The Centaur and the Centurion

Chapters

Chapter 1: The Pitter-Patter of Little Hooves
Chapter 2: Future Echoes
Chapter 3: ...And a Cockatrice in a Fir Tree
Chapter 4: Brush Your Teeth!
Chapter 5: Fallen Arches
Chapter 7: Ficus; Credits & Acknowledgements
Chapter 6: The Centaur and the Centurion

Chapter 1: The Pitter-Patter of Little Hooves

Author's Note

Note: This chapter contains spoilers for Season 5 of Doctor Who, which first aired in 2010. Read on if you've already seen that season, or just don't care!

Chapter 1: The Pitter-Patter of Little Hooves

The Centaur and the Centurion

by McPoodle

Chapter 1: The Pitter-Patter of Tiny Hooves

The time machine known as the TARDIS sat inside the barn at Sweet Apple Acres. It was cleverly disguised as a small blue shed, manufactured by the “Police Call Box” company. Well, maybe not that cleverly, as it was far too tall and narrow to appear the slightest bit comfortable to anything other than three fillies stacked on top of one another.

And yes before you ask, at one point the Cutie Mark Crusaders did attempt to prove this very fact. It somehow ended with all of them having to be broken out of a ten-thousand-year old lump of amber.

Inside the TARDIS—which was far bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside—a couple of humans were sleeping in a feather bed.

Slowly, the one with long red hair opened her eyes and looked around. “Rory?” she asked her companion.

The one with short brown hair turned around to face her. “Is something wrong, Amy?” he asked.

“No,” she said quietly, “and that’s the problem. The Doctor always wakes us up early.”

Rory lifted his head and listened for a moment. “We’ve landed,” he concluded, based on the lack of the distinctive sound generated by the TARDIS when it was traversing space-time. He looked over at his wife, who was already out of bed and getting dressed. “You know, maybe he just wanted to let us sleep in for once.” He opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped himself, smiling mischievously.

Amy turned to face him, her shirt only half on. “Don’t you—” she warned.

“I wonder what time it is?” Rory asked facetiously—the most useless question you could possibly ask in a time machine.

He got a pillow in the face for that remark.

“Worth it!” he proclaimed, his voice muffled by a mouth full of fabric and goose down.

#

A few minutes later found the humans wandering through the halls of the TARDIS, calling out for their friend the Doctor from time to time. That stopped when they found the room with the Olympic-sized swimming pool in it.

One wall of the pool room was covered with a variety of mosaics depicting various events of interest to the Doctor. Some were from the past history of Earth, the Doctor’s favorite planet. Others showed scenes from its future, or from planets that Amy and Rory had either visited or never heard of. Rory walked over to the wall, his eyes scanning its contents.

Amy gave the wall only a glance before she set her priorities on what she wanted to do first.

“Cannonball!” she screamed, diving right into the pool, clothes and all, and utterly drenching a dismayed Rory.

If there was one thing Amy Pond prided herself on, it was knowing when and how to act like a child. Her relationship with the millennium-old humanoid alien known only as “The Doctor” stretched all the way back to her childhood, when the Doctor had arrived to investigate a most disturbing crack in the wall of young Amelia Pond’s bedroom—a crack that had been stealing away her family and friends one at a time, making it so that they had never even existed. Amelia’s Doctor had stepped into the TARDIS to get the materials he needed to help her and, well, being the Doctor, he wound up not coming back to her until she was an adult—being a time traveler, of course, he had literally just popped out and popped back in—making her The Girl Who Waited. This Doctor-shaped hole in Amelia’s childhood had shaped the person the adult Amy had become, someone who had dedicated her life to accompanying the extraordinary time traveler in his journeys through space and time. And what travels they had been! Amy had seen things that nobody back home could possibly believe. And as for Rory...

From the edge of the pool, she looked up at the young man as he was examining a mosaic of the Great Fire of London, a grim look upon his face. “Young”? Had she actually thought of him as young? Well yes, he had been her age once. But then he had become the latest victim of the Crack, his mind implanted by the Doctor’s enemies into an artificial ageless body in Roman-era Britain, programmed to kill Amy the moment he met her. He was able to overcome this programming, but only after he had mortally wounded the love of his life. Having no other choice, he placed her unconscious body into an alien artifact meant as a trap for the Doctor, and stood watch over it from the shadows until the Twenty-First Century when she could be revived, thus passing down into legend as The Last Centurion. Afterward his original human body had been brought back from nothingness, but he retained the memories of his copy, making him in a sense even older than the Doctor. Rory didn’t like to think about that experience—in fact, he told the Doctor that he had locked those memories away, which is possibly why he was so good at passing himself off as an ordinary man in his twenties. But it was at times like these, when he’d look at something and Amy knew he was thinking about some event it evoked centuries in his past, that she knew better. As she watched, Rory shook his head to clear it and turned to her, his trademark goofy grin plastered across his face.

Amy wasn’t supposed to know about Rory’s suppressed memories. Amy wasn’t supposed to know about a lot of things. But a little thing like having everyone you knew and loved stripped from your memories one by one was motivation enough for her to search out all sorts of information, even when people like the Doctor thought she was better off not knowing. Especially when people like the Doctor thought she was better off not knowing.

“I think I’m finished swimming,” she told him.

“Ready for Getting Dressed, Round 2?” he asked.

Amy smiled, and held her hand out so that Rory could help her get out of the pool.

#

“Doctor? Doctor? Yeah, I don’t think he’s on the TARDIS.”

Amy looked around the confines of the console room, the place from which the time machine was navigated, and also the location of the doors leading to the outside world. She tugged awkwardly at the hem of her yellow dress, the only clothing she had left to wear after drenching her last set of casual clothes. “Why are there two sets of doors leading out?” she asked herself.

Rory walked into the room a few moments later, cradling a cup and saucer in one hand. He was wearing a pinstripe brown suit that he remembered had caused the Doctor to give him an odd look the last time he wore it. “Here you go, Dear,” he said, passing the cup to Amy and then looking around. “Um, why are there two sets of doors leading out?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Amy said before taking a sip of her tea and smiling—Rory was really good with a teakettle. “Where’s your cup?” she asked.

“I wasn’t really in the mood,” he said. “And besides, we’re out of that really good herbal blend I like. Hey, there’s an idea—do you think the Doctor’s gone shopping?”

“Maybe...” Amy said hesitantly, putting down the cup and running her hands lightly over the console’s controls.

Rory put a hand on Amy’s shoulder. “Amy, that’s your there’s-something-I’m-not-telling-you ‘maybe’.”

Amy sighed. “He goes out sometimes to do things,” she told Rory. “While we’re asleep. Nothing dangerous, or so he told me.”

“What sort of things?” Rory asked.

“To check up on people and places where he’s been, to see how well they’ve done after he’s done his save-the-planet-from-imminent-doom thing. To look in on the companions he travelled with before us. And to examine his failures, when he’s in one of his moods. And yes, I do suppose he goes shopping sometimes.” She looked up at a blank screen set high on one wall. “But I’ve got this sudden feeling that this time he’s gotten in over his head. I think we need to go find him.”

Rory looked over the controls for a bit before finding a familiar label and flicking the switch located next to it. This caused an image to appear on the screen, showing a wooden wall and a window, beyond which was an orchard of fruit trees. “Doesn’t look that bad,” he remarked.

Amy looked down at the displays on the console and sighed. “I can’t read any of these, so I have no idea where or when we are.” Those displays had been deliberately scrambled so that only the Doctor could understand them, and Amy wondered—not for the first time—if any of her predecessors among the Doctor’s companions had done something rash to deserve that scrambling.

“Well, let’s see if we can figure it out.” Rory twisted a knob to make the external camera on the TARDIS pivot around. This revealed posts and beams framing a hayloft. “Looks like a barn,” he said. “I want to say Earth.”

“...Although it’s probably ‘The Planet of the Barns’ or something equally screwy,” Amy remarked. “But if it is Earth...I’m thinking America or maybe Canada, late Nineteenth or early Twen—Hold it! Do you see what I’m seeing?” She pointed out the open doors of the barn in the image, at a creature that was walking by.

Rory squinted. “Is that...?”

“It’s a miniature zebra!” Amy exclaimed with an audible squee. “And it’s adorable!”

“Yes, Dear,” Rory said with an eye roll. Clearly, Amy was in “baby mode” again, when anything smaller and cuter than a rabid bulldog caused her to prance around on tiptoes and start talking about buying things for their as-yet nonexistent child.

Rory had only been dumb enough to tell Amy she was in “baby mode” once.

“I’m going to get a closer look!” Amy exclaimed, racing around the console to flick the switch which opened the original pair of external doors.

“Be careful, this is obviously not your ordinary farm/orchard,” Rory urged, looking intently at the view screen. The creature had already walked out of sight of the open doors, but in the brief time he had been able to observe it, Rory had noticed that the zebra had a meticulously groomed mane and a set of pale golden rings around its neck, making it likely to be a pet of some sort. Also, there was something a little unnerving about how small the horseshoes and tools he saw in the barn were. So, best to be cautious. He turned to follow Amy out of the TARDIS when he heard her scream in agony.

Racing forward, Rory grabbed Amy’s arm and yanked her roughly back into the TARDIS. He then quickly dashed over to the console to close the door and activate the TARDIS nanites, before returning to the young woman’s side to examine her. The small corner of his mind not concentrating on saving the life of his beloved barely noticed a second cry of alarm coming from outside, before the closing doors cut it off.

Amy had only managed to reach one hand out of the TARDIS before the pain had hit. It had only been exposed to the outside air for less than a second, but in that time the hand had nearly been stripped to the bone. As they watched, a gray cloud of nanites swiftly descended upon the hand, anesthetizing it before rebuilding the lost tissue. While Amy shuddered in disgust, Rory felt a bit of uncomfortable fascination—he had trained to be a nurse in order to be more like the legendary Doctor that young Amelia had so often ranted about. Now, in one brief moment, he had learned more about how the hand was put together than he had ever picked up from hours of textbook study and corpse dissection. That explained the fascination; the discomfort came from the fact that Amy had to suffer in order for him to learn this. Here was the heart of Rory Williams’ feelings about traveling with Amy and the Doctor: he was helping his wife and one true love to realize her life’s dream, but travelling the universe and plunging into danger over and over again was the last thing he’d ever want for his own life. He thought of himself sometimes as a latter day Bilbo Baggins for this reason—out battling dragons when he’d much rather stay in his cozy little hole.

Amy wiggled her reconstructed fingers a bit to make sure they were working as they should before standing back up. “Well, there must be a way to go out there,” she said. “The Doctor did it, after all.”

“That doesn’t really mean anything,” Rory said with a smile, remembering several times that the Doctor had accomplished the seemingly impossible before their unbelieving eyes.

Amy ignored him, her eyes scanning the console. “Probably that second set of doors,” she said to herself.

“Before we commit to going out there again,” Rory said, “why don’t we see if he left us a message or something?” He discretely positioned himself between Amy and the other set of doors, although he doubted he’d be able to stop her from getting to them if her mind was set on going through them.

Amy smacked her head. “Of course he’d leave us a message! Hold on...” The flick of another of the console’s several dozen switches caused a hologram of a man’s head to appear in midair.

“Just stepping out for a bit,” the hologram said in an reverberating voice. “I doubt you’ll even know that I’m gone.” The man looked young, but there was something in the voice which reminded the listener more of a favorite great-grandfather than somebody of his apparent age. “But if something does go wrong, don’t come after me. Equis is a very unusual planet, with very unusual rules. And one of them’s ‘no humans’. Just sit tight, and I’m sure I’ll work my way out of whatever mess I’ve gotten myself into and get back in time for tea.” The head then disappeared.

“Alright, then we wait,” said Rory, stepping forward and handing his wife her half-empty cup of tea.

Amy pouted before taking a sip. “I’m tired of waiting,” she whined.

“Well let me show you something I noticed in the meantime,” Rory said, walking around the console to reach the controls for the external camera. “I think the people running this place are midgets. Here, let me—what are those?”

Amy was in the act of turning her head to look at the monitor when she heard the lock to the TARDIS being engaged and the external door open and then rapidly be slammed shut. “Doctor!” she exclaimed congenially as she turned back towards the door. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to...” Her words faded in her throat as she realized the individual who had just entered the TARDIS was not who she expected.

The small yellow-furred young mare with bright red hair looked up at the tall yellow-clad young woman with bright red hair.

“What are you doing here?!” they asked in unison.

Chapter 2: Future Echoes

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Chapter 3: ...And a Cockatrice in a Fir Tree

The Centaur and the Centurion

Chapter 3: ...And a Cockatrice in a Fir Tree

The trio of ponies walked out of the barn. Rory was carrying the tree trimmer on his back, while Apple Bloom was balancing a lantern on her back.

