With only four days until Flitter was slated to change bodies, she was in character all the time. Ink Pearl had found her a cheap apartment near the base of the mountain, not far from the suburbs where Colgate had flamed out, and helped her move one early morning while Wings and Jet were at work. Flitter had been nearly useless in the move. It was as though her head had space only for the shrinking countdown on her new body, and the veneer of fear and perverse anticipation that came with it. To see her life, first reduced to a couple boxes full of possessions, then unceremoniously trucked to her smaller, dirtier, lonelier apartment, touched her in a way she had not expected. She almost cried as the penultimate box was squeezed through the doorway.

“What’ll I tell Wings and Jet?” she had asked.

“Whatever you like,” Ink Pearl had said, “just not the truth, and not where you’ll be.” She fished around in an accordion folder of papers for a minute and gave Flitter a form with contact information on it—not Flitter’s actual contact information. “They can write to this address, and you can write back through an intermediary if you want, but—ah!” She pulled back as Flitter reached for it. “All new bodies are required to sever contact with old friends and loved ones sooner or later. You’ll get ninety days to do it with this. Do you want to prolong that process?”

She had considered for several minutes while Ink masked her impatience. “I’ll just go. It’ll be like ripping off a bandage,” Flitter finally said, and Ink drove her to her new apartment.

That had been two days prior; now, she and Chilly Clouds walked down a quiet promenade in the fixed predawn, mingling with the few shoppers and retirees who were out and about on a Thursday morning. Flitter, in April Showers’ character, spoke little and used passers-by to practice her dead-eyed stare. With every non-pegasus she saw, she tagged them with a racial slur in her head, trying to loathe them, her feelings drawn from a very limited repository of bitterness. That anger, Chilly had told her time and time again, would be the most important trait to learn. Pegasus Advocates did not exclusively hate non-pegasi; they had room to hate those who were too tolerant.

They crossed a wide intersection and hooked sharply west to a record store. Chilly held the door for Flitter, who mumbled thanks with her best surly voice. There, they made a show of browsing the selections while the other customers filtered out, and then Chilly went to the clerk. Flitter paid them no attention, and after a short exchange, Chilly beckoned her into the back room, where they passed a few awkward minutes examining the promotional posters on the walls. When someone knocked on their door, they followed a Datura in street wear down a stone hallway, from which they emerged into a large, wood-paneled room, filled by three ponies and a maze of desks and countertops, piled with papers and chemistry equipment. Flitter’s eyes went immediately to the centerpiece at the back.

Chilly stayed to greet the workers by name, but Flitter approached the narrow table with heart hammering and mouth dry. Under the glass cloche, there was no question of who the pale, hairless pony-shape was.

“Here, ma’am,” one Datura said, floating a clipboard over to her. “These are mock-ups of how you’ll look when you’re done.”

Flitter took the clipboard and held it, enamored and horrified at herself. She was used to ponies with fur; seeing her new skin, weak and pink, stippled by countless follicles and freckled in places that would never, ever matter to any observer, she felt like an observer at a crash site. She was disgusted, but mesmerized. The eyes were closed, the lips and jaw relaxed to reveal a corner of molar. She wondered whether April Showers had fillings already.

Mutely, Flitter turned through the pages given her, taking in sketch after sketch of her pending body, her face, her wings, her mane and tail, herself naked, herself clothed. Taking her eyes off the blank body, she examined the rows of vials and pipettes arranged on an adjoining table, a glass gradient of browns and yellows, labeled different bodily fluids. On a modified coat rack, hanging limp inside a glass case, was her new mane, its amethyst cast weathered and sun-faded.

“She looks great,” Chilly said.

“How can you tell?” Flitter asked.

“From experience. April Showers is gonna be a fine specimen. You’re getting your heart today.”

“Neat…” She traced her eyes across the room, searching for the organ. “This is common practice, you said.”

“Relatively common.”

Flitter looked at her new self again, gaze coming to rest on the nude pinna of her wing, ugly and pathetic without its feathers, smaller than it felt to be attached to her. She looked back at her own wing, amazed and aghast, and flexed it.

“So bright and early Monday, we’re going to come back here, and you’ll transfer,” Chilly said gently. “No dinner for you on Sunday, remember.”

“How? How will I… how?”

“There’s a room.” What she said after was lost on Flitter, who knew already. Chilly’s placid tone told her everything. She would go into a room, be put to sleep, and somehow wake up behind a new pair of eyes. Of the details, as Chilly went on, she found she cared not at all. That she would have magical guide points to help her spirit move to the new vessel was immaterial. That she would spend the next few hours as helpless as an infant, subsisting on milk and vitamin drips, was immaterial. Her ears buzzed and her pulse squirmed, and she finally felt clear-headed only after they had left the bunker and exited the record store façade.

“I know it’s scary,” Chilly said. “We do this all the time, though. You couldn’t be in better hooves."

“It’s not even that,” Flitter said, a partial lie. “What I’m doing afterwards, too.”

Chilly nodded slowly. “Ink wouldn’t have chosen you if she thought you couldn’t handle it.”

Established in a slightly more comfortable hotel room than where he had started, Whippoorwill sat on the bed in his day-wear and read the morning paper. The PAs were stirring up trouble everywhere, it seemed, and more and more did the Astras’ name pop up in those same articles. Someone was probably profiting from the tension between the two groups, he imagined, and the fact that he did not know who it was worried him. He could tell that Violet Astra, the only one he had met, was getting tired of him, and he knew that White Wine and her PA group felt the same. She had grudgingly given him a list of duties, all over the phone, to help bring Strawberry’s old plan to life, and they talked for a bit after. In those few minutes, he had thought he detected in her voice a hint of his old friend, with it the suggestion of forgiveness.

The list, however, suggested no such thing. It suggested a vicious mare, a poisoned and cruel pony in whom anger had taken root too long ago. His was the job to blackmail, to slander, and to intimidate key players in White Wine’s plan, most of which she did not allow him to know. That did not bother him—he had spent most of his career working for ponies who considered themselves, rightly or not, puppet masters. What bothered him was the base hatred, the undistilled will to cause harm, on display in her intentions and her words. His previous employers had all been calculating and clinical to various degrees, and it was under them that he had learned to be the same; White Wine operated inside the inefficient confines of prejudice. They had once known each other, but he wondered whether she remembered it as clearly and fondly as he did.

In the agony of reminiscence, Whippoorwill had placed his list in a drawer and let it collect dust beside a brochure the concierge had given him. He wanted to trust White Wine, and he wanted to believe that she trusted him. If they could just go back to the good old days, he often thought, then everything… He wasn’t sure. A practical stallion, he never let himself spend too much time with romantic thinking, but distractions were harder and harder to come by, and he knew soon he would have to begin working on the plan.

He had not gone farther than the hotel lobby since arriving, sometimes taking his breakfast in the small cafeteria and other times meeting the Astras’ intermediary. Such meetings were the only bright moments for him, and he had considered many times requesting things he did not need just so he could see the chipper, talkative stallion; it was on this day, while Flitter grappled with her own private horror half a city away, that he finally did.

