Pinkie Sense and Pinkie Sensibility

The air is cool and still in the early morning haze. Clear dew clings to green leaves and little red bugs drink that dew as their first shot of espresso. The sky to the east is reddish, but paling rapidly as the sun ascends degree by gentle degree. You, however, are already out and about, making good use of the time you have been given to walk around Ponyville without being bothered. It's not that ponies in general are all that annoying, though. Really, you're just trying to have a moment of peace before a certain happy, peppy, perky-lurky-worky pony wakes up. And you don't dislike her, but right now is quality you time. Your locally-made sneakers squelch in the wet grass as you stop in your tracks beside the bakery.

A light switches on in the window of the loft of Sugar Cube Corner. Yep, she's probably heard you. That's your cue to wrap up your stroll and wait at home until you no longer have an excuse not to be outside. It's not like you have anything particularly good to eat at your house here in Ponyville. It once took an hour-long trek into the Everfree Forest to find any meat that was remotely edible — oddly enough, a bush that grew bouillon cubes — and you're certainly not going to take that risk again when there's readily-available oatmeal and eggs to be bought here in town. You take a moment to get your bearings and figure out which direction offers the quickest route home.

As one of the few omnivores ever to be encountered by the citizens of Ponyville, it only makes sense that you eat a shit-ton of eggs. Eggs for nights, eggs for days. You would have gotten sick of them long ago if there weren't so many ways to prepare them. Fruits and vegetables are also okay, and actually much tastier here than their equivalents back on Earth, but you will never stop having to explain why you haven't even touched the flowers you were so generously served. Your stomach grumbles, its small brain thinking along the same lines as your big one.

A creaking door signals to you that you've stood in uffish thought for slightly far too long, but before you can get a move on, a dramatic gasp permeates the otherwise silent morning.

“Dammit,” you say to yourself, fists clenched at your sides, your back to the bakery. Springy hooves sound and resound on the short stretch of dirt behind you like a tennis ball thrown against a balloon. An impossible sound befitting only the most improbable of colored horses. Before long, pink pone is standing in front of you, shivering in the chill of dawn.

“Hi Anon,” Pinkie Pie practically squeals. “Wow, what are you doing up so early? It's not even half past sun-up!”

You swallow your chances at an uneventful morning and choose your words carefully. “Not much, Panky. Just taking a walk.” You begin to head in a random direction away from her, noting with some small amount of perverse pleasure the way she winces when you mispronounce her name.

“Ooh, cool, can I walk with you?”

“I don't know,” you say, mentally thanking every English teacher you ever had, “can you?” And you continue walking. This seems to stump her long enough for you to get a good five meters' start on her. When she notices, though, she rushes to catch up to you.

“Yes, yes I can!” She grins. “So where are we going, Anon?”

“I was going to head to the fountain to eat a bag of pretzels,” you say as you pat your slightly bulging jacket pocket that sounds of crinkling plastic, “and then I was going back home to read, since there's no TV here.”

Pinkie giggles. “That sounds like fun! I mean, whatever 'tee vee' is must be super fun if reading books is a backup plan, but pretzels at the fountain is fun anyway!”

You sigh. “I only brought enough for me, Penka.” She winces, but returns to smiling again almost right away. Surreptitiously, you start patting her on the head, and she hums a bit as she unconsciously leans into it.

“Mmm... Oh, that's okay,” she says as she reaches behind herself, “I always keep a spare bag of pretzels in case of pretzel emergen— huh?” Her voice drops off in confusion. “Hold on, Anon, hold on...” She reaches behind herself again, to some immeasurable place where no one can see, but she comes back empty-hoofed. You're not even looking at her, but her voice becomes a bit strained. “Why... why can't I get the pretzels? I know I had them right there!” She goes through the motions several more times, sometimes mouthing the words 'pretzel emergencies' to herself, but never managing to retrieve the aforementioned bag of pretzels.

“Something wrong, Plinkie?” You can barely hold back your smirk as you continue to pat her.

She frowns. “No, no, it's just... ugh, I can't get at the... the...” She puts her hoof down and groans, apparently defeated. You stop patting her and continue on to the fountain.

“Let me know when it's working again,” you call to her as you pace up into a light jog. Looking back, Pinkie is grinding her hoof in the dirt, clearly confused at her mysterious, momentary loss of ability. She knows that something like that can't just happen, especially to her. But what she doesn't know is that you have the touch. Nopony else seems to have figured out its full extent yet, and of course you can't confirm it's a universal effect for all humans, but what you can pretty much say for certain is this:

Humans are not magic. Or, to put it another way, humans are not-magic. This you believe to be true.

By the time she's finally tried again and successfully pulled a bag of pretzels from whatever arcane Pinkie-space she possesses, you're out of her sight, and thus undetectable. She looks around a bit, then stows the bag away and heads back to Sugar Cube Corner.

