Earth to Twilight

Chapters

Chapter 1: A Modest Proposal
Chapter 2: A Certain Chemistry
Chapter 3: Put to the Test
Chapter 4: Cooking up Trouble
Chapter 5: Call to Adventure
Chapter 6: All Aboard
Chapter 7: Home Sweet Home
Chapter 8: Into the Night
Chaper 9: Darkness Beyond Twilight
Chapter 10: Castle of the Sun
Chapter 11: Friendship Studies
Chapter 12: Spring Ahead

Chapter 1: A Modest Proposal

Twilight Sparkle stood before Princess Celestia in chains, her hooves weighted down, the hammer of a clockwork inhibitor wobbling above her horn. To one side, Princess Luna looked away from Twilight, refusing to speak up and protest her innocence. To the other, Pinkie Pie was busy making out with Shining Armor, and didn’t seem to notice that Twilight was in trouble. The rest of her friends were absent – it was just her and Celestia, and Celestia was not amused.

“Twilight Sparkle,” Celestia intoned, in a grim voice. “For crimes against ponykind – the possession of weapons of mass destruction, the attempted muder of myself and everypony in Canterlot and Manehattan, and the use of the want-it-need-it spell to steal the will of more than one hundred ponies – you are hereby sentenced to the three most severe punishments available under Equestrian law. You are to be banished from Equestria, placed into a dungeon to guard against your return, and turned to stone in order to secure your dangerous and uncontrollable magical powers. Does the rest of the tribunal concur?”

Luna sighed heavily, while her bat-winged guards shuffled their hooves – as guilty as Twilight, but they hadn’t been caught. “Far be it from me to interfere with the punishment of your faithful student.”

“Huh?” Pinkie Pie said, prying herself away from Twilight’s brother as she realized Celestia was looking at her. “I wasn’t paying attention. Can you start over from ‘order in the court’?”

“Pinkie!” Twilight protested. “You’re going to make Rainbow Dash miss her cue! She’s supposed to rush in and blast me with the Elements of…”

Twilight Sparkle sat up in bed, clutching the covers to herself tightly with her hooves, her hindlegs tightly bound by her own tossing and turning during the night. “Harmony…” she muttered, blinking as she recognized her surroundings. She was back in Ponyville, back in her library, and that horrible nightmare was just that. Celestia had never ordered her banished and imprisoned and turned to stone.

Concentrating on what had become one of her signature spells, Twilight completely failed to teleport anywhere, or indeed summon any magical power at all. She sighed. She’d hoped that maybe all of it had been a dream, but no such luck. Celestia had never pronounced her sentence, because just as she was about to, Rainbow Dash had run in with the reformed Elements of Harmony and blasted Twilight with a full-power rainbow of light.

Turning her into an earth pony.

On the plus side, her sentence had been commuted to 30 days house arrest in Canterlot Castle, followed by eternity as an earth pony. She’d been back in Ponyville for a week, now.

She wondered if she’d ever stop having that stupid nightmare.

===

The important thing was to be methodical. There was always a way to accomplish any task without her magic. Sometimes, it took extra time and effort, but she still had plenty of time for her studies, most days. Sometimes, all it took was the proper tools, and fortunately for her there were generations of earth ponies before her who’d invented all of the really *important* tools, like mugs with extra-large handles that a hoof could slip through, or soap on a rope so that you didn’t have to literally wash out your mouth when you were soaping up the scrub-brush-on-a-stick.

It would have been awful if she’d had to invent those tools herself – could you imagine? A unicorn turned earth pony who in a matter of mere months solved the problems they hadn’t even known they’d had? That would have been fatally embarrassing.

Worse, what if she hadn’t been able to invent them? Nopony had let her in on the secret of soap on a rope until she’d gotten back to Ponyville, which had meant a month at a castle built for unicorns and the occasional Princess, where the best solution they could come up with was for a maid to levitate the soap for her. She’d learned to tolerate the taste, instead.

And no, stubbornness was not an earth pony trait.

Sometimes, though, just getting help from her friends was really the best solution. It would have been nice if she still had any. Then maybe she wouldn’t be balanced precariously on top of this ladder, trying to toss the books from the high shelves onto the right stacks for their new category without knocking everything over. Balancing now on three legs, as she dropped the next book onto her hoof, gripping it as tightly as she could with her frog as she read the title.

“Amniomorphics, by Starswirl the Bearded. The abridged version.” Twilight Sparkle scowled, and tossed the book carefully onto the stack of ‘magic’ books – by far the largest of the stacks set out on the floor in the middle of the room. “Just because it was written in the pre-classical era doesn’t make it a classic,” she grumbled. “What was I thinking last time I re-shelved the library?”

“Is it really appropriate for a librarian to let her personal preferences determine the organization of her collection?” asked a voice from below. “After all, this is a public library, is it not?”

“It is, Trixie,” Twilight said. “But as long as the categories are well-labeled, and the librarian on duty is able to use them to quickly locate books on subjects requested by library patrons, the exact division of those sections has always been up to the discretion of the library staff.” She grabbed another book off the shelf, briefly savoring the taste of glue and paper, and tossed it onto the pile for ‘fiction, historical’. It landed with a gentle ‘paf’, despite the distance it had to fall, perfectly aligned with the tome below it.

Trixie raised an eyebrow appreciatively. “You’re getting good at that. Have you finally unlocked the mysterious secrets of the Earth Pony?”

“I was playing with books long before I ever learned to use magic,” Twilight said, with a chuckle. “This is just relearning some old habits.” She glanced at the remaining books on the shelf, and smiled to herself. “Watch this,” she said, sweeping them all off the shelf with her hoof, aiming for the ‘fiction, historical’ section that most of them belonged in. All except that one – she kicked out with a hind hoof to redirect the lone outlier…

Then her other rear hoof slipped, her remaining forehoof – only providing balance – scraped off the top of the ladder, and a desperate lunge with her teeth clacked together on thin air. “Eeeeep!” she squeaked, as she fell towards the piles of books…

Which were not soft, taken as individuals, but the collapse of the orderly piles she’d spent several hours building did act as a significant energy sink, protecting her from taking any serious injury, except to her pride. And her re-shelving project. She groaned from what was now a heap of books, and struggled to her feet, her good mood dispelled as if by magic.

Trixie was still staring at her, expectantly.

“Why didn’t you catch me?” Twilight asked, a bit snappishly. “I know you don’t have any real magical power, but you’re supposed to be clever. I can think of half a dozen ways you could have kept me from falling.”

Trixie blinked. “That wasn’t part of the trick? I thought perhaps you were branching out into comedy – Celestia knows Cherry Berry still hasn’t quite found her stride as the new Element of Laughter.”

“No,” Twilight groused. “It wasn’t. And now I have to start all over,” she added, looking around at the chaos in dismay.

“That’s what you get for being so haphazard about it,” Trixie replied, levitating a book out of the pile and glancing at its cover, which featured the sharp fangs and glowing blue eyes of a changeling. “It might go more smoothly if you tried to be a little more methodical.”

“Why are you here,” Twilight hissed. “I don’t have any more friends for you to steal—“

“That’s a shame,” Trixie said. “Applejack and Rarity are starting to wear on me, and I was hoping I could trade them in for somepony new.”

“If you’re here for Spike, he’s staying over at Rarity’s. Again,” Twilight replied. “Do you want a book? We have plenty of books!”

“Actually,” Trixie said, “this one looks –“

“No books for you!” Twilight said, leaping across the small gap between her and Trixie and knocking the book right out of the unicorn’s magic.

Trixie shook her head sadly. Patiently. Twilight had to consciously stop herself from grinding her teeth. “That isn’t the reason for this visit. I was asked to relay a message for you – somepony who wishes to remain anonymous wants to offer you a once in a lifetime deal,” Trixie said. “And I’m sorry if you think I’m stealing your friends, but it was under Celestia’s direct orders. After all, I’m the new Element of Magic, and you’re just a librarian now. Librarians don’t need friends.”

Twilight felt a familiar fire burning inside her, and imagined her mane and tail beginning to smoulder – and ran through an abbreviated version of one of the meditation exercises she’d been studying lately, as part of her attempt to unlock the elusive magic of the earth pony. It wasn’t that she believed she could actually burst into flames – despite Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Applejack’s testimony that she most certainly could – but she was standing on top of a huge mound of paper that, as Spike periodically demonstrated, had never been properly fireproofed. There was no sense taking chances.

“Nopony needs friends,” Twilight said, letting the calm thoughts flow through her. “And at the same time, everypony needs them. Celestia’s orders were to reform the elements without me, you were my brother’s choice to replace me. So it’s true that you had no choice but to make friends with them,” Twilight said. “You didn’t have to take them all on tour for a month while I was under house arrest in Canterlot. That was your choice.”

Trixie smirked. “The road calls, and the performer answers – choice has little to do with it. Still, we invited you to our parties once you were set free.”

“And I stopped showing up after seeing how unbearably awkward it was with me there,” Twilight said.

Trixie laughed, a long grating cackle. “But you haven’t seen how unbearably awkward it is without you.”

Twilight was taken a bit aback. Had she jumped to conclusions? Did her friends still hold some feelings for her? Well, okay, that was a silly question – of course they did. As individuals. It was only as a group that the chemistry was gone, and maybe that was just because they were missing Pinkie Pie, and not because Twilight was a failure as a student of friendship, and deserved to suffer in solitude for the rest of her natural life.

“But I did not come here to criticize your organizational skills or to speak of our… mutual friends,” Trixie said, levitating a small, cloth-wrapped package over to Twilight, who caught it in her mouth. “I was asked to give this to you, a present from a secret admirer, who has a proposition for you. I don’t know what exactly he intends to offer, but I can vouch for his… let’s just say, his access to unusual resources.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes suspiciously, then crossed them to try to look at the package in her mouth.

Trixie nodded her head, tipping her hat briefly with her magic. “And so I’m off. Good luck with the re-shelving!”

===

toNIghT at MIdNigHT…

The night was cold and dark. It was almost time for Spring, but in Equestria being ‘almost’ at the change of the season didn’t count for much. The snow and clouds would be cleared away in a single day of Winter Wrap Up, and until then winter was in full force. Twilight’s hooves crunched through the snow in a quick triple rhythm as she cantered along the road out of town, a plain grey cloak clinched tight around her body to hold in the warmth. The hood hung a little too low over her eyes – she’d bought the thing when she was a unicorn, and it was tailored for her missing horn – but it was the warmest thing she owned.

Not quite warm enough, thus the brisk pace. Twilight Sparkle’s eyes focused on the icy road before her, or what she could see of it in the dim glow of the firefly lantern she held in her mouth. Beyond the edge of its pale greenish glow, Equestria was swallowed into the sort of starless darkness that one only found in the country.

She kept imagining she saw movement out of the corner of her eyes, regardless – was that a glint of her lantern’s light off some nocturnal creature’s eyes? She didn’t let it unnerve her. Her pet owl’s eyes were better than hers, and she trusted him to warn her of any danger. Not that danger was likely – the Everfree Forest was close, but she was not in it, and Equestria was generally safe, even at night.

cOMe To tHe ToP Of tHe dAM…

She slowed as she came to the rocky, treacherous terrain near the hydro-thaumatic dam. Equestria was safe from monster attacks, not from the sort of misadventure one was likely to suffer running along the edge of a slippery cliff in the middle of a dark winter night. At any rate, it was a little warmer here, thanks to the dam’s emanations, and the glow of the magical transformers lit up the canyon beside her. The dam itself would be brightly lit – although the top, and her mysterious would-be benefactor, would remain in shadow.

aLoNE

Twilight paused as she reached the top of the path, staring into the darkness atop the dam, which was deeper than ever with her night vision now ruined by the transformers’ glow. “Whooo…” came a plaintive call from behind her, and a pair of taloned feet landed on her back.

“Thank you, Owlowiscious,” she said, in a bright cheerful voice entirely at odds with the surroundings. “I’m afraid I have to go the rest of the way alone. Stay nearby, though, if you will – I’ll probably want your company for the trip home after I meet with Trixie’s friend.”

“Who?” the owl asked.

“I guess I’m about to find out,” she said, trotting cautiously towards the darkened span. With a soft flutter of wings, her pet left to find a nearby perch, and wait. Or at least, she hoped he was waiting. Trixie may have vouched for her friend…

iF You eVEr WaNT to seE yOUr hORn AgaIN

… but what kind of pony wrote an invitation in the form of a ransom note, complete with cut-and-paste letters from newspaper clippings?

Twilight laughed out loud as she set foot on the slick stones of the dam itself. It was the sort of thing Pinkie Pie would have done, if she hadn’t gotten herself lost in the past.

A chittering noise seemed to echo her laugh from the darkness before her, and a dark shape swept past, barely illuminated by the glow from the transformers, too fast for her to make out. Twilight paused, looking behind her and seeing nothing, then quickly to the high-water side of the dam as a splash came from the reservoir. “Who’s there?” she asked.

There was a thump as something landed on the dam behind her, and without thinking she ran forwards into the darkness, stumbling and slipping on the icy stone and sliding along the surface for a few dozen feet, spinning around as she drifted until she looked directly into a pair of blue glowing eyes from the dark form following her. A hoof on the small of her back steadied her, and she leapt to her feet, glancing quickly back and forth between the two black-shelled, blue-eyed, insect-winged monsters hedging her in.

The changeling in front of her flashed with a brief green fire, turning into a copy of Pinkie Pie. “You should see the look on your face!” it said, in her voice.

The one behind her transformed into Applejack. “Relax, sugarcube. We were just havin’ a bit of fun.”

The fake Pinkie Pie giggled. “You’re tasty when you’re scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Twilight said, and realized it was true. Changelings might be insidious infiltrators, but they were physically weak, and a pair of drones was hardly a threat to anypony. The only thing that made the situation even slightly dangerous was the danger of accidentally falling off the dam. “I take it you’re Trixie’s ‘friends’? Who are you?”

“Hello?” Pinkie Pie said, waving a hoof in front of Twilight’s face. “Changeling.”

“That covers ‘what’,” Twilight said. “Do you have a name?”

“’Course we’ve got names,” ‘Applejack’ replied. “We’re not about to tell ‘em, though. Safer for everypony involved if we keep this discreet.”

“We already had to pull up stakes once this season after that stupid mess in Canterlot,” Pinkie Pie said, pouting. “If it wasn’t for Princess Pinkie Pie we’d still be rotting in Canterlot’s dungeons, if they’d hadn’t hoofed us over to the School For Gifted Vivisectionists.”

“Pinkie,” Applejack said. “She doesn’t need to know your life story.”

“Well, maybe I want her to know it!” Pinkie Pie snapped. “It was her stupid brother that decided on random changeling sweeps just in case his spell missed anypony from the hive. Here’s a hint,” she said, poking at Twilight with her hoof. “It didn’t. And yet, the dungeon filled up with changelings. Innocent changelings.”

“You couldn’t be completely innocent,” Twilight Sparkle said. “You had to have been impersonating somepony.”

“Nopony but ourselves,” Applejack replied. “Well, mostly just ourselves. No sense havin’ the power to change shapes if you don’t have a little fun with it.”

“And now we can’t go back, even if we wouldn’t be arrested,” Pinkie Pie said, sitting down and pouting. “Our friends and family – former friends and former family – know we’re fakes, and everypony thinks we’re monsters.”

“Wow,” Twilight said, eyes widening as she imagined that happening to her. “That’s terrible! Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Nah,” Applejack said. “It’ll all blow over on its own. That big kerfluffle with the Moon Cannon helped a lot already, got ponies’ minds off the ‘changeling threat’. And Princess Pinkie Pie let us out of prison, so there’s that. The way we figure it, you’ve helped us enough already, and now it’s our turn to help you.”

“Right,” Pinkie Pie said. “We can give you your horn back.”

Twilight blinked. “But that’s –“ she started. “You can’t – What –“ She took a deep breath, and focused on saying something coherent. “How?” she managed to ask.

With a quick sweep of green fire, the Pinkie Pie changeling transformed into a copy of Twilight herself, only as she used to be, horn and all. Her horn glowed faintly, and with a ‘pop’ a moustache appeared on Twilight’s face.

“You’re going to toss me into the freezing reservoir and replace me?” Twilight said, twitching her new whiskers.

“What?” the unicorn Twilight asked, indignant. “No!”

“We’re going to make you into an awesome changeling, just like us!” said Rainbow Dash’s voice from behind her – apparently, the other changeling had also shifted form. “Then you’ll be able to turn into a unicorn or a pegasus or stay as an earth pony, whatever you want!”

“There are other benefits, as well,” said the unicorn changeling, levitating a scroll with a bulleted list. “Night vision. The ability to sense emotion. Poisonous fangs for self-defense. Secretion of adhesive goo—“

“Ew,” Twilight said.

“It comes in handy more than you’d think,” the changeling with the list said, looking a bit insulted.

“Um, look,” Twilight Sparkle said, setting down the lantern. It wasn’t hard to talk around the handle, but it was making her lip sore. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate the offer, because I do! It’s touching, really.” She glanced between them. “But… ew. I don’t want to be a bug.”

“That’s the dumbest reason I’ve ever heard,” ‘Rainbow Dash’ snapped. “We’re not ‘bugs’.”

“Technically –“ began the Twilight changeling.

Twilight cut her off. “Also, this is a terrible time to be a changeling. And it’s not like I could hide it, not if I actually wanted to use magic. Green magic isn’t really very common among unicorns, and my own has always stayed in the purple-to-pink range.”

“Nopony will notice. Nopony ever notices,” Rainbow Dash said. “Not until they find out you were a changeling some other way.”

Twilight stared at the hovering list held up by her changeling duplicate. In the light of her firefly lantern, it almost looked like it was glowing green instead of – she took a deep breath, and focused. Green. It was glowing green, because it was being levitated by a changeling. “That’s kind of creepy.”

“But convenient,” the changeling Rainbow Dash said. “There’s one more thing you’d get out of joining us, though. Something you’ve been missing lately.”

“Uh huh,” Twilight Sparkle said, nosing under her cloak to get at her saddlebags. She’d already decided not to take them up on their offer, but that didn’t mean the night had to be a total loss.

“Friends!” said her doppleganger, ambushing her with a hug. Twilight froze, tensed up – it felt just like a pony hugging her. For pony’s sake, it even smelled like her. How had the changelings learned what she smelled like? “No hugs?” the changeling asked, a tingling sensation washing over Twilight Sparkle’s shoulder and neck as it morphed into Fluttershy. The list fluttered to the ground, forgotten.

“Now now, dear,” said the other, this time with Rarity’s voice. “Let’s not rush the poor thing. She may be the mare we’ve set our sights on, but she barely knows us – physical contact is a big step for some ponies.”

Twilight Sparkle put a hoof on Fluttershy’s chest – which felt just like Fluttershy’s chest – and pushed the changeling back a few steps. Its wings were folded tightly to its sides, just like Fluttershy’s would have been. She pulled her notepad out of her saddlebag, and tossed it onto her hoof, then ducked back in for something to write with. “Can you explain the conversion process?” she asked, around the pencil, as she jotted down some preliminary notes.

The two changelings looked at her suspiciously. “Do you actually have any intention of joining us, or are we just research subjects to you?” Rarity asked.

Twilight winced. “Well, I’m not going to dissect you,” she said, wedging the pencil into the spiral binding of the notepad so that she could talk more freely. “But I’m not sure what you expect me to say – I can’t just meet some strange… ponies out on the edge of town in the middle of the night and decide to throw my whole life away for a new one as a giant bug. I don’t even like bugs! I mean, I don’t not like you, since you don’t normally look like bugs, but when you do it’s kind of creepy and honestly changing to look like all my friends is kind of creepy too especially since you seem to be doing such a good job of it that I have to wonder how long you’ve been stalking us!”

“That’s okay,” Fluttershy said, looking down. “We understand. Of course you’re just like all the other ponies –“

“What I’m saying is that I need some time to think,” Twilight said. “And some notes, to think about. I can’t decide to take you up on your offer right now, but if you tell me absolutely everything you know about being a changeling, then when I get back to the library I can carefully weigh the pros and cons and come up with the rational answer instead of just going with my gut reaction which is ‘ew’ followed by a long sequence of ‘no’s. Then we can meet again – in, say, a week or two? After Winter Wrap Up? – and I can give you my decision.”

“You don’t have to lie, Twilight,” Rarity said. “We’re not going to hurt you if you say no. Or kidnap you and hold you in a cave until you change your mind, or convert you against your will and hope that you’ll forgive us. We’ll just leave, and you’ll never see us again.”

“Well, you will see us,” Fluttershy said, “but you won’t notice.”

Rarity nodded. “But I’m afraid we can’t afford to schedule another meeting. If you knew that you were meeting us, would you have come here alone? Or would you have brought the guard to arrest us and throw us back into the dungeon?”

“I probably would have brought Rainbow Dash, and had her hide on a cloud in case of trouble,” Twilight admitted. “She’s good at high-speed extractions, and has a black-belt in Kung Fu if it came to that. She’s also fiercely protective of her friends, and did I mention that she still comes to my book club meetings?” She glanced over at the treeline, where Owlowiscious was waiting. If she screamed loud enough, he’d probably hear her, but could he bring help in time?

The changelings seemed to take her glance the wrong way. Rarity turned back into Rainbow Dash, and both of them hovered up into the air, ready to bolt.

“Actually,” Twilight said. “That could be a solution.”

“Having Rainbow Dash attack us?” Fluttershy said, looking around nervously.

Twilight sighed. “No, the book club.” They stared at her blankly. “It has regular meetings, and is open to the public. I’ve put up invitations all over town. You two could show up in pony form, and nopony would think anything of it. Then, if I wanted you to convert me, I’d give some sort of signal, and you could stay late and, um, do it. In the meantime, it’d be a way for all of us to make a few more friends.”

“It sounds risky,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Well, you don’t have to show up,” Twilight said. “You don’t even have to tell me if you’re going to show up. If I make the signal and nothing happens, well… I guess I’ll have to live with being an earth pony. It’s probably not going to happen anyway,” she said, glancing at her mostly blank notebook. “Especially with this little information about the whole procedure.” She wiggled the notebook to draw attention to it, and picked up the pencil again. “Hint hint.”

“I guess we can tell you a little more about it,” Rainbow Dash said, still sounding suspicious. “We can start with the procedure itself. It’s really simple –“

“Actually,” Twilight said, shivering as a cold breeze blew off the reservoir, “Would you mind if we took this somewhere warmer? At least out of the wind?”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Come on, there’s a cave nearby…”

===

A few days later, Twilight Sparkle was reading a book with Rainbow Dash – the real Rainbow Dash, she was pretty sure. ‘Her’ changelings had been much better actors than Queen Chrysalis, but she was pretty sure she’d still be able to recognize her own friends.

“I don’t see why we have to call it a ‘book club’,” Rainbow Dash said. “That’s just about the nerdiest name I can think of for a bunch of ponies meeting to read books. I mean, it’s not like we’re here to read books on boring stuff like history or…” she peeked over at what Twilight was reading. “…changelings?”

“It’s a new young adult series by a brand new author, recommended for fans of Daring Do,” Twilight said. “It’s very popular in Canterlot – a sort of adventure/romance hybrid. I thought it might be a good idea to start fresh with a new series, since I’m expecting some new ponies to show up.”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “You put up posters again?” Twilight nodded. “Did they say ‘book club’ on them?” Twilight gave Rainbow a look. “Then nopony’s going to show up, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said. “We need to call it something cooler. Like – the Adventure Club! No, the Super Adventure Club!”

“Wouldn’t that attract ponies who wanted to actually go on adventures?” Twilight said.

Rainbow Dash grinned. “It’s a risk I’m willing to take!”

“Did somepony say adventure?” came a voice from the door.

“Yeah, come on in!” Rainbow Dash said. “You here for the… thing with the books that Twilight’s running?” she asked. “I’m sorry, Twilight, I just can’t say it.”

“The book club,” Twilight said for her.

“Yeah, I hope it’s not too…” said a white unicorn with a purple mane, and a cutie mark of the letter ‘pony’ repeated over and over in increasingly faint green. “…crowded,” he finished, looking around the empty room.

A pink pegasus mare with a curly mane of a dozen different shades of green followed him in. Her cutie mark was the sun setting across the ocean, with a wavey reflected sun beneath the line representing the horizon. “Are we early? Did we get the right day?”

“You’re just on time! This is the right day, and we were just about to start,” Twilight said cheerfully, running over to the ‘new fiction’ shelf and getting a copy of the book for each of her guests. “And if you like adventure, boy are you in for a treat!”

The unicorn walked over to the table in the center of the room and sat down, looking around the library as if expecting more ponies to leap out of the woodwork. “I just thought there’d be more ponies here. We saw the posters up all over town…”

“It’s because she named it the ‘book club’,” Rainbow Dash said. “Who wants to go to a book club?”

“Ignore her,” Twilight said. “Rainbow Dash is just a little embarrassed about anypony finding out she likes to read. Even though everypony knows.” The pegasi joined them at the table, and Twilight passed out the books. “Before we start in on our exploration of the brand new genre of Changeling Romance, why doesn’t everypony say a few words about themselves? I’m Twilight Sparkle, the librarian here in Ponyville and the personal student of Princess Celestia.”

“You might know her as public enemy number one,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Those charges were dropped!”

“And I’m Rainbow Dash, savior of Equestria, first non-princess pony on the moon,” Rainbow Dash said proudly. “I don’t sign autographs anymore. It was kind of fun for a while, but after being on tour with Trixie I think I have show business out of my system.”

“Seaside,” said the pegasus. “I haven’t saved Equestria yet, but one day the beach ball apocalypse will come, and I’ll be ready!”

“Cool, another athlete?” Rainbow Dash asked. Seaside nodded, and the two bumped hooves.

“Ditto,” said the unicorn, looking around nervously.

“Your name’s also Seaside?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Yeah, ha ha, I’ve never heard that one before,” Ditto said. “I work in the print room at the Ponyville Times. It’s, um, really boring to talk about, although I find it kind of fascinating myself. So if I start geeking out about the bindings in your books, just stick a hoof in my mouth.”

Twilight giggled. “Will do! I’m just so happy to see both of you here! I know we’re going to be the best of friends.”

Chapter 2: A Certain Chemistry

Twilight stared at the vat of sulfurous chemicals bubbling away before her, and the bowl of innocent-looking white powder sitting next to it. ‘Irritant’ was how the books had described it. ‘Irritant’, instead of ‘highly poisonous’ like the ammonia whose fumes still filled the air, ‘highly reactive’ like the four different kinds of acid she’d been struggling all day not to douse herself in, or ‘highly explosive’ like the large jug of clear liquid still slowly filling up under the filtration device. Since it was merely an ‘irritant’, she’d risked grinding up the crystals with her large mortar and pestle, which used a mouth-grip. She hadn’t inhaled much of it, but she still felt like she was going to die.

Or maybe that was the acid fumes – boiling off the hydrochloric acid in a poorly ventilated underground laboratory was probably not the smartest thing she’d ever done. But in all fairness, she’d already been feeling a bit woozy from the ammonia.

But it was okay. Everything was okay. All she had left was to dump the slightly poisonous white powder into the foul-smelling cauldron and stir, then add the explosive liquid and stir some more. Nothing was going to go wrong at this point – nothing could go wrong. All the chemical reactions were done with, so she didn’t have to worry about them suddenly going dangerously exothermic again, or finishing in half the time they should have taken and filling the air with acidic clouds. Again. It was finally, finally over. And she’d survived.

“I’m starting to see why I’ve never heard of an earth pony chemist,” she grumbled, as she picked up the bowl of powder carefully with her front teeth, and carried it over to the cauldron. “They probably all die at a young – ugh!” She let saliva bubble behind her lips to try to wash out the taste as her tongue was 'irritated' – talking with the bowl in her mouth had not been a smart decision.

She put her hooves on the edge of her worktable, stretched out her neck to get the bowl over the edge of the large cauldron, and was just about to tip the powder into the mixture when the cellar door flung open. “Twilight!” Spike called from the top of the stairs, “You’ve got a visitor!”

Twilight stood stock still – her head had instinctively jerked up to look at Spike as he came in, and now a thick dusting of white powder covered her face. She didn’t dare inhale or even open her eyes, with her face covered in ‘irritant’. Why hadn’t she been wearing goggles? Oh, right. She’d ditched the goggles after the various chemical splatters had gotten so bad that she couldn’t see through the lenses. Somehow, that had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Oh Celestia, her eyes were already burning, some had gotten in! Screaming, she dropped the bowl of dust and ran for the stairs – she didn’t have a proper eye-wash station, she’d always just teleported up to her shower and used that. A yelp interrupted her scream as her flank slammed against the side of her worktable, followed by the sound of shattering glass behind her. That was not good, but she continued on until she barreled head-first into the cellar wall where she’d expected to find stairs – the impact had thrown her off course! She coughed, having inhaled some of the dust despite her best efforts, and cried out, “Help!”

“I’m comin’, sugar!” A lasso settled around her neck, and she felt herself jerked to her feet, and to the side, stumbling after the guiding rope as she started to feel dizzy. “Pee-Yew! What happened down here?”

“It’s still happening!” Twilight squeaked, her hooves slipping on the stairs as she crawled her way towards relative safety. “I need to get to the shower…” Or was it more important to evacuate the building? She was really dizzy at this point.

“Just hold on, I gotcha,” Applejack said, and her soft muzzle and mane nosed under Twilight, lifting her onto the farm pony’s back. She clung desperately to her bouncy perch as Applejack ran her up stairs, and in a few seconds they’d arrived. She gave a little grunt as she was dumped into the porcelain tub, and flinched as cold water rained down over her. She held her face up into the freezing stream, then forced herself to open her eyes – which burned even more – and washed them out too. She opened her mouth and let the water flow inside, rinsing out the horrible taste…

And then she collapsed in the inch-deep pool of water, and started to sob, sodden and cold and still coughing every few seconds as her body tried to get the dust out of her lungs.

“Thanks, Ditto,” she croaked. “I think you might have saved my life.”

“Um… are you sure you’re alright, sugarcube?” Applejack said, looking down at the sodden purple pony. “Look me in the eyes, now. How many hooves am I holding up?”

Twilight blinked, and looked up at Applejack. “Applejack?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

===

Once Twilight was all washed off and wrapped in a fluffy towel – and Spike was in his Hazmat suit, cleaning up the explosive chemicals in the basement before they burned down the library – she and Applejack sat down in the kitchen for tea. Applejack made the tea; Twilight’s hooves started shaking whenever she went near the stove.

“This has been a really horrible day, Applejack,” she said, leaning over to blow on her tea, then inhaling its calming scent. “I used to like chemistry, but now I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go near a flask or beaker again without getting flashbacks. I guess that’s one more subject I can cross off my list of interests.”

