I had been awake for four hours straight now. And I was exhausted. But I was in a good spot now. Cedar was inside her house with a playmate. I was outside, perched under a window that was conveniently cracked open to combat the muggy summer weather. But humidity and mold is just what happens to families of medicinal botanists who keep their horticulture in a brick-foundation house.
I digressed. The filly was my focus. In this position amongst the hybrid rhubarb plants I was free to hang on to her every word, to immerse myself in her psychology. And this all while diverting only a minimum amount of focus to concealing myself; Cedar’s schoolhouse had just been too risky to approach without arousing suspicion.
“So aren’t you excited knowing that at any moment your cutie mark could appear?” her friend Crystal Cumulus asked. “Cheerilee told us this year is the age when lots of foals start getting them. What are you hoping yours will be? I wanna be a weather pony, making the weather just how I like it. And be an acrobat pegasus, just like Rainbow Dash! Maybe even move to Cloudsdale, and become a Wonderbolt.”
I was poised to hear Cedar’s response. I took out my dental mirror and held it steady above the windowsill to catch her reaction.
A petite, almost frail-looking unicorn filly appeared magnified in the reflection. Her coat and tail were mild shades of persimmon, which ostensibly complimented her name, and yet… I focused on the withers where her purple mane fell onto her shoulders. Liminal streaks of faded violet stained just a few too many strands of hair past the border between mane and coat. A trick of the light, to the untrained eye. But I was not untrained; her darkly-dyed coiffure was encroaching a subtle stain on her lighter coat, itself also likely dyed.
This deduction came to me in parallel with the observation of her reaction to Crystal’s monologue. “Ummm,” she stalled, suddenly very interested in their shag floor rug. Legitimately thinking? Distracted? Crafting a lie? Deciding whether to tell a lie? No… I was so tired, it was hard to concentrate… Could it be, mild disdain, precocious nihilism? Yes, I could feel it well now...
“I think I really like chemistry, like my dad shows me.”
In fact, Cedar found her friend’s conversation rather insipid. She knew—if not quite as precisely as I—that only about 8% of ponies in her age group would be discovering their cutie marks this year. She must have been thinking something of the genre, How disappointingly early to take a whip to one’s dreams, and to envy others who so simply stumbled into their niche. And what is this about the weather just like she likes it? Her upbringing sure won’t be want for disillusionment. And as for the professional athlete circuit, there couldn’t be a surer way to ruin a pegasus’s chance for renown than for her to move to the very capital of aerial acrobatics.
But Cedar wasn’t proud of this arrogance. No, she hated that she didn’t know where these feelings came from, or how to combat them. Nopony she confessed them to could relate, and more often than not were disturbed or offended whenever she discussed them. But she did, for the moment, know how to ignore them.
“What do you think your mark’s gonna look like?” Cedar prompted, passing the buck back to her friend, even if she’d already heard Crystal’s enthusiastically boring answer several times by now.
Cedar really was my open book.
I heard the faint yet unmistakable clip-clopping of hooves coming down the street on the other side of the house. Judging by the sound, it was a male, early adult age, Earth-pony stocky build. Twenty feet away about. Was it a relative of Cedar’s? of Crystal’s? a neighbor? No, the gait was too light and ambling, and not intentional, but rather like somepony on the earlier leg of a casual evening stroll, so he couldn’t be of residence more than a mile away, therefore the probabilities leaned in favor of… Caramel? Noteworthy? Cherry Fizzy? Fifteen feet now, about two seconds until I’d be in sight, and I had no adequate cover in the rhubarb. Greater acoustic clarity echoing the details of his anatomy convinced me now it was Noteworthy. I recalled and considered his psychological profile: He would notice me, he wouldn’t just keep walking, he’d like to figure out what exactly I was doing, but would mostly just like somepony to talk to, polite conversation, he’d been feeling too lonely lately to pass up opportunities like this. One second. I was ready to act.
“I want some sorta storm cloud, with a lightning bolt like Rainbow Dash’s, but not so rainbow-y, but like that violent blue you sometimes see when…” I would keep an ear on this conversation. I put away my mirror and stuck my head and front hooves in the rhubarb in a kneeling position, leaving my flank exposed.
The clip-clopping came to a halt. “Oh, heya there! Who are you?” a voice asked in a concerned but sociable tenor. “I don’t recall seeing you around these parts. And I like to think I remember almost everypony!”
