Pinkie's Game

by AdrianJNovelle

Part 3

“Finally, we’ve made it!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed, exhausted from the journey she and her friends made to the dungeon which beheld the Oracle. The ponies devolved into the chasm, finding a giant stalagmite in the center of a cave flooded with a mucky water, fire emitting around the center stalagmite, guarding the Oracle. A phrase was carved into a giant rock engraved into the earth overhead.

The Oracle shall be within reach

When all the Elements of Harmony preach

A spark is all that is required

For a pony to gain her desire

“What does that mean?” Pinkie asked.

“I think it means that we will only gain access to the Oracle when everypony’s present,” Twilight said.

“You mean we can’t get the Oracle unless we find Rainbow Dash?” Applejack asked.

“That’s what it says,” Twilight replied.

“Great, we’re doomed!” Rarity exclaimed. “Who knows where in Equestria Rainbow Dash could be!”

“She’s right here, ponies!” a dark voice roared from above. A giant, dark-furred Dark Pegasus Pony lowered herself from the ceiling of the chasm, a pair of shades over her eyes, her Cutie Mark of fire, and her whole body of a gigantic size compared to the ponies at the front of the chasm.

“Who are you?” Twilight Sparkle asked.

“You don’t know who I am?” asked the Dark Pony, perching herself upon a pointy stalagmite. She ignored her own question. “I am Rainbow Slash!”

“Rainbow Slash?” Twilight asked.

Fluttershy nudged her friend.

“I…I think that’s supposed to be Rainbow Dash’s Dark opposite, Rainbow Slash,” she said.

“Oh, that Rainbow Slash.” Twilight gasped. “Rainbow Slash!?”

Rainbow Slash snarled vigorously.

“I was told by my leader to retrieve the Oracle for myself. But apparently, not even a group of five Light Ponies can do the work of a single Dark Pony!”

“We’re missing Rainbow Dash!” Twilight Sparkle exclaimed, “and there’s no way we can access the Oracle without the Element of Loyalty!”

“Speaking of loyalty,” Applejack began, stepping forward next to Twilight, “what kind of ‘loyal’ friend ditches us like that, just to go her own path to the same destination? I thought that pony was loyal! Guess she ain’t what she was back when Nightmare Moon was around!”

“Rainbow Dash is missing, you say? The Rainbow Dash: my opposite?”

“The very same!” Rarity exclaimed.

“Hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm,” guffawed the great pony, “it appears that close minds think alike. I volunteered to fetch the Oracle for Dark Pinkie myself!” lied Rainbow Slash, still flapping her vibrant wings of steel. “But you Light Ponies: you are feeble without any defense of any kind, and now you tell me you don’t even have all of the Elements of Harmony at your hooves. Well that’s just pathetic!”

“You can’t intimidate us!” Twilight exclaimed, buffing herself up.

“What, do you think that a giant army of enormous buffalo are going to burst through these walls and strike me down or something?”

“Sounds like a plan!” a familiar voice roared from afar.

The voice was Rainbow Dash’s, who was standing with Little Strongheart atop of the foremost buffalo of the army-sized herd she and Little Strongheart had gathered.

“Charge!” she roared at the top of her lungs.

The buffalo bolted as fast as their short legs could carry them to the Oracle Cave, Rainbow Slash too mesmerized and overwhelmed by the massive army to move. She was trampled by over a hundred buffalo hooves and stricken down. The buffalo stopped all at once, allowing the Pegasus pony to leap off and land safely near her friends.

“Hey, guys,” she said.

“Rainbow Dash!” everypony exclaimed.

“Rainbow, where the heck have you been?” Twilight asked exasperatedly.

“Well, I kinda got lost and somehow I ended up at Appeloosa. Little Strongheart and I formed an army of buffalo. Luckily, she knew where this cave was.”

“Twilight!” Pinkie interjected, “the spark! Do it now!”

“Girls,” Twilight began, moving into position at the edge of the ledge everypony was standing on, “you know what to do.”

