Party Foul
• • • •
Sunny gasped as the dream before her took shape. She held a hoof to her mouth, her eyes growing wide with shock. It was her. It was the real her.
It was Princess Celestia.
She lay slumped and unconscious before stubby, shivering amber hooves, a trickle of shimmering blood running from a small, cross-shaped cut at the base of her horn. The crimson-pink liquid magic dribbled in tiny, grasping droplets, pooling beneath her cheek and along the white marble floor of the castle. Sunny blinked, half expecting it to be gone when she opened her eyes once more, but there it was. At once deeply, impossibly surreal, and tangibly vivid.
Sunny’s trembling hoof rose, gently touching a small, cross-shaped scar buried beneath her fur. Parish had told her it had been from a fall. A misplaced hoof, perhaps, or a forgotten wound, from some ancient battle. Sunny had thought this quite impossible. She had never once bled, since she had become what she was. She hadn’t even thought she could.
She squinted as Luna’s vision grew lighter, steadily beginning to fade. All around Celestia’s body, there floated… wisps, without weight or form. Coiling clouds of light. One stood out from the rest, drifting lazily away from her horn, pulling apart into nothing. Words. Words she could read. You have a good heart.
She felt a small jostle on the bed, and her eyes fell onto Joe’s. He sat at Luna’s hooves, gazing at her with a look of profound shame. Not embarrassment, or the flustered shock from moments prior, but true, harrowed shame. His ears pressed against his head as he lowered his gaze, the vision above fading away as it settled back into Luna’s horn. The princess hesitantly rose to her hooves behind him.
Luna took a surprised glance at Sunny, then to Joe. She cleared her throat. “Ah, apologies. Our concentration... waned, for a moment.” Silence persisted as Joe looked away, and Sunny stared distantly at the bedding. “You... needn’t despair, little one. What you saw was but a nightmare. It was no more real than any such fantasy.”
Sunny glanced at Joe, watching his mouth open to protest a point, only to pause, and silently close shut. He couldn’t seem to look at Sunny. She was quite sure what Luna had just said was not entirely true.
Luna looked with concern to her subjects. In but moments, the air of the room had gone from libidinous delight to stifling and sombre. She turned her gaze upon the stalwart baker at her hooves, floating her horseshoes to his side.
“Take these to the dresser. We desire a moment.”
Joe nodded in hasty affirmation before clumsily bundling the glassware with his foreleg and pouncing off the bed. Luna waited a beat, then turned to Sunny.
“Art thee quite all right?” Luna spoke softly, in a firm, but calming tone. Her ears fell as she leveled a sympathetic look. “Please… do not be frightened. Such wanderings of the heart are prone to flares of the fearsome, but they are no more than fantasy. Thou art safe with thy princess.”
Sunny swallowed, leaning close as her voice dropped to a whisper. “Little sister, I-I… do you truly not recognize me?” She gazed into Luna’s eyes, to the bright ring of pink that trembled in place as she thought. Her silence was her answer. “I do not know what has affected our kingdom, or what seems to have affected you, but you must try and remember how it was. How we were.”
After a thought, Luna took a deep breath, and hesitantly gazed at Sunny. Her expression softened, and for a moment, she looked to her desk. "I..." She narrowed her eyes, and lowered her head for a moment, before turning back to her sister. "I am sorry. I do not understand." She gave a sympathetic look, the pink ring growing subtly brighter. “Our sister is gone. Imprisoned far, far away. She is most certainly not here, and you are most certainly not she.”
Sunny’s ears fell flat. There was an unshakable certainty in her sister’s tone. Whatever it was that bound her, had blinded her. With a pang of despair, Sunny followed her sister’s distant gaze, to her large, oaken desk. Her eyes locked on the small, well-worn book that sat atop an unkempt pile of papers and scrolls. She felt a stir of hope.
Leaping off the bed, Sunny trotted over to Luna’s desk and reared onto her hind legs. With a small forward hop, she clenched her teeth around the spine of the novel, and excitedly leapt back onto the bed, placing the book at her sister’s hooves. Luna blinked, with surprise, and gently held a hoof against its cover. The Sweetest Sound.
