The Trinity of Moons: Ancillary Mirrors

We are not that far from Canterlot. Just a few hours of running towards the train station, then a day on an express train. Or we could get there even quicker with an emergency portal station.

But we have too few bits between the three of us — five between Quartz and Stylus as they dig deep into their bags. I have nothing on me — nothing at all. I have no bag. In this trip we aren’t supposed to need money — we have a couple weeks more to first travel deeper South, then slowly return home while summer vacation lasts.

In hindsight, that could’ve served us a hint about an incoming trouble right then, as we were scraping for coins. Because I have no bag.

In fact the trouble happens a slice later - I mean, twenty-five minutes later, with twenty-five itself base-10, not base-9. I struggle with these conversions: most of my lives were spent… well, not in this timeline, obviously. Rather, those ones where base-9 is accepted and ‘days’ aren’t even a word. Anyway, it wouldn’t happen for another 25 minutes. First, we had breakfast.

After breakfast, they improvise my protection from a bed cloth, Stylus working a pattern onto it so it looks less like a ghost costume for Winter’s Mist Night, and more like a simple dress. I see his white tail flicking, his posture tense — I see it by his hind half which is in my view at that beat. Even his gray coat fluffs up a little.

“What?” I ask.

“Your cutie mark,” he says, “What is it, Bittercup?”

I instinctively call up my Bittercup memory. It comes with the Mark clearly seen in my mind's eye. All of my lives always do. Poppy provides the correct name for the flower.

“A single deep blue aconite flower. Green stalk, the hood-like flower facing outward, the inwards of the flower fully exposed for the viewer. Why?”

“And it is– can you describe it more, please?”

I don’t feel so good about his request.

“A healthy, tall stalk. Once again, a single flower, although natural aconite comes in racemes..?”

“Well, no. I mean, yes. I mean, no. Where is the real Bittercup, and what have you done with her?”

Quartz shoos him aside before I begin to properly panic. She speaks in her usual lower tone, calm and confident, or at least appearing so. “Well now, that there flower on your flank’s wilted really bad. It was right purty when we left Ponyville. I reckon, with all your tall tales, Stylus got a right to be frettin’. I trust ya, I do, but this here's mighty suspicious. Are you one of them changelings?”

Now I begin to properly panic. I know this other cutie mark with the wilted flower all too well without a glance, and am too afraid to see. When I was Lure Stardust, the one who descended into the depths of Metropolis, I saw it every time I took a bath.

It doesn't belong in this history. It stays, scanned in every detail, in databases in Rose Moon’s timeline. Lure’s timeline.

“Did I have a bag with me yesterday morning?” I ask. I feel sapped, and the question comes out flat.

“‘Course ya did. Why wouldn’t ya?”

Well, that’s it. I went into the elevator with no wearables at all. That was the condition set by keepers. “Look right under my head, at the top of the neck, from the topside, anything unusual?”

I tilt my head forward to help them look. They push my fur apart, and I hear Stylus’s quiet gasp, “What is it?”

I don’t even try to explain. I feel awful. They leave me shivering on the tent’s floor.

Minutes later they come back and confirm that I’ve replaced their friend. They saw Bittercup’s discarded bag, lost in the grass a quarter of a mile away, in a round circle burned out by a lightning strike. Apparently she walked away from the camp: Stylus's spell helped to follow the track in the tall grass. Oily black ink highlighted Bittercup’s steps along the straightest line. They end right at the lonely orange bag in the middle of nowhere. Right next to it, there is my own trace in the opposing direction which ended at the campfire.

“I’m sorry,” I whimper.

I can’t yet come to terms with that. I am Lure. Not the consciousness transferred as I had deduced at first, just myself, transported whole, with my neural connector, my own body, my own cutie mark.

If so, I have to manage. I had a lot of circumstances in my lives. I will manage — everything, the Sun not excluded. If needed, I could leave my friends behind too — they’d be right to send me away after that.

No, I felt devastated about Bittercup. The real Bittercup. At best, she is entirely lost — lightning bolts like these suggest to me a form of teleportation. At worst she’s dead, and I am to blame, because who else?

I make my choice: I would rather let the Red be than let Bittercup go. The Red, if this comes to that, is a matter of a single warning to Princesses, probably in a letter even.

But I replaced an innocent, happy pony, just because I wanted to see the dragons. I will correct the issue.

They don’t send me away. Not yet. I gather myself enough to tell them plainly what I elseonce learned from Black Moon, “Lightnings like these can happen when somepony teleports between the dimensions. To Dreamscape, or Everside, or to another world entirely. Mirrors can be portals too but you have no big mirrors with you, right?”

They don’t answer me. They need to gather their bearings first. Yet, they don’t leave me.

My thoughts involuntarily shift to real Bittercup. Where is she?

