There's activity behind Chester. A grunt of exertion, a car alarm, muffled swearing. He glances back to see Sunset on his side of the wall—righting herself from a messy landing against a parked Bronco—and an ice-blue bullet sailing over the garage wall and charging straight down the aisle at him.

Chester runs for his life, the scrabble of claws on asphalt closing in.

The claw-noise has nearly overtaken Chester when he sprints past an elevator bank. He jukes around the far side of it, gaining precious seconds as the wolf loses traction and skids past the corner. A second corner—which the wolf handles better—and then he sees his chance and bounds up the wide stairwell to the second floor.

He pauses at the top of the stairs to glance around, having bought himself a minute or two of saf—oh gods it's coming up after him, what was he thinking? Wolves were supposed to be incapable of climbing! Or was that bears?

He sprints between two parked cars toward the next aisle, then rounds a front bumper and starts randomly turning between vehicles, hoping he can lose it. An ice-blue blur from his left—

Impact reels Chester. The wolf's leaping headbutt knocks him onto a car hood, and his world is snarls and teeth and screaming and flailing, and he yeets sharp pointy death off one side of the hood and rolls off the other. Chester picks himself up and sprints across the aisle toward the exterior garage wall, thinking maybe he can jump down into traffic again, and then the saffron leg fabric of his robe suddenly jerks taut and he windmills, falling arms-first to the pavement.

He's rolling over to sit up when weight slams atop his chest, shoving him back down to the asphalt. Bared teeth fill his vision, and a slow, guttural growl fills his ears. Chester goes limp on instinct, his life flashing before his eyes, and as he's screaming incoherently, the single biggest shock of the day hits:

The ice-blue-furred wolf standing on his chest has an intense pink aura.

This is so impossible that, for a moment, Chester's fear of having a predator's jaws inches from his throat ceases to constrict him. He has had color-sight from the time of his earliest memory, and he has never gotten so much as a single streak of color from any animal anywhere. He stares uncomprehendingly, his scream dying away. His brain locks, flatlines, reboots. He's in mortal peril with a predator standing on his chest and it's a person.

"Please don't kill me," he begs, staring straight into the physical blood-red of the wolf's eyes.

A sharp wave of peach passes through the edges of its figure, fading to the deep maroon of suspicion. Its growl hitches for a moment, though the wolf holds its ground on his chest.

"I know you can understand me," he adds desperately, and that peach flares back out. "I don't know what you are but you're no wolf. I'm surrendering, see?" Chester slowly flattens his arms against the pavement and raises them even with his head. The wolf, at least, is frozen amid swirling maroon and creamsicle, and he presses hurriedly on with his monologue to take advantage of that confusion. "I know you've got a job to do, but you don't want to kill me here. We're in public, it's messy. So listen, I won't resist, I'll come with you and that'll give me time to explain why you're making a mistake."

The wolf's growling has long since died away, and now it's just staring down at him with faint colors radiating in every direction. Meanwhile, Chester's brain is churning overtime as he mentally updates his threat assessment from wolf mafia to werewolf mafia—

A rough but undeniably feminine voice imprints onto the surging surface of his thoughts, bypassing his ears and landing straight in his perceptions, causing bursts of pink color almost impossibly raw and vivid. How did you know I'm not a wolf?

—telepathic werewolf mafia.

Chester is beginning to miss the times when running from a man with a gun was the craziest part of his day.

And why do you think I'm here to kill you? the werewolf continues, still merely pink—mild ire without malice. Chester gazes dumbly upward, his terror levels slowly ratcheting downward, then begins to realize he really ought to keep up his end of the conversation.

"You shouldn't," he blurts out. "I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had no idea Anton would try to shoot her. I tried to stop him." (Technically true; hopefully true enough.) "Give me a chance, I have nothing against werewolves, your secret is safe with me."

What do you mean, shoot? the werewolf creamsicle-says. Who got shot, and why do you think I care?

"That's," Chester stammers, "why you're here, isn't it? Vengeance for that gunfight with the girl and her wolfpack?"

He realizes—as the werewolf's aura spikes back into peach—that he has completely blown it. She didn't know. He's just given her a casus belli.

"She's not hurt," Chester adds, but that just brightens the peach. "And I tried to stop him, did I mention that? But she stole his rifle, and…" Chester stammers to a stop as the peach flares again and the werewolf starts to go orange around the edges. He really should learn to quit before he digs himself any deeper.

His sight explodes with the pastel orange of alarm as the werewolf's voice presses back in. She stole a human weapon?

"Please don't hurt me yes."

The werewolf bares her teeth to keep him flat on the ground, then orange-thinks: Small, thin girl? Pale sapphire skin, bone-colored hair?

