"Are you ready?" Dream Thunder asked us.

I was glad she spoke Equish (her native tongue after all) so I didn't have to translate Sergeant Broad Strokes when she replied with a grim. "Certainly."

Her power hit us where we stood, and I found myself in a waking dream. Remembering last time, I focused on myself and Dream. She looked solid—far more solid than I felt. "This is the Dreaming?"

"Well, you can talk. That's a start. Some of your friends aren't doing so well. This is the Dreaming, or Dreamtime, but unlike last time we don't have any training wheels. If you forget who you are in here, you will fall apart. Like her." Dream Thunder lifted out a wing and pointed behind me.

Bottle Rocket flickered, her form shifting from the young pegasus she should be to an older pony with their feathers all missing from their wings, then to a foal that can't fly yet. She didn't seem to be enjoying the situation. Others were undergoing similar things, and one of the stallions had somehow gotten himself covered in snakes.

Dream Thunder stretched her wings out and gave a loud shriek. "They won't be able to help. I sent them back to the real world."

"This is a disconcerting place. What exactly is it?" Sergeant Broad Strokes asked.

"This—" Dream said as she turned in a circle, "—is the Dreaming! This is the place dreams exist when they're outside the safe confines of your head. It's possibility and chance with only one thing that can control it—you."

There was four of us. Sergeant Broad Strokes, Sweetie Drops, an earth pony named Brace, and me. That the others were all earth ponies didn't surprise me—they always seemed more grounded. What did worry me was their ability to be here was less based around their ability to imagine themselves and more about them just knowing themselves.

Okay, Lyra, time to be a little gentle about this. "Maybe you should give us something to test our, uh, faculties?" I managed not to say, Because I think some of you are faking it.

"Good thinking. A lot of bat ponies can simply keep themselves together in the Dreaming, but few can act. I want you to walk over to that bucket over there and pull out a mango." Dream Thunder gestured behind her, though there wasn't a bucket where she pointed.

How real would a bucket be if I focused on one? Could I make it exist for all of us? Probably not, if Dream thought the way I did. I walked past her, focusing on an old red plastic bucket that was full of mangoes. When I was halfway to the spot she'd pointed out, I could kinda see an outline of it. By the time I reached it, a bucket stood there. Inside, however, was just one mango.

Using my magic, I made a hand and lifted out the mango. "This one good enough?" I asked.

"I can't see a bucket," Sergeant Broad Strokes said, but she started walking forward anyway. By the time she reached me, I'd watched her eyes widen and then a satisfied smirk spread over her mouth. "Clever. I got one too."

Sweetie locked her eyes on me and walked over. Not for a second did she even look at the bucket, but when she lifted her hoof into view, she held a mango. "This is just like picturing spells draining. If I think about it enough, it happens."

Brace walked over and put their hoof through the bucket. They lifted their head up and sighed. "Yeah, yeah. I don't got this. Sorry, sergeant."

"This won't reflect badly on you, Brace. Dream Thunder, can you send him out?" Sergeant Broad Strokes gestured to Brace, and it didn't even seem like Dream did anything and Brace was gone. "Alright. What do you need us to do?"

"I'll try to shove ponies out of the Dreaming as I find them, but that's the problem—I need to spend almost all my focus on having this cover the whole town. The others will be fighting the Yara-ma-yha-who, which leaves you three to help me stop it from hurting anypony." Dream ruffled her wings a little as six figures appeared behind her.

The bat ponies all appeared much larger than they did in real life. Their wings ended in claws at each fingertip and their mouths—when they smiled at us—were full of fangs. One bat in particular had grime and muck slowly sloughing off her body and it didn't take me much detective work to realize Filthy Dreams' name had nothing to do with sex.

"We're ready to hunt, Dream, when you are." Phil looked even more imposing as she spoke—fangs seemed to appear and poke out of her mouth from all angles.

A tree seemed to coalesce out of the Dreaming around us, and I saw all the bat ponies grow restless at the sight of it. Dream Thunder, however, jumped up and pumped her wings until she reached the lower branches of what was definitely a mango tree.

When Dream spread her wings, they seemed to grow bigger and bigger, then they stretched out and I had the impression that she wrapped the town in them. "HUNT!"

Six voices rose into a screech of excitement, and the bat ponies took to their wings and rushed into the town that'd been dragged into the Dreaming. They spread out and were gone from sight among the houses.

"I—I kept most of them out of the dreaming, Lyra. Find the rest before it finds them," Dream Thunder said, her voice strained.

