Lost Summer

Rarity glanced suspiciously down the hall both ways before closing the cabin door and taking her seat. Sweetie Belle was already laying down on the opposing bench with her eyes closed, exhausted from everything in addition to her lack of sleep.

Rarity stowed her two trunks, having abandoned much of what she brought at the hotel, some of it because it was destroyed or lost. She sat down and opened a newspaper that she'd bought at the station.

“They put it in the entertainment section I guess,” she muttered, ruffling through the pages. “Oh, here I am, just like he said. I can't believe I'm in the biggest newspaper in Equestria. I wonder if I'm in any of the reviews.”

“Mom and Dad are in the hospital and you're still thinking about the show and looking for fashion reviews?” scoffed Sweetie, her eyes still shut.

“You cope with it your way and I'll cope with it mine but you might find that a nice distraction gives your nerves a much needed break.”

While that axiom was true for Rarity most of the time, right now she felt numb inside except for her anxiety.

The train whistle wailed.

“They're not even my real parents,” she murmured absently.

“Yes they are,” Sweetie shot back indignantly. “They're just as much your parents as they are mine. This doesn't change anything.”

Rarity flipped the paper down to look critically. “Maybe for you. You don't get it at all. This changes nothing for you except you're less pony than you thought. Everything I've known has been fake. I have a family out there that I've basically never met or even heard of before. There's an entire world that I was supposed to be part of.”

“Well, what are you going to do if you find your ‘real’ parents then, move in with them?”

Their car lurched from the initial stroke of the engine.

Rarity shook her head. “I don't know what's going to happen but this is all about me and I need to figure it out.”

After a thankfully uneventful journey, Rarity and Sweetie stepped off of the train in the late afternoon Ponyville Station.

Not wishing to be encumbered by a pair of trunks, Rarity abandoned her luggage near the office. Then the two of them left, trotting briskly toward the market.

“Don't go showing your friends your new transformation ability, at least not yet,” warned Rarity.

“Fine,” she groaned.

“And I think the less we speak of what happened, the safer everyone will be. Whoever asks, you say that mom and dad were attacked in a horrific mugging not witnessed by either of us. I'm returning to Manehattan to support them and we'll be back as soon as we can.”

“Okay.”

The two walked down a row of bustling stalls in the plaza all the way to the spot where the Apple Family parked their wagon nearly every day. Applejack was there alone at a folding table just giving a customer their change. She smiled when she looked over at them.

“Rarity, yer back. How was the thing?”

Rarity pulled up to the table looking haggard and gave a sigh. “Well the show was amazing but I’m afraid something awful has happened to my parents. A band of cutthroats attacked them in an alley.”

Applejack's mouth dropped open. “No,” she gasped.

Rarity continued before she could ask. “They fought back but took such a thrashing that they had to be admitted for a prolonged stay in the hospital back in Manehattan.”

Applejack's expression was horrified. “Are they gonna be alright?”

“I think so but my dad is in a medically induced coma right now because of head trauma.”

“That’s awful. Ah can't believe that. Some ponies, Ah tell ya.”

“Yes, anyway, I apologize for the brevity but I'm in a bit of a rush. I have an immense favor to ask of you. Would you be willing to take Sweetie Belle while I'm away looking after my parents in the city?”

“Of course,” agreed Applejack without hesitation.

“It may be a while,” she warned. “One to two weeks.”

“That's fine,” she shrugged. “It's a big house.”

“Thank you. You're a lifesaver, Applejack.” Rarity fished out her coin purse.

“You don't gotta pay me nothin’”

“Oh, don't be ridiculous. I know this is a huge ask and a not insignificant financial burden.”

“Ah can't accept money from a friend in a crisis. Sweetie can stay and pick apples with Apple Bloom like a migrant worker for however long ya need. It's fine.”

“Thank you,” sighed Rarity, putting her purse away. She turned to her sister with a grave shadow across her face.

“Don't worry Sweetie, We'll all come back eventually.”

Sweetie Belle hugged her voluntarily with worry.

“Thank you again, Applejack. And please let Twilight know I'm out of town at your earliest convenience.”

She felt bad about lying but she just couldn't explain the real story for a lot of reasons. Her parents were in the hospital from an attack and it was very much an emergency. That much was true. If her mother and or father came back while she was still gone, it would be their call to set everyone straight or not. - - -

The queen bed screeched as Rarity shoved it aside with her magic. She knocked her hoof on the floor here and there until she heard telltale rattling wood. She floated out the pair of loose floorboards and peered inside the gap. Down inside the floor there was a dark canvas texture. She fished out a satchel and plopped it on the floor.

Was this some kind of spy kit, she wondered. She undid the metal clasp and looked inside the flap. What must have been the aforementioned journal came out first. Resisting the urge to look inside it immediately, she checked to see what else was in the bag.

She pulled out a trio of throwing knives sheathed in a row on a strap. “I remember these,” she breathed. “This looks like a garter belt that holds knives.” There was a tarnished brass monocular that looked quite useful.

There was a spool of very fine, almost invisible, but quite strong wire, the purpose of which eluded her at the moment. She pulled out a thick cloth mask with a mesh filter over the mouth.

“What are these? Mothballs?” She sniffed one of the gray orbs curiously. It was too large. And if that was what it was, it had lost its aroma long ago. She set it on the floor and rolled it around beneath her hoof to see how it felt. It burst suddenly in a cloud of smoke.

Rarity recoiled, coughing and fanning her face as the room filled with haze. She backed into the doorway, eyes watering as she slid the windows open with her magic. She turned on the ceiling fan and waited for the air to clear before re-entering.

She put everything back in the bag except for the journal even though she was unsure about the smoke bombs.

