A Mile in Her Shoes

by Ether Echoes

First published 24th of March, 2012

When Rainbow Dash abuses a magical artifact, karma gives her and the six a new perspective on life.

Pleased to be considered for an important promotion at last, one that will give her more than enough time to practice for the Wonderbolts - and the money can't hurt, either! - Rainbow Dash buys herself an enchanted set of horseshoes of questionable origins.
During the celebration praising her opportunity, however, she ignores the warnings posted on the object and, in the ensuing burst of magical chaos, she and her fellow Elements of Harmony are all given brand new perspectives on life.

With their respective futures in jeopardy, they will have to rely on their talents and skills and each other to overcome their obstacles. However, with their identities in crisis and in being forced to adapt to situations none of them are familiar with, will they be able to pull through and keep from going crazy at the same time?

No one, least of all them, knows, and there is only one way to find out: the hard way.

Part 1 - A Shoe Too Far

Twilight Sparkle was going to kill Rainbow Dash.

Okay. Not really. But she sure felt like wanting to kill Rainbow Dash.

The rain-laden wind ran through her mane as she banked high among the clouds over Ponyville like the stroke of a lover’s hoof, climbing the surface of a towering cumulonimbus thunderhead as if it were a cliff face. Her wings, as velvety black as Princess Luna’s lovely night sky above her, beat a steady cadence, with the subtle magic of the pegasi lifting her in defiance of all physical law.

By some miracle, she had managed to contain the storm to this one cell, but it was a cell that was dramatically out-of-control. Even as she climbed, a thunderous cascade of lightning shot up the towering mountain of cloud, white lightning that seemed strangely cold for all that it was hotter than the surface of her master’s sun. The shapes of other pegasi winged about through the twisting tendrils of cloud-forms, including one that shone a brilliant pink in the reflected light from within, corralling the intensity of the storm.

It was up to Twilight Sparkle now to do the final deed and prevent this unscheduled disaster from affecting weather patterns all across Equestria, overloading the already overworked Royal Weather Service to the breaking point. The Element of Magic, the favorite student of Celestia, and, presently, the weatherpony of the Ponyville Air Municipal District. It all came down to her.

And it was all Rainbow Dash’s fault.

Some time ago...

Rainbow Dash was a pony of many colors, and a pony of many faces. Some of those faces were rude, others were silly, and others still were angry and confrontational. At this particular moment, her face was a sort of self-satisfied smirk, a radiant expression of enlightened self-interest as she, for lack of a better word, danced in the sky. In the manner of pegasi, she was seemingly walking on solid ground while, in fact, being suspended some ten feet up in the air, while giving a family of bunnies something of a heart attack when her shadow passed overhead across the dew-beaded morning grass. The world around her was almost alarmingly green, with the deep growth of a spring day that had seen a good rainstorm every night for three weeks and sunny days for about as long. This alone would have been enough to make her swell with pride in her weather-working skills, were it not for the envelope open on the ground below.

“...awesome, so awesome, I’m too awesome for my shirt, too awesome...” she could be heard singing to herself in a horribly off-key manner quite unlike her normally pleasant singing voice while she did a hoof-shuffle in the air, jerking her head and body back and forward to an unheard beat.

The fence-lined lane cut between several cottages, and ponies heading to and from town with their foals or carts of product or saddlebags looked up at the disgustingly satisfied young pegasus with baffled and confused looks, their steps quickening as they trotted along the muddy road.

“...can’t settle for less... I’m the best... too awesome for the catwalk...”

Springing along, with both of her hooves landing together and then bouncing her forth again, Pinkie Pie could keep up a remarkably ground-eating pace as she carried a basket of muffins and balloons between her teeth. Rarity trotted not far behind her, the stylish white unicorn showing off her latest in spring fashions as she trotted daintily towards Fluttershy’s cottage. Despite the muddy condition of the road, she was somehow able to keep both herself and her outfit from getting splattered by either her bouncing friend or her own hoof steps, through what might only be described as the deep magic of a fashionista.

“...Can’t touch this, naaa na na na, waah waah...”

Rarity, of course, had spotted Rainbow Dash some distance away, and was affecting not to notice her grotesque little dance as beneath her dignity when her eye caught sight of the envelope lying on the road. Quickly, she summoned her magical gifts and snatched it from the path before Pinkie Pie could mash it firmly and irrevocably into the foul mud. Pausing for a moment in mid-air, the pink Earth pony looked down at where the letter had been, protesting, “Aww, Rarity, I was going to step on that!”

“...nopony as awesome as me, no touchin’ this flank...”

Patently ignoring this blatant violation of all things natural - as one had to do now and then in the other girl’s company - Rarity slid the letter out of the splattered envelope with a shimmer of magic. The potential to learn something at least mildly juicy, even literally under the nose of the pony involved, was simply too good and opportunity to pass up. Fluttershy could wait a few minutes while I satisfy a little curiosity, Rarity thought to herself, reaching down the page rapidly, her eyes narrowing in disappointment, Folly. It seems she’s due for a promotion, nothing scandalous about that at all.

The unicorn sighed, for apparently congratulations were in order, and she steeled herself to be gracious. It wasn’t really that difficult, for she genuinely did want to see her friend do well, but Rainbow Dash was being positively disgusting. “Oh Rainbow Da-aaash!” she called up, in a sing-song voice, waving a pedicured hoof, “Congratulations! Let me be the first to wish you many felicitations over your marvelous good fortune!”

“...99 problems but a-” Rainbow Dash jerked to a halt, startled out of her reverie, but only so that she might beam down on Rarity like sunlight through a prism, bursting into a rainbow of colors, “I know, isn’t it so totally awesome?”

Rarity winced, for that final register was reminiscent of her little sister Sweetie Belle’s voice, rising into a piercing squeak. “Yes, yes it is fairly... awesome,” she looked at the paper again, fluttering it in front of her face, “Oh, this is simply wonderful. I am not terribly familiar with the weather working profession, but isn’t a Regional Meteorologist a rather large responsibility?”

“Heck yeah it is,” Rainbow answered, laying back and swimming around in circles, “It means I’m in charge of making sure the micro climate meshes with the national and even global climate scale!”

Normally, Rarity would have been surprised that Rainbow Dash knew a word with as many complexities as ‘micro climate,’ but she supposed her brash, often arrogant friend had to know a thing or two about the ins-and-outs of weather in order to perform her job, or qualify for a promotion, for that matter. Reading further, her eyes widened, and she beamed up at the other pony, “Oh, my, Rainbow Dash, this is quite a raise, too!”

“And even more free time than before,” the pegasus added, as if that were the more important part, “I get to push all the small junk I have to do off to other, less awesome ponies, leaving me with even more time to practice. And nap, can’t forget the napping.”

“Oh,” Rarity paused, coming to near the bottom of the scroll, “Rainbow, did you read the whole thing? It says you need to pass a test first.” The unicorn lowered the letter and placed it back into the envelope, raising it up towards the pegasus to reveal the offending statement.

“The practical and the written? Pft, I can do it in my sleep. I have passed these tests before, Rarity!” the cyan-coated mare said dismissively, diving down in a multi-hued blur to snatch the paper out of the air. At the other’s skeptical look, she rolled her eyes, “Seriously, Rare, I do know what I’m doin’ up here. The tests are just to make sure you have basic understanding and skills - okay, maybe a little advanced - but most of the work was already done. I had, like, recommendations for being so awesome.”

Another wince at the squeal. “Well! I am proud, Rainbow Dash, this is an excellent step up for you and your career, not to mention your prospects for the Wonderbolts. Perhaps Pinkie Pie would like to throw... a...” she glanced around, uncertain where the pink pony had packed herself off to.

“-shouldn’t have to come back to him, you need a change of pace, a new outlook on life!” Pinkie’s voice came from down the way, the Earth pony making tiny little bounces to keep up with a curly, blue-maned unicorn who was wiping her eyes with a tissue. “Sometimes you just need to remove yourself from a bad situation,” she reassured cheerfully, pulling the other pony close with a foreleg and giving her a squeeze, her basket balanced effortlessly on her head, “There’s lots of ponies in the sea! Or is that rhinos? Tigers?”

That elicited a small smile from the unicorn, who gave Pinkie a brief nuzzle in gratitude. “Thanks a lot for listening, Pinkie, it means a lot. And I will take that advice, I think,” she said, before trotting off. Apparently ecstatic to have helped a pony in need, Pinkie Pie sprung up to the others, her curly tail waving like a brush frothed with pink soap.

“What was that about?” Rainbow asked, dry, looking after the retreating unicorn.

“Just gettin’ a smile! Sup girls?”

“Oh, Pinkie, darling,” Rarity called to the Earth pony, rather unnecessarily at this range, “You won’t believe what I’ve just found out. It seems Rainbow here is getting a promotion! We ought to-”

“-Have a kung fu battle to see who is the real fighting champ of Ponyville?” Pinkie asked excitedly, lifting her limbs in a decent parody of a Crane stance, two forelegs up high and a hind leg lifted threateningly.

Rarity’s half-lidded eyes conveyed all the information she needed regarding that non sequitur. “Heavens no. Besides, I’m fairly sure Rainbow Dash already won at least one such championship. Anyway,” she said, firmly, to head off that segue before it could germinate further, “I was actually thinking that a party would be quite apropos, don’t you think?”

“Think? Not always!” the other girl answered, “But this time I think you’re totally right! Ooh, I’ve never held a business party before, probably!”

“Agh,” Rainbow Dash grimaced, “No business theme, please, that sounds about as fun and totally miserable as rock farming-” The pegasus darted back a pace or so in surprise at Pinkie Pie’s abrupt change in character, the Earth pony’s blue eyes suddenly narrowed and hard. “Okay, okay, business party it is, then! Sheesh, what bit your cutie mark?” she backpedaled, muttering the last.

“No, no, it’s okay! We’ll have a regular not-at-all-a-business-party party,” Pinkie Pie said, cheering again. She turned a level gaze on Rainbow again, her mood shifting at breakneck pace, “You. Me. Zen garden.”

“O-o-okay?” Rainbow Dash asked uncertainly, backing off again, feeling vaguely threatened.

Rarity, reaching into one of her stylish aquamarine-bejeweled bags, lifted out a small bag of bits, and, quite without reservation, delivered them up to Rainbow Dash. “Here, darling. I shan’t be able to get you a gift between now and the party, what with our appointment at Fluttershy’s and all, but why don’t you pick yourself up something nice on me?” she offered.

Snagging it, the pegasus’ face broke into a broad, if slightly silly grin. “Oh Celestia! Or Rarity, rather! Eeehee!” she squealed, girlishly, “Oh there’s a bottle of black apple cider with your name on it!” In the next instant she was off like a shot, leaving a blur of rainbow colors in the air. Screeching audibly to a halt a quarter of a mile down the road in the air, she shot back, catching the envelope as it fluttered in the air back to the ground before looping around in a complicated somersaulting figure. With that, she flashed to the horizon in a blur of color and roar of sound.

“Lead a pony to water,” Rarity chuckled, continuing back towards Fluttershy’s cottage over the way.

“And she’ll eat dirt soaked in cider?”

Across the length of Ponyville the canvases of market stalls, balls of ice cream perched in cones held by unsuspecting colts and fillies, ladders erected to aid in painting second stories, and a clown on long stilts found themselves suddenly and tragically toppled as a burst of sound and energy shot through the streets, making sharp right turns at corners that launched shock waves down the town’s streets. In truth, Rainbow Dash probably could have simplified her path of travel and avoided all the mess if she had simply elevated herself above the level of the houses in Ponyville, but, really, where was the fun in that? Making her way to the outskirts on the opposite side of town, she broke across the park, where a pegasus filly running back was so distracted by the passage she took a hoofball to the head and went down in a pile of feathers.

Heedless of any such disasters in her wake, Rainbow stuck her tongue between her teeth and looped through the half-pipe of the canyon south of town, giving her just the momentum she needed to crack like a whip at her destination - a crossroad, cutting through the gently sloping hills between the Ponyville township and its neighboring settlements. The wave of air blasted through the hastily erected bazaar there.

“Boom!” she declared in the still aftermath, her wings erect and a broad grin plastered on her face.

All around, wagons with hastily erected stalls flapped in the artificial gale created by her entrance, papers fluttering like petals and ponies staring uncertainly at the sky-blue pegasus who had just arrived so dramatically on the scene. A plop of ice cream on the dirt signaled that yet another young filly had just lost her treat, unnoticed with her attention rapt.

“It’s okay, everypony, no need to be in complete and utter awe. Just your friendly neighborhood Rainbow Dash!” she assured everyone, tossing her colorful mane and trotting proudly through the bazaar. She tossed a shiny yellow bit to the little pegasus filly, winking, “Everypony gets one.”

Doing a quick back-strut, she grinned broader still if that was possible, her face split as every eye was on her. She was particularly pleased that some rather good-looking stallions from the neighboring town, who looked like they might be part of an athletic team if the profusion of Hoofball stamps was any indication, were eying her. Adding a pronounced sway to her strut, she let her wings flutter open a bit and almost beamed when she saw three of the young stallions, in unison, crack their heads on a low-hanging branch over the turf field on the side of the road. Still got it, she thought to herself, smug, As if there were any doubt. Perfect mane, sleek body, amazing hooves. Totally awesome.

Strictly speaking, nothing in this bazaar was illegal. At the least, nothing here was so illegal that it would have attracted serious attention from anypony with any authority to prosecute such infractions of royal commerce regulation. Still, there was a perfectly valid reason why the ever-shifting collection of wagons had chosen a place between the scattered municipalities of the Equestrian Basin that lay in the shadow of Canterlot, its mountain faintly visible as a purple cone in the distance. What wasn’t clearly in sight of the easily frightened or offended noses of citizens in town could safely be ignored.

All manner of interesting things were sold here that could not be found in the streets of Ponyville or other respectable townships. Rainbow Dash, still strutting magnificently even though much of the attention had waned, perhaps aside from interested stallions and increasingly jealous mares, passed by caged lions and stacks of rare magical books in carts. Have to remember to pick something up for Twilight - if I can get reimbursed, anyway, she thought to herself, glancing around with increasing curiosity as she made her way through.

Bolts of silk and other foreign goods were sold at prices so low they must have been smuggled to avoid tariffs, hanging boldly from enormous open-sided wagons drawn by teams of poorly paid and poorly washed laborers, and, most importantly, the most varied collection of alcoholic beverages known to ponykind.

It’s not that alcoholic beverages were thought poorly of, of course, nor even necessarily frowned on, How would Applejack make a killing every autumn off the sweet apple cider stock otherwise? Still, it always did feel a bit uncomfortable to buy a stock under the gaze of her peers. Though no salt-sucking fanatic, for her athletic career would plummet straight into the toilet otherwise, Rainbow Dash did enjoy a little exotic flavoring now and again, and maybe it did add a little zest when she did her own cooking, something she couldn’t really get at Sweet Apple Acres or the Sugar Cube Corner when she dove in, unannounced and unasked, for a bite.

Giving the proprietor, a mare with a little too much in the way of makeup for Rainbow’s comfort - and a bit too roaming an eye - a quick grin, she started nosing through the offered bottles, sniffing thoughtfully. Any bottle that wasn’t properly corked or capped was no good, naturally, so she started looking curiously at some of the nicer bottles, as a pair of oddly familiar voices spoke up nearby.

“Well, look at what we’ve got here, brother of mine.”

“It looks like a particularly fine filly in need of a fix of a particularly pernicious nature.”

Bonking her head on the cabinet she had been sticking her head in, Rainbow Dash swore under her breath as she turned to look at the speakers, rubbing the top of her head. A pair of slender, quite tall unicorn stallions were next to a wagon she had not quite noticed before, with a somewhat dilapidated steam engine mounted up front instead of the traditional pony-hitches. Giving a flap of her wings, she launched herself closer to the pair, looking past them at the back of their wagon briefly, while they stood just slightly apart, standing tall and proud. “Hey, aren’t you two those cider-pushers...?” she asked, her voice trailing off uncertainly as she racked her brain.

“Why, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re referring to, my cerulean friend,” the clean-shaven one answered her, with more good spirits than any pony besides Pinkie Pie had a right to.

“Perhaps you mean to indicate the world famous Flim Flam Brothers, traveling salesponies nonpareil? Why we are no such esteemed and inestimable stallions ourselves. Indeed, you’ll find it simply impossible for I, unlike the incomparable Flim, have a very fine mustache where he lacked it,” the other added, his tones deeper, “While Flam, who had a most handsome and enviable soup-strainer himself, is clearly not this brother of mine, who lacks any such accoutrement.”

There was a pause to consider that, a few steady blinks as the blue pegasus ran that through her head. In her mind, this process resembled nothing so much as a cloud-bound racetrack. After giving it the fullest consideration it deserved, Rainbow Dash said, slowly, “Okay, I suppose that makes sense.”

“Indeed it does, my fine friend of a filly.”

“I can see that a well-set up young dame such as yourself is of a discerning eye, with only the finest in fashionable and felicitous of fabrications,” the one who was obviously not Flim informed her, tilting his boater hat to her in a respectful gesture.

“Gesundheit.”

The other, who was probably not at all Flam, passed right over that, “With such a delicately discerning eye for the most delectable of details, you definitely do not want to pass up our deluge of dependable delicacies and delights.”

“I heard delights in there somewhere, keep talking.”

As one, they stepped aside, sweeping their flat-topped hats in a flourish. With a burst of green magic the canvas flipped up and neatly hooked itself high above, blocking out the rays of the sun so that the electric lamps within could illuminate the neatly arrayed contents therein. Rainbow Dash, who had been around the block enough to recognize such things, saw that most of what was there were in the nature of imports, probably duty-free, and certainly nothing a pony could find in most legitimate shops this side of New Colt City. Her eyes widened and sparkled, ideas far more interesting than a mere bottle of hard liquor could conjure igniting in her mind. Mentally, she added a few tracks to the course, and a couple of loop-d-loops for good measure. Ideas sprouted wings and shot around the course as her options were unveiled.

“Why, I see that our fine friend of a filly has cottoned to the benefits of perusing our inventory.”

“A most astute observation, brother of mine!” the mustachioed one declared, stepping up to pull a hanging cord, making the glittering displays rotate to reveal more questionable merchandise.

“A dragon’s fang, you might say, but I can get this anywhere.”

“Ah, but no dragon’s fang was ever found written with ancient ponytongue with a spell to wallop a whale, if I don’t say so myself!”

