//------------------------------// // Ch. 15 Happy Death Day // Story: Dash of Humanity 3: Live, Fly, Reboot. // by Kaidan //------------------------------// The next few mornings I woke up worrying that Starlight would blast into my room looking for revenge. It would seem I was due some good fortune, because it hadn't happened yet. Starlight had said something about me being Minuette’s coltfriend, and seemed content to dismiss my existence and pursue other leads for now. Unfortunately, her best lead was Minuette, who lived right across the street. I didn’t want to abandon the unicorn to get interrogated over and over, so I’d started hurrying across the street to warn her every day. Starlight didn’t know where either of us lived yet, but it was only a matter of time. Before I took on Starlight again, and made it abundantly clear I was gunning for her, I needed to learn how to fight properly. A few days of training with Bon Bon and I felt like I could probably wrestle Applejack and win. I also had a newfound respect for the baker, and if she worked out as hard as she sparred, it was no wonder all that candy didn’t go straight to her flanks. Of course, I’d told Bon Bon as much when I commented on how all those bon bon’s hadn’t gone to her ass. That was why I was waking up in bed right now, after getting slammed a little too hard into a wall during sparring practice. I rubbed my sore spine before rolling out of bed, and turning off my alarm. My hooves tingled a little as if they were still asleep, pins and needles going through them. “Lesson learned, never even hint that Bon Bon’s fat.” After a brief morning routine of getting ready and alerting Minuette, I took to the sky to watch over town again. I’d developed a daily routine that involved helping the construction pony over the loops, and visiting my friends. Sticking to it may have helped me appear like just another pony stuck in the loop. Since I still had the element of surprise, it was time to put it to good use. Hopefully Starlight hadn’t gone too hard on my friends trying to find answers, but as of today, it was her turn to start supplying some answers. I wasn’t sure things would go much differently this time, but I hoped they would. Now I knew some of the signs to look for. If I glanced at a patch of road between two houses, and my eyes instantly averted, then it could be the sign of an illusion spell. The mental exercises had reminded me a bit of meditation, but allegedly would also help me catch my mind wandering. At the first sign, the training instructed me on how to refocus and pierce the spell. As soon as you saw through the spell, even for a second, it would cease to function. Today I’d asked Minuette to gather Lyra and Rarity to work on the spell, instead of laying low to hide from Starlight. So I sat over town, slowly scanning my way towards the castle, when I felt my eyes flicker. I started to wonder about how Dash was doing. Before I could get lost in that thought, I refocused and caught sight of Starlight, heading into town from the direction of the castle. “Jackpot.” Bon Bon had instructed me to strike hard and fast, while Starlight wasn’t expecting it. So I waited until she got a little closer to the Carousel Boutique. I wanted to make sure Minuette would hear it, so she could use that freaky speed of hers to help take down Starlight. Once Starlight stopped near the boutique, I dropped off my cloud and folded my wings to my side, legs tucked in. After gravity had given me an assist in speed, I flared my wings and began beating hard, diving straight towards Starlight. The wing was blurring my vision and I realized I’d built up too much speed, but it was too late to stop. I started to pull up, dodging a chimney and thinking very angry thoughts to help build up a nice bolt of lightning quicker. Before I could ram into her side with the speed of a freight train, she looked over and saw me. Starlight had time to smirk as her horn lit up. I was moving too fast to dodge, hoping I’d connect with her side first. Instead, I felt a jolt of pain, waking up back in my bed before I’d processed what happened. My next two attempts didn’t fare much better. For my fourth attempt to capture Starlight, I crouched inside a bush on the road leading towards Carousel Boutique. Bon Bon had tried to teach me how to not be too conspicuous, and I thought that having a dozen ponies help me ambush Starlight might have been too obvious. For that reason I’d decided to try and keep the strike team small. Pinkie was the queen of popping out of places unexpectedly and to be perfectly honest, I had no idea where she was hiding right now. Maybe she’d jump out of my own mane at the perfect moment. Starlight was going for a leisurely stroll down the road as if she didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that she’d gone this way several times before. I gently touched the tripwire running across the road with my hoof, smirking as the unicorn walked right towards it. I’d wanted to build a pit with punji sticks in it, but Pinkie had told me that’d be overkill. Apparently there was such a thing as war crimes in Equestria, and Pinkie had talked me into something a bit less lethal. Starlight hit the tripwire and almost