"You heard her, Privates, let's move out together. If we find that thing, we fall back as we're told and scream all the time we do it so the bats know where we are. By the numbers. Clear the street!" That said, Sergeant Broad Strokes led us both forward at a canter.

The buildings of Ponyville were all there, but a little odd. Sometimes it looked like bits of them were broken, or windows shattered, but then they'd twist back into shape. Some houses even seemed to flicker, giving insight into what was happening. Renovations and repaired damage.

It was the houses' memories of their own being.

"Hello? What's going on? I'm not sure this should be—Oh! Guardponies!"

We approached the gray pegasus who hailed us. She looked a little bewildered, but what had my full attention was her eyes—one pointed up, the other was rolling down and to the left.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Sergeant Broad Strokes said, "Please allow us to escort you to the edge of town and out of this military exercise." As our sergeant spoke, armor sprouted on the mare and soon covered her in what would otherwise be the shiny heavy-plate the Royal Guard wore.

"Oh goodness! Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

I focused my attention back to Dream Thunder, trying to be gentle as I told her, 'We have a pony here, can you—' The gray mare disappeared. 'You're the best.'

One after another we found stray citizens of the town and I called to Dream, but it wasn't until we'd swept all the way to the other side of Ponyville that we heard the fight.

There was loud snarling and angry hissing, accompanied by the most angry bat screeches I'd ever heard. If we kept up our current path, we'd plow right into where the fight was! "Sergeant, we're—"

"You can both head back." Sergeant Broad Strokes' tone was clear, she wasn't going to stop. "But I'm going to find out if they need help."

I looked over at Sweetie, but she looked about as stupid as I felt in the matter. We chased our seargeant into the open and just around a corner. We were just in time to duck as a huge red demon swung a tree through the air where our heads were.

The thing had a swollen belly and its skin hung loose in great folds, but its long arms had clawed hands, and its eyes burned with intelligence. That's when I noticed the pony huddled between its legs.

Small—looking like a foal—they held their hooves over their face and shook in fear. Their bright red coat didn't look natural among ponies, but matched the demon's skin perfectly.

For just a heartbeat a slathering, feral monster landed beside me, then Phil charged back in. 'If you can hear this, and Dream thinks you can, we need to move the Yara-ma-yha-who away from their victim. If you can get them away, we can kill it.'

The words rushed into my head with the force of a freight train. I shook under the force of them, but knew them for truth. "They're going to distract it. We need to get the foal away so they can fight it properly."

"Sounds good to me." Sergeant Broad Strokes didn't slow as she led us down another side street and curved us around to come toward the monster from behind. "Tell them we're ready to strike."

'We're ready,' I thought frantically at Phil.

The roar from the demon was enough of a signal. The very world around us shook as it stomped after the bats. We rounded the cornet to see it had barely moved, but it had its back to us.

Magic might not work how I'd like it to in the Dreaming, but I could certainly imagine all three of us wearing long, thick, and stripy socks that muffled the sound of our charge.

Neither the sergeant nor Sweetie questioned the socks, which was just as well as we reached the colt without the monster turning on us. The bat ponies were relentless and seemed driven to fury. Phil took blow after blow from the heavy claws of the Yara-ma-yha-who, but all it managed to do each time was sluice off a mass of the gunk that covered her.

As soon as I grabbed the foal with my magic, the little red colt screamed. "What are you doing?! I deserve this! This is what I need! You can't take me away now! I should—"

Sweetie conked the foal on the head as we wheeled aside and headed down another side street. The socks didn't matter now, I could feel the demon reacting to our taking its meal.

'We've got the foal it was feeding on!' No sooner had I thought the words at whoever would listen than we crashed out of the dream and into a wall. Normally, a pony (even a stacked Guardpony) wouldn't leave much of an impact on a wall, but three ponies in full armor running at a gallop tend to go through obstacles rather than into them.

That is how we managed to meet the gray pegasus again as she stared at us while rubbing her eyes with her wings. "That dream was real?!" Her wings shot up in surprise. "Who's your friend?"

Our friend was snarling and furious. He tried to bite and stomp at me while I held him in the air with my magic. A pegasus himself, I tried to ignore the angry things he was shouting, and wound up using a barrier spell to seal him up and keep him from upsetting the pegasus mare.

"Sorry, ma'am. Just, uh, passing through I guess. Sergeant?" I asked.