At three-thirty, he went down to the lobby and waited by the family fun zone, taking his favorite chair that put a potted fern between him and the front door. There, he waited for his contact, and there, ten minutes later, he met him. The brown stallion shook his hoof and eyed him up and down, smiling under the weight of what Whippoorwill had requested. Whippoorwill used his horn to relieve the pony, and the two went up to his floor—but not his room—where the stallion knew to deposit Whippoorwill’s things. At the elevators, they shared a moment of silence, and then Whippoorwill asked him if he wanted to come inside.

“Do I?” was the brown stallion’s rejoinder.

So they repaired to Whippoorwill’s room, stale and sunless, and the pony never stopped talking. How the Astras had shown him immense kindness, how their friendship had opened doors to even greater friendships, and how his future could not be brighter, he spoke like a waterfall of persiflage. Whippoorwill unpacked all his new clothing, basking in the monologue, uplifted by the sound of someone else’s voice. No one else in town was happy to see him, but this pony sounded like their brief meeting was the keystone of his day.

Pinching the shoulders of a tartan jacket in twin dots of magic, he stepped into it and did a slow turn for the tall mirror he had requested on day one of his new residency.

“Sharp look, dear boy,” the stallion said.

“Needs tailored,” Whippoorwill said. “Ah’m not sure Ah wanna go fer it.”

“Well, you can’t rightly get it tailored anyway, you silly thing. Not from here.”

“Ah can write my measurements down for ya.” He replaced the jacket with a green-gray suit and a bola tie, its jacinth center like a dying coal at his throat. He topped himself with a dark brown stetson and let the stallion take him in.

“Dashing! Just marvelous!”

Whippoorwill smiled and began to strip off his suit.

“A taste like yours should not be cloistered away like this,” the stallion said, trotting to the curtained window. “You belong out in the world, astonishing dinner parties.”

“Hey. Curtains.”

The pony stepped away.

“Ah’ve got my place in the world,” Whippoorwill continued, brushing an invisible speck off the sleeve.

“Not so good a place, if I may be so bold. Do you know what part of town you’re in? Do you, I ask?”

“Mm, can’t say as Ah do.” He grabbed a black and white hound's-tooth pocket square and searched for something it could conceivably pair with.

“My friend, this is the very center of the Plowshare District. The Plowshare District!”

Whippoorwill looked at him blankly.

“Greater Canterlot is not all garden parties and ballrooms, no indeed! On the outer lip of this glorious promontory, there lies a decrepit orphrey of average businesses and upper middle-class houses, the very face of gentrification, a corona of unremarkability that creeps ever inward on our beloved palace.” He twirled and threw himself onto Whippoorwill’s bed, regarding him upside-down as the unicorn donned a soft, black ulster. “This is the place where the ambitious and the lucky find themselves pulled to from the miasma of the ‘burbs, only to swirl among the endless, coursing masses of ponies just like themselves, all cheap ephemera, too good for the town below and not quite good enough for the town above. A frail existence of unasked-for, competent tradesponies and well-to-do homemakers, torn between living the wealth they thought they had and retreating to their pitiable nests far below. Ahh, there is some romance to it, is there not? The romance of the real, of the raw!” He hopped off the bed and put a hoof to Whippoorwill’s outfit.

“Fabric’s nice, ain’t it?”

“A delight to the senses, and a balm to this weary mind,” the stallion said. “Alas, I seem to have rather worked myself up in all this talk of your section of town. Of course, you are free to live as you see fit, but I do not think it just that one such as you should waste away in this limbo. There are finer things well within your grasp, should you simply reach.”

“Like Ah said, Ah’ve got my place,” Whippoorwill said, shrugging off the ulster.

“And I mine,” the pony said. “It would be a crime for me not to make the offer to you.”

Whippoorwill did another turn in a pair of black stove pipe trousers and a lilac polo shirt, partially shellacked by a black and purple jacquard vest.

“Ah can’t leave this room. Ah believe that was made clear.”

“As glass, my dear boy! That was not my suggestion at all.” The pony joined him at the mirror and made a funny face. “My day is free, save a rather dull engagement with the papers later tonight. I meant merely to quit the hotel and then return, bringing with me a little something we might share. A fragment of my world, which I would graciously bring to you, that we may share in its wonder.”

“Mm-hm. An’ what might that fragment be, doctor?”

The stallion winked. “Something much better than what your room service can provide, that I promise!”

Whippoorwill began trying on a new outfit, watching the stallion through the reflection, searching him for guile and finding only attraction. “Sure, Ah won’t decline ya. Ah could do with some comp’ny.”

“Then I sha’n’t tarry! You’ll find me shading your doorstep and crowding your embrasure again before the evening, Mr. Whippoorwill!”

By seven, Whooves had returned with a strange bottle and a picnic basket filled with small foodstuffs that he claimed had come to him from “a grateful, but anonymous, benefactor.” They cleared the work desk, and as Whooves arranged it, Whippoorwill showered. When he emerged, damp and wrapped in his bath robe, he could only stare and make plain his amazement.

Cordial glasses with feathered designs around their sides glowed in the weak light from outside, inverted bells of liquid brass over a spread so deliberately arranged that it could have been on the cover of a magazine, which lost only some of its luster when he snapped shut the curtains.

He sat and plucked a fat grape from its stem, one cluster under a second and atop a plate lively with designs of phlox and heather. Beads of moisture turned the room’s white light into a dash of salt across the grapes’ skins. Whooves took up a triangular cheese and pimento sandwich—no crust—and examined it, his smirk poorly restrained, before putting it down and selecting a gherkin from a long tray inlaid with jade arabesques efferent from a golden sun. On either side, a crescent moon of bread slices, rye and wheat, and a counterpart sun-shaped plate for the cheese, each slice separated from its neighbors by squares of champagne-pink film. A short spreading knife rested in a shallow ramekin beside a jar of stone-ground mustard, its silver handle wrapped with the shapes of the Equestrian continent.

“Whoops! Can’t forget the most important piece!” He reached into his picnic basket and produced a short, blue candle, its top frozen with ripples from much use. “Care to do the honors?”

With his horn, Whippoorwill lit the candle and let the scent of lilac unfurl over their table. He looked at his cordial glass.

“The finest aquavit money can buy, I’m told,” Whooves said. “Taste.”

Whippoorwill hesitantly raised the glass to his lips, unsure what to expect, and shot it back. He grimaced and gagged, and Whooves laughed.

“Aha! Looks like you’re a little overeager there, heavy hitter! Let’s top that off, hmm?”

Whippoorwill raised his other hoof, his first at his mouth as he leaned partially out of his chair. Whooves laughed again.

“Just water, then. Tsk, more for me.” He made a show of getting Whippoorwill a glass from the bathroom and filling it with tap. “Well, it’s not so special, I suppose. They use dye in this, did you know? True aquavit is clear, so I hear—something to do with the barrels, or some such nonsense. But let us not let this little setback mar our camaraderie.” Nodding to himself, he began eating in earnest, and Whippoorwill took a few gherkins to get the taste of alcohol out of his mouth.

“Ah trust ya ‘bout the outside world,” Whippoorwill finally said. “And Ah ‘ppreciate the gesture. It ain’t easy bein’ cooped up in this here hotel.”

“No, I should think not. Actually, I know not, if you’d believe it. Did you know—Ah, silly doctor, of course he’d not have reason to—but did you know, I traveled with the Elements of Harmony for a piece?”

“No kiddin’.”

