- – — – -
Em Dash
‑ – — – ‑
Princess Twilight Sparkle stared at the piece of paper in front of her. After having to fill out 184 individual forms to finalize Ponyville's budget last month, she thought no parchment could possibly be less desirable than the administrative tax sheets. The abomination in front of her, however, was suddenly making her long for the sweet caress of Form 273-A, or possibly Form 1109-B (Errata F). At least they were legible.
"Rainbow Dash," began Twilight Sparkle in the most diplomatic way she could muster, "I'm not sure this is fit for publishing."
"What?!" Rainbow Dash looked up from the Daring Do and Prism Flash dolls she was making kissing noises with. "But I wrote it, and I'm the most awesome pegasus in Equestria, therefore that is the most awesome Daring Do fanfic in Equestria!"
"Um, no." Twilight resisted the urge to permanently affix her right hoof to her forehead. "You've basically written a self-insert mary sue romance story that has spelling errors, incorrect grammar, a politically incorrect way of referring to zebras, and an appalling abuse of hyphens."
Rainbow Dash, still holding her dolls, crossed her forelegs in obvious disagreement. "Well, at least I didn't ship a cheese grater with Lord Sombra!"
Twilight blushed. "That was an experiment in objective personification as it relates to romance and our ultimate purpose as an existential crisis!"
Rainbow Dash blinked.
Twilight decided to say something in a dialect of Equestrian Rainbow Dash could actually understand. "Well, at least I don't moan about Daring Do every time I nap on a cloud!"
"What?! I do not
!"
"Oh, Daring Do!" said Twilight in a mockery of Rainbow Dash's voice, "This ancient temple is sweltering! I hope you don't mind if I take off my saddlebags"
"Okay!" shouted Rainbow Dash, blushing furiously. "Okay! Okay. You win. Just... just proofread my story, please."
Rolling her eyes, Twilight returned to the manuscript that had been hoofed to her. "Well, spelling is easy enough to fix. Some of these sentences are so awkward they rival my teenage self, but that's just a matter of practice. You don't seem to know how to use dashes properly, though."
Rainbow Dash scrunched up her muzzle. "Dashes? But I'm Rainbow Dash! There's only one of me!"
Twilight groaned. "No, look, there are three kinds of dasheswell, four if you count yourself, but– Nevermind. What I’m saying is, there are hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, but you've just used hyphens. Hyphens are used to join words together, so they never have spaces before or after them, and neither do em dashes, which are the long dashes, but en dashes do."
"Sooooo, the short ones are en dashes?"
"Yeeeeeeeeeah?" The word was spoken with the apprehension of a thousand broken hearts, bound to ancient spirits of fear and foreboding. It was the kind of word you said after you accidentally summon Cthulhu instead of cook pancakes, and your roommate asks you if breakfast is ready.
"Then I just have to add spaces around my en dashes! Thanks, Twilight!"
"No, wait, those aren't!"
But Rainbow Dash was already gone, and a second pane of broken glass lay in shards on the library floor.
Later that day, Twilight was working on a story exploring the intricacies of interspecies romance and the difficulties it posed using a metaphorical artistic viewpoint. It was called "Twilight Sporkle and the Rainbow Endtable". She had just gotten to the part where Flutterclock confessed her undying love to Applebarn when Rainbow Dash came crashing through the window.
Sadly, at this point, 'the window' isn't a sufficiently specific description, because there were now three broken windows to contend with, and the number of unbroken windows that were left for Rainbow Dash to crash through was dwindling rapidly.
"Is there a reason you can't just use the door, Rainbow Dash?" asked Twilight, not looking up from her literary work of art.
"I have doorphobia," explained Rainbow Dash, "It's a terrible disease, but don't worry, I can still lead a normal life despite my crippling handicap."
Twilight groaned, and finished penning her current sentence before turning around. "Justnevermind, show me what you have."
Rainbow Dash hoofed over a slightly edited manuscript. As Twilight gripped it with her magic, she felt a dark chill go down her spine, as though a thousand terrible OC's had risen from their pages to re-enact poorly written romance scenes. Far away, a linguistics teacher began spinning in her grave. This was discovered several years later by a pair of would-be graverobbers, who were able to use her perpetually spinning corpse as a source of unlimited free energy by attaching it to a turbine. This subsequently crashed the entire energy market and forced Celestia to enact a series of unpopular government controls to keep the economy from collapsing.
At this point, an asteroid that had been heading for Equus decided to veer towards the left and crash into some other, less weird planet instead. Life on Equestria was torn between rejoicing and feeling sorry for itself.
Meanwhile, Twilight wasn't a very happy mare. "Rainbow Dash, you just put spaces around your hyphens. It's still wrong, because they aren't en dashes, and you're not supposed to use en dashes for interruptions in dialogue."
