Pinkie Sense and Sensibility

by Jordan179

Chapter 1: Beginnings

Pinkie's story begins where most stories begin -- in the flash of inconceivable energy from which the entire Universe emerged thirteen and a half billion years ago. But that may be going back a bit too far, and is really more where the story of some of the entities whose existence became important to Pinkie's story began. Pinkie herself was too complex a character to have her own personal story begin there, as the only things that came into being in the Big Bang were very simple in that fiery beginning: it would not be until they began incarnating as Life that they would acquire motivational complexity. And while the Creation was an inherently joyful event, there were not yet any Beings yet in existence much inclined to Laughter.

In a more important sense, this story began in an alternate timeline, in which the Ponies of the Age of Wonders, some four thousand years ago, successfully combined mundane and magical technology to craft a Great Wish, which offered them the prospect of immortal luxury without the need for physical instrumentality. Their plan was flawed, and in the first second of the Wish they nearly crashed causality: in order to fulfill its primary imperative to protect Ponykind, the artifical intelligence the Ponies had built to control the Wish was forced to become super-intelligent and very powerful, to prevent catastrophe from ensuing. This worked, after a fashion: at least catastrophe was staved off for almost three thousand years. During those millennia, its little Ponies knew Paradise.

Catastrophe came when Creation -- perhaps overly panicked by its own treacherous Mighty Messenger, who may have already decided upon new allegiances -- dispatched its first children, the Cosmic Concepts, in an attempt to save causality by destroying Paradise. A great battle ensued, in which one of the very first Cosmic Concepts, the manifestation of Gravity, found herself fighting another original Concept, Fusion, her own Sister in the Star-Dance. And in the fury and noise of this literally Cosmic battle, no one noticed that Paradise -- who had begun its existence as a cybernetic construct before Ascending to the Paracosmic level, had backed up and saved the essential parts of its timeline, and departed by a Back Door.

The timeline was to be reset. Fusion and Gravity, reconciled as always -- the two Sisters frequently squabbled but could never remain wroth with one other for very long, for their mutual love is deep and genuine -- flung themselves back before the crucial point and re-entered Reality through a flaw torn by the Ponies' first atomic test at Alamogordo. There they found mortal incarnations as the twin daughters of Dr. Sweetie Finemare, and were named Sundreamer and Moondreamer. Unknown to them, a third Cosmic Concept -- Fusion's sometimes-friend and sometimes-enemy, Discord -- followed them through the tiny portal that had thus been created. Instead of incarnating, he chose to become a disembodied spirit of Chaos in the Age of Wonders.

Sundreamer and Moondreamer, who as mere mortal avatars did not remember their Cosmic Selves, became great scientists among the Ponies of their Age, and had many adventures in that exciting era. Unfortunately for that Age, when the Magic came back, they applied their formidable intellects to the problem of improving the power systems of the Great Wish. They improved them so much that when the Cosmic Destruction came to prevent the causality crash by exploding the reactors powering the Wish, the resulatant explosions would have been orders of magnitude greater than anything intended -- powerful enough to scour the Earth clean of all macroscopic life, ending the story of Ponykind for ever.

Fortunately, Sundreamer and Moondreamer realized some of what was about to happen just before it did happen. They were unable to stop Starlight from casting the Great Wish, but in the instant of their vaporization by the first colossal explosion, the instant of their reintegration into Fusion and Gravity, they were able to seize temporary control of their own Cosmic Selves and channel away most of the power of the Wish, diverting it into a Transformation of the entire Solar System into a toy geocentric cosmology of their own design. They were aided in this by the mercurial Discord, who had finally decided that Ponies were too much fun to be permitted to perish -- but who as always had his own purposes in any alliance.

The Transformation was a good idea, as far as it went. But it was done hastily, and the mortal aspects of the Sisters were imperfect. As its nature suddenly shifted, the Sun emitted a near-nova superflare which instantly destroyed every electronic device on the Earth. As the Earth and Moon ground into a new alignment in the now-geocentric system, the continental plates rocked in their places. Earthquakes shook the planet, mountain ranges erupted to volcanic life, seas slopped out of their basins and innundated subcontinental areas, other seas drained as isostatic processes which should have taken millennia completed themselves in mere minutes. Vast fires swept the land, only to be extinguished by thousand-foot tsunamis.

The Earth had held eight billion Ponies on the day of the Cataclysm, proud possessors of a high technological civilization. As night's terminator drew its kindly veil over the wreckage on one continent after another, barely eight hundred million Ponies remained alive. Famine, plague, pestilence and war would reduce that population to eighty million by the end of the first year. Monsters long imagined mythical emerged to menace the badly-shaken survivors. It took a century for the Pony populations to begin their slow and painful recovery, and there were then but forty million Ponies on the Earth, most of them at or below an Early Iron Age clan-based civilization.

