My Empire of Dirt

Chapters

Chapter 2 - There's Beauty in the Breakdown
Chapter 3 - When the Dawn Comes, Tonight Will be a Memory Too
Chapter 4 - All We Do Crumbles to the Ground
Chapter 5 - Pleasures Remain...So Does the Pain
Chapter 6 - I Couldn’t Get Away
Chapter 7 - I'll Try to Carry On
Chapter 9 - You know that I'm falling...and I don't know what to say
Chapter 10 - Hit Me Like a Ray of Sun, Burnin' Through My Darkest Night
Chapter 11 – Why, Then, Oh Why Can’t I?
Epilogue I - I knew the only peace I'd find is if this child was yours
Epilogue II - You Didn’t Know that You Fell
Epilogue III - We Can’t Take Back What is Done
Chapter 1 - I Hurt Myself Today
Chapter 8 - It's Strange What Desire Will Make Foolish People Do

Chapter 2 - There's Beauty in the Breakdown

Celestia had learned very quickly that she should not leave Sunset’s line of sight. Whenever she even so much as rounded the corner ahead of her student Sunset would scramble to catch up and then grasp Celestia’s wrist. The teen also seemed to need as near-constant physical contact as possible, even if she was just clutching Celestia’s arm as she drove back to her house. A quick inquiry about hunger (with the odd, seizure-like response) led them briefly to a drive-through window to pick up some food on the way to Celestia’s home.

They ate in silence, the single buzz from Celestia’s phone (turning out to be a weather notification) being the only interruption. Sunset grimaced slightly when she saw the burger, but picked it up and ate it anyway. Not wanting to interrupt the girl’s eating with another question that would only prompt another of those odd muscle spasms, Celestia mentally filed the moment away for later investigation.

When it came time for Sunset to get ready for bed, things seemed to be going smoothly until it was time for the girl to use the bathroom. She stepped into the restroom with her bundle of loaned pajamas, then seemed to come to a realization. She whipped around and grabbed Celestia’s wrist, fear etched on her face.

“What? What is it?” asked Celestia; she immediately cringed as Sunset started having one of those odd seizures that happened whenever she was asked something. “Alright, so you can’t answer my questions,” she said, placing a hand on the girl’s shoulder to comfort her. “Please don’t try if it’s going to cause more distress.” She started wracking her brain for a way to have communication when one person wouldn’t...and Celestia was starting to suspect that it was because Sunset couldn’t. “Okay...Sunset, I’m going to assume you can’t communicate for some reason.”

The girl gasped, dropping the small bundle Celestia had given her and grabbing Celestia’s other wrist with her bandage wrapped hand. Aquamarine eyes sunk into a sallow face darted back and forth, looking into each of the older woman’s eyes in turn. Ripples of muscle movements across Sunset’s jaw being the tell-tale giveaway that Sunset was struggling against saying anything, desperately trying to fight off another seizure.

Celestia’s heart leapt to her throat for a moment. She was very close to understanding what was going on, but she was missing some pieces of the larger puzzle. For the moment, she chose to focus on the immediate problem. “So if I were in your position, what would I be needing most right now?” She glanced down at the bundle, “You have a change of clothes and a towel and a toothbrush, so that’s not the concern. You obviously know how to use the facilities,” she glanced around the bathroom, looking for inspiration as Sunset started to fidget with her hips and mince around on her feet, “And it’s not like you aren’t aware of the need.” She looked into Sunset’s eyes again, “You’d need privacy…” the pressure from the other girl’s fingers on her wrists suddenly increased, and Celestia watched Sunset’s pupils dilate as her jaw clenched harder.

Celestia’s mind started scrambling. Sunset is clearly physically and mentally capable of doing this task on her own, or Granny Smith or one of the girls who’ve been taking care of her would have said something. If it’s a magical reason, it would have come up by now as well...I think. Celestia was still wrapping her head around having to factor in “magic” as a Thing That Is, but reality made it clear to the entire student body the week prior that it had to be considered, That leaves an emotional reason. Emotionally Sunset is very...frail...oh! Celestia started cataloging the visible and reported symptoms she was seeing, Possible change in appetite, obvious fatigue, nightmares, extreme withdrawal and disconnectedness, clearly displaying signs of hopelessness until...something...I said or did...muscle tension...suicide attempt...she’s suffering accute depression, probably compounded by trauma… Once again, Celestia found herself wishing that Princess Twilight had left the portal to her home open, because Sunset needed psychiatric (and possibly magical) help more than anything else right now, and Celestia had no way of getting the girl either of these things. On the heels of that wish she also realized that she was all Sunset had right now.

Depression, what happens with depression? Dark thoughts, thoughts of suicide, negative thought loops...Sunset is afraid of being alone with her own thoughts!

“Sunset…” she really hoped she was guessing right on this, “Would you…? No, sorry, I almost asked a question. I will be here, right here,” she pointed at the floor outside the bathroom door, “And I will...sing a song.” Please tell me Luna is too far asleep to hear me singing to a student while she uses the bathroom, she’ll never let me live it down! “And if you’re not done by the time I finish the song, I’ll sing another one. I won’t move from this spot until you’re done. Okay? Okay!” She covered the slip of asking a question with the abrupt, now out of style self-interruption that drove her up the wall when her students used to do it back when she was a student teacher.

Gently but steadily, she pulled her wrists out of Sunset’s hands and stepped back to the spot she had indicated. For a moment, it was as though her mind drew a blank as she mentally scrambled once again, this time for a song she knew well enough to sing. A snippet of lyrics floated up from her unconscious, and before she could censor herself she started singing the words, “Can you hear the drums, Fernando…”

Sunset’s eyes started tearing up and her lips quivered in a watery smile. As Celestia closed the door, she finally knelt down to retrieve the fallen bundle. As Celestia reached the first chorus, she could hear the usual sounds associated with the bathroom’s primary function and smiled slightly at the absurdity of the situation.

Celestia’s head jerked vertical to the sound of a throat being cleared. It was an action she immediately regretted as her neck muscles transmitted sensations of cramped agony to her brain. Hissing, she started rubbing her neck with her hand as she scanned her surroundings.

Right, I must have fallen asleep in the chair… She was in a seat she had brought in from the dining room to sit next to Sunset Shimmer as she tried to fall asleep in the guest bedroom. Sunset must have been successful, as the girl’s eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted, and her breathing was regular and slow. The giveaway that she was actually asleep was the tiny trickle of drool that was making a tiny wet spot on the pillow. Celestia stifled a giggle, then nearly started from her chair when another clearing of a throat brought her attention to the guest bedroom door.

Framed there was her sister, one arm crossed over her torso beneath her breasts, the other holding a coffee mug. She was still in her pajamas, as usual for Saturday mornings, and her hair only slightly managed by pulling back with a hair tie at the nape of her neck. She pointedly leaned against the door frame, cocked an eyebrow, and noisily sipped her coffee.

Mentally grousing about sisters who managed to snark without saying a word, Celestia wordlessly adjusted the blankets covering Sunset and headed to the kitchen to explain the situation to Luna.

”So when does CPS come to get her?” asked Luna.

Celestia’s brow wrinkled in thought, she didn’t otherwise react to the question.

“Sister…” began Luna warningly.

“I just think it would be a huge mistake for Sunset.”

Luna put her mug on the granite countertop between them and leaned on her elbows, tucking her hands against her sides to warm them against the cool air of the fall morning. “She is a child, one who is without a support network, is by all reports homeless, and in desperate need of professional help. How would calling in CPS be a mistake?”

“She’s a literal alien, Luna. Maybe she didn’t come from space, but she might as well have. She has no identification, she’s a completely foreign...organism, for lack of a better word, one who’s been changed to better blend in with the native life. Even without her actions at the Fall Formal, she would be sought after by some government agency, like this S.M.I.L.E. organization,” they both rolled their eyes at the odd acronym, it was unconscious by this point, “And with those activities? I’d be surprised if she weren’t disappeared under the Patriot Act as an enemy combatant.”

Luna shifted her arms to put her palms against the counter and leaned over it toward her sister. “Not to play Grogar’s Advocate, but would that be such a bad thing? As you pointed out, she’s an alien, a foreign agent apparently under exile for crimes against her own country, and actually did attack people here. That’s discounting the campaign of bullying and domination we’ve both suspected her of for the last few semesters.”

Memories of the panicked, desperate eyes that sought help without being able to speak the words overpowered any attempt at a logical rebuttal to her sister’s argument. “She...can’t. Something happened, Lu. Something that’s locked her as a prisoner in her own mind, and quite possibly something magical.” She turned her own haunted gaze to he sister.

Luna’s expression softened, “...what do you mean? I knew she had tried to kill herself, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.”

A brief explanation of what happened (and Celestia’s theories) later, and Luna had to sit on the barstool at the counter instead of leaning against it. “I see what you mean. Any alphabet agency that got their hands on her would take her inability to communicate as unwillingness and use measures more and more extreme...and if she happened to be any sort of V.I.P. from...over there, we might inadvertently be starting an interdimensional war. Yes, you’re right, CPS would be a bad idea.”

Celestia chuckled, “That’s not really why I was saying that…”

Luna waived absently, “Of course not, but it needed to be considered.” She buried her face in her hands, “Why didn’t that weird princess girl just leave the door to her kingdom open? And who sends a princess on a rescue mission?” She finished her grumble with by rubbing her face and flopping her hands down on the counter on either side of her coffee mug.

Celestia snorted, “I imagine we’ll be repeating that refrain quite a bit before this is all over…” Her train of thought was interrupted by a distressed sound from the guest bedroom. Before she even consciously thought to do it, she was rushing down the hall to check on Sunset.

Luna’s eyebrow arched as she watched Celestia’s empty coffee mug spin around in a cartoonish fashion.

The night of the Fall Formal…

“Get me the bucket of bricks you id…” Luna watched as Sunset Shimmer’s face contorted before she fell silent, the angry scowl the girl usually wore replaced by a flicker of rage before settling into depressed resignation. “Please give me the bucket of bricks.” she repeated to her cohorts. Snails hauling a bucket in the most awkward way possible and nearly tripping himself doing it.

Having dealt with Sunset Shimmer quite a bit, Luna was noticing the girl seemed less vocal than usual when dealing with her cronies. She was definitely worse-for-wear, tears in her clothing and visibly shaking limbs. Luna could tell she was still moving through sheer pig-headedness. Shaking her head, the vice-principal turned to the parking lot, where she was pleased to see a pair of headlights pulling into a spot. “Snips, Snails,” she called, “You’re done. Come get your cell phones and go home.”

Snips glanced over to the parking lot, then scrambled over to Luna, Snails in his wake. “Tools,” she said simply with a glower, and the boys quickly scurried back to where they’d dropped the shovel and pail in their haste and walked them back over to the designated spot by the small pile of waste bricks the three troublemakers had been building. They then slunk back to the vice principal. She returned their devices, and they ran off to the waiting car. She realized in that moment that she hadn’t collected Sunset’s phone, but then the girl hadn’t once even moved to take it out, let alone get distracted by it. It was a bit late to do so now.

Luna turned to the remaining delinquent under her supervision. It’d been nearly two hours since the dance ended, the last of the cleanup crew having fled after they finished and Sunset being the only student left on the premises. This meant that Luna had to stay as long as Sunset had to wait for her ride. She suppressed a grumble as she watched the girl filling another pail with brick debris.

She felt a buzz from her pants pocket. She pulled it out and saw the message her sister sent from the office where she went to pull up Sunset’s file.

Phone # on file for S. Shimmer’s parents not working. Mother listed as “Sunny Skies.” Found “father’s” name listed on a Pirate Name Generator site.

Eyebrow lifting was inadequate for the surprise Luna was feeling. They had started suspecting a few hours ago that Shimmer’s files were incomplete or incorrect when they started making disciplinary calls. How did Sunset know about Celestia’s sorority name?

Another buzz and a follow-up message came up:

Emergency contact: Nightmare Moon

At this Luna had to restrain herself from gasping out loud as here eyes bugged out. How had Sunset known about my stage name?! I haven’t even picked up my guitar in years...over a decade!

Composing her features and putting her phone back in her pocket, she looked up to see the delinquent of the hour pouring out another bucketful of bricks into the debris pile. Luna heaved a cleansing breath and barked out, “That’s good enough Shimmer. Are you expecting a ride?”

Sunset’s shoulders slumped, the bucket hanging limply from the tips of her fingers. After a moment, she shook her head in the negative without turning to face the educator.

Unsure if it was fatigue or rebellion, she decided to shrug it off. “You’re done for the night,” she said to the girl, “Come see me on Monday to receive whatever discipline we’ll have for you.”

“Th-tha-a-a-a...th-th-th…” Sunset stuttered what sounded like the start of a ‘thank,’ but suddenly shuddered and fell silent. Again without turning, she nodded her head. She gently put the bucket down next to the debris pile and started trudging off into the dark between street lights.

Before she could disappear from view, Celestia quietly stepped next to her, eyes also on Sunset as the girl walked away.

“We’re following her?” Luna inquired.

“Of course.” was the quick reply as they stepped around the damage and debris.

It took the better part of an hour and walking through increasingly seedier parts of town before they finally arrived at Sunset Shimmer’s “home.” The girl wound her way into the warehouse district, not taking anything remotely resembling a direct route. The sisters had to scramble, both to catch up with the girl and to avoid being seen as whatever path Shimmer took was obviously designed to either lose or reveal anyone who may be tailing her. It seemed to be a habitual action on Sunset’s part, though. She was so very clearly wrapped up in her own thoughts that she didn’t notice the two principals even when she passed within five feet of them after one of her double-backs through an alley.

Eventually, Sunset made her way to an apparently abandoned warehouse. The windows were mostly boarded over, and there was signage on the front declaring the city was “in the process” of seizing the property from FlimFlamCo. As the dates printed on the signs were from nearly eight years prior, it seemed most likely that the place had been caught in bureaucratic limbo, which meant that someone with no listed parents who apparently came from another world entirely would be able to stay there indefinitely.

During the trip there, Luna was growing more and more concerned over her sister’s reactions to the situation. Celestia had worn her heart on her sleeve when they were younger, and while she’d learned to keep herself composed and restrained to the general public, Luna knew all the signs to see her sister’s moods and feelings. The further on their unplanned trek they went, the more heartbroken Celestia got. By the time Sunset was struggling to open a loading dock door, the elder sister had the swollen eyes of someone fighting tears. The sounds of a rolling door protesting moving at all broke the silence of the night as Sunset finally got it open, then again once the girl entered and fought the recalcitrant door to close it.

The two sisters used the opportunity to rush across the street and try peering through the windows. Using her height, Celestia found an uncovered strip of glass over the top of one of the boards that most people wouldn’t be able to look through without a stepstool, while Luna found an old knothole that she was able to look through. They saw Sunset using her phone as a flashlight to navigate around, Luna catching the shadow of a motorcycle off to one side as well as the shapes of abandoned tool benches and machinery. They saw the girl trudge up a set of stairs leading to what looked like what had been a manager’s office while the warehouse had been operational and the door closed behind her. After a couple of minutes, the light of the cellphone-flashlight stopped moving, then went out.

Luna pulled her own phone out of her pocket and checked the time. It was nearly three in the morning. She put a hand on her sister’s back in an attempt to comfort her. “Come, sister. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.”

Present…

Luna stood in the doorway as she watched her sister gently caress Sunset’s forehead. The girl was apparently still asleep, whatever was causing her to be unable to speak during her waking hours not stilling her tongue in slumber. She was murmuring and tossing gently, mostly unintelligible nonsense, but the occasional clear word popped out. Her sister’s name was said at least once, but she also heard some phrases that had something resembling proper word structure but Luna could only guess at their meaning, like ‘thaumaturgical’ and ‘emotomancy.’

Through it all, Celestia was holding the girl’s hand, careful to avoid the injuries that had happened sometime between when they left the warehouse the week prior and when Miss Pie led her friends to find Sunset when she was attempting to take her own life. When the tossing and turning settled down and the sleep talking settled to a murmur, then stopped, Celestia continued to gently stroke the teen’s forehead, humming a gentle tune...is that ‘Dancing Queen?’ thought Luna incredulously.

Sister, Luna thought to herself, You’d better be careful. You care so much, Sunset Shimmer could so easily break your heart into a million pieces...

Author's Note

For those of you eagle-eyed people who caught the plot point that I won't identify here, no, you didn't miss anything and I didn't forget anything. :raritywink:

Chapter 3 - When the Dawn Comes, Tonight Will be a Memory Too

Celestia felt the ache of the abdominal wound already, even though the knife wouldn’t enter her belly for another 2 minutes. “Luna, please, let’s talk about this!”

“No, sister! All you ever DO is ‘talk,’ more like lecture! Ever since mom and dad died, you only LECTURE me! You never listen, you never…” Luna’s voice choked off in a pained sob, “I just needed someone to be there, but you were too busy with your FRIENDS...no, your subjects! You were so busy being a Queen Bee that you couldn’t be bothered to see your own sister needed you!” Luna’s face was pure black, and her pupils were slitted like the ‘cat’s eyes’ contacts she wouldn't start wearing until she took up the guitar with her death metal band in about three year’s time. The scars, which on Luna’s skin would be a pale blue that would eventually fade so much that they would barely be noticeable by the time they started teaching years later were now a bright, ash-white against the pitch black of Nightmare Moon’s skin.

Celestia took a hesitant step forward, hoping against hope to change the course of events she knew would happen. Didn’t she know how this would happen? She couldn’t know the future, but somehow she knew that her stomach shouldn’t already be bleeding through her t-shirt, that the knife in her sister’s hand should be covered in blood and tissue.

The horrible thing was once one of those decorative daggers anyone could buy in a mall kiosk that catered to fantasy and anime fans, but Luna had painstakingly sharpened every edge and point until the monstrous blade was perfectly capable of cutting into flesh like a scalpel. The series of even lines that scored her little sister’s arm from wrist to elbow were testament to that.

“Luna, please, just stop! You’re hurting yourself, I can’t…”

“OF COURSE IT’S ABOUT YOU!” roared Luna, her canine teeth long and pointed and white enough to be visible from stage while she was performing in five years. Celestia didn’t know why Luna was in her stage makeup half a decade before she first declared herself Nightmare Moon to a throng of adoring “Lunatics,” but that wasn’t the point right now. “You, you, you! It’s NEVER about me! I don’t get to have a breakdown when our parents died, only precious, responsible OLDER SISTER Celestia gets to weep nobley over their caskets! Only Queen Bee Celestia gets the hoard of sympathetic...sycophants that I used to call “friends” before they all TURNED THEIR BACKS ON ME AND RAN OFF TO YOU!”

This was spinning out of control way too quickly. Celestia knew her sister would accidentally stab her in a minute, maybe less. She had to get the knife away from her before she robbed Celestia of the ability to bear children cut herself again. Celestia couldn’t live through the next twenty years of life reliving the crippling realization over and over again every time her friends and sister had their periods, reminding her that she didn’t have a functional womb. Luna could wind up going too far and actually slit her wrists, killing herself either accidentally or on purpose.

Without any further hesitation, she lept for the knife wrapping her wrists around her younger sister’s. She was expecting her greater height to give her the advantage, but she misjudged her sister’s anger-fueled state and found herself truly struggling. She managed to get the knife away from Luna, her sister collapsi...but she misjudged her sister’s anger-fueled state and found herself truly struggling. Luna dropped the knife, howling at her sist...but she misjudged her sister’s anger-fueled state and found herself truly struggling. She pushed the younger woman down and pinned her with her body, managing to knock the phone off the wal...but she misjudged her sister’s anger-fueled state and found herself truly struggling. No matter how many times she lived through this, it always ended the same. Her sister’s angry thrashing coupled with an inexperienced, weak grip resulted in the knife wielding arm suddenly slamming down, a gouge being torn in her breast in line with the sudden presence of a metal spike in her gut. The sudden motion caused them to fall, jamming the knife further in, jostling it so the barbed blade turned part of her abdomen into hamburger.

The shock crystalised the moment in Celestia’s mind, looking down at the black blade, her sister screaming her name as she called an ambulance. The one thought that kept running through her mind as she slowly lost consciousness was that she had to clean the blood up if they were going to have guests coming over in an ambulance.

Celestia awoke, her mind still locked in that moment, wondering if she was in the process of dying and her life for the last two decades had been just the hallucination of a fading brain. She blinked her eyes, realizing she was in a pitch dark room, and her fear started to build. She had liked that dream where she became a principal of a school and lived long enough to have met a magical princess from another world...no, wait, the dream was the night of The Incident, wasn’t it?

She needed proof. She needed some confirmation that she wasn’t dying on the floor of the kitchen that had belonged to her parents, something to confirm that she was an independent adult that had a life and a job and a purpose outside of dying in a stupid accident at her sister’s hand.

She started to shift, her body breaking from her sleep paralysis and letting her mind control it. She realized there was something pinning her down. Her eyes now finally cleared of the blurriness of waking, she looked down and saw a head resting on her shoulder, a cascade of red and yellow hair crowning a (finally!) peacefully sleeping young woman.

Her memories started to straighten themselves out from there. She had prepared a dinner for Sunset, this time an enthusiastically consumed fettuccine alfredo (admittedly, she splurged a bit and had a ride-share driver deliver a small load of groceries so she could have all the ingredients to make it), before the pair made their way to the guest bedroom and Sunset climbed into bed. The girl spent an appreciable amount of time tossing and turning as Celestia sat by the bed, book in her hand as she tried to stay awake to keep the girl company. Eventually she just climbed into the bed herself, and Sunset tentatively snuggled next to the older woman. Celestia opened her book again and resumed reading, and it wasn’t too long before Sunset was reading too, every so often holding Celestia’s hand away from the page before she could turn it so Sunset could finish reading. The pauses to let Sunset finish grew longer and longer as time past, until a light, sighing snore met Celestia’s ears. Celestia did her best to keep the side buried under Sunset still as she used her other arm to put the book on the bedside table and turn off the light, falling to sleep shortly after.

It was no wonder she revisited The Incident in her dreams. Especially when Luna had been in juvenile hall, the first few years after the accidental stabbing she kept having night terrors of that event. Her sister’s spiral into depression followed by the self-destructive behavior that Celestia was convinced would lead to Luna committing suicide was very reminiscent of another teen girl who’d done things that had hurt people around her.

20 years ago…

“But I’m not pressing charges!” snapped Celestia at the man across the desk from her.

“I’m afraid, Miss Faust, that it doesn’t matter if you’re pressing charges or not, she committed assault on you and needs to be held accountable for her actions.” the man in the odd, mismatched suit held a smirk that could curdle milk, and his odd yellow eyes held malicious intent, but his position and authority meant that he could pretty much do as he chose within his particular sphere of influence. And since that sphere happened to be District Attorney of Canterlot City, he was able to pursue taking a minor to court to try her as an adult for attempted murder.

Celestia took a deep breath, trying to keep her blood pressure down so she didn’t rupture any stitches. “If anyone is responsible for the accident, it’s me. I’m the one who jumped at her, I’m the one who…” the painful emotions were still too raw, she couldn’t finish her sentence.

“Yes, and she’s the one who purchased the knife, she’s the one who sharpened it for use on a person, and we have records from her school that she has expressed anger directly at you, wishing for your death and then planning her own suicide.”

This wasn’t news to Celestia. The documents had been revealed at the preliminary hearings and the judge had disallowed them as evidence seized outside of the proper bounds of patient privacy law. The cat was out of the bag, however, and Celestia had learned just how badly she had been ignoring her younger sister and how badly Luna had needed her to be there. Eyes burning from tears that had been simply wrung out of her by now, Celestia did her best to keep her voice at civil volumes, “I’m sure that she was upset and, perhaps, I could have been more attentive to her…”

“My dear Celestia...may I call you Celestia?” he didn’t let her answer, “If you had been ‘more attentive,’” really, the air quotes with his fingers was just pretentious, “Given her state of mind we’d have found a pair of bodies instead of one seriously injured young lady and her sister holding a knife and covered in blood.”

Celestia realized she was getting nowhere. This...creature wasn’t interested in actual justice, let alone mercy, so it didn’t matter what she said to him. “Very well Mr. Chord...”

“Oh, please, ‘Mr. Cord’ is my father. Call me Dis.”

Celestia withheld the comment on the name ‘Dis’ being a literal layer of Hell, “...I won’t waste any more of your time. Thank you for seeing me.”

The visitor’s room of the juvenile hall was surprisingly well appointed and actually granted a modicum of privacy. Celestia’s visions of a horrible cement room with bad lighting and worse guards was belied the first time she came by the day she got out of the hospital. “I couldn’t get him to drop the charges.”

Luna didn’t look good in the prison orange jumpsuit she had been supplied when transferred to juvie from the county jail. But then, she just looked crummy in general. Luna hadn’t looked Celestia in the eye since they first saw each other the first time the older sister visited. “Sister…” she began, “I know you think you’re helping...but it’s just as well that you weren’t able to convince the D.A. to let me off. I…” she sighed, still looking at the table’s surface, “I’m clearly not well and have needed help for some time, I just didn’t know how to ask for it.”

Celestia reached across the table, not too quickly, though. She’d learned that lesson the first time she lunged at her sister to try and hug her, she’d been tackled by an overzealous guard for her efforts. “Luna, this whole thing, it’s my own fault. If I’d just paid more attention to you…”

For the first time since the night of the stabbing, Luna looked her sister in the eye, “NO!” she snapped. “This...this is my fault. I blamed you for...for everything. My friends leaving me because I was being a loner, for my depression, for...the accident.” Their parent’s deaths were still fresh enough that neither could reference the traffic incident that had turned lethal. “I...I’ve been talking with the shrink here in juvie.” Luna finally smiled, just a little, “She got me some pills...it’s like I don’t have to be sad anymore. I don’t...I don’t feel helpless. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever realized...maybe I get to be in control of me.”

At Celestia’s bewildered look, Luna finally reached across the table and clasped Celestia’s hand. “I was blaming all the things that were happening to me on a 19-year old girl. That’s not fair to you, I’m just so, so sorry I hurt you before I was able to get the help I needed.”

As though she hadn’t shed enough tears in the last few weeks, Celestia bent nearly double to clasp Luna’s hand to her forehead, tears streaming from her eyes anew. They sat there that way for a few minutes before Celestia was able to collect herself.

When she sat up and wiped at her eyes, she said, “I don’t know what I’ll do without you. We’ve already lost mom and dad…”

Luna’s sad smile actually grew at this. “You’ll survive, and you’ll thrive. I know you, ‘Tia. You’re going to land on your feet, you’re going to look fabulous doing it, and people will think you were born on the pedestal they’ll put you on. No,” Luna waved Celestia’s objections away before her older sister could give them voice, “I’m not upset, I’m just telling it like it is. Nearly...nearly killing someone can give you...perspective.”

The older girl sighed, “I...guess? But it’ll still be so long without you.”

Luna dropped her eyes to look at their clasped hands. “It’s okay, my G.A.L. is telling me that the judge is planning on reducing my sentence from what that idiot D.A. recommended. Only a little under three years.” she smiled up at her sister, and for the first time Celestia realized she didn’t see the emotional pain her sister had been carrying for so long that she didn’t think Luna had ever been without it before. “Just 1,000 days to freedom. It’s not so bad, all things considered.”

Present day…

Sunset had roused enough to use the bathroom on her own and then join Celestia in the kitchen, where there was a couple of stools pulled up to the island in the center. Normally, Celestia and Luna would have breakfast together there, but the vice-principal had left early to get an early start on the increased workload that was plaguing the two sisters since the situation had come to a climax two Fridays prior. While Sunset ate the quickly prepared omelet Celestia had thrown together for the girl, Celestia set up her laptop on the island next to her notebook and logged on to the VPN that connected her to the school’s network.

Celestia noticed that Sunset would glance over at the laptop, then back down at her empty plate. After pondering for a moment, she said, “I just noticed you don’t have your phone, and to the best of my recollection nobody has mentioned you having one since the girls found you last Sunday.” Sunset looked up at the educator like a kicked puppy, then slid off the stool, picked up the plate, and went to start rinsing it off in the sink.

After a bit more pondering, Celestia smiled in the smile of the Secret Santa. “Sunset?” the girl paused in her cleaning and turned just enough to be able to see Celestia, “I’m going to head to the mall to pick up a couple of things. Do you…no sorry, I almost asked a question. If you would like to come, please meet me at the door. Otherwise you will be in charge here and can feel free to read or nap or even eat more. Heaven’s knows you need it.” She smiled at the girl, hoping to get a reaction. Sunset merely sighed then returned to washing her single dish.

Celestia re-entered the home nearly three hours after she left. It had taken significantly longer than she expected, given that she was only picking up one item, but she hoped it would be worth it. “Sunset,” she called to the house at large, “I’m back. Please come to the kitchen.” While she normally wouldn’t want to sound...rude, she couldn’t think of a way to phrase her request without asking a question, and she’d rather not trigger one of Sunset’s odd seizures from rooms away on accident.

As the principal was settling in, putting her purse and shopping bag next to her temporary home-office setup, she heard the sounds of teenage feet padding down the hall from the guest bedroom. The girl was still in her borrowed pajamas, a pair of socks, and holding a book. A glance at the spine showed it was one of her sister’s, an early entry in The Jewelbox Files. Celestia’s mouth quirked into a small grin, wondering how a magic user from an alternate world might react to the fictional adventures of a wizard-cum-detective in modern Chicacolt. Well, she thought to herself, That’s a good incentive to get her through this and being able to communicate. Sure, it was a small goal, but sometimes one needed small goals because the bigger ones could seem impossible.

“Have a seat,” she said as she sat down as well. Sunset’s face pinched slightly, clearly trying to ponder the purpose of this sudden meeting. “I confess I had a hidden purpose for going to the mall,” so saying, she gingerly pulled the focus of her shopping expedition out of the bag to reveal a cell phone retail box. It wasn’t the latest version, perhaps a generation or two behind, but it wasn’t an old, cheap model either. She gently placed the box in front of Sunset, who was simply staring at it like she expected it to bite her.

This was not the reaction she expected.

Gingerly, she reached back into the bag and pulled out another item. This was a simple case, or at least appeared to be at first. She flipped it over so the back could be seen. “I got this at the kiosk outside the phone store. I noticed that you used to have this symbol on your clothes, so I figured you might want your phone to have it, too.” The yin/yang sunburst symbol that Celestia was referring to was easy enough to find (she did ‘lurk’ on her student’s social networking sites, after all, she knew exactly where to find a good picture of the back of Sunset’s jacket) for the employee to be able to feed into their sticker printer, which was then applied to the back of the blank case and then flash laminated with a heat gun while Celestia watched.

As Sunset hesitantly reached out for the case, she gently gripped it with both hands for a moment, then set it on the counter next to the still closed box. With the deliberation of a Neighponese tea ceremony, the girl opened the box and pulled out the small slab of black glass and metal trim. She carefully applied the case and turned the phone on, setting it down as the familiar logo of the phone’s OS appeared. For a moment, they watched it boot.

Before it finished, Celestia decided to break the silence. “I thought, well..I thought you needed to have some independence. I don’t know if you can actually use the keyboard for much, since I noticed you haven’t tried to write anything or type, but you can at least browse the web and maybe play some games. And who knows, maybe...maybe you’ll be able to write to me to keep in touch if you need to, when you can. I…” she hesitated to mention this, but it needed to be said, so she steeled herself and plunged ahead, “I know you don’t have anyone as a support network, but maybe I can be your emergency contact? Just in case?”

The phone finished booting up, showing the “swipe to unlock” screen. Sunset let the screen sleep, then slipped out of her chair. To Celestia’s great surprise, the girl wrapped her arms around the educator and started shivering. The principal overcame her surprise and returned the hug quickly, only for Sunset to pull away. At first Celestia thought this was to end the hug, but then Sunset put her hands on Celestia’s shoulders and, for the first time since Celestia picked her up on Friday, uttered a sound. “Th...ththth...th…”

Celestia shook her head, “No, Sunset, please. You don’t have to say anything! We don’t know what’s wrong or if you could hurt yourself trying to…”

Sunset’s hands turned to fists as she started shaking, “...th..tha...t’t’t’t…” Sweat started to bead on her forehead as she fought some internal battle, now gripping the neckline of Celestia’s shirt as she struggled, “Than...thank…” Celestia now put her hands supportively on Sunset’s shoulders, practically holding the girl up as she clashed with whatever was restraining her ability to speak. She took some breaths, as though steadying herself for the second half of a marathon run. “...y...yu…” Tears started leaking from her eyes, and Celestia found herself crying along with her student as a final syllable finally escaped, her voice starting to squeeze off suddenly, “...youuu…” She ended with a rasp, then finally collapsed against Celestia, who embraced her and kept her from falling to the floor.

Abruptly Sunset shuddered and stood. When Celestia could see her face, she could see that Sunset was terrified, but whatever the problem was came from inside her. Suddenly, her eyes blazed with light. To Celestia’s credit, she didn’t do more than flinch, but watched as the white light blazed for a moment, and for just an instant, the principal was worried she’d have a giant she-demon in her kitchen, but then she realized there was some sort of pattern in the light. A wheel...or a gear? She thought as the light streamed from Sunset’s eyes.

Just as suddenly as it started, the light show stopped, and Sunset slumped down. Celestia caught her and eased her back onto her own stool. Making sure the girl wasn’t going to collapse all the way to the floor, Celestia was just sitting back down herself when Sunset surged back to full alert, this time lunging across Celestia to grab one of the notepads out of the binder that the principal had sitting next to her computer. Yanking it over to her, scattering some pens and pencils in the process, Sunset scrambled for a writing tool. Before Celestia could even recover enough to stand up to move out of Sunset’s way, the girl was already scrambling to write on the notepad. As Celestia watched, she realized that the sudden surge of energy wasn’t over, it was just focused on writing, and it was frantic in a script that Celestia barely recognized but was only just able to read. Apple...jack? Yes, that’s Applejack! Rarity, Rainbow Dash...there’s Thunderlane, Pinkie Pie, Apple Bloom? Micro Chips...she’s just...oh!

Realization struck Celestia and without interrupting Sunset she turned back to her computer. A quick unlock and she brought up the student records on her computer. A quick command to the database and Celestia leapt up to run to the living room, where Luna had the printer set up that they used for the frequent times they had to work from home. Fifteen minutes later, she hurried back to the kitchen island and pushed the stack of paper under Sunset’s hands.

The girl paused in her writing and looked at the printout, which was just a list of the names of all the students at CHS. She rapidly read down the list, turned the page, then repeated the scan until she’d reached the end of the stack. She nodded, then set the stack aside. She started writing again after skipping a few lines. Celestia read the writing, Let’s see, that’s me...Luna...Ms. Harshwinney? Prof. Whooves...she’s doing the staff now! Once again, Celestia turned back to her computer to print another list.

A much shorter list being given silent approval followed by a much smaller handful of names being hand-written (including the Cakes that owned Sugar Cube Corner and a few others that were neither students nor faculty of CHS), and Sunset finally collapsed against the counter...for a few breaths. Then she reached for the first page of the printout of students and started to tear the paper. At first Celestia couldn’t imagine why she would be tearing apart the printout, then she realized that Sunset was tearing it into strips, one strip per name.

“Hang on,” she said, “I’ll grab some scissors.”

Luna strode down the hallway of Canterlot High, Applejack trailing behind her. “Thank you again, Applejack. With the fallout from the Fall Formal, the rest of the staff are rather busy, and I know your whole family already knows what’s going on and can be trusted to keep things quiet.”

Applejack tipped her hat to the vice-principal. “A’course.” she said simply as they approached on locker in particular.

Luna sighed in disappointed anger and Applejack whistled under her breath. “Well,” began the student, “I reckon people are a...mite upset at Sunset.” Covering the locker from top to bottom was graffiti. Some were just in marker, some in pen, at least one person managed to get a can of red and yellow spray paint into the school, and Luna was pretty sure she recognized the acrylics that the art classrooms used. Several overlapped, some were just simple single word statements like, “bitch,” others were more derogatory to Sunset directly. Luna’s stomach turned when she spotted a symbol that had been used by a genocidal madman three quarters of a century earlier and had been adopted by some radical extremists in the intervening decades. It was a symbol that had denoted racial supremacy, and seeing it painted on Sunset’s locker just confirmed what the school staff had already heard rumors of.

“I’ll have school maintenance...remove the door or something.” growled Luna. She lifted the combination lock and used the administrator key to disengage the latch the lock was holding closed. Opening the locker, they were met with a small avalanche of notes that had been shoved through the locker’s ventilation slots, the pair picked up one each and read, mostly in morbid curiosity.

‘I hope you die and go back to the hell you crawled out of.’ Not terrifically creative… thought Luna.

“‘You finally showed your true colors, bitch,’” recited Applejack. “Wow, they had t’stretch for that one.” she said sarcastically, “Are these people attending the same classes I am? ‘Cause Ms. Cheerilee’d read me the riot act for writin’ somethin’ so...predictable.” She crumpled the paper up and tossed it on the pile of the others.

Luna sighed, “As much as I’d like to just sweep this up and be done with it, someone does need to document it all for legal reasons. Now who am I going to get to go through them all?”

“I could...no, wait, I got chores on the farm later, and we had to put a few off last week ‘cause...well…” they both flinched a little, “Maybe Rarity could...no, wait, she’s got work tonight. Maybe she can get out of it, but I don’t wanna speak for her. RD...well, you’d never get her t’sit still long enough. Even worse with Pinkie. Maybe Fluttershy?”

“What about me?” came a quiet voice from behind them. They both turned with a yelp and saw Fluttershy standing there holding a hall pass. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you, I just heard my name. And that the others couldn’t help...and that some really mean people were saying some really bad things that need to be documented…” she timidly trailed off.

Luna resisted the urge to shake her head in irritation, “Actually, Fluttershy, your friend Applejack was just trying to volunteer to assist, but this really should be a staff matter. I just can’t think of anyone we can spare to get it done.”

“Oh, well I could help, that is, if you want me to. I already did the homework for all my classes I have in the morning, and afternoons are just home ec, P.E., and art, and none of those teachers ever give us homework. And the shelter doesn’t need me until this weekend, so I was just going to be at home with my...brother.” Neither of them missed the pause, and Applejack shuddered. Luna had also encountered the younger sibling, and did not enjoy the experience. The number of complaints from other teachers (and one of those teachers transferring out of the school because of it) about Fluttershy’s brother were legendary in the district, let alone the school.

“Shee-oot, Flutters,” began Applejack, “Why didn’t you say somethin’ earlier? You know we’ll gladly make room for you on the farm.”

Fluttershy smiled, “Oh, thank you, Applejack, but I wouldn’t want to be a bother. Besides, Rainbow already offered. I was going to go there after dinner.”

Luna nodded firmly, “Well, it looks like we have a plan, however accidental it may be. Fluttershy, you finish your current task and come back to help us with these notes. Make sure you bring back a bag. After school you’ll stay with me and I’ll make sure you get something to eat while we get these documented, then I’ll drop you off at Rainbow Dash’s house on my way home.” With a nod, Fluttershy hurried back to her classroom. Luna and Applejack turned back to the locker, “And you and I will finish up the task we came for. If you would please gather Sunset’s belongings from the bottom, I’ll clear the shelf and hooks.” With a nod, Applejack knelt down and started sweeping away some hate notes from Sunset’s books and binders. Luna started by grabbing the books on top, but had to pause when she realized that one was much larger than any textbook Luna had ever seen. She pulled it down and temporarily re-shelved the other books she was already holding to investigate.

