Chapter Thirty-Four: Pinkamena Pie's Defunct
The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions
Chapter Thirty-Four – Pinkamena Pie's Defunct
Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing
Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art
“Of all the insolent, inane, irredeemable acts of juvenile delinquency!” The mayor steamed as she stood in a puddle of gunk made viscous by the yolk that was oozing over her gray mane and aging features.
“I wouldn't know beans about delinquency, but you sure do look like you've got egg on your face!” Pinkie Pie fell back and clutched her tummy as she kicked at the air with an endless bout of giggles. “Heeheeheehee!”
“Grrrr!” The soiled mare fumbled in futility to wipe the yellow slime off of her spectacles with her ruined cravat. A gaggle of wandering equine souls trotted to a stop along the circumference of Ponyville Town Hall and watched with startled amusement. “That's the third time this month, Miss Pie! To imagine, a mare of your age acting like an anarchist degenerate!”
“Heeheehee! Then I'm happy to be a degenerate!” Pinkie beamed, her blue eyes tearing. “And if you're not down with that, then we've got two words for ya—Ulp!” Her voice was muffled by a copper hoof wrapping over her pink face.
Harmony sweated invisible bullets as the time traveler flung the elder a frightful look. “Ms. Mayor, I am so... so terribly sorry about this. I-I had no idea that—”
“That what? That you just happened to be a random and innocent accomplice to the latest mischievous escapade of Sugarcube Corner's neighborhood rabble-rouser?! Just stay where you are, young lady! We'll see what Officer Silvertrot has to say about this!”
“Officer Silver... trot?” Harmony's amber eyes blinked. Her mind flashed to a million years ago, a school room full of frightened children, Cheerilee's gasping voice, then a pair of officers who had arrested a psychotic pony rambling about the “Cataclysm.” The infinity symbols on Spike's cavern wall burned into her, and she suddenly didn't fear the trembling aftershocks of any lightning, thunder, or collapsing dome of moonrock. “Oh horseapples—Yaak!”
The time traveler shrieked because she was being yanked across the villagescape by a pink hoof. A bouncing Pinkie Pie rapidly dragged her away from the scene of the crime.
The mayor roared in the duo's absence, “Where do you think you two are going?! I am not through with you yet, Miss Pie! Haymane never tolerated such shenanigans where you came from, so why should I?! Do you hear me?—Whoah!” The elder pony slipped on a puddle of egg yoke and fell to her haunches. The surrounding villagers helplessly snickered as the mayor snarled and shook an angry hoof their way. “It's not funny! It's not funny, confound it!”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Pinkie Pie flung herself and Harmony into the shadowed crook of a lone alleyway and pressed against the wall, panting. “Whew! I almost got her to laugh that time! You'd think a politician wouldn't mind getting messy every once and a while.”
“Almost got her to laugh?!” Harmony was slumped to the ground, wheezing for breath. With amber eyes as wide as saucers, she gazed incredulously up at her brand new, candy-coated anchor. “Have you lost all decency?!”
“What?” Pinkie blinked her eyes innocently. “My two words for her were gonna be 'buck it!'”
“No, not that! You just doused the mayor of Ponyville with raw eggs!”
“Well, if I used watermelons, I would have needed a bigger bucket, don'tcha think?”
“What were you thinking?!” Harmony exclaimed.
“That I'd spend the afternoon pranking ponies!” Pinkie smiled wide, her mane of fuschia curls bouncing like the bright stalk of an exclamation point high above her beaming skull. “But now that you're finally here, we can actually get stuff done!”
“What are you talking about—?”
“Here!” Pinkie reached blindly into the ether, grabbed a white sandwich sign, and slapped it firmly over Harmony's copper flanks. “Wear this!”
“Wear what?” Harmony blinked at the white boards dangling suddenly on either side of her. “Where did you get this from—?”
“Mmmf-Mmmffff!” Pinkie Pie mumbled over the handle of a wicker basket full of colorful pamphlets. She spat it up into the air so that it landed atop her head. “Ptooie! Salt Lick City! Ever been there?”
“Uhhhh...”
“Bunch of swell ponies!” Pinkie Pie shoved Harmony like a bale of hay out into the street. “Though this one time I invited them to a wine tasting party, they weren't too happy. So I thought I'd make it up to them. Quick! Before lunchtime!”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
A bell rang. A wooden door covered with horseshoe art opened creakily. A tired-looking earth pony poked her head out with sleepy eyes. “Nnnngh... Uhh... C-can I help you?”
“Good afternoon, sir or madame!” Pinkie Pie grinned from where she stood next to a copper pegasus on the front steps of the tired pony's house. “It's so great to see a healthy citizen on this most super-duper of beautiful afternoons!”
“It's seven thirty in the m-morning...”
“But it's still super-duper, isn't it?”
Harmony blinked. She finally glanced down at the sandwich sign hanging off her Entropan body. For the moment, she could only make out the bold letters spelling “Whinnietower”. “Uhm... Miss Pie—?”
“Shh!” Pinkie briefly hissed and smiled back the earth pony's way. “My friend and I are visiting door to door, and we have one genuine question for you!” She tossed her mane. A pamphlet slid loose from the basket-hat which she promptly snatched in the edge of her teeth and held generously before the exhausted resident. “Do you consider yourself a happy pony?”
The door slammed shut in their faces.
“Hmmm. Oh well!” Pinkie shrugged and in one fluid motion tossed the entirety of her pamphlets into a nearby garbage pale flanking the subdivision's dirt sidewalk. “Can't win 'em all, I guess. I swear, some ponies can't wrap their heads around the concept of wearing a 'magic saddle.'”
“Uhhh...” Harmony pointed with a hoof. “That was just one house—”
“Pfft! The best thing to come out of Salt Lick City was John Stocktrot. I think we're done for the day.”
“What do I do with this sign—?”
“Oh! I almost forgot!” Pinkie Pie beamed and yanked Harmony's upper body. “The paper route!”
“The Paper what?—Daah!” She shrieked as she was pulled off-screen in a copper blur. The sandwich sign spun in mid-air like a Dirigible Dog's propeller blade before rattling to the ground.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Extra! Extra!” Pinkie cried out towards the rows upon rows of golden-thatched houses. “Get your copies of Equestria Daily!” The wind billowed through her mane as she loaded a thick roll of newspaper into a potato cannon and aimed it at the nearest building with a devilish grin. “Hot off the press!”
After a resounding explosion, several trotting pedestrians gasped and ducked as a wadded-up periodical soared like a missile over their manes and slammed violently into the shattering brickwork of a Ponyvillean residence.
