//------------------------------//
// Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 
// Story: A Dream 
// by totallynotabrony 
//------------------------------//

	When I awoke that morning, I knew there would be problems that day.  For starters, Rainbow was in the library.  I got off the couch grumpily.
All I wanted to do was tackle the problem of the meth in the water supply, and Twilight was forcing Rainbow to study or something.  In passing, I caught them talking about a Wonderbolts history exam.  Heh, the Wonderbolts were history thanks to yours truly.  That’s what they got for disagreeing with me.
Something about that thought seemed a little strange, but I was still too much in morning mode to give it a proper amount of pondering.  I went to the kitchen for breakfast.  Sunset was there, already setting up the stove.  
“Good morning,” she said, turning to look at me as I entered.
“If you think so,” I replied.  “Why the hell is Rainbow here?”
“She’s studying to be a Wonderbolt.  I hear that they, um, need new recruits.”  Sunset looked guilty about something.  I wondered what it was.
While I tried to muddle through my morning state of mind, Sunset cracked some eggs and made some toast.  By the time she set a steaming plate of breakfast goodness down in front of me, I had a reasonable idea what was bothering her.  By the time I had finished eating, I was sure.
“Are you feeling sorry for what happened to the Wonderbolts?”
Sunset nodded.  “A little bit, yes.”
I paused and thought a little more.  “Do you like beating ponies up?”
“Er…”  Sunset stalled, looking conflicted.  “I mean, I wouldn’t have been a bad pony if I didn’t enjoy some part of it.  I keep using as an example that one time when I tried to enslave a high school, but honestly it’s a good illustration for a lot of things, including my love of tormenting others.”
Sunset paused.  “But I know it’s not something that is socially acceptable and I haven’t done anything like that since.  Except for the times when you told me to.”
“Oh, okay.”  I grabbed some more toast and was halfway through buttering it when I stopped, a sudden thought occurring to me.  “So…should I tell you to beat up some more ponies?  Can I depend on you to do that?”
“Uh…”  Sunset looked lost.  “I mean, I’d do it, if you asked.  I know society as a whole wouldn’t approve, but… but I’d love to be somepony important to you.”
“Thanks.  That’s good to know.”  I went back to buttering the toast.
After finishing with breakfast, I left the kitchen.  Twilight was instructing Rainbow on how to properly highlight.  I was a little surprised Twilight would condone defacing a book, but more surprised that she would be okay with using a highlighter held in one’s mouth.  The fumes so close to Rainbow’s nose might turn it into a highlighter.
However, Twilight did eventually relent and move on to other methods of study.  She rolled out a chalkboard and proclaimed that she was going to give Rainbow a history lecture, just like in school.
“Is it snack time?  Or recess?” Rainbow asked.
“No.”  Twilight looked annoyed.  She hadn’t even started talking yet.  While Twilight didn’t often talk about herself, she did like to talk in general, and interrupting her might have dire consequences.
“Can’t we just watch the history of the Wonderbolts movie?” Rainbow asked.
“No!”
“Hang on, why not?” I asked.  “I mean, it’s especially designed to teach the history of the Wonderbolts.  Heck, if it’s an official production it might even cover the exact answers that the test will require.”
My comment successfully inserted, Twilight and Rainbow got into an argument over the validity of the movie.  It was basically like a lecture, except given by a movie projector.  Twilight probably just resented that it wasn’t her doing the talking.
The rhythm of their banter inspired Spike and Owlowiscious to form a little backup group that provided a beat to the bickering.
Eventually, Twilight decided to just move onto another form of study.  Her most favorite study method of all: flashcards.
If I had hands, I would have waved them all about in a jazzy style.  “Aw shit, now it’s getting real.”
Twilight was not amused.  “Valiant, don’t you have anything else to do today?”
“No.”
Twilight sighed and turned away, closing her eyes to begin reciting from memory.  “Colonal Purple Dart, the leader of the Wonderbolts in the fourth Celestial Era, was known for his-”
Rainbow shot down the card with a spit wad.
Twilight jerked in surprise and glared at me.  “Valiant, what did you do?”
“What?  It wasn’t me!”
“Oh yeah?”
I rolled my eyes.  “Twilight, when was the last time I straight-up denied something?  If anything, I would have been intentionally vague.  Also, I wouldn’t have used a spitwad.  Come on, you know me.”
Twilight frowned and then looked at Rainbow, just in time to stop another spit wad right in front of her face.  “Agh!  Rainbow Dash, you could have hurt me!”
“With a spit wad?”  Rainbow said around the straw in her mouth.
“A spit wad to the eye would have been no laughing matter.”  Twilight crimped the straw and dropped it.  Now that was cold – crimping someone else’s straw.
They started arguing again.  Rainbow completely failed a pop quiz that Twilight gave her.
