In my experience, you usually hear the best stories about a person at their funeral. Which is really too bad.
This, however, was Pinkie Pie’s funeral, so I’m sure you can imagine how it went. Of course she’d planned it herself, right down to the rap.
Yes, there was a rap.
Bible looked kind of uncomfortable at the podium, but he read it just as it was printed. Maybe it would have had a bigger impact if there was music and wasn’t being monotoned by a former holy book.
Now this is a story all about how
My life got ended into the ground
And I’d like you to take a minute, just sit right back
And listen to Pinkie’s memorial rap
I grew up on a rock farm, grey and dull
My parents raised me up to be normal
But then I caught teh gay and that was it
I had to go find me a nice mare to lick
It could have been anypony, but I had to choose
And then along here she comes with the cute
I asked and Fluttershy was her name
It was perfect, ‘cause we were gonna bang
Break it down now
S-s-sex with Fluttershy
Sex with Fluttershy
S-s-sex with Fluttershy
Sex with Fluttershy
I quietly vomited in my mouth a little. Will Smith would not be jiggy with this.
Speaking of jiggy, I could see Twilight fidgeting down at the end of the pew. As soon as the services were over and the body was lowered into the ground, she came straight to me. “You have to fix this.”
“What do you want me to do?” I said, loosening my tie.
A look came into Twilight’s eye, the one she usually got before doing something unethical with magic. “We could go back in time and save her.”
I checked my watch. “That window has passed. Your time travel spell is only good for a few days.”
“Then...Sunset knows how to bring ponies back to life, right?”
“I’m not much in the magic side of things, you’d have to ask her,” I said. “But I understand that the process takes a couple of months to do right. Then, you’re kind of left with maybe-a-zombie.”
“What about Sir Win? He deals in souls, right?”
“Yeah, but I get the feeling that Pinkie’s soul is kind of a rare commodity, though. I really doubt he, or whoever has it now, would be willing to give it up so easily.”
“But you have to fix this!” she said, echoing her first statement of the conversation. “The Elements of Harmony are incomplete without Pinkie!”
“Again, what do you want me to do? There’s no easy solution here. We can either do it quick or we can do it almost-right. There’s no guarantee it’ll work, and perversions of nature like reversing death rarely go perfectly.”
Twilight took a deep breath. “Valiant, you know what the stakes are. We need the Elements to work. We can’t risk Equestria going unprotected.”
“I can protect Equestria.”
“What about Gabby?”
“I meant I can handle stuff the Elements could handle.”
“Can you, Valiant? All you want to do these days is work for Santa Claus. Not that I’m condoning what you normally do, but your radical violence has taken a step back. With Gabby in your networks and Tin Mare down, you don’t have the capabilities you used to. I don’t think you can protect Equestria anymore.”
Jeeze, knife to the heart, Twilight. “Just because I’m a nice guy doesn’t mean I’m not also a badass guy.”
Twilight turned away. “Just get Pinkie back.”
I let out a long sigh and turned to Sunset. “Get Pinkie back.”
“Why?” Sunset asked.
“Because Twilight wants her back.”
“Did you tell Twilight that there’s no easy solution and we can either do it quick or we can do it almost-right?”
“Yes.”
Sunset sighed. “Okay, fine, I’ll get started.”
I let her handle that while I went to go find Thorax. I had an idea that I wanted to run by him.
Tin Mare’s airframe was slowly coming back together. I still hadn’t gotten her AI integrated back into it, but I was getting to the point where I could fly it manually without almost dying. I headed for where Thorax and Sunburst lived.
I walked in. “Hey Thorax, I was thinking about something.”
“Thorax isn’t here,” said Thorax.
“I’m looking at you,” I said. “What, did you think your disguise would fool me?”
He changed back from how he’d been disguised as Sunburst. “Yeah, kind of.”
“I mean, you could have picked something else,” said the real Sunburst, who was standing right there.