Chester vigorously nods, whimpering.

The werewolf's head wheels away, and when her voice touches his mind again, the tawny hues behind it are older but still sharp. That resentment is also less vivid, more diffuse—at a guess, an area broadcast rather than one-to-one telepathy. Sunset! New plan.

The delinquent finally stumbles her way through parked cars from the direction of the stairs, taking a moment to catch her breath. Her eyes wander around the scene, and she goes gray, trying to keep up the pretense that she's reacting to the sight instead of the telepathic communication. "What?"

We're going after your Ember, the werewolf says. And he's going to take us to her.

Chester doesn't resist as Sunset leads him and the werewolf back to Celestia's sports car. (He briefly entertains the thought of shouting at one of the traffic cops cleaning up the chaos, but he doubts that begging them for help with the telepathic werewolf mafia will go over well—especially when he was the one who caused those traffic accidents to begin with.) He meekly folds himself onto the bench behind the bucket seats, with the ice-blue werewolf leaping in alongside. Sunset inches the car away from the scene before the police notice, and soon they're speeding out toward Canterlot city limits, only the throaty growl of a high-end V8 challenging the uneasy silence.

Now that he's out of immediate danger, Chester finally has time to set his thoughts in order.

Fact: he now lives in a world with a telepathic werewolf mafia.

But… is that really what's going on here? They haven't pulled a single weapon, aside from the wolf being sharp and pointy. In a Chet Land novel, the evil master criminal's henchfolk would have pointed two different guns at his head by now. Aside from the timing of all this happening right after the shootout with Anton and "Ember", nobody's acting in mafia ways, are they?

Well… perhaps Ember, who did steal a rifle and who, Chester belatedly realizes, was telepathic too. (That was why the colors were so vivid at her taunt! He wasn't hearing speech; she communicated the same way the ice-blue werewolf did. That's one mystery solved, at least.) But the people in the car with him? None of the three have been particularly bloodthirsty—or even angry, aside from the ice-blue werewolf's ongoing irascibility—and Celestia has been awfully kind. All this weirdness has him badly on edge, and maybe he needs to dial it back a bit.

Speaking of Celestia. His brain flashes back to the names in her address book, and the asterisks are starting to make a kind of sense. Maybe Sunset's the normal one—their human contact, dealing with phones and vehicles—and the asterisks mean the other two are packmates. Three seems like a tiny wolfpack, but maybe they're a… strike team, or something… splitting off from a larger group.

But not Ember's group. They need him to find her, and they're concerned about her. Some sort of pack rivalry thing?

And where is this little group's fourth member? Which one is missing? Speaking of which… Chester sees an opportunity to answer two of his burning questions at once.

His curiosity overcoming his hesitation, he cautiously prods the fur on the ice-blue werewolf's flank. Her emotions have been wandering through a sequence of colors he's been too distracted to track, but at his touch she snaps straight into a vibrant maroon, and swivels her head to give him a withering stare. What?

The first of his questions is how far the werewolf's telepathy extends. In a supernatural world containing werewolves, the ability to telepathically project speech doesn't feel like one of those powers which would come in isolation. It wouldn't necessarily imply mind-reading powers—and his gut tells him the werewolf isn't acting as if she were pulling hidden knowledge from him—but if he had to place a bet, he'd bet on that mind-speech being bidirectional.

So Chester looks straight into the werewolf's eyes, concentrates on the part of his mind where he has been feeling her words pressing in from the outside, and sub-vocalizes, gathering thoughts and pushing them back in her direction. (It all feels a little foolish, but he loses nothing if it doesn't work.) Thus, his second question, starting with the name that feels werewolfier:

I'm sorry, but is your name Luna?

The werewolf's colors shift as his words coalesce. (Pay dirt! She is hearing him.) There's a brief burst of lilac, intermingled with pink, and while the humor dies away immediately, that irritation persists as she recedes into maroon. She swivels her muzzle away, not bothering to answer.

Fact: the ice-blue werewolf is "Twilight*".

Her aura has a similar intensity to Anton's, and Chester silently marvels that that makes her the least exceptional of his fellow passengers. (He wonders in passing if there's something about werewolves which makes them especially prone toward enlightenment.) Her ears are almost white-furred, tall and spiky, set in a permanent backward arc so exaggerated it almost loops around toward down. There are some spiky dark mats atop her head, matching the end of her unkempt tail. Her chest, and some dappled fur underneath her eyes, are noticeably lighter than the rest of her—and Chester takes a moment to reassess his palette. Maybe it would be better to call the lighter bits, which were burned into his brain as he stared up from underneath, "ice-blue" and start thinking of her in general as "cyan"?… No, it's a trivial enough distinction that he decides it's not worth disrupting his mental color table.

