that she didn’t actually know if Dash would agree to it. She was a busy pony, after all. It took a lot of time to be the best. Practicing, training, power-napping, drilling—

“Yeah, sure. Sounds like a way to kill an afternoon.”

Scootaloo stumbled out of her woolgathering as her hero unexpectedly agreed without needing any additional convincing. And she’d prepared so many offers and incentives too!

“I’ve never built a building before, but after all the chairs and furniture Twilight made me make, how hard can it be?”

As it turned out, once they arrived on-site, that was something of a tricky question.

“Oh, wow. Yeah, I can see why it needs an upgrade.” Rainbow Dash said as she took in an aerial view of the clubhouse. She landed on the ramp and it creaked ominous under her. When the creaking started to stretch out into a worrying groan, she gave her wings a quick beat and elected to inspect the damage from a hover instead. Personally, Scootaloo agreed with her and would have joined if she could. She’d been entering via the ladder instead of the ramp for a month already.

“Mother of Celestia!”

“Is it really that bad?” Scootaloo called up. She knew it was bad (she’d have to be blind not to), but swear-worthy bad? Suddenly she was a lot more worried about Rainbow Dash bumping into a bad beam and learning the hard way what the table under a jenga game felt like.

Dash’s head poked out of the accidental skylight. “What the heck were you doing that did this?”

She cringed. That had been an… interesting day. “Jewelry-making”.

“Jewelry!? Out of what, dynamite!?”

“Just some wire and some neat gems Spike gave us.”

“...were there any kinda smokey grey ones?”

She shrugged. “Maybe?” The details of that day beyond ‘BOOM’ were a bit hazy.

“Yeah… maybe leave those alone if you find any more. And run away. To wherever Twilight is and have her deal with it.” She flew out through the hole and landed. “There’s a lotta damage, but yeah, I can soup it up. Most of the supporting beams are surprisingly okay, you just need a lot of new planks for the walls. And the ceiling. And the floor.”

“That’s great!” Scootaloo said. “I already got a bunch of wood and nails and tools ready for you.” All part of the incentive package she’d put together, plus a big box of Rainbow Dash’s favorite snacks.

“Awesome! Let’s go then!”

What happened next was a whirlwind of activity. Scootaloo knew Dash was the fastest pony around, but this speed was just crazy. She’d expected to be able to help, but Scootaloo soon found that the only tasks she could even keep up with was holding up different tools on request for Rainbow Dash to hotswap between as she worked. It barely took an hour to remove all the damaged parts and start laying out supports for an expanded floor.

And then Rainbow Dash stopped.

Froze, really. With her hammer pulled back and ready to nail down another board. 

“What’s wrong?” Scootaloo called up. “Are you okay?”

Rainbow Dash quivered in a full-body shiver then stiffness vanished. “Yeah, I’m okay. Better than okay.” A wild grin crossed her features. One that promised something awesome. “You said you wanted some upgrades, right? Not just a rebuild?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about reinforced armored plating?”

Scootaloo’s soul escaped her body and did a backflip. “That… sounds… awesome!”

“Thought so. You hold down the fort. I need to go pick up some junk from… about five or six places around town. And some extra tools from Pinkie. Hang tight!” With a multi-colored blast of light, Rainbow Dash shot off.

Scootaloo collapsed to her knees in shock and wonder. An armored treehouse clubhouse.

She couldn’t wait to show her friends the finished thing and rub it in their faces. She’d been right. Rainbow Dash was the best choice.

As if there’d ever been any doubt.

Much to her surprise, Rainbow Dash didn't return with a cart full of scrap metal, rocks, and heavy machinery. Instead, she returned with more wood. Special wood, apparently, but to her untrained eye it looked like any other stacked pile of lumber.

Not that it remained a pile for very long. If anything, Rainbow Dash seemed to move even faster now than she had earlier. Just watching her build was incredible. Boards and planks disappeared from the pile, blurred through the area where the tools were, then appeared on the growing skeleton of a treehouse like a film reel being played way too fast.

Almost more impressive was that she managed to talk normally despite her neck-breaking pace.

"So I had a bit of inspiration earlier—Hammer. Thanks.—If you wanna build a wall, you take a couple planks of wood, cut them about the same size, and nail them together. That'll work pretty good for most things you'd need a wall for. It's simple, obvious. Anypony can do it with a few basic lessons—Planer. No, the big one.—But when you really look at it, when you know a lot about how woodworks works—heh, woodworks works—there's kind of a trick to it. A way you can cut the wood just right so the planks hold onto each other and the whole thing ends up stronger. If you do it well enough, you barely even need nails. Toss me the hacksaw."

"So..." Scootaloo ventured as the tool left her grip. She hadn't been prepared for descent into philosophy of wood, but she took a stab at where she thought it might be leading. "You thought of a way to make the treehouse better?"

"Better?" Dash stopped working just longer enough to throw her foreleg around the smaller pegasus and muss up her mane. "Squirt, when I'm done, you won't even recognize the place."

A couple hours into the afternoon, Rainbow Dash proved herself a truther. She shook herself like a dog, sending up a cloud of sawdust and splinters.

"And that's how you make an awesome fort!" Awesome was definitely the word for it. The old clubhouse had been nice, but this one looked professional. If Diamond Tiara ever decided to try and one-up them with a "better" treehouse, this was the kind of fort Scootaloo imagined her rich daddy's checkbook could buy. The planks were straight and level with fancy-looking crossbeams. The windows had shutters and (empty) planter boxes. Even the corners and edges looked expensive with little decorative carvings.

"Lemme give you the grand tour." Rainbow Dash ushered her up the ramp (which didn't creak at all!) and inside. "You've got the main room here with plenty of space for all your meetings and crusade-planning and hanging out and stuff. I saved the old podium you had, but cleaned it up a bit and added some new features."

"Features?" Scootaloo didn't know a podium could have features!

Dash guided her around the back and pulled open a hidden door. Instead of Applebloom's emergency snack supply (all apples) there were a trio of simple wooden levers.

"The left one brings out the stairs to get to the second floor." She flipped it, and with a clattering clack, a dozen boards in the wall that hadn't looked anything special fell on hidden hinges and turned into a simple staircase.

"There's not much up there now, but I figured you could use it for storage space or something. I've got way more cabinets and cupboards and shelves than I'll ever need, so you can come by later to take whatever you want. There's also a skylight up there for either seeing the stars or emergency landings."

She pulled the lever back and the stairs rose back up and rejoined the wall without a trace. "The middle one's more for emergencies, but I think it might be the coolest."

The second lever went down and with it a steady clicking and ticking sound started coming from all around. Then, with a slam! and a w-w-w-wham! the ramp pulled up like a drawbridge and rolling shutters slid down over every window, sealing them in pitch darkness.

"I call it Bunker Mode," came Dash's voice from the utter blackness. "In case you gotta hunker down and hide from some Everfree monster. This place could tank a tackle from a cragodile and I bet you wouldn't even notice." She paused. "Might wanna get some lights in here though. I can't help with that."

Her hoofsteps sounded like she was turning around, but it was impossible to tell for sure. "So, what do you think? Do I make an awesome clubhouse or what?"

Scootaloo's eyes sparkled so hard they nearly made light on their own. A spy house. Rainbow Dash built a spy house. For her. Her spyhouse with secret functions and moving parts and hidden panels and, okay, maybe it didn't have a secret underground section or paintings that rotated to reveal racks of weapons but still it was just like a comic book and it was hers and wow what were all those colored spots dancing in the air?

She cut off her racing train of thought and took a deep breath as she realized that, in her excitement, she'd totally forgotten to breathe.

Sweet oxygen rushing back to her brain cleared her head for a moment. Not only had things turned out way better than she'd hoped, but this was also a chance! A golden moment to show Rainbow Dash that she could also be cool and collected and awesome and not just break down into excited manic giggles the moment she opens her mouth.

“Super awesome!” she said very coolly and definitely didn’t squeak. Quickly! A smart question to recover her face. "How'd you make all the moving parts with just wood?"

“Well, not to brag or anything, but that trap making skill I got? A lot of it is how to build stuff so it's collapsible and portable, but it came with some basics about pulleys and counterweights and gears too.”

“Neat! So how do you undo Bunker Mode so we can get out? Oh! I bet you pull the same lever again, right?”

She reached a hoof into the podium (good thing she hadn’t stepped away, otherwise she’d have never found it) and rummaged blindly till she found the middle lever. She pushed it back up.

Only for nothing to happen.

“Huh. You said the middle one, right?”

She pulled it back down and up again. There was no clicking, no rattling.

Just silence.

“Rainbow Dash?”

The silence persisted in a very alarming way.

“Rainbow Dash, how do we unlock it?”

“Ah. Huh. Yeah.” Those were not the reassuring noises she was looking for. “I knew I forgot something.”

“...Dash… are we locked in?”

“Kinda looks like it.”

“And you said these walls could take a tackle from a crocodile?”

“...I did say that, yeah.”

Scootaloo took a deep breath and considered the situation. She was trapped inside her newly rebuilt clubhouse with Rainbow Dash. The pony who had locked them there. Her idol who was always so busy that Scootaloo’d pounce on any chance to spend more time with her. And they were stuck, possibly overnight until someone figured out they were missing, with nothing but each other and a large pile of snacks.

Which meant…

Surprise sleepover with Rainbow Dash.

A tear glistened, unseen, in the corner of her eye. It truly was the best day of her life.
> Chapter 34 - Maud
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Dear Pinkie Pie,

I have received your letter as well as the attached package. It makes me very happy to hear you're doing so well for yourself in Ponyville even if I'm not familiar with thirty-two ponies whose parties and celebrations you detailed hosting. 

Thank you for the gift you included. I did not think there was a rock out there that I’d be unable to identify, but if anypony could find such a thing, it would be you. None of my textbooks mention ‘originite’ and I can’t find any mineral that has the same properties under a different name. Even my professors are stumped.

Professor Sandstone in particular is very interested and has offered extra credit if I (that is, you) can find him additional samples. Most of the tests he wants to perform require scratching, cracking, or crushing, all of which I have refused since the only piece I have was a gift.

I’m also looking forward to studying the crystal room you wrote about when I come to visit. Unfortunately though, my trip might end up delayed for one reason or another. 

While your efforts seem as firm as diabase, my own day-to-day life seems to be as unpredictably fragile as unknowingly slaked limestone.

(That was a joke.)

(No one would ever mistake slaked limestone for unslaked.)

(I’ve been trying to use more jokes like you suggested. Was that one good?)

Lately I’ve had terrible luck. There’s been no one big catastrophe, but there have been many small incidents day after day.

My quill pens break. Professors have lost my assignments. The key to my dormitory has snapped off in the lock three times in the past month. A study on artificial magma in the pyroclastics lab went out of control and smothered the room in basalt (the room was unrecoverable, but the phenocrysts it created were remarkable). I had to repay the cost of several library books and throw away my third-favorite frock due to damage sustained from an unexpected bolt of lightning (Boulder was fine. He was holding my seat in the dining hall at the time).

It hasn’t all been bad, though. My classes have otherwise been going fine and there was a micro-meteor shower right above the campus last week. I wish I could have acquired some to study, but they all burned up in orbit (despite Goosecreekite’s insistence that one broke his window. I would have noticed if it had, since his dorm room is next to mine).

In short, while I look forward to seeing you, I expect something will happen to delay my arrival. Possibly the train will crash and I’ll have to walk the rest of the way. Or the train will be attacked by bandits whose leader I will have to charm with my feminine wiles in order to ensure safe passage.

(That was another joke.)

(I would subdue them too quickly for that to be necessary.)

I will update you if and when plans change, but my visit should still be manageable some time later this month.

Your sister,
Maud



> Chapter 35 - Upgrades, Ponies. Upgrades!
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"And next time you want to play at being sick and mortal, you can leave me out of it!"

Her condemnation delivered in suitably dramatic fashion, Twilight turned and strode off in a huff. 

As far as huffs went, it wasn’t bad. Good posture, excellent delivery of her finishing comeback. Easily six out of ten. Not bad for someone who didn’t often get upset.

Unfortunately, her dramatic exit lost her points due to the fact that she was on a rocky mesa in the middle of nowhere and would need to keep her huff up for another ten minutes or so before she made it out of sight. Truly a beginner’s mistake.

It took her a solid minute to realize this for herself, followed by another few seconds of amusingly awkward wavering before she remembered that she could teleport back to Ponyville with practically no effort. With a second (and much less impactful) huff, she and Celestia’s candy-colored emergency back-up princess popped away, leaving the god of chaos alone on the outskirts of civilization.

Par for the course, really.

Discord could care less if she felt slighted by his charade. He'd already gotten what he wanted. And amused himself for a few hours poking the limits of her friendship philosophy. To think she’d actually go to the ends of Equestria for a cure. For him! It was a riot! Oh there was so much he could do with that sort of power… but from the glare she’d given him as he’d placed her “proof of friendship” award around her neck, it probably wasn’t a trick he’d be able to get away with a second time.

Once he was alone, he gave himself a full-body shake and the colorful patina of his second ficticious illness of the day flew off and splattered all around. Maybe the chaos-flavored goo might do something to the local wildlife, but if it did, it was hardly his problem.

His prize was still just where Twilight had left it. A titanic flower, its roots still slick with ichor where it’d been bonded to the tatzlwurm that had objected rather strongly to its removal. Its petals wouldn’t cure the ‘blue flu’ he made up, but that wasn’t what he’d wanted it for anyway. A flicker of magic shrunk it to a manageable size and secreted it away in the space between spaces, and he was ready to leave.

It took all the effort of a thought to collapse the probability of himself existing at that particular point in space and uncollapse the probability of existing at a different particular point miles and miles and miles away.

To the chaotically illiterate, he vanished from the wastes in a flash of probabilistic light and appeared from nothing inside Fluttershy's cottage.

He hadn't moved, per say. He'd merely been at one place and unbeen at another. Where they were in relation to one another was irrelevant.

It was a trivial use of unfathomable power. A casual sundering of reality for a petty convenience, easy as breathing (not that he needed to breathe if he didn't feel like it).

But such was the way of things.

When one had the unlimited power of the cosmos at one’s clawtips, even the most fantastical uses of power became dull and trite with time. It was the same problem he had with immortality. Live long enough, and one eventually saw everything. In the face of that, could anyone really blame him for wanting to inject a bit of chaotic color every so often into this world that was like so much bland gray mud?

They did blame him, every time. But that was their fault, not his, for being too small minded to appreciate his vision.

Though things had changed recently. There was something new on the breeze. Strange powers of unknown scope and origin manifesting in a group of ponies with little rhyme or reason? Intriguing. For the first time in a long time, he’d found a unique flash of color that came from somewhere else.

Granted, it wasn’t that colorful. To continue the metaphor, Twilight and her harlequin band of cohorts were like splashes of tan and silver amidst the gray. Different, yes, but still fundamentally not very interesting. So one of them could suddenly build cuckoo clocks like a master craftsman. Boring. Another learned to fight in an instant. Humdrum. The spontaneous birth of a ew runic language? Novel only in the ripples of chaos cast by the suddenness of their arrival.

But Fluttershy… that was a different story entirely. 

Among the tan and silver and gray, the power that had meshed itself into her being was a sharp bubble of color-of-cycles-and-spin-and-pressure for which the local language lacked a word. It didn’t fit with the rest of the world. A chess piece on a parcheesi board. There was nothing like it that existed in all of Equestria. Which by proxy, made her the most interesting thing in Equestria.

Her ‘mushroom magic’—as she’d so naively pigeonholed it—was far more interesting and expansive than even she knew. 