I slowly crept out of the rhubarb, feigning mild surprise at the arrival of the sturdy blue stallion. I would pantomime as reference the personality, elocution, and gardening hobby of Goldengrape who was—for the utmost safety of my alibi—busy visiting relatives in Appleloosa. I engaged: “Howdy. My name’s Healthy Beat. I’m a bit new to Ponyville, but I’ve been doing some odds-and-ends gardening for the folks around here. Great way to meet ponies, wouldncha say?” I bent down and grasped one of the less appetizing stalks. “You see these guys? Soil here’s just perfect for rhubarbs. You want to try a taste? Freshly watered.”
In fact, they were desiccated and spotted brown with Ramularia, but Noteworthy was far from an expert, or daredevil gourmand. “Eh, no thanks, Beat. But welcome to Ponyville!” Noteworthy was speaking annoyingly loud, but I could count on the fan inside Cedar’s house to drown out noise from alerting her. While showing mild disappointment at Noteworthy’s rejection of my rhubarb, I sidestepped the conversation a few feet away from Cedar’s window.
Noteworthy persisted. “Would you like a small tour around town? I could even introduce you to my friends down at Sweet Apple Acres, if you love plantlife.”
I looked into Noteworthy’s eyes. They were heavy, pleading even, longing for company. In reality, the closest thing he had to a “friend” down at the Acres was a work acquaintanceship with Applejack during the Winter Wrap Up. But it seemed some particular social incident must have been gnawing at him recently; I would remember to do some deeper investigating later. “That sounds great, thanks!” I assured him, instantly planting a smile on his face. “But I’m a bit tied up with these barbs right now, how’s about we meet up about two hours from now in Sugarcube Corner for a bite, and you can show me around from there?”
Noteworthy happily acquiesced. In two hours, I well intended to be in bed. The composite pony operator I was impersonating—though he never truly existed in the first place—would be long gone, his full-body dyes already washed away in an industrial shower and his colored contact lenses retired to their organized location within their 32-piece set. By my estimation, Noteworthy would wait about an extra hour in vain for my appearance at the Corner, return home despondently, though later in the evening would return to the Corner to inquire about anypony bearing my resemblance. Either there or elsewhere he would likely receive an unconfident referral to a Mr. Filthy Rich, who would be less than enthused by the blue stallion’s confused visit. Noteworthy would make a final bid to contact the Ring family and ask about their nonexistent gardener, though it was unlikely he would cause any further trouble from there.
Aside from these inconveniences, and any further action it would be necessary to take regarding the Ring household, Ponyville would go on as if nothing had happened, as if the precipices whose edges they had trotted along had never been. This was the only way left I knew how to help them.
~~
There once lived a quiet, unassuming foal by the name of Sweet Medicine.
“Mom, I don’t feel so good,” the young yellow Earth pony said to his mother, who was currently occupied with cutting carrots for that night’s dinner. The colt had just gotten home from school, where evidently his “allergies” hadn’t improved.
She leaned down to feel her son’s forehead, dismayed at the fever that had since appeared. It was undeniable now that her son had caught some sort of bug. She felt a bit bad now about having sent him to school this morning, but now, she assured him, at least he had the weekend to recuperate. And his father was a unicorn doctor, indeed the most respected physician in their small town off White Tail Woods, and when he came home he would surely know how best to alleviate this seasonal cold. But for now, Sweet’s mother promised to whip up a bowl of his favorite soup and serve it to him in bed with some fresh vegetables.
“Thanks Mom,” he said wearily, before heading to his room to rest.
And so the Medicine household did their best to help their only child recover over the weekend. But no matter what home remedies or healthful potions they provided him, his condition only seemed to grow steadily worse. It started with a headache and some congestion—and in fact it ended there, if it weren’t for a quite singular malaise which confined him to bedrest for increasingly many hours each day. On Friday he tucked in early; on Saturday he needed multiple naps to get by until evening; by Sunday afternoon he was spending less time awake than he was asleep, and even then only he only had the energy to spend his time reading languidly in his room.
It was apparent by that evening that he would be staying home from school the following morning, but it was now a question whether his father should stay from work to look over his well-being. The stallion assured his wife that their son’s symptoms were innocuous, and that he would be of more use to the house and to the community at his office.
“Are we just supposed to let him sleep himself into a coma?”
