Piefall: A Clandestine Corps Adventure

by AugieDog

Rating: everyone
Tags: Adventure, Pinkie Pie, Spitfire, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Rainbow Dash, Romance, Original Character, Prince Blueblood
Length: 36512

The more Pinkie thinks about Twilight being a princess, Discord hanging around everywhere, and Dash's new coltfriend, the less she likes it.

After the events of "In Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps," Prince Blueblood has moved to Ponyville and is secretly training Rainbow Dash as a Clandestine Corps operative while openly dating her. Add that to Twilight becoming a princess and Discord hanging around Fluttershy's place all the time, and that might just be one recent change too many for Pinkamena Diane Pie...

Cover image commissioned from Pinmissile.

Published 2013-09-21 19:50:02 UTC
Last updated 2013-11-01 22:36:14 UTC

Act I - Live and Let Pie

Skimming just above the ground around the trees of Whitetail Woods wasn't that hard, actually, and it wasn't like Dash was flying at top speed or anything. She could do this sort of slalom stuff in her sleep.

Not that she usually did it in the middle of the night, of course, the half-moon glowing all silvery through the leaves and branches and making it hard to tell what was a shadow ahead of her and what was a rock. And she usually didn't have to keep snapping her gaze away from the onrushing trunks when she did this, either, glancing back and forth to the mail train barreling along the tracks just past the tree line.

Still, Dash kept telling herself, this whole thing was hardly tricky at all, twigs whipping her face where her tight black skinsuit wasn't quite tight enough, her wings sore from the couple or twelve times she'd scraped them cutting the turns just a little too close.

Of course, it didn't help that the bad guys on board the train had doused the lights about ten minutes ago, making the woods even darker and more shadowy. But Dash had managed to do a fly-by before that, had counted a dozen rough-looking ponies also in black skinsuits and one civilian, an earth pony wearing a blue-and-white striped cap and overalls, the poor guy tied up in the engine.

She'd taken the info straight to Beebee, and he'd jumped onto his pumpcar, told her to keep out of sight, keep even with the engine, and keep dodging trees till he showed up. "I shan't keep you waiting long, darling," he'd said in that smooth baritone he used when he wasn't being Prince Blueblood. "I shall board the train from the rear and do my utmost to become the focus of our enemies' attention. You must concentrate on shutting down the engine, for if these fiends reach the dam above town and detonate their explosives, well, Ponyville will have to change its name to Pony Lake, I fear."

A weird twinkling light pulled at her peripheral vision, a slight sparkling along the track behind the train: Beebee must be using that new shadow cloak Princess Luna had shown them at the briefing. He had it aimed forward so he'd be invisible to the ponies on the train, and that meant Dash's quick looks would sometimes let her see around the cloak's flapping edges, Beebee perched at the front of the car, his muscles clenched underneath his own skinsuit, the glow of his magic pumping the car's lever so fast, it was just a blur.

Then he was catching up to the speeding train, was leaping from his cart, was crashing through the caboose's back door, shouts reaching Dash's ears. With a grin she felt all the way down to her bones, Dash flung herself sideways, shot from the edge of the woods, rolled into the engine's cabin, and landed in a crouch, ready for anything.

The boiler roared, its door open, a sulfurous stink pouring out, the big fire inside the only light in the whole place; coal spilled black and lumpy from the tender car behind; the engineer lay bound and gagged in the far corner; and a unicorn mare in a black skinsuit stood sneering beside him. The unicorn's horn flared, and glints of silver flashed toward Dash.

Leaping, whirling, Dash stirred up enough wind to knock whatever the things were off course. They clanged and thunked into metal and wood on either side of her, and Dash glanced over to see a ninja throwing star vibrating slightly in the window frame. Focusing forward and grinning some more, she launched herself at the unicorn.

She felt more than saw the next batch of throwing stars, the same senses sparking up that let her slide out of the way of a storm's lightning bolts. Not even thinking, she flicked her wings, twisted and flowed like she was made of cloud, and smashed her front hoofs right into the unicorn's surprised face with a crash as hard as a thunderclap.

The unicorn's head bounced off the wall behind her, and she slumped to the floor beside the engineer. Dash jumped back to the boiler, then, the fire inside still raging, the train still racing down the tracks toward Ponyville dam.

So, OK. If fire made the thing go, and Dash was supposed to stop it—

Concentrating, she sprang into a hover, felt the texture of the air, the moisture in it just barely enough. She spun herself through the cabin, gathered and shaped and formed the invisible drops into a cloud the size of a baseball, then the size of a basketball, and then big enough that she could've crawled on top of it and taken a nap if the thing hadn't been so cold and wet and mooshy and she hadn't been busy trying to save Ponyville and everything.

She was panting by now, too, the effort of keeping the water bunched together in that hot, dry cabin getting more than a little annoying. So she shoved the cloud toward the open boiler door and gave a nod.

There. Mission accomplished.

Something scuffled behind her, and she did another whirl, ready to smack that unicorn in the head again— But it was Beebee, the shadow cloak shimmering around his shoulders as he clambered over the coal and slid into the engine. Dash grinned, opened her mouth to tell him she had everything under control—

But he was gasping, his horn flaring, magic lashing out to wrap around the engineer and the still-unconscious spy. Then he was slamming Rainbow Dash sideways, pushing her right out of the cabin and into the empty air beside the train.

Instinct spread her wings to their full extension, but with Beebee and two other ponies tumbling out on top of her, she didn't have a hope of staying airborne. She did manage to slow their fall a little, managed to swing them around so Beebee hit the ground first—served him right, and besides, she knew he could take it. Still, she couldn't escape all the flailing legs, and she rolled with the whole group down the embankment beside the tracks, the train rattling and whooshing past and away into the night ahead.

They fetched up with a smack against one of the first trees along the wood line, and Dash pulled herself from the tangle, leaped into a hover, aimed her words at Blueblood: "What was that all about?! I had everything completely under—!"

"A cold water raincloud," Beebee said, his eyes clenched, a front hoof rubbing at the base of his horn. "Shoved all at once into a red-hot boiler."

Dash felt herself go hot, then cold. "Uh-oh." She stretched her neck to look down the track.

Light flashed, Dash suddenly dragged downward by Beebee grabbing her back hoofs. She hit the ground just as heat smashed over them, the dirt seeming to roll, a roar splitting the air. The golden glow of Beebee's magic sprang up between her and the darkness above, and things started bouncing off it: chunks of wood, jagged pieces of metal, shards of glass scattering into the night. "Aboard a train," Blueblood was saying right into her ear, "that was already a rolling bomb..."

The yellow and orange flicker down the track made Dash's every nerve scream—leap up; sound the alarm; get the weather team out here with all the clouds they could muster—but the forest fire vanished with a silver flash, Discord suddenly prancing on his hind legs beside them. "Yes!" he crowed. "I came up with fifteen different ways you could beat my little scenario, but I never dreamed you'd pick one of the exploding ones!" He clapped his weird front paws. "An 'A-plus,' troops! An 'A-double-plus!'"

Somewhere nearby, Dash heard a throat clear, and part of the night stepped forward to become Princess Luna, her face as sour and serious as it always seemed to be. "If I might make a few observations before grades are assigned?"

Discord gave a huff and folded his arms. "If you must."

The princess nodded to where Beebee was climbing to his hoofs, the two ponies he'd grabbed from the engine drifting into the air and becoming pony-shaped balloons. "Full marks for stopping the threat to Ponyville as well as for rescuing the civilian and capturing one of your adversaries." Princess Luna's horn glowed, pushing the balloons toward Discord.

Grinning, he caught them, undid their stems, and sucked the air out. "Ah, yes," he said, his eyes bulging and his voice as squeaky as Pinkie Pie's after a dozen or so éclairs. "Waste not, want not, I always say."

Dash couldn't help giggling, but Princess Luna's frown put the ice on that pretty quick, Dash folding her wings and dropping to the ground. "Slightly fewer marks," the princess was going on, "for the total destruction of the train, a stretch of track, and a section of Whitetail Woods. Not to mention the other eleven ponies on board."

And as much as Dash wanted to leap back into the air and shout at the princess that it didn't really matter since all of it—the train, the spies, the bomb, everything—had all just been a bunch of stuff Discord had conjured up, she forced herself to do nothing but give a little nod.

"A point of order, Auntie?" Blueblood's snootiest tones rose up behind her. "I believe you'll find that I threw four of those foul miscreants off the train during my little jaunt up to the engine. So there would have been at most seven ponies left aboard, and of such low character, they're hardly worth mentioning."

Again, Dash wanted to move, wanted to turn a smile over her shoulder at her coltfriend, wanted to give a little jump and squeal at the idea that she even had a coltfriend, but no. Not tonight. Not with Princess Luna here to judge whether Dash had picked up enough from Blueblood in the six months since he'd moved to Ponyville just after Hearth's Warming and they'd started dating by day and training by night. 'Cause if the princess said she passed, then Dash would become an actual delta-level operative in Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps. So Dash was gonna stand still, look Princess Luna straight in the eye, and take whatever she said like a mare, not a filly. Like a pony who deserved to be in the Corps.

Princess Luna still wasn't smiling, hadn't shifted so much as an eyebrow, the only sound the slight squeaking of Discord rocking back and forth in the hammock he'd made from the deflated balloons. Finally, though, the princess took a breath. "Your thoughts on these observations, recruit?" she asked.

Dash didn't blink. "I screwed up, ma'am. I should've remembered that trains aren't clouds and that weather wrangling tricks prob'bly won't work the same way on iron and steel." A smile pulled at the corners of her mouth, and she went ahead and let it. "Better believe I'll remember it from now on, though."

Another long moment of silence stretched, then Princess Luna nodded. "Excellently answered, Agent Delta 6."

And nothing in the wide, wide world of Equestria could've kept Dash on the ground at that. "You mean I passed?!"

"Ha!" Discord leaped from his hammock and crooked a claw at Princess Luna. "Now you owe me a watermelon as big as Celestia's head!"

The princess blinked. "I— What?"

Discord pressed the back of his paw to his forehead. "It's the least you could do after all the time and effort I've put in on this project!" He flowed sideways like he didn't have a bone in his body, his leering face suddenly right in front of Dash, his words popping around her as soft as soap bubbles. "And, oh, the delightful chaos you'll be causing, my dear. You've quite the knack for it, you know." He straightened, one talon raised. "All in the pursuit of goodness and niceness and that sort of thing, of course. But still." He shivered, pulled a giant red and green checkered kerchief from the air, and dabbed at the corners of his eyes. "You'll do me proud."

Blinking at him another second, Dash turned to Princess Luna, saw her smiling for maybe the third time since last fall when she'd accepted Dash's application to the Corps. "Be all that as it may," the princess said, "congratulations, Rainbow Dash. Your solution to this scenario was not entirely optimal—loss of life is always a serious matter, no matter whose life has been lost, nephew—but you accomplished the primary mission objective, something that counts for a great deal in the world we Clandestine Corps agents inhabit."

"Yap, yap, yap." Discord had his front paws and claws squeezed together, the moonlight shadow of them on the ground looking like Princess Luna's head, her mouth opening and closing. "Can we wrap this up, please? Some of us need our beauty sleep." Curlers sprouted from his antlers.

Dash almost swooped over to wrap her front legs around his weird gray neck—mostly because she knew how much it would annoy him—but another smile from the princess kept her hovering in place. "Take a few days off, Delta 6, then we'll start the next level of your training." She waved a hoof as Discord. "Like my colleague here, I see great potential in you." Her gaze shifted, and Dash followed it to where Beebee was standing, quieter than she thought she'd ever seen him. "And may I say, Double-O-Zeta, that I've been just as pleasantly surprised by your performance these last six months?"

Beebee's eyes closed partway, and Dash could almost see his Prince Blueblood mask slipping into place. "I seldom have complaints about my performance, Auntie."

Discord snorted a laugh, slid up beside Beebee, threw an arm around his neck, and pinched his cheek. "Isn't he just the cutest little thing?" he cooed.

The snort Beebee gave didn't have any laughter in it, but by then Discord was spinning away and tromping into the woods. "Come along now, Luna. Let's leave the lovebirds to their nesting. I have a few more tricks I want to throw into Gamma 5's test before we run him through it tomorrow morning."

The princess nodded. "Congratulations again, Delta 6."

She turned and sailed after Discord, Dash hearing his voice drifting from the trees: "And when am I going to get a code name? A single letter, I think, would do nicely, 'R' or 'S' or something. Or— Ooo, yes! I could change it regularly, and there'd be a lovely complicated formula ponies would need to calculate each hour or so so they'd know what to properly call me..."

As he faded into the distance, Dash turned, flapping in place, stared at Beebee, and wondered why she wasn't grabbing him and kissing him. She was absolutely bubbling, after all, wanting to zoom into the night sky and spin up some kind of electrical display to celebrate. But he still had on his Prince Blueblood face, and even after dating him all winter and spring, Dash found that haughty expression hard to read. So she settled to the ground and said casually, "Looks like I'm in, then."

Sniffing, he tossed his head. "As if there were any serious doubts. I trained you, after all."

"Uh-huh." She stepped forward and poked a hoof into his chest. "Trained me to tell when you're full of cow pat. So spill, Beebee. We both got what we wanted here, but you don't seem too happy about it."

For a moment, his eyes narrowing and his nostrils flaring, she thought she might have to get tough with him, crack that shell of his with a few well-placed kicks, both verbal and otherwise. But then he took a breath and blew it out, his broad shoulders relaxing and his face clearing like the moon rising out of the clouds: bright, yeah, but still a little bit shadowy and a little bit scary. "Next week," he said quietly. "That will mark nine months since you changed my life, Rainbow Dash. And considering the nature of the work we do in the Corps, I...I find that I'm not at all prepared to risk losing you."

Dash's heart did a little flip, and before she even knew she was doing it, she was whooshing forward, wrapping her front legs around his neck, touching her nose and her lips to his. "No worrying, you hear me?" she told him then. "'Cause I'm not going anywhere. Not anywhere at all."

He gave a deep chuckle. "Ah. Threats, now, is it?"

"You better believe it, buster," she whispered, and when his hoofs closed around the base of her wings and pulled her in even tighter, she didn't try to keep herself from gasping at how just plain good it felt. "You better believe it."

***

Moonlight drifting through her window, Pinkie Pie sat in the big spinny chair in front of her peppermint-striped dresser, stared at herself in the mirror, and wasn't sure she liked what she saw.

Not that it was anything bad, of course, wasn't her evil twin glaring out at her or anything. No, it was just her: blue eyes, pink on pink hide and hair, balloons floating along her flanks. She'd been dreaming about balloons, actually, the way she liked to most every night, when she'd heard all the balloons in the world pop, all of them, all at once, an explosion so big, she'd come awake all sudden and unexpected, had sat up in bed in the dark. And her mane— Her mane had— It had...

It had flowed down her shoulders like cold maple syrup on a colder winter morning. Or actually looser and shiftier than that, more like when she would plunge both her front hoofs into the flour or sugar tubs downstairs in the bakery's kitchen and let the stuff trickle and whoosh along her legs.

That was a fun thing to do, so why couldn't it be fun when her mane did the same sort of thing? It did look kind of pretty, she thought, gazing into the mirror at the long, straight spread of it, and she knew Rarity would give that happy little squeal of hers if she ever saw it, would want to make it all fancy and chic and stylish with maybe a big black-and-white hat and a scarf. So there wasn't any reason, any reason at all, that her mane being droopy like this should make her feel like she'd swallowed a crabapple or five.

Reaching out a hoof, Pinkie touched the mirror, and the sad, serious little pony in the glass reached out her hoof, too, all cold and hard against Pinkie's. It was just that Pinkie's mane only seemed to do this when she had something she was thinking about. And thinking didn't usually turn out too well for her, she'd found in the past.

Like the time she'd thought all her friends didn't want to be her friends anymore. Or the time she'd thought the Mirror Pool would help her be a better friend to all her friends. And now, trying so hard not to think about how much life had changed for her friends these past nine months—

Because Twilight! A princess! With the wings and the horn and the nearly uncontrollable urge in Pinkie's knees to bow every time she came into the bakery to pick up scones and doughnuts!

Though thinking about that actually made Pinkie's mane poof up a little. 'Cause if the best thing that had ever happened to her was seeing Dashie's first Sonic Rainboom all those years ago, probably the second best thing was getting to know the princesses: meeting Princess Celestia a bunch of times now; helping Princess Luna when she came back to Equestria; fighting the changelings so Princess Cadance could get married. So it just didn't make sense that having another princess in the world—and not just another princess, but a princess who was already one of Pinkie's bestest friends—could ever be a bad thing. No, it was a good thing. A very good thing.

She focused on her mane in the mirror some more, tried to make it inflate all the way, but as she watched, it sank back down, flat as it had been right after she'd woken up. Because Twilight wasn't the only friend of hers who'd changed this year. No, there was also Fluttershy and—

Discord! The way he was always hanging around her place now! Talking and laughing with her whenever Pinkie wanted to talk and laugh with her!

And, sure, he was fun. Great, as a matter of fact, keeping up with her like nopony Pinkie had ever met before—probably because he mostly wasn't a pony. There'd even been four mornings in the months since he'd started being nice-weird instead of mean-weird that Pinkie would wake up to find him standing in the air outside her window with that lopsided grin of his sort of fluttering around his snout like a moth around a cabbage. She would ask Mr. and Mrs. Cake if she could take a mental health day, and when they said yes, she and Discord would be off and running.

It was never planned, of course, and so far it had never been the same things twice—not from minute to minute or from hour to hour—the two of them careening through Ponyville and the woods and hills all around, stopping on top of a pine tree or at the bottom of the lake for a quick bag of peanuts or a sandwich whenever the mood struck them. They didn't even need to talk mostly, her Pinkie sense telling her when he'd been about to stop on the roof of town hall in his lederhosen so she could have her accordion ready to accompany his yodeling, and when she'd felt the need to put together a mural honoring great moments in the history of pancakes, there he was with exactly the right boxes of sidewalk chalk for the job.

Even better than all that, though, ever since Discord had started hanging around, Fluttershy had gotten a lot bubblier, laughing more often then she had before and not hiding under her bed nearly so much. And that was just such a wonderful thing to think about, Pinkie could see her mane sort of pulsing up and down like the beat of a conga drum.

Not a bad thing, then, having Discord being their friend now. Not a bad thing at all.

But—

And just that one crunchy little word echoing around in her head was enough to sink her mane like a soufflé gone wrong. Because, yes, Applejack and Rarity were still pretty much the same ponies that Pinkie had known since she'd come skipping into Ponyville her first day of school way, way, way, way back so long ago, Pinkie's memories of it were sometimes in black-and-white, but Dashie—

Dashie had a coltfriend. And thinking about this change didn't make Pinkie shout inside because this one, this one was just too different and too real and too...too—

Too grown-up. Dashie had even said that herself, had said it like it was a good thing: "We're not foals anymore, Pinkie," she'd said not more than a week ago as they'd walked back to Sugarcube Corner after the first picnic the six of them had had for just each other in a long, long time, one of the few times recently that Pinkie had seen Dashie without Blueblood smirking along beside her. "Ev'rypony grows up, right? And I've got to say I'm liking it just fine!"

But it all made Pinkie's eyes feel too tight, made the shadowy face she saw in the mirror look all squinty and scowly underneath that long, straight mane. What was so great about getting all kissy-face with some big stuck-up jerk anyway? And sure, Blueblood wasn't like that so much anymore, Pinkie had to admit: in the bunches of times she'd talked with him since he'd moved to Ponyville, he'd mostly acted like everypony else did when she talked, smiling and nodding and maybe inching toward the door a little. And the house he'd built across the street from Filthy Rich's place down the road from Rarity's shop had this neat tower on it like houses did in Canterlot which made it just about perfect for banister sliding.

But—

And there it was, that sound again, that little choking cough in her head that meant she couldn't do it, couldn't smooth this change over and make it feel right. 'Cause Dashie and Blueblood might right this very minute be sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g, for crying out loud!

She needed him to go away, Pinkie found herself thinking, those hard blue eyes in the mirror staring back into hers. Princess Twilight, Discord and Fluttershy, Pound and Pumpkin starting to say words, and everything else? She could probably live with all that stuff if Blueblood would just go back to Canterlot and stop making Dashie be so...so—

So different.

So, OK. She would need to find somepony who knew about Blueblood, somepony who had known him before he'd met Dashie last fall during that big, big rainstorm, somepony who—

A little smile curled the lips of the pony in the mirror. She knew who she could get. She knew exactly who.

***

Settled on his divan, Blueblood looked across his desk at the dun-colored pony with the hourglass cutie mark and cleared his throat. "I'm afraid it's not working out, Turner," he finally said after sifting through all the things he wanted to say but didn't dare to as long as Rainbow Dash lay watching him through narrow eyes from the puddle of morning sun shining across the window seat on the other side of the room.

At least Turner didn't burst into tears at the news the way several of his predecessors in the job had during the dozen or so exit interviews Blueblood had conducted over the last half a year. In fact, the earth pony was nodding, his unruly brown thatch of a mane sloshing back and forth like a wheat field in a windstorm. "I'd rather thought so, your Highness, but as I'd never been a butler before, I wasn't certain whether I was—"

"'Valet,'" Blueblood forced out between clenched teeth. "Not 'butler.'"

Turner blinked, then flashed that chuckle-headed grin of his. "Well, if I didn't even know the name of the job, I guess it's a good thing you're firing me."

"Not 'firing,'" Dash said from her perch, forcing Blueblood to swallow the hearty agreement he'd been about to give. "Tell him, your Whoness."

The use of that particular nickname told him Dash was feeling prickly, and rather than start jousting with her in front of a pony who was technically no longer in his service, Blueblood cleared his throat some more. "Perhaps the phrase 'letting you go' might prove more salubrious." He flared his horn, slid the desk drawer open, and wafted an envelope across to settle in front of Turner. "Here are your entire wages for the month, and thank you for making the attempt."