Sunny smiled, meeting her eyes. “I was hoping to wait until you’d finished, but… there is a note, between the last two pages. It is a letter I wrote for my little...” She caught herself as Joe returned to the bed. “...for somepony quite dear to me.”
Luna gave a skeptical curl of the cheek, but nevertheless, floated the book into the air. Fluttering through the pages, she flipped past her bookmark and arrived on the last two pages. As promised, both were quite subtly stuck together with a small paper fold. She furrowed her brow, gently unfolding the corner and pulling open both pages to find a small, sealed envelope stuck to the back of the paper.
Luna’s eyes widened. "How... how could..."
Holding a contemplative hoof to her mouth, Luna ran her magic across the lip of the envelope, and pulled it open. With an almost cartoonish sproing!, a puff of what appeared to be cotton candy sprouted out from within. Sunny gasped, looking to her sister in surprise. Luna met her gaze with a questioning glance, before returning her attention to the odd puff of pink, idly batting at it with her hoof. It wiggled, and... giggled, then drew to a stop.
Sunny leaned in, inspecting the tuft of cotton candy. “I… I am at a bit of a loss...” She narrowed her eyes, and gingerly sniffed the bright pink tuft. The sweetness was overpowering. It felt like snorting a Pixie Stick. She loosed a high-pitched sneeze, and shuddered a clearing shake of the head before leaning forward, and grasping the end of the tuft with her teeth. With a spirited tug, the cotton candy pulled out further, now extending the entire length of her foreleg. It seemed quite impossible that so much could fit into so small a space. She hopped forward, clasping the far end of the puff between her teeth. Bracing her rump against the bed, Sunny yanked with everything she had.
What came free was far too massive, far too heavy, and far too pink to possibly be real.
• • • •
Joe squeaked in horror as Sunny's final, valiant tug seemed to... pull into being, the vast entirety of Princess Pinkie. Sunny had time enough to gawk in overwhelming surprise before Pinkie’s colossal rear came down hard, planting the startled mare into the floor.
Pinkie blinked a few times, in a bit of a daze, while her antennae swiveled in a wide, winding sonar circle. With a high-pitched ping! ping! ping!, they locked in the direction of Princess Luna and went rigid with alarm. Pinkie’s face scrunched in apparent distaste as she darted, in a blur, to Luna’s side. Between this moment, and the last, she somehow wrapped herself in a tight blue uniform, adorned with a silver sheriff's badge ('Party Police'), wide, mirrored aviator sunglasses, and a 40-gallon cowpony hat. Against her cutie mark, rigid as a statue, hung a white-haired moori holding a vaguely gunlike pose with her body. Joe felt a wash of dread as he caught a glimpse of her face as she dangled off of Pinkie’s belt with a wide, lazy grin across her face. Seraph.
As Pinkie plopped herself beside Princess Luna and began digging through her poofy pink mane, Joe scampered over to Sunny and hoisted her out of the marble floor. As before, she held a trembling hoof against her horn, and pulled away half of her pink mane. Her eye twitched, wide with alarm. She was rattled, and a bit dazed, but she seemed fine.
Pinkie’s hoof emerged from her mane with a small notebook in tow, flanked by a long tentacle of curly hair wrapped around a small pencil. With a flick of the wrist, she flipped open to a blank page and cricked her neck, holding a suspicious look on the princess. “Alright Missy McMagic Pants! My Pinkie Sense has been going bonkers tonight and it is seriously gumming up my game out there! I’m dropping rumbly tummies and flip-floppin’ tails on the dance floor and they all think I’m just good at dancin’ but it’s not even a dance it’s my brain yelling at me that somepony’s throwing freaky-deaky space magic around like that’s a totally okay and not completely illegal thing for a pony to do!!” She spun around, waving her limp tail wildly about while holding a wildly panicked look over her shoulder. “How am I gonna get any twerk done with my badonk all donked up?!”
Luna crossed her hooves with an impatience. “You cannot simply barge into my bedroom for every ridiculous bushel of the mane, Oni. Perhaps thee should make proper use of the dozens of servants thou hath so impulsively corralled for thine frivolous flights of fancy.” With a dim light of the horn, she levitated the stiff moori from Pinkie’s belt, and gently bent her limbs into a standing position, before setting her down beside the enormous mare. “They do have jobs, I remind thee.”
