Deathonomics

Soon one morning

Death comes a-creeping in the room

Soon one morning

Death comes a-creeping in the room

Soon one morning

Death comes a-creeping in the room

Oh my Princess, oh my Princess what shall I do

You may call your mother

Your mother will be no use

Call your mother

Your mother will be no use

Call your mother

Your mother will be no use

Oh my Princess, oh my Princess what shall I do

You had better hush, hush, hush

Somepony's calling my name

Hush

Somepony's calling my name

Hush

Oh my Princess, oh my Princess what shall I do?

But the MARE is trained not to pray too long. She considers the material of her HOOFS, and a PLAN begins to form....

It was as dark as the inside of a casket.

Twilight had asked Rainbow Dash to turn off the lights. Some things were easier in the dark. Baby steps, a revolution on the margins….

In the darkness, sounds were…not louder, but soundy-er. Twilight couldn’t see anypony. But she heard their breathing. She realized she had never listened to ponies breathe before, not really. She didn’t know what the back of her hoof looked like either.

There was, Twilight reflected, a lot she took for granted.

Imagine the scenario. You are in a house, not your own. It is dark. You cannot see anything, and then, within the darkness, you hear someone breathing….

Are you scared?

If not…

…And Twilight was not…

…The question is, why not?

Enough stalling. Twilight Sparkle took a deep breath. She knew what she had to say.

“Bluueeewaaaah.”

Even in the dark, as if compelled by the fundamental laws of comic timing, the four ponies glanced at each other. By tacit mutual agreement, Rarity said what they were all thinking.

“Twilight, that is, our dear friend, I regret to inform you that you might have sneezed some of your brains out through your ears—“

“No,” Twilight said, her breath coming quicker. “It’s just—hard to say.”

For some reason, Twilight thought of the day she had nearly been torn apart limb from limb for the sake of a ticket to a party. Or at least, she thought it was a near-death experience—

“Just what were you girls planning to do to me if I didn’t give you that ticket? And what did you do to Spike?”

“We were going to ask really nicely,” said Fluttershy, “And if that didn’t work, we were going to ask even more nicely.”

“As to Spike,” Rarity batted her eyelashes innocently, “A mare has her ways.”

“I thought so. I mean, I think so.”

“Twilight, we’d have to be crazier than a rattlesnake that’s been out in the sun too long to want to hurt a pony over a ticket,” Applejack said. “I still don’t know why anypony wanted that piece of paper anyway.”

“Actually, I’ve just remembered,” Twilight said, blinking pointlessly. “Princess Celestia sent me four more tickets, so we can all go to the Gala.”

“Oh, my,” Fluttershy said. “How wonderful.” Suddenly—even later, Twilight couldn’t explain exactly how or when the transition occurred, but suddenly Fluttershy’s eyes were visible. They looked as big as saucers, and they gleamed with their own internal light of innocent hope, flickering as if the slightest disappointment would provoke tears of inconsolable woe. “Um, Twilight, do you think we might be able to have a ticket each, if we said ‘please’ very nicely?”

“Yes, obviously, now stop looking at me like that! Seriously, how do ponies resist you when you do that?”

“They don’t.”

Again, in mysterious unison, everypony stared at where her voice was coming from.

“Not in a bad way!” Fluttershy said quickly. “Ponies just seem to like doing me favors.” Her eyes turned enormous again. “You will all forget this conversation.”

“Anyway,” Twilight said, “I have something very important I want to say to you all. I only wish Pinkie Pie were here as well.”

“We’ll get her back.” Rainbow Dash said. Her voice brimmed with honest confidence. It was a different sort of confidence like that which surrounded Princess Celestia like the fifth fundamental force, and Twilight suddenly missed it. It felt like a knife in her side.

She shook her head. There was no knife in her side. Rainbow Dash was not going to hurt her. She was honestly the loyalist of ponies.

When a soldier is pressed to her limits, surrounded on all sides, her back sliding down the wall as she collapses to one knee, she might see a mare in black in the corner of her vision, sharpening her scythe until it is the thinnest margin in the universe, ready to make the smallest possible change…

…Or she may fall through the wall, which was permeable after all. And on that side the ponies surrounding her may just be her new best friends, and their swords might turn out to be elaborate cakes they baked to surprise her.