The cover was soft and smooth, and in the center of the cover was what Luna recognized as the symbol that Sunset liked to wear on her person and often added almost as a signet when she turned in essays. Luna opened the book to a random page, only to find it blank. She flipped around in the book and realized that only the first two dozen or so pages had anything on them, and it was handwritten. Ah, a journal, Luna realized, closing it and then resuming gathering Sunset’s belongings.

Several hours later, Luna was finally able to let the door to her home close behind her and put her purse and the bag with Sunset's locker contents down on the coffee table. She looked up to the kitchen to see if her sister had any dinner ready, only to see a paper wasteland.

That was, perhaps, a bit hyperbolic. There was a decent papery mess, as well as...is that string? Celestia’s computer sat on the counter of the island, untouched, with torn and cut paper strewn around it. Luna noticed the paper shreds were forming a trail that went down the hall, and a brief investigation showed the trail led into the guest bedroom. She pushed the door open, light spilling out into the hallway, to see Celestia sitting on the floor amidst small scattered piles of paper shreds, lengths of cut string, at least two empty spools of the stuff and four different colors of partial string balls. In Celestia’s lap was Sunset Shimmer’s head, the girl fast asleep and clutching a cell phone to her chest like a security blanket. Sunset was practically curled around the phone, breathing deeply in her sleep as Celestia stroked the girl’s forehead and hair.

The furniture had been moved away from the one wall that didn’t have a door, window, or closet on it. Yearbook pictures that had been blown up and printed out on letter-sized printer paper of the five students who had assisted Princess Twilight at the Fall Formal were in the middle, arranged around an otherwise blank page that just had the word “magic?” written on it in Sunset’s flowing script. Rarity, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, and Fluttershy were the five who’s pictures graced the wall, with their names and some personality attributes listed beneath them. Applejack being paired with Honesty I get, but why is and while odd I understand Pinkie being listed with Laughter...OK, I’m seeing the pattern now. Each of the five were listed with their respective most dominant personality trait. What that meant Luna didn’t yet know. Connected with string was the names of other students, teachers, and the handwritten names of people in the community. Applejack being connected to her family made sense, as did Rarity being connected to Sweetie Bell, but Rarity had hundreds of connections (probably the reason two spools of thread had been used up) and Rainbow Dash had a similar number, but the color of the string was different for apparently different connections. Luna thought at first that red thread indicated family, as that was how Applejack was connected to her kin and Rarity with Sweetie Bell, but Rainbow Dash was connected with Scootaloo with a similar red thread, and Luna knew they weren’t related by blood.

“You’ve been busy.” said Luna quietly.

Celestia smiled wanly, a slightly shell-shocked look underlying her exhausted expression, “...something...something to do with magic happened. I have no doubt about it now, her inability to communicate is related to what happened at the Fall Formal.” She looked down at Sunset with an expression that Luna might have mistaken for...no, don’t be silly Luna, it’s just a teacher being proud of their student.

“She couldn’t stop,” continued Celestia. “Once it started she needed to write the names, needed to make the connections. She still can’t explain what they all mean, but we’re up there…” she nodded her head in the direction of the slips of paper and string. Sure enough, there was a pair of slips labeled with her and her sister’s names, connected with string to dozens of others and a red string between them. There was also some blue carpenter’s tape wrapped around it, though what that meant she didn’t have a clue. “...so whatever this is about, it’s more than just the students.”

Luna pondered the compilation of string and paper for a moment, then shook her head. “Well, we’re not going to solve this tonight. Have you eaten?”

Celestia waved to the corner of the room with her free hand. “I ordered some Chinese. I think Sunset may be a vegetarian. She wasn’t happy with having a hamburger the other night, but she eagerly ate the fettuccini alfredo yesterday and the vegetables from tonight, but avoided the meats entirely.”

Luna pondered this for a moment. “Hmm...if she’s truly an alien, then she may not have known that humans can’t be purely herbivorous without some additional supplements. That would explain some of her behaviors, as well as why she got noticeably worse over time.”

Celestia’s eyebrows rose as she made the same connection, “Of course, that would make quite a bit of sense, and I’ll bet Princess Twilight wouldn’t know about this either. I wonder if the magic they used did something to re-balance the amino acids...but that wouldn't explain why she can’t talk.”

“Again, sister, we’re not going to resolve this tonight.” she knelt down and started to get her arms around Sunset’s knees, “Get her arms, let’s get her into bed.”Celestia let Luna take the lead in getting first Sunset, then herself into bed. As she drifted off she had the sudden thought that Sunset might wake up before her and panic, but slipped off to sleep before she could force herself back awake to return to Sunset’s room.

Author's Note

Six thousand words.

You're welcome.

11/12/2019 - Minor edit: Added strikethrough that had gotten stripped out in the reformatting for FiMFiction.net from Google Docs, corrected the reference to Fluttershy's brother's age

Chapter 4 - All We Do Crumbles to the Ground

Author's Note

8k words.

I dun told you.

EDIT: 11/29/2019 07:28 am
Actually nearly 9,000 words.

Made some changes suggested in the comments for word usage, also did another read through for grammar and punctuation and fixed a missing strike-through that got through the import tool I use.

Chapter 4 - All We Do Crumbles to the Ground

Pinkie Pie was a giant pink golden retriever. This was the only conclusion Celestia could possibly come to as she looked at the five girls on her front porch. The only thing that Celestia found truly odd about the pink girl after having her for a student for two years now was the lack of a pink collar as she stood next to Rainbow Dash and yipped and panted like a dog. With the recognition that the girl had to be a canine in human form, it made complete sense that she should find Sunset Shimmer in situations where she could not possibly be expected to. One simply had to ignore the fact that a human girl couldn’t possibly be a dog in disguise.

No, wait, magic is a real thing, maybe Pinkie could actually be a dog. Or maybe it’s just Pinkie being Pinkie.

While Rainbow Dash sighed and scratched Pinkie behind the ears to get her to stop yipping, Rarity explained their presence on their principal’s doorstep. “So you see, while we do understand that you’re probably the best person to be taking care of Sunset during this...challenging time, we all realized that as ‘convenient’ as it would be to let someone else handle the matter, none of us felt right not following through on a request for an absent friend, especially when that friend tasked us with the wellbeing of another person.”

Celestia couldn’t help but smile in pride at the five.

“Besides,” interjected Rainbow Dash, “Nobody’s seen you at school in days, people are starting to talk.”

Applejack flicked Rainbow’s ear, prompting an offended ‘Ow!’ before speaking up herself. “Bein’ honest with you, Principal, it seems Sunset’s...fall, fer lack of a better word, has made a...whatcha-callum…”

“A power vacuum,” prompted Rarity.

“That’s the jasper. While the rest of the students are pretty open and friendly, seems there’s some...elements that’re hoping to pick up where Sunset left off. Me’n Rainbow found and interrupted a couple’a altercations. Rarity’s been hearin’ ‘bout some people tryin’ t’pick up Sunset’s information network, and Pinkie’s been noticin’ some people hornin’ in on her party last week, tryin’ t’keep out some people on account that they aint in the right group.” Applejack shook her head ruefully.

Pinkie put her hands on her hips, “I didn’t say that, I just said that those cheerleaders clearly didn’t know how one of my parties worked because they kept telling people coming in that they needed an invite. I don’t do ‘invites,’ because then how will I be able to make all those friends that I’ve never met before and so wouldn’t get an invite because I didn’t know their name to invite them? So I told those girls that they didn’t need to man the door like they were doing and they could just enjoy the party, but I think one of them musta had something bad for lunch because she got a sour look on her face and left, so I guess she needed to use the bathroom or something, and it was kinda a bummer because a bunch of her friends went with her to make sure she was okay, and I mean I know girls often go to the bathroom in groups because we like to chat and keep each other company but that was way too many people for a bathroom run, but then maybe they were going to get something from the pharma…” the remainder of Pinkie’s sentence was muffled by Rainbow Dash’s hands.

Rarity continued, “The point is, once we realized that you probably hadn’t sent Sunset to a foster care or something similar, we figured that she was still with you after you’d picked her up from Sweet Apple Acres. Pinkie said she knew how to find your home, and a short car caravan later, here we are.”

Celestia stifled a sigh as she pondered her options. It was true that she hadn’t been back to the school since taking in Sunset, but she didn’t regret that decision on the grounds that the girl needed someone to take care of her. But then, a good leader knows when to delegate, and who to delegate to. She smiled at the group, “I’ll have to check with Sunset to make sure she feels up to visitors, but I don’t see the problem with you checking on her. Come on in,” she stepped back to give them access to the foyer, “Just stay by the door until I can ask her.”

The girls gratefully shuffled in. They had to have come straight from school to get here when they did, nonetheless, the sun was starting to set and the chill fall air was brisk enough to make the coats they were wearing a requirement. After shutting the door, Celestia left the girls huddled together (Rainbow and Pinkie already pulling off their jackets without waiting for Sunset’s final say) and padded into the living room to find Sunset had fallen asleep sitting curled up at the end of the couch. Celestia noticed that the girls hushed when they saw Sunset.

Sunset still clutched her new phone in one hand, her head tilted forward in what had to be a horrible angle for the girl’s neck. Celestia giggled to herself, noticing that Sunset had managed to hook the case of her phone on the bandages around her right hand, which was probably all that was keeping the phone from tumbling to the floor. She carefully lifted the phone out of the girl’s grip and gently shook her shoulder. “Sunset, sweetie, you have some visitors.”

With a mild snort, the girl shook herself awake. She blinked owlishly and almost frantically looked around until she saw Celestia, then saw the older woman holding out her phone. The girl took it with a smile, unlocking it out of clear habit. Celestia nodded in the direction of the front door, “The girls are here to see you. Do you think you’re up to visiting with them?”

For a moment, Sunset was panicked, but then she saw who Celestia was referring to and sagged back into the couch. Sunset tapped on the phone’s screen, a mechanical voice saying, “Yes.”

Celestia turned to the girls, “Come on in, thanks for your patience.”

Rarity squawked in protest as Pinkie and Rainbow dropped their jackets on the foyer floor, Pinkie bouncing as she was wont to do, somehow the others not in her way as she gave herself a tour of the living room around Sunset while Rainbow pretty much vaulted over the railing separating the small foyer space from the living room, darting over to plant herself next to Sunset on the couch.

Rainbow had been hesitant about the idea of approaching the Principal and VP when they weren’t at school, but the others had made a whole bunch of good points that she couldn’t come up with any reason it was a bad idea against, so she went along about as enthusiastically as one of the school’s resident pranksters could be when meeting with an educator and authority figure in any setting.

The athlete wasn’t quite sure what she’d been expecting in terms of the house where Principal Celestia and her sister lived, but a (by all appearances) completely normal house wasn’t it. Maybe it was just her preconceptions from when she first entered the school system and teachers seemed like demi-gods and principals seemed like Faust Herself ruling from atop The Canterhorn. Somehow she’d expected some sort of grand palace. It was a bit jarring to encounter a comfortable home (and the television was a nice model with, like, all the game systems hooked up to it).

Dash scrambled in to sit right next to Sunset before anyone else could on purpose. She knew her friends, even with a gulf of time of a couple years before Princess Twilight showed up. Pinkie would be likely to get well inside Sunset’s personal bubble, Rarity would also get a little too up-close and personal under the impression that physical proximity would naturally lead to emotional intimacy. Applejack would sit across the room as near to face to face as she could manage, but doing nothing about the other two making Sunset uncomfortable until it’d been pushed too far, and Fluttershy would be likely to park herself on the other end of the room completely and say nothing as to “not make anyone upset.”

Dash loved her friends, but sometimes they seemed like they were completely clueless with how to deal with people who didn’t deal well with other people. Growing up with Fluttershy as a best friend helped the otherwise extremely extroverted Rainbow Dash learn how to recognize when someone was pegging all the “Oh, Faust, too many people get me out of here!” meters. Right now, Sunset Shimmer was showing all the signs that she was fighting her fight or flight instincts and that she had just been woken up probably wasn’t helping. Thus her parking herself in the spot next to the apparently alien girl; not so close she was touching, but close enough that even the antics of Pinkie “I have no idea what ‘personal space’ means” Pie couldn’t wedge herself in.

As the other girls made themselves comfortable and Principal Celestia sat on a stool in the connected kitchen where she could watch the interaction, Rainbow leaned slightly nearer to Sunset and nudged her conspiratorially, “So, you’re an alien?” she asked with a grin.

This seemed to be just what the other girl needed because she smirked and tapped on her phone again and the slightly mechanical voice came from it, “Yes.”

Putting the confusion of why the girl was responding with the phone to the back of her mind (she’d ask Applejack or Fluttershy about it, she could have sworn they said something earlier that week about it, but she wasn’t paying the closest attention and couldn’t remember exactly) she let her smirk break into a grin, “That’s pretty cool.”

“Oooh, what’s that?!” piped in the high-pitched voice of Pinkie Pie. Before anyone could react, the girl who more resembled an over-caffeinated ball of pink frizz snatched Sunset’s phone from her hands. Sunset looked positively panicked now, and Rainbow was about to launch herself at Pinkie to retrieve the phone.

The girls were spared the inevitable hijinks when Principal Celestia’s voice cut in, “Return that immediately, Ms. Pie.” Anyone who has ever experienced the sun breaking through the clouds in the depths of winter would understand the cold chills that were caused by the simple command spoken with dispassionate authority. Pinkie got the look of a very small animal that’s been targeted by a bird of prey as she slowly, exaggeratedly held the phone in a pinching grip with both hands, touching as little of it as possible, as she stretched her arms out and deposited the device in Sunset’s waiting hands, the entire time maintaining a rictus grin as she kept her eyes locked with the principal’s.

Only once Sunset was once again holding her phone did Celestia explain, “For whatever reason, Sunset has lost her ability to speak or write. I believe it’s related in some way to the magic used at the Fall Formal. The phone has software on it that is normally used for helping low-functioning autistic kids to communicate. Without that phone, Sunset cannot even give a yes or no answer to a question without having some sort of seizure.”

The mood was already pretty depressed, but that declaration killed it completely. “Sorry Sunset,” muttered Pinkie Pie.

Rainbow watched as Sunset tapped one of the three large buttons on her phone’s screen, which brought up another panel of buttons, and she tapped the big green one at the top. “Thanks,” came the robotic voice.

Pinkie giggles, back to her usually perky self. “You sound like Amazon now,” she gushed, referring to the smart-assistant that was being sold by the online retailer Silk Road, “Hey Sunset, tell me a joke!”

Sunset gave the pink girl a flat look and tapped another button on her phone, “No,” came the voice.

That got a laugh from the girls and Celestia leaned back with a sip of her coffee, the initial tension dispelled.

The Sunday after the Fall Formal...

“Are we really wasting our time following Pinkie Pie around because her ears tingle?!” growled Rainbow Dash.

Rarity looked up from her phone where she was busy texting, “I do understand, Rainbow, but we’ve hit a bit of a dead-end. It seems that nobody has ever been to Sunset’s place, and my contacts that have access to Sunset’s file in the school database are coming up with the Chinese restaurant.”

The restaurant in question could still be smelled. It was pretty run-of-the-mill Chinese food, featuring the “fast food” versions (in other words, heavily regionalized and almost unrecognizable by anyone from China) that the teenagers were familiar with, and since it was a fast food place the scent of cooking grease could be smelled for blocks around it. Nearly as soon as they got to the location looking for Sunset, Pinkie declared that her “Pinkie Sense” was going off and they needed to head in a seemingly random direction.

Applejack gave a nod, “That an’ Pinkie’s...twitches are pretty accurate. I seen it happen enough where she twitches or wiggles or somethin’ and then what she says will happen happens.” The farmer put her hand on Rainbow’s shoulder, “I understand your lookin’ side-eyed at this, but just entertain us for a bit, ‘kay?”

As the sound of a train horn blaring briefly echoed through the warehouse district, Rainbow Dash sighed and nodded, kicking an empty beer can off in the direction Pinkie was leading them. Rarity was apparently tracking the motion of the can, as she gasped, “Girls...correct me if I’m wrong,” she began, pointing just shy of where the can skidded to a stop at a small red splotch on the ground, “But is that…?”

Applejack and Fluttershy dashed over to the spot, AJ poking her finger into the liquid and then taking a sniff of the fingertip. Fluttershy eyed the red substance and both nodded, “Ayup,” confirmed Applejack, “It’s blood, and it’s fresh.”

Dash scanned the area and spotted more, apparently in a trail. “Look! It goes that way!” she pointed down a gap between two warehouses.

“No, wait,” Rarity interrupted as another train horn blast, this one nearer, reverberated through the urban canyons around them, “The trail stops, or maybe starts only a little ways in. It continues off in that direction.” She pointed off to another gap between buildings opposite the one they were near, this one wide enough to drive a small truck through.

Pinkie did a shivering wiggle dance and clasped her nose. “That’s it! Follow that trail!” The girl then darted off in the direction of the trail of blood.

“Pinkie, wait!” snapped Dash as she and the other girls chased after.

Some part of Dash’s awareness realized that the longer, much closer blast of the train horn had something to do with their situation, but what she couldn’t be sure. She was (naturally) the first to catch up with Pinkie Pie and grabbed the other girl by the arm to stop her. The rest of their group either ran (as with Applejack and, surprisingly, Fluttershy) or staggered to catch up (as Rarity had, bending at the waist to catch her breath). Another blast from the train horn drew their attention across the field of broken down fencing and empty storage yards to see a train track and an old railroad crossing that was clearly not working. On that crossing stood Sunset Shimmer, staring down the tracks. The girls turned to see that the train was bearing down on the girl and now repeatedly blasting its horn.

Sunset wasn’t moving.

Rainbow and Applejack immediately took off running. “First one to the tracks gets Sunset off, the other makes sure the girls call 911.” breathed Applejack.

Rainbow surged ahead, “You know it’s gonna be me that gets there first!”

Rainbow gauged the distance from herself to Sunset, then from Sunset to the train. Less than a soccer field, more than a football field, she thought, ...a little over 100 yards. The train is about a quarter of that distance from Sunset, it’s moving half as fast as me when I’m sprinting...I can do this. I’ve got 20 seconds.

She heard Applejack stumble, then slow down as she turned to snap directives at the others. The corner of her mind that paid attention to details noted that she was ordering Fluttershy to hold on to Pinkie Pie and then having Rarity call 911.

15 seconds and she had to hurdle a downed fence. When standing it had been 9 feet tall, but it’d been pushed over by time and lack of maintenance until it was listing at an approximate 30-degree angle off the ground. She used it to launch herself forward, planting a foot on the crossbar that supported the barbed wiring without tangling her feet in it, then letting the elasticity of the metal launch her back up like a gymnastics springboard.

10 seconds and she had another obstacle, a cement barrier. This one she did a diving leap, curling into a roll that she leapt out of at a dead sprint to make up for losing time on the roll.

At five seconds, she heard the broken crossing signal finally engage, but by this point, the train was only a couple of yards away. That was okay, as the barriers would have made it harder to do what she needed to next.

Rainbow Dash leaped at Sunset, slamming into the other girl and knocking her off the tracks. The train was so close that the very tip of her tennis shoe was clipped as the train barreled through the spot where Sunset had been standing, causing Rainbow’s body to spin slightly as she tumbled to the ground holding Sunset protectively. Once the dust had settled as the train blew past, Rainbow pushed herself up and checked on the other girl.

Something was horribly wrong with Sunset’s right arm. It was clearly the cause of the trail of blood, as there were lacerations from her palm nearly up to her elbow. Dash’s first thought, that Sunset had tried to slit her wrists, was belied by several more similar wounds, but much smaller, that peppered the girl’s hand and wrists. One looked like Sunset may have lost a finger if whatever had caused the wound had been even a quarter-inch deeper. Sunset also didn’t have any shoes on, and no socks. She must have soles of iron because there was surprisingly no cuts in spite of walking across streets, fields, and alleyways that were littered with sheared metal, broken glass, and sharp rocks.

What really scared Rainbow, though, was the other girl’s eyes. They looked dead. They weren’t focussed on anything, and other than the occasional twitching and the dilation of the iris, Sunset’s eyes may as well have been a pair of glass spheres. If she wasn’t breathing, Dash would have assumed Sunset was dead from the eyes alone.

“C’mon, Shimmer, you need a hospital.” Dash tried to shake the girl. When there was no response, she shook harder, “Sunset, you need to get up. Even with AJ, I don’t think we can carry you to an emergency room.”

There was a blink then a groan, so weak that Rainbow almost didn’t hear it over the sound of the train. Other than that, Sunset didn’t respond.

Dash looked up and saw the other four girls standing on the other side of the train. It was like looking at one of those old film movies that you could still find tucked away in the storerooms at CHS run in slow motion. She watched as Rarity spoke on the phone, whatever she was saying lost to the clacking and roaring of the train. Pinkie and Fluttershy looked shocked and surprised, hugging each other for support. Applejack just got the same look she always did when given a difficult task that she’d do no matter what.

“Hang on Sunset,” said Rainbow, “I don’t know what’s wrong, but we’re here for you. We never leave a friend hanging.”

Present…

“What do you think, Dashie?” said Pinkie.

“Huh, whu…?” Rainbow brought her attention back to the present. “About what?”

Applejack snickered, “A little lost in yer own thoughts there, sugarcube?”

Dash rolled her eyes, “Yeah, so? I got bored hearing your countryisms.”

Pinkie waggled her hand, “Eh, I give it about a six on the Applewood Sick Burns index.”

“We were…” interjected Rarity forcefully, “Asking what you thought Sunset’s world is like. Pinkie decided to make a game of it while you were pondering...whatever you were pondering.” The last bit was said with an apologetic smile.

“Oh, huh...okay.” Rainbow glanced over at their resident alien and found the girl giggling quietly, her shoulders shaking and her eyes lit up with mirth. Well, as long as she’s good for it, let’s see what I can come up with. Rainbow pondered for a minute, then snapped her fingers, “I know, you come from a race of space squids! They’re actually distantly related to humans, but it’s been so many generations that even the computer records have gotten lost. You’re at war with a race of cyborgs and you came here to escape their evil mind probes!”

By the time Rainbow had finished, Sunset was doubled over in laughter, rapidly tapping the, “No” button on her phone.

Dash ignored Rarity complaining that she’d mostly lifted the idea from an anime (which was true, so she wasn’t going to fight the other girl on the point) in favor of letting Sunset have a good belly laugh. She may not have been a doctor with fancy titles or a head-shrink, but she could take some blows to her pride if it meant she’d help Sunset to never be that dead inside again.

Monday came with the inevitability of a sunrise. And with the sunrise, also came to Canterlot High a Sunset. Principal Celestia had told the girls that she was going to be bringing Sunset Shimmer for at least the first part of the day and then see how well the girl could keep up. The five had volunteered to take Sunset in so the principal could hold a staff meeting to explain Sunset’s presently...reduced capacity.

They had dropped Sunset off at her homeroom (which she shared with Fluttershy) and broke off to get to their own (Though apparently Applejack was on duty to help in the cafeteria kitchens instead of homeroom, something that Rainbow hadn’t been aware of until that morning).

Things had been going fairly well until until Rainbow got a text from Fluttershy that she didn’t know what class Sunset had for second period and as far as she knew none of them shared that class with Sunset. Rainbow dashed (heh) off a quick text to the group to confirm Fluttershy’s fears, then began racing down hallways as fast as she dared and not get called out on by a teacher.

The bell rang, and just as Rainbow made the conscious decision to take whatever time it took to find Sunset and damn the consequences, she hit the bottom of the stairwell and turned the corner in the eastern wing of the school and heard what she was hoping she wouldn’t. Down one of the lesser used hallways came a repeated and mechanical, “No.”

Dash darted around the corner to find Lightning Dust and her latest band of cronies, The Washouts, gathered around Sunset Shimmer at the join of a t-junction of hallways, cornering her against some lockers. Sunset had clearly been knocked to the ground, her backpack had spilled open and her two textbooks for the morning were being kicked against the wall by Short Fuse. Sunset had her injured arm tucked up against her torso in instinctive protection and her right hand was holding her phone, her thumb repeatedly tapping the “No” button on the display. Rolling Thunder kicked at Sunset’s legs, forcing the former bully to tuck in tighter and in an even less defensible position. Rainbow was far enough away that she couldn’t quite make out what Lightning Dust was saying, but the tone was clearly jeering and taunting.

Then Lightning snatched Sunset’s phone out of her hand, and Rainbow saw red.

Before Lightning could even get the phone turned around to look at the screen, Rainbow had rocketed down the hallway and slammed her knee against Lightning’s forearm, the force of the kneeing kick slamming the other girl’s arm against the locker, denting the locker and pinning the arm. A muffled cracking sound could be heard as Lightning’s fingers dropped the phone, and Rainbow snatched it out of the air. Rainbow had the fleeting thought that she was surprised that LIghtning hadn’t turned at her approach, but the thought was crowded out with being self-impressed on how quickly she was able to snatch the phone out of the air.

Dash was grateful for the martial arts lessons her father insisted she take (and then subsequently embarrass the stuffing out of her at every exhibition match) as she let her muscle memory launch her off the wall in a spinning punch that slammed into Rolling Thunder’s stomach. Dash was wondering if the girl’s reputation for being a hotheaded streetfighter, and a damn quick one at that, was warranted given how slowly the girl was moving. Hell, the girl almost wasn’t reacting to Rainbow’s arrival at all. She tossed the phone up and slammed her now free hand into a second solar plexus jab as she reached up and caught the phone with the hand that had just been used for an attack, a niggling worry that maybe she was missing something started to tickle her thoughts as she once again noted how the phone had, really, barely moved once it left her hand. Not wanting to give Rolling the chance to retaliate before she could deal with Short Fuse, Rainbow hooked a foot behind Rolling’s knee and yanked with the intent of forcing the other girl to fall. Her balance must have been pretty spectacular, because she remained vertical, though there were signs that she was starting to lean, so Dash slipped around the still reeling Lightning and drove a knee into Short Fuse’s rib cage, slamming the smaller girl against the lockers hard enough to cause the entire bank of them to thunder from the impact. The part of her brain that worked on quippy one-liners noted that she should have used this move on the other girl, as a joke about the lockers making the sound of ‘rolling thunder’ as she was kicked into them would have been hilarious. Another part of her brain, one that was starting to sound alarms, noted that the sound of the lockers crashing like they were shouldn’t sound like low rolling thunder, no matter how hard they were slammed against. As the girl dropped, Rainbow slipped the phone down into Sunset’s bandaged hand, being as careful as possible to not just throw it at her friend in case the injured arm might cause her to bobble the catch. Pushing away from the wall with her foot, Rainbow launched herself at Lightning Dust and grabbed the other girl by the collar. She was pulling back a fist when she became aware of what seemed like a very low voice saying her name as slowly as possible.

She paused to look around, then suddenly the world snapped into focus. Rolling Thunder finally let out an agonized wheeze from her stomach being impacted and collapsed to the floor, her leg whipped out in front of her. Short Fuse finally hit the floor after her forced faceplant with the lockers. Lightning Dust screeched in agony and clasped her right arm with her left, bursting into tears and the initial signs of shock started rocking her body. Under the sounds of the girl whose shirt was in Rainbow’s balled up fist came the odd voice, which suddenly sped up and went from a deep base to the more familiar alto of Vice-principal Luna, “...aaaaaaiiiinbow Dash, stop!”

Rainbow blinked and realized that the VP was just down the hall of the t-junction. She looked around and realized that Short Fuse was unconscious and barely breathing, Rolling Thunder was not breathing and her eyes were rolling in her head as she gagged and convulsively tried to take in air, and Lightning Dust’s arm was clearly broken and the girl was shaking from trauma. Dash lowered the other girl as gently as she could and glanced down the hallway she had just come down, realizing it was half the length of the soccer pitch and she’d covered the distance in less than a second, black scorch marks where her shoes had created friction burns in the two places her feet had actually made contact with the floor.

Sunset Shimmer’s eyes were wide with an expression of panic, her uninjured hand clasped over her mouth and her bandaged hand limply holding the phone that had been the catalyst for Rainbow’s reaction. Luna was just standing in the middle of the hallway, jaw hanging slack as she stared at her student.

“...what just happened?” asked Rainbow.

Rainbow Dash felt sick to her stomach. She could see the flashing lights of the three ambulances that had to be called in for the injuries she’d accidentally caused. She watched as they started pulling away in a caravan, fortunately none of them had to turn on the sirens as the injuries were determined to be severe but not critical. She almost didn’t hear anything Vice-principal Luna was saying.

“...and due to the...magical nature and you being as surprised as anyone else to what happened, I’m willing to overlook the rather nasty injuries you caused your fellow students.” Dash blinked owlishly, returning her focus to the disciplinarian. Would she really just be getting off scot free? That didn’t seem right. “Let’s instead talk about why you thought that fighting in school was going to be a good idea.”

Rainbow’s thoughts swam, trying to gather themselves. “...so...I’m not in trouble? Or am I? I...I nearly killed Thunder…” her stomach started threatening to launch it’s contents again, Rainbow started shivering. “I...I should be under arrest, not getting off without a punishment.”

She heard a gentle sigh from the older woman across the desk, “Miss Dash, while you are in trouble, it would be...unjust of me to prescribe a punishment for the more extreme results of your actions. It would be akin to strapping chainsaws to a baby and then punishing the child for the damage the chainsaws caused when the infant started behaving as infants do.” Rainbow turned her gaze up to the educator who was holding up a placating hand, “This is not to say you are an infant or acting childish, but whatever magic is at work on you is powerful, and as you completely accidentally demonstrated earlier, is incredibly easy to cause damage unintentionally. I will be assigning you detention for fighting in school, but I will not be punishing you for things you have no control over nor could you have possibly anticipated them.”

Knowing that she was being granted a small mercy was a relief, but even so, she felt she had to provide a justification for her actions. “I just couldn’t let them pick on Sunset. She can’t even talk, fer crying out…” some of the emotions that had been held back by shock started leaking through, “She’s so helpless right now, and I don’t care what someone did before, you don’t do that to someone who can’t defend themselves.” She sniffed, wiping at her nose with the back of her arm, “She’s...hurt...and if I’d been any slower than I had…I had to go faster…” tears started trailing down her face, her thoughts not about the earlier altercation in the hallway but back at the train tracks, and she huddled in on herself. She sensed more than saw the vice-principal round the desk and sit down next to her, rubbing her back with gentle motions as she wept.

Celestia set the pen down on the freshly signed document and rubbed her eyes, attempting to bleed some tension out before an actual headache set in. Catching up on a week’s worth of work, even when her sister had done a lot of it and delegated what she could, was daunting no matter what the cause. Trying to find new and creative ways to bullshit the bureaucracy to keep the word “magic” out of the paperwork was especially tiring. She pressed a button on her phone, activating the intercom feature between her and her secretary. “Raven, would you mind terribly bringing me a tea, and maybe see if you can get an ibuprofen from Nurse Redheart, please?”

Celestia chose to ignore the slight mirth in Raven’s voice as she replied, “Of course, your majesty.” Well, OK, an eye roll, but otherwise ignored. The staff had taken the news that their principal’s other-universe counterpart was royalty with plenty of good-natured humor. Except for Cranky, but then he treated pretty much everyone in exactly the same curmudgeonly way.

A handful of minutes and a couple hundred milligrams of anti-inflammatory later, Celestia decided to take a moment for a quiet contemplation break as she sipped her tea. As she sat leaned back, her gaze drifted idly over her desk, then around the office, finally alighting on the large purse she’d taken to carrying lately so she could put all the things that needed to go to and from home with her on a daily basis, especially with a special needs teenager now in the house. Sticking out of the bag was the journal that Luna had retrieved from Sunset’s locker. She hadn’t brought it up to Sunset, because, of course, there was no way for the girl to say anything about it, and possibly not even any way to write in it, so Celestia was keeping it handy.

A niggling voice told her to read it. She had shied away from doing so as that would be quite the invasion of privacy, but she’d been growing more and more open to the idea in the last few days, as since the incident involving magic and the creation of the...conspiracy board? Relationship network? She still wasn’t sure what to call it, but since Sunset had created it, she hadn’t been able to speak or write again. Reading the girl’s journal seemed more and more like the best way to try and get a few more pieces of the puzzle.

She took a calming breath and turned back to her desk and eyeballed the stack of work she still had in her “to do” pile, then set the teacup down and pulled Sunset’s journal out of her purse.

It was a gorgeous piece of art on its own. Clearly hand-stitched, or whatever Sunset’s people used in lieu of hands. Its size was a bit odd, but apparently the other universe used the Golden Mean as well for their books, as it was proportional to any other book she might pick up from a book store. The front cover had the glyph or mark that Celestia was growing to understand was special to Sunset, but the spine was unmarked, as was the back. Mentally steeling herself, she opened the cover...and once again had her perception of reality shaken.

In her own handwriting was a dedication written on the inside front cover, “To my beloved faithful student. If you ever have need of my counsel, I am but a quill-stroke away. Yours, Princess Celestia.”

So, apparently it was a “thing” for Celestia to take in Sunset Shimmer in some capacity or another. She was mildly curious to find out if there were other universes out there where other versions of herself found themselves with other versions of Sunset, and if those versions of Sunset were from other universes...she stopped her train of thought, as it struck her as one of those, “turtles all the way down” kinds of philosophical navel-gazing.

She tried to mentally brace herself, but then realized the futility of it and flipped open to the first page with writing.

“Dear Princess Celestia,” it began, “I don’t know how ‘Professor’ Arcane manages to hold on to his tenure, he knows nothing about forming a proper spell matrix…”

Well, thought the principal, At least I know this is, indeed, Sunset’s journal. She’s never shied away from calling out what she saw as incompetence in educators. A small smile quirked up her lips for a bit as she read. The following entry, though, was a bit of a surprise, as it was a reply from the princess herself. Celestia had thought this would simply be a sort of “mental dumping ground” for Sunset’s thoughts, but she now realized the two had used this book to communicate. Could they not simply have chat? Did the princess’ duties keep her from being able to do one-on-one time with her student so they just traded the journal? Celestia’s questions were answered over the next few entries as Sunset had stayed home as Celestia went abroad and the text began implying the conversation was happening in near real-time, rather like a chat room online, or more accurately one of the instant messenger platforms. The journal must be magical… she allowed herself to be overcome with a sense of wonder, realizing she was one of the few, if not the only person on the planet that held an honest to goodness magical artifact in her hands.

Shaking off the feeling, at least enough to focus on her chosen task, she went back to reading. This time she was feeling much better about doing so, as this was a two-way communicator and not a private journal. There was some entries that were a bit more personal than Sunset may have wanted to be transmitted to third parties, but overall it was a fairly straightforward correspondence between two people.

The story of the two was as sad as it was inevitable. Celestia could see the frustration written in ink from both the princess and her student as Sunset’s ability and knowledge began outpacing what her teacher could provide. Demands for access to learning and education were stymied by equally insistent pleas for the student to, in so many words, “get a life.” Celestia saw Sunset beginning to chafe at what she perceived as intentional blockades of her studies, while Princess Celestia was practically begging her pupil to go out and make some friends or, at the very least, get along better with her collaborators. Principal Celestia was noticing that the further she read, the more time seemed to pass between ‘sessions’ of entries in the book, either her doppelganger would declare she would be giving Sunset “her space,” or Sunset would write an angry entry in a fit of pique that apparently stung some aspect of the princess’ pride and the journal would be silent, until another entry where they would tentatively dance around the real issue before getting into another written argument.

It finally culminated in an argument that clearly had more going on that was written. References to spoken words, miscommunications through other people (some names of which she recognized from her own life, including Counselor Neighsay, president of the school district’s board of directors, and even Raven, who was her opposite version’s seneschal), and repeated references to a “destiny” and some sort of mirror, then finally some angry words written in splotchy quill writing.

The final entry was completely different. Apparently written sometime after that final, vitriolic exchange, it was the princess communicating to her student, “My dearest Sunset; I am so sorry. I allowed my fears and emotions to get the better of our discussions regarding what was, for you, a very important topic that needed answers, not my continued stonewalling. You guessed correctly that it had to do with Nightmare Moon, but you don’t know the whole story. I ~~would like~~ need to tell you the part the reference and history books leave out. There is much you don’t know, and in my hubris, I believed it wasn’t your right to know. I know you cannot return any sooner than two years from this letter, but I would like to know that you are still there and whether you are well.” There was a block of writing that was completely obscured. Whatever had been written there by the princess had also been heavily redacted, most likely by the princess herself given what was written next. “I am sorry, I allowed my emotions to overcome me once again. I would sincerely appreciate the opportunity to mend some fences between us. Please write back as soon as you’re willing.”

The next three entries in the journal were heartbreaking;

“Sunset, are you there?”

“Sunset, please answer me”

“Sunset?”

Celestia leaned back in her chair and pondered the new information she had now. The other Celestia had mentioned something called “The Elements of Harmony,” which seemed to correspond in some respects with the displays she had seen when Princess Twilight was on this side of the portal. It did help her to understand the center of the relationship web (or whatever they were going to call it) that Sunset had put together, and may have some bearing on what happened with her five students that had been most directly affected by the magic, but she wasn’t sure why some magic called specifically Harmony would lock up Sunset’s ability to communicate. They couldn’t even seek advice from either of the other princesses because Sunset couldn’t write back to them…

Celestia’s heart stopped for a moment, ...I don’t have the communication block that Sunset has...I could write to the princess!

Should she, though? Was it right for her to use Sunset’s journal, her means of communicating, apparently privately, with her old mentor?

Her train of thought was interrupted when her sister came in without knocking. The younger woman didn’t quite flop down into one of the guest chairs on the other side of the desk, but it was clear she was drained enough that she wanted to. She let out a sigh of exhausted frustration, “Miss Dash will be serving detention for a week, but I’d recommend we get her to the school counselor and find some way to get her to a therapist. She’s not taking this well.”

Celestia blinked owlishly at this sudden intrusion, “...taking what well?”

Luna looked a bit askance at her sister, “The incident in the hallway with Sunset? The injuries?” Celestia’s face must have betrayed her confusion, “What have you been doing all day, Celly?”

The principal indicated her desk, “Beyond the obvious, I’ve been reading through Sunset’s journal. It’s...actually a magical artifact.”

This made Luna sit up abruptly. “Given what happened with Rainbow Dash earlier, are you sure you should be handling it if that’s the case?”

“It’s been sitting in Sunset’s locker for the better part of two years, I doubt it’ll cause anything to happen now; but tell me about the incident with Miss Dash…?

Luna spent the next few minutes relaying what she knew of the situation to her sister, “...I’ll have to come up with some way of explaining this to the girl’s parents. ‘Your child was magically punished for bullying a classmate in such a way we had to call in some EMTs, but please don’t look too closely at this or talk to the government spooks that are nosing around’ doesn’t look good on a note.”

Celestia snorted in amusement. “Quite, though I do agree with you on what we should do about Rainbow Dash, or at least recommend. I believe a carefully worded note to a trusted therapist might be necessary, not to mention a briefing of some sort on the nature of magic...and won't that be an interesting conversation.”

“Listen to us,” Luna sighed, “Giving briefings, dodging agents...when did we turn into a branch of the government?”

“Technically? When we went into teaching at a public school.” Celestia giggled at her sister’s unamused glower, “But yes, I think it was when we had a refuge from an alternate dimension show up in our school.”

“Universe,” corrected Luna, “She’s from another universe, not dimension. My point is that we’re not really equipped to deal with this. Cherrilee is only in class and teaching right now because the S.M.I.L.E. agents overstepped first. Had it gone any other way, she’d be in Twin Rivers Bay or some other facility we’ve never heard of.”

