Aftermath: Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie:

It is not often that ponies get to see Princess Celestia’s magic unleashed. When they do it is usually a rather grim time to be appreciating the spectacle. But on the rare occasions ponies do get to watch the princess work, they describe golden light and four-colored rainbows, the growth of unknown plants and torrents of mist so thickly wet it wrinkles pony skin without even touching it.

Pinkie Pie wasn’t looking. None of the Bearers were. They were focused on Twilight. Her eyes were closed, and her breath came shallow and rapid.

They set her on the ground.

“This is all my fault,” Applejack said. “If I hadn’t kicked her….”

“Nightmare Moon wanted to hurt her, so she was hurt,” Rarity said. “Because of you Twilight was already accustomed to the pain and able to think through it.”

The click of hoofs on the stone floor distracted them. Princess Celestia regarded them.

"Well done, Bearers of the—"

Fluttershy interrupted. “The children of the sea serpent who guards the moat are lost in the forest."

Celestia vanished in a flash of golden light.

The throne room was empty of Alicorns. The stone walls were suddenly cold, as if there had always been no pony waiting within since the long-ago disbanding of the Knights of Economics. Rainbow Dash looked morose.

“She told off a sea serpent,” she said. “It was pretty awesome.”

“She’s not dead.” Fluttershy barely glanced at Twilight. “Most of the right side of her ribcage is fractured, but nothing vital was pierced. The princess will patch her up.”

They stared at her. Fluttershy shrugged.

“What? Animals get into all kinds of accidents. I’m a pretty good doctor.”

Celestia reappeared in another burst of light.

“Charles has been reunited with his children,” she said.

The expression on her face was unreadable. “Please give me my student now.”

They looked at her.

“I believe bows are customary,” Celestia said.

“No,” Pinkie Pie said.

The blurt surprised her, but she was already the crazy pony. It was best if she voiced their thoughts.

“I pay my voluntary defense funds. You owe us an explanation.”

“Please,” Celestia said.

Was she really begging? Pinkie Pie couldn’t knorp the Alicorn’s face.

Applejack stepped forward.

"The economy slumped! Business suffered! All the ponies who depend on us—"

“Twilight is in pain,” Fluttershy said. “And she will want the attention of her princess.”

The other ponies looked at her, then stepped away from Twilight. She vanished in a blaze of white light.

“She followed me.” Pinkie Pie looked Celestia in the eye. “I said my Pinkie Sense knew the way, and she followed. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“What happened to that ghastly Alicorn?” Rarity said.

“Gone,” Celestia said. “Resting. With Twilight Sparkle.”

Pinkie Pie willed her strength into the crystal. She could feel the other ponies doing the same.

Celestia shook her head. “The Elements require an econopony. Nor would it to be wise to direct them against me, for I maintain the Bank and therefore the equilibrium.”

“You put Twilight with the one who hurt her,” Pinkie Pie said.

“They will not see each other. I am not a fool, and they are the two ponies whom I love more dearly than any other who still lives. What have I done to earn your distrust?”

“It’s what you didn’t do,” Applejack said.

“The parasprites showed her you,” Rarity said.

“We’re her friends,” Pinkie Pie said.

Anypony who couldn’t understand their behavior from that one statement was…probably a lot like Twilight Sparkle, Pinkie Pie realized.

Celestia was distracted. Her horn flashed intermittently with varying intensities like a dubstep star.

“Forgive me, Bearers,” she said. “Curing recessions is much harder than preventing them. Once the real has become intermingled with the nominal, it is easy even for me to isolate and target the right aggregates in sufficient quantities….”

“Well, I’m still cool with you,” Rainbow Dash said. “Since I’m the only pony here who’s actually happy you didn’t show at the festival.”

“Ah.” A bright white light shined from Celestia’s horn. “That explains it. Thank you, Rainbow Dash. The economy will need much liquidity in the coming weeks and months.”

“Sure,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Go easy on debt.”

"Actually, I’m in a lot of—"

“Never mind.”

