Our Girl Scootaloo 3 of 3

by Cozy Mark IV

3.32 Pinki Pie's wakeup call...

Chapter 3.32 Pinkie Pie’s wakeup call...

As the train chugged down the mountain from Canterlot, Twilight ignored the view outside the window, fidgeting with the book in her hooves and glancing back at her luggage once more. Pinkie Pie had always had her manic days and the odd depressive days, but since the surprise party incident her therapist had been keeping her on a more or less even hoof.

Until now...

The Cakes had asked her to come and help if she could, and the description they gave was alarming enough even before they added that she had barely gotten out of bed in several days. This bout of depression was serious, and when she had shown the letter to several psychiatrists back on earth they had all expressed concern for Pinkie. She could still feel her hair standing on end as the first doctor asked ‘Does your friend have a history of suicide attempts?’

And all that was before she considered what had happened to her mark... There were stories of cutie marks going grey, or multiplying, or in even being switched in bizarre cases, but this? Cracking in half down the middle as though the foundations of her world had fallen apart underneath her? This was new and terrifying territory, and Twilight didn’t know what to expect when she arrived. She had raided the Canterlot archive for books on the subject, and her implant had let her download and review several textbooks on the subject as well. Her luggage contained samples of many different human drugs that might help as well as a portable transcranial magnetic stimulation unit and several unicorn mind scanners, but would it be enough? She had prepared as best she could, but her chest ached as she worried about her friend and what might happen if she couldn’t help in time...

The train had barely come to a stop at the station before the door swung open and Twilight cantered off, several hundred pounds of luggage floating behind her in a line like ducklings following their mother. Sugar Cube Corner was easy enough to find, but the atmosphere of depression was palpable among the customers. Everypony looked up and brightened a little upon seeing her, but the looks of concern never truly left... Mr. Cake showed her to the back.

“Thank you for coming Twilight. We’re really worried about her and I just don’t know how to help. Her friends have tried to cheer her up, my wife and I have tried, even the twins...”

Twilight put a hoof on his shoulder.

“Do you know any more about what brought this on? Your letter only talked about how depressed she was...”

“I don’t know!” he whined in worried exasperation. “She just says there’s no point in parties anymore.”

Twilight felt the hair on the back of her neck standing up again and did her best to swallow her worry.

“I’ll do what I can.”

...

With no answer to her knock, Twilight gently pushed the door inward with a slow creak revealing a dimly lit room with all the curtains drawn. The remnants of multiple party projects sat abandoned where they had been dropped, dust hung in the air and the smell of somepony who had skipped too many baths assaulted her nose as she stepped cautiously in.

“Hello? Pinkie?”

A sigh drew her attention to the bed behind the door she’d just opened. Pinkie lay motionless on the mattress staring up at the ceiling with a disinterested expression. As Twilight rounded the corner Pinkie didn’t even look at her.

“It’s no use, Twilight. There’s no point.”

“Pinkie, I came as soon as I heard; what’s wrong? What happened?!”

Pinkie slowly turned her head to look at the lavender pony and seemed to decide that a simple ‘go away’ wasn’t going to work this time.

“I found out there’s no point.” She stated as if it was the inarguable truth.

“No point to what?” Twilight probed as she sat down beside the bed.

“To parties, to fun, to... anything. Everything I’m good at...” She waved a hoof at the contents of her room before letting it fall back to the bed. “There’s no point. There’s no reason for me to be here.”

“What are you talking about?! You are the life of this town! Little colts and fillies look forward to birthdays and holidays because of you! I look forward to the parties you throw!”

“It doesn’t matter. None of it does. Not when...” her eyes glanced briefly towards the baby’s room and she shuddered.

Some might have missed that glance but not Twilight.

“Pinkie. What happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing of any importance. An air headed filly just woke up and saw things as they really are for the first time.”

Twilight reached out and held her hoof, about to push for more when she saw irritation flash briefly over her depressed features.

“Look at the night light in the nursery. Then go. There’s nothing you can do to help here.”

With considerable misgivings Twilight left her friends bedside. As Pinkie had left the tablet running in the nursery where she dropped it, it took considerably less time to figure out what had happened.

In all the hundreds of pounds of luggage, she couldn’t believe she had forgotten to bring Kleenex.

Some time later Twilight pulled herself together enough to set down what had been a dry diaper and bring her analytical mind to bear on the problem.

‘So Pinkie just found out that children frequently die on Earth, and the prospect of a funeral for a kid’s seventh birthday was too much for her.’ Sniff! ‘Celestia, who am I kidding, it’s too much for me.’ She shook her head to clear it, frowning as she looked over at her luggage.

‘This isn’t a medically caused depression, I can’t fix this with the tools I’ve got! Maybe a skilled therapist could talk her around in time, but the longer that takes the greater the risk she might find a rope and...’Her eyes widened and a few bits of her mane ‘Plunked!’ out of place as her mind raced.

