Truth Be Told

Once upon a time there was a wonderful land where animals talked and magic was real. In this land there was one special unicorn who lived in a tower in a shining city. She read lots of books, could do all sorts of magic and was very, very clever.

One day, the beautiful princess who ruled the wonderful land sent the special unicorn away. She told the special unicorn to go to a little town to make some friends so that she wouldn’t be lonely.

The special unicorn didn’t like the town or the ponies in it at first, but after a great evil kidnapped the princess, she and five other special ponies set off to put right what evil had put wrong. Working together they defeated the evil, rescued the princess and saved the day.

Furthermore, the special unicorn realised that she had indeed made some friends and that they were the most wonderful friends anypony could ever ask for.

Pinkie Pie didn’t need an alarm clock. Her internal clock kept her up-to-date with when she had to be up and ready to face the day and have fun instead of lounging about like a sleepyhead. The life of a baker traditionally involved extremely early mornings. As an apprentice, Pinkie translated this to an even earlier start, as she preceded the Cakes downstairs each day to have coffee waiting for them on the counter when they blearily stumbled in. Neither Cake had the heart to tell her that her coffee was like bitumen dissolved in stagnant water, and so every day proceeded the same way. A bright and early worker was the one who baked her landlords’ worm… or something like that.

Except, however, for this morning.

This morning there was no coffee on the counter when Mr and Mrs Cake stumbled in. There was no bright and cheery smile to greet them. Nopony wagged sugar-pink hooves in Pound and Pumpkin’s face or blew raspberries on their fat little bellies to make them giggle.

“Pinkie?” Cup Cake tapped lightly on the bedroom door with a hoof. After a few moments she eased it open and peered around the edge. Typical mess greeted her. Pinkie, like most creative minds, arranged her life into organised chaos that nopony but she could understand. “Pinkie Pie?”

The lump in the bed moved. Sunlight peeked through the curtains – which hadn’t been thrown back to greet the dawn!

Cup bit her lower lip in concern. “Oh dear,” she murmured as she picked her way through the debris. “Pinkie, sweetie? Are you feeling okay?”

The lump groaned.

“Oh dear. Sweetie, are you sick? Does your tummy feel icky?” Despite Pinkie’s laudable ability to consume massive amount of sweets, even she had her limits. More than a few candy wrappers were scattered around, many of which had not been here the last time Cup Cake crossed the threshold.

“Urgh… no.” The lump half-turned towards her, but then flopped back into place like a beached whale trying to struggle back to the ocean. “M’bah…”

“Excuse me? Pinkie, dear, you’re going to have to uncover your face so I can hear you.” Cup advanced on the window and pushed back the curtains to let in some light.

“My back hurts,” Pinkie muttered as she extricated her head from her bedclothes. “And not like when my Pinkie Sense is telling me the river is going to burst its banks. It just… hurts.” She sounded listless and totally unlike herself. Usually Pinkie was the last pony to be deflated by anything. She had faced down tyrants, evil bug queens, wild manticores, hydras and dragons, all with a smile more durable than concrete. The only thing Cup had ever seen affect her was when something threatened her friendships. Pinkie valued her friends more than her own life and took their tribulations to heart in a big way. It seemed preposterous that something like a sore back could rob her of the smile even Nightmare Moon couldn’t snuff out.

Cup laid a gentle hoof on Pinkie’s forehead. “Hmm, you do feel a bit warm, but that might just be the blankets. Do you feel well enough to sit up?”

“I… think so. My joints are a bit squiggly and the light makes my eyes twinge, but not in a throwy-uppy way.” Awkwardly, Pinkie reached behind, trying to scratch her back.

Cup frowned. She has assumed ‘sore back’ meant something spinal. Evidently she was wrong. “Turn onto your tummy, dear. Let me have a look. It could just be a rash. Maybe you sat in some poison ivy when you helped Fluttershy count those bunnies yesterday? Or you maybe ate something that didn’t agree with you?” Vegetables, perhaps. Unless food had sugar on it, in it or under it, Pinkie wasn’t interested. The only unsweetened thing she voluntarily ate were the apples from Sweet Apple Acres, and that was more to do with pleasing Applejack than because she preferred them over cookies.

Cup knew that while growing up, Pinkie’s life had lacked much sweetness in any form. It wasn’t something they talked about much, but she and Carrot knew their apprentice’s life had not been an especially happy one before she came to Ponyville. In the beginning, when the bouncing pink pony first arrived on the doorstep of Sugar Cube Corner clutching an ad for a room to rent, the Cakes had tried to ask what prompted her to come to Ponyville. Pinkie had mentioned a rock farm, something about rainbows and parties and a fresh start, but her answers had ranged from vague to so off-topic it wasn’t until the next day, when the paperwork was already signed, that either of them realised she had never actually answered the question.

At some point the why had ceased to matter. Pinkie was like that. She inserted herself into your life so completely that even those who didn’t like her didn’t want to be without her. Cup wasn’t sure whether it had been herself or Carrot who first broached the idea of taking on an apprentice, or which of them had run the idea by Pinkie as she clattered downstairs again on her way to look for a job. The who of it didn’t matter either. What mattered was that the offer was made and Pinkie took up a place in Ponyville that seemed to have been custom designed for her. She fitted into the community so snugly that it shocked ponies when they learned she wasn’t originally from there.

Pinkie turned awkwardly onto her stomach. Cup leaned over her, pushing aside bedclothes and clouds of pink mane to get a better look. She sucked in a small, alarmed breath.

“What?” Pinkie asked. “What is it?” She tried to lever herself up but Cup pressed her back down.

“I’m not sure. I… I think it might be a wart.”

“Warts!?” Pinkie didn’t screech but she gave a reasonable, albeit weak-voiced facsimile. “I have yucky warts on my back?”

“Um, yes. Maybe. Well, one.” Cup paused. “A pretty big one. Oh dear…” In truth, it only looked a little like any wart she had ever seen. For one thing, warts usually pushed up in the bare skin between hairs, unlike the nubby little protrusion on Pinkie’s upper back. Cup prodded it experimentally. It reacted like fur-covered jelly, quivering a little.

Pinkie wriggled. “That feels weird.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Um, a little?” Pinkie wriggled some more, hooves flexing like she desperately wanted to scratch the wart-thing. “Mostly it just feels weird.”

“I think… perhaps I should call the doctor and make an appointment for you.” Cup backed towards the door, resolving to wash her hooves before heading downstairs to where they kept the phone.

Pinkie pushed herself up onto her forelegs so that her spine curved like a cat stretching after a nap. She looked like she was trying to work the kinks out, except that silhouetted against the window like that, Cup thought, the little lump looked even more noticeable.

Rainbow Dash yawned on her cloud, arching into a delicious stretch. She immediately curled into a ball, grabbed a hoof-ful of white fluff and tugged it over herself like a blanket.

Early shifts were her least favourite part of Weather Patrol. While other ponies were still in bed, she and her team were busting the sky in preparation for the day to come. It was especially bad in winter, when flashlights and reflective vests still didn’t prevent all mid-air collisions in the dark. Autumn wasn’t too bad, but in a few weeks she would need to find her vest once more. Joy.

Cloud Kicker and Thunderlane had worked hard on the planning paperwork this week, only finishing half an hour before the deadline the previous Friday. Their maps meticulously showed which clouds were meant to be left alone, which were to be cleared and which needed buffing up for the light shower scheduled in forty-eight hours’ time. Wingless ponies thought rain just happened – pegasi dragged a few rainclouds across the sky and voila – but it was more complicated than that. Rainclouds did occur naturally, yes, but more often than not they had to be made. Regular clouds were selected, pushed into the correct place, seeded and then left to gather moisture. You couldn’t station them too high, or the air was too thin and dry. Push them too low and they were likely to get busted by accident. Being in charge of weather patterns meant long-term planning and precision, not just lazing around all day and sometimes kicking a cumulus, as Rainbow suspected her friends sometimes thought.

Well, except Twilight.

When Twilight first realised she would be staying Ponyville, she had tried to learn all she could about her friends’ careers so that they had something to talk about. Unpractised in friendship and terrified that their only connection had been fighting Nightmare Moon, she had crammed her head with as much knowledge on apple-farming, weather control, baking, animal care and dressmaking as possible. She had even skipped sleep and meals until Spike told her friends his worries about what she was up to.

Egghead, Rainbow Dash thought, an affectionate smile turning up her lips.

A dark flicker at the edge of her vision made her open her eyes fully. What looked like a shadow shifted on a neighbouring cloud, though there was nothing up this high to cast it.

What was that?

She rubbed her tired eyes but didn’t see it again. Curious, she relinquished her ersatz blanket and flew over for a better look. The cloud was one selected for rain, freshly seeded and part of the last batch she had stationed up here. At the moment it was still pure white, though over the next two days it would darken and thicken as it saturated with water.

She was peering at it when somepony tapped her shoulder. “Dash?”

“Ahh!” She spun in place, hooves raised.

“Whoa!” Blossomforth held up her own hooves defensively. “It’s me! It’s me!”

Rainbow Dash dropped her combative stance, rolling her shoulders as if shrugging off her alarm at somepony sneaking up on her. Not many fliers were adept enough to shrug and hover exactly in place at the same time. It was a small demonstration of her prowess that gave her chance to gather and reassure herself that she wasn’t slipping. “You been taking ninja lessons, Blossom?”

Blossomforth wrinkled her nose at the nickname, but let it slide. “I’m all done in Sector Two. Thunderlane and Milky Way are just about finished, too.”

“How about Dizzy Twister?” Rainbow Dash went through her mental rolodex of who was rostered to be on the morning shift with her today. The weather team typically divided up into pairs for raincloud seeding. “And Airheart?”

Blossomforth covered her wince well. Maybe someday she would actually fool someone. “Uh, they’re just finishing up.”

Suspicion threaded through Rainbow Dash. “Define ‘finishing up’.”

“They, uh…” Blossomforth sighed. “They still have half their quota to seed.”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. Just when she was ready for a nap, too. Although… “Would you help me help them?”

Blossomforth pursed her lips.

“I’ll sign that vacation form you gave me.”

“You said were going to do that anyway.”

“Well, yeah… but I’ll do it today.”

“Instead of procrastinating?” Blossomforth raised an eyebrow. “And then giving it back to me at the last second, too late for me to book a good hotel in time?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Blossomforth lifted her goggles off her forehead and snapped them over her eyes. She almost managed to look like it didn’t hurt. Her constant efforts to look cool in from of her boss were endearing in their own goofy way. “Let’s – ngg – go.”

As the two pegasi flew away, small black lines fizzled over the surface of the cloud. They bumped into each other, crisscrossing and knocking a few of their number into the sky, where they wriggled through empty air to get back to the rest. After a few moments of hectic movement, they faded away until it was as if they had never been there at all.

Doctor Horse scratched his chin as he surveyed his patient. He tilted his head so far to the left that it was almost horizontal, and then abruptly snapped it to the right to do the same. The pony on the stool before him squirmed so much she practically vibrated.

“Please sit still,” he muttered for the umpteenth time.

“Whoopsidoodle,” she murmured. Her squirming receded to mere manic fidgeting. “So what do you think, doc? Will I ever play piano again?”

“I … what?” He shook his head against the ridiculous question. “I’d like to run a few tests.”

“Just not math. I’m awful at math. All those numbers make my brain go squidge. I’m pretty good at history, though. Want me to tell you how Equestria was made?”

“Not that kind of test,” he said gruffly. He was growing more irritated by the second; partly because this patient was so exasperating, but also because he couldn’t immediately identify her ailment.

It didn’t quite meet the criteria for a wart, which irked him. The chills and aching joints she had complained of weren’t typical of warts, either. He preferred quick-fire diagnoses that knocked queues in his waiting room down to a manageable size. His mood was inversely proportional to the number of occupied seats outside his door. The more complicated a case, the less he liked it. While his contemporaries wished for a break in the monotony of runny noses, coughs, horn-rot and wing-strain, he longed for days of nothing but easily diagnosed tedium.

This annoying pink pony presented a conundrum. A conundrum meant spending more time than he wanted to on her.

“So is it a wart? Mrs Cake said it might be a wart, but warts are icky-sticky-ugly-fugly-itchy-witchy things!”

“It’s not a wart,” Doctor Horse said flatly. “It might be a boil. I could lance it if you want.”

“A boil?” She craned over her shoulder, her expression melodramatically horrified. “Boils are even ickier than warts!”

“A boil is nothing more than an overgrown pimple. They’re often caused by infected hair follicles or ingrowing fur. Bacteria from the infection forms a pocket of pus.” He sighed. “The consistency of this lump indicates that it is filled with liquid, which is most likely pus. If this is the case, lancing it here in a sterilised environment will prevent infection and I can put you on a course of antibiotics straight away to prevent further infection.” Which would solve the problem immediately and send her away faster than a hoof to the posterior.

Except that there were also those other symptoms she had complained of that didn’t tally up with a simple boil …

“Will it hurt?” she asked, such a minor tremor to her voice that he missed it completely. “I’m not a fan of hurty things. Even worse if this is a hurty-squirty thing.”

“You may feel a pinch. I’ll numb the area first and then cut a small opening in the top so that the pus can drain out. Afterwards you’ll feel much better.” He considered his options. “I think I’ll put some gauze in the cut so that it stays open and keeps draining until it’s completely clear. There seems to be a lot in there”

She nibbled her lower lip. “Well, I guess you’re the doctor.” She brightened. “Do I get a lollipop at the end if I’m a good little filly?”

His instant reaction was to say no, but he stopped himself. Sighing, he nodded. “Yes, you may have a lollipop at the end.”

His movements were quick and proficient. She leaned forward on the stool as he took a tiny scalpel out of its protective plastic packet, designed to make sure everything stayed sterile in the event that he needed to use it. He swabbed the protrusion with an enchanted salve to numb the area more thoroughly than any antiseptic produced by medical science. Though he was an earth pony, Doctor Horse held both regular medicine and medi-magic in equal esteem. For a moment he considered shaving the required portion of the patient’s back, but then discarded the idea as redundant. Gauze in hoof, he set about lancing the – for want of a better word – boil.

And then she screamed.

She screamed so loud and at such a high pitch that his foreleg jerked involuntarily. The tip of the scalpel dug deeper – not a gouge, but certainly a wider incision than he had intended. She screamed like he had tried to reach through the back of her ribcage and cut out her lungs. His eardrums felt like they were vibrating. Reflexively, he withdrew the blade, anticipating an expulsion of pus. Instead, a trickle of blood ran down her back. It was thick and so dark it appeared black in the harsh overhead lighting.

“I thought… you said… it wouldn’t… hurt much!” Her breath came in short, rapid gasps.

“It shouldn’t! I numbed the area!” The salve was the best on the market, produced in Canterlot by the foremost research unicorns at the Royal University. There was no way she could feel anything through its effects. No way!

“It… huuuurts,” she moaned. “Like… buuuurning …”

Doctor Horse made a snap decision. Putting down his scalpel and snatching up a wad of cotton padding he had prepared for afterwards, he pressed it against the cut to stem the flow of blood. Then he thrust the gauze already in his hoof on top of it. This he bound down with several strips of medical tape, compressing the pristine white wad to form a plug.

The patient groaned. Despite her obvious pain, she reached behind with one forehoof and tried to prise off the wad. “Too tight,” she whimpered.

“It needs to be tight,” he said briskly.

This was not what he had expected. The fact that the lump was so sensitive even through the enchanted salve was startling. Past his irritable desire for speedy consultations, the revelation made him stop and reconsider. This was beyond his ken. He needed – ugh! – a second opinion.

“Miss, um…” He glanced at her notes. “Miss Pie, I’m going to write a letter recommending that you see my colleague at Ponyville General Hospital.”

“Hospital?” she said weakly, still puffing at the waves of pain emanating from her back. “For just… a boil?”

Loath as he was to admit it, Doctor Horse shook his head. “I don’t think it is a boil.” Regular boils did not spit out black blood or resist anesthetising salve. In his experience, the only things that could resist medi-magic were also magical in origin. He gritted his teeth. “In point of fact, I’m not sure what it is, therefore I’d like you to speak to my colleague.” He trotted to his desk and scrawled out something only another doctor would be able to read. “Take this. Go straight there. I’ll telephone through to let them know you’re coming.”

“So soon?” She stared at the paper he gave her. “Applejack always has to wait ages and ages and ages and ages and ages and ages for hospital appointments when her hips hurt from apple-bucking so much. She says the Equestrian Health Service moves slower than molasses running down a tree in midwinter.”

