Ungula

Rainbow Dash burst into the lounge. "WHO WANTS TO GO TO THE BLACK MARKET?!"

Let us take several steps back before we address that.

Cadenza Station was, in many ways, the hub of Ungula's spacefaring society even moreso than Equus itself.

The term "space station" brings to mind metal walls, cramped quarters, and artificial lights. This could not be further from describing Cadenza Station.

The station resembled a great crystalline hemisphere, a soft shimmer surrounding it with a bubble of air. The flat circular facet was dominated by green, broken up by glittering roads branching out and meeting at the center, lined with houses grown from the same bluish crystal as the station itself. The facet held an entire city, not dissimilar to the one the crystal ponies once called home on Equus.

This city held not just spacedocks, industry, and research institutes, but homes, shops, motels, libraries, universities, parks. A pony could forget they were on a space station at all, if it weren't for the fact that through every crystalline road you could see, far below and tinted even bluer than usual, the planet Equus.

Beyond the facet, on the rounded portions of the hemisphere, were countless dwellings more, clustered chaotically compared to the orderly city planning above. Many were grown from crystal like those above, but just as many were either built out from metal, hewn into the crystal, or both. This was the underbelly of the station, made possible to inhabit only by the gravitational effects of the environment collar – without one, you'd just fall off, and pass beyond the bubble of atmosphere only to reenter the natural one of Equus and have plenty of time to think about your life choices on the way down. Even with one, it was recommended not to jump around too much, just in case.

No ships could land on the underbelly, of course, but the major settlements upon it hewed out a hangar from the crystal, that a ship could land inside without any gravitational trickery. Many of the underbelly's buildings were like that – the interiors oriented to the actual direction of gravity, rather than the "down" the collars imposed when walking on its surface.

Rainbow Dash had chosen to dock the Fire of Friendship in one such hangar rather than a berth on the facet for one main reason: Going to the facet would mean going to see Princess Cadance for a debriefing, and she was pretty sure none of those who'd faced the thing were ready to talk about what had happened quite yet. Dash had only seen the thing briefly out the window and it creeped her out; she shuddered to imagine how Fluttershy must be feeling.

(Also, she just wanted to go there. The facet felt like a rather nice city – the underbelly was something unique.)

So, it was a bit of a complicated feeling when Cadance messaged them saying Twilight had sent her the short version already and not to worry about talking about it right away. On the one hoof, good, on the other, there was that foolish feeling like she'd thought she was getting away with something only for it to be revealed that they'd known she was doing it the whole time and hadn't cared. Oh well.

Of course, now she needed a different justification for why she'd taken them to the underbelly.

And that is why Rainbow Dash burst into the lounge and proclaimed, "WHO WANTS TO GO TO THE BLACK MARKET?!"

After everypony finished picking themselves off the floor (or ceiling, in the case of Fluttershy) and began telling her off (or not, in the case of both Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie, for very different reasons), Rainbow Dash concluded that she'd done a stellar job of taking their minds off of what happened.

She was very thoughtful like that.

They did, in the end, go to the black market.

Now, a black market is rather difficult to hide on the surface of a translucent hemispherical space station. Cadenza Station was a favorite target for everypony on Equus with a telescope, after all.

So it was really more of a gray market. A honeypot for things that weren't necessarily exactly legal, but weren't anything too heinous, such that the authorities looked the other way on most things and swiftly caught anyone who tried doing anything beyond the pale. The label of "black market" was more for advertising than anything, really. Which was why any of them apart from Pinkie Pie knew where it was at all.

The black market was a series of painted metal stalls with wooden facades, giving the appearance of somewhere ready to pack up and scatter at a moment's notice but in actuality being reinforced and bolted securely into the crystal because gravity was sideways here. Most of the stalls faced the same way, such that any wares that fell sideways from where they were secured would land safely inside the stand, and those few that didn't had the merchandise behind glass.

Pinkie Pie led them past stall after stall, each pronk taking her further than it should have as her collar's hold on gravity loosened and she fell a bit towards Equus, the weakened artificial gravity reeling her back in only for her to do it again. It made everypony who looked at her very nervous.

"And this stall has knives, and this one has drugs, and this one has spaghettinoodles!"

Spaghettinoodles was a Bucephalan baked pasta dish whose original name was mostly unpronounceable to anyone but a changeling but which sounded sort of like "spaghettinoodles" so that was what everyone called it.

Rainbow Dash had no idea why it was being sold at a black market. Or how you would eat it while gravity pulled it a different way than you.

Nonetheless, it was the most appealing thing they'd passed so far, because none of them really needed knives, drugs, or most of the other things that were sold at a black market. Except Pinkie Pie, who apparently came here regularly to buy explosives.

Evidently the others had the same idea, because they all swiftly agreed to stop for lunch.

Figuring out how to eat sideways turned out to be an excellent diversion. Rainbow Dash was going to get a good grade in friendship.