> Disco Inferno
>  by McPoodle
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Figure 1: CB Radio
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Disco Inferno

by McPoodle





Figure 1: CB Radio




The crunch of gravel under tires quietly announced the return of undercover police officers Gloomfeld and Gruekin to the winter quarters of the Pagliacci Brothers Family Circus, located a dozen miles outside the city of Passaic, New Jersey.

The hour was late, and the year was young. A few dirty lumps of snow were still visible in the shadows.

Finding an out-of-the way spot between the main tent and a wire fence, the green Gran Torino rolled to a halt, the sound of its approach muffled by the sounds of an out-of-tune calliope playing from within the tent.

Inside the car, the driver, Harry Gloomfeld, grabbed a battered tan satchel from the back seat and began flipping through the papers and photograph inside. Beside him, Aramus Gruekin sat quietly, staring straight ahead with his arms crossed.

Gloomfeld sighed. “Alright Aramus,” he addressed his partner without looking at him, “go ahead and say it before you blow a gasket or something.”

Gruekin remained staring straight ahead. “We both know this is a dead end, Harry,” he said finally. “Nothing else we’ve done has managed to stick, and this is far and away the most-ridiculous accusation by far. If the Chief ever finds out about this—”

“The Chief is going to find out about this,” Gloomfeld interrupted, “on the day when we finally expose Frankie Scarpino’s ties to the Coragglio syndicate once and for all.” He patted the satchel lovingly. “And this here is guaranteed to blow the truth wide open!” 

“Blow the truth wide open?”

“Look, just let me do the talking, alright?”

Gruekin shrugged, which served as the signal for the two men to exit their warm vehicle into the cold night air. Pulling their coats around them, they slowly made their way around the tent, staying in the shadows. From the other side of the canvas, they could hear the sounds of cans and bottles being thrown around, as well as a lot of yelling.

“That’s the fifth queen you’ve pulled from that deck. The fifth queen!” This was rather typical of the yelling.

From a nearby trailer, a record player tried vainly to drown out the other sounds:





Whether you’re a brother
Or whether you're a mother,
You're stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
Feel the city breakin’
And everybody shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.




“Aramus, stop strutting,” Harry said with a sigh.

The two men walked past an open stable door before reaching the small trailer home that was parked beside it.

Unseen by them, a large pair of inquisitive blue eyes peered out at them from the stable, and followed their progress.





“The truth may never be known for sure,” said the televised voice of Leonard Nimoy over the sound of repeated knocking at the door. “Lost civilizations. Extraterrestrials. Myths and monsters. Missing persons. Magic and witchcraft. Unexplained phenomena. ‘In Search Of...’ cameras are traveling the world, seeking out these great mysteries. This program was the result of the work of scientists, researchers and a group of highly-skilled technicians.”

Only once he had heard these final words did William Martin get up and answer the door. “How many times do I have to tell you that Antonia is not...” he started to say before seeing the two men before him: one of them in a white shirt, cream vest and suit, navy blue tie and straight brown hair under a porkpie gray hat with a Hawaiian-style band around it, and the other in a sky blue shirt, blue suit, a loosened gray tie and curly brown hair. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he addressed them acidly in his British accent, “I thought you were somebody else, two people I have never met before. Are you sure you’re not at the wrong address?”

“No, this is the place,” Gloomfeld said arrogantly. “We need a little more of your help.”

“Haven’t I done enough?” Martin asked with a hint of desperation. “Antonia’s becoming suspicious. If word gets back to her brother...?”

“Relax!” Gloomfeld replied. “I just have a few questions, and then we’ll be out of your hair, I promise! Now would you like to invite us in, or would you prefer we stand out here on your porch, where we might attract some unwanted attention?”

With a sigh, Martin moved aside and allowed the two men to walk inside.


& & &


With the ease of those who had performed this exact ritual several times before, the two undercover officers made their way to the cramped kitchen of the trailer, and sat down at the table. Martin made them some tea, interrupted when the theme from Sanford and Son started blaring from the television and he had to race over to the living room to turn it off.

“Stupid American television,” he muttered to himself as he reentered the kitchen.

“Wasn’t that particular ‘stupid American’ show based on an equally stupid British show?” Gruekin asked with a grin.

“Well...yes,” said Martin reluctantly as he sat down. “I thought when I came to this country that I could get away from that sort of pan-European idiocy. But the shows...and the music...followed me over the Pond.” He attached a particularly vicious tone to his reference to disco. “Now then,” he said, changing the subject, “what do you need to know this time?”

Gloomfeld picked up the satchel from his feet and began to rifle through it. “You know, in all the time we’ve been talking with you about this circus, I never asked you anything about what you do around here.”

“Well, I help Antonia with the pony rides,” Martin answered. “She mostly takes care of the animals, and I mostly sell the tickets and fix the carousel when it breaks down.”

“I was able to find out quite a bit about your animals by poking around City Hall,” said Gloomfeld, pulling a pile of papers out of the satchel. “Interesting thing about ponies I found out: like people, they’ve got a paper trail following them. You’ve got to file a paper when a pony is born, when it dies, when it changes ownership, and every time it enters and leaves the country. I’ve got copies here of all the paperwork on your twelve ponies.”

“Why twelve, by the way?” interrupted Gruekin. “That carousel they walk around in only has places for eight.”

“Well, ponies can be temperamental,” answered Martin, “and they get injured and tired pretty easily. We’ve found over the years that an even dozen is the best number to ensure that we can get eight on the carousel most days.”

“Now let’s see,” Gloomfeld said, pulling down two or three papers at a time, “we have Moonbeam, Sundance, Copper, Cherokee, Turtle, Ceiling Tile—”

“‘Ceiling Tile’?” Gruekin repeated incredulously, leaning over to be sure that that his partner got the name right.

Martin sighed. “That was the previous owner’s idea of a joke,” he explained.

“But what does it mean?” Gruekin asked.

Martin rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You know those ceiling tiles in office buildings, the ones with those little black holes in them? Well, Ceiling Tile the pony is the same pale gray in color, and his coat tends to get spattered all over when he—”

“Do not finish that sentence!” interrupted Gloomfeld.

Martin shrugged. “He’s not very bright.”

“How can you tell?” asked Gruekin. “Aren’t ponies just dumb animals?”

“They’re brighter than most dogs, if you raise them correctly. And Antonia practically treats ours like children.” Martin pursed his lips after saying that, and looked away from the policemen for a few seconds.

“Let me finish this list,” said Gloomfeld with some annoyance. “Ceiling Tile, Flicka…really? you’ve got a ‘Flicka’?…Damsel, Romeo, Dusty, and finally we get to the really interesting one...Rarity.” He punctuated the revelation of this name by slapping a black and white photograph onto the table. The photo showed Gruekin kneeling down beside a pure white pony with a dark-colored mane shaped into a spiraling ribbon of hair. The photo showed the pony using a hoof to hold up the cuff of the officer’s tartan smoking jacket. The creature had an expression on its face that could only be described as horror.

Despite knowing that it was coming, Martin still flinched slightly on hearing the name.

“Very interesting case here, this Rarity,” said Gloomfeld, leaning in for the kill. “Registered only a few days ago, yet clearly a young adult. Where are her birth papers? Her breeding record? If she was imported, where are her immunization records? From what I understand, you’re not supposed to be allowed to expose the public to a pony without this documentation. And yet, this one pony has a full set of waivers, signed by former Governor Cahill himself. I’m willing to bet, though, that the Governor never remembers signing those particular waivers.” He suddenly stood up and pointed at his host. “Admit it, Martin!” he cried. “The Coragglio Mob is tied to this circus! They’re using it to launder their ill-gotten gains...through ponies!”

Martin looked up at him sadly, doing nothing but blinking his eyes. After nearly a minute, Gloomfeld sighed and sat back down. “You know,” Martin said, “that cock-and-bull explanation would actually make sense, compared to what really happened.” He got up himself and started walking towards the door. “There’s no possible chance that you’ll believe me,” he said as he opened a closet and put on a coat, “but if I show you, you’ll hopefully conclude that I am merely deluded instead of insane.”

The two officers put on their own coats, and followed Martin out the front door.


& & &


“To start with,” said Martin as he locked the door, “we were short one pony. Buttercup II,”—the man sniffed back a tear—“the best damn pony a man could ever know. We...we lost her, rather suddenly. Then came the night of January 17th—”

“1977?” asked Gloomfeld, who was taking notes.

“No, ‘78, less than a week ago,” Martin continued. “Antonia was out of town. I was awakened by a bright flash outside my bedroom window, from the general direction of the stable.” He pointed at the window of the trailer, then swept his arm over to show that it had line of sight to the neighboring stable. “I got dressed, and walked outside. I could hear the sounds of the ponies being upset, and also a man’s voice talking from inside the stable. It was nobody I’ve ever heard before.”

“Just one voice?” asked Gloomfeld.

“That’s right, one voice. I never heard anybody answer him. At first, I couldn’t make out what the man was saying. I decided to sneak up to the stable to see if I could catch whoever it was that was messing with our ponies.”

And this is exactly what the three men were doing at this point, walking slowly from the trailer to the stable.

“I was about...here, when I saw two fainter flashes of light from inside the stable, one right after the other. They looked like flashbulbs going off, and they were accompanied by these faint clicks, also like bulbs going off. The voice said something before each flash.”

“What did it say?” prompted Gloomfeld.

“I, err, didn’t hear him really clearly. I’m sure I got the words wrong,” Martin said sheepishly.

“Well, what did it sound like he said? Maybe we can figure out what he really said later.”

“It sounded like he said ‘no talking’ and ‘no magic’.”

Gloomfeld repeated the two phrases as he wrote them down. Martin looked like he expected to get mocked, especially for that ‘magic’ line, but the plainclothes officers remained professional.

The men reached the side-door of the stable.

“I unlocked this door,” Martin said, demonstrating, “and I took a look inside.”

The two policemen peered over Martin’s shoulder to get a view of the layout of the stable. There was a big open space to the left of the door, with a walkway leading to the right between two rows of pony stalls. Most of the ponies were awake, and they were already at the front of their stalls, watching the unfamiliar humans with wary eyes.

Standing in the very front stall, directly across from the three men, was Rarity. The dark mane from the monochrome photo turned out to be a startling deep purple color, and her eyes were a vivid blue. One hoof was hooked over a slat of the door, like she had just pulled it shut.

“I saw this pony for the first time,” Martin said, gesturing at Rarity, “standing out there in the main area. There were no people to be seen, and as you can see, from this spot it’s pretty hard for anybody to hide or sneak out without me noticing.”

“The mystery man could have hid in one of the stalls,” Gloomfeld suggested.

“I doubt that very much,” said Martin. “These ponies do not take well to strangers. The only reason they are not panicking over you two right now is because I’m with you and they feel safe in their stalls.” He turned to the wall and picked up a pitchfork. “I picked this up and called out for the miscreant to reveal himself.

“‘I’m afraid you’ve got me, fair and square,’ the voice answered. I turned, to see that it was coming from that machine, which had never been in the stable before.”

Gloomfeld and Gruekin walked over to examine a Citizen’s Band radio that was sitting on a small table on the facing wall next to Rarity’s stall. It was a small unit, meant to be mounted under the dash of a pickup truck, but instead plugged into the lone outlet in the wall. A whip antenna was bolted to one side, and a standard CB microphone was clipped to the other; the unit was flanked by a pair of expensive stereo speakers, surely overkill under the circumstances.

The two men had minimal experience with CB radios per se, but that was more than made up for by their knowledge of police radios. They saw that the unit was currently switched on, but saw nothing else unusual about it. Gruekin turned it around and started writing down the serial number.

“Don’t bother,” Martin said. “Chuckles already tried chasing that down. Governor Cahill apparently also bought that unit during his time in office.”

Gruekin tried to imagine the staid ex-governor ever using the phrase “ten-four, good buddy,” and nearly broke down in laughter.

“Are you sure coming out of this radio was the same voice you heard outside the stable?” asked Gloomfeld.

“Positive,” said Martin.

“Can you describe it to me?”

“It was a somewhat deep voice, with a local accent. And it was overflowing with attitude. It was the voice of a man who could have anything he wanted. A man of leisure who chose to spend his time manipulating and torturing others for his own sick amusement.”

Gloomfeld looked up from his notepad at the seething face of Martin. “I take it you’ve had experience with the type,” he said cautiously.

“I used to work for a man who must have been this voice’s British cousin. He’s the reason I can never return to England again.”

“Wow,” said Gruekin. “Just out of curiosity, who was this ex-boss of yours? Did he have a title? Was he rich and powerful?”

“Yes and yes to your two last questions, which is precisely why I am legally barred from revealing his name without a court order,” Martin said sourly.

“And then what happened?” asked Gloomfeld after finishing his note-taking. “With the voice, that is.”

“I walked up to the machine and said, ‘Who are you?’ and the voice replied—”

“Hold on,” said Gloomfeld. “Did you use the microphone?”

“No,” said Martin with a grin. “I was wondering if you’d catch that. At the time, I did not know how these radios worked. Later, after I told the story to Chuckles, he tinkered around, and found a second microphone hidden in one of the speakers. ‘Voice activated’ I think he called it.”

“Chuckles,” Gloomfeld said as he continued taking notes. “That’s a clown’s name, right?”

“No, it belongs to Chuckles the undertaker,” Martin said with a straight face. “Of course it’s a clown’s name!”

“We should probably get his opinion on all of this, seeing as he appears to be good with both record tracking and electronics.”

“Not going to happen,” Martin said flatly. “Chuckles and authority figures do not go well together.”

“Well that’s a rather broad statement,” Gruekin protested. “I’m sure if we met him—”

“Tell me, Office Gruekin, in all of the time that you’ve been touring this circus, both openly and sneaking around, have you ever seen our clown?”

“Well, now that you mention it...”

“And you’re never going to see him, either,” Martin said. “That man’s got a sixth sense when it comes to cops. He’s the one who told me who you two really were. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have told you two about him at all—he’s probably going to make me buy him a whole stack of records before he’ll agree to fix my TV the next time it goes on the blink.”

“So, getting back to this ‘secret microphone’,” Gruekin said with a roll of his eyes, “I do hope that you or this clown friend of yours thought of deactivating it.”

Martin reached back and picked up a loose wire coming out of the right speaker. “It’s unplugged now,” he said. “I can plug it back in anytime I’d like.”

“The voice answered you...” Gloomfeld prompted.

“Yes, I asked who it was, and it responded with the words ‘I am nobody of consequence,’ an answer dripping with amusement at how obviously false it was. ‘I represent however a rich and influential fashion mogul that wishes to remain anonymous. This pony has been very naughty, and as a result, I am offering it to you to be your property. You are free to do anything you please with it.’ I noticed the pony flinch at these words.” Martin walked over to Rarity’s stall. “That’s when I first got a good look at it. She’s a very unusual pony, as you’ve already noticed. An abnormally large head, with such a smooth, rounded cranium, and there’s definitely something...off, about the eyes. And that white coat—this was obviously an animal that had been groomed on a near-constant basis. And then finally there’s the mane! On a human head, this style would have taken hours a day to keep in shape. Antonia’s been doing her best to maintain it, but it’s a losing battle, especially once that pony starts on the carousel. In fact, my wife’s been coming up with every excuse imaginable to keep Rarity from ever going on that carousel, but she’s going to have to go out there sooner or later.” The pony Rarity shrunk back from Martin’s words. “I have no idea what kind of dye was used to make it that color, only that it’s a lot better than anything I’ve seen Julia use. To send this pedigreed, pampered pony here, an animal who must have consumed more dollars in daily maintenance than the annual Gross Domestic Income of a small African nation! Well, she must have been a naughty pony indeed.”

Martin walked back, past the radio to a locked trunk, followed by the officers. “But even if I did wish to treat this newcomer the same way as my other ponies,” he continued, “that didn’t mean that I was willing to do it on my own dollar. I therefore demanded remuneration.

“The voice laughed. ‘Yes, you certainly should get something to repay you for putting up with her. Alright, how does $200,000 sound?’

“My eyes boggled. ‘Yes,’ I finally managed to squeak out, ‘I think that sum would be sufficient.’ I was clearly dealing with a man with no sense of the value of money.

“‘Very well,’ the voice said, ‘you will find the sum under the table.’”

Martin reached into his shirt, pulling out a key strung on a chain around his neck. He used the key to unlock the trunk. “Now, I don’t expect you to believe this, but I swear I had a perfectly good view of the space under the table when I walked into the room, and there was nothing there at that time. Nevertheless, when I looked under that table this time, I found this.” From under a pile of blankets, Martin removed a large black satchel. Tied to one of the handles was a baggage tag for Northwest Orient Airlines, with the former owner of the satchel written on it in bold black marker:





Property of D.B. Cooper




Gruekin laughed quietly for a few seconds. “This guy’s a real joker, isn’t he?”

Martin nodded.

“I don’t get it,” said Gloomfeld.

“D. B. Cooper was one of the first air pirates,” Gruekin replied. “He took over a Portland to Seattle flight in ’71, got two hundred grand in ransom, and made a parachute jump into the woods. He and his money were never found.”

“So the voice is D. B. Cooper?” asked Gloomfeld.

“No,” said Martin. “I consulted with Chuckles, who’s sort of an aficionado of the case. For one thing, the alias that the hijacker used was never ‘D. B. Cooper’, it was ‘Dan Cooper’. It was a reporter who mixed up the name afterwards. Second, if that was the actual bag with the ransom money, then it certainly wouldn’t have a baggage tag on it. And third,”—Martin opened the bag and pulled out a bundle of hundred-dollar bills,”—this money was still a bit damp and burnt at the edges, just as you’d expect Cooper’s money to be considering the popular theory that he drowned in Lake Merwin, but why would the money still be wet seven years later? In fact, it seems impossible that these bills could be in such relatively good shape after what they must have gone through.”

“So they’re fakes,” said Gloomfeld.

“Yes, but...they don’t appear to be counterfeit,” said Martin, “and the serial numbers are all on the list the FBI made of the bills they were giving to Cooper. It’s like the bag was snatched out of Time just seconds after landing in that lake and supplied with a fake tag, just for a cheap joke at my expense. Oh, and he cheated me, by the way—not all of the $200,000 ransom is in there.”

“I think I’d like to bring this bag in for analysis,” said Gloomfeld, a confused look on his face.

“You might as well,” said Martin, handing it over. “There’s no way I would have been able to spend any of that without getting arrested—that would have been the punch line of this particular joke.”

“Why didn’t you come forward with this before?” asked Gruekin.

“Because nobody would have believed me,” Martin replied.


& & &


“So,” said Gruekin with a grin as he followed the bewildered Gloomfeld back to their car with the satchel containing nearly $200,000 in hijacked cash, “have we blown the truth wide open yet?”

“Shut up, Aramus.”
> Figure 2: Clipper
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 2: Clipper





Less than a month had passed since William Martin had confided Rarity’s origins to the two police officers. Snow was still thick between the branches of trees and on top of houses, but it was beginning to lose the war against the never-ending supply of salt on the roads and sidewalks.

Rarity the pony was walking down the center of Main Street in the small New Jersey city of Passaic. Behind her were the six ponies who hadn’t come down with colds so far. Ahead and behind them was practically everybody in the circus, all of them showing off their talents while waving to the crowd. It was a parade of some sort, and the object of veneration appeared to be a particular form of braided white wig, considering how many people in and watching the parade were wearing them.

Rarity ignored the voices of the people around her, and looked down at the slushy surface of the street she was delicately trotting upon, her head wobbling from side to side. She fell behind the pace of the others, and then suddenly she was on the ground—the pony had passed out.


& & &


The man on the other end of the pony’s leash pulled a bottle of smelling salts out of a pocket and waved it under the animal’s nose until she revived, then quickly led her back to her place in the parade. The man did all this with the practiced air of one who has revived fainting ponies, or perhaps just this fainting pony, on more than one occasion.

That man was William Martin. Behind him in his assigned position his wife Antonia was busy herding all the other ponies, but Rarity was the star attraction, and Antonia wanted to make sure that she was seen. For his part, William was now holding the leash about the same way he’d hold his wife’s purse: at arm’s length, and refusing to look at it, as if by these two actions he could convince anybody that he wasn’t actually doing what he quite obviously was doing.

William’s eyes were roaming about as he walked and waved at the crowd, clearly looking for somebody. They stopped upon the figure of Aramus Gruekin, wearing a tan trench coat and standing next to a newspaper machine. As he watched, the officer ducked into a nearby alley.

William looked back at his wife. “I need to get a newspaper,” he said, attempting to hand Rarity’s leash off to her.

Antonia Martin was a short woman with short black hair, dark eyeliner and lipstick the color of deep red wine. She was wearing thigh-high brown boots and a simple dress covered with a crazy patchwork design that made it hard to tell how much mud and slush her ponies had splattered her with. The answer was: a lot. “Now?” she asked with some exasperation.

William gave her a pleading look.

Antonia sighed. “Very well, I know how much you hate doing this. But don’t give her to me: Rarity deserves the spotlight.”

As she was saying this, a shapely woman in a leotard that was mostly skin-colored arrived on the back of a majestic black stallion, riding side-saddle. “I can take care of her for you, dear sister,” the woman said, an arch smile upon her face. Her raven-black hair was long and wavy, and she looked like she had no need for makeup whatsoever. She was a few years older than Antonia, but beyond a doubt the more beautiful of the pair.

Antonia looked about her, desperate to find any alternative other than this. But the circus performers around her were busy with the leashes of wild animals, or juggling, or spitting fireballs at the delighted youngsters in the crowd. With a deep sigh of dread, she took Rarity’s leash from her husband and held it out to her sibling. “Take care of her, Julia,” she hissed, while still holding the rope.

“Why, I’ll treat her like I treat Thunderbolt,” the elder sister said gaily, patting a hand on her horse’s withers. “Like I would Buttercup II!”

“Best damn pony a man could ever know!” blurted the fire-breather.

“...Yes,” Julia said dryly, not bothering to look at him. Instead, she looked down at the leash in her hand, still tightly gripped by Antonia. “You can let go, Sis.”

“Oh. Right.”


& & &


William made his way to the alley the moment the despised leash had left his hand. He pulled a pile of change out of his pocket and began slowly passing it around from one hand to another, the whole time staring down at the newspaper machine.

“What have you found out about that recording?” he whispered.

“Damn thing doesn’t make a bit of sense,” Gruekin’s voice drifted back to him from the alley. “How’s your pony?”

“Getting worse by the day,” William replied. “Dr. Atkins still doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. She was fine before he spoke to her over the radio.”

“So you keep telling me.”


& & &


“Wow, that’s a neat pony you’ve got there,” said a little girl that had snuck up to Julia, Thunderbolt and Rarity. Her hair was blonde and in pigtails, and she was wearing a neat little pink dress.

Julia shrugged. “Eh, I’ve seen better,” she said. She looked back and forth, as if checking to see if anybody was watching, then leaned down to be closer to the girl who was walking beside her. “Wanna ride her?”

The girl ran her hand down Rarity’s mane, causing the pony to flinch. Turning to the other kids on the sidewalk, she cried out, “Hey! The lady says we can ride her!”


& & &


William Martin and Officer Gruekin were now standing in the alley, where they no longer had to pretend not to be having a conversation with each other. Gruekin was telling his story to William, a story that had the latter dumbfounded.

“...And in teeny-tiny print,” Gruekin said, “the message inside the fortune cookie said, ‘Assistance requested, most honorable westwant patwon. Am twapped inside a fowtune cookie factowy!’” Upon completing his little tale, Officer Gruekin awaited William Martin’s response.

A full minute of silence passed.

“Tell me you’re kidding about that joke,” William finally said. “Please tell me you’re kidding. Your partner actually sprung that joke on your boss?”

“Yup,” Gruekin answered with a half-smile.

“Knowing full well that said boss’ wife is Chinese.”

“Yup.”

Martin tried to rub the headache blooming between his eyes away, to no avail. “Tell me again how we got to this point in the conversation from you analyzing that recording.”

“Well that’s the thing—we can’t let the Chief listen to that recording yet, so we had to get him out of the A/V room by any means necessary, and all Harry could think of was that joke.”

“So I suppose I’m not going to be seeing him for a while?” Martin asked, a smile blooming on his face as he pondered spending time without having to deal with the gung-ho policeman.

“No, I suppose not,” Gruekin said with a sigh. “The Chief’s got him buried in paperwork right up to the ceiling.”

“Well tell me you learned something from that recording, at least,” said William.

“Ah...no,” Gruekin said with a sigh. “No matter what we do, we can’t get rid of the surface layer that your mystery man was using to cover up the sound of his voice. Have there been any other recordings?”

“No,” said William. “The CB radio has only been used the one time since you set up the recording equipment. But it can’t be that hard—I heard three phrases distinctly: ‘center of the universe’, ‘the sailor’s itch time is twilight’, and ‘the past can be changed’. Well...I’m not too certain about that middle one. It was during a pretty brief break in the laughter.”

“Laughter?” Gruekin said in confusion. “When did you hear laughter in that recording?”

Now it was William’s turn to be confused. “It was nearly constant.”

“Martin,” Gruekin said, suddenly serious, “tell me what you heard. Tell me what was in the surface layer of that CB radio recording.”

“Well it was a skit, from that silly British comedy troupe. The one about the dead bird that goes on and on forever.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Gruekin said.

“What did you hear?”

“I heard the ‘Chicken Heart’ episode from Light’s Out. Although I did find it odd that this version had an altered ending where the giant heart ate the two police officers who were trying to stop it from devouring the city. I did think it odd that the officers sounded just...like...us... ” A rather disturbed expression settled upon his face.

“Well that’s impossible,” William protested. “Obviously, you must have mixed up the tapes.”

“Possibly...” Gruekin mused. “Maybe I should escort you to the station, so you can have another listen?”

“Oh no you don’t!” William said with a shake of his head. “You have no idea how much trouble I’ll be in if I’m seen within a mile of a police station. It’s bad enough that we’re talking right now.”

“Billy!” a voice rang out. It’s tone was equal parts desperation and rage.

Gruekin handed a newspaper to William. “I’ll tell you if I find anything else.”


& & &


William Martin dashed back into the street, jogging past spectators to catch up with the receding parade. He didn’t have far to run, because the parade had stopped dead, with a solid clump of humanity surrounding the figures of Thunderbolt and Julia. The latter looked like a cat who had made off with a canary, and was too proud of her achievement to cover it up when the master shows up.

“Billy!” Antonia’s voice called once again.

“Coming, my Pumpkin!” William called back, prying people away from each other to reach the center of the mass. There he found over a dozen little girls pulling Rarity back and forth by her mane. The pony’s eyes were closed in obvious pain, and her mouth was open, but no sound emerged from her mouth.

That was the first of many mysteries Dr. Atkins had discovered about Rarity: she had no vocal cords. It was not like they had been surgically removed, because there were no scars. No, somehow she had been born without the ability to speak. He reached for one of the girls’ arms...

...And promptly got swatted away by the handbag of the girl’s mother. “Don’t you lay a hand on my little angel!” the mother screamed. “Now let go of the little horsey, Darling...”

“Mine!” the little girl shrieked. “Mine, mine, all mine!”

The same drama was playing out with every other child and parent in the mass of humanity. The tumult was nearly deafening at this close range.

Suddenly the air was rent with the sound of a thunderbolt (a real one, not the horse) at close range. A shadow dark as pitch settled upon the group.

“What is the meaning of this?!” It was a voice of command, and none dared to defy it.

A tall, thin man—far too thin to be casting that impossibly large shadow—stepped into the crowd, parting it like it was water. He was dressed in the traditional costume of a ringmaster, with a whip grasped tightly in one hand, but all anybody could see was his eyes, which seemed to sizzle like coals. One dark look was enough to cause all of the children fighting over the pony to flee for their lives, convinced that a creature from their nightmares had stepped into the waking world. The mothers and fathers quickly backed away, a few of them making the sign of the cross in the ringmaster’s direction as they did so.

The white pony lay senseless upon the ground, having fallen victim to another fainting attack.

“Is this Rarity?” the man asked Julia accusingly. His voice resembled the striking of flint.

“Y...yes, Brother,” Julia replied, her expression of self-satisfaction finally cracked. “Sh...she’s clearly not circus material. You should—”

“I’ll decide what should or should not be done with her,” the man said. At this, Julia slumped over and rode away, dropping the leash as she did so. The ringmaster next turned to face Antonia and William. The couple were standing side by side, their hands intertwined.

“So, is she for riding, or is she for show?” he asked them. It felt like an ultimatum.

“For show, Frankie,” Antonia said defiantly.

William pointedly said nothing.

“Well I hope you can afford her on your allowance,” Frankie Scarpino said coldly. “I figure you have enough for food, heat, or your pony and her precious hairdo. But not all three. So when you change your mind, and you will be forced to change your mind, sooner or later...” He reached down and yanked Rarity up by her mane, causing her to silently let out a yelp of protest. “...this distraction has got to go. This family has no place for charity.” He shoved his way between Antonia and her husband, forcing them to part. “We’ve moving, people!” he bellowed.

And with that, the parade was under way once again.





At the edge of the circus compound sat a lone trailer roughly half the size of the Martins’. The door of this trailer opened, and a gloved hand whipped out to cover a spot of the wall immediately inside the door. The head of a man in whiteface looked over at the hand, and then down at the floor, where a playing card was resting—it had been used as a primitive tool to detect trespassers. The man’s eyes narrowed, and a stiletto suddenly appeared in the man’s outstretched hand. Other than the gloves and his painted face, the man was wearing a striped tan and white shirt and tan slacks, very subdued clothing for the era. This was Chuckles the Clown, and nobody dared to poke around in his domicile.

Chuckles made his way around the small confines of the trailer, leaving the lights out. Trusting to his memory of its layout, he rather quickly ascertained that nobody was still there. Once that had been established, he turned the lights on and started combing every square inch of the place.

Chuckles’ trailer was packed, very efficiently, with two sorts of items: electronics and books. Every piece was perfectly catalogued in his mind. Of the electronics, nothing had been moved. The same could not be said of the books. Several of them had clearly been examined. By looking closely at the traces of flour that had been deliberately placed for this purpose, the paranoid clown had soon picked out the one book that the intruder had clearly spent the most time on, a thick paperback with the title Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. The book contained the complete transcripts of every one of the witch trials that occurred during the mania of 1692-93. Chuckles was very familiar with this book, having read it cover to cover at least five times. He liked to browse through it on late nights, when he needed confirmation of the worthlessness of mankind.

The man looked down, hoping to obtain some additional clue. A small amount of flour from the shelf had spilled to the floor, but instead of the expected footprint, Chuckles could only see the edge of a circular mark, repeated at regular intervals as the intruder left the scene, until it faded to invisibility.

Biting his lip in frustration, the clown turned his attention to the book. He idly flipped through the pages, but was happily surprised when it fell open to a page near the very end. A small ribbon had been left in place as a bookmark, carefully placed so that it did not stick out.

The section marked was in the appendix of the book, which contained all that remained of several pieces of incomplete documentation from the period. The name of this particular fragment was “The Unicorn Trial”. Oddly, Chuckles didn’t remember ever reading that particular fragment before. The bookmark was placed where the documentation cut off, at the end of the first day of the trial. The Salemanders were particularly batty on this day, as they were accusing a horse born with a horn-like birth defect not only of using magic as an agent of Satan, but also of talking. Talking a great deal in fact, so much so that the judge decided that the animal was to defend herself.

Chuckles sat down cross-legged on the floor and read the entire fragment to himself. He was rather disappointed in the end by the fact that it was a fragment. He wondered what judgment the “unicorn” eventually received.





Officers Gruekin and Gloomfeld hunched over the reel-to-reel tape recorder. They were sitting in a closet of the police station, with the recorder and a lone lamp dragged in on long extension cords. The recorder’s volume was turned way down, in hopes that the late-night janitorial staff wouldn’t discover them.

Gloomfeld examined the tape. “I don’t see how just copying the tape is magically going to fix anything,” he said.

“Just trust me for once, OK?” Gruekin asked. He threaded the tape through the player. “Oh, and the machine kind of ate most of the original before it got very far, but I’m sure we’ll hear something vital in the ten seconds we’ve got.”

“Ten seconds?  Ten se—?!”

Gruekin reached up to cover Gloomfeld’s mouth as they heard the sound of a distant vacuum cleaner stopping. After a few tense moments, it started up again, and Gruekin felt safe starting the tape.

“There’s a way out, of course,” a sinister voice intoned from the speaker, clear as day. “Just find the center of the universe, and you’re home free.”





The white pony stood in the slush and frozen mud outside of the pony barn, a look of steely determination in her eyes. She looked like a pony that had had enough, a pony that furthermore knew what she wanted, a pony on a mission to somewhere. And that somewhere wasn’t anywhere near here. She gave one last, contemptuous look back at the circus, and began her departure.

She stumbled a little as her path took her past the trailer owned by the Martins, but with a hoof placed beside her head, she was able to prevent herself from collapsing. It was well after midnight, and the couple should have been asleep. But instead their voices spilled out of an open window into the moonlit air. Rarity stopped to listen.


& & &


“We’re never going to make it if we don’t put her on the carousel.”

“I don’t care! She doesn’t deserve something like this.”

“She’s just a dumb animal.”

“You take that back! She’s the most perfect thing to ever enter our miserable little lives. I’d do anything for her. Even...even give her up, if that was what it would take to ensure her happiness.”

“Fine, then let’s give her back.”

“Give her back to that horrible man who’s killing her by some kind of remote control? Over my dead body!”

“We may be dead if you keep spending on her like this. We’ve nearly completely blown through the savings for our retirement.”

“...Already? Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“Pumpkin, you looked so happy before. I couldn’t bear to—hey, did you hear something?”

William and Antonia Martin turned their heads, to see Rarity pushing her way into their trailer.

William rushed past her, looking out into the darkness to try and find out who was responsible for letting the prized pony out of her pen and opening the door. The darkness stubbornly refused to yield its secrets.

Hearing a cry of shock from his wife, he turned and headed back in.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the ground.

Rarity was standing immobile, looking up at them with large glistening eyes. On the ground before her was the object she had carried in from the barn and dropped at their feet: Antonia’s electric fur clipper.


& & &


Antonia took Rarity to the barn, clippers in hand. William originally intended to just watch and make sure his wife went through with it, but after she broke down sobbing he was forced to take over, and Antonia was sent back to the trailer.


& & &


Antonia Martin spent a seeming eternity sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the return of her husband. She glanced down at the headline of the newspaper on the table: “Death Toll from Botched Commando Raid on Cyprus Airport Reaches Fifteen.” “I’m so sorry,” the woman said to herself as she swept the paper into the nearby trash can. “You’re too good for this world.”

She looked up as the door to the trailer was opened. The gentle sound of hooves approached, as Antonia stood up. Finally coming into view was a white pony, her purple mane and tail sheared back into near oblivion.

“Rarity!” Antonia cried out, nearly breaking out into tears once more. She kneeled down and spread her arms wide.

The animal raced into them, tears in her own eyes.

William sighed. “I’m going to have to break the record out, aren’t I?” Without waiting for a reply, he walked over to the couple’s phonograph player and started it up. From a nearby rack he removed a seven-inch record and placed it on the platter. “I can’t stay,” he said as he placed the needle on the edge of the record, “you know the damn thing keeps getting stuck in my head.”

Antonia looked up at him. “Go then,” she said simply.

The sound of strings, saxophone and, especially, rhythmic clapping filled the small living space.

“Come on, Rarity,” Antonia said as she stood, smiling warmly. “You’re a Martin now, and I’ll stand by you, no matter what happens.”

“Ooh, it’s all right and it’s coming ‘long, / We’ve got to get right back to where we started from,” sang the voice from the record player.

Antonia started to join in, as she did a ridiculous little dance on the kitchen floor. “Love is good, love can be strong! / We’ve got to get right back to where we started from.”

She was not a very good singer. At all. Nevertheless, the pony looked up at her, and her morose expression gradually changed into a smile.

Around about the third chorus she finally gave in and decided to show Antonia how a quadruped dances the disco. She made it all the way to the end of the song before collapsing into unconsciousness.

This time, nothing Antonia or Martin could do would wake her.
> Figure 3: Light Bulb
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 3: Light Bulb









Let’s all chant:



Your body, my body,
Everybody move your body!
Your body, my body,
Everybody work your body!



Your body, my body,
Everybody move your body!
Your body, my body,
Everybody work your body!




William Martin’s brief escape from the combined stress and boredom of the Oradell Animal Hospital’s waiting room was quickly curtailed. The near-frostbite inducing wind outside was part of the reason, but the main reason was the music. Somebody in the parking lot was blaring the latest disco hit from his speakers at full volume, and the idiotic chorus not only would not let up, but showed sure signs of burrowing into the minds of its victims, never to be forgotten. Luckily for William’s sanity, the Musak being broadcast in the waiting room when he returned was Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls”: the perfect antidote to “Let’s All Chant”.

“Ah,” he said with relief. “Now that’s what I call music!”

Antonia looked up from a well-handled magazine. “Where did you go just now?”

“Don’t go outside,” William said with a stony face. “Whatever you do, don’t go outside.”

Antonia rolled her eyes.

“What are you reading?” the man asked as he sat down beside her.

“An article about Tramp’s,” his wife answered with enthusiasm. “It’s second only to Studio 54. We really ought to visit there someday.”

William lifted up the corner of the magazine to see that it was called Discoworld. “We’ll see,” he said noncommittally.

“Dr. Kildare. Calling Dr. Kildare.” It was the voice of a male announcer over the hospital’s loudspeaker system. “Dr. Hartley, Mr. Carlin is parked outside of your door again.”

“Wait a second,” Antonia said, pointing at the nearest speaker. “Isn’t that...?”

“Yes,” William said darkly. “Yes, it is.”

“Oh, this is fun! Dr. Quincy, Dr. Quincy, there’s another stiff waiting for you downstairs. Ahem. Dr. Atkins, you are wanted in Room 103. Dr. Atkins, please report to Room 103.”

On hearing the name of Rarity’s veterinarian, William leaned over so that he could look down the hallway that ran between the animal care rooms. “I hope he’s not dumb enough to fall for that,” he muttered.

“Dr. Atkins, you have a patient in Room 103 that you simply must see,” the familiar voice from the barn insisted. “The poor dear is positively hemorrhaging money!”

With that announcement, several men in white lab coats burst out of several rooms and converged at the same door. After a brief scuffle, Dr. Atkins managed to find an unconventional use for his stethoscope to beat the others off and strode confidently into Room 103.

A disgusted William got up and made his way towards the hallway, followed after a moment by a hesitant Antonia.

He was blocked by the receptionist. “Patients need to wait in the waiting room until called, sir,” she told him. “Hey, that wouldn’t happen to be Buttercup II back there, is it? I never got to see her, but everybody tells me that she’s the best damn pony a man could ever know.”

“No, it’s not Buttercup,” William said tiredly. “Now will you let us through?”

“No can do, sir.”

“Have you been listening to that joker?” William asked, pointing at the loudspeaker. “Let us by before—” He stopped on seeing a bright flash of light underneath the door of Rarity’s room.

“Will Mr. and Mrs. Martin please report to Room 108?” the voice over the speaker asked. It had a distinct tone of triumph.

Wordlessly, the couple pushed past the receptionist and made their way to the room.


& & &


Inside the room, on a low platform, lay Rarity. Well it probably was Rarity—somebody had gotten it into their head to dress her as a robot mummy. Which is to say that what was quite obviously a waste basket had been placed over her head and secured by tape, then covered by several hundred yards of cotton bandage. The poor pony was jerking her covered head around wildly, clearly bewildered by whatever had just happened to her.

