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// 1: There's A Little Black Spot On The Sun Today 
// Story: Éadóchas 
// by Jake Was Here 
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It all began, for no particular reason, with Rarity.

It was three hours since Celestia had raised the sun, but there was a slight chill in the air over Ponyville that confirmed that autumn had just gotten underway. Although the pegasi were master weather manipulators, even they couldn't keep the winds entirely under their collective hoof; the cool air seemed to have blown right in through a crack somewhere and drilled itself, with pinpoint accuracy, into Rarity's spine. Seated at the table in her small but immaculately appointed kitchen, she shivered, both her forehooves wrapped tightly around a steaming mug of tea that she had boiled for herself and then almost forgotten she'd made. Her mane and tail had not endured, this morning, anything like the exhaustive primping they usually received; she had simply run a comb and brush over her locks until they approximated neatness, then hurried downstairs to get something warm into her stomach.

She stared blankly down into the brown liquid depths of the cup, then lifted it to her lips. For a second, she wished that she had just stayed in bed, bundled snugly into the three layers of down blankets she'd thrown over herself the previous night – but that was no good. Today was a business day like any other business day, and it simply would not do for Carousel Boutique to open late. Not that the blankets had done much for her, anyhow; she'd been feeling the sensation of cold from the moment she awoke. Besides, it would have been unbearable to stay in that bed a moment longer. She would have been compelled to go on thinking of...

...well, the same thing she was thinking of right now. She sighed and took another sip.

There are certain dreams that stand out in the memory with pleasurable – or horrifying – clarity after the dreamer awakens; there are certain dreams where all that remains, if anything does remain, is simply a vague impression of meaning or of emotional resonance. Rarity's dream had been of the latter kind; no details presented themselves to her waking mind, but the feeling was no less intense for being a mere impression, and the feeling would not go away. It was fear.

And Rarity wished she could remember what had instilled it in her. Her agile mind clutched at the still-receding scraps of dream imagery, but to no avail. With so many missing pieces, the puzzle was insoluble... though there was a kind of ill-defined picture forming around the far edges, some idea that she might be spreading herself too thin in both her work and her social life.

She set the mug down, rested her chin on a hoof, and pouted. "Spreading myself too thin?" she asked the wall opposite her. "Giving too little to too many ponies, is that it? Really, Rarity, is that all it takes to get you rattled? Your subconscious is unworthy of you, darling..."

A thought bubbled into her mind. Perchance it isn't a question of giving too little, but of giving too MUCH. I can work my hooves and horn down right to the bones, and there'll be no shortage of ponies needing my help, the kind of help I'm best suited to give. She would have smiled at the prospect of making herself so useful to so many, but the thought did not relent there. And I suppose I'll just go on giving, all my time, all my energy, all my skill, all my inimitable talent... until I've used up every last drop of them and I have nothing left to give. And what then, O Element of Generosity, what then?

"Oh, do stop it," Rarity told herself quite firmly. It did her no good, she knew, to go on thinking like that; she'd caught herself doing it before, and always scolded herself for it when she did. It was just one of those little private moments of self-doubt that everypony was probably plagued with from time to time. After she'd seen the way such thoughts could make a pony suffer, like her poor friend Twilight Sparkle, Rarity had resolved not to waste time dwelling on worst-case scenarios... So why was such a thought, this morning, persistent enough to give her the jitters?

No, no. Out of your seat and to work, Rarity. That's the best thing to calm you down and de-frazzle yourself. She downed the rest of the tea in one mighty gulp, deposited the mug in the kitchen sink, and hustled off to unlock the Boutique and get down to business on that new design.





It turned out to be a quiet morning, with almost no early customers. The village clockmaker, who had dropped off a few vests and a winter coat for alterations, stopped in to examine Rarity's progress and mentioned that he was thinking of buying yet another silk necktie for his collection; aside from that, her work had gone uninterrupted, and she was in the zone and making record time on her latest creation. As she perched over her sewing machine, working the pedal with one hind leg, the previous night's bizarre dream was the furthest thing from her mind... until she came up out of her artistic trance just long enough to note a bright speck of color in her peripheral vision that did not match the fabric.

"Hiya, Rarity!!"

The seamstress let out a very indecorous shriek and leapt a good sixty inches back from the machine, an abrupt surge of terror erasing all rational thought for a split second. Something had followed her, pursued her out of the insubstantial mists of sleep, and now that it had found her –

The intruder raised her chin from the table, where she had been following the progress of the sewing-machine bobbin almost as intently as Rarity, and a look of alarm appeared on her face. "Whoa! You okay, Rarity? I totally didn't mean to startle you like that. Sorry!"

Rarity exhaled heavily, rolling her eyes. "It's quite all right, Pinkie. I just never even heard you come in."

"Yeah, that's what I figured," said Pinkie Pie. "The bell over the door rang just like it was supposed to and you acted like you didn't even hear it so I was about to say something but then when I got closer it seemed like you were concentrating pretty hard on what you were doing and I didn't wanna distract you because I know you don't like getting distracted, so I've just been sitting here and waiting till you finally looked up. I wasn't trying to scare you, I swear!"

"I said it's fine, darling." Rarity ran a hoof through her hair. "Now what on earth brings you into my humble shop at this hour?"

"Well, it was open."