Rainbow Dash's wings bristled in annoyance. "Waddya mean? En dashes were the short ones! I used the short ones! I put spaces around them just like you said!"
"Those aren't en dashes, Dash, they're hyphens. En dashes are longer."
"I thought those were em dashes!"
"No, em dashes are even longer than en dashes."
"So, em dashes are like earth ponies?"
Twilight's right eyelid twitched. "I... I'm not even going to respond to that."
Rainbow Dash pouted. "Ok, well, I guess I understand. Are there any other dashes I should know about?"
"Well..." Twilight hesitated. "To continue your... unfortunate metaphor... Rainbow, a 'horizontal bar' is analogous to Big Macintosh, or my brother."
"Wait, why do you know how big your brother is?"
"Uh... well, moving on, a horizontal bar is used for starting quotation blocks, but it was supplanted by quotation marks and is normally only used in older scripts."
"Hey, wait, I want to know how"
"Well that's enough editing for today!" declared Twilight Sparkle, trying and failing to hide her increasingly red cheeks. "Replace your dashes with em dashes, remove the spaces and you'll be fine! Aside from having atrocious character development and plot, of course, but nopony cares about those things! Nope!"
With that, Twilight dumped Rainbow Dash's manuscript on the pegasus' head and trotted over to her reading place. She picked up her copy of "How To Use Alicorn Magic Without Destroying The World - For Dummies!" and sat down on her pillow. Cracking open the book, she began reading it intently, apparently not noticing that it was upside down.
Rainbow Dash shrugged. "Alright, be back in a flash!" She then proceeded to crash through yet another unbroken window.
I really need window insurance, thought Twilight.
That evening, Rainbow Dash triumphantly returned to Twilight's library. Naturally, she did this by crashing through the only unbroken window left in the library. Once again, she came out from under the shards of glass miraculously unharmed, which was such an egregious abuse of the laws of physics that the laws of physics brought her to court on two counts of domestic violence and promptly filed for divorce. The resulting court case cost two million bits in legal fees, as the laws of physics attempted to prove that Rainbow Dash's repeated attempts to break them were actually an elaborate pegasus mating dance. The court determined that Rainbow Dash was not, in fact, betrothed to the laws of physics, and thus could not be divorced from them. She was, however, charged with two counts of assault and velocity. The case was eventually thrown out after the courts defenestrated Prince Blueblood and determined that gravity was, in fact, still working. Then they threw Blueblood out of another window, just for good measure.
That, however, was neither here nor there, nor sideways, nor upways, or any other kinds of ways there were. Instead, Rainbow Dash was here and there, possibly at the same time, because she was vibrating with so much excitement her quantum state became entangled with itself. This generated two slightly offset copies of her that existed in two parallel universes at the same time, which caused general relatively to resign in disgust, promptly eliminating the speed of light and breaking everything that ever existed, forever.
After an incredibly long and unnecessary tangent, Rainbow Dash handed her new and improved manuscript over to Twilight, who tentatively picked it up with a degree of trepidation usually reserved for live nuclear devices. "I fixed all the dashes and took out the spaces!"
Twilight flipped through the manuscript and frowned. She had replaced her dashes with em dashes and removed the spaces properly. She had also done something else. "Rainbow Dash, why are all your em dashes colored in with crayon?"
"They aren't em dashes," declared Rainbow Dash, "they're rainbow dashes!"
Twilight Sparkle's head exploded.
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-_-
Oh, wait, that's not an em dash.
The phrase "That's a long walk for a ham sandwich" comes to mind..but this was well done. Have an upvote and a
this fic is my fault and I don't care
5145383
You should...
You should.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Upvoted for that cover image alone.
My life feels complete now that I have seen it.
The worst pun in the universe, hm? Consider me intrigued.
After reading: Worth it. Very enjoyable.
ha
Ugh. Take my upvote.
Cloudy...I think I love you.
Sorry, Twilight. The window insurance underwriters have deemed you an uninsurable risk. Actually, all of Ponyville is uninsurable.
Dat Rainbow Dash
This is a masterpiece.
Rainbow dashes
mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw2468-131697934811.jpg
Have a like, you made me laugh.
Finally, an explanation of em dashes for the masses.
That ending, oh that ending.
Ermahgerd so punny
5145383
You monster.
5145578 EXACTLY how I feel.
*unamused laughter*
5145803
reactiongifs.com/r/exc.gif
This part was amazing. I loved it.
Douglas Adams overdose.
This is fantastic. Had me laughing my ass off all the way through.
... please tell me this isn't something you actually care about.
5146013
I don't. My editors do.
Plot twist: this entire fic was written by Pinkie Pie.
5146103
RANT DELETED
I didn't want to insult your editor so I'll keep all that to myself.
... ...are other Dashes related to Rainbow?
