It was the beginning of another gorgeous weekend in Ponyville. The air was warm, the sun was shining, and everypony in Ponyville was outside enjoying the weather. Everypony except one, that is.
Somewhere above the town, a lone gray-blue eye peered out at all the activity from behind a pair of curtains. Everypony seemed to be enjoying themselves. Everywhere the eye looked, ponies were out having fun and enjoying each others’ company. A pink Pegasus with blue hair was zooming around the sky doing flying acrobatics. A seafoam-green unicorn and a light yellow earth pony with magenta highlights in her indigo mane were walking side-by-side like they had been doing for as long as anypony could remember. A group of young foals were chatting amongst themselves in the middle of the town, and from the occasional backward glances at their flanks, there was no doubt as to the fact that they were talking about their newly-acquired cutie marks.
If curtains could slam, they certainly did then. “That’s right,” muttered the owner of the slate-blue eye under her breath. “When you’ve got it, flaunt it!” She looked at her clock. 11:45. Meh, as good a time to get up as any. She walked into her bathroom and brushed her teeth, then her hair (a redundant task, really, considering how flat and static it was to begin with). She looked in the mirror. An all-too-familiar look of glum apathy stared her back. One more day, she thought to herself. One more day of a hollow, meaningless existence alone. Heaving a sigh, Pinkamena Diane Pie turned around, exited the bathroom, and started to make her way downstairs.
Wait a second.
Pinkamena sniffed the air. What’s that smell?
It was faint, but it was definitely present. A warm smell, somehow familiar, but nothing that Pinkamena could put her hoof on at the moment. It was certainly not a smell that she usually had in her house—indeed, there was normally not much of a smell of anything in her house. She hardly ever opened any windows or even really used anything in her small kitchen other than the microwave.
The kitchen.
That smell!
It smells like…somepony is baking something!
Pinkamena, bewildered by the smell, continued to walk downstairs in a slow, suspicious fashion. Where the hay could this smell be coming fr—
“La, la-la-la la, la-la-la la!”
Pinkamena stopped. She could have sworn she heard somepony humming. After a short period of silence, she started slowly walking on again to her kitchen, becoming slightly more paranoid.
“La-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la-la!”
There it was again. A high, squeaky voice humming tunelessly—and it sounded like it was coming from the kitchen! Pinkamena, now more suspicious than ever, inched slowly toward the source of the sound. The smell had gotten stronger, and it was indeed coming from her kitchen. Her own kitchen. This was getting nothing short of creepy. Slowly, she inched toward the room. Slowly, she peered into the doorway.
A bright pink filly with a mane the color and texture of cotton candy was pulling a tray out of the oven. The strange filly turned to look at Pinkamena.
“Morning, sleepyhead!” the filly chirped.
Pinkamena stared at the stranger. The filly bounded up to her.
“I made you some muffins for breakfast!” the filly smiled. Pinkamena uttered something that sounded like it wanted to be a word, but got a case of stage fright and refused to be said in its entirety. “They’re fresh out of the oven, too!” the vivid stranger continued. “And that’s when muffins are the best, but you don’t want to eat them right after they come out because then they’d be too hot and then they’d burn your tongue, and that’s not fun at all, so you should probably let them cool off for about five minutes or so, so that when you eat them they’re still all warm and fresh and toasty and yummy!” Pinkamena, taken aback by this run-on sentence, gave the newcomer a look of equal parts confusion, suspicion and resentment. When she finally found her tongue again, the words she spoke were slow and deliberate.
“Who are you, and how did you get into my house?”
“Well, I tried your door, but it was locked, and you never leave windows open, and I didn’t want to break one because then somepony would have to clean up all that broken glass, and that’s not fun, especially when it gets in your hooves and then it hurts when you walk and you have to use tweezers to get it out, and you don’t have a chimney in your house, so I had to come in through the mirror!” The filly beamed once again at Pinkamena.
“The…mirror.” Pinkamena had started to get the sneaking suspicion that either she herself or the strange cotton-candy pony in front of her was completely insane.
“Uh huh!” beamed the strange pony. “You see, I was hopping around through time and space, when all of a sudden I came across this alternate universe and I saw you being all sad and I was all like ‘Awww, what a sad universe where I’m all mopey all day! And I didn’t want you to be such a great big Frowny McMopeyPants so I decided to hop in and cheer you up!”
“…Wait…what?!” Pinkamena tried but failed to make any sense out of the stranger’s rambling explanation.
“Oh, silly, don’t you see?” The filly began to rhythmically trot in place, and then she began to sing.
I was hopping around the multiverse and saw you feeling dooooooooown…
Pinkamena was becoming more bewildered by the second.
I couldn’t stand the sight of all your sadness and your froooooooowns…
I couldn’t let this happen to any alternate me...
So I popped in and dropped on by to help you, can’t you seeeeeeeeee?
“Wait—wait, hang on,” Pinkamena interrupted the stranger’s little song. “Are…are you saying that…that you’re me?!”
“Yeah! Well, I mean, I’m you from a different universe, but still!”
“Wha-” Pinkamena mouthed, before a look of realization slowly but surely crept across her face. “Ohhhh! I get it now!”
The stranger smiled at her once again.
“This,” Pinkamena continued, “has to be the number-one weirdest dream I have ever had! I’m going back to bed.” She turned around to start up her stairs again.
“Wait! Don’t! Then the muffins will get cold!” her doppelganger pleaded.
“I’m not hungry.” Pinkamena rolled her eyes.
“But Pinkie--”
Pinkamena stopped. She turned around and looked at the “other Pinkamena” with a bewildered expression.
“...‘Pinkie’? Since when has anypony ever called me that?”
“Well, that’s your name, isn’t it?”
“...Kind of?” Pinkamena raised an eyebrow.
“Pinkamena Diane Pie?”
“How...how do you know that!?” Pinkamena was beginning to feel extremely uneasy. She began to get the feeling that somehow this wasn’t a dream.
“I’m you, silly, remember?”
“Uh, no. I’m me, and you’re...whoever the hay you are. Aaand...I don’t know you, aaand...I’d really appreciate it if you got out of my house.”
“But Pinkie, don’t you remember the rock farm?”
The rock farm. Of course, she remembered it very well, although the less well she could remember it the more preferable to her. But she still had the memories. Memories of tedium, despair and resentment. Really not entirely unlike her current life.
“You remember Mama and Daddy and Inkie and Blinkie, don’t you? And the old house and the rock fields and the Sonic Rainboom?”
“Wait...the what??”
“The Sonic Rainboom! You know!” The brighter pony began to make a series of vocal sound effects which, as far as Pinkamena could tell, approximated the sound of a hummingbird exploding.
“And...” The smile suddenly vanished from the stranger’s face. “Oh, uh, I guess you don’t know, then,” she said with a nervous giggle. “...Hey, that would explain it, wouldn’t it?”
“Explain...what?” Suddenly, Pinkamena started to feel, although she didn’t know why, a good deal less suspicious.
“Everything! Why you’re so grumpy, why your mane’s so droopy...!” The bubbly newcomer suddenly gasped, her eyes focusing suddenly on something that was, or rather wasn’t, on Pinkamena’s flank.
“And why you’ve got no Cutie Mark!”
