Across the Universe

Chapters

A Most Innocuous Evening
The Hitchhiker
Dorothy
Juxtaposition
An Encounter in Wonderland
Friend in Deed
The Spiral
First Day
A Momentous Breakfast
Vignettes From a Life Serendipitously Assumed
An Audience With the Elder
Questions and Answers
Six Times Seven

A Most Innocuous Evening

Across the Universe

For Douglas Adams, who taught me that the Narrator is a character, too.

The mission was not urgent, but Fluttershy pressed forth because it would have been a pain to get up in the morning and devote precious sleeping-time to a task such as the one she was completing. The assignment gave her motivating direction in the forested expanse of frightening variables. “It is worth the effort,” she told herself. “My dearest Angel won’t eat his pancakes without blue berries,” continuing into her mind, it’s a chore to have to go to such great lengths to satisfy that bunny, though. She gnawed her cheek with a sense of unwanted duty and continued on.

Without warning, a thought seeped suddenly into her head and asserted itself rebelliously. I am getting pushed around by a small creature. Fluttershy became fearful at the materialization of the machination and felt the need to counter it with her own retort. Angel is just a picky eater, that’s all! A rebuttal oozed uncomfortably, alien and yet self-generated. You’re just scared of him! Although the assailant could not be hidden or escaped from, the mental duress forced a quick withdrawal to the far side of the nearest tree.

Discontented with the way she had been thinking as of late, Fluttershy made an effort to cleanse her mind and quested on. She was content helping her little friends, even if it required her going to great lengths to do so. It was reluctantly confirmed in her subconscious that helping the little animal friends was indeed enjoyable and worthwhile.

It was a brisk night over the Everfree Forest. Clouds blanketed the waning moon in a smooth duvet. Sharp, whirling gusts brewed a shivering odor of sweet pine and churning static that marked the advance of a gale. Braving the elements was a pony whose direction was clear and who cantered along gracefully. She longed to be back in her snug abode, for the animals were restless. Fluttershy would have preferred less tumultuous weather, but the day her reserve of blue berries became insufficient was the day Dash and her fliers had orders to induce a periodical deluge, a coincidence not uncommon in Ponyville.

Caterwauling eerily through the branches, the breeze blew back her curly-q of a mane and stung her eyes, bombarding them with particulate matter. The draft coursed through her hair all the way down to her skin, breaching many layers of velvety down and chilling her flanks. Her soft, feathered wings instinctively contracted and conformed to her sides in an attempt to shelter the shivering flanks.

The ground smelled strongly of must and was littered with innumerable twigs, leaves, and fungi. Each hoofstep either yielded a crunch or a snap, and in places, the forest litter was knee-deep. Every so often, she encountered patches of desiccated roots that curved erratically, bursting from and then diving back into equally parched soil that was in dire need of a rainstorm. Although Everfree’s weather was not directly dictated by the pegasi of Ponyville, the part she traversed constituted the outskirts of the forest, a section more affected by the town’s weather patterns than the true wilderness’s.

It was caliginous enough that Fluttershy could not see her hoof in front of her muzzle. However, this was one of the parts of the forest she could negotiate blindly, despite the extreme tenebrosity. Moreover, she had made friends with all of the creatures, great and small, that inhabited the area. The nebulous surroundings regularly caused panic to formulate in her gut and impose terror in her hooves, but the screeching of the local bats dispersed her fears at sporadic intervals. When she had nobody around her, she felt helpless; when others were there, she felt safe either in being protected or protecting. Just having someone there calmed her.

As her mind wandered, she recalled a few incidents where she learned what courage meant, most prominently the time she faced the smoke-monster who had endangered her friends. But being brave day-to-day was difficult. She remembered that incident with a shiver because the smoke-monster was a—a— Deep breaths, Fluttershy.

Furiously fighting hyperventilation, she stopped, heaved once, and then exhaled deliberately. A recollection of the Iron Will incident materialized in her energized conscious as she started to tiptoe along. Although she learned a great deal from that particular chain of events, including how to assert herself in the face of unfairness, she was ultimately wary of being too assertive. In both trials, Iron Will and the occasion she faced the—deep breaths—a strong force of will engulfed her, making her either commit valiant deeds in the face of adversity or go from a pony who stood up for herself to a bully who mistreated her friends and neighbors. This force of will was a mysterious quantity to Fluttershy. She feared it most, only unlocking the metaphysical chains constraining it on specific occasions, those being times when all other possible resources and avenues were exhausted.

The most recent incident, the Iron Will one, caused her to withdraw any trace of that powerful will down into the depths of her subconscious for fear of turning into a monster once again. The thought of hurting things was another fear of hers, being the pony who devoted much of her time to caring for woodland creatures. However, tremors of frustration quaked here and there, originating from the antipodes of her mind where the bulk of her valiance and willpower was shackled alongside Huxley’s transcendental illusions. Doors of Perceptions aside, Fluttershy was afraid of her untamed side that carried traits she never knew she could possess. Uncontrolled hypothetical thoughts of malice obviously were not uncommon, but thoughts of that variety were becoming more frequent. Oddly enough, it seemed to her that it was more difficult for her to push away insecurities raised by her own self than by even the malevolent trickster Discord.

Padding down the forest path towards her prize, often scraping against a twig apathetic to her cause, she remembered how every time it was the help of her friends that drove her to accomplish such feats of bravery. She suffered a minor laceration on her right shoulder as a result of a collision with a newly fallen branch complete with an array of splintered twigs more than willing to catch flesh unawares. She compensated for the unforeseen obstruction with a minor detour.

Without her friends, she was unsure of who she was. Tonight, without them, she was just little Fluttershy on a simple chore getting some berries for one of the animals in her care, Angel. By now, her wings had warmly melted into her flanks. Despite the relative warmth, she felt the wind’s chilling bite engulf her delicate face, but she noticed it not. She focused more on her path to the oasis of bushes that yielded the precious blue berries nestled quietly amongst the thorns and burrs that grew on the majority of the forest’s real estate.

The screeches had grown distant and the most acute noise became the gentle aural discharge of the leaves as the multitudes of them buckled under the wind’s force. The best way for her to describe the sound was as a roar of sorts. This really frightened her. The word roar was hard for her to think of due to its tendency to remind her of a certain “super-scary” reptilian beast that was “super-scary” and “really big and dangerous”.

Deep breaths, Fluttershy. Forgoing the urge to hyperventilate slowed her heart rate and her darting irises. With her friends, it was easy to feel safe, but alone in the big, dark, frightening woods amongst the worst horrors, those of the imagination, she began to feel helpless. She shook her head and reminded herself that she indirectly correlated fire-breathing beasts to leaves, an unfair comparison to the logical part of her mind shut out by the abounding panic. When the adrenaline wore off a moment later, she kicked at the dust, making a short cloud that dispersed along with her self-confidence.

Oh! How will I ever learn to be brave and self-sufficient and have courage? Why can’t it just come to me? Why don’t I have it? Tut. I’ll be brave. I’ll learn. No matter what happens, I’ll learn to face my fears alone—somehow. I’ll do it. Well. In whatever way I can. Someday I’ll find it in me. Someday.

She trotted along the invisible path guided only by memory and felt better as well as more secure while the ground shifted into spongier dirt beneath her hooves. Now, the leaves’ mass-crinkling that had frightened her soothed the residual feeling of alarm. At this stage in her development, she had learned much and found some sense of direction with the help of her friends. Even so, there were a number of steps to be taken on her journey towards courage.

The Hitchhiker

The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.
It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government’s research team on Damogran.
This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.
The principle generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuts of a Bambleweeny 57 SubMeson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood…
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:
If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea…. and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startle to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.

As she had counted as many berries as there were points on the stars that made up Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark, a recently-stolen running-shoe-shaped spaceship popped improbably in the sky above her head and then popped away, travelling to another improbable destination with its newest hitchhiker.

The yellow-and-pink pony was in awe at what she saw: a scene vaguely reminiscent of Southend (a place she had never been), an elderberry bush full of kippers, wild horses thundering through the sky, huge children bouncing along the sand, and two odd-looking figures chatting with each other. Fluttershy, much to her luck, was nestled in a corner next to the highest prime number. One of the horses, which seemed out–of-place among the wild-looking and thundering ones with its congenital cuteness, flitted amongst them with ease. It was a small grey mare with bubbles on its flanks and a lazy-eyed stare. It greeted her with an effervescent “hello” and flew off singing “jai gura deva om” to herself and the surrounding pulsations of improbability before Fluttershy had a chance to be polite.

A small yellow fish jumped out of the custard recently upended and harmlessly wriggled deep into Fluttershy’s ear. The guttural syllables the two figures were screaming became coherent in a linguistic sense but not in actuality. She caught something about penguins as one turned into a small, flightless bird of the family spheniscidae while the other rapidly lost his limbs. Just as monkeys arranged themselves to speak with whatever the two figures were at this point about some play originally Shook by a speare, the level of improbability dropped too low to support her.

“The Babel fish,” [says The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy], “is small, yellow and leach-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

Dorothy

It was intensely sunny to Fluttershy, the world prior to her sudden deposition across the Universe being bathed in artificial light. And so it was that in a manner as confounding as the manner in which her situation coalesced, her situation dispersed by improbably popping her and a steaming-hot cup of coffee firmly atop the crest of a promontory overlooking a strange landscape with small pockets of forest; small, scorched, ashy tracts; and a vast, verdant veldt connecting it all. Long, shimmering lines crisscrossed the land, too, undoubtedly a result of the light reflecting off numerous streams. Off in the distance were snow-capped mountains, some purple due to their distance, some that seemed formed entirely out of snow, and some that appeared completely black. No doubt the two latter kinds of mountain were composed of marble.

Disregarding the blackened bits of ravaged shrubbery, it seemed like an ideal place to be left after a great white running-shoe-shaped spaceship unintentionally hitchhiked upon improbably leaves one to their own devices in a rude and uncalled for manner. In fact, it was not so bad, she told herself. It’s kind of like Equestria in a way. Maybe I’m there and there was just a migration of the— them—and I fell asleep. The vista felt exciting and enterprising and yet altogether too earthy. In that sense, it was alien. The greens lacked yellow, the grass, too, lacked the varying shades she was accustomed to. It was not naturally well-groomed. It was not naturally flowing. It seemed as if nopony had ever made an effort to make the place beautiful. And yet, in its own way, it had a sense of majesty, a sense of purity about it. Many stunted, unsightly trees also occupied the landscape furthest from the tributaries, which differed from the bumbling brooks she had known in the apparent lack of continual clarity and distinct beauty that every Equestrian stream had. The whole panorama was alien in that it was not as breathtakingly picturesque as a similar landform in Equestria would have been. Even so, it was beautiful in its own way—a balanced, untamed way.

Her wings pressed against her sides as she continued shivering at the memory of the migration of the incomprehensibly frightening, fire-breathing—. As a consequence of the alleviation of repressed memories, the next two minutes consisted of Fluttershy kneeling down with her hooves over her eyes, her tail wrapping around in a wide, enveloping crescent, and her wings plastered to her flanks. Moreover, she shivered violently on top of shaking uncontrollably until she began to overheat.

The sun, one not unlike the star Celestia rose every day, was a half-hour above the horizon, evaporating the abundant dew that glistened atop each blade of grass. Although it facilitated evaporative cooling in that respect, the rising sun moved on to higher tasks than piddling dew-evaporation and concentrated its energy into Fluttershy’s absorptive mane, soaking through each layer unpleasantly. What was that, Fluttershy? Why be afraid of memories? Why don’t I stop recoiling whenever I remember something scary? Start by not cowering from right now onwards. She felt silly after wasting so much time on worry and fear on recollecting events that were no longer even marginally consequential to her.

She opened her wings to cool herself off, letting them flex for the first time in what they told her were hours. It was only ten minutes ago she had counted a numerical value of blue berries equal to that of Twilight’s racing number. More effectively than any jab from an ornery creature with a thorn in its paw, a pang of unoriginality knocked her breath away momentarily. Consequentially, she had the notion that the unoriginality was not hers, nor was it subtle enough to be funny to the reader. She gasped once and returned to relative homeostasis, no longer flustered. Her adrenaline still affected her, fueling her continued shaking, which concentrated on her knees and wings, while her teeth had ceased chattering.

Among all of her misfortune, luck came in the form of her ear’s newest resident. Not only would she be able to understand every language that could come her way, but her newest companion had not turned into anything slightly larger than a Babel fish, which would have caused serious pain and problems. The coffee next to her, which seemed inconspicuous, had saved her life by existing; it had soaked up all the deadliest wavelengths of improbability.

The coffee cup was of no help to her. It was identical to a cup of coffee that would eventually be purchased by one of the beings aboard the ineffably cool, shoe-shaped ship, and as such, it proved too hot to drink then and too cold to take with. Out of the sky, however, was a true blessing of improbability. Fluttering down haphazardly and landing gently in an uneven pile was an exact copy of the specimen to be seen by another one of the glittering ship’s crew while he is to be in an office in a tower being forcefully taken to Frogstar B, but there was time before that would befall.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brillian marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bublatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid anima, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will thenhappily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Silently and many miles behind the dazed and vulnerable Fluttershy, a dangerous creature glided steadily downwards, accelerating and swooping lazily between two mountains, one black marble and the other white marble. The winged-beast flapped dreamily with two great whooshes and regained lost altitude, sending a noise that reached the Babel fish few seconds later and then her own ear drums another lazy milliseconds after.

The prospect of abandoning the coffee and becoming the new custodian of a powerful talisman like the towel and its floral decorations were far too distracting to notice some wings flapping, no matter how deep and dark their beats resonated. To her, it might as well be Dash practicing some of her moves over her house. Fluttershy, preoccupied, lightly exhaled out her nostrils in amusement and at fond recollection. She added a small, “yay”. Locked in her impregnable aura of adorableness, the next thing she heard, after everything she had ever experienced, was the most frightening thing she would come to perceive up to that point. Only a second after the mighty larynx vibrated with all of its potency like countless overstretched baritone strings being released at once, the sonorousness reached the poor, misplaced pony.

There was no hiding from the notion: a dragon had just roared. She spun around, her previously flexed wings once again shakily sandwiching her torso. Then she saw the most frightening thing she had come to perceive up to that point. It had bumps on its long snout and sinister yellow teeth that jutted out at equally sinister angles. Its eyes, although distant, were an unavoidably cool, piercing blue. Its rough, scaly, corrupt-turquoise face was followed by a rough, scaly, looming, corrupt-turquoise body and finally a rough, scaly, looming, corrupt-turquoise tail complete with spikes and similar accessories that culminated into a perfect combination of fear, fright, and faintheartedness. As a direct result of this trembling trifecta, Fluttershy gasped suddenly, her mouth unhinged to the agape position, and her pupils dilated. The lightness that instantly occupied her chest, the sudden spasm that compelled her legs and hooves to press the ground away, and the spontaneous way her face seemed to physically radiate a beam of awestruck energy contributed to her state of shock.

Unlike most instances of perceived danger, there was nothing to hide behind. Luckily, her general situation forced her to forget the natural instinct to stand still, so she pulled the towel over herself and lay prone on the ground. Her tail stuck out, but she was committed to this move and was committed to playing with the calamitous hand she had been dealt. Her breath against the membrane of the towel accumulated in a tight, uncomfortably warm and humid cloud, but halitosis was the least of her concerns.

