Inverno had spent hours searching the rail yards with no success. Going up and down the lines of rails opening box cars, knocking those that have been locked in hopes to find at least one of them. However, it became clear that where ever they were, the cars that held them were most likely been sent out of the Crystal Empire.

“Where could they have gone?” He wondered aloud. “I could have sworn that these trains don’t move these that often. Did… Did somepony throw out the stuff out? No, I would have found them by now. So that must mean that they were all taken out of the Empire. But to where?” Inverno rested by one of the wheels of the cars in which he leaned on. “Great, now I need to get help.”

Looking over to the crystal tower of the palace, he sighed. “I really hope they won’t be mad at me.”

And so, Inverno walked back, his head bowed low as he made his way back to the palace. Through the front doors and up the stairs, down hallways and past rooms, he went directly towards the throne room in which his parents were holding court. Annoyingly there was a line of petitioners waiting to get in. With a groan, he got in the back of the line, getting more anxious about the thought of if his ritual was successful.

‘They must be really scared by now.’ He thought, ‘I’ve just brought the greatest composers of all time and they’re stuck in boxes and heading off to someplace they’ve probably never been to before. They must be so confused, and scared, and… What did Papa’s warning about the ritual say? That they might have some kind of powers as a side effect? What exactly does that mean? If they get angry they might… break something… or someone…?’

After taking a deep breath to calm himself, his thoughts focused elsewhere. ‘Even if they didn’t, you have brought back composers centuries ago and are now lost. You need help finding them. And the only ones that could help are mom and dad. Surely, they’ve done weird things like this before. Just go in and tell that that you’ve messed up, that you need help. But they would get mad, wouldn’t they? It’s not like this resurrection spell has been used often, right? Oh, what am I saying? Of course, they’re going to get mad! I just did some forbidden magic behind their backs, that did… I don’t know what – and somepony decided to send them out to the South. Into Equestria that could do who knows what kind of damage. How am I going to tell-’

“Hey, kid?” a guard’s voice snapped him out of his thoughts. “Are you here to see your parents or something?”

“Uh…” Inverno hesitated before nodding. “It’s an emergency.”

Nodding, the guard opened the crystal doors for him where his parents were on the other side of the room. His mother sat on the throne while her husband stood next to her. Inverno gulped as his name was announced.

Cadence cocked an eyebrow. “Inverno? Is something wrong?”

“Uh…” Inverno hesitated, his mind froze trying to think of what exactly to say.

“Everything alright?” Shining asked. But there was no answer. Walking over, he waved a hoof in front of his face. “Hello? Equestria to Invern-”

“I’m sorry!” Inverno busted out. “Really! I am! I didn’t think that it would turn out-” Shining put a hoof in his muzzle.

“First off, calm down.” He said. “Before you go Auntie Twilight on us, just take your time, and explain. What exactly are you trying to apologize for?”

“I uh…” Inverno took in a deep breath. “I… did something stupid. Really stupid.”

“We still don’t understand,” Cadence pointed out as she got off her throne, “what happened?”

Another deep breath. “Just… promise you two won’t be mad at me.”

“How serious is this?” Shining asked.

“I… I don’t really know. But I need help that I don’t know what to do. So to make a long story short, I uh… tried to make friends, literally.” Intrigued, his adopted parents asked him to expand on it. So Inverno went into detail about using a metal resurrection ritual that he had found in Sombra’s library, that he wanted to befriend composers in the past by making them. He told them of using the box cars from the rail yards to conduct the ritual, but he found that they were moved out of the Empire sometime during the night while expressing the concern of the possible side effects that might have had if they successfully came back.

Shining raised a hoof. “So, who did you decided to bring back?”

Inverno pawed at the ground. “I had twelve in mind.”

“Twelve?” Cadence said in surprise. “Inverno, I get that you’re lonely but… twelve? Isn’t that a bit much?”

“I didn’t get to say who they were yet.” The young unicorn interjected.

Cadence took in a deep breath. “Okay, who are they?”