“How … eloquent of her.” Doctor Horse resisted the urge to say something acerbic. He had been warned about his bedside manner and fought to make himself appear reassuring and – double ugh! – pleasant even to his most annoying patients.

“So… straight there?” clarified the pink mare, whose name he had already forgotten. Hadn’t she come in with a heavyset pony? Couldn’t she run back to her now instead of cluttering up his office?

He nodded. Maybe Stable would be able to give more insight into her condition. “Straight there.”

“Straight-as-an-arrow there?”

“Yes.”

“Straight-as-the-crow-flies there?”

“Yes.”

“Straight-as-a-poker there?”

“Yes.”

“Straight-as –”

“Yes!” Doctor Horse interrupted. “Straight. There. Now,” he added, in case she was unclear.

She puffed out one more pained breath and hopped off the stool. “Okey dokey lokeeeeeey!” The last syllable became a shriek. Her forelegs collapsed under her as she clearly fought against a fresh wave of pain. “Oh … gosh… I thought going to the doctor was… meant to make you feel better.” She gave a feeble giggle. “Or is this Opposite Day… and so everything… has to be opposite? On Opposite Day you’re… supposed to wear… socks on your head and…” She winced, trying to get to all four hooves. “And… w-walk and t-talk b-backwards…”

Doctor Horse surveyed her. Never mind backwards; she was clearly walking nowhere. He pressed the intercom on his desk. “Violet? Can you send for an ambulance-carriage please?”

Cup Cake pressed the payphone to her ear. “Yes, Carrot. Yes, the doctor is seeing her right now. The paramedics were very kind to let me ride with her even though I’m not technically family.” Which, in itself, begged the question: where was her family? Cup realised with a jolt that if anything bad happened to Pinkie, neither she nor Carrot had any way of letting them know.

“Are you doing okay?” Carrot asked, voice laced with concern.

“Oh.” Broken from her thoughts, she smiled into the receiver. “I’m fine, honeybun.” Warmth suffused her. When the ambulance-carriage turned up at the doctor’s and Pinkie was whisked inside on a stretcher, Cup had begged the ponies pulling it to let her ride along. There hadn’t been time to let her husband know what was going on until now and she found her waning confidence bolstered merely by the sound of his voice. “How are the twins?”

“Oh, fine, fine,” he said absently. “I’m more concerned about you and Pinkie right now.”

“Well I’m right as rain, so you don’t have to worry about me.” She hesitated.

“And Pinkie?”

Another hesitation. “She’s…”

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong with her?”

Cup sighed. “They don’t know. When she went into Doctor Horse’s office she was… well, you saw us leave this morning. She wasn’t up to her usual Pinkie-ness but she was still cheerful and she could walk by herself.”

“She can’t walk?” Panic wove through Carrot’s tone.

It was almost unbelievable, how important Pinkie had become to them both in the few shorts years they had known her. Briefly, Cup wondered whether all mentors felt that way about their apprentices, or all landlords about their tenants. Probably not. So many things about Pinkie were unique – why not something like this too?

“It jars her back too much. Doctor Horse tried to lance the warty-boil-thing and apparently he made it worse.”

“And so he hoofed her off to somepony else.”

“Now, now, dear, don’t be so cynical.”

Carrot let out a short breath. “Are you going to call her friends, or do you want me to do it? They’ll want to know. You know how close they all are.”

“Yes, yes, I know, I know.” Cup glanced at the long corridor behind her. “Would you mind doing it? I’d… I think I’d like to be with Pinkie while the doctor looks her over. Not that I don’t trust Doctor Stable but… well, I trusted Doctor Horse, too.”

“Now who’s being cynical? Sure thing, sweetums, I’ll take care of it.”

She smiled. “Do you know how much I love you?”

“Not as much as I love you.” Carrot blew a kiss down the phone. After over a decade of marriage, he could still make her blush – even long distance. “Take care, sweetums. Call me the minute you know what’s going on, okay?”

“I will,” she promised and hung up the phone. The bits she had inserted into the slot clattered through its insides. For a moment she stared at the thing. Despite her words, she was unwilling to turn around and go back into the little consultation room where Pinkie awaited the doctor’s verdict.

She had a sudden bad feeling and didn’t think it was just because she had missed her morning coffee.

Doctor Stable snapped protective plastic sheathes over his forehooves. “Now then, let’s take a look at what’s under Gauze Number One, shall we?”

Stretched out on the gurney, Pinkie Pie nodded. She had folded her forelegs under her chin so her nose wasn’t pressed flush against the thin pillow. Her smile was so jaunty he was almost able to miss the drawn lines of pain around her eyes.

“The grand prize!” she chirruped. “Although, if it’s two tickets to see the Wonderbolts, I call dibs. My friend Dashie would love to go see them! If it’s icky-sticky-gunky-gunk, you can have it, doc.”

Doctor Stable smiled back at her. Though she was exhausting, he had liked Pinkie Pie when he first met her and had been concerned when Horse called to say she was being rushed to Ponyville General. At least it looked like she was staying chipper, which was always a good sign.

As ever, he made conversation as he worked, trying to put his patient at ease. “How is Rainbow Dash these days?” His smile became a smirk. “Still trying to pretend she doesn’t like reading?”

Pinkie Pie blew a tremendous raspberry. “She’s not only reading these days, she’s writing! She wrote this really long story about a mare called Prism Power who joins the Wonderbolts and becomes their best flier ever and dominates all their shows and becomes team leader and even Spitfire loves her because she’s so awesome and cool and fantastic and dazzling and –” Pinkie ran out of breath. She sucked in a lungful before continuing at the same breakneck pace. “But she found me reading it and got all weird and shouty and took it from me before I could read the end and even though I told her it was a really, really, really, really good story and that Prism Power was super, super, super, super awesome she locked it in a drawer and made me promise not to jimmy it open and read the ending which I thought was mean but I guess she was just embarrassed which would explain why she hid it in the first place –” She sucked in another lungful to carry on.

Doctor Stable listened as he prised up the first piece of medical tape. Horse had gone overboard with the stuff, as usual. It took up a few pink hairs as it peeled free.

“Ouch!” Pinkie shrieked.

“Sorry,” Doctor Stable apologised. “Just a couple more and I can see what’s what under here.”

“Just don’t pluck me bald, okay doc? I’d look really weird bald.” Pinkie scrunched up her face, as if trying to imagine the sight. “Like a naked mole rat with longer legs.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t look that bad.” Two more pieces of tape came free. There was something odd about the fur beneath. Doctor Stable frowned as he prised up the rest.

“Bad?” Pinkie echoed. “Naked mole rats are cute! Ouch!”

“Sorry. Just one more bit of tape.”

“Okey dokey lokey.” He felt her tense up in anticipation of the pain. “If I didn’t have Gummy, I’d totally get a naked mole rat as a pet – ngggg!”

“There’s a brave –” Doctor Stable removed the wad of gauze and padding. “- girl …”

“Doc? Hey, doc? What is it?” Pinkie struggled to rise, grunted in pain and flopped back down. “Doctor Stable?”

“Doctor?” said a voice from the doorway.

“Mrs Cake!” Pinkie cried in delight, energy returning to her voice. “How’s Mr Cake? And the twins? Are they all okay? Did you apologise to them for me not giving them their morning belly-raspberries? And tell them I’ll do double tomorrow? Pound and Pumpkin, I mean, not Mr Cake. Blowing raspberries on Mr Cake’s belly would be weird. Well, for me to do, anyway. I guess it’d be okay if you blew raspberries on his belly –”

“Uh, they’re fine, Pinkie.” The chubby mare cut her off as she trotted towards them, frowning at Doctor Stable’s expression. “Doctor, is something wrong?” She followed his gaze and stopped, eyes wide. “Oh my!”

“You did say there was just one lump this morning, didn’t you?” Doctor Stable asked.

“Yes, and it wasn’t so … big.”

Together they stared in fascinated horror at the two swellings now nestling about Pinkie’s shoulder-blades. Each was the size of a candy bar. Indeed, it almost looked like someone had inserted two of them under her skin, running down either side of her spine. The skin along their length was stretched tight, tiny dark pustules dotted here and there like hidden tar-pits. A vein throbbed on the side of the left one. As they watched, it twitched in tandem with Pinkie’s pulse. Doctor Stable looked at the underside of the gauze he had removed. It was streaked with gruesome black slime from several burst pustules, but there was no sign of the cut Doctor Horse had made less than two hours ago.

“Pinkie?” said Doctor Stable.

Pinkie’s ears pricked. The lumps gave an extra large twitch. “Yeah?”

“I’m going to touch your back, okay?”

“Oh…” She sounded less than enthused with the idea, but rallied quickly. “Okay.”

“Would you like to hold my hoof, sweetie?” offered Mrs Cake.

“Um, yes please.”

Once the two mares were holding on to each other, Doctor Stable ignited his horn and levitated a small probe out of his chest pocket. Gently, he nudged one of the lumps. Pinkie made a noise like she was shrieking with her mouth closed. Mrs Cake jerked as the grip on her hoof increased.

“It’s… okay, sweetie,” she gruntingly reassured.

“Consistency is firm,” Doctor Stable observed, making a note on his clipboard with another sliver of telekinesis. He nudged the lump again from the other side, finding the surface fleshy but delicate. It didn’t seem to be filled with pus, but there was definitely something inside.

“This morning it was like jelly,” Mrs Cake informed him. “And about the size of a coin. Round, too, not like … that.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Replacing the probe and scribbling some more notes, he stepped away from the bed. “Pinkie, I’d like to admit you to the hospital so we can run some tests.”

“Just not math. I’m awful at math. All those numbers make my brain go … oh hey, wait, I already did this part.”

“Uh …” Doctor Stable and Mrs Cake exchanged nonplussed looks. Mrs Cake shrugged and he had to accept that as permission to ignore the statement. As he recalled from her visits to Rainbow Dash’s bedside, Pinkie Pie was often given to saying things nopony else understood.

“For how long? Just overnight?” Mrs Cake asked hopefully.

“Quite honestly I’m not sure how long,” he confessed. “As long as it takes to get the test results back and figure out what these are.” He gestured at Pinkie’s back, where the lumps continued to twitch. “I’m afraid you won’t be allowed to stay with her past visiting hours.” He checked the timepiece pinned to his white coat like a tiny ticking medal. “Which will be over in about forty-five minutes, then restart this evening at six o’ clock. I’ll see that she’s moved into a room and then I’ll arrange the tests with the nurses.”

“Oh.” Mrs Cake looked disappointed.

“Don’t be sad, Mrs Cake!” Pinkie said as brightly as she could. “Now Dashie and I will get to compare hospital stories!”

Sudden realisation crossed the older mare’s face. “Oh! I forgot to tell you, Carrot says he’s going to tell your friends what’s happening. I’m sure they’ll want to visit you too.”

“Yay for Mr Cake!” Pinkie tried to pump her hoof but managed only a convulsive wriggle. “And yay, my friends are coming to see me! Ooh, maybe Twilight will know what these weird lumpy-bumpy things are. She’s super-duper smart, and if she doesn’t know something, her books usually do. She has this brilliant habit of always finding exactly the right one at exactly the right moment. It’s really amazing – not to mention convenient!”

Doctor Stable smiled indulgently, though another glance at Pinkie’s back tightened the expression at the corners. “We’ll see.”

Rainbow Dash forewent the door and headed for the windows.

“Rainbow!” Twilight called sharply.

“What? If you slowpokes want to use the door, go right ahead. I’ll be with Pinkie, waiting for you to catch up.”

“Do you even know what room she’s in?”

Rainbow Dash pulled up short. “Uh… oh.”

Twilight took a breath to steady herself. Getting the news that Pinkie Pie had been rushed to hospital with a mysterious illness had shaken them all. Facing down monsters, evil dictators and all the wild beasts of the Everfree could not have made the bottom drop out of her stomach any faster than Mr Cake’s words. Judging by her friends’ faces, they all felt the same way.

Applejack shook her head. “Sometimes you’re so fast I’m surprised you don’t meet yourself comin’ back the other way, Rainbow.”

Rainbow Dash swooped low. “Was that an insult?”

“Will you girls stop squabbling and hurry up?” Rarity called from beside the hospital’s main entrance. “It’s not only unladylike, it’s aggravating.”

“Look who’s talkin’,” Applejack muttered rebelliously as they cantered to join her. Worry had made her snippy but she stopped short of causing an actual argument right now.

It was easy to discover which room Pinkie Pie was in. The receptionist on the front desk provided them with the information and they made their way in muted haste along corridors that echoed like they were empty, even when full of ponies. Stripes of colour on the floor mapped out a near-impenetrable system of departments, wards, single rooms and other places that even Twilight’s zigzagging mind found difficult to decipher.

“I think Room 83 is this way,” she said after studying a sign.

“But the floor-arrows say that way leads to Rooms 65 through 78,” Rainbow Dash protested.

“The rooms aren’t numerically categorised,” Twilight replied through gritted teeth. Part of her imagined lifting the roof off the hospital and rearranging everything inside like a shoebox house so that it made more sense. The thoughts were nonsense but she used them as a buffer against other, less welcome ones. Images of Pinkie Pie in a hospital bed, Pinkie Pie attached to a drip, Pinkie Pie pale and weak and fading away from some horrible illness –

“I think I found it,” Fluttershy whispered.

“Huh?” Broken from her thoughts, Twilight looked up. Indeed, just across from where they were standing was a set of double doors. Above the read the sign: Access to Rooms 83, 84 and 85.

“Gangway!” Rainbow Dash flapped her wings to shoot off – and belly-flopped onto the floor. “Oof! Hey! What gives?”

Applejack spit out a mouthful of multi-coloured tail and nodded at another sign on the wall, this one round and ringed in red. It featured a tiny silhouette of a pegasus in flight and a big diagonal line through the middle. “No flyin’ indoors. Don’t you remember from the last time you were here?”

“Oh.” Rainbow Dash got to her hooves and marched truculently ahead. “Right. Yeah, I remember.”

Applejack rolled her eyes, but was closest on Rainbow Dash’s heels as they trooped through the swinging doors. Nopony was sure what they would find. Mr Cake had been partway through explaining the situation to Twilight when he yelled “Pumpkin, no! Not the pho–” and the signal was cut off. All Twilight had been able to ascertain was that it had been sudden and that Mrs Cake was with Pinkie.

“I hope she’s okay,” Fluttershy murmured, voicing all their thoughts.

“Of course she’ll be okay,” Rainbow Dash snapped over her shoulder, though there was uncertainty buried in her words that only those who had known her a long time would have recognised. “She’s Pinkie Pie!”

Room 83. Rainbow Dash raised her hoof. Hesitated. Didn’t protest when Applejack pushed it open instead.

“Ooh, hi girls!”

The bubble of tension that had encased them popped like somepony had burst it with a pin.

“See?” Rainbow Dash said triumphantly. “I told you so!”

Pinkie Pie lay in a bed near the window. She was on her stomach, but that didn’t stop her grinning at them like she had won the lottery and they were the grand prize. On a chair next to the bed Mrs Cake smiled wanly. There was no sign of an IV drip and the bedclothes had been folded back to the bottom of the mattress.

All good signs, thought Twilight.

“I’m so happy you all came to visit me!” Pinkie squealed in delight.

“Like we’d be anywhere else at a time like this, sugarcube?” Applejack removed her hat to fan her face. “You put a scare into us worse than a locust swam during harvest time.”

“Whoopsidoodle. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, darling.” Rarity advanced to hug Pinkie, but Mrs Cake got up and held out a foreleg to block her.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, regret rolling off her. “I just don’t think that’d be such a good idea.”

“Excuse me?” Rarity blinked at her, flummoxed.

A small frown creased Mrs Cake’s forehead. “Didn’t Carrot tell you?”

“His call to me got cut off,” Twilight explained. “I had to tell everypony else. Um, I think you might need a new phone when you get home.”

“Oh dear. Pumpkin?”

“How did you know?”

“That’s the third phone we’ve been through since the twins were born.” Mrs Cake blew out a frustrated sigh. She looked more than a little frazzled by the day’s events, and it was barely past lunchtime. Her lacquered hair drooped to one side, like a swirl of slowly melting whipped cream on a mug of hot chocolate.

“What was he supposed to tell us?” Rainbow Dash demanded. “Why is Pinkie here when she’s clearly okay?”

Mrs Cake stepped away from her. Rainbow Dash could be pretty intimidating when she was in full-on protective mode. She often didn’t realise the affect she could have on other ponies, and wasn’t great at picking up on social cues when emotional. She took a step towards Mrs Cake.

