Before Closing

Chapters

5:02 PM - Midway
5:21 PM - History
5:49 PM - Money
6:26 PM - Dinner
6:42 PM - Whirl
7:14 PM - Square
7:55 PM - Firebreather
8:22 PM - Bar
8:43 PM - Cemetery
9:08 PM - Moonrise
9:57 PM - Departure
4:43 PM - Meeting

5:02 PM - Midway

“You wanna play one of these games?” Aegis asked.

“No, not really. You can, I’ll just watch.”

“Aw, come on,” he said, nudging me in the ribs. “It’ll be fun.”

“No, it won’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”

After a few rounds of “What do you want to do?” “I dunno, what do you want to do?” “I dunno, what…”, we’d wandered onto the midway, lights flashing and ponies yelling all around us. There were stands upon stands of carnival games, each of them with at least a small line. This was one of the carnival’s last days here, so it was quite busy. There were a lot of foals, especially; more than once, a filly or a colt or several had run between us, generally swiftly followed by a flustered and very apologetic parent or two. Smells wafted over from the food court, smells of lettuce and flowers and hay and more deluxe plants. The whole place sat on the edge between busy and mellow.

I was leaning towards mellow. Aegis was leaning towards busy. He chuckled. “What, are carnival games serious business?”

“I… I lost a lot of money to them when I was a filly, okay?” I rubbed my neck and looked away. “Each year, I could’ve bought some cotton candy or something, but I always told myself I could win that giant plush manticore, and I never did.” I don’t know why I just went and told him that. Maybe because after tonight, I’d never see him again. It’s a bit easier to spill your guts to a complete stranger when you know for a fact you’ll never run into them again.

Aegis stopped walked and stared at me, the corners of his mouth quirking up. “You have a grudge against carnival games?”

I nodded glumly and braced myself for the laughter.

It didn’t come, or at least not as much as I’d thought it would. Aegis chuckled, but that was it. “I can see that. I still don’t like zucchini because of that one summer Dad tried growing some and it worked way too well and we wound up with zucchini for dinner every other night. But come on, you’re older and better now. You’re telling me you’re not going to try one now?”

“It’s not just that. They’re rigged,” I muttered. “All of them. Well, most of them.”

“They always say that,” Aegis huffed, waving a hoof, “but it’s-”

“No, really,” I said seriously. I glanced around, trying to find a way to demonstrate to him. “Like, take a look at that ring toss game right over there.” I pointed to a brightly-colored booth where the proprietor was about to show how the game worked to her next set of victims, I mean players. Actually, no, I totally mean victims.

Aegis glanced at me, then shrugged and turned his attention to the booth. “Yeah?”

“Look at the angle the rings make when the carny puts them over the peg.”

We both watched in silence as said carny dropped a ring onto the peg from behind to show how easy it was. She even did it several times, to prove she hadn’t gotten lucky the first time.

Aegis frowned. “I don’t see it.”

“The lower edge is towards her, towards the back of the booth, away from the throwers.”

“So?”

“Now watch the ponies try, and see whether the front or back edge is lower when they toss it.”

The ponies collectively tossed their rings, one after the other. None of them made it, every single ring bouncing off the peg. As the carny consoled them on their loss, Aegis shrugged and said, “The edge closer to them was lower. So?”

And finally, the coup de grâce. I said, “Now, take a look at the top of the peg.”

Aegis rolled his eyes, but looked anyway. When he saw it, his jaw dropped. “Oh, wow,” he whispered, “that’s… that’s evil. They’ve got like twice the area to fit the ring around as the carny when she demonstrates.”

The top of the peg was sloped towards the contestants. It was angled in such a way that made it easy for the carny to put her ring over it, but made it incredibly tricky for a customer to get it to fit on. And the peg itself was just large enough that the rings could barely fit over it to begin with.

“Uh-huh,” I said with a nod. “Why do you think they give you so many rings? And why the prizes are so valuable? Because, in all likelihood, you’re not going to win. It’s like a casino: the house always wins.”

“Dang,” muttered Aegis. He turned to me. “So what about other things? Like, um…” He glanced around the midway and zeroed in on a particular booth. “That tub toss game. That one right there.” It was one of those simple games where you just try to toss balls into angled peach baskets.

As luck would have it, it was about to be demonstrated just as he pointed. “Alright,” I said. “Watch the demo and tell me what you see.”

He nodded and watched intently. I was surprised at how seriously he was taking this; I would’ve expected him to just take a look, go “weird”, and move on. Because, well, they’re carnival games. Not exactly the most interesting of topics. I only knew how they worked because I’d been coming here annually for over a decade. When you do that, you start to notice some things, especially when you’re in your cynical teenager phase and actively try to find bad stuff everywhere because they kept denying you that giant plush manticore when you were younger. It was nice, seeing someone who was listening to the silly things I had to say.

That, or he was in that state of supreme boredom where anything and everything is interesting. And if he was, I can only hope it was from the Marris wheel.

Once the demo was over, Aegis turned back to me and shrugged helplessly. “I, I don’t see it. The carny throws the ball into the tub, it sticks, he lets the player throw a practice ball into the tub, it sticks, the player hands over their bits, the balls don’t stick anymore.”

I grinned, but just barely managed to keep it from being a self-satisfied “I know more than you do” smirk. “That’s not everything,” I said. “The carny tosses the ball into the tub from in front of the line, not behind the line, like the players.”

“That would make it easier for him,” Aegis mumbled. Probably just voicing his thoughts. “But for the prac-” His eyes lit up. “When the players practice, he leaves the first ball in the tub, and it makes the players’ balls bounce differently, keeping them in. But once they actually start playing, he takes the balls out and it’s more likely that they’ll bounce.”

“Exactly,” I said with a nod. “It’s even simpler than the ring toss, once you see it. Although this one, you’re more likely to win than the rings. Don’t try to bounce it off the back-” One unlucky player did just that and the ball bounced right back out. “-and instead aim for the leading edge. It’ll make the ball lose speed and be more likely to stay inside.”

“You’re the go-to gal for keeping your bits at a carnival, ain’tcha?”

“I’ve been here a while. I know what to look for.”

“So are there games here that aren’t rigged? Like, say…” Aegis looked around a little. “…the ladder climb?”

“Actually, I think that one’s completely legit,” I said after some thought. “It’s hard, yeah, but once you know how to do it, you can do it all the time.” Once I’d figured out the secret, I’d actually been banned from one booth after winning it three times in a row. I’d walked away with several giant plush manticores. It was a good feeling; it felt like revenge on the other games for all those other times I’d lost I was too old for the toys by then, but they made great birthday presents for my little siblings.

And, okay, I kept one. Still have it, even. C’mon, those things are really smooshy, a lot cuter than they have any right to be, and make for great pillows.

Aegis cocked a grin at me. “Bet I could beat you on that.”

Oh, no, he did not just say that. No way, no how. I couldn’t let that stand. “Bet you couldn’t,” I shot back, smirking a little.

“You’re on. Loser pays for winner’s climb?”

“Deal,” I said. He wouldn’t know what hit him.

We reached the game during a lull, with two empty ladders right next to each other. A sign proclaimed: 1 CLIMB, 1 BIT. +2 CLIMBS FOR EACH EXTRA BIT. Compared to some of the other booths, this one was surprisingly subdued; yeah, it had a lot of reds and whites, but the shades it used were cooler. I guess in a place where everything’s loud, being quiet can get you more attention. The ladders here were a bit longer than the ones I was used to, but the technique would be the same.

Aegis and I dropped down four bits each. We took up spots at the bottom of each ladder and grinned at each other. “See you at the bottom,” I said.

His grin was wide and cocksure, although it felt a little like he was playing it up. “Only because I’ll be there already,” he responded, and started up the ladder.

I immediately knew I’d win. Aegis put his hooves on the rungs of the ladder and scrambled up reasonably quickly, but you never go for the rungs on the ladder climb. They’ll unbalance you. Sure enough, Aegis was halfway up when the bouncing got too much for him to handle and the ladder spun over. He quickly hooked his hooves around the rungs and kept himself from falling down, but it’d only be a matter of time before he lost his grip.

I went slow. The technique’s easy: keep your hooves on the ropes and avoid the rungs as much as possible; you’ll spread your weight out and make it a little more stable. When you take a step, move your front hoof with your opposite back hoof: right-front with left-rear and vice versa. With the increased length of the ladder, it was a bit shakier than I expected, but all that meant was that I needed to slow down a bit more.

Before I was a quarter of the way up, Aegis had fallen off, slid back down, and was preparing to try again. “How’s the ground?” I teased.

“It’ll be missing me real soon!” he said. He scampered back up the ladder, which flipped over again and dropped him.

“Say what?” I asked. By now, I was halfway up, still moving slowly, and wasn’t the least bit worried about flipping over.

“Quiet. You’re breaking my concentration.” Aegis tried to go slower this time, and the ladder visibly shook. He kept eyeballing me, trying to see what I was doing, but I was way ahead of him.

Soon, I rang the bell at the top and dropped down. Aegis fell over without reaching his bell and we slid down together. “Hey,” I said to the mare running the booth, “I put down two bits, so do you think you can give my extra one to him? It looks like he needs it.”

The mare was trying her hardest not to laugh, and actually doing an admirable job of it. “I think he might, yes,” she said in a level voice.

“I resent that,” pouted Aegis. When the carny wasn’t looking, he mouthed Thanks at me behind her back. I nodded in response.

I turned down any prize, saying I’d just wanted to do it for fun. Besides, those prizes were big. I didn’t want to be carrying one around all day, as much as I’d enjoy another giant plush manticore. Instead, I just watched Aegis make his last two attempts. You know how, when you’re watching someone struggle with something you’re good at, you can’t decide whether to laugh or cringe? That’s how I felt. It was so simple, but he kept messing up and falling back down. I could yell advice to him, but that meant not watching him flop off and land in funny ways. Decisions, decisions.

I didn’t yell advice.

When he came back down the last time, Aegis still seemed in good spirits. Good for him. I’d be frustrated. “Guess that’s it, then,” he said as he clambered back to the ground. “You win.” He fished out a bit and flipped it to me.

Once we were a short distance away, he said, “So what’re some other rigged games? What about the…” He pointed to a booth at random and squinted at the sign. “…milk bottle toss? Although I think I’ve heard about that one. The bottom bottles are weighted, right?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never tried, I have terrible aim.” I couldn’t throw or buck a ball for crap. If I was aiming at a target, the safest place to stand would be right in front of it.

“Oh.”

“Although if they are weighted, you could just try to throw extra hard and hope you have enough oomph to knock them over.”

“Really? Hmm.” Aegis’s eyes darted over the prizes. “Ooo. They’ve got stick-on mustaches.” He grinned. “Totally trying this. If I win, maybe I’ll get one of them.”

“Please don’t.”

5:21 PM - History

He got one of the stupid mustaches.

“It’s funny!” he protested as we walked through the midway.

“It’s stupid,” I countered.

“You’re just jealous,” he said, his nose in the air, “because you didn’t have the skill necessary required to attain such a glorious prize as this.” He stroked his mustache slowly. “It is, after all, a most prestigious accoutrement to mine beautiful, beautiful face.” He raised an eyebrow at me and put on a Very Serious Expression.

“Acc- D-did you seriously say accoutrement?” I sputtered. “It’s a fake novelty mustache, it doesn’t deserve to be described with words like ‘accoutrement’!”

“Like I said,” he smirked, “jeeeaaalooouuus.”

I suppose it wouldn’t’ve been so bad if it’d matched his mane. Aegis’s mane and tail were this beautiful, rich blue. So did he get something that actually matched that? Like a burgundy, or a soft purple? Nooooooo. You know what he went with? Hot pink, of all things. Hot frigging pink. And it wasn’t a classy mustache, either; he naturally went for the bushiest, wiriest walrus mustache he could find, probably the least classy one available. I suppose I should count myself lucky that they didn’t have any Fu Manechu ones.

“Right,” I said dryly. “Because I, a mare, am soooo jealous that I don’t have a mustache, a facial feature that only appears on stallions.”

“Naturally,” said Aegis. He stroked the mustache again. “It has always been there, you see. An eternal, simmering resentment from the female persuasion. An envy of this, the most magnificent of physical features. It has driven wars, toppled civilizations, brought low the most powerful of leaders. Indeed, Celestia and Luna even now plot to place the mustache on mares. It is an insidious plan that has been woven throughout the centuries, leaving its hoofprints in every single major event in Equestrian history.”

I snorted in amusement. How could someone be this eloquent in this situation? “That’s it. It’s driven you mad with power.” I held out a hoof. “Give me the mustache and nopony gets hurt.”

Aegis’s eyes went wide and he flailed his hooves melodramatically. “No! No! Anything but that! I want the ‘stache! I need the ‘stache!”

“You can’t handle the ‘stache!”

We held a gaze for maybe a moment. Then we both burst out laughing. At ourselves, at the other, at our stupidity. In hindsight, it wasn’t all that funny; just playing up the seriousness of a fake mustache. But then? It felt like one of the funniest things in the world.

I regained my breath before him. “Seriously, though,” I said, my voice level again, “can you please shut up about it? You can keep it, just stop talking about it. It was funny at first, now it’s just annoying.”

“Kinda figured that,” Aegis said, peeling off his mustache. “I just wanted to indulge a little. Mustaches are cool.” He tossed the fake one into a nearby trash can.

“So why don’t you grow one yourself?”

“Can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried, but my facial hair never gets thick enough or long enough for a good mustache. Gets maybe half an inch long, what would be stubble on most other ponies, then just stops growing. Looks terrible, feels really itchy.”

“Bummer. At least I can grow my mane out if I want to.”

Aegis shrugged. “It’s not that bad. Besides, when I was in the Royal Guard, they didn’t let you have mustaches anyway.”

A-ha. I was right about him being a guard. And he talked in the past tense; I was right about him being a former guard, too. Well, probably. I thought I’d ask him. “I thought you were a guard.”

“Really?” Aegis twitched all over a little. “What made you think that?”

“C’mon, look at you,” I scoffed, waving a hoof up and down his body. “You’ve got the haircut, the muscle, everything. And you’re not quite bulky enough to be in the Guard right now. So I’m guessing you were in the Guard, but left semi-recently. Right?”

“Niceeeee,” whispered Aegis, a grin plastered on his face. “You’re sharp.”

“And your name. Welded Aegis? That’s a guard’s name if ever there was one.”

Aegis’s grin turned from an impressed one to a sheepish one, and he laughed a little. “Blame my dad. He’s from a long line of guardsponies, and he nudged me a little to join the Guard. And I really mean ‘nudged a little’, not anything like forcing me. So that might’ve been him trying to push me that way.”

I frowned. “Naming your kid that to push him into a job sounds kinda-”

“No, nonono,” Aegis said, vigorously shaking his head. “He was really open about me going to other jobs. He wasn’t one of those dads who said, ‘You’re joining the Guard, and that’s final.’ Yeah, part of the reason I joined the Guard was to make him happy, but it also was something that interested me, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.” He shrugged.

“Oh.” I squinted at him. “You’re being awfully open about this, considering you barely know me.”

