Chapter VI
Pinkie ran through the streets of town, oblivious to the winged shadow sliding along the ground behind her. Then came the combo: ear-flop, eye-flutter, knee-twitch.
“Oop!” she said, nearly tripping at the last bit. “Hey, everypony! Watch out for do-o-ors!”
All the ponies in the street obeyed with trust born of long experience, giving every nearby doorway a wide berth. However, the pegasus following her didn’t know any better.
Thus, when a pony threw open the door leading onto her second-story balcony, the green-coated yellow-maned pegasus smashed into it face-first, bounced off and plummeted onto the street right in front of Pinkie Pie. The pink mare skidded to a halt.
“Ouch, That looked like it really hurt!” Pinkie exclaimed. “Are you okay? Do you need first aid?”
The dazed pony shook her head and pushed Pinkie away.
“How about second aid? Oh! Maybe lemonade? That always perks me right up!”
The pegasus mare grunted angrily and jumped back to her feet with more agility than Pinkie would have expected after taking a hit like that. “How did you do that?” the stranger demanded, rubbing the bruised side of her face.
“That’s just my Pinkie Sense. I don’t really know how it works, but it just does!” Pinkie reached out to brush some dust out of the pegasus’s mane, but the mare batted her hoof away.
“Don’t you patronize me! I know what you’re up to, Pinkamena Diane Pie, and you’re not going to get away with it!”
Pinkie briefly took stock of the various things she was up to at the moment. First of all, she was in charge of no less than eight birthday parties later this month, two of which were surprises. Three pranks were also on her plate: one potential, one ongoing and one that would go off whenever Twilight opened the dummy cover of Planning Spontaneity for the Excessively Organized. Then there was Twilight’s secret possession of the Element of Magic, and finally Pinkie’s plan to round up Verity and Concord before the two spirits could cause trouble.
Since Pinkie didn’t know which scheme the pegasus meant, she decided playing dumb was the best course of action.
“Who...me?” she said with exaggerated innocence, placing a hoof on her breast.
The pegasus’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t even try to deny it,” she hissed. “I saw everything. You’re trying to seduce and corrupt a spirit!”
Pinkie was flabbergasted. “What? Seduce? No! No-no-no.” She paused for a moment and pursed her lips. “Wait, we’re talking about Concord, right?”
The pegasus nodded.
“—No, no, nope, nopity-noooo!” Pinkie resumed. “I really don’t see him that way at all.”
“So you’re just using him for your own nasty little ends, is that it?” The pegasus snapped. “And you’re one of the Big Six? You make me sick.”
Pinkie took a step back. “I’m not using anypony!” she protested. “You’ve got it all wrong; I’m only trying to keep him from doing crazy-weird spirit things like he did back at Sugarcube Corner.”
“Obstructing his duty, you mean,” the other mare countered. “I saw you batting your lashes at him and ordering him around. You’ve got him wrapped around your hoof, and I know why.” She reached beneath her wing and withdrew a manila folder which seemed too large to have been hidden there. The folder was labeled “PIE, PINKAMENA D.”
Just looking at it made Pinkie feel... strange. It was a sensation she’d experienced before, but she couldn’t quite place it. She noticed the pegasus’s cutie mark: silver pan scales. This was clearly another spirit in pony form. Why did Verity and this pegasus have cutie marks but Concord didn’t?
The pegasus mare flipped through the folder, clicking her tongue disapprovingly. “Oh Ms. Pie, you’ve been a bad pony.” She turned the folder around so Pinkie could see it. Inside were pages and pages of official-looking documents, each headed with a single word in red block letters.
STALKING, HARASSMENT, VANDALISM, TRESPASSING; each word was the name of a crime, and the rest of each page had a date and the details of the act written to minute precision.
“Wha-what is this?” Pinkie asked, afraid that she already knew the answer.
The pegasus smirked at her. “Why, it’s your permanent record, Ms. Pie.”
“Permanent records are really real?,” Pinkie gasped. “I always thought those were just something ponies talk about to keep you on your best behavior.”