“The body knows best. A couple days’ rest is a reasonable demand for his immune system to make.”
But through some unforeseen course of dialogue, their discussion had turned into a fight that Sweet could hear from all the way upstairs.
“How long should we wait until we start worrying? Forever?”
“I’m telling you, anywhere you take him, you’ll just run into paper pushers and expensive physicians saying there’s nothing to be concerned about, that there’s no diagnosis to be made.”
“Isn’t it your job as a doctor to make a diagnosis? Your job as a father to take care of your son?”
It was the only fight between his parents that Sweet could recall. Though in other circumstances this would only have frightened him, he felt nothing but an agitation, a frustration toward the voices downstairs that kept him awake.
“Do you think I wouldn’t wave a magic wand over his forehead to cure him, if I could? Do you think I’m withholding some sort of secret spell that could obviate my entire profession based on objective medical science, whenever I felt like it? Or do you think I’m simply too stubborn to admit defeat to your chiropractics and homeopathic cranks you trust so faithfully?”
“This is the kind of berating and arrogance I wouldn’t get if I just took him to somepony who knew better than you!”
All he wanted was sleep, and between their arguments over how to take care of him they couldn’t even let him do that!
“I wish I could live in your ideal world. Where I live, doctors are either too incompetent to diagnose the common cold, or they laugh patients like you out of the office.”
“You think you know everything, that the world would be so much better off in your hooves, but you can’t even manage your own household!”
Sweet’s head pounded.
“With a wife like you, nothing could be more true.”
The sound of shattering glass pierced the air. Sweet immediately felt wide awake, and nauseous with apprehension. Wincing slightly from his headache, he rushed downstairs to see what had happened. He found his mother huddled with fear in the corner of the living room, and across the room his father stood trembling in disjointed apology and confusion. Exploded shards of the family vase were scattered across the carpet and lodged in the wall, still resonating with a malevolent magical aura.
Sweet had never known his father to get angry before. Even after everypony had come to their senses, he alleged not to have known what came over him. Now completely pacified, he told his wife in earnest that he would stay home with the colt for however long he needed.
That was the evening the nightmares began. They were more intense than any Sweet had ever experienced, waking him at every interval of the night, almost all of them revolving around a different relative or friend betraying him or hurting him in public without anypony taking notice. When the nightmares began involving his parents, he became terrified enough that, together with his fever, he lashed out whenever they came near. By morning his father was able to obtain him some strong antipyretics for his fever, which helped together with some sweet-tasting potions to render him lucid and soothe him. Yet the nightmares continued in onslaught, their content perverting so rapidly and disturbingly that he wouldn’t even recount the details to his parents.
Sweet became so terrified of sleep by Tuesday night that he began actively trying to prevent it. But even standing on his hind legs with ice in his mouth, he was helpless against the terminal gravitation of slumber. At this point his father began phoning his colleagues in Las Pegasus in the hopes of discovering a doctor that had come across such a strange and torturous ailment, while his mother procured some expensive nocturnal sedatives from the pharmacy meant to subdue any and all dreams.
“Will this let me go to sleep again?” Sweet asked, looking uncertainly at the small vial of viscous white medicine that had cost about a week’s worth of his father’s salary.
His mother enthusiastically pledged it would.
“I’m really afraid of the nightmares.”
His mother consoled him.
~~
Parasol Trinket; female pegasus pony. Age: 22. Weight: 150kg. Pearl-colored coat, pastel-pink mane, bearing a triad of purple umbrellas as cutie mark. Temporary residences in both Cloudsdale with her family and in Ponyville with her fiancé Silver Script. Low-income lifestyle, highly ambitious to discover her talents; history of jobs with postal service, Ponyville weather brigade, and all major modules of Cloudsdale weather factory production. Talented if undisciplined flyer, placed fourth in most recent Best Young Flyer Competition. Quietly resentful of overly cautious attitudes and of being tied down; uncertain developments of romantic relationship with Silver Script as of last spring. Source(s): Cloud Break (weather factory manager, acquaintance of PT), Agent Daybreak (acquaintance of PT)
I turned her file over and reached for the next one.