Aegis laughed and shrugged again. “After tonight, I’ll never see you again. And you’re never going to see me again. Are you really gonna care? What’re you gonna do with it?”

He had a point. That was, after all, the reason I told him about my desire to win a giant plush manticore.

“Besides,” he continued, “it’s not really that private. Really, it’s just, ‘my dad wanted me to be a royal guard, so I became one’.” He shrugged yet again. “What’s so bad about sharing that?” He glanced around. “Let’s keep moving. Keep the blood in our legs flowing. And let’s stick to the midway, maybe we’ll find something else you’ll be willing to try.”

“Alright.” As we started walking, I asked, “So, if you don’t mind me asking, why’re you a former royal guard? What made you quit?”

Aegis opened his mouth, then paused. “Tell you what. Agree to tell me what you do when I’m done, and I’ll tell you.”

That was an easy decision. “Deal.”

“Well, it’s…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “To be honest, after a while, I just, I never really felt like I was doing anything. Like, for starters, Celestia doesn’t really need bodyguards all that much. Either she can handle herself just fine, or something that can take her out…” His voice trailed off.

“Would take you out even quicker,” I finished.

“Yeah,” Aegis said morosely.

“But what about keeping the peace in the rest of Equestria?”

“There’s been peace in Equestria for a loooooong time, and it hasn’t needed the Royal Guard to enforce it. Sure, there’s been pockets of conflict, tribal supremacists and that sort of thing, but I was never assigned to that. The last time I encountered anything major, Tirek was loose, and…” He cringed.

“Ooo. Harsh.”

“Yeah. Took my magic, ran off, and I was just left sitting there until he was defeated. Kinda disillusioned my whole view of the Guard as this…” Aegis theatrically waved a hoof around. “…grand job. So once my term of service was up, I just quit and decided to do something else.”

“What’d your dad think?”

“He was just glad I’d been in the Guard at all, so he didn’t care. He was even supportive when I said I wanted to go into the arts.”

Wait, what? I stopped walking and stared at Aegis. He was a few steps beyond me by the time he realized I’d halted. He looked over his shoulder and frowned at me. “What?”

“You’re going straight from the Royal Guards to being an artist?” I asked, a smile creeping onto my face. “That’s… that’s kind of a jump, don’t you think?”

Aegis narrowed his eyes a little. “Something wrong with that?”

“No, no, not at all,” I said, walking up to him, “it’s just…” I giggled a little. “I’m getting an image of this massive, musclebound stallion with this over-the-top name, Glorious Galvanization or something, with a pencil-thin mustache and one of those tiny hats Prench artists always seem to wear, standing in front of a blue canvas, screaming out, ‘It’s a metaphor for the depressive undercurrents of society, maggots!’ in a deep voice at the ponies looking at it.” I giggled again. “Kinda silly, don’t you think?”

As we began walking again, Aegis thought about it for a moment, then he started chuckling as well. “Okay, I’ll give you that. And that hat’s a beret.”

“Wait, that’s a beret? I thought berets were those lopsided hats you sometimes see in the Guard.”

“Those’re also berets. Just a different style.”

“But the Prench caps have that little sticky-uppy thing in the middle that looks really stupid.” I placed a hoof above my head and made an upward-flicking movement to demonstrate. “The military caps don’t have those.”

“Still berets.”

“They can’t be berets! Berets are way cooler than that!”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. But they’re berets.”

I sighed. “Fine.”

“Anyway, I’m actually on my way to college to study the arts,” Aegis said. “Up in Manehattan. I was passing through here on the train, wanted to stretch my legs a little, and…” He coughed. “Well, I’m procrastinating a bit. I barely have enough time as it is, but if I get on the train at 10, I should have enough time.”

“College you picked looks good?”

“Oh, definitely. Pretty wide range of topics, and I’ve only heard good things about it. I’m looking forward to it.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. Anyway, that’s my story. What’s yours?”

“Greengrocer.”

We kept walking in silence until Aegis nudged me in the ribs. “C’mon, you can’t just leave it there. I told you more, you tell me more.”

I rolled my eyes, but I was grinning a little at the same time. “Alright. My family’s pretty much generational farmers. My parents farmed, my mom’s parents farmed, I farm, and chances are, my kids’ll farm, too. We’ve got a lot of land out near Halterdale where we grow our crops to sell.”

“Hang on… isn’t Halterdale like an hour away from here?”

“More or less.”

“Why’d you come all the way out here?”

“Oh, it’s just kind of a tradition of mine. Don’t ask why.”

“Aight.”

“Anyway, yeah,” I said. “That’s pretty much it. My family grows and sells food, and’s been doing that for generations. Kinda boring, I know, but…”

“Hey, it’s not boring. Food’s gotta come from somewhere, right? Is you work hard?”

I noncommittally wiggled a hoof. “Some ponies might find it hard. I don’t. There’s a lot of it, but no, I don’t think it’s hard.” Then a few memories made me flatten my ears and lower my voice to an almost-growl. “Except when it’s downpouring and you need to make sure the fields’re draining properly so they don’t get swamped. That’s…” I groaned.

“So how do you make the plants grow? Earth pony magic? My dad, he was an earth pony and had way more of a green hoof than my mom did — she was a unicorn.”

“Yeah, that’s part of it.”

Aegis started looking at me curiously. “How does that work? I keep hearing about earth pony magic in this or that book, but the authors never really go into it.”

“Lemme guess: authors were unicorns?”

“Never checked, but probably.”

“Well, it’s…” I kneaded the ground beneath my hooves. “It’s… kinda hard to explain. I kinda just will the plants to grow. And neither Mom nor Dad told me how to do it, so I guess it’s instinctive.”

“Do you feel any different when you do it? Like, tingly in the hooves or anything?”

“Not really, no.”

“Hmm. I don’t know about other unicorns, but my horn-” Aegis pointed at it. “-feels a bit tingly when I use magic.”

“Oh.”

We walked in silence for a few more moments, then Aegis glanced at me. “What, that, that’s it?”

“What’s it?”

“You’re just gonna let all that magic stuff just slide?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Why?”

“Well, it’s…” Aegis waved his hooves around. “You’re not the least bit interested in how unicorn magic works?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on! Not even a little?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged again. “It’s just something unicorns do, like my magic’s just something I do, and flying’s just something pegasi do. I don’t see anything all that special about it just because I can’t do it.”

“Not even a little?”

“Magic’s pretty much the feature of unicorns. It’s kinda well-known. Maybe if your horns taste like candy or something, I’d be interested, since that’s not well-known, but I know practically everything I need to know about unicorns through sheer cultural osmosis.”

“Cultural osmosis?”

“Through the grapevine.”

“Oh.”

We kept walking in silence for another few moments.

Aegis coughed. “So, um, since I’m curious about the magic of other types of ponies, do you think you can tell me about yours?”

“Well, I can try…”

5:49 PM - Money

Aegis bounced the ball on his hoof (magic-proofed to keep him from cheating), then rolled it up the alley. It hit the ramp at the end and went soaring up towards the 100 pocket. I thought it would go in for once, but it bounced off the rim and rolled down to the 10. Again.

“Stop aiming for the 100,” I said again. “You’ll only hit the 10 hole if you miss. If you can’t hit a hole with consistency, aim for the 40. If you screw up on that, you’ll at least hit the 20 hole, and you might even hit the 50 if you’re lucky.”

Aegis cocked his head at me and frowned. “Are you doing that on purpose?”

“Hey, you started it, with your talk of putting balls in holes.”

“Sweet Celestia, don’t remind me,” Aegis muttered with a facehoof.

We were in a temporary arcade, with lots of dinging noises and flashing lights. It was more than a little disorienting at first. We’d passed by some skee ball lanes, a few of which were still open, and after maybe half a femtosecond of prodding from Aegis, I’d caved. I liked skee ball. I was terrible at it, but I liked it. So now we were, as Aegis had innocently put it, putting balls in holes. Well, he was at the moment. We kept switching off; he’d play a game, I’d play one, back and forth. Right now, it was his turn, I was watching him play. He only had a few balls left, though; it’d be my turn in a moment.

He fished the next ball from the slot. “But, really, it’s all about physics. You just need to know how to roll the balls right, and…” Roll. Bounce. 10.

“Yeah,” I chuckled. “Because that’s working out so well for you.”

“Quiet.” Aegis went a bit slower with his next ball, looking at it and the alley. “You know, how come carnivals rig their games so much? There’s everything you pointed out to me, and probably more.” He started preparing to throw his ball. “And then there’s stuff like the rope ladder, where there’s a secret, but it’s a really secret secret.” He rolled the ball. It didn’t come anywhere close to the 100 pocket and rolled right down to the 10. “Dangit.”

“Skee ball isn’t rigged, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I never said that, I s-”

I smirked. “You’re just jealous my scores’re consistently better than yours.” Yes, I’m terrible at skee ball. Aegis managed to be even worse. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible.

“Of course I am. But that’s my fault, not the game’s.” He rolled again and actually managed to get a 20. “But it’s almost like everything at a carnival is rigged. Why?”

“Money.”

“…What, just, that’s it?”

“Yeah. Money,” I said, shrugging. “What’d you expect?”

“I dunno. Something a bit more sophisticated than just ‘more bits’.” Roll. 10.

And that was it for Aegis’s balls. (I didn’t do that on purpose.) We swapped out and I put a bit in to start the game up again. “This place is a business. It’s meant to make money.” I pulled out a ball. “Ergo, it gears its attractions towards making money.” No sophisticated stuff like ‘aiming’ and ‘judging your throw force’ for me; I just went and threw the ball haphazardly. It earned a 20. “They offer prizes to draw people into the games, but they can’t give away too many prizes ‘cause those cost them money.” I took the next ball. “So they rig the games to keep people from winning prizes. People keep playing, money keeps coming in, prizes go out at a much lower rate.” Roll. 20.

“That seems kinda cynical,” Aegis muttered.

“It’s the truth. All these bright colors and family-friendly atmosphere?” I waved a hoof around. “Marketing. It’s all meant to look welcoming and draw you in so you can spend your money.” Roll. 10.

“So, what, you’re saying that carnivals just want your money?”

“Well, technically, yeah, that’s true of all businesses. It’s j-”

Aegis frowned at me and his ears went back an inch or so. “Okay, that’s really cynical.”

Roll. 20. “It’s not a bad thing!” I protested. “It’s just the way the business world works. I mean, I like coming here — I told you this was my thirteenth year in a row, didn’t I?”

“Back when we first met, yeah.”

“Okay. Obviously, I like coming here. Even though the place’s whole point is to take my bits.” Roll. 30. “The thing is, they’re the ones who keep taking my bits because they keep providing an experience that wants me to give them their bits.”

Aegis tilted his head. “I don’t follow.”

“Well, it’s- It’s like this. Plays on Trotway are also meant to take your bits.” Roll. 40. This might just have been my best game yet. “But they don’t just put some slapdash thing together and hope a few suckers will fall for it. They put effort into it, right?” Roll. 20.

“Yeah.”

“Right. The sets, the costumes, the design, all that jazz. You’re supposed to enjoy all that.” Roll. 10. “But there are two reasons you’re supposed to enjoy it: so you’ll come back and spend more bits, or so you’ll tell your friends about it and they’ll go see it and spend more bits.” Roll. 20. And that was it for me. We switched again. “They put up something you want to spend money on. It’s still money-focused, but it isn’t predatory or anything.”

Aegis popped a bit into the machine. “Okay. I can live with that.” Roll. 10. “But then why do they offer prizes at all? Couldn’t they just let people play?”

“They’ve gotta offer some incentive. You put a bit or two down for a game, there has to be something in there for you if you win.”

“What about playing for the sake of playing?” Roll. 10. “You know, for fun?”

My mind skipped a beat. Somehow, I hadn’t thought about that. But for the amount of time you had on most games, a bit or few seemed awfully expensive to me if you couldn’t do well. After all, if you couldn’t do well, what was the point? You didn’t have to win a prize, but you should at least be able to get more than the bare minimum out of what little time you ha-

Aegis glanced at me. “Hey. Still with me?” Roll. 10.

“I… I dunno,” I muttered. “If they un-rigged the games, maybe, you could at least have the satisfaction of doing well, but… maybe it’s just to draw more people in. So that maybe, if they do well, they can have something to show for it. And, well, paying a bit for a game that only lasts a few minutes without any chance to get anything probably wouldn’t appeal to most ponies.”

“And yet you keep putting down bits here without taking the tickets.” Roll. 10. Aegis grinned at me. “I think you’re just too competitive.”

I bristled. “I am not!”

“Uh-huh. That explains why you immediately took up my bet at the rope ladder-” Roll. 10. “-and why your main reason for not playing carnival games is that they’re rigged so you can’t do well in them, and why you’re gloating about how your scores here are better than mine-” Roll. 10.

“Well, they are.”

“Of course they are. And if you weren’t competitive, you’d just go ‘meh’, but you are, so you don’t.” Roll. 10. “And when I said that winning wasn’t everything, you got all weird and zoned out. You are competitive.”

I sighed. “Fine. You have a point there.”

“So it’s simple.” Roll. 10. “Some ponies pay and play the games because they want to have fun, and the prizes are there to draw in a few more ponies. Simple.” Roll. 10.

“Hmm.”

We swapped.I didn’t have anything more to add, so we just stood there for a few moments as I rolled the balls up the alley. Roll. 20. Roll. 30. Roll. 10.

Aegis cleared his throat. “So… what’s the whole money thing say about you?”

“Huh?”

“You’re saying the carnival’s only here to make money. What’s your excuse?”

I blinked and cocked my head. “…What do you mean, ‘excuse’? I sell crops to make money. I like it, yeah, but at the end of the day, it’s about providing goods for money.” Roll. 10.

“How can you sa-”

“Hey,” I said angrily, “I never said anything like the carnival being about money is bad. The ponies running the place need to eat and pay for stuff too, right?” Roll. 20. “And they give me a good enough experience that I’m happy to give them my money. But I need to pay for my own stuff, so being a greengrocer is about making money to pay for that. I still try to grow my crops well enough that my customers are happy to pay for them.” Roll. 20. “Being about money and making sure your customers have a good experience are not mutually exclusive.”

“Oooooooh,” said Aegis. “Wow, I, I was thinking of that completely differently.” He rubbed his neck and looked away from me. “I, um, though y-”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” I said, waving a hoof dismissively. “Whatever it was, it was a mistake.” Roll. 40. “Besides, after tonight, I’ll never see you again, and I’m not the kind to hold grudges with complete strangers.” Roll. 10. “Well, you’re not a complete stranger, but…” I shrugged. “I still won’t see you again.”

“Yeah.” His voice was a bit melancholy. I could relate.

I rolled my last ball in silence. I got a 50.

“Nice,” said Aegis, nodding in appreciation. “Very nice.”

“That might be the best I’ve ever done on this game. But I think I’m done now.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” Aegis ripped the rather small string of tickets from the machine and levitated it between us. “So what do you want to do with these, since we’re not getting anything? Seems a shame to let them go to waste.”