A few extended expulsions of flame adding new scorched tracts were heard as very deep fooms in her right ear, but other than dramatic increases in light, nothing was seen by the pony with the odd-smelling towel pressed tightly against her face. It was a fillyish position, the towel trailing down to her hind knees, but the die was cast. For a brief moment, the world grew very dark and then became light again. The towel became soggy as a result of her repeated hyperventilations. As such, there was much water on the brane.

Now the great belches amalgamated into her left ear, bringing a sudden wash of relief after a precipitating wash of confusion. She heard a few deep beats of the mighty wings and then an echoing roar that touched distant lands and brought back their muted replies. At this, the towel was off. Bright yellow light confiscated her retinas, forcing a hoof over her eyes.

When her pupils contracted to a more appropriate diameter, what Fluttershy saw was a hostile world full of danger and tribulation. In the sheer mountains, in the glistening dew, in the choking humidity, in the dark forests, in the slowly receding glare, and especially in the scorched spots that dotted the bowl-shaped valley, she saw adversity. Her heart sank and her tail snaked along the horrid ground, as did the tips of her bangs, while she plodded towards the expanse of pernicious trees in front of her, galloped down the maniacally gentle slope of the hill, and crossed a dreadfully lackadaisical stream with diabolically clean and clear water she intended to drink from. The malevolent grass crunched wetly beneath her hooves, her cream-pink tail and bangs soaking up wicked dew. Weighed down by the burden of water and solemn duty, she left the innocent porcelain vessel and its dark bean-extract but opted to take the stitched engineering-wonder for shelter, warmth, and defense.

Juxtaposition

What she felt was neither loss nor remorse. Other than a yearning for direction in her heart, the circumstances of her departure had not forced her to feel anything or go anywhere; they had just improbably popped her into a new situation. In fact, departure would indicate that she had exited Equestria. In her case, she was simply no longer there. The life she had left had no indication of changing or stopping, only not continuing. Thus, Fluttershy shed no tears over her new spatial coordinates and kept on her way purposefully. Living became the top priority.

When she reached a dense wood, she found herself in a copse of trees rife with a vibrant array of dragon fruit. After a brief lapse, she zipped behind the cover of a sturdy trunk, having matched the name of the fruit to her mind’s eye.

Steadfast in her decision not to retrogress any further into cowardice, she furrowed her brow and gritted her teeth. Wincing as she did so, she inched towards sustenance, slowly ripped a fruit from its stubborn stem, and brought it toward her face ever so glacially. After taking cover from an incendiary bombardment, the red, fireball-shaped skin offered no solace as she peeled it. Once the peel was off, however, she consumed the mildly sweet interior and the seeds with determination.

Sated and refreshed, she wandered on, perceiving faint flitting amongst the branches as unseen forces passed overhead. Paranoia descended, driving the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end. Fluttershy began to hum a comforting song. She thought the lyrics as she hummed, attempting to dislodge her distressing thoughts. …big adventure, tons of fun!…

Before long, she was trotting along in a state of claustrophobia as the mysterious woods as they grew quiet. She finished the session of jittery humming and found herself in a bright clearing bathed in white sunlight unhindered by the leaves’ filtration. From the perspective she possessed, the clearing formed a shining oasis in the middle of a treacherously crepuscular zone. The land around her darkened ominously as an apathetic cloud enjoying its midmorning glide bumbled overhead.

Fluttershy swiveled around to face an imagined sound. Many pairs of beady red eyes flashed at her atop a low-hanging branch as the cloud navigated beneath the sun. Fluttershy stood petrified, trapped by the moment. She sank down submissively and hunched her shoulders about her head, inching away from the perceived danger. The menacing aura emanating from the eyes sparked a contemporaneous drop in blood pressure, and Fluttershy grew faint. She managed to keep her eyes trained on the isolated spots of red amongst the dark greens and browns of the dense foliage encasing the abnormalities.

The cloud passed over, contented, and replaced the gray with white and the darkness with enlightenment. The owners of the red, beady eyes were an assortment of small, sprightly, dragon-like winged-creatures almost, but not entirely unlike the species draco volans. In fact, they were more like songbirds, with bulbous bodies seamlessly molded into a head without any perceptible neck and short, twig-like legs suited for nothing but holding onto twigs of the same proportions. With Fluttershy on the verge of fainting, a well-tuned whistle rang out. As it gained clarity, the others joined the melody, to which Fluttershy mentally added lyrics ...until you all shared it with me… The little things—the little birds—had learned what she had just hummed. Feeling at ease once more, she sang with them.

She made a small forward motion to fix one of the birds’ notes, but the transfixion was shattered and they retreated out of sight. Feeling alone and wayward once again, she began to plod steadily in a direction not quite where she wanted to go, but close enough to that direction that she retained a feeling of spontaneity. After some time, she mustered up the feeling in her bones to sing another song. …Whoop it up with the weepy. Chortle at the kooky. Snortle at the spooky… She stopped and heard a sudden fluttering. Behind her were the same red-eyed animals as before. They shifted expectantly. So filled delight was Flutteshy’s heart, a dainty squee filled the circumambient coppice.

An Encounter in Wonderland

With the forest filled with mirthful singing and a flock of lustrous dragon-birds all orbiting an equine singularity, things were back in the right direction. From the occasional rod of sun that poked through the throngs of leaves, Fluttershy could tell that it was about noontime.

Although the land she was in was not exactly wonderful, to her, it was a wonderland. In fact, she witnessed a sizeable rabbit and a little man in a large hat sporting an improper fraction enjoying a spot of tea together. Before she could wish them a happy unbirthday, the Universe regurgitated their silliness elsewhere. Since then, Fluttershy has convinced herself that this was a happy hallucination.

Aerating her wings in the late afternoon’s heat and the forest’s gentle breeze, she reached a small rivulet. As Fluttershy refreshed her parched throat with the water that fluxed past the pastel-colored the rocks of every fit and form, her mind wandered. The birds aren’t scary at all! They sing just like the birds I know… They aren’t quite as nice to look at, but they’re pretty in their own ways. I was wrong to judge them from my first impulse. Fluttershy noticed that she was simply craning her neck and had the front end of her face submerged as opposed to drinking. She snorted into the water at her own absentmindedness.

Fluttershy did not have the towel soak up the water on her muzzle. Rather, she left it alone, preferring to take advantage of evaporative cooling. To keep her wings moving, she opted to stroll up the stream instead of the forest path. The gentle current chilled her, rising to contact the flesh just above the hooves, and each time a new sliver of her leg was submerged, a new gasp egressed forth from her lips. Despite the discomfort, she relished the feeling of the cool water and the timelessness she dwelled in during her ascent up the gentle grade.

A small waterfall came into view. It poured sheets of water insouciantly down an assortment of stones comprising all shapes and sizes, the largest boulders at the top and fine gravel making up the local streambed. She was hesitant to navigate the obstacle. The relentless, albeit lackadaisical flow water had furrowed a swath into the ground, carving two steep walls of crumbling macadam to either side. Clearly, climbing out would be burdensome. The small aggregation of birds was expectantly perched on the branches above, staring intently with their cold, red eyes. Mysteriously, the same eyes fixated upon something beyond the waterfall.

For Fluttershy’s life up to that point, her friends had intervened defensively when anypony would dare her to complete a task or to do something that she was not inclined to. Whenever other ponies would attempt daring acts like intricate tricks whilst airborne, Fluttershy always lay low and remained a spectator. In fact, she was so good at maneuvering herself into the position of a bystander that she never had to do anything of the potentially dangerous and/or daring sort.

Now, however, she had fallen into a beguiling trap she had never known before. Fluttershy faced an ages-old battle of wills in which the shy part of her psyche was losing to the audacious part of her psyche, the intrepid bits in her having been mostly out to lunch up to this point in her journey. Clenching the towel in her teeth, Fluttershy found a shallow spit of gravel below the current that led into the gaping maw.

The roaring beast appeared much more imposing from where she stood, although the lowest part, the part she intended to jump to, resided only a meter above than her head. Biting the towel hard, she snarled, determined to undertake the challenge she had presented herself. The sun beat down on her back, unopposed by any branches or leaves as it assumed its final vector unto the horizon. She loosened her grip on the towel, snorted into where it resided in front of her nostrils, and clenched it once more. Her brows furrowed, and she galloped and beat her wings until she made a great, winged jump.

Her mind subsided into blank clarity, filled with determination and pervaded by a calm that expunged all fear and uneasiness. In only a short set of bounds and several furious wingbeats, she was over the crest, soaked by the spray. She let out an uncharacteristically loud ‘yay’ of delight.

Her reply came from what the dragon-birds had been looking at: a scaly, bulky, massive beast. It reared its head away from what would have become its dinner. Obscured by the great beast, whatever that was quickly ran off, making crunching noises as it oppressed the otherwise peaceful leaves.

The face of the animal now before Fluttershy was not unlike that of a dragon. Like the rest of its quadrupedal body, it was a gray-green, with more gray than green, as well as more brown than green for that matter. Its snout was very compact, its ears were big and round, and each limb was as short and stocky as the rest of the animal. It resembled a bear, roared not unlike a bear, and charged at Fluttershy, stopping two meters short, breathing hot, malodorous breath into her sopping-wet face as one would expect a bear to. It reared up on its hind legs and roared a low, throaty bark.

The shock Fluttershy retorted with made the single, fashionable pink-colored bang of hair flop wetly over her eye in most comical display. Her victory was cut short, and her valiant pose with wings gloriously outstretched turned to cowardly prostration with wings tucked down submissively. Her legs buckled and she expected—. Expect what?

The realization that her friends no longer occurred, occurred. There appeared only one course of action, one avenue. Calm overtook her as the last hoof to push off the ground barely dodged a powerful scaled swipe, and in a dramatic flurry, she was up in the air, flying for the first time in many Equestrian days.

Then a sense of controlled chaos overcame Fluttershy as she beat her feathery appendages furiously, swiveling her neck in a figure-eight to flourish the towel at the creature. With a steady, delicate growl, she vocalized her aggression through the threads of the weapon each time it hit the intersection of the two imaginary ellipses. She had made friends with the Everfree bears, but her life was in danger, and this was not an Everfree bear.

The dragon-bear regained composure and endeavored to make another swipe. Fluttershy, not planning or thinking lucidly, instinctively twisted and whipped her lifeline it at the beast’s mighty paw, knocking it back with a sharp crack. The beast’s better and more opportunistic instincts told it that the chances of winning this battle were slim if it was to escape without injury. It growled at its own logic, frustrated, and took one last look at the dangerous mare. What it got was a stern stare so staggering, it ran off along a separate vector from either the stream or whatever it had previously preyed upon until it was out of sight and audibility.

Hopping down a majestic meter, first touching the back-right hoof, then back-left, front-right, and finally front-left, Fluttershy radiated a unique regality the likes nobody in Equestria had known her capable of, not even herself. The effect was abruptly pulverized when, out of the corner of her eye, a stubby, bipedal figure hustled towards her. Fluttershy’s wings, still fully outstretched in formidable radiance, politely retreated to her still-wet sides, effectively making her a full half-meter shorter.

Fluttershy’s mane flopped down in a sopping mop, and only one eye was available to greet the first soul to speak with her. In a peculiar way, despite all that Fluttershy had come to know and remember, the pony had only mattered for a few hours. It was intrinsically peculiar, despite being apparently obvious, that in no way the ground Fluttershy stood on at that very moment could have been affected by her up to the point that she occupied space on that tranquil hill overlooking the veldt.

The same could be said for everything in this new place. In fact, she had begun causing adverse change in the inconceivable instant her soft, cream-pink tail and cream-yellow body juxtaposed themselves into the time-space fabric of the land like a pin on a pin cushion suddenly being improbably transported into another pin cushion across the Universe without anybody so much as picking blueberries near either. Unbeknownst to Fluttershy, the ground was not the sole beneficiary of the adverse change Fluttershy would work.

Friend in Deed

An articulate, reedy, and altogether intellectual voice emerged from a tree far to the right. “Whoa! I have been preserved and you are my savior. A million thank-you’s, friend of mine!” The language spoken used long, unsightly hisses and yelps as its form of communication. Luckily, the Babel Fish cared not whether the language included even blood-belching, and it translated everything as quickly as the words rolled off the forked tongue. As the rescued creature came closer, jogging now, little glints of sunlight reflected off individual scales and hit her eyes, forcing her to squint.

“Um—hi there,” whispered Fluttershy, her insubstantial voice hardly finding the air in her lungs to transmit itself. She had not spoken since her arrival, and singing did not assist her first tentative steps of elocution. Fluttershy widened her eyes and craned her neck down partly in submission and partly to speak with the new face, which was hoisted only a half-meter above the ground by turquoise scales and a stocky build. In fact, as she pawed at the onrushing water apprehensively, she recognized that the figure somewhat resembled someone she had come to know in her previous life: Spike.

This, however, was not Spike. As opposed to Spike’s bright color palette and springy step, whatever she had just saved was the custodian of a dull set of turquoises that blended in with the trees, the rocks, and the mud. In addition, whereas Spike had bulging eyes, cumbersome fins, and a round face, the features of whatever was standing gratefully in front of her were not limited to angled eyes with slit-pupils, slim prongs no more than a few inches tall interspersed at short intervals across the brow and back, and a long face along with a mouth truncating in two prominent fangs. When what must have been twenty pounds came to greet her, the weighted fellow slinked along deliberately and efficiently, making little noise despite his relative bulk. If not for the cordial demeanor he displayed, or the fact that she had just faced two much more imposing obstructions, Fluttershy would have run at that moment.

“Again, thank you ever so much for orchestrating my emancipation,” gurgling words coherently despite not fitting the lips. “I would have never expected a bear to come this close to civilization! They tend to stay away from people.” One of the dragon-birds overhead let out an impatient squawk.

“Uh—civilization?” Fluttershy surveyed the pristine water, the untouched rocks, and the naturally overgrown undergrowth.

“You must be new here,” the creature asserted, breathing life into the fading conversation. The fuzzy, squishy creature in front of him was clearly thrown for a loop. “Is anything at odds with your perception of reality, you Perceptive Doors?” he added, with a clearly forced but well-intentioned smile.

“It’s just—just that there aren’t any houses or buildings or ponies around. It doesn’t fit ‘civilization’.”

“You see, we have a village here. In small thanks for saving me, I could bring you there and request that the Chief allow you to stay with us in the village,” the dragon-person hissed and gargled in a most friendly manner.

The answer came in her usual voice, a light profusion of aural silkiness that seemed to emanate not from her voice box, but from the cream in her hair: “Oh, well… I’d be ever so grateful if you could do that for me. I don’t know how long I’d stay or what I could do, but I’ll try my very best. I mean, if that’s alright with the Chief.”

“By the way, I’m Tharur.”

“Oh. That’s a beautiful name,” She especially annunciated the first syllable in ‘beautiful’, “I’m Fluttershy. I mean—if that’s alright with you.”

“Perfectly copacetic, albeit onerous to articulate.”

The Spiral

Their interminably silent trek together lasted until the sun lay full on the horizon waving its last goodbyes to the valley below. Everywhere she looked, there were little red beads shining at her, unblinking. She hummed a small melody to soothe herself. The reply she got was a unanimous chirrup from every pair of red specks. Tharur, his rotund outline only fairly visible in the half-light of the decaying afternoon, jumped up with a start and knocked his head on a branch. Growling as he got up, he rubbed the knobs that protruded from his tough little skull.

