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Freeze Frame

by ToixStory

Chapter 25: Episode 6: Where The Wave Rolled Back

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The Great Red Shark cut through the morning desert air as it roared down the highway in a mad flight down the straight blacktop toward my final destination of Los Celestias. My mane blew in the wind like a great, orange cape behind me. I need a haircut, I thought, but the thought went away as soon as I mashed down on the gas.

It had been like that all morning, really. Every time I had any doubts or thoughts about what exactly I was doing, I would just press the gas a little bit more and increase my speed toward the city of freedom so far in the distance. The last sign I had passed had told me I was now a little over one hundred and fifty miles from Los Celestias, but I was pressing one hundred in the car already so I would be there in no time at all.

The engine hummed beneath my hooves and the rumble it sent out spread through my entire body as I rode the beast through the desert wastes toward my promised land. The love I had developed for this machine over the course of my journey had developed into something bordering on the fetishistic. I was part of the car and it was part of me. One Shark that drove down the endless road.

Would I ever make it to Los Celestias? Maybe, but that wasn’t the Big Question. No, the only thing that mattered was whether I would enjoy the journey there. I sure as Luna’s mane had so far.

Driving a steamcar was like a ritual or service or other somesuch. You turned the dials and cranked the levers and it went. You were firmly the controller and the steam-powered beast--a giraffe, some liked to call it--the controlled. No connection.

But with this car. Oh, this car was an entirely different story. It was more than just an animal--though it certainly was a beast--it was also an undercurrent to my thoughts and my only companion on the long roads. The longer I drove, the more the car became a part of me and I a part of it. I felt the road beneath the tires and thumping of the pistons on their never ending cycle to power the engine along.

I was in balance like some damned Zebra philosophe and I was loving it. The car didn’t judge me for my past actions or abandoning Sterling: it only asked for me to take it by the wheel and steer it into oblivion.

Luckily, it didn’t require me to be particularly good at the steering, anyway. I had the feeling that if there had been other cars on the road at some point, I would have invariably hit them. I took most of the morning to stop swerving all over the road, and even now barely kept the Great Red Shark constrained to one side of the highway.

I was reminded, again, that Sterling would have been able to show me how to drive properly. Maybe even keeps his hooves on the wheel with mine, or let me sit in his lap . . .

No. I pressed on the gas in a frantic haze and jolted the car along at even faster clip. No thinking about him, lest I would lose my nerve and turn the stupid car around and go back to Las Pegasus. It didn’t help that there was a small pit of my gut that was icy cold with regret of leaving him there. Alone, without money, and his prize invention missing.

Faster.

If he’d cared about me, he wouldn’t have just run off, right? Especially without paying the bill! Sure, I hadn’t been talkative during the dinner, but hadn’t I dropped all the hints? Was . . . was I that selfish and self-centered?

Faster, dammit!

Was I also so jealous if he had a single female friend? I had one of my own that had tried to kiss me after all . . . and one who shared a few loose memories of a particular night on the roof of the Chronicler. And yet, he’d never said a word. Never shown a bit of jealousy, or questioned me about it.

Just keep that peddle on the floor!

Couldn’t I just let him have this limelight? I was already fairly famous, after all, and now had stolen his one chance at fame in a flight of fancy. Sad, too, that he probably wouldn’t hate me for it. I had an idea--though perhaps a bit idealizing--that he would give it all up if he only could. There was an empty place in my heart that knew I could never do the same . . . not even for him.

Faster.

So maybe it was a good thing that I’d left him there, right? A kind of wake-up call to him that maybe, just maybe, he was better off with that inventor that clung to his side. She’d called in his favorite band, for Celestia’s sake! They were both smart, so they could easily come up with a new invention in the absence of the old one. Perfect for each other: heck, I was happy for them.

So why was I crying?

At that point I must have been pushing something like one-fifty and swerving all over the road as my emotions started to choke me. It wasn’t a surprise, then, when I heard the scream of a police siren behind me. I checked the mirror and saw that, indeed, swirling blue and red lights were trailing me.

