Mr. And Mrs. Pie, of number four, Colt Drive, we're around to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last ponies you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.
Mr. Pie was the director of a firm called Hoofings, which made rocks. He was a big, beefy man with hardly and hair on his head, although he did have very large side burns. Mrs. Pie was thin and old and had twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over fences, spying on the neighbors. The Pies had a small daughter called Inky and in their opinion there was no finer filly anywhere.
The Pies had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it. They didn't think they could bear it if anyone found out about the Dash's. Mrs. Dash was Mrs. Pie's sister, but they hadn't met for several years; in fact Mrs. Pie pretended she didn't have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unpieish as it was possible to be. The Pies shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Dash's arrived in the street. The Pies knew that the Dash's had a small daughter, too, but they had never seen her. This filly was another good reason for keeping the Dash's away; they didn't want Inky mixing with a goal like that.
When Mr. and Mrs. Pie woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr. Pie hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work, and Mrs. Pie gossips away happily as she wrestled a screaming Inky into her high chair. None of them noticed a small green Dragon flutter past the window.
At half past eight, Mr. Pie picked up his briefcase, pecked Mrs. Pie on the check, and tried to kiss Inky good-bye but missed, because Inky was now having a tantrum and throwing her cereal at the walls. "Little foal," chortled Mr. Pie as he left the house. He got into his car and backed out of number forum's drive.
It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar - a cat reading a map. For a second, Mr. Pie didn't realize what he had seen - then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a Persian cat standing on the corner of Colt Drive, but there wasn't a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. Mr. Pie blinked and stared at the cat. It stared back as Mr. Pie drove around the corner and up the road, he watched the cat in his mirror. It was now reading the sign that said Colt Drive - no, looking at the sign; cats couldn't read maps or signs. Mr. Pie gave himself a little shake and put the cat out of his mind. As he drove toward town he thought of nothing except a large order of rocks he was hoping to get at today.
But on the edge, rocks were driven out of his mind by something else. As he sat in the usual morning traffic jam, he couldn't help but notice that there seemed to be a Lot of strangely dressed ponies about. Ponies in cloaks. Mr. Pie couldn't bear ponies who dressed in funny clothes - the setups you saw on young ponies! He supposed this was some stupid New fashion. He tapped his hooves on the steering wheel and his eyes fell on a huddle of these weirdos standing quite close by. They were whispering excitedly together. Mr. Pie was enraged to see that a couple of them weren't young at all; why, that stallion had to be older than he was, and wearing an emerald green cloak! The nerve of him! But then it struck Mr. Pie that this was probably some silly stunt - these ponies were obviously collecting something...yes, that would be it. The traffic moved on and a few minutes later, Mr. Pie arrived in the Holdings parking lot, his mind back on rocks. Mr. Pie always sat with his back to the window in his office on the ninth floor. If he hadn't, he might have found if harder to concentrate on drills that morning. He didn't see the dragons swooping past in broad daylight, though ponies down in the street did; they pointed and gazed open-mouthed as dragon after Dragon sped over head. Mr. Pie, however, had a perfectly normal, dragon-free morning. He yelled at five different ponies. He made several different telephone calls and shouted a bit more. He was in a very good mood until lunchtime, when he thought he'd stretch his legs and walk across the road to buy himself a bun from the bakery.
He'd forgotten all about the ponies in cloaks until he passed a group of them next to the baker's. He eyed them angrily as passed. He didn't know why, but they made him uneasy. This bunch were whispering excitedly, too, and he couldn't see a single collecting tin. It was on his way back past them, clutching a large doughnut in a bag, that he caught a few words of what they were saying.
"The Dash's, that's right, that's what I heard -"
"- yes, their daughter, Rainbow -"
Mr. Pie stopped dead. Fear flooded him. He looked back at the whisperers as if he wanted to say something to them, but thought better of it.