(Were they ponies before? What was that wall, anyway?)

Okay, look, it might not be likely, but it could happen. I’m just saying.

(Which side are you on? And how do you cross the boundary…?)

Twilight swallowed. And started to talk about economics.

“Nooooo,” Rainbow Dash groaned, covering her ears. “Stop iiiiit.”

Twilight continued anyway. She had to hear it with her own ears if it was ever going to make any sense to her. “I solved the full-cost pricing controversy, I think. Most of it, anyway.”

“Um, we don’t know what that is,” Fluttershy said.

“But it sounds fascinating!” Applejack said. Twilight could hear the salespony’s smile plastered on her face, making a distinct rubbery sound as it stretched from ear to ear as if to share in the pain her brain was anticipating. It was, Twilight realized, not so dissimilar from the smile of friendship, which was fake not in anticipation of reward but because it cared. But it looked the same to the pony on the receiving end….

“Fake” was probably the wrong word. No faker than any other time a pony parted with something she wanted to get something she wanted even more, which is to say, whenever a pony made a choice….

“Marginal cost pricing is profit-maximizing,” Twilight said. “Everypony knows that.”

Some noises of alarm from the other ponies indicated that, in fact, everypony did not know that. Fluttershy, however, was silent.

“But you ponies don’t use marginal cost pricing,” Twilight said. “No businesspony does. Most of them take the ‘full cost’ of the product and add a markup, which is basically like finding the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle by squinting at it sideways, taking the length of one of the other sides and adding your best guess to it.”

“Makes sense,” three ponies said in unison.

“I was confused for a while,” Twilight admitted. At least studying under Princess Celestia for years had made that part easier to say. “I didn’t think we could just dismiss the survey data, however artfully. I didn’t think we could pretend it all worked out to marginal cost pricing somehow either. Then you ponies started taking the price system almost as seriously as I do, and I didn’t know what to think.”

“Wait, we are getting paid for this, right?” Rarity said, sounding alarmed.

“Rainbow Dash said she would pay us for our time,” Applejack said. Twilight heard a thump from Rainbow Dash’s direction that sounded like a hoof meeting a forehead in consternation.

Twilight Sparkle wasn’t really listening. “Then I had a conversation with a lady in a dress, and she gave me an idea.”

“Well, I do my best,” Rarity said.

“Not you. The lady. I know you’ve all seen her.”

“She doesn’t appreciate apples much,” Applejack said dismissively.

“She pays well, though,” Fluttershy whispered.

“Who?” said Rainbow Dash.

“I realized I was placing my faith in life,” Twilight said. “I should have placed my faith in death.”

There was a thoughtful pause.

“Yayyy….” Fluttershy said uncertainly, her voice trailing off with a dying squeak like the sound of air escaping a deflating balloon.

“What I mean is, there are two ways to view marginal cost pricing and profit maximization: as a choice, and as a condition of survival. We thought that businessponies must choose to profit maximize, but the plain truth is that businessponies can do whatever they like. There’s nothing in the laws of economics that says they have to try to maximize profits, and even if they do, there’s nothing in the laws of economics that says they’ll be terribly good at it.

“The other way of looking at profit maximization is that it’s a condition of survival. Businesses that lose money go out of business. Businesses that make money stay in business. And marginal cost pricing is how you make the most money. As long as businesses compete with each other for their market niches, so to speak, there will be pressures eliminating businesses that fail to price rationally, while businesses that profit-maximize or come pretty close will stay around. It’s kind of like evolution by natural selection. No biologist would say that organisms must say they'll try to reproduce, but if they don’t reproduce, they’ll disappear. The relevance to friendship is obvious, and is left as an exercise for the listener.”

“Huh?” was the general consensus. Twilight gritted her teeth. It felt like her tongue was actively fighting her, her throat closing up to prevent the words coming out, unless that was the allergies again. Was a short lifetime of pride worth so much? What would it take for her to give some up, on the margin…?

Twilight was aware that even as she asked the question she was standing across from four ponies dear to her. Was the whole of Economestria nothing more than a complex and elaborate metaphor designed by an inscrutable alien being to teach her a series of lessons about economics and friendship?