“Lully, Buch, Vifilli, Moztrot, Beethooven, Schubit, Paganeighni, Horseshoepin, Liszt, Tchaicoltsky, Maneler and Debussy.”

“And you have no idea where they are?”

Inverno shook his head. “I honestly didn’t know those train cars would be moved at all last night. I tried looking around in the rail yard but I couldn’t find anything.”

Cadence put her hoof to her chin as she turned to her husband. “Shining, Can I speak to you alone for a minute?” After telling Inverno to stay in that spot, the two of them went out of earshot of their adopted son towards a window. The Princess said softly to her husband, “This needs to be taken care of.”

“Obviously. I mean, I kinda get why he did it, but I’m torn between being angry that he did this without letting us know or impressed that he did it at all.”

“Nevertheless, Inverno is taking up responsibility in telling us there’s a problem he can’t fix on his own. Plus, he’s in the right to be nervous if what he says about its side effects are true. He may have unleashed something that hasn’t been seen before magic-wise. And even if that weren’t the case, there are twelve ponies out there that have been time-displaced (to a degree) and being sent out to an Equestria that’s no doubt unrecognizable to them.”

“Yeah, but how are we going to find these guys? Sure, we could ask whoever is in charge where those cars have gone off to, but even then, how would we know what they look like? Inverno himself said that he plucked hair and feathers from tourists, so they probably won’t look exactly like what they originally were.”

“True.” Cadence nodded, humming in thought. Looking over her shoulder at Inverno, she said to Shining: “I think this time you should go with him.”

“What?”

“I mean, out of the two of us, you’ve been trained to go on missions before. And somepony has to stay here, both for Flurry and the Empire. Besides, Inverno has never been outside of the Crystal Empire before, and you haven’t exactly spent that much quality time with him, so perhaps this would be good for both of you.”

“That, and he might somewhat know what they look like at least…” Shining thought aloud. “I think that if there’s gonna be any success in finding them, I’m going to need a few guards to come with us. And Professor Key Signature too, he probably knows more about these guys than we do, so perhaps he could help us guess where they might go and do.”

“Agreed.”

“But there’s one thing that bothers me.”

“That being?”

After a quick glance at their adopted son, Shining asked, “If we do find them all, what are we going to do with them?”

---

“Hello?” In a dark, dusty boxcar, a voice calls out. “Hello? Is anypony there? Hello? The door is locked.” The stallion tried to push on the sliding door but found it wouldn’t budge. “Hello! Please let me out!”

“Hello?” Another voice called out. One that sounded nearby.

“Hello? I’m in here!”

There was a sound of something heavy being moved before hoofsteps were heard that trotted up to the car he was locked into. He heard the sound of a unicorn lighting up his magic before the door finally opened, instantly blinding him.

“Are you alright?” A pair of hooves climbed aboard to help him out. After blinking a few times, his eyes became adjusted as he saw a slender unicorn who was a dark brown unicorn with a long blond mane. “For a while, I thought I might have been alone here.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me, did you too happened to wake up in a place like this and have no idea how you got here?”

“Well… yes?” The earth pony blinked. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

He shrugged, “Can’t say. Everything is so out of the way this morning that even I’m trying to figure out what’s going on uh…” The unicorn paused as he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ve caught your name. What is it?”

“Fryderyk,” he replied as he shook his hoof, “my name is Fryderyk Horseshoepin.”

This got a shocked reaction out of the unicorn. “Pardon me but… what?”

“Horseshoepin.” The earth pony reinstated. “That is my name.”

The unicorn shook his head, “No that… You can’t… No, no, this…” After taking a deep breath he let out. “I’m sorry, are you perhaps a… distant cousin, that happens to have the same name or something?”

Horseshoepin tilted his head. “What are you talking about? I’m Fryderyk Horseshoepin, I’m 39 years old, from Ponyland and… Last thing I remember I was very sick in Paris. I’m a pianist who has been ill but I feel much better… why are you looking at me like that?”

The unicorn stared at him in amazement, “Are you… Is that really you…? No, prove it.”

He blinked, “What?”

“Prove to me that you are Horseshoepin.”

“Uh… h-how?”

