Smells Like Nostalgia

by Akumokagetsu

First published 6th of December, 2013

Doug Walker, aka The Nostalgia Critic, prides himself on sensible, rational and introspective reviews. Pinkie Pie is none of those things, and he can't get her out of his house.

It's a difficult line of work, being The Nostalgia Critic.
There are all sorts of dangers involved; things like multiple explosions from sheer rage, M. Night Shyamalan, invading insane doctors, bat credit cards, people whining at him to review things.

Oh, and Pinkie Pie.

He was surprised that he had any sanity left beforehand.
She's here for the rest of it.

Review This

The life of Doug Walker was a fairly ordinary one.

“Hel~lo, I’m the Nostalgia Critic,” Doug Walker proudly announced in front of the bathroom mirror, spitting toothpaste into the sink. “I remember it so you don’t have to!”

Screw it if it was narcissistic; practice makes perfect.

He quickly gargled, rinsed, flossed and performed a variety of other extremely important oral hygiene exercises, and had just flicked the bathroom light switch off when he heard his front door closing.

Doug froze, thinking quickly.

He had remembered to lock the door… there was always the occasional extra creepy fan.

Or Missus Dinkly down the street. He swore that the nearly blind old woman was out to get him, but nobody ever believed it.

“Rob?” Doug called out cautiously, snagging a baseball bat from the corner of his room and cautiously padding toward the door on bare feet. Thankfully, the carpeting quieted his footsteps, and it didn’t occur to him until immediately after realizing this that he already gave away the fact that he was aware that someone else was in the house by shouting out the name of his brother.

Fucking genius.

“Rob, is that you? Seriously, man, you know how I feel about late visits…!” he held the wooden bat before him protectively as he inched forward, wishing he had his phone in his pajamas; but, no, he just had to leave it on the kitchen table.

The room directly adjacent to the front door.

Doug jumped around the corner, wielding the baseball bat before him and shouting “AH-HA!”

There was nobody there.

The front door was still locked.

Deadbolt, door lock, chain and all. Every window was in place, nothing was out of the ordinary at all. He let the bat fall lax in his fingers, snickering and silently scolding himself. What was he, five? Jumping at little noises and grabbing a bat – something that stupid when he should have remembered the pistol. It was probably just the neighbors slamming a car door or something – or Missus Dinkly. That thought actually made him a little more nervous.

She was a mean old lady.

Shaking his head, Doug scratched his thin beard and turned on the spot, slinging the bat over his shoulder.

“Hi there!”

Doug shrieked in a very un-manly manner, dropping the bat over his shoulder with a clatter as it hit the floor; shortly just before he did, coincidentally. He scrambled backwards against the wall, his heart rate skyrocketing as he desperately tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

“What the fuck?” he breathed with wide eyes, both shocked and confused.

“No,” the little pink mare sitting with a calm grin in front of him shook her head. “Pinkie Pie!”

“… ‘The fu~uuuuck.” Doug stared, certain that he had just suffered an aneurism.

“Hey, aneurism,” Doug said weakly. “Hand me the phone, would you? I need to call an ambulance.”

“D’aww!” Pinkie beamed. “I gave you the ‘hnnnnnngs’?”

Doug blinked, the apparition before him still not vanishing as he obviously wasn’t dead of brain hemorrhage just yet.

“… Sorry, what?” he cleaned out his ear with his little finger.

“Whoops, silly me!” the vibrantly pink bubbly pony stuck her face far too close to his own, causing him to lurch backwards and bump his head against the wall. “I didn’t even introduce myself yet, and that’s, like, super not nice! My name is Pinkie Pie! Nice to meet you!”

She jammed a hoof out and nearly struck him in the head with it. When he simply sat in a daze, she grabbed his hand and began shaking it furiously, a goofy grin plastered onto her face.

“I heard all about you, Mister Nostalgia!” the aptly named Pinkie giggled, repeatedly shaking his hand up and down as he stared. “As a matter of fact, you’re the one I’ve been looking for!”

Even when she released his hand (which he had no idea how she was even gripping with hooves) he continued shaking his hand up and down, unable to bring himself to blink. She was holding his hand. He could feel her shaking his hand and

“OH SWEET FUCKING JESUS!” Doug breathed, eyes widening even further. “It’s real – it’s real, it’s really really real!”