“Yeah. Plus, you start being him too much and I might start to question just how ambiguously gay you guys are. Anyway-”
I had started to change the subject, but Thorax interrupted me. “Wait, what do you mean? Are you saying that would make us look more or less gay?”
“Which do you want it to be?” I asked. I didn’t care, though, and went back to what I was trying to say earlier. “Anyway, I was wondering if you could use your changeling hiding skills to maybe reverse engineer Gabby’s hiding skills and figure out where she is.”
Yeah, I knew a guy whose disguise I’d just seen right through might not be the best authority, but he was the only changeling I knew.
Conveniently, another changeling walked through the door just then.
“Pharynx, what are you doing here?” Thorax exclaimed.
Pharynx swept his eyes around the room and said, “So that’s what you’re doing, brother? Cohabiting with ponies? I’m ashamed of everything you are and stand for.”
“They have beds that aren’t rocks,” said Thorax. “And everything else that isn’t rocks, either.”
“But that’s the way things should be!” Pharynx stomped his hoof. “We’re changelings and proud to live in the rocks.”
“Did somepony say rocks?” said Maud, coming in just then.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “I thought you had a very important job in Canterlot.”
If, by filling in for the missing Princess Celestia so ponies everywhere wouldn’t freak out, then yes, I thought it was pretty important. Maud said, “There’s a new Princess Celestia in town, so I’m not in town any more.”
“Wait, really? Who is it?”
“Gabby.”
“WHAT!? How could you just let her take over!?”
“I like rocks more than I like being killed. So I left.” Maud shrugged. “She didn’t have the stone that would let you rule all of Equestria if you wanted to, either. She just did it herself.”
“You like rocks too?” Pharynx broke in.
“Yes,” said Maud. “I also brought a friend.”
I heard something big move outside the house and Ember stuck her head in. “I was just saying to Maud that more things should be made of rocks. You ponies could use more fire duels and feats of strength, too.”
I could already see that nothing was going to get done if an impromptu rock convention got started. Trust me, I used to live with a geologist who was also a discerning aesthetics snob.
Plus, I had more important things to do. Now that I knew where Gabby was, I could go gank her.
I mean, she was protected by the Royal Guard and Princess Luna, but seriously, it wasn’t like I hadn’t gotten past them before.
I stopped back by Ponyville to load for bear, just to be on the safe side. I tossed everything into the back of the aircraft: weapons, tequila, literal bear. He wasn’t too happy about it, but Fluttershy was a power plant so I had to handle it myself.
I stuck my head into my building to see if anyone else was up for going to Canterlot. “Anyone? We’re going to do some stuff.”
“Nah,” said Wachowski.
“I’m still helping Daring write her book,” said Trixie.
I knew Sunset was busy, based on the way she came in, dragging Pinkie’s body by the mane. It was dirty, as if she’d just dug it up.
I did make one stop across town to pick up Filthy Rich. He wasn’t in his vigilante Shaq costume, so I got him dressed and we headed for Canterlot.
He did not appreciate being manually dressed and dragged out of his business, but I had shit to do.
We flew to Canterlot. I was figuring I would just fast-rope down through the royal court stained glass windows and go in guns blazing. Whatever Shaq did was up to him.
You may wonder who would pilot the aircraft while I was fast-roping. That was the beauty of such a durable airframe: it didn’t matter. I would just go find wherever it came to rest and get back in when I wanted to leave. Maybe a nice soft house would cushion its fall from the sky.
Oh, shit, I should probably not do that if I was trying to be a nice guy.
So instead I put it down in the courtyard and charged through the front door. I knocked over the Royal Guards there and ran past. They were probably hurt a little, but they knew I didn’t mean them any ill will. We had talked it out once and they understood their place as faceless minions. Nothing personal on my part.
