Harmannoyed

Chapters

Ch. 1 :: Harmowhats?
Ch. 2 :: Cue Laughter
Ch. 3 :: Knock Knock
Ch. 4 :: Izzy's Gambit
Ch. 5 :: Like a Very Loud Shadow
Ch. 6 :: Nothing Crazy
Ch. 7 :: Disconcerted
Ch. 8 :: Falling Down
Ch. 10 :: Getting Up
Ch. 11 :: Saturday
Ch. 12 :: Have You Seen These Lots Of Things?
Ch. 13 :: Tolerance
Ch. 14 :: He's Back
Ch. 15 :: Judgment Day
Ch. 16 :: No Rest For the Cutie
Ch. 9 :: Keeping Your Head Down

Ch. 1 :: Harmowhats?

Little buggy ♪ little buggy ♫
Today I'm feeling kind of huggy ♪
Be my friendly little buggy ♪
Don't fly away! Aaargh!

Izzy Moonbow sang and then aargh'd as she leapt out of the bush, hopping after the little beetle she had just startled. She squeezed her mouth shut in a tiny little pout, in the hopes that silence might help her in pursuing her quarry.

It was a very pretty beetle, red and pink with hearts and spots, and very round. Izzy liked tiny little round creatures, like bugs and baby birds. When she found it, it had been sitting on a leaf, pulling its little bitty foots up to rub at its face. It was at once so elegant and so cute and a little scary because of all those foots. And then Izzy started singing and it froze, and when she got close enough it started flying off.

Izzy supposed she would also have wanted to fly off if someone a hundred or two times her size came over and bothered her while she was cleaning her face with her foots.

Izzy chased after it. She would tell all her friends that she hunted a rare beast for seventy-three days and seventy-four nights, and that the extra night was because she fell through a wild time paradox, as opposed to a domestic one, which only produced more time on command, but she wasn't licensed so she couldn't control them, and she went back in time and met the Hero of Cheer, who was very tubby and wanted to eat her, so she took a bath in garlic water.

More likely she'd forget all about it, actually.

In reality, Izzy hopped after a random ladybug for an afternoon, keeping her hooves all pressed together like she was hogtied, and tripped on a rock once. "OOF!" she yelped as she rotated perfectly from the hooves up like a falling statue and fell nose-first into the dirt.

Izzy had spent her whole life with little more than dirt to play with, so she hopped right back up. She didn't bonk her horn, fortunately. A bonked horn was one of the best ways to get an unhappy Izzy Moonbow. Nobody wanted an unhappy Izzy Moonbow. Especially not Izzy Moonbow, because bonked horns hurt like heck.

For some reason she kept thinking about that, like something deep inside her was trying to warn her. She bonked her horn once as a filly and had to eat soap. So many bingbongs. Izzy was super careful now, she was bonk-proof. Wasn't she? She hoped so. She didn't really like the taste of soap.

She looked all around with a big wide smile until her eyes crossed to spot the little beetle settling onto her dirty nose. "Hey," she complained, "That makes my eyes hurt, stop it, you." After a pause, she gently shook her head and resumed chasing the beetle as it flew off again in clumsy spirals. "Hehe! Tag, I'm it!" she chirped.

Izzy continued to pursue the beetle, ignoring the paved road appearing under her hooves. She paused, however, to sniff at the air, wrinkling her nose. "Euuuh," she grimaced, "What's that stink? Did you make that stink, mister beetle? Are you a stink beetle? Thank you for waiting until you weren't on my nose anymore."

The beetle turned towards her with what she decided was an offended expression, but was probably really its regular little beetle face.

"It's okay if you did, mister beetle, everyone does it. Thirteen times a day, actually," Izzy told the beetle, then blushed and looked down with her hooves turned in. "I always blame someone else."

The beetle turned again and continued onward in a hurry.

Izzy followed the beetle down onto the gradually more regular brickwork.

In between the raised aisles of grass and well-cared for plants.

Under the big brick gate.

And, as it flew upwards, perhaps to find a nice flower in someone's window, she looked gradually higher after it, still cantering blindly onward, until she realized that weird noise she was hearing was getting much louder. Then her vision was suddenly obscured with light and she bashed her chin. "Eep!" she cried, stumbling back and falling onto her rump.

"Eyaaaah~! Best Friends, please, don't poke!" somebody said. Then someone else started gently singing over pianos and saxophones, a real bossa nova jazz kinda thing.

A passing earth pony froze mid-step to witness this, then rolled her eyes and scoffed. "Crazy freaking unicorns..." she mumbled as she headed on. Darn, Izzy thought she had eliminated all the racisms. She'd have to get a vacuum cleaner for the last ones.

Looking back, she realized she'd bumped into one of those mystical animated noise-making signs, like the ones in Zephyr Heights - but this one was mounted all on its own, rather than tacked onto the side of a building. Also, she realized as she looked around at the modest brick buildings next to the sea, this was Maretime Bay.

There was an ink drawing of a unicorn mare on the left side. Purple, with dark hair with bright magenta stripes. She had on a white ruffled skirt and jacket, with a purple blanket around her shoulders, tied in front with a ribbon. She was very cutesy, with massive eyes, like a bug. Izzy pouted. Ponies' eyes weren't that darn big. She didn't move, except for her hair and clothes slightly blowing like she was in the wind. She blinked now and again, which actually made it creepier than if she didn't.

With difficulty, Izzy read the rather stylized text taking up the right half of the ad.

HARMONOID™

Hello, Best Friends!!

Coming out of your phone and into the real world, HARMONOID™ is coming to Maretime Bay! Be prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime experience as they perform their recent breakout hits, such as Linking Lonely Hearts and Everyone's Rainbow!

The Harmonoid™s will be performing in the Canterlogic™ auditorium on Hoovesday, Autumnal 8. All six HARMONOID™s will appear and perform: Merciful☆Harmonoid™, Generous☆Harmonoid™, Honest☆Harmonoid™, Cheerful☆Harmonoid™, Loyal☆Harmonoid™, and Kind☆Harmonoid™.

Be sure to be there! The girls would be heartbroken if a single Best Friend missed out!

"Canterlogic" is a registered trademark of Canterlogic, Inc.

"Harmonoid", "Merciful☆Harmonoid", "Generous☆Harmonoid", "Honest☆Harmonoid", "Cheerful☆Harmonoid", "Loyal☆Harmonoid", and "Kind☆Harmonoid" are all registered trademarks of HarmoSync, LLC.

Izzy pouted at this sign, trying to figure out why she was consumed with absolute contempt for it. But then she smiled again, reached out, and touched the sign again, causing the music to dim. "Eyaaaah~! Best Friends, please, don't poke!" it repeated, before the music picked back up. Izzy's mouth opened - wooooow, she was mouthing - then closed.

She poked it again. "Eyaaaah~! Best Friends, please, don't poke!"

Poke. "Eyaaaah~! Best Friends, please, don't poke!"

"Izzy! Stop that, what's wrong with you?!" someone protested, grabbing her hoof to stop her poking again.

Izzy tensed, her ears dropping, then smiled at the peanut butter coat and grape jelly braids and relaxed. "Hi Sunny," she greeted, waving with the offending hoof.

She wanted to tell her about the rare beast and the time paradox and telling the Hero of Charity she had a big nasty zit right on her nose.

... but she forgot.

So she put on a faraway, blank stare and pointed at the sign with the same hoof. "This funny sign talks," she identified. "And it has a bug-lady on it and a lot of weird symbols after words."

"Bug lady..?" Sunny repeated, her brows furrowed, glancing between Izzy and the sign. She took about three passes. "You mean Merciful☆Harmonoid?"

"Whichever harmonica-thingy she is, her eyes are way too big." Izzy continued staring.

"Ah," Sunny nodded, her nose wrinkled. "That's just the art style. Ponies think it's cute."

"Ah!" Izzy gasped, beaming with remembrance. "Bugs are cute! I chased a really cute beetle all the way over here!"

"Of course you did." Sunny stared evenly with a grimace.

"But ponies should look like ponies, not like bugs," Izzy finished, closing her eyes and shaking her head in disapproval.

"Have you ever heard of a changeling?" Sunny tilted her head, smiling with her I've got a book about it face.

"Changelings?" Izzy blinked. "Those little fuzzy things that live in the swamp and climb up outta your toilet 'cause that's where we dig the pipes to?"

"Wha -- Uh, forget it," Sunny shook her head. Mission accomplished. "I'm not surprised you haven't heard of Harmonoids, they're kinda new."

"How new?" Izzy pouted suspiciously.

"They only showed up last week or so?" Sunny lifted and waved a hoof to show uncertainty. "You wanna come with to their performance? Me 'n' Hitch accidentally got three tickets in our bid to beat the snipers."

"There are snipers?!" Izzy cried in alarm.

"No, no, as in... never mind," Sunny laughed nervously. "You can come bunk at the lighthouse, it's only a few days away, actually. You're just in time!"

Izzy thought about it, looking back at the weird pony. Something about this stinks, she fretted. I can smell it even through the beetle farts. She blinked. I mean sea air. I can smell it through the sea air.

"... Ooookkaaaaaay," she eventually accepted with such thick hesitation that Sunny wrinkled her nose again.

Maybe she smelled it too.

Ch. 2 :: Cue Laughter

Author's Note

STOP. WAIT A SECOND.

The lyrics for Linking Lonely Hearts are made up for the story. While they are written to be rather generic and may thus resemble the lyrics of other songs, if these exact words ever find their way into a song, the song was made after and probably because of the story. adminn PLEES do not BENN.

At time of writing no particular melody has been devised for Linking Lonely Hearts. As a parody of Vocaloid, it is intended that the words do not quite match the cadence of the song.

Ch. 2 :: Cue Laughter

"Good mooorniiiiiing Best Friends~!!" a cutesy voice called out, sending the crowd into roars and squeals. Squeezed in between Sunny and Hitch, Izzy stopped pouting around at the complete lack of hock room, looked up, and immediately scowled.

Upon the stage was the eggplant mare Izzy had seen on the sign, with her obnoxiously square-cut hair and her massive eyes and her weird clothes, waving wildly, like she was trying to squash a scary spider with a newspaper. Her body slightly flickered as though she were some kind of illusion, but only her bare fur - her clothes appeared normal, except where they met her body. Izzy felt a bit dizzy looking too closely at this and decided to ignore it.

The unicorn stopped waving and put a hoof to her mouth, giving big dumb brainless doe eyes to the crowd. "Hmmm, are there new friends joining us today? It wouldn't be proper to continue without introducing myself... Haaaaaa..." She looked at the ceiling and thought about it for a few seconds before abruptly jumping up as though startled. "Oh!! My name is Merciful☆Harmonoid!" She put the emphasis on the Merciful and did not pronounce the star. "Hello everyone! Buenos dias! Ohayou gozaimaaasuuuuuu~! Dàjiā hǎo! Annyeong haseyoooo~! Jolan tru!!" She hopped up and down before furrowing her brows and mumbling loudly. "Mmmmm... Did you know that every year... one hundred ponies choke to death... on ballpoint pens..." She closed her eyes with a pout, as though this thought had been bothering her for some time.

Izzy winced as every single pony in the auditorium except her began laughing. Even Sunny and Hitch seemed to find this hilarious. "B-ballpoint pens?" Hitch repeated, choking on his laugh.

Izzy's mouth fell open in scandal and her heart stung. 100 poor ponies dying horribly in a totally preventable way? For all they knew, those ponies were foals or the mentally infirm. That wasn't funny at all. It was tasteless and uncaring. Surely the Hero of Mercy never treated suffering like a joke? She was said to have had trouble reading a room, but she couldn't have been that utterly... stupid?

"Ooooaaa-ha-ha!" came a sharp, ladylike laugh. "Merciful☆, darling, you are always saying strange things no one cares about..." Merciful☆ was joined from behind the curtain by a white unicorn with a very stiff stride and curly purple hair, whom Izzy had already decided she hated. Izzy cared. Izzy cared about everyone. That was the right thing to do. The real Hero of Charity - at least Izzy thought that was who this was supposed to be - would've agreed, even if she was known to be a bit self-centered at times.

"I care," someone said from behind the curtain in a very gentle voice. For some reason, this led to the crowd cheering. "I'm sorry for interjecting."

The new mare flickered just like her dumb friend over there, but her outfit was far more ornate. The chief piece was a purple dress gown, shoulderless, with a deep neckline and puffy sleeves hanging off her forelegs, much like the drawings of unicorns Izzy had seen in Sunny's old fairytale books. However, she had choked the thing in tons of unnecessary accessories from sashes to belts to clips. She also had giant earrings, which always made Izzy cringe to see.

"Merciful☆, this is a cruel thing, but... you are a dork," the madam condemned.

"... No I'm not!" Merciful☆ denied after a moment, producing another wave of inexplicable laughter. "That is absolutely not true, Generous☆!"

"It is true. You mathematically measure your hair," Generous☆ attested. "That is indubitably dorky."

"... 'Indubitably'?!" Merciful☆ repeated in outrage.

"Absolutely, cheer!" an annoying, chipper voice sounded from the curtain, leading to a few cheers and cries of "bring 'em out" from a few corners of the room and forcing her to wait for the din to die down. "Positively, cheer! Definitely, cheer." She paused again while Izzy cringed at the bizarre, drooly sounds Merciful☆ made, which no pony she'd ever met would ever make in any realistic scenario. The dumb dork swayed on the spot like a lovesick zombie. "Wow, cheer," the peppy voice exclaimed, "Merciful☆ really likes words with many letters, cheer." Izzy had figured that out from the disgusting sounds she had made, yes. Also, why was she saying "cheer" after every sentence.

"Uuwwwaaaaahh, stop it, both of you!" Generous☆ commanded. "You're acting weird. We need to start the show. Come out here, Cheerful☆! You come out too, Kind☆!" There was an immediate applause.

"Oooii oi oi!" Cheerful☆ objected. "I'll come out when everyone else is there, cheer! It can hardly be a party without everyone there, cheer."

"I... I... I'm still working on my crippling stage fright," Kind☆ excused herself.

"You girls are always so particular. Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh," Generous☆ called out with a gargantuan fake sigh. "Very well. Let us start with just the two of us, Merciful☆. We will lure the others out by starting without them."

"This is a mean thing, but they are very lazy," Merciful☆ critiqued, and the crowd began laughing again.

"They would rather sit around and eat Hayburgers," Generous☆ scoffed with a wave of a hoof.

"Zero pesticides! Good for the environment!" Merciful☆ chirped as Generous☆ stiffly rolled her eyes.

Huge crop fields are actually pretty bad for the environment, Izzy thought to herself, pouting.

"Our first song today," Generous☆ sighed again and shook her head, prompting a few giggles, "Will be Linking Lonely Hearts." She paused and waited for the cheering to die down. "That was the..." She paused for much too long. "Erm... was it the sixth song on our album..?" she mumbled in a far more natural tone than before.

"Roll with it, just pick a number!" Cheerful☆ whispered, also much more naturally than before. "... cheer!" she quickly added on just in case.

"For real?! The fans will know I got it wrong!!" Generous☆ whispered back.

"Weeeeeell," Merciful☆ considered at full volume, doing her hoof-to-face-doe-eye thing again, "We've released two versions of the album as well as a single.... It's sixth on the original album, buuuuuuuut..."

"Yes, sixth, good!" Generous☆ cut her off hastily. "We're very proud that you've all helped spread its message. After all, everyone deserves love, don't they? Be sure to sing clearly, Merciful☆! We must give our Best Friends only our best!" Something about the way she enunciated it struck Izzy as strange.

"Even if you say that..." Merciful☆ retorted, whatever that meant.

Merciful☆ and Generous☆ sashayed into position, raising their heads. As a beat started, they began performing what might resemble a dance to someone who'd never been in one. Izzy winced, a hoof to her mouth, and nudged Sunny, who was swinging her rump to the beat considerably more naturally than the performers on the stage were.

Sunny didn't respond right away, then looked up in alarm when she realized someone was touching her butt. "Huh?! What?" Sunny glanced at her, then blinked with furrowed brows. "You okay? Never been to a big gathering before?"

The Harmoninnies got to the singing parts.

Why can't you hear my heart?
Why can't I hear your heart?

Izzy fidgeted before deciding to voice her displeasure; she didn't like to complain. "These ladies are creepy," Izzy fretted. "They flicker like ghosts and they don't have any sparkle and they make weird jokes and they don't talk like normal ponies. Or move like them. Or look like them."

"Well, they're characters," Sunny excused, raising an eyebrow. "They're not gonna act like real ponies. They're idealized."

Trying to find you, I ended up in a scary place.
Did I click on the wrong link?

"I don't find them very ideal," Izzy squirmed, trying to avoid getting elbowed by the dancing pony behind her. "They already pitched a product."

"Aw, come on," Hitch cut in with a frown. "They're all the rage, of course someone's payin' 'em for ads."

I just want you to be happy
Do you want to be sad?
Or am I doing it wrong?
Why are you mad? Why am I mad?

Izzy was torn. She didn't want to be a downer for her friends, but she was not even remotely into these awful Harmobots or whatever they were called again. She gave it one last shot, looking up hopefully. "Um, so what do you guys like the most about 'em?"

"The music's pretty good," Sunny answered, confirming this with her ever-moving backside.

Izzy wasn't sure. She was surprised at how clearly the words carried over the noise of the crowd, though either nobody else heard or nobody else cared about Generous☆'s slip-up. Still, Merciful☆ seemed to sing an octave higher than she spoke and was, despite her name, quite baleful on the ears. More like Mouse-iful, she grimaced, but she was in such a bad mood she couldn't really find joy in it. She did not look forward to hearing what Cheerful☆'s singing sounded like.

There are no sadder things than lonely hearts
There are no harder things than linking lonely hearts

Generous☆ had a deeper voice than Merciful☆, except for her high, squeaky glissandi. So far as Izzy knew, those weird chirpy squealy notes were a longstanding trend to "show off good singing", but she found them unnatural, overused, and annoying. Pipp was way too fond of glissandi too, come to think of it; she was probably a big fan.

"They're pretty snappy dressers," Hitch added on. "And I like how Generous☆ and especially Honest☆ are focused on duty."

"Their clothes are pretty good," Izzy admitted. Unlike the mares themselves, the clothes looked like real clothes, and were probably made the same way as tailoring for a pony. They were also indubitably - ugh - stylish, even if there wasn't a coherent theme between Generous☆'s overdone ball gown and Merciful☆'s... sailor suit..?

Still, Izzy wasn't having it. Something was bugging her she hadn't quite put her hoof on yet. Something about the way they kept saying "Best Friends". She found herself really just wanting to leave as soon as possible, but she was stuck for possibly hours. She deeply regretted agreeing to come here with Sunny and Hitch, and she deeply regretted that regret because it meant she didn't want to be with her friends, and didn't appreciate their invitation, and Izzy couldn't stand that ungrateful feeling.

She clenched her jaw. Stupid Harmodroids making me into an ungrateful jerk, she redirected internally.

"Hey, uh," Izzy leaned back in to ask Hitch, "Are these things local?"

"Local?" Hitch furrowed his brows in thought. "Oh, you mean who makes 'em? No way, they've gotta be from Zephyr Heights."

"What makes ya say that?" Izzy tilted her head.

"This kinda tech can only be from the pegasians," Hitch assured her. "They're probably robots under there, which Maretime could do, but the holograms on top? The big screens they put the ads on? They've gotta be HQ'd in Zephyr Heights."

"Ooooh," Izzy nodded, and looked back up at them. Of course, that made sense - they had to be projecting holograms, that's why they flickered. "Sorry to talk over the song." She wasn't.

"Eh, I'm not a big fan of this one anyway," Hitch shrugged. "Generous☆ is best when she's with Honest☆."

"I wish I had hair like Kind☆'s," Sunny suddenly added in, sheepishly. "She's probably my favorite."

"But your hair looks great," Izzy faithfully praised, failing to notice that Sunny was staring at Izzy's admittedly rather kind-looking mane.

"Nah, just wait 'til she comes out," Sunny insisted. "She's gorgeous!"

Izzy had doubts.

"And you'd be surprised how confident her singing is," Hitch added. "Compared to her bashful speaking."

Izzy had fears.

Ch. 3 :: Knock Knock

Author's Note

STOP. WAIT A SECOND.

This time I think it is pretty clear those lyrics are fake. adminn PLEES do not BENN.

