//------------------------------//
// Chapter 9 - PseudoBob 
// Story: Cheerilee's Normal Day 
// by PseudoBob Delightus 
//------------------------------//

She saw the portal snap shut from the outside, just as she heard the whoosh of air and the silencing of doubled sound, and she felt immersed in an eerie blankness that pressed against her eyes. It was neither dark nor light, and neither close nor distant.

"Cheerilee!" she heard from her bones, as Twilight stared at a pony-shaped cloud of dust. "What's gotten into you? And," she shook her head, which just made both of them more disoriented, "where are you?"

Cheerilee frowned. She couldn't think of anything to say. Her heart leapt into her throat when she looked down and saw more emptiness where the ground should have been, but it didn't feel like she was falling. An exploratory step forward found some kind of surface, so she took another step, then another.

Twilight paced and mumbled for the both of them. "If she can't hear me, maybe the sensorium link is blocked by the barrier between dream and reality. No, I'm still receiving from her, so maybe it's one-way only… Or something strange is happening to her in there that bypasses the sensorium. Of course, if it's a dream, it doesn't follow normal sensation pathways, right?"

She glanced at Shining Armor and Discord, who both shrugged.

"Oh, I wish Luna was here…"

Meanwhile, Cheerilee kept walking, and found the amorphous surface beneath her start to feel like dirt and grass - then, as if it had been around her all along, a light breeze brushed her coat, and clouds drifted through the sky, and a pair of unicorn foals played on a distant hill. The colt held a bundle of string, leading distantly to a fluttering kite, while the younger filly jumped and laughed.

They wondered simultaneously, "Wait, is that the Queen and her brother?" "Wait, is that me and Shining?"

"So it worked!" Twilight cheered. "Cheerilee, if you can hear me, just keep exploring, see if you can find what you found before. If you can't hear me, then…" She trailed off into mumbling. "Just keep doing what you're doing, I guess. I'll work on getting you out of there in case something happens."

Cheerilee just kept walking, and as she did the young Shining Armor faded into the fog, the young Twilight Sparkle folded through time and age, and now the school-age filly sat hunched over a reading desk by candle light. As she took notes, her quill snapped in her mouth, and in a fit of frustration her horn alighted - lifting another quill and shooting it into the desk with such force that its nib poked out the other side. Judging by the smile on Twilight's face - seen and felt - Cheerilee guessed this was a happy memory.

She tried walking in the direction of the desk. Of course, the desk came no closer. It too folded into other memories and dreams, mostly to do with books and study. This imagery, coupled with the double-sight of the real Twilight scanning some dense tome of magic, was still utterly disorienting. At least there was nothing to trip on around here. Cheerilee moved on.

Eventually she encountered a memory-image of Princess Celestia. This felt like another happy memory, but it emanated a strange feeling that struck Cheerilee in the heart. There was something wrong here, and it came from that direction. She walked towards Celestia and wondered if Twilight could feel that too.

Beyond Celestia was a complex memory space that Cheerilee didn't know how to interpret at first. A brilliant geode; a city skyline; a flock of butterflies; a barn dancehall; an artificial rainbow. At the center of it all was a large purple egg. A great flash of magical chroma enveloped the egg, bursting it open, revealing a baby dragon that Cheerilee recognized as Spike.

But that wasn't the core of the memory. That wasn't the wrong part of it. It was something about the other concepts, something tying them all together. She couldn't tell what to look for until she heard Twilight mumble, "you found where I got my cutie mark, huh?" Right! She'd heard that story before - each bearer of the Elements getting their cutie mark at the exact same time.

Cheerilee looked at her flank, and found a blank, lavendar canvas, corrupted indelibly by a fallen star. The darkness was all around her now. The fog of the dreamworld was suddenly oppressive like deep water. She ran, but felt the weight of the water around her, slowing her down, pressing in on her, crushing her.

Dreams of study multiplied. Books towered from formless ground to formless sky. Celestia, and soon Luna, loomed in all directions, fading over distance but sharpening in intensity. Twilight's dream-self shrunk as she aged, overshadowed by monsters, disasters, and the tightening threads of fate. These were not good memories. These were oppressive nightmares.

And it all started at her cutie mark.

Cheerilee tried to stay calm as she shouted, "Twilight!"

Twilight had already been flipping through pages and assembling notes for a spell of some kind. "Don't worry, I'll get you out," she replied, absently.

"No, listen!"

"I-" Twilight's brows furrowed. "You can hear me?"

Lightning struck in the distance as the horrific character of the dreams became more pronounced. "Yes, just, stay calm, I think it's making this worse. Please."

The dreams momentarily got worse before they got better, as Twilight took some deep breaths. "Okay."

"That memory, where you hatched Spike's egg and got your cutie mark, I think that's the source."

The dream-world twisted, pulling Cheerilee back to the scene. Twilight was thinking aloud, "No, that can't be right. That was the best moment of my life! How could that be where the darkness is coming from? And besides, how could it have spread to other ponies, other creatures?"

Cheerilee struggled to put the words together, knowing they'd sound worse than in her head: "You think your cutie mark binds you and your friends together, as if by fate. But it doesn't!"

Twilight's face made a strange expression that Cheerilee couldn't map onto any she'd felt before. "But, that's… But it does! It has to, doesn't it?" She looked to Discord, then Shining Armor. "How can you say it's not fate?"

In the dream, shadowy arcs leapt off of Twilight's cutie mark and grasped whatever they could, including Cheerilee, making her stagger and gasp. She sunk to the ground, even though there was no ground to sink to.

"Because there's-" - she strained - "-no such thing!"

Tears welled in both of their eyes as images of Twilight's friends flew past and faded into the fog. "So it's meaningless?" Twilight asked. "It could have happened any other way, but it didn't, and there's no reason?"

The arcs tightened further, and with the last of her breath, Cheerilee whispered, "You made it happen…" Wordlessly she mouthed, "You chose a life with meaning."

Nothing happened for a moment, but then the arcs of shadow snapped like old rope, the deep water of the dream world cleared to fog, and Cheerilee could breathe again. She wasn't sure if she was sobbing too or if that was just Twilight.

Shining Armor pulled his sister into his hooves, and they had a good cry for a minute or so, until Cheerilee asked, "Okay, can you get me out of here already?"

"Oh, right. Sorry."





Cheerilee hopped through the portal back onto solid ground, which she would have kissed if she wasn't in the presence of royalty. Twilight Sparkle surprised her with a hug, which she accepted, but then they focused on the three fillies trapped in that same darkness - that same obsession with the fate of friendships and talents - and considered how they'd solve those problems. But now that they knew what the source was, they at least had hope.

Discord, meanwhile, began to slink away.

"Well, ladies, it seems my assistance was perfectly satisfactory. I'll just be on my way and-"

He froze, stuck in a barrier of Shining Armor's color.

"Oh, no you don't," Twilight said. "We're not done with you. Not by half."

Discord's greasy smile wilted, and he rolled his eyes. "What are you going to make me write one of those pointless friendship lessons again?"

Twilight glanced at Cheerilee, and both of them smiled.

"Oh, I do not like that," Discord said. "You're going to jump to another scene, aren't y-"





"-ou yes you are."

Discord found himself in front of a classroom chalkboard. Sun crawled across the wooden floor. A wide ceiling fan spun lazily from the rafters. And Cheerilee's students, two dozen fillies and colts, were staring in rapt attention, as if they couldn't believe what they'd just learned.

Cheerilee, too, watched on, apparently impressed by what she'd seen.

Discord sighed, rubbed his face, and put on a work-in-progress smile before asking, "Any questions?"