The new airship was wide in the middle and tapered at both ends, leaflike, with four propellers along each side and a pair of balloons, a larger one above and a smaller tethered to the bottom. It had no armaments, but a sigil painted onto the torch to activate a rudimentary envelope of shield magic, for keeping out rain or snow. Belowdecks were three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a storage room, already stocked with a few essentials: a small stove, a change of sheets, cleaning equipment.

While everypony explored and inspected the ship, Twilight was at the museum, telling Lumb what they had decided regarding the sigil in his attic; in the haste and fever of the night before, she had forgotten to discuss it with him. They took off only an hour after sunrise, readying themselves, for the first time in a long time, for a long stretch of nothing. It was four days until the Everfree Forest, where Twilight said she would decide whether they needed to stop for a spell. She sketched a quick note to Celestia, informing her of their progress, and they were off.

When Hoofington was behind them, she joined Octavia at the rail, looking south, seeing only the distant horn of Canterlot Mountain. Behind, Rarity’s voice took on an indignant tone.

“I thought you were supposed to find a home in Hoofington.”

“Me?” Whooves asked. “Ah, yes. Er, quite.”

The Elements of Harmony were four days out of Hoofington and just beginning to cross the Everfree Forest, and Colgate stepped onto the train with one suitcase and no backward glances. Her former Datura teammates were there to see her off, but she didn’t acknowledge them. In her mind, they were all traitors. She sat in the aisle beside a lemon yellow stallion, and, through the cracked window, heard Allie shout. “See you never, you psycho!”

She closed her eyes and tried to cast a simple spell, but her horn refused to respond. The suppression collar hugged her horn’s base snugly, its inside ring grooved to make safe removal only possible with magic; clumsy hooves could pull at it, but it would come off at terrible pain to the unicorn wearer.

On the aisle’s other side, Chilly Clouds read a book and occasionally glanced at Colgate. She had nothing to say of Colgate’s new assignment, saying only that she was to live with someone “in similar circumstances.”

They stopped for an hour at a nameless way station in the middle of the grassy wilderness, and arrived in Lower Canterlot at the outer edge of dusk. Chilly Clouds took her to a small, lipstick-red car, and they moved through the yellowing highways into the grimy heart of the Canterlot suburbs. Above them, the white palace hung like a prize, an opulent platter of turrets and towers over mile after mile of faceless city.

At a red light, Colgate stuck her head out the open window, studying with cold passivity the passers-by. She was reminded more of the ponies in Manehattan, but without the sense of entitlement that manifested in their strides and postures. No one looked down their nose at the pony asking for change under a shop’s awning, but no one gave either.

They turned a corner, and Colgate’s eyes followed a poster as it appeared and then faded, pegged to otherwise empty brickwork. She hadn’t time to see it all, but she had caught Celestia’s stern face and the word “Discord.” She had seen smaller, similar versions on light poles on the way.

“What’s with the posters?” she asked.

“What posters?”

“The ones with Celestia.”

“Oh. Right. Those.” They stopped at another light. “Been here so long, I don’t even notice them. We’re supposed to call them ‘safe thought posters.’ They’re propaganda.”

“Seriously?”

“Look up,” Chilly said, pointing to a building in the distance. On its roof, Colgate saw Celestia’s same visage, looking down on them. Below her dutiful frown, there read “Trust No Dissent.”

“Celestia’s taking this pretty seriously.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Colgate snarled and looked back out the window. Chilly’s tone rubbed her the wrong way, but she was in no position to say anything. She read another poster as they passed: “Support The Elements Of Harmony.”

“Okay, here we are,” Chilly said, stopping them on a small residential street. “The blue house.”

Colgate got out and looked back at the car. “From now on?”

“Good luck.”

Before she could say anything more, Chilly was rolling away, and Colgate was soon left on her own, suitcase at her hooves, her shadow long on the sidewalk. The house was a single story compact, windows open to show a conservative interior. The walls were bright blue, almost the same shade as her coat, and its chimney was perfectly clean. She imagined it was for show.

She walked up an empty driveway and crossed a patch of warm, moist lawn, a sprinkler chirping beside a sapling. The welcome mat said “Oh no! Not you again!” and Colgate wiped her hooves on it uncomfortably before knocking. She had four pills left, enough for the evening and the entire day after. They rolled in their bottle in her suitcase, along with a couple books, what little money she had outside of the bank, and some changes of clothes. Everything else, she had left at home. Standing in the golden evening, waiting for someone to get the door, she wondered for the first time why she had left so much.

A pale cream earth pony with a navy blue mane and heavy eye shadow answered, smiling. “Colgate?”

“That’s me.”

“Oh, thank Celestia. I’ve asked everypony who came by that so far; they must’ve thought I was crazy!” She laughed, and Colgate went inside with her. As soon as the door was shut, she turned and pumped Colgate’s hoof in an energetic shake. “I’m so happy to meet you. Powder Rouge. Or just Rouge.”

“Colgate.”

“Yep, sounds about right,” she said, laughing. “They told me to expect a real serious mare.”

Colgate looked around the new room. The brown carpet was thin and streaked with shed fur, most of it Rouge’s color. A small TV sat atop an empty crate next to a bookcase piled with audio equipment, all of it covered in dust.

“So did Foxglove tell you anything about what we do here?”

Colgate looked back to her host. Her eye shadow reminded Colgate of her own formerly bruised eyes. “Only that I couldn’t do any damage over here.”

“Aw, another rejection! Hey, don’t be glum; a lot of us are rejections around here. I am!”

“I… see.”

“You gotta meet the team later, you just gotta. Some of us say it’s a convenient place to put all the useless Daturas, but they’re fulla crap. It’s a place to whip us into shape,” Rouge said.

“What do you do here?”

“Oh, only some of the most important groundwork a Datura can possibly do,” she said with over-affected casualness. “We’re Datura information gatherers: ponies who keep an eye and an ear out for anything suspicious.”

“And what do we do when we find something?”

“I have a wire to another team leader, and I let her know.”

“Another leader?”

“Yeah, so, it works like this. Hey, c’mon, let me give you the grand tour. This is the front room. Tube right there, but I don’t usually turn it on. Out here’s the kitchen. Anyway, yeah, we got one team leader for us, keeping us rejects in line.” They moved into a messy, but not unclean, kitchenette. Rinsed dishes were stacked in a sink, and a roll of trash bags sat in the corner, beside a dusty fire extinguisher. “Here’s the living room. Got a TV in here too; again, not much doin’ with it.”