“Faster! Faster!” Pinkie Pie eagerly tapped the copper shoulder of the pegasus in front of her as the scenery blurred past them both. She loaded another newspaper roll into her cannon. “We've gotta beat the Whinniestreet Journal delivery or we won't get our free funny papers!”
“You mean to tell me we're doing this for comics?!” Harmony hissed from where she was hunched-over and pedaling furiously in the front seat of a two-pony bicycle. “Miss Pie, we still have a royally ticked-off mayor to worry about! We gotta get out of town!”
“No we don't, you silly filly!” With a thunderous gunshot, Pinkie Pie cannonballed another wad of ink-stained paper at a household, denting the frame of its door violently from the shredding impact. “She'll head right on over to Aloe and Lotus' Day Spa like she always does after a messy prank, and there the mayor will find the thirty-bit gift certificate from yours truly! Now if only she could learn to laugh like she loves to lather up—Extra! Extra!” Two more resounding explosions.
Harmony winced, her black mane billowing from the proximity of the potato-cannoning newspapers. “Miss Pie, I didn't come here to douse mayors in egg yolk or go door to door! And I certainly had no intention of being a paperfilly, besides—” She briefly raised her hooves from the bike handles and pointed in hideous disbelief at her pedaling limbs. “Look at this! We're two ponies on a bicycle! How is this even possible?”
“Sugarcube Corner has a sponsorship with Equestria Daily! That's how!” Pinkie Pie reloaded, aimed, and chirped at the scenery, “Good Afternoon, Ace, Sir!”
Just as they breezed by, a white stallion with a brown mane and matching facial hair marched out of his front door. “Oh good, the sports report is here—!”
“Read it!” The cannon fired.
“Ooof!” The bearded pony took it in the snout and ragdolled back into his living room.
Harmony winced and glanced towards the rear seat. “Uhm, Miss Pie? Just how come these newspaper rolls are hitting things so hard, as if they're stuffed with rocks?”
“Because they are stuffed with rocks!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “But when I say 'rocks,' of course I mean 'fruitcakes'.”
“Fruitcakes?! Wh-what the heck for?!”
“Pffft! Duh! I told you Sugarcube Corner had a sponsorship, girl!” Pinkie Pie reloaded, squinted one eye, and aimed carefully with a liberal licking of her lower lip. “Thought I might spread a sample of Mr. and Mrs. Cake's merchandise!” She fired. The latest newspaper shattered a window, eliciting a screaming cat noise from deep inside the victimized house. “What's wrong with a little smidgen of free enterprise!”
“And what if the newspaper company finds out that you've been turning their publication into a friggin' blitzkrieg?!”
“Heeheehee! What's to be so frazzled about? Equestria Daily and fruitcakes go hoof-in-hoof. Extra!”
A mailbox shattered. Its little red flag flew loose, sailing dangerously low over Harmony's trembling forehead. “M-Miss Pie, if we don't stop this insanity, I'm going to faint—”
“Oh we can't have that!” Pinkie Pie gasped and hugged Harmony closely from behind. The bicycle weaved precariously in and out of flinching, shrieking pedestrians. “If you collapse, how are you going to help me with pressure-washing!”
Harmony's amber orbs did a Derpy impression. “Help you with what now?”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Now make sure to keep the nozzles really close to the sidewalk! And I mean—like—super duper sneezey wheezey close! Pretend as if you're about to back-scratch a ladybug, but you don't wanna squish it because that would be mean!”
“This is... uhm...” Harmony bit her lip as she found herself cradling a pair of metal spouts attached to two different coils of hose running from twin, gas-powered generators. A filthy sidewalk covered in mildew lingered before the exterior of a hauntingly familiar skating rink in the midday sun. “Why am I even doing this?”
Pinkie Pie gasped dramatically from where she stood on the lawn next to her. “You mean you'd want to squish a ladybug?”
“No, I mean, what's the point of—?”
“What did a ladybug ever do to you?!”
“Miss Pie, I am not trying to kill a ladybug!“
The pink pony leaned suspiciously into the pegasus with wide blue eyes. “Was your village attacked by a rampaging tribe of ladybugs and you've lived your entire life ever since vowing revenge?!”
“I wanna know why I am standing in the middle of Ponyville with a pair of pressure washing nozzles in my hooves!” Harmony blinked violently and shook her face. “I don't even think it's safe to operate two pressure hoses at the same time!”
“They key is not to cross the streams!” Pinkie Pie grinned. In a single hop, she bounced over to the generators and cranked them with a jerk of her jaws. The twin motors roared to life. “Besides, with both of them tied together, I figure we'll earn twice the bits in half the time!”
“I still think this is really dangerous.”
“Yup! Probably is!” Pinkie Pie smiled and flipped both levers on the base of the hoses. “Okie dokie lokie, here we go!”
“Gaaaaah!” Harmony shrieked and held on for dear life as the twin nozzles rocketed up from the ground beneath her on a spray of violent water. She rode the dancing hoses like the serpentine necks of twin sea serpents thrashing against her.
“Remember: aim really close and do tiny side-to-side motions until you see the sidewalk panel start to turn gray again!” Pinkie Pie yelled firmly above the cacophonous engines and roaring deluge, forcing many a distant villager to glance over. “If you start to smell something reallllly stinky, that means you're doing it right and the mildew's going away! Thatta girl, you almost got it!”
There was a bellowing scream; the hoses finally flung the time traveler through the air so that she landed violently in a thick cluster of rattling bushes several meters away. “Ooof!”
Pinkie Pie blinked. Smiling, she cut the engines to the generator and pointed through the settling spray of sun-glittering mist. “You missed a spot!”
“Mmmfff!” Harmony flailed and clambered through a suffocating mountain of twigs and leaves beside the skating rink. “I shouldfff junnfff shuff the hoffeff umpff your ammff...”
Pinkie Pie gasped. “Of course! My aspirations to be a poet!”
“Pfftooie!” Harmony's head finally emerged from the bushes, her mane covered in squirrel droppings. “I beg your pardon?—Whoah!” She was whisked away yet again via pink hooves.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The nearby speakers whined annoyingly as Pinkie Pie finished propping the microphone up in front of Harmony. The copper pegasus stood on a broad stage at the back end of a dimly lit cellar cafe full of smoky haze, jazzy music, and a cornucopia of leering faces. She bit her Entropan lips as she found herself under the indifferent gaze of dozens upon dozens of patrons seated at round coffee tables.
“Here!” Pinkie Pie hissed whisperingly as she slapped a sheet of paper into the time traveler's hoof. “Try not to read it too quickly! It'll ruin the meter!”
“Uhhh...” Harmony blinked at the sheet, then over at the brightly-coated earth pony. “If you wrote this, then why am I reading this?”
“All good poets start out anonymously!” Pinkie squatted down on the edge of a folding chair next to the stage. “Besides, I'm willing to bet I haven't got the speaking voice that you do. I try to say a haiku, and it comes out sounding like a cement mixer!”
Harmony's eyes ran over the sheet like an amber typewriter. “In the heart of my heart, where a fire is burning, where my dreams are yearning, nopony is ever learning—” She finished murmuring, gulped, and planted a hoof over the edge of the microphone as she leaned worriedly the bright mare's way. “Miss Pie, I hate to say it, but this isn't exactly T. S. Eliotrot.”
“Pfft! Of course not! I wrote it in high school!”
“High School?—Snkkt—Why are you sampling that?”
“Heehee! I figure it's best to start out small! I don't wanna have too big a head on my shoulders!”
A series of coughs and clearing throats emanated from the impatient crowd. Harmony shifted nervously from where she stood on the dimly lit stage. “I dunno about this...”
“Go on! What's the worst that could happen? You've got an audience of happy, receptive artists!”
“All I see are a bunch of hoodies, scarves, and square-framed glasses.”
“Cuz it's dark and chilly down here in the basement!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “Just relax, and maybe afterwards I'll let you join me in arts and crafts!”
“Oh joy...” Harmony muttered to herself. She glanced at the crowd. Clearing her throat, the last pony stepped up to the crackling microphone. “This is... uhm... a special reading of Equestrian Dreams by Pinkamena Diane Pie.” A deep breath. “On a dark and stormy night, alone with every pony fright, I think and I think about kites, like I used to fly in the sky so bright—”
“Booooo!”
“You're a travesty of the Celestial Tongue!”
“Get off the stage! We wanna hear more e. e. coltings!”
A rock-hard bagel flew through the hazy cellar air and ricocheted off Harmony's cranium. “Ow! Sonuva—!”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Inside a lonely wooden cabin, Harmony sat at a worktable, squinting as she grasped a pair of screwdrivers in the crooks of her copper hooves and went to work disassembling the intricate pieces of a rusted bear trap.
Pinkie Pie sat beside her, snapping an armadillo cage to shrapnel bits with a pair of iron bolt cutters. “And so I said, 'I don't care if the Royal Court of Canterlot declares them as a tax exempt organization! I don't think they have the right to declare a holiday!' And she says back to me, 'You're just ignorant and mean and don't know what you're talking about!' And then I said, 'Have you seen Battlefield Equestria? I think this conversation is over!' And then she left the party in a huff like it was my fault! Pfft—Her loss! And to think I planned on sharing all of those cupcakes—”
“Enough!” Harmony snarled, tore the bear trap apart, and slammed her Entropan forelimbs angrily down onto the table. “Look!” Lungs heaving, she hoisted her flank up and all but thrust her emblazoned rear end in the earth pony's face. “Do you see that? Do you?”
“Jee, I dunno. Looks like a plot hole to me.” Pinkie Pie hissed, snorted, and broke into insane giggles as she slapped the tabletop multiple times. “Hahahaha! Get it?!”
“Look at the cutie mark! Look at it! I'm a friggin' clerk from the friggin' Court of friggin' Canterlot!” Harmony seethed, her barking voice echoing across the wooden beams of the claustrophobic cabin. “I came here all the way from Her Majesty's palace specifically to see you about an important scientific assignment! Why I chose to see you—nnngh—I mean, why Princess Celestia chose for me to see you is beyond me, only that I... she figured that you were the most popular pony in Ponyville and if there was any soul who would know how to help me get what I needed in this town, you would be the one!”
“Jee, that sounds really fantastic!” Pinkie Pie smiled brightly, yanked the shattered bits of the cage off her side of the table and planted a rusted deer trap in its place. “But what does any of that have to do with arts and crafts?”
“Nothing!” Harmony shouted. “It has nothing to do with anything! Just like this has nothing to do with anything!” The last pony slumped back down in her chair. She faced Pinkie and motioned wildly with her hooves, all the while lecturing, “I did not come here to dump eggs on the mayor, or go knocking on random ponies' doors, or deliver fruitcake grenades disguised as newspapers, or do death-defying pressure-washing, or read horribly written poetry—”
“I kinda thought that last stanza was good up until the bagel hit you.”
“It stank!” Harmony hissed. “I'm sorry, Miss Pie, but it stank! Just like this stinks!” The pegasus pointed towards the pile of tossed and dismantled hunter's tools. “And for your information, this is not 'arts and crafts!' This is disassembling very sharp and very dangerous weapons! Why in your cotton-stuffed head you have the ridiculous notion to call it 'arts and crafts' is beyond me!”
“Hmmm...” Pinkie Pie's face scrunched up towards the ceiling as she rubbed her chin with an errant hoof. “Well, that's what the esteemed Hoity Toity called this when he paid me to help clear his newly bought land of all the stuff the griffon colonists had left behind!”
“Who did what now?” Harmony gave Pinkie a double take. She frowned, her nostrils flaring. “Miss Pie, I think that rich floozy is attempting to take advantage of your good nature.”
“Come to think of it, you're right!” Pinkie Pie's brow furrowed briefly. “Just who in their right mind pays a grown filly in cough drops? I don't care if they're all lemon flavored. Bleachkk—Or like my Granny used to say, 'Bleachkk, oy!'”
“You see? This is all pointless. Can we please trot back into Ponyville and just—I dunno—talk sensibly for a little while?”
“You're righttttt...” Pinkie Pie sighed exasperatingly. No less than a millisecond had passed, and she was once more grinning brightly as if witnessing the birth of the universe. “Right after we take care of this bad boy right here!” With superpony strength, she clasped an enormous metal spheroid from the corner and slapped it onto the tabletop with a humongous clang. “Seems awfully rude to abandon a job when it's so close to being finished, don'tcha think?” She grinned as she patted an array of rusted metal spokes sticking out of the object from all angles. “You ever see an ogre football before?”
“Miss... uhh... M-Miss Pie..?.” Harmony stared, her mouth agape, her eyes shrinking into amber pinpricks. With a shaking hoof, she nervously pointed at the weighted monstrosity. “That's a sea mine.”
“No way!” Pinkie Pie smirked. “Mr. Toity told me that this was something ogres kick around for sport and it was perfectly safe to take it apart with a normal wrench!” She blinked her blue eyes and then face-hoofed. “Awww poopsicles, I forgot the wrench!”
“It's a friggin' sea mine,” Harmony said. She stepped out of her chair and gestured with wildly waving hooves at every angle of the infernal thing. “It... That... But... How?!” She stared at Pinkie's face with a pale grimace. “How?! That's all I want to know, Miss Pie. Just how?”
“I've got a joke for that. It either involves brown cows or insulting the language of Buffalo culture.”
“This is no laughing matter! That thing could go off any second—!” Harmony blinked in a sudden, cold realization. She squinted the pink pony's way. “Lemme guess, Hoity Toity owns this lone and abandoned cabin out in the middle of Everfree too, doesn't he?”
“Why yes! Why do you ask?”
“We sooooo gotta get out of here...”
“Heehee!” Pinkie leaned her bright elbow into the rusted hulk of metal. “Stop being so glum, chum! Er... chumette? Chumpina? Pfft—Now that last one just makes you sound fat—” A creaking noise, and finally the flimsy table beneath the sea mine gave way. “Ackies!” Pinkie collapsed out of sight.
An enormous thud echoed through the cabin. Harmony jerked, her entire body flinching. The dust settled over a pile of splinters. The sea mine was as still as a menacing mountain.
“Whew...” After a wave of silence, Harmony exhaled, all her hooves touching back to the floor in relief. “Okay. Now if we can just—”
“Oh hey!” Pinkie Pie's face flew back up into frame, wearing a shattered table leg for a hat. She brandished a glinting metal tool in her hoof. “I didn't forget the wrench after all! Woohoo!” She pumped her upper limbs in victory; the result was the wrench being flung murderously into the spokes of the giant rusted sphere. After a ringing noise, a dull and menacing ticking filled the dusty air.
Harmony's ears went limp.
Pinkie Pie blinked curiously at the noisy ball of death. She glanced over her shoulder with a raised eyebrow pointed the pegasus' way. “Now that's just silly! Why would ogres want to kick around a giant alarm clock?”
“Move it!” Harmony grasped Pinkie's shoulders, stretched her copper wings out, and flew the two of them out the nearest window of the cabin.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Glass flew as the two soared into the outer lengths of the Everfree Forest. Barely two breaths after the escape, and the calm and quaint log cabin behind them flew heavenward in a blistering explosion. The concussive blast sent both ponies sailing into the underbrush, grunting, as the afternoon sky rained down a blizzard of wooden debris and bear trap springs.
Harmony coughed and wheezed from where her Entropan body had landed in a smoldering heap. Hobbling up onto four numb hooves, she groaned inwardly and shook her snout in a blurred fashion. “Yeah, this was so much better than picking Rainbow Dash...”
“Ughh... Why is the world leaning sideways?”
“Nnngh, Miss Pie, we almost died.” Harmony lethargically glanced across the forest towards the earth pony. “What could possibly be so much more interesting than what we just—OhDearEpona!” She howled, flinching behind an upraised hoof.
“What?” Pinkie Pie's blue eyes blinked, one above the other, for her entire skull was unnaturally twisted ninety-degrees from the center of her neck. “Did I land in something?”
“Uhhhh...” Harmony hissed through a grimace of clenched teeth. She gulped as she saw several bony contours sticking out at disgusting angles through the pony's pink coat. “Maaaaaaybe.”
“Hmm?” Pinkie Pie shook her snout. There was a rattling sound, as if a poisonous snake was hidden behind her throat. “Oooh!” She rattled her joints again. “Heeheehee! Listen to me! I'm like a newborn foal's favorite toy!”
“Uhm, Miss Pie, I don't think you should be doing that—”
“This reminds me of that one time I swallowed a pair of maracas and my sisters kept hitting me with broomsticks because they thought I was possessed by a hive full of ghost bees!” Pinkie Pie trotted precarious figure-eights through the underbrush and positively reveled in the teetering pull of gravity. “Hey! Heeheehee! Lookit, lookit!” She tilted her body forty-five degrees from the earth and trotted with her crooked skull almost even with the horizon. “I was foaled on the side of a hill! I was foaled on the side of a hill! Hahaha!”
“Look, let me just get you to whatshername at the Ponyville Hospital... Uhhh...” The time traveler wracked her brain as the rattling pony orbited her gigglingly. “Nurse Red Heart! Yeah! Maybe she can—er—fix you!”
“Fix what?” Pinkie Pie twirled and twirled noisily. “It's like I've got my own percussion instrument! Now all I need is a wind section and I'll be two-sevenths of the way to a full orchestra! Like this—Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!”
“Miss Pie—”
“Whoo! Whoo! Whoo—!”
“Your head is in a bad—” Harmony scrunched her face, shook, and frowned. “...worse condition than usual! Will you just stop and—?”
“Aack!” Pinkie Pie tripped over a random root and slammed her spine straight into a tree trunk with a sickening crunch.
Harmony winced once more.
The earth pony stood up, blinking, her eyes at an even level once again. She turned her neck a few times; there was no more rattling. “Hmmm.” She shrugged. “So much for that.” The filly spun and smiled at the dumbfounded pegasus. “Whaddya wanna do now?”
“I was about to tell you!” Harmony's eyes were as thin as dagger edges. “I'm a clerk from the Royal Court of Canterlot. I'm here for astronomical research—stargazing—and Princess Celestia heard about you being a famous community organizer in Ponyville and she thought that you might know a good place for me to perform my operation—”
“Stars?!” Pinkie Pie gasped joyfully and bounced across the forest to grin in the pegasus' face. “I can make you see stars!”
Harmony's exhalation was like a pent-up hurricane billowing out from her frazzled chest. “Okay, now we're getting someplace!”
“Just follow my fluffy tail to glory, girl!” Pinkie Pie bounded towards Ponyville.
“Heh...” Harmony smirked and murmured under her breath. “And you thought I couldn't handle 'Auntie Pinkie Pie', Spike.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
A tall and pink bottle was slapped onto the counter in front of Harmony's bored eyes. The time traveler gazed apathetically at the glistening contours of the glass-encased soda while leaning her chin on a slumped hoof. Her amber eyes dripped over to a grinning pony's bright face.
“Miss Pie... What is this?”
“It's my new invention!” Pinkie Pie beamed. She and Harmony were huddled around a counter in the rear kitchen of Sugarcube Corner. “I call it 'Supernova Sarsaparilla!' It'll make you see stars!” She leaned forward and fluttered her blue eyes innocently. (“Squee!”)
“Nnnnghhhh...” Harmony buried her snout into the crook of her forelimb.
Pinkie Pie paced around the colorful bakery, monologuing dramatically, “All of these years that Mrs. and Mr. Cake have let me live here, I figured I'd return them the favor by making a brand new beverage that'll wow the crowd and fill their saddlebags with a fountain of golden bits! I know it may seem a bit bold, but it's all with good intentions! I need taste testers who are willing to humor a young and ambitious entre... entrepre... entreprenuuuuuuuur—”
“Mmmf... 'entrepreneur.'”
“Gesundheit! Heeheehee!”
Harmony stared up with icy ambers. “This is not what I had in mind at all.”
“That's what should make it extra special! It's a surprise drink! I like to call it assassin soda!” Pinkie Pie hooked her upper limbs like a praying mantis and made a wicked face. “Hisssssssssssssssss!”
“What I came here for—”
“Hisssssssss! Hiss! Hiss! Hiss!”
“What I came here for was to see stars—You know, burning gas giants left in the effluent wake of Goddess Epona's cosmic exodus! I didn't mean taste-testing! How in the wide world of all things equine could you think that I meant—?”
“Just have a sip.” Pinkie Pie grinned devilishly with a not-so-subtle wink while sliding the cold glass across the counter to the pegasus. “You seem to have your senses together! Maybe those wicked awesome Canterlotlian tastebuds can give me a detailed survey to send to the Ponyville Food Council!”
“Y'know what?” Harmony stood up straight and tall. With the brave flexing muscles of a hardened scavenger, the last pony gripped the bottle, bit the cap off with mighty teeth, spat it out, and viciously growled, “If it'll make you so friggin' happy, I'll taste your Saturday Sappernocky!”
“'Supernova Sarsaparilla.'”
“Whatever. I just want us to move on from this infernal chapter in our goddess-forsaken lives!” Harmony flung her neck back and took a liberal chug of the bubbling beverage. No sooner than three seconds into guzzling the mysterious quaff, her eyes bulged towards the ceiling. She flung her body forward and wheezed violently. Her copper coat flashed and flickered across seven different prismatic hues. This was soon followed by an immolating breath of fire that briefly but nightmarishly vomited out of her mouth before dissipating like the fumes from an elder dragon's purple snout. Harmony's body slumped like a dead weight, her snout melting into the contours of the counter as she hyperventilated for an even breath.
“So?” Pinkie Pie grinned, watching calmly and happily. “How's it taste?”
“Snkkkt!” Harmony winced to utter.
“'Snkkkt?'” Pinkie blinked quizzically towards the kitchen walls. “What does 'Snkkkt' mean? I can't put that on a survey!”
“Miss Pie, what in Celestia's name did you put in this crap?”
“I might know a pony who might know a pony who might possibly have borrowed a secret bucketful of solid rainbow from a Cloudsdalian factory.” Pinkie Pie stifled a giggle and rolled her eyes innocently towards the ceiling of the kitchen. “Dashie says that rainbows aren't known for their flavor. I think the world's just waiting for taste buds to evolve to a new level of appreciating spiciness.”
Harmony hacked, coughed, and wheezed. “'Dashie'?”
“No, 'spicy!'” Pinkie leaned across the counter with a beaming smile. “What do you think? Does it need more bubbles?”
“By bubbles, do you mean 'arsenic?'” Harmony hissed.
“Oh, that reminds me!” Pinkie Pie brightened, reached once more into the mysterious ether surrounding the unwitting room, and produced a rattling cardboard box. “While we're here, wanna help me do a favor for my friend?”
“Friend? Wh-what friend?”
“Fluttershy. She's too busy dealing with some infant 'Candy Corn' or whatnot in the Everfree Forest today. She asked that I look after some of her pets. Wanna help me feed them?”
“Fluttershy?” Harmony finally regained her breath. The time traveler smoothed back the frazzled length of her black, amber-streaked mane and managed half-a-smile. “Sure! Anything for Fluttershy...”
“Great! But we gotta de-sting them first.” Pinkie tore the box open.
Harmony blinked. “De-sting? De-sting what?—Aaaah!” The last pony shrieked as a dozen scorpions leaped out of the box and skittered all over her. She fell hard to the floor, wrestling with the sudden sea of writhing arachnids. “Getthemoff! Getthemoff! Getthemoff!”
“Heeheehee! That means they like you!” The bright filly next gasped. “Oooh! In speaking of liking stuff... !”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Pinkie Pie finished strapping a lavender helmet over her head before revving engines through the handles before her. “Anypony who doesn't like jet skis should sell their house and move to Mexicolt before sundown! Heehee! I like to get a lot of things wet, don't you?!”
“Dang it, Miss Pie!” Harmony snarled from where she limply squatted, mounted on a second watercraft identical to Pinkie's. The two bobbed up and down along the flanks of a majestic lake south of Ponyville. “We really need to talk!” She shook her mane, tossing loose several severed scorpion stingers that had been lodged in her follicles. “I mean really talk!”
“It isn't exactly safe to have a conversation while riding jet skis at fifty kilometers per hour around a shallow lake!”
“It isn't safe to ride jet skis at fifty miles per kilometer around a shallow lake, period!”
“Exclamation mark!”
“What?”
“What I meant to say was, 'I take your period and raise you an exclamation mark!'”
“Dang it, Miss Pie, I'm serious!”
“And so am I!” Pinkie Pie grinned and flashed a look over her shoulder. “And so's Dr. Whooves! Hey-ya, Doc! Ready to take your measurements?”
“Right on!” A brown earth pony sat at the shoreline and waved before scribbling onto a clipboard full of spreadsheets “Anytime, Pinkie!”
“What the heck is he even doing here?” Harmony blinked.
“Lots of ponies in town are trying to outlaw jet skis because they think it's poisoning the ecosystem.”
“Could they be right?”
“I'll let you know once they get out of the hospital for water poisoning.” Pinkie Pie revved her engines. “Come on, Mon-Mon! Let's do this! For science!”
“What did you just call me?”
“'Mon-Mon,' because you're colored like a monarch butterfly! It's very pretty!”
“My name happens to be 'Harmony'.”
“Pffft—Hahahaha!”
Harmony steamed. “Now what's so friggin' funny?”
“'Mon-Mon' is also griffonese for what a pony does in the outhouse. Heeheehee!”
“Miss Pie—”
“Which is why I kind of always giggle whenever I shop at Miss Bon Bon's novelty shop. That mare's name is one dyslexic beak away from sounding like something stinky! Heeheehee!”
“Miss Pie!”
“Oh, I'm sorry, are you part griffon?”
“I'm two parts ticked off and one third homicidal at this point.”
“That still won't get you a free scholarship at University of Fillydelphia.”
“Tell Dr. Whooves to get ready to scribble down some data. He's about to find out how much a jet ski can pollute an earth pony's rectum.”
“Hey Dr. Whooves—!”
“I was being sarcastic!”
Pinkie Pie gasped. “You mean you were actually telling a joke?”
Harmony shrugged wildly. “Why is it so goddess-danged important to you if ponies are laughing or not?!”
“Because you're obsessed with seeing stars!”
“Uhm... I... huh... ?”
“I was being sarcastic! Heeheehee!”
“Grrrrrrr...”
“Are you ladies going to start your engines or not?”
“We're not really going to keep Dr. Whooves waiting, are we?” Pinkie Pie asked with glistening blue eyes. “The last time the water-smooth stallion tried this experiment on his own, a pigeon died. Or was it one pigeon? Two? Threefourfive... just like that?”
“Nnnngh... Fine.” Harmony frowned and looked forward. She gently braced the handles of the jet ski beneath her hooves. “Uhmm...” She fidgeted.
“Need help?”
“No thank you. This is just like a scooter, only it goes over water. How hard can it be—?” A single flick of the hoof, and the jet ski violently shot forward, dragging a flailing Harmony along with it. “Aaaaaaaaaiiieeee!”
“Careful, Mon-Mon!” Pinkie Pie shouted through a pair of hooves bracing her lips while Dr. Whooves scribbled and scribbled beyond her shoulder. “We're trying to study the effects on the lake! Not the effects on the—” She winced as a thunderous crash rippled across the surface of the waters. “—wooden piers.”
“My word, is she okay?”
“She'd better be, Doc. I need somepony to spot me later while I fall a tree!”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“At least answer me one question.” Harmony grumbled as she wrung out her soaking wet, amber-streaked mane in the golden glow of the sunset. “Are you actually following a schedule, or do you seriously intend to be so friggin' random?”
“Pfft!” Pinkie Pie rolled her eyes. “I swear! Heehee! Why does everypony insist that I'm random? Everything I do is totally normal! Ahem—Now stand back.” She pushed Harmony aside, raised a pair of goggles over her eyes, and proceeded to crank the handle to a gigantic chainsaw. Once the engine roared to life, Pinkie angled the rotating, razor-sharp teeth of the machine so that it began slicing its way through the thick trunk of a dying tree besides Sugarcube corner. The grinning pony spoke over the loud buzzing noise and spillage of wooden chips, “Most ponies live out their their lives taking one hoofstep at a time! I enjoy living at one thousand and eighty degree angles all at once! Is that a crime?!”
“No, I suppose it's not a crime—”
“What?”
“I said, I suppose it's not—”
“What?!”
“Will you turn that dang thing off?!”
“I can't hear you! I'm trying to cut down this tree!”
“And I'm trying to talk to you!” Harmony shouted, shielding herself from the flying fountain of wooden bits. “I've been trying to talk to you all day! I've just about had it! If you won't help me find a spot to conduct the astronomical research on behalf of the Canterlotlian Court, then I'll find another pony who will!”
“Like who?! Dr. Whooves is taken!”
“It probably wouldn't be Dr. Whooves, unless of course he ever tutored a dragon named Spike for more than a semester.”
“Heh! He should be so lucky! The poor doc is attempting to finish a scientific study in ecological research and all of his peers give him flak cuz he's got a silly hourglass on his butt! What would you do if you had an hourglass for a cutie mark, Mon-Mon?!”
“Jee, I dunno. I'd probably kill myself.”
“That's the worst punchline I ever heard!” Pinkie cut the engine to the chainsaw and stood back. “Fore!” she shouted.
“Miss Pie.” Harmony glared at her. “'Fore' is what ponies shout at a golf course. I believe the appropriate term you're looking for is—” Her eyesight flickered a bright, billowing green and then was normal once again. At first, the time traveler wasn't sure why, until she glanced down to see that the hulking body of the dying tree trunk had landed around her. As the sawdust cleared, the last pony became aware of an equine-shaped hole in the cylindrical wood, and her hooves were standing in the middle of the collapsed spectacle. “—'timber.'”
Pinkie Pie raised her goggles. She blinked at Harmony, then at the severed tree trunk. Her blue eyes squinted at the miraculous, Entropan spectacle. The wheels in her fluffy head were obviously turning as she performed a complex mathmatical equation through her brain matter. “Really giant, heavy tree plus gravity plus living, breathing pegasus...” She stuck a tongue out, tapped the edge of her chin with a hoof, then shrugged. “Oh well!” She flung the chainsaw over her head so that it embedded into a vibrating street sign that wobbled to a stop. “Do you have the same itch for baking that I do right now?”
“No!” Harmony hissed, frowning. With a flap of her wings, she pounced on Pinkie Pie and grasped her shoulders between two heavy hooves. “No baking! No random scientific tests! No volunteer jobs for goddess-knows-what! And—most of all—no jokes! Give me one good reason to give you the breath of the day or I am so outta here!”
“Erm... Uhm...” Pinkie Pie's smile was a sweat-stained thing, but no less fervent than a day's worth of grins that preceded it earlier. “Would you like to join me in catering Rarity's fundraiser for Ponyvillean orphans, Mon-Mon?”
“For the last time, it's 'Harmony,' not—” Harmony stopped in mid-sentence, blinking hard. “Uhh... Lady Rarity's doing a fundraiser for Ponyvillean orphans?” she asked in a suddenly wilting breath.
“Heeheehee! Why do you call her 'Lady Rarity?' Pfft—Everypony knows she's a lady!”
“Erm, right...” Harmony murmured. “But... She did fundraisers for orphans here in Ponyville? How come I never knew that...?”
“She did and she is still doing them! And I volunteered to pass out dessert for everypony who attends! I mean, where have you been?—Well, I guess you are a Royal Clerk from Canterlot who's trying to perform an astronomical study here in town on behalf of Her Majesty.”
“Wait, you mean to tell me you heard me all those times I tried explaining myself?”
“So I'm gonna finish making pastries for the event tonight and time's-a-wasting!” Pinkie Pie giggled, then in a deep low voice she melodramatically chirped: “'I have a rendezvous with doughnuts, at some disputed bakery.' Heeheehee! Wanna come with?! Orphans and doughnuts always make for a great combination!”
“Miss Pie... I...” Harmony ran a hoof over her face.
