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// It is pitch black. You are likely to be hugged by a Ponk! 
// Story: House of the Rising Sunflower 
// by kudzuhaiku 
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After his emotional high, Sundance explored the depths of his emotional low. This was much like the time after adrenaline jitters—different but also the same in all the ways that mattered—and he allowed himself to be processed. Spells were cast upon him, and he stood in water that was not wet. Water that was not even wholly within this reality. Astral waters, that flowed through this reality and the astral realms. When he stood in the brain-washer, it calmed him. Smoothed out his thoughts. He could only assume that it washed away all lingering traces of stupidity and Moondancer was absolutely right; it felt marvellous. 

Moondancer wrote something, though he knew not what, and Sundance was left alone with his thoughts. Already, he knew that for him to keep his wits, for him to keep his mind, he would have to learn how to control his fear, lest he be stricken stupid. Succumbing to his fear would rob him of his senses, his wits, what little precious intelligence he had. Sundance knew that he was not a smart pony, not by a longshot. His lack of higher intelligence was an asset though; this much he knew, for it allowed him to slog through the absolute worst of bureaucratic processes without losing his mind. Being thickheaded made him an unstoppable warrior against the dreaded demon paperwork. 

“We’re almost done here,” the bespectacled unicorn said to Sundance while her pen danced over a sheet of paper. “I must say, for all of the weirdness, it really is nice to meet you.” Her pen paused, just as she did, and she seemed somehow flustered. “I am flattered that you found me attractive. Even if it is probably just some quirk of magic.” 

Sundance started to say something, but realised that now was a time to listen. 

“I don’t have a lot of adult friends,” she said. “Might have mentioned that. Well, there are adults who are friends with me, but I have a hard time with my end of the connection. It’s easier to be friends with foals. This almost feels too complicated to talk about.” 

Her pen sprang to life and began to move again. Smooth, flowing loops; terse, short lines; perfect dots that left behind no blobs of ink. Each letter was perfect, remarkable, and done without a trace of effort. Sundance envied her script, her magical connection to the pen that allowed her thoughts to flow onto paper in such a way. When he wrote, he had to work for it. While his calligraphy was better than average, it was nothing at all like what Moondancer could do without effort. 

“I become overly frustrated by the stupidity of others,” she said while her pen continued its careful, beautiful dance. “But I am not bothered by foals. They’re little. Their life is defined by what they don’t know. I wish I knew a better way of saying this that did not make me sound so egotistical.” 

Every letter spawned from the pen was a masterpiece of fluid perfection. 

“I was once friends with Sumac Apple. He was very dear to me. I suppose he still is.” Her head tilted, she sighed, and then her head rotated from side to side in an abrupt, jerky manner. “He is still friends with me, but as he grew into adulthood, I found it harder and harder to connect with him. The stupid things he did annoyed me more and more. I grew increasingly frustrated with him, and it became harder and harder to speak with him.” 

When she sighed, it left behind a morose atmosphere, as if each exhale filled the room with tangible sadness. 

“I regret that things changed between us.” 

This time when she turned to look him in the eye, Sundance saw the the pain hidden behind her thick, spotless eyeglass lenses. “Of course, fate would make it so that the one pony who was actually attracted to me was cursed with artificial stupidity. As awkward as all of this is, I would like for you to know that I am genuinely flattered. Of course, I am old enough to be your mother, and that makes things even weirder… and I am probably going to spend far too long talking to my therapist about all of this.” 

This time, when the pen halted, it was pulled away from the paper, capped, and then vanished. 

“Twilight will see you shortly. You might have to wait. Yes, she cleared her schedule for you, but things happened. Life happened. Circumstances changed a bit. I’m not completely sure what happened. We’re done here, and you are free to move into the next waiting room. Your saddlebags will be returned to you once your visit is over. Now that you are processed, you are ‘clean’, in a manner of speaking. I am positive that the wait won’t be long, as Twilight is quite eager to meet you.” 