The five other ponies gathered horizontally behind Twilight Sparkle.

“Laughter!”

“Loyalty!”

“Honesty!”

“Generosity!”

“Kindness!”

“Magic!”

Twilight ignited a spark from her horn less than a second after she finished her statement. The fire that surrounded the stalagmite where the Oracle was vanished, the lightning sparking from Twilight’s horn reaching the Oracle. Acting like a magnet, the spark brought the ancient stone right to the hooves of the ponies.

“We did it! We did it!” Pinkie cried in glee, bouncing.

“Not yet,” Twilight said, keeping the Oracle suspended in the air with her horn, “we have to defeat Dark Pinkie first. Then our mission is complete.”

“Little Strongheart,” Rainbow Dash began, “thanks for the help!”

“No problem!” Little Strongheart replied. She whistled, the enormous herd of buffalo fleeing all the way back to Appeloosa.

“C’mon, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said, turning to her friend, “let’s go kick some Dark Pony flank!”

“Which way, Twi?” Applejack asked.

Twilight pulled her map out of her backpack. “This way, everypony,” she said.

The ponies exited the cave.

Rainbow Slash had been trampled and was badly injured, but still living and breathing. She painfully rose to her hooves.

“They’re going to the Stronghold!” she exclaimed to herself aloud. “Dark Pinkie: she was be warned!”

Rainbow Slash climbed up from the ground, ascended to the entrance of the cavern, and flew as fast as she could back to the Dark Pony Stronghold.

“We’re here,” Pinkie Pie said, staring daggers at the great, bricked building. “I can feel it.”

“I can see it,” Rarity remarked.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place, Twilight?” Applejack asked.

“I’m certain of it,” Twilight said, double-checking her map.

Pinkie Pie advanced ahead while the others stayed behind with Twilight as she verified their location.

“Great,” she said exasperatedly, “just great. A drawbridge. Just how are we supposed to get inside?”

“I’m afraid the map doesn’t answer that, Pinkie,” Twilight said, putting her map away. Everyone backed into each other as a mob of ashen-colored Dark Pony guards gathered in a huge circle around the ponies. “But I don’t think we’ll have to go far to find out.”

---

Everypony, even Pinkie Pie, was escorted into the Stronghold, surrounded by guards. They were all thrown into a cell together, the cell scarcely big enough to fit everypony. Two guards – large Pegasus Dark Ponies, resembling the guards of Princess Celestia – stood by the cell every minute. Hoofsteps were heard down the long hallway as an unfamiliar figure in the dark shadows approached the ponies. No one knew of this figure, but it was not difficult to guess.

“Hello, ponies,” the figure said, peering into the cell, only her blue eyes visible in the darkness.

“Dark Pinkie,” Twilight said, staring angrily at the Dark Pony.

“You are fond of me? That is good. Of course, by now, I would expect nothing less.”

“Let us go!” Pinkie Pie cried.

“I will not!” exclaimed the agitated Dark Pony, “I have no reason to. It’s not like you possess anything I desire; and nevertheless, your feeble minds are useless to me…” Dark Pinkie paused, taking a few steps closer to the cell, her eyes locked onto Twilight Sparkle. “…Except yours.”

“Excuse me?” Twilight Sparkle asked out of confusion.

“Your opposite – Twilight Moonlight – is a total buffoon. And it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if the Dark Pony is a buffoon, the Light Pony must be blessed with intellect and brilliance.”

“Apparently,” Twilight Sparkle began, grinning, “a pony of such intellect and brilliance is even able to outsmart the resourceful Dark Pinkie.”

“What?”

“You have overlooked our progress, Dark Pinkie.”

“How so?”

“Duh!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed, “we have the Oracle!”

“Pinkie-”

“What? The Oracle? You’re bluffing!”

“Am I?” Twilight asked, lifting the Oracle from her backpack.

“Rainbow Slash!” Dark Pinkie roared for her inferior.

