Our protagonist (who wished to remain anonymous) is pulling late hours in a little diner, pouring himself into the MLP comic he's editing, to avoid thinking about his troubles. He's spared from his problems by a little, pink pony who can
A story that I, Rustling Leaves, heard related at Sugarcube Corner this past week, and it wouldn't leave my head. I have dramatized it some, collected journal entries, and conducted a number of interviews.
Our protagonist (who wished to remain anonymous) is pulling late hours in a little diner, pouring himself into the MLP comic he's editing, to avoid thinking about his troubles.
He's spared from his problems by a little, pink pony who can violate the 4th wall.
Special thanks to yours truly (not a pony name, I mean myself) for the artwork, and to Autumn Leaves for digitizing and polishing it!
"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.
The world around me was suddenly like the unfinished comic—everything was a jagged, undulating outline of itself, only seeming to harden into a semblance of constancy when I looked directly at it, then leaping back into a twisting, sketchy set of random lines at the corners of my vision. To keep my footing, I kept my eyes affixed to the bouncing, pink pony. There was nopony here but the two of us.
Good grief, that came right out of my pen, unbidden. Nopony.
She too was expressed in simple outline, a jarring effect for eyes that have only ever seen the real world. I looked at my hands and saw that no matter how I looked or how I shifted them, they seemed to have been drawn in quick pencil, sometimes crossed by a jagged line or squiggle that served no purpose at all. The entire world was a black-on-white outline, except for my guide; who's outline insisted, somehow, on a vivid pink.
Pinkie Pie giggled and twirled as she spoke to me, literally running circles around me. She sidestepped and bobbed under lines extending through that odd, white space as though she knew where she was going.
I was subjected to a barrage of questions about myself. What was my name, where did I live, did I have family in the city? I answered each as we walked (she was more dancing, really, than walking). She was shocked and pretty sad when I told her about my family—all gone, the ones I'd been able to keep in touch with. My sister was the last of them, died just recently. I hadn't been able to get time off for her funeral across the country. It seemed that after enough of my questions had sad answers, she stopped asking me about my life and started asking about mundane, happier things: the kind of music I liked, interesting places I'd been, hobbies.
All the time we were having this conversation, we kept a brisk pace in the same general direction, forging ahead to some distinct destination. I interrupted a long response about waffles (when did we start talking about waffles?), and I asked her where that destination might be.
"Equestria, silly. Everypony there is friendly...mostly, and I'm friends with all of them! I'm sure you'll make lots of friends and have a super-duper-ultra-fun time!" She then began to regale me on the finer points of equestrian cuisine. I wasn't listening; I was doing the rational thing, finally, and reeling at the idea of inter-dimensional travel.
I could scarcely believe it. I suppose I've been quasi-religious my whole life---my mother's influence, may she rest in peace---never really doing much about my half-formed faith, but hoping, somehow, that some benevolent force was watching out for me. Now I had actual, bizarre cause to suspect it was true: Something had seen me, and come to help. My own, pink, equine angel.
I wondered at that---had some god seen me? Or was it only a good-hearted mare that had seen me, and come to my aid. A voice in my heart, that felt an awful lot like my late mother's, seemed to say it was both.
But Pinkie was talking to me again, calling me from my sudden reverie.
"Hello? Anypony home?"
"What? Er...no. Just a human."
I thought my pun was clever. She thought it was hilarious. Instantly she was on her back, holding her sides with her forelegs, kicking her hind legs in the air, and practically whinnying (heh) (sic) with laughter.
We continued our walk through the odd world, and at one point, Pinkie stepped past the border of a squarish scribble, and beyond it, she was no longer an outline. She was still unlike an actual horse, far closer to the cartoon representation, but apparently, even that had been some kind of lens, doing no justice to the complex detail and alien beauty she posessed. She must have heard my gasp, for she turned back to me and smiled again, this time through the strange looking glass. The look was almost a romantic one, but it exploded into giggles. Still, for an instant, hadn't there been some smouldering fire under that tangle of cotton candy she wore her mane in? Could any of it have been for me?
Mane.... I really am pretty far gone into their world. I'd have said hair automatically, once.
Pinkie giggled at my confused expression, then suddenly looked up. Two figures, scribbles themselves and indistinct at first through the haze of sketch lines, were approaching fast.
The changelings (there were two, though I hadn't guessed that from my proofreading) from the comic draft. They'd gotten here and found us somehow. The personas (ponysonae?) they'd adopted for the race had been shed, except for the helmets that were apparently real, and each of them brandished a long pipe wrench in their fingerless hooves.
Pinkie guessed their intentions immediately. I would have—the pipe wrenches were pretty threatening—but I excuse myself based on the novelty of the experience. Pinkie grabbed my hoof hand (sic) and dragged me through the forest of squiggly walls. The changelings took to hovering after us, wings buzzing loudly and clacking against their chitinous hides. I lost all sense of direction (gaps looked the same as walls) but Pinkie kept going, making precision turns and moving faster, almost, than I could keep up with. The whole time, she never let go of my hand.
"We'll have to use this one—back to your world. Quick, jump through here!" Pinkie called over her shoulder. From what I could tell we'd reached a dead end. I couldn't see the changelings behind us anymore, but I could hear their buzzing and hissing getting louder.
"Through here," Pinkie said, and as she said it, she touched both her forehooves together against the wall and pulled them apart vertically, dragging a square hole into existence between them as though she were lifting the blinds on a window. There was only darkness on the other side.
I paused. I'd found a new world, and a new friend; I couldn't just leave.
Pinkie seemed to understand my hesitation. "Don't worry, silly: I'll be right behind you, hurry!"
I looked back once, the changelings were both there at the entrance to this hallway to nowhere, then I braced myself and jumped, headfirst, into the darkness.
