The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. The meal had been pretty good, especially considering the fact that I knew that hospital food was barely above edible, and there had been enough to where I wasn’t that hungry by the end of it. That was another thing that I hadn’t expected when I had been told that I had been out for the better part of a month. Of course, there was the chance that they had fed me somehow. That had to be the case, otherwise I would definitely have lost weight over the time.

That aside, I was now bored.

I didn’t have any books to read. There wasn’t a single pony here that seemed to want to have a conversion. Princess Twilight probably would have spoken with me, but I wasn’t an idiot. She would have likely pretended that she still cared, or that she wanted me to be her student even without some fake punishment that had started this whole thing. I knew that she wasn't a bad pony, she probably would have believed it at first herself.

That wouldn't have lasted forever, though.

I had seen her on the other side. She had made quick friends with the others. She had even made it to where I made quick friends with the others. All that added up to the idea that she might have wanted to be my friend, maybe even best friend. That didn't add up to being a teacher, something that was the most difficult thing a pony could do.

It was a good thing that I had sent her off with those words.

It wasn’t even like she had much to teach me anyway.

I needed to get my mind off of that. It was good to have some time for introspection, but this was getting to be too much. Maybe the time would have passed quicker if I got some sleep. That didn’t do anything about the next few days, but it definitely did something about the current situation. And, really, that was the most important thing. Tomorrow was a problem for … well, tomorrow. There was no reason why I needed to worry about it today.

And so I went to sleep. The bed was surprisingly comfortable, it didn’t take that much effort beyond closing my eyes.

I was in the castle, Canterlot Castle.

This wasn’t right.

It wasn’t just the fact that I was in the castle that was wrong, but something else. I saw myself, and not just in one of the many mirrors that Princess Celestia seemed to have all over the place. I, literally, saw a younger version of myself. It was back when I had been her student, when I had been learning from the Princess of the Sun. Things had been so much different back then. Some things were better, and some things were worse.

“Come on, Princess Celestia. I already know basic levitation. I can lift a dozen books and juggle them.” I had been so arrogant back then. It was a good thing that I had grown out of that. “And I can do that while moving the bookshelf that they’d be sitting in.” It had only taken something as simple as that to make me proud of myself back then. “Of course I can lift myself.”

I remembered this.

“Oh?” Princess Celestia’s tone was questioning, as if she had wanted to see me do it. “If you can do it, that would prove you’re stronger than even I thought you’d be at this point. But if anyone can prove me wrong, Sunset, it’s you.” Back then, she had sounded so sure of me. She had really thought so highly of me. Even though she had known that it was difficult to do, impossible for a pony that was just learning the basics, she had seemed to genuinely believe in me.

Or maybe I had been naive.

I knew how this ended, so I started to walk away. As soon as I left the room, the entire castle seemed to change before my eyes. I wasn’t in the hall that was in front of the room I had been in. This was the room that I had gone into later, when I had failed. This was the room where I didn’t exactly deal with my failure in a way that I should have handled it.

“It’s not fair.” I watched as the younger me started to kick some of the things in her room. “I bet Celestia could have taught me how to lift myself. All I needed to know was the basics.” I had never been one that had dealt with failure well. Normally, it only meant that I was going to go to sleep for the night. This time, it had meant that I was kicking stuff around in my room.

Actually, if I remembered right it was also one of the last times that I had done that sort of thing. This had been my last tantrum about some small failure.

“You have the potential to do so many things, Sunset.” Princess Celestia called from within the doorway. “You’re the greatest student that I’ve ever had. I doubt I will ever get another student with your potential.” That word haunted me to this day. If she had been right, and I was her greatest student, then a lot of the things that happened wouldn’t have happened. Of course, not even Princess Celestia knew everything. “With the way you pick up on things, I doubt it'll take a month before you’re able to lift yourself.”

“But why can’t I now?” The question had seemed to important at the time. Everything else seemed kind of insignificant next to the question of how I was going to lift myself.

“Because your magic is working against you.”

The younger me looked up at her. It hadn’t made any sense at the time. My magic was what caused me to be able to lift things. I just hadn’t thought of any possible way that my magic was going to make it more difficult to lift something. “What do you mean, Princess? I thought my magic would be the thing that helped me lift, not hindered.”