Ch. 3 :: Knock Knock

"Hoooooowdy y'aaaaaall!" someone guffawed in between songs. "Yer listenin' ta Harmonoid! But ya already knew that! Guh-HUH-HYUCK-HYA-HOOooOo!"

Izzy walked the gilded streets of Zephyr Heights with Linking Lonely Hearts surrounding her from all sides, blasting off the walls of every sufficiently tall, digital screen-covered building. This sure became a big hit, she thought semi-bitterly. Then she smiled, thinking about how flat-footed the dumb executives must have been when the random sixth song on the disc was the hit and not Everyone's Rainbow, the one they put first on both albums and centered all the advertising on. Mmmm, she sighed. Corporate pain. Then she winced again, her brief reprieve over.

While uncomfortable, Izzy wasn't all that bothered by being smushed between strangers' bodies. But when she looked up at the towers of glass and metal stretching into the sky, with their gaudy digital displays of every color imaginable, she felt nauseous and claustrophobic. The fact that the different copies of Linking Lonely Hearts weren't in sync due to unpredictable wireless lag and each display being a slightly different distance from her exact position didn't help.

As Izzy neared the castle, the massive skyscrapers giving way to parks and outdoor diners, she sighed in relief as the smaller structures had less room for noisy ads, most of which were all behind her and thus all on the same side now. But with Merciful☆'s bright "Until next time, Best Friends!", the song was over, and Izzy recognized Pipp's self-absorbed voice delivering another stupid ad.

"Oh-em-gee I love Harmonoid!" Pipp squealed, causing Izzy's head to fly up at once with a glare. She struggled to hold her temper, lest she involuntarily blast the digital display into bits with her mind.

Princess Pipp was one of her best friends - she shuddered as she said those two words. She could definitely hear the capitals now when the Harmodolls said it. How dare they?! They were taking something precious, something sacred, and turning it into a slogan for Big Beeswax. They're friendship-signaling, she huffed to herself. I won't let them ruin the idea of "best friends" and turn it into an ad for burgers and typewriters and swag with their stupid songs and their stupid bad jokes.

"I loooove Harmonoid," Pipp repeated, wriggling her hooves against her face, her wings fluttering rapidly. "They're so dope, I'm dying! If I could, I'd pass a law making everybody listen to them, true facts! You're so not a Pippsqueak if you don't stan Harmonoid."

It was a confusing feeling. She was shocked, and yet, she wasn't really surprised. She just hadn't stopped to think about it. Of course Pipp and her smug grinning face would promote this weird popular thing with her weird popular words. They might even do a concert together, their styles were pretty similar, except that Pipp didn't suck.

Her heart fell with guilt. She shouldn't think such negative things.

Whatever she chose to call her, Izzy liked Pipp. Pipp knew how to pretty herself up like no one else she'd ever met. She was a great singer, and the way she fluttered her wings like a hummingbird when she was excited was adorable. But if there was one thing she could hardly stand about her, it was how willing she was to cross-promote just about anything, just so her face would be on a TB screen. Pipp was absolutely full of herself, even if she was a little bit tiny and thus it probably didn't take much, and there was nothing Big Beeswax loved more than ponies who were full of themselves.

Izzy fretted with her brows low. Maybe in another timeline Pipp was the crazy megalomaniac who almost killed them with a giant robot instead of Sprout. Where was Sprout, anyway? Guys like that didn't just disappear, but they hadn't heard a single "Mommy!!" from him since the magic came back. Maybe he went to the moon. That'd be nice. She heard there was a whole kingdom up there. She wanted to see it sometime. Unless Sprout had turned it into the Sprout Kingdom, anyway. The Moonbow Kingdom would be way better. Free space donuts.

She sighed with frustration, forced a smile back onto her face, and made her way up to the well-paved terrace leading to the castle. At least she could trust one royal sister not to be into this dopey stuff.

Right?

Click click. Tap, swish. Ratatatatatatatatata. Click! Kachunk.

A certain someone's headphones began playing a strained punk song from an emo unicorn band, with heavy, sharp percussion and bad words delivered in a nasally whine ending in a heartbroken warble, or sometimes a shrill scream.

I wanna take you to Tartarus
I wanna take you away
Leave this kerfuffling life behind
Like rotting festering may...onnaise

They say bingbong
I say WINDIGO!
They say bingbong
I say daffodil YOU!
Daffodil YOU!
Daffodil YOU!
Daffodil it AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALL-AAAAAH!!!

On her laptop screen were bright, saccharine clips of two Harmonoids interacting in a manner that most ponies would write off as "platonic, if a bit comfortable".

The first, Generous☆, has already been well-introduced.

The second, Honest☆, has only been heard in voice until now, and was orange with heavily-braided yellow hair in huge, poofy pigtails, making her head look like a boomerang. She had a denim skirt over black tights with huge cowboy boots, and a yellow shirt with a brown vest jacket. This was topped off with a fat brown cowboy hat with a navy belt around the base, a golden apple gracing the front as a buckle. Honest☆ was asleep standing up in over half of the clips used.

The viewer did not realize how incredibly misfitting this music was to these clips, or perhaps, did not care.

She sniffled with watery eyes. "They're so perfect together," she deluded herself. Then she scowled and stopped sniffling. "Ah, this transition is still glitching out. What the heck. Stupid Fillygree, how can a program costing 1000 bits a year be so freaking buggy." Furious clicks resounded as she struggled to fix the problem with raspy sighs.

"Aaaahh daffodil it," she soon relented, and sat back.

CRASH! There went her door.

"Aagh!" Zipp cried, falling out of her gamer chair. "B-bingbong, bingbong!"

"What're you talkin' bout? Don't appropriate me, missy," Izzy huffed, then stopped and combed through her hair with a hoof. "Ahem-hem-hem. Zipp!" She pointed at her accusingly. "Please tell me you're not into these Harmodrone things!" She began walking all around the room, scanning her walls, and rifling through her things. "You're a jock, right?"

"I'm a what?!" Zipp protested, scampering up with a red face, scrambling towards her laptop.

"Whaaaa!" Izzy had already seized it in her magic with a massive gasp. "What the heck is this?!" she cried, staring at the screen. Her mouth slowly closed and she tilted her head, one way and then the other, like a confused puppy. "No really, what is it? It looks complicated."

"None-of-your-business," Zipp snapped, swiping the laptop back and smacking it shut. She mumbled to herself. "... it's called an AFV..."

"AFV??" Izzy repeated. She looked at the ceiling in thought. "Appalling Family Visits?" She tilted her head the other way. "All Feathers, Verily?"

"What --"

"Aaah! Flaming Vipers!" she bellowed, sweeping a forehoof illustriously.

"Animated Friendship Video," Zipp huffed, looking away. "L-look, just forget you saw anything, okay?"

"What's an Animated Friendship Video?" Izzy asked sincerely, blinking with big curious eyes.

"It." Zipp put her face in her hooves at her computer table. "... it's when ya make a video about what good, uh, friends, some characters from a movie or something are."

"Awww, that's nice. I wouldn't think you were into something so non-violent," Izzy pepped.

"What the heck does that mean," Zipp scoffed, her hooves slapping the table as she looked up in irritation. "Am I a violent kind of pony?!"

"Well, when we met, you were running from the cops," she smiled.

"Those were my own guards! And that was totally different!"

"Was it, though..." Izzy pouted, tilting her head again. "You were really beatin' up those defenseless rocks."

"Were you 'beating up' the floor when you walked over here?" she demanded.

"Oh no! Was I?!" Izzy worried. "Oh geez, I didn't even think about it."

"L-look, just go!" Zipp pointed out the door. "You shouldn't barge in on ponies, Izzy. Who are you, the freakin' fun police?"

"Hmm," Izzy thought, cantering back out and looking back over her shoulder, "Is there a position available?"

"Bye," Zipp answered, and closed the door in her face.

Izzy blinked at the closed door, then turned, scowling. "The Harmomatics have even got Zipp thinking they're actually friends," she whispered to herself moronically. "They're corrupting everyone. I gotta stop this." She looked both ways, lowered her stance, and "snuck" out of the castle with a serious face and little bird hops, with each guard she passed staring at her curiously.

Ch. 4 :: Izzy's Gambit

The sun rose slowly over the washed-out spectrum of colors that made up the Rainbow Forest and its formerly-hidden city of Bridlewood.

However many moons ago - it may have been ten, it may have been ten thousand, no one cared to remember - this city of wood and dirt was morose, with listless, impotent unicorns shuffling from anywhere to nowhere and laying limp upon the shop counters and the slides, pondering the point of their existence.

But today, with the return of magic, the foals skipped and skedaddled, yelped as their accidental levitation made them slide across the air like ice and crash into trees, crystals, and other ponies, and mildly singed each other and unlucky adults with unpracticed magic - though no brains were fried, at least not more so than they were already.

At its entrance, where once hung dozens of signs selected by paranoid and hostile creatures, hung only one last straggler.

BEWARE
OF
~~DOG~~ cHompaPOTammuS

But there was no such thing as a cHompaPOTammuS - at least not that the unicorns knew - and with a sigh and a swish of a horn, this final, wayward guardian was cut into countless pieces, floating away in the rising sun like the dust of a slain vampire, and - as we all wish we might with bad memories - quickly forgotten.

But the chatting adults and laughing foals stopped to stare in wonder as Izzy Moonbow, once the only smile in a world of frowns and even today the faithful slayer of an outdated Cerberus, took her turn to shuffle soullessly along the clumsily-strewn cobblestone, paying no need to the hum of the crystals, the chatter of the birds, or the song of the wind in the now-well-kept bushes.

She greeted no one, and answered no greetings. She went straightaway home, opened her door by hoof - for she was so accustomed to so doing, and so taken with thought, that she never thought to use magic - and entered, pausing only to close the door behind her with her behind, as its wood warped with the season and it sometimes took a hefty push to close completely.

She shambled past the rotating music machine she had fashioned without magic.

Past her newest spaghetti portrait, which frowned at her. (It frowned at everyone.)

And up the spiraling stairs, which had been shaped over countless moons by hoof and horsepower.

She collapsed into her hammock, which twisted and deposited her on the floor alongside her five or six pillows.

And there she stayed, tapping at the floor and sighing.

It had been a whole week since she had first learned of the Harmonoids, and she couldn't stand it anymore.

She'd been telling herself she hated their catchy songs and their slick outfits and their big cute eyes. Their terrible dialogue and their bad jokes that everyone only laughed at after they were explained. Actually, no, she really did hate those last two things.

But she really super hated their constant use of "Best Friends" (capitalized) and the trademark icons everywhere and the constant shilling and the fact they sprung up out of nowhere the instant the three great cities reinstated mass commerce.

Or maybe she was just ticked off that she couldn't talk to any of her friends about anything but Harmonoids, like somebody had come in and sucked their brains out and left only an obedient consumer in their place. Only Sunny seemed to recognize that she wasn't into it, but as soon as Hitch came skipping over to rant about how great Honest☆ was, the two of them chatted away.

Like Izzy wasn't even there.

"This is the worst week of my having-magic life," she said to no one in particular. That was only a few moons, of course.

She couldn't even complain to her fellow unicorns - they'd never heard of the Harmonoids and had no idea what she was talking about. There were no fancy digital displays out here. Most unicorns didn't even have indoor plumbing and they thought of an electrical grid as a demonic hive mind that would suck up their souls. (To be fair, Izzy thought the same thing when the concept was first explained to her.) Naturally, they lacked refrigeration either, which was part of why it was forbidden to keep Windigo's milk - that forbidden substance non-unicorns were free to refer to as "mayshine" or, even more harrowing, "illegal mayonnaise".

If only there were six of them! Then there'd be two unicorns, just like the Heroes of Harmony. Probably. But no, there were only five, and Izzy was the only unicorn who'd dared to leave the forest like that one kid in the legends who didn't have a fairy, so Izzy had no fellow unicorns to seethe and hate Harmonoids with.

Worst of all, "Harmonoids" sounded like something you went to see a doctor for. Actually, Izzy reasoned to herself with a thoughtful pout, that was probably nowhere near the worst thing about her current situation, but it was still bothering her to think about. She wished she could stop thinking about it so much, but she had grown up doing a lot of thinking because she had little else to do, and she found it difficult to stop. Heck, she was still stuck on whether or not beetle farts were part of Maretime Bay's signature scent.

Izzy sighed out her nose with tears in her eyes. Was she being the unreasonable one? She was the only one of her friends who disliked Harmonoids. Sunny casually liked the music, Hitch projected his righteous heart schtick onto Honest☆ and may have been hiding a passion for fashion, Pipp's Pish timeline was full of the stupid things, and Zipp seemed to be bashfully exploring her sensitive side through her weird AFV things.

They all seemed to be aware of the obvious "corporate brand" nature of Harmonoids, but they... didn't mind? Izzy scowled, starting to feel a fire burning in her heart. She liked to be open-minded, but this was something she couldn't understand. How could anyone willfully abide Big Beeswax?

It might seem odd for a unicorn, who grew up in an isolated hamlet with no coherent businesses to speak of beyond sole proprietorships like shops and food vendors, to have any particular opinion of large corporations, or indeed to know what they were. But Izzy, as the one unicorn who'd most made it a habit to explore beyond the fringe of the Rainbow Forest, had learned very early on in her travels that Big Beeswax ate forests. They drilled big holes in the ground. They belched nasty muck into the environment. And they probably left their mayshine out for weeks. They were evil.

And while they were at it, they used some kind of non-magic spell to protect themselves from comeuppance. She shuddered at the phrase: legal mumbo-jumbo. "Bingbong," she whispered to herself, for fear her very thoughts might invite the Prince of Lies to come claim her house with his silver tongue and turn it upside-down with his chaos magic.

She hesitated, second-guessing herself once more. As earth ponies and pegasians, Sunny, Hitch, Pipp, and Zipp ought to be much more intimately familiar with Big Beeswax than she was. They lived next door to them, so to speak. They should know better than her, and they weren't concerned.

Izzy started to cry, and thought again: Am I being the unreasonable one?

Then she jumped up in a huff. "No," she said aloud, "It's the happy ponies who are wrong."

Izzy had always been a pretty good guesser, and she felt that, unlike mayshine, she only got better every day. She was banned from the Bridlewood lottery a week or two after the magic came back, and nobody played cards with her anymore. They thought she was either peeking or counting the cards, and she was miffed because she'd never even thought of counting the cards and that would probably have been a lot more reliable than trying to read them through the backs like those ponies with the tiger-striped shawls on the TB.

And Izzy Moonbow, She Who Bets Not For She Knows Already The Outcome, had guessed five minutes in that these Harmonoids were no good.

She rushed back downstairs. "It's time for Izzy's Big-Beeswax-Buster Kit! Not patented because patents are evil!"

She began singing to herself as she kicked a lump of wood, which quickly unfolded into a table with a rather shrill, unfittingly metallic bwow-wow-wow-wow-wow! sound.

She stuck her head into one of her baskets, shaking her unicorn butt in time with her own now-muffled singing.

I just want you to be happy
Do you want to be sad?
Or am I doing it wrong?
Why are you mad? Why am I mad?
There are no sadder things than --

The butt froze, and she pulled her head back out in horror.

"Was I just singing Linking Lonely Hearts," she croaked with a pale face - and indeed she had been. "Izzy Moonbow, you mustn't get on stage with the enemy... Geez, that song is such an ear worm..."

She stuck her head back in, now silent.

Ch. 5 :: Like a Very Loud Shadow

"Whattyou know about Harmonoids!"

"Eyaagh!" a pegasian mare cried in fright, disappearing into the sky like a bullet. Loose feathers danced in the sky, slowly zig-zagging back and forth, some falling onto the pajama-ninja of a unicorn who had leapt out of a bush to demand answers.

"Achoo!!" Izzy sneezed as a feather landed on her nose. Golly, she stared up with a wince, holding up a hoof to shield her eyes from the sun, These ponies really made the flying thing second nature. She shook her mane before remembering that all of her hair was matted down underneath a black hood. Wait, no, it'd be first nature. Wouldn't it?

Izzy had of course returned to Zephyr Heights, where Hitch had told her the Harmonoids were headquartered. Her "Big-Beeswax-Buster-Kit" was little more than a set of black pajamas, a quill, some paper, and a clipboard. The jammies had a nice little hoodie with a clasp to latch in front of her horn, and she'd sewn in an extra strip of fabric to cover her mouth and nose. With this, Izzy was sure she wouldn't stand out while pursuing the truth.

Izzy Moonbow was a very creative unicorn, but not a very smart one.

She eventually realized after five or six flights-on-sight that her current strategy wasn't working. Because ninjas were invisible, she reasoned that this was because they couldn't see her, so they were startled when she started talking.

So she began to walk through the middle of the street yelling "I'm a ninja! You can't see me but I'm here! Don't tell anyone!"

"What is wrong with you," someone gruffed as she passed by.

Izzy froze on the spot, her cheer diminishing. She bashfully turned to look at him sidelong.

An old stallion squinted and glanced at her head before grumbling. "I tole 'em, I tole everybody unicorns was nothin' but crazies, I knew it." He leaned on his crutch with one foreleg and vaguely trembled the other, perhaps intending to shake it at her menacingly.

Izzy frowned, relaxing. She'd need to get two licenses for her vacuum. "Whattya mean?" she objected. "I'm a ninja. I'm tryin' to learn the truth about the Harmonoids."

"Harmonoids!" He spat, and began coughing.

"Oh, are you okay?" Izzy fretted, stepping forward in case her help was needed.

"I'm fine, crazycorn!" he snapped back. "Harmonoids!" He threw his free hoof skyward. "Scarlet mares, the lot of 'em! Showed up a week or two ago outta nowhere like a thief in the night!"

"Really?" Izzy blinked. "They were a sudden sensation?"

"Spread faster than the fox skip, 'n' that was a heck of a move," he chuckled, shaking his hips. "I was a fine dancer in my day, I'll tell you, perfected the fox skip, aaah, I coulda married the queen..."

"I'm sure you were and did and could have!" Izzy beamed. "Do you know anything else about the Harmonoids?" Her smile grew toothy. "Maaaaybe about who makes 'em?"

"Baaaah I don't stick my nose into such things," he scowled, waving her off. "It's a youngun you want, the kids are obsessed with every little detail of these stupid things."

"Okay!" Izzy chirped. "Have a great day, sir!" she waved and skipped off.

He gave her a small smile before going back to scowling.

"Excuse me, sir, I'm a ninja and you can't see me."

The young stallion, or perhaps older colt, blinked at her. "... Uh, yes I can --"

"Do you know anything about the company who makes Harmonoids?" Izzy continued, tilting her head with a big grin.

He paused to process. "What, HarmoSync?"

"Yep, those bozos!!" She nodded eagerly. "Do they do anything else besides Harmonoids? Liiiiike try to take over the world?" she chirped in a hopeful lilt.

He laughed. "You're serious? Not that I know. They don't do anything. It's just Harmonoids."

"Hmm," Izzy pouted. "Okay! Thank you! Have a great day!"

"My husband does some marketing for Secretary@," the older mare nodded, fondling her pearl necklace. "You know, they make typewriters. They have a cross-promotion with those Harmo-whatever bimbos. A pretty filly can make an old stallion or a young mare buy anything, so I'm sure they must have a deal with other companies, as well."

"Hmm," Izzy pouted again. She looked down at her clipboard. She'd been told the same thing for three companies so far.

Queen Haven made her way through Zephyr Heights, her servants rushing to unfurl the perfect, wrinkle-less, purple carpet for their less perfect, slightly wrinkly, purple leader. None of them dared to ask why she needed a carpet when she was flying, or how they made a carpet that remained smooth despite the many curves in her path, or why she insisted on wearing those stupid sunglasses that made her nearly fly into things every five minutes.

"Yes, yes, thank you," she condescended, carefully adjusting her flight to angle herself perfectly for the many photos being snapped of her on her day out. "Yes, be sure to get my good side and what in the world is that noise?"

Everyone paused, even the paparazzi, their ears pricked to figure out what was making that demonic sound.

"C-could it be a... a dragon?" one of the guards trembled.

"Don't be silly, Quillspear," the queen huffed, "Dragons are but legends to scare foals." Then she gave it some thought. "... but I suppose so were unicorns and earth ponies..." She landed on her carpet with a hoof on her chin before barking out orders. "Soldiers! Locate the source of that sound at once!"

