H. Rarity—Equestria, Nowhere. Sunrise of Day Two.
“Glarg.”
That was the first thing Rarity said when she woke up on a couch in a strange room, with a mouth feeling like it was full of cotton.
“Merdé.”
And that’s what Rarity said when she looked down at her hooves and realized that she was still a pony.
Rarity tried to get up, and then she fell right back into the couch, with a splitting headache.
It was simple really—hangovers are caused by severe dehydration. Therefore, severe dehydration feels exactly like a hangover. And Rarity hadn’t drunk anything in eighteen hours.
So Rarity lay there on the couch, with her pony legs sticking out, trying to collect herself. She wasn’t exactly sure how she got here, but one of her few moments of lucidity from yesterday involved meeting that beetle-pony calling herself “Applejack”, so it was reasonable that this was Applejack’s place.
Slowly, carefully, Rarity got up...and then down. She was still stuck in the body of a filly, and the room towered over her. She still felt awful, but she powered through it. With deliberation, she made her way around the small apartment—large for her—which thankfully still had all of the shades drawn. The style was...very Western.
Applejack was nowhere to be found. She didn’t even bother to leave a note—or maybe she was illiterate. This was a strange fantasy planet, so perhaps only the aristocracy and their clerks could read or write.
Rarity went into the bathroom. She turned around, came back with a chair to climb up on, and only then began the long and arduous task of bringing her hairstyle back from the dead. Having hooves instead of hands did not help, but the complete set of mane-care products did.
Applejack didn’t have any fur—what did she need with mane-care products?
After the hair, or rather mane, Rarity next turned to her tail. The prehensile nature of a pony neck made this quite useful. Also by this point she had given up and started using her mouth. She found this made things much easier—her lips were quite thick, and naturally pulled away from her teeth, meaning that they were essentially as dry as fingers the majority of the time. And Rarity could flex them in ways that were impossible for hooves. The only problem is that she couldn’t see them, but that was what the bathroom mirror was for.
Having found a curry comb designed to fit over a hoof, she was about to begin smoothing down her fur when she noticed something that had been staring her in the face this whole time: there was an image of a light blue diamond emblazoned on the side of her derrière. Correction, on both sides of her derrière. She was pretty sure she hadn’t started her adventure on this planet with those particular adornments.
Rarity sat down on the top of the chair, and got a close look at the new addition. The image was of a very-well cut, if somewhat dusty gem. It most definitely wasn’t a brand, but on the other hand when she leaned in really close she couldn’t see the individual hairs dyed different colors. There was simply an image, as if it had been projected there, but with no possible source. She pressed a hoof into one of her two gems—she didn’t feel anything other than her own pelt, but it looked like she was indeed touching it. It looked so much like a real gem... Experimentally, she picked up a chamois cloth and rubbed it. This had the effect of removing the “dust” and somewhat polishing the gem, while leaving no residue on the cloth.
Rarity had absolutely no idea what to make of this. She stared earnestly at the symbol for a few minutes, as if expecting it to start talking to her, but nothing happened. Finally, with a sad shake of the head, she decided to drop the matter for now, and picked the curry comb back up. In a few minutes, her fur was presentable.
Since she was already in position to do it, she next tried turning on the bathroom taps, but absolutely nothing happened. She had sort of predicted this from the condition she found those taps in. There was a slot in the wall next to the faucet that had once been used to collect a fee in order to get water, but that had been boarded over.
Hopping down from the chair, Rarity walked back to the couch she had slept in. She bent over a bit and managed to pick up her miniature lighthouse with her tail. It was a minor accomplishment, but at least she had managed to do something to surprise herself, an accomplishment that filled her with pride—even in this strange world and strange body, nothing was going to keep Rarity down!
She triumphantly strode over to the outer door of the apartment, and looked over at a nearby coat rack. Two broad-brimmed cowboy hats hung from the hooks, one black and one white, both of them far above her. With a jab of her hoof at the base of the rack, she caused the white one to flip itself off its hook, falling end-over-end to neatly land on her head...engulfing it. A few minutes of heavy alterations and hat-stuffing later, she walked through the door—with thanks from the chair—and up to a railing, which she looked through to peer down at the lower floor of this building.