The initial response had been a chuckle. “It’s because the magic within you is inherently resisting your attempt. Even though it’s your magic that’s trying to do the lifting, it still resists.” I still didn’t like the fact that it did that. I had since figured out how to stop it from resisting me, but it still took more effort than it should have. “You just have to figure out how to make sure that it doesn’t fight you. I know you’ll come up with something, my shining student.”

The younger me had walked up to her, nuzzling her as the lesson reached a good conclusion.

Then I felt myself get shaken.

Eyes opened up to see that I was in the company of Prince Shining Armor. I also noticed that I was chained to the bed. It turned out that I had been dreaming, which in hindsight should have been obvious. It also turned out that I hadn’t woken up before I had been chained down. I barely had much room to move.

This was terrible.

“Twiley told me that you told her to leave. Told me that you didn’t want to be her student.” I looked up at him with a worried look on my face. He wasn’t exactly my best friend, or even my friend at all. I knew that this was going to end poorly for somepony, and I had a strong feeling that it was going to be ending poorly for me. “That means you broke the terms of your release. Cadance was disappointed, but I couldn’t be happier. It means that I get to make sure that you’re no longer a threat to anypony.”

As he moved, a couple of guards moved around me. One of them did something to my horn, it felt terrible. The other had something that looked like a surgical saw. I knew what was going to happen now. Princes Twilight had told me that her brother had wanted my horn removed, and now he was going to get exactly what he had wanted.

There wasn’t much I could do about it.

I closed my eyes and got ready for the pain to start.

Suddenly, the room filled with a bright light. There was a dark blue mare, slightly smaller than Celestia. She actually looked a little like the Old Mare’s Tale of Nightmare Moon, but only a little. It took a second, in my panic, to realize that this was Princess Luna. “Worry not, my child. This isn’t real.” I assumed that she meant that in a general way. It would have been amazing to learn that I was the daughter of some sort of royal, though.

Wait, this had been part of the dream as well?

I honestly didn’t know how to respond at this point.

“I don’t have much time, so I’ll make this quick.” At least this wasn’t going to be too long. “You have nothing to fear when it comes to your horn. I have seen that your magic will rise far, and you will change the destiny of all unicorn.” I … I didn’t know what to make of that. That was certainly a bit of an ego boost, really. I was going to change the destiny of all unicorn. “Farewell, Sunset Shimmer. And be careful when you run into my sister…” With that, she faded from the room and the entire room faded with her.

Almost immediately, I opened my eyes and shot up. There was still that same, nice, pain from the before. The funny thing was that it should have been a lot more obvious that it had all been a dream.

Darn it, Luna.

That was something you should have led with. I didn’t even know anything about this supposed meeting with the Princess of the Sun. I knew that I was starting to wonder if I even wanted the meeting to take place. It wasn’t just the fact that Princess Luna had warned me about her, though that certainly didn’t help, but there was something about the way that we had parted company that didn’t lend itself to a good reunion for either of us.

I wondered who it was going to be worse for. If she had her way about it, going from what Princess Luna had told me, it was definitely going to turn out worse for me. Of course, that was going on the notion that there was even anything for her to confront me about. Princess Twilight likely would have told her everything already, everything about what had happened on the other side at least. I honestly didn’t know what it was that she would have hated me for.

Of course, there was also another possibility.

This could have all been just a dream. Obviously it had been mostly, but there was the idea that Princess Luna was just a construct of a mind that was trying to exert control over the dream. The idea that Luna was going through the dreams of others just felt weird. It just seemed like she likely had so much more that she needed to do, as the Princess of the Night. That title had been the only thing that had made it seem plausible for it to be true in the first place.

I needed to just not think it through, it wasn’t important.

I looked up at the ceiling, a thousand or so thoughts filled my head. There was something going on here, something that I had to fix. None of my friends liked Sunset Shimmer. The closest I got was that Applejack didn’t hate her completely. I also didn’t know what it was that Pinkie Pie thought about her. I normally assumed that she liked almost everypony, aside from Trixie, but I would have assumed that Fluttershy would have forgiven her as I did.

It was obvious that she wasn’t exactly in the forgiving mood.

That was something that I was going to have to have to do something about. There was no way that I was going to be able to teach Sunset Shimmer if all of my friends disliked her. They came by a lot, and we spent a lot of time together. It would have been nice if they had instantly hit it off, and then they could have become best friends. I could have taught her magic, and she could have gotten more friends than she had before.