Scootaloo wasn’t sleeping well this short midsummer night. Her dreams were too full of mirrors with faces not her own, of labyrinths without exit, of Princess Luna which was not Nightmare Moon yet resembled her too much. Scootaloo was returning there again and again, each stretch of nightmare -- an eternity. She was turning her pillow on the cold side, but heat and nightmares stood oppressive. She was done fighting it well before the sunrise.

The nightmare came back again and again, ever since that camping trip to Winsome Falls six years ago. She wasn’t going to tell anypony — that trip she learned to trust Princess Luna. In the years after she learned to adore Luna. Obviously, by sending these nightmares the Princess was giving her another, yet unknown lesson.

Tomorrow was Sunday: with the night mostly lost for sleep, she could always take a day nap, right? With that in mind, she picked up her scooter and took it for a long ride outside Ponyville and around, to the northern plains.

Still sleepy, she held well nonetheless, just sometimes nodding off for a moment: the rides in the night, wind in her mane, where she had no chance to run over anypony at all, were safe for that. She knew all the ways and roads like the back of her leg. An hour or so went well.

The thunderstorm arose: flashes and roars of thunder first on her left, then, as the rain came right over her, the orange and yellow lightnings began to strike closer and closer, their roars of thunder chaining together into rolling, rumbling waves.

She felt a little cold under the soft summer rain, and minute after minute the lightning strikes fell too close to be safe yet a little exciting for the same reason.

She fell over her head, instinctively balanced out with her small wings and landed belly down, with a long scrape, yet generally smoothly. She had experienced much worse falls before.

“What the–” she groaned.

There was a loaf of a yellow pegasus on the outside circling road. The scooter’s pieces were scattered nearby.

Scootaloo’s heart fell. What was Fluttershy doing there, in the night, so far away from the Everfree?

She called for the filly, then approached her — that took a few seconds, Scootaloo was still dizzy after the fall. Now she was sure this is not Fluttershy at all: too many differences, starting with too short, disheveled mane of the brightest green color. The age too: on the road lay a young filly, not a mare like Scootaloo herself.

Scootaloo called out to the stranger a few times, with no effect, and sat down right next to her. With unusual calmness Scootaloo internally acknowledged the loss of the scooter. Any other day that would be a disaster. Now it meant she cannot take the filly to Ponyville swifty, and that was what mattered most.

Naturally, running for the medic in the middle of the night and leaving the stranger out there wasn’t an option either. Not in the wild storm: by staying by Scootaloo could at least somewhat protect her against the storm. This thought came when Scootaloo already absentmindedly conjured a small protective dome over the filly — for once, lessons with Dash paid off.

Curious, she squinted to inspect her cutie mark in the bright moonlight.

She never saw this cutie mark in the neighborhood before — a blue hood-like flower on the straight green stalk. Something which would better fit an earth pony.

But stranger or not, Scootaloo wasn’t going to leave her alone.

When another lightning bolt struck Scootaloo, and the mirrors called her for a ride on the longest road, she refused, because, once again, she wasn’t leaving the filly alone. The call, insistent, remained for a while but quieted down.

The memory of the strike and the call dissipated.

For a while Scootaloo kept waiting in the middle of the road. Then, straining, she dragged the pony a little aside and tried to shield her against the rain with her body. She kept the protective dome supported with her inner fire all the way through, but it worked only against lightnings, not the rain, nor the inexplicable quiet sadness it was bringing over Scootaloo.

Thankfully, the rain, warm and small like silent tears, ended in a couple of hours. Just when the filly squirmed under Scootaloo, turned her head and gazed at the mare with her bright golden eyes.

I feel lost, starting with – I don’t know where this elsewhen exists. I don’t remember how I traveled here. Never before have any of my lives returned to previous ones. I don’t know where to go to find their friend.

I tell them so.

“Yet you traveled many times between other lives, right? We traveled many times, or will travel, if I were to believe you,” Stylus doesn’t really ask. “Doors always open both ways.”

I don’t know where my homeland is. But this… I take a deep breath, surfacing from the depths of confusion and self-pity. They are colder than the river had been — Hope River, I remember.

This sounds like hope, really.

"I reckon we need to visit the Princesses anyhow. If anypony knows, it's them." Quartz says quietly.

I nod. “Change of goals, guys. We have to save your Bittercup. The world can wait. The Red can wait — it’s as hard as sending a letter. And– thank you, and sorry again? We’ll find our friend, whatever it takes.”

With that, I dress up, and we go together to check the lightning strike, if only to mark it on the map. Quartz picks up the lost bag, and we turn North, to Canterlot of Two Sisters.

I hope the Princesses can track the lightning. I hope they will believe my story — believe me — even a third as much as my friends believe me.

I hope we'll find Bittercup after all. We'll bring her home.

I forbid myself to hope that I will return.