“But maybe this jeweled anklet of passing detection is more in your speed, a swift and sleek young flyer such as yourself.”

“Perfectly apt for a Sunday stroll through the castle without being interrupted, wouldn’t you say? Ah, but no gallivanting is complete without a taste of this rare bottle of Salamander tears.”

“You’ll be impressing foals and friends alike with amazing tricks of death-defying dives through ferocious flames flying fifty feet into the air!”

At each verse, they uncovered another treasure, Rainbow’s eyes starting to glisten reflectively as ideas zoomed about her head, bumping against each other as they competed to throw the others off the track and claim the coveted prize at the end: Execution into action.

“But if we’re talking flames, you’ll want to look no further than this veil from the furthest reaches, where the desert nomads incite passion so fierce they-”

“Oh, oh, what about that?” Rainbow Dash sprung in step, pattering each of her hooves against the ground and fluttering her wings excitedly in an almost embarrassingly foalish manner.

“Ah, an excellent choice,” the unicorn said, twirling his mustache as he picked up the beaded and jeweled silk veil, suitable for adorning the face of a pony mare, “Have a very special somepony you need to impress, eh? I-”

“What?” Rainbow Dash asked, insulted, flaring her wings in a threatening display of feathers and powerful wing muscles, “Are you saying I can’t have any stallion I set my eyes on?”

Taken aback at this sudden reversal, the stallion held the veil protectively close, his diction thrown off for a moment. Though both unicorns were taller than Rainbow Dash, they had had experience with troublesome customers before. Even with magic to defend themselves, the powerfully built pegasus could probably feed them their own horns before they could so much as shout if she wanted to, and such circumstances demanded caution, “Well, no, a saucy sultana such as yourself could surely have any suitable stallion, but-”

“I didn’t mean that,” she rolled her eyes, irritably, tiring of the brothers’ nattering and alliteration both, and pointed a blue hoof at the wagon, “I meant that.”

The other brother, acting to restore the proper cadence, picked up the display case the weatherpony had been pointing at. “Ah, a most excellent choice,” he declared, glancing quickly at the placard on the side and improvising on the spot. Within the glass case, placed on velvet, were a set of horseshoes made in what appeared to be a form of black steel, shot through with white streaks, as if it were stone or ceramic rather than metal. It was the words lettered on the glass that had caught Rainbow Dash’s attention:

“Do they work?”

“Do they work?” the clean-shaven brother repeated in a wounded tone, “Would we sell anything that wasn’t included in our money-backed, 100% satisfaction-guaranteed, World-Famous Warranty?”

“No returns or exchanges,” his brother added under his breath in a rush of syllables, just under Rainbow’s hearing.

“So done!” she said, and spilled bits out onto the back of the wagon. She haggled, and dearly, for she was no Fluttershy, smacking away their reaching hooves until she was satisfied. Purchase made, she walked away with her new acquisition tucked under one wing. Rather than bother carrying the box, she popped it open a few yards away from the wagon, took the horseshoes out, stuck them in her saddlebag, and, without another delay, launched off into the sky, leaving the box to clatter to the ground sadly among the dust of the bazaar road.

----

As the box bounced and spun on the earth, the Flim Flam Brothers approached it, their identical hooves striking in perfect unison as they glanced around. It wasn’t really all that necessary, for their various competitors could find very little advantage in noticing them pick up discarded merchandise, but old habits died hard in a pair of ponies who had had long experience dodging unwanted attention. Deciding, in their scavenger mentality, that they could make something out of the lost box, Flim stepped daintily up and picked it up with his magic, looking it over. “I say, brother of mine, it seems our fine friend of a filly forgot to actually examine the plainly printed warnings on the product.”

“What does it say, if I may be so bold?” Flam asked, in idle curiosity, tilting his boater up to block a bit of the sun’s glare so that he could have a better look.

“‘Do not use repeatedly! Allow at least thirty to sixty minutes between activations.’”

“Caveat Emptor, brother of mine!”

Underneath a sky that was turning from a deep, pleasing azure to an absolutely lovely cyan, within the living wood of a tree that happened to be both house and library at once, a very important mare was starting her day. The weather put the present occupant and operator of the Branches and Books of Ponyville in mind of the party that was scheduled for this afternoon, owing to the coincidental similarity in coloration between that expansive sky and a certain brash pegasus. This was something of a problem because she, Twilight Sparkle, Celestia’s personal protege and the twice-run hero of the planet, was agonizing over the mess she had made of her tail.

On the mirror were stained marks in the steam from her shower, calculations as she painstakingly checked, rechecked, and triple-checked the measurements.

“Ooh,” she whined, frustrated, “Why didn’t I listen to Applejack? Measure twice, cut once.”

In front of her, her body carefully held to allow her to shift slightly without yanking on her rear end, lay her tail, which was clamped on the counter of her modest little bathroom. Located in a tiled room of the tree which proper drainage and ventilation to ensure mold didn’t start springing up like wild fire in the rest of her very wooden house. She had been so distracted in her studies this morning that she hadn’t attended to her daily ritual until Pinkie Pie had burst in - from a storage room in her laboratory, where she had been up early working on a new magical item, with no other exits or windows, only a large mirror she used for one of her larger, disassembled telescopes, come to think of it - and announced that they were having a party for Rainbow Dash. Mortified at being caught so unkempt, she had immediately rushed to bathe and groom herself while Spike made the place ready, but she had been in such a rush that she had apparently allowed herself to grow sloppy.

The lavender unicorn shuddered as she remembered how it had happened. She remembered how distracted she had been in thinking about the party, and, more importantly, thinking about how much work she still had to do in her laboratory downstairs, where she had just left that imported crystal from Stable Arabia. She could recall the way her attention drifted, right before she made her her inattentive snip.

And just like that, the perfect cut of her tail had been ruined.

Normally, this ritual was so routine, so basic, that she didn’t even pay attention to it any more. She had had the perfect system set up. A cheap paper cutter from the general store had been all she needed; with a little daily sharpening it was as keen as any barber’s razor. Clamping her tail into one end, she did a few basic calculations in her head to make sure it would fall exactly the same way it had fallen for well over a decade since she had first begun this daily ritual as a filly, pulled the lever down, disposed of the shavings, brushed it out until it shone, and then she was done. No more tragic hair incidents, like the disaster that had prompted her to take such precautions and scarred several impressionable young colts for life, should have befallen her.

Now, however, her failure to pre-calculate the distribution of fibers in her tail with the added bulk from water had left a ragged, uneven cut. If she were to let it fall, it would seem to cleave in two different directions entirely, with uneven and jagged protrusions every which way. The offending cut was, to her eye, painfully obvious, as much as if the moon had somehow drifted out of its prescribed course by so much as the tiniest fraction.

With part of her wondering if a melodramatic declaration in the manner of Rarity in the midst of a fashion crisis was appropriate, she carefully arranged her hairs one-by-one according to the mathematical distribution she had set up, double-checked her figures and adjusting with respect to the damage already done. The unicorn even made sure to check her figures twice, as Applejack had always insisted so annoyingly when talking about the carpentry she had to do around the farm. Slowly, ever-so-gently, she lowered the newly-sharpened scissor down on her precious tail. The long, low snip made her spine shiver, and she winced in terror at the thought that the quiver of her nerves might have disturbed the end result.

With trembling hooves, she disposed of the severed hairs in the waste bin, unclamped her tail, and carefully spread it behind her. Twilight then turned, looking in the mirror, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Giving her bottom a pleased stir, she swished her tail once, admiring how the razor-edged cut fell at just the perfect angle, so mathematically precise and beautiful it just about made her cry. By the end of the process, she had forgotten all about the rare crystal in the basement; it could keep, and she would be back down there this afternoon at the latest, ready to crack its mysteries.

Outside, passing with stacked trays balanced in his scaly claws from the pantry, Spike shook his head, grumbling as he went, just loud enough for Twilight to hear, “Girls.”

Fluttershy shimmied a little as she listened to the music in the background. The butter-yellow pegasus would die rather than admit it, of course, but she was practicing her moves ahead of time in as subtle a fashion as she could manage before the actual party started. The next-to-last-thing she wanted was to embarrass herself in front of the others on the dance floor, which was even now being cleared by Applejack and Pinkie Pie in the middle of the library floor. Giving her long pink tail a flick, the gentle pegasus bobbed in rhythm. She even dared to shuffle her hooves a little. The very last thing she wanted, naturally, was for someone to actually catch her doing this.

“Fluttershy, dear, could you be a darling and-”

“Hi Rarity! I was just checking out the music collection!” she squealed, “I-I’ll move out of your way now, I didn’t mean to intrude, I-”

Rarity, who was familiar enough by now with Fluttershy’s moods, simply walked up and put a hoof on her neck. With a squeak, the lovely pink-maned pegasus shuddered to a halt, as if she were a cat whose scruff had just been pinched.

“S-sorry,” she murmured quietly, giving the white unicorn a shy, graceful smile.

“I swear, darling, you would apologize if someone you didn’t know broke into a house you’d never been to.”

“Those poor home invad-”

“Anyway, dear,” Rarity said, overriding this before it got even worse, “I was wondering if you might consider coming by over the weekend and helping me out with some of my latest designs.”

“Oh!” Fluttershy said, excited, “The Spring Shower Ensemble? With the rare green silks?” Like many things in her life, she would have hated to admit outright her desires, but her hooves were clicking rapidly on the wood between them with pleased little clops.

“Yes, yes!” Rarity gave a pleasant shudder, “Oh, it is almost scandalously luxurious to handle.”

“What do you need me for? I’d be happy to help with a-anything there,” Fluttershy said, stuttering a tad as she felt she was coming on too boldly, “I-I mean, if you wanted. I shouldn’t push-”

“Modeling, Fluttershy, modeling! I have the forms, of course, but they don’t really capture the fall of fabric, the subtle rustle of coat-and-seam, the way the turn of a body warps the frame...” she trailed off, breathy.

“Oh, I’d love to. In private, I mean, I wouldn’t want people to see me modeling again. I still get letters. It’s really, um... couldihavesomeofthegreensilk?” she spilled out in a rush, jamming her words together into a gooey slurry.

“Beg pardon?” Rarity asked, drawn out of her reverie.

“The... the green silk,” she murmured, almost backing into a stack behind her, rattling the books in their shelves. Not difficult to do, since they circled the entire chamber, “I’d like to have some of the green silk, i-if you have enough and... if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Of course, of course! I’m happy to help, especially if you’d be so kind as to help me model. I wonder if Rainbow Dash would be interested?” Rarity thought, then shook her head, “No, probably not. I think I could make her something quite acceptable, very light and flashy, but she seems determined to wander about in her skin, so to speak, at all times.”

“It’s kind of a pegasus thing,” Fluttershy said, apologetic by proxy for her kind, though she was becoming more confident as the topics were ones she was comfortable with, “Clothing drags in the air. Rainbow Dash likes to go zooming off at a moment’s notice, too, so she wouldn’t like having something that interferes with that on her if she could avoid it.”

“Yes, I suppose she does, but would it kill her to try? I can make outfits for dashing, dashing outfits, even. I’ve designed for pegasi before. Did my personally designed and hoof-stitched Gala gown not permit her to dive about, regardless of how extended rapid flight would have damaged it?” Rarity complained. The unicorn was in something of a middling dudgeon, now, and Fluttershy perceived that she was speaking rhetorically and to an unseen audience, as the high-strung designer often seemed to do, a suspicion confirmed by the unicorn shifting slightly to make sure she was framed dramatically by one of the library’s windows.

Before she could get really into a good and proper tirade, however, the door to the library was thrown open, and everyone turned to look, with Pinkie Pie springing up from behind the table with a broad smile. “It’s time to par-tay Rainbow Da-aaaah!” she sang out, expecting the mare of the hour, but her voice warbled with this latest in unexpected developments

At first they thought it really was Rainbow Dash, but the thud of horseshoes on the wooden entryway made that unlikely. They could see that they were clamp-ons, for nailed-in horseshoes were rare for anypony except for the most hard-working of Earth ponies, such as Big Macintosh or Applejack herself, but even the removable sort were almost unheard of among pegasi, who liked to have every spare ounce that they could free up for better flying. What made it even more improbable was that, instead of a powerfully sleek pegasus, the young mare walking blithely into the library was a slender and pretty unicorn, with tall, fine legs, a slender, graceful neck, and her horn poking through her forelock boldly and coming to a somewhat pointed tip.

The part that may be responsible for the admittedly quite reasonable stunned silences and Pinkie Pie’s unprecedented flabbergasting was almost certainly the fact that, regardless of the impossibility of such a thing, she had the same cyan-blue coat and radiantly multicolored mane and tail of Rainbow Dash, right down to the wild, unkempt, matted nature of it.

Right when everypony in the library was wracking their brains for any mention of Rainbow Dash having had a unicorn sibling, let alone any close relatives at all, the new entrant introduced herself with what can only be described as a rehearsed flair. “Oh, excuse me, daaaahlings,” she said, in the most parodical version of Rarity’s characteristic, acquired upper-class mannerisms that could be conceived by any being on Luna and Celestia’s good green Earth, “I seem to have become utterly lost. I fear I chipped a hoof and I became so delirious with shock that I fainted all the way here, and now my whole life is ruined!”

While all the other ponies stared, stock still, she collapsed onto a nearby chair, wailing piteously and kicking her hind legs, “Oh woe, oh foul and cruel world! I shall have to pass into exile forever!” That she was putting the emphasis on the wrong words did not appear to occur to the strange and apparently insane unicorn.

“Wait just one cotton-pickin’ minute,” Applejack said, cottoning on at last, as the blue-coated charlatan’s features cracked into a smile, “No, it can’t be.” Trotting up, she grabbed the unicorn by the shoulders, holding her up and staring into her eyes. With a sharp intake of breath, she back-pedaled rapidly, and then threw her hat into the ground and stomped with her two front hooves. “Sweet heavens to Betsy, Rainbow Dash, it is you!” she cried out, in shock and amazement, “How in tarnation did you pull that one off?”

Cackling now in her normal voice, the unicorn sucked in breath between gales of laughter, kicking her heels in the air, “Oh, you shoulda... seen your faces! Buwahahaha!”

“Rainbow Dash?” Twilight Sparkle gasped, her eyes bugging out, taking in the horn, the wingless back, “How, what, how what what how?”

“BUWAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Fluttershy’s mouth worked up and down a few times, and she realized that all she could do was squeak in mouse-like surprise. Trotting forward, she looked over her long-time friend. It was truly astounding; not only had she somehow managed to hide her wings and gain a horn, but there was no sign of the classical pegasus traits. Though her specialty was in animal medicine, Fluttershy did have some grasp of basic anatomy, and she could identify features present independently in the pony races. Most prominently among the differences she could spot was that the entire muscle structure that defined a pegasus’ wing support throughout the torso was gone. Everything from vastly strengthened chest muscles to the secondary locomotors in the back and through the loin were gone, as if her friend had indeed been born a unicorn. Curiously, other things were changed, too, which made little sense to Fluttershy, such as how her calves and thighs were no longer as prominent, nor was her neck as strong as it used to be, muscle development everypony had but were regions unicorns tended to neglect. “Wow,” she concluded, succinctly.

“Oh wow is right!” Pinkie Pie declared, excited, bouncing around the seated and laughing Rainbow Dash, “You totally had me, that’s, like, the best disguise-that-still-looks-like-you ever!”

Now that, finally, attention was able to be paid to her, Rarity put in her say. She gasped, once, of course, but that didn’t seem dramatic enough, so she gasped again, and then again for good measure. Then she tossed her mane, letting the curls bounce in a suitably offended fashion, and stuck her nose in the air, assuming a truly offended stance, with one hoof raised disdainfully, as if the floor were dirty. “Well! I never. Rainbow Dash, I cannot believe you thought that was a remotely accurate impersonation. Even if it wasn’t your voice, darling, it’s that rat’s nest of a mane and tail, I would sooner take poison than be seen so.”

Still giggling triumphantly, Dash batted at her rainbow mane with a hoof, decrying, “Oh, I know, I simply cannot believe it. I would think a fellow fashionista would have more sympathy for it! I shall simply have to be drawn and quartered at once!”

Released from their earlier paralysis, the other girls all collapsed into paroxysms of laughter, with Applejack slapping Rainbow on the back and Pinkie rolling on the ground next to a giggly Fluttershy, who held a hoof modestly in front of her nose to hide the smile. Only Rarity, who managed to stick her nose so far up in the air that it threatened to topple her, and Twilight, who was still frozen in shock, refrained from joining in. Even Twilight, after coming out of her daze, managed to chortle a bit. Finally, unable to resist all of her friends joining in the joke, Rarity patted at her mane and harrumphed, conceding, “I suppose it was a little funny.”

Twilight stepped forward, clearly excited now at the prospect of examining a magical effect she had no apparent familiarity with. “I really am impressed, Rainbow, how did you do it? Is it those horseshoes? It has to be superficial, nopony can just become another race like that,” she rationalized, lowering her horn, which flared with purple light as she did a quick probe. One cannot, strictly speaking, detect magic, Fluttershy knew, but she knew her friend was experienced enough to recognize certain tell-tale signs of long-term enchanted objects like her library’s lightning rod. More importantly, she touched the other unicorn on the horn and found no tingle of instinctive reaction, as any horn would on a foreign object threatening to come near. “Oh yes! It feels real, but it’s just for show,” Twilight declared, satisfied.

“Yeah, kinda lame, but I don’t think I’d want some freaky magic horn poking out of my head anyway,” Rainbow Dash scoffed, managing to offend both unicorns in the room with a single wave of her hoof. She lifted her feet, all four displaying the black metallic shoes. “See? These babies let me change into any race I want - obserify,” she said, making up a word on the spot.

Scrunching her eyes in concentration, the faux-unicorn was abruptly surrounded in pearly white light, and, with a flicker and sparkle, a much heavier blue mare sat in her place. They could all see that it was Rainbow Dash, of course, but as she came clopping to her feet, it seemed to them that a fraternal triplet stood in her place - a rainbow-maned, sky-blue Earth pony. Still possessing the slenderness all mares had naturally, she seemed somehow bulkier than before. Rather than select parts of her torso, her general body frame had gained a little extra girth, and her legs especially were beefed up. Pony eyes flicked from her to Applejack, the only other athlete in the room, and the comparisons were obvious, with their deep lungs and their powerful thighs. The main difference seemed to be that Rainbow Dash looked like a runner, possessing some of her pegasus sleekness with clean lines and a long body, whereas Applejack had the iron-hard muscles of a lifelong applebucker and a somewhat overdeveloped back end, to put it bluntly.