Pinkie Pie wasn’t there, even though her presence was the most appropriate. That was probably a metaphor for something too.

“I curse all gods,” Twilight said, just in case any were listening. She was not going to let anyone turn her into a friendship lesson. She would do this for her own sake, pedagogical opportunities be damned.

“Times’ a-wasting, Twilight, and it’s my money on the line,” Rainbow Dash said. “Mind hurrying this up?”

“What I learned today—“ Twilight stopped. She sounded like a character in a Saturday morning cartoon show. “Ahem. As an economist, I placed my faith in rational pony behavior. That faith was damaged, to say the least, when I met you all.” (Rainbow Dash nodded proudly.) “But I was not wrong to put my faith in optimization, if you can see the difference. The economy is something greater than individual choices, though it may be nothing but the sum of them, or the simultaneous firing of them, as it were, or however you like to imagine the economy.”

“Apples,” Applejack said immediately. “Apples everywhere.”

“I don’t find it easy to trust other ponies,” Twilight admitted. “It probably has something to do with having been trained for years in a hypercompetitive environment where everypony was gunning for the pony at the top, which, naturally, was me, being the best economist. Let’s just say I can avoid a tripwire in my sleep, which in fact I had to do once. Also being betrayed by my brother, who was supposed to spend his life forever with me, not that stupid Princess ‘Definitely Notevil Goodpony’. Also this one time I bought myself a cake for my birthday, and I took a big bite out of it, and it turned out they had accidentally used sugar instead of salt. It tasted like an ocean of disappointment.”

“You’re a survivor,” Rarity said, unable to stop herself. Twilight, who despite all her experience with it sometimes couldn’t tell when somepony was making fun of her, nodded solemnly.

“Even if everypony in the world was crazy, the economy would still work by the process of market selection. I can’t trust individual ponies, but I can put my faith in something greater, something more…automatic, that works by logic because there is no separation between the fact of its existence and the logic that explains it.

“Maybe the same is true for friendship. Nowhere is it written that a friend of mine can’t rip my heart out of my chest with her bare hoofs for the sake of a gala, but it is true that a pony who does things like that isn’t very good at friendship. Not in the individual ponies…but I can put my faith in the laws of friendship themselves.”

She was still managing to pursue the most roundabout method of production possible. Somehow, it wasn’t efficient. What gave?

Twilight did. “Anyway, what I’m really trying to say is, I’m sorry for spending all day in the daughter and generally not paying attention to you girls. I want to be friends, and not just because we’re all in a magical mare team that seems to be saving the world every week.”

“If I’m following,” Fluttershy said slowly, “You want be friends with us because if we killed you, you wouldn’t be friends with us. We haven’t killed you, therefore we’re friends, QED?”

Twilight beamed. “Yup!”

“It’s, um, a very peculiar definition of friendship.”

“Clearly it’s only a starting point, a definition that will be clarified and expanded upon in future lessons—no! I am my own mare!”

“Uh, girls, Pinkie Pie is stuck in a forest, and she’s going to be absolutely livid when she gets out,” Rainbow Dash said. “Does anypony here want to be between her and a Sugarcube Corner when that happens? Let’s rescue our friend already. She could be dead, and then we wouldn’t be friends with her anymore, like Twilight said. Keweedee.”

“I agree,” Twilight said. “We need to go speak to the Everfree Forest right now. The Frankie Knight statue was destroyed, and the Knightian code no longer holds. I think the forest is as scared as I was, maybe more. She’s more used to being betrayed by ponies than I am.”

“Did you just call that forest a she?” Applejack’s eyebrows wriggled like drunk rattlesnakes, an effect that was lost on everypony in the darkness.

“We’ll do it alone,” Rainbow Dash said. “Twilight can’t go near the forest with her allergies.”

“As to that,” Twilight said, “I have an idea. But I’ll need everypony’s help. Fluttershy, I need your giant baby sky serpent to carry me to the entrance to the forest inside her mouth.”

“She’ll probably start eating you. It’s nothing personal, of course,” Fluttershy added, “She’s just a baby and hasn’t learned not to eat everypony yet. But she digests very slowly, so if you’re quick it’ll be okay.”

