AN: This is a long one! PREPARE YOURSELVES! (Also, next POV will be different. I swear!)

Chapter Three

Twilight Sparkle

I stay silent, the word ringing in my head.

Divergent.

Inconclusive.

Divergent.

"It's not unheard-of." Charcoal tells me, as she checks the door for eavesdroppers. "But it's highly dangerous. One of the perks of being Divergent is that you can manipulate the simulations, so of course the Government can't want that, and most Divergents… well, let's say they don't make it past initiation."

"The Government?" I ask. "You mean the Abnegation?"

"The Erudite." she responds.

I feel a chill down my spine. My own faction… they want to kill me.

"My brother was Divergent." Charcoal tells me. "He was my twin, Baritone. He didn't last a week after Aptitude."

"Am I going to die?" I ask a bit too suddenly.

"Not if you're careful." Charcoal shakes her head. "I deleted your Simulation footage under the pretext that you got sick. I'll tell them that you got Erudite, okay?"

I'm still a bit in shock over it. She sighs. "We can rule out Amity, because otherwise you would have picked the cheese. You show your Intelligence with your sign of submission and the fact that you read the paper. You also show Dauntless by standing up to the man at the end, but also you don't show their personality when you didn't pick the knife. You are also Abnegation, because you were willing to sacrifice yourself for the Earth Pony… but you also didn't act selfless when the pony on the train told you that you could save him. Also, we can dismiss Candor because you didn't tell the truth… only the Candor do tell the truth on that simulation."

I barely hear her words, though I know I'll remember them. "What should I do?" I ask.

"Go where they won't expect to find you." Charcoal advises. "And don't go immediately back to your faction, because they'll wonder why you're back so early. Now, leave. Quickly, before they ask what's wrong."

"But… my friends…" I stutter as she pushes me out the door.

"I'll tell them that you're going to meet them at the train." Charcoal promises. "Hurry! Leave!"

She slams the door behind me.

[linebreak]

My friends don't arrive for another hour.

"Are you okay?" Fluttershy asks immediately.

"Do you still have any vomit I can play with?" Rainbow Dash asks, which earns a squeal from Rarity and a kick from Applejack.

"Sorry, Rainbow." I say. I turn to Pinkie. "So, we're heading to your house?"

"Yesiree!" Pinkie salutes with her hoof. "But we're going to have to disguise you all as Abnegation."

"What?" Rarity and Applejack ask at the same time.

"Why?" I ask Pinkie.

"I dunno." Pinkie shrugs. "But you know how they've been a little less than strict with their 'faction before blood and/or friendship' thing lately? Well, they're getting tighter. An Erudite has to be checked for weapons before even entering our land."

"What?" I am shocked. As if an Erudite would be dumb enough to have weapons!

Pinkie nods. "So, Twi, if you could…"

"Got it." I nod. I chant an appearance-changing spell under my breath, and a flash of purple light shoots out of my horn. I look up, and see that everyone is wearing Abnegation-style shirts and pants, and everyone's hair- even Pinkie's- is in a tight Abnegation bun. I feel cold without my scarf, but I know that it'll reappear when I summon it.

Rarity is unusually quiet, even though she normally complains how boring the Abnegation clothes are.

Pinkie silently leads us to her house, and sneaks us upstairs without her parents noticing, which makes me feel that something is wrong. She then goes downstairs to tell her parents something, and we wait in her room.

The door opens, and we all gasp when we see Pinkie's sister, Marble, look in. Limestone and Marble are a year younger than Pinkie, and they're Abnegation through-and-through.

"Hello." she says, a little too friendly-like. We stay silent.

"You really look like Abnegations, when you're dressed like that." she says, and I know she means it.

She then leaves, silently, and doesn't come back.

Pinkie bounces in a few minutes later, and closes the door. I send the appearance-changing spell again, and all our hair comes down. We are now wearing pajamas.

"What should we do first?" Rainbow Dash asks.

"No scary stories." Fluttershy insists. She got nightmares the last time. Rainbow looks disappointed.

"I have an idea!" Pinkie says. "To prove our loyalty to each other, and giving us something to carry with us when we… separate."

There is a silence in the room. We never really thought seriously hard about never seeing each other again, but now it hits us all.

"What's your idea, Pinkie?" Applejack asks.

"Let's tell each other how our simulations went!" Pinkie squeals.

No. I think. I can't tell them I'm a Divergent.

"We're not supposed to-" I begin.

"We're sleeping over, Twi." Rainbow smirks. "Since when did we care about what we were supposed to do?"

"I'll start!" Pinkie bounces. "So, I wake up in the cafeteria, and I see two baskets in front of me, one with cheese and one with a knife."

"I saw that, too." Rarity notes.

We all nod.

"So then, I hear a voice in my head telling me to choose, so I eat the cheese. Then a dog comes at me, and it's the most adorable dog ever! So I roll over to let it give me a belly-rub, just to see what happens, and it lets me pet it! And then I bounced around it singing a song about how it's my new pet, and then I wake up in a meadow with lots of sheep. I start playing with them when I hear someone come up and ask me what I'm doing. I smiled at him and told him that I was playing a game, and then I woke up! My test instructor, Tori, told me that I was an Amity! Isn't that great?"

We sigh. We figured Pinkie would be an Amity, though we were wondering how she'd take the news. She seems happy about it. She gestures to Fluttershy to go next.

