Chapters Prologue: A Spell Just Right
“I have something extremely important to tell you about the future, and I only have a few seconds so you’ve got to listen! Whatever you do, don’t - !”
Then white light flared and burned everything away – the last week, the kempt and relatively unruffled Twilight Sparkle fussing over her schedule in the library, and the real, original time-traveling Twilight Sparkle’s voice, rising into it to be enveloped along with its message.
White light.
Everything was gone.
As it died down, winding and whining like a camera flash and still hot in Twilight’s good eye (good eye?), she could see all in a moment that the magic had burnt off and dropped her back into her proper place in space and time – Tuesday morning, Canterlot Archives, Star Swirl the Bearded Wing, back from time travel. She was too dazed to remember why Pinkie Pie and Spike were with her in black bodysuits to match (why match?), staring at her in questioning. There was a pressure around her head and her mane itched.
Words fell out. “…waste your time…”
Her memory settled in strands as her head cleared. She remembered standing face to face with herself, just before the spell wore off, and before that, seeing a grizzled version of herself, frazzled mane, scratched face, tattered black clothes, wearing a bandage around her head and an eyepatch – and by Celestia, she had looked ridiculous.
“…worrying…”
And what for? She would’ve shaken out her head just for good measure if her thoughts hadn’t so swiftly begun refocusing and restoring themselves. She remembered a visitation from her future self from this Tuesday morning, that is, this morning, then singed mane – Spike’s fire – and cutting her cheek; going to Pinkie’s, where a shard from a falling flowerpot had nicked her on the head; and looking at something very bright and burning out her eye –she’d stared at the sun through her telescope. Then she’d traveled through time, to avoid the events that had created that future Twilight Sparkle.
“…about…”
Now she was here, in the royal library, after a successful step back in time, grizzled with frazzled mane, a scratched face, and tattered black clothes, wearing a bandage around her head and an eye patch. And by Celestia, she looked ridiculous.
She pressed her front hoof into her face.
“…I can’t believe I just did that.”
“Did you tell her about the cool birthday present?” Pinkie inquired through her cotton candy pony terminal from someplace high and floating.
“Remember last week when Future Twilight came to warn me about something?” There it was – she remembered exactly how this had all played out now, and now it was preposterously obvious. Had it really all been so scrambled up until just now that she hadn’t seen what she was doing? “That was me trying to warn myself not to worry so much. Now I’m gonna spend the next week freaking out about a disaster that doesn’t even exist!”
“Aww, don’t worry about it! It’s Past Twilight’s problem now.”
Twilight giggled. “I guess you’re right, Pinkie.” It had been her problem already, but now it wasn't, and Past Twilight would get to this point just past it, too. What's coming is coming, and what's done is done: a neat and complete lesson for a letter to the Princess, if nothing better presented itself in the week.
Spike moaned.
Just the way she had already let him eat... Well, she couldn’t quite place a number to how many tubs of ice cream Spike had eaten while she was preoccupied.
“My stomach... I think it’s all that ice cream. I thought the stomachache would be Future Spike’s problem... Now I am Future Spike.”
Twilight took a telekinetic hold of the bloated little dragon as she laughed along with Pinkie. “Come on, Future Spike.” He bounced slightly when she plopped him onto her back. “Let’s get you home.”
What's done is done and consequences are consequences. She tried not to think of all the rescheduling and makeup chores that she’d left herself in the past few days – one step at a time, now. That beautiful sunrise would be the most fitting place to start. She had welcomed in a lovely and promising day, now, and as for the rest, perhaps a bit of mental scheduling within the day and no later was warranted. She would have to get Spike comfortable at home and clean herself up, of course. Maybe fix him a bit of tea – ginger ale may be too sweet for him at the moment. Ginger tea instead? She’d need to buy some after dropping him off to rest at the library, and perhaps replacement ice cream while she was shopping, if he could stand it any time in the next month. While she was home she’d peek into the fridge for a more complete shopping list. After that, she took the opportunity to ask Pinkie if she expected to have the time to make up for their missed lunch, and she seemed delighted.
Tonight, she could sort through all her necessary untouched work. She would simply pick up where she left off – and try to wind down her nerves enough to catch up on sleep. With any time between that, she could freely read about anything but time spells until she’d sufficiently laughed off the past few days’ neuroticism. She didn’t need to worry about time for a while – better not to even think about it on anything but the simplest level. Of course, once the applications of time spells ceased to tempt, they ought to be a rich personal research topic. She hadn’t ever exerted the necessary excess mental energy on trotting through theories of time travel and their paradoxical mazes due to the implausibility of any solid useful fact. Now, however, she knew ponies had created workable time spells, and she had tested one for herself – not that she’d dabble in them any more, but there was a library's shelf of guidance on enormous-scale spells, marked and pointing her off to cosmically ambitious magical insight...
For the future. For now, she wasn't playing with tense.
When she was ready, she’d read theory that there is no real "changing" the past – rather plowing off a set path of time and pulling it redirected. The new path, as she would read on, would loop back into itself once more to account for visitation from a “Future Pony” and then carry on. She would then mark that “Interesting” and store it in a drawer in her mental files with other so-deemed time spells. She isn’t going to know what exactly happened on the closed time loop, as the white flash that took her through time again swallowed it up, and it faded with it.
In the most decisive difference on the closed loop from her redirected course, Twilight had been shelving books when a moment – just one moment – of silence had held her still, across which, trailed thin on a long-distance flight, had come a scream.
She’d heard books thudding over the floor, caught on the edge of the shelf and knocked out of her telekinetic grip when she’d turned her head to the door, ears swiveled forward; and Spike pattering down the stairs, a modest half-cup of ice cream dissolved into his system by then from the night before. “What’s goin’ on, Twilight?”
“Did you hear that?”
“Well, yeah . That’s why I asked, what’s going...”
The door had slammed open and Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Pinkie Pie had had Twilight and her dragon ward surrounded in a three-mare stampede, and by the time it had occurred to Twilight that they were indeed there, Rainbow had been skimming the shelves on the wing and Pinkie had been rifling through the loose books on the floor and tables.
Applejack had pulled her attention to a focus in front of her, lasso fastened to her saddlebag, actively smiling and taking quick, rough breaths through her nostrils. “Hey, Twilight... ya got anything here on barn-sized, three-headed monster dogs?”
