Space Captain Pinkie Pie

by terrycloth

20: Ancient Prophecies of Doom

Pinkie Pie’s first thought, upon waking up, was “Wheee!” She wiggled her legs in the air, and waggled her tail, twisting around to spin over and over and over and over in the magical field that held her in midair. That gave her enough perspective to see the other ponies in their little party floating along in a similar fashion, only without the spinning, or the joyful grin, or the being awake for that matter. The exception was Twilight Sparkle, who was leading the way on her hooves, horn aglow as it kept every pony else aloft.

“Where are we going, Twilight?” she asked, once she got bored of spinning. Not that she stopped spinning, she just stopped spinning faster, and figured that eventually the wind would slow her down, or else she’d accidentally brush against a wall or a pillar or doorjamb or weird swirly thing like the ones in the corridor they were floating down, and that would stop her.

“Sorry, what was that again?” she asked, realizing that she’d gotten lost in her own train of thought and forgot to listen to Twilight’s response.

“The resurfacing chamber is where we shall build your ramp,” Twilight replied, in a hollow voice. She turned her head, letting Pinkie Pie see her flat white pupil-less eye. “If you still wish to return to the surface; your reception might be unpleasant. Celestia is irked by your use of the Moon Cannon, and I do not wish to arouse her ire by opposing her openly.”

“Irk!” Pinkie Pie said. “Irk irk irk! Don’t you just love that word? Irk! Just saying it makes you scrunch up your throat and cringe, it’s sort of like onomatopoeia only with facial expressions. Irk!”

“I do not love that word,” Twilight replied, turning to face forwards. “I prefer ‘vex’.”

“Oooh, that’s a good one too,” Pinkie said, reaching out a hoof to brush the floor and stabilize herself, upside down. “There are so many fun words for such an unfun concept! Sort of like a consolation prize – you might be vexed, but at least you get to say ‘vexed!’ And maybe stomp around a bit. I don’t really do that much, since it’s too much like bouncing for me to really feel it, but I’ve seen other ponies do it and they look so fierce!”

“Please stop talking,” the possessed Twilight said, in a quiet voice. “This takes more concentration than you seem to realize. Idle chatter is a distraction I can ill afford.”

Pinkie Pie made a motion like she was zipping her lips shut, and stayed quiet for a bit, noticing how slowly Twilight was being walked, a steady but unhurried gait, like some pony wandering around in a daze. “Can I sing?” she asked.

Twilight stopped, and suddenly Pinkie and all the others fell unceremoniously to the ground as the unicorn turned and glowered at the pink earth pony with a fierce glare, although she didn’t stomp. “The resurfacing chamber is just ahead. Use it carefully, Pink One. You tread dangerously close to the wrong side of prophecy.”

Pinkie Pie looked up, rolled to her feet, and asked, “Ancient prophecy?”

“As ancient as most. Oracular traditions are unpopular in the modern age.”

“Ancient prophecies of doom?” Pinkie Pie asked, eyes wide.

Twilight smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile, but it wasn’t particularly unfriendly. “As always, the implications of the prophecy are left up to the ponies who live through it to determine.”

And then she intoned, in a solemn voice, somehow twice as hollow as her already creepy ‘I’m possessed’ voice:

When terror stares down from the night’s silver eye,

and twilight’s last glimmer sets fire to the west,

though you find it unthinkable, let Harmony’s Rainbow fly.

Though threatened by the unknowable, let Harmony’s Rainbow fly.

If you don’t, it’ll be… just… I’m sorry, that’s all I have.

Do you have any willow bark?

Pinkie Pie stared at her.

“Forked prophecies were always hard on the oracles,” Twilight responded. “The official version recorded in Predictions and Prophecies was slightly edited.”

===

By the time Twilight Sparkle and the others woke up for real, Pinkie Pie was almost done reshaping the moon to her wishes. She’d finished with all the super-important parts, and all that was left to do was the ramp.

“What happened?” the real Twilight asked, looking around. “Where are we?”

“Moon Cannon!” Pinkie Pie said happily, pressing her hooves against the giant magic mirror that dominated the room, at the spot that showed the line of hills that they’d been trying to dig a tunnel through earlier. The moondust from the nearby plains surged up around the part of the image that she touched, and the hills slid to either side as she slowly spread her hooves apart. “That’s what happened. We’re in the little ponies room now, I think. Did you know that moondust was made of little ponies?”

“Really? That’s fascinating!” Twilight Sparkle said. “And this magic mirror controls them? All of them at once?”

Pinkie Pie nodded as she tried to make the hills look pretty, and smooth out any lumps in the new valley. One of the hills, the one with the teleport pad on it and the security checkpoint inside, moved aside but wouldn’t change shape, which made it hard to get the two sides to look even.

