Flurry wasn't sure what to expect inside Miss Not-Aunt Twilight's house. Aunt Twilight's castle was...

Well, Castle Canterlot was old. Ancient. Older than Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle Spike, and all of Flurry’s aunts put together. (Though not Grauntie Celestia and Grauntie Luna. Sure, Dad had said she'd been kidding, but Flurry still believed Grauntie Celestia had been there the day they'd invented dirt.) There were closets, rooms, whole hallways that ponies had forgotten about, built copies of, found again, and then coughed awkwardly in. It was a great way not to get in trouble; Flurry wasn't wandering off, she was discovering her heritage.

She wasn't sure what kind of heritage she'd find in this little house—definitely not a lot of it—but she hadn't been expecting the giant pile of purple fur waiting just past the front door.

"Uh..." Flurry craned her head up to a huge, shaggy head... with floppy, bright green ears. A faint sense of familiarity built in the back of her mind.

Then the huge dog smirked, opened his mouth, and made it clear. "Well. Hello down there."

Flurry's jaw dropped. "Uncle Spike!?"

Not-Uncle Spike tilted his head in a very doggy way. "There's a 'monkey's uncle' joke in there somewhere."

Not-Aunt Twilight sat behind him—really more around him—and gave him a big hug and a scratch behind the ears. "My Spike and I don't have quite the same relationship as our counterparts, but he's still a very good friend who I've had for a very long time."

"Oh." Flurry thought about that as she made her way inside, taking in the bookcases and weird thingabobs that showed this was definitely a Twilight's home, even if it wasn't the one she was used to. "Like Miss Sunset is your very good friend?"

Not-Aunt Twilight froze mid-scratch, eyes bugged out. Not-Uncle and Miss Sunset both snickered.

"No. Not quite like Miss Sunset." Not-Aunt Twilight jumped to her feet. "Let's get you that pudding!"

Any more questions fell away from Flurry's thoughts, shoved off by the promise of Aunt Twilight's pudding. It may not have been made by Aunt Twilight, but she still eagerly followed the human mare through the short hallway between entry hall and kitchen. The treat was in the icebox, so she couldn't help make it, but she easily recognized the best dessert in the whole world. Two whole worlds, even!

When Flurry was about halfway through her bowl, Not-Aunt Twilight gave her a familiar serious look from the other side of the kitchen table, even if the glasses and missing muzzle made it feel weird. "Now, Flurry, just so we're clear, do you understand why you were sent here?"

Flurry threw back her head and groaned. "Yes. We talked about it the whole way here. And to Ponyville."

Not-Aunt Twilight nodded. "I just want to make sure the big, mean bacon ogre got through to you." She grinned at Miss Sunset the same way Dad looked at Mom just before a really bad joke. "Despite being big, and mean, and a bacon ogre."

And just like Dad's really, really bad jokes, it got Flurry laughing her head off.

"Really?" she barely heard Miss Sunset say from the kitchen doorway.

"She's laughing."

"She doesn't even know what bacon is."

"That doesn't matter," Not-Aunt Twilight said in Aunt Twilight's "the argument is over now" voice. "What does is that she's laughing."

"Bacon ogre," Flurry said around one last giggle. She wiped her eyes and presented her most serious look. "But I did talk about it with Miss Sunset."

Not-Aunt Twilight nodded. "And once we're sure you understand what you did wrong, we don't have to talk about it anymore, and we can spend more time showing you how much fun you can have while you're here."

More ideas came together. Flurry squinted at Not-Aunt Twilight. "Are you a teacher?"

That made her tilt her head. "Why do you ask?"

"This sounds like when Mrs. Calcite tries to make learning fun."

This Twilight frowned and said the same thing Aunt Twilight had when Flurry had told her that. "Isn't learning fun?"

"Not when there's a bunch of stinky colts in the room. And I know Aunt Twilight used to be a teacher before Grauntie Celestia made her a princess."

"Is that according to your aunt or your grauntie?" said Miss Sunset, moving into one of the empty seats.

Flurry savored the last spoonful of pudding before answering. "Both."

Miss Sunset smirked and crossed her forelegs. "Nice to hear the old mare admit it."

"Sunset, that's terrible," said Not-Aunt Twilight.

"She has more than a millennium on us, Twi. At minimum. Back when I was around Flurry's age, she'd tell me she was there when they invented dirt."

Flurry gaped up at her. "You too?"

That put a thoughtful look on Miss Sunset's face. "Huh. Well, if she told somepony else, maybe that is true."

"That's not how logic works," Not-Aunt Twilight said flatly. "And your pronouns are slipping."

"It'll make her feel more at home. But first she needs to answer that question." Miss Sunset turned back to Flurry, eyes staring more into her than at her. "What have you learned today, Flurry?"

She looked back and forth from one adult to the other, both looking at her expectantly. After a few moments of working through everything she'd been told, she tried, "With great power comes great responsibility?"

The two humans shared one of those married couple looks, the kind where they said a whole lot to one another without ever opening their mouths. Finally, Not-Aunt Twilight nodded and said, "I'll take it. Though we may still need to talk a bit more about it later. I did prepare some visual aids."

Miss Sunset frowned at that. "You didn't load up the footage for this, did you?"

"It's a perfectly reasonable illustration of—"

"Twilight, she grabbed another foal's cookie, she didn't—"

"Slippery slope, Sunset."

Miss Sunset got to her feet. "You literally just named a fallacy, Miss Not-How-Logic-Works."

Not-Aunt Twilight did the same. "It's my para-niece. If I can't be a little irrational with her, then with whom?"

Not-Uncle Spike, who had walked into the kitchen as they were arguing, cleared his throat. "You two do know Flurry can hear everything you're saying, right?"

