Fly Me to The Moon

Act 3: Shine in the Darkest Days

Part I

Merrilie had always dreamed of being a teacher, ever since she was a filly. She wanted more than anything to spread the joy of learning as far and wide as she could manage. Unfortunately, fate had proven rather unkind. Even the times immediately following the Royal Sisters' rise to power were troubled ones, despite the Two's efforts to the contrary. Equestria was just too big and too damaged by its preceding rulers for them to save all of it in a timely manner. Merrilie's hometown of Whinnieapolis, for example, was all but wiped off the map by Discord's antics. There were enough survivors to patch together a semblance of civilization, but the nature of how she would realize her destiny of guiding young colts and fillies was changed forever.

As was typical of Whinnieapolis residents before the disaster, Merrilie's charges were kind-hearted, hard-working, and resilient. The devastation, however, did a fair job of knocking off that first trait from the average townspony, unfortunately. The little ones she was to raise helped her build their new home with effort disproportionate to their youth. They handled their new lives and the reason for them almost disturbingly well, and invariably returned her own efforts with adoration and gratitude. Every once and a while, one or two would be taken in by new families, but it broke her heart whenever she thought about how seldom that happened due to the town's residents generally being too poor to take on extra mouths to feed. Unfortunately, these thoughts sprang up against her will during her daily dawntime walks for what necessities she could afford, and remained until she managed to fight them down by the time she got to her front door.

In her efforts to steel herself for the sight of (ironically) too-many sleepy but generally cheerful faces, she was in no way prepared for what she saw once she opened the door and turned on the lights to wake up the children as she did every morning. The building was completely devoid of life, or much of anything really. The bunk beds and footlockers were still present, but stripped barren. Rationality slipped away from Merrilie rather swiftly, and she galloped around the empty sleeping room in a panic, tears streaming down her cheeks as some dark part of her mind assailed her with thoughts of the little ponies being abducted overnight, or perhaps having never existed at all.

"SETTING MOON!" she shouted as hysterics began to set in, the last vestiges of her right-mindedness bidding her to call for the self-appointed but undisputed leader of the two dozen colts and fillies. The filly had the uncanny ability to know where all of the others were at any given point in time, and was a vital asset to have around whenever one or more of them went missing. Of course, when she went missing too, hope was all but lost. There was no response, so Merrilie burst out of the building, widening her spastic search pattern to include the full length and breadth of her property, shouting out the names of random colts and fillies as she did.

"CHARLIE? LUCKY STRIKE? RAINY DAZE? FLASHFIRE? WHERE ARE ALL OF YOU!?"

As fatigue and despair began to set in, she regained her bearings and headed back to her property's main building to search for clues like she should have done initially, but had failed to due to her panic. She heard a rustle as she shut the door behind her, and turned to see that a parchment note had been affixed to it. In that moment, it dawned on her just how much truth there was in the term 'blind panic', as she could not possibly have overlooked this parchment deliberately placed at her face's normal level on the door if her mind had been fully present. It read:

"Dear Miss Merrilie,

We will always be thankful to you for providing a home for us when nopony else would or could. We all love you and will always hold you in our hearts. But we must leave you now, because a Princess has asked for help and we know that the townsponies can't spare the time or take the risk. You were like a mother to all of us, so we ask that you please take pride in yourself and in us. We are certainly proud to have had you as our Teacher. We want you to know that without you, we would not have had the courage to face another day, let alone the amount needed to face this adventure. You taught us to love ourselves and to love others, and so we will, and we'll show our love by helping the Night Princess fight fear so that other ponies can sleep at night, and live better lives during the day. We will never forget you, Miss Merrilie, or the important lessons you taught us, even when we seemed unwilling to learn.

Sincerely,
Setting Moon"

Merrilie almost didn't make it through the letter, having had to stop several times to hold it away from her face so the tears she'd thought she had long since run out of wouldn't fall on it and ruin the ink. She now knew why her charges were missing, and where they thought they were going, but she didn't have nearly enough confidence in their navigational skills to trust them to find their intended destination. And even if she did, the orphanage matron could hardly call herself a responsible adult if she just let a bunch of children go gallivanting off into the wilderness unsupervised. However, she had no idea where to begin looking, other than it was most certainly not within the confines of the orphanage's little campus.

So she ran from one homestead to the next, nearly beating down the doors and asking the farmers and craftsponies if they'd seen any of her colts and fillies recently. It was not bad enough that they didn't have any positive answers, they didn't even seem to care that two dozen children were missing. All of them more or less blew her off as they prepared for the day's work, and Merrilie felt the hysterics creeping upon her once again, only this time they were of rage rather than fear. Well, nearly all of them, anyway. The blacksmith, Ashen Iron, seemed to be the only one who remembered what it was to have a warm heart. Unfortunately, Merrilie hadn't remembered that minor detail until after she had screamed the question she had been tearfully begging and pleading of every other townspony she had met prior to him.

"DO YOU KNOW WHERE MY CHILDREN ARE!?" she wailed in his tired face, her throat becoming ragged and rendering her voice hoarse even as the question escaped her.

She clamped up immediately and cringed, expecting the kind of response that kind of behavior normally warranted. Luckily for her, Ashen's kindness was as sturdy as his works, and he responded by pulling her into the embrace she'd needed all day. She sobbed over his shoulder, but at this point she really had run out of tears, another minor detail that the smith noticed. He held her in one foreleg as he reached out with the other hoof and ladled for her some of the cool, pure water he was planning to use for tempering. After two full servings, her thirst had been quenched enough for the tears to resume, but the wracking sobs had finally subsided. It was only then that he spoke.

"Have you yet asked the Twins?" he asked gently, eliciting a gasp from the mare.

It was times like this where Merrilie felt ashamed of herself for ever thinking she could be a teacher. Times when she utterly failed to notice or think of the obvious. Normally, these were also times when Setting Moon showed that her little heart was not quite as black as her beautiful but unsettling mane, and reminded Merrilie that her inability to think of the things that shouldn't require thought wasn't proof that she was stupid, just that some ponies' minds worked a little differently. However, normally the filly would be within sight of the would-be teacher, or at least somewhere from whence she could pop up unexpectedly. Now, however, she was gone and had taken the other children with her. At least now though, thanks to Ashen, her presence of mind had been returned to her, and she had been given an idea of what ponies to ask for help.

"Not yet," she replied as she reluctantly worked her way free of his embrace, trying not to think about the notion that had it not been for the disaster, the two of them might have been together. Instead she focused on the Twins as she waved goodbye to Ashen and left his home/business to go find them.

Protect and Serve were the result of one of those vanishingly rare cases wherein a pegasus and a unicorn were born as twins. Usually when twins were born, they either had matching coat and mane colors and patterns, or were chromatically opposed. Fortunately for the two, the latter case applied. More importantly, both of them shared a dream of a system of justice and peace within pony society and served as the town's guards. They spent their days with Protect patrolling the streets of Whinnieapolis and mitigating arguments that seemed on the verge of outright violence, but more often helping out here and there; and his winged sister flying the town's perimeter and immediate outskirts. She helped stabilize the weather, but also kept an eye out for monsters and suspicious activity. Both of them worked together to drive out those ponies who had resorted to banditry to overcome the poverty common to the area, and also to bring back those citizens who had gotten lost, which were more typically young colts and fillies.

If there was anypony who could help her find the wayward orphans, it was these two. She galloped to their 'station', which was marked by the shield symbol that was a common trait of both siblings' Cutie Marks.