Pinkie Pie seethed.

“Do you need transport to Ponyville?” Celestia said.

They looked at Applejack.

“No,” Applejack said. “I reckon we’ll take the long way home.”

Celestia left.

The five ponies walked outside. The sunlight glinted off the crystals pinned to their chests. Charles was there, weeping profusely as he helped them across the moat.

“I cannot thank you enough,” he sobbed. “Please, let me repay you however I can.”

“Your thanks is reward enough,” Rarity said.

“Cash is good too,” Applejack added.

Charles gestured to one of his children, the smallest, only five or six times the size of a regular pony. “Please, take the runt of the litter. Normally I would look forward to eating her, but for you ponies I can make an exception.”

Pinkie Pie’s jaw dropped. Fluttershy beamed.

“Thank you! I would love to have a sea serpent of my own. But, um, I’m afraid I don’t have enough water.”

“Young serpents will adjust to the element they reside in,” Charles said. “You could have an earth or a sky serpent if you wish.”

Fluttershy’s pupils swelled to saucers in her eyes. “I…I could teach her to fly?”

Confused, the young serpent climbed out of the water at the insistence of her old father. She focused her attention on her new father, a yellow four-legged thing that flapped in the air on two wings.

“I’m so excited to have a sea serpent,” he said, fluttering back and forth in the air. “I have to get the right food! And you’ll need to meet all the other animals. And…and….”

The serpent didn’t know what Daddy was talking about. But she took note of how Daddy moved, not slithering on the ground but flying free in the air.

The serpent’s brain didn’t understand the physics of flight. What it did know, what some ancient instinct understood from a thousand thousand generations of practice and testing, was how to become more like Daddy.

Daddy had wings.

Deep within the serpent’s body, at a level so small bacteria were titans, she began to change….

With their sixth member slithering embarrassed behind the still-squealing Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie led them to the edge of the maze of thorns.

“Last time we had Twilight giving us light,” Rainbow Dash said. Her voice trembled slightly. Probably no pony but Pinkie noticed. “How are we going to see?”

“We could conga!” Pinkie said. “Everypony put a hoof on the pony in front of them. Pinkie Sense will guide me.”

Their was much dismissive eye-rolling as usual, and they did what she said, as usual. Cupcakes were much easier to corral, although they weren’t as much fun to talk to, not even the Ultra Super Deluxe Choco-Plutium Butter Filled CupKookyz, which sometimes talked back.

Even without light, the forest seemed less threatening coming back the other way. Maybe it was the absence of Nightmare Moon’s influence. Maybe it gave up after being beaten once before. Or maybe…

It was harder this time. Not as scary, but more difficult. The forest threw all kinds of twists at her, sending the path in such roundabout circuits intermixed with so many dead ends that she almost wished she had taken Twilight up on her offer to just start blasting through the wood. Yet it was fun too. The forest challenged her Pinkie Sense in a way nothing since dominating Ponyville’s baking industry had.

Pinkie Pie was almost disappointed to see the light streaming from the entrance to the cave. Rainbow Dash let out a whoop and flew past her to the entrance. For Applejack’s sake, Pinkie kept walking at a steady pace until the end.

As she began to lift her last hoof out of the forest, a tendril of vine snaked out and caught her around the leg. It pulled her high into the air and hoisted her upside-down.

“Hey, let her go!” Rainbow Dash grabbed the vine, tugging fruitlessly at it. Rarity’s horn glowed blue—what was she going to do, dress the vine in something stylish?—and Applejack tried to gnaw on it.

Pinkie Pie laughed. Maybe it was the blood flowing to her head, but it really did seem silly.

“Girls, don’t you know a friend when you see one? She just wants to play.”

Rainbow Dash nearly lost her grip. “What?”

“I think the forest never had anypony to play with,” Pinkie Pie said. “I’m her first friend.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Serious as a pinky promise.”

The ponies relented. They knew how seriously she took pinky promises.

Pinkie Pie managed to swing herself upright, clutching onto the vine with her forelegs.

