The Mistress of Dreams
Chapter 5: Precious
The elevator opened out to the top of the hospital building. Although there were high glass walls around the perimeter, there was no ceiling to this space, and the sounds of the flying vehicles the ponies had seen earlier was nearly overwhelming.
A trio of little dragon musicians were playing in a corner. “Preciouss and fragile thingss,” the lead singer crooned in a baritone voice, “need sspecial handling. My god, what have we done to you?” Nopony paid the singers any attention as they dashed from one of the many elevators into waiting vehicles that lifted off into the sky.
Meanwhile, a steady drizzle was running down from above.
“Hey!” “Rainbow Dash” exclaimed when she held out a hoof to feel the rain. “This stuff stings!”
“Well of course it doess,” her dragon informed her. “It’ss acid.”
The extended hoof was quickly withdrawn.
“A minor sside-effect of the gem mining,” added “Pinkamena”s dragon.
“Twilight” walked over to one of the glass walls. She noted that at the top of the wall, spaced every half-ponylength, was another Optiscan camera to spy on them. “Without gems, there’d be no magic,” she remarked, looking out at the insane tangle of aerial traffic just beyond the wall. “How much of the planet has been mined?”
“Pretty much all of it,” replied Haphastia’s dragon once again. “There’ss a chance that the Lunar colony will increasse the supply.”
The ponies looked up in vain to try and see the moon, but the ever-present haze made that impossible.
“The Lunar colony?” Piflin asked.
“Where the war against the Ancients is being fought,” Applesauce replied. “Wait, are ponies allowed to answer questions in this game of asking stuff everypony knows by heart?”
By this time the group had been jostled by the crowds to the point that they were all up against the glass wall.
“Apple...sauce, wasn’t it?” “Twilight” asked.
“Applesauce 103!” the earth pony answered proudly. “Hydroponics section chief for all of Ponyopolis.”
“Hydroponics?” “Rainbow” asked.
“That means using vats of chemicals to grow plants,” explained “Twilight”.
“Who wants to come home every night to a vat of chemicals?”
“They are my vats, and I’m perfectly happy to come home to them every night, Jalpek 7!” Applesauce exclaimed. “Besides, they’re not the only ones I come home to. There’s Grandmother, and Mother and Father, and Tannic, and our two sons.”
“Oooh,” “Pinkamena” said softly. “Now I understand.”
“Yeah, but how does that memory compare with Sweet Apple Acres?” “Rainbow Dash” said in an insistent tone.
“Pinkie Pie” pulled “Rainbow Dash” aside. “Jalpak, I think we can let Applesauce here go home to her parents tonight. Just this once.”
“Rainbow Dash” looked back and forth between the pleading eyes of the others and the quietly satisfied eyes of Applesauce. “You just know that she’s going to be mad at you all for holding back the truth when she comes back, don’t you?” she asked. Shaking her head, she picked up Applesauce’s hoof and led her away from the others. “I’ll take you over to your flying bus. Or flying limousine, or flying whatever to get you home to your precious vats. Now don’t forget whose side I was on tomorrow, when we continue our little talk. Let’s say I’ll meet you at your place?”
“Alright,” said Applesauce. “Oh, that’s my bus. Pleasant dreams, Jalpek!”
“Pleasant dreams, Applesauce!” “Rainbow” said between clenched teeth. “Wow, I really miss that accent,” she muttered as the bus was lifting off into the sky.
“‘Coffiest Coffee Substitute’,” Haphastia read the advertisement on the side of the bus. “‘Three cups with every meal, and a pot to get you through the night.’ Hey, I wrote that!”
“Haphastia creates advertisements for a living,” “Twilight” said with a shake of her head. “Who ever heard of a career like that?” Gathering her thoughts, she addressed the others. “Applesauce’s farm is at the city limits. We’ll meet there tomorrow a couple hours after sunrise. Make sure to arrange to get off work.” She looked over at a particularly ostentatious limousine that was nearby. “That one’s mine.”
Haphastia looked back and forth between the limo that “Pinkie Pie” was climbing into and the one that “Rainbow Dash” was boarding. “Um, can I go with you, Jalpek?” she asked. “I’m supposed to be putting together an advertising campaign for Equestrian Airlines.”
“That was supposed to be you?” Jalpek answered. “Sure, come on in.”
“Um, do you mind?” Haphastia asked Lunesta.
“No,” the pink pony answered a little too quickly. “I don’t mind. I guess I can explore the town tonight. See the arcades.”
“Arcades?” asked Haphastia.
“I design video games for a living, and arcades are where video games live. I have no idea how ‘Florlet’ figured how much I love those. Should be fun!”
Jalpek spent the trip staring belligerently at the black sphere on the limo’s ceiling. She burst out of the vehicle as soon as it landed outside an enormous hangar. “Finally!” she exclaimed.
