The Earth Pony Conglomerate was a vast country, so big that separating it into districts wouldn't help in the search at all. Rather seeing it as the four cardinal directions was the only way to fully explore it all. Arriving from the west, Twilight saw several busy cities where earth ponies were too distracted to interact at all. All of them were on a constant move westward beyond the board to expand this massive land.
Reaching the north proved more troublesome as the group had to fight through the strange and bizarre combo of harsh desert terrain on one side and farmland so thick that the buildings themselves weren't even visible. Finding a place to stay for rest was hard enough, getting answers from ponies was even harder. Living in stubborn lives, these northerners would speak hatefully about any delegates, but wouldn't care to give details on any particular names. Instead, all they cared about was keeping the buffalos at bay.
That was one common thing that could be seen all across the Earth Pony Conglomerate. An intense, near-barbaric racism toward the buffalo species. The buffalo were treated as little more than violent monsters in the eyes of the earth ponies. Any pony that did not hate buffalos was either a liar or an idiot, according to the northerners and especially the westernmost exploring into these eastern sections.
It didn't matter what goods and grace the buffalo brought. They could come in with flowers or spears and they would be seen as monsters, just the same. From the oldest to the youngest, kicked to the ground, bow under the earth ponies' cold boots. All because they stood in the way of ever-growing expansion. Such thought was always expressed as Manefest Destiny.
Manefest Destiny, a deeply rooted ideology that started with the first-ever pony to experience magic millions of years ago. It propagated even in this past to a belief that earth ponies were divinely destined to expand their territorial reach all across the lands. This expansionist fervor was fueled by the notion of pony supremacy and a sense of national superiority. The ideology served as a justification for the relentless eastward expansion which made the Earth Pony Conglomerate to large.
This cruelly resulted in the displacement, dispossession, and annihilation of the buffalo tribes. Leading to the Trail of Bloody Tears, an infamous war that both species were barely recovering from upon their arrival. It was a brutal forced march to beat down thousands upon millions of buffalos. They were forced to flee eastward until the mountains backed them into a crossfire that ended it all.
The buffalos lost, dreadfully so and the earth ponies were affirmed in their cruel and callus assumptions. Other species of ponies had evil moments too: the custody of the naga by the unicorns; the pegasi and batponies wars with the griffins. It was the earth ponies who proved to be the absolutely worst, prideful and hateful in their ultimate victory over the buffalo. A victory through not just genocide but a far worse deception of history, utter acceptance of their own denials of those bloody crimes.
Even in the future timelines, the earth ponies were able to convince themselves that the buffalos were the monsters. That the earth ponies were here to bring civilized life. It was the earth ponies who took their own history, and their own pride, and twisted it around until even the buffalo couldn't see things any other way.
Hearing of these failures only made things harder for Hermes and Red Steel in the south. They came across many places that were once jewels of the buffalo species. Beautiful, prosperous places are not ruined beyond repair but replaced and forgotten of their true bliss. Hermes and Red Steel saw the buffalos as the true victims, not just for the war, but for the loss of their own history and the future generations never getting to know the truth.
All groups were left disheartening as they reunited back in the eastmost point. This site was one they were already somewhat familiar with. They saw most of it from above as the clouds carried them clear over it. What originally took them a few days to cross had cost them another solid month of wasted time.
April was when they started their mission, but now as they meet back up with the rest of their group it was already at the start of May. Summer was less than five weeks away and all their efforts were for nothing. Unsure if they should have left the cloud sooner and arrived in this section faster. Not that it mattered, little information was being gathered here either.
This site was known for its vast trading networks, with so many levels of different kinds of trading, both big and small. Markets all around them sell goods of all kinds. It was hard to focus on what they had to do, let alone find any clue to their objective. The sheer number of earth ponies and goods moving in and out of this place was staggering. It was impossible to find the exact pony they were searching for.
Just where was the pony that would one day change the Earth Pony Conglomerate's history for the better? Where was the ancestor of Pinkie Pie and the current embodiment of Laughter?
Where is Chancellor Puddinghead?