She was apparently in a saloon, straight out of an old Western movie, crossed with the Mos Eisley Cantina scene from Star Wars. Only, instead of a collection of aliens, this saloon was populated by anthropomorphic desert creatures. She saw several rabbits, a buzzard and a ground squirrel, but also a toad and a scorpion. In the corner she was just able to make out a chameleon, it’s scaled skin turned brown to completely blend into the table where it had passed out, drunk.
And just like the science fiction cantina, every creature down there looked like it had an extensive criminal history. None of them had a full set of teeth, and all of them were armed up to whatever teeth they might possess. For Rarity to walk down there with a white hat would be as good as signing her own death certificate. As she watched, the buzzard had half of its feathers violently and painfully ripped off for trying to cheat at cards. So Rarity turned right around and swapped the white hat for the black hat.
That just left one last issue, the matter of size. All of the creatures down there were about the size of Applejack. Well, they would be if they had remained quadrupedal, but most of them were in fact bipedal, causing them to be even more overwhelming in the height department compared to Rarity than they would be otherwise. This part was quite unfair—why did she (and Applejack) have to be the only quadrupeds? Experimentally, she used the railing to pull herself up onto her hind hooves, to try the position out. To her surprise, it actually wasn’t that uncomfortable. Sure, her back would probably be killing her if she tried to do this all day, but with that band of desperados, she needed every advantage she could get. Mentally comparing herself to Applejack, she decided that fillies’ low center of gravity let her get away with the “standing upright” thing while the adult Applejack could not.
Rarity now felt ready to deal with the saloon crowd. She picked her persona, and “walked” down the stairs, which is to say she would position a hoof beyond the edge of a step, fall half her height down onto the next one, cartwheel around like crazy, and then repeat the process. The whole time, she kept up her expression as the very archetype of a “bad mujer”—she wasn’t a drama student for nothing—assuming you ignored the cartwheeling, or how adorable that scowl on her face actually was.
As she approached the bar, the others parted for her, curious.
“Bartender!” she barked, after climbing up to stand on top of the barstool. She sounded a bit like Clint Eastwood’s character as the Man With No Name, partially by choice, and partially because it was what she could manage with such a dry mouth.
“Aren’t you too young for this here establishment?” the bartender, a large frilled lizard, asked her.
“Glandular condition,” Rarity growled.
The bartender raised an eyebrow, but quietly accepted the obvious lie. “Alright,” she drawled. “What will it be?”
Rarity tried to lick her bone-dry lips. “I think I’ll change things up this morning, and start with the chaser. Water.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the entire room erupted into laughter.
“Water!” the buzzard cried out in incredulous glee, his pain momentarily forgotten.
“She wants water!” That was a mangy cat she had missed seeing earlier.
“I’ll have a double,” the chameleon slurred in a brief moment of consciousness, before collapsing again.
“We don’t have any water, Stranger,” the bartender told her. “We’ve got cactus juice.” She poured some pale yellow liquid into a tumbler, and slid it down towards Rarity. The tumbler had been made from a cactus, and was complete with thorns sticking out of the sides.
Rarity hesitated for a split second, then looked down at her front hooves. She held one out with confidence, catching the tumbler without hurting herself.
As Rarity eyed the foul-looking beverage, the lizard bartender ambled over towards her. “Almost forgot,” she said, reaching under the bar. “Your ‘chaser’.” She removed a padded cylindrical container, the type that usually held ice cubes in hotel rooms. Lifting off the lid, she removed a pair of tongs, which she used to remove a cube of hardwood, the exact same size as an ice cube. And then she dropped it into the cactus juice.
As an incredulous Rarity watched, the wooden cube melted under the caustic effect of the juice, exactly as an ice cube would melt in a lukewarm glass of soda on an exceptionally hot day. Within seconds, it had completely vanished.
Rarity looked up at the bartender, who just smirked at her.
