DECEPTION

by Christian Harisay

Chapter Twelve, Part 1 - Plan B

Booooooom.

Swwsssssshhhhhh.

Booooooom.

Swwsssssshhhhhh.

Twilight became dimly aware of a warmth on her back, and a cold on her belly.

Booooooom.

A fresh wave of cold splashed across her face, her sides, and underneath her.

Swwsssssshhhhhh.

The fluid, saline cold entered her mouth and nose, and her dim awareness lit up as she coughed and spluttered. She raised her head and opened her eyes.

Twilight was lying in the surf of a half moon beach, her body gently pushed back and forth by the waves. The sky overhead displayed a passing storm, with the golden rays of the sun piercing through tumultuous storm clouds to illuminate thin sheets of drizzling rain descending upon the steely blue-grey ocean, still seething with foamy crests from the breeze that bustled past her in irregular gusts. Leaves blew on innumerable branches from the dense forest surrounding the bay, swaying and rustling to and fro in the wind.

In the center of the beach stood a small seaside town whose chief feature was sprawling amusement park, complete with rides, attractions, scenic photo-spots, and the delightfully terrified screams of ponies braving the several modest roller coasters. Nestled in the center of the action was a spacious mansion with dozens of windows, several towers and turrets, and an adjoining pier that stretched out into the churning water. A solitary figure sat at the end, and though Twilight couldn’t make out any features, she could see that the figure was a familiar shade of pink.

Twilight stood up and began to trot swiftly up the beach. She scowled as she looked around her. The dream was supposed to be bright and sunny to try and help Pinkie’s mood, and even though she thought the epic contrast between light and shadow around her had its own wild beauty, it still irked her: just one more thing in the mission that hadn’t gone according to plan. Something else nagged at her as she looked around, something inside her telling her that something else beside the weather was off.

The nagging feeling increased until she stopped, and her head swiveled in place as she scrutinized her surroundings, noting how they looked familiar...

She now stood upon the sandy beach of a half-moon bay that opened out into a vast ocean.  

Her heart rate spiked into the stratosphere. Suddenly it was very hard to breath.

The air now blew a cool sea breeze, carrying with it mist from the thundering surf.

“No! Noooo!” she managed to gasp, her eyes darting back and forth as though she expected some monster to come charging out of the forest or lumber from the depths of the sea.

Twilight!

“Not here! Not here! I can’t be trapped here again!”

Twilight, listen to me!

“SOMEPONY HELP MEEE!”

TWIIILIIIGHT!

Reason’s frantic shouting in her head echoed through her mind like the crack of thunder.

“R-Reason?”

About time! Now listen to me! You. Are not. In limbo.

It took a moment for Reason’s words to sink in.

“O-okay, um… h-how do you... know?”

It’s simple. You didn’t die, and you can still reach the dream matrix. Feel that?

Twilight felt Reason tugging at her thoughts again. She yielded, and felt her mind connect with the functioning Dreamscape: farther away than it would be in a first-level dream, but not completely undetectable.

“T-then... why are we here?”

Probably for the same reason that the thing-pony keeps showing up, or the train from earlier. Artifacts from your mind are bleeding over into the shared dream.

Twilight sighed, dejected. “That makes sense.”

I’m not called Reason for nothing.

“Stop it,” she said, annoyed. “I just hoped I’d never have to see this place ever again.”

Me neither.

Twilight resumed her quick pace down the beach towards the elevated pier. As she got closer, she noticed that Pinkie’s mane and tail had returned to their normal erratic curls, and her miserable frown was replaced by a nostalgic, wistful smile as she stared off into the vast ocean.

“Pinkie?” Twilight asked as she reached the base of the pier.

Pinkie remained unresponsive, just looking off into the scenic ocean vista as she listened to a captivating piano melody coming from a black music box with the relief of a heart on it.

“Pinkie? Pinkie, what are you doing out here?”

“Waiting… waiting for my dearly beloved...” Pinkie answered, fanciful and longing.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Um… Pinkie? It’s Twilight...”

Pinkie turned her head and looked down at Twilight. She did a double-take, gasped, and flipped around to lean over the railing. Her face lit up with bright eyes and an overjoyed smile.

“Ohmygosh, Twilight! You’re here! This is so super special stupendously splendiferous! You’ve got to come inside! Everypony will be so happy to see you!”

And just like that, Pinkie took off, galloping across the pier towards the mansion, giggling like an excited filly along the way. Twilight just stared, perplexed. Pinkie had gotten all the way to the extravagant patio door before Twilight thought to follow. She lit her horn and teleported behind Pinkie just as she opened the door a crack. She moved to follow Pinkie inside, but Pinkie raised her hoof before Twilight had taken a single step.

“Not this way, silly!” Pinkie giggled. “You have to come in through the front door so we can give you the proper ‘guest of honor’ welcome!”

Pinkie slipped through the sliver, then quickly shut it tight behind her twittering self before Twilight could reply or get a good look inside, leaving the befuddled unicorn to stare bewildered at the door.

Something is off here.

“Oh? Whatever gave you that inclination?” Twilight deadpanned.

The ‘everything-about-her’ part. We should have given her the identity confirmation phrase, now that I think about it.

“That probably would have been a good idea. I was just a bit too surprised by… whatever that was, to ask.”

Reason sighed. We might as well go around through the front. Looking at the matrix, I can’t tell what exactly is inside.

Twilight gulped. “W-what?”

Don’t worry. It’s not that it’s dangerous, I just can’t tell what it is. Pinkie’s subconscious has built the inside, but I can’t precisely determine how it’s built or who’s inside. She has guests, though. Lots of guests. Guess we’d better go say ‘Hi,’ shouldn’t we?

“None of those guests would happen to be Discord, would they?”

Not that I can tell, no. Worst comes to worst, we have some access to manipulation again. Now get going, we only have so much time. I’ll see if I can’t figure out what’s inside before you knock on the front door.

Twilight teleported back down to the beach, taking a little pathway that led up to the boardwalk. But as soon as she reached the marinara, she stopped, then looked back at the golden shores and frothing cobalt waves. Heavenly beams of sunlight cut through several openings in the overcast sky, turning patches of the cold, azure sea into little pools of bright sapphire. Off in the distance, she could see waterspouts bursting from the ocean’s surface as a pod of humpback whales emerged from the waves to breathe. The wind ebbed and flowed with the tides, drifting out from the forest and blowing back from across the waves, planting salty little kisses on Twilight’s nose.

The breathtaking scenic vista reminded her of why she had fallen in love with the beach in the first place, even though she knew it wasn’t real.

But she wanted it to be.

“Hey, Reason?”

Yeah?

“Well all of this is over—when we’ve stopped Pinkie’s nightmares and freed Spike of Avarice—remind me to take Spike and the girls to the beach. A real beach, like Broadtrot.”

I suppose it would be nice to have memories of being on a real beach with our friends and not just being alone on an imaginary one…

“Exactly.” Twilight’s throat tightened a little. “Sorry… I don’t mean to get all emotional with you, it’s just...”

It’s okay, Twilight. I’m here to support you.

Twilight smiled. “Thanks. Find out what’s inside yet?”

No, sorry. Might as well just knock. Would hate to keep them waiting, wouldn’t we?

Twilight sighed. “Might as well...”

She trotted the rest of the way up to the mansion, past the white picket fence and lush gardens with several stone statues of Pinkie holding various energetic and elated poses that would otherwise be impossible to carve from rock. She knocked on the set of double doors at the entrance, then sat down on the welcome mat as she waited. Then Reason spoke again in a panic.

Twilight?! Twilight! I figured out what’s inside! It’s—

The front doors were ripped open to reveal a wall of bright eyes and smiling faces. The sight nearly made Twilight’s heart stop. Her cognition suffered a system-wide cataclysmic crash and had to be rebooted.

She had expected Pinkie Pie to answer the door.

Not twelve Pinkie Pies.

The face of each Pinkie lit up with a smile that stretched from ear to ear, and the polyphonic tone of each one squealing “TWILIGHT!” in unsurpassed joy barraged her ears as a mass of hooves seized her and pulled Twilight inside before she could say “inconceivable.” They surrounded her, and besieged to the utterly baffled unicorn with joy.

“Twilight! You found a way here!”

“Oh, it’s so wonderful you could come!”

“How was your trip? Did you have fun? Didya? Didya?”

“How’d you get here? Did you finally get that teleportation ritual right? Hey, if you did, does that mean Dusk is coming, too?!”

“If we’d have known you were coming, we’d have thrown you a party!”

“Hey, we’re having a party right now! How about that?”

“That’s so tumultuously terrific! We can have even more cake and ice cream and cookies and pies and punch-back—”

“And Sparkle Cola and Sunrise Sarsaparilla and—hey, my hoof is burning again! Not now, Pippy!”

“This party is going to be so awesome!”

“Doesn’t that all sound great, Twilight? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?! Huh huh huh huh HUH?”

Twilight didn’t move. She didn’t blink. She didn’t even know if she was breathing or not.

“Aw, look girls! She’s so happy to see us all that her brain broke!”

One Pinkie stood above the rest and raised a hoof in proclamation. “Hey, I know what we should do! If Twilight’s here, we need to take her to the princess!”

“YEAH!” all the Pinkies agreed in unison.

Before Twilight could respond or even register what was going on, the Pinkies swept her off her hooves and energetically bounded through room after room of the mansion. Just about every inch had been designed and decorated for festivities. There was more surface area of the walls and ceilings within the mansion covered in a rainbow of assorted streamers than not. They branched out from chandeliers, draped down the walls, twisted in festoons from clusters of balloons running along the crease where the walls met the ceiling, wrapped around pylons and railings, and hung as curtains in the doorways. The shag carpets and tile were all buried under a tide of balloons and balls being kicked up in a plume of plastic by Twilight’s swift entourage. Confetti materialized from the ceiling and drifted gently to the ground like the first snowfall of winter. The air was saturated with the sweet, warm smell of all manner of confectionaries and concessions: the aroma of cakes, pies, cupcakes, muffins, cookies, donuts, fritters, cinnamon rolls, bear claws, juices, fruit punch, soda, and more flavors of ice cream than she could imagine pierced her nostrils in a cornucopia of scents that made Twilight feel like she was going to get diabetes just by breathing. Each new room Twilight was swept through had some variation in its decoration, but there was one constant between each one.