“I saw the chalkboard, all scribbled up with letters and numbers and fancy math,” Applejack said, taking a sniff of her tea and wrinkling her nose. She added a little extra sugar. “Granny Smith always says, when you’re followin’ a recipe, forget the numbers – you’ve got to feel your way through each step to know how much of each ingredient to add, and when it’s time to move on. ‘Course, she’s talking about baking. I reckon no pony ever had to run for the shower just ‘cause they got a little flour in their eyes.”

“Yes,” Twilight said, lifting her teacup and taking a delicate sip before setting it back down. “That sounds like something much safer to try with milk and eggs than with sulfuric acid and ammonium nitrate. Although for all the good my measurements were doing, I might as well have been winging it. Stupid hooves.” She looked down at the offending appendages accusingly.

Applejack slurped up half her tea in one sip. “Can’t say as I’m much of a fan of usin’ em for delicate work. Always more of a tongue and tail girl myself. I imagine you’re wishin’ you were a unicorn again, though.”

“Every day,” Twilight said, taking another sip. “Something happens every day to make me just… so… frustrated!” She sighed. “According to the Psychology of Contentment, it could take up to a year for me to fully adjust to my new situation, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to hold out that long without doing something crazy.”

Applejack gave her a look. “Like blowing up the library trying to cook up...”

“Fertilizer,” Twilight said, flattening her ears as she filled in the blank.

“Compost, Twi,” Applejack said. “Look into it. Or better yet, come on over to the farm and we’ll show you a whole heap of it. That’s why I came by in the first place – it’s about that time of year when all the farmin’ ponies get together and start preparing for Winter Wrap Up. If you want to start learnin’ about growin’ stuff, there’s no better chance to talk to everypony who’s everypony in the field, ‘least in Ponyville.”

“It was for an experiment,” Twilight said. “The point isn’t to grow plants, it’s to measure how much better I can grow plants than, say, Spike, with both of us following a rigid schedule for things like water and exposure to sunlight. For the fertilizer, it was to see if making it from scratch was better than buying a bag at the store. By using a fertilizer with the same chemical composition, only made by an earth pony – me – I could see if any magical force that wasn’t directly observable was acting on the recipe.”

“And the store-bought fertilizer wasn’t made by earth ponies?” Applejack asked. “I mean, Filthy Rich didn’t just find it sitting in his cellar one day – somepony had to mix it up.”

“I picked the one brand that didn’t have ‘made by earth ponies’ proudly stamped on the packaging,” Twilight said, smiling. Then she shuddered, thinking of all the trouble she’d had following a relatively simple chemical formula. “And now I know why.”

Applejack finished the rest of her tea, then tossed the teacup into the sink, expertly sending it spinning around the edge of the basin a few times before rattling safely to the bottom. “So,” she said, setting her hooves on the table. “How about it? Want to come play farmer girl with all the real earth ponies?”

Twilight had been sort of hoping that she’d managed to change the subject. There was really only one answer she could give to an offer like that. The drawbacks were obvious – immersion in earth pony culture could only add confounding variables to her search for the basis of earth pony magic, quite aside from the time it would take up from more guided study. But it was a sincere offer from a good friend, a friend that she was in danger of losing as they drifted apart. She had to say yes.

At least this way she was a lot less likely to accidentally kill herself, or give in and get turned into a changeling.

“Ah, nevermind,” Applejack said, frowning as she stared into Twilight’s eyes. “I can tell you’re not keen on the idea.”

“No no no no no, I’ll do it,” Twilight said. “It’s just… I’m a little worn out right now, and I’m not sure I’m up to meeting a bunch of new ponies. Maybe we could – go get lunch! This tea’s really made me hungry, how about you? Why don’t we head over to Sugarcube Corner--”

“Hoo, boy. You sure you want to set hoof in that nest o’ snakes, Twi?” Applejack asked.

“Oh, right,” Twilight said. “They’re pretty torn up about Pinkie Pie, aren’t they.”

“That’s what you’d think,” Applejack said, “but it’s a mite creepier than that. If you listen to the Cakes talk, Pinkie Pie never left. I think the place might be…” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “haunted!”

Twilight stared at her. “Haunted.” Applejack nodded. “By the ghost of a pony who isn’t dead.” Applejack looked a little uncertain. “I think I know what’s going on, actually. Why don’t we head over there and take a look? Besides, I could really use a cupcake.”

===

It was actually quite a nice day out, considering that it was still winter. The sky was still blotted out by clouds, but the pegasi on the weather team had set up a series of artfully placed sunbreaks, that let vividly outlined sunbeams through to shine down across the snowy landscape. Twilight noted without surprise that one of them was placed to illuminate Rainbow Dash’s little cloud-castle.

Ponyville itself was covered in a layer of fresh, white snow, that crunched merrily under their hooves as they made their way down the street and across the square to the cupcake-topped gingerbread house where the Cakes lived and worked. It was nice to be outside in the fresh air, even if it was a little chilly – Twilight shivered a little. “I probably should have put on something warmer than this saddle.”

Applejack chuckled at that. “I’d lend you my coat, but that might give ponies the wrong idea.”

“Also, you’re not wearing any clothes.”

Twilight found herself looking surreptitiously at the ponies around them as they walked, trying to see if any of them reacted to her. A couple of them recognized her and waved; everypony seemed as friendly as ever, at least on the surface. But was it her imagination that their friendly smiles seemed forced?

Probably. It wasn’t like this had been the first time that she’d messed up and gotten dragged before Princess Celestia to answer for her actions, or the first time she’d charmed half the town with a want-it-need-it spell, or the first time she’d threatened the destruction of the town, or even the first time she’d gotten everypony in town drafted for the duration of a disaster.

It was the first time she’d done all of that at once, though. “Applejack? What do ponies think about me?”

“Gossip’s more Rarity’s thing, sugarcube,” Applejack said, “but don’t you worry none. Nopony’s going to string you up by your hind legs, cover you in honey, and leave you out for the bees. Not on my farm.”

“Yay,” Twilight said, cringing.

“Wouldn’t be no bees out in winter anyhow,” Applejack said as they pushed past the door into Sugarcube Corner, and were enveloped in blessed, pastry-scented warmth.

Twilight inhaled deeply. “Now I’m really hungry.” She trotted up to the counter. “One cupcake, please!”

After a brief delay Mrs. Cake’s swirly-maned head appeared from the kitchen, peering nervously around the corner to ask, “Twilight Sparkle? Is that you?”

“Hi, Mrs. Cake!” she replied, smiling. “I’ll have my usual.”

“Vanilla with pink frosting?” Twilight nodded, and the other pony vanished into the kitchen for a few moments, before reappearing with her treat.

“There you go, dear,” she said, as she set the cupcake down on the counter on a little saucer. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Her eyes drifted towards Twilight’s forehead, and her lack of a horn.

“Oh, it’s…” Twilight trailed off. It wasn’t ‘nothing’. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s disconcerting to be cut off from my special talent, but I’m sure once I figure out the secret of earth pony magic I’ll be back in business in no time.”

“Um… I’m sure you will,” Mrs. Cake said, glancing back and forth nervously.

“Applejack doesn’t think we have magic either,” Twilight said, guessing what the baker was thinking. “But this isn’t blind faith on my part, or some argument to the basic fairness of the universe. It’s been scientifically determined that the magical reserve of a pony is unrelated to their tribe. I don’t know how earth ponies use magic, but if we didn’t have any then unicorns with earth pony ancestry would be at a significant disadvantage in magical power, and if anything the reverse is true.”

Mrs. Cake smiled. “Little Pumpkin sure is a hoof full, I’ll admit.”

“So it’s just a matter of figuring out how other earth ponies access their magic, or if they don’t, how I can,” Twilight said, “because I don’t intend to live the rest of my life without magic. I’d go crazy.” She paused. “Magic is my cutie mark. If I couldn’t do magic ever again, I would literally go insane.”

“That’s, um,” Mrs. Cake looked uncomfortable. “Applejack? Is there anything I can get for you?”

“Nah, I’m good,” came Applejack’s voice, from all the way over near the door. Twilight glanced back to see her hovering just inside the entrance, looking as if she was fixed to bolt at the slightest provocation.

“It’s good to see you girls again,” Mrs. Cake remarked. “It seems like ages since we’ve had any of you over – and you used to be some of our best customers!”

“Things change,” Applejack said. “How’s Pinkie Pie?”

Mrs. Cake frowned.

“Applejack!” Twilight said, turning to glare at her.

“That’s why we’re here, ain’t it, Twi?” Applejack said.

“Well – yes, but…” she looked back to see how Mrs. Cake was reacting.

“It’s okay, dearie,” Mrs. Cake said, backing towards the kitchen. “I’m sure Pinkie Pie would be happy to see you. You’re her best friends, after all, aside from that Rainbow filly.”

“Can you… um…” Twilight said, trailing off into an uncomfortable silence. Finally, she finished with, “Call her?”

Mrs. Cake paused, then said, in a shaky voice only a little bit louder than normal conversation, “Pinkie Pie! Twilight Sparkle and Applejack are here to see you!”

A faint voice came from upstairs – Pinkie Pie’s voice. “Okay Mrs. Cake. Tell them to come on up! I’m playing with the twins.”

Applejack backed up a step, slamming her hind end into the front door, and pointed a hoof at the stairs. “Tell me that’s not a ghost, Twilight!”

“It’s not a ghost,” Twilight said, transferring the cupcake to the top of her head for safekeeping, and heading for the stairs

“Then what the hay is it?” Applejack asked.

“It’s a –“ Twilight started, then glanced over at Mrs. Cake, who was pretending not to listen. “It’s nothing for Mrs. Cake to worry about. I’ll explain more on the way upstairs.”

Applejack stared at her. Twilight stared back. “Fine,” the farmpony said, before gingerly walking over to the stairs like she was heading for the gallows. “But if we end up cast into an endless abyss of suffering and torment, I get to say I told you so.”

The two of them walked quietly up the stairs. At the top, Twilight paused, looking down the hall to where Pinkie Pie’s voice was singing a soft song to the Cake’s foals. “Alright,” she said quietly to Applejack. “You remember how Pinkie Pie let the changelings out of the Canterlot dungeon to help host her big party?”

Applejack sighed. “Yeah. That girl never had a lick of sense.”

“I’m not sure if you know, but not all of them were caught, afterwards,” Twilight said. “I think some of them might have found their way to Ponyville, hoping that –“

Applejack cut her off. “Wait a darn second – you think that there’s one of those nightmare-spawned monsters in that room there?” Twilight nodded. “With the foals?!”

“I don’t think they’re –“ Twilight tried to protest, but Applejack was already running down the hallway.

“Get your chitinous talons away from those foals, monster!” Applejack shouted, swinging around to buck open the door. “If you set one feeler on their…” She trailed off, eyes going wide in terror.

“Hi, Applejack!” came Pinkie’s cheerful voice.

“Twi…” Applejack said, in a strangled voice. “That ain’t no changeling.”

Twilight finally caught up with her, and looked into the room, where the two foals had their heads turned, staring at her and Applejack with wide, innocent eyes, while behind them, a large mirror was propped up against the wall, with a grinning Pinkie Pie – the old, earth pony Pinkie Pie – bouncing up and down inside it.

“Oh!” Twilight said, smiling at the Pinkie Pie in the mirror. “Well, that would have been my second guess.”

===

“So what y’all’re sayin’,” Applejack said, bobbing her head a little to give the tiny pegasus sitting on her hat a more exciting ride, “is that Pinkie Pie left a mess of these magic mirrors all over Ponyville, and somehow we never noticed.”

“I noticed, actually,” Twilight said, playing tug-of-war with little Pumpkin Cake’s magic, the rubber chew toy wrapped around her wrist. “One of the mirror-Pinkies showed up to scold me when I broke a Pinkie Promise not to tell about Spike’s crush on Rarity. That’s what their main job is – keeping track of Pinkie Promises.”

“You thought she was a ghost though,” Pinkie Pie said, giggling.

“Hallucination,” Twilight Sparkle said. “I thought she was a hallucination. There’s no such thing as ghosts. I didn’t realize what had really happened until Pinkie Pie explained all about her mirror-Pinkies while we were stuck on the moon.”

“That don’t explain why y’all never showed yourselves to anypony else until now,” Applejack said, giving the mirror-Pinkie a suspicious glower. Pound Cake pounded his hoof into her hat, annoyed that his ride had stopped moving.

“Well…” Pinkie Pie said, looking a little embarrassed for a second, before turning back towards the mirror with a determined glare. “Mr. and Mrs. Cake did break a Pinkie Promise. Pinkie Pie made them Pinkie Promise not to worry when she went to the moon, and they did! They worried about her big time!” She smacked her forehooves together for emphasis.

“That sounds like an excuse,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with what you’re doing, but Pinkie Pie! Is it really healthy for you to be reminding the Cakes constantly of their missing friend?”

“They’re the ones that are missing!” Pinkie Pie protested. “They’re missing Pinkie Pie! And I can’t just set them free from their Pinkie Promise just like that. It’s my duty as a mirror-Pinkie to keep reminding them that they promised not to worry until they stop worrying!”

“Or until they apologize for breaking their word,” Applejack said.

Pinkie Pie flopped onto her belly and let her head sink onto her hooves. “Is that why you’re here? To chase me away like some creepy ghost?”

Twilight Sparkle looked at the pouting pink pony, and sighed. “No,” she said. “We actually came here to get some cupcakes.” She tossed her head, and managed to catch the cupcake with her teeth on the way back down. It wasn’t a completely clean catch, but the twins giggled at the pink frosting all over her face until she wiped it onto her fetlock and licked it up. She wasn’t quite sure what Mrs. Cake put in the pink frosting, but it had always been her favorite. “Still haven’t quite got the hang of that.”

Pinkie Pie giggled too. “Maybe you should stick to floating them around with magic. It’s a lot less messy.” She blinked as Twilight and Applejack stared at her, then gasped, bouncing up off the ground and waving all four of her legs around, somehow. “Twilight! What happened to your horn!”

===

The holes in the clouds were closed, leaving the world dim and grey as Twilight and Applejack headed out to Sweet Apple Acres. A gentle snow was falling, but it was a little warmer than it had been earlier – or perhaps that was just the heat from the three boxes of fresh cupcakes balanced on her back. As they made their way past the last row of houses and out into the park, Twilight turned to watch the playful children building snowponies, having snowball fights, and sliding down the hills on sleds. She tried to ignore the flash of movement in the corner of her eye, keeping her gaze averted from the frozen puddle next to a bench.

“Psst!” came a voice from the reflective surface. Twilight turned her head the other way, and ignored it. “Heeey, Twilight!” it said, a little louder.

She walked on. This had been happening all the way from Sugarcube Corner. Applejack, for her part, had her hat wedged down over her eyes so she didn’t have to look at anything.

“Stooooooooop!” yelled the voice, in a sort-of-quiet half-whisper that reminded her of Fluttershy, although it was Twilight’s own voice trying to get her attention.

Twilight sighed, and turned on the frozen puddle viciously. “A puddle?” she said. “How did Pinkie Pie manage to enchant a puddle?”

“Well,” said the Twilight in the puddle – that Twilight Sparkle noticed still had her horn, just like every other Twilight Sparkle in all the mirrors, window-panes, and other reflective surfaces she’d passed on her path through town, “apparently the magical signature of a mirror-based pseudo-portal persists past the dissolution and re-formation of the mirror in question. There’s almost always a puddle here, and it’s right next to the bench. My Pinkie’s heard all kinds of secrets watching from this vantage point.” She looked proud of that.

“Look,” Twilight said. “I appreciate that you want to help, but I’m not interested!”

“You haven’t even heard my plan. Rejecting it a priori is unscientific.”

“I have! I have heard your plan, at least a dozen times!”

The mirror-Twilight pouted. “Mine is different!”

“So you don’t want me to convince a unicorn to bring you out into the real world so that you can merge with me and give me your horn?” Twilight asked.

“Oh,” the mirror-Twilight said. “Okay, so it isn’t different. But you should pick me!”

“It wouldn’t even work,” Twilight said. “Your horn isn’t real. If you emerged from the mirror and tried to take over my body, you’d end up as a unicorn spirit in an earth pony body and not only would you no longer be able to use unicorn magic, you’d have no hope of unlocking earth pony magic either! Also, I’d cease to exist.”

“You don’t know that,” the Twilight in the mirror said, rubbing her hooves together. “If we used a memory spell to align our experiences, we might merge into one –“

“Tried it,” Twilight said. “Didn’t work. Now, I don’t know how you all are talking to each other, but please, just tell everypony to stop. I don’t need your help.”

“Fine,” sighed the mirror-Twilight heavily. “But if you ever change your mind –“

“You’ll be the second ponies I talk to,” Twilight said, forcing a smile.

Once they were a few hundred feet away from the puddle, safely into the light woodlands near the edge of Sweet Apple Acres, Applejack asked, “You think that’ll keep ‘em off your back? Because ponies talking out of mirrors is giving me the serious heebie jeebies, and I don’t want that sort of magic nonsense infecting my farm.”

“No,” Twilight said, “that won’t stop them for long. I’ll just have to stay away from mirrors as much as I can from now on, I guess.” She laughed. “On the bright side, this means I’ve got at least a dozen mirror-me’s researching the problem and somehow comparing notes. Maybe they’ll actually come up with a workable solution.”

“I have to admit,” Applejack said. “While I appreciate your puttin’ forth the effort to be a proper earth pony and all, if I thought I could turn you back into a unicorn I’d do it in a heartbeat. You were always so happy when you were using your magic, Twi. It hurts my heart to see you like this.”

“Trust me, Applejack,” Twilight said. “The day I figure out how earth pony magic works, I’ll be bouncing around in a circle screaming ‘yes yes yes’ like the day I got my cutie mark.”

“And then what?” Applejack asked.

Twilight grinned. “And then I’ll write a book, so that nopony else has to rediscover it from scratch.”

Chapter 3: Put to the Test

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to this part of the farm before,” Twilight Sparkle remarked, as they made their way through the orchards to a long, low building on the edge of the open fields. There was no sign of anypony around, aside from the crisscrossing hoofprints going every which way through the snow.

“Not too surprising,” Applejack said, crunching through the snow a few feet in front of her. “Something mighty confusing must’a happened if we use it more than once a year. Not much call for two dozen snow plows ‘cept during Winter Wrap Up.” Arriving at the building, she walked up to the door, and shoved it open a crack with her shoulder. “But we’ve gotta make sure they’re all in good shape, or we’ll be in a whole mess of trouble,” she said, as she walked into the darkness.

“And everypony’s here fixing them?” Twilight asked, a bit confused, as she followed Applejack into the dimly lit room. “I would have thought it more of – gah!” She cringed back, throwing up a foreleg to shade her eyes as the room suddenly lit up.

“SURPRISE!”

Once her vision cleared, Twilight could see that Applejack hadn’t lied about the building’s purpose – there were the snow plows, piled up against the far wall to clear out a space for the party. A few dozen earth ponies, most of whom she didn’t really know, were standing around grinning and staring at her. Off to the side was a snack table, and a banner overhead read ‘Celebration!’

Applejack stood aside as a pink and yellow earth pony broke from the crowd to hold out a hoof to Twilight. It was Cherry Berry, the new element of laughter; Twilight remembered that much but hadn’t really spent much time with her. She glanced down at the hoof and saw a joy buzzer strapped to it. “Um… hi?” Twilight said, lifting a hoof halfway, but finding herself quite unwilling to get zapped just for the sake of… whatever it was Cherry Berry was trying to accomplish here.

“Were you surprised?” Cherry Berry asked, holding out her hoof for another few seconds, before lowering it, as the rest of the farm ponies crowded around.

“Yes,” Twilight said, looking from face to face and trying to remember how to be social at events like this. Her memory betrayed her by replaying the scene from her first party in Ponyville, where she’d made a spectacle of herself drinking hot sauce and then hid in her room for the rest of the night. “Very surprised. What’s the occasion?”

“That you’re out of prison, back in Ponyville, and best of all that you get to be an earth pony!” Cherry Berry said.

“It’s just a ‘welcome to the plant team’ party,” Carrot Top said. “We’d be having a party anyway, for the Winter Wrap Up kickoff, but Cher Bear here figured we could –“

“Quiet, Topsy! You’re going to ruin it!” Cherry Berry said, smacking the orange-maned pony on the side of the head.

“To the plant team?” Twilight asked, frowning despite herself. “I suppose… that’s probably the best place for me to learn about how earth ponies do magic. Since our effect on plants is the most well-documented advantage over the other tribes.”

“Sorry, Sparkles,” Cherry Berry said. “Trixie got the organizer position this year.”

“Nopony even knew if you were going to be home in time for Winter Wrap Up,” Applejack added.

“Or at all,” said Daisy. “There were… stories. That you’d been turned into a statue and put in the Canterlot garden, right next to Discord.” Rose and Lily nodded.

“Stories you three started,” Applejack said under her breath.

“It’s funny,” Twilight said, smiling. “There actually is a statue of me in the gardens, although it isn’t kept anywhere near Discord’s. I brought a copy of myself out of a mirror, only it turned out to be an evil twin…” She trailed off as she realized everypony was staring at her in horror. Maybe exaggerating the danger of her magic wasn’t the way to go, here. “She wasn’t evil like that, though. Princess Celestia turned her to stone to keep her from fading away. She’s not actually being punished for anything.”

That turned the dead silence into uncomfortable murmuring, at least.

“I’ve got it!” Cherry Berry said suddenly, slapping Twilight on the shoulder with a bit more force than she was expecting when she saw the hoof coming for her. “I know what the occasion is!” She ran over to the punchbowl, and got herself a cup of punch. Holding it up on her hoof, she shouted, “Everypony! Everypony! A toast!” Hardly anypony else had drinks, but the ones who did held up their little paper cups. “To Twilight Sparkle, the earth pony! Who will no longer spirit ponies away to the moon, convince hordes of parasprites to devour our homes, or give our little fillies moustaches! And most importantly, who will never, ever, ever again mind-control any of us fall to love with Rainbow Dash!”

There was a bit of chuckling, and somepony asked, “What if I want to fall in love with Rainbow Dash?”

“Then you’ll have to get a love potion from Zecora,” Cherry Berry responded, getting a laugh. “Or Applebloom.” That got a bigger laugh – even Twilight had to chuckle a bit, although she stifled it when she saw the look on Applejack’s face. “So, a toast, to Twilight Sparkle, defanged!”

Cherry Berry downed her punch, and the other ponies followed suit, although a couple of them looked at Twilight nervously. Twilight smiled back at them. Sure, it sounded like Cherry Berry was insulting her, but all she was really saying were the same things Twilight had been thinking when the Elements of Harmony hit her, so there was no reason to be angry. Stop twitching, ear. And now everypony standing next to her was staring and backing away, so she probably had a huge, frightening grin on her face.

“Fine,” she said quietly, since she didn’t really want to make any more of a scene than she *apparently* had to. “I’m angry. Luckily, I’ve been defanged, so you have nothing to worry about, at least until I figure out how to use earth pony magic.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t,” Carrot Top said. “What’s so special about you that you have to be ‘magic’? Can’t you just be a grass-loving earth pony like the rest of us?”

“What?” Twilight said, taking a step back. “B-but –“ Her thoughts were swirling. Was that what she was doing? Just trying to show off because she was desperate to be special? “My cutie mark…” No no no no no, that was as much as admitting it. “Shut up!” Yes. Smooth. Why not follow it up by hitting her in the face?

Twilight didn’t hit anypony in the face. She squinted her eyes shut, but it failed to hold in her tears.

“Oh, ponyfeathers,” Carrot Top said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How the hay did you think she was gonna take it?” Applejack snapped. “Twi –“

“Normal,” Twilight said, planting her hooves and lashing her tail back and forth. “I think that’s what I thought I wanted. Wish granted. But no, I can’t be normal. I’m Twilight-freaking-Sparkle –“

“Uh oh,” Cherry Berry said, from over near the punchbowl. “I think she’s freaking.”

“I’m sorry, Applejack, I can’t do this,” Twilight croaked, turning to look at her horrified friend. Out of the corner of her eye, as she turned, she spotted the boxes of cupcakes that she’d brought for everypony still sitting on her back, and it just made her twice as angry. “Have some freaking cupcakes!” she screamed, grabbing the top box in her teeth and flinging it at Cherry Berry with all her strength. It wasn’t aerodynamic enough to make it all the way, instead flying open and raining cupcakes on innocent ponies in between.

“Run for you lives!” Lily said, “She’s going to explode!” Rose and Daisy screamed and pushed through the crowd towards the corner of the room.

Twilight tossed the second box at Carrot Top, who ducked but still got showered with loose frosting and a couple of cupcakes that fell from the box as it opened in midair. Caramel, standing behind her, caught the rest of the box in the face, getting his whole front half splattered.

Her teeth closed over the last box, only to have Applejack bite down on the opposite corner. “thass enou’, sugakoo,” she said calmly. Twilight let go of the box, reared up on her hind legs, and brought her front hooves down on it, tearing it from Applejack’s grip and trampling it to the ground, the still-warm cupcakes inside squishing softly beneath the layer of cardboard. Applejack stared her in the eye, and asked “Are you done?”

Twilight’s eyes darted wildly about the room – at Cherry Berry, smirking smugly at her, at the flower girls hiding in the corner, and at everypony else, looking various shades of concerned and annoyed, depending mostly on how many cupcakes had landed on them. Nopony was hurt; nopony with half a brain was even scared. She’d completely lost control, and accomplished exactly nothing except to make herself look stupid.

“I should probably leave,” she said, curling her tail around her right rear ankle, her ears flat against her skull.

“Mmm… nah,” Applejack said. “That wouldn’t solve nothin’.”

“I’m really really embarrassed right now,” Twilight said, gritting her teeth.

“Well, ya should be,” Applejack said, laughing and putting a foreleg over Twilight’s shoulder. “Relax, sugar. It’ll be okay. Trust me.”

“This is the worst party ever,” Twilight said, closing her eyes and resting her head on Applejack’s shoulder.

“It’s about par for the course for Cherry Berry,” Applejack said, calmly, nuzzling her mane, then backing off to break the hug. “That filly sure tries hard, but she’s no Pinkie Pie.” Twilight frowned, not liking the thought of the new Elements of Harmony not getting along – hadn’t Trixie mentioned something about Rarity? Before she could follow that thought, Applejack planted a hoof on her chest, and gave her a little push. “Now, I reckon you better apologize to Caramel for covering him in cupcakes.” Twilight blinked, only to be prodded again. “Git!”

Twilight walked across the room to the cupcake-covered Caramel, the crowd parting before her, ponies on either side staring at her the whole way. Cherry Berry had latched onto the flower girls as her new target, at least – Twilight was calm again, for the moment, but she felt herself tense up just imagining Cherry Berry tossing another ‘joke’ her way. Fortunately, all she had to deal with were disapproving stares, and those she’d had practice with all her life, growing up in Canterlot. It was a short walk over to Caramel anyway, and then she could focus on him and ignore the ponies around her.

“Sorry,” Twilight said, watching in morbid fascination as Caramel tried to wipe himself clean and only managed to spread the frosting to new parts of his body. “Um… do you need any help?”

“Got a towel?” Caramel asked, helplessly staring at his hoof. He’d tried to wipe it off on the floor, and now it was covered in a mixture of frosting and dirt.

“At this point, you need a bath,” Twilight said, wincing. “Or a baby dragon. Spike could lick you clean in about five seconds. I don’t know where he keeps it, but he’s got a tongue that –“

“You can stop right there,” Caramel said, looking sick. “Ugh, I’m going to smell like frosting all day. My girlfriend will never let me hear the end of it.”

“Sorry,” Twilight said. “I was aiming for Carrot Top.”

“That’s not my name,” Carrot Top said, startling Twilight who hadn’t seen where she’d gotten off to. Apparently, she’d gone to get napkins, since she had a stack balanced on her back. “My parents named me Golden Harvest.”

“Yeah, but they thought you were going to grow up to grow corn, like them. You grow Carrots, and you’re orange,” Caramel said. “Ponies change their names when they get their cutie marks all the time.”

“I didn’t. Besides, carrot tops are green,” the pony apparently named Golden Harvest said. “And no, you can’t call me Carrot Bottom.”

“Well, I guess I can add ‘calling you by the wrong name’ to the long list of things I have to be sorry for today,” Twilight said.

“I’m sorry too,” Golden Harvest said, helping to wipe Caramel down with napkins held in her teeth. Twilight watched, bemused, then grabbed one and followed her lead. “I didn’t mean to make you angry, I just don’t understand why you think you can just waltz into being an earth pony and suddenly discover some hidden magical power that somehow none of us noticed in thousands of years…”

“Thtop thwirming!” Twilight said, through clenched teeth. She dropped the napkin on the pile. “Well, if it comes to that, magical power is my special talent. For a unicorn, finding new spells isn’t even that unusual – ponies who study magic are expected to find new uses for it, and not just retrace the works of past wizards. I don’t see why it would be any different for earth ponies.” She grabbed another napkin, and ducked under Caramel’s chin to wipe off his chest. “Stay still! I don’t want you getting any in my mane!”

Golden Harvest spat out another saturated napkin. “Earth ponies don’t do magic, though.”

“Wrong,” Twilight said, waiting to elaborate further until she was between napkins. “I think you do magic all the time, without realizing it. The most obvious manifestation is some ponies’ control over plants, but it could be a factor in all manner of vocations. I’d look particularly hard at anything that earth ponies do better than unicorns, when you’d think that even the simple levitation most unicorns are limited to would give an overwhelming advantage. Do you know of any pegasus bakers?”

Golden Harvest looked a little uncomfortable, so Twilight hurried on. “I know of unicorn bakers, and earth pony bakers, but I’ve never heard of a pegasus going into the culinary arts as a profession. It probably happens, but unlike the other tribes, their magic won’t help them there. They’d have no advantage over a griffon, or a mule.”

“My girlfriend cooks,” Caramel said. “And she’s a pegasus.”

“Huh,” Twilight said. That little data point was almost entirely irrelevant, but the last thing she needed was to turn the discussion into some sort of tribalist rant. So instead of calling it out as a fallacy, she shrugged and said, “That’s what I get for running my mouth off before actually researching my thought experiments. Still, there’s the plants – you can’t tell me that making an apple tree bloom in winter is natural, and I’ve seen Applejack do that one with my own eyes.”

“That’s, um,” Caramel said, looking down and scratching at the ground. “I shouldn’t say.”

“We’re going to give her the seed test, aren’t we?” Golden Harvest asked. “Hey, Applejack! We’re still going to do the seed test, right?”

“Seed test?” Twilight asked, ears perking up.

===

If nothing else, it improved the mood of the party. Twilight was led into the center of the room, flanked by Applejack and a suddenly grumpy Cherry Berry. The rest of the farm ponies circled around them, watching them with anticipation and murmuring amongst themselves.

