Morning came, bright and chilly. The Cutie Mark Crusaders were all bundled up in their treehouse, snug as bugs.(Lightning Blitz and Sundiver up in their cloud were a bit less cozy.) While the others were snoozing away, Twist had woken up early and was looking into making some breakfast on the little clubhouse stove. As she was scrounging through the clubhouse's stash of supplies to see what there was to whip up, she noticed a flash of light at the window. Curious, she trotted over and peeked out.

The flash seemed to be coming from a funny little cloud hovering over the orchard. Now Twist was really curious. There was a toy telescope lying on a nearby shelf; she picked it up and tried to bring the cloud into focus. What she saw nearly made her drop the telescope. She gasped and ducked out of sight.

There was somepony up in that cloud, watching them!

Panting in alarm, the peppermint pony tiptoed over to where Nyx was sleeping. A quick shake and the alicorn was awake. "Nykth," Twist whispered. "Nykth, there'th thomepony whoth up in the cloudth thath thpying on uth with binocularth!"

Nyx scowled blearily at Twist. Something must be wrong, she realized; Twist's lisp always got worse when she was upset, and at the moment she was almost incomprehensible. "Whu's wrong, Twist?" By way of an answer, Twist half-dragged, half-sneaked Nyx over to the window. She poked Nyx into peeping over the windowsill. Nyx looked. She saw the odd-shaped cloud... then she saw the flash of sunlight off a pair of binoculars. She gasped and ducked down.

Twist handed her a spyglass from the toy chest. Nyx put a piece of gauze from the ragbox over the lens, to hide any reflections, and peeked out through a gap in the curtains; the cloud came into focus. It looked like it was hollow-- she could see narrow windows all the way around. She could also see two ponies looking down at them; two white pegasi, one with a red and yellow mane, and one with a blue and white mane in a crewcut and a grouchy face. They were both watching the clubhouse; one had a pair of binoculars in his hooves.

"Who are they?" she whispered, her heart beating faster.

Twist got a knowing look; her eyes narrowed to slits. Her mother had warned her about this sort of thing, and she was always on the lookout. She knew who the watchers in the clouds were.

"Pervertth," she hissed.

Neither filly was old enough to know what a pervert was. But the vague warnings they'd heard about them were enough to make Twist's pronouncement as ominous as the opening theme of the Shining.

"What do they want?" Nyx hissed back.

"To watch little fillieth and colts undrething," Twist whispered. "To thate their deviant tendenthieth. That'th what my Mother thayth." The confusion of concepts behind that proclamation was a work of surrealistic art, but it was enough to make both their skins crawl.

For a brief inkling instant, Nyx  had a fleeting recollection of the ponies who had wished her ill after her reformation. But Twist's powers of suggestion wiped that thought away in an instant. Her tiny temper flickered alight at the notion of strange Perverts 'thating deviant tendenthieth' at her friends.

Now what would do to teach these cloud-borne interlopers a lesson? Briefly, she recalled one of Applebloom's more ambitious construction projects from the week before. It got nobody their Cutie marks but it was custom made for this situation.  "Wake up the others," she said. "And get me the toolbox, a bucket, and those bicycle tubes left over from last week's Crusade."

"What do you need thothe for?" Twist asked as she nudged Truffle and Pipsqueak awake.

Nyx scowled at the curtained window. "We're gonna teach those perverts not to spy on Cutie Mark Crusaders," she said, scrunching her nose up defiantly.

Lightning Blitz grunted as he watched the weather teams breaking the clouds up on the horizon. "the foals up yet? It's getting on in the day."

Sundiver looked up from the binoculars, bemused. "They're up. You can hear them moving around." There was a faint clatter from the treehouse below. "They haven't come out though-- and they seem to be avoiding the windows."  He heard the banging of a hammer. the tree had long ago lost its foliage, so he had a clear view of... well, nothing. What were they up to?

Blitz switched viewports on the hollowed out cloud and looked down. "What the-- I didn't know they had a skylight!"

Surprised, Sundiver looked down. A large section of the roof had swung up and was propped open on spring hinges. He picked up the binoculars and tried to look down inside. He didn't manage to look down into the clubhouse, though.

His view had suddenly been obscured by a small constellation of apples, which were growing in size at alarming speed--

"CUTIE MARK CRUSADER ANTI-AIRCRAFT ARTILLERY, YAY!"