Cabs Hayworth; male Earth pony. Age: 48. Weight: 225kg. Tussock-colored coat, sepia-colored mane, bearing checkered taxi flag as cutie mark. Permanent residence in Green Copse Apartments in Galloping Gorge for 22 years, temporary residences throughout Equestria to service family carriage company Hayworth Taxis. Relatively mundane lifestyle, flat creativity, below-average intelligence. Divorced as of last winter. Highly fearful of dangerous situations, anxiety stemming from unknown foalhood experiences. Loyal and hardworking regarding family and intimate friends. Source(s): Agent Sloan (current psychotherapist of CH), Agent Diva (regular spa masseuse, confidant of CH)
I turned his file over, and was about to refresh my data on a Miss Scootaloo when the door opened, interrupting my review session.
“Agent Datum,” the austere pony behind the doorway beckoned, “it is time we engage a maximum-scrutiny investigation regarding the Cedar case. We are to execute conclusive action, if at all possible. The brief is in five minutes.” The door clicked shut without further announcement.
I lifted myself up from my haunches and stretched my limbs for the first time this morning. The Cedar case. It’d been a difficult one to judge. Our suspicions were far from mere paranoia, yet if we sought in our operations to save Equestria from more trouble than we were to cause, we needed certainty in all that we did.
I looked around. My apartment was simple; it kept my focus from wandering. Single room, nothing but a mattress and pillow to serve as sleeping quarters, a kneeling-height desk with a single drawer, and a portal to a lavatory. The carpet, walls, ceiling, doors, and all furnishings bore an identical shade of beige. The room was constructed precisely according to my specification that it remind me as infrequently as possible of its existence, and instead leave me peace within the true workplace: the mind.
I trotted out the exit into a hallway only slightly more decorated than my apartment, and entered the door on the left. The war room. Including my direct superior Agent Thalamus, there were several ponies from the bureaucratic channels seated around an oval table. As usual, nopony but my boss was particularly keen on expressing their individuality in my presence. Just as usual, they were to me the most open books of all: some with shoulders broadened and heads held high in a display to cover up habitual laziness or incompetence; others with gazes focused about a foot away from my eyes in an insufficient gesture of loyalty; yet others buried in paperwork that was in fact irrelevant to the Cedar case, but very telling of family problems back home. I couldn’t attribute high confidence to any of my individual predictions, of course, but experience had taught me Celestial civil servants were cast from a very narrow range of molds.
Scattered on the table was the most updated dossier available on the filly Cedar Ring. Acquaintance networks, homework excerpts, medical records, conversation transcripts, voluminous facial profiles at varying lights, angles, and ages. Not to mention the file on the Trottingham incident. Everything Celestia’s private cabal knew about Cedar and her elusive psychology.
I took my seat, which was Thalamus’s cue to address those gathered. “Greetings, everypony. We are here to reach final clearance on our next plan of action regarding the Cedar case. But unlike in our previous convenings, we will be making decisions under the expectation that we will not get any further chances to act. I hope you all haven’t grown too attached to this case for how long it’s dragged on, because closing procedures will be swift and unique in light of the circumstances—we will be combining final up-close field deployment of Agent Datum, together with the execution of appropriate action as to her assessed threat.”
~~
Sweet’s father had been stealing drugs and potions from pharmacies near his Manehattan city office for three months before somepony finally took account of it. By price tags alone, it must’ve amounted to over twice his yearly salary in fraudulent prescriptions and custom brews. Most of them were the typical sedatives and dream suppressants under various brand names, but the parents were ready to try anything that could’ve slowed the development of their son’s increasingly unmanageable symptoms.
But he was not caught by a whistleblowing colleague or an attentive pharmacy tech. From somewhere high up in government, a monitor uncovered the doctor’s dealings and descended upon him. But it soon became clear this pony was much more interested in Sweet’s circumstances than in his father’s.
~~
Cedar Ring had parted with her friend little over an hour ago. She had decided on a change of venue, seated now at a picnic table in a park at the immediate outskirts of Ponyville. I felt a frantic energy radiating from her being. Perhaps she sensed my presence and had no longer felt safe in her home while both her parents were away. Or maybe this energy was subconscious and as of yet unbeknownst to her. I hoped for the latter. It would be the first sign we weren’t yet too late in reaching her.
She was occupied with a jigsaw puzzle that she’d brought along. A difficult version by anypony’s standards: a 700-piece depiction of Saddle Arabia’s unchanging sandy dunes. Cedar had a personal connection with puzzles. It must’ve brought her comfort to peacefully and methodically construct the world out of so many loose pieces, each uniquely destined to their lay of the landscape. No piece, no matter its obscurity, would be denied harmony and symmetry with the others, once the scene was brought to order. Something grandiose like that.