Colgate went to the sagging gray couch opposite a larger TV, beside which she could see through a floor-to-ceiling window to the cluttered patio. A grill stood in tall, yellowing grass with a garden hose clumsily looped around its base. “The other leader, she’s like the, uh, you know, the emergency responder or whatever. Takes cues from us, and sends her own ponies out to get it. She’s got the more capable ones of the bunch. There’s just a garage through that door there, nothing special.”

She walked Colgate the one bedroom down the hall, where a wide, musty king-size dominated the tacky decorations and stacks of TV and music magazines. Colgate eyed a gaudy foam parrot perched on a bedpost; with the curtains drawn, it looked like it was eyeing her back. “Yeah, this job is cake,” Rouge said from within an abutting bathroom. “If this is what they do to the useless ones, I wish I’d screwed up earlier!”

“What do you have outside?” Colgate asked.

“Oh! Duh! I gotta show you the back. C’mon!” They trotted back to the kitchen and out into a small back yard. “So you can see we’ve got the grill there, and whole butt-load of chairs, and ashtrays, and all that jazz. I like a good yard party. Uhh, tool shed.” She pointed at a graying structure with a large dent in its door. “Got an inflatable pool in there somewhere, but, last I checked, it’s covered in cobwebs. You can probably pull it out, though.” She looked at Colgate, eyes widening. “Hey! Wanna have a pool party? I’ll round up the crew, get some beers, and we can introduce you in style!”

“Sorry, I can’t,” Colgate said, indicating her suppression collar.

Rouge looked at her, excited expression deflating only slightly. “The heck’s that?”

“It keeps me from using magic.”

Rouge frowned—an expression that didn’t look natural on her face—and then popped her eyes again. “Oh, what? Are you a freakin’ saboteur?” She backed away. “That’s cool if you are, I mean.”

Colgate led them back inside, where she sat down on the couch. “I got transferred. Simple as that.”

“Well, yeah, sure, but why? I gotta know, Cole, I just gotta.”

Colgate thought. She had no compunctions about discussing her Ponyville Datura with her new partner, but, at the same time, could not dispel the suspicion that she was sharing the house with an informant. “She’s too nice. Clearly hiding something.”

“Yeah, I get it, sensitive topic. I was hoping you wouldn’t be touchy about it, but, if so, whatever,” Rouge said. “So there’s no hard feelings, I’ll let you in on me. I used to work down in Applewood. I had a sweet gig as a makeup artist—ding! Check the cutie mark if you don’t believe that, baby—watching a little mare you might recognize. Ever hear of Photo Finish?”

Colgate leaned forward.

“She got involved in some weird stuff a couple years back. One of her models turned out to be some kind of artificial, er, thing. I think they call those golems. You know, made from inanimate crap and then made to walk? Well, anyway, a lot of ponies got really freaked out, and she did too—she didn’t know it was a golem, you know, she just found the model at some party—so they sent me to watch her. Guard stuff, nothing serious.”

“That sounds serious to me,” Colgate said.

“Eh. But I got too wrapped up in my cover job, started neglecting Datura stuff, and then bing-bang-boom, hello Canterlot reject team.”

“So who’s our team leader?”

“Fancy Pants.”

“I know of him.”

“Pretty important pony ‘round these parts. Paragon of the social elite, tons of admirers, really big name to drop, and all that. He lives up near the palace, but he’s cool. His wife’s a Datura too.”

“How romantic.”

“Sure is. I envy ‘em, running around, taking missions, saving the world together.” She went into the kitchen, still talking. “I don’t even have a special somepony.” She placed something on the counter. “Shots!”

“What?”

“Shots! What kind of ‘welcome to Canterlot’ party is this without shots?”

Colgate got up, hesitant.

“What say you?” Rouge deftly opened a bottle and lined up a pair of amber shots. She smiled, bent forward to wrap her lips around one, and took it. “Hah! Ever seen an earth pony do that?”

“I really shouldn’t,” Colgate said.

“Oh, come on, Miss Serious. Live a little!”

“No, I seriously can’t.”

“Allergies?”

Colgate frowned and nudged her shot glass aside, knowing she wouldn’t be able to drink it as easily as Rouge had if she tried. “Medication.”

“Ooooooh, gotcha.” She grabbed the shot and took it. “Wait! Medication for what? I don’t think Foxglove mentioned anything about that.”

“It’s medication to keep me evened out. I’m not exactly… well.”

“Then why the collar if you’ve got pills?” Rouge asked. Though she had taken two shots in the space of a minute, she seemed no less focused as she spoke to Colgate.

Colgate went to her briefcase and kicked it lightly. “You’re telling me no one told you what’s going on with me. You have no idea what to expect?”

“Nope! Is that a problem? You look unhappy.”

Excitement and anxiety trickled into her thoughts, and her mind chugged rapidly. She was speaking before she even knew what she was trying to do. “Okay, this is what happened. I was in Ponyville, and they wanted us to go to work on a Tartarus gateway out in the wilderness. Well, things got a little heated, and one of us had some kind of flashing potions. They were to disorient and blind some of the wildlife that had come through to our side.”

Rouge listened with wide eyes, mouth slack.

“I accidentally looked at one as it went off, even though the pony shouted at us to avert our eyes. You see, I heard the urgency in her voice before I actually processed the words, so I looked at her, thinking she was in trouble. I was rendered useless in the middle of all this chaos, and they had to drag me out.” She affected a sigh. “That’s why I got kicked out.”

“Wow, talk about rotten luck. That coulda happened to anyone!”

“Well, it happened to me.”

“Geez.” Rouge slapped the countertop and put the liquor back in the fridge, slotting it beside several other bottles. “So what happens when those pills run out, huh? You gonna go crazy or something?”

“I really don’t know. I haven’t gone off them, ever.”

“This should be an interesting week, then.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“On the up-side, once you’re off the meds, you can drink with me. I’ve got this wicked lead at a bar that I’m trying to crack. You can probably help me.”

“Sure. Where is it?”

“It’s called the Twisted Plum. It’s on… aw, heck, I don’t know the crossroads. I know the way, though. Walking distance.”

