Reality warped and buckled beneath Twilight’s rage as she unleashed the terrifying enormity of truly unchained unicorn potential. The aura surrounding her scattered blinding light over the majority of Canterlot and the brilliance of the light emanating from her eyes eclipsed the sun itself.
Pinkie tossed some popcorn into her mouth and stared as Twilight shrieked and shook, giggling at the cloud of debris levitating around her even as the castle fell to pieces. “Wow... so THAT’S what they mean by ‘Twilight O.P. Sparkle!’”
Rising off what remained of the floor and physically pulsating with power, Twilight’s glow subsided. Without opening her mouth, she spoke with a voice that shook the heavens. “LOGIC UNDERPINS ALL THINGS. YOU ARE THE ENEMY. YOU CANNOT BE. YOU MUST NOT BE. YOU MUST NOT.”
Pinkie clapped her hooves and tipped the hat she was now wearing. “Good show, ol’ chappess. But you’re not the only one drinking the crazy juice. I totally love craisins.”
“MISCREANT, THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING: SURRENDER THE HORN.”
“I would if I could, but it’s stuck to my face,” she replied, making a show of pulling on her horn with two hooves. “See?”
Twilight blurred out of and into place so that she was practically muzzle-to-muzzle with Pinkie. “YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE,” she resonated before a bolt of energy launched from her horn. It rebounded off of some invisible barrier before it could reach its target, and Pinkie smiled.
“Not just crazy juice as in being insane, also crazy as in powerful and juice as in performance enhancer! You’d be scared to learn just how powerful I’ve become, Sparkle,” she droned, her lips twitching on the edge of curving into a smile. “I wanted to stay friends. I just wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone, huh? Why do you have to make me have to be the villain here?”
“SILENCE.”
Pinkie blew a raspberry at her friend. “Fine. I see how it is. You want me to be the bad guy? I’ll be the bad guy. It’ll be a great chance to try out some pithy one-liners!” She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. “FLAME ON!” she shouted as an aura, much like Twilight’s before, expanded outward from her and her eyes lit up with crackling arcane energies.
The two mares shot mirrored beams of power that met in an explosive reaction, wiping away the majority of the castle rubble and destroying anything unfortunate enough to be in its radius. When it faded, they found themselves in an unfamiliar place. Pinkie and Twilight drifted through a sea of stars, devoid of any recognizable features beyond twinkling lights.
Pinkie sat relatively still and blinked in silence.
Twilight cocked her head to one side. “WHAT?”
“I dunno. I think maybe we broke everything.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘EVERYTHING?’”
“Ooh, nevermind! I see something! Down there!” she shouted, gesticulating wildly at an approaching mass of yellow material.
Floating around to examine the thing from another angle, Twilight asked again, “WHAT?”
Pinkie somehow hopped through empty space to join her friend in viewing the anomaly from another angle. “Oh! Yeah, that is weird. How can stars have a war?”
Twilight blinked once, then shook her head clear of the lack of rage. “I’LL EXAMINE MY SURROUNDINGS LATER - PRIORITY ONE IS ELIMINATING YOU.” Her horn began to glow with the preliminary charge for another beam.
Pinkie frowned and bounced away. “Aw, you’re no fun. You’re not supposed to use the same attack twice!” she said before beginning her own charge.
Again the two mares loosed torrents of unimaginable power and again the collision wiped everything away, including the very space they occupied so that they found themselves in another foreign location.
Thrusting a hoof into the air, Pinkie shouted, “I know, I know! Pick me!”
Twilight glared at her.
“Every time we cross the streams, we get a total protonic reversal! But instead of exploding at the speed of light, we just get teleportatoed to somewhere else!”
Twilight continued glaring.
“What? It’s an appropriate reference for the venue, right Dr. Venkman?” she chirped to her left, receiving only the blank stares of four men in khaki jumpsuits in return. And the warning light of Twilight’s horn preparing for another assault.
“You gotta be more creative,” she said as she started up her defense and disappeared in another explosion of energy.
“WHY WON’T YOU STOP BEING?”
“Stop being what?”
“ALIVE.”
“Oh. Uh, I dunno. Word count isn’t high enough yet? Really though, we should do something else. You keep shifting us so fast I don’t have time for any pithy one-liners! And the whole universe hopping thing is way overplayed.”
A middle-aged man in denim jeans and a plain white shirt arched an eyebrow. “Are the talking horses part of the set?”
“No. No they are not,” replied a superposition of a likable white-haired old man and a rotund, unlikable, bespectacled comedy hack.
“One hundred and fifty dollars,” said the first man.
The woman to his left smirked. “One hundred and fifty one dollars.”
At that moment, without prompt from either beam, the universe rippled and warped until the setting had completely changed again. A dimwitted schlub with orange hair, blue jeans, and a red jacket put down a megaphone and began doing the Hustle next to a set of stairs. Pinkie pointed a hoof and opened her mouth to speak, but before she could the universe warped again and the two mares stood on a cliff overlooking a city being terrorized by a gigantic, sticky ball and an incredibly catchy song.
“Um... I think maybe we have a problem.”
“YOU THINK?”
Pinkie nodded. “Uh-huh! I think maybe we did too much damage and the whole universe is dying now.”
“WHAT DO YOU suggest we—” Twilight shook her head, “—DO ABOUT IT?”
Another rippling warp coursed through the tatters of reality.
Tapping a hoof against her chin before shrugging and smiling, Pinkie never stopped bouncing. “I dunno. You’re the smart one. Maybe if you could stop being so mad about all the damage I was gonna cause, you could open your eyes and realize you’ve been directly responsible for much more. Or maybe I could get back in character!”
