WHEN NIGHT FALLS
A My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Short Story
By Sentinel 28A
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this a few years ago, after the first Equestria Girls movie came out. As a MLP fan, I can understand the message of forgiveness...but as an adult, I wonder if there would have been more ramifications for Sunset Shimmer's actions. To the "norms" unfamiliar with magic, Sunset's actions would've smacked of terrorism. And while later EGD movies have shown that Sunset didn't get off scot-free, in a more realistic world, there would've been far more than just resentment towards Sunset.
So, When Night Falls is an exploration of what those ramifications just might mean. Old school anime fans might just catch who the main character is.
Agent William Collins was having a bad day.
As a senior agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it was his job to help investigate incidents regarding any of those four items. Usually, this was fairly simple: moonshiners in the backwoods of the South, cigarette smugglers from Europe, gun shops selling illegal automatic weapons, accidents with high explosives. Occasionally, it involved terrorism, especially since the events of September 11. Given that Collins was assigned to the Midwest, the latter was blessedly rare. Most of his duties were, in fact, essentially that of a Federal policeman. He handed out more fines than prison time. It had been over a decade since he had drawn his weapon in anger.
This time, things were different.
He had been awoken from a sound sleep by an emergency call from downstate: an explosion had occurred at a high school. First responders had thought it a gas main explosion, which was terrible in its own right: Equestria High School was in the middle of its Fall Formal. Since damage to the school was significant, it was feared that there might be several dozen dead and many more wounded. To everyone's relief, no one was badly injured, let alone dead. That was fortunate. Unfortunately for Bill Collins' sleep, evidence pointed to an act of domestic terrorism.
A multiagency team was immediately dispatched to Equestria High, made up of agents from the FBI, ATFB, and Homeland Security, plus state and local police. As he was closest and most senior, Collins took the lead for the ATFB. One look at the school and Collins was stunned that there had been no casualties. Though the other agencies were still investigating, interviews with the student body and teachers present for the Fall Formal pointed towards one suspect: a young woman incongruously named Sunset Shimmer. When agents came to Shimmer's house, twenty-four hours after the incident, she had surrendered without a fight.
Collins leaned back in his chair, glanced at the pack of cigarettes on his desk, and fought down the urge to smoke. He was trying to quit, but any time he was in a quandary, the nicotine cravings got worse. He threw the pack into a desk drawer and pushed it shut. Then he sat up straight and opened Sunset Shimmer's file.
Shimmer had invoked her right to remain silent. A cursory investigation into her background turned up nothing suspicious. She had no connections to any foreign terrorist group, showed no tendency towards radical causes foreign or domestic, and had never committed crimes, aside from one instance of shoplifting at a mall a year previously. Her grades were superb and she had been consistently elected to student government, Glee Club, and was princess of the Fall Formal two years running. This was not the psychological profile of someone disgruntled with society, or someone angry with the country's foreign policy. In short, Sunset Shimmer showed none of the tendencies of a terrorist.
When the FBI had dug deeper, however, then the anomalies started showing up. Shimmer had no friends, and in fact seemed to shun others. She had been disciplined for bullying on several occasions. Flipping through the psychological profile, Collins was struck by the similarity to school shooters: few to no friends, a superiority complex, a hate for authority figures. Not all of those pointed towards a tendency to commit a violent act, but they were part of the classic profile. At first blush to Collins, it was an open-and-shut case: Shimmer was angry about something, and whatever it was pushed her over the edge. She had rigged a bomb—given the size of the crater in front of the high school, probably a car bomb—and attempted a mass casualty attack on her school. A young psychotic, motivated by revenge: sadly, nothing new for the ATFB, though it had never happened to Collins. Shimmer had some background in chemistry and science, not likely to be enough to be able to build something like a car bomb, but as Boston and Oklahoma City had shown, one did not need a great deal of experience or sophistication to pull something like this—and a bomber need only get lucky once. From the bruises, burns and scars on her body, she was by far the worst injured student, which was seen as a smoking gun: it was a botched bombing.
The FBI had dug a little deeper, and instead of the Equestria Bombing, as it was now known, being a relatively simple case, it had turned into the headache Collins was rapidly acquiring, from a bureaucratic point of view. Sunset Shimmer lived alone, which was unusual for a teenager; records of parents and relatives proved to be forged, though done in a very professional matter: Equestria High, the school district, even water and power companies were completely unaware that the only occupant of Shimmer's house was her.
The investigation was far from complete, but it looked very much like a pattern of forgeries and false fronts; attempts to begin a money trail were fruitless so far. It was as if Sunset Shimmer had simply appeared out of nowhere as a teenager five years ago. That was ominous, to say the least. It was something that spy agencies did to insert agents, though it was doubtful that any enemy of the United States would go to the trouble of inserting a spy into a high school at age thirteen. What had the agents assigned to the case worried was that Sunset Shimmer was somehow inserted in deep cover by a terrorist group: she had failed to inflict anything but property damage, but how many more were out there? It was the classic, terrifying dilemma: anyone and everyone could be a suspect.
Collins sighed, took out a stick of gum, and began chewing it. He put down Shimmer's file and picked up another, this one filled with the interviews of students and teachers at the formal, including the principal, Mary Celestia.
And that was where it got weird.
Every agent worth his or her salt knew that interviews taken immediately after an event were likely to be a little off. Shock would set in and ten people would give ten different versions of the story. Still, it was necessary to get the interviews while memory was still fresh, before news reports and other testimonies colored and changed one's recollections. Even the tiniest detail could be what blew a case open. So Collins was used to people seeing and hearing things, especially impressionable teenagers…but he had never run into anything like this.
The agents taking testimony were at first stunned, then angered at what the students were saying. The students were given stern warnings to quit trying to be funny, and a few switched their story around. Just as many stuck to their testimony, however. Investigators disbelievingly wrote on notepads and laptops about demons, crowns, magic and seeing six of their fellow students cast spells. The only thing that matched was that all of them had a memory lapse lasting anywhere from three minutes to ten. Agents, Collins included, were ready to call the whole thing a mass hallucination caused by the shock of the explosion, or possibly fumes from ruptured gas lines, or maybe (as one DHS agent had joked), the punch was spiked with LSD. None of this helped Sunset Shimmer's case any: besides the memory lapse, the only other thing that everyone agreed to was that she was responsible.
He jumped when there was a rapping on his door. "Come in."
Collins was surprised—pleasantly so—when the door admitted a particularly attractive woman. She was tall, almost at his own six feet, with a long fall of black hair, which he noted in passing was out of regulation for a government employee. She was pleasantly proportioned and filled out the richly-cut women's business suit and knee-length skirt rather well. Without meaning to, his eyes were drawn immediately to hers: they were a vivid purple, bright, almost luminous.
He realized she had caught him looking at her. She smiled to show she took no offense. "Agent Collins?" She stuck out a well-manicured hand. "My name is Tina Mattson."