“Songbirds. What dissimulators,” he and a particularly grey-green one were transfixed antagonizingly.

He disengaged his ocular focus and motioned with his forearm and many claws to follow him into the darkest, deepest part of the woods available, the land illuminated now by only half of the glimmering discus. Hesitant at first, Fluttershy let the calming pervasion take over and guide her to what she could only assume was safety. Her fear was an almost-tangible aura standing her hair on its ends, but when the little scaly form stopped in front of a great trunk, she knew she was somewhere safe.

Around the grand roots and down a wide and shallow spiral stone staircase they went. Close to the entrance, there was no reverberation as the walls consisted mainly of hard-packed dirt held together by randomly slithering roots of downwardly diminishing size, although a few anchoring roots continued the further down.

After a few revolutions, it seemed as if darkness would blanket them. Just when all light would have been snuffed out, a shimmying cylinder of flame tapered upwards atop a stick. More torches spaced every so often clung to the walls with elegant metal apparatuses. Then, the end of the root systems coincided with the revelation of hallways that led through the now-emerging bedrock.

Despite Fluttershy’s lightness on her hooves relative to the other two types of ponies, each hoofstep produced a resounding clop that bounced about the cavernous space endlessly, compounding with each previous step. It was cooler and drier down here, but she kept her wings to herself and proceeded cautiously, following the reptilian whose back, punctuated by menacing spikes, never turned.

She stopped at one of the hallways and peeked at its contents. She had to bend down, as it was all made for something half her height. There were four doors on each side and another at the end of the hall. Each of them had a curious three-symbol mark and a miniature knocker.

“Follow, please,” Tharur’s rough click preceding a garble forced a characteristic gasp out of the pony as she immediately swiveled her cranium to face him. He turned and walked down, slowing until he heard the first beats of keratin against the bare stone. Tharur returned to his regular pace, which was clearly normal for something of his stature but blisteringly slow for Fluttershy.

After a while, Fluttershy ceased to sneak a peek at every apparently seamless excavation and continued down. As they descended, her mind dreamt wakingly, and she let her head droop down. Her eyes rested on the endless aberrations offered by the stone as it passed beneath them. Her eyelids drifted and her consciousness seeped into a trance, lulled by her own hoofsteps as well as the gentle scraping of talons against the unceasing rows of rock. Many revolutions above, the nightlife, full of dragon-owls, dragon-Aye-Ayes, and dragon-bats went about its own revolutions, unseen and unheard by the two of them.

The sensation that alerted Fluttershy to the world outside of the confines of her mind was the decrepitude in her knees from the constant negative vector she had been assuming. However, she did not allow herself to ask for a rest. Interminableness had long since grown into a tangible companion. What seemed like hours to Fluttershy while she dwelt in the antipodes of her mind lasted mere minutes.

And then, after losing herself in the endlessly variable colors, shapes, textures, and inlaying of stones, Fluttershy tripped and fell. A soft, “heh-whoop,” precipitated the soft thud of flank on stone. The lack of staircase forced her to take a wild step intended a few inches into the stone, lose balance, and fall. She got up quickly, disgruntled and warm with embarrassment, contrasting with the cold, nonjudgmental surroundings. She was dubious as to whether or not Tharur noticed at all because he was busy pulling a couple of great wooden doors across from the final stair of the staircase.

They were impressively large for even Fluttershy. They looked old and worn, with the wood at the bottom of each door soundly scuffed from countless openings. At the same time, they looked new, covered in a warmly colored stain that looked like it was added the day before. Placed a meter above the floor on each was a single, well-polished ring that served to open the doors out into the stairs’ chamber. The hinges, also polished, were of a sturdy build.

Consoling her sore flank and stretching her wings from root to feather-tip, she flinched at the tension in both. Realizing that the poor little guy in front of her was trying fruitlessly to budge the door, Fluttershy jumped into the air and grabbed a hold of one of the rings. Flapping her wings profusely, she developed cramping in the wing roots. She built up a hot and cold sweat as a result of fatigue and cramping, respectively. Fortunately, the slab of wood gained benevolent inertia and the horizontal burden was eased by the easing of the hinges. As both dragon and pegasus sat on the floor panting, Tharur surprised Fluttershy with, “And at long last, here are my father’s quarters,” he continued after inhaling, “which includes my own.” Getting up, he walked through the doorway without a single glance backwards. “You may stay here while we arrange a home for you.”

“Er—We?” Fluttershy inspected her cold, lifeless surroundings, scanning the inanimate rock layers in search for a single iota of life.

“Our whole village would be glad to find you lodging.” Tharur said with a small smile as he looked out from the darkness that once harbored a closed door. He motioned first with a small swipe and then the universal sign for silence: an index claw perpendicular to the lips. He held it there for a half-second and blinked his double-eyelids eerily before disappearing into the lightless ink. Fluttershy noticed that he had a cat’s slitted-pupils surrounding his steel-blue irises.

It was not easy for Fluttershy to sleep that night. Laying on her back, her initial plan was to panic. That seems like a sound plan. Panic and then—panic and then… Panic and then wake up the chief? Make a bad impression? Fluttershy summed up her wits and turned on to her side. The small, pitch-black dormitory had no visible walls. She only knew the doorway’s vector relative to her position in the bed.

Her breathing intensified. The space had no visible walls, and there was no way of knowing which way she would go after she reached the doorway to the dormitory. There was no telling where those wooden doors were or if they had been closed. Her id had run out of simple ideas and left her fate to higher cognitive powers.

Trust Tharur or run? What if this is a cave with big, super-scary dragons in it? Fluttershy withdrew beneath the covers and cowered into their softness. Deep breaths. She let go of her indecision, and an intellectual calm asserted its dominance over her petty fears. Still under the covers, Fluttershy came to the realization that she had just controlled her sense of fear with will. Remain still and exert an iron will. She grasped a fold of blankets between her hooves and rubbed them against her face. They were soft. Ergo, whoever resided here cared enough about their blankets to ensure that they and their guest would not face destruction at the hands of beasts. Tharur could be trusted. It took a different manner of will to stop cringing and come to her senses. The new feeling of personal victory filled the emptiness. In the soft bed, a satisfied sigh seeped smoothly through her nostrils as she sailed into the ethereal realm.

First Day

A gray-bearded dragon-person stood over Fluttershy. That is to say, it seemed to stand over her as it stood eye-to-eye with her as she lay in the soft bed. Its eyes were of the same steel-blue as Tharur’s, but this specimen’s bumpy head was grayer than its body and had folds of scales on its forehead, cheeks, and around its eyes. The eyes stared through hers, as if analyzing a specimen located within her mind somewhere in Heaven and Hell. They were glazed over by patience.

Fluttershy jolted up respectfully, relying on her contingency of courtesy while she wiped the yellow flecks of sleep from her eyes. Then, her sense seemed to plug itself back into her capacity for fear as she ducked down under the manifold folds of blankets for cover. Dragon!

Her instincts forced her into a fetal position and closed her eyes. She shook violently. Then, she stopped and pushed away those reactions that were so common when one relied on the id. Fluttershy opened her eyes and stopped hyperventilating. No, that’s not me. That used to be me. Once more, she sat up respectfully.

A deep, creaking voice buzzed with a simple, “Greetings.” The timbre sounded complex and well-earned, like the burning sensation that trickles down a throat graced with hard liquor. In a similar manner to the way Tharur had disregarded her fall where the staircase stopped, this one disregarded her little fit. The facial expression remained impassive. “I am Narekacbor, the forty-second leader of the Borsein.”

“I’m Fluttershy. I used to live somewhere, but yester--,” she checked whether or not yesterday still counted as yesterday, “yesterday I appeared here.”

“Hm,” Nare slurped, contemplatively scratching the rough scales on his chin and neck, which were located a full meter below Fluttershy’s own chin and neck due to her position on the bed. She noticed this and hopped down onto the smooth stone floor. The soothing aura of warmth dissipated as she leapt, leaving her feeling vulnerable.

Nare concluded that further questioning into the topic of origin would procure foul emotions from the large, fuzzy thing. He changed the subject: “I heard from my son Tharur that you saved his life.

“W-well yes.”

“In that case, I wish to extend my fullest gratitude to you; you are welcome in my home and with my people for the service you have done for them,” he squelched sincerely, “Is there anything we can do for you?” He smiled with all of his sharp little teeth and sharp big teeth.

Fluttershy nervously kicked a lose pebble so lightly that it made a quarter turn in spite of its frictionless dimensions. With the same front hoof, she pawed at the ground and looked down, biting her cheek. It was not in her nature to accept someone else’s hospitality or to ask for anything. Fluttershy’s nature was to help all the little creatures and friends of hers when they needed her. In every situation, her friends made arrangements or took her to places, not making her make any accommodations for herself. Well who’s going to make the arrangements now?

Fluttershy tentatively set her hoof back in place and looked Narekacbor in the eye, which was a half-meter below her own. “Well I’m not at all familiar with this land, but I know how to cook, clean, and take care of po—people or animals who need me.”

“I’m not sure exactly what we’ll have you do, but I’m sure we’ll find a suitable place for you in our society,” Nare assured. “Welcome to your new home.”

As he said this, he extended his stubby arms and took a step back, tilting his head to either side as if he was surveying an enclosure much larger than the dormitory they were in. It seemed as if he was welcoming her into his world. Maybe he was just welcoming her into this strange edifice: a gigantic spiral staircase branching out into countless doors leading to locations unknown to the little pony.

With Fluttershy unable to formulate a coherent opinion, the kind, elderly dragon-person ended the conversation, “I’ll give you some time to get your bearings. Tharur could give you the tour of the place.” With that, Tharur, wearing a face devoid of recognizable expression, swiftly took his place next to his father. Each step, those of the elderly dragon-person’s departure and the youthful one’s entry, was punctuated by a swift and subtle scrape of claw on stone.

Tharur bowed slightly and motioned with his rough-looking arm, and they were off. He showed her the grand suite, the one reserved for the leader of the tribe, a couple of standard living quarters, the extensive underground fields that grew all sorts of crops, and the intricate plumbing network. All the while, Tharur was courteous yet distant. Hundreds of dragon-people inhabited the extensive network of rooms, houses, fields, and other spaces all centered on the central staircase. The enormity of the complex was astounding.

When one was to cook or start a fire, a chimney led out, around the room, and steadily narrowed downwards into a small pipe that led parallel to one of the steps on the staircase into the central pillar, which doubled as a grand chimney. At the very bottom, around from the Chief’s suite carved into the central smoke stack, was a wide hearth that served to provide all the needs such a place would require in terms of metallurgy, as the kind dragon-people who dwelled in this domain found enough ores every now and again in their excavations to have a few metallic luxuries.

In the fields, which were in the upper levels because of the abundance of fertile soil, were all sorts of different crops. They comprised various forms of fungus, but they served the same purpose as their surface-counterparts. There were cereal crops, root crops, legume-like crops, vine-like crops, and more.

The technology and cultural advances were on par with Equestria, more or less. The people were not religious for the most part and did not pay respects to more than one or two patron-deities, whom they rarely spoke of. In fact, for them, it was an age of enlightenment. They had invented their own flying shuttle and fire extinguishers and although they still had torches in the main staircase, many employed well-crafted lanterns within their own homes.

For Fluttershy, who had spent her entire life knowing exactly what she was good at— even had it magically appear on her side—a sense of worthlessness set in. She could not handle crops or become an apprentice in metallurgy; there were enough field hands and apprentices for those.

* * *

When she was shown to her living quarters, a nice space with a bed, a lantern, simple furnishings, and a mirror, she lay down on her bed and grumbled. What do I do? I’m useless to these people. They might cast me out, and I wouldn’t blame them. Lying there, she found that what she was laying on was extremely plush, much to her liking.

Tharur entered the room and sat down in a chair, scraping against the seat. This single, legato stroke of scale on seat seemed to hang in the air a long while. At the first creak of the door, Fluttershy executed a superb rolling backflip in time to sit upright and face the door just as Tharur entered. The sight of his long, scaled tail frightened her at first as it lay limp on the ground, but she forced herself to stop such nonsense. “Um—thank you again for the… erm… tour you gave me. I really appreciate it,” characteristically whispered Fluttershy, tense.

Tharur nodded and looked around the room. The tail twitched up a bit, coiled, and then lay limp once more. His eyes seemed brooding, but as far as Fluttershy could tell, there was not much he could be upset about. A tangible sense of the possibility of that assumption rose up and her gut was certain for a few moments that his arrangement of facial features was facilitating serious brooding. Between them seemed to sit something more than distance and deep thought. After that sense faded into equilibrium with the other potential reasons for the brooding and distance, a short sigh emanated from the chair’s occupant.

Tharur looked up, having summed up his thoughts. “You’re welcome,” he began, clicking softly, “Anything I can do to repay my debt to you. It may take a while for you to find something you can pitch in with. Don’t worry—we’re not going to cast you out or anything preposterous. Here, drawn-out existential elucidation is perfectly normal.” He rolled his eyes at the thought of his people throwing out an esteemed guest of theirs.

Fluttershy calmed down and slouched a little. So I guess they still want me. Still, I should find something I’m good at. They don’t seem to have many pets here. While she thought, her eyes absentmindedly focused upon a red-brown splotch on her towel. Tharur, not knowing what course of action to take or the significance the towel and the splotch held, shifted slightly. He could not have been blamed for not understanding how vital the barbecue-flavored stain the splotch comprised could be in a tight situation or how poorly the wheat germ that comprised another stain on the towel tasted.

“Well as the Chief’s heir apparent, it is my current occupation’s designation to assist him in his administration and be an advisor to him,” he conversed, trying to put warmth into his words rekindle the conversation.

Fluttershy, confronted by an opportunity to either be bold enough to contribute to the conversation or falter, wilted. Her feelings manifested into a single thought. Why can’t you be brave now, Fluttershy? All she could muster was to present herself as if she was really interested while she dealt with the nagging internal strife. She let out a “hm” and tilted her head to the side interestedly to be safe.

Tharur, seeing his chance to explain what nobody wanted to listen to, obliged. He spoke about the fundamentals, then the basic tasks, and then it seemed, to himself. All the while, an internal dialogue was raging a meter away. Why can’t I be brave? My friends make being outgoing seem so easy! I mean all I have to do is say hello and ask a few questions…

Tharur looked up, fortuitously catching Fluttershy’s attentive demeanor at the right moment, “…which is a normal day, but on the days when we have a festival or it’s time to harvest, it’s necessary to organize and keep track of all the numbers, which is where I come in…” He was so utterly absorbed in his monologue that almost nothing could prevent him from yammering on. From his disposition at first glance, long monologues did not seem his cup of something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

…But what if I mess up and they don’t like me? What if I offend them? What if they hurt me?

“…which is something anydragon can agree on, right?” Tharur chuckled and looked up to find two glazed-over eyes attached to a yellow face nestled into yellow hooves. Between them sat a creamy pink pillar of hair that dwindled and snaked about lifelessly on the floor. Behind all of this lay a shivering slump of yellow wrapped in pink. Suddenly, the eyes regained focus and the shivering stopped.

Tharur fumbled in finding footing in this new conversational terrain and saw that he had reached an impasse. “Er—I was boorish, wasn’t I? I didn’t notice how cold it is in here.” Fluttershy noted that in a manner uncharacteristic of cold-blooded creatures, he fumbled out of the chair, fumbled into a cabinet, fumbled a blanket out, and fumbled it open over her. To her dismay, he had embarrassed himself twice, making her feel like the embarrassment was her own out of sheer empathy. She laid still all the while, too bewildered and frightened from the ignominy. The blanket was spread unevenly such that her hind legs and rear stuck out whereas her midsection to the top of her head was covered. She shook her head, and the static cling wrested its grip on her head. The blanket slid down to a much less ridiculous position.