...

The door to Pinkies room flew open with a ‘bang!’ that startled her upright in her bed.

“Pinkie, I need your help!”

“What?” she replied in confusion. Twilight’s mane was frayed and her pupils looked smaller than she remembered.

“Come quickly, they all need your help!” Twilight repeated as she grabbed a hoof and dragged the pink pony out of the room and down the stairs.

“Twilight, what are you talking about?” Pinkie tried again, fear and confusion warring with anger and resentment at the treatment she was getting.

“The children of Earth! They need your help; all of us need your help! Right now!” Twilight elaborated as she towed Pinkie past the equally confused crowd of customers and out into the street.

Pinkie dug her hooves in hard and brought them to a stop to glare.

“And how am I supposed to help any of them! I’m a party pony for cake’s sake!”

Another bit of Twilight’s mane popped out of place as she shoved a couple of ponies away from them and triggered the recall device without warning, taking a spherical cut out of both the ground below them and the corner of the cupcake roof of the bakery in her haste. They flashed into existence in the gate room complex and the bit of cupcake building decoration they had cleaved from the bakery hit the floor behind them a moment later.

“No problem! There are scientists and engineers working to adapt the treatment to everyone right? They will need a spokespony to sell this to the parents of all those little human fillies and colts!”

“Uh, I don’t know if-...” She paused mid sentence as her friend’s eyes began to glow white and her face took on a look of concentration. “Twilight? What are you-”

Everything flashed blinding white for a moment, and when her vision cleared, Pinkie found herself in a room full of scientific equipment with Twilight and several humans in lab coats. As the glow faded from everyone else’s eyes Pinkie’s confusion only grew.

“Twilight, I thought you couldn’t teleport on earth? How did you even see where you were going?”

“Brian lent me his eyes.” She said simply pointing to one of the scientists. “Now then, I’ve been out of the loop on this too, so let’s find out what they’ve discovered about magic and medicine! We’ll both learn together! It’ll be like a college class!”

Pinkie was about to voice her displeasure with this line of thinking, and indeed this topic she was utterly unqualified to work on when another technician’s eyes began to glow white. The effect spread around the room and in seconds even her own eyes had taken on the blinding white glow as voices and information poured into her mind.

“Oh... I understand now...”

------------------ Some months later-----------

Twilight looked up from the research and noticed for the first time that there were stars visible outside the window. Given that she’d been about to go looking for lunch, she found this sight disagreeable.

‘Damn it, I lost track of time again...’

With a yawn and a stretch she got to her hooves, pausing to glance at the television that had been left on in the corner of the room. Some news crew was risking life and limb to report on one of the seemingly endless wars that took place in a region her human friends referred to broadly as ‘the middle east’. Many factors had come together to render the region perpetually unstable, and it was a strange decade indeed that didn’t see at least one war in the region.

Early on in their stay several ponies had expressed shock and dismay at the level of war and suffering humans treated as normal, and a few had even proposed direct intervention to end the hostilities. That had led to a live fire demonstration at Aberdeen and left her nursing a headache for more than a week. Twilight couldn’t help but cringe at the memory: regardless of what an average pony could dish out, even with the aid of shields and magic they could take very little in return. Any ideas of an extraterrestrial peacekeeping force had withered that day along with their collective faith in the Royal Canterlot Guard. ---Epic pony combat--- would, it seemed, remain a relic of the distant past. Newcomers to earth were now advised to avoid the upsetting war coverage as there was little they could do to help.

This particular news story seemed to be about some pony who had just shown up in the war zone to help the civilians, and was rapidly earning a reputation as the pink angel of mercy.

Huh.

“Wait, what?!”

Twilight spun around, suddenly wide awake as video of a pink pony bouncing for cover played on a loop. She vividly remembered Pinkie’s depressed expression after the nursery incident and her flat statement that ‘There’s no reason for me to be here anymore.’ Machine guns and mortar fire echoed in the background and the building to the reporter’s right exploded in a shower of masonry, profanity ringing out as the news team ran for their vehicle.

“PINKIE!”

Twilight’s eyes glowed white, and a moment later she vanished in a flash of light.

...

As the blinding glow faded the world around her came back into sharp focus, immediately making her wish it hadn’t. The road she had appeared in was covered in entirely too much broken concrete, and the buildings on either side had entirely too little. The screech of tires rounding a corner behind her was probably the news van she’d inadvertently used as an anchor to get here. The flash of panicked energy that had brought her here was rapidly cooling into dread as her thoughts caught up with her actions.

Now she was on her own in a war zone.

‘...Buck.’

Trying to find a friend who had apparently lost her will to live, or at least anything resembling good sense and driven headlong into one of the most dangerous places on earth.

