Rainbow Dash cruised along looking forHOLY bucking road patties! What the hay was that?! A distant explosion rumbled across the landscape, an emerging cloud almost glowing as it rose to the sky, glowing in a very bright shade of ...pink.
“Pinkie Pie,” Rainbow Dash said with a suspicious squint, changing her direction to jet towards the aftermath of the explosion. Heading for what, she was not certain, but she was sure an explosion like that wouldn’t be good, and that a lot of ponies might need help.
When she got there, it was a maddening sight. Rainbow Dash landed amid the wreckage of what might have been a building once. She tried to figure out just what the hay she was looking at.
The Pinkies were all zipping around almost faster than Rainbow Dash could track, and the rest of the town didn’t seem much better off! There was a stallion who seemed to think it was hilarious to ride on top of a lamp post, two mares mutually and endlessly chasing each other’s tails, a bunch of big buffalo who thought it was a good idea to roll upside down and now seemed surprised that they couldn’t get back up, basically pure bedlam.
“Discord!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed angrily, slapping one hoof in the palm of the other.
“Nope!” a strawberry red mare with blonde hair and slightly whiter highlights and bright blue eyes said, 2 inches away from Rainbow Dash’s face. “Salt!”
And then she was gone.
Suddenly alone, Rainbow Dash blinked, then looked around at the ponies running around, some vaguely trying to maybe corral Pinkies maybe, but so out of it that they were doing anything but.
“What is going on?” she shouted, stomping her hoof down.
“Um, I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” an older stallion’s voice rang out, distinct not in its volume but in its coherency. Dash turned to look at him half hidden around the corner of a nearby building. He looked like someone had forgotten his birthday and kicked his puppy while stealing his ice cream at the same time. It was an odd look for an older gentlepony. Rainbow thought he looked familiar, but she didn’t recall what he did in this part of town. Dash didn’t usually come around here on account of all there really was to do was that one sort of skeezy... oh.
“What do you want?” Rainbow said suspiciously at the tavern owner. Her glare softened as heart went out to him though, because that tavern must be what got destroyed. “I mean, sorry for your loss and all,” she admitted, self consciously scratching a hoof on her past–
“No, wait!” he said, making Rainbow Dash freeze in place.
“What’s wrong?” she asked concernedly, putting her hoof down firmly, where it hit one of the many piles of pinkish dust littered all over this wreckage.
He gave her a look.
Then he put a hoof on his forehead, and slowly drew the fork of it down his brow, and across the bridge of his nose. “That’s salt,” he stated, pointing at her hooves.
“Salt?” Dash asked looking down at her hooves. “Why is it pink then?”
“It’s strawberry flavored, okay?” the tavern owner said in a strained voice.
Dash gaped at him openly, saying, “Why would you want to make strawberries taste salty ?”
“No, not salt,” he griped. “Salt!” But that was the same thing, so Rainbow Dash just continued cocking her head at him.
“Weasel dust,” he tried, growing agitated. “Gutter glitter. White horse. Nose candy. Bounce powder! I’m sorry!” he was openly bawling at this point falling to his knees, “It’s me! I’ve been selling salt all this time! I didn’t mean to hurt anypony! It was all fine, I was just going to keep it under the table, I was making everypony happy! And now I’m ruined! One bad trip and everything went up in Pink!”
Rainbow Dash visibly... flinched. “Wait, you mean like... salt ?”
“Yes!” he said in exasperation and despair, “Salt!”
“Well that’s great buddy,” Dash said placatingly to the stallion, and not very sympathetically, with maybe a bit of a disgusted sneer, “But what’s salt got to do with m–”
She looked down at what her hooves were stomping in.
“Salt?” Rainbow Dash asked dumbly, lifting her head to look at the proprieter. He was too busy weeping to answer, but everypony around in a full block’s radius were all too happy to fill in for him, exclaiming in one single loud collective,
“SALT!”
And all with huge smiles on their faces.
Dash jerked her hoof up again. “Oh fuck oh bucking apples oh no,” she said, rising up into the air, and as soon as her wings beat down it was going everywhere again. “No!” Dash shrieked, flapping hard enough to take off vertically straight into the air. There was a collective cheer beneath her, but she ignored it. She may have kicked up clouds of the stuff all over everypony, but she had to stay out of it at
all.
costs.
As she flew, Rainbow kept her hooves as far away from her face as possible, hoping the tears streaming from her eyes were just from the wind in her face and her distress, not a certain irritating powder. In a completely selfless act that was for the good of everypony, Rainbow Dash abandoned all attempts to help anypony, instead making a beeline for Sweetie Belle’s real house, where Sweetie Belle’s real parents were, that Sweetie Belle really lived with, and more importantly for what lay just beyond it, the nearest lake lagoon that Rainbow Dash could pile head first into with a huge splash.
With a burst of water and rainbow, Dash came up for breath, her mane whipping above her as she gulped in air. Floating there on her back she rubbed her hooves quickly together, splashing in the water like some kind of pony raccoon, or otter maybe. Her forearms were clean now, and her nose felt clear. It looked like she was safe. She didn’t feel any tingling at least. Then again, that stuff snuck up on you, and especially...
Suffice to say, Rainbow Dash made sure to emerge from that lake a soaking, bedraggled, and quite muddy mess of a pegasus. And that was fine with her, because it didn’t get her. It had been close, but she was safe. Probably safe. She wasn’t blacking out, or missing time, so she was probably safe.
