"Putting them alongside the steppe mammoth is out of question. He's in musth. He could kill them. But they’re literally pining to death." Nigel explained. "They're herd animals, mammoths. They’re stuck in that paddock on their own. They’ve got no companionship." The naturalist's statement was immediately challenged when a certain girl cleared her throat, her purple and spectacled eyes narrowed. "Well, except for Twilight."

"And as we know, mammoths and elephants are closely related," said Twilight.

Fluttershy continued for her friend with the bluntness of a hammer. "What do you guys think? Do you think we can put them together?"

Suzanne was in favor. "It's been done before. We've put elephants in established herds and that seems to work. So, I don't think it's a bad idea to see how we go with Martha and Mary."

Bob and Applejack weren't convinced. "Our herd's established, it's got a pecking order, and it's got a matriarch.”

“What happens if we introduce them and Martha or Mary decide to take over as dominant female?" Applejack said.

"Surely, we can just do it slowly." Nigel countered. "If there's a big problem, we can get in and split them up."

"What else are we gonna do?" asked Sunset. "If we don't do something, they’re gonna die."

The room fell into somber silence as no one could easily answer that question. There were no other alternatives.

"What if we brought back their mom?" pondered Rainbow. Fluttershy and Nigel's heads shot up, while Bob, Suzanne, and the girls looked skeptical. Why hadn't they thought of that?

Pinkie's eyes widened. "Oh no! No, no, no, no, no! Bad call!" She cried, shooting down that idea altogether.

"Why not?" asked Rainbow.

“Sci-fi rule #1: you mess with the past, you end up with monkeys ruling the future."

The three exchanged confused glances. "We kind of already do that, don't we?" asked a puzzled Fluttershy.

"And nothing bad has happened so far," said Nigel.

"And certainly no monkey overlords," added Rainbow, rolling her eyes at such a ridiculous notion.

Twilight shook her head regretfully. "Bringing back extinct animals is one thing, but revisiting the same place at the same exact moment is too risky. The time portals were never designed for that purpose."

Sunset decided to throw in her two cents. "And Pinkie’s got a point. If you try to go back to 10,000 years ago on the very same day you found Martha and Mary, it could create a paradox that could tear a hole in the space-time continuum."

"In theory, we might also run into our past selves," said Twilight.

"Time travel sure is confusing," said Fluttershy, hand on her aching head. Nigel nodded in agreement; they were zoologists, not rocket scientists.

The rainbow-haired teen heaved a remorseful sigh. "There goes that idea,"

Somber silence once more.

"So we're all agreed?" asked Applejack.

"It's a risk we gotta take to save Martha and Mary," Nigel concluded.

As the group soon departed from the meeting, Pinkie slowly reminisced about what her friends had said about the Mammoth sisters: “If we don't do something, they’re gonna die. It's a risk we gotta take to save Martha and Mary.”

“What if the plan didn’t work?” Pinkie Pie thought to herself. “What if… what if we lose them?”

The Next Morning…

The stockade was empty and silent, all except for a determined Pinkie and a worried cameraman as they entered the portal site, both wearing their densest winter clothes.

“I don’t know if Nigel’s idea would work, but I think I have another alternative for the mammoths,” Pinkie told the cameraman as she locked in some unknown coordinates for the portal. “I’m planning to go back 200,000 years into the past in Ireland, where woolly mammoths were in their prime, but steppe mammoths were in decline. I want to surprise the gang with a breeding mammoth herd, so now what we've gotta do is to find not just a woolly herd or even a bull that’s ready to mate, but a few steppe mammoths for Mabaya; That’s what I decided to name that bull that came back with Vlad. And speaking of which, I hope we can find a partner for him too.”

With that said, they both entered the portal, the teenager hoping that her plan would be successful.

Ireland, 200,000 years ago

After the blinding light from the portal dimmed down, the first thing that hit Pinkie was the cold; It was almost oppressive. She looked around and saw a snowy plain. Powdery snow blanketed brown grass and dwarf birch trees, their leaves shed, dotted the landscape almost skeletally. A chilly wind moved through the snowy plains. Pinkie muttered, "It must be at the beginning of winter – that snow's only going to get worse."

The only animals present were a herd of mammoths; three of them were steppe mammoths and the other twelve were woolies. There were twelve adult females, a one-month-old female, and two small male yearlings. Pinkie smirked, "This is probably my easiest one yet. Well, first easiest."

As she approached the herd, however, the matriarch noticed her, trumpeted angrily, and began to advance menacingly towards them, causing her to step back in worry of the behemoth stomping her flat. The matriarch snorted in triumph – this interloper would not go anywhere near her herd.

Soon, the matriarch lifted her trunk and let out a loud, trumpeting bellow, before leading her herd away from the plains. Pinkie soon spoke up, "We better follow them; that looks like a migration to me. Who knows; at some point they might trust us enough to let us bring them back?" She hopped onto a personal snowmobile and glided through the snow, following the migrating mammoths, knowing very well to keep her distance.

Pinkie had been following the mammoths for approximately a day now, they were now in the area that would eventually be known as South Wales. She kept passing the time by looking over a field guide she secretly took from Nigel’s base of Pleistocene fauna in Europe.

Suddenly, she was alerted by a loud, throaty bellow. Pinkie looked over to a nearby hillside to see a small herd of shaggy cow-like animals grazing on the snow-covered grasses.

“Now, this is the first time I’ve seen these guys before: Umingmak. That’s an Inuit name for the muskox, and it means “Animal with a skin like a beard” and you can see why: they got all that shaggy hair to keep them warm in these conditions.”