“Right. Rainbow Dash, I need you to guide the serpent to the forest. I don’t trust the sky serpent’s navigation, seeing as how she hasn’t not killed me a hundred times yet. Also, bring Tank. We might want her to take a record of what we’re saying. Applejack, you’re riding in on your Cerberus. We're going to need security.”

“I don’t think she’ll mind guarding ponies from the forest for a change,” Applejack said.

“I can, um, help fight if you need me to,” Fluttershy said.

“Fine, you’re with Applejack. And—Rarity?”

“I—I am friends with ponies because they haven’t killed me a lot,” Rarity said, sounding curious and horrified, like she was watching a alien slug of logic crawl slowly but inexorably up the side of her flank toward her ear canal…. “I mean, how else would you know if you were friends with somepony if they hadn’t not killed you?”

“We are all being perfectly logical,” Twilight said firmly. “You are coming in the snake too. I need you to maintain a magical shield around my body to protect me from the pollen. I can’t do it because I need to concentrate.”

“And what will you be doing?”

“I will be applying economics to a real-world situation,” Twilight said proudly, much like how a toddler might announce their first successful use of the toilet, or at least their intention to do so. “Such a thing has never been attempted before. It will take all my might and wit.”

She stood tall. A light shined from her horn. In the deep black darkness of the shadow the pollen cast, it was as bright as a newborn star, beaming all the brighter for its fierce ambition to one day become a sun.

“We five ponies are gathered here tonight to protect Equestria from a terrible danger. We do not do so for the glory, although there will be glory. We have not assembled as one to strike out against the darkness because it is right, although it is right. We do not come bearing light so that all ponies may know us for what we are, their defenders and saviors, although they will know us. We do it because we are the Five Full-Sisters of Friendship, and we will fight o’er many furlongs for our friend, whom we love and who does not kill us every day. Now who is with me?”

“Just one question,” Rarity said. “How much will we be getting paid for this?”

Traveling in the mouth of a baby giant sky serpent was not exactly comfortable, but at least it was pollen-proof. Still, something about the way they were slowly being forced deeper and deeper into the serpent’s stomach was disquieting. Rarity was taking that concept to an extreme.

“IT’S EATING MEEEEEEEE! HEEEEELP!”

Rarity clung to a flap of belly inside the giant snake’s stomach, sobbing frantically. Twilight was just behind her, supporting Rarity’s weight on her head.

“Stop kicking, Rarity! You’ll knock me loose!”

“I never should have agreed to this! I don’t care how much I’m being paid! My life is priceless!”

Twilight clung to her own piece of flesh and tried to push Rarity up. She hadn’t planned to support Rarity, but Rarity’s panic moved so fast Twilight honestly worried for a moment that by the time they got there fifty years would have passed. Now they were being slowly pushed deeper into the, ahem, belly of the beast. At least there didn’t seem to be any stomach acid yet.

“Rarity,” Twilight grunted, redoubling her grip on the stomach wall, “Nothing is priceless. You implicitly put a price on your life every day by taking mundane risks—“

“This is different! You said value is subjective! My life has infinite utility to me!”

“Obviously it doesn’t, or you’d never get out of bed!” Twilight said, her face flushed red with the strain of sustaining Rarity, who did have a weak grip. “Anyway, utility isn’t even a thing. That’s why we use indifference curves.”

“I’m not indifferent to losing my life!”

“You are for enough money!”

A loud thump rocked them all, knocking them loose of their holds on the stomach wall. They landed on the bottom, momentarily dazed.

“I think we landed,” Twilight managed after a few seconds. “Rarity, are you ready? I need your magic. Imagine I’m a dress, and you can’t let even a speck of dust fall on me.”

Rarity’s eyes were wild and unfocused. “H-How much am I going to sell you for?”

“A hundred thousand bits. It’s an order from Princess Celestia herself.”

“Oh, my….” Rarity trailed off.

Twilight sniffed. She smelled something burning. Wait, ponies couldn’t literally blow a fuse, could they?

“Rarity—“

A blue glow surrounded Twilight. She found herself held to Rarity’s chest in a hug so tight Twilight eyes bugged out of her skull.

“I will protect you!” Rarity sobbed. “My dear, my precious—“

Coughing, Twilight concentrated her magic. A second later, they disappeared in a flash of magic and reappeared on top of the snake’s back.