That had been sometime after the point to which she would’ve looped back later on, but panic had hit far more acutely than it had after her encounter with herself in the redone past.
She had leaped straight in the air and drilled forward with questions, asking Applejack how long Cerberus had been in Ponyville, which she hadn’t been able to answer. While Spike had asked her what she was flipping out over – or freaking out, she had certainly heard him say something through the sounds of the re-disorganization of her organized books books – she had tried to steady herself and gather the facts. She’d looked Applejack in her ain’t-nothing-I-can't-handle smiling face and with a breath told her what she knew. The enormous three-headed dog was Cerberus – it was the only monster that fit that description – and Cerberus was the guard dog of the gates of Tartarus, the site of the confinement of the deadliest, most beastly beasts ponykind had ever seen, and plenty it probably hadn’t.
“We share Equestria with enough carnivorous and malevolent species as it is to fill entire book collections. And ponies have !” she had asserted, brandishing examples, at least four imposing, darkly-bound compendiums at a blanching farmpony. Applejack had winced as she'd watched them flop, spines up and covers wide, onto the muddle on the floor. In only tens of seconds of ransacking and pulling and rejection, books had gone spilling and pooling around their shelves like water through a cracked floodgate. Twilight had continued, pawing the floor with one forehoof in a peaking anxiety. “If Tartarus is left unguarded for even a second too long...”
An explosion of sound – a rumbling and booming bark wound from three very slightly different dog voices – had jarred and rattled the air and the heads of the ponies occupying it. Rainbow and Pinkie had been stunned, and frantic jabber from outside had boiled and bubbled at once into the place of the paper and binding sounds. Another mare had screamed, very close now.
Twilight’s knees had nearly knocked loose between her planted hooves when she’d opened the door for herself and seen Cerberus, black, Ursa-like, hot-eyed, and hulking, on the street immediately in front of the library, straining to crane all three heads to look over his boulder shoulders, growling an earthquake.
At something .
The unicorn had felt her eyes go wide and just become aware of Spike’s claw on her side, and told the dragon to hide, swiveling into him and blocking the doorway just as Cerberus barreled on and the air’s temperature intensified. A fire-colored herd of something had appeared on the horizon and blasted into closeness before blazing past. She had closed her eyes and pressed against Spike, the thought that a dragon ought to have a greater resistance to fire than her half striking her by the time she thought she smelled burning mane.
The first traces of the closed time loop back into the past to have been erased from Twilight’s mind were the fresher ones.
She had made her way into Canterlot Palace hugging close to the walls in a black bodysuit for the sake of unobtrusiveness, just in case anything nasty had crawled into the castle in all the panic outside. Wards had been placed over every civilian area in Canterlot as far as the Princesses and the city's mages could manage, leaving the unshielded, trooped palace leaning out like a lightningrod, which the princesses had claimed was all the better to keep the swarming monsters in one place. Twilight herself had encountered nothing but guards repositioning here and there inside. Her suit and hide were a bit scratched and battered and she’d put a patch over her eye when some serpentine thing had spat in it, and she’d benefited from pausing in every fifth corner for a few breaths but could have used more.
On her way to the Canterlot Archives, she’d galloped a parapet wall, head bowed while watching the still red-and-violet-and-magenta starry sky for the shadows and occasional glowing projectile. She’d broken her stride first on hearing a warped shriek beside her. When she’d turned, she’d flinched on seeing a large brown bird with an improbably-shaped beak held in place across the crenellations from her in a unicorn guard’s telekinetic field. The guard had told her good luck between grunts, and then with a rearing swing of his head hurled it off like a bull between flashing spat fireballs.
The second time had been on hearing a neigh, high, distinct, and melodiously important, giving her a flicker of a memory of academy bells. When she had made it to the crenellations to peer onto the defense on the ground, Celestia hadn’t quite touched down from rearing to rally the guards behind her. Her wings remained spread and Twilight had still heard and felt the call from her point further behind the guards. She had swallowed hard and imagined herself springing down and telling the princess that she would fight with her and do what work her well-trained magic could, like the faithful student she had been since that day she'd earned her cutie mark. She had thought of herself standing back-to-back with the princess, shielding her with her magic until they – the two of them – had sufficiently thinned that swarm of imps scrambling toward the palace, She could go on to the Archives after that – they weren’t going anywhere unless the castle was ransacked.
Her horn had glowed and she’d started to hold onto and raise herself.
Then she’d blinked at a spot on the horizon, just a bit darker than the sky around it. The imps had been serving as an entourage for something very large. Time stopped and slowed and sped around it - comets were pulled from the sky and then plastered against it to trickle diagonals. A pale pink circle of the morning had been blocked had radiated behind it, then sunset orange swelled inside that. A black hole had opened up in her stomach and an inarticulate realization told her that either way, there was absolutely no going back.
Just as Celestia had lowered her horn and begun charging a spell, Twilight had wrenched herself away from the barrier and galloped with all force for the end of the wall, to the Canterlot Archives where something forced the sand spewing down from the top of the large decorative hourglass to the bottom, hoping that she'd gathered it all properly to here and she could pull a spell in time to leap back to last week and pull everything, herself, Spike, her schedule, the Princess, and the entirety of Equestria, place and being, to veer away. It was a long shot when nopony had been able to tell her when Cerberus had left the gates or when the first monsters had surfaced in the first place, but anything could be done.
The best she had been able to do at a message for Past Twilight by the time she had made it had been “Don’t let your guard down!” The message she accidentally delivered to herself was in all likelihood more personally useful.
Celestia hadn’t even been pulled into her fight with that something very large.
Chapter 1: Ponyville Routine
The sky seemed a darker gray than it ought to have been on a decent day of any weather. The street stretched without a soul both ways, with the houses dead-eyed, windows just as gray as the sky. A few were deserted - even after the roundups had gotten underway, a few ponies had found it best for their peace of mind that they settle somewhere, anywhere, further from Tartarus than Ponyville. And all three of the dresses Rarity had posted in front of the boutique days ago – beautiful dresses with ribbons and pleats and tags bearing modest, repeatedly slashed-through prices flapping out from the lapels, turned-over old hats on the ground for each in case somepony in a flash of charity or pity felt obliged to actually pay the price – were still untouched.
In the previous weeks, as her sales had dropped, she had sunk through and past levels of impatience, indignation, desperation, and solid disappointment. By now she had slid into clean and tired hopelessness, and could not seem to feel surprised.