I stole a closer glance from over my novel. I needed to make my approach. This right now was as ripe a moment I could hope for in public. There were only three ponies in the vicinity besides myself and Cedar, and that included my subordinate, Agent Aegis. Even if things got loud I could count on him to insulate the incident from any would-be good Samaritans.
I sighed. This was not my favorite part of my duties. But it was my piece in the puzzle.
~~
“Hello, Sweet. How are you feeling? My name is Dr. Laurence Greensfield. I’m a pony psychologist. You might remember me together with the two royal guards when we brought your dad home a couple days ago. Though I understand you were still rather sleepy when we first met.”
Greensfield observed the youth seated on the stool across from him. Sweet fortunately appeared more alert than during their first meeting at his home—perhaps the new medicine Greensfield had given him was already showing results—where the doctor had not been in a situation to obtain much information from either Sweet or his family. The foal comprehendingly took in the doctor’s words, but did not respond.
“You look like you’re feeling better, Sweet. Have you had more energy during the day?”
The foal nodded lightly.
“What about sleep patterns? Have you been able to stay awake for longer with that energy?”
A shake of the head.
“Still only six hours or less at a time?”
Sweet nodded again.
“That’s too bad. But I do believe that with time you’ll get better again, and be able to hang out with all your friends and go to school again. Do you miss school?”
Sweet simply shrugged.
Doctor Greensfield gestured to a large bookcase on Sweet’s right. “I hear you like to read, and are gifted with a most phenomenal vocabulary. Do you spot any books on my bookshelf that you’ve read before?”
Sweet craned his neck to examine the upper collection of foal’s novels. “I read Calamitous Conjurations of Star Swirl the Bearded by A.R. Jade, we read To Kill a Parasprite by Sharper Key in class, I’ve read the Smoke of Mystery series by Darling Pheasant several times while I’ve been sick...” he lowered his gaze, looking through Greensfield’s academic texts, “...and also Linus’s Theoretical Framework of Pony Psychology and Graye’s On the Origin and Differentiation of Personality.”
Greensfield blinked. “Why, that’s some impressively dense material for a colt of your age! Are you very interested in how ponies think and act?”
But Sweet had broken eye contact, and instead examined his hooves, repeatedly pressing them against each other. Finally, he looked up and asked, “What’s going to happen to my dad? Why are you asking me these questions? These past few months, do you think I’ve been in a clear enough mental state to understand what he’s been up to? That I’m going to make a confession for you to put him in prison?“
Greensfield blinked again. It appeared to him that Sweet was a habitually mild-mannered colt, but in situations such as these, that Sweet struggled to strike the right balance between respect and sincerity, which for him had always been two very different things. But regardless, whilst Sweet sat on the edge of his chair, teeth clenched in apprehension of the doctor’s response, Greensfield felt relieved, and pushed a friendly smile. Was that what was bothering him? Concern for his parents? Rather mature emotions at still quite a young age. Perhaps he wasn’t even a Paraborn, but just a precocious youth. But as the doctor slumped down in his chair, he noticed a familiar glint of sunlight in Sweet’s left iris—his colored lenses.
Greensfield couldn’t let their original hypothesis be discarded lightly. Sweet’s hair samples had come back positive for dyes compensating for pure albinism. He had the rare hypersomnia characteristic to a class of Paraborn. There was at least one suspected incidence of psychic malevolence. Yet he was an Earth pony foal, not a unicorn, and some factors which were manifest in all known Paraborn subjects’ personalities were nonetheless absent in him. Or otherwise very skillfully hidden.
“Don’t worry about your parents, Sweet. What your dad did was illegal, but understandable given the circumstances. Everypony understands that.” In reality, the pharmacists wronged by Sweet’s father would require a monarchial injunction against litigation and a third-party indemnification deal in exchange for their forgiveness of his desperately broad-reaching intellectual and material theft. Though this reprieve was not simply a result of Celestia’s systematic benevolence; the Medicine family’s “arrest” was in fact the intended purpose of the artificial scarcity of information and medicine on the subject of this peculiar form of hypersomnia—that purpose being a last ditch effort to catch this class of Paraborn in the throes of their final symptoms before they turned for good. Though it was never the cabal’s plan that somepony already trained in the medical profession would end up taking things so far into their own hooves. “We just wish that your dad hadn’t been so clever. We could have all been working together to help you get better three months ago.”
