Now, when you spend as much time as a pony as I have, you become used to certain details about yourself. For a pegasus pony such as myself, to lose your wings is the human equivalent of losing one’s arms. Losing your tail is like losing both a part of your modesty, and your sense of balance. Then of course there’s your tits. As a pony, you don’t usually have to worry about your breasts being on display unless you’re on your back or you suffer from any number of conditions that would cause them to engorge to proportions impossible to hide. Even then, it’s a very unique fetish among ponies; most don’t even care.

Walking through Twilight’s mirror takes all of that and changes it without changing my overall brain function or structure. Maybe it’s because I’m used to transformation potions, being able to feel every bit of the process, and blocking out the often uncomfortable sensations of my body changing shape, or maybe the portal is just that much more effective, but I don’t feel one iota of change as I pass down the trippy rainbow seizure tube between worlds. As a former writer, I could call it a convenient means to avoid describing a transformation sequence, but to be honest, I’m more concerned by the fact that my muzzle is no longer in my field of view.

Like I said, you get used to certain things, and it is particularly alarming when you’re used to see a large part of your face occupying the bottom of your field of vision and instead you just have this little nub of a nose occupying the space between your eyes and mouth. Makes it pretty easy to ignore your surroundings, too.

“Whoa, did you just come out of the statue mirror?” a passing young man asks as he slows from his jog to regard me. He’s easily a head taller than me, and oddly he looks like he has relatively normal colored skin.

Dreadlocks and a beanie? Hippie? Pothead? I shake my head slowly, clearing the thoughts from my mind. Oh man, I am not used to my ears being on the side of my head anymore, I note as my hair brushes my ears. “Who, me?” I reflexively gesture at myself with my thumb. “Nah, that’d be weird. I was just on the other side of it.”

“Oh,” he says. Wiping a bead of sweat from his brow with a towel draped over his shoulders, he takes a sip from the water bottle clutched in his other hand. “Too bad. It’d be nice to have another pony girl come through the mirror. Things are far more lively when that happens.”

My eyebrow rises slightly at that. The guy obviously has met Twilight, or seen her around, during her adventures here. He’d probably know Sunset Shimmer, too, and might even know how to get into contact with her better than ‘Hope she’s at Pinkie’s,’ or ‘Hope she’s at school.’ “Alright, I lied,” I admit, casting a glance back at the mirror. “I’m a colleague of the Twilight Sparkle from my side of the mirror, and I need to find Sunset Shimmer. Know how I could get into contact with her?”

The guy flinches at the mention of her name, as if physically slapped. Oh yeah, she did cause some trouble here didn’t she? Even after the ten months Twilight suspects has passed on this side since she met her doppelganger, some people might still be sore about being a she demon to everybody. The guy lets out a sigh and then frowns, glancing at the main entrance of the school building directly across from us.

“No, sorry,” he says without any hint that he’s put off by my question. “She goes to this school, and it will be open in a few hours, though, so you could always wait around. Everyone passes the statue on their way in, so you’re bound to catch her.”

I bite the inside of my cheek and look up at the sky. Lo and behold, it’s roughly dawn. Well, I suppose I could wait around a bit. It would give me a good opportunity to acclimate to my altered body, maybe do a bit of information gathering while I’m at it. “Alright, thanks for the help,” I tell him, turning my head back down to meet his gaze. “Have a good run.”

He nods and begins to jog away. “Hope you find her, dudette!” he calls back as he turns at the next intersection. “Or that she finds you!”

Once the possible stoner is well out of eyesight, I turn to the mirror to examine myself. Starting at the very top, I see my hair is largely unchanged from my mane, though maybe a bit shorter in back to account for the fact that it doesn’t continue down my neck. My face is surprisingly cute, gray skinned with a little button nose and expressive silver eyebrows. My left eye is largely unchanged, a sapphire blue meeting my gaze. The other is obscured behind a pale leather eye patch.

Did the mirror suppress the cockatrice magic in my right eye? I can’t help but wonder as my hand drifts up to touch the eye patch. Dainty little fingers, free from blemish or chemical burn scars, trace the very bottom of the protective covering. The short nail of my thumb slips beneath the bottom of the patch, and I begin to press up. As the covering lifts, I’m particularly self-conscious of whether anybody is around to risk petrifying.

My concerns are quickly unfounded as I’m not treated to red-tinged binocular vision I’d experience any other time. Instead, my right eye looks completely normal, if you can ignore the glaring disparity in color between it and the left. Much as it has been since my eye wound up permanently housing the petrifying gaze of a cockatrice, it is a brilliant red that glistens like a blood ruby in the morning sun.

