Parcly Taxel: My head was back in its original place and I was all bottled up, but I couldn't stay in this amorphous form for long. Spindle rubbed my bottle at 5:15am and we spent the next full hour tidying up – both our luggage and the kirin's apartment in which we had dwelt for six nights.

Spindle: Basic courtesy, yes, but also to conform with the Japanese expectation of tidiness. Another instance of this virtue could be found beneath our hooves, in the bedroom's tatami flooring; tatami mats are dominos or monominos, which would make tiling a room trivial if not for the aesthetic consideration that at no point should four mats meet. (It is NP-complete to determine whether a domino-only tiling satisfying this condition exists for an arbitrary polyomino.)

The sound of hard, rolling wheels accompanied Parcly's hoofsteps and the slightly chilly wave emanating from my fluttering body and wispy tail as we entered Oshiage Station one last time, where we obtained single tickets to Narita on Keisei's (京成) Oshiage Line. Blue hour turned to sunrise and full daylight as we sat through the journey on the Access Express; all these colours shimmered through my body too, purple and yellow and cerulean blue.

Parcly: There was no snow outside, this railway not running very far from Tokyo, but the passenger count steadily picked up until Narita itself, for this line serves both as commuter rail to Tokyo's eastern suburbs and as an airport link. Luna materialised in a corner when I stepped out, and we walked wing-in-wing towards a patch of dense forest.

Princess Luna: Reunited with my dear genie princess, we perched ourselves atop the thick foliage, and I inquired about what she and Spindle had experienced throughout their stay in Japan. "Tokyo was a mess of attention-grabbers, fads and forced emotions – Matsumoto and the mountains, oh! winter in its purest form," Spindle started.

"I became a dullahan for two days, finding ways to use my modularity while looking cute," Parcly continued. "And I drank more... um... moonshine than I wanted to, especially in my headless state. Sake, beer and a highball."

I had not expected the alicorn to indulge in so much alcohol, knowing her historical distaste for all forms of it. "Just don't binge on the moonshine, dear." Then I opened my wings, beckoning the two wispy lovers to come along for the return flight to Canterlot, and they duly obliged.

Spindle: For seven hours all three of us flew through the frigid stratosphere. I glided in the middle, keeping both Parcly's and Luna's wings warm by feeding on the deep friendship between them; the beatings of feather and bone were few and far between, and instead their wingtips touched just above my back while their minds painted a shared dreamscape.

Parcly: We landed on the preferred spot of Canterlot Castle's balcony at sunset, when Celestia lowered the sun. I saw Luna hoofbump her sister as she made her way to the moon-raising podium.

And we retreated to our room in the castle, sharing a spiritual hug.