Without saying a word, Bon-Bon closed in on me. Her eyes spoke more than her mouth could, really. I imagined I knew how a rabbit felt when cornered by a ravenous wolf: afraid, helpless, nowhere I could really run, no options left but to face an onslaught.

She stopped almost three feet away from me, her glare not once breaking eye contact. I still felt that arctic wind, as if Bon-Bon carried it here with her. Or maybe it was just her glare—it was enough to put Fluttershy’s Stare to shame.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded in a quiet, furious voice I’d never heard her use before. “Why. Are you. Doing this.” She took one step forward. I took one step back. What could I say? Yes, I was certainly planning something—if successful, it’d make the stranger leave for good. If not, he’d stay and make everypony even more miserable. But how to explain? Where to begin?

“What. Are. You. Hiding?” Bon-Bon’s slow, venomous words were delivered as though she were twisting a knife in my head: cruelly, coldly, hatefully. Her eyes were bulging with anger at this point, and I had shrunk against the wall, slowly becoming more and more terrified, my plan of action forgotten, that intense and hateful cold coming closer...

“Bon-Bon?”

We both turned to see Lyra, who had apparently heard everything. “Bon-Bon, what are you doing here?”

Bon-Bon’s glare softened only a little at the sight of her friend. “Hello,” she curtly greeted, “Found yourself a new friend?”

Lyra looked at me apologetically, then to Bon-Bon. “Yeah. I don’t need to ask you for permission to make new friends.”

Bon-Bon began to breathe harder. At first I thought she was going to attack Lyra, but instead, Bon-Bon shook violently, as if fighting the urge to cry. “Y-You don’t… You don’t want me anymore, do you?”

“That’s not true Bon-Bon. You know it isn’t.”

“So why are you hanging out with Twilight and constantly spying on that creepy pony, instead of hanging out with me and doing the things we used to love doing together?”

Lyra looked as if she knew she’d have a difficult time answering that. “A pony can have more than just one friend, you know.”

“Answer the question,” Bon-Bon demanded quietly.

“That IS my answer,” Lyra argued. “I’m hanging out with Twilight because she’s my friend. She listens to what I have to say and doesn’t try to force me to see from her point of view. She doesn’t try to corral me or bully me into anything.” They both seemed to be near tears at this point in Lyra’s confession. Lyra’s lip trembled and her voice weakened. “And I… I don’t know what to think of you anymore, Bon-Bon. I wanna like you, but you make it so hard.”

Bon-Bon sat down. She hadn’t said anything throughout Lyra’s confession, simply taking this gentle application of a harsh truth. Lyra continued. “For the longest time, I was your only friend.”

“Yeah, you were.” Was Bon-Bon… sniffling? I recognized the crushing tone they used. Was. Were. Past-tense. “But you wished you weren’t.”

Lyra’s face betrayed her inner emotions at that point: confusion, uncertainty, a dash of sorrow. She met Bon-Bon’s eyes again. “Yes,” she answered. “Sometimes I…”

Suddenly, Lyra’s face became a mask of rage, as if a dam in her heart had burst and she was flooded with anger. “Sometimes I wanna stand up to you! I wanna stand up to you and kick your ass!” She got up in Bon-Bon’s face. “Sometimes I wanna just strangle you! Strangle you just to make you shut the hell up! Make you shut up and leave me alone and get out of my life!”

Bon-Bon seemed so totally broken by these words. She reminded me of a toy, once beautiful and beloved, now cast aside and forgotten on a dusty shelf. Hot tears began to flow from her eyes, slowly, then more and more. My eyes moistened as I unintentionally began to feel the extent of Bon-Bon’s crushed spirit.

Lyra began to cry as well. “I wanted to like you, Bon-Bon, but you… you’re so... cruel. You're so thoughtless and mean. It’s disgusting how possessive you are of me. You’re…” Her mouth began to coil. “You’re too much like Chris. Observing him alongside Twilight made me realize how similar the two of you are, and made me wonder how the hell you and I even became friends. I thought I could change you, but… but I can’t.”

