Look at Ponyville.

Start in its north and east. Look at its apartment buildings and its residential area. Note the state of them. The walls are strong, and the cracked glass and broken windows have been removed and cleared away, awaiting an earth pony who is going to be practicing his trade extensively in the coming weeks. He hums happily as he works: he’d never expected this much business, but he is rapidly becoming a wealthy stallion, even though he is doing all the repairs at a fraction of the cost for his town.

Look inside any home. You’ll see beds, and sofas, and cushions for sitting on. They’re all in place, many of them carrying stains, but the stain are being scrubbed off and cleaned, some of them long overdue anyway. New furniture is prevalent, too.

Move to Ponyville’s east now. The wide-open plaza in this section of Ponyville is bustling with ponies. The Sweet Apple Acres stand is giving out apples, pulled in from vast storehouses and supplemented by what is already good to go. The other farmers are meanwhile even now organizing with each other, taking a break from repairing their farms even as they work together to make sure that everypony gets what they need to repair their livelihoods – and they even take advice from the orange earth pony in the Stetson on how to not just fix, but improve their farms.

Now move to Ponyville’s south, then up to its west. The south and the west of Ponyville are dominated by ‘proper’ businesses – that is, stores, with windows and wares kept inside four sturdy walls. This being a small farming town, the owners of the businesses frequently live in apartments over their shops. Ponyville has a little bit of just about everything available to its citizens, or it normally would. Not right now, but that will change soon enough. Whether the shop be for a clothier, a candymare, a jeweler, or a baker, these businessponies are already hard at work looking over their inventory, finding out what needs to be ordered and drawing up lists. Soon, they’ll be able to open again, and make sure that the ponies of Ponyville had whatever they want.

Now look at Ponyville’s center. The town hall has been cleaned up, the sea of papers that surrounded it gathered up and on the way to organization, and ponies go to and from it as a beige earth pony works with an auditor sent from Canterlot, the two ensuring that the large pile of cash bits that Ponyville has received to help its recovery gets to the ponies who need it as quickly as possible. The weather patrol station, meanwhile, has a new top for its cloud silo, though it sits open at the moment as a blue, rainbow-maned pegasi works hard with the rest of her team to wrangle in the fresh cloud shipment from Cloudsdale to supplement the clouds that they had already made in Ponyville. The Night Court Representative’s home, meanwhile, already has a new window.

Now head from the town proper, and out to the farms. Crops have been replanted, irrigation systems repaired or even enhanced. A carrot farmer is already beginning to see the fruits of her labor, and in just a week her carrots will be ready to be pulled from the ground. At Sweet Apple Acres, trees that have drowned due to a pond breaking its banks have been cut down and hauled off for firewood, while the pond itself is once more back within its banks. The apple trees are already recovering.

Now look to the skies. The sky is blue and full of white, puffy clouds, organized to perfectly balance the necessary sunshine for the crops with the equally necessary shade for the ponies who tend those crops. It is a warm day, but not too warm, and the pegasi have arranged for a constant, cooling breeze.

Ponyville looks like it’s been through a war. In fact, it had been through a party, a party not of the Ponyvillians’ own design, but one that had devastated the town. But, party or war, it was over, and the recovery process has begun. Slowly, the town is rebuilding itself. In some ways it will never be the same – in others, it will be better than before.

As the day closes, the sun sets, and the moon rises into the sky, six friends come together on a hill that overlooks the town. They’re all exhausted, some from physical labor, some from paperwork and scurring from one place to the next, but they’re all smiling at the sight of a town well on its way to recovery. A single thought burns inside the minds of every mare and stallion in Ponyville:

We can fix anything.