After trying to enjoy breakfast, and much conversation, the general concensus was that there was little anypony there, save for the Princesses, could even start to do about helping those lost beyond the Firmament. "I'll try and see if Discord can help, Twilight, but I have no idea if even he can reach that far." Fluttershy promised Twilight.

Twilight nodded. "Still, anything he knows about what's out there could be of inestimable value in our search." She admitted.

"We'll have the staff in the Archives go through the most ancient sections of the records as well, Twilight." Celestia offered.

"I shall lead a team to the older archives in the Castle of the Celestial Sisters as well." Luna promised. "It's about time those ancient volumes were brought back to Canterlot for preservation and archiving, anyway."

"I'd like copies of them for the Library here, if you please, Luna." Twilight asked.

Luna nodded, then Celestia suggested "Maybe the ancient tomes from the Crystal Empire might be of some use in this case. I do not know if Sombra's obfuscation spell would have considered Astronomy as a subject worthy of obscuring. It's possible a great deal of knowledge might still be intact there."

"I'll send Shiny and Cadance a letter as soon as I start working again." Twilight assured Celestia and Luna.

"I... I guess we won't be rushing forth to save the day this time." Rarity then said in a soft voice.

All of the Mane Six seemed to be saddened by this, but then Rainbow Dash perked up. "Hey... the girls are with Stellar. She'll keep them safe."

"Yeah! And if anypony can find their way home from even there, it's Stellar." Pinkie Pie stated. "She never gives up, so neither should we."

Celestia and Luna smiled at one another as the others perked up a little, too. "Yes. Stellar never gives up." Twilight agreed. "And neither will I. We will find them and bring them home, or they'll find a way back here." She stated in a very positive tone.

"Ah bet Stellar's already found a safe place fer them ta rest and get things started." Applejack said with the same positive tone.

"I would not doubt that for a second." Rarity gave her opinion. "Even if it is a hollowed-out rock, she will make it serve her purposes."

"And she is never without resources." Fluttershy added.

"Yeah. She is, without a doubt, the best equipped pony there is." Rainbow Dash agreed with Fluttershy. "She'll find safety for Scootaloo and the others, then they'll find a way of contacting us, or even getting themselves home again."

"Then we shall leave the safety of our Family and friends in the hoofs of the most capable amongst them." Celestia declared, as the others turned to her and nodded their agreement. "We shall continue on with what we have decided we can do, until word reaches us from them, or we find they have arrived home. For now, let us concentrate on the positive aspects of this tragedy: as far as we know, nopony has been hurt by this. They have simply gone where no pony has ever gone before. And we know they will return to us. That is our conviction, knowing the quality of those that have left on this trek to the Stars. And what they bring back will enrich our knowledge immensely, that I am as positive of as I am of their determination to return Home." Celestia smiled.

The voices of the Mane Six and Spike rose in their agreement with the Solar Princess. "And we shall work from this end at trying to get word to them, by some means, that we know they are safe, and that we are thinking of them." Twilight added.

"Indeed." Celestia replied. "So, for now, we shall work in the areas we have suggested, and all of us will remain calm and continue to live as we have always done, even if our hearts and minds are on those we love and miss very much." She sighed softly. "I know, it is hard to go on as we have always done, but since there is almost nothing we can do for the moment to help, we must turn to that which we know best. To go on with our lives and live them as we know they would want us to; it shows our confidence in those we love, and shows the rest of Equestria that we know they will return to us, given time."

More than the soft applause, the confident smiles on those wounded most by this made Celestia's own spirit rise in appreciation. To know she had their trust like this made her own spirit believe what she said to them was the truth, and not empty platitudes. They needed to believe, she needed to believe that what she had said was the hardest, most powerful truth; and by the look of trust on Applejack's face, of all of them, made Celestia know that they believed it, and that they knew she believed it, too. "Now, Luna needs her sleep, once she has organised the expedition to our old home; and I need to prepare the Royal Archives for the most thorough search it has ever undergone. We will keep in contact with Twilight, of course, and speak with you all again if we find anything."

"Good night, Luna. Good day, Celestia." The seven chorussed as the Princesses bowed to them, then took their leave.

"Right, back to it, ah guess. Apples don't pick themselves." Applejack said as she got to her hoofs.

"And the weather doesn't work by itself, either." Rainbow Dash added as she lifted off.