“What, did you think your parents and teachers were lying to you all these years? I suppose that explains a lot,” the pegasus replied, arching an eyebrow. “Credit ratings are real too, just so you know.”
The pink mare gulped. “This looks like it’s super-big-time important. Maybe we could go someplace private to discuss it like...the library?” She scanned the surroundings for friendly faces, but, oddly, the street was empty all of a sudden. Where had everypony gone?
A humorless laugh escaped the pegasus’s lips. “Oh no, Ms. Pie. Please don't drag any others into this. There's no escaping...” She paused to strike a valiant pose. “...Just Deserts, spirit of justice!”
Pinkie gave the pegasus a disbelieving look. “Your name is... ‘Desserts?’ Like cake and pie?”
“What? No! It’s ‘Just Deserts.’ As in, ‘what you deserve!’ ”
“That’s what I said, ‘desserts,’ ” Pinkie insisted. “And if you think I deserve desserts, why are you so angry? That sounds nice!”
“No! JUST. And then DEH-ZURTS with one ‘s!’ ”
“You mean a big sandy place? I thought that was pronounced different.”
Just Deserts ground her teeth and thrust the folder back under Pinkie’s nose. “Listen, just... just be quiet while I state your crime and deliver the verdict, will you?” She cleared her throat and extracted several pages from the folder. “These reports all come from the same day, when you targeted a certain Cranky Doodle Donkey for harassment, breaking into his home, chasing him around town, and destroying his personal property.”
Pinkie laughed and waved a hoof dismissively. “Aww, you don’t need to bother with that, Ms. Justice Dessert spirit, we worked it out okay and everything’s fine now. We’re real good friends.”
Arching an eyebrow, Just Deserts flipped a ways back to more reports of stalking and harassment. “I’m not done! Here, when you were being avoided by a certain Rainbow Dash, you hounded her across town until she relented.”
“Well, yeah, but everything’s cool there too. Me and Dashie, we’re like this,” Pinkie explained, pressing her front hooves together.
“And here,” the pegasus continued, opening the folder to the middle, “When you shadowed your friends around town and restrained and interrogated an acquaintance when you suspected they were hiding something from you.”
Pinkie’s smile began to fade. “But I learned better from that! Twilight even wrote to the princess about it and everything! Why are you telling me all this?”
“The point, Ms. Pie, is that whenever somepony decides not to be your friend, you go to any length to change their mind, hunting them down and terrifying them until they give in.”
Pinkie pawed the ground and looked away, frowning. “N-no, it’s not like that! I mean, It always works out! They’re all glad to be my friends! They like me!”
“They know better than to let you think otherwise, you mean,” Just Deserts replied archly. “You’re sitting atop a precarious perch, and you know it.”
The pink mare felt herself becoming genuinely outraged at the spirit of justice. And she’d been looking forward to welcoming this nasty, rude, accusing creature back into Equestria!
“Listen, you big greenie meanie,” Pinkie shouted, her voice echoing through the deserted street, “maybe I’m not the best pony, and maybe I go the teeniest-tiniest bit too far when I want to be friends with a pony, but my friends are NOT FAKES, and they’re NOT LIARS and if you think they are, then you don’t know anything, not even if you have folders for them too!”
Pinkie paused, realizing what she’d just said. She bit her lip and glanced around.
“Er, do... do you have folders for them, Miss Desserts?” she continued in a much lower voice. “Could I see? Or you could just look and tell me? That they’re my real friends and not lying, scared-of-me not-friends, I mean. I... I promise I'll stop doing whatever it is to Concord if you do, cross my heart and hope to fly!”
Just Desserts chuckled, shut the folder and placed it beneath her closed wing. When she spread the wing a second later, the folder had vanished. “And there we have it! You’re afraid they’ll abandon you, and you’re willing to do anything, even grossly violate their privacy, to prevent it.”
Pinkie lowered her ears and stared at the ground, unable to reply. It would be pretty unfair to look through another pony's permanent record without their permission. But was it true what the pegasus had said about her friends? It was such an awful thing to say about somepony, but sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep at night, she lay in bed and all sorts of horrible what-ifs paraded through her mind, doubts about what ponies thought of her foremost.