Pinkie’s tail immediately shot straight into the air, rigid with alarm, before flopping back down to the bed. She grasped a tuft of her stomach fat and thrust it at Luna as an audible grumbling sound could be heard. “There it is! It’s your weirdo nutsy-butt alien magic!!” She thrust a hoof at Luna’s horn, stuffing her notebook back into her mane with a free tendril of hair. “I am so so so not cool with you trolloping about with another planetary life force, Loony Pants!” She leaned in closer, lifting her aviator sunglasses up against her forehead. “I-it makes everything go all… all...” She spun her tendrils around wildly, coiling some together and darting others between, until they’d all wrapped into one big wad of coiled hair. She shook the tangled mess in Luna’s direction. "...all wrong!"
Luna turned up her head with a huff. "We will not stop using our magic simply because it makes thee uncomfortable. We have duties to attend to, and we rather doubt thou cannot simply work around another flavor of magic.” With a gentle hum of the horn, Luna floated a thin pair of glasses from the desk drawer and delicately placed them upon her muzzle. It gave her an oddly motherly air. “You must learn that one cannot always get thy way. Even a princess must learn to adapt."
Pinkie pouted, "B-b-but if you'd just eat some more cake! Or some donuts! You could use my magic instead! It’s a million billion jillion times better!!"
Luna stuck out her tongue. "I believe I have made it quite clear how repellant I find thy 'baked goods’ to the royal tongue, my friend." She flicked her mane. “Our memory is a touch spotty on the matter, but we recall attempting to do so previous left us quite unwell. We are not in any haste to repeat the experience.”
Pinkie frowned, “But those tasty treats are made out of me!” She took a large chomp out of her tendril of hair, shifting it to fresh cotton candy as it met her tongue. She smiled as she chewed, and swallowed with delight. "I taste super-good!"
Luna rolled her eyes. “I realize this is all quite new to you, Oni, but saying there is a bit of ‘you’ inside one’s baked goods is rarely an effective means of enticement.”
“But Loooooooooonneeeyyy~” As Pinkie began a rather lengthy whining campaign against the princess, Joe prodded Seraph in the wing. She just sat there, staring drunkenly into the middle distance with a wide, self-satisfied grin across her muzzle. Taking one last look at Pinkie, Joe grasped his sister by the shoulders and pulled her to the side of the bed, between he and Sunny.
“Seraph! Snap out of it!” Joe clopped his hooves in front of her face a few times, but she returned no reaction. He frowned, glancing at Sunny. Her eyes were locked upon Princess Pinkie, drinking in her surreal immensity and strikingly draconian features. She had other things on her mind.
"Sissy!" he hissed, shaking her shoulders like a ragdoll. Nothing. After a moment's thought, Joe licked his hoof and stuck it into Seraph's tufted ear.
She squirmed against the wet whinny, her yellow eyes crossing with a shiver of disgust. "Gah! Holy heebies, what the heck?!” She batted her ear for a moment, trying to shake the sensation, before turning her gaze to her brother.
Joe gestured in the direction of Pinke. "What was that all about? Pinkie’s using you for prop gags now?”
Seraph rubbed the last of Joe’s spit out of her ear with the back of her hoof, flicking her ear a few times for good measure. “Yeah well... I do what the princesses ask. That’s kind of my job.”
“Aren’t you assigned to Luna? Why the buck is Pinkie using Night Guard?”
She looked away. “Well, okay… I guess I got distracted. She kind of...” Seraph looked at Joe with an unsure look about her. “...You probably wouldn’t understand.”
Joe gave a pleading shrug.
“She didn’t exactly ask me anything, but like, I… kind of knew, in my head, what she wanted. It seemed like the right thing to do.”
Joe gave her a look.
“Hey, I wouldn’t expect you to know, considering you’re… you know, banned for life, but being around Princess Pinkie is just… it’s the greatest, Joe. It’s like you know exactly what you’re supposed to do, all the time. You don't even have’ta think! And the feeling of actually touching her is nuts. It’s like—” She halted as her face fell in horror. “Wait a s— you’re banned for life, Joe! What’re you doing in Luna’s bucking bedroom?!”