“I’m here because of these, Dashie,” Pinkie piped up. She lay flat on the bed. Once she was sure she had all her friends’ attentions, she swept her mane to one side of her neck with a hoof.

As one, they inhaled sharply.

“What are… those?” Rainbow Dash couldn’t quite keep the disgust from her voice.

Twilight appreciated her being the one to ask. She didn’t trust herself to sound any less revolted.

“The doctors aren’t sure,” said Mrs Cake. “They’ve done some tests, but Doctor Stable said the results won’t be back until tomorrow, so they’re keeping Pinkie here for observation until then.”

“I’m like the watched pot that never boils,” Pinkie declared. “Except I’m not a pot, I’m a pony, and I don’t boil, I giggle.” As if to demonstrate, she did so.

Twilight swallowed hard. She could barely wrench her eyes away. At least six inches long and shivering spasmodically, the skin over them was stretched so tight thin veins and arteries showed clearly beneath the surface. The thin coating of pink fur did nothing to improve their appearance. Black, ugly pustules pushed up between the hairs. As Twilight watched, one quivered and split, leaking black fluid.

“Wow, girls, you can stop staring now,” Pinkie chuckled.

Rarity’s mouth worked for a moment before she asked, “Do they… how are you feeling, darling?”

“Me?” Pinkie tried to shrug. “I’m okay. Not quite double-dip, rocky-road, end-of-the-sale awesome, but okay. The unicorn that Doctor Stable brought to see me said I’m a ‘remarkable phenomenon’. Heh. Phenomenon – doo-doo-de-doo-doo.” She began singing a simple, repetitive tune that struck Twilight as slightly jagged at the edges. Pinkie’s voice sounded odd; not quite as buoyant as usual. A sliver of pain threaded through the sound like a piece of wire in a bushel of best quality hay. “He took some blood to run medi-magic tests on. Doctor Stable says he’s the best medi-mage in the whooooole hospital, and if anypony can figure out what these things are, he c-can.”

Twilight noticed the snag that caught like cloth on a rusty nail right at the end of her speech. Evidently so did Fluttershy and Applejack, as they both stepped towards her. Yet, as always, Rainbow Dash beat them to it. In lieu of a hug, she ran a hoof through Pinkie’s mane, scrubbing at her ears.

“It’s okay, Pinkie. It’ll be okay.”

Pinkie sniffed, her smile not slipping an inch, though her eyes were suddenly glassy. “Oh, Dashie…” She sniffed. “Oh, Dashie! You smell like… eww!”

“Uh, yeah. Sorry about that.” Rainbow Dash scrubbed at the back of her head, evidently to give her hooves something to do in the absence of a hug. “I was helping out at Sweet Apple Acres and, uh, had a little accident.”

“She learned that accuracy, not speed, is what counts when makin’ a compost heap,” Applejack explained with a wry grin.

“Pee-yu, Dashie!” Pinkie pinched her snout shut with a hoof and buried her face in her pillow. “You need to go home and shower.”

“Go home?” Rainbow Dash repeated incredulously. “I only just got here!”

“Yes, but you do smell a bit ripe, darling,” Rarity said archly. “Mayhap Twilight knows a spell she could use to, ah, freshen you up a little?”

All eyes turned to Twilight as Rainbow Dash raised a foreleg above her head and sniffed underneath experimentally.

Twilight considered, scrolling through the innumerable spells she had committed to memory. “Well, I guess I could try –”

“Twilight?” Pinkie interrupted her. “You changed your mane! And… your fur. Wowzers!” Her eyes widened, as if she was seeing Twilight for the first time. “How much dye did that take?”

“I … huh?” Twilight said intelligently.

“What are you talking about, Pinkie?” Rainbow Dash frowned in confusion. “Twilight looks the same as she always does.”

“Yes, boring mane-style and all,” Rarity added.

“Aw, hush, you.” Applejack nudged her shoulder with her own.

Pinkie’s frown put Rainbow Dash’s to shame. “No she doesn’t. She looks totally different! For one thing, she’s purple!”

Everypony exchanged bemused looks.

“Pinkie… I’ve always been purple,” Twilight said slowly.

“Nu-uh!” Pinkie twisted her head to one side, examining her. “You were pink just yesterday. What made you decide to change? Did Rarity finally get to you?” Her grin turned knowing. “I told you someday she’d get you into Madame Tresses’ hair salon if you weren’t careful,” she sing-songed. “But… your cutie mark…”

Twilight looked over at Rarity, but the other unicorn was clearly just as confused.

“Oh dear,” murmured Mrs Cake.

All other conversation was precluded by the arrival of a pale yellow pony with the cross cutie mark and matching hat of a nurse. Her blue mane was bound tight against the back of her neck by a hairnet and it looked like the pull on her scalp had put her in a poor mood. She glared icily at the assembled mares.

“Only two visitors at a time, please!” The ‘please’ has the inflection of a far different word that professionalism did not allow her to say.

Pinkie shook her head. “Whoopsidoodle. I guess you’ll get to go for your bath after all, Dashie.”

“Besides which,” the nurse went on as if Pinkie hadn’t spoken, “Visiting hours ended five whole minutes ago, so you all have to leave.” Her tone left no room for argument.

“I see you’re as chirpy as ever, Nurse Snowheart.” Rainbow Dash didn’t bother to hide her sarcasm.

The nurse transferred her glare solely to Rainbow Dash, who managed to withstand it almost sixty whole seconds before dropping her gaze.

“If you please,” the yellow mare enunciated, stepping to one side and gesturing to the door with an imperious hoof.

“But we hardly got to speak to our friend at all!” Dash tried to protest.

“Then be here promptly at six o’clock for evening visiting hours.”

“I… I think we’d better do as she says,” said Fluttershy. “We don’t want to break the rules, do we?”

“Snowheart by name, snow-heart by nature,” Rainbow Dash muttered. Nonetheless, she walked past to the corridor, where the five friends plus Mrs Cake gathered before the door swung shut behind them.

“Bye girls!” Pinkie waved. “I’ll see you lat –”

They made their way back to Reception, each perusing her own thoughts until they were nearly at the end of the brief journey.

“Okay, what the hay was that all about?” Rainbow Dash demanded. “Twilight?”

“I have no idea,” Twilight replied. “Mrs Cake?”

“No, that was new.” Mrs Cake shook her head. “This morning she woke up with a small lump on her back. In a few hours it had turned into… well, you saw them.” She shivered. “She had all her wits, though. She knew who I was, who Carrot, Pumpkin and Pound were – she even remembered Doctor Horse and how he gives out lollipops to little fillies who behave themselves. Oh dear, I do hope her memory isn’t being affected…”

Rainbow Dash glanced over her shoulder as if she expected Pinkie to be standing in the corridor behind them. Of course, she wasn’t. “Do you think… that was a bad sign?” she asked uncertainly. “Or do you think she was just joking?”

“She sounded completely convinced,” said Rarity. “Not like she was joking at all.”

“Perhaps we should, um, tell her doctor about it?” Fluttershy suggested.

Twilight nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. C’mon, girls. Let’s go find Doctor Stable.”

“I’m sorry, but Doctor Stable is in a meeting right now and can’t be disturbed.” The pony behind the receptionist’s desk was not the one they had spoken to when they arrived and had none of that mare’s cordiality. Her steel grey coat and steelier grey eyes said quite clearly that she was as immovable as a metal wall riveted to the ground across their path.

“But we really need to speak with him!” Rainbow Dash insisted, placing her hooves on the desk and leaning forward. Instantly she was surrounded by a silvery aura and forcibly moved back.

“It is clearly stated for ponies to keep all limbs behind the line,” the receptionist crisply informed her. “Please.”

What is it with the ponies around here using ‘please’ like an insult? Twilight wondered. She put a hoof on Rainbow Dash’s shoulder, shaking her head before taking her place at the desk. “Ma’am, we’re sorry, but while we were visiting with our friend – she came in today as an emergency case – she said something that worried us a little and we thought he should know, since he’s her attending doctor and her symptoms are … problematic, to say the least. We thought it might help his diagnosis to have facts he might not already be aware of.”

The receptionist sniffed. She shuffled through some papers and rudely levitated them between herself and Twilight so that her face was obscured. “I’ll pass on your concerns when he gets out of his meeting. Write down your concerns on this form and sign your name. I’ll make sure he gets it.”

“Yeah, sure you will,” Rainbow Dash snorted. “Hey!” She rubbed her hind leg where Applejack’s hoof had caught her.

“That ain’t helpin’,” Applejack hissed. “I thought we talked about the importance of havin’ an internal an’ external monologue?”

Twilight took up the quill. “Well … as long as he gets to see this, I guess it’ll have to do.” Though privately she resolved to seek him out at precisely six o’clock and tell him face-to-face. Whatever was wrong with Pinkie, the symptoms were disparate and formed no pattern that Twilight could see – at least until more data presented itself for her to find patterns in. Then again, though she had read a few books, neither medicine nor medi-magic were her areas of expertise.

They left the hospital both lightened and more dejected than when they had arrived. Nopony said anything as they trundled away – not until Mrs Cake cleared her throat.

“If it’s okay with you girls, I’m going to go home now and tell poor Carrot what’s going on. He’ll be beside himself with worry by now and I hate to think what else Pumpkin damaged in her surge.” She winced. “I’ve had to start making multiple copies of all family photographs in case she burns them up.”

“No problem, Mrs C,” said Rainbow Dash. “Thanks for looking after Pinkie today.”

“Oh, no, no, no, there’s no need to thank me, dear.” Mrs Cake waved a hoof like she was trying to dissipate a cloud of midges. “What else could I possibly have done? Pinkie’s like family.” With a few more goodbyes, she separated off from the group and trotted away in the direction of Sugarcube Corner.

Rainbow Dash watched her pensively. “Y’know, I bet she’s a great mom. Some ponies are just made to be moms.”

“She sure played the part for Pinkie today,” said Applejack.

At the mention of their friend, everyone fell silent again.

“So, Twilight, any theories on those… whatever they were on her back?” Rainbow Dash eventually asked.

“I don’t know,” Twilight admitted. “But I’d like to take a look at the medical section of the library before we go back this evening.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.” Rainbow Dash spun on one hoof and launched herself into the air. As ever, her tenet was clearly: ‘Why walk when you can fly?’ “C’mon.”

“All of you are coming?” Twilight said as Rarity, Applejack and Fluttershy trotted forward.

“Well of course, darling,” said Rarity. “What else did you expect?”

“If I go home, I’ll just fret,” Applejack confessed. “Won’t be worth a whit to nopony, an’ a distracted apple-farmer is an injured apple-farmer. I reckon the best thing I could do right now is some book checkin’ instead. Leastways then I’ll feel like I’m doin’ sumthin’ constructive, ‘stead of mopin’ around like a ball of yarn with no cat.”

“It’s always different when illness is involved,” Fluttershy said quietly. “Especially if it’s something you can’t cure yourself. When you can’t do anything physical to fix a situation, or if you have to rely on others, it makes you feel helpless.” She ducked her head. “At least, that’s what I’ve always found when one of my animal friends gets too sick for me to help...” She trailed off, as if only just realising what she was saying.

Oh yeah, Fluttershy is probably the most familiar of all of us with this sort of thing, Twilight thought, her own mind taking the same pathway Fluttershy’s had and coming to the same conclusion. Including the part where her animals get so sick they don’t recover and there’s nothing she can do about it… Twilight shook her head vigorously. Stop that! Pinkie was fine. She was talking and laughing and acting her regular Pinkie self. Except for the part where she didn’t recognise me. And those things growing out of her back. And –

“Hey, Twilight? Are you coming or what?” Rainbow Dash was already some distance away. She hung in mid-air, hooves cupped around her mouth.

“Uh, yes, coming!” Twilight scrambled after her friends.

Nurse Redheart did not like Nurse Snowheart. Unfortunately, working in such close vicinity and with many overlapping hours, she had learned to bite her tongue, nod and smile when the other nurse got on her nerves. That wasn’t to say she was always in a good mood herself, but her moments of irritation and frustration were nothing compared with the sheer wind chill factor Snowheart called a bedside manner.

“Bedpan check in Rooms 83 through 85,” Snowheart informed her imperiously. “You can have that one, Redheart.”

Redheart gritted her teeth, reminding herself that Snowheart was her superior and that telling one’s superior to go shove a ginger root up her backside was a bad career move. Over Snowheart’s shoulder she could see Nurse Sweetheart shaking her head while Nurse Tenderheart made cutting motions across her own throat. Taking their lead, Redheart drew in a deep breath, smiled and nodded.

“Your turn next time, though,” she said with false cheer.

Snowheart said nothing, leaving Redheart with the unenviable task of checking out the three rooms’ bedpans and emptying the contents of any full ones.

She started with 85 and worked her ways backwards. The occupant of 83 was new, but Redheart recognised the name the moment she saw the chart on the door. It was difficult to forget a pony whose baking had once reduced half of Ponyville to vomiting wrecks. By all accounts, Pinkie Pie was actually a talented baker, and had also been caught in the Puke-a-Thon, as she had named it while Redheart held a bucket under her face. Months had passed since then. Redheart was still circumspect about eating pastries from Sugarcube Corner.

“Pinkie Pie,” she nonetheless said warmly as she unhooked the chart and went inside. It was hard to hold anything against the bubbly pink pony who typically lit up the whole of Ponyville with a smile. “And what brings you here today, young lady?” she asked, looking at the notes first and the pony herself second. She stopped in her tracks.

Pinkie Pie was on her side, her back to the window. She had curled into a tight ball, face buried in her own tail, and was shaking like she had just come in from a blizzard. Redheart hurried to her side, all thoughts of bedpans forgotten as she crouched to look into Pinkie’s face.

“Pinkie Pie?” she said, soft and slow. “Where does it hurt? Tell me where you hurt, Pinkie Pie.”

Pinkie’s eyes were huge, the pupils shrunk to tiny pinpricks. It took a few seconds for her to register Redheart’s presence. Even after she turned her face towards the nurse she blinked like she didn’t recognise her.

“I’m not meant to be here,” she whispered.

“Pinkie Pie, you’re not very well. The hospital is exactly where you need to be right now –”

“All wrong,” Pinkie whispered fiercely. “It’s all wrong. Even the parts that are right are wrong.”

“Pinkie Pie?” Redheart glanced at the emergency button on the bedframe. She always tried to talk patients down first and only hit that if she needed to. Porters, nurses and security ponies flooding into this little room wouldn’t help right now.

“Subtle and big. Big and subtle,” Pinkie gabbled. She held a hoof up to her face, turning it over like it was some alien thing. “Why am I this way? I shouldn’t be this way. Is this me? I can’t remember, except the bits that I can. Where’s the estate? I was by the pool watching the babies have their swimming lesson and then … I can’t remember. It’s wrong. I’m wrong. Everything is wrong, wrong, wrong! Send me home. Please?”

“Pinkie Pie, I need you to focus on me,” Redheart said, again in a soft, slow manner designed to soothe. “Look at me, Pinkie Pie. Look at me.”

Bit by bit, the blue eyes shifted to meet hers. Redheart was shocked but didn’t show it. Pinkie Pie’s eyes were indeed wrong. It was faint, and Redheart would have had a hard time justifying it to more practically minded colleagues, but something in those eyes seemed off-kilter. They even looked the wrong colour; the shade of blue too dark and getting even darker at the edges

Then, abruptly, things shifted back into tier proper place and her pupils expanded. It was as if a switch had been thrown somewhere inside her head. Pinkie Pie blinked and in an instant she truly was Pinkie Pie again.

“Huh? Nursh Redheart, why’re you squeezin’ my fashe?”

And apparently didn’t remember a thing.

Redheart hadn’t realised she was. She released her cupping hold, allowing Pinkie to rub at her cheeks.

A small groan escaped her lips. “Why am I on my side?” she asked hoarsely. “It… really hurts. Like… a lot…”

Redheart helped her roll onto her stomach, throat constricting when she saw the lumps on her back. It looked like somepony had thrust a pair of metal pipes into Pinkie from behind and then covered them in ill-fitting fur. They moved as Pinkie drew in shuddering, pain-soaked breath after shuddering, pain-soaked breath. Something thick and dark leaked from suppurating sores caused by the thing skin tearing. Redheart instantly set about cleaning up the wounds. At first she thought the black stuff might be infection, but there were no other signs and there was no tell-tale rotten smell either. In fact, Pinkie smelled strongly of sweets. When the black gunge wafted close to her nose, it reminded Redheart strongly of Ponyville’s library, tough she couldn’t explain why.