"Nowhere to run, my little pony~" one of the changelings sneered in a sing-song voice.
Alone in the sketchy limbo, Pinkie Pie still stared at the now-closed hole in their between-realm comic book world, watching something only she could see. The changelings drew closer...
Unseen by her new, human companion, the bubbly, chaotic, happy attitude fell away from the little pony all at once. She rounded on their pursuers in the narrow corridor, seeming to be a different pony altogether. Her smile was gone, replaced by a weary frown. Her normally sapphire eyes were a cloudy grey and half-lidded. Cotton candy hair was now hanging limp and straight as though driven downward by unseen rain.
From nowhere at all, Pinkamina—for Pinkie was gone—drew her own pipe wrench.
I was suddenly lying in the diner's trash. The one behind the counter, not the one out back---thank Celes- no, now that I had reason to believe she was real, I could hear Connery's voice as he reached out to slap my head. "That'sh for Blashphemy!"
She was real. They were real. I didn't have time to ponder any further, however---my reappearance had been noticed. The woman who never brought me my coffee leaned over the counter, saw me, and seemed angry.
I stood, looked back at where I'd been lying, and saw my comic crumpled in the crushed trash can. I grabbed it, and I ran.
I think she yelled something about the police as I went, and some of the patrons wanted to know whether I was alright, but that didn't matter; my thoughts were on the mare that had saved me a moment ago. I had to know her fate.
Outside, it was raining---pouring, cascading. I ran for home, just a block away, for somewhere dry to read the comic and try to contact Pinkie.
My fingers were shaking so violently that I could barely enter my PIN at the door. I passed a neighbor or two on my way in without saying hello, shot up six flights of stairs at a sprint, and collapsed against my door, taking advantage of the time I needed to fumble for my keys to heave a few panicked breaths.
With the sort of grace that comes from years of practice, I entered, flipped on the lights, and tossed my rain-soaked trench coat on the hook in a single movement. Three steps later I was flattening out the final pages of the comic, trying not to drag the ink around with my damp fingers.
She was on the ground, broken and bruised. The changelings that had followed her were nowhere to be seen. The pages showing the fight were ruined, but the result was clear---Pinkie had lost.
I recoiled. She'd not only saved my life, she'd died to save me. Was there a way to tell her friends? ...Was there a way to tell mine? They'd never believe me, and the Equestrians would never know. How had I been such a coward? Why did I run and leave her behind?
"Because she said she would follow you," some part of me recalled.
Tears began to well up, but through the haze I saw some movement on one of the panels I'd flattened on my table. I blinked them away and saw Pinkie moving again! She was throwing herself against the walls of a different panel. Hard. As I watched, I felt like I could hear her thudding against those walls.
No, I could hear her.
Behind me.
Looking back, the little entry way was occupied now by Pinkie, still a scribbled outline, bashing against the walls as though they were the frame she was trying to escape from. She braced herself and leapt at one wall, smashing into it violently, crumpling to the ground, and then hurling herself at the opposite wall. Each time her tiny frame crashed she'd flicker briefly into quasi-realistic full color.
I found myself frozen in place. Should I leap forward and help her, or was her tenuous link to my world so fragile that I could break it by interfering? She was flickering into color for longer, now, so the violent wall-banging seemed to be working...if indeed she was trying to enter my world, as I hoped, but it looked so painful.
I had almost made up my mind to run forward and risk the consequences of trying to pull her through whatever odd barrier there was, when, in a final leap, she threw herself face first into one of the walls and collapsed. The semi-conscious pony on the ground was solid and pink all the way through. She lifted her head, her mane drooping with the sweat of exertion, but her blue eyes sparkled up at me. I smiled, and suddenly her face lit up, her mane was pulled by some happy, etherial force back into it's typical, puffy chaos. She just grinned her beautiful, mad grin at me. I found myself returning it. We laughed and laughed, and laughed some more: relief and joy and excitement and...probably some kind of magic.
Friendship, of course. How stupid of me.
The party has lasted, at this point, for seven whole hours. My cranky landlady, who lives upstairs on the whole 7th floor, came down to complain about half an hour in. She and I had two dances, throughout the night, and now she's sleeping against a cop who came about an hour after she did. Pinkie covered them with one of my spare blankets when she saw me looking at them just now.
I've done a lot of talking with her since she got here. Apparently it isn't her first time—she told me some of the stories, but those ones belong to her and those other people she helped. What I will say is this: apparently, she's taken some of us back with her. Celestia, she says, doesn't mind if she does it only infrequently.
I pointed out that from what we humans could see, there were not any humans in Equestria.
She just giggled.
What would it be like to start over? What would it be like to go to a completely different world?
What would it be like to give up my fingers?
She seemed to notice me worrying: I can see her tossing popcorn for some of my guests to catch.
When did the mayor get here?!
Pinkie's confident grin has decided me.
I'm going.
I have a few things to arrange---not many, I'm mostly alone in the world, but I do have some ties: I can, at least, get my meager savings transferred to a charity. I won't be needing it: I'll be gone in a day or two.
I leave this comic here, in the hopes that any who care about my disappearance might follow me someday, if there is a way in. If not, farewell.
Elsewhere, having had the story related to her through a long and confusing letter, Princess Celestia was defending her decision to have Pinkie race.
"Not at all!" Her Highness was saying, "He legitimately needed help!
"I concede that, sister. Mine only question beeth one of thy timing and method," Princess Luna replied.
"The timing worked out fine, Luna, and as to the method, even I can only pretend to understand how Pinkie Pie does it, I just knew she could. I am sorry about the changelings...a little."
"Art thou indeed?"
The sun princess ignored the question, instead responding “Besides, I love that song.”
