As stated, this story will be making the transition to M + sex. With a little re-imagining of the plot, the story's planned development of Dustin is going to require bedroom scenes that can no longer be hand-waved. Given that McCaffrey herself wrote bawdy fiction, I feel a lot less qualms than what I would otherwise.

If this is a problem for you, I am sorry to have ruined the story. Now, without further ado, we return to the regularly scheduled confused mare.

Dust's exodus was curtailed in the living room. It wasn't a set of cunning traps, but the knowledge that she had reached an almost trope-like level of predictability. "This is stupid. He didn't come in blasting, and I don't think anypony here lies about anything." Her memory returned to the time she had spent with Twilight, and she couldn't keep a smile off her lips.

Turning, Dust walked into the kitchen and started making a cup of tea. The water was soon boiling, and so she carefully, using all the tricks she had learned in the last few days, brewed up a pot of the delightful stuff.

"Didn't get far this time." Twilight Velvet walked into the kitchen, and tilted her nose up slightly at the smell. "Ohhh, and you have excellent taste." She paused as Night Light walked up beside her, and she offered her husband a cheek.

Disheveled from a short "welcome home" with his wife, Night Light nuzzled Twilight Velvet's cheek, and finished it with a kiss. "That was terrible of me. I am sorry, Dustin." Walking further into the kitchen, Night took a seat and held out another for Twilight.

"I thought you would be mad. When I have been… uh… caught in the act—before—the catcher didn't invite me to stay for seconds." Dust added milk to the tray, and placed the sugar bowl on as well. "To be perfectly honest, I usually had to run all the way to a ship."

"That would usually be me, and at least here you aren't expected to wear pants when boarding." Kiera's dry humor lasted barely a moment before she slipped her focus elsewhere. The translation system, of course, didn't need her constantly working on it.

"See? That twitch is how you can tell she just got a message from her friends. I don't know how it is all happening, but it certainly is clever. And now it looks like she is annoyed at either her friend, or us." Twilight smiled more and more as she explained Dustin's foibles to Night Light.

"Just Kiera making a joke. She rescued me on several such escapes." Dust carefully moved the tea set from the bench to the table, using her mouth rather than her hooves. Taking her spot, she was glad to see the glow of Twilight's magic start pouring the tea. "Thanks."

"We have a lot to talk about." Night Light decided to jump in before his wife, partly to give her time to serve tea, and partly because he wanted to show how much Dustin's feelings meant to him, too. "First…" He held out a hoof across the table, aimed directly at Dust. "My name is Night Light. I am pleased to meet you."

Dust reached out her own leg and gently bumped her hoof against Night's. "I'm Dustin y Neil. You can call me Dust, if you want." Dustin was a mile deep in customs that she hadn't understood when she was human, and it had her completely off balance mentally.

"You have questions, dear." Twilight Velvet passed Dust a cup of tea. "Please ask them, and we will answer." She repeated the serving for Night, and then claimed her own cup; all while Dust was thinking of what to ask.

Puffing out her chest, Dust carefully lifted one cup and brought it to her lips. Delicious, hot, and soothing tea wet and loosened her tongue. "Did Twilight tell you about me? About where I am from?"

"She did not." Night looked at his wife, then back to Dust. "But if I had to guess I would say Trottingham? Your accent isn't perfect for there, but it is closer than any other I have heard in Equestria." Lifting his own cup in his pale blue magic and took a sip. "Wonderful tea, by the way."

"I am from another planet. This one, Equus, is one of thousands I have surveyed." Dust's answer to Night raised Night Light's eyebrows, and before Dust knew it the stallion was leaning across the table, excitement painted in a broad stroke across his face. "W-W-What?"

Twilight Velvet giggled. "What do you think drew me to you?" Carefully standing up, Twilight turned to show her cutie mark. "And how do you think we found each other?"

Dust looked at the three stars on Twilight's flank, and then her eyes switched to Night Light's; he had a pair of moons. "Okay…" Dust's eyes drifted back to Twilight's rear, and she couldn't help but admire it for what it was.

"We are both astronomers." Night Light was almost bouncing in his seat. "Are you really from outer space? What is it like? Can you see what the moon and the sun are made of? How do you breathe up there?"

