by Perdita Finn
The girls peered at the photos. Could Sunset Shimmer have faked all these pictures? Why would she?
“Oh please!” Trixie said with a laugh, ignoring them. Snips and Snails were packing up her beach bag for her, trying to stuff in her enormous umbrella. “This is the same girl who made flawless fake photos of your friend trashing the gym,” she reminded everyone.
Pinkie grabbed Sunset Shimmer’s phone and studied the photos. She was outraged. “Yeah! Is this supposed to be me making such a ridiculous face? I’d never make a face like that!” Only she was. The exact same face. “Fake, I say!” she exploded.
Trixie cackled happily. “My work here is done. Trixie out!” She threw a smoke bomb across the sand.
The girls coughed and rubbed their eyes. When the smoke cleared, Trixie was clambering over some rocks. “Don’t forget, Rarity,” she called out, “you promised to put me in the yearbook!”
“Wait!” called Sunset Shimmer. After all, she was still the editor in chief. “You did what?”
She was racing after Trixie when she tripped over Spike, her legs hopelessly tangled in his leash. She stumbled forward, and her foot crashed down, right on top of Twilight Sparkle’s drone camera. Crash! Crunch! Catastrophe!
The camera sparked, buzzed, and fizzled. It was broken.
Twilight was furious.
“It was an accident! I can help fix it!” promised Sunset Shimmer apologetically.
“I think you’ve helped enough!” fumed Twilight.
All the girls glared at Sunset Shimmer. But Sunset Shimmer watched Trixie scurry away. She wondered where she was going. Somehow she had a feeling Trixie knew where the Memory Stone might be.
The Greatest and Most Powerful
The bell rang, and Sunset Shimmer closed her locker. Ever since she’d arrived in school, she’d noticed kids staring at her and whispering. Micro Chips approached her, trembling, and tried to hand her a wad of cash—as if she’d demanded the money. She gave it back to him, upset.
“I don’t want your lunch money!” Sunset Shimmer shouted. “I’m not mean! Got it? I’m not mean!”
He ran from her as fast as he could, still terrified.
Everyone was more scared of her than ever. It wasn’t just her friends who had forgotten how much she had changed. All the kids at Canterlot High still thought she was the Biggest Meanie. Down the hall, Trixie was getting her books at her locker.
“So…” said Sunset Shimmer, approaching her. “Here we are.”
“Here we so are,” agreed Trixie, not sure what she meant. “You really want to do this here in the hallway in front of everyone?”
Sunset Shimmer raised a single eyebrow. “Up to you.” She was trying to control her temper.
Trixie smirked and reached into her locker. She pulled out a giant poster board. It was a mock-up of the Superlatives page of the yearbook, and there was Trixie under the headline Greatest and Most Powerful!
“Behold!” proclaimed Trixie. “Canterlot High School’s Greatest and Most Powerful Student! If this doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.”
“Where’s the Memory Stone?” exclaimed Sunset Shimmer in exasperation. “You turned my friends against me just because I wouldn’t put you in the yearbook as the Greatest and Most Powerful? Which isn’t even an official Superlative!”
Trixie was genuinely baffled. “What are you talking about?”
“It is not a category!” shouted Sunset Shimmer.
“No,” Trixie answered quickly, shaking her head. “What Memory Stone?”
Sunset Shimmer sighed deeply, trying to keep herself calm. “The one you used to erase everyone’s memory, you manipulative… blowhard!”
Trixie barely noticed the insult. Instead she was thinking. “There’s a stone that could make everyone forget all the bad tricks I’ve done.…” She caught herself. “Which is none. Your puny rock pales in comparison to the Great and Powerful Trixie!”
Trixie struck a pose next to her poster and glanced at Sunset Shimmer hopefully.
“I don’t believe it,” murmured Sunset Shimmer. “You have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t,” admitted Trixie. “Sorry.”
Sunset Shimmer slumped against the row of lockers. She didn’t have another plan. She’d been so convinced it was Trixie who had cursed her.
“Did somebody really erase everyone’s memories of you?” asked Trixie.
Sunset Shimmer nodded. A tear slipped down her cheek.