“So this is her gear?” she muttered, leaving for the kitchen. “Some of it's a little more advanced than what she taught me.”

Rarity sat down at the kitchen table and unstrapped the journal. She began to flip quickly through the pages. There were basic maps of cities and buildings with rough pen sketches, scouting notation, Kirin government hierarchies and names, small dossiers and even diagrams of booby traps. She wasn't sure if they were standard or her mother had devised them herself. Cookie wrote incredibly small but exceedingly neat, allowing her to pack a lot of information into a small book that, as far as Rarity knew, spanned her entire career and beyond.

The journal seemed to be broken up into sections punctuated with buffers of blank pages to allow space for additional content to be added where needed. There were a few extraneous articles that had been affixed to pages. A formal invitation. A wanted poster with a likeness of a Kirin she may have been tasked with hunting down. The book was eye-opening to say the least. This was an entirely different life, like from a pony she didn't even know.

Rarity stopped on one of the more recently added sections where there were two maps on opposing pages. She recognized the town names, especially the first Pony one mentioned in the book, Canterlot. It sat high up on a mountain. There was a train line intersecting with another wiggly line that connected with Sky's Edge which sat below a cluster of shorter named mountains surrounded by an immense forest.

The first map looked like messy guesswork while the second looked like a refined version of the first with more detail, names and revised placement. It even had a distance scale. Perhaps her mother had referenced some pony maps and made a composite approximation.

Her eyes traced the hatched railroad to the station where another dotted path broke off going west. A path connecting Canterlot and Sky's Edge could only mean one thing: This was the route they'd taken when they left the Kirin.

“This is it,” she whispered, pointing at a dot labeled ‘Ponyville.’ If accurate, this map showed her where the Kirin lived relative to her current location. She hurried into the living room and snatched an atlas from the shelf. She opened it to the Northwest quadrant of Equestria and looked along the bottom of the page. She began to cross reference major landmarks in the region, the mountains, rivers and lakes. The prominent ones were all there and appeared to be to scale in not only size but relative distance from one another. The pony cities shown were all in their correct places. Assuming that Sky's Edge was a real place, her mother's map was legitimate. The next question was how close could she get there on wheels before she had to start hiking.

Rarity paid a quick reconnaissance visit to the Ponyville Train Station. She checked the route map posted on the exterior of the ticket office. It showed every passenger train route in all of Equestria. She quickly found the large dead spot on the network where the Kirin resided and no trains went. The closest station was of course the one to their east beyond the forest, the one depicted on her mother's map. It still wasn't very close at all, maybe eighty miles.

She frowned and followed the tracks around the big green blob. Although there was no closer station, the tracks did drift closer to her destination at one point. It was possible, she supposed, to just hop off between stations when she reached that spot in the trip.

She ripped a strip of paper from the back of the journal to help measure as a shoddy compass.

“Seventy to seventy-five miles approximately from the closest train track,” she muttered. “That is… still a ways by hoof through the forest.”

Why couldn't she be part of a race that transformed into pegasi instead? Mother made this trek with a newborn?

Rarity sighed and went to the office window. “Excuse me. When's the next train to Saddlevale?”

The old stationmaster glanced at his schedule and cleared his throat. “Leaves Ponyville at five eleven today.”

Rarity grimaced. That gave her only about forty-five minutes to pack for the most mysterious and maybe perilous trip she'd ever taken. She grinned weakly. “Um, is there a later train?”

The stallion shook his head. “Not today. Next one is tomorrow at seven PM.”

“Okay,” she groaned. “One for the five eleven, please.”

Rarity got the ticket and scampered back to her parent's house where she threw together a quick game plan for what to bring with her.

“Okay, camping, not glamping. Spying, not cavorting. Unassuming, not glamorous. Basic survival, not… hairdryers.”

It was a given that she'd take her mother's bag with the assumption that anything in it might be useful even if she didn't quite know how yet. If she could pack here using her parent's things and avoid going back to Carousel Boutique like her mother had warned, she could probably pack much lighter and be outfitted with pragmatic utility instead of excessive style or comfort which was what she usually did.

She grabbed a regional map and magnetic compass, a bedroll and an old pup tent that was her father's when he was a colt. Flint for starting fires. A watch. First aid kit, toothbrush and deodorant. She had no idea when her next bath would be.

She managed to gather all the basic tools for a saddlebag trip through the woods. Then it dawned on her: food and water. How could she forget? The situation called for things that don't spoil or take up much space like granola bars, she thought.

Rarity found a canteen in the cupboard and filled it up in the sink. She opened the pantry. Her parents had a lot of cans and jars which sounded too heavy and bulky to saddle herself with.

She looked down to see an open wooden crate of drab looking sealed food packets. “Oh, lovely, the MREs,” she droned. A dehydrated fixture of every camping trip they'd ever gone on as a family. Her mother was still buying them… or perhaps they were the same ones left over from years ago. So it was either that, the heavy cans or just a giant sack of oats that, while light and compact, would get boring quickly. She swore she'd never eat them again but at least the MREs provided some variety. She grabbed a dozen spanning across four different meals, a small sack of oats and a bag of raisins. A tin cup and a pot to cook or boil water in. She packed everything in, strapped or dangling from her mother's high end tactical saddlebag.

“That was actually kind of fun,” she told herself knowing full well it would be a lot less fun later when she was alone in the forest and all she had to live on was this scaled down assortment of basics she’d brought with her.

“Mother would be proud. I fit everything in, on or around a single bag and didn't pack so much as a-” Her eyes bulged. “My makeup! No,” she shook her head defiantly. “We're not going to think about it.” She looked at the clock. There wasn't enough time for a shower; she needed to just get back to the station.