'Double buck’.

And she also knew that at least half of the cities where the fighting was worst had been under siege for more than a year meaning food and medicine were running cruelly short. Anything big enough to eat would likely be shot on sight to feed someone’s hungry child.

And both she and Pinkie were bright colors that stuck out like a sore hoof.

‘Triple buck.’

Something moved an upper floor making her tense and the sound of boots crunching on gravel floated down to her through the sudden stillness. She looked up to see someone peer out over the floor of what had been a fifth floor living room. He looked just like the delivery person from the pizza place across campus that brought food for her late night study sessions sometimes. Their eyes met as he seemed to be trying to decide what to make of her, so she waved a hoof at him with what she hoped was a welcoming smile.

Then something moving almost too fast to see streaked overhead and the room erupted in an explosion.

She instinctively ducked and threw up a small shield against the debris that rained down a moment later, letting it fade gradually as the clang and patter of household objects slowed to a stop. A cooking pot clattered and rolled along the road until it clanked against her hoof. A little way off a few fingers lay between a table leg and the dusty remains of a stuffed animal.

The academic part of her mind informed her that the lack of blood was natural, a human only had a few quarts, and being fountained explosively out of the fifth floor meant there wasn’t much to see when it finally reached the ground.

And now there was nothing left of him but a few fingers cooling in the dry masonry dust.

Twilight shuddered violently and almost instinctually began casting magic that made her harder to see. Her horn brightened as her coat took on properties similar to a cuttlefish, blending her into the background.

‘It’s not as bad as all that. If I get reduced to just a hoof or two I’ll get another chance. I wonder what it’s like being an orange pegasus’

“Not helping!” Twilight hissed at the unwelcome thoughts. She’d read that ponies could sometimes experience strange psychological effects when subjected to extreme stress, and as she could attest from previous exam preparation, the experience was seldom enjoyable.

The silence was back in force now. Not the peaceful sound of unused space but the dead silence of humans and machines watching silently, ready to unleash terrible violence upon anything that drew their attention.

And somewhere out here, Pinkie needed her help.

That thought was enough to get her moving again, though slowly and quietly. What she’d seen led her to believe Pinkie had probably headed around the front of the building beside her, so she headed that way as well, a silencing spell quieting the sound of hooves on rock.

A simple tracking spell gave her at least a compass point direction to follow, confirming her initial hunch and spurring her to pick up the pace. She rounded the building in silence, her body matching the texture and color of her surroundings as she said a silent prayer of thanks to that old professor for assigning her a report on the order Sepiida.

As she emerged from the shade of the building she could see the plaza before her had once been a busy traffic circle for human vehicles. Now it was deserted but for rubble, a scarecrow by some burned out vehicles and a few large craters. The heat of the mid day sun beat down oppressively on the dusty no man’s land as a steady breeze blew from behind her carrying the scent of lime and shattered masonry mixed with just a hint of something on fire that shouldn’t have been. The tracking pointer set her course across the plaza and to the right, so she set out across the open space as carefully as she could.

With little to take cover behind Twilight had to sprint between the larger pieces of rubble, hoping that anyone nearby had better things to do than shoot at unexplained shadows. Near the center a burned out truck provided enough cover to let her pause and catch her breath.

‘I’m going to need water soon: It’s got to be a hundred degrees out here!’

Thoughts of what Pinkie must be going through immediately made her feel guilty for the complaint and she shook her head to clear it and focus. Ducking around the edge of the truck the coast seemed clear so she rounded the corner but suddenly froze.

Someone was watching her.

The feeling of eyes on her back was so pervasive she immediately flattened her belly against the ground, eyes scanning the buildings around the plaza for any sign of life.

Nothing...

The truck shielded her from the side and there was nothing around her but the scare crow and some rubble, certainly nothing big enough to conceal a human soldier...

An unpleasant scent she couldn’t quite place tickled her snout as she scanned her surroundings again, looking for anything that could be looking back at her. Nothing appeared. Only silence greeted her tensed ears. The feeling of being watched was growing steadily stronger, but there was nothing out here! Nothing but the ruined truck and-

The wind shifted direction, whispering though her mane and tail, and the unexplained scent suddenly overpowered her senses nearly knocking her off her hooves. Twilight gagged as the rotten odor of carrion burned her snout; if a skunk had died and been left to rot for a week before being placed in an oven it could hardly have been worse than this.

The pieces slammed together in her mind with a near audible click and her head shot up and around in alarm. A moment latter both hooves clamped down on her mouth to hold in the scream.

It wasn’t a scarecrow.

Empty eye sockets stared down at her from the body tied to the pole, the jaw hanging off on one side by a bit of sinew and swinging slowly in the breeze. What she had taken as cast off ragged clothing, torn and damaged beyond identification clearly hadn’t started that way. The lips were gone, buck, the entire face was gone! The clothing below the chest was so stained by decay that its original color was impossible to determine any longer, except where an arm with no wrist had fallen from the beam above giving a hint of blue and green.