“Yeesh, somepony’s a little excitable,” Pinkie Pie rolled her eyes as Doug strained to keep his heart from shutting down, because it felt like his brain was doing just that.

“Talking pony!” Doug blurted. “Talking fucking pony, in my house!”

“Eeyup!” Pinkie said proudly. “I talk all the time – it’s lots of fun! Except for this one time,” she rambled. “I got my tongue stuck in jam jar; I mean, it was great for a minute, because, like, I love raspberry jam! But then, I couldn’t get my tongue out of the raspberry jam jar, and so all day, I was talking in raspberries! Ironic, huh?” she grinned, showing every white tooth.

Doug sat in stunned silence for a minute, the pony still not vanishing. It was slowly growing harder to ignore, and more difficult to believe that she wasn’t merely a hallucination. And it was definitely a ‘she’. The voice, the eyes, the way she behaved; Doug had no doubts on that.

Eventually, he pulled himself to his feet by the counter and thought, mind racing.

“Talking pony,” he said again in disbelief, staring at the pink mare.

“Pinkie Pie,” she pointed to herself again. “You’re a little slow on the uptake, aren’t ya?”

“… O-kay…?” Doug began gradually. “Pinkie Pie.” He took a deep breath, steeling his nerves and trying desperately to wake up, even though the multiple pinches on his arms weren’t doing any good and this situation didn’t make any sense. “Why are you in my house, and how did you get here?”

“Both excellent questions!” Pinkie bounced cheerfully. “I was looking for you, obviously. I heard through the grapevine that you can review things, and I’d be super de duper grateful if you’d your powers of criticism against the forces of evil!”

“… What.”

Doug deadpanned, and gave the pony a level look.

“Nostalgia powers!” Pinkie clapped her hooves together excitedly. “Those will be, like, awesome helpful!”

“What.”

Pinkie promptly passed him a hoof full of Q-tips, with no explanation as to where she got them.

“No, no, I heard you,” Doug pushed the ear cleaners away. “I just have no goddamned idea what you’re talking about.”

“Right!” Pinkie exclaimed. “There’s trouble brewing in Equestria, and Princess Celestia said that it was a really old enemy, and it gave her some nostalgia! So I thought, hey, you know what goes great with dandelion? Custard!”

“What?”

“And after that,” Pinkie blathered, toying with his phone. “I figured that the best course of action would be to find somepony who knows nostalgia really well – and a few left turns at Albuquerque, and here I am!”

“Give me that!” Doug snatched the phone from her hooves. “And that doesn’t explain anything because I didn’t understand half of what you just said!”

“Were you dropped on your head a lot as a colt?”

“No!” Doug jammed the phone in his pajama pockets. “I don’t know who ‘Celestia’ is, I don’t have ‘nostalgia powers’, or anything about ‘Equestria’, or dandelions, or Albuquerque – and you didn’t tell me how you got in my house!” Doug shouted, significantly unsettled by the staring pony.

She simply gave him a deadpan expression and pointed behind her.

“Through the door. Duh,” she rolled her eyes as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“The door is locked!”

“I locked it behind me!” Pinkie grinned.

“But it was locked before – that doesn’t – how in – why don’t you make sense!?”

“Because,” the mare shrugged. “Pinkie Pie.”

Doug sat down again hard, but at least managed to make it into the kitchen chair first.

Obviously, he’d completely lost his mind. Yeah, that was it. He had finally gone completely bonkers. Doug rubbed his aching temples, cracking one eye open and spotting the pink pony digging through his pantries.

“… What are you doing?” he groaned, thinking of the best way to call the police without sounding like a deranged lunatic.

Yeah, hi, nine one one? There’s this talking horse in my house –

*Click.*

Hello?

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Pinkie waved him off good naturedly. “Just working on some late-night snacking! Want some cupcakes?”

Before he could answer, the phone in his pocket began ringing loudly. With numb fingers, he dragged it out and pressed a couple of keys.

“Doug?”

“Kind of in the middle of a breakdown right now,” he answered, the familiar sound of Lindsey’s voice on the other end. The ‘Nostalgia Chick,’ as she had been named, was understandably confused.

“Okay, is this some kind of prank?” she asked. “Because I just got a call from your number with party invitations. At your place. From someone calling herself Pinkie Pie. Like, thirty seconds ago.”

