A Dream

by totallynotabrony


Campfire Tales

“So yeah, Pinkie propositioned Rainbow and everyone is freaking out.”

“Why did you call the Council of Valiants here to talk about this?” sighed Valiantina.  We all sat around the table in the back room of the library in her universe.

“Because it’s hilarious and if I know you, and I do because you’re me, you’ll get a kick out of it.”

She pushed her tequila glass forward.  “Fine, but give me another shot first.”

I topped up her and everyone else in the room and then began telling the story.


After her little episode, Pinkie had gone to the hospital.  Her little episode being threatening to pie herself if Fluttershy didn’t take her back.

Well, only Pinkie could pie herself and damn near blow her brains out.  She was going to need some hospital time.

It seemed like we should go visit her.  I mean, annoying as she was, she was kind of a member of my crew.  Plus, this whole trying to be a nice guy thing I was doing kind of required it.

I went with Twilight and the others.  Pinkie wasn’t looking too good.  She was mostly wrapped in bandages, was on oxygen, and her mane hung like limp spaghetti, but she was awake and recognized us.  Fluttershy, of course, wasn’t there because she had an electrical cord stuck up her ass in the town square.  Plus being Pinkie’s ex. Rarity wasn't there because her ocean thing.

“Are you feeling okay?” said Twilight.

“The broken heart hurts the most,” Pinkie whispered.

Twilight looked uncomfortable, as if she was glad that Pinkie was no longer engaging in frequent, lewdly public sex with a reluctant Fluttershy, but was too nice to say so and kind of sad that it took such egregious self-harm to finally get it to stop.

“I...I never told anypony this, but I was too scared to see it through,” said Pinkie.  “I could have chosen pecan pie, and it would have hit me like shrapnel.  I was a coward, too scared to risk everything for Fluttershy.”

Not taking your own life isn’t cowardly!” Twilight was quick to point out.  “Look Pinkie, hurting yourself over a relationship is a terrible idea in general.  I get that you feel strongly and love is one of the most powerful forces out there, but don’t forget to love yourself and remember that your friends love you.”

“But the sex was good, though,” said Pinkie.

Rainbow laughed.  “Wow, you always know just what to say.  Always a laugh, with you, Pinkie.”

Twilight glared at her.

“Rainbow Dash, I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Pinkie whispered.

“What is it?” Rainbow asked, leaning closer.

“Wanna do the sex?”

Rainbow jerked back.  “Uh, Pinkie, you know I’m your friend and we’ve pulled a lot of pranks together, but I don’t know if that’s exactly-”

“You’d do Daring Do if she asked, right?”

Rainbow’s face twisted, but she said, “Totally.”

“What if I wore the hat?”

“Okay, as Daring Do is basically my daughter-in-law, I’m going to put a stop to this right now,” I said.  “Rainbow already ruined Daring’s life enough.  Screwing a proxy would only make it worse.”

“I had to try,” said Pinkie.  “If you’re going to make an omelette, you have to break a few cherries.”

“Rainbow’s already had a foal, so presumably that’s already happened,” Twilight pointed out.  “Also, ew.”

“How about you, Applejack?” said Pinkie.

“No.”

“Not even a meat puppet?”

“You know full well that I can see what they see,” said Applejack.  “At best that would only make it assisted masturbation rather than full on sex.  And either way, I’m agreeing Twilight on this: ew.”

I raised a hoof.  “Yeah, for the record, I’m going to go with that, too.”

“Three ews,” said Pinkie, contemplatively, stroking her oxygen mask because it covered where she would normally stroke her chin.  “That’s a new personal record.  I think I’ll throw myself a party.”

She pulled out a cake, complete with candles.  There was a vagina depicted in the icing.

“You have fun with that,” said Twilight hurriedly.  “I just remembered some library things I have to do.”

The rest of us muttered similar excuses and headed for the door.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pinkie turn a crowd so fast,” muttered Applejack.  “Amazing, considering her condition right now.”

I glanced back.  “Somebody call 911; she’s on fire,” I said.

Outside, we kicked around for something to do.  Twilight really did have library stuff.  Applejack suddenly remembered, “It’s time for the annual big-sister-little-sister camping trip.”