“Is that you , Rainbow Dash?” a very familiar voice said in front of her, breaking Rainbow Dash out of her spiral of worry with a heady bludgeon of disgust. Rainbow groaned, and wiped the mud off her eyes, opening them and looking forward into the unsettlingly askew, but brightly golden eyes adorning the smiling visage of Derpy Hooves.
“I’ll be fine,” Rainbow Dash grumbled to her. “I just had to wash something off really fast. I’ll just get cleaned up really–”
“Oh, I can help with that!” Derpy exclaimed, fluttering lightly into the air.
“No, no, no don’t—!” Rainbow exclaimed, squeezing her eyes shut, and sticking a hoof out at her, but a second passed, and Derpy was still just hovering there passively. She had kind of a sad look on her face, like she expected Rainbow Dash to reject her without even giving her a chance.
“I was just gonna make it rain on you,” Derpy said in a plaintive tone.
“That... that’d be fine , Derpy,” Dash said guiltily, shaking globs of mud off her wings. With an instant smile, Derpy eagerly bounded into the sky in search of a rain cloud, and Rainbow Dash had to half smile at that pegasus. She sure was enthusiastic; that was one thing you couldn’t begrudge her for. Presently a suitable cloud was fetched, and Derpy’s confident stomps made the water come down from the rain soaked cloud. The water trailed slickly over Rainbow Dash’s well oiled coat, washing the caked mud off her body and tail. Dash closed her eyes with her nose turned up, and wondered if maybe their friendship wouldn’t be so bad after all.
That was when Derpy hit the lightning bolt.
While she was unconscious, Rainbow Dash had a very peculiar dream. She dreamed she had woken up from being electrocuted, woken up quickly enough that tiny bolts of static still danced through her hair, woken up still there down by the lake. In front of her, in the dream, was Scootaloo. Except Scootaloo was just passing by, with an oversized bass drum strapped to her back, and cymbals stuck on her front hooves. Rainbow Dash thought that meant the dream was symbolic of the conflict Rainbow Dash felt between her friendship with Pinkie Pie and Pinkie’s antagonism of Scootaloo, but then there was a second filly passing by that Rainbow Dash didn’t particularly recognize at all. She had Pinkie Pie’s accordion strapped to her for some reason.
Dash was starting to think that maybe this dream was representative of her feelings of alienation, when Pinkie had stopped seeming like Pinkie while she was wearing that instrument, but then the next pony who passed by was Pinkie Pie herself, blowing enthusiastically into her own tuba, along with the rest of the troupe, in that very catchy and familiar tune that Rainbow Dash had been battling desperately all last night.
Perhaps it was just the song persisting so long through the night, that it filtered into her dreams? There was another unfamiliar filly with a banjo who stumbled to play it now and then, but couldn’t really be heard above the rest of the instruments. Behind her, bumping her forward gently was Archer, who had a harmonica attached in front of her mouth. Then came Junebug, who appeared to be attempting to trot as bouncily as Pinkie Pie did, in order to make the tambourines jingle on her flank.
Then the dream just took a turn for the strange, because behind that was Pinkie Pie, then Pinkie Pie, then Pinkie Pie, then a hundred, then a dozen, then a score. Like... all the Pinkies. “Are you okay, Rainbow Dash?” came the voice from Derpy’s familiar visage, poking her head through the unexpectedly thunder cloud, still hovering above.
“I’m fine,” Dash said uncertainly, “But I think I may have had too much ice cream before bed again, because this is one craaaazy dream.”
Derpy fluttered down to Dash’s level, looking at the parade of Pinkies, saying, “Ooh, I see. But, I thought we were awake?”
Rainbow Dash gave Derpy a look, then demanded, “Well, how do you explain that, then?” throwing a hoof in the direction of this strange phenomenon.
“When the Pinkie Pie turned into a bunch of Scootaloos, I think the song counts for her now,” Derpy speculated, a forehoof idly pressed beneath her chin, “And Scootaloo’s playing it so they’ll follow her instead, instead of destroying stuff.”
Dash gave Derpy another look... a different look. Derpy nonjudgementally looked right back at her... sort of. Rainbow Dash couldn’t help but perceive, in that moment that their eyes failed to meet, that Derpy wasn’t really capable of giving anypony a look. Derpy was one pony who would never ever give Rainbow Dash a look, no matter what Rainbow Dash did or said to deserve it. Huh.
“C’mon, let’s follow them,” Dash decided, winging up above the Pinkie parade, and pausing to look back to the ground. Derpy hadn’t moved in that moment, just with a curious, unfamiliar expression on her face, like she was unfamiliar with something. Then she too hovered up into the air and came beside Rainbow Dash, who turned forward and together, the two of them travelled quickly to the head of the parade, where Scootaloo and crew marched ahead of a massive amount of Pinkies.
Rainbow Dash thought it was a massive amount at least, but massive was an overstatement. The score of Pinkies grew and grew from there, until it turned even more massive, into a uh... a whole lot of Pinkie Pie. Pinkies came out of the woodwork (sometimes literally) joining the procession one after another, turning the streets pink with... pink. Scootaloo was travelling north through town, and every Pinkie in earshot seemed quite happy to bounce along directly toward her and join the mass travelling along behind her.