She inhaled, long and deep enough to air herself out whatever little buzzing haze of stress her system still had not quite given up on producing. Then she pulled the tags off the dresses to mark down one last time and returned inside. Her hooves on the flooring still jarred her groggy and unbecomingly irritable mind. Of all ponies to have left to fight with Celestia, Twilight could've and would have measured and accounted for all the time Canterlot had lost attempting to push the sun and moon into motion without the princess’ magic, and drawn up a schedule in loving faithfulness to her teacher’s. Twilight had left before any such action was called for, and now Rarity – everypony, probably – slept restless, broken, misplaced hours that were inevitably, by some standard, the wrong ones. Wrong amount of light, wrong space between periods of sleep, or all the worst of both.
It was easy enough to do something unproductive in an unproductive mode. She set the tags down to let them wait and watched the blank in her mind, and from a cramped and gone-stuffy place inside her, in dropped the idea to make another unsellable dress.
There was more point in keeping her trade sharp than doing more tidying up. Though she was the only pony to enjoy it, the inside of the boutique was flawless - spotless, stainless, Rarity’s image in each of the mirrors greeting her across the main room was smudgeless, catching and copying every step she made as she crossed the room as a perfect Rarity in Glass. Hardly a one of her mannequins was undressed, and every presentable one was coordinated in its position in the windows. Tools were stored. Fabric was shelved - she drew two sheets.
Her hooves continued their strangely noisy clacking across the floor.
Her inspiration room, quite contrastingly, was fertile, in the same ungainly, filthy way as rotting mulch and mossy slush-mud, and she had worked as hard here as she had elsewhere on the opposite to ensure that nothing was in place. Once, she had even danced, improvising use of any string of beads or box of paper she caught in a spontaneous telekinetic grab as a prop, and sworn Opalescence to secrecy afterwards.
She flapped her cloth, a pale yellow sheet and a baby blue, down at the sewing machine, richly surrounded in the middle of the back wall. In the flash of her horn she felt another short, plunging pang of sleepiness, which faded as the machine revved. She guided with her forehooves and the needle worked and weaved in a measured pattern, behind its punching and pulling leaving a tail of uniform and straight-line stitches at five times the rate of the most perfectionist and practiced horn work.
She had written a report on the inventor of the Equestrian sewing machine once as a filly, with a picture of the severe white-coated and strawberry-maned Fine Eye secured at the top and perfect center with a border of tape. This had been months after discovering her affinity for clothes-making but before she’d gotten her cutie mark, and she’d privately pouted at a picture of Fine Eye’s, a thread looping through a silver needle. Rarity was one of the ponies who'd tried on figurative hats of every kind as a foal – not the everything Sweetie Belle dabbled in now with her foal friends and hopefully kept herself pleasantly distracted with in Manehattan with their parents, but crafting: she’d taken turns sculpting, gardening, and painting, and then aborted before one of the stains on her lovely white coat could refuse to clean; cooking, which she had also shied away from while she was ahead with a hint of hard-forgotten guilt as she’d watched what had gone into her first cheesecake, even with her immature understanding of nutrition; and a bit of splashing her hooves into poetry, which had just been wrong, too quiet, and passive, and vague, waiting to be read and folding to a pony’s interpretation, not bold enough to hold, exist, and flirt, though she wouldn’t have put it that way then. Anyhow, she had gotten to know a passing phase when she fell under the influence of one, somewhere inside. Design and dressmaking hadn’t been one. When a whole school play's costumes hadn't brought out her cutie mark, she'd wondered with exasperation what possibly could.
And yet her special talent was not in fact gems any more than Fluttershy’s was butterflies.
Not that selling gems would serve her any better than selling dresses under these conditions.
Something moved lightly outside. In the very top of her vision was a little breeze of color, pink and yellow. The fabric and machine stopped between her hooves as she looked up. Gone.
She was on her hooves and to the front again, heart having picked up some speed and a dizziness flushing in and out of her head.
However long or short she’d been sewing, the streets were no longer empty. A warm little charge began to pick up in her brain and her ears twitched at the clusters of ponies gathering along the sides. Two royal guards in full armor started to pick up passengers down the street and a few Pegasi started to lower themselves from overhead, each one picking a gathered party and clopping to the ground nearby.
Rarity quickened her trot. Along the way down the street, a trio of mares group-hugged a friend home. She caught a glance of Ditzy Doo and Dinky past the greetings and in the middle of talking with no sign of relief; Ditzy’s mailbags were as bulky as they had been when she had taken off. Rarity leaned her neck a bit toward them as she passed. Ditzy said, “They weren’t letting anypony in.” Then with a slight sad lilt, “Not even to deliver the Cloudsdale Pegasus ponies’ mail from their friends!”
Rarity felt her mouth twist and a crawling along her spine.
Around a bend, Fluttershy hovered over Applejack in her wagon, where the latter had a snake-faced, gremlin-like straggler from the roundup boxed behind her pinned with a hoof planted in its back and a rope around its waist. She caught Fluttershy shaking her head slowly and a grunt from the scowling Applejack through the rope in her teeth, giving it a sharp tug. Then the Pegasus’s ears perked and head turned and the other’s attention followed hers.
“A good afternoon to you both,” Rarity called.
“Oh – hello, Rarity.” Fluttershy floated a concerned look back down at the earth mare, who had begun hustling with the rope to secure her catch.
“And Applejack.”
“Howdy, Rarity.” The farm pony grunted again as she pulled a knot tight, wringing a yelp out of the gremlin. She tossed her head and scattered sweat off her forelock, and took a breath. “We got nothing on Rainbow.”
“No. I’m sorry. I asked and asked the guards, bu-but they turned everypony away because it was too dangerous to go inside the city.”
“Didja really, sugarcube?”
“Oh, I tried being assertive!" Fluttershy's eyes were huge and her legs were tucked tight. "I was there for our friend, after all...”
Cloudsdale had been dangerous. Rarity lashed her tail at invisible bugs – invisible, but apparently real enough to aggravate that crawling enough to have her twitching. “I did overhear a bit from the mailmare.” She leaned in, narrowing her eyes, checking their messenger for anything she hadn’t realized she’d brought back – tension, scuffs, wear and tear that Rarity probably couldn’t interpret even if she caught it. “Did you happen to... see anything?”