fell over, glaring around the street to find the culprit. Only now did she realize the town was unusually quiet. Pinkie had ensured nopony would be out on this street this morning. Then she heard the loud snap as the trap was sprung, and several large logs rolled out into the street from between two houses. A party cannon boomed, spreading confetti and caltrops everywhere. Several sticks burst out of the dirt carrying netting hung from chicken wire between them. Despite how painstakingly Pinkie and I had set this trap up, it only took Starlight about five seconds to unleash a wave of magic and disintegrate the netting. It was long enough to give me the opportunity I wanted. I was halfway to Starlight, staying on my hooves and low to the ground hoping she wouldn’t expect it. I saw a flash of pink from a street lamp, and Pinkie was closing from the other side. Starlight shouted out in pain as she stepped on one of the caltrops, firing a blast of magic that caused one of the large logs rolling towards her to explode. I felt some of the chunks of wood hit me, but the unicorn still hadn’t turned to focus her magic on me. For the first time, I managed to reach her before she could use her magic on me. I hit her side hard, and raised a hoof to hit the sensitive part of her horn near the base, when there was a flash of magic. Pinkie landed on me a moment later. Starlight had teleported away, leaving us to untangle ourselves. The street looked like someone had ransacked a logging company and lit half the debris on fire. A moment later I realized the flaming logs were floating up into the air above me, and I was unable to get away before they came crashing back down. Today I was perched atop a cloud that was gently drifting south in the breeze towards Twilight’s castle. Only during one of my attempts was I quick enough to get the drop on Starlight, so I decided to do a little recon today. I could learn more about her daily routine, and why she seemed less fixated on Minuette now. Maybe if she got distracted by somepony on the way into town I might have more luck. So far I hadn’t seen her, as she was likely cheating by using her magic again. I’d put a few extra clouds up in the sky with the hopes that I wouldn’t stand out too much. I stretched and wondered what was taking Starlight so long, when I felt a flash of cold surround the cloud. I tried to leap off and take flight, only to realize I had been encased in some sort of crystal. My muzzle was held shut and I couldn’t call out for help. I realized with a growing sense of dread, I couldn’t take a breath of fresh air. Panic hit me and I began to struggle against the clear chunk of crystal around me, as it slowly sank through the cloud. I tried to cause a storm cloud, some lightning, or anything I could, but the glassy prison around me prevented it. After a moment I felt my stomach turn, as the crystal dropped from the cloud and plummeted down towards the ground. I couldn’t even blink as I saw the sky rush past, then a roof, then the crystal shatter with me inside it. Come on everypony smile, smile, smile Fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine I was getting very tired of waking up, in pain, to this same song. I was somewhere around zero for nine on my attempts to ambush Starlight. I’d tried hitting hard and fast, recruiting help, and even just spying on her without trying to take her prisoner. Since I was lost in thought it took me a minute to realize my muzzle was damp. I sat up in bed and rubbed a foreleg across it, noticing my cyan fur was now stained red with blood. “That’s odd.” I said to myself. In all my loops I’d died and woken up unharmed, aside from phantom pains of my death. While unpleasant, I’d never shown physical signs of trauma. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom, cleaning up my muzzle with a damp cloth, then holding it there until the bleeding stopped. My nose was still sore, and some of the muscles in my neck were painfully tight, as if I’d slept on them wrong. I recalled getting crushed by some large logs, but compared some of the other deaths, that was barely a flesh wound. Caution got the better of me, so I decided to take the loop off to visit the Ponyville hospital and have a talk with Doctor Stable. I stopped by the construction site briefly to save the brown earth pony, I didn’t want the doctor to be busy in surgery when I got to the hospital. The stallion thanked me and I headed off. Once I got to Doctor Stable’s office, I was able to see him immediately. “Hey, Dawn. What brings you by today?” Stable asked. I sat in the chair across from him. “So this is going to sound all kinds of crazy, but I’m trapped in a time loop. I keep dying, but I wake up okay the next day. Today I didn’t. Can you cast some spells and take some x-rays or something?” “What? Dawn, I know some strange things happen to Ponyville but a time loop? Are you sure?” he asked. “I know how it sounds, but it’s true. And if it’s not true, you’ve still got to run one of those fancy magic scans to figure out what else is wrong, so what have we got to lose?” I shrugged and pointed up to his horn. “Besides, think of the case study if I’m correct and you discover some cool temporal paradox illness!” He