Sunset's Dead
by Present Perfect
The moment Pinkie Pie discovered the crushed cell phone lying in the middle of the cafeteria and realized it belonged to none other than her good friend Sunset Shimmer, her mane, I mean, hair went flat and lifeless.
It was definitely because she was overwhelmed with existential horror at her discovery and not because she had accidentally used her sister's conditioner that morning and it finally gave out. Because that would be dumb.
"Alack and woe!" she cried, placing a hand upon her forehead and attracting the attention of literally everyone in the CHS cafeteria. "Upon the ground, yon cellular phone! Lo, it is smash-ed!"
"Uh," said Applejack at her most eloquent. "What?"
Rarity finished swallowing her bite of apple before speaking, because a lady always swallows. "Yes, Miss Pie--" Miss Pie was Rarity's secret special nickname for Pinkie-- "whatever are you on about?"
"Do you not see?" Pinkie held up the shattered remains of the phone, its red rubber dangly hanging forlornly from that little hole that pretty much only exists to give rubber danglies a home. "Sunset Shimmer! This communications device be hers, and yes, her most favored!"
"That really sucks it got smashed," said Rainbow Dash. Fluttershy clapped, because occasions where Dash could string together two words without puking on herself were worth celebrating.
Pinkie got right
Up
Really
Uncomfortably
Close
To Rainbow Dash's personal space and went, "YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND!
"Sunset would never go around the school without her phone!"
Her eyes got really big, and Dash's nose got really crinkled because Pinkie's breath was not exactly minty-fresh. Like, not even cupcakey-fresh. It was bad.
"Maybe she dropped it, and it just broke?" Fluttershy offered. No one paid attention to her. It was all right, though. She preferred it that way.
"The only explanation," said Pinkie, creeping around with just her eyes visible above the table's edge, "is that Sunset, in a fit of pique, threw it upon the ground, whereupon she crushed it beneath her heel." She sprang into the air, startling at least three students in the background. "Oh, her illustrious heel! The heel that once ground the mere mortals of this school into so much paste! So, too, did Sunset's phone suffer her wrath!"
Applejack gave Rarity an "Are you following any of this?" look. Rarity responded with a "Just go with it, it's Pinkie" shrug. They had a wavelength.
"Is there a point to any of this?" asked Sci-Twi, who had totally been there the whole time but, being the newest in Sunset's circle of friends, felt the least comfortable about questioning anything the others did.
"Do you not see?" Pinkie swiped Twilight's glasses, holding them before her own eyes and boggling at the Coke-bottleyness. "There can be but one explanation for this painful transgression of the natural order!"
She posed, glasses held aloft in one hand as though in supplication to gods of old, and the phone cradled in the other as though a swaddled infant. In the background, the theater geeks watched, growing increasingly sweaty.
"Lo, have the gods of technology granted upon our dear friend this necessary luxury! Forsooth, on many a day could Sunset Shimmer be seen with phone nestled in her arms, caressing it, as one does a true lover! Never would Sunset be without it!"
She dropped to one knee, clutching the phone to her chest.
"But look, ye gathered souls. Gaze upon its physiognomy, shattered as by callous hand! Never would Sunset, were she fit and gifted of will, allow such a transgression to pass! There is but one explanation, my dear friends."
Pinkie zipped over to Rarity, pressing up against her, shoulder to shoulder and cheek to cheek. "Ask you, fair lady, how such calumny hath transpired!"
There was a long pause. In the cafeteria, somebody coughed.
"Ask!" cried Pinkie. "Maiden, o, ask!"
Rarity let out a long, irritated breath. In a flat, irritated tone, she asked, "How hath such calumny transpired, o bard?"
Pinkie grinned. Then she remembered she was trying to be serious here, dammit, recasting her features in stoic ennui.
"Yea, shall I tell you! The sole explanation, the utmost tragedy of our time! Woe be upon you, Canterlot High, for Sunset Shimmer--"
Here, she drew in a phenomenal breath. Like five students were actually, literally on the edges of their seats.
"--is dead!"
There was a collective gasp from those five students. One of them actually dropped their lunch tray. The poor sap; no way the state would pay to replace that.
Clutching the phone once again to her chest, Pinkie knelt on the tabletop. "Bereft is the cruel, cold world! Of Sunsets, bereft! Of Shimmering, twice bereft! By her own hand was the telephone crushed. In a fit of pique and long-simmered anger did she rend it into so many shards of sterile, hopeless crystal!"
"Uh, Pinkie?" said Applejack. "Sunset ain't dead."
"I understand the heartache mine pronouncement doth engender." Pinkie reached out toward AJ's face. "Deny though you will, it is true! Hers is a tale of hardship and heartache, the like of which mortal ear hath ne'er before heard!
"Thrust from her home, her magical world of adorable little horsies, into the harsh, uncaring world of Man, Sunset Shimmer, willful yet honest, arrogant yet sincere, vaunted protege of the fantastic, found herself at the mercy of whosoever march-ed past her. For days, weeks, yea months, she struggled to find a place in this work, to eke out meager life in the pouring rain and sleet!"
Pinkie leapt to her feet, jumping from table to table as she 'acted out' the scenes. She was acting out, all right.
"At last insinuating herself in a vaunted hall of education, our fair heroine rose to the top! But power is not meant to last, and so she waned, as the sun sets in her very name, becoming low and craven once more."
Some kid in the back called out, "What about when she turned us all into zombies?"
The voices of a bitter few chimed in their assent.
