I couldn’t believe my luck. It was bad enough getting sent to this podunk town by Celestia to “make friends”, but now one of those friends had caused us all to lose our cutie marks.
Yes, Pinkie Pie had clearly used some form of necromancy to steal my cutie mark and dethrone me as the element of magic. I just had to figure out how she did it.
Once I got all the other ponies into the kitchen and drank a few cups of coffee, I stopped to consider our situation. I had taken thorough notes on Pinkie sense over the years and was very close to unlocking the nature of her abilities.
It was clear she had an aleph—a point in space-time where all dimensions and other points in space-time merge. I hadn’t figured out how she was able to control the aleph, as they’re only theoretically possible. Nopony has managed to prove they exist. Until now.
If Pinkie had access to an aleph, then she could have reached through to a dimension where cutie mark erasing technology exists.
“Hey, Pinkie,” I shouted, bracing myself for the auditory assault that she called speech.
“Yes Twilight? Are you finally ready to find out what’s going on? I mean, come on, everyone reading this but you has already figured it out!” Pinkie turned and winked at the coffee pot near the window.
“I don’t have time for—wait, reading this?” I lit up my horn and shut my journal, wincing a bit as the magic seemed to feel slightly off. “You’ve been reading my research notes?” I doubt she could understand half of what I wrote, but it was the principle of the matter.
“No, silly, them! But today isn’t about me, so go ahead.”
I rubbed my temples as I tried to contain my temper, and what I can only assume was the early onset of a massive migraine. “Look, Pinkie, I know you know something I just can’t figure out what it is. It could be your Pinkie sense or something else, I just want a straight answer.”
Pinkie didn’t answer, instead staring at the clock on the wall. I turned to follow her gaze, watching the second hand reach the twelve and hearing a faintly audible click as the time changed to seven twenty-three. “Well, you see it all started with—”
“No twenty-three theories!” I shouted, startling my friends. Rarity was hiding her eyes from the light using a wide-brimmed hat, easily being the most hungover out of all of us. Her eyes were so bloodshot it looked more like a subconjunctival hemorrhage than the results of a hangover. Applejack and Dash were no stranger to a hangover, getting by with just a couple pairs of sunglasses. Fluttershy, well she would jump at anything and managed to spill her coffee on the table.
“But I’m telling you ponies that our cutie marks are gone because… well, we’re not ponies!” Pinkie reached into her mane and pulled out a chalk board with several crude diagrams on it.
“Wait, do that again, get some chalk!”
Pinkie reached into her mane and pulled out a piece of chalk.
“Now pull out our cutie marks!”
She reached into her hair and pulled out her hoof. Several small colorful symbols resembling our cutie marks started to float up into the air, rapidly vanishing.
“Ugh!” I slammed my head down on the table and accepted the sharp pain as punishment for trying, yet again, to make sense of Pinkie Pie.
“So, uh, are you saying we’re changelings Pinkie? Or maybe Golems like in Daring Do and the Druish Princess?” Dash asked.
“Isn’t that the one where they tried to bottle up fresh air and sell it?” Applejack asked.
“No,” Pinkie tapped on the chalkboard. “You all remember that old mare’s tale we used to read written by Lyra, right?”
“Animorphs?” Dash replied.
“Poner Rangers?” Applejack answered.
“Mmph uugh mmmm,” Rarity mumbled, sounding better than she looked.
“Furry Bedroom Adventures?” Fluttershy responded without thinking, blushing shortly afterward as I raised my head and stared at her in disbelief.
“Anthropology,” I answered. “Yeah I remember that story, not being very good or scientifically accurate.”
“Come on, Twilight, not this again! You’ve got no imagination, or sense of adventure! It was a great story of how Lyra found herself and her true friends—”
“It was a shameless self-insert, Dash,” I interrupted. “If I wanted bad fan fiction I’d invent a means of mass communication to allow everypony to share their ideas. Literature is an art, a science, a means to communicate the deepest darkest thoughts and questions that face ponykind.”
“It’s a story!” Dash countered. “You’re supposed to read it and enjoy it, and I don’t know, have fun.”
“Girls, ah don’t think this is getting us anywhere. What’s this got to do with us, Sugarcube?” Applejack asked.
“Oh, well I think we’re turning into humans!” Pinkie replied.
I found myself grinding my teeth and had to stop for a moment to reply. At times, it was evident Pinkie Pie was just making stuff up in some attempt to keep the spotlight on herself. “So, our cutie marks vanish, therefore, we’re becoming humans?”
“Well, there’s also the hairless pink splotches appearing in our fur.”