Sergeant Broad Strokes had been leading our charge, and had subsequently taken the brunt of the charge through the wall of the nice pegasus' home. "We'll arrange for repairs. Sorry, ma'am, but this was important Guard business by order of Princess Celestia."

A small muted-pink unicorn filly stepped down the stairs from the first floor and rubbed at one eye with a hoof. "Mommy? What's happened? Why's there a hole in the wall? Who are those ponies?"

"Put the kettle on, Dinky, we have visitors. There's nothing a hot cup of tea or coffee can't fix." The poise of the gray pegasus was impossible. She'd been wrestled out of a crazy dream, had three armored ponies crash through her house, and had just calmly asked her daughter to make us a hot drink.

"Sorry, ma'am, but we really can't stay. Our friends are still fighting the monster that took up residence here." Sergeant Broad Strokes turned to look at me. "You still have them?"

Levitating the bubble up, I showed her the red pegasus colt inside who looked at least twice as furious with his predicament as before. "I can let the sound through if you—?"

"That will not be necessary, Private. Clearly he's under some kind of enchantment from the—" Sergeant Broad Strokes cut short her words when noticed the gray pegasus was still watching us with her filly beside her. "We'll have somepony come around first thing in the morning to see about repairing this."

"You know what that means, Dinky?"

"What, Momma?"

"We have to bake muffins! If there's going to be somepony visiting, they'll surely be hungry. Let's make some up now to be sure we get the mix right."

We retreated from the house out the front door and headed to the edge of town where the rest of our camp was. Of all the bat ponies, only Dream Thunder was present. Just as we reached them, the bat ponies stepped out of literal thin air.

Phil was first, then the others, came back to the real world and revealed burns and cuts all over them, but on the whole they looked more excited than hurt. "We got the bastard," Phil said in Thestralian. "Great work getting that one out. He'll be mad as a hatter for a while."

I translated for the sergeant and breathed a sigh of relief. "How'd the fight go?" I asked Phil.

"Rough. It had a strong sense of self, and it knew a lot of tricks. Pain in the ass, honestly, but we've nailed bigger and nastier things. That was pretty good work in there. Never seen a unicorn do their thing like that in the Dreamtime." Phil Stretched out his wings to show one of them had a slash in the membrane. "Don't mind that, it'll heal in no time with a few dreams."

By the time I'd translated that for Sergeant Broad Strokes, Dream Thunder was rousing from her trance. She looked like she'd worked the hardest of all of us. "Nice work, everypony. Those Yara-ma-yha-who are something we could definitely live without, but no matter how many we wipe out, they come back. Good work getting the innocents out—" she turned to the other bat ponies, "—and great work keeping it distracted while they did."

"It was tough keeping that dreaming stuff in place?" Sergeant Broad Strokes asked.

"Here? Really hard. And I had to keep it contained while letting the actual ponies slip out. But it's done, and now I can have a rest." Stretching her wings, Dream Thunder grinned half-heartedly.

I glanced at the sergeant and used my hoof to tap one of the two emergency energy drinks I had on me, and got a nod from her. "Dream, try one of these if you want to be able to stay awake. Should work wonders on your energy levels."

"After all that? Sure. What's in it?" Dream Thunder took the little bottle from me and popped the end open.

As she guzzled the drink down, I described it. "Sugar and caffeine mostly, some salt and flavoring for good measure. Pretty much liquid energy to ponies." When she didn't stop, I reached out with my magic to take the empty bottle. That's when I remembered I was supposed to be holding somepony in a sphere. "Crap."

"Where'd you take it you idiots?! It was scared and needed looking after!" All eyes turned to the red colt—all except Sergeant Broad Strokes.

I started to reach out for him, but Dream Thunder stepped past me and passed me the empty bottle. "Let me show you what happened and you can make up your own mind. What's your name?"

"I—" All the confidence seemed to drain from him and he looked like he started to tremble. Dream moved faster than all of us, and had her wing around him. "I can't remember." His voice sounded surprised. "What happened?"

"It found you a few days ago. Everything before that will be hazy to you. You can't remember your name, so it was probably only a day from finishing you off." Dream sat down and used her wing to guide the colt to sit beside her. "You understand what I'm saying?"

"It was really hurting me?"

Dream nodded to him. "In another day or two the last of you would have been gone, and all that would have been left was another of it."

When he leaned closer to Dream, I decided it was probably for the best that I'd screwed up. When I turned from the pair, it was to see Sergeant Broad Strokes right in my face. "S-Sorry, sir."