“WHA... what?”
“There’s my girl!”
“Pinkie, where are we?”
“Now? Somewhere you probably don’t want to be. There’s this guy here who likes chimichangas about as much as I do, but I don’t think you’d be able to handle me and him at the same time. In ten seconds or so, though, I think we’re headed for Mr. Castle. If we’re really lucky, we might even see an irrepressibly chipper background character we know and love!”
Twilight suppressed the urge to blink and say nothing, instead shifting her brain into gear and running mind-boggling calculations about reality’s current half-life and what function was translating their spatial coordinates before screeching to a halt and realizing Pinkie already seemed to have the answers she needed. “How do you know where we’re going to be?”
“Lazy writing.”
Twilight blinked and said nothing. The cliff and the city disappeared and were replaced by a grim pile of corpses and an incredibly out of place cartoon pony covered in blood and smiles.
“Whatever! I’m going to assume, Celestia help me, that you’re infallible here and none of your predictions will be wrong. I’m going to come up with a plan, ask you some questions, and then maybe, maybe we can fix this.”
After a short silence and another shift, Pinkie found herself staring at two small, white rodents and adopted a face-splitting grin. “Ooh, ooh, Twilight! Ask me if I’m pondering what you’re pondering! I think this is the one about the duck and the hose!”
Twilight looked up from the scribbles she was making on the back of her hoof. “Are we ever going to land near the same place twice?”
Suddenly, Pinkie’s wings, ears, and mane all drooped and her smile disappeared.
“What did I say?”
She shook her head morosely. “Nothing... it’s just now everything really is ruined forever.”
“What?”
Pinkie almost smiled. “It’s pretty funny the way you really only do two things anymore. You used to be such a vibrant, unique pony. Maybe we can ask why you’re only blinking and asking what these days.”
“Ask? Ask who?” Twilight asked, gently shaking her friend.
“Who do you think? We’re headed to the one place we really don’t want to be.”
“Detrot?”
Pinkie’s gaze snapped up and she beamed. “That’s it! Keep going!”
“What?”
“NO NO NO NO! NO MORE WHAT! Be different! Be funny, be sarcastic, be smart! Be you!”
Twilight took a step back. “Pinkie, what in the hay is going on here?”
“We were headed for a bad end! The author was getting boxed in and wanted to work on other things but didn’t want to be a jerk and cancel this so he was going to pull a stupid, cheap ending where we appeared in his apartment and forced him to write a generic happy ending because he had no more ideas about how to stop this trainwreck, but if you can keep adding momentum, we can keep plowing through the wreckage!”
“What?”
“NO! As long as we’re interesting, the story can go on and we don’t have to be downvoted into oblivion!”
“What’s a downvote?”
“The worst possible fate!”
“Isn’t manipulating things to get fewer downvotes than you rightfully deserve a bad thing?”
“No, because—” Pinkie gasped. “Oh no! It’s happening! We’re stagnating! Look at this, it’s all talking heads and no action! Where’s the prose? Quick, do something Twilight!” Pinkie screamed, slapping Twilight across the face.
“What did you do that for?”
“Do something! React!” she said, slapping her again.
“Stop that!” Twilight said with a stamp of her hoof.
“Better!”
“Look, Pinkie, I’m completely lost here. Are you saying it’s impossible to save the world? That we have to either go down in flames or be trapped in a puppetshow forever?”
Pinkie nodded vigorously.
“And that being interesting or unique is objectively a good thing?”
She nodded twice as vigorously.
“Then wouldn’t a unique ending be the best fate for us? Going out with a bang, so to speak?”
“Yeah, totally! How do we do that?” Pinkie said, looking around before starting to dance just to fill the actionless void with something other than dialogue.
“What about teaching a valuable moral? Something about relying too much on metahumor being a bad thing? Or maybe that leaving a short piece to stagnate too long makes it hard to come back to later?”
“Are you serious? Nobody wants morals at the end! You need something bittersweet or chilling or hilarious otherwise memorable!”
“Well what do we want out of those? What kind of story were we in, a horror? So we should end on a chilling note?”
Pinkie leaned back. “Chilling? No way, this was a comedy!”
Twilight grimaced. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope! See the little yellow tag over there?”
“No, but again, Celestia help me, I’m assuming you’re correct about this stuff. So if we’re in a comedy, then the appropriate ending would be either a callback to something mildly funny that happened earlier that the readers would’ve forgotten about or a really funny joke.”
“Better Nate than lever!”
“What?”
“NO!”
“Do we have anything to go back to? Did anything get embedded in the first act that we can reference now?”
“I don’t think so... at least not deliberately.”
“Isn’t deliberately a word that shouldn’t be in your vocabulary? What’d you call that, ‘out of character?’”
Pinkie recoiled in horror. “You’re right! Oh noes... how much of that have we been doing?”
“I’d say a lot. It’s fine, nothing is off limits as long as it serves the purpose of the story and right now we’re having a meta-existential crisis that allows us to go way beyond our normal characterizations.”
“Who died and made you the queen of stories?”
“I’m a librarian,” Twilight said. “Now then, even if we can grab something that wasn’t deliberate, it might work. In fact, if it’s enough of a stretch that it becomes absurd, that might work even better for something like this.”
Pinkie’s nose wrinkled. “Um, what if we bring it all back to the very beginning?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean coming full circle and treading back over the opening as part of the ending.”
“That’d be great! Can we do that?”
“You tell me. I smell a compelling smell. Maybe even an alarming one.”
Twilight’s eyes widened. “Fire,” she mouthed as flames began to lick at the void. “But... but how? How can space be on fire?”
“Oh come on! How is it not obvious? I left the oven on!”