“So,” said Trixie. “Even though we all know you’re the Biggest Meanie, you’re saying you’re not mean anymore?”
“It’s complicated,” said Sunset Shimmer as she shrugged and sat down on the hallway floor.
Trixie took a seat beside her, thinking. Sunset Shimmer had no idea why she’d joined her. Kids passed them in the hallway. Some of them edged away when they saw Sunset Shimmer. A few kids caught sight of Trixie’s poster and giggled to themselves.
At last, Trixie spoke up. “You have this idea of who you’re supposed to be, but no one at school sees you that way, is that right?”
Sunset Shimmer smiled and nodded.
“Trust me,” said Trixie, “I get it.”
This was all really surprising. “I can’t believe,” admitted Sunset Shimmer, “that the only person who believes me is the one I called a manipulative blowhard.” She extended her hand. “Sorry.”
“I took it as a compliment,” said Trixie with a toss of her head. And she meant it. “Let me help you find the Stone,” she told Sunset Shimmer.
“What’s in it for you?” Sunset Shimmer asked suspiciously.
Trixie grinned and pointed at her poster.
“No way,” responded Sunset Shimmer. “Absolutely not.” No way would she give Trixie that Superlative.
“If you’d rather go on being the Biggest Meanie, that’s fine by me.…” Trixie grinned again at her. She was perfectly happy to give Sunset Shimmer time to think it over.
A Missed Message
Sunlight flooded the restricted area of the library in Equestria. Piled in front of Princess Luna and Princess Celestia on a large table were all kinds of books, scrolls, and parchments.
Princess Twilight was frustrated. “I’ve looked everywhere! Why can’t I find the missing pages?” She banged her head on the table and knocked over the wooden box. It fell onto the marble tiles and broke into pieces. But there must have been a secret compartment in the box, because poking out between two pieces of wood was a scrap of parchment!
“This is the last piece!” exclaimed Princess Twilight. She studied the tiny piece of paper, and her eyes widened. “Clover the Clever buried the Memory Stone,” she told the others. “The rock formation must be somewhere in the other world. But it doesn’t say how to get your memories back.”
Princess Celestia looked concerned as Princess Twilight turned the paper over. “Perhaps,” read Princess Twilight, “if I had destroyed the Stone right away, some of my memories could have returned, but when the sun sets on the third day after a memory has been taken, it is erased forever.”
“You must warn Sunset Shimmer at once,” said Princess Celestia, alarmed.
Princess Twilight immediately went back to her own castle to write in her magic journal.
But Sunset Shimmer had left her journal in her book bag in her locker. It buzzed and glowed, but Sunset Shimmer had no idea that Princess Twilight was trying to get in touch with her. She was too busy looking for the Memory Stone with Trixie.
“So where should we start, partner?” Sunset Shimmer asked Trixie.
“How about with ‘What shall I call you?’ ” answered Trixie. “I’m thinking the Great and Powerful Trixie’s pretty decent for an assistant-detective-helper person.”
Sunset Shimmer smiled, and they walked through the main doors to explore the campus.
Far behind them, hidden in the book bag behind the locker door, the journal kept buzzing and glowing.
Best Detective
&nbs
p; The girls were all sitting together in the cafeteria, and Pinkie Pie was making everyone laugh… about something. But Sunset Shimmer had no idea what it was. She was at a table all by herself. She looked at her lunch; she didn’t feel like eating any of it.
Trixie slammed down her tray and then plopped into a chair beside Sunset Shimmer. “A cafeteria full of suspects, two detectives, and one Memory Stone. Seems impossible, but so does pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and I do that all the time.”
Fluttershy, overhearing her, swirled around in her chair, upset. What was Trixie doing to rabbits?
“Don’t give me that look,” said Trixie, noticing Fluttershy and shrugging. “They love it.” She began crunching on her carrots, thinking the whole time about the case. “Let’s talk motive. Who here hates you enough to erase everyone’s good memories of you?”
Sunset Shimmer looked around the room, thinking back to freshman year. There were the kids she had bullied, the kids she had teased, the kids she had ordered around. “If you go back far enough… everyone,” she sighed.