"I'll see you all later, then." Twilight said as she hugged every one of them before they left, all of them giving Spike a hug as well before they headed downstairs and back to their homes. Twilight sighed once they were all gone, then headed for the Library, carrying the blackboard back with her.

"Do you think we need to recall Starlight?" Spike asked.

Twilight shook her head. "I'm not even sure if she could do anything, at least as far as bringing them home." She answered Spike. "Let her and Trixie work on the friendship problem in the other Equestria; that alone is almost as big a problem as this is. Once Sunset, Starlight and Trixie have their problem sorted, then they'll be free to help us here as much as they can." Twilight smiled. "Maybe even Sunset could come back with them and give us a hand here. The more minds, the better." She suggested.

"Sure can't hurt." Spike agreed. "And you need to eat."

Twilight chuckled. "Okay, Spike. I'll set the table in the library, and you can give me my breakfast there, Little Brother." Twilight agreed, giving Spike a hug and a kiss on his forehead, which got Spike almost purring as he headed off to the kitchen.

Stellar was still a little apprehensive as the four ponies walked along through the huge ship. The most disturbing thing was that there were no signs of the crew anywhere they'd been so far. Through vast spaces and small cabins, they'd found signs of what the crew had been, but of that crew, none of them seemed to still be aboard.

There was also no power on the ship, either. Stellar had figured out long ago that any sort-of ship design would have had to have some kind-of emergency power supply, from very complex mana accumulators to basic battery systems. That was only logical, after all. But if the ship had such, they seemed to be drained... which meant the ship had either suffered a very quick and complex draining of those systems... or the ship had been drifting now for a very long time. "Okay, girls. I want you to go around and manually close all the external hatches. Don't worry about the big ones, I'll do those myself. But for now, we need to close up the hull and make it airtight again." Stellar told the C.M.C. "If we can get the ship airtight again, then we might be able to get some of it working again, and we'll no longer need to stay sealed up in our suits, even if we'll need to keep them on until I am sure this ship won't depressurise unexpectedly."

"Okay, Stellar." Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle and Applejack replied.

"Also, use your magnetic grapples to tether yourselves to the inside of the corridors before you go shutting the external airlock doors. If anything happens, you won't go floating off before I can come and get you. And if you can jam the doors closed so they can't open again without our intervention, that will help as well." Stellar advised them.

"Rojer that, Stellar." The fillies replied again and went off, heading for the front of the ship to work their way back.

Once they were gone, Stellar headed for the outside of the ship again. Once she was on the outer hull, she started walking up the side, heading for the top of the ship. "If the Bridge is going to be anywhere, It's either on the top or at the front." She said to herself, noticing the light-spell she'd hit the hull with was starting to fade already... which was a good thing. She didn't want the ship to stand out in space before she had a chance to get it ready to fight again... if fighting was needed. Better to stay anonymous and unseen for the moment.

As she arrived on the upper hull, Stellar saw what looked like a tower standing up about two-thirds along the long hull, that had a set of large, wide windows in the front of it. "That has to be the Bridge... or maybe a navigation room. Either way, it's a place of importance... and somewhat separate from the rest of the Hull." Stellar smiled. "I bet it could be sealed off from the rest of the ship fairly easily." She said to herself as she pushed off from the hull and drifted towards to front of the tower. After slowly floating across the space, she gently landed on the front of the tower and looked in, grumbling when she found the transparencies were covered over on the inside with some kind-of blast-shielding. "Okay, no way in this way." She said to herself, and started walking along the side of the tower. Eventually she found an airlock door... which, unlike the rest of the airlock doors on the ship, was firmly closed. "Wonder of wonders." Stellar said to herself, a little sarcasm slipping into her voice as she triggered what looked like the opening sequence on the simple controls.

Stellar wondered what she was going to find inside, as the door unlocked itself and very slowly opened. The dimness of the lights of the controls and the slowness of the door was a pretty good indication that, while the airlock still had some power, it was very depleted. Once she was inside the airlock, Stellar helped the doors close faster than they could manually, and she pressurised the lock herself. The inner doors opened as slowly as the outer ones, but Stellar helped them again to open and close, and she was soon walking down towards the bridge. "Hmm... signs in English, that's good." She said to herself. The door to the bridge opened slowly, as expected. That the temperature inside was higher than the rest of the ship was a surprise, but a hundred-and-fifty-degrees Absolute was still incapable of supporting almost all life as Equestria knew it, no matter what world you came from. "Maybe windigos could survive this temperature, but little else could." Stellar said to herself.