Moving down from my face, I take in my body. Not exactly fat, but not totally lithe, either. If I had to guess, I never shed any of the baby fat from when my girls were born. Still, the figure is feminine enough. My boobs are pretty pronounced in my reflection, emphasized by the charcoal gray form-fitting jacket. Been a pony too long to remember all the human cup sizes and whatnot, or if they even apply here, but I could easily liken them somewhere between a large grapefruit and a small melon: big, but not back-achingly huge.

Had this been me anywhere from twenty to thirty years ago, I would have been hard pressed not to reach up and give them both a squeeze. Thankfully, the fact that I have plenty of boob experience from being a mom, and my awareness that I am in a public place, gives me the willpower to ignore that compulsion. Instead, I simply cross my arms beneath my chest to feel their weight on my arms.

Hmm, wearing a bra, too; where do these clothes even come from? I’m left to wonder as I continue looking down my body. At the point at which my waist narrows sits a heavy brown leather belt. It’s not looped through belt loops on the green plaid skirt beneath or nothing; I think it’s just there to hold the light-pink medkit on my right hip that I suspect is what became of my saddlebag of holding. Focus on that later.

The skirt itself is actually pretty short, strangely enough. At most, it’s like halfway down my thigh. High enough to show a lot of leg, but not so high as to be like, “Hey, look at my panties!” That’s a miniskirt, right? Speaking of panties... like the bra, I should probably leave checking that out for a bathroom visit.

When I was a guy, I wasn’t much of a leg or foot person, so I practically gloss over my assessment of my legs. I have two of them, and they both end in feet. From what I can see, both legs are encased in dark, high denier pantyhose or tights. The are protected by some, in my opinion, stylish black flat soled shoes that look like they slip on and off easily.

My professional opinion? Hot damn, I’m a MILF, I think to myself with a smile, slowly shifting about on the spot.

Despite the recognizable colorings, it’s still strange seeing myself with human proportions after all these years, and it’s kind of entrancing to see the way I move as I rediscover the way a human’s muscles function. Conscious movement of my arms is a queer combination of my forelegs and wings, the manipulation of my fingers stemming from the adjustments I’d make to my primaries mid flight. Toes, on the other hand, are a big case of the old being new again.

It’s not what I’m used to, I decide, turning to face the school building, but for the time being, I suppose it’s a start.

~ 02 ~

It was times like these that she sincerely wished that she’d found a place to live closer to the school and portal. Her concerns about Princess Celestia coming to find her when she first came to this world had lead her to seek shelter a fair distance away. Though she was thankful enough to find a man unscrupulous enough to rent to a girl that this world considered underage, but not so much as to try to take advantage of her, she found that as her social life improved, it was starting to be more of a curse than a blessing.

Wind tore at the collar of her riding jacket as she sped off down the highway. Normally, she wouldn’t drive her motorcycle nearly this fast—she was not insured, nor was she even supposed to be in this world—but this was far from a normal circumstance, even by her standards. After all, there was a pony at or near the school grounds right at this very moment, and she knew next to nothing about them. Were they male or female? What did they even look like!?

As loathe as she was to admit it, she only really realized who Twilight Sparkle was when the mare had come to the defense of Fluttershy on the day that now felt decades away. Up until that moment, she’d mentally dismissed her as a background human she’d seen about Canterlot—the same background human who’d become her friend after the insanity of the Friendship Games. Fact of the matter was that even if this Silver Script stayed put, Sunset wasn’t sure she’d be able to find them.

There was also the matter of how this person tied into that other message in her book. Both messages mentioned an otherworldly threat not only to this world, but possibly entire universes. She supposed the pony could be some sort of expert on monsters or temporal physics, though the latter admittedly seemed farfetched. Only Starswirl the Bearded had made any headway into temporal magic, and even then, his spell only ever managed to cause what human interpretation of temporal mechanics referred to as a Causal loop. The research had been abandoned and locked up for centuries; surely nobody could have achieved that sort of expanded knowledge that quickly after she’d left.

As she slowed down for an off ramp, she had to remind herself that time did not seem to flow at equal rates between the two worlds when the portal wasn’t open. After all, Princess Celestia wouldn’t have been able to have two proteges at the same time without either knowing, never mind groom that other to become a princess. Just how many years went by in Equestria for every month she spent here? Just how bad had it gotten if she was indeed trapped in a time loop? Did the noble House of Shimmer still hold a position of power in Canterlot politics? Were her parents even still... ?

