The One Where Everything Happens
“How do you do it?” Twilight absentmindedly asked, not noticing that the object of her question was well within hearing distance.
“It’s all in the wrist!” Pinkie chirped. “You gotta stir the batter juuuuuuuust right if you want the cupcakes to turn out perfectly!”
Twilight stared at her friend with wide eyes for a few seconds before gathering herself. “No, I mean how do you do… Everything?! Pinkie sense, your party cannon, pulling things out of nowhere, always popping out of places you can’t possibly fit into… I saw you on the other side of a mirror once for Celestia's sake!” she cried out in desperation. Her face froze in shock as her mind caught up with what she had done: how she had exploded at one of her best friends. "Oh, Pinkie I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to-”
“Do you really want to know?” Pinkie suddenly asked, her face uncharacteristically serious.
Twilight floundered for a few moments before managing to respond, “Yes! Of course I want to know!”
Pinkie regarded the unicorn with a strangely heavy air of caution. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Really, really?” Pinkie leaned in closer.
“Yes!”
“Really, really, really?” She leaned in even closer.
“Yes, yes already! I really want to know!” the exasperated unicorn nearly shouted as she backed away from the pink pony encroaching on her personal space.
“Okay.”
Twilight was silent as she processed Pinkie’s response. “That’s it? I just had to ask?”
“Yep,” Pinkie affirmed.
“Oh… then how do you do it?”
Pinkie narrowed her eyes in concentration as she tried to figure out how best to approach the situation. “Twilight… can something be hot and cold at the same time?”
Twilight blinked at the seeming non sequitur. “What?”
“Can something be hot and cold at the same time? Yes or no?”
“Well, I suppose there are things that could be so cold that they feel like they burn you, so yes,” Twilight reasoned.
“No, I mean something that is really hot and really cold at the same time.”
“Of course not! Cold is the absence of heat, so if something is really cold then it can’t be hot. Since hot is the overabundance of heat.”
Pinkie’s face fell at Twilight's response.
“But that’s purely in the physical sense,” she hastened to add on, in an attempt to stave off Pinkie’s strange disappointment. “I suppose that in an emotional and mental sense something can be both hot and cold.”
Pinkie brightened slightly at Twilight’s sudden reversal and spoke up once more. “What about something existing and not existing at the same time?”
This time Twilight considered her answer before responding. She still didn’t see what this had to do with Pinkie’s strange abilities, but given what she was dealing with she wasn’t too surprised. “I suppose so,” she said after a long pause. “There are lots of things that don’t physically exist, but it doesn’t stop them from existing to a degree.” When she saw Pinkie’s questioning look she continued, “Like Daring Do. She doesn’t really exist, she’s just a character in a book. But so many ponies know who she is and how she acts that she’s taken on a life of her own. She might not really exist in our world, but we still see her in the same ways that we would see a real pony that we never met.”
For some reason Twilight’s explanation caused a radiant smile to spread across Pinkie's face before she shot forward and wrapped her friend in a bone crushing hug.
“Pinkie! Air!” Twilight managed to gasp out.
“Sorry! I’m just so happy! You might actually be able to handle it!” Pinkie apologized as she let Twilight go.
“Handle what?”
“Everything!” Pinkie chirped as she sprang back to where she had been sitting before. Without warning her face went deadly serious. “If we’re going to do this you’re going to need to listen to everything I say and try your hardest to do what I tell you to. Understand?”
“Pinkie what are you-”
“Do. You. Understand?” she repeated.
“Yes! I understand. Now what are you talking about?”
Instead of responding Pinkie looked around the room for a few moments as though looking for something. A small smile twitched across her muzzle as her eyes fixed on an empty point between them and a wall. “Okay Twilight, you need to look right over there," she said as she pointed a hoof towards the point in question.
Twilight glanced over where Pinkie was pointing. “The wall?”
“No! Well, yes, but no,” she amended. “Look about four feet away from the back wall. Do you see it?”
“See what? There isn’t anything…” Twilight’s voice trailed off as she saw a faint shimmer, as though there were a flat rectangle floating in mid-air between them and the wall. “What is that?”
“That’s the fourth wall,” Pinkie replied. “Keep focusing on it.”
Something about the phrase 'fourth wall' tickled at the back of her mind, but she continued looking at the strange rectangle nonetheless. It slowly resolved itself into an image of a the upper body of some sort of massive creature. She could see what appeared to be fingers moving around slightly below the edge of the rectangle. As the shape grew more distinct she couldn’t help but to suppress a shudder as she continued to watch the giant. There seemed to be something fundamentally wrong with what she was seeing. Something so different that it sent a chill down her spine. She jumped slightly as she finally realized what was wrong. It was the colors, the lines, everything about its appearance was wrong. The creature seemed to be made up of millions upon millions of colors, Each one blending into the next in a strange, blotchy unity. There was no clear border between the creature and everything around it either, if the colors weren’t so different she might have thought that everything in the rectangle was a single, strangely colored object. It paused and muttered something to itself. The fingers twitched in a practiced movement and the creature smiled contentedly. Without another word it stood up, Celestia it was huge, and walked off.
“What… What was that?” Twilight asked, her eyes till fixated on the rectangle.
“That was a human. He’s one of the animators for the show,” Pinkie replied.