There were Pinkies EVERYWHERE. Dozens. Hundreds. Many conversed with one another, others froliced about on the ballpit floor, and some engorged themselves at the buffet of dessert tables that lined every single wall. Twilight’s world was a blur of pink hair and blue eyes, and it was making her head spin.

Twilight was whisked into a grand ballroom through a lake of pink, and dropped in front of a large throne surrounded by hills of sweets and candy. The throne however, as grand and regal as Celestia’s if it had been designed and decorated by multiple Pinkies on a sugar rush, sat unoccupied.

“Hey, where’d she go?”one of the Pinkies asked. She and her companions went stiff and wide-eyes as a series of muscle spasms hit them. “Itchy back… twitchy ears...”

All the Pinkies who had been carrying Twilight smiled broadly and looked to each other. “INCOMING TACKLE-GLOMP!” They scattered in all directions, leaving Twilight in the center of an open space.

“Incoming what?”

“TWILIIII—”

Twilight looked back around above her just in time to see a manic pink bolt from the blue before it crashed into her with the force of a meteor. They tumbled across the floor to the base of the throne. Whatever wind hadn’t been knocked out of Twilight was forced out of her by a crushing bear hug.

“Oh Twilight, it’s so wonderful to see you here!” the latest Pinkie greeted. She eased her grip on Twilight and held her out to get a better look at her. Twilight gasped, half out of need for air and half out of shock at her newest associate.

The Pinkie in front of her was a fully grown alicorn, with a height and stature equal to Celestia, complete with broad wings and a horn that dwarfed any unicorn’s. Strands in her bushy mane and tail swirled like cotton candy in a spinner and sparkled with sporadic glints of sugar. She even wore ornate plated regala exactly like Celestia’s, except the inlaid jewels were in the shape of balloons, and her tiara was designed to look more like a party hat.

The alicorn Pinkie’s face-splitting smile dropped a little for a confused frown when she got a good look at the unicorn. “How did you get so little again? And what happened to your wings?” She smiled again. “Aw, I don’t care!” She pulled Twilight back into a hug, her every word accentuated by tightening her death-grip. “You’re… just… SO… CUTE!!!”

Twilight lit her horn and used her magic to force open Pinkie’s forelegs. They yielded only enough for her to desperately gasp for air. She tried to smile back. Keyword ‘try.’ “Yeah… good to… good to see… you too… Pinkie?”

Princess Pinkie finally let Twilight go. She dropped to the floor, and before she could even sit back up, Pinkie’s cheery, invasive grin was back in her face, shaking like a puppy whose owner had just come home from work. “So what brings you here? Are you still trying to figure out Pinkie Sense? Did you wanna get to see a full-blown Pinkie party? Did your planeswalker spark activate? Tellmetellmetellme!”

Twilight just kept smiling back with her forced grin. “Actually, I’m… uh… looking for somepony. Somepony who’ll know what to say to this...”

“Ooo, code phrases!” Princess Pinkie cooed. “What is it?”

“It’s a bright, cold day in April.”

Pinkie tilted her head to the side and cocked an eyebrow in confusion. “It is? But,” her horn lit up and a stuffed calendar materialized next to her, and she began to flip through it. “It’s June, just before the Summer Sun Celebration!” The calendar disappeared, and she looked back at Twilight. “Is that supposed to be a reference to something?”

Pinkie’s bemused expression flatlined into an unamused pout, and she turned to look over Twilight’s shoulder. “Gee, I wonder if that’s supposed to be a reference to something...” she stiffly punctuated to nopony in particular.

Twilight’s mouth fell open. “Uh… Pinkie?”

The alicorn Pinkie kept her attention off of Twilight, carrying on a conversation with somepony who only she was privy to. “Oh, don’t try to downplay what you do! It’s gotten to the point where your editors are assuming that any odd detail is just a reference to something else! Some of them even turned into plot points! Heck, one of them actually became a character!”

“Pinkie… who, or, what are you talking to?”

“Huh?” Princess Pinkie looked at Twilight, oblivious. “Oh, never mind that. I was just giving the writer some guff.” Her face scrunched up in agitation and she snapped her glare back over Twilight’s shoulder. "FOUR YEARS BETWEEN CHAPTER UPDATES, CHRISTIAN!”

She looked back to Twilight, giving her an apologetic smile and a nervous chuckle. “Sorry about that. Anyway, sorry if I can’t help. I’ll have to check my reference book to see if I can find an answer. But hey!” Her smile brightened. “You’ve got plenty of other Pinkies here to ask!”

Twilight turned around to look at the hundreds upon hundreds of Pinkie’s crammed into the ballroom. Some conversed with others, some danced, and some looked back at her with an affable smile and a wave. Twilight just gulped in return.

Are all of these Pinkie’s projections of herself? Twilight internally asked.

I have no idea, Reason answered.

What?

Dreamscape has all of these Pinkies filed as projections, but the spell is treating them like dreamers!

Twilight sat there for a moment, dumbstruck. Are you saving everypony here is a different version of Pinkie?

I don’t know. I can’t draw a definitive conclusion based on what little information I can get. And before you ask, no: I can’t tell which one of them, if any, is our Pinkie.

Twilight looked out over the teeming mass of pink, feeling a forlorn cloud forming over her. What are we going to do?

Well, I can keep at trying to defragment the code to figure out which of these Pinkies, if any, are the one we’re looking for. In the meantime, I guess you’ll have to just do things the hard way and start asking around. See if any know the correct response to the code phrase or if they’ve seen a Pinkie around here who looks like she’s not having a good time.

Twilight gulped. Ask… everypony…

Yep. And be quick about it. We’ve got less than five hours to not only find Pinkie, but the subconscious source of her dysphoria. But whenever you talk to somepony that isn’t Pinkie, mark them out so you can keep track of the ones you’ve already asked. Like this...

Twilight looked behind her up at the alicorn Pinkie. A holographic image of Pinkie’s cutie mark of three balloons with a red “X” over it appeared above her head. None of the Pinkies in the ballroom took notice.

The alicorn Pinkie looked back at Twilight and frowned. “What are you still doing on your fluffy little tuckus?” Pinkie’s horn lit up with a bright pink aura, and Twilight found herself in the bucket of a catapult aimed at the crowd.

“Princess Pinkie decrees that you are to have fun!”

Princess Pinkie yanked back on the lever, launching Twilight into the packed herd. Twilight screamed as she tumbled through the air in an arc. Dozens of hooves raised up into the air, catching her before she hit the ground, and at once she was swarmed by a dozen sets of bright eyes and smiling faces with over a hundred remarks.

“Holy guacamole, that was AWESOME!”

“Were you trying to tackle-glomp me too?”

“That was the most amazing stage dive I’ve ever seen!”

“Good thing I had a muscle tensing and a feeling of weightlessness to tell me you were going to get flung at me from a catapult, otherwise I might have spilled my bowl of sunflower seeds! Hey, do you think our friend Sunflower likes to eat sunflower seeds, or would that be like some weird form of cannibalism? Or is her name Sunflower because she loves every part of them, including the seeds?”

“Whatever you do, just don’t give any to Fluttershy!”

Twilight just stared back at them all like a deer in the headlamp of an oncoming steam train.

Had Reason been controlling Twilight’s throat she surely would have gulped from her own growing sense of foreboding.

We are so screwed.

Four mares sat in the dimly lit cellar that made up the miniscule pocket dimension separated from the chaotic nightmare world that they had only just escaped from. An uncomfortable silence encompassed them as they remained in relative stillness.

Twilight and Pinkie lay next to each to each other, an aura surrounding their heads as they slept, dreaming together. Applejack sat next to Pinkie, gently stroking her deflated mane in an attempt to provide what comfort she could as Pinkie occasionally made small twitches and grimaces in her sleep. Fluttershy clung tightly to Rarity, both looking off into a distance well beyond the confines of the enclosed space. Rainbow sat hunched up against the wall beside Twilight, a scowl deepening on her face as her tail every now and then twitched in agitation.

And in the farthest corner stood the thing-pony, looking upon Twilight with its unfathomable eyes.

Rainbow looked at the thing-pony, then looked away. Then back at it again, only to turn her head in another direction, mouth moving in silence as it tried and failed to form words. She huffed, then took a deep breath.

“Hey, pony-thing...”

The thing-pony looked at Rainbow. Her expression hardened, but she kept herself from looking away.

“I don’t get you. You’re supposed to be Twilight’s projection, but you’re so unlike Twilight it’s unreal. Knowing her, she’d dream up something super logical and complex that’d be even more talkative and egg-heady than she is. Instead she dreams up you. I mean… look at you! What are you even? Some scrawny, hairless, owl-headed colt in worn-out clothes? You make no sense!”

Rainbow’s face became even more stern. “I don’t know what to make of you. Not even Twilight knows what to make of you. Really, if you’re just some weird projection from some screwed-up part of her brain, then I have half a mind to put you in the same boat as Pinkie’s projection of Discord.”

She looked down at Pinkie, and her expression softened. “But… you knew where to find Pinkie when we didn’t even have a clue where to start looking. And you saved Twilight from Discord... “

Rainbow exhaled and looked back at the thing-pony. “I still don’t entirely trust you, but Twilight says you’re harmless, and you helped us when we needed it. So… thanks. I really mean that. Thank you.”

The thing-pony said nothing. It didn’t even move; whatever stirring it appeared to make was just a trick of the eyes played by the flickering light of Applejack’s lantern and the glow of Twilight’s magic.

Rainbow looked back with a flat gaze. “You really don’t say anything, do you?”

The thing-pony didn’t say anything.

Rainbow grumbled, stood, then began to pace around in circles.

“We should be doing something,” she muttered. “I should be doing something to help, instead of just sitting here on my butt doing nothing.”

“Just sit tight, Rainbow,” said Applejack, “and be glad we got a moment’s rest.”

Rainbow glared back at Applejack and pointed a hoof at Pinkie as she winced in her sleep. “Look at her! She’s still having nightmares, and we just sent Twilight into her mind, closer to the thing that’s been causing all this, completely alone! They could be fighting some ultra-Discord right now, and we’re just hanging around like we’re waiting to catch a train!”

“Twi said she designed the next dream so Discord wouldn’t be able to show up, Dash.” Applejack reminded her. “Whereas we’ve still got to deal with that consarned chaos spirit if he manages to bust down our one line of defense.”