Another nod, and Turner picked the envelope up in his teeth. He said something around it that might have been, "You're welcome, your Highness," then he nodded to Rainbow Dash and trotted out of the room. The pitter-pat of his hoofs in the front hall carpeting was followed by the click of the door opening and closing, and then by silence.

Into that silence, Dash spoke: "So. What did he do wrong?"

"It's more what he didn't do right," Blueblood said, but he caught himself before he could start listing Turner's many faults. Instead, he forced a smile and turned it toward her. "He was the best of them so far, however." Which was true, sadly. "It's simply not the easiest position to fill, especially after—" He stopped that train of thought, wishing he could blow it up as thoroughly as Dash had that make-believe locomotive last week. He wasn't going to think about Chives any more. He simply wasn't going to.

Fortunately, Dash chose that moment to puff a breath through her nostrils and drift up from the window seat with the slightest brush of those magnificent wings through the air, Blueblood's chest tingling at the sight. "Well, I'm running out of ponies I can think of who might be interested in working here." She gave a sideways grin as she drifted to the floor. "Unless you wanna try Derpy again."

Heaving a sigh and pouting then were the easiest things Blueblood had done in months. "Must you always threaten me?"

A laugh and a hop, and Dash was settling onto her stomach atop his desk, one front hoof reaching out to cup his chin. "You know you love it."

"Well..." He touched her rainbow mane. "I love you, certainly." He leaned forward just enough to graze his lips over hers. "To which you then reply..."

"Ooo, a little more of that." She slid from the desk into his embrace, and Blueblood lost himself in the warm, wiry pulse of her, slim and strong and more alive than any four other ponies he knew. And most wondrous and miraculous of all, she was here, hadn't deserted him when things were so dicey last autumn, had actually stuck with him while he'd tried to piece himself back together after discovering that much more of his life was a lie than even he'd thought. And while he still wasn't quite certain what it meant now to be Prince Blueblood, one of the few things of which he was entirely certain was the pony now pulling her lips away from his, smiling a breathtaking smile at him, and asking, "I'm sorry; what were you saying?"

About to give a flip answer indicating that he could no longer recall any details of their previous conversation, Blueblood stopped when a clearing of throat sounded from the doorway. Dash's ears folded, and she turned, moving herself out of the way so that Blueblood could see the fire-orange and yellow pegasus leaning against the jamb. "Front door was open," she said. "By which I mean it was so easy to pick the lock, a foal could've done it."

Dash made the cutest little squealing noise and rose vibrating into the air. "Spitfire! Oh my gosh, ma'am! What're you doing here?!"

"Save the 'ma'am' for school hours, Delta 6." If there was one thing Blueblood had always admired about Spitfire—and there were several things, he had to admit, forcing his eyes away from her flanks and his memories away from the hours they'd spent—

But he wasn't thinking about that, was he? He was thinking about how much he admired Spitfire's ability to step into any situation and completely take control of it.

"You—" Dash seemed to be vibrating even faster. "You know my code name?" She clutched her front hoofs to her chest, her eyes about as big as the average pomegranate. "'Cause you're a Corps agent, too, aren't you?"

Blueblood pushed himself to his hoofs. "Well, as nominal host here, I suppose it falls to me to make the introductions." He gestured as elegantly and insolently toward Spitfire as he could. "Darling, I believe you've met Double-O-Lambda under less clandestine circumstances?"

Dash hung in the air somehow even though only the very tips of her wings were now moving. "Double-O? Then you— You're one of the...the top— One of the ponies who...who—"

"Ten more seconds, Delta 6," Spitfire said, her gaze focused on the bottom of her upraised right front hoof. "Then I'm going to need you and your brain right here." She pointed to the carpet in front of her.

A blue flash, and Dash was standing on the indicated spot at not quite perfect attention due to her prancing in place. "This is so cool! I mean, I know it's been a week since I passed the test, but I just thought maybe Beebee was gonna do my training again!"

"Beebee?" Spitfire's eyebrows arched so thoroughly, Blueblood was surprised they didn't pop right off her face.

It was a shame Dash didn't blush more often, Blueblood had often thought; she turned such a lovely violet color. "I mean Double-O-Zeta!" she blurted.

"No, no." A smile curled slowly over Spitfire's lovely lips, lips which Blueblood was not thinking about in any way, shape, or form, he reminded himself sternly. "Beebee's fine. In fact, I like Beebee very much." Her smile vanished, and the look she gave Rainbow Dash made Blueblood want to stand at attention as well. "Still, we have business to get to, business that can't wait."

Folding her wings, Dash nodded. "Where do we start?"

"With our cover story." Spitfire sauntered the rest of the way into the room, gave the slightest flutter, and settled onto the divan on the other side of the desk, Blueblood smiling at the way Dash followed the Wonderbolt's every move as if she were trying to memorize them. "You can keep up the whole 'dating Blueblood' thing if you want to, but—"

"What?!" Dash leaped straight into the air, her wings positively buzzing this time. "Of course I'm gonna keep dating Beebee! How could you even—?!"

Spitfire rolled her eyes, and Blueblood spoke up quickly: "Perhaps you remember, darling, how we discussed the possibility that missions might come along where we not only must pretend we're not dating, but we must pretend we don't even know each other?"

"Right, right, right." Dash's mouth went sideways. "From now on, there's my real life, and then the story that covers my real life." She stopped and took a breath, her hoofs touching the carpet once more. "So me and Beebee are still me and Beebee to the outside world. Got it."

The nod that Spitfire gave was so slight, Blueblood wouldn't have noticed it, he was sure, if he hadn't been looking for it. "To cover me being here, I'm scouting you for the Wonderbolts because of your impressive performance at the Academy and your sterling personal qualities and blah et cetera blah, blah, blah." She waved a hoof. "Of course, I'm not really a trainer in my cover identity, so in a couple days, Bosky Dell will be arriving to—"

"Bosky Dell?!" Dash left the floor again. "The Bosky Dell?! The greatest coach the Wonderbolts ever had?!"

"That's the one." Spitfire's smile was gentler than Blueblood had thought her capable of. "I was the last pony he brought into the 'Bolts before he retired, so when I told him I had this terrific new prospect who needed her rough edges polished a bit, he said he'd be willing to come out here, give you a look, maybe offer a few pointers."

The expression on Dash's face almost made a jealous spark strike up inside Blueblood. "That...you— Oh, wow! Bosky Dell! Coming to train me!"

"But!" The word burst from Spitfire like a spell from a unicorn's horn, Dash dropping to the carpet, her eyes going wide. "Dell doesn't know a thing about any of us being agents: the way he's so focused on sports, I'll bet he's never even heard of Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps. So he'll be giving you his work-out, then I'll be giving you mine when he's knocked off for the day." She blinked once. "Think you can keep up?"

Resolve absolutely shone from Rainbow Dash. "I'll be asking you that question in a week, ma'am."

That got an actual laugh out of Spitfire, and Blueblood let himself relax a bit: to his way of thinking, she and Dash were too similar in temperament to be anything other than the best of friends or the worst of enemies. "Call me Spitfire," she said, "and keep in mind this endgame: if Dell says you're good enough, you'll get a slot on the 'Bolts. I'm guaranteeing that."

Once more, Dash sprang aloft with a squeal, but Spitfire's hoof came up as well, the older pegasus going on: "Boss Mare thinks having two qualified and competent agents on the team will expand the Corps' reach and effectiveness—even if it's just you and me walking into a situation and drawing all eyes to us so the actual operatives can get the job done without anypony noticing." She cocked her head. "Any questions?"

Dash was still hovering. "Boss Mare. That's the princess?"

Blueblood laughed this time. "Only when she's not around, darling."

"Ooo, yeah." Spitfire nodded. "Important safety tip, there."

"Got it." Dash's eyes danced. "So when do we start?"

Spitfire gestured to the door. "Warm up. I'll be out in a minute."

The air swirled like a mini-cyclone, and Dash was gone as thoroughly as if she'd never been there, a thought that made Blueblood shiver. Her absences didn't fill him with as much existential dread these days as they had nine months ago when he'd latched onto her and the Corps as the only constants left in his life, but still—

"Cold, Beebee?" Spitfire asked, neither her smile nor her voice anywhere near as nasty as they could've been.

Parts of Blueblood bristled anyway, but he managed to swallow them down, managed to give her a flirty little look instead of the scowl that wanted to come to his face. "Why, Double-O-Lambda! One could almost believe you cared!"

She shrugged. "A year ago, I wouldn't've."

He took a breath and let it out. "A year ago, you would've signed up with Green Briar and Chives to blast me into confetti."

"Well, if that had been all they were planning to do." A stillness came over her. "You hurt me badly, you know."

It was a sentiment he'd heard often since last fall, but it made his insides twist every single time. "I did. And I apologize." He wanted to go on, wanted to tell her how much she'd hurt him, how what had happened between them hadn't been entirely his fault, but for all that parts of him indeed felt that way, Blueblood knew it wasn't true. He and Spitfire had exploded into horrible, bloody shreds because his natural talents had found her fuse, and he had then set out carefully and systematically to light it. He'd done the very same thing to everypony until Chives had done it to him, and that was an explosion Blueblood was still recovering from.

"Huh." Spitfire blinked. "Boss Mare said you'd changed, but I have to admit I didn't believe her." She nodded toward the door Dash had just vanished through. "A positive influence, is she?"

Blueblood throat tightened, but he forced the words out: "Be tough on her, Lammy. Because she's got to be tough on me."

Spitfire's smile was slow but genuine. "Don't call me Lammy." And she leaped into the air, the whole house shaking as she burst out of the room.

***

The Question came up inevitably during his sessions, Chives had found, but no matter how much he tried to steel himself, it always took him by surprise. Whether arriving first thing out of a therapist's mouth, lurking about till the end of the hour, or sandwiched somewhere in between, The Question would pop and strike him right between the eyes as hard and fast as an arrow from a bow:

"You didn't really want to hurt Prince Blueblood, did you, Chives?"

Last fall, immediately after his capture, trial, and incarceration within the Canterlot Central Treatment Facility, The Question would cause him to explode into rantings as thick and full as his mane had been before he'd gone to work for His Highness, and he would enumerate every excruciating detail of the living nightmare he'd endured during his three years as Prince Blueblood's valet. But he'd quickly learned that it didn't do any good.

"Then why didn't you quit?" they would ask next. "If you truly disliked your job, why didn't you find another one?"

Again, at first, he would try to explain to them, would try to tell them about growing up in the shadow of the palace, about his parents, both gardeners dedicated to maintaining the grounds, and about Prince Blueblood, a spoiled, horrible brat of a colt very nearly his own age, who seemed to take pleasure in making everypony's life as miserable as he could, seemed to zero in on ways to exploit the weaknesses of those around him as easily as Chives himself could zero in on the proper ways to accomplish any task and solve any problem he set his mind to.

"And the more I saw of him," Chives told his interviewers calmly on those occasions when he could force himself not to shout about it, "the more I came to realize that His Highness was my true task, the one problem that I truly needed to solve. And when he refused over and over again to be solved, well, then I had no choice but to destroy him, did I?"

The other questions they would ask then varied to a large degree, but all of them showed that his therapists didn't understand the problem at all. So now, whenever The Question would spring into his face like a bloated and poisonous toad, Chives would simply laugh as loudly as he could and say, "Live in Prince Blueblood's house for a week, doctor, and you'll want to hurt him, too."

Still, loading dirty laundry into the first of the big steam-powered washing machines in the Facility's basement on the evening of what he realized was the beginning of his ninth month separated from His Highness's service, Chives briefly considered another course of action. Perhaps he should begin lying to the therapists when they asked him The Question. He could practice donning a sorrowful expression, learn to shake his head sadly, and force himself to say something like, "Oh, I can't believe I ever attempted to do such a thing!"

The mere thought of it made him laugh, slamming the washing machine's big door and pushing his cart of damp towels and rumpled pillowcases toward Washer #2. The only pony he'd ever been able to lie to, in fact, was His Highness, mostly because His Highness was less a pony than a festering mound of insect-ridden—

"Chives." A quiet, rustling voice settled over his ears, made them fold, his legs freezing. He was alone here in the basement, he knew, since he was always alone here in the basement on laundry day. The few other ponies being treated in the Facility didn't seem willing or able to help out around the place, but his therapists understood him at least well enough to realize that he enjoyed keeping busy. So every weekend, they allowed him to do the laundry, and oh, how he looked forward to the peaceful routine of it.

Hearing small hissing voices, however, was neither peaceful nor routine.

"Chives?" The voice asked it this time, the whisper ending on a rising note. "I know you can hear me," it more sang than said.

Perhaps bolting for the stairs would be best, and Chives was just getting ready to step away from the cart when—

"I can give him to you, Chives, can put his Princeyness right into your hoofs. All you hafta do is agree to take him away with you. Can you do that, Chives? Do you want to do that?"

The chemical-lilac smell of the laundry soap filled his nostrils, his lungs the only parts of himself that Chives seemed able to move. "Take him away?" he managed to mutter. "Oh, yes. I believe that to be exactly the course of action required for His Highness." Feeling began seeping back into the rest of his body, pins and needles prickling his skin like he was coming awake after sleeping all night in an odd position. "I am, however, rather constrained in my movements at the present time. Or will you be bringing Prince Blueblood here to me?"

The voice gave an itchy little giggle. "All you hafta do is your job...with one slight alteration. Instead of you putting the laundry into the washer, the laundry hasta put you in."

Chives stared at the open door of Washer #2. It was certainly big enough for him to climb through and into the drum, but— "And then?"

"Then take a deep breath, and get ready for the ride of your life."

Staring some more at the door, Chives couldn't help wondering if this was what madness felt like. It wasn't a bad sensation, the bounce in his chest at the thought of getting one last chance at Prince Blueblood. One last chance to take care of things correctly.

"This machine here?" he asked, nodding to Washer #2.

"Right-a-rooty!" the voice somehow whispered and crowed at the same time.

Without giving his brain a chance to object, Chives grabbed the edge of the washer's opening and scrambled inside. Immediately, the door slammed shut behind him, cloudy light filtering in through its little glass window; he'd barely had a chance to suck in the recommended breath when, with a splash and a roar, warm water flooded over and around him.

The drum didn't start spinning, though, the way Chives had expected. Instead, it cracked along the back, a jagged black chasm yawning open in the murk, and Chives felt himself swept through with the cascading flow into the darkness.

Cloth mesh tangled around him, caught him and held him, the water rushing past just in time for him to gulp in another quick breath. Then he was falling, tumbling, thumping along a smooth metal surface—inside a pipe, perhaps?—the cloth wrapping him and providing a bit of padding as he careened downward. Rolling and spinning, Chives felt glad he hadn't had supper yet, the way his stomach knocked up, down and sideways against his ribs.

One last bounce, and the pitch-blackness slid away, Chives blinking to see himself dropping now into a dim sort of twilight, the roof of a cave receding above him, a round hole among the stalactites getting smaller and smaller. Unable to turn to see what lay below him, he barely had time to think how glad he was that he hadn't imagined the voice when he thudded into something as soft and thick as the towels when he was folding them at the end of each week's laundry process. The softness enveloped him—swallowed him, in fact, it felt like—this darkness squeezing him and slowing him and finally bringing him to rest, immobilized and strangely comfortable.

A crunchy tearing noise came to him then, and the soft material pulled away, shredding like so much dryer lint; Chives found himself looking upward at four wooden walls forming a square of dim light directly above. A cover slid across it, blocking out the light, and Chives's ears folded at the rapid rat-a-tat-tat of a hammer against nails.

"There," came that same voice, not whispering now but muffled by the walls of the crate Chives realized he'd just been sealed into. "There's lotsa pillows and blankets in there, and I packed some sandwiches and fruit punch and cookies, too. You'll be taking the mail train outta Canterlot, so it'll take you maybe eighteen or twenty hours to get where you're going. I'll already be there, and I'll sign for you and unpack you when you get delivered." The voice got more whispery. "There's also a jar with a good, tight lid in case you need to, y'know, go potty. Sorry I couldn't do any better'n that."

Clearing his throat, Chives managed to get his tongue working. "Who are you?" he asked.

Another little giggle from outside. "I'll tell you tomorrow. Hang on, now." His whole world shifted and began to move.

And yet it wasn't the worst way he'd traveled, Chives reflected over the course of the next however many hours, the clickety-clack, clickety-clack of a railway car rattling to a halt every once in a while before starting up again. He got a fair amount of sleep, something that had rarely happened whenever Prince Blueblood had dragged him off to visit some crony or relative or the like, and the crate seemed cozier than many of the rooms he's found himself staying in on those little jaunts. The food was quite good, and he did avail himself of the jar provided for his comfort, using the light that filtered in through the crate's seams to make sure beforehand that the lid was indeed as good and tight as his rescuer had said.

That light was getting dim again when the constant clatter of the train slowed to a stop once more, but this time, his crate was shifted and lifted though his ears were ringing too much for him to pick up much in the way of outside noises. He was rolled and slid and thunked around, however, and by the time his hearing had settled down enough for him to recognize the long, slow squeak of nails being pried out of wood, the lid of the crate was already coming off, the darkness it revealed not much lighter than the darkness he'd known all day. Swallowing then and shifting, Chives stood on his hind legs, reached his front hoofs up, and peered over the edge of the crate.

The color scheme of the bedroom in which his crate now sat, he could tell even in the dimness, leamed heavily toward the pink. Even the room's only light source, a ceiling lamp above a red-and-white striped dresser directly ahead of him, shed a pale pinkish glow over the whole scene...and the plush red swivel chair just in front of the dresser. A young pink mare sat in this chair, her mane cascading a darker pink down around her shoulders, her deep blue eyes about as intense as any Chives had ever seen, her left front hoof resting across the back of a small wall-eyed alligator perched in her lap.

"So," the mare said, her voice all smoky smoothness. "To answer your question from yesterday, you can call me Diane." She gave a tiny smile, her hoof stroking the alligator. "You know, like the huntress."

Act II - Pie Another Day

"Trust me," Diane said as Chives watched her fling robes, hats, wigs, and beards out of a trunk she'd dragged from a closet. "This disguise is totally impenetrabobble!"

Her voice kept changing, he noticed, high and squeaky when she'd helped him climb out of the shipping container and asked him how his trip had been, then dropping again, quieter and sharper but huskier, to tell him the bathroom was across the hall if he needed it while she gave him the key to the room she'd rented for him at the Livery House, a hotel down by the railway station. Her mane moved, too, bulging like a living, breathing thing, its cotton-candy snarls puffing between her ears and along her neck when her voice went up, relaxing again when her voice came back down.

"Here!" she crowed, and Chives blinked to see her wearing a full white chef's outfit and a large black moustache. "With this moustache to cover your face and the apron to cover your cutie mark, you'll be my cousin Burl come to visit!" She cocked her head. "You do know how to cook, don't you?"

And as always happened when he met an unstable pony, a thrilling combination of trepidation and contentment shivered through Chives, the sign that his cutie mark was doing what he thought of as its secret work. Most ponies, after all, seeing the delicate white cup and saucer on his brownish-orange flanks, assumed it signified his suitability to serve as a valet. But that was merely because they never looked closely enough to see the fine pattern of gray cracks spiderwebbing across his mark. So while he'd trained himself to be the perfect gentlecolt's gentlecolt, he considered his true gift to be mending the broken and returning them to good use, something he'd of course failed at with both Blueblood and Green Briar—

But he shook that thought away, focused on the here and now, and answered Diane with nod. "One of the few things His Highness never seemed to complain about was my cooking."

"Perfect!" Her voice and mane fell, those blue eyes taking on a depth that made Chives want to both step forward and step back. "As long as you understand that nopony's s'pposed to get hurt when we do this, right? Blueblood hasta go 'cause he's no good for Dashie, but 'go' just means 'go.' I don't want him run over by a cart or turned into a statue or struck by lightning or anything like that. I just want him to leave Ponyville and not come back. OK?"

Chives considered. "And once he leaves?"

Those eyes hardened. "No hurting. At all."

Taking a breath, he shrugged. "If you insist."

"Yay!" And she was suddenly hugging him, her front legs soft but surprisingly strong around his neck, her chest quivering against his like she was plugged into an electrical outlet, a gorgeous scent of freshly baked bread filling the air. "You're the best! I knew you wouldn't let me down!"

Her embrace scrambled his thoughts—when had anypony last touched him?—and when she then kissed him, the intensity of the contact made his tail shoot out like he was plugged into an electrical outlet. All too quickly, though, her warm lips were pulling away, Chives trying to catch his breath and blinking at her grin, her apron gone, the false moustache not clinging to her upper lip anymore. "Take a look!" she said, gesturing to the mirror above the dresser.

He stepped forward into the pink light of the ceiling lamp and had to grin as well. Patients at the Canterlot Central Treatment Facility didn't have access to mirrors, and in the nine months he'd been a resident there, he'd apparently lost some weight, the apron's drawstrings cinching snugly around his waist. The pony blinking back at him from the glass seemed jauntier somehow, ruddier, more streamlined, the black moustache setting off cheekbones he didn't remember having before. "So." He nodded to himself. "Cousin Burl, am I?"

"Yep-a-rooty!" Diane leaped into place beside him, her eyes curled into crescents, her mane a blackberry bramble. "My favorite imaginary cousin!"

"Ah. Yes." He swallowed. "You should know, Diane, that I've never been good at lying."

"It's not lying." Her mane slid down her neck like the branches of a weeping willow. "Maybe Chives is your real name, but Cousin Burl is gonna be your nickname. Like my nickname's Pinkie."

A more perfect nickname for her, Chives could not imagine. "Would you rather I call you Pinkie, then?"

"No, actually." Her words became whisper-soft, and she tapped a hoof to her chest. "See, no matter how hard I try, I can't stop being Diane, but I'm not very good at it since I'm usually Pinkie these days. So maybe..." She gave him as heartbreaking a look as Chives had ever seen from anypony. "Maybe you can keep calling me Diane? So I can get more practice?"

Wanting to hug her but not sure it would be proper, Chives nodded instead. "I shall be delighted to, Cousin Diane."