“Er—er—,” Tharur’s articulation was out to lunch; he was in trouble. She had to do something. If not, she would feel too heavy a dose of empathy for her to bear. She would regret it if she were to not do something.

Say something. Say something. SAY SOMETHING, FLUTTERSHY! It’s your chance, but what if you say something dumb or something that belittles him or yourself or something mean or maybe if it’s something th—

“Well that was a Comedy of Errors from me,” following a palm to the face, a sigh, and an unconvincing smile, Tharur regained his cool, or so it appeared. Continuing, he looked straight into her eyes and voiced a superbly eloquent yet hastily delivered monologue. “Ugh. How do you put up with the droning? I’m the only one interested in what I’m interested in, it seems, so I have to find different people to drone at until one finds it interesting, you see. You seemed somewhat interested, so I saw a chance. It’s okay. I won’t do it next time. I’m pretty good at letting it out in short bursts. M-mostly.” He stopped himself from going any further, coming to the realization that he was in the process of repeating the same mistake. His eyes had long since fled to the floor. Fluttershy had tears welling up in her eyes. They were bitter with lost opportunity.

“Well... I’ve talked your ear off for quite long enough, giving the tour and going through my responsibilities and the like.” He trailed off, the façade of nonchalance chipping away and giving into more embarrassment. Sighing and looking back at her, he conceded “I grow weary of stating my own interests as you likely have. Thanks for putting up with me. I try not to be quite so much a bore… Anyways, I sincerely appreciate my rescue at your hands and welcome you as one of us.”

He was losing avenues of conversation fast but did not seem to want to leave. With no proverbial intersection to turn to, he made his way toward the door, seemingly shrinking to his actual height as his personality grew more distant. Fluttershy was damming her unhappy thoughts up, but could not help thinking, I failed. I failed to be brave or outgoing or to take part at all in the conversation. I didn’t even talk today during the tour. It was just listening and watching, like I always do. Fluttershy, the Good Listener. My little epithet. I wish I could change that, but how? I’m not a great communicator.

He opened the portal and summed up his wits for his grand finale: meticulously planned a few seconds prior to be sincere and snappy, but at the same time dramatic in that it was to be spoken over the shoulder and without any eye contact. In a voice that finally matched his figure with its hint of forlornness and regret, Tharur murmured, “Well… night.” The door closed very gradually and gently without the diminutive reptilian figure showing at all during the process of cessation. Relieved that in the whole space of time he did not care to look at her, she allowed the already flowing tears to take their course.

Outside, a pebble careened down the spiral, its original location just outside the door. Each resounding crack it generated on its way down resounded softer and softer until it could no long be heard. Beyond this, the only sound was the oceanic scuffle of claws upon the ebb and flow of rectilinear stone.

All she felt was self-pity and embarrassment, which disgusted Fluttershy. The corners of her mind were in perilous tumult. Enough of these dramatics. Straighten out! Is it really necessary to cry over this? He just wanted to talk, not to listen. Maybe he would have listened if you had managed it right, but he got on that roll, and there was nothing to do about it. There was the chance though, the one where he was floundering. It made me look mean to just sit there.

How was I brave the other day? How did I jump over that waterfall or fend off that creature or simply keep walking? It’s everyone else who does those things. I’m just Fluttershy. I don’t do that stuff. I’m just Fluttershy. In this pit of despair, she found a miniscule tidbit of beating courage that expanded at an exponential rate. The sound of her thoughts crescendoed as she gained confidence. Here I don’t have to be shy. Here I can make a new me and see what it’s like to be outgoing and fend for myself! I can learn what it really means to have courage. I just have to try. Rubbing the tears away, she was filled with ambition. She would be a new pony here. I will find the courage to be engaging and outgoing and make friends. I will do it on my own. She shivered at the prospect. It was a shiver of both fear and anticipation.

A Momentous Breakfast

What was instantly striking about the community mess hall was the vaulted ceiling in the latest annex, something unexpected from a civilization of such relatively miniscule humanoids. The entire space sat chiseled out of the bedrock in the lower reaches of the spiral. It was apparent that the space had grown to fit the needs of a growing village. It began closest to the spiral as a narrow, rough-hewn arch with a few tables and chairs into a larger, vaguely more rectangular space, and finally it opened into an efficient, smooth space that stretched on for quite a long ways and was itself a rectangular prism.

The walls were more or less uniform in the striated rock. What were not uniform about them were their unique professional etchings. These depicted tales of old. Some had great hunts, some great events, and some of animals. The nonconformity came from the disparity in style. The beginnings were baroque, then rococo, then realist, and at the far back, a large, romantic mural. Each period of art was beautiful, even if the designs became faded as they neared the entrance.

The floor in the first section, the oldest one, was well-worn and rough-hewn, but by the back of the last section, it was smooth and cut with precise masonry. Here and there, geologic formations depicting the land’s own history could be seen, and was rife with artificial blemishes that had been superficially scratched over the years into the sandstone and limestone layers. Mostly, these were near the floor and far less prominent than the grand etchings, but a few legendary examples had made their way towards the ceiling or had literally carved an indelible mark into the local geologic history. The most prominent of these was a long, capped, horizontal cylinder neighboring two crude ellipses floating at the flat end of the cylinder. In spite of a few similarly juvenile examples, the atmosphere was wondrous. What filled it to the brim was the din of the crowd consuming their meals.

Tharur introduced his cronies across the table, “…and this is Naruk, this is Lebb, this is Zem, and here’s Dentrassis.” Fluttershy felt the emboldened façade of her paradigm eroding with pairs of protruding, crocodile-like teeth gracing each grin. Their eyes were of unnaturally fiery or steely colors. She noticed that each time they blinked, a number of eyelids converged. She cowered, unable to stifle her nervous reaction.

“Don’t be shy.” Tharur reassured, putting his open bundle of claws on her side and grinning at her encouragingly, bared fangs eminent.

Don’t be shy. You’re being ridiculous. The voice in her mind that admonished and implored her sounded like her own. However, it lacked the hesitation or the warmth it had when it addressed others.

Not noticing the hand retreat, she sat up straighter, filled with an iron will, and she summoned up the greatest extent of compassion and oratory excellence she could offer.

“Uh, hi. I’m Fluttersh—,” her voice decrescendoed into a squeak. Refusing to tolerate this weakness, she picked it back up, “I’m Fluttershy.” The forcefulness in her voice astounded her. To her audience, however, it was of the auditory proportions her ‘yays’ offered Rainbow Dash in Dash’s practice runs before the fatefully explosive competition in Cloudsdale.

As the reptilians reclined back into their chairs after having craned themselves forward to catch a word or two, their understanding demeanor put Fluttershy more at ease. In fact, now that all were sitting at their regular posture in their chairs, it was Fluttershy looking down on them, not vice versa. She derived further confidence from the way their faces were more exemplified by their large, almost cute eyes and noses rather than their prominent, interlocking teeth. It’s not all bad, really.

“So, er—what do you all do?” Fluttershy forayed into uncharted territory as a lukewarm plate of crusty, amorphous rolls was placed in front of each member of the lukewarm conversation. She recognized this as her deus ex machina in that she hoped that it would relieve pressure off her and sap attention that could be used analyzing her every word and mannerism. Being held under uncompromising scrutiny had long-since been a long-held fear of hers.

Over the course of many minutes and a number of floury bites of what barely qualified as cake, Fluttershy learned and forgot most of the names and occupations of these new acquaintances. She began to realize that she had become something of a celebrity in the village just by being different and new. On the sides of her head, perceptible pressure could be felt where imagined eyes were analyzing the superficial and were attempting to probe deeper. Whenever she glanced in the direction from which the eyes seemed to bore into her, it seemed as if nobody cared to engage in so much as a head scratch in her general direction.

The last time she was a celebrity, people were nosy and in her face. Here, so far at least, they did not ask questions and respected privacy. Moreover, they were more open about less serious topics and merely sought companionship from their peers, as opposed to socially strategic information.

People were different from the ones in Ponyville. It seemed that to get their kindness, you just had to be a fellow occupier of space and a custodian of sentience. Already, it seemed as if she had made an impression in the right direction because the reptilians sitting with her were still talking. This one was a field hand, this one was a smith’s apprentice, this one was an administrator, and this one was a trade liaison, and so on.

“…but ugh the usual breakfast, am I right?” one interrupted her thoughts, which vanished in a puff of logic. She looked up. The complainer was Dentrassis, who was a lunch chef. “Of all the meals in Butzbik, this one is by far the worst.” Fluttershy had eaten enough of the brown cake to be polite, but not enough to get sick. Tasting it once more, she was greeted by a dry, bland taste that offered hints of cardboard that stuck starchily to the palate.

“Er—so why don’t they just add something like fruit to it and change its shape to something easier to cook?”

“Why would you add fruit to a cake made in a pan?” Tharur asked. Everyone’s attention was fixated upon her. The world was crashing in; there was nothing that existed neither in space nor in time than the small capsule of matter that comprised the dining hall. In that moment, she had to answer this seemingly innocuous, abstract question on the rationale behind mixing dough and fruit.

Why not?

“Where I come from, it’s normal. It’s really good—I’ll show you,” she challenged cordially. Her boldness frightened her. Am I really doing this? What have I gotten myself into?

Not hesitating and with a quick, “well I’m done,” Dentrassis pushed away from the planet with his feet and forced his chair to whine across the well-worn stone floor. The rest followed. What have I done? Oh dear. Oh dear! With a flick of the wrist from Lebb, and her disappearance from the doorway at the far end of the hall, Fluttershy was beyond the point of no return.

Sitting as a normal pony would, it took her much effort to wedge her way into a position so as to escape the confines of the chair. Once this was done, it was clear the whole room was watching. The sturdy ancient chairs were high-backed and had relativelyhigh seats. She felt pummeled under scores of eyes transfixed upon her as if in a single fiery gaze. In the heat, she crouched below the seats’ angle of vision and trudged, feeling ashamed and helpless. Her wings were locked in position at her flanks, the muscles in them tensing as the door approached. She gritted her teeth with frustration at her uncharacteristic rashness as tears welled up.

“Come on, Fluttersh—y!” Naruk poked his head back into the expanse and pronounced her name to the best of his ability in his language of jarbles and slurps. His voice did not have a single hint of scorn or begrudging, much to Fluttershy’s amazement. “Let’s get going!”

Fluttershy snapped out of her suppressed daze and galloped out. By the time she flew through the portal to the foot of the central spiral, she was flying. Already were her new companions up the staircase enough that only a single flicker of a tail was visible before it slid out of sight.

Filled with excitement and runaway abandon, Fluttershy roared up past them with blistering speed. She stopped at a large green door and stared down the flights. She covered many flights before realizing that she had not the slightest inkling as to the whereabouts of the kitchen. So embarrassed was she at this realization that it deflated her.

Fluttershy loped down the staircase to catch back down with the others. As the sound of clawsteps drew closer, it was all she could do not to cry at her discourtesy. The walls seemed to be closing in on her, her mistake surely signaling some bad consequence. The coldness and blandness of the scenery sucked out warmth and left her feeling deprived of heat, although she had worked up a sweat going up and then down without much pause. She continued down, feeling ashamed. A flight or two down, she nearly collided with Lebb, who dodged just in time.

“Overeager to prove us incorrect, hm?” Tharurr chuckled.

“I’m—I’m—I’m just so—so sorry—,” Fluttershy’s voice cracked.

“No worries, Flutt—Fluttershy-y,” Lebb remarked, carefree, “Let’s see those cakes-from-a-pan.”

“Uh—sure… Let’s go,” trying to mask her surprise at the lack of anger and frustration emanating from someone she had nearly tackled. Subsequently, they surmounted a couple flights of stairs. Fluttershy, in the truest sense of the word, felt awkward. Although she felt physically stable, the fabric of her situation felt delicate and warped. People did not react to her messing up; it was like they did not even care. They did not offer help or console her or baby her or anything like she had expected. In fact, they just accepted her as she was at any given moment. At this moment, she realized how tiring those phenomena, being helped, consoled, and babied, had become. They just seemed to accept her and her social abnormalities while ostensibly maintaining perfect social parity with each other. She skipped up a few steps.

“It’s just here,” Naruk explained, pointing at a large green door, “The grand kitchen.” For the second time, Fluttershy had reached and passed the entranceway. Now she was half a flight above it. By the time she turned around, all that remained in visual range was an open green door. In such a location as was hers, where any and all noise ricochets about constantly, it was peacefully noiseless. She took a deep breath and sighed.

Fluttershy was left speechless not only at her luck but at the nonchalance of these people. She looked up, scanning the reaches of her vision. A torch idly blazed nearby. I should enter soon. I thought they’d be mad. Why would I even cry about going too far ahead? Don’t other people do that all the time? Maybe I’m not overstepping or being rash; maybe I’m being normal.

The next sound forced an ‘eep’ and a flinch out of her. A metallic object clanged, the sound splintering the silence and Fluttershy’s internal reflection. She hurried through the entranceway. Inside, time had not stopped. A storm of bangs, clangs, and pangs instantly alerted her to a flurry of activity. In its midst, there was cheerfulness in the scaled beings, jesting and giggling, retrieving the items not for the goal, but for the process. Didn’t they want to prove me wrong or crazy?

“Alrighty then. Let’s see some cakes-in-a-pan-with-fruit,” Dentrassis smiled as the activity slowed and the supplies were in order.

“Um—okay. Here goes,” Fluttershy mumbled as her hooves carried her steadily towards her challenge. The pile of flour, pots, pans, and other ingredients daunted her. She imagined that her every move was being analyzed. She looked back at the fanged fiends and expected them to be watching her, but she saw them giggling and dancing about one another as friends do. But—aren’t they watching me to see me mess up?

The kitchen was large, clearly large enough to sustain the entire village of Butzbik, but as any good kitchen would allow, it was decentralized enough that she could fulfill all her objectives while staying within a comfortable area. This layout made the kitchen similar to the dining hall. The different styles of cutting and engraving on the walls told a wordless tale of many generations’ expanding. Central islands lined with drawers dissected the room and created narrow pathways with the help of wood ovens and stoves lining the walls.

The stretches of the ceiling closest to its perpendicular intersection with the walls were punctured by pipes for exhausting soot to faraway patches of air. The rest of the ceiling was clear, although a couple of Doric pillars restricted the view towards the back, protruding up through respective islands. The back lay in twilight, its ovens cold, dark, and mysterious. It was uncertain whether or not anybody or any dragons or scary monsters lurked in those confines.

Towards the main entrance and the green door, there remained fair light. A few embers gently wasting away reddened the interiors of nearby ovens. There were a few lanterns about, too, painting angry shadows using a canvas of stone and a palate of red and gray. Fluttershy, not the biggest proponent of contemporary art, shuddered when she first glanced at the web of varying darkness.