Twilights breath was coming in ragged gasps as the apparition seemed to stare down into her very core. She struggled to tamp down her raging emotions by bringing her analytical mind to the fore to make more clinical observations:

‘Decay is consistent with many weeks of exposure. Insect decomposition has been depressed by lack of available moisture in the local environment.’

A shudder ran though her as she forced herself to continue.

‘Lack of shoes indicates they were lost or removed before the body was desecrated here. Nail polish-‘

Her breath hitched- ‘Oh Celstia-’

‘Bright red nail polish indicates a high probability the body was female. The pole was formerly used to deliver electricity and seems to have been selected for visibility’s sake to send a message. Attachment is by means of rope which has... which has...’

‘Which has worn into the wood in several places indicating the victim was still-’

Twilight couldn’t hold it together anymore; she turned and galloped away as fast she could, quickly clearing the truck.

The world went white.

Everything was ringing and there was dull throbbing ache in her right side where she was pushed up against something sharp. Her thoughts seemed dull and foggy as she looked around to find herself on the outer edge of the plaza she had been crossing only a moment before. As the world came back into focus she noticed the fresh crater just visible on the other side of the now overturned truck.

‘Traps around her for any would-be rescuers.’ She realized ‘I only lived because I set it off running away, not coming in to help...’

No one heard her break down and cry.

...

The sound of someone calling her name made Twilight look up. It almost sounded like... Pinkie??

“Twiiiliiight?”

She wiped the tears from her eyes, wincing as the movement stung her right shoulder and looked around for the source of the voice.

“Pinkie?”

“Twilight?”

The pink pony bounced into view around a corner, the bubbly bounce of her gate looking wildly out of place in this desolate bombed out city. To say that she looked like Tartarus was putting it mildly. Her coat was caked with dust and crisscrossed with cuts, scrapes and a few nasty looking scars. Some kind of well worn camouflage saddle bags completely covered her back, a helmet was strapped to her head and buckled under her chin, and an alarming amount of dried blood was matted on the side of her face. Her eyes were hidden from the piercing sunlight by completely black wrap around sunglasses, but despite all the abuse she looked to have taken, her mane was fluffed up more than Twilight could ever remember seeing it, and seemed to sparkle in the bright light.

“Twilight? Are you here?”

She blinked.

‘Oh right, the camouflage spell.’

As her coat returned to its normal lavender Pinkie finally saw her and was instantly at her side, a torrent of words pouring out at a rate that challenged understanding.

“Twilight!OhmygoodnessitssogoodtoseeyoueventhoughIwishyouweren’tinthisdangerousplaceholdstillwhileIbandageyourshoulder!

“Huh? Ow!”

Twilight winced as Pinkie expertly plucked out a shard of concrete from her injured shoulder, then proceeded to clean dry and bandage the cut with a lightning speed she had never before displayed for anything but planning parties.

“It... Its good to see you too Pinkie.” She replied with a sniffle. “But what in the world are you doing here?”

“Well, I was racing to the market because it had been bombed, but then I heard that blast” She gestured to the fresh crater by the overturned truck that Twilight had set off, “and I felt a twitch in my knee, so I came back here to help you.” She paused for just a second as her mind seemed to catch up with that description of events.

“But now I really need to get to the market! They’ll need my help.”

Pinkie beckoned her one with a wave of a hoof as she took off, and Twilight rushed to keep up. A distant explosion made her reflect that any sane pony would have dragged them both out of this war zone at once, yet for some reason she found herself once again charging into danger with her friend. On the plus side she was obviously happier now, though in a place like this suicide was by no means the only way to die...

Ahead of her Pinkie bounced to a halt, her head cocked as though trying to listen to something through the human helmet that covered her ears. She seemed to concentrate then suddenly winced like some sharp pain had stabbed her with a splitting headache. Gritting her teeth she reached back into her bag and produced two cookies that she hurtled skyward in a high arc just as the sound of a propeller made itself know. The sound grew louder as it approached before a tremendous ‘BANG’ shook the very gravel at their hooves.

“Cheap attack drone from China. It’s been a long time since I’ve needed the old family recipe for rock cookies. Come on.”

Twilight blanched.

“One of those hit the local market?!”

“No, they say it was a missile or a bomb.” Pinkie corrected as she took off again.

“Pinkie Pie, this is insane! You can’t stay here; you’re going to get yourself killed!”

And then she galloped under an archway into the market and her train of through derailed at the sight before her. The place had once been hallway of some large building, but with years of constant threats from above the interior walls had been removed to make way for vendor stalls selling what produce could be grown locally as well as what little could be smuggled in through the blockade. They had apparently hoped that the five abandoned residential floors over their heads would provide some measure of safety from fighter dropped bombs. To a degree they had.