Some other pegasi were fluttering down uncertainly to the pink tumult, but the Pinkies were dancing along so orderly that nopony was sure it was a good idea to try to drag them away to the Pinkie cage, which was full apparently. Some efforts underway regarding that, or something. Other ponies crept out from behind barrels and under tree stumps to watch the procession, some following along its edges with caution. But one way or another, the Pinkies soon formed a solid pink core to a population of Ponyvillians who weren’t all sure what was going on, but were certainly happy that Pinkie Pie, whichever she was, had stopped destroying their house.
Somepony had the bright idea of singing along. Dash wished it was herself, but it was not her bright idea, rather one she picked up on, as the voices in the crowd began to join together, improvising a song based on this simple tune Scootaloo and crew were playing. If it was possible for the effect to be any stronger, the singing seemed to magnify it. Pinkies came from all over town. Pinkies came from where they had fought pitchforks brandished at them by desperate ponies guarding the mountainous bales of hay. Even the salt disaster, where it looked like Scootaloo was heading, the hopped up ponies didn’t all have the coordination to join, but the hopped up Pinkies all joined as one, and merely danced to the rhythm of the sixteenth notes.
Full of spirit for the success of this, a whole throng of ponies formed, looking like a gigantic spearhead from the sky, whose handle was entirely pink. Scootaloo and crew’s musical accompaniment gave strength to their words, which in turn gave strength to the song. Pegasi were turning loops in the air, earth ponies and the few unicorns prancing in unison. It was like the whole town was swelling in song. Scootaloo led them along in a broad circle all through town, finally convening for the Golden Oak’s library, where they could put these Pinkies somewhere safe.
When they arrived at the library and the climax of the song, Dash burst upwards like a fountain, from a circle of ponies in the shape of a flower with a bright pink center, twirling together with the other pairs of pegasi, her arm locked together with... oh hey, it was Derpy again. And with a bright cheer they all finished, with high hooves all around.
Rainbow Dash then spied Twilight Sparkle, still standing there by her magic box cage. Twilight’s horn was aglow, and she would have been facing the cage, but instead she was looking around behind her, giving Rainbow Dash a very odd look. Actually, Twilight was probably giving all of them a really odd look. She was just kind of staring behind her, sort of like somepony had reached in there and switched off her brain.
Ponies parted to the left and right as Scootaloo marched forward, leading the Pinkies they had gathered into the square. Standing on either side, or floating above, they watched warily as Pinkies passed them peacefully, a pretentious, preternatural procession of pink. Rainbow Dash herself flew down to Twilight, landing in front of the unresponsive unicorn, exclaiming deliberately yet casually,
“Hey, how’s it going?”
Twilight turned her head to look at Rainbow Dash, but didn’t seem to see her, sort of mouthing words with nothing coming out. Scootaloo started circling around the market square in front of the library, forming sort of a holding pattern with all the Pinkies. Strangely, none of them turned around to approach Scootaloo from the front, instead all following along behind the procession, in an endless circle of the square.
Rainbow Dash waved a hoof in front of Twilight’s eyes, asking “Are you o—”
“The song, of course!” Twilight exclaimed loudly enough to make Dash’s ears go back. “Why didn’t I think—why didn’t anypony think of–is that Scootaloo ?”
“Yup,” Rainbow Dash said, backing up and perking her ears, following Twilight’s gaze to the marching pegasus filly. “Her and some others. I really don’t wanna wake up now, because I think the squirt just saved this town.”
“Twilight!” came an alarmed cry behind her, from the mint green unicorn known as Lyra, causing Twilight to spin on her hooves. Twilight sort of blasted the cage again, with some sort of weird thing that made it more purple again. Highly technical unicorn stuff, obviously.
“Ohh, what are we going to do?” Twilight fussed, despite the taxing usage of her horn. “There have got to be at least twice as many Pinkies out there. There’s no way they’ll fit into this cage! We’re already operating at maximum capacity limits. Why did they have to multiply? Why did they have to multiply more ? There has to be a solution to this. But what?”
Rainbow Dash didn’t have a solution, so she shrugged helplessly at the brown earth pony stallion, who happened to be standing on the other side of Twilight looking impatienta. He tapped Twilight on the shoulder, where she snapped her head around to him and shouted, “What?!”
“Somma us made another cage ovah there,” the brown, heavyset stallion said in a gruff, scruffy voice with a heavy Manehatten accent. “You can put the Pinkies in it, probly.” He had a construction hat on.
Twilight blinked. “Wow, that’s convenient,” she said somewhat mollified. “And you didn’t mention this until just now, because...?”
“We did like a hour ago,” he said neutrally, “You just mumbled somethings about translatral omnisomethingoranudda.”
“Translateral omnifold matrices, yes,” Twilight corrected half-heartedly. “If you haven’t noticed I have been a lit tle distracted today” To emphasize her words, she zapped the cage extra more unicorn power, so it made a cool looking flash. It certainly was enough to impress Rainbow Dash. As for the older stallion he just raised a hoof saying,
“Hey, hey no offense. Just sayin’ it’s ready.”
“Awfully convenient that it’s only ready the very moment that we need it,” Twilight persisted, unyielding in her grumpy snark.
“Toldja it was ready ten mins ago,” he responded readily. “You just said somethin’ about star somethin’ manisomethin’s.”
“Antestarnian manifolds, probably,” Twilight said disgruntledly. “Just, do whatever you want just, get the Pinkies so they can’t hurt anyone, and don’t kill any of them!” Then she turned to face the magic cage and stared at it silently like the other sentinel unicorns.