“Ten bits says she can’t get it to work.”

“You’re on – talk about easy money!”

“What odds can I get on her blowing the roof off the building?”

“Farm is 3:1, her cutie mark has nothing to do with plants.”

“What are they talking about?” Twilight asked the ponies next to her. “Are they placing bets?”

“Don’t you pay them no mind,” Applejack said. “This is why I brought you here – to show you the secret of earth pony magic: There ain’t any.”

“Although there is a secret,” Cherry Berry said. “And magic is involved.”

“Now quiet down!” Applejack said loudly to the crowd, and the hubbub faded to a quiet whispering, and then finally to complete silence. “We’re all here to see whether this young pony, Twilight Sparkle, is worthy of intiation into the circle of earth pony farmers. But it won’t be us doing the judging – that’s up to the seed, and the earth!”

Twilight turned and stared at part of the crowd – there was something there, something that felt like magic. How was she feeling magic without a spell, or even a horn? “What’s there?” she asked.

“Earth pony brand magic earth,” Cherry Berry said. “Source of all cheap plant-magic tricks for more than a thousand years.”

“It’s the essence of Equestria, distilled,” Applejack said, as Caramel pushed a wheelbarrow towards them. Twilight tried not to stare at the pink spots of frosting still scattered here and there in his mane. “You can feel it. That’s good.”

“I can feel it,” Cherry Berry said. “Rainbow Dash could probably feel it.”

“Now, reach into the soil, and choose a clump that speaks to yer spirit,” Applejack said. “Normally, we’d say to let your ancestors guide your hooves, but honestly it don’t matter none, it’s all the same.”

Twilight stared at the pile of earth. It didn’t glow, it didn’t hum, it didn’t even make her hair stand on end like it was charged with frozen lightning. But at the same time, it glowed, and it hummed, and it made her hair stand on end. She reached into the pile, and scooped up a little clod of earth. It was cold, and wet, and smelled like dirt and rain. All of those times a hundred.

“Hey!” Applejack said, as Cherry Berry reached into the pile and picked up her own clod.

“As long as I’m going to be part of this circus, I might as well get a re-test out of it,” Cherry Berry said.

“It won’t change none. You know it never changes,” Applejack said.

The pink pony grinned. “I’m the Element of Laughter now, and wouldn’t that be a laugh – a thousand years of earth pony tradition broken by the Elements of Harmony. Hey – you should get re-tested, too.” Applejack snorted. “Unless you’re chicken,” Cherry Berry added. “Bok bok bok.”

“Fine,” Applejack said, scooping up a hoof-full. “Caramel, you’ve got the seeds?” He nodded. “Then get on with it!”

Caramel shook a single seed onto the clod of earth on Applejack’s hoof. “Now, the key is to not think about it too hard, but you’ve got to think about it a little,” Applejack said. “You’ve got to think about what it is, but not about what you want it to do.”

Twilight winced. “I’m still really bad at that.”

“Don’t worry none, everypony gets it eventually,” Applejack said. “The test isn’t whether you can do it, it’s what happens when you do. Now, watch,” she said, and her eyes unfocused a bit – and then her seed sprouted quickly into a small green plant. She let out her breath. “Yep, still a farm pony. ‘Course, I knew that, since I’ve been workin’ the fields for years since I got the damnfool Element.”

“Do me next,” Cherry Berry said, as Caramel was about to drop a seed on Twilight. He shrugged, and gave her the next seed instead. “Come on, come on,” Cherry chanted, “you can do this!” Sure enough the seed sprouted into a little green plant… but just as her eyes lit up and she started to grin, the plant turned black and shriveled up, turning to dust that scattered as she let out a heavy sigh. She stared balefully at the spot where it had been, and tossed her clod of dirt back onto the wheelbarrow. “Still a town pony, I guess.”

Twilight looked back over at Applejack’s green plant, which was no longer visibly growing, but still seemed to be healthy. “This is fascinating! I never would have guessed the earth ponies had a systematic method of determining which of them were more suited to farm labor now that Equestrian technology no longer requires everypony to work the fields. How come I never heard about this? Why didn’t you tell me, Applejack? This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been looking for!”

“I’m tellin’ ya now,” Applejack said.

“You didn’t hear because it’s a secret,” Cherry Berry said. “I’m sure the unicorns and pegasi have their own stupid secret nonsense.”

“Actually, no, they don’t,” Twilight said. “Not like this. There are restricted spells, but everypony knows that there are restricted spells, and in most cases what the spells do.”

Cherry Berry just smirked. “Of course you don’t.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t force you to tell us the secrets of ancient Unicornia,” Applejack said, “but
you can’t tell nopony what you see here, Twi. I know you want to write some book about earth pony magic, but this can’t go in it.”

“What?” Twilight said, blinking. “You can’t be serious!”

“We’re trustin’ you with a secret, Twi,” Applejack said. “One only earth ponies are allowed to know. If you break that trust --” she shook her head, and grimaced. “We’ll have a problem.”

“Ugh,” Twilight said. “Ugh! I suppose I can use it as background and find some other way to pretend to discover the principles involved. If I have to.” She glanced at her hoof, which was getting tired from holding up the clod of dirt, and noticed that at some point Caramel had dropped a seed on it. “Right, so I think about the seed, but not about what I want to happen.” She stared at it. “Corn? No, it’s not quite the right shape. Corn isn’t pointed on both ends. It’s the same color as – AIIIIIEEEE!”

Twilight screamed as her hoof suddenly burst into flame, waved it around trying to put it out, and when that didn’t work, plunged it into the convenient wheelbarrow of dirt right in front of her to smother it. She realized her mistake a second too late, as the magical essence not-glowing in front of her didn’t-glow brighter, and didn’t blister her skin and singe her mane…

It really did explode, though – a soft ‘whump’ of magical force that tossed her across the room, into the crowd of ponies already trying to flee. She hung onto somepony’s neck with her good foreleg, and watched in horrified fascination as flames shot into the air, burning a hole in the roof.

“So… what kind of pony does that make me,” she tried to say, realizing that she couldn’t hear herself talking, or anypony else for that matter – just a numb ringing. She could tell it was something scary, from the way the ponies nearest her started fleeing from her instead of from the ongoing disaster in the center of the room. In addition to the magical pillar of fire, ordinary fire was starting to spread across the rafters.

She slumped to the ground as the pony she’d been clinging to managed to detach her, and tried to focus on staying awake. Nothing good could come of passing out in a burning building. She suddenly woke up from a fuzzy daydream about building a wall of wakefulness out of green glass bricks to realize that somepony was dragging her by her tail… then woke up again from a fuzzy daydream about building a travois out of foals’ toys as she was plunged into the snow. But after the initial shock, the cold of the snow sliding against her back was relaxing, and she let herself drift off to sleep.

===

Twilight woke up to a nice warm bed, a soft pillow under her head, and something cold and wet and heavy being pressed into her forehead. She opened her eyes to find herself staring at somepony’s yellow-furred chest. After a second they finished applying the poultice, looked down at her and noticed she was awake, and said, “You’re a witch!”

Twilight’s eyes focused on the little red-maned foal sitting on top of the blanket, staring back at her from a distance of several inches. “Applebloom?” A quick glance to the side confirmed that she was in Applejack’s room; they’d probably just taken her to the nearest warm place to recover.

“Ya asked what kinda pony it made ya if the seed burst inta flames,” Applebloom said. “It means yer a witch.”

“There’s no such thing…” Twilight started, then shook her head. “No, nevermind, I’ve learned this lesson at least twice. When you say I’m a ‘witch’ you mean there’s some category of pony I fit into that shares enough in common with the old mares’ tales that they go by the same name.”

“Ah guess?” Applebloom said, tilting her head.

“So what do witches do? Aside from blow up barns.”

The little filly scrunched up her face. “Potions an’ stuff. Talkin’ ta animals and keepin’ ‘em in line. Knowin’ all kinds ‘a things that nopony else remembers. Bakin’ apple pies… some o’ that might just be Granny Smith though.”

“And making magic dirt, I suppose,” Twilight said. “I’m guessing none of this ‘witchcraft’ is written down, because Celestia forbid earth ponies keep a written record of any of their techniques.”

“She did?” Applebloom asked, raising an eyebrow. “Well, that would explain it. Everypony knows the princess knows best.”

“But since I’m a witch,” Twilight said, trying not to look too eager, “somepony’s going to have to teach me, right?”

“Yes ma’am! Ah can show you some of the basics to start with,” she said, then suddenly got stern. “But you better not write any of it down! You’re in enough trouble with the princess already.”

Chapter 4: Cooking up Trouble

“So, what sort of potion are we going to start with?” Twilight Sparkle asked, looking around the Apples’ kitchen. She was still a little dizzy, and probably would be for at least a day or two, but had no doubt that Applebloom’s herbal remedy had accelerated her recovery.

Well, maybe a little doubt. She was sure that it wouldn’t make things any worse at least. Almost sure.

“Oh, we’re not startin’ with potions,” Applebloom said. “Zecora’s got all the potion fixins. We’re makin’ cupcakes!”

“Oh,” Twilight said, her voice dropping and trailing off. She forced herself to smile. “Well, my mother always did say that chemistry and cooking were two sides of the same coin. Does it have to be cupcakes, though? I’m not really in a cupcake mood.” She shuddered at the remembered scent of frosting. It smelled like failure.

“Well, what kinda bakin’ are ya in the mood for?”

“Um… I’ve never really been that fond of baking,” Twilight said, staring at the floor and scratching at it with a hoof. “That’s always been Spike’s job.”

“Hmm,” Applebloom said. “Well, is there anything ya feel like eatin’?”

“I guess I could go for a daisy sandwich? I’m not that hungry.”

“That’s not exactly baking,” Applebloom said, propping herself up to look in the pantry. “We’ve got some dried daisies, though. Maybe we can make some daisy muffins?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of daisy muffins,” Twilight said, wincing at the thought of dried daisies. Some flowers tasted fine when dried – roses or violets, maybe – but the whole point of daisies was their nice fresh taste. It made sense that the Apples wouldn’t have fresh, though, since Rose’s greenhouse was all the way back in Ponyville proper, and she charged extra for flowers in winter. “Do you know a recipe?”

“I figure we’ll make some muffins, and put daisies in ‘em,” Applebloom said. “Doin’ it without a recipe’s kinda the point.”

Twilight laughed. “I thought the point was to learn how to use earth pony magic.”

“Witchcraft,” Applebloom corrected her. “Every earth pony’s got a bit of it, but yer a full-blown witch. I’m just a filly, and recipes already go all wrong if I try to follow ‘em too close.”

“That just means we need to adjust the recipes,” Twilight said, smiling. “We can’t just throw random things in a bowl and hope it comes out ‘muffin’. Applejack tried that once, and half of Ponyville ended up in the hospital.”

“I know the ingredients by heart,” Applebloom said. “That part of a recipe works fine – it’s the measurin’ and mixin’ and timin’ that ya gotta play by ear.”

“How about this,” Twilight said. “You play by ear, and I’ll keep track of what your ear plays, then we can see how badly it goes wrong for me, and work out how to adjust from your recipe to mine. It would be a lot easier if we had a baseline recipe to work from, but with a little trial and error I’m sure we can work out the equations.”

“That’s cheatin’!” Applebloom said. “You need ta learn to feel the recipe. That’s how it’s done.”

“Maybe that’s how you do it,” Twilight said, “but I refuse to be some mumbling mystic mixing mysterious philters following fuzzy feelings! If I can’t work out a way to quantify this power I supposedly have, then I’d rather be…” she trailed off a bit. Would she really rather be a changeling? Even if she was going to take that option, she probably shouldn’t tell Applebloom.

“A unicorn?” Applebloom suggested, raising her eyebrow.

“Or a librarian,” Twilight replied, flatly.

“Too bad, yer a witch,” Applebloom said. “An’ witches don’t do math to work out their pies and potions.”

“Then I’ll be the first,” Twilight said, grinning.

===

“No no no no no!” Twilight said, taking yet another tray of burned muffins out of the oven. “How is this possible?” She turned to the pile of notes she’d scribbled on paper borrowed from Applebloom’s school supplies, and went over the math again. “I accounted for the second-order effects due to the reduced amount of sugar and baking soda… and the temperature… carry the one…” As she spread out the papers, a plate, overloaded with carbonized muffins, slipped off the table and crashed to the ground. Twilight didn’t even pause to look – by now it was a trivial addition to the horrific mess that had once been the Apple family kitchen.

“Ah told ya so,” Applebloom said, from her perch on the countertop, with her head resting on the only edible muffins in the room – her batch.

“Stop saying that,” Twilight said, frowning at the scatter chart where she’d plotted her attempts. There was no clear pattern. “It’s just a matter of pinning down all the confounding variables, and then I can come up with a recipe that takes my earth pony magic into account.” She stared at the equation she’d come up with for baking time, and plotted it on the graph – not only did it not predict her latest experimental results at all, but it wasn’t even a good fit for her earliest attempts. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that my emotional state was affecting the results,” she said, spitting out the quill. “Argh! And I don’t know better, do I. But how am I supposed to quantify my emotional state?”

“Yer not?” Applebloom said, drowsily. “Ah told ya…”

“Stop. Saying. That!”

“Ya can’t do it this way, Twilight,” the filly said. “There’s too many confounded varmints lurkin’ in the recipe. An’ it only gets worse when you start using magic plants. Some of ‘em have a mind of their own.”

“Applebloom…” Twilight said, closing her eyes and focusing on slowing her breathing, forcing herself to relax. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to tell me. It’s clear that this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought – there are all kinds of factors worked into this ‘earth pony magic’ that make the effects seem somewhat random and unpredictable.”

“You could learn ta predict ‘em if you’d just listen to me,” Applebloom grumbled.

“I want to do this right,” Twilight said. “Maybe I won’t get it right in one day, not even for a simple recipe like this, but as long as I’m letting my calculations guide my expectations, I’m bound to figure it out eventually. The instant that I give in and start ‘feeling the recipe’, I’m letting my expectations guide my observations, and that’s bad science.”

“But it’s good witchcraft, and ah need a witch,” Applebloom replied. “If ya don’t wanna be a witch forever, can’t ya just learn enough of it to do one little potion?”

“So that’s what this is about,” Twilight said, narrowing her eyes. “I’m sure there’s somepony else you can ask. What about Granny Smith? She’s a witch, right?”

“She doesn’t do potions no more, ‘cept for zap-apple jam,” Applebloom said, poking at a muffin with her hoof. “She forgets stuff, like what kind ‘a potion she’s makin’, and it always comes out wrong.” She stood up, and pouted powerfully. “An’ Zecora said that she wouldn’t make my potion ‘cause it was a crime against nature! I don’t care ‘bout nature, I just want my darn potion!”

“And you think I’d agree to a crime against nature,” Twilight said, glaring at her.

“You never cared none about nature before,” Applebloom said. “Ya ain’t got a natural bone in yer body. Not that that’s bad – that’s normal fer unicorns.”

“I’m not a unicorn anymore.”

“Sure ya are. Ah mean, you were born a unicorn, and grew up as a unicorn, and just ‘cause you’re an earth pony on the outside now doesn’t mean yer not still a unicorn on the inside,” Applebloom said. “Ya still think like a unicorn.”

“What do you mean?” Twilight asked, insulted. Or, worse, feeling like she’d inadvertently insulted somepony else.

Applebloom just pointed at the now disorganized pile of notes and figures with her hoof.

“Are you saying earth ponies can’t do math?” Twilight said. “I’m sure Cheerilee would love to hear you try to pull that one to get out of doing your homework.”

“Ah can too do math!” Applebloom said. “But nopony thinks it’s important. That’s why I need mah unicorn potion!”

“Unicorn potion?” Twilight repeated, ears perking up.

“Ah’m sure there’d be enough to share,” Applebloom said. “An’ the witch that helped me make it would have first dibs.”

“Where in the wide wide world of Equestria did you find a potion to turn an earth pony into a unicorn?” Twilight asked.

“Ah came up with it mahself,” Applebloom said proudly. “After the love poison, and the cutie pox, and the trouble y’all had with poison joke, I figgered that if we’re surrounded by all these crazy magic plants, we should be able to tame ‘em. That’s the family specialty, after all. Ain’t none better in all Equestria at tamin’ wild magic than us Apples.”

“I don’t know,” Twilight said. “Zap Apple jam tastes good…” Applebloom narrowed her eyes. “Really good,” Twilight corrected. “Really, really good. But it doesn’t turn anypony into a unicorn.”

Applebloom nodded. “That’s why ah’m usin’ poison joke! It turned one ‘a the moon ponies into a unicorn, ‘cordin’ to the story goin’ ‘round.”

“Uh huh,” Twilight said.

“An’ heart’s desire to make it do what you want, stead o’ just what it thinks’d be funny,” the little pony added.

Twilight winced. “I think I’m starting to see where Zecora is coming from.”

“Ah’m not done though!” Applebloom said. “Ya also add amethyst to stabilize the heart’s desire an’ make it work once instead o’ buildin’ up a whole mess o’ trouble. An’ wolfsbane to dispel the curse since we’re usin’ a heap o’ cursed plants.”

“Wolfsbane doesn’t actually have any power against curses,” Twilight said. “That’s just a myth – all it does is make you really sick. It’s poisonous!”

“An’ that’s what the unicorn horn is for!” Applebloom said proudly.

“I think we’re done here,” Twilight said, turning to leave. “Thanks for the pointers. I’ll just gather up my notes and do the rest of the work on my own time, at least until I’m ready to move on to something besides baking. I think I’ve made enough of a mess here already.” She shuffled the notes back into a neat pile, and tucked it under her saddle.

“Ain’t ya gonna help clean up?” Applebloom asked.

“Eh heh heh,” Twilight said, looking around at the disaster area. Burnt muffins were everywhere – along with parts of burnt muffins, splattered batter and spilled flour. “No. I’m not really very good at being an earth pony, you know – still a unicorn at heart! Without my horn I’m useless at cleaning. I’d just make more of a mess!” She stumbled as her hoof slipped on a piece of cracked plate next to the table, and staggered over to the door. “I’ll, uh, think about your potion, Applebloom. I don’t think poison joke is the way to go, but there are some books on magic plants in the library, and maybe they have something in them that would actually – hiiiii, Applejack.” She stared into her friend’s eyes as the orange earth pony looked around the destroyed kitchen in shock.

“What in tarnation--“ Applejack started to say, before Twilight shoved rudely past her, into the snowy night. “Hold on, ya can’t just – nng, ‘et ‘ack ‘ere!” she added, grabbing Twilight by her tail and cutting her getaway short.

“Nooooo!” Twilight cried, as she was dragged back into the kitchen.

===

Twilight trudged home through the gray light of pre-dawn. There’d been more snow during the night, making each step a slog as she sank up to her belly in the white fluffy mass. It was so cold, and only the constant struggle was keeping the sweat and snow infused in her coat from freezing her into a solid block of ice.

It would be better once she got to Ponyville – the roads there were regularly tramped down to a solid snowy surface by hundreds of hooves. This path was almost unused, though, and there was no sign of the tracks that she and Applejack had left the day before, or the tracks Cherry Berry and the Flower Trio, who lived in Ponyville, must have left, or tracks from all the farmers who came from the far side of Ponyville and probably came through town on the way to Applejack’s Winter Wrap Up planning party.

She stopped, looking around at the landscape again. Was she even on the right path? All she saw were trees. Trees everwhere. Yes, that was helpful.

By Celestia’s feathery wings, she was so tired. She probably should have stayed at Applejack’s.

”What do you think you’re doing, trying to run off like that and leave me with your mess?”

“It’s not like that, Applejack. It’s just an efficient distribution of labor. I’m really no good at cleaning; I never was, even when I could do magic. I always have Spike take care of it.”

“Uh huh. And while I’m cleaning, what ‘efficient labor’ did you expect to be doin’ to make it up to me?”

“I’ve had a reeeeeally long day, and I just want to sleep…”

“That’s what I thought.” A bucket plopped in place in front of Twilight, followed by a mop being shoved into her hooves. “Get workin’. I’m gonna go take a nap, I’ve already spent too much time today cleaning up after your messes, Twi.”

Twilight’s eyes opened with a start as a chunk of snow slid off a tree limb and crunched to the ground right next to her, and she realized she’d dozed off standing up. A slight gust of wind sent a chill up the parts of her back not covered by her winter saddle, and her mane was stiff and frozen, but her legs felt warm enough, buried in the snow. She couldn’t remember if that was good or bad.

They still moved when she forced them to, at least.

Why was the snow so deep? Not just deep, but there were layers – a crust under the top fluffy layer that she kept breaking through with each step, as if a previous accumulation had been buried under the most recent snowfall. There was no way this was the right road. It was a road, though… somepony must use it. Maybe she could just go to sleep, right here in the nice thick, fluffy snow, and wait for somepony to find her. If more snow fell and covered her, she might not be found until spring, but sleeping through the winter never hurt the animals.

It had to be better than walking. She wasn’t getting anywhere.

”What do you mean it’s not clean? I cleaned everything!”

“Well, ah guess you’ll have to clean it again. Look at this countertop and tell me it’s clean!”

“It’s clean!”

“What do ya call this?” Applejack pointed a hoof angrily at a large black streak fixed indelibly to the countertop.

Twilight scowled. “I cleaned there, but it wouldn’t come off. It’s as clean as it’s going to get.”

“Ya just need ta put yer back into it,” Applejack said, grabbing a scrub brush and strapping it to her hoof. “Like this.”

Twilight watched her scrub. “It’s not coming off.”

“I’m not done. You can’t give up that easy, girl,” she said, continuing to scrub at the stubborn stain, gradually wearing it away, too slowly to see, until the streak turned to specks, and eventually to a spotless surface. “Just keep at it, see?”

“Twilight?” asked a gentle voice, and she opened her eyes, realizing she’d drifted off again. “Are you okay?” asked a yellow and pink pegasus, looking down at the mired earth pony while standing atop the snow as if it were a cloud, hooves hardly sinking in at all. Her wings were spread, as if she was prepared to flutter away at the slightest provocation.

“Fluttershy?” Twilight asked, blinking away the sleep and the cold.

===

Twilight fell asleep again on the way to Fluttershy’s cottage, draped over her back, nestled between her wings. She almost woke up when they finally went indoors, but wasn’t able to rouse herself enough to move as she was shifted gently onto the couch and covered in a thin blanket.

She actually woke up well after dawn, to the clink of a plate against a table, and the scent of hay-cakes. She sat up and stared blankly at the plate of food for a while, while Fluttershy hovered nearby, nervously. After a few minutes she realized that it wasn’t levitating over to her mouth because she wasn’t a unicorn anymore, and leaned down to grab one of the warm cakes with her lips, gobbling it up in seconds. “’ank ‘ou,” she mumbled as she chewed. She swallowed, and added. “I’m so glad you found me… I was so tired, I got completely lost.”

“Oh, it’s not…” Fluttershy said quietly, looking away. “You were on the road to my cottage, so you’d have found me if I hadn’t found you.”

“Oh, good,” Twilight said, eating another pancake. Fluttershy didn’t respond.

She ate the rest of her breakfast in silence, the only sounds the squelch of her own chewing, the slurp as she took a sip of juice, or the occasional rustle of fur against cloth as she shifted position. Fluttershy was completely silent.

Once she was done eating, Twilight sighed with contentment, and rested her head back on the cushion, drifting back into a lazy half-sleep. She wasn’t too asleep to notice her host retrieve the dishes and take them to the kitchen to wash them… it occurred to her that the polite thing to do would be to offer to help, but she really, really hated cleaning. Especially dishes. Especially as an earth pony. She’d had enough soap in her mouth to last a lifetime.

Twilight sighed, and rolled off the couch onto her hooves. She stretched out, arching her back and yawning, then drifted over to the kitchen, where Fluttershy hovered over the sink, brushing the grease and crumbs off the plates with a soaped up rag draped over her hoof, before handing them off to Angel Bunny to rinse and set in the drying rack. She turned to Twilight, and smiled.

“I was going to offer to help, but it looks like you have everything well in hoof,” Twilight said. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a burden, Fluttershy – but yesterday was a really, really bad day for me. Thank you for giving me someplace to rest.”

“Oh, Twilight,” Fluttershy said, giving a happy sigh, “it’s not a burden to take care of somepony who needs my help. I just wish I could have found you sooner, before your day got so horribly horribly awful.”

“It’s probably better that you didn’t. Applejack would have chased you away with a stick,” Twilight said, then shook her head to try to clear it. “Nng, no, I’m not going to think about her. It’ll just make me angry all over again.”

Fluttershy finished up with the dishes – there hadn’t been many to wash – and turned around to face Twilight, then looked down at the floor and poked at it with her hoof. Angel tapped his foot impatiently, then shrugged at Twilight when she looked up at him.

“Is there something you need, Fluttershy?” Twilight asked, as gently as she could manage.

“I just… wanted toknowifyouneededaridebacktothelibrary,” Fluttershy squeaked, her voice getting higher pitched and quieter as she neared the end of the sentence.

“The snow’s still pretty thick then,” Twilight remarked, after parsing that. Fluttershy nodded. “Still, it seems like a lot of trouble to put you to…” Angel Bunny shook his head vehemently, behind the shy pegasus. Twilight wasn’t sure whether he meant ‘refuse’ or ‘stop refusing’, but settled for ‘do the opposite of what you were about to’. “…but it would get me there a lot faster. I’m sure Spike’s wondering where I’ve been.”

“Everypony’s been so worried about you, Twilight,” Fluttershy said. “You vanished from the library, and nopony knew where you were.”

“Applejack knew,” Twilight said.

“Well, everypony knew that Applejack’s team was busy planning for Winter Wrap Up, so Rarity didn’t want to bother them. After all, if you were with her then you were safe. Or we thought you’d be safe, but then I found you abandoned in the cold and the snow in the middle of the night.”

“That… wasn’t really Applejack’s fault,” Twilight said.

”And what in the name of Luna’s freeze-dried tailfeathers do you think you’re doing?” Applejack demanded, standing in the doorway as Twilight turned to leave.

“What?” Twilight asked. “You said it was clean. You said I was done! What more do you want from me? Is it time to go strap me to a harness and haul burning logs from the barn?”

“Nah, we took care ‘o that while y’all were destroyin’ my kitchen.”

“Then what?” Twilight asked. “Do you want bits to pay for all the flour and sugar? I don’t have much on me, but I’m sure if you foalnapped me that Princess Celestia would laugh to herself and expect me to learn a valuable lesson about friendship!” The last part was shrieked into Applejack’s face.

“I just mean –“ Applejack started, but Twilight screamed and bowled her over, then galloped into the night, at least until she ran out of porch and had to start plowing through the snow with rage-fueled leaps. “Fine!” Applejack shouted after her. “Get your darn-fool tail froze off in the blizzard then!”

“I didn’t even think about the snow, I just wanted to get away from that place,” Twilight sighed. “It was a really bad day.”

Fluttershy looked horrified, imagining Celestia-knew what.

“Earth pony hazing ritual,” Twilight explained, trying to reign in her friend’s imagination without giving too much away. “And Cherry Berry.”

“Oh, Cherry Berry,” Fluttershy said, nodding sagely.

Chapter 5: Call to Adventure

“Twilight!”

As Fluttershy’s toboggan settled to the ground in front of the library, Twilight Sparkle hopped off into the snow – not very deep under the tree’s branches – and let out a relieved breath as she took in her home. “Thank you, Fluttershy,” she said. “Your flying really is getting much better.”

“It’s always easier when I’m helping somepony,” Fluttershy said, glancing at the purple dragon latched onto Twilight’s neck. “And this time I got to help two of my friends!” She leaned forwards and nuzzled Spike.

“I was so worried, when you didn’t come home, even after I’d cleaned up everything,” Spike said, climbing onto Twilight’s back but keeping a tight grip on her mane. “I didn’t know what to do!”

“I kind of figured you’d go sleep over at Rarity’s,” Twilight said, nosing open the door and wrinkling her nose a bit at the faint smell of ammonia.

“Well, yeah,” Spike said, “but I mean aside from that.”

Twilight paused on the threshold, then turned her head back towards Fluttershy. “I’d invite you in, but I’m not sure this place is habitable yet. The weather’s scheduled to be clear today, right?” Fluttershy nodded. “We should open all the windows and let it air out,” she said, stepping inside and going over her mental map to plan the most efficient division of labor for one earth pony and one dragon to open all the windows, and for one earth pony, one dragon, and one pegasus just in case Fluttershy volunteered…

“It’s okay. Rarity was having me over for lunch anyway …” Fluttershy said, tilting her head to cover her face with her mane.

“Do you think she’d—“ Twilight started, then cringed and stopped herself short. Inviting yourself to a private get together? Bad Twilight. Although it would be nice to see Rarity again.

She turned to take in Fluttershy’s expression, but it was never easy to read the quiet pegasus, so she decided to work from first principles. While she was fairly certain that Fluttershy did genuinely enjoy helping ponies, even she had her limits, and her lunch dates with Rarity were a chance for her to recharge and be a little unkind for a change. Specifically, to gossip. Rarity knew everypony’s secrets, but the biggest thing that Fluttershy could bring to the table right now was news about Twilight herself, which meant that under no circumstances could Twilight show up without ruining everything.

Rats. Twilight could use somepony sympathetic to rant at about yesterday’s events, and nopony was better at acting sympathetic than Rarity. Spike would feel compelled to play the devil’s advocate, and since Twilight wasn’t actually sure she was in the right, that wouldn’t do at all.

“Nevermind,” Twilight said. “Can you let her know I’d like to get together with her at some point? I’ve really been neglecting all my friends since I came back to town.”

“If you want to come, I’m sure she’d be happy to see you,” Fluttershy said, looking at the ground and poking at the snow with her hoof.

“No, I think I need to finish cleaning up my mess here,” Twilight said, forcing a smile as she added, “I can go whine at Rarity later.” She had a thought. “Spike, do you want to go?”

“Uh uh. I’m not letting you out of my sight!” Spike held her mane tighter.

“Or your claws, apparently,” Twilight said, wincing as they dug into her spine. Spike didn’t let go. “Come on, then, let’s see if we can get this place presentable before the book club meeting.”

===

“BWA HA HA HA HA!” Rainbow Dash rolled on her back, one hoof covering her face, the other pointing at Twilight.

“Apparently,” she said tersely, “Spike is joining the book club.”

“I told you I wasn’t letting you out of my sight,” Spike grumbled, reading through the first chapter of Changelings of Canterlot as he sat on her back.

“Seriously. Where did he even get that?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Was it from Rarity? I can totally see Rarity keeping one of those around.” She paused, then shivered. “Ponyfeathers! I didn’t really want that mental image. I mean, at least with an egghead like you I know you have no idea what it’s meant for.”