“Oh, pfft, that’s easy. Follow me.” We picked our way through the temporary arcade’s crowds, me counting tickets as we went. When we reached the prize counter, I took the tickets from Aegis’s magic and dropped them in front of the cashier. (I know they don’t handle cash. I can’t think of a better term for them.) Before she could say anything, I said, “We’re not interested in any prizes. If someone just needs up to eight tickets to get something they want, feel free to give these to them, okay?”

The cashier blinked, then shrugged and went with it. “Okay. Thank you for playing, and have a nice day.”

I nodded. “You, too.”

When I turned back to Aegis, he was smiling a little. “That was nice of you.”

“It wasn’t like I was going to be doing anything else with them.”

“Right. You done in the arcade?”

“For now, at least.”

“We’ve been around outside a few times. Did you see anything else you wanted to do?”

I thought for a moment, but before I could say anything, Aegis’s stomach growled loudly. He grinned sheepishly.

“Yeah, I’m hungry, too,” I said.

6:26 PM - Dinner

I looked up from my aloeburger mid-bite. “Hey, doeff dif coun’ af a dae’?” I swallowed. “We’re talking, walking around a carnival, eating together… What do you think?”

Aegis shrugged. “Don’t think so.” He took a small bite of salad. “You’re paying for you, I’m paying for me. Probably not.”

The food court was busy, loud, and smelled like heaven. We’d gotten hungry and arrived just as the dinner rush was entering full swing, but the employees were working fast, so the lines weren’t too terribly awful. Against our better judgement, we’d gone to a fast-food stand. It was cheap, and it’d fill our stomachs for tonight, even if we felt terrible the next morning. It was kind of a hard sell, though; I could see delicious peach cobblers here, rich brown wheat there, and have you ever smelled a properly-made Neightalian bouquet? With the jasmines, the oleanders, the crocuses? I swear, if I could live off that smell, I would. But everyone else had the same thought, and the line was already real long by the time we arrived. And, well, it’s expensive. Aloeburgers and quickie salads, on the other hoof, aren’t.

I took another bite. “Uffer cupples do da’.” I swallowed. “You know, going Dutch. From the Neightherlands.”

“Do they do it this early, though?” asked Aegis. “I mean, at this stage, we’re still just acquaintances eating together. Maybe friends. But not much more than that. First date, guy pays for the whole thing, right? ‘Cause it’s romantic. But you’re just doing you, I’m just doing me. We’re not even splitting the bill and doing each other.”

I choked on a bit of lettuce. “You did not just say that.” Aegis seemed to be having a bad time of that tonight.

Realization hit him and he laughed. “So, no, of course it’s not a date! We’re not doing each other. Ergo, no date.”

At least he could laugh at himself when he messed up. I probably couldn’t do that, at least not when I said something like that. As for dates, he had a point. It did vary, of course, but tradition generally dictated guy pays for girl (when it was guy and girl as opposed to two guys or two girls). No, probably not a date.

Slurps started emanating from his cup, and Aegis pushed his chair away as he stood up. “Gonna go get some more root beer. Want anything? Water? Soda?”

“Water’s fine.”

“Aight. Back in a sec.” And he was off towards the soda fountain.

As he was away, I kept chewing at my burger and occasionally taking slurps of melting ice from my cup. Today was turning out better than I thought it would. Aegis was surprisingly personable. Maybe not suave, but I didn’t want suave, and I hadn’t been expecting it. Not from his first stutters. Besides, I was a bit paranoid that suave guys were playing me somehow. But Aegis just felt too genuine for that. Too real. He laughed at his mistakes, made dumb jokes, sometimes said the wrong things at the wrong times… He wasn’t trying to wear a mask to please me, I didn’t think. He was just being himself.

It was a shame he had to leave in a few hours.

Aegis was back, levitating his drinks in front of him. “Alright, random fact time,” he said as he slid my water towards me. “We still don’t know that much about each other. So why don’t we tell each other something interesting about ourselves? Something that probably won’t come up in normal conversation.”

“What if we don’t have anything interesting?” I just wanted to see what he’d say to that; I already had something lined up.

He lightly jabbed his fork in my direction. “That, my friend, is impossible. Everypony’s got something interesting about them, even if they don’t think it’s interesting. I once knew some girl who didn’t think she was all that interesting… and then I learned she was making a whole new language for some stories she was writing.”

My jaw dropped. “She didn’t think conlanging was interesting?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, come on, that’s…” I shook my head. “She must’ve been pulling your leg or something. I mean, how can making a whole new language not be interesting? Whether or not it’s a good language is beside the point, that’s… That’s a lot of effort. You’ve gotta make all the grammar, the nouns, the verbs, the…” My voice trailed off as I tried to remember more of my Equestrian lessons, but no more names came up. “…the stuff.”

Aegis nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I said. Labor of love, you know? But she just thought anyone could do that if they wanted.”

“I suppose I could do that. Right after I go to the Badlands and beat up every single changeling.”

“But right before you teach yaks ballet, amIright?”

“Heh. Yeah.”

Aegis stabbed a cheese cube in his salad with his fork. “Anyway, back to interesting facts. You want to go first or me?” He popped the cheese into his mouth.

“I’ll go.” I leaned over the table towards him, my head propped up on my front hooves. “My family’s lived here since Equestria was founded. We were some of the first earth ponies to leave the old lands and settle down in the new ones.”

Aegis’s only reaction was to blink. It was the kind of shocked blink you do when you can’t really do anything else. “Wow,” he said quietly. “That’s… pretty cool, actually. Your family must be really dug in.”

“You kidding me? If you want to get technical, we still have a manor,” I said, grinning. This was always something I’d liked about home. “We use the surrounding lands to grow our crops. Some ponies may say they have ancestral homes, but my family’s got one that’s stretched back for over a thousand years. If there’s any out there that’s older, I haven’t heard of it.”

“Been updated a lot?”

“Actually, no,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s pretty solidly built, and it’s held up real well. There’s been some modernization — plumbing, for starters — but not that much. Those houses were built to last.”

I was kind of surprised at how interested Aegis was in this. Most ponies, I tell them that, and they’re like, “You live in an old house. Interesting.” and immediately change the subject because that last word was a lie. Aegis seemed to actually get the ties I had with the place. I’d have to ask him if he had something like that.

In between chewing on one of the last croutons, Aegis asked, “So who inherits it, when the previous generation bites it? Firstborn?”

“Yeah. Regardless of gender. And if they don’t want it, it goes to the next one. I’ve got an older brother, but he’s moving to Vanhoover, so I’ll be taking over.”

Crunch. “Lucky.”

“Yep. Oh, and depending on who you believe, my family’s been here since before Equestria was founded. Like, my grandpa, he says we were smart enough to book it out of the old lands when the windigos showed up. Me, I’m a bit skeptical. It’s nice to think that my ancestors were that smart, but it seems a bit too nice.” I shoveled the last of my burger into my mouth. “Ogay. Yoah tuhn.”

“I’m technically nobility.”

That was a surprise. I struggled to swallow my burger. I’d never really met any nobles before. I’d talked with a few, sure, they often bought some of our food, but I’d never met them. From my experience, it was split roughly ten percent between nice guys and gals, ten percent between entitled anuses, and eighty percent disinterested customers who happened to be nobles. And if Aegis was technically nobility, what was he doing at a carnival like this?

He spoke again before I could swallow. “But that’s only if you want to get really technical,” he said. “Like, de jure technical. De facto, I’m just a stallion with a slightly interesting family tree, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

I finally managed to get my burger down. “How does that work out? An ancestor get cut out of the will over something?”

Aegis grinned. “Bingo. It was my great-great-…” He frowned and paused. He tapped his hoof against the table a few times, his lips moving soundlessly. “…-great-grandmother, I think. She wanted to ma-”

I held up a hoof to stop him. “Wait, wait, lemme guess. Wanted to marry a commoner, family got all grouchy, she wouldn’t bend, they kicked her out, she got married, star-crossed lovers lived happily ever after.” It sounded cliche, but cliches were cliches for a reason, after all.

“In one!” he said, smacking the tabletop with a hoof. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. See, Great-Granny first met Great-Grandpa around the time her father was dying. Her family found out and threatened to have excised from the will. She relented until her dad had finally died. She promptly sold all the stuff she’d inherited, including the land, and took off with Great-Grandpa before anypony else knew what was going on. The family pretty much ignored her from then on out, and she ignored them.”

He grinned. “But for some reason, they never actually formally stripped her of her title. It’s like they just figured, why bother? She never went back to them, and never used that title again, but she technically still had it. And titles in nobility are inherited, so…”

“So all her descendants also kept her title,” I finished. “Huh.” It felt a little shaky to me, but there was no denying that it was a fun little anecdote.

“Don’t think it’d hold up in court, though,” Aegis added, “and I don’t put any stock in it, myself. It’s just something interesting about my family.”

That might explain his interest in my family home, actually. Nobles prided themselves on their family lines, so even if he didn’t think of himself as a noble, it might get him invested in his own line. Something like history or genealogy. So once he had that, he’d probably get attracted to places that had a long history. Like millennia-old ancestral homes.

But that’d depend on him actually being interested in history in the first place. Just because you were a noble didn’t mean you were a historian; they might be invested in their family tree simply so they could wave it around and say, my tree’s bigger than your tree. I wondered how much he’d enjoy history if he’d never learned of his ancestry.

I coughed. “So, um, if you don’t mind me asking, are there any famous nobles I’d know of that you’re related to through her?”

He preened. “Well, I don’t mean to brag, but… Prince Blueblood.”

Oh.

Um.

Yeah. Him. The lousiest, most self-centered noble of all. The one who made tabloid headlines every other day with his moronic antics and kept pushing for inane legislature that’d prop up the nobles even more, especially when they didn’t need it. The one everypony pointed to when asked to name nobles who could do with having their title stripped, if only temporarily. The one who was the most full of himself because of something he’d “earned” solely by happening to pop out of the right mare’s vagina.

And Aegis was proud of being related to… that. Uh. Well.

The words were out before I could stop them. “I am so sorry.”

Aegis was drinking his root beer at the time. He clapped his hoof to his mouth and managed to avoid a spit take, but that just meant he snorted it all out his nose instead. And guess who was sitting right in the line of fire? Yeah. I probably deserved it, but ugh.

I sat there for a moment, just staring him and blinking through the root beer dripping down my face, as Aegis shook his head and snorted out of his nostrils. He grabbed a napkin with his magic and blew his nose. “Sweet Luna, does that clear out your sinuses,” he muttered. “Wow.” Then he saw me and snickered. “Sorry, sorry,” he giggled as he wiped me down with a clean napkin. “But that timing was perfect.”

I shook a few stray drops out my mane. “What?”

“I don’t actually care about who I’m related to,” he said. He took a sip of root beer. “I really am distantly related to Blueblood — I think we’re like fourth cousins — but he’s, let’s not put too fine a term on it here, a jackass.”

“Hey! Donkeys are perfectly nice people. Stop comparing them to him.”

Aegis giggled. “He’s a moron, a jerk, an ignoramus, a git, a lout. Any one of those, take your pick. And he’s famous for it, as long as you’re not starstruck by his looks. So I can have some fun with ponies by telling them I’m related to him, acting like that means something good, and see how they react. It’s amazing how many ponies try to smile, say ‘that’s nice’, and promptly change the subject. So when you say that…” He giggled again. “It’s funny.”

I cocked my head. “You really think so? It’s not that funny. Just something I made up on the spot.”

“It is to me. Trust me, there’ve been so many ponies that try to avoid insulting me that when someone says something that I agree with, it’s hilarious.”

Well, at least someone was happy. Me, I couldn’t see why. It wasn’t even something I made up, I don’t think. I’d always thought that sort of thing had been around for a while. But oh well. If it made him laugh, I could live with it.

The last thing Aegis had said grabbed my attention. “You agree with that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Not completely, but close enough. Just because he’s distant family doesn’t mean I have to like him. It’s, why’d you want to be related to him?”

“Connections, maybe? I don’t know what the noble courts are like.”

“Maybe. But I don’t really care much for him. And my mom…” Aegis whistled. “Hoooooo boy. One day, it was just after I’d turned seventeen, she said she had some terrible secret that she needed to tell me. It was just that I was related to Blueblood, but the way she talked and built up to it, I honestly thought it was something like Dad had died. She had the sad face, the mournful voice, the downcast posture, everything.”

Now it was my turn to giggle. “Wow. That’s pretty grave for something that small.”

“And the best part? I don’t think she was joking at all. I think she was genuinely deeply ashamed of being related to him. I can understand where she was coming from, but come on.”

“Parents, huh?”

“Heh. Yeah. So, random segue,” Aegis said as he stuffed his trash into his cup, “but can you think of anything else you want to do here?”

“Not games. I think I’m tired of games.” And I never really liked them anyway to begin with. Except for the rope ladder. Maybe.

“Then how about some rides? There’re plenty of rides here.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’ll be fun.”

6:42 PM - Whirl

“That… was a mistake,” I groaned, and vomited again into the trash can I was hunched over.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” said Aegis. His voice was quite high-pitched, and he couldn’t keep his hooves or tail still.

“‘S alright,” I mumbled, the can making my voice echo. “Y’didn’t know, and I thought I cou-” I retched, but nothing came up. My stomach was feeling better, but that horrific, reeking, godawful stench unique to vomit was still wafting from the trash can into my face, and that didn’t do me any favors. I gagged. “I thought I could handle it.”

“But I’m the one who suggested we go on the Tilt-a-Whirl!” moaned Aegis. “And right after dinner! I should’ve known better! I’m sorry, it’s all my fault, I’m-”

“Calm down, you ninny,” I said. “I’m fine.” What was with him? He was acting like this was the end of the world. I retched again. Nothing came up again. That was probably it. I extracted my head from the trash can and glanced at the employee who was patiently waiting for me to finish. “I’m done,” I said to her.

“Positive?” she asked. “Need anything like a napkin?”

“Since this morning, I’ve only had an aloeburger and some fries to eat,” I said. “There can’t be much else in there. And no napkin, I’m good, thanks.”

She nodded. “Alright. You’re going to want to get some fluids in. There’s a drinking trough right over there.” She pointed down the grassy path.

“Great. Thanks.”

Aegis and I set off towards the trough as she took away the trash can. Aegis kept on babbling a constant stream of words while his tail flicked around like a whip. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, we never should’ve-”

Okay, this had to stop. I clouted him on the head. Not exactly lightly, either, but I was frustrated. “Dude. Chill. I’m fine. A single somewhat bad experience on a ride isn’t going to make me hate you.” When we reached the trough, I buried my head in the head in the water and drank deep. A small sign there helpfully notified me that some magic would keep anything unclean out of the water — whether debris from the ground or my own mouth — and so it’d always be safe to drink. It tasted fine enough, so I guess it was working. The water felt good as it entered my stomach, and I didn’t feel queasy again.

“Sorry,” Aegis muttered, rubbing the back of his head. “It’s just, I, I hate seeing you like that, and I was the one who said we should go on that ride, an-”

I pulled my head out of the water. Pinning his head between my front hooves, I forced him to look me in the eye, my muzzle still dripping. “Look, Aegis, just, just calm down, okay? It was your idea, but I was fine with it, and I feel better already. It’s nothing major and it’s got nothing to do with you. Okay?”