The easiest task was getting the Pinkies into the new pit. With some coaxing from the ponies involved, Scootaloo and the band stood alongside the pit, playing their instruments as the Pinkies proceeded forward, every Pinkie jumping heedlessly into the space below. Thanks to Twilight’s precise measurement of Pinkie Pie’s normalized pronking capacity, the pit was far too deep for them to escape. Moving the Pinkies who were already in the magic cage was trickier, because that meant both taking the cage down, and getting the Pinkies out of that plain dirt pit, without engaging her legendary digging capabilities.
What they did was lower the cage walls to the level of the ground, where ponies all around “helped” the Pinkies out of the pit, helped the Pinkies who needed it at least and didn’t jump right out. There was a greater volume of Pinkies in there than you would think, expanding rapidly when they found they could spread out and escape. But rather than terrorize the population, they simply went prancing over to the musical group, obediently jumping into the larger pit where the others remained at the bottom dancing their peabrained little hearts away.
Then the cage could be dispelled, and the maintenance unicorns all sagged with relief. A rather somewhat rotund pony with a cream coat and pink and blue curls went rushing over to Lyra, placing a cool cloth over her horn and feeding her chocolates. The doctor was joined by nurses, settling to rest there on a prepared seat instead of the solid turf. Sparkler who hadn’t gone as long had a big smile of accomplishment, and with the way her adoptive mother Derpy, and Derpy’s oddly pensive foal celebrated her release, it made sense for Sparkler to feel that way.
Fluttershy was usually Twilight’s spot-pony, her or Rarity given the situation. But Fluttershy was without a doubt currently hiding inside her house, behind the door on the first floor, underneath her bed. And Rarity was... something. Applejack was waaaay out of town, laying there on the ground like an upturned beetle, twitching now and again in her magically induced sleep. Pinkie Pie was uh... yeah. So, that left it to Rainbow Dash. She didn’t have a cloth, so she went and grabbed a nice dense, wet not staticky cloud for Twilight to bury her forehead into. Twilight didn’t seem to want to stop to catch her breath though, even though like, all of her friends besides Rainbow Dash were AWOL or K.O.’d. It made Dash kind of nervous, actually. Was it really that dangerous to have Twilight Sparkle as a friend?
The final task, perhaps the hardest of all, was to get Scootaloo to stop playing that buckfucking song. Reasoning didn’t work. Nor did pleas, shouts, threats, threats of physical violence, or physical violence. Finally it was Twilight’s magic that managed to snag the fillies, as they evaded yet another attempt by Dash to grab their instruments, determinedly playing them while running at the same time. Twilight somehow caught the leading edge of the duct tape, and as the fillies darted away, the white/blue one got spun around as the duct tape unravelled, leaving her accordion once again a useless leaky mess.
Twilight was starting to find some real satisfaction in causing damage to that accordion.
So the music stopped, and oddly that wasn’t enough to get them to calm down this time, because like, they were actually the ones playing it, or something. Scootaloo immediately ran out from under her bass drum ...somehow, to find a new accordion, but Dash went after her and finally managed to cart her into the air, holding the struggling filly up trapped on a featureless cloud until Scootaloo agreed to calm down and talk to her (if it meant getting an accordion). Subsequently, Scootaloo came to realize that she sort of really didn’t want an accordion after all, and that she actually didn’t want to play it after the Pinkies were trapped. Sort of. Maybe.
By the time Rainbow Dash cooled Scootaloo’s supernatural enthusiasm, and gave her a Dashride(tm) down to the warm, forgiving ground, Twilight had taken care of Archer, and Archer was well, trying to take care of the two new fillies, who berefit of their song were just crying without end. Thankfully, all that marching and playing had worked up a good appetite, and their cries ceased quickly once Scootaloo and Archer pounced on each one, sort of hunching over the filly to sink down over her and engulf her.
Dash was so relieved, she went and hugged both the fillies, even before Scootaloo and Archer had slurped up the tails yet. And it was weird, but... feeling the muscles within these misshapen fillies flexing and compressing under her hooves made it not weird. They weren’t weird filly blobs anymore, they were just Scootaloo and Archer, warm, alive and healthy, as they did something incomprehensible for Rainbow Dash, but perfectly normal for themselves.
After all this, Twilight hadn’t even spared a second to see this new Pinkie cage. Dash had to drag her over practically, because she was just totally pessimistic about it. “I don’t see why they even bothered,” Twilight grumbled disconsolately her butt dragging along the ground, “Pinkie spent half her life in petriculture. She can pretty much go through the walls of any physical pit you dig, like butter.”
Twilight flicked an ear around hearing nothing but the mumbling noises of ponies mingling and talking concernedly, and the occasional squeal or whine from the Pinkies in the pit. “Music stopped too,” she mumbled half consciously, “They’re probably all back around town by now, wreaking havoc agai... oh.”
While roughshod and haphazard, the larger pit the Pinkies were sitting in was entirely lined with thick metal plating, riveted and in some areas welded in place. Much of it was simply exposed metal, but many of the sheets were brightly painted in pastel colors. Rainbow Dash had never seen anything like it. Heck, she hadn’t ever seen that much metal in one place before, except maybe gold. This stuff looked like one of those weird new alloys that Dash knew very little about. Stronger than gold, lighter than platinum, something something. Egghead stuff.
