Pinkie Pie loved karaoke night. It wasn’t because she was a bad singer, no. Pinkie was normally a very good singer. The thing that she loved about karaoke night was that there was inherent expectation that everypony who did it was bad, but it didn’t matter because you were being a bad singer with your friends. And to Pinkie, that was half the fun about karaoke nights, especially with her five bestest friends in the whole world.
By the time that Pinkie Pie arrived at the karaoke bar, Twilight Sparkle was already there. But Twilight had always been the first pony to arrive at anything, and Pinkie Pie knew this.
“Hello Pinkie!” said Twilight, “No pony else is here apart from you and me. I wonder where they all are?”
“Applejack is helping Big Mac out with their cider press-it broke suddenly earlier today. Rarity was ‘caught in a fit of divine inspiration’,” said Pinkie Pie, “but it just looked like a giant mess to me. Oh, Rainbow Dash was suddenly called up by the Wonderbolts, and Fluttershy is tending to a very sick platypus.”
Twilight Sparkle nodded at each reason that Pinkie gave for their friend’s absences. She wouldn’t know that Pinkie Pie hadn’t actually invited them this week, though Pinkie suspected that they all knew why.
“So, should we cancel? I mean, it is just you and me.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Pinkie Pie, “it will totally be just as fun with just the two of us. Now come on, last one up the stairs has to sing first!”
Pinkie Pie was a very loving pony by her nature. She couldn’t help but see the joy and life in everything, it was just part of who she was. But when she looked at Twilight Sparkle, or more specifically, the pony that Twilight Sparkle had become, she couldn’t help but be overcome by a sense of purest euphoria that she had helped shaped the newest Princess of Equestria.
And somewhere in that mess of feelings and laughter and far too much sugar that Pinkie called her heart, she fell in love with Twilight Sparkle. She had watched Twilight Sparkle grow from awkward, friendless party-pooper to a joyous pony.
As such, Pinkie Pie was intentionally last up the stairs, and pretended to be disappointed when Twilight enforced Pinkie’s own rule back at her.
She had rehearsed this for hours, at least. Carefully choosing the song so that Twilight would know how she felt about her. She had made sure that her voice was ready for what she was about to do, because tonight was not going to be about bad singing with friends. It was going to be about singing her metaphorical heart to the one she loved, and Pinkie Pie didn’t want to do that badly.
She chose her song, and grasped the microphone in her hoof. The opening strains of the song floated through the air, and Pinkie watched as Twilight tilted her head to the side in that impossibly cute way she did when she was thinking really hard about something.
Pinkie Pie took a deep breath. She could do this. She was Pinkie Pie, she wasn’t scared, no sirree. But her heart was pounding in her chest, hard enough that she was scared that it might just jump straight out, and her eyes darted from side to side, almost uncontrollably.
Pinkie opened her mouth to sing.
What came out was a mess of clicks, rumbles and consonants, and too late Pinkie realised that her mouth had been replaced with a mass of pink tentacles. As had her mane. And Twilight Sparkle had left a hole in the door.
“Lvhtfp’qutgka!” said Pinkie, as one of her mouth-tentacles dragged the microphone into her mouth. Honed through years of baking, Pinkie instinctively began to chew as she contemplated exactly where she had gone wrong. Strictly speaking, Twilight had not said no, but she hadn’t said yes, either.
Microphones, like rejection, did not taste very nice.
Pinkie sighed, and tried to will herself back to looking more equine than ‘infernal space horror’.