She thought of six hundred strips of silver that she had practically vomited into Bruce's wallet. She thought of a one-of-a-kind lightning gun that had exploded after drilling her a hole into a gigantic dome of moonrock. She thought of having outrun both an army of lunar golems and a gigantic wave of runic flame. She thought of the Equestrian Wasteland and the endless gray twilight and how—with each second wasted in both forward and reverse—nothing was becoming any brighter, or prettier, or happier.
Then and there, in that moment, in a normal town surrounded by such bright colors belonging to a world so devoid of desolation that it could easily afford whimsy, she thought of a shivering little foal in a cold barn shadowed with painful memories, and she then thought of a wilting time traveler confessing all of her sins before a purple dragon. There simply was no crystal clear way to restore glory to Equestria when a pony's heart was sympathetic to the souls of Equestria at the same time. So, with a crumbling, groaning breath, Harmony sinned again.
“Yeah. I'll come with.”
“Great!” Pinkie Pie hugged Harmony until their cheeks rubbed against each other. Her dimples were like lavender explosions in the dimming sunset. “I'll bring the ingredients, you'll bring the sarcasm, question marks will bring question marks, then profit!” She bounced gleefully towards the far side of Sugarcube Corner. “Once more unto the baking soda! Heehee!”
Harmony sighed, slumping within the shadow of herself. “Sometimes, I swear, the only reason Entropa hasn't asked for her skin back is because she's watching me from afar while preparing a grand lawsuit.”
“I'd hurry if I were you!” Pinkie Pie smiled in mid-stride. She spoke over her shoulder, “Before the squirrels get back!”
“What squirrels?” Harmony glanced over and witnessed half-a-dozen bushy-tailed rodents clambering about the hollow of the fallen tree. “Oh. Uh... sorry about the tree. Life has its ups and downs, am I right?”
All six creatures spun from the trunk, spotted the sawdust guiltily blanketing the copper pegasus' figure, and leaped at her with a bloody roar cry of vengeance.
“Gaaah!” Harmony tumbled across the face of Sugarcube corner as she wrestled the tree rats with pounding hooves. “Nnngh!—For the love of Celestia! At least Bruce is a habitual smoker! What's your friggin' excuse?! Raaaugh!”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut,” Harmony murmured from an unfolded table propped up right outside the Ponyville Town Hall building under the shroud of night. A starry sky scoffed down at the last pony, its twinkling glow highlighting the various splotches of sawdust and squirrel prints that adorned her Entropan features like chaotic patchwork. As body after body of Equestrian visitors strolled into the bright doorway of the bustling event, the exhausted pegasus hoofed them a chocolate-colored treat, entreating them with a dull-ringing monotone. “Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut. Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut.”
A few confused ponies blinked worriedly at her disheveled coat, shrugged, and marched towards the crowded fundraiser inside the building. During a space in the arriving guests, Pinkie Pie sauntered up from a crate of Sugarcube Corner supplies a few meters away and slapped another plateful of fresh doughnuts onto the edge of the table.
“Okie dokie lokie! Thanks for keeping an eye on the table, Mon-Mon. I had to go and pay elemental tribute to Princess Nebula.”
“You what?”
“I had to make water. Heeheehee!”
“Oh.” Harmony blinked boredly. “Okay.”
“Here's hoping just as many ponies show up as we have doughnuts to give out!”
“Your enthusiasm is overwhelming, Miss Pie.”
“So is your sarcasm.” Pinkie Pie stuck a tongue out and let forth a trademark giggle. “That might get a few laughs in a place like Quebuck, but here in Ponyville you gotta be a little less edgy.”
“I'm not here to practice being a comedian!” Harmony growled. “I'm here to... to...” She sighed. She gazed up at the stars, her amber eyes searching for an invisible flaming passageway in the heavens through which the secrets of all things terminal might somehow land upon her past or future mind. “Maybe I should just map it all out with doughnut sprinkles. Given a quarter of a century, they'll be hard as a rock.”
“Why bother mapping the stars?” Pinkie Pie chirped. “They don't donate a bit to orphans!”
“Yeah, well—” Harmony blinked. “Huh.”
“You okay? Did the sawdust fumes get to ya?”
“No, that just... That just sounded strangely deep. Of course, that's coming from you.”
“My ex-coltfriend called me 'deep' once,” Pinkie Pie said, blinking towards the starlit rooftops of Ponyville. “Or maybe it was another 'd'-word. Something that rhymes with 'tense.'”
“You... You had a coltfriend?”
“Yupperrooni! For three months, he and I were the talk of the town! We danced, we sang, we went out for dinner, all that warm fuzzy stuff! Our every day was merry and gay! But then one afternoon we had a long talk and I realized that he wanted to be both of those things with somepony else. That reminds me, you ever been to San Fransiscolt?”
“Uhhhm...”
“Jumping jelly beans! What was I thinking!” Pinkie Pie leaned down low and stared a beady-blue-eye point blank at the pile of doughnuts. “Chocolate? Pfft... An 'orphan fundraiser' is soooo powdered sugar!”
“I don't suppose I've been the most agreeable... volunteer to have lent you a hoof all day, Miss Pie,” Harmony said. “But, for what it's worth, I think it's a very fantastic thing that you're doing here.”
“Heeheehee. Everypony has a sweet spot, Mon-Mon. The key is to keep drilling until you hit a cavity.”
“Er... Yeah... I guess...” Harmony sighed and leaned her sawdust-soiled chin once more against a hoof as several more ponies strolled by. “Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut. Thanks for attending; here's your doughnut.” She sighed long and hard, staring into the shadows of the collapsed night. Dozens upon dozens of hauntingly familiar pony faces had graced her vision, but not a single one of them was a snow-white unicorn with a silken purple mane. “Not even attending her own fundraiser, huh? I can't tell if that's either cold or just plain ironic.”
“Nah, irony isn't anything like Rarity not showing up at an event that she planned tonight.” Pinkie Pie smirked as she opened up a large box of powdered doughnuts and carried it to the table. “Irony is more like a bunch of water balloons falling from the sky and soaking us to the bone! Heeheehee!”
“Miss Pie, what are you going on about?”
“It's not my fault!” Pinkie Pie spun to show off her violently twitching tail. “I can't ever explain it! Irony just happens!”
Harmony blinked crookedly at Pinkie's quivering appendage. “Uh...”
“Look!” The time traveler's anchor pointed up towards the starry sky. “Here come the water balloons now!” Her smile was brief, for as Pinkie squinted heavenward, the falling object in question increased dramatically in both size and momentum. “Wait, come to think of it, that's not a bunch of water balloons at all. It looks more like a runaway Cloudsdalian chariot.”