The pegasus relished the look of guilt on Pinkie's face. It was so good when the accused finally came around! “And then earlier today, you met a pony who could give you exactly what you wanted; he could make anypony stay by you, anypony go along with whatever you wanted. All you had to do was convince him to abuse his power of bestowing peace.”
Pinkie’s ears shot back up. “Wait, no! I didn’t have any plans for Concord. I didn’t even know he was a spirit until a few minutes ago. That's one of those ’alley-byes,‘ right?”
“Does the when and how really matter, Ms. Pie?” Just Deserts asked, shrugging. “Even if I hadn’t laid it all out, it would have occurred to you eventually. And don’t bother denying you’re tempted.”
The earth pony slumped into a sitting position, wracked with guilt. She wanted to cry out that the charges the spirit made were false and outrageous, but were they? She would do anything to make sure her friends were really her friends. Even use Concord’s weird spirit powers to force them to be? It seemed pretty excessive and not nice at all, but now that Just Deserts had mentioned it, she wanted to. She wanted to really, really badly. That probably made her a bad pony, and here was a spirit of justice all ready to arrest her, or give her a ticket, or whatever justice spirits did to bad ponies.
The weird feeling she’d felt when Just Deserts made her permanent record appear had been growing and growing throughout their conversation until it felt like an enormous weight, crushing her normally indomitable spirit. She finally recognized it: this was exactly what it had felt like when Discord had changed her into a grouch! She knew she should fight, or run, or call for help, but she couldn’t even bring herself to raise her head.
Just Deserts patted Pinkie on the back. “There, there, Ms. Pie,” she said, “I’m going to fix everything. We’re going to make sure you don’t go through with your evil plan by making you stay the Tartarus away from that spoony cousin of mine.” She produced another dossier from beneath her opposite wing, this one printed on yellow paper. “Let’s see. Fears, fears... spiders? Too crazy. Bats? Same. Abandonment? Too abstract. Oatmeal?” The spirit of justice paused and made sure she’d read that right. “No, just... no.” She skimmed down the list to the bottom. “Ah, a new one! Oh, this’ll do perfectly. Ms. Pie, can you still hear me?”
Pinkie nodded slowly, not taking her gaze from the ground.
Just Deserts lifted Pinkie's chin, forcing the earth pony to look into her eyes, which had transformed into pools of multicolored light. “Pinkamena, listen carefully. That stallion you met, Concord, he’s not really a spirit. There are no spirits. You've been tricked...”
As the spirit-in-pony-form spoke on, Pinkie’s own eyes started to change, mirroring the prismatic glow of the pegasus’s.
- Gem shape / cutie mark match beyond coincidence.
Previous orb forms had more abstract, geometrical designs except for Magic. Why?
Ask Prin
Don’t know if Luna told her yet.
- Significance of number, composition of jewels:
nine blue, oval (Topaz? Aquamarine? Show describe to jeweler)
one pink, 6-point star (98% certain it’s a tourmaline)
9 + 1
Sign of completeness? Does 9 repre
NUMEROLOGY IS A CROCK! That way lies madness.
...Symbology maybe? Have to establish context 1st.
- Overall design resembles modern take on paleoclassical period headgear.
Get Rarity’s opinion on
Not prudent. ‘3 may keep a secret’ etc.
Twilight Sparkle sighed, floated her pen back to the inkwell and pushed the scratch paper away. Other than a brief commotion outside during the storm, everything since she’d given that infuriating unicorn the boot had been blessedly peaceful. She had spent the afternoon trying to plan out a new angle for her research, but she just wasn’t feeling any inspiration for what to do with the Element of Magic next.
She had been so certain that making the crown into a magical spirit-beacon would turn up something interesting. Failure and reassessment were inevitable when probing the greatest mysteries of the universe, she knew, but a whole morning spent casting spell after obscure spell with nothing to show for it left her feeling both magically and mentally exhausted.