Joe turned red. “Heh, she uh… we were just...”
Seraph’s eyes widened as she glanced about the ruffled sheets and powdered sugar across the floor, noting the royal chestplate peeking out from under the bed. “No way.”
“Look, that… we can get into that later. This?” He pointed a hoof at Pinkie as leapt up and down on the bed, in the throes of a foalish temper tantrum. “Seraph, Pinkie’s like a… she’s like something right out of the gates of Tartaurus. You really think you should be around her all day? Look at those frigging eyes!”
Seraph gave her brother a blank stare through slitted eyes.
“Er, uh… heh, rather her… her fangs! She’s got horrible, gnashing, razor-sharp—”
Seraph leaned back her head and made a mock chomping gesture with her gnashing, razor-sharp teeth.
Joe held his breath for a moment while his eyes scanned over Pinkie’s body. He turned back to his sister as he let out the breath. “...The… those tendrils? The tendrils are kind of freaky, you have to admit.”
Seraph scratched her cheek as she thought. “They’re weird, I guess, yeah, but I am not kidding about how amazing she feels. It’s like a freaking mindgasm, Joe.” Before Joe could object, she fluttered into the air and gently grasped the end of one of Pinkie’s hair tendrils, shivering as she brought it to the ground. “Ohhoho yeahh… that’s the stuff...” With a crooked grin, she offered the bushy poof of curly pink hair to her brother.
Joe looked away, then looked at his sister. She gave him a pleading gesture. With no small measure of hesitation, Joe walked up to the poofy mane and brushed his cheek against the hair. Nothing. He took a step back and pressed his hoof into the mane.
“It feels like hair.”
Seraph gave Joe a surprised look. “Seriously?” She batted the poof with her hoof, barely able to contain the giddy smile that erupted across her face. “Hooh! Hoochi mama that’s good...” With a delighted shake of the head, she let the tendril free, sending Joe a shrug. “Maybe it’s a moori thing.”
“So, what, you’re just going let her play around with you like a filly with her toys? Foals break their toys, sissy. How long till sheeyaaahh!—”Joe was cut off when the tendril suddenly shot around his midsection and hoisted him into the air. Joe stuttered in shock as he was brought before Pinkie’s enormous face in a blur of motion. A moment’s glance about the bed told him that she and Luna were still in the middle of their argument.
“—I'm not the gross one here! Your weirdo dumb-butt horsie magic is! It probably tastes like donkey dirt!” Joe’s body flailed about in overwhelming horror as Pinkie’s mouth drew open and a tongue the size of his body licked up the side of his face, leaving his fur and his mane jutting upwards with cowlicked rigidity. With a snap, Pinkie’s mouth closed before him, and she mushed her tongue about her mouth as she considered the taste.
Joe’s wide eyes crept over to Sunny as Pinkie smacked her lips and curled her cheek in thought. Sunny’s ears fell, and a look of fierce anger bore across her face. He’d never seen her genuinely angry, before. It was somehow more surreal than the freakish, reality-bending draconian party pony dangling him by her hair.
“Okay, it’s not horrible...” Pinkie relented with a small tilt of the head. “B-but these ponies are probably chock-full of crispity crunchity moonie magic right now!” She gestured the stallion toward an alarmed Luna with a shake of the tendril. “Betcha there’s a gooey, chewy nougat center of me at the center of every hoofsie pop! ” She brought Joe dead center, grasping his body with two tendrils and raising him before her wide, hungry grin like a lollipop. “Wanna guess how many licks it’ll take to get there?”
Luna rose to a stand, raising a hoof to hold against Pinkie’s tendril. “That will be quite enough, Oni! We will not abide you terrorizing our subjects every time you feel like throwing a tantrum.”
“B-b-b—”
“At once!”
“W-why don’t you just… just...” Pinkie trembled in frustration, an audible kettle-whistle screeching from nowhere as she turned redder and redder. “Stop pooting on my Pinkie Party!!” her eyes shot open in a piercing, swirling, hypnotic glare. A faint crackling sound could be heard as the pink ring around Luna’s eye burned bright, and her expression fell into a blank slack-jawed daze.
