If I'd known how unbelievably hot Ponyville was this time of year, I would never have agreed to visit Lyra, thought Moondancer.
She wiped her foreleg on her brow, where sweat was still pooling even though she had long since joined her friends inside the aggressively air-conditioned Sugarcube Corner. She wiped her hoof on her napkin and tossed it on the empty plate in front of her.
"...and that's why I'm not allowed within six feet of Donut Joe's!" Minuette smiled that too-wide smile she was famous for. It had taken a long time to warm up to her – Moondancer thought she was being insincere at first, but it turned out she was just like that.
"I guess that explains why you jumped at the invitation to come visit me here," Lyra said. "It must be heartbreaking to be so near the tastiest confections in Canterlot and yet so far away." She waved her nearly-finished strawberry frosted cinnamon bun in front of them to accentuate her point.
Lemon Hearts frowned. "Honestly, when you mentioned sweets, I assumed your girlfriend was making them."
Lyra laughed. "Oh, she gets that a lot! But just because her name–"
Suddenly, her muzzle was being covered by two white hooves. It took Moondancer a second to realize they belonged to Twinkleshine. She was looking away from the table while pretending not to be, the way you would if you were talking behind a friend's back and suddenly saw them on the other side of the room.
"Oh my gosh, guys," she whispered loudly, "do you know who that is?"
Her eyes followed Twinkleshine's violently jerking head and settled on a rainbow-haired mare. "Uh... I don't think so?" This happened occasionally when she visited friends, and she had developed a tactic: she looked back at her friends' faces to see if it looked like they knew something she didn't. But they looked as confused as she felt.
Twinkleshine looked comically shocked. "That's Rainbow Dash, the youngest pony to ever become a Wonderbolt! Didn't you recognize her? It's not every pony that has hair like that."
"Yeah, of course I know Rainbow Dash," Lyra said casually. "She's one of Twilight's friends. You don't know her?"
Moondancer hid her embarrassment behind her third cup of coffee. "Twilight? I feel like I should've known."
"It's not your fault you're not a sports nut like Twinkle here," Lemon Hearts sighed. "Just don't bring up buckball while she's in the room or you'll never hear the end of it."
Minuette blinked. "It's funny you should mention it – she just got inducted into the Buckball Hall of Fame a while back. Along with Pinkie Pie, actually." Pinkie waved from behind the sneeze guard. "I'm surprised she didn't tell you."
Moondancer's mouth was open in shock. "You kind of buried the lede on that one, didn't you?" She looked at each one of them in turn with an oddly pleading look in her eyes. "If she's one of Twilight's friends, then she's an Element of Harmony!"
"You're darn right I am!"
Everyone at the table jumped in their seats. Rainbow Dash was standing behind them, looking irritated and smug simultaneously. It was a face Moondancer hoped not to see again in the future. But it immediately melted into something a little more sheepish.
"Heh... sorry to interrupt you guys, but I couldn't help but overhear what you were talking about," Rainbow said. Suddenly, the irritation came back with a vengeance. "You fill your brains with egghead stuff all day in Canterlot, but you don't know this?"
Moondancer blinked. "This?"
"This," Rainbow repeated, gesturing around the general area of her grinning face.
Minuette laughed. "Who would've known you were so funny!"
Back to irritation again. She must think Minuette's making fun of her, thought Moondancer, and she felt a sting of pity for her cheerful friend. She tried not to let it show on her face as she restarted the conversation from the last checkpoint. "The Elements of Harmony is 'egghead stuff.' Do you seriously not know what they are? Professor Apple Polish mentioned them at least five times in class this semester."
Twinkleshine rolled her eyes. "Not all of us are as hopeless as you, Moondancer. We actually go outside once in a while... no offense."
Ugh, what a jerk. "None taken." Wait a minute... "But that still doesn't make sense. The Elements of Harmony aren't some boring theoretical magical construct. They've literally saved the world!"
Lyra made a face of dawning comprehension. "Oh... you mean the Elements of Harmony. Yeah, I might have heard it a couple times from Twilight... when I was supposed to be listening..." She cringed. "It was probably really important."
"Yeah," said Rainbow Dash, who they all remembered was still standing there. She had been uncharacteristically quiet. "But apparently we're not important enough to know who we are."
Moondancer blushed. "Heh. Well, you think you could tell us a little more about them?"
"Sure! You already know Twilight, of course... then there's Applejack, Rarity, Fluttershy–"
"Fluttershy?" Lemon Hearts gasped. "You're friends with her? Oh wow, could you convince her to give me her autograph? I know she's a little standoffish, but..."
She trailed off. "Why are you looking at me like that? Just because I didn't know who Rainbow Dash was doesn't mean I'm completely uncultured. You never read about her in the papers?"
She received nothing but blank stares from everyone else. Lyra wasn't even looking – she was busy drinking her courtesy water. Even Rainbow Dash seemed befuddled: "You've heard of her and not me?"
"Of course! Her work with animals is so inspiring! She even founded her own sanctuary."
Moondancer's mouth was a straight line. "And that's how you know her."
For a few seconds, nopony said anything. Then Lemon Hearts grinned apologetically.
