• Published 31st Aug 2012
  • 7,311 Views, 566 Comments

PonyFall: Leather and Lace - Dusty the Royal Janitor



It was another one of those days. You know the type... the kind where an omnipotent tomfool decides

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Prologue

A contented sigh escaped the ivory mare’s lips as she sank herself further into the pool full of imported mud, a wide smile forming on her face. With a small giggle, she waved a hoof at the two spa attendants, who quickly scampered off to take care of the other customers at the Healing Waters spa. Blowing a strand of her purple mane out of her face, she wiggled her way down to the bottom of the mud bath and chuckled.

“Simply delightful,” Rarity said to nopony in particular as she began her afternoon of self-pampering.

It had been a perfect day so far. She had woken up to a lovely breakfast with her sister, who had been staying with her the past few days as her parents were on vacation, and had managed to quickly put the finishing touches upon her latest order before lunchtime. By this time tomorrow the wedding dress would be with a happy bride somewhere in Trottingham, and she’ll have fetched a hefty sum for her efforts. Sweetie Belle had actually been a perfect little angel that day, had even managed to help Rarity clean up from the order, and had offered to help watch Opal while Rarity went out to enjoy herself at the spa for the rest of the day.

Rarity tapped a hoof to her chin as she mused over the rest of her day, and what she might do to make it even better. Perhaps after she was done with the spa she could take Sweetie Belle out for ice cream? She felt she should treat her sister to something anyway. She had been such a little dear the past couple days. Perhaps she could also fix up Sweetie Belle’s Crusader’s cape? It had gotten a little ratty recently with all of her escapades with Applebloom and Scootaloo. Oh! There was an idea. Perhaps she could take Sweetie Belle and the other Crusaders out to a nice ice cream treat. In fact, while she was at it, why not bring all of her friends? They could make a night of it. After all, she loved nothing more in life than to share her own happiness with other ponies, especially her very best friends and her darling sister.

Her musings of frozen dairy treats, however, were not to last. As she considered what a fun time they would all have sharing a sweet treat under the stars that night, she noticed that something about her mud bath was beginning to feel rather bizarre. She ran a hoof over her seaweed wrappings and puzzled at the sensation they gave her. Instead of a slick, wet feel, they felt spongy and rubbery. She lit up her horn and attempted to remove the cucumber slices from her eyes to see what had gone wrong with her mud bath, only to find that they were stuck fast to her face.

Rarity yelped as pain shot through her eyelid and she felt a nasty pulling sensation on her face. Unable to comprehend just what what going on with her spa treatment, she quickly tried to reach a hoof up to her face and yank the offending obstacle from her field of vision. She was rewarded only with even more stinging as the once-slippery cucumbers remained adhered to her eyelids. After a great deal of struggling and a lot of stinging, however, she finally managed to remove one of the objects from her face with a loud pop after yanking on it hard with both hooves. “Yowch!” Rarity exclaimed as she rubbed at her freed eye, trying to get the stinging to die down a little. She blinked the pain away and held the offending article aloft and observed just what dared to mess up her perfect day.

A lollipop.

A big, rainbow colored, sticky, sugary, dripping-with-syrup all-day lollipop had somehow replaced her cucumber.

And it had been stuck to her face.

“Oh ew, ew, ew!” Rarity cried as she tossed the sickly confection across the room in a fit. “Disgusting!” she exclaimed, feeling her face where the candy had been. She growled a little when she found that it had actually managed to tear out some of her perfect coat of fur from around her eye when she had removed it, and left behind a present of rainbow-colored syrupy tears in its wake. She quickly grabbed the lollipop covering her other eye and promptly yanked it off of her face as well, throwing it out the window with another growl of rage. Who would do such a thing? Who would barge in on a lady’s spa treatment and play such a nasty prank on her? Her first thoughts drifted to Pinkie and Rainbow Dash, but while they had always been the mischievous sort, they had never been the type to make a prank actually hurt. She dismissed those two as suspects as she rubbed her still-stinging eyes, when she caught a glimpse of what had drawn her attention to the issue in the first place; her seaweed wrappings.

Or, more accurately, her licorice wrappings.

Head to hoof, she was bound in a long rope of cherry red licorice. She rubbed her eyes again to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating and brought a hoof to her mouth to nibble on the binds a little. Yes, it was indeed cherry licorice. Rarity’s mind boggled. How in the world did somepony manage to get into her tub, replace the seaweed with licorice, the cucumbers with lollipops and...

...the mud with rocky road ice cream?