“There, there, dear,” said Antonia, kneeling down beside her. “Hold still while I get these bandages off.”

William meanwhile had performed a visual survey of the small room, and had failed to find any signs that anybody else was hiding in there. What he was able to find was Rarity’s case file open on a table, and some X-rays mounted on a light box.

“Bollocks!” he cried to the ceiling. “Why don’t you just show yourself?”

“Oh, I don’t think you’re ready to see me yet, Mr. Martin,” the mysterious man’s voice said from a speaker mounted in the ceiling, his voice dripping with contempt. “I don’t believe your type can handle that sort of thing. Far better to accept the excuses of your intellect to the evidence of your senses, after all.”

“What did you do to Rarity?” William asked, addressing his unseen adversary.

“I corrected a mistake, Mr. and Mrs. Martin,” the voice answered in an unexpectedly humble tone, “a mistake for which I wish to apologize. I had no idea that the little...modifications I made so that Rarity could live amongst you would have such negative consequences. You’ll see that I’ve found a most inventive way to fix Miss Rarity’s little condition.”

William heard a gasp from behind him as Antonia removed the waste basket from Rarity’s head. He whipped around and sputtered for a few seconds, utterly unable to process what he was seeing. “How?” he asked in a near-whisper, pointing at the top of the pony’s head. “How in God’s name could that possibly make her any better? Must everything be a sick joke to you?”

Rarity raised a hoof to her forehead, and appeared surprised to discover that a foreign object met her touch part-way. She pointed frantically at the object, looking beseechingly over at Antonia.

“Second drawer down on the right hand side,” said the voice.

“I asked you a question!” William demanded.

“Hold on, I really need to see her reaction,” the voice said. This statement caused William to try—and fail—to find some kind of hidden camera in the room.

Antonia meanwhile opened the drawer indicated and removed a large hand mirror, which she hesitantly held up before the pony.

Rarity got one good look at herself in the mirror before raising a hoof to her head and fainting.

“A-ha-ha-ha-ha!” the unseen voice bellowed. “Oh, that’s classic!”

“Well?” asked William. “What possible reason would you have for putting one of those on her?”

“Didn’t you even look at the X-rays?” asked the voice. “Clearly, the animal was suffering from an acute case of maxilolingualodontis with a side of concludite. That object you’re objecting to drains the electrical energy from her brain before it builds up and cooks her like she’s the main course. They stab it with their steely knives,” he warbled off-key, “but they just can’t kill the beast!”

William looked back and forth between the three images of the pony’s oddly shaped skull. The left-hand one he had seen before, during Dr. Atkin’s initial examination of Rarity more than a month earlier. For no explicable reason, her brain was emitting some sort of interference, in the form of a glow, that kept the vet from examining it. He had assured the couple that the pony was not radioactive, despite the fact that the X-ray looked exactly like somebody with a brain made out of uranium. The central image was dated earlier that day, and the shape of the skull was nearly impossible to make out under the intense glow effect, much stronger than before. Finally, the right-hand image showed a brain laced with miniscule wires converging in an opaque round object on Rarity’s forehead. The glow, while still present, was down to the same level as the left-hand X-ray.

“Electrical energy?” Antonia said incredulously as she rose to her feet and looked at the images. “Do you honestly expect us to believe that? I may not be a biologist, but I’m pretty sure that...that shouldn’t possibly work! Why don’t you tell us what’s really going on for once? Why don’t you tell us the truth?” Rarity managed to rouse herself half-way through this rant and looked up curiously at the ceiling speaker.

“The truth?!” the voice cried out contemptuously. “The truth that your precious pet is a magical miniature unicorn from Ponyville, located smack dab in the center of the perfect little pony land of Equestria? And that I, the living embodiment of Chaos, stole away her magic as part of a baroque revenge scheme? And that she was dying because her mana was building up with no way to release it, so I put a little toy in her head to convert all that magic into a form that will let her live so I can continue my torment of her? That truth, or the story I gave you five minutes ago?—which would you prefer?”

William and Antonia examined the X-ray for a few seconds. “You don’t have to belittle our intelligence,” William said at last. “So she needs that thing in her head to drain off excess electrical energy. Anything else we need to know?”

Thunk!

The couple turned to see their pet pony complete a face-hoof.





“So, what do you think?” William asked Chuckles a few hours later.

The Martins had brought Rarity to the place where Chuckles performed his second job for the circus: a section of the big top that had been separated by a big piece of canvas under the sign “Chuckles’ Electrical Repair”. In this area was a wide variety of machinery, including a couple television sets in various degrees of disassembly, some transistor and tube radios, and even the alternator from a ’52 Nash Rambler. Equipment was equally likely to be on the floor as on a table, and tools were scattered everywhere, but each piece of electronics was paired with a folded sheet of paper with that piece’s electrical schematic. The schematics were either hand-drawn by Chuckles, or else they were the ones that were sold with the equipment, for this was an era when everyone was expected to at least try to repair their own electronics themselves, and so everything with wires in it was sold with a schematic, no matter how complicated. The semi-chaotic layout in the tent was all to be expected for Chuckles’ workspace. The one thing that was out of place, however, was a small bookcase stuffed with old books that was placed in a corner, dragged over from its former home inside Chuckles’ trailer. Both Chuckles’ and Rarity’s eyes wandered over to that bookcase frequently during his examination of her.

“I think you need a second opinion,” said Chuckles finally. “I’m a comedian, not a brain surgeon.” He held up a small conical bulb made of translucent white plastic in a metallic screw base, and put it in front of a large light in order to examine it. “It’s made in Taiwan,” he finally concluded.

“And...?” asked Antonia.

“It’s a light bulb. Just a light bulb.” He then looked down at Rarity, who was nervously looking back up at him. “And that is a pony with a metal socket in her skull. You say he did this to her today?”

“You saw her yesterday morning.”

“Yeah I did,” Chuckles said, scratching carefully at his temple. He spent a moment examining his fingernails to make sure he hadn’t removed any of his makeup doing this. “And yet you’ll notice that she appears otherwise normal.”

“You’re right,” said Antonia. “I’ve never seen a pony recover from an invasive procedure this quickly. How could he have done it?”

“Oh simple,” said Chuckles with a frown. “He must have used experimental government tranquilizers. The ones the government uses whenever they want to frame a community leader for an embarrassing crime. All part of the vast conspiracy to keep us in our place. Sheeple! We’re all a bunch of sheeple!”

Antonia and William said nothing. Chuckles was a genius in many areas, but apparently you couldn’t be a genius at this place and time in history without also being a raving conspiracy nut. William blamed Leonard Nimoy and In Search Of. Antonia and the rest of the circus blamed Watergate. Both Martins were convinced that his paranoia was the reason why Chuckles never removed his makeup—because he thought “The Man” would haul him away if he ever allowed anybody to see and potentially recognize the actual person under the face paint.

“...It ties back to the Texas School Book Depository. Everything ties back to the Depository!”

They knew far better than to actually ask Chuckles about the face paint.

“But what about Rarity’s condition?” asked William quietly, after it seemed like the clown had calmed down. “That maxilo—”

“String of nonsense syllables,” the clown interrupted. “The X-rays tell the tale. (You better return those before the hospital notices—there are two crimes guaranteed to have Them haul you away, never to be seen again: stealing government X-rays, and ripping the tags off of mattresses.) As near as I can make out, these wires do appear to be doing what he said they were doing: somehow collecting and draining electrical energy out of her brain. Almost certainly monitoring everything she sees or hears as well. We’re safe enough in here, though.” He pointed up at the canvas ceiling above them, which was coated with tinfoil.

The couple chose to bite their tongues instead of responding to any of this.

“I’m pretty sure you can’t power a light bulb directly from your brain,” said Antonia.

“No, I suppose not,” answered Chuckles. “It works, even though it shouldn’t.” With a sigh, he screwed the bulb back into Rarity’s head, where it began to spark and glow in a variety of colors. “Especially like that. Do, um...” He paused to consider his words. “Do you think you could leave Rarity with me whenever you’re not using her and you think she’s well enough? I’d like to study her some more.” As he was speaking, Rarity had walked over to the bookcase, knocked a particular volume to the floor, and had begun reading.

“Well...I suppose so,” said William Martin, watching the pony with furrowed brow. “Do you have any objections, Pumpkin?”

“No, she seems to get along with you well enough,” Antonia said. “Now if you don’t mind, I didn’t get a chance to feed any of the other ponies before bringing Rarity over; Dr. Atkin said it would probably be best if Rarity didn’t eat anything until the morning. Let us know if anything happens to her. Come along, Billy.”

“Poker game at ten?” William asked Chuckles on the way out of the tent.

“Sure, sure,” Chuckles said absently, his attention focused on Rarity.


& & &


The pony spent only a few moments examining the book (“The Unicorn Trial”, as Chuckles had expected) before wandering off to poke her snout into one of the television sets.

“So, getting curious about electronics after becoming a bionic horse?” the clown asked as he put the book away. He dismissed the notion that the essay Rarity had consulted appeared to be longer than it had been the night before. “You’re looking at the worst of the worst, the stuff so broken that it’s not worth fixing. That one’s got a loose channel selector knob, but it’s actually an electrical instead of a mechanical problem, as the tuner...” He stopped himself, looking incredulously at the pony. “You’re actually following all of this, aren’t you?” he asked.

Rarity looked away in apparent thought for a moment, before looking back and nodding very deliberately.

Chuckles practically dived for the schematics.





A week passed. In the mornings, the “unicorn” Rarity and her sparkling horn were the main attraction of the pony carousel, perhaps even of the entire circus. And in the afternoons, the clown showed her the secrets of Twentieth Century electronics.


& & &


Late one night, Chuckles was walking away from the “games tent”, where he had just beat William Martin at seven consecutive hands of poker. His trip back to his trailer was interrupted when he noticed a light on in his workspace.

He snuck quietly up to the tent and peeked inside, only to see Rarity poking her head into the same television set she’d been so interested in all week.

“Visions of resistors and capacitors running through your head?” he joked.

Rarity looked up in surprise, getting the television chassis stuck around her head.

Chuckles chuckled to himself as he removed the equipment. “Ready for some more circuits?” he asked.

Rarity responded by resting a hoof on the television’s tuner and looking up at him expectantly.

“Yes, I already told you that the primary problem with this one is the tuner.”

The pony tapped the little box and gestured towards it with her tiny plastic horn.

“That’s only the primary problem. There’s still the problem with the antenna, and the phosphor tracking, and—”

Rarity tapped insistently on the tuner.

Chuckles sighed and picked up an oscilloscope and a screwdriver. “Very well, if you insist.”


& & &


“Alright, that’s the tuner,” Chuckles said a few minutes later. “Now do you want to look at this radio next? It’s a lot easier to understand than a television.”

Rarity shook her head, and turned the television around on the work table before pointing at one particular spot on it.

“Yeah, the wire’s loose,” said Chuckles. “That’s got to be the least significant thing wrong with the unit, though.”

Rarity tapped it with her hoof.

Chuckles sighed. “You’re lucky I have an infinite amount of patience for dealing with your kind,” he joked.

The pony raised one eyebrow.

“What, you think I haven’t figured it out?” the human said. “You’re obviously an extraterrestrial alien, here to teach humanity the way out of our bottomless greed and stupidity.”

Rarity’s only reply was to switch which eyebrow she had raised.

“Fine, keep your secrets!” Chuckles exclaimed with a smile. “But as a shape-changing alien, I’ve got to say, if you’re going to pick a form, being a pony is not a very smart move.”

The pony gave him a clearly insulted look.

Chuckles attempted to change the subject by looking back down at his equipment. “Uh...that’s the loose wire, and...wait a minute, that can’t be right!” He picked up the oscilloscope, which was still wired to the television, and made a few adjustments. “It’s fixed?” he asked. Quickly removing the oscilloscope’s leads, he picked up the nearby vacuum tube for the television and installed it. He plugged the unit into an isolated electrical circuit and turned it on. Within a few seconds, an image began to appear on the tube of a news conference, where a nervous Andy Warhol was presenting a rather amateurish portrait to President Jimmy Carter. “How did you do that?” Chuckles asked, as he confirmed that the black and white set was indeed in perfect order now.

Rarity looked like she wasn’t quite sure herself of the answer to that question.

“Did you work it all out in your head?” the clown asked.

The “unicorn” shook her head, then pointed at one of her large eyes with a hoof.

“You...saw what was wrong with it?” he asked.

She nodded slowly, as if the idea was as strange to her as it was to him.

“What about everything else?” he asked.

Rarity looked slowly around her. She walked up to a phonograph player for a moment, and then lightly tapped the needle. Then the dial on a radio. Then to one particular connector on the alternator.

Chuckles kneeled down next to the little white pony. “Work for me,” he begged her. “This is the only thing I do that anybody respects me for. Please...”

Rarity locked eyes with him, and then held out a foreleg, hoof up.

Chuckles pondered. “You want me to pay you?”

Rarity nodded.

“But you’re a pony! Or, at least, you’re trying to pass for one. What use could you have for money?”

Rarity continued to stare at him.

Chuckles sighed. “Alright, I won’t question it. How does $2.50 an hour sound?”


& & &


Rarity drove a hard bargain despite being a mute, and eventually they compromised on ten cents over the minimum wage before the pony let herself out to return to her barn.

Chuckles moved the television set over to the empty table reserved for the rare piece of equipment he was able to completely fix.

In taking one last look around, he discovered that a second book was lying open on the ground in front of the bookcase: The Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters. It was open to a photograph of the Clanton Gang in the days leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. In the photo, the outlaws were showing off their most prized possessions: their guns, their (likely stolen) cattle, and their horses. Curiously, there was also a pony in the photograph, looking very similar to Rarity in her facial structure. Even more curiously, she was wearing the same style of hat as the Clantons. The facing page had a photograph from a few days later, showing the Clanton Gang lying in their caskets. There was some sort of object inside a child-sized rectangular outline to the right of the other shapes, but it was so impossibly out of focus that there was no way to possibly tell what was actually there. It was as if History hadn’t decided if there needed to be one more coffin in the picture or not.

Chuckles had the odd feeling that, come the morning, those two cops were going to find another recording on the machine they had attached to the CB radio in the barn.
> Figure 4: Video Game System
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 4: Video Game System





“Come one! Come all! To the Greatest Show in New Jersey!”

So declared Frankie Scarpino in his shiny ringmaster outfit to the visitors entering the grounds of his circus. He used to call it the “Greatest Show on Earth”, until the B&B lawyers paid him a visit.

There was going to be a show under the big top tonight, a chance for him to shine, to show himself as the master of ceremonies, and practically force the locals to cheer themselves hoarse for him. For now, though, he was merely the puppet master of this circus, working behind the scenes to ensure that everything was just right. One example of this was the midway, an opportunity to fleece those yokels of every cent they had. Frankie walked proudly down the well-trod mud-and-dirt pathway, nodding at each of the men and women running their crooked little games or selling their grossly overpriced fair food. Those visitors who refused to pay were targeted by his pickpocketers.

He stopped at the end of the midway, the destination of almost all of the circus-goers in recent weeks, especially the families: the pony carousel. Given the massively increased demand, the $5 a ride being charged came dangerously close to being...a fair price. Something needed to be done.

“Martin, come here,” he ordered.

“Um, I’m a little busy, Ringmaster,” William said. As usual, he was attempting to put down a riot caused by yet another little girl who was being asked to settle for riding a non-unicorn pony.

With a roll of the eyes, Frankie walked up, plucked a marker pen off of the ground, and made a modification to the sign in front of the ride. It now read “Pony Rides: $5. Unicorn Rides: $10.”

“New line!” he announced to the crowd. “Stand over here if you want to ride...” What was the animal’s name? “Rarity. Right, Rarity the Unicorn.”

About two thirds of the kids in line began pulling their designated adults towards the ringmaster.

“Ten dollars!?” a father protested.

“Supply and demand, pal,” said Frankie. At seeing that a fair number of adults weren’t buying it, he switched to a different tack. “Think of it this way, kids: for $5, you still get to see the unicorn, and you don’t have to wait eight times as long to get your turn. Which means you’ll have time afterwards for candy and games, and more corn dogs than you can stand!” Yes, that did mean that there would be random spots of “yuck” behind tent corners that would have to be cleaned up afterwards. Thinking about hundreds of dollars in corndog-fueled profits generally made the feelings of disgust go away, Frankie found.

The ringmaster’s statement gave rise to an immense amount of argument, indecision and bargaining among the children and their parents (or close relatives, or poor schmucks talked into taking care of the brat for a night). What it definitely stopped was the all the screaming and yelling at William.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” Frankie said to William.

“Yeah,” said William with a smile.

“I don’t suppose you’ve tried taping horns on any of the other ponies.”

Williams sighed. “I tried, but they all ended up pulling them off.”

Frankie made a disappointed grunt, before turning to go. “Maybe we can talk that vet surgeon into converting a few more of your animals into mythological beasts for free,” he speculated out loud. “Maybe even staple on a pair of wings. It should be simple enough—I just have to dig up some blackmail material.”

For perhaps the thousandth time, William wondered why he had anything to do with the Pagliacci Brothers Family Circus.


& & &


As Frankie finally walked into the big top to oversee preparations for that night’s show, he saw Julia standing at the entrance, watching the carousel.

“Hey, Sis,” he said to get her attention.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“As my main attraction, I’m holding you personally responsible for the drop in big top revenue this year.”

“But that’s because everybody’s spending their money on Rarity rides!” she protested.

“Don’t care,” Frankie said, waving a hand in the air. “Find a way to spice up the act, or I’ll send you out there to help your sister walk the ponies.”

Julia seethed.

And Frankie laughed out loud as he walked into the tent. “I love this job!” he exclaimed. 









“You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene, digging the Dancing Queen!”




Rarity waltzed into the back door of Chuckles’ Appliance Repair, a brand-new plywood shack constructed right next to the circus entrance, so that customers didn’t have to pay admission. Frankie Scarpino didn’t mind, as he got 20% of Chuckles’ profits as rent.

The constant music being played by the audio equipment inside actually acted as a form of advertisement, as it was the highest quality music that anybody in Passaic had ever heard. That at least was 100% Chuckles’ work. There was no possible way that the business would have been a success without Rarity, so the clown was very careful to keep a mental catalog of his few solo successes, for the sake of his flagging ego.

Rarity truly proved to be a genius when it came to electronic repair, and that “eye” of hers was able to spot problems so quickly that Chuckles rarely even bothered to do any diagnoses himself during the hours when she was available to him. Therefore, as soon as he heard her enter the shop, he picked up the inexplicable little device he had been fiddling with and carried it into the back.

Rarity was seated on a meticulously clean dog cushion, looking over the various broken pieces of machinery that were laid out around her. Wire stands were used to hold up schematics behind those devices that Rarity hadn’t worked with before.

“Good afternoon, Rarity,” said Chuckles, holding the device aloft. “We’ve got a gadget here that I’ve heard a lot about, but never seen before now. It’s called an ‘Atari Video Computer System’, and apparently it lets you play multiple games on your TV using the same device! I hope this one isn’t more than you can handle.”

Rarity dismissively waved a hoof for him to place the device and its accompanying pile of folded schematics before her. And then she set to work. To Chuckles’ eyes, she seemed to skip randomly from one broken item to another, scanning one schematic with her eyes while pointing at a broken part on an entirely different device with one hoof, or with a mouth-held pointer. Chuckles had found to his amazement—but apparently not hers—that the pony’s efficiency increased tremendously the more simultaneous challenges she faced. It was like she was built for multi-tasking. All the while, the lights in her gaudy plastic horn blinked in a chaotic, mesmerizing pattern.

As she identified each problem, Chuckles would pick up the device and fix it. He’d fix nearly a dozen of them until Rarity got tired, and then he would start testing them. For the few devices that required more than a single fix, Chuckles would put them back down before Rarity for another round.

Rarity meanwhile spent her break times scanning through Chuckles’ library. He had quickly determined that her interest lay in two areas: history and fashion. Near as he could tell from the pony’s quite readable expressions, the history to her was business, while the fashion was pleasure. Understandable enough for an alien sent to this planet to determine whether it needed to be obliterated or not—Chuckles’ opinion was firmly in the “obliterate” camp, as he had explained very thoroughly to the pony on multiple occasions.


& & &


The pair’s work was interrupted by the ringing of a bell in the front part of the shop. Chuckles shut off the TV he had been testing and walked through a door to step behind a counter. In front of that counter was a large red-faced man hugging a toaster like it was a family heirloom. He was wearing a pair of small and—to judge by his constant squinting—badly prescribed eyeglasses.

“Can I help you?” Chuckles asked.

The man peered at him and scowled. “I’d like to give this to somebody responsible,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Chuckles asked coldly.

“Somebody in charge. Somebody I can give this here appliance to who won’t sell it to his shifty friends for gamblin’ money and drugs. Send me your boss, boy!”

“I’m the boss of this shop, sir,” the clown said, barely keeping his temper in check. “And you’re free to take your business to another shop if you wish. Of course, you brought it here because you heard that I’m the best, which I am. So is it possible that the only reason you’re not willing to trust your toaster to me is because I’m white?”

The would-be customer was flabbergasted. “I...what?”

“You heard me,” the greasepainted technician said, getting his face right in the other man’s. “You don’t trust me because of the color of my face! I’ll have you know that white men are responsible for some of the greatest deeds of human civilization!”

“Wait, no, I didn’t want to offend! Here, here take the toaster. I dropped it this morning and now the spring’s stuck, and if my Martha finds out she’ll skin me alive. If you can fix it by the end of the show tonight I’ll pay you $20. In fact, here’s the $20 right now, to show how much I trust you! Just...just don’t tell anybody, OK?”

Chuckles picked up the bill and held it up to the light. “All right,” he said slowly, “I won’t tell anybody that you’re racist against white folk.”

“Oh thank you! Thank you!” the man said, before scurrying out of the shop.


& & &


Chuckles cackled loudly as he returned to the back room. He stopped when he saw that Rarity was staring at him with a puzzled expression.

“So, you heard all that, didn’t you?” he asked.

The pony nodded.

“Well...if you don’t know about racism already, I’m probably the wrong guy to give you an unbiased opinion of it.”





Once Rarity had left to do her time with Chuckles, William and Antonia got to work: he to put the carousel into storage and to clean up the area where it had been, and Antonia to brush down the ponies who had been using the carousel and to care for those of her ponies who were either too sick or too fatigued to be put on it today.

Officers Gloomfeld and Grukin walked into the stable several hours into this routine. They turned to leave as soon as they saw that William wasn’t there.

“Hold it!” Antonia ordered. “How’s the investigation going?”

Gloomfeld turned to Gruekin. “When did you tell her that—”

“I’m not stupid,” Antonia said. “And I don’t mind, seeing that my connections have had no better luck than yours.”

“Your connections?” asked Gloomfeld.

“The Families,” Antonia explained. She pointed at the CB radio. “I want that guy for what he did to my Rarity. Since they haven’t had any luck, I’m willing to trust in the law, for once. So spill it.”

“Well,” answered Gruekin, consulting his notes, “all we’ve been able to get out of any of his recorded taunts are references to various individuals throughout history. Including, oddly enough, the future—somebody named ‘Pinkie’ will apparently do something significant in 1987, and ‘The Flutter Shy’ is tied to the Year 2019, ‘when synthetic animals will outnumber real ones’.”

“We were thinking of trying another tack,” said Gloomfeld. “Maybe you can help.”

“What do you want to know?” asked Antonia, taking off her curry comb.

“What do you know about Buttercup II?”

“Best damn pony a man could ever know!” Antonia blurted out.

At the same time, all of the ponies in the stable reared back as they neighed in terror.

Gruekin quietly added a mark to a tally he had been using to keep track of how people responded the first time they heard Buttercup’s name in conversation. The top answer was some variation of “Who?”, but Antonia’s exact words were a close second. After a second of thought, he added the new response “[Incoherent Panic]?”. He would have put eleven tally marks after that, but felt sheepish about counting the reaction of a pony with the same weight as that of a human being.

“Why do you want to know about her?” Antonia asked.

“Well,” said Gloomfeld, “don’t you think it convenient? She disappears and opens up room for you to take in a new pony, just as Rarity shows up?”

Antonia’s jaw dropped open for a few seconds, before snapping shut. “That bastard!” she roared. She stomped over to the CB machine and picked up the microphone. “If I ever get my hands on you, you’re going to wish you never saw a pony for as long as you live!”

“Are you going to be OK?” asked Gruekin.

Antonia took a few seconds to calm down. “Yeah,” she said eventually. “So what else do you want to know about her?”

“Well first of all,” asked Gruekin, “I assume there was a Buttercup I?”

“Yes,” said Antonia, “Although since my husband handled the purchase, he’d be the one to tell you. Billy!”

“Yes, Pumpkin?” William said, poking his head in the stable.

“Could you be a dear and answer these men’s questions while I get back to the ponies? They said they might be able to find Rarity’s tormenter.”

“Oh, uh, sure.” He walked the rest of the way in. “What do you want to—?”

“Buttercup II.”

“Best damn pony a man could ever know!”

Another point was recorded.

“Buttercup I.”

“She was a farm pony,” William told the two officers. “Lived about twenty or so miles west of here. Extremely bright, according to her owner. She died in a lightning storm giving birth to Buttercup II. Although actually, her body was never found...just like what eventually happened to her daughter. All they found was a tree reduced to cinders right next to the newborn foal. Buttercup II had a white splotch on her forehead that people say looked like a lightning bolt...if those people were drunk off of their gourds, that is.”

“Dear, what time is it?” Antonia asked from the back of the stable.

William consulted his watch. “6:15,” he answered. Turning to the officers, he said, “I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to cut off this interview—Rarity’s late.”

“That’s alright,” said Gruekin. “We’ll let ourselves out.”

“Come back any time,” said Antonia. “Out of your uniforms, of course.”

“Of course,” said Gloomfeld with a polite smile.

Antonia followed the three men out of the stable, and then closed and padlocked the front gate.

Gruekin waited five minutes for the couple to be out of earshot, and then walked up to the open screen window on one side of the stable. “Mademoiselle Rarity,” he said in a clear voice.

There were a few somewhat friendly noises from the ponies.

“Frau Buttercup,” said Gruekin.

Eleven ponies neighed in terror.





The Martins headed straight for Chuckles’ Appliance Repair to pick up Rarity. They found that the place was closed, so they went over to the prep tent, where Chuckles was putting together the props he’d use in his act in the big top that was about to start.

Unfortunately, by using the rear entrance, they failed to see the big sign at the main entrance to the big top: “See the true story of the owners of Rarity the Unicorn.”

“Where’s Rarity?” Antonia asked Chuckles.

“Oh, she went with Julia hours ago,” Chuckles answered.

“What?!” Antonia demanded.

“Yeah, she said you asked her to add Rarity to her act...you did no such thing, did you?”

“Oh, God, what is she up to now?”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice of Julia carried over the loudspeakers, “I wish to present to you a parable...starring Rarity the Unicorn.”

Antonia, Martin and Chuckles pushed their way out of the prep area into the back of the main tent. There they saw Julia standing atop Thunderbolt’s back as he galloped around the inside of the center ring. In the center of the ring stood Rarity, trying to balance on her hind legs. She was wearing a miniature version of Antonia’s patchwork dress. Her face was smeared with makeup so bright it made her look like one of Chuckles’ coworkers. Julia lowered herself down upon the black horse’s back and began to contort herself. Soon many of the parents in the audience felt the need to cover their children’s eyes. Unfortunately, they couldn’t as easily block out the sounds that Julia was making.

The horse, who had been running so hard and so long that he had begun the visibly sweat, turned his eyes to Rarity, who sort of hopped a bit in place in response.

Julia leapt off of Thunderbolt’s back and landed next to the microphone stand. “Oh!” she exclaimed theatrically. “I would never do that, William, it’s much too perverted!”

On hearing this cue, Thunderbolt bolted straight to Rarity, knocking her over.

“Oh, Sister, you brute!” Julia cried out gleefully. “It seems you two are meant for each other!” She scanned the audience, before finding Antonia standing behind her. “Oh!” she exclaimed in a stunning display of bad acting. “I didn’t expect to see you here! Oops!”

Antonia restrained herself from her first impulse—to jump her elder sister and pummel her into unconsciousness—to first turn to her husband. “Aren’t you going to defend my honor? Tell them that none of this is true!”

“Um...well,” William prevaricated. “We need to save Rarity!”

There was a loud crack from the center of the ring, and the large black stallion fell over unconscious, a bruised but triumphant small white pony standing triumphantly upon his body.

“I’ll kill her!” Julia screamed, running into the ring.

Now Antonia had no good reason to stop herself from assaulting her sister in public.

Frankie Scarpino carefully took in the entire scene before him. If this was what the public wanted, if this was what they were willing to pay for, then he had no objection whatsoever to his two sisters trying to kill each other. Profit after all was the highest possible motive. But this public was made of simpler stuff, and it was clear that they were more disgusted than titillated by what they were seeing. Frankie nodded to himself as he stepped into the limelight. “Enough of this!” he bellowed.

The two sisters froze at the dreaded voice of their elder brother.

Frankie turned down his voice in order to relay his orders to his workers/family. “You, get your horse out of here—I don’t care if you have to drag him out on your own back! You, get your pony out of this tent! And you”—this last order directed at Chuckles—“get out there and start your act! Move!” His work done, Frankie picked up the microphone stand and dragged it over to another ring, where he hoped to distract the audience from the cleanup operation.

It took some work, but it turned out that Julia could carry Thunderbolt out on her back. With his assistance, of course.

William reached out to help his wife to her feat.

“Get out of my sight!” she screamed at him, shoving him away.

“Dear!” William protested. “I love you!”

“Only after my sister was done with you! Why did you never tell me?” Her voice was descending into a shriek, more like the voice of a bird than a woman.

“I...I was afraid,” William admitted. “Afraid you’d never marry me if you knew the truth.”

“And you were right!” Antonia screamed. “I was...your second choice! I never want to see you again!”

Antonia Martin collapsed into a sobbing wreck. As William Martin exited the tent in shame, only Rarity was there to comfort her.
> Figure 5: Speakers
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

 


Figure 5: Speakers





William Martin stood behind Chuckles’ back as he touched up his makeup after the performance. He then followed him all the way back to his trailer. Neither man said a word.

Chuckles pulled out his keys and set to work on his locks. Ten minutes later, he turned to face William, who had a fifty dollar bill outstretched in his hand. Chuckles looked at the bill as if were covered in plague bacilli.

William looked confusedly down at the bill, then back up at the clown. “That is the usual arrangement, right? Fifty to sleep on the floor as far away from your bed as possible. And an extra ten if I snore. Of course, it might be a bit more than just one night this time...”

Chuckles pushed the money back. “I’m not taking your money,” he said. He looked as if the statement physically pained him.

“Oh,” William said, his head drooping. “I understand. There’s no chance that Antonia will let me sleep in the stable, so I guess I can try sleeping behind the big top. It’s April, so I’ll probably be able to make it through the night without—”

“Will, I’m going to help you...without payment.”

William lifted his head, his mouth agape. He spent several seconds attempting to talk, but was unable to get any words out. Finally he managed to say, “Are you alright? Should I take you to a doctor?”

“No,” Chuckles said, sitting himself down on the step leading up to the door of his trailer. “No, I don’t think I am alright. I think that pony of yours did something to me. Thanks to her, I’m being treated fairly for the first time in my life. And she was the first, the very first—she could have cheated on our contract. That’s what I expected. That’s the way business is supposed to run, right?”

William attempted to answer. “Well, I—”

“That’s the way I’ve always seen it,” Chuckles said with a thousand-mile stare. “White bosses, black bosses, they’re all the same: ‘It’s just business’, and to hell with the working man or the customer. But Rarity...Rarity actually...cares. She takes everyone at their word, and then gives them more than their money’s worth. It’s madness...but it works. It worked for me, and now I’m going to do the same for you.” He ended his little speech with a piercing stare.

“Um...thanks?” William said hesitantly, still not quite sure what his friend was talking about.

Chuckles opened the door and walked inside, William following mutely behind him. “I swore I’d never take up playing again,” he said to himself. “But there’s always a first time for everything.”

He walked up to a bookshelf and started transferring paperbacks to a nearby table. After clearing nearly a foot of shelf space, he reached into the back of the bookcase and removed a thick bundle of papers bound by a large rubber band. “I kept collecting them, even after I quit. Somehow, I just knew one of them would come in handy someday.” After removing the rubber band, he handed the pile of papers to William. “Pick the one that you think will do the trick.”

William looked down at the papers. “Oh, wow, do you really think this will work?”

“If she’s got any love for you left in her heart it will. That, and we need to give her time to cool off. Which is good, because I’m betting you’re going to need all the practice you can get if you want to pull this off. Come on, we’ll work in the big top.”





“Now this, Rarity, is a picture of my eighth birthday cake. Julia not only ate most of it herself, she got my friends to lock me out of the house and talked Mom into thinking it was her birthday instead of mine! Just like she’s stolen everything else I’ve ever loved!”

Rarity sat patiently at the feet of Antonia Martin, listening while she poured out a whole litany of less and less likely accusations against her elder sister.

“You understand, don’t you?” Antonia begged her between sniffles. “You’re the only one who understands, how older sisters are all horribly evil people, and want nothing more than to crush our hopes and dreams! They’re all horrible trolls, and they need to crawl under a bridge and die!”

Rarity was sitting patiently. She was fairly confident that this was the attitude she was projecting, with her caring expression and slightly tilted head. What she didn’t know, however, was that her true feelings were being reflected via her fake plastic horn, which was flashing in annoyance, faster and faster and faster.

Antonia pulled back her hair with her hands, and gave out a quiet scream. “Of course,” she said wearily, “I know full well that Billy did all of his so-called ‘cheating’ on me before we ever met, and there isn’t a man alive that can resist Julia’s charms. But darn it, I’m still allowed to be mad at them, even if it doesn’t make any sense!” She sighed. “This isn’t good for my health, you know.”

So saying, she got up and turned on the stereo. Putting her favorite record on the turntable, she was in the act of lowering the needle when—“Do you hear that?” she asked the pony.

Rarity’s ears swiveled as they picked up the faint sound of a piano playing classical music. She nodded.

“Where is that coming from?” Antonia asked, putting the phonograph needle back in its resting position. She put her head next to the speakers, and fiddled with the controls, to no effect.

Rarity gently grabbed one of Antonia’s pant legs in her mouth, and tugged towards the door of the trailer.

The music definitely became louder once the door was opened. It was a prelude by Chopin they were hearing, and not a recording, because just then there was a missed note and some faint swearing, followed by a familiar voice saying, “Go on, go on!”

Antonia sighed and looked down at Rarity. “I should just turn around and go to bed,” she said.

Instead, Rarity pushed her forward. Her horn flashed slowly, first bright, then dim, then bright, then dim again, in the rhythm of exhortation. 

They rounded the corner of the trailer to see the large open area in front of the pony stable, illuminated by a single spotlight. Chuckles was there, sitting on a stool and playing an upright piano. Standing next to the piano was William, wearing an ill-fitting tuxedo and clutching a few sheets of paper like his life depended on it. On seeing Antonia, he began to sing.

“Sweet Antonya, angel of my lifetime, Answer to all answers I can find...”

It turned out that William’s singing ability was about on par with Antonia’s dancing ability. But it didn’t matter. The intensity and desperation of her husband appealing for her forgiveness washed over her.

“Could it be magic? Come, come, come into my arms. Let me know the wonder of all of you. And baby, I want you...”

Rarity, watching this, had a near-beatific expression. Her horn glowed, whiter and whiter, but never bright enough to be blinding. Under its light, the sharp plastic edges of the lamp screwed into her head softened and re-shaped from an obvious toy horn into what could honestly be mistaken for a miniature unicorn’s horn.

Until she was suddenly brought back to reality. “Shut up!” screamed the three-pack a day voice of Lilly the Snake Lady from her neighboring trailer. “I’m trying to get my beauty sleep!”

“You sing like a flatulent cow!” exclaimed Hector the Strongman from his bed.

William whimpered.

“SHUT UP!” Antonia bellowed to the hecklers. “Don’t you have a romantic bone in your body?! It’s a pop ballad, for Christ sake—you only have to put up with it for four lousy minutes!”

The lights in all of the surroundings trailers went out, as their inhabitants covered their heads with pillows and prepared to weather out the acoustical storm.

“Pumpkin?” William asked meekly.

“Did I give you permission to stop singing?!”

“C...could this be the m...magic, at last?”


& & &


After the song ended—which turned out to be quite a bit longer than four minutes—a forgiving Antonia held out her hand. William handed his pile of lyrics back to Chuckles, then took Antonia’s hand as they both started back for their trailer.

Chuckles nodded at a job well done, and then started to push the piano back to the big top.

Rarity followed the couple, tears of happiness in her eyes.

“...simply have to tell the girls about this when I get back. Oh, it was so beautiful!”

Husband and wife were so absorbed in each other’s eyes that they didn’t even notice the voice that appeared to be growing in volume, coming from their living room. They stood there in the doorway for what seemed like hours.

Finally, Antonia looked down at Rarity. “You should go to bed,” she said gently.

“I should go to bed,” said the lady’s voice from the stereo speakers at the same moment.

Rarity nodded with a smile, and began to walk back to the stable.

“Wait, was that...?” asked the fading voice in the speaker. “No, it couldn’t be...”
> Figure 6: Camera
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 6: Camera





The Martins awoke to the sound of flamenco music coming from the stable. As they were still mostly dressed, they were able to quickly make their way to see what was going on.

In the center of the open part of the building sat Rarity, a serene expression on her face as the light of her horn beat out a veritable symphony of rhythm. Arrayed around her was a whole assortment of electrical equipment, all working as if possessed. A pair of Polaroid SX-70 cameras ejected photograph after photograph with their distinctive whirring sounds. As they self-developed, each photo revealed abstract swirls of color and pattern that had no resemblance whatsoever to anything the camera lens was pointed at. Nearby, a partially disassembled Xerox copier was spontaneously spitting out pages covered with spider-web like designs of dresses, shirts, and various other items of clothing.

Chuckles’ record player was attached to the two speakers from the CB radio, which was currently playing an obscure song by David Bowie:





“Andy walking, Andy tired,
Andy take a little snooze.
Tie him up when he’s fast asleep,
Send him on a pleasant cruise.”




Chuckles himself was attending to each of the miraculous devices, nodding, grinning, or perhaps just scratching his head at each new artifact produced.

In addition to the electrically-powered anomalies, three music stands held open three different books, and on a nearby chalkboard was drawn a timeline with dates, place names, and drawings of Rarity-like ponies in various chalk colors, one that was apparently her, another one like her with a horn, two hornless ponies, and finally two others with small wings. Two of the ponies, the blue and pink ones, had human women sketched next to them, dressed in the appropriate attire of their time periods. Various questions were scrawled next to each figure, such as “Is family the problem? Or the solution?” or “Do androids dream?”

“Rarity?” Antonia asked in awe.





“Andy Warhol - silver screen.
Can’t tell them apart at all, oh oh, oh oh oh!”




The pony looked up at the couple, and at that moment the needle lifted up off of the record. “Hmm?” said a pleasant voice from the speaker. “Oh, good morning! I hope I didn’t wake you.” The tone of the voice seemed a perfect match for the expression of the mute pony.

“I’m not surprised,” William Martin said dully. “Why am I not surprised that one of our ponies can talk? Wait, it’s less that you’re smart enough, and more in the realm of ‘How?’”

“She reversed it!” Chuckles said in a gloating tone. “She figured out how to reverse it!”