“Yeah, but we’re not dealing with Discord right now,” Rainbow tersely added. “We’re not doing anything except waiting to wake Twilight and Pinkie back up and hope Twilight found what we need to blast that jerk.”

Applejack sighed. “Look, Rainbow, you’ve got your heart in the right place, but it’s like what Twilight kept sayin’ to Pinkie; sometimes, you need to have some faith in your friends. I don’t really like gambling on this either, but we gotta have faith that Twi can pull this off. And every second we spend waiting in here is a second off the fifteen minutes we hafta keep Discord away from them. Honestly, if we did end up doing nothing but wait here until we wake ‘em back up, that would be the best thing that could happen for all of us.”

Rainbow just stared at Applejack for a moment, unable to find fault in her logic. She plopped back down onto the hard floor and looked away with a sour demeanor.

“I hate waiting,” Rainbow grumbled.

“Yeah, well, I don’t very much like being in these dreams, either,” Applejack muttered. She nodded in the direction of the thing-pony. “I don’t know if he’s got anything to do with it, but I’ve never felt right going under like this. I can’t tell ya why, but I do. But I put on my big-filly horse shoes and take it, ‘cause Pinkie’s put her faith in us, and I ain’t got no intention of letting her down.”

Applejack suddenly perked, ears high in alert and eyes wide in alarm.

“What’s wrong?” Rainbow asked.

Applejack didn’t immediately respond. She held her stiff pose for a moment, like a suspicious prey. Then…

“He’s looking for us...”

Three sets of terrified eyes were on her at once. The fourth set belonging to the thing-pony were as neutral as ever.

“But, we’re hidden!” Rarity piped. “The last time you did this trick, not even Twilight could find you!”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t exactly have ideal dream-warping conditions to work with this time. I don’t wanna check too much, lest he find me mucking around in the spell’s workings and follow us back here, be he’s prodding. He’s still in the part of the dream we left, but if he looks outside that… well, we won’t exactly be that hard to find.” 

Rainbow had gotten back onto her hooves, already tensing up for a fight. Fluttershy began to quiver again, and Rarity’s face went even paler.

The thing-pony continued its ongoing habit of having less diversity to its expressions than a marble statue.

Applejack looked down at the sleeping unicorn, her teeth grit in trepidation. “Come on, Twi… please hurry...”

“And then they were all like, ‘No, really; who are you going to target with Lava Axe?’ And then I said... ‘Myself!’” Pinkie said, then dissolved into a twittering fit of giggles.

“Uh-huh,” Twilight replied in a tone halfway between uncertainty and disinterest as this latest Pinkie recounted her tale while playing some sort of complicated card game with several other Pinkies. Whatever magic this Pinkie was talking about really wasn’t how magic was supposed to work. “Hey, Pinkie?”

The Pinkie that Twilight was talking to recovered from her snickering. “Yeah?”

“It’s a bright, cold day in April.”

“What? No, this happened in the summer at, like, three in the morning, when you get so tired that everything is absolutely hil-ar-i-ous!”

“Hey, are you telling Twilight the story about when you took your own Lava Axe to the face?” asked one Pinkie who trotted up with another Pinkie, both of whom had symbols of crossed-out cutie marks over their heads. “Oh, I love that one! Pinkie, you gotta tell Pinkie what happens next!”

“Of course! So they laughed even harder for a good full minute after that, but then they calmed down and were are like; ‘Okay, enough jokes, who are you really going to cast Lava Axe on?’ And then I just picked up my life counter, held it in the air for everypony to see, lowered the number on it by five points, slammed it back down on the table, and said: ‘MYSELF!’”

All Pinkies present exploded with laughter at the recollection of tom-foolery. Twilight just sighed, concentrated for a second, and the image of a crossed-out cutie mark appeared over the molten axe-eating Pinkie’s head.

That more or less had been what the last two hours had been like for Twilight: talk to one of the Pinkies, sometimes after they’d literally thrown themselves at her to welcome her to the party, put up with their nuances, give them the code phrase, then put the ‘not it’ mark over her head, and repeat. The only thing that kept her from completely feeling as though she’d talked to every Pinkie in the mansion was that there were still a few milling about that were unmarked.

Twilight sighed in dismay as she looked over the dozens of Pinkies playing games in the arcade, each with the ‘not it’ mark floating above their oblivious heads as they played and laughed.

Talk about trying to find a needle in a haystack. Twilight mumbled internally.

Reason snorted. This is like trying to find a needle in a mansion full of needles.

Twilight trotted away from the table where the Pinkies were playing their weird game of magic or whatever it was called. She passed row after row of arcade machines, each one either in use by a Pinkie or surrounded by a small crowd of Pinkies waiting for their turn or cheering on the current players.

Twilight felt a small pang of sadness over her building frustration and anxiety. The sheer delight of the hundreds of Pinkies around her was even more palpable and prevalent than the atmosphere of sweet aromas, but she felt so disconnected from every smile and laugh. Yet this was what she and her friends had been so desperately trying to bring back into the life of Pinkie—their Pinkie— and Twilight couldn’t even find her.

Twilight spotted a Pinkie that she hadn’t marked at the end of one aisle, fiddling with a controller that looked like a small plastic harp for a game called Lyre Hero.

Law of averages predicts approximately a zero-point-two percent chance that she’s the real Pinkie, said Reason.

Well, we won’t know for certain unless we ask, won't we? Twilight replied.

Twilight trotted up to the unmarked Pinkie, who was frenetically plucking the nylon strings of the plastic lyre with adroit finesse. She stood back for the moment, politely allowing her to finish playing through the epic ballad, half out of manners and half out of admiration for her capabilities with the controller.

Clock is ticking, Twilight, Reason impatiently interjected.

Just give her a second, it looks like she's almost done, Twilight replied.

Sure enough, the Pinkie finished her simulated performance, and the virtual crowd roared with applause. A stylized report card popped up on screen, informing her that she had completed with 100% note accuracy and achieved a “S” rank.

The Pinkie threw her hooves up in triumph. “Woo-Hoo, stage dive!” she hooted, then pounced right at the screen. She smashed into the glass with an “Ow!” and fell back onto her rump with an “Oof!”

Twilight rushed to her side. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine,” the Pinkie said as she rubbed her nose. “You’d think I would have learned after the last three times I did that.”

She shook her head with the sound of a lug-nut rattling around in a tin can, then looked up at Twilight. Just like the unicorn had seen hundreds of times in the last two hours, the Pinkie’s face lit up with a broad smile that was painfully familiar and yet also disconcertingly alien.

“Hey, you're that Twilight I've been hearing about!” The Pinkie chirped.

“The one and only,” Twilight confirmed with a half-hearted smile.

The Pinkie responded with a snicker that Twilight found unsettling. “So what brings you here? Did you reopen your long-distance teleportation experiment again? Are you leaping between dimensions? Are you looking for the realm between the firmaments?” The Pinkie's face scrunched up in confusion. “I have no idea what that means, why did I say that?” Her face lit up again. “Hey, as long as you're here, want to play co-op?” she asked, motioning towards the game. “There are some awesome songs with dual leads on here! Hey, have you ever found it weird that ‘dual’ and ’duel’ are only one vowel apart, but have opposite meanings? Maybe the ‘e’ stands for ‘enemies’ and the ‘a’ stands for ‘amicable.’”

Twilight shook her head. “No, that's not why those words are spelled that way, and I'm here because I'm looking for somepony, so I can't play right now. Sorry.”

The Pinkie's ears drooped. “Aww…”

“Besides, you'd probably be able to play circles around me.”

“Aw, you flatter me,” the Pinkie replied with a smile and a coquettish down-wave of a hoof, then looked down fondly at the plastic lyre. “Yeah, I can pluck a G-string like nopony’s business. As well as the G-sharp string, the A string, and all the strings in between! Though it is a little tough having only hooves to work it… if I had magic, or hands like Spike, or something, it'd probably be easier to get into the narrow slits between the strings and really make this lovely little lady sing…” The Pinkie looked back up at Twilight. “Do you think it'd be better if I used my tongue?”

“Uh…”

“Nah, that’d probably make everything too sticky. Anyway, I was only playing on this because I've got this song stuck in my ears.”

“In your ears?” Twilight asked.

“Most ponies say they’ve got a song in their head, but it would have to be in your ears to keep hearing it over and over and over and over again, silly! Hee-hee! But I keep hearing this song over and over again, yet I can't remember exactly how it goes or even where I heard it from for the life of me, so I'm going through the whole roster to see if I can find it again.”

Aiming to stick around for forty-seven tracks of a one-mare show? Reason snarked.

Twilight groaned internally. Fine, I'll ask her right now. “Hey, Pinkie?”

“Yeah?”

“It's a bright, cold day in April.”

The Pinkie cocked her head to the side. “‘It's a bright cold day in April’? Is that what the song is called? Gee, that sure is a mouthful… not that I’m not used to that sort of thing, what with all the cupcakes I eat,” she said as she turned to the machine and flicked through the whole setlist. “I'm not seeing anything… maybe it's under lyrics?” The Pinkie punched the line into a little keyboard. “Hey, here's something! ‘April night-tyme, and we run like muscles through the stagnant nodes of—’”

“Seriously?!” Princess Pinkie interjected from across the aisle where she was currently making a dance platform machine beg for mercy. “You weren’t even going to start using that gimmick until the next chapter!”

Twilight didn't even bother with a sigh. She just plugged back into the dream functions, and put the ‘not it’ mark above the Lyre Hero Pinkie’s head. “Well, I hate to cut this short—”

I don't, Reason muttered.

“But I've got a pony to find. Good luck with the search for your song.”

“Thanks Twilight! After you find your mare, do you want to come back and play?”

No.

“Maybe.”

“Okie-dokie-loki! I'll be right here if you do! The whole arcade is on free play, so I'll be here for a while. Course, the only problem is that the high scores are changing all the time and it’s almost impossible to remember which ones are who’s because they’re all accredited to ‘Pinkie.’” She looked back at the game with a thoughtful expression. “I really want to play ‘Deceiver Of The Goddesses’ now…”

The Pinkie scrolled through the setlist, then started up a song that sounded an awful lot like the eardrum-annihilating metal the viking sharks had been playing. Twilight turned and began to walk out of the arcade, feeling nothing but the growing emptiness of unaccomplishment.