“Are you sure we don’t need to bring anythin’ else?” the young mare asked.

“No, we’re good,” Rory replied.

“I just got the feelin’ we’re leaving something important behind,” Apple Bloom said with a pout. After racking her brain in vain for several seconds, she stopped. “Hold on,” she said in a resigned tone. “There’s somethin’ I gotta do.”

As Amy and Rory watched, Apple Bloom closed her eyes, held her breath, and puffed out her cheeks. For a moment, her hair puffed out into some sort of strange fractal curve that may have been a shade over three dimensions, while in the distance the sound of a horn or noisemaker could be briefly heard. Then everything was back to normal, and a roll of clear packing tape was balanced on Apple Bloom’s outstretched hoof. Also there was some multicolored hay at Apple Bloom’s hooves that wasn’t there a second ago.

“What was—?” a befuddled Amy began to ask.

“There’s lemons in my head! There’s lemons in my head!” Apple Bloom exclaimed. She battered her head several times with a free hoof, and then panted a bit before recovering her composure. (Reflecting on this scene later, Amy and Rory were never able to figure out how Apple Bloom managed to stay in a quadrupedal stance while holding a roll of tape in one hoof and bashing her head in with another.) “I hate doing that!” she said to nopony in particular. “Pinkie Pie tried teaching a class on earth pony magic once,” she explained, “and I was the only one who made it past the first day. Eventually I figured out the inverse relationship between how much she taught, and how much sanity I had left, so I had to back out after that. But I picked up a few things.”

This “explanation” utterly failed to explain anything to Amy and Rory. The couple then shared a unspoken communication, the rough meaning of which was “I have no idea what that was, but we might as well roll with it.”

“I’ll take that,” Amy said quietly, taking the roll of tape from Apple Bloom using her magic and placing it inside her saddlebag.

The pair resumed their walk towards the forest.

“So!” said Rory brightly. “Why don’t you tell us about this Everfree place we’re going to?”

“Alright,” the young mare replied, launching into what seemed to be a memorized lecture. From the clipped voice and somewhat different American accent she used, Amy guessed that it was picked up from Princess Twilight, or some other of this pony’s multiple teachers. “The Everfree Forest was once the city of Winnychester, the capital of Equestria in the Classical Era. However, a couple of fierce magical battles a millennium ago, coupled with the fact that it was here that Princess Celestia was forced to banish her sister Princess Luna to the Moon after succumbing to the Nightmare, meant that the city was abandoned, and the magically enchanted forest soon overran everything. Horrific monsters began to appear, and in a generation’s time, the Everfree became the most dangerous place in all of Equestria. So it remained for a thousand years.”

“Of course it would be the most dangerous place in all the land,” Rory said with a groan. By now they were within sight of the edge of the forest. Unlike most forests, it seemed to spring up behind an invisible barrier that delimited “forest” from “non-forest” with sharp precision. Outside, the apple orchard was fairly well illuminated by a full moon, but once past that boundary, the Everfree looked nearly pitch black.

“My great-grandparents came out here to found a farm, and Ponyville grew up next to that,” Apple Bloom continued. Now, her voice had a stronger version of her original accent, reflecting a new source she was unconsciously copying. “With the Everfree right next door, it took an odd sort of pony to settle down here—most ponies run away from danger, but these ponies ran right towards it instead. Princess Twilight called us all crazy for living here.”

“Well that’s a rude thing to say,” remarked Amy.

“It was right after she moved here, so she was including herself,” Apple Bloom said with a grin. “Everypony in Ponyville has a story to tell about why they’re here. Fer’instance fifty years ago, the whole town was saved by a notorious bank robber who had served her time and was trying to start over. In fact, most of the ponies who settled here were trying to start over: Rainbow Dash had been forced out of the Academy, Pinkie Pie escaped from a mad rock cult—well, that’s the version of her life story that’s probably the true one—and Colgate came to town carrying only a ficus, a pocket watch, and a recipe card for her toothpaste.”

“Wait...Colgate?” asked Rory. “As in Colgate toothpaste?”

“Oh, you’ve heard of it all the way in Humanland?”

“Our planet is called Earth,” said Amy, “and I’m guessing Colgate is the name of that dentist you said you worked for.”

“Earth?” Apple Bloom asked herself. “Now that’s a good name for a planet!”

It was at this point that the three ponies crossed into the Everfree, and suddenly that lamp on Apple Bloom’s back became very necessary in order to see. The trio huddled closer together without even thinking of it.

“Look out!” Apple Bloom exclaimed suddenly, dodging aside from the grasp of a timber DD. From all sides except the way they came, the three ponies were soon surrounded by the wooden monsters.

Rory reached up with his hooves and swung the tree trimmer off of his back. “All right,” he challenged, “who’s first?” The answer to that rhetorical question turned out to be “all of them”.

#

Ten minutes later, Apple Bloom was slowly catching her breath, surrounded by the still bodies of several dozen timber DD’s. Those monsters that hadn’t been decapitated by the tree trimmer had had their eye gems plucked out by Amy’s magic. Either method was enough to cause the beasts to collapse into the timber they were made out of, unlike their canine cousins.

“All present and accounted for?” Amy asked, dusting herself off and taking her place in the lead.

“Private Rory Williams, reporting for duty...and anything else you might be interested in.” This line was delivered with quite a bit of cheek.

“I’ll get back to you for that later,” Amy purred. “Apple Bloom, are you all right?”

“Y...yes, I suppose,” Apple Bloom said, rather surprised at how easily that encounter had gone in their favor.

“Where were we, before we were so rudely interrupted?” Amy asked, walking down the trail without even checking to see that the other two ponies were following her. “Ah yes, Apple Bloom!”

“Yes?”

“That’s an interesting arrangement you’ve got going there, apprenticing yourself to four different masters like that.”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that at all,” Apple Bloom said, putting on some speed to catch up with Amy. “Like I said, Pinkie Pie was a one-time thing, and Colgate’s just my boss. Zecora and Princess Twilight are workin’ together to help me learn about all the kinds of magic an earth pony can get. All the sane kinds, that is.”

“And yet...” Rory prompted from behind her.

“Excuse me?” Apple Bloom asked.

“I heard an unspoken ‘and yet’ coming up,” Rory said. “Tell me I’m not imagining things, Dear?”

“No, I heard it, too,” Amy said. “You’ve got two teachers, survived the horrors of the mysterious Pinkie Pie as well as the existential horrors of contemporary dentistry—”

“Unless she’s American,” Rory butted in. “Ever see an American smile? Most terrifying thing you have ever witnessed in your life. All of those identical gleaming teeth, devoid of any trace of character! ‘Stepford Teeth’, to borrow one of their own horror clichés.”

“No, I think the Doctor has proved rather spectacularly that the entire universe is essentially British,” Amy rebutted.

Apple Bloom looked back and forth between the spouses with something between confusion and horror. “No words, I have no words.”

“Yes, you do,” Rory teased. “And they begin with ‘and yet.”

“Alright, fine! Two teachers, Pinkie Pie and the dentist, and yet obviously, it hasn’t done me any good.”

“‘Obviously’?” Amy asked.

“‘Obviously’?” Rory asked. “Oops, sorry, I was a second slow there, completely ruined the stereo effect.”

Apple Bloom rolled her eyes. “Obviously, because I haven’t got my cutie mark yet! Everypony else my age already has one.”

“So what is a cutie mark?” Amy asked.

“It’s a symbol that shows what your special talent is. You get one when you realize what your purpose is, why you’re here.”

“Well, can you get it by just saying it?” Amy asked.

“Yeah...?” said Apple Bloom with some hesitation.

Amy suddenly stopped and addressed the heavens. “I exist to explore the universe!” she proclaimed. “To see everything there is to see! To do everything there is to do! And to help any person—or any pony—that I can!” After feeling something very odd, she turned her head, to see a symbol appear on her flank. It showed two objects crossing each other in an “X” shape. One object was a cigar-shaped rocket ship, like you might see in a 1950’s movie. And the other was a sword straight out of Arthurian legend. “Neat!” she exclaimed.

If Apple Bloom was a changeling, her eyes would have turned green with jealousy right then. As it was, it sure felt like they had.

Amy then turned to her husband. “OK, your turn!” she told him. “I wanna see why you exist in pictorial form.”

“Pass,” Rory said firmly. “We need to get to Zecora’s house, before something really dangerous jumps us.” Of course, the real reason why he didn’t try to do what Amy had asked was because he thought she would be weirded out if she saw her own face appear on his flank.

“Aw, those timber DD’s are the only dangerous thing to come out of these woods in months,” Apple Bloom said, pushing forward to be at the front of the group. “My sister and her friends tamed the forest three years ago, and most of the monsters have gone away. Zecora taught me how to handle the rest. Oh, by the way, if I ever tell you to close your eyes, it’s really important that you close your eyes.”

“Oh, do you have a Medusa lurking around?” Amy asked facetiously.

“Cockatrice,” answered Apple Bloom, unimpressed.

“Oh,” Amy said flatly. “I guess I would have accepted that answer as well.”

“How exactly do you tame a forest that’s supposed to be the most dangerous place in all the land?” asked Rory.

“They’re national heroes,” explained Apple Bloom. “Bearers of the Elements of Harmony.” She looked back, to see exactly the disbelieving expressions on the two other ponies that she expected to see. “Anytime we get visitors to Ponyville from outside Equestria, I try to explain to them that we ponies have figured out how to weaponize friendship, but they never believe me. Not until they see the Rainbow Beam in action. Pinkie calls it an ‘orbital friendship cannon.’”

“You ponies have learned how to weaponize...friendship,” Amy said dully.

“A-yup!” the young mare exclaimed with a grin. “They’ve saved the world six times now, and even without the Elements, they’ve saved Ponyville I don’t know how many times!”

“You know,” Amy quipped, “I think I know now why the Doctor never took us here before: because this is the only planet in the galaxy that actually doesn’t need us to save it. Admit it: if these ‘Bearers’ were here instead of us, you’d have rescued everypony already!”

“Now you’re doing it,” Rory said on hearing the word “everypony”, giving Amy a nudge.

“Doing what?”

Apple Bloom rolled her eyes at the attitudes of her companions, before continuing her explanation of why her flank was blank. “I’d love to be a hero when I grow up, more than anythin’, but the Bearers don’t really leave any room for it.”

“Well I’m sure they’ll retire eventually,” Rory assured her. “And in the meantime you could try seeking out adventure somewhere else in, um...”

“Equestria.”

“Right. Equestria.”

“I don’t think they’re gonna retire,” Apple Bloom said despondently. “I’ve got my suspicions that they might not stop for a really, really, really long time. And my friends and I have been on all sorts of adventures, and nothing ever happened. And that was before we even met Doctor Hooves.”

“Wait, you mean the Doctor?” asked Amy.

“No, Doctor Hooves. He’s a different pony than the Doctor. The Doctor’s a gray pegasus with a fez and a bow tie, while Doctor Hooves is a tan earth pony with a necktie. They both have hourglass cutie marks.”

“Wait, just a bow tie?” asked Amy. “With no shirt?”

“No,” answered Apple Bloom. “Who needs to wear a shirt?”

“I just love the fact that he kept the fez,” said Rory.

“OK, so Doctor Hooves is different than our Doctor,” concluded Amy. “Does he have a TARDIS?”

“Yes, it looks just like the one in the barn.”

“It’s a blue box too?” asked Rory.

“Yep.”

Amy and Rory shared a significant look.

“Where’s this Doctor Hooves now?” Amy asked.

“With Derpy in Canterlot,” Apple Bloom answered.

“Derpy?” asked Rory. “Is that his companion?”

“Derpy’s his wife.”

“What?!” the couple exclaimed in one voice.

“Oh, we’ve got to get that story out of him when this is all done,” Amy vowed.

“Yeah, he started a clock shop,” Apple Bloom continued, “and they live on the second floor. The TARDIS is in the basement, but nopony’s supposed to know that. Anyway, we didn’t know at first that there was anything special about him, other than the fact that he was so smart that Twilight Sparkle came to him whenever she needed to know something that wasn’t in her books. So one day Scootaloo asked him if he could figure out why she couldn’t fly. Scootaloo’s my pegasus friend, and back then she didn’t have a cutie mark.

“Doctor Hooves looked her over, and told her the reason she couldn’t fly is because she lacked the ‘particular innate magic’ all other pegasi had, which allowed them to control their weight. So Princess Celestia gave Scootaloo a map, and we went on this big adventure following it, and at the end Scootaloo got a feather stone, and once she put it around her neck she could finally fly just as well as any other pegasus.”

“And that’s when she got her cutie mark,” Rory said.

Apple Bloom chuckled. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew Scootaloo. No, she was happy she could fly, but she didn’t like the fact that she owed it to a magical artifact, that she had to rely on something made by somepony else. So she built an airplane so she could fly entirely on her own, and then she got her cutie mark.”