A dozen grade-A, late season Sweet Apple Acres apples disappeared into the cloud. There was a cascade of thumps followed by an agonized yell. The Cutie Mark Crusaders cheered as apples and curses rained from the suspect cloud-puff.

The CMC had been diabolically busy. The tree in which their clubhouse rested actually came up through the floor and forked inside before emerging from the roof. Under Nyx and Applebloom's supervision, they had strung rubber inner tubes from the forks and attached a sizeable bucket, transforming their treehouse into an enormous slingshot.

"Reload!" shouted Applebloom. More of their hoard of eatin' apples were loaded into the bucket. Truffle, being the heaviest, dragged the bucket back as far as it would go while Pipsqueak sighted for range. "A smidge more to your left, mate," he said, squinting through a spyglass. "Okay, to your back and right.... FIRE!" Truffle released the bucket, and another volley of cider in its hardest form shot skyward.

Meanwhile, Sundiver and Lightning Blitz were discovering a serious drawback to their method of concealment; while it had kept them effectively invisible, to their dismay their hollowed-out cloud provided absolutely zero cover from hostile fire. They dodged back and forth in their tiny enclosure to little avail. "We gotta get outta here!" Sundown yelped.

"We can't leave the gear," Blitz said. "Everypony's cover will be blown if we do!"

"So what do we do??"

"Come on you moron--" Blitz ran to the back of the enclosure, put his forehooves against one puffy white wall, and started flapping. "--Help me push! Quick, before they reload!" Slowly the junk-laden cloud started to pull away.

"Oh horseapples, they've got smaller slingshots at all the windows OW OW OW OW!"

Things continued to go badly for the two watchponies. They managed to finally pull their pummeled cloud out of range of the CMC's makeshift apple launchers, only to discover they were now taking fire from above. they'd been flanked!

Nyx, Scootaloo, and Rumble were on a cloud about a hundred feet higher. They weren't strong enough fliers to get so high normally, but while the 'perverts' had been distracted by the incoming apple-slaught, Nyx, SweetieBelle and Dinky had managed to pool their magic and give the three cloudwalker foals a boost to an upper cloud. They were now in hot pursuit, pushing their cloud-raft with their wings and bombing the fleeing enemy with hailstones the size of snowballs, squeezed by hoof out of the cloud cover.

"At least the little stinkers haven't---Ow!--- learned to kick out lightning yet," Sundiver said.

There was a crack of thunder. "---Push harder," Blitz growled.

The aerial bombardment didn't stop till the guards left Sweet Apple Acres airspace and were powering their way to the Everfree. The foals pushed their own cloud back over the clubhouse and fluttered their way back down. "We did it!" Rumble said. Cheers went up from everypony in the treehouse.

"Should we take the slingshots down?" Dinky asked.

"Nah, let's keep 'em," Scootaloo said. She rubbed her chin as she regarded the giant launcher. "Sorta wish we could put this one on a turret, though..."

Sundiver and Lightning Blitz sat in their battered cloud over the Everfree forest, nursed their countless bruises and glumly contemplated the report they would have to write to their superior... and just what their superior would have to say about them abandoning their post.

"Blitz?" Sundiver said.

"What?"

"Something just occurred to me. Something we really oughta have remembered."

"Yeah? What?

"That cute little innocent alicorn filly? The one we're supposed to protect?"

"Yeah?

"---Once conquered all of Equestria--- all by herself--- in less than a week."

"So you're saying we underestimated her."

Sundiver combed the remains of an apple out of his hair. "Just a tad...."

"Nyx, could you come downstairs for a moment?"

"okay, Mom!" Nyx trotted down from her room to the main floor of the library. Everypony had returned home without incident, each with their own plans for their costume tucked away in their saddlebag. Nyx had been working on her own when Twilight had called up the stairs.

The foals had told Applejack about the incident with the strange ponies, but Applejack had interpreted the story as the fillies chucking apples at some idle passersby who had traipsed onto the property. She had scolded them for pelting ponies with perfectly good fruit, but then let the matter slip her mind. And none of the foals had thought to tell their own parents about it. The strangers had fled, and in the manner of children everywhere, it was out of sight, out of mind.

So it came rather as a shock for Nyx when she found the two pegasi the CMC had driven off standing in the main room of her own house with her mother and Spike, wearing pith helmets and looking bruised, disheveled and rather discomfited.

Then again the shock became mutual when Nyx walked into the room, clapped eyes on them, screamed "It's the perverts!" and ran behind her mother.

