The Mane Six, the powerful and popular pony heroes of Equestria, had been traveling far from Ponyville, addressing friendship emergencies in Manehatten and helping Rarity open her new boutique. They, sans their assistant Spike, who had remained in Canterlot to address some business with Princess Celestia, returned to Ponyville on a midnight train ride.
Exhausted from their achievements, they initially failed to note the bizarre purplish-pink sky, but their tired ears couldn't help but overhear cacophonous, tense chattering from the multitudinous mouths of an enormous crowd of ponies that cluttered the station.
Mr. and Mrs. Cake, earth pony proprietors of Sugarcube Corner, where Pinkie Pie worked when she wasn't gallivanting off to save Equestria while leaving her employers in the lurch to scramble laboring double-time to make up for her absence, were the first to speak coherently to the Mane Six.
"Twilight Sparkle?" Mrs. Cake asked, her lower lip trembling and her hind-legs bobbing nervously up and down beside her resting sacks of luggage.
"Yes?" Twilight responded, craning her neck to better view the oddly borealis-like sky that bathed the station platform in a weird glow. "What happened here?"
Mrs. Cake glimpsed back to ensure that her twin little ones were still close at hoof, then she explained: "I've heard a lot of things. I was hoping you might have a better idea, although mostly, I came here so I could catch the train to escape." Other ponies, swarming around with their packed luggage echoed her request, and they pressed closer to Twilight and her friends.
"What have you heard?" Twilight said.
"I heard," Mrs. Cake started, "that Discord attacked Ponyville and summoned an armada of monstrous rocks that blotted out the sky!"
"Monstrous rocks?" Twilight asked.
"Lyra told me," Mrs. Cake explained, gesturing to another pony in the crowd.
"I saw them myself!" Lyra, an aqua colored pony, piped up. She hugged another mare beside her. "Bon Bon told me they were added faster and faster until it was like they were multiplying! Then they fractioned apart, dividing and glimmering like diamonds in the sky until a horrendous explosion subtracted all of them.
"If you saw them, then why would you need Bon Bon to tell--nevermind? How did you see this?"
"Via Bon Bon," Lyra nodded. "Personally."
"So you didn't see it happen," Twilight sighed. "Perhaps Bon Bon could expound?"
Bon Bon, the cream-coated pony enveloped in Lyra's embrace, had a bead of sweat break out across her forehead, just beneath her bouncy curls. "It's ... difficult to say what I saw."
Pinkie Pie piped up: "Was it a tongue-twister? Like 'she sells sea shells sometimes slowly by the sea shore for shore'! Or was it just a really long word like antidisestablishmentarianism? A homophone? A homonym? A sound? A smell? Onomatopoeia? Maybe a weird gobbledygook word that's not really a word, like Austreaoh?"
"It was ... terrifying." Lyra shook and hugged Bon Bon closer.
Bon Bon croaked--not in the euphemistic sense of dying--although she was having difficulty breathing: "Can't breathe." Lyra let her go, and Bon Bon coughed something that sounded like "teacup".
Before Bon Bon could clarify, Carrot Top, a curly red-haired pony, spoke up. "I heard there was an enormous explosion in the sky--like Trixie's fireworks--then after a keening screech, dust fell to the ground and all the crops died!"
"But you didn't confirm it?" Twilight asked.
"Our precious strawberries died!" One pony added.
"And all our flowers!" The trio of ponies who worked at the flower show fainted as one. But they managed to speak from the ground. "We barely made it here. Ponies were fighting and dying, wilted like flower-stems in the streets. The horror! The horror!"
"Dead ponies?" Fluttershy, the kindest member of the Mane Six, commented on the important point.
But her voice was so soft that it was drowned out by the bombastic complaint of Applejack--one of the Mane Six who, when not saving the world, farmed apples on her family's land: "Oh no, the farm!"
"Oh no, the farm!" Pinkie Pie mirrored Applejack's shock, showing solidarity with her great friend who was also possibly a distant cousin.
Over the din, Carrot Top could barely be heard, but she shouted louder and louder. "I didn't dare return to check my farm; I heard about it from that tragically handsome Thunderlane--and now he's blind! I wasn't gonna stick around to see what happened!"
"How could he see crops fail if he was blinded? ..." Twilight considered, failing to note the flower ponies' more dire reports of fighting and death likely because she had been mentally filtering out anything they said as nonsense ever since she had endured their weeping histrionic fit after Ponyville's latest rabbit invasion.