“Reverse what?” asked Antonia.

“What Discord did to her,” Chuckles explained. “He was turning her magic into electricity so it wouldn’t build up in her head and kill her, but magic is all about the imposition of will upon reality, so that gave Rarity control over electrical devices without him even realizing it. All she had to do was to figure it out! And I helped—see, the electrostatic mechanism from the copier is a modification of—”

“Chuckles, could you please allow me to digest your world-shattering announcements one at a time?” William pleaded, waving a hand to silence the clown. “So...Discord? I assume Discord’s the alias of that guy?” He accompanied the words with an accusing finger stab in the direction of the CB radio.

Chuckles nodded.

“And then...magic? Seriously? Magic? I mean, I was never much of a believer in the fae back in Britain, but compared to me...if there was anybody that I was certain would never, ever resort to explaining the unknown with magic...”

Chuckles gestured around him. “You know, at a certain point, seeing really is believing.”

“So if Discord’s story is a complete pack of lies, does that mean that he exiled you here?” Antonia asked Rarity after pondering everything she had just learned.

The unicorn nodded. “Discord’s powers are nearly limitless, but he still has to operate according to certain rules,” her disembodied voice explained. She gestured at the six figures on the chalkboard. “Together, we six proved the only ones capable of defeating him the last time he tried to take over my world. He tried to corrupt us, but that failed. Since he apparently can’t actually kill us or harm us physically, he has resorted to scattering us through space and time, honor-bound to provide a way for each of us to return home, but doing his best to make that process as difficult as possible. By the way, would either of you know where the ‘center of the universe’ might be located? That was the only clue that he provided to my particular way home.” That phrase, “The center of the universe”, was written prominently at the bottom of the chalkboard notes Rarity had made on herself. Similarly cryptic notes accompanied each of the other ponies.

The couple looked at each other for a few seconds and shrugged.

“The center of the galaxy’s in Sagittarius, I believe,” William said feebly.

“Yes, and you do not possess the magic or technology to travel there in any feasible timeframe,” Rarity’s voice said with a sigh. “So clearly, the ‘center’ in question must be metaphorical instead of literal. I don’t suppose you know of any way to time travel?” She gestured at the chalk board.

“Uh...no?” answered William as he examined the dates.

“A pity,” Rarity replied. “Well, the least I can do is leave some sorts of clues for Pinkie and Fluttershy to find, as those are the only two located in my future. Luckily, Twilight’s already managed to free herself.”

Antonia joined her husband in studying the part of the chalk diagram surrounding the purple unicorn labeled “Twilight”. “What’s this ‘Salem Witch Hunt’?” asked Antonia, pointing at the title explaining Twilight’s “Time and Place”.

Chuckles got a haunted look in his eyes. “It used to be a big deal, apparently. Then this Twilight pony changed history, and how it’s just a footnote in the history books, a ‘might-have-been’ of Seventeenth Century mass hysteria. Rarity is apparently the only one who remembers how events used to go.”

Rarity frowned. “Yes, and I hope there isn’t anything particularly dependent on the grim events at the O.K. Corral, because I think that moment is only a few hours away from getting undone as well. And I’m sure any moment now that Rainbow Dash will finally do something to reach her goal of becoming ‘remembered long after her time,’ considering how much she has accomplished already.” She pointed at a worn little volume, providing a biography in French of someone named Marie Marvingt that neither human had ever heard of. “So that’s three out of the six of us taken care of.”

“I...I don’t know what to say,” Antonia said. “But I vow to do anything that I can to help you out. F...fairytale creature or not, I still consider you a part of my family.”

Rarity looked her in the eyes and smiled. “And...and so do I, my dear. I have a family of my own that I miss ever so much, but I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me. There is, however, something a bit unpleasant that I need to ask you about, something I learned from Piera.”

The Martins looked in the direction that Rarity indicated, and there was Frankie’s daughter Piera, standing right beside her. Like her father, she had a habit of just sort of appearing without bothering to use a door, or perhaps she merely knew how not to be noticed. Piera was a tall thin teenage girl, with large dark eyes, pale skin, and hair like pale red thistledown. Most of that hair was stuffed awkwardly into a pale blue pullover hat that reached down to her pencil-thin eyebrows and completely covered her ears. She wore a frock dress the color of parchment.

“She’s a good pony,” Piera said in a scratchy whisper, reaching out to scratch Rarity’s head. “Not like...”

Rarity tilted her head so Piera could get better access to it. “Buttercup II,” she said grimly.

“The best damn—” the Martins began in unison, with the screaming of eleven ponies behind them.

Unnoticed by the others, an ashen Chuckles backed his way out of the tent.

“No,” Rarity said firmly, cutting off those who remained. “No, I’m afraid my fellow ponies have the truth of the matter. Buttercup was like me, wasn’t she?”

“She...well, she was pretty clever,” said William.

“She seemed to understand everything I asked of her,” added Antonia. “And the other ponies all deferred to her. Her eyes seemed to scintillate when you looked deep into them, like there was a little bit of lightning dancing in there.”

“She didn’t—” William tried to say.

“And her forehead mark definitely looked like a lightning bolt,” Antonia insisted.

William turned his nose up and sniffed contemptuously on hearing this last remark.

“She was ever so much fun with the children,” Antonia continued. “Leading them off into all kinds of games too. And she wasn’t too proud to let the adults play as well. ‘Stampede’, that was one of her favorites.”

Piera pulled back her hand, whimpering.

“Yes,” said Rarity coldly. “Stampede. Tell me what’s so wonderful about Stampede.”

“Yeah,” said William with a nostalgic grin. “That’s the one where everybody runs in a circle, wheeling tighter and tighter, until we all eventually trampled each other. Usually put at least one or two kids in the hospital with broken bones.”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Rarity’s voice asked incredulously from the speaker.

“What?” Antonia asked in a bewildered tone. “Buttercup loved it, so we loved it!”

“Everybody who met Buttercup loved her,” said William, his eyes wide as an innocent child’s, “and everybody who loved her loved doing what she told us.”

“But she couldn’t talk,” said Rarity.

“No, of course she couldn’t talk,” said Antonia. “But Piera here seemed to know what she was thinking...and after a while, so did we. Everything was going great before she disappeared! It’s such a shame, too. The Families had finally put enough pressure on Barnum and Bailey and the other big circus companies to get us invited to the annual U.S. Circusfest. Buttercup II was going to meet the President of the United States and leaders from around the world! And then she would become friends with everyone!”

Rarity shook her head in disbelief. “I...I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Discord may well have saved your world from an unimaginably horrid fate. Unfortunately...”

Another voice suddenly interrupted on the speaker. “Speak of the Devil! ...And so forth. Did I just hear the dulcet tones of my very favorite Element of Harmony?”

“Hmph!” Rarity’s voice stated, as she turned up her muzzle.

After a pause during which his eyes went back to normal, William walked over to the speaker and plugged in the wire turning on the voice-activated microphone. “And what in the world do you want?” he asked.

“I’d like to inform Miss Rarity here that she’s won my little contest, fair and square,” Discord said rather nervously, “and I’m willing to take her back to that place you don’t believe in where she came from. Everybody can come back with their fancy jewelry, do whatever they want to me...and save me from this Tartaric pony!”

There was something else audible in the background, a veritable sea of voices, saying the same thing, over and over again: “Death to Discord! Death to Discord!”

“It’s impossible!” the male voice ranted. “How can she possibly be immune to my magic?! She’s not even from this world—I just dumped her here to make room for Rarity! And her control over other ponies is absolute! She’s a greater force for dictatorial order than I’ve ever been for liberating chaos! Even the power of her name...”

“Buttercup II?” Antonia asked with an innocent smile.

“Best damn pony a—!” The voice was suddenly interrupted by the sound of an explosion, followed by another, organic sound, that was utterly indescribable.

“Aargh!” the voice on the radio exclaimed. “That’s the fifth head this week she’s taken over! Please, I’m begging you, send Rarity to the gate! The center of the universe, you can find it in—”

There was the sound of another explosion, then the chorus of voices became a deafening crescendo. There was a wail of defeat from Rarity’s tormenter and then...sudden silence.

The pony and three humans crept nervously up to the radio. William reached for the volume knob.

“Hmm...” came a new, female voice. “Hello, Earth!” it finally said with sadistic glee. “You know what? I like this place a lot better than home, so I guess I’ll release you freaks. Have fun with your crappy planet!” There was a crunching noise, followed by static.

William and Antonia collapsed, screaming briefly in pain and clutching their heads in their hands. Rarity and Piera kneeled down to check their vital signs.

Before they had gotten past checking pulses, the couple revived.

“Oh my God, we’ve been mind-controlled by a pony,” William said dully.

“What is that I’m hearing?” Antonia asked, gesturing towards the other ponies and their inexplicable noises of glee.

“That, I believe, is the traditional terrestrial pony song of liberation,” Rarity said solemnly.
> Figure 7: Slide Projector
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 7: Slide Projector





“Hey Frankie Boy,” the rather insulting letter from the ringmaster’s brother began. It contained multiple allusions to the recipient’s sexual impotency, and found every opportunity to bring up the reasons why Frankie Scarpino’s group of performers were currently banned from participating in any activities of the larger Coragglio Syndicate. But buried within the put-downs was one last shot at redemption.

Frankie Scarpino didn’t mind the insults in the just-received letter too much. After all, they had a fair basis in recent events. From his seat inside a train caboose located at the far end of the fairground, Frankie frowned as he stared at the financial figures for the Pagliacci Brothers circus for at least the tenth time that hour. The problem wasn’t that the circus was losing money; in fact, it was making a steady profit.

The problem was that balance sheet looked suspiciously close to that of an honest circus.

Frankie had delivered a fierce lecture on this failing to the circus performers earlier that morning. They had taken it quietly enough, although Chuckles’ choice of what song to blare through the loudspeakers immediately afterward perhaps reflected their true opinion of him:





But my dreams
They aren't as empty,
As my conscience seems to be.

I have hours, only lonely.
My love is vengeance—
That's never free.




The bulb of a small desk lamp flicked, briefly plunging the shaded room into a twilight dimness. Frankie scowled and tapped the bulb with a fingernail, causing it to spring back to life with an oddly bluish glow.

Frankie looked up at the sole door of the train car, its window covered with light-blocking drapes. “Enter,” he announced coldly, a full second before his visitor was about to knock.

After a pause, the door slowly opened, allowing the music of The Who to pour into Frankie’s office. Looking calmly into Rarity’s nervous eyes, he beckoned her forward with one hand.

“The door, if you please,” he said, then watched with some interest as the pony displayed a level of dexterity at manipulating a round knob not usually associated with equines.

Now that she was out of the light, the ringmaster was able to get a better look at his star attraction. Rarity was wearing a piece of sheer yellow fabric that was wrapped around both her neck and her haunches, forming a sort of cross between a cape and a dress. The Pagliacci Brothers logo was emblazoned across its back. Its craftsmanship was impeccable. In strong contrast, the pink tasseled “princess hat” on her head (it most certainly didn’t deserve to be called a hennin) was constructed of scrap cardboard spray-painted Day-Glo Pink and secured around her head by an elastic band.

With a sweep of one hoof, Rarity removed the headgear and dropped it onto the lone circle of Frankie’s desk that was illuminated by the small lamp. At the same moment, the telephone on that desk started ringing.

Frankie picked up the telephone handset.

“What is the meaning of this?!” demanded the voice of Rarity from the phone, at a volume so loud that Frankie had to yank the handset away from his ear. He decided to rest it on the desk between him and the angry pony. The ringmaster leaned forward so that his face was illuminated, although sharp shadows cut into the sides of his sharp nose and sunken eyes.

Rarity, by contrast, was easily visible in the dim room, almost as if she shone with an inner light.

“It’s called merchandizing,” Frankie explained to Rarity. “You know how it is: You’re a unicorn. Unicorns are usually ridden by princesses. Little girls are paying premium prices to ride you. Therefore—”

“Yes, yes, I understand what you’re getting at,” Rarity’s voice interrupted. “But look at the quality! And you’re selling them in a shop called Rarity’s Boutique! What are people going to think?”

“You don’t like the name?” Frankie asked in an innocent tone. “I figured for one of your evident breeding that the French term would be preferable to the generic ‘Rarity’s Shop’. Perhaps I should have gone with ‘Shoppe’ with the double-P and an E, for that Old English feel.”

“The name is not the issue,” Rarity insisted. “Rather, the fact that a store exists in my name that I have no control over. Either give the shop to me, or change the name.”

“‘Give’?” Frankie asked with a raised eyebrow.

The voice on the phone sighed audibly, as the pony mimed the same action. “Very well...rent. I have some ideas for clothing designs that...”—the pony’s eyes swept over his shadowed form—“might work quite well on bipeds.”

Frankie said nothing.

Rarity sighed a second time. “And I suppose I could include some...more economically priced items for the would-be ‘princess’ market. Which you would share in the profits thereof.”

“That’s more like it,” said Frankie. “I’ll draw up a contract this afternoon, as a basis for negotiation.”

“That would be quite acceptable,” said Rarity’s voice, as a polite smile formed on her face. “May I say that you have handled this whole situation with me remarkably better than I might have expected.”

“The talking unicorn thing?” Frankie asked with an amused grin.

“Yes. You all seem to have accepted the truth without any resistance. Even the adults in the town—to whom, I must note, I have never demonstrated my intelligence to them or their children—by and large seem to treat me the same as they would any other adult human, for which I am most grateful.”

“Yes,” Frankie said with a chuckle, “we live in a credulous age. Unlike me, the masses will believe practically anything fantastic that comes their way, without even a shred of proof.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “While you...” she prompted.

“While I don’t need to believe. I know.”

Rarity waited for the man to elaborate. When he refused, she shook her head and turned to leave, with a muttered “if you say so” barely audible from the phone handset.

“Of course, there is something you could do that would substantially improve the terms of that shop contract.”

Rarity turned, a wary look upon her muzzle. “Yes?”

Frankie sat back in his chair, the shadows seeming to swallow him entirely—with the exception of the whites of his eyes. He tapped his fingertips together for a few seconds before answering. “You could join the Family.”

Rarity tried to step back, but was stopped by the door of the caboose. “You mean the Mob.”

Frankie chuckled. “You make it sound so dramatic. You do know that both of your owners are members.”

“Well yes, yes I do know that. I presume they have their reasons. But I have no wish to become a criminal.”

“A ‘criminal’?” Frankie asked with a laugh. “Don’t be so naive! We are not criminals—we are free men and women!”

Rarity frowned. “But what of justice? You break the law.”

“What of it?” Frankie answered. “I know not what fairytale land you come from, Rarity, but in this world, all governments are corrupt, and all forms of law and order are used to oppress the weak, by order of the strong.” He reached out to pick up one of two small flags on stands that sat just outside the circle of light: a flag of the United States. “Even here in America, the ‘Land of Liberty’,” he continued with a contemptuous snarl, “the taxes never seem to apply to the top 1%, petty crimes like theft and graffiti are punished more severely than the so-called ‘white collar crimes’, and whenever one of them suffers a misfortune, it’s always one of us who gets the blame—the Blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the Asians...or anybody with an accent. There is no recourse, even at the top of the system: in this decade we’ve had a president who was a thief and a liar, and he was followed by two spineless weaklings, one from each political party, that tacitly allowed their underlings to commit any crime in the name of ‘national security’.”

Frankie put the American flag back next to an unfamiliar flag that was divided diagonally between triangles of red and yellow, with a triskelion of three human legs in the middle accompanied by three ears of wheat and the head of Medusa. “We in the Family stand for our own. We defend the weak from the strong. And we bring fairness to a world where it is utterly lacking. It may not be your idea of justice, but I think it’s the closest that anybody like me is ever going to see on this Earth.”

Rarity took a moment to consider her response. “I respect your views, but I still must most regretfully decline. You...won’t expel me from the circus if I do not wish to join, will you?”

Frankie shook his head. “Not at all,” he replied coolly. “After all, Chuckles is not a member.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” said Rarity’s voice. “Chuckles does not strike me as a member of any organization whatsoever.”

“Indeed,” agreed Frankie. “He nearly got himself arrested for starting a riot at the last Fourth of July Picnic when the mayor asked us all to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Now then, did you have any other business with me?” He picked up the telephone receiver and waggled it a bit.

“No,” the voice from it replied.

“Very well,” said Frankie, hanging up the phone. “Oh, and I hope you don’t mind if I borrow the Martins tonight. We’re having a bit of a Family meeting, and since you’re not a member...” He got up to open the door for Rarity.

Rarity looked up at him, nodded her head in acquiescence, and made her way back out into the sunlight.

“Shiftless, shady, jealous kind of people,” were the lyrics of the latest song to come out of Chuckles’ sound system, “Watch out! Watch out!”

“Yes, yes,” Frankie said dryly as he closed the door. “I get it.”





“I hold in my hand our last chance at redemption with the Coragglios,” Frankie informed the rest of his Family that night. The group comprised practically all of the long-term circus personnel, minus Chuckles and Rarity. The object in question was the letter from that morning, carefully held so that nobody he was addressing could read any of its actual language.

“We have been offered a job,” Frankie continued, “a job nobody else in the Coragglio’s would dare to undertake, a job uniquely fitted to our skills. We are being asked to commit a heist, ladies and gentlemen, a heist to correct a heinous affront to Sicilian pride.” He picked up a small wired remote from the small table beside him and pressed a button, activating a nearby Kodak Carousel 760H slide projector.

Projected on the wall of the tent behind him was the crude figure of an eagle, carved out of solid metal. The image came in blurred, but then with an audible whirr the image snapped into focus. (This ability to auto-focus each individual slide was one of the most valued features of the Kodak Carousel 760H model of slide projector, the mid-level choice in the Carousel line in 1978, and one of Kodak’s bigger sellers.) “This is the Bronze Bonelli,” Frankie Scarpino explained. “It was carved in 1118 and was the symbol of the Sicilian monarchy for centuries, until it was lost during the chaos of the Vespers.” Frankie pressed a button, and a black and white photograph of some deep sea divers posing next to the Bronze Bonelli like it was some sort of fishing trophy appeared. The projector attempted to focus this image, but unfortunately the original photograph was not completely in focus. As a result, the machine focused in, then a second later focused out, and repeated this routine endlessly. Frankie tried and failed to get the machine to stop, but found to his frustration that the projector had no means of turning off the auto-focus feature or of manually focusing a slide. (This was the reason that a significant portion of Kodak Carousel 760H units over the years ended up getting traded in for the more expensive 860H model, which could both auto-focus and manually focus.) Finally deciding to ignore the struggling piece of equipment, Frankie continued with his set speech. “A year ago [whirr!], a group of Amer—[whirr!]—I said, a group [WHIRR!!] of American [WHIRRRRRRRR!!] treasure hun—[RRR-RRR-RRR-RRR-RRR]—ters discovered the Bonelli in a shipwreck off the coast of...” Frankie realized that the machine had gone silent, and the light level in the tent had dropped. He looked around to see Rarity sticking her muzzle into the body of the unplugged slide projector, a screwdriver held daintily in her teeth and the light of her horn pounding out the rhythm of what appeared to be a rumba. “Do you mind?!” Frankie asked her indignantly.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Rarity’s voice answered from a small strapped-on speaker that had replaced the cape-dress on her back. “I’ll have this little problem fixed in no time at all. By the way, you may wish in future to project your top-secret images on surfaces that are not the wall of a circus tent, as those do not do a very good job of blocking those images from being seen by anypony walking by.”

Frankie face-palmed, and looked down at his watch. A curious William Martin leaned over to see exactly how she was doing what she was doing with nothing more than hooves and her teeth. He could have sworn he saw the wires and everything they touched moving of their own accord.

Less than two minutes later, Rarity slapped the lid back onto the projector, plugged the unit back in, covered the “760H” on the projector’s name plate with a piece of masking tape, and with a permanent marker held in her mouth wrote “860HR” on top, the “R” in particular being in a quite stylized font. “Done!” she pronounced with satisfaction. With a quick tap, she turned the projector back on before she quickly let herself out.

After the few seconds it took for the bulb to warm back up, the auto-focus motor began to once again try unsuccessfully to bring the trophy photograph into crystal clarity. Frankie reached over to the newly-installed manual focus knob on the machine to turn the function off. He then swung the projector around a right angle, so it was now pointing at an interior wall of the tent.

This resulted in two dozen folding chairs being adjusted at once, and the sound of a loud sigh to be emitted by Frankie. “Now then,” he said wearily a few seconds later, “the Bronze Bonelli was found by a pair of American treasure hunters a couple of years ago. Rather than doing the right thing and sell the treasure to the highest bidder—which was the Coragglio Syndicate—they instead handed it over to the Bergen Museum in Hackensack.”

Frankie advanced the slide to a photograph of the bronze eagle in a glass display case. “The Syndicate planned to donate the Bonelli to the people of Sicily, to whom it rightfully belongs. The Italian government has requested numerous times that the sculpture be handed over to them, or purchased for a reasonable sum, but both the museum and the American government have refused all offers. This is an insult to the Sicilian people, and it must be avenged.”

The next slide showed the layout of the Bergen Museum. “This Sunday, we’re going to steal the Bonelli, right out from under the noses of those who have insulted our people, and then send it back to where it belongs. And I have been assured that if we pull this off, we will be allowed back into the Coragglios, with all sins forgiven. Now before I delve into the details of this job, are there any questions? Any...objections?”

“Yes, I have a question,” said William Martin, his arm raised high in the air. When he saw the contemptuous looks given to that arm by the others, he sheepishly lowered it.

“Yes?”

“What have you done to militate against the risks of this operation?”

The others glared at him once more.

“I...I don’t mean to suggest that I have a problem with an act of risk such as this, far from it in fact, but, well...we have to get in there before we can commit this valiant deed, and there’s a security system, and we’re not bringing Rarity...”

Frankie smiled. “Ah, now we are getting to the real objection. Believe it or not, Mr. Martin, we are capable of committing crimes more serious than petty theft without the assistance of a miniature monoceros. After all, she’s not the only one with knowledge of the supernatural...” And as he said this, a light with no source began to grow around his head.

William backed away, a shaking finger pointed at the ringmaster. “You...”

“Come now,” Frankie said, floating slowly towards him. “You’re one of us now, and deserving to know some of our secrets. Like the fact that I am exceptionally well-traveled. I have been places on this world that no living soul has seen, and I have been places not on this world at all. And the things I have learned in those places...Under my leadership, you have nothing to fear regarding risk.” With a light “thump”, Frankie’s feet touched ground, and his halo went out. “Also, I bought out Harry Gloomfeld.”

Signaled by a snap of Frankie’s fingers, the police officer stepped into view.

William responded to this last revelation with a blink. “What? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Gloomfeld said with a grin. “Finally, after all this time!” There seemed to be something...empty...at the back of his eyes.

“But you were trying to arrest him!” William protested.

“Yes, yes,” Gloomfeld said glibly, “so I’d make Captain. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching all the cops in the movies and from working the beat up and down this lousy state, is that working the law is for chumps. You’re nobody in the police force, until you’ve been bought by the Mob.”

William looked from the plastered on smile on the policeman, to the supreme look of ownership on the face of the ringmaster, and then threw up his arms. “Alright, sure, why not! You’ve got no more objections from me.”

“Last call for any objections,” Frankie said, “and then I’ll just have to assume you’re all in and we can get started.”

Julia almost opened her mouth then, to ask who precisely had offered this job to her family and why. But she thought the question might be seen as challenging her brother’s authority, and after her latest humiliation, she wasn’t about to attempt that.

She was soon to have abundant reason to regret keeping her mouth shut.
> Figure 8: Portable Radio
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 8: Portable Radio





Frankie Scarpino owned a van. It was a 1974 Dodge B300, with a V-8 engine. It was painted simply and unabashedly in an avocado-tan color scheme, and it had no logos associating it with the Pagliacci Brothers Family Circus. That meant that it was Frankie’s van, and Frankie’s van alone.

When the sheer annoyance of putting up with the other members of that particular circus became too much for him, Frankie would drive off in his van and disappear for a day or two. He always kept the van stocked with enough cheap wine and dried food that he wouldn’t even have to look at another human being until he decided that the circus had suffered enough from his absence, and that it was time for him to return.

Sometimes he brought his daughter Piera with him. This was just as good as being alone as far as Frankie was concerned, because Piera had a strong aversion to talking. He taught her to drive before her growth spurt, when she could just barely see over the top of the steering wheel. Frankie considered her a better driver than he was, and would sleep with confidence in the back of the van while his underage daughter found somewhere remote for them to hang out. By day, they’d stare out of separate windows of the van at nothing in particular. Frankie fantasized about retaking his position in the Mob. He didn’t know what Piera thought about during these times, and he never asked.

This trip was nothing like those others.

“Ooh, look at that one!” exclaimed Lilly the Snake Lady, her face plastered against one of the windows of the van.

“Oh, I think that’s taken from Boston’s first album,” said Antonia Martin.

The big van was far from empty. Frankie was driving and Piera was sitting silently next to him in the passenger seat, her eyes occasionally wandering over the controls.

Behind them, both bench seats were occupied. Sitting on the first bench was Julia Scarpino, Lilly and Officer Gloomfeld, wearing his full police uniform. Lilly’s primary purpose as far as Julia was concerned was to keep the increasingly zombie-like Gloomfeld as far away from her as possible. The back bench was occupied by the Martins and Hector the Strongman. The sun had long since set on this late April evening, and everyone was dressed in black. Some, like Frankie, Julia and Piera, made black look like a fashion choice. Others, like Hector and Lilly, made it look like they were going to rob a museum.

Which of course is exactly what they were on their way to do. They were five minutes out of Passaic on Interstate 80, destination Hackensack. And they were gawking at the van conversions.

Custom van conversions were a sort of plague upon the freeways of America at this time, clogging up traffic, bankrupting families, and generally acting as the latest stand-in for the American Dream.

“Is that a Confederate flag?” asked Lilly, pointing at the side of another van.

Hector looked out the window. “Yup,” he acknowledged.

“Oh hey!” William exclaimed, looking out an opposite window. “A complete summary of Star Wars in van form.”

“Really?” his wife asked incredulously as she took a look. “This is becoming completely ridiculous. It’s just a movie! Why is it still playing in every town we’ve driven through so far? What’s it been now, six months since it was released?”

“More like a year,” said William.

“A year!” Antonia exclaimed. “I just don’t get it.”

“Well, I liked it,” William offered meekly, then he looked back outside. “Wow, is that John Carter of Mars?”

The massive strongman squashed the Martins against their seat as he took a look. “Looks like the artist copied a Frazetta cover,” he said. “I’ve read all of the John Carter and Carson Napier books from Chuckles’ library.”

Frankie turned back to glare at them. “I’ve heard enough about van art in the past ten minutes to last a lifetime. Change the subject!”

With a few grumbles, everybody faced forward.

“Alright,” Antonia said with a small smile. “What about circuses? Did you know that the King-Carol Circus shut down last month? They just weren’t able to pull in enough to meet expenses.”

“Well, that’s something that won’t ever happen to us,” Frankie said smugly.

“Yes,” agreed with Antonia. “And that’s why I think we should take in their side show. We have none of our own, and— ”

“Out of the question!” Frankie interrupted. “By ‘side show’, you mean the freaks, right?”

“Well...yes,” Antonia admitted.

“A modern circus doesn’t need a freak show to succeed. We’ve amply proved that.”

“It’s not about what’s necessary,” Antonia countered. “Everybody else that was laid off can get a job elsewhere. But they cannot. Nobody will hire them. They only way they can earn a living is in a circus.”

“Then let it be some other circus,” Frankie said, “because this circus doesn’t operate on charity, and we don’t waste our time on anybody who can’t do their fair share of the work.”

“It wouldn’t be charity, and these people can do their share—they’re not children,” Antonia insisted. “Well, there are a couple children the same age as Piera. They might have a few things in common.”

Piera peeked around the edge of her large bucket seat at her. One hand self-consciously scratched at the edge of the woolen cap that was pulled down over her ears.

“I won’t have my daughter mixing with her social inferiors,” Frankie proclaimed, “end of discussion.” He turned back to glare at the group again. Piera’s hand calmly reached over to control the steering. “The whole lot of you are getting infected with ideas from that enchantress Rarity. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a robbery—the exact opposite of the kind of generosity that that tiny horse preaches. Isn’t that right, Harry?”

In response to the question, Harry Gloomfeld suddenly leaned over to face Antonia and haphazardly flopped his head up and down, looking exactly like a marionette controlled by a giant invisible hand. At the same time, Frankie’s right hand was moving above the steering wheel in the same manner as that hypothetical hand.

Antonia shuddered. “Quit it,” she told her brother.

“Change the subject. Again,” Frankie said as he faced forward. Officer Gloomfeld flopped back into his seat.

“Oh I know!” Lilly exclaimed, reaching into a cardboard box located under her seat. “How about some music?”

Lilly’s first attempt to remove an object from the box was blocked by a “love hug” administered by her 50-pound boa constrictor. With a grunt, she slowly pried the coils of the creature off of one hand by using the other, and finally emerged with a red ball the size of two average fists clenched together, hanging from a chain ending in a keyring. A hole cut into the side of the device revealed an AM radio dial. “Calm down, Patty Hearst,” she addressed the boa, “you’ll have your time in the moonlight soon enough.”

The Dodge B300 does not come with a sound system as a standard feature, and that was just the way Frankie Scarpino liked it. But on those occasions when there were more passengers than just his daughter, they always insisted on music. Therefore, the sound system for the van consisted of the red sphere, a Panasonic P-70 Panapet.

Seeing the device in Lilly’s hands, Julia snatched it from her hands and twisted a flat knob to turn it on:





It's a heartache,
Nothing but a heartache.
Love him till your arms break.
Then he lets you down...




Antonia frowned at the lyrics and stared glumly out of the window, until William gently pulled her into a hug and her frown turned into a smile.





It ain't right with love to share,
When you find he doesn't care for you.
It ain't wise to need someone
As much as I depended on you.




“Yup,” Frankie commented as the song ended, “sounds like love to me.”





Plop plop, fizz fizz
Oh what a relief it is!




The song was immediately followed by an annoying earworm of a commercial.





Meow meow, meow meow.
Meow meow, meow meow.
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow!




This was then followed by one that was even more annoying.





Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese,
Tomatoes, onions on a sesame seed bun!




And that was followed by one so mind-controlling that it had half of the passengers singing along.

Frankie grit his teeth and put up with it.

“This is Chuck Leonard at Music Radio 77, WABC,” the radio DJ said after the commercial break was finished. “And here’s the latest hit from song-meister Barry Manilow.”





I can’t smile without you.
I can’t laugh, and I can’t sing—




Julia, steamed by this reminder that Barry Manilow had sabotaged her perfect plan to break up her sister’s marriage—a plan that she was lately feeling unaccountably guilty about—savagely started turning the tuning dial at this point, muttering, “You got that right, Barry—you can’t sing!”

The AM radio shifted frequencies, as the song was replaced by static. For a moment, the static cleared, and a confident male voice announced that “WCBS News Time is 9:27 PM!”. The sound continued shifting, stopping next on the faint sound of a pipe organ. An even more confident young man with a nasal twang in his voice declared that “The Lord Almighty knows what you all are thinking. And the Lord will—”

Julia quickly changed the station once more, stopping when she heard music.





I know you're looking for a ruby in a mountain of rocks,
But there ain't no Coup de Ville hiding at the bottom
Of a Cracker Jack box.




“Change it.”

Julia looked back at her sister. “Did you just—”

“Change it,” Antonia ordered, her eyes steely.

Frankie chuckled to himself.

With a shrug, Julia went back to station hunting.





Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels.
Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.
In ‘65 I was seventeen and running up 101.
I don't know where I'm running now...




The van became unusually quiet, as everyone reflected how well the lyrics matched up to their own lives.

“I’m...I’m changing it,” Julia finally said without prompting.

“You’ve listened to the rest, now listen to the best: WJDM, you never heard it so good!”

Julia rested the Panapet in her lap, waiting to see what the station would throw at them next.

“This is America’s Top Forty with your host, Casey Kasem. Number 19 on the Top 40 list was co-written by Trammps keyboard player Ron Kersey, inspired by a scene in the movie The Towering Inferno. I’ll let you see if you can guess which scene by listening to the song.”





It was so entertaining when the boogie started to explode
I heard somebody say
(Burn baby burn!)




“Nope!” William declared just before the song dropped its title. “We will be having no disco on this trip!”

With a groan, Julia twisted the dial once more. “Whoops, end of the dial,” she said.

The song that began to play had an odd sort of pattern to it, where the solo singer was joined by a chorus for certain words only. The passengers soon began to join in:





Jack (Jack!), wanting someone to feel
Sat up on the hill (Hill!) and
Waited all day for Jill.




“Jill!” exclaimed William, Antonia, Julia, Lilly and Hector. The song’s chorus failed to match their prediction, being off by one word.





Jill (Jill!), always away from home...




The passengers laughed at the song correcting them.

“Enough of that!” groused Frankie. “Change the station!”

With a frown, Julia started turning the knob in the opposite direction from before. She stopped on the same disco song as before, and deliberately stopped with a wicked grin.





I heard somebody say
(Burn baby burn!) Disco—




“No...!” warned William.

“Alright, alright,” purred Julia. 





Roland searched the continent for the man who'd done him in...




“Um...” said Julia, reaching for the knob.

“Keep it,” said Frankie. “I like this one.”





Roland aimed his Thompson gun - he didn't say a word
But he blew Van Owen's body from there to Johannesburg!




“Do we seriously have to listen to this?” asked Lilly. She gestured back at Hector, who was trying to curl himself into a fetal position.

“Oh, all right, you can change it,” Frankie said with reluctance.

Tune, tune...

Mariachi!

“Change it!” ordered Frankie.

Tune, tune...

“God!” The speaker somehow made this one word last for at least nine syllables.

Tune, tune...

“Crazy Eddie, his prices are INSANE!”

“Stop,” said Frankie.

“And it’s Chuck Leonard, at Music Radio 77 WABC, layin’ some heavy music on ya. Here’s the latest from Elton John.”

The song opened with Elton John playing what sounded like a toy piano for the soundtrack of a melodrama train seeking to run over some blonde heroine in the 1920s.





Take a look at me now and take a look at my billing.
I'm not in it as an extra, I'm in it for the killing.




The back passengers, who all recognized the song, all looked at Frankie in expectation.

“You know what, I like this one!” he said, surprising no one. “Keep it here.”





I'm so obsessed with my ego,
My ego and it's message.
Oh inform the press, invite the guests,
I need the press tonight!








Everyone in the van that night had a specific function to fulfil in the planned robbery: Hector was the muscle, and Julia was the acrobat—both very useful roles to have in case of trouble. Lilly (and specifically Patty the Snake) were for the purpose of intimidating anyone not intimidated by Hector. And of course Harry Gloomfeld was there to convince everyone that this was actually a “routine police inspection”, and not a robbery at all. In the absence of Chuckles (and Rarity), William was the electronics expert. And Antonia was the lookout.

Frankie had two different roles. On the one hand, he was the mastermind, expected to be able to most-quickly improvise should anything go wrong in his master plan. And on the other hand, he had his mystical abilities, specifically the ability to make security cameras and alarm systems deactivate while clouding the minds of the guards monitoring that equipment so they wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

And as for Piera? She was the getaway driver, and therefore the only one not entering the museum. This was because out of everyone on this mission, only she and her father actually had driver’s licenses. (Technically, Piera had a learning permit.) Julia specifically went out of her way to not learn to drive, for the single purpose of never being obligated to drive anybody anywhere. This overwhelming selfishness was the primary reason why Julia was Frankie’s favorite sister.





The trip back from Hackensack was of a considerably different character than the trip in the opposite direction two hours earlier. To begin with, two people were missing from the van, and one person had been added. The subtractions were Frankie and Gloomfeld; the addition was Rarity.

Piera was driving. She was doing a carefully calculated seven miles-per-hour above the speed limit on the mostly empty interstate. Her eyes were mostly on the rear-view mirror, looking for cops. Rarity, sitting in the passenger seat, was staring intently at the steering wheel and the road ahead, ready to take over should anything happen. Considering she had exactly the same amount of driving experience as Patty Hearst the Boa Constrictor, she was not looking forward to this eventuality.

The eyes of everyone else in the van was also on the alert for pursuing police cars. Hector had moved up a seat to join Lilly and Julia. The radio was silent, and no one was in the mood for talking.

About halfway back to Passaic, Piera took the Saddle Brook exit to stop at a parking lot for a closed Food Fair supermarket. After waiting a full minute to be sure they hadn’t been followed, she shut the van off and got up out of her bucket seat so that she could face the others. She then gave them all a piercing stare that was rather reminiscent of her father.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

“Look, it was all—” Julia began, before being cut off.

“You better tell it from the beginning,” said Lilly, putting a hand on Julia’s arm.

Julia snatched her arm away with a grimace and then, after a moment of thought, she reached out to grab the red Panapet radio from where it had been resting in Lilly’s lap. She didn’t turn it on, instead rolling the sphere around in her hands. “The plan went perfectly at first,” she began, using the Panapet as an excuse not to have to establish eye contact with Piera. “Gloomfeld got us into the building, and your father was able to handle the security like he promised. Then he entered the display room, and everything went wrong.” She turned around and handed the radio to Antonia. “You saw what happened next better than I did,” she told her sister.

Antonia looked down at the Panapet. “I...really?” She looked up at Piera’s accusing eyes for a moment, and then quickly redirected her eyes to the red sphere. “Yes, well I was right behind him, and he said something about the walls, ceiling and floor being covered with silver foil, and that being a particular vulnerability of his.”

Piera winced.

“He told us to scatter to the corners not covered by the cameras,” Antonia continued, “before his powers failed completely. He focused everything he had in keeping control over Officer Gloomfeld. Then a searchlight came in from the front window.” She passed the Panapet to William.

With a roll of his eyes, William continued the story. “Coming over a loudspeaker was the voice of Officer Gruekin, Gloomfeld’s partner. In fact, I expect you know that part of the story, Piera.”

Piera nodded.

“Right then,” William said with some relief. “Then that means you got most of the story. Your uncle Dino set your father up, so that Frankie would be sent to jail.” Resting the radio in his lap, he started counting out points on his fingers. “He brought Officer Gruekin in on the plan, to break your father’s control over Gloomfeld, which he did. He also implied that your father was the only other person in the museum. I think it was because he thought we’d let him take over the family if he arranged for only your father to be arrested.”

Antonia took back the radio. “I don’t know if he ever told you this, but your father and Uncle Dino tried to rob a bank together twenty-five years ago.” Being forced to look Piera in the eye for this part, she took to curling and uncurling a lock of her hair with the hand that wasn’t cradling the Panapet. “When it all went wrong, your father escaped to Faerie by opening a portal, but because he only knew how to create portals for himself only, he wasn’t able to take Uncle Dino with him, and as a result Dino went to prison for twenty-five years. So, you know, that was why Dino had a grudge.” She sped her way through the rest of the explanation: “And why the rest of us ended up running a circus as punishment. It was twenty years before he came back, and of course, when he did come back, he came back with you.” She shoved the Panapet back into William’s hands. “Although that does raise a question: if he can only use that portal spell on himself, how was he able to come back to earth with you?”

Piera’s only response was a shrug. She then looked over at the current holder of the Panapet.

“Right,” William said. Then he stopped, as he remembered that was the same word he had started his last part with. “Anyway, Gruekin kept your uncle talking and talking about his cover story about being a ‘concerned businessman’ who had accidentally overheard the one-man robbery plot while visiting the circus. And while that was going on, Rarity showed up!” He quickly tossed the Panapet over Lilly’s head in the pony’s direction. Only then did he realize that equines are not well equipped for catching round objects, and winced.