“I had fun too, Evil Dark Scary Pony-Eating Forest! I’ll be sure to come back soon so we can play again. Cupcakes taste way better than ponies, you know.”

The vine’s grip on her leg loosened. Pinkie Pie smiled—she wasn’t sure how the forest was reading her behavior—and patted it on the…vine.

“Like a birthday, I’ll come back and with cake. I always wanted a pet forest!”

The vine released her. Pinkie Pie had a moment to realize that her relationship with gravity was not so negotiable.

“Rainbow Daaaaash!”

Aftermath: Applejack:

“Your hat,” the Cerberus said. She placed it on the ground.

Applejack picked it up and placed it on her head. It felt like reattaching a limb.

“Get going, girls,” she said to the ponies. “You especially, Rainbow Dash.”

Fluttershy snapped her teeth at the Cerberus. The guardian beast of the forest flinched.

"Be sure to brush more often!"

Then they were alone.

“You did not give your hat to one of your friends,” the Cerberus said.

“Was I supposed to?”

“I thought so. It was the hat of your mother and her mother. It is the reason I trusted you to return. Now it will end up in my stomach.”

“You haven’t been eating well these last thousand years or so, have you?” Applejack said. “Reckoned not. Not much good eating on an old cowpony hat.”

Drool gathered at the edges of the Cerberus’s mouth and spilled out. A waterfall of stomach acid called forth its own rainbow, one driven by centuries of malnourishment. It couldn’t compare to Nightmare Moon’s pain, but it was more desperate, more uncertain.

“Yes,” the Cerberus said. “I am hungry.”

Her ears perked up at the distant whine of something flying very, very fast.

“I ain’t the expert Fluttershy is,” Applejack said, “but we’ve always had animals helping us out on the farm, and I’ve picked up a thing or two. Most ponies figure dogs eat nothing but meat. Truth is, they need fruits and veggies too.”

The whine grew louder.

“A pony small as me wouldn’t sate your hunger for a single hour. You need something every day.”

In the distance, a rainbow streak. At the head of it, a flying pony.

“No!”

The Cerberus backed away.

“You called her here! You cheat! You liar! I didn’t—please, no, I won’t, you can go—“

The Pegasus landed, carrying a heavy bushel of apples around her neck.

“Sup,” said Rainbow Dash.

She wrinkled her nose at the fetid scent wafting from between the Cerberus’s legs. "Urgh, did she just p—"

“Eeyup.”

"She thought I was—"

“Eeyup.”

Applejack tipped the bushel of apples over in front of the Cerberus, who seemed faintly embarrassed.

"I, uh, I thought she was—"

“You guessed wrong,” Applejack said. “Sound familiar? Brought you a snack.”

The Cerberus sniffed nervously around the bright red fruit.

“They’re apples from my very own Sweet Apple Acres. Best apples in all of Equestria.”

“The…hat.”

“That’s right. The hat represents the Sweet Apple Acres guarantee of quality. You won’t find a more widely trusted symbol anywhere this side of the Everfree. I’d stake my life on the quality of our apples.”

The Cerberus sniffed the apples again. Her mouth opened.

It had been four hundred thirty-two years, seven months, four days, eighteen hours, nine minutes and fifty-two seconds since she had last eaten.

Two sets of eyes flickered over the pair of ponies.

All three mouths opened.

The Cerberus pounced.

Red skin burst open and flew into the air. Bright shining jewels of juice scattered and refracted the light, reflecting rainbows around the clearing. Brown seeds spurted from within the white meat, spreading across the soil that marked the ground between Ponyville and the Everfree Forest.

(In five years, maybe a field of red apples. A hoofshake between ponies and the forest. The mark of friendship, if by then Pinkie Pie wasn’t already wrapped in blankets with the forest at two in the morning telling each other ghost stories and giggling like mad ponies.)

The Cerberus’s long black tongues rolled out of its mouths and gathered half a dozen apples each, swallowing them so fast Applejack wasn’t sure she even stopped to chew until the wave of spittle and flecks of white meat that covered her and Rainbow Dash in a disgusting spray.