"A-ha!" Izzy Moonbow cried in trumph, standing on top of a giant lollipop jutting from over the horizon against a backdrop of swirling colors. "Your doom is at hoof, Harmonoids!"

All six of them were real mares, without any creepy ball joints or anything, and they were all in their underwear, even though ponies went naked most of the time.

"Eyaaaagh~!" Merciful☆ whined. "We've been caught with our pantsu down, girls!"

"Pants," Izzy corrected with narrow eyes.

"Izzy Moonbow has exposed our heinous scheme and unfashionable unmentionables!" Generous☆ drawled, then threw one hoof over her head and swooned, falling over the other horizon. "Especially Loyal☆'s," she raised her head and opened an eye to add before sticking her tongue out and pretending to be dead.

"Don't look, none of you broads look," Loyal☆ spun around in circles like a dog chasing her tail, trying to cover her white-and-pink striped panties.

"Izzy did a really good job," Kind☆ praised, hiding under her several yards of long, sakura-pink hair and smiling bashfully with her one uncovered eye. Izzy had to admit she was indeed quite gorgeous.

"Dang," Honest☆ conceded, standing comfortably in bloomers, her mouth moving from one side to the other in a frustrated, how do I get outta this one pout.

Cheerful☆ stared up at Izzy with a big smile and said nothing, completely frozen from her plump, dimpled pink cheeks to her wild, untamed, deep velvet jungle of a mane and tail.

"U-um," Izzy fidgeted. "Don't you have any last words?"

"Wake up, you sputtering engine!" Cheerful☆ suddenly snarled, and hurled a bucket of water at her.

"Waaagh-huck-ggff --" Izzy sputtered and coughed, sitting up in a confused panic.

"Izzy Moonglow, if I recall," Queen Haven stared down her nose at her, passing her now-empty bucket off to an attendant. She pouted as a second leaned in and whispered, then grimaced. "Moonbow. My apologies."

"Wha? Y-your majesty..?" Izzy recognized, blinking and recovering her breath.

"I am told," the Queen drawled with her chin raised as a third attendant polished her sunglasses while they were still on her face, "That a certain someone has been harassing my people, asking after the recent trend, the Harmonoids. And lo and behold, I find you sleeping on our fountainside bench like a bum, dressed like a ragamuffin, and snoring like my late husband."

"I'm sorry for your loss," Izzy answered at once, rubbing at her eyes.

"Am I correct to presume that you are the quote-unquote 'crazy unicorn running all over town asking a lot of questions'?"

"That's not how you use that," Izzy objected, getting up and stretching. ""It makes no sense to unquote before you say what the quote is. That's like writing both the quotation marks before a character's dialogue line. See? Like I just did.

"What?" Queen Haven wrinkled her nose.

"Your Majesty," Izzy bowed. "I'm sorry for being a pest. I'm investigating the Harmonoids 'cause I think they're up to somethin'."

"Oh?" the Queen raised an eyebrow, "The world of pop culture can be quite cutthroat, but we in Zephyr Heights hold our businesses to a high degree of accountability, Miss Moonbow."

"I know," Izzy accepted, "But it's so suspicious! I can't even figure out who voices the dumb things."

"Of course you can't," the Queen gave a throaty laugh. "No one knows! Not even me. They're a well-kept secret. They call them their 'Twin Souls', and act like one lives and dies with the other." She waved with one wing. "These mares would be in great danger if their identities were discovered. Rabid fans might kidnap them."

"What!" Izzy's eyes went wide. "Ponies would kidnap them? Why?"

"There is a reason we were so quick to think ill of your people, Miss Moonbow," the Queen sighed. "There are plenty of pegasians who are absolutely crazy. Dangerously so. In fact, I do believe someone already kidnapped a mare who was incorrectly identified as a Harmonoid actress..."

"Already?" Izzy's eyes darted around in thought. "But haven't they only been around for a couple weeks?"

Queen Haven nodded stoically. "Dedicated fans are very fast, and dedication and madness are only a few wingbeats apart, Miss Moonglow." She cringed as an aide leaned in to whisper again. "Miss Moonbow."

"Has she been found?" Izzy worried.

"She was indeed," the Queen tapped her chin, "But I've forgotten her name..."

Izzy leapt up and grabbed her clipboard.

"Stop!" the Queen commanded with a hoof raised. "Just stop. I will look into it for you. If you would please, you're scaring ponies..."

Izzy smiled bashfully and nodded.

Ch. 6 :: Nothing Crazy

Dahlia sighed, keeping her head low as she trudged through the streets of Maretime Bay, trying not to look at Merciful☆'s face.

She'd had a bit of a falling out with her bestie, Mayflower. The mare knew she had issues with Harmonoid, how could she be so inconsiderate? But she hadn't meant to yell at her so fiercely. She'd have to apologize to her later.

She forced herself to smile and wave as Sunny Starscout skated past her, then scowled at her back. Sunny was a good filly, but Dahlia couldn't help but feel a little bit envious. Sunny was an instant celebrity - the mare who brought back the magic. And with her ability to turn into a flaming angel of death at a moment's notice, she never had to worry about protection.

Dahlia sighed again, and with that thought, suddenly found herself enveloped full-body in a really big bag, tumbling and turning, unable to tell which way was up.

"Mmmh?!" she cried in alarm.

"Gotcha!" she heard a chipper female voice cheer. "The Harmonoids' secrets are mine!"

She relaxed. "Nawthibagih," she grumbled in resignation.

Izzy Moonbow whistled to herself as she cantered around the room, adjusting lights and fixtures until she felt the mood was right. The right mood was "really dark except at the table".

"Was this necessary," Dahlia droned. "This is my house. You couldn't just wait for me to come home and talk to me? It would've taken like five more minutes."

"I'll ask the questions here, pally!" Izzy yelled, slapping the table.

Dahlia jumped, startled. "H-hey, you're gonna scuff it," she complained. "This's expensive wood!"

"Who are da Har-ma-noids's Twin Souls?!" Izzy demanded, levitating a microwaved taquito over and holding it sideways in her mouth like a cigar. "Yer gonna tell me, see?"

"Or what." Dahlia scoffed.

Izzy blinked and thought it over. Then she gave a big toothy grin and began to wave her hoof in circles over the table.

"You're gonna scuff my table?" Dahlia deadpanned back at her. "I could sue you, you know."

Izzy paled and pulled her hoof back at once. "Well crud, I'm all outta ideas, then..."

"You're the worst fanfilly ever, you know that?" Dahlia rolled her eyes.

"Fanfilly?" Izzy's eyebrows shot up, her taquito going limp. "Fanfilly?!" She repeated, seizing her taquito and devouring it in many vicious bites, causing Dahlia to lean back uncomfortably. "I can't stand Harmonoids!"

"Then why are you bothering me?!" Dahlia whined, her forelegs wrapped around herself in disgust at Izzy's voracious display.

"I need to know who their 'Twin Souls' are!" Izzy insisted, levitating another taquito over. She paused. "You want one?" she offered, levitating it over to her.

"Gee, how nice of you to offer me my own food..." Dahlia grumbled, but she leaned over and bit it out of the air.

"You're not a Twin Soul. Right?"

"Imnah," Dahlia said with her mouth full.

"Do... you know... anyone who is?" Izzy floundered.

Dahlia finished her taquito and took time licking around her teeth. "Maybe I do, maybe I don't," she finally answered.

"You don't wanna get smart with me, pal!" Izzy puffed out her cheeks in mock anger.

"Well one of us has to be..." Dahlia leaned on her table with one elbow, sighing.

"You were kidnapped before, right?" Izzy tried another angle.

"Yeah," Dahlia gave an unamused grin and batted her lashes. "And it was a lot scarier than whatever this is."

"I'm not much of a kidnapper," Izzy admitted in a low voice, clicking her hooves together.

"I'll say," Dahlia agreed.

"But I'm real good at being nosy!" Izzy stamped her hooves.

"Can't argue there," Dahlia wrinkled her nose.

"Okay! I'll... prove it!"

"Prove what?"

Izzy checked the mantle over the fireplace. "Aha!" She picked up a framed photo and brandished it at Dahlia.

"Don't break that, that's sentimental," Dahlia pouted.

"This proves..." Izzy paused and looked at the photo again, her brows furrowed. It showed a younger Dahlia and her father at the nearby dock. Dahlia was holding up a really big fish and looked proud of herself.

"It proves you're fishing," Dahlia shot at her after a beat. Izzy gently set it back on the mantle and, with a very delayed snort, began giggling.

As Izzy kept giggling, Dahlia shuffled uncomfortably and glanced at the exits. "That's a funny joke," Izzy huffed between laughs. "You like jokes?"

"Uh," Dahlia squirmed. She froze as she heard the doors locking without anyone touching them. She jumped at the sound of a heavy thunk and a spotlight shining on Izzy, standing on her table with a tophat and a cane.

"Good afternoon, lady and nocolt, I'm feelin' on top of the world today!" Izzy gestured with the hat, then pouted and looked down. "Or at least on top of this table..." She took a crazed look onto her face. "HehEEheeEheEe!"

"Uh," Dahlia stared, both hooves clasped over her chest.

Izzy waved her legs around wildly while speaking. "Ya might ask, why, Izzy Moonbow, what's got you in such a good mood? Well I'll tell ya." She ran to one side of the table. "I went to the doctah this morning and he tells me, he says, why Izzy, your cutie mark's fallin' off. And I say that can't be right, I want a second opinion, 'n' he says, alright, your laugh makes me sick. HeHEEheHEEEhe!"

"I'm no doctor but I agree," Dahlia said a bit loudly. She moved to get up and froze at the cane pointed at her. Looking up at the friendly, smiling face, Dahlia grimaced and slowly sat back down.

"Turns out stickers don't stick to fur very well..!" Izzy choked up and began laughing at her own joke, setting her cane back on the table and leaning onto it.

"Please shut up," Dahlia pleaded.

"Now I know yer an earth pony so's you might not unda-stand: How many unicorns does it take ta screw in a light bulb?" Izzy gestured to Dahlia with her hat.

"Uh, um," Dahlia tugged at one ear, trying to think of a safe answer. "I don't know," she settled on.

"I was hopin' ya did because what da heck is a light bulb?!" Izzy cried, pretending to swoon. "Somepony asked me earlier and I tell ya, it's enough ta drive a mare ta lick!"

"Drive a mare to what," Dahlia bristled.

"So I went down ta the salt lick," Izzy continued, bouncing around the table, "And to the bartender I asked him, hey bartender -- but then I thought about it, 'cause if I asked him what a light bulb was he mighta told me I'd already had enough," she pouted with a hoof to her chin.

"Uuuuugh," Dahlia put her head down on her table.

"And while I was thinkin' about it, a pony came in," Izzy continued. "And he was a pirate with a steerin' wheel in his --"

"Okay, stop!" Dahlia cried, holding both hooves up. "Okay, alright. I auditioned for the Harmonoids! Is that what you wanted to hear?!"

"Oh yeah?" Izzy chirped, leaning on her cane again, interested. She narrowed her eyes. "Where?"

"It was an impromptu location," she shook her head. "They said they never used the same spot twice."

Izzy scowled. "So this pirate --"

"B-but!" Dahlia hastened to add, raising a hoof, "I smuggled out a copy of my audition tape!"

"Tape..?" Izzy repeated. "What's a tape?"

Dahlia stared in horror.

"That's not a bit, like the lightbulb thing," Izzy blinked, shaking her head. "I honestly don't know what a 'tape' is..."

"It's... it... You can listen to it to hear the audition again, you just stick it in a tape player," Dahlia stammered to explain. "They kept me long enough for me to do a group audition with the other applicants! It's possible one of them was accepted!"

"Really..." Izzy rubbed her chin, then furrowed her brows. "Then shouldn't you know their faces?"

"No," Dahlia shook her head. "We were brought in separately and had screens to keep us apart. That way, the ones who weren't accepted couldn't rat out anyone else's identity."

"That's nuts," Izzy concluded. "... Where's the thingy, the tape?"

"It's in the drawers in my bedside table," Dahlia wrung her hooves. "Take it with you, get out of here, I don't want anything more to do with these stupid Harmonoids."

"You 'n' me both, sister," Izzy nodded. She hopped off the table and headed out a door.

After a few seconds, she came back. "Uh, which way's your bedroom?"

Izzy headed upstairs to the restored lighthouse's second floor. She felt a little bad about not being totally honest with Sunny about what she was doing here; Sunny just knew she needed a tape player. Dahlia had booted her out of the house too quick to ask after hers, partially because her act on the table had scuffed the wood.

Izzy carefully looked around the room, gradually realizing that she did not know what a tape player looked like. She looked at the tape and tried to think about what kind of thingy would play it.

It must have had big nasty teeth, since the tape had little holes in it for teeth to go. It must have been kind of square, since the tape was kind of square. It was probably a really big, really square goblin head that made a "aauaummmf" noise when you put the tape in. Like a "omnomnom" noise.

Izzy double-took Sunny's actual tape recorder and moaned in disappointment. "How utilitarian," she critiqued, opening it up and carefully setting the tape in.

It took her five minutes to figure out how to make it play. She was scared of messing up and damaging it. Don't accidentally record over it, Sunny had said.

"Oh no!" Dahlia called. "Loyal☆! Are you alright? That was a nasty fall."

"Shut up, egghead," came a high, childish voice. Not the current Loyal☆.

"O-Okay..." Dahlia responded. Izzy liked her voice better than the one they got.

"Loyal☆, really!" Izzy's entire body perked and her heart skipped; this was definitely the current Generous☆ voice. "Merciful☆ is being very concerned for you!"

"I'm fine," Loyal☆ insisted. "Shut your fancy trap."

"I can't believe you --" Generous☆ started with a voice crack, then the actress cleared her throat. "Oh wow, I totes beefed that, hashtag RIP..." Izzy's heart dropped at the sound of the actress's regular voice. "Don't freak, I got this one, ahem." She inhaled and perfectly nailed the voice. "I can't believe you..!"

Izzy wobbled on the spot, afraid she was going to pass out, and immediately focused on her breathing.

"Look, I'm sorry," Loyal☆ conceded, but with an edge. "I'm just a little bit... miffed, okay?!"

Easy, Izzy, she assured herself. You just got hit with a heartbreaking bombshell, it's okay. It's okay.

"Oh darling," Generous☆ cooed, "It's nothing to be embarrassed about."

Izzy stared at the wall with her heart pounding, breathing slowly and deeply, processing the secret she'd just learned and figuring out what to do with it.

"I'm a pegasus, I'm supposed to be able to fly."

Izzy stopped the tape.

Ch. 7 :: Disconcerted

Author's Note

STOP. WAIT A SECOND.

Hey look! More made-up song lyrics! These were inspired by AI-generated lines so they may have some resemblance to multiple source songs. If these exact words ever find their way into a song, the song was made after and probably because of the story. adminn PLEES do not BENN.

I actually developed a melody in mind for this one, unlike stupid Linking Lonely Hearts. Maybe I already uploaded a cruddy version of it by the time I published this.

Ch. 7 :: Disconcerted

Right on que, Princess Pipp stepped out of the mist to great applause, catwalked perfectly to the beat, stopped, and raised a hoof, sweeping across while shaking her booty, with a smirk and a raised eyebrow, moving her lips silently as her own voice sounded incoherently around her. Between the fact she was behind the speakers, and the fact her crowd was especially excited today, she would have no idea what she was saying had she not written the words herself.

The rain is pretty bad today
But that's just fine
Every cloud is beautiful
With the sun behind

Most other ponies had no idea what she was saying in any event - both in what the words literally were, and what in the world they meant once the first part was figured out, but whatevs. She stopped herself from shrugging, and skittered around the stage in a taptrot.

You think the rain will never end
But don't you know
After every storm
Is a rainbow

She'd done this so many times by now she could think about stuff while she did it. Quite frankly it got boring at times. Not boring enough to appreciate slipping on the stage and going the worst kind of viral. Felt more bacterial, actually, though since PR disasters affected her whole family it might have been cutiesomal.

It's not like anyone would notice if her lips formed the wrong word once or twice because the line said "hoof to heart" but her head thought "gosh I'm hungry". And besides, she was lip-syncing her own song. She legitimately did the recording. It's just that it was literally impossible to sing like that, or at all actually, while huffing and puffing from all this athletic stuff she was doing, even as spry as she was. That was the real reason Zipp wouldn't be caught dead on a stage - she was still embarrassed from like three years ago.

Pipp had already gotten busted for the strings-for-wings fiasco. If they had the nerve to get mad at her for lip-syncing her own vocals she was gonna sue. And if they were too stupid to figure out that the clearly-overlapping vocals with harmonies weren't performed live while running a marathon on stage, then that was their fault.

She spread out her wings and began twirling for her bridge, an excuse to stretch them out in preparation to take off.

I love you more than anything
More than everything

No strings attached this time - she took off for real and flew like a phoenix, her lights strobing and her crowd going wild.

You are my sun, the light of my life
With you, I feel so warm
I have no shade but I know no strife
I want to go blind in your light

It hadn't been long since the Pegasians had gotten their wings back, but she'd been furiously dedicated - almost as obsessed as Zipp, who'd always hated faking flying. The only "trick" was all the glitter that dropped out of the air and her hope not to get it in her eyes. The crazy lights made it pretty much invisible until she knocked it around with her flying.

She continued to soar, swirling and twirling, to finish her chorus.

You are my sun, the light of my life
We'll weather any storm
I have no shade but I know no strife --

She fell out of the air in shock as the doors to the concert hall exploded open in a storm of unicorn magic that instantly shut down all the electronic equipment and deafened the gasping audience with cacophonous microphone feedback.

She forced her eyes open against her demonic cringing. Accustomed to her bright lights, she could barely make out a purple-and-blue blob standing backlit in the door like an angel of death. Her heart sank as she accepted all the strife she was about to know with her worst best friend.

"Fuhbuhlee!" Izzy might have shouted, standing tall and backlit in the doorframe, her head held high. Then she stopped talking and waited for the feedback and audience babbling to stop as everyone turned to look at her, covering their ears with their wings. "Sorry, let me start over." She cleared her throat, magically summoned a brush, smoothed over her coat and hair, and did some stretches before jumping and landing in her previous, heroic pose. "Fun police! Princess Pipperoni, you are under arrest! Again. You traitor! You're gonna spill everything! All the beans!"

"W-what?!" Pipp cried, half-leaning off the stage. "No. Nonono, this is not happening again," she scrambled back up, "This must be a bad dream, you did not just ruin my first real-flying concert! And that's not my name."

"Oh wow, your first one?!" Izzy chirped, pixie-trotting in excitement. "I'm so proud of you! It hasn't even been that long and you're that confident already?! When is it?"

"W-when is..?! YOU JUST CRASHED IT!" Pipp squeaked. Her wings began buzzing like a hummingbird's, taking her a hand or two into the air. "Just like you crashed the last one! You exposed me when I was faking it and now you're ruining me doing it legit?! I would so unfollow you if you had an account!"

"You can follow bank accounts?" Izzy blinked, then shook her head and raised her chin proudly. "Don't distract me, evildoer! I'm here to expose your treachery and lies!"

"Didn't we already do this?" Someone in the crowd asked.

"Yeah! We did!" Pipp pouted down at Izzy. "What exactly are you gonna expose about me this time?!"

"This! Ta-daaaa!" Izzy cried brightly. The crowd gasped as, with a flash, her cellphone materialized out of thin air and floated in midair, having been summoned from beyond the veil. Then she rubbed at her face. Every time she did that motion, she could feel her face wobbling. She was afraid she might pull a tendon or something if she hit it too hard.

Pipp stared down at her in disbelief from upon the stage. Her wings slowed down and she gracefully descended before scuffing her stage with a snarl. "You have a phone?" she protested, stomping her hoof to accentuate phone. "... Why do you never answer my texts?!" She scowled, huffing out of her nostrils.

"Because I can never charge it," Izzy responded matter-of-fact, smiling all around at the confused crowd. "Bridlewood doesn't have any electrical outlets. ... Or any wireless reception..." she pouted at the corner of the ceiling before smiling at Pipp again.

"You..." Pipp put a hoof to her temple, blinking and unsteady on her feet. She closed her eyes. "You've got a phone that you can't use... because you live in the boonies like a cavemare..."

"Bingbong," Izzy warned cheerily.

"Shut it. So how exactly is your phone working now?!" the princess demanded.