Doug stared at the phone for a second, looking back at the pony who was busy stuffing a batch of chocolate chip cupcakes in his oven.

“When did you even –” he started, only for the phone to begin signaling an incoming call. “Hey, letting you go, I’ve got another call coming in.”

A couple of button presses later gave him the voice of someone just as confused as Lindsey.

“Dude, what the hell?”

“Say, Brad,” Doug said uncomfortably, a horrible thought occurring to him as several other calls began coming to him. “Did you just get a call for party invitations?”

“Yeah, about thirty seconds ago,” the reply came back. “Who the hell is Pinkie Pie, and do you even understand the concept of ‘beauty sleep’? Ah, who am I kidding, of course you don’t.”

Doug had a reply prepared as Pinkie Pie hummed a happy tune, watching her cupcakes slowly bake through the oven glass.

However, he opted to answer a different call instead.

“Har de har har, Doug,” the agitated voice came through the phone. “Frickin’ hilarious. Do you know what time of night it is?”

“Hang on Noah, I’ve got more calls,” he said distractedly, unable to take his eyes off of the pink anomaly. “Just checking, did you get a call from me a few minutes ago?”

“By that, you mean thirty seconds?” Noah answered. “Then, yes. And if you’re going to fuck around with soundboards, at least let me know where you got the damned things – I’ll admit, that sounded real as hell. I always guessed you were a closet Brony.”

“A what now?” Doug blinked, his attention going back to the phone.

The majority of Doug’s calls went something akin to this, each one just as confused (or thrilled and asking if they could accept the party invitations immediately, upon which he turned them down) as he went through call after call after call. In the meantime, Pinkie pulled her finished cupcakes from the oven, and Doug resisted the urge to ask her how in the hell each and every person insisted that she had personally called them all thirty seconds ago at the same time.

“For the fourth time, Lou, I do not know what you’re talking about,” Doug pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Hey, is that Linkara?” Pinkie Pie asked excitedly, stuffing another cupcake in her mouth and offering him one simultaneously. He politely declined, slightly revolted as flecks spewed from her mouth when she tried to talk. “Oh, bwuck yeph! I wuff dat guy!”

“Ew.” Doug wiped a bit of cupcake from his face, clicking the phone off before any more odd calls came through. Pinkie swallowed hard, looking in disappointment at him.

“Aw,” she moped. “And I was so ready to make ‘Fourth Wall’ jokes, too. Total buzzkill,” she narrowed her enormous blue eyes grumpily.

“Am I going to get a decent explanation at all today?” Doug asked in exasperation, honestly not expecting one.

“Well,” Pinkie drawled, tapping her chin with one hoof. “There are a couple of options. I could tell you that this is all a figment of your imagination…”

“Yes, that,” he nodded slowly. “Let’s go with that option, and I’ll go drink until I have even less of an imagination than Michael Bay.”

Pinkie Pie snorted, and said “Wow. That’s going to take a lot of cider.”

“What’s option number two?” Doug asked, rolling his hand through the air.

“Hmm…” Pinkie Pie grinned slyly and began to unlock his front door. “Let’s see what’s behind door number two, eh?”

She slowly pried it open, sunlight pouring in despite the fact that it was obviously nighttime, which he could see through the kitchen windows. He blanched in shock as a bright light filtered in, almost blinding him.

“Or you take the pink pill, and I show you just how deep the pony hole goes.” Pinkie winked at him.

“… Did you just make a Matrix reference, or was that some kind of ‘adult’ joke?”

“Who knows?” Pinkie cackled, bouncing out the door and vanishing into the bright light.

Doug considered himself to be a rational sort of man.

A reasonable one, a guy that preferred to pick the most sensible option in a situation. He was the kind of person that always favored the more logical choice whenever presented with decisions.

But really, what else could he have possibly done except for follow?

Author's Notes:

A PONY CREDIT CARD?!

Run, Critic, Run

Stepping out into the bright, cheery sunlight had been the easy part.

Adjusting to the unexpected and rather abrupt altercation to his perception… not so much.

When Doug had finally stopped screaming and pretending that he wasn’t clammily weeping into the knee high grass, Pinkie Pie kindly helped him stand up and dust his pajamas off to get a better look around.

“Welcome to Ponyville!” Pinkie threw her arm toward a rather bustling village filled with ponies in nearly every color of the rainbow.