“Oh! Discord, you’re back!” She smiled at him as she looked up from the mess of scribbled ideas for both botany and cash raising that covered her kitchen table. But behind her bright smile and expressive eyes he could see it; nestled deep in the dimensional depth of her soul, a mesh of strings and chords and information that shifted and folded into itself in a dance of complex dimensions. An impossible knot, even by his measure. “Were you able to find one?”

He reached into the depth of nowhere, briefly made it somewhere, and extracted his hard-conned prize with a chuckle. “Was there ever any doubt? Of course I did. One tatzl flower, freshly harvested.”

Fluttershy squealed as she practically tore it from his paw, inspecting every leaf and petal. “It is. It really is! And it’s definitely a real one, right? Not one you made? That was very important.”

He waved off her concerns. “Yes, yes. One hundred percent Equestrian grown. Not a drop of chaos magic in its make. It should play nice with your fancy recombobulator.”

And hadn't that been a frustrating day, when he learned that anything made by his magic that went through the Horadric Cube turned the results to rainbow-gray sludge. And not even novel sludge, either. Just bland undifferentiated protomatter.

A terrible disappointment all around. Though if it hadn’t been the case, he might have been tempted to spirit the cube away for his own purposes. He’d leave a decent fake in its place, of course. Only fair.

“That’s wonderful!” Fluttershy beamed, before launching into her new ideas for how this latest magical plant might be of use to further enhance Priscilla. Something about its symbiotic nature and the mechanism by which it connected to the wyrm. He wasn’t exactly listening; the details were less important than the results.

Fluttershy was… a curiosity that he found himself having a hard time nailing down his feelings about. The pony herself was, well… she was a doormat. A shy people-pleaser that caved under the slightest social pressure like a house of cards. Nothing worth writing home about. At best she was the vessel that carried around what truly interested him. 

…Even if she had been the only one to make him break the rules of his game, last time he made a bid for world domination. The only one with a strength of self strong enough to make him cheat. Not that that intrigued him, of course.

Not to mention how she had been the only one to later extend a hoof in friendship. To look at him as something more than...

It was strange. And not... unpleasant.

Yes, she was a curiosity indeed.

Which was why he couldn't allow her to go to prison for something as banal as not filing proper paperwork. They didn't let you do interesting things in prison (or at least, Celestia hadn't let him do anything interesting during his stint as a garden gnome) and he was invested now in seeing what novel things she would do.

Thus, his current willingness to help her acquire things for her projects. (Though no one said he couldn’t have some fun getting others to do the hard work for him. Tom Sawhorse, eat your heart out.)

Though he did wonder why she didn’t seem to feel the same way.

“Is there a reason you're trying to do this in the hardest way possible?” he asked, interrupting her rambling train of thought about infusions and mushroom supplements.

“What do you mean?”

“All this hard work just to make some pencil-pusher approve your creation. It seems like such a waste of time when it’d be no trouble at all for me to—” He plucked his brain out through his ear and gave it a vigorous scrubbing against a washboard.

“Discord, no! You can't just go around brainwashing ponies!”

“I assure you, I can." It'd be as trivial as anything else and if it kept his latest source of amusement out of prison, so be it.

“I mean it's not nice.”

He shrugged. That caveat of not violating too many social conventions around her was easy to forget, but it really just made things more of a challenge. Mostly in finding her acceptable limits.  “There are other ways too. A sudden plague of paperwork-eating armadillos on their offices. Overthrowing the government and simply canceling your debt as the new High Princess. I could even just make the bits for you to pay them off with.” He snapped and fell apart into a mountain of gold coins before melting up back into his usual shape. “There's no need to actually work to earn the money and the inspector's respect.”

She seemed unconvinced, so he played another card, one he was less sure about. “Why, you could even ask your friends for help. I don’t even believe you’ve told them about your current troubles, have you?”

That made her squirm but also, paradoxically, seemed to firm her resolve. "Oh, I couldn't do that. This is my problem to deal with. I wouldn't want to worry them or make them feel obligated to help me. And I can do it on my own. I just need to dig into my savings a bit. And maybe think about charging the hospital a little for my healing food. And maybe have a yard sale. I don't really need all this furniture..." her voice trailed off into worried mutterings as she lost her grip on her scraped together confidence.

And then, just as she was about to dissolve into another panic attack... one of the little curiosities clipped to her mane activated in a flare of foreign magic.

Her breathing steadied. Her shaking stopped. Her eyes shone with a resolution that had nearly failed.

"I want to— I need to do this for myself. To prove that I can. All the time I have to rely on other ponies to help me do things. Sometimes even something as simple as going outside and talking to strangers. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but I still have a long way to go. And something like this—even if it's just scraping together enough bits to pay off these fees—it'll be me solving my own problems for once."

She looked very proud of herself, standing much taller than she usually did.

It was too tempting to not burst her bubble.

"And what does that make me then? A very handsome appliance?"

Fluttershy stumbled as her confidence faltered. In an instant she was back to her usual awkward stuttering self. "Well... that is... I mean, you already knew about it from the start." She worried a lock of mane between her hooves as she collapsed inward. "And you volunteered to help..."

The hypocrisy was obvious, though not unexpected. Sometimes ponies could be illogical and make choices that didn't make sense.

It was partially why he stuck around to watch them.

"Indeed I did. But if you're not going to take any of my suggestions to deal with the money problems, you might as well carry on with the plans to improve your perennial progeny."

That brightened her mood immediately. "Right! The tatzlflower! Okay, so the first step is to hybridize it with a mushroom in the cube to make it more compatible with Priscilla’s biology." Her key that-was-and-yet-wasn’t opened her pantry door to a space-between-spaces filled with crystal and paper that somehow evaded his ability to find and access on his own.

As she began her work, a twinkle of something caught Discord's attention in the corner of his eye. Fluttershy didn't react. He doubted she could perceive it, seeing how it was coming from a direction that her language has no word for and her science no concept of.

A tangled knot of power and light, undulating in more dimensions than most could perceive. It was indefinably unique... yet very much like the tangle that currently existed in Fluttershy's soul.

He'd heard that they got new abilities unexpectedly, but this was his first time being present for the event.

And it was going to miss.

Direction was a tricky concept in higher dimensions, but it was obvious the knot of power was aimed elsewhere, ready to sail on by to another destination. Some other pony.

But that wouldn't be any fun. 

A light twist of dimensional forces plucked it from its path and sent it sailing towards the oblivious pegasus instead.

It sank into Fluttershy's being without resistance, meshing and entangling itself with the one already present. Forging new connections while still remaining discrete. A marvelous ballet of forces.

As he watched, Discord quickly found himself somewhat less of a pure observer than he'd expected as something rippled through his being. Not just the portion of himself he expressed into three dimensional reality, but his entire Being.

It didn't hurt; it was a shock more than anything. The magical equivalent of a ruler smacked against his knuckles, but with enough strength behind it that All of him felt it.

Whatever force or Being was orchestrating things, its warning was clear. No interfering.

Fluttershy's gasp heralded the end of his unplanned introspection on his place in the cosmic pecking order.

"Oh Discord!" she gleefully cried. "I just got— wow. I didn't know— oh my. I think... I think I'm a doctor now! Heh... heha... Hehahaha-Ha!"

Doctor powers? Not exactly the burst of fresh chaos he'd been hoping for, but he'd take it. And he could appreciate the maniacial giggling. It was almost ironic, in a way, that him faking an illness had directly led to her getting such an ability.

He prepared a snappy repartee... and sneezed.

A terrible heat grew within him like a bottle being filled with disgustingly warm snot. His knees ached. His sinuses burned. One of his legs broke out in a rash.

Oh dear. Perhaps that cosmic chastisement had been laced with a bit of karmic retribution.

"I don't suppose—" he coughed and hacked up a lung "—I don't suppose your new skills would tell you where you could find me a little glass of water?"
> Chapter 36 - Physician, Heal Thyself
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twilight's eyes glanced over the top of her medical textbook like a tiger peering through the grasses of the savanna. Pages whipped by blindly until she stopped at a random spot, glanced at it, and launched her attack.

"Name the six primary pelvis nerves."

An easy question. Foalish, even. "Femoral, obturator, gluteal, sciatic, tibial, and fibular."

"Hm." Twilight didn't confirm it, but she knew she was right. She knew the names of the nerve clusters as well as she knew the names of her friends.

Pages flicked again as she rifled for a new question. "What do macrophages do?"

Another slowball. Was Twilight going easy on her? "They find and get rid of harmful bacteria and viruses, as well as activate other parts of the immune response."

Twilight's brow furrowed. "Alright." She snapped the book shut. "Last question. Where is your carbuncle located?"

A smile crept across Fluttershy's face and she had to fight back the urge to giggle. She'd been having to do that a lot lately. "Trick question. I don't have one, but you do. It's right at the base of your horn. Pegasi do have a similar organ at the joint of each wing, but it's more commonly known as the "flight core" and is a biologically distinct organ despite doing a similar function."

"Correct. Again." Twilight stood up and set the book down. "Well, you seem medically competent to me. Or at least as far as this textbook's review questions can determine."

Acing a test, and being fully confident in her answers, was a surprisingly thrilling feeling. Was this how Twilight felt all the time? This assurance in her own knowledge? She liked it. But now that she'd proven herself in basic biology, Fluttershy felt up for a bit more of a challenge. "Maybe we can try some more difficult ones?"

Twilight gave her a look that was hard to decipher. "Fluttershy, that was a university level textbook. I don't have anything harder."

"That was... it was?" She felt lightheaded. Like the floor was suddenly far away. If those were the hardest she had, why had they all felt so... obvious?

Twilight continued nodding, unaware of her sudden spiking uneasiness. "Right! You know, for a lot of those I had no idea if your answers were right or not until I checked the answer key. It's really quite impressive."

Smarter than Twilight. She was smarter than Twilight Sparkle. In one very niche field of knowledge, but still. It was a strange thought to have. Stranger still that, as a whole, she didn't feel any smarter.

There had been a split second of dizziness as the power arrived, but after that it just felt... normal. Natural. Her head didn't ache like a shelf full of textbooks had been crammed in. She didn't have extra memories of going to medical school like Applejack had gotten with her combat training.

The information was just... there. Obvious. One plus one is two. Yellow plus blue is green. Here's how you fix a compound fracture and suture the wound shut. The major components of the vascular system are as follows.

"It's fascinating," Twilight remarked as she added more notes to her copy of their linked journal. "There seems to be more of a theme to the ones you've gotten than the rest of us. The ability to grow and cook healing food, a tool to harvest plants perfectly, and medical knowledge. I know three data-points isn't much, but it's starting to look like a pattern."

Fluttershy couldn't deny the synergy. Before this new power, she'd only had a vague idea which of her magical foodstuffs would heal a little and which could heal a lot. Now, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the equine body worked, she could.

Mostly.

It wasn't perfect, more like a much refined intuition than anything else. And she was still fuzzy on exactly how some mushroom powder and store-bought cake mix and a few apples could patch up a scraped knee, or why some recipes also restored energy or stamina or magical power, but it worked all the same.

"We still should ask Rarity to take a look at it with her Hoarder's Eyes and see if there's anything non-obvious about it," Twilight continued, "But as far as perks go this seems pretty straightforward. Congratulations, Fluttershy. You're now a medical— well, not a professional. You don't actually have a degree or any certifications—"

"I have a veterinary certificate." And, now that she thought about it, an odd hodgepodge of trivia about some animal anatomy as well, specifically from ones she'd help recover from severe injuries. Something to look into later.

"Medical quasi-professional then," Twilight conceded before stifling back a yawn.

There was one other aspect to this new power that they hadn't really touched on. She didn't have any new senses that let her sniff out injury or disease, but with so much raw knowledge about the body's functions she found she could read a pony's symptoms like a book.

And Twilight was written in extra-large print font.

"Then, as a medical quasi-professional, I'm unofficially officially diagnosing you as stressed and sleep deprived."

"Whaaa-" Twilight tried to object before her body betrayed her with a jaw cracking yawn. "I'm not sleep deprived. I just haven't had my coffee today. Spike's been busy helping Rarity."

She wasn't buying it. She could see her bloodshot eyes. The slight twitch in her muscles. "What time did you go to sleep last night?"

"A very reasonable hour."

"When?"

"It was... ah... hm..." Twilight's confidence drained quickly. Her face morphed between emotions like a watercolor painting in a fogbank. "...it was definitely before the sun came up."

"Oh Twilight." She shook her head through the unicorn's blustering explanations and excuses about a breakthrough and laid a hoof on her shoulder. "As an almost-doctor, I'm prescribing you two fried eggs, a honey candy, and an hour of fur therapy."

"Fur therapy?"

"There's nothing better for relieving mental stress than cuddling with an adorable animal." There were better options. Medicine, actual rest, direct stimulation of certain glands. Yet, in this case, she could tell a simple solution would work better than normal, partially because she'd been the one to prescribe it. An oddly circular bit of logic, but her new intuition said it was valid.

"Let's head back to my cottage and I'll find you some kittens to pet."

"That does sound nice..."





Pinkie Pie had never focused on a book so intensely before.

Okay, so maybe she had once or twice with some really good cookbooks but this was her first time reading a book that updated itself.

She'd already had it open an hour ago (jotting down some new neato chemical reactions that had come to mind) when her Pinkie Sense had gone off with the familiar warm tingle slowly building in her body of a new power coming in. But then something changed and it bounced off in a different direction before it could finish. Which was a bit of a disappointment but also new and different and neat. Sure, it meant she had missed out on something new (but honestly she was still coming to terms with her multidisciplinary expertise) but it also meant that somepony else got a new surprise!

Thus, the series of events that had led to her eagerly flipping through the book for the past way too many minutes to count, waiting for somepony to update their entry.

And then, like magic (cause it was), a new page appeared in Fluttershy's section but Twilight's hornwriting.

She couldn't help but gasp as she read the details and understood their true implications.

"I can't believe it! We're Doctor Buddies!"





At roughly the same time, Rarity was practically grinding her teeth to a powder in frustration. She'd finally booked some time working with the Cube to try and replicate that fabulous fabric she'd made for fashion week, only to find it a bigger challenge than she'd expected.

Not even Spike's earnest suggestions and steady supply of low-calorie snacks could keep her spirits up.

Curse her younger self for not writing down the recipe, and curse the Cube as well for being so exacting! She didn't want to sacrifice a thousand-year-old tapestry for each bolt of fabric, but even a slight change in ingredients produced wildly different results.

Two hours of experimenting had produced a lot of novel fabric that wasn't quite right, but also a large pile of useless mishmashed junk that would have to be thrown away (unless someone wanted to spend just as much time separating its component materials with the Cube. Maybe Moondancer would like to do it. That mare was… an odd one).

She nearly jumped out of her skin when Pinkie's voice shouted from behind her.

"New skill update!" Rarity whirled around in a near-catastrophic fall turned last-second into a graceful stop to find...a pink muzzle poking through a door barely big enough to accommodate it.

It was odd enough to displace her displeasure at being surprised. "Pinkie? Is that... did you use your key on your breadbox again?"

"Yes! Not important! Fluttershy's a doctor now!"

Rarity blinked. "Oh? Good for her, it certainly suits her."

"I know, right?!" There was absolutely no reason to shout, yet Pinkie continued to do so anyway. "And it means she and I are Doctor Buddies! Can you make us matching outfits?"

Rarity’s breath caught in her throat. She’d never consider it before, but now that she was… both Pinkie and Fluttershy did have coats that lent themselves well to white. Add some color coded lapels... Fluttershy could pull off a short—no, remember her modesty—a long jacket, yes. Something shorter for Pinkie, more casual and approachable but still professional. Maybe if she could get them to put their manes up in buns... try on some glasses...

Oh.

Oh-hoho!