"Oh, I stopped by a coffee shop on the way over here," Izzy nodded, raising a hoof to gesture out the door, because that was where the coffee shop was within a 180 degree arc and a few hundred miles radius. "Sat there for three hours! Gosh my butt hurts!" She wiggled her behind with a wrinkled nose, causing a few mothers to cover their foals' eyes.

"You waited for three hours to ruin the most important concert I've ever done?"

"No way, I'd never do that!" Izzy giggled and shook her head several times, ignoring Pipp's twitching eye, pulling the phone closer and fumbling with the touchpad, bright eyes darting casually over the surface. "I came to talk about your Pish!"

"... My Pish?" Pipp raised an eyebrow. "I don't post anything vulnerable on my TL, I'm real careful with it..."

"Exactly!" Izzy suddenly jabbed a hoof in her direction, making her jump. "You promote these Harmonoid things all the time! You Echo fans covering their songs! You even do ads for them!"

Pipp sighed and rolled her eyes. "Zephyr Heights has a constitutionally-protected freedom of association --"

"But you've never posted a cover of your own!" Izzy accused.

Pipp froze, slowly paling. The crowd looked at her, then back to Izzy, eyes wide with interest.

"Yeah!" Izzy continued. "You do all these concerts, and you love Harmonoids who are all about music, and you promote fan covers which are technically piracy but that's a bit hypocritical to say considering," she giggled again, "... but you've never done a cover? That's really weird! Unless, of course... " She tapped a hoof to her chin and looked all around, drawing it out for several seconds.

The crowd went silent again and stared back at her. A few ponies raised a hoof in a rolling motion, gesturing As if what?!

"Unless of course you can't do a cover..." Izzy chewed on the insides of her cheeks meaningfully. Meaningfully to her, anyway.

The crowd gasped in scandal.

"ExCuUuSe yOoUuU," Pipp croaked on an inhale. She began coughing and took a few seconds to recover. "I-kih-hack-hack, I could absolutely do a cover..!"

"Oh, I'm not talking about your singing skills! You're great!" Izzy closed her eyes and beamed sincerely. She blinked them back open and tilted her head. "I mean because your cover would sound just like Generous☆Harmonoid because you're her Twin Soul." she waved off casually.

There was a very tense pause for three seconds. Izzy looked casually around the room, smiling.

"That sounds legit!" someone yelled, and an army of cameras rose out of the crowd and began flashing at Pipp and Izzy, the former flailing, the latter closing her eyes and grimacing in mild discomfort. "Yup, I'll take it," another pony called.

"AAAAAAAAHHH!" Pipp shrieked in anguish, writhing on the stage and covering her face, going blind in Izzy's light. "YOU DUMB IDIOT! I can't believe you! I mean I totally can because you did this to me before but you're unbelievable! Couldn't you talk to me about this when I'm not in the middle of a concert surrounded by live cameras?!"

"You're always in the middle of a concert surrounded by live cameras," Izzy sulked, now poking at a dark spot on the carpet and scowling at it.

"Okay so maybe I am but have you lost your mind?!" Pipp flailed, wincing her eyes closed as the cameras continued flashing at her. "Don't you understand why Harmonoid actresses are a secret?! I'm going to get recalled!"

"I don't know what that means!" Izzy chirped with a smile.

"Well the cat's outta the bag so you're about to find out! RECALLOIDS!" Pipp commanded in the Generous☆Harmonoid voice.

"All these -oids are too much to keep track of," Izzy pouted.

The Hero of Charity - two of her - combat-dove through the stained-glass windows, rolling in midair, landing on the stage, and cracking it. The crowd shrieked and ran for the exits, though the journalists snapped a few more pictures before skedaddling. These "Recalloids" stood up in their black backless gowns, adjusted their now-askew sunglasses, raised their pouting movie-star actress chins, shook their luxurious, curly purple manes, and locked their beady little eyes on Izzy. The one on the right sat down, lifted her forehooves, and punched them into each other with deep resounding thunks.

Pipp walked to the very edge of the stage and leaned down to look at Izzy closer. "This is the part where you, like, GTHO?" she smiled, batting her lashes.

"GTHO?" the Recalloids repeated, slowly approaching the stairs off the stage.

"You sure know a lot of words I don't," Izzy complained, hurriedly putting her phone back in her pocket dimension. "Geez, I should've known you'd play the spoiled one..!"

"Fire at will," Pipp snarled with outraged eyes, and Izzy took off running, right out the front door of the castle with two Generous☆Harmonoids in hot pursuit, shooting tennis balls out of their wide-open snake-mouths with FOOMP sounds.

Ch. 8 :: Falling Down

Friendly tree ♪ friendly tree ♫
Please be a friend to me ♪
Tattle-tale, don't be ♫
I should shut up.

Deep in the peaceful valleys just inland of Maretime Bay, where rivers ambled to the sea and birds sang because they had songs, Izzy Moonbow - who had many songs herself - sat in a tree, wisely stopped singing, and pouted at nothing.

Izzy liked to learn new things, but only most things. Some new things were better left unlearned, such as that there were Recalloids. She found the sheer volume of content with Harmonoid to be too much, too fast.

Izzy didn't like complicated things. She had trouble focusing on them and would get distracted by simpler things like cute beetles and yippy dogs.

Just a few weeks ago, Sunny had tried to get her to read Lordstone, an ancient epic by a long-forgotten author. Why did her ribs feel funny. There were over a dozen different versions of it now each with their own huge followings. She couldn't even name half of the characters, and they expected her to learn a made-up language - more like three made-up languages - to get the full experience! It was nuts. She could barely even stay still for the movies, let alone read the books.

Yet something was making her focus on this. She furrowed her brows and rubbed at her belly self-consciously. She was pushing and pushing this angle that Harmonoid was bad. She knew there was something behind this... but what was it? Was she pushing too far? Was she imagining it? Was she being a "crazy unicorn"?

Zipp had offered a pegasus story called Feathers of Every Gray. It was horrifying and Izzy didn't want to think about what was in it any more than she wanted to think about her ribs breaking for some reason. She wasn't sure if it was meant to be romance, tragedy, or horror. Zipp seemed very uncomfortable with answering which it was.

These Recalloids looked like Generous☆Harmonoid, except she was supposed to be hot, and her Recalloids were just scary. Why did Recalloids even exist? Why did the actresses need to be a secret if they had guards? Why did her ribs hurt so much?

Pipp made her do a "hot pepper challenge" once and that was a tennis ball ghost. A blue tennis ball ghost clearly embedded in her chest. She stared down at it in wonder. Why was there a tennis ball ghost inside of her ribs in her mind? Those were her mind-ribs, excuse you.

Izzy suddenly dismissed all of her tangled thoughts, leapt out of the tree in a panic, and ran.

A tennis ball phoomp'd into the foliage about where her ribs previously were. The tree shook like a doorstop, and after a pause, its leaves abruptly fell off in a sudden heap. The tennis ball rolled off, bounced down the branches, and vanished into the pile with a gentle, staticy swoosh.

But while a reader might pause to appreciate this forewarned imagery, Izzy felt she had no time to ponder it; she turned her head over her shoulder while running, to see a femme fatale with overdone mascara galloping heavily down from the crest of a not-so-distant hill towards her with bouncing hair, bouncing sunglasses, and a stoic frown. This strongly encouraged her to speed it up a bit.

Turning her head back forward, she gasped in horror and skidded to a stop as two ghostly Recalloids stood in front of her at the riverside, staring at the water. Something in her mind told her that she was trapped - if she continued forward along the riverside, the second would meet her around the corner. The river was much too wide for even her to leap over.

Without looking back again, she held her breath, ran between the ghosts - which poofed into mist at once - and dove into the water. After all, if they were to follow her, these ghosts would not be standing around. Right?

Izzy gently swam with the current for about thirty seconds before surfacing downstream, clutching at a big rock, gasping for air. Looking back up the river, she indeed distantly saw both Generous☆es standing exactly where their "ghosts" had been, staring at the water's surface.

Most ponies would require at least three incidents to conclude there was a pattern. And as Izzy scrambled out of the water and scurried around a corner out of sight, she hissed and stepped back before stepping upon the faint, flickering blue phantom of a gopher. As soon as she pulled her hoof back, an actual gopher darted out of the nearby brush through the phantom, took two steps, turned its head to notice her presence, then took many more steps very quickly and vanished out of sight into a nearby hole dug into the earth.

Izzy now had her three. However, she did not quite have her wits back - for what they were worth - and was not yet able to interpret any pattern. "Aw geesh..." she panted instead. "My mane must be a rat's nest..." She paused, shuddering and confused - and, steadying her breathing, she put one hoof in front of the other and went back to Maretime Bay.

Sunny's lighthouse had been restored very quickly after the Emperor Sprout incident. After all, it made ships not crash. Since she was remodeling it anyway, she'd taken the opportunity to add an outdoor balcony, to enjoy the weather on calm days.

And on that balcony, two earth ponies and a unicorn sat at a collapsible table on collapsible chairs, the former staring at their bowls of soup, the latter at the terracotta tiling that formed the balcony floor. Relaxing low-fi crooned from a cheap radio precariously perched on the balcony's railing.

Hitch had been the first to see Izzy. He had squealed, screamed something about a thing from the bog, and vanished. Sunny, however, had fussed over her, checked her for injuries, and insisted on bringing her to the lighthouse to clean her up. She must've gone to retrieve Hitch while Izzy was in the shower.

Izzy did a lot of thinking on her way to Maretime Bay. She'd run the shower cold.

"Izzy, what's wrong?" Sunny furrowed her brows. "You've barely said a word and you're not touching your soup. Did something attack you..?"

Izzy's eyes flitted up to glance at her and back away, her stomach queasy. "Y-yeah," she mumbled. "Robots..." She shuddered despite the comfortably warm air.

"What?" Sunny and Hitch returned.

Izzy sighed, feeling sick, rocking in her chair and worrying with watering eyes. What was she supposed to say? That she had re-kidnapped a kidnapping victim and endangered their best friend by exposing her to a great risk of the same? What would they say in return?

There was nothing Izzy feared more than arguing with her friends, but she'd made that bed and now she had to lie in it, since she couldn't lie to them.

"Izzy, what happened," Sunny asked softly, though her concerned tone and furrowed brows made it a gentle request.

"Are you in trouble?" Hitch ventured. "Do you need our help?"

Izzy slowly inhaled and exhaled. "I was chased here by Recalloids."

"What..?" Sunny blinked. She leaned forward with a harsh sigh. "You mean by Harmonoids." She said in a long-suffering tone.

"No!" Izzy said quickly, and shook her head. She's already mad, her mind told her. She already thinks I'm crazy. "I mean, yes, but they're a different model, way scarier, Pipp called them Recalloids."

"Pipp?" Hitch asked as they both stared in alarm. "Did these robots attack Pipp?"

Izzy swallowed. "N-no," she sniffed. "Pipp summoned them to attack me. I dove into the river to escape 'em."

They stared quietly. They think I'm making it up, she told herself. But when I convince them they'll hate me. She wiped at her eyes and struggled with herself before she shakily breathed in and out and continued. "Pipp summoned them in anger because I exposed her as a Twin Soul."

"Wait, what..." Sunny put a hoof to her temple. "A Twin Soul? A voice actress for the Harmonoids. Pipp?"

"Yes," Izzy sniffled. "I, I wasn't completely honest with you when I asked for your tape player," she admitted. "I needed to play an a-audition tape for the Harmonoids. When Generous☆'s voice actress flubbed a line, sh-she talked normally, and it was Pipp." She waited. She's going to yell at me, she theorized.

"Wait here," Sunny pouted. "You left the tape, I'll go get it." She headed back into the lighthouse. Her heavy tread and swinging hips told Izzy she was anything but amused. Realizing that Sunny hadn't nosed in on the tape after she'd left it behind, Izzy felt even worse about her own deceit.

Sunny returned with the tape and the player, and the three listened quietly. Of course, Izzy already knew roughly how it went, but the others were stunned to hear Pipp flowing in and out between her natural patois and Generous☆'s more refined banter.

"So," Hitch summarized, "Pipp's been Generous☆ the whole time..."

"Seems like she is," Sunny sighed. "But Izzy... When you say you exposed Pipp, do you mean... in public?"

Izzy swallowed and nodded.

Sunny leapt up, her chair sliding back with a loud skrrtch, and smacked the table with both hooves, her bowl of soup bouncing up and clattering. "What were you thinking!" She sat back down and turned her hooves up in exasperation. "Don't you know Dahlia was kidnapped, and she's not even a Twin Soul?"

"Yes..." Izzy squeaked down to the floor, trembling with her ears low. During the walk back, she'd realized what a terrible and awful thing she had just done. She was expecting to hear horrid news any second, and she couldn't bear her friends' palpable displeasure with her right now.

Bad things always happen when you show up.

"How did you get the tape?" Hitch asked gently. He's disappointed, she repeated in her mind. Disappointed, disappointed. Ashamed of me.

Izzy closed her eyes in resignation. "I... interrogated her. She didn't find me very intimidating. Just annoying. She gave me the tape if I promised to go away."

They both blinked, their mouths hanging open in disbelief. "You..." Sunny struggled to process this. "You... YOU CRAZY IDIOT!" Hitch hissed in alarm, and Izzy recoiled, dots swimming in front of her eyes.

You crazy unicorn.

"You re-kidnapped Dahlia?!" Sunny repeated. "You exposed Pipp?! Why! Literally why would you do that!" She leapt up from her seat and began pacing rapidly along the balcony.

Why would you do that to everyone?!

Izzy sobbed into her hooves. "T-t-t-to find out w-w-what HarmoSync is plotting..!" she offered weakly.

"Plotting?!" Sunny Sunny turned and threw out a hoof in a frustrated wave. "What could they possibly be 'plotting'! It's a song and dance troupe!"

Why do you have to bother us?

"Sunny," Hitch gulped.

"A-a-aren't you suspicious?!" Izzy shrieked, her heart aching.

"We're having fun!" Sunny nearly snarled. "Is that a problem for you!? Enough you have to endanger Pipp?!"

We were having fun until you showed up.

"Sunny!" Hitch raised a hoof.

"No," Sunny pointed back at him, "You see where I'm coming from, right?" She leapt back into her seat and slammed the table again. "What is wrong with you?!"

What's wrong with you?

Izzy stopped crying and went completely still, her head down in her forelegs, her eyes wide despite staring only at the floor, feeling like she was about to throw up.

What's wrong with you?

The radio crackled. "We apologize for interrupting this broadcast," came the voice, "Princess Pipp of Zephyr Heights has disappeared from the castle."

Izzy pulled her head up. She wished she'd been surprised.

Did you get what you wanted?

Sunny froze for a few moments. She blinked in confusion, slowly turning her angry eyes towards the radio as though offended by it butting in.

"I repeat, Princess Pipp is missing," the voice continued. "Her disappearance comes soon after she was publicly revealed as a voice talent for the virtual performance group, Harmonoid. Authorities currently presume she has been abducted by a crazed fan, as occurred a week or two previous with another mare mistakenly identified as a performer..."

"That's..." Hitch furrowed his brows. "Izzy..."

Why do you always have to ruin everything for everyone?

"You were just there, weren't you?" Sunny scowled.

"I, I..!" Izzy stammered.

With your crazy ideas and your dumb smile.

"Just an hour or two ago, right?"

Nobody wants you around!

"You just exposed Pipp..." Hitch reminded her with a huge frown of his own.

Izzy's head buzzed, their faces floating in double vision, their words echoing and mixing with her own spiral of grief.

Get out of here, you witch!

Izzy jumped up from the table, sobbing. "I'm so sorry..!" she cried.

"Izzy..!" Sunny reached out.

But she twisted away, sobbing, and ran down the stairs.

Ch. 10 :: Getting Up

"Hey."

Izzy ignored the burly greeting and continued to stare out the window, with its brass bars and its smooth glass. The last time she'd been in this same cell, she'd enjoyed the massage chair and other comforts - but this time, she ignored them. For once in her life, Izzy's brain had completely shut down and stopped inventing new fancies.

Perhaps she was not even consciously aware that she had turned herself in at Zephyr Heights as a supposed accomplice in the kidnapping of Princess Pipp, whose uncertain location and future now consumed her thoughts, along with Sunny's outraged eyes and Hitch's sad, contemplative stare.

She couldn't even see the skyline through her quiet tears.

"Hey," the voice came again. "Don't ignore me, Izzy."

Izzy's ears perked at her name and she turned just enough to recognize the white hooves of Pipp's sister standing outside the cell, as she did last time, in the corner of her vision. Her heart was suddenly pierced with fresh pain and alarm, and she jerked her head back away before she could get a good look at her face, squirming uncomfortably.

Zipp sighed. "I'm not here to yell at you," she assured her gently. "We've got our finest looking for Pipp. We'll find her. I'm sure Hitch..." Izzy's ears drooped at the name and Zipp paused, "... has got some folks looking in the Bay, too. By the time we asked him about it, they'd already heard on the radio. Wish good news traveled as fast as bad news... y' know?"

Izzy numbly nodded, flopped onto the flip-bed, and stared at the wall. She pulled her limbs in, her face red with shame. She wasn't looking at Zipp, but she imagined her face in her head, stoically glaring, a big hateful scowl. She thought about Pipp lost in some caves somewhere, completely out of her depth, stumbling around trying to get out or find food, too afraid to even be sassy.

"Uh," she heard Zipp swallow awkwardly, interrupting her grief spiral. "Listen... You didn't kidnap my sister."

Izzy sat up and timidly turned her gaze towards Zipp.

Zipp wasn't glaring at her - in fact, she looked away uncomfortably as Izzy turned to her. She looked sad and uncertain. The cogs of Izzy's brain, rusted by her tears until they halted, began to slowly turn again. She's worried about me, she realized. She doesn't know what to say. She's not mad at me at all and she doesn't want me to think she is.

But Izzy was still quite mad at herself, and certainly had no more idea what to say than Zipp did.

"You didn't," Zipp repeated, gradually speeding up her speech as she fished around for the words. "She... was nabbed right here in the castle, we're all just as responsible as you. And should I remind you, Pipp and I are princesses. Folks have been trying to kidnap us since we were born. Especially me, since I'm the heir."

Izzy shifted on the bed and looked away. What Zipp was saying made sense, but Pipp wasn't kidnapped. Not until Izzy Moonbow stuck her dumb smile in and ruined everything for everyone.

Zipp sighed. "I don't know what Sunny and Hitch said to you." She paused while Izzy wriggled uncomfortably, trying not to think about how they looked at her. "I can see you react when I say their names, so I know something happened. But this isn't your fault."

Izzy heard a shuffling noise, but continued to stare at the wall.

"Okay," Zipp said like she was relenting. "Okay, fine. You want to be guilty, I get that. That's why you're here, that's why you turned yourself in. Fine." She sighed again and her voice grew more frustrated. "But at least feel bad for the right feathering reasons."

Izzy bit her lip. Zipp was right. She was here because she felt horrible. Her friends were having fun and she wasn't, and she made up this insane conspiracy theory to justify it, and she wondered what the right feathering reasons were for anything she'd done these last few weeks.

"Y'know that song was about you, right?" Zipp asked.

"Huh..?" Izzy finally responded. She rolled over, sat up, and looked at Zipp.

Zipp was leaning against the far wall with her chin up, pouting at her. Her eyes softened when she saw Izzy's red eyes and tear-stained cheeks. "The concert you crashed," she explained. "That song was about us." She looked away for a second, wriggling against the wall uncomfortably, before looking back. "That's what she told me when I let her catch me listenin' in on a rehearsal. Pipp's not very good at expressing herself, but she's been opening up to you girls."

"And Hitch," Izzy reminded her instinctively.

"Pff, right," Zipp smiled briefly. "And she's even more open with me than she was before."

"Open..." Izzy repeated. It might've been a question, maybe.

"Yeah, open," Zipp confirmed. "Though she didn't tell me about the Harmonoid thing - it was a non-disclosure agreement, 'n' all. Us princesses, we have some limits. Pipp's realized she can't let her hair down, because for some profane reason she started livestreaming every second of her life, and if she tries to stop now, everyone'll start nosing in, asking what's wrong."

Izzy nodded numbly. That was exactly what she did. Just stupidly. What is wrong with you, echoed in her head. You crazy unicorn.

