Chapter 1: Party of Many
Very Early Morning, December 22nd, Y.O.H. 1502 - Not Quite Our Equestria
The hilarity was general in the Great Feast Hall of the Palace at Canterlot. Ponies were eating, drinking, laughing, some openly hugging and kissing one another at the trestle tables Princess Celestia had laid out to welcome everypony to her Second Day Feast. Stallions, mares, colts, fillies and foals were all present; all social classes mingled in theoretical freedom, even though in practice families and friends tended to congregate at the same tables, and some of the highest members of the aristocracy insisted on remaining aloof.
Pinkie Pie, sitting and stuffing herself with pastries and punch, drank in the blaze of Joy. She had more than done her job helping to lay the tinder -- she'd contributed some recipies (though that Sweet Cream could get very grumpy if one tried to help her out in the kitchen), worked with the castle staff on the decorations -- the vast number of balloons decorating the room had been her influence -- and helped to kindle and stoke the fires with some impromptu singing, dancing and other acts of merriment, most of which the Royal Guards hadn't to be enemy attacks (they could get amazingly nervous about the discharge of a party cannon indoors, even in a very large room!)
Now everything was going very well. The party was roaring of its own momentum, and there was no need to feed the fires any further. Indeed, feeding the fires further might be a very not-good idea -- it could rage out of control and destroy part of the Palace at Canterlot, which Pinkie suspected would make not only Twilight Sparkle but even Princess Celestia rather cross at her. Pinkie Pie had once gone through a phase of having trouble controlling her parties.
When she'd been young -- from getting her Cutie Mark and for the first four years after -- she'd had really good control over parties. Then, after Cloud Kicker Awoke her, it had all become very difficult, because now she was also throwing the special parties and sometimes everything was just very confusing. Really, her whole teenaged years had been very confusing until she met Twilight Sparkle, in that unforgetable summer of 1500, and she learned that she was the bearer of the Element of Laughter.
Everything had, slowly, started to make sense again. It didn't seem so much like realization as remembering, as if there was something she'd forgotten, something she'd lost years ago, something slowly coming back to her. When she saw Twilight (Minty -- wait -- who was Minty?) it was as if something in her head, the pieces of something broken, were trying to spin back into place, as if her mind was a jigsaw puzzle that had been spilled out of the box and she were slowly putting it back together.
Jigsaw puzzles -- Maud was good with jigsaw puzzles, Pinkie remembered, and the memory had the taste to her of a part of her not touched in many years. An image arose before her of Maud with a wedge on one hoof, rapid-fire pumping it to cut fine and precise lines in painted plywood, making her a jigsaw puzzle. She smiled. Why did she so seldom think of her beloved elder sister? Normally it was as if she were swimming upstream, fighting a current, to remember Maud. Normally, she started to feel bad, though she couldn't remember why ...
Normally. But nothing could make her feel bad this Hearth's Warming season, and she turned to regard the reason why, sitting beside her.
Light from the magecrystals and from the hearth fiercely blazing at one end of the great hall mingled in the glorious rainbow mane of her True Love. Lovely cerise eyes flickered with the far-fiercer internal fires of her warm soul. Rainbow Dash sat on Pinkie's right, so Pinkie saw her better left-side profile, unmarred by the terrible injuries Rainbow told her she'd taken in a long-ago fight, whose details she had so far chosen to keep private even from Pinkie.
Poor Rainbow Dash! No pony so good, so noble, should have been hurt so badly! Even now she had problems with close-in depth perception, even occasional partial seizures (partial petit mal, the information came to her from somewhere). And then there was the damage that had been done to her down between her hind legs, in places that only doctors and Pinkie herself ever got to go. Some places, inside, that only the surgeons who patched her up had ever gone.
(Traumatic insult to the lower pelvis, the information came to her, serious tissue damage both interior and exterior, accompanied by uterine hemorrhaging, all before the onset of menstruation, resulting in malformation of developing tissues -- impairment of both sexual and reproductive functions. Prognosis for unassisted recovery is poor. Permanent non-functionality the probable outcome).
This time the burst of mysterious information was strong, definite. It smelled and tasted like ... Granny. The image of her gentle, kind but utterly no-nonsense grandmother -- Golden Pie -- surged fully into Pinkie's memory. Big fluffy white hair, just a tinge of its former gold, framing an orangish-yellow face, from which bright and intelligent golden eyes gazed upon her grand-daughter. Her warm, loving voice, homespun tones concealing her great knowledge and even greater wisdom, often spiced with more than a hint of sarcasm.
Granny was sage, scholar, sorceress, biologist -- and midwife. This was exactly the sort of situation about which one would expect her to know.
Pinkie wished that Granny had been there to help Rainbow Dash after she got hurt. Granny could have made her all better. Granny could do almost anything!
If Rainbow was all better, Rainbow could land without crashing so much. She could stop having those times when she went all twitchy and not in the useful way like her Pinkie Sense, but the way that just left her helpless. She could feel things down there, so Pinkie could make her feel really good like she wanted to do. Rainbow deserved so much to feel really good, because she was so really good herself -- Pinkie wished she could heal Rainbow Dash.
Bourne up by the dreamy happiness of the moment, the Joy of the great party surging all around her, and her own love for Rainbow Dash, she pretended that things were like they were before her Awakening, and she could just wish things to happen. She could sort of still do it, but only to save her life or those of her friends. She knew now that thinking she could do it was childish, to be put away with the wider and better world to which Cloud Kicker had introduced her, but sometimes she just wanted to be childish. Or childlike.
She looked again at Rainbow Dash, and it occurred to her that Rainbow was a Hero, like the ones she'd heard about in the fairy tales her mother had told her when she was small. Someone fearless, who would go through anything for one she loved, someone like one of the Immortal Flock of Derecho, or the Faithful Tourmaline. Someone out of her childhood tales, and if their love was more sexual than anything the filly Pinkie could have imagined, there was still something pure and wonderful about it that had never been in any of the many casually-carnal activities in which she had engaged ever since Cloud Kicker had shown her how to really be a Party Pony. Something, in fact, very much like the most innocent dreams of her youth.
Rainbow Dash noticed Pinkie looking at her. She turned her face to Pinkie, one eyebrow raised questioningly. Pinkie could now see the subtle asymmetry of her face, where her head had broken around one eye.
(Severe fracture of the right orbit, Granny's voice said in her mind. Serious bruising to the lateral rectus, internal damage to the orb, partial retinal detachment ...)
The asymmetry did not mar her. Nothing could mar the utter beauty, within and without, that was Rainbow Dash.
Pinkie smiled at her True Love, a great, utterly-open and completely-loving smile.
It was the longest night of the year, but it was as if the dawn broke from Rainbow's face, as she smiled back at Pinkie Pie. It was a wholly-unguarded expression, one of pure and perfect Love.
Pinkie Pie felt the Love and Loyalty wash out over her, with a curious precision of emotional awareness on her own part, one which she did not question. It never paid to question at these moments. Too many questions spoiled the comedy.
So Pinkie just closed her eyes in happiness ...
... and Wished that Rainbow Dash could get better. With all her heart and might, she Wished ...
And Something -- Something long-forgotten -- answered her call.
Deep within her was a portal, a portal once open almost the time but which over seven years ago had been fettered fast with steel chains, when an Intruder had entered and raped her soul of everything it wished to take. The Intruder ... which even now her mind slipped off naming ... had made sure that Something could not help her. But the chains had been laid on so long ago ... nopony had inspected them recently ... they could be rusting ... surely they were now rusting, weakening, failing ...
Pinkie's own power, rendered overwhelming by the great Party all around her, swept forth to test the chains.
They snapped in a spray of rust.
The portal opened, deitrus fountaining as Something surged through long-unused channels to eagerly, happily, lovingly enter her mind.
Knowledge overwhelmed her. A precise diagnosis of Rainbow Dash's original injuries, delivered in Granny's voice but coming to her far faster than the old mare could have possibly been speaking. Maps of Pony anatomy, the characteristic growth patterns analyzed down to the cellular level, the location and function of every organ and tissue as plain to her as cupcake recipes. A vast Mind accessible to her, the combined and preserved knowledge of a millennia-old super-technological civilization that had spanned a whole Solar System in a now-vanished worldline. The World That Was Lost ... but had been saved, backed up, and one day would be restored ... by Something ...
My Sire ..., Pinkie briefly thought, but this thought was so awesome in its implications that it directly conflicted with what the Intruder had taught her -- that she was just a silly, helpless little Party Pony, rather than something transcendent, that there was really nothing special about her -- that she clamped down hard on this line of thought lest the internal conflict distract her from the important thing she meant to do. For a moment, the wards of the Intruder tried to check her from her action ...