“What’s the lead?”

Rouge went to a window and stared out of it, her voice lowering to a dramatic, arch tone. “You know when you meet someone, and you can just tell that they’re not all that they seem?”

“All the time,” Colgate said, watching her with practiced neutrality.

“Bingo. This pony… there’s something going on with him. And I don’t like it.” She turned abruptly. “We’re gonna have to trust each other, you and I.”

“I wouldn’t be a Datura if I weren’t trustworthy.”

Rouge smiled and hugged Colgate, saying, as she did so, “And so a friendship is made!”

While Rouge was outside scrubbing the grill, Colgate sat and watched TV. The Super Six was on, one of the more successful films concerning the Elements of Harmony, and their efforts to stop Nightmare Moon.

Colgate’s mind drifted far from her location, even as Nightmare Moon screamed that her night would last forever.

Rouge seemed harmless, but Colgate was not ready to give up her suspicions. She hadn’t batted an eye at Colgate’s lie about her time in Ponyville, though she realized shortly after that it was a lie she would have to keep track of for her entire time in Canterlot. If Rouge did suspect, and was merely hiding it, her job would be as simple as waiting and asking Colgate to repeat the story in the future, to see if her details would slip.

At the same time, she had checked Rouge’s fridge, and found only cheap food and hard alcohol, neither of which suggested to her a pony of particular intelligence.

She sat up and watched as Rouge crossed the lawn to speak with someone on the other side of the wall. She could see only the top of a mane, bobbing up and down with what she imagined was enthusiasm while Rouge doubled over in laughter.

At sunset, Rouge led them out of the neighborhood to a warmly lit, spacious bar far from the street corner. Piano music spilled onto the street with an electric purple light, coming from the garish, neon plum glowing on the bar’s sign. A yellow toothpick skewered it and dripped fat, purple teardrops into a martini glass.

Inside, the bartender greeted Rouge with a casual wave, and Colgate gave him a friendly nod, which went unnoticed.

“Right here, next to the pianey,” Rouge said, pulling out a chair and slapping the table garrulously. Colgate sat down and looked at the selection of signature drinks, more for appearances than any real curiosity. What Rouge had said earlier stuck in her mind. After her final pill was gone, she could, and possibly would, start drinking, and the thought of it shriveled her dull emotions into a painful knot of what other ponies knew as fear—nothing but a peculiar quickening of thought for her. She had never drank, being too young for it when she first started taking medication, and studied the myriad bottles behind the bar, knowing nothing of them, a stranger in a world she would shortly be encouraged to dive into.

“Howdy, miss. Don’t think I’ve seen you before,” a bright green unicorn said, sashaying beside their table in a checkered blouse and skirt. “What can I get for you?”

“Just water, please,” Colgate said.

“Gimme a tropical storm,” Rouge said. “And can we get some zucchini boats too?” She leaned over the table as the waitress moved off. “Cole, you’re gonna love these things. They stuff ‘em with pimentos and some kind of cheese, I don’t know what.”

Colgate nodded and looked around. The only ponies inside were themselves, the piano player, the bartender and wait staff, and a pair of intimately conversing ponies at the bar’s corner.

Rouge laughed. “Hey, Cole, did I forget to mention I’m a space alien here to steal the city’s newspapers?”

“I’m listening,” Colgate said. “Just familiarizing myself with the area.”

“Good. I thought I’d lost you. Oh, thank you, hon.” She sipped gratefully at a dark blue drink, and Colgate looked at her water. “Mm, now that’s the way to start a night. Check this out, Cole. Dark rum, simple syrup, pomegranate and cherry juice, and some orange peel rubbed around the rim. I know you can’t taste it, but take a whiff.” She pushed the drink toward Colgate, who smelled it.

“That’s a strong drink.”

“You bet your bippy it is.” She took another sip and looked meaningfully at Colgate, then flicked her eyes at the piano player. “Oh, darling,” Rouge addressed the player, who paused, “play something more upbeat. I just made a new friend, and I want to celebrate!”

The player smiled and leaned into his work, switching into a discordant, happy tune, to which Rouge began nodding her head and then swaying in her seat. Each time her eyes connected with Colgate’s, she smiled, and Colgate returned it without thinking. Her ears were up and she tried to pay attention to the song. She knew there would likely be no message to it, but, she thought, she had to start somewhere.

Nodding in time to affect distraction, she looked around the bar again, and when she turned back, Rouge had finished half her drink, and was staring intently at the back of the bar. Colgate turned similarly, pretending to crack her back, but saw nothing. Leaning as much as she could, she gave Rouge a questioning look.

“Waiting for someone to come out of the bathroom,” she said. “You’ll be okay on your own?”

Without waiting for a response, Rouge hopped up and vanished, and Colgate waited out the piano’s song, thinking to herself how to approach the stallion. She could do nothing that night, she knew; she was too new, too noticeable. Whatever was to happen, she realized, she would be forced to rely on Rouge for direction.

By eleven, the bar was full of jostling ponies, a vacant piano, and an impenetrable noise. Rouge was on her sixth drink, gregariously drunk, and was splitting her time between Colgate and a neighboring booth of strangers. She didn’t appear to notice, but Colgate watched their smiles waver each time Rouge returned to them.

She wet her hoof on her sweating glass of iced tea and watched a guffawing pair of mares stumble out into the streets. One of the things Rouge had told her before losing herself to the night was that public intoxication was worthy of a hefty fine in Canterlot, but, in their part of town, there weren’t many police to enforce it. Colgate quietly hoped that the two strangers would not be so lucky.

She jerked her eyes over to Rouge, who was cheering something with a foreleg around one unicorn’s wither, and let her gaze slide away. No one paid her any attention, and she was both fascinated and disconcerted.

In one way, the anonymity charmed her. She was surrounded, the scene impossible to miss, but was just a quiet unicorn buried in the middle. She felt invisible.

In another way, though, she could not completely believe it. She felt, even as she folded a napkin and looked at a basket of peanuts she could not grab with hooves alone, that someone was scrutinizing her. She could not pick them from the crowd, but she knew what it was. The same prickling sensation that moved her skin nearly constantly in her final days in Ponyville beset her in the bar, and she had to consciously slow her movements, to pretend a relaxed air.