“Drink up.”
She looked around her: the others were all looking to see if she’d drink the concoction, or chicken out. And then she noticed a primitive sort of mirror behind the bartender—not silvered glass, but merely polished brass. And in that reflection she saw her horn.
She remembered reading somewhere that in medieval times people used to dip “unicorn horns” into poisons, with the belief that the horn’s purity would neutralize the toxin.
Carefully, she leaned over and dipped the tip of her horn into the cactus juice.
“Aaaaah!” she screamed. It felt like dipping her fingertips into sulfuric acid. Quickly, she rubbed her forehooves in the dust accumulated on the bar, and tried to rub as much juice off of her horn as possible. This succeeded in stopping the pain.
The patrons laughed.
Rarity ignored them. She still had to drink the stuff to prove herself. Carefully, she positioned her hooves around the glass and lifted it to her lips, then tossed down a quick swallow and put the—
—glass down. Wait, what had just happened? It felt like her brain had just jumped ten seconds into the future.
The bar patrons stopped laughing—she had missed the part where they had started.
“Hey, Stranger,” the squirrel said, looking her in the eye. (With Rarity standing on the stool, she was finally at the right height to look the other bar denizens in the eye.)
It was at this point that Rarity decided to give them her name. But not her actual name—Rarity would not fit her chosen persona at all. If she had kept the white hat, she might have gone with “Radiance”, the name of her favorite superhero, but for the black hat...
“White Raven,” she growled.
“Where you from, White Raven?”
Rarity pulled out a speech she had prepared years earlier for an elf sorcerer character she had never got to role-play as. “Beyond the fields, err, deserts, that you know, beyond the borders of Erl, beyond the lands of dream where Time holds no claim, beyond the very edge of the east came I. For there was a place where the horned ponies fed along the border as it was sometimes their custom to do, feeding sometimes in Elfland, which is the home of all great things, cropping the lilies below the slopes of the Elfin Mountains, and sometimes slipping through the border of twilight at evening when all of the fields are still, to feed upon earthly grasses.” And yes, she did say all of that while attempting a Clint Eastwood impression.
Everyone stared at Rarity like she had taken leave of her senses. Philistines.
“Why aren’t you using your horn to pick up the glass, Unicorn?” asked the porcupine. “Are ya tryin’ not to hurt our feelings with your superior knowledge of spellcastin’, or are ya broken?”
Rarity looked once again upon her horn in her reflection, and spun a yarn.
“There’s only one spell that this horn of mine casts rightly, and that spell is my curse,” she said, turning to face the patrons. “It is a spell that shrinks everything that is not living, and woe betide any that should be caught within its grasp.” She didn’t realize it, but her Clint Eastwood had slipped back into her chosen Crystal Prep accent. “Well I remember my last birthday, in my home town of Passamaquoddy.”
“Passama-what?” asked the cat.
“Passamaquoddy,” Rarity repeated. “On the coast. I tried to blow out all of the candles on my birthday cake, but the candles would not go out, so in a momentary slip of reason I tried to use a spell to blow them out. But instead of a gentle wind, the dreaded shrinking spell took hold. The walls pulled inward, closer and closer, the ceiling and floor crushing towards each other. Friends and family tried to flee, but it was already too late, as the doors and windows were now too small. The spell didn’t affect me, it never affected me, so I just passed through the walls as they moved to crush my bones. I tried to stop the spell, but it was inexorable.”
“In-what?”
“It could not be stopped, Darling. Before I knew it, I was the lone survivor. Everyone in town was celebrating in my house, and now...I leave it to your imagination to picture their horrible fate.” She looked around, to see that she truly had the crowd hooked.
“Do not attempt to find Passamaquoddy on any map,” she concluded. “The government had its existence erased, less any poor ponies lose their minds trying to comprehend the truth. And I have been a fugitive from justice ever since.”
The inhabitants of the bar looked at each other, and Rarity was afraid they were about to tear her story apart. So she raised up her tail.
The cat gasped and pointed. “Is that...?”