Much of the building and even parts of the ceiling were still intact, but what had been the far end of the building was now just an empty hole looking out into the devastated city around them. One leg emerged from a pile of ruble sufficient to reduce an adult minotaur to little more than raspberry jam.

“Twilight, you take the ponies on the left, I’ve got the right side!” A bag full of medical supply struck her in the side and she narrowly caught it before it dropped to the ground.

“Call me if you find anypony you can’t help.”

‘Right... emergency medical triage... I can do that,’ she thought to herself with rising confidence.

“I knew studying with that neat anatomy app would be useful!”

The first few cases only needed basic bandage wraps and were quickly dealt with. A glance over her injured shoulder showed Pinkie giving CPR to someone who wasn’t looking at all good. She shook her head and focused on the task at hoof as a welcome distraction from her roiling emotions.

“Deep cut to the upper thigh, considerable blood loss. Apply CLOX packing gauze and wrap in a pressure bandage.” She did so as she spoke, grabbing the man’s hand and placing it on the injury. “Hold here.”

The next person though...

“Severe blood loss due to lacerations and crush injury to the lower extremities.” There had to be half a house on top of her legs and lower torso! Twilight couldn’t help but cringe – injuries this severe were rarely survivable under the best of conditions...

“Pinkie!”

Her friend was at her side a moment later, evaluating the poor woman before them.

“I don’t think we can-”

But Pinkie didn’t appear to be listening. She said something to the woman in a language that sounded like Arabic and she replied in strained tones. Pinkie nodded and leaned over, then suddenly locked lips with her! They shared a breath... two... and the crushed woman’s pain visibly eased as the tension flowed out of her. After the third breath Pinkie pulled back and smiled while she said something that sounded like a thank you.

Twilight blinked and closed her open mouth as Pinkie trotted quickly to the next victim.

“Pinkie?!?”

“She’s going to be okay now.” Pinkie shouted over her shoulder, “I’ll explain later, just help the next person!”

The groan of someone else sporting a wound to the arm pulled her attention away and back to the task at hoof. The crushed woman did indeed look much better, but regardless there wasn’t a lot she would have been able to do anyway. Even a direct teleport into a fully stocked hospital surgery would result in instant shock and death from blood loss as soon as the weight came off her crushed pelvis unless Twilight stayed for hours to hold the pressure with her magic; a move which would leave Pinkie all alone here.

The next few minutes blurred together as she rapidly processed one person after another, quickly burning through the supplies in her bag.

And then in a lull in the panicked pace she found her first body.

The man had been pulled from the rubble, but looked to have bled out only a few minutes ago. His total lack of pulse came as little surprise given that his left leg ended at the socket.

"Oh no... Pinkie...”

The pink mare was at her side in a moment pressing a hoof against the man’s forehead.

“Pinkie, he’s... he’s gone. There’s nothing we can-”

Pinkie nodded again as though reaching some satisfactory conclusion, and positioned herself sitting above him, her saddlebags drooping a bit with his head in her front hooves.

Then with startling swiftness she unhinged her jaw revealing four large fangs and sunk them into the man’s head with an audible ‘Crunch!”

Everything seemed to freeze for a moment as Twilight’s eyes warred with her brain, one insisting that her friend was a party planning herbivore pony, while her eyes screamed back that she had just grown fangs and driven them into a dead man’s head!

And then it was over as Pinkie released his head, closed her mouth and set him gently back down on the floor. In the chaos of the bombed building no one seemed to have noticed and she quickly made for the next injured person.

“What the BUCK?!”

Pinkie turned her head to see what the problem was.

“What?”

Twilight could feel several clumps of her mane popping out at odd angles.

“Don’t you ‘what’ me! What in Tartarus did you just do?!”

Pinkie blinked, then had the decency to look sheepish.

“Oh, right... I probably should have mentioned that. Remember that science team you dropped me off with a few months ago?”

Twilight’s eyebrow twitched alarmingly.

“Yes... I followed up regularly, and they all agreed you were feeling much better and helping them with their work...”

“Yeah! Adapting the treatment to work on more people was an awesome success! We found other ways to get magic to those who needed it, and after setting up the first human cloud, they helped me out with my goal. I’m really good at spreading magic now!”

“Wait, they accomplished all that?! In two months?! They created a ‘human cloud’ like the one that preserves the minds of dead ponies? Scootaloo’s ‘coming back from the dead’ trick will work with magic capable humans on earth?!”

Pinkie grinned, showing off her fangs beneath her wrap around sunglasses.

“You got it!”

Twilight’s mane was getting visibly more frayed as Pinkie watched.

There was a pause.