"You've softened up a little, Lyra. I'd suggest working on your focus in your spare time—I'm sure you could ask one of your teachers for help with that," Sergeant Broad Strokes said. "Don't sweat it, Lyra, you helped get the job done."

"So what happens now?"

"Now we escort our friends back to Canterlot, we ensure the colt gets the attention he needs to recover, and then we find somewhere to share a drink. We helped find and stop a monster before it killed a pony—that's a successful mission, Lyra."

Sweetie, Sergeant Broad Strokes, and I slept while the bats and other four members of the Guard kept watch. I remember drifting off to sleep to the sound of Dream Thunder's voice reassuring the colt.

When dawn broke, the sun prized my eyelids open and spike bright light into my eyes at a time that was honestly too soon after the previous night's activities. I yawned, sat up, looked around at the cozy camp around us, and realized that the bats were all looking just about dead on their hooves.

"Lyra," Sergeant Broad Strokes' voice startled me out of what remained of my morning stupor, "I want you to head into town with Private Sweetie Drops and see what you can find out about who Little Red is, and help patch up any homes that might have been damaged. You are to remain here until relief arrives. If that takes more than a day, I want you to contact the mayor about finding somewhere to spend a few nights. Until this is over, you're on active duty still."

"Sir!" Sweetie and I both said at the same time.

We both donned our armor after checking over each piece. The rest of the Guard were in the process of cracking open an energy shot each, and passing a spare to each of the bat ponies. While they all prepared to head to the train station to take a shorter ride back to Canterlot, we headed toward the town for a different purpose.

"We should probably see that mare first. I could probably do something about covering her wall for the short term." I rolled my muscles and stretched as we trotted—the truth was I wanted a good run, but we had a duty to perform first.

Sweetie, however, surprised me by kissing my cheek. "We're going to get married." She kissed me again, and I kissed her back.

"You should see my dress. I didn't—You know my hangups about it, but seeing you again makes me want to wear it, Bon Bon."

Sweetie waved a hoof at me. "Oh no, Lyra Heartstrings, you are not going to use my Guard nickname as a term of endearment. That's not—"

I leaned over and nibbled her nearest ear and whispered the cute name to her again, "Bon Bon."

"None of that. We're on duty, remember?" We approached the front door of the gray pegasus' home while Sweetie reminded me, and I had a moment to reflect on her kisses being fine. Favoritism.

Sweetie lifted her hoof and carefully knocked, not wanting to put another hole in the mare's home.

When the door opened, the tiny unicorn from the previous night looked up at us and started bouncing with excitement. "Mommy! Mommy! The Guardponies are back! Will they be making more holes?"

The unflappable pegasus opened the door further and smiled. Her eyes were still odd, one looking up and left, the other down and right, but she seemed perfectly capable of seeing us. "Oh! You're going to be helping with the new ventilation system?"

Of all the things I'd expected, an amazingly put together pun was not one of them. I smiled, I snorted, and I even giggled. "Lyra Heartstrings, E.U.P. Guard," I said, and thrust forward one hoof.

"Derpy Hooves, Resident." The name surprised me in the sheer poninicity of it. She clopped a hoof against mine only a moment before the filly did.

"Dinky Hooves, Filly!"

I snapped a sharp salute to Dinky. "A pleasure to meet you both. My completely platonic and not at all my fiancee partner here is Private Bon Bon. We are indeed here to see what we can do about your wall, and wanted to ask a few questions."

Derpy's wings shot up and she looked between us. "You're engaged?! We need more muffins!" She flapped her wings in a display of delight that would leave any bat pony jealous, then stepped back and gestured us inside. "Like I said last night, I made a bunch of muffins for you. Where's the other nice mare?"

"Sergeant Broad Strokes—" it hit me how firmly her full name and title were embedded in my head, whenever I thought of her, her full rank and name always leapt to the fore, "—is escorting the rest of our squad back to Canterlot. She told us to make what reparations we can and find out who the missing colt was."

"Missing colt?" Derpy looked at me intently, or at least she looked to my right shoulder and left ear-tip intently. "The only pony missing is Short Fuse, but he wasn't a foal. Is he alright? Did you find him?"

Sweetie came to the rescue. "Yeah. We found a male pony, though he has amnesia. Our squad escorted the pony to Canterlot, where he'll be seen safely back to health." She'd been careful to avoid mentioning him looking like a colt.