"But you mighta noticed, after the magic came back, Pipp's been letting a bit more of herself out," Zipp concluded. "She's not just that vain selfieholic who Echos pics of cute cats and dumb ponies hurting themselves. Even her music's a bit more personal and thoughtful. You're the best thing that's ever happened to her." She paused and rolled her eyes around in thought. "To us," she corrected awkwardly.

"... Pipp's in love with us..?" Izzy doubted flatly.

"What?" Zipp coughed, stumbling off of the wall. "What're you --"

"Like, all of us? That was a love song..." Izzy sighed. "I thought the old Legends of Harmony said self-shipping was dangerous, I think the Hero of Kindness got too deep into it..."

"No, hang on," Zipp shook her head, holding a hoof up while she tried to gather her thoughts.

"Actually, it makes sense if she was in love with Sunny, 'cause of the whole sun theme thing, and 'cause Sunny's cute as heck..." Izzy bemoaned. "Actually, it's really obvious now that you mention it..."

"It's not that kind of love!" Zipp stamped her hooves, her face red. "Quit it with that... that weird stuff, this is sappy enough as it is! It's friend love! The kind the Heroes of Harmony had."

"They had a menage a six though."

"They did not!" Zipp scoffed. "You know the Hero of Charity only had eyes for the Hero of Trust --" she put a wing to her mouth as she realized what she was saying. "Bah, look!" She fluffed her feathers and began pacing back and forth down the hall outside the cell. "What I'm trying to say is, you crashed a concert Pipp was holding about how much she loved and trusted you and publicly humiliated her. That's what you did wrong, not this..." she stopped to wave a wing around. "... this suspiciously-timed kidnapping."

Izzy furrowed her brows. "... suspicious?" she repeated. She looked down at Zipp's hooves, at the blue ghost-fragments strewn over the carpet at one end of her pace-path.

"What, you didn't notice?" Zipp scoffed, turning sharply with a scuff as Izzy's eyes traveled up the wall. "Like I said, someone or another's been trying to kidnap us our whole lives. There's no way some random lovesick nerd succeeded where rebels and cartels have failed. Pipp got kidnapped almost instantly - within an hour after you left."

Izzy blinked in sudden realization. You were just there, weren't you? Sunny had said. Just an hour or two ago, right? In her grief she had presumed that Sunny and Hitch were merely hammering home what she had done, too angry with her to be merciful. But now she realized that their whole conversation had changed the instant the radio had announced Pipp's disappearance. That smelled so fishy they could smell it in the Bay.

Izzy's brain-cogs were at about half-capacity now, but the tears were still flowing. Someone was waiting and ready to kidnap Pipp, she concluded. But it's still my fault that it happened. "Pot," she called out in a monotone.

"W-what..?" Zipp paused mid-pace, glaring at her dumbfounded.

CRASH! A potted plant fell from a wall shelf and shattered into pieces where Zipp was just about to step. She leapt back into a clumsy flight with a hiss, then slowly touched back down to earth, glancing back and forth between the wreckage and Izzy.

Izzy sighed and flopped back onto her prison-bed. "Y-yeah..." she mumbled. "While I was runnin' from the Whateveroids, I discovered something about my magic." She sighed again, staring at the ceiling. "I'm psychic." She raised her forehooves in consternation. "For all the good it does me... or anyone..." She let them drop, as though she'd just related an annoyance in her life, and not given earth-shattering news.

And for Izzy, that's what it was. Her overactive psychic brain connected all the dots. Including the ones that, perhaps, weren't connected. That's why all of this happened.

After a pause, her ears perked up at the sound of metal clinking. "Huh?" She rolled back over. "Whatcha doin'?"

"Whattyou mean what am I doing," Zipp scoffed, kicking the door open. "I came here to convince you to let me let you out of jail. And now you tell me you're psychic?" She grabbed Izzy gently by the shoulders, staring into her face. "You know what psychics can do?"

"Never make up our minds what we're havin' for lunch..." Izzy pouted back at her. "Constantly panic about the thoughts of strangers forcing themselves into our brains until we go crazy and have to be put in a medically-induced coma indefinitely..."

Zipp blinked back at her in wide-eyed horror.

"I've been watching a lot of sci-fi when I visit," Izzy sighed. "Do do do do ♫ ... kiiinda regret doing it now," she looked away and spoke to the wall. "Um, just in case, could you try not thinking about anything..."

Zipp shook her head with a wince. "Psychics can find missing ponies!"

"Oh phew!" Izzy let out a huge breath, eyes closed in relief. "I had no idea you were thinking that..." She gave her a weak smile. "Yeah, that happens a lot," she admitted. "Or at least they say they're psychic and they say they helped the police and most of the time the pony is found dead..." She ignored Zipp's sudden pout. "... so you'd think if they were so psychic they woulda called in sooner." She tilted her head and looked back at Zipp. "Um, where are you going with this..."

"Izzy," Zipp sighed out her nose with a puff of steam. "You're the only one who can find Pipp."

Izzy paled. "M-m-m-me?! But I'm the reason she ow!"

Zipp kicked her in the butt to get her going. "Shut up and earn your freedom," she commanded.

"Okay-okay! I'm earning! Just point me at the freedom and I'll earn it!"

Ch. 11 :: Saturday

"Saturday. Any other Saturday it would've been a comfortable weekend. But not this Saturday. This Saturday was ten hands of poopy in an eight-hand suit. And I had to be out here, cleanin' up the mess."

"Izzy," Zipp protested, "I'm glad you're feeling better but do you need to... narrate? Or whatever that is you're doing? In that weird deep voice? Out loud..." She tilted her head with furrowed brows.

"I kept pacing in the throne room, lookin' at the windows, sniffin' at the floor. Sniffin' out clues. The princess was givin' me attitude, but I couldn't get mad at her. I knew she was stressed. Real stressed. Down bad, as her sister would say. If she were here. But she wasn't here. She was got. Because she got got. She was got-ified by the bad side of town. The bad crowd she fell in with on bad Saturdays."

Zipp cleared her throat indignantly. "That's a great full circle and all, but my sister is actually a pretty big square for how much she says otherwise on Pish..."

"Her lips kept moving, but I couldn't hear the words. All I could hear was justice. I looked at the windows again. No evidence there. They broke when the Recalloids dove in. Shattered like the dreams of foals when they grow up and realize how cruel the world is. How cold. How callous. How --"

"The world sucks, we get it," Zipp facehoof'd.

"The missy wanted me to hurry it up. The first forty-eight hours were vital. I took one more lap around the room. But there wasn't anythin' to find. Just an empty throne room with nothin' in it but the ghosts of yesterday. And ghosts weren't real. Or heck, maybe they were. But they sure didn't talk, and they couldn't tell me nothin'."

"Keep looking," Zipp scowled. "There's gotta be something."

"There wasn't any sign of a struggle. That didn't line up. The vic had robots guardin' her. Maybe they were still out chasin' me when she got nabbed. But either way, there should've been damage. Cracks in the floor. Paintings knocked askew. Brains smeared all over the place like a kid learning to paint."

Zipp urped and covered her mouth.

"But it looked like she kept her brains nice and tidy, and I knew she always kept her hair real nice and tidy. Too nice and tidy. No loose furs to track her down. No bread crumbs for Hansel and Gretel to follow back home. I could only hope she wasn't about to get gobbled up by a nasty witch."

"The witch only ate big fat kids," Zipp reminded her. "Pipp's a light eater."

"The lady had a point. Princess Pipperoni had a big personality, but she was a two-bit, one-bite social butterfly in the jaws of the big city. Kept herself a fanclub that just ate her up. Maybe one of 'em was feelin' a bit more ravenous than usual."

Zipp blinked, a wing raised, her mouth open, and her eyes darting around as she considered what part of that to object to. "... 'Pipperoni'?" she decided.

"My heart sank like those foals' dreams. Whoever plucked that little bird right out of her nest took advantage of me crashin' that concert. A concert about friends, and love, and other nice things that can't exist in this sick twisted world. That gal thought I was her best friend. And I never even learned her name. Her and Zippolini."

"You know what my full name is..."

"Zipperoni."

Her Royal Highness The Princess Zephyrina Storm of Gil, Duchess by Right of Quillwich, Countess Proper of Nightingale, 56th Champion of the Look Ma No Wings Wrestling League, bristled with a phlegmy growl appropriate of some of those titles. "Oh come on! We're not twins!"

"Zipotle."

"Stop."

"I was wearin' grooves in the floor from circlin' around. I sighed. Tired and defeated. There was nothin' in the world of fact and reason that'd help me find Pipp."

"What!" Zipp cried. "You're giving up? Just like that? Pipp's in danger!"

"She told me what I already knew. But we'd already asked everyone in the castle, and the queen didn't see a thing. The guards didn't see a thing. No one noticed a kidnapping. And there wasn't any evidence. It's like she just... disappeared."

"I won't forgive you if you quit."

"She was ready to deck me, but I never said anything about quitting."

"Huh?" Zipp tilted her head.

"Reality was nothin' doin'. It never was. It always rained when you wanted a picnic. People closed doors when you wanted 'em open. It always smelled like beetle farts in Maretime Bay."

"It does stink over there."

"So it was time for imagination. I knew somebody took her. Now who could it've been. First I looked at Zipp, the good older sister."

"Uh, no you didn't --"

"She had no motive. She didn't even know the vic was a Twin Soul. And she woulda left me to sulk in that luxurious jail and unreasonably deprive myself of its massage chair and mysteriously ever-full bowl of exotic fruits. Besides, she coulda knocked the little lady off at any time if she wanted."

"Knocked her off..?!"

"Literally. They couldn't fly until the magic came back. Woulda took one little push to turn her into Pippty Dumpty."

Zipp urped again.

"But why would she? Zipp was the heir, not Pipp. If anything, Pipp woulda wanted her dead. But Pipp hated responsibility. Bitesize wasn't a threat to Zipp, so she wouldn't'a struck first. And the queen wasn't a suspect either. Worst intrigue she ever got herself into was, uh, oh yeah, it was the fake-flying thing, wasn't it?"

"You mean when you made me and Pipp homeless?"

"Most aristocracy was a real basket case, but these folks were a basket of good eggs, and they weren't missin' the don't-kidnap-your-family eggs. A real commodity in this rotten city. No, someone hated good eggs. Someone thought the only good egg was an omelette. Someone wanted to wake up on this awful Saturday and have a nice Pippty Dumpty for breakfast."

"Please stop saying that," Zipp buried her face.

"I didn't like the idea of havin' to interrogate the whole castle staff again. No time. We needed someone who was able to keep a princess ransom. Wouldn't have been any of the petty staff, like the maids or the cooks. No, it would've been higher up. A vizier, especially."

"No way," Zipp shook her head. "We treat our cabinet super nice. Tons of benefits - tons of audits. None of them would wanna risk losing their jobs. And me 'n' Pipp grew up with the vizier, he was like our uncle, he coulda kidnapped us a hundred times, he's a cool dude."

"My instincts told me to always distrust viziers and always distrust creepy uncles, but I had nothing to pin on the guy. The rest of the cabinet was a bust. A stranger to the castle would've been noticed. I was all out of leads. But where did the robots go, I wondered. They should've come back. Maybe they did - maybe they knew where Pipp was. Maybe they were zeroing in on the kidnappers. I had no idea how Pipp was able to control them. Musta had a remote. Maybe a chip embedded in her neck. But they had to have a way to know where she was."

"Wait," Zipp brightened. "Maybe there's something in Pipp's room related to the Recalloids!"

"Was worth a shot. This old throne room had nothing to tell us except that the queen could stand to lose a few pounds."

"Excuse me..." the gentle voice warbled.

The maids continued fussing about in the hallways, ignoring the request. "Oh our dear Princess..!" Adjusting the paintings. Knocking the vases over, catching them before they shattered, setting them back upright, bemoaning their Princess and their clumsiness. "Whatever will she do without us beside her!"

The guards double-took and furrowed their brows at the visitor, looked at one another, and approached with caution.

"Excuse me..." the gentle voice repeated.

"She'll lose her mind within an hour of no Pish..." A maid stared a thousand yards away while slowly fluttering down the hall, dusting, dusting, dusting. She began to dust the flickering yellow pegasus with the long pink hair.

"Please do not do that," Kind☆Harmonoid requested.

A guard approached, her armor clanking. "Er, ma'am," she grumbled in what was clearly a put-on low voice, "The palace is off-limits to the public following the disappearance of the Princess."

Kind☆Harmonoid looked the guard up and down. "I'm sorry to impose," she apologized, "But I need your armor, weapons, and if it's not too much a military transport one mare can operate, please."

"I beg your pardon?" the guard balked, blinking.

"You might have spares I can borrow... I'll give it all back, though I can't guarantee the condition... Did I remember to say please? Please."

The guard approached to put a hoof gently on her chest. "Now look here, lady --" and she flipped the guard onto her back, her armor popping off with springing sounds and spinning in rattles on the floor, leaving her there with polka-dot shorts and her eyes wide with surprise.

The maids gasped and leapt back as the guards rushed forward, yelping and brandishing their various armaments. "Oh dear." Kind☆ fretted, easily swatting a baton out of a guard's hooves. "This is highly suboptimal."

Izzy had given up the noir thing after half an hour of ransacking Pipp's room and had gone straight to whining after an hour of interrogating a cute little robot. "Nothing?!" she cried. "Nothing at all?!"

"Celestia," Zipp commanded. "Are you hiding anything from me?"

"You are recognized as an administrator," the small cylinder replied, its lights pulsing in time with each syllable. "You have accessed all files available to me."

"Thank you, Celestia," Zipp said. "That's all." She sighed and turned back to Izzy as the cylinder's lights faded. "See? I've gone through her laptop, her backup cell phone, her backup backup cell phone, her eJournal, and her Celestia," Zipp scowled, counting them off on her feathers. "I'm making a big sacrifice here, she told me she'd un-sister me for snooping. She needs to change her password, it's 'PippIsHeckaLit' for everything. And there aren't any other electronics. If she ever had a Recalloid remote, she's still got it there with her and the kidnappers."

"Then... there's no hope," Izzy flopped down on the ground. "I'm clueless. It makes no sense. You and your mom didn't do it, nobody on your staff did it, nobody else could do it..."

"There's gotta be something," Zipp sighed in frustration and worry.

"But what?!" Izzy started sobbing. "There's no other explanation! The only possible way that she could've been kidnapped is if --"

All the dots connected, so quickly that Izzy couldn't even find the words to describe it as it happened. As though the Calculous Crystalcorn had beamed all the knowledge into her brain and her head was gonna explode like the evil lady in that movie. Her heart was not doing much better.

Zipp paused and double-took as Izzy stopped making any noise. Then Izzy leapt up with a gasp as her eyes suddenly turned pure glowing white, causing Zipp to roar in alarm and leap back from her.

Izzy had never felt this feeling before and she didn't know what to call it. It wasn't like when a friend accidentally elbowed you in the chest and you got mad at them. It wasn't like when you were losing in a video game to a stupid unthinking computer that had no soul and devolved into bingbong-words and snarls. No, this was far deeper. Izzy had, for the first time, felt the bitter, righteous anger that led sons and daughters to avenge their fathers, that made saner mares than Izzy Moonbow plot the demise of bitter rivals over months, years, and eons. She had become the avatar of retribution, a nightmare to those who walked in shadow, a demon unleashed upon all those who might trespass upon the children of light.

But she was also an excited Izzy Moonbow again and that was much worse than any of that.

"Of course..!" Izzy cried. "Zipp, come on!" Her eyes returned to normal and she galloped out of the room.

"Come on where?!" Zipp objected, flying after her. "You're still under parole, you know! How do you run so fast?! What is happening in your head?!"

One of the guards whipped her head around perfectly to follow their movements, fished around in her saddlebags for a phone, glanced at it for an instant, nodded her flickering head, and began walking after them, gradually increasing her speed. Then she tripped on her spear with a meep and face-planted.

Ch. 12 :: Have You Seen These Lots Of Things?

For the third time in the last few weeks, a cute creature ran from a pursuer down the dirt roads along the quietly murmuring coast. For the second time, this cute creature was Izzy Moonbow. But this time, although a very tired pegasian princess followed, that was not quite a chase per se; no, Izzy Moonbow was clueless that she and Zipp had completely lost their real pursuer at least five times on their journey.

Intuitively taking a turn, Izzy abruptly paused and visibly wilted, recoiling and backing into Zipp on her way back to the crossroads.

"Aagh!" Zipp bounced off of her and scowled. "What's the big idea?"

"Wroooong way!" Izzy beamed, perky again, and took the other route. Zipp glanced down the path, turning her head up to follow the goat-trail zig-zagging along the hill, and curtly nodded, recognizing Sunny's lighthouse. Then she twirled in midair like a parade dragon to follow Izzy.

Their ears twitched at the sounds of bubbled discussion, and Izzy cantered into Maretime Bay, freezing mid-step as she recognized Sunny and Hitch at the front of the crowd, staring at another Harmonoid digital display. Then she set her jaw in a determined pout and, silently weaving through the crowd, stood right behind them and craned her neck to read.

HARMONOID™

We're terribly sorry to inform our Best Friends that HARMONOID™ is unable to perform the remainder of its scheduled live performances in Maretime Bay.

Following the disappearance of her Twin Soul, whom we are obliged to concede is the inimitable Princess Pipperoni Petals of Zephyr Heights, Generous☆Harmonoid™ has fallen into an unresponsive fugue state. She thus cannot perform her duties in our intended programming, nor will she be able to record any new music or videos.

HarmoSync stands in firm support of the ongoing investigation to find Princess Pipperoni and we hope for her quick and safe return. We are currently re-evaluating our security to ensure the safety of the other Twin Souls' identities.

"Kind of a cringy way to announce someone's disappearance, isn't it?" Hitch critiqued.

Sunny nodded glumly. "I shouldn't have gone overboard."

"Hey," Hitch put a hoof gently on her shoulder. "I'm sure Izzy will accept our apology."

"'Our' apology? You didn't go nuts at her."

"I think we both let her down."

Izzy's lip trembled and her eyes watered. She looked over her shoulder, carefully backed away a step or two, and weaved back through the crowd and away, heading towards the town market, sniffling.

As soon as she was out of their earshot she burst into tears in the middle of the street and stamped her feet. "They're so saaaaaaaaad!" she cried. The ponies around her jumped back and walked around her in a wide berth, staring at her with outraged eyes.

"They-feel-awful-and-I-feel-awful-and-I-gotta-find-Pipp!" she hiccuped. "I gotta fix it! I'll fix it so good because right now everything is so baaaaaaaad!" She jumped into the air with her legs waving and continued on, staring at the ground with giant round watery eyes and a huge pout.

"There you are! Why does everyone think it's 'Pipperoni'?!" Zipp complained upon catching up to her outside the coffee shop, then double-took. "Whoa! What happened?!"

"Aw it's nothin' I'm just heartbroken," Izzy sniffled and waved off. Then she tossed her head and went back to smiling. "Anyway let's start pentagulating!" She chirped brightly.

"What. Let's start what. Are you okay?"

"Excuse me, miss," Izzy gave a little bow to a random mare nearby, "Do you know where HayBurger's main factory is?"

"No way, I don't live near the industrial sector," the young mare shook her head. "Sorry."

"That's okay, thank you for your time." Izzy walked about ten steps away. "Excuse me miss," she bowed again, "Do you know where HayBurger's main factory is?"

"That old belcher!" the plump mare wrinkled her nose. "It's just down Excelsior Way -- actually, do you have a map?"

"I sure do," Izzy beamed, fishing it out of her mane. The two of them huddled briefly as the mare marked the location.

"There you are, dear," she smiled. "Don't stay long, it'll ruin your vibrant health."

"Oh I'm sure it would! The price we pay for hedonistic convenience," Izzy made a sour face, then beamed. "Thank you very much!" Izzy walked another ten steps. "Sir!" She called. "Sir, do you know where Hay -- no, wait, I just got that one." She consulted her notes. "Uhhh... Secretary@! Do you know where the main Secretary@ factory is?"

"Uuugh," Zipp groaned. She flittered to a nearby stand and took the opportunity to sit down, laying against it. "I have no idea what's going on."

"Yes, that's Princess Zippy-something, she's my parole officer, I'm technically in the custody of the pegasian state, but I didn't do it and I'm gonna catch the guy who did," Izzy technically told the truth with a big, never-stabbed-anyone-but-kidnapped-a-mare-once smile.

