This was intentional, of course. She hadn't run full-speed into Zecora's hut while blindfolded for no reason, nor had she escaped the infuriated Zebra's curses and charms for naught. It just... wasn't quite what she had expected.
There was no outline, rippling air, or faint shadow where she held her hoof in front of her face. No, it was as if it wasn't even there - just the dirt road leading to Ponyville. Her whole body was like this, including her eyelids, meaning she could still see just fine with her eyes closed. And that whole part just seemed wrong for some reason.
It took a while for her to figure out how to walk like this. All the muscle memory was still there, but if she thought about it too hard, and started to wonder where her hooves were - ow! She'd trip over herself and fall. She still left hoofprints, but those would disappear a minute or so after she made them.
Oh, and that was the other thing. She wasn't just invisible - she couldn't make any sound either. Hoofsteps muffled, voice silent, even her 32-pounder party cannon barely let out a 'puff' when fired.
Still, she tried waving and saying 'hi!' to everypony she met in town, but none of them noticed her. Occasionally her heart would jump when a pony looked straight at her, or noticed a breeze when she passed, but the most they'd do is shake their head, or ruffle their feathers, and move on. Nopony knowing she was there - it was starting to make her sad.
What did she do when she felt sad? Why, she spent time with her friends, of course!
Only problem: everypony in Ponyville was her friend. That didn't narrow it down one bit. She thought about spending time with her best friends, with whom she'd shared countless hours of play and laughter, but that still only narrowed it down to a few hundred, some of whom had just passed her without noticing.
"Ah," she said, "I should find my ultra super-duper friends!" Of course, none of the ponies around her heard any of it.
Nevertheless, it was a good idea. There were only five ultra super-duper friends in Ponyville, and they tended to cope with her weirder moments better than the average pony. It didn't take long before she found one of them, hauling a wagon full of apples towards market square, with her distinctive hat atop her head: Applejack! She was the perfect mare for the job!
Pinkie simply walked up beside her and shouted into her ear, as she often did, "HEY APPLEJACK!"
No reaction.
She tried again, jumping up and down and screaming, "APPLEJACK! APPLEJACK! APPLEJA-A-ACK!" - but Applejack just kept moving, oblivious to the nonexistent racket.
It seemed shouting and jumping around really wouldn't solve this problem, which was definitely a first for Pinkie Pie. She hopped onto the apple wagon and thought about her dilemma extra hard for a moment. Applejack noticed the extra weight, but, after a quick inspection of the wagon, just shrugged and kept moving.
They soon arrived at the market stand, which Applebloom was running - with only a little help from Big Macintosh. What a strong young filly! Her next birthday was less than a year away, so Pinkie hoped she could get this invisibility problem fixed before that.
With the three of them starting to unload the wagon, Pinkie Pie hopped off, to get out of their way - and the movement was noticed again, but again waved off. She could still touch things just fine, but the fact hadn't really occurred to her until just then. Curiously, she poked Applejack on the shoulder.
Applejack merely turned, looked through Pinkie, and wondered aloud, "Huh?"
"What?" Applebloom asked.
"... Nothin'," she responded, but Pinkie poked her again, and she suddenly jumped and shouted, "Who's prankin' me?!"
A dozen ponies around the market turned in reaction to her outburst, and she retreated, quietly trying to explain what was happening to Applebloom and Big Macintosh. Pinkie prepared to poke a third time, as it had so far been the only thing to get a reaction, but it was all interrupted by a white mare rushing over.
"Applejack, Applejack!" she cried - it was Rarity! Score! With two of Pinkie's ultra super-duper friends here, surely she could work something out!
But her hopes were dashed when she realized what Rarity was telling them: "Have you heard? There's a ghost in the market!"
All of them froze - including Pinkie, though nopony else noticed. Applejack stated, not quite a question, "a ghost."
"Indeed!" Rarity said. "Or a poltergeist, more like. Some nasty haunting spirit. I hear it's tripping ponies, knocking things over, all silent and invisible - only leaving hoofprints behind."
Pinkie Pie stood, dumbfounded. What kind of mean old spirit would do those things? This pony must have been a serious case of nastiness in life if even their ghost was this rude!
Applebloom voiced the question on everypony's mind: "What do we do?"
This shook Applejack out of her petrified stance, and she reasoned, "Well, just stay calm, everypony. And just think for a minute, you hear? It might could be all exaggerated, or a regular sort of magic, or even a prank. Maybe once we're done here, I can ask-"
"Hay," Applebloom interrupted, "weren't you just sayin' somethin' about a prank? You think...?"