"Phew! That's good to hear. You'll want to tell Mayor Mare. He kept to himself mostly, but we had a pegasus meeting for the upcoming winter snowfall event, and he didn't make it. Here, try these." Derpy used her wing to hold a basket out to us that was stacked high with still-steaming muffins.

"Thanks." I took one with my magic and bit into it. Instantly, I was transported to a different town—one named Bliss. The muffin was still warm and fluffy, and reminded me of all the delicious things you could have for breakfast but never did because an apple or porridge was better for you.

When I finally came down from my muffin-high, I noticed that beside me, Sweetie was still enjoying hers. "These are amazing, Derpy. Are you a baker?" I asked.

"I used to be. It's not really my talent, but just a job I was good at. I do a lot of little jobs like that, at the moment I spend all my time taking care of a little filly." Derpy leaned down and kissed Dinky between the ears. The sight of mother and daughter in that moment made the part of me that wanted to wear a dress for our wedding swell. "Do you do anything apart from demolition?"

This time I was more free to bark a laugh at her gag. "When I'm not charging through houses and eating everypony's muffins, I'm still at school in Canterlot. I go to Princess Celestia's school."

Dinky stared up at me with awe in her eyes. "Y-You go to Princess Celestia's school? Are you in any of her classes?"

"I am! She's really nice, and she has a way of teaching that just leaves your mind buzzing for more." There was something about the filly that sparked the idea of seeing if I could get her into Celestia's school too. She was too young now, but in a few more years she might have what it takes.

I didn't even know how much it cost to send a foal to Celestia's school, though by the slight worry that creased the corners of Derpy's mouth, I'd say it was normally beyond common ponies. Well, I'd just have to talk to Princess Celestia about it.

"These muffins are so good! Do you think you could share the recipe?" Sweetie asked.

Derpy ruffled her wings in obvious excitement. "Only if you share a recipe with me, too!"

Seemingly on the verge of entering full cooking mode, Sweetie deflated a little and let out a sigh. "We'd probably best go see the mayor first. Will you be home later today, Derpy?"

"Oh, right. Uh, I'll probably have to get something to fill the hole in the wall, then I have to go to work at the post office. Dinky will be at school all day." Derpy kept turning to look at the hole in the wall. "So, uh, maybe later tonight?"

"Building and repairs aren't normally my thing, but I bet I could do something to at least seal your house up. I mean, a force-field would be most unicorns' go-to spell for filling a hole, but I don't want to be a literal battery charging your house until the hole is mended, so I need to work with other stuff." As I spoke, I walked toward the hole and examined the damage we'd caused when we hit it. "Did you have any thoughts as to what you might want? Maybe a nice big tree growing here? I could do a tree easily enough."

Dinky was the first to join me, munching on a muffin as she looked at the hole through the amazing filter that only children had. "A castle! A hoooooge castle! I can be Princess Dinky!"

I looked back at Derpy, who looked a mixture of terrified and excited. "Well, you have a back yard here. What about if I build you a little castle, and use the stone to form the back wall of your house?" Now mother and daughter just looked excited—though the former also looked relieved.

"Bon Bon?" I looked over at Sweetie and caught the gleam in her eyes for my use of her nickname. "How far down's some stone?"

Sweetie looked surprised at my question, then the light came on and she walked over to the hole. I could almost feel the hardness of stone and earth about her as she used her talents. Seeing the way she worked a more subtle magic than anything a unicorn would do, I wondered if there was a research paper I could write on that.

Then it hit me how much of a nerd my time in Princess Celestia's classes had made me, but the idea of increasing awareness and knowledge was something that appealed to me.

"About three mareters down." When I raised my eyebrow at her precise estimation, Sweetie stuck her tongue out at me. "It was something I was good at guessing, and I've been practicing."

What had surprised me more than her guesstimate was her use of the pony version of metric. Most ponies just used pony-lengths and hooves as distance measurements, but industry had come up with its own measurements, and like everything in Equestria it was eerily similar to what I'd dealt with back on Earth.

So, rather than having to wing it and use my magic to dig around for some stone, I tried targeting a rock-growth spell three mareters down, as she'd said. My spell fizzled, but when I recast it at four mareters, it hit pay dirt—or pay rock.

"Stand back. I need to get this just right." I walked through the hole and stood outside, and grew the rock upward. When the soil started to bulge, I had to work another spell to displace that, and soon enough the stone underlying the town reached the surface in this one little spot. "Okay, now to do the tricky bit."