Her mane and smile bounced up once more. "I even packed for you!" She spun back to the closet and pulled out a scuffed but sturdy-looking suitcase. "So when you get to your room at the Livery House, you'll have stuff to put in the dresser! Then you can get a good night's sleep before you show up here tomorrow morning a couple hours before dawn to meet Mr. and Mrs. Cake and help with the baking!"

And as much as he hated spoiling the moment, the low boiling in his middle forced him to ask, "And Prince Blueblood?"

By this time, the deflation of her mane barely caused him to blink. "We're gonna take it slow with that. I dunno why, but Dashie really likes him, so if he really likes her, too—"

"Not possible." The words came out as hard and sharp as butcher knives, and even the shock that flooded her face couldn't make Chives soften them. "In all the years that I served His Highness, he never really liked anything or anypony."

Diane's eyes narrowed. "Dashie's special." Her mane perked up, and she grinned. "But you'll see that at the party tomorrow night."

He stared, certain he'd misheard. "Party?"

"Of course!" She threw her front hoofs into the air, and Chives could only stare at the confetti that burst from them. "To welcome my favorite cousin Burl to Ponyville! Good night, now, and I'll see you tomorrow bright and early!"

"But—" was all he managed to say before she was pushing him and the suitcase across the polished wooden floor and straight out the window. Scrabbling for purchase, he slid down the slope of the roof, shot over the eaves into empty air, collided with a fir tree planted between the sidewalk and the street, and tumbled to the ground, the last bit of his fall cushioned by the case. He looked up, saw her bushy silhouette in the window's pink light, and when she blew him a kiss, he was sure he felt something stroke his cheek.

Then the light snapped off, and Chives found himself sitting alone on top of a suitcase under a tree beside a street just off Ponyville's town square, ponies in pairs and groups laughing and chatting in the early summer evening. The false moustache bristling, the apron scratchy against his flanks, he stood, slung the suitcase over his back, and started through the crowds toward the train station; he knew the way from his last trip here at the unfortunate conclusion to his dealings with Green Briar and Prince Blueblood.

He tried to stop those thoughts, but every step brought back the horrible events of nine months ago, events that Chives simply could no longer deny being partially responsible for. Prince Blueblood and Green Briar had been too similar, he'd come to realize during his therapy sessions in the Facility, too stuck in their ways, and too resistant to the sort of helpful change Chives had brought to the lives of so many ponies by means of a few kind words or a little positive attention. His mistake, he saw now, was recognizing the parallels between the two but not plotting to kill them both.

Well, at least Green Briar was off his list: questioning his therapists had finally gained Chives the information that his former accomplice had never returned to consciousness after the disruption of the Octopony spell that had briefly turned him into some sort of alicorn bent on destroying the world. Now to find a similar solution to the problem of Prince Blueblood, and Chives could get on with his life.

The Livery House's porch light glowed warmly, and the older stallion who answered Chives's knock had a kindly, well-fed look. Chives stammered out a few words about his cousin Diane reserving a room for him, but it wasn't until he offered the innkeeper the key that a grin burst over the unicorn's face. "Oh! You mean Pinkie Pie! Sure, yeah, c'mon in! Any cousin of hers is more than welcome here!"

Chives approved of the lobby's orderly condition, and the room was just as pleasant. The innkeeper, Dust Ruffle by name, told Chives that supper was being served in the hotel's café, but after sitting motionless in that crate the entire day, Chives found he wasn't hungry. So he declined with thanks, asked if he could have a wake-up call for 4AM, and stretched himself out luxuriously over the bed, truly on his own for the first time in quite a number of years.

Of course, by the time the night clerk tapped on his door the next morning, he was already prepared, his apron and moustache in place, but he still made his way through the pre-dawn darkness of Ponyville with more than a little stutter in his steps. By now, his escape from the Facility would surely have made the news, and with Prince Blueblood in town, this would even more surely be the first place the authorities would come looking. Staying here, Chives readily acknowledged, would not only endanger himself but Diane as well. And yet—

How could he leave? He had to resolve the matter of Prince Blueblood, or he would never know another moment's peace. And sweet, disturbed Diane: Chives knew he could help her, knew it all the way down to the mended cracks of his cutie mark.

He entered the town square and stopped, the lights of the bakery a beacon across the way. Checking the hang of his apron and the grip of his moustache, he trotted across and around to the back door.

"Cousin Burl!" Diane's hug took him by surprise again, nearly knocked him over backwards into the building's rear courtyard. Mr. and Mrs. Cake nodded, distracted by the morning rush, but they took more and more notice as he slid himself easily into the operation. And, oh, how wonderful to have something other than laundry to do for the first time in long, long months!

Their questions gave him a bit of trouble, but he was proud to find that he was able to answer them without telling any outright lies: he had just left a position he'd held for some years because of mutual dissatisfaction on the part of himself and his former employer; he'd been at somewhat loose ends before Cousin Diane had appeared and offered him this little vacation; he'd called her Diane for as long as he'd known her; he would love to help out around the bakery if they didn't mind him imposing.

Diane filled in the rest of the details about the two of them with an energy not at all diminished by the way her various stories contradicted each other. The Cakes seemed to take it in stride, and they assured Chives at the end of the day that he and the amazing pastries he'd put together would be welcome in their kitchen for as long as he wished to stay.

For his part, Chives found Miss Pinkamena Diane Pie, known to all but him as Pinkie, more and more fascinating as the day went on. The way she appeared right where and when she could do the most good, whether it was charming a surly customer, helping deflect a question from Mr. Cake about Chives's supposed family, or setting the bottle of vanilla extract beside the mixing bowl exactly when he was about to need it, he couldn't help wondering if those balloons on her flanks were perhaps as misleading as his own cup and saucer, if her special talent was perhaps as metaphorical as his own.

The party that night gave him his answer. By sheer force of will, it seemed—her mane never wavering, her smile never paling, her energy and good spirits filling Sugarcube Corner like the aroma of the baked goods she set out for her friends—Diane swirled the other guests away from Chives while still making sure he met them all. She even managed to introduce him to Rainbow Dash and Prince Blueblood—"Dashie? Bluey? This is my cousin Burl! You'll prob'bly see him around town for a while!"—exactly at the moment when His Highness had turned away to refill his and Ms. Dash's cups.

In truth, the other guests would have sent Chives fleeing into the night had Diane not been there employing her skills to keep everything flowing as smoothly as a balloon in flight. Equestria's newest princess, Twilight Sparkle, laughing and dancing gawkily beside the phonograph on the other side of the room! Discord, shrunk to the size of a mockingbird and racing about the tables on a two-wheeled contraption made entirely of cheese! The bearers of the Elements of Harmony, whose number, he soon realized, included the very pony who had broken him out of prison and brought him here!

But his confusion on these points quickly evaporated, his every thought and feeling overwhelmed with uncertainty as he observed Prince Blueblood. Because His Highness was acting solicitous! Engaging! Even the expression on his snout seemed less his usual smirk and more an actual smile!

And yes, Chives did notice a few instances of the narrow eyes and flared nostrils that he knew so well from his years in His Highness's service. Each time it happened, however—and Chives almost cried aloud the first time he saw it—Prince Blueblood would glance at Rainbow Dash, take a breath and give a blink, and would control himself, something Chives had long ago decided His Highness was incapable of doing!

"It makes no sense!" he vented at Diane as the two of them cleaned up afterwards, the guests having gone their ways with many a smile all around. "His Highness— It couldn't— He must be a changeling in disguise!"

"Oooo!" Diane's hair had returned to its usual smooth looseness after spending the entire evening all bunched and tangled. "I hadn't thought of that! Maybe he's just using Dashie to slip in and start another invasion!"

"An undeniable possibility." Chives washed the last dish and set it in the rack for Diane to dry and put away. "We must observe him in more situations." He turned to her. "Can you get us into his house without him knowing?"

"Sure." She slid a pitcher into one of the kitchen's cupboards. "You wanna go right now?"

Chives thought a moment. "No. You were right about taking this slow. Something...something's happening here, and we need to be very careful with it." He set the pot scrubber down. "We'll watch him for a week, then proceed to the breaking and entering step."

Diane's mane puffed up a bit. "I'm so glad you're here, Chives." She rushed forward and embraced him, a little catch in her voice. "There's nopony else I could even talk to about all this!"

Touching a front hoof to her warm neck, Chives closed his eyes. "I'm happy to be of service."

***

Repositioning his lounge chair slightly on the front lawn, Blueblood wondered if the tiny umbrella jutting from the slice of pineapple in his drink was perhaps a bit much.

But no. It and the red satin smoking jacket he wore were absolutely appropriate for the image of indolence he was trying to project. Even though, he had to admit, it had become more than a little unclear to him as the week had progressed at whom exactly he was projecting this image.

He didn't need to do such things for Rainbow Dash's benefit, he knew: in fact, she tended to roll her eyes and sigh loudly whenever she noticed him playing these little games. And he certainly wasn't doing it for Spitfire—

Though spending so much time in the company of a former fillyfriend was a new and somewhat unsettling experience. Yes, everything between them was very cordial, very professional, very much up to the standards expected from operatives in the Clandestine Corps. But every night when Spitfire stopped by to run Dash through her various training exercises either in the gymnasium downstairs or out around the grounds he'd purchased at the edge of the Everfree Forest, Blueblood found himself getting itchier and itchier, thoughts flashing through his head of what a churl he'd been, not just to Spitfire, but to everypony he'd met during most of his life.

Worse still, he could tell that Spitfire was enjoying his discomfort, and the self-satisfied cant to her eyelids whenever she spoke to him, he was sure, would have started him shouting some days ago if not for Dash's presence. And as much as a part of him kept wanting to smirk at Spitfire about how some ponies seemed to bring out the best in him while other ponies mostly decidedly didn't, he'd quickly come to the conclusion that a reaction of that sort undermined itself rather badly.

But with a bit of effort, he'd managed to keep things professional and cordial from his end as well. So he couldn't be lounging about on his back lawn in the evening's twilight with a tropical fruit drink floating lazily in the glow of his horn to impress upon Spitfire how much better his life had become since meeting Rainbow Dash and moving to Ponyville!

He must be doing it to impress Bosky Dell, then.

Not that he had any desire to deal with that foul curmudgeon any more than necessary. Blueblood had followed the Wonderbolts since he was a colt, of course, and knew all too well the almost reverent reaction the mere mention of the name Bosky Dell could trigger in some ponies. But now that he'd actually met the fellow—

A downdraft washed over him, two pegasus mares and an off-white stallion is a dark blue cap and windbreaker descending. The stallion appeared to be in mid-rant: "You've gotta concentrate! I mean, it's like ev'rything I tell you goes in one ear and out the other!"

Dash didn't respond with so much as a snort, and the salty scent of her exhaustion slapped Blueblood's nose; springing up, he pushed the lounge chair to a spot beneath her dangling hoofs. "What have you been doing, darling?" he called, trying to keep the concern from his voice. "Fighting manticores?"

"Ha!" It came out of Dash more like a pant than a laugh, but she flashed him a grin that made her look slightly closer to normal. "That woulda been easy!" She settled into the chair with a grunt. "Thanks, Beebee."

And as much as he wanted to offer Bosky Dell a few choice and crackling words concerning Dash's condition, he instead took a breath and turned slowly to where the two other pegasi were landing. "And how is Ms. Dash progressing?"

Spitfire had a stormy look about her eyebrows that Blueblood knew all too well, but for a change, that look wasn't focused on him. "Not bad, you ask me," she said.

Bosky Dell's snout wrinkled, and he made a popping noise with his lips. "Which shows why you ain't a scout, Spits." He jerked his head at Dash. "I been here a week, and I still ain't sure there's anything there worth training."

Another grunt from the lounge chair, Dash wincing where she lay; Blueblood moved immediately behind her. "On your stomach, darling."

She flopped over with a groan, and he slid his hoofs across her back, the muscles there bunched tight against her skin. Her next groan was a much prettier one, and Blueblood gently set to work doing what he could. He still fondly remembered how Chives had always—

He snapped that thought off and concentrated instead on easing Dash's pain, though Dell giving one more of those infernal pops almost made him break off to take a swing at the older pegasus. "We'll try it again tomorrow, Dash, if you think you can pay attention. See you, too, Spits."

A flapping of wings told him Dell was leaving, but he waited a bit, Dash almost purring now under his hoofs, before glancing at Spitfire. "I always understood that calling you 'Spits' was enough to summon a fiery whirlwind of pain and destruction."

"That rule had one exception." Spitfire's glare was aimed in the direction Bosky Dell had taken. "An exception I'm almost tempted to rethink. But—" She blew out a breath, and the look that came over her was much softer than Blueblood would've expected under the circumstances. "He's married to Paisley."

Hearing that name made Blueblood's hoofs jitter and freeze, and that got a grunt from Rainbow Dash. "Hey!" Her wings slapped his legs. "You don't hafta stop, y'know, while you tell me who this Paisley is."

Spitfire grimaced, but Blueblood jumped in before she could open her mouth. "Perhaps, darling," he said, keeping his tone light and choosing his words carefully, "you recall when Discord first broke free from his stony prison last year?"

Dash tensed, but Blueblood was prepared, starting the massage more forcefully than before. "Oh, yeah," Dash more groaned than said. "I'm not gonna forget that day any time soon."

"It was a memorable day all across Equestria." Blueblood swallowed, recalling the near panic that had filled Canterlot, the sun and moon sliding around the sky like amateur ice skaters. "And even after you and your cohorts had returned Discord to quiescence, some of his effects remained."

"What?" Dash's ears folded. "But our harmony blast! Didn't that fix ev'rything?"

"Six unicorns." Again, Blueblood couldn't stop a shiver. "All of them top researchers at Princess Celestia's Academy. As near as the doctors can tell, Discord's chaos energy drove them out of their minds, and while we managed to subdue them before they could cause any real damage, they remain under constant supervision in the Canterlot Central Treatment Facility. Paisley is one of them—she's quite the accomplished artificer—but I had no idea she was married to Bosky Dell."

"Artificer?" Dash asked.

"Magic items." Blueblood shook away the white and fiery memories of the objects Paisley had unleashed on them before he and several other Corps agents had incapacitated her. "She was one of the foremost experts in their manufacture."

"Huh." Dash stretched under Blueblood's hoofs, a sensation so lovely that he almost forgot what they were talking about. "Well, let's get Discord on it, then! I mean, if he whacked 'em, he oughtta be able to unwhack 'em!"

Spitfire shrugged. "That's the plan, but, well, the princesses want to know he's really reformed first." She sighed. "Dell hasn't been the same since Paisley went crazy, and I thought maybe giving him a real project like training you might snap him out of it." She was looking in the direction that he'd disappeared into again. "Now I'm not so sure."

Blueblood ground his teeth, started to work on another knot in Dash's muscles. "Then we can gently tell the unpleasant Mr. Dell that his services are no longer required?"

"Nope." Dash's voice flowed out of her like a liquid. "Perfect cover story for us all to be here. 'Specially now that Chives is loose."

Hearing that name aloud made Blueblood's hoofs jitter some more, Dash sucking in a breath. "Sorry," he said, pulling back before he could do any actual damage. "Can you walk, darling? Time to go inside."

"Don't wanna." She hugged the lounge chair's cushion. "'Sides, who's gonna hear us talk out here?"

Spitfire cleared her throat. "Do we need to go over security protocols again?"

Dash gave another groan and turned those big, violet eyes toward Blueblood. "Carry me?"

A snort came from Spitfire's general direction, but Blueblood decided to ignore it; crouching down, he activated his horn, concentrated, and lifted Dash as carefully as he could to drape across his back. "Like so?" he asked.

"Mmmmm..." She snuggled against him, and Blueblood's heart did a few flips. "So warm..."

Smiling over his shoulder at her, he rose, turned for the front door of the house, and stopped to see Spitfire staring at him, a look of absolute shock on her face. "All right," she said. "Who are you, and what have you done with Prince Blueblood?"

Not bothering to do more than roll his eyes, Blueblood crossed the lawn, used his magic to push the door open, and moved down the front hall to his study, the quiet chuff-chuff-chuff of Spitfire's hoofs telling him she was following. "So," he said once he heard her step inside. "An update on the Chives situation, perhaps, if you wouldn't mind, Double-O-Lambda?"

A chuckle. "That's closer," Spitfire said. "Though I'm pretty sure the Double-O-Zeta I knew would've just barked the word 'update' at me."

Busy settling Dash onto one of the divans, kneeling beside her, and restarting her massage, Blueblood again limited his response to an eye roll. But Dash, spreading herself like so much jelly over the cushions, gave a chuckle of her own. "I wasn't gonna ask this 'cause, y'know, awkward, so go ahead and tell me it's nunna my business, but—" She raised her head, her face smiling but still somehow serious. "How long did you guys date, anyway?"

A chill ran through Blueblood so deeply and so thoroughly, he couldn't've answered even if he'd wanted to, and he wrenched his hoofs away once more before they could pinch or jab her. That a similarly frozen silence echoed from the other side of the room made him hope for half a second that Spitfire would also be too surprised to—

"Huh," Spitfire said. "Well, let's see now. It wasn't quite a year, was it, your Highness?"

Worst-case scenarios burst across Blueblood's brain: Spitfire detailing with relish every last knock-down, drag-out fight they'd inflicted on each other; Dash recoiling in horror from Spitfire's reports—and from him; his own baser nature finally breaking loose at the onslaught and giving voice to all the festering awfulness he'd kept bottled up the past nine months. Shivering, swallowing, he turned to Spitfire and managed to squeeze out two words: "Must we?"

For another half-second, her blank expression made him think she didn't understand—or worse yet, that she did understand and was going to launch into her tales anyhow just to spite him. He could feel the vitriol building, bubbling at the bottom of his throat, ready to explode outward in a veritable fountain of—

But she was cocking her head, the same odd little smile he'd seen earlier back in place. "That was a long time ago, wasn't it? And I'm thinking we've both grown up a little since then." She gave a crisp nod. "Besides, we've got actual things to talk about."

It took Blueblood several breaths before he could say, "Yes, I— Thank you, Double-O-Lambda. We...we'd best be discussing the latest news from Canterlot."

Dash gave a little huff, but by then Spitfire was all business. "There's still no sign of Chives, but in the week since somepony broke him out of the Central Treatment Facility, rumors have kept cropping up all over Equestria about something big and harmful in the works. The stories run all the way from another crazy unicorn sorcerer to another changeling invasion, but every report shares one detail: whatever's on its way, it's coming to Ponyville."

Blueblood couldn't help scowling. "Chives, I suppose, looking to finish me off."

Spitfire shrugged. "That's one school of thought."

Sighing, Blueblood rose to his hoofs. "I'll leave tonight, then, draw him away from town, and—"

"No!" both pegasi answered at the same time, Dash's much more emphatic than Spitfire's. "Are you nuts?!" Dash then went on, pushing herself up from the surface of the divan and glaring at him. "I've got way too much to do right now to go charging off who knows where!"

And as much as the sentiment made him smile— "You wouldn't be going with me, darling. After all, if I'm leaving to prevent anypony else from getting injured in the blowback of Chives's vendetta against me, I would hardly ask you to come along, would I?"

"What?!" Dash's eyes went wide.

"Actually, Double-O-Zeta," Spitfire cut in, "Boss Mare wants you right here."

This time, it was Blueblood turn to sputter: "What?!"

Another shrug from Spitfire. "If you're the target, we'll make you nice and visible. And if you're not, Mare says you, me, and Delta 6 need to be ready to jump in and take care of whatever's really happening."

"Ha!" Dash folded her front legs across her chest.

"Till then—" Spitfire arched over Blueblood's back to land beside Dash. "You and me are in the gym, Delta 6. I know Dell put you through a heavier-duty workout than he probably should've today, but we've still got your Corps training."

Dash's groan this time, Blueblood could tell, was largely phony, and she slid from the divan to the carpet on firm hoofs; moving past him, she even trailed one wing teasingly along his flank. "Maybe you wanna come down, too, Beebee? Get a little sweaty with us?"

Doing his utmost to remain debonair—and to hide his shudder at the use of the word 'sweaty'—he said, "As charming as that sounds, I believe I'll decline."

With a laugh, Dash pushed the study door open, shook her head, and stepped out into the hall. "Just as well, I s'ppose." She gave a look over her shoulder that in other circumstances would've had Blueblood instantly at her side, but she sprang into the air before he could so much as move a hoof. "Neither of us needs that sorta distraction right now, do we?" And with a whoosh, she was gone.

Blueblood moved that hoof anyway—maybe a little time in the gym would be just the thing—but Spitfire landing in the doorway made him stop. She touched a front hoof between her glaring eyes, then swiveled the hoof to point at him.

"Ah." Blueblood nodded. "Watching me. Yes. But...thank you, Spitfire. You've been fairer than I could've asked."

"And don't you forget it," she said, then she was turning, her wings spreading to flap her toward the basement stairs.

Taking a breath and blowing it out, Blueblood considered Spitfire's report. Yes, he had orders to remain stationary in Ponyville, but that certainly didn't mean he shouldn't do his job. Some quick steps brought him to the hidden closet he'd had installed beside his desk, his magic popping the door open and hauling out the shadow cloak Princess Luna had given him before Dash's Delta test two weeks ago. Draping it over his shoulders, he activated it and nodded to see his reflection in the glass door of the display cabinet along the wall flicker and vanish. Time to see where the compass rose of his cutie mark would lead him.

***

So much bubbled in Pinkie's brain that she couldn't understand why her head hadn't swelled up like a balloon and carried her off into the night.

Was her hair weighing her down? Everything seemed so much heavier when her mane hung long and straight like this: the air, the clouds, the sky, even the sun and the moon. Not that being heavier made any of these things better or worse, she'd noticed this week. It just made them different. Like this week had been different, this whole weird, awful, wonderful week, the longest time she'd spent not being Pinkie Pie in more years than she had hoofs to count them.

Maybe Chives would let her borrow his hoofs for a minute so she could add everything up.

