(Applejack’s POV)

“So what is this all about again, Pinkie?” I questioned the pink mare as she continued with her takeover of the only kitchen on the train. Twilight was concerned that Pinkie might’ve been a little distracted, so she asked me to talk to her and help her focus her efforts on the matter at hoof. I told her it was just Pinkie being Pinkie, and that she would come through when we needed her to, but she was… oddly insistent on me touching base with her.

“I already explained, AJ! Weren’t you listening?” The ever joyful mare in question answered, hopping from the oven to the counter and switching out a tray of baked cupcakes for a tray of unbaked cupcakes so quickly that I could barely even tell she was moving in the first place. “I’m planning a big ‘Welcome to Equestria’ party for Jackson, and we’re throwing it for him once we get to the empire! We’ll play games, eat cake, tell stories, get into hijinx for the readers to enj-”

“No, Pinkie. I already know all of that. It's just… why not wait a little bit?”

That got her to stop in her tracks and put her full attention on me, eyes wide with surprise and small hints of terror.

“WHAT?!?!?! Why would you say that?!?” She screamed loud enough for the ponies down in Appaloosa to hear. “I’m already five days behind! And by the time we get there tomorrow, I’ll be six days behind! Why delay any longer?”

“We-well, it's just that… you know, Sombra is still hanging around. Maybe it's not the best idea to host a party while he’s circling around the empire like a timberwolf pack around a pig farm.” I explained to her. Hopefully, that would help to focus on th-

“Is this because you don’t like him?” Despite the question being awfully accusatory, she asked it in the usual cheerful tone she would use during any other conversation.

“That’s got nothi-”

“Nope!” She interrupted me by forcibly introducing a chocolate cupcake into my mouth. “Don’t even try to deny it, AJ! Dashie and Fluttershy already told me everything. So spill the beans!” She punctuated her sentence with that same Celestia damned smile she always wore. Finishing the delicacy that was so forcefully introduced into my mouth, I was quick to answer the unasked question…

“Chocolate?” …With a completely unrelated question.

“I don’t know what his favorite flavor of cupcake is, so I’ve been making at least a dozen of each type! Gotta play it safe with these… Wait a second! I see what you're doing!”

“Really? What am I doing, Pinkie?”

“You're dodging the question, that’s what! Well just know that I will not let you leave this car until you spill the beans!”

Now, at this point, I had two options. Option A was to call Pinkie’s bluff and try to leave anyway. Option B was to tell Pinkie the truth.

“Why am I even entertaining this? Go with the safe option.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll tell ya.” Pinkie was quick to sit her flank down right in front of me and pay close attention, ready to hang off every word I was about to say. If I hadn’t seen that same smile so many times before, I would describe the scene as slightly uncanny.

“To be honest with ya, I’ve got nothing against the feller. From what I’ve heard, he seems nice enough.” I let out a long sigh. “I just… I’m just a little worried, is all.”

“Worried about what?” Pinkie innocently asked.

“Well… it's tough to explain, but… you know how the Apple family is one of the oldest in Equestria?” At the nod of her head, I continued with my explanation. “There’s a lot of old legends from my family, some from the early days. One of them, from the group of my family that went down to where Applewood is now, talks about a tall creature with lanky limbs and strange clothes that lived in the forest nearby. They didn’t have a name for it at the time, but that side of the family gave it the nickname of ‘The Stranger’. At first, my ancestors thought it was dangerous. But overtime… it seemed to be content to leave them alone, as long as they left it alone. It would occasionally stop by the farm to trade wood or fish for tools and apples, but never any more than that. And that’s how it went for the next few years.

“But as Applewood was founded and started to grow, the creature started becoming more and more reclusive, retreating deeper into the woods as more of it was cut down to build new homes. A few of my ancestors tried to convince it to come out of hiding and integrate in the community, but it was difficult to communicate with it. It couldn’t speak a word of Equish, and they couldn’t speak a lick of… whatever it was speaking. What did Twilight call Jackson’s language again? English?” At this point, I noticed that Pinkie hadn’t moved at all. I was sure that she would’ve gone back to cooking by now, but no. She was still seated right where she was when I had started.