“Gross!” Rainbow Dash wiped at her face.

The Cerberus sniffed the ground for more apples. It pawed at the basket, sniffed it, and knocked it away with a frustrated whine.

She raised her three heads to the sky and howled at the sun and the moon for a very long time.

When it was over, Applejack and Rainbow Dash uncovered their ears.

“We grow durn good apples,” Applejack said.

An idea seemed to occur to her.

“So long as I’ve misanswered your question and you haven’t et me, that vine of yours is still stretchy, right?”

The Cerberus nodded. Juice dripped down her chins.

Applejack grinned.

“How do you feel about pulling a plow for Sweet Apple Acres? You can have ten percent of all the produce of the acreage you cover.”

“Fifty percent.”

“We’ll talk about it.”

Aftermath: Rarity:

The Invention Room of the Carousel Boutique was where Rarity designed and created her new dresses. Translucent purple curtains draped across the windows, casting the room in a meditative glow. Half-finished gowns hung on models ill-fittingly, and blueprints for new designs smothered the plain wooden table.

It was the one room in the Carousel Boutique that was not beautiful or elegant. Even Sweetie Belle was not allowed inside.

Somehow it reminded her of Twilight Sparkle. What an odd pony, simultaneously graceless and possessing remarkable poise. The way she had faced up to Nightmare Moon….

Rarity shuddered. They had come so close to dying, more than once, which was already more than she had ever experienced previously or ever wanted to again.

No pony had said it. That was the problem. It made her wonder if she was the only pony thinking it.

Rarity wanted to see Twilight again.

But she allowed everyone into her room, didn’t she? That was the whole point.

Or maybe she didn’t. How could Rarity know what Twilight was thinking? She wasn’t a parasprite.

The parasprites had attacked Twilight with the voice of her mentor. Nightmare Moon had done it again, tearing down Twilight’s concept of the princess.

Rarity had never asked Twilight just what her relationship with the princess was. None of them had. They had been too full of their own thoughts, and besides, the very idea of having a relationship with Princess Celestia was just too weird. Princess Celestia was a character in a story, a picture in a newspaper, not a real flesh-and-blood pony….

Except to Twilight Sparkle, her most faithful student.

Now what was she thinking, resting in whatever healing-place the princess had hidden somewhere?

“Think,” a voice said.

Rarity whirled. Her horn glowed blue, and in the light it cast she almost couldn’t see the tiny round ball with two overlarge green eyes, born aloft by insect wings.

“You!” she said. “You followed me from the forest? Vous êtes un grand cheval!”

“Think,” the parasprite said weakly. “Hungry….”

Rarity sniffed. “If you’re looking for an apology, you won’t find one here. I don’t regret a single mean thing I said about you.”

“No….”

“You like terrible words? Of course, I should have known. And here you are now, sniffing about for more. Pitiable creature.”

“Help….”

“No.”

“Trade.”

“What do you have that I could ever want?”

“Information….”

Rarity laughed. They had encountered the parasprite in a clearing in the Everfree Forest. As if it knew anything she wanted to know.

But then...the parasprite's advantage wasn't in the information it had but how quickly it learned. All it needed was the touch of a pony's head to know everything it needed to.

It was small, barely noticeable, easily dismissed as a bug. How many ponies could recognize a parasprite these days? It could go anywhere, over fences and under doors, gathering all the world's secrets....

Rarity laughed again for very different reasons.

But it wasn't just world domination. Rarity was vaguely aware that she was now part of some kind of group of magical girl ponies who could unite to vanquish evil.

Who knew what disgusting monsters still lurked in the Everfree Forest? Or where Nightmare Moon now was, or if there weren't other Alicorns somewhere, maybe with the dragons, who could come roaring out of their caves to set Equestria aflame....

Or other ponies, who might have their own pets and their own magic and their own intelligence. Surely there was more than one parasprite out there.