“The show?”
Pinkie reached out and another rectangle, exactly like the one they had just been watching, appeared in front of her hoof. Without slowing, she reached through it and rummaged around for a moment. When she pulled her hoof back she was holding a small rectangular box. “Our show. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.”
Twilight took hold of the box with her hooves, she didn’t trust herself to try and use magic right now, and looked at the box’s cover. There it was, the title that Pinkie had read off as well as a picture of her and all her friends. “What…? This can’t be real.”
A touch of melancholy spread across Pinkie’s face. “It is. That’s a DVD. It’s kinda like the film projectors, but way, way fancier." She reached out and the rectangle appeared again. This time when her hoof reappeared she was holding a small black box. With expert precision she flipped the lid open and pressed a button. The inside of the lid suddenly lit up, displaying an image of her, her friends, and several words. Pinkie quickly tapped a number of buttons on the object and the lid darkened, then brightened again.
Twilight looked on in wonder, eyes wide as the device told her the story of the mare in the moon that had set her on the path to Ponyville so long ago. Her eyes widened in shock as the image zoomed out to reveal her, reading the very book she had found the story in. She heard her voice emanate from the box, repeating the exact same words she had said after reading the story. “How… They… Are those human things watching us?”
Pinkie grimaced slightly. “Not quite.”
“Then how…” Twilight’s face fell as the small part of her mind that had been trying to recall where she had heard the phrase 'fourth wall' before finally spoke up. “No…” she whispered.
Pinkie nodded her affirmation.
“Then they? And we’re? But…” Dozens of question stampeded past each other in their rush to be first. Finally she found the most important one. “How long?”
“Almost two years.”
“Then… then… what about my foalhood? What about all my memories of studying with Celestia!?”
“They’re real! They just… aren’t,” Pinkie finished lamely. She locked eyes with her friend, desperately hoping she would be able to calm down.
“Then what about us?! What are we? We aren’t real! We’re just a bunch of made up characters!”
“Calm down! Remember who you are!”
“Calm down!? CALM DOWN!? We aren’t real! We don’t exist!” Twilight was shaking now. “Everything… we’re just here to entertain them right? Discord, Nightmare Moon, Chrysalis, even Trixie and the Flim Flam brothers. The only reason any of them happened was to make an interesting plot!”
“Twilight! Remember Daring? She’s not really real, but she is still a real pony right?”
“What about Daring?!” Twilght screeched. “She’s just a character in a book! She isn’t real and neither are we! We aren’t real… not real…” her voice trailed off as her knees gave out underneath her. Her eyes were wide and panicked as they darted around the room.
Pinkie looked on, her eyes misting slightly as she watched her friend questioning everything around her. With a sniff she closed her eyes and focused. The sounds of Twilight’s breakdown ceased, the distant sounds of Ponyville vanished, and she opened her eyes. She shook her head as she fought the wave of vertigo that always came with doing this and looked around. Everything seemed strangely flat around her. Instead of being able to see the entire room she could only see a small section centered around herself and Twilight, beyond that was a sea of grey on one side, on the other a series of buttons and panels.
With a resigned sigh she dropped out of the room and landed at the bottom of the strange place she was in. She looked up at the tabs on the wall in front of her and tapped her left hoof against the one marked 'TIMELINE'. As always she was greeted with dozens upon dozens of bars and boxes. “I hate doing this,” she muttered to herself as she moved towards the far end of the wall and tapped her left hoof on the final box. She repeated this with the final box on every row until each one had turned light blue. Her hooves were heavy as she went back to where she had started, she tapped several more boxes until each bar had a line of blue running through it. This time when she tapped the boxes she made sure to do it with her right hoof. A large rectangle covered with words appeared in front of her. It was so large that she had to climb up it to reach the words she wanted. Without hesitation her left hoof hit the words ‘Remove Frames’, and the long blue bars were replaced with long chains of bright blue boxes.
She looked back up at the room she had leapt down from. It no longer showed Twilight lying on the ground panicking, but instead showed her looking over at Pinkie bemusedly, about to ask her a question. A small, sad, smile worked its way across Pinkie’s features as she jumped up to the room once more and stood where she had been before and closed her eyes.
“How do you do it?” Twilight absentmindedly asked, not noticing that the object of her question was well within hearing distance.
“It’s all in the wrist!” Pinkie chirped happily. “You gotta stir the batter juuuuuuuust right if you want the cupcakes to turn out perfectly!” Before Twilight could continue Pinkie pressed on. “Of course you have to do it differently for different things. You need to be a little rougher with the brownies cause they’re kinda thick, meringue you have to be really gentle with, and don’t get me started on croissants.” She leaned over to Twilight. “They tend to get really haughty.” She grinned happily as she watched Twilight’s incredulous expression.
“Never mind,” Twilight said with a small smile and a shake of her head. “Just Pinkie being Pinkie,” she muttered to herself and turned her attention back to the book she had been reading.
As soon as Twilight turned away Pinkie’s smile faltered slightly. “Maybe next time,” she whispered hopefully to herself. “Maybe next time.”
Special thanks to DF, Frederick the Saiyan, and Kione for pre-reading this sucker and pointing out all the errors I had in here. Seriously, you people owe them a lot.