Rarity cleared her throat. "Pardon me, Applejack, have you had a run-in with this ghost?"
Applejack looked deep in thought, and pushed her hat away as she scratched her head. "Hmmm. You know..."
But Pinkie Pie wasn't quite listening. Had this ghost been haunting Applejack this whole time, without Pinkie even noticing? What a terrible thing! Here she was, so very ghost-like, and she couldn't even protect an ultra super-duper friend from a ghost. She sat, even sadder now, and pawed at the ground.
"-Wait," spoke Big Mac, cutting through the din - everypony looked to him, even Pinkie. He pointed in Pinkie's direction - through her, of course - and asked, "What's that?"
Pinkie Pie stood to look behind her, and there came sudden, piercing screams:
"Hoofprints!"
"It's the ghost!"
"RUN AWAY!!!"
All at once, the market was pandemonium. Stalls were forgotten, if not clambered over; carts still hitched to their panicked drafts crashed into others; and all around was dust and noise and the rumble of stampede.
And then...
Nothing.
All that remained of her friends was Applejack's signature hat, left behind. She leaned down to pick it up, and chuckled around the brim as she realized.
Pinkie Pie found herself wandering around Ponyville, dismayed at its abandoned appearance. It was almost as if everypony had become as invisible as her - but really, they were just hiding from a ghost. She could see the ruffling of curtains, hear the battening of doors and windows, and eyes peering through cracks, which, upon noticing her hoofprints, hid away even further.
Or maybe they were noticing her hat. Applejack's hat. It would have been mean to leave it in the dirt, so she wore it, if only be for a little while. It made her laugh - how silly it must have looked! A hat just floating there! But it couldn't quite cheer her up. Even her own laughing was silent to her.
Here and there, she remembered where she was going: up to the Apple farm, to give the hat back, or at least leave it on a fence-post where Applejack might find it later. It was just hard to get around such an empty place. She navigated not by landmarks, but smiles.
Eventually, she did find the path out to the countryside, and followed it for long enough that her mind started to wander elsewhere.
Would she ever find a cure for her invisibility? Or was Pinkie doomed to forever go unseen, unheard, and unnoticed?
The line of thought really ruined her mood, which had not at all been in a need for ruining lately. If she remained invisible forever, how could she make ponies laugh? Perhaps, if she kept herself from tripping ponies and knocking things over and doing all those other rude poltergeist-y things, the ponies of Ponyville would gradually come to appreciate the local "ghost". And maybe she could even make ponies laugh, still, by doing things that an invisible, silent pony could still do. Like... juggling! Or playing pranks! Maybe if she did the right variety of these things, ponies would even remember that it was her, and that would - if she dared imagine it - break the curse!
That did it! Pinkie was starting to feel much better about her predicament. All she had to do was focus on what made her special, and help other ponies see the fun in things, and everything would be al-
WOOSH! A multi-coloured streak blew past her, nearly knocking her hat off. What the hay?
In the distance, towards where the streak had flown, Pinkie spotted a blue pegasus - well, of course! It was one of her ultra super-duper friends Rainbow Dash!
She didn't have much in the way of preparation, but now was as good a time as any to try out her plan. She picked a rock out of the ground, found an errant pine cone, and dug up a clod of dirt, and started trying to juggle all of it - but she was hit again by another blast of wind as Rainbow flew past her, even closer this time.
"Hey, what gives!?" she shouted on reflex, knowing all the same that it wouldn't be heard. And Rainbow didn't hear it. She just reared up for another pass.
It seemed, as she approached, that Rainbow was trying to snatch the hat, but the way she was heading, she'd crash into Pinkie as well. It was all she could do to dodge and hold on tight, but the passes kept getting lower, and closer, and tighter, and faster, and eventually Pinkie was surrounded by a kaleidoscopic tornado.
"What's going on!?" Rainbow Dash asked, to the hat, mainly.
"I could ask you the same question!" Pinkie replied - unheard.
Rainbow was already continuing, "Some magic or something, I bet. Well, you ain't seen nothin' yet! I'm not leaving without my friend's hat!"
The chaotic attempts to capture the hat, and injure Pinkie Pie, redoubled, beyond the point where Pinkie could consistently avoid the charges. In a desperate last measure, Pinkie retrieved her 32-pounder party cannon and fired it into the whirlwind. It wouldn't harm her friend - maybe another pegasus, but not Rainbow, she was sure of that - but it wouldn't have done her much good either.