Now, I could have easily lost him in his extra-slow steamcar, but I eventually decided against it. Against all logic, I let my hoof off the gas and began to slow down toward the shoulder of the road. Why? I don’t know . . . maybe it was a punishment I was inflicting on myself. Maybe it just felt good to know that somepony would be telling me what to do.

At any rate, I hit the sand-gravel mix beside the road at seventy and spun in a donut before coming to a complete stop. My high speeds had left the cop in my dust, so it was a few minutes before his car showed up in the little area to the side of the road.

He parked and shakily emerged from the car. Overall, he seemed surprised that I had even bothered to stop, but it only showed on his mustachioed face for a few moments before being replaced by the normal haughtiness.

The policepony approached the side of the Shark and leaned over me imposingly. I grinned up at him. “Nice day, isn’t it, officer?” I said.

“Ma’am,” he said, “do you know how fast you were going?”

“Pretty fast?”

He threw up his hooves. “Honestly, I have no idea, because my instruments don’t go up that high!”

I shrugged. “So what, am I getting a ticket, or is it jail time for me?”

My apathy, to me, felt less like defeat and more just like being too tired to do anything but accept the consequences. Many fine books had been written from prison, after all. Writing reports and books weren’t so different, were they?

The cop looked around and then back at me before heaving out a sigh. “Look, ma’am, I’m in no way to carry this right now. You look tired, so why don’t you head up to Barnstow? It’s a few miles up the road, and it’s got a rest stop. I’d suggest you take a rest there.”

I looked at his badge, that indicated he was in the highway patrol. “That’s out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it?”

“Yes ma’am. Barnstow’s got some great breakfast food, too. You might want to try some of that.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that I had more to do than stop in some podunk town, but then reconsidered. Here this cop was, me squarely in his sights, and he was offering me a way out! To not take the chance would be to act like a fool, and even in my current state I wasn’t quite that.

So, instead, I chose to reply: “The breakfast food, you said?”

He nodded. “Pat’s Diner has some great biscuits. After, of course, you take a nice, long nap.”

I smiled tentatively. “Of course.”

“Good.”

He gave me a grin before returning to his car and driving off. However, he stopped not too far down the road back to Las Pegasus, and waited. Testing me to see if I would take his advice. So, I did.

I put the Great Red Shark back into drive and roared off toward Barnstow. Did I plan to actually stop there? Maybe . . . just, maybe.

* * *

Running out of gas in the middle of town was a good way for the decision to be made for me. It was just as well, however. I did need a little time to stop, after all.

There wasn’t much else to the town, anyway. It was a little spitball of whitewashed, clapboard and cement businesses that set itself in the middle of the desert astride the highway and refused to move. There were a few steamcars on the road and ponies walking the streets, but the population didn’t seem to be larger than a few hundred at most. Really, if not for the highway, there wouldn’t have been a reason for a town with the silly name of Barnstow to be there.

When the engine started clunking away to inform me that I needed to refill its ravenous maw with gasoline, I pulled into the rest stop that the policepony had mentioned. It was little more than a numerous amount of parking spaces centered around a staccato-topped building with bathrooms and little else.

Not much, but I figured it would do.

By the time I had finished lugging the cans of gasoline out of the trunk to the gascap, pouring the strange liquid into the tank, and hauling the cans back into the trunk, I could feel the weight of a night with no sleep weighing on me already.

Sleeping in the middle of the day, to me, had never felt like a desirable activity. For some reason, it just felt wrong. Maybe it came from years of working on a farm, but wasting daylight hours just to sleep made me feel like a foal more than anything else. It was a reminder of how tired I was when I ignored those feelings and put the car’s top up to get a few winks of sleep.

I lay down in the front seat and looked up at the beige canvas of the convertible’s top. It was blank. Really blank. Yet, somehow, it held my interest even when I tried to force myself into sleep.

