Pearl's Travels 2: Canterlot

Before the princess could get over her sudden spell of embarrassment, Hammer Hoof / Oval returned with our tickets and I was forced to say my goodbyes to the others so we could make our train in time.

"I'm looking forward to seeing you again in Ponyville, Pearl," Princess Twilight Sparkle reiterated.

"I'll be sure to plan ahead for the questions you have to ask me when I visit," I returned with a smile.

"Now you stay safe out there in the mean time, you hear? Ah'd bake ya another pie lickety-split if you need any, but applebuckin' season is comin' up and ah'm gonna be busy on the farm for a while," Applejack pointed out.

"I can't very well expect you to ignore the harvest on my account, Applejack," I told her in earnest. "Thank you for your help."

Aurora had an odd look on her face as I approached her to say my goodbyes, and she leaned in to whisper in my ear.

"If you need to use me as a reference, don't hesitate to do so. I could vouch for you as long as you don't tell anypony I'm your grandmare or anything," she told me. "We're not too far apart agewise, so I could easily be your cousin."

"Hammer said he'd be my cousin for the duration of my stay in Hoofton as well. I'm gaining cousins left and right, it seems," I joked.

She smirked at that before pulling me into a sudden hug.

"Just keep your back story simple. It's easy to get lost in the details otherwise," she pressed onto me while hugging me to herself.

"I'll remember that, thank you Aurora," I answered as I hugged the Pegasus.

Meadowsweet just smiled from a step or two beside us.

"If you're ever in the city again, let me welcome you into my home, Pearl. You know where I work, and Camellia can lead you to my home if need be. Don't be a stranger," the Royal Gardener offered up. "You have opened my eyes to new possibilities. I can't thank you enough."

My turn to blush, and I kept holding onto Aurora since I could hide my flush from prying eyes by burying my cheek against her fuzzy one.

"Time to go, or we're going to miss the train," Hammer spoke, forcing me to reluctantly detach from Aurora / Tizzy.

"I'll be sure to reach out to you all," I told the group, but then turned to follow Hammer Hoof toward the train which would take us to Hoofton.

We made it to our train with a minute to spare, and we walked into a carriage which was packed full of other ponies.

"Oh, well, this is a full train," I chuckled. "Reminds me of rush hour back home."

"Let's walk over to one of the other carriages. There's bound to be a place to sit in another one," Hammer Hoof suggested, walking through the space to the door up ahead.

He was stopped by another Earthpony stallion's forehoof as they leaned in to look down the aisle past Hammer at me.

"That's Pearl, ain't she?" the gruff stallion asked.

Hammer Hoof gave a nod up in return. "Yes, why do you ask?"

"Have our seats, bro. We'll find a spot elsewhere," the stallion decided.

He nudged his companion, a lovely Unicorn mare, and the both of them stood up from where they sat.

"There's no need to," Hammer protested, but the other stallion grinned a wide grin.

"It's for Pearl, don't sweat it. Enjoy the ride," they threw back, then walked off to prevent us from protesting more.

I just stared at them as they walked down the aisle to the door leading to the next carriage, feeling my cheeks warm up yet again.

"Well now," Hammer Hoof grumbled, "that's a thing."

He turned to face me, then motioned to the empty seats with his left forehoof.

"You can take the window seat, Pearl," he offered. "I've seen the landscape a few too many times myself."

I obliged and sat down opposite a younger Unicorn filly and what I presumed to be her dam, also a Unicorn.

The pair of them had light-pink pastel coats, but the mother had a white mane with streaks of darker pink through it while the filly had a lightblue mane with streaks of white.

The younger one was busy drawing onto a sketchbook pad by moving a pencil over the paper with her magic, but the older mare looked at me as if to study what was so special about me that another pair of ponies would give up their seats for me.

"Good morning," I told her, but then leaned in to look out of the window at the station outside.

Hammer Hoof sat down beside me with a deep sigh. "When we get home, I'm going to spend a full day and night sleeping. This whole excursion has taken all my energy away."

I chuckled at his complaining.

The carriage shook as the train finally started on its way, and we were soon going out through one of the tunnels.