“How did you find out about Doctor Hooves’ TARDIS?” asked Amy.

“Oh, we just stumbled into it one day: Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle and I. We started the thing up, and travelled back in time to the Griffish Revolution.”

“Wait, that’s not supposed to be possible,” Rory protested. “The TARDIS has all kinds of safeties in place to make sure that only he can operate it.”

“Well,” Apple Bloom said sheepishly, “we’re kinda good at disabling safeties. And maybe Doctor Hooves turned some of them off, so Derpy could pilot it. Anyway, we met Emperor Noffony I at Water Loop when he was about to cut the Strings of Fate, and this big bell in the TARDIS started ringing, and Sweetie Belle started singing to it, and—”

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on!” Amy interrupted. “You set off the Cloister Bell?!”

“We didn’t set it off!” Apple Bloom protested. “At least, I don’t think it was our fault. So what’s it do anyway? That name suggests that it’s for gathering monks to supper.”

“It only rings if the world’s going to end,” Rory explained.

“No, it only rings if something a lot bigger than just the world’s going to end,” corrected Amy.

“Oh,” said Apple Bloom, having some difficulty comprehending that statement. “Anyway, Sweetie Belle spontaneously invented music-fueled unicorn magic, saved...more than just the world, and got her cutie mark. So I figure the only thing left for me to get a cutie mark is for me to join your club.”

“Our...club,” said Rory.

“Yeah!” exclaimed Apple Bloom. “I read through Spike’s entire sci-fi comic book collection to get ready. I bet if your ray gun goes dead, I could even refuel it from raw plutonium!”

“You read comic books to prepare you for life as a Companion,” Rory said doubtfully.

“Worked for me!” Amy bragged. “Well, that and a couple of ‘People’s Histories’. One word of advice, though: real plutonium isn’t Day-Glo green.”

“It isn’t?” Apple Bloom asked despondently, as a beloved foalhood belief was shattered.

“Still want in?” Amy asked with an impish smile.

“You gotta accept me!” Apple Bloom said with desperation. She then climbed up on a nearby rock in order to address the couple. “Either you accept me, and I get a ‘save the universe’ cutie mark, or...” her look deflated. “Or, I’m not meant for adventuring, and I get a dentistry cutie mark, or a potion-making cutie mark. Or maybe a carpentry cutie mark, ‘cause I’m pretty good at that. Or maybe an apple-related cutie mark, for working on the farm. Either way, I’d finally know what to do with my life.”

“Now wait a minute!” Amy said, pulling Apple Bloom back down to the ground and putting a hoof to her chest. “You’re just going to let a flank mark tell you what you’re going to do with the rest of your life?”

“That’s how it works,” Apple Bloom explained.

“No, I don’t think that’s how it works,” Amy protested. “Or at least, I’m certain if that is how it works, then it’s wrong. It should be that you decide what you want to do with your life, and then the cutie mark shows up to tell everypony else what you’ve decided.”

“But...but I’m not really sure!” Apple Bloom exclaimed. “I’m good at all sorts of things, and my family have left it up to me. I could leave the farm if I want, and Granny Smith and Big McIntosh will be able to take care of it without me. Or I could settle on the farm, and that would be fine, too. It’s...none of the choices work for me! I want more!”

Amy craned her head around to look at Rory. “Rory, has Apple Bloom spouted a mermaid tail yet?” she asked, a mocking smile on her lips.

“Not yet,” Rory replied in a similar tone.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Apple Bloom asked.

“We were just checking to see if we had fallen into a Disney musical,” Amy explained. “Protagonists singing songs about how they want more is a primary sign.”

“I wasn’t singin’,” the young mare said with a pout.

“I’m willing to bet a million pounds of oats—or whatever else you use for currency around here—that you’ll get your mark as soon as you commit yourself,” said Amy.

“They’re bits—our currency, that is.”

“Seriously?” Rory asked.

“Seriously.”

“OK, my turn to take the lead,” Rory said confidently, before walking right into a gigantic tree that the path was curved around. “Wow,” he said, craning his head back. “Ponies sure are tiny.”

“Rory, that tree would still be enormous even if you were a manticore,” Apple Bloom told him as she rested a hoof on its trunk. “It’s six hundred and eighteen years old.”

“You’ve got manticores, too?” Rory asked, looking around him nervously. “Any of them still around after those Element thingees tamed the forest?”

“Just one,” Apple Bloom said, a big grin slowly spreading across her face. “But his bark is far worse than his bite. Wanna know what we call him?”

Amy looked between Apple Bloom and her husband, and then put on a big old grin of her own. “I bet I can guess...”

“What?” the stallion asked, looking back and forth between the two mares. “What’s his name?”

“His name?” Apple Bloom asked, drawing out her words for maximum effect. “His name is Roary of course. Roary the Manticore.”

Rory groaned in near pain. “Your princesses screwed up when they picked the bit as their currency. If they had only picked puns instead, then every pony in Equestria would be millionaires!”

“Now that I think of it, he was pretty red,” Apple Bloom added with a smirk. “He might have even been the red-haired king of the manticores.”

“I can’t stand it,” Rory said as he fell into position behind the two females. “I just can’t stand it.”

Author's Note

Yes, I know that officially, her name is Minuette. I am using Colgate here for the entirely valid reason that it makes me laugh.

Chapter 4: Brush Your Teeth!

The Centaur and the Centurion

Chapter 4: Brush Your Teeth!

The ponies emerged into a large clearing dominated by a strangely-shaped tree, complete with windows and a door.

“That’s Zecora’s house,” Apple Bloom quietly told the two others.

The reason why she had said it quietly was because there was a light on in the tree, and a brief shadow revealed the presence of somepony inside.

Amy carefully walked up to a cart that was parked outside the tree. She lifted up the edge of a tarp that was covering the cart’s contents from view. “Books,” she noted. “Lots and lots of books.”

Apple Bloom joined her. “Those are pretty advanced,” she said, flipping over a couple of covers to look at the titles. “Definitely from Princess Twilight’s collection.”

Rory pointed at the tree. “So it’s the Princess?” he asked.

“If it’s the Princess, then who’s maintaining the shield?” asked Apple Bloom. She lowered the hood over her lantern. “Follow me.”

#

The exterior of the house seemed pretty intimidating to Amy and Rory, what with the oversized and grimacing mask and the bottles hanging from limbs that seemed to click against each other from unseen winds.

The interior wasn’t much better, with even more masks, flickering candles, and a great big cauldron. There were shelves holding bottles and gourds filled with potions. Some of these had been toppled to the floor, probably by the mysterious visitor, who was audibly searching through various items at the back of the tree.

As they were sneaking past, Rory stopped to peer into the cauldron. He picked up a ladle, and took a taste of its contents.

“Rory!” Amy hissed. “You don’t know what’s in there!”

“Sure I do,” Rory whispered back. “The Doctor’s herbal blend. Told you he stopped here for shopping.”

Once she was sure that her new friends were positioned to help her block all avenues of escape, Apple Bloom stepped out of the shadows to confront the intruder. “Halt!” she cried as she flipped up her lantern’s hood. “What are you doing in Zecora’s house?!”

A light blue unicorn mare cried out in surprise, raising one hoof to cover her eyes. This caused her to lose her balance, stumbling back into a shelf full of empty gourds, which all fell down on her, followed by several dried plants and extracts, and finally a sprinkling of gold dust.

“Colgate?” Apple Bloom asked in disbelief. “How did you get out here?”

“Uh...I’m not sure,” the pony said, removing the various items that had fallen off of her and trying to put them back in their original places, ending with her getting quite a bit of dirt into the small bag that held the gold dust.

Amy and Rory took this opportunity to observe her. There was a jingling sound made every time she moved, which was caused by the satchel full of bits around her neck. Her mane was two tones, periwinkle and dark blue. Combined with her coat color, she looked like the popular brand of toothpaste brought to life. “I think I found a hole in the shield,” Colgate guessed more than said.

“A hole in the shield?” Apple Bloom asked incredulously. “And how did you get past the guards?”

“There were guards?” Colgate asked.

Apple Bloom face-hooved.

“Oh!” Colgate exclaimed, walking past the young mare. “I didn’t see you were with aliens. What are your names? And when’s the last time you had a full dental checkup?”

“I’m Amy, and he’s Rory. And, um...recently. Really, really recently. Honest.”

“Hi, Amy! Hi, Rory! I’m Colgate.” She sat down to shake hooves with both of them at the same time. “Here, take these!” she said, as she used her magic to remove a couple of objects from her saddlebags. This action revealed that her cutie mark was an hourglass.

Amy and Rory looked over their gifts: a pair of toothbrushes color-coordinated to their coats.

“Brush your teeth!” Colgate cried, a too-wide smile on her face.

“Um, sure,” Rory said, moving to put his brush in his saddlebags.

“Right now!” Colgate ordered, a metaphorical fire in her eyes.

A cowed Amy and Rory quickly complied.

“Yay! Clean teeth!” Colgate exclaimed.

For a moment, Amy had seen an incredible amount of drive in the eyes of the crazed pony before them, but it had quickly faded, and now it didn’t look like there was really all that much going on in that noggin of hers. “It’s nice to meet you, Col—hey wait a second! How did you know that we were aliens?”

“You’re aliens?!” Colgate exclaimed. “Wow! Wait until I introduce you to Lyra! She thinks aliens are just a myth.”

“No, you said we were aliens,” Rory said, trying to correct her.

“When did I say that?”

“Just now!”

“No, I said you were foreigners.” She turned to Apple Bloom with a frazzled expression. “Didn’t I?”

“I’m sure you did,” Apple Bloom said soothingly. “Now why don’t you tell Amy and Rory why you’re here while I gather up a few things.” She slipped into a nearby pair of saddlebags and began carefully selecting containers to put inside it.

“Oh, there’s not much to say,” Colgate replied with a empty-headed grin. “I’m here to help Zecora with the monsters. I come here all the time to get medicine for my headaches. This time, I came to get something to help me save everypony.”

Apple Bloom stopped before a small wooden desk. “What did you come to get?” she asked very carefully. She kept her back to Colgate and slowly opened a small drawer, her body placed so that the blue unicorn could not see.

Amy, noting this, crept closer to her.

“It’s...you know, I can’t really remember,” Colgate said, scratching her head with the edge of one hoof. “It’s really important, but it’s also really drastic. Like I can only use it once, and once I do, I can’t ever take it back.”

From the drawer, Apple Bloom removed an elaborate silver pocket watch, which she placed into her satchel, all while still keeping it out of Colgate’s view. “Oh, I don’t think you need that,” she said with a false air of nonchalance. “The three of us can handle this problem without it.”

“F...ffour,” Colgate said, having some difficulty getting out the word. “I’m coming with you. I need to come with you. Very bad things will happen if I don’t. I...I’ve been having bad dreams.”

Apple Bloom turned to face Colgate. “All right,” she said gently. From the relative postures and tones of the two mares, one would think that the earth pony was the employer, and the unicorn the employee. “I see you brought some books. Did you dream about those as well?”

“No. Yes...maybe,” Colgate said, looking more and more lost with every sentence that passed through her lips.

“Why don’t you show them to Amy and Rory, while I finish up in here?”

“A...alright,” Colgate said with a firm nod. She walked slowly out of the hut, her guileless eyes roaming across everything in sight as she went.

With a silent instruction from Amy, Rory followed her, and soon engaged her in conversation about the books. Amy then closed the door, and walked up to Apple Bloom.

“That’s an...interesting watch you have there,” Amy said in a low voice. “Can I take a look at it?”

“She mustn’t have it,” Apple Bloom said, passing it over. “Ever. She has the most horrible dreams when it gets anywhere near her. I think it might be possessed.”

Amy held the object before her eyes with her telekinesis. As she examined the elaborate carving on its cover, she suddenly recognized it and began hyperventilating.

“She gave it to Zecora for safekeeping soon after arriving in Ponyville,” Apple Bloom said. Then she noticed Amy’s reaction. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.

“I...I never got the full story from the Doctor,” Amy said, her eyes locked onto the slowly spinning object before her. “But I do know about Harold Saxon, and that a watch just like this made an ordinary man into the insane genius that brought humanity to the brink of destruction on two separate occasions, before the Doctor finally stopped him.”

Apple Bloom snatched back the watch and put it on the ground, posing one hoof over it. “Should I destroy it?” she asked.

Amy looked away and snorted in disgust. “If I know how these sorts of things work, you probably can’t destroy it, or throw it away. Just so long as your friend never opens it, we should be safe.”

Apple Bloom nodded, and put the watch back in her satchel. She spent several seconds examining the object inside her satchel before pulling the drawstrings shut. “She doesn’t even remember it exists when she’s not looking at it,” she told Amy.

“Perception filter,” Amy explained. “You run into those a lot around the Doctor.”