"Okay, you got me. She was a fashion model for a little while some years ago. I'd buy every issue of Stylish Pony she appeared in because she was so cute. Actually, I think she helped me realize that I was a... um..."
Lemon Hearts blinked and then buried her face in her hooves.
Rainbow Dash held out a hoof, as if to relieve her from duty. "Okay, well, uh... I'm kind of surprised that's what you know her from. She was in all the big battles: Nightmare Moon, Discord, Chrysalis, Tirek, Discord again..."
"Who are they?" asked Twinkleshine.
Minuette's eyes practically burst out of her head. "Are you serious? We were all hypnotized by Chrysalis at Princess Cadance's wedding!"
"Oh, that wasn't Cadance? I thought she was just secretly evil."
"Uh... Okay," Moondancer said, "but how could you possibly have missed the time Discord turned the world into pure chaos?"
"I had a lot on my mind back then..."
"Nightmare Moon?" offered Lyra.
"Don't be ridiculous! Nightmare Moon doesn't exist."
Everyone at the table gaped at her.
"What?"
Rainbow Dash looked like she was about to deliver a rant, but just as she opened her mouth, the door chime rang and Applejack walked in. She scrambled over to her. "Applejack, you gotta help me here – these guys don't know who we are!"
Applejack raised one eyebrow. "Should they?"
"Duh!" Somehow, Pinkie Pie had teleported right on top of the dining table, sending the empty plates clattering to the floor. "Who wouldn't want to know about you guys? You rule! Oh, and me too I guess!"
Applejack and Rainbow Dash approached Pinkie Pie and the others cautiously. "Shouldn't you be running the store?" asked Applejack.
Pinkie Pie waved her foreleg. "Don't sweat it, the Cakes will be back in..." – she counted silently to herself – "five hours."
"Oh, Pinkie, you don't count," said Minuette cheerfully. "I'd be surprised if there was a pony on the planet who didn't know you!"
"Then you'll be surprised!" Pinkie declared as she hopped off the table. "I never get recognized as the Equestrian ambassador to Yakyakistan."
Lyra started coughing violently. Applejack rushed to help her, patting her back until water spewed out of her mouth. "Sorry," Lyra said weakly, "wrong pipe."
"And it's not just me! You'd think Rarity would be super famous what with hanging out in Canterlot all the time and her fancy boutiques, but the only time I saw her get recognized was for being in the Pony Tones."
"Pony Tones?" asked Moondancer.
"They were an a capella band. Fluttershy was one too, but she was hiding it at first, so it makes sense no one would recognize her, but then there's the time she represented Ponyville in the Equestria Games along with Rainbow Dash, the time Rarity and Applejack produced an off-Bridleway play, the time where half the town got destroyed when Twilight and Tirek were screaming and shooting lasers at each other, the time where literally all of us became famous but everyone in Ponyville forgot a week later... actually, that might have happened more than once. And the time when..."
With sudden clarity, Moondancer looked around the table. It was a sight to behold: Lyra, silently staring at faraway nothing; Twinkleshine, her face showing no sign of comprehension; Minuette, doubled over in laughter; and Lemon Hearts, looking as though she would like nothing more than to hide under the tablecloth and never come out again. Meanwhile, Rainbow Dash looked infuriated, Applejack just looked plain confused, and Pinkie continued talking as though nothing particularly unusual was happening.
"...And you know," Pinkie mused, "even Twilight Sparkle sometimes doesn't get noticed as much as she should. I mean, ponies only seem to acknowledge her presence half the time, and she's the best of all of us! It's not every day you meet the Princess of-"
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, friendship, we know."
"I was gonna say Princess of the Fall Formal, but yeah, that too."
"This is really weird..." Moondancer said hesitantly.
Lemon Hearts sighed. "Tell me about it."
"No, I mean Pinkie's right. Ponies should know who the Elements of Harmony are. With the amount they've publicly accomplished, they should be famous ten times over, but..." She frowned.
There was a long silence. Everyone looked solemn. The ticking of the clock suddenly became very loud and Moondancer could have sworn she saw tumbleweeds blowing by.
The door chime rang again. The silence was broken.
Spike walked in, holding a pizza box. "Hey guys, I was just... uh... what the heck's going on here?"
A crystal pony couple eating blueberry pie jumped out of their seats. "Honey, look!" exclaimed one of them, a purple colt. "I can't believe it! It's Spike the Brave and Glorious in the flesh!"
"Ugh," Rainbow Dash groaned, "you have gotta be kidding me."
She trotted out of Sugarcube Corner and didn't come back for the rest of the day.
As for Moondancer, she galloped straight toward the Castle of Friendship's library and checked out every book Twilight had on memory-wiping magic.
Author's Note
Several times I've had the funny observation that all of the public accomplishments of the Mane Six are drastically out of proportion to how much recognition they seem to receive across Equestria. In particular, I remember in Common Ground, Pinkie, Rainbow and Snails were sitting in a theater where a buckball newsreel was playing and saying they were the first inductees into the Buckball Hall of Fame, and Pinkie asked, "Do you think they know we're here?"
Did they know they were there? I'm not so sure.
