The Belonging Herd

by GaPJaxie

Rating: everyone
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Drama, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 4847

When a pony named Ruby Rails is replaced by a mysterious doppleganger, it's up to Twilight to uncover the truth!

When a pony named Ruby Rails is replaced by a mysterious doppleganger, it's up to Twilight to uncover the truth!

But the more she digs, the more she hopes it turns out to be a changeling plot.

Published 2017-03-26 01:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2017-03-26 01:10:01 UTC

Chapter 2

Twilight sat in the darkened observation room. The room had no lights, and a sign at the door had warned her not to illuminate her horn. She could barely make out the objects around her: a table, a few chairs, an ashtray, the picture, some police poster on the wall she couldn’t read. All were covered by deep shadows that left them little more than outlines.

The one-way mirror glowed in the darkness. The glass was transparent, but the difference in light between one room and the other was so stark that the discontinuity was obvious to the naked eye. It was like a portal to another world, so clear you could step through it, but strange at the fringes. And there in the middle was the otherworldly creature. Twilight could see her.

The blue mare sat on one side of a thin metal table, right in the middle of a sterile white room. The table and her chair were each made of sheet metal, and bolted to the floor. They were slightly too far apart to be comfortable, leaving an awkward gap between her and the table. She had a juice box sitting on the table edge near her. She would sip it, from time to time.

She said nothing, and Twilight watched her in silence. She watched the blue mare stiffly look at the one-way mirror, only to quickly pull her eyes away. She watched her practice taking deep breaths. She saw how stiffly the mare held her wings, and that she held the left wing tighter than the right.

The mare took the tiniest of sips from her juice box. From the compression of its cardboard sides, Twilight suspected the juice must have been nearly gone. The blue mare took great steps to conserve it.

Twilight looked down and away. In front of Twilight was a picture of Ruby Rails. The details of it were lost to the darkness, but Twilight could see her smile. She was a little red unicorn, with a short orange mane and a bottle-brush tail full of split hairs. The picture was her at university, grinning at the camera with her school friends.

When she held the photograph up to the light from the one way mirror, Twilight could barely make out Ruby’s cutie mark—a white spider web with a gemstone stuck in the middle.

Eventually, Twilight got up from where she sat, and signaled to the guards. She walked the long way around, and they opened the door to the interrogation room.

The blue mare’s head shot up as the door swung open. It took a half second for her eyes to focus on Twilight. “Oh. Wow. Uh… hello, your Highness.” She cleared her throat. “Er, Twilight. Sorry. I read somewhere once you preferred being called Twilight?”

“I do,” Twilight said. She calmly moved across the room, and took the seat opposite the blue mare. “Though you can call me whatever makes you most comfortable.”

“Uh… Twilight’s fine. I don’t mean to, you know, freak out over you or anything. I’m not, like, an old-school monarchist. You’re just kind of a big deal.” She rubbed her left hoof over her right leg, and let out a tepid, weak laugh. “Is it bad form to ask your interrogator for an autograph?”

“I’m not here to interrogate you. I think you’ve been interrogated enough already. Though I would like to have a conversation.” Twilight reached into her bag and pulled out another juice box, the photo of Ruby, a notebook, and a ballpoint pen. She offered the juicebox to the blue mare, and laid the photograph and notebook out on the table. “Do you mind if I take notes?”

“I… guess not. Heh.” The blue mare reached out and took the new juicebox. She hesitated a moment, then finished the old one before tearing at the wrapping of the new one with her teeth.

“A quick question first. How are you holding up?” Twilight watched the blue mare clumsily get the plastic wrapper off, struggling to use her teeth alone to get the straw into position. “Are you feeling alright? Are the guards taking care of you?”

She managed to get the straw in. She cleared her throat. “Well uh… I’m not super enthusiastic about being here. If that’s what you mean. But, yeah, I guess. Prison is way less bad than I thought it would be. In TV it’s always these dank, dark, unfinished concrete buildings. But I’ve got a pillow, and my cell has natural light, and they keep bringing a ton of books.”

“Modern media likes to portray prison as dark and scary because it makes for classic drama, but the last time Equestria still had dungeons, I was a unicorn.” Twilight gave a small smile, though her manner remained restrained. “These days we understand that cruel conditions only increase recidivism rates. The purpose of prison isn’t to punish, but to correct bad behavior. Giving prisoners the opportunity to study and think does a lot to put them on the right path.”

“Heh.” The blue mare fluffed her wings. A stiff smile appeared and vanished, and she looked around the interrogation room. Her long blue mane, shiny and straight, slipped until it hung over her face. It obscured one of her eyes, until she pushed it out of the way with a hoof. “So, uh… is my behavior going to be corrected?”

