Twilight Sparkle: What would happen if you forcibly broke your stream in half and then put a barrier between them?
Parcly: …I’ve never tried that. I’ve only pulled myself out without stoppering my bottle in order to clean its interior, a quite finicky task in itself.
Spindle: In any case, Parcly cleaned her bottle among other things before heading out to Tokyo, as she wanted to look a bit more stylish. While doing so she watched a sampling of international news in multiple languages, reminiscent of the cosmopolitan atmosphere she would encounter later.
There is a paradox with my species, in that we symbolise loneliness and starvation but hunt in places with a concentration of ponies. As I floated down the streets of Takayama one last time, I wondered why this was the case, and came to the conclusion that we were inducting into our herd the minority of ponies who were irretrievably lost in hatred - giving them a new life, in effect. Transformed windigos retain full memory of their past selves, and we use this to help other creatures big and small in the mountains.
Parcly: Tokyo is on the eastern side of Japan, a long way from Takayama and the Chubu (中部) or central region, so I would be taking the Shinkansen to my destination. First, however, I had to take a normal train to Nagoya, where I finally stayed awake all the way. The scenes of countryside Japan I saw were mostly forested mountains, with lots of interlocking roads and dams - as well as the railway line itself - nonetheless running in the valleys formed at their bases.
My original plans called for a short trip around Nagoya before continuing on the Shinkansen. Rainbow Dash saw them and contended that Tokyo was much more fun, so I obliged and immediately proceeded to the high-speed tracks after alighting at the station.
Rainbow: These trains are awesome just for their sheer speed, which even I can’t match. The line Parcly was riding, which at its full length stretches from Tokyo all the way west to Osaka, is doubly awesome because five billion ponies have used it, more than any other high-speed line in the world. It’s so fast that the train has to bank at shallow corners; it’s so popular that the interval between trains is only five minutes.
The whole ride on Hikari #518, stopping at Toyohashi, Shin-Yokohama and Shinagawa, took precisely 103 minutes and ended at 14:10. Even at such an early time, I could already see the faint outline of the moon…
Princess Luna: …which was looking down on a land about to explode as it has always done every night. Forever on the edge of chaos, there is hardly an idea of “yesterday” among its natives; all times reference the future. The air was rather warm for a winter day, which only seemed to encourage clocks to tick faster while staying in perfect synchrony. Thousands by the minute and millions by the day, transactions were being made in every possible place. From a story of the city it becomes a story of the pony inside - a story about you.
Parcly: The metro system of Tokyo offered me a brief respite from the hectic streets above as I navigated to a small four-storey house where I would be staying. Even with its relatively peaceful cars and detailed digital station graphics, it was very much an evolving service with several stations undergoing renovations for accessibility and some more being constructed on the outskirts.
Spindle: It was quite a tight house we found, having been built on a small plot but only recently refurbished - that’s OK, Parcly’s a claustrophile! After unloading our belongings and relaxing for a while, we ventured out for dinner as the Tokyo Skytree lighted up in white.
Hatsune Miku:
We’re going to Akihabara~
All the anime and manga~
As soon as I saw Princess Parcly I was ecstatic! She’s not somepony you see every day, so to commemorate this extra-special occasion I dragged her to Yodobashi-Akiba, the largest electronics store in all of Tokyo!
…and was kicked out at the entrance. Parcly’s definitely not a hobbyhorse.
Spindle: So many events occurred in our journey from Takayama to Tokyo that we made finding a delectable dinner top priority after the Hatsune incident (to clear our minds, of course). We found it in the form of a tempura donburi or ten-don, which also included an egg, an eel and a cuttlefish. The gimmick of the restaurant we ate this at was serving only this dish, though I had seen a similar idea back in Canterlot. Regardless of the marketing, we found a very rich flavour in the seafood, and Parcly was assured of sweet dreams when the bottle consumed her again.