It occurred to Rarity for the first time just how dangerous a single pony with the right tools and the wrong motivations could be.

“À cheval donné on ne regarde pas les dents,” she murmured. Better to die la petit mort than la mort du petit cheval, non?

“You, parasprite, will search out information for me in every nook and cranny in all of Equestria,” Rarity said. “You will find my friends’ and my enemies so that we may destroy them. In return, I shall show you such cruel friendship as you have never experienced in a thousand years.”

She stuck out her hoof. “Deal?”

Aftermath: Rainbow Dash

Rainbow Dash didn’t need a highly impressionable giant serpent, a magical semi-intelligent forest, or a vicious pony-eating Cerberus for a pet.

She had a tank.

Well, she had Tank.

Tank was a tortoise.

Rainbow Dash had personally clocked Tank's land speed at a cool oh-point-eight miles per hour, which, though Rainbow Dash didn’t know it, made Tank the fastest tortoise in existence. She could tear apart a wedge of lettuce with her not-very-sharp teeth in well under an hour so long as the lettuce didn’t try to run away. Sometimes the lettuce did try to run away because Tank was a magic tortoise.

Tank did not have one magical power. She had seven, the first six of which had to do with lettuce. The seventh made her very, very good at accounting and law, and she was a necessary component of Rainbow Dash’s definitely legal and totally sound financial practice.

Sometimes Tank felt unappreciated.

“I could have had a cool pet!”

Rainbow Dash flew around the ceiling of their house, leaving rainbow trails in her wake.

“Everypony else comes back from the forest with an awesome magical sidekick, and I’m stuck with you!”

Rainbow Dash pointed an accusing hoof at the only tortoise that stood and occasionally walked very slowly between her and a long time behind bars.

“What can you do? You can’t even hunt lettuce properly! I have to buy it for you! What would you do without me?”

In fact, if Tank had been a wild free-roaming tortoise, or as much roaming as tortoises ever are, she would have been Queen, ruling with an iron claw over the kingdom of reptiles that recognized no Alicorn as master, though the slow talks of war were inevitably derailed by the onset of evening. Young male tortoises green of shell and stout of tail would spend years carrying their village’s best lettuce from yards away just for the opportunity to deliver it at her feet in the hopes that she might finish eating it before they died.

But Tank liked Rainbow Dash, a true if occasionally ungrateful, blind, and pig-headed friend who had saved her from being eaten by a gryphon years ago, and so she elected not to tell her that.

Besides, keeping up with Rainbow Dash’s finances was much more interesting than lording over a bunch of cold-blooded lizards. There were many ways to describe Rainbow Dash, but slow-moving was not one of them.

So Tank tapped her claw on the paper in front of her. She did it again until she had Rainbow Dash’s attention. Tortoises are patient creatures.

Rainbow Dash may have been a Pegasus with her head in the clouds, but she had learned that when Tank wanted her to look at something, it was worth looking at. She flew over and took a peek.

Her eyes widened. They gleamed with the unsophisticated greed of a child on Christmas Day.

“I almost forgot!” Rainbow Dash said. “I’m rich!”

Aftermath: Spike

Spike swept the floor of the treehouse Princess Celestia had purchased for him and Twilight Sparkle when she sent them to Ponyville. The wood was starting to wear away, as were the bristles on the broom. The scaly calluses on his palms, however, were only growing tougher.

What else was there to do? He had already disorganized the bookshelves so Twilight could organize them later. She thought libraries just had some kind of inertial drift toward entropy.

So Spike flossed his teeth and appreciated the feel of the new shampoo on his strengthening scales. He went through some of Twilight’s routine correspondence, worked his way through some of the dense paperwork she had been doing for the princess, and perused a catalog from the Carousel Boutique.

Nothing for dragons. Maybe he could ask for something tailor-made. She’d have to take his measurements….

(Though Twilight had never discussed with Spike certain aspects of growing up, the magical bond between the two combined with the thaumatic fluctuations that inevitably accompany both baby dragons and puissant Unicorns allowed certain aspects of her psyche to rub off on his without direct communication.)