• • • •
Sunny leapt. She had no options, no plan of attack, no conceivable way she might subdue the colossal pony that held her sister and her friend helpless, but it was something. She had to do something.
With every ounce of strength she could gather, she bit down on Pinkie's perky pink ear, and held tight. Pinkie screeched, breaking her gaze on Luna and dropping Joe to the bed as she frantically shook her mane and hopped about the bed.
Sunny clenched her eyes shut and held fast as she flopped about the air, ragged against Pinkie's efforts.
"Owie owie owie offa offa offa meeee!" Pinkie plopped her rump on the ground and began scratching her ear with her hind leg, like a giant dog. Sunny caught one or two light bats to the side, but held on. With a rigid straightening of the back, Pinkie’s tendrils spun around her head and wrapped Sunny into a bundle of bubblegum hair.
Sunny’s eyes clenched shut. She was out of options. Her chest tingled with a steady, weighted heat as her horn sputtered and shorted. She pictured the pendants around her neck, reaching within them with immaterial hooves and guiding their power out from within. There was almost nothing left, after all these years, but there was enough.
Her eyes shot open with a brilliant white fury, her horn flickering with an ancient, elemental magic. It had been centuries. She had not dared use it since she had cast her sister into exile.
Pinkie’s face contorted into strained confusion at the building heat within her tendrils. With a wayward glance, she leaned close, and peeked through the coils of her mane. She saw only light. Sunny released her hold, and freed her magic of its binding.
With a flash, Pinkie’s tendrils exploded into sugar, scattering into the air like snowflakes. Sunny landed on the bed with an elegant twist of the flank.
“Yyyyeowie flip-fffffff—” Pinkie danced about the bed on two legs, like she’d just stubbed her hoof. “—ffflippin’-zowie!” She shrieked, waving her severed band of hair like it was on fire. She curled her lip, glaring at her sugary stump, then to Sunny. “Party foul, sister.”
Sunny watched with shock as her tendril reformed with a winding flash of pink light, the sugar seemingly sucking itself back into place from the bed. She briefly tested the appendage before thrusting it at the retreating mare, grasping her by the tail. Pinkie’s eight tendrils melded into the one, stretching further and further away, as if clutching the tail of a writhing snake.
Sunny’s breath caught in her throat. She rose her gaze, just ahead, and looked into Joe’s eyes for a single, horrid heartbeat. She felt Pinkie’s tendril pull taut, the ground rushing out from under her. Her world spun.
And then she was gone.
• • • •
Joe didn’t blink. He was sure of that. One second she was there, and the next, she just wasn't.
He followed Pinkie’s poofy tendril into the air, where it spun in a little voilà! gesture before splitting back into eight smaller ropes of hair and tucking into Pinkie’s mane. Joe frantically looked about the bedroom. Seraph seemed just as baffled. Gone.
His eyes darted to Pinkie’s. “Where—” He stopped as he noticed her left eye twitching, her head subtly tilting one way, then the other, like her left eye was fighting her right. He saw her antennae waving. Out, then in. Out, then in. Frantically, and desperately. It was an unmistakably panicked gesture. Like a pony on a deserted island, trying to flag down a passing pegasus.
Joe stared as their movements changed. They pointed directly at him, then thrust straight up. Him, then up. Him, then up. He blinked, and looked skyward, following their frantic movements. His eyes scanned the open night sky that stretched above, through the yawning opening that was once the castle roof. That was when he heard it. The faintest wailing, very far away. He narrowed his eyes.
There it was. A speck of white and pink against the brilliant grey moon above.
Falling fast.
No.
• • • •
Sunny screamed.
There had been a heaving force, and a fierce wind at her back, and then nothing below her hooves. Her breath was sucked out of her lungs as the open castle shrank below her, to little more than a sugar cube. There was nothing but terror. Her speed slowed as her body slowly spun completely around, leaving her facing the overwhelming immensity of the moon. She pulled in a sharp gasp as she stopped, in mid-air, just inches away from its powerfully radiant grey-white surface.