She softened when Fluttershy cringed just before she began mumbling her response. “N-no... Plenty of us asked what was going on, but they wouldn’t say anything. They must have wanted to avoid, um – causing a panic.”
Anypony would have noticed a phantom storm or some sort of weather factory catastrophe even from the ground near Cloudsdale, surely. A fresh monster infestation, then? She tried to imagine Rainbow Dash and the Wonderbolts outraced and outfought by Tartarus birds. When she succeeded, she instead tried to settle herself weighing its probability and stomping in her decision on preposterously bad – the Sonic Rainboom pony, caught and eaten?
“Hey, uh, Rare...” Her attention snapped back outward to the mare in the cart, who had put on a slightly taut, rather sympathetic smile. The dramatic wears her heart on her fetlock again! Applejack turned away and then back with a basket in her teeth. Rarity cocked her head when, as she realized in a snap, she should have been bracing herself as the basket slipped just out of the edge of her telekinetic focus, and out from the pink checked cloth cover spilled a dozen apples, rolling and scattering. Rarity squeaked and swiveled on her hind legs, righting the basket, lifting the cloth, catching, replacing and rearranging. Applejack chuckled. “Yer late, you know. Big Macintosh already left with the Chokago shipment, but we remembered to save y’all some of what we got.”
Rarity satisfied herself with the fold of the cloth and offered up a somewhat sheepish smile, tempered from crashing gratitude and embarrassment at the ungraceful scramble. “Well, I am most thankful. I hope you don’t mind if I return home for my coin purse...”
“Don’t you worry none about the price. That basket’s on the Apple family.”
“Really?” The unicorn stood stalk straight again. “Surely, you...”
“We don’t need anything from you – no offense a' course. You know how rough business is lately. Everypony’s gotten so tight with their bits that prices on everything else keep gettin’ lower and lower. But...” A shrug emphasized her brightened grin. “We all gotta eat, and though the orchard's been better, we’re gettin’ by on our sales.”
“Well, I’m delighted to hear so.” And Rarity was too tired and now in addition too soothed and swept-over with appreciation to challenge the Element of Stubbornness in charity. It had only occurred to her while Applejack spoke that she had hardly eaten since yesterday’s lunch. She smiled her sweetest and bowed her head once to each of the others “Thank you so much, Applejack. And you, too, Fluttershy – don’t you dare fret about Cloudsdale. It was entirely out of your hooves.”
They’d already increase their fretting about Rainbow Dash enough to compensate, after all. Still, Fluttershy’s polite smile outdid anypony’s in sweetness as was Fluttershy's manner. The very concept of fretting blew away for a just moment, and settled itself back in.
“And take care, both of you.”
“We ain’t had any accidents yet! By now, Cerberus’s gonna roll over for Fluttershy when he smells her coming. Anyway, see y’all later.”
Rarity leaned down to the basket handle and imagined herself biting down, her nose that close to those dozen fresh express gift apples, and her stomach growled, and she grimaced. She glanced up to see if either of the others had reacted, but Applejack was busy hitching herself to the cart, with Fluttershy offering her help, settling on the ground. With a conclusive “Farewell!” she turned herself away with the basket hovering in blue light next to her head.
The cart rolled away behind her, the rumble of the wheels and one strangely petulant, foal-like howl from one of the creatures in the cages. And there went Applejack and Fluttershy, along with Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash in cleaning the Tartarus mess.
She returned home and set the basket on the clear kitchen counter, then lifted up the cloth, and willfully lay herself into a trance on the apples. They had a hot-stone red glow and their smell rose off of them like a sweet heat wave. She hadn't needed the reminder that Sweet Apple Acres was hardly at its peak – at least the farm had survived the rush of alien pests and stampedes of fire-breathing, fire-hooved monsters. But the orchard had been in that state for some time. Rarity lifted her pick, pinched the skin to popping between her teeth, and sucked on the bit of applemeat in her mouth. It was the best she had had in recent memory, which was more than enough. She took another bite, and another, and another.
Everypony had to eat, indeed. That was why Pinkie Pie could be counted on not to disappear from Ponyville to the extent that the capricious pony could be counted on for anything. The town loved Mr. and Mrs. Cake and their baking, the couple had twin foals to raise, and they too received fairly regular donations and discounted offers of ingredients from Sweet Apple Acres. Sugarcube Corner remained where and as it always stood.
Rarity chipped a last nibble out of the core and dropped it into the garbage. Perhaps she would see Pinkie. And decide on the way whether it was better that she did or didn’t pass on the news from Cloudsdale.
Ah, but first –
She snatched the dress tags off the table in the main room and with a purple pen - she had already used pink and blue - slashed through the numbers and worked in halved ones underneath, and returned to the three dresses in the front, tucking each one's tag back into place.
“Ohh, wait! Two more, please!”
Rarity’s head whipped back to the street, where on the other side Berry Punch had waylaid a cabbie. She flipped him two bits and two more for her little sister and they boarded his wagon. He gawked on and the two other passengers had worked through their surprise enough to look at her with annoyance.
She hadn’t seen Berry Punch take one of the cabs out of Ponyville before – she knew most of the ponies who would have had reason to do so, and she and her sister had no luggage on them apart from saddlebags.
“Good afternoon, Berry Punch!”
The magenta mare started and looked up – at the sky.
“Over here!”
She leaned over the front of the wagon while the cabbie watched her with his head ducked in crushing secondhand embarrassment, then behind. One of the other passengers shook her head.
Rarity joined her – pity, not exasperation, dear, everypony has their moments – and cantered to the side of the cart. “I’m right here, darling.”
Berry Punch started again. A look of borderline intoxicated relief seeped over her when she finally looked down and locked eyes with, gripped, and recognized the owner of the voice that had called her out. “Hi, Rarity. I wasn’t sure you were still in town.”
A blindingly hot and yellow light flashed in the unicorn’s mind. She gritted her teeth when she smiled. “I’ve been spending most of my time in the boutique, I’m afraid.” The truth - bracingly embarrassing when used. “You have business elsewhere?”
She nodded once, neck-snappingly hard, pleased as punch in a way that showed all across her face. “Yeah. This wagon’s going to Chokago. There’s an apple cider place there that’s to – die – for, or, y’know, so I hear, and we’ve got to check it out at least once...”