“Oh my Celestia,” Rarity gasped, releasing Twilight. “We’re saved!”

Twilight wasn’t so sure. Hesitantly, she breathed in, all too aware it could be her last. She hadn’t even thought to bring water. It was one thing to say that everypony put a price on life every day and quite another thing to pay the bill.

Twilight breathed out. She didn’t sneeze. Her throat didn’t even itch a little bit.

Twilight offered a silent prayer of thanks to the profit motive and looked around with light from her horn. They were about twenty feet from the entrance to the forest, a distance mostly covered by the sky serpent’s face. Rainbow Dash was huffing and puffing beside Tank. Twilight wondered just how much effort it was to haul a tortoise while flying as fast as a sky serpent.

“I’m okay,” Rainbow Dash panted when Twilight and Rarity came over. “It was easier than a stock rainboom.”

Twilight nodded. “Tank, I need you to write down everything we say. Can you draft a contract for us that looks really legal and proper?”

“She doesn’t do speed,” Rainbow Dash said. “But she’ll remember everything.”

“That’ll do.”

A few minutes later Applejack and Fluttershy arrived on the back of the Cerberus, who splattered enormous flecks of drool everywhere as she came up behind them. The look in her eyes was the look one might wear if Cthulu had kindly asked for a ride and was now idly looking out the window of the passenger side. Twilight realized having Fluttershy travel on the Cerberus’s back might have been a bad idea.

Applejack and Fluttershy came down and joined them. Four Elements of Equilibrium were gathered, and the last was only a few meters away as the Bearers and Twilight approached the wall of vines. They were going to put an end to this exogenous shock.

But the wall of thorns and gnarled trunks was forbidding. Before, when Nightmare Moon had unwittingly called the Elements into being, the entrance to the forest had been open—open like a waiting mouth full of teeth, but open. Now the twisted trees were thick with black vines that showed no passage. The only light came from Twilight’s horn, and the shadows in the trees looked like faces.

The roots of the trees were intertwined, wrapping around each other so tightly there was no getting through. It looked scary. Then Twilight thought that maybe the trees were just holding hoofs.

Slowly, Twilight approached the forest.

“Hey,” she said, suddenly all too aware how out of her depth she was. It’s not like she had a friendship speech just waiting inside of her. “I, um, that is, I have something to say.” She cleared her throat. “Forest, I know we seem different, but if you look a little deeper, I think you’ll see that we have a lot in common. I mean, I was just like you—that is, until a little ago, you were just like me. But now I’m here to tell you that the science of friendship—well, what this is about is, anyway, is that—oh, I didn’t say, my name is Twilight Sparkle—anyway, I can help you see another way. So if you could just,” she gestured to the gate of vines, “Get up—“

“Get down!” Rainbow Dash shouted. She caught Twilight in a flying tackle and carried her to the dirt. Twilight heard a vine whip through the space her body had just occupied.

“It’s gonna come around!” Applejack warned from atop the Cerberus’s back. Fluttershy and Rarity scurried behind the sky serpent’s enormous girth.

“We can work together!” Twilight pleaded as Rainbow Dash forced her away. “I’m not like the Alicorn from before, I’m not trying to win a crown—“

Rainbow Dash pushed Twilight further away, which meant that the forest was almost completely hidden in shadow again.

“It’s gonna make a sound,” Rainbow Dash said to Applejack. “I’ll go up, you go down. If we work together, we can help Twilight get that contract—“

More vines scythed out of the darkness, but Rainbow Dash was faster. By the time Twilight’s brain caught up with her eyes, Rainbow Dash was a dark blur in the air, recognizable only by the rainbow streaks reflected in Twilight’s glow. The Cerberus dashed forward, trapping vines underneath its heavy paws and snapping at the ones in the air with all three heads.

Twilight raised her forehoofs in the air, trying to send a message of peace to the forest, which probably wasn’t half as noticeable as a giant Cerberus, now bleeding from a dozen small wounds, biting vines out of the air. Twilight waved her hoofs desperately and then dropped them, helpless.

“Twilight!” Rarity called from behind the giant snake, “Honestly this could be going a lot better, and that’s being generous!”