Trixie pulled out a little notebook and wrote down what she said. Known enemies: all. There was only one option. They would have to question everybody in the whole school. She looked up at the clock, stuffed her sandwich into her pocket, and grabbed Sunset Shimmer. “C’mon,” she urged. “No time to lose!”
Their first stop was the nurse’s office. Bulk Biceps sat in a chair with a thermometer in his mouth. Nurse Redheart looked up as the girls stormed in. “Good afternoon, ladies,” she said. “You feeling okay?”
Trixie whipped out her notepad and narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “That depends on how well you answer my questions. Has anyone come in complaining of memory problems recently?”
“Not that I can recall.…” Nurse Redheart answered.
“You can’t recall?” Trixie shook her head sadly. “We’re too late!”
The next stop was the computer lab. Micro Chips leaped out of his chair when the girls entered the room. “Will you accept creamed toast?” he said, offering up his lunch tray.
“What?” Sunset Shimmer was so confused. “Ew! I told you I don’t want your lunch money, and I definitely don’t want your lunch.”
“Speak for yourself!” said Trixie, glancing at Micro Chips’s tray. “Word around school is, you know a lot about erasing memory.”
Micro Chips nodded. “I erased a ton of memory just this morning.”
“You did!” exclaimed Sunset Shimmer. A lead at last!
Micro Chips held up a hard drive. “Four terabytes of quantel-accelerflex memory to be precise.”
The girls’ faces fell. This was no good.
“How come no one’s ever impressed by that?” Micro Chips wondered out loud. But the girls were already gone. They had more investigating to do.
When the bell rang, Sunset Shimmer and Trixie began cornering kids at their lockers and showing them the picture of the Memory Stone. No one recognized it.
“Is there anything you can tell us about it?” Sunset Shimmer asked Maud Pie. Pinkie Pie’s sister was super smart. Maybe she would notice something about it. “Anything at all?”
“I can’t tell much from a drawing,” said Maud Pie. “Only that it’s felsitic intrusive igneous, granular in texture, most likely arranged in an equigranular matrix, with scattered biotite mica and amphibole, at least sixty-five percent alkali feldspar by volume, with a melting point of twelve-fifty centigrade, plus or minus ten degrees.”
Sunset Shimmer’s mouth fell open. Trixie was dumbfounded.
“Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” Maud apologized.
But that was the only lead they came up with, and they weren’t even sure what it meant. Nobody else recognized the Memory Stone, or maybe, nobody else remembered it. They were stuck.
“Sure, it seems like we’ve only come up with dead ends,” said Trixie. “But I mean, it could be worse.”
Sunset Shimmer looked up and saw her old friends walking and laughing together. They were probably headed to the Sweet Shoppe… without her. Later, they’d text one another and share jokes and stories. She missed them. She missed them a lot.
“It is worse,” she said very quietly. Losing her friends was the worst thing of all.
The Worst Case of Invisibility
Twilight Sparkle was tinkering with her camera drone, trying to fix it. She tightened a last screw and turned it on. Beep! Beep! Beep! It buzzed into the air, flying in loops around the girls.
“Good as new!” Twilight sighed, relieved. “The Best Friends yearbook photo, number thirty-six A, attempt eight, take two!”
Sunset Shimmer peered through the window of the yearbook office, watching the girls strike a happy pose together. Trixie came up beside her, shaking her head.
“On three, everyone say, ‘Best friends!’ ” exclaimed Twilight. “One, two, three…”
“Best friends!” shouted the girls together.
Twilight checked the photo; it was perfect! She sent it to the yearbook.
In the yearbook office, Sunset Shimmer saw the photo arrive in her in-box. She opened the photo on the yearbook computer.
“Stop looking at that,” ordered Trixie. “You’re just going to wind yourself up. You can’t think if you’re wound up.” Trixie paced back and forth in the office, pretty wound up herself. “Think, Trixie, think!”
Sunset Shimmer flipped through the pages of this year’s yearbook on the table. Here were all her classmates. Which one would want to hurt her so badly? “Who are we missing?” she wondered out loud. “We’ve talked to everyone, from A to Z.”