“Hm? Oh, yeah. That’s what Twilight called it. Yup. English.” She ended her confirmation with a… nervous chuckle? Chalking it up to ‘Pinkie Pie being Pinkie Pie’, I continued my retelling of the old legend.

“Well whatever it was speaking, English or otherwise, it made itself pretty clear that it wanted to be left alone. My family tried to respect its wishes, but some of the new arrivals didn’t like my family stepping in and trying to cut back on cutting down the woods. Eventually, some of the unicorn immigrants started complaining about some creature or pony that was messing with their logging operation. They found some strange fabric near one of the emptied out sheds they had been using to store axes and, putting two and two together, my family figured out that it was the creature doing it. Of course, they never said that. They feared that angry ponies might rush into the woods and get hurt… or worse. And who knows what they would’ve done to it if they got their hooves on it.

“So my family went back into the woods and found the creature again. They tried to tell it to stop messing with the ponies property, but it either didn’t understand or didn’t care. More axes went missing, one shed went up in flames in the middle of the night. Then winter came and everything went quiet for a while. My family thought that the creature either packed it up and left or had given up on fighting. Then, the day after Hearthswarming, a filly went missing in the woods.”

“Ow, that was between my ribs!”

I stopped myself as I heard a noise coming from my left. As I looked, I saw Pinkie closing a cabinet and putting her full weight on it. My raised eyebrow must’ve been enough for her to realize the unanswered question in my head.

“It’s just… um… baking ingredients! Yeah! I, uh, must’ve put a few too many in here and now it's overflowing! I’ll just, uh, reorganize a little an-”

“Nope!” I trotted closer to the mare the cabinet she had been protecting. “I know you, Pinkie. You're never one to overflow a cabinet so badly that it’ll burst. Now, I’ve told you my truth. You tell me yours.”

The pink mare's face contorted into one of consideration, before another voice interrupted her.

“It’s fine, Pinkie. Just… let us out. She’ll find out eventually. And it's pretty cramped in here!”

Complying with the voice from the cabinet, Pinkie opened it up wide, revealing…

“Rainbow Dash? Spike?!”

“Heyyyyyy” The pegasus and dragon spoke simultaneously, both clearly uncomfortable with their current arrangement. Spike’s shoulder was between two of Rainbow’s ribs, Rainbow's wings were pinned under her weight in a corner and, oh, the rainbow haired mare was also upside down, somehow. As for Spike… Well, he was still rightside up, but Rainbow’s head and dangling back legs weren’t giving him any room to move around either.

“Why the… no, how the hay did you two even get in there?”

“Well, it wasn’t by choice! The others already took the big one!” Rainbow responded angrily, with both Pinkie and Spike motioning for her to shut her yapper.

“The.. big one?” I questioned. From the wide eyes, Rainbow had seemingly recognized her mistake by now, but it was too late. “Which ‘big one?’”

“I.. uh… big one?” Rainbow nervously backtracked. “I never said anything about a… big… one… hehe…”

“Uh huh. So if I go around opening cabinets, you're telling me that I won’t find the others hiding in one of them?”

“Yup! That’s exactly what I’m saying! Yes ma’am!”

I looked over to Pinkie. Unlike Rainbow, she knew the jig was up and simply pointed at the large cabinet just three down to the left from the one we were at. Making my way over, I made sure to look at Rainbow one last time as I opened it up to reveal Rarity and…

“Wait, Twilight? How did they convince you to get in on this?”

The purple unicorn looked about as frustrated as I was about this situation. “Well, they convinced me that figuring out why you didn’t like Jackson by spying on you would help ‘strengthen our friendship’... How I fell for that I have no idea…” A yawn escaped her lips, seemingly answering her own question for her.

“Yes, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that you have only slept once during this entire trip, Twilight.” Nonetheless, Rarity came in with her own response to Twilight’s question. Her sarcasm died quickly once her eyes properly met my gaze for the first time. “Oh, um… no hard feelings, Applejack?”

“Quite the opposite.” I responded. “Hey, where’s Fluttershy? Does she know about this?”

“She does.” Rainbow answered, attempting to brute force her way out of the cabinet with help from Pinkie and Spike. “She wanted nothing to do with any of this. Said it was wrong.”

“Well, she’s right. If you wanted to know why I didn’t like the feller, you coulda just asked.”