Pushing the thought away, Sunset pulled her motorcycle into the student parking lot. She needed to keep her head clear, at least for the time being. After she found this pony and was certain he or she wasn’t about to meet an unfortunate end in traffic, she could stop to worry about all that. Until then it would only serve as a distraction from the issue at hand.

After parking and dismounting her bike, she ran as fast as she could around the front of the building. Barely even a second was put aside to remove her helmet, for every second wasted was one better spent finding that pony. When she cut through the sports field and hopped the fence into the front of the school, however, she was treated to the sight of an empty schoolground. Nobody—human, pony, or otherwise—was present; it was just completely empty.

“Come, child. Have a seat,” came a woman’s voice to her immediate right, behind some of the decorative shrubbery. Following the voice, Sunset found an eyepatch bearing woman who looked to be in her early thirties in the corner between two shrubs, her legs comfortably folded beneath her. Before her was a jade teapot sitting atop an impossible jar of fire. “You look like you could use a calming cup of jasmine tea.”

The woman offered a jade teacup full of a steaming liquid that could only be tea. Taken aback, Sunset accepted the offered tea and crouched before the woman on the ground, her helmet quickly forgotten at her side. Though she knew she had more important things to do than have tea with strange women in the bushes in front of her school, something—some sort of intuition or half-forgotten memory?—told it would be best to accept.

“What brings a young woman riding on her shiny metal horse so early in the morning?” the woman asked in a playful tone, smiling in such a way as to accentuate the laugh lines on her face. Taking a sip from her own teacup, she looked up at the brightening sky with one blue eye. “This is the time to be fighting a losing battle with a snooze alarm, not rushing about, ignoring the things set out before her. Unless...”

Sunset blinked in confusion. Why was she wasting her time here? “I’m looking for someone,” she offered warily, sipping her cup of tea. Coffee was Sunset’s preferred beverage, but the tea was of high quality, and it reminded her of her old mentor. “They were in this area not too long ago, and I should really be looking for them right now.”

Nodding, the woman retrieved a napkin from a light pink cloth medical kit at her hip. “It must be pretty important,” the gray lady agreed, wiping her teacup and stashing it in the medkit of all places. “What are you expecting to find in this person: friend, lover, ally? They might still be about, if only you’d look.”

At the mention of an ally, Sunset narrowed her eyes. “You aren’t anything like what I expected, Silver Script,” she said with a smile, finishing her tea. “From your letter in my book, I was expecting—”

“A punk? A brute? A guy, perhaps?” Silver Script asked, arching her eyebrow. “Yeah, perceptions are easy to skew and misread, and you never know who’s putting you on, who’s fuckin’ with you, y’know?” She accepted Sunset’s cup and putting it away much like the first. Pouring out the remains in the pot, Silver did something very peculiar; she put the pot and the jar of fire into her medkit without creating any sort of distortion in the cloth. “You usually don’t know who’s dangerous or crazy as shit until it’s too late. Even if they give you bad vibes, it’s easy to mistake someone for criminally stupid, rather than a threat.”

Sunset rose to her feet and brushed off her jeans, before offering a hand to help Silver up. To her surprise, the pony-turned-human’s grip was far more firm than she would have expected. Even Twilight’s grip hadn’t been that firm her second time around. “Sounds like you’ve got some stories to tell,” she commented, leaning down to grab her helmet. “Just how much can you fit in that, anyway?”

“Practically or theoretically?” Silver asked with a toothy grin. “Let’s see... I have an entire lab worth of alchemy equipment and supplies, enough tea to survive ten weeks plus my favorite jade tea set, dozens upon dozens of potions, a few magical artifacts, and some personal belongings with me right now, and that’s just in practice. In theory, I could probably haul a couple of manticores, but never been arsed to test that. Why?”

Looking down at the helmet in her hands, Sunset bit her lip. “In my hurry to get here to find you, I kinda forgot to bring a spare helmet,” she said. “I can’t risk a ticket without raising a lot of questions I can’t answer without being committed.”

A shiver wormed its way down Sunset’s back as the woman’s grin widened. “Oooh, a challenge,” Silver said, rubbing her palms together. “Ever imagined you’d have a pocket rocket?”

~ 02 ~

“You know, when I asked how much your bag could hold, I wasn’t expecting you to fit my entire motorcycle in there,” Sunset says from the seat beside me. “I just wanted you to hold onto my helmet until I could go back to get the bike later. Helmets are expensive!”