“They’ve got this big fancy airship, they do, and let me tell you.” He bit into his second triangle of sandwich. “Looong are the days riding that beast from town to town. So maybe you and I are not so different in that regard.”

Whippoorwill opened his mouth to add that he, too, had met the Elements, but instead took water.

“A lovely bunch, they. Ah, ‘tis a shame we had to part ways.”

“How’d you lose ‘em?”

Whooves drained the brown liquid and refilled his tiny glass. “Rather an unpleasant story, but I should not mind to share it with a friend. How to put it, though? Let us just say that the Elements are not so perfect as society makes them to be. One of them—I dare not put a name to her, for the sake of discretion—had a failing at rather an important juncture. Applewood, the flood, the power outage. Ring a bell?”

“Course.”

Whooves winked. “Ah, the picture I could paint of that loathsome night. A cacophony of concrete, a miasma of machinery… such a tumultuous ride across the dimmed and dying heart of a brave and brash Equestria, the former city of lights and wealth, into the gnashing maw of evil itself! That selfsame airship did not seem so cramped that night, no no! For hither and thither we ran, witless and terrified.” He shot back another glass. “Grandiosity does not even approach the scene! For hours, we toiled, wrestling with Discord’s hydroelectric colossus, magic turned against magic, pure force against pure force, like fencers or philosophers squared up in an arena of their own making. It was like an epic poem, something made to grace lips far more skilled than mine.”

“You always talk like this?”

Whooves grinned. “The soul of the artist knows not when to look inward, nor should it.”

“You said you were a doctor.”

“Oh, don’t be so exact. It dulls the senses. Now, where was I?” He stood up and pirouetted around the room, his food forgotten, his capped bottle tipping onto the carpet as he made his way to the open space by the window. “At last, we were about to deliver the finishing blow, but hope and vim were spent, save for one. One of us, yet, had power to crush our opponent. But what did fly from her, I ask? What magical spell touched the night, like a coruscating cannonball, shot stern to bow, its holy light the only warning to a world that would soon see deliverance from Discord’s prized possession? Nothing.” He looked into Whippoorwill’s eyes and repeated the word.

“So they failed. Yeah, Ah know that. It was in the news a while ago.”

“Bah! You’re no fun.” He cleared his throat. “For the want of an effort, the battle was lost. No? Perhaps the news puts it differently. But I was there, I saw it with my own two eyeballs. The others were distracted, and it was to keep quiet this secret shame that I was put to pasture.”

“That’s very interestin’,” Whippoorwill said. He wasn’t sure how much to believe, but seeing the other pony prance about was entertaining in its own way.

“The stories I could tell, the stories I could tell,” Whooves said, taking his seat. “Ah, before I forget, my friend, I meant to indicate a few places near the hotel, should you ever see fit to go wandering. There’s this lovely bodega—”

A skin of magic paused his hoof as it reached for the dresser drawer. Whippoorwill smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Ah’ve got a couple personal affects in that drawer. It’s nor fer pryin’ eyes, if ya take my meanin’.”

“Nothing so scandalous, I wot.” He clapped his free hoof over his muzzle.

“Pardon?”

“Ah! That is, I would assume, by your dashing self, the radiant figure you cut in the nascent sunlight, that anything unsavory would be most far outside your realm of experience. Is it not so?”

“You were snoopin’ while Ah was in the shower. What did you see?”

“As I said—”

“What did you see?” He rose to lean on the table, jostling the grapes, and Whooves quailed.

“N-nothing to incriminate, I swear upon my life,” Whooves managed. “Seemed just a rather odd checklist, ‘twas all I gathered.” As Whippoorwill sat down, Whooves seemed to grow back into himself, and bounced in his seat. “Might it be the source of your exile to this dreary enclave? If so, Mr. Whippoorwill, perhaps—”

“Shut up.” Horn still idly alight, he looked pointedly in the direction of his valise, unassuming in the corner. Behind it, he had hidden one of his pulse crystals.

“Consider me shut,” Whooves whispered.

Whippoorwill picked at another grape. Whooves was lying; the checklist was red with incrimination, written by one who had not expected anyone to see it. His mistake, letting the strange pony into his room, but it was done. If it had been anyone else who discovered the list, it might only be a matter of destroying the pony. He was sure he could convince the doctor to take him to his house, where it would be easier, but he knew that the stallion seated before him—wiggling with nervous energy, mumbling what he clearly wanted to blurt out—would be missed, and by the Astras.

“Might be you could help me,” Whippoorwill said at length. He looked at the spread of food, much more than either of them could eat, and resisted the urge to spit on the table. Hot loathing reared up in him at the simpering, empty-headed pony, whom he guessed meant well, even if was in an obtuse way.

“Helpful, that’s me! Ooop! I assume I can talk now?”

“You know ponies in the press? Ah’ve seen yer name a couple times.”

“Oh, you flatter me, dear sir.”

“Do ya or don’t ya?”

Whooves straightened. “Why, yes, I suppose I do.”

“Then you can probably help me set a few things straight, regardin’ the PAs an’ yer buddies.”

“The war between Astras and Pegasus Advocates? Such heavy news. One does not—”

“Right, great. Without goin’ into too much detail, let’s just say it’s in my best interest if the tension between those two was to slacken, ya hear?”

“Ah.” He slouched in his chair and moodily took up a rye cracker. He pointed at the mustard with a pout, and Whippoorwill spread it for him. “Well, that is rather a tough spot, is it not?”

“Explain.”

“No, it’s just that I, well, rather have done well for myself in this climate. The push and pull, it does wonders for a soul not so heavily invested in either side. Oh, dear, I am making myself sound rather like a monster, hm? It’s not like that. I swear to you—”

“It’s you!” He stood again, and Whooves flinched, and in that moment, Whippoorwill went to his valise, revealing the pulse crystal but stopping short of grabbing it.

Whooves, shaking, managed to get a candied praline in his mouth. “However, peace benefits us all.”

“The PAs never wanted nothin’ to do with the Astras, an’ only got involved with ‘em ‘cause of the rumors. Your rumors, turns out. Oooh, Ah’d sorely like to talk to you ‘bout that.”

“Talk would be lovely,” Whooves said. “Provided we keep that delightful crystal safely tucked away, mm? A mighty conversation piece, I’ll own, but rather too contextual.”

“No, Ah think Ah’d like to keep it out fer now,” Whippoorwill said, floating it over and taking his seat at the table again.

“Please don’t hurt me, sir.”

“Not at this hour of day, an’ in a hotel room no less.” He tapped it. “Ah’ll tell you what Ah told my last… interlocutor. Understand that both of us can walk away from this today, unharmed. That appeal to you?”

“Oh, most certainly!”

“Then let’s talk ‘bout yer relationship with the Astras an’ PAs some.”

“It’s like this.” He leaned back, as if to gesticulate, but thought better of it and grabbed another triangle of sandwich. “The Astras are my friends, and their friends too are my friends. You might say I’m rather a pony of high society nowadays. Ha, to think! Me on the coast, so long ago, a hardscrabble existence—”

“Back to the point, you flower.”