The questions, so enthusiastic and honest, tickled Dust's nerdy side. Just as he was about to reply, Twilight cut in.

"Dear, this is meant to be where Dustin asks questions of us." A thin veneer of calmness covered the excited filly that lived inside Twilight Velvet. She sipped tea, and her magic quivered in its grip on the cup. "But—at a later time—if Dust wanted to explain some things…?"

"Of course!" Night Light struggled to get calmed down, although the tea helped. "Sorry Dustin, but it really would mean a lot to me."

"Sure. Well, I guess this answers my first question. The next one is to each of you: what happens now?" Looking between the two excited ponies, Dustin caught them glance to each other.

"That depends more on you, dear." Twilight was stacking up questions, all of them about space, while she thought on Dustin's own question. She gestured to Night. "We are more than happy to continue things, if you wish to?"

"I had a lot of fun. It is really different." It wasn't like she had anything else to do, after all, or so Dustin reasoned. She focused her attention on Twilight, first. "I think I would like to keep having fun, but I am not going to be so much of a pushover. We rushed to this, maybe a little fast, but we are adults. Let's do the right thing and go on more dates. Really get to know each other."

"And me?" Night Light raised an eyebrow.

"I have been with guys before… stallions… but that was with me as a guy… stallion." Dustin waved a hoof and rolled her eyes when she got to the second language conflagration. It made her pause for a moment when she realized she had used the Equish word for stallion.

Night Light looked towards Twilight Velvet. "There was something, I think, that was more important among the things you left out." He turned his full attention back to Dustin. "You were a stallion?"

"Yes." Dustin sighed. "It is a little complicated, but something about Equus—and magic—changed Belay and myself. Belay is my crewmate." She was quick to clarify her relationship with Belay. "Your daughter is working on restoring us."

Night Light smiled as softly as he could. "A lot more has become clear. Thank you for the illumination, Dust. Is it a confidence thing?"

"Partly, but it might be irrational. I just… I am scared of some things, is all." It took a lot of Dustin's borrowed confidence to get the words out and admit to her fear. She dipped her head a little and looked down at the floor, And almost missed Night Light getting up and circling the table towards her. "What—?"

A warm hug wrapped around Dustin. She wanted to pull away at first, but Night Light's gentle but firm grip held none of the fire that had scared her in the bedroom earlier. She leaned into him and closed her eyes.

"We go at your pace. I won't make any move on you without your okay." Losing the fun he thought he had gained upon first finding Twilight in bed with another mare didn't sting Night Light at all. "And if you ever need a hug, and need to be told you are a wonderful pony, you don't even need to ask."

With no hint of sex attached, being with another male didn't trigger Dustin's fear. She could relax in his arms and, she dared, trust him. "Mmm, okay. Slow, and this means more dates."

"She loved Vinyl's music. I think we could go there later, if you were both up for a long night?" Smiling wide, Twilight Velvet got a warm tingle up her spine at seeing Night snuggling with Dustin.

Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, had been neglecting the immediate urging of her domain in favor of a much grander, and more important one. Lifting her snout back from the ancient book—that had been written by Star Swirl the Bearded himself—she tried to fasten the two parts of a spell she had found.

Causing her horn to glow a brilliant shade of raspberry, Twilight pushed magic through both shapes as carefully as she could. The first was a containment: meant to keep things sealed within, safe—she had disassembled a shield spell to make it. The second was like a vacuum pump, but for magic. Aiming at her measuring devices' probes, Twilight formed the two spell components together.

A rush of air, a loud WHUMP, and Twilight was shoved back across the room. She stared at where her spell-in-progress had been, and saw her probes were on fire… again.

It had taken Belay a week to build the probe—suitable to test the surfaces of the "moon" and "sun"—according to Dustin's specifications. He had started off using Kiera's fabricators, but there was still the matter of the power source for the tiny robot. But that had been what triggered his current project.

On the workbench before him, in a disused wing of the castle, was a very strange mix of metal and crystals. The odd sandwich of material he had made conducted magic in an exciting way; when the double-sided material was exposed to a magical field, it split that field into two flows of power moving in opposite directions.