She grabbed a pan with her teeth and set it down on the cold countertop. Then, she picked up a sack of flour propped up lazily against the island and set it down with a thump. The sack clearly contained flour because its contents felt fluid but dense, as well as altogether deserving of their own weight. Lifting it exerted an eurgh and a short pant, but she was undaunted. For all the trouble she was having to cope socially, none was to be had dealing with inanimate objects. The second sack was full of sugar and perceivably heavier than the last. This one seemed to be coarse sugar for its smell and the uneasy packing of the crystals that shifted about. Squinting and tensing all of her muscles to lift the sugar, Fluttershy was locked in a titanic struggle with the sack and her clenched teeth, whom she was afraid would be the first to succumb to the strain.

Fluttershy gave up, allowing a brief, half-second’s respite to rally. From under her, the sugar was lifted up. Shattered was the stark and noble image of straining against this challenge alone. Her pride deflated, she looked with dismay as her friends were taking all the heavy things. They don’t have to be so nice. I was fine doing it on my own.

“You guys don’t have to be so nice—I—I would have gotten it by myself,” she remarked, stuttering and then regaining poise with a pervading tone of gratitude. She spotted a small measuring cup and bent to grab it, but it had vacated its location and rested atop the island before she could get it. “Really… oh…”

“Don’t mention it, uh, Flu—buddy. We’re your friends!” Naruk chimed.

Friends. They’re my friends. I used to wonder what this kind of friendship could be.

“Alrighty then. We’ve got everything in place. Let’s see you make those special cakes-in-a-pan, which I hope haven’t been too overhyped by all this here commotion,” the words rolled away from Lebb‘s mouth as easily as the heavy utensils had been translated onto the counter.

“Uh… Okay… Here goes.”

In a flurry of fire, Old Janx Spirit, and measuring cups, a single sheet of golden pastry was procured from a pan. It was tickled out of the pan in two swiftly slashing strokes by a scrupulous spatula and deposited onto an adjacent plate. The intermediate light and the plainness of the plate emphasized the irregularity the speckled creation wrought. It was so perfectly alien to the herpetological beings that they stood in awe around the masterwork, momentarily moved beyond elementary eloquence.

“There you go! One dragonfruit pancake.” Fluttershy beamed as she literally hovered around their heads in anticipation. It was an unusual position of power she had acquired in that stretch of time; she had astounded them and impressed them, even reached a mythic status, albeit temporarily, as a baker. This accomplishment put her in a state partially unlike her usual self in that she did not falter or feel uneasy when she spoke. It injected confidence into her manner. This sensation of confidence instantly felt natural to her, and she accepted it in the spur of the moment.

“I like it,” Naruk breathed.

“Indubitably,” Tharur returned, acknowledging the shapeliness of the new culinary manifestation more than his companions.

“So, who wants to try some?” Fluttershy smelling-salted them out of their trance, relinquishing her state of authority but not forgetting the sense of personal certitude she then knew was attainable.

“I—I’ll try a bite,” Dentrassis withdrew from the hypnosis, his mind having thawed enough for coherent utterances.

Fluttershy divvied up the saucer into equal parts with the knife previously used for cutting the dragon fruit and scrounged through the cabinets for forks. In little more than a flash, nothing remained of the creation but some burnt bits stuck to an empty plate left somewhat greasy, cold, and crispy in the absence of a pancake. Fluttershy’s patrons left the entirety of what was once on the plate up to peristalsis, even after each had enjoyed a good portion of breakfast several minutes prior.

In this frozen snippet of time, Fluttershy’s mind wandered back to the grand conundrum of why these people were nothing but nice. They did not actively instill fear, contrary to their appearance. Behind their beady eyes, sharp grins, and protruding snouts, there emanated only kind thoughts, or so every snippet of evidence would harmlessly suggest. If they had any ulterior motives dealing with her, they would have already carried them out.

In its own way, this exercise, that of mid-morning baking, granted Fluttershy something as well. Despite only effectively existing for a short time, her sense of belonging emerged from the murky depths of her soul, exhumed from its untimely grave by the kindness and hospitality extended by the friends in front of her. However, all was not clear to her; this reality, real as it was, did not match up with the reality she was accustomed to.

The notion with which she grappled came from a state of culture shock. For many, there is a fine line between friend, acquaintance, and stranger. This concept was the one Fluttershy not only adhered to, but depended on. Without it, everyone would be recognized as hostile. In her past existence, everypony save a few lucky souls were to be feared until proven innocent by someone already proved friendly, protecting her from harm and overly-engaging social stimulus. Moreover, the only social stimulus she achieved was with those with whom everything was shared. In this new reality, she found herself with friends who did not have to share everything. They were just nice. They’re friendly because they can. They don’t have to have a few best friends and a bunch of strangers. Everyone can be a friend. I could be friends with anybody. I could have loads of them! It would be really nice. I’d be just like them: outgoing, caring, spontaneous.

In a gleeful humor, Fluttershy probed, “So—did you like it?” She squeed hopefully and smiled nervously.

“You should be the head breakfast chef.” Dentrassis suggested.

“But—but—wouldn’t that kick whoever that is out of their job anyway and hurt their feelings? I—I—I mean who is the...er main… breakfast chef anyway?” Flutershy’s face looked nervous and distraught once again, and she started shifted back into submission. You’re doing it again. The thought chimed like a bell. She stood up a hair straighter, no longer headed towards prostration.

Dentrassis chuckled. “I am the head breakfast chef,” he said.

At this, Fluttershy noticed that the remnants of the funny feeling of directionlessness in her heart were replaced by the plain euphoria of belonging. When that sensation subsided into the background of general emotion, she found that the antecedent feeling of melancholy did not take its place.

Vignettes From a Life Serendipitously Assumed

Fluttershy got up, stretched lazily like a cat in a sun ray, and flexed her wings to their fullest lateral extent. She pointed each dormant feather in the same direction and grunted softly as she did so. Probing the nightstand’s surface for a match with the aid of feeble light poking under and around the door, her hoof connected with the sought irregularity. She lit it and watched the room expand with the crackle of light and sound. The meager flame found itself in a coal lamp, which turned the half-light whole. The square room, big enough for one pony’s needs, was fully visible. The lamp bathed the stark stone walls and nearby floor with comfortable light but projected harsh shadows on the opposite walls and floor.

The image before her appeared as a dreamscape, one that Fluttershy saw every day but often had to remind herself was genuine. Secure in reality, Fluttershy ambled around her bed towards her mirror and her washbasin. From the cold stone, she plucked forth her brush and hummed absent-mindedly while she stroked her mane, mussed after a long night’s sleep.

Decisively awoken by the brisk, dull stings innumerable knots bring, she proceeded to make her bed. After much reaching and pulling, the bed was made. Almost ready to begin the day, she perambulated around the bed, clutched the idle lantern in her teeth, and brought it towards a small, wooden table by the door. As she neared the table, she looked back and took the room in.

The lantern casted distorted adumbrations of her belongings onto the walls, which seemed to slowly advance towards her. These did not frighten her as they once would have, however. Her room was placid and plain, like an unfrequented pond. It was her sanctuary after a big day; a place for her to think and to meditate. Although she had few personal belongings and it was not as snug of an abode as one of her previous iterations would have demanded, it belonged to her just as much as any.

Set on the table by the opened door, the lantern was put out, returning the room to darkness. Fluttershy stepped out and took in her surroundings, remembering to pull the door back to close it. On it were the numbers 2, 3, and 7. And so, the sleep thoroughly rubbed from her eyes, she proceeded onward and upward, humming peaceably, long before most of the other villagers in Butzbik woke. Around her wrist was a talisman of her duty: the bracelet that signified her first job of the day.

Although the place Fluttershy arrived at was her job, this “work” filled her with such glee that it could not be considered labor by her definition. She entered either grinning, beaming, or with the corners of her mouth turned up in some way. The job was one of the highlights of her day for many reasons other than the joys of feeding everydragon and assisting the community as a whole by doing her part. Fluttershy was vaguely sure that her daily feeling of joviality would have fulfilled someone else’s dream and made their day, but neither name nor face registered. As she swung around the doorway, her eyes registered with unusually colored pair: pink.

All around the deep-sunk pink eyes were yellow and yellow-green scales that covered the eyes’ face, utilizing the gloom cast by a dozen warming ovens to procure a scowl. The eyes stared at her blankly. Fluttershy greeted, “Heya there, Ezalg.” Ezalg was always the first one up every morning in order to kindle the ovens.

“Hey there, Flutter!” Ezalg exclaimed, as most of Fluttershy’s friends’ mouths were too maladroit to pronounce her full name, their mouths being filled with unwieldy teeth. Ezalg’s lips curled around her many outward-pointing teeth to smile, “Sleep well?” Her eyes seemed to find hitherto nonexistent light in order to glisten in an amicable manner.

“Oh just fine, thanks,” Fluttershy stated plainly, maintaining eye-contact with her friend.

“That’s just swell news,” Ezalg turned and stoked an oven, “They’re warming up nicely. Just a little while and they’ll be ready for you.”

The scraping growing ever-more sonorous foretold the arrival of Dentrassis, whose job was to prepare the beverages for the community. He arrived punctually, albeit shuffling to work as usual. As he set the various herbs and juices onto his allotment of countertop, one could see that mixing drinks was his joy. In fact, he enjoyed it so much, he was the head drink-mixer for every meal, relieved to be relieved of his former position as the head breakfast chef.

Next to appear was Fluttershy’s apprentice, Hoov. His full name was Hoovaloo, but he preferred Hoov for short, much to the disappointment of his scales’ color, who was very smart—hyper-intelligent, in fact. Regardless, the color was intelligent enough to kept quiet. As was quotidian, under Hoov’s eyes were deep wrinkles slightly more purple than the surrounding scales. It was not uncommon for a dragon’s face here to be wrinkled, but the severity of physical deviance indicated a lack of sleep. He had been out late again.

By then, Fluttershy had assembled the various utensils required to make each pancake. She had gradually acquired her instruments of culinary genesis throughout the time she had lived in Butzbik. There was her special chopping-knife, curved along its length in order to glide through whatever fruit was required that day, her flour-cup precisely measured to contain the perfect amount of flour, her corresponding cup for sugar, and her various bowls required for the baking task. She put her mixing bowl on the counter and picked up her mixing spoon. The spoon was well-marked by her teeth, having been clutched daily.

Hoov shuffled languidly towards the assemblage of apparatus and peeled the crystaline sleep from his eyes. He occupied one of the simpler tasks concerning pancake production by peeling the fruit, the supply of produce already relieved of its protective barrier swiftly increasing in scarcity. He yawned and nodded a few times, his head jerking up with more and more acumen. He peeled off a scale in a perfunctory swipe, decisively waking himself. Sucking in air through the sides of his mouth, he grimaced, suppressing an impulsive paroxysm. The color of his scales mourned silently at the loss of a member.

“Woken up?” Fluttershy smiled wryly, her eyes soft and her head cocked to the side. To Hoov, it seemed she unfairly held the secret to compos mentis every morning.

“Yeah… Just a small scratch,” he allowed. Confidingly he whispered, “I shouldn’t stay up so late, I know.” Sighing, he admitted, “It’s just that I like to spend time with my friends.”

Fluttershy could relate: “It’s tough to say no, but one has to realize that the same opportunities will rise again, given time.” She marveled at this incident of confidence. It was unusual for someone to ask or divulge more than was necessary, even to those with whom they were well acquainted.

Fluttershy wondered if it was time for her to tell her story. The possibility crossed her mind on occasion, but what enrichment would be wrought in telling people about something that has no way of affecting them? While she weighed her options, Fluttershy wrapped the handle of a hot pan in a floral sheet of absorbent cloth dotted with many dark spots.

Fluttershy resolved to let her simplistic remarks immortalize themselves in her apprentice’s conscience and to allow the two of them to fall back into silence. She stole a glance around. Her friends on the other side of the kitchen made no indication that they had perceived the short patch of conversation.

Often whilst baking, Fluttershy’s mind gadded about, often unconscious to the things it scrutinized. It’s like spring now with the birdies and berries… Winter wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t very festive, but it wasn’t harsh… Her conscious was like a vast stretch of water at this time of day, rendering her free to swim endlessly in any direction. Humming leisurely to an old tune, she tended to the sizzling just beneath her nose. We wake their sleepyheads so quietly and nice… She scanned the countertop for the cup filled a few ticks above halfway with the next ingredient. Is it three quarters of a cup or two thirds? One thought descended into another within the catalyst of the concept of measurement, which transferred volumetric thought to the chronological sort. Wait: is it Wednesday or Friday? Is today somedragon’s birthday? She searched franticly in the cabinet above her. At first, she was gripped with fear at having forgotten one of her friend’s special days. Oh, the sprinkles were hiding behind the hinge, of course. She gave a laugh of relief, and smiled at the wall she so dearly baked in front of each morning along with some of her friends.

Humming to herself, Fluttershy glanced down. Burnt! They’re going to get burnt! She shifted the iron pan cradling the molten dough with what can only be described as a schmatta. It was marvelous how much the towel had served while she lived in Butzbik. These look about ready. In a couple of soprano hm’s, a new set of discoid globs atop the heated pans was set over the stove as the previous batch was deposited onto the designated porcelain receptacle. And so, onward went her gleeful work.

* * *

Breakfast came tardy, but the residents of Butzbik could not have cared less so long as it was as delectable as the previous day’s breakfast. Of all things that morning, foreseeable and unforeseeable, the likelihood of the meal’s imminent saporosity was definitely on everydragon’s top five most-likely events.

Warm saucers of pastry eased onto the rows of tables. The new custodians graced them with insignificant yellow crystals of sleep wiped clear of their tear ducts while they consumed the pancakes. The yawns and slow stretches were soon drowned in the voracious din of utensils stabbing, cutting, and scooping.

“I must say, Flutter,” Tharur began, speaking through and then around the wad of sweetness in his mouth, “you’ve done a good job again, and props to Hoov.”

“Oh thank you. I’m just glad to be doing my part here,” she warranted graciously, “I know all of you do the same.” She smiled contentedly, vindicated for her hard work. Upon such, she sipped a few dehydrating gulps of Dentrassis’s morning concoction and felt at the sacchariferous residue assert its dry presence on the back of her throat. She partook in some cool water to rid herself of the heavy dosage of cassonade and glanced about.

Everydragon was content: Hoov was off with his buddies, and Nare was undoubtedly discussing politics and trade with a few elders concerning the nearby villages, or as Fluttershy had learned to call them, Munecoms. Fluttershy blinked slowly at Tharur as he explained the intricacies of the upcoming festival commemorating the anniversary of Butzbik’s founding. Lebb’s eyes seemed entirely consumed by a single point infinitely inside and infinitely outside the Universe in which the tabletop that her eyes were vectored at existed. Naruk, on the other hand, was erratically nodding and jolting up over his empty plate in a vain attempt to appear ready for the day, but it was evident that he was failing even to convince himself.

Fluttershy chipped away glacially at her pancakes. Eventually, the moraine of crumbs and syrup left was picked up by a passing busboy. From the diminishing din generated by the last pokes at tidbits of pancake, a lively buzz of talk brewed: expectations, hopes, inhibitions, dreams, ideas, dreadings, and all sort of conversation that goes with a public site of food worship.