“Well, color me red and stick me on a tree for Hearth’s Warmin’ Eve- not literally, Pinkie!” she hissed to the pink Earth pony, who had managed to find a squeeze bottle of red food dye, turning back to Rainbow Dash, “I reckon you could probably scorch me in a hoofrace now, Rainbow, not that ah wouldn’t give you the soundest thrashin’ ah could in any case. You almost look proper respectable.”

“Shucks, pardner,” Rainbow Dash drawled thickly, eliciting a startled look and then a guffaw from Applejack, followed by the other ponies. The blue Earth pony stood on her two left legs, letting the other two cross them, in the way Applejack often stood, “Ah don’ rightly know that ah a-pre-ci-a-nate yer tone-a-lot there. Fry me in a biscuit with some gravy an’ call it an eight-legged derp-dragon, ah oughta wipe that thar plumdinger grin offa yer face.”

“Okay, Rainbow Dash,” Applejack chuckled, “That’s about enough of that, it ain’ that funny.” There was a pause, and she said, more seriously, “Really, knock it off.”

“Oh, oh, I know!” the cyan-blue pegasus said, bouncing on all four hooves now, “Let’s throw a party to celebrate having a party!” Starting to bounce around the room now, she sang, off-key, “La-la-la-la-la, I love candies and cakes and colorful things, and pink posies and red rosies!”

“Eee, you too?” Pinkie, who could take a joke with the best of them, asked gleefully, though whether she had actually comprehended that it was a joke or not was up for debate, “I love all of those things!”

Together, they began to spring around the others, to the increasing laughter of all involved. When she landed for the last time, Rainbow Dash concentrated, and became the slim, graceful unicorn version of herself again. “C’mon, guys,” she said, in a slightly nasally tone, “This is a library, and we ought to be quiet! Don’t hurt the feelings of the books!”

While Twilight blinked, Rainbow Dash managed to find the box she used for returns and flipped it so that she could stand on it, striking a heroic pose as she stood framed by the looming book stacks, which seemed to flank her like attentive soldiers in her latest role. “Pay attention, girls, this is important! Any minute now, Nightmare Moon and Discord are going to come dancing through that door riding an evil dragon, all of whom are threatening to destroy Ponyville!” she snorted in her nasally impression, sounding not at all like Twilight. She stamped a hoof petulantly and the others started to roll about, rendered helpless.

“My sides!” Rarity cried, trying to support herself on Twilight, who was blushing furiously, “Oh, Twilight, she’s... you...”

Twilight gave an unwilling giggle, her thoughts plainly whirling, probably wondering in some dark corner of her nervous mind if she did, indeed, sound anything like that.

“If we don’t gather up the Elements of Harmony at once and have a campfire song about friendship, truth, justice, and the Equestrian way, we’ll all be sucking chaos out of Nightmare-brand curly straws! It’ll be freaky shadow-dragon-bear-pony cross breeds as far as the eye can see. And brush your teeth!”

Inspired by this unexpected outpouring of her personal element, Pinkie Pie, in the background, clicked the music player back on. Twilight, for one, felt like she was going to collapse if a guffawing Applejack kept slapping her on the back so hard, her knees buckling even as laughter bubbled up inside her.

While the other ponies moved onto the dance floor, Fluttershy, coming up to Rainbow Dash’s side as the temporary unicorn managed to rise up on her hooves, made a fateful decision, while the opportunity was still fresh. Lowering her voice to the most minuscule registers she could find and still be heard over the sound of dancing ponies and party music, she murmured, “Can I try those on?”

In the dark of Twilight Sparkle’s lab, freshly sealed and locked against any too-curious ponies or dragons who might get into something more dangerous than they ought to, a faint glimmer arose, casting pink shadows across scattered instruments and tomes.

In truth, there was really no physical reason why it should have worked so effectively. Twilight knew that, as surely as Rainbow Dash’s horn had been a lump of useless keratin, with no special connection to her brain as the horns of true unicorns were, so Fluttershy could not as an Earth pony have any special vigor or strength she lacked before. The student rather suspected that Fluttershy knew that as well. Psychology, it seemed, could be a very powerful motivator.

“Woohoo!” the butter-yellow Earth pony called out, dancing as she had rarely danced before, springing from hoof to hoof and swinging her pink mane, her seemingly powerful new legs beating in time. That fiery spirit that sometimes showed itself within her was in full force, throwing caution to the wind, no matter how much she may be embarrassed about it later. The horseshoes, clamped onto her feet, rang out with every step.

“You go, Fluttershy!” Rainbow Dash called from above, her pegasus form, wings and all, having been restored in a flash of pearly sparks the moment she took the enchanted shoes off. Aerial dancing was just as good in her opinion, and she could do moves no ground-pounder could dream of, darting back and forth around the chandelier over the dancing ponies.

Outside, the windows of the library beat like drums within their living wooden frames while ponies paused to stick their heads up to look in with envy at the sight. They would have been welcomed in at once, of course, for Pinkie Pie had nothing but a smile and a laugh in her heart for all and, as Twilight herself would say, a library is a public place, but they passed on anyway, knowing that the six were all old friends and deserved their time together. There would always be other parties.

As it would turn out, this avoidance would be for their own good.

“C’mon, Fluttershy, do an impression!” Rainbow Dash goaded, grinning down from above as she held her hind knees, flapping to keep her balance as she slowly somersaulted, “It’s the whole reason I picked those up!” Swooping about the warm room, filled with laughter and music and dancing, Rainbow demonstrated for all and sundry exactly why she was one of the best athletes alive in this world, and how a good set of wings could let you move like nopony’s business.

“I was meaning to ask about that, actually, where did you get them from?” Twilight asked as Fluttershy seized up in surprise at Rainbow’s suggestion, the lavender pony looking up at the ceiling, “Those don’t look like local work at all, I don’t think they’re even from this part of the kingdom.”

Pushing off the chandelier to bounce about the ceiling like a blue pinball, Rainbow decided, at the last minute, that telling the effective deputy of the national regnant about a bazaar filled with illegal goods could have dramatically unintended consequences. It demonstrated remarkable foresight on her part, though that wasn’t saying much, as it might have saved everypony a great deal of headache in the time to come. “Oh, you know, someplace,” she said, vaguely, waving a hoof dismissively. This proved somewhat awkward, given her corkscrew trajectory made waving a rather haphazard prospect.

Twilight started to press, buying Rainbow’s lamest excuse yet not at all, but then Fluttershy pounced on her, “Ghak!”

Giving her a noogie in a headlock, Fluttershy announced in her very country best, “Shoo-ee! Gosh darn good t’see ya, Twailaight!” This behavior alone startled everypony, not least Twilight, who found herself being squashed to the former pegasus’ chest. “Ah cain’t say how glad ah ahm t’have all y’all here t’getha.”

“All y’all are terrible at mah ack-cent,” Applejack muttered, facehoofing. She grabbed a cup of punch to commiserate with as her ears flattened against the assault.

Shining through the shadows, the pinkish glow intensified, blue and yellow joining it. The light was steadier now, like a very faint lantern on its lowest setting. The colors swirled within, like a burning gas, and more of the laboratory was revealed, with Twilight’s notes left unfinished, her magnifying lens on its articulated stand left facing the gem. If an eye had been pressed to the right depth and angle, it could have seen tiny movement of the crystalline structure on the surface.

“I’m Fluttershy!” Pinkie Pie announced cheerfully. Bubblegum pink wings were spread as wide as they could go, the energetic equine bouncing on her heels. Sunlight flooding down from the open windows dappled across her flanks and outspread wings, making her look rather like someone had set a taffy factory on fire with her fur and feathers aglow as they were.

“...really, that’s your impression?” Twilight asked, skeptically.

“No, silly!” the other girl giggled, settling into a hunched stance with her wings folded up tight at her sides, speaking in a quiet, unassuming tone, “Oh, hi everyone... I hope I’m not interrupting... if it’s okay, I’ll just go curl up in a corner, it’s all right, I don’t mind.”

Twilight, for one, was rather surprised, for Pinkie Pie’s voice sounded almost exactly like Fluttershy’s when she spoke in that fashion. Nearby, Applejack grabbed the real Fluttershy’s tail before she could do just as Pinkie had said in her stead, hauling her back from one of the corners.

“Oh, hi Fluttershy,” she said, sad-eyed, more like a puppy than Fluttershy ever managed. Somehow, she was able to pull enough locks of her cloud-like mane in front of her face to hide her eyes, resulting in total blindness as she slunk lower into a pitiable ball. “It’s a shame there are no animals here, I would have liked to cuddle one ever so much.”

“Oh, fine,” Rarity snorted, though no one had looked to her or even suggested the idea. She had, apparently, while in the process of examining her pony pedicure, talked herself into an idea. “Give those over here, I had best show the rest of you ruffians how it is done. The theater,” she said, emphasizing the last syllable, and finishing in a dramatic flourish, “Awaits!”

Subtle cracks were forming on the surface of the crystal. The increasing luminance, with a clean white flame added to the mixture of colorful burning gas-like lights, filtered through the crazed surface to paint the laboratory in a myriad of differing colors, dancing like the reflections off a rippling pond.

A common mistake was to think of Rarity as an actress. Certainly, melodrama was her stock in trade and, if so she cared to, she could craft the most delectable and incomparable of disguises - if her sense of style didn’t get in the way, in any case. Eight-legged mutant dragons aside. In Rarity’s mind, there was no barrier between herself and the melodramatic persona which she had spent her entire life building, erected as a bulwark against the crass and uncultured world of Ponyville and her parents, elevating her into the refined and sophisticated ranks of the cultural elite.

Even in a mere party game, she would not stoop to something as low, fake, and vulgar as impressions of her beloved peers. She would show them that beauty transcended race, that even a solid Earth pony or a flighty pegasus could achieve such lofty heights of fashionable perfection as she.

“Ooo,” Pinkie Pie said, crouched on the table as she watched, “Fancy.” All eyes were drawn to the wings Rarity spread, at just the right angle so that the marble white primaries could catch the rays of the afternoon sun and cast them back at her fellow ponies. She stood in her most regal countenance, evoking the elegant statues of Equestria’s unaging Princess Celestia, with one hoof raised in what can only be described as benefaction. Spike, at the stairs, collapsed with a sigh into a vaguely dragon-shaped puddle.

“No, no, it’s quite all right. Your worship is, however understandable and appropriate, unneeded,” she said graciously, tilting the wings this way and that as she thrust out her chest, strutting forward, as if she were on a model’s runway in Manehattan instead of a somewhat haphazardly arranged small town library. Not a single feather or tuft was out of place, and it all flowed into smooth, graceful lines.

“Pffft,” Rainbow Dash said, landing with a toss of her matted polychromatic mane. If she showed any sign of inadequacy next to the former unicorn, it wasn’t visible to the others. So what if it would take her hours of preening and a pair of industrial-grade bolt cutters to get her wings, coat, and mane in that good a shape? “Try flapping those like a real pegasus and see how long they stay like that.”

Rarity scoffed, reflexively tightening the magnificent wings that sprouted now from her back, with the snowy-white primaries partially covering the even brighter secondaries, “I would not even dream of ruining such splendor! Unlike ruffians such as yourself, if I could fly, I would do so in adroit fashion, a balletic display of aerial poetry, as in my - very nearly victorious - entry into the Young Flyers’ Competition at Cloudsdale.”

“Fly like a wuss, I think you mean,” Rainbow tossed back, and stretched substantially, as if she were some wild cat, with her spine bending at angles none of the other girls in the room would dream of attempting, “That’s all right, though. A body this sleek and perfect is something you gotta be born with to start and keep in world-class shape with death-defying, totally awesome stunts that nopony too much less cool could even dream of attempting. If a pony as uncool as you even so much as tried, your wings would shrivel up on the spot!”

Tossing her head, permitting her mane to bounce with just the right amount of disdain, Rarity turned her nose up at the sky-blue pegasus. “I should have expected you to be jealous of such beauty, Rainbow Dash,” she said haughtily, “No matter, your comments only solidify the undeniable fact that I make the most fabulous pegasus of them all.” Rarity flared her wings just so, to demonstrate a standoffish attitude.

“Hey, hey,” Pinkie said, prodding Applejack while the two pegasi began to get into their argument, “You should totally go next.”

Looking away from Rarity and Rainbow Dash, who were even now flaring their wings to their fullest extent, hissing like a pair of territorial cats, Applejack gave Pinkie Pie a long, disbelieving look. “Beg pardon?” the countryfilly asked, almost scandalized, “Me, put on those weird magic shoes? I don’ rightly fancy that notion, Pinkie, and even if ah did, my hooves are already plenty occupied.” In answer, the orange Earth pony tilted a hoof up, revealing the nailed-in horseshoe stamped there, with the originating smith’s hammer-and-forge mark cut into the underside.

“Don’t you dare touch those!” Rarity could be heard shouting, “Back, at once! I will not have those dirty claws you refer to as hooves soiling my perfection!”

“I’ll show you claws, get back here!”

“Aw c’mon, Applejack, you can pull those old shoes out,” Pinkie Pie pleaded, widening her eyes into beseeching pools, spreading her forelegs imploringly, “I bet you’d make an awesome looking pegasus! And/or a unicorn!” Exactly how Pinkie Pie was able to say the words “and” and “or” simultaneously would forever remain a mystery.

“Ah’m perfectly happy just the way ah ahm, thank-ee, ah never asked to be anythin’ else and ah never wanted to be none, neither,” she said, tapping her shoe against the table with a ringing report, “And ah ain’ pullin’ these shoes out, neither! Don’ ya have the slightest idea how long it takes to break in a new pair?”

“I dunno,” Fluttershy said, thoughtfully, as she looked at one of the hind toes, the horny keratin looking a bit overgrown to her eye, “Those are looking a bit old, Applejack, don’t you get re-shod now and then? You could do with a clip.”

“What do ah look like, Rarity?” Applejack protested, snatching her rear hoof back from the butter-colored pegasus and casting a glance over at the fancy pony in question, who was being cornered by a grinning Rainbow Dash. “Ah’m just tryin’ to save a bit of money, that’s all, I shoe Big Macintosh and Apple Bloom but I can’t well shoe m’self. They’re both all left-hooves when it comes to work like that, and Granny’s eye ain’ been steady since I was a filly.”

“It’s not that expensive,” Pinkie Pie pointed out, “I bet you’re just worried about looking like you care too much about appearances.” Rather as with Rarity, it was sometimes easy to blow off Pinkie Pie due to her wild moods, but, from time to time, she could be quite as perceptive as any other pony, and willing to show it. She grinned, to show what she thought of that idea, and teased, “Dunno how anyone would think that.” Nor, apparently, was she above a little reverse psychology; a pony needed a lot of tricks up her metaphorical sleeves if she was going to give everypony in town lives filled with fun and excitement, no matter how they objected.

“And just what in the hay is that supposed to mean?” Applejack asked, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. The mare took a firm bite out of one of the apples on the table, one of her own naturally, looking askance at her friends.

“Oh, you know,” Fluttershy commented, cluing in to Pinkie’s idea, “It’s perfectly all right that you’re not worried about your appearance, Applejack. I mean, I like going to the spa and making sure my mane looks nice and everything, but you’re more practical than I am.”

The pegasus’ too-wide smile threatened to throw the gig, and Pinkie Pie tore in to make sure the effect wasn’t spoiled, distracting Applejack. “Sure!” she said, hopping off the table and rising up dramatically, “Everypony knows you’re the most dependable, most hard-nosed, most get-to-itness pony out there! Other mares can worry about how they look, but Applejack, she’s got more important things!”

It was probably a good thing that being the Element of Honesty didn’t necessarily mean she could identify a bald-faced lie any better than most ponies. Adjusting her hat firmly, she nudged Pinkie’s body out of the way, the pink Earth pony sliding along the floor in a fashion inexplicable for a creature that normally obeys friction, going over to a chair and, with four well-practiced jerks, neatly pulled the old horseshoes free with a clatter of nails. Examining them critically, noting the patina of corrosion adorning the shoe and nails, she decided that maybe it had been a bit too long since she was last shod. Perhaps, it wouldn’t be so bad just to give the magical shoes a try. Just this once. Ain’ like ah’m gonna be stuck lookin’ like whatever.

The last color to join the now visibly pulsating crystal below was a solid lavender, the shade the eastern sky took on in the late twilight. Unlike alabaster white, dark orange, bright blue, dull yellow, and even nauseous pink, the gaseous-like color did not burn, but instead shot through and interwove with the others, forming a pattern that was at once immediately clear and completely undefinable. Resolutely liminal, it stood as an immanent sensation, a teasing puzzle for the mind to test the edges of. The laboratory was now lit bright as day, and papers rustled in an unseen breeze, the air pregnant with possibility.

Applejack neither kept the enchanted hooves long nor did she perform any impressions. Like Rarity, she didn’t see herself as an actor and carried the additional baggage of being relentlessly straightforward and utterly incapable of telling the simplest lies without completely botching both the delivery and the content. Indeed, after breaking up Rarity and Rainbow Dash and claiming the horseshoes for herself, she was clearly, to Twilight’s eye, content simply to curiously test their power in peace while other ponies moved on to other party games, the allure of the strange devices a bit dimmed after four straight rounds of it.

Though interested to see how the other pony had changed, and how very powerful she looked even as a unicorn mare, Twilight turned away from Applejack, who even now was pondering the logistics of wearing a Stetson hat with a very prominent orange horn jutting from her blond forelock. Twilight Sparkle made her way over to Rainbow Dash, who was busy looking at herself in the reflection of one of the windows, hovering high enough to get a good view, and muttering under her breath. If Twilight didn’t know the brash pegasus better, she might have thought that the other mare was reassuring herself of her good looks, but, clearly, that was absurd on the face of it. Dismissing the thought out of hoof, she called up, asking, “So where did you say you bought those shoes again?”

“The inter-county market meet,” Rainbow Dash answered at once, inattentive. Pinkie Pie wasn’t the only pony who knew how to play on someone’s psychology.

“Uh huh. Rainbow Dash, were you buying off-market enchantments? You should know how dangerous that can be!” Twilight said, about to lift her hoof in admonishment when she realized, embarrassed, how close she was sounding to Rainbow’s own impression of the student when she was at her most preachy. Sobering thought, that, and one that almost made Twilight pause to reconsider it, but if being worried over her preachiness never stopped her before, why now?