Speaking of colors. It occurs to him that for most of the time they've been together—which includes that initial chase before he consciously registered her emotions, hindsight supplies—Twilight's aura has been some variation of pink. Chester wonders if it would be werewolf-racist to call it "resting bitch face."

She's not pink now, though. With Chester's distraction over, Twilight is staring unfocusedly toward the front seat, her colors once again quickly shifting. Chester had dismissed that earlier, figuring that she was silently sorting through her emotions. But now that he's established that she can telepathically hear as well as speak, he studies the women in the front seat for a bit, too. The colors of all three passengers are shifting in loose synchronization.

Fact: The other three are talking behind his back.

Despite not being in the recipient list, Chester realizes that he has a pretty good idea of the conversation's content from its emotional contours and the targets thereof. The others lag Twilight's reactions for a while; she's sharing a summary of their conversation. There's clearly mutual concern over Ember's gun. Then oranges and blues, far more sharp and accessible: a discussion of how much they can trust him. And… something to do with the Holy Mother? That seems probable. The sequences of emotions in that stretch seem to be related to him, but not sharp enough to be firsthand. Oddly, there's no uncertainty to those sensations, which suggests they're acquainted with Chryssa-swamini already, at a level beyond reputation. And while Chester's not in the Holy Mother's inner circle like Esau is, he would definitely recognize these bizarre strangers if they had been around the ashram before.

A few moments after their conversation dies away and his companions' auras start fading back toward unsettled neutrality, Chester clears his throat. "I, uh," he starts—then immediately halts instead of continuing with didn't want to interrupt and mentally tallies a rare Stupidity Avoided point—"I know that I'm making your life complicated right now and you don't exactly owe me anything, but would you maybe please consider telling me what's going on?"

The others' emotions whirl back to life, but Sunset—from the driver's seat in front of him—immediately halts discussion with muddy green confidence. (Chester pictures her telling the others: Chill out, I've got this.)

"Well, it's very simple," she says, with a jocular tone at odds with the smug muddy purple of her words. "We're magical talking unicorns from another dimension, and after a few close calls, we decided to find and redeem this world's duplicates of the pony world's greatest villains before they can enact some evil plans of their own."

Chester politely waits through the beat that Sunset gives him to let it sink in. Then she bursts into laughter—again, with that same muddy smugness of secretly kidding on the square, rather than the lilac of an actual joke. "No but seriously, Celestia moonlights as a traveling ventriloquist and uses her dog for her show, and Ember's just a weird friend prone to violent outbursts who we're a little concerned about."

Fact: Celestia and Sunset are magical talking unicorns from another dimension.

(Twilight*, maybe not. Chester's gut says that she feels like a werewolf in a way the other two don't. He mentally separates them into different talking-animal buckets.)

Unicorns are no more nor less bizarre than werewolves; that piece of the puzzle slots in without resistance, even if he now has to come to terms with two bizarre talking-animal races instead of one. Other, broader epistemological questions immediately stir up with the whole alternate-dimension thing. He sets those aside for later.

Because magic? That instantly clicks. Some people might have found it a roadblock, but for Chester, it's not even a speed bump. He's a frequent witness to the golden shine of the Holy Mother's perfected aura, and her siddhis… well. No point in exhuming those memories.

If anything, the surprise is that there are other beings besides Chryssa-swamini who have reached such a level of transcendence as to have developed powers. (Telepathy isn't one of the siddhis the Holy Mother claims to have, but it's on the list of attainments they acknowledge.) None of them have shone with the Holy Mother's transcendent gold, which puts them at levels far below hers, but Twilight's siddhi is proof enough that Sunset's quip is no joke, and the intensity of their auras is strong supporting evidence.

And frankly, the magic makes the crazier parts of the claim fit together neatly. The world outside the Holy Mother's ashram is base and transgressive; it makes perfect sense that transcendent beings would be from elsewhere. It also makes perfect sense that if they're enlightened enough for magic, their goal would be to cleanse the world of villains. It's the exact same thing the Holy Mother is clearly trying to do with Anton, reach and redeem someone dangerous—

Chester pauses, relief flooding him as the important pieces click together. It still stings him to think of Celestia's amusement at Chryssa-swamini's title of enlightenment. But now he can be certain that was a mistake from insufficient knowledge. Like so many others, Celestia had only looked at the Holy Mother's reputation, and not at the purity of her intentions. (Chester nearly laughs in relief. He'll get that sorted out before they meet.)