Glancing over to where he walked beside her in his Cousin Burl disguise, though, she could see that his brain was being bubbly, too. And since bubbles were way more fun when they were shared, and since they were now a couple blocks away from Prince Blueblood's house and the scene they'd just watched while squeezed tight beside each other in the air vent, Pinkie let some of her brain bubbles turn into words and puffed them out through her mouth. "See what I mean? About how Dashie's special enough for Prince Blueblood to really like her?"

Chives began shaking his head slowly, the tips of his big moustache swaying back and forth. "Not possible," he said the same way he'd been saying it the entire week. Or not the same way, she realized, listening to his brain bubbles popping. This time, instead of trying his very hardest to make her believe it, he seemed to be trying to convince himself. "His Highness isn't— He doesn't— He wouldn't—"

With a little growl, he stomped a hoof. "Ever since we were both colts, I've been trying to reach him and get him to behave properly! But my techniques, techniques that I've refined into success after success over the years, they all failed on him! Even the more direct approach I was finally forced to attempt with Green Briar collapsed in the end!" The look on his face made Pinkie think that his mane would've been all loose and flat if it hadn't been cut so short. "And in nine months, this Rainbow Dash of yours has him acting almost respectably! How can this be, Diane?! How?!"

Pinkie shook her head, her mane waving around her neck like laundry on a summer clothesline. "She's special," she said the same way she'd been saying the entire week. She almost wanted to start right from the very beginning, tell Chives about the Sonic Rainboom that had changed her life and about the other amazing things Dashie had done since then, but, well, she'd already told him all that three times the past few days.

Still, she just about launched into it again in the hope that it might push out the other thought she was thinking, the one that was keeping her mane so droopy. Because after going around town with Chives, working with him and laughing with him and having dinner with him while they pretended that they weren't spying on Dashie and Blueblood, she'd started thinking that maybe...maybe... "Maybe," she heard herself saying out loud, "I was wrong about Blueblood not being good for Dashie. Maybe we shouldn't—"

"No." Chives looked way more like Chives right then than he did like Cousin Burl. Which was too bad, Pinkie thought: she'd noticed that Chives seemed a lot happier when he was being Cousin Burl. "It's a trick. It has to be! His Highness exists as a spider wrapped within a web of deceit, and it's our duty—our duty!—to untangle it and expose him!"

"But all that secret agent stuff him, Dashie, and Spitfire were talking about!" The memory made Pinkie's mane fluff up. "I mean, Dashie'd make the best secret agent in the whole wide world!" Her mane fell. "Or...d'you mean that that's the trick?" She could hear her voice getting tighter and tighter, a ball of fire in her chest getting hotter and hotter. "If they're fooling her into thinking they're training her to be a secret agent, that would be...would be—!"

"No, no." Chives gave her a little smile from under his moustache. "His Highness and Ms. Spitfire are indeed agents in Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps. In fact, the way Ms. Spitfire called Ms. Dash 'Delta 6,' she must have already passed her first test and become a first level Corps operative."

Everything inside Pinkie leaped for joy. This called for a Congratulations on Becoming a Secret Agent party!

Except, well, that wouldn't be very secret, would it?

Well, she'd just have to throw a secret party, then, a party where nopony there would know what the party was for! Could she do that? She'd never even imagined such a thing! Would the invitations be in invisible ink? Or maybe—!

Something pressed hard against the top of her head, and Pinkie looked up to see that she'd walked straight into the side wall of Sugercube Corner. "Diane?" Chives was asking from a little ways behind her. "Are you all right?"

She spun and grabbed him around the neck, pressed her snout to his ear, and whispered as shoutily as she could, "A party! A secret party! Tomorrow! It's the only possible way to find out if they really, really, really, really like each other!"

He didn't pull away from her like ponies usually did when she grabbed them; he just swiveled his head around, his eyes big and dark in the starlight just starting to flicker in the night above them. "I don't understand," he said. "Unless...you mean we should use a party atmosphere to put His Highness at ease, then...then subject him to a variety of indignities, each more embarrassing than the last?"

Pinkie blinked at him. "Ummm...."

"Yes!" His eyes took on a glow, his front hoofs coming up to rest on either side of her neck. "If we make him lose his temper, make him show his inherent awfulness in a way that Ms. Dash can't ignore, she won't want to be with him anymore! She'll see the truth about him, will come to her senses, and will leave him on the spot!"

The way he was quivering made Pinkie start quivering, too. "You think so?"

"I know so!" He started doing a little dance right there in the street, Pinkie squealing, her mane bounding up as she swung into step with him. "Prince Blueblood hasn't changed! He can't have! So if we scratch him deeply enough, his true nature will boil pustulantly to the surface, and every right-thinking pony who observes him will properly recoil at his grotesquerie! Diane, it's perfect!" His front legs flexed around her, and Pinkie found herself being pulled into a kiss so deep and thorough, it crackled through her bones, hide, and hair all the way out to the very tippiest tip of her tail.

And for all the times that Pinkie had kissed ponies and been kissed back, this kiss rang bells in her head that she hadn't even known she had, sent a whole fire truck full of bells racing in circles around the inside of her skull.

But he was already pulling away. "Oh! Diane! I...I didn't mean to...to take advantage! I was just so...so—!"

"Shhhh." She could feel her mane draping down along her back like a cape, but suddenly nothing about her felt heavy at all. Grinning, she reached up, pulled his moustache from where it had lodged itself above her upper lip, and pressed it gently back into place above his. "Our secret party'll be tomorrow afternoon at Fluttershy's house—she doesn't mind when I hafta do something all of a sudden like this. That means Discord'll be there, and if we invite ev'rypony and Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo, too, that'll give us a lot to work with! We'll run Blueblood through the wringer, see if he's still a jerk, and then..." She smoothed his moustache with her hoofs. "Then we'll see about some other things, too."

His quivering had started up again, and more little bells started tingling inside Pinkie when he kept holding the sides of her head. "I...I think I should go, Cousin Diane," Chives said after a moment. But he didn't move at all.

Leaning forward, she brushed the tip of his nose with hers. "I'll see you bright and early for baking, Cousin Burl."

Eyes wide, he finally half-stumbled, half-slid backwards, and even though it was pretty dark and he was sort of brownish-orange to begin with, she could tell he was blushing. "Yes, I...yes," he said with a little bow. "Good night." But he didn't run the way she'd almost expected; instead, he did a little skipping shuffle down the street like maybe he was still dancing more than he was walking.

Pinkie turned, opened the side door, drifted up the back stairs and into her apartment, her whole body humming like a bottle of Applejack's sparkling cider about to pop its cork. Except she wasn't about to pop or leap or scream or shout or anything like that: the bubbles in her brain were more hot-air balloons now, big and floaty and relaxed. She glided over the carpeting to Gummy's swimming pool, scooped the alligator up, and settled with him in the big chair in front of her dresser.

And in the mirror, the sad little pony with the long, straight mane who usually looked back at Pinkie when she sat here alone with Gummy and her thoughts, that little pony was smiling, her happiness filling the room like the scent of chocolate-chip cookies fresh out of the oven and making Pinkie even floatier, floatier than she'd ever been before.

***

"Whaddaya mean you're taking a break?!" Bosky Dell glared at Dash like she'd asked him to tear off one of his own wings.

Which, Dash couldn't deny, was the best idea she'd heard all week. "I didn't say I was taking a break!" She forced herself to hover steadily in front of him. "I said I was taking off! Remember? I told you earlier I had someplace to be this afternoon!"

"She did, Dell." Spitfire had flapped up from her observer post closer to the treetops and had that weird half-angry, half-sad look on her face that she'd been wearing for days now.

Dell started sputtering, and Dash started smirking. She'd just about kissed Pinkie Pie when her and her eggbeater flying machine had come clattering along this morning just as Dash was heading over to Beebee's place for breakfast. The three party invitations Pinkie had given her were absolute life-savers as far as Dash was concerned, especially the way Dell had been kicking her all over the sky today.

Because yes, he was the greatest coach the Wonderbolts had ever had: Dash could recite statistics for hours to prove that. But the stunts he'd been running her through, it was like the time Dash had watched Rarity try to explain high fashion to Applejack. Something basic just wasn't connecting: not only couldn't Dash picture what he wanted, but he didn't seem able to explain it, either.

"So you're quitting?!" As usual, Dell's sputters had turned to yells. "You're saying you don't wanna be a 'Bolt?!"

"Did you hear me say that?!" A little bit of the shouting Dash had been holding in burst out. "Maybe your hat's too tight, the way you're not hearing anything so good!"

His lips pulled back. "You wanna know what I'm hearing, missy? Do you?"

But Spitfire cut him off, her ears folded nearly flat against her head. "Dell, what's the matter? You've been off your game all week! Are you sick or something?"

Dell whirled on the Wonderbolt captain. "I'll tell you what I'm sick of, Spits! Wanna-be prima donnas wasting what's left of my life!"

Which was about as much of that as Dash was willing to take. "If I'm no good, how 'bout you just tell me?!"

"I'll tell you this!" Dell smacked his front hoofs together. "Only reason I'm still here is you maybe could be good if you got the right training!"

"What?!" Spitfire whooshed over to jab a hoof into Dell's windbreaker. "I've been biting my tongue since you got here, Dell, watching you do whatever you call this! Because it's no kinda training I've ever been through!"

The old stallion's eyes narrowed. "'Cause this is the way I train real champion flyers, Spits! That's why you never been through it!"

Spitfire's jaw dropped, her body flinching like she'd been bucked in the stomach, and Dash found herself gaping, too. Dell spun to face her. "So you get your head in the game, missy! You've got one more chance with me! One! That'll be tomorrow morning, or it won't be at all!" He sprang away like he'd been launched from a catapult, arched over town, and dwindled away to a spot in the sky.

Dash could only stare after him for a minute; a blush heating her face, she turned to Spitfire. "I—," she started to say, but she couldn't think of anything after that.

Silence swirled on the afternoon breeze around them, Spitfire hanging from her slowly flapping wings the way moss might hang from a tree branch. "Huh," the older pegasus said after a moment, and the glance she gave Dash seemed as jagged as broken glass. "Blueblood meets you, and he turns into a completely different pony. Dell meets you, and he turns into a completely different pony." Her voice choked off, but she cleared her throat. "I'm thinking I should get outta here before I turn into a quivering puddle of goo or something."

"But—" Knowing it sounded stupid, Dash somehow couldn't stop herself from asking, "What about the party?"

Spitfire gave a coughing sort of laugh and shook her head. "Right now, I'm pretty sure I'd end up stomping somepony into the ground. Still, I'll see you tonight, Dash." And she rocketed off into the spotless blue sky over the Everfree Forest. In the opposite direction from Dell, Dash noticed.

Hovering there another moment, Dash shook her head, let herself fall into a dive, and swooped back toward Beebee's place. At least with Spitfire calling Dell out like that, Dash knew she wasn't the one messing up—not entirely, anyway. And yeah, maybe Dell was worried about his wife like Beebee had been saying earlier, but that didn't excuse him from being such a jerk...

And speaking of that— She smiled to see Beebee stretched out white and gold in the afternoon sun on the lawn chair in the backyard again. That he still hadn't gone all "His Whoness" on Dell yet made Dash wonder if she should suggest it, but no. He'd been trying so hard not to be a jerk since he moved to Ponyville, she probably shouldn't tempt him. No matter how much fun it'd be to see in this one case.

She went into a glide, hoping that maybe he hadn't heard her yet so she could drop down on him and get a little tickling in, but he was already sitting up, cupping a hoof to his ear, and saying, "Hark! Dare I hope that to be the flapping of the Lesser Equestrian Spotted Turkey Buzzard? Ah, the sweet warbling melody of its call!"

Steepening the angle of her descent, she picked up enough speed to comb a new part in his mane as she whooshed past, then pulled into a tight loop and brought herself smack down onto his chest with what should have been enough force to knock the wind out of him. "How's that for a warble?"

Beebee barely grunted. "Perhaps I was mistaken." His hoofs closed around her. "It might in fact be wise for me to study this particular avian specimen a bit more closely."

And, oh, how she wanted to let him. But for all that she was a couple years younger, she knew that she was usually the adult around here. How in the wide, wide world of Equestria that had happened, she had no idea. But so far, she was loving every minute of it. "We got a party to get to," she told him, settling her stomach against his and folding her front hoofs over his chest.

"I see." He didn't make a move, either. "Are you going to carry me there? Or—" He rose all at once, sliding under her like one of those otters that sometimes played in the stream down the hill from Fluttershy's place, a tingle passing over her that meant he was using his magic. And in less than half a heartbeat, he was standing in the grass, Dash lying across his back. "Am I carrying you?" he finished.

With a laugh, Dash flipped herself onto the ground. "So you're saying we should get even more wild stories flying around about us?"

"Ha!" He started down the little path that led past the house to the road out front. "The thin cabbage soup that passes for gossip here in Ponyville pales and quails in comparison to the richly-seasoned lentil stew that one finds freely offered on every street corner in Canterlot."

Dash trotted beside him with a grin. She knew this game. "And yet?" she asked.

"And yet,—" He bent his neck to nuzzle between her ears. "The day I left that place behind to be here with you will likely loom large among the happiest days of my life for quite some time to come." He chuckled. "Still, I do have an unusual bit of gossip about your friend Pinkie Pie. If you might be at all interested."

"Pinkie?" Dash nodded eagerly.

They reached the road, then, the Rich family's sprawling estate right across the road. Dash could never look at it without remembering Beebee telling her how he'd directed his architect to make his place exactly one square foot smaller than the Rich house: "just to be neighborly," he'd said with a grin.

"This cousin of hers," Beebee was saying now, starting down the road toward town. "Do you know him well?"

"Cousin?" Dash blinked. She vaguely recalled Pinkie introducing her to somepony at the party early this week, but after slamming through Dell's maneuvers, Dash was surprised she still knew how to walk.

"Thin fellow?" Beebee arched an eyebrow. "Wears his apron everywhere? Sports a moustache large enough to experience its own weather patterns?"

"Oh, yeah." The moustache did it. "Burl, right? I've seen them when we've gone out this week. What about him?"

"Well..." Beebee leaned closer. "Last night, I took the shadow cloak for a spin around town to see if I could find anything that might relate to Spitfire's report."

That, Dash hadn't forgotten. "You think Pinkie's cousin's involved in whatever's s'pposed to happen?"

"What?!" He drew back. "No, no! Nothing like that!"

Dash had to blink. "Then what—?"

"The term 'kissing cousins.' I've heard it before, but I had no idea you rustic gentry took it so literally."

Rolling her eyes, Dash blew a breath loudly through her lips. "Pinkie kisses everypony!"

"Not like this." His voice had gotten quiet again, the road bringing them past Carousal Boutique and into the town square. "There seemed something very serious about them as I passed by."

She gave that another eye roll. "I've seen Pinkie Pie serious maybe three times in my whole life, and one of those was when Discord turned us all inside-out."

"Nonetheless." With a sniff, something very close to 'his Whoness' look slipped over him. "I can only report what I observed. And while I'm certainly not one to judge—"

"Ha!" Unfurling her left wing, she smacked him in the side. "You'd better not be, buddy!"

That got enough of a grin to push his sour face away. "Besides," she went on, "if you wanna judge somepony, lemme tell you what Dell had me doing today!"

Complaining about her trainer took them the rest of the way through town and out to Fluttershy's, but the sight of the normally-quiet little house stopped her with a whistle. "Wow! And Pinkie just put this together overnight?"

Nearly everypony in town seemed to be chatting and laughing on the grass around Fluttershy's place, what had to be Cheerilee's whole class running and squealing between the tables set up all over the yard. Sprigs of balloons blossomed from every gable and eaves trough, a red and blue bunch waving in the breeze from the top of the chimney, and the mutter of conversation made Dash's wings rustle; there'd been a few little parties this week, but nothing she would've called epic. This one, though, definitely looked like it might—

"Welcome!" a baritone voice called, and the air twisted in front of them, Discord pouring out like water from a wrung washcloth. "So lovely to see you, Rainbow Dash! And your coltfriend, of course: what was the name again? Barnblatt or something?" He tapped his chin, and two eyes appeared along his forearm to give a wink.

Dash grinned, and so did Beebee, she was glad to see. "Yes, that's it exactly!" Beebee bowed. "And how pleased and honored I am to finally meet the Great and Powerful Trixie."

Discord blinked, then burst out laughing. "Come in, come in!" he said, slapping Beebee on the back. "As long as you're here, at least, we're sure not to run out of cheese!"

Inside the house, the scene was a little more placid. Granny Smith and some of her canasta cronies sat cackling in rocking chairs on one side of the living room while Pinkie and a couple ponies wearing aprons—Dash caught sight of Burl's moustache just disappearing into the kitchen—were setting out a truly massive spread of fruit, sandwiches, and desserts on some tables on the other side of the room.

"Dashie!" Pinkie leaped over the tables and spun her into a hug. "And Bluey!" Suddenly, Beebee was squeezed against her, the whole room spinning. "It's so super colossal that you guys could make it!"

Then everything fell back into balance, Pinkie hopping up and down in front of them, Beebee's eyes still swirling beside her. "Wouldn'ta missed it, Pinks," Dash said, sliding over to press herself to Beebee and help steady him. "What're we celebrating, anyway?"

"Shhhh!" Pinkie jumped forward again, jammed her head between Dash and Beebee. "It's a secret! Nopony's s'pposed to know!" With a pop like a cork, she wrenched her head away, her mane wiggling around her ears like strawberry pudding. "But have fun anyway! Gotta go!" And she whooshed away.

Glancing over, Dash saw a familiar crackling hardness around the edges of Blueblood's face. "The word 'exuberant' doesn't quite do Ms. Pie justice, does it?" he asked, his eyes now calm and fixed steadily on the food tables, the other ponies in aprons still setting stuff out.

A little crackle came over Dash's stomach, too, and she figured she better douse this fire quicker than quick. "You gonna need a time out, your Whoness?"

"I don't believe so." He turned, began examining the knickknacks on Fluttershy's shelves, and while his gaze didn't soften, his voice did. "Did you ever meet Chives, Delta 6?"

She felt like she'd just flown across a pressure ridge, her skin prickling. "He's here?" she asked just as softly.

The nod he gave toward the tables was so slight, Dash doubted she would've seen it if she hadn't been looking; the hindquarters of Pinkie's cousin were again slipping through into the kitchen. "There's something about that fellow Burl," Blueblood was saying, the words barely reaching Dash over the music and hubbub of the party. "Last night, my cutie mark drew me to the scene of him and Pinkie Pie's rendezvous, and today, seeing him in the full light of day..."

When he stopped, Dash looked back at him, the air as raw as if a lightning bolt had gone crashing through. "How?" she somehow managed not to yell. "Did he trick Pinkie? Is he really her cousin? Why's he—?"

"We need to get into that kitchen." Blueblood's glance moved from side to side. "Quietly, though, so as not to alarm him or break up the party." His glance settled on Dash. "Can you arrange that, darling?"

Her mind sprang to life like she was half a mile up with a squall forming around her, and letting her gaze roam... "Follow my lead," she murmured, then she started across the room to the back door. On the grass just outside, a group surrounded Applejack, all the ponies laughing at whatever funny story the farm pony was telling. Fluttershy sat smiling at the edge of the group, and Dash sidled up to her. "Hey, Shy! Great party! It's been, like, never since you've had one, right?"

Fluttershy scarcely even flinched, her smile not wavering at all. "Oh, thank you, Rainbow, but it's much more Pinkie's party than mine. I only found out about it this morning when she asked if she could have it here, actually." Her eyes did go wide, then, and she jumped to her hoofs. "Oh! Your Highness! I'm sorry!" She bowed, Dash unable to stop a sigh: Shy was the only pony in town who still did that.

"Tut, tut, now, Fluttershy," Blueblood said with a laugh that almost sounded real to Dash's ear. "This is a less than formal occasion, so perhaps we can do away with a few of the usual fripperies." He gave Dash a look that had at least three layers to it: his smiling face laid over the top of his serious spy face with his Prince Blueblood and Beebee faces sort of bubbling somewhere underneath. "Now, what was it you were going to ask Fluttershy, darling?"

Dash swallowed, covering it by tapping the ground like she'd just remembered something. "Oh, yeah! See, Shy, I was telling Beebee about that time in flight school when the whole group of us did that trip out to San Pinto for fog training, and I got to wondering if you still had that whale statue you picked up in the gift shop down by the harbor."

Because of course Fluttershy still had the thing: Dash knew her friend well enough to be one hundred per cent sure of that. Dash was even fairly sure it was stashed away in one of Fluttershy's kitchen cupboards, though that was the iffiest part of her plan.

"My narwhal?" Fluttershy's ears perked. "Oh, yes, I most certainly do still have it!"

"Wonderful!" Beebee sounded more like Pinkie Pie than Dash would've thought possible. "Perhaps you didn't know, Fluttershy, but statuary is one of my passions! Might I prevail upon you to have a look at the artwork?"

Fortunately, Fluttershy's attention was glued on Beebee because Dash was finding it pretty hard to keep a straight face. "I'd be honored, your Highness!" Fluttershy practically danced through the back door into the house. "I had it displayed on my shelves for the longest time, but, well, Angel started giving it the most terrible looks! So I moved it into one of the kitchen cupboards just to keep things peaceful."

Following Fluttershy inside, Dash felt a little nudge along her side and looked over to see Beebee nod, one eyebrow quirking at her. Fluttershy was padding around behind the tables, so Dash sprinted forward to push the kitchen door open. "That was pretty much the best trip we ever took at school, wasn't it, Shy?"

"It was." Fluttershy sighed. "I'll never forget how big the ocean was, but oh, so very quiet."

The kitchen, on the other hoof, wasn't quiet at all, Pinkie and her four assistants—at least, Dash was pretty sure there were just five ponies—rushing around chopping and stirring and slathering what smelled like mustard over slices of bread. "Don't mind us, folks," Dash called out cheerily, flying up to what she knew was the wrong cupboard. "Just getting something outta storage. In here, Shy?"