“They cannibalized the train,” Twilight mentioned disbelievingly.
“They trained the what now?” Rainbow asked her sometimes inscrutable friend.
“The tr– the locomotive,” Twilight corrected herself, looking at Dash for confirmation.
Dash smiled awkwardly and attempted, saying, “They trained the loco cannibals?” with a shrug. She knew it was wrong, because cannibalism was what Nightmare Moon did, not regular ponies with any sense in their heads. But she had to say something wrong, so that Twilight could correct her, without Dash having to do something stupid like admitting she didn’t know something.
Twilight groaned, and said, “You remember that new rail network that they have been building out from Canterlot?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Rainbow said unenthusiastically. “Move stuff around faster, some big machines on rails or something? I don’t know why they don’t just ask a pegasus!”
“Those machines are called locomotives,” Twilight lectured, “They operate on the mechanothaumic recompression of ignited anthracite, which turns the wheels that push them along the rails.”
“Woah,” Rainbow Dash said in an impressed tone, “Loco is right!”
Twilight rolled her eyes, continuing, “Anyway, as the weight is not a limiting factor, they generally construct these locomotives, or ‘trains’ out of a modern metal alloy, generally an even ratio of platinum/iridium, which is quite tough and its metallic nature would be resistant to any sort of digging or scoring.”
“I think I follow, but that doesn’t explain what’s the deal with cannibalism.”
“Well,” Twilight followed up impatiently, “They have been building a rail to Ponyville for quite some time now, and the locomotive to ride on those rails was built out of, and covered in very strong metal plates.”
Rainbow Dash blinked. “Oh, like those plates?” she said, pointing down at the pit o’ Pinkies.
“Exactly,” Twilight said. “My guess is they just ripped off all the plates and casings, leaving the train looking like an animal picked clean by scavengers. Thus the term ‘cannibalize.’”
Dash nodded sagely, “Uh huh, but the thing is, we are ponies. We’re not rail machines. It couldn’t really be cannibalism if we aren’t–”
“It’s just a saying, okay!” Twilight snorted huffily with a death glare.
“...okay,” Dash said, shrinking back meekly.
The sunken metal pit the two stood over could have encompassed the foundation of Town Hall. The roughly attached plates formed a haphazard but complete seal from floor to open ceiling. In this pit could be seen a sea of pink. Shifting, roiling, bouncing... but staying.
“That’s a lot of Pinkie Pies” Rainbow Dash remarked distantly, feeling a little dizzy even looking at the thing.
Twilight nodded sleepily, looked like she was going to fall over, then shouted “Princess Celestia!” at the top of her lungs, and started running away at full speed. Rainbow Dash watched her indecisively for a second, before sighing and taking to the air, flapping on after the fleeing unicorn, who appeared to be heading in the princess’s last known direction, to the east. Rainbow may as well follow along, because Twilight needed somepony to catch her when she did fall over, after all.
Derpy may have shyly watched Rainbow Dash leave, before sighing and flying in the other direction across the square. She had a foal to keep watch over, after all.
Princess Celestia was the first thing Rainbow Dash saw at the edge of town, the resplendent princess standing there very quietly, doing seemingly nothing. Before her was a sleeping, or otherwise unconscious Pinkie Pie, who had undergone a dramatic change, and that’s not counting the wings on her back. Pinkie Pie looked... like something Pinkie Pie should never look like, like something nopony should ever look like.
She was a lot smaller now, and not in a good way. Her legs were skinny and her barrel was tight, shrunken against her belly; you could see her knees, and the edges of her ribs. Her hair had fallen limp, descending haphazardly around her head which, looked unsettlingly normal. She was surrounded by a glowing circle of the princess’s magic, which had a bunch of lines coming out of it that joined together at sort of right angles before going into a second circle which had lines coming out of it which... well okay, it was a big magic thing, and it looked kind of scary. Pinkie would twitch every few seconds and it would light up briefly.
Rainbow Dash would have poked it curiously, but she didn’t have a death wish.
Twilight was walking carefully around it, peering at the edge of the pattern intently. “What do you make of it?” Rainbow Dash asked in a carefully concerned tone.
“Princess Celestia is trying to remove her magic from Pinkie Pie, without removing Pinkie Pie’s magic,” Twilight explained roughly. No really, she sounded pretty rough. “It’s a very delicate process, and she must not be disturbed.”
“Wow, you can get all that just from this spell thing?” Rainbow asked with a marked degree of respect.
Twilight glanced back at her sideways, saying, “Well, yes. But it’s also written on the side, here.”
Rainbow looked down and actually the edge of the magic circle thing wasn’t lines, but instead letters in Princess Celestia’s elegant swirling calligraphy. They said, “Please do not disturb. Spell separation in progress. If T.S. refer to D.D. Delicate Dweomer Division”
“The pentuple D is pretty last resort,” Twilight said with a heavy look towards Pinkie Pie, “You only use it when your enchantment includes no disenchantment facility, or disenchantment is beyond your thaumic capabilities, and you can’t just integrate the enchantment into their dative pattern. In this case, disenchantment itself includes no such facilities since it is already disenchanting, and the level of magnitude to blind wipe a fifth tier would be uh...” she paused counting on her hooves. “Well, hopefully it’s beyond the princess’s capabilities,” she admitted, “Because that amount of magic would be pretty much sufficient to destroy, well, everything.”
“Everything in Ponyville?” Dash said with a really creepy feeling in her tummy.