That got both to twitch like startled crystal sheep. Not-Uncle Spike shook his head and smirked at Flurry. "Yeah, I help get them out of their own heads. Spikes are good at that."

She beamed and nodded. "They are!"

"We can at least have some fun now. No need to bring Mid—" Whatever Miss Sunset was going to say got cut off by two loud, blaring sirens. She and Not-Aunt Twilight both pulled little rectangles out of their pockets, frowned at them, and started poking at them. The sound stopped early on, but that didn't stop them.

Flurry turned to Not-Uncle Spike. "Is it a monster attack?" The Empire didn't get many, but she'd been in Ponyville for a few drills and one hydra incident. But she didn't think she'd be able to get a fun bit of jump rope out of whatever was going on, not when she didn't have any magic.

He thought about that for a moment before saying, "More or less."

"I've got confirmation from most of the girls," said Miss Sunset. "Dash is en route from Seaddle, she may take a bit. Nothing from Fluttershy; she may not have any bars."

Not-Aunt Twilight sighed and held up a hand. It glowed along with a jewel on the neck of her blouse. "I told her 7G wasn't good enough anymore. Energy readings are consistent with a false geode, but whoever has it isn't holding still long enough for more detailed analysis." Two full-body jumpsuits like Aunt Rainbow's flight suit floated into the kitchen, wrapped in the same magic. Each adult took the one that matched her coloration, Miss Sunset taking off her suit jacket.

"What's going on?" Flurry asked.

"There isn't a lot of magic in this world," said Not-Aunt Twilight, leaving her glasses on the table. Helmets floated into the room, hers with a clear purple visor. "When people misuse it, or it misuses them, there aren't many people who can stop it."

"It's mostly us," added Miss Sunset. "We've got the power, we've got the responsibility. And don't you even start, Twilight."

"Be good, Flurry," Twilight Sparkle said on her way to stop some emergency. The eerie familiarity was made all the stranger when Aunt Twilight's wings unfolded from her back and the jumpsuit shimmered like it had been dipped in crushed amethyst. Miss Sunset did the same thing, but with rubies. "Spike, show her how the TV works."

Not-Uncle Spike's ears pulled back. "You're seriously going to let screens and a dog babysit her?"

Not-Aunt Twilight stopped her rush just long enough to give him one more hug. "Given the dog? Absolutely." Then she literally flew out the door.

Miss Sunset waved as she took to the air too. "We'll be back soon, Flurry!"

"I knew she was a princess!" The warm glow of being right didn't last long as the situation hit Flurry fully. "Are they gonna be okay?"

After too long a pause, Not-Uncle Spike said, "They should be." But he didn't look away from the front door, and he didn't look any happier.

Flurry looked from him to the door and back, thinking. It wouldn't be the first time she'd helped Aunt Twilight with an emergency... without her permission. And she may not have made things better last time, not at first, but she'd still helped in the end.

Of course, Not-Uncle Spike didn't know any of that—probably not, anyway—so all she said out loud was "Wanna go check?"

"We don't need to leave the house for that." Not-Uncle Spike started padding into another room. "Come with me, kiddo."

She followed him to an assembly of couches all pointed at a big black rectangle. Not-Uncle Spike leaned down and grabbed a very pony mouth-handle set in the carpet, pulling and sliding a panel to reveal a bunch of buttons. He pressed one, and the rectangle lit up to show a human stallion with an odd wand in front of what looked like a storm cloud somepony had dropped in the middle of a busy city street. Red lightning flashed behind him even as he tried to look calm.

"We've just gotten word from representatives of the Sparkle Institute that specialist responders are en route, including most members of Harmony Team. There haven't been any casualties thus far, but—" The human flinched back as one bolt got too close. The rectangle pivoted to show a black path like the kind Miss Sunset had driven on, except now there was a jagged line of glowing red crystal where the lightning had hit, somewhere between carnelian and lava. A few seconds later, Flurry heard the thunder.

"As you can see," the human's voice continued as the rectangle turned back to him, "the situation is still developing. We'll be on the scene for as long as we can. I-I-Iyiyiyiiii..." The image, like the human's voice, froze, stuttered and flickered before breaking apart into squares of every color of the rainbow. Flurry might have thought that the device had broken were it not for the high-pitched cackle getting louder and louder.

Suddenly, the rectangle gave way to two humans, a stallion and a mare, in a big room like an audience chamber. Both looked shaken for a few moments before the stallion cleared his throat. "Sound Bite appears to be having some technical issues. We'll get back to him when we can."

"Coming up next," the mare said with one of the fakest smiles Flurry had ever seen, "five superfoods to get you ready for bikini season."

Not-Uncle Spike's paw all but slammed on the big button again, and the rectangle went dark. He sighed. "Well then. I don't suppose you want to learn about streaming video?"

Flurry moved to his side, rubbing his neck with her weird mini-hooves. "Wanna go check?" she said again.

"We really shouldn't," he answered even as he looked back towards the front door. "You could get hurt."

In her best impression of Grauntie Celestia actually being serious, Flurry said, "With great power comes great responsibility."

That got a strangled sound somewhere between a sigh, a laugh, and a whimper. "This whole family..." Another thunderclap sounded, louder than the last one. The whole house shook a little. Not-Uncle Spike winced and knelt down. "Alright, hop on. And remember, this was your idea."

It wasn't the first time Flurry had gotten a ride from a Spike. All the fur actually made it easier to hold on to this one. "Don't worry. I'll be careful."

"Sure you will, Flurry," said Not-Uncle Spike in a familiar, weary tone. "Sure you will."

And once she opened the door for him, they were off.

Author's Note

The "older than dirt" comment is a joking reference to a documentary on fungi narrated by Nicole Oliver that, among other things, discusses the origin of soil.