Celestia said nothing, just resting her elbows on the desk and her chin on her folded hands. The two sat in silence for a bit before Luna stood.

“I have to go sit detention soon. I know you’ve still got paperwork, but you and Sunset do still need to eat. Please make sure you get home in time for dinner.” She waited to leave until Celestia silently nodded.

The principal remained deep in thought for a few more minutes after Luna left. Sunset’s...crippled due to magic, Rainbow Dash is harming others because she’s accessing magic somehow, government agents circling like sharks...

Celestia reached for a pen, pulled the book closer, and started writing.

Dear Princess Celestia...

Luna’s mood was sour as she approached the classroom that held the student she really didn’t want to have in detention. She understood exactly what Rainbow Dash had intended, and truly wished she could encourage such behavior. If more people intervened for others when they saw bullying, the problem would be much less severe and Luna’s workload as school disciplinarian would be much reduced. Rules were rules, however, and as Dash had been the one to escalate from assault to battery, she had to be punished, intent be damned.

As she drew nearer to the open door, she realized she heard Rainbow Dash’s voice. “...eriously, Sunset, just go! I’m the one who got detention for fighting in school, not you. Did you get detention for blowing off the front of the school? N…” she was interrupted by a mechanical, “No.” from Sunset’s phone. “No, that’s right, you didn’t. So you don’t belong here, now shoo!”

“No.” came the robotic reply.

An exaggerated groan floated through the open door, “C’mon, Sunset. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, and only being able to speak in yes’s and no’s is driving me crazy!”

“Maybe.” The synthetic voice was underscored by quiet snickering.

“Ha-ha, very funny,” growled Rainbow Dash, then came a sigh. “Well, fine, look. When Vice-Principal Luna gets here, I’ll let her get you to go home. I guess you can stay until then. You’re all right, and...and I kinda wish I’d gotten to know you better before...well, I mean...look, I’m not good at this mushy stuff, but I guess if you wanted we could be friends. You know, if you want.”

Silence reigned for a moment, then, “Yes.”

There was a rustling, “You’re all right, Shimmer.” More rustling and a thump. “Ow! And you hit hard, too! I’m gonna have to teach you how to do friendly shoulder punches.”

Luna smiled and looked at her watch. Well, she thought, I think they’ll keep each other company nicely, and as long as Miss Dash doesn’t leave the room, I think I can consider her detention for the day served. Decision made, she quietly walked away to leave the two new friends to their own devices.

An hour later, Celestia and Luna approached the detention classroom, Celestia was strangely reserved, but Luna brushed it aside as the stress of the day. She once again heard the vibrant tones of the school’s star athlete, “So they bite into the ‘cookies,’” the emphasis on the word ‘cookies’ indicated that this was yet another retelling of one of Rainbow Dash’s infamous pranks, “And they nearly all spit them out! Well, everyone but Pinkie, but you know how she is with the weird foods.”

Sunset’s laughter could be heard from the hallway, and they were both grateful for whatever was locking up Sunset’s speech wasn’t also keeping her from making any sounds at all. “Well,” began Celestia as they entered the room, “I understand today has been busy.”

Rainbow jumped to attention, having been leaning against the teacher’s desk as she spoke, “Oh, uh, Principal Celestia, VP Luna...I, uh...I was just…”

Luna smiled, “Relax, Miss Dash. I knew Sunset was here with you. By the by,” she said, ignoring the raised eyebrow from Sunset at the anachronistic phrase, “I’ve been in contact with the hospital. Lightning Dust was the worst injury and she was discharged an hour ago. The other two were mostly shock-related trauma and are expected to recover fully within a few days. Miss Dust’s broken bones will have to take their usual time healing, but then she has a history of such with her sports activities anyway, so as gauche as it is to say...she’s used to it.”

Rainbow Dash relaxed visibly. “Wow...just...thanks, Vee-Pee.”

Celestia chose to chime in, “That said, Miss Dash, while I agree that getting into fights in school is never acceptable...I think I can agree with your reasons in this case.” She winked conspiratorially at Sunset.

Luna elbowed her older sister. “I do expect to see you back here tomorrow, Miss Dash. And Sunset,” the girl turned to face Luna, “Well meaning though it may be in joining Rainbow Dash today, I am afraid she is in detention, not you. Solidarity aside, the form must be followed. You’re going home with Celestia tomorrow.”

Sunset let out a resigned sigh and tapped the, “Yes.” button on her phone.

Luna smiled at her, then turned to Rainbow, “You’re done with detention today, you may go home now.”

As soon as the final syllable left Luna’s mouth, Sunset sat up ramrod straight and grasped the desk she was sitting at, here eyes suddenly unseeing and then they started glowing.

Rainbow had leapt into a sloppy defensive stance and Luna almost tripped over backward at the sight. Celestia was startled, but recognized it. “This is what happened last week!” she gasped as the other two recoiled. The light almost projected against the opposite wall, and the others could almost see a very blurry gear shape that was gently spinning. One of the five spokes glowed a bright blue, in contrast with the golden-white light of the rest, then the glow stopped and Sunset was left gasping in her seat. Abruptly, she stood and power-walked almost robotically out the door to the classroom.

Celestia only briefly looked at Luna, who just said, “Go!” in permission for the older sister. Celestia took off after Sunset, and moments later the duo could hear a squeal of tires in the parking lot, presumably Celestia trying to drive Sunset.

Rainbow Dash was shocked, but not as badly as earlier that day. “What was that about?” she gasped.

Luna shook her head, “I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect that’s related to whatever magic is keeping her from being able to speak. If I guess right, they’re headed home, where a...project is that Sunset put together the first time that happened.” She shrugged her shoulders, “Come, at least I can drive you home.”

Celestia tucked Sunset into bed and plugged in the girl’s phone, putting it on the bed near her for when she woke up. She stood and studied the relationship web for a moment, admiring the blue string that now connected probably three-fifths of the wall. From what she had read in Sunset’s journal, somehow whatever happened today was connected to what she assumed was Rainbow Dash’s element, Loyalty.

Shaking her head, she decided to go to bed herself. Her thoughts were growing fuzzy, and she still had to go back to school tomorrow, probably to deal with three new sets of parental inquiries tomorrow as well as everything else.

A brief shower later, she climbed between her bedsheets and double-checked her alarm on her phone. Grumbling slightly at the realization that she’d only be getting about five hours of sleep at this point, she put her phone face down on her end table and nestled in.

Just as she was about to slip off to sleep, she heard a buzzing and a throbbing light filled the room. Damnit, she thought, I could have sworn I put that thing face down! Grumbling under her breath, she pushed herself off her pillow and looked at her phone...which was still, silent, and face down on the end table.

Confused, she looked around the room to see the light coming from her large purse. She stood and walked over to the hook she hung it on next to her door, pulling it open to see the journal, vibrating gently and glowing with magic.

Slowly, almost not believing it was actually happening, she opened the journal to the bookmark she had put in it after finishing her entry earlier that day, she looked down at the page below her signature line. Just before the glow of the book’s magic faded in response to her opening the book to view the message, she read the words, Dear Principal Celestia...

Chapter 5 - Pleasures Remain...So Does the Pain

Dear Princess Celestia,

I’m afraid I must apologize right off the bat; I am not Sunset Shimmer. Whatever rules of the multiverse have conspired to make it so, Sunset finds herself in the care of a Celestia again. Princess Twilight Sparkle can probably explain better than I, but apparently, you and I share many things beyond a name, but to provide some evidence, if it can be called such, I offer the following: I gather from the previous entries in this journal that something happened to your sister Luna, and as of the final entry you left over three years ago by our calendar, you still hadn’t had her returned to you. While I don’t know the specifics, I know something of that pain and understand your unwillingness to speak of it to your student. I, too, lost my Luna for a while. Due to some problems when we were young where she perceived that our friends were abandoning her in favor of me during the period after our parents died in an accident, she was incarcerated for 1,000 days. While she has come to terms with what happened and uses medication to control the depression that led to the incident, I still feel that the ultimate responsibility for the incident is mine. If whatever occurred between you and Luna was at all similar to what happened with us, then I hope that you can use the relationship as a bit of hope that things will get better.

As for the reason I, and not Sunset, am writing to you...we have a bit of a problem. During the events of the Fall Formal (which I’m sure Princess Twilight briefed you on) some magic was used that at first seemed to simply instill a sense of humility in Sunset and strip her of some power, as well as undo a...would the word “transformation” be accurate? In the days following, though, the magic somehow crippled Sunset’s ability to communicate. She cannot talk except in her sleep, and what she does say when she’s sleeping indicates she’s having night-terrors. For whatever reason, save for when a certain trigger happens (which we’ve only managed to activate twice, so we’re not quite sure what the trigger even is), she is unable to write anything, even on the computer or cell phone. Any attempts to do so cause a seizure in Sunset. We’ve adapted a cell phone with software that’s normally used for low-functioning children with communication problems, but the responses are by nature limited, so while Sunset may have the knowledge of what’s happened to her, she’s unable to relay it in such a way as to help us make sense of what’s going on.

As a former caretaker of Sunset, you should also know that she tried to commit suikill hers take her own life. She also has some severe injuries to her right arm that happened during a time of about 12 hours where we can’t account for Sunset’s activities or location and she’s unable to tell us what happened.

In short, Sunset is suffering from intense trauma, very likely has PTSD and situationally induced depression, and magically enforced communication impairment.

While I’m hesitant to involve anyone else in our problems, there are other things that are happening around Sunset and the use of magic at the Fall Formal you should know about.

I don’t know if Princess Twilight has explained this, but here ‘magic’ is considered to be either parlor tricks that are done by sleight-of-hand, or a fantasy or mythical force that exists only as a narrative trope in fiction. Consequently, we’ve been under growing pressure from the parents of our students and various government agencies to explain the events and provide reassurances, and the ‘convenient gas line explosion’ line is growing increasingly more challenging to keep going. The staff and student body of the school are helping as best they can, but ultimately we won’t be able to keep this going much longer, and I fear that in attempting to protect the students, some teachers may find themselves on the wrong side of law enforcement.

Additionally, the use of magic seems to be spreading in an uncontrolled way. One of our students, one of those befriended by Princess Twilight during her time here, accidentally used magic in such a way that it injured three other students to the point of needing emergency medical care. Please let Princess Twilight know, if you relay this to her, that Rainbow Dash is fine and the injured students are expected to recover fully.

We need help. Whether you can (please) reopen the portal so we can have an expert in magic take a look at her or even just advise on how to handle the situation, whatever you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Principal Celestia Faust

To: Sunday Sprinkles, Director, FBI

From: Red Tape, Legal Counsel, Canterlot City High School District

Subject: Unauthorized and unlawful activity of FBI agents on school district property

Director Sprinkles,

Please see the attached federal court order to halt all activities of your agents on the property of the Canterlot City High School District. The actions the agents who have already been banned from Canterlot High are now also under restraining order regarding all Canterlot City High School District personnel and students. Any violation of this order will be met with the fairly severe reprisals listed in the document for convenient reference.

-R.T. Legal Counsel

Dear Principal Celestia,

I am sincerely grateful that you have reached out to me, and I have a team being put together to work on the problem of gaining access to your world again. While I normally wouldn’t interfere with the workings of my teacher Starswirl the Bearded so many years since his death, I believe the situation with Sunset Shimmer alone merits interfering with the normal flow of interdimensional magic, let alone the issues with magic use and the interference of your government.

I have suspended my usual court tomorrow morning so that we may converse more readily, and additionally, I’ll have Twilight Sparkle with me to aid in the communication challenges that may exist. (Would Twilight have encountered this “cell phone” that you wrote about to be able to explain it? I am most interested, as it may help some of my little ponies that are similarly born with communication difficulties.)

In the meantime, any further information on the symptoms of magical suppression you’re seeing in Sunset Shimmer would be appreciated. Any little thing you notice could be the clue that unlocks this mystery.

In regards to my sister, soon after that final entry I made to Sunset, Twilight and her friends assisted in freeing Luna from the clutches of the Nightmare. Luna has since embraced the Nightmare Night holiday and has become beloved of the children of the nation. It’s a great amusement and consternation that she has taken to “pranking” during the month leading up to Nightmare Night.

Would you be able to tell me more about the medication your Luna takes? There are times where I catch my Luna in a...melancholy mood. Though she does try to reassure me that she is fine, I remain concerned and watchful. If the medication is effective at treating depression, I might suggest it to my sister.

Yours Sincerely,

Princess Celestia

Dear Ms. Blaze, Ms. Dusk, and Ms. Dazzle (and their parents/guardians):

Canterlot High School is pleased that you are interested in applying to transfer to our school to continue your education. We regret to inform you that at this time we’re unable to accept your application to transfer. This is not due to any issue with your paperwork or credentials (which we would be more than happy to accept under normal circumstances) but due to events beyond our control. Please advise your parents/guardians that we will be reopening enrollments for transfers for the Spring semester and will be happy to provide testing for any of our core subjects to prove independent study progress and, upon request, will be providing references for Canterlot High School District approved tutors to keep you up to speed with the coursework your future classmates will be doing. Of course, we will understand if this delay will not suit your situation and would be happy to provide references and vouchers to other schools that are able to take new students at this time, such as our sister private school Crystal Preparatory Academy.

Please contact our office at any time during school hours to pursue any of these options, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to prepare you for your future successes.

Sincerely,

Vice-principal Luna

Dear Princess Celestia,

Thank you for replying, I hadn’t realized how much I’d been dreading facing the current crisis unassisted until your reply made me feel as though the world had been lifted from my shoulders!

To clarify my earlier statements about magic - We don’t have any, or at least we didn’t before the Fall Formal. While there may have been tiny pockets (it can clearly exist here, so I wouldn’t rule out the existence of small amounts, especially as the inspiration for some of our myths and legends), it’s always been considered a non-existent thing, so there’s been no serious study or enough of a framework for me to be able to identify anything specific to ‘suppression’ magic. I’m afraid you’ll have to give me a bit of an education on that.

As far as taking the time, while I do appreciate the gesture of canceling a court hearing, I’m afraid I’m still catching up on my own duties as principal. I had taken a week off work to address Sunset’s immediate needs, so I will be quite busy. I will do my best to reply as soon as possible whenever you message and will leave the journal with my secretary Raven in case something comes up that requires my immediate attention.

Of additional note, while Princess Twilight will undoubtedly have encountered numerous cell phones during her time here, it’s unlikely that she’ll have gotten more than a cursory understanding of how they work. I’ve had to make myself proficient in their use owing to the proliferation of their use amongst my students, I’m afraid I’d prefer to refer you to some reference texts once you have access to this side of the portal, presuming your efforts to reopen it bear fruit. The best “simple” explanation that I can offer is that a modern cell phone is a handheld computer that connects to the Internet using radios.

As far as the medication goes, it’s marketed under the name Tantabus. I’d have to be able to spend some time doing research to find out the actual chemical properties of the active ingredients to tell you more, though. Maybe you have Tantabus on your side?

Sincerely,

Principal Celestia

Dear ~~Princess~~ Celestia,

Sorry! I’m still not used to addressing you by just your name and not your title, I’ll continue to work on it.

Anyway, thank you so much for the update and I will be heading to Canterlot just as soon as I wrap up the latest craziness that came out of, believe it or not, one of Spike’s comic books. I’m especially concerned about the friend that Principal Celestia mentioned that was using magic. Any idea on who it was, specifically? It might also help to know the exact circumstances of the use, since as you know, fledgling magic among foals always happens due to an emotional prompt of some sort. It might be an early indicator of further incidents at the high school if magic is growing in that universe.

Your ~~faithful student~~ friend,

Twilight Sparkle

Dear Principal Celestia,

I am heartened and relieved that even just my correspondence is helping in lightening your load. As you know from my final entries in the journal before your’s, I have had her constantly on my mind since she ran awayexiledherself left.

As far as the issue of the Day Court, I certainly don’t mind canceling it, and even your occasional response will be plenty of excuse for me to take a day or two from seeing Equestria’s nobles trying to ply the throne for more of my little ponies’ tax money is a welcome relief, even if (like your duties as Principal) they cannot be delayed forever.

I’m noticing quite a few parallels in our worlds and quite a few ways in which they differ. We both have a Raven Inkwell that serves as a liaison and advisor, of sorts, that ensure our days run efficiently.

Speaking of which, perhaps we should use this as an ideal opportunity to allow my government to open relations with yours. My dear Twilight Sparkle informs me that it is only a matter of hours now until we are able to open the portal. She has volunteered to go through again to begin the process of opening up an embassy, which she advises should prove quite easy now that she has come up with a way to keep the portal open permanently. Apparently, there was a bit of an epiphany when she was visited by her Ponyville friends and Pinkie Pie gave her the ideas on how to make the portal open permanently. Once the Royal Society of Mages and the staff of the School for Gifted Unicorns finishes working with Twilight to make her design for modifying the mirror something more than (and I’m quoting Professor Bright Eyes on this), “an eye-melting horror of a prototype that, while functional, has so few safeguards that it is nearly a universe destroying bomb waiting to happen,” we’ll open up the portal outside of its pre-designed cycle for the first time since its creation.

I do hope to see Sunset with my own eyes again soon and look forward to meeting my counterpart, as well as that of my sister.

Sincerely,

Princess Celestia

Transcript, recorded for use by the Royal Archivist.

(Transcriber’s note: Original source is a “video recording,” much like one of the recent “talky” films that have become popular from the west coast film industry out of Applewood. The display that was used to show the video was given to the Canterlot Embassy required quite a bit of tutoring to learn to use, but this transcriptionist is now convinced that this kind of recording could revolutionize the gathering and dissemination of information. I am copying the Academy of Sciences on this so that they may encourage similar developments in Equestria)

Recording begins, visible are three entities known as ‘humans.’ These three appear to be younger adolescents of the species, especially compared to the taller and clearly more developed humans that can be seen later in the video. The transcriptionist notes that they all three appear to be female, also based on comparisons to examples later in the video.

Human adolescent with yellow coloration and red mane is identified in the video as Applebloom, human adolescent with pearl-white coloration and two-tone violet and pink mane is identified as Sweetie Belle, and human adolescent with orange coloration and purple mane is identified as Scootaloo.

(Transcriptionist’s note: Effort has been made to properly convey accented speech throughout transcript)

Applebloom: This is it, y’all, we’re gonna be the only people to get to record first contact with another species!

Sweetie Belle: Technically, it was our sisters that made first contact with Twilight, remember?

Scoootaloo: Girls, quiet! They’re doing something!

View shifts to reveal the three are hiding in a bush of some variety, a pair of hands on either side pulling the foliage to the side to allow for a view of a statue surrounded by more humans. While there is a large number of uniforms of some form of guard capacity (represented by two types; one set of uniform is blue with some form of padded armor covering the torso with clear signs of sheathed weapons of some variety, the other a suit-like uniform worn by soldiers, recognizable as being stationed in a similar array as the blue-uniformed guards), those of note are a very tall example of humanity, apparently female, with a mane extremely similar to Princess Celestia. This individual would later be identified as Principal Celestia. Also with her is a human female that is identified similarly as Vice-principal Luna. Standing with them is a small group of six human females conversing quietly enough the video recording device was unable to capture the sound of their conversation.

Scootaloo: [leans into the visual frame of the recording device] D’ya think the portal will open like on that show Heaven’s Door? You know… [Scootaloo makes a horizontal motion that resembles a splash with her arms and the claws that humans have instead of hooves] …’kawoosh’?

Applebloom: We’ll we aint gonna know if’n ya don’t get outa the frame, Scoots!

Scootaloo: Right, sorry!

View resolves back into focus on the statue. A book vibrates and begins glowing in Principal Celestia’s hands.

Principal Celestia: [lifts the book and reads] They’re about to activate the portal.

The assembled beings move away from the statue. The video capture device is not able to record magic auras so none appear on the screen, though the light does seem to reflect more brightly from the base of the statue. A dog comes through, leading another human. The dog and human are the forms the portal granted to the dragon Spike and Princess Twilight Sparkle respectively. A babble of conversation starts up as five of the six younger humans rush over to the princess and engage in a round of hugging and greeting. The yellow human with a pink mane, later identified as Fluttershy, and the white human with purple mane, later identified as Rarity, pay some extra attention to Spike. They are joined swiftly by a squad of Equestrian Guardsponies, recognizable by their armor which has adapted to their new forms like their bodies have been adapted. The lieutenant of the squad can be seen moving to meet with the human guards and is quickly directed to the apparent leader of the guards. The group hushes as another figure steps through, this one physically a mirror image of Principal Celestia, but wearing different clothing entirely. The princess’ usual regalia is still on her body, but adapted by the portal to this human form, and she is now wearing a dress. At her appearance, the guards from both sides seem to come to even greater attention.

The sixth younger human abruptly moves to hide behind Principal Celstia, though it’s obvious that Princess Celestia has seen this younger human. The young woman has orange skin and red and yellow hair, later identified as Sunset Shimmer. The two Celestia’s approach each other, Sunset clutching at Principal Celestia’s coat as they move.

Sweetiebelle: [quietly] This is it, when the authorities on two worlds meet for the first time. If Princess Celestia is anything like Principal Celestia, this will be a fairly reserved meeting, most likely with some sort of speech intended to be heard by the people around them about two worlds uniting in harmony…

Scootaloo: ...and sunshine and skittles and bla-bla-bla! Do you think they have blasters hidden somewhere like Twilight had at the Fall Formal?

Sweetiebelle: Scootaloo, shush! They’re exchanging some words, or at least the Principal is speaking. The Princess seems to be focussing on Sunset, who has yet to step out from behind the principal. Principal Celestia is reaching out to shake hands with the Princess. Princess Celestia is looking at the outstretched hand, she appears to be looking back and forth between Sunset and the principal. The princess is moving and OH MY GOSH!!!

The view shakes considerably, suddenly what appears to be Scootaloo’s hand reaches out and grabs the frame, then the picture is once again focused on the statue.

Scootaloo: AND THE PRINCESS OPENS ‘NEGOTIATIONS’ WITH A HAYMAKER TO THE FACE! What will the principal do? Any student who’s gotten into a fight in the halls of Canterlot High will know that Celestia is not to be taken lightly, AND SHE COMES RIGHT BACK OFF THE MAT WITH AN UPPERCUT! The princess is staggered, but clearly she’s made of some pretty stern stuff, as she turns around and uses a modified reverse kick! Probably comes from that equine anatomy that she usually has.

Applebloom: That’s gotta hurt, Scoots!

Scootaloo: Indeed it must, ‘cause Principal Celestia is staggered. She’s handing off the book she was carrying to Sunset and charging right back into the fight!

Applebloom: Ah hear that they’re all ponies or horses on th’other side of the portal, Scootaloo. Ya think that’ll tip things in Cel...er, Principal Celestia’s favor?

Scootaloo: [pulling the recording device back so she can be seen while keeping the fighting between Princess Celestia and her counterpart in the frame] Well Applebloom, it really does depend on how a bunch of ponies could become the apex of their food chain. Humans are apex perceive predators.

Sweetiebelle: [from out of the frame] That’s ‘pursuit predators.’

Scootaloo: Yeah, that. We’re also highly adaptable, which means that we can use forms like that absolutely gorgeous Drive the Tiger Away form Principal Celestia is demonstrating to keep Princess Celestia from landing some pretty nasty looking punches.

Sweetiebelle: Uh, girls...

Applebloom: [Leans into the frame to take the opposite position to Scootaloo while keeping the statue visible] While those punches look downright strange on a human, I’cn easily see how they would be rather nasty pummeling moves coming offa horse. In fact, the speed is makin’ it a challenge fer the principal to keep up...but then it looks like being unfamiliar with bein’ in a human body is makin’ the princess unsure o’ herself. She’s fallin’ back on her heels an’ it looks like we’re finally seeing some people tryin’ to break up the fight.

Sweetiebelle: Girls...

Scootaloo: Oh, that’s a shame, but even so the two Celestia’s are trying to keep going. It looks like Rainbow, Rarity and Fluttershy are pulling away Principal Celestia while Princess Twilight, Applejack, and Pinkie Pie are-WHOAH! I have never seen Applejack get thrown like that, normally it’s Applejack doing the throwing!

Sweetiebell: I think we need to go...

Applebloom: But look at that Scoots, she’s right back up! That’s mah sister fer ya, stubborn as a mule and strong as an ox, and it looks like the Principal’s bin corralled, it’s just the Princess...and now that Applejack’s got’er in a rasslin’ lock, it’s over folks!

Scootaloo: That was some really impressive brawling from the Equestrian princess, given she’s only had that body for a few minutes…

Sweetiebell: GIRLS!

The frame blurs and three human guards in suits and two Equestrian guards are seen hurrying toward the recording device. The image blurs and Sweetiebelle’s concerned face is seen in the display.

Sweetiebelle: Gotta save gotta save gotta-

A hand covers the visible frame and the recording ends.

THERE’S TWO OF THEM!?

Dear Princess Celestia,

I must apologize, our dear Raven seems to have suffered a bit of a mental break when it was revealed that she may one day face not one, but two Pinkie Pies. As she is the one that, by necessity, is often responsible for cleaning up after Miss Pie’s well-meant disasters that she calls parties, the idea that two such individuals should exist, even separated by a whole universe, was perhaps a bit much for her to handle. Celestia is still doing her best to calm Raven down. Poor thing won’t stop muttering about ‘pink eldritch horrors from another world.’

That said, please don’t let your Pinkie Pie on this side of the portal.

Ever.

Sincerely,

Vice-principal Luna

SoccerKicksUrA$$: OMG, CAN YOU B-LEEV IT!?

ApplesRLife: Dash, Capslock is not cruise control for cool! And neither is misspelling everything!

FashionistaDiva: Ordinarily, darling, I’d completely agree with you on this. However, while I would never stoop to soiling my text messaging with such crass errors of written language...WE’RE AMBASSADORS TO ANOTHER WORLD! APPOINTED TO A PRINCESS! ALL THE YES!

PinkPartyPlanner: I no rite?! Party at my place! (Maud said ma and pa said it was okay as long as Limestone got enough sleep for her finals)

BunnyMom: This is Twilight Sparkle, using the sex to speech software on Fluttershy’s phone while I learn how to use it.

FashionistaDiva: Oh, good heavens!

BunnyMom: No, that’s not right, phone correct ‘sex’ to ‘test’.

SoccerKicksUrA$$: 😆😆😆😆😆😆😆

BunnyMom: No, phone, you’re doing it wrong. Fluttershy, why are you turning so red? How do I get your phone to correct my letter?

BunnyMom: What do you mean it’s sending this out whenever I finish a sentence?

BunnyMom: Well, yes, I can understand that you don’t normally use this method of sexting, but it just seems so convenience!

ApplesRLife: Oh, dear, this is gonna get bad. Fluttershy, just do the texting for Twilight for a bit, please!

PinkPartyPlanner: No, no! I wanna see where this goes.

BunnyMom: Phone, you’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you? I swear it’s like when Spike started his teenage years all over again!

BunnyMom: Yes, Fluttershy, the same Spike that’s a dog while he’s on this side of the portal.

FashionistaDiva: Twilight, please, just give Fluttershy her phone back. I promise we’ll help you with texting later, just, for the love of all that is good and fashionable, please stop!

Dear Majesties Principal Celestia and Vice-principal Luna,

We are very grateful for the regular updates, and as the portal comes online for long enough for us to be able to properly visit, we desire to know and understand the condition of Sunset Shimmer better. Please ensure that she is given full and proper medical treatment and diagnosis as best as your world can provide in these circumstances. We do understand your resources may be very limited due to the lack of magical diagnostic techniques, but we do request that a society as primitive as yours not be allowed to use any invasive means for discovery. Trepanning, as advanced as a magicless society may have taken the practice to treat those maladies that a more refined culture might~-

Dear Principal Celestia,

This is Raven Inkwell. I do apologize, but Celestia’s nephew Prince Blueblood (please don’t ask the relation, it is too long and complex and goes back to the Discordian Era where records are...fragmented at best) took it upon himself to follow-up on a conversation between Princesses Celestia, Luna, and Twilight Sparkle. They were concerned with the health of the former ward of Celestia, and Blueblood is...infamous for his ham-handedly idiotic attempts at what he calls “diplomacy.” Please disregard anything he says.

That said, the Princesses are rather keen to get any medical information you could provide. With the understanding that actual information exchange won’t be able to be done in earnest until the portal is considered to be fully functional and declared “safe” by the Royal Society of Mages, whatever details you can give would be welcome.

Sincerely,

Raven Inkwell, Seneschal

Of note is the scars on the back of the patient. Not appearing to match the other injuries the patient suffered, they are simultaneously clearly new scars as the tissue around them does not have the characteristic puckering and stretch marks associated with scars of this size of the apparent age they would be if the scar tissue itself were an indication of how far the patient has healed. The scars themselves could easily be mistaken for being years old, if not over a decade. For those without readers that can render the attached photographs, the physical description does not match that of any sort of traditional “lashing” that one would associate with abuse victims with scars on their back, nor does this appear accidental.

The scars themselves appear to be something like a half-moon, but with a widening to include a ‘bulb’ near the top and the bottom ‘tail’ of the moon bending back to point toward the tailbone. ‘A comma with the tail twisted the wrong way,’ would be another apt description. A third scar is easy to miss if one is not looking for it, a nearly perfect oval with a slight point in the upper edge of the top, positioned nearly perfectly over the patient’s tailbone.

The limited questioning that could be done with the patient indicates that the patient had no knowledge of the presence of the scars, and the limited records retrieved upon court order from the patient’s school indicate that even as recently as an accident during P.E. where the student was involved in an accident on the soccer field, the scars were not present. This once again is evidence of an anomaly, as the scars themselves appear to be quite old.

While the reader may question my repeated reiteration of the age of the scars, short of taking tissue samples, I’m quite sure that the healing was artificially accelerated.

Addendum: After conferring with the newly discovered colleagues on the other side of the portal that has appeared on the subject’s school campus, a new branch of health science and medicine that hasn’t been seen on this world before does have a history of being able to accelerate the healing of large-scale traumatic wounds that result from incidents that are described in the documentation as “thaumic biological transference and transformation events.” Updated and corrected records since the actual incidents that happened at the school during one of their social events were declassified certainly bear all the hallmarks and fingerprints of the textbook “thaumic biological transformation event” the literature describes, and the recently verified video evidence that had previously been rejected as faked or special effects confirm the patient catastrophically grew trans-species mutations (bat-like wings and a tail) and just as catastrophically lost them just minutes later. This doctor is now satisfied that the scar tissue is a result of that incident.

Dearest friend Twilight,

I have indeed been able to read the reports delivered by the scientist and scribes of the court. And while I do find the notion of our dear Tia engaged in a round of hoofticuffs with her own counterpart tremendously funny, I do understand you do not share the sisterly bond with her and so may not enjoy the idea on the same level I do.

Never-the-less, I do share your concern. As soon as I had partaken of the reports and had the chance ere both my sister and I were together, I asked her of the incident. As I rather expected, Celestia was unwilling to fully explain her actions. She did let slip that she felt that she had rather been cheated by her own doppelganger of the opportunity to gain a relationship anew with the errant Sunset Shimmer, t’which did plant the germ of an idea that would only fully bear fruit many hours later whilst I was patrolling the dream realm during my regular duties.

There was a philosopher back in my day before my banishment, his name escapes both me and the hasty inquiries of the librarians of Royal Archives, but he provided the following quote which I wouldn’t fully understand the import of until my own fall from grace and subsequent redemption, “True Tartarus is meeting the pony you could have been.” ‘pon seeing my dear sister, apparently unmarred by the centuries and still just as powerful as ever...neigh, e’en more, as it took all the collected power I had gathered to merely seal her in the sun using mine own magic as the key...to see what I might have been had I not fallen from mine own path.

T’was most bitter pain, indeed! One thousand years wielded with grace and confidence in ways that I knew would take me e’en another thousand to begin to master! The ache in my heart still burns, knowing that there, but for mine own foolishness, go I. E’en today, the pain is strong and I needs must constantly be on guard that my habits toward self-isolation and solitude do not allow me to be alone with my thoughts, lest they spiral down dark paths and I become confronted once again with the darkness that spawned the Nightmare.

I know not what Tia saw in her doppelganger that caused her to lash out thusly, but if the burn and ache that she felt were but the merest candle to my own (and I have no doubt that, seeing whatever she saw wearing her own face, e’en one altered by the portal, t’would be a thousand-fold stronger) and she had not expected it, I am not one whit surprised she responded as she did.

I know this is poor solace, and I do apologize. As ones who love my sister, thee and thine and me and mine can merely be there for my sister.

Sincerely and with love,

Princess Luna

XoXo_AppleBloom_oXoX: Tell me you got it!

RainbowDashIsMySempai: Yeah, Sweetie Belle! That was some of the most epic improv I’ve ever done!

Sweetie_Bell: Well, those guards from Equestria may know a lot about magic, but they know nothing about cloud saves.

Chapter 6 - I Couldn’t Get Away

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 7 - I'll Try to Carry On

Celestia sighed into the microphone as she watched the antics of the girl who, in another universe, was a werewolf. An enormous, pink, fluffy werewolf. She shook her head to clear it before returning her attention to the screen on her laptop. “I’m sorry, Agent Victory, but as much as I appreciate the agency’s position, I’m afraid I cannot budge on this. The school’s facilities are for the student’s education, not real estate for federal offices.”

Sunset’s aggrieved sigh caught her attention, she looked up to see her daughter being heavily doted on by Pinky, who had somehow in the brief moment when Celestia had been looking at her computer screen had changed into a nurse’s uniform. Thank goodness it’s actually an authentic uniform and not the “Nightmare Night Sexy” variety, she mentally sighed in relief, Or I’d have some very pointed questions regarding her intentions toward my daughter. Sunset was allowing her friend to “examine” her with a series of increasingly bizarre questions, not bothering to wait for a response as she bounced from one random topic to the next. (“Do your ears hang low?” “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a taffy-pop?” “Do you hear a ringing in your ears when the devil dances by the pale moonlight?”) The former unicorn was wearing a flannel shirt over her pajamas, which was apparently enough of a hospital outfit to satisfy “nurse” Pinkie that she was playing along. Sticking from her mouth was an old-style thermometer with a comically large red bulb at the end. Satisfied that Sunset wasn’t being unduly stressed by her visitor, she returned her full attention to the agent on the screen.

“What we’re saying is that it should be both. After all, these students of yours are already starting to show some fairly unusual talents even before the Fall Formal incident. What I’m offering is to have our training program become your training program. We’d of course be integrating your staff with the agents assigned, primarily to promote continuity and trust, and along with that would come top-tier equipment for both physical fitness and monitoring the health and safety of the students.”

Before Celestia could reply, Pinkie popped up from behind her monitor, “Sorry Miss Celestia, but I’m s’posta ask you if I wanted to take Sunset out of the house. Can I, please?”

For the first time since the meeting began, Celestia’s patience came close to being tested. “Miss Pie, I’m in a meeting…”
“I know, and I wouldn’t have interrupted if this weren’t super important for Sunset, but I gotta friend that wanted to help and she doesn’t have long for her lunch break so we gotta go in the next, like, five minutes.”

Doing her best to ignore the amusement of the agent on the screen, she set the computer to the side and looked over to Sunset to assess her condition. Surprisingly, the girl who had just been in PJs and loungewear was suddenly dressed for a school day, wearing her jacket and holding her backpack in one hand and her phone in the other. The look on her face made it clear that she was just as confused by the quick change as Celestia was. The principal pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation, “Aren’t you supposed to be in class? What about your schoolwork?”

“Got that covered!” So saying, she dropped a stack of papers that appeared to be homework in Celestia’s hands and presented her phone with the other. Cranky Doodle was on the screen and scowling (not unusual for him, really).

“Principal Celestia!” snapped the codgerly social studies teacher, “Remind Miss Pie that I do not allow any sort of remote classwork,” he reached off screen and pulled back a surprisingly life-like cardboard cutout of Pinkie Pie sitting at a desk, “Even if she leaves this in her seat with her laptop’s camera pointed at the blackboard!”

Celestia’s brows furrowed, Pinkie Pie was here before Luna left this morning...again! When did she get time to set that up? I know Luna wouldn’t have done it...wait, didn’t Luna take Pinkie with her to work?! When did she get back and why didn’t I notice?! Realizing she was keeping Agent Victory waiting, she inhaled abruptly. “Cranky, just...check her homework when she gets back, and please give her the latitude for it this time, it’s as good a solution as any.” She ignored the other educator’s grumbling as Pinkie smiled even brighter, “Pinkie, just stay with Sunset and have her back here within two hours. She’s taking the day off to recover from the magic incident yesterday, not go sight-seeing in Canterlot City.”

Sunset’s face was etched with confusion and broadcast a question to Celestia as the pink girl dragged her out of the room. Celestia mouthed silently, “Just go with it for now…” and shrugged at her daughter. Sunset’s exasperated eyeroll was the last thing she saw of either teenager before the sound of the front door opening and closing could be heard.

With a beleaguered sigh, she sat back down at the desk. “Unusual talents,” indeed, she pondered briefly, I doubt Pinkie’s...Pinkie-ness was what Agent Victory had in mind when he suggested this but… She turned the screen back so she was facing the federal agent directly. She chose to ignore the smirk as the twinkle in his eye made it clear it was humor-motivated as opposed to calculating or malicious, “Alright, Mr. Victory, I’m listening. How would this new program work?”

Though Pinkie had kept up a stream-of-consciousness-style chatter all the way from the Principal’s home, as they deboarded a bus in the middle of the industrial district, Sunset finally managed to get a word in edgewise (after having dug through her phone’s menus the entire ride), her phone issuing a monotone, “Where?”
Pinkie giggled, “We’re visiting a friend at her work. Well, I say it’s her work when she actually lives there, too. She also sleeps there and eats there and…”

Sunset snorted in irritation and once again tapped, “Where?”

The poofy-haired party planner grabbed her friend’s hand and started dragging her to a nearby building, its design appearing more in the style of the Oriental peninsula than the surrounding architecture. Before they got too much closer, a sudden voice barking from a guard shack they had nearly walked right past caused Sunset to jump so high she nearly landed in Pinkie’s arms.

“WHERE do you think you’re going there, young ladies?! Nobody’s allowed into the monastery factory!”

Pinkie simply giggled, “Oh, Mr. Tracks, you know that’s not true. Mrs. Shine told me so just the other day!”
Mr. Tracks turned out to be a grizzled old man leaning out of the guard shack’s window so far he was nearly falling out of the small building. Sunset edged herself behind Pinkie as the security guard gave them the stink-eye. “MISS Shine doesn’t say anything, and you know that!” he bit back at the girls.

“Psht, tsk, pffft!” expectorated Pinkie in a nearly perfect imitation of Rarity’s dismissive attitude, “You know what I mean. Besides, she thought you’d be like this, so she had me prepare.” So saying, Pinkie pulled her phone from her purse and started tapping and swiping quickly until she found what she was looking for. She held the phone so her friend could see over her shoulder and showed a woman, nearly as tall as Celestia, wearing a stoic expression on her face and simple brown robes held closed by a tidily knotted rope and holding a sign written in what appeared to be permanent black marker reading, “Loose Tracks, your job is to lower our insurance premiums, not keep people out.”

Sunset snickered as Pinkie turned the phone for the guard to read, “Mrs. Rain Shine said that if you don’t stop keeping visitors out, she’ll have to find another guard, and that this is a pretty good gig for an older gentleman. They need a security guard to make their insurance agent happy, you need a job, it’s a win-win!” Pinkie shrugged, “Well, that’s what she told me, anyway.”