Spike sat down at the table and poured himself a bowl of gemstones. He took a bite, chewed, and spat it out.

Rhodochrosite, gross! Twilight had gone shopping. She really didn’t understand some things….

The door creaked open. Spike looked up. A lavender leg stepped into the room.

Spike kicked away from the table and shot out of the chair.

“Twilight!“

Aftermath: Twilight Sparkle: Robustness

Twilight leaned nervously on her right side. It felt fine, she knew it was fine, but some part of her brain couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment her ribcage was going to shatter under her own weight.

No sign remained of their adventure through the forest and the final confrontation with Nightmare Moon. Her hair wasn’t cut short, no scar marked her face. Her cutie mark hadn’t transformed, no crystal did she bear.

Everything was the same again. The status quo had been restored. So why did it feel like something was still missing?

“It’s strange,” Twilight said. “I know we defeated Nightmare Moon. I saw it with my own eyes. But it still feels…it still feels like when she had you sealed away. I had to do anything to get you back.”

“And you did.”

Princess Celestia allowed the tips of her mane to touch Twilight’s side.

“I truly thought I faced a thousand years inside the sun. Thanks to you, that visit was brief.”

“It doesn’t feel like you’re back. Even though I’m here with you, I’m still missing somepony….” Twilight trailed off.

Student and mentor sat beside each other on the softly waving field of grass. Twilight didn’t know where they were. A place of healing, a place of thought, which were in many ways the same thing to ponies like them.

Twilight broke the silence. “Did you know your sister was coming back?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would you have done?”

“Gathered the Elements sooner.”

“And the Bearers?”

“We could have found them. You knew they were in Ponyville.”

“No.”

Twilight hesitated.

“What? But you sent me to Ponyville to find them, right?”

“No, I sent you to Ponyville because it is a dumpy backwater town full of rubes that doesn’t even have a university. It is the last place Nightmare Moon would think to look for an economist.”

“But…but what was your plan?”

Princess Celestia sighed.

“I didn’t have a plan. I knew I would not be able to defeat my sister, I knew the Bearers would not be revealed except in the act of their creation.”

Twilight blinked.

“So I resolved to raise an econopony who could hope to be my successor in time,” Princess Celestia continued. “Someone who might maintain the Equilibrium and contest my sister’s control over the Bank while she searched for the power to defeat her.”

Twilight noted the way Princess Celestia described her as her successor.

“But how could I have fought your sister? I can’t influence the Bank at all.”

“No? You didn’t notice those NGDP-controlling horns I had prepared at the festival in Ponyville? I felt you trigger one. Why do you think I was always so harsh on fakes and imitators? So that in a moment of need a seeming imitator would be a sign of my hoof.”

“Oh,” Twilight said. She felt stupid.

“But what could I have done after that?” she said. “It would still be a thousand years of misery.”

“I hoped you might go to Princess Cadance for help.”

Twilight was silent.

“Or your brother.”

Twilight didn’t answer.

Princess Celestia sighed. “Your stubbornness does you ill.”

The wind changed direction. Twilight stiffened. Sometimes the princess like to use the weather to illustrate a point, but she was not in the mood—

“I owe you an apology,” said Princess Celestia. “And my thanks.”

Twilight somehow managed to feel unsteady sitting down.

“I was mistaken to imprison my sister. I was mistaken to have no better plan that to hope one of my students could solve my own problem. But I was not mistaken to rely on you.”

It was some time before Twilight could look at her mentor and nod.

“I believe it is customary when a brave young pony rescues the princess that she makes a request of the kingdom.”

At first Twilight thought she didn’t need anything, and truly, she didn’t. But, oddly, she remembered her friends.

“You could cut the vine binding the Cerberus to the forest,” Twilight said. “It would make her work easier, and Applejack already figured out the loophole.”

The princess nodded. “I will have to find a new guardian.“

“Maybe not. Pinkie Pie sort of made friends with the forest.”