* * *

In Fluttershy’s own room, she combed her hair after the dash to make the daily requirement of batches (along with a few extra). She lay enervated on her side following a fervent lecture given by Tharur. In this position, she dozed, eyelids fluctuating in their weight like a young woman in the dating game. This presented a comfortable challenge, as Fluttershy wished not to slumber through lunch and endanger her punctuality. However, she had a while to rest before having lunch and then completing the task dictated by her second band.
In this world without the abundant magic of her last, there were no preordained destinies determined by images on one’s rear. Instead, to establish similar order and individuality, everydragon wore tri-colored bands denoting their particular task. There could be many or a few, depending on the length of each responsibility. Fluttershy’s first, the one closest to the end of her foreleg, was colored with two blue stripes and a single yellow. Next, she had one with a blue stripe, a red stripe, and another blue stripe. Past that, she had a solely blue band.
It had taken a while, but they had grown to feel natural. Every so often, Fluttershy shifted the multicolored rings to allow the flesh beneath them to breathe. At first they itched, but eventually she adjusted. When close enough, however, the bands pinched the skin in a most unwelcome manner, forcing her to take precautions to prevent such annoyances every few moments.
Fluttershy wore a short, fashionable headdress she felt passively amplified the long, curled suaveness of her hair, and only a thin necklace graced her otherwise plain neck. The string was thin enough and well-worn enough that it was rendered virtually invisible under the hair it had sunken into. The sole item it strung itself though thus produced the effect of protruding from her chest. That item was a long, curved, falciform fang clearly having pertained at some point to the left side of a jaw, but not to the jaw of any of the inhabitants of Munecom—as far as she could tell. The thought of something large enough to have once wielded the wicked tooth frightened her, but it was a gift of honor. Hence, she wore it respectfully until she had gotten used to it, and it was a source of great pride for Fluttershy.

* * *

Rounding corners was an inescapable reality of life in the spiral. Their inherent blindness could make them dangerous, being made of stone and part of an unrelenting roundabout. As a generally accepted unspoken rule passed down over the centuries in order to avert collisions, most residents of Butzbik stuck to the outside going counterclockwise down and the inside going clockwise up.

That day, Fluttershy had taken a catnap whose end lay just outside her desired wake-up time: lunch. After so long without constant reference to time, such as was her case, she eventually managed to trust her inner clock, which was sending strong vibes to her that she was tardy. She bolted upright and took a risk, diving down the spiral in tight circles to compensate for lost time, hugging the coarse stone as she descended.

Of course, luck is a rarified air reserved for wizards’ drinks and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. people. The meager bits Fluttershy had accumulated over time ran out when she hit a rough red wall. She rebounded off, and one her lower vertebrae met the merciless corner of a step, knocking her windless. “Hey! I’ve been having enough trouble today as it is!” came a low, pugnacious-sounding voice.

“—,” Was Fluttershy’s reply, her lungs too preoccupied with the pain in her back to contract and allow air in. She managed a cough pitifully through the pulsations of shock.

“All I wanted was to get back to my room and be alone, but you had to come and get in my way,” the wall waved his burly arms over her. She noticed bands and bands of agricultural yellow denoting his work as a laborer.

“—,” Fluttershy began a retort, drawing in a few wisps of air to reassure herself that she was not in danger of asphyxiation, “I’m… sorry.” She felt relieved to be able to apologize. “I’m just in a hurry. Didn’t mean to get in your way,” she smiled weakly from her pained position lying on her back looking up at the towering red dragon. From there, she reckoned that he was about her height, enormous by Butzbik-standards.

His face was furrowed with frustration, and his eyes seemed teared-up from his trouble. No doubt today had not been his best, “Look, it’s okay. You seem to be the one who got the worst of this—here—let me help you up,” he extended a jagged limb in offering of help.

“Thanks!” pulling hard until she felt an electric spasm course outward from her lower back. Ignoring it in a painfully cold shiver and gritting her teeth, Fluttershy informed him, “I better get going. See you around!”

“You, too, Flutter,” his vibrant eyes mismatched his menacing face.

She murmured musically to herself on the rest of the trip down. I love to see everydragon beam. It just brightens up my day.

* * *

Sand, smoothed by a day’s wind scouring, was perforated with patterns of a single rounded figure with three small, laterally spaced pokes clustered in a line adorning one side. Really, these bunches of four ovaloids were in two side-by-side chains, each set of three being situated towards the ‘top’ of the rounded figures on each side. The chains arched from a common forest path to a point on the shore. But the sand was not riddled with just one, but many of these furrows. In fact, the shore was a rife with muddled sand kicked up where claws trampled the same places again and again to reach similar destinations. Out of the multitudes of the scrambled scores punctuating the granular tract, one such path had no small perforations, and each dent was not irregular. Moreover, each pit in this set of two side-by-side chains of elegantly intersticed pits was perfectly circular.
At the end of each of these curious formations, including the perfectly circular one, porcelain disks were covered in sand, dipped in water, scrubbed with a towel, and dipped once more in the pool. The mere, situated in a calm part of the local stream system, was still enough to not sweep away any plates, yet moving enough not to be considered stagnant, not unlike to your author’s social life. The sluice picked up its pace near a rocky bend downstream. Still further along the rivulet’s course lay a waterfall of special significance to three residents of the forest.
A persistent din pervaded, antithesizing with the placidness of the pond. The clamor comprised of the familiar clink of plates, but the mass aggregation of noise at any given moment was so dense and consistent with the last that the effective result was utter silence. The grand commotion allowed for the idle mind to engage in furious cognitive locomotion; it was here that one could meditate peacefully.
Completing the ordainment of her second armband was a daily reminder to Fluttershy of her entry into an invisible world of friends, relationships, and jobs. She hummed away the scraps, the grease, the grit, and the wet. Among the many positive aspects of the job, it was a joy to watch the sun bow beneath the forest canopy and end its daily reign, signing a red promise across the sky of its return. To her left and right, a couple of fast friends worked industriously, humming along with her, unconscious to the lyrics of the spritely tune. The lyrics would not have made too much sense to them as they did not know what apple cider was, so they mused along wordlessly. They did indeed have an unfiltered, unsweetened, apple-flavored beverage that they served occasionally, but they called it jynnan tonnyk. Oddly enough, they did enjoy a good tonic with a spot of gin in it every now and again, but they had another name for that.
Whereupon the evening had been coasting along ordinarily, at one moment, Fluttershy recalled that the friend to her left, Church, was having trouble. As Church had informed Fluttershy recently, there was a male whom she knew whose company she very much favored. Tragically enough, Fenchurch did not know what to say, the most common dilemma to face romantic urges in the Universe after the absence of decent prospective companions. Fluttershy’s subconscious was bubbling with calculation when solace frothed forth across the membrane of her conscious, tickled it a bit, and then popped into her head proper. Fluttershy, say something.
“Well, Fennie, there used to be a day called Hearts and Hooves day where everypo—everydragon would ask another if they would be their special er—,” she finagled the two discordant words into one brief, “somedragon.” It was hard to fight against the indoctrination gradient and not utter a word she had used so many times before in similar situations. Continuing, “If you get a chance like that, you should talk.”
Fenchurch, surprised at this reference to her friend’s unknown past life, tried to remain nonchalant, but the mere reference to something otherworldly halted the sharp clinks and the piercing scrapes of the clean and dirty stacks of porcelain. Fenchurch, flummoxed, “Oh, er, okay. Thanks. I guess—I mean that’s really helpful. Our Couples’ Day is in a few weeks. Thanks for the tip.” The short bout of words passed in a tone quiet enough that nodragon would normally hear. However, this seemingly insignificant peek into an infinitesimal facet of Fluttershy’s past life thickened the air, and it teemed with anticipation. Not ready to commit to her own history out of fear of dejection, Fluttershy continued scrubbing. Following three excruciating moments, each one a separately severe tremor of terror for the spotlighted little pony, the air was once again thick with furious scrubbing, stacking, and sanding.

* * *

Dinner was done, and most of the Butzbikians were reading, writing, or accomplishing some leisure in their personal residences. Outside, however, turbulence wreaked the canopy. The tree beneath Fluttershy found its matted clumps of leaves flapping savagely in the shifting air currents. The ground was a stable commodity not found at this height, as the moonlit leaves of the much lower surrounding trees formed a glittering cloak over it. At this precarious height, the branches of the ancient tree were not particularly confident in safely distributing a pony’s weight, even that of a petite pegasus, but Fluttershy paid no attention to her imminent danger and balanced, meditating.

Fluttershy had been out flying a few times, but each time, she could not safely burst through the dense canopy formed by the lower trees. That night, however, she decided to hop, skip, and jump her way to the top of a tree not far from the bushes from which she harvested berries with Hoovaloo every few nights. In this position, she gracefully stretched herself out linearly, raising her chin to the horizon and disregarding the majesty of the night with closed eyes. But solitary concentration is another humor one rarely assumes, as the Universe is prone to aggressively terminate it. Under her, the mighty trunk and its multitudes upon multitudes of singular fibers each warped minutely, producing a fearsome bellow and a few degrees of deviation.

Instinctively, she leaped into the air. The tree groaned back, seemingly saying, “Go”. It had the voice of an irritated bullfrog under rapidly decaying effects of sulfur hexafluoride. In fact, it was expressing to the tree next to it that its solitary concentration had been brusquely interrupted by the feeble creature atop it. It had been a hair’s breadth away from realizing the Question. It has been long-speculated whether or not it was about to realize the actual Question, how many roads a man must truly walk down, or both.

Now, flapping in idle, Fluttershy looked at the moon in its quicksilver serenity. It was pockmarked with craters, forming what the Munecomers called the Moon’s Claw. Fluttershy was not fazed; she had seen more frightening patterns on more frightening moons and had even been one’s speech coach. Another gust of bitter wind knocked her out of transfixion. It was dangerous, as lingering at treetop level permits very little margin for error.

To compensate for hugging the deck, Fluttershy rose, distancing herself from the homely calls of the forest beneath her. Soon, only the wind hissed at her as she reached a cloud enjoying a nighttime float through the local climate of the valley. Then, she felt above everything; she felt in command of all that lay beneath her. Here was a safe enough place to start.

No single organism was discernible at this height. Patches of black lines and shimmering lines interspersed the silver valley’s floor far, far below. Although her muscles stayed warm, her nose and ears began to chill. Up there, the horizon sat slightly beyond the peaks of the mountains, allowing a short glimpse at the world around the one she knew as her own. It did not seem too interesting, being just a round sliver of land the same color as the one situated dizzyingly far below.

With the night’s observations completed and the moon in a distressingly late position, Fluttershy ceased opening her eyes and beating her feathered appendages. Her airfoils released their firm grip on altitude in single synchronized contraction.

Down Fluttershy dropped, her mane and tail corkscrewing with turbulence and drag, fanning out into shapes most unlike their usual forms. The shrill wail of the wind and the greedy tug of gravity were all Fluttershy felt for as long as she dared.

She teared up when her eyes opened a safe distance from the ground in order to institute a singularly tall tree as a reference point in accordance to her position relative to the ground. At that, she opened up her wings slowly. They seemed to want to tear off against the onrushing air, but she persevered. The ground slowed toward her, and she angled her wings when the treetops reached out to take her. With blistering speed, the forest below blurred past, and in a breathless instant, it turned away from her. As the relentless curb turned vertical, beyond a brief glimpse of the mountain peaks, all she hurtled towards were stars. Her wings, fully extended, were hastily withdrawn once more, and her inertia carried her onto her back. A rhinestone sheet radiated at her as she inverted.

Next, her vision was consumed by the brilliantly gleaming orb of the moon. Fluttershy whispered breathless, “Luna.” It beamed at her as an unrelenting quicksilver spotlight above the world. On her back with wings fully outstretched, nothing supported her; not even a single updraft prodded her.

The sky was at her command, and nothing could touch her. Euphoria and enlightenment seemed to immerse the sky, and the ground became an afterthought. Actually, the ground had become an unthought. The boundaries of her mind felt endless. Her heartbeat was so rapid, too, that it pulsed over her whole body and especially in her ears.

When the Universe caught up to Fluttershy, her mind’s tendrils reached out to the subjects of gravity, ground, and going down— all against her will—and she resumed descending. Abruptly but precisely, she completed a concise flip and regained idle flapping. Next, she glided down, not understanding what exactly had happened, but euphoric once more at having been able to do something she had never dared to try in her past life. Dashie would be so proud.

* * *

The next night was one of the two nights of the week when Fluttershy completed the task directed by the band closest to her chest. It was a part-time job, so it comprised only two stripes instead of the usual three. In this case, both were blue.
Fluttershy was busy explaining the technique of finding the very best in berries by their appearance to Hoov, speaking around three basket handles. To him, delicately holding a pair of woven containers in each set of fore-claws, it was nice to get out of the spiral every now and again. To her, it was a reminder of her past life, which soothed her.

They went around the great, familiarly groaning trunk of one of the tallest trees in the forest. Down there, below the enveloping canopy of the season, it was as dark as pitch. Although Fluttershy was light on her feet and walked briskly, Hoov led the way, his adolescent internal clock ordaining the hour as the one at which he was most active. He stopped for a second, exclaiming, “Oh!”

“Why’d you stop?” Fluttershy inquired, gently setting the baskets down on a root.

“I just remembered,” only his teeth showed in the darkness as he smiled a few inches below her. It seemed like a prideful smile. “They’re taking you to the elder!”

“Who’s that?”

“He’s this great dragon whom everyone reveres and who comes around every now and again.”

“So when’s the next time he’ll be here?” Fluttershy asked, suddenly intrigued.

“He just gets here when he gets here, but it’s always announced in some way. It’s kind of a big deal.”

“Okay. Have you ever seen him?”

“No, but he sounds pretty neat,” assured Hoov, “I hear he’s the most incredible, gigan—.”

Remembering that Hoov should be sleeping soon, Fluttershy decided to get him moving with, “From what you say, it seems like a great honor. Now, back to business.” She smiled at him as he turned and led the winding way between prickly bushes that were so very similar to juniper. “You know, I used to pick berries in this way almost every night, except alone,” Fluttershy divulged absent mindedly. A revealing moon ray brightly revealed Hoov’s gleaming head as his ears pricked back expectantly. Fluttershy debated telling him more. By the next beam of moonlight, his ears were once again directed into their normal setting.

They split off from there and each found a separate thicket from which to harvest the berries before feeling their way back home.

An Audience With the Elder

“Fluttershy! Fluttershy wake up! He’s here! Wake—Good morning! Are you ready? The Elder is patient, but we better not keep him waiting.”

“Erumph,” Normally it was Fluttershy who woke Hoov up. Several aerial adventures had passed since she had first heard of the Elder. Her eyes had trouble blinking smoothly as she had the jabbing sensation of crystallization beneath her eyelids. Prying the big yellow chunks from the inner corners of her eyes, Fluttershy exited her abode dizzily and followed a huge number of residents up the staircase. When the blood finally returned to her head, she noticed Tharur in front of her. He was speaking. She caught on to what he was saying midsentence.

“…so aren’t you excited? I mean I haven’t seen him in weeks! He’s always got something to say and he tells of weather patterns and he is just the most sublime! You will love him, I know. We haven’t taken you yet because it’s a little off-putting to see him for the first time. We just let you sleep mostly, along with the young ones and older ones who don’t fancy getting up this early. This one time…”

The one-sided conversation reached the top of the stairwell and strolled along through the forest with the group. Still weary from sleep deprivation and sore from trying a new stunt, Fluttershy was growing cold. The ground was thickly laden with algid dew, and the sky was filled with meager sunlight parallel to the ground, good only for getting in one’s eyes. Everything was frustrating her; there was nothing pleasant. She flicked back her mussed hair and sighed. Then she remembered the towel on her back, the one she took everywhere and used as an oven mitt while cooking. It had a few new brown spots that smelled more like burnt fabric than barbeque sauce, but for now, it served well as a sun visor.

