Twilight, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, and Rarity were gathered at the library, which Twilight had shut for the afternoon. They were making use of an unusual opportunity to share their worries about their pink friend, who was minding the Cakes’ twins, Pound and Pumpkin. She wasn’t going to be bursting in suddenly, so they’d have to have this conversation now. Applejack and her family were pruning the North Orchard, which was going to involve a lot of cleanup after a violent storm.
Rarity sniffed as she levitated an elegant teacup towards herself. “If you ask me, that was not the behavior of a gentlecolt, leaving her at the station like that without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Spike said proudly as he carried a plate of cakes to each mare in turn. “It’s part of the Noble Dragon Code: never leave a lady in distress.”
“Are you sure it isn’t “never eat a lady in distress? Never mind, Spike,” Twilight hedged, as Spike glowered at her. “I’m kidding. We know you only eat gems. Point taken: you’d never just have run off and left one of our friends like that.”
“None of us would,” Rainbow Dash snarled around a mouth full of cookies, “and I’d like to know what kind of pony did.”
~~
The first indication that something was wrong came early in the morning, the day after Dash’s birthday party. On the day after a Pinkie party, ponies would be tired but happy, yawning and wishing each other a good morning. This morning, quarrelling started before the market even opened, as the fruit and vegetable sellers jostled for places and snapped at each other to look where they were going. The vendors at neighboring stalls argued over five inches of boundary space in areas that they’d shared for years. They turned their annoyance onto their customers, who found prices abruptly marked up for no apparent reason at all. They snarled as they placed their groceries into their saddlebags, snarled at the customers still waiting in line, and trotted off to find some more company for their misery.
At the schoolhouse, Miss Cheerilee had trouble keeping order. Diamond Tiara chose the few minutes before the opening bell to harass Scootaloo about her undergrown wings. Scootaloo stood there, face unmoving, then replied calmly, “My wings may grow, but you’re never gonna outgrow the ugly.” A minute later, the schoolyard was decorated with orange pinfeathers, purple and white strands of mane, Apple Bloom’s hair ribbon, dented jewelry, and filled with the wails of Diamond Tiara complaining that she’d tell her Dad on everypony. Nopony was seriously hurt, but Cheerilee could tell as she looked out on the frizzy mane of Silver Spoon and the icebagged face of Apple Bloom that the day’s lessons were a dead loss.
By the time school let out, the word had gotten out: nopony had seen Pinkie since the party, or rather, everypony felt that she wasn’t there. There hadn’t been such a massive wave of bad moods since those five critical cutie marks had been switched, sending Pinkie Pie off on her short, disastrous career as an apple farmer while a nervous Fluttershy did her best to take her place. Some ponies talked of forming search parties, other muttered about how hopeless searching would be, until Rainbow Dash lost her temper and announced that she didn’t care what anypony else did: she was going looking for her missing friend and nopony was going to stop her. Applejack immediately declared she would do the same. Everypony felt it: the eerie, definitive absence of laughter. They felt it until the following evening, when just at dusk, the cross-Equestria freight car stopped for a few minutes in Ponyville. Only a few ponies saw a jittery Cheese Sandwich jump out of the train with Pinkie Pie, lay her on the bench, say something to the stationmaster, and jump back into the boxcar before the train pulled out of the station.
The Cakes were immediately alerted, and they raced off to the station to collect a sleepy Pinkie Pie. She appeared to be completely calm, unhurt, and relaxed except for an inexplicable tic in her hind leg. She asked the Cakes how long she’d been away, nodded, and walked back to Sugarcube Corner with them. Once there, she climbed the two floors to her bedroom, got her talking Ponyacci doll from the top shelf of her cupboard, and slept for two days. On the third day, she got up and went on about her business as though nothing had happened, and that was all anypony ever knew about it.
~~
“She hasn’t been the same since,” Twilight said, frowning, and waited for her three other friends to agree with her.
“It is beyond question that Pinkie Pie has not been herself,” agreed Rarity, delicately sipping her tea. “She has been distinctly odd.”
“How can you even tell?” said Dash incredulously. “This is Pinkie Pie we’re talking about. Turkey-call-award-winning, wall-climbing, balloon-headed Pinkie Pie. She rings bells with her head. How do you know what the new normal even is? She’s so random.”
“AHA!” exclaimed Twilight, slapping her hoof on the table and making everypony jump. “That’s not true. Pinkie Pie has distinctly predictable patterns of randomness.” She levitated a giant roll onto the table and unfurled a huge chart full of multi-colored graphs, criss-crosses, astrological charts, weather records, and inset with scribbled copies of Pinkie’s crayoned notes and attempts to translate them in Twilight’s neat writing. “See? I’ve been taking notes on her for years. The implications are obvious.”
What was obvious, her friends thought, was that Twilight’s obsessive determination to make sense out of the conundrum that was Pinkie Pie still left her baffled, and that the chart was taking up a lot of room and covering the cookies, but nopony wanted to say anything. “Spike? Would you get a quill and a scroll and take a note? Let’s make a checklist of anything different we’ve noticed about Pinkie since her disappearance. I’m sure that once we combine our observations, I can come up with a hypothesis to cover all the salient facts.”
“Well,” said Rarity, placing her teacup on a side table, reclining back on the sofa cushions, and narrowing her eyes as she attempted to recall, “I’m sure this seems absurd, my dears, but if anything, she seems a bit more confident to me. Do you remember how she sounded before the Ponyville Festival announcement? She was quite sure that her skills as a party planner made her an ideal choice as organizer. She knows she’s skilled, and she knows it’s a skill worth having. Even not being selected did not faze her one bit. She knows that she is –how shall I put it?—a master of her craft. It’s unmistakable to me, artisan to artisan.”