Loose Tracks glared at her and started grumbling as he pulled himself back into the booth, “...lazy, no account delinquents. Should be in school instead of bothering old men just trying to do their jobs…” he cut himself off as he closed the window to the guard shack hard enough to rattle the glass pane.

Pinkie grabbed Sunset’s hand and continued to guide Sunset inside the fence line. Sunset read the sign on the fence posted just inside the gate and tugged Pinkie’s arm, cocking a thumb at the sign and jerking her head to the guard shack with a questioning look on her face. The sign read, “Welcome to PerilousPeaks Outfitters - Your source for ethically sourced athletic gear,” and, “Visitors encouraged.”

Pinkie giggled, “Oh, yeah, it’s like Mrs. Shine said, Loose Tracks is just there because the insurance company said the factory has to have a security guard to keep their premiums down. It’s not like they don’t live here. Heck, the first time I came in by myself, he actually yelled at me. Not like, 'Get offa my prop'r'tee, ya meddlin' kids,'" Pinkie mimicked a crotchety old man, "I mean just, 'AAAAAAAAAAH!!!'” and she giggled again.

“What.” came from Sunset’s phone.

The somewhat vague question was left unanswered as Pinkie pushed open the doors to the factory and led Sunset past a reception desk. Behind the desk was a young woman wearing a familiar expression, like Maud Pie had started a trend for off facial tics, and monk’s robes similar to what the woman was wearing in the photo on Pinkie’s phone. “Morning, Blossom! I’m gonna get you that surprise birthday party, just you wait! 22 days, missy!” she winked as she hurried past. The young woman, apparently named Blossom, smiled very slightly and nodded her head at them before returning to whatever she was working on at her desk.

They pushed through a pair of doors to enter a hallway lined with alternating panel windows and paintings of mountain vistas. Plaques below the pictures apparently identified the vistas they portrayed, with names like, “Mount Wisteria,” and “North Mountain Basin.” Through the windows could be seen various assembly machines, rolling bins, and factory workers, a few wearing robes like the woman at the desk, but these were being careful to not step past yellow lines painted on the factory floor. The yellow lines appeared to be safety markers as they all appeared ten or so feet from any of the equipment. The people working the equipment wore clothing that appeared similar to the robes in color and style but were clearly made to be around factory machines. All the people in the rooms through the windows wore hardhats and safety glasses...and the same stoic expression as Rain Shine had in the photos and Blossom at the desk. Lidded gazes and closed, flattened mouths dominated; were it not for the occasional focused stare or look of intense concentration, they could have all had full-face Botox treatments and gotten their faces stuck that way. Shaking her head with a look of disbelief on her face, Sunset hurried to catch up to Pinkie, who had been skipping down the hall during their short trek down the hallway. “...and she really doesn’t like surprises since she came back from overseas. I guess the military had her doing something that makes her reeeeal jumpy around loud noises, so I give her plenty of warning for all my surprise parties. I think she likes them anyway, at least when I warn her about the surprise party in advance. Oh, hey, we’re here!”

Pinkie stopped in front of a regular looking door that had an engraved 60’s-style faux-wood grain sign on it that said, “Break Room.” Before Sunset could respond, Pinkie pushed open the door and pulled Sunset in after her.

The room had a few occupants, all of whom were wearing monk’s robes and stoic expressions with an obvious equipment worker sitting quietly in the corner. Save for the shuffling of shoes on laminate tile and clothing as the people moved and the low, almost inaudible bass thrum of the operating machinery on the other side of the wall, the room was silent. A pair of service windows leading into what was obviously a small service kitchen with a handful of people staffing it, all wearing simple robe-like uniforms that were safe for kitchen work. While half their faces were covered with simple disposable masks covering their nose and mouth, their eyes had the same mild, stoic expression that everyone they had encountered in the factory. The quiet wasn't the enforced quiet of a library, it was the worshipful quiet of a temple.

And then it suddenly wasn’t, “Pinkie! Hey, what are you doing here so early? Did you skip school again, ya delinquent?” Any rancor in the words was belied by the jovial, playful nature of the voice. Sunset started and they turned to see a woman, also in monk's robes with the hood up but not covering her face, standing up from a table with a half-eaten lunch. She swept over and grabbed Pinkie up in an enthusiastic hug.

The pink girl giggled and replied, "Noperonni!" she chirped, "I even got the principal's permission to bring her daughter with me!"

Sunset glanced around at the other people in the room and saw a couple watching with curiosity and more than a few showing signs of irritation at the clearly unwelcome noise. Suddenly, she was grabbed up in a great big hug by the robed woman, "Oh, you're Pinkie's new friend that she's been telling me about! I'm Autumn Blaze and I'm so glad to meet you finally! I gotta warn you, I'm a hugger." Sunset's only reply was a wheeze of breath and some facial twitches, "Ooooh, right! Sorry!" Dropping Sunset and helping her maintain her balance, she pulled out a chair that Sunset was clearly grateful to accept.

For several minutes Pinkie and Autumn chattered happily, catching up on ranging on topics Sunset either had no interest in or only tangential awareness of the subject. Some of the other people in robes would occasionally glare at their table, and Sunset's eyes tracked a couple leaving hastily, either leaving their food on the table or hastily packing it up and tossing their trash in the waste bin by the break room door.

"So, Sunset, Pinkie tells me you can't talk, some sort of disability…?" the woman left the question hanging.

Sunset's eyebrows drew together. She pulled out her phone and tapped twice. "Yes," and then "No," came from the phone in monotone.

"Ah, it's complicated, huh?" Autumn nodded sagely and continued without waiting for an answer, "We got all sorts here at the monastery." At Sunset's confused blinking, the woman clarified, "Oh, Pinkie didn't tell you? Our factory doubles as a monastery. Everyone here has taken a vow of silence for whatever reasons they had to bring them here. I mean, some people are quite open with their reason; well, as open as you can be without actually saying anything. But there's a big-ol' book out in the lobby of people who've joined the order and wanted to share their story."

She pointed to one of the others in the room, "Radiant Sunset over there came from an abusive family when he was 19. His dad hit him...alot...and Radiant realized he was showing the same temper as his old man and came to find a place that would help him manage his anger. He decided to become a lifer after his 2-year sabbatical ended."

Autumn waved to the door to the breakroom, "Blossom Burst has PTSD from her time in the military. Never did find out what caused it, but then that's between her and her maker, so whatever, but she realized she was one public disagreement from a jail sentence or a stint in the shrink ward so she came here."

Sunset tilted her head to the side, one eyebrow raised. "Oh, me?" replied the other woman, "My parents were lifers," a sad smile crossed her face, "Just made sense for me to join the family business, if you will, and keep it going. I...well, I just had a lifestyle gut check that made me realize that maybe the life-long vow of silence wasn't my jam, 'course, the factory's my home, so they couldn't exactly toss me out…"

The apparent monk went quiet at the same time as every eye in the break room and kitchen went to the break room door, which had just opened to reveal the tall woman from the photos on Pinkie's phone.

Pinkie jumped up and waved her hand like she was on the other side of a high school cafeteria instead of just the other side of a much smaller break room, "Oooh, ooh, Mrs. Shine! Over here!"

Eyebrow arched, the taller woman practically glided through the room. In her hands was what appeared to be a silver tray with some objects on it. The objects in question were revealed to be a traditional Kirinese calligraphy set, complete with writing brush, a block of ink, a sloped stone with a shallow well in one end, a small cylinder of water, and a pad of paper.

"Oooooooh…" Pinkie groaned and pulled out her phone. At Sunset's questioning glance, she said, "Texting Principal Celestia, we're going to be here for a while."

Message sent, they settled in to watch as Rain Shine wet the stone and began grinding the ink stick on it, preparing to write out a message in the most patience-demanding way possible.

The night of Sunset's suicide attempt…

Pinkie was bawling into her hands, her normally very poofy hair was falling in sagging curls around her face. She was practically in Autumn's lap as she cried, sobs wracking her frame as the older woman gently stroked the girls back, attempting to sooth her.

"...a...an…'n then they said we couldn't all get in th'am…" she drew in a shuddering breath, "...ambulance…'n Rainbow was gonna punch the EMT, and Rarity convinced them to let one of us go, and I wanted to but I couldn't talk 'cause it was so scary and.." another convulsing sob shook the girl, "...'n Applejack went and said she'd call her Granny, 'n I called Maud to take me to the hospital…" she sniffled and took the facial tissue Autumn offered and blew her nose into it. The thing was soaked through in an instant and Pinkie almost absently dropped it into the rapidly filling trash bin her friend held out for her. "Thanks…" she muttered around her sobs for probably the hundredth time.

She stayed quiet, letting low moaning sobs out as Autumn quietly held the girl, being a rock of support as Pinkie vented her emotional overload from the events of the day. "They wouldn't let us see Sunny," she finally said when her breathing started approaching normal, "Only Applejack had any idea what her condition was, and that was only 'cause she had rode over in the ambulance and they assumed they were sisters." Pinkie sniffled and wiped under her nose with the back of her arm. Autumn winced slightly at the unhygienic display and wiped Pinkies arm off with another tissue before offering a fresh one. Pinkie took it with a nod, "After that, there wasn't much point in staying around. Granny got Applejack, Rarity and Fluttershy drove home, Rainbow got her dad to come get her. I...I couldn't go home yet." She took another shuddering breath, "I...I just...started walking. I couldn't be at the hospital, I couldn't go home yet, so I...I guess I recognized the area and that's why I came here so late."

Autumn blaze looked at the cell phone Pinkie had tossed on the bed, an inbound text message turning on the phone's display to show the time; 11:08 PM. "It is...rather late…" said the older woman.

Pinkie sighed again, "Yeah, Maud must be worried sick." She picked up the phone and unlocked the screen, her eyes widening as she read the text and then smacking her forehead, "OH DUH! I'm so stupid!" so announcing, she started smacking her head with her fist.

Now alarmed, Autumn grabbed Pinkie's wrist, "Pinkie! Stop!" she gently pushed the girl's arms down and put her other hand on Pinkie's shoulder, "What did the text say?"

Pinkie looked like someone had just taken her golden retriever out behind the woodshed for a date with a rifle, "Sunset...Sunset doesn't have any family. She's an orphan." Pinkie's face scrunched up in anger, "I mean, of course she's an orphan, she comes from another world, duh Pinkie!" a brief, half-hearted struggle occurred where she was clearly about to start smacking her head again but Autumn held her hand down. With an angry huff, Pinkie continued, "A magical princess gives us gifts of magical magic and one job...one job, to be her friend, and we screw it up so bad…" another tear leaked down her cheek, "...so bad…"

Autumn just pulled Pinkie into a hug. "Pinkie, if you ask me, and you haven't, but if you did, I'd say you're already a great friend!"

A muffled, "Mrph?!" came from the shoulder she'd buried Pinkie's head in.

"Yes, Pinkie, you're a wonderful friend to her. Think about it," the monk pulled Pinkie's face out of her robes and held her by her shoulders, "Just last week you were telling me that you wished she would just drop off the face of the earth because she was such a ‘meanie pants,’ and now you’re absolutely heartbroken because you couldn’t be there for her.” Autumn giggled, “And you saved her life, Pinkie, that’s a pretty big deal when it comes to being a friend!”

Pinkie hiccupped a few times, wiping the tears from her cheeks, “Yeah…yeah!” suddenly, it was as if her hair simply…inflated. Autumn flinched in surprise as the pink curls suddenly bounced back to their normally fluffy state. “I’m a GREAT friend! I’m going to go over to the hospital and I’m going to show Sunset Shimmer so much friendship!” As the girl’s hair poofed out from her enthusiasm, an unfazed Autumn Blaze cheered like Pinkie’s own personal pep squad, “By the time I’m done, she’s going to Feel The Friendship!”

A victorious pose was interrupted by a blipping chime from her phone. She glanced at the screen and cringed, “…aaaand I’m gonna have to do it tomorrow, Maude’s asking where I am, she’s at the hospital right now.”

The older woman giggled, “Well, let her know she can pick you up here. Don’t want you walking around the warehouse district after dark, after all.” So saying, she stood and put Pinkie in a one armed hug and guided her to the door. “Let’s go, I’ll walk you out.”

As they walked, Pinkie sighed, “Thanks Autumn, I guess I needed a friend too.”

With a smile to her friend, Autumn nodded sagely, “We all need friends sometimes, especially when life hits you in the kidney.”

The teenager giggled, somewhat mutedly, at the mental image. “Speaking of…how’d it go at the doctor’s office?”
With a melancholic sigh, Autumn Blaze’s smile turned wistful, “Not so good. I mean, they did say it was a long shot, and they did everything they could, but apparently…”

Pinkie remained silent as her friend trailed off, just hugging her closely.

“But!” if the sudden interjection surprised her, Pinkie didn’t show it. Autumn continued, “The good part is they’ve improved their procedure! Apparently, the work they had to do to even run the tests to see if I could take a donor kidney meant they overcame several obstacles that kept them from helping others. I heard they were already getting treatment protocols set up for five other patients that they were expecting to have to get ready for hospice care. They’re calling it the Blaze Protocol!”

Pinkie’s smile returned full force, “That’s awesome!” she began gesticulating as Autumn opened the front door, “I can see it now, in big, bold letters, ‘The Blaze Protocol, coming soon to a theater near you!’”
Autumn’s laughter could be heard in the factory even after the door closed behind them.

“…and while I do understand that my current life’s path, the one that I started on after we parted ways in our college days, may make it a challenge for someone who’s love of words was legendary among our group of friends, it would only add to the sense of daily wonder and tranquility I experience in my daily life if we were to rekindle our relationship, even if it were just as good friends.”

“I also look forward to getting to know your sister, whom I hadn’t had the chance to meet while we were in school due to the circumstances that caused you to cut your second year short.”
Celestia wiped absently at the wet spot that appeared on the paper before it could soak all the way in, realizing that it was her own tear in the instant before another appeared. Goddess, Luna would go crazy trying to ‘talk’ with Rain Shine these days… she giggled absently as she continued reading.

“With my responsibilities, now a great many more than I ever dreamed, I truly do understand in ways that I never could before your obligation to your sister. Though, of course, every person in need of healing is different, having helped so many others, even just briefly in some cases, I believe I now understand the love for Luna in ways I never could before.”
Sunset was sitting next to her, listening as Celestia read the note out loud. She had intended to wait for Luna to get home to deal with the emotional…mess that remembering her time with Rain, a bond that began being two of the tallest women on campus, but swiftly grew into a hot, blazing passion that Celestia had never experienced before or since. But along with that fire that made their intimate moments so memorable came the burn of imagined slights and misunderstandings that flared into a schism that would eventually cause the relationship to end. It had hurt Celestia deeply, even now she felt the old scar on her heart sizzle with both kinds of heat.

A gentle squeezing on her wrist brought her out of her introspection and she looked up at Sunset, the teenager’s gentle gaze flickering from the paper to Celestia and back. The principal smiled and turned back to the page of dense calligraphy.
“Being the principal of a school as well as adopting a daughter may not have been what I imagined your life’s path would be, but it nonetheless brings me joy to see that you have built your family up again, as well as building a legacy that will endure.”

Celestia sniffled then chuckled, “Rain Shine always did like to talk. I can’t imagine how long it took her to write this, no wonder you were late getting home.”

Turning the page over, she continued, “I would love to formally invite you and Luna, as well as your daughter and her friends, to the factory. Your student Pinkie Pie will perform wonderfully as a tour guide and Autumn Blaze has volunteered to be an ambassador to the students. We do, of course, recognize that contemplative silence, vow or not, is not a good fit for teenage attention spans.”

Both women, both mature and teenaged, giggled at that.

“Though I know that I have not real right to ask, I feel I must beg forgiveness for the pain I caused you when we had our parting. I know now the demands I was making of you were unreasonable and, in some ways, unconscionable. I am truly sorry and have felt the pain of hoisting my own petard so deeply since I realized the trap I had laid for myself.”
Celestia sighed again, this time laden with the pain of regret, “Oh, Rain, I forgave you…so long ago…” Sunset wrapped an arm around her mother and hugged gently.

After a few moments, Celestia read the last of the letter, “In sincerest hopes that we can be friends again, I close with a riddle. Your daughter has it with instructions on presenting it to you, and I will leave you with one hint; your science teacher and your language arts teacher both teach this subject in their class. With friendship, if not more, Rain Shine.”
Quizzical expression on her face, Celestia turned to Sunset, who now had a slightly impish expression. Without prompting Sunset pulled an envelope out of her jacket pocket. The packet wasn’t sealed, and in moments Sunset had dumped the contents onto the kitchenette table.

A smile returned to Celestia’s expression, “Oh, Rain always did love origami…” And this was truly paper folding taken to high art. A stylized sun with a distinct pattern drawn on it, a series of shades and squiggles that hinted at an image but couldn’t be fully discerned. Next to it was a cloud, carefully folded so as to hint at fluffiness and rain, though how that had been achieved with just folds of paper Celestia couldn’t guess. Where the sun had drawn art on it, this papercraft had a negative pattern cut out of it. It looked almost, but not quite, like an arch composed of triangles and quadrilaterals, but there were enough extra cutouts that created significant enough “noise” in the paper sculpture that she couldn’t be sure if it was an arch or something else.

A riddle… she thought, and glancing at Sunset realized that the reveal of the pieces was the entirety of the presentation and the remainder would be for Celestia to figure out.

Pondering, she held the two designs in her hands. The sun was a dead ringer in shape to the cutiemark inscribed on her sword’s crosspiece. So, I guess that’s really my cutiemark… she contemplated it for a moment longer and realized that she could see some vague similarity to the pattern draw on the sun and the voids on the raincloud. She placed the cloud on the sun and realized the holes formed a filter, and that there was an outline on the sun that hadn’t been obvious without the cloud. A memory teased her conscious mind, something that Rain Shine had started saying just about two weeks before their breakup after having encountered one of the order’s monks, one who was on a six-month hiatus between the renewals of their two-year vow of silence for the purpose of finding others in the community who may need the refuge of the monastery factory.

“…Rainbows! Of course!” she gasped out. She lined up the cloud with the outline, realizing it was slightly misaligned she tweaked the positioning, and before their eyes the eye twisting patterns merged to show a rainbow that was only visible when the two pieces were properly fixed.

Celestia started chuckling and looked up at Sunset. At the girl’s curious expression, she said, “It was one of Rain’s favorite sayings from the monks, ‘Rainbows can’t light up the sky unless you let it rain.’” She indicated the papercraft puzzle, “It means that you can’t have the good that comes in life if you’re unwilling to experience the bad.”

Sunset smiled, her eyes lighting up in understanding as she began to take a deep breath…and then suddenly gasped, her form shuddering. Celestia was about to scramble to the girl’s side when Sunset’s eyes lit up in a familiar way, the second time in one day. The projection of the odd gear shape lighting up yellow and then going out before Sunset sagged against the table.

Celestia smiled, “Well, let’s try to get ahead of it this time,” she said as she gently pulled Sunset to a standing position and guided the girl down the hall to her room. Sunset, panting like she had run a mile, just nodded her head tiredly.

Author's Note

So this happened. No more authors' notes tonight, I'm tired. Watch my blog, if I have time I'll post...something... there...maybe.

Chapter 9 - You know that I'm falling...and I don't know what to say

Celestia hadn’t thought that she’d find herself in a home built into a tree, but then the last few months had found Celestia in many places she never entertained the existence of.

Zecora’s home was, indeed, built inside a tree, or rather seemed to have been shaped from three trees, all originally planted close enough together that with time and patience, allowed the mystic to form a suitable home, once one plugged inevitable holes with the appropriate ancient building techniques and materials. It was well ventilated, too, enough so that her host had needed time for her and Applebloom to make some preparations to make it so it could contain the smoke from the fires they were about to light without suffocating them. The two took the nearly unresponsive Sunset into Zecora’s home to prepare her for the coming ritual while Celestia was instructed to run an errand.

“Go to your home and gather items three of great import. One of destiny, one of the bonds of love, and one of last resort.” Exactly what that was supposed to mean, Zecora wasn’t saying, only that, “Your heart is wiser than your head, don’t think too deeply on what was said.”

For all that Celestia was skeptical, the hermit had been right. And it turned out she already had two of the items with her, it was the third that almost escaped her, as it was normally kept so out of sight it didn’t even have a physical presence unless called upon, accidentally or not.

Her sword, the one that had somehow created itself during her Hearth’s Warming jaunt through the multiverse, was certainly an item of destiny. It managed to get around all attempts to keep it magically or technologically contained, and always found its way into her hand…even when she absolutely did not need a weapon.

Sunset’s phone was the item for ‘the bonds of love,’ as trite as that sounded. She was somewhat concerned that the items had to be magical, but then Zecora hadn’t said anything about magic, did she?

Finally, there was the journal. Shortly after the portal had been opened out of cycle by Princess Twilight, some of the mages from Equestria had rigged a much more stable system that didn’t rely on a small-ish, easily stolen or destroyed book. Once the portal had been rigged into a gate system that could be opened, closed, and secured on-demand, the journal had been returned to Celestia for safekeeping, ostensibly until Sunset felt up to using it again (and was capable of doing so), but the girl hadn’t so much as given it a second glance when Celestia had offered to return it to her, just shaking her head and replying, “no” with her phone.

Sunset lay in the corner of the small home on a straw mat covered in a sheet. A blushing Applebloom gathered the pile of Sunset’s clothes from where they had been discarded. In response to Celestia’s arched eyebrow, she muttered, “Zecora said that this ritual had t’be done nekkid. You gotta lose yer clothes, too, but…well…I reckin’ you can do that and bathe yerself.”

As Celestia’s other eyebrow went up, Zecora entered the room as well just as Applebloom was exiting with the clothes. She held a basin in one hand and what appeared to be a simple, unbleached cotton cloth in the other.

Celestia looked to Sunset, then back to Zecora’s hands, before scowling at the woman, “…really?” was all she could think to say.

Her answer was an enigmatic smile and an outstretched hand offering the cloth.

One cold and slightly embarrassing sponge bath later, Zecora draped a sheet over Celestia before calling in Applebloom to finish helping with the start of the ritual. The healer added a log to the fire burning in the pit in the middle of the large main room of the house before stoking it, then she scattered a handful of what appeared to be crushed leaves and powders into the flames. Nodding, she ushered Applebloom out. Celestia could hear, somewhat distractedly, Zecora’s quiet direction to return to the Apple home and let the rest of the family know where their guests were so nobody panicked upon return from the hospital.

Celestia shifted a bit as the other woman moved quietly about the room, gathering further ingredients into a handful of bowls that were sitting on a shelf near the door. Zecora put the bowls and a kettle on a tray, then moved them over the fire, setting them down near the three items Celestia brought, then the other woman sat on the floor next to the mat Celestia was laying on. She put the kettle over the fire and simply stared into the flickering flames. Having nothing better to do, Celestia did the same.

“Quiet your mind must be, still and calm like a mountain lake; if into your daughter’s magical prison, this journey you should take.” said the healer after a pause.

Celestia snorted, “I know the drill, I’ve been part of a few ‘prayer circles’ in my more wild days in college…and that was a tortured rhyme.”

Zecora turned to face her guest, a smirk on her face. “Rhyming is the art of mindful speech…but every so often…” she nodded her head in amusement, “...one must reach.”

With this, Zecora rose to her feet and gathered the book, the phone, and the sword and laid them in a line between Celestia and Sunset. So doing, she paused, returned to the fire, and collected the kettle. She poured the now hot water into a bowl and returned the kettle to the fire and herself to a seated position. After a moment, a colored smoke started to rise from the fire. It was multi-hued, looking a bit like a shimmering rainbow for a moment if a rainbow could be made of pastels and sparkles, then turned to ash before turning green. As it continued to shift in coloration, Zecora nodded sagely and picked up the bowl, sipping the brew that Celestia realized was a tea of some sort.

To her amusement, the healer’s face flinched, a blanch like someone had punched her with a lemon. A string of sibilant words in a tongue that Celestia didn’t know flowed from the other woman's lips. “Good that need of this brew is rare, its flavor is that of a horse’s derriere.”

Celestia giggled, and on the inhale breathed in what felt like heavy air. She gasped, her lungs heaving in, only to have the flavor of woodsmoke roll down her tongue. She at once became suddenly hyper-focused and completely relaxed. The hacking cough that would normally have happened seemed to be stilled by a slight aftertaste of cotton candy. She felt as though the room would tilt off its axis if she so much as blinked, but then the thought was chased away as she saw Zecora stand, seemingly watching nothing. More of the musical language filled the air, and Celestia recognized that she was probably inhaling smoke from some sort of herbal substance that was acting as a psychedelic. If it will help Sunset, the only coherent thought came, I’ll get so wasted I’ll fail every drug screening for the rest of my life! It was such an odd thought that was so counter to her normal demeanor that she giggled again.

Zecora turned to Celestia, “Breath in deeply, you must, and in the herbs and smoke place your trust.”

The healer knelt down between her and Sunset’s feet, nearly straddling the sword’s tip. The smoke was heavy in the air now, waves of shimmering pastel and oscillating color filling the room. Zecora cupped a hand over Celestia’s face, stretching her long limbs to do so. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the healer’s other hand hovering over Sunset’s mouth as well, before she moved her hands in a scooping motion. Trails of colorful smoke seemed to drift through the air, almost like a streamer from Celestia and Sunset’s mouth to Zecora’s hands. The other woman began undulating her arms, making cris-crossing motions with her palms, pulling the glittering streamers through the air. Barely moving her head, Celestia turned enough to see the two ribbons of smoky glitter twining together over her and Sunset’s belongings, before a point on the rope-like trail dipped down over the phone.

Zecora nodded and reached down to pull Celestia’s hand out from under the sheet that was covering her, then did the same to Sunset. She first placed Sunset’s hand palm down on the phone, then did the same to Celestia’s over the back of Sunset’s hand. Almost instinctively, Celestia curled her hand around her daughter’s and stepped through the mirror portal.

She was at first horrified by the change in her body; going from quadrupedal to bipedal would indeed be quite a shock, but not nearly as much as losing her magic. It turned out the best opportunity to have made the transition was at night, as trial and error had proven what the morning’s sun would reveal readily, these strange beings walked upright and wore clothes pretty much everywhere and her attempts to walk on all fours were comical, at best. Recognizing that the dark of night was not a good time to go exploring a foreign world, she found a storage shed behind the building near the portal (which was in the base of a statue on this side…odd, but not terrifically so. Better than a fragile mirror, at any rate.)

At least the language was the same, even if they did use odd words like, “computer,” and “Internet.”

She realized within a few minutes of conversation that the building she was outside of when she arrived in this world was a school. And, unfortunately, she appeared to have de-aged to be mistaken for one of the youths that needed to attend, as the dark-skinned woman who found her made clear after the horrible excuse for a timekeeping device of a bell nearly blew her ears off at the apparent start of the school day. Not wanting to show her hoof just yet, Celestia let the woman, apparently, the co-regent of the school named Luna, lead her to the administrative offices. Being one of the sharpest students at the School for Gifted Unicorns even before her mentor took her under her wing, she realized that she’d better find ways to play along fast.

Some very fast-talking (and a few gaffes, she’d have to learn the lingo and fast if she was going to pass as a native), and some minor lies (she really was “transferring” from her old school…they just weren’t likely to be able to forward any records for at least 30 moons) convinced the vice-principal to start a file on her and forgo any disciplinary measures. Celestia received her schedule, her locker (whatever that was) assignment, a combination lock (which she realized was designed to be used by the very deft “fingers” these creatures had, not pegasus wings, unicorn magic, or earth pony lips), and a packet of donated school supplies (given when they realized that Celestia was carrying ink and quill and rolls of parchment in her portal-transformed saddlebags-cum-backpack), and was just about to leave the office to find her way to her first class when she came in.

At first, Celestia was sure her mentor had somehow managed to get the portal open out of cycle and had come to this world herself to retrieve her. The woman, appearing to be just as tall, regal, and royal as Celestia expected, barely registered her presence with a distant smile and casual nod of acknowledgment before moving on. A request for some records to the apparent secretary (which Celestia now realized looked startlingly like Senescial Raven and was also named Raven) before going through another door to a private office allowed her to breathe more easily. The door even bore her mentor’s name on a placard, though the writing was the same stiff, almost formal, print she was seeing all over the place in this world. With a slightly shaky breath, she stepped out into the school.

Within two of the sessions (which were called “periods” in this school system), Celestia formed a more solid working theory than when she first stumbled through the portal; this world was almost a twisted mirror universe to Equestria; several of the teachers and students had very clear and obvious counterparts to the ponies (and even a few other races) from her home. While she’d never been friends with any of them, she did get to know a large number of ponies in her life, even if it was just to learn enough to get the better of them. She was able to easily use that understanding of their person and character to navigate this student body as well.

By the third night in the storage shed, which she’d learned was used for the P.E. equipment, she realized she’d have to find other accommodations, even if showering in the school locker rooms was a fantastic solution to the dreaded “teenaged body odor” problem. Some exploring led her to a pawn shop, which took the bits off her hands to exchange for the currency of this world. While she was 100% sure she was getting stiffed on the exchange, especially given the pawnbroker was treating the coins as little more than novelty gold rather than their actual value. A number of bits that would have supported a family of three in Equestria for three months wound up becoming little more than enough to buy some clothes, basic supplies, and a super-cheap phone with some prepaid time and data.

But it was enough to start.

From that foundation, she expanded. The school’s rumor mill led her to the abandoned warehouse, where she evicted some rodent tenants and set up an extension cord from the Chinese restaurant nearby. Running an entire home’s worth of electricity might have been noticed, but just enough power to charge her phone, laptop, and run a lamp? The restaurant probably burned more money to run the aging neon sign out front.

Celestia’s interactions with the principal were, thankfully, very few. She wasn’t sure she could remain detached or emotionally stable. There was just so much…baggage between that woman and her counterpart in Equestria. It wasn’t too long before the journal came out of her backpack and on a shelf in the warehouse. Its weight was just another reminder of the life she left behind, and she had enough of that every time the principal’s voice came on the P.A. system that she didn’t need it the rest of the day as well. It wasn’t too much longer before the journal was crammed in her locker, a place she rarely visited, and therefore would rarely see it.

Naturally, she excelled in every class. Her only real challenge was History, as this world clearly didn't develop at all as Equestria did, and sciences, which had no use of or reference to magic at all. The lack of a Discordian Era was surprising, as was the knowledge that the orbital mechanics were completely backward, but once she accounted for the differences it was fairly easy to master the modified subjects, and even begin mastery of Information Science and the technology of this world.

Time seemed to pass in a blur, though a few notable events happened. The first Fall Formal she became princess of was particularly special, reigniting her desires to claim her destiny. The staff seemed impressed that an obviously disadvantaged girl with apparently absentee parents should be able to pull off the win. The student body was impressed over her absolute control over the entire process, to the point that by the night of the dance it wasn’t even a matter of whether she would win, but by how much.

The first chance she had of doing so, she ducked back through the portal. She had no real idea what she expected, but discovering she had been replaced was…so very not it. Her return via the portal, once again at night, was one of stealth. Nobody knew she was there, which was good, since as soon as she found out that some upstart named Twilight Sparkle was hailed as the princess’s star pupil and a national hero for stopping Nightmare Moon she incinerated the newspaper she’d been reading from the archives. Dusty Pages would have been so disappointed to learn that Celestia had destroyed something from the library, but then the librarian wasn’t there to take her to task.

She had done more research, what little she could do on the pony who replaced her without leaving Canterlot. Sparkle had apparently recently relocated to a small town called Ponyville. (Celestia had to chuckle when she learned the name of the town. Before she spent time in the human world, it would have been an ordinary name for her. Now she could only imagine the humans doing some similar name, like “Man’s Field” for a farm or something similar.) Pictures were sparse, and facts were obfuscated by the “telephone game” (a human term she found rather appropriate) of newsponies relaying facts without having been there, but apparently, Sparkle had assembled a strike team of ponies with a variety of specialties to navigate the hazards of the Everfree Forest and the ancient castle where her former mentor had banished Nightmare Moon to recover the Element of Magic. As soon as Celestia saw the photo of the element, she knew it was what she needed to claim her destiny, but it would have to wait, she had to prepare. More determined than ever, she returned through the mirror end of the portal and began planning how she would return in two and a half years. The next day, she returned to the school with a purpose.

She encountered Flash Sentry, who was rather attractive as these humans went, and was gullible enough that he bought her sob story about never having her parents around and enough of a white knight he never really questioned when she needed help with even things that were simple or commonplace in this world. He seemed to think that there was more than just an acquaintance relationship between them, which worked out for her in that ‘boyfriends’ apparently had an increased social burden in terms of what was expected of them. This gave Celestia a measure of power she found she rather liked.

Other faces came and went, including an unusual group of friends. The pink one was obnoxious and hard to navigate, but easy enough to manipulate once you figured out that she was a chronic people-pleaser. The jock and the hick were also fairly easy. Hit them in their respective egos and they shattered. Fluttershy was the easiest of all of them, she just shrank and never pushed back, even when it would have been better to do so. She just made Celestia so angry and it was easy to take that anger out on the quiet girl.

Rarity stood out the most, being the only other student with anything close to her social network and charisma. The Spring Fling victory was extremely close, requiring her to hone her somewhat atrophied social skills enough to get close enough to the girl to find some dirt, anything, that could be used against her.

That the girl was attracted to other girls being at all taboo was such a foreign concept that Celestia almost missed it. It took a consultation with several other students to confirm that, for families like Rarity’s, it was, indeed, a pretty big secret. It surprised Celestia to discover that she almost felt bad about exposing the secret, knowing it would cause a rift between a girl so similar to herself and her parents…but in the end, she was just another girl, and Celestia had a destiny to claim, so she crushed Rarity’s hopes for the crown. It was almost comical, seeing the otherwise so well put-together girl coming apart at the seams, but in the end, it had been worth it…surely…

It was shortly after this that Flash cut off what had been a relationship between them. Celestia wasn’t really upset with the breakup, what bothered her was that he had initiated the split.

When it came time for the portal to open again, Celestia's preparations were complete. 72 hours was not much time, and the specially crafted spell she had prepared was entirely theoretical. It was based somewhat on the human concept of Radar and radiation scanning. As soon as she stepped through the mirror, she tested her spell…and it worked! She was the greatest genius to come out of her mentor’s school, after all…at least until Twilight came along. The thought of her replacement sobered her considerably, and she followed the “ping” back through the crystalline halls she found herself in. At first, she thought she was back at the castle in Canterlot, but she didn’t recognize the armor of the guards and the few glimpses she caught of the city and surrounding landscape belied that notion. Amusingly, her theory of the two worlds being mirrors was confirmed by the sight of a pegasus version of Flash Sentry on patrol through the castle. Ignoring the unusual local for the mirror to be moved to and her lack of knowledge, she made her way to what was apparently a wing for guest suites and found the crown…right next to the alicorn Twilight Sparkle. Sure, she takes my place with…her, takes my title at the school, takes my place in the history books…why not take my destiny, too?!

The snatch-and-grab was almost perfectly executed…but for a damned dragon’s tail. It didn’t matter in the end, she made it back through the portal, thankfully managing to avoid encountering any substantive response to Princess Twilight’s alarm. Everything was fine…until she crossed through to the other side of the portal and the crown was gone.

Some questioning of her contacts revealed that Fluttershy had picked it up when it bounced through the portal, and the first thing in Celestia’s plan went wrong when she realized that volunteering for the committee responsible for the Fall Formal decorations so she could make the crown a duplicate of the Element of Magic backfired on her rather severely; nobody recognized the thing as anything more than a prop for the upcoming dance.

Encountering Princess Twilight had been unexpected, but she was confident that the other transplanted pony wouldn’t be able to make any further problems for her…but then she did. She began by unifying the group of five that included the target of her bullying, the two who could network as well as she could, the jock who practically ran all the school’s teams, and the one person in the school that everyone (including the staff) trusted without question. Then gained the ear of Flash, which was just rubbing salt in the wound, really. Faced with a suddenly shrinking time window and an actual potential threat to the success of her plan, she attempted a “Hail Bitters” move that was childish, but simple; she trashed the gym and all its decorations and framed Twilight for it. If she could get the unicorn-turned-girl out of the way even for a few hours…but such was not to be, not only did Flash uncover her deception (admittedly not the best-executed plan she’d ever had, but she was suffering from severe time and resource constraints, and delegating the photo-doctoring to Snips and Snails really wasn’t a good idea at all) but the princess and her friends managed to put the gym back together in record time…and pulled even more support from the student body. She didn’t even bother with her formal dress because she already knew she wouldn’t be winning against Twilight.

So finally, she enacted her final gambit, a roll of the dice that had so little chance of working it would have been a small miracle…and in the end, the princess had called her bluff. Twilight had won, Celestia lost…and it hurt. It hurt in ways she couldn’t explain, and then when her friends began trash-talking and crowing over their victory, the pain turned to anger…and she acted without thinking. The fight would have been comical if the stakes hadn’t been so high. Equestria’s superweapon and Celestia’s destiny hung in the balance, and when she got her hands on the crown, she knew who had won. She put it on, anticipating, no, relishing the magical thrum she felt from it, using the skill that was so ingrained in magic students that it was more habit than action, she opened her mana channels and let the power of the Element of Magic, the most powerful magical item in two worlds, flow through her…

…and it burned! The pain, the anger, the fury, and loathing that she’d grown up suppressing blasted to the surface of her consciousness like a fountaining volcano. The thin facade of the genius filly-turned-girl shattered, and with it, her body transformed. She grew, stretched tall, taller than the principal! Her skin turned red and her back sprouted wings. A tail tearing itself through her clothes was almost an afterthought to the feeling of her legs lengthening and her hands turning into claws. She felt the power flowing from the crown and through her and looked down on the frightened students of the school…her traitorous subjects…and concocted a plan that was brilliant even if hastily cobbled together. She’d enslave them, then take them through the portal. If Flash had a doppelganger who was on the guard, then it was likely that many of the other students had similar mirror versions in Equestria, and very possibly ponies in positions of power, or close to it. Even if there was only half the duplication, she’d have more than enough to run a shadow campaign against the throne while she consolidated her power. She just needed to get them through the portal and out of the city, which meant she needed additional power by her side. A spell on the students and on her two hench…boys (they weren’t men, certainly), and she was ready to move…but then Twilight stood in her way.

And she looked at the girl who had taken everything from her. Saw the loyalty she inspired, the generosity she had shown even when her own people and nation were at risk, the kindness she had extended even when it didn’t serve any greater purpose, the honesty in the face of ridicule or disbelief, the joy she brought her friends without expecting anything in return. She didn’t see a former unicorn, or a princess, she saw a thief. The rage that filled her boiled out into a fireball, which she fully intended to eliminate the being that had so completely nullified her purpose, her destiny.

Made her worthless.

Made her nothing.

Celestia was not nothing.

And then something happened that the most brilliant student to ever come from the School for Gifted Unicorns, both of them, had never anticipated.

The girls who Twilight befriended claimed their magic.

Within moments, they had once again rallied victory from an absolute certain defeat. Rising like a phoenix from the fireball that was supposed to burn Twilight to ashes, the six girls summoned the Rainbow of Light. It shouldn’t have been possible, they were missing the other five elements, which presumably were back in Equestria. This wasn’t the strike team Twilight had formed three years prior, it was a handful of everyday girls that she’d pulled together as friends…and they somehow were wielding the might of power so legendary its number of uses could be counted on hooves even though it had existed for at least a millennium.