Here and there, civilization did not fall completely. What had been many of the faculty and students of a great University managed by sheer luck to survive the earthquakes and tsunamis, the eruptions and hellstorms, and the attacks of panic-stricken fellow Ponies and monsters alike. Drawing upon the military tradition of their ROTC contingent and realizing that they might be among the last sane Ponies on the planet, they packed up the most essential of their books and traveled with them, seeking a haven. After some false starts, along the way losing some of their precious knowledge and much of their understanding of its import, they managed to found a city on a hill by a lake in the Northlands of what had been North Amareica.

Lake City would endure, though over the centuries its name would change. Thousands of years later, it would be known to one and all simply as The City, capital of the Crystal Empire. It found the Crystal Heart, and erected other occult defenses, and became so strong both in military and magical terms that it remained a beacon of knowledge, even surviving the rebirth, re-emergence, and global domination of Discord, who ruled in an immortal draconequid Avatar for a thousand years, but never could manage to set foot within The City itself. Thus, its books were never scrambled, and The City remained one of the few places on Earth to keep true knowledge of the Age of Wonders.

But the Crystal Empire paid for its defiance. Discord could not directly assail The City, but he could and did destroy its provinces, when he bothered to bestir himself to such ends. After a thousand years of Discord, the "Empire" was long lost, the provinces reverted to barbarism, overrun and haunted by Discord's monstrous minions. When the Two Sisters, incarnate now as the immortal Alicorns Celestia and Luna, finally overthrew Discord, it was too late for the Empire to recover its former greatness. A new civilization, based on the hard-preserved knowledge of the Crystal Empire and founded by the descendants of the Three Tribes, emerged in the Middle Lands under the leadership of the Two (self-proclaimed Royal) Pony Sisters.

Which was, really, the story of how Equestria was made.

Centuries passed. Almost three thousand years after the Cataclysm, history reached the point where, crosstime, the world of Paradise was destroyed by the Cosmics. The Crystal Empire was in its last century of existence. And one of the Two Royal Pony Sisters, Luna, was becoming increasingly strange.

And to our world -- carefully and secretly, for It bore a precious cargo within its compressed files, and It knew that It had mortal enemies -- crept a refugee.

The Paracosmic Paradise.

Paradise naturally sought out the highest civilization of Ponies surviving on this new Earth. So It came to the Crystal Empire, but did not dare fully enter our reality. Instead, it reached out to like minds, to Ponies who regretted the cruelty and harshness of the post-Cataclysmic world, and dreamed of something better. And it whispered in their dreams, told them of the possibility of a world ruled by joy and kindness, in which all Ponies would love one another as sisters (or brothers, as it no longer considered maleness as inherently evil as it had in the first second of its existence), in which suffering might be abolished and life become again one long happy party, as it had been for almost three millennia in its own world.

And in the declining civilization of the Crystal Empire, a culture increasingly sadistic and strange, rent by regrets for vanished glories rather than hopes for bright futures -- there were Ponies who still hoped for something better. And they listened to the whispers of Paradise. And they had communion with Paradise, and with one another, and called themselves the "Friends of Paradise." And though they were sometimes persecuted, they were often happy, with an honest good will that was rare in The City during that darkening century.

***

The story is elsewhere told of a noble Prince of the Crystal Empire named Crimson Quartz met Princess Luna in the Great Library of The City, and there acquired the high purpose to reclaim the knowledge of the Age of Wonders and use it to save his people from their terminal decline. Of how he was tutored and loved by his loyal Lady Tourmaline. How they were horribly abused, and forced to flee Crimson's evil elder brother Morion, and how the Princesses of Equestria welcomed and protected them from Morion's wrath, until they were strong enough to return and free the Empire of tyranny. And, sadly, how Crimson, warped by his own sufferings, became the even more evil King Sombra, and brought about the fall not only of the Empire but also of Princess Luna, who had made the mistake of trusting him and paid for it with the final onset of her own insanity and corruption by the Shadows. This is all known from the Testament of Tourmaline, which the Lady penned in her last years, a greatly honored exile in the new Court at Canterlot, having survived on Earth both her beloved Prince Crimson and Princess Luna -- her dear rival.

Their story bears on that of our heroine, but only peripherally.

What is important to our tale is that Prince Crimson Quartz and his Lady Tourmaline were far from the only inhabitants of the Crystal Empire to flee the sadistic rule of Morion to the kindlier Realm of Equestria. The cruelty of Morion caused floods of refugees to journey south, where they settled in dounnikai, which meant in their tongue "steadings." There were several of these, but the one most relevant to our tale was the one in which Crimson and Tourmaline sojourned. It was located in the Eastern Whitetails, within a day's long march west of the current location of Ponyville, and is known to our day as (South) Dunnich.