Inside, Stellar froze instinctively as she walked out onto the floor of the bridge. Even her fast mind took a little time out to contemplate what she was seeing, as she stared at the sight before her. "Celestia and deities above..." She almost whispered.

Before her lay lines of suited forms, about sixty to her quick count. Stellar's mind took in that they were all bipedal as well. The suits were more advanced than the ones she'd made the C.M.C., and maybe more advanced than her own, save for the metal her armor was made of and her magic. She walked slowly forward, checking each of them. They were all tied up, secured to what her sensors told her were magnetic plates tied to their backs, and laid out almost meticulously. She cleaned some of the frost off the clear visors of the helmets, to reveal human faces within, the bodies frozen inside the suits. "Humans." Stellar said. "So, this is a Human ship." She snorted. "Can't say I'm surprised." She commented to herself as she walked up onto the plinth with the Captain's chair on it. There was another suited body lying there, and Stellar couldn't help but think that this might be the captain of the ship. She said a soft prayer to the Cosmic Deities to protect their souls, before she hopped up onto the Captain's chair and checked the displays arrayed before it.

Some of the displays showed signs of power: one that showed a clock in the corner, another with a digital counter advancing with what, Stellar assumed, was probably the time since they'd left Base... wherever that was. While it was most likely Earth, that wasn't a certainty. The counter was showing what she assumed was over a hundred and fifty years elapsed time, a very long time, Stellar knew, for any space mission that wasn't a generational ship. "Well, I wanted to get back out into Space," She said to herself, grinning, "But this isn't exactly how I wanted to do it, to be honest. Let's see what I can learn from these displays." And she started tapping away on the visible controls.

The touchscreens lit up and displayed information to Stellar, most of which she made sense of as it showed her everything in English. The knowledge she'd gained from her other selves elsewhere helped her interpret what she was seeing. "Okay, Most of the connections to the main hull have been severed, and only the Bridge tower has power... and even that's starting to fail slowly. There's a computer still active in the tower, but there's nothing from the rest of the ship. Life support's on bare minimal, just to keep everything from totally freezing up here, but it looks like the last orders were given about four years after they left Base... and they lost power only a month after they left Base, which is damned wierd. " Stellar said. "So, where's the power coming from?" She managed to bring up the layout of the tower five minutes later. "Okay, there's a battery room at the lowest floor of the bridge section. I should be able to plug a mana-to-power converter into the system there if their systems aren't too different from what I know." Stellar got to her hoofs and made her way down to the lowest floor of the bridge complex, listening with a smile to the constant chatter from the Cutie Mark Crusaders as they did what she'd assigned to them...

The Cutie Mark Crusaders were slowly working their way through the hull of the ship, closing every open airlock door they could find floor by floor. Sweetie Belle had been the one who found that the doors were held open by a latching system, and by disengaging it, the doors would close by themselves. It made things much easier to do, with even Scootaloo being able to trigger the doors to close. Securing the outer and inner doors was made easier by a similar system that locked the doors in their closed positions. "Ah wonder why tha ponies on this ship didn't just lock tha doors shut, if'n it's so easy to do?" Applebloom contemplated out-loud as she trotted from one airlock to the next one about fifty metres down the corridor on the second floor.

"Maybe there were too many of them to get to all at once." Sweetie Belle suggested as she did the same on the other side of the hull. "Most of these look like they're not meant to open normally. I mean, they look like, y'know, those 'emergency' doors they talk about in Star Charter's science-fiction novels, with all this black-and-yellow striping around and across them."

"Yeah, they do, don't they?" Scootaloo agreed with Sweetie Belle as she trotted along on the floor below. "I mean, it's almost kind-of scarey, how close Star Charter got to how this ship really feels like inside." She told the others as her helmet lights lit up another cabin on the floor she was on. Seeing something floating around inside the room, Scootaloo went in and grabbed it. It was a small rectangle of plastic with a small glass section and some controls on it, and a set of strange little 'thingies', as Scootaloo thought of them, attached in a housing on the back of it. She tucked it into a pocket on her foreleg's housing, then went on her way. She'd ask Stellar about it later. "I'm almost back to the hangar section on this deck. How are you two doing?" Scootaloo asked the others.