The Dark Pegasus Pony zoomed in from above, crashing on the ground nearby, walking the rest of the way to her leader.

“Yes, Master?” she asked.

“You told me that they didn’t have the Oracle, you liar!”

“No. I said that they hadn’t figured out how to use the Oracle. They definitely have it!”

“Yes, I can very well see that. Go!”

“Go where?”

“Away! I don’t care where!”

Rainbow Slash bolted away from the hallway as fast as she entered.

“As Rainbow Slash informs me,” Dark Pinkie continued, “you don’t know how to use the Oracle.”

“That is hardly a prevention,” Twilight replied. “You will still be defeated.”

“Technically, I won’t be defeated…I will be defeated again. And that is only if you succeed this time, which is practically impossible.”

“Wait, again? What do you mean again?”

Dark Pinkie only laughed devilishly.

“All within time,” she said, departing.

The ponies were now alone, with no one around except the guards.

“Girls, we have to figure out how to use the Oracle’s power!” Pinkie Pie commanded, “it’s the only way we’ll defeat my opposite!” Pinkie Pie turned to Twilight. “Do you have any clue on how to use your magic to provoke the power?”

Twilight shook her head.

“You would think I would know…but I have no idea.”

Twilight lifted the Oracle out of her backpack and levitated it a few inches off the ground using her horn, taking a seat nearby to study it. She stared at it closely, concentrating. Suddenly, it all came spiraling back to her.

She was there. So was Pinkie Pie. The Elements of Harmony. The Oracle. It was all part of the game.

Twilight’s head hurt unbearably, disrupting her concentration. She quickly developed a migraine.

“Ow!” she said.

“Are you alright, Twilight?” Rarity asked.

“I will be,” Twilight replied. She rose to her hooves, still mildly disoriented. She walked over to the bars of the cell. “I wish to speak with Dark Pinkie,” she said to the guards.

“No one speaks with the Master,” a guard replied.

“Especially those who are prisoners,” the other guard said.

Most ponies would have given up then. But Twilight took a deep breath and shouted as loud as she possibly could: “DARK PINKIE!!” Her plan worked. Dark Pinkie returned to the cell.

“Of all the abomination-” she began, peering into the darkness. “What be your problem, Miss Sparkle?”

“Dark Pinkie,” Twilight began, “I wish to speak with you in private.”

“The Master-” began one of the guards. Dark Pinkie raised her hoof to his mouth.

“Bring her to my chambers,” she said, “in chains and with no arms.” Her eyes returned to Twilight. “You will have ten minutes with me. Then it’s back in the cell.”

One of the guards left momentarily to get some chains for Twilight’s departure from the cell. Twilight grabbed the Oracle with her horn.

“Here,” she said to Pinkie Pie, inserting the Oracle into her backpack, “take this in the meanwhile. It is your game, after all.”

The guard returned a moment later and opened the cell, chains wrapped firmly around her legs, her horn imprisoned in the metal material found everywhere within the Dark Ponies’ Stronghold. A muzzle was put around her mouth as the guard brought her to Dark Pinkie’s chambers upon her request. She was standing in the center of the room, reading a book that was placed on a pedestal when Twilight was brought in.

“Guards,” she said, gesturing with her hoof to leave. Once the guards were gone, she began.

“What business do you have here with me?” she asked, “It’s not every day that a prisoner wishes to speak with her captivator.”

“I was trying to figure out how the Oracle’s power could be provoked,” Twilight began, “when my mind seemed to race around in flashbacks. I was starting to remember.”

“Remember what, exactly?” Dark Pinkie asked, grinning fiendishly.

“It was that word: again. You were right.”

“About?”

“About this being a second time.”

“Keep going. What else do you remember?”

“I remember that Pinkie Pie was there with me. And Princess Celestia. And the Elements of Harmony. And the Oracle.”

