Meadowsweet had a hard time accepting that Aurora and me now looked like Ponies, but she had overcome her earlier fears of us as Changelings already and I thought she would get tot a positive conclusion on her own if only we gave her some space to think.
I wandered off a little from her to scout our immediate area, spotting a set of train tracks leading into a tunnel not too far from our location to the West.
Considering the direction I knew Ponyville to be in, those tracks supposedly led from Canterlot straight down to Ponyville.
It was not like the tracks helped me right now; getting on the train would involve us going back into Canterlot, which risked us getting thrown in jail anew if that bubble of anti transformation magic was still up.
I turned instead toward the East, which is the direction we had to go in to find the forest near the Foal Mountain.
The Foal Mountain range was close to Hollow Shades, the town where I had my spa adventure and met Pinkie Pie and Starlight Glimmer, but we were now on the opposite side of them.
A few of the peaks stuck out on the right side beside the tall mountain we were still fairly close to.
"Closer by, huh?" I muttered to myself. "It seems farther away."
Aurora walked up to join me.
"See the tracks coming out of the tunnel there?" she asked me, motioning with her left hoof in the direction of another tunnel I had not seen yet in the darkness of night. "The plains are good for running; we can get to them in a few short minutes, cross them, and get to a copse of trees."
"A copse of trees is not a forest," I protested flatly.
"No, but it was close enough to Canterlot for us to hide in when our Queen said we had to attack it. We waited there while she infiltrated Canterlot until the signal was given that we were to attack the city," she explained, revealing something about her past that I had only been guessing at before.
"The trains pass fairly close by, so it was a coming and going of them as we waited," she continued, and I realised there had been so much more going on in the background of that failed invasion than was expanded upon in the show back home. "I was so nervous every time another one came by. I was sure our Queen had bitten off more than she could chew and was thrown in jail, like we were, or killed."
"You keep saying that; that the Ponies would kill us," I pointed out.
"Yeah, well, they would," she stated with a shrug. "Or it's just a story we get told, just like the stories the Ponies tell about us. I don't want to run the risk of it being true."
"It doesn't rhyme with my experiences with Ponies so far," I spoke, hoping to alleviate her concerns. "I've found that they're mostly open to reason as long as we are truthful to them."
"And that's the problem, isn't it?" Aurora sighed. "Being truthful to them when you have to hide yourself among them as somepony they think they can trust? I don't go into the cities anymore unless I have no other choice... too much has happened."
"So what brought you to Canterlot then, sister?" I had to ask. "If you don't go to the Pony cities anymore unless you have to, as you say, then what brought you here?"
"Passing through. All of their trains go through Canterlot, and it's sometimes easier to use them than to fly yourself. Especially if you have to go from Baltimare to Tall Tale," she spoke, and my ears perked up.
"Tall Tale? That's where Burst says I should claim I'm from when I go to meet her mare in Hoofton. What's it like there?" I asked greedily.
"It's calmer than Baltimare; A lot of ships visit the Horseshoe Bay to trade with the city. Tall Tale is wedged between the bigger city of Vanhoover and the Smokey Mountain, but it doesn't have direct access to the North Luna Ocean," Aurora explained like she was a tourist guide.
"It's still close enough to the beach that a lot of Ponies prefer going there because the prices of the hotels are lower than they are in Vanhoover. We have a Hive in the forest near it, which is where I was going; it's where I hatched," she revealed.
"I hatched in the Hive close to Hollow Shades myself. Can I say that since I'm from a different world? I know a lot of you look at us different," I wondered, trying to judge what her feelings on the subject were.
"Yeah, you can say that," she agreed. "You're one of us now, no matter what it is you were before. It's not like we can afford to fight among ourselves."
"Thanks sister," I told her, genuinely put at ease. "So can I ask about your name? I think Crook or Burst said your common name is Tizzy?"
"Yeah, Matron named me Swat, but I prefer Tizzy," she revealed. "I was the last of my batch to hatch, and Stripe has always made fun of me for that. She teased me to the point where I would swat my forehoof at her to get her to leave me alone. Matron spotted me doing it, so..."
"The more I hear about the names our family has been given by the Matrons, the more I think they should get new material. It's not like they're very inventive, are they?" I wondered.
"I think they got tired of naming us all after body parts," Aurora offered back with a wry smirk. "You met Cubitus and Glottis in the jail."
"And I know Thorax since he met with princess Twilight Sparkle in the Crystal Empire," I listed. "I don't know a lot of others with bodyparts as names, though."
"Bodyparts as names?" Meadowsweet asked, walking up to the both of us.
"Glottis, Cubitus, Thorax," I listed quickly. "Some of our family are named like that. I'm named Pearl because of my pearl necklace. I much prefer that, to be honest."
"Right," Meadowsweet accepted. "I did hear the princess talk about Thorax before, and Cubitus and Glottis were in the jail with us."
"That's what I said," Aurora pointed out. "Are you ready to run through the fields with us?"
"I'll certainly do my best," Meadowsweet spoke, and Aurora set off at a leisurely pace toward the railway to the East of us.