Without a thought, she thrust out her hooves in the blind, impossible gesture of grasping tight the ground above. There was a barely perceptible tug from the moon, a flutter of an impossible hope that possessed her to grasp at the ashen surface with open arms. Her hooves passed right through the fine powder, leaving a faint line in the charcoal dust. With a wash of heart-stopping dread, she felt a much stronger, much greedier force pull her away, and back toward the sprawling kingdom below.
Her voice sputtered as her breath left her. As all thought left her. She was picking up speed, hurtling back toward the impassive enormity of Equestria below. She tried flapping the wings she no longer had. She tried weaving a spell with the magic she could no longer feel. She tried simply willing the world to let her live, to let her survive. She couldn’t just die like this! Not here! Not now! She couldn’t!
Sunny’s eyes widened as the deepest of fears surged from within, grasping her by the horn and staring her in the eyes. She might actually die. Right here, right now. She could not recall the last time she had even remotely felt a sensation so savagely immediate. So real. She had not been faced with true, life-threatening danger since… since…
Ever.
Sunny’s hooves pressed against her cheeks as the castle grew clearer, as individual rooms and wings became visible through the excised roof. As the sputtering, shimmering square that once was the roof of the Royal Dining Hall set itself squarely below her, its thin magic barrier the only thing containing the thriving void within.
She had failed them, hadn’t she. She was about to leave them all alone.
Sunny closed her eyes.
• • • •
Joe ripped his eyes from the sky and turned them to his sister. She blinked. He opened his mouth. She was gone.
He turned to the speck and clenched his teeth, driving every shred of willpower he had into the singular need that pulsed through every fiber of his body. Seraph was giving it everything she had, but she would never reach her in time. He felt an impossible pain vibrate down his horn, coiling in random and jagged movements to his head and to his heart. He didn’t give it the time it needed to mean ‘pain.’ There was no time. There was just no time.
His breath shuddered as the feral orange spark of magic streaked along the crack of bone, filling the base with a violent flickering etherium that felt like magma on his brain. He had felt this pain only once. He pressed harder. Anything and everything.
For a fraction of a second, there was a sickly hum. His eyes were red and wide and for a time he didn’t feel like he was even there, like there was anything to him but the pain and the thought and the need for this one thing to become true. Please make it true. Please.
I’m begging you.
• • • •
A tug. Sunny’s eyes shot open to see a dim whisp of amber magic run across her hind leg and cling against her hoof, and then disappear. It was almost nothing, but for a moment, it was there. She saw another, then three at at time, then none, then another two. They came and went so quickly. She felt herself slow, just a bit. She turned her gaze to the ground. She was just above the Dining Hall, above a wall of solid cobalt magic that formed the ceiling of the containment spell she’d wrapped in place with an impenetrable sunlock. Beyond, there was just black. A pure, hungry emptiness.
She shut her eyes, feeling the fleeting touch of Joe’s magic on her leg. Her pounding heart settled, a bit. She pulled in a deep breath, and felt her mind grow quiet. She could feel his need, his desperate desire and fear. His love. She held it close, feeling his grasp grow and strengthen at her embrace. Against the whipping winds and the tearing air about her, it was the most wonderful blanket of warmth.
The wind slowed. She opened her eyes, gazing with a solemn serenity at the wall of hard light barreling toward her muzzle. Somehow, even as she stared her death in the face, the fear had gone from her.
“Gotcha!” Seraph’s body slammed against Sunny’s as she snapped all four legs around her midsection and thrust her wings skyward with everything she had. One beat. Two. They were slowing. Three. They'd never make it. Five. Six. She struggled to break free, to push the mare away before she too was splattered against the barrier below. Seraph pulled tighter. Sunny clenched shut her eyes. They hit.
The magic stretched.
Her eyes shot open, watching with an ecstatic shock and joy as the weakened barrier bent inward with their weight, like a trampoline. She felt their momentum slow to a stop, and her heart flew.
She was alive. She hadn't left them. There was a chance.
Sunny felt a deep relief float through her body, glancing to the floor below as it stretched to a stop. For a moment, it flickered.
And then tore.
Sunny had time enough to suck in a horrified gasp before the magic dissolved beneath her hooves, plunging the mares into the deepest, darkest, hungriest black she had ever seen.