Accelerando
Chapter 3: Twilight Sparkle’s ‘Worst Possible Thing’
The next morning’s peaceful tranquility was shattered by the sounds of roars and screams.
The screams were from ponies. The roars were something else altogether.
Vinyl Scratch raced out of Carousel Boutique, where she had been spending the night in Rarity’s guest bedroom. “What’s going on?!” she exclaimed.
She was answered by a roar. A roar coming from a...
“Giant-sized manticore,” explained Pinkie Pie casually, having appeared out of nowhere.
It truly was that, a manticore the size of a three-story building. I think Twilight would probably give a lecture at this point of how its legs needed to be bigger to support its weight or something like that, but she’s not here, and the monster stubbornly refused to obey the Box-Ball Law or whatever it’s called.
“By the way,” Pinkie continued, “how was your sleep?”
“My—”
She was interrupted by a roar.
“My sleep?” Vinyl repeated a second later. “Wait, weren’t we just talking a—” (roar) “—second ago? How did I get—?” (Roar.)
“It was a trick question, silly!” said Pinkie. (Roar.) “You can’t remember sleeping when you’re in a dream!” She looked up rather significantly as she said those last words.
Pinkie’s weird. Oh, and roar.
“So what should I do?” Vinyl asked, craning her neck to follow the monster’s rampage a couple blocks away. (Roar.) There was something definitely off about the creature: it wouldn’t make any sounds as it walked, and then suddenly there would be a loud “crunch!”, like it had to be reminded from time to time that it was supposed to stomp like a rampaging beast.
“I think the problem’s being handled as we speak,” answered Pinkie. (Roar.) “I saw this strangely familiar yellow blur racing up from the Everfree.”
Roar.
“Hi, Vinyl. Hi, Pinkie,” said Twilight, walking up to join them.
Roar.
“Well, don’t you think we should do something?” Vinyl asked her.
Roar.
“About that?” she said, gesturing over her shoulder. Right on cue, the manticore roared once again.
“Yes!” Vinyl cried out.
“It’s a fake.”
(Roar?)
“What! Why do you think that?” the DJ demanded.
(Roar!)
“That roar, which you have been hearing repeated every five seconds—” (Another accusing glance at the sky! What do they mean when they do that?) “—is not what a manticore is supposed to sound like, not even a magically enlarged manticore. Do you know what that sound actually is?”
Vinyl listened to the next roar. “A resin-covered glove rubbed along the loosened strings of a double bass, with the sound then recorded and played back at a slowed-down speed?”
Twilight gave her a look.
“What?” Vinyl asked. “I got bored visiting Tavi one day.”
“Well I suppose that’s a right answer,” said Twilight reluctantly, “but not the answer I was looking for.” She looked over at Pinkie, who was hopping up and down and waving one hoof in the air.
“Me! Me! Pick me!”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Yes, Pinkie?”
“It’s the roar of Madragon, from Dashie’s favorite etheric show.”
“Yes, that’s the answer I was looking for,” said Twilight, nodding. “Also, it doesn’t have a shadow. Therefore, it’s an illusion. I’ve been looking for who’s responsible, and why, but I haven’t had any luck.”
Meanwhile, the sounds of screams from the inhabitants of Ponyville had changed to “ooh”s and “aah”s. In the main square, the monster had stopped its rampage, and was now slowly turning in a circle as its eyes watched the yellow blur racing around it. Every few seconds, it would lash down with its stinger, but it would always miss.
“How can I help?” asked Vinyl.
“Help?” asked Twilight. “No, you’ve got it reversed. You’re supposed to tell me how I can help you.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re the main character,” said Pinkie Pie.
“Me?” asked Vinyl incredulously. “No way. You’re the main characters, and always have been. I’m just a background pony.”
“How can you say that?” replied Twilight incredulously. “I’m sure you’ve led an exciting life. The things I’ve seen you do—”
“Yes,” interrupted Vinyl, “and all of those things I’ve done in support of you six, or the Princesses. Away from you, I’m like everypony else. I’m nopony.” She dropped her head.
Only to immediately have it raised by Twilight’s hoof. “What’s gotten into you?” she asked. “Are you forgetting that you saved Princess Celestia’s life? Twice?”