“Indeed,” she said, looking upon the miniature lighthouse. “This is the very home itself, kept so I may never forget and accidentally unleash my curséd magic once again.” (Yes, she actually pronounced “cursed” with two syllables, for the proper effect.) When they tried to lean towards the toy to get a better look she pulled it back. “I would not advise a close inspection,” she said. “I haven’t finished extracting my family yet.”
That definitely sold them. “White Raven!” she overheard a rabbit tell the buzzard. “We better not mess with her.”
“Welcome to Nowhere, White Raven!” the bartender said, refilling Rarity’s glass. “Looks like you’ll fit right in here.”
“Nowhere?” Rarity asked, picking up the glass. “Is that what you call this place? I must have missed the sign when I came in.”
“Yeah, it’s called Nowhere,” the squirrel quipped. “Because nobody wants to admit that they’re from here.”
“Hey Filly!” a new voice suddenly cried out from the saloon’s outer doors. “I ain’t seen you around here before.”
Rarity took another gulp of the cactus juice, feeling nothing other than a brief stinging pain in her throat this time, before turning to face the door.
Two figures had just entered the bar. One was a blue and white upright cat, while the other was a brown upright mouse—again, both the same height, and both of them with their heads twice Rarity’s height if she were standing on the floor.
“She’s not a filly,” said one of the rabbits. “She’s got a glandular condition.”
The mouse ignored him. “We’re looking for a funny-looking mare that goes by the name of ‘Applejack’,” he said in a gruff voice, holding up a crude sketch of the beetle pony. “Have you seen her since coming into this town? We can make it worth your while.”
“Nope,” Rarity said, in complete honesty. “Is there some kind of price on her head?”
“Maybe,” said the blue cat. “What’s it to you?”
“Well maybe I wanna collect the whole thing if I happen to see her first,” answered Rarity, staying firmly in character. “As opposed to getting a fraction from you.”
“I’d like to see you try, Filly,” the mouse said with a sneer. “Lady C. was very specific: she’s not paying for a live Applejack.”
Rarity bristled. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw similar reactions from the other patrons. Criminals or not, they clearly considered Applejack one of them, which explained why they hadn’t sold her out yet. “What did she do?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah!” the squirrel exclaimed. “Can’t be any worse than what White Raven here did.”
“She crossed the wrong boss,” the cat bounty hunter said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Meaning that’s all she told you,” Rarity concluded. “I bet you don’t even know what the ‘C’ stands for.”
The mouse walked right up to her, trying to intimidate her with his height. Although, with her standing on the barstool, he really wasn’t that much taller than her. “And what are you implying by that little remark?” Up close, he looked like he was made out of muscle, and from the scars on his face, it looked like he frequently fought enemies bigger than himself, and never lost.
Rarity looked contemptuously up at him, using her immersion to keep her knees from knocking. “What I’m implying, Tom and Jerry, is that she knew you didn’t have the strength of will to keep from blabbing her name at the first opportunity.”
“Hey!” Tom exclaimed. “How did you know our names?”
Jerry slammed a hand down hard on the bar beside Rarity’s head. “I’ve had enough of your lip, Filly. I challenge you to a duel!”
Rarity blinked. Somehow, she had not anticipated that turn. “I beg your pardon?”
“Pistols!” Jerry exclaimed. “Fifty paces. Right out there, right now!”
“According to the code duello, the challenged party gets to pick the conditions of the fight,” Rarity said. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were darting about as she tried to think her way out of this situation. If she could change the weapon to knitting needles, for example, she was sure not only to live, but maybe even to win as well.
Meanwhile, the crowd watching all of this was stunned into speechlessness. This was a pony, from Equestria, who had been challenged to a duel...to the death. She should have collapsed into a catatonic mess at the mere thought of having to kill another living soul.
The bartender slammed a thin book with wooden covers onto the bar—it turned out that the town of Nowhere did have their own rulebook for duels. “Y...you’re wrong, White Raven,” she said. It looked like the very words hurt her to say. “All duels in Nowhere not involving dragons are settled by pistols, at ten paces. The challenged party can pick the location. That’s it.”
