"But, Twilight!" Pinkie Pie exclaimed, "I always call the races! If you put me in a car, instead of up in a balloon, nobody will think the comic is authentic!"
"Comic?" Twilight said, but sanity (and, by now, habit) dictated that she write it off as "Pinkie being Pinkie," Then a thought struck her.
"Did you say nobuddy? What...who even...don't you mean nopony?"
"What?” Pinkie asked, all panic gone, “No, silly. We are ponies, we can't read ourselves."
She really might have responded - she almost did - but somewhere in the back of Twilight's mind, between repressed memories of Magic Kindergarten and the cabinet where she filed applied harmonics theory, in a little plastic box built into a retrofit wall, a fuse shorted. There was an almost audible ‘puff,’ and the moment was forgotten.
“I don’t know why, Pinkie, but the princess specifically requested that you race.”
Pinkie Pie looked confused. Before she could say anything else, though, Twilight (who was getting a headache from the high-pitched objections) said, “And when you’re done, of course, we’ll have to have-“
“A PARTY!” Pinkie squealed. All confusion, indeed, any emotion but pure excitement was gone. She bounced and jittered and twirled, a beautiful, incoherent dance of glee to a tune no one else could hear.
On the night before the big race, a foreboding, orange firelight, flickering and raging, glowed like magma from the tiny basement windows of Sugarcube Corner. The following morning everypony saw why. Next to the Apple family’s sturdy, modified haycart, The CMC’s Destroyer (a terrifying conglomerate of wooden planks, obviously stolen high-quality silks, and a tiny, aluminum scooter), and a number of other…shall we say, unique, carts, loomed a massive, ornate, baked …thing. At least thrice as high as the other carts (and about twice as high as the spectators).
Pinkie Pie’s car-fection was at one extreme end of the starting line. She took a moment, chocolate helmet in hoof, to slowly turn to her left (the Pies are notorious ambi-turners) and paused dramatically, fighting a serious case of the giggles under her darkest game-face frown.
Her innate laughter quickly got the best of her.
Still giggling, she cinched up her racing boots-for Pinkie was never one to be without full costume- topped off the fuel in her vehicle (with a proprietary and saccharine rocket fuel of her own design) and leapt up into the wafer-cookie seat at the top.
A gloved hoof snapped down on the handle and revved the cart.
The line of carts all roared to life
And then in a final, bonus panel on the page, dark eyes…were they changeling eyes?...glared.
For all I hadn’t wanted to review a comic for kids - for little girls, no less - the art was expressive and the storyboarding work was exquisite. The previous issues had been good, too, but this one was more…fast paced, I finally decided. I wrote the term on my napkin so I wouldn’t forget.
Fast paced and distracting, which I needed. To be brief, I was in a dark place at the time: lonely, impoverished, malnourished, angry at the world, and this work - the third of four jobs I was holding down - was my only solace. I’d just picked up the corner of the page to flip it over onto the ‘done’ pile when I was interrupted.
“C’n I git anythin’ for ya, hon?” an elderly drawl roused me from my reverie. I hurriedly put down the leaf I was turning and repositioned my notebook to cover it - I’m not quite ready to tell random strangers that I’m a fan.
She raised an eyebrow at my secrecy, but said nothing. At length I remembered she’d asked me something.
“Uh, coffee, heavy on the sugar and cream.” That was odd… I normally take it black, don’t I?
Pinkie won, somehow, in that monstrous, confected contraption. She pumped her forehooves and cheered when she crossed the finish line, then reached under the dash panel of her frosted vehicle and pressed the remote firing button for her nested party cannon array.
The sound of cannon blasts and firecrackers, whistles, clappers, and a trumpeting fanfare filled the air all at once. Brilliant flashes and billowing, white smoke filled the stands and the track, and when it all cleared, the party was perfectly set.
In a display of prowess in (or, some might argue, blatant disregard for) Newtonian dynamics, each ballistic charge had exactly placed dollops of frosting, crystalline cups of sugary punch, streamers, ticker tape, and pastries. None of the tablecloths were wrinkled, each candle and lantern, lit by the explosions of the cannons themselves, was whole and flickering. Every item and every piece of furniture supporting it was in flawless alignment.
As she did every time, though no longer bothering to wonder how it worked—weary of the affront to probability these parties represented, she had given up calculating trajectories long ago—Twilight Sparkle stood outside of the festivities for a moment to admire Pinkie's hoofiwork. There was an exactness to her chaos that Twilight found beautiful.