"Well, I picked the cheese, of course." Fluttershy says. "Then the tables disappeared, and a Factionless pony came and asked for the cheese. I gave it to him, and he asked if I was a Dauntless. He looked really mad, so I said no. Then he started yelling at me, and I got really scared." Fluttershy whimpered at the memory. "He then told me that I could save him if I was Dauntless, so I responded that I was. That's when I woke up, and I was told that I was… Abnegation."

Pinkie squeals, but the rest of us are quiet.

"Well, I picked the basket." Rarity shrugs. "It was very pretty. And then an Art-class came in, and asked me to join them. I did, but they told me I couldn't if I was Candor. Now, they were all about to make pretty dresses, so I told them that I wasn't. They screamed that I was lying, but I held my ground. That's when I woke up from the Simulation, and I was told that I was an Amity."

We turn to Rainbow.

"I picked the knife."

That wasn't much of a surprise.

"Then the dog came at me, and I pounced on it. I kept the knife in my mouth, where it'd be out of the way, and then…" Rainbow proceeds to give us a blow-by-blow description of how she made the dog submit to her, and by then she realizes that we're bored. "Then right after that I just woke up, and the Abnegation in there told me that I was Dauntless, and didn't need a second simulation."

"I didn't pick anything." Applejack tells us stubbornly. "But the dog didn't come for me. Instead, your leader, Twilight…"

"Jeanine?" I ask.

"Ya, her. She tells me that if I'm an Apple, then I have to die. I didn't see any point in lyin' to her, so I told her that I was an Apple. Then I find myself in a field, under an Apple tree. Big Mac tells me to buck it, but no matter what I did, the Apples didn't come down. After a while, Big Mac tells me that he'll buck it if I tell him I can't do it. So I told him." Applejack looks daunted at the memory. "I woke up from the simulation, and the pony told me that I was Candor."

"Cool!" Pinkie says.

"Not cool!" Applejack yells back. "She said that from my results, Amity was the least likely for me. How can I live in Amity at the farm if I can't be an Amity?"

We all fall silent. We knew that Applejack didn't want to leave her family, but… wow.

"How 'bout we just get some sleep?" I suggest.

"What about your Simulation, Twilight?" Fluttershy asks.

I take a deep breath and shrug my shoulders. "Same as yours, Applejack, except instead of bucking an apple, I'm taking a test, and Shining Armor wants to take it for me. And I refused, because I knew the material."

"So you got Erudite?" Rarity asks as I summon sleeping bags.

"Yes." I lie as a curl into my make-shift bed.

But I didn't get Erudite.

Erudite. Dauntless. Abnegation.

What am I?

[linebreak]

We set Rainbow Dash's alarm clock for four in the morning. At that, we all crowd together. We know that this is the last time we'll ever be together, and we feel upset.

"If I pick Amity, I'll see you around." Pinkie says brightly. "I'll be delivering food."

"Same here." Rarity says.

"And I'll be guarding stuff." Rainbow smiles. She knows for a fact that she'll pick Dauntless.

I grin. "Yeah. Okay."

But we all know it isn't so.

I summon a transporting-spell, and we smile at each other for perhaps the last time.

And I awake in my bedroom, in my house, in my faction.

And I cry.

[linebreak]

I only get another two hours of sleep before Mother wakes me up to go to the Choosing Ceremony. We have to cross into Abnegation Land to get there, and we see firsthand that Pinkie wasn't kidding; we have to be searched by Dauntless guards before we can enter Abnegation. All the way into the Hub- the building where the Ceremony is- and up the Elevator, Father mutters under his breath about the Abnegations.

I never liked Elevators. This strange magic scares me. Finally, we get to the room where the Ceremony is held, and I nod to my parents before scampering in line.

As we're going in reverse alphabetical order, I am the first of my friends. I look back and see Rainbow in a short-sleeved Dauntless outfit, and Rarity in front of her, wearing a Candor suit.

"Welcome to the Choosing Ceremony!" calls an Abnegation, Marcus, in front of us.

He proceeds to give a boring speech about how the Factions came to be. In short, our ancestors blamed war and destruction on evil. Those who blamed dishonesty for evil formed Candor; those who blamed arguments formed Amity; those who blamed cowardice created Dauntless; those who blamed selfishness formed Abnegation, and those who blamed ignorance made Erudite. He continues to babble on about how we are now sixteen and may choose our path in the world, but I'm just counting ponies ahead of me.

At this point, I realize that the reason I was so confident that I would pick Erudite was because I was so confident I would get that on the Aptitude test. So which should I choose? Dauntless are brave, and I'd be with Rainbow, but they also scare me a little. Abnegation is a no-go; I dislike them as much as my Father does. Erudite has my family, but I also want adventure, so should I pick Dauntless? Or Erudite?

He calls up an Abnegation pony first, and he picks the faction that he was born in. As the line ahead of me gets shorter and shorter, I start to panic. When Marcus calls up, "Twilight Sparkle!" I almost faint.

I canter up and he hands be a knife. I am supposed to cut open the skin above my hoof and drip it into one of the bowls, to symbolize where I am going. The candor bowl is full of glass, the Amity bowl is full of dirt, the Dauntless bowl has heaps of hot coals, the Erudite has water and the Abnegation bowl has stones.

Dauntless? Abnegation? Erudite?

What should I choose?

Then then I realize that I don't want to choose.

The Erudite water turns red.