Twilight poked a hoof at the bridle, but the tiny clasps remained too small for her to work with her hooves. “I’ve had it since I was little. It’s a toy.”

“She made me guide her around Canterlot and keep her from running into other ponies while she was too busy reading to see where she was going,” Spike said, then tried to sound out a word. “…ess-pee-oh—nayg?”

“Espionage,” Twilight corrected. “Spying.” She turned and stared at him as best she could with him firmly planted on her back. “Are you still on the first chapter?”

Spike dragged her head back forwards with the reins. “Come on, this is way above my reading level!”

“It’s for young adults!” Twilight complained. “You live in a library! How can you not –“

There was a knock on the door. Spike kicked his heels into Twilight’s sides as she started to move, eliciting a warning growl from her as she trotted over to the door and welcomed in… “Rarity?”

“Hello, dear!” Rarity said, smiling happily for about half a second before her expression froze. “Why are you wearing –“

“Spike slipped it on me while I was distracted,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes. “Are you here for the book club meeting? Now that I think of it, Changelings of Canterlot does sound like the kind of book I can see you reading.”

“Oh, I simply adore it,” Rarity said, levitating a copy out of her saddlebag, and clutching it to her chest with a hoof. “The mystique! The passion! The magic! If only the real changelings hadn’t turned out to be such uncouth beasts.” She shook her head as she walked inside and joined Rainbow Dash at the table.

“Yeah, I kind of skip past those scenes,” Rainbow Dash said. “What’s so romantic about somepony pretending to be your lost love? It just seems kind of rude.”

“Did you miss the part where they were spies?” Twilight asked. Rainbow Dash stared at her. “Why did you think the Royal Guards kept showing up and chasing them?”

“Because it was awesome?”

“I missed something awesome? I knew I should have come early,” said a voice from the door. Twilight jumped forwards as it bumped her lightly on the rear, pushed open by Seaside’s nose. The pink pegasus waved with her wing as she squeezed through the gap, then did a double-take as she saw Rarity. “Ditto? I thought you weren’t coming today.”

“My name’s Rarity, dear,” she said, turning to face the newcomer. “And you are?”

“Oh, right,” Seaside said. “He’s got – well, not your mane, but it’s the same color. More or less. Hard to tell in this light, you know. Sorry about that! I know I’d be pretty angry if somepony mistook me for a colt.”

“Why?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Ponies mistake me for a colt all the time.”

There was a moment of silence. “And that doesn’t make you mad?” Seaside asked.

Rainbow Dash laughed. “I think it’s hilarious.”

“Rainbow Dash!” Rarity proclaimed, scandalized. Then she smiled impishly. “But if you must impersonate a stallion, Rainbow, I do have a line of suits and pants that would look positively adorable on you.”

Twilight stared silently at ‘Rarity’ as she and the pegasi shared a laugh, and quietly picked up the teapot and poured out tea for everypony. When Rarity lifted her cup to drink, Twilight looked carefully at the color of her magic. Blue. It was definitely blue. A slightly greenish blue, made a little greener by the rich brown background of the library’s wooden décor, but definitely not the bright green a changeling would have.

“Seaside!” Twilight said, belatedly remembering Rarity’s question. “This is Rarity, one of my dear friends.” The bridle pinched at her muzzle as Spike tugged at it. “And the overprotective little dragon on my back is Spike, who has apparently declared himself my knight in shining armor.”

“I was wondering about that!” Seaside said. “Oh, and Ditto’s not coming, I guess,” she added, looking at Rarity again, then quickly looking away. “Some big emergency at work I think. He works way too hard.”

“That’s a shame,” Twilight said. “I hope he’s able to come to the other meetings. It’s a lot more fun with more ponies here.”

“So, what does one do at a book club meeting?” Rarity asked, levitating her tea and delicately taking another sip. This time, it was backlit by her gray coat, and wasn’t very greenish-tinged at all.

“Talk about the books, mostly,” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s not as boring as it sounds.”

===

Twilight sat on the floor, the polished wood smooth against her skin, the warm air full of the scents of tea and cookies, books and ponies. Spike leaned against her neck, as he read from the book open in front of them. “Lago… morphic?” he said, sounding it out.

“That’s right,” Twilight said. “It means ‘like a bunny’.”

“Lagomorphic re-sill… re-silly…”

“Resilience. It means being tough, basically.”

“As tough as a bunny,” Spike said, staring at the somewhat purple prose. “That’s, um, kind of weird, Twilight.”

“Well, it is describing how well she jumps,” Twilight noted. “It’s mainly just using fancy language to put you in the right frame of mind, though – the viewpoint character of this section is supposed to be extremely clever, so they try to subtly suggest it by using large words to describe everything.”

“She rebounded off the variegated cobblestones of the cul de sac with lagomorphic resilience…” Spike repeated, then continued reading the story quietly as Twilight looked up at the other ponies in the room, pleased that they were able to carry on a conversation without her.

“I just don’t get what all the drama is supposed to be about,” Rainbow Dash said, circling idly in midair over the table. “I mean, they’re obviously in love, they both want to overthrow Celestia, but she keeps acting like he’s the enemy. Except that at the same time that she’s all terrified that he’s a changeling, she keeps asking him to convert her?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Rarity said. “She’s worried that his emotions are false, and that he’s only trying to drain her of her love to fuel his own powers. That’s why she keeps asking him to change her – then he wouldn’t be able to drain her love, and she could be sure that he wanted to be with her legitimately.”

“I’m kinda with Rainbow Dash here,” Seaside said. “What’s so illegitimate about feeding off her love? It’s not like it hurts the ponies he drains.”

Rarity scowled. “You don’t see the difference between true love, and one pony using another to satisfy their own needs?”

“So… what?” Rainbow Dash said. “You can only really be in love if you don’t get anything out of the relationship?”

“I wish she’d just go on and convert already,” Seaside said.

“Yeah, I know!” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s not like you don’t know she’s going to. The title is ‘Changelings of Canterlot’, plural. Not ‘changeling and changeling wannabe’.”

“It’s not the sort of thing that one can just rush into,” Rarity said. “Really, you two. If you were in her place, would you give up being pegasi without a second thought?”

“Uh, let’s see,” Rainbow Dash said. “The changelings in the story fly faster than any pegasus, use magic better than any unicorn, regenerate from any wound in seconds, read minds, see in the dark –“

“Live forever. Can’t forget that one,” Seaside said.

“He only has all of those powers because he’s fed on so much love,” Rarity said. “He’s not supposed to represent a typical changeling.”

“Still, who wouldn’t take that deal?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Especially since she’s just an earth pony. Um, no offense, Twilight.”

“None taken,” Twilight said. “In the context of the story, earth ponies are pretty bad off. No inherent advantages of any sort, and treated as second class citizens by a tyrant Celestia.”

“So would you do it?” Seaside asked. “Would you get turned into a changeling?”

“If I lived in the Canterlot depicted in the story? I think I’d have to,” Twilight said. “Earth ponies in the story have no magic, and my cutie mark almost requires me to work with magic in some capacity.”

“Speaking of earth pony magic,” Rarity said, looking over at Twilight curiously. “Have you unlocked its secrets yet? I remember you said that was one of the things you wanted to do before turning back into a unicorn.”

“I’ve made some progress, I guess,” Twilight said. “I don’t think I get to turn back into a unicorn after I figure it out, though – it’s not like I was transformed into an earth pony for the sake of writing a research paper.”

“Of course not,” Rarity said, smirking. “Still, how hard could it be? You were turned into an earth pony essentially by accident – if you set your mind on being a unicorn again, I’m sure we could work something out.”

“Are you talking about that thing you were talking about with Trixie?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Indeed!” Rarity said. “Between Rainbow Dash’s sonic rainboom, Trixie’s skill at redirecting magical power, and my own gem-finding spell…”

“…you could get super-rich and pay somepony to turn Twilight back?” Seaside guessed.

“Nah, she wants us to go after the lost wishing star,” Rainbow Dash said. “Ponyville’s wasn’t lost all that long ago, so it might still be somewhere nearby.”

“I suppose hundreds of years ago isn’t that long in geological time,” Twilight said. “It’s probably still gathering dust in some dragon’s hoard. But it’s not a gem, it’s a living creature. And it wasn’t all that powerful – none of the wishing stars were.”

“Twilight Sparkle was powerful enough to turn itself into a unicorn,” Rarity said.

“Twilight Sparkle?” Rainbow Dash asked.

Twilight shook her head. “Rarity…”

Seaside blinked. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard this story. Some silly filly wished Canterlot’s star into a unicorn eight hundred years ago, and the unicorns haven’t had a wishing star since.”

“I know I was shocked to hear our little Twilight was actually a wishing star!” Rarity said. “I can’t believe you never mentioned it!”

“My distant ancestor was a wishing star,” Twilight said, cringing. “At this point half the unicorns in Canterlot are probably descended from her.”

“So… how many wishes do we get?” Seaside asked.

“I don’t grant wishes!“

Seaside shook her head. “I mean, if we went and found the real wishing star, would we each get a wish? Or is it first come first served?”

“From what I remember,” Rarity said, “at the Winter Wish Festival each pony would get a single wish, until somepony asked for a difficult wish, at which point the wishing star would attempt to grant it and then go back to sleep for another year. But after 300 years of rest, it probably has a great deal of power saved up. We’d have all the wishes we could ever wish for! Twilight could be a unicorn again, Rainbow Dash could join the Wonderbolts --”

“Cherry Berry might actually learn some good jokes,” Twilight suggested.

Seaside leapt into the air. “Let’s do it!”

“Guarded by a dragon,” Twilight reminded her. “Not a gem.”

“They cancel out,” Seaside replied. “Dragons have plenty of gems! Rarity can find their hoards, and we can just keep checking until we find the right one!”

“Or until a dragon eats you,” Spike grumbled, looking up from his book. “And you’d deserve it too, for going around raiding their hoards.”

“I’m not afraid of any big stinking lizards,” Rainbow Dash said. “We’ve faced down dragons plenty of times!”

Twilight shivered as she remembered the dragons she’d seen close up – the sheer scale of the beasts, the sheer, impenetrable scales, the glistening teeth, the uncaring eyes – even Discord had had more mercy in his gaze than those dragons. “And we didn’t win. We always had to run away. The only pony who ever actually won against a dragon is Fluttershy, and I don’t think guilting it into moving into a different cave is going to work if it catches us robbing its hoard.”

“Mmm,” Rarity said. “Actually, that one did catch me robbing its hoard.”

“Rarity!”

“And I was this close to getting my hooves on those diamonds,” Rarity said. “Really, the way that dragons lock their gems away where nopony can see them is a crime against fabulosity.”

“You can’t be serious!” Twilight said, covering her face with her hooves. How could they be so stupid? Rarity at least was usually more sensible than… she suddenly looked up. “You’re not serious, are you.”

Rarity and Rainbow Dash looked at each other, then both started laughing. After a second, Twilight joined in with a little giggle.

Seaside looked around the room, and pouted. “Aww.”

“It’s more of a Daring Do-themed adventure anyway,” Rainbow Dash said. “Now, if we wanted an adventure based on Changelings of Canterlot…”

===

That night, Twilight lay awake in bed. She’d finally gotten the bridle off using a fork strapped to her hoof as a lever – it had meant looking into a mirror, and for the first time she noticed that, yes, her reflection in the bathroom mirror still had a horn. Pinkie Pie must have gotten into her bathroom at some point and warped her personal mirror along with all the others in Ponyville. The mirror-image Twilight stayed well behaved, at least, not using her magic and struggling right along with her to pry loose the tiny, delicate latches, and the mirror Pinkie Pie (that she was sure was in there somewhere) stayed out of sight, although Twilight imagined she heard her giggling softly from out of frame.

If she turned into a changeling, would her mirror-selves also turn? Without Pinkie Pie’s interference in Canterlot, were there even changeling refugees in mirror-Ponyville to do the conversion? Could she detect changelings by holding up one of Pinkie Pie’s subverted mirrors and seeing who didn’t reflect? No, that was silly. The mirror-Pinkies must have some way to make the mirrors reflect properly most of the time, or everypony in Ponyville would know about them.

Unless that was another one of the silly little Ponyville secrets that nopony ever got around to telling her about until it was too late. At least this latest one – the story of the wishing star – was one she’d already known. How many other magical artifacts were lying hidden nearby, just waiting to cause trouble for some unsuspecting explorer? Probably quite a few, given the town’s location.

“Not that Canterlot is any better,” she grumbled, flipping over in bed to try to get comfortable. Time travel spells hidden in the library, a huge abandoned crystal mine right under the castle, Luna’s bat-themed barracks at the top of the mountain... and let’s not forget the city-destroying super-weapons on the moon. And changelings, apparently living undetected for generations.

She was so sick of secrets. The only good thing about them was uncovering them, holding them up to the light, and making the world a little more sensible and consistent.

And when she put it that way, turning into a changeling wasn’t really an option, was it? It’d be another stupid secret for her to keep, forever, or else get locked in a dungeon with all the other changelings, who’d been too comfortable lying to everypony to let anypony know that they’d been there all along, and now it was too late. And to make it worse, those stupid stupid bugs had told her their secret, and now she had to keep it for them, because betraying a friend’s secret was… just not right, even if she could almost convince herself she’d be better off without them as friends.

She turned over the other way, tangling herself in the blankets. Was she really trapped in their lies? Maybe there was a way to untangle the web of deceit. Surely if she explained their situation to Princess Celestia, she’d understand that they… had an apparently insatiable urge to impersonate other ponies even when they didn’t need to, for ‘fun’, and the best you could hope for was that the only damage they’d do was accidental. Twilight could live with that, but what about everypony else? Celestia would want them to change, to behave, and they’d try, or claim to try, and fail, and then what? Twilight’s imagination was all too happy to fill in the blanks.

Twilight sighed. Maybe Princess Luna? She was, as far as Twilight knew, still looking for unicorns to help with her secret project. Changelings might be close enough. She’d been willing to protect the moon ponies, who weren’t even from Equestria – would she be open minded enough to take the changelings under her wings? They were creepy, and scary, and deceptive – right up Luna’s alley. It seemed like a done deal. The only problem was that she hadn’t helped. It’s not like she didn’t know about the changelings locked up in the dungeon.

There was a crash across the room, and a blast of chill air. Twilight sat up in bed, a bit awkwardly because of the tangle of blankets, and stared across the pitch black of her bedroom at the now-open window swinging back and forth as the snowy wind howled past outside.

Something rustled, just outside her field of view. “H-hello?” she said, her voice seeming to echo in the late-night silence. She tried to focus on the least menacing possibilities. “Spike? Was that you?”

A dark mass rose from beyond the foot of her bed, occluding the window. It smelled like snow, and feathers, which lent itself to one obvious explanation. “Rainbow Dash?”

The pony spread her wings and leaped atop the bed, pinning Twilight down beneath her blankets, her face held inches away. “Guess again,” she said softly, in Rainbow Dash’s voice.

“Oh,” Twilight said.

The changeling nodded. “I expected you to be a lot more scared.”

“Should I be?” Twilight asked, shifting uncomfortably.

There was a brief, blinding flash of green fire, and a changeling in its natural form stared down at her with blue glowing eyes. It bared its fangs, inches from her nose. Twilight stared back at it. A long, snaky tongue extended from its mouth, flicking a glistening tip across Twilight’s nostrils.

“Stop that,” Twilight whispered, wrinkling her nose. “You’re being gross.”

“What’s wrong with you?” it hissed, in a sort of crackling, buzzy voice. “I have you in my power, and you feel nothing?”

Twilight turned her head to the side, bit down on her pillow, and whipped it into the changeling’s face. As it recoiled, she rolled off the bed to shed the blankets. The changeling tried to keep hold of her, and ended up getting slammed to the floor underneath her, with two of its perforated legs tangled and trapped. There was a brief, chaotic struggle, that ended with Twilight Sparkle perched atop the changeling intruder, pinning one delicate wing under a hoof while her forehooves held her pillow down over its head, keeping its fangs and horn at bay. “Say auntie,” she said. “Say it!”

“Owwww…” moaned the changeling.

“Thirty,” Twilight said. “I took down thirty changelings in the battle for Canterlot, and they knew how to fight. I’ve fought dragons and manticores and held off a three-headed hydra while my friends ran to safety. I am way out of your league. Now stop being an idiot and give up before we wake up Spike.”

“Twilight?” Spike said drowsily, from behind her. “What’s going on?”

“You’re dreaming,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes. “Go back to sleep.” There was a brief glow of green spilling out from under the pillow, but she stomped on it hard enough to disrupt the spell.

“Okay, okay, I give up,” whined the changeling.

“Good,” Twilight said. “Now let’s go talk like civilized ponies.”

===

Downstairs, Twilight slowly ate a daisy sandwich, one bite at a time, focusing on the fresh flavor of the daisies and the subtle wheaty taste of the bread, letting it take her back to her childhood. Her mother’s daisies grown in the back yard garden plot, tossed into the simplest possible dishes to avoid wasting time preparing food. Time that could be better spent unlocking the mysteries of science. Simple to eat, too – no trip to the kitchen required. A thousand sandwiches eaten while poring over books, or working on assignments for school. Cadance had always been her favorite foalsitter, because they’d go out and play, and have fun, but it was her mother who’d always understood what Twilight loved best – solitude and a lack of distractions.

She finished the sandwich, and slumped to the table, exhausted. Across from her, Ditto licked his lips. “That was delicious,” he said. “I should break into your room more often.”

“I’m never going to get to sleep the night, am I?” Twilight remarked. “Now. Explain.”

“Applejack knows,” he said, simply. “Why did you tell her?”

Twilight’s fur stood on end, and she was suddenly awake again. “What do you mean? How much does she know? What did she say?” Ditto leaned forwards and touched his horn to her forehead, and it flashed…

She was sneaking through the apple orchards in Rainbow Dash’s shape, flitting from tree to tree and staying under cover. Something big had happened the day before – a pillar of fire that the Apples had tried to wave off as a rogue lightning strike, but she’d already talked to the weather squad. No lightning scheduled that day, and Derpy hadn’t been anywhere near the farm.

No, this was that ‘earth pony magic’ that Twilight was studying, she was sure of it. With thoughts of the purple earth pony in her head, she took her form without thinking when the burnt remains of the barn came into view. She appraised the damage – the building was a total loss, but all the loose debris had been moved away. The shell of the back half of the building sat there, sagging slightly, with its contents – dozens of snow plows, piles of spare parts, what looked like a folding table, and a wheelbarrow full of fertilizer or something – spread out on a tarp.

Her hooves clopped across the wooden floor of the destroyed barn as she searched for ground zero, but there was no sign of an explosion – nothing physical, anyway. Something felt… off, but she couldn’t place it.

“Twilight?” Applejack asked. “I thought I saw somepony sneaking around out here, but I didn’t expect you to be back so soon.”

“I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help,” she said. “After the, um, the incident.”

Applejack narrowed her eyes suspiciously, the suspicion rolling off her in tangible, if inedible, waves. “Uh huh.”

“So… what happened here? I mean, exactly. Obviously I was here and saw what happened, right?”

“You burned down my barn,” Applejack said. “Can’t rightly say much more than that.”

“That was magic, right? I used earth pony magic?”

Applejack snorted. “Used up a whole year’s supply.”

That answer was just confusing. “I don’t understand. How does it work?”

“You know, you’re awfully chipper for a mare who stumbled out of my kitchen not two hours ago, saying she wanted to go home and sleep,” Applejack said. “You don’t look tired at all.”

“I’m too tired to sleep?” she suggested, smiling nervously.

“Ditto,” Applejack said. When the changeling wearing Twilight’s skin flinched, Applejack gave a nasty little smile, and her suspicion turned to deviousness. “Come on back to my place, Twi. We’ve got a niiiiice comfortable bed for you to rest up in, for as long as ya need.”

When Ditto transformed into Rainbow Dash and flew away at top speed, there wasn’t even a flicker of surprise from the mare she left behind.

Twilight pulled back as she returned to the present. “You could have used a Flashback Window for that,” she grumbled.

“I’m better with memory spells,” Ditto said. “How did she know I was a changeling? How did she know my name if you didn’t tell her?”

Twilight winced. “I… may have called her by your name the morning before last, when she stopped by the library. I didn’t think she thought anything of it, I was pretty out of it at the time.”

“Well, thanks for that,” Ditto said. “Now I get to leave another town. I’d already be gone, but I needed to let Seaside know, and she wanted to stay for the book club meeting since her cover wasn’t blown yet. It will be, though – all my friends are going to be scrutinized, and she barely has an identity at all. Mine might have held up, but she’s not even in the town census.”

“Oh, shut up,” Twilight snapped, holding her head, which between the life-energy drain from the feeding, and the memory spell with no warning, was starting to ache. “You were the one skulking about as me without knowing the first thing about what I’d been doing. If you’d picked any other pony she wouldn’t have caught on.”

“Fine, it’s all my fault, I don’t care,” Ditto said. “We’ve still got no choice but to leave town. So I’m here to make a final offer – do you want to come with us? It’ll take a couple days for the hunters to find our cave. We still have time to convert you.”

“No,” Twilight said, without hesitation. “I’ve got a better idea. We’re going to Canterlot.”

Ditto stared at her. “What?”

Chapter 6: All Aboard

It would have been a relatively nice day, for winter, if it hadn’t been for the cursed wind. The wind hadn’t been on the weather report, which meant it was either random weather from the Everfree Forest, or an unanticipated side effect of the weather patrol’s more visible efforts. That, or somepony on the weather team was in a really bad mood and decided that everypony else should also suffer.

Whatever the reason, Twilight was still uncomfortable even beneath her saddle and scarf. She wasn’t cold, exactly – actually, with Spike sitting on her back, huddling under a blanket, she was a little overheated – but the wet, wind-driven snow stung her legs, flank, and the exposed parts of her face. A force field would have really come in handy.

At least it meant the streets were mostly deserted, so she didn’t have to worry that everypony was laughing at her behind her back. The only laughter was from the town’s fillies and colts, who seemed immune to the weather.

“Think fast!” came a high-pitched voice from beside her, and out of the corner of her eye she spotted a snowball coming her way. For once, she remembered she was an earth pony, and tried to buck it away with a hind hoof instead of catching it with her nonexistent telekinesis, only to miss it and end up with a wet, sloppy snowball splattered across her rear. Twilight squeaked and sat down heavily, waking up Spike and eliciting a round of giggles from her assailants.

“Sorry, kids, I don’t have time for a snowball fight right now,” she said to the pair of fillies hiding behind the wall of a snow fort. “I’ve got seventeen items left on my checklist.”

“I could add it to the list if you want,” Spike offered, peering out from under the blanket with drowsy eyes.

“No! Time is critical,” Twilight said, standing up and ducking under another volley from the fort as she ran for the marketplace.

When she arrived, almost everything was closed. Many of the merchants who still sold during the winter months were absent, and while the apple family cart was there, it was shuttered and unattended. The wind was twice as strong in the market square, which provided a bit of an explanation. She looked around for any sign of Applejack, and her gaze drifted across Sugarcube Corner, which was definitely open, and judging from the movement she could faintly make out through the snow-speckled window, even had customers for once. Well, it was worth a try.

The bell over the door jingled as she pushed through into the pastry-scented warmth, and a babble of excited voices washed over her. Sugarcube Corner was packed with ponies, all of them happy and excited, but the one voice that pierced through the crowd was the high-pitched, bouncy voice of Pinkie Pie.

“…and then Twilight was like ‘GASP! What happened to your horn! Oh no, what happened to my horn?!’”

Twilight cringed, and tiptoed across the room behind the crowd, heading for the counter. What was Mrs. Cake thinking, letting Pinkie out in public like that? Spike peeked out from under the blanket. “Is that Pinkie Pie?”

“No!” Twilight hissed, but it was too late – he’d already hopped off and pushed between the gathered ponies to get a look for himself.

“Hey! Over here!” came a grating voice from the other direction, and Twilight spotted Cherry Berry gesturing wildly for her. She hesitated – and only grudgingly joined her at her tiny table because Applejack was sitting next to her.

“Applejack! I’ve been looking all over for you,” Twilight said. “Well, technically, I was about to start looking all over for you, but I found you at the second place I looked. I would have kept looking all over for you though, since you’re the highest priority item on my checklist by far.”

“That’s… nice,” Applejack said, staring at her suspiciously. “I guess?”

“Of course, I was hoping to catch you alone.”

“Alone? In a dark alleyway, perhaps? What were you planning on doing to her?” Cherry Berry asked. “If it’s not too dangerous I might be able to help.”

“It’s not that,” Twilight said. “It’s about a secret.”

“Ooh, tell me more!” Cherry Berry said, leaning forwards eagerly.

Twilight shook her head. “Sorry. It’s not my secret.”

“I figured it might be something like that,” Applejack said, frowning. “This is about yesterday morning, right?”

“Yeah,” Twilight said. “Out at the barn. When you met my friend.”

“You sure she’s a friend?” Applejack asked.

“I’m invoking Ponyville law to declare her my friend,” Twilight said. “You all did it to me when I first arrived, so you owe me that much.”

Applejack laughed mirthlessly. “Fine, but I hope you know what you’re doing. Her sort is bad news, Twi.”

Twilight sighed. “I know. But I think she means… well… I don’t think she means any harm. Per se.“

Applejack snorted. “It’s okay, I understand. Just keep your eye on ‘er.”

Twilight nodded. “I will.”

Cherry Berry stared at the pair. “A griffon?” she guessed.

“No!” Twilight said.

“Hmm… a dragon.”

“Stop it, Cherry,” Applejack said. “You know how bad Twilight is at keepin’ secrets. Do you really want her blabbing everything to a room full of ponies?”

“Weellll…” Cherry Berry said, scratching at her chin with a hoof. “Am I one of those ponies? I think I am.”

Twilight’s ears folded down. “Look, Applejack, I just wanted to say… please keep it under your hat, at least for a few days. I’m looking for a more permanent solution right now but I need a little time.”

“A changeling!” Cherry Berry said.

Twilight closed her eyes and took a breath. “No, Cherry Berry. It’s not a changeling.” She had no idea if she’d delivered that believably. Opening her eyes showed Applejack frowning at her.

“Hmm… a human?”

Twilight blinked. “A what?”

Cherry Berry scowled. “Oh, come on, am I at least getting close?”

“Look,” Twilight said, “I’ll tell you at some point in the future, but you need to stop guessing now. I might slip up and give it away and it’s not my secret! How would you feel if I gave away your secrets?”

Cherry Berry looked confused. “I have secrets?”

Twilight opened her mouth, then closed it and narrowed her eyes. She smiled sheepishly, and said, “I’ll make some up?”

The pink pony stared at her for a few seconds, then burst into laughter, slapping her hoof on the table. “I like you, Twilight! You’re fun.”

Twilight stared at her. “Well. That’s… good. I guess. Anyway,” she continued, digging into her saddlebag to fetch her checklist, and into her other saddlebag to get a quill, “I think my work here is done.” With the quill in her mouth, she carefully drew a checkmark next to the item at the top of the list.

“’Silence Applejack’?” Cherry Berry read off, peering at the list upside down.

“I… may have been just a little bit annoyed at her when I was making up this list,” Twilight admitted. “Sorry, Applejack.” She smiled briefly at Applejack, who stared back patiently from under her hat. “Spike! Come on, let’s go!”

The little dragon came running. “Twilight! They’ve got Pinkie Pie trapped in a mirror!”

“As long as she stays trapped there,” Applejack said, scowling. “Always nice to see ya, Twi, and good luck with the rest of your list. I’d offer to keep ya company, but I think I’m gonna stay here and make sure that Pinkie doesn’t try nothing.”

Twilight smiled. “Then I’ll leave Equestria in your capable hooves.”

===

After another look at the deserted marketplace, and a few minutes shivering in the cold, Twilight found herself wondering how many of the rest of the items on her list could be found at Barnyard Bargains. Normally, Twilight preferred using smaller shops – the big barn stores had never caught on in Canterlot, and she still felt a bit intimidated by the notion of one shop selling everything, or at least an inferior but workable substitute for almost anything. With the freezing wind howling outside, though, and so many other ponies staying home from the weather, she decided that facing her fear of ponies selling things out of barns was the lesser evil. Well, the lesser annoyance.

At first glance, the giant shop was as bewildering as she’d feared – shelves, stacked higher than anypony could reach with seemingly random items, lining all the stalls where cows would normally sleep, and more set up in rows in the central storage area. It was bright and warm, at least – firefly lanterns were set up everywhere, and there must have been a furnace in some hidden corner.

“Hi there!” said a cheerful green mare, lunging at her as she entered. “Welcome to Barnyard Bargains! Need help finding anything?”

Twilight stared at her in shock until she realized she was being rude, then shook her head and said, “It’s okay, I’ll just, er, have a look around if that’s okay.”

“Alright! Just ask anypony on staff if you need any help!” the clerk said cheerfully as she wandered back to the register to wait for somepony to buy something.

The rows of shelves reminded Twilight of the central Library in Canterlot, and once she’d made that connection it didn’t take long for her to realize that the aisles and stalls were labeled by category, like a library of goods. Checking the list for the first item to buy, she guessed that climbing equipment would be filed under ‘sports’, assuming that that was what the hoofball sign represented.

She tentatively took a step towards the aisle in question, letting out her breath in relief as nothing new jumped out to terrify her. Then she took another step, and a dark shape swooped past through the hayloft, almost overhead. Looking up, she spotted shadowy pegasi moving large boxes around the upper level, occasionally carrying one down to the lighted floor level to restock the shelves.

She took a careful look around the barn, imagining invisible lines delineating the part of the store where the hayloft’s floor protected the customers below, and the deadly reaches where she’d be unprotected from plummeting inventory. It was quickly apparent that there was no safe path, thanks to the high shelves dividing up the store into narrow passageways, most of them perpendicular to the wide gaps above. So with no way to stay completely safe, she carefully walked down the aisle to the edge of the line of death, staring across the imaginary danger zone at the shelves full of climbing equipment beyond. She lowered her head, scratched at the ground with her hoof, and waited for the aerial assailants to pass before making a mad dash to safety under the next stretch of ceiling.

“Ahhh, Twilight! What gives!” Spike complained, his claws digging into her neck as he struggled to stay on her back.

“Nothing! Nothing. Everything is fine,” Twilight said, grabbing a coil of rope and passing it to Spike, then peering at a selection of pitons and grappling hooks. “I’ve got it figured out.”

“Just warn me next time,” Spike grumbled, gathering the items as Twilight pulled them off the shelf.

“Okay,” Twilight said. “We’re done here. I think I saw preserved food three aisles down, so we’ll just need to make a quick run back to the start – AHHH!” She screamed and jumped back as a pegasus plummeted from the sky to land right in front of her.