~~
She was engrossed in the puzzle. Yet some part of her paid no less attention to me. Every once in a while, under the pretense of deep thought about the jigsaw, she would glance upward and around her, sometimes toward the innocuous scenery or bystander ponies, but also toward me, and at a statistically unwarranted frequency.
Earlier in my career I would’ve approached her case differently. In the past, I would have stuck around a while. Shadowed her at every instance of the day, gradually increasing in conspicuity and technical skill until she noticed me and feared me on every conscious level, and right before my audacity broke her down and caused her to confront me herself, I would intercept her, at her psychologically weakest point. Maybe I had had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. But in fact this was still the best course of action, against certain ponies. Ponies who already had a strong affinity with their Paraborn spirit and who without this intimidation could be convinced through their own pride and fear that they could evade, incapacitate, or even kill me in order to escape.
But I percepted something different in Cedar. Like a sugar cube dissolving in a glass of water, something had already worn her defenses down for me, and for a long time coming now. Broken down her ego, her love of self and of the world, even her will to live. The death of these fundamental motivating identities—normally not even having born recognition yet in such a young foal—was rancidly displayed in her actions. She was not one of the Paraborn I existed to confront; any day now she would break loose, but she would not have the will to inflict ruin on anypony but herself and a select few closest to her. Simply put, she was not a threat to Equestria at large.
I closed the book between my hooves and stood up. She was not a threat, but still a problem that needed resolution.
I trotted slowly but uniformly in Cedar’s direction. My teammate Aegis eyed me warily. Cedar cast another furtive glance at me, but I didn’t waver. I reached the opposite side of her table and stopped. She reactively looked up at me again. I laid the book beside her puzzle and seated myself.
A brief pause. “You really have a knack for these,” I said flatly, gesturing toward her nearly completed desert scene. “I can only wonder how you haven’t gotten your cutie mark for them yet.”
Cedar kept anxiously silent, but shifted her sides uneasily at my remark. She wasn’t feeling talkative toward the stranger seated before her. Good on her parents.
“Don’t worry about those things too much. When you’re a mare you’ll have plenty of time to devote to your special talent.”
Perhaps in the effort of looking anywhere else but in my eyes, Cedar fixated on my book. For lack of response in the ensuing silence, she prodded it gently. “What’s that?”
I looked at the cover, which portrayed a legal quill inscribing the book’s title in sterling font: A Pursuit of Integrity. “I don’t really know,” I told her. “I think it’s a biography of the mayor of this town. Almost certainly ghostwritten, by my take. But altogether it’s not very interesting. I just picked it up at a dime store as a cover while I’ve been out here observing you.”
Cedar’s gaze was widened, taken aback. “Who are you?” she asked, more loudly this time.
I quickly surveyed the two bystanders. They were beginning to grow concerned about the ambiguous stranger-danger situation, but were still looking to Aegis’s feigned nonchalance for guidance. I turned back to Cedar.
“I am the consequences of your actions. I am the specter of what you did in Trottingham. I am the herald of the uncomfortable belief that what has happened will recur again and again with greater violence, no matter what you try to do about it. And everypony is going to blame you for it.”
Cedar’s mouth drew open in shock. She searched and failed to find words to offer in response. Instead she pulled herself up from the table, as if to flee.
“You’re not actually about to leave, Cedar. I got your full attention and devotion as soon as I mentioned Trottingham. But you haven’t let me finish. I am also the exception. I don’t deny the evil or the good that are inextricable from your identity. And believe me, there is evil. Let us revisit Trottingham: Do you think that pegasus colt, Altostratus, deserved to die? Was he that much of a bully?”
“O-of course not!” she stammered. “You don’t know me if you think I’m like that!”
“But it’s a tricky dilemma, isn’t it? You can’t believe he just died of natural causes. Without preexisting complications the young don’t just die of sudden cardiac arrest. Indeed, I bet your heart beat faster just before Alto’s gave out. And that the more you grow into your native unicorn magic, the more you recognize that feeling of intense, willful concentration just before a spell is performed and your will is enacted. So tell me, if what happened to Alto was born of your will, how can you say you had no desire that he should die?”