“Thanks,” Pinkie said gratefully. “I don’t know why I rolled over when it hurts so much to move. Um…” She reached behind her and poked tentatively at one of the growths. “Oh…” Her voice lost all semblance of cheer. “They’ve grown again.”

Redheart was about to say something when a strangled gulp made her stop.

“A-At this rate… by the time my test results come back… there’ll be more of these things than there is of me.” Pinkie tried for a giggle but it fell flat. “It… It’s kind of scary… y’know? Not knowing what they are. Or what’s happening to me.” Her voice became a whisper nopony who knew her would have expected. “Or what’s going to happen to me.” A fat tear rolled down her cheek. Then another. And another. In only a few seconds, she was struggling not to bawl and Redheart was doing the only thing she could think to do in the circumstance: hugging Pinkie’s head. She shushed her and stroked her mane as the eternally positive pink pony sobbed herself ragged.

“Th-thanks,” she eventually sniffled. “I th-think I needed th-that. Heh. Good thing I didn’t cry when my f-friends were here, or they’d w-worry like silly-fillies.”

“Sometimes everypony needs a good cry,” Redheart said sagely. “Better out than in.”

“Like burps,” Pinkie whispered. “Or gas.”

Despite herself, Redheart snorted.

“Nurse Redheart?”

“Yes, Pinkie?”

“Have you ever seen anypony with… things like these before?”

Redheart paused before answering. “No, Pinkie, I haven’t.” She had seen strangely lumpy growths before, usually in cancer cases, but nothing that had ever grown at the rate Pinkie’s chart said hers had grown. “Pinkie, do you remember what you said to me when I came in?”

“Um…” Pinkie thought hard. “I asked you why I was on my side. I guess I must have fallen asleep. I always roll on my side when I’m sleeping, though it’s usually the right, not the left. But I guess I must’ve got all twisty-turned-around since I’m in a strange bed instead of my nice snuggly-wuggly warm one back home.”

She didn’t remember any of the strange things she had said. Delusions, maybe? Waking dreams? She wasn’t on any medication yet, so it couldn’t be an adverse reaction to that. Redheart resolved to find Doctor Stable and tell him about this. Maybe he would have an idea.

“Hey, Nurse Redheart?”

“Yes?”

“Is there any way I could get some food around here? I missed lunch and now I’m starving!”

“Oh.” Redheart blinked. “I’ll… see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” Pinkie beamed. “You’re a peach.” She giggled like it was the funniest joke ever told in the entire history of the world.

High above Ponyville, a cloud that had been carefully placed by the Weather Patrol effervesced like a corpse filled with maggots. Convulsively, small black lines wriggled out of its folds and worked their way to the neighbouring cloud. They writhed and squirmed and twisted across the sky, silently making their way out of town and into the open sky above the countryside beyond.

“Hey!” A grey pegasus swooped into their path. Ditzy Doo wasn’t the fastest or smartest pony in Ponyville, but even she knew something like this wasn’t normal. She landed on the cloud, sending the lines into an apparent panic. “Ponyfeathers, what are these?”

The black lines crowded together, spitting out fragments of themselves into odd patterns across the cloud.

“This doesn’t look good,” Ditzy muttered to herself. She turned to fly away, deciding upon what was, to her, the most natural recourse in a crisis. “I’d better go get Rainbow Dash.”

The clouds below her detonated upwards in black.

Twilight discarded yet another book and looked at the clock. It was nearly half past five.

Time to head back to the hospital, she thought bleakly.

They had been searching the library for hours and none of the books had rendered the information they had hoped for. Behind her, Rainbow Dash sat on a literal tower of books, looming over the rest of their friends as she flipped irritably through a medical journal. Twilight might have commented on misusing books but her frustration made her bite her tongue in case she said something she regretted.

“This is dumb,” Rainbow Dash declared, snapping her book shut. “Half the words I can’t understand, even with the dictionary you gave me, Twilight, and the other half don’t say anything useful.” She tossed it away like a frisbee. Halfway between her and floor, a lavender aura enveloped it and brought it gently to Twilight’s own hooves.

“I thought I told you not to do that?” frustration frosted Twilight’s words.

“It deserved to go splat. It’s useless.”

“These books aren’t useless!” Don’t snap, don’t snap, don’t snap. Snapping at her won’t help anything. Twilight brought a hoof to her chest and pushed it away, breathing out and imagining her negative emotions leaving her body on that out-breath, just as Cadence had taught her. When she spoke again, her words were less like metal spikes. “They just don’t happen to have the exact information we want at this exact time.”

“Like I said.” Rainbow Dash folded her forelegs. “Useless.”

Twilight did Cadence’s exercise again. It was less effective a second time. Even less the third. Her fraying nerves must have shown on her face, for Applejack chose that moment to interject.

“So how are we all gonna do this visitin’ thing?”

“We go to the hospital and see Pinkie, same as last time.”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Thank you for that stunning piece of repartee, Rainbow Dash, but I believe Applejack was referring to the ‘only two visitors at a time’ rule.”

“Oh.” Rainbow Dash frowned. “Right.”

“Um, we could draw straws to see who goes first?” Fluttershy suggested.

It was babyish and simplistic, but in the dearth of other suggestions, the others agreed. Each wanted to be the first to get in to see Pinkie but was aware that this sentiment was shared by all. Not even Rainbow Dash could come up with a reason to shove her friends aside so she could go first without looking like a total heel. Instead, Spike went to fetch a clutch of drinking straws from the kitchen. It took longer than Twilight had expected, but eventually he brought them through to the circle of waiting mares.

“And I get to go too, this time,” he said pointedly.

He had not been happy to return from the grocery run to find the library abandoned and the front door swinging on its hinges. In her haste and worry, Twilight had neglected to shut it behind her and now kept apologising for worrying him. In the context of their lives, where being abducted from one’s house by nefarious forces was an actual possibility, it did not do to leave one’s friends uninformed about crises.

“Sorry, Spike.” Twilight’s ears plastered themselves against her skull in embarrassment.

He waved a claw. “Stop apologising, Twilight. You were panicked: I get it. Just do that ‘calm down’ thing of Cadence’s and think of me next time, okay?” He held out the straws. “I blobbed some food colouring on the bottoms. Two are red, two are green and two are blue. I figure we could decide which colour goes first and then divide ourselves up.”

“Good thinking, Spike!” Twilight was impressed.

“That’s some mighty fine figurin’, Sugarcube,” Applejack agreed.

“You clever, clever little –” Rarity started until Rainbow Dash interrupted her.

“Yeah, yeah, woo-hoo, Spike’s a genius, can we draw the straws and get going already?” She had flown down from the top of her book mountain and now shifted from hoof to hoof in unconcealed impatience.

“Don’t get your tail in a bunch, Rainbow. We’ll get there in plenty of time,” said Applejack.

“How about we go red, green and then blue – the order of the colour spectrum?” Twilight suggested. She waited for Rainbow Dash to make some ‘egghead’ comment, but it never came. “The two with red straws go first, the two with green straws go sec –”

“You don’t have to spell it out, Twilight. We’re not dumb just because we’re not eggheads like you.”

Ah, there it was.

Strangely, however, it was Rarity who snapped, “Rainbow Dash! Darling, while I understand you’re worried about Pinkie and eager for the off, that is no reason to keep being so rude! We are all worried about her and we all wish to depart as quickly as possible, but we are not backbiting each other because it! Doesn’t! Help!” A lock of mane fell into her eyes with the force of her inflection.

Rainbow Dash lowered her eyes, and then her head. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. Um, sorry, Twilight.”

“It’s okay, Rainbow.”

Yet Rainbow Dash’s hooves didn’t stop shifting as everypony took a straw and looked at their colour. She groaned when she saw hers. “Blue? Aw nuts!”

“Red,” said Twilight. “I guess we’re first, Applejack.”

Rarity held up her green-stained straw. Spike didn’t quite manage to mask his pleased grin at being paired with her. Fluttershy held up the matching pair to Rainbow Dash’s.

“Shall we go, then?” Rarity asked, levitating over a waste paper basket in which they all deposited their straws.

“No chance of a redraw?” Rainbow Dash muttered. “No? Didn’t think so.”

Big Macintosh hauled the traces on his cart into place and hitched himself up with practised ease. Though he didn’t have his sister’s patter, he was still a good apple seller and had brought in quite a lot of money today. Granted, some of this was down to pretty mares wanting an excuse to talk to him, but he accepted their giggly overtures the same as he accepted anypony’s conversation: with a few words and a languid, oblivious smile.

As he trundled away, a grey shape bobbled across the rooftops that bordered the market square. With a squawk and a crash, several roof tiles fell to the floor, closely followed by an upside down pony. Given that he was the last seller to shut up shop and go home, Big Macintosh hurried over to see if his help was needed.

“Miss Doo?”

The grey mare in the centre of the broken tiles wavered from side to side on her haunches. She shook her head, blinked a few times and looked down at the mess.

“Uh-oh.”

“Are you all right, Miss Doo?”

“I made a boo-boo,” she said dolefully.

“What? Miss Doo, did you hit your head?” Her eyes were… wrong. Neither one focussed on him. Instead, they drifted out in opposite directions. Could a concussion do that?

She stared at him with her left eye, though her right stared off into the middle-distance. “Huh?” The syllable lasted far too long. She definitely sounded like she’d sustained some kind of head trauma. Ditzy Doo wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, but she was more articulate than this.

“Doo?” she echoed. “Doo who?” Her high, bubbly voice had become a low-pitched rasp.

“Ditzy, I think you should get on up on my cart here an’ I’ll take you to the hospital.”

She looked behind her and then back at him. “Are you talking to me?” Again with the elongated words and odd, almost coltish voice. Again with the drifting eyes. His worry deepened. “I’m not Ditzy. Ditzy is…” She paused, frowning in thought. “Some other pony. She isn’t seen much. Gets lost easily. I’m Derpy.” She beamed proudly at him, lisping the words. “Derpy Hooves!”

Big Macintosh opened his mouth to respond.

“Oh, hey. More of them.”

“Huh?” He turned to look where she was pointing. He caught sight of what looked like black worms crawling all over the apples he had left-over from the market. Some even poked into the shiny red fruits, though they didn’t seem to cause any actual damage. “What the –”

A world of darkness erupted over him. As he submerged under the black wave, unable to yell or fight back, Ditzy’s changed voice echoed in his ears.

“Uh-oh. I just don’t know what went wrong…”

Nurse Redheart stroked Pinkie Pie’s mane and shushed her gently. Tears flowed freely from the poor mare’s eyes as she scrunched them shut against wave after wave of pain. When asked, she could not summon the breath to explain the specifics where she hurt and how, so Redheart had nothing to tell Doctor Stable when he arrived.

“Evvythin’…” Pinkie gritted when he asked the same question. “Fills… r-ron… nggg!” She sucked in a high-pitched gasp as another spasm of agony shook her. Her legs convulsed, trying to pull into a foetal position while also splay out, giving her the appearance of a marionette with tangled strings and a very untalented puppeteer. “My… bonesur’… burnin’…”

Doctor Stable’s horn flared. He yanked over a trolley filled with items and selected one at a glance. As Pinkie’s whole body jerked and another strangled shriek left her, he found a vein in her foreleg and drove the hypodermic home. Moments later her muscles relaxed. Her eyes drifted shut, though she was clearly fighting the sedative. She blinked, forcing herself to look at the two ponies beside her. Her eyeballs seemed to shiver for one long moment before they rolled up into her skull. For that moment Redheart could have sworn a sheen flowed over them, making them appear briefly purple.

As Pinkie’s hold on her hoof slackened, Redheart breathed a sigh of relief. Not so Doctor Stable. He worked quickly and efficiently, dabbing with a cotton bud at the dark gunge that had leaked like tears from the corners of Pinkie’s eyes and dripped out of her nose. He carefully placed this in a sealable polythene bag and levitated it above them.

“I’m putting a rush on her test results,” he said briskly.

Redheart bit her lip. “She was just talking to me and then she screamed.” The tray of food lay on the floor, one lone cupcake upended in a sad little splatter. An apple and a heap of grapes were somewhere across the room, flung there when the convulsions started and a flailing hoof knocked the tray from Redheart’s grasp. “There was no warning.”

“The growths don’t seem to have changed shape at all,” Doctor Stable observed, looking at the neatly written updates she had made to Pinkie’s chart. “Did she say whether they hurt?”

“You heard her,” Redheart replied. “’Everything feels wrong’. She kept saying it. That and something about her bones burning, over and over.” When she could speak at all. Those screams would stay in Redheart’s head for a long time.

Doctor Stable frowned, though not at her. “This isn’t like anything I’ve ever encountered before. The symptoms don’t match! And it’s all happening too fast. Even the head of medi-magic was stumped. His team are analysing her sample he took from her right now.”

“Should… should she be quarantined?” Redheart asked nervously. “This might be a communicable disease.”

He shook his head. “No, his immediate tests told us that whatever this is, it isn’t transmissible.”

“Medi-magic has a test for that?”

“You’d be surprised what medi-magic can do.” He said it carelessly, not intending to insult, but that carelessness made her bristle. She had been here two years before he arrived from Fillydelphia, the big-shot doctor from the big city. She would be surprised what medi-magic could do?

“You just said that this isn’t like anything you’ve encountered before,” she pointed out. “What if it doesn’t transmit in any way you’ve encountered before either?”

Doctor Stable seemed to give her words serious consideration. “Have you been feeling sick?”

“What? Me? No!” And the itching on her back was psychosomatic. It was. She had checked in the break room when nopony was there to see her cave in to paranoia.

“Me neither, and one of the characteristics of this thing seems to be rapid and severe decline.” His eyes unfocussed once more. “Then again, we don’t know how long the incubation period is either…” He fell silent for a long, tense moment.

“Doctor?”

“You’re right,” he said gravely. “Until we know what this is, we should play it safe.”

Far outside Ponyville, Inkie Pie worked diligently on a shrinking pile of paperwork. Ever since her father gave all accountancy tasks over to her, the rock farm had been bringing in more revenue than ever. The fact that they had struck a seam of gems in the last quarter helped immensely – and even made up for the mess caused by that incompetent unicorn they had briefly employed a few months ago.

Not briefly enough, Inkie thought wryly.

They went through temp workers like crazy, but that one had been a crazy pony who temped on her way through. Inkie couldn’t say she had been sorry to see the back of her.

Somepony knocked the door to her office. She looked up, spectacles sliding to the end of her snout. “Come in.”

A tail and flank entered before the rest of her sister. “I brought you some dinner,” Blinkie said, presenting her with the tray of food. “Otherwise I know you’d forget to eat. Momma and Poppa say they never see you at the table anymore.”

“Is it dinner time already?” Inkie consulted the clock on the wall. Ponyfeathers, it was! When she got stuck into a task she rarely came up for air until it was done. Present her with a sheet of numbers and she was happy as… well, as Pinkie.

As usual, she felt the same old jolt of longing to see her other sister. As usual, she tamped it down. Knowing Pinkie was happy in Ponyville didn’t make Inkie miss her any less. It hurt that Momma and Poppa never talked about her; as if their youngest daughter had ceased to exist. To them, she had. Some days, Inkie thought, if it weren’t for the photos Blinkie had hoarded, their parents might have erased Pinkie’s memory from existence entirely.

It isn’t right, she thought, though who was she to talk? She had chosen to stay and live by the rules of their family.

“Are you nearly done?” Blinkie asked. She was sweaty and dusty from a day in the quarry. Despite being a supervisor, she often picked up tools and joined those she was supposed to be bossing about. She never seemed to particularly enjoy her work, though; not the way Inkie enjoyed her numbers.

Inkie sighed. “Almost.”

“I don’t know how you can stay out here longer than you have to,” Blinkie said unexpectedly. She waved a hoof at the desk, though the gesture seemed to encompass far more than just Inkie’s little shack of an office. “Doesn’t it make you… I don’t know. Mad sometimes?”

“Mad?”

“Mad. Angry. Annoyed. Wrathful. Livid. Pick a synonym!” Blinkie exclaimed. “Being stuck here on this damn farm. Farming rocks. For the rest of our lives.” She shook her head. “Who the heck farms rocks?”

“Blinkie…” Inkie stood up and came around from behind her desk, but Blinkie was already at the door.

“Never mind,” she muttered, keeping her face averted. “It doesn’t matter. It’s dumb, I know. I’m just… blowing off steam. Forget I asked.”