Closing his eyes, the unicorn thought for a moment before getting an idea. “Do you remember another pianist called Liszt? He played one of your pieces that he improvised a little. What did you do?”

Tilting his head to the side he answered. “Well… I told him that it was perfect as the way it was. So, then he asked me if I would show him how it was meant to be played. He stepped aside and I played on for a very long time. By the end of it, he was so moved that he apologized for interfering with poetry, as he called it… Why do you ask?”

The unicorn’s jaw dropped. “Oh dear Celestia, is it really?” Without warning, he embraced him in a hug. “Horseshoepin! It’s really you! Alive again!”

“Wait a minute!” He pushed him aside. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“Fryderyk, don’t you recognize me?” The unicorn asked. “It’s me, Franz. Franz Liszt.”

“Wait… really?” Horseshoepin blinked. “You look nothing like him. The one I know is a Pegasus, and you’re a Unicorn.”

“Yes I know, I could say the same with your coat colors.”

Immediately the earth pony looked down at himself. It was a purple coat with a blue mane. Certainly completely different from his usual sandy brown coat and white mane.

Liszt continued, “But I’m telling you the truth, it’s really me! I just… I can’t believe you back. Honestly back. But… how? How are you back?”

“What are you talking about?”

For a moment Liszt hesitated as he tried to choose his next words carefully. “This… This might come as a shock. But the very last time I saw you, was at your funeral. And that was about forty years ago.”

Horseshoepin stared at him. “What?”

“I know. I’m trying to wrap this idea around myself.”

“Franz,” the earth pony raised a hoof, “just out of curiosity, what year do you think this is?”

“886. Why?”

“No… That can’t be right, it’s 849.” Both stallions stared at one another. “Franz… What’s going on?”

“Believe it or not, that’s not even the weird part.” He said as he trotted out into the morning light. “Take a look at where we are.”

Confused, Horseshoepin stumbled out into the brilliant light and into a rail yard in which was surrounded by towers of brick, glass, and metal. But what was even more puzzling was the sign nearby that said only one word: Manehattan.

“We’re in Equestria?” he looked over to Liszt. “How did we get here?”

“More importantly, why are we here?” The unicorn pointed out. “I’m just as much in the dark as you are. But I must say, of all the places I’ve visited, this looks… advance somehow.”

“I wonder…” Horseshoepin walked across the railroad tracks in which Liszt followed him up a flight of stairs and onto the bustling streets. Looking around, he spotted what he was looking for: a newsstand. He approached it to pick up the most recent newspaper. “Oh, Celestia… Franz, look at this!”

He peered over his shoulder and Liszt’s eyes widened. With one look, they both knew in a moment, that they were in the future.

“Hey,” the pony behind the rows of magazines and newspapers said, “are ya gonna pay? That’ll be three bits there.”

Instantly, both stallions realized the same problem – they had no money. So putting back the newspaper, they both walked on. “One-thousand-and-three!” Liszt said astonished. “Alright, this is starting to make sense. But what exactly are we going to do?”

“Tell me about it. We’re in a new city, in a new country, in a new time period no less. No idea why we’re here, how we got here, and more importantly, we’re broke. For the first time in years, I’m completely broke. And what’s more… I don’t know if there’s anypony that remembers us.”

Liszt was taken aback. “What are you talking about? I was the most famous pony of my time, and even after your uh… death, there were plenty of ponies that still play your music.”

“But after two hundred years?” Horseshoepin questioned. “Even I know that time always changes ponies tastes, so how do we know there’s a soul out there that knows a single note of what we wrote?”

His friend couldn’t answer back. “Well… regardless, we’re stuck here, and we need to get money somehow. After all, in a place this big, you’d think there might be a job somewhere.”

“What about over there?” Liszt followed the pointing hoof as it leads directly towards a high end looking restaurant called “The Blue Sun Bar and Grill” wherein the window was a sign that advertised a job to any pianists for hire. Looking at one another, the unicorn said, “Well, that might work.”

Next Chapter: 3: Return of an Old Friend in D Major Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 52 Minutes