Cedar had sat back down and was struggling to hold back tears. The forecast called for saline showers owing to… frustration? grief? fear? Examination of her tight temple and jawline indicated the first option. I still had work to do, then. “I didn’t mean to! But he made everypony’s life horrible, even the teacher’s! None of my classmates ever talked to me the same again, and even though me and my parents had to move to Ponyville, I know they’re all happier now that Alto’s gone!”
“I guess spilling the blood on others does make it easier sometimes. Easier for you, at least. But now everypony else has to share in that guilt. You might know a thing or two about how it feels to carry that around.”
These were low blows, and not even strictly correct on all accounts, but they were having the desired effect; her anger was sublimating into sadness. But like a surgeon nicking an artery during an operation, I seemed to have cut too deep—between sobs she was getting hysterical. “What am I? Why am I the only one with these feelings and this responsibility? How come everypony else’s problems are so easy, but no matter how much I think about my own problems, there will always be those like you telling me—convincing me—that I’m rotten inside and powerless to make the right decisions? Why is it that Alto’s death made me think more self-aware thoughts and feel more complicated, depressing emotions than Alto would have ever felt in his life, but I’ll never feel any closer to having lived out my penance for his death?”
“You’re asking the right questions, Cedar. Your introspection hasn’t gone to waste,” I consoled. “You can’t hold yourself to the standards of ordinary ponies. You—we—are Paraborn. And you’ve borne this responsibility as well as anypony could have expected you to.”
Cedar had had her cry and was now in a more docile state. By beating her out of her frustration but lifting her from her sadness I had earned some of her respect and trust. Leaning her forelegs on the table, she dolefully looked up to me for a rational explanation at last.
I would start from the top. “You know the three races and their unique talents: pegasi, obviously, are gifted with the power of flight; unicorns are capable of manipulating space and matter with their magic; as an Earth pony, what’s supposed to make me special?”
“Increased strength and endurance, and a more acute connection with nature,” Cedar answered academically.
“Seems like a bit of a raw deal in a modern society, doesn’t it? But no matter. What does this last bit mean, actually?”
“It means Earth ponies sense things better, I guess.” She concentrated, thinking back to her schooling. “They catch details better by more developed sense organs and brainpower, scientists think, but they also suspect that the correlation might be self-fulfilling in light of preexisting social--”
“You can end the thought at that, the rest is mostly pro-social propaganda. There is a grain of truth, in that the Earth pony has evolved a slightly more advanced cerebral cortex as he doesn’t need to house a larger cerebellum for flight-based coordination or otherwise divert brain architecture for conducting magic through a horn. But there is nonetheless a kind of precursor to magic immanent in all Earth pony kind that the public is largely ignorant about.”
“What does this have to do with a unicorn like me, exactly?” she pondered.
“Getting there. This psychic energy is mostly subconscious, where it isn’t vestigial altogether. There are instances of ordinary Earth ponies exhibiting mild clairvoyance or telepathy following hindbrain stimulation arising from great pain, fear, et cetera, which confirm an old ponies’ tale or two, but this talent for the most part is inaccessible.
“But sometimes, when an Earth pony and a unicorn love each other very much, they may give birth to a unicorn foal with some very… distinctive traits. Complete oculocutaneous albinism is typical, giving them snow-white fur and red eyes. The mechanism of cutie mark acquisition is corrupted, and the resultant cutie mark—if one develops at all—comes most often as a black blob or scribble that doesn’t resemble anything. Paraborn ponies and their parents invariably take your route of continually dying their fur and wearing color contacts in order to avoid the stigma of being a colorless—and later in life, markless—skeleton in a cheery, technicolor world.
“But their lack of melanin isn’t what most isolates them from their peers. From a very young age, they develop profoundly advanced emotional and intellectual characteristics. This frightens the adults around them and estranges them from their foalmates. What at first might be considered prodigious maturity twists and warps into deep-seated frustration and misanthropy. By adolescence they give up the ambition to change the world for the better and to find their special place within the world, and without this baggage the rest of their lives will be devoted to two directives: fulfilling their basic bodily needs of hunger and thirst, and inflicting pain on others. Some Paraborn measure their success by how many they can hurt; others, by how deeply they can hurt.
“So which appeals to you then, terrorism or torture? … Nevermind, that was bad taste.