sighed and chuckled once. “I would have done an exam regardless, for a friend.” His horn began to glow and I felt a tingle of magic run over me. “Hey don’t get sentimental on me, I get enough of that from the mares in town. The perfect stallion relationship involves fishing, growing old, and not talking.” Doctor Stable didn’t laugh at my joke, instead I felt the magic increasing as he seemed to concentrate harder. He carried on for a minute before noticing me staring at him. “Oh, you wanted an x-ray too? Let’s go do that.” “Wow, that felt rehearsed. Intensely focused, quick change of topic, how bad is it?” I inquired. “Let’s… get some x-rays.” About half an hour later I was in a patient gown in a lead-lined room waiting for the results. “You realize I’m always naked, so why bother with a gown?” I asked the x-ray tech. “Because it’s hospital policy, it’s how we’ve always done it.” “Yeah, but, why? If I take it off, I’m still covered in fur. And the way you cut the gown, my junk’s gonna hang out anyway. So the one useful thing it could be doing, it isn’t doing.” He shrugged, and Doctor Stable walked into the room. He placed some of the images up on the lightboard so that we could all see them. “So, Dawn, I’m not sure how familiar you are with the pony bone structure, but look at this.” He pointed a hoof up to the image of my skeleton. I got a little closer to see it better. “It looks pretty normal to me. Are there supposed to be so many criss-crossing lines on it?” “These,” he tapped on my femur in the image, “are healed hairline fractures. I noticed it when I cast the spell on you, but there were so many I knew it couldn’t possibly be right.” “Wait, but the loop restarts and I go back to normal every morning. Right?” “I suppose it could be working like that, but it doesn’t seem to be. Maybe time is rewinding or something but it doesn’t go back quite far enough to erase the damage. Maybe the spell is weakening. It’s beyond my expertise. But what I can tell you is this: if you keep dying, eventually it’s going to be more than scars.” I gulped and nodded my head. “Like waking up in the morning with a nose bleed and a sore muzzle.” He raised an eyebrow and stared at me. “And you’re sharing that now? Was there any bleeding from the ears, or eyes? If the bones show this many signs of injury, your soft tissue is probably a lot worse off.” “No.” I shook my head. “Just a nosebleed, that's why I came in today.” “Well, how hard will it be for you to avoid dying anymore until you resolve this crisis?” Stables asked. “Well, I’m kind of taking a day off from fighting a homicidal and emotionally unstable unicorn who seems to take it very personally when I try to knock her teeth out. I’m guessing it’ll be hard to avoid dying anymore.” “You know,” he stated, “you could always try talking to her. Not everypony’s first choice is violence, Dawn.” “If you’d met her you’d understand,” I sighed. “First time I met her she killed two of my friends.” “Just think it over. If you keep this up, something bad will happen. The physical toll you pay to fix the loop may not go away when it ends.” I nodded. “Fine, it’s past noon. I’ll take a day off from the violence, and try to reach out to this Starlight maniac.” It was already past noon when I left the hospital, so I acted on my plan to take a day off from getting my ass kicked. Tomorrow would be a better day to try and reach out to Starlight and call for a parlay, or maybe I would call it a truce instead. Trying to quote the pirate code to somepony who definitely wouldn’t get the reference might not be a good idea, even if I found it endlessly amusing to confuse ponies with Earth’s pop culture. In order to get a day of rest without getting attacked or discovered by Starlight I’d have to go somewhere in town she wouldn’t think to look. I flew straight up to Dash’s house as quickly as I could, figuring it would be as safe a place as any since unicorns can’t fly. As soon as I walked into her home to enjoy my day off, I noticed a picture of the two of us on her mantle. A wave of sorrow hit me as I walked over to look at it. We’d taken the photo a few weeks ago, but it had actually been almost a year for me. Dash and I were seated at one of the restaurants in town. We’d finally admitted our feelings for each other, helped Twilight to rescue Shining Armor, and ran Soarin out of town. I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant. I’d been keeping myself so busy trying to fix things that I hadn’t realized how deeply I missed Dash. I wiped a foreleg across my muzzle and it came away damp with tears. She was out there somewhere, blissfully unaware that I was trapped, missing the pony I cared for most. If it wasn’t for our mutual friends I don’t know how I would have coped. All the visits to let Fluttershy console me, or all the hijinx with Pinkie, couldn’t replace the special place that Dash had come to occupy in my life. Across the room was a dining table, the one that I’d found myself sitting at only moments after being zapped to Equestria. I’d had a mean right hook and sent Soarin toppling to the floor for trying to kiss me. Then I’d done my best impression of a space shuttle trying to fly: half-gliding and half-plummeting towards