The crowd ooh'd and aah'd and moved closer, eager to be part of a crime thriller.

"Maybe she ought to do our PR," Zipp mumbled, fanning herself with a magazine that had Loyal's face on the cover.

"Princess or not, that magazine's five bits, lady," the vendor protested, leaning over the counter to stare at her, his mustache twitching indignantly. His eyes widened and he became all smiles when Zipp tossed fifteen over her head onto his counter.

"Sir!" Izzy continued shouting, running around with all the energy in the world. "Sir, can you tell me where Warhorse Electronics's main factory might be..."

Knock knock knock.

Sunny pulled her head up from her living room table. "Huh..?" She furrowed her brows and yawned. "Hiiiitch? Is that you?"

"I'm with the Zephyr Heights Royal Guard, ma'am," came the gentle reply through the door. "I need to ask a few questions..."

"Zephyr Heights?" Sunny tightened her face a little further, her eyes darting in thought and worry. "Uh, just a second," she called, rapidly dashing around her house to straighten up, before answering the door.

"Hello," the guard beamed, waving. "I'm so sorry to bother you so close to dusk. You must have heard about the disappearance of Princess Pipperoni."

"Princess what?" Sunny blinked. "Oh. Pipp." She swallowed, looking down. "Yeah. We're good friends..." She sighed.

"In response to her disappearance, it seems her sister, Princess Zephyrina, has gone looking for her..." the guard tilted her head. "Have you seen her recently?"

Sunny's eyes flitted back up to the guard and widened, her whole body freezing for a second as she realized the guard's face was ever-so-slightly flickering. "She hasn't been here!" she answered, trying to make it seem as though the question was ridiculous to account for her reaction. "She rarely comes all the way down to the Bay. She definitely hasn't been staying with me."

"Really?" the guard raised her chin a little bit. "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely, officer."

"Hmm..." the guard tilted her head and considered her. "What about the infamous unicorn... Izzy Moonbow? She's also a friend of yours, isn't she?"

"Izzy visits more often, but she hasn't been to my home since the Princess's disappearance, officer." Sunny replied firmly.

"Hmm. Thank you for your time," the guard frowned, then beamed again. "Have a great day!"

"You too," Sunny returned, smiling and closing the door. Then she scowled and shuddered, leaning against the door with a hoof to her chest. "Izzy was right," she realized in a whisper. "I gotta warn Hitch."

The guard turned and walked back down the path from the lighthouse to Maretime Bay, frowning to herself. "Why did she try to mislead me?" she mumbled to no one in particular. "Meep!" She tripped on her spear again.

"Izzy," Zipp groaned, stumbling through the air after her. "Where are we going? It's getting dark."

"Not much farther," Izzy muttered to herself with wide eyes and a manic smile. "Almost there. Then the plan will be laid bare. All the beans, exposed, in their unfettered profanity. I love beans. Do you like beans?" She suddenly shot a crazed look at Zipp.

Zipp fell out of the air and stared back. "You're a crazy bean," she eventually responded.

"Oh ho, you flatterer, two can play at that game," Izzy mumbled nonsensibly, then turned her attention back to her map, not looking where she was going. "Yes, carry the two, round up. The ley line has been seen. And what has been seen can't be unseen. I can see forever."

"I told you you were having too much coffee," Zipp frowned. She would've had more herself, but she was afraid she'd just add "jittery" to "tired" and would end up... well, end up like Izzy.

"Coffee! The best bean," Izzy cackled. "They laughed at it in school. 'Loser! Go back to your video games!' Well who's laughing now."

"The coffee beans like video games?" Zipp dared to try to follow.

Izzy turned to her with a huge scowl. "Don't you know how competitive gaming started?" she turned her face back forwards and walked into a pole. "Awk!"

"Whoa! Izzy!" Zipp cried, rushing over to her as she stumbled back. "Are you okay?"

"Yuh-huh," Izzy winced, holding her nose, her eyes squeezed shut and watering. "Dibbit bob muh horb."

"What?" Zipp blinked, staring intently at her for signs of serious injury.

Izzy lowered her hoof and gently wrinkled her nose. No bleeding. "I didn't bonk my horn," she repeated, "So it's fine! You don't wanna see me bonk my horn. I might go into a mad dancing frenzy."

"Mm," Zipp nodded, glancing up at the extremity. "Must hurt like heck... Do you smell blood?"

"Nah," Izzy grimaced. "I think I'm okay. Ooouch ouch."

"Um, maybe you shouldn't walk and read the map and say crazy things all at the same time. Also, I think competitive gaming leans more towards carbonated beverages..."

"You can carbonate coffee. And don't worry, we're already here!" Izzy snarled and then beamed, blinking the tears out of her eyes and gesturing. "Ta-daaaa!" She pouted and felt at her neck. Definitely need to stop doing that, she decided.

Zipp took one look at the crumbling, silent mess of concrete and metal and, after looking down to make sure she wasn't about to poke herself with the get-sick, stamped her hoof. "Izzy Moonbow," she grumped, "If you set one hoof in this abandoned, incredibly unsanitary, already-very-dark property I'll charge you with trespassing. Or if you find a way to levitate over it as a loophole."

"You can't charge me with trespassing in another city, you're not the boss in Maretime Bay, Hitch is," Izzy protested. "And aaaaalso abandoned factories are public property in Maretime Bay and I can go in and get tetanus if I want." She stuck her tongue out.

"I could tell Hitch what you did, 'n' I'm still your parole officer..." Zipp grumbled. "... or more like your foalsitter..."

"Which means you get in big trouble if I get hurt," Izzy inferred. "So I guess you better follow me!" She skipped lightly into the wreckage and carefully stepped around the loose rusty metal.

"H-hey!" Zipp yelped, and flew after her, losing sight of her instantly. "Izzy?" Zipp called impatiently. "Izzy."

"Uh oh, I guess we're both trespassing!" Izzy's voice teased from around a corner. "Better keep our secret together like good friends doooo!"

Zipp growled. "I'm gonna make my musical comeback with a song about how wonderful every friend is except you," she threatened, flying after the voice.

Night fell upon the abandoned factory.

The flickering guard arrived, frowning. She stopped to stare at the pole Izzy had bumped her nose on, leaning in with a squint. Then she began to remove her armor, hiding it within a group of bushes near the factory, along with most of her weapons.

With a crackle, her visage returned to that of the yellow pegasus with the pink hair. Tucking only a dirk under one wing, she strode with purpose and direction into the abandoned factory.

Ch. 13 :: Tolerance

"I-Izzy, no..!" Zipp hissed.

"Relaaax," Izzy waved her off, walking up to the strange door with the bright light casting scary shadows out into the hallway outside and peeking her dumb smile against the window.

She blinked for several seconds before waving Zipp over to come look too, summoning her phone from the abyss.

"What is it..?!" Zipp whispered in awe.

"This, my dear Princess Zippopotamus, is an unravelled conspiracy!" Izzy smirked. Heeeheeheeee, her brain-voice was giggle-neighing, Heehehehe! VIIIIIINDICATION!! Eat it, Sundrop! Wait no, Izzy forgives you, Sunster, you were very upset and didn't know what to get mad at and you feel so bad and Momma Izzy's gonna make it all better.

"What did you just call me."

Maybe Zipp can eat it, Izzy considered with a frown. She's done nothin' but complain.

They were looking at a massive show room for a fully-automated assembly line. There was a huge, clear area to stand in the middle, but the walls hosted dozens of huge, robotic arms plucking metal and plastic pieces, moving them to and from the conveyor belts. Dozens of belts came into and exited the room at odd angles, showing horrific, metallic skeletons in various states of completion. Dozens more measured, produced, and assembled plastic pieces in the vague shape of equine features to serve as a shell for these cores, whose jaws hung slightly open as though eternally mildly surprised. Izzy had to admit it was kind of awesome. Too bad it was evil.

Despite no ponies being present, it was well-lit in white and blue. And yet, an equine presence must have been expected, because it was covered with branding. More than would be necessary even with a team of nerds working the place.

"I-Izzy!" Zipp choked again, her feathers bristling as Izzy confidently slid the door open, strode into the room, and began recording on her phone, which let out a beep-beep! so that everyone would know to stop being so naked all the time, a camera was on. Zipp instinctively stopped talking as soon as the recording began.

Izzy swept her phone across the assembly line, the Secretary@ logo on the computer terminals, the Warhorse Electronics logos all over the walls, and the crates and boxes stamped with Ecru and Hayburger. She resisted the urge to crack some crates open and see if anything was good to eat. She'd heard that some fabrics were even edible.

Izzy cut her phone recording (beep-boop...) before speaking again. "Let's take a look around."

"That's nuts," Zipp trembled. "Izzy, don't you see what's going on here?" She swept a hoof around the room. "This is where the robots live!"

"Yup!" Izzy chirped, looking from corner to corner. "Split up or stick together?"

"You've lost your mind," Zipp exhaled. "Don't you dare leave my sight. C-come back here!" And she zig-zagged fearfully through the air after the giddily cantering unicorn through one of the side doors.

The two walked in silence other than the clink-clink of Izzy's hooves against the plastic-and-metal flooring, until their ears perked at the distinct, tinny sound of a high-passed Linking Lonely Hearts.

Zipp quietly touched down and leaned in to whisper to Izzy. "Headphones."

"You're sure?"

"I definitely know what loud headphones sound like." Zipp insisted, then drew her hoof across her mouth. No more talking, Izzy understood with a nod.

They both walked slowly, making no sound as they followed the noise to an open side room. This time, they approached it together, peeking around simultaneously.

In the otherwise pitch-dark room, there were the headphones, resting on an unattended computer desk, their "GAMURR" lights pulsing in time with the sound. The three monitors were all full of confusing windows and subwindows, showing sound wave patterns, diagnostic logs, and Minesweeper.

Unwisely, they slowly inched further into the room - until the lights flicked on to reveal, hooked up to an operating table like Holstein's Monster, a robotic equine. Izzy's and Zipp's mouths fell open in awe and horror.

She was colossal. Double their height, easily, with the chiseled jaw, strong legs, and proud shoulders of a powerful stallion, yet the soft eyes, flowing mane and tail, and curved body of a mare. Even in this light, her flickering form was dark, especially around the backside. Her wings were large and fluffy, her horn long and dangerous, with hooves like maces.

Izzy and Zipp scampered back to the desk and, trying not to touch anything, looked wildly all over the three monitors for any information on this horrific beast. The right monitor, fortunately, was half-taken up by a project overview. Glossing over it, they learned this monster's name.

Nightmare☆Harmoonoid

"Is that a typo," Zipp whispered.

"She has the moon on her butt," Izzy whispered back. "Must be a pun -- Stop!"

Izzy hissed and slapped Zipp's hoof away as the princess, without thinking, seized upon the computer mouse to investigate further. Unfortunately, this produced a click! followed by alerts immediately appearing on the computer screens.

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED
This terminal has been accessed outside of scheduled operating hours and has been locked down.
You will now be Recalled. Goodbye.

"We gotta go," Izzy yelped, seizing Zipp in her magic and fleeing as steam began to release from the operating table.

As Izzy scampered back down the hallways, she heard the heavy ka-thunkthunkthunk of a four-legged robot getting to her feet, and picked up the pace.

"W-which way did we come in..?" Izzy huffed, glancing every which way at an intersection. "D-daffodil it, this way!" She turned right. "If we go right enough times we'll get out."

"I-Izzy, let go," Zipp squirmed. "Or at least be gentle! I can barely breathe!"

"Can -- ya -- breathe with a -- big freakin' -- robot -- sittin' on you?" Izzy reasoned between breaths, rapidly tip-tapping up the steel stairs. She turned into a side-corridor and skidded to a stumbling halt with a strained screech.

There was a flickering yellow pegasus with long pink hair standing in front of her, more or less blocking the hallway. Even devoid of clothing, both recognized this as Kind☆Harmonoid.

"Please get down!" Kind☆ called, and as Izzy slammed herself and Zipp against the floor ("SQUAWK!"), she ducked down, then leapt over their heads with wings spread and a dagger in her mouth.

She smashed right into the face of Nightmare☆ as she came up the stairs, sending them both tumbling over the railing and back down. Izzy scraped Zipp off of the ground and went back to running.

"Guuuuh-zzuuuhh?" Zipp offered, her eyes rolling. "Hehe robot fight~"

Come on, Izzy pleaded as they neared another intersection. Come on, psychic powers. Help me out here!

And with a sputtering cough and the hum of neon lights switching on, a big blue ghostly arrow appeared on the ground pointing forward. I was totally never gonna pick forward, Izzy thought as she followed the arrows. Forward, right, left, forward, second door on right, forward. I didn't realize we went through all these doors when we came in here! she complained to herself, but her mouth was too busy gasping for air to speak anything aloud.

Finally, she could see the first room, the big showroom with all the conveyor belts and branding. Pressing Zipp against her back, she leaned forward and ran like the elder was coming after her for bringing Parasprites to the village.

Phoomp! Izzy's legs came out from under her and she and Zipp toppled to the ground ("HONK!") and rolled into the showroom along with a tennis ball.

When her head stopped spinning, Izzy looked up to see Nightmare☆ standing over her, sparking from the limbs and neck a bit with her hologram unstable, but looking quite comfortable with herself, and incredibly intimidating, looking down her nose at them. Especially when her hologram glitched and made her head look like a black skull.

One of the nearby vents exploded open. With a feral growl, Kind☆ fell down onto Nightmare☆'s back and jabbed her dagger into her back. There was a distinct click! and a CHOOOO... and Kind☆ tumbled off.

"You are not tolerated," Kind☆ admonished from her prestigious position on the floor.

Nightmare☆ stood in place, frozen, then goat-fainted to the side like a statue. Her hologram glitched out for a bit before turning off, leaving her a creepy, unreasonably-tall robot-skeleton laying on the floor with a dagger sticking out of it.

Kind☆ stood back up and clinically examined herself for injury as Izzy and Zipp stared at her in frozen, confused fear. She turned her military doe-eyed gaze to Izzy and Zipp, who quivered up at her. She tilted her head this way and that. Then she smiled with closed eyes. "Come with me if you don't mind," and she offered them a hoof to help them up.

"Didn't I tell you," Dahlia huffed, "That I wanted nothing to do with Harmonoid ever again?"

They were back in the coffee shop, the three of them sitting at a booth away from the window. Dahlia was their waitress and the only one working that shift. She had almost fainted when she saw Kind☆Harmonoid walk through the door.

Having kicked open an Ecru crate before leaving, Kind☆ was now dressed in an elegant, cherry-and-black kimono, with black pins and red ribbons in her hair. The sleeves largely obscured her forelegs, and while leaving the factory, she had retrieved some of the weapons she had taken from Zephyr Heights and stuck them there and other places. Zipp had already arranged for the armor to be returned to Zephyr Heights.

"Please do not worry about Nightmare☆," Kind☆ soothed. "That Recalloid should be disabled for at least several hours."

"You sure," Zipp shivered.

"She has not been properly fitted with a casing as she is still in early testing," Kind☆ answered. "Because of this, I was able to disconnect her main drive. This has corrupted most of her files and forced an emergency shut down. She'll require a reformatting of her main drive and a clean reinstallation of her operating system. She won't remember us when she reactivates."

"Why are you helping us?" Izzy blinked at her. "Aren't you a Recalloid?"

"As I told you earlier," Kind☆ returned, "I am Recalloid unit 83N153. My default hologram is HarmoSync Model 105, so if it's convenient, you may simply think of me as Kind☆Harmonoid. I was scheduled for decommission due to... aberrant behavior..." She blushed and looked away.

"What's that mean." Zipp crossed her forelegs, one eyebrow raised.

"I don't like being mean."

Izzy and Zipp exchanged a glance.

"I soon became aware that the two of you were investigating the Princess's disappearance thanks to social media and suspected you might discover and search the factory, thereby endangering yourselves." Kind☆ smiled. "It seems I was right on time."

"How are you able to talk?" Zipp pouted. "Harmonoids need an actress to perform their voices."

"Technically true," Kind☆ blinked slowly once. "Every satisfactory performance is recorded. HarmoSync helps develop an advanced vocoder AI that, with equine guidance, can process speech samples and build up a database of semantics, emotions, and common speech quirks. As the actresses continue to perform, providing an increasingly larger library of samples, Recalloids' speech becomes rapidly more colorful and natural. Provided the samples are well-chosen, as little as 10 minutes may be sufficient to produce a convincing equine voice. This vocoder AI is known as Deep16."

"Wait," Izzy's ears perked. "There's a mobile app that lets you do that. Wasn't it 15?"

"Version 15 is hosted for limited public use," Kind☆ clarified. "The latest build is available only to certain privileged parties and isn't ready for public release."

"It's not self-aware, is it..?" Zipp conjectured, shaking nervously.

"I don't know," Kind☆ answered. "Am I self-aware?" She tilted her head.

The two shared a very uncomfortable look.

"Do you know where Pipp is?" Zipp requested.

"No," Kind☆ shook her head. "But you were mistaken in presuming she was in the factory."

"Is that why we were there?!" Zipp threw up her hooves in frustration. "I was so confused this whole time, Izzy, you never explain anything." She paused, blinking. "... Uh... Why would Pipp be in the factory..?"

"How do you know she isn't in the factory?" Izzy pouted.

"The security of the factory is lacking. I was able to acquire sufficient clearance to view the entire blueprint and perform a biometric scan of every room, including secret areas. Consequently, I was able to verify that the factory held 102 Recalloids and only 2 equines."

"The two being us," Izzy sighed.

"Why would Pipp be in the factory?" Zipp repeated, slapping the counter.

"She would not," Kind☆ insisted. "It's much more likely she is somewhere in Zephyr Heights."

"You're not gettin' me," Zipp gave a raspy sigh and dropped her head onto her forelegs on the counter.

Izzy, however, gasped and clapped her hooves to her mouth. "I'm so stupid..!"

"Not at all," Kind☆ contradicted, "Your deductive abilities, emotional intelligence, and creativity are rather commendable."

"U-uh, thanks," Izzy blushed, beaming, then looked serious again. "Zipp, why didn't you point out how silly I was being!"

"I did," Zipp mumbled into her forelegs. "But can you explain to me what kind of silly you were being this time."

"Of course Pipp would still be in Zephyr Heights! That's where HarmoSync is headquartered!"

"Hnn?" Zipp grunted.

"Zipp," Izzy scoffed, "HarmoSync kidnapped Pipp!" Kind☆ nodded, unaware that Zipp couldn't see her.

"Wait, what?!" Dahlia suddenly objected. "Hold on. HarmoSync kidnapped their own actress."

"They must've!" Izzy insisted, bouncing her butt in her seat. "No one else could possibly have done it. She had two Recalloids guarding her that sure never brought her back to the castle. They had to have come back and kidnapped her. Right?"

"Hold on," Dahlia was suddenly quivering. She reached up and brushed her hair anxiously. "Is there a way to tell a Recalloid apart from a pony?"

"The most obvious difference is the flickering of our holograms," Kind☆ responded at once. "Or attempting to touch the subject. The hologram isn't solid."

"What about if I can't see clearly and I'm tied up?"

"Please wait a moment," Kind☆ asked, and blinked many times, thinking it over. "Perhaps tongue twisters."

"Huh?"

"Deep16 does not directly emulate the equine vocal apparatus or any aspect of psychology," Kind☆ explained. "Equines are prone to faltering in speech when confronted with difficulty, and will stutter, repeat themselves, or become angry or embarrassed. A Recalloid will produce speech, correct or incorrect, with full confidence and no shame."

Dahlia fidgeted. "I think I was kidnapped by Recalloids."

"What!" Izzy cried in scandal. "I'm not a Recalloid!"

"Not you, idiot!" Dahlia scoffed. "Before! The first time!"

"Ooooooh," Izzy meeped, putting her hooves together and looking at the wall, embarrassed.

"Listen, robot," Dahlia ran a hoof through her hair. "I'm gonna write a... a word down, and I need you to read it out loud for me. Okay?" She quickly skritched something down at the counter and tossed it onto the booth.

"Okay." Kind☆ accepted, and looked at the paper. She paused for a few seconds. "Laaawooillyillykuu~wayyooooa," she delivered sincerely and without slurring. Dahlia's and Izzy's fur stood on end as, at least in one part of that utterance, she made an echoing trilling sound that was not generally available to ponies.

Dahlia paled and stumbled in place, a hoof to her temple. "Oh geez," she mumbled.