“Okay, would somepony please explain just what in the world is going on?!” Rarity cried out into the spa, only to find that the attendants and the other patrons had fled the building. And with one glance, she could see why. Every feature of the Healing Waters Spa had been altered and twisted into a deranged candy land! The potted ferns that decorated the store had been changed into spun sugar and bundles of pixie sticks, the paper lanterns had turned into gumdrops, and the towels and washcloths had all turned into taffy! The walls themselves had turned into large panels of peanut brittle, and the floor was covered in tiles that looked like the sections of a chocolate bar. And as she looked at all the rows of various mud baths and hot tubs, she noticed that each one was a giant container of a different flavor of ice cream. Rarity gaped at the sight, at a loss for words. She knew one thing for certain, though: This was definitely not the work of Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie.

In fact, now that she thought about it, there was only one being she had ever encountered who could manage something like this.

“Oh no...” she muttered. “Not again! Not him again!” she cried as she attempted to get out of her mud bath and get herself free of her licorice bindings. She had to get out of there and find her friends and her sister as fast as possible. But as she tried to pull herself out of the tub of chocolatey gelato, she found her lower-half wedged firmly in the ice cream. She struggled to pull herself out of the muck, but it was like quicksand; the more she struggled, the more stuck she became. She snarled at the offending dairy treat and attempted to use magic to get it off of her, only for her magic to fizzle out upon contact with it. Giving the dessert her best death glare, she finally sighed.

“Well,” she grimaced, “I did say I wanted ice cream tonight...”

* * *

Rarity galloped through the topsy-turvy town as fast as she could, still wrapped up in licorice as she sought out her home and workplace, the Carousel Boutique. Granted, ‘as fast as she could’ was not particularly fast at all at the moment, given the several pounds of chocolate ice cream that was residing in her gut, and the resulting aches and pains that come from eating such a vast quantity of frozen dessert. She let out a groan as she crested the hill that led to her boutique and gave a sigh of relief that it stood and was seemingly unmolested. Given the sorts of things that she had seen in town, like buildings suddenly turning inside out or twisting into feats of non-euclidian geometry, this was a huge weight off of her mind. Safe in the knowledge that her beloved sister and pet were alright, she quickly trotted up to her doorway.

That was when her house imploded.

Rarity stumbled back in horror as the windows of her house all simultaneously shattered and the structure twisted and contorted in front of her. The decorative pillars and flags that surrounded her abode all crumpled in and flattened into the greater structure, which started to shrink in on itself with terrible screeching and grinding noises. The perfect coat of paint on the building flaked off in some places, and changed to a sickly lime-green in others; the decorative awnings and overhangs all shriveled up into nothing. As Rarity looked on aghast, the boutique started to twist into a new, smaller shape; one that was inherently familiar to the fashionista. After a full minute and a half of the terrible grinding noises and the nauseating sight of watching her home twisting and bending against the laws of reality, Rarity watched a lime-green saddle with orange tassels plop unceremoniously down atop a large boulder (one that Rarity would later recall was infuriatingly familiar and, for some reason, had a bow-tie tied around its middle and sat next to a bouquet of roses).

At that particular moment though, Rarity took no notice of the granite intruder. The cessation of her house’s transformation had managed to shock her out of her horrified stupor. With a wail of terror, Rarity whisked the saddle off of the rock and held it in her hooves. “Sweetie Belle!” she cried in despair. “Opal! Sweetie Belle! Oh no, however could this have happened to you?!” Rarity clutched the tacky saddle to her chest and fell upon her rump in distraught sobs. “Oh if only I had been a little faster getting here,” she wept. “If only I had noticed something was wrong at the spa sooner, I could have saved you both! I could have gotten you to safety! But now you... the both of you... EVERYTHING is gone!” Her hysterical ramble quickly broke out into incoherent sobs as she fell upon the ground, clinging to the only remaining piece of her beloved sister. She continued to sob on the ground for a minute when she suddenly threw her hoof into the air and shook it at the sky. “Are you happy now, you cosmic ruffian?! Are you sitting there laughing, now that you’ve taken everything away from me?! Well by Celestia I swear, when I find you, I will make you rue the day that you dared lay your claw upon my sister! I will find you and I will tear you to piec-

“Rarity, what in Equestria are you doing?!”

Rarity blinked, her cries for vengeance halting. She turned around so fast she almost made herself dizzy, and came face to face with her younger sister. Sweetie Belle stood there with an incredulous look on her face, and with a grumpy-looking cat draped over her withers. The two sisters stared at each other for a minute, the younger of the two looking Rarity up and down quickly before she cocked an eyebrow.

“Rarity, why are you wearing licorice?” Sweetie Belle asked.