Rarity mustered her patience. "Of course. But surely you're here for a reason..."

"Oh, right," said Pinkie. "You're never gonna believe this, but – " she bent down and retrieved with her teeth a roll of paper that had been lying at her hooves – "Aiy gawhdun ohrder fhor you heuhr!"

"A work order? From you?" Rarity asked. "Goodness, what's the special occasion? Some really massive party, perhaps?"

"Ith fah Nidemeuh Nide, uhn cohfe!" Pinkie replied, bouncing out from behind the sewing machine with the paper tube still clutched in her mouth.

Rarity raised one eyebrow. "Nightmare Night? Pinkie dear, this is the first week of fall! Nightmare Night's not for another month and a half!"

Pinkie spat out the papers on a nearby workbench. "I know that, silly! I just wanted to get a head start on my costume. See, I've got plans for this year's festival – big, huge, massive, ginormous, like really big plans – and I think it might be a smart idea to get this one thing finished and out of the way ahead of time so I don't have to do any worrying about it."

"Plans?" Rarity was just about to unroll Pinkie's papers and examine them for herself, but the tone of Pinkie's voice encouraged her to ask.

"Yeah... You swear not to tell anyone else?" Pinkie said, her eyes darting to the corners of the room as if expecting to see an eavesdropper in every possible hiding spot.

"I'll even make it a Pinkie Promise if I have to," replied Rarity, casually making the customary gesture with one hoof. "Until you give the 'all clear', darling, mum's the word."

"Okay, then, here goes!" Pinkie beamed. She looked one way, then the other, and then sidled in close to Rarity and spoke in a near-whisper. "So you've probably heard that Mister Cake is going all-out to decorate Sugarcube Corner for Nightmare Night this year, right?" Rarity nodded encouragement. "Here's the big thing. I've been begging him and Missus Cake to do this for years and this year they're finally doing it, and they've put me in charge of it... I've got permission to turn the main floor and the basement of the bakery into a big old haunted house!" The last sentence was accompanied by a gradual rise in enthusiasm until Pinkie was bouncing with elation and practically shouting.

Rarity flapped her ears to dispel the ringing. "Goodness. I didn't even know the bakery had a basement."

"And that's why I'm here," Pinkie went on. "I wanna get my costume ready as soon as I can so I can concentrate on building scary stuff for the house. And I know exactly what I want it to look like!"

As Pinkie spread the papers out on the bench, Rarity leaned in over them for a closer assessment. The drawings were crude, done by mouth with colored pencils – she supposed, charitably, that they looked far better than they would have in simple crayon – but what she saw was unmistakably a series of self-portraits of Pinkie Pie, clad in a draping, boogeymare-ish patchwork outfit that, for all its variety of colors, did have a rather unsettling look to it. "Hmm," she said at last. "I must say it's a bit... creepy. Garish, but creepy all the same."

Pinkie smiled again. "That's the idea! I was sort of aiming for the unstabled madmare look," she went on, giving a lopsided sinister smirk and twirling a hoof around her ear. "You think it'll work?"

"I daresay I can make it work," answered Rarity. "It'll be tough to get it exactly right, but it's certainly doable... And it's nothing like that chicken getup you had me assemble last time."

"Oh, yeah," Pinkie giggled, "that one was a riot... But if it's gonna be a challenge – "

"Then you've come to the right mare." Rarity grinned fiercely. "I adore a good challenge and you know it, darling."

"Sweet!" Pinkie leapt in excitement again. "Let's do this!"

Rarity nodded and glanced at the pictures again. It looked to be a very stimulating project indeed, something truly different... but she felt her grin starting to fade as she re-examined the design. She'd never seen anything like it before, but something about it reminded her of the dream she'd had the previous night. Had it involved Pinkie Pie? A... what did she call it... an unstabled-madmare Pinkie?

No, that wasn't it. It had been something more devious, less thuddingly obvious than a single crazed pony. Only one thing recalled itself clearly to her conscious thought – a generalized sense that something had just gone wrong – or worse, had always been wrong – with the world and with her place in it.

For just a split second, the cold clutched at her nerves again.

Pinkie blinked. "Um... Equestria to Rarity, come in. Are you okay?"

Rarity shook herself, then offered a glance and a reassuring smile to Pinkie's look of concern. "Quite all right, Pinkie. Just had something else on my mind there for a moment."

"Oh. Did you have a bad dream or something?"

Rarity whirled, flabbergasted, and looked at Pinkie head-on. "Now how in Celestia's name could you guess at that?"

"Experience," Pinkie shrugged. "Lots and lots of experience. I mean, everypony gets nightmares, don't they? Even me! I mean, you wouldn't think it to look at me, but it's not like I'm immune or anything – "

"Yes, yes, darling, all right." Rarity suddenly felt the urge to halt that train of thought tout de suite before Pinkie began cataloguing the details of every single bad dream she'd ever had since the age of three.

Pinkie cocked her head at an angle. "So what was yours about? Oh, or maybe you don't wanna talk about it, in which case, just forget I asked."

"Pinkie sweetie, I can hardly even remember it. Let's forget this nightmare talk and get down to brass tacks, shall we?" Rarity used her magic to pick up and hold the biggest and best of the pictures before their eyes. "Now then. First question: What kind of material were you thinking of using?"