Izzy looked at the note.

Lauwiliwilinukunukuʻoiʻoi

Her mouth fell open. "... What the heck is that word? Lawwy.. li... willy..."

"Say it in pieces. Lau, wili-wili, nuku-nuku, 'oi'oi," Dahlia repeated. "Better known as the longnose butterfly-fish."

"You used to go fishing with your dad..!" Izzy remembered.

"And swimming and diving too, so my house has lots of fish memorabilia," Dahlia nodded. "Whenever I invited someone over, they always stopped to ask me about that fish. But when I got kidnapped, they didn't miss a beat. They just... said it. Very wrong, but they said it, like it was totally normal." She breathed in and out. "They must've been robots. No wonder they creeped me out so much, they literally weren't ponies."

"Izzy!" Zipp suddenly leapt up and slapped the counter, making the ponies jump.

"Is there danger?" Kind☆ asked, looking at the windows.

"No," Zipp swallowed and looked abashed. "Izzy, we're getting on the train."

"Huh?!" Izzy squeaked. "Why?!"

"We're going to Zephyr Heights," Zipp rubbed at her eyes, "When we get there, I'm gonna come from the east like Star Swirl on the fifth dawn, and wedgie every single dweeb in HarmoSync HQ, and..." She was yawning again. "... I need a nap before I go do that."

"Will you need my assistance?" Kind☆ fretted. "I would likely draw a crowd, which would endanger bystanders..."

"No, they might reprogram you or something, I want you to stay in Maretime Bay," Zipp instructed. "Find Sunny Starscout and Hitch Trailblazer. The one lives in the lighthouse outside town and the other's the sheriff. Protect them like you'd protect us."

"I am familiar with them," Kind☆ nodded. "Please be safe."

"Star Swirl didn't give out wedgies," Izzy huffed.

Ch. 14 :: He's Back

Izzy felt funny. Really heavy. Like the time she first learned what "firesalt" was. Izzy had a bad habit of jumping in with four hooves. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to open them. Did she fall asleep on the train? What time was it?

"Hahaha, the fools awaken at last," called a whiny voice in what he probably thought was a villainous drawl.

"Izzy's an idiot, but don't talk about my sister like that," a snippy voice chastised him. "You're on thin freaking ice, you son of a walking beehive."

"Oh sure I can't call your sister a fool but you can just talk about my moooom?! And you know what they say about the best-laid plans..."

Izzy looked up with bleary eyes as two ponies came into focus. "Wha..?" She tried to move, but seemed to be tied to something really heavy. There was a small table in front of her. Aw crud, someone's gonna yank out all my teeth 'n' put 'em on that table, she imagined. Then she gave a sleepy smile. Never mind, there's no ghost-teeth on the table, I'm good.

She was in a dark room with no windows and harsh lights - exactly like she'd tried to recreate to interrogate Dahlia. There was a kitchen islet in the far corner, and Izzy realized she was feeling a bit peckish. As a unicorn, she was amazed by even the simplest modern kitchen. This one had the sink, fridge, and that magical box that made bowls clean. A wood block with a bunch of knives stuck in it. A microwave? A toaster!

And Pipp, sitting there slowly drinking her tea between bites of toast, holding the cup like she was trying very hard not to break it with her hooves, glaring daggers across the room at...

"Long time no see," the red face with the slicked-back yellow hair smirked. "How serendipitous that I expected you to track me down eventually!"

"Did mommy teach you that word, Sprout," Pipp jabbed.

"Yes -- I mean shut up!" Sprout stamped. "Why are you being like this."

"You kidnapped me," Pipp reminded him.

"I knew it," Izzy mumbled.

"Wha..?" Zipp mumbled, blinking her eyes open. They widened as soon as she saw Sprout. "Aw hecks nah," she slurred, and began struggling weakly in her binds.

"How'd we get here," Izzy racked her easily-distracted brain to try to remember.

Pipp sighed, loudly. "Zipp led the charge into HarmoSync HQ and the two of you got got by Recalloids."

"Oh," Izzy pouted. "We shoulda thought of that."

"Yep," Zipp admitted.

"Indeed," Sprout drew himself up, "You otherwise uncovered my entire nefarious plot!"

There was an awkward pause.

"Would rather keep your plot covered, actually," Zipp contradicted.

He scowled, closing his eyes indignantly. "After my ignominious defeat, I, Sprout, took my remaining funds --"

"And some mommy-money," Pipp interjected.

"-- and-some-mommy-money and invested!" Sprout rose a tense hoof and stared up at the ceiling. "I knew that the unification of the three great cities would bring about a massive boom in the market! So I bought controlling shares in a few key companies."

"Ecru for the clothes, Secretary@ for the typewriters, Warhorse Electronics for most of the tech, Whinny Records for the music, and Hayburger for the heck of it," Izzy listed off.

"Hm!" Sprout stroked his chin with a raised eyebrow. "Someone's been connecting dots. These five companies rapidly expanded into these new markets."

"Not Bridlewood, we don't have electricity," Izzy reminded him.

"You still like a good burger, though," Sprout insisted. "And burning them over wood gives a unique flavor."

"... They are pretty good," Izzy nodded weakly and looked back down at the floor as Sprout preened himself.

"With these fortunes, and altered schematics from CanterLogic's old projects, I was able to realize my master plan!" Sprout drew himself up.

"Makin' a robot army?" Zipp guessed.

"... uh..." Sprout fidgeted awkwardly. "Pretty much!" He smiled widely. "The Harmonoids were an excellent cover - and one that secured unexpected levels of funding, as well! But the Recalloids, which you've unfortunately brought to public attention before their scheduled debut, are the real project."

"You absolute pig," Izzy condemned in her most hateful voice, "You were calling ponies your 'Best Friends' to set up a cult of personality so that they'd patronize your bullpoopy corporate power grab and trust the robot police you were gonna enforce as a totalitarian dictator..."

"What she said," Zipp nodded along.

"Honestly," he shrugged, "I don't know if the 'Best Friends' thing even matters. Who'd argue with the robot police?"

"I might," Izzy and Zipp said at once.

"Don't you dare skip over the part where you kidnap your own actresses when they get outed," Pipp slapped the counter, making Sprout jump and glance over at her nervously. "No, go on, explain how that figures into your stupid plan."

"Um," Sprout cleared his throat. "W-well, there was a bit of a mix-up with Dahlia."

"Oooooh? How's that."

"Uh..." Sprout fidgeted with his hair. "Well, for one, I told them to 'make it look like a real kidnapping'. But they tried to make it look like one to her too, which, uh, wasn't necessary."

"You have fortunately amended that mistake," Pipp gave a big, dangerous smile.

"But also, uh," Sprout looked anywhere but at her. "Dahlia wasn't... actually... accepted as an actress..."

"That's right." Pipp stared him down. "She wasn't."

"I'm working it out, okay?!" Sprout stamped. "I told the Recalloids to capture and I quote 'anyone publicly identified as a Twin Soul'! I just... neglected to tell them to only capture them if they actually were a Twin Soul!"

"Mmm," Pipp nodded over and over like an angry chicken, her smile growing wide and toothy, "Wow, I sure hope you didn't kidnap anyone else you weren't supposed to." And she leapt up and smacked the counter with both hooves. "LIKE A PRINCESS!!"

Sprout recoiled. "It gets sympathy for the braaaaand!" he stamped.

"You're an idiot too," Pipp dismissed him. She hissed and jumped back as the door opened and Cheerful☆Harmonoid heavily sauntered in, balancing a huge tray on her back.

"Room service, cheer!" the rotund marebot piped with a smile.

Sprout cringed, then cleared his throat, drawing himself up, one hoof pulling at the collar he wasn't wearing. "You two must be hungry," he drawled as Cheerful☆ carefully set two paper bags on the counter next to Pipp. "I will need to think about what to do with all of you after I've, eh, taken over the world. Stay here, you'll be safe and there's enough food until I get back. A pity I couldn't nab Sunny and Hitch, they'll be a pain in the butt to deal with..." He grumbled as he shambled to the door, leaned in with a suspicious look both ways, and covered his hoof while tapping in a code.

When the door opened, Cheerful☆ obediently left at Sprout's gesture, then giggled. Phoomp! they heard as she fired a tennis ball down the corridor for no apparent reason. As Sprout sighed and followed, the door closed on his tail behind him. "YOWCH!!" he yelped, pulling his tail free and leaving the three of them alone.

Regaining her senses, Izzy began to realize that one, Pipp was staring at her and was probably really angry with her and that made her heart hurt, and two, she was pretty darn hungry.

"Hey Pipp..?" she decided to work on both of these problems at once, "Could ya bring those bags over to us, please..."

Pipp gave a huge, exaggerated sigh, rolled her eyes, and seized the bags with her wings, stomping over and slapping one down onto Izzy's table, setting Zipp's down more gently.

"Thank you," Izzy offered sadly, "And I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what." Pipp spat, working to remove Zipp's binds first. "Ruining my public image and life in general again?"

"Treating you like a toy in a silly game," Izzy clarified as Zipp quickly freed her from her own ties. "Even though I was right about HarmoSync, I didn't respect you and I acted like a foal and if I'd been a little more mature you wouldn't have gotten kidnapped by robots and I wouldn't have pooped all over your really nice song about how happy you are that we're friends and we could've taken down HarmoSync properly together."

Pipp crossed her forelegs, wings-a-fluttering, and sighed. "Fine," she said. "I accept your apology."

"The chorus is really good," Zipp praised, double-taking and plucking the tennis ball off of Izzy's horn.

"Yeah, it's too bad the readers can't hear it," Izzy added, magically ruffling her bag open and taking a half-hearted bite of whatever was in there, just barely waiting to get the paper off. "Mm," she admitted with her mouth full, "Goff, theef ah goo burbrrs."

Zipp hopped back to her chair, fished out a burger, and took a bite. She closed her eyes and nodded, chewing thoughtfully and swallowing. "He may be a momma's boy and a dweeb but I guess Sprout knows a good burger when he eats one."

"Yeah cool, you two stuff your faces I guess," Pipp shrugged, trotting back to her seat at the kitchen counter. "We've got all the time in the world unless we figure out how to get outta this dump. Any ideas?"

"Mm!" Izzy objected, holding a hoof up and chewing.

Pipp glared and waited twenty-odd minutes for Izzy and Zipp to devour their burgers, fries, and sodas in relative quiet. Then, after the annoying blurble of Izzy sucking on her straw with a now-empty cup died down, the unicorn hopped off her chair, skipped lightly to the door with its electronic numpad, and with a quick series of pulses from her horn, got it to open.

"... Wha..." Pipp blinked.

"I'm psychic!" Izzy beamed, pointing to her horn. "Kind of! I could 'see' what numbers Sprout tapped when he left. C'mon!" She turned and headed out the door.

"What-do-you-mean 'why'd I voice a Harmonoid'!" Pipp objected. "Generous☆ was made for me! Hashtag me IRL!"

Izzy quite forgot she was talking with them, looking all around the tall, narrow corridors with wonder as they searched for the way out. Pipes, wires, boxes, and switches covered and made up the walls as though they were just scattered around for scenery and not actually designed with intuitive function in mind. There wasn't even enough room for a pegasus to fly in here, the princesses were walking. And it was really dark. Her glowing horn cast stark shadows dancing in the labyrinth of mechanics that spooked her a little bit. And she was still hungry.

"The paycheck can't hurt," Zipp looked pointedly away.

"The paycheck ain't squat!" Pipp stopped to stamp. "We're princesses! Everyone's paycheck is our paycheck."

"See, saying stuff like that is why ponies are cool with kidnapping us," Zipp scowled.

"Okay fine, so the extra spending money is low-key abap," Pipp rolled her eyes and trotted to catch up with Izzy's longer stride, "But it really wasn't a big concern for me."

"You coulda let somebody else who did need the job take it," Zipp insisted.

"They should've worked harder," Pipp sniffed, her head held high. "Why you all up in my biz?"

"I'm trying to get you to admit why you really wanted the job," Zipp replied matter-of-fact.

"And what reason is that?!"

"Becauuuuse," Izzy answered without thinking or looking, "... it was the only part of your life that wasn't broadcast to the whole world and subject to your family's approval."

"I..!" Pipp sighed and audibly deflated. "Y... yeah. I guess."

"Not true, she also turns it off when she poops," Zipp jabbed. "We don't inspect that, either."

"Zipp!" Pipp squealed in scandal. "You know princesses don't do that --" Then she gasped. "Izzy! Watch out!"

Huh?

DOOONNGGGnnnnggnnngg...

Startled by the sudden echoing sound and flash of sparks, Izzy felt herself stumbling back and dropping to her knees, her eyes slamming shut. Then she realized there was a horrible searing pain rapidly growing throughout her entire horn, threatening to split her head in half like a coconut.

"Omigosh..!" She heard Pipp trot to her side. "Are you okay..?!"

"RRRRRRRRRRGH!!!" Izzy's hooves slammed against the ground and the baleful eyes of a banshee, now the only light in the utter darkness besides the red and green bips of the local machinery, glared back at the tiny pegasian, fiery and watering, causing her to squeak and flee back. "Do I withering look okay, Pipp?" Izzy growled. "I just bashed my daffodilling horn on this kerfuffling..!" She glanced up and blinked through her tears of agony. "This kerfuffling whatever that was! Aaagh, windigo kids!"

For the passage Izzy had just attempted to travel was designed for - and, presumably, by - an average pegasus. They were a bit on the short side, and had no horns. Izzy, however, was a whole hand taller than Pipp before accounting for the several inches of horn. So of course, the many doohickeys jutting out across the claustrophobic passageway were not quite enough clearance for her, most notably the massive pipe she had just bonked her horn on.

And a bonked horn was one of the best ways to get an unhappy Izzy Moonbow. Especially when she was also hungry.

"W-whoa, whoa, watch the language..!" Zipp called, raising one wing defensively in the darkness. Pipp had fled back from Izzy and clung to the general position of her sister.

"Uh, bingbong?" Pipp glanced back and forth anxiously between the two. "How many of those do we need?"

"Go bingbong a tree," Izzy hissed. She kept her horn low, held out a hoof to find the pipe, ducked under it, and shuffled onwards in a grump.

Ch. 15 :: Judgment Day

"Aaaaahahahaaha! Burn! Burn to the grouuuund! Burrrrrn!" Izzy cackled manically, standing upon a heap of corpses, harshly lit by the flames of her burning victims, her smile toothy and her eyes dark.

Don't worry, all of the corpses were robots. And half of the burning pile was probably tennis balls anyway.

The girls had found the elevator taking them from Sprout's secret bunker to Sprout's less-secret penthouse suite in Zephyr Heights, whose most notable feature was the excellent view of the entire city being overrun by Recalloids. Unfortunately for the forces of robot, the trio rapidly descended the complex by leaping from Sprout's balcony jacuzzi and the Recalloids were thus set upon not only by Vengeful Zephyrina and Indignant Pipperoni, but by Horn-Bonked Izzy, who found her mood marginally improving with each of the three hundred and forty two Recalloids she had hitherto destroyed within the span of fifteen minutes. Unfortunately for everyone, once the pain in her horn had sufficiently faded, she became much more carefree in wildly hurling magic around. She may not have been able to do anything specific, but she was absolutely able to cause general mayhem by just firing and forgetting.

"I-Izzy, do ya think you're going a bit ham?" Pipp dared to ask. She stepped too close to the smoldering pile of robots, hissed (as did her hoof), and backed away, shaking her smoking hoof in pain.

"Smells more like chicken!" Izzy retorted, then abruptly returned to her normal, vacant expression, looking worried. "... I didn't fry any pegasuseseses, did I?"

"We're not chickens!!" Pipp squawked. "And no, everyone flew the coop --" she paused and winced. "Dang it, I flew right into that one --" She clucked in indignation. "I'm gonna shut up."

"How do we know what ham and chicken are..." Izzy mumbled to the sky with suspicious eyes.

"We can verify casualties later!" Zipp admonished. "There are more! A lot more!"

And indeed, Recalloids were assembling into a vague wall around the remnants of the city block, like a blockade.

"We must be priority one," Pipp whimpered, giving Izzy a blaming glance.

"Izzy must be priority one," Zipp corrected. "She's like Augeron Wick, we're more like those bumbling robots from that space movie with the laser swords."

"TO THE CASTLE!!" Izzy declared, blasting a wave through a random corner of the blockade and charging off.

"I guess your horn must be feeling better!!" Pipp cried as she and Zipp followed.

"How did that dopey little momma's boy sneak so many weaseling robots right under our very nosy noses?!" Izzy yelled, teleporting through an Honest☆Harmonoid and kicking her right in the butt to knock her off the royal plateau. There was a sizzling hissing sound and a bunch of black smoke came up from over the edge.

"You mean -- your - very nosey nose," Pipp panted, darting in a figure eight as two Loyal☆Harmonoids circled around her. "Some of us -- keep our noses --" She suddenly dove and escaped to the side as the two of them pounced, crashed into each other, and fell apart in a cloud of smoke. "-- clean!" Pipp landed, shaking her mane.

Izzy ducked as a Cheerful☆ sailed right over her head, paused in midair, shrugged, and dropped off the plateau with a monotone "waaa-hee-hoo-hooeeeeey."

Izzy spun around in alarm at the sound of smashing behind her instead of below her. Zipp was pinballing back and forth between a dozen Recalloids, leaving dents in their ribs and heads with each bounce. She pirouetted off the last one and landed as they all collapsed and burst into scrap at once. "This is awesome!" She nearly squeed. "I mean, uh, dang, it's gonna break the royal bank account to fix all of this devastation."

"That's gonna be a lot of lemonade," Izzy conjectured, hopping onto a Generous☆'s punch like a martial arts master, skipping up its foreleg, jerking her whole body to dodge the phoomp! of a tennis ball, and taking its head off with a swish of her pipe-tempered battle-forged horn.

"Lemonade won't cut it," Pipp rasped. "AIIE!" She received a tackle from a Loyal☆, spun in the air with it, and hurled it off into the distance. "I'm gonna be running charity concerts for months! ACK..!" She took a second tackle and threw it again. "And you better not dare to screw any of 'em up, Izzy. I'll sue you." This time she twirled, causing Loyal☆ to slide right over her and plant itself right inside the face of a huge digital Pipp on a nearby building. "Aaaah! That's my good side!!" she whined.

"... Which one's your good side?" Zipp raised an eyebrow, punching a hole in a Merciful☆'s face without looking.

"My whole face is my good side? Like duuh?" Pipp whined, flying in circles with an Honest☆ trying to catch her with some ultramodern megafiber lasso. After a dodge, Pipp grabbed the lasso and flew off, with the Honest☆ repeating "Eeyyiiip yip yip yip yip yip!", finishing with "hoosuappuru da ne!" as she dragged it off of the cliffside and let go.

"Pipp is pretty cute," Izzy praised, magically swatting Recalloids out of the air as they came too close, without looking.

Zipp stood on a robot and ripped its throat open with her teeth. "As long as she flosses her teeth," she wrinkled her nose, spitting out bits of plastic. "She livestreams so often she sometimes forgets."

"Ewww!" Izzy stuck her tongue out in disgust as Zipp cackled.

What felt like an eternity later, the girls looked over the city from the royal plateau, and surveyed the damage.

"How... many robots... did we fight?" Izzy panted with an exhausted, sleepy smile, her horn sputtering and flickering.

"Over nine thousand," Zipp shrugged, not winded at all.

"What..! Nine thousand!" Pipp balked at her, while laying on her back like she was making snow pegasuses.

"Izzy alone must've taken out about 5K," Zipp estimated, furrowing her brows. "Did we see a single Kind☆?"

"They made me mad," Izzy justified. "They friendship-signaled, they pushed products from sleazy Big Beeswax, they had the nerve to lock me up in a jail for cute little pegasus fillies like you girls and make me bonk my horn on the way out, and after all that it turns out the cheap mass-produced models are practically made outta paper compared to the prototypes?! Nuh-uh. Momma Izzy had enough." She stamped a hoof to accentuate, making the sisters shudder.

"Well," Pipp stood up, stretched like a cat, and looked back at her home, "At least the castle is intact... Let's do a quick fly-around."

As soon as they came into the business district, their ears perked in alarm at the sound of a stallion groaning and a weird, metal clanging sound. He stumbled around the corner. "My leg," he groaned, "I stepped in a bucket and I can't get my hoof back out..." They looked down at the bucket on his hoof and all lowered their heads with closed eyes and a sputtering sigh.