Rarity didn’t bother to answer her little sister as she swept both her and Opalescence up into a huge bear hug, which prompted a startled squeak from Sweetie and an annoyed yowl from Opal. Rarity sobbed into Sweetie Belle’s mane with relief. “Oh Sweetie Belle,” she cried. “I thought I had lost you. I thought I had lost both of you! Oh you can’t believe how happy I am to see that you are both safe.”

“I’m fine, Rarity. Don’t worry,” Sweetie Belle said, still puzzled as to just what her sister was talking about. Then she noticed the saddle lying on the ground where the boutique was supposed to be. “Hey, wait a minute! What happened to your house?!”

“Shhhhh...” Rarity soothed. “Don’t worry about it. The important thing is that you and Opal are safe.”

Sweetie Belle struggled against her sister’s grasp for a moment and managed to get herself and Opal free. The cat quickly bounded away, coming to a stop beneath the suspicious boulder, where she promptly started to clean herself of the brutal jostling she had just been given. Sweetie Belle stood up and looked her sister dead in the eye. “Rarity, you’re not making any sense. What’s going on? Why is the town all crazy again? What happened to your house, and why are you all covered in candy?” she demanded.

Rarity laughed humorlessly as she looked at her current apparel. “It’s been a very long day, Sweetie Belle. As for what happened to the town and the boutique...” she began, but was cut off before she could give any proper explanation by a purple unicorn and several other familiar faces bounding up to meet her.

“Rarity!” Twilight Sparkle cried as she crested the hill, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy close behind her. All of them, even the near-perpetually cheerful Pinkie looked grim. “Rarity, thank goodness you’re alright,” Twilight panted as she trotted up to the pair of sisters.

Rarity nodded and gave Twilight a quick hug, and then motioned to her former home. “For a given definition of alright, Twilight dear. Just look at what that brute has done to my boutique!” she exclaimed, tossing the lime green saddle away from her with a huff. “He could have at least kept it a decent color. Frankly, though, I’m simply relieved that my darling Sweetie Belle and Opal are alright.”

Twilight nodded. “I know what you mean. He turned my library into a bowl of petunias! It’s a good thing I sent Spike off to Canterlot and Owlowiscious is out foraging for food. I couldn’t live with myself if either of them got hurt.” She bowed her head a little “I hope they’re alright.”

Applejack stepped up behind the magician and put a hoof on her shoulder. “Now don’t you worry none, Twilight,” she drawled reassuringly. “I’m sure they’re both fine and dandy. They’re smart lil buggers after all. But right now, we’ve got a job to do!”

Twilight nodded, looking intently at Rarity. “Right. Rarity, we need you to help us find Princess Celestia and fix this mess! Are you in?”

The fashionista swept her mane out of her face and gave Twilight a level stare. “I’m shocked you even have to ask, darling. If you could just help me out of these... bindings, I’ll be ready to go!”

Twilight cocked her head. “Bindings?”

Rarity rolled her eyes and motioned to herself. “You know. The lic...or...ice.” She stopped as she noticed the cherry licorice had seemingly vanished from her body. She looked around perplexed, only to quickly catch sight of Pinkie Pie happily chewing on something a few feet off.

“Mmmmm... Fruity!” the pink pony remarked.

Rarity shook her head. She didn’t even want to know how Pinkie had gotten that stuff off of her and into her mouth without her noticing. It was better not to think about it. Pushing it out of her head, she turned to Twilight with a nod. “I’m ready.”

Sweetie Belle quickly piped up. “Wait! What about me and Opal?”

Rarity tapped her chin with her hoof and considered that. She certainly didn’t want Sweetie Belle out and about in town at the moment. Not with all that was happening. And she couldn’t exactly stay inside the boutique, given that it was now a tacky saddle being used by Opalescence as a scratching post. Rarity looked to her friends for a suggestion when Applejack held up a hoof.

“She can hunker down in the clubhouse,” Applejack said. “We’ve already sent the other Crusaders there. Might as well let ‘em all be together for this.”

Rarity sighed. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it’d have to do. She turned to her sister and put a hoof on her shoulder, looking into her eyes. “Sweetie Belle, what I am about to tell you to do is very important. You must do what I say as best you can. Understand?”

Sweetie Belle nodded. “Alright, Rarity.”

The older sister smiled faintly. “Very good. Now, I want you and Opal to run to the clubhouse as fast as you can,” she said as she lifted the cat from the saddle and draped her over Sweetie’s withers once more. Opal didn’t even put up a fight this time, instead looking at Rarity seriously. “Once you get to the clubhouse, I want you and the other crusaders to stay inside where it’s safe, and don’t open the door for anypony, alright?”

Sweetie shuffled her hooves. “Rarity, you’re going to be okay, right?”