My front hooves covered my mouth. This was it. Lyra and Bon-Bon weren’t friends anymore. I, the Element of Friendship, had accidentally destroyed the friendship between two ponies. I had betrayed my own element! What had I done! Was salvaging my plan really worth this?

But there was no way to change the outcome. Bon-Bon merely got up and began to walk away. I got the feeling she was not headed anyplace in particular, just… away. She didn’t say anything. Not good-bye, not how dare you, not I’m sorry, not what can I do to change, not give me a second chance. She merely left.

She looked back at the two of us just as she was beginning to vanish into the throngs of ponies wandering the streets after their work hours were done. She disappeared then, as if being swallowed by the crowd, digested into the town.

The tears didn’t stop flowing from her eyes.

I looked at Lyra, who was watching Bon-Bon fade out of her life. Her eyes, those yellow eyes of hers, seemed so lifeless now. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for it all to come to this.”

Lyra patted my shoulder and wiped away her tears, sniffling as she did so. After a confused second, she wrapped her forelegs around me and held me tightly. Her body shook as she sobbed; she wept into my mane, telling me that… that this was the way things had to be.

Sometimes, friends can’t stay friends. Sometimes, even extending friendship to somepony can be a bad idea. I had learned that from the stranger: any attempts at improving or befriending him was an exercise in frustration that never ended well—and it seemed Lyra had learned this too.

Suddenly, we heard a crash. We both dashed into the Boutique, Bon-Bon now forgotten. Inside, the Doctor had been knocked down. The stranger roared at him like an angry foal, the same yell he belted at me when I had invaded his temporary cave. I looked at the Doctor incredulously. “Really?” I asked him. “He knocked you over? Really? Him?”

The Doctor stood back up, undaunted. The stranger began yelling at him now. “Dis is all yer fault you JERK! Yerra dang dirty troll! An yer here ta stop me fum findin true love!” The Doctor rolled his eyes—along with Lyra and I. Suddenly, I realized Rarity was no longer in the room.

“What did you do to Rarity, you creep?!”

He tried to explain, but I can’t remember what exactly he said. His accent, layered on top of his constant slurring, stammering, and spittling, along with his frustrated screeching made it difficult for me to understand a word he said. I think some of it may have been in a different language.

Finally, I had had enough. I picked him up with my telekinesis and threw him against the wall hard enough to shake the entire building. Lyra and the Doctor both shrunk a bit and looked at me in horror. I hadn’t noticed, as I suddenly shut out the rest of the world.

The world had evaporated now—there was only myself and my prey. This creature that had led so many to pain and ruin. He hurt Derpy and took advantage of her, he made Fluttershy become a monster, he tried to slander Mr. Cake, he shoved the Doctor down for no reason, he hid Rarity someplace, he made Lyra want to end her friendship with Bon-Bon…

I snorted. My eyes had taken on a quiet coldness, and the stranger could see it. It terrified him. Yes, terror. His fear fed my rage, and I could feel my hate for him pulsating inside me like a second heart, beating, feeding the rest of my body with blackest malice. I picked him up…

… and threw him down. And picked him up...

… and threw him down. I kept doing this, enjoying it, tasting it like his pain was fine dining. Making him pay for everything he’d done to ruin my friends and ruin me. Suddenly, I felt even colder—as if my body were…

I looked down at myself. My body was beginning to freeze, literally! Looking back up at Chris, I saw a tall, shuddering ghost-horse.

A Windigo. It must have been following me ever since I began hating the stranger.

I recalled at that moment back when you had me and my friends act in that Hearth-Warming Eve play. I distinctly recall being told that the Windigos designed for the play by the special effects team were more of a facsimile, a "family-friendly" design of the actual thing. Well I saw the real thing, and... what can I say? Looking at the Windigo was like looking at Death. Its eyes were empty and cold, as if they were merely a pair of holes in its head; its lips were drawn back so far I could see its jagged, sharklike teeth. Its anatomy was similar to the ones in the play, only it was even more like an exaggeration of equine physiology, as if it were more of a ghastly parody of what you'd created.