Of course, that thought brought about questions of its own

What was I going to teach her? If she had been a new student with no knowledge, or little knowledge, it would have been easier. Sweetie Belle was the example that came to mind. She didn’t have any instruction beforehand. That made it easy to know what she knew, which made it easier for me to come up with a lesson plan. I didn’t know the extent of Sunset’s former lessons, beyond the fact that she had obviously learned from Celestia.

There was also the fact that she had known more about what the Elements of Harmony could do than I had.

The other question was if I was going to be able to teach her anyway. She didn’t seem to want me to teach her. No, no, there was something else that I wasn’t aware of. There was something that told her that I didn’t actually want to teach her. But that didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t think of a single thing that I had done that would have made her think that. When I had last seen her, I had introduced her to ponies … errrr, people who seemed like they were going too be her friends.

She even seemed to react to my friends as if they were their counterparts from Mirror-Equestria.

Maybe I needed to focus. If I focused on each problem until I fixed them, then moved on to the next, things wouldn't be too terribly bad. I just had to start thinking of my problems, then I had to give them an order of importance. They also had to be given an order of difficulty. After that, it was possible that I would have been able to choose the order in which I was going to deal with them. All of this relied, heavily, on something that I was amazing at.

This relied on a list.

List of problems and explanations

None of my friends like Sunset Shimmer. Most of them tried to talk me out of making her my student. Fluttershy knocked her out (something I need to figure out how she did). This could be fixed if I spoke with them, and helped them work through whatever it is that they dislike about her.

I don’t know what Sunset Shimmer has been taught. That makes a lesson plan impossible. I don’t know, as of now, how to deal with that.

Sunset doesn’t seem to want to be my student, and doesn’t seem to think I want her to be my student. I need to figure out why, and I need to fix whatever it is that’s causing her to think like this. The only pony who can help me out with this is Princess Celestia.

Princess Celestia wants Sunset Shimmer dead. I need to figure out why, and then I need to talk her out of the idea.  I don’t know how I’m actually going to do the second part, though the first is easily figured out if I talk to her.

I had the four big things out on paper. There were likely more things that would come up as I went along, and some of them were bigger than a single number would have led ponies to believe, but they were the main things. The next step was to figure out which ones were going to have to be done first and which ones were going to have to be done last. That meant I had to figure out which ones were more important to me, as well as which ones were more difficult.

Alright, I had to think.

The first thing I needed to do was probably talking to my friends. They were my friends, I was worried about all of them. I also wanted to know why they all felt the ways they did. It was also likely the easiest of the four. I knew that my friends weren’t the types that would hide things from me. Once we had everything out, I knew that I was going to be able to do something about it. My friends weren’t completely unreasonable, after all, even if they had reached poorly to the idea that she was going to be my student.

What was I going to do second?

The second thing was likely something to do with Celestia. I needed to talk to her about Sunset Shimmer. That was something that would actually fix two problems at once. I needed to figure out what she had against Sunset first, though. If Princess Celestia was going to try to kill her, or at the very least wanted her dead, the idea that she was going to help me figure out the problem was significantly diminished. This one was going to be the most difficult, as it involved me trying to convince Princess Celestia that her strong feelings were wrong.

The third was obviously to figure out what Sunset’s problems were. I needed to get those out, it was the only way I could have dealt with them. If that didn’t happen, there was no way that she was actually going to be convinced to be my student. After I knew what it was, that was when I was going to be able to plan this one out more. I didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t able to completely plan this one out, but it was impossible. I didn’t have the information needed, which was something that I needed to get from Princess Celestia.

The last one depended on her being my student. I had enough time to plan out how to sole it, but I wanted to come up with something right now. I wanted to be able to have these things planned out if she said yes. The only ideas I came up with seemed like mediocre ones. The first idea that I came up with was to simply ask her. It was based on the obviously true idea that she knew whitish had been taught.

That idea was also one that was likely to take a long time.

My other idea was to test her. This idea was based around the idea that I had learned for many years and knew a lot about magic. I was capable of coming up with something of a written test. It was going to have to be difficult, obviously, if I wanted it to be sufficient to test her. It also had to be extensive if I wanted it to mean anything. The downside was that there was a chance that she was just bad at tests, and that this would have simply provided me with the knowledge that she was bad at tests.

That was something that I was going to have to put more thought into.

