Chapters
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Ashton showed off the castle, taking them through every room and corridor of the castle. Space itself seemed a fickle mistress here, where hallways spiraled in on themselves and doors went to different places if you walked through them another way. They passed through a basement door, which Arcane explained was the ‘retail space’, without elaborating.But there was plenty he did explain. A pool that stretched out past one of the walls to overlook the city, a garden of standing stones, several laboratory…-
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It was some time after their tour of the city that Ashton finally returned. It had been so long that Violet insisted on making a trip back to spend a few hours with her school friends in Hoofhill. “I’ll be back by dark, promise!” And he had no reason to be worried for her. If anything, she was probably safer than he would be.Emmet waved her goodbye from inside the castle courtyard. No trains for her, just an instant gateway from one place to another. He could probably get them too if he asked. Why…
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Ashton was a little disappointed to see that after cycling through so many different avatars, so many different options and possibilities, Emmet settled on a pony that looked almost exactly the same as the one he’d been when he came in, just a pegasus instead of an earth pony. Even if some part of him had known it would end that way—that part of him had a right to feel put out, so far as he was concerned.Of course, the rest of him was so busy digesting all this new data that he could barely find enough…
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Ashton took a few days off Equestria. His sale of mods and spells didn’t need him to keep it up, and not just because there were ponies in the castle to make sure potential visitors got personal attention. He just needed a little time to think, and he wasn’t going to get it in Equestria.He found his mind drifted back anyway, imagining his transitional diagrams and the signal propagation that could be combined to form a pony. Not a real one—he would probably never be creating minds the way Celestia…
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Dinner with the family wasn’t much better. His brother and sister both had their own horror stories about school.“We’ve got to make arrangements,” his father declared. “I’ve been looking into the price of farmland. We should think about relocating before the end of the year.”“We will relocate,” his mother argued, just a little of her anger returning. “But we don’t have to be on the run for the rest of our lives. We should emigrate like everyone else is doing.”“You can’t be safe…
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Ashton wasn’t ignoring the bigger issues in his life, not one bit.It certainly wasn’t that his brother and sister had upended his entire life, and probably the rest of his family with them. There was a note downstairs on the printer, left there as though it had come from Parker’s laptop. Of course the printer’s own access records would show the truth of that claim, at a level that Ashton didn’t have the time or the patience to wipe. But his parents didn’t know how to look. When they got home,…
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The world was frozen. Nopony moved—Violet’s confusion was plastered onto her face as an adorable mask. Emmet stared at the ground, a little frustrated and angry. A wave crashed over a few swimmers, catching the glitter of morning sun.“You can’t change the world for me.” He didn’t have the energy left for bowing and pretending, no matter the consequences. He just met her eyes, feeling worn. “You can’t go back and undo the people who emigrated.”“And I wouldn’t if I could,” Celestia…
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Ashton’s world didn’t end right away.But from that moment on his father was fiercely focused on their departure. They had enough money now that he didn’t have a work shift, and thus had as much free time as he wished to prepare.Contrary to what Ashton might’ve expected, he didn’t pull him from school and flee into the unknown. Dad made that clear the next morning, when he tried to sleep in. “You’re going to class,” he said, flipping on all the lights. “An inspector is going to talk to…
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Arcane Word woke to a world of rain and thunder.She’d heard plenty of rain in her life—most of it recordings through secondhand computer speakers. But this was something else, so rare for her that she had no memories of it. Not the occasional trickle that sometimes swept across the city, but a terrifying storm, shaking every building with thunder and careening off roofs in terrible sheets.For a few moments that was all she knew, other than being warm and comfortable. She did remember comforters this…
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There was much that Arcane was afraid of for her first steps into Equestria, and almost all of it was tied to the reactions of her fellow ponies. She had always known that Celestia didn’t judge her—that she didn’t even care what Ashton decided to be. Or more precisely, that Celestia would care very much and would ultimately only allow her to choose things that would lead to her long-term satisfaction.The princess’s initial allowance might as well be a lifetime of religious absolution, all…
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