Her two fellow passengers looked at each other with knowing, dreamy sparkles in their eyes. All of the ponies in the cab were bound for the exact same place. To buy the exact same thing. That hot light flickered back up to single-lightbulb level. The unicorn’s ear flicked. “Apple cider... in the middle of spring?”
“I know!” Berry Punch whinnied with laughter. “A place that cells cider year-round! What could be better? I guess I’m gonna have somewhere new to take the bits I’ve been saving up! I can’t wait!’
“And neither can I,” muttered the stallion behind her, his remark and the rapping of his hoof on his side of the wagon blowing around and past Berry’s ears.
Oh, everypony’s got to drink! flared through Rarity’s brain. And then, silently scoffing, Cider! She suppressed a shudder – and then wondered what was so terrible about cider.
The apple cider was being sold in Chokago – and then she remembered that was where Big Macintosh had sent the apples early. A buyer in Chokago was one of the places keeping Sweet Apple Acres healthy. It was logical that a cider seller would buy capital from a stable producer and ponies piggybacked on the profit of other ponies, naturally.
The yellow flash solidified itself into a spur and bit down.
“Forgive me, do you mind, sir?” she said to the cabbie with a token flutter of her eyelashes. “Just one more passenger.”
She was back in, then back out with her saddlebags fastened and the bits that she would have likely given to Applejack earlier otherwise at the ready. She paid the cabbie and boarded. The cabbie sweated as his legs churned and brought his two-mares-and-a-foal heavier cab back to rattling momentum.
Chapter 2: The Cider House
Rarity hadn’t been to Chokago. She’d heard little enough about it in relation to her personal interests that she’d seldom ever remembered there was such a place clearly enough to talk about it. But she might have tried a few visits by now, if she had known it wasn’t so far from Ponyville. That four ponies were willing to take a cab ride there for cider had first told her that. On the ride, the royal guards where Ponyville’s houses ended saw the wagon off and wished the cabbie a safe crossing, and then they’d climbed a hill, short on Ponyville’s side, on the other sloping long and on to a metropolitan gate across the horizon with angular buildings pointing up into the sky. A few stars had appeared; a few lights were on, setting armor on aerial sentries who passed close shining with goldenness barely detectable at their distance.
The other passengers’ eyes widened as the wagon lowered and Rarity would have sworn she heard Berry Punch salivating with her squealing gasp of anticipation – it was best that she didn’t look, instead peering around Berry and squinting at the lights while racking her memory for what was inside that much city that missed Ponyville. She knew there were restaurants, though the names and specialties escaped her. And she’d read the name of a well-regarded art gallery, or two, or three. Silly her – this would have been an excellent place for social activities, wouldn’t it? She and Twilight, Spike, Fluttershy, Pinkie, Rainbow, and Applejack could have ridden there the week after the Grand Galloping Gala and on her sales of party clothes she could have paid for a lunch for six, appetizers, entrée, and a shared dessert, and her budget at the time just may have allowed for her admission if not two or three other ponies’ to an art museum.
On the left passed a battered sticks-and-charcoal tree. On the right they passed a Welcome to CHOKAGO sign under the lettering of which a painted white Pegasus swooped and curved up into the corner as suggested by speed lines. Where they began was marked by a strange, bloodless sort of splatter of stuck, flapping pink feathers from a real Pegasus pony. From a scuffle with another pony, Rarity hoped, though no explanation her imagination played her failed to perturb.
With the welcome-in of the guards posted at Chokago’s own border, the cab had crossed.
The street leading further in was wider than any in Ponyville and had begun widening to that point as the ground had started to level. Rarity had realized she’d been looking forward to the inside of the city holding a bit more noise than that of back in town, and found herself jerked into a chilly disapproval, which she raised to express with a practiced pout that nopony noticed to ask about. The street was lined with yellowish lights on sleek black posts that lit a few colored awnings. Someplace that might have been a diner was lit further down, with the dark curved line of printing on the window standing out in shadow. One other wagon rolled solitary beyond that, without a single head above the silhouette of the cart. Rarity’s expectation – a perfectly reasonable one, if from past experiences in less thought-troubled times – was that all respectable cities had their nightly business to attend to, constant movement and productivity, and as all of these tidbits gathered in passing and now rising to the visit made plain, Chokago was, or at least had been, a perfectly good city.
She felt a brief shock of surprise when the cab turned down a narrower side street. Her face turned up along the walls to the lane of sky between the edges of the roofs, which was now murky purple, and she faced forward again. There was still not a pony on either sidewalk. There were no wagons in sight either – it struck that they hadn’t passed Big Macintosh on the way from Ponyville. But there were more bright windows and doorways. They’d be moving along the edge of the city rather than into its center, but activity increased anywhere past the entrance.
In another turn, the wagon passed by a strolling earth stallion, unless Rarity had missed a horn, who the mare whose name she wasn’t sure of called out a “Hey!” to. The little golden spur that had run Rarity into the cart returned with a sudden nip and she found herself turning to examine this first Chokagan specimen, but didn’t catch much but the white tail and green in his cutie mark and that he didn’t – somehow just didn’t – look like he would have come from the cider place.
Her forehoof had started to drum on the edge of the cart. She asked if they were close. “Aaalmost,” said the stallion.
The section of street spread to twice the width of the previous one. The cabbie pulled to the side just before its end. The cab hadn’t even quite stopped before Berry Punch let go a schoolfilly-like “This is it!” and scrambled out – nearly at the same time as the mare Rarity didn’t know, slamming sidelong into her but loosing herself first with a lucky and accidental kick. She landed with all fours slightly splayed on the sidewalk, her sister skipped out after her, and the stallion and mare disembarked.
Rarity paused to scan their stop. Underneath a red awning with a white trim – apple colors, of course – were widely-arched wooden double doors, marked symmetrically by a quaintly-carved apple, dark red curtains on either side hiding any windows in the front. She searched for an establishment name, but instead locked eyes with Berry Punch and was so puzzled to see that the other four hadn’t opened those doors yet that anything she was looking for spun away.
“Aren’t you coming, too?”
Her tail lashed and she hopped out, bobbed a “Thank you, sir” to the cabbie without looking back longer, and trotted to join the group, then to lead it.
