Parcly Taxel: When ponies go on a holiday, be it a friendship retreat with my friend Twilight and her friends or just a stranger in a strange land, it’s for more than just fun. It’s a time to interact fully with places that can only be described in books, a time to savour the known and chance upon the unknown within places. For a place as large as the city we were visiting, the associated novelty would never cease: somepony could spend years among the natives and still not have an intuitive understanding. Just like quantum physics.
 
Spindle: Yet the pegasi in Hong Kong had scheduled rainy conditions for the next five days – my least favourite weather, since rain melts the snow that blankets the high mountains among which the windigos blow.
 
Parcly: I also felt a stiffness in my body, both the solid and misty parts, when I released myself on the morning of departure. I knew this had to do with me granting several last-minute wishes to ponies like Applejack and Rainbow Dash before concentrating on my luggage, and that the pain was not localised, but it wasn’t the lightness I’d expect of my floating self.
 
So I turned to a relaxation technique the Saddle Arabian genies taught me. Staying about a hand above the bottle’s mouth, with the suction and my willpower balancing out, I allowed my contained stress to move freely across my warped coat and mane, reshaping or moving molecules as it desired. Within seconds I was a puffy cloud of magic circulating like a solenoid, and when I broke out of this dreamy envelope my hooves and face felt as soft as a real cloud of water vapour.
 
Spindle: Recent developments had much destabilised the lands outside Equestria. I phased into the luggage and ensured that all was fine, lest a stubborn changeling who wasn’t in the hive when Thorax was crowned sneak in and plant something nasty (or something along that line). The great hinterland of China was another concern specific to this trip, increasingly asserting its authority over Hong Kong and stirring some hatred on both sides. I’m not an evangelist though.
 
Parcly: In the end, none of these worries seemed to affect me in the slightest. I had a simple breakfast of half-boiled egg, toast and hot chocolate, then beat my wings and… crashed into one of Canterlot’s waterfalls. I had to spend a few minutes preening off the water in my wings (they’d freeze in the stratosphere otherwise) and drying my saddlebags, but I got things right the second time.
 
A passing courier had newspapers from my destination. I picked one up, levitating it to read when no clouds or other obstacles were ahead. “Wow! So much pony races!” I exclaimed when taking out the relevant section, but Spindle was neither warm nor cold. She calmly explained how racing, which was once a local pastime, had grown under the influence of the former colonists to become a major social topic/issue.
 
Rainbow Dash: As thanks for having my wish granted by Parcly, I drew a rainbow across the highest cloud tops for her to follow.
 
Applejack: For granting mine, I gave her some of my freshest apple pies to eat in flight, for it’s even colder up there than all the winters I’ve been through combined. She really got that freak ability to take coldness by the horns, no doubt due to spindly Spindle!
 
Spindle: Am I thin or what? Look at me, I need to be this thick to blow the powerful winter blizzards!
 
Applejack: Huh, sorry. Just found some wordplay there.
 
Parcly: Regardless of stereotypes, I reached Hong Kong in four hours, landing at 2:40 in the afternoon. The first things I noticed were the very tall condominiums – being a small land has forced the ponies upwards in a manner not unlike Manehattan but on a far larger scale. Then I noted the lack of any rain as I boarded a train to downtown. Perhaps my trip wouldn’t be so downbeat after all to Spindle?
 
Spindle: Of course it wouldn’t be. Parcly alighted at Kowloon and found a loop service to the hotel we would be staying at, the Dorsett in Mong Kok, only to realise there was a direct connection. So startled she was at her discovery that she whiffed through my ethereal coat looking backwards.
 
Parcly: Just like Spindle evading my wild charge by presenting no resistance, the shuttle I was expecting never seemed to come. To pass the time I twirled my luggage around myself over and over again; its inertia provided the challenge but I figured out the trick relatively quickly. Finally, however, I gave up and flagged down a taxi.
 
Here the throngs of the city proper played in full splendour. Beneath car horns and walking ponies were the rhythmic, almost hypnotic beats of pedestrian traffic lights, slower at stop and faster at go. Cantonese, the variant of Chinese I never got around to learning, was in the air.
 
Spindle: The hours spent flying and trotting and waiting had begun to wear upon us, and it was five in the afternoon when we checked into the Dorsett. We settled into some telepathic small talk, the link having been established before Luna inserted hers into Parcly, at the time when I tried turning her over to the spirits. The conversations snaked deeper into our subconscious memories until Luna’s influence lulled the alicorn to sleep, at which point I settled on my own bed too…
 
…until the true night was above us. I pulled my eyes back into focus at 9:30 (windigos have no eyelids, so “sleep” in a different sense) and had to shake Parcly out of sleep paralysis – she found the bed and the dreams too sweet. Even when we went out for dim sum at the same place as the first night of our first trip to Hong Kong, her hooves remained clumsy and she swayed in many false directions. Already Parcly was entranced in this urban sprawl.