Lights flashed all around. The smell of smoke was thick in the air. Flames from the sweet shop bathed surrounding houses in a warm, orange glow. The roaring fire had engulfed the shop, creating a large beacon in the calm of Luna's night sky. Small bits of flaming sugar and frosting spewed from the broken windows like napalm, forcing the emergency teams to keep all unauthorized ponies at a great distance from the shop itself. Eventually, two large stallions sporting heavy boots, large, flame retardant coats, and red, plastic hats came rushing through the doorway of the shop. Either was carrying a small bundle that writhed and shrieked as they exited the building. The screaming was awful to listen to; onlooking ponies covered their ears and shed a tear for the poor infants. They had minor burns on their bodies, but those were the least of their problems. They were old enough now to understand things, and what they understood was that both their parents were dead. Their father had been engulfed in the flame that spewed from the oven, immediately set ablaze. His screams of pure agony had terrified them and woke their mother, who had been napping on the couch. She soon found her lungs were filled with deadly smoke and she died in a twitching heap on the floor. The two children were small enough that the smoke floated harmlessly above their heads, allowing them to be the only survivors of the terrible conflagration. But they were without parents and they were without a home, and for this, they wept.
"What do you mean I can't have the kids? I've been taking care of them since the day they were born! I'm just as much their parent as the Cakes were!" The pink earth pony was livid. Her eyes flared in anger and fear as she shouted at the judge.
"I apologize Miss Pie," the judge returned, "but the Cakes never verified a godparent for the children. Therefore, by Equestrian law, they must be put in the custody of their closest blood relative, so long as he or she permits it. In this case, that relative would be Mister Cheaps here."
Pinkie Pie turned to glare in contempt at the shady character to her right. He was of regular stature, though slightly more portly than the average stallion. He had a waxed handlebar moustache that, under other circumstances, Pinkie would have found hilarious. He spoke with a conceited attitude and everything he said had a sort of sinister inflection to it.
"Please Mister Cheaps," Pinkie begged, "I have the responsibility to take care of these two. It would be wrong to take them away from their home. Please let me have them!" Pinkie was groveling at the pony's feet, her desperation making her unaware of how ridiculous she looked.
"Excuse me, Miss... Pie, was it?" The stallion removed himself from the chair he was in and stepped over the ruined pink heap on the floor. "I have no intention of leaving these children to a pony I don't even know. I would be much more comfortable raising them myself, and I'm sure Carrot and Cup would want the same. Now if you would please pick yourself up so I can sign these papers without any further interruptions, we can both part ways and move on with our lives." He grabbed a pen in his mouth.
Pinkie looked up as she watched him sign the paper, with each stroke taking Pound and Pumpkin, her two little angels, further and further away. Tears dripped down her face, matting the soft pink fur and reddening her eyes. As Cheaps set the pen down, Pinkie realized her family was gone. Her parents were dead, her sisters were dead, her adoptive parents were dead, and now she would never see her adoptive siblings again. And for this, she wept.
“Hey runt! Get your miserable little flank out of bed and start stretching. The show starts in one hour.” A gruff voice, tired and aggravated, awoke Pound from his sleep. The tan pegasus rubbed his eyes and gave a depressed sigh and heard Uncle Cheaps yell again, this time at his sister. “As for you,” he screamed, “if you don’t get that transparency spell down before the show, you’re going to be eating my hoof for dinner!” A loud thump and a whimper immediately removed any of the foggy sleepiness in Pound’s head. He darted out of bed into the room over, finding his sister crying quietly on the floor, holding her head in pain. Anger began to cloud his mind, but he quickly regained control of himself, remembering, with a glance at his slightly misshapen hind leg, what happened when he talked back to Uncle Cheaps. Instead, he held his little sister, reassuring her with kind, caring words and rubbing her back to calm her.
“Don’t worry,” he told the crying filly, “you’ll get it before the show. You’ve never missed a spell as long as we’ve been doing this.”
“B-but this is d-different,” Pumpkin stammered as tears began to form in her eyes again. “Alterations have always been hard for me, and this one’s just too much. The most I can get is just a little see-through.” A sob burst through her lips and she placed her head in her soft, yellow hooves.
Pound pulled her hooves from her face and turned her head, staring straight into her deep blue eyes. “Listen, Pumpkin. You are the most talented unicorn I’ve ever known. You were levitating and floating through walls when you were just one month old. I know, at three years, you can turn a pony invisible.”
“But I can’t even manage to turn a simple spoon invisible!” she exclaimed in frustration. “How can you possibly think I can turn you invisible?”
Pound’s smart little brain worked up a quick answer to his sister’s query. He didn’t know much about magic, being a pegasus, but neither did his sister, as she never got the privilege of reading to study her spells. Uncle Cheaps usually just told her what the process was and left her with it to mull over. Pound responded, “Well obviously that spoon is made of metal, right?”
“Right,” his sister sniveled.
“And metal is highly reflective. In order to make it transparent, you have to make light pass through it instead of bounce off of it. So a reflective spoon would be much harder to perform the spell on than a pegasus.”
Pumpkin stopped crying and looked up at her brother. "You think so?"
Pound decided to drive the nail in with another fabricated reason. "Plus, I'm alive. That means I can focus on cooperating to make the magic work better, unlike dumb old mister spoon over there." He nodded towards the dirty utensil laying on the filthy carpeted floors.
Pumpkin's sniffling and tears were broken with a short laugh and a loving embrace from her brother. "Thanks, bubby," she bubbled adoringly.
"No problem, sis." He paused, as if waiting for something. "Well, aren't you going to try it out?" he asked, turning his head to the side, an inquisitive look on his face.