Twilight gawped at her daughter, completely flabbergasted. "Wha--- Nyx! What are you..."

Nyx pointed an accusing hoof at them from around her mother's flank. "Those two! Those two were spying on us in the clubhouse yesterday! They were hiding in the clouds, they had binoculars and cameras and stuff and were trying to catch us taking off our clothes---"

"WHAT?"

The accused ponies were staring in slack jawed horror. "NOW WAIT a MINUTE--" one of the bruised pegasi yelped, waving his hooves frantically. There was a frantic gabble of voices and pointing of accusing hooves.

"Excuse me," a third voice said. Everypony stopped talking. A third pony Nyx hadn't noticed before, a unicorn with an indigo coat and coal black mane, stepped into the brief gap. "If you will give me a moment I think I can explain..."

Twilight looked indignant. "You'd better!"

Spike snorted. A small spurt of flame shot from his nostrils, making the pegasus nearest him flinch. 'Protective' did not begin to describe Spike's attitude about Twilight or Nyx. Tiny or not, he was an arrowproof reptile who could spit fire, chew solid diamond, and wade through molten rock. If he ever thought anypony had hurt his foster mother or sister, it would go very, very poorly for them.

"Believe me the explanation is simple," the indigo gentlecolt said. "These two fellows are bird watchers. These fellows work for the  Equestrian Aviary Society. We'd received report of an exotic bird sighted in Ponyville and-- ah, there he is!" He said happily, as Peewee flew into the room and perched on Spike's head. " A baby phoenix is quite a find, you know..."

"So why didn't you just come out and meet us, if you wanted to see PeeWee so bad?" Twilight asked suspiciously.

"We couldn't do that," the blonde-and-red maned birdwatcher said. "We had to observe the subject undisturbed in it's natural environment!"

"A treehouse?" Spike deadpanned.

"You gotta work with what you got," the pegasus mumbled apologetically.

"Aaand let me guess, you put up a bird blind, the Cutie Mark Crusaders spotted you spying.... and nature took it's course," Twilight said, with some amusement. She poked lightly at one of the birdwatchers' bruises. The pony flinched and grunted. "Yes," he admitted. "At high velocity, no less."

"We had a slingshot," Nyx said.

"Well, the children were acting in self-defense," Ink Spot said. "And no damage done, in the long run. I do hope it didn't get your daughter in any trouble."

Twilight gave Nyx the gimlet eye. Nyx gulped. It hadn't dawned on her that she could be in quite a bit of trouble for pummeling strangers with high-speed fruit.  "Well..." Twilight said, then sighed. "I suppose I'll let it slide. This once." Nyx sighed in relief. "Thank you," she mouthed silently to the gentlepony. He merely chuckled and winked.

"So what is your role in all this?" Twilight asked the indigo unicorn. He smiled. "Oh, forgive me, I didn't introduce myself-- my name is Ink Spot. I'm an editor for Informative Publishing, the publishing house that produces---"

"-- The Astronomer's Guide to All Things Astronomical?" Twilight said with sudden glee.

"-- Yes, and the Aviary Guide, and the Hitchhiker's Guide to Equestria, and the Encyclopedia Equestria, and The Atlas Obscura, and Trotford's Dictionary, and--- well you get the idea, I'm sure," he grinned. "Basically we print and distribute pretty much every resource volume and guidebook in your library."

"So you're in the dictionary and encyclopedia business?" Spike asked, monotone. "Sounds riveting."

"Spike!" Twilight scolded. Ink Spot only chuckled. "Well, it's not exactly a life filled with thrills and danger," he admitted. "But it does have its perks. I get first peek at every new edition of the Encyclopedia Equestria...."

"Ooo," Twilight said.

Spike regarded them both with a blank expression. "ffffascinating," he said. "You'll excuse me while I go feed PeeWee, here... You two wanna come along and get some pictures or something?" He said to the two Aviary representatives. They looked at one another and shrugged. "Might as well..."

"Great. ...You guys want some liniment or something for those bruises...?"

Spike toddled off to the kitchen, with the pegasi in tow. Twilight and Ink Spot continued to talk books. Nyx noticed with some interest that Twilight was standing much closer to Ink Spot than was usual for her. She also seemed to be smiling a lot more. And batting her lashes....

Her turquoise eyes widened. She bit back a giggle and crept as silently as she could from the room. Twilight and Ink Spot didn't even notice her leave.