he. she. we.

 

As you can probably guess from the titles, the chapters alternate POVs between the human and NMM. So this is one human chapter and one NMM chapter.

 

First, the human chapter. Go go gadget "angsty backstory!"

Dude (whose name is "North Shores", a perfectly normal human name if I ever heard one) has been crying over this shit for four solid years now. And just in case you forget how dreadfully unhappy the guy is, every third paragraph or so contains a reminder:

 

Anyway, here's the actual story: Mr. Sad is living alone and miserable in a giant house bought with his dead wife's $20M trust fund, when one day he starts hearing strange noises. Then a black horse appears in the hallway for a moment, before vanishing. He hears the sound of crying from nowhere. Objects start appearing, disappearing, and moving around when he's not looking. He even hears a voice in his dreams, which drives away his nightmares.

 

So, Mr. Sad's house is haunted by some kind of ghost of NMM. Kind of an interesting premise, right?

 

Unsurprisingly, it only takes until chapter 2 for Shinzakura to torpedo that whole idea. Turns out NMM is not a ghost, she's just really, really sneaky. She hides out in the basement, and only comes into the main house when Mr. Sad isn't around. She (somehow) avoids letting him see her, out of fear and/or shame.

 

 

Double posting to discuss NMM's backstory, because it's honestly kind of amazing. Normal "angsty Luna/NMM" backstories might go like this:

This fic manages to top them all.

 

When Twilight and friends used the elements on NMM, they didn't just exorcise the nightmare spirit, nor did they simply purify Luna. Instead, they did both at the same time. NMM wasn't originally an evil spirit, but the elements separated her from Luna anyway, producing two separate ponies with the same memories. Then they purified both of them, and sent one to Earth.

 

So, the pony living in Mr. Sad's basement

In fact, she's so ashamed of what she's done that she doesn't even want to be in the same room as another living person, hence the poltergeist act.

 

Also, calling the ending now: Mr. Sad's NMM somehow merges with S1 Luna, producing S2 Luna. Makes sense given that this NMM is explicitly mentioned to be normal pony size, just like S1 Luna.

 

 

 

 

It's now 8 months later, and NMM has been living in Mr. Sad's basement, eating his food, washing his laundry, playing his video games, listening to his music, buying things on the internet with his credit card, etc, etc... and somehow he has still never seen her or heard her speak except that very first time.

 

Mr. Sad has quit being all emo, which is definitely an improvement. I think I only saw a single reminder of his tragic backstory in chapter 3.

 

Unfortunately, it seems like the reason Mr. Sad quit being emo is because it's Moon's turn now. She finally talks to him, and spends most of the time saying things like this:

For fuck's sake, Moon, you're over a thousand years old - quit moping and get your shit together.

 

Chapter 4 was boring as hell, because half of it was retelling events from chapter 3 from Moon's POV, and the other half was more of Moon lying around feeling sorry for herself. Also, this:

I understand she's having some kind of identity crisis, but this is just obnoxious.

 

 

 

Previously, on "he. she. we.":

 

Now that Moon and Mr. Sad finally got their shit together, it's time for them to fall in love. Which they do, with all the subtlety of a freight train.

 

And on her side:

 

Finally:

 

Okay, done. Time for drama now.

And here I was, looking forward to reading about a pony living in secret on earth. Silly me!

 

 

 

Chapter 6 more or less resolved the major conflicts in this fic: North and Moon are now dating, and Moon can switch between human and pony forms at will, so there's little risk of her getting hauled off to Area 51. Now it's time for something new.

 

First, you should know that Moon loves video games (also Hot Topic shirts and anime, if you were wondering). She's really, really good at them - so good, in fact, that she lands a spot on some kind of vaguely-defined pro gaming team. I'm not sure when she had time to get that good, given that most of her year on earth was spent on things like "hiding from North" and "crying herself to sleep".

 

Unfortunately, it turns out that to get hired as a pro gamer, you need stuff like photo ID and a bank account. Moon, being a magical talking horse from another dimension, has none of these things. Not a problem, though! Moon ALSO somehow picked up super l33t computer h4xx0r skillz. She stays up late hacking ALL of the databases, and by morning she has credit cards, bank accounts, and enough documentation to get a driver's license. Not bad for someone who 18 months ago was still trapped on the fucking moon.

 

Eventually, Moon's implausible game-playing and computer-hacking expertise leads her to some vaguely-defined video game tournament. She destroys her opponent (playing a perfect match of Street Fighter with a character she's never used before), so after the game, he punches her in the face. No big deal (earth pony endurance, etc.), but when she goes with North to file a police report, they hear that the guy is comatose and has turned completely gray. Moon knows what this means, and it's nothing good: there's a changeling on earth. [spoiler]DUN DUN DUN[/spoiler]

 

 

Oh, one more thing:

 

 

Two posts because apparently I'm 4 chapters behind.