The moment the chromatic weapon enveloped her, she was suddenly aware of standing in the middle of a circle of light. At six points around the circle shown entities of pure magic

They were speaking to her, but not with words. The concepts she was being confronted with only barely distracted her from the fact that she stood before them as a human, not a pony. “What?! What are you trying to say? I’m supposed to be your princess, your champion, why are you fighting against me?” she shouted at the cacophony of pure thought that was assailing her.

All at once the clamor silenced, and five of them seemed to fade…no, not fade, but still, and in their stillness, their brilliance diminished. Now that they were no longer storms of color, she could see they were more like incredibly complex multi-dimensional circuits, paths of light that seemed so dense as to form crystalline structures, but there was nothing particularly solid to them. The one that remained active rose above the others as if stepping up to a podium, if a concept given the form of light could even perform such an action.

“Sunset Shimmer, you have abused the power of the manifestation of Friendship|Magic,” it recited, the two words of Friendship and Magic somehow being spoken at the same time, as if meaning the same thing, “You have ignored the lessons laid at your feet and reached for a gift that you are not prepared for.”

She tried to rally a defense, surely she would be permitted a chance to acquit herself before whatever these beings were. “I only sought to claim what was mine by destiny!” she retorted, “So many people…so many ponies sought to block me from becoming what I’m meant to be!”

She was now seeing dominant coloration and even patterns in the entities she faced. The one that had been addressing her was lavender and held a shape that was vaguely like a star. She sensed some activity behind her and turned to see the other purple entity begin to take form and grow active. It rose, not as high as the star but above the other. “You failed to grasp that it was the very people you stepped over that were your keys to your destiny. Time and again you had the chance to take the path to the ascension you crave, but each time you cast it aside.” Having spoken its piece, it lowered to the same level as the others and stilled.

“No…no! How can any of these people have been a part of my destiny!?” Celestia cried, “I’m meant to be a princess, an alicorn!” Now snarling, she turned back to face the chair-entity of this apparent counsel. “How can any being lower than me be a part of that destiny?!”

“As you have yet to learn the lesson needed to even begin to comprehend the question you have asked, let alone the answer, you will be placed under a geas. You will be required to uphold the values of Harmony and Friendship. Once you have shown that you have fully understood the Magic of Friendship, the geas will be lifted. You must be honest,” the red-colored entity seemed to spin to activity and rise to the same level as the star, “Generous,” the diamond rose up, “Full of joy,” the pink…blob rose, practically a micro-hurricane compared to the others, “Kind,” the other pink shape, this one seeming to be composed of four lobes, more gently spun up and joined the others, “and loyal,” the final entity looked like nothing more than a red streak, but seemed to spin its entire self vertically rather than horizontally like the rest, “Before you will be released to practice the agency that you have so abused.”

Celestia scowled at the entities, “You’re going to punish me for pursuing what’s mine by right?!” she began shouting, “I’ve outwitted every challenger, I out-maneuvered an immortal princess! With barely anything, I went from an outcast to the doorstep of Equestria with an army! You think a bunch of lights can stop me?!”

“SILENCE!” thundered the six entities in unison. “Your hubris will endanger yourself and others,” the star began, “Has endangered two worlds! And you speak your words without a thought to the consequences. To ensure you are unable to manipulate others with the truth, you are prohibited from revealing that you are geassed or the nature thereof.”

The lights started fading, but somehow her awareness of the entities had not. It was like she could sense them closing in, pressing against her spirit and mind like a mold. “You think just keeping me from talking about something directly can stop me?! You will not beat me, nobody beats me!!! I will find a way!”

Before she could speak another word, visions, images, feelings, experiences started flashing over her consciousness. An awareness of her misdeeds, of the ways she had injured another in any way, whether the immature reactions of a filly or the calculating schemes of a young woman, started slamming into her being. She was being forced to live every pain and torment she’d visited upon anyone else, starting with her mentor and culminating with attempting to kill Twilight Sparkle. It didn’t matter to the entities how justified Celestia thought the actions were, if they were counter to the will of the Elements, she was forced to endure the pain and suffering she’d inflicted.

It was only with a dim awareness that she realized she was falling through the air, by the time she was jarred back into full cognizance by a twenty-foot fall to the bottom of a crater, the agony she experienced from what she had done to others was far worse than the pain of the impact. And worse, was the voice. Not of the six entities that seemed to represent the elements, but her own voice, the one tucked into the back of her mind, the one that was fully aware of how much she was hurting others and how drastically she was falling from the principles of Harmony. It had always been there, she had simply trained herself to ignore it.

The Elements had magnified that voice, giving it center stage to show her that not only did she know better, she made the choice to turn a blind eye to Friendship.

There had been another way…and she’d ignored it.

She knew how it would look; the “bad girl” of the school, suddenly contrite and ready to learn about friendship with eyes full of tears. She looked back at the sum total of her life and realized that she had destroyed it more certainly than Twilight or her old mentor ever could. She was nowhere, had nothing, had nobody, and there was nobody to blame but herself.

And it hurt. I hurt far worse than any punishment could.

As she watched the aftermath, accepted the complete and total loss to the girl she had put on the pedestal of “Nemesis,” she felt a small flicker of hope. The princess had…well, not quite given a royal decree, but she had tasked the five girls she had befriended with teaching Celestia the lessons she’d ignored all her life.

Banishment was fitting, and she didn’t even ask Twilight about returning; what would the point be? She’d have to go back to face her mentor, likely face treason and sedition charges, not to mention theft of a magical artifact, and if the princesses were feeling particularly vindictive, they could potentially try her for war crimes for using mind magic on unwilling victims.

When the portal closed, the flow of magic suddenly stopped, but unlike the last few times she’d been on the human side of the portal after the three-night deadline, she could feel the weight of the Elements on her. Even if she had wanted to, she wouldn’t have been able to use her old methods of getting her way.

Maybe if I spoke to the girls, explained that I needed to make friends…maybe they could help me figure this curse out. And she did view it as a curse, it was an inhibition on her free will, magical in nature, and enforced by an outside entity. In fact, I don’t even need to say anything about it, I can just…let the curse do its thing! Let it stop me from explaining it, they’re not stupid…she watched Pinkie plow into the base of the statue, bouncing off it when the now inactive portal didn’t let her through, …okay, they’re mostly not stupid, maybe if I just suggested certain activities, or played word games…

Her vision suddenly blurred, and six hues seemed to spin up around her, but nobody else seemed to notice. She realized that this was happening inside her own head, somehow.

“Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed.” echoed through her head.

Celestia was poleaxed. What, specifically, had triggered that? And why did the Elements respond so…coldly?

She watched the group of girls as they began to head into the gym. They weren’t looking in her direction, so they couldn’t see her raise her hand to flag them down, and also missed her opening her mouth to call out…and no sound emerged.

Clasping her throat, she spoke to herself in a hushed voice, “...no, no, no…oh, thank goodness!” she breathed a sigh of relief.

What happened there? she thought as she began directing the boys on their assigned cleanup duties.

Having been shown the error of her ways in perhaps the most forceful possible way, Celestia was determined to not go down that path again, but she was tired, emotionally drained, burdened with a curse that she couldn’t figure out yet, physically injured from the fall, her back and tailbone itched fiercely for reasons she hadn’t been able to investigate yet, and so when Snails grabbed the empty bucket instead of the one with the bricks…words came out that she hadn’t intended, “Get me the bucket of bricks you id…” Before she could finish the sentence, her voice choked off.

“Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed.” echoed through her consciousness again.

That was an accident! she mentally shouted at the constructs. There was no response, just that not-quite-there-ness of the entities, that feeling of several presences surrounding her and binding her.

Sighing, she sighed and tried again, “Please give me the bucket of bricks.”

At least I can still ask for things nicely… maybe I can work within the restrictions the Elements put on this curse, use the virtues directly to figure out a way out of this…

“Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed.”

For the first time, a moment of genuine fear stabbed at her. That was in response to my thoughts! But what had it done to her?

A few minutes later, Vice-principal Luna was dismissing them to go home, and for the first time since she had fled to this world…she didn’t want to go. “You’re done for the night,” said the older woman, “Come see me on Monday to receive whatever discipline we’ll have for you.”

The response came automatically, the basic courtesy drilled into her by the orphanage, her teachers, and the princess herself, “Th-tha-a-a-a...th-th-th…” and her vocal cords stopped working. The longer she tried to speak the simple word of gratitude, the harder it was to exhale, her body felt like it was being pressed in from all directions, and she started seeing the oddly gyrating lights in her vision. Before the sensations became too intense, she stopped trying to speak and just nodded her head, hoping the educator wouldn’t inquire further.

Her walk home was mostly automatic, and she found herself greatly wishing she’d ridden her motorcycle to the school that day. She hadn’t actually expected to need it after the dance, she was supposed to be back in Equestria by now, so rather than risk the thing stalling out on the road again, she had left it at the warehouse. The long walk gave her plenty of opportunities to think, though, trying to figure out what had happened, why the Elements were suddenly behaving so differently. She almost didn’t even think about the door she pushed her way through and then closed, her mind caught up on reviewing anything she’d ever learned about magic and the nature thereof to figure out why she suddenly was being restricted from basic communication. Absently, she pulled out her phone and shook it twice, activating the feature she’d stumbled onto for this particular brand of Cyborg phone to turn on the flashlight without turning on the screen. She devoted a little more thought to her navigation of the warehouse as it was a bit more hazardous than the walk had been, given the stripped and abandoned large machinery, tracks in the floor where large-scale platforms were moved from one end of the warehouse floor to another, and of course the tools and parts she had splayed around her motorcycle.

A brief pause of her light on the vehicle to confirm it was still in the same condition she’d left it, she played the light across the path she had left for herself through the building. I’m going to have to take it to a shop, she thought, If I’m going to be here for another 30 moons. Sighing at the thought, the other day-in, day-out tasks of life flooded her consciousness, tasks that she had been mentally preparing herself to never have to think of again. Probably going to have to get a job if I’m going to keep living on my own, probably going to need to move into an actual apartment, which will mean I’ll need to get better ID documents. Didn’t think I’d need ‘em long-term, now it looks like I’ll need them for…a very long time still.

Her progress through the warehouse had brought her to her room, which had once been the manager’s office. The realization that she may never return to Equestria sunk in with the finality of the “click” of the latch for the door engaging. Her throat tightened in a purely emotional response as she felt her eyes start to water. No, she told herself, You made your bed, now you get to lay in it. Sniffling and wiping her eyes dry with the heel of the hand not holding the phone, she turned and flicked on the small light by her bed before shaking the phone again to shut off the flashlight.

She sagged into a sitting position on her bed, shrugging out of her jacket and tossing it at the desk chair she’d set up across the room. She missed entirely but ignored the pile of cloth and leather as she sank into her thoughts. She yanked off her boots as she continued her mental checklist, I’ll need to pay my phone bill…and probably actually buy insurance for the motorcycle. My fake driver’s license passes muster at a traffic stop, but the old, “My insurance card is in the mail,” excuse is only going to work so many times. More clothes were in order, her body was proving that it had, indeed, reverted to the middle of adolescence when she first came through the portal years ago, and while growing taller didn’t seem to be a thing she’d need to worry about, her hips and bust were constantly waging a war on her wardrobe. Of course, that would mean she’d have to leave the warehouse and face the very community that she had spent years tearing apart and molding to her needs, only to have them see her for what she truly was; a monster.

She felt a slick knot of stress in the pit of her stomach and began experiencing a dark realization that even if she were to die in this warehouse, nobody would miss her. The girls who had been tasked with her would likely just wonder where she had disappeared to, the other students at the school would breathe a sigh of relief, and after having experienced the pain she’d caused them, she wouldn’t blame them. The teachers would simply mark her absent and, eventually, forget about her.

The Equestrians would probably send someone back through in 30 moons, and when they didn’t find Celestia within the three-day window, they’d likely report back to the princess that she was lost. She’d be presumed dead after a while, then her role in Equestria’s history would be just a footnote to Princess Twilight’s rule, then she’d be forgotten entirely.

She had no family, no loved ones, no friends, and after tonight Snips and Snails probably wouldn’t want to even be acquainted with her.

A buzzing in her hand and the sound of a classical piece that she’d taken a liking to from this world startled her out of her thoughts. While she would have sworn that she had just sat down moments before, her blaring alarm on her phone was evidence that she’d been sitting there for hours. As if to confirm her phone’s testimony, her muscles aching from fatigue and inactivity and the dim natural light of the pre-sunrise morning announced that it was, indeed, the day after the disaster that her plans had turned into.

Her thoughts returned to her predicament as she absently fished out the charging cable for her phone. Magic is a living thing, the reasoned, It’s flexible, allowing for the intent of the caster to shape the spells. She angled the bottom of the phone so she could clearly see the port on the bottom. Yet the Elements are acting…static, like they’re not alive. She pushed the connector into the port and flipped the phone to see the display as it bloomed to brightness, adding a bit more light to the room. A few notifications were still visible, as was the battery level and the time, displayed with the computer precision of a network-connected device.

…because it’s a computer, came the thought.

Celestia halted her movement, staring at the phone. A connection was trying to form between the thoughts in her head. Deliberately, she pushed the button on the side to shut off the display, then turned it back on.

Computers do what you tell them to. No matter how ‘smart’ they seem, they’re limited by their programming.

What was her subconscious trying to tell her?

Computers are dictated by their programming, and most of the ‘intelligence’ of computers, like my phone, comes from the way they’re connected to bigger, more powerful computers on the network…

She unlocked the phone and absently stroked her thumb up to move the app list, not really looking at the icons or names, just trying to make the connection her thoughts were forming.

The Elements are acting static, rigid… she absently tapped on an icon for an idle game that she had downloaded. After the first initial bout of interaction these games always required, she’d lost interest but never bothered to delete it. She watched as the lights and colors burst on the screen and the numbers tick upwards. Unless she interacted with it, the numbers would continue their steady climb, regardless of whether any of the goals or checkpoints for the game had been met. They were following their programming rigidly…

…like the Elements.

As though a cover were removed, Celestia could see the entire situation like a painting in a Canterlot museum. Different universes, especially those with clearly different processes in motion, regardless of how similar they may seem on the surface, have different laws of nature that govern their existence. The five fundamental forces of electromagnetism, gravity, weak and strong interactions, and magic can be tweaked just so, and of course, the nature of magic on this side of the portal meant that it was harder for the beings here to use it, which meant that the universe developed differently. The stellar bodies wouldn’t need any sort of intervention to move, equines wouldn’t have developed magic so simians took their place in the evolutionary ladder due to their more predatory nature and ability to develop tools without magic, and as they developed those tools and the rules for using them, they unwittingly would have shaped the very rules that dictated the unused magical force…

…which meant that the Elements had installed programs onto the computer of her soul, programs that required a connection to the living Equestrian magic on the other side of the portal. A connection that would be cut off for the next 30 moons.

A chill gripped her, she needed to get help, now. A curse like this running wildcat with only a few loosely defined rules would be catastrophic, for her if not resulting in a magical energy loop. Where could she find help, though? Twilight wouldn’t be back for another 30 moons at the earliest, and the portal was closed. The Element of Magic was gone, and that meant that there were no magical means of opening the portal.

But that wasn’t the last magical artifact in this world that she had access to.

Key…I’ll need a key to the building! she thought, I think I’ve still got the janitor’s contact info, I’ll need to write this out, somehow communicate that it’s urgent without actually speaking. Frantically, she reached for her phone and unlocked the screen. She tapped into the app for messaging, and put down her thumb…only to have it slide off the phone’s screen. The resulting garbage word on her phone was worthless, so she tapped on the backspace button and put her thumb on the screen…and it slid off again, regardless of what she wanted to type.

OK…don’t panic! she told herself. You’ve broken into the school before without being caught or leaving any evidence, the same security holes should still be there. She grabbed her phone and scrambled to her bedroom door. Opening it, she was faced with a still dark warehouse. Shaking the phone to life, she navigated down to her motorcycle. There was no time to waste, if the curse was progressing down her possible communication channels, even if the journal still worked, all the princess would wind up seeing would be a bunch of random scribbles made by a ballpoint pen.

She hopped on her motorcycle, intending to start it up, walk it over to the door, shove the loading bay door open enough to drive out, and just leave without securing the warehouse. It wasn’t like she could lock up anyway, and if this plan failed, she may wind up being a mute teenager, unable to even ask for help, probably eventually starving to death because she couldn’t get food…

…stop that Celestia, you are being over-dramatic! She wasn’t starving yet, she wasn’t even hungry. She tucked her phone into her jeans pocket, not even shutting off the light in her haste, and stomped down on the kick-start, barefoot smarting as it connected with the metal lever. The engine sputtered briefly but didn’t start. A slight, tell-tale gurgle told her exactly what the problem was. Oh, not now! The bike had been a junkyard find, not even in the vehicle section of the yard, just tossed by some particularly strong yard-hand into a pile. Celestia had snuck it away and spent the better part of 9 months slowly patching it up until it could start and run somewhat reliably. It was good for the occasional trip downtown or to one of the suburbs, but sometimes wouldn’t even start. She figured out over time that there was a leak somewhere between the cooling system and the oil feed. Exactly what she hadn’t yet figured out, but she did know if she poured enough stop-leak into the coolant it would let the engine run enough to get her where she needed to be.

She grabbed the stop-leak and popped off the cap for the coolant reservoir, and sure enough, it was nearly dry. She’d dealt with this before, so knew that one bottle of the stop-leak would be enough to fill the coolant tank and seal the leak…wherever it happened to be, so she just shoved the bottle opening in and let it glug until empty. She yanked it out and put the cap back on the coolant bottle, then stood next to the bike to stomp on the kick start again. This time the engine sputtered to life but threatened to stop again. She’d dealt with this, too, so she reached across the bike and yanked back on the throttle, forcing the engine to rev.

She heard the hiss moments before her world went white-black with pain. She found herself on her back and covered with greasy and hot coolant. Weakly, she stood and staggered her way over to the emergency water station off to the side of the warehouse floor. The warehouse must have had to deal with some variety of toxic chemicals, as there was a station for emergency rinsing on both sides of the building. This particular station did work, but only if the reservoir was full, as she found out one bored summer Sunday when school was out and there was nothing to do but explore her surroundings. The cold of the water did little to stop the pain, and she realized that her right arm was the odd combination of on fire and numbness that comes from being freshly injured. She had activated the emergency shower with her left hand out of instinct, apparently. The running water continually rinsed away the blood, which let her see the jags of metal that were embedded in her hand and wrist.

As though watching someone else do it, she watched her left hand move up to her right wrist and gently tease the metal slivers out. As her hand worked on removing the remaining bits of metal, she looked over at the motorcycle to see one of the coolant pipes, directly under where her right hand had been while twisting the throttle, was blown outward. Coolant and stop-leak were oozing out of the pipe, which wasn’t supposed to have enough pressure in it to allow for any of the (much more sludgy substance than it should be) fluid to still be pouring out, but she also saw that the stop-leak had started bonding with metal slivers and was coming out in clumps.

She had accidentally given her motorcycle a heart attack, clogging its major artery, then trying to blast coolant through. The pipe burst before the obstruction that had built up could.

Absently, she realized she needed to call an ambulance. She’d figure out how to pay the bill for it later…or even provide the ID the hospital would need. She needed medical attention.

Then the realization hit her. She was standing under sluicing water. Even as she thought about the realization the reservoir ran out and the shower petered off to a dribble. She reached into her back pocket with her left hand, pulled out the device, and held the soaked phone up. Futility, she squeezed the button to activate the phone a couple of times.

Nothing. The phone was dead.

Forget dying of starvation, she’d die of blood loss first.

She didn’t consciously let go of the phone, she just stopped holding it up. It clattered to the floor of the warehouse, the screen shattering as it fell into the puddle of water at her feet.

Celestia started walking. She didn’t know where she was going, and she didn’t care. She had nothing, she was already dead. In a detached way, she wondered if she had died when her motorcycle blew up and she was just a ghost. The oncoming light of dawn was no comfort, it was just there. She felt the gravel and debris under her feet as she staggered, felt the drops of blood as they occasionally fell on her right foot as she moved, but didn’t register any pain. Dead people don’t feel pain, right? she reasoned, …so why does being dead hurt so much?

Numbly, she stumbled through the warehouse district. Abruptly, she realized she was standing on the railroad tracks that ran by the warehouse. The warehouses lining the tracks originally had built-in docks for the freight cars, but when the city built a central train hub in the next district, the trains had no need to stop at the warehouses one by one, so the docks were fenced off, but the tracks were still kept in operating condition. They weren’t used much, but on weekends, at least one train hauling freight blasted through.

And right there, an answer presented itself when she hadn’t yet asked the question. How does a dead person stop hurting? she thought, Take away the body, then the pain goes away…

With slow deliberation, she centered herself on the tracks and waited. She heard the blare of a train horn, which always started when they were entering the district due to some local ordinance or other, and she turned to face it.

Absently, she noticed the sensation that the feux-Elements were spinning up again. She had been pushed beyond caring, and unless they were able to puppet her body, they weren’t going to be able to stop her.

Before she could find out if they could, she was tackled off the tracks by Rainbow Dash.

Over the next 48 hours, Celestia remained in a numbed, shocked state. She was distantly aware that her arm was being taken care of, as were most of her other physical needs. She followed directions, slept where and when they told her to, attended whatever meeting they asked her, and took the medications they handed her. But she didn’t say anything.

After all, she couldn’t speak.

Two days after being admitted to the hospital, the Apple family was picking her up again. Applebloom at first treated her like a sack of primed C4, but once it was made clear that Celestia wasn’t a threat, relegated the former bully to “background” and otherwise mostly ignored her. Applejack was just quietly there, never pushing herself onto Celestia, but also making sure she knew the farmgirl was present. Big Macintosh did his best to help in his quiet way and seemed to be comfortable in her presence, and Granny Smith always just looked a bit sad. When the other girls started coming to keep watch over her, she simply…existed. Pinkie Pie seemed to never be alone with her, which meant that one of the others was always a mitigating presence, something Celestia was grateful for.

Then…she came in. The mirror image of her mentor, someone who didn’t know the princess (and by proxy, the principal) may not have noticed, but Celestia could tell the woman was tired. The amount of bureaucratic drudgery that she had to have endured because of the incident with Equestrian magic must have been nightmare-inducing, and yet the woman wasn’t angry at her, wasn’t there to lecture, she was there to help…

Celestia just couldn’t figure out why…

Why would she help me? I’m worthless! I’ve failed at everything, I have nothing to give her in exchange…why is she here?! The voice in her head was not the pseudo-Elements, it was her own. They were still there, but they were passive, not intervening in her internal monologue.

I should figure out how to tell her to not bother, I’ll only disappoint her. But a small part of herself spoke up then, But what if she can help? Even if it’s just to have a place for a little while, just a quiet place where we can pretend, even just a little longer, that I never lost anything.

But I lost it all when Twilight Sparkle won.

That’s not when I lost everything, though, the small voice chided her, I lost everything when the princess didn’t want to be my mom.

The reminder was almost enough to cause her to start crying again. Instead, she began raising her hand.

The principal took her into her car, and Celestia expected the lecturing to start.

It did not.

The principal offered Celestia food. It had meat in it, something she’d avoided eating as soon as she figured out what the food being served on this side of the portal was. She expected the “lessons” that served as chastisement to start.

They did not.

Celestia couldn’t figure the woman out.I hurt her just as much as anyone at the school…probably more given she’s the one that needs to deal with the fallout, she thought, Why isn’t she using this as a chance to get back at me?

The first awkward night was so overwhelmingly good compared to the previous two weeks she couldn’t properly process it. It was like she was dreaming, but unlike her actual dreams of late, it wasn’t accompanied by magical backlash, the mocking laughter of her classmates (which all sounded suspiciously like the fillies and colts from her time in Equestria, not so much like the students at Canterlot High), or a particularly vindictive Twilight Sparkle dragging her back to Equestria for summary judgment. She kept expecting someone to jump out at her and point out the demon wings or for the zombified students of the school to tear down the wall and start eating her alive. But then the principal started singing a sappy song that was on the top-ten charts decades ago, and somehow she never felt safer or more secure in her young life.

Vice-principal Luna (who Sunset somehow never connected the dots that the two adult women in the house were sisters until she also occupied the same residence…which let her figure out a lot about the Nightmare Moon stories that weren’t taught in schools when she was a filly) was distant at first but seemed to warm up to her readily enough. The sisters would talk about their day, Luna updating her sister on the events at school, and occasionally banter as though Celestia weren’t in the room. It was oddly domestic, and she started to see her principal as a different person from the princess…and that gave her even more hope for reasons she couldn’t quite figure out.

The first time she was left alone since the Fall Formal had been somewhat harrowing. Rather than allow her mind to dwell on the silence and being alone…and the temptation to slip into darkness that would bring…she decided to raid the tiny library that occupied a wall of her hostess’ bedroom. At first, she couldn’t track why there was such a different selection split between two sets of shelves but decided to pull from the collection that had some more fanciful titles. The Jewelbox Files caught her eye, and on reading the preview text on the back of the novel figured out it was the fictitious account of a human magic user in modern Chicacolt and how they managed to survive and thrive in spite of being viewed with suspicion by the authorities.

The obvious self-identification with the protagonist was not lost on her.

When the principal returned with the new phone, she wasn’t sure how to deal with it. On the one hand, it was a new phone, one which she may not be able to do much with besides unlocking the screen. On the other, it was possibly a loaded relationship mine, one to trigger whenever the principal felt she needed leverage. Then she saw her cutiemark on the case, and her heart nearly stopped. Humans didn’t have cutiemarks. Sure, they often wound up with pins or symbols in their clothing that seemed to match their pony counterparts, but there was no reason this version of her mentor could understand the significance of this design.

She planned her approach. She wasn’t sure if she could even do what she was about to try, but even if the attempt finished what she started by standing in front of a train, she was going to show this woman some gratitude for her generosity.

She began speaking. Just forming the sounds required immense physical control, and she almost couldn’t see from the spinning colors and lights from the pseudo-Elements. The compression on her soul started to hurt physically, somehow, a feeling like she was shoving a limb into some heavy machinery while it was still operating. She could feel it when her vocal cords stopped working and the final syllable of “thank you” came out as barely more than a hiss. Once she stopped trying to speak, the pseudo-Elements suddenly stilled, and the crushing sensations suddenly stopped. She sagged against her hostess, her muscles somehow aching in response to her spiritual trial.

Suddenly, her world was awash in light. Rainbow colors, a pure wash of magic this time and not just the fragmented not-spinning of the pseudo-Elements, flooded her vision. The whirlwind of color coalesced into a ring with five locus points around the ring and one in the center, connected like a star. Each locus point was a color, blue, pink, orange, red, and lavender around the ring, and a bright white in the center. The light seemed to resemble some sort of clockwork mechanism, and as she watched, the lavender locus on the ring formed into a four-pointed gemstone, and it was as though the ring of light slid around. If she were to make any comparison to a real-world object rather than something that was just in her mind, she’d say it was like an extremely fancy lock.

All at once, the light fled, and for a moment it felt like the world was dark. Her vision began to adjust, and she realized she was being held by the principal.

Before she had a chance to feel embarrassed, she was suddenly seized with the need to write! She practically leaped across the table and grabbed a pen and paper and began to write names. She wasn’t even sure what she was writing, just that the names she was writing down were important. Faster than she could write, names of other students, teachers, and members of the community were flooding her mind, as though the people the names were attached to were flooding her mind. When her hostess put the list of names from the student roster in front of her, it was like all the people whose names she could see on the list suddenly stopped shouting their own names at her. She flipped through the pages, reviewing the names, and small whispers of why the names were important to her began floating up in her mind. Broken friendships, shattered trust, damaged relationships…it was a list of her crimes against the people around her in this world represented merely by their names. Some had litanies of injury so long that if she were to list them all she’d be writing for a week. Some had only one accusation against her.

When she finished the list, the chorus in her mind was quieter, but not yet silenced. She began writing the teacher’s names, and shortly another printed list was presented to her, and once she finished reviewing the staff roster, she only had a handful of names that weren’t in a handy database.

By this time, the clamor of names was silent, but the whisper of her crimes against Harmony was near deafening. If her hostess was saying anything to her, she couldn’t hear it. She needed to organize the names, put them together in ways that let her see the relationships, find the broken connections and restore them somehow. She wasn’t sure how she would do that, but that was all she could think to do. She began tearing the lists of names into strips, and she was handed a pair of scissors. When she began laying the names down on fresh pieces of paper with drawn lines between them, then having to scrap the original pages and create new ones when the lines she drew weren’t correct or there weren’t enough, she was handed some string. Once the relationship web grew big enough, the names she still hadn’t attached, the supplies they still had, and the web that she’d assembled thus far were transferred to the guest room, where the principal had already cleared a wall.

She worked frantically, scrambling to get the names up so the chorus in her mind would quiet. She began coloring the string, then using the offered colors to add to the web. Family groups were formed, even among people that weren’t related by blood. Scootaloo was connected to Rainbow Dash by a family tie, even though they weren’t actually sisters. Rarity and Pinkie Pie had enough strings coming off their names to snare a whale, and Fluttershy only had a few connections.

In the middle of the web were the five girls that had stood with Twilight. They were connected by the center, but there was no name for the person who should be there, so she just wrote “Magic?” on a piece of paper, since Twilight’s element was Magic, and she assumed the other five girls represented the other elements somehow.

Dinner came and went, she ate as much as she could between positioning names. The two sisters that were counterparts to the princesses back home were placed near the five in the middle, with “friend” connections between the girls, but a family connection to the middle.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when she awoke the next day, she looked up at the wall and saw what she had made. While impressive, her heart sank. It was a testament to her hubris, a monument to the lives she’d damaged in her ambition to claim the title of “princess” for herself. She touched one of the strings, knowing it represented a family tie that she’d broken. Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara are sisters? She thought. Well, maybe not by blood, but they are inseparable.

Somehow, she was supposed to fix all of it. She had no idea how.

Her first day of school after the Fall Formal was a terrifying prospect, but she knew she had to face it if she was going to be able to live her life. Besides, she knew free-loading off the principal and her sister wasn’t in the cards for the long-term, so returning to something resembling normalcy would only be a benefit.

The bullying…was expected. She was prepared to let the students take out their years of anger and frustration on her. Rainbow Dash coming to her defense was not expected, and the display of magical speed was an absolute shock. She must still have Equestrian magic! she thought, I thought it was cut off when the portal closed…but what if it’s growing on top of the already existing magical field here?

The urge to study and test was only curtailed by her inability to write anything down, and unless you can write it down (so the saying went), you were just screwing around.

She didn’t know how to thank Rainbow Dash, and even if she’d been able to speak, the jock probably wouldn’t care about the words. When she heard about Dash’s detention, she felt guilty. Dash was only coming to her defense, so it didn’t feel right that the other girl should be paying for her good deed by serving punishment. So she decided she was going to join the girl in solidarity.

Celestia didn’t think she’d earn a friend. She didn’t think she’d like Rainbow at all, really, she thought the other girl was just too obsessed with sports to think of anything but her own skills…but she realized that sold the other girl severely short. In the hour she was with Dash in the detention room (and she knew the older woman had left them alone on purpose, she learned that the bravado masked a truly impressive drive that had matched her own, but steered and guided by a heart of gold.

When Luna declared the detention served, the rainbow returned, this time the red locus reconfigured into a stylized lightning bolt and more of the struts and arches of light slid out of the way. Of what, Celestia still couldn’t be sure. By the time the light faded from her eyes and her vision returned, she was marching down the street, very quickly redirected into the principal’s car and driven to her home.

Celestia’s frenetic work on the relationship matrix was brief, not nearly as much work needed to be done this time, but it reconfigured quite a bit. The relationship between Rainbow Dash and the center of the element’s circle currently labeled “Magic?” was now the blue string that represented friendship, and from that a cascade of white string had been replaced with blue, and some of the red had been twinned with blue as well.

When she was finished, she took in the whole of the wall of names and string and was struck by a wave of vertigo. That one change…that one new friendship altered half the web! She had pulled the strings (metaphorically, of course) of the girl’s friendships before, but she’d never realized the extent. The five girls were so heavily woven together and they cast such a wide net…Celestia realized it might take less work than she thought to fix her mistakes.

Work that she had no idea how to go about doing.

The next day, she and her hostess set about exploring the features of the phone and downloading and installing the assistive software. Just being able to answer basic questions was a huge relief, and she experimented with responses of the “yes,” “no,” and “maybe” variety. A few of the other available buttons were connected to the word “thanks,” and “bathroom.” The principal was the one to find the part of the app that allowed someone to form a sentence from the words in the limited dictionary. Celestia didn’t even let herself think of using it. The entities in her head were reacting to her thoughts. If she allowed herself to openly and consciously think about communicating with the phone beyond the basic commands, she may lose the use of the phone as well.

Hearth’s Warming rolled around soon after. This would be her first in the human world with a family around her, one that she was rapidly beginning to feel like she was part of. Any time that notion entered her mind, though, she quashed it; she’d gotten her hopes up about finally finding a family years before when she’d gone through puberty the first time. It still hurt, and the feelings of being home were just too new and too raw, she didn’t have any way of dealing with the sudden exposure to the trigger of Hearth’s Warming decorations being put up by her hostess…who she’d begun to feel was her mom, way down in her heart of hearts.

And she just couldn’t. She couldn’t face that heartbreak again. Before the principal could see her fall to pieces, she ran to the guest room and closed the door firmly, but didn’t slam it because she had grown to care too much about the women in the house to make them think her breakdown was their fault.

After rebuffing the inquiries at her door, wept, and she forced herself to do so very, very quietly. It wasn’t this version of the woman who was princess back in Equestria that rejected her over and over, it wasn’t the principal that had passed over the first student she’d taken in directly in centuries in favor of a country bumpkin that happened to stumble into being an alicorn. They aren’t my family, they are just being nice to me, they don’t care beyond making sure I don’t die out in the world. They’re better than most but no different than the orphanage. I cannot let myself…let myself even hope for being accepted here…of being loved. I don’t deserve a family…I don’t deserve a mom…

Those thoughts were all she allowed herself to think during dinner, and it worked as a mantra against the feelings of, “I’m home,” that came up every time she looked at the tree. It was a relief to leave the room and go to bed, and she was so emotionally wrung out that she fell asleep nearly as soon as she got under the covers.

Her surprise at finding the principal on the floor outside her bedroom door was surpassed only by the tale of how it happened that she got there. Multiverse theory was, of course, an early 200s course at the School for Gifted Unicorns, anyone who started to learn how to teleport had to take the course, and naturally being Equestria’s only (so far as she knew) long-term expatriate living in another universe, she was living the evidence that other versions of herself existed in the multiverse…but to have her hostess tell so many details of her own past was at once mortifying (in the “don’t look at my filly pictures!” way) and exhilarating. Someone else knew exactly what her life was like before the mirror! Well, the holidays, but it was enough of a microcosm of her life that she somehow didn’t feel quite so alone.

And the Anon-a-miss incident that seemed to happen in so many other universes to those other versions of her? She wasn’t sure if it was worth the trade to have her current condition compared to having the school turn on her…but she supposed that having all that progress she had made in those other worlds suddenly ripped away by a trio of jealous underclassmen…the thought was chilling.

And those strange alternate futures? A vampire? A vampire hunter?! Getting married to Luna of all people?

And throughout it all, she kept glancing at the packet. The stack of paper on the table between her and the obviously exhausted woman could be many things, and a small part of her was hoping against hope that it meant she finally had a home. But there could be other things in there. Just a form of ID or some real documentation to prove she existed.

But she didn’t dare hope for anything more than that.

And then she had a mom.

Just like that, she had a mom, a fulfillment of a dream that had been crushed, a filly-hood wish given form. And the woman was so unsure, she didn’t think Celestia would want to have her as a mom.

If she ever got her ability to speak back, she’d never, ever let a day go by without telling her new mom how much she loved her.

When the Equestrians made contact, Celestia was ambivalent. She didn’t think they’d try to force her to go back through the portal, but if they did she’d show them a few things about how the dominant species of this world managed to become the dominant species. This turned out to be a non-issue, however. Other than the princess’ odd behavior, nobody seemed to be at all inclined to remove Celestia from her new home.

Princess Twilight was a breath of fresh air, a fellow Equestrian that was just as familiar (well, more familiar than the average Equestrian) with the world that she now called home, and it was nice to have someone around who had so many experiences in common…but just the same the gaps in Twilight’s knowledge of this world’s magic were maddening…and she began to lose hope again. She’d never try to take her own life again, but it was clear that none of the mages or the princesses had even remotely thought of questioning their own assumptions about the workings of magic, and Celestia couldn’t correct them.

When Fluttershy began keeping an eye on her, at first she was grateful for a friend, but the longer the silent girl was near, the more Celestia’s memory played back all the ways she’d hurt the shy girl. And the memory of the pain and anguish that Fluttershy, specifically, had endured…she could no longer face it. She could no longer tolerate the person she had been, and being around Fluttershy was forcing her to remember it. What she had done was inexcusable, especially when she realized it was her that drove Fluttershy to attempt what she had also done.

And Fluttershy had forgiven her, and that alone nearly broke her. How could she forgive me?! I nearly killed her! It may have been Fluttershy’s hand that took the action, but it had been Sunset’s words that caused it. Celestia could never take back any of it, Fluttershy had been just as close to simply not being alive as Celestia had been, and if her attempt had been anything like the former unicorn’s, then it was only by the barest of moments and pure luck that she had survived. And more incredibly, she believed Fluttershy, sweet, kind Fluttershy, truly forgave her. Her heart broke into a million pieces, and she cried for all that could have been if Celestia had just offered friendship instead of being a bully. Whatever destiny she had been pursuing hadn’t been worth it, would never be worth all the pain and suffering she’d caused the girl who now wanted to be her friend. Any remaining thoughts of somehow regaining her path to her former “destiny” were tossed out like yesterday’s cafeteria lunch, any dreams of princess-hood or alicorn ascension would never be as important to her as this moment of being relieved of a burden she hadn’t even been aware she was carrying.

It wasn’t until she woke up that she realized that she’d encountered another of the girls showing Equestrian magic, she had grown so used to sleeping with a pair of wings around her as a filly that she had started to take it for granted that the princess would hold her like that. And that reminded her that, for all that she’d received forgiveness from Fluttershy, she had a long way to go to offer repentance to all the people she’d wronged, starting with the members of the Equestrian delegation and one pony in particular…which was when she experienced the third flash of rainbow brilliance.

She was alone this time, but that was okay because she was in her own bedroom, and they’d stocked up on the supplies she’d need. Her adoptive mother found her working away when Celestia didn’t respond to calls for breakfast, the woman clearly making the appropriate connections and coming to the correct conclusion by immediately making calls and getting Luna to take over what duties she could.

She hardly expected her day to end as it had begun, but after the visit to the monastery factory, all the little pieces of the puzzle of what Pinkie had been trying to teach her in that uniquely “Pinkie Pie” way came together. It was not a huge surprise in retrospect, really; the kindness to accept forgiveness of yourself is what allows for accepting that life is full of ups and downs, heartbreak and ecstasy, and without allowing the pain to happen in life, nobody would ever experience what comes after it, and that which comes after is so much sweeter than if it had been handed out on a silver platter. The princess…tried to teach me that, she recalled, She tried to tell me a lesson she’d learned a thousand years ago, but I chose to ignore her because I thought…I thought that a pony shouldn’t have to go through pain…

Having once again worked herself practically to exhaustion, she had just enough energy to take a quick shower and crawl into bed.