The mare diagonally across from me used her magic to provide a light for her foal to draw by while we were otherwise in the dark.

The kid was so engrossed in her art project that she didn't look up from her work.

As the light of Celestia's sun returned to my eyes once we left the tunnel I could see a familiar sight; the grasslands to the South-East of Canterlot's tall mountain.

The few copses of trees dispersed out in the distance.

The river further up ahead to the East, and the Foal Mountains to the North-East.

We were following the tracks which Meadowsweet, Tizzy, and myself had had to cross to get to the safety of the small group of trees where I left the pair just yesterday.

The place where I met up with Forsythia again, and then continued on with her toward the Foal Mountains.

I turned to look through the window to my right, past Hammer Hoof and the ponies sitting on their respective benches across the aisle, and could see the grouping of hills which sat beside Saddle Lake, and which were blocking my view of Ponyville beyond that.

We would soon pass by Rambling Rock Ridge on that side of the train. There was just a lot of grassland with a few groupings of trees here or there on the left side where I sat.

I noticed one of the mares on the other benches smiling at me while looking at me directly.

I dared a smile back, and she dipped her head down a little while mouthing "thank you" to me.

I blinked, felt my cheeks glow again, and turned away to look out at the grasslands we were chugging past again on my side of the train.

Too many ponies on this train were part of my Changeling family. Too many of them were suddenly treating me like I had done some fantastical thing for them.

I really didn't know what to do with this.

"With some luck our luggage will be waiting for us at the station," Hammer told me. "Don't discount the importance of properly labelling your luggage, Pearl."

I gave an absentminded nod to that.

He was just making smalltalk, trying to parse what had happened these past days, which had included a night which had been impossible to measure without having a watch or clock handy.

Back home I would have just used my mobile phone and a stopwatch app or something to measure just how long it had been dark for. From what I could gather, it had been nighttime the entire time we had been in the jail.

This also explained why lunchtime had passed by without a food delivery to the jail. This might have saved us from being discovered while we were making plans with all of our brethren out in the open outside of their cells.

While Deadbolt must have an internal chronometer to know just what time it was outside of the jail, his 'good-for-nothing' son and friends must have been waiting for a sign from outside to indicate they could swap with a new group of guards again.

If the Canterlot palace guards rotated out depending on the location of the sun and moon up in the sky, and the moon had essentially been stuck in the same place in the sky while Luna fought off the Tantabus' effects, then they would have been on the same shift for way too long.

I reasoned how this must have led right into our plan as well; if the guards had been on the same shift for so long, they must have had a slow reaction speed, had maybe no idea whether the groups of five that were escaping from the palace grounds were real or hallucinatory, or might have been asleep while we fled the scene.

I felt a nudge in my side and looked up to see Hammer stare me down.

"You okay there, Pearl? You zoned out there," he asked with some concern.

"Yeah, just thinking about things," I answered truthfully. "How long until we get to Hoofton?"

"Twenty minutes," the mare diagonally across from me said. "You're not going on to Baltimare then?"

"No, Hoofton is our stop," Hammer answered before I had a chance.

"And here I thought you were on your way to enroll her into the community college," the Unicorn scoffed in a dismissive tone. "My daughter is going to the Mareland Institute College of Art, you know? She has a full scholarship because of her talents."

I decided I didn't like her, no matter how much she looked like a soft pink candy cane. Maybe more like a sour stick, considering her remarks.

"I can see she's very talented, yes," Hammer Hoof replied more politically than I could have mustered. "What is it she's drawing there?"

The filly moved the pencil aside and held the drawing up for us both to see.

It showed a realistic pencil sketch of Canterlot Palace as it jutted out from the mountainside, with an insane level of detail to it.

"Oh wow," I cooed to the filly, who couldn't help their mom being an elitist. "That's lovely. Why did you decide to draw the palace?"

"Because it was there," she replied with a dumbfounded look. "I draw anything I see."

She turned the sketchbook around again, flipped to a new page, and resumed drawing.

"I see," I responded with a light chuckle. "Because it was there. That should have been obvious to me."

"Does she have any other hobbies or does she just draw a lot?" Hammer Hoof inquired of the mare.