"Ah. The pink one. I don’t think she likes me very much. Wait, she what—"

“And Fluttershy needs a flight permit, the highest level one.”

"A military grade permit? But—"

“No. Higher. A new one with no maximum speed or altitude.”

Princess Celestia digested this. “What else?”

“No more sealing ponies in astronomical objects.”

“I have already sworn this to myself a thousand times over. And what about you?”

Twilight thought.

“I don’t need anything,” she said. “Just to be with Spike again and to assist you with the Bank.”

“Then you will be pleased to hear that I am making some changes to the organization of the Bank in light of recent events,” Princess Celestia said.

She smiled at the expression on Twilight’s face. “Yes. In over a thousand years the Bank has been the one constant. Now it too must change.

“My sister was able to threaten the world with the power of the One Bank. No pony could resist her. Therefore I will create nine daughter banks centered in economically strategic locations to aid and, if necessary, oppose the Bank. The Nine Daughters will make Equestria’s economy more stable and robust than ever before.”

“With the One Bank to rule them all?” Twilight said.

“Yes,” said Princess Celestia, “and with the rainbow bind them.”

Twilight felt a stir of excitement. “Sounds like overseeing the creation of the Nine will be quite the administrative task. Lots of organizing to do, items to be checked off of lists….”

“Not to mention choosing the Chief Executive Economists of each of the Nine,” said Princess Celestia. “I was thinking perhaps Twinkleshine for Manehattan?”

"Twinkleshine? That b—"

“Bright young pony,” Princess Celestia cut in, “which is exactly what Equestria needs at this time. And yes, Trixie will be getting one too.”

“Don’t talk to me about that mare!”

“And,” said Princess Celestia, “it has come to my attention that a certain dumpy backwater town full of rubes by the name of Ponyville is quite the hub of economic activity these days. Despite not even having a university, some of Equestria’s most successful and growing businesses are based there. Furthermore, it is located by the Everfree Forest, a subject of some concern. I need one of my daughters—one of the Daughters placed in Ponyville, of importance secondary only to the One Bank.”

“Smart thinking,” Twilight said. “Somepony needs to keep their eyes on Rainbow Dash. I think she might be playing with more money than exists.”

“To manage the bank in Ponyville will require an econopony of the utmost intellectual and moral qualities. She must be brave, kind, highly intelligent, with a proven history of wielding the Equilibrium for the betterment of all of Equestria, and she must be already familiar with Ponyville itself, particularly the most volatile yet successful businessponies who live there.”

“I’ll get the search started right away,” Twilight said.

Princess Celestia sighed.

“Twilight Sparkle, my dearest and most faithful student, I am offering the job to you.”

Aftermath: Ponyville

Twilight said yes, of course.

The construction of the Daughters began immediately. The flow of the bureaucracy and the stream of academic ponies to the new banks happened more gradually. Twinkleshine, that…well, you know, went to Manehattan, and Trixie to the Crystal Empire, and six other ponies to their places.

Twilight Sparkle went to Ponyville. There she survived her first party, helped to clean a Cerberus of her fleas, shook hoofs with a rather shifty tortoise, engaged in a hushed conversation about a parasprite, and barely prevented a giant serpent with growths like budding wings on its back from falling onto a house.

Then she invited her five friends to the first and last meeting of an ill-fated book club.

But even as Twilight winced when Applejack commented that Twilight’s library was the nicest outhouse she had ever seen, even when Rainbow Dash walked right out and it took Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie together to drag her back in, and even though Rarity seemed more interested in critiquing the library’s decor than anything Tina Malthushoof had to say about the formation of general gluts, some chamber hidden deep within her heart felt that it was almost as much fun as reading itself.

Almost. Well. Friends had their good points too. Maybe she wouldn't kick them out just yet.

(And the ponies of Ponyville hid away the stamps Silvia Gesell had suggested they issue and spoke no more of the matter. The princess had her pride, and she was much beloved by all the ponies. And that too is how an equilibrium is maintained.)