“OK,” said Rarity, hopping down from the stool to land on four hooves before rising back up on her hind hooves.
The bartender sighed in relief. She then pointed at the cat and mouse. “Oh, and only one of you can actually fight her.”
“That will be Jerry,” Tom said. “He’s the best shot. I just stick around for moral support.”
It was obvious to Rarity that “moral support” meant that Tom would get dibs on shooting her if by some miracle she managed to defeat Jerry. “Well,” Rarity said, thoroughly shaken. “Let’s find a location.”
# # #
The trio walked out into the blistering sun. Rarity peered through the heat mirage, then began walking down the street. Everyone in the bar followed her from inside the bar—these things tended to turn into active shooting matches very quickly, and they knew better than to get anywhere where they might find themselves in the field of fire.
After only a few seconds of putting up with the heat and her low bipedal pace, Rarity dropped into her natural posture and walked up and down the small street a couple of times, examining each building very carefully. Finally she stopped at an abandoned shop and worked the warped door open, standing back up. “In here,” she said.
Jerry walked over and peered in. “This tiny shack?” he asked, then chuckled. “Your funeral.” He walked in, followed by Tom and then Rarity, who closed the door behind her.
The crowd in the saloon immediately spilled out and gathered in front of the store, with anticipatory grins on their faces.
There was a shout from inside the building, the sound of a fired shot going wild, and then the walls suddenly collapsed inwards. The now horizontal door opened, and Rarity emerged, to the cheers of the crowd. They were all convinced that she had shrunk the building, but in fact all she had done was kick out the last beam keeping the structure intact. That time she had wasted six months studying architecture before trying out for the main part in Platinum Junior High’s GAT production of The Fountainhead had finally paid off.
The crowd loudly cheered. “Our savior!” the mangy cat exclaimed.
“I owe you one,” the beetle-pony Applejack said, stepping forward from the back of the crowd.
Rarity was puzzled where Applejack could have been hiding all of this time. She also could have sworn that there was one more rabbit in the crowd just a few seconds ago.
Having had as much exposure to the sun as they were willing to stand, the rest of the bar patrons returned to the saloon, leaving Applejack and Rarity standing and facing one another.
“You really stuck your neck out for me, and you barely know me,” Applejack said, clearly moved despite trying hard not to show it.
The two of them walked into the shade of another abandoned store. “You mind telling me why you’ve got bounty hunters gunning for you?” Rarity asked. “You know, just in case this ‘Lady C.’ sends out some more.”
“I messed up, big time,” Applejack said, pawing the dust with one hoof. “And now my...my former boss considers my very existence a threat. She needs to get rid of me before anybody finds out about my accident...or what caused it. I didn’t think she’d ever find me out here.”
“So are you leaving?” Rarity asked.
“It depends—this is a really good place for hiding, despite certain...annoyances. I’m going to ransack the cottage they were staying at outside of town, see if I can tell how much they’ve been telling the Old Lady.”
“Could you trust a displaced spirit’s intuition, and go over there right now?” Rarity asked. “I’ve got a feeling if you wait too long, you’re not going to find anything.”
“Alright,” said Applejack. “Are you going to be here when I get back, or are you skipping town?”
“I think I’ll stay at least a little while,” Rarity replied. “I haven’t found out yet what Nowhere has to offer.” She looked up and down the abandoned street. “Now before you go, I’ve got what’s got to sound like a dumb question.”
“Those are the best kinds,” Applejack drawled.
Rarity smiled, blushing slightly. “It’s about...this.” And she pointed at one of her gem images.
“Your cutie mark,” Applejack said flatly.
“Is that really what they’re called?” Rarity asked.
Applejack nodded.
Rarity sighed. “Do you know what it’s for?”
Applejack stared at her, slack-jawed. “You really aren’t a pony, are you?”
“That’s what I said.”
“And I believed you at the time, although just why I have no idea. It’s...a cutie mark is what makes a pony a pony. It’s your life’s purpose in picture form. And it gives you one superpower.”