And the next one is going to have a less than zero-point-two percent chance, said Reason.

Don't you have a matrix to be looking at? Twilight fired back.

Reason groaned. I've been hacking at the codes for this place and everypony in it for the last two hours, trying to figure out what this place is, what or who all the Pinkies here are, where they came from, how they got here, and most importantly, where the hay our Pinkie is and why I can't find her. So far, I’ve had about as much luck as you. I'd have a better shot at finding my way out of the Wind Chaser Mystery House while numb, blindfolded, and drunk. Forgive me if I’m a little frustrated.

You’re not the only one having a bad time here, Reason.

Yeah, well, jumping head first into the dreams of the craziest pony we know and all that. If something doesn't change soon, we're going to have to try another tactic, because this is getting us nowhere.

Twilight’s mouth tightened pensively. Right. Any ideas as to what we could—-

“Ohmygosh, Twilight!” Another Pinkie with a kazoo tied around her neck interrupted her thoughts as she bounced up to her.

Hold that thought, Twilight said to Reason as she turned to the latest replica of her friend.

“Hi Pinkie,” Twilight greeted with an eroded enthusiasm that wasn't mutually shared. “Good to see you here.”

“And it's awesuperific to see you! I didn't know you were coming too!”

“Well, I'm here now,” Twilight replied with a programmed smile.

“Yes you are!” The Pinkie exclaimed, then pulled Twilight into a tight hug: one just like the dozens of others she’d received in the last two hours. Then the Pinkie's face lit up with an even brighter smile. “Hey, since your here too, you can help me find the pony I'm looking for!”

Twilight peeked up. “You're looking for somepony too?”

The Pinkie gasped in delight. “You’re already playing?!” She squeed. “Oh, this is going to be a great follow-up to best game of hide and seek that we just played a little while ago ever! She gave me her kazoo so that way she could tell me apart from every-Pinkie, but after she found me in the ‘s’ bend of a toilet from my snorkel sticking out of the water and it became her turn to disappear, I haven't seen hide or hair of that little filly! But since you’re here, we can work together to find Nyx!”

Twilight faltered. “Who's Nyx?” she blurted.

Pinkie reared back with a look of shock and disgust. “What the—-oh… oooh,” her expression of revulsion slowly morphed to one of sly understanding, “I get it; you're in on the act! Of course you'd take her side, so she convinced you to pretend like you don't even know she exists so that way she could stay hidden for longer! Dang, she is good!”

“That may be, but really, who's Nyx?”

The Pinkie just smiled and patted Twilight on the head. “Oh Twilight, I know you're just playing along for Nyx’s sake. I know you would never really forget your own daughter!” Then she turned around and began skipping down the hall. “When you see that sneaky little filly, let her know she's in for the biggest noogie when I find her!”

Twilight stared at the Pinkie as she left, dumbstruck by the exchange. She found another tired sigh in her lungs, and let it out as she marked the latest Pinkie just before she turned the corner and was gone.

“I guess that gives the next one a zero-point-one-nine-nine-eight percent chance of being the real Pinkie, doesn’t it?” Twilight mumbled to herself.

At this point, I think it's reasonable to predict just a zero percent chance of finding the real Pinkie in the mansion. Reason hypothesized.

“You don't think she's somewhere outside, do you?”

Oh Celestia, I hope not. We don't have enough time to scour the entire dream world, especially if it's as big as it was the last time you were here...

Twilight's entire body went stiff and her breath caught in her lungs. Suddenly the warm air felt rather cold.

Oh… I'm sorry. This isn't… you're not… sorry.

Twilight slumped up against a nearby wall. “Let's just find Pinkie and get out of here.” She looked around her, apathetic to the exuberant decorations around her. “So what now? Do we start looking in the amusement park?”

No, even with as little progress we've made, the presence of all these Pinkies and the erratic nature of the codes in here is too much to be just a coincidence. Even as bleak as it seems, our best bet at finding the real Pinkie most likely is in here.

“And it’s not like we can just ask the Pinkies here if they’ve seen her,” Twilight added.

Not unless we want to start another round of the most chaotic game of hide-and-seek ever played by ponies, no. There’s what looks like an art exhibit down the hall where the code gets weird… weirder than normal, I mean. Try looking there.

Twilight trotted down the hall, rounded the corner, and entered through a large set of ornate double-doors that opened up into an expansive art gallery. The decorations were much more reserved here, and the refreshments were limited to trays of wine glasses filled with punch and cider, bottles of water, and platters of cupcakes atop silk napkins. There weren't many windows, but the interior was still brightly lit by shining fluorescents that ran all across the ceiling. Numerous spotlights lit the many rows of low mocha walls that had all been nearly buried underneath a multitude of paintings contained with immaculate frames, all of which were portrayals of Pinkie engaging in some activity or event or other, none of which Twilight could recollect her Pinkie ever taking part of.

However, the angle of every adjustable light source and the positioning of every wall had been arranged in a manner to lead the eye to the largest painting of the all, at the back of the gallery directly across from the entrance, and though she hasn't been there to witness it for herself, this one Twilight did recognize.

The grand masterpiece featured Pinkie, still as a young foal without her cutie mark. She stood in a rural, barren field choked by rocks, looking up at the sky with the happiest smile engulfing her face and the spectral shockwave of Rainbow Dash’s first Sonic Rainboom reflected in her enormous, awe-stricken eyes.

“The event that led Pinkie to earn her cutie mark.”

And every painting branches out from this focal point. Reason noted. Perhaps the residents here are the result of Pinkie's subconscious forming different possible versions of herself? Either way, with all the importance centered around this painting, it's possible that every projection here will say this is how they got their cutie mark, too. But since this is how the real Pinkie got her mark, maybe if we look we'll find another painting directly related to her.

“And then we could possibly trace the code of the painting back to our Pinkie and finally find her!” Twilight perked up with the first promising lead she’d had in hours. “And that's why you're called Reason!”

You flatter me. Same plan: you check the dream world while I check the codes.

Twilight set off, meandering through the maze of artwork within the deceptively spacious gallery. It wasn't long before the paintings surrounding her began to feel less like oil on canvas and more like windows into the still lives of hundreds of other Pinkies. Some were depictions that Twilight recollected some of the Pinkies she’d met had insinuated of: one of a Pinkie taking to a young, pretty mare with a light golden coat and an auburn mane and tail that Twilight surmised was Sunflower if her name was eponymous with the flower on her flank: another of Princess Pinkie with an impossibly wide smile on her face and her forelegs in an emphatic tight hug/choke-hold around her five friends, also alicorns themselves. Many others she didn't recognize: a Pinkie and a Fluttershy affectionately holding a pink filly between them that looked like what would have been the result of combining the DNA of the two mares: a distraught Pinkie being comforted by another Rainbow Dash as she held her in the kitchen of Sugar Cube Corner, in the center of which sat a trash can full of knives: Pinkie sitting in an open field under a dark sky of night split apart by fireworks, a foreleg curiously out in the air as though it was wrapped around somepony, though she was by herself.

Twilight frowned a little in discomfort, feeling like she was standing admits a nexus of doors to other worlds. “Gee, the last time I saw paintings this eerily life-like, it was when the thing-pony first showed up.”

Let's just hope none of them come to life and start materializing in our dreams at random, said Reason. Check around the corner; I found a bizarre gap in the code there. If that's our gateway back to Pinkie, it should take us v right to---

Twilight rounded the corner, and saw an open space on the wall in between two pictures; one of a white mare with a blonde name that looked like Pinkie if she were a pegasus, and another of their group of six around a table in Twilight’s library, playing a game with small figurines on sheets of paper with icosahedral dice. The section of the wall had  recently been painted over, and taped off with a little ‘wet paint’ sign.

And sitting on the floor just in front of the empty space was an unmarked Pinkie with a flat mane and tail, all by herself and looking rather melancholy.

Twilight smiled. Bingo.

“Pinkie?”

The mare flinched at Twilight's voice, then exhaled a resonated sigh. “Oh, hi Twilight,” she murmured, barely even looking back.

The unicorn's heart began to breast a little faster. “What are you doing here, all alone?”

The Pinkie let out a miserable whimper. “These walls used to be ‘latte.’ Now they’re ‘mocha.’ I watched as the latte room died, forever to be replaced by the mocha one; buried like the deceased under a thin layer of oil and gloss, and I did nothing to stop it!”

Twilight tilted her head to the side, her fleeting hope wavering. “You watched paint dry?”

Pinkie sniffed and turned, wiping her nose on a pastern. “It’s a metaphor, if you think about it. Are we really just the sum of what changes us? Everypony comes here for the paintings, but nopony thinks about the walls underneath them.” She looked Twilight square in the eye. “Is a mare nothing more than what others say she is? Then how am I supposed to know who I am? Who-slash-what am I really if I’m always changing? Always burying my past selves under the me of the present?”

Twilight’s expectations had risen again. “I don’t know right off-hoof… that’s something that can take a long time to find, especially if you’re by yourself. But maybe I can help you.”

“How?” the Pinkie asked.

Twilight gently cleared her throat. “It’s a—”

“There you are!” another Pinkie interrupted Twilight as she bounced up to the two. “I’d heard there might be a Pinkie here who was all Ms. Sour-Puss McFrowny-Face!” She grabbed a cupcake off a nearby platter and shoved it into the other Pinkie’s mouth. “Time to smile, smile, smile!”

Pinkie the paint-watcher hummed in delight as she chewed, her hair poofing out to its natural state as she swallowed the treat in a single gulp. “Thanks, I needed that!” She looked at Twilight. “Sorry, I get all mopey and existential when I’m running low on sugar!”

“I’ll say!” the other Pinkie supported. “You were watching paint dry!”

“I was?” she asked as she looked back at the wall. “Wow… that’s what I get for not eating for a whole ten minutes...”

“Hey, Pinkie’s looking for somepony to play co-op on Lyre Hero! Wanna come!”

“Sure! Wanna play too, Twilight?”

The unicorn just stared with her mouth ajar.

“Well, you know where we’ll be if you change your mind!” Pinkie number Twilight-had-lost-count replied, and bounced after her compatriot.

“Wait!” Twilight blurted. “It’s a bright cold day in April!”