"Oh no, she draws pretty much all the time when she's able to," the Unicorn responded. "She's already sold a few of her pieces to the Whickerthonian Art Museum, you know?"

"Right, how old is she if I may ask?" Hammer Hoof pressed.

"She's seven as of last month, why do you ask?" the mare replied, now starting to look suspicious.

"Have you ever considered she may be a sauvant?" he suggested to her.

The mare's cheeks puffed up and she all but hissed at us. "My daughter is NOT damaged goods!"

"I don't know," one of the other ponies opposite the aisle brought in, now joining the conversation. "If I see it right, she's doing a pretty fine portrait of that mare across from her. That's not something I'd expect from a seven-year old."

I peered at the drawing the filly was working on and spotted my own face coming to life on paper, albeit upside-down from my viewpoint.

"I did not ask you," the mare diagonally opposite me proclaimed to her new target, while Hammer Hoof's mouth pulled into a small smile.

I considered the filly opposite me, the way she was so engrossed in her work, was drawing like she was an inkjet printer or was tracing lines from a photograph.

"That looks great," I suggested to her.

She finished a few more lines, then tore the page out of her book and floated it across to me.

"Here you go, lady," she beamed proudly at me.

I very carefully grabbed hold of it with my forehooves, my cheeks burning again as I was called lady by this kid.

I looked down at what could very well have been a photograph of myself. A face I had only seen a few times in reflections here or there.

A cute Earthpony mare with a pearl necklace.

The conversation between the mare and the ponies across the aisle was getting more heated by the second, until she briskly stood up from her seat and pulled the sketchbook out of the filly's hold.

"We're going to find another place to sit, not near this rabble who obviously want to feel good about themselves not being able to draw 'stump foal' as good as you," the Unicorn mare decided, walking off with the sketchbook.

The filly quickly jumped off her own seat and gave chase, calling out "My draaaawiinngs!"

I felt for the kid and looked back down at the drawing she had given me.

"It's trompe l'oeil, but she wouldn't know if it hit her in the face," the pony across the aisle remarked. "That poor filly."

"How do you know what this is called?" I asked, looking up at the other Unicorn mare's amber coat and her smart blue eyes looking back at me from under her darker blue mane.

"I'm a junior at the Mareland Institute of Art; we did a course on art styles like that just last semester," they returned. "I'll let one of my professors know how she behaved. The kid can't help it, but we may need to keep the mother away from interfering with her child's studies."

"I know hoverparents like that," I sighed.

"Can I see the drawing for a moment?" the Unicorn asked, and I lifted my forehooves with the painting resting on them.

She carefully grabbed hold of it with her magic, then held it in front of her face to study it.

"She's a natural. She kept the pencil pressure light enough to correct any mistakes she made on the first sketch, then went over the lines which needed more volume and built out the drawing that way. I can see why the Whickerthonian would display this," she muttered as she looked the sketch over.

"Do you mind if I roll this up for you so you can transport it without needing to fold it?" the mare asked, looking at me again.

"No, not at all," I agreed.

"I'll need your hairband," the Unicorn told one of her companions, and promptly freed their mane from it.

I watched as she expertly rolled the sketch up, then tied the red hairband around it like it was a ribbon, and floated the roll over to me again.

"You should keep that safe. Get it framed when you get home," she spoke to me as I reached out to grab hold of it again. "That filly might be famous one day, and you'd have one of her early works on your wall."

"Thank you, I will," I agreed.

"We're coming up on Hoofton," Hammer Hoof suggested. "Want me to carry it for you or do you think you can hold onto it yourself?"

"I'll manage," I answered, very carefully taking the piece of paper in my mouth directly after.

"Fwankf," I spoke again, smiling around the roll toward the other ponies.

"Stay safe, Pearl," The mare sitting closer to the window spoke, confirming my suspicion that she was part of my extended family.

"That's more of an emerald than a pearl," opted the stallion across from her.

I just left them to their conversation and followed after Hammer Hoof as he walked in the opposite direction than where the mare and her filly had wandered off to.

The train slowed down as we approached Hoofton station, and Celery Stalk was waiting for us somewhere in this city, in the home Hammer Hoof had so desperately been trying to get back to.