"Oh, no, Rainbow Dash," Fluttershy was saying as Dash wrenched the cupboard doors open. "That's where I keep my afternoon tea set. I keep the statue—"

But where she kept the statue, Dash never did find out. Because what squatted inside Fluttershy's cupboard wasn't the teapot or the cups or the saucers Dash had seen so often when she would stop by here for a pre-dinner snack after practicing all day. No, inside the cupboard now sat a thing of cardboard cylinders bound together with baling wire. A little part of it on the front fell off as Dash watched, and lights began flashing here and there over the whole device.

Time seemed to slow down then. It wasn't that she'd seen this exact object before, but the general shape and distribution of parts made her thoughts spring back to this past winter and her training with Beebee. He'd spent quite a while on the most common sorts of bombs he'd come across while in Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps, and this thing that Dash was now staring at, it...it...

The part that had fallen off, for instance, that would've been the trigger, and the cupboard door would've been holding it in place. And now that she'd opened the door, she had three, maybe four second till—

"Bomb!" she screamed, whirling away as time snapped back to its regular tick tick tick. "Shields, Beebee! Maximum—!"

But that's as far as she got before everything went all white and fiery.

Act III: For Your Pies Only

Head throbbing despite the hornvocaine, Blueblood pushed the emergency room's double doors open with a hoof—no magic for the rest of the day, the doctor had said—and stopped at the scores of silent, anxious faces staring at him, the hospital's front lobby filled. Nearly everypony in town, it seemed to him.

"Prince Blueblood?" The voice pulled his attention to Princess Sparkle stepping forward. "Are you all right?"

Of the various things he wanted to shout—Oh, yes! I find surviving an explosion every now and then to be ever so refreshing!—he instead chose to say as calmly and clearly as he could: "I am, thank you, your Highness, as are Rainbow Dash and Ms. Fluttershy. Dash should be released momentarily, but with Fluttershy still unconscious—"

A roar shook the room, and everything in it—ponies, sofas, potted palms, even the air itself—all flickered and froze, turning the bluish-black of deep winter ice. Something even blacker snapped toward him like a whip, wrapped itself tight around him, and became Discord, his mismatched eyes huge and burning directly in front of Blueblood, more teeth showing in his snout than should have been possible. "You!" Discord bellowed, his breath as foul as a field of rotten pumpkins. "This is all your fault, you and your thrice-becursed Clandestine Corps! So let it be on your head, Double-O-Zeta: if she dies, I will destroy this world and any other world I might happen to come across over the next few millennia!"

Shoving aside his first few outraged and cutting responses this time was much easier, and Blueblood forced his thoughts not to dwell on what a creature like Discord could do if he chose to. "She's alive," Blueblood decided to say, very glad that it was true. "Thanks to your quick actions dissipating the force of the explosion, as a matter of fact, you saved the lives of everypony at Ms. Fluttershy's house today."

One of those burning eyes twitched, and the constriction around Blueblood loosened. "Who?" Discord asked, his words buzzing like hornets. "Who did this?"

"We'll find out." A hunch nudged him, his compass rose cutie mark pointing him in a possible direction. "Would you be able to help, do you think? Do that snap-and-flash of yours and take me back to last night when our bomber would've been planting the device?"

Uncoiling completely from Blueblood, Discord slouched against the frozen form of Princess Sparkle. "It doesn't work like that, Zeta. What I do isn't magic, after all."

"Isn't...?" Words deserted him.

Discord's sour look got somehow even sourer. "I merely call it magic so as not to confuse your tiny pony minds. To get grotesquely technical, however, what you do when you get that thing going—" His eagle claw lashed out, and Blueblood felt it flick his horn, a sudden smell of cherry cider washing over him. "—is completely different from the effects I cause. My power comes from the dimensional vortices I create between the material and numenistic planes due to my being a physical manifestation of the more basal aspects to be found in the collective unconscious of all ponykind. Which means nothing to you, does it?"

Unable to keep the pique out of his voice, Blueblood let his mouth go sideways. "My tiny pony mind can't decide whether to answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

Something like Discord's usual sly grin crept in around the edges of his face. "Well, trust me on this: most of what I'm able to do is by definition the very opposite of helpful." He touched his lion paw to his chin. "Although I suppose I could crack open the skulls of every pony in town and rummage about in their brains till I found the responsible party." He cocked his head. "Would that help?"

Blueblood's lips had gone very dry. "Would it hurt the ponies you did it to?"

Discord blinked once. "What part of 'cracking open their skulls' did your tiny pony mind not understand?"

"Ah." Blueblood cleared his throat. "We'll call that 'Plan B,' then. First, though, let's see what Spitfire and the team from the Corps can find in and around Ms. Fluttershy's cottage. Dash and I will make a few inquiries as well, and I'll ask you to remain here and keep watch over Ms. Fluttershy."

"Watch her? Of course! But why?" Discord waved his arms, his lion paw and eagle claw popping off and spinning around several times before reattaching themselves. "Surely this is somepony striking at you and the Corps, Double-O-Zeta! Nopony could possibly want to blow up Fluttershy!"

Again, Blueblood weighed his response. Discord hadn't mentioned Chives, which made Blueblood wonder if Princess Luna perhaps hadn't seen fit to share certain information with certain individuals. And if Discord didn't know... "Consider," Blueblood said as calmly and—he hoped—as convincingly as he could. "Nopony knew about the party at Ms. Fluttershy's cottage until this morning, at which point the place immediately became a hive of activity. That's why I say the bomb must have been planted last night and why I further say that the bomber's target could not have been any of the ponies invited to Ms. Pie's impromptu get-together."

"You mean..." The frozen silence stretched for several seconds, Discord's ears folding completely out of sight. "It was likely meant for either Fluttershy or me."

"Exactly." Blueblood thought about reaching out to put a hoof on Discord's shoulder, but he wasn't certain it would still be a hoof when he pulled it back. "That you can take care of yourself, I'm entirely certain, but if the target was Ms. Fluttershy..." He let himself trail off.

That snaky grin slithered into place with full force. "Oh, you're good, Zeta; as a master manipulator myself, I must compliment you." Discord scraped a claw along Blueblood's chest, Blueblood trying not to wince as it gave off the sound of a hoof scratching a chalkboard. "You want me safely out of the way and occupied with some small but necessary task so I won't start cracking skulls without you."

"Well?" Blueblood shrugged. "My tiny pony mind should legitimately be concerned about you doing that, shouldn't it?"

"It should." A shudder ran through Discord's body like the wake of a stone tossed into a still pond. "I hate this, did you know that?" His voice, quiet and with almost no sneering in it, took Blueblood by surprise. "Hate every foul minute of it."

And while his head told him that Discord could mean any number of things by that, Blueblood's cutie mark told him precisely what the creature meant. "Yes." Blueblood's mind flashed back to that instant in Fluttershy's kitchen after Dash's shout, his reactions kicking in, flaring the shield spell from his horn with all the strength he could muster, unsure if he could reach Dash in time... "Caring for other ponies is the most wonderfully horrible thing in the world."

Discord nodded, those yellow and red eyes focused on nothing that Blueblood could see. "I'm smaller, but larger. Wide open, yet clenched tight. Constricted in my every movement, and still somehow freer than I've ever been." His snaggle tooth emerged as his lips pulled back into something that might have been a smile. "Ah, the magic of friendship."

The sentiment struck a great deal closer to home than Blueblood would've liked, but he was saved the effort of trying to mask his reaction by Discord shouting, "It's you ponies!" His upper body swirling like water in an unstoppered sink, Discord bent around and tapped a claw on Princess Sparkle's solid blue chin. "You're just so confounding! I mean, mere nanoseconds have passed in the world outside, but I can already feel magic licking at the walls of this bubble I've thrown up around us, our stalwart Twilight no doubt trying to drain it away! Another twenty or thirty interior minutes, and she might actually break through! It's astonishing! And you!" He spun back to face Blueblood. "It was your shield that did all the work earlier, you know. I merely grabbed it and blew it up like a balloon to push the explosion away."

Blueblood rubbed his forehead. "I don't suppose you can do the same with the headache?"

With a laugh, Discord spread his arms. "I only cause headaches, remember? Still—" He snapped to his full height, stomped his goat leg, and saluted with his lion paw. "Reporting for Fluttershy guarding duty, sir!" The blues and blacks vanished with a whoosh, Discord whisking away with them, and Blueblood found himself staring at the blinking princess.

"Did you...hear something?" she asked, her brow wrinkling.

"It was Discord." Blueblood managed to keep the quiver out of his voice, the hot and cold sweat under his mane making him feel like he'd just faced down another bomb. "He'll be watching over Ms. Fluttershy till she wakes." He nodded to the crowd. "Perhaps you could reassure our fellows that all will be well and send them home to their suppers?"

"Discord?" Princess Sparkle's ears fell. "His magic's just so confusing, I'm still never sure what's what with him!" She shook her head, and Blueblood could very nearly smell the effort behind her perky little smile. "But yes, we should probably see about updating these folks."

She turned to face the room, but before she could speak, Blueblood felt a wonderfully familiar warmth slide along his side, Dash's scent washing through the antiseptic dryness of the place. Turning his head, he found half the aches in his body simply evaporating at that touch, her glorious rainbow mane right where he could rub his cheek against it. He heard the puff of her breath, and when she leaned against him, an absolutely irrational surge of optimism swept through him. When he'd first seen her stretched out on a table and grimacing as a doctor finished bandaging the worst of her cuts, he'd felt relief. But this now, this was something ten or twenty times stronger.

"Hey, Twi," Dash called from beside him, her voice perhaps a bit rougher than usual. "Shy's awake. Discord's in there, but Doc says maybe a couple or four of you can pop in, too, if you make it quick."

A quiet cheer wafted from the crowd, tired smiles appearing, ears perking up. Applejack, Rarity, and Pinkie Pie stepped out from among the gathered ponies to join Princess Sparkle, and at Dash's nod, they hurried past her into the depths of the hospital. Everypony else in the lobby started drifting away with many a grin and wave to Dash, and before long, Dash and Blueblood stood alone in the waiting room. "Well," Blueblood said, allowing what still felt like his natural self to rise a bit closer to the surface. "Finally ready to get a bit of work done?"

Her scratchy little laugh was the sweetest thing he'd heard in days. "Way ahead of you. Fluttershy didn't remember hearing a thing in her kitchen last night, so Chives must've planted the bomb this morning when he was there helping Pinkie get things set up." She pushed away, turned to face him, and he couldn't help wincing at the bruises along her legs, the bandage around her left knee wrapping what the doctor called a slight sprain.

"I disagree." Refusing to think about how much worse this whole thing could've turned out, Blueblood forced himself to focus on the matter at hoof. "Chives could very well have planted the device last night: he always was so confoundedly quiet, creeping about his duties. Still, we do have two slightly more urgent questions." He fixed his gaze on the deep violet of her eyes. "Did Ms. Pie know he wasn't actually her cousin Burl? And does she know where he is now?"

Dash's tail lashed. "She didn't know who he was: she couldn't've. Where he is, though..." She sighed, unfurled her wings, and drifted over to one of the now-abandoned couches. "Might be we wanna ask her that when she comes back out."

Blueblood nodded, stepped across the carpet, and climbed up onto the sofa next to her. She slid over to press against him again, and this time, he could feel her shivering. "Darling?" he asked, trying to keep the concern out of his voice. "Do you need a spot of coffee or some such?"

"No, I—" She sighed, and when she nestled her head onto his shoulder, Blueblood froze, not sure she'd ever done that before. "It's not s'pposed to happen here, Beebee," she said, her voice as pale as winter sunlight. "The bad guys're s'pposed to be out there." She waved a hoof. "Not...not here..."

Unsure what to say or do, Blueblood moved his chin to touch her ear, large parts of his brain spinning in utter confusion—Rainbow Dash?! Showing actual vulnerability?! How could this be possible?!—while the rest of him began to settle into a state of complete and total relaxation. That she seemed to be taking comfort from him for a change felt— It was like...like—

It was like nothing he'd ever experienced.

They sat tucked that way for a wonderfully timeless time before the rustle of voices made him look over at the emergency room doors, Princess Sparkle and her party emerging. "It ain't right!" Applejack was saying, her tone to Blueblood's ears even grouchier than usual. "And I say we do something about it!"

Rarity was nodding. "As a group of concerned local citizens—who have, incidentally, saved the world a number of times—I'd say we have every right to investigate this matter if nopony else is going to!"

Princess Sparkle was looking around the room, and when her gaze met Blueblood's, he could see relief flood her face. "Actually, girls," she said, turning back to the other two. "I can't really say too much, but I've spoken with several agents of Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps about this. And they're already investigating."

The trio stopped beside the sofa, Applejack blinking. "Clandestine Corps?" she asked. "Y'mean...they're real?"

"Gracious!" Rarity's eyes had gone quite wide. "I rather thought they only existed in adventure novels!"

"Nope." Princess Sparkle gave a crisp nod. "And they're on the case even as we speak."

The others looked impressed, and Blueblood did his best not to roll his eyes. "Well!" he said, pouring the Canterlot accent into his voice as thick as maple syrup. "I know I shall certainly sleep better knowing—"

"Hey." Dash pulled away from him and sat up straighter. "Where's Pinkie?"

With a little laugh, Princess Sparkle gestured toward the emergency room doors. "Oh, she gave Fluttershy a hug, said she had to get back to the bakery, and jumped out the window." Smiling, she looked back, and a chill shivered through Blueblood. "I don't know what that pony's thinking sometimes!"

***

Racing through the dusk-lit streets, Pinkie tried to stop her brain from thinking anything except, It isn't true, it isn't true, it isn't true, it isn't true! Because if she let herself think anything else, she knew, nothing would ever be right again ever in the whole wide world, and she would have to keep running like this, never stop, never rest, never have another second of fun. Ever.

She skidded around the corner, charged toward Sugar Cube Corner, sprang up the back steps, and slid into the kitchen, the warm, wonderful scents wanting her to think maybe everything would be OK, maybe he hadn't disappeared forever the way she'd thought when she'd seen him running away after the explosion, with the screaming and the ambulances and the hazy, dazy walk to the hospital and the—

But she wasn't gonna think about that. Especially since—

Chives in his Cousin Burl outfit blinked at her from in front of the big oven, his mouth full of a padded mitt holding a tray of perfectly browned dinner rolls. "Cousin Diane!" he exclaimed, the words completely clear and understandable. He turned, set the tray on the counter, and took a step toward her. "I'm sorry to have left you, but I was uninjured, and knowing that the Cakes would need help with the dinner rush, I—"

She tackled him, shoved him ahead of her up the back stairs and through the open door of her room, kicking it shut once they were inside. "Tell me." And her voice was so low and growly, she almost thought it must be somepony else's: not even Diane at her most Dianeiest had ever sounded like this. "Tell me it isn't true."

"It isn't true," he said.

For one teeny, tiny moment, Pinkie thought that would be enough. But no matter how much she looked at him standing in front of her candy-cane striped dresser, no matter how much she'd enjoyed getting to know him this past week, and no matter how big and wide and pretty his dark eyes were—she just wanted to fall right into them like into two vats of sweet, creamy chocolate—she still couldn't quite stop the thoughts.... "OK. Now tell me what isn't true." Maybe that would work.

He gave a nod. "I didn't have anything to do with the bomb at Ms. Fluttershy's house."

Again, her mane almost puffed up with joy, but— "Wait." She sat down, her voice almost back to her regular Diane voice. "If you say it isn't true that you didn't have anything to do with it, doesn't that mean it is true that you did?"

Jumping across the room, he took her front hoofs in his. "Please, Diane! You must believe me! I had nothing to do with that device! I would never do anything to betray your trust, and I would certainly never do anything that might lead to innocent ponies being injured!"

His touch made her want to ignore all her horrible little doubts, but she had to be sure. "Promise me."

"I promise."

"Pinkie promise."

That made him blink, but he quietly and carefully went through each and every one of the steps when she told him how to do it. Her heart pounding harder and harder, when he finally stuck the cupcake in his eye, she had to throw her absolutely biggest hug around him. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" And, well, she had to kiss him after that, didn't she? Just to make sure he knew everything was OK again.

And it was OK. Fluttershy was OK, Dashie was OK, Discord was OK, even Blueblood was OK: Pinkie had seen all of them for herself either outside Fluttershy's house or at the hospital. And finding out that Chives was OK, too, that he wasn't hurt and that he hadn't planted the bomb, Pinkie just plain didn't want to stop kissing him, giggling with him and trading the moustache back and forth. Closing her eyes, losing herself in the sensation of his cheek rubbing gently along the side of her neck—

But then a knock sounded at the door, Mrs. Cake's broad accent asking from outside, "Pinkie? Are you here? Rainbow Dash and Prince Blueblood are downstairs asking for you."

Leaping away from Chives like she'd bitten down on a raisin in what was supposed to be a chocolate-chip cookie, Pinkie gave off an "eep!" that would've done Fluttershy proud.

"Pinkie?" Mrs. Cake asked again. "Was that you? Should I tell your friends they can come up?"

"No!" She shot a glance at Chives, then gestured toward the window. "I'll be right there, Mrs. Cake!"

Chives was shaking his head, but for once in her life, her Pinkie sense didn't give her a single clue what he meant. She wanted to grab him, push him out the window like she had that first night—or at least tell him that he had to get out of there before anypony caught him. But she didn't have the time or the privacy, not with Mrs. Cake right outside and Dashie downstairs and Prince Blueblood really being a secret agent and also Chives's old boss—

She gestured more frantically toward the window, then turned and sprang to the door, pulling it open just enough so she could squeeze out into the hallway. "Hi, Mrs. Cake!" That she could manage something at all close to her regular Pinkie voice told her that her mane was at least a little bit poofy, and she forced a big, toothy smile after grabbing the knob to pull the door shut behind her. "Sorry I couldn't be here to help with the dinner rush, but I hadta wait for Fluttershy to wake up."

"Not to worry, dear." Mrs. Cake reached out to pat Pinkie's knee, the cinnamon-and-spice scent that filled the air around her relaxing Pinkie the way it always did. Until she said: "Burl was here to help out, so we did fine. He's a treasure, that one. D'you know where he's got off to?"

The question swarmed around Pinkie like ants around spilled orange juice. "He was downstairs when I came in," she managed to say.

"Maybe he went for a bit of a walk." Mrs. Cake nodded, then cocked her head. "You're looking a little flushed, there, Pinkie. You OK after all the kerfuffle?"

Rarity had once told Pinkie how lucky she was to have such a rosy complexion: Nopony can tell when you're blushing! she'd said with that wonderful, wrinkle-nosed grin of hers. Still, Pinkie had found over the years that Mrs. Cake was as much as exception to that rule as she was to most other rules. "I'm OK, Mrs. C. And Fluttershy's OK and Dashie's OK and ev'rypony's OK! So I'd sure call that OK! I'd call it even better'n OK!" She practically threw herself down the stairs. "But I shouldn't keep Dashie and Bluey waiting! I'll see you later, OK?!"

Tumbling into the dining room, though, and seeing Dashie with her bandages and Blueblood squinting like it was too bright even though Mr. Cake had turned the lights down to their dinner time coziness, Pinkie started thinking that maybe she should've stayed and taken her chances with Mrs. Cake.

"Hey, Pinks," Dashie said, and while her smile was real, it was stretched pretty tight across her snout. "Me and Beebee, we're just, y'know, making the rounds, checking up on everypony after the, uhh..." Her smile crumpled into a grimace, and she shrugged. "All the wild stuff today," she finished.

Pinkie put on her happiest happy face. "Well, I'm OK!" she said, and it was kind of a little bit true. "And you two are OK and Fluttershy's OK and Fluttershy's house is even OK—I mean, it maybe got a little burned up in a couple places—but ev'rything and ev'rypony's A-OK!"

Blueblood shifted, his already narrow eyes getting even narrower. "And your cousin Burl?" he asked, his voice just as squinty as his eyes. "I assume he and the other ponies who were in the kitchen with the three of us when the device went off are OK?"

The sudden quiet in the room, Pinkie thought, was the same sort as a glass makes right in the second before it hits a tile floor. "They all looked OK when we were standing around outside not panicking." Except for Chives, she didn't say. But Blueblood didn't know about Chives—please, please, please he didn't know!—and anyway, Chives had promised her—had Pinkie promised her!—that he hadn't had anything to do with the bomb.

When Prince Blueblood shifted this time, he seemed to get bigger and closer to her even though he didn't move from his seat. "You know, I don't recall seeing your cousin Burl when we were evacuating. Are you certain he's OK?"

"Well, yeah! Of course!" She should be hopping around more, Pinkie thought to herself, should be laughing and dancing and juggling muffins. But she could barely get her jaw to move. "Why wouldn't he be?"

"I can think of several reasons." Sharp and sour things dripped from the prince's voice even though Pinkie wasn't quite sure how sounds could drip, and when he stood and marched past her like a soldier pony, Pinkie forced her gaze to follow in case he started for the stairs and she had to jump on him. But he stopped at the front display counter instead. "These cupcakes with the lemon. Are they items your cousin Burl baked?"

Blinking, Pinkie nodded.

His horn sputtering, Prince Blueblood winced and stepped behind the counter, the glass door in back sliding open. He bent down, took a big sniff, and Pinkie could see the shudder that wiggled down his back. "Perfect and unmistakable," he more whispered than said; straightening, he turned an even-harder glare at Pinkie. "Would it surprise you, Ms. Pie, to learn that your cousin Burl is actually my former valet Chives?"

Which made everything shatter into a million, billion pieces. "He calls me Cousin Diane!" Pinkie wanted with all her might not to say anything, but she had to keep Dashie and Bluey's attention here, had to give Chives a chance to get as far away as he could. "And nopony ever calls me Cousin Diane except for Cousin Burl! And he's smart and funny and happy and nice! And when he takes me to dinner early so we can get back here to help ev'rypony else get their dinners, he talks to me and looks at me and listens to me! And when we go walking in the evening after we've finished doing the dishes, it's like walking with a pony-shaped bundle of springtime air and summertime sunshine! And he's such a good baker even though I don't think Cousin Burl ever learned how to cook!" Her face was wet, Pinkie realized, and Dashie was sitting right next to her, one front leg around Pinkie's shoulders. "He's really nice, Dashie," she told her friend.