Rarity opened her mouth to make a silent shriek, then dodged out of the way. The red sphere bounced off of the instrument panel, struck her in the side (leading to a quiet gasp), and then it landed at the bottom of the passenger compartment.

“Sorry,” said William sheepishly.

Rarity rubbed the spot she had been struck with a hoof and gave William a disappointed look.

Piera then reached down, picked up the Panapet, and turned it on. No sound came out of the built-in speaker. Rarity stared at it for a second and with a brief spark, it turned on.





Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea.
All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see.
Dust the wind. All we are is—




There was a collective start from the group, at how appropriate the lyric was to their current emotional state. Piera stopped the song by tuning to an empty section of the radio spectrum. The static faded out, to be replaced with...

“Yes,” Rarity’s voice stated from the radio speaker, as the seated pony looked across at the teenage girl. “Officer Gruekin came to get me after your uncle had contacted him. Being a ‘dumb animal’, he was able to bring me in the back of his police car, with your uncle being none the wiser. He told him that your father had an emotional attachment to me.” The pony rolled her oversized eyes at this absurd lie, and was amused to see that Piera had done the same thing at the exact same time. “I easily escaped as soon as they parked and made my way into the museum. It took me a few minutes, but eventually I was able to put the security equipment on a loop so that they recorded nothing incriminating, back to the start of the operation. But when I found the others, well, your father was nowhere to be seen. I promise you that I would have saved him with the rest if, well....”

Everyone’s eyes looked away from Piera’s.

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Hector reached forward and put one hand atop the Panapet still being held in Piera’s. “He ran, Piera,” he said, looking straight at her with eyes hooded with sadness. “The moment he knew that his brother had betrayed him, he told us he had to go. Just opened a portal to Fairyland, and abandoned us to our fate.”

Piera stood there, stock still, lowering her head as tears sprang to her eyes.

Lilly gently pulled Hector’s hand away from atop the Panapet, to replace it with her own. “He was perfectly logical about it,” she explained. “He had the criminal record, and we didn’t. If he was caught, it would be Riker’s Island, hard labor for twenty years, twenty years where he wouldn’t be able to be your father.”

Piera jerked her head up, her accusing eyes piercing into Lilly’s. The snake woman flinched. “Well,” she said with extreme reluctance, “he never actually said your name. But surely he was thinking of you when he said he’d no longer be running this family.”

Antonia reached her arm forward, but was unable to reach the Panapet. “Uh, just pretend I’m doing it, OK? What I wanted to say is that this way, he could come back any day!”

Piera turned her death glare upon her aunt, who curled her outstretched hand into her chest. “Of course,” she admitted, “with the time dilation effects, that is very unlikely. But he had our best interests at heart.”

“nO he DIdn'T!” Piera screamed as she threw the Panapet to the floor, her voice cracking up and down several octaves. She dived into the driver’s seat and tried to curl up into a ball, knobby elbows and knees sticking out and a thumb knuckle absently rubbing at her sore throat. The sounds of repressed sobbing could just barely be heard. Her displaced cap fell lightly to the ground.

Antonia stood up and leaned forward, lightly touching Piera’s shoulder around the edge of her seat. Piera—who had never been comfortable with being touched—flinched, and a guilty Antonia withdrew her hand.

Seeing this, Rarity hopped down rather loudly from her seat and looked at the radio. It had split open into two halves, with an exposed circuit board and loose wires. At her mental command, the device swiftly reassembled itself and tuned itself back to...





I’m a Pepper, she’s a Pepper,
Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?




“This is Chuck Leonard, ending my time together with you on Music Radio 77 WABC on this beautiful Sunday evening. In four minutes it’ll be the Larry King Show, with guest Muhammad Ali. But for now, here’s ‘Movin’ Out’ by Billy Joel. And as for me? Well you can get the butter, and roll me outta here!”





Who needs a house out in Hackensack?
Is that all you get with your money?



It seems such a waste of time.
If that's what it's all about.
Mama if that's movin' up,
Then I'm movin' out.




Rarity let the radio play, to give Piera some privacy and to allow the others some time to think. She then turned down the volume of the song so her voice could be clearly heard over it.

“Frankie Scarpino is no longer running this family. And I believe you all made it rather clear that you did not want Dino Scarpino telling you what to do, either. So what happens next? Do you want to rejoin your brethren?”

“You mean the Coragglio’s?” Julia asked. “We used to dream about that, about having power, about having people look up to us.”

“Look up to us in fear, you mean,” Antonia added.

Julia shrugged. “Well, I was fine with that.” She stopped, then glanced over at the slightly shaking driver’s seat to nerve herself to continue. “I’ve been scared most of my life. Making others scared was power to me. I didn’t think there was anything other than one, or the other. Until...well, until you, Rarity.” She looked at the pony, an uncertain smile on her face. “The crowds we get now, they don’t all have chips on their shoulders, and I’ve stopped seeing them all as chumps. They smile now, smile because Thunderbolt and I am making them happy. And I didn’t want to admit it, not to Frankie and not to myself...that I like making people happy a lot more than I like making them scared of me.” She abruptly turned around and tugged on Antonia’s sleeve.

“Oh!” Antonia exclaimed. “What my sister’s trying to say is that, well, we’re happier as circus folk than as mob folk.”

“A circus is like a pirate ship,” said Hector.

Everyone stared at him incredulously, including a Piera that was peeking around the corner of her huge chair with gravity-defying hair and pointed ears.

“Hear me out,” Hector assured his audience. “A pirate ship has a captain, and to any prisoners the pirates capture for ransom, that captain is the guy in charge. But the rest of the time, when it’s not for show, a pirate ship is a democracy, where everybody votes for where they’ll sail next, and who has to do which chore. And a circus is the same way, or at least it’s supposed to—the ringmaster’s in charge for the show, but only for the show, understand?”

“That’s not the way Frankie’s been running things,” Lilly commented.

“Well...that was wrong,” Hector said. “I think we should all be running the circus now. That includes Chuckles, and it includes you, Piera. You can stay with any one of us for as long as you’d like. Your father was right that our circus was a family.”

“And now I guess it’s a better family than it was before,” added William. “What do you say?”

Piera, who had taken a moment to put her hat back on, nodded her head a couple of times before using the palms of her hands to wipe the tears away from her eyes.

“And that includes you too, Rarity,” said Hector. “You get to make decisions just like the rest of us now.”

“Me?” Rarity asked, putting a hoof to her chest. “I don’t really know much of anything about how to run a circus, whether on Equestria or on Earth.”

“Just take the position, Rarity,” Julia growled.

“Alright, I accept. And as first order of business in this new democracy, may I propose that Piera here drive us back to Passaic. All in favor?”

“AYE!” the others chorused.

“All opposed? Nobody? The motion is unanimously passed. Piera, if you would?”

With a happy sigh, Piera started the engine of the Dodge van. Rarity turned up the volume of the radio, tuning it away from Larry King.





Thank you for being a friend.
Traveled down the road and back again.
Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant.




“Oh God!” Julia exclaimed. “I don’t care how goody-good we are now, I don’t have to put up with that kind of sap. Could you please change the station? There—I said ‘please’ and everything!”

“Alright,” Rarity “said” with a smile. 

“Damned! To the judgement of Hell you are forever damned! Unless...” And here the furious voice suddenly turned syrupy. “...You decide to donate all of your worldly wealth to God’s best friend in the whole wide world, little ol’ me!”

“NO!”

Rarity continued tuning with a smirk. She stopped at the sound of Casey Kasem’s voice, from apparently the second airing of the same show on a rival network:

“Number Fifteen this week in America’s Top Forty and up two spots from last week is the instrumental piece ‘Feels So Good’, by jazz composer Chuck Mangione. The single is a three-and-a-half minute edit of the original track, which was nearly ten minutes long on the album of the same name. When asked to describe how he succeeded in making such a major cut, Chuck described it as ‘major surgery’, but I think it sounds majorly groovy. Here’s Chuck Mangione, with ‘Feels So Good’.”

A solo brass instrument took up the melody. Rarity listened intently for a few seconds, before asking. “Is...is that a flugelhorn?”

William nodded. “Yes, I believe it is.”

“In that case, could we keep it here?” Rarity asked quietly. “I have some fond memories of a flugelhorn being played really badly.”

Everyone looked at Julia.

“Alright,” Julia said with a resigned shrug. “Knock yourself out.”
> Figure 9: Headphones
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 9: Headphones





Officer Harry Gloomfeld was awoken from a troubled sleep by an insistent pounding upon the door of his downtown Passaic apartment. With several indistinct mumbles, he put on a robe and slippers (and his holster) and opened the door. His sleepy eyes went wide with recognition at what he saw.

The woman on the other side was tall and slender, her figure obscured by a tan trench coat, and her face above her ruby-red lips hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses as well as the brim of a large gray floppy hat; the platinum-blond shoulder-length hair that could be seen was almost certainly a wig. The moment the door was opened, she used two rolled-up newspapers, one held in each hand, to shove her way into the apartment—the one in her right hand, the North Jersey Herald-News, was barely thicker than her thumb, while the other was almost too big around to grasp with one hand. “Remember me?” she asked, her scowl instantly transformed into false perkiness. It was clear that she was deliberately speaking with a lower than accustomed pitch in her voice.

“Sparks Nightly?!”

“Close enough,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t heard a thing since I sent you those pony registration records back in January. Soooo, how’s the investigation?”

“Not well,” Gloomfeld said carefully, trying in vain to hide from her behind the apartment’s door. He had long since learned to watch his words around this woman, as her ability to draw correct conclusions from miniscule amounts of data was frankly terrifying.

“So what’s the hold-up?” Sparks asked eagerly. “Are you missing evidence, or do you need to put some more pressure on that English guy?”

“No, it’s not like that,” Gloomfeld replied as he adjusted the alignment of his robe. “They’re...they’re not up to anything.”

The woman waved the Herald-News in a vague manner next to her head. “You’re speaking a foreign language to me, Harry. Are they Corraglios or not? That’s the only question that matters, right?”

“Well...” Gloomfeld tried to answer, but Sparks was having none of it.

“That’s the only question that matters, Harry. The one with the right answer, the answer that will get you transferred to the Big Apricot like you always dreamed. The one that will get me my big story, the one that will finally break me out of writing those awful fashion and advice columns under stupid aliases, the story that will finally launch my dream career of being an investigative journalist for the greatest newspaper on the face of the earth!” She punctuated the end of her last sentence by lightly tapping Gloomfeld’s chest with the enormous newspaper in her left hand.

“Yeah, but they’re not up to anything anymore—they’re nothing but a wholesome family circus,” the police officer finally said. “I’ve dropped the case.”

“You’ve dropped the case,” the woman said in disbelief. Then she swatted him upside the head with “the greatest newspaper on the face of the earth”. “You dropped the case?!”

The man staggered a bit before regaining his feet. “Yes, that’s what I said. There is no story here.”

Sparks took a few steps back in shock, putting her back outside the man’s door. “They...they paid you off, didn’t they!” she accused. “That’s why I had to come here after you weren’t at the station. You bungled taking a Mob bribe, and now you’re suspended!”

“I’m not suspended!” Gloomfeld replied, deliberately side-stepping the whole issue of bribery. “Things got a little intense, and now I’m on a paid vacation. You can verify that with anybody at the station. If I had taken a bribe, there’s no way I should have gotten away with just a vacation.” Those words were the absolute truth—Gloomfield still had no idea why he hadn’t been fired for his act of blatant stupidity, and he refused to believe Gruekin’s story of mind control. He knew what he did, even if the reasons why didn’t seem to make much sense anymore.

The woman thought carefully about what he said, the movements of her head tracking everywhere his guilty eyes darted. “Well in that case,” she said slowly, “you won’t mind if I make a little visit of my own to the Pagliacci Brothers Family Circus, yes?”

“Ah...no, not at all!” Gloomfeld said with a smile that only crept up one side of his face. “That circus has nothing to hide! Now can I go back to sleep now?”

“Dream away”, Sparks said as she turned to go. “Just keep your eyes on next Sunday’s paper. If I’m right, there will be a front page exclusive with my real name on it, spilling all the sordid details about this ‘wholesome family circus’.” She looked down at the two newspapers she was still holding. “Oh by the way...catch!”

Gloomfeld quickly stepped out of the way, rather than try the dangerous feat of trying to catch the big-city newspaper. Sure enough, the paper smashed right through a ceramic table lamp located a foot behind him.

The woman had the decency to wince. “I’ll pay you back for that, I promise!”

“You better,” the officer said laconically. “And what happens if I’m right? What will I see in the Sunday paper then?”

The woman rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. “You’ll have another ‘heart-warming tale’ from ‘Sparks Nightly’, with some cutesy-wootsy title like—”









In Pursuit of Rarity



By Sparks Nightly


This columnist’s pursuit of beauty is a never-ending one. Beauty can be found in a museum or in a trashcan. It can be found in the stories of ordinary New Yorkers, like those I have shared with you over the past few months. It can even be found in...New Jersey.

Shocking, but true. Even more surprisingly, I found this beauty in the environs of a homely little outfit by the name of the Pagliacci Brothers Family Circus. I found it in the form of an unlikely individual who goes by the name of Rarity.

I am no expert on circuses. I cannot tell you which acrobatic tricks are the most death-defying, or which lion-taming stunts are the most difficult to procure from an unwilling feline. I only know that, quite contrary to my expectations, I was entertained by the drama and comedy I was presented with under the big top. And, in this place of all places, I saw beauty. I saw fashion. I saw the birth of an absolutely unique voice. I saw it in the costumes worn by the performers. I saw it in the choice of colors for the tent fabrics—it was not just a tan canvas, but rather a rainbow of color swathes stitched together, no two pieces the same size. And yet every piece seemed to have its place. From my position in the audience, the patch that was behind the high wire artist at the dramatic height of her performance was exactly right to accompany that moment, and the one behind the rather verbose and politically-savvy clown as he gave a rather brilliant teardown of President Carter’s latest missteps was worthy of a Greenwich Village nightclub.

I save the ringmaster for last. Unique to any of the admittedly few circuses I have ever attended, this ringmaster belonged to the fairer sex, although I would surely not consider her one of the more withdrawn members of her gender. Her ensemble was therefore not the stereotypical outfit of a coloring-book ringmaster, ready to be filled in all with black. No, Miss Julia Scarpino’s dress was that of a woman of sophistication, in deep purple with sequins, yet undoubtedly the most commanding such dress I have ever encountered, and with a way of capturing the spotlight that had to be seen to be believed. I’m sorry that the photos accompanying this article can in no way capture the magic inherent in this single outfit alone.

I was here with my niece—I suppose I should make that clear for those wondering what manner of madness would have sent this columnist to North Jersey. Miss Sally was not interested in the performance, or the highly fashionable way with which it was presented. She was there for one reason and one reason alone—to ride upon the unicorn Rarity. Rarity was not actually a unicorn, of course...



“You’re not my mother,” the girl insisted. “And do I have to keep lugging this camera around? It’s heavy!”

“Of course I’m not your mother,” the woman with the blond wig under her red sun hat said with a forced smile. “I’m your Aunt Sparks, remember? And you’ll need the camera if you want the best possible picture of you with your pegasus.” She was wearing a trim pink and white dress that might have come from the 1920’s or 30’s, and she had a habit of twirling the handle of her parasol when she was bored, which was nearly always.

“Unicorn,” the girl insisted.

“Whatever. Just think of what your friends at the orph—” (She caught herself to look around at the curious adults listening in on their conversation.) “Orpheus School for Little Girls would say if you didn’t have proof of your little ride.”

“Alright,” the girl sulked. “So can we go now?”

Sparks pointed ahead of her. “Look, we’re almost up to the ringmaster. Five minutes, and we go straight to the pony ring, alright?”

The girl put on a grumpy expression as she eyed the five people between them and the ringmaster, the leader of which was gushing on about her appreciation of the show in a way that made it clear that this could go on forever. 

As the reporter waited patiently in line, she let her gaze wander to the crew taking down the various props used in the show. She wondered for a moment why they were all wearing long flowing cloaks that obscured all of their features, until she happened to catch a glimpse of a misshapen face.

“Why hello there, Ma’am,” she heard a voice from behind her back. “And how did you like our little show?”

Sparks whirled around to see the circus’ lone clown crouched down so he could address Sally at eye level.

“It was alright,” the girl mumbled as she played around with the camera in her hands.

“Excuse me...?” Sparks addressed the clown, who stood up to face her.

“Chuckles,” he said with an easy smile.

“Chuckles,” Sparks repeated, and then pointed at the cloaked individuals. “I don’t mean to...well, that is to...I don’t think there is any polite way to say this, so I’ll just say it: are those...freaks?”

Chuckles took the trouble to look over Sparks’ shoulder with an eyebrow raised. “Ah...yup, that they are. Say, don’t I know you? Your face looks awful familiar.”

The woman sighed in a resigned fashion. “I’m a newspaper columnist. Name’s Sparks Nightly.”

Ah, the joys of photostatic reproduction—when you could submit a photo of yourself wearing an obviously fake wig to display at the top of all of your articles, and not one of your readers was able to discern the fakery amid the blur.

“Sparks Nightly!” the clown exclaimed. “I read every one of your articles!”

Sparks took a moment to take in Chuckles’ baggy outfit, which looked better than it had any right to be, considering it was composed entirely of scrap fabric sewn together. “Really?” she asked.

“Really!”

“Huh. So, why are they doing clean-up, and not, you know, in their own tent?”

Chuckles drew himself up to his full height, and addressed the reporter with a look of disappointment, causing Sparks to shrink in on herself a little. “Miss Nightly! We live in a modern world, one where we don’t have to look down on others just because they were born outside the range of what we consider an acceptable appearance. We employ them because frankly they can’t get jobs anywhere else, but that does not mean that we pay them any less than they deserve, and this way they do not spend their lives in a box, being gawked at by paying customers. Instead, they have free time to spend any way they’d like.”

Sparks looked in the direction Chuckles indicated. One of the “freaks” was engaged in an animated conversation with a teenage girl using sign language. The hood of her cloak was folded back, revealing that the hair on her head was in random clumps, and that her eyes didn’t seem to be quite lined up horizontally on her face. Nevertheless, the normal-looking girl was signing to her as if she was any other of her friends her age. Sparks got a little misty-eyed at the sight.

“Sweet, isn’t it?” Chuckles asked, before the tone of his voice turned dark. “Of course, wasn’t it your editor who opined that ‘freaks like that knew where they belonged in my day’? Well, I’ll be seeing you two around.”

Sparks groaned as the momentary good mood drained right out of her.

Beside her, Sally uttered a near-identical groan, because in all this time the line to speak with the ringmaster had not gotten any shorter. Then she looked down at her camera with its flashbulb and got a wicked glint in her eye.

“Picture, picture, picture for the paper!” she sing-songed as she set off the camera’s flash in face after face. In seconds, the pair were the only ones waiting to speak with the ringmaster.

After suppressing a smile of pride, Sparks stepped forward to shake the hand of the momentarily confused ringmaster. “Awfully sorry about little Marcie here,” she said with a disingenuous frown. “But I simply had to tell you how pleased I was with your show.”




“Oh, well this is a group effort,” Miss Scarpino told me when I expressed my admiration of the high style of the show. When I insisted that there must be a single guiding genius to the unified look of the show, she reluctantly confided to me that Rarity was responsible.



“The pony?!”

At that exclamation, Sparks saw the cloaked woman suddenly turn in shock to look at her, before quickly pulling up her hood to conceal her features and slinking off into the relative anonymity of the shadows.

“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that,” Julia Scarpino told Sparks with a mysterious smile. “Why don’t you check out Rarity’s Boutique after 4 p.m., and I’ll send word along that you’d like to speak with her then. You...do wish to speak with her, don’t you?”

“But of course!” Sparks Nightly replied with a gleaming smile.

Behind that smile, however, she had no idea what was about to happen.


& & &


Seeing that it was only a little after 2 p.m., the young reporter allowed the girl in her charge to drag her without resistance down the midway to another tent, this one much smaller than the big top. To one side she saw a second, smaller line leading to a carousel of eight riding ponies. None of them, Sparks noted, had horns upon their heads. A five-minute ride on the carousel cost $5. Five minutes with Rarity in the tent cost $35. And yet here was a line of children and parents willing to pay that seven-time premium.

As they waited, Sparks picked up on a pattern with each pair of child and parent to be admitted to the tent. The girl would emit a high-pitched scream upon seeing the miraculous little horse in person, as if Rarity was some kind of rock god instead of tamed livestock. The screaming would last through most of the allocated five minutes. And then the girl would finally calm down enough to get one certainly botched photo with the animal before being unceremoniously ejected from the back end of the tent. And despite the clear warning example from the couple to enter before them, the next pair of child and parent would then enter and repeat the process.

The pattern broke when Rarity suddenly emerged from the tent. Her appearance was heralded by a gaggle of gasps from the little girls standing in line, followed by a discordant chorus of “Mommy, Mommy!” as the girls sought to get their parents’ attention. And with few exceptions, the parents waiting in the line before Rarity’s tent were in fact female. In fact, it gradually dawned on Sparks Nightly that several of the adults were at least as excited to be seeing a “unicorn” as their gullible daughters.

The first thing that struck Sparks’ eye regarding the little white pony was that she must have been trained to an exceptional degree, and even beyond that must be exceptionally bright for her species. Her purple-dyed tail and mane was only half grown out, yet it had been given what must have been several hundred dollars’ worth of beauty care—the tail was shaped into a semi-circular curve, while the mane hung over her left eye in a way very reminiscent of Veronica Lake. She also walked like the blonde bombshell might have in her heyday, her steps light and delicate. She moved to accentuate her curves, and always managed to just be out of reach of the more grabby children in line. Her head was held high as she gazed serenely into the eyes of all who craned and contorted themselves to see, and she could almost be said to be smiling—except of course that ponies couldn’t smile. Upon reaching the end of the line, she turned to prance around the carousel, causing the riders to happily cry out her name. Then she returned to the tent, and after a minute of settling down, everything was back to normal.

“She’s...she’s engaging in expectations management,” Sparks slowly realized out loud. “Keeping the crowd from going nuts waiting out here, as well as throwing a bone out to the ones stuck with the rest of the ponies.” A second observation occurred to her, one that made her just a little uneasy: the pony had looked humans in the eye, humans that weren’t her master. Based on her experience with cats, that meant that Rarity considered herself the equal of any human she encountered.

The girl interrupted her thoughts by tugging on the hem of her dress. “Yes, Frieda?” she asked, looking down.

“We’re next, but you have to hold the line for me,” the girl replied.

“How did you manage that?” Sparks asked. She was quite sure that there were at least three girls, one boy, and three mothers ahead of them.

“I found out they all go to the same school together, and convinced them to save their money by all going for the same five minutes. Plus I agreed to go in and take extra pictures to mail to them, for a quarter a shot. That’s alright, right? Plus I get to see Rarity and get all calmed down so I don’t waste my five minutes when it’s my turn.”

Sparks smiled once more in admiration. “You’d make a good reporter, kid.” She reached in her bag and handed over a couple of film packs. “Although next time you should probably remember to include the price of shipping in the deal. Oh, and here,” she added, tearing off a sheet of paper from her notebook and handing over her pen. “To get their mailing addresses.”

“Right, thanks. I forgot all about that.” And with that, the line moved forward so that only Sparks was outside the tent.




A few minutes later, and I was able to witness Rarity the pony in action. She was a charming animal, the perfect huggable pet for all little girls (and boys) who dreamed of living in a fantasy world of brave knights, daring princesses, and wish-fulfilling unicorns. Some children were happy to just be with the pony and the well-painted but nevertheless plywood-backed sets for the five minutes they paid for, while others took advantage of the well-stocked wardrobe to engage in photography sessions, sessions that I was surprised to learn were free with the price paid to see her. All in all, I considered it to be the best use of $35 that I ever spent, if only to see the blissful look of joy upon the face of my dear Violet.

As I’m sure you will agree, Rarity is very photogenic.

But in the end, the pony Rarity was just what she presented herself as: a fantasy. The horn on her head, I was informed, under an oath not to tell any of the children present, was just a fancy flashlight, originally needed to treat a medical condition, but then modified to its present use of delighting the public.

And so of course Rarity the Pony was not the fashion designer for the Pagliaci Brothers Circus. This “rarity” was not unique. I needed to find the other Rarity.




& & &


It took another trek across the circus grounds to finally reach Rarity’s Boutique.




Instead of a plain canvas circus tent, this Rarity lived in a one-room dollhouse (canvas) castle, scaled up to adult human size. Doors and windows were painted on the walls, and furniture was comically oversized and made extra-durable for the bounce-testing of the little ones. And just like a dollhouse, the entire front facade, made of cloth, rolled back to expose the innards to the outside world. On a warm spring day like today, that was alright. I wondered what they did on rainy days.



The shop was manned by the teenage girl Sparks had seen earlier speaking with the cloaked woman. She had short fine blonde hair that stood up from her head like thistledown, and her skin was nearly the color of buttermilk. She was wearing a plain wheat-colored sundress, a pair of amber-tinted sunglasses, and a pair of over-ear headphones, and she was nodding her head lightly to the beats she was hearing from the boombox stereo whose handle she clutched with one hand. The one feature of her that most strongly drew the eye were the silver rope chain bracelets that wound around her forearms. As she moved about her job of cataloguing inventory, the bracelets slid around her skin. The chains looked long and loose enough that they should have slid entirely off of the young woman’s arms, but somehow they seemed to stick to her like they were made of iron and she was magnetized. Except that that explanation wouldn’t explain the sliding.

Sparks walked over to be in the girl’s line of sight and tapped lightly on the top of a counter. When the girl turned off the boombox, Sparks told her that she was there to see Rarity at 4. “You’re not Rarity by any chance, are you?” she added.

The girl blushed and shook her head. She then pointed at a clock on the wall, showing that there were still fifteen minutes until the designated meeting time.

Sparks nodded and then joined her “niece” in looking at the clothing available for sale.




The finer clothes were displayed in the shaded corners of the little house, the only illumination provided by sunlight caught and refracted through mobiles of colored glass—perhaps they were even jewels, although if that were the case, each one appeared to have been cut specifically for acting as chandeliers in that particular spot, because each dress, suit and ensemble was lit to perfection.

The primary purpose of the shop was to replicate the fantasy costumes from the pony’s photo session. A wide variety of costumes were available, in various sizes. I was intrigued to discover that multiple price points were available for purchase, and yet even the cheapest sets, made from pieces of painted vinyl assembled with hot glue, nevertheless showed a definite care for detail that was sure to leave every customer satisfied.



“I don’t suppose there’s any chance I can talk you into buying me any of this stuff,” the girl said in a low tone, running a hand idly along the frilly collar of an elaborate Italian Renaissance dress, complete with gold brocade and (presumably imitation) ermine ruffs. The dress stood out from its neighbors in being completely over the top in ostentatiousness. If all the other dresses for little girls were rewards for being good little daughters, this one was there as a self-inflicted punishment, a way to tell the world that you’re a spoiled brat who deserves everything bad that happens to you.

In addition, Sparks recognized the girl’s choice to be an close reproduction of the wedding dress of Catherine de’ Medici, one of the most influential and copied pieces of clothing ever worn. Sparks remembered Catherine for three acts that resonated through the ages: First, her difficult youth before being suddenly elevated to Queen of France was the basis of the fairy tale of Cinderella (complete with the “Catherine de’ Medici” dress). Second, after that fairy tale marriage she grew into the bitter old woman who orchestrated the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre. And third, she invented the very first pair of high heel shoes to go with that wedding dress, so she wouldn’t feel so bad about being a short Italian girl surrounded by the king’s tall French mistresses. This third fact may in fact help to explain the second one.

“You know what, Lucy?” asked Sparks with a wicked grin. “I’m going to let Rarity pick out the perfect dress for you when she arrives—it will be great for my story, and I’ll even foot the bill on the off chance that my paper doesn’t. And if she thinks that dress is the right one for you, then that’s clearly the dress you deserve.”

The girl looked carefully at the dress she had been touching, and then slowly backed away.




Before I knew it, it was finally time to speak with the mysterious crafter of all of this beauty...the other Rarity.



The shopkeeper ushered her pair of customers out of the building, then rolled the facade back into place to “close” the shop. Then she left to fetch Rarity.

Curiously, she never removed her oversize headphones the entire time, despite the fact that they were no longer attached to anything.

Next door to Rarity’s Boutique, Sparks discovered another canvas building, this one an electronics repair shop. From within could be heard what sounded like a live performance by Stevie Wonder, but in fact must have been an incredibly good sound system:





When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then you suffer.
Superstition ain’t the way.




Standing outside the open tent flap of this structure was Chuckles the Clown. He was wearing a baggy parody of a business suit...and still had his face paint on. His arms were crossed and his eyes had a faraway look, but he had a satisfied smile on his painted lips.

“Good afternoon, Mr. ... um, Chuckles,” the young woman said by way of greeting.

“Good afternoon, Miss Nightly,” Chuckles said evenly, his eyes never moving from their target.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything you can tell me about this Rarity before I meet her. Being her neighbor and all.”

“Miss Rarity,” said Chuckles. “She pretends not to care about titles or compliments, but she does like being called ‘Miss’. Of course, that depends on which Miss Rarity you’re about to meet.” With these words, his smile turned into a disapproving frown.

Sparks Nightly turned slightly to look in the direction in which Chuckles the Clown had been gazing for the past minute. It turned out to be the top of the circus big top tent, where a woman in a cloak was crouched down. As Sparks watched, she climbed a rope tent attached to the sloped roof in order to reach a trapeze bar that had been secured to the central pole of the tent. There, she sat herself down and arranged some equipment she had been carrying around her neck, extending a long antenna before producing a pair of binoculars. Sparks looked away just in time to prevent being caught in the view of those binoculars.

Sparks couldn’t be certain, but she had a strong suspicion that this was the same cloaked woman from earlier.

“Chuckles, did you wish to see me?” came a voice from an entirely different direction.

Sparks craned her neck around, to two figures on the other side of the businessman/clown. One was the shop girl from earlier.

And the other was Rarity the Pony, who was standing very still, her large blue eyes fixed to Sparks’ in a shocked expression.

Chuckles finally wrested his eyes away from the woman sitting atop the tent to face the reporter and the silent girl beside her. “If you could give us a few minutes?” he asked them quietly. “She’s not very enthusiastic about the press, so we told her she was going to meet me instead of you. I’m sure I can convince her to give you a few minutes of her time.”

“Um...alright,” Sparks said after a few silent seconds, before grabbing the girl’s hand and trying to walk away.

The girl, however, refused to move.

“Come on, ...?” Sparks urged, embarrassed to realize that she had forgotten her name.

“Peppermint Patty,” the girl said, deadpan, and then started walking.

“No, I’m pretty sure that isn’t it,” said Sparks.

From a spot next to the entrance to Rarity’s Boutique, Sparks witnessed a hushed but quite animated argument between the clown and...what appeared to be the pony.




At first, I thought I was being tricked, for the Rarity I was introduced to then was the pony I had already met. That I was being asked to believe in the existence of talking magical unicorns, in this day and age.



“She told me she wasn’t Rarity,” Sparks muttered to herself, trying to figure this out. And in fact the teenager standing next to the pony hadn’t opened her mouth once during the entire conversation. As the pony made what was surely a trained gesture of putting a hoof to her forehead in mock-exasperation, the cape she was wearing slipped to one side, revealing the existence of a speaker strapped to her back. And then Chuckles reached down and extended the collapsed antenna that was attached to that speaker.


& & &


“Oh no, I couldn’t wear anything like that!” Sparks’ “niece” exclaimed a few minutes later, as the store clerk held up the dress that Rarity’s voice had picked out for her. “I mean, what would my friends think? They’re not into any of the girly stuff.”

“Unlike you,” the voice over the speaker said with an audible knowing grin. “Well, what about a cape then? I think this shade of orange would look fantastic on you, and I think your friends would agree.”

The group was by this time out of sight of the woman atop the neighboring tent. Of course, it certainly helped that Chuckles was walking beside them, narrating their current location as they went.

At this location was a structure shaped like the spines of an umbrella, from which hung a large variety of capes, in both child and adult sizes, brightly colored on both front and back. Sparks found herself strangely attracted to a bright red adult-sized example.

“Why are they so short?” she asked the pony beside her. “And this scalloped design on the bottom...”

“It’s for catching the wind, my dear. We are about a decade past the last time that anybody considered a dress cape useful. Those long weighted capes are meant to accessorize standing still, with their dull exterior sides contrasted with striking interiors exposed with every slightest move. These capes, on the other...um, hand, are designed for motion, for people on the go! You see, I dream of the day when the dreary streets of your cities will be accented by the bright colors of my capes—it would go a long way towards making them look like the...some of the places I used to know, places I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to. And...”—the pony actually started producing tears at this point, so well was she trained to respond to the tone of her mistress’ voice—“...if it turns out I can’t ever return there, at least I can make this place a little bit brighter, a little bit more hopeful, a little bit more...home.”

Chuckles kneeled down and produced a flower-patterned handkerchief out of his wrist to wipe away the pony’s tears.

“It makes me feel like I can fly!” exclaimed the girl with the pink cape tied around her neck, as she ran out of the shop.

“I’ll take it,” Sparks said with a bittersweet smile, gently rubbing the fabric of the red cape between her fingers. “This one too. I could use a little more flying in my life.”

The shop clerk rang up the purchases without a word, then repeated her procedure of closing up the shop.

“Thank you very much for your time, Rarity,” Sparks said as she walked into the late afternoon sunlight. Her eyes were not on the pony, but on the grinning woman sitting atop the big top.

The pony bumped her lightly, forcing her to shift her attention. “Think nothing of it,” the voice from the speaker said. “Are you sure you don’t want a longer interview? I had no idea that you big city reporters could be so accommodating! I’m not sure if I have anything else to say, but I do think that was rather short—don’t you?”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” the disguised reporter replied. “I’m pretty sure I know exactly how I’ll end this story.”


& & &





At first, I thought I was being tricked, for the Rarity I was introduced to then was the pony I had already met. That I was being asked to believe in the existence of talking magical unicorns, in this day and age.

But the truth was much more mundane, if a little heartbreaking. For you see, Rarity the Pony wore a speaker and an antenna, and somewhere nearby a woman with a microphone and another antenna was using that setup to talk to the first person she had met in months capable of fully understanding what she was doing in this easily missed North Jersey circus. The Other Rarity was a woman dedicated, even obsessed, with the idea of making everyone she met look as beautiful on the outside as she could see they were on the inside. But the one person her wonderful gift could never make presentable, the one person who would never be presentable to the world at large, was the human Rarity herself. So she hid behind a pony. Some, seeing the act without guessing the reason, would call her a gimmick in desperate search for celebrity. I instead proudly proclaim her to be the greatest undiscovered fashionista of the era, and I invite anyone who wishes to catch a glimpse of what beauty truly is to take a ride down the 95 to North Jersey, to track down the current whereabouts of the Pagliacci Brothers Family Circus, now on tour throughout the cultural wilds of northern New Jersey.







“Wow,” William Martin exclaimed a week later upon reaching the end of Sparks Nightly’s latest fashion article. “How did you manage to pull that off? Officer Gloomfeld only gave you a couple hours’ notice!”

“It wasn’t too hard,” Chuckles said as he reclaimed his copy of the newspaper. “I had a full collection of City sections, as the back pages are just packed with little articles I use to build all my conspiracy theories. Well...that I used to use. So I was able to get a good read on this ‘Sparks Nightly’ character from that, enough to figure out that like me, she had a profoundly suspicious mind, and would never buy the idea that Rarity could actually talk in a million years. After that, I just asked myself what would be necessary to trick me into believing what I wanted her to believe, and went with that. It wouldn’t have worked if Livinia wasn’t such a good actress.”

“I notice you didn’t have any problem lying to her.”

“I did not lie to her. Read that article again. I never once said that Livinia was supplying Rarity’s voice. I just presented her with an option that was more believable than the truth. And Rarity insisted on acting like herself after I let her in my plan—she could have played dumb, you know.”

William sighed as he turned to leave. “So in other words,” he said over his shoulder, “you made her famous by proving that Discord was absolutely right about us. This world may well have been as magical as Equestria once, but we humans killed the wonder by refusing to believe in it.”

Chuckles chose to say nothing in reply.
> Figure A: Video Cassette Recorder
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


(No circuit diagrams included—if it breaks, throw it away and buy another one!)

Figure A: Video Cassette Recorder





Presenting a brief interlude, set 4,000 kilometers west-by-southwest and 8 years in the future...





Billy Alden drove his gray 1985 BMW E30 with the utmost care through the pampered streets of Beverly Hills. Although he was wearing the gray suit, spotted burgundy tie and striped red shirt that screamed “yuppie” to the world at large, the wide-eyed look of panic on his face made it clear that this man had no idea what he was doing. That, and the fact that the BMW was a rental instead of a lease. The brown-haired, clean-shaven man was 29 years old, although he looked barely old enough to have a license to drive.

After several careful consultations of the large Thomas Bros. Guide spread open in the passenger seat, Billy finally managed to make his way to his destination: a large gray office building. Each floor of the five-story building was easily fifteen feet tall, and the tinted windows were each fifteen feet wide, meaning every room inside was an executive suite. At night, when the building was bathed in blue spotlights for big events that shone right through the tinting to illuminate the rooms inside, it looked...well, Billy thought it looked exactly like a gigantic parking garage, to be perfectly honest.

The building was in fact the world headquarters of the most exciting movie studio in America—The Cannon Group—Don LaFontaine said so, so it had to be true. The company’s name and its logo, a multi-lined hexagon consisting of a “C” and a right-pointing arrow, were displayed across the top of the building. Standing on its roof was a large billboard proclaiming the company’s latest magnum opus, The Delta Force (1986), starring Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin. Delta Force (1986) had been condemned as a travesty by all of the paid movie reviewers, racist cartoonish wish-fulfilment of the lowest-possible order. Nobody actually admitted to watching a Cannon movie (they waited until it came out on VHS), and yet somehow the company kept making money. Perhaps the building’s location provided a clue: despite the fact that everyone working there swore they were in Beverly Hills, the Cannon Group building was in fact situated across the street in Los Angeles, where the rent was much lower. And besides, not every film Cannon put out was as awful as Delta Force. Next Friday the billboard was slated to be re-worked to advertise something called Highlander. Nobody knew what to make of that one, although it was nice that they got Queen to contribute the title song:





Here we are, born to be kings—
We're the princes of the universe.
Here we belong, fighting to survive
In a world with the darkest powers.



And here we are, we're the princes of the universe.
Here we belong, fighting for survival—
We've come to be the rulers of you all!




Billy Alden pulled his BMW into the little parking garage located next door to the gigantic parking garage. He steered the car down a floor, to the maintenance level, out of everyone’s sight. After parking, and checking the view through every window and mirror, and checking the time on his (imitation) Rolex, and then checking the windows and mirrors again, he cautiously removed a gold pocket watch from inside his suit. Cradling the centuries-old relic in both hands, he carefully opened it and pressed down on the stem.