“I don’t mind the wait,” he said with the hopes of making Moondancer’s job just a tiny bit easier. “Processing wasn’t so bad. I got a chance to learn about myself, and more importantly, I got a chance to meet you. Consider yourself one of my friends, even if you have a hard time returning the… uh… feeling? Is that the word I’m after?” After he’d flubbed his words, he wondered if his new friend was annoyed with him, and he was fearful that he’d failed to make a good impression. 

“Through the door, please. You will find yourself in a waiting room just outside the visitation chambers. Good luck with Twilight. I hope that you and her find a way to save Equestria. It’s a bit worrisome, that. Everything is on the verge of collapse.” 

These final, parting words caused Sundance’s mouth to turn dry. He rubbed one front hoof against the other—his pricked frog only hurt because of the memory of pain—and he found himself considering the ramifications of Moondancer’s casual statement. If what she said were true, if Twilight wanted him to save Equestria somehow, then this was going to be a long day indeed. 

“It was nice meeting you,” he said, his voice dry and creaky as an addled adolescent’s. 

Then, saying nothing, Moondancer gestured for him to leave. 



 

The waiting room wasn’t just one room, but several. Three small rooms that formed a sort of half-circle around a teeny, tiny central alcove with a decorative fountain and some plants. It was luxuriously furnished, with things fit for a princess, or prince, or visiting dignitary, or, in his own case, a visiting baron from a bumpkin barony. During his exploration of these rooms and the perfectly round room in the middle, he found bookshelves and books aplenty. 

He saw fish in the fountain, which were nice to look at. At least it was a pleasant way to waste time. A devious part of him wondered if Princess Twilight made Princess Celestia wait in these chambers. All of the framed art on the walls were done by foals. Little hopeful artists, no doubt. There were windows here, but something didn’t quite feel real about them. He suspected that what he saw in the windows had to be some manner of illusion, because he was too far into the depths of Twilight’s castle. 

In the middle of the three rooms, the one directly left of the central round alcove, Sundance found a door left ajar. Being a curious pony, he poked his nose in so that he might have a look around. He found a closet filled with all manner of mundane things. A mop hung from a hook, there was a bucket in the rear, and a broom stood in the corner. The broom had some cobwebs on it, and was in dire need of a little housekeeping. There was a watering can for the plants, some bottles of something or other, and a humongous box of fish food with a smiling seapony on the front. 

Something seemed wrong with using a seapony to sell fish food. 

Disappointed, dismayed, Sundance shut the closet door. There was nothing exciting in there, no grand adventure into the unknown awaited. Now that he was an adult, closets had lost their magic. No longer were they portals into distant, dangerous adventure. A secret lair, a dark, dank cave, a hidden cache for pilfered cookies, a closet could be anything. Only now, as an adult, a closet was just a place for cleaning supplies. He sighed, forlorn, mourning his long-lost foalhood, and wondered at what point did the magic he once knew leave the world. The time when his toys still spoke to him and his imagination felt so real. 

Real adventure awaited him now. He’d ventured into a long-forgotten ancient cellar in search of a lost foal. An owlbear had been battled and a friend lost forever. It was spider season… which was rather worrisome. His forays into the closet as a foal had not prepared him for this. The closet was a means to escape the city—but now he’d escaped the city and closets were a luxury that he no longer had. 

If he had foals, he would need to provide them closets to play in. 

Or at least to hide from spiders in, because spider season promised to be a long-term problem. 

He thought of Moondancer, relished his lingering attraction to her, and his brain suggested that it would be easier to meet mares now that he was grown up and away from his classmates. This might be true, or not true at all, but he did move in different social circles now. Now, due to the changes in his life, he knew weird ponies, and surely, one of these ponies would be just the right sort of weird for him. 

With the closet door now shut, Sundance prowled around for something to keep him occupied. Something to keep his eyes busy for a time, a distraction to pass the time. If Princess Celestia had to wait here, what would she do? How might she spend her time? Her time was too valuable to waste, but Sundance was a rookie baron from a foul-smelling barony. He had more time than he knew what to do with. 