“B-but I-”

“Okay?”

Aegis swallowed and nodded. “Okay.”

“Good.” I released him and semi-staggered over to a bench. “I’ll take a few minutes to rest, though. I’m still not a hundred percent.” I flopped down on the bench, taking up the whole seat, and sighed. “You know, just three years ago,” I murmured, “this didn’t bother me. ‘S why I didn’t say anything when you suggested it.”

Aegis sat down on the ground next to the bench. “Oh.” He tried to look nonchalant, but he still had concern written all over his face.

“Don’t you hate how that happens?” I said to him. “How you can do all sorts of stuff and not feel bad when you’re a kid, or even a teen, but once you become an adult, it all goes away? Like, I used to be able eat a footlong sub and still feel hungry, but now I’m full just before I’m done.” I hung my head over the edge of the bench and looked at him upside-down. “You know that feeling, right?”

“Deep-fried cake,” Aegis said wistfully. “When I was younger, my parents wouldn’t make it. Now that I can make it myself, I can’t keep it down.”

“Yeah. That. Or being able to stay up all night.”

“Drink several cans of cider in a single sitting.”

“Ooo. That sounds good,” I said. I almost licked my lips.

“Run all day and not get tired. Or at least not be completely sore the next day.”

“Vault over fences and low walls without a second thought.”

Aegis grinned a little. “Ride a certain fairground ride without puking?”

I chuckled. “Heh. Yeah.”

Aegis rubbed my hair a little. I liked it. “Well, it’s all part of growing up. It’s not that bad yet, we’ve still got a few decades before we’re over the hill.”

“I know,” I groaned, “but…” I stared up at the sky, watching the few wisps of cloud drift by and the occasional pegasus push one into position. It was a very blue sky. “It wouldn’t be so bad if I felt any different. In the last few years, I, I haven’t felt like I’ve been getting any older.”

“Physically or mentally?” Aegis asked, sitting up a bit straighter.

“Both. I stopped growing five years back and I completed going through puberty, so that’s the physical bit, but…” I rolled onto my stomach to look at Aegis rightside-up. “I’m still not sure I’m ready to be an adult. I know I am, I can do everything an adult needs to do, but sometimes, it feels like I’m a filly only 14 or 15 years old in a 23-year-old’s body, copying everything the grown-ups do just to get by and hoping no one tries to call my bluff.”

“I thought I was the only one who felt that way!”

My ears went up. “You, too?” I asked, propping myself up on my forelegs. “But, come on, you used to be a royal guard.” If there was any job that made you feel like you were a mature adult, it’d be that one.

“When you get right down to it, your superiors in the Guard are really just teachers who’re a bit nastier.”

“Yeah, but… no offense, but you were trained to kill people.” I winced internally; that came out a lot cruder than I expected, practically accusatory. But it was true, and I couldn’t think of a better way to put it.

“We placed more an emphasis on protecting Equestria,” said Aegis, “but, technically, yeah. And I never really went into intense combat and had to actually kill people, so that was never really a reality for me. My duty was mostly bodyguard duty for the Princesses, a few nobles or diplomats or other VIPs, some police patrol, and… that’s it, really.” He shrugged.

“So what about Tirek or the Changeling Invasion or something like that?”

“I wasn’t in Canterlot at the time of the Invasion, so I can’t talk about that, and Tirek…” Aegis sighed. “Tirek wasn’t anywhere near what we trained for. Just an unstoppable force that I was helpless against and could do nothing but watch as the Big Ponies handled it. It’s…” He flicked an ear with a hoof. “It’s as if I’m a colt and my house just burned down. I’m sitting there, watching my parents run back and forth, trying to deal with stuff I’ve never of, like ‘insurance’. But all I know is that my house, one of the things that was always there, is gone.”

“Dang,” I muttered.

“That never happened, by the way,” Aegis quickly added, “it’s-”

“Yeah, a metaphor, I get you.” I’d never really thought about it that way. Whenever something bad threatened Equestria, I’d always thought, “Let the Royal Guard handle it.” But if the Royal Guard couldn’t handle it, well, how would they feel? Like they’d failed, probably. They only have one job: protect Equestria. Then something like Tirek comes along, overpowers them, and they’re in way over their heads and feel young and stupid. And if almost all of Aegis’s experiences in the guard were like that (when they weren’t easy and boring), it was probably amazing he was as well-adjusted as he was.

I rolled back onto my back and looked back up at the sky. “I kind of feel the same way about the grocer’s,” I said. “We grow our own food to sell, so every now and then, we naturally have a bad season or year. I was smart enough to know what was going on even when I was a young filly, but we never had any serious problems with money or food. I always thought Mom and Dad had some secret method to keep the family alive that was too complex for me to know. That goes for the bills and stuff, too. Then I grow up, I’m responsible for running a lot of the store, and the secret method? Save your extra money and pay the bills when they come. Lather, rinse, repeat.” I grinned an upside-down grin at Aegis. “I still feel like I’m making some horrible mistake that’s going to come back and bite me, but that really is the best method, right?”

“I hope so, ‘cause that’s what I’ve been doing. Except for saving for college, I don’t need to worry nearly as much about that.”

“Huh? Why d- Wait. The R.G. Bill, right?”

“Yeah. I’ve still got some college expenses, but the Bill takes care of most of them.”

“Lucky.” I stared at the sky for a few moments. “You wonder if anyone else feels the same way about this? About feeling overwhelmed by adulthood?”

I heard the grass rustle and guessed Aegis was lying down next to the bench. “There’s gotta be. I don’t think it could just be us two, right? Not unless we’re soulmates, and I don’t believe in those.”

“Good. I don’t either. But if others feel like this, how come we never hear about it? Not in books, not in the theatre, not in the movies, nowhere.”

“I dunno. Maybe everyone else is too scared to admit it because everyone else looks like they’ve got it down?”

“Maybe.” I was reminded of school, how the teachers always said, “Don’t be afraid to ask questions!” because apparently if you had a question, chances were at least one other person had the same question. If Aegis was right, there could be a large chunk of people out there who were just acting out the motions and hoping no one else would see them choke. Maybe even everyone.

Great. What a comforting thought.

“And what about the Princesses?” continued Aegis. “Luna likes to dress up for Nightmare Night. You think she’s a lot younger at heart than we think?”

“Or Twilight. At least Cadance could prepare for her… thing. Twilight just kinda became a princess one day out of the blue. Do you suppose she ever just sits back and goes, ‘holy crap, I’m a princess’? I know I would.”

I could hear the grin in Aegis’s voice. “And if it’s true of all of them, then Equestria is being led by a bunch of alicorns who really have no idea what they’re doing.”

“I wouldn’t go quite that far.”

“But just imagine it.”

I did. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

I heard Aegis grunt and soon he was standing over me. He still looked concerned, but there was a lot less of it. I could live with that. “You feeling good enough to get up?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I rolled off the bench and onto my hooves. “I’m already feeling kind of rided out, though.”

“Gee, I wonder why.”

“And since I’m also carnival-gamed out, I was thinking we could go into Luna Pier and find something else to do that isn’t in here before you leave. Something a bit lower-key. That sound good?”

Aegis nodded. “Sure. What do you want to do?”

“I dunno, what do you want to do?”

“I dunno. Do you know what’s in town?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

Sigh.

7:14 PM - Square

Luna Pier was a small town, but still just big enough to get lost in. When we wound up in the town square for the fifth time, we both broke down and agreed to take a look at the map set up there. Spending a night wandering about town was only fun if you weren’t wandering about the same part of town over and over and over.

“Okay, what is with that part of town?” muttered Aegis. “Just look at it.” He jabbed a hoof at the southwest corner of Luna Pier.

I took a look for myself and immediately saw what he was talking about. It was a confusing maze of streets that dead-ended, stopped and started, curved around on themselves, and generally made faces at common sense. “I dunno,” I said. “Where the town started, maybe?”

“How come?”

“Well, I don’t know why Luna Pier was founded, but if there was something here — let’s just say it was on a trade route — then it’d start with just a few buildings built where it was convenient. Maybe there was a well there. And then as it grows in importance, more and more buildings start springing up, but at first, there isn’t much organization, ‘cause there isn’t much need for it. Then someone goes, ‘Sweet Celestia, this place is confusing’ and they start planning it out more and more, but the early bits’re still there and just as confusing. And we’re left with that.” I poked the relevant corner of the map.

Aegis frowned at the maze, tapping his hoof against the ground as he thought. “You know what, yeah, that’s probably it.” He glanced at the statue of Luna in the middle of the town square. “Wonder if it says anything about the founding on that plaque.”

The square wasn’t that big, as far as town squares went, but Luna Pier wasn’t that large a town to begin with. There were a few ponies milling about, none of them paying much attention to us. In the center stood a slightly-larger-than-life-size stone statue of Luna. It looked old, worn and chipped, but I could tell just how old. A plaque was affixed to one side of the statue’s pedestal. Neither of us had read it, but we both guessed that Luna was involved in the town’s founding in some way, given the statue’s location.

“I’ll go check,” I said. I trotted up to the plaque and polished it a bit with a forehoof. Aegis followed me and looked over my shoulder as I began reading it. “To our most illustrious Princess Luna,” I read, “who solidified our town’s future by opening trade with the diamond dogs of the Badlands.” I looked at the date. “Wow. Two hundred years before Nightmare Moon.”

Aegis whistled and looked around himself. “Never thought it’d be that old. Looks like some of the buildings had to be rebuilt.” He glanced briefly at me. “Not as strong as yours then, hmm?”

“Guess not.” I took a few steps back and looked up at the statue. I didn’t know how old it was, but it was probably younger than the town as a whole. Too centralized, especially in comparison to the mess of early Luna Pier. But it was too old to have been put up since Luna’s return. “What do you think the townspeople felt when their princess went crazy?” I asked Aegis.

“Dunno. Probably scared and sad, but…” He thwacked the pedestal with a hoof. “This is still here. Maybe they thought Nightmare Moon and Luna were two different ponies?”

“If you believe the royal line about Luna getting taken over by something, they are.”

“Yeah, but how many ponies back then would believe that? It sounds like a weak attempt for the Court to save face, doesn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.” I put on a deep, stupid-sounding voice. “Oh, no, that wasn’t Luna, an evil force totally took over her mind. No, we couldn’t save her. Yes, blasting her to the moon was absolutely the best option.”

“Heh.”

“Still, they probably believed something about that. Or maybe they just wanted to honor the Luna that had been, rather than the Nightmare Moon that was.”

“I’m guessing honoring the memory. I mean, Luna did play a big part in the town’s founding, if this is to be believed, so it’s kinda hard to just sweep her under the rug.”

“Hmm.”

I kept looking at the statue. As I did, it brought back something from our talk at dinner. Something that’d been nagging at me this whole time. I’d never thought about it before tonight, but now, I just couldn’t ignore it. “You know,” I said, “you’re related to Blueblood.”

“Yeah.”

“And Blueblood’s a unicorn, but he’s nominally Celestia’s nephew through adoption.”

“Right,” Aegis said with a nod.

“And so is Cadance.”

“What’re you getting at?”

“Well, it’s, they’re adopted, but…” I turned to one side, embarrassed, and batted at an ear with one of my hooves. This was a stupid thought, but I wanted to get it out anyway. “Do you think Celestia and Luna have ever had any biological kids? They had to come from somewhere, right? So, what if, what if there were other alicorns where they came from and they, you know, had foals?”

Aegis frowned and scratched his head. “I… I never really thought about that,” he said. “I don’t think they have. We’d hear about them, right? What reason with Celestia and Luna have for keeping them secret?”

“I wonder if they even can have foals anymore. Yeah, they’re immortal, but that’s, um, that’s not the only thing involved in babies. Do you know if the, um, if the…” I coughed. This was even worse than before. “…if the, y’know, the tubes are still working?”

It took him a little while to get it, but once he did, Aegis blinked and slid back a little from me. “Are… are you asking me if Celestia and Luna have menopause?”

“Well, think about it,” I said, waving my hooves. I decided to just keep going. Might as well. “They look fine, but the two of them are at least a thousand years old. Do you really think all of their body is perfectly preserved?”

Aegis coughed and glanced away from me. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t be. Look, can w-”

In hindsight, the signs were obvious, and I still feel stupid for missing them. But I didn’t notice them then, so I kept talking. “But if those bits are working, why don’t they have any kids? I mean, Luna I can understand, but Celestia, I mean, a whole millennium without doing it a few times? And she could have whoever she wanted, be-”

Aegis snapped his head towards me, breathing deeply and his face turning red. “Heheh, uh, look,” he mumbled, “c-can we not talk about the, the possible sex life of the Princesses? Pretty please?” He grinned that cute, nervous grin he has when he’s flustered. “It’s just that, it’s, I just, it’s really weirding me out. Like really really weirding me out.”

I moved my foreleg over my mouth so he couldn’t see me grin and hid it with a cough. “Alright, fine,” I said. “Let’s just assume they can’t have kids. For whatever reason. I don’t know, alicorns are weird. Do you think maybe Cadance and Twilight are kid substitutes or something?”

“Well, I, I, I don’t know,” mumbled Aegis, rubbing the back of his neck. Now that we’d steered away from the previous topic, he was slightly less nervous. Slightly. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean just that. Substitutes for the children Celestia and Luna never had. They’re both alicorns, aren’t they? And they both started out as unicorns, but Celes-”

Aegis frowned. “Wait, wasn’t Cadance born a pegasus?”

“I always thought she was a unicorn.”

“Pretty sure she was a pegasus.”

I waved a hoof. “Fine. Let’s go with pegasus. The important thing is that she didn’t start out an alicorn, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. But she was turned into an alicorn by Celestia, right? And so was Twilight.”

“Pretty sure Cadance was, but I’m not sure about Twilight.” Aegis looked up at the sky and started drumming his hooves lightly on the ground. “I think it had something to do with the Elements of Harmony and discovering her destiny or something hokey like that. I know Celestia had a hoof in it, but I’m not sure if she initiated it.”

“Well, wait, hang on,” I said. I tried to rack my own memory for stuff about Cadance. Not much came up. “Did Celestia initiate Cadance’s transformation as well? Now that I think about it, it might’ve been in response to something else.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Something about a love spell.”

I sighed. “So forget the substitute kid theory. Celestia turned the two of them into alicorns after something else happened.” So much for that. It was fun while it lasted.

“Guess so.” Aegis pulled back and frowned. “You think Cadance and Twilight are ‘true’ alicorns? Immortal and all that?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” I said with a shrug.

“Because the odds that they’re the only ponies to be, I don’t know, ascended or whatever, are pretty slim. Let’s just say they’re immortal. But then that would imply all other ascended alicorns are also immortal. So how come they’re the only alicorns around? Discounting Celestia and Luna, obviously,” he added as he waved a hoof. “I mean, over a thousand years, you’d think at least one other pony would do something good enough for Celestia to make them an alicorn. But if she did, they’d still be around, ‘cause they’re immortal, too. So where are all the other alicorns?”

