//------------------------------//
// Epilogue: Choices 
// Story: Xenophilia: Advanced 
// by SpinelStride 
//------------------------------//

"Twilight?" Pinkie Pie asked, walking with her through the market. "Do you have time tonight for a party?"

Twilight Sparkle blinked. She couldn't remember the last time Pinkie had checked with an attendee before organizing a party. She couldn't remember the last time Pinkie had checked with the host. "I guess so, Pinkie. What's it a party for?"

Pinkie smiled at her. "It's a birthday party! Just for you and me."

Twilight blinked again. There was an awful lot of back-up-and-think-again involved in talking to Pinkie Pie sometimes. "Pinkie, it's not my birthday and it's not yours either." Another thought occurred and she added, "You don't mean a... private private party or anything, do you?"

Pinkie shook her head. "No, silly! This isn't a courting thing at all. Okay, I'll see you tonight!"

Twilight watched her pink friend bounding merrily away, shook her head, and went back to her shopping.

***

"So now will you tell me what's going on?" Twilight asked, standing on the library balcony next to Pinkie. The party pony had been intensely restrained, for her; the railing of the balcony was wrapped with streamers and a trio of balloons flanked the door, and that was it. She'd brought a small cake, too, barely larger than a cupcake, unfrosted.

"Do you remember Gus?" Pinkie asked, looking down at the cake.

"Of course I remember Gus," Twilight answered. She smiled sadly. "Poor guy. He turned physics on its head. Most of what he came up with wasn't possible to discover on our own. We might never prove some of it. There's just not enough detail. It only works if you start with his assumptions about the underlying model. Most of the most interesting bits don't work at all in Equestria, but they're still a framework for the rest."

"Do you remember how Gus left?" Pinkie asked. She took out a box of candles, opened it, carefully took none out, closed the box, and set it down.

"Yes," said Twilight, and looked away. "There wasn't anything left. I couldn't look at my tiara for months."

Pinkie took out a match, lit it, waved it over the top of the cake, then blew it out and set the extinguished match aside. "And a great big silly you were being, too. He didn't leave nothing behind."

"That's a double negative, Pinkie," Twilight pointed out. "And what are you doing with that cake, anyhow?"

Pinkie reached into her mane and pulled out a contraption. It looked like a plate with one of Tank's spare rotor rigs attached to it. She put the cake onto the plate. "You were worried he left nothing behind, so he didn't leave nothing behind, he just went forward. That was eleven months ago."

"Elev... Pinkie, anniversaries are supposed to be after a year."

Pinkie shook her head, holding the cake. "It's not an anniversary party, Twilight. This is a birthday party. Somewhere there's a pegasus mommy who just had the cutest little peach-coated foal with a yellow mane and funny little black rings above his hooves and a white mark on his head, and he didn't cry at all when he came out, he laughed and hugged the doctor right then and there. And they named him Rainwright because he's going to be so good at clouds."

Twilight stared at her friend. Hope surged in her chest. "Pinkie... are you saying... Gus is alive? You had... a hunch?"

Pinkie shook her head again. "Gus didn't know what was going to happen to him, but he kept believing it was all going to be okay. He never smiled except that one time that totally didn't count and that other time that was my fault, but I was so busy trying to make him smile that I never realized he was doing something totally else and it was my Element even. He was hoping. He didn't have any Pinkie Sense or hunches or twitchy tails or anything else at all, he just decided it was going to be okay. So... I'm not taking any hunches for him or Pinkie Senses or anything else. I'm just..." She looked up at the clouds overhead. "I'm just deciding he was right and it's all okay and he's going to have a long and happy life doing anything he wants and getting to have rainbows all day. And if I meet him and he doesn't know me then I'll have a party for him all by myself. But it's been eleven months so that means he should be getting born today."

Pinkie let the cake go. The rotor spun, lifting the plate up into the sky.

Twilight put a hoof on Pinkie's shoulder. "You can invite me too."

They started to sing Happy Birthday.



[ Edit: This was later found on Pinkie's wall: ]