//------------------------------// // The Full Reverse Half Rarity (+00:00) // Story: Human in Equestria any% speedrun (kill Celestia ending) // by Anti-Tachyon //------------------------------// “An’ this here’s the Ponyville market!” Applejack turned to look at her strange acquaintance. He was still there. Had he been there this whole time? He was soaking wet, but at least he no longer stank. Maybe he’d actually taken her suggestions to heart? “Ah need to drop off this load of apples at my brother Big Mac’s stall, so ya’ll just… wander ‘round? See the sights? Spend some of them… dumpster bits?” Talk ta anypony else but me, please. The bizarre stallion dashed off into the market. A brief moment of respite amidst the madness. Now, to deliver these apples… Applejack was being very… weird this run. Uncooperative. She was definitely taking at least a second longer than usual to trigger her dialogue. But even in spite of this, he could feel the pace he was on. Almost everything besides the first drop clip had gone perfectly. But that pace could slip at any moment. He’d have to do it. And he needed to do it first try. But that was later. He grabbed a physics object crate in his magic, jumped, flicked the camera around, and fired. Another quick launch, sailing directly over the flower sisters’ stall, who, of course, screamed and ducked for cover. “Remember how we did that hoof-grip tutorial way back at the start of the run”, said PonyRunner, “and that bag of bits we’ve been carrying around? This is where it all comes together”. His target was a fruit stall. But not Applejack’s. No, he needed a different kind of apple. PonyRunner had never watched the show, but Tropical Slice had the distinctive look of an original character. She had a bright orange coat, unkempt green hair and, most importantly, a cutie mark of a pineapple. She was joined by her daughter, Piña Colada, but this was irrelevant. “This is our victim. We are going to absolutely ruin her career, and the economy. Can one of you explain this for me?” Wait. No. He shouldn’t have said– “Sure, I’ll take this”, said the Rainbow Dash Guy. He sniffed. “So basically, what PonyRunner is gonna do here is an item dupe, that you can only do when you have one inventory space”. PonyRunner interacted with Slice, opening the trading window. On his side, there was only a single square of space, occupied by the bag of fifteen dumpster bits. On Tropical Slice’s side, there was a long list of various tropical fruit. “Now”, Dash Guy narrated, “he’s going to hover over the pineapples, buy as many as possible with the 15 bits, and then he’s gonna confirm the purchase and on the exact next frame he’s gonna press X to drop the bit bag from his mouth. Now we have the pineapples in our inventory, and the bit bag is still on the floor. He’s gonna drop the pineapples, pick up the bag, and repeat.” Oh. That was… perfectly fine? Correct, even. Crisis averted. “We have one inventory space, but we can hold 99 of the same item in it. Don’t ask where we’re keeping these pineapples”, said Gage, to much audience amusement. “Oh, and this only works before we get the saddlebags from Rarity”, Dash Guy continued, “because, afterwards, bits go into a… wallet thing. Bit bag objects stop appearing in your inventory. You can still dupe, but it’s way slower.” “While I’m duping, can someone explain why we need 99 pineapples?” Luna was tired beyond belief. But with significantly fewer pony dreams during the day, this was her best opportunity to narrow down the source of the disturbance. Follow the buzzing… And she had. The thing before her was less of a singular nightmare, and more of a writhing mass of souls, all pulling with and against one other. Luna tucked her wings and alighted silently before it. This had to be it… but what was it? Only one way to find out. The Princess of the Night drew forth a thin, white strand from her horn and cast it backwards, tethering her to the dream realm proper. A safety line, to guard against whatever lay below. She spread her wings once more, and dove horn first in. And slammed horn first into some sort of screen. At first, she thought she had failed to penetrate the anomaly, but upon closer inspection she was no longer in the dream realm at all. To her right, she felt a writhing mass of minds: restrained, but desperate to be unleashed. But in front of her, beyond the screen, lay a very strange scene. There were three… ape-like creatures, one sitting close to the screen, and two sitting far apart on a sofa, some ways behind it. She was reminded vaguely of Sunset Shimmer’s description of the creatures from the mirror realm, but she had never seen these “Hugh Mans” with her own eyes. One of them was speaking. “… the story is, roughly, that we need to ‘make friends’ with at least one member of the Mane 6, including Luna and Starlight, at which point Celestia will invite us to Canterlot Castle to meet her”, said the ape-thing with the long mane, seated on a sofa further back from the screen. “This unlocks Canterlot as a selectable destination at the train station, which is our only way of getting to her this early in the game. This is any%, so naturally we’ll be killing her instead.” Kill Celestia?! What manner of diabolical plot had she stumbled upon? “Our only options for ‘friendship’ in this run are AJ, Rarity, Twilight, Pinkie… and, of course, Luna. And by friendship I mean dating sim. And by dating sim I mean pineapple feeding and menu sim”. Luna, while