“You’re a somewhat unusual prisoner.” Twilight’s ballpoint pen scribbled for a moment. “I know you’ve been asked this before, but just to get the conversation started, could you tell me your name?”

“Ruby Rails.” She let out a breath. “Hasn’t changed since the last time you asked.”

“The same Ruby Rails that’s in this picture?” Twilight held up the glossy photo for her to examine.

She only had to glance at it before she nodded. “Yeah. That’s me. That picture is from my junior year of college. I’d just gotten my cutie mark.”

“What was your special talent?”

“Web design.” Her eyes went down to Twilight’s notebook, and she watched the pen scribble. After a moment, she added: “That’s not my special talent now, though.”

Twilight paused. Her eyes went to the blue mare’s flank. The blue mare obligingly turned to show off her cutie mark: a heart shaped gemstone and a set of railway ties.

“Sustainable charity,” the blue mare said, ruffling her wings to try and keep them steady as she twisted her flank around. “It’s a fair trade stone.”

Twilight paused a moment. Her pen made several sharp motions, quickly sketching the blue mare’s cutie mark. The blue mare noticed. She held her pose, flexing her wings as she tried to keep herself steady. Twilight finished a moment later.

“Would you like to explain that?” Twilight asked as the other mare straightened out in her seat. “Your new special talent, I mean.”

“Hundreds of millions of bits of rubies are extracted from Griffonstone’s mountains every year, mostly by peasant laborers.” She tapped the table gently with a hoof. “Everypony thinks that that means ‘slaves,’ but it generally doesn’t. Peasants dig up the stones and can sell them where they want, but all the roads and railways are under the control of petty warlords who take them for a fraction of what they’re worth. So a peasant digs up a ruby and sells it for five bits, and that same ruby sells in Vanhoover for five hundred.”

“I’m familiar with Griffonstone’s political situation, yes. What does that have to do with you?”

“Well, I thought, what if the peasants could sell their gemstones here in Equestria directly?” She made an open gesture across the table, encompassing Twilight and herself. “Cut out the middlegriffon. And we’ll use magic and drones to actually pick them up and deliver them. So I buy a stone for two-hundred bits instead of five-hundred, and the peasant gets to keep all two-hundred for himself. Win-win.”

The blue mare paused a moment before she went on. “And I kind of thought it was a dumb idea. Because ‘fair trade’ is something idiot yuppie ponies want to see on their coffee. Like, it has no place in an actual political crisis. So I worked on it in secret for a long time, and it didn’t work particularly well, but we got a few orders, and one afternoon I got a text from a griffon named Guidance.”

The blue mare cleared her throat, gesturing down at the table. There was nothing where she indicated, but it made a fine excuse to look at the table instead of Twilight. “She’d gotten her two-hundred bits, which was more money than she’d ever seen in her life. She said I was her very own Princess Celestia and talked about how she was going to use it to buy a solar panel, a battery, and a lamp so that her children could see in the dark and there could be time to teach them to read after work each day.”

She shrugged. “And after that… I don’t know. I realized this was what I wanted to do with my life. I couldn't go back to coding social networks for dogs or whatever the heck we’re working on this week.”

Twilight’s pen scribbled. “Was that the Thursday night the police are claiming you vanished?”

“That’s the night I changed.” The mare let out an angry snort. It was only after a moment’s thought that she added, “If that’s what you mean.”

“And you just… changed?” Twilight flicked a hoof through the air. “Like a changeling? Poof?”

“Kind of. I don’t know.” She rubbed at her jaw. “It was more complicated than that.”

Twilight watched and waited patiently, and after a little while, the blue mare went on. “I’d… I’ve been really unhappy at work lately. And just unhappy in general. And I was out late with friends. And yeah, friendship is magic, and they do make it better. But I was realizing that hanging out with friends had gone from something I do because I like it to something I do because I need that reinforcement just to get through the day. And…”

She laughed a little and shook her head. “And maybe I had a few hard ciders. And I got home and I spent a long time staring at myself in the mirror and thinking how did I end up here? Like… what’d I do for my life to end up this way? And I ended up going back and rereading that text from Guidance a few times.”

She trailed off, and looked away into the corner of the room. After a few long silences of silence, Twilight prompted. “And then?”

The blue mare let out a breath. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Her voice was stiff. “I always had this… this vision of what my life was going to be. Ever since I got my cutie mark. I was going to write cool code and digitally connect the world and make a ton of money and put the word ‘cyber’ in front of everything for no good reason.”