I burst into the royal court and pulled up short, my hooves skidding to a halt. Gabbby was there. Court petitioners were in line waiting to talk to her. The rest of the room was covered in tons of piles of walnuts. I wasn’t sure how many tons. Thirty? Did somebody empty a couple of train cars into the room? There was no other standing room, as the whole place was filled with walnuts.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to wait your turn in line,” said Gabby, as if she didn’t recognize me and know I was coming to kill her.
“I’m pretty sure you recognize me and know I’m coming to kill you!” I shouted.
“That’s why I took appropriate measures,” she said, gesturing to the walnuts piled everywhere.
I shook my head. “Th-that’s nutrageous!”
While she may have stopped me, fortunately, I had brought a backup plan. The bear.
He came in with blood on his mouth. Oh shit, had I left Shaq alone with him? Totally an accident, not because I was being a dick. It didn’t count if you didn’t mean it. Maybe. I wasn’t very good at this yet.
Anyway, because the bear wasn’t hungry any more, he didn’t really go for Gabby like I wanted and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it because I was already starting to get puffy from airborne walnut exposure and had to pull out.
“You can’t hide behind your nuts forever!” I shouted, shaking my hoof as I left. “One little slip up and I’ll penetrate your inner sanctum and give you what you deserve!”
“Wow, and you call my brother ambiguously gay,” said Pharynx, who had arrived just then. I knew it was him, because while he was in disguise, he wore a Hello nametag with his name written on it. Apparently the impromptu rock convention had gotten out of hand.
“How did you get here so fast?” I asked.
“There was an express train,” he said. “It was some kind of farmer’s market, though. They had lots of grapes. Stupid pony things.”
“Yeah, and if you hate stupid pony things, have I got a deal for you,” I said. “Princess Celestia is in there right now and needs to be taken down a peg. She kind of looks like a griffon at the moment, but as an average, timid pony, I’m too embarrassed to ask why. Anyway, why don’t you go in there and do your changeling stuff?”
“Changeling stuff is to attack in swarms,” he said. “Which we can’t do because you killed Chrysalis. I’m not doing anything for you, and I hope you die in a fire.”
I winced.
“What?” he asked.
“Pinkie Pie died in a fire and I just remembered that we’re supposed to be trying to bring her back to life.”
I didn’t question whether he knew who Pinkie Pie was. She got around. Even if she didn’t, Pharynx was a changeling hardliner and absolutely knew the Elements of Harmony.
I left him there and went back to Ponyville.
Sunset was apparently getting pretty well into this necromancy thing. She really could do quick or almost-right.
In this case, the quickest she could get it done was to get Pinkie’s skull. This involved placing her body, which had been buried just a few hours ago, on the table, removing the head, and then removing everything from the head that wasn’t skull. Basically, she just left the brain and eyes on the table with the skin draped over it, along with the rest of the body. Kind of ick. I would have done the same, though. Efficiency is efficiency.
“All right, here we go,” said Sunset. She lit off a spell. Two blue points of magic approximately the same color as Pinkie’s eyes suddenly popped up in the eye sockets of the skull.
“Hey everypony!” said Pinkie’s voice from somewhere. “Wow, I’ve never been a skull before. Could somepony take me over to Twilight’s so she can have a little freakout about the abomination to nature we did?”
Well, I was glad her personality was intact, but doing what she suggested both sounded like work and was inconsistent with me trying to be a nice guy.
Although, Twilight was the one who’d ordered this. Satisfied with that justification, I picked up the skull, was was still a little damp from recently being used in its original purpose. Ick.
As we walked to the library, Pinkie kept talking as if she hadn’t recently died in a fire. As we passed Fluttershy’s shed, Pinkie said, “Can we stop in there so I can have a little time with Fluttershy? I don’t have a tongue anymore, but I do have a boner!”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Oh, come on, Valiant. I really like Fluttershy. I’d put a little slam-slam in her wham-bam, if you know what I mean. You know what I mean, right?”
“Yes. Yes, I caught that single entendre.”
We made it down the street to the library. I opened the door and called, “Twilight! We sinned against nature!”
“Again!?”