“It’s a kindness to expect a forest to be—loyal!” Applejack grunted, trying to maintain her balance on the Cerberus. “Enough to make me laugh!”

“Twilight, you have to help the forest see—eek!” Fluttershy shrieked and ducked down as a vine bounced off the sky serpent’s tough scales.

A sonic whine rising into the sky told Twilight Sparkle that Rainbow Dash was building speed. She looked up just in time to see the start of Rainbow Dash’s descent. There was a tearing sound like the air itself was being ripped apart.

“Time to show you all that I can be!”

Twilight shouted, “STOP!”

And everything went dead.

Cautiously, Twilight opened her eyes and nearly fainted at the sight. All the vines and trees in sight, even the Cerberus and Rainbow Dash, were outlined in the lavender glow of her magic. They were also completely still.

“Oh dear,” Twilight said, like a coyote who has run over a cliff and only just noticed the lack of solid ground supporting it. “Um—Rarity, Fluttershy, help—“

Everything went blacker.

And stayed that way when she awoke. Twilight realized after a disoriented moment of confusion as to her own state of consciousness that she was inside the sky serpent’s stomach, still an improvement over a pool of snot. She could feel her friends warmth around her, hear their breathing mixed together.

“Who was that pretty lady?” Twilight moaned, sitting up and quickly regretting it. Her horn ached. Thauma trauma. It took a long time to heal.

“Twilight’s awake,” Rainbow Dash announced. “Okay, now we can go kick that forest’s trunk—“

“No,” Twilight said. “We’re doing this peacefully.” Wincing, Twilight summoned a shield around herself, lit her horn with light, and teleported them outside, where upon she stumbled, fell, and nearly lost her shield.

“Twilight!” Rainbow Dash was beside her in an instant. “Go back inside the snake’s belly. You don’t have any tissues, and I am not cleaning that up again—“

“I’m fine,” Twilight insisted, gritting her teeth, but she didn’t refuse Rainbow Dash’s weight to lean against. Rarity cast her own shield over Twilight, and Twilight gradually lessened her own. The pain in her horn was severe now, like a blind idiot dentist was drilling it down and the painkillers had worn off.

Her other friends gathered around.

“So what’s the plan, Twilight?” Applejack asked. The Cerberus was licking its paws beside the sky serpent, and she sniffed at Applejack’s tail with its two other heads.

“Fluttershy,” Twilight said, “How would you get a frightened naturally evolved organism to trust you?”

“I would be very patient,” Fluttershy whispered back.

“We can’t wait,” Rainbow Dash said. “Pinkie could be starving in there, and it’s still pumping out pollen.”

Twilight tended to avoid certain subjects. Mares and stallions—she had far more important things to do, she told herself. But finally something clicked.

“It’s—she’s trying to reproduce,” Twilight said, gazing up at the thick blanket of pollen that covered the sky. “Before she—um. Oh dear.”

“What do we do?” Rainbow Dash said.

Twilight blinked. “We—ow—wait.” She turned off the light from her horn and recast her shield. “I can shield myself for a few more hours. The rest of you should sleep now and when you wake up Rarity can shield me again while I rest.”

Rarity immediately lit her own horn, casting them in a pale blue glow. “Twilight, I can’t help but notice that you seem to be speaking as if we will be staying here. I thought we would get Pinkie Pie, Equilibrium Beam the forest, and leave. Aha.”

“Transaction costs are too high right now. We’re staying until the forest trusts us.”

Rarity’s mouth opened wide, and Twilight knew she was about to start whining.

“Name your price.”

Rarity was silent for a moment, her mouth hanging open, ready to explode, but a wire had been cut. “W-What?”

“Name your price. I’ll pay it. Same for all of you. We’re staying here.”

Rarity’s mouth closed and opened again. “Uh—Twilight—“

Twilight turned to Applejack. The pain was really quite intense now, a background radiation that burned her mind from the inside out. It was remarkably clarifying. “Send the Cerberus back for food and water. I’ll compensate you later. Tank can write it all down. Fluttershy, can the serpent stay here for a few days—“

“A few days?” Rarity shrieked. The forest rumbled. Twilight heard roots slithering across the leaves and dirt.