"Thunderlane's blind!" Rainbow Dash, another of the Mane Six, interjected.
"I heard that too!" Mrs. Cake added. "Terrible, just terrible."
Her husband, Mr. Cake coughed, and added. "Yes, terrible. Uh, dear." He whispered something to her and she flushed, then looked him directly in his eyes.
"They're so white ..." she hissed, but didn't say anything else.
Fluttershy, the kind pegasus, noticed his cough and walked over, then passed him some pills she plucked out of the satchel she always carried for medical emergencies. She often tended to injured beasts and it was just a matter of dosage in adapting pony pills for them, so she always carried a bushel of healing powders and pills.
"There, there," she comforted softly. "Hopefully this cures any PESTILENCE you may be feeling."
Mr. Cake reached out, missing Fluttershy's hoof by several hooves. After steadying her husband, Mrs. Cake reached over and took the pills, then slapped them into Mr. Cake's mouth, mouthing "thank you" to Fluttershy.
"Was Thunderlane blind when he spoke to you, Carrot Top?" Twilight asked.
Carrot Top bobbed her head.
"And you just let him go off? Blinded! By himself?"
Whispers traversed the crowd, chattering how Carrot Top had abandoned (and in some versions of the tale) blinded Thunderlane!
"His younger brother Rumble was leading him around." Carrot Top screeched, barely audible over the cacophony of outraged speech. Somepony pushed her into another pony, who shoved her back.
"Get off me, you meanie!" One of the twin Spa Ponies pushed Carrot Top with strong massage-strengthened hooves.
"Thunderlane was a lovely stallion!" The other whacked her with a massage paddle that apparently had been so important she had brought it with her for the evacuation. Carrot Top tumbled to the ground.
"Ponies! Please!" Twilight Sparkle unfurled her wings and rose into the air. "Let's not descend to WAR among ourselves! Be calm." The unrest subsided.
Fluttershy helped Carrot Top, face red and embossed with an impression of the wooden train platform, to her hooves, whispering to her, "I'm sure you didn't mean to say something someponies might just think was a mite bit thoughtless, dear."
Carrot Top cried, and Fluttershy blushed. "Oh, dear," Fluttershy sighed. "That was a bit much. ... I don't know what's happening." Fluttershy looked desperately to her friends for help. "I'm ... not used to hurting otherponies' feelings."
Twilight Sparkle alighted. "Fine." She fixed her stare on Mrs. Cake. "What happened next?"
"Yeah, what about the loss of crops--we could have a FAMINE! Anypony seen that? Anypony seen any Apples?" Applejack Apple demanded, loudly projecting her voice as she inquired about her family and their farm.
"They live pretty far from Ponyville; they may not have been affected."
"Of course fate would have it that those ponies wouldn't be affected," Strawberry Sunrise, a golden pegasus who hated apples and who had recently moved to Ponyville to be closer to her friends, snorted. "We'll probably have to subsist on awful awkward apples."
"Now just a gosh darn minute here--" Applejack was distracted by the horrifying statement.
"Ponies! Please!" Twilight repeated. "We're not moving forward; how about we trace events back ... when did this disaster start?"
"When Doctor Hooves died!"
"What? There was a DEATH? Who said that?" Twilight asked, looking frantically around.
"Oh, Sweetie Belle!" Rarity, a white-coated unicorn mare member of the Mane Six, called out, recognizing the voice of her little sister. "What terrible things are you saying?"
"Doctor Hooves was standing in front of a shadowy extraordinarily tall pale pony near what was left of the clock tower."
"But wouldn't the tower's destruction have been the start--" Twilight tried to impose some sense and logic.
"It was destroyed by lightning!" Lyra exclaimed.
"You saw this?" Twilight asked.
"No, but Octavia told me about it." Lyra gestured to a gray-coated pony with a black mane who was lugging around an enormous cello grasped in one foreleg and gripping an oblivious, headphone-wearing, music-appreciating DJ-Pon3 in her other.
"It was quite a disturbing sight," Octavia said, enunciating clearly. "I lost no time in evacuating myself from the premises, taking a moment only to rush back to my abode to recover the essentials." She indicated her instrument and DJ-Pon3 in turn with sharp movements of her head.
"It was more of a magical explosion," Bon Bon's raspy voice interjected.