Twilight lifted her head to look straight at Rainbow Dash, her voice level as she said, “Everything.”
“B-b-b-b-but what’s she doing right there!” Rainbow Dash said quick stepping away from that ominously glowing circle.
Twilight blinked at her, then her face softened into a smile and she said, “Don’t worry, no spell is that powerful. It’s just some outrageous value that indicates our thaumic metrics are not a perfect model. Prosaic Scrutinizer had the—” she took another look at Rainbow Dash, and said, “I mean, this is Dancing Dusk’s Delicate Dweomer Division. It’s only half the raw power of the target enchantment, more like a surgeon’s scalpel, really.”
She turned to muse at the glowing thing around Pinkie, saying, “A really large surgeon’s scalpel.”
Dash nodded uncertaintly, saying half under a wing, “So... you’re gonna help her?”
Twilight actually snickered at that. It was quick, but enough to hurt Rainbow’s pride. Twilight said, “Well, if you were watching somepony perform surgery, would you push their head around trying to help them perform surgery better?”
Rainbow didn’t answer, but as she felt her ears going down, she figured it was pretty obvious to Twilight that she didn’t have to tell her that the answer was “No.”
Instead, Twilight turned to Celestia again and said in a worried tone, “Has she been casting this all these hours?”
“She’s a princess?” Rainbow Dash offered as if in explanation. “Besides, you were casting that cage thing for all these hours.”
It was probably the wrong thing to say because Twilight sagged at that revelation, saying, “You know what, I think I’m just gonna take a rest here.”
“Yeah, you look pretty terrible, Twilight,” Dash admitted with something of a wince at the limp haired, bedraggled, eye twitchy, shaky hooved friend of hers.
Twilight rolled her eyes at that, practically rolled her whole head really, and settled down onto her belly in the meadow they were in, collecting her tail neatly around her haunches. “Yeah I’ll be fi–” she said before flopping over onto her side in a dissheveled heap on the grass there. Dash peered over her friend concernedly, but Twilight merely began emitting a quiet snore.
After propping Twilight’s head up with the softest thing she knew any pony could touch, which is packed cloud, Rainbow Dash flew back through Ponyville. The town was already in the process of reconstruction. With the Pinkies taken care of, those who survived the saltpocalypse were quick to action to restore their town to its iconic beauty.
Which is to say, the fallen half of one single broken building was halfway pullied up to being reattached, and several rooted up flowers were already restored to their beds and de-wilted. Several ponies with watering cans were making the top priority of flower garden restoration a reality. But Ponyville was still pretty darn broken. Everything looked smoking, shattered, dissheveled, or otherwise on fire. It might take half a week to fix this much damage!
Rainbow Dash really hoped that Pinkie Pie wouldn’t get in too much trouble for all this. It totally wasn’t her fault! Well, it sort of was, but it also wasn’t? Even her clones were never trying to do anything bad, they just kept making really really stupid mistakes because they were dumb. But maybe Pinkie was lying about it and meant to make the mistakes? How could one pony accidentally cause this much chaos and destruction?
Not to mention scaring a little filly so her folks would cave in. But... Pinkie wasn’t even there at all. It was just a misunderstanding between Scootaloo and Apple Bloom, if Rainbow Dash heard right. Pinkie just said stuff, to make... later happen... stuff. Rainbow Dash’s head was starting to hurt. So she did what she usually did when things were getting confusing, flew high up into the sky until everything was tiny and insignificant below her.
Dash didn’t know how long she stayed up there, dancing on the chill winds that swept fast through the upper vastness, playing with clouds like it wasn’t already her job to do so. A solid ten minutes at least. But such a very long time was just what she needed to clear her head. There were no obstacles up here, nothing but water vapor and sky, and her drifting around like a little lost pebble in the stream. Except pebbles don’t float. And this is air, not water. And she wasn’t really floating she–
Yeah she had been up here long enough.
The first thing Rainbow Dash noticed swooping back down to town was a commotion around the local constablry. She landed on the roof of the jail, walking across it and swooping down by the window. On what she saw in there, Rainbow Dash got a guilty look and went around to land at the main entrance, walking into the cramped building. Two ponies were being let out of jail and the more stoic one had been coaxed out, but the other was so hysterical, they absolutely refused to be taken outside.
“What is your problem?!” the constable shouted angrily around her mouth hold, but the only answer she got is a steady, “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.” They’d already gotten a shaken Cheerilee out of there, but Big Macintosh just wasn’t letting go of that sink.
Apparantly there weren’t any detectives here who could do detective work, because even Rainbow Dash could see what happened, from all the pink hair scattered crazily around and the eerily disgusting ooze all over the jail cell bars, which was clearly slobber from Pinkie Pie. It was like these ponies had never been slobbered on by Pinkie Pie on a regular basis, the way Rainbow Dash was used to. It looked like Pinkie had been so persistent to get at the occupants within, that she left curiously smooth looking bite marks on the bars.
It took a few tries, but finally when Rainbow Dash said, “The Pinkies are all gone. They’re in a cage, very far away,” it got through to him. Enough for him to say,
“...really?”
And also for his grip to loosen enough that they could drag him out of the prison.
“You’re free to go!” they said, tossing out Big Macintosh, where he thudded on the ground right next to where Cheerilee was waiting nervously. Then they tossed Rainbow Dash out for good measure, though she caught herself before hitting ground and shook her fist at the stubborn officers shouting, “Why I oughta–!”
