BridgeWorld

[994AB Day 296]
"Oh, that was such a wonderful meal, Princess Celestia!" Gandon exclaimed. "I'm sad to say that Big Joe has some serious competition on his hooves!"

"Actually, that order was one that Big Joe had created," Celestia told him. "I had my chef start corresponding with Big Joe to trade griffon recipes. I have to entertain your ambassadors periodically, so it helps us all to make these little arrangements."

"Well, he'll be happy to know how faithfully your chef followed the instructions," Gandon said, happily sighing as he rubbed his belly. "I really couldn't tell the difference between his and this!"

"Is this what all griffon food is like!?" Jackie asked astonished. "You said that I was eating like this all the time I was working in that restaurant!? For several days!?"

"Yes," Gandon said. "And that music you brought us made even hungry griffons pause in their eating to listen to it!"

"I'm really sorry that I don't remember any of that," she softly said.

"What about you, Twilight?" Celestia inquired to the unicorn. "Did you enjoy that? I do believe that's the first time for you to eat griffon fare, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," she replied. "I do know that pegasi, and by extension, alicorns will routinely eat fish, and that all ponies can eat it, but we mostly don't for cultural reasons. I did find it was quite delicious though, and the meat texture was very interesting. It did have a flavor I couldn't identify, however."

"Ah, but that's the 'secret ingredient', my most faithful student," she cooed with a grin.

"May I have some more of that 'secret ingredient', Your Highness?" Gandon asked.

"But of course," Celestia said, levitating the carafe over to refill Gandon's glass.

"You mean the 'secret ingredient' is alcohol!?" Twilight sputtered in indignation.

"Whiskey, my unicorn friend!" Gandon corrected.

"Hooffield-McColt Whiskey, to be precise," Celestia added, nodding to the griffon, who toasted her in return with his drink.

"How is that a 'secret ingredient'!?" Twilight demanded.

"It's not called 'grilled whiskey glazed salmon' because it's shiny," Gandon quipped after sipping his drink, and the purple unicorn facehoofed for several moments.

"How is THAT a 'secret ingredient'!?" she screamed up at the ceiling.

"Because—you couldn't identify it," Celestia slowly replied, smirking at her.

Twilight's lower left eyelid began twitching.

Jackie had the oddest feeling that she had seen this sort of byplay happen before. Shrugging, she simply reached out to get another serving-spoonful of the fish for her plate. Although she was quite full, she just wanted a few more bites from which to savor the flavor of the dish.

[994AB Day 297]
"Ugh! What a mess!" Gordon exclaimed when he entered the store.

"Okay? I'm—impressed," Paddock softly muttered swiveling his head about to quickly gather up as many of details as he could before being forced to look away.

"The day-clerk is over there, detectives," Corporal Higgs reported, pointing at the green unicorn mare sitting in the corner—whose fur was orange. "We've kept her there ever since we got here to answer her call."

"Good. Thank you, Corporal," Gordon said. As he led Paddock over to her. "I can see why she's that color," he muttered to his partner who responded with a grunt of agreement. Or maybe the unicorn detective was just trying to keep his own breakfast down.

Jackie slowly woke in very soothing warmth and immense comfort, but the sight that greeted her when she opened her eyes nearly freaked her out, but by the next moment, she remembered how yesterday had ended: hearing a musical play from Earth, finally getting to talk with those equinoid monstrosities, reencountering that big one that had shocked her nearly shitless with being just as fast as she was, and the realization these creatures weren't her enemies who were out to do her harm. She slowly began to relax.

Then the specks of dust dancing in sunbeams cutting through drawn drapes began moving again. And the sound of a ticking clock started up again.

Her eyes focused on the motion of the dust specks, and she had to giggle to herself. In the time it took for her to wake up until she calmed down again, she realized she could have easily been from here and back to Trotten where they found her, and the only one who would even have a chance of keeping up with her was their head of state, Princess Celestia.

Jackie thought back to yesterday soon after they had finished dinner, about how Celestia had personally taken the time to show Jackie and Gandon about their guest rooms, after performing her apparent duty of lowering the sun and raising the moon, instead of pawing it off to some random castle staff. During that ceremony, Gandon certainly looked impressed, although his expression couldn't come close to reaching the level of sheer utter awe in that purple unicorn's face, but they both clearly had intense respect for the tall equiniod. And yet, such an obviously high-level dignitary had taken an extraordinaire amount of time to just explain to her how the toilet and shower worked! After a quick shower and blowdry, the moment she climbed into bed was the last memory she had of then until she woke up this morning so toasty and cozy.