Ponies’ voices and a little of a melody and pulses of beat thrummed out through the door. Rarity recoiled at a tingle down her neck and under her hooves as a wonder hit her whether the city had gotten filthier the further along they’d moved as well. She shook her back leg slightly and inspected the floor around her for puddles and her legs for stains, turning to do so. The cab was gone. Just behind her, the mare had her head cocked, the stallion looked away, and the Punch sisters stared at her in some inarticulate question.
A flustering chased through her and made her shudder – she felt her face starting to flush and she turned away and thrust her chin up to hide her face and shake the feeling loose, calling her dignity back into place: well, now, they didn’t have to wait for her. But if they were so insistent upon it...
She lifted a hoof flat to each door and pushed.
Through the doorway blasted an instant explosion of color and vivacity.
Rarity’s eyes popped. Ponies were already about their nightly business after all, it seemed – mares and stallions collected in rolling groups everywhere clear of the doors with enough space between crowds for a single pony to wriggle through. She glimpsed wings and horns and rainbow colors and what she was rather certain were artificial colors, and a constant gabbing; a wheezy laugh sawed out over the voices, and the singing coming from inside and out of sight, somewhere to the left.
Something nudged against her side and jolted her back to full consciousness – she looked down at the green mane of the mare, who, along with the stallion following suit, appeared to be done waiting behind. Rarity sniffed back an indignant snort and stepped aside to hold the left door open, letting Berry Punch and her sister inside first, glancing about herself to gauge any obstacles soon to be and following.
The light was dim, apart from a spotlight shining down onto the center of most of the congregation on the lounge’s left side, perhaps a stage, from the opposite edge of the ceiling. She had been right about the wriggling, wriggling after the pink mares on their way to the counter in the back as she made her assessments, past strange ponies, her teeth gritting as she bent strange wings and brushing up against strange sets of flanks – even though the hall was of a good size, impressive for anypony to muster the funds to rent out in a populous city. And the air was muggy, moist and apple juice-scented from drinks and the breaths and inevitable sweat of so many ponies splurging on cider!
Berry Punch turned left and Rarity jerked right to break through a pony wall to a space in the corner and panted, catching her breath and cooling herself of a fresh heat of frustration. Her ears pricked as a wolf-whistle needled into her brain from just in front of her. The first thing she looked up to see was the surface of a billiards table, a pony standing on each end: a green earth stallion and a striped mare, perhaps zebra, with a white stick poking out of her mouth that lost any mystery when Rarity caught a slight round bulge of her cheek. The whistler was a cream-colored Pegasus sitting on a sofa behind, but all three watched her, and she hauled and threw back their sport the best she could with a hauteur-heavy raise of her brow.
While the billiards ponies smirked back at the Pegasus, she scanned the bar for Berry Punch, who popped her head over the crowd and waved her over with an ebullient grin. The unicorn pushed through to her, taking some care to keep her hips relatively still as she turned them on the billiards table, and broke through to air again, sliding with a thank-you to good fortune into an empty stool to the earth pony’s left. “Berry Punch, dear, are you quite certain your little sister should be in a place like this?” She motioned across Berry’s length of counter to the little filly bouncing on her stool on the other side and met the addressee’s look with a teeth-clenched smile. She didn’t especially want to look back to the gambling corner.
Berry Punch gave her big, blank, sparkling grape juice eyes. “Fillies should have fun , Rarity.”
And this was the mare who had outraced her Sweetie Belle and her in the Sisterhooves Social, the mare who rushed to deal her bits out for apple cider in a nearly stopped economy – the pressure between Rarity’s teeth increased. She didn’t think she was smiling any longer, nor was Berry Punch paying her further attention.
Berry looked along the counter one way, then the other, and finally over her shoulder, then gave the wood a sharp pound. “That’s why the server’s not coming! C’mon, Sis...”
The pink ponies slipped off their stools and out of reach of Rarity’s hooves. She called for them to wait, but they pressed on to the stage and she pressed after. The closer they went, the clearer the music played – there was a gentle piano. She looked to the left end of the stage for its player, but line of sight to it was blocked out by ponies half-sprawled across the stage, some with forelegs hooked around half-drained mugs, all gazing up at the two singers on the stage.
Rarity’s sharp gasp lasted long enough for her to hear her breath stopping.
The golden spur melted back into pure, hot light. It burned in her stomach, her chest, and even her face – she was blushing, by Celestia, why in the world was she blushing? And she knew acutely what had been so wrong about cider – grade A top-notch blow-your-horseshoes-off cider!
The two stallions were unicorns, apple-yellow coats, green eyes, peculiar red-and-white striping to their manes, identical coloration, faces, and lean, lanky proportions. And they were handsome , which raked her nerves to blistering – why did that always need to happen? It was difficult to pretend that they weren’t but she despised them. Prince Blueblood was indisputably handsome as well, and she despised him, too. All that was different was that this time, they were dressed in dark blazers and bowler hats, bringing to her mind something along the lines of legal or salesponies. Some sort of ponies who bluff for money.
The one with the moustache – Flam, or Flim, no, most likely Flam – glided to the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000, the Red Delicious engine in all its metal-tubed and embellished glory parked alongside the stage, very likely attached to the piano, she realized. He turned the valve, and set a mug foaming over.
The Flim Flam brothers were selling Apple Family cider – that was what was wrong.
“Bring in your troubles and your misery... ” he crooned, “Send ‘em floating ‘cross the amber sea! ”
He set down the mug and with a gentle push sent it skating in its own spilled foam to a spellbound Berry Punch, who Rarity had somehow and sometime found herself next to again, as Flim stepped up – and in all of one moment he recognized her, and he winked at her. A thrill of indignant horror – of all the nerve! “Everypony in? It’s warm and it’s cozy... ” He reared with a hoof extended to the gambling corner. “...And the dice are ro-o-olling! ”
“Ro-o-olling! ” the crowd echoed.
“So – take your cider, simmer down! You’ve got the greatest seats in town! Friends at your flanks, so stick around! Pack up your day! ”
They sang, staccato, synchronization in notes and that bogglingly nimble bipedal hoofwork with which they danced, cider-silly crowd enthralled, Rarity mortified.
“Swallow yourself an hour full! Let the most Great and Powerful – Trixie yours and ours – dis-ap-pear – i – fy – your – stress – a – WAAAAaaaaayyy! ”
The piano jangled to a stop under their last note. With a final chord, they sprang apart from the center of the stage off entirely. Dead in the spotlight a puff of white smoke cracked into existence and as Rarity realized what they had just sung thought she felt bile corroding her stomach and lower throat.