Now that was a look.

"Pinkie Pie, darling, you just might be a genius."

"I know! I have many degrees!" The muzzle disappeared for a moment, sniffed, then reappeared. "Whoops! Gotta go! My piranha juice is about to burn!"

The door winked away as Pinkie no doubt removed her Key and rushed off to deal with... whatever piranha juice was. It didn't sound terribly tasty to her.

But the brief visit had had a wonderful effect on her mood. Gone completely was the storm of frustration, replaced by the bright sunshine of inspiration.

Rarity had a new project, and it was going to be fabulous.

“Hey!”

She jumped once again as Pinkie came back just as quickly as she’d left. “Yes? What now?”

It felt oddly fitting to call Pinkie’s disembodied grin ‘cheshire’. Or at the very least, quite smug. “I got a new one too!”

“What, another?” she asked. That was strangely fast. Usually there were a few days in between new arrivals. 

“Yepperooni! I don’t get exactly what it’s supposed to be, but I think I’m immune to boredom now!”

Rarity felt her chest clench as her heart missed a beat. A Pinkie who couldn’t get bored. Out of everything that had changed since that fateful day when Twilight cast Starswirl’s spell, this was perhaps the most alarming thing yet. 

She eyed the Cube and wondered just what kind of ingredients she’d need to combine to invent an explosion-proof fabric.
> Chapter 37 - Squad Goals
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“And with that, next week’s schedule for use of the Horadric Cube is settled, barring any unforeseen changes.” Moon Dancer made a few finals marks on her ledger before slipping the page away to be posted later. “Next, is there any new business to be discussed?”

It was a grand feeling to be up behind a podium, organizing a meeting of the minds of magical researchers. The kind of thing of which she'd dreamed since she was small and written in her pre-teen diary. Of course, reality never quite lived up to dreams.

It wasn’t a think tank of Canterlot’s finest. It wasn’t a secret black site facility outfitted with the best equipment money could buy. She wasn’t researching the kind of ancient and secret magic that even alicorns held close to their chest. Instead, it was a basement under a library-slash-tree populated by a group of enthusiasts who were doing research in their spare time on the effects of magic mushrooms, new runic strings, and exceptionally quick woodworking.

But it was magic no one had ever seen before. And she was in charge. Mostly by seizing the leadership initiative when no one else had wanted to, but still.

A first step on the road to greatness. Today a basement, tomorrow her own facility.

A white hoof rose into the air.

“The floor recognizes Twinkleshine.”

The hoof went down. “I still think we should change the name.”

At least a mare could dream of greatness. But getting there was substantially harder when her supposed subordinates coworkers seemed to lack the same drive and ambition, always getting hung up on meaningless things. It seemed like every meeting someone brought up the name again and wasted more time with pointless arguing no matter how many times she used her authority as chairpony to declare the topic finished. “That is old business. The name stands. Any—”

“But come on! GRUMP? Really?” 

How such intelligent (mostly) ponies could not wrap their heads around such a simple concept continued to baffle her. Their name didn’t matter. Shouldn’t matter. It was little more than a time-saving shortcut so she didn’t have to list out every joint researcher on every piece of documentation. “There is nothing wrong with the current name. Gathered Researchers of Unexplained Magical Phenomena is both concise and accurate.”

“But it makes us sound like a bunch of stodgy old stallions!”

Moon Dancer sighed. It was time to put her hoof down. Again. They had wasted too much time already and she could feel the schedule cramping. Honestly, how some of her “fellow researchers” managed to succeed in the same university as her with this manner of quavering focus was a wonder. “The last time we discussed it, we wasted over two hours of time and still failed to arrive at a name that a majority was satisfied with. The matter is settled.”

“But—”

“Old news. Dead topic. Moving on now.”

“I have a question!”

For once, she was thankful for one of Minuette’s outbursts. “The floor recognizes Minuette.”

The unicorn lowered her hoof to point at the proverbial elephant in the room. “Why is Bon Bon here?”

“I was wondering that too,” added Lemon Hearts, completely failing to recognize the established process being recognized for the minutes before speaking. “Not that I mind you bringing your marefriend, Lyra.”

Admittedly, Moon Dancer had been pondering the earth pony’s presence at their meeting as well. The inclusion of Lyra was not unexpected; she had been part of the same social circle back in school and had visited the extra-dimensional crystal chamber several times to add her niche expertise to the research efforts (not that the expertise of a cryptomagizoologist contributed much beyond confirming that the tools in the “Hunter’s Workshop” area were not designed for or by ponies. Anyone with a minor in equipology could have determined that). Her showing up to the weekly meeting to go over their findings and organize a schedule was only proper, and a sign of her finally joining in a more official capacity. 

Her bringing a plus one had been a surprise. 

As far as Moon Dancer’d been informed, this research initiative was something of an exclusive club. Close associates only. She wasn’t against a change in policy, but it would have been nice to be informed of it beforehand. Likewise, if the new policy allowed any doe, jack, or filly off the streets to join, then she was going to need to re-evaluate some of her priorities.

Namely, prioritizing the request to have a door made for her living space.

"I'm supervising," was Bon Bon’s simple reply.

"Yeah..." Lyra elaborated poorly with an awkward shrug. "That was her condition for letting me join. That she gets to come as well to 'keep me out of trouble'. Her words, not mine."

The earth pony crossed her forelegs and glared, daring anyone to challenge her presence. "And with good reason. I know how Lyra gets when she picks up a new passion project. Somepony has to make sure she doesn't try to cast any unnamed spells on herself—"

"That worked out for Twilight, didn't it?"

"—or nearly poison herself with a home brewing kit—"

"That was one time and the instructions were unclear."

"—or waste three months of rent money getting caught up in a multi-level marketing scheme for magic leg-lengthening horseshoes."

"Hey! That one worked out. I was definitely taller after."

Bon Bon continued as if the interruptions hadn't happened. "If the rest of you were her friends in school, then I can only assume you're cut from the same cloth. So, for the sake of safety, sanity, and the continued stability of Ponyville as a whole, I intend to be the voice of reason and make sure that no one gets possessed by obvious evil jewelry, stores unstable potions in a coffee mug, or tries eat a ball of energy larger than their head."

Moon Dancer dismissed the byplay with practised ease and focused on the facts. She had no issue taking on another member. The mare's proposal seemed reasonable enough. She came across as both competent and serious (a rare pairing if her current coworkers were any metric) even if she lacked any particularly useful scientific or magical background.

Though Moon Dancer had a suspicion that this Bon Bon might have some applicable experience to offer. After all, most common layponies weren't familiar with Mage Overload's one hundred and one magical theorems, let alone his divisive orb-to-cranium approximation. (Personally, Moon Dancer was on the side that opposed the use of it. While broadly accurate in relating the amount of mana a unicorn could safely intake to the size of their carbuncle, it was a crude ratio at best and a number of notable exceptions to the rule had been discovered since Overload's time. And even in the cases where it did still apply, it was still too inaccurate for her standards. If it was to be taken at face value, then Equestria would long since have been conquered by the pony with the biggest head).

Her thoughts on that aside, while it was odd for an earth pony to be familiar with high level casting metrics, as far as Moon Dancer was concerned it only made her a more useful asset.

"You can't be serious," Twinkleshine protested. "We don't need a babysitter. We're all adults here. Professionals in our craft. We would never—"

"Erlenmeyer incident," Lyra coughed.

Whatever this incident was (probably some inane hijinks from their school days, she reasoned) it was enough to make everyone else wince (Lemon Hearts most of all).

"I retract my objection."

"This could be a good thing," Lemon Hearts said quickly, "Inviting a non-academic perspective might help us see things that we'd otherwise overlook."

Moon Dancer seized the opportunity to redirect the conversation back towards a productive direction before her schedule could be wrecked any further. "Bon Bon, was it? What is it exactly that you do? What special skills or knowledge can you bring to the team?"

The mare paused for longer than what even Moon Dancer thought was socially acceptable before simply answering, "I'm a candymaker. I make candy."

Alas. Nothing useful then. At least it wouldn't hurt to have another note taker and material fetcher. "Unfortunate. That seems irrelevant to our needs. We—"

"No actually, that's perfect," Minuette interrupted. Again. "I've been looking into those candies that Fluttershy makes. Real clever things, those. There's something inherently magical about them that gives them their extra oompf but I haven't been able to pin down what. A professional candymaker's input might be just what I need. Tackle it from a different direction, you know?"

"Oh that sounds neat!” Lyra rose and swapped seats to be next to her, further ruining the carefully designed seating plan organized for maximum efficiency of conversation. “I'd like to look into that too. You think it could fix this crick in my neck?"

“Not passing out on the couch would probably help,” Bon Bon muttered under her breath.

“Hard to say,” Minuette shrugged. “I’ve been trying to build a reference guide of what her different treats can cure and how well, but Fluttershy gave away so much for free that there’s hardly a sick or injured pony left in Ponyville for me to test them on!”

“How terrible,” Lemon Hearts said, her face carefully neutral. “A town full of healthy ponies. My condolences.”

“You know what I mean.”

Moon Dancer ground her teeth. This was exactly why she preferred to study alone back in school. No one could focus for five minutes without devolving into jokes and chitchat. Did no one have any respect for her schedule? “Fine. You three can be a team then.” She made a note in her ledger to return to the topic later at the follow-up meeting. "Now if we can get back on task, we—"

A distant explosion sent a shudder through the room and made her ears pop. Her glass of water rippled.

“What was that?!”

Lyra smacked her hooves together, an expression of surprised realization on her face. “Oh! I forgot it’s Rainbow Dash's birthday today.”

“Does that usually involve explosions?”

“Sometimes, yeah. But they’re extra big this year cause Pinkie's declared a turf war with some out-of-towner party planner.”

Bon Bon nodded. “I think I heard something about that. What was his name? Screwball Jones or something?”

“I think it was Murphy Law,” Minuette countered.

“Nah, that’s a lawyer in Canterlot. I heard someone say it was Dandruff Tuba.”

“No, it was definitely Grilled Cheese. I heard Pinkie muttering about it earlier when she kicked me out to use the Cube.”

“Pinkie kicked you out?”

“Well, no, but she was clearly on the warpath. I heard her mention cordite and tannerite and I made myself scarce.”

Her poor schedule. It was flexible enough to accommodate for a certain amount of distraction, but they were supposed to be nearly done by now. She was up late as it was, and it wasn’t doing anything for her mood. “Does anyone have anything actually important to discuss or should I just tear up the minutes and reclassify this a tea party?”

“I wouldn’t mind some tea,” Lyra mused, not quite quietly enough to avoid an admonishing shove from Bon Bon.

“I did have something, actually.”

At last. Progress. “The floor recognizes Lemon Hearts.”

“Were we still doing that?” At a glare, she continued. “I’ve been studying those filing cabinets full of blueprints, trying to put together a glossary of terms and symbols to help eventually decipher their meaning. It’s slow going, so I mailed a copy of a few to a friend of mine who works in the Cloudsdale weather factory. He's mechanically minded, so I thought he might be able to understand it better.”

“And?” Her quill hovered at the ready. Finally a tangible benefit to the meeting. 

She shook her head, dashing Moon Dancer’s hopes. “He was baffled by most of it as well, but he's pretty sure that electricity is central to its function. Maybe more so than magic. Though he couldn't find anything resembling a lightning generator or an IPH slot on the diagrams.”

“IPH?”

“It’s an industry term. It refers to components in a weather factory’s machinery where an operator has to manually apply weather magic to make it work.”

“So IPH stands for…”

“Insert Pegasus Here.”

“Of course it does.” Leave it to the pegasi to make even their professional terminology casual and lackadaisical.

Another rumble shook the room, this one sounding both louder and closer. Something in the far corner where they'd pushed all of Twilight's junk wobbled and toppled over.

"Are you sure it's safe to just ignore that?" Twinkleshine asked, half-rising from her chair. "Shouldn't we duck and cover or… or head for the hills or something?"

Lyra merely waved away her concerns as if the literal approaching cannons were no more a concern than a rogue cloud. "Nothing to worry about. Pinkie's usually pretty good about making sure her party cannons all point up ever since the Town Hall incident last year. Worst case scenario: the shockwaves collapse a few market stalls. We're in a tree. You ever heard of a tree collapsing?"

Another series of cannon blasts ripped through the atmosphere, no more than a few streets away, loud and clear enough for the sound to force its way into even their earthy bunker like an unwelcome guest. They were unmistakably timed (and somehow tuned) to the opening notes of For She's A Jolly Good Fellow.

"Not to sound alarmist..." Bon Bon's face broke its stony countenance for the first time, revealing a hint of worry, "But we're not in a tree at all. We're in a hole underneath one." She glanced up at the root-entwined rafters. "And I can't help but wonder how old those support beams are."

Another rumble (this one followed by a sharper retort, like twanging metal or striking crystal) and a small cascade of dirt trickled down onto Moon Dancer's muzzle. The dark earth stood out in contrast to her pale coat like blood at a crime scene.

"A-all in favor of moving this meeting into the Hunter's Workshop?"

"""""Aye!"""""

"The ayes have it! I declare a short recess! We reconvene in five minutes! If I become incapacitated in that time, Lemon Heart is in charge."

The basement emptied out in record time.





Moon Dancer made it all the way to the crystal table in the main room before she collapsed, dead asleep.

The schedule was there for a reason, after all.
> Chapter 38 - The Moon's Lament
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was dusk in Canterlot. A fine evening with no clouds and warm breeze. The kind of evening that made second shift workers look out the window with wistful sighs. 

Much like those belabored ponies, the evening was only the start of Princess Luna’s workday.

Having just set the moon rising on its ascent for the night, she returned from the balcony into her private lunarium.

Strictly speaking, according to 300 years of castle history and informational pamphlets, it was a solarium, but that had been a mistake quickly rectified upon her return planetside with the swift aid of a team of architects and interior designers amenable to working in a style they deemed  centuries out of fashion. An “interesting challenge”, they’d called it. One cheeky colt had even called their work “manufacturing antiques”. At the time, so soon after her return, his casual comment had cut so much deeper than she’d expected, and she’d been forced to seclude herself for several hours until she could regain her composure.

Appearances were more important than ever in this modern era.

So much had changed in what felt like an instant. What she knew as fashionable, cultured, and vogue was the stuff of dusty records and plays. Plays that, for some moon-forsaken reason, insisted upon butchering her mother tongue such that everything rhymed. The world was bigger, louder, and more complicated than ever. She’d always been willing to let Celestia deal with the more mundane minutiae of rulership, and look where that had gotten her: a thousand years later and a puffed-up ponce of stallion who titled himself a “decor-ordinator” had the unashamed gall to argue with a princess that “blue and silver are not royal colors”.

While she’d been informed that most her preferred methods of retribution were now considered somewhere between “barbaric” and “absurd”, she’d found that the fine social art of blackballing worked just as well among trendy socialites as it had among the artisan guilds of her day.

He had not lasted long after that.

A few strides was all it took to bring her to her desk, one of the few pieces saved and preserved from her old castle in the Everfree. It was a proper desk; sturdy and unshakable no matter how much was heaped upon it (unlike the flimsy gilded thing she’d seen in her sister’s quarters). If necessary, she could (and once had) use it as a bludgeon against enemy siege engines. It still bore the scars of that battle; a gouge down the side that there was no hope of sanding out. It was a small, true piece of home nestled within an expensive replica.

In contrast, her chair was as new as her desk was old. One of Twilight Sparkle’s creations, made by special request (though apparently the mare had crafted so many in the name of ‘rigorous testing’ that she was quite literally giving them away). It was comfortable, yet sturdy, and a commendable recreation of the one that had originally been paired with her desk. She held no doubts it would suffice to subdue a would-be assassin.