But that worry leaves behind another as it recedes, and the second one is not so easy to dismiss:

Was Chester right to think Anton could threaten the Holy Mother's safety?

He thinks for a moment, then figures his best option is to take the plunge and test the waters.

"If I were to tell you that I've met a second one of your duplicate villains," he says slowly, "could we talk about that?"

Sunset goes pale orange, eyes flicking at the others. "I was kidding about that," she ventures. "You caught that, right?"

"Sure," Chester says. "So. Exact same question, but we'll pretend it's hypothetical."

There's another burst of telepathic communication, with both types of surprise from multiple directions, which suddenly resolve into a unified lilac. "And I don't mean the Holy Mother," he quickly clarifies, trying not to be disappointed in their misplaced amusement.

And that sets off a longer silent conversation, dominated by black. Their uncertainty accumulates threads of a tentative light violet, and he waits until their curiosity wins out.

"For purposes of hypothetical discussion, sure," Sunset says, her light violet not entirely hidden behind gray. "I mean, it doesn't take a magical talking unicorn to want to make the world a better place, right? If you know someone in need of a little friendship, we might have ways to help."

Chester nods. "I mentioned him earlier. Master Anton. The rancher who shot at your… uh, Ember. He…" Chester hesitates; he was about to mention the color-intensity Anton shares in common with these transcendental outsiders, but that would raise uncomfortable questions about how he made that observation. "… He seemed perfectly nice when I met him, but when she arrived, it was like a switch flipped and he went sort of, uh, apocalyptic."

His compatriots seem to consider that for a moment, a muddy swirl of colors fading into black—but Celestia doesn't share their doubt. "It's not impossible," she says, light violet and her trademark periwinkle. "Describe him?"

"A loner at the moment, but big on family," Chester says, before realizing she probably meant physically. "A huge brick of a man. Thick beard."

Celestia, now full-on violet, turns in her seat toward the other two. "I actually think Chester's onto something," she says. "Scorp-Anton? I could see it."

"Scorpan-ton…?" Sunset says, keeping her eyes on the road as creamsicle swirls. "Wait, like the historical Scorpan? Lord Tirek's brother that you and Star Swirl befriended once upon a time?"

"The Sirens dated even farther back, and they caused you plenty of trouble here."

"True, but not my point. Scorpan wasn't exactly a villain, was he?"

"He started much closer to redemption than most," Celestia periwinkle-says, "but I assure you that back in his day, he was plenty dangerous in the wrong company."

The wolf snorts and opens her mouth, and for once Chester's not the target of her pink. "So that's it?" Twilight says (in perfect human speech, and Chester nearly freaks out anew). "We're just dropping all the pretenses, and revealing everything to the changeling?"

"You did first," Sunset shoots back immediately, "with that stunt in the garage."

"I was just being a telepathic wolf! Who believes in telepathic wolves?"

"Chester, apparently," Celestia lilac-says. "You said he knew what you were."

"He thought I was some sort of… werewolf contract killer!" Twilight pink-says. "Whatever he thought he knew was guaranteed to be three-quarters wrong until you two just laid it all out."

Sunset sighs, a bit of pink creeping into her aura as well. "Look, we're clearly past the point where dancing around the truth is accomplishing anything. And you of all people should know that some changelings are good. Chester's gone out of his way to help us out despite an awkward start."

Twilight's pink deepens. "Some changelings! Exactly!"

"Well, if you just need to know he's trustworthy, there's a simple way to settle that." Sunset signals and pulls over to the side of the highway.

Chester wasn't about to interrupt while the others were dropping so much juicy information—even if he has zero context for any of it—but the conversation is starting to go uncomfortable places. "What do you mean?" he finally says.

Sunset steps out of the car, pulls the driver's seat out of his way, and gestures for him to step out and join her. "This'll just take a moment," she says, in that special shade of pale muddy orange that signals an apology. There's undercurrents of cream-colored guilt there, too, and of a purer orange—but she's keeping that fear well under control. "We never got to finish our introductions earlier. Chester, hello. I'm Sunset Shimmer."

She sticks out her hand. This time, Chester glances down and focuses his sight on it. Just like before, its colors are distorted, sparkly. Her name isn't the only shimmer she's got.

Unfortunately, he's no closer to understanding that than last time. And if he reacts in any way, he gives away the fact of his color-sight. Maybe he should come up with some wild excuse not to touch her? (Allergic to unicorns?) Or tell her everything, grovel, and hope she takes it well?

On the other hand, it's a handshake. And even if she's pulling some siddhi out of her back pocket, what's a handshake going to do? The conversation made it sound like she has some way to measure the purity of his intentions—and that's a test he should trivially pass, since they're all fundamentally working for the same goal.