“Yes, a few days,” Twilight said. “I will pay for it all, so keep it down. Fluttershy, is the serpent okay here?” Fluttershy nodded. “Good. I think it’s night time, so you all should get some sleep. Tank and I will entertain each other.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Ow—yes.”

“Don’t play cards with Tank,” Rainbow Dash warned. “She’s the best bluffer I’ve ever met.”

“Good advice. Good night.”

The ponies settled down to sleep, except for Rarity, who seemed to be struggling with the idea of dirt as something that didn’t only happen to other ponies. Finally she managed to nudge the other three into a sort of living pillow and lay down on them, still whimpering like something inside of her had broken utterly.

Then it was night, finally. Twilight allowed herself to focus on the the ache behind her eyes and in her legs, which was better than the piercing pain in her horn. She wondered where Nightmare Moon—no, where Princess Luna was, and what she was thinking, if she liked the pollen, hated it, or was somewhere else entirely. Even the dark Alicorn herself had not been able to block Princess Celestia’s sun so effectively….

Dark as the night was, it wasn’t silent. Leaves rustled, things slid across the dirt, roots shifted, trunks groaned, and, every fifteen minutes or so, a boof shuddered through the ground, shaking them. The other ponies shifted and mumbled, except for Rarity, who screamed quietly every time it happened.

Twilight wanted a way to track the time without the sun. After a bit of trial and error she managed to construct a makeshift hourglass out of the dirt, nothing precise but good enough. Tank tapped her on the knee and scratched at the ground. It took Twilight a while to understand, but eventually she traced a chessboard for them and gathered bits of stick and rock to represent the pieces. She made a second hourglass, and they played. Tank moved slowly, which gave Twilight time to think. And realize.

She was playing chess. With hourglasses.

Twilight thought a bad word.(1)

“Tank,” she said, as the tortoise indicated she wanted to move her knight(2), “Have you ever had the feeling you’re just a pawn on a chessboard being manipulated by forces beyond your comprehension?”

Tank watched Twilight move her piece for her. After a few minutes of reflection, she shook her head no. Twilight considered her next move.

“Is that because you and Rainbow Dash bought the chessboard?”

Another long pause. Nod.

Twilight, who hadn’t yet learned to pay much attention to her friends’ advice, took the idea to heart.

Time passed, about three days, by Twilight’s reckoning. They ate apples and drank the water the Cerberus brought. Tank kept them entertained with lessons on probability theory, accounting practice and legal history. Rarity and Twilight alternated sleep schedules, and when Rarity tired, Twilight crawled into the sky serpent’s mouth to catch a few hours of sleep. Meanwhile, she was thinking.

When they could afford no more time, Twilight teleported out of the sky serpent—just in time, as the serpent had started to produce stomach acid—and roused the other ponies.

“We are the ponies of no system,” Twilight declared. Dragged kicking and screaming indeed! “No hoof can arrange us like pieces upon a chessboard—“

“Huh?” Rainbow Dash said tiredly. They were all deeply exhausted. Three days of inactivity in near-total darkness had taken its toll.

“—We have our own principles of motion, and we are not aimed at checkmate but to save our friend. Also the world I guess.”

Twilight slowly approached the fortress of trees. They drew back, shuddering violently, and vines shot forward but didn’t touch Twilight as she walked through them to the base of a tall trunk.

“I’m going to be myself,” Twilight said softly, almost cooing, like she sometimes did to Spike. “No matter what I do. And if we’re different, forest, I want you to be true to you. If you work with me, we can put our differences aside. I promise you ponies and trees can stick together to save Equestria’s hide. Er, bark.”

There was a moment of tense silence, and then Twilight heard a voice.

“Twilight?”

“Pinkie? Pinkie!”

The other ponies joined her. “Pinkie! Are you okay? What happened? Is it really you?”

“Um…well, the forest and I had a little disagreement, I guess, and um, it’s been a while, I suppose. There, uh, wasn’t much to eat, and the blue flowers I used in my cupcakes seemed edible, and uh, I think I have telepathic powers now. I’ve been using them to talk to her.”

Twilight blinked. “Pinkie—“

“Also I can fly. Anyway, I think the forest wants me to help translate.”

1) ”Drat.”

2) Normally represented as a hunched-over primate.