So they argued some more.  This time, Rainbow was taking shots at Twilight’s famous study methods.  “I don’t see why I have to take this lousy test anyway!”
“Knowing history actually is beneficial!”
“Yeah,” I added.  “That’s how we know Communists can never be trusted.”
I’d hoped to derail both of their trains of thought, but mostly Twilight and Rainbow ignored me and kept trading verbal barbs back and forth.
I got bored – finally – and went back into the library.  Sunset was reading a book on theoretical physics and had a few diagrams spread out in front of her.
“I was hoping you could help me with something,” she said.  “I’m working on a little project.”
“What is it?” I asked, stepping closer.
“Remember the magic converter in the basement?  I’m trying to engineer a more compact version.  At the same time, I hope that I might enchant it in such a way that it can convert matter into magic, instead of just changing magic items into a more cohesive magic.”
“This sounds exactly like the kind of project that I should be working on,” I said.  I paused to listen.  It sounded like Twilight and Rainbow had quit their arguing and gone off somewhere.  At that moment, Spike walked past us and exited the library wearing a director’s beret.  Something was clearly afoot.
“Hold that thought,” I said to Sunset and headed for the door.
A stage had been hastily constructed nearby.  Fluttershy and Spike had apparently put together a pet pageant purported to proliferate Rainbow’s understanding of the Wonderbolts’ past.
Oh, that was it?  Just a benefit for Rainbow?  Not interested, I turned around and headed back towards the library.  From somewhere behind me, I heard Pinkie’s voice.
The world suddenly shifted to a narrow box format and went slightly blurry.  Pastels and horrible clothing were everywhere.  It looked like an out of date music video.
A simplistic, repetitive beat filled my ears and rapid scene changes flashed in front of my eyes.  It was over in less than a minute, but it left me gasping for breath and confused.  I stumbled into the center of town, catching myself on a cart that Big Macintosh was standing beside.
He looked at me curiously.  I shook my head, managing to clear it.  “Sorry.  Flashbacks to the Great Hip Hop War of ’96.”
Filthy Rich approached just then, and Mac’s attention shifted away from me.  Filthy was carrying a briefcase.  “Mr. Macintosh, I believe this is what you were looking for.”
He opened the briefcase and a golden light spilled out.  Mac said, “Eeyup.”
“Hang on,” I said.  “What are you doing with Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase?”
Both Filthy and Mac stared at me.  I shook my head.  “Nevermind.  I don’t want to know.  Just if anyone asks you if you think he’s a bitch, say no.”
I went back towards the library.  Along the way, a thought hit me.  “Mr. Macintosh” could have been a reference to something else.  However, I dismissed it.  Filthy Rich was just stinking rich, not a villain.  I’d already checked him out, me being suspicious of suspiciously wealthy people.
I spotted Pinkie, who was practicing rhymes and wearing an alarm clock on a rope around her neck.  Other than the fact that she didn’t look like it, didn’t know how, and wasn’t really coming close at all, she could have been mistaken for Notorious P.I.E.
I got back to the library, but a whup whup whup noise distracted me.  I looked up in the sky and saw Cherry Berry flying by in a pedal-powered helicopter.  It was an upgrade from her usual hot air balloon, but the fact that she had a helicopter in the first place was a little unusual.  It was quite a bit more sophisticated than Pinkie’s machine.  Although, of course not as sweet as my own aircraft.
Still, ponies in helicopters pissed me off – not in general – just that day.  I muttered under my breath a note to self to invent surface to air missiles.
Twilight came running up just then.  “I’ve got a great idea to get Rainbow learning!  We just have to set up reminders for her everywhere in town and have her fly over them.”
“Sounds complicated.  Why do I care?”
“Well, since Sweetie has gone to live in parts unknown, I can’t really enlist the Crusaders to teach Rainbow about the EUP.  We’d be short a unicorn.”
I rolled my eyes.  “It’s not hard to remember.  I mean, it’s only the three biggest pony races that you’ve lived with forever and interact with on a daily basis.  Heck, you could even make up other things that EUP stands for just to drive home the point that it’s so simple.”
I cleared my throat.  “For example, EUP could be the Extra Upper Peninsula, like Canada is to Michigan.  If someone is really riding your ass about something, they could be Extremely Up your Pooter.  That bad breakfast place down the block is Ernie's Undercooked Pancakes.”
“Rainbow already came up with that last one,” Twilight said.
“See, the system works.”
Her eyes narrowed.  “Correlation doesn’t imply causation.”
“When was the last time something was just a coincidence around here?” I asked.  “Does the phrase on the longest day of the thousandth year, the stars will aid in her escape ring a bell?”
Twilight looked like she wanted to argue, but instead shook her head and went off to organize the thing for Rainbow.
I went into the library.  Pinkie was there, still dressed in her strange getup.
“Hey fool, you lookin’ for some love?” she asked.
I stared at her.  “No.”