I roll my eyes and glance toward the front of the bus, where the old man driving the bus is definitely trying to keep his eyes on the road and not risking a peek up my skirt. “C’mon, you know that stoner from the parking lot is going to spend a lot of sleepless nights wondering how we pulled that ‘vanishing act’ off,” I reply, making good use of air quotes for emphasis. No, seriously, do you have any idea how awkward air quotes are when you have goddamn hooves? “Besides, you said that pawn shop is closer to your apartment than the school is, right? This way, I’m saving you gas and a trip.”

The younger woman crosses her arms and looks out the window. “What do you have that you can sell that won’t be potentially harmful to this world?” She throws a sidelong glance to the bag at my waist. “Even if that tea set is an antique, Flim and Flam won’t give you too good of a deal.”

With casual ease, I reach into my enchanted bag and begin feeling about the void for one of my bartering chips. I close my fingers around a coarse object and carefully pull it out, taking care not to draw attention to it, and slip it into Sunset’s hands. “Pretty sure when cut and polished, one of these would run around a million dollars,” I whisper, fighting off another shit-eating grin as I watch her eyes widen. “Even if they try to ‘rip me off’, I’ll still end up getting a good price in the end. I paid maybe forty bits for this.”

With an almost frantic urgency, she shoves the piece of ore into my hand and urges it back toward the bag. “You can’t just wave a pink diamond around like that,” she practically hisses, and I can see her fighting the urge to smack me in the back of the head. “Jeeze, it’s like you’re trying to draw attention to yourself.”

I put my hand on her shoulder and look her in the eye. “Sunset, I don’t know how long I’m even going to be here,” I say calmly. “I have no job and no documentation, so I can’t exactly open a bank account here. Can’t even get some false credentials until I have some money to buy them.”

For a long while, she doesn’t say anything; I just watch her as the scenery flashes by. After maybe ten minutes, she says, “Don’t try and milk Flim and Flam for too much, okay? I do odd jobs for them and manage their shop’s online storefront, and they help me out financially in return.” She gives me a pleading look. “They’re as crooked as they come, but when it comes down to it, they’re my friends. Try not to take advantage of them.”

“I’m not looking to fleece anybody, Sunset,” I say flatly. “They’ll get rich off what I have to offer, and all I’ll be asking in return is a few things from the shop and a paltry sum to live off while I’m here.” I reach into my bag and pull out some chicken jerky. I don’t even have to see the look of horror in her eye to know that offering her a piece is probably not the best idea. Doesn’t stop me from stuffing my own face. “Besides, unless I find a place right quick, I’ma be payin’ you rent and utilities.”

The question of ‘What is wrong with you?’ is evident on her face, but she refrains from saying anything on the matter. Instead, she looks once more out the window and says, “This is our stop.”

After departing the bus and bidding the driver a pleasant day—never hurts to be courteous, even if the driver was trying to be a perv—Sunset leads me down the block to a charming little storefront that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a pawn shop. You know how it goes; guitars, computers and furniture all occupy the space behind barred windows. Pretty sure I even see what looks to be a game console or two. Tempting...

She leads me unceremoniously through the door, and I’m nearly crushed by a wave of raw nostalgia. It’s been almost twenty years since I’ve seen a television, and now here I am in a pawn shop surrounded by beautiful, glorious, kill-your-mom cathode ray tube televisions of all shapes and sizes. DVD and VHS cassette players in stacks line one row of shelves, and directly opposite of them were mounds upon mounds of discs and cassettes. I didn’t even recognize any of the titles on the spines or covers—otherworld differences and all—but it’s like fucking Christmas seeing all of this consumable media ripe for the picking.

Is it bad that this is kinda turning me on?

We continue past that aisle to a corner of the store opposite the one that has a whole bunch of computers. Does she suspect, or... She leads me to a countertop beneath a sign stating ‘Trade & Sell’, where one of the Flim-Flam brothers is seated. The mustachioed man doesn’t notice us approach, focused intently on the mechanism of a pocket watch that bears an alarming resemblance to a cursed compass I once owned. No sign of the other brother, though. Come to think of it, is this place even open yet?

