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As the sun continues its ascent in the fair morning sky, the soft rustling of the forest's foliage lulls Starfalls Town to sleep. You decide to leave the bat ponies to their peaceful slumber, and resume your flight eastward.
After flying over a burbling stream and past the distant ruins of the Everfree Castle, you glide down to the southern edge of a wide awake Ponyville. Then, following the directions from the letter, you begin making your way north of the busy town square.
Before long, you find a building matching the description you were given: a moderately large establishment with blue banners flanking a gold-crested door. Above the door, a decorated sign reads: "Equestrian Voyagers Agency."
Moonflower: "Ooh, we're here!"
You nod, and enter the guild hall together. However, before you can so much as take a look around, you are greeted by the enthusiastic receptionist.
Receptionist: "Hi, and welcome to the Equestrian Voyagers Agency! My name is Pinkie Pie, and you must be Moonflower and Trailblazer!"
You ask if she was expecting you.
Pinkie Pie: "Nope! I just heard Twilight talk about a bat pony with glowy eyes and what she thinks could be the only alicorn prince in all of Equestrian history! So when I saw you two walk in, I took a teensy little peek, and thought to myself: yup! That's them!"
While you're still not quite sure how princely you feel, you decide to let it slide, and ask Pinkie Pie what she can tell you about the guild.
Pinkie Pie: "Oh yeah! The Equestrian Voyagers Agency is a guild for daring adventurers who are willing to brave the unknown — to chart the uncharted, and discover the undiscovered!
Have you ever been on a long and arduous quest, far away from home, and then your tummy grumbles because you're really hungry, and you still have that grass sandwich you packed earlier, but it's gotten a bit stale, and there's this super-duper delicious-looking cake you can smell from across the street, but then you find out that you're all out of bits? Just me? Well, let me tell you: it's the worst feeling!
And that's where the Agency comes in to save the day! Whenever you travel under our banner, we've got your backs — and your bellies — covered! That's right: any transportation, lodging and food costs are on us. That means it's free for you! What a deal!
But wait, there's more! Have you ever wanted to send a message back home, but there's no post office in the village, region, or dimension you're in? Well you're in luck, because we've got all kinds of animals trained to deliver mail from and back to you, wherever you are in the world! You'll never feel alone again!"
Moonflower: "Oooh! Cool!"
You admit that those do sound like interesting benefits to have, but you can't imagine that it all comes for free. Curious, you ask Pinkie Pie about how committed a member becomes to the guild.
Pinkie Pie: "Good question! Agents represent not only the guild, but also their sponsor, and all of Equestria. Now, I know what you're thinking: holy moly that's a lotta responsibility! And you're right, it is!
If you're thinking of trying it out, don't you worry — if you don't like it, you can reclaim your independence any time you want! EXCEPT... during a voyage. Oh! Voyages are what we call the adventures you go on outside of Equestria. Agents can choose to plan their own voyages, or pick from the Sponsored Voyage Board right here!"
The pink mare gestures to a posting board behind her. You quickly skim through the three offers already on the board. The offers read:
"The Canterlot Museum of Equestrian History is looking for an artifact from the Castle of Pegalithos depicting Commander Hurricane's coat of arms."
"Manehattan Music Management is searching for pop star Dirt Flaxen who disappeared after a failed tour around the Kirin Empire."
"An independent sponsor requests any and all information about Elves."
Pinkie Pie: "Anyway — those are the big rules: be on your best behaviour, and finish what you started. It's kinda like good table manners, if you think about it! Ooh, now I'm hungry. Did I mention we serve cupcakes in the other room? I bake them myself!"
Enter a comment
And I don't know if we're ready to leave on an adventure right away, even with the Guild helping our preparations, but perhaps we'll start by looking for Dirt Flaxen; they might just want to be left alone, but they also might be in serious trouble.
(The safety of an Equestrian citizen is likely more important to a prince of Equestria, but we should double check that it's not one of those world-ending artifacts that are too powerful to fall into the wrong hooves. Otherwise, I'd lean towards taking the quest to find Dirt Flaxen. The elves one sounds made up, or at least less-than-important.)