The situation with Twilight and her fellow Bearers was a troubling one. Strange abilities, new magic, odd portals. It all stank of Discord’s shenanigans, yet the Spirit of Chaos had sworn, under spell, that his claws were clean. Which left things displeasingly in the realm of the unknown. Celestia’s spells had ruled out any demonic, eldritch, or corruptive influence, but as time passed with little progress made on discovering the true source of the foreign magic, the seeds of doubt began to grow anew. In response, Celestia had promised to “dispatch an Agent of the Crown” (and not explain what that meant, as she often failed to do) to monitor the situation, but that was the last she'd officially heard of the matter. Unofficially she’d heard a great deal more. The castle staff loved nothing more than fresh gossip and there was no shortage of them with relatives or friends in the village at Mount Canter’s hoof. 

Some of the stories coming out of Ponyville bordered on the unbelievable… but such had been true even before this latest bout of strangeness, making it hard to tell fact from fantasy from fragments of truth flung out of proportion by the township’s legend of infamy. In times like those she wished her Order of Shadows had survived her absence. Oh what she’d be willing to give for her clandestine network of rumormongers, bards, and tavernkeepers.

Perhaps it was time to bring back the old traditions. If she could only find the time.

A knock on the door roused her from her musings. Peace never lasted and, as ever, there were enemies at the gate. “You may enter.” She held the door open with her magic as her personal aide entered.

“Evening, princess!” The mare stepped out from behind her cart for a brief but low bow, wings spread in supplication. “May the moon shine bright upon you this evening.”

“And upon you as well, Tea Service.” Luna completed the traditional greeting. 

The wheels of the cart squealed under heavy load as Tea Service coaxed it across the floor. “Gotcher coffee and the day's first batch of trouble”

Luna allowed herself a groan as she felt the stirrings of a preemptive headache coming on. “Please do not tell me that’s all for me.”

“I’m afraid so,” Tea replied with a shrug and a wan smile. “I skimmed it on the way over. Found a few documents that should have been sent to Princess Celestia instead, but the boys downstairs are getting better at sifting out the right things.” She rolled the cart up alongside Luna’s desk, bearing with it a monstrous pile of what the lunar diarch considered the most heinous thing borne of her sister’s millennium-long rule.

Paperwork.

It was inescapable. There was a form for everything. Every possible aspect of rulership had been boiled and rendered down to an appropriate form. Things had been simpler in her time. There had been paperwork, true, but it was limited to scribes who took down decrees and tax collectors who managed the census. Not these daily piles of parchment tall enough to block her view beyond the edges of her desk. 

“Running a country was so much simpler a thousand years ago,” she groused as she lifted the pile from the cart to her inbox. 

“Oh?” Tea commented with feigned disinterest. Luna was quite familiar with how interested her attendant was with her stories of the early days of Equestria. The mare could barely focus as she started to prepare the evening’s coffee.

A few minutes delay before tackling the bureaucratic beast would not go amiss.

“Indeed. While friendship and diplomacy might rule today, what you must understand was that in those days, might made right. Authority stemmed from personal power, be it physical, magical, or the wealth to field an army. Between the boons of alicorndom and being inheritors of Platinum's lineage, Celestia and I had all three. Nobles and liege lords acknowledged us as regents because we dealt with the monsters and tyrants that nopony else could. ‘Government’, such as it was, was a matter of one or both of us personally addressing the matter. Monsters invading in the south? I’d hoist my halberd, rally the guards, and ready a warparty. A new wall needed to be constructed around a loyal village’s expanding borders? We’d fly out and organize the laborers, direct the architects, and deter any expansionist-minded neighbors with her warhammer and my halberd. A noble suspected of skimming off their taxes? I would pay them a visit to personally remind them exactly why they paid that gold.”

“With halberd in hoof, I suppose?”

“If need be.”

“How often did it need be?”

She grinned, all teeth. “With refreshing frequency.”

“I see.” The percolator began to sing and Tea poured a cup of dark ambrosia. Luna took it gladly. Despite her name, Tea made excellent coffee.

“Quite so. A direct and simple solution for every problem.” But the warm memories could only buoy her for so long when she was still confronted by the paperwork mountain. “Alas, that is no longer the case. In my… absence—” She danced around the still fresh wound. “— Celestia turned to solving her problems with delegation, creating ministries to handle tasks for her. All she needed to do was send them written orders while she handled more important tasks herself. Then those ministries grew large and bloated and spawned departments which, as decades and centuries passed, divided again and again and again like some kind of insidious slime, seeping into every crack and crevice of government until there became nothing left for a Princess to do except sign forms, approve requests, and make public appearances.”

How she loathed it. It was bad enough that it was dull and tedious, but worse was that the centuries-old bureaucracy had not been developed and refined with a second princess in mind and it was not taking the change well. Even now, months after her return, a good third of her pile was often sent to her by mistake (though Tea’s efforts had reduced that amount). Either they were supposed to go to her sister or were inconsequential trivialities that should have been dealt with at the lower levels. Sometimes there were documents that she couldn’t make horns or hooves of at all, lacking some modern context. What she would give to be able, to be allowed (and wasn’t that a wild thought; that a Princess would need permission) to solve some problems the old fashioned way.

She sighed and let the idle fantasies drift away. It was not to be. Equestria was at peace (mostly) and, for better or worse, her sister’s tangled web of bureaucracy seemed to keep it that way. So she bit her tongue, filled out her forms, and left her restored halberd on its rack.

If a threat came that required a lovingly-sharpened solution, she’d be ready. But until then… paperwork.

“...and here we are now,” she finished lamely and gestured to the pile, realizing that at some point she’d drifted off in thought.

Tea merely nodded and removed the empty silverware. 

She only wished—in lieu of more fantastical dreams—that there could be some facet of the system dedicated to sorting out the important documents from the garbage before they were piled onto her desk.

“As usual, I see we’re starting the evening with more junk mail.”

For example, the glossy and eye-searingly colorful pamphlet that crested the top of her inbox like a golden tiara. It was one she knew well. A flyer that, if she bothered to read it, would once again suggest she renew her subscription to Simple Mare's Interior Lifestyle Enquirer magazine, a publication she’d never heard of and certainly never bought in the past. She gave it a magic-enhanced flick that sent it sailing off in Tea’s direction. The mare dutifully caught it and regarded it with all the courtesy it was due.

“Pardon my Prench, your highness, but what the actual buck?”

Her casual candor was a refreshing break from the two-facedly pontifical (from the nobility) or overly reverential (from the staff) language that had become commonplace around the castle, and a strong reason why Luna appreciated her company. Even if it took sharing her special blend to get the mare to open up.

“How do these keep getting mixed in?! This is ridiculous! I swear I told those boys down in admin to catch them before putting together the day’s forms. Is it that hard to pick the junk mail out of a Princess's priority work? I swear this wasn’t here when I checked earlier!” She’d crumpled the paper in her anger, but spread it out again to glare at it. “And would you look at that. Someone’s even gone and stamped it with the official “Priority” seal.”

“No doubt some bored quill-pusher somewhere thinks himself funny.”

Tea snorted. “A real jokester for sure. I’m so sorry, princess. I swear I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“Don’t trouble yourself.” Luna selected a quill and inkwell from the desk’s assortment. She needed to get started eventually to have everything done before Night Court was due to begin. “Perhaps if they send enough they’ll eventually bankrupt themselves on mailing fees. Just deal with it like always.”

“As you wish.” Tea tossed it into the fireplace, along with a few other pieces of bureaucratic flotsam that had slipped through, and collected a few things on her cart that needed to be taken away. “Did you have any special requests for breakfast?”

Luna waved her off, her focus on the forms. “Just the usual. You may— no, wait. Have we any more of those muffins Twilight Sparkle sent us?”

“The ones with the berry and nut clusters that Chef Beans couldn't identify?”

“Indeed.” She frowned. “Or has our dear nephew already absconded with them all?”

Tea grinned, a sly and conspiratorial thing that pulled her features sharp. “I do believe there may be two or three that her highness Princess Celestia has squirreled away where Prince Blueblood wouldn't think to look.”

Luna matched her grin. “How considerate. I’ll be sure to thank her later for saving them for me.” 

With the dismissal, Tea departed, the sound of the door closing behind her briefly overcoming the crackling of the multicolored flames in the fireplace as they ate through the dross of bureaucracy.

Settling herself into her comfortably firm chair, her mind filled with thoughts of curiously re-energizing pastries despite her attempts to focus, Princess Luna dearly hoped that whatever Twilight and her compatriots had gotten themselves mixed up in would not be Dark enough to require her intervention. Losing such delectable confections would be a travesty all its own.
> Chapter 39 - You Can Always Trust a Dishonest Man to Be Dishonest; It's The Honest Ones You Should Worry About
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

There were two things that Flam, traveling salespony nonpareil, knew to be true in life. First, that between him and his twin brother Flim, he was obviously the superior salespony and leader of their outfit (it was the moustache, really. It lent him an air of dignified sophistication that his brother's fifteen minute head start on life just couldn't match).

The second was that for every brilliant money-making scheme they came up with, there were a dozen backwater towns ready to fall for it before anyone caught wise.

Their latest venture was only on town number five and had already proven unrivaled success. A miracle curative tonic. Healing in a bottle (or at least, sugar water and minotaurine and an outstanding sales pitch). With each new town the bits just kept rolling in, and by the time anyone started to question the placebo they were off to the next. They'd made so much money that for the first time in their years of questionable business enterprises, they'd expanded operations!

True, hiring a single extra employee wasn’t a monumental expansion, but it was still a clear sign that their star was finally on the rise.

Silver Shill wasn't much of a salespony, but as a crowd-raiser, rumor-spreader, and audience plant, he was stupendous! Fantastic, even! Watching him throw off a pair of crutches and break into dance after gulping down their swill was like watching a Bridleway performance. It was surely an act of destiny that he and his brother had snatched him up before some big acting agent set their sights on the stallion. Town after town, show after show, he played his part brilliantly and earned his keep (that being two square meals a day, all the tonic he could ask for, and a wealth of the most valuable currency of all: practical on-the-job experience).

Or at least, that had been the case until today.

"What do you mean you can't find anyone?!" Flim demanded.

Silver Shill quaked like a leaf under the completely reasonable question. Without his frailty-implying fake glasses and array of medical props he didn’t look nearly as miserable and scrawny as usual, but even with a healthy physique he still had a backbone like a wet noodle. "T-That's exactly it, M-Mr. Flim, sir. I went all around the town—all over—but nopony was interested."

"That’s ridiculous!" Flam countered, "You're telling me there's nobody in this hick town who's even the slightest bit interested in a magical miracle curative tonic?!"

"Not a one?" Flim added as they fell into a rhythm.

"Not a soul? Did you check all the usual places?"

"The hospital?"

"The retirement home?"

"The bingo hall?"

"Yes, yes, and yes. And the fitness center and the veterinarian's and the day spa. I even thought to hang around the school to look for self-conscious teens but, well, they were all too young to have body-image issues yet.” Silver shook his head. “Best I could get was polite refusals."

Flam scoffed. For all his acting chops, Silver Shill was an unoriginal liar without a script. That much ground covered in one morning? More likely their star employee was getting a bit too big for his britches and turning lazy. Too lazy to even come up with a believable excuse. "What am I supposed to believe then? That this a town filled with nothing but perfectly healthy ponies?”

"Well… effectively... yes. That about sums it up," Silver cringed. If he were a turtle he'd have been completely inside his shell. "Apparently there's some mare in town who cooks up cookies or potions or something that heals wounds, cures sickness, and generally makes you feel better. The rumors didn’t all agree, but in the end no one seems interested in trying a new product when there’s a local one they trust."

That sounded... familiar. Intimately familiar. In fact, it was little more than a less catchy rephrasing of the chorus for the song he'd come up with to help sell their miracle tonic.

Which meant one thing and one thing only.

Someone was cutting in on their grift.

He locked a side eye with Flim, whose grim expression showed that his brother's train of thought had mirrored his own.

"Flim, dear brother mine, it seems someone's stolen our schtick."

"Besmirched our brand."

"Ripped-off our recipe."

"And didn't even have the decency to pay us any royalties." Flim shook his head in exaggerated sadness.

"What say we go pay a visit to this local dealer of miracles?"

"A ‘it'd be a shame if something were to happen’ visit or a ‘cut us in or we'll expose you first’ visit?"

"Let's see where the afternoon takes us."





It was entrancing to watch Fluttershy work. The long strand of wire twisted and danced between her hooves like a living thing as the pegasus bent and shaped it along the guidance of some ineffable instinct.

"It's actually really simple." 

It absolutely was not. 

"No harder than knit one, purl two." 

And then another twenty steps undiscovered by Equestrian knitters.

Rarity blinked and another foot of wire vanished into Fluttershy’s web.

Over and under, through and across, back and forth through loops and eyelets it went. Rarity considered herself something of a deft hoof at weaving (not that the opportunity often arose, more’s the pity) but even with her own magically gifted skill she had her doubts whether she could manage such a complex pattern, let alone freehoof with neither a guide nor tools. Not to mention with metal wire. Yarn and thread were troublesome enough, thank you very much.

It made her feel like she was five again, watching her Grandmother do needlepoint at blinding speed while still carrying on an argument with Grandfather in the other room.

Minutes passed in the blink of an eye then Fluttershy was done. The fine wire that had stretched across her kitchen and down the stairs was weft and coiled and practically macramed into an intricate little bundle barely twice the size of a postage stamp.

Fluttershy picked up two little plastic discs she'd prepared earlier and sandwiched the mesh between them. A little pressure around the edges and a few pops and clicks announced that they'd snapped together into a single piece.

Her latest badge was done.

It wasn't exactly fashionable—the shiny plastic façade made it look like something designed for preteen fillies to waste their allowance on—but given she'd watched Fluttershy cut the plastic out of an old shampoo bottle with a pair of safety scissors, it looked surprisingly well made. Exactly how a bit of wire, plastic, and crystal managed to create magic was beyond her, but that was why sussing out the mechanics of it was Twilight's department (and Moon Dancer’s, but the less spoken of her the better). 

Even if she didn't understand it, she couldn't deny the results. Especially not when her appraisal backed them up.



<<FS Emblem>>
A hoofmade magical badge. Used change the wearer's coat and mane colors to match that of Fluttershy



To be perfectly truthful, that was more than confirmation enough, but just because she didn't have to personally test it did not mean she didn't want to.

Because she absolutely did.

"Done," Fluttershy announced. "How was my time?"

She hadn't been paying attention, but that was why she had a stopwatch. "A touch over twelve minutes."

Fluttershy pursed her lips and frowned. "Hm. It didn't feel that long when I was doing it."

"That, darling, is what we call 'getting in the zone'." She held out a hopeful hoof. "May I?"

"Of course. You can keep it. I can't really use this one."

Rarity had to restrain herself from snatching it right out of her friend's hoof. It clipped onto her mane with ease, despite not having a proper clasp. More of that same strange magic it used. But she found she couldn’t care less about the hows and whys of it as she marveled at new colors spilling across her mane and coat like paint poured on canvas.

"I know Twilight and her schoolmates are fawning over your cooking, but I think these are really even more marvelous." She stroked her mane, now pink as Fluttershy's own. Better and more natural looking than any dye job she'd ever seen. Perfectly even color from root to tip. Oh the things these could do to the fashion scene. "And they're all that easy to make?"

“It varies," Fluttershy replied. She refilled her tea from the now lukewarm pot and took a deep sip. "I get a little tired if I try and make too many in a row, but it's not bad. And the emblems are easier than the badges."