"Ah'm almost at tha same point you are, Scoots." Applebloom answered as she closed another airlock's inner door and secured it. "How about you, Sweetie Belle?"

"I think I'm finished on this side. I'm just closing the door to the hangar section." Sweetie Belle replied.

"I wonder where everypony on the ship went?" Scootaloo then asked the question all three of them had been asking themselves sub-consciously. "I mean, there's nopony here at all, not even... you know." Scootaloo added, not quite saying the word: 'Bodies'.

"Y... yeah. It does make it kinda creepy." Applebloom agreed.

"Frankly, I prefer it this way." Sweetie Belle gave her opinion. "Better than finding floating lumps of crew and blood-splattered walls and floors." She said as if she was just discussing her latest favorite novel in her room at the house the three shared in Ponyville. It was a better arrangement than living separately, they'd all decided. While Scootaloo could now fly up to Rainbow Dash's cloud-house, and Applebloom always had a room at Sweet Apple Acres, of course, each one of them preferred to have their own space away from their older siblings. They'd managed, with help and lots of hard work and saving, to pool enough to buy a house in Ponyville with three distinct living areas, plus a common kitchen and living area. Sweetie Belle had taken the west side of the house, Applebloom the east side, and Scootaloo lived on the upper floor, which suited them all well. Sweetie Belle had a studio, where she worked at her music, painting and writing; Applebloom had a connecting door to the workshop out the back, where she worked on whatever she was working on that week; and Scootaloo had a big room above the workshop, where she practised her brand of music and weight-training.

Applebloom just snorted. "Sweetie! Ya don't havta be so... so..."

"Blasé about it?" Scootaloo suggested.

"Yeah, or blunt." Applebloom completed her sentence.

Sweetie Belle sniffed haughtily, echoing Rarity almost perfectly. "I don't see what you're upset about. I was agreeing with you, after all. It is wierd that there's nopony here, but I stand by the fact that finding nothing is preferable to having bodies floating about or bits of them splattered everywhere."

"Yeah, ah guess yer right about that, Sweets." Applebloom had to agree. "So, fourth floor?"

"Yes." Sweetie Belle agreed as she headed down to the fourth floor with Applebloom, leaving the starboard side of the third floor for Scootaloo to finish.

Stellar had made her way down to the lowest level of the Bridge section, and after checking through several rooms, found the emergency power room. She'd found several large power accumulators and battery units fitted throughout the room. "At least the humans had the sense to label everything in rooms like this." Stellar said to herself, as she was able to identify everything fairly easily. Stellar felt she was very lucky to have found a Human ship, rather than one by a more-alien race. At least she could understand the way Humans laid out their technology and systems.

Towards an emptier section of the compact and fairly-full room, she found connectors for what seemed to be more accumulators that were never installed. Smiling, Stellar rummaged around in one of her H-S pockets and retrieved two mana-to-power converters and two quiescent mana generators. Like those that powered her backpack thrusters, they could generate almost as much power as Celestia herself could, without tapping into the Sun's power.

It took Stellar close to ten minutes to wire the converters to interface with the on-board power systems. She had set the system to have the power flow into the accumulators first, which could regulate the power feed to the Bridge Complex, instead of the power flowing directly into the more sensitive equipment. Once she was sure the systems were secure and properly wired-in, she locked the generators into place on the converters and slowly let them start powering up. Checking every so often to assure the system was accepting the power flow from the converters without damaging the accumulators or wiring, Stellar then left the accumulators to charge up. She had to remove the bodies on the bridge into permanent cold-storage before the Bridge started to warm up.

While the elevator shafts didn't have airlocks on their doors, Stellar found the staircase leading down from the bridge had an airlock at both the top and bottom, so she went through and down to the rest of the ship that way. "Cadets, report." She said to the C.M.C.

"We've closed the doors on five of the floors, Captain." Sweetie Belle replied.

"But Engineering and the flight bays are still open, as you directed." Scootaloo added.

"Very good, Cadets." Stellar smiled. It seemed the girls were starting to take things seriously. "I've started on getting a section of the ship liveable for us. I just have to clear it first of some things the former crew left behind." Stellar had to grin at the cheers from the teenage fillies. "What? Are you becoming tired of your suits already?" She asked.