“Tell me more.”

Chapter 5: Fallen Arches

The Centaur and the Centurion

Chapter 5: Fallen Arches

“Amy? Apple Bloom? You better come out here.”

The two mares emerged from Zecora’s tree house to see an army of timber DD’s waiting for them. Colgate had apparently fainted upon seeing them.

“Ah,” Amy said calmly. “I see that their master learns from his mistakes.”

This batch of wood-based creatures were built like American linebackers, so they now longer had necks for a tree trimmer to snip. And the gems that animated them were now buried in the middle of their bodies.

Apple Bloom turned around, and began using her hind legs to lob homemade firebombs at the enemy. The others tried their best to assist, but sadly, Apple Bloom only had a few weapons that were useful, and nothing the others came up with proved damaging against a seemingly endless supply of minions. During the fight, they learned that the change to their eyes made the timber DD’s nearly blind. On the other hand, they proved more than capable of making up for that with their other senses.

In a matter of minutes, the ponies had been overwhelmed, their electrum rings had been stripped from them, and a cloud of dragonfire had teleported them from the scene.

Three of the four captured ponies awoke to find themselves in a long rectangular cage made of metal mesh. It was located somewhere underground, as evidenced by the roughly hewn stone walls around them. The cage extended from inside of a small enclosure into a large open area. Based on the placement of blankets and hay, the dark area in back was for sleeping—and the small amount of privacy that the captives were allowed—while the bright area in front was for daytime activities. Of the four ponies who had just been captured, Amy could not be awakened by the others, as she seemed to be stuck in a deep slumber, so she was left in the sleeping area. Colgate had awoken with a small pool of blood on the floor of the cage around her snout. The nosebleed was not the result of being beaten, but rather something she had been increasingly suffering from in recent months. Apple Bloom and Rory were unharmed. Also present in the cage were several other ponies.

“Applejack!” Apple Bloom exclaimed, moving forward to embrace an orange earth pony with a blonde mane. Her rear legs from the three apple cutie marks downwards were set in a cement block that she could drag around the floor of the cage; she appeared to be healthy enough otherwise. In addition, Applejack looked like she was missing an accessory or two, as evidenced by the cowboy hat and coiled rope located a long way away from the cage.

“Apple Bloom!” exclaimed Applejack and an elderly mare with a pale green coat and nearly white mane. The zebra first glimpsed outside the barn was also present, but she had a plaster cast over her muzzle that prevented her from speaking. Apple Bloom’s greetings soon identified the zebra as her teacher Zecora, and the pony as her grandmother Smith.

“Fraxinus, report on our new captives,” came a booming voice from above.

A timber DD, larger than the others, stepped forward. “Two ponies of the worthless variety, and two magic users,” it reported in a strange hollow voice.

“Hey, I resent that remark!” Apple Bloom exclaimed.

“Give me their cutie marks for my catalog,” the mysterious voice said.

Fraxinus stepped up to the cage, and seemed to squint his little wooden eyes as he looked over the others. “Male worthless has no mark,” he said. “Female worthless has cutie mark of a timepiece.” Apple Bloom made sure she was as far from the magical creature as possible as he was making this identification. “Blue magic user has cutie mark of a different timepiece. The yellow magic user that you have studied has cutie mark incorporating a melee weapon and a ‘rocket’, an object depicted in comic books.”

“I know what a rocket is, you moron. Give me their possessions.”

The wooden servants dumped the saddlebags and satchels of the captured ponies into a pile in front of a stalagmite. Stepping out from behind that stalagmite was a dragon, green in color, her wings folded at her sides. She was standing on her hind legs, and wearing a pair of spectacles. She was about a head taller than Rory had been as a human, and twice as tall as any of the ponies present while standing on all fours.

The first thing the dragon did was to sweep the pile of bits from Colgate’s satchel out of her sight. “Oh no, we’re not going through that again,” she was heard to mutter to herself.

Next, the dragon quickly began sorting through what was left of Apple Bloom’s potions, emitting some sort of magical field from her talons as she did so. Like her creations, her vision appeared to be poor, as she needed to bring each object quite close to her face to be able to identify it.

“Stun potion, sleeping potion...is this Nitro-9?!”

“A-heh,” Apple Bloom said nervously, rubbing the back of one neck with a hoof. “I didn’t have enough room to try that one out.” She then turned to her sister. “What happened to Big Mac?” she whispered. “Did he get away?”

Applejack sighed sorrowfully. “You’ll find out soon enough.” She composed herself before looking at the other new ponies. “Howdy, Colgate.”

“Um, howdy?”

“Who are your new friends?” she then asked Apple Bloom.

Apple Bloom tore herself away from her fevered imaginings of what might have happened to her big brother that her sister didn’t see fit to tell her. “These are the Doctor’s companions,” she said, “Amy and Rory.”

“Any friend of the Doctor’s is a friend of mine,” Applejack said, shaking each of their hooves. “Especially now.”

“Where is the Doctor?” Amy asked, slowly walking to join them from the back of the cage. She looked absolutely exhausted.

“There, and there,” Applejack said sadly, pointing first at another cage, and then at a rock pillar located next to the dragon. In the cage was the unconscious body of a gray pegasus, a spilled fez resting next to him. On the pillar was a metallic head with faintly glowing eyes. At being referred to, the robot’s ears swiveled in their direction.

“Is that a Cyber...pony?” asked Rory.

“As a matter of fact, it is,” the dragon answered, having finished her examination. “I tried to make a regular Cyberman head, but somehow it ended up like that. I knew I’d have to deal with a fellow Time Lord, so I used that to trap the Doctor’s consciousness. He can see and hear everything that’s going on, but can do nothing to stop me.”

“You’re a Time Lord?” Rory asked incredulously.

“But of course!” the dragon exclaimed. “Only the most brilliant Time Lord of all time could have possibly evaded both the constable sent to arrest me as well as the legendary Doctor! For I am the one, the only...Rani!”

“The Great and Powerful,” Applejack added sarcastically.

“Sure!” the dragon exclaimed happily. “It’s a relief to finally be able to introduce myself, instead of being interrupted by failed escape attempts every five minutes. So, Companions, are you reeling in terror yet?”

Amy and Rory looked at each other for a few seconds, and then shrugged.

“Should we be?” Amy asked. “We’ve never heard of you.”

“What?!” the Rani exclaimed. “I was the Doctor’s arch-enemy! I very nearly destroyed him any number of times! I mean, the deadly hugging trees alone...surely he must have included a briefing on me when you were inducted into your position?”

Again, the pair shared a questioning look.

“Nope, must have slipped his mind,” said Rory. “Besides, shouldn’t you be dead...or locked in an alternate reality or something, along with the rest of your kind? The Doctor did not wear his title of ‘Last of the Time Lords’ lightly.”

“I survived!” the dragon exclaimed boastfully. “The Doctor knew when he saw the face of his captor that we two are the last two Time Lords, in either this pocket universe or the larger one from which we came! I escaped capture by the Time Lords in the same way as the late and un-mourned Master. And I should know, because I invented the chameleon arch we both used.”

The Cyber-Doctor’s eyes flashed furiously at this remark.

“Alright, alright,” the Rani said with an eye roll, “I was on the committee that invented the chameleon arch. But as the resident genius in that committee, the credit rightly belongs to me!”

Amy made a point of looking all around her. “I don’t see an arch anywhere around here.”

The Rani sighed, reached behind the stalagmite, and pulled out a very familiar looking pocket watch. “This is a chameleon arch, you simpleton! Well, the important part of it, in any case. It transforms a Time Lord’s body into the form of a native of whatever planet she happens to be on at the time, and rewrites her mind into a gross simplification of her own personality. It’s the only way we can truly disguise ourselves from our more powerful enemies...or from our fellow Time Lords. The disguise is so perfect, in fact, that we no longer even remember what we once were, as false memories are created to explain our new identity, and to keep us from even conceiving the possibility that we are something different than the natives we have chosen to hide among! And so the perfect disguise persists, until the subject opens the watch and thereby reverts to his or her true self. In this case, of course, we already had to change our physical forms to even exist in this reality, so I altered the device to only complete the transformation.”

“And the personality held by the disguise?” Apple Bloom asked fearfully. “What happens to it when the watch is opened?”

“It dies,” the Rani answered coldly. Her eyes lit up as she resumed her monologue. “I had come to this pocket dimension after discovering a deliberately buried report of its existence filed by the Doctor...” she began.

Meanwhile, Colgate had backed away from the dragon until she was out of the dragon’s sight; her eyes were wide and she was hyperventilating. Seeing this, Apple Bloom casually joined her, gave an appraising glance at the bars at the rear of the cage, then snapped a few of them free from the bottom of the cage with a couple of quiet bucks. She led Colgate deeper into the cave, listening carefully to the pontificating dragon as she did so.

“I had gained a bit of a shady reputation for the so-called ‘crime’ of improving lesser beings’ bodies and minds to meet my own lofty standards,” the Rani continued, “and access to this world was forbidden by the Time Lords, so I was pursued here by the Castellan or some other mindless servant of the Time Lord council; but just as we made it through the Sphere of Stars, the recall signal from Gallifrey was sent. I was not about to participate in that idiotic and ultimately self-destructive Time War of theirs, so I activated my arch, while my nemesis’ TARDIS crashed and burned before my eyes. I was stuck in the body of this dragon for who knows how many centuries, before his greed finally compelled him to open the watch and free me. Even then, it took decades for me to assert my control over this body, to reverse its greed growth and the effect that had upon my stupendous intellect. Now I am finally ready to resume my purpose in coming here: to study the strange branch of physics stupidly labelled ‘magic’ by the pendants of this world, and find a way to adapt it into a form that will work in the larger universe. With that power, I will be able to reshape the life forms of every planet in existence to fulfil my every whim!”

Amy looked over at Rory. “What would you say?” she asked. “A six? Maybe a seven?”

“No, definitely a six,” Rory answered. “She’s nowhere near Davros-level.”

“Are...are you rating my speech?” asked the Rani.

“Oh, we’re connoisseurs of megalomaniacal rants,” Amy explained. “This isn’t quite ‘the destruction of reality itself’, but it’s still pretty good.”

“I have had enough of your mockery,” the Rani said, crossing her arms in disgust. “I have sent my ultimatum to the local princess: she is to provide me with a complete documentation of how magic in this world works, or else I use my TARDIS to destroy the planet. I can get my answers from space dust just as well as I can from living creatures—although this way is much more amusing, and in any case I hate wasting good knowledge. That’s why I also asked for books on your science and culture.” She placed one claw over her left-hand heart and stood tall. “After all, knowledge is the only absolute good in the universe, and any action is justified in service of increasing it. In the meantime, I shall amuse myself with my experiments on you, thereby gaining even more knowledge. Servants, remove the tan earth pony.”

“What? No!” Amy cried, as the cage door was opened and the timber DDs removed a struggling Rory, tossing him over a railing down to the floor of a miniature Coliseum. “What are you going to do to him?”

“To him? Nothing. He’s the control. I need to see how well my latest creation operates, and the best way to do that is to pit him in a battle to the death against my creation!” With a wicked gleam in her eyes, the Rani picked up a control stick, and pressed a button. From the shadows of the area emerged the half-simian thing that was once—

“Big Mac!”

Chapter 7: Ficus; Credits & Acknowledgements

The Centaur and the Centurion

Chapter 7: Ficus

It turned out that Princess Twilight knew precisely how to deal with a rampaging greed-bloated dragon. Also, their fight took place in the Everfree, which is much better at absorbing collateral damage than Ponyville.

Afterwards, Twilight joined the others at the emergency ward of Ponyville Hospital, to help fix the rest of their problems.

The first of these was Big Mac. A certain species-transforming spell that the Princess had first used during the Breezy migration was trotted out, and soon the sorrel pony was back to his normal shape. Still unconscious, though—Princess Twilight Sparkle was many things, but a miracle worker wasn’t one of them.

And then there was the Doctor. In this case, the blue Time Lord pony used the Doctor’s “sonic screwdriver” to “reverse the throughput on the logic gate” in order to transfer the proper mind into the proper body.

(“There,” Amy commented to Rory. “That’s the kind of technobabble I’d like to be good at. I bet she doesn’t even know what those words actually mean, but the way she delivers them...”

“She’s right here, you know,” the blue unicorn commented lightly.)

“I am leaving,” Zecora announced at this point in a very cold voice, and turned to go.

Applejack’s eyes went wide, and she raced to cut the zebra off. “Please, Zecora, please don’t think that that dragon’s opinions are the same as our own! Just ‘cause she put a muzzle on you because of yer rhymin’ doesn’t mean we’ve got a problem with it!”

“Darn tootin’!” chimed in Granny Smith. “Why, without your verses, you wouldn’t be you at all!”

Zecora raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Are these words you are speaking true, or just sayings so I won’t feel blue?”