I really didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have enough information to come up with a plan for half of these problems. I also didn’t like the fact that I was sure I was missing problems. Then again, the list was sure to grow as I went through the ones that I did have written down. Right now I just had to come up with a plan for tomorrow. My entire month’s plans had been ruined already, and I hadn’t made them as extensive as I had wanted to on the notion that Sunset might have woken up at any point.

I hated not being able to plan out my month.

Twilight’s Daily Schedule

Wake up at sunrise, comment on how beautiful it is.

Go downstairs, try to make breakfast for myself

Likely fail, hopefully not by setting fire to my cereal again

Head down to Sugarcube Corner, get something for breakfast

Try to get Pinkie Pie’s attention for a conversation (remember to bring something shiny in bad, or maybe some balloons)

Figure out Pinkie’s opinion of Sunset and find a way to make it more positive if necessary.

Find Rainbow Dash (this one could take the longest)

Talk Rainbow into liking Sunset if possible

Stop by Sweet Apple Acres to talk to Applejack

Talk to her about Sunset Shimmer

Head over to Fluttershy’s cottage.

Talk to her about Sunset Shimmer, console her about why she had kicked her.

Head over to Carousel Boutique.

Talk to Rarity about Sunset Shimmer

Worry about stomach rumbling, as I liked haven’t eaten all day

Get dinner at Sugarcube Corner

Talk to Pinkie Pie about what I needed to do to fix the problems

Head back to the library as it’s probably dark

Write out tomorrow’s schedule

Let Owlyscious in

Comment about how I wished Spike was around

Ponder writing a letter to Rainbow and Spike

Write a letter to Rainbow and Spike

Go to bed

I looked that it, and quickly realized that it was more of a list and less of a schedule. I needed to work on it a little more before I went to sleep.

Twilight’s actual schedule

6:00 to 6:05- Wake up, comment on how beautiful the morning sky is.

6:05 to 6:15- Get ready for the coming day. This involves brushing my teeth, brushing my hair, checking to see if I’m out of quills or parchment, and then heading down for breakfast.

6:15 to 6:30- Attempt to make breakfast, likely ending in failure. Congratulate myself for not setting cereal on fire again, if relevant. Put out fire if one occurs.

6:30 to 6:35- Lament the fact that I can’t cook without Spike around, and wish he was around.

6:35 to 7:00- Head down to Sugarcube Corner for breakfast. Act as though I’m going to try something new, but get a bagel with creme cheese as normal. Give a tip, likely as much as what the meal itself cost.

7:00 to 7:05- Convince Mister Cake that the shop deserves a tip the size of the bagel.

7:05 to 7:10- Convince Pinkie Pie to talk to me.

7:10 to 8:00- Get Pinkie’s opinion on Sunset Shimmer, figure out a way that she could become friends with her.

8:00 to 11:00- Find Rainbow Dash, and talk to her about Sunset Shimmer. Figure out what the biggest problem is and come up with a way to fix it.

11:00 to 2:00- Head over to Sweet Apple Acres to talk to Applejack. We will likely talk through lunch, which I will happily join her. If she doesn’t ask, ask her if I can join her.

2:00 to 4:00- Head over to Fluttershy’s cottage and talk to her. Figure out what I can do to help her overcome her problems with Sunset Shimmer.

4:00 to 7:00- Head over to Carousel Boutique. Figure out how to help Sunset Shimmer and Rarity become friends. Ask Rarity why she wanted me to teach Sweetie Belle and think about teaching her as well.

7:00 to 7:30- Head back to Sugarcube Corner for dinner. Eat said dinner.

7:30 to 8:00- Tell Pinkie Pie about everything and how I had gotten every one of our friends to give Sunset Shimmer a chance.

8:00 to 8:10- Head back to the library.

8:10 to 8:30- Write out tomorrow’s schedule.

8:30 to 8:32- Let Owlyscious in

8:32 to 8:35- Lament, again, about how Spike isn’t around

8:35 to 8:45- Contemplate writing a letter to Rainbow and Spike

8:45 to 9:15- Write the letter anyway

9:15 to 9:17- Choose a random book from the non-fiction section to read in bed before I go to sleep.

9:17 to 11:00- Read a little of the book and make some notes on what I learned.

I was proud of myself for using the daily word, which I used to keep my vocabulary up, twice in the schedule. There never seemed to be good times to use the word ‘lament’.