“Well, you didn’t seem like you... wanted… to…” It was here the cyan pegasus had managed her way out of the cabinet that had desperately wanted to hold her prisoner. “Ugh, finally! Anyway, you didn’t seem like you wanted to tell us no matter how much we asked. So we… set all of this up.”

“Wait…” I turned back to Twilight. “So that whole thing about ‘touching base’ with Pinkie…”

“Was a lie, yeah.” Twilight admitted. “We just needed you to get into a conversation with Pinkie. We thought that she would have the best shot at getting you to open up with her… Pinkieness… While I was hoping that she would be a bit slower and more natural with her execution, I guess she got the job done in the end.”

“I don’t think critiquing our friends' performance is the thing to be doing right now, darling.” Rarity said to Twilight. “But she is right about our general plan.”

“Well, it worked.” I replied, bitterness ever present in my tone of voice. “Are you happy now?”

“I… not really, no.” Twilight said, shame apparent within her voice. “I mean, I’m glad that we figured out why, but…”

“But what?”

“But I regret how we figured it out. All of this… you and Fluttershy were right. We shouldn’t have done all of this.”

A brief silence filled the car as all of us were now stuck in our minds, the words hanging in the air mixed in a cocktail of regret and anger.

…

…

“What would you do if you were ripped from your home, away from your family and friends, and into a place you knew nothing about with no way to communicate with those around you.” Fluttershy’s words from the other day echoed in my mind. It was at that moment, everything clicked.

“Is that why the stranger from so long ago did what it did? Fear of what us ponies might do to it? Did it see us as a threat after some point?” It… actually made a lot of sense. An… uncomfortable amount of sense.

“But why is Jackson so different? Why didn’t he try to isolate himself? Was it because he couldn’t, or was it because of something else?”

…

…

…

At last, I broke the silence with a heavy sigh, my anger having dissipated from my body by that point.

“Look… I understand you wanted to know why, and maybe I shoulda been more open about why in the first place. I just… it’ll take me some time for me to be able to forgive y'all.”

“It’s alright, Applejack.” Rarity spoke up for the group. “We understand.”

“Thank you.”

“Sooooooooo…” Rainbow began, “Are you gonna finish that story?”

“RAINBOW!” The other three mares shouted at the athlete.

“Okay, okay! I was just asking!” She let out a short sigh before continuing again. “But you… are going to finish it, right?”

“At some point. But I wanna do something else first.” I turned to Twilight. “Say, Twi? Can you do me a favor?”

“Of course. What is it Applejack?”

“Can you send a letter to Princess Luna for me?” At the confused look on the librarian's face, I continued. “I just want to meet with her tonight about something.”

“Oh, sure. Spike, do you have any paper on you?” She asked the young drake.

“Right here!” He held a roll of paper high for us all to see in one claw, along with a quill in the other. “What do you want to tell the Princess?”

“Just… say what I already said. I wanna meet with her tonight to discuss something.” As Spike began writing, the girls began to look at me curiously.

“What is so important that you need to send a letter to Princess Luna?” Rarity was the first to vocalize the question on the air.

“Well… Twilight, didn't you say that the Princess was keeping tabs on Jackson in his dreams or… something like that?”

“Through the dreamscape, yeah.” Twilight responded. “But what does that have to…” As the pieces clicked together in her head, her eyes widened in realization.

“Oh. I see.” The sudden nervousness in her voice was obvious to anypony who was in the room.

I could understand her nervousness. I was doing something only three other living ponies have ever done. But if I wanted answers about Jackson, I already knew the best way to do that…

… was to go straight to the source.

Author's Note

The Nineteenth Chapter of the first story. It would appear that Apple Horse and the Homo-Sapien are on a collision course. This should be fun.

So this chapter did have a very short first draft that included the song "Yellow Rose of Texas". I ended up scrapping it cause I realized that AJ would've been developing a very unhealthy obsession with American Folk Music, and I felt that was a little too out of character for how I've written her so far. The song will probably pop up again in the future, but for now its cut content.

Special thanks to my friends Ali and Wither for proofreading this chapter for me.

This is the last chapter that will be released, as the story is now officially considered to be canceled. Thank you all for the support! Now go support a good writer lmao.