"Uh, not really, Ma'am." Applebloom answered. "But it's still gonna be good to get some rest, maybe out of them." She admitted.

"Believe me, I can sympathise, girls." Stellar replied as she floated down to the deck with the medical bay and sank to the floor of the deck with practised ease. This deck wasn't sealed yet, so it made it more imperative, Stellar knew, to check everywhere and be safe. She closed the airlock doors herself as she moved along the floor, until she reached the medical bay and went inside. "If they're going to be anywhere, they'll probably be in storage in here, somewhere..." She said to herself as she walked along through the quite-advanced facility. Eventually Stellar found "Ah, they have a Morgue." Checking it over, she sighed. "They only have ten freezers. Looks like the rest are just going to have to be put on ice elsewhere." She did find human-sized storage boxes that would take the crew's bodies... with a little bit of enlargement to handle their spacesuits.

Teleporting the proper number of them to the bridge, Stellar checked over the plans of the ship she'd found and decided that one of the outer holds with an external access door would do well to hold the bodies once they were encased. Stellar made her way to the hold, finding it contained a lot of containers with pre-fabricated structures that were secured in place. "This will do." Stellar assessed, and she closed the external door and sealed it. She pressed a mana beacon in place on the floor, then teleported back to the bridge. Once there, Stellar started assembling the storage boxes and moving the suited corpses into them, placing spells inside the boxes to keep the remains frozen, no matter the temperature. Stellar found it took her about five minutes per body to secure them in the boxes and teleport them to the hold. "This will take a while, then." She said as she sent one full box to the hold with the beacon in it.

The Cutie Mark Crusaders were having fun exploring the ship as they worked on closing the airlock doors. There was so much on-board they didn't recognise... and so much they did. "Hey! I've found a room full of musical instruments!" Sweetie Belle told the others.

"Are they in any good shape?" Scootaloo asked.

"I think so." Sweetie Belle replied. "They're mostly sealed away in some kind-of hard cases, but I can see through them."

"Cool." Scootaloo replied, the smile in her voice most evident. "I think I've found the gym. It's got some really wierd equipment in it."

"Speakin' of equipment," Applebloom's voice butted in. "Ah think ah've found tha workshops. There's tons of tools an' other things in here."

"You're down near the hangars, aren't you Applebloom?" Sweetie Belle asked.

“That’s ay-firmative.” Applebloom replied, a grin in her voice.

Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo giggled as they converged on Applebloom's location. They both walked out into one of the open bays, to where they could see Applebloom standing beside a large pair of doors. "See?" Applebloom asked as they walked into the rooms. Huge toolboxes made of metal were fixed into spaces along the walls inside the rooms, and a counter with dozens of shelves behind it showed lots of other tools locked into place either on them or hanging up in clamps on back-boards showed that this was definitely the equipment store for the hangar. As the Trio walked out into the hangar, they could see a lot of the fightercraft were lined up in this bay along the side-walls in smaller bays as well as on the floor. It seems the crew had locked them all down to the floor before they vanished, as Applebloom expected. Whatever she felt about who might have owned this ship before them, she could see the professionalism they'd left behind in the way everything had been cleaned, stored and secured... even if they'd expected not to survive what had happened to them.

"You see this?" Scootaloo then said, pointing to the fighters in their bays. "There seems to be two types of these things, a big one and a little one." She pointed them out.

"Yeah, and it looks like they can join together." Sweetie Belle pointed out a number of the fighter-pairs with the smaller ones attached to the front of the bigger ones.

"Yeah. Kinda wierd, but ah guess it makes sense... somehow." Applebloom gave her opinion.

Scootaloo was up at the cockpit canopy of one of the smaller ones, looking in. "They look really fast! I bet they'd be really great to fly in."

"Maybe you could learn to fly them in time, Scoots." Sweetie Belle suggested as they walked around the fighters, heading for the front of the hangar and maintenance bays.

After five hours, Stellar was feeling tired. The bridge was empty and, after she checked, the accumulators were charged and the batteries were charging. Glad things were going as they should, she powered up the bridge section fully and called to the C.M.C. "Cadets, make your way to section A7. I'll meet you there and take you to our new quarters... for the moment."