At this caliber, and at this range, anything was a direct hit. Rainbow, blasted away by an invisible and silent force of confetti, carved a crater into the ground where she landed. She emerged angry, but dazed and confused, and quite far away.
Now was Pinkie's chance! She dove into the grass surrounding the field, and galloped into the forest, and hid under a ball of roots for a while, until she was fairly sure that Rainbow wouldn't find her again.
She finally let out a shuddering breath. She'd had tough crowds, but this was ridiculous!
With Rainbow Dash patrolling the skies, the Apple farm didn't seem like such a good destination anymore, even though all she really wanted was to deliver the hat. Oh, she should have just dropped it on the ground and let Rainbow have it! But, under attack, she hadn't had the time to think clearly.
What next? Well, she needed to find another ultra super-duper friend, one who wasn't hiding from ghosts or hunting a magical hat-thief. That left two options.
The nearest was Fluttershy. Oh Fluttershy! She would fright easily, but was still relatively calm, and maybe wouldn't right away think a ghost was haunting her.
But... that just didn't sit right with her. All of her ideas had gone wrong so far, in spectacular fashion, and she didn't want to bring this mess on Fluttershy as well.
That left Twilight. Of course! That should have been her first idea! Twilight wasn't afraid of ghosts, or magic, or maybe anything. And she was certainly smart enough to figure things out and have her own ideas on how to cure this problem, or at least stop it from getting much worse.
So she snuck off, back to Ponyville, avoiding flat and open areas, but making a line straight to the library. If she could just get a hold of Twilight her troubles would soon be at an end.
Twilight Sparkle was just getting some bookkeeping finished when she heard the doorbell ring. "Just a minute," she called, as she tabulated the final numbers, making sure everything was in order. Finally, she looked up to an empty library.
"Huh," she said, and didn't know quite what to do for a moment.
First, she went up to the door and looked outside. Had somepony poked their head in, only to leave? Not that she could see - the streets outside were empty.
Well, that was a little strange! But it wasn't worth thinking too much about, Twilight thought. Maybe she'd only imagined the bell that time. However, on her way back in, she noticed a hat hung up next to the door - Applejack's hat - and when she returned to her desk, she noticed her logbook was open to a blank page. Now this was suspicious.
"Hello?" she asked the room, though not really expecting a reply, so to say. After that, she closed the book, and took a step back, observing. It seemed these unusual events struck when she wasn't paying attention. If she could only see it when it occurred...
There! The book was open again! She tried not to react too strongly, but instead crept slowly towards it, hoping to catch it in the act and maybe figure out what was going on. She was about a leg away from it when she was stopped by something pressing against her barrel. She looked down, seeing nothing, and so glanced up again, and saw a quill running itself against the page. She gasped! Not the page!
Twilight wanted to put an end to this affront to her logbook, but she was again stopped from moving forward. This gave her time, thankfully, to notice that the quill was not just animating itself chaotically over the paper, but writing in a messy, if legible, hoof.
She was just barely able to catch the end of it before the ink fizzled away:
Hey Twilight, it's me, Pinkie!
... Pinkie?
Twilight groaned, "Pinkie!"
The quill wrote:
Sorry!
"What's even happening right now?" Twilight asked. "Where are you? And why are you writing with invisible ink?"
I'minvisible! It was an accident! Sorry!!!!!!!!!
Twilight swept the quill away from the page with an aura, just to stop Pinkie from writing those exclamation marks forever. She tried to take a deep breath. "Okay. You're invisible. And this was-" deep breaths "- an accident. Okay. What do you - what do I - what do you want me to do, Pinkie?"
The writing resumed, but only once Twilight let go of the quill and allowed it to return to the page.
I don't know! I thought you'd have some idea???
Twilight sighed, but stopped it from becoming another groan. As hard as it was to believe in the moment, this was not the weirdest thing Pinkie had ever done. She just wished it had not come on the tail of a long list of comparably weird things, each more difficult to predict than the next, and all a quest and a half to deal with.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, I'll help. I just have to find some anti-invisibility spell and cast it on you." She was just about to search her index when she realized the error. "Um, wait, Pinkie. Is there anything else you can tell me about this? Like how it happened, or any other details?"