She led Haphastia to a “spinner”, a flying craft small enough to only fit the two of them, or so it appeared. “Let’s go for a ride,” Jalpek invited her. “No dragons.”
“But Mistresss—” Jalpek’s dragon began to say.
“Nope. Too small. There’s no way we’ll all be able to fit in there, and Haphastia here needs to find out all kinds of stuff to make her advertising from.” She waved a hoof over at a far corner. “Go over there and wait for us.”
“Mistresss?” Haphastia’s dragon asked.
“Go ahead,” the pony instructed him. “You know how to fly this contraption?” she asked, lifting a panel and marveling at the complex inner workings. “I can almost follow this.”
“Of course I can fly it!” Jalpek protested. “I’m president of the company, remember? And look,” she added directing the magenta mare’s attention to the interior of the plane. “No spy do-hickeys. This is state of the art, so I got an exemption from the government so my competitors don’t steal my designs.”
“You’ve got competitors?”
“Aeronautics is a cutthroat business,” Jalpek said with a straight face, before breaking out in a grin and adding, “from what I remember.”
~ ~ ~
In a few minutes, the plane was out several hundred ponyheights above the rest of the traffic.
“I think that whitish blob over there might be the moon,” Rainbow Dash said, pointing out the window. “So, you want to hear something funny?”
“What is it?” Pinkamena replied.
“The reason why I, why ‘Jalpek 7’, became an aircraft designer—it’s because I’m supposed to be terrified of flying on my own, so I had to build machines to do the flying for me. Can you believe it? Me, afraid of flying?”
Pinkamena put on the barest hint of a smile. “Lunesta and Haphastia have precisely the opposite personalities of Pinkie Pie and myself.”
“Yes, I guess that would do it.” Rainbow Dash engaged the autopilot. “OK. So, we need to talk.”
“About what we’re doing in this dream?”
“No, about Pinkie Pie. The truth about Pinkie Pie.”
Pinkamena crossed her forelegs and sulked. “Knowing the truth is not going to do you any good, Dashie. All it’s given me is one big headache.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me, and let me decide?”
Pinkamena sighed. “Well for one thing, you’d have to keep it to dreams. Never, ever give the slightest hint you know her secret when you’re awake, or it’s over. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. Give this secret away when you’re awake, and everything’s over. No more ponies, no more Equestria, no more Princesses. Everything you’ve ever known will end. The only reason I feel safe even hinting at this is because Pinkie’s pantheon doesn’t include any dream gods.”
Rainbow Dash reeled in the confined space of the cabin. “So it’s true, then? Pinkie Pie’s an honest-to-Celestia goddess?”
Pinkamena paused, then scratched at one ear with the edge of a hoof. “Are you sure you want to know her story?”
“Tell me everything.” Rainbow insisted.
The earth pony sighed. “OK,” she said, “but you are going to regret it.” She dramatically tapped the glass of the spinner’s canopy. “She was born on the Hidden Planet, at the edge of Known Space. Her people were technologically advanced, although emotionally frigid, having their every need met for them, and had abandoned their space program centuries earlier. Their greatest scientist, Jell, had discovered that the planet was doomed, but the Science Council refused to believe him, so he broke his infant daughter’s genetic link to the planet and created a rocket to save only—”
Rainbow Dash groaned. “Seriously?” she asked. “She ripped off Supermare’s origin story?”
“Well, at the time she told me, I didn’t even know what a comic book was, so I was quite impressed.”
Rainbow frowned. “Well, at least she had the good taste to use the version from Burn’s Mare of Steel miniseries. So what did she tell you happened after the planet exploded?”
“The rocket crash-landed in the ocean of a planet much like Equestria. That world was protected by a group of ponies with strange powers, ponies who were hated for being different.”
The pegasus rolled her eyes. “Here we go...” she muttered under her breath.
“After saving the world once again, their spaceship crashed right near where Pinkie’s rocket landed. She discovered them all, unconscious, and brought them to the surface before they could drown. But one of them, Mental Mare, was hurt so badly that she had to be put into suspended animation for months before she would be able to wake up. So Pinkie used her incredible powers to impersonate her.”
“Oh no!” Rainbow exclaimed. “She didn’t!”
“Soon afterwards,” the earth pony continued with a grin, “this false ‘Mental Mare’ was kidnapped by the evil Chess Club and brainwashed, thus realizing the full extent of her powers.”
“And then she went and blew up a star, right?”
“Right,” said Pinkamena with a sardonic smile. “However did you guess?”
“Ex-Mares, issues 129 to 138,” Rainbow Dash recited. “Written by Clear Mount, drawn by...wow, she really must be a Burn groupie. And then what happened?”
“Blowing up that star brought her to the attention to a band of renegades that had also escaped from the Hidden Planet before it blew up, and who were also as super-powered as her. They adopted her into their clan, then resumed their millennia-long reign of terror.”