I guess it was because I kept getting all emotional. Stupid emotions . . . they were all stupid, really. Making me act like some stereotypical mare who blubbered around without her stallion and couldn’t express herself properly toward him. We were better than that.

I rolled over on my side and started to close my eyes. The seats were comfortable, but the car was so . . . lonely.

* * *

Some time later, I was woken up to a tapping on the driver’s side window. I peeked one eye out from beneath a hoof that I had draped over my face. Outside, the day had gotten a bit brighter, and the figure next to my car was draped in a noonday shadow.

I rubbed my head and sat up in the seat before rolling the window down. With the change in position came a change in perspective, so I got a better look at the mare standing outside the car. A familiar face that practically shocked me out of my seat.

Outside stood the Trixie imposter, still in full regalia with her silver hair and even blue coat. Her eyes shined down at me, though it looked as if she had aged a dozen years in a night. Of course, I had never gotten the best look at her in the first place, so how was I to know she hadn’t looked that way in the first place?

I rolled down the window. “Can I help you?”

She stared at me. “We need to talk.”

“Okay . . . why?”

‘Trixie’ walked around to the other side of the car and knocked on the door until I opened it for her. “Drive to Pat’s; we can talk there.”

I crossed my forehooves over my chest. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me why you just show up and start ordering me around.”

Her horn glowed a light blue and I watched as the key I had placed on the dashboard float up and insert itself into the ignition and turn to start. Just as quickly, my hooves wrenched themselves out of my control and placed themselves on the wheel and stick shift.

“Drive to Pat’s, or I’ll do it for you,” ‘Trixie’ said coldly.

I gulped and complied, backing out of the parking space and turning back onto the main highway. I drove back into the heart of the town and took a few minutes to find the obscure, adobe restaurant on the other edge of town.

I parked the Great Red Shark on a cracked blacktop and got out carefully, aware the whole time that I was being watched closely by ‘Trixie’. She’d been silent the whole drive, but didn’t take her eyes off of me.

As we walked along the sand-blasted wall of the restaurant on our way to the entrance, I happened to get a look at her flank. An innocent look, but what I saw threw me for a curve.

‘Trixie’ back at the bar had been unique in that she hadn’t had the same cutie mark as the real Trixie, but rather something to do with a hammer. But the mare beside me . . . her cutie mark didn’t have anything like a hammer on it. Instead, it was the image of a crescent moon and a magic wand crossed over it.

Oh no.

“T-Trixie?” I exclaimed, backing up against the wall.

She smiled at me. “The Great and Powerful. Why, did you expect somepony else?”

My mind drifted back to the fetishist and her pet . . . and the actions commenced with them. “No . . .”

“Good.” She turned and continued to walk toward the diner’s door.

“If I could ask one question, though . . .”

“Hmm?”

“How in the wide, wide world of Equestria did you find me in a town like this?”

Trixie smirked. “I come through here on my way to Las Pegasus all the time. As it turns out, a red convertible car like yours is quite noticeable, especially after a certain daughter of mine took pains to describe it over the phone to me.”

She laughed and I did so in return, partly out of relief. It wasn’t like she was exactly familiar, but a small connection to Grapevine in a lonely desert town was nice enough for me.

Trixie took me inside the cafe and sat us at a corner booth. She ordered some sort of bagel-thing from the flustered waitress while I settled on simple eggs and a biscuit, per the cop’s recommendation.

I couldn’t help but keep looking at the famous pony across the table from me. “You’re speaking in first-person,” I said.

“Oh?” she said. “Is that silly reputation still sticking with me? I haven’t even used it since Grapevine was born, after all.”

I put on my best smile. “Of course it’s not sticking with you! I was just, uh, really curious.”

“Well, good.”

Our food was delivered and we started to eat in a moment of silence. I couldn’t help but keep sneaking glances at her, and she noticed eventually.

“Why do you keep staring at me?” she asked.

I gulped. “Well, uh, it’s just that you . . . and the Ponyville Six . . . and being famous and all that.”