Looking for some way to cheer up, she decided to try her best to smile.

Tharur smiled back, “…see? I prophesized you’d be excited once you had arisen from your slumber.”

Fluttershy stopped smiling emptily and looked at him with a puzzled expression. She smiled once more, trying to mean it, and even nodded acknowledgingly. Tharur turned around and marched on sprightly.

After some time, Fluttershy’s legs grew weary while the air grew humid. The sun had finally decided that it was high time it heated something up, so it took the dew and confected it into a sticky and uncomfortably warm fog. The dense fog was restricted to a few feet above her, and it permitted her to see only the cloudless blue sky and as far as the third dragon ahead of her: Ezalg, whose bright green and yellow scales were heavily muted by the white veil. Fluttershy’s head drooped down as she fell into steady step behind Tharur, zoned-out.

A distant roar resounded in murky echoes. Fluttershy was too engrossed in her own thoughts concerning the planning of the intricate paths in the dark to be used the following night in order to reach the next thicket of ripened berries to pick. Her mouth watered imagining the crisp crunch each berry yielded and the instantaneous burst of tart liquid that permeated one’s mouth after.

Again there was a roar, closer, that boomed from far behind. She snapped around and looked up. There was a lanky pillar of rising black smoke. Nobody else seemed to notice, and after a second, a wayward waft of fog obscured her vision, leaving only the heels of Tharur in front of her to see. Confusedly, she turned and kept going.

For a third time, a roar bounced its way into her ear. There was no hiding from the notion. A dragon had just roared. She witnessed the most frightening thing she had come to perceive up to that point. It had bumps on its long snout and sinister yellow teeth that jutted out at equally sinister angles. Its eyes, although distant, were an unavoidably cool, piercing blue. Its rough, scaly, corrupt-turquoise face was followed by a rough, scaly, looming, corrupt-turquoise body and finally a rough, scaly, looming, corrupt-turquoise tail complete with spikes and similar accessories that culminated into a perfect combination of fear, fright, and faintheartedness.

As a direct result of this trembling trifecta, she gasped suddenly, her mouth unhinged to the agape position, and her pupils dilated. The lightness that instantly occupied her chest, the sudden spasm that encompassed her legs and hooves to press the ground away, and the spontaneous way her face seemed to physically radiate a beam of awestruck energy contributed to her state of shock. It was especially terrifying to see it fly against a curtain of black smoke. It wretched another cone of fire downward and dove out of sight.

Fluttershy was stuck with nowhere to run. She witnessed it swoop down right at her from behind a wall of fog, staring down at her and piercing her to the core with its fierce eyes. It glided past her to land with a mighty stomp. In this fell swoop, the fog whooshed away dramatically. Tharur, now fully visible, turned to her excitedly. Awestruck, Fluttershy stood agape at what she saw standing amenably right in front of her.

“He’s here!” Tharur exclaimed excitedly as he bounced over along with the rest of the trekkers in a big semi-circle around the beast. It looked down benignly at the congregation. From out of a tuft of fog, Nare emerged and put his arm around Fluttershy, who was now shuddering uncontrollably. Her eyes were fixed on the dragon.
“Come now, Flutter,” Nare insisted. Beneath her, Fluttershy’s legs moved. There was a festive air intermingled with the absolute terror she experienced. Her legs trusted Nare more than the rest of her did. She was led up towards the coiled giant. The dragon sat down with its long, spiked tail in a lazy curl around itself, twitching. In addition, the huge naked membranes of its wings, crisscrossed with thick veins, were half-unsheathed and confiscated a huge partition of local sky. As she crept into its looming shadow, she could hardly bear witness to its grandeur. Dead-center with hundreds of the little dragon-people around her, she strained her eyes up in the most pitiful manner conceivable.

With its whole neck arched back, revealing a line of spikes running centerline through, the dragon had its head facing straight up. It wretched an isosceles cone of flame which extinguished after a brief burn in the sky, leaving only a small black cloud that drifted away leisurely. The dragon looked back down with malevolent-looking eyes.

It loudly seized air from in front of her. It seemed ready to expel it.

“Greetings,” went a low, neutral tone. “I am the one they call the ‘Elder’.”

I’m not dead. Run! Wait. No escape. Talk? How? Say something? What do I do? Um. Um!...

“You must be the… Fluttershy was it?”

She looked up at him. He had a meaningful but curiously incomplete smile.

I guess it’s worth the effort then.

“Yes I am. It is wonderful to meet your acquaintance,” she smiled back at him. She felt as if another being had commandeered her; controlled chaos had overcome her senses. Fluttershy noticed that one of his outward-jutting teeth was missing; it did not have a counterpart— at least not in its original location.

“I have heard much about you—,” he turned and released a bark of fire at a nearby tree. “My sincerest apologies—I have the worst allergies. I’ve had it for the longest time. Whenever I fly around here, I try to cough on the uninhabited spots.” He chuckled, loosing some jets of smoke as it led into a coughing fit. He directed it upwards once more.

Looking around, Fluttershy noticed that the assembled dragons were not paying all too much attention to the conversation. Mostly they were chatting amongst themselves relaxed. It was surreal.

“So where do you come from?” She inquired, trying to appear friendly and not at all delectable. A cold shiver ran down her spine.

“You seem frightened. I thought this might happen. Almost nothing here eats—other things that live and breathe. Mainly fruits and crops and so on. I am from another part of this world, not too far away. It’s mostly made up of large caves with dragons like me, but none of them are quite like me. They are all odd characters.”

“How so?” forgetting her imagined peril and starting to become intrigued.

“They are characters: one speaks only of the delicacy that is s tangerine peel—if you can believe such a thing—another speaks only of defeating this Galbatorix and being ridden, and still others only of killing humans or sheep. When I inquired as to what either humans or sheep are, they had no idea. Some are blisteringly cool-looking, some speak a language of pictographs I don’t understand, some believe they control the seasons, some are nice and intelligent, and some are nasty… I prefer to speak with ones from Munecom, really.”

“So—so you’re not here to eat me?”

“Eat you? I hardly know you!” he cried. The assembly burst out laughing.

“I can see you are a dragon of the flying sort, too. Odd…” The Elder paused and shakily inhaled, attempting to not provoke any further coughing. He carried the air of having all the time in the world. His eyes were transfixed upon Fluttershy, as if examining every particle. If these kind people accept you, I am to accept you, too,” the Elder stated proudly.”

His blankly staring eyes drew themselves into sudden focus, each of them gazing intensely into hers from each side of the massive skull. “Hm… Zarquon almighty—they gave it to you...” a hushed murmur reverberated from the great gullet, “I see that they have given you a part of me. They must really like you, Fluttershy.” She looked about herself confusedly. “It’s around your neck—losing that tooth wasn’t my most agile feat, but I am honored that they gave it to you.”

“Oh well thank you. It’s an honor sir, really,” Fluttershy mewed.

“Yes, yes. Now…Nare, to other matters: there are storms in the immediate vicinity, two or three days out. It seems best that they roll in…”

After a well-articulated briefing on weather patterns and their effect on the valley as well as the politics of the great dragons living in the land of the caves along with him, the Elder made it clear that he would be leaving. Following a brief coughing fit, he looked back at the only pink and yellow soul in the crowd. “Goodbye, Fluttershy and the people of Butzbik. Until next time.” He heaved upward with a few beats of his great wings. The assembly was buffeted, nearby trees and grass leaned, and it became difficult to open one’s eyes.

When the air ceased thrashing about, a dark circling figure called from far above, “Fluttershy, I will be passing through the valley every now and again. If you so choose, you may assist me in moving the clouds.”

With that, he soared away over a stalwart marble peak and was gone.

Nare moved his way to the middle of the already wavering semicircle. “Okay, everydragon. Time for breakfast!”

Questions and Answers

“What is it, Flutter? Is something wrong?”

“No, Hoov… Tonight just reminds me of a night long ago…” Fluttershy remarked, not looking down from the clouds blanketing the otherwise waning moon. She turned to look down upon his stout frame. He looked expectant. He wants to know about my past life. They all do. I guess they deserve to know everything about me if I know everything about them. “It’s late, but if we get done quickly tonight, I’ll tell you about it, okay? Then we’ll go home.”

“Sure!” He scampered off without looking back, a wide smile adorning his face as he shot through the undergrowth.

Is he ready to know? Is anyone? What will they think of me? Oh, Fluttershy! It’s not that horrible to have lived once and then have a new life all of a sudden, right? All of that was a lifetime ago, but it feels like it’s been more than that. I’ll just have to see what happens. I’ve told him that I will tell him, and I’m sticking to my word.

Thoughts pinged about her mind as she flitted a meter off the ground through sharp, pine-scented gusts. They were filled with the static of a coming storm, one she and the Elder had concocted a few nights prior. Everydragon was ready for it back at Butzbik, her home, but it just so happened that today was the day she ran out of blue berries. She never seemed to be able to escape such coincidence. A breeze whistled a smooth note through the tree limbs above and then subsided. The curly-q of her main was blown back, and the gust chilled her skin. She enjoyed the brisk weather; it was refreshing after a day underground.

She landed in order to navigate under some tricky branches she was sure were ahead. The air in between gusts was filled with the musty smell of the littered ground. Over the decay, each clawstep offered one or more of a variety of noises. Through this uneven ground, mischievous roots in the darkness provided an easy, if painful, trip for one’s face to the ground. In fact, it was so dark that a dragon could not see his claws in front of his face.

Unfazed by all of this, Fluttershy pressed on, the distant calls of the woodland creatures she knew giving her an idea as to her general location. Even the bears had yielded to her kindness after some coaxing. But when there were no calls and no light, she did not fret; she could find her way after traversing the same paths to the berry thickets innumerable times.

Soon I’ll be home again. Back to my friends. This mission was not the most pressing, but getting up early and conscripting Hoov would be a chore. After an internal dialogue finally elected to keep her word in revealing her past identity, thoughts of home and friendship kept her pushing under prickly bushes and through pokey, low-hanging branches.

Stopping to rest in a small clearing, Fluttershy recalled the breadth of her life there so far. There were so many incidents in which she had to be brave and unlock that unknown quantity of courage she had. To grow accustomed to the dragons, to meld into their society, to take risks in every conversation managing information and secrets—there were many happenings in which Fluttershy had to make it on her own. It left Fluttershy momentarily awestruck to realize how normal living had become to her. Despite this sudden surge of befuddlement, she stayed put as it was not like her to do something like hide behind a tree when alarmed suddenly.

Her mind free to meander, Fluttershy started to think those existential thoughts on who she was. She used to think that she was nothing without the ponies she cared about because without them, she incapable of doing anything. Her life amongst the dragons had taught her that she was herself out of her own volition. Her friends like Tharur and Fenchurch did not defend or aid her more than she aided or defended them; she felt natural among these dragons who looked so different and spoke so differently than her. Interestingly, she had come to realize recently that her lips were moving oddly when she spoke nowadays. Although she did not realize at the time, it had turned out that she was, in fact, speaking their language along with them, after so long speaking in her own tongue and relying on the Babel fish to convey as well as translate messages.

Fluttershy scratched at her mostly barren foreleg. She was still acclimating to her newest band: two white stripes surrounding one gold stripe, bestowed for her weather service. It was smaller but matched the one the Elder had been given eons prior.

The wind picked up again. Above, a few branches rattled and resonated with a roar. The word ‘roar’ had changed drastically for Fluttershy, too. Her mind no longer toyed with the phrases super-scary or really big and dangerous, especially not all the words all together in sentences. Here, alone in the big, dark woods among unknown entities, she felt safe and secure not for the inherent qualities of the surrounding environment, but for the inherent qualities of the small yellow-and-pink pony prancing down the forest path.

At long last, she located her destination just as it started to drizzle. It was not long until she would have to rise up out of the forest and race to the rendezvous point by wing, hopefully without losing any berries.

Fluttershy was counting by multiples of six, putting the berries in the first basket. At the seventh multiple, a hole opened up under her. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of million light years from end to end. She was sucked into it and emerged at a point back in time. Left in her place next to the basket was a steaming-hot cup of coffee too hot to drink then but too cold to take with. In another fit of improbability left by the fumes of the nothingth hole, the cup of coffee transformed into an ice-cold Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. The words the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster heard before it lost its new custodian were, “Oh no, not again.”

The words Fluttershy then heard were a computer saying, “At an improbability factor of eight million seven hundred and sixty-seven thousand one hundred and twenty-eight to one against.”

* * *

Once again in a corner, Fluttershy sat next to a light gray mare with a yellow mane and an off-kilter stare. The mare looked at Fluttershy and faded away gently as her personal improbability was too great for the surrounding environment. As the figure slowly dissolved into another stretch of space and time, the mare whispered, “See you soon, Fluttershy.” Not believing what she saw, Fluttershy looked up: a rabbit and a small man with a green hat sporting an improper fraction vaporized as well, but not before wishing her a happy unbirthday. Fluttershy was unable to believe this, either.

At her wit’s end, Fluttershy crouched low so as to not reveal herself to the inhabitants of the ship as it descended towards a massive ball of dust. Out a porthole next to her, she witnessed a bowl of petunias plummet alongside a whale, the two sharing their first and last moments in tandem. Fluttershy winced as they impacted the dusty planet, one making a larger dent than the other after naming a thing or two.

Out from a door next to Fluttershy, a few white mice darted past. Behind them they whispered, “Greetings! Don’t snitch, Fluttershy. We have business to attend to, you know.” Fluttershy complied, if for an ulterior reason than to tattle.

The situation forced upon Fluttershy did not provoke a reaction of frustration so much as a reaction of determinedness in ending the all-too familiar sensation of being without direction. Her life had taken such an unexpected turn that it no longer knew where it was going. Even so, Fluttershy was not about to give into circumstance, and she braced herself against the reality she was in with all the dauntlessness she could muster, determined to eke out an identity from the fortune the Universe had dealt.

Hearing the hatch at the far side of the ship’s bridge open and close with, “It’ll all end in tears, I know it,” Fluttershy got up and made her way to the exit. She snuck out right behind a robot whose compassion sensors were breaking trying to analyze her. Because of this, the paranoid android kept mum. Fluttershy trailed a group of lanky bipedal things, luckily obscured by the dust they kicked up in front of her.

As the convoy neared the crater formed by the impact of what were at one point nuclear missiles, the smell of freshly obliterated whale became overpowering. The mighty indentation stank of oil and blood, two reeks Fluttershy was not partial to. She hid behind the first lump of forcefully tenderized meat she encountered and peered out from one side, suppressing her gag reflex.

Three of the things went down into the crater and disappeared at the bottom. Fluttershy watched the thing in the robe and slippers dustily storm about around the edge of the crater while the robot turned itself off. Sensing no other options, Fluttershy rushed to the gaping hole at the bottom of the crater and dove down into the underground edifice therein, swooping neatly as she had practiced so many times before. Fluttershy walked down the corridor steadily, marveling at the abstruse latticework of tiles and symbols that adorned the walls.

Up ahead, the three bipeds were chatting away. All of a sudden, their part of the passageway filled with funny-colored smoke, and shortly thereafter, they were all on the ground unconscious.

* * *

Fluttershy waited around the corner of the doorway silently. She dared not enter the room, having followed the threes’ unconscious bodies as they were carried to the room by the Magratheans.She listened to the three in the room with bated breath as they woke up and marveled at gold, platinum, and fish. When the Magrathean escorts came to set the three in another room, Fluttershy shadowed them once again.

