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// Chapter 3: A Memory of a Smart Pony 
// Story: Underped 
// by Unwhole Hole 
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It was a small room, barely a closet. Derpy rarely entered it because of how sad it made her—but she doubted she could get much sadder than she already was.  

She had placed a jar of fireflies on her desk, and their blueish glow filtered through the dusty air. In the shadows, she looked up at the dirty sheets of glass covering two framed documents on her wall. She could no longer read them, but she knew what they were. Diplomas from her two doctorates.  

On the cluttered surface of the desk were a few remnants of other documents and, shoved into one corner at the far end, a set of black-and-white photographs of a younger version of herself. In one she was smiling to the camera while wearing her uniform—and in another one, She was standing with with the other fliers of Forward Analysis and Reconnaissance Scout Squadron. In both, her eyes were looking directly forward at the camera, because those images were from before that day. The sudden flash, the boom she never even heard, and the plume of metal that passed so easily through her skull. When a griffon shrapnel-shell had killed all her dreams.  

She put her head on the table and cried softly and alone. It had been easier when her daughters had been there. They were the only good thing that that day had ever led to, the only things worthwhile that she had ever found on her redirected path. But they were gone. Not permanently, of course, but they were away from her. Living their own lives. It was so much harder to deal with the nights all alone—and with the memories. Half-remembered times of when the world had been so clear, when thoughts had come so easily, when things made sense.  

It left her wondering what she still had. If there was anything left at all. 

She stood up and walked through her empty, dark, decaying house. She stopped at the kitchen and looked at the racks of muffin ingredients. The one thing she could still do, the barest remnant of her years spent in the most prestigious research laboratories in Equestria working with detailed synthetic chemistry procedures and aliphatic compound analysis.   Muffins.  

Her eyes—or at least one of them—came to the bottle of poisonberry extract. She approached it and, with a shaking hoof, took it, removing the cap with her teeth. A small skull-shaped cloud puffed out and she stared at it, still shaking, her mind moving in a direction she could not control as she lifted the bottle.

Then, in a moment of clarity, she threw it to the ground, screaming and crying all at once as it shattered against the floor. She kicked her table, overturning it, with the recoil causing her to slip in the poisonberry sauce and fall to the floor with a thud. As she landed, she felt pain—and felt as it resided. She wished she could stay down there forever. Where she would never hurt anypony again.

And, as she lay there, a piece of paper fluttered down onto her face. She very nearly inhaled it and choked, but when she spat it out, she saw it was the one that the Doctor had read to her—from the hospital.  

She could not read it, but she knew what it was. And she decided, in that moment, what needed to be done.