She was definitely issuing a complaint to the Ponyville Penitentiary, Pinkie Pie nonwithstanding.
Cheerilee was much calmer and more rational than Big Macintosh, relatively at least. “She came at us !” Cheerilee orated dramatically to Rainbow Dash waving her hooves for emphasis, “She wouldn’t stop chewing her way into the cell! She wanted something, maybe our blood! She exploded or seemed to explode there but was always watching without a scratch! I saw things down that throat, Rainbow Dash!”
“I saw things,” Cheerilee repeated, holding Rainbow Dash to get her face right up close to her bloodshot eyes.
“Right! Okay!” Rainbow said with a false confidence in her voice, “Don’t look down her throat. Got it!”
“Oh I’m sorry Rainbow Dash,” Cheerilee said relaxing some of her titanic strength on Dash’s shoulders. “I shouldn’t be taking this out on you.” And then she crushed Dash close again exclaiming, “But did you see those bars ? Those bars were pure platinum, and she was chewing through them!”
Cheerilee released Dash entirely then, pushing away from her with an embarassed blush. “I’ll be fine,” she said abashedly, “I just had never imagined Pinkie could ever be so... I think I finally understand what the true urgency of a Pink Alert is all about.”
“Yeah th–” Rainbow paused. “A pink alert?” she asked hesitantly.
“Yes the new alert system has a pink level now,” Cheerilee explained, “For acts of Pinkie Pie, ever since the incident with the cakes and the Cakes.”
“Wait, Pink Alert is actually a thing?!” Rainbow exclaimed in pure stunned amazement. And maybe with a little guilty glance to the side.
Cheerilee nodded, giving Dash a jittery smile, with that sad look in her eyes. She said, “A lot of this could have been avoided if somepony had just mentioned to put the school on Pink Alert.”
Rainbow bit her lip, turning away and saying, “Heh heh, yeah that sure would have been a nice thing, wouldn’t it.”
Finding immediate urgent business elsewhere seemed like a good idea, so Rainbow Dash bid the newly freed Big Macintosh and Cheerilee farewell. She almost mentioned that Applejack was currently unconscious or something over by the pool of Pinkies, but then she remembered that Applejack was currently unconscious or something over by the pool of Pinkies and thought better of leading Big Macintosh in that direction.
Instead, Rainbow Dash headed to the one other thing she really probably should have taken care of a while ago, like “right away” a while ago. Landing in front of Carousel Boutique, Dash shouted out flatly, “Rarity. You have to come out of there.”
There was no answer which was a little worrying. Rainbow said a little louder, “Rarity! You have to let Sweetie Belle go!”
“Never!” came the muffled voice from within. “You Pinkiesprites are never going to get dear Sweetie Belle and make her your newest Pinkie Belle clone!”
Dash sputtered, then shouted, “This is Rainbow Dash, not Pinkie Pie! The Pinkies can’t even talk!”
“That’s just what the Pinkies want you to think!” was Rarity’s answer. Still no word from Sweetie Belle. This wasn’t good. Dash flew up and tried the windows, finding them all latched tightly shut, except one which only led into a sealed, locked room.
“Open a window, Rarity!” she shouted, flying up to the top of the Boutique. No answer. “Open a window, or I’m coming in!” Rainbow shouted again. There was the sound of a chair being scooted against a window.
“That’s it!” Dash shouted, swooping up into the sky, and doing what she did best. With a hard, fast, mostly controlled dive, she smashed hooves first through the window, the chair, a sofa, and the refrigerator which thankfully didn’t get smashed through, but only scooted away with a muted thud of hooves on metal.
Embedded in the sofa, Rainbow Dash had to strain to pull herself out from its spring laden confines, trying not to wince as they poked at her uncomfortably. What made that really difficult was the broken high pitched screaming and the animated broom continually swatting her in the face. But Dash got free somehow, and planted on the ground, grabbing the broom in her mouth and– and not being planted on the ground, but hanging onto the broom and– a-a-a-a-a-and
“Stop shaking the broom, Rarity!” Dash exclaimed, clopping down to the floor of the second story of the boutique.
Rarity responded by whirling it in the air expertly beside her like a grand master of broom fu, shouting, “Rainbow Dash, you—!”
She paused.
“You’re not Pinkie Pie...” Rarity said quite dissociatively. Her squiggles were rumples. Her bathrobe was shedding. Her eyes weren’t exactly focusing properly. And the whole Boutique was just saturated with the heady smell of fear.
“Out,” Dash stated, kicking what was left of the sofa away from the window. She yanked loose the chair. “Out,” she repeated, dragging a panicked protesting Rarity to the window, physically forcing her to stick her head out with a wail of despair. “Breathe, Rarity!” Rainbow commanded, though the hyperventilation of the heaving unicorn underneath her hooves made saying that quite unnecessary. With some fresh air in her lungs, Rarity finally started to calm down.
Rainbow Dash left her there quivering with her head stuck out the window, and swooped around, pulling open the windows in the room and blowing out the stale air all in one move. She would have rushed downstairs to search for Sweetie Belle, but upon turning around Rainbow Dash saw Rarity had pulled her head in, and was now looking at the ground rather than at Rainbow Dash, saying,
“I... had thought there would be more Pinkie Pies out there.”