“The door is gone,” Doug swiped in a deadened sense of shock at midair where his front door had once been. “The door is gone. The door is gone, the door is gone – how am I going to get back, the door is gone!”

“Aw, calm down!” the overjoyed mare bounced once, but her mane continued to spring long afterwards. “Getting back is easy peasy; we just need to get you to the princess and everything will be okie-dokie-lokie!”

Doug flipped his hands over a few times, examining the rather cartoonish look that seemed to have plastered itself over his entire body to match the world around him. The prospect of actually being a cartoon was just so strange, so surreal and bizarre that he hardly heard the little pink mare pushing him toward the busy community.

“-nd after that we’ll all have cupcakes!”

“What?” Doug blinked, jerking away from Pinkie and walking on his own, firm dirt meeting his bare feet as they walked down the main road and startled quite a number of stunned bystanders. “Yeah, sure. Absolutely.”

“Whee! That’s fantastic!” Pinkie Pie squealed in delight, springily hopping alongside him as nearly every single pony in their path fearfully scampered out of their way. “We’ll have everything right as rain in no time at all, you’ll see!”

Doug’s palm rubbed over his forehead a few times as they walked, the disbelief still weighing heavily on him.

“That’s it,” he muttered. “I’m on drugs. Somebody stuffed my lasagna full of crystal meth, and this is the result.”

“What’s that?” Pinkie Pie asked him cheerfully, spinning around to face him as she continued to trot backwards along the sidewalk.

“What’s what?”

“Crystal meth!” she asked with interest. “Is it a candy?”

“Uh… yeah,” he lied. “Nothing you’d like though-”

“Don’t be silly, I love all kinds of sugary treats!” Pinkie giggled, whirling back around and continuing her bouncy trot to who knew where. Doug considered informing her precisely what she was even talking about, but decided against it. He still had a few brain cells left, no reason to slaughter them yet.

He could save that for watching The Christmas Tree.

“… Where are we going again?” Doug scratched the back of his head, the warm sunlight pouring down on them and making him wish that he had thought to grab shoes first.

“Well, first we’ve got to take you to go see Twilight,” Pinkie said seriously. “And after that you can go see the princess.”

“Why? What’s the point? Who’s Twilight?” he inquired, more out of attempt to keep from thinking very hard about the situation lest the impossibility of it all result in a mental breakdown.

“Because Twilight is one of the ponies that knows the most about the invasions!” she explained, all previous seriousness vanishing in an instant. “Aside from Princess Celestia, I mean.”

“Then why are we wasting time scaring the crap out of a bunch of innocent townsfolk?” Doug jabbed a finger at a couple of terrified ponies trailing at a safe distance behind them.

“What, and skip all this necessary character development?” she snorted.

“DAMMIT PONY, TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER!”

“And here we are!”

Pinkie Pie gestured grandly up at a gnarled old tree that swayed gently in the breeze.

“That is a tree,” Doug deadpanned. “That is very much a tree.”

“And?” Pinkie urged him on. “Twilight’s in there, so let’s go see her!”

“Your friend lives in a tree?”

“It’s more of a house than a tree,” Pinkie explained.

“So which is it? A house or a tree?

“A library.”

“DAMMIT pony, will you please start making sense!”

The front door to Golden Oaks library creakily swung open, revealing a slightly scorched purple unicorn with a bright blue mane.

“Hey, Twi!” Pinkie waved cheerfully despite the fact that she was hardly a foot away. “When did you get the new manecut?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said with a frown, eyeing Doug in a way that he did not appreciate. “Is that the thing?”

“I’m a person, excuse me,” he frowned, crossing his arms defensively.

“Oh Celestia, it talks.” Twilight seemed a little put off by that.

“That was kind of my reaction,” Doug jabbed a finger at the still eagerly bouncing pink mare. “Is this Celestia person your god or something?”

“She’s the princess!” Pinkie elaborated unhelpfully.

Doug only stared at her for nearly half a minute.

“… Not that this hasn’t been riveting,” he drawled, dripping sarcasm. “But I kind of need to get back home before my brain melts.”

“Right – Mister Critic,” Twilight cleared her throat awkwardly. “I am not proud to announce that we have specifically sought your assistance-”

Doug didn’t hear most of this, as he too busy running away.

Author's Notes:

Please let me know if I've missed any typos!