Its black eyes fell on me, and its lips contorted into a hideous grin. I began to feel colder and colder, the ice crawling up my legs as if threatening to devour me. Its grin grew wider, as if to say, "I win." I suddenly screamed, as did Lyra. (She later had claimed that she saw the Windigo as well, so it wasn't just me!) Finally, the Doctor ran towards me and tackled me, trying to get me under control. He wrestled with me, my body no longer under my control, as if the ice covering me were a creature all its own, until he finally pinned me to the floor. He slapped me, once.

“Get a hold of yourself, Twilight!” he yelled, the fear in his voice evident. “This isn’t you! You are not a monster!” He repeated the last five words more slowly, more quietly. I calmed down. I must have lost consciousness, for the next thing I remembered was waking up with a damp towel on my head and no ice on my body at all.

I sat straight up, and looked about. We were still in the Boutique, or at least I had thought so. The red light of the setting sun cast dark shadows all around the main lobby, the blackness splattering the walls like cubist art. At the window stood the Doctor. He appeared worried.

“Hey,” I said. I got up and trotted toward him, asking him questions: how long was I out? What happened? Where is everypony? What happened to Rarity?

He said nothing, but instead rested his forehead in his hoof, leaning on the windowsill. His body shook with fear. “I let this happen,” he said quietly. “This is all my fault. I leave my sensitive equipment lying around, and this is what happens. I’m so careless!”

I tried to ask him, again, what happened. He merely pointed outside. I exited the Boutique.

The Boutique was a ramshackle. It looked as though it had been abandoned for years, and never had been a Boutique to begin with. Shiftless ponies bustled about, their ill-fitting and poorly-designed, hideously-colored clothes making them seem like legions of pauper clowns. Ponyville seemed to be an uneven city now: lopsided buildings, both abandoned and lived-in, dotted the horizon, made of bricks and stones, washed in ugly colors. Even the clouds seemed to have been built clumsily, as if drawn by a child. Up in the sky were zeppelins with their searchlights beaming down on the town, apparently keeping sentry. On their sides were pictures of the stranger, as if to say his eyes ("One's greener than the other!") were everywhere.

“What in..?”

I walked forward, trying to ask somepony, anypony, what day it was, what year it was. Finally, I had found a newspaper. It was the evening paper of the same day I had begun this operation, but the news it bore on the front made my stomach drop. I have included an excerpt of it in this report and a full copy of this newspaper in the supplementary materials I have sent you—otherwise, you would probably think I had gone crazy.

For a moment, I prayed on your great wings that my going crazy was all it was.

CWCVILLE TRIBUNE

MAD DOCTOR APPREHENDED

Earlier today, infamous Troll Doctor Whooves had been apprehended by CWCville's beloved and honorable Troll Buster squadron on accounts of fraud, larceny, trolling, and first-degree murder. When asked how he would plead, the Doctor said, “Duh, I am dumb and bad, so please do the execution thingy now.”

As our Great and Beloved Mayor, Christian Weston Chandler, cast his sentence, the Doctor bowed his head in silent submission. He was executed later, at 5:00 P.M., by drilling to the testicles, drawing and quartering, and being dumped in acid.

I dropped the newspaper in horror. The stranger had become Mayor?! The Doctor had been executed?! This town… was it Ponyville? It had been renamed? What the heck was going on?!

I picked up the newspaper again and raced back to the Boutique-That-Was-Not-A-Boutique. I threw it at the Doctor’s feet and asked him to read it. As he did so, the color drained from his face. His eyes met mine, and our fears interlocked, intertwined.

“What. Happened?” I asked again.

The Doctor, still terrified, put the newspaper down. He looked away, as if searching for answers. He looked back at me, his face as white as ash. “The TARDIS. He took the TARDIS.”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Holy crap, shit just got real! So far, everything has led up to this. This is where the big adventure starts, everypony! Next Chapter: 11. Strangers in CWCville Estimated time remaining: 3 Hours, 57 Minutes