“Yes, well, anyway, I just thought it prudent to turn the Astras’ collective gaze on this little black spot of Canterlot culture. So backwards, your Pegasus Advocates. And might I add, odd that you, a unicorn, should associate with them. I’d surely like to ask you…” He trailed off as Whippoorwill nudged the pulse crystal. “Perhaps another time, though. You sure you don’t want any more aquavit?”

“My patience ain’t infinite, doc.”

“Quite.” He shot back another glass of aquavit and made a face. “Ugh, brutish stuff. But do not make me out to be the source of evil in your life, dear friend! My intentions were pure. Who better to cleanse the iniquities of the Pegasus Advocates than my friends, with their power and wealth?”

“You just took it on yourself to set this up, then? Outta the goodness of yer heart, you decided Canterlot could use with losin’ the PAs.”

Whooves forced a chuckle. “Well, the publicity doesn’t hurt.”

Whippoorwill studied him for a long time then, first forming a response, then just enjoying the way Whooves squirmed and sweated under the scrutiny.

At last, he couldn’t take it anymore, and shouted, “I’ll do anything you want, as long as you take that dreadful thing away from me!”

“Yer gonna keep yer voice down.”

Whooves clapped a hoof on his muzzle, eyes wide, irises shrunken.

“Whatever you’ve been tellin’ ponies ‘bout the PAs an’ the Astras bein’ at odds, that stops today. Find somethin’ else fer yer publicity, but this particular story is over.”

“But good sir!”

“Over.”

Whooves licked his lips, took another bite of sandwich, and shuddered with another shot of liquor. “If I may, I’d like to ask why you care so. The PAs surely don’t like you, being a unicorn. Why should you not want to side with the Astras?”

“‘Cause that ship has sailed too.”

The days were hard, and the nights harder, for Lotus, on whom the pressure of her office was finally taking a visible toll. She was already short tempered and inattentive, prone to leave the cabin she shared with Aloe for walks in Umbrella Park or to moodily sip hot cocoa under The Leaf’s checkered awning, but in recent days, she had become frazzled and empty looking. The sleepless rings under her eyes, the uncombed mane, and the forgotten showers were all signs of the turmoil most ponies in Snowdrift had figured out for themselves.

Aloe tried to comfort her when she could, but her advances were rarely appreciated, never asked for. She knew it wasn’t her fault, that it wasn’t personal, but she nonetheless felt more than a twinge of resentment as she walked the icy promenade with her sister. Snow swirled around their chests and faces on a gentle breeze that penetrated their layers. It had been beautiful earlier in the day, when the unadorned wind swept pine needles and chimney smoke across the clear sky, but the clouds had rolled in an hour ago, with them the weather that gave the town its name, and their routine patrol had become brooding and impatient.

Lotus looked without speaking, taking in each building and street corner, a job that had only recently been added to her list of daily tasks. Aloe had asked her if she needed her to come, hoping Lotus would decline, but expecting her not to.

It was a big day, and many of the Snowdrift Daturas had been told to clear their schedules. They knew to expect the Elements of Harmony; several of the local precogs had confirmed it a month in advance, and debate had raged narrowing it down to the precise day. The Elements would arrive to reconvene outside the gateway, then take a quick jaunt south, then loop back up and take the second of three new Elements. More, their arrival would herald a few days of contained chaos, then a wide wake of aftershock, the specifics of which Lotus had not chosen to share. How exact the precogs’ stories were, and how well they all coincided, Aloe did not want to know; it was her sister’s duty to sift through all of that, a duty they both hated.

“That’s them,” Lotus said, angling her muzzle toward the approaching airship. “Should we say hi?”

“Uhh.” Aloe adjusted her scarf. “Do you think it’s necessary?”

“I hope not.” Lotus sighed. “They’ve got Colgate, though, and she’s not what I’d call a closed book. There’s a fair chance we have to explain some stuff to them.”

“I can explain things, if you need.”

Lotus didn’t look at her, and Aloe swallowed an invective that flashed in her thoughts. “They’re too low,” Lotus said, holding a hoof to the horizon and squinting.

“Too low?”

“For the airship lot.”

“Oh. Well—”

“Quiet.” Lotus thought for a second, her eyes closing and her mouth furrowing in a frown. “Crap. Follow me.”

“What’s wrong?” Aloe coughed, startled by her sister’s sprint down the snowy road.

“They’re gonna land right on it. Stupid! Should’ve thought about it earlier.”

Aloe ignored the questions she wanted to ask, the clarification she wished her sister would offer. What Lotus thought often went unspoken, up to the point of one or two distilled commands, and Aloe was never used to it.

Ponies parted in the streets as the pastel sisters kicked up spumes of snow, breathing evenly for the exertion. In Snowdrift, they were known for living quietly, except when they weren’t; when trouble arose, the twins were invariably involved. They had not day jobs, but seemed always at work.

Snowdrift was only a couple miles across, and the spa twins arrived, panting lightly, on the south end just in time to see the new airship narrowly miss brushing its hull on the warehouse’s lightning rod. They stood just outside a wide ring of warning tape, yellow and black and flapping in the ubiquitous Snowdrift wind, as the ship made to touch the empty parking lot’s black ice.

“Lo-lo?” Aloe asked.

Lotus held up a hoof and ran her eyes over the tableau, steady despite the beating of her heart and the frustration with herself for not imagining the scenario earlier. Drawing from her cloud of thoughts and shuffling through everything it knew about the warehouse and what it newly contained, and the airship’s landing trajectory, a course of action crystallized.

Still not looking at her sister, Lotus spoke. “Evacuate the southern tip of the city, everything south of Box Poppies’ Diner. Have Morning Serenade get his team together and meet me in the cabin at noon.”

The uncertainty in her sister’s voice as she said “you got it” rankled with Lotus, and the two separated, one back to the town and the other under the warning tape. The snow was not hard, and she took a buried trio of stairs up to the lot instead of the uneven, slippery selvedge. Eyes scanning the asphalt for ice, her cloud of thoughts constructed an ideal path from airship to safety, a route with fewest chances for slipping, at the same time calculating how long she would expect to stay with the Elements, explaining everything. The hazard in the warehouse would be moving, she knew, but she didn’t see any signs of it when the airship touched down. Applejack and Fluttershy looked down at her with shock on their faces as she closed the distance, shouting to get off as quickly as possible and leave everything they could.

The gangplank extended and the pegasi exploded off the deck as voices rose and questions filled the air, but Lotus just repeated her instructions: leave the ship and get off the parking lot. She ran to the ship’s side to see the warehouse, its doors shoved open and filled with the hazard’s opalescent form, oozing across the walkway and ramp, pushing tufts of snow and gaining a light sheen from the snow that still fell. Behind, the ceaseless babble of panicking voices flowed into her, meeting the cloud of thoughts and magically unraveling from one another, ten sequences of questions and expressions of fear, more useless noise.

The hazard, as they termed it until it could be positively identified, had only shown up six days ago, taking several warehouse workers and scaring the rest of them into disorderly flight, drawing the local Datura’s divided attention. A team of Daturas and policeponies had rushed onto the scene to help evacuate, clear away knots of bottle-necked cars, and assess the threat. Now, the Elements had gone and landed right on top of it, and Lotus’ cloud was already at work reformulating a plan to deal with the hazard. The electric tumult of thought ordering itself, independent of her own input, still distracted her, and it seemed an infuriating lapse of time before the Elements were on the move with her, dodging and falling on ice, throwing up snow, yammering questions and complaints about the weather. One of them had seen what was behind, and had gone quiet.