“Blinkie,” Inkie said sharply. “Are you thinking about leaving?” It wouldn’t surprise her. Blinkie had been antsy ever since that awful visit.

“To do what?” Blinkie let out a small, bitter laugh. “All I know is rocks. Rocks in the brain, rocks in the hooves and rocks in the blood.” She parroted their father’s favourite saying. The Pie family had been farming rocks around here for seven generations. “All I know is … rocks.” Blinkie shook her head. “You know something? I really envy her.”

Inkie didn’t have to ask who. “You could always do what she did.”

“Leave?” Blinkie snorted. “Get shunned? I’m not that brave. But sometimes…” She paused before carrying on, as if she wasn’t sure she should say what was truly on her mind. “Sometimes I wish this whole place would just disappear so we could start over. Try something else – somewhere else! Anything but farming rocks.”

Inkie didn’t say anything. She couldn’t think what to say.

Blinkie retreated from the office, trotting across the open quarry back to the homestead where their parents were waiting for her. “Like I said, it’s just me being dumb.”

High above, little black lines wriggled across the clouds.

“What do you mean she’s not here?” Rainbow Dash shouted.

The grim receptionist from their last visit was as impassive as ever. “Miss Pinkamina Diane Pie has been moved to an isolation ward. She isn’t receiving any visitors.”

“Ponyfeathers!”

“Whoa there, filly.” Applejack grabbed her friend before she could try to vault the desk. “Let’s get all the facts before we start makin’ a hoo-haa.”

“An isolation ward?” Twilight echoed. “Why?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. You aren’t family.”

“Oh for –”

“Rainbow! Language!” Rarity barked.

We should let her family know, Twilight thought abruptly. They haven’t a clue about any of this. If Pinkie is this sick… She shook her head. How had this happened? Just yesterday Pinkie Pie had been leaping around her table at Sugarcube Corner, trying to get her to try her latest creation: the lemon surprise muffin.

“What’s the surprise?” Twilight had asked, unsure of the innocuous looking thing laid before her.

Pinkie had giggled. “Silly filly! If I told you, it wouldn’t be a very good surprise, would it?”

The surprise had turned out to be a thick pool of lemony syrup in the centre of the muffin. It had dripped down Twilight’s chin onto the tablecloth, making Pinkie laugh out loud.

“Surprise!”

Unbidden tears welled in Twilight’s eyes. She tried to blink them away. Ever since she first entered Princess Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns, she had rarely felt truly helpless. Even when faced with the worst problems imaginable, she took comfort in the kernel of confidence that came from knowing hundreds upon hundreds of spells. Her default internal response to a crisis was still ‘use magic on it’, even though after years in Ponyville she rarely said it aloud anymore.

She couldn’t use magic to solve this. She was totally reliant on other ponies and their expertise to make sure her friend was okay. Now, to top it off, she couldn’t even see Pinkie for reassurance anymore. She swiped a hoof across her eyes.

“Twilight?” Spike said softly. Perched on her back, he laid a palm on her mane, the way he used to when she was upset as a filly.

“I’m fine, Spike,” she said huskily. She cleared her throat and asked the receptionist, “So there’s no way we can see her?”

“No.” Short. Blunt. Inflexible. The grey mare’s eyes burned into Twilight like a laser.

Twilight turned around. “Applejack, you’ve known Pinkie Pie a long time, right?”

“Uh, I guess. Though Rarity’s known her nearly as long as I have. She chased up both around Ponyville until we said we’d be her friends when she first moved here. Why?”

Twilight blinked back her tears before they could fall. She might not be able to do much, but she could do this. “Do you have contact details for her parents’ rock farm?”

Doctor Stable was about to don his breathing mask in preparation for entering the isolation unit when Nurse Sweetheart jogged up to him. Given that she was a chubby mare who liked more than her fair share of chocolate, she was puffing hard when she reached him.

“Test… results… for you…” she panted. “The iso… isola… isolation… patient…”

“Already?” He accepted the clipboard and hastily surveyed it. Not all the results were here but the rush job he had ordered had apparently worked on at least some of the samples. His eyebrows crept into his hairline. No wonder these results had come back quickly. They were nearly impossible to believe. “This can’t be right.”

“What… is it?” asked Nurse Sweetheart.

“No,” he said instead of answering her. “This is… it’s impossible.”

“Doctor… Stable?”

He raised his eyes to hers. “Ink?”

“Ex… cuse… me…?”

“These results say that substance I collected from her eyes is ink.”

Sweetheart’s forehead wrinkled in consternation. “Ink?”

He flipped through the papers. Yes, it definitely said ink. One of the lab technicians had even attached a post-it note to the bottom asking whether this was the result of a unicorn spell gone wrong. There were recorded cases wherein teenaged unicorns and unpractised spellcasters accidentally caused their bodies to spew forth all sorts of awful things – frogs, beetles, lizards, tadpoles, and even, in one instance, solid gold coins. Yet Pinkie Pie was an earth pony and according to the accounts given by herself and Mrs Cake when they arrived, she had worked at Sugarcube Corner every day this week and only briefly had prolonged contact with Fluttershy yesterday while outdoors in the open air, away from any unicorns.

He gave the clipboard back to Nurse Sweetheart. “If any other results arrive, page me immediately. Don’t come into the iso unit. I’m going to go check on the patient.”

Nurse Sweetheart’s expression remained worried as he pushed open the heavy door, which popped like a refrigerator when the seal gave way. There was a corridor in between the isolation unit and the rest of Ponyville General, kept clean by fastidious janitors even though they rarely had cause to use the unit. Pinkie Pie was their first resident in over six months.

A line of four beds sat against the wall. None of them were occupied, though the covers of the last one had been thrown back.

“Pinkie?” Doctor Stable called anxiously.

The only way in or out of the unit was the door through he had just used. A window on the other wall provided light but didn’t open. Instead, a ventilation unit kept the atmosphere at a controlled temperature. He had supervised Pinkie’s transportation down here only a short while ago. The sedative he had given her could not have worn off yet. It had been infused with medi-magic and was more effective with fewer side effects than regular anaesthetic. In one corner of the room floated a gently burbling ball of security magic, designed to keep an eye on the room’s occupants and raise the alarm if their vitals plummeted or they tried to leave. His eyes scanned the room.

And there, crouched on top of the tall cabinet that housed all the medicine for this unit, was Pinkie Pie.

Her entire musculature seemed locked into place, as if one little twitch would make her fall. With all four legs tucked under her like that, the lumps on her back brushed the ceiling. Even those ugly things seemed to have stopped moving. She was very, very still.

How in Celestia’s name did she get up there? Doctor Stable wondered. He hurried over, horn reacting instinctively to the sight of a patient in danger. “Pinkie? Pinkie Pie!” She didn’t answer. “Pinkamina Diane Pie!”

Warily, the pink pony turned her head. Her expression was one of such deep-rooted fear that Doctor Stable barely recognised her. Pinkie Pie had a thousand varieties of smile but her other emotions were like crayon drawings compared with a master painting: simple, sincere and guileless.

“Pinkie, why are you up there?” Doctor Stable asked, trying to be gentle and audible at the same time.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” she replied angrily. If her face had been barely recognisable, what came out of her mouth belonged to a different pony altogether. It was her voice but the inflection wasn’t like her at all. She clutched at her head. “No, no, no, no, no!”

“Pinkie, we need to get you down from there before you hurt yourself –”

“This is wrong. One plus one equals two! Add two ones and you don’t get just one – can’t squeeze blood from a stone, can’t make something from nothing, can’t fit a thousand books into ninety-nine spaces.”

“Pinkie Pie –”

“Who is that?” Pinkie braced her forehooves and leaned her neck out to glare down at him. “Is that her? Is that me? I can see pieces but not everything. And the pieces aren’t even in the right order! Some of mine have been left behind! What am I missing? What am I missing?” she shrieked. “They didn’t bring all of me across! How do I know this me is really me? How do I know?”

Doctor Stable didn’t understand what she was talking about. How could he? It was all nonsense. Had her mystery illness affected her mental faculties? Was this the result of the medi-magic interacting with her changed body chemistry?

There would be time enough to ponder that later. Right now, his immediate concern was getting her off the cabinet before she fell.

“Pinkie, I’m going to use my magic to get you down, okay?”

“What?” She blinked at him. “You can’t wink out. There isn’t enough room up here for both of us.”

Wink out? “Hold steady now.” His horn flared with telekinesis honed by years of deftly handling sharp implements and lifting comatose bodies. It wrapped around Pinkie. She started to struggle, panic infusing her face until her back brushed the ceiling and her protests devolved into an agonised screech.

“Wha-? Where are my… no, no, not them, please don’t say I lost them too!”

“I’m going to bring you down now,” Doctor Stable said firmly. “Here we go.”

“Let me go! Let me go! Don’t you see? Don’t you see this is all wrong? I’m not meant to be here! I was never meant to be here! This is all wrong. You can’t force two things into one, however much you want to – the one breaks! And if I replace her, it’s… it’s murder!” She hissed the word as if she had never said it before. “Won’t someone please send me back? Please, please, please! I don’t want to be here! Bad things will happen if I stay here, I just know it!”

“And … down.” Doctor Stable set Pinkie’s hooves on the floor but he hesitated before releasing his magic. She was irrational. Plus, if she had somehow managed to scramble up the cabinet under her own power when she should have been unconscious, who knew what else she could do? “Code Amber: ID Stable,” he said loudly.

The ball of security magic brightened to orange and began whooping.

“What’s that?” Pinkie demanded. “What did you do?”

“I’m just bringing some ponies to help you, Pinkie.”

“Who is that?” she cried.

Minutes later, two porters entered the isolation unit. Both wore breathing masks, just like him. Wordlessly, they stood either side of Pinkie Pie as he released his telekinetic hold on her. He tensed in case she sprang at him, but she cowered away and put her forehooves over her head.

“I want to go home…”

And then something shifted. A ripple swept over her like a breeze through a field of waving corn. When it had passed, she raised her head, looking around with interest.

“I switched rooms?” she asked brightly. “How come?”

Doctor Stable gaped. “Pinkie?”

“Hi, doc. What’s up?” Pinkie Pie sniggered to herself. “What’s up, doc? Oh, I kill me sometimes.”

When Twilight put down the payphone, everypony was aware of the change in her posture. She had started the call with ears flat. They had pricked halfway through as she spoke to whoever was on the other end of the line, always a sign of something capturing her interest. Subsequently slamming down the phone and demanding a fresh coin without explaining why was such un-Twilight behaviour that even Rainbow Dash was shocked into silence. Twilight had dialled another number and engaged in a cryptic conversation that made her ears had flatten and her face register a kind of horror that made the hair stand up along everypony’s spine. Her friends now waited impatiently for whatever she had to tell them.

C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Rainbow Dash thought, her hooves twitching. What’s wrong?

“The rock farm,” Twilight said disbelievingly. “It’s… not there.”

“Huh?” Applejack frowned. “What do you mean ‘not there’? It’s a rock farm, sugarcube. Those don’t move.”

“Well this one did.”

Rainbow Dash was unimpressed. “Seriously, Twilight, this is a lousy time to be making … jokes …” Her knowledge of her friend kicked it as she reached the end of her sentence. Twilight would not make jokes like that, especially not at a time like this. “You’re not joking, are you?”

Twilight shook her head. She looked stunned. “The number Applejack gave me put me through to a pony in a neighbouring village. They said they’d never heard of any rock farm in that area, nor any Pie family. They said there has never been any rock farm anywhere near there and that … that it was a stupid idea anyhow. Who farms rocks? So I called the Equestrian Topography Centre in Canterlot.”

“Top-what?” Rainbow Dash interrupted.

“They keep maps of all Equestria.”

“And you just happen to know their phone number by heart?”

“I helped them map out part of the previously uncharted areas of the Everfree Forest after we defeated Nightmare Moon and I have an eidetic memory, but that’s not important,” Twilight said dismissively. “The point is, they agreed. There is not, nor has there ever been, a rock farm belonging to a family named Pie – not there and not anywhere in Equestria.”

“What?” The exclamation echoed at her in several voices.

“But that’s preposterous!” Rarity protested. “We know it exists. Why, that brute of a showmare, Trixie, went to work there for a while! She showed us the pictures!”

“I know that but… look, I don’t know how to explain it.” Twilight shook her head. “They were all really insistent.”

Rainbow Dash scowled. “Well they were all wrong. I’ve been to Pinkie’s farm.” At Twilight’s curious look, she shrugged. “I went with her once when her mom was sick a few years ago. What?”

“So you met them?” Twilight asked urgently.

“Well, duh.” For a moment Rainbow Dash’s face flickered into sympathy as she recalled Pinkie’s frozen smile and a bedroom door that remained shut even when she called to the occupant within. It was one of the few times she had ever seen Pinkie genuinely sad and it had stuck with her. “It… wasn’t pretty. Her mom didn’t want to see her and her dad was a dud but her sisters were pretty cool.”

“Then this all makes even less sense!” Twilight threw up her forehooves. “Why would the Topography Centre lie? Their records are second to none. Those can’t be wrong.”

“Whatever.” Rainbow Dash’s wings vibrated with pent up frustration at her inability to do anything. She felt like she had been cooped up all day.

Actually, she had been cooped up all day! Added to her worry over Pinkie, it royally, royally sucked. Fury and frustration tightened in her stomach like she had swallowed hot metal that was solidifying in her guts. She needed to do something, not just sit around waiting for that something to happen on its own. That wasn’t how she was wired. Rainbow Dash, Fastest Pegasus in All Equestria, did not just wait for things to happen. She made them happen!

“You know what? The rock farm isn’t far from here if you’re flying. I’ll go and tell them Pinkie’s in hospital.” At least then she would be doing something. Inactivity was her worst nemesis along with math and alfalfa. And if she got to have a flaming argument with Pinkie’s parents, well then so much the better. She would rather argue with somepony she barely knew than explode at her friends – and right now she was worried that was exactly what might happen if she stayed with them.

“Rainbow Dash, wait!” Applejack started.

“You guys can wait. I’m going.” With that, she cantered to the door, turning the last few feet into a defiant glide that took her outside and into the sky at ever-increasing speed. She could almost convince herself the wetness on her cheeks was just from facing into the wind.

Almost.

Twilight stared at the glass doors as they slid shut behind their friend.

“I can’t believe she just did that,” Applejack said incredulously. “She just up an’ left! An’ after all her bellyachin’ about getting’ here in the first place!”

“Please don’t think badly of her.” Fluttershy’s stare remained fixed on the sky visible through the doors. “Rainbow Dash is just upset and she… doesn’t deal with feeling helpless that very well” As the pony who had known her longest, Fluttershy spoke with a quiet conviction nopony questioned.

Applejack blew out a sigh. “We’re all upset, sugarcube, but we don’t all run off at the drop of a hat.” Applejack paused. “This is the point where Pinkie would say that my hat didn’t drop because it’s still on my head,” she muttered. She turned her face away. “Dang it. How the hay did things get this bad so gosh darn fast? She was fine yesterday, an’ maybe she wasn’t a hundred percent fine when we saw her today, but she wasn’t…” She trailed off.

They were all asking themselves the same question: How far was Pinkie’s decline going to go?

“I… I don’t want to go home,” Spike piped up. “Um, just saying. Even if we can’t actually go up and see Pinkie, I don’t want to go home yet.”

“Me neither.” Rarity cleared the revealing croak from her throat and said more emphatically, “If Pinkie is here, I’m staying here.”

“I’d like to stay too,” Fluttershy added. “But, um, I should probably go home and feed my animal friends first.” As if somepony had questioned her loyalty, she gabbled, “I mean, the thing is, I last fed them before lunchtime, a-and even though I fed them plenty, we went straight to the library after we left here and I haven’t been home since, so they’ll probably be very hungry by now, and Mrs Mouse recently had a litter of babies, so I should check on them, not to mention I have to change the dressings on Miss Vixen’s foot and… um… I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologise, Fluttershy,” said Applejack. “You want somepony to walk with you? Many hooves make light work an’ all. I’m pretty good at changin’ bandages on squirmy critters after Winona hurt her paw last Spring.”

“Thank you, but I’m fine. You should… you should stay here in case…” Fluttershy seemed unable to finish her sentence. She bit her lip. “I’ll be as quick as I can. I-If Pinkie… if something happens…”

“I’ll come and fetch you,” Twilight said, thinking of the teleportation spell she had used several times. Teleporting another pony with her left her nauseous and dizzy, but if anything bad happened to Pinkie, speed would supersede comfort. “I promise.”

“Thank you,” Fluttershy said gratefully. “I’ll be back soon.”