Finally, Twilight started in a calm and pleasant voice,

“Congratulations Pinkie, that’s an amazing achievement worthy of a Sleighbell Prize, but what does that have to do with you growing fangs and biting people!?!

Pinkie waved a hoof dismissively.

“Oh that. These,” she gestured to her new fangs, “are for injecting magic directly into the brain when there isn’t any heartbeat to carry magic to it through the lungs.” She paused to wiped the blood from her mouth and spat. “It tastes awful, but that’s a small price to pay if I can save someone who would be dead for sure otherwise.”

Twilight’s mind was spinning as it processed that new bit of information.

‘Of course! Brain tissue, even recently dead brain tissue would still record all of a pony’s personality and memories! Just because the brain was dead didn’t mean the data was lost, just that life couldn’t be restored to that original brain. But if you could inject the magic directly into the brain to get a copy before rot set in then you could revive the pony whenever you got a new body!’

Pinkie cocked her head to one side.

“Changing my bones wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. I wanted to change my taste buds too so that blood would taste like cupcake frosting, but the rest of the team thought it was a bad idea.”

Twilight could only stare as Pinkie’s annoyed expression faded to her usual perky smile below her sunglasses.

“But I’ll tell you all the rest later – right now we’ve got..” she counted swiftly, “seven more people to see, and two who need a pony ride to the hospital.”

The next few minutes passed in a blur as wounds were bandaged, broken bones set and, thank Celestia, no one else bitten. The two soon found themselves back by the entrance where two women were laid out on makeshift stretchers. Again Pinkie seemed to concentrate, then nearly toppled over as a searing pain seemed to shoot through her head. Once more she shook it off. A quick conversation in a language Twilight couldn’t understand resulted in one of the wounded being strapped to Pinkie’s back as best they could around her injuries. For her part, Twilight lifted the other woman in her magic and looked up to see Pinkie already cantering out the door with a strange but smooth gait that left her passenger undisturbed, about as far from her usual bouncing as was physically possible. She didn’t even make the ‘poing!’ sound anymore, which was, somehow, a little creepier than the fangs.

Twilight shook her head at the sight of her friend doing the paso llano and galloped after her back out into the sun-baked streets.

“Where are we going?” she called out from behind.

“The hospital isn’t far from here; it’s in the basement of an old factory with a generator.” Twilight’s eyes flashed without her notice and the exact location flowed into her mind as though she’d always known it.

A long straight road stretched out before them and Twilight found herself cringing at the unavoidable exposure. “Pinkie, couldn’t we just teleport there instead of walking?”

Pinkie shook her head as she continued,

“No, I can’t any-”

She stopped suddenly, then face hoofed with a loud ‘clack’ against her helmet. When she turned to look at Twilight she wore a silly smile under her sunglasses.

“Sorry, of course you can. Thank you Twilight, that would really help.”

Then a huge hole exploded through Pinkie’s barrel.

Both mares blinked in surprise and horror. Without working lungs Pinkie couldn’t speak, but her voice rang loudly in Twilight’s mind.

‘Quick, get us out of here before they fire again!’

The world went white.

All four appeared a foot above the floor in the hospital and promptly fell in a heap. As the medical staff moved to help disentangle them Twilight could only stare at the hoof sized hole through Pinkies barrel where her heart and lungs should have been.

“Pinkie! No, no no nono!”

Twilight’s eyes flickered white as Pinkie’s voice spoke directly to her,

‘It’s okay Twilight, you know what you have to do...’

Her voice trailed off as she passed out. Twilight looked around in panic at the room full of nurses and scavenged medical equipment.

“Help her! We have to help her!”

‘And so we shall.’

Aside from those tending to the seriously wounded, all movement in the room slowed to a stop. First one nurse looked at her with shining white eyes, then another and another until most of those present were staring at the dying pony and her friend.

‘Come. Aid us. Her anatomy is unfamiliar.’

The conglomerate voice was calmly confident, but oddly devoid of any language she could understand as thought their intentions were being felt directly. Twilight’s eyes went white and suddenly she understood.

‘Her mind is still alive, all we need to do is fabricate a new heart and lungs for her, then repair the damage!’

Time seemed to slow down to a crawl in the real world as the conglomeration of medical minds worked together on the problem. Twilight found several intact cardiac cells and replicated a few of them onto a model of what her heart should look like. After watching for a moment, others began copying her painstaking and tedious work, and Pinkie’s heart began to visibly repair itself, regrowing on its magic supported scaffold.

Several trauma specialists had already stemmed the bleeding while Twilight worked, and a few hours in her time later but only seconds of real world time she had trained the heart repair team and moved on to the lungs. A similar course of action soon saw the lungs beginning to take shape, and Twilight was able to devote her attention to sketching out the rest of the damaged and missing tissue.