“Hi!” Seaside said. “What’s got you so jumpy?”

Twilight looked up at the other pegasus working with the boxes. “Wouldn’t it make sense to keep the heavy, pony-crushing crates under the floor or something, instead of looming overhead?” Twilight asked nervously, one eye twitching.

Seaside laughed. “Oh, come on, nopony here has ever dropped a crate on a customer’s head.”

“Never?” Twilight asked, suspiciously.

“Never,” Seaside said. “If we do, we get fired. Like that crazy gray mare I got hired to replace a few weeks ago --”

“Derpy was working here?”

Seaside nodded. “Although from what I’ve heard, not for very long. Oh!” She took off, and flew up into the loft. After a few seconds, she swooped down through a different opening, landing behind Twilight. “Here! We’ve got a million of these sitting in a crate, I’m sure the boss wouldn’t mind if you borrowed one for a while.”

Twilight took the rainbow-patterned umbrella hat, and with a shrug, flipped it onto her head. Seaside snickered.

“I like it,” Spike said. “It’s very you, Twilight.”

Seaside covered her mouth. “It’s a little silly looking, but it’ll keep you safe. Guaranteed! The box says it’s ‘Pinkie Sense Approved’ whatever that means.”

Twilight glanced up at the hat. If nothing else, it would keep her from seeing the pegasi flitting around overhead. “Thanks, I guess,” she said.

“Anyway, since you’re here, the boss wanted to talk to you,” Seaside added conversationally. “The office is over in the back behind the farm equipment. There was something about ‘tell Twilight she’d better come or else you’re not getting that time off you asked for’ blah blah blah, not that I really care – I mean, either way I’m not coming back here. Right?”

“It’s always best to keep your options open,” Twilight said. “I talked to Applejack and she promised to trust me, for now. She hasn’t told anypony.”

“Told anypony what?” Spike asked.

“Exactly,” Twilight said.

===

The umbrella hat worked as promised, and absolutely nothing fell on Twilight’s head while she was wearing it, not even when she accidentally dislodged a half-dozen boxes of trail mix trying to fetch them from a shelf that turned out to be just a little too high to reach. They fell on Spike’s head, instead, but he was a dragon and virtually indestructible, despite his grumbling.

So, in what seemed like only a few minutes, Twilight had purchased everything on her list, and half a dozen things she hadn’t thought about until she saw them there on the shelves – like some soap-on-a-rope since her parents probably didn’t have any, and some zap apple jam as a gift since she was showing up unannounced. She even had enough bits left over for her train ticket, which would save a trip back to the library to get more. Hopefully that would leave her enough time to finish everything before the afternoon train, even after adding an unexpected meeting to her list.

“It’s a surprisingly efficient operation,” she remarked to Spike, as she headed for the back corner to find the office.

“It makes me a little nervous,” Spike said. “It’s like a giant cave full of stuff – I keep expecting the dragon to show up and defend his hoard.”

“Well, we’re going to see the dragon now,” Twilight said. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t intend to eat us.”

Once they were at the back, the office wasn’t hard to find, although pushing past the sign reading ‘employees only’ gave Twilight a slight twinge of conscience even though she knew she’d been invited.

“There you are!” screeched the small pink filly sitting behind the desk two sizes too large for her. She was head down over a ledger, making notes with a quill, and didn’t look up at Twilight and Spike. “I hope you remembered the extra hay in my hay shake.”

“I was told you wanted to speak to me?” Twilight asked, a little surprised that the ‘boss’ was Filthy’s daughter, although it made sense that he wanted her to learn the family business. Even Applebloom did chores around the farm.

“You!” Diamond Tiara said, dropping the quill instantly and sitting up straight, as she recognized Twilight’s voice. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to come see me at my mansion. Can’t your friends even be blackmailed properly?”

“Are you sure she’s not going to eat us?” Spike said in a low voice.

Twilight sighed. “You’re not supposed to call it blackmail, Tiara.”

“Diamond Tiara,” the filly insisted. “Send your minion away, and we can discuss business.”

“Anything you can say to Twilight, you can say to me!” Spike insisted. “We don’t work for you, so you don’t get to order us around!”

“Spike, humor her,” Twilight said, tossing him the umbrella hat. Normally she would have been inclined to take his side, but given that the messenger had been Seaside, there were possible topics of conversation that Spike didn’t need to know. Possible angles from which she could be blackmailed, because she had secrets. Although if Diamond Tiara tried to blackmail her, she could always foalnap the filly and have Ditto alter her memories, since apparently he specialized in memory spells. But first, she’d hear her out -- that sort of intrigue was best left to fictional characters and the occasional idle fantasy. “And don’t listen at the door,” she added.

“Aww,” Spike grumbled, as he ambled out of the office.

“And don’t snack on that food I just bought!” Twilight added as he closed to door behind him. “I swear, sometimes I’m not sure if he’s a dragon or a bottomless pit.”

When she turned back to the desk, Diamond Tiara had once again donned her eponymous headpiece, and somehow, in the few seconds that Twilight had been looking away, she’d also cleared the papers off of her desk and set up a few expensive-looking kinetic sculptures. Noticing Twilight once again looking her way, she slammed both hooves onto the table dramatically. “Where is my moondust!”

“The princesses confiscated it?” Twilight said, unsure where the filly was going with this. They’d had to scrape it off the side of the mountain, first – the return flight from the moon hadn’t really ended well.

“I don’t care if they had it shipped back up to the moon, Sparkle. You and Pinkie Pie promised to bring my father a crate of moondust –“

“Moon rocks,” Twilight corrected.

“Well, lucky for you, we’re willing to accept moondust, since that’s all you actually managed to bring with you,” she replied.

“Is this for you, or for your father?” Twilight asked. “Moondust isn’t just pretty dust that glows on its own, you know. It’s dangerous.”

“How dangerous could it be? You were swimming in it up there.”

“It’s made up of millions of tiny golems,” Twilight explained. “While they’re inactive, it’s just dust, but if you figured out how to activate them you could wreak havoc. Somepony could get seriously hurt!” Diamond Tiara looked unconcerned, so Twilight added, “Probably you.”

Diamond Tiara snorted. “That’s for me to worry about, after you get me my moon dust.”

“The Princess is going to worry about it beforehand,” Twilight pointed out. “She’s going to want to make sure it isn’t misused, and that isn’t even considering the sentimental value it has for her as a piece of her moon. I can bring up your claim, but I don’t think she’s going to go along with it.”

“You’d better figure out a way to make her,” the little pink filly replied, “or else…”

Twilight’s ears perked up, and she tensed. Here it came. “Or else what?”

“It seems that somepony checked out your first edition, signed copy of The Return of Harmony from the library. What was it doing on the shelves? I mean, it was obviously from your personal collection…” Diamond Tiara shook her head. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if it was never returned?”

“You do know that I’m allowed to impose fines for overdue books, right?” Twilight said, relaxing a bit. Compared to the possibilities she’d come up with, a stolen book was, well, kid’s stuff.

“I know how the highest fine ever imposed for an overdue book compares to my weekly allowance,” Diamond Tiara replied. “Besides, I’m not the one who checked it out.”

Twilight sighed. “And I’m not the one you have to convince that you’re responsible enough to be trusted with moondust. I can ask Luna about it, but I can’t make any promises.”

“You already made your promises, Sparkle,” Diamond Tiara said. “Now get out of here. And get me my moondust!”

“Would you like a hay shake with that?” Twilight said as she left the room, to find Spike sitting very still next to a large semi-automatic snow plow. Rigid. Motionless. As if he hadn’t just been listening at the door.

“Come on, Spike. All that’s left is to let Cheerilee know she needs to watch the library for the next couple days, and then we can go see Rarity. You like Rarity, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” Spike said, unenthusiastically. “You’re not going to ditch me there again, are you?”

“Of course not! Look at the checklist,” Twilight said, getting it out of her bag and letting it unroll enough for Spike to see the entry in question.

“’Visit Rarity for better cold weather gear, and not to ditch Spike,” he read out loud. “Yeah, that’s not suspicious at all.”

===

Ditto was waiting for her at the train station. “Is everything ready?”

Twilight nodded and set down her packed suitcase. “Cheerilee’s watching the library, Applejack promised not to say anything to anypony, and I ditched Spike at Rarity’s. He thinks I’m being fitted for a new jacket. It probably won’t fool him for long, but he’s not really very fast under his own power, so the train should be gone before he can get here.”

“Seaside’s already on board,” Ditto said. “She brought a friend. I hope that doesn’t change your plans.”

Twilight shook her head. “Not as long as you’re all okay sharing the guest room when we get to my parents’ place. Or I guess one of you could stay in my room, since we’re already doubling up.”

Ditto looked confused. “Why do we need rooms? Aren’t we leaving to see the princess the same night anyway?”

“We’ll be up all night, so we should probably at least catch a nap.”

She bought her ticket, and with Ditto levitating her suitcase, they headed onto the train. Twilight cringed a little when she saw Seaside’s friend – the changeling was sitting next to Rainbow Dash, or somepony who looked just like her, which was sure to get attention. Not necessarily the wrong kind of attention, though – her parents didn’t know Rainbow very well, and she’d certainly be in character accompanying Twilight to see the princess.

Still… “Rainbow Dash? Really?” she asked, as she and Ditto took seats in front of them.

“No, not really,” Rainbow Dash said. “I’m a changeling, infiltrating Canterlot!”

“You’re not supposed to say it out loud!” Seaside hissed.

“Heehee, sorry!” Rainbow said, covering her mouth. “I guess you and Ditto are team Earth Pony, then? He should probably get a hat to hide that horn of his. Or are you a sympathizer, or maybe a double agent for the unicorns?”

“That would be telling,” Ditto said.

Twilight blinked. “Team… huh? Wait – are we pretending we’re in the book?”

“Pretending is for fillies,” Rainbow Dash said, waving a wing dismissively. “We’re role-playing.”

“No, we’re really changelings,” Seaside said.

“Right. Changelings,” Rainbow replied, nodding. “I mean, not changelings. Ordinary pegasi. Not spies or anything.”

Seaside laughed. “Right.”

“So you two can get us an audience with the Princess, huh?” Rainbow Dash asked. “We’ve got some questions for her.”

“I certainly hope so,” Twilight said, trying to think of whether having the real Rainbow Dash along would complicate things. Probably not by much; it’d be easy enough to distract her with the moon ponies and get time alone with Princess Luna. Assuming, of course, that this was the real Rainbow Dash, and not a changeling using reverse psychology to pass as her friend. “But not until after nightfall. Our first stop will be a safe-house – some sympathetic unicorns have a spare room we can use to lie low until it’s time.”

“In the meantime, try to use the train ride to practice your disguises,” Ditto said. “Canterlot is the heart of the enemy’s anti-changeling oppression – you need to be the pony you’re disguised as. One slip up and all of us get a one-way ticket to the badlands.”

“That means no going around saying ‘I’m a changeling’,” Twilight said. “Even if you’re pretending that you’re only pretending to be a changeling. Okay?”

“Got it!” Rainbow Dash said, saluting.

“Yes, ma’am,” Seaside said, with a smirk.

Soon enough, the Friendship Express lurched into motion, and slowly pulled out of the station. Twilight watched out the window for Spike, or Rarity, or even maybe Applejack to show up to stop them, but for once nothing went wrong.

When they were well underway, the conductor started heading down the aisle checking tickets. Twilight got hers out of her bags ahead of time, just in case. Ditto followed suit. Rainbow Dash and Seaside looked at them strangely. “You bought tickets?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Isn’t that cheating? I thought we were supposed to be spies.”

“Yes, spies,” Twilight said. “The first rule of being a spy is ‘don’t arouse suspicion’.”

“But you’re leaving a paper trail,” Seaside said. “At least tell me you bought those under a fake name.”

“You didn’t buy tickets,” Ditto said, looking as flabbergasted as Twilight felt.

Twilight glanced nervously as the conductor made his way closer – the mid-day run was pretty crowded, but they still didn’t have much time. “They’re going to throw you off the train!” she hissed.

“They’ll have to catch us, first,” Rainbow Dash said, opening the window and letting in a blast of wet, freezing wind. “See you in Canterlot!”

The conductor ran over as he spotted the two pegasi climbing out the window, and pushed past Twilight and Ditto to look for them. A pair of loud thumps on the roof of the passenger car revealed their plan soon enough.

The conductor gave a long-suffering sigh, and muttered, “Blasted pegasi.” He shouted out the window, “No riding on the roof! There’s too many tunnels for train-surfing!”

“Sorry, sir,” Twilight said, forcing herself to smile politely. “They’re playing at being changeling spies. I’m sure they’ll come back inside before we get to the mountains.”

“Do they have tickets at least?” the conductor asked. Twilight’s mind went blank, but luckily Ditto took over.

“Of course, I think they’re in this bag…” Ditto said, opening Twilight’s suitcase, which was packed full of everything anypony would need for a hiking trip in the mountains. “Oh for pony’s sake –“ Ditto said, “Can you guys help me look through all this junk?”

“Um, okay,” Twilight said. She made a show of moving stuff around and looking underneath it, although she was pretty sure that while this might buy some time, it was not a long-term strategy for success. After all, the conductor had hours to check everypony’s tickets. After a few seconds, though, he was annoyed enough to lean in and lend a hoof.

Ditto’s horn bumped against the conductor’s forehead, seemingly by accident, and briefly glowed green. The conductor’s eyes flashed the same color. Twilight looked around, but with the three of them bent down between the seats, nopony else had had a good view. “There, I knew they were in there,” Ditto said.

“Right, everything’s in order,” the conductor said, in what to Twilight seemed like a slightly dazed voice. He looked up as the sound of hoofsteps echoed on the roof, as Rainbow and Seaside moved around. “Just make sure they’re back inside before we get to the mountains. We’re not responsible for idiots getting plastered against the mountainside when we go into a tunnel, but somepony’ll have to clean off the roof.”

Once he’d moved on to the next car, Twilight hissed, “I can’t believe you did that.”

“What else could I do?” Ditto replied as quietly as he could manage, barely audible over the noise of the train. “Besides, we’re already going to get thrown in the dungeon if we’re caught, I don’t see how this makes things any worse.”

“Well now you deserve it,” Twilight hissed back, glowering.

“You do worse all the time, whenever you need to,” Ditto replied. “Or want to.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Twilight said, slamming her suitcase shut and struggling to refasten it. “I’m finding another seat. I don’t know you – any of you. Especially you, Rainbow Dash!” she shouted at the ceiling, although she still wasn’t sure if the ponies on the roof could hear her over the wind and other noise. “If you manage to get to Canterlot without being arrested or – or thrown off the train just meet me at 21964 Star Terrace Court. That’s on level 5. You can ask any guard for directions, it’s half their job.”

“I know my way around Canterlot,” Ditto said.

“Ask for directions anyway,” Twilight replied. She thumped the suitcase heavily with her forehooves, most of her weight behind them, and was finally rewarded with a faint ‘click’ as it latched closed. “Because that section of the city is really confusing for anypony who isn’t a native.”

“I – right,” Ditto said. “We’ll ask for directions.”

Twilight grabbed the suitcase in her teeth, and backed out into the aisle. “And if I don’t see any sign of you by nightfall,” she started, mumbling it slightly around the handle… then sighed, shoved the suitcase back under the seat, and sat back down. Ditto stared at her, confused. “Forget it, I’d rather know right away,” she said.

She noticed that everypony in the seats around her was staring at them by this point. A mint green unicorn smiled back at her as Twilight’s gaze went past, and a blue-coated earth pony in the next seat over asked, “So are you all spies or something?”

“No,” Twilight said, flattening her ears. “We’re role-players.”

Ditto poked her. “Hey, stay in character!”

Chapter 7: Home Sweet Home

There hadn’t been any particular security in place at the Canterlot station when Twilight had taken the train back to Ponyville a few weeks before – just a pair of Royal Guards on duty in case anypony needed directions. She still spent most of the trip worrying, though, since their group was anything but inconspicuous. After they’d gotten to the part of the route where there were too many tunnels for even Rainbow Dash to risk train-surfing, the two pegasi had started ‘sneaking’ around the crowded passenger cars and ‘converting’ anypony willing to play along – mostly foals, at first – by tickling them with their wings until they agreed they were changelings.

In the close confines of the train, there really wasn’t anywhere to run, and soon they had a horde of giggling ‘changelings’ running up and down the aisle. When the train pulled into the station, they swarmed out onto the platform – and before Twilight could say ‘horseapples’ she found herself falling in step with the crowd as they sang an impromptu musical number about the pending liberation of Canterlot. Like most spontaneous outbursts, it was unreasonably catchy – whatever muse implanted these songs in the minds of ponies seemed to know what it was doing.

The pair of hapless Royal Guards looked on, bewildered. But at the end of the song everypony fell down laughing, and the crowd dispersed back to their pony lives, and Twilight and her changeling cohorts made haste away from the scene of the crime.

===

Normally, the walk from the train station to Twilight’s childhood home didn’t seem very long. Canterlot was a small city – smaller than Ponyville, in fact, if you measured it from end to end. It seemed a lot larger from the inside, however, since it was built vertically, layer upon layer. Only the skill of the ancient architect who’d designed the city’s infrastructure allowed for every street to be open to the sky, and for most of the transitions between levels to involve gentle switchbacks and ramps that the inattentive might not even notice were there, giving the impression of the large, sprawling city that the mountain cleft couldn’t possibly have supported, even with a whole lot of magically braced cantilevers. There was a reason for the ever-present Royal Guards – always one within a minute’s walk – and it wasn’t to guard against changeling invasions.

That said, it was only a fifteen minute walk from the station to Star Terrace Court, and the route took Twilight past many of her favorite sights and shops from when she’d lived in the city, some of them still decorated for the winter holidays, even though Hearth’s Warming Eve was long since passed. She wasn’t in any mood to enjoy the sights, unfortunately, and the thought of what Seaside and Rainbow Dash would get up to if she dared to stop and shop was… not unthinkable, sadly enough. She could imagine the results with perfect clarity. So instead all she could do was hurry along and try not to be noticed by anypony, but every guard they passed seemed to be staring at her, personally, with suspicion and distrust, and she really wished she had her ninja outfit.

And then she noticed Seaside singing.

Their iron hooves won't break us!
Their walls can't segregate us!
Their chains won't let them take us!
Our cause will be victorious!

It was that song, that accursed song from the train station – and Twilight realized she’d been humming along with the tune. She stopped suddenly, and Seaside glanced over and gave a little giggle.

“Ugh,” Twilight said. “You know that the sentiment in that song is completely inappropriate for the actual Canterlot and the real world, right? It may be fun to fantasize about a world where we were forced to rise up and ‘fight the power’, but nothing good has ever come from a revolution.”

“Speak for yourself, pony,” Rainbow Dash said.

Twilight glowered. “I’m trying to be serious. Can we stop role-playing for thirty seconds? You two were completely out of control on the train, and I don’t want you doing anything stupid and actually getting arrested!”

“So what if they do? I’ll get zapped by a stupid changeling detection spell and then they’ll let me go,” Rainbow Dash said.

“But what if you were actually a changeling?” Twilight asked. “You’d be thrown in a dungeon and who knows if you’d ever be let out?”

Rainbow Dash looked at Twilight oddly. “If I was a changeling, wouldn’t I know?”

Twilight shook her head. “Well, yes, I didn’t mean you you, but some of the ponies in that crowd might have been changelings, just going about their business and not hurting anypony. And you’re putting them in danger by stirring up hysteria!”

“Everypony seemed more amused than hysterical,” Ditto said. “Still, any changeling who willingly took a train into Canterlot with Celestia’s detention order in effect would have to be a complete idiot.”

“Or a rebel,” Seaside offered. “They might have sung that song and meant it.”

“The last thing the changelings need are rebels,” Twilight said. “Princess Celestia can’t possibly plan to detain them indefinitely – it would go against everything Equestria stands for.”

“I don’t know,” Rainbow Dash said. “They’re not ponies, so you can’t expect her to treat them like ponies. Equestria is an awesome place to live, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t want to be a monster here.”

“Everypony who wants to be a pony is a pony to ponies,” Twilight said.

Ditto looked at Twilight oddly. “That’s a quote from Princess Pinkie Pie, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “She was never quite in touch with reality.”

“She’s a genius,” Twilight insisted. “And stop talking about her in the past tense.”

“That would be a lot easier if she were present,” Ditto said, a bit harshly.

“Everything would be easier. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation,” Seaside added, flapping into the air and gesticulating wildly. “She let the changelings out of prison, only for Celestia to round them back up as soon as she disappeared. I can’t believe she just abandoned them! If I ever see her, I’m going to smack her so hard!”

“Geez, Seaside, calm down,” Rainbow Dash said. “Why are you taking this so personally? Are you really a changeling or something?” She smirked at her own joke.

“YES!” Seaside shouted, right in Rainbow’s face.

Rainbow Dash stared at her, shocked. So did Ditto and Twilight, not having to fake their surprise and dismay in the slightest.

“I mean, no,” Seaside said. “Of course not. I can’t think when I’m angry! And this whole city makes me angry.”

“Can we not talk about this outside on the street?” Twilight asked, looking around surreptitiously, but not seeing any sign that the ponies walking past had noticed anything out of line. She supposed a pair of pegasi screaming at each other would just confirm the conventional Canterlot wisdom about them.

“You started it,” Seaside grumbled.

A few minutes later, Twilight noticed Seaside humming that song again, but didn’t say anything.

===

“It’s bigger on the inside,” Rainbow Dash said, standing in the doorway of Twilight’s home. From the outside, it had looked like a tiny cottage built against one of the city’s dozens of internal walls, but the living room, right inside the door, was larger than the entire building had appeared. “Messier, too,” the pegasus added, as she took to the air to avoid knocking over the piles of books and scrolls, and the occasional dirty dish, that covered every surface, including most of the floor.

“Well, it’s not like she’s expecting visitors,” Twilight said, looking around. The house seemed deserted, and from the looks of things her dad was probably spending most of his time working with Luna – he was the neat freak of the family. “Mom? Are you home?” When there was no answer, she kicked off her boots and headed for the back hall, dodging around the mess with well-practiced maneuvers. “I’ll go check to see if she’s in the lab, or the garden. You three stay here, and don’t break anything.”

Seaside joined Rainbow Dash in midair. Ditto carefully edged his way through the front door, and contorted himself to close it behind him, staring in dismay at the obstacle course in front of him. “You can move things!” Twilight said, exasperated, as she headed further in.

The door to her old room was open, which was a little odd – the other times she’d visited, it had always been closed, since it was hardly ever used for anything. She turned idly to look inside as she passed, and managed to take the magical blast to the face. For a second she was completely disoriented, and then she felt herself gripped by her mane and dragged into the room. The door shut with a quiet click, and flashed purple as it was magically sealed.

“Hi, mom,” Twilight said to her assailant, who was standing in a defensive posture. “What’s going on?”

Twilight Velvet turned to look at the door, verifying it was still closed and locked, then back to her daughter. “The changeling wards went off, but the detection spell says you’re a pony,” she said, suspiciously. “Who did you have with you when you came inside?”

Twilight winced – apparently, Shiny had been busy. This changed… nothing, in the long run; she hadn’t decided whether or not to tell her mother about the changelings, and all this did was make that decision for her. Volunteering the information would have been a much better first impression than getting caught, though. “Well, this is awkward,” Twilight said, at last.

===

“Just put on the inhibitor.”

“No!” Ditto said, shoving the tiny clockwork device back across the kitchen table. Twilight Sparkle stopped it with her hoof. “Why isn’t she putting on an inhibitor?” the changeling asked.

“Because this is my house, and in my house you follow my rules,” Twilight Velvet replied. “Or you could leave.” She levitated another load of papers from the cluttered table, looked at them on both sides, and then dumped them into the trash.

“If they leave, I’m going with them,” her daughter replied. “I’d love to spend time with you, mom, but I really need to keep an eye on them.” Twilight looked at the inhibitor sitting in front of her. “Why do you even have this?”

“Your brother left it in case I caught a changeling.”

“Are you sure I can’t just erase her memory?” Ditto asked. “She’d forget that the wards went off. And that she attacked you. And this whole conversation. It wouldn’t hurt her at all; I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“I don’t think admitting that is actually helping your case,” Twilight Sparkle replied, shoving the inhibitor back across the table. “Just put it on. You hardly ever use magic anyway.” Why was he being so stubborn? It was a completely useless precaution, since it’d be a matter of seconds for him to change into an earth pony or pegasus, and leave the thing without a horn to cling to. “It’s the only condition mom put on you staying here. Just… humor her. Please? I promise not to let you get arrested before we talk to Princess Luna.”

“I let her tie up my wings,” Seaside said, wiggling them under the ropes. The ropes were shiny, almost like ribbons, and a purple that matched Twilight Velvet’s mane and cutie mark. Rainbow Dash’s wings were also bound, ‘just in case’, since she’d refused to let the unicorn blast her to verify her species.

“No!” Ditto repeated. “I hate these things. Have you ever been in prison?”

Twilight Sparkle looked back at him. “Yes?” she said, wondering how he could have possibly forgotten that. “And yes, they made me wear an inhibitor.”

“Then you know how much they hurt, every time you forget and try to cast a spell.”

Twilight winced a little. “Well, yes, but –“

Ditto levitated the inhibitor, and threw it across the room into the garbage pail. “They’re torture devices! They shouldn’t even be legal.”

“There’s no law against using them on monsters,” Twilight Velvet replied, levitating a bunch of dirty dishes into the sink, and then retrieving the inhibitor from the trash.

“Oh, you want me to be a monster?” Ditto said, putting both hooves on the table as he stood up from his chair. Twilight Velvet responded by levitating a half dozen knives from the knife rack, and pointing them at the changeling.

Twilight Sparkle looked back and forth between the two, then leapt onto the table, between them, slipping a little as one of her hooves landed on an old magazine, and screamed, “STOP!”

“Twilight! Why are you taking his side?” her mother asked. Then with a sudden gasp, she dropped the knives haphazardly on the floor. “Moon and stars, are you two dating?”

Twilight blushed. “Mom! I’m not – how can you even --“ she sputtered, trying to figure out how her mother had even gotten that idea. And trying not to imagine how somepony might have misinterpreted the sight, the night before, of Ditto in his changeling form, pinning her to the bed. Somepony like the author of Changelings of Canterlot, which featured several similar scenes. Or Rainbow Dash, who had the sort of look on her face like she was considering them as a couple.

“I assure you, her feelings for me are entirely platonic,” Ditto said, sitting back down. “We’re friends.”

“Right,” Twilight said. “And he’d know, because he can taste emotions. He’s following me around like a puppy because I fed him this morning, and he’s probably hoping for a second helping.”

Ditto looked embarrassed. Rainbow Dash glanced at Seaside, and asked, “Is that why you always want to hang out so much?”

“Eh, girl’s gotta eat,” she replied, looking at the table.

“Right,” Twilight Sparkle said. “So, can we agree that we’re all friends here? And that we don’t have to strap torture devices to each other to get along? Because I’d really like to get off this table.”

Twilight Velvet’s horn glowed, as she re-levitated the knives – then spun them around and put them back in the block. “I don’t trust them, but maybe we can compromise.”

===

Twilight Velvet levitated the cookbook next to her as she added herbs and spices to the casserole. “I wasn’t expecting to have guests over,” she’d said when she announced that she was cooking dinner for everypony, “but at least two of you are going to need to eat something.” Twilight Sparkle’s trail mix hadn’t counted.

“I wish I could help,” Twilight said, as she held the end of the purple ribbon tied around Ditto’s horn. A sharp jerk would disrupt a spell, if he tried to cast anything malicious, without the painful impact the clockwork inhibitors used. Of course, for that to work, she’d have to be keeping an eye on Ditto instead of watching her mother cook.

Her mother laughed. “You’re a terrible liar, Twily. You never think of a lie that anypony could possibly believe.”

“I didn’t say I would help, but it’d be nice to be able to,” Twilight replied. “I don’t think I’ve told you about the so-called-progress I’ve made on earth pony magic.”

“So it really exists?” Twilight Velvet asked. “And it keeps you from cooking. That’s still not terribly believable – I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of earth ponies cooking.”

“As far as I can tell, it’s a sort of random catalyst, only not limited to reaction rate. At the time I thought I’d just mismeasured, because my instruments weren’t made for hooves, but given what I’ve learned since I’m fairly certain it made a certain reaction release about twice as much hydrochloric acid as it should have.” She shuddered at the memory. “Oh, and I burned at least twenty batches of muffins. That is reaction rate, though.”

“Heat transfer,” her mother corrected, as she turned the cookbook upside down and sideways, staring at an unusual step. “But I think I understand – you’re having random uncontrolled surges, just like when you were a filly learning unicorn magic. That’s a shame – I’d have hoped the training would carry over.”

“Right. The training. That’s probably the worst part,” Twilight said. “Applebloom tried to give me advice on how to… well, ‘control’ is the wrong word. How to anticipate the effects. And it was all –“ she shook her head.

“Hey!” Ditto said, leaning his head towards her to create a bit of slack, as her careless motion tugged on his horn.

“Sorry,” Twilight said, tying the ribbon around her hoof instead of holding it in her mouth. “It was all poppycock, mom! Superstitious nonsense!”

Her mother glanced at her. “And yet, earth ponies manage to cook all the time, many of them quite skillfully. There must be something real hidden beneath the superstition – there often is truth behind the old mare’s tales. I mean, look – changelings are real! Do you know how many folk tales that could explain? The Shadow Twin, the Feather Storm, the Mirror Pool…” She paused. “I’d say The Mare in the Moon, but that turned out to be Princess Luna.”

“I’m not saying it’s not real, I’m saying it’s not quantifiable. You’re supposed to forget about keeping track of time or quantities and just add ‘a little sugar’ until it feels right, then cook it until it ‘seems done’,” Twilight said.

“That sounds like pre-classical spellcasting,” Twilight Velvet mused, as she stirred the mix of noodles and sauces and vegetables. “Plenty of unicorns still cast that way. It’s strange that the earth ponies would still be stuck in the pre-classical era, though – even the pegasi managed to industrialize their weather magic, and they’ve always been a bit featherbrained.”

“Exactly. If nopony’s ever managed to figure it out in all this time, what if it can’t be quantified?” Twilight asked. “I haven’t given up yet, but none of the data I collected from all my failed experiments in baking is any use, and I’m starting to think that one of the confounding variables might be my own emotional state. That, or something to do with the time of day. Possibly both. In the meantime, I’m stuck being even more useless than if I was – I don’t know, a donkey or something. Or a unicorn with her horn cut off.”

Her mother laughed. “Or a filly who hasn’t learned to control her magic yet? Give it time. Work with the experts. Every earth pony figures it out eventually, I’m sure you’ll master the knack in no time.”