the ground in my attempt to flee my strange pony nightmare. A couple weeks later, I’d worked together with Dash at this same table to try and make things right with her. I’d given her the inside advice she needed, and the courage she lacked, to have a successful second date with her fillyhood idol. Perhaps I did my job too well, because the date had ended in a way that thrilled Dash and horrified the man riding shotgun in her mind. Before long I had wondered my way up to her bedroom, lost in my nostalgia. I came across a full-size standing mirror in her bedroom, and looked at my reflection. Even looking at myself it seemed somehow unfamiliar. “Have I really been in the loop so long this all seems so distant? Will she even recognize who I am now, running around loop after loop trying to cripple Starlight?” I went to Dash’s bed and lay down on the compacted clouds, pulling the blanket up over me. The pillow smelled faintly of spring rain. As far as time was concerned, Dash had laid here only a day ago, so her scent still lingered. I smiled as I thought about the nights we’d laid here together snuggling, drifting off to sleep before I knew it. Come on everypony smile, smile, smile Fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine I woke up in a far better mood than usual. It helped that I hadn’t been killed by something straight out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon yesterday. It also helped that I’d spent the night at Dash’s house, remembering how far I had come from a socially isolated human, to a somewhat isolated and assholish pony, to being in a committed relationship. If a little friendship could turn a sarcastic jerk of a human into a functioning member of society, maybe Twilight was right about it being magic. I took a little time this morning to get ready, treating myself well by taking a shower and shampooing my mane, then brushing it. It was very relaxing and helped lower my stress levels as I treated it like an almost normal day. The room was dark despite the sun being up, so I headed over to open the curtains. Once I got to the window and opened them, I looked outside to see Starlight standing in front of Minuette’s house. “Buck me.” I dropped the curtain as Starlight looked across the street at my home, but I knew deep down she’d seen somepony peeking out the window. “Damn it!” I ran across the room, looking for something to defend myself with. It was bad enough she’d found where Minuette lived. If she could get here this fast, and realized where I lived, she might be able to kill me before I even woke up for the morning. I’d never live long enough to be aware of another loop. “Shit!” I ran into the bathroom, looking around for a razor or something. I opened the medicine cabinet, and saw the bottle of fast acting poison joke that I’d been saving. I laughed as I grabbed it and downed it in one gulp. I closed the door for a moment as Zecora’s potion acted quickly to reshape me into the form the poison joke had found most “funny” for a human male stranded in Equestria: a pink mare with a highly active libido. Being a mare had been confusing at first, led to some wildly fun experiences, and threatened me with split personality disorder. The poison joke may have gone a bit overboard, but eventually I made my peace with it. Now I kept it around mostly for all the fun things two adventurous ponies could do with such a potion. Once I was finished changing, my fur matched the old pink streak in my hair, which was still mostly blond. The highlight was blue now, and aside from the cutie mark, I looked like a completely different pony. I opened the door to walk out into my bedroom, noticing Starlight standing there looking through a dresser. “Uh, hi, can I help you?” I asked. She looked over at me and her horn glowed briefly before fading. “Sorry, I was looking for a stallion friend of mine. I think he’s been… cheating on me.” Starlight smiled and looked over. “Do you live here alone?” “Yeah,” I replied. “Just me.” “And you are?” She asked. I blurted the first two vaguely weather sounding words to come to mind. “Sunny Cloud.” “Ah, Sunny, I see you’ve got some rather interesting… marital aids,” Starlight replied. “And some of these outfits seem a bit big for a mare.” I had to think of something quickly that sounded plausible, and one pony in town was almost as infamous as the elements were famous. “I’m a friend of Cloud Kicker’s.” I smiled as I walked up next to her and brushed my feathers along her flank. “Friends with benefits you could say. Have you heard of the weather vein trick?” My bluff worked. I was beginning to understand why Cloud had so much fun teasing ponies like this. Starlight blushed and backed away from me. “Wait, what?” “I’m no stranger to horns either, if you’re feeling horny. Mysterious pony breaking into my home is one of my top three fantasies,” I explained. “No… just no!” Starlight groaned. “Look, I’m looking for an idiotic cyan pegasus stallion. Everypony seems to know everypony in this damn town, so can you at least tell me who it is?” I tapped a hoof to my chin as I thought about it. “Hmm, real sarcastic smart ass, always doing reckless stuff? Sounds like Dawn. I think he lives near Ghastly Gorge.” “Thank