Cup Cake nuzzled Pumpkin’s stomach, making the tiny foal giggle. “Oh, I could just eat you up! Has there ever been a foal as cute as you? Had there ever-ever-ever?”

“Right here,” chuckled Carrot, cradling Pound. The little colt yawned, each blink lasting longer than the preceding one.

“Oh yes!” Cup exclaimed in mock surprise. “So there is!” She applied talcum powder and finished putting Pumpkin in a fresh diaper. “All done. No more stinky.”

Pumpkin burbled and chewed on her forehoof.

Carrot pulled a face. “Well, almost.” He indicated to the scented plastic baggy containing the old diaper, which was not quite as good at keeping in bad odours as advertised. Cup had placed it to the side of the changing mat. Now it was steadily filling the room with its conflicting smells.

“Yes, I’ll just get rid of that, shall I?” she said wryly. “Then we’ll get going.”

It was lucky that their neighbours had agreed to babysit while they went to visit Pinkie at the hospital. Lyra wasn’t the most reliable pony in the world, but Bon-Bon’s no-nonsense practicality balanced out her partner’s enthusiasm. Privately, Bon-Bon had confessed to Cup that they someday hoped for a foal of their own, so she had been more than happy to agree when Carrot asked. Since there were two of them, and especially since Lyra was a unicorn with first-hoof experience of growing up magical, the Cakes felt assured they would be able to cope with Pound and Pumpkin’s quirks.

Carrot buckled Pound into the stroller and Cup left him to do the same with Pumpkin while she disposed of the diaper. She held it out from her, foreleg locked so the baggy wouldn’t touch her. She knew it was unlikely to spontaneously burst open and cover her in her daughter’s excrement, but you just couldn’t help some superstitions. She loved her little ones with all her heart and soul, but even she had her limits.

She was so focussed on her task that she didn’t see the little black lines wriggling across the ceiling. They jerked and jolted over her head, some concealed in recesses of shadow, some blatantly twitching past the light fitting. A few stragglers hurried to catch up as they crawled like convulsive caterpillars over the doorframe and into the twins’ room.

Cup gratefully plonked down the lid of the trash can and headed back inside. She climbed the stairs slowly, knowing she would be puffing and panting if she took them at speed. Carrot always said he loved her no matter what she looked like, and it was hard to say no when Pinkie presented her with the ‘mist-cakes’, as she called those too misshapen, burned or just plain ugly to sell in the café. Nevertheless, sometimes she wished she had the energy to take up jogging or join an exercise class and get rid of her post-pregnancy pudge.

At least, most of it is post-pregnancy, she thought wryly. Okay some of it is. A little bit. A very little bit. Putting the unwelcome thoughts of her expanding waistline from her mind, she called, “Honeybun, are you all ready to go?”

“Go?” Carrot called back. “Go where?”

“To see Pinkie, of course.” Cup stepped through the door to find Carrot unstrapping Pound from the stroller. Pumpkin got herself onto her hind legs to thrust her stubby forelegs through the bars of the playpen at her mother.

Carrot frowned at her in confusion. “Pinkie? Who’s Pinkie?”

“What?” Cup laughed, assuming he was joking. “Carrot, don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly, snookums.” He continued to look genuinely puzzled.

Carrot was a sweetie with a mind like a sieve and a heart of gold, but he couldn’t keep secrets and was the worst liar in all Equestria. Cup could see through any untruth like it was cellophane. She inhaled sharply as she looked into his eyes. He wasn’t lying. He really didn’t know who she was talking about.

“Pinkie Pie,” she said slowly, as if that might jog his memory. “Our apprentice. She rents a room upstairs. She’s lived with us for almost two years now. She’s in the hospital, remember?”

“I think you’re the one being silly, honeybun. We never managed to rent the room upstairs, remember? We tried, but nopony wanted to live in a place where we start work at 5am.” He shook his head. “And our apprentice isn’t called Pinkie Pie, and she sure isn’t in the hospital. She finished her shift and went home, remember?”

“What?” Panic sluiced through her like ice water. “But…”

In the playpen, Pumpkin’s jabbering took on a fretful edge. Her little horn glowed like she was about to have another magic surge.

“Uh-oh!” Carrot left Pound buckled into the stroller and hurried to pick up their daughter. “C’mere, you. Don’t worry, Daddy’s here.” He picked her up and stroked her back like all she needed was to be winded. Instead of soothing Pumpkin, she only grew more agitated, reaching desperately for her mother.

Or that was what Cup assumed until she realised Pumpkin was not looking directly at her. She followed the foal’s gaze, gasping when she saw a mass of jittering black lines on the wall. She backed away, putting herself further into the room and closer to her family. Instinctively, her stance became protective; head lowered and hooves planted wide.

“Carrot! What are those things?”

“Hm?” He started to turn. “What?” A few black lines scuttled from his mane and crawled through the air like worms through soil.

Cup shrieked. “They’re on you!”

“What are?” Carrot looked at her, then at the wall where she pointed. He blinked, his sight-line a steady, undistracted stare. “Honeybun, are you okay? You’re acting awfully strange.”

He can’t see them, she thought.

Pound began to cry, his little wings flapping as he tried to extricate himself from his seatbelt.

The wriggling black lines were forming a pattern. Cup was about to shout for Carrot to run when she realised that she recognised the shapes some had formed.

Cakes

She stared in mounting horror and bewilderment as more squirmed into place either side of their surname.

The Cakes’ apprentice

The words trembled as if alive – alive with the wriggling, jiggling, squiggling little … whatever those things were.

Another word formed.

“Carrot,” she said hoarsely. “We have to run.”

On the far side of the wall yet more of them came together.

very happily together.

“We have to take the foals and run – now!” She grabbed for Pound, panic making her fumble with the clasp of his safety belt.

The lines were making a sentence, starting at either end and working their way inward. They were silent, but the words they made rang through her head like a knell.

and they work

She yanked at Pound so roughly she nearly fell backwards. He cried harder in her grasp.

“Honeybun!” Carrot exclaimed. “What’s gotten into you?”

Pumpkin burbled angrily her tiny horn glowing like she was trying to protect her oblivious father.

is called

“Carrot!” Cup pulled at him and ran for the door. “Follow me, quick!”

“Wait –”

Too late. The last word formed and with a noise like a happy sigh, the whole sentence stopped wriggling. The edges smoothed and the words became as easy to read as type on a printed page. The sentence peeled off the wall. For a single, frozen moment it hung in the air. Then it shot towards the running mare and wrapped around her in an explosion of black ink.

Pumpkin screamed.

Rainbow Dash soared through the air, so high that clouds brushed her belly and countryside rapidly passed below. She would be there in no time at this rate. The rock farm where Pinkie had grown up was, as Pinkie herself had always put it, only a stone’s throw from Ponyville. In reality it was more than that but the distance posed no problem for the fastest pegasus in Equestria.

She swooped out of the cloudbank to get her bearings, realising she had travelled even further than she had thought. It was amazing what you could do when you were really motivated. The rock farm was just over the next rise. She crested it expectantly.

The quarry wasn’t there.

Rainbow pulled up short. “Huh?” She circled the area, thinking she must have missed it or not gone far enough. She had been there only once before, and though it was unlikely, it was possible she had got the location wrong.

She hadn’t. There was no quarry and definitely no rock farm anywhere around. Green fields stretched as far as the eye could see.

Twilight’s words came back to her: “There is not, nor has there ever been, a rock farm belonging to a family named Pie.”

“What in Celestia’s name is going on here?” Rainbow Dash asked the empty air. The sun was still up but beginning to make its descent into dusk, casting long shadows across the land. She did another circuit but came up with the same result: fields of freshly harvested crops but no rock farm. “This makes no sense! How does a whole quarry just disappear into thin air?”

And what about Pinkie’s family? If their farm was gone without a trace, what about them? She espied a farmhouse at the edge of one field and powered towards it. Maybe the ponies inside would know something.

“Keep your mane on!” shouted a gruff voice as she pounded on the door. It opened to reveal an aging brown stallion in a black hat with a pristine white band around it. She recognised him immediately. It was hard to forget somepony who had made your friend cry.

“Mr Pie!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed.

“Hmm?” He eyed her suspiciously. He was still chewing the stalk of grass as last time. Except that it wasn’t just grass, it was a grotty stalk of wheat. “Can’t you read the sign?” He pointed at a little piece of cardboard pinned to the door: No Hawkers, Circulars or Salesponies.

“I’m not selling anything. Don’t you recognise me?” They had only met once, but Rainbow Dash knew her mane and tail made her stand out in ponies’ memories.

Not a scrap of recognition showed in his face. “Can’t say that I do.”

“I’m Pinkie Pie’s friend!”

“Who?”

She scowled. So it was back to this: Pinkie had essentially been excommunicated by her family for choosing to leave the farm. Her father had called it called it ‘shunning’, which Pinkie had explained meant she pretty much didn’t exist to him anymore. Apparently having a party-themed cutie mark was tolerable up to a point, but choosing to live out the dreams it opened up was not. The whole thing made Rainbow Dash want to turn around and buck him, but that would not get her the answers she wanted.

“Look, I know you like to pretend you don’t have a third daughter, but I’m here to tell you that she’s real sick in the hospital and you need to go see her because when I say real sick I mean real sick and where the heck is your rock farm?” She sucked in a much-needed breath.

“Rock farm?” Mr Pie said laconically. “What kind of dumb idea is that? Who farms rocks?”

“You do! Or … you did. Something real screwy is going on here and – hey! Hey, Blinkie!” Rainbow Dash caught sight of Pinkie’s sister. Gratitude swept through her. Blinkie was the only pony who had acknowledged Pinkie during their last visit. She had chased after them and pushed a brown-paper wrapped package into Pinkie’s hooves, which later turned out to be family photos their father had tried to throw away.

Blinkie, who had been crossing the hall, trotted over to the door. “Yes?”

“It’s me. Rainbow Dash.” At Blinkie’s blank look, she added. “Pinkie’s friend.”

Blinkie’s expression could not have been emptier. It was as if someone had punctured her heart and let all the emotion seep away a long time ago, leaving her with no recourse but blank indifference. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about, miss.”

“Sure you do!” Rainbow Dash insisted angrily. “You –” She stopped, her eye caught by the wall of framed photos behind the two earth ponies. She recognised some. They were from the package Blinkie had given over. Now, instead of carefully glued into albums in Pinkie’s room above Sugarcube Corner, they were displayed proudly on the wall here. Yet it was not this that made the words die in Rainbow Dash’s throat.

Pinkie was not in any of them. Even the ones Rainbow Dash recognised did not have her in them. Rainbow Dash knew where she should be – could even pinpoint the exact spot with her hoof – but there was no sign of a pink filly in any of them.

“Are you all right, miss?” Blinkie asked, as if it didn’t matter to her one way or another.

“I … I …” Rainbow Dash backed away. “I gotta go!” She ran down the path and launched herself into the sky, banking a sharp left towards Ponyville. This was too weird. She had to tell her friends – fast!

Luckily, fast was what she did best.

Redheart pulled the food trolley down the little corridor to the isolation unit, opening the door at the opposite end open with her rump. It involved some complicated near-acrobatics to hold it open with one hoof while she dragged the trolley through, swinging it into the room in a tight arc before letting the door shut again. The breathing mask may have been necessary but it sure made simple tasks more difficult when she couldn’t grasp things with her mouth and use all four hooves for walking.

“Hi there,” she said with a smile the mask concealed. “Dinner time. Since you didn’t get anything to eat earlier, I figured you must be pretty hungry by now.” She raised her head. “Pinkie?”

A dome of restrictive magic shimmered over the bed. Since her back condition and the possibility of seizures prevented Pinkie Pie from being restrained by normal means, the hospital had been forced to come up with an alternative. The effect, Redheart noted, was like a gigantic food protector over a single pink cupcake.

“Pinkie Pie.” She pulled the trolley closer. “Would you like something to eat?”

Pinkie lay on her front, face buried in the pillow. She lifted her head at Redheart’s approach, looking befuddled. She blinked and shook her head as if to clear it. Her left eye twitched.

“Oh. Hi there.”

Deciding to remain cheerful in the hopes it would, in turn, cheer Pinkie, Redheart presented the trolley. “I have daisy sandwiches, daffodil and pasta salad and some sweetened clover patties. If you’re still hungry afterwards, there are lemon surprise muffins, red velvet cupcakes or fruit.” She smiled again, hoping it reached her eyes. “I’m sure hospital food can’t compare with your home baking, but for what it is, it’s not half bad.”

Pinkie blinked at her. “Do you… have any dew soup?”

“Dew soup?” Redheart had heard of it, though she had never tried it. Soup made from the water of morning dew was a speciality dish served almost exclusively in Cloudsdale and parts of Canterlot and Manehattan – typically areas populated by pegasi. The soup had some quality that made it appealing to a pegasi palette but taste like boiled dishwater to all other ponies. “Uh, no, I don’t.”

“Oh.” Pinkie lowered her chin to the pillow. “I think I like dew soup. It might even be my favourite.”

“You think you like it?”

“I’m not sure. It’s one of the hazy things. A lot of things the other me knows are becoming clearer now, but some are still hazy.” She made a face. “I wonder whether I’ll ever know some of them. I think they got left behind. If you break two mirrors and mix up the pieces you don’t get two reflections but the picture is still wrong. It’s the same with jigsaws – nothing fits exactly anymore, so you have to stomp on the pieces to make them fit when they don’t want to and the picture at the end is weeeeeiiird.” She giggled. “Stomp, stomp, stomp, find a friend to glomp.” A frown creased her brow. “What is a glomp, anyhow?”

Redheart wasn’t sure what to say to that. Then again, she often had no idea what Pinkie Pie was talking about. “Uh, would you like a sandwich?” she asked.

Pinkie’s left ear flicked independent of the right. “I can’t.” She indicated the shimmering dome. “It’s in case I climb on top of the cabinet again. Which I won’t, but they wanted to be extra specially, specially, specially, specially sure, because I might fall off and hurt myself because I can’t –” She stopped abruptly. “I … can’t …” Her eyes became unfocussed. “Ffffff –” Though she tried, whatever she was trying to say would not come out. Instead, her body started to rock from side to side. She covered her head with her forelegs and moaned. “Aiiiiii….” She elongated the vowel so much it was nearly unrecognisable. “Shhhhhhh… shhhhhoooouuuulllld…” A strangled scream burst from her.

Oh no! Not again!

However, this time Redheart had come prepared. She grabbed the hypodermic from the lower shelf of the trolley, slipped the protective plastic from the needle and made sure there were no air bubbles. Satisfied, she scrubbed a hoof through the circle on the floor that marked the limits of the magical barrier. From within, nopony could touch or affect it, but a single break in the line from this side would cease the magic’s effects until somepony connected it up again with charmed magnetic chalk. Though the circle had been drawn by a medi-mage, it had been specially designed so that any hospital staff member, unicorn or not, could dissolve it in case of emergencies like this.

“Hold still, Pinkie,” Redheart said, keeping her voice calm and level. “This will only pinch a little.” She reached for one of the forelegs clamped over Pinkie’s head.

Pinkie arched her back in a fresh scream. She flung her forelegs out, knocking the hypodermic from Redheart’s grasp. Redheart scrambled to pick it up as Pinkie rocked upwards, head thrown back in a second agonised scream.

“Pinkie!” Redheart shouted over the noise. “Pinkie P-”

She was silence by a noise like tearing fabric.

Thick black liquid splattered the wall as Pinkie’s back tore open. It was as if she was being flayed by an invisible whip. Her scream became a choked gasp as first one, and then two splits appeared, shearing from shoulder to hip. Then something pushed through the flesh, twitching and writhing like maggots breaking free of a hollowed out corpse. She leaned forward, convulsing in time with her deep, ragged sobs. Finally, with a wet rip, something unpeeled from beneath her coat and stood on end. First one, then a second pushed free, flinging gouts of liquid into the air. Some landed on the ceiling, a dripping splotch of red and black. Some landed on Redheart, who stifled her own scream of revulsion and fell backwards as she tried to shake off a piece of skin covered in pink fur that had landed over her eye.

“C-Code Red: ID Redheart,” she shrieked.

The security magic glowed and the alarm started to wail.

Pinkie panted, hunched over on the bed. The things poking out of her back fluttered like they were testing the air after being trapped for so long inside her. Rivulets of dark liquid ran over her sides and dripped onto the bedclothes.

Redheart was frozen with shock as Pinkie raised her head and turned to look at her.