“No, Twilight,” Vinyl said firmly. “I was an instrument, a living microscope, that other ponies used to save the Princess. Don’t worry about me. I’ve known the truth for years about myself. Every concert I have given, every bit of entertainment I have ever done, served one purpose: to be the background music to accompany important doings by important ponies. Trust me, it’s a lot better than the fate that was originally planned for me.”
“And what about these powers of yours?” asked Twilight.
You told her about your powers, Vinyl? Don’t you know anything about secret identities?
“Yeah, what about those powers? When you were all falling to your deaths back in Cloudsdale, who was saving the day? Not me. It was literally physically impossible for me to save you. Fluttershy’s the real hero, the same hero who is busy saving Ponyville right now. Face it, she’s the Green Flashlight, and I’m just her rechargeable power pack.”
“You’re selling yourself short,” said Twilight. Then she looked around. “The roaring’s stopped, the manticore’s gone, and Pinkie has disappeared. We’ve got to go, but this conversation is not finished.”
Vinyl shrugged before following Twilight to the last spot where the monster had been seen.
There was no trace of the monster, which is about what you might expect given that it was an illusion. Fluttershy was found hiding under an overturned fruit cart, just how she was always found following the defeat of a hideous monster by the mysterious Yellow Flash.
Twilight cast a few spells, then headed back to the library, followed by Vinyl. “I picked up a very unusual glamour from that area,” she said. Seeing the confused expressions on their faces, she explained that it was the residue left over from a spell, which could be studied to learn various technical details and blah, blah, blah, Twilight lecture mode. “It almost seemed familiar,” she added.
At that moment, she opened the door, and in the next moment she froze in shock.
“My books...” she whispered.
Every book—every single solitary book in Twilight’s library—had been turned to stone.
The librarian raced up to a shelf and tried to use her magic to remove a volume, but they were all joined together. She then turned to a particularly thick book that was resting open on a table. The top pages could be read, but there was no way to flip to see any others.
“Who...who would do something so incredibly unfair?” Twilight asked in horror.
“Um...hello, Twilight,” the faint voice of Fluttershy said from the door behind them. “I was wondering if I could borrow...a...book?” She walked past the two ponies in the doorway to the center of the main room, looking around herself in growing fear.
With an audible “THUNK!”, Time ground to a halt.
Vinyl looked around wide-eyed at her blood-red surroundings.
“You ponies are all in incredible danger,” said Fluttershy. No, said Fluttershy’s other self, the one with the creepy eyes.
“Who are you?” Vinyl asked. “What are you?”
The creature in Fluttershy’s body sighed. “You may call me Lux,” she said. “I am a faerie.”
“The beings that live in the Dimension of Magic?” asked Vinyl. “Like the Nightmare? And Waking Terror?”
“The same,” replied Lux.
“Then you are in Fluttershy’s body for the same reason those two needed physical bodies,” realized Vinyl, “because the laws of this dimension would sooner or later tear you to pieces otherwise.”
“That is correct. Fluttershy became my host when your first Music-boom tore a temporary hole in the veil between our two realms. It appears that your second Boom yesterday opened a second hole, and another of my kind has escaped.”
“How can you tell?” asked Vinyl.
“We can recognize our own type of magic. And I know this type very well. It is the work of my sister, Umber.” The tone she invested in the name of her sibling made it obvious that the two of them didn’t get along so well. “She was always jealous of me, and of my accomplishments, and eventually it drove her mad.”
“Yeah, I noticed that madness seems to be a sort of occupational hazard for you guys,” Vinyl said flippantly, before slapping her hooves over her mouth. You know on second thought, it didn’t really sound like Vinyl speaking. Huh, weird.
Vinyl Scratch slapped DJ Pon-3, her mental alter ego, into the mental “time out” box, for speaking out of turn.
Lux gave her a long cold stare before continuing. “I was fleeing for my life when I fell into Equestria,” she said. “Fleeing...from her. And now she’s here; here to pursue her mad vendetta against me, even if it means destroying Ponyville to do it.”
“Wait, if your sister is here in Equestria, then that means she must have a host of her own, right?” asked Vinyl. “Do you faeries have any vulnerabilities when you’re stuck in a host body? Something we can use against her?”