She tilted her head back and forth, and gestured vaguely with a hoof. “And for awhile it was like that. But web design hasn’t been that way for years now. And just realized, it’s never going to be again. That dream is dead. And the thing that’s making me unhappy is that I think that dream is me. I’m unhappy because I have to be this thing, but this thing doesn’t belong in the world anymore. And so I don’t belong. And I realized I just need to… let go.”

She swallowed. “So, I did. I just let go of it. And, poof.”

“Were you alarmed at all that you’d just shapeshifted in front of the mirror?”

“No. It felt right.” The blue mare’s voice tightened. “I felt kind of great, actually.”

A long quiet hung between them, broken only by Twilight’s scribbling pen. Eventually, the blue mare lifted her head. “Do you have other questions?”

“Actually, my next question was going to be if you have a muscle cramp in the base of your second and third primary feathers.” Twilight spread her own wings and gestured with a hoof. “Right there.”

“Uh…” the blue mare blinked. She looked down at her wings, and shuffled them, and when she looked back up at Twilight her eyes were narrowed. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“You’re holding them too tightly. I did the same thing, when I became an alicorn. Here. First, stretch like this.” Twilight demonstrated with one wing, and the blue mare followed suit with both of hers. “Then fold them back until the primaries almost, but not quite, completely overlap with the secondaries. The tips should not touch. Like this.”

She shifted in her seat, shifted her shoulders, and shifted her wings last of all. “It feels too loose. Like they’re hanging off my sides.”

“They are hanging off your side. That’s what feathers are like.” Twilight laughed, just a little. “Sorry. You get used to it after a few months.”

“Oh.” The blue mare looked at Twilight with a new expression. She sat up, and her expression became more alert, her body language less sedate. “Do you… actually believe me?”

“I’m not sure if I believe you’re Ruby Rails. There’s a lot more evidence I would need to see first. But, I do believe you.” Twilight leaned forward in her chair, and softened her tone. “You’re telling me the truth as you perceive it. And you mean well. Whatever happened, Ruby is what you want to be called. So I’ll call you Ruby. Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” the blue mare said. She even smiled a little, and it wasn’t as strained as it had been. “Yeah, that would be kind of nice. Thank you.”

“Sure thing, Ruby.” Twilight smiled back. “We’ve been talking for awhile. Would you like to take a break before we continue? Walk around outside or something?”

“No. I’m good. But… uh.” She put a hoof on the table and leaned forward. “Twilight. I’ve had this same discussion with like, ten cops and a magical investigator. Why can’t I be Ruby Rails? Ponies transform all the time. Like you when you got your wings!”

Twilight shook her head. “It is true that pony magic occasionally manifests as physical transformations, from common things like the hairs on your flank changing color when you get your cutie mark, to my alicorn ascension, to the occasional rare pony who had it as a talent. In the fifth century AE, Celestia met an earth pony named Moonlight who could turn into a variety of animals.”

“So maybe I’m special!” The blue mare gestured sharply at herself. “Why can’t it just be that?”

“Because those transformations are always skin-deep. Superficial.” Twilight fluffed out her wings, and gestured up with a hoof. “My wings didn’t make me a princess. They were an acknowledgement that I’d come to understand the magic of friendship. Just like your cutie mark doesn’t give you your special talent, it’s just a stamp acknowledging you discovered it. Magic doesn’t change who you fundamentally are.”

“No. I changed who I fundamentally am.” The blue mare sat up straight and squared her shoulders. She took in a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Princess.”

Twilight smiled and shook her head. “Ponies do reinvent themselves from time to time. But it doesn’t quite work that way.”

“Why not?” the blue mare asked. “I can get up one day. I can decide I…” She reached out and tapped the photo on the table. “I can decide I don’t like the color red. I can decide I’m tired of a pixie cut and I want to see how I look with my mane grown out. I can move to another city. I can take elocution lessons to change how I talk.” She reached up with a hoof and pushed it back behind her ears. “We all know that that’s okay. So why can’t I decide I want to change other things too?”

“Because those things: your appearance, your accent, where you live. Those are all just details. They’re not a fundamental part of who you are.”

“But my cutie mark. My race. That’s fundamental?”

Something about the blue mare’s look put on Twilight on edge. She sat back in her chair, and it was some time before she answered. “Among other things.”

“You know I didn’t get my cutie mark until I was twenty-one?”

“I’m aware that ponies getting their cutie marks late in life has become a bit more common-”

“No.” The blue mare’s tone stiffened to match her posture. “When you were young, getting your cutie mark when you were twelve was ‘getting it late in life.’ I was a full grown adult. That used to be considered a disorder. And for my group of friends, I was the early bloomer. Spark Song, my boyfriend in college? He didn’t get his until he was twenty-five. He was married and considering if he and his wife wanted to have a foal together before he knew what his destiny was. Turns out it’s electro-acoustic deep ocean surveying, and he and his wife had to decide if they were going to move to the coast because he’ll be at sea for six months at a time.”