 

North and Moon just got back from a vidya tournament in Chicago, where a changeling killed one of Moon's opponents. While Moon runs around investigating, North gets a call from his sort-of kid sister. He shows up at her place, she opens the door, and out of nowhere he suddenly gets knocked unconscious.

 

Meanwhile, Moon goes to visit her vidya teammate Pumpkin Spice (a perfectly normal human name if I ever heard one), who is currently the #1 suspect for being the changeling. She's not the changeling, though - she's the daughter of Russian spies and frequently gets harrassed by the CIA. After hearing Pumpkin's big secret, Moon is thinking about revealing her own secret as well, but just then, she senses North has been knocked out via their psychic bond. (Of course they have a fucking psychic bond. Are you even surprised?)

 

Moon smashes her way through the walls of Pumpkin's house and blasts off at Mach 23. She arrives at Katie's house and "rescues" North by slamming changeling Katie around with magic. Luckily, North wakes up and defuses the situation before anybody gets murdered. All three and Pumpkin (whose house is completely trashed) meet at Denny's to discuss the clusterfuck that is their lives. Specifically:

And of course:

And finally, she's being monitored by HIVE, ostensibly a charity, but secretly a front to allow the more full-blooded changelings to monitor their cousins across the world. In other words, shit has gone full cloak-and-dagger. God damn it.

 

 

 

Katie gives the background on the whole "I'm a changeling" thing. It's about what you'd expect: changeling gets stuck on earth because of reasons, she gets freaky with the locals, now 700 years later the right bloodlines will occasionally mix to produce a "queen" (or "throwback"), meaning a human with changeling powers. The HIVE spies on known descendants of the bloodlines, especially queens, since they're the most dangerous.

 

Moon, being a reasonable and well-balanced sort of person, shows up at the local HIVE office, teleports the boss to the moon, and gives him the alicorn + Canterlock treatment for a while about how they need to leave Katie alone. I didn't realize at the time, but apparently we're supposed to consider this a complete resolution of the cloak-and-dagger subplot, since the story promptly takes a left turn for crazytown.

 

 

Moon goes to a vidya thing, and gets back to find some psycho bitch throwing all her stuff out of North's house. Said psycho bitch is Destiny, who North went on a date with, once, two years ago. Now out of nowhere she's reappeared, and swears up and down she's North's girlfriend and lives in his house.

 

Moon calls Carrie (North's sister), who is friends with Destiny, to come sort this shit out. Destiny flips out a pulls a knife. Moon flips out and pulls a gun. Destiny leaves, but Moon dials up Katie on the magic brain radio, and also Pumpkin (who is apparently a gun nut), just in case. (Moon and Pumpkin are both really good with guns, because of vidya, you see.)

 

Destiny comes back the next night to slash everyone's tires and smear her own shit on the front of the house. Naturally, they call the cops and have her crazy ass thrown in jail. Oh wait, that would make sense - no, they have Katie call HIVE and demand they investigate. Apparently that's a thing she can do now.

 

 

 

A changeling killed somebody in Canada, so the HIVE sends Moon to investigate. They also send a bodyguard, one Celestia Arturia Moynihan. Ms. Moynihan, as it turns out, is a crazy person:

Oh wait, disregard that. Five minutes later, she becomes completely reasonable, and now she's on perfectly good terms with Moon and North.

 

Moon and her new BFF fly to Canada, and visit the set of the latest movie by the Vandervort siblings, "the hottest director/screenwriter/producer combo in Hollywood at the moment". These big shots are working on what turns out to be a trashy, low budget horror movie. Moon and Arturia meet up with Arturia's half-sister (an actress, and also a changeling) and do a bit of investigating. Eventually, we get to the real meat of the chapter, which is Arturia's life story:

Hope I got all that right, it's a bit of a clusterfuck.

 

Also, Equestria-Luna discovers (through North's dream) that Moon is alive, and vows to hunt her down. North says "nah fuck off" but otherwise provides no details that might actually convince Luna to do so.

 

 

Fuck-all happens in 15. North gets stuck in some backwater town for a few days because a routine tire replacement reveals that his car is "legally undrivable". He hits it off with some emo chick he meets at a diner, but literally nothing happens because he's got an overpowered horse girlfriend.

 

16 is the second half of Moon's investigation of changeling activity at a movie set in Canada. She and Arturia are pretending to be CDC agents investigating the "mysterious" (changeling-caused) deaths, which works great until a real CDC agent shows up and says he's never heard of them. They tell him to check with their fake boss, Aaron Harrison. He *is* Aaron Harrison. This is the best thing that has ever happened in a Shinzakura fic. But nothing comes of it - Moon just mindrapes the guy a little bit and sends him on his way.