“Hey, Cole, how you doin’?” Rouge shouted. “You all right?”

“Fine,” Colgate called, nodding along. She froze. “Too much.” The nod was exaggerated, so Rouge couldn’t miss it, but she felt with a too-heavy comprehension that her mystery watcher had also seen. “I stick out here. I’m not drunk, and I’m keeping still.” She looked warily around, still holding to her casual demeanor, her face still blank. A burly earth pony at the bar turned at the same time and gave her a smile, his young face light and ruddy.

She turned back to her drink, the slowness pulling at her nerves. She could feel his eyes on her even with her back to him, and she tried to imagine what she would do when he approached.

“Hi! Cherry Orchard,” he said, coming swiftly from behind to take Rouge’s seat. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

Colgate froze, and a single thought shouted through her muddied mind. “Don’t let him see you.” She smiled warmly and met his eyes. “That would be nice, Cherry Orchard.” She sighed. “My friend ditched me.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, I saw that. Nice mare, right?”

“Eh, she doesn’t mean anything by it.” She laughed. In the noise of the bar, her laughter sounded, to her, false and mechanical. A tiny thought reminded her that no one else knew it. “Petunia. Good to meet you.”

“That’s a pretty name,” he said. “I’ve always liked ponies with plants for their names. I thought it always sort of said something, you know? Ponies named after growing things have good character, in my opinion. At least, every one I’ve ever met. What is that?”

“Just iced tea. I don’t drink.” She gave an apologetic look, but he smiled.

“They serve non-alcoholic mixed drinks here, did you know that?”

“Really?” She smiled again and held it for as long as it took him to look away, and then quickly studied his face. The grin he wore seemed genuine to her, clouded as it was by alcohol.

“I haven’t tried any myself, but I heard the apricot blitz is really good.”

She swept his face again, noting as she did so a mild wrinkling of the brow as he spoke. She felt her own smile falter. He was judging her.

“So what does a nice pony like you do for a living?”

“I’m actually on vacation right now. I work in the spa down in Ponyville.”

“Ponyville, wow! I’ve always wanted to go there,” he said, turning around. “Is it nice?”

“It’s wonderful there. Everyone is really nice. This is my first night, and I already miss my friends.”

He smiled and leaned forward. The overhead light reflected briefly in his eyes, and she stared. He seemed to search her, and she sat back. No articulate thought crossed her mind, but she felt a renewed sense of threat from him.

“I should go down there sometime.” He chuckled. “I’ll be sure to visit your spa, too, Petunia.”

“This isn’t right. I shouldn’t have told him it’s my first night. He knows he can lie to me now.” She sighed and pushed her tea aside. “Did you know that you can have a heart attack if you spend too long in the steam room? The heat and humidity can affect older ponies.”

He frowned.

“One of my friends had to resuscitate one once.” A small thought stirred in her swirling mind: “What are you doing? This is no time to be overt.” Her mouth went on without pause, and she could feel a malicious smile taking over her false, friendly one. “Of course, it can be hard with all the sweat and condensation on the fur. Imagine squeezing a sponge.”

“That’s horrible,” Cherry Orchard said.

“The old pony later died of more natural causes, not in our building, thankfully. The family could have taken us to court, maybe, but they didn’t. Good ponies, nice upbringing.” She licked her lips, watching her new friend’s face grow more and more uncomfortable. “The undertaker and I are good friends, and she said that the oldster died aspirating a carrot. Imagine that!” “My Celestia, what is this?” “They had to use a speculum and a pair of pliers to get the sucker out of him. Of course, the teeth get in the way, so they take those out first.”

“Oh my Luna.” He looked paler, but it was hard to tell in the light.

“I think the teeth get incinerated, along with the unicorn horn and the hooves. There’s a crematorium somewhere under Ponyville, I think, or a giant oven anyway.” She drank her tea and watched his eyes, wide and soft, and then looked over at Rouge, who gave her a wink and a grin.

“Petunia?”

Inside her head, suspicion had become a slow spiral, drawing conscious thought away from her words. “I remember one pony accidentally stepped on a thin patch of earth and got her leg caught in one of the exhaust pipes. There are signs, but some ponies don’t pay attention. There’s a spot right next to the river where, if you step wrong, you can fall right through and accidentally go down a giant vent. There’s no coming back from that.”

“I have to go,” Cherry said, pushing away from the table rapidly. “It was, uh, great to meet you, Petunia.”

She watched him go and waved, but he didn’t look back.

“What was his problem?” Rouge asked, taking her seat back.

“I’d rather not find out.” She looked at her tea, still a quarter full, and got up. “I think it would be best if I got out of here.”

Colgate woke up under an open window to the smell of brewing coffee. Rouge’s bed was larger than hers back in Ponyville, and she rolled over and got up, feeling no pleasure at the knowledge that she had neither hospital nor strenuous Datura training to occupy her day.

She went to the dining room and helped herself to a piece of bread, and Rouge poured them both a steaming mug. “Black, great for the morning after,” she said.

Colgate sipped it, distantly registering the scalding in her mouth. She tried to levitate a pill from her bottle on the counter, but faltered, remembering the collar, and took ten minutes to get it out with her hooves.

“So what did you do to that poor stallion last night?” Rouge asked. “He was cute.”

Colgate placed her pill bottle between them on the table. She had thought about her course of action for an hour after returning the night before, but it was with hesitance that she began speaking.

“You all right?”

“I told you I’m going to go off these,” she began. “And that’s nothing to scoff at, Rouge. These pills keep me calm. Once they run out, I’m not completely sure what will happen to me.” She paused and looked away, drinking more coffee as she did so. It was such a simple act, telling the truth, but Rouge’s interrogative, non-threatening expression felt like a drill in her mind.

“Is that really something to worry about? From what I’ve seen, you don’t have a mean bone in your body.”

“Something about the bar last night got to me. I don’t know what it was, because I’ve never been in one before.”

“Got to you how?”

“I can’t define it, but that stallion last night caused it. I don’t know what he was trying to do to me, but I just went off. I started making up this whole story about a giant oven buried underneath Ponyville, and how ponies sometimes fell through the ground to get burned up. That was around when he left me. He looked worried.”

“Geez, Colgate, you don’t say! Where’d you even come up with that?”

“I don’t know.”

“So that whole time, you were lying some gruesome blue streak at him?” She laughed. “That’s kinda funny, actually.”