That seemed like a good enough schedule for the day. I had left plenty of time for me to talk to each of my friends, after taking into account their personalities. It also left me with enough time to get plenty of sleep for the next day. I didn’t have anything big to study, so the past few days had ended at roughly the same time as tomorrow seemed scheduled to. My only problem with it was that I was starting to feel as though I wasn’t getting enough done. Tomorrow was going to be a big day for fixing problems, but before that it hadn’t been as big.

Maybe after tomorrow I needed to put some exercise time in. Or maybe after tomorrow I needed to come up with something big to study.

Right now, though, my main focus was on trying to go to sleep. Tomorrow was a big day, I needed to be ready for it.

Roughly Midnight

Maybe that nap hadn’t been the best idea. Either that, or I was really just bored. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of things that I could have done while I waited those four days.

Well, it was three at this point.

There were plenty of games here. None of them were games that I could have played by myself. Even if I hadn’t told Princess Twilight to leave, she would have gone home by now. There was also the fact that they all seemed like games that a small child would have enjoyed. The worst of the lot was Battle Clouds. There wasn’t any strategy to it, there was simply luck that decided if a pony was able to hit any of them.

Of course, there were also books.

Contrary to popular belief, as ponies seemed to have some weird idea of what a student of Celestia did and liked to do, I didn’t enjoy reading. I did it when I had to, when it came to something that was going to help me with what I was doing. I had never done it for leisure, something that I was almost being forced to do out of boredom. It was either that or stare at the ceiling, and I had already counted the tiles a dozen times. I had even counted dots on each tile, which had taken very little time.

Then the nurse had come by and put a book that she had called her favorite down on the table. It was something called ‘Daring Do’, which was a series that I had heard about before. From what I had heard, it was a series that was intended to get young ponies to like reading. It didn’t seem like something that a grown mare would have enjoyed. I was more than a little skeptical about the idea that I might have liked it at all.

Unfortunately, they didn't have any books about horn-related problems that they were going to let me see. The best they offered was to do a scan on my horn, and that was only able to be done when there was a trained doctor around. Apparently he had gone home for the day, something about the fact that he needed sleep.

So I was stuck with this book, and so I opened the cover and got to reading.

I just hoped that it wasn’t as awful as the cover at, and the initial few paragraphs, led me to believe. If it was, then I was going to have a bad time. It wasn’t like the nurse with the books was likely going to come around until morning. That meant that I was either going to have to read it or I needed to find a way to force myself back to sleep.

My bets were on the idea that I was going to have to force myself to go to sleep.

The Next Morning

As soon as the sun was up, I was up.

I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t woken up with the sun. It had started even before I had become Princess Celestia’s student, and it hadn’t changed afterward. After all, Celestia was obviously up when the sun rose. I doubted she ever really slept, or even if she did if it was for any large length of time. Maybe that was something that I needed to ask her, since I had never actually gotten around to doing it before.

I shook my head, this wasn’t the time to let my mind wander. Today was going to be a long day, and it was going to be a rather full one. As I turned to look at the sunrise, I couldn’t help but marvel at how it looked. There was something about the colors, or possibly how one moved into the next, that I didn’t think I would ever grow bored of. “Even after all this time, every day is just so beautiful.” I would have said that even if it hadn’t been scheduled.

The fact that it was scheduled only meant that I had designated some time for it.

Actually, I didn’t know why I had put five minutes for it. I was awake, I had looked at the sunrise, and I had thought about how beautiful it was. That had only taken two minutes out of the five, although that was because I had woken up fairly quickly. Maybe I had been looking forward to getting up, and getting all of this done. It was important that I did it, after all. I wasn’t just affecting my life, or my friends lives, but I was affecting Sunset’s life as well.

As I continued to think about this, I put the toothpaste on the toothbrush.

As I continued to brush my teeth, I pulled the schedule over to me. The first thing was quickly marked off the list, and the second was going on quickly. I had just finished brushing my teeth, and the hairbrush was moving over to my hair. There weren’t that many knots. Maybe it had something to do with my change in diet. I had looked over my nutrient intake, and I had done some research on the things that helped with hair growth and health. Either that, or maybe I just hadn’t rolled around as much last night as I had before.

Next on the list was to check on my supplies.

I walked out of the bathroom, and over to the desk. It looked as though I had a stack of parchment, enough for the next few days, and a stack of quills. I seemed to be going through fewer of them recently, for whatever reason. I probably needed to figure out what it was that was causing that. It was a good thing, the fact that I still had enough supplies to last a few days, but it was still something that was outside of what could be considered normal.