“Keep going…”

Dark Pinkie, facing away from Twilight, took a few steps forward to close the book she was reading earlier, a faint beam of light shining in from a dusty window above, reflecting not just a mane on Dark Pinkie’s head…but a horn. Dark Pinkie was not an earth pony: she was a unicorn. And with that, Twilight remembered everything.

“The Elements of Harmony,” Dark Pinkie said, returning to her position in front of Twilight Sparkle, “in the beginning of this whole ordeal, you were wondering where you had heard of them before. And all you knew was that your knowledge of them was present long before then. You were right about that all along, but you never did discover where you heard of them before.”

“This all happened before,” Twilight said. “But it wasn’t Pinkie…it was me.”

---

Twilight knew why the Dark Pony in front of her was a unicorn and not an earth pony like her opposite. That was because Dark Pinkie was not really Dark Pinkie at all: she was a reincarnated spirit of Dark Twilight Sparkle, rendering Twilight Moonlight to just be a diversion and a dimwitted assistant.

A long time ago, Twilight Sparkle had stopped Nightmare Moon from taking over Equestria. It seemed that the harmony in the world would never cease. But sometime after, Twilight became less and less harmonious; and became more and more villainous and enraged. She studied dark, more powerful magic, becoming an even bigger threat to Equestria and Princess Celestia than Nightmare Moon could ever hope to be.

Princess Celestia had sent Pinkie Pie, the happiest, zippiest, most cheerful pony of them all to find the Oracle: she knew how to use it. She told Pinkie Pie how to unveil its divine powers. Pinkie Pie did so, making it her game as she conquered the great beast that was Twilight Sparkle, putting an end to the reign.

Thereafter, Princess Celestia returned the Oracle to the cave where it was found originally, so that if this ever happened again, she could send the most trustworthy of ponyfolk after it, and put a stop to the horror once more.

But the Princess feared the return of the evil Twilight would be too simple to not occur. She felt it was imperative that she take extreme measures to prevent such disaster from occurring. She found the evil Twilight shortly after her defeat by Pinkie Pie. She turned her around, changed her appearance, destroyed her wings, stripped her of her villainy and claimed her name was Twilight Sparkle, a pony of social isolation whose job it was to discover the magic of friendship and unite the most powerful emblems in Equestria: the Elements of Harmony.

What is happening now was no different than what was happening before. Everything Twilight knew was just repetition of a life she had lived before.

“It’s all a lie,” Twilight began, “the fact that you’re in charge of the Dark Pony league. You’re a hoax!”

“That may be,” Dark Pinkie replied, “but I am not in the wrong. I was chosen to be the leader because your opposite – Twilight Moonlight – is a dunce. Pinkie Pie – my opposite – has a personality so perfectly balanced between happiness and sadness, work and play, joy and misery that I was able to take command. In addition, she is not the brightest of ponies when it comes to global domination. I, being her opposite, am.”

There was a bright light illuminating behind Twilight Sparkle, at the entrance to Dark Pinkie’s quarters. The wall collapsed from the immense force of a gemstone levitating over Pinkie Pie’s mane.

“Guess who discovered how the Oracle works,” she said, bouncing in position.

“Uh…you did?” Twilight asked.

“The Oracle? No! How is this possible!?” Dark Pinkie asked, approaching her opposite, a dark shadow following in her hoofsteps.

“Nopony could have predicted how Pinkie Pie actually discovered how to provoke its hidden powers,” Rainbow Dash began, putting her hoof on Pinkie Pie, “but when we figured it out, it could not have been more obvious.”

“What provokes the power?” Dark Pinkie asked angrily, “Tell me! I demand to know!”

“Duh,” Pinkie Pie answered, “a teardrop!”

“A teardrop?”

“It was an exceptional discovery!” Rarity exclaimed. “Pinkie’s mane popped like a balloon and she became very sad when she refused to stop thinking about Twilight and how she may never see her again. The very thought of that even caused Pinkie Pie to shed a tear. Right at her hooves was the Oracle. And, well, the rest is self-explanatory.”