She watched the quill scrawl across the page at ferocious speed, regaling her in an unbroken, rapidly disappearing sentence that could only have come from the hoof of one Pinkie Pie. It began somewhere with a blindfold, ran through the myriad events of the day, and eventually came out the other side with an actually useful detail:
then I ran into you and oh, yeah, I can't make any sound either! Isn't that weird?
"Okay, okay, that's good enough, Pinkie," she said. "I think I got the gist. Now just... wait here, I'll see what I can find."
After what must have been nearly an hour of searching, Twilight managed to find an anti-concealment spell, which would remove both invisibility and inaudibility, in some dusty old tome with half the pages still sealed together. Perhaps the lack of need for these spells was a good thing, really.
After some discussion over the logbook, Twilight managed to convince Pinkie to stand in the center of the library foyer, so that the spell wouldn't be fouled up by surrounding objects, while she charged it - and had her wear Applejack's hat, to make for a better target.
But it did foul up, almost instantly after she fired it. Not only was Pinkie Pie not visible, but the hat had gone invisible, too. Only seconds passed before a set of hoofprints appeared around the floor - in a sense. Really, the floor disappeared, as if painted so by the hoofprints, and this invisibility spread outwards like creeping frost, such that moments later only the soil beneath it was visible.
Some letters appeared on the logbook, just long enough for Twilight to read:
Oh no!
... before that, too, disappeared, along with the quill, and the ink bottle, and the desk, and the floor under the desk, and the books on shelves nearby
"Oh, this is bad," Twilight said, and repeated for good measure, "This is bad!"
Was it the book? That damned book! She searched its pages, and others, for some answer - rushed upstairs to escape the creeping curse - but the pages too were fading away. She discovered with horror that her own hooves were transparent, and losing colour fast. There wasn't much time to fix this before - before - she dared not imagine it! And she didn't have time, anyway!
Another spell, then. A solution was necessary, but she'd settle for a delay, or a workaround, or anything to keep her from disappearing altogether. Finally she found one, and committed it to panicked memory just as the book faded away.
That's all she could see - at first. But then, suddenly, her muzzle! Oh, what a beautiful thing! She never knew she'd miss seeing her own muzzle between her eyes until it up and disappeared on her. And then a shock of curly hair appeared, and some furry appendages, and then wouldn't you know it, she was all there again!
Twilight's spell had worked - sort of. Pinkie Pie was visible again, and she could hear herself as she giggled at the sound of her own giggling. But nothing else was visible.
Where was she? Well, there was a floor. And as she walked around, she found that her hoofsteps - which made noise again! Clippity-clop! - appeared beneath her, in the colour and pattern of... floor. That was odd. Even odder than the invisibility, really, but maybe she had just gotten used to it.
More and more of the floor became visible, and then eventually the whole room, and Pinkie realized she was still in Twilight's library. Twilight was at first nowhere to be seen, but she faded into view a few minutes later, tucked into a corner upstairs, holding a book to her face, and-
Crying?
"Twilight," Pinkie asked, "what's wrong?"
"It failed," she said, muffled behind the book. "I failed."
Pinkie Pie looked around them. "Um, no it didnt?"
Twilight dropped the book from her face and looked - or tried to look. Her eyes had this faded quality to them that made her look blind, but slowly they gained their colour back, and she met Pinkie's gaze.
All she could say was, "huh?"
Pinkie Pie jumped for joy, and yanked her into a hug. "You fixed it, you smarty-pants! I knew you could do it!"
Twilight squirmed in her grasp. "But why is everything so dark, and... strange?"
The library was indeed dark... Darker than usual, at least. And it did also have this strange quality to it. Like when the Moon was behind clouds.
But she could see! And that meant she could see the bright side, of course. "It's not dark and strange, Twilight, it's atmospheric!"
That made Twilight groan - which was almost as good as a laugh, in Pinkie's book. Then she seemed to have an idea, and finally wrenched herself out of the hug, before running to the door and peering out.
"This is bad," she whispered.
Pinkie hopped up next to her to see what she was looking at, only to find that she couldn't. There was nothing to look at! Just them and the library, floating in a great sea of dark, strange... atmosphere. Only the dirt at the threshold was visible beyond them, and then only just - and creeping outwards a little, slow and steady.
Before she even knew it, Twilight was poring into that book again, flipping through pages, muttering to herself, until finally she stopped and looked as if she'd seen a ghost. Hah!
"We're-" she started, but couldn't get through it for the trembling. "I think we're still invisible."