The week that followed was…a bit frustrating. While it was largely a hunch, she suspected that the final piece of the puzzle was within reach, and Twilight (who she was rapidly learning she had severely misjudged) and the other Equestrian mages were still pursuing the wrong avenues of study. No matter how they cast, what theories they tried, how many crystals they burned out, the kept trying to treat the curse as a single living organism as you would any other out-of-control spell in Equestria instead of five interlocking programs in a computer. Just like watching a boomer hit the case of a computer as though it could feel pain, the spells being cast on her were simply bouncing off the surface of the “lock” on her autonomy. If it didn’t create a psychic backlash in her mind space, rather like having her head stuck in a bell and banged on repeatedly, she would care less about their ineffective attempts. Had her mom not offered to take her away from it all for a weekend, she was going to just start refusing tests.

The time she spent at the farm was bitter-sweet. On the one hand, it was back where she was at her lowest outside the warehouse, on the other, it was always an environment of familial love and support, and it was clear that even the people who weren’t ‘official’ Apples were still kin if the Apple family said so. Rarity was…somehow being so very forgiving. She made it clear that she hadn’t forgotten in the slightest what happened with the Spring Fling, but it was as though it had been a minor spat between friends instead of a massive amount of broken trust.

And then a tractor-trailer fell on her.

Even dazed after the initial impact, she recognized that she was extremely lucky to have been on the outskirts of the impact, but that was shortly followed up with the realization that Rarity may not have been so lucky. She obviously hadn’t been the only one to come to that conclusion, because Applejack was just as quickly at “ground zero” for the impact…and showing every sign of uncontrolled magic use. She had seen it before, been through it herself, and was trying to get close enough to shock the other girl out of it. One of the documentaries shown in her science classes was about sharks and how you could startle them out of attacking if you punched them in the eye. While not wanting to really hurt her friend, she was hoping a gentle poke might do the trick since none of the other physical intervention was working. Unfortunately, she couldn’t safely get her hands to Applejack’s face without causing the girl injury.

And then the healer showed up. Zebra…! thought Celestia. She recognized the glyph on the woman’s bag as being a Zebrican glyph. Not really a spell, but very much like a pony’s Cutiemark, but with some differences in how they came to be and what they meant…or at least that was what the Zebrican ambassadors would tell her when asked about it. While not hostile, the zebras were somewhat secretive with their culture and considered their glyph marks to be sacred in a different way than ponies viewed their cutiemarks.

She watched Zecora disarm the ticking time bomb that was Applejack running on wildcat’d magical energy without expending a single spell or taking any injury, something not even the mages at the School for Gifted Unicorns had been able to do reliably. This woman will be able to get Rarity out! she realized, and she pulled out her phone.

Her mind was racing a mile a minute, looking for alternatives to what she was about to do, ways to create the results she wanted without committing to this path. She could sense the pseudo-Elements starting up, beginning to intercept her thoughts and plans, the only thing that kept her going was that so many of them were being discarded as unworkable nearly as fast as she thought of them. If I do this, she thought to herself, I won’t be able to communicate at all beyond the simplest of gestures. The thought of gestures as a way to communicate led to thoughts of sign language that she’d used by the two deaf students of the school, which lead to a chorus of, “Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed,” through her mental space as that avenue of communication was shut down. It felt like bars were being embedded under her muscles but over her bones as she felt her arms stiffen. Thoughts of gestures also lead to “yes” and “no” and shrugging which could contain a multitude of meanings that, if the right questions were asked, could mean someone could guess at the nature of the curse. The mental sound of the entities installed in her soul was nearly deafening, and she realized she was running out of time.

I will have one shot at this, she thought, I need to make it count, what do I say? What can I communicate before my hands stop working?

Four words. She managed a punctuation mark to separate the phrase for clarity, but her thumbs stopped tapping on the dictionary buttons at the fourth word. Any further attempts wouldn’t even let her thumb contact the section of the screen where the dictionary was spread out.

She waited for the right moment, grabbed Applejack’s hand, and communicated the last thought she’d ever get a chance to relay outside her own head.

“Trust me, trust her”

It was a long shot, perhaps her only chance to help Rarity and, of course, keep Applejack from panicking. Celestia had no reason to think that Applejack would even take any counsel from her, unlike the others in their friend group, there hadn’t been any one major experience that set the tone for their relationship, nor had they interacted much beyond just being around each other. That had apparently been enough for the farmgirl, however, as she stepped aside and let Zecora work.

With everyone’s attention on Rarity, nobody saw Celestia stumble backward, awkwardly moving her body over to the barn. Before she could collapse, she managed to get herself to a seated position, clutching the phone to her chest with her arms, unable to grasp it. She slumped down, not caring for comfort, just hoping she could keep holding the phone. Gingerly, she lowered her hands away from her chest, and before she could even so much as glance at the screen, it fell from her hands and created a little crater in the dust between her boots.

She didn’t know how long it took for the others to board the ambulances and for the principal to notice her absence, she was trying hard not to think of anything. Just focussing on the fallen phone, reciting old lessons in her head, playing back musical earworms from the playlist of her memories, doing whatever she could to not have to think about what she had done and her current state.

When her mom held her hands, she had to bring herself out of that state, put herself in the position of being in control of her body, in whatever form the malfunctioning pseudo-Elements would allow, to hold her mother’s hand in response. When the older woman put the phone in her hands and it simply slipped out again, she wished with all her might that she could have one last chance to speak, to at least tell her mother how much she loved her, how much she had come to find a home and family here where she had never had one before.

Celestia felt her eyes grow wet, but couldn’t bring herself to cry. “Please,” she said using the voice in her mind-scape, “Let me go.” When no response came, she continued, “I know…I know I was horrible before, and I see that now. I never want to be that person again, she was cruel and full of fear and so easily hurt…I thought being strong meant you had to hurt others, pull them down before they could hurt you. I thought I had to take and hoard everything in order to have anything. I thought I could only feel happiness if others felt miserable…that only the weak showed mercy and compassion…I hid myself away, showed the world a mask of anger and spite to protect myself…until I forgot myself.”

The memory of seeing Rarity trapped in the force bubble and Applejack being willing to tear her own body apart to save the girl she loved played back in her mind’s eye. “I would save them again. I would do it every time, I would sacrifice my life for them if necessary.” Moments with her other friends followed, Rainbow actually learning chess just so Celestia would know someone cared about her, Pinkie bringing light to a dying woman, Fluttershy quietly loving the whole world. “I would do it for any of them.”

Her mother’s frantic crying and choked-off sobs seemed to float into her awareness. “...but please, please let me tell my…my mom that I love her. Just once. I only ask for the once.”

And Celestia blinked.

The crushing weight of sadness suddenly lessened until she was aware that something…wasn’t right. Beyond the wrongness of the malfunctioning pseudo-Elements, beyond the events surrounding her that led to problems for her friends and family, there was something else wrong…and she realized she had the tools to figure this out.

Three realities suddenly flooded her consciousness.

One was almost an echo of a real event, something she could remember that predated the events after the portal opened for the first time in her memory, but it was hollow, like the entire moment was just shadow puppets and vapor, but with so much pain and fear connected to it that the miasma was practically its own reality. She remembered being stabbed by Luna, and that had happened when she was in her early 20’s.

A second, one where she survived being nearly mortally wounded and went on to become an educator and eventually have the privilege of adopting a daughter was like a shock to her soul.

The third was the reel of memories she had just cycled through, as though she were an actor in a play and she had reached the end of the script.

“This isn’t right.” she declared into the mindscape.

Almost instantly, the expanse that she had stood in judgment during the events of the Fall Formal coalesced around her. In the distance, she could see the “lock” near a pool of light, its mechanism seized by a complex knot of interweaving streamers of shimmering and glowing luminescence. Those streamers extended throughout the mindscape and into the darkness beyond her perception, and she intuited that they were the mechanisms locking her in the prison of her own consciousness.

The star rose above the others, its motion rigid and mechanical in comparison to the time it had done the same at the Fall Formal, “Sunset Shimmer, you have abused the power of the manifestation of Friendship|Magic,” it recited, the two words of Friendship and Magic spoken at the same time, “You have ignored the lessons laid at your feet and reached for a gift that you are not prepared for.”

And Celestia remembered…

…and said, “I am not Sunset Shimmer.”

All at once, all the pseudo-Elements practically roared to life. The entire world tilted and rotated without moving until the orange shape took the place of the star, and she could now see it resembled an orange-colored apple, of all the odd things. It flared up, bright and almost angry, its light flashing out at her, passing through, and seemingly doing nothing. It began to spin and gyrate faster, it’s motions more and more erratic until its tendrils started overlapping the other lights, which were themselves cycloning wildly.

Perhaps it was intuition or maybe it was the borrowed memories from Sunset, but Celestia knew instinctively what to do. She formed a Tower of Will, an ancient unicorn technique designed to still the mind and allow the emotions and random surges of the unconscious to storm around their conscious mind. It was used when a filly or colt was going through a magic surge and was one of the earliest lessons taught to young unicorns. Instantly, a barrier appeared before her, and oddly enough another rose around the pool of light the lock was hovering next to. The storm of light was nothing like the Rainbow of Light Sunset had experienced at the Fall Formal, this was a hurricane, a stellar storm that would terrify Discord himself. One by one, the tethers that led off into the darkness snapped and blinked out of existence, the pseudo-Elements fracturing themselves and then fading away as they lost their coherence and potency. It could have been days, or it could have been seconds, but the storm soon faded, and Celestia stood in a solitary splash of light in the darkness.

The pseudo-Elements were gone, their tendrils of light and constricting effects vanished, and the lock was no more.

Her memories from reliving Sunset’s life were starting to fade from familiar intimacy to an almost dream-like recollection. She could recall the events, but it was like she had read them from a book or watched a particularly riveting docu-drama.

She glanced down at her form and saw a pendant on her neck with what she remembered was a rune in High Elven for “Teacher.” Her normal pantsuit was on her mental body, but it was the high-grade silks and custom tailoring preferred by her vampire lord counterpart. At her waist was a very high-tech belt, and on one side was strapped her sword and hanging on a shoulder strap on the other hip was a carbine she had used while in the universe with the Hunter version of herself and her family. She had some thought from the lessons Sunset had been through regarding mind magic and mental discipline that the form she now held was her truest mental self. It wasn’t necessarily a reflection of her soul, but how her mind thought of itself. A brief test of running her tongue across her teeth revealed that, yes, her canines were vampire sharp.

She chose to put that on the back burner for the moment and turned her attention to her environment. She was far from finished, or she wouldn’t still be in the mindscape.

There was very little to see. Just her in a pool of light…and one other pool of light. Now that the tendrils of luminescence were no longer polluting the mindscape, she could see that the other pool of light was also occupied. With nothing else to guide her, she walked over to the other occupant and guessed what she’d find long before her eyes confirmed it.

Laying on what constituted a floor for this ethereal realm was a small orange unicorn filly, small enough that she probably shouldn’t have a cutiemark, but she did. The familiar sunburst with yin/yang swirling identified this filly as surely as if she’d said her name.

Celestia had found her daughter.

Chapter 10 - Hit Me Like a Ray of Sun, Burnin' Through My Darkest Night

Celestia looked down at the small filly, “Sunset…”

The unicorn’s ear twitched in her direction but otherwise didn’t seem to acknowledge the woman’s presence.

“Sunset…” she breathed as she knelt down next to her adopted daughter. The filly was barely the size of a large housecat, with the overly large head and extremities of juveniles of any species. Celestia reached down and stroked her daughter’s mane. “I’m here, sweetheart, and I’m not leaving you behind.”

The filly huffed a deep breath, slightly shuddering on the exhale.

“I…saw. I saw what you’ve been through…” Celestia offered, and without waiting for a response, she scooped up the pony and cuddled her daughter close. “You don’t have to carry those memories alone. Not anymore.”

Holding Sunset’s equine form to her chest like a particularly large house cat, Sunset’s hoofs poked cutely up into the air, her forehooves tucked slightly and hind-hooves sticking up awkwardly. The filly blinked her eyes open but didn’t look up at Celestia. “I…I was so stupid.”

“Oh, sweetie…” sighed Celestia, “What makes you think you could ever be stupid?”

Sunset snorted gently and shifted a bit, “I knew…I knew the Elements were…were powerful. I knew they were basically forces of nature given physical form…and I thought I could just…” a tear formed in the filly’s eye, “Just wave them around like a really big stick and get ponies…people to do what I wanted. I thought I could make Cele…” at this, she quickly glanced up and then back down to gaze at her hooves, “Princess Celestia make me her…” the tear slowly rolled down a furred cheek, “…daughter.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow, “You didn’t want to be a princess, too?”

“Ha!” Sunset barked a laugh, “Of course I did! Immortality, wings, massive mana pool? Who wouldn’t want that?” the filly deflated a bit, brief spurt of energy ebbing away, “But she…she didn’t want me. She didn’t want a daughter. I was just another duty to her.” A spark of anger seemed to flare, but then just as swiftly snuffed out, “And I guess…I guess she was right. I’m not worthy of being her daughter. I’m not worthy of being any…”

“You stop that line of thinking right there, young lady!” interrupted Celestia.

Surprised at the interruption, Sunset met Celestia’s eyes for the first time. Sunset’s eyes were full of tears, and Celestia couldn’t help but start to cry, too, though for a different reason. “You are a wonderful young…” her gaze flicked over the equine in her arms, and with a smirk, she continued, “...filly,” in response, Sunset’s lips quirked up just a little and she rolled her eyes, “And anyone, human, pony, or any other race on that crazy world you came from would have leaped at the chance to be your mother.” She looked up to where a horizon should be and was surprised to see what resembled the line of light that precedes the sunrise off in the distance. “Just because…she didn’t see that in you, or if she did she didn’t bother showing it, doesn’t mean anything about you.” She pulled her daughter closer and nuzzled her fuzzy nose, “I love you…I love you so much, I can’t even begin to tell you how much. And I know you love me, I felt it when I was reliving your life.”

Sunset flinched, her eyes widening in surprise, “You what?!”

Celestia smiled down at the filly, “Ah, didn’t realize that was what was happening, huh? Yeah, from…when you came through the portal the first time, I think?” she scrunched her nose up and her eyes flitted back and forth, trying to recall details that were fading. “It’s getting to be a bit fuzzy in my memory, I don’t think I’m meant to hold all those memories, they are yours, but I saw everything,” she sprouted a mischievous grin and locked eyes with her daughter, “Including when you were experimenting with ‘hands’ and the things you overheard in the girl’s locker room about how to use them.” She gave her daughter a matronly wink.

Hooves clapped over mortified eyes as a furious blush showed through the fur on Sunset’s face, “Oh, goddess!”

A laugh, a deep, bright laugh, the first Celestia could remember using in months escaped before she could clamp down on it for her daughter’s benefit. “It’s okay, silly filly,” she couldn’t stop herself from smiling and she just knew there would be a twinkle in her eyes, “I could hardly avoid the memory, though you might want to keep it quieter from now on, you’re not in the warehouse anymore, and I think your aunt might have a few awkward words with you if you got too loud in the house.”

“Mo~o~o~om!!!” groaned the pony.

Celestia glanced around, still smirking, noting that the light over the “horizon” only seemed to be coming from one direction and that it was growing no brighter. “Just think, this is my first time giving you a ‘mom-barassment attack.’”

“Augh!” groaned Sunset without removing her forehooves from her face, “What have I gotten myself into?”

Celestia looked down as she started walking, noting with amusement that even though Sunset was still very embarrassed, a tiny uptick of the corners of her mouth was visible. After a few strides, Sunset lowered her hooves and looked around curiously, “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” the woman replied, “But it’s the only other light visible, and there’s nothing else around, so it seemed like the logical choice.”

What seemed like moments but could have been any length of time, the darkness around them started to form shapes. The first defined shape of a wall caused Celestia to stop short, the architectural feature simply being there with no recollection of approaching it or seeing any sign of it before. They examined it curiously, but nothing new happened after several minutes. It was simply a space of wall that seemed to fade into the blackness behind them.

Shrugging slightly, Celestia walked on, the wall seeming to somehow keep pace, and as she moved more features seemed to form around them. Celestia didn’t take her eyes off the horizon, and she thought she detected a slight increase in brightness as time passed.

A gasp brought her up short, and she looked down at Sunset, who hadn’t stopped looking around as physical features seemed to appear out of nothing. “What is it sweetie?” she asked.

“It’s…it’s my old room at the orphanage!” she replied. At this, Celestia turned in place, realizing that they were, indeed, in a small (for her) room, with two bunk beds against opposite sides of the room, small filly-sized toys scattered around the room. When Celestia turned back to face forward again, she found herself facing a wall. There was no movement, not even through the outside windows, where snow could be seen stilled in mid-air.

With nothing happening, the pair simply looked around, then at each other, then Celestia shrugged her shoulders for the both of them and she started toward the door, only to have Sunset burst through the door. Startled, she stopped moving, and the Sunset that came through the door stopped as well, suspended in mid-air as she bounded into the room, a huge smile on her face. She looked down at Sunset, still in her arms, who was just as confusedly looking back at her. Celestia resumed her walk, and the Sunset not in her arms resumed her bounding through the room. Celestia stopped, as did the other Sunset, and she realized she was no closer to the door than when the room first formed around them.

“Mom,” said Sunset, “I have a theory…keep walking, even if it seems like you’re not making progress.”

Befuddled, Celestia resumed walking, and just as Sunset implied, she didn’t seem to be moving forward at all. She could feel her feet propelling her forward, nothing was holding her back, but she also was getting no closer to the door. At her feet, an eager (and slightly panting) filly Sunset dropped a pair of saddlebags on the floor and darted around the room, grabbing small things with her mouth and dropping them into the bags. They seemed to be small keepsakes, a notebook, a pencil…it wasn’t much, but it clearly meant something to the filly.

“I remember this…it’s one of my earliest memories I can recall clearly. It was right after I’d gotten my cutiemark. Youngest in my age group…” as she narrated, the memory version of herself finished packing, took a second look around to ensure nothing had been left behind, then nodded to herself in satisfaction. “Celes…Princess Celestia is downstairs, she had somehow heard how I got my cutiemark and came to see me, asked me to perform some magic for her, I think she was doing some tests…” Memory-Sunset slid her muzzle under the straps of her bags and flipped them up and onto her back. The Sunset in Celestia’s arms blushed, “I wasn’t used to using magic for things yet. I…got teased about that when we got to the capital.”

Suddenly, they were moving, not in time with Celestia’s steps but with Memory-Sunset’s gallop. Celestia experienced quite a bit of vertigo as they practically rocketed through the door, down the short hallway, and then down the stairs. Memory-Sunset ran up to the memory of Princess Celestia, standing next to a slightly portly unicorn with a bright brown coat and yellow mane and smile lines around her eyes.

“Well, your highness, this certainly isn’t a traditional adoption, but then I don’t think we could ask for a better home for this little filly than what you could offer!” said the matron with a grin.

A bright, warm smile split Princess Celestia’s face as she watched Sunset approach. “Would that I could do an actual adoption, but we don’t actually have a legal process in place for an immortal princess to adopt a filly into the royal family. The average pony in Manehattan has more freedom to adopt than I do.”

Filly Sunset’s giant smile faded some, but then returned full force. “But I’m practically adopted, right? I’m gonna live at the castle with you and we’re gonna have dinner and exchange dolls for Hearth’s Warming, and go get candy for Nightmare Moon on Nightmare Night, right?”

Celestia caught it, even if the memory of Sunset didn’t, the flash of pained recollection on the princess’ face as the filly inadvertently touched on a nerve. Then it was gone, “Of course, my little pony,” replied the alicorn, “What kind of princess would I be if I let one of my subjects go without those things if I could have a hoof in it?” she said with a wink and a smile.

The memory faded as the memory of Sunset began gamboling around the princess’ hooves as the two adults in the scene discussed the logistics of the transfer of custody.

Celestia continued on through the darkness, holding her daughter close and feeling the steady rhythm of the pony’s pulse against her chest, taking comfort in the feeling of her daughter breathing. Why are we even breathing? the pondered, This is…a memory, a mindscape, we shouldn’t even have autonomic functions here…but then I guess it would be weird to not experience them.

The room that would later be filled with Sunset’s papers and books and scrolls and even a few posters of the occasional pony pop celebrity faded into view. Celestia didn’t stop walking this time, and time proceeded as expected for this particular memory. The little filly in the room was seemingly oblivious to the ray of light that was creeping down her wall about to wake her up, but before it could get all the way down to the level of her head, Sunset practically leapt out of bed with an enthusiastic, “Hah!” pointing an accusing hoof at the line that divided the day from night on her wall. Apparently satisfied that she had won whatever silly game she had concocted, she trotted over to the window, dragged the stool from the nearby desk over with her magic, and stood to watch the sunrise. She lifted a hoof to block the bright light from damaging her vision and squinted into the morning with a smile, “Good morning, Princess!” she chirped, before darting over to the suite’s attached bathroom and closing the door.

Celestia giggled at the brief memory, then looked down to the filly in her arms to gauge her daughter’s reaction. Is it just me, she thought, or is Sunset larger now than she was a moment ago…?

Sunset stared into the space the window had been in with a melancholy expression. “I had this silly notion…I thought that if I said something to the sun, that somehow Princess Celestia would hear it.” The filly sighed heavily, a light misting of tears reflecting the scene around them. “I asked her once when I was just hitting puberty if she ever heard any of my morning greetings. She…hadn’t. I guess…I guess that was when I realized she wasn’t as all-knowing as she seemed to pre-cutie mark Sunset.”

Celestia gently stroked Sunset’s mane, letting the cadence of her steps set the pace for her (for lack of a better term) petting of the small equine in her arms.

They kept going, passing through memories of school, time with the princess, studies, and the occasional interaction with other ponies not in the context of school or the royal court. As they went, Sunset’s pony form grew bigger, as though the passage through memories was also the passage through Sunset’s maturity as a pony.

She was a pre-teen, obsessively listening to the same records on the phonograph for hours at a time as she studied, she was in her early teens, crushing on another filly but not even thinking of saying or doing anything about it, just keeping it to herself. “Sun and moon, I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Sunset from her next in Celestia’s arms, “She was…I guess she was a lot like Celestia.” They watched as Sunset’s memory of herself tried to split her attention between the book on the library desk in front of her and the physical attributes of a statuesque mare a few tables away, who was blissfully ignorant of being observed by the Princess’ star pupil. “Tall, white coat, aloof as Tartarus. What even was her name? Fleur…something?” She shook her head as the scene faded to the featureless landscape.

Sunset was older, isolating herself more and more until she only ever interacted with the staff and the princess. Even other heads of state were ignored in favor of her self-imposed isolation. Soon, the princess showed her the mirror. Celestia frowned as she watched the vision of Sunset as an alicorn princess manifest in the glass. The memory was a long one, culminating in Sunset’s final moments as a pony before knocking out the guards and escaping through the open portal.

Once the memory drew to a close, the scene faded but left the mirror behind. There was no more light on the horizon, which was no longer visible. They had arrived at their apparent destination. The reflection showed Celestia holding a very young human Sunset shimmer. She looked down to meet her daughter’s eyes, still on an equine face, who looked just as confused. After looking around for a clue as to what to do next, they returned their gazes to the mirror, looked each other in their reflected eyes, and Sunset nodded to her mother. “I guess no way out but through…”

Celestia smiled and stepped forward, the mirror actually staying in place this time as she approached it. Taking her cue from the memory they had just watched, she stepped through without hesitation…and found herself outside Canterlot High, still holding Sunset, though now the girl was young, looking as though she was only 13 years old.

The night was still, that unnatural stillness that met them whenever they stopped during Sunset’s pony memories. Celestia adjusted her hold on her daughter and resumed her forward walk. As she expected by now, the scene seemed to jump them to Sunset’s first night in the P.E. storage shed.

Sunset, still curled in a princess carry and examining her hands, said, “I…I can walk now, mom. You don’t have to carry me.”

Celestia continued walking, smiling as she watched the now familiar memories of Sunset’s time between being under the care of a Celestia flit past her. “I…want to carry you, sweetheart. It just feels right to do so…and it’s probably silly, but I feel like…I feel,” she looked down at her daughter’s human face, “I feel like you’ve had to walk on your own far too long.” A tear started sliding down the older woman’s cheek, “And you need your mother to carry you now more than ever.”

As the memories of the factory warehouse formed around them, at first hostile and barren, then just as hostile but marked with the first signs of someone inhabiting it, Sunset began silently crying, just curling up tighter in her mother’s arms.

The motorcycle appeared, then the workbenches were arrayed around it with tools that were purchased second-hand or otherwise acquired. Then they were in the school, darting through the hallways as the memories followed Sunset’s initial triumphs, followed by her campaign to dominate the school in her misguided attempts to seize her destiny. As the events of the current school year began, Sunset started tensing up. “Mom…” she breathed shakily, squeezing her eyes shut.

“I know,” replied Celestia, clutching her daughter, now the same size and apparent age as when Celestia retrieved her from the Apple farm, tighter to her chest.

The trip through the portal to retrieve the crown came and went almost in an eyeblink. Sunset began shivering, “Mom…I don’t want to…I can’t…” she now had tears streaming down her face, eyes still closed tightly.

Celestia, remembering the pain but willing herself to keep moving, “I know, Little Sun. It will hurt.” Her reply was choked off by the fear climbing her own throat. She swallowed thickly and continued, “It will hurt…but I’ll be here with you this time.”

The fight at the base of the statue began, and Sunset was practically clawing at Celestia’s suit coat, clasping and releasing spasmodically, muttering, “No…no…no…” over and over.

The Principal paused for a moment, the memory of Sunset holding the crown over her head in triumph, Princess Twilight reaching out from a distance, as though to stop the other girl, the other students scattered around, the talking dog paused mid-leap in the air.

She took a deep breath and stepped forward.

The memory landscape was blasted away in fire and pain. A liquid rain of anger flooded their awareness as Celestia set a foot down. On what, she had no idea, but she didn’t stop. She lifted her other foot and pushed forward against the storm of blasting fury.

She had no idea how long she walked, how long the memory burned for, but when she finally felt the cessation of pain, the lack of sensation was so acute it took her a moment to realize she had her eyes crushed closed and she could hear Sunset’s pained sobs. Determinedly putting one foot in front of the other, she looked down at her daughter.

Sunset was practically limp in her arms, still crying out, “No…not again, please…”

The memory landscape was shadow and nightmare, echos of the pain of others like a torturous choir. The harsh lights of the Elements left behind in Sunset’s psyche lit the way but never showed the destination. Even so, as they moved forward, the factory warehouse loomed ahead, at first hidden in shadows, but the motorcycle almost faded into existence right before them.

Sunset was still, no longer speaking but sobbing, her head buried in her mother’s chest. Celestia frowned at the bike, and took a determined breath, “It’s going to be fine, Sunset. This will hurt, but I’ll be with you, and I’ll be there with you until the end of time.”

So saying, she began walking faster.

The world exploded in pain once again, this time a wet and sickly feeling that seemed to soak into their very being. It was only Celestia’s dogged determination to hold her child close that kept her from instinctively dropping her, as her right arm flared in pain…then went numb. Blood began to seep through her sleeve and stain Sunset’s clothes, and in her arms, Sunset’s wrist and hand began pouring blood onto her torso.

The memory landscape became a rainbow prison, bars of light appearing all around. At first completely random and chaotic, the fractals of multicolored light began forming corridors, then the corridors were cut off and only the path forward remained. Soon the gaps between the rainbow bars grew so small that the bars became walls. Then the colors began to blend until she was pushing herself through a blindingly bright white expanse, the air itself seeming to push back.

Step by step, her progress slowed, but never quite stopping, until she seemed to be pressing against a wall. She was oblivious to everything around her, unable to see, an angry, pained scream escaped her as she leaned harder, feeling something before her give and tear, clutching Sunset tighter, only barely able to feel the girl and desperate to not lose her…

Celestia gasped awake, a light sheet draped over her naked body, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead and soaking the thin covering. She coughed and shook, feeling like she had just run a marathon with no training beforehand. Dimly, she was aware of Zecora moving around her and Sunset, whipping the equally sweat-soaked sheet off the teenager’s body before putting the girl’s head gently on a pillow and covering the girl’s body with a dry towel.

Sunset’s eyes were opened, but unfocused. Her gaze darted around the room, arms reaching almost blindly, “M…mom…!” gasped the girl.

Celestia took a steadying breath and yanked the soaked fabric off her own body, then reached over to clasp Sunset’s hand, “I’m here, Little Sun, I’m here…”

Sunset’s eyes briefly focused on the principal before fluttering closed. In moments, she was breathing deeply and steadily.

Zecora smiled at the sight and finished patting the girl dry before drying Celestia’s body as well. “Your spirit walk is now complete, and the sound from her lips is quite the treat. Now you must rest awhile and recover, I’ll go to the farm and tell the others.”

Celestia nodded, clearly exhausted, dragged herself over to hug her daughter close.

Zecora smiled down at the exhausted principal and spread a blanket over her, making sure to cover Sunset’s form as well. The girl was out cold, sleeping peacefully for the first time since the principal brought her into her home, and snuggled against Celestia. The nudity would be an issue later, to be sure, but for now, they were too wiped out to care. “A bit unusual, perhaps, to birth a child this way,” murmured the shamaness, “But the results speak for themselves, I would say.”

Far too tired to respond with words, Celestia smiled at the woman, eyes fluttering closed, and slipped off to sleep.

Chapter 11 – Why, Then, Oh Why Can’t I?

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Epilogue I - I knew the only peace I'd find is if this child was yours

Author's Note

No, it's not quite done. Two more epilogues and I'll be able to put this one in the "complete" pile.

Also, I looked it up, and yes, "Nobel" means "Good Character." That's a direct translation.

Epilogue I - I knew the only peace I'd find is if this child was yours

It was Tuesday. The cafeteria was serving tacos, students were being loaded down with yet more homework (especially given the nearly wasted day Monday had turned out to be), and Canterlot High experienced it’s second day as a new nation.

Princess Cadence had made the trip through the mirror, joining the other three princesses in a special ceremony commemorating the events of the previous day, and in a fit of puckishness, Luna and Agent Armor conspired to arrange for his fiance, Dean Cadence, to put in an appearance as well.

It turned out to be a perfect photo op for the assembled press organizations; at one point the suggestion was floated and accepted that the assembled delegates and administrators with doubles present stand arranged around the portal. Principal Celestia agreed on the condition that none of her current students be in the photo for their protection, which to the amusement of Princess Twilight and Sunset meant that the native Twilight Sparkle was still going to wind up in the photo, but Sunset was not. The picture was sure to be one for the history books and would likely result in sold-out papers around the world; flanking the base of the Wondercolts statue was Celestia, Luna, Twilight, Shining Armor, and Cadence, with the royals from Equestria on one side standing in mirrored order to the educators and student on the other side.

To keep them from being mobbed by reporters, the students were restricted to the school’s grounds for the day, and with specific exceptions, the press were kept off the school property, a cordon formed of police, federal agents and Equestrian guards marking the “do not cross” line. The press relations staff on loan from the Federal Executive office and the Equestrian Royal Staff Core ran the show like a finely tuned engine, ensuring that the delegates, the ambassadors (also known as Princess Twilight and Sunset’s friends), and various members of the alphabet agencies that were authorized to speak with the press were given space when necessary, corralled any known "wingnut" publications from even gaining entry into the impromptu press corp., and one enterprising staffer had even arranged a food truck to arrive to cater to the unexpected crowd. Notable in their lack of interviews was Sunset Shimmer, Fluttershy, and the human Twilight Sparkle. Sunset had taken to calling the girl “SciTwi” as a nod to being a Good Character nominee when she had objected to the “Sparky” nickname after it’s third use.

SciTwi, Fluttershy, and Sunset became sort of a “safe haven.” Since distance and group pictures that happened to include the three were permitted while individual shots and interviews were not, they became a “safe home base,” as Pinkie had taken to calling them. Some member of their friend group would approach a group of reporters, answer some questions, mug for photos (that was mostly Rarity and Rainbow Dash, of course), then return to the spot near the school steps where the three girls were camped out.

The nearby clock tower chimed 2:00 PM, and that seemed to be the cue for the event to be over, as the various students, administrators, and Equestrians began congregating together, and the majority of the press began to pack up and leave.

The girls began planning the rest of their day, including dinner ideas. The consensus was that while burgers was the majority preference, in deference to their pony visitors they would aim for a fast casual pasta place. Agent Armor quietly issued orders over his radio to send an advance team to clear the restaurant.

The two Cadences were getting on like a house on fire, occasionally glancing in the direction of one or both of their paramours and giggling as they exchanged words the rest couldn’t hear but had both Shining Armor’s sweating for reasons they couldn’t quite identify.

Something that went unspoken that was being handled with balletic grace was keeping the two Celestias apart. All present but Cadence had seen the pair of them getting along like cats in a bag and had no desire to have an international incident because one of them said something the other took offense to.

Princess Celestia begged off going to dinner on the human side of the portal due to some affairs of state that needed attending to. Vice-principal Luna glanced over to her counterpart, who shook her head subtly. She’s just trying to get away…but maybe this is the time for answers…

Casually, as though she was simply headed in the same direction as the princess, she broke away from the group and caught up to Princess Celestia. The princess chose not to react, apparently content to let Luna dictate how this interaction would proceed. Fine then, she thought, You made this my empire of dirt, time to exercise some authority!

“I have questions.”

Celestia nodded slightly at he sister’s counterpart, “Always important to have questions, I’ve found that with time one’s mind only stays sharp by asking many questions.”

Luna glared at Celestia, but being wise to her own sister’s tactics for attempting to divert the conversation, she proceeded to ignore it, “Ever since you first came through and chose to start a fight with my sister, I’ve been pondering…why? What would cause you to randomly attack someone that happened to share a similar face and name? Because, for all our universes have…disturbing similarities, the likeness between you and my sister is mere coincidence.” Celestia didn’t react, save to clasp her hands behind her back under her cloak, the cut of her dress making her form now look like she had tucked her arms under a pair of wings. “In fact,” Luna continued, “I believe it has something to do with Sunset.” Still no reaction, so she continued. “It can’t be her well being under my sister’s care, else you wouldn’t have been in tears at the farm on Sunday."

That got a reaction. They were nearly to the portal now, but Celestia stopped in her tracks for a moment. She made to continue through the portal, but Luna grabbed the princess by the arm. "You've been hiding something. There's something you're keeping from everyone involved in this, probably as far back as when you first took Sunset in as your student. I think your sister knows, even if my sister is too...blinded by your similarity to her to notice. Sunset may suspect, but there's too much baggage for her to figure it out objectively. But I've been watching you; you...close up when Sunset is around and there's just something about your behavior…" Luna glared at Celestia, who was refusing to look Luna in the eye, instead her gaze looked through and beyond the portal surface. "...you're jealous!" gasped Luna.

That drew Celestia's eye, even if just for a flickering moment.

"You are! Over what?! You're a magical immortal princess of your world's most powerful nation! What could you possibly be jealous of a high school principal over?"

Celestia stood silently, not fighting the hand on her arm, though the storm of emotions in the princess’ eyes clearly betrayed that she would rather be anywhere else. The magical immortal princess looked up to see Sunset standing near her mortal, human counterpart, not looking back to the statue or Luna. She swallowed heavily, then sighed before finally speaking.

“Once upon a time,” she began, “in the magical land of Equestria, there was a mare that everyone thought had everything she could ever want. Her subjects fell over themselves to give her anything they thought she needed, but none could fill the hole in her heart. For you see, she had banished her sister so long ago that nobody remembered that she even had a sister.”

This raised some questions for Luna, of course, but she withheld them for now, more interested in what this mirror version of her sister had to say about Sunset.

“The princess was lonely, you see. She was surrounded by ponies, but she had nobody. And as the centuries passed, she began to look at the families that would come and go around her with longing. What she would give to have a family again, to be that close to somepony and share unmatched familial love, uncomplicated by the games of politics or traditions or the latest scandal of the week. And maybe, if the gods smiled on her and the universe decided she deserved something good for once, she would have someone else with whom to share the burden of immortality and the long stretches of the undiscovered country of the future.”

“So the princess started sneaking out of her own castle in disguise. She sought the seedier side of her kingdom, hoping to find someone that she could bed that wouldn’t necessarily care about the logical conclusion. Eventually, after numerous times with stallions, so many that she began to fear she may be infertile, she realized she was pregnant.”

The princess was now looking at the ground but seeing events as they happened many years before. Luna was suddenly so much less angry and now heartbroken, her imagination giving her just enough to understand a little of what this other being went through.

“There were...many ‘royal retreats’ that year, especially near the end of the pregnancy. Nobody knew; the secret was kept from everyone, even her most trusted advisors. There would be no record, no way for the world to discover that their precious princess had debased herself to lay with a mortal pony.”

Celestia’s eyes started to bead with tears, “The filly was born in winter, the princess had secured a private residence far from the capital in a small town that had seen better days so nopony would bother the single pony that had moved in at the end of an otherwise vacant street. The labor took hours, but she was gifted with a beautiful little filly. And for a brief, tiny, fractional moment of time,” she took a shuddering breath before continuing in a quavering voice, “She was finally happy. She had a family again, and the little filly was everything she had ever hoped...although the lack of wings was a minor let down.” Her lips turned up in a melancholy smile.

“And then...she realized how short-sighted she had been. She’d been so intent on getting the foal that she didn’t stop to consider having the foal.”

She paused in her story, watching Sunset as she chatted with her friends while the principal looked on. A single tear fell from its perch on her eyelashes and tracked a streak down her cheek.

“So the princess weaned the foal as quickly as she could without causing harm, and once again used the cover of night, this time to find an orphanage that was near the castle. Near enough she could watch the filly grow, but not so near that anyone could ever suspect where the...orphan had come from.”

Luna had let go of the princess by this point, hugging herself tightly.

The princess sniffed, daintily, practically majestically. After centuries spent in the public eye, Luna imagined that being the image of regal nobility must be an unconscious habit. Celestia swiped a hand against her cheek, using the back as though she still had hooves, “The princess watched the filly grow, watched someone else help her take her first steps, watched someone else be there for her first playground injury, watched someone else teach her about growing into a mare...watched another pony be there, but never a mother. She was never adopted.”

“Of course, when the filly started showing uncommon magical ability and intellect far outstripping her peers, that gave the princess the perfect excuse to bring the filly in as her own personal student. Why, with somepony so talented, it was practically expected.” A tiny flicker of pride and joy sparked very briefly in the eyes that had seen centuries fly by, “And the filly was brilliant! The princess was barely able to keep up, feeding the voracious appetite for knowledge and seeking avenues to channel the ambition of her secret daughter.” The light dimmed, Celestia returned to looking at the ground but seeing something else, “But a princess is not a mother, and a mentor, no matter how well-meaning, will never…” she choked a sob, her voice tightening with regret, “...will never be called ‘mommy.’”

The princess turned to look Luna in the eye, “You know the rest of the story. The student never learned she was secretly the princess’ daughter, and through a series of mistakes on the princess’ part the filly would find herself stranded on an alien world, in an alien body, having nothing but her wits and will to survive by. And yet she thrived, while the princess would only be able to find another student, one who would eventually find a way to free her sister from banishment, then start eclipsing the princess as she became more and more of a leader of ponies far faster than the princess could have expected her to.”

Luna’s anger at Princess Celestia had been snuffed out. She realized she could never condone what the princess had done, but she could understand it, and knew that there was nothing anyone in her world...or possibly any world...could do to Celestia that would hurt worse than what she had already done to herself. “You should tell her.” The words escaped her lips before she even realized she had thought them.