Once the full three dimensional anatomical scaffold was in place the growth rate accelerated dramatically. All of the processes for cell copying and knitting together with living tissue had been developed elsewhere by medical teams similar to this and were instantly available to the participants as memories of having performed the operation before. In places where Twilight didn’t know the full details of pony anatomy she looked inward to her own for a template. The process of making tiny amounts of pony blood and bone with Pinkie’s DNA from nothing was foals’ play next to creating an entire apple when she was hungry -a common unicorn shortcut back home.

Soon the healing tissue was moving again; the lungs slowly inflating as the heart gave its’ first lub/dub, all in super slow motion from Twilight’s point of view. Various other contributors to the group consciousness fanned their attention out over Pinkie’s body fixing cuts, scrapes and other injuries as she was rapidly made whole.

As the white light of Twilight’s eyes died out time seemed to speed up once more and Pinkie’s glacially slow inhalation sped up until she heard it as a deep gasp for air. Twilight blinked as her vision returned to pony normal after many hours of subjective time spent in the microscopic and she noticed for the first time that Pinkie was floating in a multicolored aurora of magic flowing from the hands of all those present. Her mind which had been hell bent on one critical and very narrowly defined goal after another seemed to flatten back out from its hyper specialized state, allowing previously unimportant things like Pinkie’s wings to come into clear focus.

Before she could give that startling revelation much serious thought Pinkie, now free from all clothing, bags and glasses, opened her eyes and looked at her though lenses of blinding white light.

“Thanks, Twilight! You’re the best!”

Twilight blinked.

Around the room the staff’s white glowing eyes were fading back to normal as they began to move again, resuming their normal work. Someone muttered something in Arabic, and Twilight heard;

“Hey, what are we, chopped liver?”

She blinked again.

Pinkie settled to the ground, grabbing the pouting doctor in one hoof and Twilight in the other and several others in her magic as she pulled them into a group hug.

“Oh! I love you guys so much!”

Twilight blinked a third time. Between magic fatigue and pure shock it was getting difficult to stay on her hooves.

Pinkie released the rest of the group to warm congratulations and turned her attention back to her friend, using her magic to steady the lavender pony.

“You’re alive!” Twilight stated.

“Yup!”

“You have wings!”

“Right a rooney!”

“You have a horn!”

“You got it!”

There was a pause.

“Oh, Oh! My cutie mark is all better too!”

Pinkie spun about displaying her cutiemark of three balloons, their strings now held by a human hand, a ponies hoof and a griffin’s claw all drifting on a sparkling wind.

“It turns out I’m good at helping everyone get healthy enough to party! Who knew?”

Twilight collapsed on her rump staring vaguely at her friend.

“Oh, I know what you need!”

A moment later something delicious was shoved into her open mouth.

As she automatically munched on the chocolate some of her sanity seemed to slowly return.

“Dementors may be made up, but Dumbledore and Rowling had a point about chocolate after a bad shock. Are you okay, Twilight?”

The gears in Twilight’s regularly ordered mind gave a loud screech as though protesting so many consecutive shifts. She settled on the most important earth shattering revelation first and hugged her friend fiercely.

“Pinkie, I’m so glad you’re okay!”

“Aww! It’s okay, Twilight. I love you, too.”

After a moment to settle herself and dry her eyes she pulled back enough to ask the next question.

“How?! How are you alive?!”

“You saved me, silly.” Pinkie responded with a grin. “It wouldn’t have been easy without all your magic; I’d have been stuck in bed for weeks of recovery, but with everything you brought to the sharing I’m good as new!”

Yet another odd thought struck Twilight and she stated it out loud.

“Your eyes are still glowing!” Indeed, the sight of her friend’s brilliantly glowing white eyes was a little unsettling.

“Uh huh! That happened after I got my Party Princess Promotion!”

“The what now?” Twilight stated feeling lost again.

“These.” Pinkie stated flaring her wings and horn. “The magic is super useful, and I tapped your experience a bunch of times over the last few weeks to learn what to do with it. The wings really aren’t much use around here though – too many anti-drone weapons. Come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve had them fully healed since the day I got them.”

“How? How did you get to be an alicorn?”

“I saved an entire school full of kids from a building that was bombed and on fire. Also under fire come to think of it.”

Twilight blinked again.

“Wow. I guess that would do it.”

There was a pause as Pinkie put her saddlebags and glasses back on. With a look of relief she held up the helmet and punched a hole in the top to slide it over her horn.

“Oh that feels so much better! Have you ever had your horn snapped off Twilight? Cause it hurts like a mother-”

“Pinkie!”

“What? It does!”

With her glowing eyes concealed behind her sunglasses once more and her wings tucked back under her saddle bags full of medical supplies Pinkie stretched and looked back to Twilight.

“They’ve got things under control here. Let’s go for a walk. Come on, I know a place.”