On the other side of the warning tape, Lotus let them stop for a minute to catch their breath, and, revealing her face, told them two more essentials: the warehouse was infested with something dangerous, and their ship might soon be its new nest. She read each puzzled and frightened expression, not one untouched from the darkness of impatience and disenchantment with which she clinically empathized. Moving slower and closer together, they walked in Rainbow Dash’s dome of warmer air until they got to town, where Aloe was at work rounding up ponies and evacuating buildings.

“It is you two!” Rarity cried.

Lotus didn’t look back at her. Annoyance, guilt, anger, and plain tiredness were all mixed inside her; she knew she had a lot of explaining ahead, and was not looking forward to it. Her cloud of thoughts began working on the most efficient way to explain everything to the Elements, but she ignored it—she could not stop it—for she had long ago learned that there were too many unknowns to ever calculate a conversation’s length, even a simple one. Where other ponies’ actions were concerned, her cloud could rarely predict with certainty.

“It’s the hazard, right?” Aloe asked.

“They landed the ship. Possible new center for its area of effect.”

“Got it.”

“Need help?”

“Morning Serenade is helping.”

Lotus nodded. Aloe looked at her for a second, as if expecting some final acknowledgement, then ran back to her operation. Behind her, she could hear Rainbow and Rarity talking. Rainbow kept saying “it’s them, it’s them too.”

Big Mac had remarked from the ship’s telescope balcony that the building had seemed like an art installation, but the tall, thick corkscrew that seemed buried in the choppy hillside had a door, windows, and a trio of steaming vents on its roof. Only Twilight did not go immediately for the square of love seats in the lobby or hearken to the big, friendly boom of brass music pounding out from behind the glass doors to the bar.

Lotus nodded curtly at the mauve mare at the desk and ordered three rooms to be put on her tab, and the mare did so without blinking. Twilight, like her friends behind, could only look in awe at the walls and ceiling: straight and sensible, like any building’s should be; conservatively decorated with prints of fruit and musical instruments; sparely occupied by other ponies moving between the brunch nook and elevators across black marble tile.

“It’s just an illusion, Twilight,” Lotus said, and thanked the mare for the room keys. “Come on, everyone.” She sighed. “You have questions.”

“Ya don’t say?” Rainbow said, jumping up with a flap of her wings. “I’ve got the first question, if you don’t mind.”

“Once we get to our rooms,” Octavia said. “We will speak there.”

They endured a silent elevator ride to the fourth floor and a long walk to the back of the building, and Lotus let them into their room. The ponies spilled in, some going directly for the beds, some for the window, one for the bathroom. Twilight stayed with Lotus and just looked at her as she removed her coats, but edged away as Lotus’ frown deepened.

“So it is you two,” Rarity said, calmed down from the run. “You said something about going home when we saw you in Ponyville. Was this it?” Beside her, Colgate stared at Lotus with unabashed distrust.

“What about that thing in the warehouse?” Rainbow asked.

“What about this hotel?” Twilight asked.

“Why did we—”

“Enough! One at a time.” Lotus backed to the door and pointed at Rarity. “You first. Yes, we’re the same ponies. I’m sorry if we hurt you by not saying anything; it didn’t seem important at the time, and we were very distracted.”

“You seem preoccupied now,” Vinyl said.

Lotus waved her off, but then thought better of it, and turned around to take several deep breaths. She was overstimulated, clear to many of them, and was not much better when she faced them again. She looked at Colgate for a second before putting her eyes on Rainbow instead. “You suspect ‘secret agent ponies’.”

“I knew it!” Rainbow cried.

“It’s not suspicion,” Rarity said.

“I know Cloud Line confirmed it to you and Fluttershy in Passage Town. She was spoken to,” Lotus said. “I’m not confirming or denying anything about myself.”

“That’s code for ‘yes,’ and you and I know it,” Rainbow said.

Ignoring her, Lotus turned to Applejack. “Fast question: Applejack, I know Twilight sometimes imprints the airship on you, so it’ll follow in the case of separation. Did she do that this time?”

“I did,” Twilight said. “On the flight to the mountains, I did it.”

“Okay. Applejack, you can’t go farther into town than this hotel.”

“What?” Applejack asked.

“So you don’t accidentally move the hazard if it attaches to the ship,” Lotus said. “If you do, you could drag it with you wherever you go.” She saw a question forming on Applejack’s face, but charged ahead. “Now, to begin, the warehouse was operational up until just recently. Vanilla Cream had been spending a lot of time in the forest just west of Snowdrift, and his leaving coincided with the hazard’s appearance.”

“What is it?” Fluttershy asked.

“What is what?”

“Sorry. The hazard, what is it?”

“Wait, I have some questions,” Twilight said.

“One at a time,” Lotus growled. In her voice and accent, the anger came off as lesser frustration, and Pinkie stifled a smirk.

“Who are you?” Twilight asked. “I’d like to know that. You’re not the masseuse we knew.”

“Were you ever?” Fluttershy asked.

“One at a time!” Lotus snapped. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I get irritable.” She surveyed them, those who had known her shocked and hurt, those who did not glaring. “Sorry. Please, let’s keep the questions one at a time, and be as specific as possible if you can. Twilight, you asked me who I was. What do you mean by that?”

“Uhhh…”

“My name is Lotus, I’m thirty years old, female, part-time beautician with my sister, Aloe, twenty-nine and also female—”

“I mean why are you here in Snowdrift? What is your job?”

“Much better. I can’t tell you everything, but you can say that I’m in charge of logistics and organization for operations in the city and elsewhere.”

“Logistics?” Rarity asked. “What do you mean by that?”

“It’s what it sounds like,” Colgate said. “Details behind the scenes, so other ponies can focus on their jobs without having to worry about unrelated stuff.”

“Legal procedures, transportation, and supplies, for example,” Lotus said. “I supply and catalogue information as well.” She looked at Colgate, noticing that only Rarity did not seem surprised at her knowledge. The detail was filed away.

“Anyone for room service?” Pinkie asked, flourishing the binder of special events, local attractions, and amenities. “You want anything, spa buddy? Double-chocolate cake? Lemon meringue pie? Caramel hurricane sundae? Jackfruit and sesame sorbet?”

“A stiff drink and a long smoke,” Lotus said without smiling. “Joking. Maybe later.”

“Coffee?” Applejack offered.

She paused. “You mean to ask if I want coffee. I hate it, but thank you.”

“Do ya mind the smell?”

“You can have it.”

“So was your job in Ponyville just a cover?” Twilight asked as Applejack began fiddling with the coffee machine. Since hearing that they had tried to contact her spirit through their coffee machine in Roan, she had taken a stronger liking to the drink.

“Yes and no,” Lotus said. “To answer your question most completely, it would require explaining something very large about myself, but also not immediately relevant.” She thought for a second, eyes rolled up. “My sister can fill you in later. For the sake of expediency, can we all agree to just trust me as I answer your questions, and not worry about how I know what I know?”

“I trust now,” Colgate said.

“You?” Pinkie asked.

“If Colgate trusts you, then I do as well,” Octavia said, Applejack nodding along as she tried to unwrap a package of dried coffee.