“Aw come on, Valiant,” she said, shedding her persona if not her outfit.  “I’ve got to do something with all this rap culture I just now accumulated.  I can at least be a pimp or something.”
“Are rappers normally pink lesbian mares who make candy?” I asked.
Pinkie thought about that.  “No, I guess not.”  She threw away all her rap stuff.  This pleased me.
“But I can still do the whole love thing!”  She grinned.  “You know, Valiant, Sunset is really interested in you.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“You should get to know her better.”
I stared at Pinkie.  “We’re roommates.  We eat meals at the same table.  We’re both keeping six mares chained to the basement wall.”
“Yeah, and you should get to know her better!  Sure, you hang out a lot.  Sure, you work well together.  Sure you both do hardcore research on new and potentially destructive technologies.  I’m just saying, maybe you should take it up another notch.  At the end of the day, don’t you want to know that everything worked out for the best and you can…” she winked and nudged me “…ride off into the Sunset?”
I stared at her.  “That was a lot of buildup for a pun.”
“Yeah.  Anyway, have a super cool day, Valiant!”  Pinkie bounced out the door.
“Who was that?” Sunset asked, coming into the room.
“Pinkie,” I said.  “She says you and I should bang.”
“Oh, um…”  Sunset flushed bright red and disappeared around the corner.

Later that day, Rainbow returned from her history exam.  She came into the library to show off her results.  She’d missed the question about EUP.  Despite not being perfect on her history, the Wonderbolts had been forced to give her a passing grade.
“Guess you can’t be a dragon now that you’re going to be a Wonderbolt,” I said.
“Hey, how did you know about that?”  Rainbow’s eyes narrowed.
“I think it’s wonderful that you attained your goal,” said Twilight.
Distracted, Rainbow chuckled.  “Well, yeah, I am pretty awesome.  Maybe I’ll even be promoted to a high level position.  The Wonderbolts are looking for new recruits.”
That last sentence was true, even more so than she realized.  After seeing what a dangerous job it was, many had abandoned their posts.
It was a little humbling, knowing that the mere threat of me could cause almost all of a military force to go AWOL.  But then, that’s what they got for disagreeing with me.
Huh.  There it was again, the faint sense that something wasn’t right.  I thought about it a little.  Hurting people because they didn’t share my point of view…
Oh, right.  That was a bad thing to do and totally not in line with democracy.
Shit.
Here I’d spent so much time trying to get the universe to conform to my own vision that I’d forgotten to take into account basic decencies and rights.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I was kind of a dick.
No, actually, I was kind of a war criminal, if you wanted to be perfectly honest about it.  Man, that was just the thing to ruin my day.
It wasn’t every day that I found out I was the villain in my own story.  I mean, it had happened before, just not very often.  Of course somebody had to be bad, but I just never expected that it would be me.  However, this wasn’t the first time that this realization had happened.  The ponies had run interventions for me before.
They hadn’t this time, mostly because I’d kept things under wraps and in the shadows.  In a way, I was proud of that, learning to cover my tracks.  At the same time, though, why was I hiding?  That was what terrorists did – never showing their faces and attacking from the shadows.
“Valiant, are you all right?” asked Sunset.  “You’ve been standing there with a glazed look on your face for five minutes.”
I shook my head.  “I should…go camping.  Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.  Just me and the great outdoors.  Something to clear my head.”
I left the library.  Twilight called after me.  “Don’t you need camping gear?”
“Already got it.  ‘Be prepared’ and all that.”
I walked for a long time, not bothering to look back.  Those heavy-duty mental revelations can be a real bitch.
As it got dark that evening, I found a nice place and pitched my tent.  One of the stakes was a little bent, but it wasn’t a big problem.
It had been a while since I’d gone camping, so I made sure everything was in order.  The stove, oven, microwave, and all the kitchen appliances were good to go.  I checked the closets and mattresses.  It was really a very big tent, but I liked my space.
I was coming back downstairs when I heard a knock on the door.  I unzipped the flap and saw Sunset standing there.
“Hey,” I said.  “Did you follow me all the way out here?”
“Well, you just walked in circles around Ponyville for a few hours before pitching the tent right outside of town,” she said.
“My question stands.”
“I just thought you looked upset about something when you left and I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
I shrugged.  “Yeah, I’m good.  I made my peace.  I kind of realized that I need to be a little more understanding and less quick to murder.  Also possibly relabel ‘murder’ as a more socially acceptable term.”
Sunset shifted her hooves as a cool evening breeze blew by.  “They’re using the library to hold a ‘Congratulations on passing the Wonderbolts history test’ party.”
“That sucks.”
Sunset nodded.  “I’m glad we think the same.  I don’t know if I want to go back there tonight.”
She smiled as if an idea had just come to her.  “Maybe I could share your tent.”
“Damn right you can.  I didn’t get the extra large size for nothing.”