Had Moondancer ensorceled away his stench? 

It seemed likely. 

Beyond the bookshelf just to the right of the closet, there was a wall and upon this wall were a gallery’s worth of foalhood art—as well as one sign. A yellow warning sign, the sort of sign that immediately draws one’s attention. Unaware of any danger here, Sundance wondered what could possibly be a threat, and moved in to have a closer look at what the sign had to say. Maybe something about the floor being slippery when wet, or some other such nonsense. 

Yellow sign, black letters, a black triangle with a lightning bolt speared through it, the universal pictogram for danger. But the words printed on the sign confused Sundance a great deal. Mysterious words that had no context, no meaning. Words that failed to express or explain what the danger was, or why it was dangerous. 

“Beware of Ponk,” he read aloud. “That makes no sense at all. What’s a ponk? Is this sign a joke of some sort? Just what is a ponk, and why is it capitalised?” 

The closet door burst open without warning, and a vivid pink force of nature emerged. Before Sundance could react, or even cry out, the force of nature was upon him, cartwheeling to quickly close the distance. There was a terrific smack when the pink mare collided with him, the sort of smack that could only be described as a stone block slathered in custard and then wrapped up in the softest, pinkest velvet. Sundance would have been bowled over, but the pink elemental grabbed him, and somehow he found himself lifted up into the air. 

Then, the most horrible thing happened: she squeezed. 

Sundance experienced the longest second in his life, which stretched like pink taffy into a prolonged infinity with no conceivable end. Perhaps it was some lingering aftereffects of the portal. But he was being crushed to death, that much was for certain, and he saw his short life flash before his eyes in a not-so-compelling blur. His life, for the majority of it, wasn’t terribly exciting. 

“I’m a Ponk, silly!” The pink terror squeezed so hard that Sundance’s eyeballs almost escaped his eye sockets. “I’m the Pinkiest Ponk that ever did Ponk! Oh, I love hugging pegasus ponies, just like Rainbow Dash! They’re so fluffy! I just can’t stand it!” 

Sundance found himself wondering if his duodenum would survive this, but he had no idea what a duodenum was. His was in danger though, mortal peril, for surely his ribs would collapse and his insides crushed to jelly. She was impossibly strong—as strong as she was pink—and Sundance was whirled round and round while she bounced from one hind hoof to the other. 

Blood rushed into his wings with each squeeze, each life-threatening act of constriction, and he feared that his feathers might go shooting out from the intense pressure. His organs shifted around, which caused some of them to be squooshed down into his legs, and his brain thrummed against the back of his eyeballs to the time of his own frantically beating heart. 

This was how he died; not by owlbear, or spider, or monster, but by earth pony. 

An ignoble end for certain. 

“Oh, you’re so soft and fluffy! You have that wonderful pegasus pelt! I love it so much!” The Ponk’s words were muffled, smothered as she rubbed her fuzzy cheek against his neck and jaw. “So smooth and sleek! I miss Dashie! She’s so hard to catch now! Oooooh!” 

Sundance tried to breathe; he struggled to draw breath and found that he couldn’t. Air no longer existed, there was only pink. Everything was somehow pink and it was all because he failed to beware of the Ponk. How she’d come out of the closet was a great unknown, a mystery, one of life’s riddles. Sundance lived in a world that was now post-Ponk-comes-out-of-the-closet, and nothing would ever be the same. Closets were no longer safe. 

She snorted, she giggled, she squealed, but all sounds shared something in common, and they were pink. Sundance had never heard pink noise before, but he heard it now, and would never be the same after his experience. When she hugged him, he distinctly heard the sound of two balloons being rubbed together, but he could not discern the source. 

Then, quite without warning, he was put down by the Ponk of pinkness, she looked into his eyes, and said, “You seem sad.” 

Sundance’s organs couldn’t remember their way home. 

“My name is Pinkie Pie, and in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m the Ponk. You’re Sundance, unless I am mistaken. Why are you sad?” 