Apple Bloom stepped forward to hug her. “You’re a part of this town, and we love you the way you are.”

The zebra looked awkward at first with the physical contact, then smiled slightly as she returned the young mare’s gesture. “With that statement, I am content,” she said.

“Come with us back inta town,” Apple Bloom invited her. “There’s probably a big Pinkie party waitin’.”

Zecora stepped back and shook her head. “I might be made welcome, but I must return to my home.”

Apple Bloom on hearing this leaned forward and whispered something into Zecora’s ear, leading to another heartfelt hug. Then the two finally parted company, and Zecora returned to her forest.

While all this was going on, Twilight had talked to the other ponies, ending up with a fair idea of what had happened. The big mystery remaining, though, was Colgate. That look that Twilight saw in her eyes, a look that rightly did not belong to any common pony—and didn’t even belong to Twilight herself a quarter of the time when she really needed it—was evidence in and of itself that something fundamental had changed. She saw that the blue pony had been speaking with a yellow unicorn medic, who had scanned her with a magical beam.

“I’m sorry,” Twilight overheard him telling the pony, “but I’m afraid your condition is now deteriorating even faster than before.”

“Excuse me, Miss?” the alicorn asked politely.

The unicorn looked over at her. “Yes?” she asked. Even after hearing what appeared to be bad news, her expression was still perfectly composed.

“I understand that you had some memories hidden away, and now they’re back?”

“Yes,” the unicorn replied, hesitant for the first time.

“So, now that you remember, who and what are you? If that’s not too rude to ask.”

The unicorn sighed. “I’m an alien in a pony disguise. My name is Romanadvoratrelundar—” She looked over at Apple Bloom, who had had walked over after waving goodbye at Zecora, and given her a hopeful grin. “But my friends call me Colgate.”

“I understand perfectly then,” Twilight replied. “I’ve done a lot of work with memory spells. I mean, just so long as you’re still my friend Colgate, then I’m alright.”

“Yees,” Romana replied, more hesitantly than the last “yes”. She just knew that this was going to get back at her, but she just couldn’t stand to hurt the feelings of the adorable alien before her.

Twilight responded with a squee and a hug. Then she saw that the gray pegasus—rather confusingly referred to as “The Doctor”—was reviving. “I’ll let you get back to your work,” she said, disengaging.

“Yes,” Romana said once more, this time with a more absent tone, before turning back to her patient. “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked the Doctor. She was holding a single hoof up for him to see.

“Sixteen and a half,” the Doctor answered cheekily.

“Close enough.”

The Doctor rose to his hooves and looked the other pony in the eyes. “The War,” he said, with all the gravitas that term deserved. “I thought you were—”

“Yes,” she said distantly. “And I know that you—”

“Yes,” he said, turning away. “I won’t waste your time with reasons or excuses.”

She pulled him back to face her with one hoof. “But you had to.” She said this as much to convince herself as to soothe his conscience.

He looked away. “Someone had to.”

She pulled his head back once again. “And no one else would.”

“No.” He took a few moments to make up his mind. “You...you could come with us.”

“Yes,” said Amy, barging into the conversation with her husband in tow. “I think it’d be a lot of fun with another Time Lord around. I’ll let you have Rory.”

The actual manner of Rory’s completely unnoticed reaction will left as an exercise for the reader.

“No,” Romana said decisively. “I said I understood. That doesn’t mean I forgive. Not yet. Probably, almost certainly in a century or two.” Her face softened. “You have to understand—for me, it just happened.”

The Doctor stepped back, a smile and a sad glimmer in his eye. “I understand. Look me up whenever that happens. Or look me up to yell at me. I’m good at being yelled at, as Amy here will attest.”

“He really is,” Amy said on cue.

Romana turned to leave, to be stopped by the Princess.

“So...Colgate,” Twilight said. “I would appreciate it if you came with me and answered some questions. Oh, and since I’ve known the memory for names to often be the last to come back, I’m Twilight Sparkle...Princess of Friendship.” She said the last bit with some degree of discomfort, more for being a princess than for being an expert on friendship.

“Of course, Your Highness,” the unicorn said with a curtsy. “I need to make some arrangements in town in any case.”

As she turned to go, the unicorn saw Applejack staring at her, and she was pretty sure she knew the reason why. “I wish to apologize for my deception earlier, in the cave,” she said.

“Naw, that’s alright,” Applejack replied. “It was pretty obvious the way things were going to go from the moment that dragon started out-Twilightin’ the Princess.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” asked the indignant Princess in question.

Romana looked quietly around her, at the ponies calmly handling the aftermath of a crisis, and doing a remarkably good job of it. She wondered if she was even needed here.

Romana looked about her in awe as she made her way into the rather insignificant settlement of Ponyville.

It was almost like she had never been there before.

It was a town full to the brim with fairy tale creatures—and earth ponies, which Romana firmly believed should have been classified as fairy tale creatures from the moment she had first met one—and all of them were living perfectly ordinary lives. Ponies ran shops. Ponies lit lanterns. Ponies sang and danced...no, wait, that was just Pinkie Pie, leading the town to the big celebration being held in...

“I’m going to make a wild guess and say that it’s my shop that is being trashed right now,” Romana stated for the record.

“It’s not being trashed,” Princess Twilight clarified. “Pinkie only throws those kinds of parties for our enemies. And not the decent enemies either—the ones who fight dirty.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Romana said quietly.

#

The interview in the library went rather quickly—despite Romana asking nearly as many questions as Twilight—and a scroll was soon sent off to Celestia, courtesy of Spike. The baby dragon was rather grumpy over the way that his sending ability had been grossly overused in the past several hours. Also, it was way past his bedtime, but he wasn’t about to admit this as the true cause of his crankiness. He promised to re-shelve the borrowed books tomorrow.

“So the Rani wasn’t really a threat to the planet?” Twilight asked as they emerged from “Ponyville Library 2.0”.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Romana replied. “Sure, she could have blown up everything with her TARDIS, but there’s no way she could have done that and survived, and she’s not the type to throw away her life like that. It was an empty bluff.”

“And how did you know to borrow my books?” Twilight asked.

“Well, I don’t really remember anything before I opened that watch,” said Romana. “But if I were to reconstruct the chain of reasoning, Ponyville was being attacked by mind-controlled plants, that used dragonfire. The first is one of the Rani’s trademarks, and the second is specific to dragons. Given her character weaknesses, that pretty automatically says ‘give her more knowledge than she can handle’.” Seeing the Apple family nearby all huddled together she added, “I’ll see you at the party.”

The Princess looked in the same direction, and nodded after a moment. “All right.”

Big Mac was awake, but still lying down on a pallet borrowed from Ponyville Hospital. He could have easily stayed there overnight, but the Apples had a strong belief in the healing power of being surrounded by your home and family, so it looked like he’d be spending tonight in his own bed. A rather emotional scene seemed to have just concluded.

“Am I...missing something?” Romana asked Apple Bloom as they headed over to the dentist’s office for the big party. The other Apples split off to return to Sweet Apple Acres, assisted by the Doctor and his companions.

Apple Bloom sighed. “We all knew this day would come sooner or later, but it didn’t make it any easier.”

“I see,” said Romana, although she really didn’t.

The banner inside the waiting room proclaimed the subject of the party to be “Ponyville’s Salvation #73”. Although it was rather on the late side, several fillies and colts were present. Also in attendance were:

“Sweetie Belle! Scootaloo!”

“Apple Bloom!” exclaimed Sweetie Belle. “I’m so glad you’re safe!”

“More than just safe,” bragged Apple Bloom. “Look!”

“You’ve got your cutie mark!” exclaimed Scootaloo. “Everypony! Apple Bloom has her cutie mark!”

The whole crowd shouted their approval. Within seconds, a somewhat crinkled “Apple Bloom’s Cutie Mark” banner was added to the ceiling by Pinkie Pie.

(“Well, I knew I was going to use it eventually!” Pinkie noted to Roseluck when it was asked how she could have been able to do that so quickly.)

Apple Bloom climbed up on the little window that separated the waiting room from the front office, in order to show off her new mark. Several ponies split themselves off from the party to settle various bets that had been made as to the exact timing of the young mare’s cutie mark.

Twilight took Romana under her wing, re-introducing her to each of the other ponies at the party.

“Well, you can get this party started now, because here I am!” proclaimed a late arrival.

“Rainbow Dash! What took you so long?” asked Twilight.

“I just had to get a little flying in now that that stupid dome is gone!” answered Rainbow. “Speaking of which, why did you have to have the top of that force field so low that none of us pegasi could fly? Your brother’s domes are much higher.”

“There’s a perfectly scientific reason for that,” Twilight explained. “Shining Armor uses a hemispherical dome, which is simpler to construct. But I believe that a lenticular design can be more easily reinforced. I intend to publish a paper with my findings in next month’s—”

“Excuse me,” Romana interrupted, “but I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

Twilight turned quickly to face her. “Oh? And why’s that?”

Romana walked over to a whiteboard and picked up a marker with her mouth and drew diagrams of both shapes of shield being discussed, with several points labelled and a couple of supplementary equations added. Putting the marker down, she explained: “Well if all energy-based shields share the same fundamental principles—and I believe they do—then the strengthening you speak of has the unfortunate side effect of creating random power fluctuations. It was by taking advantage of one of these fluctuations that I was able to leave Ponyville. Luckily for you, that particular sort of weakness is one-way only, but a knowledgeable foe could probably break in with a minimal amount of effort.”

“Hmm...” Twilight mused, studying the diagram. She used her magic to lift up a different colored marker and work through a few algebraic transformations of the equations, before nodding grimly. “I see what you mean. You know, I’ve asked Doctor Hooves plenty of times about shield construction, and although he was very good at tearing them down, I don’t think even he had your level of in-depth knowledge of this particular subject. However did you...?”

The words in Twilight’s throat died as she looked over at the Time Lady. The expression on her dazed face was so vivid you could almost see the reflections of explosions in her eyes, and hear the screams of the damned in her twitching ears. It appeared certain that Romana had once made the same mistake that Twilight had made, and paid far more dearly for it.

“I’d...I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind,” Romana said in a near-whisper.

It took a few moments for a stunned Twilight to get her voice back. “Alright,” she finally managed to choke out. “And thank you.”

Romana closed her eyes for a few seconds, and for those seconds it appeared that she had stopped breathing. Then she opened her eyes, and appeared back to her normal self. “I don’t believe we’ve met your friend Rarity yet,” she said.

“Right here, Lady-President-of-an-entire-planet,” the white unicorn who was right behind her said with a curtsy. (Let it never be said that Rarity was the last pony to pick up a juicy rumor. Especially if it involved a title somehow.)

“Former Lady President, Miss Rarity,” Romana corrected her with a nod. Of a former planet. “I was wondering if I might purchase a dress from you. I apologize for the short notice, but I’m afraid I’ll have to buy it prêt-à-porter, as I will be needing it within the hour.”

“Oh!” Rarity exclaimed faintly. “No, it will be no trouble at all. If you could take a moment to step by my shop—”

“Oh, I know which dress I would like,” Romana said. “I saw it in the window on the way here. The white one with the frilly shoulders. This should more than cover the inconvenience.” And saying this, she slipped her satchel off of her neck and mouthed it over.

“I...I couldn’t possibly accept this!” Rarity protested. “You just saved Ponyville. And been through a perfectly wretched experience. Giving you the dress is the least I could do.” She slid the satchel back to Romana with a hoof.

Romana slid it back. “Yes, it was a wretched and perilous experience, hundreds of years of it. And in all that time, the ponies of Ponyville and whatever other towns I passed through looked after me, and cared for me when I didn’t have the means of taking care of myself. Well, this is my gift in return for your gift. Bearer of the Element of Generosity, I trust you to spend this money wisely, for the benefit of all ponies.”

“Oh!” Rarity exclaimed. “Well, that’s different.” She picked up the satchel with her magic and bounced it a little to get a feel for how many bits it contained. “Surely you need some of this, though.”

“No,” said Romana, dipping her head slightly. “I’ll be leaving the planet at the end of this party.”

“Leaving?!” Rarity and Twilight cried out in unison.

“Wait, I’ve got this! I think there’s room for one more sign,” Pinkie’s voice called out from the back of the room.

“What about the practice?” asked a lilac-colored unicorn mare.

Romana turned to look at her. She opened her mouth for a few seconds, then hesitantly closed it. “I’ve got some memory problems, but I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to know you.”

“I’m your assistant, Sea Swirl,” the unicorn said.

“Perfect!” Romana exclaimed. “I’m giving you the practice.”

“You are?”

“You’re all right with that, right?”

Sea Swirl thought for a moment. “Yes, I think I can handle it.”

“Oh good!” Romana exclaimed. “Good luck!”

#

“I’d better get that dress,” Rarity said, excusing herself.