“Molecular machines,” Tess said, a bit too calmly – she almost looked dazed. “We’ve been wading through molecular machines.”

“Well, not molecular,” Twilight Sparkle said. “After all, if you looked really close you could see the individual grains.”

“We have to take some with us,” Chance said. “As much as we can fit in the cargo hold.”

“Are you insane?” Tess asked. “They’ll kill us!”

“They probably won’t do anything off the moon,” Twilight said. “Well, unless some pony manages to reverse engineer the control spell, which I suppose would be a lot easier than enchanting them one by one. I wonder how they were made?”

Pinkie Pie giggled. “Even I know how little ponies are made, Twilight.”

For some reason, Tess was the one that that seemed to bother most.

But building the ramp was the main concern. Every pony pitched in, since there didn’t seem to be a limit to the number of hooves on the mirror that the little moondust ponies would listen to at once. No pony else was nearly as adept at kneading the moon rock into shape as Pinkie Pie, though.

“You’re a natural at this,” Twilight Sparkle said, as she struggled to get a ragged section of ramp to hook up with the bits on either end, that weren’t quite aligned. “Is it an earth pony thing, since we’re moving around rocks?”

“I think it’s just practice,” Pinkie Pie said, nudging Twilight’s hoof to help her out. “I was doing this for hours before you lazy bones woke up.” She paused. “I did wake up a lot faster than you guys. That might be an earth pony thing! Does that count?”

“Hours?” Chance asked. “How many times did you start over?”

“Start over?” Pinkie Pie asked, confused.

Chance looked back, equally confused. “Well, when we woke up you were just starting on the ramp.”

Pinkie Pie laughed. “Oh! I wasn’t practicing on the ramp. Look!” She bumped every pony away from the mirror with a few quick swings of her hips, then made a weird gesture and changed the viewpoint to show the whole moon from a distance. With another odd flourish, she spun it around to show the view from the ground. “Isn’t it pretty?”

The face of the moon was now, literally, a face – with two eyes of slightly mismatched sizes, the pupil-craters misaligned, and a pointy-toothed grin that on a pony would have stretched from ear to ear. Derpy squeaked, and covered her eyes.

“Please tell me you haven’t committed this,” Chance said, staring at the moon in horror.

“Committed?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“What we’re doing here is planning future changes,” Chance said. “Nothing will actually happen until we find the big red button and press ‘fire’. Right?”

“Magic mirrors don’t work that way,” Twilight said softly, sitting on the cold floor as she stared at Pinkie Pie’s work. “If you can see it in a mirror, then it’s real somewhere. Maybe just in a mirror world, but you wouldn’t use a mirror this big for planning out changes you hadn’t done yet, since warped mirrors can’t easily be un-warped to use again.”

She stood up, giggled a little, and leapt at the mirror. “But it’s not too late! The moon just set when we passed out, so we probably have some time before moonrise to fix everything. All we have to do is remember where each of the thousands of craters and mares were located after Nightmare Moon erased her symbol, even though we only ever saw them through a telescope and never actually received the new version of the Moon Watchers Guide to Craters. Heh. Heheh. But we’ve got hours to figure it out!”

Tess and Chance looked at each other. “We were out for… kind of a long time,” Chance said.

“It’s about an hour before midnight,” Tess said. “Every pony’s looking at… this. Right now.”

“Well, good!” Rainbow Dash said. Twilight and the moon ponies looked at her. “I mean, it’s one thing to say ‘oh yeah, we were on the moon and it was really cool’, but this is proof. Are you sure you can’t put my cutie mark up there instead though, Pinkie? That face could be any pony.”

“Mmmmaybe,” Pinkie Pie said. “But the prophecy said ‘terror stares down’, and a thundercloud doesn’t really stare.”

“A prophecy,” Twilight Sparkle said.

“Of doom!” Pinkie Pie replied, happily, spinning the moon back around to the ramp. Zoomed out, they could see that she’d landscaped the rest of the surface, covering the moonscape in giant stone cakes and candy canes and statues of happy, partying ponies. “But it’s okay! There’s no doom if they just let Rainbow Dash do her job. Which is otherwise pretty unlikely, if you think about it, since we’re all wanted criminals for almost blowing up Manehattan.”

“And you know this because –“ Rainbow Dash prompted.

“Luna was here! Well, there,” she said, poking Twilight’s forehead. “She said Celestia was ‘irked’. Probably vexed, too.”

Tess covered her face with her hand. Chance snapped his gaze up, grinning widely. “New plan!” He said. “Let’s stay up here while Twilight there tries to restart the generator. Once it’s running again, we fix the computers, look up how to synthesize exotic matter in our library, fix the rest of the ship --”

“Send Rainbow Dash to fetch the rest of the crew from the surface,” Tess added.