He drew in a wheezing breath, and failed to respond. 

Sundance found himself picked up once more—gently this time—carried across the room, and then the Ponk plonked him down upon a sofa. She sat down beside him, patted him on the back, and her merry blue eyes twinkled with unspeakable, indescribable joy. A few grey strands could be seen in her mane, but something about her was young, eternal, timeless. 

“I am sad,” he gasped, and perhaps because he was just squeezed, he found that words just spilled out of his mouth. “This morning, I lost my temper. I said awful things. Mean things. Horrible things. I got scared and then I got stupid and I just found out that when I get scared I turn stupid and I’m pretty sure that is what happened this morning and when I go home, I have to face the music, I need to own up to what I’ve done, and that scares me, and I’m worried that I’ll be stupid because I’m scared, and that will make me mess everything up, and then everything will be worse, and if I make things worse, then maybe I shouldn’t be a baron anymore, and that, that really scares me.” 

His words were punctuated by a faint squeak. 

“Oh boy, that’s rough,” Pinkie Pie said while she pulled him into a smothering hug. 

“I don’t know how to make things right.” Sundance wondered if he was scared right now, because he felt stupid. What made it worse was the fact that he didn’t know if this was just general stupidity, which he was prone to, or stupidity brought about by fear. When beset on all sides by stupidity, it was difficult to determine the source. 

“Well, to start with, you hafta say that you’re sorry.” 

“Sorry doesn’t always make things right,” he replied whilst he shook his head. “That doesn’t fix anything. I said awful things.” 

“Well”—Pinkie stretched out this word until it was as long as a sentence—“you still gotta say that you’re sorry. That’s just how it is. Even if it doesn’t fix things. It’s how you start, see? Sometimes, sometimes we don’t say we’re sorry… for whatever reason. Sometimes we just expect that we’ll be forgiven. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a Pie Sister, it’s that we can’t take other ponies for granite. Saying that you’re sorry helps to smooth over hurt feelings.”

“Huh?” Something that Pinkie had said jarred Sundance from his thoughts, but he wasn’t sure what. Just something. 

“Oh, I’ve done stupid things and just expected my sisters to forgive me. Because they’re my sisters. And I didn’t say that I was sorry. That caused a little resentment. It was a big complicated mess, the sort of convoluted mess that seems like it might take forever to fix, but in reality takes about twenty-two minutes to resolve.” 

“Twenty-two?” Sundance had no idea what was going on. 

The pink Ponk squeezed him, softly, and pulled him close. “You seem a little clueless, Sundance. Do you need for me to slow down and explain things?” 

“Uh, maybe?” 

“Start with saying that you’re sorry. It might not fix things, but leaves an opening for future dialogue.” Pinkie Pie patted him on the back while her riotous curls boinged about her head like a crown of the curliest chaos. “After that, it is just a matter of hard work to make everything right.” 

“I don’t think it will be that easy. Hollyhock is one of my peasants. One of my subjects. And I think she hates me. I’m pretty sure that she does. This doesn’t seem like something that I can fix. It feels very complicated.” 

“Sometimes, things can’t be fixed in twenty-two minutes. Every now and then, a really big boo-boo happens. Not a simple screw up, but a big-time blunder. Something that requires both forgiveness and redemption. That might take a whole season. Maybe more.” She rubbed her fuzzy chin with what seemed to be a third hoof, because she still had Sundance in a smothering embrace. “If you crammed all of that forgiveness and redemption into twenty-two minutes, or worse, a brief montage, that would just be stupid. So, expect for it to take some time, but you can still sort things out.” 

“What if I just make things worse?” he asked. “It’s hard, because I am in a position of authority over Hollyhock, and I think she resents that. No matter how I approach her, no matter how I say I am sorry, it doesn’t change the fact that she’s still stuck doing what I say. I really want her to accept my apology as a pony, not as a baron.”