“That was a very long time ago, now.” She laughed. “Really, it’s you and my daughter who are the famous ones now.”

“Really?”

“Enough that back in Los Celestias I can find copies of the Chronicler.” She smiled. “It’s nice to see Grapevine out and doing some good in the world. Celestia knows I hoped she wouldn’t turn out like me when I was younger.”

I nodded. “Right, before you and the Ponyville Six had that-”

“Yeah.”

I munched down on my eggs thoughtfully, while she stared at me over her own meal. Her hair, I noticed, was more grey than silver now, and the lines around her eyes were much more prominent than pictures I had seen. Even in the ones that Grapevine had showed me after that one night we shared.

“You know,” Trixie continued, “when Grapevine was calling me on the phone, she told me specifically that you were going to be in Las Pegasus . . . so why are you on the road to Los Celestias?”

“Oh, right.” I bit my lip. “Well, you see, I had a little . . . trouble . . . in Las Pegasus, so I figured I would take the car and head to Los Celestias for a bit to cool off and find a new story.”

In hindsight, my scheme sounded more ridiculous than when I was thinking it up back at the Winged Unicorn Hotel. Then, it had seemed like the logical course of events, but now it just felt like a fever dream that had somehow become real.

“A flight of fancy, huh?” Trixie said. Her brow furrowed. “Wait, Grapevine said you were going to Las Pegasus with some colt, uh, Silver or Sterling or something, right?”

“Yeah, that’s true,” I admitted.

“At the risk of focusing this conversation on you, are you out here because of him?”

I tapped a hoof on the checkered table that was thick in the remains of a thousand meals that had soaked into it over the years. “I wouldn’t quite say that.”

“Oh, and why would that be?”

“I’m not really out here because of him. Really, I’m out here because of me.”

Trixie snorted. “Oh, this oughta be good.”

I glared at her. “What?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just that these stories tend to be at least somewhat interesting.”

I briefly thought about just shutting up and letting her talk for the rest of our meal, but then I would have had to keep justifying my actions against the doubt she already put in my head. If I could speak my part, perhaps I could quiet those traitorous thoughts.

“Well, the only reason I’m out here is because of myself,” I continued. “Sterling and I were in Las Pegasus for the conference, you know, and I was the one who screwed everything up.”

“How so?”

“I . . . I-” I paused, and let the words sink into myself before I could utter them. “I wasn’t good enough for him. I was jealous and rash and could only think about myself the whole time! I made a fool of myself, so I ran away.”

I looked away. “Maybe this way he can find happiness without me.”

The words hurt to say, and bit like knives when they left my tongue. I felt darker than I had in a long time . . . which was why I was surprised when Trixie began to laugh.

Of all the reactions I could have gotten from her, laughing was the last I could have expected. Laughing so hard until she cried. Her hoof kept pounding on the table as her laughing droned on and on until it was replaced with hacking and coughing.

Eventually, she called down enough so that she could dab at her eyes with a paper towel while still giggling slightly. I glowered at her.

“And just why is all of this so funny?”

“You . . . you’re taking all of this so serious!” Trixie cried. “You’re trying to act like all that’s happened is so ‘dark’ and ‘deep.’”

“This is plenty dark!”

Trixie chuckled. “Look, dear, how long have the two of you been seeing each other?”

“A month.”

“And have you been in a relationship like this one before?”

“ . . . no . . .”

“I figured as much,” she finished. Trixie laughed again, though only once. “I was right, though, this is interesting. It’s nice to see a mare like you going through the first trials of love after all.”

“L-Love?” I stammered.

She raised an eyebrow. “You two haven’t talked about the L-word? I mean, I know it’s only been a month or so, but if you two are taking a trip together to a far-off city . . .”

“L-word?” My mind jumped briefly to Grapevine. “You mean lesbians?”

Trixie very carefully placed one hoof on her forehead and rubbed it there. “No . . . no, not lesbians. I meant love, I wasn’t trying to trick you.”

“Oh, right.”

