Of Maids and Mistresses

Twilight’s eyes flew wide open, and she was completely awake within the space of a single second. The sun was shining in through the window, and as soon as she saw that she rolled out of bed and dashed down the stairs. There would be no sleeping in.

Somehow, she managed to get to the ground floor without tumbling down and breaking all of her bones, but upon seeing the state the library was in she stopped so abruptly that the laws of physics considered throwing a hissy fit about her disrespect for momentum. She took in the room with a shocked silence; everything had been put in order again, all books neatly upon their shelves. And of course, Twilight would normally have been very happy to see that, were it not for the fact that she distinctly remembered having found three books of some importance the night before, which were now nowhere to be found.

She wished she could remember their titles, but the truth was that she had been so exhausted that her memories showed her nothing but a chaotic blur of movement and sounds. She tried once more to focus in on the names of the books, but they--like the plan upon which her search for the books had been based--were lost to her.

She heard voices coming from her left, and she quickly pursued them, bursting into the kitchen.

“Where are my books?” she immediately asked the two ponies gathered there.

Trixie looked up from her cooking and threw Applejack a glance, but the earth pony shrugged. “Ah’m not telling you anything until you’ve gotten some food in that belly of yours, Twi. Won’t do nopony no good if you go collapsing again.”

Twilight gritted her teeth. Applejack’s advice was sound, but she was so close to the answer... she simply had to take a look at those books.

“Trixie, your mistress orders you to bring her those books at once.”

“B-but mistress,” Trixie said with a little squeal, “she hid them without T-Trixie knowing, T-Trixie can’t...”

“Oh, alright, alright...” Twilight said with a sigh. “Have it your way, AJ.” She sat her rump down next to the table, still grumbling a bit. “At least tell me the titles.”

Trixie served Twilight up a big plate of salad with a smile, as Applejack raised an eyebrow.

“Tell you what?”

“The titles. Of the books.”

Apart from the clinking and splashing noises caused by Trixie doing the dishes and the crunchy noise of Twilight chewing her salad, the room remained silent for a few moments.

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Well, obviously I did at some point,” Twilight mused, “but I seem to have forgotten. Soooo?”

“Eh, Ritual Magic: For the Unicorn with the Time to Cast; Omnus Grey’s Travels of Equestria and a Historical Atlas of Equestria. But Ah was already thinking that those haven’t got a lick to do with Trixie, and if you don’t even rightly remember... Ah reckon fatigue just got to you, Twi.”

“Well, I... it’s possible that...” The purple unicorn’s eyes became wide. “No, wait, I got it! I remember now!”

She quickly stuffed the entire remaining part of the salad into her mouth, chewing it with some difficulty. It was most unsightly, but Applejack was used to a lot worse and didn’t really complain, while Trixie, thankfully, had her back turned. Not that she’d have dared complain about her mistress’s table manners, at any rate.

“Fhow mpfh mpfhy bwooks,” the librarian told Applejack as she stood up.

The earth pony sighed, but she lead Twilight back into the library anyway.

“Ah figured Ah wouldn’t find too good of a hidin’ place lickety split, so Ah just put them in the wrong place on the shelf. But if ya didn’t remember the names anyway...” Applejack shrugged, but Twilight nodded; it made sense, in a way, to hide books amongst books.

The farmpony’s memory was solid, and so they gathered up the books without any problems. Twilight started flipping through their pages at once.

“Ah still don’t see how this is going to de-maid her...” Applejack mumbled.

“It isn’t. Not in the way you think, at least,” Twilight explained. “The trying-to-get-Trixie-to-be-less-like-a-maid idea was bust, bankrupt, out of possibilities. But it was the wrong approach from the very start.”

“Why’s that?”

“Too small, a distinct lack of ambition. Why continue fussing over the symptoms if,” she paused as she turned her gaze towards Applejack, “we can simply uncover the roots and hack down the entire tree?”

Applejack pushed up her hat and scratched her head. “Ah’m afraid you lost me there, sugarcube.”