“That’s… huh.” I looked down at the plaque again. “Cadance and Twilight could be the only ascended alicorns, but I agree with you, that, that’s unlikely. And Celestia and Luna are still quiet about where they came from, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So whatever made them could be different from what makes a normal pony an alicorn.” I twitched and looked up. “All alicorns now are princesses. Do you know of any princesses in the past? My history’s kinda foggy.”

Aegis shook his head. “No, sorry. History was never my strong suit.”

“Oh, come on!” I protested. “You know math, psychology, and physics when they’re just interesting tidbits, but when I actually want to know history, you draw a blank?”

“I am a terrible pony!” Aegis said in an overly-whiny voice, then made a face far too sad to be taken seriously. I giggled a little at that. Then he shook his head and, serious again, “Sorry, I really don’t. I could never pay attention in history class.”

“Hmm. And Cadance and Twilight don’t have that, y’know, flowy, sparkly mane or tail, either.”

“But does that indicate anything? It might just be a pretty mane.”

“Celestia and Luna’re the only ones who have it. It’s gotta mean something.”

“What, though? It might just mean they’re extra powerful and have nothing to do with alicornhood. Didn’t King Whatsisface have a flowy mane? The Crystal Empire guy, I can’t remember his name.”

“Me neither. Sombro? Sombra?”

“That second one, yeah,” Aegis said, nodding. “I think he might’ve had a flowy mane, and if he could control the Crystal Empire on his own-”

“Was he the only one controlling the Crystal Empire?”

“The crystal ponies sure act like he was. And he was the only one who came back after a thousand years.”

“Right, yeah. Yeah, he was probably alone in that.”

“So he was probably extra powerful, too. And he was just a unicorn, but he also had dark magic. Maybe it’s got something to do with how much magic you have. Like, I don’t know…” Aegis shrugged helplessly. “You’ve got so much magic it bubbles out your hair follicles and makes your mane ethereal?”

I was about to laugh at that, but the more I thought about it, the more it weirdly made sense. Hair was always growing, after all, so excess magic might come out of that as grew. Celestia’s and Luna’s manes were literally infused with their magic, right down to their core. Plus, if that was true, that wouldn’t be the only thing magic followed. “Maybe,” I said thoughtfully. “And that would also explain their, y’know, their aura.”

“That feeling of lightness around them?”

“Yeah. It’s not just in their mane, it’s in their coats, too. You ever noticed how they always seem to stand out in a crowd? And not just because they’re several times larger than everypony else, the way your eyes are drawn to them, even if you’re not looking at them.”

“You’re saying that’s because of magic?”

“I don’t see why it can’t be.”

“It might just be because of their… regality,” Aegis said, tilting his head. “Like a placebo or whatever it’s called. They don’t really have anything special, you just think they do because of their position.”

“Hnng. Maybe. But then why haven’t I felt that when I’ve seen Cadance or Twilight? They’re princesses.”

“Probably ‘cause you’ve known Celestia is a princess your whole life. She’s been there the whole time. Cadance has been out of the public eye a lot, and Twilight hasn’t even been a princess a year. Why you also see it in Luna…” Aegis frowned. “Okay, yeah, you might have a point there. In the context of your life, she’s been a princess for less than Cadance has.”

“So let’s say the flowy mane and tail and stuff is indicative of a lot of magic. Maybe Cadance and Twilight are going to get it when they’re older.”

“But are they going to get that much older, or are they just going to get old and die like normal ponies?”

I shot a Look at Aegis. “Didn’t you just say that they probably aren’t immortal a few minutes ago?”

He clapped a hoof to his face. “…Right,” he muttered.

“But how much does their power grow when they’re an alicorn? Does their power even grow, or do they just get some extra limbs?”

“I dunno.”

“Me neither.”

Silence.

“Alicorns are weird,” I said.

“Eeyup.”

7:55 PM - Firebreather

We’d found a griffon. She was breathing fire, but that was okay.

Some more meanderings through Luna Pier had led us to… it wasn’t exactly an alley, but it was a bit too narrow to be a road. Screw it, I’m calling it a road. And at one end of this road stood a small cluster of ponies staring excitedly at something.

“You wanna check it out?” I asked Aegis.

He shrugged. “Sure.”

Fortunately, the ponies weren’t so tightly grouped that we couldn’t find a spot. We edged around one end of the group to get a good look at what they were watching. The what turned out to be a griffon. She was doing some kind of dancing, twirling a long pole burning at both ends between her front claws as she balanced on her rear legs. She wasn’t flying, but her dance included various flaps, flares, and foldings of her wings. Off to one side, a pony was beating out a fast, rhythmic song on a set of drums, her brow furrowed in concentration and a few beads of sweat running down her muzzle. A red line was traced on the ground, indicating that ponies couldn’t stand beyond it. Safety purposes.

As the drumming reached its peak, the griffon slammed her rear paw against the ground, held one of the “torches” to her beak, and let out a loud caw. A colossal plume of fire, well over a yard long, bloomed from torch into the night. Several ponies, myself included, gasped and/or took a step back. The griffon held the note and the flame for several seconds before finally letting both die down. At the same time, the pony at the drums beat one final, loud chord, then stopped drumming, panting. The griffon pulled the pole away from her beak and bowed as the ponies in the crowd beat their hooves against the ground in applause. A few bits went flying into an upturned hat sitting in front of the griffon and the drummer.

“Cool,” I whispered to Aegis. I tossed two bits into the hat as the griffon took a long drink of water. “Very cool. Kinda dangerous, though.”

“I’m sure the griffon knows what to do,” Aegis whispered back. “And they’ve got a fire extinguisher.” He pointed at a red cylinder with a weird kind of handle sitting unobtrusively in the corner. It looked to be based on normal extinguishers, but it was hard for me to tell how it worked.

We kept our voices low, so we didn’t disturb anyone watching. “How do you use that?” I asked Aegis. “It’s… There’s nothing in there for you to put your hooves in. It’s all too smooth.”

“It’s not for ponies to use. It’s for the griffon.”

I looked sidelong at him. “And that makes a dif-”

“She’s got claws.”

I smacked my hoof into my face and pulled down. “Right. Yeah.” The griffon was taking a drink from another bottle, but didn’t seem to be swallowing. I took the moment to examine her claws as best I could. They were strange, but I could see how they’d be used on the extinguisher. “Why do you think they have an extinguisher that only one member of the pair can use here?”

“The drummer probably has one behind her.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

The drummer started drumming again, and the griffon started dancing again. The tune was different; it was slow, but pounding. The griffon’s dance had changed to match; she stomped with every other beat, alternating feet, and she moved the double torch around as if she was fighting some invisible opponent. It was easy, fluid, mesmerizing.

I stared at the griffon’s claws as she twirled the pole. I’d never seen a griffon up close in person before, and I was drawn to the claws. There was just something about the way they moved. They looked too nimble and precise for their own good. Ho-

I gasped as Aegis lightly nudged me in the ribs. “You’ve got a weird look in your eyes,” he whispered. “What’s up?”

“Claws.”

“What about them?”

“It’s just… they’re weird. How does she keep track of them all? She’s already got two more limbs than I do, then you go and add on four more mini-limbs each to the ends of two limbs… It’s, I don’t know.”

Aegis didn’t chuckle, but I could tell he was holding back. He was quivering just a little. “Are you saying you’re creeped out by claws?”

I shook my head. “No, not any more than I’m creeped out by all those legs on a centipede. It’s natural on her, it’s just…” I held up my plain, blunt hoof, looked at it for a moment, then shoved it in Aegis’s face. “…compared to this, claws seem weird and unnecessarily complicated.”

Aegis lightly pushed my hoof away. “Claws are useful. They add a lot more dexterity, for one.”

“You sound like you know that from experience.”

“Yeah. Just a few months ago, like right before I left the guard, we had this…” Aegis waved a hoof vaguely. “…this cross-national training thing with the Griffon Kingdom. They’re having a rebirth of sorts and’re revamping their military, so they wanted to train with us to compare tactics. There was one griffon…” He whistled softly. “Man, the things he could do with a pike. He put some of the best pikeponies in Equestria to shame. Just because he had claws.”

“Oh, come on,” I snorted. “Do they really make that much of a difference?”

“Oh, yeah. Definitely. Like, tell me the basic design of a pike.”

“A long pole with a blade on the end, and two handles that can slide up and down the pole that you wedge your hooves in.”

“Right. Well, griffons don’t need those handles. They can just grab the pole directly. It means they’re a lot faster with the pike and can move it ways that just aren’t possible with the handles. It’s…” He shrugged and waved his hooves around. “It’s really hard to explain if you haven’t seen it, but trust me, it makes a huge difference. I mean, just look at what she’s doing now.” He gestured to the griffon.

He had a point. Even at this relatively slow speed, the griffon was twirling the torch in ways that… Well, I wouldn’t say they were impossible for ponies, but they would definitely be, at the very least, maddeningly difficult. She didn’t need to try to spin the torch around her hoof to keep it going; she could just wrap her claws around the pole, twist her wrist, and release it at the right time.

“And, really, pikes are just the start,” Aegis continued. “They don’t need to set up bows to use them. They can just hold the bow in one claw and pull the string with the other.”

“Wait, really?” I said, turning to Aegis. “That’s… that’s gotta be really complicated. I mean, you’d have to keep the bow elevated with one leg while also pushing it forward to keep it from coming back when you pull back on the string, and while you’re pulling the string with the other leg, you’ve also gotta make sure it’s aimed properly relative to both your eyes and your other leg, and… and…” I looked at the griffon again. “How do they do that? Were they accurate?”

Aegis nodded. “Oh, yeah. Maybe not quite as accurate as a pony with a grounded bow, but still pretty accurate, and the griffons were a lot more mobile and could shoot arrows a lot faster.”

“Wow. But then how do they, y’know, keep track of all that… stuff? I mean, there’s four claws on one foot alone. Don’t they ever get confused and mix some of them up?”

“Dunno,” Aegis said with a shrug. “Never seen any of them get claws mixed up. I guess it’s just because they grew up with them, the same way pegasi don’t get their wings mixed up because they grew up with them.”

“Hmm.”

The griffon finished her dance with another fire plume and bow. “Thank you for watching,” she said, and extinguished the torches as the crowd applauded. Behind her, the drummer pulled out a large case and began putting their stuff away. Seeing as the show was over, the crowd began to disperse, most of them tossing a few bits into the money hat.

Before Aegis and I left, I flipped a bit of my own into the hat. “And another thing,” I said as we walked away. “How do griffons speak Equestrian? They don’t have mouths, they have beaks.”

“Dunno. Maybe it’s harder for them, with their different structure?”

“It can’t be that much harder. She didn’t have an accent.”

“True. And when I trained with the griffons, none of them had accents, either. At least, no accent you couldn’t also find in Equestria.”

“Hnng. I mean, beaks are hard, right? How do they make ‘ooo’ sounds, like at the end of ‘you’? I can’t make it without puckering my lips, but I don’t know if griffons even have lips.” I glanced over my shoulder at the griffon, still packing up her things, then looked at Aegis. Looked at the griffon. Looked at Aegis. I looked away from both and started chewing my lip.

“What?” asked Aegis.

I rubbed my neck and muttered, “Well, it’s… I want to see how her beak moves when she talks, but I, I don’t really want to just walk up to her and go, ‘hey, I want you to talk so I can stare at your beak and see what happens’.”

“…You can be a bit more subtle about it than that.”

“Yeah, but that’s how I’d feel. It’s just a really weird reason to talk to someone, y’know?”

“I guess.”

I glanced back again. “You wonder if there’s a Griffish language or something? I mean, if you could just go and train with griffons at any point, then they all speak Equestrian. So did they ever have their own language at some point?”

“Dunno,” Aegis said with a shrug. “Maybe this language is Griffish, and it just got taken over by ponies and renamed.”

“Nah, I don’t think so. I’m kinda picturing some language that sounds like birdsong with a lot of caws thrown in for good measure.”

“Griffish can’t be that different from Equestrian. If it did, it’d probably require different vocal cord structures or something that’d cause accents that griffons can’t get rid of.”

“Hmm. Yeah, probably.”

“But then…” Aegis tapped his chin. “How did both species wind up with Equestrian? Was there some other species that was here before either ponies or griffons that used the language, and we just adopted it?”

“No clue. I’m bad at history already, but I’m terrible at pre-Equestria history.”

“Yeah, me too. I don’t even know whether the Griffon Kingdom or Equestria came first.”

“Me, neither.” I glanced back at the griffon again and muttered, “Maybe griffon beaks are more flexible than bird beaks…”

Aegis sighed. “If it bothers you that much, just go back and talk to her!”

“No,” I muttered, shaking my head, “I, it’d feel too weird to me.”

“Fine. But, really, you’re just avoiding the answers you want.”

“I know.”

8:22 PM - Bar

We’d decided to go a bar for some reason. I can’t remember why, but we did. Unfortunately, we didn’t know any good bars around, and neither one of us could work up the courage to ask one of the locals, so we’d spent a while just meandering around Luna Pier looking for a bar.

Finally, we managed to find ourselves a little dive-y place that didn’t seem too rundown, and actually looked quite nice on the inside. Well-maintained, an upbeat atmosphere, colors that weren’t too drab. It smelled of alcohol, but what bar doesn’t? That’s kind of the whole point of a bar: to offer booze. It’d be like walking into a donut shop and not being able to smell any donuts. The place was busy, but it wasn’t packed. Not yet, anyway. The music playing for entertainment was simple, but rhythmic and surprisingly catchy.

“Hey.” Aegis was speaking loudly over the noise. “Want something from the bar? I’ll pay.”

“Just some soda,” I said. “I don’t drink.”

Some ponies look at me like I’m crazy when I say that, but Aegis just said, “Any kind?”

“I don’t care. Surprise me. I’ll meet you in that corner over there.” I pointed towards the back, where an out-of-the-way corner was mostly taken up by a worn (but still functional) pinball machine.

Aegis nodded and disappeared into the crowd. I lightly nudged aside some ponies and walked over to the corner. I took a gander at the pinball machine; it didn’t look like any part was missing or broken. I tried the flipper pedals on the floor. They moved easily enough, but I wouldn’t know if they actually worked until I put some money in and tried it out. I assumed they would, though; if people started complaining about the pinball machine not working and taking their money, management would put up an “out of order” sign, right?

I heard Aegis muttering to ponies in the crowd. “Uh, ‘scuse me… Sorry, sorry… Could you please let me through, thanks…” Finally, he popped out, a bottle of beer and a soda cup floating in front of him. He set the soda down next to me on the pinball machine.

“Thanks,” I said. “What’d you get me?”

“Can’t tell you; that’d ruin the surprise,” he said. He popped the lid off his bottle. “You said you wanted it to be a surprise, right?” He winked at me and started drinking.

I chuckled and took a sip from the straw. The soda that hit my tongue was surprisingly tangy and rich. I pulled back and blinked a few times. “What is this? I’ve never had it before.” I went back to the straw.

