Princess Equestria strode forth from her castle gates, ready to begin her quest to recover the first fragment of the Friendship Chalice. (It is a good thing for her that she likes puzzles and long rambling stories that don't seem to go anywhere.) She paused, her polychromatic mane and tail fluttering and waving in the utterly still air as she considered her next move.

She needed a way to locate the dispersed fragments of the Chalice and she knew that she'd better find something for herself quickly before she got saddled with some spunky sidekick or stupid pet that wouldn't shut up. She cantered, then loped down the canted slope that led to the city of Canterlope, capital of Horsolia. As she trotted past street vendors, mendacious mendicants and carts full of road apples, a single store caught her eye.

She entered and met an elderly sky-blue unicorn pony with a compass rose for a doofus-mark. He bowed. "I am Nagellan. Welcome to Compassion, Your Highness, where directional instruments are our only—"

Equestria trotted past him and started rooting through the bargain bin, turning up old FillyScout compasses, demagnetized needles and blunted arrows. "You got any hex-phase polyaxial positioning systems with thaumatic sensitivity in the range of 500-900 milliabras?"

"Only quad-phase, I fear—oh, Your Highness! I beg of you, please don't squeeze the Garmin!"

"Not good enough," she said. "What else'ya got?" She inspected a Tom-Tom mounted on the wall.

"We just use that to drum up extra business," said Nagellan, "but I do have this handy disastrolabe, which allows you to navigate by stars that don't even exist..."

"And...?" Her voice chilled the room like a window-mounted heat pump.

"And... this Universal Detector." He turned it on and it started beeping and flashing immediately, having successfully detected the universe.

After some whickering and dickering, it was agreed that Nagellan was completely useless and Equestria stormed out of the shop in a foul mood, carrying a cheap piece of cardboard with a plastic arrow stuck in it. Her horn glowed as she cast a spell upon the spinner, adjuring it to always point to the next-closest plot element. Tossing the device in the air, she gave it a brisk spin with her horn.

The fat red pointer made a silly dopplered raspberry noise as it spun. It finally rattled to a stop, indicating the Moon! Princess Equestria shat herself again without even bothering to think about it. (Unicorn ponies enchant the floors and cobblestones to magically absorb their feces. Rich ponies hang little jeweled buckets from their tails. Poor ponies spread hay on the floor. Earth ponies offer to shovel the used hay out of the houses of poor ponies, and then they go and spread it on their strawberries. Pegasi just laugh at everyone else.)

The Princess sighed. This was going to be a short day. She shouted down the sun, watching it bounce off the sky's rim and over the horizon, and up popped the moon, location of the next fragment of the Friendship Chalice... and home to her eternal nemesis.

Princess Equestria spread her magnificent pinions and flew off into the starry sky. She knew she'd have nothing to fly against when she got outside the atmosphere, but she just figured she'd wing it.

Also, because she's supposed to find a piece of the Chalice in every chapter, she felt something tickling her nose and she sneezed and a chunk of golden stuff flew out and what do you know it was a piece of the Friendship Chalice that had gotten stuck in her nose after it burst in her face when she was drinking out of it! And she laughed.