She was soon joined by Apple Bloom. “If she needs a dress, then so do I,” she said.

Sweetie Belle was the first to catch the significance of this. “You’re going with her?” she asked.

Apple Bloom nodded. “It’s what my cutie mark is telling me. Or I’m telling it. Same difference, I guess.”

“I’ve got one of your old party dresses that you tore a few months ago,” said Rarity. “It’s fixed up, but might need an adjustment. Come along.”

Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle looked at each other, and then followed after, to stretch out their goodbye as long as possible. It was a possibility that the Cutie Mark Crusaders had discussed more than once over the years—the possibility that their cutie marks might drive them apart.

#

Pinkie Pie got the “Farewell Colgate” sign up, only to overhear that Apple Bloom was leaving as well. For a moment, just a very brief moment, she almost became frustrated. Then she repositioned the farewell banner so it overlapped the cutie mark banner. That way, the words “Apple Bloom” in one banner could be seen to double as an additional subject for the other banner. With that, every last centimeter of ceiling space was now taken. “Yup,” she said to herself with a smile, “you’ve still got it.”

At that moment, Rainbow Dash landed next to her. “So, I just heard from Twilight that Colgate’s been a Time Lord this whole time,” the pegasus confided to her. “Are we going to celebrate that, too? And what about those three new ponies I heard about?”

“Oh come on!” Pinkie exclaimed.

#

Apple Bloom returned to the party a few minutes later, wearing a simple pink dress. Rarity was with her, carrying the dress Romana had asked for. Also with them were Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle. All of them were a bit teary-eyed. Rarity quickly excused herself to seek out Colgate. The trio made their way around the party, Apple Bloom saying her farewells as she went. Finally they stopped before a gray pegasus and a lavender alicorn.

“There, there,” said the Doctor, picking up her chin with a wing. “Twilight and I have thrown together something that might lift your spirits.”

At this prompt, Twilight presented the former Cutie Mark Crusaders with a pair of small identical boxes made from wrought iron, with large handles for carrying them “earth pony style”. Each was covered with filigree of dancing serpents, and had four interlocking doors on the top that opened outwards.

“These are dragonfire sending boxes,” she explained. “You put a message in one of them, and it instantly appears in the other.”

“Not quite as good as a cell phone,” added the Doctor.

“It was something that I thought might be useful if ponies ever colonize the Moon,” said Twilight. “The Doctor made some necessary changes so it would still work across universes.”

“All the same,” the Doctor noted, “you probably don’t want to take it outside the TARDIS once you leave this universe.”

“This is perfect!” exclaimed Apple Bloom. She led the other two in glomming the inventors.

Amy and Rory laughed at the sight.

“So do you have any advice?” Apple Bloom asked Amy as she climbed out of the pony pile. “From one red-haired adventurer to another?”

“Never forget your family,” Amy told her with a smile, “but don’t let their memories hold you back, either.”

“Keep an open mind,” said Rory.

“And an open heart,” said the Doctor.

“Or hearts,” added Amy with a smirk. “Any other advice I could give is specific to the Doctor, and you know Colgate better than I do.”

Apple Bloom nodded slowly.

“Good luck,” Amy said, giving her doppelganger a hug. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Which isn’t much,” quipped Rory.

“Got that right!” Amy replied with a laugh.

“Take care of her, OK?” the Doctor said, suddenly serious. “I think she saw some of the worst of the Time War, of things our people thought they had to do to preserve the universe. I think...I think she needs some simplicity in her life. So stay true to yourself, to your identity as a pony, and as an Apple. As much for her, as for yourself. Even when you find you don’t look much like either.”

“Alright,” Apple Bloom said with a nod. “And thanks for everything.” She picked up her sending box in her mouth and tried to find Romana. Failing at this, she returned to the Doctor.

“You know,” he told her, “a TARDIS is supposed to blend into its surroundings, to allow its inhabitant to observe history being made without interfering. That’s why the Rani’s TARDIS looked like part of her cave. The only reason my TARDIS looks like it does is because it’s become a trifle...eccentric.”

“Oh!” Apple Bloom exclaimed. She walked right up to the large ficus plant that Colgate had brought with her into Ponyville, and stepped behind it.

Apple Bloom stumbled into the console room of the TARDIS. Unlike the Doctor’s TARDIS, the color scheme leaned more towards sky blue than brown. The struts and beams were a bright orange in color, and had organic shapes to them.

As she had half-expected, the passage through the doors had made her human. She wondered, if she looked into a mirror, if she would see a slightly younger version of Amy Pond looking back at her.

“So you decided to come after all,” said a voice.

Standing behind the console was a majestic humanoid in a pretty white dress and a blond head of hair, her eyes full of warmth.

“Yup!” Apple Bloom said brightly. She used one of the struts to raise herself onto her legs. “What should I call you? Romanadvor...it’s kinda long.”

“The Doctor called me Romana. You can call me that too, if you’d like. What’s wrong with ‘Colgate’?”

“Colgate’s fine in Ponyville. But it isn’t right. I can’t call you Colgate because you’re not Colgate,” Apple Bloom said sadly. “Not anymore. The real Colgate told me that she’d die if she opened the arch, and she was right. You didn’t even know how to use your horn, did you?”

“No,” said Romana. “But...Colgate was not entirely right. She was able to do some things that only I should have been able to do, like getting through that shield. And...I think there are some little flashes of memories, intuitions of how I should feel about this pony or that. I feel...very grateful for what you’ve done for her...for me.”

“And this is just the beginning,” said Apple Bloom, stepping carefully away from the wall and over to the console opposite Romana. “But I’m not sure that ‘Romana’ is right, either.”

“I beg your pardon?” Romana said, raising an eyebrow.

“That’s your birth name, right?” Apple Bloom asked.

“Yes.”

“But the Doctor and the Rani just have titles. Why is that?”

Romana looked down at the console, working her way through the system diagnostic yet again as a way to keep from thinking too deeply about what she was saying. “On Gallifrey, my people were divided into two classes. The Time Lords were of noble descent; they were responsible for the fates of galaxies, and they were addressed by their birth names, names that denoted their rank and stature. The others...well, they were lucky to be referred to by their titles, and not just ‘hey you’. It was the rebels—those who left Gallifrey, never intending to return, who shed their names, and chose the titles that others would refer to them as.”

She walked around to stand next to Apple Bloom, her eyes still on her instruments. “Most of them were only after mastery, either over people or over nature. The Doctor was one of the few with noble intentions, more ‘noble’ than the nobles he left behind.”

“So which are you?” Apple Bloom asked, looking up at her.

“It depends,” Romana said with a small smile. She walked over to one wall of the console room. With a touch, one of the roundels set into the wall pivoted open, revealing a set of hidden controls for her to idly manipulate. “I’ve been one of the Doctor’s companions, I’ve done some good on my own, but mostly, I was a Time Lord, on Gallifrey, trying to improve things from the inside.” She sighed as she closed the roundel. “In that, I was less than successful. But I guess...I am a rebel now.”

“So what should I call you?” insisted Apple Bloom, who had tried mixing her walk over to the wall with a bit of a skip.

“I...had a title of sorts that I gave myself, but it didn’t work out.” The flat surface of the roundel that Romana had just closed had a large flat mirror set in it, and she briefly gazed into her reflection, her hand lightly brushing across it. In her mind’s eye, she saw not her current face, but that of a tall dark woman with auburn hair and a put-upon look. “The Council had assigned me to spy on the Doctor while ostensibly assisting him in retrieving the parts of a powerful artifact, at the request of an all-powerful being who claimed he needed it to save the universe. Each part was disguised as an ordinary object, with extraordinary powers.

“All the Time Lords wanted was the Key: to study it and, if it proved interesting, to incorporate its technology into our own. But I saw whole civilizations imperiled by those pieces, civilizations that my masters would have allowed to perish rather than violate their non-interference policy, and my loyalty shifted to the Doctor. And then...”

Romana called Apple Bloom’s attention to the mirror. “Princess Astra was the last of the pieces we needed. She sacrificed her life so that we could complete the Key, only for us to learn that our taskmaster intended the object for evil purposes instead of good. He was defeated and Astra was restored, but that moment when I thought she had died for nothing deeply affected me.

“I felt I had to do something, so I regenerated into her appearance, and something between my old personality and hers.” Romana smiled. “It’s something we Time Lords can do at will—similar to the chameleon arch. Although with certain limitations.”

“So that’s a princess?” Apple Bloom asked, pointing at Romana’s reflection.

“Yes,” Romana answered.

“Then you should be the Princess!” Apple Bloom exclaimed.

Romana was taken aback. “I...I thought you would object. I got the impression that you gave your princesses a great deal of respect.”

“Yeah, but that’s because they deserve it,” Apple Bloom replied. “They serve the people instead of just rule them, like the kings and queens of other lands. That’s why they are princesses. A princess is somepony who has ponies above them as well as below them. They rule ponies, but they also serve them. It’s something you earn instead of just being born to it. So, could you take that as your name, Princess?”

“And...and you truly don’t mind? You won’t treat me like a snob, or like somebody impossibly above you?”

Apple Bloom shook her head. “Not at all! I knew Twilight before she became a princess, and she explained it all to me. I think you’ll make a great princess! Unless you turn out to be like Diamond Tiara, in which guess you better believe I’ll call ya a snob!”

“Thanks,” the Princess said somewhat teary-eyed. “I hope I live up to your expectations.” She walked back to the console, and checked one more set of controls. “Now then, would you like to turn back into a pony, at least until we reach our first destination? All you have to do is go out the door and come back in again.” Her hand hovered over a switch.

“No,” Apple Bloom answered without a moment’s hesitation. “I think I might as well start getting used to this whole ‘being human’ business.” She looked the Princess in the eyes. “Trusting each other is a big part of the princess business.”

The Princess seemed to be getting nothing but surprises from her new companion tonight. “You...trust me?” she said, putting a hand to her “feeling” heart. “But I’m just a stranger to you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Apple Bloom. “Like Princess Twilight always tells me, what is a stranger—”

“—But a friend you haven’t met yet!” said the Princess brightly, but then her brow furled. “Where did I hear that before?” she asked herself.

Apple Bloom smiled broadly.

“Right then!” the Princess said with a matching grin. “Let’s see how well he flies!” She started turning knobs and flicking switches with reckless abandon. The outer door closed, and the rotor in the center of the console began to move up and down.

“‘He’?” asked Apple Bloom, looking around her. The whole room was making the oddest throbbing sound—like the Doctor’s TARDIS in flight, but not quite.

The Princess looked around her. “This place always gave me a ‘he’ vibe,” she said. “You know in school, we were instructed never to leave our TARDISes operating any longer than absolutely necessary, for fear that they will spontaneously develop worrisome eccentricities. I deliberately told this one to stay on even after it repaired itself. Who knows? The old boy might start developing a mind of its own!”

“Celestia forbid!” Apple Bloom exclaimed playfully.

“So, where should we go first?” asked the Princess, inviting the transformed pony to join her as she fiddled with the time machine’s coordinates. “The Cascades of Orion? The Delphic Spectacle? Good Old Earth? Oh, I know! I’ll take you to—”

Credits & Acknowledgements

My Little Pony is copyright Hasbro, created originally by Bonnie Zacherle, with the Friendship Is Magic series originated by Lauren Faust and currently run by Meghan McCarthy and Jayson Thiessen. The characters of Zecora, Apple Bloom, Colgate (official name Minuette), Applejack, Granny Smith, Big McIntosh, Winona, Doctor Hooves, Derpy, Lyra Heartstrings, Princesses Celestia, Luna/Nightmare Moon and Twilight Sparkle, Spike, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, Roseluck, Shining Armor, Sea Swirl, Diamond Tiara, the Diamond Dogs, Changelings (as they appear in this series, not the general concept of a fay creature that replaces a baby), and the unnamed green dragon from the episode “Owl’s Well that Ends Well” all come from that source, as well as the locations of Sweet Apple Acres, Canterlot, Ponyville, the Everfree Forest, Zecora and Twilight’s tree houses, the group called the Cutie Mark Crusaders, the concept of a cutie mark, bits as units of currency, and finally the Elements of Harmony (aka “the Orbital Friendship Cannon”). I also suspect they do now or will soon own the word “anypony”, so prepare to start paying by the word.

Doctor Who is copyright the British Broadcasting Corporation, created originally by Sydney Newman, revived by Russell T Davies and currently run by Steven Moffat. The characters of the Doctor (the Tenth incarnation referred to in this story as “Doctor Hooves” and the Eleventh incarnation referred to as “The Doctor”), Amy Pond, Rory Williams, The Master/Harold Saxon, Davros, Romana (technically Romana II), and the Rani all come from that source, as well as the TARDIS [Time and Relative Dimensions in Space] and everything inside it (including the Cloister Bell), the planet of Gallifrey and the culture of the Time Lords, the Time War, the Chameleon Arch, Nitro-9, the sonic screwdriver and the race of Cybermen.