“Cherry soda.”

“I always thought I’d hate it.”

Aegis gulped. “You did? I-if you want, I, I can go-”

“Actually, I like it.” Something was up with him. He probably didn’t mean anything by it, but something was definitely up.

“Oh, okay. Okay, good.” I got the feeling that he hid a sigh of relief. “So how come you don’t drink? Family… stuff?”

“Actually, the rest of my family drinks quite a bit. Except for the underage ones, obviously. Me?” Sip. “I just can’t stand the aftertaste of alcohol.”

“Really? That’s it?”

I nodded. “Yeah. It’s just so… bitter, I can barely down a single swallow.”

“Never gotten drunk?”

“Never even gotten buzzed. I know beer and wine are supposed to make you relax, but what’s the point in drinking them if they taste terrible?”

Aegis laughed. “That’s one way to stay sober, I guess.”

“The best way.” Sip. “On another topic, what’s with you and freaking out?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“You freak out over the slightest things,” I said. “On the Marris wheel, you were all calm and casual, then suddenly you get really embarrassed once you realize I might not want to talk to you. You start stuttering a lot once you ask me if I want to stay with you. And when I get a little nauseous on a Tilt-a-Whirl, you act like the apocalypse is upon us.”

Aegis blinked, then looked away from me and folded his ears back. “Oh,” he said quietly. “That. It’s…”

He didn’t want to tell me. That much was obvious. Or at least he was uncomfortable with telling me. Either way, I should give him an out. I owed him that much, considering all the times he told me I could leave. “If you don’t want to tell me,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual, “that’s fine, I und-”

“No, no, you’re fine,” Aegis mumbled, waving a hoof. “It’s just… I’ve never really told anyone this before. It’s not that private, just kinda uncomfortable for me. And besides, after tonight, I’ll never see you again. Gimme a sec.” He took a swig from his beer bottle and breathed deeply. “You’ve seen how I’m the one who’s usually pushing us to do stuff, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, years ago, in high school, I, I was dating this girl.” He pawed lightly at the floor. “And I wasn’t just assertive, I was pushy. I just kept saying we should do this or that, and she’d say no, and I’d keep pushing, and eventually, she’d cave. I was dominating the relationship, but I didn’t see that at the time. And then, one day, she broke up with me. She, she said I was smothering her and making her do things she didn’t want to do.” He took another drink of beer.

“Oh.” Pieces started to fit together. I think I could see where this went.

“A few days later,” Aegis continued, “I was at a party and I happened to notice her. I tried to talk to her, to apologize, to get back together, but…” He groaned a little. “She wouldn’t talk to me or even look at me and just went somewhere else in the party. I tried following her, but I couldn’t find her. She was avoiding me, right? And…” His ears went back and he started staring at the ground. “And then I realized just how much I’d been forcing my own stuff on her.”

He swallowed. “I, I mean, it’s one thing to just, to just be pushy, right? But I went way beyond that. I was so forceful that she didn’t want to see me again at all. She… she just wanted me gone. I, I think she might’ve even been scared of me. And when I realized that was the way she felt about me, it, she, I, it just…” He took a drink from his bottle. “I felt like crap. A horrible person. The kind you talk about behind their backs as people to avoid. It’s terrible, thinking someone thinks of you that way.”

“Wow,” I muttered. I could imagine the feeling. I’d dumped some people and knew how much I wanted them out of my life. I never thought about the other side of that, and Aegis had it even worse. “That would be awful.”

“So now…” Aegis looked back up at me. “Now I’m scared that I’ll do it again. That, that you’ll think I’m too pushy and not want to even look at me. If you don’t want to stick together for some other reason, fine, but, but I don’t want to control you.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” I said softly, reaching out and laying a hoof on his shoulder. “You’re not being pushy at all right now.”

“I kinda feel like I am,” he mumbled, turning back to the ground.

“Well, you’re not,” I said, more firmly this time. He was not going to have a bad night tonight because of something that wasn’t even his fault. “Actually, I’d say you’re overreacting a bit.”

“Really?” he said. Or maybe it was, “Really.” It was hard to tell if it was a question or not; it was right on the border of hopeful (“Really?”) and skeptical (“Really.”), and I mean right on the border. Like razor-edge on the border.

“Really really.” I took a long sip of cherry soda. “I don’t know what you were like before, but now, you actually stand to be a bit more assertive.”

Aegis looked up at me and, again, it was hard to tell if his expression was hopeful or skeptical.

“Just a smidgen,” I said. “You haven’t really pushed me into anything. You’ve made suggestions, sure, but you always keep adding, ‘But if you don’t want to, that’s fine’ or whatever. It makes you feel a little wishy-washy. Like, I don’t know, like you don’t actually want me to go along with you.”

“But I do.”

“And I know that. But then why do you keep telling me there’s a way out? You need to just let me say ‘no’ and acknowledge that, not keep pointing at the emergency exit. I know where the exit is, stop telling me that, or I’ll feel like I’ll need to use it, because why else would you keep telling me where it is? Do you want me to light you on fire to make an emergency and force me to use the emergency exit, is that what you want?”

Aegis grinned a little. “You might be getting a bit off-topic there.”

“Maybe. But I don’t want to be reminded of the emergency exit if it isn’t necessary. Just ask me if I want to do something and let me say yes or no. Maybe say please once or twice, but then don’t go beyond that. That’s assertive, but not controlling.”

“I’ll try to remember that.” Aegis took a long drink of his beer. Wiping his mouth off, he asked, “S-so, um, if, if you don’t mind me asking-” He froze and flicked his tail. “Is that being wishy-washy?” he asked nervously.

Man. We’d just talked about this and he was already finding his own flaws in it. “Are you leading into a personal or semi-personal question?”

“Yeah.”

“Then no. Telling someone they don’t have to answer a personal question is a lot different than telling someone they don’t have to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl or something. That’s something I don’t mind being shown the emergency exit for.”

“Okay.” When Aegis started talking again, he sounded a lot more confident. “If you don’t mind me asking, if I’ve been wishy-washy this whole night, what made you stay with me?”

I tilted my head up and pretended to be deep in thought. “Well… there is one thing…” I grinned, leaned close to him, and whispered, “You have excellent taste in mares.”

He broke into a fit of the giggles. “Flattery will get you nowhere,” he said.

I leaned back. “But seriously, if nothing else, you’re a good conversation partner. You know when to talk, when to listen, you’ve got interesting things to talk about… You’re technically a noble! That right there could provide hours of conversation on its own, if that’s the way we went.”

“Maybe not hours, but I get you.” Aegis thought for a few moments, then nodded to himself. “That’s actually a lot more reassuring than I thought it would be. I mean, you hear ‘I like talking to you’ and it doesn’t sound all that great, but then you actually think about it, and it’s something more like, ‘I enjoy your company and you being you’.”

I nodded. “Yeah. That’s it.”

Aegis smiled. “Thanks.”

“And that’s just the first thing I could think of. You’re enjoyable to be around. You’re just so…” It took me a little while to find a good word for what I was thinking of. “…so laidback and… mellow. You go with pretty much everything I talk about, and you’re actually interested, not pretend-interested.”

“What’s so great about that? None of the stuff you’ve wanted to talk about is boring.”

“Yeah, but not everyone would see it that way. I mean, you were hooked when I was talking about rigged carnival games.”

“Eh. I guess,” Aegis said with a shrug.

Leaning back in my chair, I said, “So, I answered your question, you answer mine: why are you sticking with me?”

Aegis grinned. “Besides your excellent taste in stallions?”

“You’re not allowed to steal my lines.”

“Heh. Well, actually, that’s part of the reason I’m still with you: there’s just something about the way you talk that I really like. You’re… you’re witty.”

“Witty? Oh, come on, no I’m not.” Still, I can’t deny that I liked that he thought that. It’s one of those things that everyone kind of wants to be, even if they don’t admit it.

“Okay, maybe you’re not super witty. But you’re sharper than most ponies. Definitely me, at the very least. It’s, it makes you a good conversation partner. I don’t always know what you’re going to say.”

There were worse things to be, I guess. At least he hadn’t said anything like “I think you’re purty.” And, well, going on what he’d said earlier, he enjoyed me for being me, too, so that was a plus. I still didn’t think I was witty, though.

“And you’re…” Aegis waved a hoof helplessly. “I don’t know. Not exactly blunt, but…” His ears suddenly stood up straight and he grinned. “Forward! That’s it! You’re not afraid to speak what’s on your mind, but you’re not overbearing about it. You just say, ‘That mustache is stupid’, you don’t keep quiet, but you also don’t whine about it.”

That was something I’d never been called before, but I wasn’t unpleased. Actually, I liked it quite a bit. There’ve been times when I’ve been worried I’m being too blunt — I want to be sure ponies know what I’m thinking — but if Aegis was telling the truth (and I don’t know why he wouldn’t), that wasn’t a problem; I hadn’t spent the night trying to dial it down at all. And it also meant that Aegis liked that I didn’t always agree with him, which in turn meant that he knew he wasn’t the light of my life. I could get used to a guy who thought of me as my own person, and not just a marefriend.

“So…” Aegis gulped down more of his beer. “Now that we’ve poured our hearts out to each other, now what?”

My gaze fell on the pinball machine off the side. Oh, might as well. I nudged it with a hoof. “You like pinball?”

“Not really, no.”

“You are the worst pony in the world and I hate you.”

Aegis clapped a hoof to his mouth and snickered. “But of course. We like each other for our personalities, but pinball? That’s the primary thing in a relationship.”

“Naturally.”

Aegis scooted to one side to give me better access to the machine. “But if you can talk and play, go ahead. You want to play it, I won’t stop you.”

“Alrighty.” I fished out a bit and popped it into the machine. It sprang to life immediately. I tested the pedals; both flippers worked just fine, and I didn’t see any lights that were burnt out. Guess it was just well-used, not breaking down. Which meant it was probably a good machine.

Aegis looked at the high score on the status screen. His eyes went wide and he gulped. “That’s… that’s a lot of numbers.”

I shrugged. “It’s pinball. You get used to it.” I deployed my first ball.

8:43 PM - Cemetery

“You believe in ghosts?”

I stared at Aegis and cocked my head. “…And just where did that come from?”

Aegis pointed. “We’re passing a graveyard.”

We’d been done in the bar for a while and were wandering aimlessly through Luna Pier, talking about nothing. I guess we’d somehow found our way to the edge of town and were now, well, passing a graveyard.

I turned to look at the graveyard. It wasn’t that big. As far as graveyards went, it wasn’t that creepy, not even in the gathering gloom as the sun approached the mountains. As far as I could tell, the only thing making Aegis bring up ghosts was the fact that it was a graveyard.

I must’ve zoned out thinking, because Aegis nudged me and asked, “Well?”

“I… I don’t know,” I muttered. “I haven’t seen any with my own eyes, but at the same time, no one knows what’s beyond death, right? So maybe there’s something there, and I…” I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Kinda on-the-fence, aren’t you?”

“Well…” I waved my hooves around. “It’s, I don’t know enough one way or the other. I haven’t seen any, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And other ponies have claimed to see them, but they could be wrong for whatever reason. Why not be on the fence when getting off is a massive leap of faith either way?”

“Hmm. Okay, yeah, I’ll take that. At least you have a reason for being indecisive. I’ve met some ponies who didn’t pick a side just because they couldn’t be bothered to.”

“Well, I used to be indecisive. But now I’m not so sure.”

Aegis chuckled softly, then glanced at the cemetery. “Wanna go in?”

“Into the cemetery? Why?”

“Why not?”

“Because…” I tried to find a reason, but they were all weak. Essentially variations on “I don’t wanna.” It wasn’t the greatest place to be in, but it was hardly the worst either. “Fine. Let’s go in.”

As far as I could tell, there wasn’t anypony else in the cemetery. Just rows upon rows of tombstones, broken up by the occasional mausoleum. A lot of them had flowers or other gifts laid on the graves. It was surprisingly peaceful, especially at this time. The breeze was crisp and cool, and the yard itself rolled over several small hills. The only sounds were the wing, birdsong, and our own hoofsteps.

We silently walked down a path for a minute, just looking around. Eventually, I asked Aegis, “How afraid are you of dying?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Exactly that. How afraid are you of dying?”

He glanced at me and cocked a grin. “What makes you think I’m afraid of dying at all?”

“I never said that. If you’re not afraid of dying, then that’d be a zero on a scale of one to ten.”

“Oh.” He turned back to the path. “After my time in the Guard, not very. It’s still there, but it’s mostly gone. I guess more than death itself, I’m afraid I’ll go before I get my affairs in order. I’d be okay, relatively speaking, with a terminal disease that let me get everything organized, but I’d hate to die in a fire or something.”

“That’s awfully pragmatic.”

Aegis shrugged. “I learned it in the Guard. When you’re being trained to kill ponies, the fact that we’re all going to die someday becomes just a fact, and not a big, looming shadow of ominousness.”

“Oh.”

“So how afraid are you of dying?”

“Kinda like you, to be honest. It’s, yeah, I’m going to die someday, and I don’t like it, but I’ve accepted that.” I lightly kicked at a rock on the path. “Really, I’m more worried about how I’ll die. My worst fear isn’t heights or anything like that. It’s dying of either suffocation or dehydration.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ve heard that when you’re getting dehydrated, it feels like… like your lungs are burning.” I cringed. “Like, take regular thirst and turn it up to eleven. I mean, just… ugh.”

Aegis cringed, too. “Wow. Yeah, that’s, that’s not a very good way to die.”

“And suffocation because I’ve actually felt it myself. I was… eleven or twelve, I think. It was during dinner, and I was eating too fast, and something went down my throat wrong, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I kept trying and trying, but I just couldn’t get any air.” I snorted. “You know how, in the theatre, characters sometimes say ‘I can’t breathe’ to one another?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never been able to take those seriously. If you can say that, you can breathe, if only a little. I couldn’t say anything because I literally couldn’t get the air out. I was just sitting at the table, trying to gasp, and no one else noticed anything for several moments.”

“Yeesh. Scary. What happened?”

“I got lucky. Mom noticed me acting funny and asked what was wrong. I pointed at my throat and the next thing I knew, I was out my chair and she was slapping me on the back. The blockage quickly got cleared out and we all lived happily ever after.”

“Good.”

“Yeah. Probably the closest I’ve ever come to dying, and now I know that however I die, I don’t want to die that way. The feeling was terrible.”

“I can imagine.”

“So what about you? How close have you ever come to dying?”

Aegis grinned nervously and rubbed the back of his neck. “Heh heh… Um, well…”

I waited for him to continue, but he kept stammering and hemming and hawing. “This isn’t too personal, is it?” I asked hesitantly. I figured he’d say if it was too personal, but I just wanted to check.

“Heh, um, no,” he mumbled. “It’s, um, uh, just that…”

It hit me. I blinked and looked at him in disbelief. “Are you seriously saying that you’ve never been that close to death?”

He grinned again. “Heh. Um, not really, no.”

“You’re not saying that, or-”

“The other one.”

My jaw dropped. “You’ve never had a brush with death? Never been in a situation where you thought you were gonna die?”