Dashie's face looked a little wet, too. "Where is he, Pinkie?"

"He's got a room at the Livery House." Pinkie waved a hoof toward the train station and hoped Chives had run in the other direction. "But he's my cousin Burl, Dashie. He said he was! He hasta be...."

"Inexcusable!" The way Prince Blueblood spat the word made Pinkie sure he'd found raisins instead of chocolate-chips in his cookies before, too. "That the scoundrel would dare to practice upon Ms. Pie's credulous simplicity!" He moved back from around the counter as big and golden-white as a cloud at sunrise, his sternness somehow friendly. "Fear not, Ms. Pie. He shan't get away with this."

Which made Pinkie stare. He was mad the way he always pretended not to be, sure, but Pinkie could tell that he was mad not because he thought Chives had tricked him, but because he thought Chives had tricked her...

Dashie gave her another squeeze around the shoulders. "It's gonna be OK, Pinkie." And Dashie looked so much like a super secret agent right then, all calm and concerned and ready to track down the bad guy that Pinkie felt her mane puff up despite everything. "But if you see him anywhere or if he stops by or anything, you'll let me know, right?"

"I will." She felt her mane collapse, draping over her shoulders as cold and smooth as a snowdrift. "I...I'm sorry, Dashie."

"Get some rest, Pinks." Dashie stood. "We'll be by tomorrow at lunchtime to see how you're doing." She nodded to Prince Blueblood, and the two of them left.

Feeling like she was under water—no, feeling like she was under salt-water taffy—Pinkie slewed herself around, plodded across the empty dining room, and crept up the stairs, pushing her tired head against her door so she could ooze inside. At least Chives was safe. Of course, that meant he was gone, too, and that she probably wouldn't ever see him again, wouldn't ever hear that sweet, soft voice of his calling her—

"Cousin Diane?"

Fire and ice shot through Pinkie, snapped her head up and frizzed her mane and tail. Because Chives was still sitting right where she'd left him, still in his Cousin Burl disguise and still looking better than a triple-decker custard cheesecake.

She crossed the room without touching anything till she collided with him; then she touched him a lot with her front legs and her lips, and then she touched him maybe kind of hard across the muzzle with a swipe of her right hoof. "What're you still doing here?!" she squeaked. "They know that you're you! I mean, that you're not Cousin Burl! I mean, you are Cousin Burl 'cause there wasn't any Cousin Burl before you came along, but they know that you're both of you at the same time! You've gotta go!"

Chives was shaking his head. "That would be irresponsible, Diane, when there's a pony in this town looking to strike at His Highness, most especially since that pony appears to be as dangerous as Green Briar at his maddest. We must therefore settle accounts with His Highness once and for all before this mad pony can cause some actual injury." His front hoofs slid under the flow of Pinkie's mane to rest firmly but gently on her shoulders. "You must go to Prince Blueblood tomorrow morning at seven, and you must tell him that I am waiting for him at the Castle of the Pony Sisters in the Everfree Forest. Tell him he must come alone and that we will then decide things between us. Can you do that, my love?"

Pinkie felt like she'd turned into a statue in Canterlot Gardens. "Your love?" she whispered.

"Can you tell him?"

Somehow, she got her head to nod.

"Thank you." He shifted against her, touched his lips to her forehead, and slid from her embrace. "If I possibly can return to you, Diane, I will. But if I cannot, I hope you'll think fondly of me now and then."

His shadow in the evening darkness rustled at the curtains, and Pinkie wanted to call after him: No! It's OK! You don't hafta! Prince Blueblood's a good pony now! He is!

But by then the curtains were settling, and Chives was gone.

***

Pacing among the collapsed stones of the ancient castle, Chives kept trying and trying not to draw the obvious connection between his surroundings and the mess his life had become. After all, it wasn't as if this past week in Ponyville had revealed everything he'd ever done to be either a lie or a mistake. Yes, all his long-formed conclusions about His Highness seemed to have been in error, but—

No! He stomped a hoof. He couldn't be wrong about Prince Blueblood! Hadn't his cutie mark come to him due to the skills he'd developed during the seven years he'd spent secretly trying to help His Highness and the three years he'd spent in his service after that trying to destroy him? And he'd been right about all the other ponies he'd helped, all the ponies he'd quietly and unobtrusively guided back to the path of proper behavior!

So it was simply not possible that His Highness could somehow have changed in the nine months since Chives's final scheme had collapsed under the weight of Green Briar's madness! Chives couldn't deny that Ms. Dash was indeed a formidable personality, but how could she have succeeded where Chives had failed? Reforming ponies was what he did!

Except in the cases of Prince Blueblood and Green Briar, of course...

Stomping again, he turned and started back along his circuit, the harness around his chest and shoulders heavy and rattling. It had taken him less time than he'd expected last night to gather the parts—Ponyville was a more cosmopolitan town than he'd expected—and he'd arrived at the ruins just after sunrise with plenty of time to get the rest of his preparations in place. All he had to do now was wait for Diane to get his message to His Highness.

Ah, Diane. Sweet, lovely Diane. Chives had to stop and shiver. Never before had he met a pony so layered, so complex, a veritable sundae of personalities and charms: all sweet syrups, whipped toppings and nuts covering a succulent mixture of ice creams, cakes and fruits. Each time Chives had felt himself folding in despair at the sight of His Highness not lashing insults against all those around him, Diane had been there to hold his hoof, to tell him he was right, to agree with him that Prince Blueblood had to be faking it. And when she would express her doubts as they sat huddled together on the floor of her room, he would reassure her that they need only watch His Highness more closely to catch him.

If only— But no. Sighing, Chives began plodding again, stepped into the vast and empty throne room of the former palace. He refused to think about all the 'if only's anymore: if only he'd met Diane two years ago; if only His Highness had met Rainbow Dash two years ago; if only the explosion at Ms. Fluttershy's had actually—

No! He wasn't thinking about any of that! This morning, right now, right here, this was where his focus needed to lie!

He couldn't help laughing. Lie. Yes. That was the word exactly. Considering that the only pony Chives had ever been able to lie to was—

"Well, well, well." The sneering voice behind him slapped his ears like a mosquito's buzz, but his heart leaped as if reacting to a long-absent caress. "I've finally met a criminal stupid enough to return to the scene of his crime."

"I'd recommend remaining where you are, sir." Chives turned so His Highness's gaze could fall fully upon the harness, magic crackling in red and orange bolts across the front.

Prince Blueblood rolled his eyes; the dim morning light filtering down through the trees of the Everfree Forest washed in around His Highness, his over-sized self seeming to fill the throne room's exterior doorway. "More explosives, Chives? How unimaginative."

A strange sort of calm settled over Chives at those disdainful tones. So much in his life had been out of balance these past nine months, but now, now everything was going to be right again. "I learned my lesson from the first bomb, sir," he told his former employer.

That got a bark of laughter. "Forgive me if I'm unimpressed." His Highness's horn glowed, it's golden light spreading to surround him like a second skin. "Still, feel free to blow yourself up. I shall be safely within my shield as I was at Ms. Fluttershy's home." He almost strutted into the room. "You showed such promise earlier this week, Chives, wandering about town under my very nose and even breaking into my house sometime last night to steal my shadow cloak. But now it's time for me to crush you like the miserable insect you are."

Chives held up a hoof. "The bombs this time, sir, are hidden in and around Ponyville." He brushed his left hoof along the front of the harness. "My vest merely contains the triggers, triggers that will respond either to my touch or to the touch of your magic anywhere in my general vicinity. Understand, therefore, that I shall utilize the first of those triggers, Your Highness, to destroy Princess Sparkle's library tree should you take so much as one more step forward."

The effect this statement had on His Highness both gratified Chives and startled him. For Prince Blueblood froze in place a few paces from the doorway, his ears folding and his eyes darting in the direction of town. "You're bluffing," he said, his muscles tensing but his legs not moving.

"You may certainly take that chance if you'd like, sir." Chives kept his hoof pressed to the vest. "I will, however, remind you of my first device yesterday should you wish to consider how serious I might be." He wanted to start shaking, wanted to start screaming, wanted desperately for His Highness to— "Step forward," he heard a choked voice saying, the words echoing so strangely around the shadowed walls, Chives would never had know they were coming from his mouth if he hadn't felt his lips moving. "By all that's good and true in Equestria, prove me right and step forward!"

The shock that rattled across Prince Blueblood's face felt like a kick to Chives's gut, but His Highness's expression quickly tightened into anger. "You foul and loathsome little—" The prince's jaw worked, but other than that, he continued not to move. "I suppose that's what you've been up to in town all week, isn't it? Using that poor baker as cover while you traipsed about placing your explosives!"

It was all going horribly, horribly awry. Chives had planned for this eventuality, of course, and while he couldn't deny that seeing His Highness quivering with impotent rage set his blood fizzing like the chocolate soda he and Diane had shared two nights ago, he'd truly never thought it would play out like this. "How well you know me, sir," he said, and with his left hoof still in place, he dug his right hoof under his vest for one of the items he'd spent most of the early morning hours in search of, unearthing the stash of magical objects he'd watched Green Briar hide in this very room nine months ago. Finding the one he wanted, he held it up: a stone the size and shape of a grape.

Keeping his hoof steady by sheer force of will, he tossed the semi-spherical pebble at the prince; it clattered and rolled, wobbled across the cracked and weathered marble floor, and when it struck the wavering light of His Highness's shield, it burst with a tiny pop like the smallest of gray balloons. It didn't deflate, though, but flared out, sucked up the prince's magic, twisted and grew and became some sort of stone rope, its ends flailing to bind His Highness's front legs together while wrapping itself like chains around his midsection.

Whether it was the weight or the sudden shift in balance that forced Prince Blueblood to his knees, Chives didn't care. Simply seeing His Highness subject himself to this humiliation made Chives tremble where he stood. It couldn't be true! It couldn't!

His Highness snapped his head up, his eyes blazing. "If it's me you want, Chives, then you have me! Now deactivate that foul device, for you'll see no mercy whatsoever should any more ponies in that town come to harm due to your actions!"

"My actions?!" Chives lunged forward, his mane feeling like needles jabbing into his neck. "I've done nothing compared to you!"

"Nothing?!" Prince Blueblood flailed against the restraints. "Breaking out of prison! Planting explosives! Misleading ponies! Breaking a filly's heart!"

"Don't you dare!" Chives roared, rearing back to stomp his hoofs into that bloated and leering face—

But something struck him hard in the side, knocked him sprawling over His Highness; scrambling, he tried to stand, tried to see who had attacked him, but only dim light filled the throne room, his frantic gaze darting around to see nothing anywhere near him but the bound prince.

Somepony was grabbing him, though, rough hoofs rifling his pockets. One of Green Briar's small stone spheres floated out, then dropped, striking him, bursting into stony coils, wrapping him securely. "What—?" he cried out.

But a voice as tight as clenched teeth rose up from the emptiness. "Worse than breaking a heart, Prince Blueblood?" The air flickered, wavering like a tablecloth on a clothesline, and Chives stared to see Diane appear, shadows shimmering around her back, her eyes more wrathful than His Highness's could ever be. "He broke a Pinkie promise," she growled.

***

Spinning out of the roll after exactly three seconds just the way Dell had told her, Dash tucked her front legs to her chest and stretched her hind legs out, streamlining her profile like he'd said—

And slammed straight into the upper canopy of an elm tree, the branches whipping her hard, each leaf like a mouthful of tiny teeth. She cried out, her wings flailing, and while her speed more or less blasted her through that elm, the next one, an instant's panicked glance told her, was even bigger and thicker. Without a hope of maneuvering, she did what she could to curl into a ball and brace herself, her momentum plunging her in.

Eight trees, maybe nine—she kind of lost track somewhere in the middle—but she somehow managed not to run into a trunk, and the various tangles of twigs with all their smackings and slappings slowed her down enough so that when she finally slammed into the side of the hill, the crater she made wasn't nearly as deep as some she'd made in the past.

Still, she decided to lay there for a minute and take stock. Not her worst crash—no bones seemed to be broken, at least—but knowing what was coming next made her tense up like she'd snapped her every metacarpal.

"Pitiful," came that rumbling drawl of a voice, and opening her eyes, Dash saw Bosky Dell above her, his front hoofs in the pockets of his windbreaker, his wings flapping just enough to keep him airborne, his hat pulled down so the brim covered most of his face. "You're just wasting my time now."

"Hey!" Pushing herself up, she leaped toward him, the adrenaline crackling in her blood more than enough to let her ignore the complaints she imagined she could hear from her assorted body parts: First that explosion, and now this?! Hovering in front of him, she half-expected her heart to be clattering against her ribs like Pinkie playing the xylophone. "I did exactly what you told me to do! Exactly!"

"Uh-huh." Hoofs still in his pockets, he shrugged, his voice weirdly calm compared to all the shouting he'd been doing the past week. "I told you to crash, did I?"

"Yeah, you did!" She jabbed a hoof into his chest. "Three hundred feet, I said! But no! Two hundred, you said!"

"A good flyer coulda done it."

And that, Rainbow Dash decided, was enough of that. "Are you blind or just stupid?! Even at three hundred feet, there's maybe five ponies in all Equestria who coulda made that move! At two hundred? Not one! Not ever!"

His head tilted back, and with her ears still ringing and the rest of her still wobbly, Dash thought for a second that Dell's eyes had a glow to them. "So you're saying you wanna be coddled, huh? You don't wanna work for a living?"

"Work?!" She waved her hoofs. "See that sky up there, buddy?! I'm using my vacation time from working that sky so I can be here with you training! But if all you've got to show me is that you've lost your mind, then—!"

"Fine." The word came out as quietly as everything else he'd been saying, but it still had a weight that Dash could feel, a force that made her mane rustle like a thunderstorm was coming. "You can just go crawling back to Spitfire and your prince and the whole Clandestine Corps of 'em. 'Cause I'm done with you. I'm done with all of you." A little flex of his wings, and he shot into the mid-morning blue.

Dash wanted to race after him yelling. Everything that had happened yesterday was bad enough what with the big zero she and Beebee had drawn trying to track down Chives. But when they'd finally given up for the evening and swung by Fluttershy's to see what Spitfire and the team from the Corps had found, nopony there had even seen Spitfire! She hadn't shown up at Beebee's later like she'd promised, either, and she hadn't been here this morning to watch Dash's training like she'd been doing all week! Add to that the note Dash had found on Beebee's desk when she'd stopped by before meeting Bosky Dell—Pursuing possible lead. We'll still meet for lunch at Sugar Cube Corner—and the absolute last thing Dash needed was that grouch being such an absolute—!

Wait.

Watching the dark blue spot of his windbreaker getting smaller and smaller in the distance, Dash found herself remembering something Spitfire had said way back at the beginning of the week, something about Dell not knowing anything about the Clandestine Corps. But hadn't he just said—?

She narrowed her eyes, her suspicions too wispy even to be called a cloud. But she took off following him anyway.

He didn't seem to be in any hurry at least, so Dash stayed low, below the treetops, swooping and swerving, peering up whenever she found a gap in the canopy to make sure he was still heading in the same direction. Away from town, she realized quickly. Away from everything, actually: there wasn't anything but woods out this way.

Well, except for Ghastly Gorge.

But she shook that thought from her head. Nopony'd be stupid enough to go there. Other than Dash herself, of course, but that was just for very specialized training. Not for sightseeing or whatever.

Still, with the week she'd been having...

Sure enough, Dell started descending about ten minutes later, and when Dash shot forward, weaving between the trunks to reach the shadow of the last line of trees, she was just in time to see him wing down into the rocky gash of the gorge itself. Dash knew the Quarray Eels didn't live down at this end—this was closer to where Tank had saved her from the rock slide way back when—but still, watching the older pegasus flap into one of the many caves along the jagged walls gave her a chill. What in the wide, wide world of Equestria was he doing out here?

Not happy with any of the possible answers, Dash kept her eyes on the cave. Counting silently to sixty—her least favorite of Beebee's tips when following somepony—she took a breath, whisked herself over the edge, across the brittlely dry air, and landed just inside the opening.

All she could smell was dusty rocks, so she didn't sniff too deeply: wouldn't want to start sneezing right here and now. Waiting another minute till her eyes got used to the darkness, she crept forward along the twisty little path, hardly more than a crack, really, leading deeper into the cliff face. Her perked ears heard nothing, but her wings, spread so the very tips of her feathers just brushed the walls, felt stirrings in the air, probably from the passage opening into an actual cave, she guessed. She could still see faintly, too, a gray light making shadows stand out ahead, and inching around a corner, she found herself peering into what had to be some sort of a workshop.

A lantern full of lightning bugs hung from the ceiling, and below it on various rocky shelves and outcroppings sat bottles and jars, coils of string and rope and wire, assorted magical gewgaws glowing faintly or sparking fitfully, and—

Dash's heart flopped over sideways. Spitfire lay on the floor with a gag in her mouth, her eyes wide and staring at Dash, something the size and shape of a hoofball strapped to her chest.

Even in the dim light, she could see it was a bomb. Just exactly like the one she'd found in Fluttershy's kitchen cupboard, too.

Spitfire's eyes went even wider, and pain blossomed hard against the back of Dash's head; she tried to roll with it, but the stones seemed to dance under her hoofs, pitching her forward into the cave. Two sounds: a muffled groan from one direction and an all-too-familiar popping of lips from the other. The air swirled around her, scooped her up, spun her in its embrace, and slapped her down onto her back against the stone, a tightness around her middle and a weight on her chest. Blinking to clear the sparkly things from the corners of her vision, she froze to see another bomb, black and bulky, sitting on top of her. A thin glowing thread stretched from the trigger thing off to Dash's left, and turning her head showed her Spitfire beside her with her eyes now clenched, the thread attached to the trigger on her bomb.

"Well, now," came a voice from her right, and swiveling her head, she saw Bosky Dell standing there, his face split by the biggest grin Dash had ever seen on a pony. He didn't have his hat on for the first time since Dash had met him, but something was still sitting on his head: something that looked like a tiny harness cinched around behind his ears. Jutting up from the strap of the harness that crossed his forehead stood what looked like a stubby little unicorn horn, and Dash had to stare at the white fire that crackled up and down the thing. "Don't the two of you just make the prettiest little picture?" he asked.

Act IV: The Pie Who Loved Me

In the flickering light of the lantern, Dash blinked. Maybe it was just all the exploding and crashing she'd been through in the last twenty-four hours, but she couldn't help thinking that nothing was making a whole lot of sense right at the moment.

The way she was lying flat on her back in a cave with her hoofs tied together underneath her and a bomb strapped to her chest for one, and the way that her bomb was connected by some sort of glowing string to another bomb strapped to the chest of Spitfire, bound and gagged and stretched out to Dash's left on the dusty rock.

Add to that Bosky Dell, Spitfire's retired coach, standing there looking at them with a big grin on his face and some sort of phony little unicorn horn attached to the headband he'd been wearing under his hat, and Dash felt sure things weren't going to start making sense any time soon. Especially since Dell's horn was flaring with white light so sharp and bright, it reminded Dash of flying through the wrong end of a thunderstorm. "Uhh, Dell?" She cleared her throat. "What're you—?"

"Now, now." The flash of his horn tore the air, and a little white bundle came flying across the cave to squeeze all dry and cottony into Dash's mouth. "Foals shouldn't speak till they get spoken to, I've always thought." A strip of cloth whooshed over next and wrapped itself around her snout a couple times, Dash struggling not to struggle; the cloth wasn't covering her nostrils, she quickly discovered, so she could still breathe, and too much squirming with a bomb attached to her seemed like a really bad idea. "Not surprising, though," Dell was going on. "You Clandestine Corps types don't seem to have even the most basic manners."

All the 'what's and 'who's and 'why's she wanted to ask were zipping through her brain like the lightning bugs in the lantern, but she couldn't do anything except glare at him. His grin widened, his eyes sliding upward toward his headband. "Amazing thing, isn't it?" he asked. "Greatest invention of the past thousand years. Maybe longer'n that, even." His grin deflated. "I mean, it woulda been if it hadn'ta been for you." Sparks crackled from his horn and eyes, hair prickling along Dash's neck. "If you and your damn princesses and your damn Corps hadn'ta started fooling around with Discord, then Paisley wouldn'ta gone crazy! Did you ever think of that?! Did you?!"

Trying to look sympathetic, Dash gave as much of a shrug as she figured she could; her bomb, she'd seen in the couple quick glances she'd been able to give it so far, had a trigger jutting out of it just like the one at Fluttershy's yesterday, and the glowing string ran from her trigger to Spitfire's. So one twitch too far, and both bombs would go off.

"No, of course you didn't think! You just saw Discord's power, and like foals, you had to have it!" Dell's stormy face was heading toward a category five. "But Paisley knew! She'd seen same as the rest of us what Discord did to ponies, and she was smarter'n your princesses, smart enough to design something that'd drain that monster's power every time he used it anywhere nearby!" He waved a hoof at his horn hat. "But then she started changing, talking about how she didn't want to waste the power, didn't want it just washing away into the air, wanted to harness it! And she..."

Those last words had been barely loud enough to hear: the pin-drop silence in the eye of the storm, Dash recognized. "Discord got to her," Dell said, vibrating where he stood. "Like he got to you. That's his trick, see, making ev'rypony think he can be useful when he can't and he isn't and he won't ever be. He got into her thoughts, made Paisley change the spell, change the helmet, change everything! He made her want to absorb his power instead of just dispersing it, and I couldn't— It wasn't— I had to...to stop her..."

He was staring at the cave wall now, his head nodding, white fire leaking from the edges of his eyes like lava from a volcano in a Daring Do movie. "I had to take the helmet from her before Discord infected her mind completely, and that's when your Clandestine Corps buddies came for her." He gave a snort. "Putting her in the Treatment Facility! But she'll never be right again—Equestria will never be right again—till I get that monster mad enough to really cut loose. Then I can suck all his power into myself and use it to puff him away into water vapor. It's the only way." His head swung back toward Dash as slowly as a rusty weather vane, nothing on his face but sheer, solid craziness. "The only way."