“Aw, c’mon, Twilight,” Rainbow said, rustling the other pony’s mane, “Don’t be such a downer, I just got it for some laughs. And maybe to throw people in town for a loop. Annnd maybe a few other tricks, haven’t thought of them yet.” The pegasus tapped her chin with a hoof. Following her gaze, Twilight noticed Applejack trying on feathers, the former Earth pony looking almost annoyed with them, as if she couldn’t figure out where they belonged.

“I know you did, but-”

“Am I sexy?” Rainbow Dash demanded, overriding Twilight’s question, all four legs on the ground and spread in an aggressive, irritated fashion, her wings half-open with frustration.

“Well- wait what?!” Twilight demanded, shocked out of her wits.

Growling, the pegasus stamped a hoof, “I knew it.”

“Wait, wait, you look good, Rainbow!” Twilight said, quickly, able to tell that the pegasus was upset without quite knowing why. Normally, she’d give a quick pat or even a brief nuzzle to show her she cared and try to calm her down, but that idea was strangely uncomfortable at the moment. Continuing, she qualified, always a little too pedantic for her own good, “I mean, sure, your mane is a bit matted, and some feathers are out of place.”

“Oh yeah, like you’re one to talk about manes,” she grumbled, eying Twilight’s razor-edged hair and tail. While the librarian was trying to shift gears into being at least a little offended, she launched her surprise attack, “So what’re you gonna try first, when you put them on?”

“Pegasus, but- that’s not the point!” Twilight objected, stamping a hoof.

“Oh, so you’re gonna try them, even after telling me how dangerous it was?” Rainbow asked, grinning now as she darted and caught a glass of punch from the table, lounging back in mid air, “I see how it is, everypony but you has to watch out.” Her wings flapped lazily, letting her hover just about effortlessly. Let other ponies march about in the mud Rainbow had better things to do with her hooves.

“That is not-” the lavender unicorn bit off, “Ugggh!”

Flashing, she teleported across the room, just as Applejack, restored to normal, was taking the last of the horseshoes off. Yelping, the farmer dropped it with a metallic clatter, fixing her hat. “Landsakes, Twi, you wanna watch it where you do that? I half jumped outta my skin,” she complained, rubbing at her coat with a hoof to reassure the flesh underneath it.

“Sorry, just- Uggggh! Rainbow Dash!” she complained, as if that explained everything.

Apparently it did, as Applejack nodded with an understanding grin, “Shore thing, sugahcube. Your turn now, huh?”

“Might as well,” Twilight said, moving to set her hooves into each and lighting her horn up, clicking the clamps securely into place, “I guess since everypony else has, and had fun with them, I can’t well be the stand out and grump in place, can I?”

“Hey, I didn’t say nothin’ about nothin’,” Applejack grinned wider, if anything, at the other pony’s reluctance, as if her own had been lost to history.

Twilight gave her a level look, exasperation writ large against her features.

Somewhere in the back, Rarity was loudly bemoaning the loss of her beautiful wings, “Again, I have lost them again! First my gorgeous gossamer set, and now my very own flesh and blood and feather! Why, why did such beauty have to be lost? Is this the curse of all things perfect and beautiful, that they must wither away into star dust and morning dew? Why would a good universe permit such things?”

“Uhm, Rarity,” Pinkie Pie, of all ponies, tried to interject, sounding a touch skeptical, “Maybe you’re taking this a bit-”

“Can you not see, Pinkie? The forces which created this universe are cruel and empty of all meaning!” the unicorn wailed, her horn dragging Twilight’s stand mirror before her with a flash of magic so that Rarity could stare longingly into it, “It is just you and I, now, my flawless reflection. We are all that remains of a just world worth abiding in.”

With a firm facehoof, Twilight concentrated on the magic horseshoes, willing to try anything to change the pace around her library. The sensation of the change overcoming her was more involved than she had previously imagined from the reactions of her friends, which she had studied quite closely. The graduate student wondered, idly, if her face had that same, slightly slack look of uncertainty that had touched so briefly on the others, when their flesh had, all under the pearly glow of magic, changed from one instant to the next.

It was, indeed, a flesh-change, and superficial at that, Twilight knew. Stretching forth midnight wings, she could feel the reality of the muscles not only in the wings, but also underlying her back, hooked to a more prominent collar bone than had previously existed. Her chest could draw in far more air than before, her lungs having increased in their capacity. Without having to flap her wings, which she did anyway, she knew that it was all for naught, of course. Maybe she could have slowed her descent from a great height with the physical wings and air resistance alone, but without the unspoken magic of the pegasi backing her up, there wasn’t a chance in the world she could fly. She wondered if she could walk on clouds, however, for just about any winged animal could, but she doubted it.

The most mysterious and powerful change, however, was that the loss of her horn did indeed remove, or at least dampen, her unicorn’s magic; without the focusing implement, it was somewhat akin to trying to spray a leaky hose without a nozzle and a ragged end, all diffuse and vaporous. Even as a pony with the very concept of magic on her flank and the Element itself in her soul, she couldn’t even focus enough to lift a pencil off a nearby desk, though she could see a lavender haze for a moment when she concentrated on the patterns of energy.

Prancing around a bit with her unshod hooves clicking on her wooden floor, getting a feel for how her muscles were connected now, Twilight marveled at the subtle precision of it all. It really was as if she had been born a pegasus, complete with the sort of muscles she would have developed, though even that had a decidedly well-fed, chair-bound, book-read existence. The faux-pegasus was a touch plumper than either Fluttershy or Rainbow Dash. Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course, sometimes stallions liked a little plush. There isn’t a chance I’m going to get fat with my activity levels! I gallop practically daily with the disasters that hit Ponyville!

Twilight Sparkle hastily made a mental note to skip on the party’s chocolate cake.

Turning to Applejack, she smiled broadly, spreading her wings again and striking a pose. “What do you think?” she asked, a hoof to her mane to fluff it a little, making the pink stripe stand out a bit more.

“I think you look ravishing, darling, you really should let me-” Rarity began, but was cut off by Rainbow Dash.

“No way, no how, Rarity! A true pegasus always looks a little mussed, it’s part of our, um - what was that word, cull, cult... culture!”

“Oh yes. A matted and tangled mane that hasn’t seen a brush in Celestia knows however long, possibly not since the Grand Galloping Gala, and a tail that rats could use as a very flashy nest-”

“A prim, prissy, ultra-boring-”

“Your coat would shriek and skin itself off if you even saw a bottle of shampoo-”

“-sooner drop dead than actually contribute to the world by working-”

“-absolute brute of a mare with a stallion’s sense of the feminine-”

Shocking what a little disharmony can do, really, under the right circumstances. When the white and the blue flames began to shiver and destabilize, they very quickly took the others with them. Colors began to jangle and bleed together into unseemly wholes, with a jigsaw pattern of potential states that cast the room a quiver with uncertain light. And through it all, the purple radiance tightened, and quivered, and then, quite suddenly-

“ENOUGH!”

Huh.

Twilight hadn’t expected her voice to do that.

There was still ringing in her ears when she started to collapse. It seemed to her that her voice had released some unseen, hitherto unnoticed tension. She could imagine having seen colors bursting out of the air, lightning flashes of forked power that shot through every part of her library and her own flesh. Her voice continued to echo, drawn by unknown carriers, and, most ridiculous of all, appeared to have blown out that entire wall in front of her, sending books bouncing off surprised ponies halfway down the street. A particularly large tome, meant for nearly life-sized diagrams of a large number of animal species, blew through a cart of flowers, sending three overly excitable mares fleeing and screaming into their homes.

Deciding, quite sensibly, that she would obey her body’s sudden lethargy and her mind’s obvious fantasies, Twilight Sparkle laid her head down on her legs and, with a pleasant, and not-at-all pained sigh of tense throat muscles, fell asleep.

Part 2 - Over the Rainbow

Racing clouds, as black as coal dust, their choking billows enveloping her mind. They shivered, and swam, first sped up so that they resembled a slurry and then slowed so that she might see every particle. Ponies rise out of the dust, and speak to her in words that had no meaning, though it seems as if she should know them.

A laughing voice cut through the malaise like a knife of radiance, the sun itself shining and slicing through the fabric of gloom, piercing uncertainty and bringing clarity to that which had lacked all reason. When Twilight Sparkle - for that was her name, now that she paused to remember it - lifted her face to bathe in its warmth, it seemed to her that, even in this cold gray world of half-knowledges and incomplete thoughts, it should be strange that the sun was a bright, vivid, and unrepentantly crass shade of pink.

Gasping for air, her lungs kicking into high gear after their rather unasked for silence, Twilight Sparkle burst her way out of her stupor and into something resembling consciousness. The reviving pony beat her hooves involuntarily against the air, the ground, and anything that happened to be in her way, a staccato stutter that, blessedly for poor, beleaguered Spike, who had been desperately trying to rouse her, ended as soon as it began. Her thoughts refused to gather into any real causal relationship at first, with effects following causes while her brain went into what might best be described as a hard reboot. Air filled her lungs, and then she breathed. Her body shuddered, and she felt her heart race and muscles contract. The girl yelped and winced, and then felt pain. Wings flapped and cringed of their own accord, and then she felt itching, scratching, twinging shoots up her wings.

I am going to kill Rainbow Dash, she promised herself when her thoughts reversed themselves into the proper flow. Refreshing herself on the memories that had gotten scattered in the blast, she realized that the shoes she had worn to temporarily change herself into a pegasus must have still been on her if she could still feel her wings, and she knew that whatever disaster had just befallen her and her beloved library, they, and by proxy Rainbow Dash, were responsible.

In absolute terms, she had not been out for all that long, though it certainly had felt like longer in her head, which meant that she had probably lost consciousness due to a head injury or magical effect. Ponies were durable creatures, but even they could not survive failing to breathe without lasting harm for very long. Worried she might have had a magically induced seizure, or even worse, a stroke, Twilight Sparkle quickly ran through a rather extensive mental list of facts and figures to make sure she was operating smoothly. To think, Spike had laughed at me when I had drawn up that exact list for just such an eventuality, calling me a hypochondriac of all things, she scoffed to herself. Satisfied that she knew who she was, who her family was, what year it hopefully was and the exact proportion of tomatoes-to-celery sticks she liked on her CLT sandwiches, she concluded that she had probably suffered no lasting mental harm, though she would have to pull the physical copy out of her safe upstairs to double check.

Regrettably, it seemed that she still remembered having, as a young filly in Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, making a Hearts and Hooves Day card for a colt in the same class and becoming so distraught with nervousness over the project that, when the day came, she not only had to excuse herself from class all day to dry heave into the sink, she ended up unleashing a burst of magic that knocked everyone’s drinks at lunch into the air and unto their heads. It had taken her mother, her father, and Princess Celestia together three days to talk her out of her room. If she was going to suffer severe brain trauma, she would appreciate it if it would at least rid her of a few of her more inconvenient and embarrassing memories.

The ragged, gasping coughs coming from her and other voices in the room distracted her from her own private imaginings. A persistent bouncing noise alerted her to the fact that Pinkie Pie, apparently, had recovered before her. Unaffected by the thick dust from demolished books and wood choking the others, she stuck her face into Twilight’s with a face-splitting grin, apparently quite pleased, filling all of Twilight’s vision. “Hey Twi!” she said, sugary, “You’re up! That’s great! I was yelling at you for like, for-ever, and you were all ‘blaaah’ only you weren’t all ‘blaaah’ because you weren’t breathing, so I gave you mouth-to-mouth, which is totally okay because I had to learn it because sometimes ponies at my parties would be just so surprised that-”

Twilight flattened her ears against her skull, and, quite deliberately, coughed even louder. Though grateful Pinkie had, apparently, managed to save her from a fairly unenviable fate, her head was still ringing loudly enough to make the chatterbox’s voice rattle in her skull like a set of pink dice. On the plus, that face shining down on her so enthusiastically and the manner in which she was revived certainly explained where the pink sun in her imagination had come from. The purple-furred pony wasn’t quite sure she wanted to contemplate that line of thinking too closely, so she quickly shunted off into other, more important ones.

First thing’s first: I need full access to my magic, not a piddling trickle. I think Snails could probably overpower me without half trying right now, she decided, and concentrated. She focused first on the idea of her being a unicorn. Yup, just me and my horn, a twisting growth of keratin sheathing a shaft of bone with the Cornuatic Nerve going right through my skull into all the most important parts of my brain, she narrated to herself, as she concentrated on the key difference between the unicorn race and their equine brethren. Unnoticed by her, Pinkie Pie bounced off to go make sure the others were coming back to life, and that they were not, in fact, zombie ponies. After a few false starts, however, Twilight gave up on that route, and could quite understand why, since not only was her vision swimming but her focus was gone and her concentration was almost completely shot.

Fumbling her hooves against one another, the mare wondered if she could just peel the shoes off and be done with it that way, but there was no such luck. It was as if they had been blown off entirely, for the reaching toes didn’t feel anything attached to their bottoms, which, to Twilight, indicated that she had become sufficiently numb that she may be partially paralyzed or that she just couldn’t concentrate enough to tell the difference between her own hooves and a clamped on strip of metal. That had only happened once before, and she and the entire Chess Club had sworn never to speak of it ever again.

If she could clear the dust out of the room through that new and dramatic hole in her house she had apparently just made, she wagered that she could probably get enough clean air to try again. And I do happen to have a pair of perfectly good wings for doing just that! she informed herself cheerfully, pleased to have happened upon such a useful line of reasoning at last for, though they weren’t exactly useful for flying, her fake pegasus wings were perfectly apt for clearing a room of air.

Rising to all fours very nearly did her in right then, her muscles burning as if she had galloped for miles, she shivered and began to quiver. Her hooves clattered frightfully on the wooden flooring of her library as her legs shook like a newborn filly’s, and, with a sad thump, her bottom found it much preferred not fighting gravity. Resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to be standing up anytime soon, Twilight settled for resting her rump on the floor and leaning against her two front hooves.

Wincing, for it seemed as if her wings had never been used before from the intense muscle fatigue and pain that shot up her spine, Twilight Sparkle raised her wings as high as they would go, figuring she could get a few determined flaps out of them before she-

CLANG!

Unscrambling her brain for the second time that afternoon, Twilight was able to reconstruct exactly what she had just done to herself. Quite impossibly, it seemed, she had put all of her strength into a full flap of her useless wings and had managed to generate considerable downward thrust. This accelerated her body into the air and, predictably, crashed her skull directly into the ceiling above her, where the stunning impact robbed her of the sense to notice when she crashed back down on the floor again. Thus, her wings were functional. Ergo, she had become, by some quirk of magic, a true pegasus.

One thing was for certain: At the rate she was giving herself serious head injuries, she was bound to get that traumatic loss of brain cells yet.

Three jackhammers were racing to see who could dig their way into Applejack’s skull first. In her imagination, each one was crewed by a different member of her baby sister’s little gang of adorable hooligans, the Cutie Mark Crusaders.

“C’mon, you wimps, I’m so going to get my cutie mark in brain surgery first. If you two slow pokes don’t hurry up, all the good brains’ll be surgeried!” Scootaloo announced, the orange filly located somewhere above Applejack’s forehead.

Halfway around her skull, at the left temple, Apple Bloom was determinedly trying to knock aside enough bone to see what it really was like inside her sister’s noggin, and if it was, indeed, filled with apple custard filling. “Nuh uh, she’s mah sister and ah’m gonna get through first, you’ll see! I’ll fix her up right!”

Meanwhile, at the base of her skull, it seemed Sweetie Belle had given up, much to Applejack’s relief, looking in a puzzled fashion at her own hammer and asking in a confused voice, “Where did I even plug this thing in?”

Bracing for the deafening shout of, “Cutie Mark Crusader Brain Surgeons, Yay!” that never came, Applejack slowly began to realize that she was in fact only hallucinating them. The farmpony wasn’t quite alone, however, as it became obvious that she had, in the blast of whatever unwholesome magic had knocked her over, become thoroughly tangled up with another pony. The pain in her left temple probably had more to do with the fact that she had banged the side of her head into Twilight’s hardwood flooring than any new malignant plot her disaster-prone sister had cooked up to earn her badge of identity.

Grateful for the thickness of her cranium and its wonderfully efficacious impact resistance, she groaned, loudly, to let the world know how she felt about the aching bones in her body and doggedly began to extract herself from the butter yellow hooves that had snaked themselves, tentacle-like, around her. To her not inconsiderable surprise and the loss of all the air in her lungs, the seemingly soft yellow legs tightened and crushed themselves around her barrel, driving all of the air out of her chest, air she sorely needed to breathe right just then.

Applejack gasped, as pointed a criticism as she could muster without any real breath to work with. The blond mare knew that Fluttershy could be strong when she was panicked or upset, but this was far and away more force than she would have expected or found necessary, for that matter.

“Gack!” she huffed, eloquently. The sudden oxygen deprivation made her head throb even more intensely than before, the spot above her forehead hurting, if anything, even worse than it had before rather than less. “Fluh... shy... can’t...” she wheezed, taking tiny little gasps of air to forge what few words she could.

Shockingly powerful hooves wrapped, if anything, more tightly around Applejack at her words, as if she were some sort of orange pony-shaped pillow the poor, pink-maned girl was snuggling into to escape a terrible nightmare. Of course, few pillows could undergo a distinct change in color from orange to burgundy to a deeply air-deprived shade of blue, but Fluttershy was clearly in no condition to worry about the state of her furniture, however organic.

“Ger...” air hissed faintly out of Applejack’s throat, and she cried, “...off!”. With a stunning report, an orange light exploded between them, filling Applejack’s vision with stars and sparks that only multiplied when she went bouncing and rolling along the floor to knock against Twilight’s table.

With life-giving air restored to her lungs, however much dust she sucked in with it, Applejack squeezed her eyes shut. The pain in her head had increased to unprecedented levels, as if somepony had gone and jammed a tuning fork into it, making even the tough-as-nails workhorse shudder and gasp with the reflected vibrations of intense sensation. In those miserable moments, Applejack almost wished she’d been able to lose consciousness for a minute at Fluttershy’s unintentionally harmful grasp for then, maybe, the hammering on her forehead would have stopped at last.