“So what do you think about it?” She leaned over the table toward me. “Come on, I know you’ve at least thought about it once or twice.”

I looked down at my hooves. “Once or twice.”

“Aha, and what did you think then?”

“Well . . . mostly about that I’m not really feeling love at all. I mean, we’ve only gone out for about a month. Sure, bonds forming over danger like we had are pretty strong, but it doesn’t seem like an actual love situation.”

Trixie leaned back in her seat. “You’re right.”

“I am?” I stammered. “But I thought you said-”

“I asked if you thought about love, not if you were in it. Because, let’s face it, you aren’t.” She smiled. “But what you are on is the path to love, and this whole situation with running away so he can have a better life are some good first--if very shaky--steps.”

“What do you mean?”

Just then, the waitress returned with our check. She slapped it on the table while watching us closely, then left. Luckily for me, Trixie was quick to pull out a coin purse and offer to pay it, since I didn’t have much in the way of money other than Sterling’s stash. Somehow, I figured she would frown upon that.

With the bill paid, we headed out of the diner and back toward the Great Red Shark. Despite the service, I at least felt satisfied with the food: my stomach was very comfortably full. The heat outside, however, quickly took away that comfort to replace it with a sweltering blanket of pure hot.

Trixie settled for leaning against the rear fender of the car while I watched her.

“Are you going to finish your speech from in there?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Probably better that I didn’t. These are lessons that, no matter, how painful, need to be learned on your own.”

My shoulders drooped a bit. “I suppose.”

“Though I guess, since you came all the way out here-” she began with a small wink, “I can tell you this: jealousy isn’t a bad thing to feel in a relationship. Far from it. The only bad thing is not confronting your partner about it.”

I looked at the highway and toward the way I had come from. Back to Las Pegasus, the city of the lucky.

“I’m going to have to go back there, aren’t I?”

“Most likely.”

I sighed. She was right, of course. How could I have been so foolish? The Great Magnet was always going to draw me back to Las Pegasus, no matter where I went. Fleeing to anywhere else was a hopeless endeavor.

I walked up to Trixie and offered a hoof. “Thanks . . . for everything. Really, if you hadn’t found me, then I’d probably be heading to Los Celestias right now. I don’t know how we found each other, but I’m glad we did.”

Trixie didn’t shake my hoof, however, but instead brought me in for a hug. “Any friend of my daughter’s is huggable,” she said.

When we pulled away, she held onto my front shoulders and smiled. “I know it’s all new to you, but trust me: this will work itself out. Grapevine’s said before that you’re the kind of mare that things just seem to work around, and I don’t think this should be any different.”

I smiled back and she let me go and I climbed into Sterling’s car. She told me something about calling Grapevine to tell her about the whole thing and walked off.

For a minute, I simply sat in the car and let her words echo in my head. About Sterling . . . and love . . . and Las Pegasus. I tried, too, to banish all my fears and self-loathing that had accumulated over the course of the trip. That’s all it had really been, hadn’t it? Fear and loathing in Las Pegasus.

* * *

The farther I drove out of Barnstow back toward Las Pegasus, the more I became convinced that the Trixie I saw had, in fact, been a hallucination. Some sort of mad vision that acted as my own little morality avatar to get me to do the right thing.

Then again, maybe I had met Grapevine’s mom in the middle of a tiny desert town for no reason at all. Stranger things had happened, right?

I told myself this as I kept the Great Red Shark at a nice cruising speed of around ninety, conveniently forgetting my run-in with the police only hours earlier. I was driving better this time, though.

I was more awake and felt refreshed. Energized. I was going to cover my story and convince my coltfriend that I wasn’t a crazy psychopath and I was going to do it all by noon tomorrow. How, I didn’t know.

Those details aren’t the most important in life, however. The how is always pointless when it comes to the why? Why a story is good is more important than how exactly it was written. I had learned that the hard way.

But I’d come this far, and by Celestia I would keep going! My dream was just being realized, and I had plenty of time to shape it myself. With a spoon. A spoon, by Celestia, a spoon! The glorious silver tool of scooping power!