“Oh, that’s tough. Twilight has that problem. Even more so now that she is the de facto ruler of Equestria. As far as I know, she’s never managed to make peace with it, and it remains an ongoing problem. It’s hard to be friends with those you rule. Technically, she rules over me, but I don’t listen, I disobey royal decrees, and I do my part to make everything better.” 

“Royal decrees?” Sundance, confuzzled beyond his understanding, sought an explanation. 

“I am supposed to act in a manner befitting a royal… and I just don’t. Twilight keeps trying to reinforce it, and it has become a game we play. It allows Twilight to blow off stress. She has a lot of stress. But this doesn’t apply to you, I suppose.” 

“No, I guess it doesn’t. But it does help me—” 

“Oh goodness gosh!” the pink Ponk exclaimed suddenly. “I am supposed to be helping Rarity! I promised that I wouldn’t get distracted! Rarity needs me!” 

Sundance found himself released from her smothering embrace and she lept up from the sofa with an explosion of curls. Pinkie Pie pronked, bounced, and cartwheeled across the room. Into the closet she went, slammed the door behind her, and then the clang of metal could be heard, followed by a series of increasingly frustrated grunts. 

“Who left a mop bucket in the cleaning closet?” she could be heard saying, which was then followed by silence. 

Sundance waited on the sofa, uncertain of whatever had just happened. When she did not come back out of the closet, he rose from where he sat, and moving at a cautious trot, he approached the closed closet door. A part of him wanted to flee, his brain warned him against discovering the truth, but he did not listen to himself. The daredevil part of his mind compelled him to keep going, to open the door. 

Even if doing so might mean his ruination.

After he reached out his wing, he hesitated, frightened for reasons that he dared not think about. Because of his foalhood love of comic books, he understood cosmic horror, and he wondered if that is what he felt right now. A Ponk had come out of the closet, and a Ponk had gone into the closet. But what was in the closet right now? Blood thundered in his ears and his heart pounded within the tight confines of his throat. 

All he had to do was open the door and confront the unknown. 

Why was that so hard? 

Sweaty, fearful, he wondered if his mind was going. It might be. That was his new worry. Every time he felt afraid, he would wonder if his mind was going. Fear gave him the stupids. Pegasus ponies did dangerous things. Scary things. Flying was sometimes pretty scary, and so was crashing. Yes, crashing could be extra scary, and he recalled how his mind seemed to disconnect when he was about to have an exciting landing. 

“Just open the door, Sundance.” 

His primaries were inches away from the brass handle. Just inches. Yet, the ornate brass handle might as well be miles away. Ears rigid, tall, straight, he listened, but heard nothing. An earth pony had come out of the closet, and then back in. A closet, which only had one door, one way to go in or out. Logic dictated that if he opened the door, he would find a Ponk. Yet, when he’d looked into his closet earlier, there was no Ponk to be found. Logic was dumb, and so was Sundance. 

Nothing to it but to do it. Sundance reached out his trembling wing, and then reconsidered. What if he didn’t like what he saw? He might open the closet door and gaze into the maw that devoured sanity. There might be colours from beyond space in there, pink abominations beyond imagination. His thigh muscles jerked while his belly spasmed. It was hard to breathe now, but it was also getting harder to think. And he knew why. That made everything worse. 

Just as his primaries touched the brass handle, the door opened on its own. It swung out, almost hitting him, but stopped as suddenly as it had opened. From the darkness beyond, a pink limb extended—it reached around the edge of the door and the pink hoof at the end was pressed firmly against Sundance’s snoot. He might have screamed, but all his air had long since left his lungs. 

“Boop!” 

Sundance backed away in a hurry, his eyes crossed, and his tail tucked between his legs. He heard a giggle from within the dark confines of the closet, and then the pink leg was pulled in. It vanished like a slurping tongue back into the inky blackness from whence it came. The door did not close, no, but remained opened just enough for a limb to reach out. Sundance tripped over his own legs and went down into a heap with a muffled, muted wheeze of terror that lacked the air required for volume. 

Never again would he ever trust a closet; for beyond the door was Ponk-space.