Toasty and cozy? Toazy? she considered for a few seconds. Hmm… that might work.

She shook her head in wonder.

This didn't seem to be a creature who considered herself so self-important as to look down her nose at anyone—despite having a face from which she only could look down her nose at people—but instead, Celestia was evidently quite the humble being only interested in trying to help where she could. Years of traveling had taught Jackie how to spot the difference, but with these creatures not being human, she had had a hard time looking past their forms and seeing their natures.

Then she remembered.

She had had the same trouble seeing her friends through their new forms, after she and they had come out of those vats—

"NOooooo!" she cringed as terror began to overwhelm her.

There was no place to run.

There were only a few places to hide.

So, she hid.

She hid for hours.

It was so clammy where she stayed, but she was determined to not be found, so she stayed hidden.

She hid.

It was so quiet where she hid.

So, she was determined to stay even more quiet.

No matter how uncomfortable it beca—

Then the stink of piss and shit reached her nose.

Something in her brain suddenly switched, and she looked toward her nethers then hung her head in exasperation.

"Fuck!" she whispered barely over the sound of the ticking clock.

Pulling herself out from her hiding place, she looked around, rather puzzled.

I was hiding for hours, but I distinctly recall Celestia telling me that she would come get me in the mor— Then her vision caught the sight of the clock on the fireplace mantle, and she suddenly began to laugh hysterically.

There was a knock at the door.

"Jackie?" Celestia called out as the door opened.

Jackie laughed even harder at that, rolling over onto her back.

"Jackie? Are you okay?" the horse asked, quite puzzled as she approached that quickly switched to an alarmed expression. "Jackie!?"

It was the most hilarious thing Jackie had ever seen, especially the look on her face when Celestia must have finally caught her scent.

"N-no!" Jackie got out between guffaws as she held her sides while laughing uncontrollably. "I'm not!"

It had only been two minutes between the start of her panic attack and when she finally poked her head out from beneath the bed.

"Doesn't this remind you a little of that incident at the circus last week?" Gordon asked, looking critically at one of the victims.

"Like how that Zucco fellow's brains were splotched all over the inside of the tent?" Paddock inquired. "Has it only been a week since then? Seems more than just a few months since the city blew up! But, yeah—yeah, kind of does, now that you mention it," he said, glancing about at the walls and ceiling. "About a dozen times over. I thought with Jack Black dead, we'd be rid of this stuff by now."

"Is he truly dead?" Gordon challenged. "We never found his body."

"C'mon, Rookie! You heard Shetland Hoofley tell us that he saw Jack Black's rump get booted into that vat of manure!" Paddock argued. "Whether he was still in that vat or got flushed down the drain, when that stuff blew up, he would've been atomized!"

"Maybe, maybe not," Gordon replied, shrugging his shoulders as he gathered a swab of debris from the inside of a pony's head. "Either way, we didn't get all of his gang gathered up or accounted for. There might still be several of them out there working to make more of it. In the wrong hooves or right hooves, there's tons of bits to be made from mushroom joke."

"True," Paddock grumbled as Gordon inserted the swab into a test tube. They watched as the fluid in the tube turned into a bright medium violet-red. "Roadapples," he whispered.

"But—mass casualties of mushroom joke in a single crime scene—?" Paddock began, looking about again.

"My thoughts, exactly," Gordon quietly muttered. "Something's not right here—"

"Detectives?" Corporal Higgs said approaching them. "The clerk's finished the inventory. She reports that several high-end VADs are missing, as are the security recording crystals."

"How many high-end VADs?" Gordon asked.

"At least a dozen, each more than a thousand bits."

"Somepony using mushroom joke to kill over a dozen ponies as cover for a simple robbery!?" Paddock exclaimed. "'Something's not right here' is an understatement, Rookie!"

"I'm very worried about you, Jackie," Celestia said as the bipedal cheetah stepped out of the shower stall. "That laughter was not the laughter of a healthy individual!"

"I know," Jackie softly said, looking past the country's ruler to the cleaning crew who were just finishing up their cleanup work of the mess she had left under the bed. Then she chuckled. "But you have to admit, from my vantagepoint, it was pretty funny."