Ugh. I grabbed my head and stared up at the sun. The heat was getting to me; it was frying my brains like eggs in an iron skillet. I had to take a rest.

I edged the Shark onto the side of the desert highway and stopped in a big clearing of dust and tiny, sun-bleached rocks. I lay back and tried to think of cooler places than, well, a desert.

The problem was, thinking of nothing but snow was boring. So I did the first thing that jumped to mind when sitting in a car that isn’t yours: check the glove compartment. I figured Sterling must have at least stuffed some food or reading material in there. I really hoped it was food.

I popped open the compartment and expected something from the mundane. Instead what I got was . . . unexpected to say the least. My heart lept to my throat when I saw what Sterling had hidden in the compartment.

Sitting among maps and paperback books was a very large and shiny silver revolver. The kind with the big black handle and barrel as wide as a unicorn’s horn. From a little lecture from Ivory about gun safety after my last fiasco, I knew the revolver to not be just any normal weapon: it was a griffin weapon. Each bullet was designed to take down one of them in a single shot, so there was no telling what it would do to a pony.

I slowly handled it with my wings--using the harder feathers to act like griffin talons--and checked the chambers. Sure enough, they were all filled by a brass bullet. The gun suddenly seemed even more dangerous to me.

My first instinct was, of course, to put the gun back. I’d had enough of them the last time I had handled one. The guard I had shot had recovered just fine, but he’d always have scars to remind me what happened if I got reckless. So, naturally, I meant to return the weapon to its place and wonder why Sterling would have something like that in the first place.

But something held me back. Maybe it was how shiny the gun looked, or the heat exhaustion, or maybe just the weight of so much stress finally collapsing upon me, but this gun called out to me. It called out for it to be shot. After all, what harm could come of it? I looked both ways down the highway and saw the expected nothing. Nopony was around.

The feel of that killing machine leaping in my wing grip as it threw a hunk of metal riding an explosion at hundreds of miles per hour . . . there was something exhilarating about it. Plus, I reasoned, there was no reason why a gun being shot in such a harmless manner could actually be a bad thing.

That was probably why I suddenly found myself facing the quiet desert stretch with the silver revolver pointed out in front of me and my eye lining down the sights. Could I really do it? Could I really-

BAM!

The gun leapt in my loose grip and the recoil sent me sprawling on the ground. The massive retort echoed across the rocky desert landscape long after the bullet had impacted somewhere far out in the desert. Maybe some little groundhog had had his day ruined, but no ponies were around.

I looked at the smoking gun in my grip and laughed.

“That was awesome!”

My wings flapped and I flew a little in the air in exhilaration. The intensity, the power . . . it was exhilarating. It was like throwing all my troubles downrange. Yeah, that was it. I grinned and pointed the gun ahead of me again. Just take all of my troubles and shove a .44 down its throat.

Cog getting so close with Sterling?

BAM!

Abandoning Sterling shortly thereafter?

BAM!

Spilling my guts to my best friend’s mother?

BAM!

Not knowing if I love Sterling or not?

BAM!

I lined up my last shot very specifically to hit a small rock off in the distance, just to see if I could. I whispered my last problem to myself: “Still not knowing if what I’m doing is right?”

Bam.

The echo reached me a few moments later. It sounded . . . empty, in a way. Hollow. I pointed the revolver one more time downrange and clicked the trigger but, as, expected it simply clicked and nothing came out. Empty, but I wasn’t.

I sighed and tossed the gun on the ground. It had felt nice to discharge so much ammo in a short time, and the little bursts of energy were as nice as any drug, but it still didn’t stop me from having more questions than bullets.

The desert was like that, I supposed. It was so empty that it offered no answers: only your own questions thrown back at you. I could look at the rimmed plain of rock and sand for hours and find nothing but myself out there. But there was a point where that would no longer do. When the time for questions was over. It had been that way back in Fillydelphia.