“No it isn’t!” Pinkie said as she departed. “Good to see you here, though!”

Twilight stood there, unmoving as the two left, leaving her alone in the aisle. She groaned in frustration, smashing her hoof against the floor.

“Any other surprises left to throw at us?!”

 “SURPRISE!!!”

“AH!” Twilight yelped in shock as the white pegasus from the nearby painting ripped itself off of the picture and was suddenly in Twilight’s face. “Buh… how… wai—what?! How’d you do that?!”

The pegasus Pinkie dissolved into a fit of giggles as she hoovered in the air, her wings buzzing like a humming bird’s. “By holding my breath and sucking in my gut, silly!” She sucked in a lungful of air and held it, and her entire body flattened into a thin strip of a pony. She released the air and popped back out, twittering to herself again. “Oh, you used to love that one! And I did stuff like that all the time when I was still your imaginary friend and you still called me Surprise! You remember all the fun times we had together, right?”

Twilight.exe has stopped working.

Surprise clocked the side of her head with a hoof. “Oh right, of course! You couldn’t possibly remember because that magical surge that was triggered by Dashie’s Sonic Rainboom that you had as a foal pulled me and all your memories of me out of your head and brought me to life as an earth pony that you later became best friends with named Pinkie Pie! But now we’re apparently in somepony’s head or dream or something, so I’m back to my original form!”

Surprise’s face lit up with joy. Twilight’s cognition had rebooted, and next thing she knew, Surprise had grasped her by the cheeks and was pressing their noses together.

“We can have fun just like old times! And we can bring every-Pinkie else in on the old games we used to play like Swaple-Tople and Whumper-Thumper! It’ll be just like becoming friends all over again!”

Twilight smiled back with the world’s worst poker face. “That’s sounds… great, but I… uh,” she paused, “still have to say ‘hi’ to the other Pinkie’s I haven’t met.”

“That’s alright, we can just have fun together again later!” Surprise replied. Then her eyes went wide and her body became stiff, floating in midair without even flapping her wings. Her mane and tail fritzed out, then she looked back and Twilight wide with an even broader smile. “And you’ll have plenty more chances for ‘hellos’, because guess who just showed up? MORE PINKIES! Race you downstairs!” And then Surprise took off at speeds that would rival Rainbow Dash, laughing in delight all the way.

Twilight.exe has stopped working. Please consult your systems administrator if the problem persists.

Uh… Twilight, Reason trepidatiously began, Supplies, or whatever her name is, wasn’t kidding about the arrival of more Pinkies.

Twilight took a moment to respond. “How… many… more?”

More… a lot more… as in, there’s statistically a zero-point-one-six percent chance in one of them being the Pinkie we’re looking for… but all things considered…

Twilight didn’t hear Reason trailing off. She slowly fell to her haunches, and sat there in the gallery for some time, with only the faint wafting of paint fumes to accompany her. She hung her head, breathed out, then got back up on her hooves. She didn’t even bother looking at any of the paintings of unfamiliar Pinkies as she trudged past them. She opened a door that led to an unoccupied balcony overlooking the ocean.

She knew she shouldn’t waste time here; she knew she should stay inside and try to keep looking for clues as to where Pinkie had disappeared to this time, and she had precious little of that to find her and the anomaly… and to see if inception was possible two levels down. But regardless, she knew that she would stay here for a while, for she needed a break.

Twilight stood there on that lonely landing, casting her gaze across the sea, breathing in the crisp ocean air and hearing the roiling waves peppered with the roar of the roller coasters in the park behind her.

“Any luck finding a link that we can trace back to Pinkie?”.

No. I tried to see if I could trace that gap in the code to anything, but it’s self contained and leads back to itself, where it just drops off into non-existence. It’s like that patch of encrypted code we found outside of Avarice’s cave the last time we were in Spike’s dreams.

Twilight didn’t even react to the answer; she’d been expecting it. Her thoughts began to drift amidst the fogged oceans of her mind, where vacuous vortices of questions left unanswered spited the natural logic that abhorred them. What was this place? Who or what were the Pinkies inside, and why had Pinkie dreamed them up? Was this exclusive to Pinkie, or if she set up her own dream just right, would she find herself in a palace like the one she’d made in limbo, but filled to the brim of other versions of herself? Would she be able to keep track of where she ended and the dream copies of her began?

She thought back to Pinkie recounting her nightmares: of being a Pinkie in horrible situations or who did terrible things. Would she have started to lose herself if she had been in her horseshoes?

It was definitely a question worth discussing with Pinkie… if Twilight ever managed to find her.

Another pang of sorrow poked at her heart. Looking out over the sea from her lonely perch, suddenly the air felt a little colder.

Twilight wiped her face of dried tears, then got out of bed. Her body felt exhausted and drained. Her wings ached like no other part of her body ever had before. Looking out her bedroom window, she saw the sky filled with deep colors and overlaid with a pale orange, the light of the sun asking to be raised.

However, instead of raising it, she left her tree house, then walked to the ramparts of her palace and looked out over the sea.

Why should I raise the sun? What’s the point? What’s the point of anything?

Twilight fell to her haunches. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the stone, choking back a sob clawing at her throat. A chilling wind blew past her, and she heard the distant flap of a flag in the gust.

Twilight felt a hoof on her shoulder. She jumped a little, instinctively reaching for the point of contact. She grasped nothing but the air and her own coat. Then she realized what she was actually feeling: the little pony in her head was doing the most she could to give her a hug

Want to talk about it? Asked Reason.

Twilight had half a mind to say ‘no,’ turn around and go back to her fruitless search. But as long as she has somepony to talk to…

“So much for Plan B,” she muttered. “What do you suppose we could have the ‘B’ stand for? ‘Busted?’ ‘Botched?’ ‘Bungled?’”

She thought of the little dossier hidden in her saddlebag, containing a single sentence; ‘My second favorite color is blue’: the innocuous little idea she had intended to plant in Pinkie’s head to see if the act of inception could be replicated.

“Plan ‘Betrayal of Trust?’” She whispered in shame. 

We encountered variables we couldn't have possibly known in advance to account for, Reason consoled. We’ll just have to take what information we have gathered and use it to reevaluate our methods.

“So what are we supposed to do now?”

Reason didn't answer immediately. To be honest, I don't know. I can't think of anything at the moment.

Twilight let out a short, bitter laugh. “I don't suppose we can just wait around and hope the thing-pony shows up to save our plots again, can we?”

Reason gave a short, half-hearted chuckle. No, I don't suppose we can.

There was a moment of silence between the two.

Want to go ask the Pinkies that just showed up if they've seen anything?

Twilight huffed, forcing back a little smile. “Hush, you.”

Well, actually, you might as well now… given that there's one right behind you.

Twilight whipped around. Standing a few yards behind her, with purple cape waving in the wind, was Mare Do Well.

Twilight groaned. “Great… you. Come to give me a taste of my own medicine and take my overconfidence down a notch? Because I'm already feeling like a failure as it is.”

Mare Do Well didn't make any vocal response. She just kept staring at Twilight with those cold, serious eyes: the only emotive feature of her stony, cotton face.

Twilight furrowed her brow as a corner of her mouth pulled right. “Are you going to say anything, or if I pull off your mask am I going to find the thing-pony?”

Mare Do Well made no movement whatsoever, except to slightly raise an eyebrow at her. Otherwise, she might as well have been a gargoyle pulled from the roof and dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and a cape.

Twilight grumbled. Mare Do Well was showing some form of an emotional response, so she definitely wasn't the thing-pony.

“Well, if you're not going to say anything, we should just go our separate ways. I have important things to do, and I don't need you following me around, especially if you’re just going to shadow me like some revenant of my questionable ideas.”

“That wasn't my intention.”

“Gah!”

Twilight jumped back at the response. She didn't move back very far before her rear ran into the balustrade. She put a hoof over her chest to ease her spooked heart.

“So you do talk,” Twilight eventually managed to get out.

“As do you, even if you're alone,” Mare Do Well added.

Twilight tilted her head. This Mare Do Well didn't sound like Pinkie, or anypony she knew for that matter. Her voice was deeper, and spoken with a bit of a harsh rasp to make her tone more gruff. She thought it sounded a little like Pinkie doing an impersonation of Batmare, albeit a slightly less forced one than Celestian Bale’s portrayal of the vigilante had been. And also if Pinkie sounded nothing like Pinkie.

That made sense. Somehow.

“So, is the ‘talking to yourself’ quirk your thing?” asked Mare Do Well.

Twilight paused. “I wasn't talking to myself… “

“I heard everything from ‘So much for Plan B.’”

“Oh, that… never mind that, “ Twilight paused, “it was nothing.”

“So ‘Plan Betrayal of Trust’ is nothing?”

Twilight’s eyes went wide and her legs went stiff. “Nothing! Yep, it's nothing!” She blurted. “Nothing at all! That was just… it's… nothing!”

To her immense surprise, Mare Do Well began to coquettishly chuckle. “You're cute when you're flustered.”

Every joint in Twilight's body locked up. Her cheeks suddenly felt very warm. “N-no I'm n-not!”

Mare Do Well chortled a little more, then began to walk forward with slow, deliberate steps. Twilight suddenly found it difficult to maintain eye contact.

“Oh, yes you are,” Mare Do Well said with precise animated turns of her head. “That total loss of your intellectual composure as you avert your eyes, stammer and blush… it's adorable. A little like Fluttershy, but more gratifying since you're not so easily befuddled. And the fact that you could easily pull off the sexy librarian look if you tried certainly doesn't make you any less fetching.“

Twilight's eyes hadn't gotten any less wide. A lump formed in her throat as it occurred to her that Mare Do Well had gotten close… and was getting closer. And then she was struck with a thought that made her stomach feel like she was on a roller coaster that was well on its way to making her lose her lunch… and even more terrifying was the feeling of a toasty little butterfly fluttering around in her nauseous insides, making them feel a bit warm and fuzzy.

“Are you… coming onto me?!”

Mare Do Well gave her another demure laugh, moving even closer. The underside of her broad hat grazed the tips of Twilight's ears, making them snap-fold back against the unicorn’s head. Their noses were mere inches from contact—Oh Celestia she's so close so close SO CLOSE!—when Mare Do Well turned her head to the side, allowing her cheek to graze against that of her prey, chilling Twilight's clammy skin and making her fur prickle.