The latest sample he was working on was just two centimeters long, and one wide, but he felt it was time to test it for its next property. Securing the sample using his hooves—to avoid exposing it to his own magic aura—Belay reached his magic out to grasp a stylus and tablet from Kiera. "Okay. Experiment number thirty-five. Testing compound L for charge when magic is exposed."

The basic potentiometer on the bench read zero, of course, without any connections. With careful movements, he attached the probes of the simple electronic device to each end of the sample material. "Exposing sample to strong magic field in three, two, one…" Using his horn, Belay pushed energy into a ball of potential around the metal. A fizzle, and a pop, and Belay watched the polarized magic run down the leads of the wires and straight into the meter.

A flash of white light later, and Belay blinked away the sparkles from his overexposed eyes. "That wasn't meant to happen." The wires were still glowing a little, ambient magic now saturating the sample and causing it to glow softly all on its own. "Test number thirty-five failed to yield a potential difference, but did turn test equipment into a banana."

Looking at the fruit, Belay reached his hoof out to a spatula, and carefully pulled the test wires from the banana. Making sure to note everything about the piece of fruit, Belay gave a sigh and climbed off the chair, and headed back towards the little forge he had built. "Time to make a sample for test thirty-six… Actually, I might take a break."

Turning off the gas on his forge, Belay left the study for the main room of the suite. Picking up a book with his magic, Belay pulled it over to the couch he had drafted to be his "reading couch" and curled up with the intermediate magic guide.

Dustin felt her mind relax back from the period of hyper concentration. The language primer Kiera's translator software had created made her ears twitch and neck tingle while it used basic hypnosis methods to train her in Equish, but she was perfectly happy to deal with that so she could have a little more privacy.

Yawning, Dust turned over in bed, and nuzzled against Twilight's side. Her sleeping habits had been a little awkward at first, but there was harmony in the bedroom so long as Twilight Velvet was between her and Night Light.

When Twilight's snout leaned over and pressed her nose to Dustin's, each of them smiled against the other's lips as a kiss took their focus. Dustin closed her eyes, and focused on the feel of Twilight.

A rocking motion in the bed was Dustin's first hint of what was happening, and she turned her head just enough to see Night Light making love to his wife. The look in Night's eyes, the raw energy he seemed to radiate, tickled intimidatingly at Dustin's mind. But the act exposed her worry too. Of course Night Light and Twilight Velvet didn't use any protection, they were happily married, and quite ready for more foals. Dustin felt a slight pang of panic at the thought, but it wasn't her he was atop, and he had never broken his word to her.

Boldness and a desire to reward Night Light filled Dustin, and she broke the kiss with Twilight and leaned up. Night's lips were not as soft as Twilight's, but he was insistent. Hunger was evident in his every action, and despite herself, Dustin was turned on by it.

Night Light tried as best he could to keep the kiss neutral, but he was in bed with Twilight, and was copulating with his darling at the time. Every drop of passion Night Light had washed into the kiss, and he was happily surprised by Dustin's acceptance of it. The oral embrace proved to last longer than he could, and as Night felt his body tense and start exploding, he could feel Dustin's lips against his.

Moaning loudly when Night's climax pushed her over the edge, Twilight Velvet stared up at Night and Dustin kissing. She watched as Dustin seemed more open to Night than ever before. Even with pleasure blasting through her body repeatedly, Twilight found herself smiling at the impromptu make-out session above her.

Author's Note

Dustin: would you stay a mare just to be with Twilight Velvet?

"N-N-Not really. It is fun to pretend to be a mare, to be in her embrace and forget the weight of the world, but it's not really who I am." Dustin blushed nearly the entire time she spoke. "Besides, Princess Twilight Sparkle is on the case, and from what I have heard she leaves no problem unsolved." It was unclear if Dust was trying to persuade herself more, or everyone else.

So I do this "Ask x" thing, x can be any pony within the story. You can ask them anything and ~~I~~ they will definitely hopefully reply. Keep the questions appropriate to the age-rating of the stories and of course, ~~I~~ they will answer the best question(s) in the author notes of the next chapter. The more votes a comment has the more likely I will get it to the right pony to answer, try and keep it to one answer per post! ~~I~~ They will pick one question per chapter.

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