At that moment, a tiny little purple unicorn (of the same general proportions as Rarity) appeared standing on the watch glass and staring up in his general direction. “If you can see and hear this illusion,” the creature said in a far-off voice, “that means that you must be a member of the Alden family, and located somewhere where non-Aldens cannot see. My name is Twilight Sparkle, and I have enchanted this watch to assist your family with their pledge to rescue my friends through the centuries. The watch is indestructible, and will find a way to return to one of you if it is ever separated by more than a hundred pony-lengths...” At this point the unicorn turned her head to hear the words of someone not included in the recording. “That would be about a tenth of a mile. I figured that having these kinds of features would be necessary to convince members of your family as to the veracity of my—”

Billy wasn’t listening to any of this, as he was busy examining the edges of the watch, where several colored lines had appeared at the same time as the unicorn. After carefully making up his mind, he stuck a fingernail into a particular groove and wiggled it slightly. This caused the miniature pony to disappear mid-speech, to be replaced by a pink-colored arrow. The arrow did not simply lie flat on the face of the watch, but in fact stuck out of the watch to point nearly straight up.

“Right,” Billy said quietly to himself as he closed and pocketed the watch. “Now I just have to convince my boss that any of this is real.”


& & &


After grabbing his gray Gucci briefcase from the trunk of his car—a briefcase that contained nothing except for his sack lunch, Billy Alden crossed over from the parking garage to the office building, checked in with the Uzi-armed security guard, and boarded the elevator to the fifth floor. (In Hollywood, they take bad movie making very seriously.) Instead of elevator music, the young man was besieged by the motivational speeches of professional announcer Don La Fontaine—in other words, movie trailers for Cannon Group films. “A new age of terror requires a new breed of warrior.” “The adventure of a lifetime is coming to a theater near you.” “Charles Bronson is the one man who cannot be stopped.”

The visual accompaniment to this aural assault came in the form of twin movie posters. The poster on Billy’s left depicted a grassy hill near Boston harbor in the era of the Revolutionary War, British redcoats armed with muskets climbing into the smoke of battle. Through a hole in that smoke was visible a squinting Italian man in a trench coat and a burly mustache, armed with a laser-bazooka. At his feet was the body of a woman in Colonial period costume with curly pink hair. “In 1776, the British owned the greatest empire the world had ever known. But then they took Pr. Chonoton’s woman, and now he’s going to take everything from them.” (Never try to get your history from Cannon Group movie posters.) The other poster showed a snowy rugged landscape, with German Panzer tanks converging on a lone shirtless mustachioed Italian man standing over the body of the same pink-haired dead woman in the exact same pose, with only her costume changed into something worn by an Andrews Sister. The man was armed only with a single-button remote control...and the fifty-foot tall mustachioed robot with enormous biceps looming behind him. “Pr. Chonoton only wanted to pick a good year to settle down in. Too bad the year he picked...was 1941.” The movie being advertised on the right was Live Free, or Die Trying (1981). Its sequel on the left was Live Free, or Die Some More (1983). They were the first and second movies written by Billy’s boss, Cannon’s number one screenwriter and money-maker, Matthew P. Black.

Mr. Black had the entire fifth floor to himself. Even Menahem Golan, the president of the company, took his office on a lower floor—and not the fourth floor either, as that was reserved for Cannon Group’s prop department. Billy Alden exited the elevator and made his way over to Room 530, Matthew Black’s corner office. As he walked, he passed poster after poster for Mr. Black’s films after his Live Free films: A Good Man’s Grave (1982), Dance with the Reaper (1984), The Graveyards Are All Full (1985). The posters followed the usual pattern for Cannon Group action films: Two partially-undressed men would be leaping towards the camera while shooting off some manner of firearm, propelled by the power of several explosions behind them. One man would be scowling more than the other, thereby designating him as the villain. The tasteful placement of a vehicle or two in the corner would be the only means of identifying the film’s setting. Oh, and somewhere, harder and harder to see as the years went by, would be that same dead woman with pink hair.

Billy checked Room 530, but Matthew Black was nowhere to be found. He stopped for a moment to stare at the extra-large poster mounted behind Mr. Black’s executive chair. It was called American Tidal Force (1986), and it somehow managed to use the exact same layout as the other posters, despite the fact that the antagonist in this movie was a hundred-foot tall tsunami possessed by the spirit of an evil ninja. If you looked really closely, you could even see that the wall of water was somehow firing a sub machine gun. During Billy’s interview for the job as Mr. Black’s assistant, the writer had bragged that he had been “this close to talking Chuck Norris into playing the killer tidal wave.”

“Matt?” Billy called out as he left the office. “Matt, are you here?” As his assistant, Billy was the only one allowed to call him Matt—in fact, his boss insisted upon it. Hearing nothing in reply, Billy hesitantly pulled out his pocket watch once again and activated it. The pink arrow was pointed towards the Television Room. The fifth floor of Cannon Group HQ had its own film screening room, but the Television Room was more useful for when Mr. Black just wanted a quick check of a videotape in Cannon’s library.

Matthew P. Black was a thirty-something man of average height and exquisite taste (in clothes), favoring Armani suits and Givenchy shoes. He truly was the yuppie that Billy Alden only pretended to be. He had slicked back black hair, piercing blue eyes, angular features...and abnormally large nostrils. At least, they looked abnormally large from Billy’s perspective. Maybe it was just because Billy was currently looking down upon a Matthew Black that was spread-eagled on his back in the middle of the Television Room, not the best possible perspective to be seen from. Mr. Black’s Armani suit was rumpled and stained, one of his Givenchy shoes was missing, and he had a five o’clock shadow, which for a yuppie was completely unacceptable. An empty cognac bottle lay next to his hand—this on the other hand was completely acceptable. Three of the room’s five television sets were on and showing static, with videotapes sticking out of their attached VHS players.

The pink arrow was pointed directly at Mr. Black’s head.

Billy quickly put the watch away as Mr. Black began stirring. He knelt down to help the elder man up. “Are...are you OK, Matt?”

Mr. Black gave Billy a look of complete desperation. “Am I haunted?” he asked his assistant with complete earnestness. “Because if I’m not haunted, I must be insane.”

Billy Alden helped Mr. Black into a rolling chair that was wedged into a corner of the room. “I don’t think you’re insane, Matt. You’re not looking that good, though.” He glanced around him, and took in the rancid smell of the room. “Have you been in here all night?”

Mr. Black mumbled an affirmative.

“You need to get yourself cleaned up,” Billy suddenly decided. He tried to rouse Mr. Black from the chair, but failing that, he rolled it out of the room and down a hallway to the restroom. He pushed the chair into the restroom, allowed the door to close behind it, and walked back to his boss’ office to await his return. “Yes, get you back to yourself, and whatever is troubling you will suddenly clear itself up, I just know it!” he yelled over his shoulder.


& & &


Billy spent his time waiting in Room 530 looking at Mr. Black’s things. Besides the desk, three chairs and the movie poster, there was also a “word processor”—not the software, but a digital typewriter with an 80 character by four line screen that people in the 80’s used before computers completely took over the world. Something that hadn’t been modernized, though, was Mr. Black’s rolodex. Billy decided to see if Mr. Black’s doctor was in the rolodex...just in case. What he found instead was a photograph that had been trimmed and inserted into the deck just like another contact card. A younger Matthew Black was sitting on a bench with a checkered jacket and a genuine 1970’s mustache. His arm was around the shoulders of a petite woman in a white dress. Sitting in each of their laps was a little boy, aged around three. The woman looked like she was living exactly the life she had always dreamed of. Matthew Black had the look of a cornered and desperate animal.

Billy pulled out the photograph and looked at the back. Written in a fine cursive were the words “Matt, May and the boys, 1976.” Billy quietly put the photograph back in the Rolodex. With that one exception, there was no evidence anywhere in the office that Matthew P. Black belonged to any family at all.

It took another five minutes for Mr. Black to finally return to his office. “It didn’t clear itself up, in case you were wondering,” he grumbled, as he sat down in his chair. “I still don’t know if I’m crazy or possessed.”

Billy, sitting in his expected chair off to the side of where a client would sit, picked up a notepad and pen for a moment, but then decided that discretion was probably for the best and put them back down. “Perhaps you should begin at the beginning, Matt,” he said quietly, “so I can reach some sort of judgment, if that’s what you want.”

Mr. Black leaned back in his chair. “Yes, I suppose that would be best.

“It started right after I hired you yesterday. No sooner had you left the building, but I was summoned down to Menahem’s office. ‘Matthew,’ he told me, ‘I’ve got a favor to ask of you, and I know you’re not going to like it, but you’re better off not knowing the reason.’”

Billy pictured Menahem Golan in his office, a man literally larger than life, with his frizzy gray hair and speaking in his thick Israeli accent, sitting in his low office chair looking up at the standing Matthew Black on the other side of his desk, and yet still managing to make clear from his look who was the boss of the company.

“Then he told me he wanted me to change up the formula for my next picture, to let the girl live for once. I thought it was an odd request, and I let Menahem know it. ‘You’ve got other pictures in production,’ I reminded him, ‘pictures like America 3000 (1986) where women are the main characters. Art pictures like Duet for One (1986) where practically nobody dies. If you’ve grown a conscience all of a sudden, why do you have to inflict it on me?’

“We had a good laugh over that one. And then he said, ‘Matthew, my boy, there’s some promises that you just have to keep, and this is one of them. I need a script with your name on it, where the female love interest makes it to the closing credits.’

“‘It’ll bomb,’ I warned him. ‘Or at the very least break even.’”

Matthew Black spread out his arms and shrugged broadly in imitation of his very physically expressive boss. “And Menahem sighed and agreed with me. ‘But it’s got to be done.’

“I decided I’d like to see his ‘reason’. He warned me against it, and God knows he was right—I wouldn’t be in this mess if I didn’t insist. But he eventually broke and handed over a letter that he had laminated and kept in a drawer in his desk. I wasn’t allowed to take that letter out of his office, but I remember its general contents well enough.

“It was written by somebody named Radiance, or Reliance, or Rare—”

“Rarity?” Billy asked suddenly.

“Yeah, that sounds right. You heard of him?”

“Her,” Billy corrected. “She was a fashion designer from nearly a decade ago.” He hoped he wouldn’t be asked anything else about her.

Mr. Black shook his head. “Well that just makes things stranger. Anyway, the letter was from 1978, and addressed to both Meneham and Yoram [Yoram Globus, Menahem’s cousin and the other owner of the Cannon Group]. This Rarity lady congratulated the two of them on their Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination for the movie Operation Thunderbolt (1977) and then went on to reveal that the current owners of Cannon were on the verge of bankruptcy, and looking for trustworthy buyers.”

Billy leaned forward in his chair. “So you’re saying that Rarity was responsible for Golan and Globus buying the Cannon Group? What did she get out of it?”

“Nothing, unless she bought a lot of stock beforehand. But there’s more—the letter specifically named me, and insisted that giving me free reign to write movies my way would make the company incredibly wealthy. She, um, managed to word that as regretfully as possible.”

“Huh,” Billy said as he thought this over. “So she was some kind of psychic?”

Mr. Black shrugged. “Probably. Anyway, for these two revelations, she had one price: ‘that Matt Black was to stop killing Pinkie Pie, even if for only one picture.’”

Billy Alden got very still all of a sudden. Mr. Black failed to notice.

Instead, he rolled his eyes in recreation of his reaction to his boss’ order. “‘I haven’t been killing anyone!’ I insisted. Menehem told me that the phrase was referring to all of the characters that this ‘Pinkie Pie’ has been playing through the years. The name meant absolutely nothing to me.” Black punctuated this statement by slamming a fist on his table, before sighing and continuing his tale.

“‘But surely you know the members of your own repertory company,’ Menahem insisted. ‘Although come to think of it, the girl’s the only one who keeps showing up.’”

At this point in the story, Mr. Black got up and led Billy Alden back to the Television Room, which had been thoroughly sprayed with Lysol to make it inhabitable again.

“Menahem’s story was ridiculous,” Black continued, “or so I thought at the time.” He picked up a tape, stuck it in one of the videotape players, and started fast-forwarding it to a specific point. He continued his story as he was doing this. “As he was getting yet another call from Frank Langella pleading to increase the makeup budget for Masters of the Universe (1987), I excused myself to the records room downstairs, where I found that there was indeed an actress named Pinkie Pie credited to every single one of the ‘motivational death’ parts I put in all of my scripts. But paperwork is easy to mess with. I came back up to this room to see the truth for myself. I started with Live Free, or Die Trying (1981), because I distinctly remember sitting in on the casting sessions with Kathy Lorza for the part of Betsy Ross, Pr. Chonoton’s love interest. I remember that I wanted to get a respectable character actress that was both older looking, but also believable that my star could fall head over heels in love with her. I was positive that Patty Duke had ended up getting the part, because she had good chemistry with Franco Nero. But I got to her big scene, and I didn’t see Patty Duke, I saw this woman.”

The scene on the television showed a pink-haired young woman in colonial garb trying to cheer up a grumpy man in a lab coat, reading jokes from the Joe Miller Joke Book (1739) she held in one hand. The nearly complete Betsy Ross flag was draped over a nearby chair.

“There was this poet who was born without a nose,” the lady recited, “and as he was walking along the riverside, a beggar-woman came up to him and began saying ‘God preserve your eyesight! The Lord preserve your eyesight!’ And the poet asked, ‘Why do you pray so much for my eyesight?’ So the woman replies, ‘Well, if it should please God that you grow dim-sighted, where would you hang your spectacles on?’ Or, how about this: A lady was asked her opinion of a gentleman’s singing, who suffered from halitosis. ‘The words are good,’ she said, ‘but the air is intolerable!’” She flipped a few more pages, and got excited. “Oh-oh-oh! There being a very great disturbance one evening at the Drury-Lane playhouse, Mr. Wilkes, coming upon the stage to say something to pacify the audience, had an orange thrown full at him! Mr. Wilkes took up the fruit and made a low bow, saying, ‘This is no civil orange, I think.’ That’s a good one, right?”

And then a Redcoat burst through the door and bayonetted her to death in slow motion. Which Billy thought to be a bit of an overreaction.

Black froze the video on Franco Nero’s anguished reaction. “After seeing this other woman playing the part, I hunted down Kathy, who’s currently in Marketing, and asked her who she remembered hiring to play Betsy Ross.

“‘Pinkie Pie,’ she replied, ‘the same person you got to play Mata Hari in the sequel. Stroke of genius there, hiring an actress whose checks always bounce. We just keep paying her the same $500 for every picture!’”

Mr. Black walked down the line of VHS players, rewinding and playing tapes to show scene after scene after scene of the pink-haired woman. The last tape he prepared instead showed the closing credits—he paused the tape to show the credit of “Jane” played by “Pinkie Pie”. “This is where it really starts to go crazy,” he told Billy. “You see, there is no Pinkie Pie. Nobody exists with that name—I pulled quite a few favors last night to be absolutely sure, but it’s true. It’s like she only exists in my movies.” Mr. Black laughed a little too loud at this point. “But you can see already that that’s impossible. Somebody had to film her, somebody had to costume her. In short, this Pinkie Pie character had to have her own unit.” 

Black un-paused the movie that was playing credits and fast-forwarded it a bit, to bring up some more credits. “And that’s what turned out to be true: she did have her own unit. I had a second unit all this time that I knew nothing about, because they weren’t being paid. But they sure were getting credited: D. Chord, Director. D. Chord, Editor. D. Chord, Cinematographer. D. Chord, Sound Effects! D. Chord, in short, was anything and everything.

“I tried to find him. No good—he disappeared without a trace three months ago. But somehow Pinkie Pie’s scene in American Tidal Force (1986) managed to film itself, because sure enough, the print of it I checked in the projection room has her in it!”

Billy Alden took in all the scenes playing around him of Pinkie Pie doing her stuff, and picked up various scattered remote controls to replay them over and over. Her scenes were all incredibly short, usually less than a minute to establish that the main character loved her, and then she would be blown to smithereens. Or shoved off a cliff into the jaws of a waiting alligator. Or the hero would suddenly find her head in his refrigerator. As R-rated films became more and more violent over the course of the 1980’s, so went the dignity delivered to Pinkie Pie’s characters.

Pinkie Pie did the best she could in these brief scenes to bring her various characters to life. She knitted, or she recited random lines of Shakespeare. Mostly, she worked the typewriter like it was a piano. Her characters were variously failed novelists, college professors reviewing papers, homebodies expressing themselves through poetry or cook books, or merely a frustrated wife with no better way to express herself. Billy also noticed that Pinkie Pie would occasionally be able to get him to laugh at her antics before her inevitable demise—a little dance, or a pie to the face of the man with the Uzi. It was the only time that Billy ever remembered laughing at a Cannon Group film...even the (sex) comedies.

Mr. Black sat down on the arm rest of his rolling chair. “So eventually I was forced to admit that there was some bizarre sort of conspiracy, with the goal of forcing some obscure actress to play the same role over and over, as...what, some sort of feminist protest? I dunno. I’m still mad that I’m being manipulated like this, but I was at least willing to entertain the idea of letting her inevitable character in my next script live. But what would I write?

“The easiest answer would have been to write something that doesn’t follow my usual—and very successful—formula. I had Marie Marvingt’s translated autobiography that I won in the divorce—the only damn thing that May liked that I managed to take from her in the settlement after she took everything of mine, the greedy little b....” The screenwriter suddenly cut himself off to take a labored breath before continuing. “Anyway, I figured a biopic of her would be perfect. You remember Marvingt, right? The world-famous stunt pilot from the 20’s?”

Matthew Black picked up the battered old hardcover book from the seat of the chair it had been resting on, and flipped through the pages for a few seconds before handing it over to Billy. “Read that part out loud,” he instructed. “I really need to know that those words are actually there.”

“‘I suppose someday somebody might want to make a movie about me,’” the passage began. “‘But I hope it isn’t anytime soon. Most of the silent movies I try to watch just bore me—somebody needs to hurry up and invent sound already. And the flying stunts in movies...well, they’re good, but nowhere near the level of my good. But let’s say it’s the future, and the movie people know how to make an awesome movie, so they’re finally ready to do my story justice. And whoever writes the script for this story, let’s call him Matt...” Billy paused for a bit in discomfort before continuing. “Matt Black. If Matt is trying to condense my life down to nine reels or less, let him take this advice: no sidekicks. It might be tempting, you know, so you’ve got somebody to bounce the exposition off of. But you shouldn’t do it. You know why? Because I know if you give me a sidekick, Matt, you’re going to cast Pinkie Pie for the part and kill her off, again. And I’m getting really tired of that.’ That’s...quite a wild coincidence,” Billy said lamely as he handed the book back.

“So you don’t know why she wrote that.”

“Why would I know?” asked Billy.

Black flipped the book back to the front page. “Because this book was translated from French to English by Roger Alden in 1928...your grandfather?”

Billy squirmed. “Ah, he did a lot of translation work—did you know that he did the first translation of Gide’s The Counterfeiters (1925)? I always thought that it would make for a great movie.”

Black let the book fall back into the chair with a groan. “Whatever. I got myself well and truly drunk at that point, and eventually, I passed out. Then came the absolute lowest point of my experience. I had a dream—a nightmare! These gigantic green eyes emerged from the darkness and began boring into my soul! ‘Matt Black!’ a woman’s voice cried out to me with a Southern accent. ‘Stop killing Pinkie Pie!’”

Matt laughed at that point at the ludicrousness of his dream, running one hand over his hair. “I...I think the dream got lucid at that point, because I got right up into those eyes and yelled back, ‘She ain’t real!’ And the eyes sort of pulled back and were part of some alien horse-dog like creature, with blonde hair like a lady, and a cowboy hat on her head. I swear I’m not making this up! ‘Well, could you stop killing her anyway?’ the alien said, all flustered. ‘Using Hopi magic to haunt you from 1881 isn’t exactly easy you know. Couldn’t you just, you know, not kill her for variety’s sake? I promise I won’t haunt you again if you do it.’

“‘How are you haunting me from 1881?’ I asked. Yeah, I know, there are like a million better questions I could have asked, but that is what I went with. 

“The horse alien rolls her way-too-big eyes and says, ‘Time isn’t really a barrier when it comes to dream magic,’ like that was common knowledge or something.

“‘Well, I know one way I can do what you ask,’ I said. ‘Why don’t I write a screenplay about your life story? I’ll be sure not to kill Pinkie-Whoever that way.’”

It was at this point that Billy Alden began to mentally apply the word “overkill” to this entire scenario.

Matt Black on the other hand was really getting into the story. “And she started going on about how she wasn’t that important, and I countered that time-traveling aliens using Hopi magic to haunt people from 1881 are plenty interesting, and then Pinkie countered that nobody was going to believe any of this, and I said that if Cannon was willing to pay Tobe Hooper to make a film about naked vampire aliens hiding in Halley’s Comet trying to start a zombie apocalypse in the heart of London [Lifeforce (1985)] that surely they’d go hog wild for cowboys and aliens, but May still had to be the doubter, so I told her to kindly shut the f—”

“Hold on, hold on!” Billy interrupted, suddenly excited. “Was it Pinkie Pie in this dream, or May your ex-wife?”

“Who said May had anything to do with this?” Matt protested. “But...yeah, the phantom actress was in my dream, right out of nowhere, and I didn’t even notice.”

Billy stood up and grabbed Matt’s hand. “Come with me,” he ordered.


& & &


Matt Black allowed himself to be led back to his office without resistance.

Billy pulled the photo out of the rolodex and showed it to Matt, pointing to the woman with curly red hair. “That’s your ex-wife, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“And if you were casting the story of your life, who would you pick to play her?”

Matt shrugged. “I dunno...Lucille Ball in her prime?”

“Or Pinkie Pie?”

“I guess. They’ve got the same general body type. So what?”

Billy took Matt’s hand. “Why’d the marriage fail, Matt?”

Matt yanked his hand back. “It just did, OK? She was the homecoming queen at the senior dance, I was the quarterback for the football team. Everybody expected us to get married, so we got married, and had kids. And...” He started messing with the carpet with the toe of his shoe.

“And...?”

“And I realized one day that I didn’t love her, or the kids. That I probably never loved them. That there was something wrong with me. That, or...she did something to kill the love. So we got divorced, and it got really, really nasty.” Matt nervously started to rub a thumb alongside his chin. “All of our friends picked one side or the other. Mine told me I couldn’t really come out of it with my manhood intact if I didn’t hurt her, hard. But everything I tried just bounced back in my face. I used to be in real estate, Billy. I picked up a pretty good job in my father-in-law’s company. But all that was taken away. Both houses—even though she never spent any time in the cabin. She got the kids, the alimony, the car, any hope of my ever getting a job in academia thanks to her connections...she even got my typewriter! And all I got was a second-hand book and the need to get her back for what did to my pride.” Matt sat down in the client seat and sighed. “So I cast Pinkie Pie as her doppelganger and I killed her. Again and again and again. In some dark corner of my subconscious so I’d never have to feel guilty. Maybe I thought it was therapy.”

Billy put his hand on Matt’s shoulder and smiled. “And now?”

“And now I need to purge her from my head. Maringvt’s life story is off limits, apparently, but how about Andy Warhol? He was in the news recently. Pinkie can play Edie Sedgwick. That’s a happy ending, right?”

Billy looked down at him incredulously. “Sedgwick died of a drug overdose.”

Matt looked up in confusion. “She did? When?”

Billy groaned. “Look, I think the whole problem here is that we’re taking Pinkie Pie’s free agency away from her. What kind of movie would she want to be in?”

Matt pointed at his head. “You’re treating her like she’s a real person, instead of a magical...construct or whatever. She hasn’t got a free agency to...to...wait.” He got up and walked out of the office, Billy trailing behind him.

Back in the Television Room, Matt rewound four of the films in the VHS players to show Pinkie Pie’s scenes again. He paused one of the tapes. “There,” he said, pointing at the piece of paper visible in the typewriter Pinkie was working on. “The script I wrote for this scene says that that’s supposed to be a letter to the newspaper. Does that look like a letter to you?”

Billy leaned in close to look. “It looks more like a screenplay to me.”

“And these four movies are in chronological order. See how the pile of paper is taller in each scene? It’s almost like she’s—”

“Like she’s writing her own movie!” Billy exclaimed. 

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but...to the prop department!”





Susan, the woman in charge of the prop department on the fourth floor, looked at the two men like they were insane. But she worked for Menahem Golan, so this was an everyday sort of thing for her. She came back ten minutes later shaking her head in wonder, holding the complete script for Flying Dogs (1987), by Pinkie Pie.

“Well this is ridiculous,” Matt said after a few minutes of flipping through the manuscript, Billy looking over his shoulder. “Comedy and action pictures simply don’t mix. Didn’t she watch King Solomon’s Mines (1985)?”

“Well, this one seems to be working, Matt,” Billy offered. “It’s funny, it’s action-packed, and the lead role that Pinkie Pie obviously wrote for herself lives to the end of the picture. Add to that the fact that Cannon’s never made a movie about either computer networks or Cold War spying before. I think this could actually work.”

“One problem, though,” Matt said, flipping back to the front of the manuscript. “It’s written by Pinkie Pie. Not me.”

“She doesn’t exist, remember?” Billy replied. “So that means there’s no legal objection why you can’t just replace this front page with one that gives you the credit and hand it over to Menahem. Problem solved!”

“You think she will mind?” Matt asked.

“JUST DO IT!”

Matt looked wildly around him. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” asked Billy.

“It sounded...never mind,” Matt said, shaking his head violently. “Come on back to my office so we can finish looking this over. Looks like we might be working overtime tonight.”

Billy grabbed the script from his boss. “I’ll do the editing and filing work—it’s what you hired me for, after all. I suggest you call your ex.”

“And why would I do that?” challenged Matt.

“You told me that your so-called friends made your divorce as awful as it became. Have you considered that the same thing might have happened with her as well? At the very least, you have a quite considerable debt to pay back to your now teenage sons. I mean, do you even remember their names?”

“Sure,” said Matt flippantly. “One’s named Chuck, and the other’s Charles, although we call him Chuck as well.”

Billy rolled his eyes. “That’s our lead actors.”

“I know that.” Matt looked fondly at the rolodex photo. “Anything I can arrange for you before I go?”

“Just order me the usual Cannon dinner.”

“Fried chicken in Styrofoam containers?”

“That’s the one.”

Matt Black laughed out loud as left his assistant in control of his own office. “Oh Billy,” he said, “thank God that you at least weren’t part of this insane conspiracy.”

Billy Alden could do little more than roll his eyes ironically behind Matt Black’s back.
> Figure 10: Air Cushion Restraint System
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 10: Air Cushion Restraint System





Rarity had put a great deal of time over the past couple of months dispelling the notion among humans that she was a “common animal”. As fashion writers had come to visit the circus, first in ones or twos but eventually in dozens, she had always strove to keep her temper and present herself as at least a well-trained pet, for the majority of visitors who bought into the illusion that there was a “real Rarity” hiding somewhere in the shadows. Even for the first two New Jersey fashion shows, which she won with ease, she kept her excitement in check. But now that the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel shone in the late afternoon sun, and the enormous city beyond beckoned...well, perhaps it was no coincidence that the Panapet was playing Gloria Gaynor’s cover to “Goin’ Out of My Head”.

“So...so many different buildings! Where’s the Fashion District? Is that the Statue of Independence? No, I suppose that would be on the other side of the island. So that flat area over there is Central Park? What about Equestrian Avenue? Or the Griffish Empire Building?” She was hopping from one side of the Pagliacci Bros. van to the other to take in all the sights through the small windows, the speaker strapped loosely to her back sliding this way and that. Draped on top of the speaker was one of her now signature capes, this one gold with the “swoop and eyes” logo of Carousel Boutique.

“Would you calm down?!” bellowed Julia from the driver’s seat. “I only got my license a couple days ago, and you’re not making things any easier.” As the lone member of the van not attending a formal event, she was dressed in a faded Coca-Cola logo tee-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers.

Rarity stopped, practically in mid-air, and settled down into the rear bucket seat. “Oh, well I’m dreadfully sorry about that little outburst. It’s just that I’ve been reading so much about your human Manehattan—via back issues of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, and now...” She gestured back at the rack of designs that were installed at the back of the van. “To finally have a chance to show my designs in one of the premiere fashion cities on your planet!”

“‘Manehattan’,” William said with a grin. “I suppose that is pony-ese for ‘Manhattan’?”

“That is the correct name for the part of New York City where we will be visiting, is it not?” Rarity asked, stretching her long neck around the back of the bucket seat ahead of her to try to see who she was speaking to.

“Well, I don’t believe that that island has been referred to as ‘Manhattan’ since the 20’s,” said William with an air of authority. “Everybody just calls it ‘The Big City’ now, or, if you wish to appear erudite, you could use the Greek form of—”

“Hey, nice conversation there,” Julia quickly interrupted, “but somebody needs to hand me a buck-fifty for the toll, pronto!”

“I’ve got it,” said Antonia, handing over a bill and coins that she pulled out of a gold purse. Her hair was freshly permed and arranged into a sort of cloud around her face, and she was wearing a thin black wrap over a gold lamé blouse, with red leather pants, gold heels and a string of pearls around her neck. Beside her, William was wearing brown shoes, brown slacks and a brown sports jacket, over a green dress shirt and a mustard-yellow bow tie. Antonia figured the chances were good that she would be let into a disco club with her current ensemble. Getting her husband in dressed like that? Not so good.

“And thank you once again for agreeing to drop us off and pick us up,” William said. “You know full well how hard it is to get overnight parking in the City.”

“Well that, and I don’t want anybody stealing or graffiting Benny,” Julia admitted as she paid the attendant.

“You...named the van?” asked Antonia.

“Well, I’m the one driving everybody around now that Piera decided to try being a normal teenage girl for a change, so I think that makes the van mine, more or less.” She looked over at the girl, who was sitting in the passenger seat. Piera was wearing a black and white speckled jacket with a fur-lined hood over a white gypsy shirt, striped black-and-white bloomers, and black-and-white sneakers. Under the sleeves of the jacket were located the necessary silver chains, and the equally-necessary electric blue ear warmers were also in place. The jacket looked more than a little out of place on this early August evening, but a fae’s blood normally runs quite a bit colder than a human’s, especially when her magic is being suppressed. Oh, and the original fur trims and linings had been replaced with synthetics, out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to Rarity. (“But darlings, animal fur provides the best materials! Just so long as they’re not intelligent and were treated humanely in life, you can use pony fur for all I care!”)

“You’re in the wrong lane,” Piera quietly pointed out from the passenger seat.

“Gaaah!”


& & &


Once in the city proper, the van slowly made its way towards the center of the island. Now everybody was gawking out of the windows, but it wasn’t to see the wonders of the city.

The Big City in 1978 had some resemblance to a bombed-out European city from 1945. At least one in every three buildings they drove by were clearly abandoned, with broken windows and fire-gutted interiors. Random spray-painted graffiti in a variety of colors covered the walls, but the most common motif was the letter “L”, rendered in a variety of styles.

“Why would anybody do something like this?” Rarity asked incredulously.

“For the insurance money,” Antonia explained. “Most businesses have gotten so bad that arson’s the only alternative to declaring bankruptcy. They tried to apply for a federal bailout a couple years ago, and President Ford basically told the city to drop dead. Plus there was that blackout last summer—practically the entire city turned to looting every unprotected business they could find. And it’s not like there are any police around to stop it—thanks to out-of-control corruption, most of the city taxes end up being paid to the Families instead of actually making things better for the common people. Now Little Italy at the southern end of the island...that neighborhood looks like Paradise compared to this.” She spent a moment to reflect on what she just said. “Perhaps it’s right that the Family got kicked out.”

“Hold on, did I miss something?” Rarity asked, her attention suddenly drawn to the interior of the van.

Julia laughed. “Didn’t you notice all the people in suits wandering through the circus in the past week?”

“Well, um, yes,” Rarity admitted, “but I was so busy preparing for this show that I didn’t really notice, if you get my understanding. So that was the Corraglios? What happened?”

“They got evicted, is what happened,” Julia replied. “It turned out there was a balloon payment on the mortgage of the Coragglio Family headquarters, one that nobody remembered, but that’s been due since 1954. With interest, that came out to nearly a quarter million dollars and legally, the Corraglios don’t have anywhere near that amount of money, so they moved out, and some mega-corporation took over.”

“Legally...right,” said Rarity. “So, are they just living in the spare tents now? What’s going to happen to them?”

“Oh, I’ve been driving Papa around up and down the New Jersey countryside, putting up with his rants about getting revenge on the Luxite Redevelopment Corporation and looking for someplace for them to settle down. Of course they wanted Atlantic City, but there’s no way you’re going to get Atlantic City real estate on short notice. I figure we’ll wear them down in another month, and then they’ll settle for perfectly respectable digs...far away from us.” Julia made sure to put extra emphasis on the last part.

“Well, alright,” Rarity said reluctantly. “I am sorry to ignore your worries at a time like this. If there’s anything I can do to help, feel free to ask.”

“No, I think we can handle this just fine,” Julia said. “They’ve accepted my takeover of the ‘reject’ branch of their family, and that’s enough to keep us safe from any of their more outrageous plans. Right now I think you’d just be a complication.”

“Well, if you insist...oh, I do believe that is it!” Rarity tapped a white hoof on the window, at the multiple story building they were now approaching in the center of the Big City’s Garment District. The first floor was tall enough to allow for a performing theater, which was to be the performance venue for the “Fashion America Competition”, as proclaimed by a small banner. “The YSL Building. That stands for Yves Saint Laurent, world-famous fashion—”

“Yes, yes,” Julia said, pulling in to parallel-park. “Less talking, and more unloading. I don’t need a parking ticket added to my criminal record.”

Without a word, the four passengers jumped out of the nearest doors of the van. Piera removed a diamond-studded leash from her pocket, which she expertly looped around the silver collar that Rarity was wearing.

Already waiting for them was a young man in a black tuxedo and an oversized top hat. He had a large blue carnation in his button pocket and an oversized silver ring on his right hand. “Hurry, hurry!” he cried, consulting his ornate pocket watch. “You only have a few minutes to check in!” As soon as it was lowered to the street, he grabbed the garment rack and wheeled it into the building.

“Are you sure you’ve got everything?” Julia asked Rarity as she tried to get her bearings, the setting sun making it impossible to read several of the nearby street signs.

“Positive. Now you get the Martins checked into that hotel and then back to the front side of this building. I’m pretty sure you can make it before the show begins.”

“Goodbye!” William and Antonia cried out in chorus. “See you in a few!”

The man in the tuxedo emerged just as the van drove away. He gazed around him with a disinterested expression. “I am Ford Trelaine,” he announced, with a tone that expected a crowd of admirers instead of the two measly witnesses to his grand speech. “I am the organizer of this particular show. You may call me Mr. Trelaine. Now may I ask who is the designer here?”

Rarity stepped forward, opened her mouth, and...nothing came out. Of either her mouth or the speaker. She sat down in confusion.

Piera looked down with some concern at the pony. “R...Rarity,” she finally said in a low rasp.

“What was that?” the man demanded.

“R..Air...iTEE!” Piera croaked, her voice shifting nearly an octave up and down.

Mr. Trelaine’s response was to put a pinkie finger in one ear and twist it around. “Rarity,” he repeated. “Admission fee,” he then demanded.

Again, Rarity attempted to talk, and again she failed. She tried to gesture to Piera, and found even that act was difficult to accomplish.

Meanwhile, the girl pulled a fifty dollar bill out of her jacket pocket and handed it over with a neutral expression.

Ford Trelaine spent a moment examining the bill for authenticity, then quickly stuffed it into the breast pocket of the tuxedo. “The designer and designated assistant shall enter through this door for check-in.”

Piera began walking towards the door. She was surprised to find that Rarity wasn’t following her, and had to tug on the leash to get her to rise to her hooves. They then began walking towards the rear entrance.

“Now then...” Mr. Trelaine began, before looking down at the pony before him. “Oh, this will not do,” he said. “We will not be allowing any animals into the theater. This is a Big City competition, not New Jersey.”

Piera looked down at Rarity, expecting a rather loud rebuttal. Instead, she saw the pony’s eyes go wide as she tilted her head to the side.

With a desperate sigh, Piera turned back to face Mr. Trelaine. “R...arity,” she managed to say in a more-or-less even tone. She closed her eyes to concentrate. “You...invite...ed. Rarity.”

Mr. Trelaine looked at Piera in disgust, ignoring the unicorn entirely. “Yes, I invited Rarity, not her little pet/security blanket. If you are Rarity, then you may go inside, while I get Animal Services to—” And then he tried to take the leash away from Piera.

With a yelp, Rarity suddenly lunged at the man standing in their way, snapping her teeth an inch from the hand that was gripping the leash.

“Fine!” Mr. Trelaine huffed, yanking his hand away and deliberately turning his back on the pair. “In that case, you are hereby disqualified from the competition!”

“FIFty DOLlars!” Piera squeaked.

“No refunds!” And with that, he marched into the building and locked the door behind him, disappearing into the murky depths inside.

Rarity lowered her head for a moment, shaking it like a slobbery dog, and hit it a few times with a hoof in a much more human action. “What about my fashions!” she demanded, rearing up to pound her hooves on the glass. “You have no right to those! I demand you hand over my fashions this very minute!”

Mr. Trelaine re-appeared with a shotgun. “Who said that?!” he demanded.

Rarity collapsed to the ground as if she had already been shot.

With a laugh, the proprietor turned and walked back out of sight.

A few moments later, Rarity slowly and carefully got up and dusted herself off. She took a few steps down the sidewalk, until she was sure her line of sight into the building was broken before she decided to speak again. “This is not the end of this matter, Mr. Trelaine, mark my words! You’ll be hearing from my lawyer!”

“You don’t have a lawyer,” Piera whispered after they had turned the corner of the building to enter a narrow alley. “You could use ours...”

“I’d rather not,” Rarity said briskly. 

“What happened?” Piera asked, worry evident in her eyes.

“It was nothing,” Rarity said lightly. “I’m just not used to intimidation.”

“Should we go back?”

“NO! I mean, no, that will not be necessary. It’s not like anybody else in the fashion scene is using capes, so there’s little chance that they can get anything from those clothes without being forced to admit they stole them from me. Let’s find someplace to wait for the Martins.” 

The two of them made their way down the alley. As they did, Rarity would occasionally glance behind and around her, to make sure that Mr. Trelaine was nowhere near her. She tried her best to hide her terrified trembling from the girl next to her.





She tried to figure out what had just happened to her. In Ford Trelaine she had encountered a man so convinced that she was an animal that the conviction had started overturning reality—she had lost first her power of speech, then fine motor control, and in the end her thoughts had even been slipping into those of a domesticated animal.

She thought back to her first days on Earth, how she had to fight to establish her identity in her own mind every time she woke up, and how this process became easier the more friends she had who believed in her. Did all humans have this ability to shape the reality around them? And if that was the case, to be trapped in a place as miserable as the Big City surrounded by tens of millions of pessimists...





“Wait,” Rarity said via her speaker, suddenly stopping in her tracks. “That ring...was Mr. Trelaine fae?”

Piera nodded, then looked abashed. “I forgot that the rest of you can’t tell. Tell me the truth—did he do something to you?”

Rarity nodded sadly.

Piera scrunched up her features, and tried to get as much emotion into her whisper as possible. “Well, the next time one of them tries something, I’ll...! Undo it. Somehow.” She sighed. “The only powers I know how to use are the ones that hurt me more than anybody else. I’m useless.”

Rarity reached up a hoof to rest on the girl’s leg. “That is not true, Dear! You’re just don’t know what your purpose is. But someday you’ll figure it out and when you do, no one will be able to stop you! Just like my Sweetie Belle...Oh!”

Piera pulled out an ornate handkerchief to wipe at Rarity’s eyes. “There, there,” she whispered with a loving smile. “You don’t want to mess up your mascara now, do you?”