not quite as shocked as she had been at the revelation that they were planning to kill her sister, was nevertheless shocked. It was hard to decipher what exactly these creatures meant, but it seemed they intended to manipulate the element-wielders in order to get close to Tia. And if they got close enough… Perhaps this was some scheme of Chrysalis’, she thought. The changelings had been reformed, but their former queen was still at large, and doubtless hungry for revenge. From the way they spoke, they must have some agent in Ponyville; one which, for all intents and purposes, seemed like a normal pony. “What’s the vote looking like?” “Let me check…” said an unseen voice that sent odd shivers of electricity down Luna’s spine, “Twilight is still in the lead with 38 thousand dollars, but in second place, Luna has actually overtaken Rarity and is sitting at 27 thousand dollars to 25! Keep those donations coming guys.” Luna was torn. On the one hoof, how dare they try to murder her sister to solicit charity money! On the other, how dare they vote for Twilight over her?! “Luna voters, you still have time to save the run. Get out there and donate.” Now Luna was even more confused. “Let me explain”, said the ape-creature sitting closest to the screen. “All of them, for some reason, accept pineapples as gifts, which increases friendship. So any pony should be fine, right? Wrong. Luna is the fastest option by a lot. Not only does she introduce the friendship mechanic to us later, so we don’t have to go out of our way to befriend anyone, but she absolutely loves pineapples for some reason. It makes the run go by so much faster. You’ll see.” Wait. ‘The Run’? She knew what this was. She had simply been looking at this scene from the wrong perspective. She lacked context… Luna drew upon all of her Gamer instincts. It was even worse than she could have imagined… They were speedrunners. She had to warn Celestia. Tropical Slice felt like she was going insane. She could have sworn she had given this stallion his order of pineapples at least 10 times now. Yet, every time she looked up, there he was, bit bag in mouth. The floor was covered in pineapples. Finally, finally, the unicorn handed over the bits, she handed over the pineapples, and he left with his ill-gotten gains. AJ was now on her way to Rarity’s boutique, having left the cart in Big Mac’s hooves for the time being. As she approached the market entrance, she scanned the area nervously for any yellow sign of the strange unicorn. She couldn’t see him yet. She felt guilty, but a part of her feverishly hoped that he had disappeared back to whatever dimension had spat him out. Or had, at least, gotten lost in the market. Her hopes were dashed, however, when a yellow blur slammed into the ground, inches from her head, the instant she laid hoof at the market’s exit. Followed by a box of pineapples. She sighed. “Rarity! Rarity!” The boutique was closed, but that wasn’t going to stop Applejack. She was desperate. “Rarity! Ah need to talk to you! It’s an emergency! Get yer flank down here!” There were hoofsteps, followed by a distant voice. “Applejack, language! Sweetie has a friend over upstairs!” ’A’ friend? The CMCs were nigh-on inseparable… anyway– The door opened, revealing the aforementioned white fashionista unicorn. She still had mane-curlers in. “This had better be important, Applejack. It is my day off–” She leaned her head to one side, locking eyes with the yellow unicorn standing behind Applejack. “Who is–” “That’s what–” “Ah need to talk–” “Can we come–?” Applejack was glancing around nervously, ears laid flat against her head. “O-oh, well, I suppose–“ “Great!” She grabbed her unicorn “companion” and threw him bodily through the doorway. “Go on, git!” It was time. “Once we load in, I’ll be attempting one of the hardest tricks in the run. There’s a walkabout section, followed a cutscene that’s really long, explains the whole plot, and we are going to try to skip all of it. This is absolutely not marathon safe, so I’ll go for it once and if I miss we’ll just watch the cutscene normally.” Inside the boutique, Rarity was heading for the kitchen, presumably to boil the kettle for her two guests. PonyRunner, however, was interested in something else: the ponnikins lining the back wall. “It’s called the Full Reverse Half Rarity”, he said “and it’s called the Full Reverse Half Rarity because, if you discover a trick, you get to name it. And I discovered this trick.” He grabbed a ponnikin in his magic. “First, we need to speed Rarity up.” He held the ponnikin over Rarity’s head, and pushed down firmly. She felt a sudden pressure in her horn and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was in the kitchen. Funnily enough, she couldn’t remember how exactly she’d gotten into the kitchen. Or when. “...what was I doing again?” she asked herself, “oh, yes, the tea”. She took a single hoof-step forward, and suddenly found that the tea had been boiled, brewed, and placed upon the table. She didn’t remember doing any of that, either. “This is one of the only examples of a horn bonk in run. Rarity has a horn, which sticks out of her hitbox, obviously. By jamming something on her head, the game thinks she’s gotten stuck on a physics object, and just teleports her to the next pathing node. You do this way more in true ending, since there are actual unicorns you, ya know, interact with”. “If there’s one consistent theme of this run”, said Gage, “it’s