RoMS' Extravaganza

by RoMS

Nov 4th, 2019 - Shear Consequences (collab with Regidar)

"I think I hit something,” Rarity said with a shudder, throwing the shovel to the side to peer at the rectangle hole she’d dug up. “If only somepony would lend a helping hoof?”

“I told you already. It won’t work,” Starlight replied, puffing up a muddied strand of mane off her face. “It’s got to be alive.”

“It? It?” Rarity sibilated, a hoof on her chest in a show of abject offended horror. “Starlight, we’re talking about our…” She cleared her throat and looked down at the casket. She suckled air and motioned her hoof. “Very dear friend.”

“Very dead friend,” Starlight corrected.

Rarity didn’t answer verbally. She simply rolled her eyes, sighed, and nodded in a lady-life fashion—if the lady had been waddling in rainy mud.

“It’s pink,” Starlight said, a low chuckle escaping her puckered lips.

“What?”

“The casket,” Starlight said, pointing at the slab of wood showing its front under the dirt. “It’s very... pink.”

Almost offensively so, Rarity noted to herself. Even in the darkness of the moonless night, it hurt to look at it. The box bore the slash of Rarity’s shovel, the only damage to the otherwise pristine coffin.

“Well, no time like the present,” Starlight said. She picked up the shovel in her magic, and slammed its edge deep into the wood.

“Oh, it stinks,” Rarity said, waving her hoof in front of her muzzle. “She’s not been dead for even a day!”

“Well, she was old,” Starlight said matter-of-factly. “And bacterias kinda like sugar… like a lot?” She jammed the shovel in the casket’s lid and leveraged herself to pull it fully open and reveal a very sodden|/i] body. And by the look of the sheen the night couldn’t abate, Rarity knew it wasn’t embalming.

“I’m going to retch,” Rarity burped, puffing her cheeks before excusing herself behind the nearest tombstone.

“We’re not going to close that time rift with that attitude,” Starlight called in the direction of a fit of gurgling noises. She discarded the shovel to balance herself on both edges of the cracked open painted pine box. A long, thin shaving razor popped in her magic.

Rarity walked back to peer into the hole and eye Starlight with a raised eyebrow. “We want the mane, not the… whatever you’re doing.”

“If it’s white, it’s white, doesn’t matter where the hair comes from,” Starlight muttered, lowering herself next to the bloated, geriatric corpse of her very old-looking friend. “But I assure you, again, it won’t work.”

Starlight did the do and, once her magic firmly gripped onto a massive clump of hairs, she climbed back up the hole. Tired and sore, she glanced at Rarity. If Starlight had bags under hers, she hoped Rarity wouldn’t pass by a mirror to give herself a look-over.

“Now that we’re done,” Rarity said, “we can head back to the Boutique and finish the patch up.” Rarity turned around without a glance back at the grave. “White hair obtained from the toil of the one pony who caused that rift—What a stupid guideline. It had to be Pinkie, in my shop!”

“She meant well.”

“Maybe, but I don’t like having timelords, timedukes, timedespots, and other non-democratically elected timerulers visit me during working hours. It scares the clientèle!” She stretched up and sighed and wiped the sweat off her brow, only to draw a horizontal mud-smear across her forehead. “Eww, and do you have any idea how unsettling it is to try and bathe while fourth-dimensional entities have the ability to just show up anywhere?”

“Or anywhen.” Starlight smirked.

Rarity shook her head and sighed. “Oh, do be a dear and stop talking. Let’s go because I am tired and I’ve missed…” She looked around at the very futuristic town of Ponyville—The ruffians had the audacity to rename it Ponytopia! “Likely sixty years of spa days.”

Rarity and Starlight had mastered time-travel because of Pinkie’s shenanigans. They could time-jumped, five minutes in the future, simply by walking down the elongated street of Ponytopia. They quickly found their way to and in the large, warehouse-y Carousel Boutique.

“I really hate what they did with the place,” Rarity commiserated. “Damn shareholders, always about efficiency. There ought to be aesthetics in corporate arrangements!”