“I don’t want to master the knack,” Twilight said. “It’s unscientific. And worse, if I do master it, how will I ever be able to properly perform the experiments I’d need to use the magic properly? I’d be a biased observer.”

“Twilight…” her mother said. “There are solutions to every problem you’ve proposed. Obvious ones. Observer bias is a real problem with every scientific experiment, and there are plenty of books on how to account for and minimize it. Accounting for the time of day is trivial. Your emotional state… is trickier, but I can think of two different ways to make sure it doesn’t ruin the results off the top of my head. Three, since you have changeling friends.

“Honestly, it sounds like you’re looking for excuses to give up and declare the whole project a failure.” She shook her head. “If you want to give up and wallow in self-pity for a while, I’ll be here to brush your mane and feed you chocolate. But that’s not the Twilight Sparkle I know and love.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to wallow in self pity,” Ditto suggested. “Maybe she wants to explore other alternatives.”

“I’m not turning into a changeling,” Twilight Sparkle said. “You saw how mom reacted – she’s still scared of you, and Shining Armor is probably worse, after what the Queen made him do. I can’t do that to my family.”

Ditto frowned. “They wouldn’t have to know.”

“I’d know,” Twilight Velvet said. “Twilight is terrible at keeping secrets.”

Twilight sighed. “It doesn’t matter, since the secret is out. Now that everypony knows changelings are real, even experts like you and Seaside—“ she was pretty sure she said that with a straight face “--couldn’t stay hidden for more than a couple of weeks. I’m taking you to see Luna because I’m hoping she has a better life to offer you than constantly staying on the run, or… or whatever Celestia has planned.”

“Being locked up in prison for all eternity,” Ditto said, bitterly.

“That is not the extent of her plan,” Twilight insisted. “If nothing else, she’d turn you to stone to make long-term storage cheaper. The fact that she hasn’t built a new changeling-themed statue garden means she has something else in mind… or is hoping that another option will arise.” She smiled. “Maybe we can give her one!”

===

While the casserole was cooking, Twilight demonstrated the one bit of blatant earth pony magic she was able to do reliably: preventing water from boiling by watching the kettle. After seeing it, her mother asked her to try a few experiments with candles – with a little practice, Twilight was able to snuff them out with a glance, which startled everypony the first time they saw it – and had her attempt the archetypical earth pony trick of making a seed grow into a flower instantly. Without the magic soil that she’d promised not to talk about, Twilight wasn’t able to do anything to the seed.

“There must be a trick to it,” her mother said, frowning.

“I’m sure there is,” Twilight answered, honestly enough. “I got the impression that I’m unusually magical for an earth pony, but growing plants is not my thing. I wasted weeks trying to have any effect at all on the flowers in the Canterlot Gardens.” Every word true, and completely misleading. She was glad that her mother thought she still didn’t know how to lie.

Soon enough – exactly soon enough, precisely at the time specified in the cook book – the casserole was ready, and they all sat down around the kitchen table to eat. Seaside waved off taking a plate of her own. “I already ate.”

Rainbow Dash’s eyes went wide, and her wings tugged against the ribbon still holding them bound. “Nothing happened! We just slept – I was asleep the whole time!”

Seaside grinned, and licked her lips. “You had tasty dreams. Don’t worry, I don’t know who they were about.”

“Probably Thunderlane,” Twilight said casually. “Or maybe Trixie.”

“Ugh,” Rainbow Dash said. “You’re as bad as Rarity.”

“I’m just glad you two are still getting along,” Twilight said, wedging her fork underneath the loop of ribbon still tied to her wrist and connected to Ditto’s horn. She poked at the casserole experimentally. “I was worried you’d, I don’t know, freak out or something.” The fork shifted to the side as she tried to pick up some noodles, and she dropped it to the side and just leaned down to take a bite.

“Uh, yeah,” Rainbow Dash said, holding her own plate up balanced on her hooves so that she didn’t have to lean. “I don’t ‘freak out’. Freaking out is for losers who don’t have any faith in themselves. It’s the definition of uncool.”

“And you’re cool,” Twilight said, looking at Rainbow Dash suspiciously.

Rainbow Dash looked at Seaside, and nodded. “Yeah, we’re cool.”

Twilight Velvet was carefully not meeting anypony’s gaze throughout this exchange. Twilight Sparkle was about to open her mouth and say something, but Rainbow Dash pre-empted her. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Twilight, moms aren’t supposed to be cool. It’d be kind of creepy anyway.”

Twilight’s mother sighed. “I just don’t want to be the thing that’s holding her back. If the changelings could really convert her – and not drive her insane or turn her into a mindless drone – she’d have her magic back! But I just can’t get over the wedding. It was – I almost – I can’t let it go.”

“Mom, it’s okay,” Twilight said, leaning her neck against her mother’s and giving her a hug. “You’re not the only reason.” She pulled back, and added, “Besides, they’re not the only option. If all else fails, I can just master earth pony witchcraft and whip up a batch of Applebloom’s ‘Unicorn Potion’.” She grimaced.

“Unicorn potion,” her mother said. “From the look on your face, there’s a story there.”

“Not so much a story as a recipe from Tartaros,” Twilight said. “You start with Poison Joke…”

Author's Note

ARGH. Stupid changelings. You were supposed to be a minor subplot.

Chapter 8: Into the Night

Canterlot, halfway up a mountain peak, was high enough to be above the blanket of clouds that shrouded most of Equestria for most of the winter. That didn’t mean that the sky was always clear – snow clouds had to be pushed up over the top of the mountain if it was to acquire its signature snowy peak, and nopony wanted to go the entire winter without getting to play in the snow – but most winter nights you could look up and see the stars glittering overhead, and the moonlight shining down on the snow kept everything quite bright.

It also made the the mountain city very, very cold, particularly at night. The biting chill almost made Twilight regret ditching Spike with Rarity instead of actually getting new clothes made; fortunately, her mother came to the rescue with extra layers of sweaters and blankets and socks and scarves.

Ditto, who’d barely dressed for winter at all, got the worst of it. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I look like a mummy.”

“It’s your fault for being a unicorn,” Seaside said. Like Rainbow Dash, she was going naked, or at least she would be once Twilight’s mother let them take off the ribbons binding their wings. Pegasi felt the cold, in the sense that they could tell cold weather from warm weather, but there was nothing inherently less comfortable about sub-zero temperatures for them. Twilight’s trip to the moon had proven that their weather immunity went quite a bit farther than that, but for flying around in wintery mountains, the high-altitude adaptation that everypony knew about was sufficient.

It was a little surprising that changelings acquired the same power simply by taking pegasus form, but only a little. A ‘changeling disguise’ was a transformation and not an illusion, after all.

While she was considering the implications – good implications, for once, since Luna’s special project was likely to go back into space at some point, and potentially being able to survive there would be a definite plus to her hiring the changelings – Ditto suddenly burst into green flames, that didn’t set fire to the clothing engulfing him or the books surrounding him. “Right,” he said, in Rainbow Dash’s voice, “I should have thought of it myself. This’ll make rock-climbing easier too.”

“You are not going around as Rainbow Dash’s twin,” Twilight said, as she and the others started unwrapping him. Her. It. Come to think of it, she didn’t actually know whether the two changelings were really male or female, under their disguises – she’d seen them in their base forms, but they just looked like bugs. The green fire flashed again – driving the ponies back a step in surprise, although, again, it didn’t actually burn anything – and now they were looking at Daring Do, mustard coat and greyscale mane. Twilight shook her head. “That’s almost as bad.”

“It’s not like I have an infinite number of pegasus forms,” Ditto whined. “How about this.” With a flash, she turned into Applejack, and then with a look of concentration, spread a pair of orange wings. “Y’all can call me Fruit Fly,” she said. Twilight Velvet removed the last layer of clothing covering her flank, revealing a cutie mark of three apples… with wings. ‘Fruit Fly’ glanced at them, and turned them green instead of red.

“I guess that’ll do,” Twilight Sparkle said. Her face still looked exactly like Applejack’s, but at least to somepony who didn’t know them she’d appear to be a unique pony and not an obvious duplicate or fake.

Her mother stared at the changeling, one eye twitching. “Wasn’t she just a colt a few seconds ago?”

“That’s another reason we’re not dating,” Twilight said.

===

“Are you sure you don’t just want us to carry you?” Rainbow Dash asked, as they left the city and headed towards the mountain trails.

Twilight Sparkle shook her head. “That shouldn’t be necessary.”

After about thirty seconds of walking, Rainbow turned back again, pacing Twilight while flying backwards. “Because it would be a lot faster.”

Twilight sighed. She didn’t like the idea of being hauled around like luggage, but when she’d originally planned to head to Luna’s secret lair on foot, she’d expected to have two ground-based ponies and one pegasus. Three flyers to one walker did change the situation enough to merit reconsideration. After all, she didn’t like being the one slowing down the entire group, either.

“Do you know where her lair is?” she asked Rainbow Dash. “I know vaguely where it is but I was looking out from inside. I know it’s covered by an illusion.”

“Nah, I’ve never been there,” Rainbow replied. “Every time I’ve met the moon ponies since they joined up with Luna, they were in town, guarding.” She looked up at the vast expanses of mountain looming over them. “So we don’t know where we’re going?”

“There’s presumably a trail,” Twilight explained. “My father works there most nights, and complained about the trip a few times when he was visiting me in the castle. From the way he talked about it, it didn’t sound like he was having the Night Guard ferry him back and forth. My plan was to take the public trail up towards the peak, and keep our eyes open. If that doesn’t work, I brought climbing gear to more fully explore the mountain, although at that point you’re right – it’d make more sense for you to carry me.”

“Ugh,” Rainbow said. “How come every time we need to climb a mountain, we end up walking?”

After a few minutes’ walk (or, in Rainbow Dash’s case, very slow hover), they reached the trailhead, where the footpaths leading up and down and all around the mountain all met. The guidepost had two dozen symbols on it, with corresponding arrows pointing every which way. Twilight consulted her map to identify the symbol representing the peak trail; it was fairly obvious which way was ‘up’, but better safe than sorry. The two changelings stood behind her, watching her anxiously.

“Nervous, sugar?” Fruit Fly asked.

“I just want to get this over with,” Seaside snapped.

Rainbow Dash was apparently less nervous, and more bored, and wandered around the area aimlessly, kicking at rocks and watching them bounce down the steep drop-off, just a few feet away.

“Okay,” Twilight said, after triple-checking the map to make sure she had the right trail. “I think –“

“Hey, look at this!” Rainbow Dash interrupted, from just over the edge of a steep section of cliff. Seaside and Fruit Fly flew down to join her, leaving Twilight to carefully slide down a slope next to the cliff, catching herself on a spur of rock to keep from sliding the rest of the way down the mountain. From there, there was a hidden trail leading to a narrow, icy ledge that extended a few feet below the cliff face her friends with wings were already staring at.

Twilight blinked a few times to make sure she was seeing it right – the cliff was currently in shadow, but there was enough ambient light reflecting off the clouds below to make out the runes and pictograms carved semi-randomly into the rock. “That looks just like the decorations we saw on the moon,” Twilight said, excited.

“Which means secret door, right?” Rainbow Dash said.

“Right.” Twilight examined the pattern carefully, and made sure not to touch anything until she’d identified the specific rune that formed the keystone of the entire pattern – the secret doors on the moon had often been trapped, and setting off any sort of trap here, perched on a narrow ledge on the side of a mountain, would be potentially deadly. “Get ready to catch me if I guess wrong,” she said, and the two Changelings flew back a few feet, which was almost the opposite of what she’d just asked.

Still, she was pretty sure that between the three of them her companions wouldn’t let her fall, so she placed her hoof against the crescent moon at the center of the pattern. She thought she felt a faint tingle through the layers of socks and the sole of her boot, but nothing happened.

“Let me try!” Rainbow Dash said, crowding Twilight out of the way. She put her bare hoof against the same rune, and a picture of her cloud-and-lightning cutie mark appeared floating in midair – then turned red, with the sound of a buzzer. Seaside and Fruit Fly tried as well, with similar results.

“If it’s checking our cutie marks, we should use a mark it expects to see,” Twilight said. “My father’s cutie mark is two nested crescent moons, the inner one rotated 135 degrees clockwise.” She scratched a rough sketch in the frost coating the ledge. “Yellow in color, against his blue coat.”

Fruit Fly altered her cutie mark to match Twilight’s sketch. “This doesn’t seem very secure.”

“Getting a magical sensor to recognize individuals is difficult,” Twilight replied, defending Luna even though, really, using a magical sensor to try to recognize individuals was something the description of the magical sensor spell said not to do. “And cutie marks are hard to change with magic. Well, pony magic,” she amended, glancing at Fruit Fly’s flank. “The inner moon needs to be a little smaller, and both of them should be curvier,” Twilight said. “Good… a little more… almost right. There. That’s close, anyway.”

It turned out to be close enough. Fruit Fly placed her hoof on the rune, and an image of the fake cutie mark lit up in green. The rune-covered section of wall swung open inwards, revealing a dark corridor leading into the mountain. “I hope this is the right path,” Twilight said, peering into the darkness. “If we accidentally broke into Luna’s hazardous artifact storage crypt, it’ll be kind of embarrassing.”

“Want me to check for traps?” Rainbow Dash offered, peering into the darkness.

Twilight shrugged, “Sure, why not?”

In a flash, Rainbow Dash was gone, leaving a trail of rainbow-colored fire burning briefly down the center of the secret passage to mark her path. “She’s too fast for them to hit when they trigger,” Twilight explained to the changelings, who looked completely confused. “So unless she flies face-first into an invisible force field or something, she should be perfectly safe.”

In a few seconds, Rainbow Dash was back. “All clear,” she said. “But man, those are a lot of stairs.”

===

The Night Guard was waiting for them when they got to the top of the stairs, and opened another magically triggered door. The entire Night Guard. All four of them. They were in a lounge of sorts, with carpeting and a pair of sofas, lit by a modern magical lamp. It looked significantly more homey than the last time Twilight had visited.

“Took you long enough,” said one of the bat-winged ponies in their evil-looking armor. Hanging off the far wall was a magic mirror, showing an image of the secret door in the cliff face – it was no mystery how Luna’s ponies had anticipated their arrival.

Twilight stared at them, then slowly collapsed onto her belly, breathing heavily. “Too… many… stairs…” she gasped. At least it was warm here, aside from the chill air seeping in from the staircase.

“I guess I’ll do the intros, then,” Rainbow Dash said to the changelings. “Meet Luna’s Night Guard, also known as the moon ponies. The snarky one is Warp, the girl of my dreams.”

“In your – right,” the Night Guard in question replied. “Luna only rarely brings me along when she dream-walks. Your experience was atypical.”

“The silent one behind her is Ram or Hart or something like that.”

“His short name is Wolf,” Warp corrected. To the changelings, she added, “She’s making fun of him because the translator spit out his full name as ‘Wolf-Ram-Air-Hart’, and because she’s a jerk.”

Seaside snorted, trying to hold back a snigger and not entirely succeeding.

“The other guy is Chance. You can recognize him by the stupid grin on his face,” Rainbow Dash said. unfazed.

“Only when I get to see you again, Dashie,” Chance said. “You shouldn’t be such a stranger.”

Rainbow Dash ruffled her wings. “Eh heh. And the one with the horn over there must be Tess, by process of elimination. New armor, Tess?”

Twilight opened her eyes. “Horn?” Sure enough, Tess’s ‘night guard’ transformation, generated by her enchanted armor, lacked the typical batwings that the rest of the moon ponies sported – instead, sprouting from her forehead was a sharp, curved horn, black as her coat. “Oh. My. Stars. Luna made a set of unicorn armor?” Twilight leapt to her feet, her fatigue forgotten. “Yes! Yes yes yes!” she said, bouncing around Tess in a circle, too overcome with excitement to hold it in. “I knew I didn’t need to do anything drastic! I can just borrow a set of armor from Luna, and I’ll have unicorn and earth pony magic!”

“Um…” Tess said.

Twilight put her hooves on Tess’s shoulders and stared her in the eyes. “Take it off! I want to try it!”

Tess’s horn flashed green and Twilight was thrown across the room, slammed into the wall, and pinned there for a few seconds while it pulsed with an overglow. “Stop it!” Tess said, eyes rolling upwards to look at the horn sprouting from her own forehead. Twilight Sparkle felt her vision dim and narrow, while her limbs went numb. She heard Tess yell “Sparkles!” and then there was a flash, and –

The next thing she knew, Twilight was in a much more sparsely decorated room, alone except for Tess, her body aching from a recent transformation. “Sorry about that,” Tess said. “Sparkles is a bit possessive of our horn – it’s her only way of affecting the real world right now.”

Twilight grimaced – Sparkles was another one of her mirror twins. Rather than being turned to stone and put in the statue garden, she’d been converted to data and stored in the machines implanted in Tess’s brain. This left her able to see and hear the world through the moon pony’s senses, if Tess let her, but otherwise she was trapped in an imaginary realm – a rather small and basic one, intended for temporary habitation as part of a game. It was an uncomfortable situation, and she’d never been that stable to start with.

“At least she used a temporary transformation,” Twilight said, smiling weakly. “I’m sorry I was so… enthusiastic. But you have to understand, this is a dream come true! You can’t imagine how much I’ve missed having access to magic… unicorn magic, I mean. Do you think Luna could make me another set? I’d do anything!”

“Anything?” Tess asked. “Would you murder one of your friends?”

“Would I what?” Twilight Sparkle asked, shocked. No, Tess was just teasing her for using imprecise language. “No. No I wouldn’t. If Luna set that as the price, I’d consider her ‘evil’ and work on some way to cheat or trick her into giving me the armor anyway.”

Tess snorted. “Unfortunately, it’s not a price so much as a material component. Rainbow Dash explained about your changeling friends while you were a houseplant.”

Twilight felt a shiver run through her, and her hair stand on end. She took another look at Tess’ horn. Short. Black. Curved. “That’s a changeling horn.”

Tess nodded. “And the donor has to be alive while it’s enchanted. They aren’t alive by the time you finish.”

Twilight got to her feet and stared at Tess. “Explain,” she said angrily. She hoped there was a good explanation. She really, really hoped so. Because otherwise, she was going to have to try to punish Luna, and aside from Luna being, essentially, a goddess among ponies, Twilight Sparkle was currently trapped in a room with one of the moon ponies – freakishly fast, freakishly strong, and oh this one also had a copy of Twilight herself living in her head, ready to cast all the spells that Twilight no longer had access to.

“It’s not really a happy story,” Tess warned, watching Twilight warily, as if she could read her mind. Or perhaps as if she had a copy of Twilight inside her head advising her on what the Twilight in front of her was probably thinking. “One of the changelings Pinkie Pie set free went to ground in Canterlot, and managed to stay away from the law for a few weeks. When it was caught, again, it tried to run for it, and was badly hurt trying to escape. Stabbed with a lightning-spear instead of just getting shocked.”

“So the guards were authorized to use lethal force,” Twilight said, scowling, “and as a direct result there was an entirely predictable accident. How does this translate into changeling sacrifice?”

Tess’s expression was blank as she said, “Barring heavy magic that nopony wanted to pay for, it was going to die, so the Professors from the School for Gifted Unicorns claimed it for dissection. Promised to make it comfortable in its last moments, yada yada. Princess Luna heard about this, and decided to intervene. She stabilized it and kept it alive. She didn’t heal it, but she kept it from dying as long as she channeled the spell.”

“And then?” Twilight asked, afraid that she knew the answer.

“Then they went ahead and dissected it. Vivisection is a lot more useful than dissection, apparently, when what you really want to study are a creature’s magical traits.”

Twilight’s skin crawled at the thought, but in the wake of ‘another changeling attack’, she could almost imagine somepony convincing themselves that it was justified. When you were caught up in the throes of curiosity, it was easy to handwave away the obvious flaws in your rationalization with a bit of convoluted logic. Twilight could see herself falling for that trap – she wasn’t proud of it, but there was a part of her that came to the surface when she felt stressed, and it sometimes made her do things that she shouldn’t.

Things like mind-controlling Ponyville. She’d done that twice. But there was a reason Celestia punished her for that. It wasn’t acceptable. “Nopony saw a problem with this?”

Tess rolled her eyes. “They figured since it had Luna’s blessing, it was okay.”

Twilight cringed. “So what was Luna thinking?”

“That if it wasn’t socially acceptable, they wouldn’t have proposed it. She’s been taking her cues on morality from other ponies since returning from exile.”

“And the horn?” Twilight prompted, although the rest was fairly obvious.

Tess smiled a grim smile. “After they’d gotten all they could by cutting the changeling apart, Luna helped ‘dispose of the remains’.”

“I don’t think I want one anymore,” Twilight Sparkle said, feeling sick. “How can you even stand wearing it?”

Tess shrugged. “Waste not, want not. It’s not like it matters to the changeling anymore.”

“That’s a horrible excuse!” Twilight snapped. “You can’t just accept the benefits of an evil action without qualm because the evil that produced it happened in the past! The next evil act will be in the past too, as soon as you’re done doing it!”

“That’s more or less what Celestia said,” Tess admitted. “It doesn’t bother me, though. Maybe I’m just used to it. Before we got stuck in this place, we were scavengers – we picked over wrecks left by pirates all the time.”

“Except that this time, you’re working for the pirate,” Twilight said.

Tess shook her head. “Anyway, don’t bring any of this up with Luna. It’s a sore spot. She and Celestia were going at it off and on for days.”

“The changelings I brought with me are my friends,” Twilight said. “I can’t leave them here if Luna is going to treat them as walking spell components!”

“I’m pretty sure Celestia covered that sometime during the two-day argument,” Tess said. “But if you want to go make the moon princess angry, Sparkles says that she’s willing to back you up.”

Twilight nodded, determined. “So you two will come with me to speak to her?”

“Oh no. Nooooooo,” Tess said, holding up a hoof and backing away slowly. “She’ll be your back up so that in case Luna kills you, there’ll still be a Twilight Sparkle around.”

Twilight stared at her.

Tess smirked. “We’ll be behind you all the way. Way, way behind you.”

Chaper 9: Darkness Beyond Twilight

“Princess Luna is ready for you,” Moondancer said, letting the door to Luna’s private chamber close behind her as she ended her vigil. With her yellow coat and bright pink mane, she reminded Twilight unpleasantly of a sort of reverse, unicorn Cherry Berry, but where Cherry was abrasive but generally honest, Moondancer had always been extra polite, instantly eager to hang out with Twilight since the moment she’d first heard about her position as Celestia’s student. Even a young, asocial Twilight had been able to see through her machinations – even if Spike never had – and her unease around Moondancer had been a small part of the reason she’d avoided the social scene during her school days.

That said, Twilight Sparkle had nothing against Moondancer now. With Twilight in disgrace, and Moondancer ensconced in a prestigious position as Luna’s hoofmaiden, there was no longer any reason for the weasely little social climber to pretend that they were friends, which made their interactions much more natural.

“How is she feeling tonight?” Twilight asked, a little apprehensive about facing the princess.

“Dreamwalking always leaves her in a pleasant mood,” Moondancer replied. “Please try not to ruin it. Some of us have to live with her.”

“No promises,” Rainbow Dash said, as she and the changelings broke from their conversations with the moon ponies to join Twilight by the door.

“I should probably go in alone,” Twilight Sparkle said, surprised to see them lining up behind her so eagerly when she herself was half tempted to give up on the whole idea and just run while she could. Oh. Right. Tess had told her about the ‘incident’ in private, probably for a reason. That reason being the two changelings, who presumably hadn’t been told. “I have something unpleasant that I need to talk to Luna about, before I get around to asking about, er, employment, and I don’t want her to feel cornered.”

“Maybe you should ask about employment first?” Ditto asked. He was back in his unicorn form from Ponyville, so she was calling him Ditto again. “While she’s still in a good mood?”

“No,” Twilight said. “This is important, and private. Don’t worry – if there’s any chance of having her accept you, I’ll make sure not to ruin your chances.” That was almost certainly a true statement; ‘if FALSE’ always was. “Trust me,” she added, knowing that it would have the opposite effect, but should make them humor her instead, which was just as good in the short term.

“Oh come on,” Rainbow Dash said. “Another secret?”

“Yes,” Twilight hissed. “Ponies keep telling me their secrets. Apparently I have a very dishonest face.”

“Shy librarian,” Moondancer said, softly. As Twilight and Rainbow Dash looked at her, she elaborated. “It’s not that ponies think you’re sneaky, it’s that they think you’re too much of a nerd to spread gossip because you never bother to talk to anypony. You’re a shy librarian who keeps to herself, and unless somepony steals your secret diary, their secrets are safe.”

“I don’t keep a secret diary,” Twilight Sparkle replied. “Spike reads it all the time.” Which, of course, was even better. She looked away from Moondancer’s patronizing stare. “Right. Regardless of why they’ve decided to burden me with this, I still have a responsibility to keep their trust. Which means I need to talk to Luna alone.”

She headed for the door, and glanced back to see everypony watching her – even the moon ponies from the lounge down the hall. After a couple of seconds making sure they were staying put, she nosed open the door and walked into the darkness.

Luna’s room was pitch black, lit only by a faint sparkle of starlight twinkling from the princess’ mane – a tuft of night swimming in the deepest black. As her hooves clacked against the hard stone floor, Twilight saw the night lift from its bed and swoop towards her suddenly.

“Twilight Sparkle! Oh, most wonderful of nights!” proclaimed the princess. Twilight squeaked as the energetic alicorn lifted her from the floor and pulled her into a bone-creaking hug against the fur of her chest. Luna set Twilight back down, and her horn flared briefly, awakening a series of tiny, pale firefly lanterns around the room, filling the space with something resembling moonlight. The princess smiled happily as she looked into Twilight’s eyes, not a hint of artifice or guile showing. “It has been too long since we have met. We must engage in merriment and revelry!”

“At the same time?” Twilight asked, her mind spinning a little as she tried to recover her balance.

“If it is possible, we shall endeavor to do so, and perhaps we can have ‘fun’ as well!” Luna said. “Is that why you are here in my home? Art thou weary of Ponyville at last, and come to seek excitement amongst our followers?” She smiled, but her wings drooped a little. “It would be nice to have a friend here. Our guards, and the other ponies that work with us, are devoted and respectful, but depend on us too much for us to truly relax our guard, lest we harm them inadvertently with an errant word.”

“Where all I have to worry about is being harmed by an errant hug,” Twilight said, rubbing at her shoulder with her nose. It hadn’t actually been popped out of joint, but she’d probably be limping for a while.

“Ah, our apologies. We forget sometimes that you are not yet an alicorn –“

“Yet?” Twilight tried to interrupt to ask, but Luna continued on without pause.

“—and our usual source of camaraderie is our sister.” At this, Luna frowned. “With whom we are not speaking at the moment.” She brightened once more. “But let us not burden you with our problems! Tell us instead how thy studies have advanced, into the magic of the earth pony!”

“Well, I –“ Twilight began, then stopped, and met Luna’s gaze. “No, Luna, I’m not here to talk about me. I’m here to talk about you, and I think you know what I’m referring to.”

Luna’s smile faded gradually, and she turned away from her accuser. “Then leave,” she said, dropping to the ground, and burying her nose in her forelimbs. “I am not speaking of it any more. I’m done making excuses and promises and trying to pretend that I understand why everypony’s so angry. It’s just another arbitrary rule that I had no way of knowing until the trap my sister set sprang shut on my reputation.”

“And since I’m your friend, I’m supposed to take your side even though it bothers me just as much?” Twilight asked.

“No, that’s why I have my minions,” Luna said. “All I wanted from you was a distraction. Why must thou press on this matter? Is there nothing else in Equestria that we can discuss?”

At this point, the princess’ eyes were closed, and her wings pulled tightly against her sides. Twilight cringed to see her suffer. “I don’t want to do this,” she said, to herself as much as to Luna. “But I didn’t come here to be your friend. I’m sorry, Luna, but I came here to ask a favor, or maybe to do you a favor, and now I just don’t know if it can possibly work.”

“Were my actions that unforgivable? I harmed nopony,” Luna said, her starry tail twitching listlessly.

“Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the changeling you harvested for Tess’ horn was a pony,” Twilight Sparkle said.

“It was dying—“ Luna started.

“It?” Twilight said. “Why would you call a pony ‘it’?”

“Fine, ‘though this ploy to spark empathy is wasted. She was dying before we intervened,” Luna said. “She was beyond harm, and remains so.”

“And that’s the only reason you decided to turn her into a piece of apparel,” Twilight said. “You didn’t see a wounded changeling and think, ‘wouldn’t it be convenient if she were to die; then Tess and Sparkles could have that unicorn armor they’ve been asking for’.”

“Nay, no such thought crossed my mind,” Luna replied. “I intended to use the incident to curry favor with the unicorns studying the creature, in hopes of recruiting them to my service. If you wish for an ulterior motive, there it is, as plain and ugly as day. I am not some ghoul hunting for trophies, although I would like to know when the practice fell so out of favor that it is seen as a horror, rather than an eccentricity.”

“Sometime during the golden age,” Twilight said, considering the question. “It was already considered unusual and archaic a thousand years ago, but it didn’t die out completely until after the peace with the griffons. Or was it the dragons?” She shook her head. “I’d have to refresh my memory to give a specific date.”

Luna snorted.

“And no, Celestia did not engineer the shift in social mores as a trap for you when you returned,” Twilight said. “The issue at stake was Equestria’s effort to shame the griffons out of eating pony prisoners and criminals.” She paused. “Yes, I’m sure it was the griffons. You can’t shame a dragon.”

“Of course,” Luna said, looking up at Twilight. “It was for the sake of the griffons, because nothing that my sister does has ever had more than one purpose.”

“And yet your motives are as plain as day?” Twilight asked, flicking one of her ears.

“Indeed. ’Twas always a bone of contention between us,” Luna replied earnestly. “The ponies would have us be the mistress of secrets, but in dreams our secrets are revealed, and in the dark we have no reason to hide our true colors.” She looked down again. “But when we try to come out into the light, we’re seen as a colorfully dressed harlequin. On our good days.”

“Well…” Twilight said, trying to think of a polite way to put it, since lying to the princess would do neither of them any favors. She settled on, “Yes. But that’s usually part of your charm.”

Luna stared at her, impassively, then snorted again. “Fine. Then tell us, why is this so different?”

“I’m friends with some changelings,” Twilight said, deciding that if she didn’t just go ahead and get to the point, she was probably never going to get to the point, and sooner or later she’d lose her resolve, let Luna change the subject, and have to start the whole conversation over. “I thought, ‘hey, here are some social misfits with weird magical powers that Luna might find useful, and they just happen to be creepy giant bugs. Luna loves creepy giant bugs!’ But they’re from Canterlot, originally, and they almost certainly knew the one you – the one the guards killed. How do you think they’ll react when they find out you had a hoof in her death?”