“You’re a wonderful mare. Twilight,” Mare Do Well whispered with a husky purr and a hot breath into Twilight's ear.

The toasty, gastro-androgynous butterfly was now riding the rabid roller coaster in Twilight’s stomach, and it didn't know whether to be pleasantly surprised or terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought either.

A second later, Mare Do Well had parted, and was looking over her shoulder at Twilight from several paces away. “But you’re not my type: not colorful enough.”

Twilight could only gawk at the masked pony. 

“Who are you?”.

“A mare in a mask.”

Twilight put her serious face back on. “Well, that goes without saying. “

Coy, frosted eyes looked back at her. Twilight swore she could see creases in the mask from the mare underneath smiling.

“Of course it does. I'm just pointing out the deductive contradiction of asking a masked mare who she is.”

Reason cleared her figurative throat, regaining her composure. She’s not ours, but overwhelming likelihood is she's another copy.

Right. Twilight sighed. “Look, Pi—-”

“Shhhhh!”

Twilight blinked in surprise at Mare Do Well’s interruption. A tense passage of silence followed, neither mare breaking eye contact… or at least Twilight was pretty sure she was maintaining eye contact: it was hard to tell with that blasted mask.

“P—-”

“Shhh!”

Twilight grumbled. “Is there a reason why you won't let me call you by the name I'm almost certain is yours?”

“Because it would spoil the obvious spoiler.”

Twilight gaped at her. “Spoil the—-what?! P—-”

“SHH!”

Twilight growled in frustration. “There's a Pinkie that is of the utmost importance I locate, and I've already squandered in excess of two hours in a thus far fruitless attempt to find her. I don't have the time to waste with somepony who won't even let me make an educated guess as to their identity!” Twilight stood and began to trot back inside, her hooves striking out a brusque stacotto. “Now if you'll excuse me, I have an assignment I have to finish. Goodbye, Mare Do Well.”

“Don't call me that!”

Twilight stopped in surprise at the outburst, then looked behind her. Mare Do Well was shaking her head as if to clear it off something, and her legs began to quiver with such tremors that she looked to have trouble standing.

“That's not my name… that's not my name! Don't EVER call me that! I have a real name!”

Twilight rounded on her. “Well if I can't call you by what I'm ninety-nine-point eighty-one percent certain is your real name and you won't let me refer to you by the moniker of a character we created together, then what am I supposed to call you?!”

Mare Do Well leaned forward, raising her hoof to punctuate her point. Her mask stretched as she opened her mouth, and there was a sound of rushing air as she breathed in to deliver her fiery response… and then she went no further. Twilight watched in silence, no word coming to either’s mouth. The anger in Mare Do Well’s chilled eyes melted away into uncertainty, then terrible realization. She put her hoof back on the ground and fell to be seated on the stone balcony. Her voice trembled as she finally answered.

“I… I don't know…”

Now it was Twilight's turn to raise an eyebrow in confusion.

Mare Do Well looked off to her right, her hostility gone. “There is somepony under this mask, but I'm not her right now. I might look like Mare Do Well, but I'm not her, either; I'm the mare underneath, pretending to be a superhero.” Mare Do Well strained out a dry, pitiless laugh. “You want to know the hilariously sad irony of it all? I started wearing this mask because I thought I could be somepony more than the mare everypony thinks I am. Somepony brave, who could be the hero, who could be a little cold and cocky, and who wasn't afraid to step on other ponies hooves… somepony she’d like… but when I approached her like this, she only got interested in Mare Do Well. She’s not interested in me… she doesn't even know who I am.”

Mare Do Well looked back up at Twilight with those icy eyes, frosted by the loneliness of a pony who had been left out in the cold. “I took up the role of Mare Do Well again because I thought I could have an outlet to free my darker side. But now this mask has become my prison, and I've gotten myself caught between double lives.” She put a hoof to her cloth face. “That's the tragedy of masked ponies like me; sometimes, we wear our masks for so long that we forget who we really are underneath.”

Twilight was a bit of a loss for words, stunned by the spontaneous confession. “Then why not just take off the mask and put a stop to the whole charade?”

Mare Do Well turned away once more, her shoulders slumped with weights of shame. “Because the longer I've tried to be the brave hero, the more I've realized I'm just pretending that I'm not a coward.” Her voice became more strained, each word an effort. “I'm buried too deep, and the only way out is for somepony to find the real me.”

Even through the fluctuation of emotions, Mare Do Well’s voice maintained its disguise. But in her pained, regretful admission, Twilight heard the tiniest whisper of the Pinkie underneath.

What the heck, she thought.

“It's a bright, cold day in April,” Twilight said.

Mare Do Well looked back up, her stoic composure regained and confusion etched on it. She looked back at the stormy summer skies and frothing ocean, then looked back at Twilight, peering at her with uncertainty.

“Apart from being one of the most bizarre non-sequiturs I've heard from somepony who isn't Pinkie, no Twilight, it's not.”

Even though she's been expecting it, Twilight still sighed in disappointment. “I'm sorry, but I don't think I can't help you in the way you need it.” She turned to walk away. “I have somepony who I need to find myself, so I guess this is goodbye. I hope you find the courage to tell who you're hiding from what you've told me, or that she finds you the way you want her to,” she bid, then began to trudge back inside, wondering what she should do next.

“Good luck with your own search, Twilight. Sorry I'm not who you're looking for,” replied Mare Do Well. “Though really, what were you expecting of me?” A playful tone worked its way back into her voice. “Were you hoping I would tell you the time?”

Twilight froze dead in her tracks.

There was no movement or sounds from either mare; just the waves in the ocean breeze and the distant thrilled screams from the ponies in the park. Twilight looked back over her shoulder to see Mare Do Well already locked onto her; the mask barely hiding a cat’s smile with canary feathers sticking out of it.

“Because if I was her, I'd be telling you it's an hour past noon. Or do you need that information in twenty-four hour format?” Mare Do Well asked with the sweetness of an imp.

Twilight slowly marched back to Mare Do Well. She got within a hooves’ reach of the vigilante, and leaned forward as she bored through the dark mask with piercing eyes. When she spoke, Twilight's voice was barely above a whisper, yet it slashed through the wind.

“Where is she?”

Mare Do Well remained calm. “To be perfectly, one-hundred percent, Pinkie Pie promise honest, I don't exactly know.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes as she leaned closer forward. Her jaw tightened and her lips pressed together until they were thin as a switchblade.

Mare Do Well stayed unphased by Twilight's approach. Another moment of tense silence passed between the two. Then she stood, and her mask creased with a mischievous little smile.

“But I know where to look.” Mare Do Well strode past Twilight, nearly close enough to flirtatiously brush flanks, as she moved towards the entrance back into the gallery. “Follow me.”

Twilight was at her side in an instant. Her hooves twitched with the urge to gallop, her sudden anticipation frustrated by Mare Do Well’s casual gait.

“Humor me, Twilight. How much do you know about writing a good mystery novel?”

Twilight looked at her with impatient uncertainty. “Trying to come up with an even more tangential non-sequitur than me?”

Mare Do Well giggled. “Not quite. I’m trying to make a point. So, what do you know?”

Twilight just stated for a moment before responding, unsure of the conversation’s direction. “A decent amount. The Fetlock Holmes series was one of my favorites when I was a filly. Why do you ask?” She thought about the question for a second. “How much do you know?”

“Just the basics, mostly. Logical equilibriums, the raven paradox, Roan Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, that kind of stuff.”

“I would never have pegged you as a mystery aficionado.” 

“I learned a lot from another Pinkie a little while back; she was going on about some murder-mystery novel her Fluttershy was writing,” Mare Do Well replied. “Since you're well versed with the genre, I expect you'll have an educated answer to this question; what's a good mystery without plot twists?”

Twilight was a little perplexed by the spontaneity, but the inquiry of literary tropes had flipped her ‘nerdy librarian mode’ switch from ‘off’ to ‘on.’

“Well, you can't have much of a mystery at all without misdirection. The only possible way I can think of that a mystery could be written without any twists was if it was created so that any information the reader is given allowed for so many likely interpretations that the solution will inevitably get buried under the multitude of equally likely possibilities, or was so obfuscated that the mystery is all but impossible to solve before the concluding act, even if all the information the reader needs to figure it out has been given to them.”

Mare Do Well’s mask creased with her familiar wry grin. “Told ya… sexy librarian…”

“Quit it,” Twilight mumbled, trying and failing to suppress another blush.

Mare Do Well just chuckled at her. “So with that established, what's the mark of a good twist in a mystery?”

“One that you didn't see coming, but all the pieces were presented. A twist is the moment when the puzzle is instantly assembled and the protagonist, as well as the reader, gain clarity that puts the story into a new perspective.”

“Close, but not quite.”

“But, that's the very textbook definition of a good twist!”

“That it is… but I’m not looking for the textbook definition then, am I?”

Twilight huffed in exasperation. “Then would you mind filling me in since clearly you want your dramatic reveal?”

Mare Do Well chuckled. “The best twist in a mystery is when you never even realized there was a mystery that needed to be solved in the first place.”

Twilight came to a stop, thrown for a loop by Mare Do Well’s wit. Twilight let her get a few steps ahead before responding.

“Not that I don't appreciate your help, but do you have to be so cryptic about everything? If you know something that I don't, then why don't you just tell me?”

Mare Do Well halted in mid-step. All four of her hooves met the ground, her head fell, then turned back in Twilight's direction without looking at her.

“For the same reason I can't just arrange another one of our nighttime visits, tear off this mask, open up my heart and soul in total honesty, and get her to feel the same way about me,” Mare Do Well solemnly replied. A moment passed before she glanced back up at Twilight. “You say you’ve been looking for your Pinkie… did you ever wonder if maybe the reason you can't find her is because she's hiding from you?”

Twilight's eyes widened a little. “I… I never thought of that…”

Mare Do Well turned her full body in Twilight's direction. “If your Pinkie is like me, she's got something to hide, and she’s so desperate to keep it hidden that she'll go as far as lock herself away rather than let her friends know the truth.”

Twilight thought back to the near week that Pinkie had made a pariah of herself. “But she was the one who asked for my help in the first place. Why would she let us get close to just start running away again?”