“Artisan. . . to . . . artisan. . . got it, Rarity,” Spike said, as he finished writing down every word she’d spoken.
Twilight looked next at Rainbow Dash, who had become a bit restless and was hovering on her back, just because she could. “Dash?”
Dash righted herself. “Me? Yeah, I dunno about sane and balanced Pinkie Pie. She just seemed like that because somepony was outdoing her in the crazy category recently.” Rarity glared at her. “I’m telling you, she’s busier than ever these days, but she still makes time to go for a swim with me or something fun once in a while. She is having twice the number of Pinkie Sense fits she usually does. Maybe three, four times the number. Some of them were what she calls “doozies.” Before, she usually knew what they were about. Now, most of ‘em, she’s got no idea. Usually she’s fine right afterwards, but I went to Sugarcube Corner one afternoon and the kitchen walls were covered with batter, floor to ceiling. There were broken bowls and cups everywhere. I helped the Cakes snap her out of it. She was breathing hard, and she was not fine. And I want to know what or who is doing this to her, and when I find out, I will end him.”
Spike had stopped writing and looked over at Twilight, raising his eyebrows. She sighed. “Just put down ‘alarming Pinkie Sense attacks, accompanied by violent blustering by Rainbow Dash.’”
“Blus-ter-ing,” Spike muttered as he wrote. “Got it.”
“Fluttershy, what’s your opinion?”
The yellow Pegasus glanced down at the floor, demurring. “Oh. . . don’t ask me what I think. I’m sure everypony is right.”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “I’m not asking everypony, I’m asking you. What do you think? Remember, we can’t help Pinkie if we don’t all work together.”
“What I think? Well, all right.” Fluttershy took a deep breath. “Pinkie makes me a bit nervous sometimes, but I know she cares about me enough to tell me the truth when I need it, and I think maybe we all still feel very bad and very guilty about how we treated Pinkie Pie on Dash’s birthday, and we blamed ourselves when she went missing, only we don’t want to admit it. So we’re trying to blame everything on Cheese Sandwich, because he’s not here. I think we should go to Pinkie and tell her that we’re all very worried about her and hug her and ask if we can help. But . . . um . . . that’s just me,” she said quietly, and gulped. “I’m sure I must be wrong.”
Dash looked simply furious. “I told her right out I was sorry. I don’t know what her disappearance has to do with me. Oh, all right,” she sighed, and dropped back to the ground. “I was worried sick and angry at myself. Stupid Dashie hurts Pinkie’s feelings all over again. But what I say still goes. When I find out what or who is doing this to her, I will end him.”
Twilight asked Spike to read back his notes. “ ‘. . . I . . . will . . . end . . .him.’ That’s all I’ve got,” Spike stated, finishing his report.
“Hmm,” said Twilight, thinking out loud. “You may have a point there, Fluttershy, but I don’t think asking Pinkie is going to help. If she wanted to tell us what was going on, wouldn’t she have told us by now? Pinkie talks about everything, but if she thinks her mouth should stay shut, it stays shut. All we’ve got to go on is that she’s a bit more confident, she’s having a lot of Pinkie fits, and she’s keeping a secret.”
“Oh, and she’s playing a lot with that doll,” Dash shot in.
“Which doll? Her talking Ponyacci doll?” Twilight asked eagerly.
“That’s the one,” nodded Dash. “Actually, she’s letting Pound and Pumpkin play with it. Pound is pounding the hay out of it, but she doesn’t seem to mind.”
Twilight waved to indicate that everypony should be quiet while she thought. She pressed both hooves to her temples and knitted her brows, muttering to herself. Finally she dropped her hooves and sighed.
“I’m sorry, everypony. I can’t think of anything, other than that Pinkie must have left with Cheese Sandwich for some reason after the party. She told the Cakes she couldn’t baby-sit, didn’t she? She must have known she was going, and she seems completely unhurt, so all we know is that she went off with him, he brought her back, and he disappeared.”
They all looked at each other. How many times had they all dropped everything to go on an important journey and do something that had to be done? Plenty of times. The difference was that none of them had been with Pinkie this time.
“So really,” Dash said hesitantly, “he didn’t do anything we wouldn’t have done. Does this mean I don’t get to hate him now?”
“I don’t want you to hate anypony, Dash,” Twilight replied, “but just dropping her like that was still a big risk. You know how Pinkie gets when she thinks somepony is leaving her. She thinks once they’re out the door, they’ll abandon her forever. You remember how she behaved when Fluttershy took a day trip—she was racing down the track after her. She stood by the mailbox for days waiting for your letter when you were at the Wonderbolts Academy. And that’s when she’s already been told exactly why her friend is leaving and exactly when she’ll be back! This is a hundred times worse. She could have been a mess.”
“Yeah, she coulda been. She shoulda been. I dunno. Meh,” Rainbow Dash said, shrugging. “She must not have liked him very much.”
They all agreed that this must have been the case.
The door slammed open, and Applejack appeared framed in the doorway, dusty and blowing hard.
“Twi, we got a situation in the North Orchard. You got time? ‘Cause this is sort of an emergency.”
“Of course, Applejack,” Twilight said, rolling up her Pinkie Pie chart and depositing it neatly on her desk. “We’ll all go, if we can. What is it? Is it the vampire fruit bats again?”
Fluttershy opened her mouth to begin a passionate defense of the bats, but before she could get started, Applejack cut her off.
“Not the bats, no,” said Applejack. “It’s sorta hard to explain.”