“Kind of hard without Rarity,” I pointed out.

“What about Trixie and Cordoba?” Applejack asked.

“Not a good time,” I said curtly.

“Well, could you at least fill in for Rarity like you did during the Hearth’s Warming play?” said Applejack.  “You don’t even have to play Princess Platinum this time, just be Sweetie Belle’s big sister.”

I reluctantly accepted.  That was better.

So we went camping.


“Wait,” said Valiantina.  “I thought this story was about Pinkie getting with Rainbow.”

“Almost,” I said.  “I’m not there yet.”

“If you were going to tell this long-winded story, you could have at least invited us to your place.  Don’t you have that really good pub?”

“We can’t go to my dimension.  That’s where Gabby is.”

“Why aren’t you hunting for her instead of being here telling us this supposed-to-be-funny story?”

“Because this affects that.  Like I said, I’m not there yet.”


We went for a long hike towards Winsome Falls.  We planned to set up tents somewhere along the way.  The first night, however, sucked a big one.

Little bugs called fly-ders started chewing on us worse than mosquitoes.  I mean, I set up the flamethrowers, but a couple got through.

We sat around the fire, with other fires sitting around us.  Sweetie Belle looked around, the burning napalm glinting in her eyes and the roar of jetting pyres shooting skyward echoing in her ears.  “I don’t think I could get to sleep like this.”

Guinness looked like he agreed with her.  “I don’t even have ‘Nam flashbacks, but I think this might be triggering some.”

“Why are you here, anyway?” I asked him.

“I thought it would be a good opportunity to spend quality time with Rainbow,” he said.  “Plus, I guess if she’s adopted Scootaloo as an honorary little sister, that makes me her honorary uncle or something.  Plus, I thought it would be good for Skyla to get out and have some fun on a camping trip.”

“Yay!” said Skyla.

I looked around.  “So...where’s Rainbow?”

She came zooming back in from the darkness, covered in bug bites.  “Valiant, your stupid pyrotechnics only attracted more of these stupid things!”

“I’m mildly surprised that you know that word.  But also, yeah, that was kind of the point, so they would be lured in here and get roasted.  It’s the circle of life, except for them it’s kind of a brick wall.”  I frowned.  “Okay, bad analogy for a wall that circles us that is actually made of pure fire, but you get my meaning.”

“I just wish we could go to sleep,” said Apple Bloom.

“We could maybe tell some stories to pass the time,” suggested Applejack.

“You want stories? I've got a ton of stories!” said Rainbow.  “Spoiler alert: they're all about me and how awesome I am!”

That put me to sleep.

In the morning, the fly-ders had gone and we made it to Winsome Falls.  Not much to say other than I’d seen it before.

Late that day, we made it back to Ponyville.  Rainbow had been unusually quiet the whole way.  I was suspicious, because a quiet Rainbow usually preceded her making an unusually bad decision, but I enjoyed the silence while it lasted.

We were almost back to the library, when I heard her quietly ask Guinness, “What would you think about an open relationship?”

“Huh?” he said, the question catching him totally off guard.

Twilight came out of the library to greet us, though she quickly realized what she’d walked into.

“Hear me out,” said Rainbow.  “Pinkie wants to have sex with me.”

“I, uh,” Guinness fumbled.  “I’m kind of against this.  We’re married.”

“Wait, are you seriously considering what Pinkie said?” Twilight broke in.  “You saw how Fluttershy came out of it.”

“I guess it wouldn’t be that bad,” defended Rainbow.  “You know how well I get along with Pinkie.  I bet she would be okay with me being me rather than Guinness always trying to stop me from being awesome.”

“I usually try to stop you from doing something incredibly foolhardy to keep you home and spending time with our family,” Guinness pointed out.  He gestured to Skyla, who was sitting on his back and happily playing with his mane.

“That’s not even my kid,” said Rainbow.

“You know, you’re right, said Guinness.  “Skyla is way better than the hellspawn that we had biologically and you still don’t care about her.”

“We had a kid?”

“You were there!” Guinness shouted.

“To be fair, that was pretty traumatic when Valiant murdered your child,” Twilight broke in, shooting me an unkind look.