“Again, if she's anything like me, she's torn. On the one hoof, she wants to hold onto her secrets, but on the other they're tearing her up on the inside and she wants to be rid of them. The conflict leads to indecision, and she just ends up doing what she's already doing, which is hold onto what’s hurting her.”

Twilight frowned a little. “I kept telling her that she can trust us… that she can put her faith in her friends…”

“I don't doubt you have every intention of keeping your promise, but the price of that is going to be learning what she doesn't want you to. Even if I did know what she's hiding, it wouldn't be my place to tell you what it is. If you really want to prove she can trust you, then you have to be the one who removes her mask and see her for who she really is. You have to be the friend who stays to pick up the pieces and put them back together with her.” Mare Do Well looked squarely at her. “Are you willing to accept that?”

Twilight thought back to that first day she'd woken from her solitary confinement in limbo and the searing pain in her lonely heart when Pinkie didn't want any company: of her mounting worry has she heard second-hoof stories of Pinkie's fraying composition. She thought back to when the distraught Pinkie finally came forward with what had been plaguing her dreams, and how she’d never left her side when she told the whole story all over again to their friends: how she’d been tending to her for the past five days while the five of them had been training in every spare moment they had to defeat Pinkie's nightmares. There hasn't been a single moment in the last week when she'd second guessed her cause, resolve, or devotion to her friend.

Twilight firmly nodded. “Yes, I am.”

Mare Do Well’s mask shifted as her confident grin returned. “Then follow me; you've got a Pinkie to find.”

She turned, leading Twilight through the rows of paintings like amalgamations of the lives of a thousand different Pinkies. They rounded a corner, and Twilight once more found herself looking at the empty space on the wall sectioned off for having dry paint.

Twilight looked at Mare Do Well with slight confusion. “I was already here, and I didn't find anything except for a Pinkie that has an existential crisis without a constant influx of sugar and another that was Pinkie in blonde pegasus form.”

“Then you weren't looking hard enough. If you can't find Pinkie inside the box, you have to find a way outside of it.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?”

The mouth around Mare Do Well’s mouth creased with a knowing smirk. “Break them down.”

Twilight's eyes went wide. Her thoughts rippled from memories of the decree of a blasphemous hydra with the heads of the divine royal sisters and the vilified chanting of a faceless, vindictive legion.

“Tear down her wall,” Twilight whispered.

She reached out to the bare wall, and gave it a knock. A dull, hollow ‘thump’ answered back. She looked at Mare Do Well in surprise: the vigilante looked flatly back at her.

“Done with the foreplay?” the masked mare asked.

“So, do I just…”

Mare Do Well turned away from Twilight, took a step forward, then raised a forehoof. Twilight yelped in surprise as Mare Do Well punched right through the wall, leaving a hoof-sized hole in the plaster and thin cracks roughly the size and shape of the picture frames surrounding it.

Mare Do-Well removed her hoof, took a step back, then looked back at Twilight, her mask creased with her distinct smirk. “Got her all warmed up for you.”

Twilight lit her horn, and her aura enveloped the fractured segment of the wall. She pulled it out with the crunch of plaster stripping from plaster and floated it off to the side to gently set it down. Instead it fell to the floor with a heavy crash as Twilight saw just what had been hidden underneath.

It was a painting much in the style of the other hundreds in the gallery, save for one crucial difference: this one Twilight recognized, because she had been there.

The painting featured the streets of Ponyvillle, its citizens scattered about in the chaotic brawl of water balloon warfare from the week before last. In the distance she saw Rarity in a fashionable raincoat, simultaneously using a scarf to fling aquatic artillery like a trebuchet while trying to stuff Sweetie Belle into a stylish poncho. Fluttershy was just trying to hide from the onslaught as she did her best to deflect incoming projectiles away from Angel. Rainbow Dash was hurling entire rainclouds at ponies, while Applejack was lassoing one and shifting to buck it right back at the pegasus. Nearby she saw herself just as she had remembered, somewhat struggling to launch her hydro-ordinances with as much accuracy as she was hoping to accomplish while the only thing that was keeping her going at that point was the highest-octane sugar rush of her life, while a smiling Spike sat on her back, flinging balloons with his tail like a catapult while defensively using his fire breath to rupture as many oncoming enemy payloads as he could.

And in the center of it all was Pinkie, her Pinkie, deftly flipping through the air and avoiding watery bombs with the skill and finesse of a pre-cognizant acrobat, foreleg reeling back with a rubbery present of wet revenge aimed right for the horrified and helpless face of Scootaloo. On her face was an open proclamation of pure, undiluted joy, emanating with her palpable delight even when she was only an illustration in paint.

“This was the day after I got the Dreamscape spell working and Pinkie and I had our first shared dream together,” Twilight said. “But she's been suffering from horrible nightmares from then, and I haven't seen her smile like that since.” She took a step forward, as if the painting itself was pulling her in. “That wasn't even two weeks ago… it seems so far away now… “

Mare Do Well hummed thoughtfully to herself. “So dream magic is your thing… Tell me; when I asked earlier if you'd promise to stick by Pinkie and help repair the damage to your friendship that removing her mask will cause, did you mean it?”

Twilight looked back at her companion without missing a beat. “Of course. Why are you asking again?”

Mare Do Well picked up a nearby tray loaded up with glasses of water. “Because it's time to practice putting your bits where your mouth is.” And then she threw the tray right at the painting.

“Wait!” Twilight blurted, but it was too late. The discordant chime of half a dozen glasses crashing against the painting and shattering on the ground made Twilight's ears flinch away. She watched in horror as the water grew thick and dirty as it warped the image underneath, dripping down into an ugly puddle, melting away her last happy memory with Pinkie.

Twilight whipped back around. “Why did you do that?!”

“Because I know a mask when I see one,” Mare Do Well replied, then pointed back at the ruined artwork.

Twilight returned her attention to the dissolved piece. To her surprise, Mare Do Well’s vandalism has left not a stained canvas, but uncovered another picture that had been hidden under the first. This one she had also been there for, but wished hadn't happened.

The painting depicted Pinkie, now the downtrodden and melancholy mare she'd been for over a week, sitting alone on the stage of her show trial. A low spotlight cast her long shadow upon the towering, unfeeling wall behind her, where it twisted into the cruel silhouette of Discord that cynically cackled at her.

Twilight blinked, thrown for a stupor by the turn of events. She looked back at Mare Do Well, who simply motioned towards the exposed painting.

“I'm guessing that's how your Pinkie is now?”

Twilight nodded, glancing back at the terrible picture. “This was just a few hours ago. Her own subconscious put her on trial and declared her guilty.”

“Of what?”

Twilight's brow furrowed. “Of smiling… of having friends...” She shook her head. “I just don't get what she could feel so guilty about that she'd let her subconscious excoriate herself like it did.”

“Whatever the reason, I think it's safe to conclude it's directly related to why she's hiding,” Mare Do Well noted. “So if Pinkie was here right now, what would you say to her?”

Twilight looked closer at the painting of Pinkie's show trial. The eerie realism made Twilight almost feel as though Pinkie herself was sitting in front of her: sad and alone, in dire need of comfort and a friend.

Twilight took a step forward, feeling a little like she did all those nights ago when Pinkie had finally come to her for help.

“Pinkie…” She gulped: suddenly her mouth felt rather dry. “Pinkie, it's Twilight. I want to help you—- all your friends want to help you—-we've come so far and done so much just so you can be happy again. You don't deserve to suffer like this, and you don't need to keep  hiding from us.”

The painting remained as it was: stationary.

“I know I'll never fully understand you, and that's okay. But I don't get why you'd be afraid of us. We're the last ponies you'd ever have to fear.”

The heartfelt communion fell on inanimate ears. Twilight looked off, ponderous over Pinkie's absence and Mare Do Well’s hypothesis as to why. And then a thought occurred to her: one that has never before occurred to her but suddenly opened up a whole new perspective.

“Pinkie… are you upset with me? With us? Did we do something wrong?”

Twilight's mind began to race. Had she done something wrong? Should she have come to Pinkie's aid before the poor mare had cracked? Did Pinkie secretly blame her for causing the nightmares like Rainbow did? Or was she upset about something else? The wedding maybe?

“Pinkie, if there's contention between us, we can work it out; we always have.”

The painting showed as much a reaction to Twilight's words as the thing-pony.

Twilight's heart was starting to thump, and she didn't know why.

“Have faith in your friends,” she said, just barely above a whisper, then held her hoof out to the sad little Pinkie in the painting, just like she'd done so many times with the real one.

A moment passed in silence, with Twilight in full sincerity offering support to something that couldn't even respond to her… and then, from somewhere behind the painting, there was the sound of a ‘click’ like a door unlocking.

Twilight's mouth fell open in shock.

“Well,” said Mare Do Well from behind her, “you've got a Pinkie to find.”

Twilight’s expression became pensive. “Roan Knox’s sixth commencement is ‘No accident must help the detective, nor must she ever have an unaccountable intuition that turns out to be correct.’” She turned to look deliberately at her company. “How did you know all this?”

Mare Do Well’s focus shifted off of Twilight. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

Twilight huffed. “I ended up in a dream expecting to find my friend, and instead I found over five hundred different versions of her, including but not limited to one that has existential crisis’ when she's low on sugar, a Pinkie pegasus named Surprise, a stallion version of her named Bubble, a pyromaniac, a mythical sea pony, and one that was a freaking alicorn. My suspension of disbelief has been stretched pretty far by now.”

Mare Do Well began to chuckle. “Touche. Alright, if you must know, a bird shrouded in a black cloak told me.”

Twilight blinked. “Okay…” She looked back at the portrait. “Either way, I can't thank you enough.”

Mare Do Well tipped her hat. “The pleasure is mine. Just remember: no matter what, she's still your friend.”

“I will. And again, thank you.” Twilight earnestly said, then turned back to the painting. She took a deep breath to steady herself. She gripped the frame with her magic, and pulled the hidden door, revealing a long, dark passage beyond.

That wasn’t what made Twilight gasp however: it was the pony inside.

But she wasn't Pinkie.

Twilight came face to face with a black unicorn filly with a midnight purple mane and tail, and wearing glasses and a vest of little violet. Her hair was combed back and held in place by a turquoise headband that matched the color of her eyes, which were filled to the brim with tears of fear.

Their eyes met, and overwhelming relief washed over the filly’s face.

“Mommy!” she cried, then tracked Twilight with a desperate, frightened hug.

