It was a night like any other in Equestria. The stars were shining, the moon was bright, and Twilight Sparkle was up late studying again. In fact the only unusual thing about that night could be completely disregarded on the grounds that the pony it involved was regularly doing unusual things, and therefore unusual behavior on her part was considered normal. However, the reasons behind her usual unusual behavior tonight were rather unusual.
For the first time in a very long time, Pinkie Pie had gotten in a fight with the Cakes.
Not a physical fight, mind you, but a very heated verbal one. She was so upset, she couldn’t even remember what had started the fight in the first place, but she certainly remembered how it had ended. She was fairly certain the neighbors could remember how it ended too, given the volume of the argument.
How could Mrs. Cake say something like that to her?
The fight had ended with Pinkie running from the building in tears, her mane and tail straightened out, heading for the edge of town at a speed that would have put Rainbow Dash to shame. She had headed straight for the very outskirts of the Ponyville area, a place so far outside of town, only Derpy would have been willing to go the distance to deliver the mail there, and only for the promise of at least three muffins.
The old abandoned rock farm…well, technically it wasn’t abandoned. Technically Pinkie owned the place. Technically she was supposed to be living there, and technically Derpy should have been getting three muffins a day to deliver Pinkie’s mail.
But alas, Pinkie’s talent wasn’t rock farming, and she hadn’t been old enough to live by herself when the place became hers. By chance, she had ended up living with the Cakes until she was old enough to live on her own, and continuing to live with them after that. The farm had been left alone, as the land it was on top of was only good for few things besides rock farming, which was a completely outdated practice.
It was a place of solitude, where Pinkie could be alone if she felt like it. Whenever something was upsetting her she would come out to the rock farm. The entire property was hers to do whatever she wanted with it. Sometimes she’d just walk around, looking at the rocks that were still in the fields, having not been moved in years, and other times, when she felt a need to keep busy, she’d grab a toolbox and some supplies and start fixing up the old house, if just to make sure it didn’t fall down. She always took at least one day off in a month to make sure that house was still in good shape.
There were other times where she’d simply walk up the hill behind the house, sit down by the five headstones at the top, and visit with her family.
Tonight felt like a night to keep busy.
It was around midnight, when the pink pony took a break from her work. The roof had needed fixing, so that was where she found herself lying on her back looking up at the stars. It was very early autumn, so it was just starting to get cold out, but the coolness felt nice after working so hard. She had almost forgotten why she was out there to begin with…almost.
The party pony sighed, and began to contemplate what to do about her situation, when she was distracted by an oddity in the night sky. One of the stars was green and it was getting bigger. About ten seconds after she noticed it, her tail started getting twitchy, and her brain put two and two together.
The Green light wasn’t getting brighter; it was getting closer…and judging from the way things looked, it was going to crash straight into the house Pinkie was lying on top of.
The pink pony was still for another ten seconds before she realized that sitting on the roof of a building that was about to be hit by an object falling from outer space was probably a bad idea.
It took another five seconds for her to realize that she should be moving out of the way by now, seeing as how the object was getting really, really close.
Pinkie rolled off of her back and quickly got to a standing position, before running for the ladder she used to get on the roof. Unfortunately, she forgot about her toolbox, and tripped over it on the way to the ladder. She fell hard, hitting her face on the roof, before rolling down the slope, and falling off the top of the house. She hit the ground two stories bellow in a belly flop, and discovered that as painful as that was when jumping into water, it was more painful when hitting dry land. Her house subsequently exploded behind her as the falling space object crashed through it.
After taking a few minutes to recover from her painful landing and to wait for debris from her house to stop falling, Pinkie got to her hooves and turned around to see just how bad the damage was.
It was bad.
The whole center section of the roof had been replaced by a giant hole, leaving roughly half the upstairs bedrooms exposed to the elements, and every window in the house had shattered from the force of the impact. After she’d been staring at it for a few seconds, the chimney collapsed, falling into a pile of bricks and dust. It was officially beyond her ability to repair.
Tears started welling up in the pink pony’s eyes, as she gazed upon her now ruined foal hood home. After years of putting tender loving care into it to make sure it would always be there, it had been wrecked in a matter of seconds by…
“What exactly was that thing?” She suddenly pondered out loud. Whatever it had been, she was going to have a talk with it about how mean it is to fall from the sky and crash through buildings that didn’t belong to it. Even Tom had more manners than that, and he was a rock!
She walked around to the back of the house, since the thing had shot straight through it, and spotted a crater by the hill where her family was. She quickly rushed over to it and was greeted by a sight that would change her life forever.