Rarity laughed. “No, of course not.” She waited until Piera had put away the hankie. “Shall we continue?” she then asked, a hoof outstretched.

Piera nodded, and with a few more steps, the pair of them emerged from the alley.


& & &


What they found at the front of the building was a near-riot.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Trelaine told the crowd via a megaphone from a second floor window, “but world-famous designer Rarity has decided to cancel at the last second. Said something about rather being caught dead than to set foot in New York City.”

“The nerve!” declared Rarity, rather quietly, so that neither Mr. Trelaine nor the crowd would notice. “I ought to step to the front of that crowd to correct things before they get entirely out of hoof. A...after Mr. Trelaine leaves, of course.”

Piera held up a small flier that she had found on the street.

“Come one, come all,” the paper read, “to see the un-masking of the mysterious fashion designer Rarity! Only $25 admission.”

Rarity groaned. “On second thought, let’s just wash our hooves of the whole thing.”

After a moment’s thought, Piera took off her jacket and draped it over Rarity’s shoulders, flipping the hood over her head.


& & &


Rarity and Piera waited on the corner of 6th and West 36th for nearly an hour, long enough for the crowd of gypped fashion fans to disperse. Rarity found that growling like a rabid dog did a good job of keeping the curious from getting too close. The whole time, Rarity would wince every few minutes as her sensitive ears picked up the screech of truck brakes on the nearby streets, and Piera would wince from the occasional groan of poorly maintained window unit air conditioners in the high-rises around them. The pair tried to keep their eyes out for the Pagliacci Bros. van, but in the end it was the Martins who found them first.

The first thing Rarity asked about was the van. “Is there any chance we can just go home?”

“What happened?” asked Antonia, kneeling down to peel back the jacket’s hood and take the pony’s head in her hands.

“And no, you’re too late,” William added. “There was a traffic jam near Penn Station, so Julia dropped us off. She’s probably halfway to the Tunnel by now.”

Rarity took a moment to collect herself. “The fashion show turned out to be a bit of a sham, I’m afraid. We lost the clothes, and the money, but I don’t really care about either of those right now.” She decided not to trouble the pair with the more disturbing news until they got home. “How about if we see the view from the city’s tallest building before heading back to the hotel and calling it a night? I’m sure we can find something interesting to see tomorrow.”

“Alright,” Antonia said, gently removing the jacket and returning it to Piera. “And then we can order something nice from room service. But first we need a taxi.”


& & &


It turned out that getting a taxi was easier said than done.

It wasn’t that it wasn’t hard to hail a taxi in the middle of the Garment District, but none of the drivers were willing to let Rarity ride with the humans, no matter how much all four of them protested about how well trained she was. One of the drivers even had the nerve to require that the pony wear a diaper before he would allow her to ride in his vehicle.

“This day is getting worse and worse!” Rarity proclaimed, raising a hoof dramatically to her brow. “It appears that this place resembles some of the worst stories I’ve heard about Manehattan back home.”

“Well, we’re in luck,” William said just then, walking back to the group after talking with a number of different drivers. “I found somebody who actually knows who you are, Rarity, and is willing to take us.”

“On what condition?” asked Antonia.

“An extra $20.” He pointed at the lone yellow Toronado in a sea of Checker cabs. The driver was standing outside, holding the passenger door open.

The group walked over to take a closer look.

“Well at least it looks somewhat luxurious,” Rarity noted, lightly touching the body of the vehicle with one hoof. “Anti-lock ABS, catalytic converters, power steering, brakes, windows and door locks, air conditioning...even driver and passenger air bags, not very common in this day and age.” She looked back towards the Martins. “Well I don’t think we’re going to get anything better tonight.”

“Oh very well,” Antonia said with a sigh. After checking to see that she still had sufficient cash, she squeezed past Rarity onto the small rear passenger seat. She was soon followed by William, Rarity and Piera.

“Where to?” asked the driver, a heavy-set man wearing dark sunglasses, after settling in.

“The World Trade Center is too far away,” Antonia said. “How about the Empire State Building?”

“Empire State, coming right up,” the driver said, pulling into traffic.


& & &


“So,” William asked Rarity a few minutes into their drive, “how does the Big City measure up against this Manehattan of yours?”

“Hard to say, really,” Rarity replied. “Since I’ve never been there in person before. Manehattan is sort of like the anti-Canterlot, for better or for worse.”

“I’m afraid that comparison is not going to help much,” said Antonia.

“Right, of course,” Rarity said with a smile. “Canterlot is the capital of my land, the place where royalty lives. It is a place of splendor, of tradition, the place where the aristocracy is at its strongest.

“Manehattan, by contrast, is place where individuality shines. It was independent from Equestria for nearly eight centuries after the NLR Riots, and even now, it is said that Princess Celestia is made to wait for a cab there just like anypony else. Ponies, griffons, diamond dogs and even a few utterly unique beings all live together there without prejudice, and anyone with talent has the chance to rise to a position of influence and power. It is the place where Equestrian fashion truly lives, because what is fashion but the vision of artistic individuals, their sole goal to make everyone from peasant to duchess as beautiful as possible.”

“So,” Piera commented “what you’re saying is that Canterlot is Order, while Manehattan is Chaos.”

Rarity took a moment to think this over. “I...never really thought if it that way...Equestrian teachings tend to label ‘Order’ as an absolute good, and ‘Chaos’ as an absolute evil. But more realistically, then yes, I suppose within the limits of what a pony would consider harmonious, Canterlot is on the side of Order, and Manehattan is on the side of Chaos. But of course, Discord took chaos too far, and now Buttercup II is taking order too far.”

Antonia looked outside the windows for the first time since she had gotten in the cab. “Excuse me,” she said, knocking on the partition between the driver and passenger compartments, “shouldn’t we be at the Empire State already?”

“Yeah, if that was where I was taking you,” the driver admitted sinisterly as he pulled over. Turning around in his seat, he opened a panel in the partition and pointed a large pistol at his passengers. “Now start shoving all your valuables through the slot, and nobody gets hurt.”

“Unbelievable!” exclaimed Rarity, clambering over Antonia to take her place behind the robber. “I don’t suppose you’re in cahoots with that horrible Mr. Trelaine?”

The robber put on an evil smile.

“I knew it!” Rarity declared. “You’re not going to get away with this!”

“I’d like to see you try anything,” the robber bragged. “You can’t unlock those doors, no matter what you try—that’s why I picked this particular luxury car to steal and disguise as a taxi.”

“You stole the car as well?!”

“Look, will you just shut your horsey up?!”

“I am a lady, dear sir, and don’t you forget it!” And with that, she reared around and bucked the partition hard enough to send the would-be robber falling towards the steering wheel.

At the same moment, Rarity ordered the car’s airbag to deploy. The quick combination of motions knocked the man out. A second later, the passenger doors unlocked themselves.

“There, that was easily enough solved,” Rarity said with a toss of her head. “With a little effort, I can probably use the radio to contact the police to handle this ruffian. After that, we just need to find...our...”

Waiting outside the doors of the fake taxi were nearly a hundred young men armed with everything from switchblades to semi-automatic machine guns. Absolutely none of them were armed with Star Wars laser pistols, or anything else electronic that Rarity would be able to control. Most of the men had cursive L’s sewn onto their shirts or baseball hats, appearing to be a form of gang identification.

“Nice applique work,” Rarity said deadpan, pausing for a moment before turning her mood to outrage. “Now where has that scoundrel taken us?!”

William gazed around at the collection of theaters, both musical and pornographic. “I’m afraid we’ve been taken to the worst, most crime-ridden spot in the whole of New York City: Times Square!”
> Figure 11: Turntable
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Figure 11: Turntable





From within the bogus taxicab, Piera looked around her with growing apprehension.

What few innocent bystanders there were in Times Square had quickly fled once the situation had become apparent. Of the police which Rarity had contacted—seemingly more concerned with the crime of using a taxi radio to broadcast on reserved frequencies than with the imminent threat to life and limb—there was nary a sign.

Correction—there was a sign, but it was not encouraging. Quite to everyone’s surprise, Officers Gloomfeld and Gruekin had emerged from the crowd dressed in leather and with blacked-up faces. Gruekin had tried to give a speech about how the pony in the cab was too famous to attack without repercussions, and how anyway they were there for a much more important purpose. This last remark was punctuated by pointing out a video camera and transceiver that were mounted on a pole taking in everything that was happening in that corner of Times Square.

The response to this argument came in the form of a single word emitted from a speaker mounted below the camera: “Narcs.”

After that, Gloomfeld and Gruekin were lucky to merely be clubbed into unconsciousness before the angry mob turned once more on the cab. A young man with a shaved head and a baseball bat adorned with numerous nails especially stood out.

As for the inhabitants of the cab, Antonia had produced a pearl-inlaid pistol from who-knows-where, while William’s hair appeared to be visibly turning white, one strand at a time.

As a last-ditch attempt to stave off their inevitable fates, Rarity took over the cab’s sound system. “ATTENTION!” she shouted in the most threatening voice she could muster. “This is the Big City Police Department, and we have the block surrounded! Anyone who puts down their weapons now will be allowed to leave; otherwise, we tear-gas everybody and sort you out at our leisure!”

Piera was impressed to note that the sound from the cab speakers appeared to come from the sides of the square. Unfortunately, two aspects of Rarity’s speech made it impossible for the mob to take seriously: First, a snarling Rarity is still much, much more sophisticated than any New York City cop could ever hope to be—I mean, “at our leisure”? Seriously? And secondly, this was the 1970’s, and no matter how much second-wave feminism had achieved, there was no way that the MPD would let a woman use the bullhorn in a crisis.

The crowd began trying to simultaneously tip the cab over and smash its windows open to grab the valuable prizes inside—any minute now, they’d remember they had guns, and things would get really ugly. As Piera watched the end of her life unfold, she couldn’t help but be massively disappointed in the workings of Fate on Planet Earth. After all, Rarity had achieved an electro-mechanical form of ventriloquism, something Piera had believed to be quite difficult to do, and Rarity had pulled it off on her first try. In fact, by studying the fading soundwaves, the young woman could see just how complex the effect was, considering that it had to fool an audience that completely surrounded the source, as well as deal with the echoes and reverberations of the nearby walls and...

Piera then realized that humans were normally unable to see soundwaves. Fae too, for that matter. She could see all the soundwaves in fact, and knew exactly which gang member or brave/panicked cab passenger had produced each one. In fact, the way that Piera had been able to follow the echoes of Rarity’s projected voice was by “pushing” away any other sounds that got in the way. And that meant...it meant...

Piera screamed, at the top of her lungs. Rarity and the Martins looked at her in amazement, because they couldn’t hear anything coming out of her mouth. Instead, it all came out of the car’s speakers, modulated like Rarity’s to be nearly inaudible at the source, but then rising to maximum volume less than a foot away from the outside of the car, and unlike Rarity’s voice, infinitely more malleable. At her command, a sonic shell sprung up around the car. A second one covered the prone bodies of the two undercover cops, and a third expanded until it reached to the edge of the square, along the way blowing out the lens of the security camera that Gruekin had pointed out. The gang members were now enveloped in a wall of sound, which caused them to all cover their ears and cry out in pain.

Chuckles the Clown had shown Piera a binder once, containing pages that had been photocopied and mimeographed dozens of times. He claimed the original versions of those pages were in the possession of the CIA, and that they consisted of research banned by the Geneva Convention on precisely what different combinations of audio frequencies did to the human brain. An awful lot of them supposedly caused death or permanent brain damage, but one particular combination was guaranteed to cause exactly three hours, three minutes and three seconds of unconsciousness. Piera just had to tune the unnatural sounds she was producing just a bit more, and...

A hundred young men collapsed to the ground in unison. A second later, the sonic shells, invisible to all but their creator, vanished.

Piera stopped screaming, and cleared her throat. “There,” she said proudly. “I believe that ought to do it.” Her voice was possessed of a strange lilt, somewhat but not quite like an Irish brogue.

The others looked at her, and then at the dozens of prone bodies. With a touch, Rarity unlocked the rear doors. Antonia got out first, followed by the others, all but Piera looking around them with unease.

“We’re...we’re alive?” William asked the universe incredulously.

“Y...you didn’t hurt them, did you?” Antonia asked Piera in a hush.

“What? No, of course not. They’re just knocked out. Oh, and Gloomfeld and Gruekin are over there—I made sure they were protected like we were. So, what do you think?” The teenager leaned against the car with a cocky grin.

“Your voice is quite lovely,” Rarity said, turning her head to face her. “Congratulations on finally figuring it out.”

Piera put her hand to her throat in surprise. “No, I...I didn’t mean the voice. I meant my powers. I finally figured out my powers. You never have to worry about being in danger again, because I can protect you.”

Rarity turned fully around to give Piera a critical eye as she continued.

“And whenever you find that ‘center of the universe’ thing that Discord told you about, I can come with you!” The teenager threw her arms wide, her eyes closed as she imagined everything her new-found abilities freed her to do. “From the moment that Buttercup II arrived at the circus, I’ve been wanting to stop her, or even find a way to warn others in a way that they’d believe me before it was too late. You’ve told me so many wonderful things about Equestria and now—”

“No.”

“What?”

Rarity reared back and rested her front hooves on Piera’s shoulders so they would be close to eye level. “Piera my dear,” she said via the speaker on her back, “you are still a filly! You have the opportunity here with the circus to enjoy a wonderful foalhood, and to grow up into somepony absolutely unique!” She took a moment to review her words. “My apologies, I should have said ‘some-fae’. My point still stands, though. You discovered a way to hurt others, Dear. At the moment, you could use that to grow up to be a solider or a proper police officer or...a vigilante, like so many in Applejack’s Old West, and if that is what you truly want and considering the state of this city, nopony should lift a hoof to try and stop you. But you’ve only just discovered the beginning of your powers. That new voice of yours implies that there are things you can do now that will not hurt others, and perhaps that is the direction you should be exploring. At least until you’ve had enough time to process all of what has happened so far.”

Rarity looked away from Piera and dropped herself back down on all fours. “There is also another consequence that you will have to consider if you truly wish to use these powers as a hero.” She pointed a hoof at a nearly thug—the same skinhead with the spiked club that had terrified her earlier—and the thin line of blood that was draining from his ear and down the young man’s face. “This one is more than knocked out,” she commented in a clinical manner. “I’d say you ruptured his eardrum, and without the kind of medical care usually denied to one of his economic status, he may never hear again.” 

Piera flinched.

Rarity then waved her hoof to take in the rest of the unconscious crowd. “Most of these others have a chance to do something with their lives,” she said, sweeping the hoof around until it finally rested on the bleeding man again. “They will all eventually find jobs and special someponies, settle down and raise families and put this day behind them, all of them, but not him. I have sadly seen this in the American history I studied to save my friends, especially in the lawless setting Applejack was banished to. For you see, you have given this man a dark purpose without meaning to, a desire to revenge himself on you for your mistake. And he will not be the first. For every hundred people you save, there will be one that you hurt through accident or over-zealousness, and the number of your enemies will continue to grow. That is what it means to be a hero in a world without harmony. I am not saying that being a hero in a world that is mostly cold and heartless is an unworthy goal—it is the most worthy goal imaginable. But it’s hard, it hurts, and it has its costs.” She stopped her speech for a moment while Piera wiped the tears from her eyes. “I just wanted you to know this now, before you’ve committed yourself—before you’ve made an enemy. I’ll take care of this one, though.” And with that, Rarity reached into a hidden drawer built into the speaker on her back and came out with two folded thousand dollar bills held lightly in her teeth. She tucked the bills into the shirt pocket of the bleeding man.

“That’s most of your life savings!” William exclaimed.

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Yes, well one of the most important tenets of Generosity is to never advertise how cheap or dear one’s contributions are, but as they always say, I can always make more.”

“That’s a hell of a lot more than I would have put up,” said Gloomfeld, who was now standing behind them. “What if he isn’t the only one who’s deaf? Or brain-damaged?”

Further away, the group saw Gruekin filling a burlap bag with the weapons he was collecting from all of the unconscious thugs.

Rarity looked around her with growing dread. “Are there any others showing obvious signs of permanent injury?”

“No,” Gloomfeld admitted with a mischievous smile.

Rarity and Piera uttered simultaneous sighs of relief.

William stepped up to address Gloomfeld. “So, Officer Gloomfeld—”

“Detective Gloomfeld,” the man interrupted. “We both got promoted.”

“Alright, Detective Gloomfeld, could you answer me this: What are you doing here? Did you finally get that transfer you always wanted to go with the promotion?”

“Yes and yes,” Gloomfeld said proudly. “I finally get to follow in the footsteps of my lifelong hero: Detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, the hero of the French Connection case. The whole time I was in Passaic, I’d go into situations asking myself: ‘What would Popeye Doyle do?’”

“And most of the time he couldn’t carry them out,” Detective Gruekin interrupted, “because the only two things he could think of was ‘engage in an epic high-speed chase through the streets of the Big City’ and ‘shoot the bad guy in the back who’s about to kill his hostage’.”

“But now that we’re in the Big City, we get to do both of those things!” Gloomfeld exclaimed with a blissful look on his face.

“You do know that I was...nah, forget it.”

“But how did you get transferred?” William asked.

“Well,” Gloomfeld answered, “after the entire Mafia was forced out of the City, the MPD thought they’d have things easy, but—”

“Wait a second!” interrupted Antonia. “Are you saying that the Corraglio’s weren’t the only ones forced out?”

“Oh no, it’s all of them,” said Gruekin, finally joining the group with a very full burlap sack. “They were the victims of the biggest real estate swindle in Big City history. And it was done so well that no one would have realized what happened, if it wasn’t for the work of one reporter, —” And he followed this with a name that none of the New Jersey visitors recognized.

“You know her as Sparks Nightly,” said Gloomfeld. “She uncovered evidence that one mastermind was behind the dozens of fake companies that gave him control of some of the most valuable real estate on Earth. Of course, with the truth discovered, ownership reverted to the city, which is in the process of giving everything back while trying to find an excuse to keep the mob families out for good. Despite her best efforts, Sparks wasn’t able to track down the lair of this mastermind, a man the police have given the name ‘L’, due to the fact that all of his fake company names start with that letter. You probably heard his voice earlier from that speaker over there. Even after he lost his land grab, L managed to take over nearly half of all the security cameras in the Big City, and, with microphones and speakers added, he’s been using them to organize a mob of his own. Once the New York police realized this, they pulled every good cop they could find into their ranks from the tri-state area.” The detective pointed down at the ground. “Right here was supposed to be the biggest meeting of them all, a meet so big that L would have no choice but to show himself, and that’s when we would’ve nabbed him!”

“Oh, that sounds great,” William said, breaking eye contact. “It’s too bad that we got pulled into the middle of everything and ruined your plan.”

Gruekin pulled the broken security camera out of the bag. “You know, depending on how much L saw before this camera went out of commission, it might be a good idea to stay as far away from the Big City as possible in the next few months. At least until he’s caught.”

Gloomfeld stepped forward and posed dramatically. “You mean, until we catch him. Right, Partner?”

Gruekin rolled his eyes. “We did catch him last Tuesday, remember? And then you let him go.”

Gloomfeld frowned. “That wasn’t him. There’s no way it was him.”

“He was in the right place at the right time,” Gruekin insisted.

“That was Popeye Doyle,” Gloomfeld said quietly, before shouting, “And there’s no way that Popeye Doyle and L are one and the same person!”

As the two detectives were arguing, a police cruiser finally showed up in Times Square.

“Dreadfully sorry to interrupt,” William said nervously, “but I believe you made reference to a threat to our lives?”

“Oh, I think you’re probably safe for tonight,” Gruekin said with a smile. “L is very meticulous with his hits. I mean, it took a full month before he started trying to kill Sparks for exposing him.” He tried to ignore the newly arrived police officer, who was rather desperate for an explanation of how a hundred men ended up unconscious.

“By ‘trying’, I assume that he hasn’t succeeded yet?” asked Antonia.

“Yup.”

“Well, I hope you have her under police protection at least.”

“No,” answered Gruekin with an weary shake of his head, “but that’s not due to any lack of trying on our part. Um, excuse me for a second.” With a sigh, he walked off with his evidence bag to talk to the uniformed officer.

“She’s refusing? But why?” asked Rarity.

“She refuses to believe that any of the extremely unlikely accidents that she has barely survived in recent months are L’s work,” explained Gloomfeld. “I mean, the taxi she always takes to work had its brakes cut, and its accelerator stuck, both while the car was moving on the way to pick her up. Now granted, that’s really hard to pull off, but not to a genius of L’s caliber. There have been elevator failures, and safes falling off the sides of buildings, all right when Sparks Nightly was supposed to be in the area. The only thing keeping her alive right now is stubbornness and dumb luck. If you happen to run into her tonight, please try to convince her to let the police do their job and protect her. I don’t care what it does to her career.”

“Well, if we see her, then we’ll do what you ask,” Antonia said, “but for tonight, I think we should head back to our hotel. I don’t suppose we can get any protection?”

“Yeah, I think I can authorize that,” said Gloomfeld. “Aramus and I will be busy cataloging this mess, but Officer Dave here should be able to take care of you. Isn’t that right, Dave?”

“Whatever you say, Boss,” Officer Dave said in a dead tone. It seemed clear that he was used to being ordered around by the two detectives.

“Have you had dinner yet?” Gruekin asked.

The three people and one pony shook their heads.

“Well, we can’t have that!” Gruekin exclaimed. “Take them out to dinner, Officer Dave. I’m sure I can get the precinct to cover, let’s say $100 apiece, especially if any of this evidence or later interrogations lead to the arrest of Public Enemy Number One.”

“Why thank you, Detective! Or...Aramus, was it? I’m sure with the brave Office Dave protecting us, we will be perfectly safe!”

Officer Dave chose not to look at the talking pony. It didn’t make the ridiculousness go away entirely, but at least it helped.





“Stop the car!” Antonia shouted about ten minutes later.

“What, what is it?” Office Dave cried out, as he pulled over, producing a large pistol and pointing it out the driver’s side window. “Did you see a hitman on the corner? Or maybe a bazooka?”

“Oh, um...no,” Antonia said, scooting away from the police officer in the driver’s seat. “It’s just that, well...that’s an Automat over there.”

William leaned over to look. “My word, you’re right! I thought I’d never get to see one of those.”

“What’s an Automat?” Rarity and Piera asked nearly in unison.

“In my childhood, the Automat was the Future,” Antonia told them. “Well...even by then it was a rather faded and tattered future, but still it was something different than the world I grew up in. Instead of the adults pushing each other around, and giving out ‘justice’ to whoever they thought ‘deserved’ it, the Automat was gleaming chrome. Automatic. The same price for the same food for everybody.”

“The same price for everybody—isn’t that every restaurant?” asked William.

“Not when you’re in the Family,” Antonia replied. “The Automat was the only place where I had to pay for anything. And that made it the best place in the Big City. I...I know it sounds ridiculous when we’ve got a $400 budget for dinner, but...could we eat here?”

“Do they have vegetarian?” asked Rarity.

“Vegetable plate for a dollar,” said Antonia, proud that she could still remember, “or a bowl of baked beans for a dime.”

“The place looks empty,” Dave commented. “That makes it safer.”

“Very well,” said Rarity.

“Fine with me,” said William.

Piera simply shrugged her acceptance.


& & &


Officer Dave reached the glass-walled storefront first. After looking carefully through the window, he opened the door and stepped inside. Some unidentifiable piece for a string orchestra was playing over the five or six speakers embedded in the ceiling.

A young man sitting at a stool next to the door quickly rose to his feet and stepped over to a small machine on a pedestal. “Is there anything wrong, Officer?” he asked in a creaky voice.

“No, just thought I’d step in for a bite to eat with my friends,” Dave said, drawing himself up and deepening his voice to try and sound older than he was.

“How does this place work?” asked Piera.

The clerk pointed at the far wall of the narrow establishment, a wall made up of many small windows with knobs attached to them. “The cook’s on the other side of that, filling the little cubby holes with a variety of fresh meals. You put quarters in to open the doors, and I change your dollars into quarters.”

“Oh, so it isn’t automatic, it just looks that way,” said William, looking disappointed.

“What do you mean?” asked Antonia.

“Well, if this place was really automatic, then there wouldn’t be any people at all. There’s be a machine to change dollars into quarters, and the food would be machine-packaged and delivered, perhaps with one of those ‘radar ranges’ that some restaurants use to heat food up.”

“You’re talking crazy talk,” commented the clerk.

“I’m sure this is a nice place,” William said apologetically, “and a reliable way for the working class to get a cheap lunch, but I can see why these places have been going out of business.” He gestured around him, at the cracked and stained linoleum floor, the rows of unoccupied Formica-topped tables with exactly two heavy steel-framed seats apiece, and the yellowing and humming florescent lights. “It’s like this is where Thirties Futurism went to die.”

“You’re wrong,” the clerk countered with confidence. “We play strictly 60’s Musak here. None of that Big Band stuff.” He took a moment to listen to the song currently being played. “See? That’s ‘Age of Aquarius’, from the hit musical Hair.”

William laughed. “Another dead future!” he proclaimed. “I lived through this one. ‘No more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions,’” he sang along to the wordless song. “And what happened when the hippies of America finally had their say? We got this world!” He punctuated his point by pointing at the ground. “Decaying infrastructure, loss of respect for American ideals abroad, betrayed by endless CIA ‘special op’ revolutions and coups that put anti-democratic governments in power all around the world. We get nightmares like this very city, where absolute power worse than anything the Mob was ever able to grab hold of is now available to whichever madman is clever enough to seize it first. So in the end I have to ask: What have the Sixties ever done for us?”

“Well,” a voice at the far corner of the Automat replied, “there was a small expansion of civil rights for women and minorities. And I do like to think we perfected Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

All heads turned in unison, except that of the clerk. Where there had once been what everyone was sure was an empty table, there now sat a middle-aged man with pale skin and silvery hair. He was wearing red wire-frame sunglasses which obscured his eyes, and a black leather jacket over a black turtleneck shirt.

Rarity raced down the aisle until she had her hooves on the man’s table. A portable tape recorder and instant camera sat on either side of a half-finished bowl of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. “Andy Warhol?!” she exclaimed.

Officer Dave at this point made the conscious decision to stay with the clerk and...guard the door. Yes, that was what he was doing, guarding the door. His decision had nothing whatsoever to do with the feeling of unnatualness that radiated off of the quiet celebrity.

Meanwhile, the man in black looked down at the pony fawning at his feet. “I assume you’re Rarity,” he said flatly. “Either that, or I am the victim of an incredible coincidence.”

The man was indeed Andy Warhol, world-famous Pop artist of the 1960’s, mostly famous in the 1970’s for just being famous. He was the guy who thought that taking a photograph of a soup can counted as art, or coloring in a black-and-white photo of Marilyn Monroe. Mostly, though, he was the guy who said “In the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame.” Nobody ever let him forget he said that.

The above paragraph acts as a stand-in for ten full minutes of gushing by Rarity, which managed to cover all of the above points, but in a much more enthusiastic and positive manner. She also went on about The Factory and its movies, but the less said about that topic, the better.

“Why ever did you stop?” Rarity asked, referring to that last subject.

“I got shot because somebody didn’t like one of my movies,” Andy replied laconically, resting a hand on his belly. “It stopped being fun after that.”

“Oh...right,” said Rarity.

See? Bad topic. Also, Andy was lying.

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Antonia said, reaching down to Rarity’s collar. “We shouldn’t be interrupting your dinner.”

“Oh no, go right ahead,” Andy said with a slight smile. “You must be Rarity’s entourage.”

Antonia smiled self-consciously. “Yes, I’m Antonia Martin, this is my husband William, and back there is Piera, my niece.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” Andy said with a slight bow of his head. “I do enjoy meeting interesting people, and I believe Rarity here fills her own distinct category. You’re not exactly from this world, are you?”

Rarity stepped back in shock. “Whatever gives you that idea?” she asked nervously.

“You’re a talking pony,” answered Andy.

“Oh, right...that. Well, I could be a very-well trained pet that the real Rarity is—”

“Yeah, I read that in all your interviews,” Andy interrupted, “and it sort of breaks down. No line of sight.” He pointed around him. And indeed, there was no way that anybody outside the building could possibly be watching this conversation. “And besides, I’ve seen weirder.” He quite deliberately scratched at the edge of his silver wig, which in fact was not made up of silver-colored hair but in fact of thin strands of actual silver.

“You’re a fae?!” Antonia and William asked in unison.

Piera stepped forward and nodded her head. “Yup.”

“I, uh...I’ll get us dinner,” Antonia said self-consciously, before separating from the others.

“Ah,” Andy said, holding out a hand for Piera to take. “Nice to see another one. Have you been causing trouble?”

Piera thought back to the pile of unconscious thugs. “Not exactly...”

“Well, try harder!” Andy said with a genuine smile. “The job of every fae in exile should be the same: undermining illegitimate sources of power. Nowadays, that’s practically every source of power.”

“You’re a revolutionary,” William said incredulously.

Andy’s smile grew even wider. “I’m the best type of revolutionary. Unlike those hippies you were deriding earlier, I’m going to win.”

“But you’re as Establishment as they get! All you’ve done in the last decade is sell your doctored photos of the rich and famous to the rich and famous! How is that revolutionary?”

Andy Warhol stirred his soup. “I don’t like being the center of attention anymore,” he said with a sulk. “I love going to parties, but only if I can stand in a corner and watch. I am not a ‘do-er’. And I normally would never explain myself, not to anyone on this earth that could possibly stop me. But God’s the only one so far that knows what I’ve been up to, and I’ve been dying to tell someone. And you, Rarity, you’re an alien—there’s no better third-party witness to confess to than that.”

“I knew you were my favorite artist for a reason,” Rarity practically purred.

“Me?” Andy asked, putting a hand to his chest in surprise. “I’ve never come near to fashion in my art. Why aren’t contemporary fashion legends like Halston, Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren your favorite? You are a fashion designer like them, are you not?”

“Please!” Rarity exclaimed theatrically. “I am nothing like them, while you, Mr. Warhol! You are the consummate bystander. I’ve read interviews with all three of the so-called legends, and they sound like so many of the designers and artists of my world, inflicting their visions upon the world instead of using their genius to serve the needs of their clients.”

Andy frowned. “In this world at least, successful designers, like all successful artists, absolutely serve the needs of their clients, which is to say the very ‘rich and powerful’ you have so astutely accused me of pandering to, Mr. Martin.”

“Well yes, our designers and artists are exactly the same. I meant to refer to a designer’s true clients, which is to say anyone in need of being reminded how beautiful they are inside, regardless of their...net worth.”

Andy’s smile beamed as he stood up from his chair, revealing that he was wearing blue jeans and black boots. “Oh yes, yes, I indeed have found the perfect confessor. Listen carefully, as I lay out the scheme I devised the day I learned the truth about myself—”

“Which was?” Piera asked quickly.

Andy waved a hand in the air, annoyed at the interruption. “That I’m not the real Andrew Warhola Jr., son of Andrew Sr. and Julia Warhola. The real Andrew Jr. was snatched from his cot as a baby to become a lifelong servant to the Queen of the Fae, selected for his beauty. While I” —he gestured at his own pockmarked face— “was dumped in his place as a punishment for being a fae too ugly for the ‘Benign Perfectress’ to look upon without turning green. That’s the way that changeling swaps work, by the way. Anyway, after being properly grateful that I was living in a country without a monarchy or hereditary aristocracy, I did find one field where a servile worship of money and power still existed, and I determined to end it.”

“Art?” Rarity asked, her mouth agape. “You plotted to overthrow the whole of Art?”

“Well, just the visual part,” Andy admitted. “The musical arts have become thoroughly populist, so I had no problem with that. No, what I didn’t like was the way that the generic-term ‘artist’ was defined in my time. You still had to train with a better artist, just like this was still the Middle Ages. And you had art critics, themselves firmly embedded in the world of the rich and powerful, to declare who was great and who wasn’t. The works of the so-called great were bought and sold for millions, while the works of those not on their very small list were all deemed worthless. There was no such thing as public opinion in art, only the curated opinion of those critics. And the idea of someone taking up a brush or camera to create art with no prior training was absolutely forbidden.

“That entire structure was artificial. The moment that the camera was invented should have been the death of it, but somehow it had still persevered, leaving visual artists in the same boat as Haydn and Mozart when they were forced to write what their patrons wanted instead of the music that would make the entire world sing.”

Andy Warhol sat back down and started sketching something on a napkin. “I wandered around in the 50’s and 60’s, establishing myself, doing whatever it took to get the critics to make me their darling. My only hurdle was that I came from the world of commercial art, but I made that work, by making the subjects of commercial art into the subjects of my art, and getting the critics to see the beauty in designed objects like soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. But it was in this decade that I unveiled my true plan.”

He turned his sketch around for the others to see. “Do you have any familiarity with how a silkscreen machine works?”

“That’s how they put images on tee-shirts, right?” asked Piera.

“Yes, exactly,” said Andy. “It’s a primitive form of a duplicating machine. What I do for my celebrity portraits is that I take a few dozen photos in a frankly unprofessional style, and then let my subject pick the three they like best. I take those three photographs, color over them again in a deliberately unprofessional style, and then I transfer those color regions into the silkscreen machine, where I apply them on top of a print of the photographs. And then I sign the finished product. But I never get rid of the negatives or the silkscreen masters.”

“Which means that none of your art is original!” realized Rarity.

“Exactly,” said Andy. “All I have to do is set those machines in motion, and all of those works that I’ve been paid $5,000 to $10,000 apiece to create are suddenly worthless. They were only ‘art’ when they were unique.” He looked away. “Now, I’ll admit that the reason I haven’t done that yet is because I really, really like money, which is horribly hypocritical. But I have left strict instructions in my will, so at the very least my death will mark the death of Art as a servant to Power. I foresee a day in the very near future where anyone, no matter how poor, will be able to create any form of visual art they are able to imagine, even movies like I made in The Factory.”

“How?” asked Piera.

“One word, my compatriot: computers. Personal computers. I have seen the future, and it’s in a little place called Xerox PARC in California.”

“That’s...wow. That’s quite an ambitious goal you have there, Mr. Warhol,” said Rarity, clearly at a loss.

“Please, call me Andy.”

“Andy. Well, it was certainly an honor to get such an in-depth view of your...um, inner workings. Now if you don’t mind, we were going to have dinner here before we retire and finish our first...and probably only, visit of this city.”

Antonia put down a set of plastic-wrapped plates on the two tables closest to Andy’s. “All the prices have skyrocketed since the last time I was here,” she groused. “I mean, $2 for the turkey plate? Thirty cents for a cup of coffee? And that kitchen! I caught a glimpse of the cook’s wrist or elbow or something, and it was positively blue! Are they freezing the poor girl just to save money on food preservation? What is the world coming to?”

The conversation stalled for the next ten minutes as everybody ate their dinners. Only Antonia was really satisfied with the taste.

Seeing that they were finished, Andy leaned forward. “If I may ask, how much of the city have you seen so far?” he inquired.

“Well, we saw the Lincoln Tunnel—that was nice,” William began. “Then Rarity was ripped off by a con artist running a fake fashion show, and it sort of went downhill from there.”

Andy stood up, shaking his head. “No, no, that will not do at all. I was here sulking because of a particularly dreadful 50th birthday party, but you should not leave the most human city on earth without seeing at least one of its bright spots. I know—how would you like to see Studio 54?”

“Yes!” screamed Antonia on hearing the name of the most-famous, and most-exclusive disco club on the entire planet.

Her husband merely closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. “I suppose...” he muttered.

Rarity looked between the two and said nothing.

“It’s a very...unique...location,” Andy commented. “The only place I know where rock stars, movie stars, political stars, and whichever ordinary people catch Steve Rubell’s fancy, all mix together, totally unself-consciously. It truly is the one place today where anyone can get those fifteen minutes of fame that everybody but me obsesses about. You truly must go there, Rarity. The place could hardly be said to be complete without your presence.”

Rarity hesitated. She had had a truly awful night so far, and she was still worried that Piera’s new-found powers might go to her head. But then her mind found another subject to latch onto. “I suppose I can visit for an hour,” her speaker said, “if you’ll answer a question for me.”

“Ask away,” said Andy, crossing his arms across his chest as he looked down at her.

“It appears that each fae has their own unique powers, similar to a pony’s cutie mark. What is your special talent?”

Andy hesitated for only a moment before answering. “Controlling exactly how much attention people pay to me. It’s why you didn’t see me when you came in.”

“Interesting,” said Rarity. “I suppose it’s the same reason why I’m completely unable to focus on your telltale ears?”

“That would be correct,” said Andy. “Any particular reason for this line of questioning?”

“Someday I am going to return to my home,” Rarity answered. “And when that happens, I would like someone to accompany me with a very specific skill set. Not yours, Piera,” she quickly added. “I need somebody that can affect the power of willpower. Specifically, somebody who is immune to it, and who could possibly break the control of another, who currently holds my land in an iron grip. I...hesitate to even make this request, because I can offer no guarantee that my form of travel, which is in a bit of limbo at the moment, will be anything other than one-way. I am asking for someone who wouldn’t mind becoming a permanent traveler, an alien in a world thoroughly unfamiliar to them. It’s...not a particularly kind thing to ask, I know, but I am not the Bearer of Kindness, and this is far from being the kindest city on this planet.”

Andy reached out an open hand towards Rarity. “I think I know exactly who you are looking for, and I seriously doubt that he will have any problems with the conditions of your offer. This man needs to leave Earth, before it kills him. And best of all, I can practically guarantee that he’s in Studio 54 right this second. So shall we take a trip across town so you can make your case?”

With a cautious smile, Rarity put her hoof in Andy Warhol’s outstretched hand. “I do believe we shall!” she exclaimed.





A few seconds after Dave the Police Officer walked out of the building with his entourage increased by one, one of the little glass windows popped open all by itself. “Did they say they were going to Studio 54?” a female voice from the other side asked. “Charlie, is there any way I can get off work early?”

With a sigh, the clerk walked over to the open window, the newspaper he had just started reading still held in one hand. “You’ve still got two hours, Trixie,” he said. “Despite what that wisecracker who just left might think, this place doesn’t run itself.”

“But you saw her, Charlie. You saw her, right? Another pony like me! Maybe she knows what I’m doing here. I mean yes, I was breaking into her house at night to set up a prank for Twilight Sparkle when that flash went off, but that meant whatever happened was meant for her, not me. I was just an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire! Maybe her do-gooding friends are around to take her back—that means they can take me back, too!”

Charlie carefully put the newspaper aside—it might have an article saying where Rarity lived, and so like all the other newspapers, it had to be kept out of the blue pony’s sight for as long as possible. “Look, this is a free country,” he said laconically. “You can walk right out, but it’ll mean your job. And if you can’t find this other pony, if you’re caught out in the open without protection, what’ll happen then?”

“Th...the government?” Trixie’s voice asked nervously.

“Exactly,” Charlie said coldly. “The government. They’ll take you away for stealing jobs from honest Americans, and nobody will ever see you again. Now get back to work, and afterwards I’ll let you hide back there for another night. In return for rent.”

The little door closed without a word.

Yup, Charlie though smugly to himself, I’ve got a space alien with honest-to-God magic, and I only have to pay her 10 cents an hour because she’s too scared to ask for more—I get most of it back in rent. And the City’s too broken to ever track her down. Surely I live in the greatest city in the greatest decade of all time! 





Billy Alden was the youngest bouncer in the history of the Big City. He got his job not for his strength, but for his discernment. In short, if you were nobody and you wanted to get into Studio 54, Billy Alden was the guy you needed to impress, because studio owner Steve Rubell never disagreed with Billy’s picks.