Outside the library, a small gathering of concerned ponies had formed a sort of half-ring, just outside where the chunks of displaced, formerly living wood were most heavily clustered. Ponyville was large enough to be cosmopolitan and just small enough for most, albeit not all, ponies to know each other, and so a certain level of compassion for their fellow neighbor was expected. Furthermore, aside from being something akin to celebrities, Twilight Sparkle and her friends were all quite well-known around town and almost everypony had benefited from their business, kindness, or aid in some way before. Several had already run off for medical aid, while others were moving in to see what they could do personally, while the remainder milled around, doing their best to stay out of the way while watching and waiting.

A few, showing some presence of mind, ran off towards City Hall, intending to get the attention of Mayor Mare. Some, showing superior presence of mind, ran off in separate directions, to find ponies who could actually be of help, like Big Macintosh, or even Derpy Hooves. Just about anypony would do over one of the Mayor’s speeches. Among some ponies, more skilled, more concerned, or simply more inclined towards bold endeavor, more direct action was called for

First into the breach was Thunderlane, a dark-coated pegasus with a flashy mane held in a saw-like pattern down his back. Enormous hooves clanked along with the distinctive ring of a shod Earth pony, and the charcoal-coated young stallion turned his head a hair to see an enormous, bulky blue draft pony, one he thought he recognized from the squash farm down south a ways, and to his other side a pretty young medical student in residency at the hospital, one he recognized from his not infrequent trips to the emergency ward. Flaring his wings, both to brake before he hit something in the dark and to present a more threatening posture towards anything that may be out to harm the girls - or him, for that matter - he winced at the sound of a pony slamming her head against the ceiling, and darted forward to break her fall on the way down. Too jarred to notice him, the midnight-coated pony in his forelegs screamed in pain and clutched at her head. Though uncertain of the identity of this somewhat plush pegasus mare, Thunderlane acted quickly, and turned to call out to one of his companions, shouting, “Help! She’s wounded!”

Stepping back, he had to take a double-take as he looked more closely at the other pegasus. Purple hair, with a pink stripe? Ruler-edge cut forelock? his thoughts reeled, trying to make sense of what he was looking at, But... where’s her horn? Wings? Huh?

Briefly, Thunderlane checked his own pulse and temperature, and discovered that he wasn’t, or at least it didn’t seem like he was, running a fever. He had even gone to the trouble of washing his hooves before entering the library this time, a mistake he wasn’t liable to make twice after Twilight had teleported him halfway across town into the ladies’ changing room at the spa the last time he was here, most likely because he had gone and left prints on the shelves with dust tracked in from outside on a hot summer day. The bruises alone had been enough to land him in a clinic; the humiliation had kept him away from his friends for a week.

Resolving to at least make himself useful, he steadied himself against the floor and beat his wings as hard as he could without actually taking off, using heavy, steady beats to churn as much air as it was possible for him to manage. He angled them so that the dusty air inside was forcibly ejected outwards with the intent of pushing clean, fresh air inside, thus clearing the library out and allowing him to see clearly inside.

No slouch among the local pegasi, he managed to generate a startling amount of force and, as he had anticipated, the wing action was having the desired effect. Halfway up the stairs, the pegasus could see Spike as the air cleared, hoofprints of mysterious provenance recognizable embedded into his scaly body, the purple dragon’s eyes half-lidded as he watched the ponies from on high. Thunderlane wasn’t sure why the young dragon wasn’t helping out, but reasoned that he must have taken an unintentional beating when the girls went down. This was perhaps a little callous on the dragon’s part, he considered, but reasoned that when someone is a tiny, easily stepped on creature, it may be the course of wisdom to stay out of the way of large ponies with very hard feet and not much consideration to where they’re stepping.

Aside from Twilight, it seemed that none of the mares had managed to seriously harm themselves, for which Thunderlane was grateful. Indeed, it seemed as if they were more exhausted than anything else, rising up on shaking hooves and leaning against the walls or the table or chairs. The young nurse-in-training was winding a bandage about Twilight’s head, and gave a reassuring smile to the pegasus, one he didn’t notice, owing to the fact that his attention was decidedly preoccupied just then.

When he had seen Twilight, with her wings splayed out and her hornless head in the clear sunlight from outside, he had thought that maybe he had been mistaken at first, but now he was back to questioning his sanity.

Rising from a stack of books that had fallen unto her, Fluttershy was easily recognizable by her soft pink mane and yellow fur, her eyes a little glazed. What was wrong, though, and what made Thunderlane’s charcoal gray wings shrivel up in impotent fright, was the fact that she had no more wings. In utter horror, he looked at her sides, fearing to see the ragged, bloody stumps of her struts and yet drawn to them in sick fascination, only to be drawn up short when he saw nothing but fur, somewhat tousled by being stuck under a book pile, some of which were still hanging on top of the other pony. He was so shocked that he didn’t even notice how sturdy she looked; as far as Earth ponies went, she was still quite delicate, after all, and he had more important things to worry about.

While Fluttershy half-collapsed against the pile of books she had just vacated, his eyes darted, more uncertainly now, to the next closest pony. Applejack’s hat had come off, and she was even now trying and failing dismally to pick it up, her eyes almost crossed in a fashion Derpy Hooves, a wall-eyed pegasus with a penchant for disaster could be proud of. From the looks of it, she was failing to retrieve her hat primarily because she had forgotten that she needed both of her front hooves on the ground in order to stay upright, and so in trying to reach up and rub at her forehead in pain, she kept slipping and having to start over after reaching for her hat at the same time. Why she was rubbing at her forehead became immediately clear as an orange glow flared about the new horn jutting out of her skull, a puff of telekinetic force blowing the hat away at her irritated shout of, “Consarnit, get up here, hat! Who said you could run away?” The farmpony chased after it, in a wobbly, coltish fashion that resembled a newborn’s gait. Thunderlane noted in passing that, unicorn or not, Applejack still had the nicest haunches of any of them, an odd thought that stood incongruous with his growing panic.

Starting to sweat quite seriously now, Thunderlane turned his attention to Rarity, who was already moaning about the state of her hair. Tugging at the purple locks with one hoof, the alabaster mare concentrated, but her mane remained unkempt, hanging long and bedraggled. Rarity started at the utter lack of a response from her horn, something that had never happened since she was a filly still learning how to properly control her magic in the first place. Patting herself over, as if she could somehow locate her defining trait as a unicorn elsewhere on her body, Rarity was quickly working herself into a panic. With her horn no more present on her head than Twilight’s was on her, her search was futile, and her descent into hysterics inevitable.

“First my glorious wings, and now my horn!” she wailed, and threw herself at the blue draft stallion, sobbing piteously. “Please, just... just crush me under your hooves! I have nothing left to live for!” she begged him. Apparently, even when she was completely out of her mind with grief and the dazed results of a magical accident, the proprietress of Carousel Boutique was not about to let a little high drama slide, “No, wait! That’s not stylish enough! We need a wagon of flowers, a carefully choreographed dance troupe, and a very posh knife, then I can die! Oh, the other ponies will be green with envy at such a beauteous demise, sages will sing of the tragedy of it for centuries, Celestia and Luna will weep over it eons from now...”

Right, moving on, Thunderlane thought quickly, trotting through the library. Pinkie Pie he saw at once, the pink pony looking a bit less excited after Twilight’s head-cracking incident, her concern for her friends outweighing any curiosity she might have had, in addition to her own exhaustion. After the shock the others gave him, seeing her equipped with a pair of violently pink wings only made him frightened for Ponyville itself, with the potential of her madness being liberated from the confines of the Earth looming like a dark cloud. Like the other mares, she seemed to be a little cross-eyed, her wall-eyed stare making the young stallion decidedly uncomfortable.

With Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie as pegasi, Rarity and Fluttershy as Earth ponies, and Applejack as a unicorn, that left only one pony, and he had a sneaking suspicion he knew what he was going to find. It was as if the world were setting him up, laughing at his ill-fated heroic gesture.

The weatherpony didn’t have to wait long, as it turned out, as the last standing bookshelf exploded out with a cyan-blue flash of light. Thunderlane only barely managed to raise his wings and hooves protectively, though the spine of Practical Comedy: Pratfalls and Pitfalls did crack him across the face regardless, leaving an imprint of the embossed words on his cheek. When he could look again, what he saw horrified him as much, if not more, than his glimpse of Fluttershy. His boss, the leader of the Ponyville Weather Patrol, the fastest pony in Equestria, maybe in all of history, and probable future Wonderbolt, was wide-eyed with equine terror, her nostrils and barrel flaring with fast, heavy breaths.

Backing up, Thunderlane recoiled from the terrifying visage. Though he would certainly never admit it to anypony, he had always had a certain amount of awed admiration for the mare - or, at least, a certain competitive respect - and even without her wings flaring in a threat display, she looked like she might tear him limb from limb if he so much as breathed wrong. Though this notion may well have blinded him into insensibility, he had a moment or two of her stunned and shaking silence to contemplate her a bit more objectively. Taking the time to examine her from where he stood, it seemed to the pegasus that Rainbow Dash was a lot thinner than she should have been. Though always sleek and more than a little alluring, she looked downright underfed for any pegasus in her position. His eyes flickered up to her forehead automatically and he flinched back further, as a rather sharp and lethal looking horn was glowing a vivid sky blue, the tip shining almost white.

“Uh, Dash?” he cajoled, foreseeing a repeat of his teleportation-related assault and battery in his near future, even without benefit of supernatural Pinkie Sense, “You, uh...”

“Where are my wings?!” she demanded in a shout, managing a fair approximation of the Royal Canterlot Volume setting. If there was any humor in the situation, though, Thunderlane wasn’t seeing it. “Where are my wings?” she asked again, in not much less of a shout, her breaths coming faster and harder.

“Look, Dash, Rainbow Dash,” he tried again, glancing around to see if he could hide behind anything, but there was no such luck, for he was being backed into the open floor. Even with wings, he was skeptical of his chances of simply outrunning Rainbow Dash. He could still remember the sound drubbing she had given him on their last race, and she had been half-dead with exhaustion from running a major storm the previous night. The hissing sound of magic building up was growing like an angry swarm of bees, which made the prospect of escaping by retreat before she could do something drastic to him even more unlikely.

“What happened to my wings, Thunderlane?” she demanded, perhaps a touch irrationally to his ear. Maybe more than a touch, really.

“I-I don’t-”

“I am still awesome!” she shouted at him, and it sounded almost more like pleading than a statement of fact, “Tell me I’m awesome. I’m awesome, aren’t I?”

“Yes!” he answered, almost sobbing with relief at being offered a way out that didn’t involve him having to say something that would cause a distraught mare to beat him to death, “Yes you’re awesome, you-”

“And I’m going to get that promotion, I’m going to join the Wonderbolts, I’m going to be the best darned pegasus in Equestria, right?”

“Dash, please, calm down!” he shouted right back, deciding to try a different tactic, figuring in a less-than-stellar moment of decision that, should being solicitous fail, then the only rational choice was to try to smack some sense into her. He flared his wings to their fullest extent, his primaries and coverts rigid and making him as large as he could be, trying to assert himself. Mares sometimes said they liked him when he was assertive, and in his imagination he pictured her hesitating, snapped out of her hysteria. While he was at it, he even projected into the future, hoping that she might even grant him a grateful nuzzle or a promotion.

One small snag had failed to register in Thunderlane’s calculated assessment, however.

He was challenging Rainbow Dash.

And that was a really bad idea.

Lifting her head, slowly, gently, Twilight Sparkle was glad to find out that she had only managed to give herself a fairly severe contusion, instead of splitting her skin or even her head right open. The wood was softer up there on the ceiling, just enough apparently that it wasn’t a heavier injury than it could have been. Reaching up, she could feel the soft part of the contusion through the hair of her mane, and quickly snatched her hoof away at the glare from the trainee nurse.

Shifting, Twilight began to rise to her feet, her thoughts turning to thanking Thunderlane, when rage-filled shout split the air with a crack of thunder. A quite literal thunder crack, in fact, following an arcing blast of colorful lightning that briefly filled the darkening library with light and deafening sound. The charcoal pegasus stallion flew past her, bouncing out of the library with noisy thuds, his fur trailing smoke from several points. Trails of multi-hued lightning had thrown him into the clock maker’s shop across the street, forcing the gathered ponies to duck in shock and scatter before the projectile pony could hit them. Alarms began to clang noisily, cuckoos popping in and out of wall-mounted clocks to tweet down at the intruder, seeming to almost dance around his head.

Turning, her ears flattened against the sound, she looked in some shock and more than a little fright at her friend Rainbow Dash. As Thunderlane had perceived, she was, indeed, a unicorn. Unlike the stallion, however, Twilight was aware of the deeper implications of this turn in events, of that fact that her horn was shining with the inner light of the unicorn birthright, and knew that no mere party trick horseshoes were capable of anything so dramatic and all-encompassing. Even powerful transformation magic cast by a pony such as herself, with the Element of Magic behind her, should have worn away with an effect so deep it could change the fundamental nature of a pony’s magic.

The pain in her muscles had faded to a dull ache, and she was able to stand as the newly minted unicorn practically charged at her. The young nurse shouted, but her warnings went unheeded as Rainbow Dash grabbed Twilight in her hooves and bodily pushed her back, making the lavender pony stumble to the floor. “Where are my wings, Twilight?” she demanded of her as she had demanded of Thunderlane.

Intellectually, Twilight knew that Rainbow Dash wasn’t being sensible. It wasn’t like her to act like this, to strike out at ponies around her or to break down into a wreck.

As it had with Thunderlane, seeing her friend, who was normally so brash and elusive about her real feelings, be reduced to hysterics was almost physically painful for her to watch. The shaking wasn’t all that intense, as far as it went, but the look of pain and loss on Rainbow’s face cut into her heart like a jagged knife, slicing deep and drawing forth gouts of red emotion. In truth, Twilight could emphasize strongly, for she wasn’t sure how she was taking the loss of her horn and the magic that meant so much to her so well. Honestly, she suspected that shock was involved more than anything else.

In a very real and sickening sense, it was like being amputated.

Rainbow, like her, had realized that her wings, her real magic, her very personhood, were not coming back, just as Twilight had intuited her own loss would not be solved instantly.

“What did you do with them, Twilight?” she shouted, moving to accusations now, a strong note of pleading entering her voice. It’s like she managed to compress denial and anger into one single super-charged grief stage, and is slowly bleeding into bargaining, Twilight grimaced inwardly.

“Please,” Dash begged, her voice starting to crack with the pressure of it, “Please, just... I’ll do anything, I’ll rebuild your wall, I’ll pay you anything, I’ll give you anything I have...”

Lifting a hoof, Twilight waved off the blue stallion who had been trying to ease up on them, his massive forelimbs tensed to restrain the cyan unicorn. Desperate, she waved harder, and he reluctantly backed off, trusting Twilight in spite of his concerns about whether or not Rainbow might turn dangerous. Rarity and Applejack, Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy, all of them were staring, rendered speechless, watching the breakdown as one might a train wreck, feeling powerless to stop the tragedy unfolding.

The rose-colored eyes that filled the rest of her vision were still wide, but as her friend’s rage began to ebb they lost their force, leaving behind empty pools. Rainbow Dash could be mad at Thunderlane as she had been - she liked him well enough, even if he was still a bit of an irritant at times - but to threaten or accuse Twilight now was apparently beyond her ability to sustain.

“Twi... I...” she tried, her voice, which normally cracked and warbled at the best of times with her unrestrained excitement and energy, now low and steady with need and intensity, “Please.”

Twilight didn’t know what to say. Sometimes, even in a world of smiles, laughter, dancing, and singing, there can be no blue skies or sunny days, somewhere over the rainbow.

Part 3 - The Other Shoe Drops

Twilight Sparkle sighed heavily. This was becoming a habit for her today, much to her disgust. She wasn’t normally given to whining or carrying on, but, to be fair, she was having a sufficiently bad day to justify it. The muscle ache had nearly faded and, though the throbbing pain was still great, the blow on her head at least helped distract her from her loss.

It could distract her a little, at least.

Twilight rubbed at her forehead miserably, her lavender hoof touching the place where her horn should have been, just below the still-soft contusion. She was, at that time, laying on her belly in a bed at Ponyville General Hospital’s emergency room, where tan walls rose warmly about her. A medical center that served much of the basin, Ponyville was lucky to have such a modern facility, though, in her opinion, it would do the six of them very little good, no matter how modern and sophisticated its machinery and the quality of its medical supplies. The doctors had, of course, insisted on running tests on them anyway, and the girl had reluctantly agreed, just in case something awful had occurred on top of the transformations.

The last thing we needed was for one of us to be missing both her kidneys, or for somepony to have a newly defective heart. A unicorn can never be too careful, she mused silently to herself, and then winced. Former unicorn, she corrected her own assessment, bitterly, and rubbed more vigorously at her forehead, as if she could somehow search out a tiny, infinitesimal nub of horn to call her own once more.

The trip had been very quiet, at least for the girls. Big Macintosh had come charging in through the hole, barreling over poor innocent ponies who were too slow to dodge in his desperation to reach them, looking as if he was prepared to do battle with a whole army of foes ranging from dragons to hippocampi to pie-wielding cultists. After it was clear that they were all right, aside from being unable to walk in a straight line and being transformed as they were, they were all herded, against their protests, into a wagon. Matters had become even more awkward when Thunderlane, still smoking and twitching, was scooped and poured into the back. Thankfully for the girls’ consciences, his plaintive moans had sounded more faked than anything serious, and so they stopped paying him attention and turned to more important matters.

It had seemed, then, that they were all beginning to cope fairly well under the circumstances. Friendship and unity could go a long way to healing wounds of a more subtle nature. When it came to Rainbow Dash, however, Twilight was far less certain that her friend was coping adequately. The collapse in Twilight’s library, in her embrace, had in her dazed state nearly been too much to handle entirely. For Rainbow Dash, who had seemed nearly untouchable in her mind, rising above any challenge, both literally and figuratively, to suffer a breakdown of that magnitude was just about as terrifying a thought as Twilight was capable of imagining. There had certainly been times when she had shown a more vulnerable side, be it through performance anxiety or her desire for acclaim, but the loss in her eyes... Twilight Sparkle sighed again.

Turning her head, she looked over at her varicolored-maned friend, who was even now standing on her own four legs by her own hospital bed, with only a slight tremor. If anything, the sight was almost enough to bring her to tears once again. She could vividly recall how, on the wagon trip to the hospital, the other girls, who had at last managed to regain their own senses following the magical burst, crowded around Rainbow Dash and belatedly offered the mare their mutual support. Ten hooves belonging to five girls had crushed the cyan blue unicorn between them. It was what happened next that had convinced Twilight Sparkle something was terribly wrong.