Celestia smiled sadly. “No, I couldn’t do that to her. She deserves a mother...a mom. What could I give her that she doesn’t already have?” she nodded her head in the direction of the subject of their conversation.

Luna looked over to see her sister’s arm draped over Sunset’s shoulders, the girl wrapping her arm around her new mom’s waist, Sunset’s friends laughing at something Pinkie was saying while making some sort of overblown gesture that Luna couldn’t possibly guess the purpose of. When Luna looked back to reply, the princess had already gone through the portal, the hem of her dress disappearing with a water-like ripple in the stone surface.

Epilogue II - You Didn’t Know that You Fell

The moment Adagio knew things turned south was when the principal’s eyes turned black and blood red.

The plan had been elegant in its simplicity; once they spotted the distant ‘fireworks’ display of magic last fall, they mobilized their resources and determined the location of the event was a high school. It was, of course, one of many such schools in the city and one of dozens since the modern school system was invented that they had infiltrated to get high quantities of low quality food. The emotions of teenagers were easily roused from their normally stupified state into intense anger. Of course, maintaining this state was often a challenge, but for a week, maybe two weeks to get their fill before moving on to bigger and better targets? It was (literally) child’s play.

Certainly easier than attempting to infiltrate offices or government organizations, where their eternally youthful looks often had the humans in those organizations dismissing them as children themselves. It could be done, especially with the right application of makeup and right selection of wardrobe, but Aria never had the patience and Sonata didn’t have the attention span.

It hadn’t used to be this way, of course. After they were first banished, the average age of “functional adult” was on the low end of the teenage years, where what to modern sensibilities would be a child of 13 was often tasked with running a household, sailing a ship, or fighting in wars. Then progress happened, medical technology improved, and lifespans grew longer, and then modern conveniences started appearing to make even contemplating people as old as 19 to be “children” to the ever aging adult demographic. It was in the 1980s that they truly ran into “age ceilings” when attempting to infiltrate adult spaces, and from then on it was a challenge to even be seen as interns, let alone getting into any sort of leadership position.

They didn’t need those advantages, strictly, but the more they could position themselves as unquestioned leaders before having to resort to using their ever-dwindling pool of magic, the easier it was to use less and less of said magic. It was never a total win, of course, and even then the magical control couldn’t be maintained forever.

This wasn’t Equestria, after all.

So they applied to “transfer,” providing the school the “information” for transferring their files from the fictional school they maintained records of for this very purpose. Then the damnable delay happened, at first they had no idea why. It wasn’t like this particular school was exclusive; it was a public school, and so the admissions didn’t have any particular exams to pass or boards to impress (not like that would have been a challenge), and due to the nature of public schools there wouldn’t likely be strict population caps, surely three more “students” wouldn’t be a problem…then the delay stretched to the holidays…then into the new year… and then they found out why there was a delay, along with the rest of the world. Of course the damned Equestrian princess would cause them problems, even after all these years and across worlds! Starswirl’s pet student seemed determined to make their lives just as difficult as the old codger had.

Adagio decided they’d go through with the plan anyway. When they received the letter from the vice-principal of the school after it had been granted micronation status, the sirens figured the humans were too stupid to notice that the names of the three new students happened to match three of Equestria’s greatest threats (well, Adagio figured. Aria was too busy breaking furniture in frustration and Sonata was curled up breathing into a paper bag).

The name of the vice-principal should have raised alarm bells for her, but she again passed it off, these humans were not immortal, and their similarity was coincidence. There were far more humans in each generation than there ever were sentient beings in Equestria, and there were bound to be purely magical creatures back home that had no comparable humans to mirror.

While Aria raised…many good points about the increased risk to the plan with the Equestrians providing direct support to the humans, Adagio pointed out the equally increased reward. One or more wielders of Equestrian magic would have given them the power to dominate a city, putting an entire delegation of native Equestrians under their control would allow them to dominate a continent.

So they proceeded as planned. The Monday after they got their confirmation letters they checked in with the brand new building that the staff were calling “the gatehouse” on the end of the walk leading to the front of the school. Once their bags were checked (even immortal magical sirens need to carry their money in something) they proceeded to the front office, and due to a stroke of luck (they thought it was good luck at the time) Vice-principal Luna was dealing with an administrative matter and Principal Celestia wound up being the administrator to check them in. While far from the usual, in their experience, it wasn’t so uncommon for it to be unprecedented that the principal or dean of the school would be the one to start their process of check-in personally.

So into the principal’s office they went, the door closed, and away from prying eyes, they began to work their magic.

It seemed to be working at first, Principal Celestia settled into her seat, seeming to slip into trance, the magic gripping her mind and manipulating her agency to the siren’s whims. They sang their song, pleased that they made a connection to the mind of the highest authority of this little micronation so quickly..

And then, suddenly, the principal’s eyes turned black and the irises bloomed into blood red. The woman blinked, as though waking from a dream, and then turned that black gaze on them.

Impossibly, the weight of centuries was behind that glare, possibly as ancient as she and her sisters, but even more powerful and bloodthirsty. The woman stood, projecting authority and domination with every move of every muscle, her lips peeling back in a snarl, and somehow, superimposed over the woman’s canines, was a spectral pair of fangs, as though this woman was turning into a vampire from human myth before their eyes.

“You dare…” hissed the monster before them.

Suddenly aware she wasn’t the biggest shark in this ocean, Adagio tried to cut off the magic, but somehow the woman had locked the mental connection open, and the siren’s voices choked off. The principal held out her hand and a very magical sword just appeared in it, and once the weapon was in her grip the dark sclera cleared to the normal white and her iris returned to light violet.

As she glared sternly at them, she reached the hand not holding a sword on them to a small console on her desktop and flipped back a cover off a red button. Clearly a new installation on the desk and positioned next to the public address microphone, the cover was the kind of clear-with-yellow-and-black-stripes that were more common in government installations that involved extremely high security or safety considerations. The woman pressed the button, and an alarm outside the room started blaring. Outside the principal’s office window, they could see every guard already posted by the statue and gatehouse immediately arm themselves and one of the temporary buildings across the street had it’s door practically kicked open, a stream of tactical gear-suited agents pouring out and in the direction of the front of the building.

The door behind them burst open, and two nearly identical men rushed in, wearing light plate armor (of all things) and carrying a sword and the other wearing a suit that just screamed “government agent” and holding a gun at the ready. When they saw Celestia holding the sirens at swordpoint, they turned their weapons on them as well. The one with the sword held the tip to Sonata’s throat and the one with the gun held it nearly point blank between Aria’s breasts. The principal adjusted her stance so she was holding the sword on Adagio, ensuring all three were being covered by weapons. The lead siren didn’t take the desk between her and the principal as any sort of buffer or comfort. If the magic she could feel radiating off the thing were even a hint of it’s wielder's abilities with it, the desk wouldn’t offer any protection at all.

“What’s the alarm for, your highness?” said the main in armor.

The magic holding its grip on Adagio’s voice suddenly stopped, and the principal sagged slightly, putting a hand up to her head and squinting as though straining through a particularly intense migraine. “...starting to hate when that happens,” she said to herself before addressing the men who came in. As she spoke more agents and guards filed in, making the office extremely cramped in very short order. “Please, Captain, it’s just Celestia. I’m not your princess, after all. These three tried to use mind magic on me.”

One of the guards, a woman in armor, shuffled forward and held up a gemstone mounted in a gold-wire framework. She passed it up and down Adagio’s body like a metal detecting wand, the gem glowing brighter as it neared the choker holding her gem. “Unless they’ve got some inherent magic that doesn’t light this thing up, the source of their magic is the gems on their necks.”

Adagio had only a moment to register the implications of their discovery of the nature of the chokers when Celestia said, “Well, looks like we’ve got three new artifacts to add to the vault. Get the chokers off and put the girls in…” the woman sighed, “Can’t believe I’m saying this…put them in holding until we can confirm their identity.”

Adagio’s awareness went white with panic.

Celestia sighed again, closing her eyes tight against the pain ringing in her head as the three girls were literally dragged out of her office kicking and screaming. This wasn’t a tantrum of a spoiled child or even the drug-induced hysteria of the (thankfully few) drug addicted students she’d had to deal with in the past, the girls were reacting as though she had suggested their hearts be ripped out. She took a moment to collect herself, using some of the techniques that plowed into the surface of her memories when whatever remnant of the vampire that resided in her soul now took control when the magic started subverting her will. I suppose even just a batch of memories is enough to hold a personality after a millennium… she reasoned. At least, she hoped that the Vampire Lord Celestia hadn’t somehow taken over her brain, even if it had been for good cause.

She had recognized Adagio from her holiday jaunt through the multiverse, of course. The memories of the other two were far more fleeting, having been acquired second-hand from the mind of another version of herself, but she remembered her interaction with the poofy-haired girl with a slightly amused, if exasperated, fondness. There had been…something between the girl and Sunset in that universe, one that clearly stressed that version of herself out, but then any mother would be concerned with her daughter being in a relationship of any kind with an obvious “boss bitch” like Adagio. That version of Nagatha had said something about the girl being 1,000 years old…but then so had Celestia in a few of those universes.

It was odd, she didn’t think her memories of the young woman included that choker that they obviously had an…unusually high personal interest in.

Ah, well, she thought to herself, The Equestrians will deal with the artifacts, once we find the actual identifying information for the three of them we’ll get them back to their homes, and that will likely be the end of that.

A flash of movement out of the corner of her eye drew her attention, and she looked out her window to see the three girls being pinned down to the lawn by guards and agents as some EMTs ran up. It was a harrowing 90 seconds as she watched the med techs administer sedatives and the trio finally stopped screaming and thrashing. Not long after they were loaded onto stretchers, some Equestrian guards removing the chokers and securing them in magic-containing cases, and the stretchers carted off to one of the temporary buildings across the street, this one much more robust than the others, with bars on the windows and walls that were several inches thicker than their counterparts.

Celestia felt sick, a feeling that had nothing to do with her headache, and knew exactly why. Heavy is the head that wears the crown…she pondered, I don’t even have a crown, and already it’s hard to hold my head up at what I just did…mother, father, please help me make my choice the right one…

That none of the memories she carried from her other selves had any sort of happy feelings connected to the beginning of their respective reign or command left her chilled.

She turned in her chair to face her desk where she had set the sword in the chaos of removing the three girls. She gently touched the sigil on the pommel that was the elven glyph for “teacher” in another timeline and felt her heart clench, “...how easy would it be to become her?” she pondered to herself, thinking not of the queen that had somehow given her the sword, but of the princess who had given her a daughter.

Epilogue III - We Can’t Take Back What is Done

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Chapter 1 - I Hurt Myself Today

Principal Celestia suppressed a sigh of fatigue as she blinked her eyes to stay awake. The darkness of the rural countryside kept trying to draw her into sleep, which would be a very bad thing to happen behind the wheel. It had been an eventful week of dealing with contractors, the school board, the school district board, the finance and budget committee, several law enforcement agencies on the local, state, and federal levels, and jumping through even more hoops to keep her students’ lives as protected from bureaucratic machinations as possible, not to mention the “X-files” type government agency (that she now knew wasn’t just a conspiracy theory concocted by Lyra) that started sniffing around the Monday after the Fall Formal. Goddess, it’s only been seven days since…? she wondered to herself. Seven days since the wildest events that she could possibly imagine happening, events that answered dozens of questions about the last couple years and raised hundreds more.

Oddly, it helped that Sunset Shimmer hadn’t been at the school for the last week. Of course, the reason she wasn’t at school wasn’t good at all.

That morning…

Celestia set her coffee to the side as her door opened fully, the portly matriarch of the Apple family making use of the ‘open door’ policy Celestia maintained with her staff. The friendly greeting she was about to offer died on her lips when she saw the serious, downcast expression on the older woman’s face as she closed the door behind her.

“Hello, Mrs. Smith. Is there a problem in the cafeteria?” After the last week, a simple food supply issue would be a relief.

Granny Smith remained quiet until she could shuffle over to a chair and settle herself into it. She breathed deep through her nose before speaking, “No, I’m ‘fraid not.” she began. “It’s about that Shimmer girl.”

That surprised Celestia. According to Sunset’s file, she was absent today and for good reason. The principal had filed the notice herself, as Sunset’s file had only been removed from her desk on Tuesday in an effort to keep her student’s name from being connected to the events (that were apparently so significant they could be seen from space, Sunset’s file now had the satellite photo to prove it) when the agents of S.M.I.L.E. had shown up. “I don’t understand, I thought she was still in the hospital…?”

Granny shook her head, “They only hold someone for 72 hours, and if they aint gettin’ the patient to talk and they’re otherwise well behaved, they gotta discharge on account they can’t do a diagnosis.”

The statement left Celestia mildly winded. “What?! But when her friends took her in…”

“Yeah, but ‘parently the word of a ‘buncha teenagers’ don’t count fer much.” That Mrs. Smith was actually affronted by this Celestia wasn’t terribly surprised. The woman had raised Applejack to be honest, after all, and someone was calling that honesty into question. “I had t’go pick the girl up. ‘Parently since there was no actual I.D. t’proove she’s underaged and no parents coming in, they were gonna send her to ‘pretective survisis’ ‘till I came in.” Celestia repressed a smile at Granny’s intentional accented slurring of the agency’s name. The principal had been an emotional support to the family after Applejack’s parents had died and had been witness to the attempts of the agency to remove the woman’s grandchildren from the home. There was truly no love lost between CPS and the owner of Sweet Apple Acres.

“So where is she now?”

“At the farm.” Granny sagged a bit again, being brought out of her indignance with the reminder of why she came into the office. “She...barely moves when she’s awake. She has nightmares somethin’ fierce.” She opened her mouth as if to continue, then closed it.

Celestia decided to chase that particular conversational rabbit. “So why come to me? Wouldn’t a psychiatrist or a therapist be better for her right now?”

Granny shrugged, “Maybe, maybe not. She aint said anything, and every time she looks like she wants to talk she gets a look like the combine drove over her favorite puppy and shuts right down again. Aint even written anythin’ down, neither. Nah,” she shrugged and looked Celestia in the eyes, “Thing is, she does talk in her sleep. Most of it’s babble, you know the like, but one thing comes out clear as a sunrise on a harvest mornin’...” she looked right into the eyes of the principal, “She keeps cryin’ out yer name.”

That was probably the biggest surprise to have hit Celestia since one of her students turned into a demon and five others sprouted animal ears and tails. She almost didn’t breath for a moment, “...what?” she finally gasped out.

“Firs’ time I heard the girl shoutin’ out in her sleep I ran in, an’ she was shiverin’ and cryin, beggin fer somethin, not quite sure what, but then she said, ‘Please, Celestia, help me,’ and then let out the saddest cry you ever done heard.” The matriarch closed her eyes and swallowed thickly, “Most nights have been pretty much a repeat of that. Two, three times a night she starts cryin’ out in her sleep and at least once yer name comes up.”

The principal was flummoxed, “But...why? I’ve certainly had my share of interacting with Sunset Shimmer...she has been one of our...problematic students, after all. But why would she be calling to me in a dream?”

Granny Smith shrugged, “I ‘spect you’ll have to ask the Shimmer girl that directly t’know for sure, provided you can get her to talk while she’s awake. I did talk to Applejack ‘n Rainbow Dash, seein’ how they’re taking the most time with Sunset tryin’ to be friends like that visiting princess girl said to.” She shook her head wryly, “Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d be utterin’...Anyway, they said that the reason Princess Twilight was able t’make friends so fast with all the students was ‘cuz where she and Sunset Shimmer are from there’s dopel-whatchahoozums, y’know, duplicates of everyone?” Celestia nodded her comprehension and Granny Smith continued, “From what they understand, the two girls are from a place where Twilight already knew everyone there, so used that knowledge to bring everyone together here. My thinkin’ is that Sunset Shimmer was pretty close to that other version of you an’ has been calling out for her now that...well.” The elder woman’s eyes slid in the direction of the front door of the school, as though she could see through the walls to the crater left behind after Sunset’s defeat.

There were a few beats of silence, the occasional noise of a busy school in early morning activity making its way into the room through the closed door and open window. With a sigh (she’d been doing far too much of that since the Fall Formal) she said, “I suspect you didn’t come in just to give me an update.”

Granny’s lips quirked up at the corner, “Yep. I’d be much obliged if you could make your way out to the farm to see what you can do for the girl. Also, I’ve been writin’ notes to excuse Applejack a couple o’ days this week, and Mac’s taken a day off so he can help, but right now Sunset needs...monitorin’ in case she decides to...well, you know.” She shifted uncomfortably. “Now, you know me, Miss Celestia…”

Celestia felt a knot in her stomach forming even before Granny had gotten to the part that referred to the reason Sunset had landed in the hospital. “...she needs a place to stay and someone to watch her?”

Granny sighed again. There was a lot of that going around, “Yeah. You know I wouldn’t ask if I had…”

Celestia leaned forward and reached across the desk. With the furniture in between them, there was no way she could actually clasp the older woman’s hand reassuringly, but she could at least make the gesture and know her friend and coworker would understand. “Granny, you do as much as any three other people and you’re raising your grandkids to do just as well...maybe better if Mac and Applejack are any indication.” She smiled warmly at the other woman, “I’ll see what I can do. Do you need me to come over at a specific time…?”

A relieved smile caused Granny’s face to crinkle as the laugh lines worn in by time framed her eyes, “Nah, just come out when you can. I’ll let AJ and Mac know to expect you. Applebloom’s been...well, you know the CMC.” the amused snort reflected the mood of the entire school’s staff at the trio’s antics. “Anyway, I know yer busy…”

Just then Celestia’s phone intercom buzzed and Luna’s voice came through, “Sister, Agents Gingerbread and Harvest are back.”

Granny Smith nodded knowingly at the phone. Celestia snorted and keyed the button to reply, “Thank you, Luna. I’ll be there shortly.”

Mrs. Smith continued once the intercom light clicked off, “Like I said. You just come on over when you get the chance.”

They exchanged a farewell as Celestia grabbed the folio that she was starting to call “the X-file,” slipped the most recent report from Prof. Whooves in that showed no appreciable radiation above the background levels, and glancing at her computer chose not to print out the report she’d been reading about a theoretical new fundamental force. It was early, early stages of purely theoretical research and mathematical work, but from what Celestia could understand from the (incredibly dense) technical jargon, it did fit the phenomenon that they observed the previous Friday night. Just as she hit the key combination to lock her computer, her eyes flitted to the byline for the article. Huh…’T. Sparkle.’ I wonder…? Shrugging the thought away, she locked her desk as well, grabbed her keys, and headed off to deal with the paranormal investigators who seemed intent on digging into information that would put her students' lives under threat, and she considered it her job to keep that from happening.

Present...

If only Princess Twilight had bothered to establish formal diplomatic ties...or even just keep the gate or portal or whatever it is open...Celestia allowed herself a small bit of grumbling as she pulled onto the small private road framed by the sign “Sweet Apple Acres.” The headaches kept piling on as more time passed. The agents had continued trying to pry, attempting to pick apart the staff’s agreed-upon story that the front facade of the school was damaged by a freak accident of a particularly intelligent student messing with materials that she didn’t fully understand and it went out of control. True as far as it went, but it left out huge pieces that the agents were starting to suspect were being kept from them.

Poor Cheerilee was practically shaking in frustrated anger after the pair had interrupted class attempting to pull a few students for questioning. Cheerilee wouldn’t be brought up on charges of assaulting government employees as the pair had overstepped the bounds of what the law allowed, but the teacher had to take the rest of the day off and Celestia had to step in as substitute since it was too late in the day on a Friday to find one through the usual channels. Of course, her regular workload could only be delegated so far, and she still had to stay after school for several hours to complete paperwork and make requisite calls to parents.

As Celestia pulled in, her headlights’ beam passed over the white and purple VW ‘bug’ that Rarity drove. She smiled, satisfaction that her five...most visible students were doing so much to take care of what had been the school’s biggest bully. With Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash in the group, she couldn’t call them her “best” students by traditional academic measures, but if “character” were taken into account, the five would blow away pretty much any other school’s entire student body combined. She was heartbroken when the five’s friendship broke during their freshman year. Their recent reconciliation and subsequent teamwork literally saving the students and faculty just proved that the five were natural born leaders.

She parked, not bothering to lock the car given how deep she was into private property. The front door to the house opened as she approached, young Apple Bloom practically bouncing out of the way to let the educator in. “Granny told us you were comin’ over. She had ta’ take a nap after dinner. I’ll go get’r up.” Before Celestia could tell her not to bother the older woman, Apple Bloom was off like a shot to the stairs leading to the bedrooms, nearly bowling over Applejack as they passed on the stairs.

“Apple Bloom!” snapped the older sister, “How many times do we have to tell you to WALK in the house?” she nearly shouted up the stairs.

A somewhat distant, “Sorry sis!” floated down, but they could still hear the running pace of the youngest Apple as she ran through the upstairs hall.

Rolling her eyes, Applejack finished descending the stairs and approached the educator. “Evenin’ Principal. Sorry y’couln’t come out under better circumstances.”

Celestia smiled at her student, “It’s alright, Applejack. I’m just glad that you and your friends stepped up to help as you have been. I couldn’t be more proud to be your principal.”

Applejack’s shoulders squared in pride even as the girl blushed and scratched the back of her neck in embarrassment. “Aww, shucks, ma’am. Twern’t nuthin’ any right-thinkin’ person wouldn’t do.”

Celestia chose not to respond, as she knew from dealing with the girl’s grandmother for years that no matter how much praise one heaped on an Apple, they just wouldn’t allow themselves to be spoken “too highly” of. She simply nodded and turned to the stairs again when Granny Smith appeared at the top.

The older woman refrained from climbing down the whole way, only going down far enough to catch Celestia’s attention and waved her over.

Once Celestia had joined Granny Smith on the stairs, the older woman climbed back up and began leading the principal down the hall. She spoke quietly as the moved, “I have her in our guest bedroom, it’s across th’hall from mine and right next to Jackie’s, so there’s always some’un to respond if necessary. She’s aint been eatin’ and with her sleep being so bad, well, she’s pretty tuckered most of the time.” Arriving at the door to the mentioned bedroom, Granny Smith opened it.

Rarity was the bright spot in the room. The teenager started at the sudden opening of the door, then relaxed when she saw Mrs. Smith, only to start up again when she saw Principal Celestia. The lights were kept low, only the bedside lamp next to the chair Rarity had been sitting in was on. The room itself had clearly not been used regularly, for all efforts had clearly been made to keep it livable. Dust clung to some surfaces, while curtains that hadn’t been moved since spring cleaning hung like they were reluctant to break the habit of stillness.

Celestia was so used to her most unusual student’s room filling presence that she had the fleeting thought that they were playing a trick on her. It was only a second look at the figure under the covers on the bed that she realized she really was looking at Sunset Shimmer. While she didn’t look emaciated or sickly, (there hadn’t been nearly enough time since she last saw the girl for either condition to be true) it was like the girl’s presence had just...collapsed in on itself. Celestia couldn’t help but think of a documentary she had seen about dying stars that didn’t have enough fuel to go nova. They just burned out, their matter pulling in until they were just faintly glowing orbs in the sky, barely visible, destined to extinguish long before their brethren. What Celestia could see of her face was drained of most of its color, leaving the normally bright orange skin looking more like pale rust. Her body was curled in on itself under the covers, and the principal was struck by how small Sunset really was.

“Oh, Sunset…” she whispered to herself, then turned to Rarity, “Has she said anything?”

The fashionista bit back an unlady like huff. “No. Every so often when I do something to help her, she seems like she’s about to, but then stops and looks like she’s about to cry. Honestly, I’ve just taken to assuming she’s trying to thank me and simply saying, ‘you’re welcome,’ in reply. She at least smiles at me when I do...though I can see that she’s frustrated about something.”

Celestia watched Sunset as Rarity spoke. The bedridden girl was breathing, but otherwise not moving. “Is she asleep?”

Rarity paused and watched Sunset for a moment before answering. “No, I don’t believe so. She has a...slightly slower breathing pattern when she sleeps. It was hard for me to tell at first, but after watching her for a few hours I was able to pick up the differences.”

Celestia unconsciously gave a slight shake of her head, then stopped herself when she realized what she was doing. “Thank you, Rarity. Would you mind giving us the room?”

“Of course, Principal.” Rarity collected her purse and left, smiling and nodding at Granny Smith as she went.

Granny stepped fully into the room now that it had enough room for her. “S’too bad it took this to bring that girl out to the farm, I think she and Applejack’r good fer each other.”

Rather than replying, Celestia moved around the bed. As she entered Sunset’s field of view, the girl’s eyes snapped to her, but otherwise she didn’t move. The girl watched her as she approached, tracking every movement even as the principal sat down next to her on the bed. “Sunset, can you move on your own?” Celestia watched as Sunset’s head started twitching, accompanied by her shoulder’s tensing, then she closed her eyes and simply sagged into the mattress, seemingly more defeated than before. “...I’ll take that as a yes.” At that the girl’s eyes snapped open and locked onto the older woman. The educator’s years of reading body language was all she had to rely on in that moment, as Sunset’s fixed gaze spoke volumes that her voice wasn’t. Despair, defeat...and a tiny, faint glimmer of desperate hope.

With so little feedback from her student, she was unsure what to do, so she relied on her instincts. She slowly reached out her hand in invitation, “I want to help you. Will you come home with me?”

Sunset’s muscles did the twitching and tensing action again, and instead of replying directly, she reached out, her arm trembling as she did so, until she was able to drop her hand into Celestia’s. The effort seemed to have exhausted the girl for some reason, as she practically sagged into the mattress again. This time her face showed...contentment? No, Celestia corrected herself, Victory. Exhausted victory, like she had to fight an army just to hold my hand.

Just then, Sunset started crying. Not loudly, there was no noise, and at first Celestia had mistaken the sobbing for the odd muscle twitching she had observed earlier. A moment later, the tears started flowing from the teen’s eyes. Celestia pulled the girl up into a hug, and Sunset continued to silently cry.

Author's Note

I'm not expecting this to be very long or epochal. It's mostly just a germ of an idea that happened to latch on to the emotions and trauma related to my own recent stint experiencing homelessness. It doesn't have a tragic ending, but does deal with issues of suicidal acts and acts of self-harm, not to mention depression and recovering from trauma. The end of this chapter is less than ideal, but it was either capping it here or turning this into an 8k-word chapter. :twilightsheepish:

Chapter 8 - It's Strange What Desire Will Make Foolish People Do

Author's Note

Fair warning! This monster clocks in at just 55 shy of 11,000 words long. Get some water, plan a bathroom break, and maybe pack a snack.

Also, I'm not nearly as happy with the finished product of this chapter as I've been for others. Granted, it didn't turn out to be quite the cluster I was worried it could have, but it's also not my finest work.

Also, be sure to thank OhMyOtaku for doing my pre-reading. They've been with me since I first started this fic and have saved the lot of you from plenty of bad writing decisions. :raritywink:

Chapter 8 - It's Strange What Desire Will Make Foolish People Do

Principal Celestia sat at the conference table listening to the sound of her own voice. That it wasn’t her speaking made this frustrating.

“So, you see, Senator, such a magical registration system would be, at best, a fruitless endeavor that would simply waste your taxpayers’ dollars. By all accounts this world is swiftly developing its own magical field similar to our own and will likely start producing previously impossible talents and abilities among the general population within a small handful of generations. At worst it could be used by less scrupulous members of your ruling classes, whether elected or not, to create a segregated society. You would find yourself swiftly returning to fiefdoms and ruling lords that kept other sentient beings as slaves.”

Sure, it was exactly what she was thinking when the senator (that she was now very much regretting voting for) proposed it. When she tried to voice her concerns, in comparison to the apparently off the cuff treatise her counterpart had just delivered her tersely retorted, “Isn’t that what Welldweller did?” sounded like a lame 14-year-old on the Internet invoking Divine Ally’s Law. Good job, Celestia, she thought to herself, your better version just made you look like you never took debate class.

The senator just sputtered for a moment before Agent Freedom took over, “Well, it was something that was in the “spitball” stage anyway, clearly wasn’t really thought through.” he said with a glare to the elected official. “So, unless there’s anything further to bring up as new business, we can probably call this a day.”

There was silence for a moment, then Celestia felt Luna’s knee bump hers and she remembered that she was supposed to be running things. A glance at her counterpart showed…nothing. She was calmly sitting, watching her with an unreadable expression, hands folded primly.

Forcing herself not to glare at the princess, she nodded at Agent Freedom. “Yes, none of us have duties that can be put off very long. Thank you, ladies, gentlemen…and gentlemares and stallions, of course.” She followed up with a nod to the Equestrian side of the table.

The federal government group stood and leaned across the table to shake hands with Principal Celestia and bowed in Princess Celestia and Princess Luna’s direction before slowly shuffling out the door. Principal Celestia started gathering her papers into her folio as quickly as she could without being obvious about it, though the askance look from her sister showed that someone who knew what to watch for wouldn’t be fooled.

As the door closed slowly behind the last of the government entourage, she felt the Princess’ eyes on her. It was an uncanny feeling she was growing uncomfortably familiar with in the last few weeks as the two Celestias were required to spend more and more time in close quarters as the process of normalizing relations dragged on. Just let it go, stay quiet, we don’t need to discuss anything further, Celestia thought as she wrestled the final folder into her folio, Don’t ask how Sunset is doing, don’t ask how Sunset is…

“My good principal,” began the princess, “How has Sunset been fairing?”

She felt her sister’s foot pressing against hers, a reminder to keep her cool. If you read the reports your student sends you, she thought but didn’t say, you wouldn’t have to ask me! Out loud, she replied, “Doing…well. She is expressing all the nonverbal signs of frustration in her inability to communicate as one would expect after being poked and prodded by doctors and wizards for days on end, and she still can’t fully participate in her classes, but she’s taken up games of all sorts to continue interactions with other students.”

“Indeed,” interjected Vice-principal Luna, “I did not think that Rainbow Dash would ever be convinced to sit down at a chess board, let alone learn the game, yet I found her and Sunset doing just that, with Sunset actually teaching Rainbow without words how to play.”

Princess Luna chuckled, “One can barely imagine Rainbow Dash in any world sitting still long enough. Sunset is to be commended for her patience and perseverance.”

A moment of pride forced a real grin on the principal’s face. That was a moment she had desperately wished Luna had captured in video, but she’d take the blushing smiles on both girl’s faces as her parental prize for the event.

Then she spoke up, “Oh, it’s hardly a surprise. Sunset took to the game very quickly when I taught her as a filly, and she always showed great potential to be a teacher and leader of ponies…er, people.”

It was as though cold water was splashed on the conversation. Both Lunas turned to Princess Celestia, surprise and disappointment etched on both their faces to differing degrees. For her part, Princess Celestia seemed to not notice…but Principal Celestia knew herself better than that. Nag, she thought to herself, read the room!

Rather than ending her current line of conversation, Princess Celestia seemed to have chosen to double-down. “In fact, I’m surprised you’re able to keep up with her. When she was living in the palace, I practically had to assign an entire team of the staff dedicated just to Sunset’s needs. Somepony of your much more limited resources is sure to drop the ball through no fault of your own. You really don’t need to play the act of being Sunset’s mother any longer, the charade served its purpose for the limited time needed to open the portal. You need but give the word and I can have my staff and team of magical and medical authorities take her off your hands.”

At this, everyone in the room was now just staring in shock at Princess Celestia. Princess Luna’s jaw had even sagged open slightly and the frosty anger practically radiating off the Moon Princess made it clear she was briefly entertaining thoughts of regicide…again. The only sound to be heard in the shocked pause was the crinkling of paper as Principal Celestia’s hand clenched into a fist around some of the papers in the folder she was still holding. Vice-principal Luna gently gripped her sister’s knee under the table, as though that might stave off the impending parental violence.

A youthful but refined voice split the silence, “I do beg-pardon for interrupting, but we need to borrow Principal Celestia to discuss plans for this weekend.”

Both the Equestrian and Canterlot High contingents blinked away the tension as the tableau seemed to pop like a soap bubble. Almost as one, they turned to see the student Rarity, flanked by Granny Smith and Applejack. Granny was clearly “reading the room” and clenching her fists enough to pop some knuckles, and Applejack looked like she wanted to be anywhere else.

Rarity, for her part, seemed as calm and collected as any diplomat could hope to be. Her intense, meaningful gaze meeting Principal Celestia’s eyes as though an entire message could be passed by looks alone, “We, of course, wouldn’t want to presume to make any decisions for Sunset without her parent and legal guardian present.”

Restraining the bubble of vindictive laughter that threatened to escape, the principal nodded and finally finished shoving the last of the papers into her folio, “Yes, thank you for coming to me with this Rarity.” So saying, she stood, “Excuse me, but one thing I’ve learned since taking in Sunset is a mother’s work is never really done.” She bowed briefly across the table at the princesses before turning and squeezing her sister’s shoulder as she passed. “Lulu, can you finish up here?”

Luna nodded and smiled at her, “Of course, sister.”

Using that as a “by your leave,” Celestia left the room, controlling her walk so it wouldn’t betray that she just felt like running out of the room and all the way home. The Apple’s backed away from the door and followed her lead, and she heard Rarity give a brief farewell before the door closed. Now no longer having to hide her emotions from visiting royalty, she started stomping through the halls back to her office.

“Celestia,” began Granny Smith as the older woman easily matched Celestia’s pace, “What in tarnation was goin’ on in that room before we got there?”

Applejack finally spoke up, also easily keeping up with the much longer-legged woman, “Shee-oot, ‘coulda cut tension with a knife.”

Celestia was about to answer but realized abruptly that she was glaring at one of the Equestrian guards that could be seen at intervals between the meeting room and the exit of the school closest to the portal. She paused in her angry marching, closed her eyes, and took a couple deep breaths, then opened them again. The guard looked to be slightly tense, though perhaps a bit fearful. With a start, she realized she had accidentally summoned her sword again. She activated the belt she’d taken to wearing since the incident with Neighsay in her office and stowed the sword in its inventory slot, disappearing it from view. She pinched the bridge of her nose with her now-free hand before smiling at the guard reassuringly and resuming her walk. “I’m sorry, ladies, but there’s just something about the princess that…just seems to rub me raw.”

The pause had given Rarity the chance to catch up to the group and Celestia’s slower walk, much closer to the normally sedate walk the principal usually used when accompanied by students meant the girl could more comfortably keep pace with the group…and slip her hand into Applejack’s. Finally, Celestia thought as a smile cracked her frustrated countenance, A bit of good news to this mess. Out loud, she continued, “So what was this about plans for the weekend?”

Rarity once again became the speaker for the group. “Well, we have noticed that Sunset is showing…signs of stress. She has not been faring well with the tests Twilight and the other magical researchers have been performing, plus with all the classes that she’s not really able to participate in…well…” the girl trailed off.

Granny Smith took over from there as the group crossed the threshold into the administrative offices of the school, “Th’girl needs a break. An’ I don’t mean just the week off from school for spring break comin’ up. I’m talkin’ ‘bout leavin’ all this behind fer a bit.”

Celestia dropped her folio on her desk, not even bothering to avoid the keyboard to the computer. She then dropped into her chair, the seat creaking with the sudden weight of her body being unceremoniously plopped on it. Granny’s eyebrow raised and she spoke up again, “An’ honestly, you look like you could use a break y’self.”

Luna found herself using an ability she hadn’t exercised since before she went to Juvenile Hall for stabbing her sister, the introvert’s stealth-walk through school.

“Sister!” her counterpart from Equestria hissed from a few feet in front of her, “What were you thinking?!”

When she’d been an awkward teen, the learned skill of keeping quiet and practically gliding through the traffic in the hallway in such a way that people just ignored your presence had become such second nature to her during that time that using it now was like riding your childhood bicycle; horribly uncomfortable but so intuitive you barely had to adjust to the fact that it didn’t fit anymore.

“I was merely attempting to bring Sunset back home where she belongs.” Replied her sister’s funhouse mirror image. As they walked, the guards that had stationed themselves along the hall joined the entourage, marching in a two-column formation behind the royal sisters. They seemed to ignore Vice-principal Luna by virtue of her proximity to the princesses…or perhaps they thought of her as one of them since she was the mirror opposite of the Night Princess.

For someone who didn’t know how Celestia operated, it might have been missed. Luna suspected that her own princess counterpart may be so caught up in the emotions of the moment that she didn’t notice, either, but Luna could see an abruptness to Princess Celestia’s walk, a tension in her shoulders, and the way she clasped her hands were all so similar to her sister’s tells that she could deduce there was a fury boiling just below the surface.

Princess Luna’s nostril’s flared as she snorted in an equine fashion, “Sunset Shimmer has a home, one you seem Tartarus-bent on taking her from,” she snapped in reply as the group reached the doors to the school entrance nearest the portal. A pair of guards opened them and the procession marched through to the light of day.

The tension in the older woman’s shoulders ramped up a notch and it took her a moment to respond, “Though I’m…disheartened to have learned that Sunset was living as a homeless orphan for…” there was a pause as Celestia clearly was trying to control her emotions, “…for three years before finally being taken in by my counterpart, and I am indeed grateful that she was able to receive the support and care before we were able to get the portal open full-time…we simply have no need for her to remain on this world. Twilight Sparkle can easily take on the project of continuing to normalize relations with the federal government while also studying the new magic field…”

Luna’s eyes narrowed angrily, and it was clear she wasn’t the only one to notice. They were only a few strides from the base of the Wondercolt statue when Princess Luna stomped and turned to face her sister directly, “Thou’rt dodging the issue!”

Celestia stopped just as abruptly and faced her fellow princess, “She should have adopted her three years ago, Luna!” A light lick of what appeared to be flames seemed to flare from Celestia’s eyes, occurring so fast it could have been mistaken for a trick of the light. The sight was clearly caught by both Lunas, though, as the dark-skinned princess had taken a defensive step back and the vice principal realized she had done the same instinctively.

The two princesses faced each other for a breath, then two before Princess Luna’s face twisted into a scowl. “Mayhap We recall that thou hast a great many, ‘shoulda-woulda-couldas’ in thine own history with Sunset Shimmer, sister.”

Princess Celestia may as well have been slapped. Her shoulders sagged and a sheen appeared over the eyes that just moments ago had been about to erupt into magical flames. Celestia glanced back at Luna, clearly not surprised to see her there, then fled through the portal.

The princess and the vice principal glanced from each other to the portal and back. It was Princess Luna that broke the silence. “We assure thee…that is, I assure you, sister from another world, that this behavior of late from Celestia is…atypical.”

Luna’s brow pinched, “I’ll…take your word for it. My first interaction with her was watching her attack my sister.”

Her counterpart nodded, “That was also highly unusual. At the time I ascribed it to the newness of her body, the physical changes affecting the Humors…rather, the hormones in her brain, as well as the emotions she surely must be grappling with. E’en so, such a response is…extreme, especially given that, save for the disorientation that comes from having one’s body changed around them in instants, none others who have ventured through the portal have reacted thusly to anything similar.”

Luna had no response to that, save to gaze at the base of the statue as though she could see through the portal to the other side and somehow glean the mysteries of the princess’s behavior from what she saw.