“I’m aware.” Twilight let out a sharp breath, and straightened her posture in her chair. “And yes, it’s a problem. But it’s a practical problem. The first Equestrian survey recognized fifty-two types of professions. The one we’re holding this year recognizes forty-two thousand. The world is just more complicated than it used to be. It takes ponies more time to find themselves.”

The blue mare drew her mouth into a line. “I’m sorry, Princess. Uh… Twilight. I don’t want to lecture you, but as somepony who actually grew up in this era, and who did struggle to find her cutie mark? You’re wrong.”

She let out a breath. Twilight stared her. Then, Twilight nodded. “Okay. Why am I wrong?”

“Because I didn’t need a cutie mark to find myself.”

She delivered the line bluntly, and a long silence hung between her and Twilight in its wake. Finally, the mare spoke again. “When you’re eight, you can wait around for the world to tell you who you are. You can’t do that when you’re an adult. You have to make decisions about what kind of person you’re going to be. And if you don’t have enough information to make those decisions? Too bad. You still have to make them. I knew who I was and what I was before I got my cutie mark. And I was okay with it. The mark, my special talent. It just let me know where I fit in. Like you said, it wasn’t the thing itself, just a post-fact affirmation.”

Twilight didn’t answer right away. She fiddled with her pen. “That’s still… learning about yourself. It’s the same thing, you’re just phrasing it differently.”

“If it’s all the same, then why does my race matter?”

“It determines…” Twilight struggled for words. “It’s a part of who you are.”

“That’s circular logic. It’s a part of who I am because it’s a part of who I am? Why? What difference does it make? I never knew a single spell when I was a unicorn. I certainly never intend to be a weather worker. What does it matter if I type using magic or with my wingtips?”

“It influences what types of ponies you hang out with. If you can go to Cloudsdale or not.”

“So does where I live. If I grew up in Griffonstone, I certainly couldn’t visit Cloudsdale, and you bet it would change the types of ponies I hang out with, in that they’d mostly be griffons. Why is where I live a detail but my race matters?”

“Because you’re born with your race!” Twilight’s voice rose. “Just like you’re born with your special talent. It takes time to discover it, but it was always there.”

“Was it?” The blue mare’s voice rose as well. “Finding your special talent isn’t… isn’t a matter of just finding it. I wrote HTML code for years before I got my cutie mark, because the code isn’t what’s special. I can’t possibly know every single kind of web-code that will ever be used. I love some of them and I hate others. There’s no way for me to just look at the work and know if this is what I want to do.”

She gestured wildly, struggling for the words. “I mean, think about! Princess, more words have been written about the profession of web development than used to exist in the entire royal canterlot library. It’s an impossible amount of information. There’s just no way for a young pony to read that and make a meaningful decision about what they want to do. And that’s a super narrow sub-set of all professions. Imagine somepony trying to decide from a blank slate.”

Twilight paused. She lowered and softened her voice, and sat back in her chair. “I’m aware it must be frustrating. But what does this have to do with your situation?”

“You grew up knowing what made you you.” The blue mare pointed at Twilight’s flank. “You had enough information, early, to know who Twilight was and what she would always be. I don’t have enough information. I have too much. I’m drowning in it. I can’t possibly make the right decision. And that’s when a right decision even exists! The thing about web development that I thought was beautiful wasn’t invented when I was eight. What if the world changes again? I can’t say where I fit.”

The blue mare sat back in her chair, rubbing one hoof over the opposite leg. “No matter what decision I make, I know it will be wrong. So if I make a decision and stick with it, I’m doomed to be unhappy. I can see it everywhere. My friends, my coworkers. They’re all so stressed. So what if I didn’t have to stick with it? What if I didn’t choose?”

She smiled, just a little. “What if I decided just to be where I belong? To be what belongs. To be what fits the needs of the moment. And I just kind of…”

She lapsed into silence for a long time. “Was.”

Twilight set her teeth on edge. She sat back in her chair.

“Princess, if you believe I’m not an evil changeling or a doppleganger or anything, can I please go? I’d kind of like to be a free pony again.”

“You’re not a changeling. And you’re not a doppelganger.” Twilight’s tone was stiff. “But I’m not sure you’re a pony. Whatever you are, it’s not what a pony’s supposed to be. Ponies stand for things. The thing that matters most. We have a core to our being.”

