Unity
Admiral Biscuit
It was a beautiful spring day in Ponyville.
It was also a beautiful spring day near Ponyville. (That’s how geography and weather patterns work.)
Ponies were taking advantage of the beautiful spring weather to do the kinds of things one would expect ponies to do. Picnics, long walks, enjoying the park, lying on their backs and looking up at the clouds and identifying the shapes that the clouds made—something more tangible than constellations, and yet in Equestria also less random, since a cloud that looks like a sheep might have been made to look like a sheep by a pegasus who really likes sheep but she can’t get a loan from the bank to buy a sheep farm, or at least a small flock of sheep—even one sheep (and you’d think that there’d be a separate term for one sheep versus many sheep, but language is weird that way) because she’s a pegaus and everypony knows that only earth ponies are cut out to be farmers. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business: she’s not economically viable, so she makes clouds that look like sheep and every day at the weather factory she’s got a brave smile on her face but really she dies a little more inside every day she’s making clouds and not herding sheep and each and every cloud she makes is shaped like a sheep. A nuanced shepherd would be able to identify different breeds of sheep because if her calling wasn’t as a shepherd it would’ve been as an artist and yet this detail is lost to ponies on the ground. All I’m saying is that it’s not a perfect system and her cutie mark is clearly a sheep, not a cloud and anypony who says otherwise is wrong.1
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Spring was in the air, love might have been blossoming amongst the ponies visiting one of the many parks the Ponyville Tourism Board promotes (one of which has not yet suffered a monster attack; depending on who they’re trying to attract it’s either played up as being safe from monsters, or due for an attack at any time), and we don’t really care about any of that. That's all just scene-setting.
One particular pony was using the fresh spring air and the relatively balmy climate to her advantage, not packed for a picnic but instead packed for an expedition. Fashionable saddlebags, fashionable cart, fashionable pickaxe, it’s none other than Ponyville’s most swank fashionista, Rarity. And while it’s true that gems care not for seasons, it’s a lot nicer to pick them out of the ground when the weather is pleasant.
Were she the kind of pony who had a gem cutie mark, she might WERE SHE THE KIND OF PONY WHO TOOK HER CUTIE MARK LITERALLY she would of course be gem-finding in all kinds of weather but in her opinion her cutie mark meant making fashionable dresses and dress accessories. Did I mention it wasn’t a perfect system? ‘Cause it ain’t.
Anyway, Rarity had her gem-finding spell and a pickaxe and a light lunch in case she got hungry ‘cause she was too prim and proper to just nom on the flora like any earth pony might, and since she was multi-talented and multi-tasking, she also was keeping an open mind for things that might influence her to come up with a late Spring fashion lineup or an early Summer Fashion lineup—or Autumn, even, ‘cause let’s be honest there’s some lead time required and everybody knows that Spring is the same as Autumn except that they’re reversed (unlike Summer and Winter, which are clearly opposite; Rarity was a successful fashionista since she understood that making a new Summer lineup required her to be inspired by winter and then do the opposite [or sometimes the same, just to mix things up, keep ponies guessing, etc.]).
Rarity isn’t a pony given to whistling jaunty tunes, or—Celestia forbid—actually singing popular music. Wasn’t ladylike, at least in her opinion, certainly not out in public. Unless she were singing with the Ponytones, of course.
But you can imagine that she might have been, as she trotted to her favorite getting spot, a place where the gems seemed to spring up out of the ground. It was a place of good memories, and a few that weren’t so great but the thing with memories is sometimes you had to have a few bad ones with the good ones, that’s just life.
One thing it was not—or, more specifically, had not been until just now—a crime scene.
Technically, I suppose, a crime scene is a crime scene the moment the crime is committed . . . at that scene. Even if it isn’t discovered until some time later.
Rarity had been looking for gems; what she found instead was the grisly remains of a murder. The victim had been worked over with a pickaxe, very similar (at first glance) to the pickaxe that she, herself, was carrying. The very pickaxe with which she had intended to chip away at rocks to discover hidden treasure within.
That did not occur to the fashionista/miner when she stumbled upon the scene, of course. Nor would it occur to anypony with a shiny conscience; their first thought would be to notify the appropriate legal authority.
Or, in the case of our fantastic fashionista, faint.
She did not. For one, when she’s not playing a character, Rarity is tough as nails and the first to throw a hoof in a fight. Furthermore, there was no point in fainting without witnesses, what was she going to do, just lie there for a while (and maybe the murderer was still around) and then recover and trot off to Ponyville to report a body?
Moreover, if she were to faint she’d land on the dirty ground which was simply Not Done; a proper ladylike swoon required a fainting couch or some other couch-like furnishing on which to collapse. If she’d seen the murder occuring, maybe falling to the floor would have been acceptable, but she hadn’t. Just a corpse. And various bits of corpse strewn around hither and yon.
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Ponyville hadn’t invented 911 (or 999, or whatever phone number gets you emergency services in your particular locale). If they had—and if they had also invented cell phones—she might have just let her hooves do the walking. Instead, she had to let her hooves do the walking, right back to Ponyville, where she reported to——
Ponies also hadn’t invented police. If there was a crime that needed solving, it was going to require a smart citizen and maybe some Film Noir or a bubble pipe or Twilight Sparkle because she was smart in a different way than Rarity or Pinkie Pie.
In the case of a murder, Rarity judged that Twilight would be a more immediately helpful resource, and would be sympathetic to the unicorn (her, not Twilight) dramatically fainting as she recounted The Horror.
She didn’t gallop back to Ponyville for three reasons. One: it was unladylike to gallop. Two: if the murderer were still around and if they tried to murderize Rarity, they’d find out why giant crabs and dragons and guitars feared her. Three, it would make her coat all sweaty.
Rarity did trot for some of the journey, since it was faster, and since a pony in motion doesn’t have to think too much about what she’s fleeing.
She could have barged in, a murder was a perfectly valid reason to, but she knocked and waited, and by the time Twilight answered the door, her chest was heaving, her mascara streaked, and:
“Rarity? I—”
“Oh, it was horrible, darling; I was out in the badlands near my secret spot to find some gems on this fine spring day and I came across a body, a dead body, the scene of a most brutal murder.”
And then she fainted.