"Hardly!" Celestia protested, frowning at her. "I can't see anything that could possibly be funny about that!"

"Think about it," Jackie tried to explain. "I thought I was literally under there for hours! I thought the day had already passed, and when I crawled out, it turned out it was less than two minutes! Then you walk in right on cue—just putting that ironic situation right up there with Lex telling Clark their friendship would be the stuff of legends!"

Celestia raised an eyebrow at that in an otherwise deadpan face.

"You—don't know who they are, do you?"

"No, I do not."

"Okay—" Jackie said, thinking of another way to explain it. "Okay, I'm—essentially—Barry Allen."

"Who?"

"Oh, you don't know him, either…?"

"Mmnnn-no," Celestia said, shaking her head.

"Um—Barry Allen—? The Flash—? Fastest man alive? He's able to run nearly at the speed of light—" Jackie rattled off but stopped when she was getting more blank looks from Celestia.

"Okay—remember when we first met, and I ran? You flew after me, just as fast as I could," Jackie ventured, and Celestia nodded. "So, that's like the race between the Flash and Superman—" Another blank look from the winged unicorn horse-thing.

"But do you remember how compared to us, everyone else seemed—frozen?" Jackie asked.

"Yes."

"Yippie! A breakthrough!" Jackie cheered, throwing her ~~hands~~paws up into the air. That got a rather odd tilt of the head from Celestia.

"Okay, sorry about that, but back to how everyone seemed frozen," Jackie explained. "That was us moving at superspeed. Even though we had to travel the same distance as anyone else who might try walking the same paths we took, we were doing so, so fast, that everything else was literally standing still, but we had to go through every step, every dodge, every turn, where our minds were having to run just as fast as our bodies were doing so that our reflexes could keep up."

"True?" Celestia agreed but only enough to encourage Jackie to go on to get the point she was trying to make.

"So, from our perspective, that race through that city took several minutes before I finally evaded you," Jackie told her. "But from the viewpoint of everyone else on the planet, our entire run was so fast, no one could even see it! It all happened in less than a fraction of a second!"

"So, what are you trying to say?"

"While I was hiding under the bed, not moving at all, it seemed like hours for me! But when I crawled back out, I discovered it was less than two minutes!" Jackie said, and Celestia's face began to register the implications. "I was moving at superspeed, even though I wasn't moving an inch!"

"You lost control of your speed!" Celestia exclaimed, clearly horrified. "Jackie! This is very, very serious! You might be able to run as fast as all that, but while doing so, you're also aging so much faster, too! It's not much of an issue for me, since I have such a naturally long lifespan, but you do not!"

"I know," Jackie soberly replied. "I remember reading of a similar story in The Flash. There was this one time that Barry Allen was stuck at moving at superspeed and he couldn't slow down. He was living hours, days, even weeks, in mere moments."

"Then you do understand the danger you were in! How can you think any of this as being funny!?" Celestia angrily demanded.

"I wasn't laughing so much about it being funny—okay, maybe for a little bit, I was," Jackie had to amend her initial statement from the disapproving glare from the horse-creature. "But it was more from relief. I had gone through the same thing that Barry Allen had gone through, and somehow, I managed to escape from it even before I realized I was in danger from it."

Celestia raised her head and held a faraway look in her eye for several seconds. "Ah, I see," she finally said.

"You walking in at that moment only punctuated the fact of how close I was to that danger," Jackie finished to which Celestia nodded.

"And this incident was brought on by another panic attack?" she asked, and Jackie nodded.

"Then we must get you all the help possible to get you through this trauma, and it's in no small irony to say that you need help quickly!" Celestia firmly stated. Jackie chuckled at that.

"You should know, we humans absolutely love irony," Jackie said grinning. "We built our entire entertainment industry about that concept."

"Having met a few of your ancient Elliniká forebears, I came to learn and appreciate that about your kind," Celestia groused. "In that, you haven't changed. Much."

"I think that's what makes us human," Jackie replied, grinning.

"Okay, okay, I admit it!" he shouted back from her nagging. "That batch won't make us any money on the market. But you have to admit—it was funny to see all their heads pop like that!" he finished with a giggle.