From somewhere else in the mansion, Twilight heard Princess Pinkie scream: “OH COME ON! REALLY?!” There was a pause. “You and me both, Present!”

“What were you doing in there?” Mare Do Well curiously asked the little filly. She didn't answer.

“What were you doing in there?” Twilight asked, curious herself.

Also, who are you, how did you get here, and why are you the first pony we've seen in over two hours that isn't some weird copy of Pinkie? Reason asked.

The filly sniffed, then clung a little tighter to Twilight's foreleg. When she spoke, her quivering voice reminded Twilight of a glass harp.

“Auntie Pinkie and I were playing hide and seek. When it was my turn to hide, I found this place behind that painting. But when I was hiding, one of the other Pinkies came in and ran deeper into the tunnel. I tried following her, but… “ she shivered and constricted Twilight's leg until she was restricting the circulation through the appendage, “I saw… things. Terrible, horrible, awful things! I tried to get out, but the door was locked!”

The little filly buried her face into Twilight's chest and began to cry. “I w-was trapped in there for so long!”

Twilight looked to Mare Do Well, hoping for some kind of assistance. She just looked back with an expression that said, ‘sorry, this one’s all yours.’

Twilight looked back down at the filly, finding her already looking back up at her.

“Did I do something wrong, mommy?”

Twilight was a little startled by the question. “What? No, of course not,” she answered, putting a hoof around the filly's back in an attempt to comfort her.

Twilight thought back to what another Pinkie she’d met had said to her. “You gave your Aunt Pinkie your kazoo, right?”

The filly nodded.

“Alright, don’t worry, you're safe now.” The gears in her mind began to turn again. “So… Nyx, that Pinkie you saw run into the tunnel; were her mane and tail flat, did she look really distressed, and did she have a pair of blue saddlebags?”

Nyx looked up at Twilight, then nodded again.

Twilight gasped and looked at Mare Do Well. “I think that's her!” She pulled away from the embrace to look Nyx in the eyes. “Okay, your Aunt Pinkie is still in the mansion, and she’s looking for you because she thinks you're still just playing hide and seek.” She motioned her head in Mare Do Well’s direction. “My friend here can help you find her. But it's very important that I find the Pinkie that ran in there, so I need you to go with her. Understand?”

Nyx looked confused. “But, why do I have to go with her? Why can’t you stay here with me?”

“She helped me find you, so you can trust her. And now that you’re safe, I need to go get that other Pinkie out safely, too.” Twilight answered.

Nyx took the answer, but her expression indicated she wasn’t entirely convinced. “Okay… but, before you go, may I ask you something? In private?”

Twilight really didn't want to, but she couldn't bring herself to tell the dear little filly no. “Alright, but it has to be quick.” she said, then walked around the corner with Nyx. “What did you want to ask?”

Nyx took a small gulp before responding. “What was the first meal you ever gave me?”

Twilight blinked in surprise, caught off guard by the question.

Nyx hung her head in disappointment. “You're not really my mom, are you?”

Twilight’s ears fell a little. “No, I'm not.”

Nyx looked back up at Twilight, eyes shimmering. “Then why did you lie to me?”

Twilight almost rolled her eyes. “I didn’t lie about who I was; you just assumed that I was somepony I wasn't.”

The filly looked away. Twilight felt like smacking herself at the sight of Nyx’s crestfallen face. She sighed, then lowered her head back down to Nyx’s level.

“I'm sorry. You caught me off guard is all, and at the moment you looked like you needed somepony to comfort you more than anything else.”

Nyx looked back up, her eyes a little softer, then looked back at the painting.

“That Pinkie in there… she's yours, isn't she?” Nyx softly asked.

Twilight nodded. “Yes, she is.”

“So why would she lock me in that scary place?”

“I don't think she meant to. I think you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and her goal was to lock herself in there.”

Nyx’s eyes shot open. “W-why would she do that?

“Because my Pinkie has been suffering from horrible nightmares recently, and I think what's causing them is something she's so desperate to keep hidden that she'd rather hide with all the things that are causing her so much pain than let anypony know what it is. All I want is to help her. I just want her to be happy again.”

Nyx tilted her head down, her face thoughtful. “Then you might need this,” she said, then lit her horn with an aqua green aura and reached into her vest.

Twilight saw something underneath the velvet shift, then Nyx withdrew an item and floated it over to Twilight.

“Your Pinkie dropped it on her way inside, “ explained Nyx. “I don't know what it's for, but you might be able to find some use for it.”

Twilight took the item, turning it over as she inspected it. The object was a metal cylinder with the sheen of dull chrome that was about as long as her hoof and as thin as a pencil, tapering off to end in a sharp point. On the opposite end was a thick, six-toothed gear cut with diagonal grooves like a screw. A narrow opening along the body revealed the coils of a dark, ridged tube, like muscle under a steel exoskeleton. It looked unsettling as it was, but in the warm, colorful, and vibrant mansion, the metal quill looked all the more sinister and alien.

Twilight frowned at the item, but deposited it into her saddlebag anyway, just in case it proved useful later.

“Thanks,” Twilight said to Nyx. “Is there anything you can tell me about what you saw inside?”

Nyx shriveled at the question. She looked away and began to path at the floor with a hoof. She gulped before replying back in a quiet voice.

“Cold, metal corridors and halls filled with weird and scary things. There was this stuff everywhere that made me feel really uncomfortable. And there were monsters… they were shaped like ponies, but they weren't… bodies of skin and steel.” Nyx shuddered in fear. “I'm sorry, I don't want to talk about it…”

“It's okay, you're safe now,” Twilight reassured Nyx, pulling the little filly back into a hug. “I'm sorry for asking.”

Nyx sunk into the embrace, but didn't return it in earnest like she had before. “That's alright. I know you just want to help your friend.”

“Yeah, I do. Speaking of which, she still needs me, so unfortunately I have to cut this short.” Twilight said, standing to walk back to the portal to elsewhere, Nyx following close behind. When they rounded the corner, Mare Do Well was already staring their way.

“Done bonding?” she asked.

“We weren't…” Twilight automatically started, only for her response to fall off. She looked down at Nyx, who was already curiously staring up at her.

Mare Do Well started to chuckle. Twilight just rolled her eyes.

“Though I hate to ask more of you after everything you've done to help, could you help Nyx find her Pinkie?” Twilight asked Mare Do Well, then looked down at Nyx. “Oh, and when you find her, beware the coming noogies.”

Nyx’s eyes went wide. “I-I didn't make her upset, did I?”

Twilight smiled a little. “Nah, but you know how she gets.”

Nyx responded with a nervous smile of her own. Twilight couldn't help but grin at the adorable little filly.

“And since I'm not your mother, I suppose I can't tell you to not help yourself at any of the dessert buffets.” Twilight added with a wink.

There was another shift under Nyx’s vest at the sides of her barrel as her face lit up with a beaming smile that Twilight couldn't help but giggle at. She then looked back up, her determination clear.

“I'm ready.”

Mare Do Well nodded, stepping aside so Twilight could host herself into the passage. She started down into the imperceptible space, and the significance of the moment hit her like vertigo. This was it: the hour that she would finally discover and vanquish the subconscious anomaly that had been causing her friend such heartache and suffering.

“Any last words to mask the occasion?” Mare Do Well asked.

Twilight thought for a moment, then realised there was something important she needed to ask.

“Um, if the door locks behind me and later on you hear knocking from the other side of the painting, it's probably going to be Pinkie and me, and we're stuck inside. So if that happens, could you let us out?”

Mare Do Well laughed, and once again, even through the altered tone, Twilight could hear the humored voice of the Pinkie behind the mask coming through.

“I guess there are some things that remain constant,” Mate Do Well chuckled.

“Stay safe! I hope you find the Pinkie you're looking for!” Nyx bid as the portal began to close.

“See you both on the other side,” added Mare Do Well.

There was a slam as the door met the threshold, and Twilight was more or less alone again. She stayed there for a moment, watching the still features of the unmoving door as she processed everything that had just occurred.

“Was it just me, or did those two seem oddly cognizant for projections?” Twilight asked.

I didn't think they seemed more self-aware than any of the other projections we've come across, Reason replied. The difference with those two was just that they didn't act like they already knew us. Though considering what that Mare Do Well was talking about, there could be some credibility to the thought that Pinkie wants to stay hidden as much as she wants to be found, and that projection was that concept given form. That might explain why she knew the correct response, but didn't say it.

“In which case, then it's about time we find her,” Twilight said as she turned around, facing the long haul that stretched into the crushing, oppressive darkness, like a passage to the lair of loneliness.

Twilight's legs locked up. She felt an ethereal wind stir the still air, sending a chill across her coat like prey under the breath or a predator. Paranoia ignited her amygdala, instilling the uneasy sense that she really, really did belong here.

She felt Reason’s hoof on her shoulder again.

Want me to take point? Reason offered.

Twilight shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts of trepidation and feeling very much like a fool that she was still having such reactions.

“No thanks, I'll be fine,” Twilight replied. She lit her horn, creating her own little girls of light that made the shadows look even more known in its presence.

It wasn’t the first time she had seen an overwhelming darkness surrounding a small source of light with the intent of crushing it.

Twilight grimaced, trying to crush the detrimental thoughts out of her head, choosing instead to focus on the soft echoes of her hoofsteps reverberating down the hall. However, her ceaseless thoughts would not be so easily stifled.

“So if that Mare Do Well was Pinkie's subconscious representation of her indecision to either conceal or confess her secrets, what do you think that filly was supposed to be?” Twilight asked.

Nyx? I have no idea. At this point, the only thing we should be focusing on is finding Pinkie, identifying the anomaly, and completing any… secondary objectives before the girls wake us back up again.

Twilight nodded, trying to ignore the thoughts about the dossier in her saddlebag. “Right. Now that just leaves the question as to where and how we’re going to find them… also, what that little piece of metal is supposed to be used for, as well as if and or why it's important.”

That is a good question. And perhaps most pursuing, why would Pinkie's subconscious dream up something like it?

“I don't know. I guess we'll just have to ask Pinkie when we find—-”

Twilight's left foreleg came down, but made no contact with the ground. She stumbled, and on reflex her other leg jutted forward to regain her lost balance. It met only air too, and Twilight fell face-first, screaming into a void...