Bill Collins came out from behind his desk and shook hands. "Miss…?" he hesitatingly began. At her nod, he continued, "Miss Mattson. I got your call only an hour ago."

"Yes; sorry for the short notice," Tina Mattson replied. "The agency called me in on the Equestria bombing only this morning, so don't feel bad."

He motioned to a chair and resumed his seat. He opened up a small refrigerator. "Coke?"

"Certainly." The accent was hard to place, Collins thought; there was just the hint of a British accent, but it was more Middle Atlantic. Ivy League schooling, then. She was wearing a security badge, but already had her identification out. He checked it, then her paperwork that she withdrew from an inner pocket of her suit; he noted in passing that she did not carry a firearm, or if she did, it was not in the customary shoulder holster. He whistled softly when he read the paperwork: Agent Mattson had a higher security clearance than he did.

"Washington said you were a specialist," Collins said, returning the paperwork and shoving the Shimmer files over to her.

"That's right." She opened the folders, frowned, withdrew a pair of reading glasses from another pocket, and scanned them.

"In school, um, incidents?"

She looked at him over the top of her glasses, which made her even prettier, Collins decided. "Actually, no." She took off the glasses. "For lack of a better word, I would say…weird happenings." She laughed a little. "In fact, my branch of the agency was originally going to be called the Weird Happenings Organization, but it turns out that's trademarked. So they settled on Agency Zero." She rolled her eyes. "Makes us sound very ominous, but really it's pretty mundane."

"So what is it that Agency Zero does?"

"Investigates crimes that don't make sense, basically. Someone reports seeing a UFO, the Air Force can't or won't verify that it's a load of bull, you start getting calls to the mayor or governor or whatever, and someone calls us. A lot of the time it turns out to be nothing: someone saw a military plane over central Nevada and immediately assumed it was aliens." She shrugged. "If I had a dime for every time I've interviewed someone who turned out to be a drunk redneck with too much moonshine on board, I could retire."

"Ever actually found anything you couldn't solve?" Collins didn't expect to get an answer, and was mildly surprised when he did.

"Oh, certainly. I would say a good third of our cases remain unsolved." She smiled again. "A plane disappears over the Bermuda Triangle. We get called, we can't prove foul play or anything else, so the case remains unsolved. Anyone with a brain knows that someone just flew his Cessna into the water on a moonless night, but without a body or evidence, we have to leave it open. Next thing you know, some crank is calling midnight talk radio to say that they were abducted by aliens and saw the missing person. It's sad and stupid, but there you are." She replaced her glasses. "If you don't mind…"

"Right." He let her read the file in silence. When she was done looking over what little was known of Sunset Shimmer and the interviews, she put her glasses away, sat back, and took a long drink of soda. "What do you think?" he asked.

"I'm not sure, to be honest." She tapped the folders. "We have the entire façade of a school blown off and a crater fifty feet deep by sixty feet wide, with the leaves blown off the trees and most of the windows shattered. Classic car bomb scenario—except there's no car, no parts, not even a hint of explosive residue."

"Which is impossible," Collins added.

"Exactly. Which means that either the ATFB has missed something…" her voice trailed off, watching his reaction. He shrugged: it was possible. "Well, it's only been 72 hours. In Sunset Shimmer's case, we have someone who doesn't appear to have existed six years ago. We have a birth certificate, but it's forged. The parents named convienently died in a car wreck ten years ago, and there's no record of a foster family."

"The forgeries were professionally done, too."

"Indeed," Mattson answered. "Everyone in the city was fooled. It was only because the FBI ended up suspecting forgery that she was even caught."

"Okay, but did you read the weird stuff?"

"Oh my, yes." She shook her head in wonder. "Sunset Shimmer became some sort of a winged demon after putting on the Fall Formal crown. She then transformed two other students into demons, tore the front off the school, and did everything in the Cartoon Villain handbook, up to and including the cackling laughter. All we need is thunder and lightning." She sniffed a laugh. "Then everyone has a massive memory loss. They wake up, as it were, with a crater in front of the school and Shimmer back to normal, curled up in a ball and crying her eyes out. End of testimony." She sighed. "That's what about half of them say, anyhow. The others claim seeing Shimmer parking a car out front and setting off a bomb. There's even one person who insists that Shimmer intended to kill everyone at the formal because she lost out to this…what was the name?"

"Twilight Sparkle," Collins supplied. "What is it with parents giving their kids weird names? They didn't do that when I was growing up." He reached over and pulled the Shimmer file back to him. "It gets freakier. There's no record of Twilight Sparkle in school files, but the principal, several teachers, and some kid named Flash Sentry insists that she's a real person. It's like she showed up out of nowhere too and disappeared just as quickly."

"You think she was killed?"

"We haven't found anything like body parts—not even skin. It would take a bomb a lot more powerful than that to vaporize someone. No one's filed a missing persons report either." He finished the Coke. "Now according to the kids, she was palling with some others…" Collins checked the file. "Your agency interviewed these six, and they don't know a damn thing about a Twilight Sparkle. They were at the Formal, and their testimony doesn't match up. Amy Applejack holds to the demon story; in fact, she's pretty damn detailed about it. Riana Verdunnt claims that she showed up late and missed the whole thing. Fluttershy Everfree—you know her parents were hippies—broke down crying; best we could figure out was that she's sticking to the demon story. Rainbow Dash, which has got to be a nickname, started screaming about her rights and finally told us she didn't see a damn thing other than Sunset Shimmer causing trouble. And this Diane Pinkamena…" Collins closed the file. "She talked so fast the agents couldn't get anything out of her. What they did get made even less sense than anything else."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. "Is Sunset Shimmer being held here?" Mattson asked.

"Yeah, downstairs. She's been quiet. We Mirandized her, so she knows her rights. Given the evidence, she's being charged with a ton of counts of forgery and mail fraud. We're holding off on any terrorism charges until we get something more concrete, but the paperwork's already there. She's going to jail for sure, but the question now is if she goes for ten years for fraud or life for attempted first-degree murder." He paused. "Or death if it turns out she knocked off this Twilight Sparkle character."

"Can I see her?"

Collins got up. "Yeah. Let's go."