A wave of knowledge and understanding that had come from my friends always having the answers to all of my problems. That wave had swept me up, and carried me along until I reached my goal of reporting . . . but it was never enough. They could only carry me so far before I had to learn life on my own. As the sun high over the desert set the landscape alight, I looked down at the revolver and, for a moment, thought I could see where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

* * *

I kicked around in that empty desert for a little while longer before heading back to the car. I made sure to very carefully place the gun back where I had found it, sans ammo. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice until my little problem with him had blown over.

I put the car in gear and started down the highway feeling a little lightheaded, but I hoped it was a sign that everything was right with me. Probably not, but then again, when was everything right with me?

As I roared down the highway, I started to formulate a small bit of a plan for what to do with Sterling. It wasn’t much yet, but it was something. I’d make most of it up as I went along, of course, but that was to be expected of me.

After around an hour of driving, I pulled into another rest stop and headed right over to the local payphones. I grabbed a couple of bits from a bag Sterling kept in the trunk of the car. A gun in the glovebox and money in the trunk . . . that probably had some meaning behind it, but for me it just meant way too much effort for far too little money.

I ran up to the nearest phonebooth and almost lost my nerve. That squawking terror . . . but no, I could do it. For Sterling!

The mouthpiece felt odd in my hoof, but I pressed it to my ear anyway and inserted two copper bits anyway. A buzzing started in my ear and I almost slammed the piece back on its cradle, but I pushed on.

Luckily, it was soon replaced by a bored voice of a mare. “Connection?” she said.

“Uh, the Winged Alicorn,” I replied.

There was a pause. “Alright, room?”

“Room 498.”

“Wait just a moment.”

There was a pause that returned her voice to that shrill buzzing for a little while. Soon, however, it was replaced by an altogether too-familiar voice.

“Hello?” Sterling said.

I almost didn’t say anything. It was all too painful at the moment, but I persevered. “Sterling?” I asked.

“Minty!” he cried. “Oh, thank Celestia you’re okay! Where have you been? One of the hotel managers said you had left with the car . . . we were all so worried!”

I paused. “So . . . you’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad?”

“Well, uh, aren’t you worried about the money?”

Sterling laughed. “We were, for a while, but then it turns out that they upgraded our suite. Something about a customer named Duke who transferred the funds through another guy named Thompson, and it all ended up paying for a better room!”

I looked at the receiver like it was spouting lies to me. What. So, apparently, I bluff my way out of a hotel and it gets them an upgrade. Really, I was okay with that.

“So when are you bringing back the car?” Sterling said, though this time more cautiously. “I mean, we assumed you just went for a joyride, but when you didn’t come back . . .”

I cringed. “Well, I had a very good reason for not coming back, you know.”

“Which is . . . ?”

I rubbed my head and told myself to think. Think hard. “It’s for a, uh, surprise.”

“Surprise?”

“Yeah, for the expo. It ends tomorrow, right? Well, I figured that I could take the car out and return with a big surprise for you that is sure to wow the judges.”

I could almost hear the hesitation color his voice, but in the end he relented. “Alright. I’ll trust you . . . and look forward to it.”

“Thanks,” I said, then added, “and I’m sure Cog will like it too.”

Sterling laughed. “I’m sure she will, especially with the heart attack she almost had when she found out it was gone. You may want to steer clear of her until after the expo.”

“Can do.”

“And Minty?”

“Hmm?”

He paused, and sighed a little. “I miss you.”

I smiled. “I miss you, too.”

We kept in silence for a few minutes before Sterling said he had to go and we said our goodbyes. He hung up on his end and I on mine. I stared up at the phone.

So many promises I had made that now I had to keep. Crap. I sighed and picked up the telephone again. I had one idea about how to make the big surprise at the expo special.

“Connection?” the mare asked again.

“Do you know if Jefferson Airship is still in town?”

Next Chapter: Episode 6: Fear and Loathing in Las Pegasus Estimated time remaining: 30 Minutes
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