“Thank you so much, ma’am. Really, I’m so sorry to have held you up this whole time.”

“Oh, don’t worry yourself about it. I understand what you two are going through, and not to put any words in the princess’ mouth, but I should think that Princess Celestia would agree with letting you stay.”

“I… I suppose. You’ve done so much for us, ma’am. I can’t tell you how much this means to Feather.”

She sighed. “Good night, sir. The night clerk will be up front to let you out whenever you two are ready.”

“Thank you.” Brandish shuffled nervously. “I still hope you won’t get in trouble for this.”

“Bah, they’ve got nopony else they can convince to stand posted all year-long at the front-desk. I’ll be fine. Good night, Mister Plumes. I sincerely hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Brandish sat there for a moment as the pony’s hooves click clacked down the hall. A thud reverberated shortly after the steps had faded, the heavy lobby door’s mechanism firing off as the bolt fell into place. He was alone now in the break room, left to isolation with a small stash of foodstuffs. There was no question of what he had left do now; his eyes landed on a particular container. The corner of Brandish’s mouth twitched ever upward.

He returned to their room once his work was accomplished; the bowl of oatmeal, delicately balanced on the back of Brandish, shifted slightly under the temptation of gravity. The door’s hinges squeaked in protest as the droopy-eyed stallion made way. Felt Feather was lain across the chair muzzle-deep in her files. The sight of the unconscious filly made Brandish smile, and for the briefest moment, he felt himself lost in forever.

Unfortunately, the food would get cold if he stayed in forever.

“Feltie.” When the filly refused to stir, Brandish set the bowl down in his chair and shook her gently. “Wakey wakey, grits and gravy.”

“Mmrn...” Felt closed the folder and set it off to the side as she struggled to wake herself up. Stretching, she continued mid-yawn. “What time is it?”

“Definitely past a filly’s bedtime… it’s a little past seven, Feltie.”

“A-and we’re still here?!”

“It’s fine, Feltie. We can take all the time we need.”

Felt gave Brandish an incredulous glance. “Are you sure? Did she—?”

“Feather. We’ll be fine, calm down.” The soft clink of ceramic filled the stuffy room. “Just eat your oats, and let’s get back to business.”

Still sulking, but compliant nonetheless, Felt dug into her meal.

Brandish lifted the folder from his friend’s chair and carefully creased it open. The contents of the folder—of the life of one Feather Felt—stared back up at the stallion. A majority of the documents were all very official and full of logistical nonsense pertaining to the filly’s social identification, but there had been several breakthroughs in the recent few hours, specifically in where Felt had been born; Vanhoover General Hospital.

Despite the important hint as to Feather’s mother’s location, there were also a great deal of conflicting documents in the folder. Feather Felt was said to have held residency in no more than four cities: Manehattan, Baltimare, Fillydelphia, Haybinger, and Vanhoover. Cloudsdale was not on the list, but that made a lot of sense to Brandish; Feather Felt and her father had likely never been documented as residents of Cloudsdale.

Brandished had stretched his mind thin in the nigh impossible task to understand how a filly born on one side of Equestria could end up all the way on the other. The situation was only worsened because Feather’s mother could be in any of those cities, not to mention that she could be anywhere in between. At the current time, he would take a name if he could; how could the Equestrian polity have failed to record even a mother’s name?

Maybe we missed it. “Feather?”

Felt looked up from her bowl. “Mhm?”

“Did you happen to skip any papers while you were going through this?”

“Mm…” She swallowed her bite. “Maybe? I… I think I might have missed a page because a lot of them were stuck together.”

“How far through?” Brandish asked. “When did they start sticking?”

“The um, twentieth one?”

He flipped to the respective area; most of the archived logistical forms were located there, and true to her word, the pages were stuck quite well to one another. As Brandish leaned in to get a closer look at the mess of garbled ‘nonsense’ workforms, he noted that there were in fact several key notations that the two of them had missed out on during their initial investigation of the pages. All of the information presented had already been gleaned from papers further in the folder, but it sent a clear signal to Brandish.

“Feltie, we’re not skipping papers anymore. When you’re done with your oats, we’re going to go through all the bureaucrats’ work together.” He spoke in a vibrant yet lamenting tone. Feather Felt quickened in eating her meal.

Brandished and Feather were swiftly cleaving their way through the folder; pages were neatly stacked as to keep the archive in order, and the stack steadily grew as time passed. Their eyes glazed over each page rapidly but tersely—they often doubled-back to scan their paper once more.

At the dawn of the first hour into their revival, an excited babble erupted from Felt.

Brandish shot up. “What is it?”

“I’ve got a name! My mom’s name!” Feather had leapt from her chair to parade the paper held deftly in her hooves. “Yes!”

“Come here, Feltie. Let’s take a look.”

She squeezed into the chair with Brandish and held it up for them to read. “See, right there!” She pointed at the name hidden deep in the crevices of the boxes. “That’s gotta be her!”

“Cloud Rifter…” Brandish repeated the name and furrowed his brows. “Huh. Definitely her, and—” he reached for the clipping attached to the packet “—here she is.”

The cyan mare stared out from the picture, her bright cherry-red mane spilling across her head. Her feathers on her outstretched wings were fluffed out in all directions , but a shining grin still lit her visage. The background—filled with crowds of ponies streaming under a sign labelled ‘Manehattan Ironpony Competition,’ and a whirling ferris wheel anchored beside the beachfront—reeked of frivolity and gallantry. But it lacked a family.

“Do you think she might be in Manehattan?” Feather Felt squealed.

“She could be.” Brandish said warily. “But she looks pretty young here; this is probably an older picture, and she might have already moved on. I don’t see you or your father here, and even if your father shot the picture, you’re not there and you were born in Vanhoover.”

Feather’s face drooped. “But… she might still be there.”

“It’s possible, but we need more to go on. So we have two options: we can keep going through your folder—” Felt visibly shuddered, “—or we can go talk to your father.”

“... Let’s do both.”

“Both, eh? Go through this and then—”

“Yes, exactly!” Huffing, Feather snatched photograph away and slid from the chair. “I want to hear what he has to say!”

Brandish blinked owlishly. “Are you going to be alright, Feather?” he asked gently.

“Yeah… I'm sorry.” Felt sniffled and rubbed her nose. “I’m going to ask if I can keep this picture.”

“That sounds good, sweetie.” Brandish quietly watched her go to the door; she paused in the doorway and peered out into the hall, before slipping away in a flash.

Click.

Brandished turned back to the packet. He ran a hoof across the box next to Cloud Rifter’s name and frowned; the name of the Rifter’s partner—of Feather’s father—dawdled before him.

“What other secrets have you been keeping?”

Author's Note

Take a picture, it'll last longer than family.