“I am a Paraborn. I suffer the same albinism, and underwent many of the formative foalhood experiences common to my kind. I am furthermore part of a subclass of Paraborn who must surrender upwards of twenty hours per day to sleep in exchange for enhanced memory formation, empathetic reasoning, and sensory acuity. But I am unique. I am the only full-fledged non-unicorn Paraborn to our knowledge, which means I have no access to magic and only a passive access to an underlying psychic power, and beyond this I seem to have retained some sense of value for individual life and happiness.
“Up until the current moment you’ve been trying to wrap your head around the present and the past, but now I wager you’re beginning to wonder about the future. Why am I here? What am I going to do to you? Probably nothing violent, you assure yourself, though you doubt if I—who is this ‘we’ I speak of?—wouldn’t take the necessary actions to coerce you if you resisted.
“This is an apt analysis on your part. With your token permission, I’m going to take you to a special home for fledgling Paraborn just like you, a manor founded outside Canterlot just over two centuries ago when the Paraborn theory was first brought to Celestia’s attention. The upside is you’ll be able to retain your sanity and dignity and associate with other Paraborn. The downside is you’ll be forced to retain your sanity and dignity and associate with other Paraborn. For better or for worse you won’t see me often except to deliver a motivational lecture every couple years. The end-sum incarceration rate is 35% and gradually declining thanks to--”
I heard crunching grass just ten feet behind me. It was the bystander pony by the name of Star Hunter. Adrenaline pumped. Why was this the first sign I was hearing? Why didn’t I predict his approach from the start? Why didn’t I hear a disgruntled huff or the creak of his bench when he got up? Why didn’t I notice Cedar’s eyes focusing over my shoulder? I knew why actually, it was because I was dead tired, but the epinephrine boost now should make up for the lost time in celerity of mind. Seven feet. I recalled the pertinent facts from Star Hunter’s psychological profile: Intentionally tough haircut, likes to take control of problematic situations, suffers in follow-through, vulnerable against shows of force; mildly paranoid, once called the town guard to investigate a raccoon sighting. Three feet. I had thought of a plan, though I would likely have to retreat. I now counted only three distinct limbs crunching in the grass—he had a hoof raised, to hit me? to tap me on the shoulder? in apprehension? The second clearly, it’s part of his overly concerned citizen shtick. Drats, I had several exit plans by now, but none that let me stay talking with Cedar.
“Hey, what exactly is going on here?” he interrogated, plopping his hoof on my shoulder in a gesture that was supposed to be ambiguously threatening or sociable depending on my guilt but was actually just awkward and clammy. “Is this your daughter?”
Showtime. I wouldn’t answer at first, but would rather--
“Actually, he’s my uncle. I haven’t seen him in so long!”
Star Hunter looked surprised, and maybe I looked the same. But I would go with it. “Yes, she’s been having some growing pains recently,” I said, brushing his hoof aside. “Fillies are always a handful, don’t you agree?”
He paused. “Yeah, well, as long as she knows you, I guess,” he concluded, slightly indignant, before walking away.
I looked back at Cedar, who smiled impishly. “Thank you,” I said, stifling a yawn. “So does this mean you’re on board?”
Cedar mulled it over for several moments. “What will happen to my family?” she asked.
“We will cover the moving expenses and ten years’ rent for an apartment in a very affluent district of Canterlot, and secure them analogous jobs. There will be full disclosure of the situation with very tight contractual bindings. Particularly, they will be able to visit you at the manor as often as they wish, and you yourself will have limited periods of supervised freedom in normal society. The relocation will start and finish within 72 hours.” I leaned in closer. “Can I have your word that you and your parents will comply with my fellow agents when they arrive? That you won’t fight back, or try to move to another town again? That any drama between your family and my men will be strictly emotional?”
Cedar stared at the Saddle Arabian sands still left unassembled on the table, lost in the moment of my question. How, precisely, would her future turn out at the manor? Would accepting her Paraborn side allow her to finally come to terms with her deepest existential questions, or would they only multiply with this new knowledge? I went through her same tribulations in another life. But I, in my current life, wasn’t employed to help her make this journey and to pick her up when she would stumble. I was employed merely to force her on it, in much the same role (if not by the same means) that Greensfield had been for me. There was much left unsaid in this conversation as to the nature of the Paraborn, but I was confident in Cedar’s judgment that she would come to realize that not only was she truly in danger but that she had no other options.
This she conveyed not with any words, but with a gentle nod.