----

Earlier, on the wagon...

Rainbow Dash laughed. She laughed long and hard.

Startled, the sway of the wagon knocking them apart, five sets of pony eyes widening in surprise at this unusual reaction, their group hug terminated before it could really even begin. Scrubbing her face of the leftover tears that had been soaked into her fur, Rainbow neither laughed cruelly nor callously nor shrilly nor even madly. Lacking even any real humor, it was as if she were, somewhat shamefacedly, laughing at a joke that had gone badly.

Noting their confused looks, she offered them all a sheepish grin, saying in more normal tones, “Hey, c’mon... don’t look at me like that, guys.” Shifting in her seat, her horn barely missing Applejack’s eye before the other new unicorn jerked back, she scooted over to Twilight and gave her a brief, but firm hug.

“It’s all right,” she said, her voice regaining some of its proper toughness and pitch, “I don’t really blame you, Twi. My fault for bringing the stupid things in.”

That set the others at ease. Together, they rocked to the sway of Big Macintosh’s borrowed wagon, on towards the hospital and its promised medical aid.

---

Chewing over her reminiscences, Twilight Sparkle glanced over at her friend again, her thoughts whirling. Rainbow Dash had moved over to Applejack’s bed, joking with the other pony and trying to stick a tomato from the mare’s hospital salad on to the orange pony’s new horn, like it was a skewer. It seemed to almost everypony that her breakdown had been merely a momentary lapse in her otherwise endless well of coolness and fortitude.

It seemed as if Rainbow Dash was, in fact, perfectly all right. She seemed to be coping well and was going out of her way to make sure the other ponies were being taken care of. Still, Twilight felt deeply unsettled, and she thought she could put a hoof on why.

Unlike the others, Twilight Sparkle had seen into Rainbow’s eyes in that critical moment, following the transformation. She had seen, and could not forget no matter how hard she might have tried, the emptiness within them Additionally, she could recall quite clearly a few times that Rainbow Dash had been sick in the past as well as the stories Fluttershy would tell about their time together in Cloudsdale, and she knew that when Rainbow Dash was sick, she made sure to let everypony know it, carrying on and milking attention for all it was worth. Perhaps with an injury inflicted during training she would be too annoyed at the circumstances to do so, but given even a minor illness she would play it up as if it were her last hours at the hands of the plague.

If Twilight wasn’t mistaken, and she had every reason to believe she wasn’t, then if Rainbow Dash was putting on a brave face and trying to convince everypony around her that she was doing perfectly well, rather than being irritated and grouchy or miserable and needy, then chances were she was every bit the opposite of well.

Twilight had not wanted to think about it, but she believed she could sympathize completely. Rubbing the space where her missing horn had been, yet again, she could not shake that deep, abiding sense of something missing. Her magic was an intrinsic part of her, and much of her life’s study had been dedicated to understanding it and learning more about it, picking up an array of skills, spells, and talents that would be dizzying to almost any other unicorn she knew. Any unicorn could, of course, pick up a certain degree of proficiency in magic, and it was even theoretically possible that another could have the same degree of power and proficiency as she. Starswirl the Bearded’s more advanced work gave even her headaches, and his mark had not been a talent for pure magic as hers was. The thought of giving up magic for good filled her with a level of dread and loss that she nearly broke down into tears herself.

Indeed, she felt she had to admire Rainbow Dash. It had to take a sort of courage beyond Twilight’s conception of the word to suck up such a serious blow to her identity, worse than anything but the most tragic of injuries, and put up a good face of camaraderie and security to see to it that her friends wouldn’t be hurt, even if she was hurting inside.

Even so, Twilight knew that she had to get Rainbow to open up again, for her own sake. If she was right, then bottling up her feelings, no matter what altruistic purpose it served, could be a recipe for disaster.

Rainbow laughed, dodging back as an involuntary bolt of orange magic shot by her head. “Oh come on, you wuss, you can take a better swing than that!” she goaded Applejack, who was glaring at her cyan friend, a cube of hospital jello jammed onto her curled horn.

...Then again, maybe Rainbow is just being Rainbow, she considered, with another depressed sigh. If I were Rainbow Dash, if I had lost the wings that made me who I am... If I wasn’t a unicorn any more, if I didn’t have unicorn magic, then what am I?

No. We are going to fix this. We’ve beaten Nightmare Moon and Discord, we can beat a stupid party favor, she told herself, firmly, and awkwardly shifted in the hospital bed, every movement echoed in her injured head, adding in an uncertain voice, quietly, “We will.”

It seemed that the blast of magic had been involuntary, for Applejack followed it up by tackling the offending former pegasus and began to tussle, much to the nurse’s disgust. Twilight sighed.

Trotting as fast as his little legs could carry him, Spike barged into the ward later that afternoon, with the sun still hanging over the western horizon. Dodging between the pale legs of the nurse, he charged into the care unit and skid to a halt, sliding along his soft belly as he tripped in his excitement. As his momentum ceased at last by Twilight’s bed, he lifted the scroll over himself towards her, calling in his exhausted voice, burnt out from running all the way there, “Twilight! It’s... phew... Princess Celestia! She wrote back!”

His voice rousing her out of her funk, Twilight rose on the bed a little to get a look down at her favorite assistant and de facto adopted baby brother. The words certainly got the attention of the other ponies, who had returned to moping around on their beds, exhausted and stuck in their own thoughts. Looking pleased that the situation may be over at last, each of them crowded around, though Rainbow Dash’s attempt to float over them was futile, ending in her smacking herself into Applejack’s bed and planting both forehooves in her unused bed pan. Grumbling to herself, the blue unicorn stomped over with both hooves still jammed in.

Concentrating, Twilight floated the scroll into the air so she could-

Aw crap.

Everypony’s eyes darted back down to the scroll still held in Spike’s claw, apparently having expected the very same thing as Twilight. Laughing in a sheepish fashion, Twilight quickly reached down and snatched the scroll, embossed with Celestia’s own personal seal. Trying not to concentrate on how her still-tender wings shifted sensitively to adjust for her balance, an action that, for Twilight, was becoming increasingly and uncomfortably natural, the young mare slid the seal off and unfurled the rolled and snowy white vellum. Quickly, she read the words out loud for the benefit of the other girls. “My Faithful Student-” she began, unconsciously echoing her master’s velvety voice.

“Oh man, we’re going to be ourselves before the hour is out,” Rainbow Dash gushed, excited and almost squealing with joy and relief, “Which is good, because she’s the Princess of the Day, and she hibernates all night long, so we’d have to wait, for... what?”

Few ponies could match Twilight for exasperated glares. She knew this empirically, for she practiced them in the mirror daily and elicited volunteers to conduct trials, and expected to have the results ready for publishing in two to three years after the double-blind studies could conclude. “Really? Never seen her with the sun down before, huh?” Twilight asked, dry.

Rainbow squirmed, coughing awkwardly, “Well, okay. Shut up.”

“It’s okay, we’re all on edge,” Fluttershy murmured, leaning into the blue unicorn comfortingly. Dash feigned distaste and squeamishness briefly, before grunting and leaning back into her yellow-coated friend.

“C’mon, Twilight, let’s have it,” Applejack said, with unconcealed impatience, her horn poking up through the front of her hat, the durable leather shining in the hospital lights.

Nodding, Twilight smoothed the parchment out on the sheets in front of her with a hoof, reading the elegant script of her master and Princess. Clearing her throat, she began to read aloud again, resisting the urge to scan ahead, “I apologize for not arriving at once. I have the greatest sympathy for the plight of you and your friends, and I-” Twilight frowned, and paused.

“What’s wrong?” Rarity asked, “Is it fatal? Are we going to die? Oh Sweetie Belle, I-”

“Stopping you right there,” Twilight snapped, aggravated. Reaching behind her, she shoved Pinkie Pie, who had been trying to peek over her shoulder; the pegasus had apparently already discovered how to hover, rather like a large pink bottle fly with rapidly buzzing feathered wings. While, gum-like, Pinkie Pie clung to her hoof and arm in her attempt to catch a glimpse of the vellum, Twilight Sparkle concentrated and read again, “I have the greatest sympathy for the plight of you and your friends, and I regret to inform you that I have, at present, no means to restore you to your natural forms.”

Powering through the chorus of yelps, shocked noises, and demands, Twilight raised her voice, continuing, “I am even now having the Royal Library of Canterlot turned inside-out, searching for any reference to a spell or situation that might be considered remotely similar to your own. I will be taking many of the tomes and scrolls, those which can survive the journey, with me when I come to visit you in person in Ponyville, after the Wizard’s Council, myself, and Princess Luna make a preliminary investigation here in Canterlot.”

That quieted the other girls. Settling back, Applejack waved her hat at her face, as if to cool the red blush on her cheeks, leaking through her orange fur, muttering, “Shucks. Now ah feel bad.”

“All those people are going to be... concerned about us?” Fluttershy murmured uncertainly.

Rainbow Dash might have added a comment, but she apparently decided a choked gasp was more appropriate. Applejack loosened Fluttershy’s foreleg from about Rainbow Dash’s neck, where it had been clamped tightly, restricting the unicorn’s airways.

“That’s why she’s Princess,” Twilight said, proudly, her fears melting away. With both Princesses and all the best wizards in the realm working on their problem, it couldn’t possibly withstand scrutiny.

“I’m pretty sure she’s Princess because she’s over a thousand years old and raises the sun,” Spike said, in a low, sarcastic tone.

“Because she’s generous, kind, and all of the other things the Elements represent. Also, she has millenia of magical experience behind her! You just wait, girls, we’ll be back to normal before you can say ‘Wonderbolts!’” Twilight declared, pumping a hoof in the air.

“Ugggh,” Rainbow Dash groaned, laying on her back on one of Twilight’s couches, which had been pulled up to the library’s loft. Unable to return to her cloud home for the duration of her transformation, Twilight had offered her friend a place at her library home once they had been released from the hospital that night. “I was supposed to fly out to the Wonderbolts show tonight, I had tickets and everything!” she groused, as if her life hadn’t taken enough miserable turns as it was.

"Ugggh!" she added again, more loudly, in case her roommate hadn't heard her the first time. Agitation burned in her, a sensation she was no stranger to, but one she was accustomed to coping with by the simple expediency of intense physical activity.

Certainly, she could have run around the tree or done a couple hundred push-ups, but that would only remind her of things she didn't want to think about just now. Rainbow Dash dealt with neither idleness nor disability in a constructive nor graceful fashion. That it was due to end within the next day or so didn’t really help, for it was qualitatively different from past maladies. Her agitation stemmed not from situations which had left her grounded before, such as her wings being broken, sprained, or tied up. Her wings were gone, as if she had never had them in the first place.

Somewhere up above, in her bed, Twilight Sparkle seemed to be beginning to regret her generosity. Looking up from the couch, Rainbow could see that her friend was staring at Luna’s moon, seemingly trying in vain to find comfort in the familiar contours of its surface. The former unicorn asked, annoyed, “You know, you could have just asked somepony else to fly you to the show.”

Somewhere in the library below, Owloysius was probably hard at work cleaning up the results of the party. A canvas had been stretched across the damaged wall, awaiting the attention of an arborist who could help the tree regrow into the wound inflicted on it. Spike snoozed in his basket at the foot of Twilight’s bed, oblivious to the argument between his roommates and seemingly blissful in his dreams. The song of late summer crickets was soothing, albeit not soothing enough to quiet the agitation of the two ponies, awaiting word from their leader and mentor.

For a moment, Rainbow Dash was silent, staring up at her friend incredulously. It was, for her, really hard to believe that anypony, especially a pony with a set of wings of her own, however recently gained, could say something so breathtakingly stupid. “Go to a Wonderbolts air show not under my own power? Are you crazy?” she asked, perhaps more insultingly than she had first intended. The pain in her forehead, the throbbing ache in that horn she didn’t want to admit existed, had not yet gone away, and it was fraying her already volatile temper, leading her to snap, “A pegasus athlete who does something that pathetic deserves the humiliation.”

If she had been hoping that Twilight would snap back at her, rise up and flare her wings and rage back at Rainbow Dash, to call her a jerk or at least protest that she wasn’t pathetic, the unicorn was disappointed. Indeed, when Twilight just rolled over in her bed, pulling her sheets about her more tightly, she felt her stomach sink a little in her chest, a deeply uncomfortable sensation Rainbow found neither familiar nor welcome. Another one of those rattling sighs carved the air, and Rainbow stewed quietly below. Never having been a bully, she couldn’t really appreciate a fight when the other pony just lay down and took the abuse.

Turning, she dug her face into the pillow, wincing and almost growling when her horn dug into the fabric of the couch. It was sensitive enough without being irritated, and she barely managed to suppress a weak sputter of magic from the tip by clenching her jaw tightly, sending fresh shoots of pain up the bone. Rainbow was surprised she could still walk after blasting Thunderlane like she had that afternoon, for the unintentional magic had sapped her of energy as good as a 10 mile race might have. Her horn had already ached like someone had given it a few whacks with a hammer and her head had ached as if said horn had been a railroad spike driven into bone. With her barely being able to stand as it was, shooting someone with lightning bolts had felt like picking up an entire storm cell with her own back and carrying it from Ponyville to Manehattan.

Worse, it was getting increasingly hard for her to pretend like she wasn’t being affected as much as she was, and she groaned silently, I can’t let on, not with everypony counting on me to look out for them, too. I’m supposed to be the tough one, I’m supposed to be the one who holds together and blows it off like nothing happened.

The young mare suppressed a sign of her own, thinking irritably, Who do I think I am, the new Twilight Sparkle? Wishing she had a nice cloud to curl up on, she settled on thoughts of flying as she began to drift off. No matter how soft a bed Twilight’s couch made, it couldn’t really compare to a cloud. The mare turned a bit, the thought of climbing up on to a cloud giving her a rather unusual brand of chills. If someone did toss her on one in her present condition, she would find, rather than a soft bed, a plunge into the depths, screaming into the abyss.

Trying to put aside unquiet thoughts, Rainbow Dash fell asleep, and into dreams.

Rainbow Dash could fly.

In dreams, she could fly.

Great blue feathered wings spread out to either side, catching the crisp, thin air of the upper atmosphere.

It was sometimes asked of her, by people who didn’t really understand her, why she let her mane grow out so long. They wondered why, since a long mane could get in the way of an active pony. They wondered even more when they considered how much of a tomboy she was, and would point out that it seemed like such a waste to grow her hair out so much if she wasn’t even going to bother brushing it, leaving it matted and tangled for most of the day.

Quite aside from how awesome it was to have hair that naturally evoked the colors of the rainbows that named her, Dash had another, far more important reason for a good head of hair..

Tucking her wings up, she dived towards the earth far below, her energetic scream of joy tearing the heavens asunder. Clouds burst around her as if detonated by charges of blasting powder, forming expanding rings in a descending cone in her transit. As she closed her eyes, unafraid of anything here in her natural element, she smiled a broad, tight grin. Her mane unfurled like a banner and fanned behind her, leaving trails of multicolored light that spread behind her in a beautiful contrail, effervescing particles of radiant light. To anyone watching from afar, it may have seemed as if the sun, breaking through the clouds, had scattered its light through the rain and made a perfect ribbon of color fall back down to grace the earth, freeing its inhabitants from dreariness.

“Wha’cha doin’, Dash?” Scootaloo’s voice called, her tones as adoring as they always were in addressing her hero. Jerked out of her meditative contemplation, Rainbow Dash yelped and spread her wings automatically to come out of free fall, only to find that nothing was changing when she tried. Opening her eyes, panicked, she could see Scootaloo flying beside her, her tiny orange wings beating so fast they steamed in the air. For some reason that eluded Rainbow, the filly was riding a jackhammer, the long cable flapping in the air far above. Terror-stricken, Rainbow tried to flap her wings and arrest her fall, but again nothing happened, nor could she feel either her wings or the air flying past them. Tucking her head to look at her sides above her, she could see why: Bare sides, her barrel unadorned by any such appendages.

Apple Bloom, lounging on a jackhammer above her, looked down, her apple red mane flapping behind her. “Gosh, Rainbow,” the yellow filly observed, her eyes wide, “Why’d you come up all this way, you know unicorns can’t fly.”

Horror beat through Rainbow Dash’s throbbing equine heart, even as the clouds all around turned dark and threatening, the sky racing with ill intent. Feeling at her skull, she pushed aside her waving forelock and felt with her hoof. Chills ran up and down her spine as she ran it along the curled, sharp appendage jutting there.

“It’s okay,” Sweetie Belle squeaked, drawing Rainbow Dash’s eyes again, her breath now coming faster and harder. Standing atop her own power tool, the unicorn filly gave her a broad grin, adding in a bright tone, “All you have to do is cast a spell to arrest your momentum without, you know, smashing into, um..”

“Paste,” Apple Bloom supplied.

“Yup! Zap apple paste!”

Already sickeningly dizzied by her uncontrolled free fall, Rainbow Dash wondered if she’d vacate herself of the spaghetti Spike and Rarity had made them all for dinner in the library that night. Horrifying visions of Granny Smith scraping rainbow jam off a smear of blue paint in the pavement just about did her in right then.

Who am I kidding?

I can’t fly.

“I can’t cast spells, I’m not really a unicorn, I’m Rainbow Dash!” she protested to the Cutie Mark Crusader Skydivers, unsure if the stabbing sensation in her chest was her heart trying to beat itself to death on her rib cage or the aching pain of loss.

“It’s okay, I’ll show you. Now, how did that go again...?” Sweetie pondered, rubbing her chin with a hoof, blithely unconcerned by the fact that she could no more cast spells at her age and development than Scootaloo could fly or the onrushing ground, which was even now dominating far more of Rainbow Dash’s world than she cared for, could treat an unhindered landing gently. Ponyville looked strangely alarming in this light, the pointed roofs jagged and their cheerily lit windows turned into burning pits of flame. The street had recently been paved with flagstones, and looked about as soft and inviting as a granite cliff.

“The Rainbow Dash I know isn’t a unicorn,” Scootaloo accused, her eyes narrowing suspiciously as she watched the rainbow-tailed pony fall, “She’s the fastest flier in Equestria, the awesomest pony in the world. She’d never let me down. You’re just going down.”

Well, that did it, Rainbow Dash grimaced, watching as her heart, freshly cut out of her chest, fluttered away in the growing storm. With a despairing sob, she reached her hooves out to Sweetie Belle imploringly, begging, “Help me! I can’t fly, I’m going to crash, I can’t fly!”