“I didn’t even give him my real name.”

“That’s okay, though,” Rouge said. “Celestia, that’s one hell of a story to tell someone who’s just trying to be friendly.”

“That was not friendliness. He had something planned, I could tell.”

“Really?”

“I have some skill at reading expressions, and body language. He isn’t the first pony to try something with me, either.”

“Huh, wow. Some luck you have, huh?”

Colgate smiled. “What about you? Did you learn anything about the pianist?”

“Oh, him? No, no, nothing at all. Hey, that’s the cost of a good time sometimes, you know? We’ll get him eventually.”

Lacey Kisses was reading when someone knocked on her door. She rose, crossed a cranberry red carpet, and allowed in a coolly uniformed pony with her room service. She thanked her with a smile and a couple bits.

Manehattan was long behind her. It was her twelfth night in Applewood, and her third in the Apogee, a hotel ironically close to the city’s center. From her vantage on the seventeenth floor, she could see nearly the whole city beneath and before her: the monolithic hydroelectric dam in the northeast; the night-shredding spotlight of the Sun Stadium in the northwest; and the endless grid of bars and restaurants that formed The Bright Road, the jewel of Applewood’s tourist economy. Millions of ponies visited every year, coming for their chance at wealth, fame, or treasured memories, temporarily—and occasionally for longer—losing themselves in the ribbon of lights under her window.

She had left only a month ago, more than half of which was travel time, and was only just recovering from having to uproot herself so quickly. Seeing disastrously few options for survival, she had quit her job and taken all the money out of her bank account. Keeping it hidden, and spending with unflagging caution, she said she had been fired to anyone who would ask.

Captain Shout, the radio personality she had persuaded to turn on Strawberry, believed her story happily, which was exactly what she wanted. The information made its way to Strawberry, which was also what she wanted. When he sent a new thug to her house in the middle of the day, she was ecstatic that her plan had worked. Quick to overconfidence, he would slip up right in front of her, as long as she could wait him out.

What she had not counted on was Captain Shout’s idea of personal integrity. She had assumed that he would be blinded by a need for revenge, and not once consider the innocent lives he would be disrupting at her behest. She had not expected that, despite doing and saying what she wanted him to, he would turn and reveal everything to the listening public, to his own detriment. “A warm sense of duty,” he called it on the air.

She remembered listening to his show, as she did every night, and sitting in stony horror as he listed her name, Strawberry’s, and other incidental criminals’, and then calmly stating their parts as he knew them in the city’s recent tribulations. She was still on the defensive from Strawberry, and, with neither job nor prospects, found herself in the space of a few hours unable to handle the machinations that had carried her since first meeting the Elements of Harmony. Her delicate web of lies and plans was blown apart, and she was forced to face the reality that she had manipulated herself into a corner. Strawberry was good enough at hiding his tracks that all accusations appeared groundless, but Lacey did not have the resources. Between exile and eventual arrest and imprisonment, she had no choice but to embrace the former.

She finished eating and opened her bag, finding, on top, a note that she had read countless times. Reverend Green had written it in the airship docking station in Manehattan, and passed it to her at the last second as she boarded. Barely legible, it read: “Do not let Applewood’s brightness blind you on your way.”

She tucked it away and closed her eyes. He had left Manehattan already, she was sure, but she had no idea where he was headed. She recalled his voice, responding to her worry with a patient tone that always made her smile, that care was intrinsic to anyone who walked in the way of Princess Luna.

He was her oldest friend, but she did not ordinarily feel fear for him in his travels, so frequently occupied was she with her own affairs. Alone in the new city and free of the chess game of her former life, however, she was able to wonder where he went, and how he survived in the wilderness. He had told her, in Manehattan, that he had come on hoof from Appleloosa. Her own legs felt weak to imagine the distance.

She did not even think to ask the most obvious question in her astonishment that he had tracked her down in her hometown, unsolicited, and it tore at her in her solitude: how did he know to come? They had not even exchanged letters after The Crumbling, as she and many others were starting to call it, but something had drawn him all the same. He had found her only days before Captain Shout unraveled her life on live radio, and the timing was too good, she thought. She knew he would deny foreknowledge, and attribute the meeting to coincidence, or divine will, but she didn’t like to think of his life-saving advice as a mere product of good luck.

She had called him just after midnight, crying tears of humiliation, rage, and despondency, and then waited for an agonizing hour as he made his way to her house, where they stayed up until four in the morning, talking. She told him everything, starting with the threats to her job, and the way she had coerced Rarity into performing for the camera. She told him how she lost Wings and Jet, her two closest work friends, and how Strawberry had gained the advantage in the then invisible conflict.

She ended with the catastrophic broadcast, and, after a disquietingly short interval of silence, he advised she leave Manehattan at once, not only for her safety, but for the security of her soul. He had even offered to pay for her airship ticket, and the choice had seemed perfectly clear at the time. Her life in Manehattan was falling away. She could feel it by the hour, and there was no safe place to land. She left two days later, leaving Reverend Green to his own devices—a mystery to her—and leaving Captain Shout with, she hoped, a big enough distraction to keep him pinballing between sides until she had an opportunity to reestablish contact.

The only problem: she still had no idea how to regain power, once she was settled. In Applewood, she had a meager pair of contacts, ponies she had only ever written to, and whom she could not trust in a time of need. She had found an apartment, but could not move in until a few more days had passed, and so had to drain her finances shifting between hotels.

On the other side of Equestria, meanwhile, Strawberry remained, just as dauntless and completely hidden from her. Phone lines were up inside the city, but not across the country, and she had no unicorns at the ready to send or receive letters. A public mail-sender would not suit her needs. She knew she couldn’t trust the pony she would contact anyway, had she the option.

She was cut off, but had to consider what her counterpart did, and try to predict his movements so she could catch up when the opportunity presented itself. She could not rely on it to last, and a quick decision could mean very much for her life, and possibly more. Strawberry’s ultimate goal, as she knew it, was not to destroy her, but to enlarge his own power in whatever way he could, to the greatest extent he could. She was doubtless that, if he were able to envelope Manehattan, his eye would turn outwards. Appleloosa seemed to her a likely next target, as did Fillydelphia.