"Rojer that, Captain." Came three replies, and Stellar smiled as she headed down the staircase, floating down along it rather than walking. Once she reached the bottom of the bridge stairs, Stellar touched down again and went through the airlock. This was the lowest section of the ship that actually still had power, the airlock doors opening and closing properly and cycling normally. She had to wait nearly ten minutes for the fillies to arrive, but then she saw them trotting up the corridor, their white suits glowing in the lights from her helmet.

After they’d gone through the lower airlock, Stellar told them “Okay, up the stairwell, and we can relax a bit.” Stellar said to the trio.

“We’re walking all the way up there?” Applebloom complained.

Stellar smiled. “No, you can turn off your PGF and float up, Applebloom. Just keep it slow and steady. If you do get ahead, wait for the rest of us at the stair-top airlock. The fewer times we have to go through it, the better.” Stellar answered her.

“All right!” Scootaloo exclaimed and headed up around the stairs at a much faster pace, flying along in the lack of gravity.

Stellar shook her head with a smile, as Sweetie Belle sighed. "It must be nice to be able to do that." She commented.

Applebloom asked "Is there any way ya can give us wings too, Stellar?"

Stellar thought for a second as she pushed off and floated up the first flight of stairs, Sweetie Belle and Applebloom following a little more slowly. "I guess I could make you sets of mechanical ones, but enabling your magic to let them work like the wings of a pegasus? That might be a little beyond my abilities at this stage." Stellar admitted.

"So... no?" Applebloom asked for confirmation as they reached the first landing, and Stellar showed them how to turn and use the walls to change their direction.

Stellar smiled at Applebloom. "Tell you what: once we get home again, then I'll see if Twilight wants to work with me on making a set of wings for you." She offered the pair. "After all, they'd be good for pegasi who've lost their wings or the use of them, too." Stellar thought on that as they headed up the second flight. "Y'know, if we submit the project for official funding with that in mind, we might just get help from other sources, too." She smiled at Applebloom.

"Sweet." Applebloom replied as Sweetie Belle grinned with her.

Once they'd made the bridge, Stellar checked the air pressure, temperature and purity, then sighed happily. "Okay, girls, it's safe to open up." And her own face-plate slid up into her helmet. The fillies unlocked and slid their helmet faceplates up, breathing in the air.

"Still smells a bit funny." Scootaloo commented.

"It's likely due to the time the bridge has been frozen. Some materials react differently to being frozen and thawed." Stellar explained. "The filters are still in good condition, so they'll clean the smell up eventually."

"Can we get outta these suits?" Applebloom asked as she looked around.

Stellar chuckled as the other pair started asking the same thing. "I should think so." She answered. Stellar told them how to retract their suits back into the helmets as her own armor retracted. Once they had taken off their helmets and stretched, Stellar started rummaging in one of her H-S pockets, bringing out containers of water and food for them all.

"Uh, Stellar..." Scootaloo started to ask.

"Go out the door to the right and it's the second door on the left." Stellar told the young filly, and all three of them raced off. Stellar chuckled as she shook her head and started taking bowls out and constructing a salad for them all. The look of relief on the fillies' faces when they returned almost had Stellar laughing out-loud, as they settled near her, ready to have something to eat that wasn't concentrate bars.

"Ya really got a lot of food stored away, don't'cha, Stellar?" Applebloom asked, as Stellar handed out the salad bowls and put more bottles of water and apple cider for them all.

"Managing food is a major part of Survival training, Applebloom." Stellar told her. "Of course, using magic makes keeping fresh food fresh a lot easier than using other methods, like dehydrating and freeze-drying food, but at least one of my H-S pockets is full of nothing but food rations. And on-board a ship like this, it is even more important to have, since you can't go and just find food like we could if we were stranded somewhere else on Equis." Stellar reminded them all. "And I made sure I had my bag full of fresh stuff before I was going to let Twilight send me anywhere with that spell of hers; whether it was the Moon or to the other side of Ponyville." Stellar grinned at the three fillies as they giggled. "After what happened the first time, I made sure I packed way more than even I felt might have been prudent. After all, Shize happens, and it happens very often when messing with prototype spells."

The three fillies nodded knowingly. "At least we didn't get covered in tree sap this time." Scootaloo commented, to gagging sounds from the others and chuckles from Stellar.