Rarity laughed. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve been through worse than this. Remember that fashion show with Hoity Toity?” A giggle escaped Sweetie’s lips as Rarity nuzzled her. “Now go. I’ll be fine,” she said. Sweetie nodded and galloped off as fast as her little legs could carry her. Rarity turned to her friends, who had been watching the scene silently. “Let’s go,” she said darkly.

* * *

The battle... had not gone well. In fact, it was a stretch to say that it had ‘gone’ at all.

Twilight had quickly managed to lead the group to where she sensed Princess Celestia to be. But without the Elements of Harmony, which the villain had no doubt hidden once more, neither the Princesses, nor the six friends could do much of anything to stop the renegade cosmic clown. By the time they got there, Princess Celestia lay battered on the ground, staring venomously at the twisted Avatar of Chaos, while Luna was being held by the throat in his talon after an attempt to rush the villain had gone sour. Rainbow Dash quickly swung around for an aerial attack, but by this point, the rest of the friends could see that it was obviously fruitless.

Discord had won.

A snaggle-toothed grin formed on his face as the draconequus surveyed the fallen ponies. “Oh, now isn’t this so very delightful,” he cackled as he looked over the ponies meant to embody the elements of harmony one by one. “I do hope you didn’t really think that brute force could overcome my stunning wit and charm,” he said, punctuating each word with maniacal glee.

Rarity ignored his taunts, instead looking around for something that might help them. Anything would do, even if it was only a temporary distraction. There had to be some way to turn this around, hadn’t there? She turned to see her friends: Twilight grinding her teeth in rage; Applejack, her morale seemingly shattered by the state of the princesses; and Pinkie and Fluttershy hugging each other closely, tears running down their faces. It really was that bad, wasn’t it? She was brought out of her thought by Discord’s tail swinging around and cracking like a whip. She turned her attention back to the mad god and saw him looking at them all with false gloom on his face.

“Do my words not impress you?” he mocked. “What about my latest interpretation of Ponyville, hmm? Does it not scream chaos?” He sighed, suddenly looking bored. “Very well then. I suppose I’ll just have to make things more interesting for you all.”

Rarity flinched as he raised his lion’s paw, a crackling pink flame of chaotic power built up inside of it. The skies turned from their cheerful blue to a deep, almost menacing hot pink as he slowly and overdramatically lifted his paw towards Luna’s face. Rarity gasped, fearing for the Princess’s life, when she noticed that Luna didn’t look frightened at all; she looked furious. Rarity watched as the Princess swung her head around and an ebony charge of magic sparked through her horn. She thrust a bolt of magic right into Discord’s paw just as it made contact with her muzzle.

There was a disturbing sucking noise as the two magics collided. Rarity could feel something wrong vibrate through the air and down her horn, sending a chill down her spine. She flinched for a split second and looked up again to see Princess Luna twitching sickeningly in Discord’s grasp.

“Sister!” Princess Celestia wailed, climbing to her feet once more.

Rarity watched in terror as the twitching Princess of the Night seemed to vanish in a flash of navy blue smoke. As the smoke cleared, the ivory mare could only gasp as she made out the form of a squirming blue filly struggling against the draconequus’ grip. She could only make her out for a second, however, when a pink shockwave of energy seemed to emanate from the point where Luna’s magic and Discord’s power had collided and swallowed the little filly up.

Discord blinked watching as the pink shockwave grew. “What?! Oh for the love of-” he was cut off as the shockwave swallowed him up like it had Luna. Rarity turned to see her friends all panicking at the sight of the destructive magical pulse that had seemingly vaporized two god-level entities in mere moments.

“Run my little ponies!” Princess Celestia called out before she, too, was swallowed up by the light. Rarity looked left and right to see her friends fleeing the scene. Fluttershy tried to fly away, but seemed to be too scared to make much progress. Pinkie attempted to help Fluttershy, and Applejack was muttering something under her breath. Twilight, on the other hand, just stood there grimacing in concentration. Rarity rushed towards her to try and help her out of the way of the blast.

“You heard the princess!” Rarity cried, hoping her friend could hear her over the din. “Let’s get out of here!”

Twilight shook her head as her horn glowed with magic. Rarity saw Twilight’s shield spell start to flicker into existence, but it was too little, too late. “I can’t hold it!” Twilight cried as the shockwave swallowed her up too.

Rarity had no time to mourn for her friend. She quickly got to her hooves and attempted to outrun the swirling pink energy. So blind was her panic, however, that she didn’t notice the single root that stuck out of the ground in front of her, and she went down with a thunderous crash and hit her head on a rock.

Her vision started to fade just as she felt the nauseatingly warm energy wash over her...