That didn't make any sense to Pinkie. So she said, "That didn't make any sense to Pinkie."
"I'm serious."
"So is-"
"I'm serious, Pinkie!" Twilight screamed, sounding as if she was about to cry. Pinkie Pie decided it was best not to interrupt this time. "I think we - I screwed up, with that spell. Both of those spells. The first one was just a misapplication, taking it to be formulaic magic rather than something more primal, which is what this has to be. So now it's spreading. That's - that's awful, of course. The second - well, I think it really did have an anti-invisibility effect in the worst way - it made it so we can't see anything that's not invisible. Not the rest of Ponyville, not the sky, not even the Sun!
"Now this is just going to spread, and cover everything, and - and I really screwed up this time, Pinkie!"
Pinkie Pie tried her best to pay attention to what Twilight was saying, and understand what she meant, and it was mostly a success. She got the beginning part, and the middle part. And most of the ending part. But the very end, she didn't quite get. "How is this a screw-up, Twilight?"
Twilight laughed, almost, but it wasn't a pleasant kind of sound. "How? Didn't I just say how? This is going to spread everywhere! All over Equestria, even! But I guess-" She managed to calm down a little. "I guess I have time to think of a fix. It wasn't spreading that fast. And I can see my books again. Just. This sucks."
"I still don't get it, Twilight. Once it spreads everywhere, won't everypony still be able to see each other, since they'll all be invisible, like us?"
"That's not-"
Twilight paused.
"But-"
She paused again.
"Well, you should-"
"Just-"
"What about-"
After a few more stops-and-starts, Pinkie imagined smoke pouring out of the unicorn's ears, and giggled. That seemed to knock Twilight out of her loop.
"I guess you're not wrong, Pinkie."
The compliment, as much as it was one, gave her a big smile. But she wanted to impress Twilight some more, so she did some more thinking on the subject. "Although... now that I'm prognosticating on it, and such and so forth..."
"...What?"
"The sky is kinda far away, isn't it?"
Twilight had to think about that for a bit before answering. "I suppose it is."
Pinkie rubbed her forehead as she called upon more smart-pony speak. "Thus... and therefore... it would probably take a really, re-e-eally long time for the anti-invisibility-stuff to reach all that... stuff... up there."
"You mean like the Sun and Moon?"
"Yeah, those things!"
Twilight sighed, and grimaced. "If we really do go with this solution of letting it sort itself out, I guess we could get help from the Princesses."
"Woo!"
"But", Twilight warned, "first, we'd have to admit what we did, that led to this whole mess...
"And then we'd have to convince them not to banish us."
Zecora eyed the shelves of her hut, lined with new pottery and glassware. Her stocks were neat and orderly. Too orderly, she thought, as she nudged a jar out of alignment.
She was used to organized chaos. It hadn't been the same ever since that moro- no, that good friend of hers - had charged through. Zecora had cursed up a storm in that mare's wake, for all the trouble that spilling most of her ingredients had brought her, but ultimately it might have been a blessing in disguise, for it gave her an excuse to clean up. And no longer would she store potions in crystal-glass bottles, or spices in pouches of leaf-leather and bark. No, she'd put these agents in containers that could survive more than a slight breeze. That day of destruction had not been a slight breeze, but maybe it wouldn't have been such a headache if she'd done this years ago.
Absently, she noticed the windows brighten, and peered out to see the weather - but there was no weather. And in the direction of Ponyville, there was no forest, either. Just a great, blank expanse. Stepping outside, it became clear - the invisibility was spreading.
Well, she figured that might happen, so she had prepared the cure for it earlier. She took the old bottle out from its hanging-place, and held it up, and waited - just until the moss under her hooves turned to glass - and then dashed it onto the ground.
In effect, it reminded her of a charlatan's act - a sudden yank of a tablecloth without disturbing the glassware above it. The strange clarity of the ground and the surrounding forest receded just as suddenly, and things appeared back to normal. She could see distant landscapes come back into view - even that precarious palace upon the mountain, which she had somehow forgotten was there.
With that done, Zecora returned to her hut, and resumed her final task before she could be, in her estimation, back in order. A sizable board of bark was the canvas, bleached white by a simple acid, and black pitch-paint formed the letters. She knew the Equestrian script, but just hadn't had much practice writing in it lately, so it was slow-going - but eventually it was complete.
She hung the sign by the door, and found it fit to purpose. Meant for a particular friend of hers, it read:
