A Nightmare Before The Night [CYOA]

by Selbi

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Making sure the orange cupcakes with the grim faces on them didn’t have too much icing, hanging up spooky-looking “Welcome!” banners, making sure said cupcakes wouldn’t be eaten by Pinkie Pie, getting a new batch of cupcakes because Pinkie did exactly that, checking if the costumes were presentable, getting yet another batch of cupcakes…

It was a busy day in Ponyville. Hasty hooves could be seen everywhere as ponies were preparing the big festival of the day: Nightmare Night! There were rumors of Princess Luna dressing as Nightmare Moon for the event’s highlight, and nopony wanted to leave a bad impression.

All in all, it was a pretty normal day for everypony—if you didn’t look at the, admittedly, not-so-spooky decorations.

Everypony save for one: Twilight Sparkle. The purple librarian had quite a few different issues on her hooves.

“I can’t believe it!” she complained as she left a kiosk. “Today may be the thirty-first of October, but is that a reason not to have any newspapers delivered?”

For the past two hours, Twilight had been looking all over Ponyville to find that day’s issue of the local paper. Unfortunately, all deliveries were canceled with the explanation, “It wouldn’t be worth it for a day like this; nopony would have any time to read them.”

Twilight rolled her eyes as she thought about those words again. “Yeah, right. I mean, I’m not even expecting the ponies to read them myself, but buying them could be the least they could do!”

Twilight’s ability to carefully organize and plan ahead allowed her to be done with the preparations for the event days before the other ponies even started—some even had the bright idea to postpone their work until the day in question and now scream at everypony for their own fault. She had hoped she could take advantage of the extra time to spend some hours in peace before it got dark. Looks like Mister Destiny had other plans for her that day, though.

She had almost hoped something would happen just so she could spend her time on something. Another ursa minor attack for example. Those were fun, and she knew exactly how to deal with it. Or maybe another bad-guy-returns-after-one-thousand-something-years-and-threatens-to-destroy-ponykind attack so she could spend forty-four minutes to humiliate the attacker with her friends and inject them with two-hundred milligrams of pure, liquid friendship.

Her more or less desperate desire for a random problem she could resolve—so that the day would pass by faster—had been fulfilled when the one thing happened that she didn’t want to occur.

“Twilight Sparkle, just the pony I was looking for!” Mayor Mare called out.

“Oh, good day, Mayor,” Twilight replied with a slightly forced grin. Why does this have to be now?!

“There has been a little change of plans. Do you think you could bring me the fireworks now?”

“Right now?! But I thought you wouldn’t need them until midnight!”

“Yes… I know. That won’t change, but our team of voluntary pyrotechnicians didn’t show up. Apparently they were involved with some sort of accident over at Canterlot, and now we have to set the system up ourselves. We don’t know how long that will take…” Mayor Mare confessed.

“Ugh, fine.” said Twilight. “It’s not like I had anything else to do right now anyway.” Still, she had hoped preventing Equestria’s doomsday again would be more exciting than grabbing a bunch of custom-made fireworks ahead of schedule.

“Thank you, Twilight! I’ll wait for you at town hall.”

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Twilight closed the door of her house behind her, and headed towards her bedroom. Next to her bed stood a huge, metallic safe that looked like nothing from her imagined list of disasters could break it open. She went to a nearby table, and levitated her saddlebag on it. Then she opened it.

Her jaw dropped at the sight before her, and she started to shake her head slowly. “Oh, by Luna’s tattooed-on cutie mark, don’t tell me I lost it…”

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What could “it” be? Find out on the next chapter: Chapter 3

Comments

[MLPTMNTLPS-Moving]

“It wouldn’t be worth it for a day like this; nopony would have any time to read them.”

expect for Twilight

[Koekelbag]

Oh by Luna’s tattooed-on cutie mark

Oh? That is... kinda specific. You don't think she has an actual cutie-mark?
Or do you mean that cutie marks in general are all tattooed?
Either way, an most interesting viewpoint indeed...