//------------------------------// // The Lies We Tell Ourselves... // Story: The Last Party: A Eulogy For Laughter // by No one is home //------------------------------// I should explain something, I think, about Z-978, something that never came up when I met her in my world, but that’s haunted me ever since I pulled her out of Starlight Shimmer’s time loops in this world. In this world, Z-978 was originally Switch Shift, a changeling drone who, along with her clutch-sisters were charged with concealing the escape of a young proto queen from Chrysalis’ hive during the invasion of Canterlot. In this world, Switch Shift was killed in the invasion, and the proto queen survived and grew up alone on the streets of Canterlot. In this world her death was a tragic accident that was caused by this world’s Pinkie Pie getting a little too carried away using her Twilight as a uni-cannon. Overall there were nearly no actual casualties, and most of the drones actually escaped. In my world… we didn’t even know that the drones were sapient. We were scared and we were angry, and… a lot of changelings died. A lot of Changelings died… no… I killed a lot of changelings. There was no one face to put on it. There was no one big bad thing that I had to make up for. I could tell myself whatever I wanted to. A lot of changelings lost somepony they loved that day. Most were because a big ole wave of love just smeared them across Canterlot. But a lot more because one happy pink pony laughed while she blasted them to smithereens. It- it was a lot like what you hear refugees from the hive in Canterlot say the invasion “felt like”. But it wasn’t “like that”. It was that. It was exactly that. Luna, the real Luna created my world in a dream. Everypony who ever saw it called it a nightmare. And Z-978 made me think later, after I escaped into the real world, if maybe it was a dream AND a nightmare. But what if it wasn’t Silver’s dream, or Charlie’s nightmare, what if it was some kind of world dream? What if it was a world made from the dreams of everypony in the world, and Silver and Charlie were just locked inside it? What I did in the battle of Canterlot, I’m 100% positively sure was the nightmare of one lost, lonely, and starving little changeling filly who lost her best sister during that horrible stupid fight. And I think maybe Z-978 in my world was her dream. That was her dream where her sister escaped and she got to live a happy little life and have super fun holiday adventures with her favorite human. I hate it when ponies call my world a dream, but when I think about leaving Charlie with Z… I’d like to think at least part of my world was a happy dream. I have to believe that because there’s a pretty pink little changeling filly who didn’t have nearly enough happy dreams, and she needs extra giggles and extra snuggles, and I’m not going to be there to give them to her anymore. And it doesn’t do me any good to think about that. But it’s hard not to. I never tried to contact Charlie again after that, but when Hearth’s Warming rolled around, I made sure to have a big ol heaping box of rock candy delivered home to the rock farm on Hearth’s Warming Eve. I invoked the Satana-clause so Charlie would pretty much have to make the delivery himself. I left it to Z to figure out what she should do from there. After that things got… well downright weird. I became friends with Silver through Twilight, they saved the crystal empire, and Silver became an alicorn. Oh, and he got his wang-a-lang back, too. Not so important to me, but I’m pretty sure it was a pretty big deal for him. I mean sure, it was a pretty big deal, but then I married a giant monster, so it’s safe to say I’ve seen bigger deals. Just sayin’. But that’s really not what’s important. The important part is that with a new alicorn prince, Princess Celestia got the idea that maybe they could open a portal back to the human world. At the time everypony assumed there was only one world where all the humans were coming from, and Princess Celestia said that if they could open a portal then the humans could go home… if they wanted to, of course. That didn’t really account for all the humans the princesses had already turned into ponies of course (especially Luna, she really has a thing for turning humans into lunar ponies, in my world and in this one too), but they seemed pretty well adjusted to living in Equestria anyway. And that’s when things really went sideways. There were complications, and not only did they not open a portal, but they infected the world they were trying to reach with Equestrian magic in the worst possible way. Luna did her best to help the humans cope with the disaster. The humans called it the “Pink Step Plague”. Anyone infected became a pony. At least if they were lucky they just became a pony. There were all kinds of crazy mutations, and a lot of the former humans lost all their marbles and couldn’t think of anything BUT spreading the plague… which they did by being REALLY super friendly with anyone who wasn’t infected. They were pony rape machines. There I said it. No really nice way to talk around it. Eventually they began to rebuild. They found a cure, but there was no way to restore those who’d already transformed. They even managed to send a diplomatic envoy into our world. Princess Luna of course promised that we would send any help we could, and me and Dashie even volunteered to go back with the envoy to help in their recovery efforts. What I did next… I only wanted to help. No, that’s a lie. I wanted to prove that Charlie was wrong. Wrong about the spoilers. Wrong about worlds breaking. Wrong about how everything would just fall apart if Pinkamena Diane Pie wasn’t where some stupid little filly’s story said she should be. What if Pinkie Pie just hurled herself into the void to divert a big mean ole surge of equestrian magic and re-wrote time? What would all his spoilers mean then? Nothing, that’s what! Because you can’t break a whole world! And even if you could, the whole wide world of Equestria wasn’t going to just break and go away just because one little pink pony wasn’t where she was supposed to be! And I was going to show Charlie, and he was going to be sorry he ran off, even if he was super happy with that changeling, and even if I really wanted him to be super happy and it’s not like I didn’t like Z-978, but I was going to show him how silly he was being. I was right. Maybe I’d end up in some weird alternate dimension where cupcakes didn’t even exist, but I was going to beat the spoilers and I was going to save Charlie’s world from the plague! I was a fool.