“I … knew I should … be able … to fly,” she panted. “Knew it … knew it … knew it.” She giggled. It sounded wrong. Her face fell and panic suffused her expression. She leapt off the bed, though she should not have been able to move with those injuries.

Redheart scrambled away but Pinkie bounded over and cupped the nurse’s face in her forehooves.

“If you try to push two things together, they both break,” she said in a panic. She spoke using the same tone and inflections she had when Redheart had found her lying on her side. “That’s why you can’t just smoosh whole worlds together. But doing it piecemeal doesn’t work either! We can’t both exist. It’s not possible. But they want it! They want it – want me to be me so much that they set it in motion and… and we’re breaking… I’m breaking… and… and…” Her eyes became unfocussed again. “And they’re right. Of course they are. It has to all be as it should have been. Before the beginning. All of it.” She dropped Redheart and ran for the window. “All of it!”

“Wait, no!” Redheart cried.

Pinkie crashed through the glass, but instead of plummeting, she opened her new wings and flew like she had been doing it all her life. Redheart hastened to the window. However, by the time she got there Pinkie Pie was nowhere to be seen.

Redheart turned when the door crashed open and a slew of ponies thundered in, demanding to know what had happened in a clamour of overlapping voices. The soaked ceiling, walls and bed didn’t tell even half of what had happened, but the truth was so farfetched that Redheart’s mind did as many do when faced with a truth too impossible to process: it snagged on a single, insignificant thing, which she had noticed as she literally watched a pony’s mind snap in front of her.

Pinkie’s eyes had been bright purple.

“What happened, Redheart?” Doctor Stable pushed his way through and turned her to face him. “What in the name of Celestia happened here? Where is she?” His eyes flicked to the broken window. “Did she jump?”

“I… I…” Redheart stuttered.

On the wall behind the gathered ponies, small black lines crawled silently into formation.

“There you go, Miss Vixen.” Fluttershy stroked the fox’s head. When she tried to take her hoof away, the ostensibly wild animal pushed against her, urging her to continue her gentle ministrations. Fluttershy smiled. “Your wound is healing nicely. You should be able to go home by the end of the week. Won’t that be lovely?”

The fox gave her an eloquent look.

“Now, now,” Fluttershy chided. “You know that staying here indefinitely isn’t an option. You need to go back. If you stay with me you’ll forget how to fend for yourself. The Oath of Mutual Protection isn’t meant to extend beyond my cottage and garden. It isn’t the natural order of things, and that’s important to maintain. Even if there are parts of it I don’t like either,” she added in a sad mutter.

A long time ago she had been forced to accept that the roles of predator and prey were not something she could ignore or prevent in nature, however much she had tried to at first. Her heartfelt wish was to take care of all animals in such a way that none of them needed to hunt each other in order to survive, but even she had come to accept that this simply wasn’t tenable. She had tried for a long time, but months of trying and failing to halt the ceaseless cycle had threatened to break her until she accepted the unpleasant truth. Nature had created a pattern of life and death that she couldn’t stop just because she hated the idea of her former patients being part of it. In the end she had compromised by creating the Oath, which set up her cottage as a place apart from the natural order, where predators and prey agreed to leave each other alone until the day that they departed back to their real lives.

The fox looked away.

Fluttershy chucked her under her narrow chin, bringing her face around. “It may seem like the better option now, but trust me, when springtime comes you’ll want to go find a mate, which means going back to the wild. How would you feel if you couldn’t feed your babies because you’d grown too soft to hunt, or just plan forgotten how?”

The fox’s ears snapped back. She chuffed low in her throat, staring deep into Fluttershy’s eyes.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m not asking you to like it, but I’m glad you understand.”

Fluttershy could never explain to anypony else exactly how she communicated with animals. It wasn’t magic, as such, but it wasn’t the same as when she talked with ponies either. It was a strange combination of actual speech, body language, facial expression and intuition that, once upon a time, Twilight might have wanted to strap her into some machine to test. The net effect was that Fluttershy arrived at a perfect understanding of even non-verbal creatures that she never really had to think about. Perhaps some part of that was fear that if she picked apart her abilities and thought too much about how they worked, she would forget how to do them, but she preferred to think that she simply didn’t need to know the whys and hows. What she did with her talents was far more important than how they functioned.

The fox yawned, forcing Fluttershy to release her chin. The cottage wasn’t as full as it had been in the past, though there were enough animals in residence that it had taken Fluttershy over an hour to feed and check on them all. Mrs Mouse’s babies were snug in their nest, which sat only inches from the mass of straw and grass Miss Vixen had claimed as bed. The fox had not tried to eat them once. The parrot with the broken wing was nearly ready for his splint to be removed and Fluttershy was fairly certain the crow who had been attacked by a desperately starving eagle was ready to be released. She would give him one more day to make absolutely sure he was recovered, then take him back to the spot where she had found him and –

Someone knocked loudly on her front door.

“Oh!” Fluttershy exclaimed. She wasn’t expecting anyone. All her friends were still at the hospital and nopony else ever called on her. She sucked in a breath, wondering whether one of her friends was on the other side, bringing her terrible news about Pinkie Pie. She hurried to answer. “C-Coming!”

Miss Vixen lifted her head. The birds on their stands hopped and chittered.

Fluttershy felt something grab one of her hind legs. When she looked down, she saw Angel’s tiny arms wrapped full around her fetlock. He shook his head, his meaning clear to her.

“I have to answer it, Angel. It might be Twilight, or Applejack, or Rarity, or even Rainbow Dash.” She stepped forward. Angel was lifted off the floor when he refused to let go. “Now don’t be a silly bunny.” She awkwardly raised her hind leg and stretched her neck to pluck him off by the scruff of his neck. Of course, contrary as ever, he hopped straight off the chair on which she deposited him. He followed her as she went to the door and pulled it open.

It wasn’t Twilight. Or Applejack. Or Rarity. Or even Rainbow Dash.

“Oh my goodness … Pinkie, what happened to you?” Fluttershy gasped.

Pinkie stood on her hind legs, forelegs braced on either side of the doorframe as if to keep herself from falling over. She was panting, face scrunched with the effort of sucking in enough oxygen. More disturbing, however, were red and black streaks daubed across her coat and mane.

“You’re… actually… h-here…” she gasped. Each breath was laboured. “I w-wasn’t… sure you… w-would be… b-but… I h-had a f-feelin’ –”” Her words dissolved into a hacking cough.

“What in the name of Celestia are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in the hospital!” All sorts of dreadful possibilities raced through Fluttershy’s mind to explain why Pinkie was here and what was wrong with her. And she was standing up! Albeit unstably, but hadn’t the ponies at the hospital said she couldn’t stand at all without tremendous pain? “Come inside, quick. Are you hurt? What am I saying? You’re bleeding!”

The animals in the cottage began to chatter at the scent of blood.

Suddenly Angel leapt in front of Fluttershy, paws raised in a bizarre approximation of a martial arts pose. He glared at Pinkie Pie. She stared back at him blankly. Recognition clicked into place a few seconds later.

“Oh!” she croaked. “Of course! Everyone got a pet here, didn’t they? There was only Dinah before and that didn’t work out. I think. Yes, I think the giant puppy was … before. Not here. My pet here is…” She seemed to ponder deeply. “A toothless alligator? That can’t be right.”

“Pinkie Pie?” Fluttershy said warily. The setting sun didn’t quite turn Pinkie into a silhouette, but it cast odd shadows across her face as she swivelled to look left and right inside the cottage, then lean back to gaze outside.

“Your garden is so useful!” she exclaimed, like this was a bad thing. “Where are all the flowers?”

“Flowers?”

“You have to have flowers. That’s your thing! Or it was supposed to be. Not vegetables and a chicken coop! You don’t keep chickens! That’s not right!”

“P-Pinkie?” Fluttershy’s eyes widened. There was something very, very wrong with Pinkie. It wasn’t just her staring eyes and the jagged edge to her voice, though those were strange enough. Fluttershy knew Pinkie was given to saying things others didn’t understand – she remembered all too well how miscommunication during the parasprite incident had nearly ruined all of Ponyville – but this felt different. Pinkie herself felt different. “Um, I think you should come inside so I can clean off all –”

Pinkie vaulted away towards the vegetable garden almost faster than Fluttershy’s eyes could follow.

“– That blood. Hey, Pinkie!”

“Wrong!” Pinkie dived amongst the tall leafy plants, only the top of her mane visible as she began pulling them up and tossing them away. “It’s all wrong! How could they get something so basic so wrong? No wonder this world needs to be fixed!”

“Pinkie Pie, please!” Fluttershy ducked to avoid being hit by a flying turnip. “P-Please, stop!”

“Why did they change it? It shouldn’t be this way! Flowers, not vegetables! How difficult was that to get right?” Turnips were followed by carrots and potatoes, all still covered in clods of soil. They whizzed past Fluttershy, forcing her to take to the air to avoid them.

“Pinkie Pie!” she called down. “Please stop ruining my garden! I need those vegetables to feed my animal friends!”

Pinkie froze. She looked up at Fluttershy, eyes wide. There was something wrong with her eyes but Fluttershy had no time to figure out what it was before they were rushing up towards her.

“You can fly!” Pinkie pointed an accusing hoof at her. “So that’s why I’m an earth pony! You got the wings instead of me! Two unicorns, two earth ponies, two pegasi – the perfect balance! Except that they gave the wrong one of us the wings.”

Fluttershy gaped. “Pinkie Pie you’re… flying.”

It was an astounding yet gruesome sight. Pinkie Pie had wings. She had wings! It was not the first time Fluttershy had seen one of her earthbound friends flying, but these were nothing like the beautiful butterfly wings Rarity had worn in the Young Fliers’ Competition. Some of Pinkie’s feathers were brittle with dried blood, yet it was easy to see that her wings were not pink like the rest of her. Around her shoulders flaps of skin and pink fur swung in time with each angry white flap. Yet if Pinkie noticed or felt any pain, she didn’t show it in her expression.

“I was meant to be the flier. That was how it was meant to be. That’s a big thing to fix. I mean, I’m a main character. Putting something so significant right …” She wrinkled her nose. “Yep, difficult. But I guess it worked because I have my wings back!” She twirled in mid-air, showing off the horrible things.

“Oh m-my…” The words emerged as a horrified whisper. Fluttershy edged away.

“Soon, everything will be the way it was meant to be.” Pinkie nodded. Her left eye twitched. “Y’know, at first I thought this was a mistake. You can’t just replace one thing with another – not when the universe is already established like this one. At the beginning, when things were still in flux and nothing had been decided yet, maybe it would have worked, but now? I thought they were crazy.” She giggled. It sounded forced and tinkling, like someone pouring beads into a glass. “But I guess this whole fourth wall thing was useful after all. I can see the bigger picture now. I didn’t always understand what was going on, but glimpses are as good as staring contests.” Pinkie frowned contemplatively. “Or … was it me who didn’t always understand? Feh, I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore. Me, other me, it’s all the same difference now.”

“Pinkie, what happened to you?” Fluttershy asked. She had to find Twilight. This was obviously some kind of evil magic – a curse or a spell or something. Who or what could have done this to poor Pinkie Pie? Who would do anything to her? Everypony loved Pinkie Pie. The thought that someone would want to do her harm was absurd.

“I can see it all now,” Pinkie laughed. “They have some very particular ideas about how things are meant to be. It took some doing for them to figure out how to make it all work, but you know what? It is possible after all!”

“Pinkie –”

“You see, it’s all fictional. I’m fictional, you’re fictional, the whole of Ponyville is fictional – heck, the whole of Equestria is fictional! And fiction can be changed.” Pinkie’s grin wrapped almost all the way around her face, like a hyperactive puppy’s leash around a tree. “Twilight would understand. She loves books and words and reading and writing. The pen!” Pinkie stuck a hoof in the air dramatically, as if orating to a crowd. “Is mightier than the sword!”

Fluttershy didn’t understand. All she knew was that something was seriously wrong with her friend, and no matter how horrified or scared she was, her overwhelming compulsion was to try to help her.

“The thing is, I was the problem,” Pinkie went on. “I required the most changes because I deviated so much from the original version of me. We’re all problems, really. Just because something is fictional doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It’s all gone too far, you see. We’re in too many heads and hearts as the versions of us that we are now. The world beyond ours knows us too well as we are now. You can’t just write that away. Nope, nope, nope; you have to make it work in context. You have to make the changes one by one. And that gets, uh…” She plucked at a piece of loose flesh dangling from her shoulder-blade. “Gooey.”

“Pinkie Pie.”

“I’m not even the right colour! Can you believe that?” Her left eye twitched again. It didn’t seem possible, but her grin stretched even further. “But I can fix that!”

Fluttershy’s stomach knotted as Pinkie reached behind herself, grasped one of the flaps of pelt and pulled. Like wallpaper, it peeled up her back before tearing off completely at the base of her wings. Pinkie examined it for a moment, then shrugged and threw it into the vegetable garden. She reached for another.

“No!” Instinctively, Fluttershy shot towards her. She grabbed Pinkie’s forelegs to stop them. Blood and black liquid smeared on her own hooves but she forced herself to ignore it. “You mustn’t!”

“But I’m not meant to be pink!” Pinkie protested. “It doesn’t hurt. I told you, I’m fictional. Once I figured that out, everything else makes more sense. Fictional things can’t feel pain because the pain is fictional too, so it’s not really real.” She sighed and shook her head. “It’ll be so much better for them when they figure out they’re fictional, too. I wonder… someday, maybe someone from the world beyond theirs will make them understand too.”

“Pinkie, there’s something seriously wrong with you.” Fluttershy swallowed the bile threatening the back of her throat. “We need to get Twilight. She’ll know what to do. A-And she’s at the hospital, which is even better. The doctors there can take a look at your injuries and –”

“Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Pinkie sing-songed, shaking her head. “I just came from there. Besides, nopony remembers I was there anymore. It didn’t suit the storyline for me to be in hospital so they fixed that.”

“They?” Fluttershy echoed helplessly.

Pinkie had allowed her hooves to remain held down but Fluttershy was loath to take too firm a grip in case she hurt her friend. She was close enough, however, to see why Pinkie’s eyes had looked strange before. They were the wrong colour, but the wrongness didn’t stem from that. Their gaze seemed to be coming from a long way away, jittering in some distant place that Fluttershy couldn’t reach.

She looked unhinged.

Pinkie tilted her head to one side. “They’re the ones who’ve been putting everything back the way it was in the beginning – the way things were meant to be, before editorial mandate and copyright laws and all that stuff ruined everything. They’re the ones with the words.”

“Pinkie, I-I don’t understand.” Fluttershy tried but failed to keep the tremble from her voice.

“It wasn’t as simple as they thought it would be. They don’t think magic exists in their world.” Pinkie laughed. “Boy, are they in for a shock when they figure that one out. It took them time and effort to even get this much right from what little they think they know – you can’t change a world in one go; you have to change it in increments. Little itty-bitty-chitty-chitty-bang-bang pieces – one bit at a time so the whole shebang doesn’t go… well, bang!” Pinkie chuckled. “See? The changes are good. Would I have known the word ‘increments’ before? I don’t think soooooo!”

“Pinkie –”

“I mean, look! They’re doing it right now!” She pulled a hoof free to point over Fluttershy’s shoulder.

“What?” Fluttershy followed the line of her hoof and gasped.

Tiny black worms wriggled across the front of her cottage. They twined in and out of the honeysuckle and ivy, slipping in between the pieces of straw in the thatched roof. Some had linked up and quivered in place, while others continued to crawl towards each other.

In front of the pretty cottage is a lovely

Angel was in the doorway, pointing and hopping up and down. Apparently he had been trying to get her attention for a while, but she had been too preoccupied to notice. Fluttershy released Pinkie and swooped to scoop him up. As her forelegs closed around him, the last black lines met and the entire collection stilled.

garden.

The words slid off the cottage, hovered for a moment in mid-air, and then shot towards the garden. When they met the sticks for the tomato plants they exploded like a punctured balloon, spraying what looked black ink over everything. Wherever it touched, vegetables withered and flowers burst into life. Roses, daffodils, forget-me-nots and dozens of others Fluttershy couldn’t name erupted from her carefully planted furrows, submerging the ground in a riot of colour.

“The pen is mightier than the sword!” Pinkie crowed gleefully. “See? See? Didn’t I tell you? It’s not perfect – they still need a helping hoof here and there – but they’re putting everything back the way it was supposed to be.”

“Who’s doing this?” Fluttershy begged. “Who are ‘they’?” She nuzzled Angel, taking comfort in his warm body and familiar smell. What kind of terrible magic was this?

“The fans of the true vision,” was Pinkie’s oblique answer. As she spoke, she tore off another strip of flesh from her back. “It took them a long time. They had to work it all out, you see. They had to get past the fans who prefer the altered versions of us. Still, the true vision will win out in the end. The creator wanted it this way and they’ll make her vision a reality! You’ve seen the power of words firsthoof, now.” She pulled on a ragged piece of fur at her collarbone. It came away with a wet rip, as if she was just tearing the sleeve off an ugly dress. “Ugh, that’s better.” Instead of bared muscle, underneath was white fur. “It smarts a bit, but it’s worth it in the end. Don’t you agree? As Should-Be Sparkler would say, white is so in this season.” Pinkie pursed her lips. “Although actually, she’ll be blue, so blue will be so in this season.”

“Please, Pinkie, stop hurting yourself,” Fluttershy begged.

“But I’m not hurting myself. I’m fixing myself.” Another wet rip. Another sloppy impact on the ground below. Miss Vixen had limped out of the house along with several other animals. They sniffed at the pieces of pink and black and red. All of them growled and backed away again. “Hm, I’ll have to clear those away when I’m done.”

Fluttershy could do nothing as Pinkie pulled and tugged and ripped at herself. Neither could she leave. She hung in the air, almost forgetting to flap her wings.

This couldn’t be happening. This could not be happening!

But it was.

It really was.

Miss Vixen snarled at the last thing to fall: the sticky, detached face of a pink pony.

Pinkie rubbed at her white cheeks. “Oh, that’s better! What do you think?”

Fluttershy whimpered.

“Aw, don’t cry. You’ll see. You think you like life as it is now? You’ll love it when they’re through setting things right. I know I do. In this world, I come from Cloudsdale and my family talk to me and I still get to be a baker and throw parties and have fun and … ooh, everything! And you! You’ll have a fan-dabby-doozy pretty garden and you won’t have to worry about flying anymore and – ooh!” She clapped her hooves together in sudden thought and dived to the ground, disappearing amongst the flowers.

Her disappearance broke Fluttershy from her trance. She whirled to the animals now gathered outside her cottage. “Run! Oh, please run away, little friends!”

They looked up at her in mute shock. She was throwing them out?

“Run someplace safe! I’m going to go get my friends. My, uh, other friends. They’ll … they’ll fix this.” I hope, she added in silent desperation. Whatever this is. Magic words and true visions and everything else Pinkie had said sloshed about in her brain in a soup of fear and panic. She flapped her wings, heading for the hospital.

“Oh no you don’t.” A disapproving white shape rammed her. Fluttershy let out a ‘whuff’ of expelled air and dropped a few metres.

“Angel, are you all right?” she gasped.

Shaking and showing little of his usual self-confidence, he nodded and burrowed against her chest. She tightened her hold on him and tried to fly on.

“Don’t you know it’s rude to leave a party early? Especially a Fix the World and Make It Better party!” The white missile came at her again. She twisted and it shot past. “Hey! That’s not fair! You ducked!”

For the first time ever, Fluttershy regretted living outside town. While the privacy and proximity to her animals’ homes was useful, she had no neighbours to hear her shout for help. “Pinkie, stop it! P-Please… you’ll hurt Angel Bunny –”

“Whoopsidoodle.” Pinkie hovered in mid-air. “You’d better give him to me for the next part.”

“What?” Reflexively, Fluttershy’s hold tightened further.

“Well you don’t want him to fall, do you?” Pinkie said matter-of-factly. “Silly filly. I’ll take him back to your cottage and make sure he’s safe while we fix you.”

“Fix me?” Fluttershy’s heart beat against her ribs like an attic-trapped bird.

“Well of course. Didn’t I tell you they need a helping hoof when it comes to us? It’s easy for them to change other ponies’ minds about us so they know that we’ve always been the way we are. Or were. Or will be. Wow, that’s a little confusing now that I think about it. Anyhow, it’s not as easy with us. We’re the main characters. If you want to change us, you can’t just pretend the changes away. You have to make them happen so that everyone can see how much better they are.” Pinkie beamed. “It makes perfect sense.”

It made no sense at all.

“But the thing is, I’m the only one who can do the whole fourth wall thing. I can tell you we’re all fictional, but you won’t get it.” She shook her head sadly. “You never did all the other times I did something to break it. So you’ll feel pain because you think it’s real, and I don’t want that. You’re my friend. That hasn’t changed. Friends don’t hurt each other. They help each other. And that’s what I’m going to do to you!”

Fluttershy closed her eyes, turned a sharp circle and flew away as fast as she could.

“Hey!”

She knew Pinkie was chasing her. She was trying to escape from one of her best friends in the whole world. Please, somepony, make this not be happening.

White wings. Impact. She spun in a crazy spiral, trying to right herself, but another crash made it impossible. The best she could do was try to land without breaking anything as Pinkie drove her to the ground.

“I’m sorry!” Pinkie shouted. Ridiculously, she sounded like she meant it.

Fluttershy tried running. That was even less successful.

“Banzai!” Pinkie leaped at her, limbs splayed. At a pool party it would have been fun. Right now it filled Fluttershy’s heart with dread.

She just had time to throw Angel from her before Pinkie landed on her. The little rabbit went rumbling ears over tail into the brush.

“Good call,” Pinkie complimented. “Now this might pinch a bit, but then all the pain will go bye-bye, and when you wake up you’ll be just how you were meant to be.”

“What – ow!” Something sharp bit into Fluttershy’s flank. It was followed by warm, spreading pain.

“There now. That should do it – hey!”

Angel had come rocketing back out of the brush and connected with Pinkie’s head. She reeled backwards.

Fluttershy staggered to her hooves. The world swam. Everything inside and outside her head was a tilting carousel, spinning around in a blur of colour and textures. She fell to her knees, struggled to get up, failed and slumped to her side. The hypodermic still stuck straight up from of her flank like a flag claiming a piece of land.

“Now that’s not very nice,” she heard Pinkie exclaim, but her voice sounded like it was coming through deep water. “You’re part of the story too, bunny-bunny-bun-bun. They like your slapstick stuff.”

What?

The whole world slewed beneath Fluttershy and she slid off the edge into darkness.

Rainbow Dash had stamina in spades. A lifetime of training regimens, crazy work schedules and a desire to prove herself as more than a flight school dropout had hardened her muscles, sharpened her focus and left her with the endurance of a small tank.

However, it wasn’t just stamina that kept her going as she neared Ponyville. Her nerves still jangled at what she had discovered about the Pie rock farm and her head had not stopped buzzing as she tried to figure out what was going on. She wished she had some sort of gut feeling she could follow, but the plain fact was that she was not Twilight or Pinkie Pie. Her intuition sucked and she possessed no equivalent to Pinkie Sense. All she could do was think up possible explanations that each seemed less and less possible.

Aliens? she thought, dismissing her latest idea out of hoof even as it formed in her mind. No, that’s just plain stupid. How about – huh? “Whoa!” She flared her wings and braked hard as a parrot flew into her face. “The heck!? Watch where you’re going, buddy!”

The parrot clacked and whistled, turning in small circles in front of her.

“Boy, are you lost,” Rainbow Dash observed. “Parrots don’t like in the Everfree.” Though flying too low in Everfree airspace was risky, she had elected to go that route for expediency. The faster she got news of the rock farm to Twilight, the faster the world would start making sense again. This situation might even merit the princesses’ involvement.

The parrot squawked some more. Frantic cawing made Rainbow Dash duck before she was blindsided by an equally noisy crow that joined the parrot in its circling. The parrot flew drunkenly, as if its wings weren’t working properly. In fact, a piece of mostly unwrapped bandage trailed from the left one.

Rainbow Dash narrowed her eyes. “Hey, didn’t I see you two at Fluttershy’s cottage last week?” She didn’t really take much notice of Fluttershy’s changing roster of animal patients, but she was almost sure there had been a parrot amongst the birds on the stands.

The parrot whistled triumphantly. Evidently she had got it right. It turned in another small circle and then dived for the ground. The crow cawed and followed. They didn’t do anything as convenient as speak exactly the right words to tell her what they wanted, but their meaning was still clear.

“You want me to follow you, huh?” Rainbow Dash muttered.

She glanced at the light-spangled bulk of nearby Ponyville. Night had finished falling while she made her return journey and the houses lit by enchanted lamps looked like something from a watercolour painting. Below her, not far beyond the edge of the forest, Fluttershy’s cottage was also lit from within.

“Huh? Fluttershy’s home from the hospital?” A thought hit Rainbow Dash. “Or did somepony break in while she was out?” Fresh anger erupted inside her, eating up her frustrations with the prospect of something she could understand and could deal with. “If they have, I’ll kick their butts until they’re a brand new shape!” She folded her wings and dived.

The burst of cawing and whistling in her ears nearly knocked her off course. She alighted with some of her dignity left and turned to give the two birds a piece of her mind, stopping when she spotted Fluttershy’s garden. She had let it become completely overgrown, which was weird because she was usually so neat and tidy about her vegetables. Rainbow Dash didn’t know thing one about growing food, saving the tips she had picked up about fruit trees from hanging around Applejack. Did plants really grow that fast if you left them alone?

The door to Fluttershy’s tool shed stood open. That was weird too. Fluttershy always locked it in case some animal wandered in and accidentally licked the bottles of weed killer she kept in there.

That wasn’t the only door ajar. The front door to the cottage was open too. Rainbow Dash quietly pushed it, pausing in case somepony was hiding inside. Though crime in Ponyville was almost non-existent, the local newspaper was full of stories of Manehattan and Glascow, where it was much more prevalent. Fluttershy lived far enough out of town that it wasn’t out of the question that somepony might be dumb enough to try bugling her.

Nopony jumped out. Rainbow Dash stepped inside, being carefully to avoid the creaky floorboard two feet over the threshold. The living room as dark. The light she had seen came from the kitchen, judging by the soft yellow glow under the closed door. She crept towards it, wondering why the cottage felt so off.

Realisation struck her when she was halfway across the room: the place was silent. Where were all the animals?

A soft squawk and the skitter of claws caught her attention. She turned, eyes growing accustomed to the extra deep gloom of the cottage’s interior. The parrot and crow perched on the back of the couch. Next to them stood the tall golden birdcage Fluttershy used to contain jumpy little birds that would otherwise fly off and exacerbate wing injuries. Fluttershy often fought with herself over whether it was right to use the cage and tried to avoid it wherever she could talk the birds into staying put instead.

Right now it contained one very anxious white rabbit.

What in the name of Celestia–?

Rainbow Dash hurried over. Angel’s foot on the floor of the cage had been the cause of the thumping. Fluttershy would never put her precious Angel Bunny in a cage; not even when he was being his most obnoxious.

Angel stuck a paw through the bars, jabbing it in the direction of the kitchen door. His face, which Rainbow Dash had so often seen screwed up in a temper tantrum, was now twisted with worry.

What’s going on here? she wondered as she unlocked the filigree door.

Angel leapt onto her head, sprang from there to the floor and cannoned towards the kitchen. He literally threw himself at the door, battering at it with all four paws.

“Who’s there?” called a voice that made Rainbow Dash’s mouth drop open in shock.

“Pinkie Pie?” she said without thinking.

“Uh-oh, spaghetti-o!” the unmistakable voice trilled. “You’re a little early to the party. Just give me a minute!”

Rainbow Dash trotted to the door. Angel continued to hammer at it. He jumped for the doorknob but it was just out of his reach.

“Pinkie, what’s going on? Why aren’t you at the hospital?”

“Just a minuuuute!” Pinkie repeated, ostensibly ignoring the question.

“Pinkie –”

With a grunt, Angel managed to hook both front paws around the doorknob, suspending himself in mid-air. Pressing his hind feet against the wood, he twisted his whole body. The door clicked open and swung inward.

There was a crystalline moment in which Rainbow Dash’s mind attempted to reject what she was seeing. It contradicted everything she knew so thoroughly that her thoughts closed in on themselves, forming a protective barrier of denial. For that frozen moment all she registered were snapshot images that refused to form a coherent whole: purple balloons; pink hair against wood grain; an open sewing kit; the metallic gleam of red in the lamplight.

And then, all at once, the entire scene snapped together. Her mind caught up with her eyes and her gorge rose in her throat.

“Oh well,” Pinkie sighed.

Except that it couldn’t be Pinkie. Pinkie wasn’t white, she didn’t have green hair and she definitely wasn’t a pegasus! Yet the pony standing in the middle of the room had her voice and posture. When she spread her hooves and jumped up and down, she moved with the same inimitable manic energy as Pinkie. When she yelled, she reminded Rainbow Dash of when Pinkie had thrown her a Thank You For Going With Me to See My Family party.

“Surprise!”

Angel raced between Rainbow Dash’s hooves towards the pony slumped in a chair, her torso across the kitchen table.

“Sweet… Celestia…” Rainbow Dash breathed as the last piece of her brain accepted this impossible piece of reality.

“I kind of thought I’d be all done and dusted here before I got to you,” Not-Pinkie giggled. “I still have to clean up. It’s not nice to make a mess in someone else’s home and not clean up after yourself.”

Fluttershy’s face was drawn. Her chest rose and fell but she was clearly out cold – otherwise the crudely stitched lumps on her back would have caused more than a mere frown. One of the bony, burned lumps twitched as her eyelids flickered. She was coming round, her body trying to flap wings that were no longer there. On her flank, someone had cut around the three pink butterflies, turning them into three red-streaked flowers instead.

Not-Pinkie wasn’t holding the knife but she might as well have had it in her hoof.

Not-Pinkie bounced in place. “I told her they needed a helping hoof. Personally, I think Should-Be Posey looks better as an earth pony.” She gave another deranged giggle. “And when she wakes up, she’ll be Posey all the way. Once the body changes, it’s easier to get the mind inside. After all!” She spun around, waggling her wings. “I’m living proof! I had to start growing wings and have holes put into my bones so I could be brought over into this world. I even knocked her out so she wouldn’t feel anything.”

A set of gardening shears were visible in the sink. A metal spatula rested in the flames of a ring on the hob. Yellow feathers stuck out from under the trash can lid. She had cut off Fluttershy’s wings and thrown them away like garbage!

Rainbow Dash only had to flap twice to smack straight into the other pegasus and pin her against the wall. Air left Not-Pinkie’s lungs in a giant whoosh that blew back Rainbow Dash’s mane. Her breath smelled like candy.

“That… was a pretty good… surprise …” Not-Pinkie wheezed. “Didn’t see it… coming –”

“Who are you?” Rainbow Dash snarled. “Why did you do this to Fluttershy?”

“Not… Fluttershy…” Not-Pinkie shook her head. “Posey… just like… she originally planned… I’m just helping them… make… her vision… our reality–”

“She? They? What are you talking about?”

“Can’t… breathe…”

Rainbow Dash eased off enough to let the other mare speak. “Who are you?”

“Don’t you recognise me?” Not-Pinkie looked sad. “Of course not. You’re not fixed yet. You still think you’re Dashie.”

“What?”

“It won’t be so bad for you. You’re just a palette swap and a new cutie mark. Well, new-ish, since you already have a lightning bolt. You and Twilight are lucky that way. Applejack is the luckiest, though. All she has to do is lose that hat of hers. Although, I guess for her that is like losing a limb. I was the toughest to pull off – palette swap and a different race, but as you can see, they did it in the end.”

“Who. Are. They?” Rainbow Dash demanded. “And who are you? Why did you do this?” She wanted to gesture at Fluttershy but didn’t want to release her hold.

“For the fans.”

“What?”

“And they did it for her. They love her. She was so upset when she had to leave the project – though she had lost most of her creative control by the end anyhow. That’s how this whole problem started, y’know – her losing creative control and others making decisions that contradicted what she’d planned. The fans just wanted to make her happy again by making us what she originally planned. It’s kind of sweet, when you think about it.”

“What?”

Not-Pinkie shook her head and sighed indulgently. “You don’t get it yet, Should-be Firefly.” Despite Rainbow Dash pinning her forelegs, she tried to use one to point upwards. “But you will soon.”

“Huh?” Rainbow Dash risked a quick glance.

And froze.

The words peeled off the wall above them, pausing in mid-air just long enough for her to read before they dropped and exploded over her in a wash of ink and destiny.

The fastest pony in Equestria is Firefly. She is pink and fearless and danger is her life.

She is Lauren's favourite pony.

And so all the ponies lived happily together in the wonderful land where animals talked, magic was real, and no bad things ever happened that friendship couldn’t fix.