Rarity looked at the gem, wonderingly.
Back on Earth, Rarity knew a student named Lyra, who liked to collect conspiracy theories. She didn’t believe any of them...or at least, she pretended she didn’t believe in them. She just liked to collect them and laugh over them with her friends. One of these theories said that the counterparts of Markists on the Perfect World were horses, and the marks were their brands. Because what could be more humiliating than discovering that your supposed life purpose was nothing more than a property mark?
Was she occupying the body of her own counterpart? Was she now in the Perfect World?
Rarity pondered these questions for about half a second, before dismissing them for being utterly absurd. For one thing among thousands, this place was far from perfect.
“Do you know what this mark means, or what my ‘superpower’ might be?” she asked.
“You were there when you got it, so you should know,” Applejack replied.
“Well let’s imagine that I was completely out of my mind when it happened. Just hypothetically.”
“Okay, so you’re asking me to stare at your butt,” Applejack said. “I just need to lay that out there before you go nuts on me.” When Rarity didn’t say anything in response, she leaned in to get a look at Rarity’s cutie mark, rubbing her chin with one hoof. “Well, it’s a perfectly-transparent gem,” she said. Several seconds passed. “I’ve got nothing.”
Rarity had noticed the “perfectly-transparent” property earlier. But of course that wasn’t actually true. The image only appeared to be transparent.
Rarity thought back over the string of absurd lies she had told all this morning, and how every one of them had been instantly accepted. “Did you know that my fur is actually black instead of white?” she said as a test. “The true color only shows up under fluorescent lighting.”
Applejack nodded. “Seems legit.”
“Oh my Goddess,” Rarity said, sitting down hard on the wooden sidewalk. “This had better not be my actual mark and talent. I want to create fashions that actually change the world, not just the ability to talk anybody into thinking my dross are made of Pinkamena!”
“What’s ‘pinkamena’?” asked Applejack.
Rarity froze for a moment, and then blinked. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
“Hey, you’re the one who said you didn’t want to talk ponies into thinking your clothes were made of ‘pinkamena’.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“How odd.” Rarity put a hoof to her head as she tried to think this through. “Do you by any chance happen to know a pony named Pinkamena? Or any kind of creature, actually. Anything at all bearing the name ‘Pinkamena’?”
Applejack took a moment to think. “No, can’t say that I have. It doesn’t sound like a very ‘pony’ name to me. Or griffon, diamond dog or, err...‘beetle-pony’. So why did you say that name?”
Rarity looked very confused. “It just sort of...popped in there, and I had to say it.” She spent a moment going over her memories, pulling the thin strands of ‘Pinkamena’ out from the massive cotton candy ball that were her memories of ‘Applejack’ in that same period. “Oh...oh dear. I think I need to find her. But who’s to say she’s even on this world!” She screamed into the heavens.
Applejack just stood there. She was beginning to get used to her companion’s brand of insanity.
“I’ll just have to put poor Pinkamena aside until the opportunity presents itself. Now then, where were we? Oh, yes—I was expressing my fears that my personality is on a slippery slope to utter moral degeneracy, thanks to the fact that no one has the ability to resist my web of lies.”
Applejack thought a bit. “So...gold or some other precious metal, then?”
“What?”
“When that ‘Pinkamena’ thing got stuck in your head, you said you were afraid that everypony would believe even your worst designs were... I’m figurin’ the missing word there was gold?”
Rarity thought for a bit. “Yes. So...how do I fix this?” And Rarity pointed at her cutie mark.
Applejack looked about her uneasily—how to talk down a cutie mark crisis was not exactly part of her training. “Err...you can’t.”
“What?!”
“But on the plus side, you’ll really fit in here with that ability.”
That didn’t help.
Just then, the ground squirrel ran up and grabbed one of Rarity’s hooves. “I’m taking you to see the mayor!” he exclaimed.
“Don’t believe a word that reptile says,” Applejack whispered in her ear as she was dragged off.
And then, with a sigh, she set out to see what her chances were for staying in Nowhere.