She tried. She really tried. But it was only for a few more seconds before her stern expression broke and she burst into guffaws, and she was nodding in agreement. She had to hold onto one of the VAD crates they had taken to keep from collapsing to roll on the floor. And they both were gleefully laughing for several minutes at how the caper went down.

"Oh, that was so much fun!" she sighed as she came down from the hilarity. "Ah, but let's get these units set up so we can watch those recordings. We need to make us some cashrooms! Get it? Cash Shrooms!"

"Ha! Ha! Ha! Yes," he agreed. "But—you know—this current batch certainly does have its uses," he said, sampling a taste of the mixture he had sprayed into the faces of the store clerks and customers when they committed their robbery.

"True!" she said, nodding. "We should definitely keep that recipe handy for the future," she agreed, licking the remnants of the mushroom joke powder from his lips. "Hmm, so much potential there."

"So much kinetic, too, when their heads went kablooey! Hee! Hee! Hee!" he giggled, setting them both to uncontrollable laughter again.

"My deepest apologies, everypony," Celestia said as she and Jackie arrived in the dining room. "I was unavoidably delayed dealing with an emergency that popped up. But, as promised, here's Jackie Valentine—although, I regret to inform you that she's not the Jackie you knew. All of her memories from the time she arrived in Equestria until the moment I removed that sliver of Dark Magic from her have been lost." She then looked to Jackie.

"Jackie, these are the friends you had made while in Manehattan," Celestia said addressing the cheetah. "Shining Armor, Twilight Sparkle, and Gandon, whom you've already know. This is Big Joe," she introduced the older unicorn stallion, "owner of the Griffon Way Restaurant. His nephew, Fireplate," another unicorn stallion, "and the members of the musical band, Gus," a male griffon, "Griz," a female griffon, "Gia," another female griffon, "Gitaly," the third griffon male in the room, "Hammer," an earth pony stallion, "Victoria," the other unicorn mare, "and Flitter," the pegasus mare.

"Welcome back, Jackie," Big Joe softly said, slowly getting up to approach her. He reached out a hoof to gently touch her arm. "We missed you so much!" All their expressions mirrored Big Joe's, being mixtures of relief, sadness, and hope. The evident sincere outpouring of concern for her threatened to overwhelm her.

"I—I'm sorry that I can't remember any of you," Jackie sadly whispered.

"Don't let that worry you, Jackie," Gus spoke up from where he sat. "We remember you! We're all just so glad that you're alive, safe and sound, and back with us! As Gandon explained the situation to us, we all stand ready to help you learn about us once more, and more importantly, to help you find your own lost comrades! Together, we shall find them and bring them home, too!"

"You have given us so much, Jackie," Griz said, getting up to stand before her alongside Big Joe. "It's the least we can do to repay you for those wonderful songs you provided us!"

"And I dare say, that when word gets back to the restaurant, every griffon who has ever eaten there will also take up the hunt to restore your lost friends to you," Big Joe said. "Or I don't know my griffons!"

"Honor demands it of us, Jackie!" Gus echoed.

"You will discover you have lots of friends in plenty of high places, Jackie," Celestia said, smiling down at her, making her laugh in gratitude. "Griffons are warriors and creatures with a deep sense of honor. They don't make promises they won't work to keep. And perhaps save for dragons, you'll likely never meet a creature with less determination or ability to carry out their promises than a griffon."

Jackie reached out and Griz did likewise and gave Jackie a sincere hug.

After they had their meal, they spent the rest of the morning telling Jackie what they witnessed of how she comported herself while working with Big Joe, and he spoke about how he had accidentally discovered that she had such superspeed ability. He laughed at how he was first thinking she had been slacking off, but then found that the place was far cleaner than he could have imagined, and that it had only taken her a few minutes to accomplish it. He was so impressed that he had no hesitation to introduce her to Gus and the band when he saw the sheet music that she had been working on after she was finished cleaning the restaurant. While Big Joe spoke, Gitaly stepped out to bring back a player so that she could hear the songs that she had gifted them.

She was astonished at how closely they had managed to reproduce the five songs she supposedly had jotted down. She knew that she had a very good ear to analyze songs, and it made her feel a little self-conscious that she had put so much effort to reproduce the sheet notes needed for them to play those pieces so faithfully.

Then Big Joe revealed how much money was waiting for her from her share of the tips, and Celestia had to explain how much a bit could purchase. Jackie almost had another panic attack….