“Are you sure we’re allowed to draw on these maps?”
 
“Nope! But it’s too late now!”
 
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Shall update later with a full story.
 
Also, sorry for the absence for this week, I was actually doing a fair bit of drawing the whole time but it wasn’t quite coming out right. I was trying to nail down the designs of Trop’s two sisters, but neither of them were really working properly and I didn’t know why so I decided to start from scratch with them and a couple other characters I haven’t shown yet. None of them have fully finalised designs yet, but I’m at least happy with the sketches now so new characters shall be on the way.
 
I’m also, though, trying not to just introduce a boatload of characters straight off the bat without doing much with the pre-existing characters. The thing I’m finding with Tommy and Co. here is that I’m enjoying them more as individuals, and I’m liking putting them together more in different scenarios and seeing how they do.
 
Anyway, whatever, catch you later
 
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Story Time, Bitches!
 
Attempting to be as sneaky as possible, Phantomwise carefully nudged open the door to her mother’s private library, a place filled with ancient tomes, sacred scrolls, and spells that no normal pony could ever hope to perform. Her eyes scanned the room, peering into every dark corner, and her ears strained to pick up on even the slightest noise.  
“There’s no one in here,” came a voice from above.  
Tommy glared at it’s source. “Summer, that’s not fair,” she pouted.  
“But it takes you so long to look!” The little ghost performed a few flips in mid-air as Phantomwise came fully through the doorway.  
“Um, can I come into the room now?” Tropical Oasis poked his head around the door. “Not that I don’t want to fight a guard or anything, but I don’t really want to get into more trouble with Mama this week.”  
“Yeah,” Tommy sighed. “Summer says it’s empty. We got the place to ourselves.”  
“Great!” Trop rushed into the room and barely stopped to close the door behind him before he dashed off down one of the many isles of shelving. “This is so cool!” His voice drifted back to them.  
“Not so loud!” Tommy hissed. “We might get caught.”  
“He’s down the wrong bit as well,” Summer informed her.  
“And Summer says you’re in the wrong section.”  
Trop reappeared from where he’d vanished off to, not looking a bit put out. “We have to come back here after though; this stuff is amazing.” He looked around. “Alright then, where are the maps?”  
Tommy opened her mouth to answer, then realised she didn’t know.  
“Um?” She looked at Summer, who rolled her eyes playfully.  
“This way,” she said, zooming off down a row of shelves stuffed to bursting with tubes of rolled up parchment.  
“This way,” Tommy parroted, taking off after her, Trop hot on her heels.  
A small amount of galloping later and the group came to a halt in front of a particularly large and imposing shelf. Every available space within it had been taken up by a neatly rolled scroll and, knowing Tommy’s mother, all of the scrolls would be in alphabetical order. Or area order.  
“Alright,” the alicorn immediately took charge, eyes scanning the shelves trying to work out the best plan of attack. “Trop, you search the lower shelves, I’ll search the upper.”  
“What about me?” Summer asked.  
“You can’t read,” Tommy reminded her. “Keep a lookout?”  
“Okay!”  
As the ghost zipped off back to the entrance, Tommy took her place in the air, staring from the very top of the shelves, just to be on the safe side. She read the neatly inscribed titles on the edges of each and every map and found that they were indeed in alphabetical order. After this revelation, she quickly found the maps of the Everfree forest and began pulling them off the shelves, dropping them down to Trop, who gathered them all into a nice little bundle. After this was done, she swooped down to retrieve the maps of Ponyville.  
“That all of them?” Trop asked as the last map was brought down personally by Tommy.  
“Think so. Unless there’s another shelf.”  
Tommy grabbed all the maps in her magic, and the pair marched back to the table by the door. Once there, Tommy couldn’t help but giggle at the sight of Summer, who was floating half-in half-out of the door,  
“We’re back,” she whispered. Immediately, the little ghost was at their sides.  
“Did you find it?” she asked.  
“We don’t know yet. Me and Trop’ll roll all this lot out and you can shout if you see something you recognise.”  
“Okay!”  
“What shall we start with?” Trop asked, nudging the piel with his hoof.  
Tommy shrugged. “Just grab whatever.”  
And so they did, unrolling map after map, but to no avail. Occasionally, either Trop or Tommy would think they’d found what they were looking for, but Summer always said it wasn’t right. Eventually, the trio were forced to concede defeat.  
“Well, this was a bust,” Tommy pouted, dramatically flopping onto the floor on her back. “Now we’ll never find you old village!”  
Summer was equally as dejected. “I really thought there’d be a map,” she sighed. “Oh well.”  
But Trop was not to be disheartened.  
“Tell me again where the village was in relation to the castle, Tom,” he asked, pulling a map toward him that was dated to Ponyville’s foundation.  
“Uhhh, like…”  
“Towards the river, and sort of downstream but a few miles away from the banks in case it flooded.”  
Tommy parroted the information back to Trop.  
“Okay,” he said, not taking his eyes off the map. “That means…” he trailed off, instead opting to pull a few more maps towards himself, and examine them all.  
Tommy and Summer exchanged confused glances, but didn’t want to interrupt something that was clearly taking a lot of concentration.  
Luckily, they didn’t need to wait too long.  
“I got it!” Trop announced, beaming up at Phantomwise. “The village should be somewhere around here.”  
Summer hovered over his shoulder and looked at the place he was pointing to.  
“It’s too close to the river,” she said.  
Tommy relayed this to Trop.  
“But the river’s moved!” the earth pony insisted. “Over the last thousand years it’s carved itself further towards the village.”  
“Wait, rivers can do that?” Tommy was astonished. “Huh.”  
“Yeah! It’s really cool. So, I think that’s our best way of finding this place.”  
“What?”  
“Okay,” Trop pushed away all the maps but the one dating back to Ponyville’s founding, which he dragged closer to himself, “so we start here,” he pointed at their home, “then from there we go-”  
“Hang on,” Tommy cut him off, levitating a pencil off the desk to join them on the floor, where they’d all ended up. “Here. Draw the route.”  
“Okay, so we start here,” Trop drew a little love heart to symbolise the beginning of their adventure, then he stopped. “Are you sure we’re allowed to draw on these maps?”  
“Nope! But it’s too late now!”  
“We’re gonna be in so much trouble,” Trop complained, but he continued to sketch out their routee, talking them though it as he did so.  
“How does that sound to you, Summer?” Tommy asked when he was done.  
“Looks awesome!” Summer performed a few flips. “I can’t wait to try find my family!”  
Tommy rolled the map up and tucked it safely under one of her wings. “Alright then,” she addressed them both, “we’ll meet up at Trop’s house tomorrow, I’ll bring this, and then we can get going.”  
“Sounds good to me,” Trop agreed. “Now, let’s put all this back before your Mom realises what we’ve been up to.”  
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