The air shimmered around him, and his wings burst into flame. "I'll come back for you when I'm done." He rose from the stone floor, a smile twitching across his snout like a moth across a candle. "Those harnesses'll trigger if you try slipping out of 'em, so just lie here nice and quiet and try to stay in one piece." He flared so brightly, Dash had to squint, and when she could open her eyes all the way again, he was gone.

OK, this was bad. This was really bad.

Without another thought, Dash scooted closer to Spitfire, the cord between their two bombs going slack, and nudged the Wonderbolt with an elbow. Spitfire's head flopped over, and Dash had to wince at her folded ears, her wavering eyes, the sour stink of despair in her scent. And yes, Dash could imagine that it might be a little less than awesome to discover that your former mentor was blowing ponies up and trying to kill Discord because of some overpowered magical hat. But the world pretty much didn't have time for them to worry about that.

Fixing her gaze on Spitfire's, Dash gave a wink, flexed her wings, and used them to push herself up, lifting her whole body off the stone, an exercise she'd had to do way too many times lately with Spitfire standing over her and counting. Keeping a careful watch on the string, Dash slowly rotated a quarter turn, balancing on her wingtips till her head and shoulders slid over Spitfire's face.

Of course, her muscles kept trying to remind her about everything that had happened to them yesterday and earlier today, but that just made Dash laugh—or it would've if she hadn't had a wad of cotton stuffed into her mouth. She'd been crashing into stuff her whole life, after all, and one thing she knew was the difference between real injuries and plain ol' whiny body parts. Ignoring it all, she inched herself across Spitfire, feeling her way with her pinions and staying as level as she could while still keeping a hoofspan of air between her back and her friend's face.

Underneath her, she could hear the rush of breath through Spitfire's nostrils get faster and faster, probably because the Wonderbolt had no way of knowing what in the wide, wide world of Equestria Dash was trying to do. Still, if everything went well, Dash wouldn't have to leave her in the dark much longer.

Her wings finally slid down the other side of Spitfire's head, cold stone again pressing against her straining feathers. Another inch, another, one more, and she couldn't stop a grunt of satisfaction as she finally felt her bound front hoofs touch Spitfire's gag. Steadying herself with her rear hoofs, she began fumbling at the cloth, prying at its edges, hoping Dell had just used his stolen magic to wrap the thing around Spitfire's muzzle the same way he'd wrapped it around Dash's...

A sudden muffled gasp, and Spitfire began moving her head up and down against Dash's hoofs. This helped the process along, and in half a minute, the cloth was wrinkling and coming loose. Dash pushed the gag down around Spitfire's chin, and with a choking sort of a pop, a large, warm, wet glob spattered the small of Dash's back. "Yes!" she heard Spitfire cough, then: "Hold still, Dash, and I'll—"

The cloth binding Dash's front legs started jerking, Dash wincing a little each time Spitfire's teeth chomped her hide instead, but in another thirty seconds, a rip told Dash she was free; her eyes still on the joined triggers sticking from the tops of their bombs, Dash brought her front hoofs around, tore off her own gag, spat out the wad of cloth, and said, "Gimme a minute, and I'll have your hoofs free!" She scooted around Spitfire's head this time instead of across it and settled her grumbling body to the stone so she could—

"Thanks, Dash, but, I mean, why bother?" And of all the depressed ponies Dash had sat with and listened to—Fluttershy despairing of ever learning to fly; Pinkie when her mane and tail would lose their fluff; Rarity collapsed on her coach and certain she would never have another idea again—Dash had never heard anything as dark-sounding as those muttered words.

It took all her self-control not to leap to her hoofs and start yelling. Freezing in place beside the Wonderbolt, Dash forced herself to say quietly, "What?"

"You heard what Dell said." Spitfire's voice sounded so gray, Dash had to fight again not to grab her and shake her. "These harnesses'll explode if we try to get out of 'em, and those triggers look like they'll fall right off if we even try to get up! Flying upside-down in unison won't work—that passage we came through isn't anywhere near wide enough—and I just don't...I can't...there isn't..." She trailed off with a sigh.

Lying there with Spitfire again on her left, Dash took a few breaths, turned her head, and said as quietly as she had before, "Spitfire? Look at me."

Spitfire's ears twitched, but she flopped her head over once more so Dash could meet her tired gaze straight on. "We're going to get out of this," she told the Wonderbolt, pronouncing each word as carefully as she could: she'd watched Beebee do this when he was trying to control his temper. "I don't know how yet, but as Celestia is my witness, we will. Because if we don't, then Dell wins. And that is not going to happen." She touched Spitfire's shoulder. "Now, on three, we both lift up on wingtips. Got it?"

For half a second, Spitfire just stared at her, then a little smile curled over her snout. "On three," she said.

The tiniest sliver of hope crackled through Dash's middle; she nodded, counted it off, rose up nice and even with Spitfire, reached under her, and unwound the cloth binding Spitfire's front hoofs. "And down," Dash said, and they settled back to the floor of the cave.

"Thanks." Spitfire was rubbing her hoofs together. "He's had me tied up in here since yesterday." She blew on her hoofs with a wince. "Circulation coming back's the worst. OK, not as bad as the circulation never coming back, but—"

"Circulation." An idea started swarming in Dash's head, a stupid, crazy, absolutely impossible idea. Or, she quickly corrected herself, it would've been stupid, crazy and absolutely impossible if she and Spitfire had been any other two ponies in the world. "You can hit twenty wingpower, right?"

Spitfire did some blinking. "Sure. I've even made twenty-five a couple times."

"Good." Dash swept her gaze around the cave, all her senses alive, the cloud-wrangling parts of her brain taking the idea and spinning it. "'Cause twenty's the minimum we'll both need. Oh, and we'll have maybe three seconds to go from zero to as fast as we can. That won't be a problem, will it?"

When Spitfire didn't answer, Dash lolled her head over to find the older pegasus staring at her. "Three seconds?"

"Yeah." Dash stretched a hoof up to the bomb's trigger and found she could just reach it. "These are the same bombs Dell planted at Fluttershy's, and that one took, like, three-and-a-half seconds to blow after the trigger dropped off. So our cyclone hasta be going full-tilt within three seconds."

"Uhh, Dash?" She felt a touch at her shoulder, Spitfire this time looking a little white around the eyes. "I need you to explain what you're thinking from the beginning, OK?"

With an effort, Dash started lining up the strands of her plan like clouds along a pressure trough. "It'll be just like raising water up to Cloudsdale, see? Only instead of water, we'll be funneling the blast energy of both these bombs going off. I figure in a confined space this size and shape and channeling fire instead of water, we'll only need about five or six per cent of the usual force."

The touch on her shoulder got a little heavier. "OK, but that's not the beginning of the plan, Dash."

This time, it was Dash's turn to blink. "It's not?"

"The bombs, Dash."

Dash looked back and forth between Spitfire and the bomb. "Well, they explode, see, and we—"

"Gonna stop you right there." Spitfire was doing the whole 'quiet and careful pronunciation' thing, Dash suddenly realized. "'Cause I'm pretty sure neither one of us would survive that."

And as much as Dash wanted to shout, Well, duh!, she swallowed it down, took a breath, and said, "You're right. Step-by-step, then, from the beginning."

Spitfire nodded. "I'm all ears."

"With our left front hoofs, we grab these outer triggers." Dash demonstrated by stretching up to not-quite-touch the little piece of ceramic sticking out from her bomb. "That way, we can hold 'em in place when we rise up and hover chest-to-chest. OK?"

"OK."

"With our right front hoofs, we reach around to the buckles on the back of these harnesses. I count to three, we flip the buckles open, drop the bombs, and take off in a counter-clockwise rotation pattern as close to the walls as we can. If we can raise a forty, forty-five wingpower cyclone by the time the bombs explode, that should be enough to direct the blast straight up, and, well, Beebee told me just the one bomb woulda leveled Fluttershy's house if him and Discord hadn't been there. Two will blow this whole ridge to gravel, and we slip into the wake like riding a rope tornado back into the cumulus, y'know?" Dash flashed a grin, the plan not sounding quite so crazy when she spelled it out step-by-step.

The expression on Spitfire's face was more a complete lack of expression than anything else. "That's crazy."

"No. It's not." Dash reached over and hooked Spitfire's fetlock with her own. "If we're as good as we say we are, then we can do this. And I'm telling you right now: we are as good as we say we are."

The silence lasted less than a second. "So," Spitfire said, "left hoofs on the trigger mechanism, you said?"

***

His foalhood, Chives had always thought, had been an absolute idyll. His parents, after all, had worked as gardeners at the Royal Palace in Canterlot, and growing up in and around that marvelous place had allowed him opportunities most youngsters simply didn't have. A foalhood free of want and trial it had been before he'd met the young Prince Blueblood, an event that had led him by a strange and circuitous route to his current position: bound by magical stone rope and lying atop the equally bound prince.

Through it all, however, even in the unraveling of his plan to rid himself once and for all of His Highness by means of the mad unicorn Green Briar last autumn, while Chives had known anger at his failures and regret at being caught, he was certain he had never known true fear.

Until now.

In fact, with Diane's pink porcelain mask of a face glaring down at him and the air behind her shimmering in a way that he recognized from the night they'd secretly watched His Highness don his shadow cloak, Chives knew more sharp and stabbing emotions than he'd thought himself capable of feeling. "Diane!" he blurted. "I didn't—! I wasn't—! You've got to know I never would have—!"

"Stop talking." She jabbed a hoof hard against his snout, and Chives found himself sliding slowly sideways off His Highness, slipping toward the cracked stones of the floor. "'Cause it looks like neither one of us knows anything."

"Be cautious, Ms. Pie, please!" Prince Blueblood's shout echoed through the ancient palace's throne room. "His vest will trigger the explosives he's planted back in Ponyville!"

Hoofs caught Chives under his front legs. "Yeah, yeah," he heard her grouse. She lowered him gently, set him down on his side, and when she withdrew her embrace, Chives was certain his heart shattered in his chest.

"It's not true!" he groaned, not wanting to raise his face from the ground. "I had nothing to do with the bomb at Ms. Fluttershy's house, and I've set no explosives anywhere in town, either!"

Her snort ruffled his mane. "I was right here listening the whole time, Chives," Diane said, and the way she emphasized his name made the jagged shards of his heart stab into him, longing to hear her call him Cousin Burl...

Clenching his eyes, he forced himself to go on. "I was lying to him, Diane! He's the only pony I've ever lied to, the only pony who deserves being lied to!"

His Highness's gasp didn't make Chives feel better at all, and Diane's voice managed to get even colder. "Nopony deserves to be lied to."

His anger flared, but paler than usual, merely a ghost of the force that had driven him for so many years. "You don't know him!" He winced at how much like a petulant foal he sounded. "You don't know what he's like!"

"That's the problem." Diane sounded paler now, too, and Chives glanced up, some of the beautiful softness back in her face. "I thought I knew him, so I went to get you 'cause I didn't want that Prince Blueblood taking Dashie away. But when you got here and I really started looking at Bluey, it was like I'd gotten it all backwards! Bluey wasn't taking Dashie away! Dashie was bringing him here instead! And even better?" Her mane breathed and stretched for the first time since she'd appeared. "He was coming here 'cause he wanted to come! He was trying real hard to be a good pony even if he was still a little spiky and stickery, and—" She stomped a front hoof. "He's good for Dashie! He is!"

Something inside Chives popped, a balloon that had been wilting all week and was so tiny by this time, the foul odor of the gas inside finally dissipating scarcely made his nose twitch. "He is," he forced through gritted teeth. "And she's good for him. Better than I ever was..."

A sound stroked Chives's ears, a sound so peculiar, he craned his head around to make sure it truly was what it seemed to be: a warm and genuine chuckle from His Highness. "Don't sell yourself short, Chives." Even lying on his side, his front legs and upper body wrapped in stone chains, Prince Blueblood looked imposing. But the smile and the shimmer in his eyes were like nothing Chives had ever seen from his former employer. "When you betrayed me to Green Briar, it absolutely destroyed me. Fortunately, Dash appeared to help me pick up the pieces and show me how ghastly most of those pieces were, but—"

Silence filled the room, His Highness's chest rising and falling with several breaths. "I needed to be destroyed, Chives, needed the only pony I thought of as a friend to kick me square in the face before I could see it. So...thank you."

"Yay, Bluey!" Diane threw herself around His Highness's neck. "Now we can all live happily ever after!" She spun, her mane huge and snarled and bouncy, her grin bigger than Chives thought should have been physically possible. "And yay, Chives! Now you can be Cousin Burl again!" She spread her front legs wide, and as much as Chives wanted nothing more from life than to feel her embrace—

"Stop!" he cried, trying to cringe away from her leaping toward him. "The explosives!"

She froze in mid-air, her mane deflating as her eyes expanded. "Explosives?" Her hoofs came down, touched the floor beside him, and some of the hardness came back into her face. "You said there weren't any, Chives."

His heart hammering, Chives swallowed. "I said there were no explosives in town. But I—" He had to look away from her. "I fully expected His Highness's willful self-absorption to reassert itself once the two of us were alone together in this isolated place. I had planned on him calling my bluff and attacking me despite the possibility that in so doing he would be endangering the lives of everypony in Ponyville. This would have demonstrated that he had no real concern for them and would—" He wished his hoofs were free so he could've buried his face in them. "Would have proven me right once and for all."

More silence, then His Highness asked softly, "Where are the explosives, Chives?"

"Here." Eyes closed, he tapped his chin against the chest strap of his harness. "If you'd reacted the way I'd expected you to and used your magic against me, you would've detonated the spellignite I have lining my vest. When you chose to act reasonably, however—"

"Spellignite?!" Prince Blueblood sounded very much as he did in Chives's nightmares. "There's nothing more magically unstable in the world! Have you lost your tiny pony mind?!"

Chives couldn't help regressing a bit himself, turning the same sort of cold look on High Highness that he'd used during his years in the prince's service. "That I had lost my mind, sir, I believe was rather firmly established at my trial. That I am in the process of regaining it, I hope to prove by—"

"Yes. Right. Sorry." His Highness swiveled his head to Diane. "Ms. Pie, I'll ask you please to run back to Ponyville and fetch Princess Sparkle. I could attempt to defuse Chives's vest with my magic, but that would be a feat as mindbogglingly stupid as trying to extinguish a fire by smothering it with kindling. I feel certain, however, that her Highness's unparalleled knowledge of spellcraft will—"

"Help!" an odd, squeaky voice screamed from somewhere nearby. "Zeta! I can't—! I don't—! There isn't—!" A brown streak whooshed through one of the high windows along the throne room's battered wall and pulled into a hover above His Highness's head: Discord, Chives saw it was, but smaller than a pony's foreleg, his wings buzzing like a hummingbird's. His eyes moved, looking from His Highness to Chives to Diane and back again. "I'm guessing this is a bad time," he said. "But as my very existence seems to be at stake, I hope you won't mind me taking advantage of your formidable bulk." Another whoosh, and the creature somehow zipped in between His Highness and the stone ropes wrapped around his midsection.

"What the—?!" Prince Blueblood began, but another voice, distant but carrying, cut him off:

"Discord!" This was a pony's voice, yes, but something about it seemed very wrong to Chives's ears. "I can smell the stink of you around here somewhere! So let's say you come on outta them trees before I hafta start blasting, huh? I'll spot you the second you use your magic, but if you come out now, I promise I'll dissolve you quick! Quicker'n you were when you infected my darling Paisley and all the other ponies whose lives you turned upside-down, at least!"

His Highness's eyes had gone wide at the first shouted word from outside. "Is that— Bosky Dell?" he asked.

Discord's head popped up from the bindings. "I hope you'll forgive me, Double-O-Zeta, but I neglected to get the name of the insane pony with the impossible magical device who sucked me so dry that I'm almost literally a shadow of my former self." He ducked back inside.

"Discord!" the voice shouted again, anger now twisting through it. "I'm gonna start counting, and then these woods're gonna start burning!"

"Umm..." Diane's mane floated about halfway between tangled and flat. "Should I still go get Twilight?"

"No time." His Highness's horn began to glow. "I'll ask you to evacuate yourself from the area, however, in case—"

"What??" She waved her hoofs. "Hello? Only pony not tied up over here!"

"Very well." Prince Blueblood gestured with his head toward the far wall of the throne room. "Could you perhaps move Chives in that general direction? I shall be exceedingly careful with the magic I'm about to do, but the further I am from all that spellignite—"

"Spellignite?!" Discord popped up again. "And you're going to do magic?! Thank you, but I'd prefer not having to put myself back together with paste and baling wire afterwards." He buzzed back into the air and held up his mismatched front legs. "Just tell me what you need done, Zeta, and I'll conjure up something possibly appropriate."

"No." The prince gestured with his head in the other direction. "If he senses you, we all become targets." He nodded to Diane. "Thank you, Ms. Pie. If you can drag Chives away, we may survive this yet."

"OK!" Diane whirled, Chives overjoyed to feel her front legs slide under his and ashamed that he was making a difficult situation even worse. "If we do survive, then it's donuts for ev'rypony!" Diane began tugging him across the floor. "And if we don't survive, well, then it's donuts for ev'rypony except us, I guess!"

Doing his best to sit up straight so his vest would have as little contact with the rough stones as possible, Chives tipped his head back, determined to meet those beautiful blue eyes. "Diane, I...I'm so very sorry for all this. I shouldn't've allowed myself to—"

"Oh, hush, now." Still hauling him, she leaned forward, and when she touched her lips to his, Chives might almost have thought he was floating except for the bump-bump-bump of his hindquarters along the ground. Then she was pulling away. "We'll talk over donuts." She swished her upper lip back and forth. "But if you're gonna keep being Cousin Burl, you're really gonna hafta grow a moustache."

***

Propping Chives against the wall, Pinkie turned to wave at Prince Blueblood and Discord. "OK! Go ahead and start!"

But Bluey already was going ahead, she could see, light wavering out from his horn into the air of the shadowy old throne room like melted marshmallows swirling into hot chocolate. "Actually, Ms. Pie—" he began.

She cut him off with a giggle. "Oh, c'mon, Bluey! We're like family now! You don't gotta keep calling me Ms. Pie!"

He smiled from the big but tidy heap of himself on the floor—and it was a real, honest-to-eggplant smile, too, now that she was letting herself look at him. "Very well," he said. "Do you prefer Pinkie or Diane?"

Hearing that name from his mouth, Pinkie almost collapsed, almost fell right onto the floor beside Chives from the combined weight of her hair going flat and the back-and-forth awfulness and wonderfulness that had gotten attached to her not-so-secret-anymore name this past week. Between Chives and Cousin Burl, between the kissing and the missing, between the anger and the love, she couldn't even begin to sort through her changed feelings right now. So—

"Call me Pinkie," she managed to tell the prince.

With a nod like he hadn't heard any of the flapping and twisting that had just gone on in her brain—and to be honest, Pinkie wasn't sure she'd heard all of it—he smiled some more. "I'll ask, then, since you've so valiantly volunteered to stay and assist, that you pull that shadow cloak back around yourself, step outside, and see what Bosky Dell is up to. By no means draw his attention if you can help it, but merely find him and report back. I will in the meantime see about dissolving these foul chains in a way that will hopefully not blow us all to the moon in the process."

The mini-Discord, clearing his throat, tapped his lion claws and eagle talons together. "And as lovely as I'm certain the moon is this time of year—" He whooshed away from Bluey, and Pinkie had to giggle when he wrapped himself like a scarf around her neck. "I believe I shall valiantly volunteer as well to accompany Pinkie on her reconnaissance mission." He looked back at Bluey, and with a sound like a whole bucket of popcorn going off, hundreds of tiny eyeballs cracked open all up and down his body. "Nothing shall escape my glance!"

"Be careful," Bluey said, his face squinty as the glow from his horn started spreading over him like butter over pancakes—licking her lips, Pinkie wished she'd had time for breakfast earlier. "Remember," Bluey was going on, "you're the one Dell's hunting."

"Don't remind me." Discord's little huff of breath tickled Pinkie's snout. "How do you ponies always manage to arrange events so that cowardice isn't an option?!" Pinkie felt him squirm from her neck till he was lying along her back under the invisible cloak thing. "Shall we, Pinkie?"

"We shall!" She looked down at Chives, his face all miserable and forlorn without its moustache, and bent to give him another quick kiss. "And we'll make it all better 'cause that's what friends do for each other!" A shrug of her shoulders got the cloak to flop over her head, and as quietly as she could, she galloped from the throne room out into the tumble-down courtyard of the scary old castle.

"You listening, Discord?!" that crazy-mad voice shouted, and skidding to a halt in the courtyard's ruined gateway, Pinkie looked up to see a pony hovering above the Everfree's treetops. He had wings and a horn, but she could tell he was pretty much the exact opposite of everything a princess was supposed to be, white fire leaking out of him and bleaching the sky to the color of bone. "You want chaos?! Well, how 'bout I use your power to turn this place into the Everfree Desert, huh?! Think that'll get your attention?!" He cocked his front legs back, a big, jagged grin on his face—

And something way off on the other side of town exploded. Pinkie snapped her head over, a column of smoke and regular fire-colored fire spinning up from maybe somewhere around Ghastly Gorge. Which was weird enough, but the way her knees and tail started jerking made Pinkie's breath catch.

"No..." The scary glowing stallion was staring at the fire tornado or whatever it was. "Spits!" he more groaned than said. "I told you and Dash not to move!"

Parts of Pinkie's always-spinning brain teetered, crashing into each other and telling her what her twitches meant. This was the guy who'd put the bomb at Fluttershy's! And the way he was talking, he must've put one at Dashie's house, too!

She couldn't stop a gasp—maybe Dashie was blowing up right now!—and the stallion whirled, his glare washing hot as a gust of steam over her. "Discord?! That you?!"

For two reasons, Pinkie didn't answer: first because she wasn't Discord, so it wouldn't've been polite; and second because, well, staring past the guy-who-definitely-wasn't-a-princess, she was busy watching that column of fire thing start bending, rising all of a piece into the sky and pointing itself right toward her. Except— It wasn't doing this itself, she could see now. A trail of cloud spun around the bottom of the column like it was trying to keep the fire together instead of letting it whoosh out all over the sky. And at the top of column, whirling around like it was aiming the fire—

A perfect flashing rainbow.