Now I just had to do downstairs and figure out what I was going to eat for breakfast. Cereal made the most sense.

I needed to figure out how to cook.

Today was a gold star day on the ‘set cereal on fire’ front. I didn’t even know how I had done that last time. The toast had turned out to be mush, and the orange juice had been burnt. Another possible answer to this was for me to come up with a spell. If I was able to make breakfast appear with magic, there was a lot less chance that I was going to be forced to go to Sugarcube Corner every day like I seemed to be.

“Things would be so much easier if Spike were still here.” He had tried to teach me how to cook once, and only once. It had ended with him somehow being covered in green fire. Normally, that was only reserved for his dragon fire, but somehow I had created it while trying to create an apple pie. I had thought about asking Applejack to teach me how to do that, but Spike had told me that it was something of a lost cause.

I was starting to think that he was right.

I was already on the fifth item of the list and I was already about ten minutes ahead of schedule. That was something great, but I didn’t know if it was going to last. With everything working as it had, I might not have placed enough time on the schedule to talk to Rainbow Dash. Then again, there was always the chance that things were going to be easier with somepony else, and that it would have freed some time to talk to Rainbow Dash.

That was the bad thing about this schedule, it relied on far too many unknowns.

It was really a good thing that everything was becoming a pattern. I was able to do my thinking while I went through a lot of it. Even the walk to Sugarcube Corner was something that was being built into muscle memory, though that probably wasn’t something that could be considered a good thing by most ponies. I also needed to pay attention to the fact that there were other ponies, and they likely had something to say to me.

That thought still weirded me out

A shake of my head as I looked at the shop-slash-house that was the best bakery in town. Inside, there was my normal breakfast, there was Pinkie Pie that I was going to be able to talk to. Four of the day’s items were going to be able to be done from here, more than that if I was to count the few items that I needed to come back here later to do. A deep breath, and I walked through the door and into Sugarcube Corner.

There was a bagel with creme cheese being finished as I walked in, and it was on the counter by the time that I walked up to it.

“Here you go, Princess Twilight.”

It was good to have a pattern. They had gotten it ready for me, they had known that I was going to be here around this time. For the life of me, though, I had to ask. “But what if I had ordered something different? I could have tried a donut, or maybe a slice of pie or cake.” None of that was true, but it could have been. There were plenty of items on the list, eventually I was going to try one or two of them for breakfast.

Not today, but some day!

Mr Cake just looked at me. “You haven’t ordered anything different since the day you came to Ponyville more than three years ago, your highness.” That was a good point, but it might not have been true today. It was, but maybe it wasn’t going to be the same tomorrow.

“You’re right. That’ll be three bits, right?” With that, I pulled out six bits and placed them on the counter. “That’s three for the meal, and three for a tip.” I was ready for the rebuttal. I knew it was coming, he was going to tell me how the tip wasn’t warranted. Then I was going to point out why it was, and five minutes or so later he was going to cave in. My schedule might have been changed by him earlier, but I was sure that this wasn’t going to change.

“Thanks for the tip, your highness.”

My eye actually twitched, I felt it.

This entire day was being thrown off schedule. There was the fact that I had done everything at the house quicker, that I had gotten my bagel quicker, that he wasn’t arguing about the tip. “Are you sure you don’t want to argue with me a little?” That sounded far more pathetic than I meant it. Everything was just falling apart on the schedule. It wasn’t even 6:45, and I was already at the item that was shortly after 7:00.

“I guess I can get Pinkie for you to argue with, your highness. I’ve just given up on it.”

I did have to talk to Pinkie anyway. This was probably a good thing anyway. I was freeing up time for when one of my friends needed to talk with me longer. Whether it was Rainbow Dash or Applejack, or one of my other friends, one of them was likely to take longer than scheduled. An additional fifteen or so minutes was going to make a dent on the change. “That would be great, Mr Cake. I’ll just be over there eating breakfast.” I pointed over to one of the tables, and started to talk over to it.

I took a bite of the bagel, it was as delicious as it always was.

By the time that I had taken the last bite of the bagel, Pinkie had shown up. “Sooooooo.” Pinkie started, obviously not completely sure why she was there. “I’m told you wanted to argue with me about something? That didn’t make any sense, we’re friends and friends rarely argue. They certainly don’t go to the person’s house just to argue.” Obviously Mr Cake hadn’t told her a lot about it, or maybe he had been confused as well.