The only other thing she knew was that Captain Shout would not be a serious threat to him. Strawberry’s talent for moving evidence was too great. It would be only a matter of time before the loudmouth rebel outlived his usefulness as an easily redirected missile, and Strawberry saw fit to remove him; Lacey feared that she would not get to see the results of what she could only imagine as Shout’s final blaze of glory.

“Still, if Shout can keep him off balance for long enough, I might be able to pick myself up and create a counter-attack,” she thought.

It was a familiar idea, one she had looked at many times in the last week. And as she did each time she thought it, she looked around her room, out the window, at the most expensive city in Equestria. She found, as she did every time, that she didn’t want to.

It was a simple fact that she could not ignore. Freedom from suspicion and vague threats was like a splash of ice water to the face, opening her eyes to herself. She had no desire to return to white-collar crime, not for her own gains and not to depose her rival. Were she younger, she knew she would jump at the chance, but she saw no good in it from her safe spot in the Apogee. Danger, stress, worry, and endless ways to try to manipulate good ponies into bad situations. As far as she was concerned, one had been too many.

“But I can’t dismiss the fact that I have the best chance of anyone at removing Strawberry from his position,” she thought. “Shout has his own warm sense of duty. Why not me?”

Retreating to Applewood, after all, would be easy. She could get the apartment, find a steady job as an attractive waitress, and wait for the Elements of Harmony and the princesses to take care of the country, assuredly safe in the giant city. By the time Strawberry’s net had widened to reach Applewood, if it ever did, she would be far from his mind, as long as she kept quiet.

She read Reverend Green’s note again. “How does one know her own way, though?” she asked the empty room. The TV was on, and answered with a cheering crowd as a loved character entered the scene. It was her favorite sitcom, but she was too deep in thought to enjoy it. The problem’s benign orthodoxy stood out to her, though what it meant, she wasn’t sure.

She looked along The Bright Road once more. Hotels towered at its edges like festooned trees among patches of glowing lichen, and ponies pulsed through the streets like confetti ants on the forest floor. The distant noise was atonal, but, closer, she heard music. Someone had set up a drum set of buckets and pounded away while a unicorn with a harmonica wailed at passers-by.

“Do other ponies lose themselves so easily?” she wondered, and lay on the bed, propping herself enough to see the TV. She slipped her eyes closed and tried to embrace the walls of sound, and nearly succeeded. A well-timed burst of laughter broke her concentration, and she moved the pillow aside to look up at the ceiling. “Damn it,” she whispered.

One pill jostled in Colgate’s bottle. Rouge, much better with her bare hooves than Colgate, tipped it out and gave her a glass of water.

“So, that’s it,” Rouge said as Colgate swallowed. “How do you feel?”

“What do you mean?”

“Uh… what’s it like to be out of medication?”

“I think I’m okay.” She went to the fridge. “I don’t know how withdrawal is going to be, though. I know going off them suddenly like I’m about to is a bad idea.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. I probably won’t want to go out with you for a couple days. I might be sick, or I might be something much worse than that.”

“How much worse?”

“I can’t say.” She frowned. “I’ve never done this before, remember?”

“Sorry, Cole.” They were silent for a second, and Colgate closed the fridge door. “Wanna go out and have a last hurrah, then? Before you get all messed up on withdrawal?”

“What did you have in mind?”

Rouge shrugged.

“Let’s do dinner. I’m hungry.”

“Yeah, okay. Wanna do what you did last night again?”

“What’s that?”

“You know, make up some kind of elaborate lie. Could be a fun little challenge, see if we can keep up with each other.”

“I imagine you’d outpace me.”

It was the middle of their eighth day from Hoofington, and Twilight was in her room, researching. Celestia was done with the dragons, and was to take only a week to rest before going to her next country, the small city-state of draconequuses deep in the southeastern plateaus and mesas, a peanut-shaped sea away from the minotaur continent. Discord was staying nowhere in particular, but always near his castle; both princesses assumed, with much dismay, that it meant his third attempt on the capital could not be far off.

She was perusing a book on the Elements of Harmony, their origins, and how they functioned. It had been in the ship’s hold, apparently forgotten, but she recognized the author, and was excited to have time to go through it. Silver Sun was a jeweler and alchemist from the mines beneath the Friesian Mountains, her name appearing in dozens of journals ranging from magic studies to crystallography. Twilight knew her best from her articles on the Elements of Harmony.

Twilight knew that they had been created as a joint effort between the goddesses, who did the research and experimentation with magic, and a jeweler in the present-day Friesian Mountains. She knew that the Elements were best used by six separate bearers, but had been originally designed to work for the princesses only, all six for both in case one were to be indisposed. Originally, Celestia or Luna could, at any time, take up the Elements and use them, but at great risk, for to power six artifacts from one source was to invite confusion and disaster in the delicate magical system.

She even knew why it had to be them to use the Elements on Discord, and not the princesses, though she was not certain Celestia was aware of her knowledge. Luna had returned from her imprisonment to be cleansed, and, in addition to the manifest evil that had surrounded her, she lost her spirit-deep connection to her sister. It was no real surprise, Twilight thought, but it rendered her unable to use the Elements as she once was intended, and it would be too dangerous for Celestia to attempt all six again. The single shot to imprison her sister could have easily backfired.

When she looked up from her book to see Fluttershy before her, she started. “Geez, Fluttershy, how long have you been there? I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Sorry, Twilight.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re over the swamps, not far from the Element.”

“Oh, good. Tell Applejack to stop, but keep us above ground. We need to find a way to get in there without breathing that gas again.”

“I did.”

“Ah. Good.” She looked back at her book, hiding mild surprise. “Hang on.” She looked back at Fluttershy, and flipped several pages. Something about Fluttershy’s quiet calm, the fact that she had given an order of her own accord, and a good one, made Twilight’s brain run. She looked under a section titled “Element Propagation.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Hold on.” She read. “Listen to this. When one bearer passes or in some way makes themselves into an inhospitable environment for the Element of Harmony, it will either go into dormancy or transfer to a more suitable host, ideally within the extant group’s circle. If it must go outside the other hosts’ range of friends, the other Elements will follow, if possible.

“If a bearer is to become close enough friends with someone else, it is possible to impose an Element onto that pony. A Familiar spell cast between bearer and the appropriately structured gem will become an Element of Harmony, if that Element and its bearer fit with the current bearers.”