“I needed a demon sacrifice,” I said, shrugging.  “It was kind of an emergency.  You were there.”


“I have to say, that was a pretty messed up thing to do,” said Valiantina.

“What, killing a demon?”

“Killing a demon, who was inside the body of a child, and doing it in front of the child's mother and everyone.  I’m not saying it wasn’t an effective, but you really could use a little bit of tact.”

The others around the table murmured in agreement.

I spread my hooves.  “I keep telling you, I've changed and I’m trying to be a nice guy now.”


Trying to be a nice guy, I quietly disengaged from the argument brewing in the street.

I headed back to my place.  On the way, I saw Bakey Pie working in Sugarcube Corner, filling in for Pinkie.  I frowned.  Who had let her out of the basement?

Also, had Celebrity been functioning in Rarity’s stead while Rarity was the ocean?  I took a little detour to see if I could find her.

Sure enough, the second member of the B-Team was handling the fanciness and freaking out that Rarity would normally do herself.  Now if I could only get Rainbow Dash disposed of and get Reading Rainbow in her place.  I paused in thought.  Maybe there was something to that.  Morning Matte probably wouldn’t judge me as hard at Twilight did.  The other two didn’t have much use, however.  I didn’t really have much use for Appletack since Applejack was generally hyper-competent.  Ironically, Shovelshy could only work with Fluttershy if Fluttershy had instead turned out to be a coal-fired power plant.  Oh well.  It was a nice thought.

I arrived back at my place. Wachowski was working on some film editing when I walked in.  I saw on the screen that it had ponies in it, so I didn’t figure it was any movie I wanted to watch.

I did look over her shoulder, though.  “Crush the blacks.”

It’s not racist, it’s a color correction term.

And color correction isn’t eugenics, it’s a filmography term.

Wachowski looked at me.  “I was just about to crush the blacks, thank you very much.”

“Don’t forget about the white balance, though.”

“Valiant, I think I know a little more about movies than you,” she huffed.  “I am a Saturn Award-winning director.”

I laughed.

Venturing further back into the building, I found Daring hard at work in front of her typewriter.  She seemed angry about something.  Trixie sat across the desk from her, flipping through a few pages of manuscript.

“Working on anything good?” I said.  While I used to enjoy Daring’s books, learning they were true, me doing some badass stuff of my own, and explicit sex scenes between Daring and Trixie had kind of turned me off them recently.

“I think you’ll like it, dad,” said Trixie.  She smiled briefly.  “We’ll have an announcement press conference soon.”

I went to see Tin Mare.  We were still working through some airframe issues.  She herself had suggested a few things.  I was trying to get a little more performance out of her, back to her original fighter jet days, but couldn’t give up the utility that her cargo variant afforded.  Maybe I could keep her as the VTOL and do something like give her a little buddy for attacking.  Nah, that would way too many AI’s running around.

I discussed the news with her while I worked.  We still hadn’t found Gabby.  Rainbow and Guinness were fighting.

“Actually, they’ve just broken up,” she said.

“Wait, what!?”

“I recorded this minutes ago.” Her video screen turned on.

“Sunset!” I called.  “Come in here, and bring the popcorn!”

Tin Mare put it on the screen and we settled down to watch.

It was pretty great.  Rainbow kept being a bitch like a broken record.  Guinness kept taking it like a broken rectum.  Eventually, he couldn’t take any more.

We witnessed the breakup live and it was glorious.  The two of them fought it out and Rainbow left. I swear, I would transcribe it if I thought I could do it justice, but believe me, it was glorious.

Then, I remembered that I was supposed to be a nice guy and should probably go comfort Guinness, the newly single father.

What, you thought Rainbow would want the kid?

I sighed and got up.  “I guess I have to go to the pub and stop Guinness from drinking himself to death over what a bitch Rainbow is.  After that, though, I’m going to go over to Universe 63 and tell everyone about this because it was amazing.”

I headed off to do just that.


“And it gets better,” I said.  “Rainbow thought she was just going to go live a carefree lesbian life, but now that Pinkie’s dead, Rainbow looks pretty stupid for dumping Guinness.”

“Wait, what happened to Pinkie?” Valentina asked.

“She died in a fire, because nobody called 911 when I said to.”