“No.”

“You… Seriously? I mean, come on! You were a royal guard! It’s your job to risk your life!”

“Yeah, well,” he mumbled, “it’s peaceful now, and I, and I never really got into any dangerous situations. The worst was Tirek, and he didn’t try to kill you, he just-”

“Still!” I said. “That’s… that’s ridiculous! I had a moment where I was nine and I thought I was going to die! Are you telling me my nine-year-old self gets into more danger than the Royal Guard?”

“Really? What happened?”

It was like the world stopped. I hadn’t meant to say that. That was personal, and not something I liked to talk about. I’d been young and stupid and impulsive. I’d hurt my parents, and they didn’t hold against me, but I’d never forget how they felt when it was all said and done.

Still. After tonight, I’d never see him again.

Aegis saw the look on my face and flinched. “Um, l-look, sorry, if, if yo-”

“No,” I said, waving a hoof, “it’s, you’re fine. Just, just give me a second.” I took a few deep breaths.

“Okay,” Aegis said quietly. “You take, just take all the time you need.”

Eventually, I said, “Okay, like I said, I was nine. It was near the end of summer, so, y’know, school’s coming up. And just a few days before the first day, I was at a friend’s house in town, and I saw this flier for a carnival. The one we were at, actually. And I wanted to go, I wanted to go real bad, but my parents said no, we just didn’t have the time. So one day, I… I went there myself.”

“On your own? Didn’t you say you lived like an hour from here? While you were nine?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I really wanted to go, and I was just smart enough to read a map, and… Well, yeah, I was determined. So I went, taking some of my own money with me, and spent most of the day there. I had a lot of fun, not really thinking about my parents, and then…” I swallowed. “Then I had to leave as night started to fall, and I didn’t know the way back home.”

“Didn’t you say yo-”

“I got rid of the map once I got to the carnival. I, I didn’t think I’d need it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” I swallowed. “And I started following a road, thinking it’d take me home, but I kept walking and walking, and I didn’t find anything, and I didn’t recognize any of the land. I was terrified, and I, well, I really thought I was going to die. Probably an overreaction in hindsight, but…” I shrugged and tried to chuckle. It didn’t quite sound genuine. “…little filly alone in the dark in an unfamiliar place. Your mind goes places.”

“Wow,” Aegis said quietly. “Yeah, I can imagine. So what happened? Were you out all night?”

I shook my head. “There were these guard out on night patrol, and they found me crying at some crossroads. They took me back to their barracks and tried to find out where I lived. I was too young to remember my address, but I could remember Mom’s and Dad’s names, so that worked out. Got me back home, and…” I folded my ears back, flicked my tail, and looked away. “…and I saw Mom’s and Dad’s reactions.” My voice had dropped a few notches in volume.

“I thought I was scared, but that was nothing compared to the state they were in. I thought they hadn’t taken me to the carnival because they didn’t love me, but seeing them like that, worried for my safety… I mean, can you imagine? All of a sudden, your kid goes missing for a day, and night falls, and she’s still not found, and…” I sniffed a little. “After seeing them like that, I felt… geez, worse than I’ve felt since.”

“Dang.”

“Yeah.” I waved a hoof. “Anyway, you probably don’t want to hear what happened next, and even if you do, you can probably imagine it. It’s all the usual teary-eyed stuff where we make up. They were more worried at me than angry, even though… yeah, they were pretty angry. But they forgave me, I learned my lesson, and everything went fine after that, so no harm.”

“Good,” Aegis said, nodding. “Good. Yeah, um, I guess nine-year-old you has gotten into more danger than me, technically speaking.”

“Wuss,” I said with a little grin.

“Hey!”

“Look, you took a job meant to be dangerous, and I got into more danger by going to a carnival. When I was nine. What else do you call that?”

“Just because I wasn’t in danger doesn’t mean I’m a wuss! It means I never got in danger!”

“Oh, all right, fine.”

Aegis harrumphed, then glanced at the mountains, where the sun was about to vanish behind them. “You know, it’s a shame we’re on the east coast, and not the west coast. We could watch the sun set over the ocean.”

I laughed. “Oh, come on. Everyone watches the sun set. I’ve got a better idea.”

9:08 PM - Moonrise

Aegis squinted and pointed out towards the horizon. “I think I see an island out there.”

I nodded. “Probably. There’s one out there called, uh…” I scratched my head. “…either Roan Bay’s the island or the name of the town on it.”

“Probably the town. It sounds like a town name.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was thinking.”

We were sitting close to each other on a cliff above the ocean, facing east. Waves crashed softly against the shore below and whipped tiny bits of salt spray up into our faces. It tasted… well, salty. But it was something, because you can’t normally taste spray. You can’t even smell it. Not here. Just open your mouth or breathe in through your nose, and you know you’re at the ocean, not just some big inland sea.

The eastern evening sky, compared to the western evening sky, is very boring. Of course it is; the western sky’s got the sunset. But the eastern sky’s got a small charm of its own. It’s where the first stars come out as night creeps in. Already, numerous pinpricks of light were scattered around the sky, reaching from the horizon to almost three-quarters of the way to the next one. It was especially beautiful in the east, with no light from the sun blotting them out. It’s a lot more subtle and slower than the sunset. You need to invest more time, but if you’re willing to just sit and wait, it’s a spectacle.

And that’s before the moon starts coming up.

“It used to be a major hub for unicorns,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Roan Bay. Or at least the island it’s on. Before Celestia and Luna came, some of the unicorns responsible for moving the sun and the moon lived there. They were like the first ones to draw the sun and moon above the horizon. They left once Celestia and Luna came, since they weren’t needed anymore, and I’ve heard some of their ruins there can get weird, thanks to all the magic in the air.”

“If the unicorns left, how come there’s still a village there?”

“The unicorns left way before Roan Bay was founded. Roan Bay itself actually does a pretty decent business in kelp farming.”

“Oh.” Aegis put a foreleg around my shoulder. I knew what was coming before he did and brought my own foreleg up in preparation. When he twitched and tried to pull away, I pushed down on his leg, keeping it on my shoulder. He relaxed, and I released him and put my leg back down.

Aegis looked up. “The stars are beautiful, aren’t they? I’ve never seen so many.”

“City colt?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“You can’t see as many stars in the city because of all the light from the city. Out here, there’s less light, so you can see stars that’re a lot dimmer.”

“Right, right.”

Silence, except for the waves tumbling over the shore.

“You ever wonder what stars look like?” Aegis asked. “Up close, I mean.”

“Not really. They’re just continual magical reactions, aren’t they?”

“What do you mean, ‘just’? That’s like saying that Celestia is ‘just’ a pony with wings and a horn.”

“I guess.”

“Besides, they’re supposed to be big continual magical reactions. That’s gotta be different than something like…” A small spark popped out of Aegis’s horn. He caught it on his free hoof and held it up to me. “…this.”

I took a look. It was pretty much just a ball of light. Pretty, but not much else. I could see some structure in there, some filaments twisting around it, but that was it. “Probably, yeah.” I looked back at the ocean.

Aegis’s spark winked out. “You’re being awfully quiet.”

“There’s nothing wrong, if that’s what you’re wondering. I just want to take in the scenery.”

“Alright. Want me to shut up?”

I quirked a smile. “If you don’t mind.”

“Alright,” Aegis said. I could hear him laugh a little, and he squeezed me slightly for a second.

I liked the squeeze a lot more than I thought I would. It was strong, firm, close. Reassuring, somehow. I don’t know why. It was nice, being so close to somepony. I wonder if he felt the same. Probably. He’d started this whole thing, after all.

The first wisps of the moon broke above the horizon, shining bright white. The moon wasn’t full tonight, but it was close. By the time it was fully up, we’d practically be able to walk without streetlights.

Aegis gasped softly. “Wow.”

“And it’ll only get better,” I said.

We waited quietly, and ever so slowly, Luna’s moon climbed. In a few minutes, it had completely cleared the horizon. It hung there, a gigantic silver medal casting its light over Equestria, and everything suddenly lost substance. The moment felt delicate and ethereal, something beautiful you didn’t want to touch for fear of destroying it.

“It’s huge,” whispered Aegis. “Why’s it so huge?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hmm.” He was silent for a few seconds. “This is amazing. I wish I could just stop time right now, freeze the night right here.”

“Oh? How come?”

“Because this is just so… tranquil. And, well…” His voice got a little bit lower. “…after tonight, I’ll never see you again.”

“Yeah.”

And then I realized what he’d said.

I suppose that was the first time it really hit me that I wouldn’t see him again. It’d always been in the back of my mind, but now we had less than an hour until his train left, and then that was it. He’d be completely gone from my life. I didn’t want him around forever, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for him being gone forever.

I liked him. He was sweet. He listened. He admitted his mistakes. He was smart. And in less than an hour, I’d have no trace of him. Except for the memories.

I turned to him. “Hey, um, Aegis?”

He turned to me. “Yeah?”

His muzzle was inches from mine. Scant inches. All I had to do was lean forward, just a little, and then I cou-

I turned away. “Nothing, nothing,” I muttered. “Forgot what I was going to say.” A lie. I couldn’t make it sound convincing even to myself.

“Oh.” It was one syllable, but I could hear a lot going on that one syllable. Some fear. A little nervousness. Surprise. Suspicion. Some other things I couldn’t put a hoof on. Aegis swallowed. “You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“…Alright.” A touch of regret. A touch of understanding. Mostly acceptance.

Why did I do that? Why didn’t I do that? Was I going too fast? Too slow? Pushing too much? Not pushing enough? The moon went up another inch, and my thoughts continued to battle. I’d spent the day with Aegis, gotten to know him a fair bit, but would doing that be too serious for the amount of time we’d spent together? I didn’t know. Whenever I went to one side, I got a lot more arguments for the other side. Then I’d change sides, but so would the arguments. I tried to remain neutral, and the arguments would start screaming at me from both sides.

I didn’t know. And there was no way I could.

Aegis’s wistful sigh pulled me from my thoughts. “Do you feel… like this isn’t real time? I mean, if that Marris wheel hadn’t broken down, we wouldn’t be here. You’d probably be at home already, right?”

“Probably, yeah. This shouldn’t really be happening. I should be in bed, and you should be grumpily sitting at the train station, demanding the clock hurry up so the train can just leave already.”

“Exactly. It’s like this is some kind of dream world, but it’ll break once the sun rises.”

“The sun doesn’t rise at 10 PM, you rube.” I nudged him in the ribs.

He giggled. “Fine, then. The fairy godmother screwed up her spell, and we’ll turn back into pumpkins at 10, rather than morning.”

“Nah. The carnival will turn into a pumpkin. You’ll have to produce a glass slipper for me to try on.”

“You’ll need to lose one for me to produce.”

“Well, then, Ms. Fairy Godmother really screwed up, ‘cause I don’t have one to lose.”

“Heh. Yeah. Curse you, godmother.”

We watched the moon rise in silence for a few more moments. The stars continued to twinkle in our time, just for us. The waves continued to crash. And it all kept slipping away.

“…Do you think it’d fit?” he asked quietly. “The slipper, I mean.”

“…Yeah. What about you?”

“Yeah.”

That was it, really. Borrowed time. I should just let it go. I had to. If I clung too closely to him and his memories, it’d eat me up when he was gone. Memories would turn to an idealization, and I’d be pining over a pony who never existed. What would that do to me? Nothing good, that was for sure. I should just let it go.

But I couldn’t. Not yet. I still had some time left with him. And the slipper would fit.

“Bluebell?”

“Hmm?”

“Thanks for spending the day with me today. I really liked it.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Neither of us wanted to mention how little of the day we had left.

Aegis patted me on the shoulder. “You’re a good mare.”

I reached up and patted him on the shoulder. “You, too. Except you’re a stallion, not a mare.”

“Heh.”

With what time we had left, we simply enjoyed each other’s company and watched the moon climb into the sky.

9:57 PM - Departure

We were back in real time. It was depressing.

We slowly walked down the train platform, neither of us wanting to say goodbye. Saying goodbye would make it final. So would the train leaving, but we could drag it out as long as possible.

The platform was almost completely empty except for a few stragglers. Steam drifted from the locomotive, leaving mist that wreathed about the place and smothered the yellowing lamps that were the area’s only illumination in the night. The shadows danced along the cobblestones, like a cloudy sky in reverse. Water doesn’t have a smell, so I could just barely smell the little bit of smoke from the wood burning in the engine’s firebox. Pine. Pine always has that rich, unmistakeable aroma. I could only imagine what it smelled like in the cab. The station was quiet, the silence broken up alternately by night noises and sounds from the engine, small hisses and pops as water worked its way through the pipes. Above it all hung a clock, slowly ticking down the minutes until the train left.

Of course, the only reason I noticed all that was because it kept my mind distracted. I didn’t want Aegis to just… leave. He wasn’t my soulmate or anything like that, not in the slightest. I could live with some time away from him, easy. Probably even a lot of time. But to just never see him again at all… That wasn’t fair. It’d leave a hole in my experiences. A small one, but it’d be there. Always.

I glanced at Aegis, wondering what he was thinking. His face was inscrutable, but his head was a little bit lower than he usually carried it. Maybe. It might’ve been wishful thinking on my part, I’m still not sure.

I opened my mouth to say something.

I didn’t say something.

I closed my mouth again and turned my eyes forward.

We silently retrieved Aegis’s things from a locker and headed towards the train. I think there were a few times he wanted to say something to me, but couldn’t get it out. I could relate.

And then we were in front of a passenger car. Aegis looked up, then looked at me. “S-so, uh, I guess this is goodbye,” he muttered.

I rubbed a hoof against my other leg. “Yeah. See you.”

He swallowed. “The harvest for you, that’ll, um, that’ll be coming up soon, right? Good luck with that.”

My heart was beating faster. I looked off to one side for a few moments. “Yeah, that’ll start in, start in a week or so. Thanks. A-and good luck in college. I, I hope you do good.”

“Do well. Good’s an adjective and modifies nouns. Well’s an adverb and modifies adjectives, verbs, and other adverbs.”

“Well, at least your Equestrian grade will be good.”

“Yeah.”

“You grammar Neighzi.”

Aegis twitched and laughed softly. “Heh. Yeah.”

Our eyes met.

I’ve heard you can see other ponies’ emotions in their eyes. Read them. Get an idea of what they’re thinking. Maybe if you know the other really well, I suppose. But right then, I couldn’t see anything like that. All I could see in Aegis’s eyes was Aegis’s eyes. Nothing more. They weren’t any particularly special color, either, just a plain, soft blue. All in all, there was nothing out of the ordinary in his eyes that I could see. Nothing especially attractive about them. So I don’t know what clicked right then. But something did.

I reached out and hugged him.

He gasped slightly, staggered a little in surprise, but quickly returned the favor, squeezing firmly. We held each other for a few seconds like that. When we broke, I felt short of breath. Before I could speak, he did. “I, I want to see you again,” he said quietly. He was talking very fast. “All this, all this stuff about, about not seeing each other again after tonight?” He shook his head. “It’s-”

“It’s a load of road apples is what it is,” I said. I was also talking fast, same as him. “I want to see you, too.”