“Let us find out,” Luna said, rising to her hooves and striding past Twilight.

“What?” Twilight asked, as the princess flung open the door, blinding her with the bright light from the hallway.

“Moondancer! Send in the creepy giant bugs!” Luna announced, imperiously.

===

“Ripple,” Ditto said, after grilling Luna on everything she remembered about the changeling who’d died. “It had to be Ripple. Stars… she was so young.”

“Did you know her well?” Twilight Sparkle asked, glancing nervously at Seaside, who’d been very quiet through the whole story. Both changelings were in their base forms, at Luna’s request, and in the dimly lit room looked like nothing so much as two sets of glowing eyes. Seaside’s eyes stared blankly at nothing.

“Too well,” Ditto said. “I had to clean up after her screw ups so many times… I always worried she’d come to a bad end, even before the invasion. But it’s still hard to believe she’s really gone…” he looked up at Luna. “Easier for you, I imagine.”

“Indeed,” Luna replied. “We are well acquainted with the passing of mortals.”

“And you saw her… cut into little pieces…” Ditto hissed through clenched fangs.

Luna nodded. “That as well. Dost thou bear us ill will in this matter? Is there aught we can do to make amends?”

“We knew it was risky to run,” Ditto said. “And it doesn’t sound like anypony wanted her to die. So… I don’t know.” His wings buzzed briefly, then folded tightly against his sides. “I probably shouldn’t.”

Luna nodded, and turned to Seaside. “And thou?”

Seaside sobbed, and tried to cover her face with her hooves, although the glow from her eyes shone through the holes in her legs. “I don’t want to die!” she wailed. “Why can’t you just leave us alone!”

“I do not think your plan will work, Twilight Sparkle,” the princess said, looking down at the miserable changelings.

Twilight looked at the seething Ditto and the sobbing Seaside, and had to agree that it looked bad. But what was her backup plan? To take them back to Ponyville and hope that Applejack was willing to keep their secret in the long term? To let them run to another town and hope that the next time they were discovered it didn’t lead to their doom at the hooves of an angry mob? Those options were not ideal. But maybe… she took another look at the changelings’ reactions. They weren’t swearing eternal vengeance on the Princess or Equestria, they were just… sad. Maybe there was one more thing to try.

===

Everypony gathered at the main entrance to Luna’s secret cave. Through the illusionary wall, semitransparent from inside, they watched as the golden light of the rising sun spilled over the blanket of clouds obscuring the land to the west, although Canterlot and the cave itself remained in the mountain’s shadow. Luna stood with her back to the entrance, behind a cloth-covered table on which Ripple’s enchanted horn sat, still set into the headpiece of a suit of lunar armor.

Tess, accordingly, was out of her armor, and stood nearby in her true shape, looking like nothing so much as a humongous bipedal ferret. Chance had also disrobed, and sat with his clawed hand resting on the still-armored Warp’s back, between her wings. Wolf was around somewhere. All the moon ponies looked distracted, and Twilight suspected they were chatting silently amongst themselves, since the machines in their heads let them do that. But that was okay – this ceremony wasn’t for them.

Rainbow Dash looked extremely uncomfortable. Her wings kept twitching as she stood next to Seaside, letting the fake pegasus rest against her with a wing draped over her back. Ditto stood on Seaside’s other side, with Twilight Sparkle a respectful distance farther on, next to her father and Moondancer, who were standing far too close to each other.

“Is this really necessary?” her father whispered to the hoofmaiden.

“Shut up,” Twilight hissed, before Moondancer could reply.

“Dearest friends,” Luna began, lowering her head slightly, “we gather here to pay tribute to the life of the changeling known to her friends as Ripple. Most of us did not know her, but everypony here has felt the desire for freedom that kept her from accepting the fate Celestia decreed for her kind, as well as the fear of isolation that drove her to remain in a city that wanted her gone. As those who did know her could attest, had events not conspired to take her from us, she might have been standing here, unharmed and alive, as our friend.

“Equestria is a colder and emptier place for her passing. As the coldness of her absence settles upon us, let us take solace in the hope that her spirit finds rest in the lands beyond, and that as surely as the sun and the moon rise each day anew, in time her spirit will return. Perhaps in the next life she will find the peace and contentment that was robbed from her in this one.

“Does anypony wish to speak of the deceased?”

Ditto glanced at Seaside, and stepped forwards. Luna stood to the side as he took her place behind the table. His horn flared with green light as he lifted Ripple’s horn, staring at it from all angles with a somber eye, before letting it drop back to the cloth. “I don’t have much to say,” he said to the crowd. “She was a joy, and a pest. Had she lived, I’m sure she would have accomplished… dramatic things, in somepony’s name, if not in her own. She would laugh to see this ceremony.” He trailed off. “I had a memory of her that I was going to share, but I don’t think I can manage it right now. I’ll show it later to the ponies who care.” He glared at Crescent and Moondancer, who stopped whispering to each other and pretended to pay attention. “I’m done here,” he said, hurrying back to Twilight’s side and burying his tears in her shoulder, as she gave him the hug he was obviously in dire need of.

Luna looked next to Seaside, who detached herself from Rainbow Dash and approached the table, although she kept her back to the crowd. “Ripple…” she said, tearfully. “You IDIOT!” She slammed her hooves into the table, knocking it over. The horn went spinning towards the hundred-foot drop-off just outside the cave entrance, but came to rest a few feet from the edge. She stared at it for a few seconds, then stalked back to the audience, where she carefully stood a foot away from Rainbow Dash and everypony else.

“So… what now?” Tess asked, looking at the enchanted horn and flexing her hands anxiously. “Do we bury it? Burn it?”

“You were one of Pinkie Pie’s friends, right?” Ditto said, wiping off his eyes on the back of his foreleg.

“Yeah,” Tess said. “For a few days, anyway.”

“Keep it then,” he said. “I don’t know if Ripple would have wanted you to have it, but we all owe Pinkie Pie for letting us out of jail in the first place. And since she’s not here, the best we can do is help out her friends.”

“Oh thank the invisible spirit of the sky,” Tess said, scrambling towards the fallen horn and clutching it desperately to her chest. “I did not want to listen to Sparkles complaining about losing this for the next year,” she said. “Thank you. THANK you.”

“It’s yours,” Seaside said, meeting Tess’s gaze with a ferocious stare. “NOT Luna’s.”

“I can live with that,” Tess said, smiling nervously. “Sorry, bad choice of words.”

===

”No!” the viewpoint Pinkie Pie squeaked as she watched her duplicate toss the purple earth pony she’d been carrying around off the edge of the terrace. She darted through the crowd, with a little assistance from her magic, and confronted the errant Princess as she laughed and joked with a trio of nobles, who seemed strangely unconcerned. “What did you just do!”

“I showed her a short cut!” the other Pinkie Pie replied.

The unicorns she’d been speaking with laughed. “There are wards against falling on all the terraces,” one of them explained. “But how do you know that, my dear, while you –“ he turned towards the viewer and looked at her suspiciously, “do not? Are you not using Nightdancer’s Unbound Image spell to appear in multiple places at the same time?”

“Oh, I don’t know any spells,” the other Pinkie Pie said. “I’m just winging it. I guess that version of me wasn’t listening when we learned about the wards. Go back to your area,” she said, gesturing with her wings, “Shoo! Shoo!”

Twilight laughed as the last memory from Ditto’s spell faded, and she returned to reality. “Thanks for sharing that, Ditto,” she said, smiling despite herself. “She really was a pest, wasn’t she.”

Ditto nodded, but didn’t say anything. The two of them were alone in one of the many, many unused chambers of Luna’s secret lair; back when Canterlot was a nameless village of miners and gem cutters, it had been an isolated mountain fortress, with enough space to accommodate dozens of guards and all the ponies that had supported them.

“So… are you feeling better?” Twilight asked. “Luna is willing to take you and Seaside on, if you’re interested. You’d be safe here.”

“We can’t stay here,” he said.

Twilight drooped. “You still don’t forgive her?”

“It isn’t that,” Ditto said. “The unicorns hate us, and the moon ponies are either nearly emotionless or just incompatible. There’s no love here. Luna is curious and vaguely sympathetic, but that’s not enough. We’d have to go down to the city to feed, and that’s suicide.”

“Oh,” Twilight said, frowning. “I guess I should have anticipated that that might be a problem, although I did expect Luna to have done a bit more recruiting by now.” She shook her head. “Maybe there’s some other way to feed you? How do they feed the changelings in the dungeon?”

“Badly,” Ditto said, and shivered. “So, what’s our next move?”

“I don’t know,” Twilight said. “Luna is the only pony I could think of who’d be able to harbor you legitimately, and otherwise you’re probably better off just changing identities again.” She sighed. It really did sound like they were going to have to go on the run. She’d miss them, and worry. “Maybe you could get Luna to write you a note?” she suggested, dragging another desperate idea up from the depths of her imagination. “Your cover in Ponyville isn’t completely destroyed, and I’m sure if Applejack thought you were working for the Princess she’d keep your secret…”

“It’s bad enough relying on Seaside to keep our secret,” Ditto replied. “But Applejack? Really?”

“Ugh,” Twilight said, ears drooping.

Ditto nuzzled her. “The note’s a good idea, though, if Luna will go for it. It might give us enough time to get away the next time we’re discovered.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have anything better to offer you,” Twilight replied. “I’m going to go talk to Princess Celestia about all this – she can’t be planning to keep the changelings locked up indefinitely. She just can’t! Maybe I can get her to move things along, and you won’t have to hide for very much longer.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Ditto said, standing up and taking a deep breath. “I guess this is goodbye.”

“Good luck,” Twilight said, as he left the room. After a few minutes of unproductive brooding, she got to her hooves and went to find Rainbow Dash.

Chapter 10: Castle of the Sun

“Stop squirming!”

“I’m not squirming! I’m just trying to get a better grip. Why are you going so fast?”

“Because I’m not supposed to be flying over Canterlot like this,” Rainbow Dash complained. “But I’m not about to spend the next two hours walking through the stupid maze of streets just to get to the castle.” Twilight looked down at the aforementioned streets. From above, it really did look like a maze. It also looked like they were attracting a lot of attention, which meant that at least one of them was going to get a stern talking to by the Royal Guard, assuming they weren’t intercepted and knocked out of the sky.

“You’re coming in too fast!” Twilight squeaked, as she looked up and saw the white marble wall of the palace flying towards them at a breakneck pace.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” Rainbow Dash said, and Twilight screamed and latched her hooves tightly around the reckless pegasus’s neck as she flared her wings and tilted back, slamming into the palace window with all four hooves.

The latch snapped, the window flew open, and the two of them landed in a heap in the corridor outside Celestia’s chambers, where they were immediately surrounded by armored unicorns pointing halberds at them. Several pegasus guards flew in through the open window a few seconds later, joining the circle.

“Take me to your leader!” Rainbow Dash said, leaping to her feet and grinning at the guards, ignoring the sharp metal implements poking at her throat and side. “Actually, take her to your leader,” she amended, nodding to Twilight, who was in the middle of getting shakily to her feet when a razor-sharp spear pointed at her forehead made her sit down instead. “Take me to your kitchens.”

“Are you sure we can’t arrest them?” one of the guards muttered under his breath. Twilight didn’t recognize him, which surprised her; she was no Pinkie Pie, but she’d spent years in the castle growing up, and knew most of the guards by name. Maybe he was new.

“You could, but it wouldn’t be good for your career,” another unicorn replied. That one she recognized – it was one of her brother’s lieutenants. Shifty… shifty… Shifting something. “Lucky, take your fillyfriend to see the captain, would you?”

Twilight looked back at the spear, and up the shaft to the pegasus holding it. Yep, it was Lucky. One of her best friends in the guard, or at least he had been when she was younger. Their last meeting hadn’t been quite as friendly. He motioned her to her hooves, and they headed down the hall while the rest of the guards questioned Rainbow Dash.

“Fillyfriend?” Twilight asked as soon as they were out of earshot.

Lucky laughed, and shouldered his spear. “They gave us all a thorough examination when we got back from the moon. Found a memory spell on me, and peeled it back to see what it was replacing.” He grinned at her.

“Oh,” Twilight said, blushing a bit. “You weren’t supposed to – nopony was supposed to remember that!” she said, cringing as she thought of her ridiculous attempt at seducing him out of his armor, which had only worked because the want-it-need-it spell had already clouded his mind.

“And that’s why you thought it was safe to let out your true feelings, right?” Lucky replied. “It’s okay, Twily. I can call you Twily, right? I thought it was cute, and... well… I’m not seeing anypony at the moment. If you wanted to go catch dinner sometime…“

Twilight laughed. Lucky trailed off, and she looked at him and giggled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was worried you’d be mad. If you’re calm enough to joke about it, then I guess we’re still friends?”

“Who’s joking?” Lucky asked, then sighed. “Oh well, Shining Armor would probably have my helmet if he caught me dating his sister anyway.”

Before long, they arrived at a small, unremarkable door flanked by a pair of guards. “Intruder to see the captain,” Lucky said.

One of the guards reached for a secure abacus fastened to the wall next to him. “We’ll have to verify this change in orders.“

“No,” Lucky said.

The guard looked uncertain. “But the procedure…”

Lucky scowled. “I am not going to spend the next fifteen minutes multiplying forty-digit numbers just to drop Twilight Sparkle off to see her brother. If you don’t want to let her in, that’s up to you. I’m heading back to my post.”

The door guards looked at each other as Twilight’s escort trotted off. One of them opened the door, but before he could get a word out, Shining Armor said, “Send her in.”

Twilight headed into the cluttered office, glancing back at the door as it slammed shut behind her, locking itself magically. She looked over the neatly stacked piles of paperwork, stepped around a box full of cold-weather gear, and took a seat in front of the desk. “Are you okay?” she asked, because her brother certainly didn’t look okay. She hadn’t seen him so worn out since the changeling queen had drained him nearly dry during the invasion.

“You set off the wards on our parents’ house. You didn’t set off the wards on the castle,” he said, rubbing at his temple with a hoof. “Does that mean you’ve already found a way to defeat them, or does it mean that you’re actually my sister?”

“I –“ Twilight said, then found it impossible to hold back as she felt herself bristling. “And what if I was a changeling?”

“Then you’d be confined to the changeling containment wing of the Canterlot dungeon for your own protection, as ordered by Princess Celestia,” he replied. “Do you consent to a secondary test of your changeling nature?”

Twilight sighed. “Fine. Mom stunned me, so you might as well –“ Her body suddenly froze, as Shining Armor’s horn flared with strange, cloudy green and purple light. She tried to speak, but she couldn’t draw breath – tickly tendrils of magic wormed their way through her aura, and through her body, but strain as she might she couldn’t even giggle. Just as she thought she was about to go insane, they reached her brain, and the senseless confusion she’d been expecting finally hit.

Her next coherent experience was Shining Armor feeding her water out of a small glass. “Significant changeling contamination indicating prolonged exposure to at least two changelings, evidence of moderate life energy drain characteristic of changeling feeding behavior, and a complex memory spell,” he said to her. “I’m sorry, Twily. When mom told me you brought changelings into her house I was so angry. I should have known you were being manipulated. How did you get free?”

“What?” Twilight asked. “I wasn’t –“ she stopped short, as her brain spun up. Shining Armor was offering her an out. Was it on purpose? Did he already know the truth, but needed plausible deniability? Or did he honestly think that the changelings had been mind-controlling her?

It didn’t matter. He wasn’t the one she needed to convince that they meant no harm, and there was nothing to be gained by defending their honor. On the other hand, “What sun-forsaken hole did you pull that spell from? That wasn’t the normal changeling detection spell!”

“No,” Shining Armor said. “It wasn’t. It was the one that actually works against a changeling determined to keep its disguise up. It’s restricted magic, for obvious reasons.”

Twilight sat up, and took another sip of water, holding the cup in her hooves. “It felt like I was being tickled to death by rotting kelp,” she grumbled.

Her brother nodded. “Even I am not allowed to use it on anypony without their consent. Thank you for consenting, by the way. When mom complained about you inviting changelings into our house I was angry – when she told me that you’d mentioned converting I was terrified! I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, Twily.”

Twilight looked up at him, and smiled. “You wouldn’t lose me. I’d be down in the dungeons where you could see me every day.”

“Good point. Maybe I should lock you up anyway,” he said.

Twilight perked her ears and smirked. “With the changelings?”

After a short pause, he grimaced. “Nevermind.”

===

Eventually, after being thoroughly searched, scanned for active magic, and stripped of absolutely everything she was carrying, Twilight Sparkle was allowed to see Princess Celestia. She got the impression that if she’d still been a unicorn, she might have been held back regardless. Somehow, she managed to avoid antagonizing the guards by reminding them that if she’d walked in the front gate normally, she would have been allowed to see the princess with no questions asked. Instead, she kept her mouth shut except to politely answer their questions, and found herself ushered into the small lounge where the princess took her afternoon tea.

“Hello, Twilight,” Celestia said, pouring out a second cup of tea for her guest as Twilight took a seat on a small cushion opposite the princess. “I’m sorry for all the trouble you had to go through; the Royal Guard has been rather rambunctious lately. You know how colts can get.”

“It was no trouble, princess,” Twilight said, placing her hoof over the top of her teacup and swirling it around to help it steep. “And it was really my own fault; I shouldn’t have asked Rainbow Dash for a shortcut down from Luna’s secret lair. After that mistake, the rest was inevitable.”

Celestia laughed politely. “And how is my sister faring? We’ve been a bit distant of late.”

“She’s… fine,” Twilight said, frowning. “As long as nopony mentions your name, or anything about the arguments you’ve been having. Then she’s not quite as fine.”

Celestia sighed, and sipped her tea. “I hope that’s not why you wanted to see me. It’s been so long since we took the time to enjoy each other’s company.”

Twilight looked down. “Yeah…” She nudged her tea with a hoof, then pinned the cup carefully between her front hooves and lifted it to sip. It tasted a bit off; probably her earth pony magic working to sabotage everything that happened in her vicinity. “Princess,” she said, looking up from the cup. “Am I still your student?”

Princess Celestia didn’t answer right away, which chilled Twilight to the bone. But she didn’t look angry at the question, or even sad – she looked thoughtful. “There are only two things that would make you stop being my student, Twilight Sparkle,” she said, at last. “The first is if you committed a crime so serious that I was forced to banish you from Equestria, or imprison you in stone, or otherwise remove you permanently from my presence.”

Twilight winced. “And have I?”

“Not yet,” Princess Celestia replied, with a melancholy smile. “You’ve made mistakes, to be sure, and I do wish you’d show a little more concern for the well-being of your fellow ponies in stressful situations. But I understand all too well how easy it is for those with power to cause harm even without meaning to, and I could never bring myself to judge you, or anypony, too harshly on that account. There are those that consider that a fatal weakness of my reign; I consider it instead a worthwhile place to spend my strength.

“But if you were to become a danger, and could not be reasoned with…” Celestia said, closing her eyes. Twilight thought of the times Celestia had been forced to harshly sanction those too dangerous to leave to their own devices, and felt tears coming to her eyes.

“I promise,” Twilight said, wiping at her eye with a fetlock. “I promise, with -- with you as my witness, that no matter the situation, I will always be willing to listen to you, princess.” She sighed. “As long as you promise to listen to my side of the story before you judge.”

Celestia nodded. “Then the only reason that you would cease to be my student is if you felt that you had nothing further to learn from me,” she said. She added, with a laugh, “I do expect that day to come at some point – you have to grow up eventually, my dear.”

“I don’t know that even a lifetime would be enough time to learn everything that there is,” Twilight Sparkle replied. Her ears flattened. “I’m glad to hear you say it, though. I’ve been worried – you haven’t given me a new assignment in months!”

“You seemed to have quite enough on your plate,” Celestia replied, “and I’m afraid ‘earth pony magic’ is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. Perhaps more so, since you’ve had some time to study it by now. I would be very interested to hear anything that you’ve learned.”

“I’m not sure my findings are really ready for publication,” Twilight said, taking another sip of her tea, which was now, somehow, weaker than the first sip? One of her ears twitched. Just when she thought she was figuring it out – “I suppose I can give you an abstract of my findings so far, although there is still confounding data,” she said, setting her teacup down and glaring at it. Celestia leaned over and looked at the cup, then at Twilight, confused. “The basic mechanism by which earth pony magic expresses itself seems to be a ‘meddling’ factor on physical processes that happen in the vicinity of the earth pony. Processes like diffusion.” Twilight motioned to the cup as an example. “I’ve learned a few parlor tricks involving heat – do you have a candle?”

The princess levitated a fat candle out of a drawer, and set it on the table. “You’ll need to light it,” Twilight said, and once she’d done that, demonstrated her ability to snuff out the flame by concentrating on it. “There,” she said. “A more blatant display of magic than 99% of earth ponies are capable of. Apparently, my raw magical ability carried over.”

Princess Celestia stared at the candle, then at Twilight. “I can honestly say that I have never seen an earth pony put out a candle like that before,” she said, “at least, not with magic; there is always sleight of hoof. Their work with plants is often rather ‘blatant’, however.”

“Well, yes,” Twilight said, “but they cheat.”

The princess laughed.

“At any rate, the next step is to learn to control the expression of earth pony magic in situations that don’t call for brute force,” Twilight said. “Such as baking. When I can bake a muffin without burning it, I’ll know that I’m ready to move on to the next step. I expect this to take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years.”

Celestia nodded. “I’d appreciate it if you could send me regular reports on your progress,” she said. “I also haven’t received a friendship report from you in a while, and I find it hard to believe that after everything that happened, you haven’t learned anything about friendship.”

“I have!“ Twilight said, eagerly, then looked down, embarrassed. “I didn’t send you a letter because I was afraid that I wasn’t your student anymore,” she said. “I’ll need to check my notes and do a more rigorous analysis of the situation, but I’m learning a lot about the way in which friendships survive a period of enforced absence, as well as the way that adding and removing ponies from the equation changes the dynamic among a group of friends. And…” she trailed off.

Yeah, it was time to move on to the uncomfortable part of the conversation. “And I’ve also learned something about being friends with deeply flawed individuals, that your family and peers have difficulty accepting for perfectly valid reasons.”

Celestia said nothing, but waited politely for Twilight to elaborate.

“For the last week or so I’ve been conspiring with a pair of changelings, to keep them out of prison,” Twilight said. “My entire reason for being here in Canterlot was to try to convince Luna to take them under her wings, and protect them. That… fell through.”

“I imagine it did,” Celestia said with a faint smile. “Where are they now?”

“I don’t know,” Twilight replied. “And I don’t want to know – it’s better for them if nopony knows who they are. They can make new identities, and blend in with society again, and… and I’ll never see them again,” Twilight said, scrunching up her face a bit. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

“I wish it were that simple,” Princess Celestia replied. “You should have brought them to me.”

“Why?” Twilight asked. “So that you could lock them up? I – I’m sorry, princess,” Twilight said, cringing at her own tone of voice. “I don’t mean to say that you’re wrong, but – this can’t be a permanent solution. We can’t just keep them locked up forever.”

Princess Celestia sighed, and looked pained. “Believe me,” she said. “I wish it was as simple as just letting them go. I had a plan drawn up to register all the changelings that claimed to be loyal to Equestria – their names, their typical forms and those forms’ names, and an impression of their spirit if they needed to be tracked magically.”

“That sounds…” Twilight contemplated it. “Well, honestly, it sounds like a recipe for disaster. Not only are changelings completely incapable of staying out of trouble even when ponies don’t know who they are, the ponies that lived near them would blame anything wrong that anypony did on the changelings, whether or not they were involved.”

“Exactly,” Princess Celestia said.

“You’d need to have the Changelings keep a magically verifiable record of their transformations,” Twilight said, thinking through the problem. “Most of them could probably be satisfied by playing relatively harmless pranks with their shapeshifting capability, and if they could prove that they weren’t responsible for things they didn’t do, ponies would eventually stop trying to scapegoat them. But to accomplish that you’d need either constant surveillance, or an awful lot of truth magic. Perhaps some sort of enchanted paper on which only the truth could be written? That seems like it should be possible, although I’d have to work out the spell to be sure. And of course, producing enchanted objects in bulk is always problematic.”

“Of course,” Celestia said, chuckling to herself. “I should write those ideas down, in case I decide to resurrect that plan. Unfortunately, even with safeguards in place, there isn’t anywhere in Equestria where their release wouldn’t cause an unacceptable level of disharmony.”

“Oh,” Twilight said, frowning.

“So, for the moment, I’ve been concentrating on making their imprisonment more bearable. We’ve done quite a bit to improve conditions in the castle dungeons, but for long-term containment we’d want a more open facility – one where open-minded ponies could go to connect with the changelings, and certainly one where the changelings could live a full life.”

Twilight looked at Celestia. “A changeling grove in your garden, where these rare specimens could be put on display during formal events, like your monkeys and kangaroo.”

“No, Twilight,” Celestia said. “More of a neighborhood that ponies and changelings both lived in, but the changelings were not allowed to leave, except under guard.”

“They would try,” Twilight said, with certainty. “They would have help. The ponies that lived with them would become their friends. They’d take the changelings’ side, and push for their release – and that’s your real long-term plan, isn’t it.” She laughed. “It would take a long time, though.”

“Anything we try would take time,” Celestia replied. “A necessary prerequisite is for the ponies of Equestria to accept changelings among them without fear, and the attack on Canterlot rattled everypony. Everypony except…”

“Hmm?” Twilight asked, as the princess trailed off.

“It’s probably a foal’s dream,” Celestia said. “But there was once a magical kingdom, remote and isolationist, but a beacon of love and hope across all Equestria nevertheless. It was… lost. Sealed away from the world. But between Nightmare Moon, the elements of harmony, Discord, the moon ponies, and for that matter the changelings themselves, this seems to be an age where seals are broken and the lost are found.”

“And if this place returned, you could banish the changelings there,” Twilight said.

“Yes, in the sense that they’d be sent beyond the borders of Equestria, perhaps against their will,” Celestia said, in an even voice, as she sipped her tea. “No, in that they wouldn’t be abandoned in the wilderness and left to fend for themselves, without the company of others.”

Twilight blushed. “I’m sorry, Princess. I’ve been awfully rude – I suppose I just hoped for more. For some magical plan that solved everything in a way that I hadn’t even thought of.”

“It’s only natural,” Celestia replied. “You’re comparing current events to historical records. When the history of this age is written, I’m sure whatever plan we eventually come up with will seem obvious in retrospect.”

“Unless we fail, and plunge Equestria into a new dark age,” Twilight noted.

Celestia lowered her head until her horn rested against Twilight’s forehead, and met the earth pony’s gaze. “We won’t let that happen,” she said.

Twilight nodded weakly, unable to speak.

“Now,” Celestia said, sitting back up. “Unless you have any other disasters to report, I’d appreciate hearing more about what you’ve been up to lately. How have things been going in Ponyville? Trixie’s been sending me ‘friendship reports’ but they tend to be all about Trixie.”

“Well…” Twilight said, trying to think of where to start. “I guess I could start with a visit Trixie made to my library about a week ago,” she said. “I was sick of finding books of unicorn magic everywhere I looked, so I was trying to re-shelve it all by hoof…”

===

Twilight Sparkle stood near the entrance to the castle hedge maze, watching the sky change colors as the sun drifted towards the horizon. Next to her stood a twisted statue of a hodgepodge creature made up of pony, dragon, eagle, lion, and perhaps not even Celestia knew what other parts – Discord, the spirit of chaos and disharmony, whom Twilight herself had sealed in stone. After her talk with the princess, in which she’d related all the troubles she’d had in the last few days, she’d felt her lack of unicorn magic weigh on her shoulders like a yoke. She knew how to cope. She even knew which direction she had to drag the weight in order to turn this curse into, ultimately, a new learning experience that no unicorn before her had ever been offered. But it would be a long, hard pull.

So she’d found herself drawn to the statue. When he’d been free, Discord had added and removed pegasus wings and unicorn horns with a snap of his fingers, and that wasn’t even close to the limits of his powers. He could solve the changeling problem just as quickly – by making them into ponies, or giving everypony their powers of shapeshifting, or just turning them into lawn chairs or, really, quite literally, anything at all that he could imagine. Of course, solving problems was hardly in his idiom, but that didn’t stop her from fantasizing about it.

It did make her fantasies end badly, however.

There was a rustle as Rainbow Dash landed next to her. “Found you!” she said. “And just in time, I see. I know that you’re sick of being an earth pony, Twilight, but is it really worth unleashing a storm of chaos just to get turned into a pegasus?”

Twilight laughed. “I wasn’t going to – wait, a pegasus?”

“Well, yeah,” Rainbow Dash said, grinning. “I mean, given the choice, who wouldn’t want a pair of these babies?” She waggled her wings.

Twilight giggled. “I don’t know, Rainbow Dash. It seems redundant to acquire a pair of wings of my own, when I can always just borrow yours.” She crouched down and wiggled her tail, and Rainbow Dash took a nervous step back, then turned to fly away. Twilight leaped and bit down on her tail, stopping her short, then as the pegasus protested and made a show of struggling, Twilight clambered onto her friend’s back. “Come on, let’s go home.”

“Only for you, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said, hovering in midair as she looked around to get her bearings. “I’m not sure I can find my way back to your mom’s place in the dark, though. The streets here are all crazy, it’s hard to make heads or tails of anything from the air.”

“Not there,” Twilight said, resting her weary head on Rainbow Dash’s mane. She was so tired – she’d been up all day, and most of the night. “I think it’s time to go back to Ponyville.”

“Ponyville, right,” Rainbow Dash said. “Train station it is.”

Chapter 11: Friendship Studies

Case Study #1: Spike

Twilight drew a horizontal line under the title, and looked up at her number one assistant, who was staring back at her across the library table with his arms folded.

“I can’t believe you ditched me, again!” Spike said, glowering.

Twilight flattened her ears a bit. “I thought you liked spending time with Rarity?”

“I can’t believe I fell for it again!” Spike said, throwing up his arms. “And Rarity! She was in on it, wasn’t she? How could she betray me that way?”

“Oh Spike,” Twilight said, standing up and nuzzling at him, only to have her muzzle pushed roughly away. “I would have taken you with us, but I was trying to keep the whole changeling thing a secret.” She couldn’t help glancing at the newspaper article Spike had silently greeted her with when she arrived, ‘More Changelings Spotted in Canterlot!’ She hadn’t taken the time to read it yet, but one of the pictures was of her being harassed by Royal Guards, captioned ‘Is Celestia’s former student secretly a changeling?’

“Which obviously didn’t work out,” she admitted, then decided to change tacks. “We were also going mountain climbing, and you hate mountain climbing.”