“A runaway what-now?” Harmony tilted her head up and gasped to see a flailing pegasus figure entangled with a falling chariot that was hurtling their way. “Holy—!” In a heroic blur, she shoved Pinkie Pie and two other gasping doughnut patrons away from the front of the Town Hall building—
A tremendous crash echoed across the heart of Downtown Ponyville. The time traveler's body was reduced to a living bowling pin. Taking the brunt of the collapsing chariot, she flew backwards through two successive tables full of doughnuts and was instantly blanketed in a curtain of powdered sugar. She coughed and sputtered, finding her entire vision blotted out by the fine, white substance.
“Sweet tap-dancing hydras...” Harmony hissed, fighting to shake the blinding sediment from her face. “What in the hay?!”
Amidst a rising cacophony of startled voices and scampering hooves, Pinkie Pie could be heard. “Yeesh! That wasn't ironic at all! That was just spontaneously violent! Hehehehe—Okay, so maybe it was ironic!”
Another voice rose from the Ponyvillean bedlam. It stabbed Harmony's twitching ears with its hauntingly familiar eloquence. “Good heavens! What caught our fall?! I was positively certain we were going to perish! Oh, dearest Anastasia, are you all right?!”
“Hey Rarity! Nice landing! Say, who's Anastasia?”
“Never you mind! Is your friend terribly hurt, Pinkie? I swear, this catastrophe was most unexpected!”
“Hey! You wanna make an entrance, you make one heck of an entrance, girl! Heeheehee! Hey Mon-Mon, stay calm. I'll get a bucket of water to clean you off!”
“Dang it, Miss Pie—” Harmony seethed.
“I'll be right back!” Pinkie's hooves could be heard bouncing away from the noisy scene.
“N-no!” Harmony growled and hissed, clawing at her face with desperate hooves to scrape the blinding powder away. “For crying out loud—Pinkie, come back!”
It took a frenzied effort, but she managed to peel the stuff away from her eyelids. When her vision returned, she was faintly aware of a dozen startled Ponyvillean citizens clambering about the crash site of a Cloudsdalian chariot a few hooftrots away. There was a white blur of a unicorn being helped out of the overturned vehicle's seat. Before any excited cell in the time traveler's Entropan body could register that image, she spun about in search of her anchor's bright form. She was utterly unsuccessful.
“Crud crud crud crud crud crud crud!” Harmony hissed. She twirled about and growled at the nearest pony she could see. “You! Miss...?”
“Erm...” An orange-haired mare fidgeted nervously. “C-Carrot Top...”
“Whatever. Where did she go?!”
“Where did who go?” The earth pony blinked at the chariot, then at the mess of spilled doughnuts. “Are you okay, ma'am?”
“Just tell me where the friggin' pink pony went bouncing off to!”
The mare winced and pointed a trembling hoof to the Town Hall building. “Over there! I think I saw her go into the fundraiser!”
“Thank you!” Harmony galloped immediately into the building, her hooves leaving white powdery trails across the wooden floorboards.
Once inside, the scavenger from the future briefly shuddered through a troll-infested flashback. With another blink, she was partially relieved to see the place brimming with ponies of every pastel shade imaginable. As a record player broadcasted elegant chamber music under several brightly-lit banners displaying “Support Ponyville's Orphans,” the last pony peered her eyes desperately for a bright pink coat. Finally, she saw such a figure and cantered up to it in a flash.
“Miss Pie! Praise Celestia!” The sawdust and sugar-stained pegasus breathed with relief as she slumped against a wall, panting. “Don't run off like that! I can't even begin to explain why, but it's important that you and I stay within shouting distance of each other if I'm to successfully perform my duties for the Court of Canterlot—” She paused in mid-speech, blinking hard. Instead of three balloons, Pinkie's cutie mark suddenly consisted of a cluster of grapes and a strawberry. Upon an even closer examination, the pony's coat was a deep magenta and not a bright pink. “You're...” Harmony's amber eyes twitched. “...You're not Pinkie Pie.”
The mare turned around and smiled under bloodshot eyes. “Hmmm... Pie?” She slurred and raised a cocktail glass in the crook of her hoof. “Hic! I'd love some! I sure hope it isn't—Hic!—sawdust and powder flavored, though.”
“If Pinkie didn't come in here for a bucket of water...” Harmony thought out loud. She gulped. “Then she must have gone the opposite way—”
There was a green flash. The drunk pony was gone. The music and banners were gone. The entire town hall building was gone. Scootaloo stood numbly on four brown hooves, her body forming an infinitesimal dot upon a bed of cold dry stone. Eyes twitching with a sudden scarlet color, the waif of a scavenger glanced up and saw an overcast sky raining down snow and ash. She flashed a look to her left and saw a collapsed dome of pulverized moonrock. A leather saddlebag and the shattered remains of a lightning gun rested next to her.
Lengthy, dead silence kissed the contours of her short pink mane. She breathlessly lingered there, covered with the brutal apathy of the endless Wastelands.
“I... I...” She blinked, she seethed, she barked: “I did nothing! I did absolutely friggin' nothing! It... That... She... It... P-Pinkie... Snkkt—Aaaaugh!”
The last pony jumped up to her hooves and let loose a bestial roar of blood-thick frustration into the twilight yawning above her. Her short pink hairs danced and billowed as she spun circles like an angry little dog. Finally, she slid onto her knees and clasped her skull in shivering brown hooves.
“Nnngh—What was that?! I mean—What the heck was that?! I didn't get to do a single dang thing! Oh, for the love of Epona!”
She snarled. She flashed a frown to her side. The powdery mountain of crushed moon dust laughed at her.
“What are you looking at? Dumb rock!” She dashed over, grunted, and slammed a rear hoof into the great bulk of the thing. A shot of pain rocketed up her spine. “Ow! Ow ow ow!” She limped away, clutching her bruised limb and hissing. “Nnngh... Dumb rock! Dumber pony! Oh goddess, dumber pony!”
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(“Squee!”)
I couldn't take the smile off of my face during this chapter.
The innuendos were fantastic.
cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/37759853.jpg
Cross the streams!
Angel goes to poetry slams?
Someone's cranky
Pinkie Pie is so difficult to voice...
Hey, at least it didn't say "I hate mud ponies".
Wow, just wow. Amazing chapter, especially pinkie pies antics! Could not stop laughing! Talk about pinkie pie being super duper extra pinkie pie!
i SEE WHAT YOU DID HERE:
“They key is not to cross the streams!”
Ghostbusters anyone? :D
Why the heck would you follow her instructions instead of keeping her in place or at least keeping your vision on her by binding a rope or something?!