The waste basket next to her desk was overflowing with crumpled-up pieces of paper containing more scribbles and discarded plans on the subject. Ruefully, Twilight realized she’d have to destroy these and keep careful tabs on any future documentation to keep the secret safe. She crammed the papers into the wastebasket until they all fit, then levitated the whole bin before her and headed downstairs.
Twilight dumped the contents the basket into the bare fireplace in the living room downstairs and leaned over the hearth, calling up a simple spell to ignite the papers. Just as she was about to cast, the door to the library proper slammed open behind her. The distraction made the spell go haywire, and the pile of paper was incinerated in a miniature firestorm mere inches from Twilight’s face.
“Who’s there?” Twilight choked out between coughing and trying to rub the ashes from her face. Spike, standing in the doorway, started to laugh at Twilight's ash-coated visage, then doubled over, clutching his stomach.
“Urp! Mail call, Twilight. This...something’s different abLAARGH—”
A gout of emerald fire spewed forth from his mouth. The flame hung in the air for a moment, then twisted and curled around itself, transforming into a rolled scroll with a golden seal. Twilight gulped. The border of the paper was dyed red, the sign she and Princess Celestia had agreed upon for messages of utmost importance. Twilight snagged the missive out of the air, broke the seal, unrolled it and read:
My F.S.T.S.,
I apologize in advance for skipping our usual pleasantries.
As your mentor and sovereign, I command you to postpone whatever you may be doing and immediately tell me whether or not the Element of Magic remains in your possession. You may simply write ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a scrap of paper and send it to me via Spike. Do not read the rest of this letter until you have done the following:
(a) actually set eyes upon the element (if you have it)
(b) sent me your response
in that order. Do it now.
The writing was hurried and messy, and the period after ‘now’ looked more like a splatter than a dot. Twilight’s eyes jumped to the next paragraph from force of habit.
Twilight Sparkle, I know you don’t like to leave things halfway done, but please control yourself and put down this letter.
Twilight reddened slightly and rolled the scroll back into a tube.
As she was reading, Spike leaned against the door frame, making faces and sticking out his tongue. “Bleah! That red ink makes it taste like the whole thing was dipped in paprika.” He noticed the worry evident on the unicorn’s face. “Uh-oh. What’s up?”
Twilight rushed past him with the letter in tow. “Get ready to take a really short note, Spike. There’s something I have to check on right now.” She ran through the library common room and down the stairs to the basement, leaving the door wide open behind her.
Spike had just turned away from the door to head for Twilight’s nearest stash of ink, quills and paper when the library’s front door burst open with enough force to nearly knock it off its hinges. The baby dragon jumped back in surprise as a frantic Pinkie Pie rushed through the door.
“Spike! Where’s Twilight? Is she okay?!” Pinkie shouted, grabbing the dragon and shaking him as only a dragon baby could be safely shaken.
“Hey, leggo!” Spike said, trying to break out of the frantic mare’s grip. “Twilight’s fine; she just went downstairs a few seconds ago. What’s got you so worked up this time, Pinkie?”
“A new pony just came into town today!” Pinkie explained, turning worriedly to look out the front windows.
Spike rolled his eyes. “...And you forgot to throw her a welcome party? That’s not a—”
“NO!” Pinkie interrupted. “This is bad, Spike! He’s been following me around all day, he probably knows about the super-important-thing-that-I-promised-Twilight-I-wouldn’t-talk-about, and he’s... he’s...” She gulped.
“What? He’s what?!” cried Spike, growing genuinely worried.
“He’s an evil, nasty, nature-corrupting ALCHEMIST!”
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The ending was kinda abrupt
I liked just desserts guilt trip
Needs more mane six
1925797
You're right, it was abrupt. The next chapter will continue from pretty much exactly where this one ended. I was afraid this chapter would get too long if I carried it to the next stopping point, so I ended it on the reveal of what JD did to Pinkie.
And yeah, I probably should have put more characters in. Based on what I've got planned, the other four will have pretty small parts if anything. I was trying to aim low for my first fic.