Best Detective

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.