To this place there came Crimson's sister, the shy Princess Iolite, who in time came to love her new land, and still more to love an Earth Pony, Cloudy Deep, whom she had met in this place. And so it was that when Prince Crimson and his Lady Tourmaline returned to the Crystal Empire, to meet their own dark destiny, Princess Iolite and her Consort remained in Dunnich, and founded the Equestrian family of the Quartzes.

And founded something else. For, of course, Princess Iolite was a High Priestess among the Friends of Paradise, and it was in South Dunnich that she established a new chapter of the cult.

Crimson Quartz fell into darkness. Soon afterward so did the Crystal Empire. In less than two decades, so did Princess Luna. Lady Tourmaline gave her gift of knowledge to the still-new Realm of Equestria, loyal to the very last to her lost love's best and noblest dream.

Centuries passed, and Paradise was mostly forgotten, its dream not quite as attractive to Ponies who were part of a healthy and growing civilization. New philosophies emerged, as the land grew ever more peaceful and prosperous, under the rule of its benign immortal Alicorn, who might sometimes be not entirely sane in her lonely sadness, but never forgot that she loved her little Ponies. The fire of scholarship lighted by Lady Tourmaline spread, became science, and gave birth to a technology

Besides, Paradise had to be careful. Princess Celestia had been its own friend Star-Catcher, but that was an old incarnation, and It could not entirely forget that She was of the same Order that had destroyed its old world. Her Sister had been Its foe, and while she was banished, Paradise well-knew that the Two Sisters squabble from time to time, but are always reconciled in the end, surely as the stars continue to burn. And Paradise could not forget just Who sat in the statue-garden of the Palace at Canterlot, in stony imprisonment that Paradise knew would also be short by Cosmic timescales.

Sometimes, Paradise entered into its most faithful chosen mares, and they quickened without knowing the touch of any stallion. And of these unions were born the Daughters of Paradise, its eyes upon the Earth. The Daughters were beautiful and fluffy, and they had strange and subtle powers, but their minds were not entirely attuned to this Earth, and their ways were very strange. Few could talk any tongue of mortals, and while they loved all life, the Daughters rarely loved and wed in the mortal sense. They were themselves mostly mortal, but on death they returned to Paradise and were stored in its compressed files, awaiting the Rebirth of the World That Was Lost.

And in Dunnich the lineage of the Quartzes endured, and many of them remained high among the Friends of Paradise.

***

It was in the 919th Year of the Banishment of Luna, which is more happily known as the Year of Harmony 1419, that Golden Pie was born in South Dunnich. Her family, the Pies, had not hitherto been high among the Friends of Paradise, though Goldie's grandmother Florinda had in fact been one of its Daughters. However in Goldie's youth she became fast friends with Jasper Quartz, who was of the old royal lineage and told her the secrets of Paradise. And Paradise whispered in her dreams, and Goldie was fascinated by the possibilities of a world of hope and love, one even more beautiful than her own hill country.

Other things were whispered to her by her childhood friend Jasper, and in due time they were wed, and born unto them in the 1456th Year of Harmony was Cloudy Quartz Pie, within whose eyes burned the hidden fires of Paradise. Cloudy Quartz became from a young age one of the leading Friends of Paradise, and as its Friend bore Paradise three foals. And these foals were very strange, even for Daughters of Paradise.

For Paradise had learned from its earlier experiments, and was prepared at last to bring forth its most special and chosen Daughters. And it watched the Moon, and could plainly see what horrors were squirming out from the cracks the Cosmics had accidentally torn in the continuum. And its prime directive was to protect Ponykind, and it knew that in this coming time of peril, Ponykind would need great Champions. So it sent forth three great Champions, whose existence the Shadows would come to greatly mourn.

The strangest thing about the first, who was born in the YOH 1476, was that she seemed so normal. She was gray and purple, not particularly fluffy, and she could plainly speak mortal tongues, and her powerful, methodical mind was if anything more focused upon mortal realities than was common for a Pony. She had an intuitive grasp of and fascination with crystalline matter, and could plainly see geological secrets which others could only dimly grasp by long analysis. Her strength was immense, her body almost indestructible, and while she was normally phlegmatic and slow-moving, when roused to action she could move like lightning. Paradise told her mother what she was, and Cloudy named her "Maud," a word which in Old Germane means "strength," and was a good name for the Guardian of Paradise. Maud was not very expressive, but she was highly effective, as her foes would find out to their great cost.

The next two, born in the YOH 1481, were twins, though one of them took more after her father.