 

Moon casts "detect magic" in hopes it will catch the changeling, then wanders off. When she gets back to check the results, disaster has struck! The bad guy stumbled across her spell, despite it being in an out-of-the-way location that nobody was watching at the time, and destroyed it. This is completely contrived and doesn't actually matter anyway. Moon immediately casts "detect DNA", which picks up traces from the site of the spell and points her directly to the rogue changeling queen.

 

Moon teleports in. Turns out the queen (male) is Larry, one of the movie's directors. Xe's only supposed to feed on xer sister Larissa, who's the other director. But xe's apparently given up on all subtlety and is now sucking the life out of a half-dozen people at once. Naturally, that includes Arturia and friendly changeling Taylor. Moon blows xer the fuck out with her overpowered magic.

 

Larry goes to special changeling jail, and Larissa goes to special changeling-victim therapy. Everyone assumes the two were fucking, for some reason. Also, Shinzakura tries to explain things using genetic chimerism, and fails even worse than the last time.

 

 

Moon gets back from Canada. Moon and North fuck for eight hours straight.

 

North goes shopping for an engagement ring for Moon. He brings along Arturia, who is shapeshifted as Moon because of reasons. At the mall, they run into Jake, North's best friend. His first words to "Moon" are:

What a great "friend". As usual, everyone acts like this is acceptable behavior, and also he never fucking stops despite both "Moon" and Moon making it clear that they are utterly, utterly uninterested.

 

Jake, by the way, still can't believe North didn't get with that "hot freak" Destiny when he had the chance - you know, the same Destiny who recently slashed North's tires and smeared her own shit across the front of his house.

 

In other news, turns out the manager of Moon's pro vidya team is starting to worry that she's getting to old to be a pro gamer. She can't exactly tell him "I'm immortal, my dude", so instead they set up an overly convoluted business arrangement: the newly-formed Black Alicorn Entertainment buys the rights to Project Anataeus from Renaissance Studios, but Renaissance will keep working on it for some amount of time for some reason (I'm not sure who's paying for this), while BAE waits for enough girls to age out of the Vixens and magically turn from pro gamers into professional artists, programmers, and/or 3D modelers.

 

As Moon signs the last contract to make this happen, she looks out the window and sees the garage where she parked is currently in flames. DUN DUN DUNNN

 

 

HOLY SHIT it's finally time for

Remember how the last chapter ended with Moon's car in flames? Well, guess what: it's fucking nothing! The arson has no connection whatsoever to HIVE, nor was it the work of North's psycho ex Destiny. Instead it was some random guy, so irrelevant that we don't even get his name, who torched Moon's car after mistaking it for his wife's. By sheer coincidence, their cars are identical in make, model, and color, and even have similar license plates.

 

Moon and North are loaded, so he just buys her a new car, but Moon's teammate Caballero [spoiler]despite the name, Caballero is in fact a girl[/spoiler], whose car was also destroyed, isn't so lucky. But Arturia and HIVE will make sure she gets a replacement, as a favor to Moon. Sadly HIVE has no influence over the insurance company, so instead Arturia plans to buy over 9000 T-shirts from Caballero's web store.

 

At work, North interviews someone, who by sheer coincidence turns out to be Jessica Chen, the emo girl who kissed him back when he was stuck in that random town. The magazine doesn't need anyone with her skills (she only got an interview because she knows North's boss), but North refers her to Black Alicorn Entertainment, Moon's company. Moon is surprisingly unbothered by the fact that this girl once made a pass at her boyfriend, and she hires her as BAE's communications director.

 

Moon and North go to Honolulu for a tournament. She plays Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late [st] (which is a real game - thanks Japan - but normal people just call it UNIST), and wins the grand finals against a girl who turns out to be part changeling. This girl directs Moon and North to a particular restaurant, where they meet Dr. Sarah Goodspeed, director of the Hampstead Institute for Vitalizing Education and queen of all 40,000,000 changeling throwbacks on earth.

 

Dr. Goodspeed is in fact a full-blooded changeling (Moon notices she speaks English with an Equestrian accent), who fell into a dimensional shift 60 years ago and by sheer coincidence landed in the house of a high-level HIVE executive. But she's also dying of bug-cancer. Rather than hand off leadership of HIVE to a trusted lieutenant, she offers it to Moon, who she had literally never met until an hour ago.

 

Moon doesn't decide right away. Later, she and North discuss it while walking on the beach. Moon is hesitant: she doesn't think of herself as Luna or as NMM, and isn't sure if she wants to be a ruler. North eventually talks her into it, and then proposes for good measure.

 

Despite the sound of things, I don't think this story is wrapping up just yet. At the very least, Luna is still on the hunt for this final remnant of the Nightmare, now that she knows Moon exists.