As she watched, somepony—somepony handsome—that she'd never taken notice of, was waving for Twilight to join in the dance. She'd have to introduce herself, later. Twilight, however, knew her limitations, and chose to forgo the dance.
Instead, she selected one of the already poured glasses of punch (musing on how they had been fired out of a cannon and still managed to be evenly poured, lined up, and uncracked) and chose a soft patch of grass to sit in, outside the main body of the party.
Twilight grinned at the huge crowd of happy ponies. Pinkie's parties were always a celebration of the magic of Friendship (capital 'F') that were both beautiful and magical. Twilight began to ponder the ramifications on the harmonic and thaumic fields that such a dense gathering of mutual friends could cause...if she could derive some sort of constant, or constantly variable vector space, relating to intensity and number of bonds...would distance be a factor?
As she wondered, she began to feel a tingle in her horn. This, unlike most such distractions, this caught all of her attention immediately, as it quite likely reflected actual evidence of her theory. She shut her eyes, set down the punch, and felt the energy ebbing and flowing around her.
It was centered on a pink earth pony in the middle of the crowd.
Pinkie Pie had re-mounted her confection for a photo op, requested by a thickly accented and wildly excited grey mare. Some three or four assistants of hers kept shooting Pinkie at different angles. She grinned and posed, lounged like a calendar model, or grabbed the handle like she was still mid-race...
And her ears began to twitch.
Both of them.
She froze, cool-racer pose still firmly in place. Pinkie began reciting the natural responses her body had to external phenomena, trying to locate the meaning of this one. One ear typically meant she needed to remind somepony of the consequences of breaking a Pinkie Promise. Left then right meant somepony was in trouble, the opposite had something to do with food being too bitter, but she couldn't quite recall. If it was anything like the double knee-jerk, it must have something to do with ..out there. That direction that only she ever looked.
Double, simultaneous, ear twitch...Somepony out there is in trouble, or needs sugar.
That one sounded right. They must feel awful, too, because now the twitching was accompanied by a sharp pain in her tummy. Or maybe she was just hungry.
In a way she couldn't explain if she wanted to, she felt for the edges of reality, pushed gently, and like an old friend welcoming her in, reality stepped aside.
Like the crack of a lightning bolt, the local thaumic field shattered. Twilight, who had extended her senses to observe the magical flow around the party, was blown head over hooves under the table. Other unicorns in attendance shuddered and bowed, some clutching at their horns to assuage the sudden ache.
Pinkie Pie extended her hoof, and it disappeared into thin air.
"Did that pony just wink at me?"
It couldn't have happened. It didn't happen. I was sure of it. Instinctively (I guess) I looked up. Perhaps to see whether someone else had seen what I did, though how could they? I was yards from everyone else and I was hiding what I was reading. Perhaps I just wanted to make sure they were all still there, to see and remind myself of the real world, and prove to myself that I was still in the diner, hiding from the cold rain outside, waiting for my coffee, pretending it wasn't as late as it was and not thinking about how soon tomorrow would come.
It didn't work. My eyes swore they had seen movement. Nervous, now, I looked back down at the page.
She smiled.
She had been smiling before, a cocky 'I won' sort of grin. Now she was looking straight out of the page, and smiling. I moved my head a little to the left, and her eyes followed me. I remembered that there was a popular optical illusion to that effect---look at a painting and you see it's eyes following you---so, after another quick check of the diner to see whether anyone had taken notice of my nervous breakdown, I held my hand over the page and moved it to the right.
Her eyes darted to my hand, then returned to me.
Before I had time to react with the proper, enthused screaming this mind-bending hallucination truly deserved, it got worse. From out of the larger frame below the eyes that watched me, a hoof, or the outline of one, extended. It's owner---Pinkie Pie, I assumed---crooked the last knuckle at me, beckoning me toward it.
Someone must have seen that! I thought. Twelve inches of illustrated, pony foreleg sticking magically out of a page. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but it was still there, defying what I knew to be rational. But no, no one had looked up. I looked back down at the papery appendage. It beckoned again.
I reached out my shaking hand. I didn't feel paper, but, rather, horseflesh: hair and hoof. Once I'd taken the hoof in my hand, it began to pull toward the paper, and in an instant, I wasn't there anymore.