Spike and Daring were glad to be back in Fetish, and especially glad to be back in their residence. The entire train ride back the staff of the train were fawning over Lilac, for various reasons that related to either her cuteness or unique physical appearance. Of course, once Twilight and her parents heard about her, they couldn’t schedule a ride down fast enough, once they finally did get a train scheduled for the visit Lilac was just barely a month old.

The visit was pretty much like when the small family was in Canterlot or the Crystal Empire. With Velvet just wanting to play with infant mostly, Twilight had a similar response as well. Also during the visit, Daring and Twilight talked about magic tutoring once the filly was a bit older. The whole town had a similar response when Daring officially introduced everyone to her.

The train they had caught back home was so late that almost nopony was up, and those that were didn’t noticed the return of two of the community’s more notable figures. Lilac was thankfully sleeping soundly in her travel carrier, which had been provided as a Hearth’s Warming gift to the couple by Luna. When they arrived, Spike was the one wearing the carrier.

Spike took her to his shop pretty early on; he wanted to see what Lilac’s thoughts on rock candy were. Her teeth had yet to get strong enough to make an impact on gems, same with her jaws, but her bite strength was noticeably higher than a pony of similar age. Once he had her in the shop, Spike gave her one of the fossil candies and watched as she just devoured the thing. He followed this up with a small fossil candy collection, which Lilac also gulped down in short order.

Lilac still required regular feedings of her mother’s milk; her teeth were not quite at the point they would cause Daring noticeable discomfort just yet. That was likely to change when she started actually teething. Dragon teething was surprisingly similar to pony teething, with both having their first few days or so. But in the case of Lilac, all her teeth that grew in were very dull and mostly akin to a pony’s while having an enhanced strength to them that was more in line with the structure of dragon’s teeth. Due to a lack of sharp teeth by which to break gemstones apart, Lilac had instinctively created a method that took her dragon-like claws into account to assist her dull teeth that were not yet capable of breaking intact gems but could still easily break apart pieces ripped from gems.

Thanks to her dull teeth the damage she could inflict on her mother was significantly reduced, but her surprisingly strong jaw muscles almost turned that fact into a moot point. Ponies would typically drop begin dropping their baby teeth as newer and stronger teeth developed between the ages of four and five years, usually at the time commonly referred to as four and a half, but dragon’s tended to develop newer more matured teeth at around just a year and a half.

The major difference being these newer teeth were actually a stage between baby teeth and adult teeth often called “child teeth” and many different dragons were prone to go through several of these sorts of teeth every few months up to age ten, in some rarer cases this would actually occur until they were seven, which is when their “adolescent” teeth grew in, these would typically stick around until their late teens before being dropped and their genuine adult teeth grew in. Spike had learned all of this from Ember and the other dragons that frequented Equestria for peaceful reasons.

Regardless they were just happy to be back home. It seemed those days in Canterlot and the Crystal Empire, coupled with the travel, had led to Lilac being a bit more accommodating for a bit. The first week back the young filly hardly made any noise, allowing her parents to get some much-needed rest. By the time she a full-month-old she had seemingly outgrown her bursts of noise.

Unsurprisingly, Daring was bringing the filly to church during her sermons, not that any of the attendees minded too much. Lilac become a sort of unofficial mascot for nearly every business in the town, mostly Mystique Elegance and Dragon’s Sanctum. It was unsurprising really, Spike was her father and Stellar Weave got more chances to work on baby clothes. Also, both had a tendency to dote and spoil her a bit.

Stellar Weave actually started keeping a small stock of rock candies of various kinds in her shop as treats for Lilac and Spike probably did more playing with his daughter at the shop than actually work, not that anyone minded either case. To almost everyone, just seeing the hybrid foal was a treat.

That all said, they did run into some minor problems when word about Lilac got out around Equestria. There were nineteen cases of attempted ponynapping of her and Daring, an additional twenty pertaining to just Lilac, and several dozen new applications by various researchers in sociology and/or genetics applying to come and visit the town. Thankfully the security measures for the town were working like they should and guards got something to do, but it didn’t mean they were happy about it. The guards, amusingly enough, had gotten so used to seeing ponies in revealing attire that they were actually more suspicious of ponies with more on than less, the excuses they gave were claimed security related but that didn’t seem to be the whole reason.

Then there were the increased attempts for visits by Twilight, Rarity, Cadance, Luna over the following months leading up to spring to just spend more time with Lilac, all with similar yet different excuses why. Shining, thankfully, was able to thwart his wife’s attempts at increased visits. Pinkie, surprisingly, was acting as a voice of reason along with Applejack to diminish Twilight’s attempts, with the two mares, and Rainbow, actually having to physically restrain the attempts at visits by Twilight and Rarity. Celestia had no such compunctions; instead, her reasoning for suppressing her sister’s visits had more to do with her desire to be the fantastic grandmother she thought she could be, which happened to include restraining and thwarting her sister’s travel attempts.

There were times Luna tried to hide her attempts at visits by booking trains to various other locations in Equestria, Celestia was so experienced with having to dealing with similar sorts of ruses she was able to spot those her sister almost immediately. In some cases playing her own little jokes on Luna in the process, like issuing a declaration her sister is to only ride two trains over the course of a month and all trains headed to the Crystal Empire that find her as passenger, especially a disguised one, were to get confirmation of travel from Cadance and one other princess that was not Luna, which usually meant Celestia or Twilight.

Spring was fast approaching and Daring was working on trying to coordinate Winter Wrap Up, the whole snowfall for the town was managed by the town’s resident pegasi. Due to the presently sensitive nature of the project they didn’t have a dedicated weather team, this was likely to change when the community became officially opened to the public.

Twilight’s parents kept wanting to come back for visits to see Lilac, which meant they were more than happy the community would be open to the public soon since their first and only visit was a family perk that they couldn’t cash in more than once. Lilac was seemingly oblivious to all the activities surrounding her; she was barely aware of the attention she did seem to notice. All she wanted to do was spend time with her parents, nothing more.

Author's Notes:

So they’re all back home. Another time skip with the next chapter, be prepared for a few more of those in coming chapters. I have the next few chapters written up, just need to run them through Grammarly and they’ll be good to go. I’m actually working on the final chapter right now, I’m hoping it will prove to be a suitable cap to this story.