It was an odd naming scheme, but Rarity elected not to comment. Fluttershy had said it simply 'felt right' and that was that. There was a lot of that going around when it came to their new abilities.

“It’s really finding the right materials that’s the hardest part. The simpler ones can use plastic but the fancier ones need metal. It doesn't matter what kind, but it has to be the right color." She nudged the lightning bolt-shaped emblem that Rarity knew could endow her with Rainbow Dash's woefully underutilized locks. The rainbow spiral beneath bold lettering made it actually rather fetching. "This one was one of the hardest to make so far. I had to take apart some Hearth's Warming decorations for all the red and green."

"Strange how that's all it needs,” Rarity observed. “With such simple materials you'd think somepony would have discovered the technique before now."

To her surprise, Fluttershy shook her head. "I don't think they would. The wire has to be just right or nothing happens and every badge has a different pattern. Moondancer was trying to understand them the other day and she said that the bead of crystal in the center takes in magic from nearby, then the wire... it... um..." She shuffled awkwardly and her eyes crossed as strove to remember precisely. "She said that I ‘produce an unknown magical energy which is captured and expressed in a three-dimensional spellform through the wire’s geometric alignment which acts akin to a physicalized runestring but without actual characters because why not at this point it makes as much sense as enchanted jumping boots'. Then she started grumbling about not having better equipment to measure it with."

"She does seem to do that rather often," Rarity agreed and sipped her tea to hide the fact that she really hadn't understood much of the explanation (though she was quietly impressed at Fluttershy’s recall). The mathematical and theoretical side of magic had never been her forte. It was fine tea. Overtones of tart apple that almost concealed a faint earthy hint of mushroom. Quite good, if unusual.

She couldn’t help but notice that Fluttershy’s diet seemed to have more apples to it as of late. Perhaps there was something going on between her and Applejack?

The thought tickled her imagination, but now wasn't the time to be speculating on her friends' theoretical romances. (That would come later, back home with her charts.)

For as much as she loved spending quality time with her friends (and as much as she was interested in Fluttershy's lovely trinkets), she'd had more pressing matters clouding her thoughts.

Namely, the fact that something was wrong with Fluttershy.

They'd all noticed it. (Well, she'd noticed it and was sure Applejack and Pinkie had too. Twilight had been... distracted lately, and Rainbow Dash would never win any prizes for her observation skills. Suffice to say it was worthy of note, regardless whether her friends had picked up on it.)

The pegasus had been more reclusive than usual, more twitchy and disquieted. Something was stressing her beyond her usual anxieties.

Rarity’s first guess had been she’d received some unsettling memories alongside with her new abilities. Memories of combat training hadn’t fazed Applejack overmuch, but she could imagine that learning the ins and outs of anatomy might have been a much more traumatizing affair for the squeamish pegasus. But that idea had landed dead in the water. Fluttershy had been more than happy to wax poetic about how her new medical knowledge was helping her provide better treatment for her animal friends and positively gushed about how her carnivorous plant creation was developing (to wit: in increasingly unsettling ways. There was little Rarity would not do for her friends, but she still desperately hoped she’d never be tapped for plant-sitting duty. The mere thought of it sent a cold shiver down her spine. Flowers were not meant to have teeth.) If anything she seemed less anxious when talking about setting a broken bone than otherwise.

The badges clearly weren't giving her any undue stress either, which meant she was back to the drawing board.

She flinched as the tingle of a new power ran up her horn before fizzling out. Fluttershy’s wings likewise twitched in surprise.

“Yours?” the pegasus asked.

“Not mine. A shame. I feel I’m overdue for one.”

“I wonder who got it.”





Across town, in the depths of a zoning-regulation-violating basement expansion deep beneath Sugarcube Corner, Pinkie Pie cut off the gas to her welding torch and lifted her mask.

“Huh. That’s… weird.” Her ear twitched. “Did I get… I think I did…” Her back leg half-kicked of its own accord. “Yep yep, definitely a new one. But then why…? I don’t feel any different. No new memories. Or skills, I think.” She tapped her hooves. Squished her cheeks. Ran through a quick kinesiological assessment. “Nope, all clear there. Maybe it’s more free stuff, like my toolbox? I’d better go tell Twilight.”

She tossed her tools back into the inky depths of her toolbox and headed up, leaving the welds to cool, their fading light casting strange shadows on her half-finished party plans and boxes of assorted scrap.





“I supposed we’ll find out in due time,” Rarity allowed. With no new insights to Fluttershy’s troubles, she mentally set the matter aside. Perhaps something would naturally come up in conversation that would provide a clue. 

She fiddled with the ornament in her mane, fashionable possibilities running through her mind. “Have you ever thought about selling these? You could make quite a splash.”

Fluttershy blinked uncomprehendingly. "A splash?"

"Quite so. The biggest hurdle with fashion is that there's always some colors a pony just can't wear because it clashes with their coat. You’ve never seen Pinkie try and pull off lime green, have you? But with these, rather than picking clothes to match themselves, ponies could change themselves to match their clothes." 

Fluttershy hesitated, seeming unsure. "You really think that ponies would want to buy them?"

Rarity scoffed, just firmly enough to sound classy without sounding mean. "Darling, if you'd unveiled these at Fashion Week you'd have every agency in Manehattan beating a path to your door."

The teacup clattered against the table as Fluttershy dropped it, completely forgotten. "Really? You think so?" She practically leapt over the table, unaware or uncaring of the pieces of the tea set she knocked over. "How much do you think it might make? Would some colors be better than others? What color would be the most valuable?"

Rarity reeled back—she had to, else her face wouldn't have room to move—and tried to regain her composure. Still, it seemed like a pretty solid lead on what was bothering her friend. Best to seize the moment.

“Fluttershy... I don't mean to be indelicate about it, but… are you having some sort of money troubles?"

The pegasus shrank back into her seat like a flower wilting with the sunset. Fluttershy nursed her teacup, oblivious to the fact that it now only held leaves. "Oh. Well… there's a little something. But it's not a big deal. You don't need to worry about me. I'll figure something out."

Rarity remained silent and allowed the pegasus to fret and justify and hem and haw herself into admitting more than she intended.

“It's not a big debt or anything. Well, it is big but not that big. I can manage. I just have to cut back on a few luxuries for a while. Like preening oil. And groceries.”

Slowly, Rarity gleaned the major beats of the story from Fluttershy’s nervous excuses. Something to do with unexpected fees from the government, a headache she was all too familiar with (she still remembered those panicked early days of running her own business before she learned that “running a boutique” and “being a seamstress” required separate tax forms). The problem was what to do about it. Obviously she was more than willing to help in any way she could, be it a loan, a gift, or even greasing a few frogs (favors went a long way with the elites of Canterlot). The challenge would be getting Fluttershy to accept the help.

Fluttershy's shyness expressed itself in many ways, from a hesitance to meet new ponies to a phobia of too-many-things-to-list, but one of the more insidious of the lot was her "I don't want to be a bother" mindset. Even when the issue itself would be trivial for one of her friends to solve, she just couldn't bring herself to impose on them. The pegasus could be just as stubborn as Applejack sometimes, though her refusal stemmed from shame rather than pride.

Which really just meant Rarity had to get creative. Even if Fluttershy refused her bits, there was still the option of helping her out indirectly. She had a plethora of skills to help the mare earn the money herself.

A passing notion drifted into the path of her train of thought, and the resulting collision blossomed into a truly marvelous idea. Fluttershy had a product she was eager to sell, but no experience with the market (and a lack of proper backbone needed to survive customer service). Meanwhile Rarity had an established brand, connections to ponies who'd recognize value, and the business savvy to make sure her timid friend wasn't taken advantage of.

The simple answer was to sell Fluttershy's emblems through Carousel Boutique.

It was a brilliant plan; genius, even, if she did say so herself. A way to help her friend and an offer she’d have no excuse to refuse. Fluttershy wanted to sell, after all. And so what if a little creative book-keeping meant that the pegasus ended up with the lion's share of the profit (which she'd surely protest if she knew). Rarity didn’t mind. What was a little lost profit margin compared to helping a friend (not to mention how having such an exclusive and ground-breaking accessory would help elevate her own status in the fashion world)?

A win-win all around. All she had to do was convince a mare who hated the spotlight to have a trusted friend act as an agent in her stead. Easy as a straight stitch.

She was just beginning to compose her pitch when they were interrupted by a knock at the door.





Flim was not impressed.

A quaint little cottage, cozy as could be, surrounded by nature and cute little scurrying animals? One secreted away at the edge of town, just close enough to the spooky Everfree Forest to invite mysterious rumors?

Poppycock. Utter balderdash. It was so blatantly staged he could practically smell the staff services table.

No one really lived in places like that. Only apocryphal ponies in rumors and urban myths... and also ponies trying very hard to establish a persona.

Still, somepony had invested a lot of effort into selling an image, so he was probably looking at a long term operation. Someone who had enough confidence in their snake oil that they didn't need to fear getting run out of town. Normally that'd put newcomers on the backhoof in any negotiations, but most newcomers didn't have the kind of experience he and his brother had. They were professionals; trained by the very best. In one glance at the set dressing he was confident he knew exactly what he'd find behind the cottage door.

It'd open to a plump, matronly mare (one who “definitely” wasn't stuffing her skirts with a couple of pillows) with a grandmotherly smile. She'd invite them inside and try to lower their guard with an affable demeanor and an endless supply of "homemade" cookies. She'd probably call them "dearie" and "handsome young things" before she not-so-subtly did a cold reading of their ailments and began praising the benefits of her "all natural", "herbal", "holistic" remedies.

It was a tried and true gimmick, practically an industry standard, though one he and Flam lacked certain natural assets to pull off. (More the pity. He’d worked hard to train a passable falsetto and never got the chance to put it to use.)

Still, as much as it pained him to intrude on a competitor's turf (not very, but he had some professional pride), it wouldn't do to have two groups in the same town both selling miracle cures. Giving ponies a chance to shop around and compare options would only hurt the both of them. Which meant they either had to work out a deal... or somepony needed to clear out.

They reached the door and knocked, one hoof each, in steady stereo. It always paid to present a united front.

The mare that opened it (after a long minute of clicking metal as many locks were unlocked) was a far cry from what he'd expected. Young and petite, half hidden by the door and another quarter by her own mane, with wide eyes that seemed more suited for a spooked animal than a pony.

Quite cute, really. Perhaps if things worked out amicably…

He brushed away the distracting thoughts. She couldn't be who they were looking for. An assistant maybe? The local competition's equivalent to Silver Shill?

"Hello?" she offered, a nervous squeak at the end turning the greeting into a question.

Flam seized the initiative, putting on his best salespony grin and tipping his hat he’d worn specifically so he could do just that. "How do you do, my fine filly. My brother and I are looking for one Miss Fluttershy. This wouldn't happen to be her residence, would it?"

Her already wide eyes became somehow wider. “Am I— is she in trouble?”

“Not in the slightest!" Flim riposted, his grin as wide as his brother's. "My brother and I are new in town, you see, and word on the street is there's a mare who lives around here who makes miracles in a bottle."

“Or a bundt pan, as some rumors say."

The mare froze for a second before she reached up and tapped on an odd pin in her mane he hadn’t noticed, which seemed to calm her down immediately. Some kind of nervous tic? "Oh! You're here about the remedy treats." She opened the door fully. "Yes, I’m Fluttershy. Sorry, I thought you might be from the government."

A mare after his own heart. If only she wasn't a competitor. "Perish the thought! No one wants a visit from a stuffed shirt. I say we’d be better off without the lot of them.” Following first rule of traveling salesponyship, he took the open door as an invitation to enter, his brother a step behind.

The inside of the cottage was exactly what he would have guessed from the outside. Clean, but with a tasteful clutter of knickknacks and birdhouses and tchotchkes pressed around the edges. Warm and inviting, with a faint smell of animals and loam and cooking. All it was missing was a cauldron and some bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters to be the spitting image of a hedge witch's cottage straight out of a storybook.

“A lovely place you have here,” Flam remarked.

“Very quaint. Very… atmospheric,” Flim added leadingly. Just a little hint to let her know they were on to her game.

She bobbed her head in a small nod. “Thank you. I’m sorry about the mess. I’d have cleaned up more if I knew more ponies were coming.”

A bit of empty humility that ignored his probe. Well if she wasn’t willing to play, then he could jump straight into a harder tactic. “So these ‘medicinal remedies’ of yours… they sound like quite a marvel.”

“Oh, they’re nothing special. It’s just a few simple recipes for drinks and snacks that help the healing process.” 

If she was going to keep playing the fool, he could tip his cards a little. “There’s no need to be modest. You see, my brother and I are also in the business of… alternative medicine.”

“The Flim Flam Brother’s Miracle Curative Tonic, to be precise,” Flam pulled out one of their trademark bottles as he spoke. Of course he’d brought one with him. His hat had pockets. “It’s the taste sensation that's sweeping the nation!"

“It cures your ills!"

"With electrolytes!"

"It's got what ponies crave!"

“I’m sure you’ve heard of us.”

“Maybe?” she offered uncertainly. “I think the name sounds familiar.”

Flim frowned. So much for professional reputation. “Well, suffice to say, we’re rather established in the business.”

“And when we rolled into town and heard about somepony else plying the same trade—”

“—we felt it natural to come see how the local brew holds up against our market-tested formula.”

And there it was. The gauntlet was thrown. They couldn’t possibly make it any clearer that they knew of her scam and fully intended to edge in on her territory. Now to see how she responded.

“Oh! Well that sounds lovely!” She said with an unflappable smile. “It’s nice to know that there’s other ponies who also do what they can to try and help out the sick and tired ponies out there.”

That was… not the way the script was supposed to go. Before he could collect himself, she clapped her hooves together with a delighted expression. “I just had a wonderful idea! Would you mind terribly much trying some of what I can make and telling me what you think? Everypony in town says they can’t get enough of it, but I’d love to get an expert’s opinion.”

Flim leaned back just enough to meet his brother’s eye. An imperceptible nod and a furrowed brow conveyed all he needed to know. If she refused to crack, they just had to keep applying pressure. “I think that’s a splendid idea.”

“Indeed. Let’s get a gander at these miracle treats for ourselves and see if they cut the mustard.”

He settled onto the overstuffed sofa as their host left the room. Flam sat beside a moment later.

“So.”

“Quite so.”

“Not the expected reaction.”

“She’s experienced. Been in the game for a while.”

“Maybe she misunderstood.”

“I doubt we could be much clearer.”

“Indubitably. I don’t like her confidence. Something doesn’t add up and it makes me worried.”

“Big fish in a small pond. I bet she’s been working this town so long she can get by on placebo alone.

“If that’s the case we might be better off just moving on. No sense wasting our time against a pony so ingrained.”

Flam considered it for a moment. “No. Let’s see this through, brother mine. I’ve got a hunch there’s something more going on than meets the eye.”

“Your last hunch got us run out of Hoofton on a rail.”

“That wasn’t my fault, it was—ah, you’re back.”

It was about then that Fluttershy returned bearing a tray containing… a rather ordinary-looking strawberry shortcake with cream and a pair of pale green drinks.

Not exactly an impressive display. It certainly lacked the gravitas of their miracle curative tonic with its custom labels and engraved corks and rigorously rehearsed song and dance number. He accepted the plate while his brother went for the drink first. 

Spearing a small portion onto his fork, Flim brought it to his lips and bit.

It was, in a word, delicious. The cake was light and spongy, the strawberry fresh and tart, the cream sweet and thick. Despite being chilled, the bite melted away on his tongue like a piece of candy, leaving behind a sweetness that was neither cloying nor saccharine. The whole experience from mouthfeel to lingertaste was absolutely refreshing.

No, it was more than that.