Trixie looked over her shoulder. “Wait.” She’d noticed something. Or rather, she’d noticed that something was missing.
At the end of the students’ photos was a small line of text, Not pictured… Wallflower.
Trixie furrowed her brow. “Wallflower? Who’s Wallflower?”
“I’m right here, you know,” said a quiet voice from the corner of the room.
Sunset Shimmer blinked. Sitting at a computer was the quiet girl she’d met just a few days ago, or rather, realized that she knew. What was it about her? Sunset Shimmer always seemed to forget that she was there.
“Who are you?” asked Trixie before Sunset Shimmer could stop her.
Wallflower sighed. “I’ve known you since third grade.”
Trixie’s face brightened. “Ahh! I remember third grade. Not you specifically, but what a grade it was. The Great and Powerful Trixie debuted her disappearing frog trick! One of my best. You know, a lot of people don’t know how much work goes into raising tadpoles.”
Sunset Shimmer was just about to say something nice to Wallflower to cover for Trixie’s not knowing who she was when she noticed a gentle glow from her bag. It was her magic journal! Princess Twilight was trying to get in touch with her. Maybe she had figured out what had happened to the Memory Stone and who had cursed her.
She picked up the journal eagerly. Sunset, we think the Memory Stone was buried under this rock formation, she read to herself. And if you don’t destroy the Memory Stone by the time the sun sets today, all those memories will be erased forever.
Attached to the note was a picture of the rock formation. Sunset Shimmer felt more hopeless than ever. How am I supposed to find a rock formation that looks like a rock formation? she thought.
Except that right in front of her was another photo of the same rock formation. It was the screen saver on Wallflower’s computer.
Very carefully, Sunset Shimmer slipped the journal back into her bag. She tried to keep as calm as possible. “Can I ask a silly question, Wallflower?” She hoped Wallflower didn’t hear the tremor in her voice. “Where did you take that lovely photo?” She pointed at the screen saver.
“That’s my garden,” said Wallflower. “Well, the school’s garden, technically. I’m the president of the Gardening Club. I founded it, too. I’m also the only member. And the only one who’s ever been to the garden. Or seen it. Or even asked about it.�
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“You’re not really into other people, are you?” asked Trixie.
Wallflower blushed. “I was maybe going to add this picture somewhere in the yearbook. What do you think?”
“Sorry, Sunset doesn’t let anyone put things in her yearbook, no matter how much they deserve them,” answered Trixie, pointedly.
“No, you should do that,” Sunset Shimmer contradicted Trixie. “So don’t let us keep you from working on it.”
Trixie exploded. “What? The Great and Powerful Trixie is annoyed and insulted. Why does this random person you don’t even know get to be in the yearbook, but your esteemed partner…?”
Sunset Shimmer waited and then shook her head softly to Trixie. When Wallflower’s back was turned, she pointed at the computer. “A clue,” she whispered.
Very quietly, Sunset Shimmer snuck up behind Wallflower. She needed to know what she was thinking. All she had to do was touch Wallflower’s shoulder ever so lightly.…
But Wallflower whirled around. “What are you—?”
Sunset Shimmer grabbed her by the wrist. There was no time anymore to be subtle. She had to know what was inside Wallflower’s head. She saw flashes of life at Canterlot High. Students were hanging out in the parking lot and in the gym. There they were at the Battle of the Bands and at Camp Everfree. And there was Wallflower, always in the shadows and a step behind. “Hey, guys, wait for me!” she whispered. She was always the last one picked, the one that was overlooked, the invitation that never got sent, the one kid without a valentine. She was used to it. She expected it.
Sunset Shimmer saw Wallflower walking through the woods all by herself. She was unhappy, like she always was. She was lonely. She came to a clearing, and right in front of her was a strange triangular rock formation. That’s when she first decided to garden. She began planting flowers and succulents and creating a garden. She dug in the dirt with her shovel to plant a baby tree, and the spade hit something hard. With her hands, she cleared away the dirt. Was it a treasure? Wrapped in cloth was what felt like a jewel. Wallflower unwrapped the package. It was the Memory Stone!