Then Fluttershy heard a male voice tell them that the mice would be seeing them. As the Magratheans left, she scurried back to the room in which the mostly hairless ones had previously marveled at rare metals. Fluttershy was in awe at what she saw:

It was her house. It was warm, had animals, smelled nice, and even had a few of the Cutie Mark Crusaders sound asleep in it. She looked upstairs. On the penultimate step to the top, she noticed a green number. It changed, subsequently leaving her in a room of postmodern murals. Some parts were nice, but others were not particularly to her taste, as Fluttershy was not the biggest proponent of contemporary art.

The room changed again, placing Fluttershy atop a promontory overlooking a valley ringed with marble-hooded mountains. This one was very familiar. The room changed again, this time filling rapidly with copies of her. Dazed by all of the sudden changes and feeling lonesome amidst the surplus of herself, Fluttershy left, following the echoes of the distorted voices along the smooth grand corridors.

At once, the sounds emanating from the room in which the people who were deposited grew nearer and nearer until she was once again hiding around the corner from it. The people sounded like they were having tea, which they were. Then, Fluttershy witnessed the one in sweaty, disheveled robes and slippers (the clothing clearly put in that state by Thursday morning mud) step off an aircar and shuffle through the doorway with an older, cleaner biped, one she had not seen before.

After a short bout of conversation with Frankie mouse and Benji mouse, the old man got back into the car. He looked around, and just as he was about to take off again, he spotted Fluttershy by the pink twist of hair she had neglected to conceal behind the corner. She did not want to run and was not in the mood, so she peered out cautiously, dilating her eyelids along with her pupils, making sure to bring her full countenance to bear in order to enhance her cuteness-factor to its highest potential. Fluttershy was aware of her inherent adorableness, of course.

All of a sudden, the conversation coming from the room became shrill. The man did not mind, however, and his eyes gleamed with excitement as they came to recognize Fluttershy. “You know the fjords up in the far North and the grand moraine of Manehatten?” the man asked excitedly as he jogged towards her. Fluttershy nodded unconsciously. “I made them! Oh you are undoubtedly my favorite! I’ve always wanted to meet you, but I couldn’t because of the reality contract and professional honor and such. Don’t worry about any of those things. Bureaucracy and such. Anyways, why in Zarquon’s name are you here of all places?”

“Well—I don’t really know—it’s a weird story,” she began to raise her voice over the conversation inside the room that was reaching a fever pitch.

“Well then get in the aircar. You can explain while I take you to see the factory floor,” the old man said as there was a crash in the room, “Hurry now!”

They got in the aircar and zoomed off as the door behind them burst open. Soon the doorway behind dwindled and then shank below the underground horizon while the inside of the world on all sides raced past faster than her eyes could fathom. She looked down at the instrument panels to stave off vertigo. “Well where do I start?” she inquired, trying to find footing for the commencement of the story as well as for her legs.

“Well, Fluttershy, start from the beginning.”

After a brief period of silence, she began, “A long time ago, in a past life, if you can believe it, I was out alone at night when this big white shoe zoomed in from out of the sky. I assume what happened is that I appeared inside of it along with a ton of horrible things, and then I ended up, after witnessing the weirdest show in my life, in another place where there weren’t any ponies—there were dragons. Then I lived there for a while, made friends, made a new life for myself, and the same thing happened on a similar occasion—the white shoe appeared and then I appeared inside of it only to survive on another world and to advance some inane cosmic plot, or so it seems to me. Here I am, across the Universe it seems.”

“You mean to tell me you were on that ship on the surface? The Heart of Gold?”

“I guess that’s the one. If so, twice.”

“Well my instrumentation is reading that your two encounters are each six billion and seven billion to one against. With improbability, you multiply, so your experience takes the number four spot on improbable events. The third was today,” the old man explained.
Fluttershy had no idea how to retort, so she allowed the man to continue speaking.

“What I am about to tell you may come as a surprise to you,” he said, making full eye contact with her.

“Okay then. Can I at least know your name?”

“It’s not that important,” the man insisted.

“If you say so.” Fluttershy did not want to be rude.

“Well I’ve said it a few times today to a far lesser being than you, so I suppose that it’s only right you get to know. I’ll be reckless for once,” he sighed and looked forward, unfazed by the dizzying lights that zipped past the aircar. “It’s… Slartibartfast,” he annunciated each syllable.

Fluttershy smiled warmly, taking care not to seem at all amused by the name. When she attempted to look at the multicolor-stream zipping past at incredible velocity, Fluttershy staggered to the side and was forced stare once again at the aircar’s instrumentation in order to regain her balance. “Alright then. Surprise me, Mr. Slartibartfast,” she challenged dizzily.

Hearing this, Slartibartfast giggled and jumped up once, shaking his curled up arms by his head most uncharacteristically. He regained poise and took a breath. “You see, we were told not too long ago—maybe thirty years—to commission a planet. Making planets, if you haven’t heard, is what Magrathea does. Most of us Magratheans stayed asleep for complicated economic reasons you may pay any passing hitchhiker who is well-versed in Magrathean history to recount in exchange for a ride to Alpha Centauri and a warm meal.

“But back to what is relevant: A few were awoken, not including myself, but some of my work was copied and given due credit to me after… Anyways, we had a client whom we are forced by contract, and for the customary privacy of our customers, to call by one name. This man from Earth, a planet now recently destroyed and soon to be recreated, is to be known amongst outsiders as G.N. Other than that, all I know is that he was a pretty successful business man. Something to do with steam, if my memory serves.” Fluttershy continued listening, debating whether or not to believe.

“Well this guy had a map of a place called ‘Equestria’ and a ton of written and animated material for us to work with. He threw money at us, unbeknownst to the residents of Earth. He wanted the Universe to see—he wanted them to see you and the rest of the Equestrians. Naturally, we complied.

Magrathea makes planets, and we made the planet of Equestria. From your account, it sounds like we also made the planet you were just on. It was commissioned by another Earthman, a real enthusiast on these dragons. Don’t ask.

“Back to Equestria: we engineered the planet around the revered television show My Little Pony Friendship is Magic and added a few necessary aspects—a planet has to be a planet, you know. We also put in millions of cameras to document you and the other five ponies’ (but sometimes another three’s) adventures for Galaxy-wide Sub-Etha. It’s been the most popular thing on the waves since the Vogons destroyed planet Arrested Development.”

Fluttershy was surprised. “So you mean to tell me that nodr—nopony in Equestria knows about this… this program, and it has been going on for as long as there has been an Equestria?”

“Until very recently, that is. As the show was in the middle of a production cycle, you vanished. And to answer your other question, there are at least two… ponies, as you say and think, who are ‘in on it’. One is a director while the other is an assistant director. It’s possible that a small support crew exists, too.

“What’s more important is that you, my favorite of all the ponies, and every—everypony in Equestria, have inspired an entire galaxy for years now. When it all shut down midseason—when you got picked up by the Heart of Gold—right after, we the Magratheans reset your world to the conditions right before your departure. It was pretty simple considering that a show as popular as yours is prepared for just about every contingency, renegade presidents included. Just today we finished it, and it really is in its pristine condition at the very point you were no longer there.” As he said this, the aircar zoomed into what appeared to be an infinite space. It seemed to Fluttershy, as every reference point twinkled out of existence behind, like they were not moving at all.

“This,” Slartibartfast referred with his outstretched arms matching his smile in breadth, “is our factory floor. In reality, the space is only a sphere three million miles across—though you’d be forgiven if you were to think that it’s infinite.”

They sped through the space until an arbitrary moment passed, and soon after, the aircar slowed gradually to stop in front a floating cube whitewashed and with a simple white door with a simple brass doorknob. “And here is where you make a decision,” Slartibartfast said, snuffling a bit with the knowledge that he only had a few fleeting twinkles of time left with his idol. He straightened out some by getting up from the driver’s seat and looking away. Together, he and Fluttershy walked out of the aircar and through the doorway.

The outside of the small cube, only a few meters to an edge, was an illusion. Inside, it appeared ten times larger than it did on the outside. The walls were covered in various sets of instrumentation and pipes of all sizes. Slartibartfast shuffled to a small keypad fixed to the wall and typed in a few numbers. An ovular portal opened up behind Fluttershy, prompting her to turn and face it. A few more keys were pressed, and a second portal opened up. Fluttershy looked back at Slartibartfast as just two keys were pressed, the first key pressed on the pad, which had nine numbers arranged in a square and one key below, was in the middle row on the left-hand column. The second was on the bottom row in the central column. Something zipped into their part of the cube and stopped.

What Fluttershy saw when she turned back around was a green tube filled with some sort of bubbly liquid. Floating in it was something very similar to herself. “It looks weaker than I remember,” Fluttershy remarked at the creature locked in indefinite slumber.

“It’s you. Well it’s almost you. It’s a perfect recreation of you the instant before you were gone from Equestria. In fact, it has all the same memories. Now, behind you are those two portals. Your personal, individual fate is up to you, Fluttershy. Each portal leads right back to a forest you know in the exact spot you left them. The one on the left is your first life while the one on the right is your most recent one, although I detect a very dangerous beverage in the vicinity there. You can guess as to the ramifications of your decision, whatever it may be.” Slartibartfast blew sorrowful mucus into a handkerchief recently pulled from a pocket of his.

“If you go back to your original home, you have to act and grow as a pony the same way you did before. It’s okay that you’re in on it if you don’t tell a soul the secret. Really, there is no interference with the outside Universe, and everything there is as real as this room we are in, or as real as me, Slartibartfast. That I assure you wholeheartedly. Who is to say that the Universe as you or I know it isn’t just another fiction?” He smiled weakly through the tears in his eyes.

“Is the beverage really dangerous?” Fluttershy could not help but ask. As for the whole show thing, she knew that what she had always considered reality was reality, and that reality in of itself is simply what one believes and perceives is so.

“Oh yes it’s terribly dangerous, but it’s really quite nice,” Slartibartfast’s responded as his eyes zoned away nostalgically.

Seeing no reason to tarry any longer, the sublime plurality of all Fluttershy past, present, parallel, and future, gripped the little pony and stiffened the small figure. It turned about to face Slartibartfast. Finally ready to return, it took off its bands and its necklace and asked with the voices of all the aforementioned forms, “You can add all of my memories up to this point to the creature in the tank, correct?”

Slartibartfast, taken aback by the straightforwardness of the question and sincerity of implied motives, replied, “Uh. Er—ye—yes we can.” He turned around, and his fingers flew across the keypad for a few moments. There was a short beep from the keypad and a steadily increasing bubbling in the holding tank. Then, unseen forces gripped Fluttershy as she advanced mechanically towards a portal.

“Wait!” Slartibartfast rummaged in a chest and pulled out a pair of tweezers. “One more thing.” He brought them up against the side of her head, finding her ear under the thick mane. Slartibartfast held the unremarkable tweezers against her outer ear, cupping her head against his chest while he did so. Fluttershy began to wonder why he was hugging her for so long. “Almost done,” Slartibartfast said, trying to keep himself businesslike. All of a sudden, Fluttershy felt a slimy sensation deep in her ear tugging outward. An uncomfortable moment later, in front of her was a miniscule yellow fish in the grips of the tweezers.

“If I didn’t have one, too, you wouldn’t be able to understand me,” Slartibartfast explained. Fluttershy was not inclined to contemplate his remark, so she established in her mind that it was time she got on with her decision.

“Goodbye, Slartibartfast,” her soft, regular voice cut in for a moment, and then sternly, “You know what to do.”

In a dazzle of pink and yellow, Fluttershy was gone. The only sounds left in the room were the whoosh of decompression and an old man sobbing tears of immense loss.

Six Times Seven

Hoov grew testy as he awaited his mentor’s arrival. The moon had shifted noticeably along its eventide trail as he had waited, and it poked through the dusty gray overlap of cloud banks every so often to survey the ground below. The icy drizzle that percolated down the various layers of the forest dripped and dribbled upon Hoov’s head in a miserably syncopated rhythm. The sorry little apprentice had been expecting his mentor with nothing save a thin layer of scales to insulate him from the driveling foliage.

Hoov was about ready to go looking for her when she appeared out of the undergrowth whisking a now criminally abused towel at a stupefied bear clutching a glass. The bear’s mind had been thoroughly redistributed by what had previously been in the vessel; he felt like his brains had been smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Feeling for the very first time a profound sense of direction, the pony surveyed the dense diluvial forest and urged, “Hoovaloo, let’s go home.” They walked abreast between the bushes that were similar to juniper for a silent stretch of time, mentor and mentee. At long last, as they felt their way back in the dark together, the pony began to tell a long story: “You see, Hoov, I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be…”

* * *

Across the Universe, on a most innocuous evening, Fluttershy found herself in the middle of a vibrant forest. Accordingly, the only sounds available to her ears were the wind and the bats. The ground smelled strongly of must and was littered with innumerable twigs, leaves, and fungi, but to Fluttershy’s thinking, the forest seemed too clean and too fresh. Her analysis was interrupted when she noticed that there were some newly-picked blueberries in the basket at her feet.

Already it was drizzling. I should get home before Dash’s storm comes in. Fluttershy took to the air and raced back towards her cottage for the first time in a long time. To the world around her, however, she had never left. Looking down from above, the forest shimmered, reflecting the moon’s silver light. From this perspective, each tree looked like it belonged where it was put; it was as if everything had grown so naturally that it was neat and trim.

To be safe, Fluttershy made sure to stop flying a good ways away from her house and trotted the rest of the way back. Every so often, she encountered patches of desiccated roots that curved erratically, bursting from and then diving back into equally parched soil that was in dire need of a rainstorm. Sharp, whirling gusts brewed a shivering odor of sweet pine and churning static that marked the advance of a gale.

In sight of the clearing in which her house was situated but still a good ways into the forest, Fluttershy stopped. Something poked out from behind a tree in mesmerizing multicolor waves. She moved in to investigate, circumventing the general area of the color. Fluttershy crept around without trepidation as she tiptoed silently and held her breath. At long last, she was upon her quarry.

Standing before her when she pounced out from behind a sturdy trunk were Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. They turned around with a start and then, regaining composure, they stared at her sternly, but not without a glimmer of deep compassion mixed with admiration and pride embedded in their eyes. Luna put her hoof over her mouth and ‘sh-ed’ very softly. Celestia winked for an agonizingly personal second, as if to say, “Nothing’s gonna change my world,” and then she flew off, flapping in great whooshes. Luna nodded briefly, maintaining eye contact with Fluttershy. Suddenly, she darted off in a great flying leap after what Fluttershy could only assume was her sister. The two were briefly silhouetted against the moon before they disappeared against the gently beating backdrop of stars Fluttershy had parted from for so long.

Fluttershy snuck back to her house, careful to wake neither the chickens in their coop nor the other birds in their respective houses. She glanced at the back of her house as she passed it. Nothing was different. In spite of her attempt to sneak through the front door, she was forced to bear the awful creaking it produced for its entire rotation.

She peered up at the stairs. There was no green number. At closer inspection, the penultimate stair from the top had, in green letters, ‘Newell’.

Fluttershy deposited the basket of blueberries on her kitchen counter and then curled up in her bed to sleep, feeling a deep sense of belonging in, but not restricted to, the cozy confines of the snug blanket of safety that she so perfectly fit into. As she rolled into a comfortable position and sighed, there coalesced in Fluttershy’s heart a new sense of direction, for she knew that tomorrow would be the first day of her new life.