Starlight rolled her eyes as she bumped her shoulder past Rarity and headed towards the backroom.

A glowing, floating blue tear in the fabric of reality throned in its middle. The two-pony tall rift was rippling, the same pulse it had since they’d come through many times over the past days.

“It’s undone,” Starlight gasped.

“What do you…?” Rarity said, hurrying to join Starlight’s side. Her cheeks reddened and a stammer wracked her words. “M- My stitching never comes undone! What is this sorcery?”

A clump of white hairs tied into a single, rough but sturdy thread lay on the ground.

“Sompony did that,” Rarity blurted, growing offended and defensive as Starlight threw her another look. “My couture is optimal.”

Rarity snatched the clump of hairs she’d desecrated her future old friend for, and magicked them in another thread she hurried to link with the one laying at her hooves.

Pulling a needle from her mane, Rarity began threading and sewing and seamstressing, humming away as fatigue ate away at her talent.

“Tadaaaa!” Rarity burst, showing her work with an extended mid-air hoof.

“It won’t work,” Starlight said.

“It’s repaired. Look here, Darling,” Rarity enunciated, pointing at the fine seam.

The rift was indeed stitched, but not gone. It wobbled and fought the threaded restraint. At once, it calmed down then popped open like a rotten, bloated belly—wider and brighter than before.

“See,” Starlight said with a deadpan. “Starswirl’s notes mention clearly that, I quote, to close a time rift, a thread of accursed white hairs must be spun from the pony who created it—” Rarity mimicked her talking, waving her hoof up and down “—And! Those white hairs must be obtained through toil, terror and pain.”

“I know. I already said that. And anyways, That sounds like your realm of action,” Rarity said. “You know…”

Starlight glanced at Rarity with puckered lips. “I know…?”

“Time shenanigans, trying to cause a time shift, hurting ponies with time spells,” Rarity began to list. “It’s kind of your shibboleth as far as I am concer-”

“Alright, I get it.”

One step through the portal, and it didn’t matter the day, time of the year or even the time spent to arrive. They were somewhere, somewhen else. And ready for mischief and mayhem.

Starlight sure did overdo herself.

“You sure do seem to like changing into a foal, mhm,” Rarity snickered.

Starlight gawked at Rarity. “Twilight told you about that?”

“No, Maud did. Everypony knows about it at this point, darling.”

“Alright, let’s get this over with,” Starlight said hastily enough a coughing fit wracked her throat. Holding a hoof in front of her muzzle, she smiled and let out an ever-so-slightly too nervous laugh. “Remember, Starlight: we don’t want to kill her; just spook her real good.”

Rarity had to admit, Starlight had done quite the number with their disguises. Be it master illusion or repurposed changeling magic, Starlight had magicked them in two non-descript fillies.

“I wish there was a less... cruel way to do this,” Rarity said, her little filly brow furrowing and certainly not giving Starlight any sort of unwholesome thoughts.

“Me too,” Starlight said after a short hesitation, “but this is the only way we’ll get hairs that works for closing the rift. The ends justify the means.”

“Do they, Starlight?” Rarity asked as the two of them poked their heads over the crest of the quarry edge, giving them ample view of the small, oblivious pink pony playing at the bottom. She squinted at Starlight. “Do they?”

“Sure, whatever,” Starlight said with a shrug, her horn lighting. The rocks nearest to her shone bright in her aura and levitated in a straight line to hover directly above Pinkie Pie.

Rarity eyed the large stones apprehensively. “Those aren’t pebbles, I hope you know. You’re certain this will just scare her, correct?”

“Yeah, foals are pretty durable,” Starlight said nonchalantly. “Alright, get into position!”

Rarity nodded, her horn alight as she picked up a large branch and scrambled down the side of the quarry. At the same time, Starlight released her grasp on the rocks.

They came crashing down their thirty-foot descent on the unsuspecting young Pinkie Pie.

Pinkie Pie’s tail gave a twitch and the filly looked up, cutting short her very serious and extended conversation with rock lizards about the teleological limitation of Hegelian dialectics.