(Our motivation for seeking Honourshine is, of course, our old promise, and this seemed like a place to start because of its connection to the College of Equestrian History that we heard about in 2023-01-16.)
diplomat"representative of Equestria" card when it suits us.I need to think about which adventure sounds cool. As Skywind noted, the first quest will put us closer to Honourshine's area of study assuming she's a historian, but that's still a vague hope right now, even if in-character Trailblazer makes such a connection. But also: KIRIN KIRIN KIRIN KIRIN KIRIN. Slightly OOC: What if we end up responsible for improving relations with the Kirin and for all the Kirin immigrants/exchange students in the last timeskip episode, S9E26 🙃? Also... "Kirin Empire", not "Kirea"? I shall give my (joking) tsk tsk!
I half-expected to run into Apple Basket, since he got an endorsement as well. He could still be chilling in the lounge or something!
- Forgot to say: Oh my gosh it's Pinkie Pie! 3/6 mane six cameos complete! I wonder if Appledash is canon in this universe, given the QM's previous work.
- That Twilight mentions us is flattering! I'll try to influence Trailblazer to grow into the princely/regal role in my future commands, but I'm not sure if other players are on board.
- Are elves humanoid or equinoid in this universe, if not imaginary 🤔?
- Might be interesting to ask who else has joined the guild so far.
- Remote mail is very cool! I half-expected dragonfire sealed in a jar 😆.
- I wonder how payment is afforded... do they give us a giant pile of bits beforehand, or is there an official royal IOU?
- Any other facilities in this building? They did construct an entire building for this. I assume lodging at least.
I’ve the feeling the independent sponsor interested in elves could be Lyra. Because of the meme about her fascination with humans and elves are basically being immortal, snobby humans with pointy ears.
Nah Apple Basket is our friend, it would be mean to leave him behind if he wants to come along. Albeit I doubt that he’s already in Ponyville. It takes at least a day to travel from Greenhoof Grove to Ponyville by train. So unless he received the letter at least day earlier or somehow gained access to a teleportation spell, it’s unlikely that he had arrived before us. Not to mention that he may not be able to immediately travel to Ponyville due to chores on the farm.
And yeah, I couldn't bring myself to leave behind Apple Basket if he wants to join us, even if it'd be convenient to have an all-flying team for travel purposes. It might be time to invest in one of those flying pegasus-pulled chariots/carts. His cutie mark isn't really related to adventuring; ours is the only one directly about it. You could say Moonflower's mark gives her an adventurer's personality due to needing to explore to find ingredients.
That's a good theory for the elves actually. I feel like we would have picked up her name when we skimmed it, but maybe it wasn't in the flyer.
What really makes flying useful is that it makes it easier to get past obstacles; to scout an area from above and to get to otherwise hard to reach places like a mountaintop. For me it would make more sense to have Trailblazer learn the butterfly wing spell so that we can cast it on non-fliers whenever we want instead of dragging a bulky chariot around.
For learning the butterfly wing spell, I wonder about the QM's interpretation of cutie marks and magic. Going by Boast Busters, unicorns normally can only learn spells based on their special talent, unless their talent is magic, in which case they can learn any spell. (This is the case in Tails of Equestria for example.) So if there's a spell we want to learn, we'd have to justify its connection to exploration. But that might go out the window with our alicornhood, or with other theories of magic. This story has a quite interesting theory of magic established in 2021-10-11 (Horn's Law); the connection between cutie mark and magic could relate to the "magic signature" idea.
I wonder how viable carrying a non-flyer is. There's 2015-11-19 and 2019-11-18, but I assume carrying another pony's weight is too much for long distances. But then how do flying carts work 🤔? The physics of flight are a mystery!
Personally I don't think we need anything like that right now. For long distance travels it doesn’t really matter that much whether or not everyone in our group can fly. And if we just need to get somepony across a chasm or up a cliff Blazer and Moonflower together should be able to pull it off. But since we're already in Ponyvilel and probably going to visit Twilight anyways, we can ask her about it.
As for the the flying carts, they are most likely enchanted.
Also, call me dense, but I don't see the pun between "party" and "adventure/voyager".
EDIT: The dialogue does imply that we haven't seen her before, at least.