We stand patiently near the counter, allowing Flam ample time to complete his operation on the delicate clockwork device. Once he sets it aside, he looks up to Sunset with a curious smile. “Sunset, you know the arrangement,” he says with an air of amusement. “No work during school hours; the labor board doesn’t appreciate us working kids your age during the weekday. We wouldn’t want anyone thinking my brother and I were contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

Rather than remark or counterpoint in her defense, my bacon-haired companion tilts her head in my direction. When his eyes alight on me, I give a coy little wave. “My friend has something she thinks you might want to get your hands on,” she says coolly, as if she doesn’t particularly enjoy dealing with him. “Having seen it, I figured it might be better to do this before store hours. Not the sort of thing you want customers hearing about, lest they get ideas.”

His eyebrows rise as he looks at me with a greedy glimmer in his eyes. “You must have something worth a pretty penny, Miss,” he says, resting his elbows on the counter and steepling his hands before him. “May I see it?”

With a nod, I turn away, just enough that he can’t see the opening of the bag at my hip, and withdraw the unprocessed pink diamond. I hold it at arm’s length, but when he reaches out one hand to take the stone, I tighten my grip on it. “Tut-tut,” I say, clicking my tongue and waving a finger teasingly. “This is a raw pink diamond, mate. This stone is easily 5 grams. Even accounting for what’ll be lost during processing this’ll still be worth quite a bit.” I open my hand and allow him to take it. “I’m not looking for the whole value. Just enough to live comfortably for a couple of months.”

Flam pulls a magnifying eyepiece from his shirt pocket and begins examining the uncut gemstone. His jaw drops, and quite quickly it is followed by the eyepiece as he continues to gape at the stone. Without even looking, his free hand moves over to pick up a cordless handset. Pushing a single digit and then the call button, he puts the phone to his ear. “Flim, brother of mine,” he croaks in a shaky voice. “You gotta see this.”

~ 02 ~

The next half hour is spent making offers and parrying counter-offers. In the end, I get about $50,000, a high-end laptop with a bag and headset, a futon—just a mattress, not that bulky piece of furniture—a mini-fridge, a helmet should I ever need to ride bitch on Sunset’s snazzy not-Suzuki motorcycle, a backpack, and a safe. I still don’t know how I resisted getting a stack of DVDs that looked interesting. Hell, one of the brothers even offers to give us and ‘our’ swag a ride back to Sunset’s apartment.

Well, he gives me a ride to Sunset’s apartment. While Flim is loading the stuff out back—faux-chivalry in this world is the same as the one I was born in, it seems—I’m in the alley next to the shop carefully maneuvering Sunset’s bike out of my bag. Before the brother is even done loading the stuff, she’s off, presumably to her apartment to either tidy up or unlock the place, leaving me to ride with a strange man I barely know. Eh, if she trusts him enough to work for him...

God, it’s so weird getting into a truck is strange after all this time, I muse as I climb into the passenger seat. After being spoiled by the bus ride, I nearly have to be reminded by Flim to do up my seatbelt. Can you fuckin’ imagine? Show up in another world to lend a hand only to fuckin’ fly through a windshield?

“You’re not from around here. I can tell from your accent,” he says, idly tapping his fingers on the steering wheel while we wait at a traffic light. “What brings a pretty lady like you to Canterlot? For that matter, how do you know our Sunset.”

“Family friend sent me her way,” I reply in a flat voice. “Suggested she might need someone to keep an eye on her, and I needed to get away from it all for a while, y’know?”

“Can’t say I do.” He glances at me out of the corner of his eye as we continue on. “Ma’am, I’m going to be honest with you, which isn’t something my brother and I often do in our line of work. Sunset’s been a good employee to us, and if she didn’t trust you, we wouldn’t have done business with you. I can tell you’re holding something back, but you’re also being truthful enough.”

At the next traffic light, he turns to me and gives me a look. “That diamond you sold us: is any trouble going to come from it?”

I smile at him and lift my eyepatch to look him in both eyes. “I can one hundred percent guarantee that unless you go waving that thing around until you can hock it for more, nothing will come of it. It’s clean with no history.” Letting the eyepatch fall back into place, I lean back into the seat. “Can’t say the same about me, but none of that’s going to bring our fiery friend to harm.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Author's Note

Hey guys, sorry for the delay on this one. DarkxRedemption's work had them pretty busy and unable to assess the chapter until today. Next chapter'll be up in a few hours at most, so most joyous of occasions, right?

Now, in these last few chapters, you might have noticed a bit of a theme as far as word pairings/phrases showing up. They are in fact references toward one of my new favorite songs, 'Contact Redux (Feat. Meredith Hagan' by Trocadero. Can you spot them all?

Also, you expected Silver would make finding her hard for Sunset, didn't ya?