Pinkie tapped into the Love and Loyalty from Rainbow Dash, combined it with the Laughter from the party, and by dint of both main force and misdirection staved off the compulsions that throughout her mind were rising to full alert, trying to prevent her from using her power in this fashion. That use of power was reserved for the Intruder itself, to do its bidding, to extend and cement its control over ... but her mind hurt when she tried to think that thought.
Something surged through to aid her.
Don't try to get fully loose yet, my Pink Daughter, the Something said, in a voice full of caring. The Shadow Vice has finally made a fatal error, and the moment of your full freedom approaches -- but not now. Help your friend for now. Be true to her. I shall protect you while you do this.
Pinkie nodded.
The pressure of compulsion was lifted. With her full intellect, Pinkie integrated diagnosis, knowledge, and probability. She Wished.
Forces which not even the Age of Wonders in its final moments had fully understood fountained forth from her, affecting multiversal worldlines on a massive scale, yet with the delicacy of a surgeon. Tremendous quantities of virtual particles appeared from Nothingness, interacted, producing showers of daughter particles, canceled each other out, yet not entirely -- the asymmetries nudging probability in the directions she desired. Her mind easily formed the necessary images, playing the incredibly-involved Finemare Diagrams with the same skill she did any and all musical instruments, in what was but the most trivial manifestation of her true Talent, which was to manage the Party that was the webwork of worldlines in Creation.
Rainbow Dash had not had a medical checkup in almost a year, Pinkie's power verified. In that year her diet and hormonal balance had changed, she had encountered new experiences (within her, the part which had normal Pony emotions giggled happily at the precise nature of some of those experiences), and she had completed most of her final growth from adolescence. It was hardly beyond probability that a final burst of growth would permit an answering final burst of healing, allowing her to recover from at least some of the damage done to her in that long-ago fight.
Hardly beyond probability. So it could be True, and without visible Paradox.
A final effort of realization on Pinkie's part.
And it was True.
The Wish had been completed, and with only trivial strain to the continuum.
The flare of Chaos magic from Pinkie Pie was very minimal.
But not impossible to notice.
***
Sitting on Pinkie's other side, Twilight Sparkle's eyes widened, and muscles on her back and around her barrel tensed. If she'd had wings, they would have flared at that moment.
What just happened? she wondered. She turned to regard Pinkie Pie narrowly. It was much like what she'd sensed from Pinkie around the time they fought that Hydra, but much, much stronger.
"Pinkie Pie?" she asked.
Pinkie turned to regard her, smiling at her with both her mouth and her guileless blue eyes.
"Yes?" Pinkie replied.
"Did you do something just then?" Twilight knew better than to try to get too specific. Pinkie's power had a way of protecting itself.
"Just looking after Dashie," Pinkie replied. "Her old ouchies."
"Oh," said Twilight. "How've they been?"
"Getting better," said Pinkie, smiling even more widely. "Better and better every day."
"I'm glad to hear that," said Twilight. She meant it. Rainbow Dash had once been in some dreadful fight, from which she still carried the scars. Twilight knew that they still pained Dashie from time to time.
Now that Pinkie was Dashie's fillyfriend, Pinkie was probably noticing this too and using her own unique abilties to ease Dashie's pain. Since those very same abilities had on more than one occasion saved Twilight's own life, and both Pinkie and Dashie were among her own best friends, Twilight entirely approved of the situation.
"I'm getting better too," Pinkie randomly said. And then something else, which Twilight couldn't quite catch. Though she might have heard the word. But it made no sense.
Who was "Minty?"
***
No!
Cloud Kicker's wings flared with the alarm of the being within her. She stared right across the great feast hall to the place where the Element Bearers sat together.
What had Pinkie just done? It shouldn't be possible!
Pinkie Pie was hers. Pinkie had been hers since their encounter after the Nightmare Night party of 1495. Hers, in the usual sense of a sexual conquest (and that in itself had been delectable ... Pinkie had been so cute at fourteen, once Winning had finished fixing her mind so that the frightened filly had begun to enjoy it) ... and in the more important sense that Winning had fed on her Element and spread its glorious Essence into her soul. Pinkie still had her powers ... could still use them for important purposes and to defend herself and others from anyone save Cloud Kicker herself ... but Winning had made damned sure to sever Pinkie's emotional and psychic connections to her own family. And most especially to her Sire, the Paradise Entity.