the physics not knowing what’s going when things are inside each other”. Now for the difficult part. He placed the ponnikin down in front of the kitchen counter, and leapt. First, on top of the ponnikin; then, on top of the kitchen shelves. “We aren’t allowed to go upstairs, but thankfully Carousel Boutique has conveniently weird geometry. Epilepsy warning, by the way.” From there, he jumped to the clock above the kitchen window, where he perched precariously, pixel perfectly. “The ceiling curves inwards in a dome-shape, so we can do this–” He spun the camera and fired into his own face. He ragdolled straight through the wall. “We have now entered the Rainbow Hell Zone.” A garish nightmare of colours stretched on infinitely, Carousel Boutique merely an island in a sea of blinding after-images, like a hall of mirrors in a rainbow factory. “And now”, said PonyRunner, reaching below his seat, “this is how it’s going to go down”. He produced three pieces of cardboard, with a drinking cup glued between each layer, and a tiny Fluttershy figurine. “We are falling down out of here”, he mimed with Fluttershy leaving the middle layer, “and heading towards here”, placing her on the lowest layer. “We’re going to fall into the void for about 40 seconds”, he said, “I promise this is faster than watching the cutscene. Eventually we will hit this plane, called the ‘wrap point’. When we hit it, our height, the Z axis coordinates, will overflow from negative to positive. This will instantly teleport us to the height limit of the map”. He moved Fluttershy to the top layer. “But there’s a problem. We’re now in something called a ‘voidout zone’. When you’re inside a VZ, you, naturally, void out, like when you fall in a bottomless pit. This puts you back where you were just standing. Normally, there’s a value called “ActorLastStablePosition” which stores the last co-ords when you were on solid ground”, he demonstrated with Fluttershy, ”but, because we’re above the map, we have what’s called a ‘pegasus voidout’”. It was time for a certain couch commentator’s redemption arc. He turned to face the Dash Guy. “Guess Fluttershy did make an appearance after all”, he said, putting the prop down, “you do full game runs, can you explain this part?” “Oh, uh, I guess?” he said. He seemed genuinely surprised. Don’t screw this up... “Normally, the, uh, sky has a... soft boundary that pushes you downwards and back inbounds. Like, similar to the one around Applejack but weaker. Above that is something called a ‘pegasus voidout zone’, which we can glitch into with pegasus flight in full game runs. A PVZ behaves... weird? It takes your last X and Y coordinates, but instead of height it just draws a line down from the sky to find the highest stable ground, and warps us there”. “Exactly,” PonyRunner, interrupted, “and because our x and y were set when we were in the ceiling in the kitchen, the voidout warps us up from there. Directly into…” He hit the zone. Sweetie Belle was a little bored. She wasn’t really sure what she’d been expecting, but it was probably a little more… she couldn’t think of the word, but it wasn’t this! Don’t get her wrong, she was fine watching PGDQ with Button Mash. She enjoyed a good speedrun now and then, and the runs were fine this year. It’s just that Button was being so… weird! He was mostly just sitting in silence, eating popcorn and staring at the screen. Occasionally he’d risk a glance at her, before quickly looking away when he noticed her looking. And when she tried talking to him, he’d just say one word, turn bright red, and start cramming popcorn into his mouth. It was nothing like how he usually acted! What was wrong with that colt? Was it Sweetie’s fault? Was it all that… lawyer stuff? Maybe it was his mom? He’d really wanted to watch Pony Games Done Quick, but she wouldn’t let him. And with her own parents out of town (typical, she thought bitterly, but at least they weren’t Scootaloo’s parents), the only option was Rarity’s. Button had hauled the crystal TV the entire way from his house, up the stairs, and into Rarity’s “inspiration room”. Sweetie wished he’d had that kind of dedication for, you know, talking to her? She turned back to the TV. There was something… weird about this whole situation. Everything was contrived; she felt like she was being set up for some kind of prank. And if she squinted, the runner stopped looking like a pony, and the game he was playing seemed oddly familiar… There was a thump as something landed on the ceiling. “PonyRunner has to be extremely careful here. He can slide off the roof very easily” came a voice, unnaturally doubled by the TV. “He needs to stand here, and slide back inbounds on at the exact right pixel, so he hits the stairs on the same frame he activates the SweetieMash cutscene.” A yellow hoof glitched through the wall, and began to shuffle around the circumference of the room, towards the stairs. The hoof was followed by a head with a red mane. Even Button Mash had unglued his eyes from the TV. There was no need to watch it any more. It was happening for real. “We’re going to start this cutscene, and then try to leave downstairs. This tells the game we’re at a different point in the cutscene, and the Rarity cutscene gets confused and skips to the end. And oh, look, Twilight is here! And we have the saddlebag!” It was impossible to tell who grabbed who first, but one could be certain that they both screamed together. “This saves about four seconds”.