“Our hosts are our vulnerabilities, but we can change hosts at any time. Having permission helps, but Umber is probably strong enough to take over most anypony. Or any other creature, had she the inclination.”
“Hmm, that’s not good. Just out of curiosity, what is Fluttershy getting out of this deal? I mean, does she have any privacy left whatsoever?”
“Of course I leave her her privacy,” Lux answered. “In me she has a friend, one who will never judge her for her lack of seriousness.”
“Wait, lack of seriousness?”
Whoops, lost track of my sidekick character for a second there.
“Err...lack of cruelty,” Lux answered. “Yes, that’s what I meant to say. And I gave her the ability to understand animals, so she would be able to support herself and finally move out her mother’s house.”
A respectful moment of silence, please, in honor of Fluttershy’s terrifying mother.
...
Moving on!
“That illusion I found outside,” Lux continued, “an illusion powerful enough to smash buildings and set them aflame with fire breath—that was almost certainly Umber’s gift to her host, which is why I wasn’t able to detect her before I came here. Now, how are we going to defeat her?”
“How come everypony thinks that I have all the answers?” protested Vinyl Scratch.
“Because I have nothing capable of countering her power. You are the most powerful pony in this town, perhaps in the whole world. You just need to figure out how to harness your abilities.”
Vinyl sighed deeply. “I’ll...I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s all I can ask,” said Lux, as she restarted Time and became Fluttershy again.
Pinkie Pie had walked away from the conversation between Twilight and Vinyl as soon as it had started to get awkward. “Yelling ponies always give me a tummy ache,” she told me once.
She sought out the ponies of the fire department, who were battling a monster-started blaze at her own Sugar Cube Corner. She seemed to be taking the potential loss of her home awfully lightly.
“That’s because it’s not my real home, just my dream home,” she commented.
Whatever.
In a few minutes, she put together a portable kitchen, and started feeding the fire ponies as they went on break.
One of them, an orange pegasus with a striped red and yellow mane, caught her attention. “Hey!” Pinkie called out. “You look kinda like Rainbow Dash!”
“You mean Fire Boom?” the firemare asked. “I’m her older sister, Fire Bane. Well, one of her older sisters.”
“Is that her real name?” Pinkie said with a huge grin. “I am so going to have fun with that!”
“Boom never told me that she knew any Ponyville ponies,” Fire Bane said, “she spends all her time in Canterlot.”
“Oh?” asked Pinkie Pie. “And what does she do there? Not that I don’t know, being a friend of hers and all.”
Fire Bane gave her a look. “Well the last I heard, she was leading a dance band. ‘Fire Boom and the Boomerangs’. Just like Mother planned for her.”
“Your mother wanted her to lead a band?” Pinkie asked.
“Mother wanted her to be a drummer. The last generation’s drummer hadn’t done a good enough job, so she assigned Boom at birth to surpass her. And so she did.”
Pinkie Pie gave her a rather horrified look at this news. “She picked out occupations for all of you?”
“Yup!” said Fire Bane proudly. “I was third, so I got to be the fire pony.”
“And which one gets to join the Wonderbolts?”
“None of them,” Bane said rather harshly. “The Wonderbolts are merely entertainers.”
“So are drummers,” protested Pinkie.
“Boom’s the eighth daughter. The good jobs are given to the elder sisters, like me. And the first of each generation of my family gets to be a true soldier and hero: the one and only Firefly!”
“Oh, I know Firefly!” exclaimed the pink pony. “She was a great hero twenty years ago!”
“That was my mother, Firefly IV. Firefly V is in the royal guard.”
“She doesn’t even get her own name?”
“None of us do. If you have your own name, then you might start questioning the Grand Plan of the Fireflies. Keeping the same names from generation to generation is how we guarantee that our family is the greatest ever!”
Pinkie started to back away in horror. “Right...If you happen to see, um, ‘Fire Boom V’—or whatever number she’s up to—before I do, be sure to give her my regards. We’ll have a party sometime, and she can bring her drums.”
~ ~ ~
“Wow,” said Pinkie once she was out of earshot, “and I thought Pinkamena had it rough!”