Celestia arranged with Rarity’s mother over the phone to take the girl to Sweet Apple Acres after school (after the fashionista’s blushing admittance that she had spent the night on enough occasions that she had a whole weekend wardrobe in Applejack’s closet) and Applejack would go home with Granny Smith to prepare the spare room for Celestia and Sunset to stay at the farm for the weekend. They stopped back at Celestia’s house just long enough to confer with Luna and throw some weekend necessities into on overnight bag (for Celestia) and a backpack (for Sunset) and left immediately. The only delay came when the two sisters briefed Sunset on what happened after the meeting to prompt the invitation from the Apples. Once they had explained what Princess Celestia proposed, Sunset practically dropped her phone in her haste to tap the “No” button in her assistive communications app just before launching herself in an intense hug that did more to relieve Celestia’s stress from the day than even the prospect of not having to deal with a single government bureaucrat for an entire weekend did.

The drive to the farm was quiet, Celestia opting to put on some ABBA as the scenery passed by. The only interruption came in the form of a panel van that practically screamed, “We’re totally not the FBI, promise,” but a quick call by Rarity to Princess Twilight’s new phone got the government tail off their backs before they even made it to the halfway point.

Being friends with royalty did have its perks.

Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy were hosting Princess Twilight at Rainbow Dash’s house for the three-day weekend that marked the half-way point between the start of term and spring break, which would keep the security contingent from the Equestrian embassy focused on the suburbs and their human counterparts needing to equally staff their own security contingent to match, which allowed them to get some quiet, “unplugged” time, well away from the rest of the population of the city and on a farm with lots of acreage, including well-tended apple trees, several full fields of cash crops, some farm animals…and unlimited site lines and clearly established boundaries that even the Federal agencies were required to observe. Nobody was going to harass Celestia or Sunset under threat of Granny Smith’s ire and a clearly displayed shotgun that leaned against the porch railing next to where Big Macintosh was quietly lounging.

On the Apple’s part, the addition of guests at the farm was a welcome bonus, as spring break would also mark the start of planting season for the crops that wouldn’t just grow back themselves after the winter, the three-day weekend, plus the extra hands, meant that the work of preparing for the younger Apple’s upcoming week off would go that much faster.

Sunset seemed to mostly gravitate to hanging around either Celestia or Rarity depending on whatever activities they were participating in at the time. While she couldn’t speak, she could take orders and seemed quite content to follow whatever instruction she was given to assist. When she wasn’t actively helping, Celestia caught the girl simply observing the farm with a slight smile on her face. What emotions were going on with her or what thoughts the girl had were still an enigma, but clearly Granny Smith had been right when she said Sunset needed a break; it seemed to be doing something to heal the girl just a little.

As Saturday morning ebbed into Saturday afternoon, the various tasks and chores of the day pulled Big Mac and Applejack out to the acre of land that held the various farming vehicles and attachments that were needed to keep the large homestead operating as a profitable business. One of the tiller’s jack stands had slipped and fallen over the cold season, leaving the rubber of the tire, deflated to preserve it against the near- and sub-zero temperatures the farm could suffer during the winter, pressed into the ground and subsequently ruined by the weight of the tiller. Since the vehicles and trailers were parked on what was, basically, a fallow field that was starting to become weed choked, there wasn’t firm enough soil beneath the tiller to put a jack that wouldn’t just push itself into the dirt below. A pair of firm hands and a strong back would have to suffice, though, and it happened that Big Mac was quite capable…but he recognized that his sister was even more so.

Applejack grunted with the effort it took to hold up the tiller. She may have been strong, but weight was weight and she’d been holding the thing up for ten minutes while her brother fought with the lug nuts.

A quiet, metallic groaning sound met her ears just before she saw the tire iron Mac was wielding finally turn. Having loosened the third nut of five, he gently tugged it off the post and started hand turning the nut the rest of the way. C’mon, ya danged fool, Applejack thought to herself, Y’got yer ‘thinkin’ face on and only two more lug nuts to go. If’n you don’t hurry up and ask whatever it is yer thinkin’…

AJ was spared the necessity of voicing her mental tirade when Big Macintosh finally spoke, “So…” he drawled, “…Rarity?”

She rolled her eyes in exasperation and hissed a sigh as she shifted her grip, “Yeah, what about it?”

Mac tossed the nut into the nearby upturned hubcap and picked the iron back up. Sliding onto the next bolt post and shimmying it on, he snorted, “City girl?”

Applejack returned the snort with a raised eyebrow. “We’re pretty much,” she grunted and pressed her leg against the tiller to steady it as Mac started tugging the tire iron to loosen the next lug nut, “…pretty much th’only farm left in Canterlot County, ‘taint like I gotta lotta country gals t’pick from.”

Mac’s own grunt of effort preceded the tire iron turning about a quarter turn, “Mmmm…” he muttered as he pulled the iron off again, “A bit, er, ‘fru-fru,’ aint she?”

Applejack blushed, “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Then she smiled, “But she’s just so…well, you know. I seen you an’ Sugar Belle makin’ eyes at each other.”

It was Mac’s turn to blush as he seemed to stare more intently at his work on the nut he just loosened, “Hey now, jes’ cause you caught us on th’ front porch…”

Snickering, AJ hefted the axle back up a quarter inch after letting it sag a bit, “Jus’ sayin’, big bro, y’aint got stones t’throw.”

“Think she’ll live on th’ farm?” he replied with a wry smile as he went to work on the last lug nut.

Now Applejack turned VERY red, “I…that…but…now don’t get ahead o’ yerself, Big Macintosh! We only just started datin’, it aint time to talk about livin’ t’gether yet!”

Macintosh simply snickered as he tugged on the tire iron.

The Apple’s house was originally built nearly a century prior to replace the previous house that the family had originally built nearly a century before that, and the lumber that could be salvaged from the original building had been used to construct the new home’s porch. A pair of rocking chairs stood on the porch and were presently occupied by an interdimensional refuge and a teenaged diplomat.

Sunset was smiling as Rarity talked. Not that Rarity could say for sure that Sunset cared what she talked about, per say, but then one didn’t necessarily have to be fully engaged to be a good listener, one just had to show one’s audience that you were there and not allowing yourself to “zone out” or get distracted. “…and of course I have tried to explain to mother that it’s not just a matter of picking any old bit of fabric, it has to have the right weave or the right cut or it simply won’t work for the outfit.”

Rarity did remember, with vivid detail, that the pair of them had been in nearly this identical situation before. The weeks leading up to the Spring Fling were particularly bitter-sweet. In Sunset, she had found someone that was not only her intellectual equal but seemed to be able to keep up with her interest in fashion. A few questions had been odd at the time, questions that made much more sense in hindsight now that they knew Sunset had spent close to a quarter century as an equine that didn’t wear clothing most of the time, but at the time Rarity had attributed them to simply “playing the fool” in the conversation so her creative juices could be kept flowing. And it had worked wonderfully, allowing Rarity to achievements that she hadn’t expected to make until she was more experienced and well after high school would be over.

“But then mother always seems to have the sense of a naked mole rat and the tact of a ball-peen hammer,” the fashionista continued with a roll of her eyes, “The other day she asked me if Applejack and I were ever going to ‘settle down and get ourselves husbands once we got over this phase,’” she made liberal use of the exaggerated air quotes as she spoke

Sunset’s eyebrow rose as she met Rarity’s eyes for the first time in several minutes. “Well,” continued Rarity, as though the other girl had actually spoken, “Of course I wasn’t going to let that slide, but you know my mother, she’s from…well…her generation. They did have that weird ‘purity’ movement that took hold briefly after the hedonism of the 70’s, so I can’t say I blame her, really. She just doesn’t quite seem to really understand sometimes.” She waved an alabaster hand dismissively, “She really does try, the dear, she gave Applejack a gift of a flannel shirt for her birthday as an apology.”

Of course, the casual way she could discuss her relationship with Applejack was entirely due to the fact that she was ‘out’ to the whole school and several social steps beyond that. Sunset was, of course, directly responsible for it. Her reign as Spring Fling Princess depended on a perfectly timed political move on Sunset’s part to find any small tidbit of possible scandal, no matter how seemingly trivial or whether it was even truly problematic. That Rarity grew up in a household where same-sex attraction was frowned upon was her deepest shame at the time…which of course in retrospect was silly. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that.

At Sunset’s quizzical look, she rolled her eyes, “Oh, you and I both know Applejack took to it like, well, like ‘a pig in a fresh new mud waller’ as Applejack would say,” she intentionally over-enunciated the countryism, “But of course mother hadn’t a clue what Applejack’s preferences were, she simply bought a flannel shirt for both of us,” at Sunset’s snicker, she rolled her eyes again, “Yes, darling, I know, but she bought them because,” air quotes again, “’That’s what girls like you like, right?”

Sunset’s hand raised to her mouth was clearly instinctual as it did nothing to hide the mirth that split her face into a grin.

Rarity pouted, “Yes, yes, darling. It’s funny, but at the time it was simply mortifying.”

Of course, her father had breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Now I don’t have to worry about figuring out a shotgun cleanin’ routine for some dirtbag boy until Sweetie’s old enough to date!” As almost tackily blasé as it was, the simple statement of relief was leaps and bounds better than dealing with her mother, who proved without a shadow of a doubt where Rarity got her ‘drama gene’ from. However, once the nearly two weeks of lament and metaphorical gnashing of teeth (“Good girls don’t grit their teeth, dearie, it’ll give you wrinkles.”) passed, the older Belle had proven she loved her daughter and accepted her choices and acted in accordance with her understanding of the situation…which was always less than optimal.

Further conversation, monodirectional or not, was interrupted by a deep, shouted, “LOOKOUT!”

“If’n you don’t pay closer attention to those apple’s yer choppin’, I’m takin’ the knife away and makin’ you make the crusts,” the near centiginarian voice popped the bubble of introspection Celestia had been stewing in.

The principal blinked and glanced down at her hands, which were thankfully unmarred by errant knife slices. She sighed and set the knife down and leaned her head against the cabinet that hung over the counter she was working on. “You’re right Granny,” a ripple of amusement crossed her features, still tickled after all these years at calling another fully grown adult she wasn’t related to ‘Granny,’ “My mind just refuses to focus on anything but what’s going on at school.” Straightening her posture, she took the hand towel off her shoulder and wiped her hands before crossing from the kitchen to the dining room and slumping down in one of the old wooden chairs that flanked the large table. “It’s…just so big, and what am I doing in the middle of it all?

The older woman carefully draped the pie crust she had just finished up into a pie tin and began wiping her own hands on another towel. “Well, now,” she began as she lowered herself into a chair next to the principal, “That’s somewhat obvious t’me, but I think this’s prolly one a those things that y’gotta figure out on yer own. So why don’t you tell me about it?”

The pair were silent for a long moment, the old grandfather clock that had been in the house since Granny Smith was a little girl gently ticking away the time.

Finally, Celestia spoke, “It’s…it’s the way they look at me.”

Granny Smith simply grunted and raised her eyebrow.

“The Equestrians,” Celestia clarified, “The guard, Princess Twilight, Princess Luna…even Sunset still gets the look every so often. They look at me like I’m…like I raise the sun every day.” Even as her brow pinched together, she grinned ruefully, “And, of course, Princess Celestia actually does raise the sun every day…as though I needed yet another reminder of how much more perfect she is than me.” Granny snorted dismissively, but before she could say anything Celestia continued, “Oh, I know, she’s hardly perfect and there have been problems and Nightmare Moon was a thing for them and she makes mistakes…but then we’ll be in meetings, and I’m on my fifth cup of coffee and my pits are sweating under my suit jacket and I can feel the bags under my eyes and I still have two meetings with heads-of-state, the last three class periods, finishing paperwork for the district, and that’s all before I go home and have to take care of Sunset and work on the curse…puzzle…wall…thing and make dinner…and then she comes into the meeting, looking like a freaking Fires-of-Isis princess escorted by people that practically worship her…and she wants to take Sunset from me.” At this, Celestia leaned on her elbows, her hands clasped in front of her and her hair dropping into a veil over her face.

Granny just reached out and clasped Celestia’s hand gently.

“And, I mean, what’s to stop her?” she took a shuddering breath, “She’s nice, and she’s polite, and at this point I’m pretty sure she’s got the feds eating out of her hands…hooves…whatever!” a sniff punctuated her confusion succinctly, “I’d thought of asking Princess Twilight for help, but honestly, if the Equestrians were a Princess Celestia cult, Twilight would be her high priestess. I can’t help but think that if she just asked the question outright, ‘Can you make her give me Sunset?’ they’d all practically jump at the chance and suddenly the adoption papers would mean…nothing.”

Silence once again took hold in the kitchen, the muted ticking serving as a Hellenic chorus to Celestia’s lament.

The silent ticking was suddenly punctuated by muffled shout followed by the entire house shaking and a thunderous crash of metal on wood.

A deft lift and a propping up of the jack-stand later, Applejack was enjoying a brief rest as Mac set the wheel with the bad tire aside. They’d have to take the whole thing into the city later to get the tire replaced, but they did have a spare, which Mac retrieved along with a pair of bottled ciders from the cooler.

They stared off at the distant horizon as they consumed their drinks. They had often spent hours in conversation, even some familial debates, but they were both old enough, one on the cusp of adulthood and the other already there, that they understood that sometimes the silence spoke as much as the words.

Macintosh glanced over at her, and AJ saw out of the corner of her eye that he started speaking several times before finally saying something, “So…ambassador?”

Applejack snickered, “Eeyup. M’thinkin’ Twi wanted to make sure the government couldn’t touch us. I mean, good call an’ all, but now I got both th’feds and the Equestrians wantin’ me to have a protection detail.”

Mac snorted along with his sister, “Figure you’d prolly wind up protectin’ the protection detail. Just the way you are.” So saying, he tossed back the last of his cider.

The smile faded from his sister’s face ever so slightly and he knew she had more to say. Best to let her get to it in her own time, so he just set the bottle on a nearby flat surface on the tiller. Her distant gaze slowly turned into a thousand yard stare, “Th’ girls RD hurt are back at school. Dash was practically tripping over herself to apologize and they…they were terrified of her. I never seen Lightning Dust afraid of anything…I mean, never did hang out with her much, but I never saw the look on her face like that, and her two cronies…” she finished the last of her cider and put her bottle next to her brother’s and locked eyes with him, “What’re we becoming, Mac?”

Her older brother gazed off in the direction of the forest, a habit she recognized as looking to the tree that marked their parent’s gravesite on the farm. They couldn’t see it from where they were, but after years of looking to the inosculated pairing of an apple and a pear tree when they needed to remember their parents and their guidance, both siblings tended to do it when they needed a little emotional boost to manage whatever they were struggling with internally.

A few breaths later, Mac stood, absently dusting off the seat of his pants then bussing his palms together, “I’ve been listenin’ in on the talks that Princess Twilight likes to give ‘round you and the girls when y’all have your overnights here. Now, Ah’aint any sorta magical expert, but from what I understand, seems like you girls were picked ‘cause you were you.” He met her eyes briefly and quirked a slight smile at her confused expression, “Seems t’me that Rainbow didn’t become no wizard, she became more Rainbow Dash. ‘n Pinkie? Well, she certainly seems t’be more Pinkie ‘n ever.” The third time since the Fall Formal the girl had shown up in their kitchen at the crack of dawn without coming through any door or window just to ask for a baking or cooking ingredient of some sort was about when the whole family had stopped asking how it was happening and just sort of went with it. “Whatever you become, it’s not gonna change who you really are, not deep inside.” He put a hand on her shoulder, “Yer an Apple. An’ you know what that means better even than me. Prolly only Granny understands as well as you do.”

Five years ago…

Applejack giggled as her father stumbled about beneath her, “Oh no!” he gasped in exaggerated faux concern, “The cursed Country Princess has blinded me, the king o’ the Farmin’ Giants! Whatever shall I do?” The girl knew her father could probably see right through the gaps in her fingers as she cupped them over his eyes, herself almost blinded as his hat, several sizes too large for her, slipped down and covered half her face. She knew that he knew that she knew, but that was OK, because it was all a silly game, and it was fun.

“Bright Mac,” came her mother’s voice, “You better be careful around that farmin’ equipment. I don’t want either of you injured. ‘course, you let Applejack get hurt I’m takin’ it outa your hide.” The stern command was cut with an amused lilt in the voice. Applejack knew her momma wasn’t going to do anything, not really, but she also knew that rough-housing time was over.

Sure enough, her father’s ambling stumble leveled out as he gently lowered himself down to a kneeling position and chuckled ruefully, “You heard your mother, apple-seed, time t’get down.”

Even this was part of the game, she knew, and she let out a loud, bellyaching, “Awwww, but maw!”

Pear Butter simply chuckled, “Well now how’s my favorite taste tester gonna be able to tell me if we’re getting the apple fritters for dessert right?”

Applejack gasped, “Woo-hoo!” and scrambled off her father’s back and ran towards the house. Her Granny was waiting for her on the porch, wiping her hands on a tea towel, a dusting of flour on her apron. “We’re havin’ apple fritters, granny?!”

The older woman giggled, “’as right, lil’ sprout.” The older woman turned to the couple, “Bright Mac, y’all better not take too long in th’ barn. Mac’ll be comin’ back with th’ truck and’ll need a place t’park it. Y’all still got that stuff from when Applejack was born all strewn about, t’aint barely got enough room to step in there.”

Pear Butter giggled at her mother-in-law. “Mac’s such a good boy, just got his driver’s license and already helpin’ with the chores. The sooner we get that new basinet…just wish we’d known the carpenter bees’d gotten into the packin’. Just glad the exterminator’s pretty sure they stuck to the softwoods in the boxes and left the barn alone.”

Bright chuckled, “Well, he may be doin’ it to get into town to see some girls ‘sides the one’s he’s related to. I ‘spect we’re not gonna see him ‘til after dark.”

Pear elbowed Bright in the ribs gently. Her husband’s quiet “oof” was not quite loud enough to be heard over her reply, “Not my boy, he’s more responsible than that. He knows I’d tan his hide if he kept lil’ Applebloom from havin’ her own bed.”

Bright Mac nodded sagely, “I tell ya, I didn’t have sisters growin’ up, but he does me proud with how much he takes care of the girls.” He caught his daughter’s eye and winked at her. Applejack giggled conspiratorially at her father even if she didn’t quite know why.

Pear wrapped an arm around her husband, “Granny, I’m gonna join Bright in the barn, see if I can cut down the work time on getting all that stuff back in the loft.”

Granny frowned slightly, “Now you two be careful. I know the inspector said he didn’t see any signs the barn’s wood was et, but it’s an old barn…”

“We’ll be careful, Granny,” replied Pear, “And you know this galoot wouldn’t let me do anything that he thought’d be unsafe.” She playfully squeezed the arm around Bright Mac’s waist.

Bright Mac just chuckled fondly at his wife as Granny led Applejack into the house and the couple went to the barn.

“Granny,” began Applejack, “C’n ah help feed Applebloom?”

The matriarch chuckled and winked at her granddaughter, ‘What’cha thinkin’, apple fritters?”

Applejack cackled, “Naw, Granny, she’s too little!”

“You sure ‘bout that?” Granny replied with a grin, “Why, I remember when you were knee-high to a grasshopper, you kept beggin’ fer apple fritters, even when we gave you th’finest cream.”

The girl giggled, “Granny, I was 2, not jes’ born!”

“Right y’are, sprout. Now let’s…”

Whatever Granny was about to offer was interrupted by a horrid sound, one that would forever resurface in Applejack’s worst nightmares from then on. It sounded like the baying of a wolf if that wolf were made out of decayed and rotting wood. Then the ‘crunch,’ as though the impossible wolf had snuffed the life from its prey. Like a shot, the pre-teen girl launched herself back out of the house and halted at the edge of the porch, unable to quite grasp what she was seeing.

The great red barn, the one that had stood for as long as Applejack could remember, laid in ruins on its foundation. One of the walls fell away from the structure, which looked as though it had split in two across the joists of the loft and just dropped on itself. Dust still swirled and eddied in the air.

“Momma…?” Applejack choked out. “Daddy!?” tore from her throat, starting to constrict with dust and fear.

She leapt of the porch and straight at the collapsed structure. “MOMMA, DADDY!!” she cried as she stumbled to a halt. Not knowing anything else to do, she reached out and grabbed at a joist that was now jutting from the ruins and heaved upward…but the wood didn’t even budge. She was screaming nearly incoherently, so didn’t hear the sound of Granny Smith’s running footsteps behind her. She only barely registered when the older woman wrapped her arms around her torso and pulled her away, the matriarch still wielding plenty of strength from her days as one of the primary producers of the farm before her son and daughter-in-law could take over, and then her grandchildren.

Granny barely registered the screaming and flailing of her granddaughter as she held the girl close, sparing only enough time to realize even if she had the tools that were now buried in destroyed lumber, her children, both the one she’d birthed and the one she’d welcomed into her family, had preceded her into the undiscovered country.

The old woman felt every single minute of her life for a moment…then lifted the now sobbing Applejack into her arms and hurried into the house to call emergency services. Maybe the Allmother might grant them a miracle…

Present…

Applejack smiled across the orchard in the direction of her parent’s tree. She turned back to Mac and grasped his outstretched hand, pulling herself to her feet. “Well, when y’put it like that, I can’t hardly sit here mopin’ and worryin’ about it, now can I?”

“Eenope!” he replied with a smile as he gave her hand a familial squeeze and then turned to pick up the replacement wheel.

Applejack, laced her fingers together, stretching her arms and popping her knuckles, then stretched her neck. A determined air was the only prelude to her kneeling down, cupping her hands underneath the tiller axle again, and tensed to heave it up again.

Mac would later swear he had no idea what caused him to turn, but in the moment, he could swear he felt as though the earth beneath his boots seemed like it deflated, just a little. It didn’t actually move, but the feeling that somehow it had just been sucked in the direction of his sister caused him to look over to her, only to see a sudden glow flash around her as she lifted…

…and stumbled back as her heave turned into an extremely dangerous caber toss. Applejack stumbled back and fell to the ground, smacking her head against the earth. The tiller arced high into the air, turning end over end, and he realized where it was going to fall. “The house…” he half whispered as his feet started him moving before his brain engaged that he’d never make it before it fell. “LOOKOUT!” he bellowed as loudly as he could.

Dimly, he recognized Applejack scrambling to her feet and chasing after him, only to start to pass him as they rounded the barn just as they heard a tremendous crashing of the tiller landing. As they approached the farmhouse, they saw the overhang collapse under the weight of the tiller onto Rarity, just missing Sunset. The tiller lurched further down, hammering the debris, causing Sunset to be launched backward by a board on the porch floor levering up on its support joist. She landed a few feet away from the porch, the air knocked out of her as she hit with a graceless thud. Just as they thought the tiller had stopped falling, a sound like an electric air bag split the air and a sphere of blue-white energy, seemingly made up of diamond facets, explosively pushed the tiller up and a large chunk of the debris from the house away from the spot Rarity had been occupying. In the center of the sphere lay Rarity, wood crumpled around her, seemingly unconscious.

Applejack’s pained, strangled “…no…not again…!”

Everything seemed to all start happening at once. An orange-yellow nimbus sprung up around Applejack’s body as she pulled her fist back and slammed it into the glowing sphere. Granny Smith and Celestia came out through the door of the house and stood in shock at the sight of the tiller collapsed across the corner of the building. Applebloom stumbled out shortly after, her face paling at the sight, before saying, “I’m gonna get some help!” before charging back into the house. The sound of Applejack’s fist slamming into the glowing sphere cracked through the air like a gunshot.

Mac and Granny rushed over to where Applejack was while Celestia rushed over to Sunset. When they got there, forced to stand several feet away by a flailing Applejack as she wound back to kick the apparent force field, they could see Rarity. Apparently out cold, one of her shins was pinned by a support beam that had dropped onto the girl’s leg in the crash, held in place by the magic radiating out from the girl, keeping the tiller in the air. With Rarity unconscious they couldn’t be sure, but the leg looked to be broken.

“CON,” Applejack’s curse was punctuated by her fist smashing fruitlessly against the barrier, “SARN’D,” the other fist slapping the energy wall, “MAGIC!!!” she spit as she wound back for another blow.

Sunset grasped the arm, but Applejack didn’t even look back, just whipped her arm around until Sunset flew another dozen feet away with another gasp of air. Celestia ran to help the mute girl up as Mac tried a hand at calming his sister. “Jackie!” he snapped as he wrapped his arms around her torso, lifting her to pull her away. Her elbow hit his ribs and with a reflexive “Oof!” he dropped her back to the ground, where she charged back at the barrier and began smashing at it again. From her vantage point, Granny Smith could see the girl’s eyes starting to glow green and whisps of black smoke starting to leak from the corners. “Applejack!” she cried, “Get a hold of yerself!”

“I CAN’T LOSE HER TOO!” screamed the farmgirl. Two more retorts blasted their ears as her fists resumed their pummeling, “I CAN’T!”

Celestia and Sunset stepped up beside Mac, the young man turning to each side to see the women bracketing him with determined looks on their faces. Nodding, he started forward, the other two following his lead. As his sister stopped for a moment to catch her breath, he ducked in, grasping her around her torso. Celestia grabbed one arm about to lash out and Sunset quickly followed up with the other. Sunset, being the smallest of the group, was lifted up off the ground, but since Applejack didn’t have the leverage from before, she simply dragged the arm back down instead of being flung away. Even the much taller Celestia was being jerked around.

Sunset moved to reach for Applejack’s face but was yanked away by the girl trying to shake her off. Applejack’s eyes didn’t even seem to register Sunset’s attempt, they were still staring at the glowing sphere. Just when it was seeming the three would be able to get Applejack under control, the heel of her boot smashed into Big Mac’s shin. It wasn’t hard enough to break the bone, but it was enough to get him to reflexively drop her again, and this time both Celestia and Sunset were tossed away and Applejack resumed her pounding on the sphere. The four onlookers approached the girl warily, not sure how to proceed. Into the stalemate ran Applebloom, coming from around the farmhouse instead of through the door this time. The group turned to the girl, Granny Smith speaking for them, “Bloom, didja call fer help?”

Applebloom was doubled over, far more winded than a quick run to a phone would account for, holding up her cell. “Yeah…Granny…called,” she paused for a deep breath even as another crack of noise came from the sphere. Celestia and Sunset turned to see that this time Applejack had hit the barrier so hard she’d damaged her knuckles. Blood dripped down the surface, tracing symmetrically around the diamond shapes. Applebloom swallowed a breath, then continued, “Called SweetieBell. She’s got Scootaloo’s number, and Scoot’s has Rainbow Dash’s number. Got on a group call an’ Twilight was with Rainbow. They’re gonna get some royal guards an’ an ambulance an’ I guess agents out t’the farm ‘soon as they can.”

Granny Smith flinched at the sound of a wet ‘thwack’ as Applejack slammed her fist into the field again, “Sakes, girl, what’s got y’breathin’ like a steam train?”

Applebloom smiled with a hint of mischief, “I was gettin’ help.”

The lack of sound where there had just previously been the loud retort of magically powered fist against magical force field blasting their ears like an oversized clock was as deafening as the earlier noise. They collectively turned to Applejack, surprised shock on everyone’s face as they beheld a woman with gray skin and striped black-and-white hair styled in a mohawk. Gold rings adorned one arm and her neck, large, looped earrings in either ear, and a simple skirt and halter combination covered her beneath a dark tan cloak. Hanging from one shoulder was a canvas bag that looked like it first saw service back during the last world war with a stylized spiraling sun design stitched in yellow thread. The other arm was outstretched, the hand firmly holding a segmented bamboo staff, pushing Applejack’s arm into extension away from the force field.

Applejack turned to face the woman, snarling, “I told ya before, witch, y’aint welcome on this here farm!”

A corner of the woman’s mouth quirked upward even as Granny Smith tsk’d in exasperation. “I don’t think your friends and family would agree,” the woman began, “But it looks like you are using magic, not me.”

Celestia blinked at the rhythmic cadence to the woman’s speech. “Who…?”

Applebloom spoke up, “This here’s Zecora, she’s lived on the edge of our farm for years, but Applejack don’t trust her on account a’some rumors at the co-op about her.”

Applejack roared in anger and swung her other fist, this time at Zecora. The woman didn’t seem at first to react, but simply seemed to flow around the wild swing, the tip of her staff arcing up to rap Applejack in the back of the head, causing the girl to stumble forward. Before she could recover, Zecora struck the back of Applejack’s knee, causing her to further drop into a kneeling position. So smoothly it looked like a dance, Zecora reached her free hand into her bag and pulled out a small paper pouch, put the corner between her teeth and tore it off. As Applejack rose to her feet, the green in her eyes blazing brighter than ever and black smoke practically fountaining out, Zecora poured the powder into her palm, then blew it at Applejack’s face as the girl was preparing for a charging attack.

As abruptly as the charge started, it stopped, Applejack falling to her knees, coughing and sneezing to expel the powder from her nose and lungs. The eldritch light in her eyes flickered out and the smoke dissipated completely as the emotional fugue was short-circuited.

Sunset observed the interaction with intense interest, then reached into her jacket pocket to retrieve her phone. She set about tapping on the screen, first with her thumb, then with her other thumb.

Celestia, meanwhile, rushed over to her student, “What was that powder?”

A twinkle in her eye, Zecora held out the plain paper packet, “Medicine used for acne, fever, and inflammation. Powdered aspirin, a requirement for any field surgeon.”

Applejack was not finished, though. Pushing herself to her feet, she stumbled back over to the sphere. The desperate urgency that had dominated her actions was gone, but the determination was not. More calmly, but no less forcefully, Applejack pulled her fist back and bashed it against the dome.

“Jackie, y’gotta stop! Whatever magic is puttin’ that dome up may be the only thing keepin’ Rarity alive!” Granny fretted and gestured up to the tiller that was still pressing down against the dome.

Applejack turned a haunted gaze at her grandmother, “Ah know Granny, but it’s also keepin’ us from getting’ to Rarity to get ‘er out from under the trailer!”

Celestia put a hand on her student’s shoulder, “We don’t know enough about magic, Applejack. Let’s wait for Twilight, I’m sure she can…”

“That’s my worry!” Applejack cried, “What if it gives out before Twilight can get here? It takes th’ambulance 45 minutes to get here, and that’s with their sirens going!” she shook her head and turned to the shield, belting it again with a magically assisted punch. With the attention off Applejack’s earlier panicked behavior, it was easy to see Rarity’s body flinch back with the impact against the energy barrier.

“The power at play is the boon and curse; what is saving her could summon the hearse. An incense to calm the nerves and rouse the sleeper will ensure we foil the coming of the reaper,” said Zecora in her cryptic cadence.

Celestia’s head cocked to the side as she examined the relative stranger. “Are you saying you have something that can help rouse Rarity? Something that will get through the barrier?”

The gray skinned woman nodded sagely, “That it lets through air to breath is quite apparent,” a quick glance showed that dust kicked up by the impact was settling to the ground through the shield, even as the larger debris that fell, such as dirt and splinters, were bouncing or sliding off the shield. “Young Applejack should listen to her grandparent.”

Applejack glared at the woman, “I listen to her plenty,” she retorted, “I also know we’re all in over our head.” She sniffed derisively, “It’s y’all, I don’t trust!” So saying, she pulled back her hand to make another swing at the sphere, only to have an orange hand grasp her wrist.

Startled out of her swing, she glanced over at Sunset, fiercely gripping her arm with one hand and holding her phone out with the other. The mute girl locked eyes with Applejack, and held the phone out and tapped it with her thumb.

“Trust me, trust her,” Issued forth in a mechanical voice.

The people who interacted with Sunset on a regular basis stared in shock. Zecora looked on in curiosity, not interrupting.

“Sunset…you aint never made that thing say anything but yes, no, an’ maybe…why aint you used this before?” Applejack exclaimed.

Celestia spoke up, “I…knew that feature of the software was advertised, but when she didn’t start using it…I guess I forgot it was there. It has a limited dictionary, no more than a couple hundred words, so the user could form a sentence longer than a word or two with the preprogrammed responses.” She looked to her adopted daughter with hope, wondering if they would be able to make more progress on their questioning and tests if Sunset could form more complex responses.

Sunset was ignoring the principal. She squeezed Applejack’s wrist tighter, gently shaking it as she tapped the phone again.

“Trust me, trust her,” it said again.

Applejack lowered her arm, looking pensively down at her girlfriend. Breaths all around were held for a moment, before she turned to Zecora and with steel in her voice asked, “Alright. What do you need?”

Sunset let go of the other girl’s arm and stepped back as Zecora moved in to stand next to Applejack.

Events moved quickly after that. Zecora began barking orders as efficiently and firmly as any emergency room doctor receiving a new patient. Within minutes, a small camp stove had been set up and an old frying pan set on the lit burner, wood chips and herbs slowly cooking to their smoke point. As that work commenced, a cardboard moving box was retrieved along with a drywall saw, and a smoke chamber was placed around the burner. With just a few more moments, smoke started to pour out a large, cut opening in the side of the box facing the shield, and a small battery operated fan was held up next to a smaller hole cut in the opposite side. The fragrant incense began filtering into the sphere, and within moments Rarity started to stir. Without needing to be directed to do so, Applejack and Big Macintosh scrambled up on top of the debris and braced the tiller and with little prompting Celestia was summoned to Zecora’s side in case Rarity had to be pulled out from under the farming equipment quickly.

With a pained gasp, the young fashionista awoke. “Ah! What…?”

“The incense will be helping with the pain, but the picture of calm you must remain.” Instructed Zecora.

Blinking in surprise through the haze of pain lancing up her leg, Rarity turned her head to see who had spoken. Curious eyes roved the woman up and down before she asked with a groan, “Oh, a tribal healer. I wasn’t expecting that on the farm.”

Chuckling at the non-sequiter, Celestia asked, “You recognize her? Have you met her before?”

Rarity winced and gasped as she tried to shift but was met with more pain from her leg, “Oh, no, I found a book on Zebrican fashion at the central library and there was an entire chapter on the history of fashion in the medical industry.” Tears started to streak down her cheeks, “If I may ask, why am I still pinned down? I assume an ambulance has been called…oh my!” she gasped, “Well, I believe that,” she paused as she made a pained gurgling noise, “That answers my question.” She pointed up with a shaking hand, “What is that thing and how did I get under it?”

“A magical barrier designed to protect seems to be a thing you can wield. Unfortunately, against those that can help it also seems to shield.”

Confused, Rarity turned to Applejack’s concerned face, “You’re the source of the shield, china-doll,” Rarity blushed and tittered with a slightly embarrassed glance to the others at the use of a pet name, “It popped up with the tiller hit ya, and now we can’t move you or the tiller with the bubble in the way.”

“Oh dear,” Rarity moaned as sweat began appearing on her forehead, “Um, I seem to be having a hard time thinking of anything but the pain. I imagine it works like the magic Twilight and the other Equestrians have demonstrated…but they all seem to need to be able to focus, which I’m having a hard time doing…oh dear…” she repeated, shivering starting as her body started going into shock.

Zecora nodded down to Applebloom, who lifted the smoker box off the camp stove, then poured the contents of another packet into the small frying pan before replacing the box. Turning back to the trapped girl, Zecora instructed Rarity to breathe deeply of the smoke. Within minutes, the shivering had stopped, and the pinched look on the girl’s face had relaxed into a near stupor. Applejack and Macintosh had been instructed to breathe shallowly so as not to be impacted by the soporific effects of the incense.

Without warning, the dome flickered, then disappeared. Mac and Applejack both grunted with the sudden exertion of catching and holding up the heavy farm equipment. Applebloom yanked the cardboard away and grabbed the camp stove by the base, cranking the knob controlling the flame off, and letting the pan fall to the ground. Zecora toed the pan out of the way with her boot as she and Celestia darted forward, Celestia grabbing and lifting the board pinning Rarity’s leg as Zecora eased the broken limb out before simply grabbing the girl’s hips and pulling. As soon as it was clear, Celestia dropped the board and grabbed Rarity’s arms, and the adult pair pulled the teenager out.

After glancing around to confirm that everyone was clear, Applejack turned to her brother, “On the count of three, we let go and jump away, got it?” At his confirming nod, she started, “1…2…3!” As one, they pushed away from the tiller and the void that had been left by Rarity’s shield and bounded backward. The tiller smashed to the ground, crushing even more of the porch railing and deck.

Applejack watched the dust and debris settle where Rarity had just been and turned pale. She bent over and put her hands on her knees gasping gently. Her brother put his hand on her back and just gently rubbed, letting his sister process what they had just accomplished.

About that time some sirens could be heard in the distance. They all turned to the front entrance of the farm, seeing a small caravan of vehicles on their way. “Tch,” grunted Rarity from her position on the ground, “Isn’t that just like the government, always showing up after the hard work’s been done.”

The group looked at the injured girl incredulously, then started chuckling at the absurdity.

Twenty minutes later, the second ambulance had been loaded up with a vehemently protesting Applejack accompanied by her brother. Zecora had been insistent that they go along, given how much of the smoke of the incense they had inevitably inhaled. Granny had gone with Rarity in the first ambulance, and with the injured and peripherally drugged individuals shuttled off to the city proper, the federal agents and Equestrian guard that had come along to escort went back to the city as well.

With the action finished and the adrenaline starting to ebb, Celestia took a centering breath and surveyed the damage. At least we have Equestria’s help to get this fixed this time, she shook her head and smiled at the sight of Applebloom cleaning up the spilled ash and embers from their smoke box under the direction of the Zebrican woman. So many questions for her, but I can’t help but be grateful… Leaving the pair to their task, she turned in place, searching for…ah, there she is!

Sitting on a haybale facing away from the farmhouse was Sunset. With a start, Celestia realized the girl hadn’t been part of the action to rescue Rarity since her use of her phone. Now slightly concerned, she started over to the girl rather than calling for her. As she approached more alarm bells were ringing in her head. The girl was…still. She could be seen breathing, but she wasn’t moving her head, there was no motion in her shoulders, she wasn’t even making the odd fidget that humans did to keep comfortable in a sitting position. Her posture was hunched, shoulders shrugged up, as though her head were too heavy to hold.

Hurrying slightly, she rounded the haybale to see Sunset was holding an odd posture. Her seated position allowed her to rest her elbows on her knees, her hands cupped in front of her holding…nothing. Her gaze was aimed at her hands but seemed to be focused on nothing. Below the girl’s hands was her assistive phone, lying face down in the dirt. Celestia knelt down and retrieved the phone and put it in Sunset’s hands…which it promptly fell through, the fingers not gripping and the device just dropping back down to the dirt.

“Sunset?!” gasped the principal. She grabbed one of Sunset’s hands, which slowly, almost hesitantly curled to hold her hand. She reached down and grabbed the phone, attempting to put it in the girl’s other hand, but the hand didn’t close around the phone. She gently removed her hand from Sunset’s and tried putting the phone in its place, as she knew that hand worked just fine…but it also failed to close around the phone. “Sunset!” she snapped louder, more desperately.

Dropping fully to her knees and letting the phone fall again, she cupped Sunset’s face in her hands. The girl’s eyes looked in her direction, but they weren’t focused. Thousand-yard stare, unresponsive… she felt the stirrings of panic as she recognized the look; Sunset had collapsed back in on herself, right back to the same state as when her friends had found her standing on the train tracks. “Sunset, sweetheart, please…you’ll be fine, we’ll find out…we’ll…” her own words started to die in her throat as she realized that they had no idea what the cause of this latest development was, let alone how to fix it.

She began fighting the urge to break down in tears. Unable to even begin to think of what she should do next; she just pulled an unresisting Sunset into an embrace. Dimly, she was aware of another person standing between her and the setting sun, casting a shadow over her and her daughter.

“Applebloom tells me that Sunset is cursed, the cause of it unknown. Perhaps I can render aid that shouldn’t be postponed.”

Celestia sniffed back a sob and looked up to see Zecora standing over them, staff in hand and a curious Applebloom holding the woman’s bag.