“I’d like to know details,” Twilight said. “But they can wait if you’d like.”

“I would prefer not to explain at all,” Lotus said. “I tire of it.”

Twilight sighed.

“My job at the Ponyville spa was more like a day job. From there, I conducted my business of logistics management, a job which wears on me the more I do it. My spa work, however, brought me real pleasure, which is why I chose it in the first place.” She showed them her cutie mark, the blooming lotus. “The mark is no lie; my first talent is making ponies feel beautiful. However, ever since The Crumbling, I’ve had hardly any time to do what I love. We were called down to Snowdrift first thing, and here we’ve stayed.”

“Sure you don’t want anything?” Pinkie asked, phone to her ear.

“I’m sure.” She spared a blank look at Pinkie. “Next question.”

“Does Aloe have the same job as you?” Vinyl asked.

“It’s related. You’ve noticed that I’m being short with you.”

“We have,” Rarity said.

Lotus glanced at her. “It wasn’t a question. Aloe, she acts as my handler. Again, to fully answer, I’d have to explain that large thing I alluded to earlier.”

“Now I definitely want to know,” Twilight said.

“Like I said, talk to her.”

“So what about the monster in the warehouse, then?” Rainbow asked. “I’d like to talk about that now.”

“What about it?”

“What do you mean, what about it? What about it?”

“No open-ended questions,” Fluttershy said.

“What is it?” Big Mac asked.

Lotus sighed again and moved away from the coffee machine as it hummed to life. “If we’re going to discuss what it is, it would make the most sense for us to also discuss how to handle it at the same time.” She ran her eyes over the room and went out the door with their room keys. They could hear her opening the door across the hall.

“What’s her problem?” Rainbow asked.

“There was something big going on on the south side,” Colgate said. “That room’s window faces south. She’s checking on her sister.”

“So you’re one of them, then,” Pinkie said. “Secret agents?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“She’s fine,” Rarity said. “She’s still one of us.”

“I’m not the only one who doesn’t trust this, right?” Rainbow asked.

“There’s obviously more going on than what she’s saying, but I trust her so far, I think,” Twilight said. “I can feel her magic, first and foremost.” Vinyl nodded along.

“What kind of magic?” Fluttershy asked. “Like our magic?”

“No, it’s not active. She’s got an enchantment attached to her, a big one.”

“That’s probably what’s got her on pins and needles,” Vinyl said.

“Is it a curse?” Rarity asked. “Perhaps a curse of bitchiness?”

Applejack laughed.

“It’s dark magic, not a curse.” Twilight nodded at Rainbow. “Princess Luna’s type of magic.”

“Magic that deals in wisdom!” Pinkie said. “Food in five, girlies.”

“What’d you order?” Big Mac asked.

Lotus popped her head back in, not far enough to look at them. “I have to run and deal with some things. Fast details: the hazard requires a central point to anchor itself from strong winds, and it feeds on organic materials like carbon and keratin. You understand? I’ll be back, not sure when, and we’ll discuss how to deal with it.” She was gone down the hallway at a gallop before they could respond, and the door swung closed with a clunk.

“Just gimme a minute,” Colgate said to something Rarity whispered in her ear. “I think I like her style. Sooo, let’s start by agreeing to shut up about the secret agent thing, yes?”

“Psh, cat’s already out of the bag,” Rainbow said with a shrug, accepting a cup from Applejack.

“I don’t like that, and I want us to drop it.”

“Fine,” Octavia said. “We know what we know, and that can be it. I am comfortable with that.”

They paused to accept their food; Pinkie had called up a veritable buffet, also putting it on Lotus’ tab, and they spent several minutes arranging it inside the overcrowded hotel room, balancing plates and bowls on the TV stand, the windowsill, the bed. Vinyl uncorked a bottle of red wine and looked about for something to pour it in.

“She reminds me a little of you,” Octavia said, looking at Colgate, hunched over a salad of pickled onions and cucumbers. “She is very quick-thinking.”

“Quick,” Colgate said, nodding to herself, as if she had said something more meaningful.

“I am beginning to feel self-conscious, surrounded by all these smart mares.”

Vinyl looked at her with a smile. “Attempt at humor?”

“Yes.”

“If her business is in information and logistics, I wonder if it could be an intelligence-enhancing spell,” Twilight said.

“Ain’t those illegal?” Applejack asked.

“Yo, can we please talk about the monster?” Rainbow cried. “We could be in danger, and you’re talking about the stupid law!”

“If we were in danger, she’d have told us,” Colgate said.

“Unless she doesn’t know we’re in danger.”

“She knew exactly what to do with her sister and exactly where to take us, and those two facts she spat at us before leaving were good enough for us to figure out the main points of this monster on our own. She probably knows exactly what we’re up against.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“Ah’m not so pleased myself,” Applejack said. “Ah’m gonna go stir crazy if Ah have to stay in this hotel the whole time.”

“She kept looking at me,” Colgate said, jabbing her plate with a fork. “I’m pretty sure I know who she is. I’ve heard ponies refer to an Information Handler in my line of work, a couple times. If she’s that, then she knows who I am, and she knows…” She stood up and went to the bathroom, shutting the door and turning on the faucet.

“She’s scared of telling us,” Rarity whispered.

“Thanks, couldn’t tell,” Rainbow said.

Colgate came back, face wet and mane dripping. “I keep getting told I’m good at figuring stuff out, so she probably wanted me to do that with her hazard facts. What were they?”

“It feeds on flesh, that’s big number one. Let’s start there.”

“She said it feeds on ‘organic material,’ Rainbow. Carbon and keratin and things,” Twilight said. “Seems self-explanatory.”

“There were plants peeking through the snow when we were leaving,” Colgate said. “So we can guess it doesn’t like plant material, or it would’ve gotten them already.”

“The other bit was that it needs a solid anchor,” Big Mac said. “So it don’t blow away. That part’s confusin’.”

“Hang on, I’m not done.” Colgate paused as everyone looked at her. Her eyes darted around the room and settled on the TV remote. For a moment, it appeared that she would run for the bathroom again, but she simply floated the remote over and turned on the local news. Turning it down, she continued after a minute. “Carbon is easy, but carbon and keratin, that’s more. Our fur is made of keratin. It can eat our fur too.”

“So?” Pinkie asked. “Fur balls? Is that it?”

“That’s nothing,” Vinyl said.

“It can eat us from the outside in,” Colgate said. “What’s more, she said it feeds on those things. I think the implication is that it can draw energy from any kind of organic material commonly found in us ponies. You know, rather than just gobbling us down like a manticore. Might be some kind of mold or membrane, or a parasite or something.” She nodded to herself. “Probably why we were told to run, rather than just whip up a firestorm. Monster’s too small or too delicate for that; it needs a gentle touch, or a gentler touch.”

“Maybe that ties into how it can blow away?” Vinyl asked.

“Maybe. Could be it’s light. If it’s light and dangerous, and we had to travel so far to be safe, then it’s probably pretty quick. What did you say it looked like, Pinkie?”

“Like a blob of egg white,” Pinkie said, spooning rice into her mouth.

“Well, that’s not much to go on,” Twilight said.

“Maybe it stretches,” Rarity said. “You said it was kind of oozing?”

“Like bad frosting,” Pinkie said.