“Of course,” Chance said. “Warp would be a huge help for all of that. And then we all fly far, far away from here, and see if we can find a gateway to another world. Preferably the one we came from, but another simulation would probably still be an improvement.”

“What, just abandon Equestria?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Adventure!” Chance said, grabbing Rainbow Dash by the shoulders. “Excitement! Not being arrested and turned to stone!”

“Aww, being turned to stone isn’t so bad,” Pinkie Pie said. “Tell them, Twilight!”

“It’s awful, Pinkie!” Twilight Sparkle said, emphatically.

Pinkie Pie continued, undaunted. “But just think of all the neat futuristic things we’ll see when we’re turned back!”

“What makes you think we’ll ever be turned back?” Chance asked. “Isn’t it your version of the death penalty?”

“Well, they have to turn us back sometime,” Pinkie Pie said. “I mean, they can try to keep us imprisoned in stone forever, but forever is a really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really –“

“I’m kind of hungry,” Rainbow Dash said. “Wanna go back to the center chamber thing and make some more pancakes?”

“Really really really really really really really really really really really really--”

“Oh! I’m starving,” Twilight said. “Come on, let’s go!”

Pinkie Pie bounced after them as the rest of the ponies headed out of the red orange wing, saying, “Really really really really really really really really really really really really—“

They talked in low voices while the pancakes were cooking – Derpy volunteered again – ignoring the pink pony bouncing around them, chanting, “really really really really really really really really…”

“I think that’ll work,” Twilight Sparkle said. “It’s simple enough to work, right?”

“I don’t know,” Rainbow Dash said. “I don’t like leaving you hanging like that.”

“Pancakes are done!” Derpy called, and Twilight levitated the top one off the stack and shoved it in Pinkie Pie’s mouth.

“Really really mmph!” Pinkie Pie stopped, chewed, swallowed, and finished with, “long time.”

“I’m really the only plausible choice, unless we wanted to use one of the moon ponies,” Twilight Sparkle said. “And it’s not their fault! It’s mine. I almost destroyed Manehattan – I deserve whatever I get.”

“She really will turn you to stone this time, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said. “I mean, you’re inventing new crimes that you didn’t even do, just to get us off the hook.”

Twilight sighed. “It was bound to happen sooner or later,” she said. “I’ve known that for a while now. Celestia only picked me as her student because I was a danger to the ponies around me, and since then – do you know what one of the first things she taught me was?”

“How not to explode in random magic when some pony makes a loud noise?” Pinkie Pie guessed.

Twilight laughed. “That was the very first! But around the same time, before she got around to actually teaching me magic, she was putting me into sensory deprivation as a ‘meditation technique’, and teaching me how to not go crazy.”

Rainbow Dash snickered. “That explains a lot.”

“I thought it was fun, at the time,” Twilight said, smiling. “She taught me to make up my own little world to experience, from visions I pulled out of my head. Your brain wants chaos, when it doesn’t get any input, but if you focus you can make a world that makes sense.” She frowned. “The final test was to stay in that state for an entire day, and then recognize the real world when I was finally released. I kind of cheated – I made every pony in my dream world pink.

“I didn’t realize what she was actually training me for until years and years later, when that cockatrice turned me to stone,” Twilight said. She drooped, her muzzle pointing at the ground. “So, yes. I’ll probably end up on a pedestal next to Discord, but that’s always been my fate. I’ve disappointed her time and time again, and again and again she’s forgiven me and given me one more chance, and – it’s better to just get it over with. It was always only ever a matter of time.”

Pinkie Pie walked over to Twilight and hugged her. The purple unicorn set her horn on Pinkie’s shoulder, nuzzling into her chest, and sobbed. Pinkie Pie patted her head, and stroked her mane. “I think I like Chance’s plan better,” she said. “The ‘not being arrested and turned to stone’ part is hard to top.”

“I’m not leaving Equestria,” Rainbow Dash said, slamming her hoof down. “Not like that. I mean, yeah, it’d be super awesome to go off and be a space pirate and all, but my mom would kill me. And what about Derpy? She’s got kids at home, and Twilight has her ‘BBBFF’ –“

“Who I also almost destroyed,” Twilight sobbed.

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes, then looked at Pinkie, “—and you have the Cakes, even if you don’t care about your real family. What would little Pound and Pumpkin do without their favorite foalsitter?

“Besides,” she added, “it wouldn’t work.”

“We could give it a few months, and see if it was working?” Chance suggested.