“Ok, look, I told you Trixie’s current state of mind is the result of her denying her past, right? She denies she is who she is, so she sort of latches on to any identity she’s offered to fill in the blanks.”

Applejack nodded: that much she could understand.

“So there you go. We make her mind acknowledge her past and presto!”

“And these books-”

“Are my guide and method of transportation.” The purple unicorn grabbed hold of the Historical Atlas of Equestria, turning to the end of the book. “This atlas shows Equestria over the years... borders, cities, rivers... you can see the land changing slowly as you flip the pages. But it also tells you something about ponies; specifically, it has population densities.”

“That’s... that’s swell, Twi, real swell,” Applejack said. “Ah’m sure that’s one cantooter of a useful book. But how in tarnation does it help now?”

“Simple, really,” Twilight said with an excited glimmer in her eyes. “We know Trixie’s hometown suffered an incredible epidemic when she was young, so we just look for smaller towns that suddenly suffered an enormous drop in population density during that time...” She started flipping through the book, glancing back at previous pages a few times. “Looks like we have about... ten possible matches, give or take. I seem to recall there was a lot of migration towards the larger city centres during those years.”

“Ok, so, Ah’m not saying Ah completely get it just yet, but are we really going to go through all of those towns one by one? They seem mighty far apart, and if you don’t know which one it is, ya’ll might just not even realise your plan failed even when it does!”

“Which is why we have... this.” Twilight pulled up Omnus Grey’s Travels of Equestria. “This book is unique. The author visited every single city or place of interest in Equestria, and wrote about all of it. There is no contemporary work quite like it. Although,” she said with a frown, “it’s rightly criticised for being a bit broad and shallow, but that was to be expected, and it suits our purpose... The timing is grand too: Only a couple of years, or less, after the year I estimate the epidemic took place.”

“And why aren’t we just asking Trixie what her town’s called?”

“Well, she didn’t use any names when she told me about her past through that ‘it’s just a random story’ delusion of hers, so chances are names are too deeply repressed for them to ever float to the surface like that.” She glanced over her shoulder at the kitchen, before continuing more silently. “Besides, she mustn't figure out what we’re planning; her subconscious may throw up even more walls to keep us out if that happens.”

She began to check the names the Historical Atlas of Equestria had revealed to them against the alphabetical list in the back of Omnus’s book, quickly turning to the page the list indicated every time. She struck the name in question off of her mental list if some detail or the other seemed not to fit with what Trixie had told her of her hometown. She quickly started to wish records about known epidemics in Equestria weren’t out of her reach, as she had to dismiss some based on vague clues, such as the aptly named town of Silvermine--essentially a mining village--which she dismissed based solely on the fact that a mining village probably wouldn’t qualify as “not unlike Ponyville”, while Trixie had quite clearly described her hometown as such.

In other cases, the decision was a lot easier to make, like when Omnus had made explicit mention of migration waves away from the village in question, which meant the epidemic had not taken place there as there wouldn't have been much of a population left to migrate if it had.

But, like these things usually go, her search was looking quite fruitless until she arrived at the very last item on the list. She had just started to doubt some of the calls she had made before, when she gasped and read the following text out loud:

“And so I remained for a moment taken aback, because the eyes of those few ponies I saw gathered there were dull and filled with sadness, lacking much of the joy and wonder I had seen during the rest of my travels. So ill did those faces befit the simple elegance and beauty of the village, that for a moment I wondered if I saw not the lingering images of ponies long gone, rather than their descendants who still walked upon this soil. Only later did I find out about the illness that had swept through the village just weeks prior to my visit, and I wept for the existence of such sorrow which befalls even Celestia’s kingdom, and from whose grasp not even she can offer sanctuary forever. But at that time, a small light of hope was also kindled within my heart, for the ponies of Neighton had come face to face with the cold hoof of Death, and some yet stood to tell the tale. Truly a village of extraordinary individuals; may those whom they mourn forever be remembered.”

A long list of names followed, and Twilight felt something grasp her by the throat as her eyes scanned the many entries. “Woodrow Lulamoon,” she finally managed with a choked voice. “That must’ve been Trixie’s father... I... we found it.”