The portrayals of the characters listed above are my own (and therefore my fault if I got them wrong). Young adult Apple Bloom is of course more original than most of the other existing characters, and Colgate’s portrayal is heavily influenced by Rina-chan’s version of the character. Unless I forgot something, any characters, concepts or locations not in the above lists—that are not cheeky pop culture references—are my invention. And what do you know? Here’s the list of all of those cheeky pop culture references now, complete with bonus ranting sections!

The exposition dump in Chapter 1 recounted the overall arch plot of Series 5 of Doctor Who. Although Amy is known to have talked with the Doctor about what he does when she and Rory are sleeping (the “Night and the Doctor” set of mini-episodes), the part about her figuring out that Rory remembers being the Last Centurion despite his claims to the contrary is my invention. In fact, the characters of Amy and Rory in general do not quite line up to how they were at any point in Series 5, 6 or 7, mostly because Steven Moffat likes to make his characters suffer. No, this is an idealized version of the pair.

The idea that the Friendship Is Magic character of Doctor Hooves is a regenerated or transformed version of the Doctor has been done so many times that I don’t think I could point out the first fanfic to do it, or even the best—although lots of people like to point to “Number Twelve” by Squeak-anon.

The brown pinstriped suit Rory was wearing that the Eleventh Doctor looked strangely at was the standard costume of the Tenth Doctor. Hey, I wanted Amy and Rory’s clothes to control what coat color they got as ponies, pony Rory in my head is brown, and I thought using Ten’s suit to pull that off would be funny.

“TARDIS nanites”: Doctor Who definitely has healing nanites (“Aliens of London”), but I’m not sure if the TARDIS itself has them. If it doesn’t, it should. The fact that they are necessary is because of a fundamental incompatibility between the laws of the Doctor’s universe and Equestria’s—the standard excuse trotted out by authors as to why the Doctor is a pony in Equestria.

Bilbo Baggins is from The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937), by J. R. R. Tolkien, which included a dragon. While we’re on the subject of Tolkien, the city of Minas Tirith, from The Lord of the Rings (1954) was the inspiration for the design of Canterlot, which is why Rory makes his “Tolkien vibes” quip upon seeing it.

“Equis” is a common fan name for the planet that Equestria is located on. According to canon, it’s either “Earth”, “Equestria”, or not yet named.

“Mannequins with kill appeal” is the closest thing to a description that you are going to get from the song “Diamond Dogs” (1974) by David Bowie—the title of the song of course was the inspiration for the creatures in FIM. The idea that dragon magic cannot affect electrum, and that this is the reason why Zecora wears electrum rings, is my invention—as far as I know, those rings are gold in canon, and are ceremonial. (Besides, I couldn’t use gold because I was saving that for the Cyberponies.) Oh yeah, and canonically, we don’t even know that dragons have any magic besides sending fire, and that could very well be Spike-specific.

“Rory” is the Anglicized version of the Irish Gaelic Ruaidrí/Ruairí, which does mean “the red-haired king”, and coincidently was the name of several Irish kings in the Middle Ages.

Winnychester has been mentioned in a few fanfics as the name of a former capital city of Equestria that became the Everfree Forest after Celestia banished Nightmare Moon.

“Stepford Teeth” is a reference to The Stepford Wives (1972), a “satirical thriller” by Ira Levin (to quote Wikipedia) about a town where all the wives are submissive robots. The adjective “Stepford” has since gone on to be applied to anything that looks perfect but turns out to be sinister.

“A sword straight out of Arthurian legend”: King Arthur’s in the public domain, so there. The sword in question can be either Excalibur or the Sword in the Stone—most people think they’re the same sword, after all.

The idea that Doctor Hooves’ companion is Derpy, and/or that they are married, is practically common knowledge at this point, thanks once again to “Number 12”.

Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle’s cutie mark stories (and how Scootaloo started flying) are my invention. For Scootaloo, I was dissatisfied with some other proposed explanations, and wished to keep with Lauren Faust’s original intentions regarding the character—that she be permanently disabled, and needs to learn how to live with this (see also the character of Wilt in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends). A “feather stone” or a flying machine in this case works the same way as a cane for a blind person or a wheelchair for a paraplegic—it doesn’t make the disability go away, and never makes things as easy as not being disabled. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a feather stone in a FIM fanfic before, but I’ve encountered them in fantasy novels before. I’m using the concept of rock-based dragon magic that I nicked from some now forgotten fanfiction (sorry), to solve the problem of how they move their hoards around—pegasi can magically pull anything attached to them through the air, but there’s no reason to think that dragon flying magic works the same way.

As for Sweetie Belle, the business with Noffony I was snuck into an appendix of my earlier fanfiction “The Best of All Possible Worlds”. It should be noted however, that that story took place in an alternate universe that diverged from canon early in Season 2, so it’s probable that the Noffony I from that story was not visited by three time-travelling foals. Music-based magic is something I’ve been playing around with in my fanfiction for quite some time now, but giving it to Sweetie Belle is certainly not original to me.

Apple Bloom spouting a metaphorical mermaid tail is a reference to The Little Mermaid (1989, Disney).

I could have sworn that “Roary the Manticore” came from “Hands” by Andrew Joshua Talon, but apparently I’m mistaken.

“I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it,” at least in my ears, is always a quote by Charlie Brown from Peanuts (1950), by Charles M. Schulz.

Lyra in the fandom has traditionally been obsessed with hands and humans, to the point where now the fandom has turned against this trend and like making Lyra the exact opposite. I think what we can say with canonical certainty is that Lyra is excited. About anything, really.

Amy thinking the Chameleon Arch (aka the silver pocket watch) made Harold Saxon evil: [Rant Warning] Something I’m rather annoyed/disappointed by in a lot of fanfiction, not just for FIM but for pretty much any fandom, is an inability by the author to comprehend or sympathetically portray the opinions of characters who are wrong or who feel differently about things than the author does. The dedicated Doctor Who fan, learning that a character has a fob watch, will instantly want to see it opened, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that most humans that know what those things really are would never want to see one used ever again.

Nitro-9 is a fictional explosive used by the Doctor’s companion Ace. The specific doctor in this case is the Seventh incarnation, the “fellow with the question mark umbrella”.

“Fraxinus” is the genus name for olive and lilac plants, so I thought it an appropriate name for a mad botanist to bestow upon one of her creations.

And yes, the Rani is a mad botanist from the Classic series of Doctor Who, one of that rare breed of mad scientist that prefers creating freaks of nature to using science to try and take over the world/universe. I am of the opinion that if a writer were to go to the trouble of properly re-inventing her, she would make a fine one-off villainess for the Revived series. (Or they could continue to create original characters, too—I’m fine with that as well.) Also, I think she fits in very well with FIM, unlike some of the more horrific creatures I’ve seen used in crossover fanfics. I suppose I could unleash my rant on that particular subject if asked nicely.

Zecora with a cement muzzle: Alright, I’ll admit it, that was me. It probably took me longer to write her four lines of dialog than most of the rest of the entire fanfic. I hate writing poetry.

“The Sphere of Stars” is similar to the barrier between universes often used in other Doctor Hooves fanfics, and a reference to my own cosmology for the FIM universe, which is deliberately Ptolemaic.

“The destruction of reality itself” is a reference to a rant by the character Davros in “The Stolen Earth” (2008), written by Russell T Davies.

The idea that a Time Lord’s left-hand heart is emotionally cold and the right-hand one is warm: I’m pretty certain that either Four or Romana said something along those lines at some point. Probably while Douglas Adams was script editor—it seems to have his brand of whimsy written all over it.

“The mad man with a box”: A title given to the Eleventh Doctor, from “The Eleventh Hour” (2010) written by Steven Moffat.

The Herd with a capital-H: Definitely a fandom concept—canon tries not to get that mystical.

“Roranicus Pondicus”: Name thrown out as a joke by the Doctor in the episode “The Almost People” (2011, written by Matthew Graham) to refer to Rory’s former life as a Roman centurion. I’m taking it seriously, because that whole scenario was plucked out of Amy’s adolescent fantasies of half-naked Romans anyway. “Second Augustan Legion” is an educated guess as to which of the Roman legions in Britain he was a part of. I am really surprised that none of the Doctor Who episode transcripts and fanfiction I searched through had bothered to work out this very important detail before now, so I am proudly claiming it for myself. It’s almost as if the vast majority of fans of Doctor Who are fans because they’re science fiction nuts instead of history nuts, which is completely and utterly bonkers! [Oh, and Rant Over, I guess.]

Romanadvoratrelundar: Full name of the Doctor Who Classic character Romana, who I and tons of other fans would love to see come back in some form in the Revived series. Here, I’ll even link to a variant of Murray Gold’s “I Am the Doctor” theme, tailored to Romana by a lone fan who’s trying to create her own video series with this goal. The idea that she became Lady President of Gallifrey at some point comes from the novel Happy Endings (1996) by Paul Cornell, and was accepted as fact in the Big Finish audio dramas.

Cybermen’s weakness being gold dust: This was from the very first appearances of Cybermen in the Classic series. Eventually it became obvious that this was a very lame weakness, and so the Cybermen altered themselves to be immune to it.

Princess Twilight needing to know how to deal with a greed-bloated dragon: “The Secret of My Excess” (2011), written by M. A. Larson.

Breezies: “It Ain’t Easy Being Breezies” (2014), written by Natasha Levinger.

“Reverse the throughput on the logic gate”: Meant to be a variant on the Third Doctor’s “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”, only this time it actually makes sense.

“Princess of Friendship”: Twilight’s title starting with “Twilight’s Kingdom” (2014), written by Meghan McCarthy. The episode included the destruction of Twilight’s original tree house/library. Even if she’s now living in a castle, Ponyville still needs a library, so I’m postulating that sometime between then and the time my story is set, “Ponyville Library 2.0” would have to be set up somehow.

“Prêt-à-porter”: French for “ready to wear”, i.e. the clothes you don’t get custom-made from a professional dressmaker.

Sea Swirl is a background pony with a similar mane design as Colgate’s. Since Colgate is not canonically a dentist, there’s no way that Sea Swirl can canonically be her assistant. Actually, I have no idea who Colgate’s assistant is according to the fandom.

The exclamation “Oh come on!”, as always, will be attributed to Sweetie Belle in the episode “Hearts and Hooves Day” (2012), written by Meghan McCarthy.

The name vs. title distinction for Time Lords given by Romana in Chapter 7 is my invention, although it resembles any number of fan theories. Of course, I’ve never heard Romana being called “The Princess”, despite that title working particularly well for her. I always thought her line about basing her regeneration on Princess Astra merely because she looked nice in the serial “Destiny of the Daleks” (1979, credited to Terry Nation [although quite obviously written by script editor Douglas Adams]) was a bit too glib. Romana’s story references the “Key of Time” arc (1978-79, also script edited by Adams), specifically the serial “The Armageddon Factor” (1979) which featured Lalla Ward as the doomed Princess Astra before she was cast as Romana after the departure of original Romana actress Mary Tamm (are you following all this, or have I overloaded your capacity for parentheticals yet?). Of course, this assumes that Doctor Who in this period was made for people obsessed with character growth and continuity, instead of for the lackadaisical “teatime family” crowd.

Likewise, the theory about why Equestria is ruled by princesses is one of several that fans have come up with to cover Hasbro’s rather lame actual reason, which is that “Princess Twilight” dolls sell better than “Queen Twilight” dolls with little girls. I mean, as if this were a show for little girls!

How to make your TARDIS interesting by leaving it on too long: Another fan theory of mine.

“I’ll take you to—” The serial “Revelation of the Daleks” (1985, written by Eric Saward) ended with the Sixth Doctor saying “All right, I’ll take you to Blackpool.” Only, the series was put on hiatus right before the last episode aired, with no certainty that the planned episode set in Blackpool would ever be made (it wasn’t), so the final word was cut off from the broadcast version. Not knowing this fact, I have always thought it was tremendously evocative to end an episode in that way. That, and I have no idea where to send The Princess and Apple Bloom for their first adventure together, assuming I ever wrote one. I mean [Rant Time Again] it’s not like I’d be able to post such a series if I actually wrote it. I wanted to write the origin for an inverse of a typical “Doctor Hooves” fanfiction series, and that means a series set solidly in the Doctor Who universe, where the only Equestrian character is in human form 99% of the time—how can I possibly justify posting that to FIMFiction? Besides, I think I’ve said everything I have to say on this particular crossover.

End rant, end pop culture reference list, end Credits & Acknowledgements, and end fanfic. Always remember to properly nest your endings, kids!

Chapter 6: The Centaur and the Centurion

The Centaur and the Centurion

Chapter 6: The Centaur and the Centurion

In the throne room of Canterlot, a bored Princess Celestia was reduced to the role of courier service.