Inside the crater was a being the likes of which Pinkie had never seen before. It had arms and legs, like a monkey, but its head and tail looked more like a cats. Its body was covered in white fur with black stripes, which reminded Pinkie of Zecora. Over the creatures body was a green and black suit. On the middle of its chest was a solid white circle with a symbol inside of it: a circle with a horizontal line on the top and the bottom, all of which were green.
Now, Pinkie was no doctor, but she was pretty sure that the large gash on its left shoulder was a bad thing, as were the large number of claw marks over its body, all of which were slowly leaking a purple substance that the pink pony could only assume was the creature’s blood. It lay there, on its back, looking like a mess, and Pinkie completely forgot that she was supposed to be mad at it for wrecking the house. She hopped into the crater and quickly trotted over to the being.
“Hey…are you going to be okay?” She asked, even though she was sure she knew the answer. “Do you need a doctor? Because I think I can go get a doctor if you need one. It wouldn’t take me too long, I swear.”
The creature’s eyes opened. They were green, with cat like pupils. It glanced at her as best it could without moving its head.
“No thank you. I do not think there is much your doctors could do for me.” It spoke, its voice definitively masculine. It sounded proud and brave, but gentle too. Whatever this creature was, it had a kind heart…or equivalent thereof. It was some sort of alien after all. For all Pinkie knew, its brain was in its tail and its stomach was in its head.
Its voice also sounded weak, and in pain. Pinkie sat down next to the creature on its left, brushing a bit of her long mane out of her face as she gave it a warm and comforting smile, as opposed to her usual giant toothy grin.
“Well, okay then, if you’re sure you don’t need one. My name is Pinkamina Dian Pie.” The pony frowned for a moment, wondering why she had given the alien creature her full name. She quickly dismissed it, as it most certainly wasn’t the strangest thing happening right now, and was therefore not important. “Everyone just calls me Pinkie though. What’s your name?”
“I am Saban Ran’ger, Green Lantern of Sector 1847.” He replied, before coughing weakly.
Pinkie gasped slightly as she had a sudden realization. “Green Lantern! Of course! I knew I’d seen that symbol somewhere before! The Symbol on your chest is the same one that’s on Green Lantern’s uniform!” She gasped again. “Oh my gosh! You’re a Green Lantern from a whole other planet! This is so exciting! My first extraterrestrial encounter is with a super hero from another world!”
Saban chuckled a bit, before it turned into another coughing fit. He spoke again when the fit had passed, smiling slightly. “That’s just my luck; crash landing on my partner’s home world while she’s away.” He sighed heavily. When he continued speaking again, his voice sounded tired and defeated. “Perhaps she’ll find some comfort in the knowledge that my replacement will be from her home world. That I at least didn’t die alone on a completely unfamiliar world.”
Pinkie gave him a worried look. “Die? What do you mean ‘die’? You said you didn’t need a doctor.”
“I said, I didn’t think there was much your doctors could do for me. My injuries are fatal and I am an alien; they wouldn’t know the first thing about how to help me. I’m most definitely going to die…”
The pink pony found her eyes starting to water for the second time that night. “No. You can’t die; you haven’t even gotten your party yet.”
“My…party?” Pinkie nodded. “What party? When did I get a party?”
“I throw all my new friends parties. Yours is going to be a big one, since we’ll have so many reasons to celebrate. You’re new in town, you’re my new friend, you’re a super hero, you’re an alien visiting from another world, and, most importantly, your not dying. Because if you do die, then you can’t be there for any of it, and that would be really awkward since it’s going to be your party. So you have to stay alive to be there.” The Pink pony sniffed a little bit, as the tears started coming from her eyes. “Besides, I don’t even know what you that well yet. I’ve never met an alien before; I can’t throw a party for you unless I know what you like. I’ve got to know what color balloons to get, what shape the piñata should be, what kind of cake to bake, how many-”
“You…” the alien interrupted “…you consider me your friend?”
“Of course; why else would I throw you a party?”
“But…you barely know me…”
“Yeah, but I know enough. Your name is Saban Ran’ger. You’re an alien, and a Green Lantern. You know my Green Lantern, and called her your partner, which means you’re a hero like she is. And I know you’re my friend.”
Saban was quiet for a moment. He coughed again, and a small amount of his purple blood came out with it this time. He looked at the crying pink mare, a native of his partner’s home world. She was a being that wanted to fetch doctors for him, to throw a party for him, to be his friend. She had known him only a few short moments and already she was distraught at the thought of his death and begging him not to die.
“Never before have I met a creature that cared so deeply for its fellow living beings, no matter what they may be. I can honestly say there is no other being among the stars I would rather have with me in my final hours.”