... I wanted to comment but... just take my thumbs up and go
Feel my pain, Twilight. Feel it!
I love em dash
I... don't know what to put here. Though I kind of want to see a Twilight Sporkle x Rainbow Endtable fic now.
5146598
That was an actual story idea i had, but I couldn't think of a plot, so I just used it as a comedic reference here instead.
I had to stop reading a few times as I couldn't stop laughing.
Great job on this story.
I think the best part is how you actually employed a rainbow dash in the text. Well done.
Oh, and the tangents. Those were some epic tangents. Physics may be disgusted with you, but I think trigonometry has become one of your biggest fans.
Thank you for this.
I.... you... HA! I love this! I... (Falls over laughing)
Review from one of my character's perspective
Minty Fresh: There's no lesbian sex in this! But otherwise I give it a thum . . . wait, I don't have thumbs . . . errrr, plus 1!
How?!
Even after the window massacre and the dash pun, this still bugs me.
If you can accidentally summon horrors from beyond when you cook pancakes I want to know how!!!
Not for any bad reason I promise. I just want to eat my pancake without untold terrors causing problems
5147662
I'd tell you, but you wouldn't believe it anyway.
I found your use of actual rainbow dashes rather charming.
I KNEW she was going to do that!!
You used a hyphen. That should be an en dash.
This fic is incredibly silly. Good job!
mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/rsz/mlfw516_small.jpg
Why doesn't the pic in the author's note have wings?
5149730
Sombra stared up at the ceiling, memories swirling like the wisps of essence boiling off of his insubstantial body. Memories … of her.
His gaseous form seemed to fade away as agitation roiled within him. Fade away, like our love, he thought morosely. Did I truly mean so little to her? Was I only ever just a way to put Luna to sleep while she attacked Equestria? His eyes shuddered closed. No. Remember the good times. The times when he could seep into her chambers, deep in the bowels of the hive, past the vigilant eyes of her hundreds of drones. When he could coalesce around her in the night, and wake her up with whispered words of honey, his form enveloping her like an insubstantial oubliette. How she would moan in ecstasy as his form flowed in, around, through her, caressing the secret places of the holes in her limbs, penetrating her totally in a way no fleshy lover could dream of, feeding her his love even as she struggled to breathe and suffocated little by little, her life in his hooves, drawing him further in with every little sound —
— until the day he arrived to find he had been replaced by a mind-controlled slave pony, a couple of drones with feather-fans, and a chubby stick of incense.
"It's not what you think!" Chrysalis had cried, leaping to her hooves. "I missed you too much! I needed something!" … but, no, he had known the truth from the moment he laid eyes on the whole sordid scene. There was nothing special about him, in her eyes. He was emotional food, served with a side order of a curious sensation that she'd finally found a way to reproduce.
He'd been replaced by an object.
Well, two can play at that game, he thought, rolling over in bed and solidifying a hoof so that he could tenderly stroke the smooth, hard edge of his new lover. What had she been to him, anyhow, but a way to feel his essence funnelled through a hundred hard-edged holes? Well, and a source of sexy and flattering sounds, but that was easily enough fixed. "Oh, Sombra," he murmured in a falsetto, brushing his lips to the cold metal of The Grate And Powerful Chryssy's … um, carapace. "Take me, you handsome and powerful tyrant, take me like you took the Crystal Empire, like you would have taken my hive if you'd ever decided it was worth the bother."
Sombra cleared his throat and responded in his usual suave growl. "Why should I, you worthless wretch? I don't need you. I don't need anyone."
"Oh, Sombra," T.G.A.P. Chryssy breathed. "But I need you. I need you flowing through me. That silly incense smoke was no substitute, I need your life, your vitality …" No. That was going to uncomfortable places, given the circumstances. He tried to push that thought from his mind before it could spawn any existential revelations, and tried again. "Because I'm so weak, I mean. You're right, Sombra. You're so strong, you don't need anyone."
Much better. "I don't. Which is why I will take you, Madame Grate, just to show everyone how perfectly fine I am with this." He raised his voice and shouted to the heavens. "DO YOU HEAR ME, CHRYSALIS? I'M FINE WITH THIS!!"
Then he dissolved the bonds that held his form together, settled into a fine dark mist, and with a lascivious moan that reverberated throughout the cloud of his essence, he flowed through the holes of his shiny new cheese grater.
5150017
This is the single greatest comment anyone has ever posted. Ever.
5150017
I don't... I can't...
Just...
Alright. Everyone go home.
This man wins every fucking thing ever.
~Skeeter The Lurker
You know, you really don't need to warn us in the story summary that there is going to be a terrible joke coming at the end. We know, man. We know.
Though, I do like the cover art.
5150017
I enjoyed this more than I enjoyed the actual story.
5150017
God damn you, you glorious son of a bitch.