The smoke was scattered and blown into dissolution with the flourish of a magician’s cape. Its wearer was a young unicorn, all cloud blue with a pale mane, whose eyes skimmed over her audience, smirking down at them as she made them hers one by one - stopping at Rarity.
Rarity narrowed her eyes. The two unicorns leered at each other in a heating magnetic current before Trixie huffed and snapped the look, raising it back to the crowd, and smirked again. “Fillies and gentlecolts,” she declared with her full-lunged showmare bravado, “watch and be amazed by the feats of the most crafty – the most br-r-rilliant – the most magical of equines... the Great and Powerful TR-R-RIXIE! ”
Rarity averted her eyes quick as instinct before she could give up a moment of indulgence. All the while, Berry Punch reacted to nothing. She showed no sign of recollecting the twins’ interference last cider season or Trixie’s last spectacle in Ponyville and gaped obliviously up as she lifted her mug, and Rarity was alone among these ponies squandering away precious bits on games of pool and swindlers’ luxury beverages and parlor magic shows in a disreputable lounge in an Equestria of farmers and artists , calling out to passersby through Tartarus-trampled earth and wilderness to spare something for their work – “Berry, please – you’re not going to drink that, are you?” she hissed, peering fervently, desperately at her only remotely pleasant acquaintance.
Berry Punch didn’t hear. She brought the mug bottom of and loudly gulped, and gulped, and gulped, and gasped with some profound fulfillment. Rarity watched – her ears were flat, hooves cracking against the floor, body winding so tight it was beginning to snap muscle by muscle against itself – as her mortification was justified.
“Hey, now!” said a stallion’s voice.
Something struck her across the withers and she jerked, her head swinging back - and up. Flim had locked onto her. He had laid one of his forelegs around her shoulders and was smiling a casual, pleased smile down at her. Her head filled with a popping and sizzling.
“You’re one of the Honorary Apples, aren’t ya? Fancy meeting you here.”
Her mouth dropped open and she breathed hotly. “It’s such a small world,” she managed. Her skin crawled under his limb.
“I’ll say.” Flam had appeared on the other side. The twins had her flanked. The hair along her neck bristled. “You haven’t had a drop to drink yet, have you?”
Her eyes crossed as a fresh mug of cider closed in before her nose and she let her eyelids droop and a dry laugh puff out of her throat. “I don’t think I will.”
“Suit yourself – here, young filly, why don’t you help yourself?” Just a motion and the mug disappeared behind Berry Punch in the hooves of her foal sister. The sizzling had been under a teakettle. That kettle was now beginning to whistle. “How can we help ya, then – conversation?”
“Flam! Flim! Flam!” a third stallion voice called. Three unicorn heads turned. The whistling white Pegasus had left the corner. The kettle screeched as the Pegasus clicked his tongue with an unabashed leer. “You three know each other?”
“Oh, you could say so,” said Flim. “We met in Ponyville a while back, and, if we’re not terribly mistaken, we have some catching up to do.”
The kettle screamed and screamed and Rarity jerked her backside upward and bucked it over. “You’re not terribly mistaken,” she said. The lid popped off and the boiling water sprayed back. All over the Pegasus.
She didn’t want to. She wanted to go outside, into clearer, wind-moved air, where the light was even, the insufferable Trixie couldn’t look down at her, she could move without a bump or a boor eyeing her from the corner. But there was so very much that these two begged of her to be said.
“Straight from the pony’s mouth – go on, play another round or two while my brother and I talk to the lady!” Flim flicked his hoof back at the corner and the Pegasus rolled his eyes in humor and turned.
Flim and Flam crossed one foreleg each in front of her. “Better come with us to our V.I.P. lounge, ‘cause you, sweetheart, are a Very Important Pony and we’d be doing you a disservice if we talked with you where just anypony could listen,” one of them chattered in one half-whispering breath. She could have remarked that it wasn’t as if h was trying to sell her anything. Then again, she didn’t know that.
“’Specially those pool ponies,” said the other. “They’re trouble! ”
They exchanged a sideways look over Rarity, the significance of which she couldn’t ascertain while ducking, and steered her in a round past the stage, excusing themselves to the occasional patron in singsong. They passed the cider press with a piano fixed in the back – the pianist was a gray unicorn mare, playing with orange flashes of magic. Behind her seat was a door in a divider a foot shorter than the ceiling, which Flim opened and posed alongside on his hind legs in a display. “After you,” he said as Flam ushered her through, and shut it behind himself.
The divider didn’t muffle the sound of crackling pyrotechnics from the magic show in the main hall – merely gave the cranny some superficial autonomy from the rest of the lounge, made it a space, which it was, though the air felt no less humid. A door in the side could be assumed to lead behind the stage to a dressing or prop room, and at the back wall, the twins had snugly worked in a long red couch that they draped themselves over, watching Rarity with one pony’s keen over-interest overbearingly doubled in identical faces over a glass-topped table. She bit the inside of her cheek and took her seat against the divider.
“…You’re…” Something about the mirroring tilts of their heads and raised brows stumbled her. She caught hold of her sentence. “…using Apple Family apples, aren’t you?”
“Yyyup!” they chirruped, and winked at each other. Rarity felt a pang at the brazenness, pawed at her memory of the cider contest for any time they might have talked to Big Macintosh. Flim continued, “Rightfully bought through a proxy. They’ll have no more trouble from us ever again.”
Rarity secreted all the poison she could into the smile she’d split into her face. It oozed like sap and the twins listened completely undaunted. “You know, Sweet Apple Acres isn’t meeting quite its old production standards. And you’re making a bit of profit off the apples, aren’t you?”
They looked at each other again. Well, of course! What’s wrong with that?
“Oh no no I’m not trying to call you…” Parasites, scoundrels, profiteers… “…opportunists, but isn’t cider a bit of a luxury, compared to apples?”
“The good ponies of Equestria could use a little luxury in their lives nowadays.” Rarity thought of those three poor waiting dresses, tags charging pocket change unreadable with the lights off in the boutique windows. “But the point is that we’re filling a constant need.”
Rarity’s voice curved high, slow, and sneering. “…Food and drink?”
Still unruffled, Flam beamed. “More to the tune of, ah – entertainment. Morale.”