you! Finally somepony in this town can answer a bucking question on the first try. Well, sorry to have barged in, Sunny. Take care!” Starlight vanished in a flash of teleportation magic. I slumped down on the ground and exhaled in relief, having only narrowly avoided being discovered. The plan was to reach out to her today; now I knew she’d be investigating Ghastly Gorge. She was expecting Dawn, not Sunny, so I’d have to change back before I went to talk to her. However, I was feeling paranoid that she could be lurking around my house to spy on me. So I went and took another long shower before taking the antidote to change back. She’d bought my lie about being a mare, and didn’t know about the poison joke. I could hide in plain sight anytime I wanted as long as I was careful. Starlight seemed more than happy to blast first and ask questions later, especially after I’d tried to grievously injure her over a dozen times. Luckily for me, as far as she knew Sunny was just another face in the crowd. Once I finally got cleaned up, and convinced she wasn’t lurking in my bedroom any longer, I decided to go check on Minuette. The front door to her house was locked, so I went around to the back and found it open. Now that I was a blue stallion again, if Starlight did find me, she wouldn’t realize I lived in the home of the pink mare she’d barged in on earlier. Once I got inside, I found Minuette dead on her sofa, encased in crystal. “This mare is really starting to piss me off.” I rushed back outside and took off towards the Ghastly Gorge. It was all the way across town, one of the reasons I’d sent Starlight there looking for me. As I flew over I calmed down a little bit, and began to slow down. If I went in like she expected, hostile and ready to knock some heads around to save Equestria, she’d respond in kind by blasting me again. I wasn’t some super spy or unicorn, and I’d seen over the past week how well trying to be one was working out for me. So I landed quietly outside the gorge once I’d spotted her, and walked down into the canyon. Along the sides were the large holes the quarray eels lived in. I stayed away from them and the gashes their teeth had left on the walls and ground of the chasm. I could see Starlight from here, poking at the barrier that surrounded the town and trapped everypony inside. Ripples were traveling along the wall of shattered time, and it almost looked like she was trying to find a way to make a hole in it. The light seemed less distorted, and for a moment I worried she might succeed and step outside, leaving me alone here forever. “Don’t shoot, I’m alone and unarmed. I just want to talk,” I said loudly. Starlight spun around, horn still glowing, but when she saw I had told the truth she didn’t fire. “You again, Dawn.” She groaned and glanced back at the barrier. “If you’re here to surrender it’s about time. As fun as it is finding new and exciting ways to crush you like a bug, it’s distracting me from fixing this spell.” I took a few more steps towards her so I wouldn’t have to yell to talk to her, and she continued to hold her fire. “Look, I know you broke time and it’s okay. I want to help fix it. We can both walk out of this eternal prison together, but only if you agree to stop killing ponies.” “Pfft. It’s not like they stay dead, nothing we do has consequences. There is no escape. Our only reprieve is the amusement we can find.” She smirked as she lifted up a stone, encased it in crystal, and let it fall to the ground. “I’ve been studying with my friends on how to fix this. So, Starlight, are we going to fix this thing the easy way, or the hard way?” “I don’t have time for anypony or anything that can’t help me achieve my goals. What good is a pegasus going to do me? Why shouldn’t I just keep killing you for fun?” she asked. I advanced slowly on Starlight, my head slightly lowered as I glared directly at her. I spoke softly but firmly. “Yes, I’m just a pegasus, but I used to be a human from another dimension. I don’t have magic, but what I do have is questionable morality, and a very particular set of skills. Skills that would make me a nightmare for somepony like you. If you help me fix this loop now, that’ll be the end of it. I won’t look for you, I won’t rat you out to Twilight or Celestia. However, if you kill me with magic one more fucking time, I will look for you next loop. I will find you. And I will kill you. And then I’ll make a game of doing it slightly faster each loop, until you go insane and I can get back to fixing your mess on my own.” Starlight had taken a few steps back as I approached. Her back was against the canyon wall near one of the large holes. I stopped in front of her, watching as she levitated a small rock up in the air. “Hmm. You say you can be useful to me, then provide empty threats? Prove it.” She tossed the stone she was holding up into the dark hole in the canyon wall. I heard a rumbling and took a step back, flaring my wings and getting ready to fly. I tripped and fell onto my rump, looking down to see I was now sitting in a large gash in the ground. My eyes went wide in surprise as I scrambled back to my hooves. A mouth snapped shut around me just as I tried to take flight, swallowing me whole.