Sculpting stone was more Twinkeshine's thing, but I knew enough of the spells involved to begin building a cool little castle out of it. While I worked to raise the parapets and wall of the little structure, I also melded it to the back wall of Derpy's house.

Dinky had apparently rushed outside through the back door and stood beside me as the two-mareter tall castle took its final shape. The most draining part about doing the work had been the precision—I didn't want to raise the stone and upset the footings of the houses around us, so it had needed a careful hoof to bring it all together.

When I was done, I'd used far more of my reserves than I should have (at least than Twinkleshine would have), but I'd built a credible castle in the back yard immediately behind Derpy and Dinky's house, that also happened to cover the hole in the wall. "Now the tricky bit. You want to come inside and see that, Dinky?"

"Can I watch?!" Dinky's head swung between looking at the castle and looking at me repeatedly.

"Of course you can. Did you start school this year?" I headed to the back door with Dinky at my side, mostly so she could lead the way.

Dinky pronked a few times in obvious excitement. "I did! It's a little scary with all the big foals there, but there's some nice ponies, and Miss Cheerilee is really, really nice!"

We walked inside together to find Sweetie and Derpy completely ignoring the hole and chatting together about recipes together. I turned to the hole and considered my options. "What do you think, foremare Dinky? An arched fake fireplace with a mantle on it?" As I spoke, I turned to look at Derpy to see if she'd heard—she had, her eyes flicked to me and she nodded just a little.

"That'd be great! What would it look like?" Looking up at me, Dinky sounded ecstatic.

The easiest way was to show her. I built up a weak forcefield and shaped it into what I was planning, with a convenient height mantle, and stolen wood from the sides used to pack in at the top. "How's this?"

Peering at it critically, Dinky shook her head. "It's too high, even for Momma. What about a bookshelf instead? Mom always says we need another one for all the important things I'll get from school."

Derpy and Sweetie's conversation had gone quiet and both were watching us. I made a point of holding my hoof up to my chin and rubbing it—while sneaking another look at Derpy. "Well, I—" When Derpy started nodding, I changed tack with my reply. "I think that'll be perfect. Okay, do you know how to make magic sparks?"

"I do!"

"Okay, when I say so, I want you to make the biggest sparks you can. Okay?" My magic was already leeching back up quickly after the first expenditure, but this would mean there wouldn't need to be any repairs here, and if that used about half my magic reserves, well, they'd come back.

The filly nodded a lot.

Dispelling the fireplace, I focused on a design for a fancy stone bookcase and started building it. Growing the stone out from the castle was the easy bit, keeping it from doing its own thing wasn't. It was coming along well with the stone-shaping spell using the same amount of magic to operate as before, but more finesse this time.

When I was almost done and the stone was still growing, I shouted, "Now!"

Dinky lived up to her promise. Sparks sprayed from her horn and showered over the floor, wall, us, and the bookcase—the latter was the important bit. I pushed more magic behind the sparks, imbuing them with enough magical burn to stain and scorch the stone with their colors as it finished growing.

When it was done, Dinky stopped her sparking and stared up at the bookshelf. "Gosh!"

Derpy rushed over and picked up her filly in her wings and hugged her close while staring at the bookshelf. "Look, Dinky! Look what you made!"

I didn't begrudge lumping the praise on her daughter, not one bit. After everything that'd happened to me back on Earth, living as a pony agreed with me in ways that made me feel better about myself. Still, I wore a big grin on my face even after we left, found the mayor of the town, and talked to her about what had happened.

Everypony in town was just as nice as Derpy and Dinky. It almost felt like they were welcoming us, and I guess the uniforms helped with that. The mayor called a town meeting for the evening, and we had to explain what had happened and how Short Fuse was going to be okay.

So I do this "Ask X" thing. X can be any pony within the story. You can ask them anything and they will definitely, hopefully reply. Keep the questions appropriate to the age-rating of the stories, and they will answer the best question in the author notes of the next chapter. The more votes a comment has the more likely I will get it to the right pony to answer. Try to keep it to one question per post! They will pick one question per chapter.

Support me on Patreon or fuel my writing on Ko-Fi!

Join me on Discord. Please use your FimFic name as an alias. Warning, said chat may contain NSFW material and should be considered adult in nature.

Awesome ponies who are already helping to keep me in keyboards and rum:
A.P.O.N.I.
Canary in the Coal Mine
Daremo
Dio-Drogynous
KFS Crimson
Sirion123
Wind of the Skies

And special thanks to the following, for careful eyes and friendly words:
Lab