"Oh!" Pumpkin perked up, remembering why she'd been crying in the first place; she could be so forgetful sometimes. Her horn gave a few small sparks and suddenly, it erupted into a beautiful, yellow halo of mystical force. The yellow unicorn scrunched up her face in concentration, her eyes squeezed shut, focusing every ounce of energy into her spell. She felt around herself with her magic and found the aura she was looking for, an aura she had worked with many times before, an aura that gave her comfort every time she contacted it, an aura that belonged to her beloved brother. She felt their two auras mix, and two became one. She felt, for the hundredth time, a genuine sense of surprise at the power of his magical being. All ponies, not just unicorns, were magical; that's why they all got their cutie marks, after all. Only unicorns, however, had the means to externally direct this magic, so they naturally had larger reserves of it. Pound however, had the magic reserves of a newborn unicorn, which was still dramatically more than the average non-unicorn. This pool of energy allowed Pumpkin to exponentially increase her magical ability, giving her the ability to perform spells that were out of the reach of most adult unicorns. The massive waves of magic bombarded her body, pulsing through her limbs and making them tingle. She collected all the internal strength she had and focused every bit of magic she had into her horn. She let it lose, and the modest halo burst out into a huge cone of intense, sparking magic. Every strand of her silky, orange mane was standing on end. She felt her surroundings, though her eyes were closed, and sensed her brother's presence. She also sensed the beams of light around him and how more and more were going harmlessly through her brother until he was completely invisible.
"Hey, get your flanks in gear! The show starts in less than- wait, where did that miserable sack of manure get off to?" Uncle Cheaps was furious; His veins were bulging from his neck and he was yelling at the top of his lungs, wondering where Pound had gone. All this noise, of course, broke Pumpkin's concentration.
Ssssssseeerrp! Seemingly out of nowhere, a small, beige pegasus appeared directly in front of Cheaps' face.
"GAH!" he screamed in shock. He stumbled backwards and smashed into the wall behind him, unsettling a precariously hung knock-off painting, which fell and thumped Cheaps right on the head, exacting from the crude, gray pony a series of swears and a groan of pain. Pound and Pumpkin turned to each other, lips puffing out and eyes watering, both trying to keep themselves from bursting out laughing.
"You sniveling, cowardly little gelding! Don't you ever do that again!" The cruel, fat, pony accented his last statement with the back of his fore-hoof in Pound's face. The colt was thrown and fell to the floor in a heap. He was glad his mane was hiding his face. He couldn't let his sister see him crying; she looked up to him. Instead, the tough little pony stood up shakily, gave a curt apology to his uncle and proceeded to prepare himself for the show.
The two young ponies could hear the faint roar of an audience watching all sorts of ridiculous, demeaning displays. Ponies who had failed in the real world but still retained some sort of freakish talent came to Cheaps Cakes' circus as a last resort. It was awful work. The trainers were abusive and perpetually drunk. The living conditions were wretched; most of the rooms smelled of vomit or urine and held about them a feeling of lost hopes and dreams. But worst of all were the performances. All of the ponies were laughed at or booed, especially the zebras, considering the ever-present racism in Southern Equestria, especially Saddlanta. The twins found it all evil and despotic, but there was nothing they could do about it. Uncle Cheaps was their guardian, not to mention he was five times their size and ten times as strong. Thus, they had to lead the same lives as the other circus folk, tortured inside and out every day.
Soon enough, the two twins heard their uncle beginning their introduction. "Fillies and Gentlecolts, lend me your eyes and ears, for this is the moment you've all been waiting for!"
A great roaring applause erupted from the audience, signaling their approval of the traditional grand finale. Pound crouched down and got ready for take-off, while Pumpkin wrapped herself in a yellow veil, beginning to hover off the ground.
"I now present to you, the great, the spectacular, The Terrific TwinderBolts!"
Pound rolled his eyes at the ridiculous name Cheaps had given their show, but the deafening noise from the audience overruled his opinion. He pushed off hard and, when he came out of the performers' room, he banked and turned hard as he whipped around the stadium, inches over the heads of the audience. Meanwhile, Pumpkin levitated herself out of the room at a much slower pace, shooting fireworks and sparks from her horn as she went. The noise from the audience was deafening, but the two young ponies, used to it by now, proceeded with their act. Pound pulled off loops and spiral dives and all sorts of acrobatic stunts, while Pumpkin accented them with small flashes and explosions, glowing orbs of multicolored light, and her own midair stunts. The two worked in flawless harmony, making a stunning show for the audience. When it came time for the grand finale, the two focused hard on making the invisibility spell work. Pound hovered over Pumpkin’s head, his wings flapping slowly to stay aloft. As Pumpkin’s horn exploded into the same fiery yellow cone, Pound began to disappear right before the audience’s eyes. They gasped in shock and awe, marveling at the sheer power of Pumpkin’s magic. The small unicorn slowly got used to the spell and began to play with it. As Pound flew over the crowd, she let him waver in a sort of translucent state, making him ghost-like. Some of the children screamed, while many of the adults just sat in awe, having never seen something so marvelous.
The performance continued with a few more tricks, including Pound becoming invisible and suddenly reappearing right in front of members of the crowd, which caused several ponies to drop whatever they were holding and spill it on themselves. The two also executed a strobe light effect that made the young, cream-colored pegasus seem to rapidly flicker in and out of existence, complimented by showers of sparks from his flying path. The grand finale consisted of a series of massive explosions and lights spraying from Pumpkin’s horn while the two ponies hovered and spun, holding hooves, in the middle of the circus tent. With a flourish of trumpets and a crash of cymbals, the lights in the seating area brightened and Pumpkin teleported her and her exhausted brother back to their living quarters. They instantly collapsed on the grimy cot they shared and fell into a deep slumber.