He didn’t just feel refreshed, he was refreshed. Maybe he was falling for her ruse, but in that moment Flim would have sworn that he felt more energetic, more filled with vitality. Even the subtle ache in his hooves from crisscrossing the town to gather rumors seemed to fade away.

Curiosity won out over his caution as he eagerly took a sip of the drink to follow. It was thicker than he’d thought, more a shake than a juice, and an odd flavor combination of honey and melon. 

It too was absolutely refreshing. 

He went for another bite for confirmation, but his fork clinked against an empty plate. He’d already eaten the whole slice without even realizing. His cup was empty as well.

Flim was proud of the elixir he’d created. It’d brought in a lot of cash and was dirt cheap to make. But in full never-tell-the-public disclosure, most of the heavy lifting was done by his and Flam’s showmanship. The elixir worked because they convinced ponies it would.

This was something different. He’d gone in skeptical and still felt more rejuvenated than he had several forkfuls ago. That was more than just good marketing: that was the sign of a secret ingredient. Something that gave it more of a punch than mere thoughts and prayers.

It tasted like legitimacy.

Legitimacy… and opportunity.

A small noise of satisfaction from Flam snapped him from his trance. It was no time to be lost in thought. Things had just gotten much more serious. This was no longer just a meeting of posturing to feel out a competitor; now it was an opportunity to take their scheme to the next level.

If he played his cards right, this could be the golden goose that would fly him and Flam straight to the top.

“So?” Fluttershy asked. She shivered, as though a cold breeze had run through her feathers before she tapped her mane pain again and settled. “Is it… good? I mean, up to your standards, at least?”

A quick glance to Flam confirmed his brother was of the same mind. Time to pivot the plan from intimidate to incorporate.

“It’s passable.”

“Perhaps not as good as our elixir, but commendable for a novice.”

“Good enough for a small town like this. I imagine you’ve made yourself a pretty penny selling it out of a little pop-up stand at the farmer’s market.”

She looked away. “Not… really. To be honest, I’ve actually been giving most of it away for free. I’ve been looking to start selling it recently, but I’m not sure how much to charge. It doesn’t cost me much to make.” She fiddled with her mane pin again before meeting his eyes. “Since you’re experts, maybe you can try it and tell me what it’s worth.”

Flim grinned. At last, the pieces clicked together. This was her goal all along. She’d been angling for a collaboration from the start. 

Still, his instincts told him he was missing something. Some key piece of context or insight. The plan didn’t match the mare that was selling it. 

But it was too good an opportunity to pass over.

“Let me answer your question with a question,” Flam replied, “Have you given any thought to expanding operations?”

“Introducing your product to the wider market?” Flim added.

“I'd love to, but... I don't know. I have a lot of recipes but I don’t know if I could prepare them fast enough to keep up. Even if some of them are very simple, I still have to make them all by hoof to be effective.”

More recipes? Just how many products was she pushing? But that only sweetened the pot. More options meant an appeal to a wider customer base. Limited output would be a challenge, but the fiasco with the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 had taught Flim a hard lesson about sacrificing product quality to save time. They just needed to market around the issue.

“Not a problem!” he declared, “When you say 'slow production' what I hear is 'small batch production'.

“Bespoke craftsmanship!”

“Limited quantity!”

“Exclusivity!”

“With your fortifying formulas—”

“—and our nationwide network—” More or less a map of easy marks, but she didn’t need to know the details.

“—we could take you from a local legend to a household name. Imagine! A bottle of your product in the hoof of every pony in Equestria!”

Bottles that would have his and his brother’s face on it, but that’d all be in the fine print. Silver Shill wouldn’t even need to wash out the bottles they had since her concoction was the same color!

“That sounds wonderful!” she beamed, completely caught up in their pitch. 

“A smart decision. If you’ll allow me a moment to write up a quick contract—”

“Ahem. I believe that would be my cue, darlings.”

Cutting Flam off before he could scribble something quick and legally binding, in from the next room walked a pony that was as much Fluttershy's opposite as she was her copy.

In looks, they were the same, but in bearing they couldn't be more different. While one was rather milquetoast, the other strode forward with enough confidence for three ponies.

For a moment, he felt like he’d stumbled upon some kind of bizarro funhouse mirror. What were the odds of coming across another pair of twin confidence ponies with yellow coats selling miracle cures?

Then again... maybe this was destiny knocking at the door.

Her coiffed pink mane was held back by a pair of mismatched pins: one a simple triangle that matched her mane and coat, and a second that looked like it'd been made from a pair of gold bits.

A touch tacky, but it sent a message. This was the mare to talk money with.

"If you're interested in any manner of business negotiations, then I’ll be the one to handle that."

Flim nearly gasped as the final piece clicked into place. A silent partner. That’s what was missing. That’s why Fluttershy’s success seemed at odds with her meek and friendly personality. Their deviation from the usual healing tonic routine made sense now. One sister to be the face of the product, innocent and guileless, while the other worked behind the scenes on the dirty practical business side of it all. If he and Flam weren't in constant competition to be the center of attention, they might have developed something similar.

"Rarity..." Fluttershy's voice quavered with uncertainty.

Rarity and Fluttershy. He didn't see the connection, but he supposed not all twins could be as lucky in their names as he and his brother were. 

“Ah ah ah! Not a word, Fluttershy. You trust me, yes?” The pegasus nodded. “Of course you do. Then trust me to have your best interests at heart. This is much more my area of expertise than yours. Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll hammer out a deal with the best terms you could ask for. If you’ll let me.”

After a moment’s pause, Fluttershy nodded again. “Thank you.”

“Think nothing of it! Now! Why don’t you bring out one or two of everything you can cook up so your esteemed business partners to-be can get a full grasp of what you have to offer?”

“Good idea! I’ll be right back!” At that, she scampered off. 

As she left, Flim noticed Rarity’s gaze harden as she turned it on them, her eyes as unyielding as diamond chips. “Now then. To business. Fair warning, I drive quite a hard bargain.”

Flam chuckled. “I’m certain you’ll find that we do as well.”

“So I’ve heard. But such is the way of high-stakes business, no? After all, you can’t make cider without squeezing a few Apples, as they say.”

Suddenly Flim didn’t feel quite so confident. Perhaps their reputation had preceded them. 
> Chapter 40 - Ain't Nothing Gonna Break My Stride
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Now, let's begin. I want you to look deep into my eyes. Deeper. Deeeeper. Deeeeee-ow! Not that deep!"

"Sorry. I got excited."

"Sit back down. Look deep into my eyes, without getting up. You are falling into a trance. A deep sleep that leaves you open to suggestion. Now, when I count down from three, you will believe you are... hm... ah!... you'll believe you are Twilight Sparkle, the most boring bookworm in Ponyville."

'Hey!'

"Quiet now, Bookhorse. No interfering with the test, you said. Counting down to Twilight time in three, two, one... zero! Now, tell me... who are you?"

"I'm Pinkie Pie!"

"What. No, you're Twilight."

"No, that's Twilight over there with Moondancer behind the pane of glass. I'm Pinkie."

"Hmph. Maybe that was too complex for you. Something simpler then. Look back into my eyes. Watch the swirling colors. Deeper. Deeper. When I hit zero, you will be a chicken, got it?"

"Got it!"

"Three-two-one-zero! Now cluck!"

"Bkawk!"

"Ha! That time it worked!"

"No it didn't. I just clucked cause you asked me to."

‘He's not doing very well, is he?’

‘Let’s let it continue a bit more. This is still good data.’

"Fine. We'll do it the boring way then. If you're not going to play by the rules then neither will I! *SNAP!* There! You're under my control, so do a jig or something."

"But you told me to stay sitting."

"How are you still resisting me?! *SNAP!* You are a worm! A worthless, lowborn, dirt-eating worm!"

"Nnnnnooope! But would you still love me the same if I was~?"

"Why." *SNAP!* "Won't." *SNAP!* "You." *SNAP!* "Obey!?"

"Have." *CLAP!* "You tried." *CLAP!* "Asking." *CLAP!* "Nicely?"

"I think that's enough for now." Moondancer tapped on the glass to get their attention. "You may stop. Clearly she is immune."

"No she's not!" Discord snarled. "You can't just be immune to my powers. I'm the Lord of Chaos! I use the laws of physics as a bathtowel and logic as a dental floss!" He spun back around to Pinkie who remained on her stool, smiling placidly. "How about round two of inversion therapy?"

He flicked the tip of her muzzle and a grey pallor began to creep across her body.

Or rather, it just about reached her eyeballs before it swiftly reversed course, her pinkness coming back even pinker than before. She sneezed and sent the last little droplet of grey negativity flying like a spitball.

"Sorry," she giggled, "I guess I'm allergic to bad vibes."

"Why you little—"

Rolling her eyes at their unprofessionalism, Moondancer activated the silencing spell on the barricade and all sounds from the other side abruptly cut off. At the change, Twilight looked up from her notes. "I think we can call this a success," she said. "As vague as it sounds, Pinkie is immune to mind control."

"Discord's, at least," Moondancer clarified. "There's still changeling hypnosis, dark magic, mundane brainwashing, and several others that we lack a way to test. Not to mention the 'inability to be erased from a timeline' aspect that seems inherently unprovable."

Twilight gave her a look. Moondancer, she realized, was exactly the kind of pony who'd go out and learn ancient secrets of dark magic purely for the sake of scientific study. She'd have to keep an eye out for that. Maybe Celestia could teach her some kind of dark-magic detecting spell. Just in case.

"Still," Moon Dancer continued, "It's quite convenient that you have such a powerful creature available to test these things."

"He’s not a creature, he's a friend."

Her fellow researcher made an unimpressed noise. "As you say. Incidentally, your 'friend' appears to have Subject Five in a chokehold. Should we be concerned?"

Twilight snapped her attention back to the glass partition that separated them from the testing area. Discord had both his claw around Pinkie's neck and her tail in his paw and was stretching her out like a piece of taffy. But Pinkie seemed to be laughing about it so... "She's fine. I don't think he'd do anything permanent."

"I meant concerned for us. Wasn't he evil not long ago?"

"He's... figuring out friendship," Twilight hedged. Figuring it out in stumbling baby steps. "I think working with Fluttershy has been good for him." At the very least she seemed to be having better luck channeling his chaos in constructive directions.

"About that.” Moondancer made a few final notes before shuffling a fresh page to the top of her clipboard. “Despite my insistence, she's refused to allow me to perform a vivisection on their creation. Can you use your authority to convince her?"

The nib of Twilight's quill snapped off against her notes. "Can I what? Why would you want to do that!?"

"Because I haven't studied it yet," she answered easily.

Twilight took a deep breath, held it for a five count, and released it. She didn’t want to snap at her  or get upset, but day by day it was getting harder. It was honestly starting to get concerning how little social boundaries seemed to matter to the mare when it came to pursuing novel research. Twilight knew she herself could be a bit overzealous at times, but Moondancer’s fixation was practically monomaniacal. Food, sleep, relationships, social niceties. Everything that wasn’t research was a bother to her. 

At some point she needed to sit her down and have a very serious discussion about things… but at the same time, Twilight couldn’t help but blame herself for possibly setting her down this path. For poisoning the well just when she was starting to open up. And if she pushed back too hard, made a request that Moondancer found unreasonable… would she lose this one second chance to help her former friend recover?

And so she didn’t push back. She acceded to Moondancer’s requests, giving her as much room as she wanted and the freedom to direct her own research. Friendship had to start somewhere, but she was giving so much to even get back to neutral ground.

But in the meantime, she still considered Moondancer a friend even if the feelings weren’t reciprocated. And even if she lacked a certain amount of... empathy for others. And for possibly sapient plant-creatures.

"I'll ask, but I don't think she's going to change her mind. I'll see if she'll make a copy of her own research for you."

"Ugh, fine." Moondancer rolled her eyes. "I doubt it'll be up to any professional standard, but a hobbyist's notes are better than nothing. It can't be worse than her scribbled recipe cards for medicinal desserts." Her ear twitched to the side. "Speaking of which."

Twilight jumped as something orange and creamy smacked into the barrier hard enough to break through the noise cancellation spell.  

“Parry this you filthy casual!”

“Pear, you say? I’ll have you know this is apple country!”

In the scant minutes she’d looked away, somehow Pinkie and Discord’s argument had escalated into a full-blown cupcake war. Lines had been drawn in the sand, battlements hardened, siege engines readied, and already a good portion of the room had been repainted in a thick splatter-coat of icing.

“Hey!” She reached across the room with her magic and stopped a half-dozen sugary missiles in flight. "I said no food in the testing area!"

Pinkie peered up from behind the table she’d repurposed as a tower shield. “Yeah, but you said it's okay if it's an experiment.”

Twilight paused. “What experiment?”

Answering by example, Pinkie unleashed a furious fusillade of red velvet ordinance. “Question: How good is Discord at dodging?!”

Discord juked and dived, twisting his body in several highly improbable ways. “Hypothesis: Very!”

Twilight sighed and recast the silencing spell. She was just about finished with testing anyway, so they could have their fun. Besides, Pinkie knew the lab rules (even if she was a little too keen on exploiting loopholes). She’d make sure to clean up after or risk losing some of her earmarked time with the Cube.

The Cube was a fantastic tool for keeping chaos managed (draconequus interference notwithstanding, of course)

"See?" Moondancer's voice was laced with smugness like icing on a cake. "The blast shield was necessary, even for a supposedly clean test. This is why I said I'm not taking any more chances when it comes to Subject Five.”

And then there was that. The odd phrasing that had been cropping up in her reports lately. "Calling Pinkie that is a little much, don't you think? There's such a thing as too much professional detachment."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd lived through what I experienced." She shuddered as her eyes took on a thousand-yard stare. 





"This is a copy of the Equestrian Board of Education standardized tests in mathematics, chemistry, and biology. Since I've been informed you were... homeschooled... for much of your youth, this should provide something of a benchmark of where you stand having received new knowledge. Any questions?"

"You can put your hoof down. This isn’t school and you're the only one here."

"Does it matter what color I answer the questions in?"

"...Black ink is preferable."

"But does it matter?"

"Just use black."

"Okay! Do I have to answer the questions in the form of a question?"

"How... how would you even do that?"

"I don't know. That's why I'm asking."

“You… no. Just answer them normally, as thoroughly as you can. Any more questions?”

“Yeah, is your name one or two words? I can never remember and I wanna get it right for your ‘I survived one month in Ponyville’ celebration cake.”

“...just take the tests.”

Three hundred minutes later, Moondancer learned that Pinkie interpreted ‘answer as thoroughly as you can’ to mean ‘derive everything from first principles and include proofs’. In the end she answered only five questions, though they were irrefutably correct.




“Hey! Moondancer! Look what I made!”

“I see you've wasted several boxes worth of uncooked pasta and glued it into a pile of junk. Very impressive if you were a quarter your age.”

“Aw, thanks! But you haven’t seen the best part! Look what happens when I pump the bellows.”

“Oh. Wow. It's capable of self propulsion. That's actually a rather impressive display of mechanical engineering. It looks quite insectile with so many moving legs. Was this inspired by changeling biology?”

“Nah, just a weird dream I had. And watch this, I can make it dance!”

“Is that part intended to flex quite so— oh.”

“Whoops. I guess the macarena was too much for store-brand glue. Oh well.”

“I don't suppose you made any record of how it was constructed?”

“Nope!”

“Of course you didn't.”





"Heya Moony! You want to see a hydrophilic expanding long-chain sucrose polymer?"

"It’s Moondancer, and absolutely not. I'm eating lunch."

"Come on, it's really neat and Rarity didn’t— oh no. It should not be frothing like that. Random, totally unrelated question: you don't happen to keep any acetic acid in here do you?"