When I thought about what I had said, it hadn’t made much sense.

“Actually, Pinkie, forget about arguing.”

“Yay, no arguing. This calls for a ‘Twilight didn’t argue with me’ party!” I shook my head, a smirk on my face. “Oh, we can have some balloons, some cake, some ice cream, and some cake.” I knew better than to point out that she had said cake twice. I had once, and she had pointed out that she always fixed two cakes in case one of us didn’t feel like eating the other flavor. They were always varied flavors, too, so there was actually the chance that eventually she would have chosen something that one of our friends didn’t like.

“Actually, Pinkie, I was hoping to talk to you about Sunset Shimmer. I was hoping you could tell me what you thought about her from the short meeting yesterday.”

“Well… she seemed nice enough. She didn’t seem anything like the pony you told us about, which meant that she must have changed. And that’s all because you taught her!” I couldn’t help it, I blushed at the comment. The idea that I had such a great effect on her life wasn’t something that I had actually put in that light. It wasn’t something that I was going to take much credit for. “And that’s probably why you wanted her to be your student. I mean, you already taught her about friendship, so there’s that.”

“Wait, so you’re alright with her being my student?”

“Well, yeah.” This was turning out to be even easier than I had thought it was going to be. “I mean, everypony deserves a second chance.” I was almost tempted to ask if this extended to Trixie, but I knew better than that. Everypony had somepony that they didn’t get along with, and it seemed that Trixie was going to be that pony for Pinkie. “There was actually something that I wanted to ask you about that had to do with Sunset Shimmer.”

I was curious, even though I had a pretty good idea where this was going.

“What type of cake does she want at her party?” That wasn’t the exact question I had thought she would have asked, but it was in the same ballpark. “When you had come back, I had made a cake that I had known you would like. I didn’t have any clue who it was that was coming with you, and I definitely didn’t know what type of cake she likes.” That was actually a question I didn’t think I could answer. I didn’t even know if she wanted a party in the first place.

“I’ll ask her when I see her.” Pinkie’s smile widened, something that I wasn’t sure was even possible. “There was something else, though.” I wondered why she had been so easy to talk to about this subject. “Everypony else seems to dislike Sunset Shimmer, and for good reason. I guess I just kind of expected that if Fluttershy was capable of kicking Sunset that you might have been mad as well.”

Pinkie’s expression changed for a second, but quickly went back to the smile. “Well, you told us that she changed. If she changed, then we need to see her for the new her. I mean, imagine if we all assumed that Discord was still a big meanie.” That was something that most of us did, but I didn’t want to bring that up. “If we did that, he might think there’s no point in changing. I mean, imagine it. If you don’t have friends to help you, how will you make it through the bad times?”

That … was surprisingly insightful.

“Well, Twilight, I hate to rush off but I had to.” It was probably work related. “I have to get the twins ready for their nap. That can take a while.” Or I was wrong, and it was related to the fact that Pinkie really loved those two foals. “Maybe later we can talk again about the party. There are so many things that I think you can help me with, since she’s your student and all.” With that, she walked towards and stairs and the two foals that waited for their Aunt Pinkie.

I should have told her that Sunset didn’t want to be my student.

While we had been talking, it hadn't even come to my mind. I had just been focused on what she thought about Sunset, and why she thought that way. It hadn’t been until the last few moments, when she had said something about how I knew more because she was my student, that it had hit me. Not only was that not true on the basis that I didn’t know a lot about her.

I still needed to convince her to be my student.

A shake of my head, and I moved for the door. I needed to find Rainbow Dash, and then I needed to talk to her about Sunset Shimmer. This one was probably going to be the one that took the longest. Not only did I have to find her, which was a feat unto itself, but I had to talk her into forgiving a pony that she seemed adamant about not forgiving.

As I left the building, I was greeted by a voice.

“Spike was right. I didn’t even have to wait any time, you’re right here when he said you were going to be.” How had Spike been able to predict my schedule when I hadn’t? That didn’t make much sense. “Well, okay, I had to wait a few minutes … but it was totally worth it for me to say something that I should have already said.” I braced myself for what I knew was coming. Rainbow was a good friend, but she was also a pony who said exactly what she felt.

She was also a pony who disliked those that hurt her friends.

“I’m sorry for how I acted about Sunset yesterday. That was not cool.”

Wait.

What?