She put the book down. “It goes on to show the math behind Element thresholds, technical stuff. Are you okay?”

“I didn’t know it was possible to make more,” Fluttershy said.

“Fascinating, right?” She got up and went for the stairs. Fluttershy followed her silently, and she turned, recognizing what it meant from her. “What’s wrong?”

“I think it might be more than fascinating, Twilight.”

They went up into humidity and sunshine. They were just above the treetops, slowly coasting south and waiting for further word.

“So where’s the Element from here?” Rainbow asked.

“I think we can stop in around ten minutes,” Fluttershy said, walking to the prow to look out with Applejack. Twilight stayed back, watching as the pegasus directed Applejack’s movements. She spoke with quiet authority, and a tone that did not expect questioning.

Fluttershy turned and looked at Twilight. “We may as well do it now, Twilight.”

“Do what?” Pinkie asked, hopping over from the other side, her tail switching.

“Something I read,” Twilight said. “And… well, yes, Fluttershy’s right; we should all talk about this.”

“Is it bad?” Big Mac asked.

“No, but it is important.” She looked around. “Where’s Octavia?”

“Brooding down below,” Rarity said. “Shall I get her?”

“Yes, please. We all need to talk about this.”

They waited for Applejack to bring them to a stop, then assembled in a circle on the wide deck. Behind, the torch emitted occasional spurts of flame to keep them at the height they wanted.

“So, the Elements of Harmony.”

“You sure this ain’t bad?” Applejack asked, and Fluttershy looked at her. “Sorry. Continue.”

“According to A Study of the Elements of Harmony… well, I mean, I read that… how do I say this?”

“Just spit it out,” Rainbow said. “That’s what I do.”

“Right. Yeah. Okay.” She looked at them all in a slow gaze. “We have the option to create more Elements of Harmony.”

For a minute, in which Twilight could feel her own heart beating, no one spoke. She had not seen any severity in the information, but Fluttershy’s reaction, and then everyone else’s, made her wonder whether she was missing something.

“How?” Rarity asked. “They can only be made by the goddesses.”

“No, they can’t.” She settled more on the deck, the moment past. “Anyone with sufficient skill with gemstones and magic can make one. As far as the actual object is concerned, it’s just a crystal in a golden frame, with some base-level duration enchantments on them.”

“But ours are special,” Rainbow said.

“Yes, indeed,” Whooves said, sitting close to Fluttershy. “If that were true, Twilight, then every knock-off Element of Harmony souvenir would be almost just as good as the real article.”

“Yes, plastic is so close to crystal,” Rarity said.

“A mild exaggeration, my dear.”

“It’s not the thing itself that’s special,” Twilight said. “It’s the magic cast between the bearer and the Element. It’s a kind of spell that intertwines their energies, and it’s really complicated. It had to be, for how they were used.”

“I mean no offense, but what does this have to do with us?” Octavia asked.

Twilight looked at Fluttershy.

“Um, well, I just thought it was something we should all get on the table,” Fluttershy said.

“Ah got a question,” Big Mac said. “Instead of runnin’ around an’ tryin’ to find the rest of the Elements, could we just make three substitutes an’ get everythin’ over with?”

“Blasphemy!” Whooves cried, and chuckled. “Just a joke, old chap.” He blushed slightly under the others’ looks. “What? Some ponies take the idea of Element purity extremely seriously. Silly idol worship and all that, you know?”

“You talk like you’ve heard about this before just now,” Rarity said.

“Er… well, that is, not as such.”

“I think it’s a worthy idea, Big Mac’s. Twilight?”

Twilight shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“What do you mean?” Applejack asked.

“The Elements of Harmony—the six original ones, the ones we’re supposed to be finding—were made to be used together only. It’s in the way the magic compounds inside the crystals, and inside us. We have to have all six for all six to work. We can’t just take half the real ones and use three new ones.”

“What is stopping us from simply replicating that magic, and making the new ones so that they can work with our three?” Octavia asked. “Is that not possible?”

“See… it’s, well, it’s hard,” Twilight said. “It’s more than hard.” She cleared her throat. “Getting the Elements of Harmony to work the way they do was one of the biggest things that separated the princesses from the rest of the mortal ponies. Tampering with their fundamental magic is so far beyond my capabilities, it’s like asking Big Mac here to pick up our airship and toss it across the country.” She shook her head. “And if I tried, and got it wrong, we could wind up destroying ourselves and leaving a crater the size of Manehattan behind.”

“No easy way to avoid findin’ the last three,” Applejack said. “All or nothin’.”

“Exactly. The simple truth is, that’s how they were made. No getting around that.”

“So what about new Elements, ones that aren’t supposed to take the place of ours?” Rarity asked. “Is that possible?”

“I guess, but I don’t see the point.”

“Wouldn’t they just wind up producing the same magical power from more sources?” Fluttershy asked. “Um, spread the load more evenly?”

“Yes, but that’s not even a problem. They were designed to be safe with six ponies. One or two—especially one—bearer is playing with suicide, but all six are fine anyway. More just complicates things.”

“Besides, Discord would just scatter the others,” Rainbow said.

“No, he wouldn’t, because we wouldn’t leave the mines until they were complete.”

“Mines?” Whooves asked.

“We’re not gonna buy ‘em from a jewelry store, pard,” Applejack said.

“The point is moot anyway,” Octavia said. “There is no advantage to creating more, so we will not. Right?”

“Why was it six?” Pinkie asked.

“Six Elements? I don’t know,” Twilight said. “I think it said something about six being all they could afford at the time.”

“Six Elements, made specifically to work for two princesses,” Whooves said. “Two, ten, however many more Elements, made with another pony in mind. You said something about them drawing from the same source, Fluttershy?”

“What she means is that six Elements and sixteen Elements would give the same amount of power, because they would be combining their energies to the same magical tipping point, whatever it is that activates that rush of magic we’re so familiar with.”

“Is that tipping point not inherent to the ponies that made it?”

“What do you mean?”

“So say we have the main six right here, and they combine to reach an activation point. Who’s to say that any extras have to abide that point? They’re not made by the princesses, or for them. They can be totally different entities.”

“But don’t they have to tie in to be Elements of Harmony?” Applejack asked. “Ah thought that’s what made ‘em special.”