Pipp fluttered up to examine a busted digital billboard. "Hm, come to think of it, we might be able to salvage some of the robot parts for repairs," she considered. "Gotta be tons of high-grade circuity currently scattered all over the city." She snorted steam out her nose and spread her forehooves wide, frogs up. "Hellooooo? There's a sand shortage, peeeeopllllle."

"Yeah, megalomaniacal tyrants don't seem to be affected by the depletion of natural resources," Zipp frowned, hovering between her and Izzy a story down. "But there might be too much custom or proprietary stuff. It might not be compatible, and if it was, we might have to go through a lot of legal tape, lest we violate the intellectual property of a guy who just attempted a coup."

"They're too roundy," Izzy called up with authority. "Your buildings are made outta flat."

They both stared at her.

"What?" she blinked up at them. "You're not gonna use those pony head-shaped bits of plastic to make nothin'. Are ya?" She tilted her head.

Pipp's phone buzzed and began singing. I want to go bliiiind in your light! it bellowed in her voice. She jumped with a yelp, rolling and spinning back down to the ground, clumsily juggling her phone in her hooves and wings before securing it and landing elegantly.

Zipp landed nearby and shared a look with Izzy. Only Pipp would make herself her ring tone, the look said.

Pipp put the phone on speaker mode. "Y'ello, Princess Pipp and associates speaking, and no I'm not kidnapped anymore. Are you calling in regards to the recent robot invasion of Zephyr Heights?"

"It's Sunny, I'm really glad that you're okay, and yeah, I was wondering about that," came the response. "Maretime Bay got hit too. Hitch and I just earned a key to the city, sure had our hooves full doing it though. Good thing I've got these magical wings and horn I can summon at will that bring the sun's wrath down on anything that mildly displeases me. We also have a very spirited and well-dressed Kind☆Harmonoid who says you're her friends and who is currently braiding my hair... Is everyone alright?"

"The three of us are fine, and it was more exercise than anything," Zipp leaned in and offered. Izzy nodded with an evil grin while Pipp frowned. "We're checking the damage right now and don't know of any casualties."

Distant shouting could be heard from the phone.

"Are - you - all - okay!" Izzy leaned in and shouted. "Who's - yelling!" Pipp leaned away from her with an outraged face.

"Whoa-whoa-whoa," Sunny objected. "You mean besides you? That's Sprout," she sighed. "Hitch is taking him in. Did he make the robots?"

"Who'd'ya think made the robots?" Pipp sassed. "It's a little complicated but it's kind of our fault."

"He - invested - in - a - bunch - of - companies - which - got- rich - from - the - unified - market - and - used - them - to - make - robots!" Izzy hollered.

"... Has Izzy ever used a phone before?" Sunny questioned after a pause.

"Sheeeee has one..." Pipp volunteered.

"That's not what I asked," Sunny complained. "Anyway. Hitch and I are fine, Kind☆ says she has only superficial injuries, but what're we gonna do about all the damage to both cities?"

"Make that jerk Sprout pay for it," Pipp answered at once. "He's probably gonna get booted off all the boards of directors or whatever, but I'm sure he's got enough left to cover it. The rest will have to come outta the royal funds and whatever Maretime Bay uses for civic projects..."

They heard Sunny groan in frustration. "We're pretty well-off, but that's gonna be a lot of lemonade," she sighed.

"That's what I said!" Izzy beamed.

"Come by Maretime Bay later," Sunny requested. "We need your input on whether to put Sprout on the moon for a couple centuries. Hooves-to-hearts."

"Hooves-to-hearts," they all chirped.

"What does that mean?" Kind☆ asked as they all hung up.

They awkwardly sighed out at the broken ruins of the city.

"I'm starving," Izzy suddenly piped up. "Any delis around here still standing?"

"End-a-da-world sandwiches, right heah, get your end-a-da-world sandwiches, life's too short right now not ta try one," came the immediate call from just down the street.

They looked at each other, shrugged, and headed down that way.

Ch. 16 :: No Rest For the Cutie

Creak! Creak! Creak! Bam! Bam! Bam!

"Mama," a young unicorn asked curiously, "What's Izzy Moonbow doing?"

"Speak not the name of the Witch of Tartarus, child," his mother chided him in a hush, and began dragging him off. "Let us away afore you are taken by her windigous madness."

"But she's makin' somethin' cool --"

"Tirek's work is not 'cool', young colt!" she hissed, and they disappeared into the forest.

Izzy Moonbow continued singing to herself in her front yard, craning her neck this way and that to check the bolts on her latest masterpiece.

La la la sun, la la, la la la
La, la, la, laaaa so warm
I have no shade lalalaaaa la la
I want to-go rice late at night

"... Wait, is that how it goes?" She blinked, then shrugged, picked her wrench back up with a twirl, and began singing again, replacing everything with la's until she got tired of it and continued working silently.

Creak, creak!

Thip, thip, thip.

Izzy frowned, tilting her head. "Huh? That's not the noise a wrench makes." She furrowed her brows.

Creak, creak! She waited with an accusatory glare towards her invention.

Thip, thip, thip.

"What the heck," Izzy murmured, scratching at her head, "... now just why in the world is it making a noise like that --"

"Izzy?"

"Eyaagh!" Izzy leapt up and turned at the sudden voice from behind her. "Oh!"

"Sorry," Sunny was standing right behind her with a grimace, her head low and her hooves turned in. "Um, I thought I'd drop by, since we can never call you."

"Funny you mention that -- oh, that was your foots making that noise!" Izzy chirped, forgetting completely what she was about to say otherwise. "I thought my wrench was being sassy!"

"Oh, uh, no, that was me," Sunny sped that along without question. She looked awkwardly around before clearing her throat. "So uh, whatcha doin'?"

"Gettin' myself burned at the stake," Izzy beamed, patting the large, blue-and-white panel next to her affectionately like a beloved pet.

"W-what..?!" Sunny couldn't passively accept that statement.

"Unicorns are still gettin' used to this 'magic' thing," Izzy explained, looking over her work once more. "For every real magic thing we learned how to do we made up five that you can't but if you figure out how you'll be exiled as a windigo-child."

"... A windigo..?" Sunny blinked.

"Yeah, those cloud-pones that hate friendship," Izzy confirmed. Bam, bam, bam! She smacked a few more spots with her wrench. "Everything we don't like we say windigos did it."

"Unicorns appear to be rather superstitious..."

"Aw you don't know the half of it, sister," Izzy rolled her eyes. "Oh yeah! About my phone! It's good you're here, can you tell me, is this what this is supposed to look like?" She smiled and waved at the panel she'd set up.

Taken aback, Sunny double-took and stared at it. "Uh... That depends. What is it?"

"Sounds like a no..." Izzy drooped.

"It looks like a solar panel?" Sunny ventured.

"Aaaaah!" Izzy leapt up, now peppy. "Yes yes yes! That's exactly what it is! Maybe! I don't really understand how they work but I think I can charge my phone here at home now!"

"That's great!" Sunny smiled, looking it over, until the smile became a forced grimace as she noticed something missing. "So uh," the corners of her mouth twitched, "Where do you plug it in?"

"What?" Izzy stopped hopping around and froze, still beaming.

"You have to plug your phone in, right? Like you do at a coffee shop."

Izzy's smile dropped. "... I thought I just had to stand here with it and it'd work."

Sunny slowly inhaled and exhaled, her expression placidly frozen. "How does the solar power get into your phone?"

"It beams it over!" Izzy insisted. She tilted her head. "... doesn't it?"

"No," Sunny shook her head, still grimacing.

"What!" Izzy goat-fainted with a cloud of dirt. "Awwwwww, I don't know how to make a pluggy-thingy!" she smacked at the ground with her hooves for a second or two.

"I'll bring some stuff over and help you out tomorrow," Sunny promised. "But um, the reason I'm here today is uh."

As Izzy got up, she suddenly found herself enveloped in a big hug.

"I'm really sorry I yelled at you," Sunny sniffled.

"Oh pffft," Izzy nuzzled back, giggling. "Of course I forgive you, I put myself in jail, I was way meaner to me than you were."

"What," Sunny laughed, "Gosh, I wish I could stay as upbeat as you."

"Lemme tell you a secret," Izzy said more morosely. "... I'm not always upbeat, I'm just really good at actin' like it... Buuuut it helps that the only prison I've ever been in has a massage chair and a bowl o' fresh fruit..."

"Snrrk..." Sunny snorted. "... Um, I went to talk to Dahlia after you ran off," she tucked her hooves in bashfully. "Y'know, to make sure she was okay. And she told me she was fine and that I was overreacting."

"That's funny, I thought I was the one who kidnapped her," Izzy said sincerely with a hoof to her chin.

They laughed together before their phones rang in unison. "Oh cool, I still have some charge," Izzy observed. "Must be a group call." They fumbled with their phones. "Y'ello?" Izzy chirped brightly.

Pipp sighed. "Oh good, Izzy's not yelling this time --"

"Sprout's got a racism gun!" Hitch screamed frantically. "I don't know how it works but it makes ponies racist. You girls gotta get over here quick but you birds better take a bath first! Oh geez I'm so sorry I said that but someone had to say it and I'm gonna hang up before I say anything else about you darn--" Click.

"Wow," Pipp drawled after a second, "Wow. ... Wow, y'know I stream most of my baths, right? Like, we're not some third-world country who builds castles out of mud instead of I dunno, SOLID GOLD." Click.

"It's usually between 4- to 8-karat gold, but can you believe that's within the ToS? Foals use that site," Zipp sighed. Click.

"Guess Hitch is gonna be a bit late with his apology," Sunny sighed as the two of them also hung up. "He um, insisted --"

"I know, I heard you two talkin' about it, and I forgave both of you ages ago. But Sunny, can I ask a favor?" Izzy batted her lashes.

"You heard--? Uh..." Sunny leaned back uncomfortably. "You can ask, sure..."

"I haven't gotten to see you blow anyone up with your fancy give-me-the-works powers yet," Izzy frowned. "So can ya wait for me to be lookin' before you turn Sprout into ash?"

Sunny wrinkled her nose. "... Sure thing."

"My giiiirl," Izzy hoof-bumped her and began running off, then paused. She looked back over her shoulder. "Take care of the house while we're gone!"

"Okay," came Kind☆'s voice, followed by a small chorus of various affirmations, from behind the door.

Sunny stumbled back from the house, half-rearing up. "... Izzy!" She scolded. "Are there Recalloids living in your house?"

"The six prototypes," Izzy nodded. "It turns out none of them like to be mean. I'm teachin' 'em how to sing impromptu. They're all excellent house-guests..." she considered with a hoof to her chin, "... except maybe Loyal☆ and Honest☆..." She beamed. "It's only 'til they can figure out other arrangements. Everything in the Rainbow Forest shimmers and flickers and no one here is very touchy-feely so no one's noticed anything's weird. C'mon, let's go!" She waved Sunny to follow.

"You're gonna get bingbonged straight to Tartarus," Sunny sighed. She closed her eyes, breathed in and out, and followed Izzy's upbeat galloping with an excellent attempt at a natural smile.

Ch. 9 :: Keeping Your Head Down

The little purple filly with the long blue hair trudged down the dirt road with her head low, glancing side to side in case the world should decide she'd been alone for long enough, the smell of rotten mayonnaise as fresh in her mind as the shame.

One week ago, she had skipped down this same road singing to herself. Perhaps a week in the future, she might do the same.

But not this week.

This week, her song was quieter and sadder than usual, and she paused after each line to make sure no one was listening.

Foggy sky ♪ foggy sky ♫
Bad day ♪ for birds to fly ♫
Oh! I guess they still try ♪
I hope they do OK.

What are these crystals for ♪
What are those mushrooms for ♫
What's anything for? ♪
They're nice to have around, I say.

I wish I was nice to have around.

She paused, blinked away her tears, gave it a few tries at a smile until it felt right, and cantered the next dozen or so steps into the general store.

"Hrn?" the shopkeeper gruffed, looking up and then leaning over the counter to look down again, with a small smile. "Oh, Izzy. Did your father send you?"

"Hello!" Izzy nodded, beaming and waving. "Yeppers! Gonna need another box of nails..."

"He's still not hittin' 'em straight?" he shook his head and tutted.

"Nope," Izzy giggled.

"Take two, the second's on the house."

"Oh wow, thank you!" Izzy perked up.

"Don't mention it. Ain't like anyone else is buyin' 'em..." he sighed.

She counted out the bits, scooped two boxes of nails into her saddlebags, and, waving again, headed back out the door.

Then she froze, her smile dropping at the sight of the three foals playing marbles just down the road. They must have just set up within the last couple minutes, while she was getting the nails.

They were two boys and a girl. She wished she knew their names. They, however, knew her better than they would like to, which was to say, at all.

I wish they'd teach me how to play, she thought for some reason before shaking her head and swallowing. Just keep your mouth shut, Izzy, she instructed herself, and quietly moved to the far side of the road to pass.

She heard a disgusted euugh from one of the foals she'd snuck past before. She immediately froze, her hooves locking up, sighing out her nose in resignation.

"What do you want, Izzy Moonbozo," one of the colts scowled at her. The others jumped as though shocked, turning to face her.

"U-um," she stammered, lost for words. "N-nothing, I'm just passing by..."

"You're always up to something," the filly accused. "Just the other day you were makin' mayshine..." The other foals gasped and made rising ooooo sounds like even saying the word was breaking a sacred rule. "Whattyou got in the bags?" she demanded.

If you say nothing, they'll wanna know even more what it is, Izzy reminded herself. You gotta tell 'em what it is. "U-um, nails," she said.

"... 'nails'?" the filly repeated, blankly. "What the heck are 'nails'?"

"They sell 'em in the general shop, stupid," the colt huffed. "You can make stuff with 'em."

"They're f-for my dad," Izzy continued. "R-really, I'm just passing by, y-you guys have fun..."

"We were havin' fun until you showed up," the second colt scowled. "Why do you have to bother us?"

But I wasn't, Izzy thought, her eyes watering. "I'm sorry. I, I'll just go," she offered, but her hooves wouldn't move.

"You must be why I've been doing so bad!" the first colt yelled. "You sneaky little -- So? Didja get what you wanted? Huh?"

"W-what I wanted..?!"

"How do you do that, anyway, huh?" he growled. "Every time you show up, bad things happen!"

"Yeah!! The windigos almost got us 'cause you wanted to make that ugly smelly stuff!" the filly squealed.

"You know what IIIII heard~" the second colt drew himself up, feeling important. Izzy shrunk, already knowing what he was going to say - so proud of his secret that everyone already believed. "IIIII heard she steals all the fun for herself. Keeps it in a jar in her house so no one can be happy except her."

Izzy didn't do that at all, of course. She tried to do exactly the opposite. But she just stood there shuddering, looking down in shame and fear.

"Right next to the windigo's milk?!" the filly wrinkled her nose. "I won't want my fun to smell like eggs!"

"What!" the first colt squeaked in outrage, turning to Izzy with an accusatory glare. "Why would you do that to everyone?! What's wrong with you?!"

"I-I..." Izzy shook, hyperventilating.

That's what they always said. When she made the mayshine. When she built the "devil's machine" with her dad. When she smiled too much. What's wrong with you?

"... Sooo... Why doesn't anyone go in there and get it?" the filly asked with an eyebrow up.

"Her whole house is hexed, dummy," the second colt sniffed with his nose high. "You even put one hoof on the lawn in front, zip zam zoop! Do you wanna get your eyeballs turned into more horns?! At least eyeballs are useful!"

"Ewwwwww!!" the filly cried. "Ew ew ew ew ew! That's gross!" She pointed at Izzy. "You're gross!"

"You crazy unicorn!" the first colt scowled. "Why've you always gotta ruin everything for everyone?!"

"Yeah!" the other one jeered. "Go away, with your crazy ideas and your dumb smile! Get lost! Nobody wants you around!"

Izzy stumbled away with her ears low. "I-I wasn't even gonna bother you..."

"Get outta here, you witch!"

Izzy turned with a squeak and ran.

Izzy cantered through the front door with a springy step and a big smile. "I-I'm back, mom, dad," she chirped.

"Did you get the nails?" her father called from the other room. "Just drop 'em on the table, joy."

"Yes, dad," Izzy's smile weakened to a grimace as she set down the nails. "He gave us an extra box today, no charge."

"Is he pitying me?" came the response, with playfully exaggerated offense.

"Supper's in a few hours," her mother called.

"Thanks, mom," Izzy called back, heading upstairs and closing the door.

She waited a few seconds to see if anyone would come up, shivering.

She'd left her window open again.

But she didn't care. She fell into bed crying.

Why does everyone hate me?

She didn't understand. What did she do wrong? Why did the other kids despise her and blame her for everything? Sure she messed up now and again, like with the mayshine incident, but she just wanted everyone to have fun and be happy. She didn't keep all the joy in a jar in her room. She took every chance she got to share it with everyone and none of them wanted it.

At least, not from her.

All her life she'd heard about the magic, the magic! Oh no, the magic is gone! She had no idea when it had disappeared. Just that everyone couldn't think about anything but the magic.

But who needed magic? The world was full of so many wonderful things without it and they wouldn't let her do any of them. They'd shriek bingbong and do ritual dances and threaten her with a salting all for this magic that didn't exist.

Why do they care more about this pretend magic stuff and less about real ponies? she sniffled to herself. Why doesn't anyone want to be my friend?

Something brushed her ear and she jumped in alarm, managing to stop herself from yelping. As she leapt up out of bed, a large, round something pushed off from her head and floated in the middle of the room, spinning in place.

It was carrying something, some kind of letter.

She jumped up to grab it, but it evaded her, spinning upwards towards her ceiling.

Gathering her questionable wits, Izzy rushed back to her bed, closing her window so that it wouldn't escape back out. When she turned back, the strange thing had bounced off the ceiling and back down slowly to the floor.

She approached slowly in a low stance, wriggled her behind a few times, and pounced on it like a cat before holding it out with both hooves to look at it.

It was some kind of lantern, a gentle red all around. It had been glowing a warm, friendly gold at its open, frilled bottom - but it sputtered and went out as she looked at it - as though it had completed some divine mission and had no further purpose.

And, as she flipped it over to read, she found it had the most beautiful letter attached that she had ever seen.

Sure, the rainbow gracing most of it only had five colors, and the ponies drawn on it may as well have been hippos or alligators, and she wasn't sure whether that was a picnic blanket with a basket or a field with a big house, but it read:

DEAR UNiCORNS AND PEGAS~~U~~i

YU HAVE FRiENDS IN MARETIME BAY
COME ViSiT US!

Izzy sat there holding the letter, staring at it in disbelief, shivering now from excitement and wonder instead of cold and pain.

She had no idea where Maretime Bay was or what pegasi were. Was Maretime Bay a magical place of eternal picnics? Were pegasi those ponies with no horns? Were they the ones with the wings or the ones without? She'd have to ask --

What's wrong with you?!

She curled up into a ball, fumbling and dropping her letter, swatted down as sure as if someone had said it, and it hadn't simply echoed in her mind. She was quietly sobbing again.

She might be able to ask her parents - she got her open-mindedness from them. But even they might scold her for daring to ask about such secret things, however gently, and if anybody else heard about it...

She could be exiled... she remembered the elder warning her parents after the mayshine incident; they didn't know she was eavesdropping. He was a kind old stallion, and it would have killed him to do it to her, but hearing him entertaining that possibility, and her parents sadly nodding in understanding, not even shocked, had shaken her to her core. She knew he would, if the village called him to do so.

She trembled, suddenly understanding the weight of this secret that had fluttered through her window on pure serendipity.

There was a knock at her door and she leapt up, tucking the letter and the lantern under her bed. "Y-yeees?"

"Izzy? It's supper time..." her mother called through the door. "Are you okay?"

"Y-yes, mom!" Izzy assured her. "I'll be down there soon!"

"Don't let it get cold," came the voice already descending back down the stairs.

Izzy fished the letter back out and looked at it again one more time, and she noticed something she'd missed the first time:

There was a muffin floating next to the unicorn in a sparkling purple aura.

The unicorn's doing magic, she realized with wide eyes.

She had to find this mystical place, this land of friends, Maretime Bay.

I could bring back the magic.

But she would have to find it on her own.

I'll be down there soon, she repeated to herself with a smile.