“A stretchy, lightweight hazard,” Colgate said. “It envelopes you if you get too close, I bet.”

“If it stretches, that also explains how it can blow away,” Fluttershy said. “It can stretch out to catch the wind, like a sail.”

“She said it needs an anchor,” Applejack said. “Needs.”

“Implying that whatever force is keeping it together isn’t as strong as the wind,” Twilight said.

“This just occurred to me,” Vinyl said, lighting her horn for attention. “Element’s probably in there. Did you check, Fluttershy?”

“I hadn’t checked yet, no,” Fluttershy said.

“Knowing Discord,” Octavia said, “I would believe it. But why did we not feel it on the way out?”

“Maybe Fluttershy missed it,” Applejack said. “No offense.”

“Thanks,” Fluttershy said.

“Elements move,” Twilight said with a shrug. “Maybe he hadn’t found a good place for this one yet, so he gave it to the egg white to guard.”

“Lazy. We were just here,” Vinyl said. She was drinking wine from one of the toothbrush glasses, and met their eyes as she took a long draft. Fluttershy looked back, expression challenging, and Vinyl smiled.

“Princess Luna said he’s on the run,” Twilight said. “In a letter, a while ago. His options are thinning.”

“As are ours,” Octavia said.

Rarity nodded. “That’s worth keeping in mind.”

“I just cast the Element spell,” Fluttershy said. She picked at a cherry tomato, and it rolled off the plate and onto the carpet. “Vinyl’s right, it’s here. South of us.”

“Well, that’s just ducky,” Colgate said. “You got any monster-fightin’ experience we should know ‘bout, Cole?” Applejack asked.

“Nothing interesting.” She recalled the time in Canterlot with Fleur, dispelling a rogue teleportation spell. She had run around blindfolded and overwhelmed for some time, not the picture of confidence that Applejack saw. In an instant, she realized that the others had no reason to know of her near failure on that afternoon, and the pall of fear lightened. She looked at Octavia, then Applejack, then Rarity.

The snow had paused, leaving the spa sisters with the easy visibility that they needed to keep the evacuation organized. There were only seven buildings that needed emptied: the diner, a coffee shop, two houses, the town’s little radio station, a gas station, and a hardware store. Lotus had gone to help Aloe evacuate the radio station, which involved queuing up a sequence of automated tapes and prerecorded material; they didn’t want the radio to simply go dark, for that would surely cause undue worry in the town.

It was on the top floor where Lotus was in her least favorite, but necessary, position. Surrounded by workers, it was her job to answer all of their questions as quickly and clearly as possible so they could proceed with the evacuation efficiently, and not keep Aloe stuck running back and forth. Lotus’ cloud of thoughts enabled her to process information and create solutions faster than her mouth could move, and, emotionally drained and overworked, she had to struggle to keep hostility out of her answers to the frightened workers. Aloe was outside, keeping lines orderly and maintaining a head count, and it wasn’t for the first time that Lotus’ envy burned to something akin to rage. She hadn’t been able to relax for months, and the work only got harder.

An hour later, she was free to wander the abandoned radio station, its tapes spinning with best-of compilations and standard music mixes. She closed her eyes and let the sound of machines soothe her mind, trying to relax her body. She knew she was needed back on the ground, and wanted at the hotel later, and could not loosen her dread for yet more explanation, yet more information running out of the cloud and forced through her small mind.

She went to a wide window and looked at the last groups of ponies dispersing across the imaginary line she had calculated to mark the hazard’s potential new area of affect. The Snowdrift Datura had originally had indefinite time to deal with the hazard, its anchor point being too far from anything else for it to potentially move into town. With the airship, though, it could creep closer, and reach one of the outlying buildings. Lotus knew that changing anchor points was strenuous for it, and that once it switched to the airship, they would have a few days before any building was under threat of occupation, but there was no comfort in the time they had. She was supposed to be working on a schematic for Discord’s castle and the magic it embodied, and had received a report of unrest in Hoofington the day before; now, the hazard. With disgust, she left the radio station and joined her sister, did a quick count of the evacuees, and assured them that the situation was under control. Her cloud of thoughts, in the background, whirred on to create a solution for the new problem.

She met with Morning Serenade’s team and outlined her plan for handling the hazard, emphasizing that no one take action until she had gotten the Elements on the same page, and then ran off into the pine forest without a word of explanation. She was still gone when Aloe got back to the hotel, nine in the evening and dawn’s trace in the east, to explain the finer points of what the Elements had mostly figured out for themselves. The hazard was something Discord had pulled out of Tartarus and dropped onto the warehouse, a membranous mix of magic and simple vitreous substances, best compared to a giant amoeba. It stretched and segmented itself to go after prey that wandered into its territory, and, as Fluttershy had surmised, it could expand itself to catch the wind in case of danger. She didn’t know whether Lotus had any ideas for how to handle it yet, but assumed she did, and simply hadn’t yet chosen to share.

As apology for Lotus’ abrupt departure, Aloe treated them to dinner and drinks in hotel bar, sitting between Twilight and Vinyl at the very end while the others carried on beyond. The bar had been cleared of its live music, and only a few patrons remained, chattering around a game of checkers in one of the corner booths. The bow-tied bartender greeted them all by name, which Twilight found refreshing for the lack of pretense. Most ponies pretended to be pleasantly surprised when they found out they were serving the Elements of Harmony.

“Before you tell me about her, I’d like to take a guess,” Twilight said.

“Go for it,” Aloe said.

“I did a little reading. Actually, a lot. She either has a direct mental link to a divine library somewhere, or a cloud of thoughts.”

“Nice.” Aloe ordered the death by chocolate martini, Twilight a soda. “That’s how they tried it in the beginning, a direct link. It turned out to be too unwieldy for our purposes. I wish that was the case still. It sure would be easier.” She accepted her drink, a muddy glass overflowing with chocolate syrup around a spiral mound of cocoa-sprinkled whipped cream, a trio of brownie bites speared on a toothpick. Across the bar, Pinkie eyed it enviously and hollered for the bartender.

“I never studied clouds of thoughts,” Twilight said. “That’s actually where I chose to go into light magic instead. You could say the cloud scared me away.”

“Nopony likes the cloud,” Aloe said. “Least of all Lo-lo. Princess Luna gave it to her when she was younger. Can’t say how young, I’m afraid. It was actually passed down. Information ponies…” She took a long drink. “The cloud’s been around longer than any of them, and Luna keeps attaching it to the next information pony.”

“But what actually is it?” Vinyl asked.

“I’ll tell you what it’s supposed to be.” She paused for Vinyl to receive her drink, a flute of bubbling sunshine liquid that smelled strongly of hibiscus. “Imagine that she’s a walking video recorder, instead of a pony, and everything she takes in, every sensation, is recorded. That’s the cloud’s job, to hold and catalogue all that stuff, in addition to all her thoughts and feelings regarding all those things she records. She herself doesn’t remember anything that a normal pony wouldn’t, because nothing extraordinary is stored in her mind. That’s how we get around madness.”

“The burden of genius,” Twilight said. “Fair enough.”

“However, that’s only the first part of what the cloud does. It also sorts and processes all this information, faster than a pony can. Since it’s all magical, and doesn’t rely on a pony’s brain, which is finite, she—sorry, the cloud—can comb through entire years, entire decades even, of sensation in a couple seconds. Most of the information is absolutely useless.”