She skidded to the side, the lizards scattering themselves beneath her hooves, and narrowly avoided being crushed by a sudden un-forecasted downpour of rocky shrapnel.

“Yikes! That was a close one! Good thing my Pinkie sense—”

Rarity dashed out from behind a stoney outcropping, branch raised high above her head. “You’re ugly!”

THWAP! The branch connected hard with Pinkie’s side, who grunted as wind and large quantities of saliva were knocked out of her.

“You’re a burden on your family!”

SHWACK! Right against the chest. Pinkie made a noise that was truly indescribable, but if one were to make an attempt it likely would land somewhere between a kitten being stepped on and a puppy being kicked.

“Nopony will ever love you and you’re going to die fat and alone!”

CRONCH! The branch splintered into several pieces as Rarity brought it down against Pinkie’s head with the force of a pro golfer, slamming the poor, traumatized filly into the ground. Her body ragdolled across the rocks for a moment before she slid into a nearby crater.

Panting, Rarity bent down over the edge of the crater and examined her future friend. Concluding that she was quite dazed but alive, she turned to see foal Starlight gallop up beside her, a ball of rocks once again within her magical grasp.

“Good work!” Starlight commended Rarity.

Pinkie gave a dazed groan from the ground, prompting Starlight to dump the rocks atop her, virtually burying the filly except for her mane.

“W-Why?” Pinkie moaned from within the rock pit, her voice muffled.

Starlight stepped on a pink ear sticking up and brushed various earthen debris from Pinkie’s mane. She plucked a single white hair from the ocean of pink.

“Excellent!” Rarity chirped, clapping her hooves. “Although, I must say, how did you know humiliating and debasing her while beating her with a stick would produce the white hair?”

“Produce the what now?” Starlight said.

Fast-forwarding again, the two time travelers glanced at each other before the time rift. Battered and shoulders cast low, dripping with sweat and mud and shame, they stayed muted for a lengthy moment, if time meant anything.

They had the hairs, the rift, the newly-made thread; and Rarity was damn happy to comply with the plan and sew the rift back shut.

“And, done!” she chirped.

“I think we’re missing something,” Starlight mumbled, eyes riveted on the slowly vanishing rift. “Like… I think we’ve done a terrible mistake somehow.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow far higher than she should have been able to. “What’s worse than hurting Pinkie Pie and terrifying her into getting white hair at sixteen?”

“Come on, Rarity. You left her a can of hair dye. That’s low,” Starlight said with a forced cough. “I’m not that irredeemable, you know. Twilight did reform me.”

“And I can see she did a damn well job at it.”

Once done with the rift, Rarity sat on her strained rump and let out a long withheld sigh. “It’s done, at last.” She looked around at her Carousel Boutique and smiled faintly. “I can go back to work, without having to deal with Pinkie’s shena… Oh, horse sheaths on a shank.”

“W-Whaa…” Starlight said, her head popping up as she was falling asleep. “What do you…? Oh. Fuc- Fudge.”

This was Carousel Boutique, Rarity could tell. But not the Carousel Boutique she’d left in Ponyville.

“Wrong time, wrong place,” Rarity heaved, her head drooping back. A rattle of defeat escaped her lips and she gradually turned to Starlight. “I guess you don’t have that Starswirl’s spell?”

“Twilight destroyed it.”

“Well, we’re doomed.”

“Helloooooo, girls!”

They snapped around to see Pinkie peering out of a new rift, time winds blowing her very pink mane all over her face. She waved her hoof too enthusiastically.

“How did you find us?” Starlight asked, heaving now as well.

“One big doozy I’ve had for years now!” Pinkie gawked. “How crazy is that!? It started when two bullies shoved me in a crater, those meanies! But I knew that when I’d hit rock bottom, I could only go up!”

“G- glad you found your ways, Pinkie,” Starlight half-heartedly laughed.

“Oh, by the way,” Pinkie bubbled, turning to Rarity, “thanks for the pink dye! It’s really pinker than pink. I’m sure to paint that color everywhere, forever!”