"Nothing beyond the vinaigrette on this salad."

"Yeah, that'd do it. Hit the deck!"





"Do you know the thaumatological coefficient for pomegranate-plum buttercream frosting, Twilight? I do. I had to calculate it longhoof because, surprise, it's not in any of my reference texts. I'm possibly the first pony to ever have any reason to need it. And despite my spellwork I swear I can still smell icing around that corner of the room.”

Moondancer shuddered briefly before composing herself and pushing her glasses up her muzzle. “I can't take seriously someone who refuses to take this research seriously. That's why I have reclassified her from research assistant to research subject. I consider her on par with the originite crystals.” She smirked slightly. “Fitting, given their shared tendency towards explosions.”

"I even-" She started to continue, but stopped suddenly, her mouth snapping shut. The smirk vanished as her usual neutral expression re-asserted itself. “She’s making faces at me through the glass, isn't she?”

Twilight glanced behind her. “Actually, no. Discord's turned her into an abstract painting of herself. I think she was making a face at him but now it's stuck like that.”

Moondancer sighed. “Of course he did. I ask again, should we be concerned?”

“I'm sure he'll turn her back.”

“I meant for how it will affect future tests. Two-dimensionality might have lingering side-effects we can’t predict and I need to know if I’ll have to adjust her testing schedule to accommodate.”

Twilight refrained from rolling her eyes. Perhaps hoping Moondancer was concerned about Pinkie’s wellbeing had been too much to ask for, but she’d get there in time.

Hopefully.
> Chapter 41 - A Young Mare’s Clockwork Synergy
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Ooooaark. Oooaark!"

Fluttershy had never in her life needed an alarm clock. When she was thirteen, she'd gotten one as a present from a well-meaning but distant relative, but within a week she'd regifted it to her brother (not only did he need it more to counter his habitual laziness, but the harsh ringing first thing in the morning had left her a panicked and anxious mess till lunch).

Part of it was that she was just naturally an early riser, but it was helped by some clever interior decorating. Her bedroom was arranged just so such that the dawn sunlight would gently caress her face as it rose over the horizon. (A more entitled pony might have boasted that this meant she had Princess Celestia herself as a wake-up service, but no one had ever accused Fluttershy of being entitled.)

And, of course, if it were ever rainy, cloudy, or she felt unwell, she always had Angel Bunny as a back-up. The little fuzzball knew exactly when he liked his breakfast and would put his stompy little feet to devastating use if she ever slept in too much.

It was a fine arrangement, and one she'd grown used to over years of repetition.

"Ooark!"

Though she hadn't expected the latest addition to her household to be an early riser on par with Applejack.

"I'm up, I'm up," she mumbled as she fought through her tangle of weighted blankets, two hooves still firmly in Princess Luna's realm. Strands of dream clung to her mind like seaweed even as she rose, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. A blurry figure on the windowsill wriggled in anticipation of the day. "If you'll just hold on a moment, please."

One stumbled trip to the bathroom later, she returned, her breath freshened, face washed, and feeling much more awake.

The first rays of morning were just peeking over the edge of the forest, dyeing the skies in swirls of gold and red and giving the fields and woods an autumnal hue.

Including the swaying and grinning flower that begged for her early attention.

"Good morning Priscilla! And how are you today?"

"Oaark!"

"That's good. Now, morning checkup first, then your breakfast. Lift your leaves, please."

"Oar!"

It had been quite the surprise one morning to find Priscilla talking—though to call it talking was a bit overly generous; the sounds she made were less words and more like if a frog had learned pitch control and had an excellent vibrato. But she was quite emotive with the few vowels she had, and the fact that she could do even that much was an unexpected development in and of itself.

“Good girl. Now stretch up, tall as you can.”

Her little seedling had been growing slowly but steadily since that first bit of explosive growth on the day she’d sprouted. Her biggest pair of leaves were the size of playing cards now and from pot to petal she stood nearly as tall as a foal just shy of cutie mark age. Not that she stood straight up all that often; she much preferred to bob and sway and stretch towards the nearest source of light or sound or curiosity.

"Good! That's a quarter inch of growth and a new leaf bud." She took a few more measurements and carefully transcribed everything to the little boxes of a chart she kept pinned to the wall. More than half of it was already filled with similar numbers taken every morning and evening since she'd had her visit from Wolfsbane.

"One last thing then we're done." Priscilla's leaves curled as she made a low whine that tugged at Fluttershy's heartstrings. "I know you don't like this one, but it's important. It'll only take a moment; I'll go as fast as I can."

Priscilla coiled her stem to make herself smaller, hiding her bulb behind a wall of fanned leaves.

"Please?" Fluttershy tried, to no effect. As smart as she seemed to be, the plant didn't yet have much grasp on complex social constructs and niceties. But one thing she did understand was treats.

"Would you do it for a parasprite?"

Priscilla perked up immediately, then tried to hide behind her leaves again as she failed to disguise her interest. But some of the tension was gone from her petals.

"Two parasprites?" Fluttershy offered.

The plant peeked out from between its leafy barrier. It held up three leaves. "Oaa."

"Two, and I'll top off your mushroom juice with one of the special breeds if any are ripe today."

Priscilla nodded eagerly and unwound herself. Then, like a head of cabbage with aspirations of being a fly trap, she spread her petals wide.

Fluttershy loved Priscilla as much as any of her other animal friends. But even given that she still couldn't help a momentary instinctive hesitance at seeing that toothy maw open wide. Sweetheart though she was, Priscilla had a bite radius wider than Harry the bear's. It took a second for her brain to catch up and remind her that the “teeth” were merely angled petals meant to lock together to trap prey inside rather than actual sharpened enamel meant to cut and tear. Still, she took her measurements quickly and (much to Priscilla's wriggling displeasure) took a quick swab of the fluid leaking from the under-developed and unsettlingly-tongue-like organ at the back of her throat-stem.

The moment her hooves were clear, the petals snapped shut like a steel trap and unruffled themselves back into their lip-like grin.

"Done! You were such a good girl! Yes you were!" Fluttershy leaned in and gave the plant an affectionate nuzzle. It met her halfway, mimicking her movement with silky soft petals on her fur as it trilled a high noise of delight.

Fluttershy giggled. "Okay, enough cuddles. I've got more to do today." She broke contact and headed for the door. "For starters, your breakfast."

"Oark!"

"And your treat, I won't forget!"

Despite the recent changes to her life, Fluttershy's morning routine was still mostly the same, barring a few unusual exceptions. Wake up. Measure and care for her plant friend (species name still pending). Feed her animal friends. Have breakfast herself. Check the beehives in the backyard. Check the tunnels of magical mushrooms and harvest any ripe ones with her magical golden sickle. Check her calendar for any social events she might have forgotten to write down in her diary or her to-do chalkboard. Monotonous tasks, mostly, made relaxing by their familiarity.

As she prepared breakfast for the many denizens of her home (including a magic mushroom smoothie, served in modified baby bottle to drip feed it right to her roots) Fluttershy's mind inevitably began to drift to the various swords still dangling over her head; the repercussions for unknowingly stepping on the BMMC's and GALM’s hooves with her unsanctioned dip into playing Faust with life. All the backdated fees and licenses and permissions she had to pay for. The requirement to start documenting her spur-of-the-moment idea as a proper research paper. The hovering specter of Wolfbane's "eccentric friend" 's upcoming visit and the need to impress them with either Priscilla or, as he had hinted, something more.

It was only thanks to her favorite creation, her Feelin' Finer badge, that she hadn't broken down in an outright panic attack. All it took was a simple tap to drain away the anxiety and let her consider things clearly (even more so than before, since she discovered her new medical knowledge let her "prescribe" herself the use of the badge which made it function slightly better than it should).

That, and her friends. Rarity, who was helping her manage the socially domineering Flim-Flam brothers to turn her treats into bits, and Twilight, who knew about research papers and told her what to record and how to record it (and promised to help compile it all in the end into something that would stand up against professional academic inquiry). Sometimes she still felt like she was pushing her problems onto her already busy friends, but the feeling was weaker than it used to be. Especially since she was turning her free time to helping them in ways only she could.

She finished up her morning tasks about an hour before lunch, which meant she had most of the rest of the day free, giving her the time she needed to make a few special deliveries. Rarity had asked for a set of color-changing emblems in as many varieties as she knew how to make (which turned out to be six, currently, with a peculiar seventh). Meanwhile Pinkie had put in a special request for a couple of her badges with more esoteric effects, as well as two pairs of her Super Boots.

Why Pinkie needed a Hammer Throw, Pretty Lucky, or Zap Tap Badge she was almost afraid to ask. So she wouldn't. It was probably something party or surprise related anyhow.

Tracking down Pinkie at a moment's notice was usually a challenge, but luckily she had an appointment where she knew she could meet both of them at once.





"Is this really necessary?"

"Necessary? Darling it demands to be done!" Rarity held another swatch of fabric against her friend's buttery coat. Close, but not quite. White was an easy color to pair, but the material was too light. It draped well, but a proper doctor’s coat called for something a little more robust and practical. "The moment Pinkie Pie pitched the idea to me and I visualized how you’d look in it, why, my honor as a professional fashionista insisted that I bring it to fruition."

"Yes, but do you really need to take all my—eep!" Fluttershy yelped as the cold metal tip of the measuring tape brushed against her flank. "D-don't you still have my measurements from making my gala dress?"

"I do," she agreed, "but the fit of a jacket is completely different from that of a ballgown. Might as well redo everything while I have the tape out." Beside that, it was also the most discrete and polite way to check if any of her existing patterns for the pegasus were going to need letting out. It'd be hideously gauche to ask aloud, but she couldn't deny that her friend's diet had taken a recent upswing in candy and confections.

Luckily for Fluttershy, it seemed mushrooms really were a superfood. The mare hadn't gained an inch. Some ponies really did have all the luck.

“Besides,” she continued as she split her attention between taking new measurements and writing them down with a hovering quill, “I needed a break to focus on a casual passion project. Work’s been getting a little stressful now that my name’s being passed around more high-profile circles. The price of success, I suppose.”

She leaned in as if to whisper, but didn’t actually lower her voice. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I recently landed a commission from Sapphire Shores herself to make a custom costume for her next concert and she has very demanding requirements. Every bead and sequin must be hoofstitched.

“I know I should be honored to have a commission from such a celebrity performer, but she is just so particular. I swear if I have to hoofset another sequin-sized sapphire today, Princess Luna’s going to be fighting them off in my nightmares tonight.”

A flick of magic rolled the tape back up as she turned to her other guest, who currently resembled a warped funhouse mirror version of herself.

"Pinkie, emblems off. I need to see your real coat to match the fabric."

"I dunno." Pinkie shook out her mess of royal purple curls, leaving them in a completely new arrangement that still somehow maintained her usual silhouette. "I kinda like this color. Might try keeping it for a few days. Ooh! And it'd be great for Nightmare Night!"

Rarity narrowed her eyes. Before she could ask exactly how looking like her was supposed to be a scary costume, Pinkie grabbed another emblem from the table and stuck it in her mane. The moment the clip snapped shut, the Wa Emblem transformed her purple and white into a sickly green and off-gray.

"Ta-da! Instant changeling!"

The boutique was silent for a moment as they digested the idea.

"I think... you might get arrested if you tried to go out as a changeling," Fluttershy eventually said. "Just from the police being extra cautious."

"Yes, and I'd rather not have you start a rumor that I'm secretly a changeling. I have enough trouble with Suri's mudslinging as it is."

Pinkie shrugged and plucked both emblems from her mane, restoring her fur to its much more aesthetically pleasant pinks. "Eh, maybe in a few years then. I bet I could pull off a mean Chrysalis."

"It'd be harder to pull off a nice one," Rarity tittered and sent the measuring tapes to check any changes in Pinkie's pleasantly plump proportions. She gestured down as she worked her way to Pinkie's legs. "You'll need to take off the boots too—"

"Super Boots," Pinkie and, surprisingly, Fluttershy both corrected her.

"Either way, they're in the way of me measuring your ankles for the cuffs."

Pinkie hopped out—thankfully at a normal height. She'd seen firsthoof just how high those boots could let one leap and she liked her boutique without a skylight, thank you very much—and stood still enough for the measuring tapes to do their job.

But Rarity found she couldn't quite put the boots out of her mind.

"Fluttershy, I have to ask. For those boots- super boots, why did you choose such a—" Lurid, she wanted to say but didn't. "—vibrant shade of green? It's rather a clash with Pinkie's coat. Blue would have been better. Or even red, at a stretch."

Fluttershy tilted her head and shrugged. "If they were red, they'd be Ultra Boots," she answered opaquely, "And I need special materials for those that I don't know where to find."

It made about as much sense as how her badges worked. On a whim, she turned her Hoarder's Eye to the quartet of green booties, just to see what they'd say.



<<Super Jump Boots>>
A magical tool that allows the wearer to jump very high for a devastating impact. You can have it in any color you like, so long as it's green.



Sometimes she swore the little informational boxes had a mind of their own. And a cheeky one, too.

"...Right. Anyway, what even do you need them for Pinkie? You're quite bouncy already and I'd have loved to take you on a filly's day out to shop for some fashionable footwear."

"It's-" Pinkie crouched low and cast her eyes about the room before leaning in and finishing, "a seeeeeeecret," she whispered loud enough to be heard anywhere in the boutique. "I need them for part of a big project I'm working on. Don't tell the others, I want it to be a surprise!"

Hardly a strange request from the resident expert on surprises (and quite a few other things, as she liked to remind everyone). But secrets were cousin to gossip, and the hunger for juicy details was ever-present.

"Oh, don't tease us like that! You've got to tell us something."

"Weeeeell... okay!" Pinkie grinned. "I'll give you a hint. It has to do with synergy."

Synergy? As in, between different abilities? Or the abilities of different ponies? It made sense, if she was collecting some of Fluttershy's creations and planned to combine it with something of her own. Though it was a bit of a disappointment that the secret was rather less juicy than she'd been hoping. "Well, if my weaving or Hoarder's Eyes can be of any help, don't hesitate to ask. Or my more mundane abilities, if you need another outfit after I finish these matching medical uniforms."

Fluttershy sat up slightly. "Oh, that reminds me." She rummaged in her bag for a moment before pulling out a small glass bottle with a tuft of white inside. "Here's today's sample, if you don't mind checking."

"Not a problem, darling." A moment of concentration turned her Hoarder's Eyes upon it and she was greeted with a familiar text box.



<<Clean Glass Vial>>
A slim glass bottle, formerly containing Dover Brothers' Cheese-Stuffed Olives. Currently used to hold a medical swab.



Rarity refrained from rolling her eyes. Was this her comeuppance for thinking of the boxes as cheeky earlier? She tried again, focusing with greater intent.



<<Dirty Cotton Swab>>
A cotton sample swab dipped in a mildly caustic chemical. Commonly used in doctor's offices to collect viral or bacterial samples from patients' mouths or other orifices.



"Is everything alright?" Fluttershy asked.

"Fine, fine. The Eyes are just being difficult today."

Once more, with gusto, and a rather pointed consideration towards using the Eyes to reorganize her thread cupboard again.



<<Caustic Chemical Sample>>
A complex organic compound unknown to Equestrian science from a juvenile [ERROR]. May react violently under certain conditions. Used for [ERROR].


 
"Got it," she announced. "Oh! There's a slight change. Nothing new, but the description changed from seedling to juvenile."

"Does that count as a birthday?" Pinkie mused. "It's not been anywhere near a year yet but that sounds like something to celebrate. What kind of cake does Priscilla like?" She gasped. "Can a plant even eat cake?"

"I haven't tried giving her cake yet, but I know she likes magical insects. I give her parasprites as treats for good behavior."