At the moment, Billy wasn’t letting in anybody, no matter how trendy their clothes or how high their platform shoes were (that only worked once). Instead, he was scanning the crowd for one particular creature alien to this planet.

Billy had never really believed in the stories his father had told him about their family heritage of aiding time-travelling ponies from another dimension, despite Twilight Sparkle’s little recorded message (“they can do anything with transistors nowadays”), until the night he had idly checked the family watch for “the white one”, and got a glowing arrow pointing right at the area in New Jersey where the next day’s paper revealed the existence of a white-coated pony fashionista.

In the months since, he had tried everything he could think of to get her to the club that didn’t  make him look like a total sleaze. He figured he’d have to drive out there to make his case in person, but so far he had been awfully good at making excuses for not venturing into the festering cow pasture known as New Jersey.

Just then, a police car pulled up across the street. Billy signaled to Bruce, the more-traditional “shaped like a silverback gorilla” bouncer, who in turn pressed a button on the wall to inform Management that an old-fashioned bust was incoming. However, the police officer driving the car did nothing other than getting out to let some passengers leave the car, before he was talked into getting back in and driving away. The man doing the convincing was none other than club regular Andy Warhol, while the group leaving the cop car included none other than...

“Rarity the Unicorn!” Billy Alden exclaimed.

“Yes, and I won’t hear one word from you banning her from the establishment,” Andy said, holding the door open to allow the pony and her human companions entry.

Billy Alden thus found that one of his two entire purposes for existing had just been negated...by Andy Warhol. “Yes, sir,” Billy said quietly.





The door opened, and Rarity was hit by a blinding light and the sound of an overpowering rhythm blasted from countless speakers. No, not “a” rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythm of Disco, of Studio 54, of the climax of the 1970’s: “I Feel Love”, sung by Donna Summer and composed by Giorgio Moroder.

If Rarity was bipedal, she would have spread her arms wide as she walked into her destiny.





Inside the main floor of the club was bedlam, as patrons and staff collaborated to hide or dispose of any number of illegal or quasi-legal substances in preparation for a supposed drug bust that would never come to be.

One floor down was a place that was a lot harder for the police to get to, and so the process was a lot more relaxed. This was the place where the truly famous gathered among the only group in the world that truly understood what it meant to be alone in a crowd of millions, isolated as something simultaneously more than human, and yet ripe at any moment to be torn down to the level of has-been by any common genius with a typewriter and an axe to grind. This was where Andy Warhol had led his guests.

Rarity looked around her in awe. Milling about her like they were normal people were the likes of actresses Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor, Bianca Jagger (wife of musician Mick of the Rolling Stones), Debbie Harry of the band Blondie, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Grace Jones, fashion designer extraordinaire Halston, writer Fran Lebowitz, and Margaret Trudeau, the estranged wife of the Prime Minister of Canada, who treated her trips to Studio 54 as the perfect revenge on her soon-to-be ex-husband. None of them seemed to have any problem with a talking pony in their midst. The massive amounts of cocaine that had been consumed so far that night may or may not have had a part in that lack of reaction.

“They’re all here,” Andy Warhol said, spreading an arm wide. “All of the most interesting people in the world. Some nights we even get members of the Iranian royal family, all living like it’s Rome in the days of Emperor Caligula. Truly for someone like you or me, this is the center of the universe.”

Rarity looked up at him in shock. “Say that again,” she demanded.

“Well, it’s true!” Andy replied. “This is the most exclusive spot on the planet. Only the best of the best—or whoever catches Billy’s fancy—is let in, and you just made the cut.”

“I did it, I actually did it!” Rarity said, looking back at her three companions from the circus. “Oh thank you, dears. I never could have made it into someplace as exclusive as this without your help.”

“Oh Rarity,” Antonia said with a gentle smile. “We only worked to make you famous as gratitude for what you did for us: making us a family again.” Wife and husband kneeled down to take the pony in their arms, Piera standing awkwardly in the background.

Rarity took in the hug with a huge grin...that is until something occurred to her. “Oh, that is so generous for you to say,” she began with growing nervousness, “but, well...there might be a bit of a time limit in effect. Quick, look around for a portal to Equestria before it disappears!”





Upstairs, the staff and guests still hadn’t realized that the cops weren’t coming. At the center of the storm of drug concealment was Steve Rubell, one of two owners of Studio 54, and the one far more interested in its day-to-day operations. Rubell was the guy who knew everybody’s habits, and made sure to cater to every one of them. He was also the kind of 1970’s Italian American to spend his entire life in shirts spread open to expose as much chest hair as humanly possible—that’s when he even bothered to wear a shirt.

“Steve!” an anonymous Hollywood producer whined. “I just lost a half-kilo of snow in Stall Number 6 to a bunch of Technicolor dogs! And no, I swear I didn’t hallucinate them!”

Steve took the man’s hand in his and patted it gently. “You know what? I actually believe you. And you would have lost that half-kilo anyway, because we’re going to be busted any second now. As for the ‘dogs’, there’s somebody I have to have a word with.”


& & &


After using his personal key to gain access to the elevator, Steve quickly made his way downstairs, where he scanned the crowd for someone in particular. “Andy!” he finally said after running down his quarry. “What did I tell you never to do in my club?”

Andy looked at Steve in confusion. “What, that bit about never calling this place the center of—”

“Yes, that!” Steve said as he put his hand over Andy’s mouth. “Every time you say that particular phrase to whichever semi-somebody you drag down here, you open another portal to Candy Land in the Men’s Restroom. It’s extremely disruptive to our guests.” He removed the hand with a warning glare.

Andy’s jaw dropped. “I didn’t think you were serious!”

“I am. Now stop it.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Rarity said, gently tugging at the bell bottom of his slacks with one hoof. “But could you tell me how long one of these portals stays open?”

Andy put his arm around Steve’s back. “Steve, I’d like to introduce you to Rarity. She’s a unicorn. Rarity, this is Steve Rubell, the owner of the club.”

Steve looked down at the talking pony. Then he looked up at Andy, who merely shrugged. Then he tried to remember how many possibly mind-altering substances he had already consumed that night. And finally he rolled his eyes in resignation before answering the may-or-may-night-be-real unicorn. “Three hours, give or take ten minutes.”

“Oh good!” Rarity exclaimed. “I’ll have enough time for a proper farewell. William, if you can find a piece of paper and a pen, I have some messages I’d like to relay to the rest of the circus, for after I am gone.”

William quickly ran off to find said paper and pen. He did not expect his search to be a very fruitful one.

“So you’re really leaving?” Antonia asked, dropping down to her knees once again to embrace the pony.

“Well, in three hours, give or take ten minutes,” Rarity answered. “And I am ever so grateful for everything you’ve done for me during my time here. It was never really an exile after you brought me into your family.”

“Never forget us!” Antonia cried, her arms still around the white pony.

“You have my word,” Rarity answered. “Piera, are you alright?”

“You’re leaving so soon,” Piera said, her eyes on the ground. “I didn’t think it would be so soon. I thought you’d help me with figuring out my powers.”

Rarity thought for a moment, then looked up at the ceiling, where the booming music from the main floor could faintly be heard. “Mr. Rubell,” she asked. “Is there any chance that my friend Piera here could have a look at your disk jockey booth? She has a strong interest in acoustics and electronics.”

Steve rubbed the back of his neck. “I dunno...” He pulled Andy aside. “So she’s not a hallucination?” he asked.

“She’s a highly influential representative from another planet, Steve,” Andy replied with a highly amused smile. “Think about it for a moment: Studio 54—the first club to cater...to aliens.”

“Wow,” said Steve. He then looked over to Piera and sized her up with a critical gaze. “Come on,” he said after making up his mind. “You’d like to see how they make the music here, right?”

Piera nodded, and soon she and her uncle and aunt were accompanying Steve into the elevator for another executive key unlocked trip.

“Now where is he?” Andy asked, looking around him in vain for somebody.

“Who?” Rarity asked.

“That individual you were looking for,” explained Andy. “I assume it’s even more important to you to track him down now, yes?”

“Oh! Yes.”





It was slowly beginning to dawn on the folks on the main floor of Studio 54 that the eminent police bust...was a bust. This led to an entirely different outburst, this one about how many wonderful, wonderful drugs had been dumped down toilets or sink dispose-alls that were no longer available to be used, and how somebody ought to pay for the loss. 

The one area on the floor that was still quiet was the bar. For the most part, the bar was populated by ordinary, non-famous people, the sorts of people that Billy Alden had let in for being strange or interesting, but who eventually discovered to their disappointment that they were not strange or interesting enough to steal the crowd’s attention from Liza Minnelli, Halston or Margaret Trudeau. Having discovered this harsh life lesson, they were drowning their sorrows in drink.

And then there was Truman Capote.

The short tubby man in a black tuxedo slammed down a black fedora and black spectacles on the surface of the bar, revealing a balding head of once-blond hair and bloodshot eyes. “Wha’ss a guy gotta do to get a drink around here!?” he demanded in the voice of a petulant little boy.

“You’re on rehab,” the black bartender he addressed replied, focusing his attention on polishing his already dry glass. He was shirtless. All of the male staff at Studio 54 were shirtless. Steve told them that it made a significant portion of the clients happy, both female and male. Considering the size of the tips, the male staff managed to convince themselves that they weren’t being exploited.

“Thosse other famous people can have anything they want,” Truman continued. “I demand the ssame for me...starting with some sherry.”

“No can do,” said the bartender.

“Hey, Isaac, do you know who I am?” Truman asked.

The bartender scowled. “So what, you think that because I’m black and a bartender, I automatically have to have the same name as the guy on the Love Boat?”

Truman raised his pudgy hands into the air. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Don’t go slinging accusations of racism around just because I’m Southern. One of you’s named Isaac, right?”

A bartender with a frizzy brown afro (and equally frizzy chest) waved his hand.

“There, ssee? I’m ssoo not racisst that I can’t tell the differensse between a black and a Jew bartender. So, what iss your name?”

“Mike.”

“Nice to meet ya, Mike! Now, can we get back to the ssubject at hand?”

Mike sighed before finally replying. “Alright, I’ll bite: which subject?”

“Thiss one: Don’t you know who I am?! I was the inspiration for the character of Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, I re-defined the confesssional novel with Other Voicess, Other Roomss, I wrote the definitive Big City novel in Breakfast at Tiffany’ss, and created the true-crime novel with In Cold Blood. I am, in short, the greatest American author you have ever met!” He slowly lowered the fist he had raised triumphantly at the end of his speech to think over what he had just said. “Did you happen to meet William Faulkner before he died?”

“No.”

“Then my sstatement sstandss! Now give me a drink.”

“No.”

Truman sulked for a few more seconds. He then looked theatrically around him in both directions before whispering, “I’m also a fae.”

“I don’t care,” Mike replied.

“Well, maybe I can try my luck with one of your compatriots.”

“You’re not getting a drink, Truman,” the other two bartenders answered in chorus.

Truman sat on his barstool, his legs dangling, and thought for a bit more, before beckoning Mike the Bartender to come close, a request that Mike fulfilled with the utmost reluctance.

“Out of curiossity,” he whispered, “and it’ss purely curiossity ssince I can’t even get a ssingle drink at thiss esstablishment, how much alcohol would you ssay it would take to kill an individual of my approximate height, weight and age? Kill me stone, cold, dead.”

Mike quickly backed up and gave him the stink-eye.

“Well?” Truman asked with what he thought was a winning grin. “Aren’t you going to ansswer my quesstion?”

“Truman, there you are!” cried a voice from the other side of the dance floor.

Truman spun around with a smile. “Andy!” he exclaimed. “Tell these kind men that I can have one teenssy-tiny drink! They’ll be ssure to lissten to you.”

“No,” said Andy.

Truman spun back to face the bar. “Aw, you’re no fun.”

“Truman, I’d like to introduce you to Rarity.”

Truman spun back around, hopped down from the bar stool, and stalked over to the mildly-nervous pony, his hands clasped behind his back. “Hmm...” he said to himself as he walked around her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Rarity’s voice said with a degree of caution.

In a moment, Truman had slid down on his knees next to her and had flipped the cape over her head to reveal the speaker on her back.

“I beg your pardon!” Rarity exclaimed.

Truman picked up the speaker and examined it thoroughly, before putting it roughly back on her back with a sigh. He got up and from an inside pocket of the tuxedo removed a fifty-dollar bill. “Alright, she’ss legit,” he admitted with a sigh, placing the bill in Andy’s outstretched hand. He got up and faced the people standing behind Andy. “Now who did you bring with her?”

“Piera’s still up looking at the DJ booth,” said Andy. “Antonia and William Martin, this is Truman Capote.” He rolled his eyes before adding, “Yes, the Truman Capote.”

Antonia was the first to step forward. “Oh, Mr. Capote, it is such an honor to meet you. I loved your eccentric performance in the movie Murder By Death. It looks like the start of a brilliant career in acting.”

“Acting,” Truman said, deadpan. “That’ss all you know me for...acting?”

“Well...sure!” Antonia exclaimed.

Truman closed one eye and turned an accusing glare from Antonia to William, who flinched.

“Hey, I’m sorry I missed your acting debut,” William said. “I’d wish you good luck, although I think your age is a bit too late to start on the path to becoming famous.”

Truman whipped around to face the bartender. “Mike!” he barked. “You sstill haven’t ansswered my quesstion!”

Mike suddenly found he had other patrons to serve.

“Rarity here is looking for someone with expertise in mind control,” Andy said.

Truman sighed deeply before turning around. “I’m done with that, Andy. You know that,” he said, with a tone of disappointment in his voice.

“Truman here used to have the Big City in the palm of his hand,” Andy told Rarity. “And before that, he used his powers to get a hardened criminal to confess his whole life story. But, Truman being Truman, he decided one day to see how far he could abuse his powers, and published a little story exposing the worst secrets of his patrons under the guise of fiction. He’s never been able to get anybody in the City to trust him ever since.” Andy turned to Truman. “Rarity would like to hire you, to help her fight to save a whole bunch of fun-loving ponies from the mental enslavement of an evil mind-controller pony.”

“Not interessted,” Truman said. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“Ha!” Andy laughed. “I very much doubt the former. Did I mention the part about leaving Earth, and quite possibly never coming back?”

“On ssecond thought, I’m really liking this thought of fighting for the freedom of poniess from the threat of mind control,” said Truman. “When do we leave? And it is we, right, Andy? I couldn’t think of traveling to a strange land without at least one friend at my side, and since Harper left me, you’re the only real friend I have.”

“Now hold on a minute,” Rarity said, coming between the two men. “Both of you are famous! I don’t know if it’s right taking you before you’ve finished your time on Earth.”

Truman rested his hand on Rarity’s head, quickly repositioning it after accidentally landing on the horn the first time. “Trusst me Miss Rarity when I ssay we’ve both passt the point where we really have anything ssignificant left to give to the world. Having us dissappear now will have no ssignificant negative impact on hisstory, and should act to make Sstudio 54 an even more legendary place than it already iss, for being the location where we dissappeared into the Men’ss Restroom, never to return.”

“How do you know the portal’s in the Men’s Restroom?” asked Andy.

“I happened to be in there the last time you set it off.” He turned to face Rarity. “He called it the ‘center of the universe’, right?”

Rarity nodded.

“Classsic Andy,” noted Truman.

“Wait, the Men’s Restroom?” Rarity asked.

Truman nodded.

Rarity face-hooved. “Even after being deposed, that fiend Discord continues to vex me!”

At that moment, the music filtering down from above suddenly became crystal clear: strings, winds, and that strong percussion in 4/4 time that made disco stand out from all other contemporary genres. But each instrument heard was taken from a different source—parts from four different songs were playing at once, yet each could be distinguished from the others, with the acoustic quality of a live performance.

From one corner came the voices of Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA: “Friday night and the lights are low, looking out for the place to go.”

In the next corner was Hank Dixon of The Originals: “I just realized: I’ve been wasting my time. Although my baby is gone, I’m moving on.”

In the third corner, Taka Boom, guest singer for The Undisputed Truth: “Please let me turn your gray sky blue, ‘cause that’s what I’m gonna do baby.”

And in the final corner emerged the voices of Philip Bailey and Maurice White of the group Earth, Wind & Fire, singing “And we will live together, until the Twelfth of Never; our voices will ring forever...as one!”

The New Jersey visitors had raced for the stairs from practically the first note.


& & &


Rarity emerged from the stairwell to see dozens of people dancing on the floor, with the occasional brave couple or individual taking the lit center stage to strut their stuff. High above in the DJ booth could be seen Piera, wearing a pair of dark purple shades and matching earphones, and pumping her fists into the air in triumph. The pieces of audio equipment around her were performing miracles never dreamt by their designers, and the sound coming out of them was under her complete control. Tears of joy could just be made out leaking from the edges of those shades.

And the disco remix continued, sounding even more glorious here than before:

“Bags—I’ve got ‘em packed. There’s no turning back. And consider the rest—repossessed!”

“And when you get the chance...”

“I’m gonna dust off my heart and my hat and shoes...”

“You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen...”

“Find someone, to help me lose these blues. I’m takin’ my body down...down down down to Love Town.”

“Come to see victory, in a land called Fantasy. Loving life, a new degree, bring your mind to everlasting liberty...”

“You plus me...equals love and harmony!”

Seeing the newest additions to her crowd, Piera pointed down at Rarity, letting her know that this song was her farewell gift to the pony who had done so much for her.

“That!” Rarity exclaimed, pointing back up at the booth. “That, Piera! That was what I was hoping you’d find! A way to bring beauty instead of pain.”

The Martins embraced.

“Oh, Frankie,” Antonia sighed. “If only you could have been here to see this...maybe that would have been enough to get through that thick skull of yours.”

William looked down at a low desk right next to him, with pens and stationary decorated with “Studio 54”. “Oh, I found the supplies you were looking for,” he told Rarity.





“...And finally to Chuckles: may you finally succeed one day in changing the world for the better, without anybody ever figuring out that it was you.” Rarity finished her dictation of her farewell to the circus. “Well, I do believe this is it.”

There was quite a large crowd gathered in front of the door of the men’s restroom. Several of the more impatient ones had wandered in to take a picture of themselves next to the swirling anomaly located in Stall #6.

“Let’s see, am I forgetting anything?” the pony asked herself. “Officially, the speaker goes to Chuckles after I leave, although I’m sure that he’ll give it to Piera if he knows what’s good for him.”

William blanched at the authentic tone and accent Rarity gave the Mob catchphrase without realizing it.

“Now Antonia,” Rarity continued.

“Yes?”

“In a couple of years, Piera will discover Punk when it goes mainstream, and your relationship with your niece will become quite unpleasant. However, you have my word as a predictor of fashion that that phase can’t possibly last more than a couple of years before going underground again, and she’ll emerge on the other side as an excellent disk jockey. If she wants something Equestrian-inspired for a stage name, tell her that she can have ‘DJ P0n-3’, as I am confident that the original holder of that name will approve.” She put a hoof to her chin as her eyes wandered. “I do believe that is everything.”

William looked from Rarity to the two aging men standing on either side of her. “Rarity,” he said as he crouched down next to her ear, “forgive me for asking this again, but are you sure that these two men are going to help you save your world?”

“Absolutely.”

“Huh,” William said as he stood back up. “Andy Warhol and Truman Capote are going to save the world.” He rolled the sentence around his mouth like it was in a foreign language that he was trying to get right. “If it were any other decade besides this one, I wouldn’t believe it, but for the 70’s...alright, sure. Why not?”

“Your expresssion of ssupreme confidence in our abilitiess is duly noted,” Truman said, deadpan. 

“Just go,” said Antonia with a sad little smile and one arm wrapped around Piera’s shoulder.

Rarity put on a matching smile of her own and shrugged out of the speaker, leaving the cape still around her neck. “Goodbye, everyone,” the voice from the speaker said, fading in volume as the pony and her two companions passed into the restroom stall. “I’ll never forget any of you, or your wonderful fash...”

And with that, she was gone.
> Afterward, Credits & Acknowledgements
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Afterward





Rarity returned to Equestria. Due to the nature of the spell Discord had used to banish them, all of the ponies arrived back in their beds at the moment the last of them went through their personal portal from Earth.

That Buttercup II was defeated was never in question—this was Equestria, where Good always triumphed over Evil. Although it turned out that Rarity wasn’t the only pony to bring humans back with her, so that was interesting.

Nevertheless, I will use my perogative as author to instead tell you about the fates of the humans Rarity left behind...





Having never appointed an apprentice or successor, the fashions of the enigmatic fashionista known as “Rarity” were quickly bought up in late 1978 until nothing was left. For years afterwards, fans from around the world would visit an obscure North New Jersey circus to pay homage at a boutique that had been stripped of its fashions. Considering that the story that tied her to Studio 54 was completely unbelievable, her disappearance went alongside that of D.B. Cooper and Jimmy Hoffa in the case files of unsolved mysteries of the decade. She even got her own episode of In Search Of... in 1982.

Speaking of which, the Pagliacci Brothers Circus continued for more than two decades after Rarity’s departure. It was never the most popular circus in the Big City or New Jersey markets, but it was well-loved by those few that went out of their way to discover it. Of all of its rival circuses, it was the one that most felt like a family, no matter how many new members were added.

Julia Scarpino held the dual roles of ringmaster and horse-rider for two years, before she was forced to retire due to a hairline fracture in her left tibia from a rare fall off of Thunderbolt’s back. Afterwards, she moved behind the scenes, taking care of a growing menagerie of retired show horses, until she eventually opened the Thunderbolt Stable in 1986.

Hector the Strongman took over as ringmaster with Julia’s retirement for a six month period, to be followed by a rotating cast of charismatic individuals who took over the role, usually out-of-work stars from Broadway. During this time, the leading voices in making decisions behind the scenes rested with Julia and Antonia. And, in 1993, when Frankie Scarpino suddenly and violently returned to Earth, it was they who took on the daunting task of bringing the returned brother to the guiding philosophy put in place by Rarity fifteen years earlier.

Antonia and William continued to run the pony ride attraction at the circus, although they never again had a headliner like Rarity...or Buttercup II. They treated Piera like she was their daughter—even when it embarrassed her—and kept wishing for the day they could have a child of their own. In 1988 they came to their senses and adopted a fae orphan named Michalino. As of 2016, Michalino Martin is the current ringmaster of the Pagliacci Brothers Circus.

Piera, after earning a minor criminal record during her “punk phase”, went on to become the most popular DJ in the Big City, with a completely fictional version of her life story being made into a movie in 1998. Her secret alter ego of Siryn—typical 80’s spelling—appeared on a brief TV news clip in the background at 0:36:57.

Chuckles the Clown dropped out of the circus in 1978, on the grounds that it was becoming far too popular with people with video cameras. No certain information exists after that point—since as far as the government was concerned, he never existed—but it makes sense to assume that Siryn’s more advanced electronic gadgetry came from somewhere...


& & &


Having failed to have any significant part in the rescue of one of the two ponies that he was assigned to, Billy Alden was quite surprised to discover that a pony not on his list at all happened to work at the Big City’s last Automat. When her employer started putting up a fight, Billy called a reporter friend he knew who had just moved into the Big City. The Automat was shut down, Charlie never made more than minimum wage for the rest of his life, and Trixie got into Studio 54, where luckily it turned out that the voice-activated portal still worked.


& & &


The fate of the other Big City characters in this story began unfolding just moments after Rarity’s departure. The camera recovered by Detective Aramus Gruekin contained a videotape that led the two cops to an Otis T. Berg, a man with sizeable spending habits but no source of income, frequently seen in the same subways and train platforms where the infamous “L” was suspected of lurking. He had some traffic tickets, so it was simple to bring him in for questioning.

Otis was completely open about the fact that he worked for “L”, who’s true name he revealed to be Luthor. Gruekin and Gloomfeld let Mr. Berg go, confident that he would lead them straight to Luthor and that they’d be “captains by midnight”. Harry Gloomfeld followed Otis down into the bowels of the Big City, telling Gruekin by radio that he had the man cornered on Track 22. But alas, he had pitted wits against the Big City’s mastermind, and lost. All that was found of him afterwards was his porkpie hat, sliced in half by the wheels of the subway. Gruekin continued to serve as a police officer for another seven years, but he took an early severance during once of the city’s numerous labor disputes and retired to Passaic to watch the circus.

Luther was not content with simply taking out a nosy detective on that night when Rarity left. On learning that the reporter who had exposed his plans was taking a private helicopter cross-state to interview the President, he put yet another of his “accident plans” into effect. This one relied on a loose bolt and a runaway wire to ensnare the copter at just the right moment to send the reporter plunging to her death on the sidewalk of the Daily Planet. But this outcome was not to be—out of nowhere, a flying man in blue tights and a red cape appeared to rescue Lois Lane from her fate.

Superman had come to the Big City (or Metropolis, as it was also known), and although the date was August 12 of 1978, the decade of the 1970’s...was over.









Credits & Acknowledgements





First of all, I want to express my gratitude to the readers of this story, who stuck with it through the entire two year period it took me to write it. I had strong doubts at the beginning that anybody would want to read a story with a premise as strange as this one, but you made it quite clear that you were willing to follow this story wherever it ended up going, and for that, I thank you.

The next most important thing to get out of the way is the matter of the three real-life individuals who managed to get ensnared into this story as characters. Let me make it absolutely clear that my interpretations of the characters of Menahem Golan, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote are exactly that, my interpretations, and that I do not wish the slightest harm to the reputations of those individuals or their estates (despite the fact that Warhol’s survivors pretty clearly went against his dying wishes by declaring themselves the sole source of authority as to what an authentic “Warhol” is or not, thereby ensuring their wealth and the survival of Art with a capital “A” forevermore).

Oh, and let me make this perfectly clear: Andy Warhol and Truman Capote are not fairies. They are perfectly normal human beings just like you or me.

Oh, and to forestall the inevitable question: The reason I didn’t add Charles Nelson Reilly to the list of humans accompanying Rarity back to Equestria at the end of this story is because it would have been a disaster. If Weird Al taught me anything, it’s the fact that C.N.R. would never give up control of a cotton candy paradise once he had wrested control of it away from an evil mind-controlling pony.

OK, deep breath.

The characters of Rarity, Discord, Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Sweetie Belle, Princess Celestia, Trixie and DJ P0n-3 (aka Vinyl Scratch), and the locations of Ponyville and Equestria all come from the series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic—the franchise was created by Bonnie Zacherle for Hasbro in 1981, developed into its 4th generation form by Lauren Faust in 2010, and currently overseen by story editor Josh Haber.

The characters of Detectives Harry and Aramus and the reporter I referred to as “Sparks Nightly” far more than as Lois Lane (for obvious reasons) were specifically taken from the movie Superman (1978), directed by Richard Donner and written by Mario Puzo and a host of others. Ray Hassett played Harry, Steve Kahan played Aramus, and Margot Kidder played Lois.

All other characters and settings are original, including the last names of those two cops. I mean, Passaic, New Jersey and New York City are real places, but having never visited either one in 1978, I doubt I got them right.

Other references by “figure” are below. And let me make this clear—I explain all of the references not because I think any of my readers are ignorant enough to miss all of them, but because the chances are great that they might learn something new about one of them. And it’s a chance to exercise my anal-retentiveness.

Figure 1: CB Radio (a Cobra 77 X, manufactured from 1977 - 78)

* Pagliacci (1892) is the opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo about a clown who isn’t very funny.

* Passaic: The city was selected pretty much at random—I just needed someplace in New Jersey within easy driving distance from Manhattan.

* “Staying Alive” (1977) is a song performed and written by the Bee Gees. The song was most famously used over the opening credits of the film Saturday Night Fever (1977), directed by John Badham and written by Norman Wexler, which is what I linked to in the chapter; this link is to the music video.

* In Search Of... (1977 - 82) was a syndicated television program created by Alan Landsberg and hosted by Leonard Nimoy. Among other subjects, the show covered UFO’s, animal ESP, and the disappearances of D.B. Cooper and Glenn Miller.

* Sanford and Son (1972 - 77) was an NBC sitcom developed by Norman Lear which was based off of the BBC sitcom of Steptoe and Son (1962 - 65, 1970 - 74), created by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

* My Friend Flicka (1941) was a novel by Mary O’Hara about a boy who comes of age while raising an untamable horse named Flicka. It was made into a movie in 1943, and a television series from 1956 - 57.

* William T. Cahill was Governor of New Jersey from 1970 - 74. Although he himself had a good reputation, he suffered a common fate among New Jersey governors, in that his government was riddled with corrupt staffers who were making themselves rich at the public’s expense.

* Buttercup II: The FIMFic “A Clever Pony”, by Drax99, concerns an ordinary Terran pony named Buttercup who was struck by lightning and ended up in Equestria. The daughter of this pony is entirely my creation.

* “The best damn pony a man could ever know”: The joke of bunch of hypnotized people repeating the exact same line of praise over and over again comes from the “Amazing Alexander” skit from Saturday Night Live in 1986 (“I loved it. It was much better than Cats. I’m going to see it again and again.”)

* CB Radios: For a brief period in the mid-70’s, America became infatuated with truck drivers and their use of CB radios to communicate with one another. This gave rise to two memorable (if not necessarily good) products of the decade: the song “Convoy” (1975) and the movie Smokey and the Bandit (1977).

* Chuckles: You can’t have a story set in the 1970’s without a character spouting conspiracy theories. The fact that this one is a black clown is thanks to Homey the Clown from In Living Color (1990 - 94). In a brave attempt to get into the head of such a character, I attempted to read The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anson Wilson, but I just could not finish it. I will note, however, that the saner parts of that book are about an investigation by a pair of world-weary New York City cops, and the Illuminati are (of course) responsible for everything that happens in this story.

* D.B. Cooper: I pretty much cover all that is known of the case in the chapter. In 1980, a few hundred dollars of the ransom were found on the shore of the Columbia River, which I why I left that amount out of the sum that Discord snatched back in time to pay William Martin with.

Figure 2: Clipper (an Oster A5 Single-Speed Clipper, manufactured from before 1982 to present)

* In case it wasn’t clear (or the reader hails from outside the United States), this chapter is set during President’s Day weekend, wherein people willingly dress up as Washington or Lincoln to get people to buy their discounted wares, and colonial-style powdered wigs are everywhere.

* Antonia and Julia: I am trying to evoke I, Claudius here (1934 novel, 1976 BBC miniseries), as those were the names shared by several of the most conniving characters in the story.

* Thunderbolt: Flicka’s son in the inevitable sequel was named Thunderhead. I wasn’t paying too much attention, and besides, Thunderbolt is a much better name in my opinion. Also, Bob Clampett made a puppet series for TV in 1952 called Thunderbolt the Wondercolt, that surely was the inspiration for the term “Wonderbolts” in Friendship Is Magic.

* Trapped in a Chinese fortune cookie factory: TV Tropes dates the earliest use of this joke as the fortune in a fortune cookie to comedian Alan King in 1955.

* “The sailor’s itch time is twilight”: More like “the Salem witch’s name was Twilight”. So this is the point where we learn what Discord did to her. (It helps if you imagine Discord using a Cockney accent for no particular reason, so “Salem” is pronounced as “Sighlem”, and “name” is pronounced as “naime”.)

* British comedy skit: For the two people reading this unfamiliar with the Dead Parrot sketch, you have been linked.

* Bill Cosby’s Chicken Heart skit is much less well known than the Dead Parrot sketch, and that definitely needs to be rectified, so here it is. (Yes, I do know what Bill Cosby has been up to lately, so let me relay a life lesson that has been instrumental in keeping me from being miserable 24/7: you must distinguish between a person’s artistic works, and their real-life deeds and personality. My favorite entertainment has tended to come from people I otherwise despise. You cannot appreciate good comedy without listening to Bill Cosby, and you cannot appreciate good science fiction without reading Orson Scott Card, but that doesn’t mean I have to like either one of them personally. Rant over.)

* “Mine! Mine!”: Bill Cosby again. We are in the midst of the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids era here, after all (1972 - 85).

* Frankie Scarpino, the antagonist who has quite clearly sold his soul to the Devil: Ah, I am ever so fond of this trope. I personally got it from Cats Don’t Dance (1997).

* Chuckles using a card in the door to detect trespassers: Google failed me here, I’m afraid, so I can’t tell you which movie I took this from.

* Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Written by Paul Boyer in 1972.

* Salemander: Yeah, I didn’t know that’s what a citizen of Salem was called either.

* The botched commando raid on a Cyprus Airport: This was the so-called “Battle of Larnaca”, February 19, 1978. A couple of assassins killed some important Egyptians and then hijacked a plane in a Nicosian airport, so Egyptian commandoes swept in and killed everybody. Sort of a nightmare version of Operation Entebbe in 1976.

* “Right Back Where We Started From”: 1975 song sung by Maxine Nightingale and written by Pierre Tubbs and J. Vincent Edwards. The #1 most addictive song of all time is of course the theme from I Dream of Jeannie (1965 - 70).

Figure 3: Light Bulb (a photo of a generic C9 bulb, the big Christmas tree lights)

* “Let’s All Chant”: 1977 song performed by the Michael Zager Band (and written by Mr. Zager) that surely ties “Muskrat Love” by Captain and Tennille as the single worst song of the 70’s to reach the Top Twenty charts.

* Oradell: Actual city in New Jersey, located near Passaic and having an animal hospital.

* “String of Pearls”: 1941 song performed by Glenn Miller and written by Jerry Gray and Eddie DeLange. The late 70’s and early 80’s was a time when big band music had a resurgence, with a few old styles adapted into contemporary forms: see this bizarre sequence from the 1980 film Xanadu.

* Musak (why would you click that link?): The name of a company that provided background music to companies, most commonly heard in elevators and waiting rooms. The music would frequently consist of popular tunes from a decade or more in the past with the lyrics removed, and performed by a soothing string orchestra instead of the original rock band. The company holdings are now controlled by Mood Media.

* “Now that’s what I call music!”: A roughly-quarterly compilation series of hit singles (created by Stephen Navin and Jon Webster of Virgin Records in 1983, migrated to the United States in 1998), inevitably hated by anybody who wants to proclaim their hipness. Hey, at least it isn’t Kidz Bop.

* Tramp’s: The second-most famous disco nightclub in New York City.

* Studio 54: Proof that I did in fact know where this story was going to end right from the beginning. Founded by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager in 1977. The pair were busted for tax evasion in 1980 and the club was sold to another owner, who ran it until 1984. It’s now a playhouse. In the late 70’s, it was the site of debauchery on an unbelievable scale, as documented by Andy Warhol in his diary. Two of his friends really summed up the feel of the place in an entry from March 6, 1978: Bob Colacello: It really becomes more like pagan Rome every day. Diane Vreeland: I should hope so—isn’t that what we’re after? Here’s an article from Vanity Fair from 1996.

* Discoworld: An actual magazine covering the disco scene in the 70’s.

* Dr. James Kildare: Fictional character from a series of pulp novels written by Frederick Schiller Faust under the pen name Max Brand in the 1930’s. His adventures were adopted into a series of films in the 30’s, a radio series in the 50’s, TV series in the 60’s and 70’s, and a comic strip. In the 60’s version, he was played by a young Richard Chamberlain.

* Dr. Hartley and Mr. Carlin: Characters from the CBS sitcom The Bob Newhart Show (1972 - 78, created by David Davis and Lorenzo Music), specifically a put-upon psychologist and his neurotic patient.

* Dr. Quincy: Lead character from the NBC mystery series Quincy, M.E. (1976 - 83, created by Glen A. Larson and Lou Shaw). Quincy was a medical examiner, and hence frequently associated with “stiffs”.

* Robot Mummy: Which is at least a small step upward from a Robot Monster (1953).

* “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast”: Quote from “Hotel California” (1977 song, with the Eagles performing and writing).

* Nash Rambler: Considered to be the first successful compact car on the American market.

* Schematics scattered everywhere: One of the traits that distinguished this decade from the ones after it, at least in my biased memory, was that all electronics were sold with their schematics—you were not only allowed to open the cover without voiding the warranty, it was expected that you’d at least try to fix anything yourself, then try a repairman, and only as a last possible resort would you throw it away to buy another one.

* “I’m a comedian, not a brain surgeon”: Insert stock quote by Dr. McCoy from the original Star Trek (1966 - 69).

* “Made in Taiwan”. In the 70’s, that meant it was halfway-decent, unlike that crap made in Japan.

* Sheeple [sheep + people]: Nobody can possibly use this term and be taken seriously.

* Watergate: Oh boy. Do I really have to cover this? Yes? Well, for a major portion of the populace, it was a huge obsession throughout the 70’s, so here’s the (highly biased) way the story would have been told at the time: The Watergate Hotel and Office Building was the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the lead-up to the 1972 Presidential Election. Now despite the fact that the Democratic candidate had made a series of devastating mistakes that made Republican President Dick Nixon’s re-election inevitable, the President still insisted on having the Watergate office bugged. (Nixon’s enemies never failed to call him “Dick” instead of “Richard”, which is why the name became so unpopular during that decade.) The individuals picked to plant the bugs were caught, and investigative journalism eventually traced the guilt all the way up to the top. As usual with these sorts of political crimes, there was a good chance that the President might have gotten away with it if he had admitted everything in the beginning and asked humbly for forgiveness, but instead it was the cover-up and the air President Nixon gave off that he was a superior being to the plebians who elected him that eventually led to his forced resignation. Vice President Ford pardoned him for his crimes, both proved and yet-to-be-proven, and as a result, Ford became one of the most mocked figures of the era. Most entertaining movie on the subject: Dick (1999).

* Texas School Book Repository: No, I draw the line here. Look up the Kennedy Assassination yourself.

* Ripping the tag off of mattresses: Another US-only joke. Thanks to a scandal in the early 20th Century, it became required for mattress makers to include a tag stating what the mattress was made out of. You know, so people wouldn’t accidentally buy mattresses made from plague rats or something. To keep these nefarious mattress makers from hiding the truth by snipping off the tag, Congress required that the tag include bold language declaring that removing the tag was illegal. Now imagine generations of kids growing up reading that tag on their mattresses, and thinking that they could be carted off to a federal penitentiary for life if they accidentally tore it off. Generations of dumb kids are the reason why Congress had to change the phrasing of that warning to say “...is not to be removed except by the consumer.”

* Tinfoil as protection from mind-reading: This particular trope dates back to a work of science fiction. No, not by L. Ron Hubbard, but by Aldous Huxley. In a 1927 short story, he had his protagonists use the decade-old invention to keep the telepathic villains from discovering their plans. Too bad that aluminum foil actually focuses electromagnetic radiation, meaning that if anything, “tinfoil hats” are themselves a plot hatched by the government to read our minds.

* “Games Tent”: The name of my very first fanfiction, published online way back in 2003, before some of you were even born. No, don’t look for it—it’s awful.

* Chuckles and aliens: I always found it amazing that the same decade that developed such a strong distrust of government was nevertheless convinced that when the aliens arrived that they would solve all of humanity’s problems, instead of revealing that they were just as messed up as we were. Of course, we know much better nowadays...

* Andy Warhol and Jimmy Carter: The first of many appearances by Andy in this story. The event actually occurred on June 14, 1977, so that was a bit of an anachronism on my part. Here’s a link to a photo—Andy looks like he’s going to drop dead of stage fright.

* The Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters: Unfortunately for me, this book by Bill O’Neal wasn’t published until 1979, but I couldn’t find another book that would have covered the subject as extensively before this one.

* Gunfight at the O.K. Corral: I invite you to read the Wikipedia article on this one for the full story. In short, there was a gunfight in the town of Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881, roughly over which of two rival groups would have control of the town: the Earps or the Clantons. The Earps won, and portrayed themselves as the side of law and order, with the Clantons portrayed as cattle rustlers.