"You never told me that!" Lyra huffed, a look of betrayal crossing her eyes.
"It was more important to evacuate." Bon Bon looked around. "And where there's magic, there may be bugbears."
Lyra gasped and grabbed Bon Bon tighter.
"Anyway!" Sweetie Belle interjected. "The clock tower isn't important! But it happened there. Underneath the tower's rubble, the scary pony touched Doctor Hooves. He reared up in horror. Then he fell down, all stiff."
"Maybe he was just struck down, dear, knocked unconscious." Rarity hugged her little sister.
"Nuh-uh." Sweetie Bell shook her head as much as she could while wedged tightly in the overly-perfumed pit beneath Rarity's shoulder. "Scootaloo poked him with a stick."
Scootaloo, Sweetie's orange pegasus friend, was close at hand. "And he didn't move!" She said it almost gleefully, happy to provide a helpful answer.
Rainbow Dash, struggling to make out words, only heard part of that exchange. "Why'd you hit Doctor Hooves with a stick Scootaloo?"
"He was already dead!" Scootaloo shouted.
The crowd pressed around Scootaloo, who was lost amid a sea of angry words. Then a gray, blond-haired mare bearing a bump on her head zipped in, clearing the crowd around Scootaloo with a crash landing accompanied by a shrieked demand: "What did you do to my beloved brother!" She grabbed Scootaloo by the filly's shoulders, shook the young pony back and forth like a cat toy and lifted her off the ground. "Why!" The mare demanded, her crossed eyes darting to and fro in a vicious search for truth in Scootaloo's gaze.
"Aaaaahhh!" Scootaloo shrieked, flailing in the air. "Deeerrrppppyyy! Leetttt meeee goooo!"
Rainbow Dash struggled to pull Scootaloo away, but Derpy's grip was shockingly strong.
"How can you be a murderer?" Tears were forming in Derpy's eyes. "Whyyyyyyyyyyy," she whined.
Scootaloo shivered, and also cried. Shoving and fighting broke out again on the station and, now that the train was ready to move, the stationmaster called "All aboard! Tickets please!"
The ponies, sans the Mane Six, Derpy, Scootaloo and Scootaloo's friend Sweetie Belle, raced to jump aboard the train that would take them far from Ponyville. Since the Mane Six had the conflict in hoof, the evacuees prioritized their own survival; none of them stayed to help.
"Nopony killed anypony, Derpy." Rainbow struggled to pull, digging into Scootaloo's flesh.
"How do you know!" Derpy insisted.
Scootaloo started crying as her body was torn two ways. Sweetie Belle started trying to pull to help, but it just strained Scottaloo's limbs worse. Then Twilight, with a vast exertion of her magic from her horn, picked up and separated Scootaloo from Derpy.
Huffing, Twilight spoke shaply. "Quite a grip, Derpy. Now, listen carefully. Scootaloo never said she'd killed Doctor Hooves. Nopony said that! Scootaloo just said she found him lying prone, so she poked him with a stick--to see if he was okay."
"But whyyyyyy?" Derpy's eyes were so full of tears that one could not even see her distinctive floating eyeball.
"I don't know," Twilight said. "But I intend to find out. He might not even be dead."
"Really?" Derpy sniffed and cleared the tears from her eyes.
"We can search better if you get on the train."
"Okay," Derpy rose. "Whatever you think is best, Princess Twilight." She sniffed again and more tears came.
The train blew its whistle. It would soon depart.
"You should get onboard too, Sweetie Belle, dear." Rarity added.
"But I can help!"
"Matters appear to have become quite grave." Rarity ushered Sweetie Belle onto the train, stuffing her into a car far from the one that Derpy entered. "You look after Scootaloo."
Scootaloo was wincing and had involuntary tears filling her eyes, but she let Rainbow Dash escort her to the train.
"We'll see to this problem," Rainbow Dash asserted. "No sweat."
"Thanks, Dash," Scootaloo breathless, boarded the train.
Dash flew up to Sweetie Belle's ear and whispered into it. "Hey, kid. Take care of Scoots, and keep Derpy away from her, you hear?"
"You got it!" Sweetie Belle said with a brisk nod.
Then the train, packed burgeoning to the windows with its fearful exponentially rumor-generating ponies, was off and the Mane Six galloped into the town to confront apocalyptic terrors lying within.