“You did, once,” the blue mare spoke. Her voice was soft as a whisper, but Twilight heard every word so clearly. “But once, you were a humble librarian. And that pony is gone, isn’t she? Time washes away all things. You know that better than most.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

The blue mare watched Twilight. Her eyes flicked up and down. “You haven’t changed in the last eight hundred years?”

Twilight’s voice was stiff. “My friends would still recognize me.”

“But would they still know you? Yes, of course, friendship is magic. They would know you were still a good pony. But Celestia is a good pony too. If I put you and Celestia in a room, hidden behind a curtain, could your old friends tell which was which?”

“Eight hundred years of growth as a person is not the same as magically transforming over an evening.” Twilight snapped, her tone turning harsh.

“It uh…” She coughed. “I think it is. My way is just faster.” The blue mare smiled a weak smile, and her voice softened. “But, I wouldn’t worry too much. Left to decide who I am… I mean. I like to think I’ve decided to be a good person. And if I don’t stand for something fixed? I stand for what I believe in. And I’m happy with that. Conceptually, I guess, it’s not so different from having foals. They won’t stand for what you stood for, but you trust them to build something good.”

Twilight frowned, but the harshness in her expression faded. “And if I let you go, and this trend continues. Where does it end?”

The blue mare shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know there were more ponies like me until they told me a few days ago. So I can only speak for myself. But…”

She thought, licked her lips, and eventually found the words. “It’ll be strange. And scary. And I’m sure it won’t be perfect. But I trust ponies to make the right decisions, more or less. And when we do screw up, we’ll always have you, right?”

Twilight didn’t answer.

Chapter 1

Ruby Rails disappeared on Thursday evening, some time between 9:44 PM and 7:43 AM.

The exact time she vanished could not be determined from the available evidence, nor was it determined where she had gone. The last confirmed sighting the Manehatten police department had of her was on the subway. She’d been out at dinner with her coworkers after a late work night. She took the Celestia line home, and sixteen minutes before ten, got off at her usual station. The pony at the ticket stand saw her pass.

She was not seen again.

Shortly before eight the next morning, the security guard at Lucky Horseshoe Systems observed a bright blue pegasus mare enter the building. She presented Ruby Rail’s ID card at the front desk, and was granted entry. When later asked how he mistook a bright blue pegasus for a dark red unicorn, the desk guard could only recall that the ID card seemed correct at the time.

This unknown mare then proceeded to Ruby Rails’ desk. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, she collected Ruby’s personal items, submitted a notice of resignation with Ruby’s name at the bottom, and stole a large number of pens from the office supply cabinet. Then, she left.

Company officials contacted the police after an investigation by management into the incident, initially believing it to be a case of industrial espionage. Police located the blue mare living inside Ruby’s apartment, where she was arrested. Under interrogation, she repeatedly claimed to be Ruby Rails, though she had no explanation for the alleged change in her appearance, including a different cutie mark.

A standard blood test confirmed that the blue mare was not a changeling, and magical analysis by the Manehatten Institute of Thaumic Studies showed no traces of transformation magic upon her. After some consideration, the police decided to classify the incident as a case of identity theft and kidnapping. They might, if things had gone on longer, have pressed charges.

The second case appeared on a Tuesday. Shale Strike was recently married to his wife, Rose Quartz. They had only been home from their honeymoon for two weeks. She sent him out to fetch some groceries from the corner store. A different stallion came back.

Two more cases came the next day. Then four the day after that. Then ten more over the next week. Rumors started to spread around Manehatten, and the start of a panic.

That was when the Princesses got involved.

Chapter 3

It had been a long time Twilight saved the world. It simply wasn’t in danger as much these days. She’d seen to that.

Nopony smiled at her when she walked down the street anymore. They didn’t like her crown. When she told ponies about how she’d discovered her special talent for magic, they’d correct her. They’d say her special talent was technically for sorcery. Magic was kind of an outdated term.

She didn’t understand why she’d had to apologize on the news for calling Cloudsdale a pegasus city. She didn’t understand why saying everypony should have a few good books was tone-deaf. She didn’t understand why ponies were outraged at cameras in public spaces, then recorded every second of their days and posted them online.

When she told little foals that friendship was magic, they rolled their eyes.

There were good things in the world. She knew better than to think this new generation was just awful. She’d seen them be loving and kind. But somehow, she was never a part of it.

And maybe she’d had a few hard ciders as well.

She stared at herself in the mirror, and held a book to her chest. A modern book. A book that could never have been written in her home era, but that she loved. She wanted to write more like it. She looked in her own eyes, and pictured Ponyville and the old world.

She let go.

Equestria’s princess vanished on a Thursday.