He blinked. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was worried you might not feel the same way! Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was worried you might not feel the same way!”

Part of me wanted to laugh. The rest of me said that would be a waste of time and I should keep talking. I kept talking. “We had a heart-to-heart under the moonlight! How could you be worried about that?”

“I thought I’d never see you again! How could you be worried about that?”

“But-” I groaned and waved my hooves. “Okay, let’s- let’s just forget about that, okay? You, look, what do you want to do about it?” The clock’s ticking seemed to have jumped a couple notches in volume.

Aegis ran a hoof through his mane, messing it up and whipping his tail around as he thought. “I, I don’t- Do you know the schedule for that carnival?”

“Uh, uh, yeah, yeah,” I said, nodding. “It’s yearly. Annual.”

“Alright, so, so why don’t we come back here next year, alright? When the carnival comes again, y’know? Same date.”

“Um, yeah, that, that’d be good. At the Marris wheel again?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Aegis muttered. He kept shooting glances at the clock and his legs were twitching.

“And if the carnival’s not here on that, on that particular date,” I continued, feeling a little out of breath from how fast I was talking, “we’ll just meet here, alright? Four o’clock, either way. PM.”

“That, yeah, that sounds good,” said Aegis, nodding. “One year from today, Marris wheel or this station, four PM.”

“Right.”

“Okay, yeah, I, I can make that work. It’s, listen, it’ll be a long trip for me, but I, trust me, I’ll be there, okay?”

“Okay, right.” I paused for half a moment. “You, you wanna exchange addresses, so we can write, or-”

Aegis shook his head. “No, no, it, that, it wouldn’t work. It’s, I liked talking with you, and letters can’t do that, they can’t have that, that quick back-and-forth. They take too long. It’s-”

“It’s depressing.”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“One year?” I asked. My voice was a lot slower, back to its normal pace.

“One year.”

“Sounds good.”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

More silence.

We both jumped as the train’s whistle blew. I glanced at the clock. “Your train’s gonna leave.”

“Yeah.” Aegis swallowed. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

He grinned a little. “See you later.”

I grinned back. “You, too.”

He nodded and disappeared into the train car.

I turned around and left the station. I had a long trip back.

I wasn’t sure how I felt. Excited. Nervous. Confident. Regretful. Elated. Depressed. Satisfied. Empty. All those things at once. It was like I’d jammed my emotions into a blender and hammered the “purée” button. Aegis was gone, there was no denying that. But it wouldn’t be forever, just a year. I could live with that. Besides, he was really confident he’d show up, so he would. Right? I couldn’t just let him down after tonight. Still, a year was an awful long time. What if I moved on and he didn’t? What if he moved on and I didn’t? Part of me said one of those two would happen. If not both of us moving on. But another part scoffed at that cynicism, saying that we’d find each other again, and while things may have changed, we’d still hit it off.

So, no. I wasn’t sure how I felt. Not at all.

But, one way or another, I’d be back in a year.

Behind me, the whistle blew again, and I heard the click-clack of the train’s wheels as it pulled out of the station. I looked over my shoulder at the slowly accelerating train and its trail of steam. The windows on the cars were irregularly illuminated, most of them dark, some of them bright. I watched the train, silhouetted black against the dark blue of the night, as it rattled away, towards the edge of town, towards Manehattan.

Then it went behind a hill and it was gone.

4:43 PM - Meeting

I’d gone to the Marris wheel for a little bit of peace and quiet. Relatively speaking, anyway. This was a carnival, you couldn’t really get away from the sound, but it was quieter at the top of the wheel. It’s something of a tradition of mine; ride the wheel at least once when the carnival came around late summer, even if that was the only thing I did. Don’t ask me why. But the wheel was a good way to take a brief break from the carnival.

Twenty minutes, however, was more than enough peace and quiet, and I was ready to get back to the bustle and noise.

The wheel’d broken when I was near the top. Lucky I had the view, at least, but I was bored. I kept flopping around in the… “car”, I guess, I don’t know the term. It was one of those ones where the seats are arranged in a circle around a central point, not a single straight bench. I wasn’t in any danger from falling out. Anyway, I was bored, and I kept trying to find a way to lie down and rest until they could get the wheel fixed. I was alone, so I didn’t even have anypony to talk to. At first.

“Hey.”

You don’t really expect to hear anypony while you’re at the top of a Marris wheel alone, so it took me a while to pinpoint the source. In the next car over, a little higher up than me, a unicorn stallion was hanging his forelegs over the sides, looking at me with vague interest. Gray coat. Plain, but he made it work well enough. Looked like he was alone, too.

He grinned. “You look about as bored as I feel.” His voice wasn’t exactly deep, but it was kind of getting there. Almost, but not really.

“Is your boredom level ‘very, very, very’?” I asked as I propped myself up. Kind of silly, just talking to him like that, but, hey, I was bored, too. I was just glad to have something else to do.

“Might want to add in another ‘very’, but yeah.”

“Then you’re about as bored as I feel.”

He grinned again. “Guessed as much.” He suddenly twitched, lowered his ears, and looked away from me. “Um, s-sorry if I butted in-” His voice had gotten a lot quieter, and I had to strain a little to hear him. “-b-but, it’s, I was just bored of sitting here, a-and you looked bored, and-”

I waved a hoof at him. “Nah, you’re fine. If I wanted to ignore you, I would.”

His ears went back up and he smiled. “Oh. Cool. Thanks.” He leaned over the car’s wall a little more, making it rock back and forth slightly, and peered down at the base of the wheel. Lots of ponies were milling around there. “How long do you think it’ll take them to fix it?”

“It shouldn’t be too long,” I said with a shrug. “The rides here are usually pretty reliable.”

He looked back up at me and cocked his head. “Been here before?”

“The carnival comes here yearly,” I said, “and I always try to go at least once. This is my thirteenth year, and the first time I’ve heard of a breakdown.”

“Huh. Yeah, that’s a pretty good record.” He looked down at his car, then at mine. “Bet I could make that jump,” he said.

I quickly scooted to the far wall of the car. “Whoa, hey, no, that’s a bad idea,” I said. “Very bad. Superbad.”

“I wasn’t going to actually do it!” he laughed. “I’m not that stupid. Just saying, I could make that jump if I really wanted to.”

“And why would you want to?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. Wheel stuck like this forever and we need to climb out?”

“They’d just send up pegasi to carry us down,” I pointed out.

He flattened his ears and pouted. “You’re no fun.”

“Buuuuuut… if every single pegasus came down with the feather flu…” I looked at the next car over and grinned. “I suppose that would be pretty fun. If I didn’t fall and break every bone in my body.”

“You’ve got it easier,” he said. “It’s math. The car on your other side’s the same absolute distance away, but it’s got a greater vertical distance and a shorter horizontal distance.” As he spoke, his horn glowed, and shining lines appeared in the air, illustrating his words on a floating diagram of a circle. Which was good, because I probably wouldn’t’ve been able to follow it otherwise. I never liked math. “Long story short, you don’t need to jump as far to get to the next car as I do.”

This was kind of a silly line of conversation, but I kept it up. Not much else to do. “And what about when we get to the part where the cars are over each other vertically?”

“That’s… dunno. Hmm.” He tapped his chin and looked vaguely around. His gaze fell on the frame and his eyes lit up. “We’ll be at the point in the wheel where the spokes’re horizontal. Crawl along them to the center, drop to a diagonal one, and slide that one down to the ground.”

I grinned. “So now, whenever a Marris wheel stops, we’ll be ready. We shall never fear the Marris wheel apocalypse!”

It didn’t click with him. He frowned at me and cocked his head, making an “eh” sort of sound.

“It’s where all Marris wheels stop dead,” I explained lamely, “and not much else. It’s a stupendously boring apocalypse.” Hindsight kicked in and I wanted to slap myself. By Celestia and Luna and Cadance and Twilight and every single other Princess there ever has been and ever will be, that was stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Probably one of the stupidest things I’d ever said, and if you know me, you know that’s saying a looooooot.

He paused, then shrugged. “Eh. I’ve hear-”

The wheel lurched and started spinning again. He fell completely back into his car, while I just jumped a little. “Hey!” he called down to me over the grinding machinery. “Wanna meet at the bottom?”

“Alright! First one there waits!”

We both got off in about a minute, him before me. Once the ride operators had finished prolifically apologizing to the ponies who’d gotten stuck, we started heading… off, I guess. Not anywhere in particular. Just away.

Anyway. The stallion. He looked alright. Bigger than me, but most ponies are. Kinda-but-not-really brawny, like he’d once been a bit more muscular but had stopped trying to keep it up a month or so ago. Ten bits said he used to be royal guard. Especially since his mane was growing a little in that way that means it used to be a lot shorter but isn’t anymore.

He groaned and stretched his legs out as we walked through the carnival. “So glad that’s done,” he muttered. “Those carts are just so small. Barely any room to walk.”

“You’re not supposed to be able to walk in them,” I said. “Besides, I feel fine. Wuss.” I mentally punched myself once I’d finished talking. I’d meant that last word to be a joke, but the way it came out, he probably wouldn’t see it that way.

I got lucky, and either he saw it for what it was, he let it slide, or he just didn’t notice. “Yeah,” he muttered, “but…” He coughed. “Anyway. Names. Welded Aegis.” He bowed a little. Name like that? Yeah, almost definitely a (possibly former) royal guard.

“I’m Bluebell,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Same here. So, uh, if you don’t mind me asking, what were you doing up there alone?” He gestured back towards the Marris wheel.

My first thought: kind of a personal question, don’t you think? Second thought: he did say “if you don’t mind me asking”. Third thought: it’s actually not that personal, and the answer’s pretty harmless. Still… “I’ll tell you what I was doing up there if you tell me what you were doing up there.”

He nodded. “Fair enough.”

“I came here alone and wanted to ride the Marris wheel.”

Aegis waited for me to continue. “Aaaaand…” he prompted.

“And that’s it,” I said with a shrug. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Oh, come on, that’s my reason!” he said, faux-scandalized. “You can’t steal my reason!”

“Tough. You told me to go first, so I got to use the reason first. Nyeh-nyeh.”

“Heh. Well, I guess I can tell you why I’m alone. Passing through on the train, saw the carnival, decided to take a break and take another train out when I’m done.” Aegis shrugged. “That’s it.”

“Hmm.”

I wasn’t sure why I was still talking to him. He wasn’t a creep or anything — at least, not as far as I could tell — but, well, he was still a random stranger that I happened to meet on a Marris wheel. At the same time, though, he seemed nice enough, and besides, it was still somepony to talk to. I’d come here alone, and being alone with your thoughts is fine, but there are times when I just want to talk with somebody else. Aegis seemed to be scratching that itch.

His voice jarred me from my thoughts. “Um, h-hey, I, I was wondering,” he said. He pawed slightly at the ground. “Are you, um, with anyone here?”

I was pretty sure I knew where this was going, but I asked him anyway. “No. Why?”

“Well, it’s just, I was thinking…” He coughed. “You’re alone. I’m alone. So what if we just, you know, spent the rest of the day together here?” He looked away, rubbing his neck. “I mean, I mean, if, if you don’t want to, that’s, that’s fine, but I was, just, you know, thinking that maybe we could, you know, yeah.” He swallowed, turned back to me, and grinned awkwardly. “Just for today.”

Maybe I’m crazy, but creeps don’t stammer like that. They’d try to be a lot smoother. Still, I figured I’d try one last thing. Just in case. “Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t feel comfortable talking with a stranger like this.”

“Oh.” He looked slightly crestfallen. But only slightly. He was probably figuring this would happen. “Well, then, um, sorry.” His voice still sounded strong.

“Don’t apologize, you couldn’t know,” I said, trying not to sound condescending. “It’s just, you understand, right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Aegis said with a nod. “Totally.” He sounded pretty honest, but I’m not sure I trust myself with that sort of thing. “Anyway, nice to meet you, Bluebell.”

“You too, Aegis.”

“See you.” He bowed a little and turned away into the crowd.

I watched him as he walked away. It didn’t look like he was looking back. Which meant he wasn’t one of those entitled or pushy types that never stopped going, Come on, it’ll be fun! and just wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. He was just testing the waters and found them not to his liking. Or, to be more precise, found that they didn’t like him. And he accepted that.

That clinched it. “Hey!” I yelled. I ducked around a family passing between us and started trotting towards him. “Aegis!”

He stopped walking and looked over his shoulder with a hopeful look on his face. His ears were very perky.

“Actually,” I said as I came up next to him, “I wouldn’t mind.”

“Okay. Okay, cool. What made you change your mind?”

That was a bit of a toss-up. Lie, say “second thoughts”, and keep a good rapport between us? Or tell the truth, say “I was testing you”, and risk bad blood with the implication that I didn’t trust him? I went with the best policy. It’d keep it from getting brought up somewhere down the line. “I just wanted to see how you’d react,” I said. “You know, some guys, they think because they’re nice, so they deserve you, and they just keep pushing.” Please don’t take this the wrong way.

“I get that, yeah.” Aegis looked up at the sky and hmmed. “So… I let you have your space when you said you wanted to have your space, so you’re letting me share your space, but if I wanted to share your space when you said you wanted your space, you wouldn’t want to share your space?”

“More or less, yeah. It’s kinda screwed up, but-”

“No, it’s, I think it makes perfect sense. It’s psychology. You’re assessing my mental state by seeing how I react.”

“Aren’t you the smart one. First math, now psychology?”

Aegis shrugged. “I read a lot in school.”

Fair enough. Besides, I knew what he was getting at. I just wouldn’t’ve used the word “psychology” to explain it. “So what were you thinking of doing together?”

“I don’t know,” said Aegis, waving a hoof vaguely. “Make trails, make hoofprints, make memories, make connections… maybe even make a little love.”

I raised an eyebrow at that.

I saw the exact moment he realized what he’d said: his ears and tail twitched and his eyes widened by several inches. His next words came out very fast. “By which I totally mean maybe just some light romance and most definitely not anything to do with the horizontal tango, nope.”

“Stop trying to sound poetic,” I chuckled. “You’ll just screw it up.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, “I guess I just don’t… Wait, did you do that on purpose?”

“Do what?” I asked. You’ll just- I slapped a hoof to my face in realization. “No. I didn’t. And I don’t even have an excuse.”

“Heh. Nope.” Aegis paused. “You, um, still okay with this?”

“Hey, if movie couples can have true love at first sight, I’m fine with a little light romance over a few hours.” And I was. I doubted it’d come to romance, but I wouldn’t be opposed to it. Guys who talked like that wouldn’t take advantage of you. “Speaking of which, do you need to leave for the train at some time?”

“Yeah, the last train out’s departing at, um…” He frowned and scratched his head. “…10:07.”

“Wow. Late.”

“I knew that when I got off here. You win some, you lose some.” He wiggled his hoof. “So we got until then.”

“Alright. So, here, I’m game for almost anything. What do you want to do?”

“I dunno, what do you want to do?”

“I dunno.”

Sometimes, the hardest part of a day off is just finding what to do on your day off.