“I remember now!” Sweetie Belle said triumphantly, her eyes popping excitedly, “It goes like this!” Closing her eyes, the young unicorn focused her thoughts, and her horn began to glow a soft, very pale pink. An iridescent rose-colored bubble shot up around her and her three friends, decelerating gently and leaving Rainbow Dash behind in moments.

Struggling to concentrate, to repeat what she had seen Sweetie Belle do, the plummeting mare’s horn sputtered, fitful sparks launching off into the darkness about her, illuminating briefly the mockingly glittering black shoes on her hooves, but she was not supposed to be a unicorn and she did not truly know magic. She couldn’t sure what she was, there in the dark, before the ground rushed up to claim her for its own.

The night sky over Sweet Apple Acres was filled with the rich vastness of the night sky, impeded only here and there by the occasional cloud. A full day without Rainbow Dash’s attention during one of the least critical junctions of the year, the slow, easy transition of summer into autumn, wasn’t going to cause any immediate natural disasters that the less able ponies of the Weather Patrol couldn’t handle.

Applejack, for one, was glad that it wasn’t the time of year for the nightly covers of cloud to hold in the day’s heat for the critical run up to the harvest, or the time for the showers to wash away the remains of autumn in preparation for winter and to refill the stocks of aquifers, for it allowed her to see the sky unhindered. Though no real connoisseur of constellations and their stars like Twilight Sparkle was, Applejack knew them all from watching the seasons all of her years, and it allowed her a chance, sitting on her porch, to really appreciate the sky Princess Luna had fought so long and hard to be appreciated for. Certainly, she didn’t order the stars in the heavens as she did the changing moon each night, but she clarified it, bringing to light such beautiful stellar phenomena such as the milky spill of the Galaxy, and the swell of nebulae and the intricate dance of further, stranger things nopony yet understood. Without the Princess of the Night, so much of the true sky faded into insignificance, and those parts that were there had seemed dull and uninteresting compared to the night skies of this age. Applejack felt pity for the long generations of ponies who never had had the chance to see such wonders in anything but the most ancient of paintings, and perhaps, in that moment, felt an inkling of sympathy for the ancient alicorn. It made her wonder if those ancient ponies of yesteryear had just taken a lovely night sky for granted, and its mistress along with it.

“Appleja-aaaa-ck,” Rarity whined from inside the farmhouse’s kitchen, “Your food is getting cold! I didn’t spend all night cooking just so you could get all mopey and stare at space all night long!”

“Well, ah can enjoy it until somepony starts hollerin’ and carrying on,” she carped, pawing at the ground. Tucking her father’s hat back on her head, Applejack stifled a groan. She kicked a loose can down the way out of the warm golden light of the back porch and rose from the swing chair, cracking her back with a stretch that brought her still-powerful chest towards the ground. Personification of honesty or no, Applejack felt that unnecessary complaining should be kept to a pony’s own self, and not foisted off on other, innocent ponies, especially ones who might have serious problems of her own to work out. She would also sooner rather have Big Macintosh buck her into the next county than admit that she had been staring at the sky partially to keep from looking down, at the land itself.

To admit that she had felt, in a walk from the hospital that had seemed to take forever and a day, almost no relief or sense of peace at the sight of her beloved apple orchards had been almost too much to bear.

Rarity had, at the time, taken her silence for an invitation to gab, and Fluttershy was always far too retiring to object to anything, and so they had all been treated to a lengthy diatribe on why being an Earth pony suited the fashion designer not at all. At the conclusion of her rant, Rarity had punctuated by smacked face-first into the kitchen door, which had at least given Applejack something to chuckle over after making sure her friend wasn’t hurt.

Moseying back into the kitchen, Applejack bore witness to repetition of that moment, as, in turning to go into the pantry to collect some more plates for the extra guests, Rarity slammed head-first into the door, apparently forgetting, once again, that she didn’t have any unicorn magic left in her, let alone a horn to work it with. The farmgirl suspected this would become something of a pattern for Rarity.

“Oh!” Fluttershy said, almost a mirror for her earlier reaction, with her soft eyes wide and concerned as she darted over to the alabaster mare’s side. While Rarity had agreed to come to Sweet Apple Acres so she wouldn’t have to return to her empty home in the Carousel Boutique alone that night, much as neither she nor Applejack had either admitted to or hinted at such, Fluttershy had been so sick with worry for her animals in her absence that Applejack was surprised that she hadn’t simply declined. Apparently, concern for her friends eventually outweighed her natural worry for her animal friends. Applejack supposed that animals could care for themselves at least a little, but sometimes ponies could be absolutely helpless under the right conditions. “Are you all right, Rarity?” she asked gently, examining the other’s head for any damage.

"Oh, I've never been better, dear," she answered with more than her fair share of bitterness. Rising to her hooves, she shook off her daze and pushed the door open with a shoulder, her head erect and affronted, as if it had done her a great insult. After a spare moment remembering she couldn’t pick the wooden plates up with magic, she took them in her mouth and returned, placing her and Fluttershy’s plates on the table, speaking in a relieved manner while Fluttershy took her seat, politely, “I am glad, at least, that Sweetie Belle isn’t here to see such inelegant blundering on my part, to think I had almost been beginning to miss her.”

“When will the girls be back from their camping trip?” Fluttershy asked softly, eager to bring the conversation somewhere pleasant, “They must be having so much fun. Hiking in the hills, roasting marshmallows over an open flame...”

“Tellin’ ghost stories?”

“Oh! I hope not,” Fluttershy shivered, scrunching unto her chair as if she could fold into a pocket of space and vanish entirely, in Pinkie Pie fashion, “That would be scary.”

Applejack grinned, taking the pot off the hearth and planting it on the table before answering, “They’re due back sometime in the afternoon.” She glanced through the doorway at Big Macintosh, who was pulling a blanket over Granny Smith in the front room by the fire there, the ancient pony too tired and insufficiently hungry to join them. He tip-toed as delicately as an enormous draft stallion could into the kitchen, on the edges of his hooves, which raised a grimace from Applejack as she saw the increased pressure was leaving indentations on the wood paneling.

“With any luck, they shan’t discover our condition except as a dire and swiftly forgotten rumor,” Rarity sniffed, taking a seat. “Forgive me, Applejack, but I surely miss my horn as much as you would wish to rid yourself of it.”

“How d’ya know this one is yours?” Applejack asked, reaching up to rub at the tip, though the involuntary wince she saw on her friend’s face made her pause. Perhaps excessive fiddling with a sensitive instrument of magic wasn’t such a good idea.

“Because, dear, it’s obvious dramatic convenience.”

“Drama-what now?” Applejack asked, skeptically.

“Uhm...” Fluttershy murmured, “Maybe it’s more the horn you might have had as a unicorn? If, you know, you could have been one.”

“Nonsense, dear, that horn is mine. Thankfully, it shall be mine again by this time tomorrow, and I’ll never let it go again..”

“Ye’re welcome to it,” Applejack tossed, with a hint of heat that caught the others at the table somewhat off guard.

Filling his enormous bowl with a heaping helping of the stew, with carrots, potatoes, soy blocks, and other good bits, Big Macintosh very nearly slopped a load onto the floor in shock at his sister’s bite.

Feeling embarrassed at herself for snapping, Applejack thrust up from the table. “I’ll be back. Forgot t’feed Winona,” she said, loudly enough to talk over their concerned requests for her state of being, and trotted out the back door and leaving them all a little stupefied.

Making her way over to the doghouse illuminated by the bright moon above, she had her work dog’s chow bag in mouth. The liquid-eyed border collie gave her a completely trusting look as she sat patiently by her bowl, just inside the work shed, saying without words that she completely forgave Applejack for delaying her dinner. The farmpony made it herself, of course, she didn’t trust a city packing factory to feed any member of her family, no matter how carnivorous, and little chunks of ground bone meal and bean mash fell into the wooden bowl. Topping it off, she added a few chunks of relatively fresh fish, her nose wrinkling, her herbivore’s instincts recoiling at the odor.

“There ya go, lil’ doggie, vile-smellin’ meat just for you,” she said, and, since she was speaking in a cheerful tone, Winona of course wagged her tail enthusiastically, awaiting politely until the pony had moved back before digging in eagerly.

While her dog ate, Applejack took a little walk towards the nearest field, where the very oldest of their family’s orchards were, planted when Granny Smith was just a young pony and the Apple family had first set down its roots. A low stone fence surrounded it, thick with green moss, and the orange unicorn vaulted it with an easy leap rather than go all the way over to the rusty gate. With her shod hooves digging firmly into the rich loam, which was refreshed by her own labor every year, she looked up at the starry expanse above, and, then, down at the earth below, which was as warm and inviting as it could be in the early autumn. Digging a hoof, she upset a worm, which was busily devouring earth to add its own contribution to the vitality of the system.

There was, however, no mistaking the feeling she had here, in the beating, living heart of her family and their land, two things that were as near to her heart as could be.

Or, perhaps more aptly, the lack of feeling.

Certainly, standing here where her blood had settled and worked the earth for so long gave her a quiet sort of thrill, the weight of history settling on her hardened shoulders, but Applejack could tell quite clearly that something important was missing. Some deep, abiding connection to the land and its fruit, the produce of her labor and the very purpose of her life. Maybe she could tell herself it would all come rushing back to her tomorrow, yet just now, there was no denying it. Applejack had never been a good liar, and that included to herself.

Ah just feel...

Empty.

She knew that Fluttershy, with Rarity in tow, would come to retrieve her in short order, to bring her back to the cooling dinner with a friendly nuzzle and distracting conversation, but, until then, Applejack continued to stare up at the sky, wondering where it had all gone.

“...and then she started screaming, and she exploded!” Twilight hissed to Applejack, that following morning, as they all gathered back in the library. Pinkie Pie, presently munching on a sour lemon cake as she cheerfully hovered over the crowd below, had suggested Sugar Cube Corner for a meeting place, but, for some reason, none of the other girls had expressed any real interest in sweets, almost as if they all felt rather too sour themselves. The purple pegasus scrubbed a hoof over her face, looking sideways at the rainbow-maned unicorn across the library’s floor. Lyra and Bon Bon, who had come in to return some books and peruse the shelves for new reading material, looked rather antsy at all the tension and eager to leave, the latter quickly avoiding Twilight’s gaze when it happened to fall on her. “I don’t know how, but she’d somehow managed to cast a hover charm in her sleep, and she was zipping around the loft until I managed to calm her down. Then she grabbed me and shouted, ‘I’m not a tomboy, I’m comfortably feminine!’ What does that even mean?”

Tilting her hat up, Applejack looked up from where she was leaning on one of the library’s long chairs, taking in the sight of the heavily agitated Twilight Sparkle. “Ya look an unsightly mess, Twi, maybe you should take an ease and stop thinkin’ so hard,” she said, drawling slowly, clearly preferring to focus on the matter at hoof than get into gossiping about Rainbow Dash’s erratic behavior. A mess was an understatement for Twilight, so frazzled with the thought of her mentor’s imminent arrival and Rainbow Dash’s odd morning behavior, hadn’t had a chance to shower or comb herself at all, and her mane and tail even looked slightly out-of-place. Her lavender coat was mussed, with the parts she had been sleeping on, her left side, matted and flat, while the right side stuck straight out. Her wings, of course, looked miserable and bedraggled, for she had never been taught, nor had she attempted to figure out, how to properly preen them.

“I know, I know,” the former magician moaned, rubbing her hooves through her mane in a vain effort to smooth it, “I tried reading but I just couldn’t concentrate. I feel like I need to go for a run, or scream, or... something!”

“So why don’cha?” Applejack asked, reasonably.

“Because that would be just silly!” Twilight said, flapping her wings in frustration, a gesture she didn’t even seem to notice herself performing. With little midnight feathers falling off, it made her look somewhat like a particularly oddly shaped chicken trying to scare others off her feed.

“Uh huh. C’mere, sugahcube,” she said, annoyed. Affixing her hat to her head more firmly, she tugged Twilight Sparkle to the bench beside her with a powerful limb and smoothed Twilight’s coat for her. It was such an aggressively motherly action that Twilight actually blushed, and glared Lyra and Bon Bon out of the room when they had the temerity to giggle. Still, it settled her somewhat, and she sighed a bit melodramatically. “You’re right, I’m being stupid,” she said, slumping on the long couch.

Applejack had, of course, said no such thing, but she didn’t contradict her. “Just take it easy,” she offered instead, “In a few minutes or an hour, we’ll be back to our normal selves and I’ll buck a forest just to prove how happy I am about it. You can, ah dunno, blow up a mountain or somethin’, whatever you do with magic.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Hah, hah,” she grumped, but smiled, and reached over to pick up a book. It one of her favorites, she was pleased to see, the Principles and Applications of Buoyancy.

Meanwhile, towards the center of the room, Spike was looking decidedly agitated. He was fidgeting with his claws, looking at each of the girls with studied impatience. Taking pity on him, as was her lot in life, Fluttershy nosed the dragon and asked, “What’s wrong, Spike? Twilight has been feeding you right, hasn’t she?”

“He feeds himself!” the negligent big sister in question shouted, a comment that was promptly ignored.

“Twilight? No, that’s not it - well, okay, maybe she doesn’t feed me as much as I’d like-” he started, but quickly diverted at the death glare Twilight delivered, her attention pulled from her book, “It’s something else, though!”

“What is it?” the pink-maned Earth pony asked, her wide eyes and manner suggesting she would happily listen to anything Spike chose to divulge, at any length or frequency. Which she would, but that would not be required today.

“I dunno, you probably wouldn’t like it,” he hedged. What ponies might or might not like was rarely a problem for Spike, who blithely invited disaster every time he opened his scaly mouth, but his trepidation increased in direct proportion to the number of hooves that could kick him were in his immediate vicinity.

A little more intimately aware of her assistant’s quirks, and his foibles, than the other ponies, Twilight Sparkle groaned and rolled her eyes. “Knock yourself out,” she said cryptically, having a pretty good idea about what this was all about, “It’s your last chance and I know you’ve probably been aching to do it.”

Spike grinned, almost hopping in place, ignoring the others’ confused looks. “Oh man, you have no idea. I stayed up all night thinking about them!”

“What’s this, Spikey-wikey?” Rarity asked, puzzled, her lovely face adopting a thoughtful pout, “Is it a gift?” Somehow, even without magic, the clothier had managed to style her mane into its customary flip, her coat smooth and sparkling in the sunlight from outdoors. The white Earth pony had just finished putting the last touches on her modification to the hole in the library wall, in what she clearly thought was a very lovely distraction from the ugly canvas sackcloth that had been used to patch the hole until somepony could look at it, with several indoor plants and a hoof-knitted tapestry. Where she had found the last article was a total mystery to everypony else, and would remain so.

“Better!” the young dragon said, his grin now quite broad, and he hopped up onto the table. Clearing his throat, he pulled out a scroll which was covered with all manner of crossed-out, scratched-out, or otherwise deleted words, leaving only a small number of circled ones.

“Applejack? You are now Applecorn.”

“Beg pardon?”

Almost giggling with excitement now, he moved his claw down the list, looking to Fluttershy, “How’s the earth feel under your hooves, Flutterock?”

Blinking, the butter-colored mare didn’t quite know how to take a comment like that, and settled for a polite, “Uh... fine I guess.”

“Pega Pie, high in the sky!” he announced, pointing up at the circling pink pony.

Giving a gleeful giggle, Pinkie laughed, “I’m not that high. Not yet, anyway!”

The others had begun to cotton on to what the often irritating little boy was up to, and so Rarity had something of a cross look as his attention settled on her. “And of course, my perfect lady - Rare Earth. The most delicious and obscure of elements. With a magnetic personality!”

Caught a bit off center, Rarity blinked, unsure if that was a compliment or not, which was all the opening Spike needed to dodge away from any retribution she could dish out if she decided the wrong way. Hurrying to hop onto one of the smaller book stacks, he grinned over at Rainbow Dash, whose horn was looking decidedly threatening as she narrowed her eyes up at him beneath her tangled forelock. “And of course, how could I forget? The amazing, the spectacular, the indubitably stupendous,” he paused, sucking all the drama he possibly could out of the moment, “Rainbow Magic!”

“Rainbow Magic?” she groaned, making a face, “Spike, that’s horrible. It’s not even good horrible.”

“Fine, fine, second run, second run...” he squinted at his list, “Prismatic Spray!”

“Huh?”

“Ugh, never mind, I’ll come back to you,” he huffed, and turned to face the mare who hatched him.

“Well? Come on, get it over with,” Twilight grumbled, crossing her forelimbs as she sat on her belly.

“I’m trying, sheesh. It wasn’t exactly easy, you know,” Spike complained, hopping off the table, going into the sunlight streaming in through the open window.

“You had all night to come up with this, and you’re still not sure?” the pony said, exasperated.

“Seriously, Twilight, I keep telling you, you need a new name,” Spike insisted.

Twilight blinked. “What? I like my old name, my old name is great!” she said, animated, “What’s wrong with Twilight Sparkle?” Looking to the others, as if for assurance that her name was perfectly acceptable, she growled before returning to glaring at her assistant.

Lidding his eyes with a wicked look, he chuckled, saying in that low, sotto voce voice he loved to use to mock others with, “Oh, well, I suppose it’s not important any more, you basically do have a new name. You’re the new Rainbow Dash.”

“I AM NOT!” Twilight Sparkle shouted, rather more loudly than she had intended. The words struck with remarkable accuracy, stabbing deeply into her gut and wrenching. To be fair, she probably should have expected that little indiscretion from Discord’s reign to bite her in the flank at some point, but Spike had evidently managed to find the best possible moment to drive in his verbal dagger.

Behind Spike, Rainbow Dash started, “Wait, what?” Her eyes were wide, and she seemed almost frightened, strangely.

“Come, Twilight. You know it to be true. Search your feelings,” Spike taunted, reveling in the librarian’s distress, bubbling over with tormenting glee as he watched.

“What is he talking about?” Rainbow asked, sounding more than a little alarmed.

“Oh, and we can’t forget about you!” Spike said, remembering now that he had been meaning to come back to Rainbow, “I guess since Twilight is the new Rainbow Dash, that makes you the new Twilight Sparkle.”

“Heh,” Applejack chuckled, from under her hat, “Twilight Dash and Rainbow Sparkle.”