“That’s acute dermatitis, likely a reaction to increased cortisol in our systems, but I imagine that further testing could be warranted…” I opened my journal back up and started to jot down some notes. If only I had some willing—or unwilling—test subjects I could really get to the bottom of this mystery.
“I’m thinking next the magic and ability to fly starts to go, some fingers and toes, and voila! Hairless ugly apes!” Pinkie stood on her hind legs and for a moment, her body reshaped itself into a cartoonish human
“Look, there has to be a logical explanation to explain this, and we’ll be hearing back from Celestia at any moment. So, girls, here are my current top three explanations.”
I looked around the room to make sure I have everypony’s attention. Rarity had even managed to look up at me from under the brim of her hat, eyes bloodshot. Applejack had found herself a bottle of hard cider and was drinking it. “Really AJ? More alcohol?”
“Little hair o’ the dog is the perfect thing to nurse a hangover,” she countered.
“Okay…. Then, the first plausible explanation is that we’ve been affected by a hitherto unknown disease which causes ponies to lose their cutie marks.” I glared at Pinkie to pre-empt whatever nonsense she was about to say. “Second, is that Discord has broken free and stolen our Cutie Marks in order to sever our link to the Elements of Harmony. Third is that I drank myself into a coma and am dreaming, and at any moment Luna will appear to inform me that I’ll never wake up and that they’re going to have to pull the plug.”
“Whoa, that last one is dark… I’ll have to use it for one of my stories sometime,” Dash stated. “I mean, if we’re losing our special talents, I’m gonna need a new dayjob.”
“Writing isn’t a job, it’s a hobby,” I replied.
“Come on, Twilight, humans doesn’t even crack the top three? I’m telling you, this is exactly what happened in that mildly interesting story Anthropology!” Pinkie’s ear started to twitch, accompanied by a shaking rump.
I had no clue what this meant, nor would I have cared if I did with the way this headache was starting to throb right behind my eyes. I heard a loud belch from the other room and then a scream of pain. Pinkie’s entire body was shaking now, this one I knew. “Doozie?”
“Y-y-y-yep!” Pinkie said as she bounced into the next room.
Before I could follow into the next room I heard a click as I stepped on a loose floorboard, and focusing my magic I teleported out of the way of a confetti mine. Nopony was following me close enough to be hit by the trap, thank Celestia. “Pinkie!” I growled at her as I looked around for other loose floorboards. “Now really isn’t the time.”
“Oh I hid that there last week, I thought sure you would have found it by now. Anyway, you need to come help Spike!”
My friends made it into the room only slightly after me to a horrific site. Curled up on the floor, halfway out of Spike’s mouth, was my brother. His body was half tan and hairless, and his forelegs ended in misshapen curled up fingers. His horn was gone and his hair was a short dark brown. Between his hind legs was an even more hideously deformed penis, barely the size of a foals. Everything further back on his body, including the rest of his legs, was in Spike’s mouth.
“Shining! What happened?” I quickly began to pull on Spike while Dash and Applejack pulled on Shining, until we’d seperated the two and enabled Spike to breathe again.
“Twily…. It was Celestia…” He caught his breath and curled up into a ball, half-pony, half-monstrosity. “She was trying to return a reply to your letter but her magic is on the fritz, her horn was barely two inches long. The spell hit me instead of the scroll.”
“Oh no,” I began to pace around, mind racing. “It’s affecting Celestia too? If she loses her magic, we may not be able to fix this…”
“You’re… you’re still okay,” Shining reached out and ran his boney fingers through my mane.
“We’ve already lost our cutie marks, how did you get so bad so quickly?” I asked.
“I don’t know, it seemed to affect us quicker at the Castle.”
“What could it mean?” I chewed on my lip, thinking it over. “You are older than me, and this happened on my twenty-third birthday. Could the curse be making up for lost time with older ponies? This would imply younger ponies would be affected slower or not at all, but further testing will be required and I will need some test subjects and a control group… not to mention parchment, quills, test tubes, oh, this scale of an experiment will be exhilarating!”
“You and Pinkie may be the only two amused by this dreadful situation,” Rarity said.
“I certainly am having a blast!” Pinkie added. “Why, Shining is 23 months older than you isn’t he Twilight? I’ve got a diagram with lots of string that explains everything.”
“Hmm, save it for later Pinkie… I think the only thing we can do, should do, is go on a grand adventure to Canterlot. We’ll bring the Elements and combine my power with Celestia and Luna before it’s too late to fix this! So pack up your things, girls, we’re going to Canterlot!”
Spike coughed and rolled over, “yeah I’m fine. Thanks for asking…”