So he takes a calculated risk. "Um, hi?" he says, and reaches out.

Naturally, the question at the forefront of Chester's mind is what exactly she's doing—and the exact instant their hands make contact, she starts wondering the same thing about him. Sunset's aura suddenly distorts, and those earlier mixed colors vanish into an unmistakable light violet. That's odd timing, Chester thinks—and in perfect unison, her violet intensifies. Then she also goes peach as he startles at the repeated coincidence—and he realizes he's seeing his own emotions.

But she's not a perfect copy. He blinks and looks again. And he realizes: Sunset has gone a shimmery… mirror… color. He didn't even know that was possible. And now that he's directly looking at his distorted reflection, there's an inner image within it, a silvered form showing a tinier Chester, with an inner image of a tiny mirror showing a Chester with a mirror showing—

Sunset gasps and jerks her hand back, the mirror shattering into quickly dissolving fragments. Chester loses his balance and sits roughly on the highway shoulder; he's aware at the corner of his vision of Sunset windmilling and falling back against the car door. He's breathing rapidly, getting light-headed. She looks pale.

"Was—" Chester stammers, beating her to speech by a fraction of a second. "Did—was that—did you just read my mind?!"

"Was that—" Sunset stammers back, her colors an unholy mess. "You see emotions?!"

Chester fights to bring his breathing under control. "I—okay. No, this makes sense, I guess. You're all telepathic."

"I mean, okay," Sunset says, standing unsteadily back straight, "I should have anticipated that, it's probably a changeling thing."

Chester blinks, mental gears grinding to a halt. "But you're not a werewolf, you're a unicorn, and you're the only one who's done that… mirrored silver thing."

Sunset raises a finger, pauses with her mouth open, then frowns and taps her chin. "You're used to nobody else seeing colors like you do."

Chester doesn't bother to correct her—he's not quite alone, but he and Esau aren't talking much these days, and yes, he has adjusted to the idea that everyone else in the world seems to somehow stumble through life without color-sight. "Right." He gestures toward the werewolf, still sitting in the back seat of the car and radiating curiosity. "Is she not actually a telepath? Was that you all this time?"

"No," Sunset says absently, "that's… a long story, but she got whammied with a magical artifact or two. About all she can do these days is mentally communicate at people and then pick up their responses and surface reactions. Whereas I don't have telepathy, but I can read memories when I touch people."

"Isn't that a gross invasion of privacy?" Chester says defensively.

Sunset's fragmented colors finally coalesce into a sharp cream, and she clears her throat uncomfortably. "I only use it to solve friendship problems. I… hey, wait. Doesn't the same thing apply to what you do?"

"Of course not," Chester reflexively denies. "I… ehrm."

He's never actually thought through the ethics of his color-sight from the perspective of people without it. And now that she mentions it, not two minutes ago he was undetectably eavesdropping on the conversation in the car. It's not like he can control who he is, any more than wolves can stop eating meat, but she kind of has a point.

They stare at each other in mutual cream-colored silence.

"So. Er. Anyway." Sunset coughs into her arm. "Sorry?"

"Likewise," Chester says. "Look, your intentions are clearly good. I should have told you what I could do."

Sunset chuckles, flaring to a weak lilac. "No, it makes perfect sense. You thought we were the werewolf mafia."

Chester uneasily chuckles back. "In my defense, it has been an extremely weird day."

"We have a lot of those," Sunset says, the pale yellow of resignation and an apologetic muddy pale orange bleeding together. "Thank you for being so cool about this, especially after the way we dragged you in."

"Dragged? Are you kidding?" Chester asks. Everything he's done at the ashram has been in pursuit of enlightenment—being asked by magical extradimensional unicorns to help the fight against enlightenment's enemies is literally the most exciting thing that's ever happened to him. "If there's anything I can do for your villain-redeeming agenda, I would be sincerely honored to help out."

"I know," Sunset says, radiating a cerulean which says the same thing, then sticks out her hand again. "We'd be honored to have you."

"I know." Chester starts reaching forward—then freezes, eyes flicking back and forth between the sparkling hand and Sunset's eyes.

Sunset stares in creamsicle confusion for a moment, then the muddy orange of embarrassment flares as she facepalms. "Sorry," she says. "Keep forgetting I can't turn that off."

Author's Note

It's a good thing Chester cleared up all his misunderstandings in this chapter.

Now that we're headed into the post-launch period, I'm shifting into the twice-weekly regular publication schedule (though I'm open to changing that, so give me your feedback at the linked post if you'd like to see more frequent chapters).

Next chapter, "Into The Woods," comes out Wednesday, Aug. 7!