A scroll materialized before her, condensed into matter from its former state as green dragonfire. The floor was littered with more than a dozen similar scrolls.

Celestia grabbed the new scroll with her magic and unrolled it. “How about now?” she read aloud. “Can I save them now?”

Her Princess-Twilight-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown impersonation was uncanny.

“No, no you can’t,” answered a bored Doctor Hooves, speaking as if he were addressing Twilight Sparkle directly instead of via dragonfire correspondence.

Beside him, his wife Derpy used her wing feathers to grip a quill. The quill was used to write down the Doctor’s words on a blank scroll. Once this was complete, the gray pegasus rolled up the scroll and held it aloft with her mouth. Princess Celestia then floated the scroll out of her mouth, tied a purple ribbon around it, and used a spell to convert it into a cloud of green dragonfire that quickly flew out of the castle window and towards the domed—not, for once, doomed—town of Ponyville.

A few seconds later, a reply from the town arrived, thereby repeating the cycle.

“Are you sure?” the message read.

“Yes, I am,” Doctor Hooves answered. “You will get a very clear signal from the Everfree before too long, and that will be the time to move in and save everybody...err, everypony.” He waited until Derpy had finished transcribing before adding, “Actually, it will be less ‘save everypony’ and more ‘clean up’, but you don’t need to tell her that.”

“And how are you so sure that everything will turn out alright?” Celestia asked on her own, after sending off the Doctor’s reply.

“I was assured by the only authority in the universe that I trust besides Derpy,” the Doctor told her.

Celestia, having had to deal with the Doctor before, was easily able to figure this one out: “Yourself.”

“Exactly.”

Derpy thought about this for a few seconds, before having an uneasy realization: “And can you trust all of your regenerations?”

Doctor Hooves had a mental image of the fellow with the question-mark shaped umbrella, a fellow who was entirely too clever for his own good. “Um...”

In the bowels of the Everfree, Apple Bloom reached back and tore free the chameleon arch that she had attached to her hip with clear packing tape. She held the object out, balanced on one forehoof.

“You...you keep that away from me!” Colgate said, slowly backing away from the earth pony.

“Colgate, you need to open this,” Apple Bloom said quietly, slowly closing the distance between them on three legs as the watch was still outstretched before her.

“N...nno!” Colgate protested, shaking her head wildly. “You heard what that dragon said. If I use it, I’ll die.”

“You won’t die,” Apple Bloom insisted. “You’ll turn back into what you’re meant to be, into that ‘noble creature’ from those dreams you told me about.”

“There were mad creatures as well in my dreams—how do you know I won’t become one of them instead?” Her eyes suddenly lost their focus. “And the noble one was the Doctor. Noble and mad, all at once. ‘The mad man with a box.’”

“You were chasin’ after that Rani character. Since she’s bad, then you must have been good.”

“Not necessarily!”

“But you are a part of her, and you are good!” She looked down at the trail of blood drops that been dripping from Colgate’s snout this whole time. “And...and you’re dyin’.”

Colgate had long since run out of cave to back into, and had slid down into a seated position. She squeezed her blue eyes shut, and squeezed some tears out of them. “So you know,” she whispered.

“I had to find out why you were so sad after that checkup,” Apple Bloom told her as she sat down beside her. “But don’t you see? That’s probably the side effect of being disguised for centuries. The arch is probably not meant to be used for this long with a pony body, or something about the magic of Equestria messed it up somehow. If you turn back, you’ll be cured.”

“Cured?” Colgate repeated slowly, her eyes still closed. “Maybe. But only if I turn back...and leave. Because that’s it, isn’t it? If I become...a Time Lord, then I have to stay a Time Lord. And, this wanderlust I’ve been fighting all my life will permanently take hold of me, and I’ll have to leave this entire universe, for the one that they came from. I will become a wanderer in an immense and lonely expanse, one of only three of my kind left in an infinity of space, inhabited by strange and unwelcoming species. I’ll have left behind all of my friends here in Equestria, left in my tiny time machine to wander the whole of Time and Space...alone...” Across the unicorn’s suddenly opened eyes marched the ultimate nightmare of any of Celestia’s little ponies: to be sundered from the Herd...forever.

“No,” Apple Bloom vowed, putting her free forehoof on Colgate’s shoulder. “I won’t let that happen. If you have to leave, then I’m coming with you.”

“No!” Colgate protested. “I couldn’t possibly do that to you!”

“What makes you think that it would be a bad thing?” Apple Bloom said with a smile, tears of compassion and a strange sort of light glistening in her eyes. “We ponies have lived all of our lives on this little world, thinking that it was the whole of Creation. But it isn’t—it’s just the start of a whole incredible universe, wonder after wonder. If one world can produce creatures as inspiring as Amy and Rory, what else is there to see and do? How many opportunities must there be to improve the lives of those in need, to save those lives that think that no one is left who cares for them?! Most of all, how many lonely souls exist that are in desperate need...of our friendship? Colgate! Colgate, or whatever name you really have, we two will see the universe! A place filled to bursting with strangers, and what is a stranger, but a friend you haven’t met yet?!” And saying this, she gently placed the watch into Colgate’s outstretched hoof, a hoof the unicorn had seemed to raise without even realizing it.

The moment was rudely interrupted by four timber DDs, who silently yanked Apple Bloom to her hooves and dragged her away. The pony made no move to resist, her eyes fixed on a frozen Colgate until the earth pony was dragged out of eye contact.

“Make an example of the unicorn,” the voice of the Rani commanded. “I have no use for mental defectives.”

The wooden army moved in for the kill.

#

Three timber DDs dragged Apple Bloom back into the cage, and positioned her so she could watch the fight in the nearby arena. She turned her head to see that the hole she had made in the back of the cage had already been repaired. Soon, all the ponies in the cage had their eyes transfixed upon the cruel tournament that the Rani was forcing Rory to participate in. As for his opponent, the transformed Big Mac appeared to have no free will whatsoever, completely controlled with the Rani’s device. With his greater height and strength, the centaur seemed to be the inevitable victor of this fight. Meanwhile, the timber DDs had placed the unresisting Apple Bloom’s rear legs into a wooden mold, and had begun filling it with quick-drying cement.

“Wait!” ordered the voice of the Rani. She put down the joystick that she had been using to control the centaur she had created from Big Mac. “Your cutie mark has changed. No pony is supposed to be able to do that! Fraxinus, describe the new mark.”

Apple Bloom looked at her flank. Instead of the plain yellow fur, or the pocket watch that she had taped there before, she saw—

“The outline of a flower marked out in white points.”

“Not points,” Apple Bloom corrected is a voice of rapture. “Stars!”

While most of the ponies’ eyes were upon the new cutie mark of Apple Bloom, Amy’s had never left the steadily losing battle of her husband. “Give him a weapon!” she cried. “What else could you possibly learn from such an unbalanced fight?!”

The Rani raised one scaly eyebrow. “Indeed!” she said. “I do need to see the limitations of this form, before I consider transferring my consciousness into a unicorn version.” With a sadistic smile, she reached down and tossed a short sword into the arena. “Oh I’m sorry!” she cried out mockingly. “I forgot that the Doctor’s companion is now a worthless earth pony, and not a creature capable of wielding a—hold on, how is he holding that? That...that shouldn’t even be possible for a quadruped! How is he fighting back against my perfect warrior? What is he?”

Amy was more than happy to explain. “That, Rani, is Centurion Roranicus Pondicus, of the Second Augustan Legion, part of the greatest untechnologically advanced fighting force ever known. Of course, ‘Roranicus Pondicus’ is like the stupidest Roman name ever, but I invented it as a twelve-year old girl for this really annoying boy that always wanted in on my make-believe games, and the gods saw fit to turn those silly little fantasies into reality and I really don’t need to go down that particular logic chain right now. Let’s just say that he knows a Roman sword like nobody’s business.”

“How?!” the amazed dragon shouted only a few seconds later, as her remote-controlled monster collapsed into the dust, unconscious, bleeding, but alive, thanks to an almost-surgical knowledge of equine and human nerve points by his scrawny earth pony opponent.

“A...a little top heavy, I found,” a gasping Rory informed her. “Kinda inevitable with a centaur, wouldn’t you say?”

The Rani looked hopelessly at her woefully incomplete notes on pony abilities. “I must know more!”

“And so you shall!”

All eyes turned to the entrance of the cave.

Standing there, surrounded by a nimbus of light, was a light blue unicorn. But that voice couldn’t be hers—it was more authoritative than any pony had ever remembered hearing it. It no longer was the voice of a dentist, of a lowly citizen of Ponyville. It no longer was the voice of a pony that never expected to be obeyed, even when conveying advice on how to prevent gingivitis.

It was now the voice of a princess.

The dragon studied the figure silently for a few seconds, before smiling at a joke that only she knew. “I think you’d better introduce yourself. Again, since the earlier name no longer applies.”

The unicorn stepped forward. “I am Romanadvoratrelundar, former Lady President of Gallifrey and chief of the Time Lords. I was authorized to apprehend you for your crimes against basic sapient decency.”

“But your authority no longer exists,” sneered the Rani. “Now let me introduce you...to your prison!”

As she said this, the dragon quickly reached behind her stalagmite, removed another Cyberpony head from behind it, and tossed it unerringly right towards the unicorn’s head. Its eyes were glowing a brilliant blue.

The unicorn’s response was to reach into a small bag with one hoof and toss a pile of gold dust at the metal head.

The Cyberpony head struck the unicorn’s head, causing her to reel. The light of the construct’s eyes scanned over the pony, trying to initiate a transfer of consciousness. But this was interrupted as the disembodied head began to cough in a shrill metallic voice.

“Nooo!” the Rani cried out. “It was first generation, and I didn’t have the resources to set up a defense against auric bio-mechanical breakdown!”

“Well!” the blue unicorn said coldly. “Now that we are done with introductions, shall we proceed to the terms of our alliance?”

“An...alliance?” the dragon asked incredulously.

“Yes, the two of us to rule and exploit this planet. Together.”

“You are supposed to be on the side of law and order!” the Rani protested. “Why would you possibly want to take over a planet?”

“In case you forgot, we were all sold out by the forces of ‘law and order’,” the unicorn replied contemptuously. “And as for ruling this planet, it’s practically begging for a take-over! Under Celestia, technological development came to a stand-still! For the sake of progress, for the sake of knowledge, the ponies must acknowledge their superiors—us! Together, we can rule Equis!”

The other ponies looked silently between the two speakers. That included a battered Rory, who had climbed out of the arena, the sword gripped in his teeth.

The Rani laughed out loud, in a highly theatrical manner. (This is not to say that practically anything she had ever said was ever not pronounced in a highly theatrical manner.) “That was what I was going to do anyway!” she lied. “What do you possibly have to offer that would lead me to share one iota of my power and knowledge with you?”

“Well, I dunno...” Romanadvoratrelundar said idly, waving one hoof around in a circle. “How about...this?!” And having said this, she reached around a corner and pulled a cart containing the books she had stolen from Twilight’s library into view. “I hereby present the collected magical wisdom of Equestria—the greatest intellectual treasure trove of all time! And the 24-volume Encyclopedia Equestria as a free bonus.”

The Rani pointed excitedly at the cart. “Bring me that!” she ordered her minions, in a tone little distinguished from a junkie ordering her next fix.

The timber DDs brought the cart over to the Rani.

“Neuromolecular Structure of the Unicorn Brain,” the dragon said, eagerly reading aloud the title of the top-most book. She quickly moved on the rest: “The Somewhat Complete Dragon Spell Catalog. A Practical Demonstration of Pegasus Weather Control Capabilities. Just What the Heck is a Breezy, Anyway? Flora and Fauna of the Eastern Deeps, Rated by Diminishing Magical Capacity! 10,001 More Spells You’ve Never Heard Of! So much knowledge! I must possess it! It all must...be...MINE!”

As she had been speaking, the Time Lord pony had retrieved a stubby cylindrical object from the cage that contained the comatose body of the Doctor, and used it to somehow open both cages and shatter their various concrete enclosures. The ponies had then swiftly made their way out of the cage, and into the Everfree, carrying the centaur, the Doctor’s body, and the Doctor’s consciousness between them. You might consider this a mighty heavy load to bear, until you remembered that one of the ponies doing the carrying was Applejack.

The timber DDs did nothing to stop them. Instead, they watched in the fibrous equivalent of bewilderment as their mistress ranted more and more about unintelligibly-complex topics, her greed for knowledge causing her to bloat and bloat in size, until it overwhelmed her intellect entirely.

The Everfree echoed with the roar of an enormous dragon, as her expanding body demolished her hidden lair and crushed her former servants.

...And back in Ponyville, a pent-up princess with nothing to do finally received her signal to actually do something.