“Nah, Applecorn, she’s not Rainbow Dash anymore, not without her-”

Spike had been right to be worried earlier, before beginning to hand out his chosen nicknames for the girls. With a crack, he was sent flying through the air, barely having time enough to yelp before he was driven headfirst into the wood between two bookshelves on the side of the stairwell. Rainbow lowered her hind leg, giving the others a challenging look as they stared at Spike embedded in the carved trunk, protesting in her defense, “What? He’ll be fine. Besides, he was asking for it.” Given the well-known fact that Rainbow Dash was prone to taking offense at what other ponies considered to be fairly shallow slights and insults and dishing out equally petty revenge in return, nopony really noticed the deeper edge of discontent in her words, least of all Twilight.

Just then, a belch ran through the purple dragon, making him pop off the wall with the pressure of the hot exhaled gasses. A spark, then a flame, launched from his open mouth as he lay there dazed, resolving into a tightly wound scroll. Acting quickly, Pinkie Pie snatched it up with a swoop, though it seemed as if her landings needed improving upon, for she slid in the air and smacked into the floor back-first after her aerial dive. While Fluttershy tended to the baby dragon, Twilight scooped the scroll off the floor with one hoof, where it had rolled after bouncing out of Pinkie Pie’s mouth.

Scrubbing a little saliva off the back, Twilight Sparkle unfurled the scroll and read her Princess’ majestic lettering.

Twilight paused, and read it again. Her ears drooped.

“Oh dear.”

“What do you mean she isn’t coming?” Rarity gasped, shocked and horrified out of her poor wits, which were already frayed like a particularly well-worn hemline on a much-loved winter dress. Her panic was rising to a fever pitch, the white Earth pony erect with tension. Already having spent nearly a full day without her horn, Rarity didn’t want to contemplate what the Princess’ change of plans could mean.

“I mean,” Twilight Sparkle drew in a deep breath to calm herself, continuing, “That she isn’t coming yet. Because, um..” The lavender pony shrank back, as if trying to hide herself, “...because she can’t cure us.”

----

Outside the library, a pair of stallions carefully carrying an enormous glass vase between them had to steady themselves against a thunderous noise coming from the library, a collective scream of, “WHAT!?” that shook nearby windows in their casements. They breathed a sigh of relief, as they managed to regain their balance.

----

“Now hold on to your horses, everypony,” Applejack said, coming to Twilight’s side to ward the others off from crowding around her, as if she, too, hadn’t screamed at the cowering little pony herself, “Give her a chance to explain, ah’m sure the letter has more to say than that. Our Princess wouldn’t just leave us hangin’, laughin’ from that pretty throne she’s got.”

Thoughts of Princess Celestia cackling maniacally in a fair approximation of her sister’s twisted villainous alter ego, Nightmare Moon, did do a number on their indignation as they each reflected on the notion. Rarity laughed to herself, Really, who could think our graceful and lovely Princess capable of anything like cruelly laughing at her subjects’ misfortunes? Even the idea of her engaging in harmless pranks seemed absurd.

----

At the Canterlot Royal Library, in the depths of one of the archives, Princess Celestia winced and gave a great, unladylike sneeze into the crook of her foreleg.

“Careful of the dust, sister,” Luna said, cheerfully, the Night Princess said, floating books over to glance at the titles, her excitement undampened by failure with the prospect of in-depth research.

----

“Princess Luna spent the whole night with volunteers, trying to turn them into other sorts of ponies?” Rarity repeated incredulously, having just listened to Twilight Sparkle’s recounting of the letter’s contents, “Oh dear... I can’t imagine how that would have turned out for the failures.”

“It’s all right, nopony was seriously hurt,” Twilight assured, looking over the scroll again, as if for comfort, “Though one apparently still thinks he’s a pegasus, so they had to tie him to a bed for now. The Princess and the wizards with her tried everything they could think of or put their hooves to, but, even though they could make the spell last just about as long as they wanted, it was always a superficial change alone. No unicorn was ever able to use magic, no pegasus was ever able to fly.” Smacking herself with her hoof, she groaned, “I should have known, this has been tried before, I’d read the studies in school. Nopony has ever been able to really become another pony, at least not and told anypony else about it that we know about.”

Sobered, the other girls settled back. Spike, almost forgotten, slowly came back to wakefulness nearby, the bottom-heavy dragon rising up on his squishy lower body. Almost forgotten.

With a crack, the little dragon went flying through one of the open windows. There was a pair of noisy, shattering crashes, almost as if a glass vase had suffered an impact from a flying reptile and the ground in quick succession. Rainbow Dash whistled innocently, tucking her hooves in a manner reminiscent of Applejack, suffering only a glare from Fluttershy.

“The Princess said they aren’t giving up, though, and she’s going to come visit us soon,” Twilight continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted, injecting a bit of forced levity into her voice, re-reading the last portion, “To check up on us and see how we’re doing.”

Rarity, for her part, was simply distraught. With her breath coming in shallowly, she was due for a good fainting. But no, she realized, looking around, I couldn’t give in to such a base result, tempting as it was to slip away into oblivion. No, I simply have to set an example, the mare decided, firmly. With the other girls set to mope about and carry on like a covey of mourners, an example of style, grace, and perseverance under adversity, as she believed a true lady should.

Striking one perfectly hooficured toe against the ground, the sound of its impact ringing through the library’s sanctum, she raised her head proudly. “Ladies!” the alabaster Earth pony declaimed, once she had all of their attention, a state she rather enjoyed even in these troubled times, “What is this disquiet I hear? Are we not the thrice-victorious heroes of Equestria itself? A mere set back such as this will not deter us!”

“Don’t get all Twilight-y on us, now,” Applejack muttered, ignoring a noise of protest from Twilight, but Rarity had the bit in her mouth and was pulling for all she was worth, now. Pinkie Pie, above, started patting a little drum, to give a beat to the designer’s speech.

“Even as we speak, the Royal Pony Sisters themselves are preoccupied with the cause of our restoration, and it would an offense, a treasonous disregard, to insult the sacrifice of their time and energy on our behalf with meek and pointless meandering, in word or deed!” Rarity said, lifting her head and giving her hair a defiant toss. She pointed a perfect, gleaming hoof at Twilight, “Rainbow Da- I mean, Twilight Sparkle!”

Pretending she hadn’t just heard herself almost being called by another name, Twilight blinked owlishly, “Yes?”

“It is the root cause of our misfortune which must be located and delivered at once to the Royal Palace at Canterlot!”

“Sorry, didn’t follow that.”

“The shoes, my dear girl, the shoes!” Rarity said, drawing it out. Sometimes, the poor girl seemed almost too dense to be as smart as she was.

“Oh... Oh!” Twilight said, catching on to Rarity’s vague phrasing, her wings spreading excitedly as she hopped over to Rainbow Dash, “And we should find out where they came from, too! Where did you get them?”

“Uhm, well...” Rainbow scuffed at the floor, her hoof almost drawing into the hardwood, “I may have kind of bought them off the back of a wagon.”

“What?”

“Well, you know,” she huffed, “Okay, okay, I bought it off those guys who mashed up Applejack’s trees to make cider.”

That got Applejack’s attention, all right, her teeth grinding audibly.

“You weren’t, um.. suspicious?”

“I didn’t recognize them at the time, all right? I mean, I was really thirsty back then and then I was choking on dirt and then there was the whole ‘being squashed into a treadmill’ thing...”

“We remember,” Twilight groaned, rubbing her forehead. It was clear to all that her lack of a horn was causing her a great deal of distress, but Rarity couldn’t pause to comfort her just yet.

“Perhaps we should try convincing the Royal Guard to intervene,” Rarity suggested, “With the Flam Flam brothers engaging in illegal commerce, I do not doubt that they could level a dozen or so charges.”

That idea brought a wince from Twilight. “I’m reluctant to suggest that, it’s kind of abusive of my position,” she frowned, considering it, “You’re right, though, they are shady and suspicious, and we do have a victim of a malicious sale of an unknown magical object, which is probable cause.”

“Why don’t you write it up in your return letter to Princess Celestia,” Rarity recommended, gently. Now that she had established enough leadership to help settle the others and give them a purpose to overcome their fugues, she could afford a gentle touch. Turning, Rarity looking over to the other side of the library, “Now, Fluttershy and Pink- where did Pinkie Pie go?”

Looking around and up, the girls saw neither hide nor feather of the pink pony, the library empty of her presence..

“Oh,” Fluttershy murmured, only now speaking after such a long time being silent, “She said she had a lot of parties to make up for, now that we know we aren’t going to be turning back, and flew out the door.”

“Well, Fluttershy,” Rarity continued, in a sympathetic voice, “Why don’t you go see to your animal friends? They must be positively worried sick with you absent so long without explanation. Once you’ve seen to them, you can come help Applejack and I question some ponies I know about town, who might have some idea of where those horseshoes came from. I know some who have traveled very far, and others who trade in rare curios, so we may stand a fair chance.”

“O-okay, so long as you don’t expect me to do any,” she swallowed and stammered, as if the word itself were intimidating, “In-in-interroga-gating.”

“Of course, dear, not at all, I just expect you to be your normal charming self,” Rarity assured her, giving her back a stroke and seeing her on her way. In a way, such focus gave her the opportunity to distract herself from the prospect of long-term loss. Though by no means as attached to her horn as Twilight was, Rarity was still a unicorn, and magic had been a part of her life for its duration. Aside from allowing her to avoid getting her own hooves dirty, it was an important part of her identity, not to mention the effort it would take to sew all of the necessary modifications she’d have to make to her outfits to suit her Earth pony build, by hoof alone. Oh, she shuddered at the thought of being seen in her gala dress now, that would just be a disaster!

What is likely to be even more of a disaster, she reflected as she walked out with Applejack at her side, Is how I am going to live this down if word became widespread that I am no longer a unicorn. Certainly, she knew, Equestrians were centuries beyond the petty racism that had defined their prior separation, but the shame of allowing herself to be transformed so at all. It was almost a scandal. The most alert - that is to say, the most gossip-minded - ponies in the land would assume that she had, of course, intended it in some fashion, or perhaps that she had been experimenting with some forbidden or salacious deviancy. Thinking on it again, she reconsidered, deciding that she could probably turn that to her advantage if it came to it.

Worst of all, though, would be the look on her dear, beloved little sister Sweetie Belle’s face. Shuddering, Rarity could imagine it now...

Sweetie Belle’s eyes had grown to fill her entire head, from the looks of it, watery and shiny in the moonlight that shone down on the graveyard. Behind the mulberry-and-rose maned filly was a pit, freshly dug by her two rather more boyish companions-in-arms, their jackhammers ringing as they encountered stone far below.

“How could you, Rarity? Don’t you love me? Didn’t you want to be a unicorn like me?”

“Oh!” Rarity wailed, her voice echoing across the land, throaty and thick, “Sweetie Belle, my one and only sister, for whom I would move mountains, never would I have disappointed you, had it been but within my power!” The white pony drew the stylish black cloak about her tighter, the symbol of her shame.

Collapsing, weeping, onto her own oversized power tool, Sweetie Belle cried out for mercy to the uncaring stars, but it was too late. Her sister, the fair and noble Rarity, marched steadily to the lip of the grave. Down below, Scootaloo whooped, “Oh hey, dinosaur bones! Awesome!”

“Rarity!” Applejack shouted, annoyed, “Focus, girl, task at hoof.”

“Ah, right,” Rarity coughed delicately, and struck a pose as they faced out of the library’s open doorway, “Let us go, then, and restore ourselves to our natural forms.”

“Or just, y’know, question some ponies.”

“Applejack, darling, you lack all sense of drama.”

Hope, so briefly kindled by the enthusiasm Rarity had shown in the tree, was swift dwindling to a rather sad little flame by the time everypony gathered again, that afternoon, in Sugar Cube Corner. Persuaded by Pinkie Pie to grab some comfort food, Rarity, Applejack, and Fluttershy were the first to arrive, and were commiserating over eclairs, a slice of apple pie, and a shockingly large bowl filled with double fudge chocolate ice cream.

“...what?” Fluttershy murmured, defensively, hiding under her hair and shrinking behind the table and the conveniently placed bowl topped with dark ice cream, “High metabolism.”

“I was not about to comment,” Rarity demurred, a little too quickly, eying her eclairs with a second glance. Maybe something stiffer was called for in such a situation, she considered.

Twilight Sparkle, looking strangely exhausted for someone who had such a simple job, slumped into the bakery with her saddle bags stuffed full of books and scrolls, a somewhat scuffed Spike napping on her backside. Pinkie Pie pushed open the salon doors that led from the front room into the kitchens, a cake balanced atop a milkshake lay balanced on her head, giving Twilight a look.

“Wow, Twilight, no luck for you either, huh? I woulda helped, but I was, like, so far behind on my schedule. I can’t rain joy on ponies without putting the hours in, you know!” she said, cheerfully, laying her burden expertly on the table with nary a drop nor crumb spilled, “Oh! I know, I can, like, make it rain now, can’t I? I should see if I can rain something other than rain - chocolate milk if I can hang it, Discord had least one good idea.”

Letting Pinkie Pie motor off, Twilight slumped into a seat and pulled her milkshake over. Spike slid listlessly onto the floor, where he was promptly ignored.

“You look absolutely devastated, darling, what happened?” Rarity asked, concerned now. Twilight wasn’t even reaching for her books to read at the table, and Rarity had been trying to break her of that habit long enough now to notice.

Grumping, the purple pegasus sucked harder on her milkshake, before wiping her mouth with a fetlock. “Rainbow started accusing me of-,” she paused, considering, “Accusing her, I guess. I can’t really follow her train of thought these days.”

“Ah was worried about that,” Applejack said, shaking her head, wincing as a spark of magic flew off the tip of her horn. It seemed to Rarity that Applejack’s horn was firing off unusually frequently, ever since the other mare had had a chance to rest and put some real food in her belly. It always came as sparks or spurts of light, and from the looks of her face it was making her head ache, if the twitching her eyes was any indication. “Ah think she feels guilty.”

“Whatever gave you that impression?” Twilight muttered, covering poorly the fact that such an obvious notion hadn’t really occurred to her. “I think it’s more than that, though, she was already on tenterhooks last night, and after this morning...” she said, trailing off. Twilight shook her head, fiddling with the cinnamon shaker at the center of the table as she spoke, “I think we should talk to her, this may have hit her harder than we think. Why isn’t she in here, bragging about how much more ice cream than Fluttershy she can stuff down while telling us about all of the totally awesome stunts she’ll be doing when she gets her wings back?”

“It really isn’t that much ice cream,” Fluttershy muttered to the table, defiantly scooping more with a large spoon.

“You may be right, Twilight,” Rarity agreed, washing her early dessert off with a glass of chilled milk, “But where is she? Wasn’t she with you last?”

“Ah, well, that was kind of the point where she ran out. Her horn was acting up, and she said she needed some fresh air,” Twilight answered, pausing as she saw the look on Applejack’s face, “What is it?”

“Nothin’,” Applejack lied, and was terrible at it as always. As if to emphasize its owner’s malfeasance, the orange horn on her head gave a series of pops, with little green rings zipping up to bounce into the ceiling.

“Applejack, is your horn hurting? Are you having headaches?” Twilight asked, more intently now, and Rarity also became very interested in her friend’s answer, having a dark inkling about what Twilight was on about. Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy exchanged confused glances, but left the matter in the hooves of the two former unicorns.

Applejack squirmed under their gazes. Her fork rose of its own accord, a green aura matching the glow about her horn surrounding it, and tapped it nervously against the plate. “Well, maybe,” she admitted, sweating, even as she winced again. She flexed her muscles, a visible shiver racing down her spine.

“Oh no,” Twilight groaned.

“This is bad,” Rarity agreed.

“Awful.”

“What, what is it?” Applejack demanded, fur sticking up along the back of her neck, another chill racing up her spine as if Pinkie Pie had just ran an ice cube up it, “Goldang it, girls, if my horn is about to explode or buck me into the sun like Big Macintosh drunk on spirits, ah’d sooner know about it than find out when ah’m settin’ up an apple shop on the corona.”

Punctuating her remarks at each pause, her horn began to pulse and glow, in multiphasic brilliance, green and orange auras flaring one after the other. Throughout the room, loose dishes, chairs, confections, and pictures of the Cakes’ twin foals began to lift themselves off of available surfaces with Applejack’s agitation. As the thrumming hiss of her magic built, Applejack’s grip on the table hardened, for it was matched by the increasing intensity of her headache and muscle spasms.

“Applejack!” Rarity shouted, “You need to calm down, listen to me!”

Twilight, acting quickly, dived for her saddle bags, emptying one even as Spike started to float into the air.

“Wh-what’s go-goin’ on?” Applejack stuttered, her teeth chattering. A spark lit, and a bolt of lightning connected her with Pinkie Pie’s cake. Instantly, the pastry burst as if someone had placed a charge inside it, spraying the others with steaming hot dough. Rarity, giving up the apparently useless effort of trying to talk Applejack out of her panic, did the next best thing, and, bracing herself, slapped the orange unicorn right across her horn.

Pain exploded in Applejack’s world, as, with a clatter and clash of whatever dishes Pinkie Pie couldn’t save, her magic abated. Relief was temporary, however, for the involuntary nature of Applejack’s magical discharges were not so easily suppressed as that, and it began to spark and hiss again even as Applejack shuddered against the table. Leaping into the open moment, Twilight threw her bag about her friend’s head, closing it tight about her snout.

Surprised, Applejack tried to draw another sharp, shallow breath, but found it arrested. A few more such inhalations and exhalations into the bag and she found her shoulders slumping, a sort of calm forced over her. Leaning into her pegasus friend, she gave an apologetic look at the other ponies, particularly Fluttershy, who had taken to cowering under the table with her bowl of remaining ice cream in her forelimbs, and gave a shuddering, final breath before taking the bag off, looking exhausted and pained.

“Don’t speak,” Twilight cautioned, putting a hoof to her mouth, “Just focus on relaxing and calming down.”

“It’s as if you were just a foal... no, not just a foal,” Rarity said, with growing horror, “As if you had a baby foal’s utter lack of control or skill and a fully grown adult unicorn’s power.” Looking towards the open door, she shuddered, continuing in the same dire tone, “And, somewhere out there, Rainbow Dash has, or is about to, unleash the very same thing...”

Rising to all fours, she spoke in almost a whisper, her voice carrying in the dead silence left by her pronouncement, “Only we won’t be there to stop her.”