Rainbow put a hoof to her forehead. “The chronology here is giving me a headache.”
Pinkamena nodded in sympathy. “Eventually, they made such a nuisance of themselves that the neighboring gods declared war on them. Pinkie’s name back then was Judge Ender. ...Or Finality, or Termination, or something grim like that. She was little more than a baby by their standards. She thinks she might have been the reason why her side lost, that she didn’t accelerate the inevitable destruction of an entire planet of psychics before they had tipped the balance.”
“Yikes,” Rainbow said quietly.
“I think the planet was called Aladan, or something like that,” Pinkamena continued.
“None of this last part is ringing a bell,” Rainbow said. “I was thinking maybe Judge Doom or Kirby Dot’s New Gods series, but I never paid too much attention to the philosophical titles.”
“No, I did my research, and I didn’t find anything like this. I think it might have actually happened to her. Anyway, after they were defeated, her pantheon was sentenced to spend a lot of time in this place called Limbo—it was like a billion years, but much longer. Like if we had a word for a million, times a million, times a million—that’s how many years it would be. She spent her time in Limbo away from the rest of her group, because her brief glimpse of mortals had taught her how awful her fellow gods were. She found a way to spy on this race of funny mortals near one of the entrances to Limbo. She said she lost her mind after learning about something called the ‘Cat Skills’ from them. That’s where I came in.
“I was too close to your first Sonic Rainboom, Dashie,” Pinkamena said, her eyes unfocused. “Way, way too close. You killed me, Dashie, left nothing but a little scorch in the ground.”
“No, really?” Rainbow asked in shock. “I’m sorry.” The words sounded horrifically inadequate.
“It’s OK,” Pinkamena said with a slight smile. “I got better, eventually. But the first thing that happened was that the magic of your Rainboom was so powerful that my soul was sent to Limbo instead of where it was supposed to go. I started to lose my mind there, being confronted by beings so far beyond my comprehension. But she found me, and she figured out a way to get me back to Equestria, and back in a new body identical to my old one. And best of all, back at the exact moment I left, so nopony would know any better.
“It took the better part of a week, at least as I measured time, for her to complete the preparations for this. And during this time I found out about her, about how she was living, and most of all, I learned enough to decide that she didn’t deserve this life. So, at the final moment, when I was being sent back to my body, I pulled her along with me.
“I wasn’t ready for coming back,” Pinkamena said, looking at the floor of the self-guided aircraft. “My family knew, they just knew. And I was never very popular before. I tried to show them the happiness I had learned from my new friend, the happiness that had given me my cutie mark, but they just told me how I had ruined everything. How I was going to cause the end of the world...by being happy. And that they would never, ever love me again, unless I became as miserable as them.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said through tears. “I couldn’t! But I couldn’t stand to be rejected by the only ponies I had ever known. So...I ran away. I ran away in my own mind and left a ditzy god in charge. She decided to call herself Pinkie Pie, she talked her way into the Cake household, and the rest you know.”
“No, I don’t know the rest!” Rainbow protested. “Like for instance, how does the secret getting out end everything?”
Pinkamena frowned. “Pinkie told me that her family is a very jealous sort. They don’t really care how she lives her life in Limbo, but they couldn’t stand the idea that she was out and about while they were stuck doing nothing. They’d report her disappearance. Or, if they didn’t, it was always possible that some god might notice her, and then she’d be in trouble.”
“But Pinkie does impossible stuff all the time!” Rainbow insisted. “How is that not putting everything in danger?”
Pinkamena opened her mouth to reply, then stopped to think out how best to phrase her answer. Finally she said, “There’s a line past which it would get really obvious. Pinkie knows where it is, and won’t go anywhere near it. But let me say this again: she can’t go past it. Pinkie has the power to fix everything, but she can’t. There could be a monster that wipes out Cloudsdale, that wipes out Canterlot, that threatens to blow up the planet, and Pinkie couldn’t cross that line to stop it. Because if she was caught, all evidence that she had left Limbo would have to be erased. That doesn’t just mean Equestria going away. It means the whole galaxy that Equestria’s in would have to disappear, erased from history before the moment of its creation! So, do you promise never to tell a waking soul?”
Rainbow looked calmly at the panicking Pinkamena for a few seconds, trying to decide at which precise point this conversation had leapt head-first into complete madness. “So basically, what you’re telling me is that Pinkie is the same as I always thought she was: a weird, weird pony.”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, alright, I promise not to tell. Wow, it’s a good thing that Dragon Emperor didn’t spy on any of that.”
Well, it’s not like you’ll remember any of this when you wake up, Dashie, Pinkamena thought to herself in relief.
And all the while, the spinner’s open microphone was broadcasting the two ponies’ entire conversation into the aether.