“There were plenty of ways we could have done it, but the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 is our baby.” Flim tucked his front hooves together tight. “You saw it in action, my dear, and you saw that nopony can get enough of the Flim Flam Brothers’ fresh-pressed top quality cider – and there was still plenty of money in that! We lay low for a while, went looking for some place to take our product where the Ponyville fiasco wouldn’t come back to haunt us, looked into a few ways to get the apples. Tartarus opening up I’ll admit had us teensy bit worried about getting our business going again, but it led us to the lovely Trixie and a cheap place for rent. That’s where we are now, putting our contraption to work, making a comfortable living, all three of us, and pleasing paying customers.”
The self-pride with which they both glowed was the only rise she’d gotten out of them. They posed for nopony but themselves, heads high with an incongruously coltish enthusiasm – smiles rather than smirks, forelegs crossed, flank to flank, their cutie marks complement – Flim’s apple wedge and Flam’s apple sans a slice. Rarity thought of the sewing machine and needle again. “I do suppose you’re marked for cider-selling,” she remarked.
“Oh, these?” Their tails lifted slightly and flanks bumped closer – everything they did, so choreographed. “We got these years before we took up tinkering.”
They looked at each other as they talked now, instead of her.
“These led us to the cider business; not the other way around.”
“What these marks of ours actually mean is that we belong together, or at least that was what they first meant.”
“You can bet that they did nothing for the other foals asking us if we’d both feel it if they gave one of us a kick.”
“But we’ve seen plenty of cutie marks with some surprising versatility in their meanings.”
“There was a funny incident with apples not a month after these showed up.”
They suspended a bundle of shared storied between them, spinning it like a treasured crystal ball that showed them all their most amusing memories. That force was off Rarity. She began to relax, an exhaustion escaping whatever level of feeling her body had suppressed it to and diffusing. She leaned into the sofa, heard the cads banter on.
“What about you, Miss...”
No peace for long.
“Rarity.” She’d hoped they wouldn’t ask.
“Rarity. How did you find that very gorgeous cutie mark of yours?”
The patience for eye contact had left her. “I demonstrated a knack for finding gems in my schoolfilly days.”
“What is it you do for a living back in the sticks?”
“I run a boutique. I make outfits, especially dresses.” Referral to Ponyville as “the sticks” had given her nerves a pluck.
“Keeping afloat?” Flam was cockeyed under the rim of his hat.
The door opened. “Flim? If I could just cut in for a second…”
Rarity turned to fling a dagger of a look at Trixie. The other mare caught it in her teeth. All part of the show, everypony! “You,” she hissed, “Trixie saw you back in Ponyville a year or two ago, now, didn’t she?” It had been that long, and if she had learned anything, she was keeping it disguised. “The one with the green mane?”
Rarity froze, thought of the scrubbing and the apology to Golden Harvest for wailing over the color green – and she watched Trixie glance sideways at the twins and a bubble of pure amusement inflated warm in her chest. This little stage magician was no different than before. Back then she’d used every ostentatious measure to bind and pile the town’s admiration and sit herself on top of it like a throne. The Flim Flam Brothers had hired her to do so as she pleased, catch the admiration of cider-silly ponies in the security of a lounge, a new throne for every night. They admired her enough to pay her and now they had pulled Rarity, who couldn’t stand them, aside into their V.I.P. area for conversation – oh, Rarity knew well when a mare was jealous! “Don’t you talk to me about green, darling,” she said with a tone fringed with a giggle.
Trixie started to lower her horn. “Oh?” she said as it started to shine, “I could show you a thing or two I know about colors, show pony.”
“Ladies! Before we go jinxing each other, why don’t we all four of us get back into the conversation together?” Patronizing bemusement seeped cloyingly in Flim’s voice – he clacked his hooves. “Trixie, honey, we had no idea you knew Rarity here. What’s the story?”
“Oh, I’m sure she would be delighted to tell you, as she’s clearly dying to speak to you,” Rarity said, staring Trixie in the face, leaning in as she stepped off of the sofa, watching her blink and flinch with a warm burst of satisfaction. “But surely by now it’s quite late and I don’t want my cab devoured by a pack of ghouls on the way back to Ponyville.”
Trixie watched wide-eyed as she reached for the door. She was shaken and knew that the mare who had her so was one of the ones who had watched her shown up in the face of an Ursa Minor, she could tell. The blue unicorn turned to look at the twins, who didn’t stop her. “Suit yourself, sister. Guess it’s you and us after all, Trixie.”
“Good night,” said Rarity, and she shut the door.
She shut all three of those cosmic-gag twist-of-fate collected thorns in the sides of her friends and her behind the divider and squeezed a path for the door. The piano played on and a cider-hazed stallion arhythmically pounded his hoof on the stage and whooped out a song stripped of tune. Her head was pounding. She didn’t bother looking for the other four she’d rode in with. They’d been so excited to get here they would’ve still been having their fun, drinking themselves to bloating while the place was open. On the way to the door, she caught its name printed backwards on the window, no curtain covering the inside. FLIM FLAM CIDER HOUSE .
She yanked the door open and burst gasping through to clean space. It was dark. It was clear. Her head throbbed and her ears rushed.
But she wasn’t angry, now. Relieved. And she produced the one small victory she’d escaped with and appraised it: Trixie had been jealous.
She had gotten nothing from the Flim Flam Brothers, no remorse or sign of legitimate cheating. Trixie had refused to take a lesson from Twilight after the surprise calling of her Ursa Major bluff, was now working for the twins, living off her lust for attention, counting on it, and had consequently experienced jealousy. That was some victory.
Rarity, on the other hoof, had not been jealous. There was nothing in a success like theirs to envy, selling overpriced drinks and hollow pizzazz to halls full of ruffians. It was easy. It was too easy, and it was dirty.
Still, the three were very proud of themselves.
Now that nopony was there to hear, Rarity nickered in agitation – where is a cab at this hour? She levitated a few coins from out of her saddlebags, which it struck her she certainly hoped hadn’t been picked, rotated them in the corner of her eye and the gray moonlight in the band of sky above.
“And I am not your ’sister’ !”
She imagined they heard through the noise, and the piano, and the graceless singing, and Trixie’s pomposity, and they looked at each other again in a private expression of profound smugness, and smirked.
The cads.