Meadowsweet and I just tagged along as she did, with Meadowsweet peering between the both of us Changelings again in a mixture of wonder and concern.
"I'm still not sure I like how you can just take on a different appearance like that," she brought up. "It's confusing me that I'm now talking with two entirely different Ponies than before, yet you're still the same inside."
"It's something you get used to over time," Aurora chuckled darkly. "We have to change guises so often that it's better to just accept it."
"But how do you recognize one another?" the Earthpony wondered. "There were so many of you down in the jail earlier. Almost every one of you looked the same. I know Deadbolt said it was to do with the shoulders, but I couldn't see it."
"Mannerisms, smell, size," my sibling explained as we walked on. "How do you Ponies keep one another apart? It's the same for us."
"Well, we have cutiemarks," Meadowsweet half-protested, falling a few steps behind so she could look at ours. "And so do you now. Do you change those too when you change disguises?"
"We have to," I answered. "Can you imagine coming across a different Pony with the same cutiemark as somepony else you know? It would immediately be noticeable there's something off about it."
"That's the truth," Aurora agreed. "How many guises did you take on before you learned that one, Pearl?"
"Oh, no, just this one so far," I warded off. "But it makes sense when you think about it, right? I did get training on how to take on different looks on my first day. I think it was Burst who showed me how to do that, and then Breeze tried to teach me how to look like a foal. Blaze was in charge of teaching me to fight."
Meadowsweet fell further behind and Aurora and I stopped to look back at her.
"Foals!" the Earthpony decried. "Are you for real?"
"Yes," I nodded to her. "My clutch sister Breeze mostly roams around Equestria as a foal. She has the worst time of it; constantly has to switch schools so as not to rouse suspicion."
"Ah, yes, schools," Aurora groaned. "That's the main reason I don't use foal forms. They kept dragging me into those buildings and there were uncomfortable questions I couldn't answer there. I had to sneak out during recess each time."
Meadowsweet sat down and rubbed at her temples. "Stop breaking my brain, please."
"Maybe we should just run for a bit; clear our heads?" I suggested. "As an aside, though; how long do you think it's been nighttime for? Because I don't see the moon move..."
Meadowsweet and Aurora both looked up at the moon, still hanging in the same spot in the sky as where it had been when we escaped from Canterlot.
"Are you sure about that, Pearl?" my sister asked, looking pensive. "The only time I know that the moon stopped moving was when Nightmare Moon was threatening the Ponies."
"Eternal night," I breathed out, remembering the show's episodes which featured Nightmare Moon in them. "I'm sure it's not that bad."
"I hope not," Aurora agreed. "We have enough problems as it is."
"She was defeated before," Meadowsweet mumbled, dragging her hooves as she walked back up to join us again. "We have to put our trust in Celestia to defeat her again. We simply have to."
"Your faith in Celestia is commendable," said Aurora. "But she's just as much a Pony as you are. Our Queen Chrysalis captured her before. If our Queen can, then what about your Nightmare Moon?"
"Twilight Sparkle should be on it," I knew, and motioned my left forehoof in the direction of the spire that was Canterlot's palace. "She went up to the Princesses to convince them to do something about the Tantabus."
"The what?" Aurora wondered.
"The Tantabus," Meadowsweet knew, having felt its influence in Camellia's house. "It makes you feel like everypony is turning against you."
"It's the reason Canterlot is in the state it's in right now," I added. "Twilight Sparkle and Applejack rushed over here to help defeat it."
"Well, I wish them all the luck with that, then," Aurora spoke with no indication she knew what to do with it beyond that.
"I'm sure Twilight can handle it just fine," I spoke, more to soothe my own growing worries than anything.
If Princess Luna had become Nightmare Moon again, the situation had only become worse. Twilight had defeated Nightmare Moon once before, with the Elements of Harmony, but how well could she and Applejack handle it now? What with the Tantabus being in play at the same time?
This was so much different from watching the show back home; it would have changed focus to show the viewer what was going on in the palace whenever a side character like myself made an observation like the moon not moving in the sky.
It would have revealed this epic fight between Twilight Sparkle and Nightmare Moon, while Applejack was trying to convince Luna that her fears were ungrounded. Or something like it.
But this was the real world, not a show.
I stared hard in the direction of that tall spire, wondering what Twilight was doing over there. And how long she'd been doing it for. How long had I been down there in the jail?
Deadbolt apparently knew that time progressed even while he was down in the jail with us, but even he had looked somewhat shook when we passed him by on our way out.
Was that what he had been looking at? The night sky? The moon staying as still in it as if it had been glued in place?
"Let's continue walking," I suggested. "I think we'd best meet up with the rest of our family sooner rather than later just in case. We don't want to be the only ones out here in the fields if Nightmare Moon is truly back."
We ran as fast as we could for the safety of the copse of trees Aurora had pointed out. We still would have to cross the railway first, but that would be easy enough once we got to it.
For now we just wanted to make some distance between ourselves and Canterlot, just in case Nightmare Moon had truly returned.
Just in case the Tantabus had been victorious over Luna.
Just in case Twilight Sparkle had failed...