“Sadness is the key!” Twilight exclaimed, “that’s why Pinkie Pie was chosen to guard the Oracle! She is the only pony who is incapable of sadness unless in a desperate situation. It all makes perfect sense!” Twilight limped over to Pinkie Pie, still chained. “Pinkie, would you like to do the honors before we sent your opposite out of her misery?”

“What honors?” Pinkie Pie asked, uncertain.

Twilight whispered something into Pinkie’s ears.

“Ah! I got it now!” she exclaimed. A dark look of victory and confidence came across Pinkie that moment as she stared at Dark Pinkie in the eyes. “Game over,” she said.

The Oracle rose overhead, becoming increasingly bright as it lit up the otherwise dark and gloomy scene.

---

And so, the Oracle had vanquished Dark Pinkie’s empire in a spectrum of bright light as it showered the world in brightness.

Pinkie Pie completed her task as the guardian of the Oracle by returning it to its rightful place in the archaic cavern, just in case this predicament was ever to break out again.

Princess Celestia stood at the entrance of the cave where Pinkie Pie was returning the Oracle. She watched in contentment as Pinkie Pie gently set the Oracle in the middle of the giant stalagmite with her hooves.

“Miss Pinkie,” Princess Celestia said.

“Princess Celestia,” Pinkie Pie said.

“There is one last precedent we must address,” the Princess began.

“Oh? Which is…?”

“Princess Luna and I wipe the memories of everypony who was involved with this event, to minimize the probability of its recurrence.”

“And how does that concern me?”

“This includes you.”

“It does? But…but why?”

“You’re the guardian of the Oracle. It is in your nature to not know that. You will have the privileges of controlling the divine powers of the Oracle. Whether they be for good or evil, we cannot risk anypony getting their hooves on such power. I’m sorry, Pinkie Pie, but I must: for the safety and welfare of everypony.”

“How about instead, I ‘forget’ this whole thing ever happened?” Pinkie Pie suggested.

“You expect you will have amnesia?”

“No, I mean I pretend to not remember that any of this happened.” Pinkie eyed the Oracle. “This adventure was the single most exciting thing that ever happened to me! I don’t want to forget it, even if I do have access to the Oracle’s powers. I promise not to abuse this privilege.”

“You will try to forget your guardianship?”

“I will.”

“You will not bring it up with Twilight or any of the others?”

“I won’t.”

“And you will not speak of this event to anypony, no matter how much it manifests your memory to do so?”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Very well then, Pinkie Pie,” Princess Celestia began, “Princess Luna and I will forego the wiping of your memory of this event. You will recall everything you have experienced these long, dark hours. But, if you ever mention this to anypony – especially Twilight, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Fluttershy or Applejack – I will not hesitate to proceed with the wiping of your memory. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Pinkie Pie said.

---

Later that afternoon, Pinkie Pie and her friends had a tea party; Pinkie’s idea.

“I had the weirdest dream last night,” Twilight Sparkle said.

“Oh? Tell us about it,” Rarity said.

“Well, we were all in it, I remember that much. And Equestria was under a dark haze. Pinkie Pie! You were the leader of this evil group of ponies called the Dark Ponies, which we vanquished by the end of the dream.”

“That almost sounds…” Applejack began.

“Vaguely familiar?” Rainbow Dash interjected.

“Yeah!” Fluttershy exclaimed. “Almost as if-”

“It really happened?” Twilight asked.

Everypony turned their attention to Pinkie Pie.

“You know what they say about dreams,” she began, “they always seem so real.”

Everypony then laughed – except Pinkie Pie – who only winked.

Comments

[Regidar]

Expecting Ender's Game crossover.
Sad Kurt is sad.
24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9jegkUvxC1r8ey2ho4_250.gif

[AdrianJNovelle]

1865029 What, dogs dying? Don't be ridiculous. I'm a dog-lover And I also hate violence. Plus, there's no dogs in Ponyville.