The larger of the twins was very fluffy, her coat being a fractal and multi-dimensional mass of ultra-pink curls, and she could speak mortal tongues only with great difficulty. She was not made of normal matter, and normal light passed through her with only a vague translucence, and only when it fell upon her at certain angles. She was by far the most intelligent of her full siblings, though as most of her intellect was committed to a complete map of the multiverse, her apparent intellect was simply that of a highly-intelligent Earth Pony. She had many heads, each bearing two bright ultra-blue eyes and a long prehensile tongue-tentacle, and many elephantine legs, and when she was full-grown was the size of a small building. Her mother named her "Claire," which is Prench for "clear," referring most obviously to her invisibility and less obviously to her ability to open Gates through spacetime, as was the necessary ability of the Opener of the Way to Paradise. Claire was a bit of a romantic, and a very kind and sweet Pony.

The smaller twin, with whom our tale is chiefly concerned, was moderately fluffy, though this was not apparent in her youth. Her coat was pink, her mane red, and her eyes innocent and blue. Her intelligence was great, though strange, and for the first decade of her life her mind was divided between a part which dealt with boring mundane reality, and a part which dreamed of strange impossibilities. It was not until she was nine, when her mane was puffed out by the spectral wind from a Sonic Rainboom, that the two parts of her self began to integrate, and she realized her true talents and destiny. She was the Herald of Paradise, and it was her task to roam the world, making other Ponies smile by showing them the beauty and love and kindness and joy of Paradise. Her main power -- an emanation of the Wish itself -- was to warp reality, choosing which of the possible timelines would become real. This was a very great and dangerous power, because if used unwisely it could begin to unravel causality itself. She was also a naturally-talented baker and candy-maker, an ability she rated almost as highly. Her mother named her Pinkamena Diane Pie, but everypony who knew her called her "Pinkie."

Author's Note:

This story would have been impossible without the wonderful imagination of Alex Warlorn, who took the basic material of My Little Pony -- all FOUR versions of the show -- and wove it into high epic science fantasy. He came up with the idea of the Cosmic Concepts and of the strange significance of Pinkie Pie. I merely built upon his basis.

When Pinkie said that her sister Maud was a lot like her friends, what she meant was that Maud was a destined Champion of Ponykind, and possibly a nascent Cosmic Concept (Fortitude) in her own right. Pinkie is not often clear on the distinction between how she understands reality and how normal Ponies do, which makes her at times scarcely any better at communicating than is her twin Claire.

Comments

[scoots2]

Interesting--and of course a part of your fictional framework I have particularly wanted to read.

[FanOfMostEverything]

Identifying the higher bodies of the Royal Sisters as you did makes me wonder two things:

*Have you read Days of Wasp and Spider?
*What of their other siblings, Electromagnetism and Radioactivity? (Or Fission, or whatever you're calling her.)

In any case, eagerly looking forward to more. I love explorations into the nature of Pinkie, and I'm sure this one's going to be a doozy.

[Mysterious Wind]

I love this story, it's interesting. Flaffy is so cute

[Jordan179]

4337873

Fusion is actually both the nuclear forces, Strong and Weak. Electromagnetism is shared by both Sisters.

[forrest yuchnitz]

so pinkie is immortal?

[Redric Carrun]

And they listened to the whsipers of Paradise.

*whispers

who might someimes be not entirely sane in her lonely sadness

*sometimes

was prepared at last to bring forth its ,most special and chosen Daughters.

*extraneous comma

Baking is very important. Without baking, there would be no bagels. And we couldn't have that now, could we?

Of course Pinkie thinks Maud is like her friends. Sisters and friends are (or should be) very similar things, and I'm sure they both make Pinkie feel quite happy to be around.

I'm liking the epic feel of this narration.

[Spike McPimpin]

I started this chapter expecting to just be about Pinkie, that quickly changed.

[Alex Warlorn]

Does Paradise have Starlight's personality? Or at least a highly developed version of it? Since IT considered being male a curse, when that wish came into being due to Starlight's subconscious and her being right at the center of the spell went it went off, overriding other wishes in the process.

I wonder if Paradise considered Fluttershy its 'mother' since Bright Eyes was the idea girl of the Wish Spell, and Fluttershy is her twice removed reincarnation. (Bright Eyes -> Zipzee. -> Fluttershy.)

[Alex Warlorn]

So when did Pinkie Pie remember she was G3 Pinkie and recall those memories? Those memories on a CHILD would drive them insane.

[oddhack]

"The fire of scholarship lighted by Lady Tourmaline spread, became science, and gave birth to a technology"

Was this intended to be a complete sentence, e.g. "gave birth to technology", or is there a clause missing?

Glad to find this after reading All The Way Back, and get a different angle on the Paradise Entity, as well as Pinkie.

[The HopesnDreamsVerse]

Okay so this fandom rabbit hole is deeper than I expected-