“Don’t say things like that. You’re going to live. You have to live. The world you’re from needs it’s Green Lantern just as much as Equis needs ours.”
Saban turned his head to look at Pinkie. His eyes were filled with sadness as he spoke. “Pinkie…my planet was destroyed long ago. I am the only survivor.”
Hearing him say that broke Pinkie’s heart. She couldn’t even imagine what that would feel like; being the only surviving creature from her whole planet. The friend that lay before her, dying, had had his whole world taken from him. He was all alone; the last of a race that was about to be extinct.
“Pinkie, there is one thing I absolutely must do before I pass on.” Saban said with a tone of conviction in his weak voice. “This was no chance meeting. The ring has chosen you, Pinkamina Dian Pie of Equis, to join the Green Lantern Corps.”
Saban raised his right arm and brought it over to her. She noticed a green ring on his hand that had the same symbol that was on his chest on it. “Hold out your right hoof please.” He asked.
Pinkie complied, lifting and holding out her front right hoof. With his left hand, he removed the ring, before putting it back in his right hand. Without a word, he carefully took her out stretched hoof with his left hand, and moved to put the ring on it.
“I don’t think it’s going to-” She started to say, when the ring began to glow green. As it touched her hoof, the glowing ring stretched around it like a rubber band. When the glowing stopped, Pinkie had brand new green bracelet. In hindsight, she probably should have seen that coming.
“You are now the newest member of the Green Lantern Corps. Say the oath to the lantern, and the guardians will explain everything to you.” Saban told her. “This is the oath; listen carefully and commit it to your memory: In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.”
As soon as he finished saying that, two things happened. First, Saban had another coughing fit, this time coughing up a significantly greater amount of blood. Second, the ring Pinkie now wore shone brightly, in a brilliant green flash. When the light (and Saban’s coughing) died down, Pinkie saw a new object floating in the air in front of her. It was a lantern, similar to the type that Pinkie had seen railroad workers use. It was green, the same shade as the ring, and a bright green light radiated from the holes in the front and back. All in all, it looked incredibly similar to a 3-D version of the symbol on the ring. She sat there staring at it for a few moments, before another coughing fit from Saban snapped her out of her trance.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say the oath?” he asked once finished.
She looked at him, then back at the lantern. Her pinkie sense tingled, informing her that if she did say the oath, she was going to experience something almost nopony else in the world had ever experienced before, something that would put all the rest of the strange stuff happening tonight to shame in terms of weirdness, something that was going to be, as Tick Tock (the pony who used to live in the blue box that now belonged to Time Turner) would say, fantastic.
But it would also take her far away, and leave her dying friend all alone.
“Do I…do I have to do it right now?” She asked, casting a worried glance at her alien friend. “I know you said it was important and stuff, but…but I don’t want to leave you here, all alone. Can’t it wait just a little while?”
Saban didn’t know how she knew the lantern would take her away, but he knew the answer to her question was: “It can wait, just for a little bit.”
Pinkie smiled a warm smile, glad she could stay by her friend even if she knew that he was going to die. The thought of him dying made a question pop up in her head. “Do you want me to bury you? When you die, I mean. It seems like that would be the appropriate thing to do, but I don’t know if aliens do that kind of thing, or if they prefer cremations, or if there’s something else they do…”
Her friend coughed a bit before responding. “Thank you for asking; not many would think to ask about such things. A proper grave would be nice, and if I’m not mistaken the traditions of yours are not too different from the traditions of mine.”
This put another question in Pinkie’s head. “Could you tell me what your world was like?”
“I…I would be happy to tell you, my friend.” He answered with a smile. “My home world was a planet called Eltar…”
He began talking, telling her everything he could of his home world. He told her about the plants and animals, about his people and culture, about his friends and family and the love of his life. And as he told her, even though his voice grew weaker and breathing became harder for him, even though Pinkie started crying again because she could tell his time was near, it was apparent to both of them that he was the happiest he had been in a long time. He was already at peace; ready to move on, and join the rest of his race.
Pinkie sat and listened, committing everything to memory. Even though she cried as he got weaker, she smiled knowing he wasn’t going to die sad and alone. She waited with him until his time came, and when he thanked her for doing so, she simply told him “It was the least I could do for a friend.”
Seconds later, he breathed his last breathe, and smiled.
*
Where there had once been five headstones upon the hill behind the old Pie family house, there were now six. The newest one, placed slightly separate from the rest, had been hoof made by the sole surviving member of the family. Pinkie’s talent might not have been working with rocks, but it was the family business and she had grown up learning how. The new headstone may not have been fancy, but it didn’t need to be. All it had to do was sit there and show it’s engraving to anyone that came by and read it.