...

The pair flashed into existence on a dry stone hilltop overlooking the city in the distance. A steady wind blew from behind them toward the city where the smoke from several large fires was drifting up into the sky. The distant sound of artillery and machine gun fire echoed sporadically out to them, telling of the continued conflict below. However all that was soon pushed from her mind as for the first time Twilight saw that the sparkles in Pinkie’s fluffy mane were not part of her imagination, but very much real as the wind lifted them off and carried them towards the city below.

“Pinkie?”

The pink alicorn followed her pointed hoof to her mane and smiled.

“Ah, that was one of our biggest achievements.”

Seeing her friend’s confusion she pressed gently against Twilights mind. Twilight’s eyes shone white briefly as the information poured in. With a human cloud built using the systems already coded into the magic, the team had to infect as many people with magic as possible, as fast as possible. All those who died without it would be lost forever, and Pinkie had insisted that magic be made infectious to untreated humans. The team agreed, and soon found that code to do just that already in the native magic code, making the process as simple as turning on a long disused application. The activated magic was coded into her mane, able to drift on the wind and infect other people and animals. Pinkie had pushed for more, resulting in her ability to breathe it directly into the injured to ease their pain and inject it into the recently dead to save even more.

As Twilight’s eyes faded back to normal she simply stared.

“You... you’ve changed so much so fast!” Twilight was used to being the quickest pony in most conversations, and finding herself struggling to keep up like this was unnatural for her.

“It was only a few months ago we were worried about having enough pony bodies to save the children who needed them! Now you’re saying you’ll be able to save them even without bodies?!”

Pinkie smiled broadly.

“Like cupcakes without wrappers!”

Twilight pondered that strange mental picture for a moment while Pinkie continued.

“All this,” she gestured to her fangs and sparkling mane, “was just for me. Most of this is getting done by the birds.” Twilight just stared, and Pinkie couldn’t help but giggle. She whistled and moments later a bird flew down from the blue above trailing a fine mist of sparkling magic from its feathers as it landed on her back.

This fact that the bird was a huge vulture detracted somewhat from what would otherwise have been an adorable spectacle.

“Oh, you should see your face!” Pinkie giggled. “Come on Twilight; if you had to spread an airborne contagion to an entire world as quickly as possible, how would you do it?”

“That’s not something I normally think about!”

“That’s okay.” Pinkie replied switching gears again. “We’ve got this. Thanks again for coming to save me today, it really means a lot.”

The vulture gave her a glare before taking off, and there was a pause as Pinkie leaned into Twilight, her contact pleasant despite the heat from the burning sun.

“Besides, now you get to see your first citywide activation!”

“What?”

Constantly being three steps behind the conversation was really starting to get on Twilight’s nerves.

“Citywide magic activation?? What does that even mean?!”

Pinkie giggled again as she took a few steps away, looking towards the city down below them. Her horn lit up, growing brighter and brighter in the noon day sun until Twilight was forced to look away from blinding arc like light.

She was about to demand more answers, yell at her to stop when something caught her attention.

Silence.

The glow of Pinkie’s horn was fading back down to something possible for normal ponies as Twilight looked past her, out to the city that had suddenly gone quiet.

The bombing had stopped.

There was no more gunfire.

Twilight turned slowly to stare at Pinkie who was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“You stopped the war?”

Pinkie nodded, still grinning.

“You brought peace to the Middle East.”

Another nod.

“An area that has been at war with itself for thousands of years.”

A third nod.

“By yourself.”

“Well I was just one member of the design team that-”

“How the buck did you do that!?!”

She couldn’t help screaming the question, though Pinkie didn’t seem to notice.

“That’s simple silly. We brought all of them into a sharing where lies and falsehoods are impossible. You remember how fast subjective time can be in a sharing like this. Right now viewpoints are changing, long held hateful views are evaporating... It could take hours of realtime, but when they come out they’ll have new purpose, new goals and a new direction.”

There was a pause as they both looked out over the stopped city pondering the enormity of what was happening.

“And then we can have the biggest ‘war is over’ party this world has ever seen!” Pinkie squealed as she bounced up and down.

Twilight felt her legs give out as the motivation for it all finally became clear: Pinkie had ended the longest war in human history primarily so she could run the after-party.

Author's Note:

This is the last of the remaining content. The final chapter will bring various threads together and wrap it all up. For those still reading after all these years I hope you've enjoyed the ride!

Comments

[Omegaweapon1000]

Twilight felt her legs give out as the motivation for it all finally became clear: Pinkie had ended the longest war in human history primarily so she could run the after-party.

... yeah, that checks out.

[Gyro Pony]

I wondered what an alicorn Pinkie could/would do.

Thanks for answering that pondering.

[Whisper Spirit]

I never knew I needed this in my life