Pinkie was one of the few forces Winning had seemed to truly fear. Rainbow's blind Loyalty had been defeatable first in direct physical combat and then by erosion through the infliction of self-loathing. Princess Celestia was too pure to even notice her, and she had managed to Touch Princess Luna earlier this very year -- the Winningness was within her, growing through her soul, slowly drawing her back down into the Shadows, the truth of her corruption utterly unguessed by the Moon Princess. Generosity and Honesty sensed something wrong in herself, but thought that it was pure lechery, rather than the primal essence of Lust. The naive, nerdy Twilight Sparkle could not even begin to understand what Cloud Kicker was in truth.
But Pinkie -- Laughter -- she could have spoiled everything. She could have warped reality and, with the aid of her Sire, directly defeated Winning. So she had to be neutralized before the Elements even met up. What Pinkie had told her about most of the other worldlines only confirmed the wisdom of her decision. It had been a tough fight, but a necessary one.
Her eyes narrowed as she regarded the little pink party pony. Not now, she thought. Not now, when I am so very close to my triumph. So close to Ascension.
One more year, and I'll have the power I need.
"Sweetie?"
The voice was high and childlike, but with a throatiness which made it obvous that its owner was no child. Cloud Kicker turned to regard Derpy Hooves.
Cloud felt an uncharacteristic rush of warmth and caring. Derpy, she thought fondly. My true friend. Desiree Doo. When I have won my victory, you shall be high at my side, my own Loyalty, the only Loyalty who has ever loved me. And you shall be at the head of your clan -- they shall pay dearly for having cast you out.
You'd be horrified if I told you this. You've never cared for yourself, only for others -- for me, for Sparkler, for Muffin. You don't want revenge on those who have wronged you; only happiness for those you love.
You are truly good, she thought. Your rejection by Equestria is proof that this is a sick and flawed society. I shall make a better Equestria when I rule. Certainly, a far less hypocritical one.
But to win I have to keep my Laughter under control, she reflected. And the harness seems to be slipping.
I'll have to do something about that.
"Aw, nothing," Cloud Kicker replied, smiling warmly at Derpy Hooves. "Just thinking about my old friend Pinkie Pie. She's really having a good time at the party!"
"Oh yeah," Derpy giggled. "Pinkie loves parties!" She leaned and bumped Cloud's side. "I love her parties too. She's nice and fun!"
"Yep," agreed Cloud. "Nice and fun."
***
Princess Celestia gazed up below half-lidded eyes at Pinkie Pie.
That had been a noticeable flare of power. Pinkie had done something, some sort of Wishing, and stronger than she'd ever seen Pinkie do.
There had been a taste in that of something very old, too. Something from before Celestia's own current Incarnation, before even Sundreamer, and sideways.
Something Star-Catcher had known very well.
Is Pinkie growing into her true Self? Celestia wondered. Really, I expected her to have done so by now. She's certainly shown enough power before now, when she's had to do so.
Something's been wrong in the land, she reflected. For a while now, some half a decade before Luna returned. Something dark, something twisted. But it doesn't smell quite like the Night Shadows ...
She turned to look at Luna. Her Sister had agreed to come to the celebration, but seemed strangely-subdued. She'd been getting so much better, growing into her power -- but in the last few months she'd relapsed. She'd become melancholy, caring less and less about her military reforms. Less and less about Twilight Sparkle.
You're giving up again, Celestia thought. Something darkens your soul. Something about which you do not wish to speak with me. Something of which you are ashamed. Something for which you fear I might despise you.
O Sister, do you not know how wonderful you are, how noble, how good? Do you not know that there is nothing you could do for which I would despise you? You are a heroine -- I but a schemer.
Her mouth tightened, her jaw set in determination.
I shall not lose you again, as I did once before, she vowed. I shall find out the source of your sadness, and I shall help you love yourself.
Pinkamena Diane Pie, I hope that you really are coming into your inheritance. For I shall have great use of your aid, against this invisible corruption.
Something is spreading to threaten us, to threaten all my little Ponies. And I shall not let it triumph.
I stand between my little Ponies and the foe. As always.