“But it’s a mite on the far sides of things, sugarcube,” Applejack said as she pointed out Neighton on the map. Her voice was as calm as always, as she was much more rooted within pragmatism than Twilight was, and thus deaths long past shook her less violently than they did the purple unicorn.

“That’s... that’s alright,” Twilight said as she slowly regained her composure. She patted the third and final book, Ritual Magic: For the Unicorn with the Time to Cast. “There’s a gating spell--an advanced form of the teleportation magic I sometimes use--contained within the pages of this tome. Give me an hour and I can calculate the parameters that can open a gate from here to there, and one to get back as well. After that, half an hour to draw the actual formula for the spell...”

“Ah’m not sure I trust all this here magicking,” Applejack confided in the other mare. “Last time you tried a spell that size, you ended up turnin’ parasprites into building-eaters... and that’s not the only thing them little fellas ate...”

“Does everypony have to keep reminding me of that every time I suggest using a mildly advanced spell?” Twilight scoffed. “I mean, it was only one ti-”

“And that inc’dent with Smarty Pants. Ah heard that was... bad.”

Twilight gritted her teeth. “Well, this time I’ve got time to run the calculations... no need for guesswork... Besides,” she added, “you’re not coming with.”

“How come?” Applejack asked with a frown.

“It’s too much of a personal and intimate experience. We’re going to go see the place where Trixie’s parents died, after all... I’m her marefriend, and in her current state she couldn’t go alone anyway, but you...” Twilight shook her head. “I’m sure you understand, after all: you’ve never taken any of us along when you go visit your parents’ graves, either.”

Applejack nodded slowly, reluctantly. “Alright, alright... Ah s’pose that’s only fair... But ain’t this a mite... risky? You keep saying we need to be careful not to make her snap, and this seems like a mighty delicate issue you’re dealin’ with now.”

“Well, there’s only two possible outcomes, really... One: She continues denying it, in which case it’ll have no effect upon her. We’ll be back where we started, but perhaps we’ll have some extra information to go on, at least. And two: she finally acknowledges her past, which will be painful, but it will give us the opening we need to help her, if she doesn’t just snap out of it herself. It stays risky, but it’s well worth it.”

Applejack nodded. “So when do you-”

“As soon as I finish preparations. Try to keep Trixie busy as I work this out...”

Applejack nodded as she headed back towards the kitchen, and thus she didn’t notice the sweat that started to pearl upon Twilight’s forehead. She’d acted confident towards the other mare, but in truth, they could never be sure what would happen once Trixie set hoof in Neighton.

But the situation was desperate, more desperate than she let on, and thus it was time for desperate measures. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to ask the princess for help, it was also that she doubted it’d do much good. After all, if she had the power to help, wouldn’t those five ponies in the Canterlot Psychiatric ward have been cured long ago? Twilight would never believe that the princess would let even one pony suffer “for science”, and thus the implications were clear.

Nopony would be able to help Trixie if she failed, and she was about to put into motion her last and only idea. She swallowed and, with her whole body shaking, she started writing down the gating spell’s calculations.

It took her close to two hours, but at last she finished both the spell matrix calculations that would bring them to Neighton and back, as well as the enormous chalk drawing in the centre of the library which would serve as the spell’s focal point. A mere fifteen minutes later, her saddle bags were packed and ready to go, as a confused Trixie stood next to her, staring at the markings upon the floor. Applejack stood to the side of the room, a grim look in her eyes.

As Twilight cast the spell, all the runes she had drawn started to glow and pulse, and Twilight knew quite a spectacular light show would be taking place at their destination point, to warn potential bystanders to get out of the way.

“W-where did you say we were going again, mistress?” Trixie asked.

“I didn’t, I only told you we’d be going by gate...” A blue sphere materialised in the centre of the runes, and Twilight lead Trixie towards it. “But if you must know... I am going to Neighton, but you, Trixie... you are going home.”

She pushed the maid into the gate before jumping in as well, and as colour exploded behind her eyes she finally knew what it felt like to stack all of your hopes upon the arbitrary hooves of fate.