“If Derpy and I can make it to the moon, so can the Royal Guard,” Rainbow Dash said. “They’re not about to leave us up here with the Moon Cannon -- they’re probably already on their way! We need to finish the ramp and get off the moon, fast. Derpy and I should probably leave now to start on that thunderstorm, since we’re still more or less over Equestria.”

“Right,” Twilight said, drying her eyes on her foreleg and regaining her composure. “Whether or not we’re using my plan, if you’re going down there, there’s one more crime I need to commit. If we’re already wanted criminals, the weather squad isn’t going to listen to you --”

“They’ll have to,” Pinkie Pie said. “There’s a prophecy! Of doom!”

“We can’t count on every pony in Equestria knowing about that,” Twilight said. “We can count on this.” Her horn glowed, as she focused, and then three pink hearts emerged from the tip and floated over to Rainbow Dash, popping as they hit her in the face.

“Hey, what gives?” Rainbow Dash asked, backing away and wiping at her stinging eyes.

“It’s a want-it-need-it spell, like I put on Smarty-Pants,” Twilight said. “Works every time! Any pony that looks you in the eye will follow you around and do anything you say.” She looked around at the others. “So, um, no pony look Rainbow Dash in the eye, except for maybe Derpy, since she’s going down with her anyway.”

“That can’t be legal,” Tess said.

“I don’t actually know!” Twilight said, laughing. “I learned it from my foalsitter! I’m pretty sure using it to mind-control twenty ponies as weather slaves isn’t, though.”

“Um, yeah,” Rainbow Dash said, looking studiously at the ground. “Thanks a lot, Twilight. Good to know how much faith you put in my friends.”

===

Shining Armor walked through the streets of Ponyville, the mountainside city of Canterlot glowing inside its purple bubble behind him, in the distance. Without him there to reinforce it, the shield was mostly a bluff, but it was a bluff that had worked well enough the night before. All across Equestria, similar bubbles in all colors of the rainbow rose over every major city – and those were even more of a bluff, since none of the unicorns who’d created them had Shining Armor’s talent for force fields, and he suspected that many of them were nothing but illusions.

Ponyville did not have a bubble. Every pony agreed -- of any place in Equestria, this was the last town that Twilight Sparkle would destroy. Putting up a bubble would just call attention to it, and they didn’t want her looking too closely at what was quickly becoming the staging area for Equestria’s counterstrike.

“Every pony’s drafted,” Shining Armor said to his lieutenants. “The mayor explained that to the townsfolk before we arrived, so no pony should be surprised when you give them their assignments. I want all the pegasi split up into lift-teams, four to a jelly jar. One earth pony per jar on tree duty, and one Guard unicorn to do the actual fighting.”

“Do you really think we’ll need all this?” Blazing Arrow asked. “The featherheads will be there before we even get off the ground. I know Twilight’s powerful, but she can’t take out the entire pegasus wing of the Royal Guard.”

“Don’t underestimate her,” Shining Armor said. “Besides, there’s a prophecy involved.”

Shifting Sands groaned. “I think I know where this is going. That sealed box of yours --”

“It’s classified,” Shining Armor said. “But yes, when we saw… that,” he looked up at the grinning specter of death that now graced the looming moon, “it sparked Celestia’s memory of an ancient prophecy, and when she looked it up in the library, it was surprisingly clear. Martial force isn’t going to win this one, either.”

“By Celestia’s beard, Shiny, it’s the freaking Elements of Harmony again,” Shifting Sands snapped. “Every pony knows that it’s always the Elements of Harmony.”

“Um… call me crazy,” Blazing Arrow said. “But aren’t half the Elements on the other side?”

“If it was the Elements,” Shining Armor said, “I’ve heard from a reliable source that they aren’t too picky. I’d be able to find new bearers and get them attuned in time, just like Twily did for Nightmare Moon.

“Oh, that reminds me,” he added, “there’s a special exemption from the draft for Fluttershy, Rarity, Applejack, and three other ponies yet to be named. They’ll be helping me with a top secret project.”

“How mysterious,” Shifty deadpanned.

“Just do your jobs,” Shining Armor said. “And try to pretend that it matters?”

Comments

[Rowyn]

Well, Celestia did forgive Nightmare Moon for trying to imprison her and bring eternal night. She might forgive Twilight for accidentally almost blowing up Manehattan.

[terrycloth]

891922 After a thousand years.

[LittleSallyDigby]

Oh my.
I like the Equestrian strategy here- the fake barriers, the lack of one over Ponyville, the preparation for mass spaceflight, etc. Though I have to wonder where they're going to get all those jars.
The revelation that just anypony can reshape the face of the moon adds significantly to the ongoing puzzle of what the moon ponies' existence means for Equestria in general...
And just think, all this war nonsense could've been prevented if Spike hadn't decided to stay home.