“We saved them,” Dash asserted. “Stopped them, I mean. Stopped them. They’re all at the library. Not in the library, no in a cage. Or a pit. A pool I guess. She had to correct herself a lot at the little signs of alarm Rarity was displaying. Man, when a pony had a freak-out, Rarity sure didn’t mess around.
Then again, neither did Pinkie Pie.
“Where’s Sweetie Belle?” Rainbow Dash asked evenly.
“Oh, I simply sent her to her, um...” Rarity lifted a hoof. “Oh dear,” she said worryingly, “If you will excuse me for just one moment.” And then she was running full tilt down the stairs. Dash stayed right on her neck until Rarity got to her uh, fancy things room. “I may have um,” Rarity tried to explain, “Discipline um, she was acting out you see, so um, perhaps I may have been a teeny bit excessive with the er, for her protection, her restraints, that is to say—”
“Just cut her loose,” Rainbow Dash said, with a sigh, “And we can all go home in peace.”
Rarity’s cerulean magic undid the lock, and then the other lock, and then the other lock, and a deadbolt, and a door brace, and pulled it open to reveal a tiny little fitting room, in which there was what looked like a convincing looking pony mannequin used for fitting, and beside it a shredded pile of what looked like cloth ribbons that had been tied to a wall column. Oh and there was also that one open window back there, letting sunlight stream in.
“Oh dear,” Rarity said with a blush from head to hoof, saying, “I never meant to I mean you see, she may have ...escaped, a tad.”
“You are like the worst babysitter ever,” Rainbow Dash said with a hoof to her own face. She snapped her head up with a cheesy smile though, saying, “Good enough for me. Good luck with her parents, Rarity!”
“Her...” it finally seemed to get through to Rarity as her ears tilted down and she crouched forward going, “Oh no, oh no no no no,” all staring forward at nothing and everything. Dash really couldn’t do much for Rarity’s emotional state, like, ever , but she did have to make sure Sweetie Belle was okay. Sweetie had asked for her help after all!
That was the only thing Rainbow Dash felt any real guilt about, as she dashed into the sky leaving the darkened boutique behind. Sweetie had to escape on her own, when Dash had to leave her behind to save the town, in the protective, loving arms of her best (only) sister. Too late to do anything about it now, even if the filly had proved herself resourceful on her own. Rainbow was sort of curious how Sweetie Belle kept escaping like this. She was getting awfully good at it.
Dash kind of felt like she wanted to spend some more time up in the clouds again.
It looked scary and all, but Pinkie Pie was fine it turned out. Twilight kept explaining it wrong, but Rainbow Dash finally got the gist of it, that Celestia took all the rest of the Pinkies out of Pinkie before they could really come out of her. And they did take a piece out of her when they came out, even though it didn’t look like it at first, so left unchecked Pinkie would have eventually wasted away to Rainbow Dash didn’t think about that part.
So, controlled conditions apparantly meant another magic cage, smaller with opaque walls. Under controlled conditions, in that cage was the princess, Twilight Sparkle, a clone, and the weary, wasted body of Pinkie Pie herself. Princess Celestia awoke Pinkie Pie, and laid down for her the way it was gonna be. Oh and Rainbow Dash was there too, sorta, perching on the top of the cage to listen in.
“Princess... Celestia...?” croaked the emaciated Pinkie, the radiant princess being the first thing anypony sees when they walk into the room or awaken with her in the vicinity. Pinkie could barely sit up on her own, so Twilight was quick to raise a glass of water to her lips, which Pinkie sipped then coughed on. “Is that... me...?” she asked hesitantly, focusing on the other her who was considerably fuller and healthier and bouncing randomly around in the cage. What water Pinkie drank was quickly turned to tears as she started to realize. “I’m...” she tried to say, not saying it very well as she was breaking down on the spot, “A monster!” she managed to get out in a weepy cry.
“Pinkie!” Twilight asserted to her urgently. “You’re not a monster. You’re a wonderful pony who has simply made some very unfortunate mistakes. It’s okay, Pinkie. I forgive you. Scootaloo forg—” and that was enough to get Pinkie curled up on her spindly little self, bawling hoarsely and even refusing water. She tired of her tantrum... worryingly fast, just shivering there on the ground like she had no insulation from the cold. That was when Princess Celestia chose to speak.
“Monsters cannot cry,” Princess Celestia stated.
She was turned away from Pinkie Pie the whole time, like it hurt to look at her. It probably hurt the princess to look at her. But Princess Celestia said, “Monsters can pretend to cry, and it can look like they are crying, but they will know that they are not. Are you crying, Pinkie Pie?”
There was a silence. “Buh,” Pinkie bwabbled, “Buh, what am I then?”
Twilight sat down beside Pinkie, cradling her head against her side as if she wasn’t a horrific half dead monstrosity. “It’s okay, Pinkie,” she repeated, “You’re a pony . You’re not like other ponies, but you are still a pony, and you will always be a pony.” She actually forced Pinkie to look at her, not that that was hard to force her in any direction at this point, saying, “More than anything Pinkie, you’re my friend. You’re still my friend. I know you didn’t mean it, and that you’ll never, ever do it again.”
“T-thank you Twilight,” Pinkie whispered. She was soon managing to sit on her own now, fumbling with the water canteen in broad hooves on sticklike arms. It fell, and Twilight caught it in her magic, nudging Pinkie’s attention over to the other curly haired healthy and dumb Pinkie Pie, saying,
“Well, if you really want to thank me, you can start by eating her.