Sucking in an excited breath, Pinkie was about to shout Rainbow Dash's name, but something started squirming along her back, Discord flipping out onto the mossy stones of the courtyard beside her. "All right, all right!" he shouted, his voice not as squeaky as it had been earlier, and she thought he was maybe a little bit bigger, too. "This whole thing has gone way beyond tedious at this point!"

The sheer anger that seeped into the fiery stallion's face made Pinkie take a step back even though his glare was firmly locked on Discord. "You!" the stallion shrieked. "That's two more ponies you've destroyed, monster!"

Discord took several stiff-legged hops away from Pinkie and waved his lion paw. "Yes, yes, yes. After all, I'm the fellow who's been going about planting bombs, aren't I?"

"You are!" The stallion reared back, the air around him boiling even whiter than before. "I mean, it was you making me do it! So no more talk! I'm gonna finish you up so much, there's not gonna be enough left to turn into a statuette!"

"Don't think so, Dell!" Dashie's wonderful scratchy voice rang out, and the stallion spun just in time for the whole column of smoke and fire to smash right into him.

"Yes!" Discord crowed the word this time. "Thatta girl, Rainbow Dash!"

Pinkie would've been cheering, too, but she was a little busy leaping over, grabbing Discord in her mouth, and sprinting for the entryway back into the old throne room, heat even hotter than the big oven at Sugar Cube Corner licking at the tail. Spinning around the corner, she skidded over to where Bluey was still lying on his side, his magic sort of bubbling at a low boil over the stone chains holding him. With a stomp, she shook off the shadow cloak's hood, spat Discord out, and yelled, "Dashie just dumped a whole lotta fire over that guy Dell out there, but since he's got a unicorn horn and all kindsa magic, I'm pretty sure it's only gonna make him mad!"

Bluey's head came up, his eye opening really, really wide. "Dash?" he whispered. His jaw tightened, the glow of his horn flared, and with a sound like a whole bag of flour dumping onto the floor, the chains dissolved to cookie crumbs around him. Pinkie's stomach grumbled at the thought, but Bluey was already leaping to his hoofs, everything about him so heroic, Pinkie almost forgot her skipped breakfast. "Discord! Get that vest off Chives!"

"Mais oui, mon capitan!" Discord saluted, raised his paws and claws, lightning streaming from them—and the lightning froze all at once, looking like long, coconut-covered noodles. "Now, of course, since I can't really be helpful, I'll only be able to take the vest off him if I put it onto somepony else." He crooked one claw at Bluey. "And don't ask me to squeeze it over Bosky Dell's pointed head, either; believe me, I would've done that already if I—"

"Me, then!" Bluey stomped a hoof, and Pinkie was sure everything in the room jumped. "Hurry!"

Discord snapped his lion paw, and Chives was suddenly standing and blinking by the wall across the room where Pinkie had settled him, his rock ropes and his vest gone. The vest, though, reappeared right away around Prince Blueblood. "Now!" Bluey snorted through his nostrils. "Chives! Pinkie! You're to find shelter somewhere deeper in these ruins and stay out of harm's way, is that understood?! Discord! You're with me!"

"I'm what?!" Discord was definitely bigger now; Pinkie thought maybe he would've been able to look her directly in the eye if he'd been standing on the ground instead of flailing in the air like a whole swarm of moths around a whole swarm of lanterns. "See here, Zeta! Just because I'm in this Corps of yours doesn't mean I'm actually expected to—!"

Rearing back on his hind legs, Bluey snatched Discord with his teeth and charged out into the courtyard.

"Diane!" Chives called, galloping to her side. "Is that truly the bomber outside?! I could almost make out what he was shouting, but— What's going on?!"

"Bad stuff." Pinkie could feel her mane draping all flat and serious along her shoulders even though her whole body was humming with more energy than maybe she'd ever felt before. "Come on!" And she took off after Prince Blueblood.

She didn't have far to go, actually. Rounding the corner with Chives right behind her, she had to screech to a halt just outside the throne room in this long walkway place: it wasn't really a hall 'cause it only had a bunch of crooked pillars instead of a wall between it and the courtyard, and it wasn't part of the courtyard either 'cause it had a crumbling little roof covering it instead of being open to the sky. Bluey had stopped there and was pretty much blocking the way, his squinty, frowny face aimed upward, Discord hanging from his jaws and looking more like a wet cat than anything else.

Lightning and rainbows and clouds and fire swooped and smashed all over the place above the trees of the forest just past the courtyard, wind gusting everywhere, but it was happening so fast, Pinkie could only get glimpses here and there of Dashie and her Wonderbolt friend as well as Dell, the stallion guy who was causing all the trouble. Still, it was pretty easy to see that they were all fighting.

"Blast!" Prince Blueblood shouted, and he was so much the mean and awful pony prince right then, Pinkie couldn't even think of him as Bluey. "Discord! Get me up there at once!"

"Ha!" Released from Prince Blueblood's teeth by the shout, Discord had sprouted a little parachute from between his wings and was drifting toward the ground. "Some of us are still recovering from a certain insane wanna-be alicorn's nearly deadly assault, I'll have you know, and we have no intention of getting ourselves mixed up any further in all this!" Landing, he folded his arms, and the parachute floated down to cover him completely.

Prince Blueblood's teeth were gritting so hard, Pinkie thought she could hear them grinding even over the thunder crashing above them. "You filthy, craven, little—!"

"Hey!" Again, several parts of Pinkie's brain mooshed together, and she remembered how she'd gotten out to the old castle in the first place. "I can get us up there! C'mon!"

***

Wanting to bellow and stomp, Blueblood instead forced himself into positive action. Grabbing Discord again, he wheeled away from the fight he couldn't yet engage in and hoped that Ms. Pie—Pinkie, some small whisper told him: she asked you to call her Pinkie—hoped that Pinkie for once in her mad existence might actually have something useful to offer.

He simply refused to think about Dash and Spitfire barely holding their own against whatever force had possessed Bosky Dell; he refused to think about the vest full of spellignite wrapped tight around his chest, the sour sandpaper stroke of the magical explosive something he'd experienced before, of course, but so much of it concentrated in such a small space burned his horn like salt in an open wound; he refused to think about Chives, his former valet running after Pinkie Pie and stirring an entirely useless combination of fear and anger through the still-mending parts of him; he refused to think about—

Then stop thinking about it! he yelled at himself and raced down the decaying colonnade after Chives and Pinkie Pie, a hissing Discord hanging from his teeth, the shadow cloak around Pinkie's shoulders flapping to make various parts of her disappear and reappear as they ran. Leaping over fallen stones and skittering around a corner into a smaller side courtyard, he stopped short to see a machine the likes of which he had never before so much as imagined: pipes striped and curled like over-sized candy canes, a seat perched above some pedal-powered gearwork, a rotor blade sticking up from the top.

"Pinkie Pie!" Discord slipped from his grip somehow and swooped grinning around the mechanism. "This is the niftiest gyrocopter I have ever seen!"

"Thanks!" Pinkie bounced over to it, her eyes curling into crescents, and began unfolding more candy cane machinery somehow at the front and back of the copter. "The hardest part's getting the flavors to balance."

Discord nodded. "I can see that. The lemon and peppermint must be diabolically difficult to—"

"Blood and thunder!" Blueblood roared, unable to hold back. "Is it possible to save the discussion of culinary aeronautics for some other time?!"

Chives, Pinkie, and Discord were staring at him, and he glared in return, barely able to squeeze out the word, "Please?" through his clenched teeth.

Nodding, Pinkie turned back to the copter, and Blueblood saw that it now had two more sets of pedals, one fore and the other aft of the rotor shaft. "I'll pedal in the middle so I can steer," Pinkie was saying. "Bluey, you should be in back since you're heavier, and Chives can—"

"No." A plan burst into Blueblood's head with a force that told him his cutie mark was at work. "I'll be in the bow with Discord. I know that will mean more difficulty taking off and steering, but I must be able to get as close to Dell as possible." Another explosion from the larger courtyard folded his ears and made him leap aboard. "We've no time to waste!"

Pinkie and Chives followed quickly, he was glad to see, but when he turned to grab Discord, Blueblood was more than a little surprised to find the creature already draped across his shoulders like a strange brown feather boa. "I will never," Discord declared, "turn down a ride on a gyrocopter!"

Not allowing himself to feel relief—his plan relied much more on Discord than he would have liked, and so many other things could still go horribly wrong—Blueblood braced his hoofs on all four pedals and looked back to see Pinkie fumbling with the shadow cloak. "Watch this!" she called with a grin, slinging the cloak off her shoulders and around the back of her chair.

Ready to start shouting again, Blueblood instead found himself holding his breath, the gyrocopter shimmering in a way he recognized from the times he'd worn the cloak. "It...it makes the whole machine invisible?" he asked, unwilling to believe what he was—or in this case, what he wasn't—seeing.

"Yep-a-rooty!" Pinkie waved one semi-transparent front leg. "It works on all of us, too! Neat, huh?" She reached into her mane, pulled out a pair of goggles, and snapped them over her eyes. "Now let's go help Dashie!" And she stomped the pedals.

Blueblood spun forward and set to work as well, his stomach yawing as a breeze sprang up behind him and the ground dropped away beneath. The whole mechanism slewed around in a half-circle and shot forward, Blueblood putting his back into the pumping. "Discord!" he hissed into the windstorm of the battle ahead. "Do you trust me?"

A stirring at his shoulder, and Discord's still-much-smaller-than-usual face swung into view, the creature's eyes narrow. "That's an alarming question even under the best of circumstances, Zeta."

"But do you?!"

Discord's eyes narrowed further, and just as the corner of the castle whisked by to show Blueblood the maelstrom of cloud and fire cascading in ever-widening gyres above the Everfree Forest, the whole world froze into shades of blue and black. Something slithered across his neck, and Discord rose into the darkened space before Blueblood, his strange front legs folded over his chest. "I get the feeling this might take a while," he murmured.

Blueblood couldn't focus on Discord, couldn't stop his body from straining forward at the sight of the suspended battle: Bosky Dell, his mouth open and his face clenched, globs of blue fire surrounding his outstretched front hoofs and bursting from his forehead so brightly that Blueblood had to squint at it; Spitfire caught in mid-tumble, her body twisting sideways to avoid Dell's blast as she bucked a cloud the size of small cart, a jagged bolt of lightning starting to form; and Dash—

Even with everything black and blue and motionless, Dash seemed to flow, her mane still vibrant, the determination on her face rattling Blueblood's heart as she stretched herself toward Dell. Black smudges stained her hide, and he told himself it was soot: that it might be blood immediately went to the top of his list of things he didn't want to think about.

A clearing of throat brought his attention back to Discord, floating and tapping his claws along his forearms. "Ah. Yes." Blueblood shook his thoughts into order. "I need you to throw yourself at Dell and let him do whatever it is he's trying to do to you."

That got Discord's eyes open quite wide, his jaw dropping. "Let me review if I might, Zeta," he said after a moment, a moment during which Blueblood realized that the combatants ahead of him were still moving, inching through the air instead swirling, their wings still flapping, their fire and rain still sizzling. "Because I apparently didn't make it clear to you exactly what your friend there is after." Discord spun and aimed a shaking claw at the slowed ballet of carnage. "He's trying to suck my power into himself so he can use it to kill me!"

"But he can't!" Blueblood wanted to grab the little creature and shake him, but he kept his hoofs on the pedals rather than risk upsetting either Discord or the gyrocopter's flight. "You told me yourself the last time you stopped the world like this that you spring from the minds of all ponies everywhere! So as long as there are ponies around, how can anything kill you?! And you also told me that your magic and ours worked in completely different ways! So ramming yourself down his throat should stopper him up just long enough for me to—!"

"Are you insane?!" Discord swooped into Blueblood's face and dug his claws into his hide. "Haven't you noticed by now that I very rarely know what I'm talking about?! I'm a spirit of chaos! It's you and your tiny pony minds that insist on things making sense!"

Which wasn't at all what Blueblood had hoped to hear, but still— "You've got to trust me, then." He gave his own chest a quick tap. "I've spent my life seeing what would best help the ponies around me and then giving them the exact opposite! So believe me when I tell you that the last thing Bosky Dell needs is the very thing he thinks he wants! He'll suck you in, but you'll overwhelm him! His tiny pony mind will spray you right out the other side!"

"And then what?!" Discord flailed his paws and claws. "He turns around and sucks me up again?!"

"If we don't stop him in that moment he's frozen, yes!" Even inside their bubble, Blueblood knew they had no more time. "It's the only way!"

Discord's face scrunched up like he'd smelled something awful. "Caring for other ponies! Bah!" He whirled, shot forward, and punctured the blackish-blue skin surrounding them, the world crashing back into motion, the pedals rising under Blueblood's front hoofs and almost slamming his own knee into his face. "Hey!" Discord was shouting, undulating through the air toward the storm of fire and smoke. "I thought this was all supposed to be about me, Bosky Dell!"

"You!" shouted a voice like nothing Blueblood had ever heard, and the whole sky seemed to ripple and flex. All the lightning and clouds blasted straight upward, Dell hovering in suddenly clear air with Dash and Spitfire blinking a hoofball field away on either side of him. "You're mine!" And he lunged toward Discord.

Blueblood began pumping for all he was worth. "When I shout 'Turn,'" he yelled over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from Dell charging across the sky, "you must bank hard to the left, Pinkie Pie, and the two of you must begin pedaling as if your lives depend upon it! Because it's entirely possible that they will! Do you understand?!"

"Okey dokey lokey!" came the cry from behind him, and Blueblood couldn't help wincing as Bosky Dell swooped head first directly into Discord.

"Mine!" that glass-shattering voice screeched again, and the horn on Dell's headpiece flared, white fiery jaws springing open from it, snatching Discord up and smashing down around him.

The reaction was immediate, Dell stiffening in place, his mouth hinging open wider than should have been possible, his face contorted in a silent scream of agony. And then—

The explosion wasn't of light or of sound but rather of smell, a scent of burned toast and moldy strawberry jam blasting into Blueblood's face, his mane standing on end at the enormous release of power-that-wasn't-power, of magic-that-wasn't-magic, no word anywhere in his head to describe what he was sensing.

Tiny pony mind, he heard something deep inside him whisper, and even though he wasn't sure he was close enough, this was the moment. "Turn, Pinkie!" he shouted, and leaped from the gyrocopter into empty space.

Except, of course, that it wasn't empty. A loose and flowing chaos, the temporarily disembodied force of Discord, swirled around Blueblood; breathing it in, he fixed his gaze on Dell's oh so distant and gaping face and cast a spell-that-wasn't-a-spell. More feeling than thinking, more wishing or suggesting than ordering or commanding, he aimed for the exact opposite of what had stroked over him back in the throne room when Discord had moved the spellignite vest from Chives to him: leave the vest in place this time, he offered, and instead move—

A deep sort of giggle rose up around him, and white fire stole the world away for half an instant. Then Blueblood found himself blinking at the ruined castle below and ahead of him instead of beside him, Pinkie's flying machine banking sharply away from a figure floating in the air above the courtyard. "Beebee!" he heard Dash's voice shouting somewhere, but he couldn't afford to be distracted: gaze still fixed on Dell's silent scream, the pegasus now hovering in the wake of the gyrocopter and now wearing the vest, Blueblood wafted a tiny breath of a telekinesis spell at him, tried to push him further away from the retreating machine—

And this explosion was everything the other hadn't been, all sound and light and furious percussive force slamming him backward just as gravity took notice of him and started pulling him downward. Trying to go limp, knowing he had exactly one chance of surviving this, Blueblood smiled. One chance was all his darling Dashie needed, after all.

Four hoofs squeezed tight around him, then, that wonderfully unmistakable scent and bristling mane shoving themselves into his face, Dash's voice shouting, "Tuck and roll right on three!"

Trusting that she would slow them as much as she could—"One!"—and that she would slide them onto the best possible angle for impact—"Two!"—Blueblood tucked himself against her lithe, muscular form, sucked in a breath—"Three!"—and the whole of Equestria seemed to slam into his right shoulder.

Rolling with it, tumbling, he held her closer, moved his front legs so they would cover her wings, and crashed through quite a variety of underbrush, not all of it prickly, he was glad to discover. That slowed them even further, the ground sloping upward, so when he smashed at last into a tree of some sort, the impact was only hard enough to jar his teeth, not shake them loose entirely.

Silence settled over him like cool water on a too-hot afternoon, and the last little niggling doubt inside him puffed away to nothing when Dash stirred and muttered, "Better'n my last couple crashes anyway...."

He let himself unfold slowly, ready for the telltale stab of broken bones, but none came. "I don't know," he said then, stretching himself out and looking up at the pony lying atop him, Dash's face sweaty and dusty and absolutely incomparable. "Perhaps we should try it one more time: you are being graded on your performance, you know."

Her ears folded, and a quiet laugh made him glance to the side, Spitfire landing in the path of broken shrubbery that led downhill from the large box elder Blueblood now saw he was reclining against. "I was going to ask if you were all right, Zeta," she said, ruffling her wings. "But you're never all right, are you?"

Dash went tense. "Oh, my gosh! Discord!" She sprang from his chest into a hover. "And Pinkie! I saw that weird eggbeater flying machine of hers down there just before Dell exploded!"

A clearing of throat, and Discord stepped out of nowhere; he was his full size again, and Bosky Dell lay slumped across his forearms, the pegasus charred but breathing. "That, Double-O-Zeta, was too clever by half." Discord's eyes glinted, his lips pulling into a sideways smile. "Taking advantage of my dispersed and semi-conscious state to influence me unduly like that! I'd never have been able to do something as helpful as switching you and Dell if I'd been in my right mind, and I doubt such a trick will work again, either!"

Blueblood started to shrug, then stopped at the first of what he knew were going to be many and frequent muscle twinges. "I only needed it to work once. In the meantime,—" Concentrating, he managed to roll over and stand. "Might you look into the current location of Pinkie Pie and Chives? I—"

"Whoo-hoo!" came a shout, and creaking his stiffening neck over, Blueblood smiled at the gyrocopter descending into the clearing at the bottom of the hill, Chives clinging to the rear set of handlebars, Pinkie standing on the center pedals and waving what he feared must be the tattered remnants of the shadow cloak. "Awesomest ride ever!"

A lilac-scented pop, and Princess Sparkle appeared halfway down the hill, her eyes wide. "Will somepony please tell me what's going on around here with all these explosions?!"

"Twilight!" Dash and Pinkie both shouted, and as they raced toward her, each telling different parts of the story at the top of their lungs, Blueblood closed his eyes, letting himself relax. After all, nopony in the world was more organized than Equestria's newest princess, and indeed, Blueblood found his instantaneous journey to Ponyville's hospital, his check-up there, and even his subsequent debriefing with Spitfire and Princess Luna in a borrowed hospital conference room to be fairly pleasant.

Not entirely, of course. "And Bosky Dell?" he asked after Princess Luna had finished commending them.

The name made Spitfire cringe and Princess Luna sigh. "He will be remanded to the custody of the Canterlot Central Treatment Facility alongside his wife Paisley. I must also finally approach Discord in the hopes that he might assist in the rehabilitation of those ensconced within those walls." Her mouth went sideways. "Though I find myself doubting he will be amenable to my appeal. We have too much history between us, I fear."

"I'll speak to him, your Highness," Blueblood said. After all, he and Discord had made some sort of connection these past few days....

Spitfire cocked her head. "Zeta? Are you actually volunteering to help?"

He considered scowling at her, but when she gave him a nod and another of her small smiles as she and Princess Luna headed deeper into the hospital to see to Dell's transport to Canterlot, he decided to return the gesture. So even that was pleasant.

Still, the most pleasant of all, he wasn't entirely surprised to discover, was the warmth that rushed over him when he finally stepped out into the hospital lobby late that afternoon. And yes, the whole town wasn't waiting there, but Dash cheering and throwing herself around him while Discord, Pinkie and Chives stood watching proved quite satisfactory.

For approximately two seconds, at any rate. Then Dash was landing with a stomp and glaring at him. "But you better not come out here saying that Chives's gotta go back to jail! 'Cause Pinkie told me all about what happened, and I say he's cured now!"

Blueblood looked past her to where Chives and Pinkie stood, both earth ponies with eyes downcast, Pinkie's usually jumbled mane as flat along her neck as a spilled strawberry milkshake. And as much as a part of him wanted to narrow his eyes, give a sniff, and pretend he was going to send Chives away, he found it quite easy to ignore that part. "I find myself, Chives," he said instead, stepping forward with what felt like the proper sort of smile, "in need of both a valet and a friend. You did exemplary work in that first position for several years, so I'm hoping you'd be willing to give the second a try now as well?" He held out a hoof.

Pinkie gave a little gasp, and the shimmer in Chives's eyes when he reached his own hoof out made Blueblood know he was making the right choice. "I shall be honored, sir."

"And so!" Discord called, his voice echoing somehow as he drew himself up to his full height, his lion paw pressed to his chest. "I proclaim that our triumph must be celebrated in the only appropriate fashion!" He swept his eagle claw upward, and a pink tutu popped into existence around his midsection. "With interpretive dance!"

"Whoo-hoo!" Pinkie leaped into a spin, and when she came back down, she had on a huge grin, a full set of bagpipes, and the loudest tam o'shanter Blueblood had ever seen. "A-one and a-two and a—!" she sang out, squeezing quite a stirring chord from the device.

Discord pirouetted out the hospital's front door, Pinkie marching and squwonking close behind, and Blueblood turned to Chives. "One thing you must realize, however, Chives, is that all the ponies in this town are crazy."

Chives's grin was almost a match for Pinkie's. "Oh, yes, sir. I'm well aware of that." He nodded and followed the other two outside.

A wonderfully familiar wing nudged his side. "Crazy, huh?" Dash asked.

"Oh, yes." Blueblood leaned against her. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."