“I hate it less than staying home worrying that the next time I see you you’re going to be in a full body cast because you fell off the mountain,” Spike grumbled.

Twilight sighed. “I’d offer you an apology, but I’m not really sorry I didn’t take you, Spike. It wasn’t a very fun trip. I spent most of it stressed out and desperately trying to keep everypony from exploding at each other, and the rest of it getting stunned by anti-changeling spells.” She winced, remembering Shining Armor’s horrible new spell. “But it was all worth it – Princess Celestia confirmed that I’m still her student, which means that I need to make up for lost time with a very thorough friendship report!”

Spike looked at her dubiously. “Well, if you want a friendship problem, I have this so-called friend who keeps ditching me.”

“Actually,” Twilight said, “it’s more of a survey this time. Question one: On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, how close of friends do you consider us to be at the current point in time?”

===

Case Study #2: Rarity

“Welcome to Carousel Boutique, where everything – Twilight! How wonderful to see you again! I see you made it back from your trip to Canterlot in one piece? After today’s paper, I admit I wasn’t sure if we’d ever see you again outside of a prison cell.”

Twilight winced a bit, and followed Rarity into her shop. “I should probably read what they’re saying about me at some point,” she said. “I skimmed through it and saw all kinds of factual errors just on a quick glance.”

“Mmm,” Rarity said, noncommittally. “So you didn’t defeat Princess Luna in single combat, tear your way through the entire Royal Guard, and then fight Princess Celestia for six hours before finally being driven off?”

“That’s more Rainbow Dash’s thing,” Twilight said. “They didn’t really say I did all that, did they?”

“Not in so many words, but it was implied rather artlessly,” Rarity said. “How did your little soiree with the princess go?”

Twilight grinned, folded her hooves up against her chest, and, trying her hardest to contain her excitement to a faint ‘squee’, happily declared, “I’m still Princess Celestia’s student! She wants me to write up everything I learned about friendship since I came back from the moon! So I’ve got a short survey…”

“Weren’t you going to see Princess Luna?” Rarity interrupted to ask.

“Oh. Right,” Twilight said. “I convinced her not to dissect any more changelings and by the look on your face that whole dissection mess wasn’t public knowledge was it.”

“Oh dear,” Rarity said, eyes going wide. “Did you stop her before she got Ditto?”

Twilight blinked. “You knew Ditto was a changeling?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Rarity replied. “I knew from Trixie that several were in town, and… well… you saw his cutie mark. And that name –“

Twilight winced. “I know! He made up a pegasus form for the climb up the mountain. Can you guess what he named her?” Rarity leaned closer. “Fruit fly. Fruit. Fly.”

Rarity shook her head. “The poor dear probably thinks he’s being clever. I wanted to say something, but, well, I wasn’t sure, and it would be awfully rude to go up to a random pony and tell him his name made him sound like a Changeling. We do have a Junebug and a Mayor Mirror, after all.”

“Mayor Mirror? I thought it was Mayor Mare?”

Rarity tittered. “That’s almost as bad – it’d be like naming your pony form ‘Pony’.”

“Like Pony Joe?” Twilight asked. “You don’t think – no, no, I’m sure I would have heard if he’d been arrested.” She really hoped he hadn’t been – Spike would be inconsolable if the best donuts in Canterlot were gone for good. On the other hoof, he made the best donuts in Canterlot, and if he was forced to re-open his shop in Celestia’s theoretical changeling neighborhood, it might be enough to convince a few more ponies to visit…

“So is he okay?” Rarity asked. “Ditto, I mean, not Pony Joe.”

“I don’t know,” Twilight said, looking down. “He was fine last I saw him, but Luna couldn’t help him, so he’s going back into hiding.” She sighed, as Rarity lowered her head in sympathy. “But that’s not why I’m here,” Twilight said, fetching her scroll from her saddlebag and finding a table to unroll it. “I’d like to ask you a few questions for my friendship survey, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“A survey?” Rarity said, looking a bit unenthusiastic. “Well, I suppose I can answer while I work.” She headed back to her sewing machine, paused with her hoof over the activation button, then lifted a (much quieter) needle and thread instead.

“Question one,” Twilight began. “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, how close of friends do you consider us to be at the current time?”

“Oh a ten of course,” Rarity said without pause. “We’re the very best of friends.”

Twilight wasn’t sure she was being entirely honest, but the numbers were only meant to be compared with her answers to other questions anyway. “Question two, would you say that over the past month, our friendship has increased in intensity, decreased in intensity, or stayed about the same?”

“We’ve always been the best of friends,” Rarity replied, then gave a little frown. “Although I admit I was a little worried when it looked you might turn into some sort of delinquent. Or worse, a rebel! Rebels are fine targets for romance, but not really the sort of pony you want to be associated with on a daily basis.”

That was enough to knock Twilight off-script. “You don’t associate with your romantic interests on a daily basis.”

Rarity laughed. “Well of course not! One doesn’t want to seem desperate, after all.” She turned to Twilight and smiled, while her magically levitated needle continued to sew perfect stitches from outside her field of view. “Next question?”

===

Case Study #3: Fluttershy

Twilight found Fluttershy outside Rarity’s boutique, waiting patiently for the fashionista to finish her latest creation so that they could go to the spa together, too shy to knock on her door and remind her of the appointment. At least the weather was about as good as weather got in winter – small sun-breaks shining down through the cloud cover, and a temperature comfortably above freezing, but not so far above freezing as to turn the fallen snow into mud and slush.

“It’s probably my fault she’s running late. I had her answering a survey for my next friendship report…” Twilight said, trailing off as Fluttershy looked silently at the ground. “Would you like to take the survey while we’re waiting? I was planning to visit you later tonight, but if you’re just waiting around anyway…”

Fluttershy gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod, so Twilight quietly took out a tiny, unthreatening scrap of parchment to record the answers, sitting down in the snow and resting it on her forelegs. She could transfer it to the big scroll later. “On a scale of one to ten, how close would you say our friendship is right now?” she recited from memory.

“Ten,” Fluttershy whispered.

Twilight sighed. It was bad enough that Rarity had answered ‘10’ to every numerical question in the list – if all her friends were going to do the same thing, she might as well not even have those questions. “Fluttershy… I know you don’t want to upset me, but it’s really important that I get honest answers for this. My studies in friendship aren’t just a make-work project the princess gave me as an excuse to stay in Ponyville – friendship creates a very real, very energetic connection that can be tapped to power magical spells, like the Elements of Harmony.” Or to feed changelings, Twilight suddenly realized, although she didn’t say that out loud for fear of spooking the already nervous pegasus. “Now, the numbers I’m asking for don’t have to be absolute, but it’s very important that the numbers you give for the different questions are all on the same scale relative to each other. If you answer ‘10’ for the first question, then that means that you think we’ve never been better friends than we are right now.” She paused to take a breath. “Do you think that we’ve never been better friends than we are right now?” That wasn’t quite the right wording for question two, but it got at the gist of it.

“Mmm hmm,” Fluttershy said, with a short nod.

“Really?” Twilight asked, skeptically. “Even though I haven’t spoken to you in a month except to crash on your couch after nearly dying of exposure through my own sheer stupidity?”

“I like it when ponies don’t talk to me,” Fluttershy said, a little louder. Her wings were still tightly pressed against her sides, and her ears were flat, but apparently she’d decided to open up enough to speak in something almost resembling a normal tone of voice. “And you’re not as scary as you used to be, now that you’re an earth pony I mean. Not that I was ever scared of you! I was just scared of, um, the things you’d do when you got angry, or scared. Which I could completely understand since I’m even worse when I get angry, but that didn’t stop it from being scary.” She cowered, and squeaked, “I’m sorry!”

“No,” Twilight said, blinking and scribbling down a quick summary of Fluttershy’s explanation. “No, that’s perfect! That’s just the sort of thing I’m looking for. Thank you, Fluttershy!”

Fluttershy visibly relaxed. “Are we done with the survey then?”

Twilight laughed, “Oh, no, not at all. Question three – on a scale of one to ten, how would rate our friendship as of six weeks ago, before the trip to the moon?”

===

Case Study #4: Rainbow Dash

“Eight. I mean, I love you and all, Twilight, but I gotta leave some room for, you know, ponies that are a teensy weensy bit more radical than you.”

Twilight nodded to Rainbow Dash. “It’s okay, Rainbow. However you want to divide up your scale is up to you.”

“Take Warp,” Rainbow Dash said. “We’re not really friends, but if we were, she’d probably be a better friend than you. No offense. You’re just a little lacking in the ‘wings’ department, and that’s kind of essential if you want to be the perfect friend for a pegasus like Rainbow Dash.”

“Moving on,” Twilight said, “if you compare our friendship now to our friendship from a month ago, would you say it’s increased, decreased, or stayed the same?”

“After taking me to the moon and that awesome raid on Canterlot?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Increased, for sure.”

That sounded reasonable enough – Rainbow Dash was one of the friends who she’d seen on a regular basis both before and after her term of imprisonment, so of all her friends she was the one Twilight had worried about the least. “So on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate our friendship as of six weeks ago, before the trip to the moon?”

“Oh wow,” Rainbow Dash said. “Each of those has to be worth at least a point, but that means we would have only been a six. That can’t be right.”

“The scale is completely subjective,” Twilight repeated. “It actually works better if you find some way to use the entire range.”

“No, no, that’s just wrong,” Rainbow Dash said. “We were way closer than six. But we can’t be a ten right now…” She scrunched up her face in thought. “Can my scale go up to twelve?”

===

Case Study #5: Cherry Berry

“You know what would really make you my best friend?” Cherry Berry said, instead of answering the question, “If you’d take over as the element of laughter. I know you have it in you! And you’re an earth pony, so it’d keep the tribal ratios even.”

“I really don’t have it in me,” Twilight said.

“I’ve seen you laugh!” Cherry Berry said. “I’ve even seen you tell jokes. Good ones. What more do you need? I mean, for pony’s sake, it let me be the element of laughter. Nopony laughs at my jokes.”

“Contrary to what you might think, the core of the element of laughter has nothing to do with laughing per se,” Twilight said. “It’s about being the one to lighten the mood when everything seems hopeless. Pinkie’s spirit of boundless optimism and your well of boundless cynicism both serve the same purpose – to give your friends a reason to keep going in the face of fear and doubt.” Twilight winced. “When I’m faced with fear and doubt, I tend to… overreact. You remember the want-it-need-it spell.”

“And the cupcakes,” Cherry Berry said. “Maybe you could inspire ponies to keep going by freaking out and pelting them with cupcakes?”

Twilight Sparkle rolled her eyes. “But what would I do if the bakery was closed?”

Cherry Berry snickered.

“Seriously, have you seen my cooking?”

“The way you made that barn go up, I almost was your cooking,” Cherry Berry replied. Then she grinned widely, and her eyes went wild. “Fire! You could motivate your friends with fire!”

“I think we’re done here,” Twilight said, rolling up her scroll.

===

Case Study #6: Applejack

“I don’t know if I’m comfortable answering these questions, Twi,” Applejack said, as the two of them shared a light lunch of apple-slices and cream in the farmpony’s kitchen.

Twilight wasn’t sure that she was comfortable being back in the kitchen where she’d suffered so much misery, but instead of playing that angle, went for something more to the point. “If you don’t answer them, I’ll need to answer them for you,” she said. “I’m writing up my studies on friendship to present to the Princess, and I need to do as thorough of an analysis as I can. But I also want an accurate analysis, and the answers you give me are bound to be much more accurate than what I can determine by observing you.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Applejack said. “I’m still mighty angry at you for what you did to the farm. I had to ride herd on ya like a sheep to get you to clean up the kitchen, and we’re still down ten pounds’a flour and two ‘a sugar, not to mention a barn and half our snow plows.”

“Oh,” Twilight said. “You don’t look that angry,” she said, lowering her head.

“I’m bein’ patient,” Applejack said, letting a hint of impatience leak into her voice.

Twilight sighed. “Why don’t I leave a list of questions here, and you can fill it out when you’re feeling calm, then?” she suggested, hopefully.

“Leave ‘em if ya want, but I wouldn’t hold yer breath waitin’,” Applejack replied.

===

Case Study #5, addendum

“Twilight! Twilight!”

Twilight Sparkle pondered running away at full speed when she heard Cherry Berry calling out for her as she left Sweet Apple Acres. She hadn’t been seen yet… but the snow off the path was still deep, and while it was warm enough that she wouldn’t be in any danger of freezing to death, she’d be in serious danger of getting all wet and muddy. “What?!” she called back, frustrated.

“What was he!” Cherry Berry asked, appearing around the corner. Now it was really too late to run. “You said you’d tell me when you got back!”

“What was – oh, you mean the friend of mine Applejack found out about.” Twilight laughed. “He was a changeling.”

“What?!” Cherry Berry said, eyes going wide. “You cheater! I guessed changeling and you said that wasn’t it!”

“I guess I’m not qualified to be the element of honesty either,” Twilight said, with a shrug.

===

Case Study #7, The Great and Powerful Trixie

“The key factor in how much a friendship deteriorates during a period of absence is not the time that passed, it’s the number of new friends that surpass the absent friend in the meantime. Friendship is, after all, fundamentally a competition for the attention and time of the ponies called friends.”

“So you’re saying that in order to answer the question, you’d need to review historical data about the rate at which you acquired new friendships in the past, and also figure out how many ‘slots’ were available and what rank the missing friend started at,” Twilight said. “That’s a fascinating hypothesis. And testable!”

“Through a longitudinal study, one would hope,” Trixie replied.

“I suppose that would be the ethical way to go about it,” Twilight replied, filing away nascent plans to manipulate ponies into becoming friends with each other in the metaphorical ‘bad idea’ drawer.

“Is that it?” Trixie asked, as Twilight started to roll up her scroll.

Twilight nodded. “Yep! That was the last question. And I have to say I’m impressed, Trixie – you’ve obviously done your homework.”

“Of course! How could one hope to lead the Elements of Harmony without studying friendship?” Trixie asked, smiling obnoxiously. “Now, since all of your questions have been answered – even though most of them did not apply to anypony but your old, close friends – it’s time for you to make good on your part of the deal.”

Twilight flattened one ear. “We had a deal?”

“It was implied!” Trixie replied. “Hoof over your notes from the last Winter Wrap Up. It would be ludicrously inefficient to start from scratch planning this year’s.”

Twilight blinked. “You mean you haven’t even started planning? Winter Wrap Up is in a few days – have you at least collected data on this year’s roster and environmental variances from last year?”

“The first time you organized the teams, you did so with no warning whatsoever,” Trixie replied. “We can start with last year’s plan and let my improvements fill any gaps.”

Now Twilight was insulted. “Improvements? You haven’t even seen the plan, how do you know you’ll even be able to make any improvements, especially in such a short –“

Trixie interrupted her. “How many fireworks displays did last year’s plan involve?”

“…none?” Twilight said, reluctantly. “Why would you even –“

“How many sonic rainbooms were used in the cloud-clearing portion of the plan?”

Twilight blinked. “Well, zero. Cloud clearing isn’t a very time-consuming task and most of the pegasi who don’t normally do weather duty look forward to it.”

Trixie snorted. “Typical. And how many prizes did you offer to teams that finish ahead of schedule?”

“Prizes!” Twilight exclaimed. “You’re turning this into a competition?”

“Everything’s a competition,” Trixie replied. “This is just adding some spice.”

“I don’t know, Trixie,” Twilight said. “Ponyville’s traditions are very important to them. These changes might be too much for them to accept.”

“Nonsense. If there’s anything I know, it’s how to win over a crowd,” Trixie said. “We don’t need to settle for another boring repeat of a proven formula – you’ve done the hard work, now it’s time to have fun with it. So bring me last year’s plan… actually, why don’t you go ahead and make those changes you were so sure we’d need? You can be the all-team organizer’s assistant. You already have an all-team vest.”

“So you want me to do the same job I do every year,” Twilight said, “only you get all the credit.”

“It’s called delegation,” Trixie replied. “And it’s not like fireworks displays plan themselves – nopony is slacking off here. We’re just going to work together and make things a little more… awesome.”

===

Case Study #4, addendum

“Rainbow Dash!”

In a streak, the rainbow-maned pegasus was hovering before her. “Hey, egghead. Still working on that survey thing?”

“You put her up to this, didn’t you,” Twilight said, narrowing her eyes. Her tail twitched.

Rainbow looked confused. “Put who up to what?”

Twilight fairly spat the word, “Trixie.”

“Oh! You mean the Winter Wrap Up thing?” Rainbow Dash said, oblivious. “Yep, that was all me. I knew how much you loved bossing everypony around, so I asked her to give that job back, and work on making things awesome this year. And it’s going to be awesome, Twilight!” Her eyes lit up, and she swooped around as she described the fireworks, and prizes, and “…sonic rainboom! Can you say Best Winter Wrap Up Ever?”

At the moment, Twilight could not. She was so angry she was barely listening. Not only did her so-called friend – the so-called element of loyalty – not only did she take Trixie’s side, she’d actually given Trixie the whole idea! And she didn’t even respect Twilight enough to lie about it, or act ashamed! She was acting like she expected Twilight to thank her or something. Had she been lying about them still being friends?

Always expect the best from your friends, never the worst.

Twilight let out a breath and calmed herself down. Trixie’s arrogant gloating had put her in a bad state of mind, but Rainbow Dash really did look like she’d expected Twilight to be thankful. Because, yes, from Trixie it was blatant exploitation and abuse of power, but Rainbow Dash wasn’t getting anything out of it. Her workload stayed the same. The only reason for her to suggest that Trixie let Twilight handle the organization part of being the organizer was if…

“You okay?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“You actually thought I’d miss doing all the organizational work,” Twilight said, opening her eyes.

Rainbow snorted. “Well, duh.”

To tell the truth… she probably would have, if she hadn’t already scheduled other tasks for the time she’d normally have spent on it – chiefly earth pony magic experimentation, but also the research paper on friendship she was writing for Celestia. She’d had too much time to get used to the idea of a nice, relaxing Winter Wrap Up with somepony else telling her what to do, and now suddenly being thrust back into a leadership role was jarring. But that was just her being lazy.

“That and Trixie couldn’t organize her way out of a paper bag,” Rainbow Dash added. “Applejack had to take care of all that junk when we were on tour.”

Twilight sighed. “Thank you, Rainbow. That was a nice gesture, I guess.” She swished her tail. “I just wish you’d told me sooner. Now I’ve got to completely redo the month’s schedule. Again.”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “You know, Twilight, if you just put down twelve hours a day for napping, you wouldn’t have to keep rescheduling things whenever you hit a bit of turbulence.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

===

Conclusions and Footnotes

”…and so I’m forced to conclude that even with Trixie Lulamoon’s hypothesized friend-displacement factor, a single month was not enough time to significantly alter a close friendship between the ponies being studied. In particular, because all parties involved spent most of the intervening time in unfamiliar locations far divorced from their ordinary lives – ie, house arrest in Canterlot Castle, or on a show tour of Equestria – once returned to a familiar environment, their old familiar routines began to reassert themselves.

“Unfortunately, the effect of adding and removing friends from the group is not so easy to dismiss. However, a full report into that phenomenon will have to wait until after Winter Wrap Up. As always, I remain your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.”

Spike scribbled away at the scroll, speaking out loud to himself as he sounded out the words. “Phe…no…me…”

Twilight sighed. She wasn’t entirely happy with the report, but she didn’t have time to perfect it if she was going to organize Winter Wrap Up, and she thought there were a few valuable insights that were worth sending to the princess right away. She was especially unhappy with the part about Applejack, which was based on fudged data and still didn’t really support her conclusions. Something was different between them, but it wasn’t clear what.

There was a faint noise outside the door, and Twilight trotted over to investigate. “Don’t send it yet, Spike. I think I might want to make another draft.”

“Twilight! I’m getting claw cramps,” the baby dragon complained.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to send a report to the Princess in my sloppy mouth-writing!” Twilight replied, as she opened the door to see nopony there. But there, at her feet, was the list of questions she’d left with Applejack, all filled out.

She looked up, and spotted a dark shape vanishing into the night. “Applejack! Wait!” she called out, and the shape started running.

She ran after the fleeing pony – what else could she do? “Waaaait!”

The cloaked pony ran a few more steps, then stopped, drooping, and turned around to face her. Yes, it was Applejack. “What do you want. I answered your silly questionnaire,” she said.

Case Study #6, addendum

“I’m so sorry, Applejack,” Twilight said. “I know you were doing your best to accept me as an earth pony, and I screwed up everything. But there has to be something I can do – I don’t want you to be angry with me anymore. If it was anypony else – Rarity or Rainbow or… or Spike, I’d just wait it out, but you’re the most level-headed pony I know. If I’m doing something to make you angry, there’s a really good chance that I’m doing something wrong.”

“I don’t know that I can say as you’re doin’ something wrong,” Applejack said. “You just don’t walk in the same circles as us farm ponies. I should know that well enough; I’ve learned to deal with Rarity and you’re not half the prima donna that girl is.”

“But something’s bothering you,” Twilight said. “Was it the changelings?”

“The who?” Applejack said. She laughed. “Them a little bit, those moon ponies Luna rounded up a little bit more, but mostly you, Twi.”

“I can pay for your barn,” Twilight said. “I’m still Celestia’s student, and I’ll be getting a stipend for research. I can write off the problem with the… you know… as a research-related incident.”

“Well, that’s a load off,” Applejack said. “But it’s not really the problem so much. Barns are mighty cheap. I’m a bit worried about the plows…”

Twilight nodded. “Trixie has me organizing Winter Wrap Up for her. I’ll come up with something to compensate – maybe I can send some of the pegasi that Rainbow’s displacing with her rainbooms?”

“Rainbooms?” Applejack said. She scowled. “Fluttershy’s not gonna like that. Not sure I like it either, it’s getting mighty close to magic, ain’t it?” She sighed. “But that ain’t it either.”

“So… what is it, then?” Twilight asked.

“It’s your research,” Applejack said. “Not the friendship stuff, the ‘earth pony magic’. I don’t want to be a magic pony. It don’t sit right with me.”

“No one is going to force you to change how you work,” Twilight said. “I might not even be able to figure anything out!”

“You will,” Applejack said. “Sure as sugar comes from beets. When has Twilight Sparkle ever failed?”

Twilight gave her a look. “Do you want a list?”

“You’ll figure it out,” Applejack said. “And then everything changes.”

“You won’t have to change,” Twilight repeated. “There are still unicorns who cast instinctively – not every unicorn is as interested in magic as I am! There’s no reason to think every earth pony will be either.”

“Sure, but those are the ‘corns that work in normal jobs that don’t need magic,” Applejack said. “I’m a farmer, sugar. The earth pony’s link with the plants and the ground is my whole life, and that’s what you’re lookin’ to put under a microscope and file away in little boxes.”

“Even if that’s true, nothing’s stopping you from –“

“I ain’t gonna get left behind,” Applejack said. “If you find something that’ll make me a better farmer, you can bet your boots I’ll use it! I’m not gonna run my farm into the ground like some sort of stubborn mule. No offense meant to our cousins.” For once, there wasn’t a mule nearby to accept her apology. “I’ll grit my teeth and magic up my trees from here to Hoofington if I hafta.”

“Maybe you’ll like it?” Twilight offered.

“Horseapples!” Applejack spat. “Why can’t you just go be a unicorn again?”

“Contrary to popular belief, changing tribes is not a trivial process,” Twilight replied. “Nopony’s come up with an idea that isn’t horrible, in one way or another.”

“We could blast you again,” Applejack said. “The elements. The elements fix everything, right?”

“No, Applejack,” Twilight said. She smiled, and reached for the farm pony, giving her a quick hug. She didn’t hug back, so Twilight let her go after a second. “I think I’m heading home. Thanks for filling out the survey.” She thought about promising to be careful, or that she wouldn’t ruin her friend’s life with her research, but… honestly…

“Even if you do change everything, I’ll still be your friend,” Applejack said. “Pony Friends Forever, right?”

“Yes, but you’ll be a grumpy friend,” Twilight said, pouting. “I like you better when you’re happy.”

“If I find a way that isn’t horrible, you’ll take it,” Applejack stated.

“Deal,” Twilight said. After a second, she lifted her hoof and spat on it, then offered it to Applejack. They bumped hooves, then parted in the night.

Chapter 12: Spring Ahead

Winter Wrap Up came and went like one of the whirlwinds used to clear the snow from the less populated areas. Twilight managed to throw together a plan at the last second, just like everypony knew she would, and for the most part Trixie’s improvements didn’t interfere with the well-practiced rituals the Ponyville ponies looked forward to all year. Everything seemed to go better than ever – they finished the last of the wrap up two hours after dark, instead of having to work through the night like they had the past few years, and everypony showed up for the big fireworks show / awards ceremony where Twilight counted up the score for each small team of ponies, and Trixie handed out the prizes alongside a magic trick or two to keep the whole thing from being boring and dry.

When the sun rose, it was a town full of tired but happy ponies that walked slowly home to rest after a night of celebration, enjoying the bright sun, green grass, colorful flowers, and warm spring breezes that they’d all worked so hard to bring back to the world.

Once the glow had worn off, though, some of the problems started to surface. Patches of unmelted ice on some of the lesser lakes, dead grass in fields where nopony had remembered to plant new seeds, bits of cloud-cover that the sonic rainbooms had tossed around instead of dispersing, and even one secluded forest valley full to the brim with snow, where the icy air numbed your skin and the bright green leaves that shaded the scene from the sun, and obscured it from patrolling pegasi, were already starting to wilt from the cold. Apparently, the promise of prizes had led some teams to get a little over-eager to call in complete. It was the fastest Winter Wrap Up in Ponyville history, but also the sloppiest.

“Maybe next year we can bring in Flim and Flam to have a giant, magic-operated snow throwing machine dump all our snow cover on Fillydelphia,” Twilight grumbled.

“You’re just jealous that you will never have the amazing organizational powers of the Great and Powerful Trixie!” said the showmare, before blinding everypony with a flash of light and galloping off.

She didn’t come back. “I guess she left for her show tour early,” Rainbow Dash said, a couple days later, as Twilight and her friends, and Cherry Berry, and Cherry Berry’s friends were having a picnic in the park. “She should swing back by Ponyville in a month or so.”

“And none of you are going with her this time?”

“Winter break’s over, dear,” Rarity said, looking over from her chat with Heartstrings and Sweetie Drops. “We have our own businesses to attend to.”

Twilight wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Eventually, she decided it was none of her business – her friends would grow apart from Trixie, or not, and all Twilight had to do about the situation was document it for posterity, and check the outcome against her models.

And spring was the perfect time for not worrying about things, especially if you were a student. Even more so if one of your fields of study was so ill-defined that you could rationalize hanging out in the outskirts of Sweet Apple Acres with Rainbow Dash as ‘relaxation practice’. In a small fig leaf to responsibility, and to distinguish the time from simple slacking off, Twilight left all her books at home.

She spotted a sky-blue hind leg dangling from the canopy of a large apple tree, and curled up near the trunk, shifting around until she was comfortable, letting the breeze run through her mane, while her hoof scraped idly at a gnarled root. She closed her eyes, and imagined her spirit soaking into the ground, linking her to the web of life that made up the orchard – grass and trees, mice and snakes, and the slow steady progress of the other ponies working the land.

At some point, she must have dozed off, because she woke with a start as something slammed into the trunk of the tree, and a sprawling, feathery mass of pegasus landed on her back. The two of them looked up at the scowling orange farmpony. “Not you too,” Applejack grumbled, fixing her eyes on Twilight in particular.

“And this where we run away,” Rainbow Dash said, “before she makes us help with her chores.” So they ran off, laughing, as Applejack shook her head at the pair of them and didn’t bother chasing.

“It was getting pretty late anyway,” Twilight said once they’d shaken off their lack of pursuit, eyeing the sun on its downward arc. “Want to head home and start the book club meeting early?”

“I think I’ll practice a few tricks,” Rainbow Dash said, fluttering up into the sky, as if dragged by an invisible magnet. “No sense wasting daylight.”

“I’ll bake another evening batch then,” Twilight said. “I’m in the right frame of mind for it. Maybe this time it’ll even be edible!”

“Uh… yeah…” Rainbow Dash said, in a tone that was trying desperately to pass for politeness and flailing.

“I know, I know,” Twilight said with an easy laugh. “Don’t save room.”

That night wasn’t the batch where she finally figured out the intricacies of baking either, but afterwards she and Spike choked down the bitter, sticky, blackened things, making their best guess as to whether she’d gone ‘high’ or ‘low’ on each ingredient, and then matching it to the predictions she’d made at the time using her intuition and that Spike had made using her formulas. The results were still random, but if nothing else, only baking at certain times each day kept her from obsessively trying over and over until she’d worked herself into a panic and destroyed the kitchen.

Eventually Rainbow Dash came over for the book club meeting. She was back to being the only member; Rarity begged off more often than not (tonight’s excuse was that she had a big order and needed to brainstorm) and of course Ditto and Seaside were long gone. They’d finished Changelings of Canterlot – or, rather, Twilight had finished it, and Rainbow Dash only had a few more pages so she read them while Twilight waited.

“What the hay?” Rainbow Dash said, as she read the last lines.

“Quite a twist, wasn’t it?” Twilight said, laughing. “I have to admit I didn’t see that coming.”

Rainbow Dash threw the book down on the table. “It ruined the whole book! I mean, the whole time you’re rooting for the changelings and the rebels and then it turns out it was all a trick just to get her to convert?”

“There were hints,” Twilight said. “I mean, in retrospect… at the time I thought it was just poor writing. I wonder what they’re going to do for the sequel?”

Rainbow Dash snorted. “I’m not sure I care.”

“Well…” Twilight said, walking over to the fiction section and looking over the books there. “The next Daring Do isn’t out yet, let me see what we’ve got.” She skimmed the titles, making a mental list of likely candidates. Finding something that would hold Rainbow’s interest was not a trivial matter.

“Do you think they were just using us?” Rainbow Dash asked, snapping Twilight back to reality. “A quick snack, and maybe they’ll trick us into converting, then when it’s obvious they’ve gotten all they can, poof.” It was pretty obvious who she was talking about. Both of them had been glancing anxiously at the door all night, hoping that a pair of… well, of probably unfamiliar faces would show up.

Twilight considered it for a bit, then shook her head. “Friendship lesson 23. Always expect the best from your friends, and never assume the worst. Rest assured that a good friend always has your best interests at heart.”

Rainbow Dash stared at her.

Twilight stared back, nervously. “What?”

“You memorized them?”

“Er… heh heh,” Twilight said, flattening her ears. “After the trouble with Discord…”

Rainbow Dash laughed. “You did! You studied your own friendship reports!”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do!”

“Egghead!”

“Trixie studied them too!”

“You are such a nerd!”

“Rainbow!”

And they laughed into the night, because it was good to be home.