“This is the closest yet,” Pinkie said, a good distance away from the bovines, not risking to cause a stampede, before turning her attention to the mammoths, who had stopped to feed on some conifers, "The mammoths are having a pit stop, just a little detour for them."

“You can get a good idea of the size of them; not as big as you think they are from a distance, only about four feet tall,” Pinkie explained about these incredible animals, as the horned beasts minded their own business. “Both the males and the females have got these incredible horns, they drop down at the front, then curve up at the tips. The males have got that big boss of bone in the middle of their heads, it can get up to nine inches thick and protects their heads when they’re head-butting for breeding rights. The females only have this fringe of fur between their horns.”

Soon, she took notice of a little figure within the herd. “There’s a little calf with its’ mom. They can give birth every year if the conditions are just right for them. And that little guy could live up to twenty years if his mother and the rest of the herd can keep him safe from predators like wolves or cave lions.”

Soon, a loud snort got the party girl’s attention as a familiar hulking beast wandering towards the muskoxen: A female Elasmotherium, the only difference from Vlad was that she had just a short horn, almost looking like a giant nub on her nose.

It seems this could be Pinkie’s lucky day!

Immediately, Pinkie gets to work setting up the portal. Once she had, she was just about to get the rhino’s attention when a series of thunderous trumpets and bellows caused Pinkie to turn her attention to something coming her way, with wide eyes. It was a colossal bull woolly mammoth! Pinkie could tell that this male was fully grown and was ready to mate, as well as extremely aggressive and irritable. His presence was starting to unnerve the usually crusty and irritable rhino, and she began to snort in fear and move away from the increasingly agitated bull.

"This is fantastic; a healthy bull mammoth, this could be our chance to breed the woolly mammoth in captivity. And if he can lure the rhino through the time portal as well..." Pinkie immediately got to work.

“HEY!" Pinkie yelled, waving her hands at the Ice Age beasts. "Over here!" The two giants admittedly had never seen a human before; humans hadn't yet migrated here. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the Elasmotherium had very poor eyesight and a heated temperament that made them wary and annoyed at almost everything. And a towering bull mammoth in musth was always looking to kill someone. In that instance, both animals found someone to take their aggression out on and charged toward the threat, spooking the muskox herd into stampeding toward the girl.

As soon as Pinkie leaped out of the way in front of the portal sticks, a snorting rhino looking to turn her into a shish-kebab, a raging pachyderm wanting to stomp her into meat puddles, and a startled herd of Ice Age survivors all ran through the time portal as it flared to life.

Yup... Pinkie was so loving this moment.

After days of following the herd, setting up camp, and resting for two days, Pinkie had followed them to roughly where the Channel Islands were today. The changing terrain would have been too dangerous to ride through, so she had no choice but to follow the mammoths on foot. As she walked further, she noticed the terrain had become increasingly precarious. "If the blizzard whips up again, we'd better be careful. If you fell down those cliffs, it’s game over. Fossils have been found in this area of whole herds of mammoths and rhinos piled on top of each other – they used to think hunting parties of Neanderthals went and drove these guys off the edge; however, they found that the herds had just fallen off the cliffs and the Neanderthals gotten to them later. Let's hope this doesn't happen here."

As Pinkie and the mammoth herd had hiked further into the hills, a small mixed herd of saiga antelope, reindeer, and wisents had joined the mammoths, along with a small bachelor herd of young bulls.

After following the mammoths for most of the day and shortly before sunset, Pinkie noticed that the wind was starting to whip up – She knew what this meant. A blizzard was starting to blow in from the west – she just hoped that this one would be less severe than the one last night, especially in terrain this precarious. As it remained, Pinkie had to be careful; one misstep and she was dead.

Unfortunately, in the next few hours after sunset, the blizzard increased in intensity to the point where visibility was reduced to zero. As the blizzard flurried, the matriarch bellowed out in indignation and alarm. The blizzard was so intense, that visibility was practically zero– however, with nowhere to stop, the matriarch was forced to lead her herd through the blizzard. However, blundered by the reduced visibility, the matriarch made a wrong turn and ended up leading the herd in a more precarious area; Pinkie had to do something or the whole herd would be accidentally led off the cliff.

Suddenly, Pinkie ran out in front of the mammoths, grabbed a flare from her bag, and began waving the bright glare of light, before running away from the cliff edge they were heading towards and running onto a safer area.

The matriarch briefly stopped the herd in their tracks and looked at the strange thing shining the light – this creature would be walking away from the cliff edges. If they followed her, they would be able to avoid the cliff edges. Letting out a loud bellow, the matriarch followed Pinkie, shining the flare through the blizzard. The herds followed the mammoths – the mammoths were probably following the light to safer ground. It would do best to follow them.

After about an hour of walking (and a few near-misses when a mammoth or grazer stumbled), Pinkie, with the herds following her, had successfully navigated the cliff edges and reached safer ground. At this point, Pinkie was able to activate the portal and she went through it, with the unified herd following her through the portal, into the present.

When the blinding light from the portal had died down and the temperature of present-day Prehistoric Park hit her, Pinkie looked up to see some of the staff watching her from the viewing platform with dumbfounded expressions on their faces. Pinkie rolled her eyes, smiled at them, and said, "I'll tell you about it later."

In an instant, she took out a walkie-talkie and began radioing Bob, “Guys, meet me at one of the snow fields. I’ve got a bit of a little surprise for you!”

Author's Note

Note: Pinkie Pie’s encounter with the muskox herd is based off from Arctic Exposure with Nigel Marven.