"Forget that stuff," Pinkie said testily. "What matters is that, like a phoenix, Sunset was reborn in the arms of a few good and true friends. Until, in the selfsame miasma of mistrust that you so callously have reinvigorated--" here she pointed an accusing finger at the student who had shouted, and he quite meekly shrank back into his seat, so accusatory was her pointing-- "did those very friends betray the girl whom they had pledged to support through all slings and arrows! So was she wrongfully accused!"
"Oh my gosh!" Fluttershy's hands flew to her mouth. "You mean Sunset's still upset about Anon-a-Miss?"
Rainbow groaned. "That was like two years ago! I thought we were all over that!"
"Anon-a-Miss?" said Pinkie lowly. "Anon, a hit!" She shook her fists at the heavens. "Done great wrong by one and all, Sunset was stabbed with the barbed dart of injustice, envenomed by perfidy. Words were spoken and deeds were wrought, the like of which could not be forgot. Lo, she did her best to make amends, to party once again with friends--"
"She's rhyming!" yelled someone in the back.
"--but still did the angst and suffering fester in her breast. Fester and welter did it, until the day when, anguish rekindled by the images locked herein--" she held the phone up for all to see-- "Sunset finally did break! And is it any wonder that such occurrence would befall? For she, too, is but a mortal, and all mortals have breaking points.
"Her reputation burnt to cinders. Her home taken. Forced to sleep in the streets with but a moth-bare blanket for shelter! Her efforts to garner coin walled by those who walked past, their hearts like bricks! She tore her clothes, she cut her hair! Even her dog was kicked!"
"The poor puppy!" Fluttershy wailed, collapsing against Rarity and sobbing.
Rarity patted her hair and gave a wan smile. "Fluttershy, dear, Sunset doesn't own a dog."
"Behold!" shouted Pinkie. "What transpires when the mortal shell can hold no more heartache! Sunset crushed her phone, for the world crushed her, and then she crushed herself!"
Pinkie grabbed a bottle of ketchup and held it above her head in the middle of the cafeteria. Granny Smith sighed and preemptively grabbed a mop.
"Sunset! Friend who I could not save! Let me join you in the earth's sweet embrace!" She squirted a long stream of ketchup onto her face. "Together, let us become trees!"
Pinkie kept squirting ketchup onto herself until the bottle made that embarrassing farty noise that squeeze bottles of ketchup always do. Then she started rubbing it all over herself: her face, her hair, across her shoulders and back, and down her chest onto
Hrm uh what, was I writing something? Forgot what was going on for a minute there.
"I die!" Pinkie cried and collapsed to the floor. Her eyes closed, her tongue lolled out the side of her mouth, and she made a sound like "Blergh!"
The cafeteria was silent for a moment.
Then the theater kids jumped out of their seats, applauding wildly. Some wept. Roses were tossed upon the reposing Pinkie Pie. There was a reason no one sat near those kids.
"Nicely done, Miss Pie," said Vice-Principal Luna as she walked past. "Drama tryouts are the first of next month."
"Thanks, VPL!" said Pinkie, before going back to dead.
"What's all the clapping for?" asked Sunset, walking up to the table where her friends sat. "And is Pinkie--"
"It's ketchup," said Rarity quickly. "She's just being Pinkie, don't mind her."
"Oh Sunset!" Fluttershy wailed, leaping up and wrapping herself around Sunset's waist, where could cry some more. "I'm so sorry we didn't believe you! Please don't die! I'm sorry about your dog!"
Sunset looked at Applejack, Rainbow and Rarity like 'WTF mate?'
"Pinkie found your smashed phone," said AJ, ticking off items on her fingers, "thought you was dead, gave some kinda Manespeare soliloquy, then covered herself in ketchup."
Rainbow gingerly withdrew the phone from the ketchup-and-Pinkie pile, holding it up to show Sunset. "You're not dead and neither is she, but what happened to this?"
Sunset, her efforts to dislodge Fluttershy so far unsuccessful, shrugged and settled for dragging Fluttershy bodily back to their table. "Dunno. Not my phone. Looks like it got wicked jacked-up, is my guess." She sat, and only then did Fluttershy finally relent her hug.
"What's this about not believing me?" Sunset asked, giving Fluttershy a pointed look. Fluttershy pointedly looked away.
Sunset's eyes got wide. "Wait, is this all about Anon-a-Miss? I got over that like, two years ago!"
Rainbow Dash let out a loud "Hah!" No one else said anything. The rest of the lunch period got swiftly back to doing what it normally did: sucking.
"Anyway, I didn't die, I was just in the bathroom." Sunset chuckled. "Guess I really missed something."
"I'll say," said Rarity.
"You were gone an awfully long time," said Fluttershy with the tiniest, most adorablest sniffle ever. Sunset's heart nearly broke.
"Yeah," Sunset said, trying not to meet the other girl's eyes. "They don't exactly make bacon-wrapped filet back in Equestria, but whenever they have it at lunch, I can't resist. I always overdo it!" She patted her stomach. "And the ol' Equestrian guts don't exactly appreciate being mishandled." She pointed her thumb back over her shoulder. "Do not go in there."
Rainbow and Pinkie started laughing. Applejack and Rarity looked disgusted. Sci-Twi was present, maybe. Fluttershy only stared up at Sunset in unabashed horror.
"What?" asked Sunset, starting to get creeped out.
Fluttershy gave her the most withering look a vegan could muster.
"You're dead to me."