"Parasprites?" Rarity asked, "Fluttershy, please don't tell me you've started breeding—"

Her measuring tape jerked in the air and her train of thought derailed as she felt a familiar tingle start in her horn. Someone was about to get something new. She didn't hold much hope for getting it herself, but she was hardly jealous. Her Hoarder's Eyes were undoubtedly the most useful (and most in-demand) of their abilities. Perhaps if she was lucky it'd be another tool they could all use. The Horadric Cube had been instrumental in her recent creative success, after all.

But the feeling didn't dissipate. Instead it grew, stronger and stronger until it paradoxically felt like she was on the precipice of sneezing through every part of her skull except her nose.

Then all at once it vanished.

*tic*

An idea popped into her head. A set of tiny gears.

*toc*

Another idea. A gemstone, one designed to store and channel mana.

*tic-toc*

The shape of a spell, but unlike any she'd ever seen before. It—

*Tic-Toc-TIC-TOC*

A logic gate in brass and copper. A long string of numbers. A fragment of a memory of a lecture hall. An equation rich with terms she didn't know.

*TICTOCTICTOCTICTOC!*

Terms she did know, and a dozen more as knowledge flowed into her mind as swiftly as if it were her own thoughts. Mathematical formulae strung together like the notes of a Heartsong. Clockwork mechanisms more complex than any watch or clock she'd ever seen, yet that she could visualize as easily and completely as a dress she'd patterned herself. And memories too. Some fuzzy and indistinct, as though glimpses of a dream, others as vibrant as if they happened only yesterday. Years spent working, studying, training. Striving to be the top of her class. Sleepless nights spent hunched over her desk, working by candlelight with a slide rule and tweezers. Landing a job at... somewhere prestigious. A government office? An apprenticeship she both loved and hated under a lunatic genius whose mere memory filled her with both respect and disgust. She was lost in the flow, adrift and rudderless on sea of information and experience, years worth of study in magic, mechanical design, mathematics, and—

—and then a party popper went off right next to her ear.

She blinked as reality reasserted itself and the memories skipped like a jostled record player before fading into the background. Not gone, but no longer occupying every inch of her awareness. As though she'd experienced nothing more than a particularly vivid flashback.

"Hurray!" Pinkie cried as confetti rained around. "Congratulations on your third, Rarity! That makes you tied with Twilight and Fluttershy and only two behind Rainbow Dash. I was starting to think you'd never get another one."

The outburst was enough to ground her properly in the moment. "Have you been keeping score?"

"Not score," she corrected, "just a record. In case there might be a pattern."

"Congratulations," Fluttershy added with a small smile.

"Thank you," Rarity replied. Still feeling woozy from the rush of information, she lit her horn and summoned her fainting couch, taking a seat as it appeared behind her. She pressed a hoof to her temple. "Just give me a moment to compose myself. There's a lot to sort through."

"Should I get you a glass of water?" Fluttershy asked.

"That'd be lovely, thank you."

She closed her eyes as the pegasus left the room. She wasn't in pain, per se, but she still felt rattled as dichotomous thoughts ground against each other. Different facts that she 'knew to be true' yet which couldn't possibly exist simultaneously. It was... taxing.

She opened her eyes as she felt a gentle pressure on her side. It was Pinkie, sitting down next to her and leaning in. Her friend rubbed small circles on her back as she spoke softly. "Mind whammy hitting you pretty hard? They’ll do that. I remember when I got all my degrees shoved in my head. I felt like an overpuffed party balloon about to pop for two days after."

Rarity chuckled ruefully. "It's definitely an adjustment. It doesn't hurt but... things feel off."

"I know. It changes how you see the world. Right after I got my big one, I just couldn't stop noticing stuff. Like, I knew how my oven worked but I didn't know, you know? And then I did know and suddenly it was like I was seeing it for the first time. Then repeat that for... everything.” She pulled her other arm around to turn the cuddle into a proper hug. “It gets better. You’ll adjust and it just becomes a part of you."

It wasn’t often that she got to see the quieter, more reflective side of her normally chaotic friend. But it was a comfort to know that she wasn’t alone and that somepony understood these strange feelings she couldn’t quite put into words. "Thank you, Pinkie. Hopefully this will pass faster than your experience did. This knowledge is... a lot, but I doubt nearly as much as your every-degree-under the sun."

"How much is a lot?" Fluttershy asked as she returned with the water and aspirin.

Rarity downed them both before she replied. "About seven years worth."

"You got new memories? Like Applejack did?"

"Four years studying at the Imperial College and three apprenticing at the Bureau of Magecraft under... someone whose name I can't quite recall. Strudel? A brilliant but insufferable boss." Rarity rolled through the new knowledge in her mind, marveling at how it all felt both new and familiar at the same time. “It's certainly strange, and I can see now what Applejack meant by new memories being disorienting. The broad strokes are there, but my classmates and teachers are all blurred away."

"Did you learn anything fun?" Pinkie asked. "Are you joining our Doctor Buddies group?"

"Not yet, but I do know everything there is to know about computation orbs."

"Computation orbs?" Fluttershy repeated, "What are they?"

"Oh they're the most marvelous devices. A fusion of clockwork and crystal that can cast a complex form of magic spells derived entirely from mathematical principles."

It was an incomplete description, but it was the sort of oversimplified definition as she remembered learning it in her first year. What they cast wasn’t even truly spells in the way that unicorns knew them, but long equations that altered reality to produce magical effects.

The math was almost beautiful in its complexity, but too complex for an average mage to be able to handle through mental arithmetic alone. Most could manage some minor cantrips, parlor tricks at best, and maybe a rare genius could manage something of note, but mages like that were few and far between. But that was why computation orbs existed at all. To take the brunt of the effort off the caster. To eke out the maximum potential from the smallest bit of magical energy through ruthless mechanical efficiency. Orbs were a necessity to make magic a reliable tool.

But a part of her, the part that had been casting spells nearly everyday since she was five, said that was wrong. She didn't need to wring out every ounce of magic, she had mana to spare. She was a unicorn. She was meant to cast spells.

Granted, she wasn't Twilight with her once-in-a-generation skill and magical capacity, but she was hardly a slouch by any reasonable standard.

“I learned the ins and outs of their making. From gear alignments and crystal cutting to the underlying mathematics that allow them to function as anything more than expensive jewelry. My graduating thesis paper was a comparative analysis on how different types of gemstones performed at retaining programmed spells.”

There were dozens of spells that she remembered seeing at one point another in her studies, but only a half dozen or so that were considered “standard” enough to warrant full memorization. A shield charm, a ranged explosive spell, a minor spinning enchantment, and...

Her breath hitched as “old knowledge” bloomed into a new realization.

The golden standard spell for any computation orb in modern production. The measuring stick by which they were classified.

The Flight Formula.

A memory came to her then, unbidden and unwanted, of the most embarrassing moment of her adult life. When she'd gotten so wrapped up in her own ego that she'd tried to upstage the Best Young Flyer's competition in Cloudsdale. It'd taken barely an hour with a spellcast pair of butterfly wings to think she was not just equal to, but better than pegasi who'd been flying their whole lives. The sheer arrogance made her cringe even now.

But despite the shame associated with the memory, she couldn't forget the thrill of those few hours. The sheer visceral joy of flight was... well, afterward she understood much better why Rainbow Dash almost never landed.

But the Gossamer Wings spell Twilight had cast on her that day was a novelty. A bright and colorful toy designed to awe and astound a crowd more than anything else. It made the user a puppet, clad in a pretty dress and flitting about the stage while behind the scenes the automatic parts of the spell mechanically manipulated gravity and balance and air resistance to poorly ape what a pegasus could do naturally.

The Flight Formula that computation orbs ran was an entirely different beast.

It was thrust, plain and simple. Vectors of movement that had to be balanced against one another and the forces around it. It was a spell built from the ground up for precision control over movement in three dimensions, with only a token nod to creature comforts tacked on the end like a postscript.

It was like comparing a runway model's dress to Royal Guard armor.

Gossamer Wings let her fly but the Flight Formula would give her flight.

And it wouldn't be disabled by a warm beam of sunlight either.

Most mages required orbs because it was so difficult to keep the spell formulas fixed in their minds. But she didn't have that problem. As of moments ago, she knew the equations forwards, backwards, and inside-out. Not just how they functioned but why. Every aspect of a computation orb down to the last gear, with a complete understanding of exactly what each piece did and why and how that physical motion translated to shaping the spell.

Almost by instinct, she spun up the spell in her mind, calculating the vectors with the ease of long practice. She lifted and placed her hoof atop nothing... and the nothing held her weight.

It was still awkward to cast. Compared to the more instinctual Equestrian magic, it was like trying to write calligraphy with her left hoof. Sloppy, difficult... but not impossible.

And that was without even using an orb to do the heavy lifting! Once she made one... she could scarcely imagine the possibilities.

Of course, she couldn't go making herself a Type-50 orb right off the bat (let alone any of the cutting edge experimental models she knew of from her apprenticeship. Honestly, four cores in one orb? Whoever had approved the Type-95 clearly had a death wish). Even the more modest workhorse orbs in the Type-30 range were still monstrously complex, with hundreds of parts that demanded precise machining.

Anything earlier than a Type-20 would be too big to carry, but perhaps one of those older clunky models would work as a proof of concept.

But even beyond a computation orb's value as a tool was its elegance as an accessory. Gold filigree and flawless gemstones were an Equestrian fashion mainstay.

“...arity? Rarity?”

She snapped back to reality from the depths of her creative vision as Fluttershy gently shook her shoulder. "Sorry, what? I was... distracted."

"I'll say!” Pinkie giggled. “You were lost in the sauce. I zonked out a couple of times like that right after I learned the deep lore of the chemistry of baking. If you were out any longer I was gonna start seeing how much stuff I could balance on you before you came back."

Rarity lowered the hoof she'd rested on thin air and three spools of thread fell off her head.

Pinkie grinned unabashedly. “Or maybe I'd already started. But it wasn't easy! Your mane's too silky soft for stuff to stay put.”

She accepted the compliment as an apology and levitated the spools back to the shelves where they belonged. "Apologies. I was... overcome with possibilities. What was I saying?"

"You were telling us the new magic you remembered learning," Fluttershy supplied.

"Right. Of course. As I said, spells shaped by mathematical formulas. There’s quite a lot of them but I only have a few memorized. Minor utility spells, mostly."

"Neat. Does it work with regular unicorn spells?"

She pursed her lips in thought. "Hm. No. No, but if I had enough time I could probably convert a spell to magical formula. Though it wouldn't be a quick or easy process. I'd have to work out the math longhoof."

"Sounds like a job for Moon Dancer and her league of extraordinary researchers then," Pinkie grinned.

That sat… poorly with her, for reasons Rarity couldn’t quite put a name to. The idea of sharing this knowledge felt like a squirming worm in her heart. A small, oddly militant part of her insisted that the knowledge of computation orb inner workings was a closely held government secret that she'd taken oaths to never reveal.

...which was patently ridiculous. The knowledge was hers to do with as she pleased. She held no allegiance to an Empire whose name she couldn't even remember.

But what was the reason then? Why did another small, ugly part of her demand she hoard the information to herself anyway? As impressive as computation orbs were, they were hardly revolutionary. Your average pony on the street could casually cast a few spells that a mage would need a Type-40 or better to achieve, and a third of all ponies could fly under their own power.

And yet…

And yet.

She could always tell them later, right? Twilight and her research team had so much on their plates already. Really, she'd be doing them a favor by not piling more on.

But how to convince her friends of that?

"I think, perhaps, we should... refrain from telling Twilight about this one. I don’t suppose you two could keep this a secret for her? If only for a short time?”

Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy gave her mirrored looks of surprise. “What? Why not?”

“But we've always told each other about new abilities. That’s what our journals are for.”

“Well, she's already very busy researching all those as is, isn't she? So busy that she had to call in part time help. And I’m quite busy as well. I have that order for Sapphire Shore to make and I’m simply not going to have time to explain an entirely new branch of magic to her.” 

No one was arguing, but from the looks on their faces she could tell they weren’t quite convinced.

“She’s gonna know,” Pinkie warned. “She and Moon Dancer can sniff out new magic better than Applejack can sniff out spoiling apples.”

“I know. But you know how she gets. We didn’t see her for three days after she learned about those runes that let her make spell beacons. And the math side means that Moon Dancer and some of her other researchers are going to want to learn as well. Four years worth of lectures isn’t something I can summarize over tea.” She shook her head. “The knowledge isn’t going anywhere. We’ll just… set it aside until a better time.”

Fluttershy was quiet. Rarity had banked on her innate desire to avoid confrontation and it seemed to be paying off. Pinkie, however, looked more contemplative. After a moment, she smacked one hoof against the other. “Explain it to me then.”

Rarity blinked. “Pardon?”

“I’ve got several doctorates in advanced mathematics. I’m sure I’ll pick it up quickly. Just narrate as you work and I’ll grasp enough to field any questions Twilight might have until your schedule clears up. That way, we don’t have to hide anything.”

It wasn’t what she’d planned, but it did give her better control of the information. Both sharing the information and keeping secrets from her friends made her uncomfortable… but maybe she could compromise. Pinkie wasn’t the type to pry and pester for every possible detail so it wouldn’t be hard to keep a few secrets. Besides, would it really be so bad to keep the flight spell to herself? For the time being, at least? It'd take weeks or months for Twilight's team to get to the level where they could start making orbs themselves.

And wouldn't it be something? To be the first unicorn to properly fly?

After a moment more of consideration, she agreed. “I suppose I can cover enough of the fundamentals in a lecture or two, if you’ve got the time.”

“Um, excuse me,” Fluttershy cut in. “I’m not very good with math, so if you have all the measurements you need, do you mind if I step out? I wanted to deliver some more healing treats to the hospital.”

“Of course, Fluttershy. Make sure they pay you this time.”

She squirmed and made a pained expression. "I know. I remember what you said, but it still feels bad to charge sick ponies."

Rarity shook her head as she mentally shifted to business mode. “And should the doctors work for free as well? Charity is well and good, but your effort has value and you deserve to be compensated for it. Don't forget that. Besides, you're practically healing them out of a job! A small portion of the hospital's food budget is a fine price for freeing up their time to focus on patients with troubles too severe for your juice and cookies to fix.”

“I offered to help with those too, but they said they legally couldn't accept actual medical help without some kind of certification.”

“Perhaps you should cross that bridge once we settle your current issues with legal paperwork.”

A few more goodbyes were said and the pegasus left the boutique. Rarity prepared the fabric that needed pinning and cutting while Pinkie made herself comfortable on the chaise with a sandwich she’d pulled from somewhere. 

“Alrighty,” Pinkie said once she was settled. “I am prepared, O wise sensei. Teach me the secrets of New Math.”

“I might ramble a bit and drift between topics,” she warned. “I know the knowledge, but not how to teach it.”

“No problemo! My last perk gave me endless patience. Letting it all come to you naturally might help all the new thoughts settle in faster. Now hit me with that mathemagic!”

With a small laugh, Rarity turned the brunt of her attention to her sewing and let her memories drift towards what she remembered from her earliest lectures. “Mathematics is the fundamental language of reality. Indelible truths about the universe. All of nature is expressed through patterns, and mathematics is the way through which different systems speak and interact with one another. This is just as true with magic as it is with anything else. Given a formula and the inputs, you can calculate the output. But with the right formulas, you can influence a little piece of the universe’s pattern. Manipulate the output. That is what we call a spell. With the right pattern of gears to turn an equation into something physical, you can make an accessory that will cast it for you.

“We’ll start at the beginning with Cabbage’s Difference Engine, what some called the Mark 0 computation orb.”