"How in all the mysteries of the Cosmos do you three keep getting covered in tree sap, every time you go within cooee of the Everfree?" Stellar asked.

"Meh." The three replied. "Just unlucky, I guess." Sweetie Belle answered.

"Although we ain't gotten covered innit fer a long while now, ever since we had ta get jobs." Applebloom added.

"How's that been working out for you three, anyway?" Stellar asked.

Applebloom smiled brightly. "Filthy Rich's been really good about lettin' me werk on tha farm when they need me there." She told Stellar. "After all, our crops do supply his store with some of its best 'merchandise', as he calls it."

Stellar nodded. "Any troubles with Diamond Tiara?"

"No, none of us have had problems with her, ever since we helped her find out what her cutie mark really meant for her." Sweetie Belle answered. "She's still a bit snarky occasionally, but it seems to disappear once she realises she's doing it."

Scootaloo nodded. "Yeah. She can still be sarcastic, but it's honest sarcasm, not nastiness." She added.

"Good to hear." Stellar said back. "How are you doing, Scoots?" She asked.

"Ditzy's okay to work with." Scootaloo replied. "A lot of Ponies think she's not playing with a full deck, but she's really smart. She's got Ponyville all divided up and laid out so we can get the deliveries done really quickly. If she could get some more pegasi to help her, she could just work the office and leave the deliveries to us... if she wanted to." Scootaloo chuckled. "Between all of us, I think she loves just getting out and meeting other Ponies."

Sweetie Belle chuckled. "I'd have to agree." She replied. "Sassy and I are getting along okay, too." Sweetie Belle told the group. "Since she doesn't have a 'vested interest' in watching over me, I can do my job without having her breathing down my neck all the time, unlike when I was trying to work under Rarity." Sweetie Belle shuddered. "Don't get me wrong; I love my older sister, but she is not the best to work for when you're her younger sister. She finds it hard to keep the distinction between work business and Family stuff... and while that's understandable, it makes it hard to concentrate on what I have to do in my job." She smiled.

"Sassy lets me do what she assigns me, and I think she trusts me enough that she's not watching me all the time now... well, at least when I'm working the counter. And thanks to your lessons, Stellar, my magic's gotten strong enough and accurate enough that I can change the banners by myself, most of the time." Sweetie grinned widely. "I think I'm no longer 'The Boss' younger sister' in Sassy's eyes. Last week, we closed the boutique over Lunch, and she took me to one of her favorite restaurants. We sat, ate and talked for our break, and she didn't even mention Rarity once, all the time we were there. I really enjoyed that." Sweetie Belle then let out a huge yawn.

"That's great, Sweetie Belle." Stellar said. "It seems you three are truly moving out from under your older sisters' presence and influence, and are starting to make your own way in the world."

"Ee-yup. An' it's thank ta you, Stellar, that we've been able to." Applebloom then said.

"Yeah!" Scootaloo agreed. "If it wasn't for you helping us to get our own place, we might still be stuck in our ruts and not getting anywhere."

"It was my pleasure to help, Girls." Stellar replied. "There comes a time when everypony needs to get out on their own and start living their life the way they want to, and I could see that you three were more than ready to do so, almost over-ready. So I just helped you get going." She gave them a wink. "You've proven me right with what you've done and how well you've done it." As Stellar saw Applebloom give a huge yawn of her own when she'd finished writing, Stellar smiled softly. "Now, I think it's time you three stretched out and got some sleep." She pulled a pair of large, inflatable mattresses from one of her H-S pockets and set them up for the trio. Sweetie Belle and Applebloom crawled onto one of them, while Scootaloo settled onto the other one. Stellar turned the lights down as the trio settled, then moved to the Captain's chair as she said "Good Night." In a soft voice.

"Good night." Was the reply from all three fillies, and Stellar watched over them as they fell asleep very quickly. It had been a big day for all three young ponies, and they were more exhausted than they realised. Well fed and knowing they were safe with Stellar watching over them, they slept very soundly.

Author's Notes:

Here's Chapter Two!

Chapter Three is still undergoing second-stage perusal by my proof-readers and might not be available for a while if they head off on Christmas Holidays before they finish. They've promised not to, but sometimes things happen, and they won't Pinkie-Promise me, which makes me very suspicious.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this, and it doesn't keep you up at night, waiting for the next chapter... at least more than an hour.