* The blurry photograph: On the one hand, using a photo to tell the effects of time travel mucking around with history comes from Back to the Future (1985). On the other hand, the Nineteenth Century in general had a weird thing about photographing the dead, so this fits together perfectly. Also, this is Applejack’s introduction to the story, although we don’t even have a distorted version of her name yet.

Figure 4: Video Game System (an Atari 2600 from 1977)

* B&B: Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, who do in fact own the phrase “The Greatest Show on Earth”. In the 1970’s the circus was actually owned by Mattel, who as we all know are the arch-enemies of Hasbro. In 1978, the ringmasters of the two divisions of that circus were Harold Ronk and Kit Haskett. This information is utterly and completely useless as far as this story is concerned—I just like the idea of somebody being known as “Ringmaster Ronk”—he sounds like would have been an awesome rapper of the era.

* “Dancing Queen”: 1976 song performed and written by ABBA.

* Atari Video Computer System: Better known today as the Atari 2600 (1977), developed by Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell.

* “It was like she was built for multi-tasking”: I offer up “Art of the Dress” as my evidence on this front.

* “The Year 2019, when synthetic animals will outnumber real ones”: I am thinking here of the novel that Blade Runner (1982) was based off of, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), by Philip K. Dick. A major plot point of the book was that human overpopulation had wiped out almost all animals. Meat was grown in vats and if you wanted a pet, you bought a robot dog or cat. Just as sticking Rarity in the tackiness of the 1970’s was designed by Discord to torture her sense of fashion, so is this particular setting designed to torture Fluttershy. That, and since she would be a talking pony, also put her in a considerable amount of peril. (Note: Just to make things as confusing as possible, the film was set in the year 2019, while the original edition of the book was set in 1992, changed to 2021 shortly before the author's death.)

* [Incoherent Panic]: As I make clear almost immediately afterwards, this bit was derived from the Frau Blücher joke from Young Frankenstein (1974), directed by Mel Brooks, written by Brooks and Gene Wilder.

Figure 5: Speakers (I think that was from a car stereo wiring diagram, but I couldn’t tell you which one)

* A prelude by Chopin: The song below begins with and is based on the chord progressions from the Prelude in C minor for Piano (Op. 28 No. 20) by Frédéric Chopin (1839).

* “Could It Be Magic”: A song that reached its peak popularity in 1975, performed by Barry Manilow and written by Adrienne Anderson, Manilow and Chopin (see above). The line “Sweet Antonya” was originally “Sweet Melissa”.

Figure 6: Camera (a Polaroid SX-70, introduced in 1972, but not really popular until Christmas 1977 - 1981)

* Polaroid SX-70 camera: See above—designed by Polaroid founder and CEO Dr. Edwin H. Land. An interesting feature of the self-developing film used by this camera is that by physically manipulating it during the development process, you can create unique coloring effects. Although what Rarity is doing here is strictly electrical rather than mechanical.

* Xerox copier: A photocopier manufactured by Xerox. Not really anything interesting to say about it. At least in the 1970s. Except this one is being used as a printer for Rarity’s brain.

* “Andy Warhol”: 1971 song performed and written by David Bowie. The subject of the song will be discussed in much more detail in the notes for Figure 11. But I do think that Bowie understood Warhol far better than most people.

* “Do androids dream?”: Because I thought I wasn’t being obvious enough the last time I talked about Fluttershy.

* “What’s this ‘Salem Witch Hunt’?”: You know, I find it regrettable that so few authors of time travel science fiction are willing to embrace the idea of just mucking around with history and leaving it changed at the end of the story.

* Marie Marvingt: An actual French athlete, mountaineer, aviator and journalist who died in 1963 and who most people have never heard of. What she was not was a multi-colored pony in a human body. Need to keep myself libel free here.

* Piera: At the moment I introduced her, Piera had only two purposes in the plot: to be the centerpiece of Buttercup II’s failed plan of world domination, and the person to hold Rarity’s leash when she went out and about, so she wouldn’t get in trouble. She was going to be the daughter of Hector the Strongman, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with her voice. But then I had to give her thistledown hair...

* Thistledown hair: In the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke, the villain is a fae described only as “the gentleman with thistle-down hair”. Frankie himself was sinister in a similar way while definitely being human, so Piera at that moment just naturally became his daughter from some unnamed fairy. And then fairies just sort of seeped into the whole story.

* Circusfest: There are several meetings with this name, with the best-known one in the U.K. I’m not even sure there was such a thing in 1978, but it seemed reasonable.

Figure 7: Slide Projector (a Kodak Carousel 760H, modified into an 860H, with the “R” added to the model name by the individual doing the modification)

* Kodak: Another pointless note to point out that the Kodak and Polaroid camera companies were bitter rivals, and had an epic lawsuit between them over whether Kodak was infringing Polaroid patents when they set out to make their own instant cameras after the success of the SX-70. Polaroid won the suit in 1992, but by that time everyone was buying disposable cameras with film that could be developed professionally in an hour instead of instant cameras, and in another decade both companies would be wiped out by the rise of digital cameras. Despite this fact, there is no fundamental opposition between this chapter and the one prior to it, which I really should have done if I was paying attention to which corporations I was using. Oh well.

* “Behind Blue Eyes”: 1971 song by The Who, written by Pete Townsend.

* “Forming a sort of cross between a cape and a dress”: Inspired by the FIMfic “Easy Come, Caprese Go” by heliopause, wherein Rarity casually invents a cross between a cape and a dress that soon becomes a Ponyville sensation. I had a notion that Rarity had to invent something new to justify her becoming a fashion icon of the 70’s by the end of the story. Eventually I decided that capes alone were good enough.

* Princess Hat/Hennin: One of those objects that everybody recognizes by sight without knowing what it’s actually called.

* Day-Glo Pink: In the summer of 1933, a young chemistry student named Bob Switzer suffered a fall that severed one of his optic nerves. Doctors told him that the damage would heal itself, but only if he spent the next few months in a dark room. Bob’s brother Joseph spent the time entertaining him with magic shows and telling of his dream of performing a magic show entirely in the dark, using florescent paint on the props. The problem was that florescent paint hadn’t been invented yet. So the two brothers set out to do just that. By the time that Bob’s sight had returned, they had succeeded, leading to the foundation of a company that would eventually be known as Day-Glo. That name refers to their discovery in 1944 that by mixing their florescent paints with normal paints, they were able to create colors that seemed to pop out even in daylight. The original set of colors were Signal Green, Arc Yellow, Saturn Yellow, Fire Orange, Blaze Orange, Rocket Red, Corona Magenta...and Aurora Pink. (I tried to find a good online photo of all eight colors to show you, but DayGlo colors are notoriously hard to photograph.)

* The triskelion flag: This is the flag of Sicily, should Sicily ever become a nation independent from the rest of Italy.

* “Shiftless, Shady, Jealous Kind of People”: 1972 song performed by the O’Jays and written by Gene McFadden, John Whitehead, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.

* The Bronze Bonelli: Inspired by the Maltese Falcon, but embedded into Sicilian history instead. In AD 1070, the Normans conquered Sicily from the Arabs who had ruled it for centuries. Joined with southern Italy, it became a kingdom in 1130. The Hohenstaufen Dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire took it over in 1194, but lost it to the Dukes of Anjou in 1266 (in both cases because the male line had either died out or had no interest in ruling it). The Normans and Hoehenstaufens had taken care to give the Sicilians autonomy and to cater to their wishes, but the Angevins treated Sicily like their personal property, which led to an insurrection known as the Sicilian Vespers in 1282. This resulted in Sicily being joined to the Kingdom of Aragon, while southern Italy (now called the Kingdom of Naples) went to the House of Anjou. Sicilians are kind of obsessed with this period in history, as it represents the closest the island came to controlling its own destiny since before the Roman conquest. Bonelli’s Eagle is a breed of bird that lives in Sicily, among other Mediterranean locations.

* The Bergen Museum of Hackensack: Let me quote the entirety of Wikipedia’s article on the Bergen Museum of Art & Science, as it seems so very “New Jersey” to me for some reason: The Bergen Museum of Art & Science is temporarily located in cyberspace while its extensive art collection valued at over one million dollars is being stored in an art warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, United States. The museum relocated from the Bergen Mall in 2010 is currently undergoing re-organization and is looking for a new building to contain its entire art collection, sculptures, fossils, artifacts, drawings and other items and collectibles. That’s right—a million dollar art museum was once located in a shopping mall. I couldn’t think of a more insulting place to put a Sicilian national treasure.

* “A miniature monoceros”: I hereby donate this phrase to all “purple unicorn” writers looking for the most obscure possible way of referring to a pony unicorn.

Figure 8: Portable Radio (a Panasonic Panapet R-70 from 1972)

* Boston’s first album: 1976, designed by Paula Scher, illustrated by Roger Huyssen with lettering by Gerard Huerta.

* “A complete summary of Star Wars in van form”: Here’s one.

* Star Wars (1977): Written and directed by George Lucas.

* A Princess of Mars (1917), written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was the first volume in the John Carter of Mars series. (Oddly, I can’t find images online of vans using Frazetta’s cover to the novel, but just look at it—doesn’t it look like the stereotypical van art subject?)

* Pirates of Venus (1934), written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of the Carson Napier of Venus series. (No naked women this time, but still quite “van-worthy”.)

* Frank Frazetta (1928 - 2010) was an artist best known for the covers of mass-market paperback fantasy novels, usually featuring well-muscled and barely clothed men and women. The definitive image of Conan before the Schwarzenegger film came from Frazetta.

* Patty Hearst (born 1954): The granddaughter of multi-millionaire William Randolph Hearst. In 1974, at the age of 19, she was kidnapped from the University of California at Berkeley by the SLA, a socialist terrorist group that sought to overthrow the American government for being corrupt, capitalist and racist. The group had already assassinated one school official (Oakland’s first black superintendent), and had kidnapped Hearst in order to pressure the police into releasing the two of their members who had been arrested for the assassination. After two months of rape and torture in retaliation for not getting what they wanted, Hearst announced to the world that she had joined the SLA. She subsequently helped lead a bank robbery that left two men wounded. Another bank robbery where Hearst was the getaway driver ended with the murder of a woman who got in the way. When she was finally caught and put on trial in 1976, Hearst claimed to be the victim of brainwashing, but was convicted anyway, as nobody on the jury believed that brainwashing was real.  The subsequent mass suicide at Jonestown two years later made the public much more willing to believe Hearst’s defense, and her sentence was commuted by President Carter in 1979.

* Panasonic P-70 Panapet: I can’t seem to find any information on who at Panasonic was responsible for this beauty, or which year in initially came out, although signs point to 1970.

* The songs: The following were all in the Top 40 for the week of April 29, 1978. I obviously can’t confirm that they played in this order on the stations named.

* “It’s a Heartache” (1978), performed by Bonnie Tyler, written by Ronnie Scott and Steve Wolfe.

* Alka-Seltzer commercial jingle: Here’s a cringe-worthy TV spot from 1978 with Sammy Davis Jr. The song was written by Tom Dawes.

* A Meow Mix commercial from the 70’s. The song was written by Shelley Palmer and Tom McFaul.

* “Two all-beef patties” jingle: Written by Keith Reinhard and Mark Vieha in 1974.

* Chuck Leonard at WABC: The link, a bunch of song intros by Leonard recorded in 1974, is proof that you can indeed find anything on the Internet.

* “I Can’t Smile Without You” (1978), performed by Barry Manilow, written by Christian Arnold, David Martin and Geoff Morrow.

* WCBS News: Example broadcast from 1978. Although why anybody would actually click this link is beyond me...

* “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” (1977), performed by Meat Loaf, written by Jim Steinman.

* “Running on Empty” (1978), performed and written by Jackson Browne.

* A bunch of undated WJDM clips. Towards the end somebody mentions free circus tickets.

* America’s Top 40: Here’s a sample program from 1977 (part 1).

* “Disco Inferno” (1976), performed by The Trammps, written by Leroy Green and Ron Kersey.

* “Jack and Jill” (1978), performed by Raydio and written by lead singer Ray Parker, Jr.

* “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” (1978), performed by and written by Warren Zevon.

* Crazy Eddie commercial from 1978, performed by “Dr. Jerry” Carroll.

* “Ego” (1978), performed by Elton John, written by him and Bernie Taupin.

* Dino Scarpino: Well, this is rather standard for me. If I have a Frankie [Frank Sinatra] in a story, sooner or later I’ve got to introduce a Dino [Dean Martin].

* “Dust in the Wind” (1978), performed by Kansas and written by member Kerry Livgren.

* Riker’s Island: The main jail for New York City.

* “Be a Pepper” jingle (1978), written by Jake Holmes and performed by David Naughton.

* The Larry King Show (1978 - 1994): Radio talk show syndicated by the Mutual Broadcasting System. For some reason, it’s really hard to find recordings of the show before 1982 or so. Here’s an interview with Charles Schultz from April 28, 1988.

* Muhammad Ali (1942 - 2016): Charismatic American boxer and Heavyweight Champion (1963 - 68, 1974 - 78, 1978 - 79). I could say an awful lot more about him, but I’ll leave it at that.

* “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” (1977), written and performed by Billy Joel.

* “Thank You for Being a Friend” (1978), written and performed by Andrew Gold. The song is probably better known today as the theme from the TV show The Golden Girls (1985 - 92).

* The radio evangelist joke: Yeah, I know...easy target. Most of the really good scandals and examples of outrageous behavior were in the 80’s, but I can at least point out Billy James Hargis, founder of the Christian Crusade ministry and president of American Christian College, who was forced to resign the latter position in 1974 over a sex scandal.

* “Feels So Good”, written and performed by Chuck Mangione.

* Flugelhorn: Reference to Pinkie’s flugelhorn joke from the FIM episode “The Crystal Empire” (Part 2).

Figure 9: Headphones (1978 patent for adjustable headphones—does that mean headphones were one-size-fits-all before then?)

* Sparks Nightly: This is supposed to be a description of Margot Kidder playing Lois Lane in 1978. The giant newspaper is the Daily Planet.

* The Big Apricot: New York City has been known as “The Big Apple” since the 1920’s. In the DC Universe, Metropolis is called “The Big Apricot”.

* Sparks’ monologue: I was unable to uncover any information on Lois Lane’s official backstory prior to becoming an investigative journalist for the Planet, so I made this part up.

* President Carter: Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 (defeating Gerald Ford), serving through 1980 (when he was defeated by Ronald Reagan).

* Greenwich Village: The name given for the west side of Lower Manhattan, a place known for its patronage of the arts. It’s also the location of the Comedy Cellar, one of the most famous comedy clubs in the city.

* “Miss Sally”: Sparks manages to mis-name this girl using most of the female cast of Peanuts.

* Veronica Lake: Lake’s hairstyle is iconic, so it’s almost certain that giving Rarity that same style on the part of Lauren Faust was deliberate.

* Frieda: Frieda doesn’t show up that much in later Peanuts strips. She’s the redhead who’s always bragging about her naturally-curly hair.

* Violet: Another obscure Peanuts character, originally one of Charlie Brown’s chief tormenters, but eventually replaced by Lucy, who she physically resembled.

* Silver bracelets: Silver is frequently given the property of cancelling out evil magic in fantasy works. I was trying to imply that being half-fairy was an unpleasant experience for Piera, with her having the equivalent of two or three extra senses that were all on overload, and only by wearing silver can she come close to being “normal”.

* Catherine de’ Medici (1519 - 1589): Queen of France from 1547 - 1559. I’ve of course told the tale of the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre in another FIMfic.

* “Superstition” (1972): Song written and performed by Steve Wonder.

* Capes: With the ending revealed, I think you know exactly where I’m going with this, and why Sparks likes the red one.

Figure A: Video Cassette Recorder (page from the manual to a 1986 Sharp VC-581 VCR)

* This chapter: Would not have existed if not for reader JZ1’s persistent questions about Pinkie’s fate.

* 1985 BMW E30: The 80’s was all about the status symbols. “Greed is good,” after all.

* Yuppie: Abbreviation of “Young Urban Professional”. Basically the younger brothers of hippies.

* Thomas Bros. Guide: If you lived in a big city in the era before GPS’s, a Thomas Bros. map book was indispensable. I still use my California State book for planning out vacations, as I can flip through it faster than I can scroll Google Maps from Eureka to Carlsbad. I linked to the company’s online store—the longer you look at the site, the more obvious the desperation becomes. Nobody buys Thomas Guides anymore.

* The Cannon Group Building: 640 San Vincente Boulevard. The linked page has a particularly parking-garage-looking photo of the building.

* The Cannon Group (1967 - 1994). I learned most of what I used in this chapter from the 1986 BBC documentary The Last Moguls, which is available on YouTube. There’s also the more-recent documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014), which I got off of Netflix, but as that link might disappear at any moment, I wouldn’t say that it really had much that wasn’t in The Last Moguls.

* Don LaFontaine (1940 - 2008): The greatest movie trailer voice-over artist of all time. I couldn’t narrow the good YouTube clips down to one, so you can choose between this serious documentary from 2007, or “5 Men in a Limo”, a goofy short starring LaFontaine and the other biggest voice-over artists of the day that was used to introduce some obscure Hollywood awards show from 1997. (And no, there are no copies with better video quality without having crappy audio.)

* Delta Force (1986), directed by Menahem Golan. Written by Menahem Golan and James Bruner. Trailer voice-over by you-know-who.

* Chuck Norris. This is the Internet—I don’t need to tell you who Chuck Friggin’ Norris is. (Of course that’s his middle name. Do you have to question everything I type here?)

* Lee Marvin (1924 - 1987): Another tough-guy actor. Delta Force was his last performance.

* “Racist cartoonish wish-fulfilment of the lowest possible order”: That’s a direct quote in fact—the review is one of the highlights of The Last Moguls.

* Highlander (1986), directed by Russell Mulcahy, screenplay by Gregory Widen, Peter Bellwood & Larry Ferguson, from a story by Widen. Trailer voiceover by Don, song snippet at the end by Queen.

* “Princes of the Universe” (1986): written by Freddie Mercury, performed by Queen.

* Rolex: Here’s a page selling used Rolex watches...for upwards of $65,000...for a watch. Definitely not the kind to just let go of if it falls into the toilet. (Well...it was $65K in 2014. I checked the site in late 2022 and it's more like $15K.)

* A gold pocket watch. Huh, another pocket watch in one of my stories. Well in my defense, I grew up watching The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything (1980), a movie about a pocket watch that stops time, and how an ordinary guy uses it to make his dreams come true.

* The Alden family: Captain John Alden was one of the individuals accused of witchcraft during the Salem Trials who didn’t get executed. He wrote one of the main accounts of the Trials. His family has lasted all the way to the present day. I made up all of the other Aldens in this story, so I wouldn’t have even more people coming after me for defamation of character.

* Gucci: Italian luxury brand in the realms of fashion and leather goods, founded in 1924.

* Uzi: The most popular submachine gun ever made.

* “A new age of terror requires a new breed of warrior”: From the trailer to Delta Force.

* “The adventure of a lifetime is coming to a theater near you”: From the King Solomon’s Mines (1985) trailer.

* “Charles Bronson is the one man who cannot be stopped”: From the Death Wish II (1982) trailer.

* The Live Free films: Totally made up. For once, I’ll skip past all the references in this paragraph, or we’d be here all day. Same thing goes for Matt Black and his made-up movies.

* The art of Cannon Group posters: Lifted shamelessly from this Cracked article. (Which only exists on archive.org now, so it looks kinda sucky.)

* Giorgio Armani S.p.A.: Another Italian fashion house, this one founded in 1975.

* Givenchy: This one’s French. Founded 1952.

* 1986 Word Processor: Here’s a picture of what one of these things looks like. I got through my first two years of college on one of these guys.

* Rolodex: One of the many many inventions made obsolete once people learned to use their computers.

* America 3000 (1986): Directed and written by David Engelbach. Trailer not narrated by Don LaFontaine.

* Duet For One (1986): Directed by Andrei Konchalvosky, written by Tom Kempinski. Trailer narrated by somebody more cultured than Don.

* Operation Thunderbolt (1977): Directed by Menahem Golan, written by Golan, Ken Globus & Clarke Reynolds. This was the film that put filmmakers Golan and Globus in charge of Cannon Films after it was a hit while the studio was going bankrupt. I swear I named Julia’s horse Thunderbolt before I ever picked Cannon to write a chapter around.

* Frank Langella, Jr. (born 1938): Actor best known for playing Dracula and Richard Nixon. He was the poor guy playing Skeletor in Masters of the Universe.

* Masters of the Universe (1987): Adaptation of the He-Man television series. Directed by Gary Goddard, written by David Odell. It  was the commercial failures of both this film and Superman IV that doomed Cannon Films.

* Kathy Lorza: Made up casting director for Cannon.

* Betsy Ross (1752 - 1836): The woman credited with sewing America’s first flag.

* Patty Duke (1946 - 2016): Film and television actress, best known for her parts in The Miracle Worker (1962) and The Patty Duke Show (1963 - 66). She played Martha Washington in the 1984 TV movie George Washington.

* Franco Nero (born 1941): Italian tough-guy actor, best known for the part of Django (1966). He was the star of the Cannon movie Enter the Ninja (1981), although his voice was dubbed by somebody without an accent. I figured he’d make a good Pr. Chronoton.

* Joe Miller Joke Book: Joe Miller (1684 - 1738) was a popular English stage comedian. After his death, John Mottley put out a book of 247 jokes, all supposedly from Miller’s repertoire (in reality, only three jokes came from Miller). The book has been continuously in print ever since, growing larger and larger over the centuries. It finally fell out of favor in the mid-Twentieth Century (Daffy Duck fails to sell the book in a 1942 short), brought down by how very old and dull those jokes actually were. The jokes I put in Pinkie’s mouth actually came from the first edition, with the language modernized.

* Mata Hari (1876 - 1917): Famous spy from World War I. There were no female spies as overwhelmingly well-known from World War II, so Matt just tacked another three decades onto her lifespan.

* Head in a refrigerator: Oblique reference to the Women in Refrigerators website.

* The Counterfeiters (1925) by André Gide. I picked this mostly because it was the most-famous French novel of the 20’s. There was in fact a French film adaptation made in 2010.

* Hopi: A Native American tribe living in northeastern Arizona. So kind of far from Tombstone, but they’ve got a really sophisticated culture and religion, including a belief in dream-walking, so I decided to use them anyway.

* The plot synopsis of Lifeforce (1985): As Dave Barry would say, I swear I’m not making this up. Oh, and that’s an R-rated trailer I linked to—if you tried to make a trailer out of the Lifeforce footage that didn’t include a naked Mathilda May, it would only be 10 seconds long.

* Cowboys and Aliens: Sadly, it would be another 26 years before anybody would get around to making a movie with that title.

* Lucille Ball (1911 - 1989): Creator and star of I Love Lucy (1951 - 57).

* Andy Warhol in 1986: That was the year he created his Self-Portrait, his last major work before he died. (Except of course in this reality he never created it, so it must be some impostor pretending to be him.)

* Edie Sedgwick (1943 - 71): American heiress, actress and fashion model. In the mid-60’s, she became the most famous of Andy Warhol’s “superstars”, the individuals he cast in his experimental films. She died of a barbiturate/alcohol overdose.

* Flying Dogs (1987): Another film that doesn’t exist. However, what I was thinking was the Whoopi Goldberg movie Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986)...only actually good. And funny. Because that movie’s got a good idea behind it—it’s just the execution that sucks.

* King Solomon’s Mines (1985), aka Cannon’s rip-off of the Indiana Jones movies.  Directed by J. Lee Thompson, written by Gene Quintano and James R. Silke. Trailer narrated by Don LaFontaine. The soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith is actually pretty good when it’s not trying and failing to ape John Williams.

Figure 10: Air Cushion Restraint System (the one belonging to a 1974 Chevrolet Impala)

* Manhattan: I decided not to try and find a map of Metropolis for this chapter, and just assume that Metropolis is Manhattan with a different name. I found this to be the most useful map for planning everything out.

* Lincoln Tunnel: One of the main roadways connecting New Jersey with Manhattan.

* “Goin’ Out of My Head” by Gloria Gaynor (1978): Cover of a 1964 song written by Teddy Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein and originally performed by Little Anthony and the Imperials.

* Fashion District: Better known as the “Garment District”, an area in central Manhattan between Fifth Avenue and Ninth Avenue and between 34th and 42nd Streets.

* The Statue of Independence: According to my head-canon, that is the name of the statue in Manehattan’s harbor, based on the idea that the city was independent of Equestria through most of the period when Celestia ruled the kingdom alone. In this world, it refers to the Statue of Liberty, built in 1886 and designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. It’s located off the south shore of Manhattan.

* Central Park: The dominant feature of Manhattan, established in 1857, with most of the design attributed to Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux.

* Equestrian Avenue: Sixth Avenue, officially known as “Avenue of the Americas”.

* Griffish Empire Building: My name for the Equestrian equivalent of the Empire State Building, the Midtown Manhattan skyscraper developed by William F. Lamb in 1931.

* Swoop and eyes logo: Linked in case I didn’t describe it very well.

* Coca-Cola logo tee-shirt: Here's one from 1979. The Coca-Cola Company was founded in 1886.

* Cosmopolitan: Fashion magazine for women, launched as a literary magazine in 1886 by Paul Schlicht of Schlicht & Field of New York, relaunched as a fashion magazine by Helen Gurley Brown of the Hearst Corporation in 1965. She was still editor in 1978.

* Vogue: Fashion newspaper founded by Arthur Turnure in 1892, later converted into a magazine under Condé Nast. Edited by Diana Vreeland (1963 - 71) and Grace Mirabella (1971 - 88) during the 70’s.

* Manhattan in 1978: My primary source here is NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell, a 2007 VH-1 documentary about the rise of hip hop, disco and punk music in a city that was falling apart.

* “President Ford told the city to drop dead”: And I have a New York Daily News front page to prove it. Hey, if you can’t trust the Daily News, who can you trust?

* Atlantic City: The city in New Jersey with the casinos.

* Yves Saint Laurent (1936 - 2008): The greatest fashion designer of the second half of the 20th Century.

* YSL Theater: Actually 132 W. 36th Street, if you wanted to get a look at it.

* Ford Trelaine: Original character, but with at least a little of the appearance of William Campbell, the actor who played the character Trelaine in the original Star Trek series.

* Penn Station: One of two main train stations in Manhattan, dedicated in 1910 and designed by McKim, Mead and White. The above-ground structure was demolished in 1963.

* 1976 Oldmobile Toronado: One of the few cars in the 1970s to have airbags, or rather the “Air Cushion Restraint System”.

* Checker Motors Corporation: An American auto company that made nothing but taxicabs for the Checker Taxi company. Founded by merger in 1922, went bankrupt in 2010, a victim of the Recession and of Bernie Madoff.

* World Trade Center: The largest skyscraper in New York City in 1978. Dedicated in 1973 and designed by Minoru Yamaski. Destroyed in 2001.

* Rarity’s speech calling Canterlot the center of order and Manehattan the center of chaos for Equestria: Massive head-canon on my part. The part about Canterlot seems to be backed by recent episodes: “Spice Up Your Life” has the population saddling themselves with awful restaurants simply because a pony in authority gave them her seal of approval. For Manehattan, I’m taking the part where Princess Twilight couldn’t get a cab in “Rarity Takes Manehattan” and running with it.

* Times Square: From around 1960 to 1989, Times Square truly was an awful place to visit. See the film Midnight Cowboy (1969) if you’d like to see for yourself. It was finally cleaned up under Mayors Dinkins and Giuliani.

Figure 11: Turntable (a Technics SL-1400Mk2 from 1978)

* Second-wave feminism (aka Women’s Liberation): The period from the 60’s through the early 80’s, in which women fought for the right to work outside the home, to make birth control legal, and make marital rape illegal. The only major failure of the movement was in not getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed.

* MPD: Metropolis Police Department.

* CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. government.

* Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War: A 1949 treaty outlining the rights of civilians during war. The term is generally used to define which actions are unacceptable under any circumstances.

* Popeye Doyle: Main character in the movie The French Connection (1971), directed by William Friedkin, screenplay by Ernest Tidyman, based on the novel of the same name by Robin Moore. The character, a short-tempered no-nonsense cop who plays by his own rules, was portrayed by Gene Hackman. Gruekin then gives away the two best parts of the movie.

* Lex Luthor: The short-tempered antagonist in the movie Superman (1978), played by Gene Hackman. Coincidence? I think not!

* The Last Automat: Description taken from this New York Magazine article by James T. Farrell. It’s from 1979, close enough to work in 1978.

* William’s argument about a truly automatic kitchen: Just a prediction of the modern workplace break room. Microwave ovens were called “radar ranges” until the early 80’s, when they finally became common in homes.

* Formica laminate is a composite of several materials, invented in 1912 by Daniel J. O’Connor and Herbert A. Faber and now manufactured by their Formica Group company.

* Futurism: Worldwide art movement of the first half of the 20th Century, founded in Milan by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

* “Aquarius”: Song from the musical Hair (1967), written by James Rado, Gerome Ragni & Gait MacDermot. Released as a single by the 5th Dimension in a medley with another song from the musical, “Let the Sunshine In”. I can think of no better song to represent the hopes and dreams of the hippies.

* Andy Warhol (1928 - 87) in the 70’s: Now this was a hard nut to crack. The man had almost completely retreated into himself in this period—everyone would invite him to parties, and he’d just stand there in the corner and look awkward. You’d be lucky to get one inscrutable observation out of him, and in interviews he made a deliberate effort to contradict himself. Besides the usual Wikipedia article, I found this New York Review of Books article useful (especially for informing me about the whole authenticity debate), but mostly I relied on The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989, edited by Pat Hackett)—I had to buy that one. The theory that he spent the 70’s trying to destroy Art-with-a-capital-“A” is entirely my invention, but I believe it is consistent with what I could decipher of his motives. Otherwise, I tried to be as true to his personality as possible—well, I doubt he ate Campbell’s Tomato Soup when he was depressed or went to the Automat while keeping that fact out of the Diary, but other than that...

* Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962).

* Marilyn Diptych (1962).

* Fifteen minutes of fame: Something Andy included in the program for an exhibition of his works at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 1968. Andy’s lifelong fascination was with fame, and how people could become famous for doing practically anything. He thought fame was a wonderful thing, and wished that everybody would have a chance to experience it someday.

* The Factory: This was the name Andy gave to his studio. Between 1963 and 1968, it was where he made a series of experimental movies starring his friends, the “superstars”.  During this same period, the building was full of the most interesting people Andy could find, 24/7. That particular party ended on June 3, 1968.

* June 3, 1968: That was the date when Valerie Solaris, one of Andy’s superstars, shot him over a missing script. He barely survived, and carried lasting physical effects of the attack for the rest of his life. Solaris claimed that she shot him because he had too much control of her life, but my reading is that, faced with the blank wall which is Andy Warhol, she projected her own ideas of repressive manhood onto him, and when he didn’t bother to disprove her beliefs, she decided to act on them. Andy had one of his few personally insightful quotes on the subject: “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television—you don’t feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.”

* Andy was lying: He was lying about a movie being the reason he was shot, not the part about it not being fun anymore. I wasn’t sure if I was clear with that sentence.

* Halston (1932 - 90): American fashion designer who was at the height of his fame in the 1970’s. He was known for his use of cashmere and ultrasuede, and later for a line of perfume.

* Calvin Klein (born 1942): Ranks with Ralph Lauren as America’s most famous fashion designer. Among the most lucrative of his products were his tight-fitting jeans, introduced in 1974.

* Ralph Lauren (born 1939): Ranks with Calvin Klein as America’s most famous fashion designer. I suppose the short-sleeve Polo shirt for both men and women is his most famous creation.

* Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 91).

* Green Coca Cola Bottles (1962). Andy sort of did all of his best works in 1962.

* Andy’s silkscreening process: Here’s a webpage on the Hamilton Selway Museum website describing the technique. By the way, here’s an example of a portrait from 1976, of Paul Anka (used as the cover of his album The Painter--scroll down).

* Andy’s will: Made that part up. And even if it were true, there’s no way that The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts would ever let anyone know about it.

* Xerox PARC: The research and development company that invented modern computing. Founded in 1970.

* Andy’s 50th Birthday Party: It was on August 6, 1978. He was completely ignored at his own party by all the guests, who were more interested in talking to each other and going off to other, more interesting parties. And then two days later one of his assistants announced his intention to divorce his wife by starving her beloved cats, drowning them, and then throwing the remains into an incinerator. I should note that Andy, who didn’t seem to have any problems associating with torture-crazy dictators, was truly horrified by this revelation. And this was right after his friend Truman Capote had a meltdown on live TV and had to be sent off to a rehab clinic.

* Steve Rubell (1943 - 89): Co-owner of Studio 54. He was there every night, because he got a contact high from being around the rich and famous, and knowing they knew him by name. He’s sort of Andy Warhol’s worst impulses turned up to 11. The photo I linked is I think the perfect portrait of him, surrounded by Andy, Calvin Klein and an underage Brooke Shields. The ludicrous amounts of illegal drugs consumed on Studio 54 were either supplied by Rubell, or he turned a blind eye when somebody brought some in and started handing it around.

* “I am not the Bearer of Kindness”: One thing I’ve always found fascinating about Friendship Is Magic is how willing the bearers are to violate each other’s traits: Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash have no problem with lying, to give the most obvious example.

* Billy Alden: Yes, the same character from Figure A. In reality, it was Steve Rubell who decided who got in or not.

* “The festering cow pasture known as New Jersey”: New Yorkers are known for having an exaggerated dislike of their neighbors to the east: here’s a good example.

* “I Feel Love” (1977): Written by Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. Moroder is considered a pioneer in the realm of electronic dance music/hi-NRG. I’ve used his track “Chase” from Midnight Express (1978) as the theme song for my version of Vinyl Scratch in other fanfics.

* Liza Minnelli (born 1946): Probably best known for her role in Cabaret (1972). In 1978, she was on Broadway, starring in the musical The Act. She frequently skipped performances to visit Studio 54. The linked photo, taken January 10, 1978, shows her with Andy and Bianca Jagger.

* Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - 2011): Best known for films such as National Velvet (1944), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Taming of the Shrew (1967). The linked photo shows her with Halston at Studio 54 in February 1978.

* Bianca Jagger (born 1945): In August of 1978 she was just known as Mick Jagger’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a jet-setter, and a minor philanthropist. It wasn’t until the 80’s that she became a renowned humanitarian. Look at Liza Minnelli’s link for a photo including her and Andy.

* Debbie Harry (born 1945): Best known for her days with Blondie. The linked photo was on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the magazine Interview, which was run by Andy. The huge image in the background is the cover of the 10th anniversary issue, with Debbie Harry as the subject. In front of that image are Jerry Hall (the woman Mick Jagger was cheating on his wife with), Andy, Debbie, Truman Capote and the youngest daughter of Pablo Picasso, Paloma Picasso.

* Michael Jackson (1958 - 2009): The King of Pop. The link is to a photo of him in Studio 54 with Woody Allen.

* Sir Elton John (born 1947): Just about at the height of his fame as a pop singer. The linked photo shows him with George Hamilton’s wife Lana and Rod Stewart.

* Grace Jones (born 1948): A supermodel who had just successfully transitioned into being a popular singer in 1978. The linked photo, taken by Andy, shows her with Steve Rubell and another model.

* Halston (again): See Elizabeth Taylor’s entry for a photo with him at Studio 54.

* Fran Lebowitz (born 1950): Essayist. Got her start writing articles for Andy’s Interview magazine. The linked photo shows her with Calvin Klein, Andy, and Steve.

* Margaret Trudeau (born 1948): There’s not much else to say about her in 1978. She was Pierre Trudeau’s wife, and she embarrassed him by partying at Studio 54 when the public thought she should be home raising their children. The linked photo shows her with Andy at Studio 54.

* The Iranian royal family: The Pahlavi dynasty, soon to be deposed in the Iranian Revolution (1979).

* Emperor Caligula (AD 12 - 41).

* Technicolor: The most-widely used process to provide color to motion picture film between 1922 and 1952. The term has generally become used to describe a scene more colorful than everyday real life.

* Candy Land: Children’s board game created by Eleanor Abbott in 1948, and currently manufactured by Hasbro. In 1996, Hasbro sued a website called candyland.com for hosting adult content—among the first lawsuits ever over a website domain name.

* Truman Capote (1924 - 84): Truman himself tells you all you need to know about him. My research on Truman consisted of watching Murder by Death (1976) and bits of his interviews with Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson. A little of him goes a long way—here’s a minute from Murder by Death. It’s odd that he and Andy were such good friends, as they are so clearly opposites of each other. There are some truly awful pictures of Truman from 1978 that I could have used, but I linked to one of the better ones—he’s in the middle, with the glasses.

* Isaac the Bartender: Character on the ABC sitcom The Love Boat (1977 - 86), played by Ted Lange. The show was inspired by the nonfiction book Love Boats by Jeraldine Saunders; the executive producer was Aaron Spelling.

* Truman’s bibliography, in order: Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), In Cold Blood (1965). To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) was written by Harper Lee, a childhood friend of his who became estranged after helping him research In Cold Blood.

* William Faulkner (1897 - 1962): Frequently considered to be the greatest Southern American writer of the 20th Century. Truman was a fan of his.

* Murder by Death (1976): Parody of murder mysteries written by Neil Simon and directed by Robert Moore.

* Truman’s “little story”: “La Côte Basque 1965” (1975), published in Esquire. It exposed the sordid secrets of Truman’s friends William S. Paley (president of CBS) and his wife Babe. The chapter was supposed to be part of Truman’s magnum opus, Answered Prayers, which was left unfinished at his death.

* Piera’s remix: I’m not entirely sure these songs can even be mixed together, at least not without tweaking one or more tempos. Anyway, they are “Dancing Queen” (1976) by ABBA [already covered under Figure 4], “Down to Love Town” (1977) by The Originals (written by Don Daniels, Michael B. Sutton & Kathy Wakefield), “You + Me = Love” (1977) by The Undisputed Truth (written by Norman Whitfield), and “Fantasy” (1978) by Earth, Wind & Fire (written by Maurice White, Verdine White & Eddie del Barrio). For “You + Me” let me note that the line “You plus me equals love and harmony” appears in none of the lyric sites for this song, which always write it as “equals loving, honey”, but frankly when I listen to the song, I clearly hear the former but not the latter.

* Anni-Frid Lyngstad (born 1945), Agnetha Fältskog (born 1950), Taka Boom (born 1954), Phillip Bailey (born 1951), Maurice White (1941 - 2016).

* The DJ booth at Studio 54. The linked photo shows what it looked like. That’s Diana Ross singing.

Afterward

* Jimmy Hoffa (1913 - 75): President of the Teamsters Union. After becoming involved with organized crime, he disappeared without a trace. The case has still not been definitively solved.

* Siryn: Name taken from a Marvel Comics character who debuted in 1981. She was created by Chris Claremont and Steve Leialoha. The character has many of the powers that I’ve given to Piera.

* Otis: Character played by Ned Beatty in the 1978 film.

* The 70’s was over: I’ve long considered Superman as the perfect transition between the 70’s and the 80’s. There is plenty of 70’s grittiness in the film if you look carefully: Harry and Aramus, for example, or the way Lois is always looking for the spelling of the most gruesome words to put into her stories. But the overall story is hugely optimistic and based on the notion that one individual can make a difference—hallmark traits of the 80’s.

So...do you think I went a little overboard with the links?