“Here rests Saban Ran’ger, the last survivor of Eltar, a Green Lantern, and a dear friend.” Pinkie read aloud, wiping the last of her tears away. It was sad, really; not only was nopony ever going to believe her if she told them about it, but she also was going to have to earn the money to repair the damage he’d done when he crashed through the house, because she was pretty sure her insurance didn’t cover extraterrestrial crash landings.
She sighed, tired from the work of the day and staying up at such a late hour…or was it an early hour? She glanced up at the night sky and managed to estimate that it was way past Twilight’s bed time, which was saying something since Twilight stayed up later than most of the ponies in town.
The party pony turned and started to head towards the road to town, when she spotted the lantern from before. It was still floating there, right over the crater, exactly where it had appeared. She had completely forgotten about it after Saban had started telling her about his home. She glanced at the ring on her fetlock, pondering what to do.
“On the one hoof…” she said out loud to nopony in particular “…it’s really late and I’m really tired and I totally need to go get some sleep.” She paused for a moment, and then looked back at the most recent grave on the hill behind her. “On the other hoof, he said it was important, and it’s been way longer than ‘a little while’. I told him I’d do it, and I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t keep my word.”
With her mind made up, she trotted over to the lantern, staring at it silently for a moment, as she tried to remember the words she had been told.
“Um…In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power…Green Lanterns light!”
As soon as the pink mare finished, the light of the lantern brightened, shining at such intensity that Pinkie was forced to shield her eyes. When the light died down, the party pony found herself inside a transparent green bubble, and the lantern had disappeared.
“Uh…” Pinkie said nervously to herself, as she pushed against the bubble with her front hooves, only to find that it was much, much stronger than the soap made bubbles that she was used to. “Didn’t Saban say something about guardians and me getting an explanation? Because now would be a good time for somepony or alien to start explaining what’s going on.”
The bubble started rising off the ground, slowly at first, but getting faster with each passing second. Soon Pinkie was higher than the top of Canterlot Mountain, and showing no sign of slowing down. She looked above her, and saw the moon was getting larger as she continued her only some-what expected trip. She swallowed back the lump of fear in her throat.
“Well…I always did want to see what the moon was like.” She told the bubble. “Luna wouldn’t tell me much about it when I asked, except that it was dusty, empty, boring, and had no air.”
As she breached the upper atmosphere, she was happy to note that the bubble was apparently providing air for her, so she wouldn’t suffocate in the vacuum of space. She was also slightly relieved and concerned when instead of landing on the moon, the bubble and her simply passed the giant satellite, literally missing it by just a few yards.
“Well…I guess Luna was telling the truth.” She said as the moon began to get smaller and smaller as the bubble traveled further and further away from Equis. Pinkie looked back at her world, hoping to see what Luna had had the privilege of seeing during her less than privileged thousand years on the moon. Sadly her she was already so far away she could barely see it, what with the moon obscuring part of it and the sun shining in her eyes at the same time.
Speaking of the sun, Pinkie couldn’t believe Princess Celestia moved something that huge every single day. The giant fireball was enormous! How did she do it?
At that moment, the pink pony was privileged to be the second non-alicorn equine to receive an answer to that very question. She just barely spotted a midnight blue aura around the moon, and glanced over at the very edge of the sun (doing her very best to not look directly at it, lest she hurt her eyes) to see a familiar golden yellow aura surround it. The auras shone around their respective objects for a few seconds, before dissipating, leaving it looking like nothing had happened.
It was rather anti-climactic.
Seeing the spells that moved the sun and moon activate brought a new thought to Pinkie’s mind: Was it morning already? It hadn’t seemed that late when she’d said the oath thingy. Her mind turned to all her other friend who would be starting the day. Berry Punch would be walking out into the park for her morning Yoga and Tai Chi exercises, while Vinyl Scratch would just be getting back home in time to say hello to Octavia as the cellist left to catch the train into canterlot. Applejack and Big Macintosh would be finished with breakfast and starting to work, while Dashie hit the snooze button on her alarm clock for the first of many times. Everypony would be having a nice ordinary day…
…while she was stuck in a glowing green bubble heading (possibly) farther out into space than either of the princesses had ever gone in their lives…
…and there didn’t appear to be an in flight movie or snacks.
“This is going to be a long trip…” Pinkie told the bubble, before she curled up, getting as comfortable as she possibly could. “…I hope my friends will be okay without me until I get back.” She muttered as she finally drifted off to sleep.