“If we have to cast a spell—psh, we—if Twilight has to cast a spell to draw the new Elements in to the same magical, er, system as the old ones, why not just skip that step and let them be Elements unto themselves?”

“I get it,” Twilight said. “It wouldn’t mess up the six originals, because we wouldn’t be adding anything to their magic, and we wouldn’t need to have all the new ones assembled to use the six we’ll hopefully already have.”

“You’re talking about creating a new set entirely,” Fluttershy said.

“Exactly.” She thought, a frown deepening. “No, that doesn’t work. They have to be tied to one pony, though. One of us.”

“I thought you said they could stand alone,” Rainbow said.

“Why can’t they?” Whooves asked.

“Because then they wouldn’t be Elements of Harmony. The Elements combine magic into a single beam. They synthesize magic efficiently. They have to work together, otherwise they’d be useless. They don’t do anything to amplify magic on their own, so they’d be an empty filter.”

“Why not abandon the idea of more Elements, then?” Rarity asked. “Just make amplifiers?”

“Those are just pulse crystals,” Octavia said. “Discord is stronger than that. Though it might not be a bad idea to have some with us anyway.”

“Can we make a big one?” Rainbow asked.

“Sure, and we can march it right up to his castle, knock politely, and ask him to stand there while it charges up,” Twilight said. “An amplifier that can produce the same magic as the Elements of Harmony would have to be the size of one of those Manehattan office buildings.”

“They condensed all that power down to just six little baubles?” Whooves asked.

“It’s why they’re the goddesses, and we’re not,” Twilight said.

“Why not pick one of us an’ attach the Elements to her?” Big Mac asked.

“We’re not getting any,” Twilight said. “At least, I’m not planning to.”

“I just thought of something else,” Rarity said. “If we did make these new Elements—and I’m not saying we should. I quite agree with Twilight, actually—then how could we be sure they would even go to the ponies we wanted them to? If we did an Element of, say, trustworthiness for Big Mac, then how do we know it’ll go to him when it’s complete? It might wind up with some pony we’ve never met on the other side of the country. Then what good is it?”

“It would have to stay with one of our friends, if it wants to be included in our set,” Twilight said.

“But if it’s a new set,” Pinkie said, “then does that still work?”

“Oh, right. Uh… geez, I don’t know. I think not.”

“This is what Ah think,” Applejack said. “We’re clearly not ready to make this kind of decision, even if it just amounts to a lot of nothin’. We don’t even have a good idea of how it works.”

“Applejack is right,” Rarity said. “Let’s table this discussion and come back at a later time.”

“Yeah, okay,” Twilight said, looking out over the swamps. “Let’s worry about the Elements that actually exist for now.”

“Like the one less than a mile away,” Fluttershy said. Twilight thought she could hear bitterness in her voice.

While everyone else discussed the possibility of new Elements, and Twilight pondered a solution for the toxic gas that malingered in an invisible field just below, Rarity went to the shower, her second that day. She felt bad for using so much water, but the smell of the swamp stuck to her fur, and she had to take shallow breaths to keep from gagging.

She let tepid water turn her mane into a dark curtain, eyes closed and breathing slowly through her nose. It felt good to relax for the time, even though she knew, in less than an hour, she could need to go back into the swamp.

“This makes three, and then we go south. Half the Elements, half the country. Discord sure does like things symmetrical, doesn’t he? It’s a shame he’s such a villain; I’d love to try to make clothes for him.” She smiled and giggled, imagining taking his measurements with a comically long tape measure.

Still grinning, a tiny voice spoke inside her head. “Don’t fret. It is just I, your good friend.”

She did not register the words at first, thinking them an idle thought of her own, but jumped back and nearly bolted out of the tiny enclosure as a shape appeared in the corner. Her own wet fur converged out of the drain and slid up the wall, dragging thin snakes of water behind. She froze, simultaneously terrified and disgusted, unable to stop herself from imagining the grime and water spots dragging on her fur. As it moved up the wall, the trail grew, and she was pressed into the opposite corner watching as it reached her own height, then slightly taller, to become a narrow thread of dirty, wet white. It seemed to bend and swell out of the shower wall, and gained two beautiful blue eyes, a horn, and a sharp black mane.

Vanilla Cream nodded courteously and let himself out, closing the door behind him. Rarity only stood, trembling.

“Sorry for startling you,” he said quietly.

She let out her breath in a low moan, surprising herself that it was not louder. After a moment, she found her voice. “Don’t ever do that again. I nearly had a heart attack!”

“I told you it was but me, did I not?” He sounded apologetic, but she could see only his silhouette through the shower door.

“What do you want?”

“Last I saw you, you were all in a sorry state of affairs—something that could not be helped, I’m afraid. It looks like you’re all much better off now.”

“Yes.” She still avoided the shower stream, though her calm was seeping back.

“Twilight has reached a breakthrough, Rainbow has finally seen the end to that troublesome anxiety, and you’ve even made a new friend. One wonders whether you should want my magic at all.”

“Is that what you’re here for?”

“And yours specifically, Rarity.” He walked to the other side of the room. “I like you very much. You have integrity, and that’s something I respect in one of your kind.”

“You flatter me.”

He laughed. “They can’t hear us, by the way.”

“How?”

“I have ways,” he said. She felt it unwise to pursue the question. “So, you’ve got about a month before Discord attacks Canterlot again. Do you think you can get four more Elements in that time?”

“A month?”

“Give or take a week.”

“You’re being intentionally vague.”

He laughed again. “Of course I am! I can’t give precise information on him, not that I have it anyway. That is against—”

“The terms of your binding, yes, I know,” Rarity said. “It’s quite convenient.”

“I see Applejack’s been getting to you lately.”

“I can be suspicious on my own.”

“As you will be of getting in the shower for the next several months.”

“Now you flatter yourself.”

“My my, testy today. Why does no one seem to be in a good mood when I’m around?” He chuckled. “Despite all I do for you. Well, here.” The door slid open and Rarity shrunk under the faucet, a shriek ready on her lips. “This is your gift.” His horn glowed, and she stumbled where she stood.

“What is this?”

“Some heaviness in the legs is to be expected. Your magic will manifest when you wake up tomorrow. I put a delay on it because… well, why not?” He closed the door again, laughing softly. “You seem to be in no hurry.” Then he was no more.