“Like what she had for breakfast seven years ago,” Vinyl said.

“Exactly. Useless day-to-day stuff that no one cares about, but the cloud holds that information all the same,” Aloe said.

“Does it have a limit? It must,” Twilight said.

“Lo-lo did the math once, I forget what she came up with. There is a limit, but it’s way out there.”

“When you say Lotus, you mean her cloud?”

“Pretty much. Uh, but try not to make that distinction around her.” She lowered her voice. “Sis is touchy about the cloud.”

“No, we get that,” Vinyl said. “Magical identity is weird.”

Aloe managed to slide one of her brownie bites off its pick. “Naturally, the cloud’s used mostly for recalling facts about various events, various ponies, various creatures, and so forth, and also for problem solving or troubleshooting. Our hazard, like I said. I’m sure she’s got something cooking.”

“That’s why she ran off?” Twilight asked.

“Who knows with her? I think it was to get away from ponies. All I know is, thank Celestia she did.” Aloe took several small, quiet sips.

“You get tired of her,” Vinyl said.

“Uh, yeah.” Her voice was slightly louder, shrill with her accent. “I love her, she’s blood, but babysitting her is a unique hell sometimes, let me tell you. She reminds me of those crackpot geniuses you read in books, with their short tempers and their annoying foibles. My job is keeping her from knocking ponies’ hats off in the street.”

“I’ve had a friend or two I felt like that towards,” Vinyl said, Twilight nodding along.

“I’m sure of it. Especially you, Vinyl, being an artist. It gets exhausting after a while.”

“Does she get worked up?” Twilight asked. “I know she looked like she was ready to blow a cog in our room earlier.”

“She probably was. She doesn’t do anything that remarkable when she’s stressed, either, that’s the thing. She just complains. Seems like she can go on for hours, just bitching, if you don’t stop her. She’s a walking headache.”

“Have you told her how you feel?” Vinyl asked.

“Oh, she’s aware,” Aloe said, nodding emphatically. “She knows when she’s doing it. She tells me to tune her out and let her go, and I do. It’s just, you’re still aware of it. It’s still a negative atmosphere.” She gestured at her glass. “Want a sip, by the way?”

“I’m good, thanks,” Twilight said as Vinyl placed her second order.

“So basically, the cloud does all the thinking, and it’s Lo-lo’s job to collect the base information and then tell everyone the answers. That’s why she’s in information and logistics. I feel bad for her, honestly.”

“It sounds miserable, when you think about it,” Vinyl said. “I’ll bet she gets backed up all the time. Can’t talk fast enough for the brain.”

Aloe nodded. “It gets to her. Well, you know. She was nothing like this in Ponyville, never.”

Twilight stirred the ice in her glass. “Yes, so how long did you say you’ve been doing this?”

“Since before we met you all, at least.”

“Huh. And I’m guessing there are others in Ponyville too. Ponies like you.”

Aloe tilted her head.

“I know you know what I mean.”

“I hope you don’t take it the wrong way, Twilight. Lotus and I never intended to hurt anyone. We were quite content to stay in Ponyville with everyone else, you know that. You do?”

“You’d have wanted to come home eventually.” She waved a hoof. “That’s beside the point, though.” She sighed. “It’s a lot to take in. I do get it, that it’s your job to keep your information work a secret. I get that it’s not personal.”

“Still, you think you know a pony,” Vinyl completed.

“Exactly. Out of everyone in Ponyville, I wouldn’t have expected it to be you two.”

Aloe only smiled. “You know I can’t talk about this with you.”

“I know.” She leaned back to see what the others were doing; it sounded like they were having more fun than she. Rainbow and Pinkie were engaged in lively debate, broken by bouts of laughter, while Rarity looked on with a face red from mirth.

“Is your Element in the warehouse?” Aloe asked.

“Yup,” Vinyl said. “Hazard’s got it.” She looked at Twilight. “In a way, I’m kind of excited. I’ve heard about your monster fights, but not had one myself.”

“Does the dam not count?” Twilight asked.

“I feel like I barely participated in that.”

“Well, I’m sure we can change that if you’d really like.” She glowered for a second, but broke into a smile, and Vinyl laughed too.

“We’ll work on a plan tomorrow,” Aloe said. “If Lo-lo isn’t back, I’ll still help you, Twilight.”

“I’ll take all the help I can get,” Twilight said. “I don’t even know where to start with this one. We know what it is, but that’s it.”

“You were only on the lot for a few minutes. You couldn’t have figured out anything in that time. I’ve got a pretty good idea what we can do, though. Doing it, that’s different, but… Well, tomorrow.”

The bartender returned to take Aloe’s empty glass and take Vinyl’s next order. “You ladies here for the Contraction?”

“I’m sorry?” Twilight asked.

“The Contraction!” Vinyl cried, slapping the bar. “Wow, I’d completely forgotten. We’ve got one coming up? Twilight, this was made for you.”

“What is it?”

“We have ‘em every now and again,” the bartender said. “Everypony gathers in Umbrella Park and plays games, socializes, gets to know each other. There’s music and food and art.”

“Like a fair?”

“If you like.” He turned to greet a new customer.

“The Contraction is awesome, Twilight,” Vinyl said. “We had one when I lived here. This town is the unofficial capital of experimental magic.”

“Yes, that I know,” Twilight said.

“Basically, a long time ago, some schmuck cast a spell on the whole village, making it teleport.”

“Teleport?”

“All the buildings and the plot of land they stood on,” Aloe said. “It was an experiment in mass transit gone wrong.” Seeing the look on Twilight’s face, she giggled. “Don’t worry, we don’t teleport anymore, at least not in the way you’re thinking.”

“They used to, though,” Vinyl said. “There’s records of it in the library, I’m sure you can ask someone to help you find ‘em. The spell wasn’t stable, see.”

“The whole town could zip off anywhere, at any time,” Aloe said. “We were in the Everfree forest for a couple days, near where Fillydelphia is now for a month, even underground for a while. That was the longest one, I think, the underground. Ponies actually managed to tunnel out of the city before it moved again.”

“You’re right, I do need to read about this,” Twilight said, turning an idea over in her head.

“They couldn’t break the spell,” Vinyl went on, but Twilight was only half listening. “So they did the next best thing: contain it. Now, whenever Snowdrift teleports, it just blinks into its original spot each time. That’s why it’s the Contraction, ‘cause it goes in real quick, then expands back to normal. Blink of an eye.”

“We’ve got the highest percentage of precogs right here,” Aloe said, “so we know a Contraction is coming pretty far in advance. Like he said, everyone gathers in the park and makes a festival of it.”

“That sounds awesome!” Pinkie shrieked on the other side. Aloe wasn’t sure whether she had overheard, or was responding to someone else.

“You unicorns have it easy,” Aloe teased. “You’re used to the feeling. Us earth ponies have to prepare.”

“Fasting often helps with that,” Twilight said.

“Er, yes, I know. So that’s the Contraction.”

“Top you off, miss?” the bartender asked.

Twilight blinked. “Hm? Oh, yes, please.”

“Twilight’s got an idea,” Vinyl said to Aloe.

“I recognize the look,” Aloe said.

“Suppose you would.”