You actually have corn chips, not pretzels. Their rough, spice-laden texture is infinitely better for putting in your mouth on a cool, crisp dawn like this one. You just like hearing Pinkie say “pretzel.”

At about ten in the morning, you re-emerge from your humble abode through its enlarged front door. The air is drier and warmer now, and the sun is gleaming like a coin being polished with vegetable oil. Another perfect day. That's not to say the rainy days organized by Ponyville's weather team aren't perfect — those are perfect rainy days. So you guess you should call this a perfect sunny day.

In any case, this perfect sunny day looks to be a great opportunity to determine just how far your anti-magical abilities go. You haven't had much of a chance, what with all the getting settled into a strange society of adorable ponies. You remember your first day here. It was only hours after your arrival in Equestria that the local librarian Twilight Sparkle found she couldn't get a grip on you.

You feel cornered. These three ponies — white, purple, and blue — are advancing on you in this weird-ass library that is also a living tree. The door is right behind you, of course, and all it would take is throwing it open and running to get your freedom. So you make to do just that.

“Hold it right there, mister!” The purple unicorn shouts, flaring a burst of light around the horn on her head. A hint of the same light begins to manifest around the back of your shirt collar, but almost immediately, she yelps and the glow dies out. There is a sound of stumbling hooves. You are concerned, naturally. Have you hurt this unusual horse? Did you accidentally land a punch without feeling it? You turn to face her, and see her clutching her forehead with a hoof. The other two have rushed to her side, helping her keep steady on her hooves. As she sees your bewildered gaze, the purple pony's eyes regain their fire, and she flares her horn again, focusing somewhere on your left side. The hair along the length of your arm stands up, but just as before, the light on her horn flickers out and she grabs at her head, groaning.

“What... what are you?” She grunts out, simultaneously confused and pained. “R-Rarity, can you try...?”

The white pony, Rarity, nods to her friend and adopts a steadfast stance. With legs apart, she lowers her head and lights up her spiraling horn. This time, it's your chest that feels the faintest of electric tingles. But as with her purple friend, she yips as her horn winks out and she stumbles backward into the other unicorn.

“What did you do to them?!” The blue wing-a-ling pony flies up towards you, getting right in your face. You hold your hands up as a show of innocence. This seems to attract the purple one's attention, although you don't know how she could possibly understand the gesture.

“Dash... d-don't hurt him, okay? I don't think he's doing it on purpose,” she says, standing more easily now. Rarity has knelt down to keep herself from falling, but Dash looks at the both of them with an incredulous glare.

“But he hurt you! Didn't you,” she counters, turning to you, “you weird monster?!”

Again, you hold your hands open. “I swear, I didn't do anything. I don't even know what they were trying to do.” This is true, although you do have a few guesses.

After that awkward first encounter, and multiple rounds of “Don't hurt him,” “But he hurt you,” bordering on Frère Jacques levels of repetition, there were finally some proper introductions. You learned each others' names, and then Twilight began to hypothesize, in a scholarly manner you would later see come to define her, that for some reason your body, or the matter comprising it, is inherently non-magical. It made sense to you, of course, since Earth has no magic but CGI and charlatans. But the very idea was almost unthinkable to this little unicorn, and completely unthinkable to her dear friends, who frankly didn't seem quite as educated. In due time you met the whole circle of ponies who allied themselves with Twilight Sparkle, as well as her pet (son? brother?) dragon. Dragons, right, how cool is that? He even breathes green fire.

But there is a time and a place for dwelling on the past, and that time and place is this Friday at the hay bar. Right now, there are things to be done. Picking one of the wider, faster streets that will give a towering biped like you room to breathe, you head to Sugar Cube Corner for the second time today.

It doesn't take you long at all to get to where you're going. The place is made of gingerbread, or some more architecturally sound substance resembling it, and it stands out like a shorn fetlock among the thatched-roof cottages. You head inside, and there you see your target. Pinkie is humming loudly as she holds a broom in her mouth and a dustpan in her hooves, cleaning a massive amount of colorful confetti off the floor and into a bag labeled “recycled confetti.” She hasn't even noticed you enter. This is perfect.

As quietly as possible, you reach over to the storefront counter and grab the nearest convenient object, an empty cupcake tray left out overnight, one which pretty desperately needs to be washed. The range of your reach alone would astound most ponies, but that's not the effect you're aiming for today. You tiptoe up behind Pinkie Pie, hold your breath, and drop the cupcake tray at her right side.

As the tray clatters to the floor, her reaction is instantaneous. Pinkie screams, darts away to the left on loping legs, and clings against the stairway bannister while staring wide-eyed at the fallen tray. You find it difficult to suppress a chuckle at her expense, and as she calms down and notices you, she chuckles too, nervous as she is.

“Ohhh, hehe, uh, hi Anon! I didn't see you there, how silly of me! Gee, you got me good, heh...” She disentangles herself from the bannister and walks forward, sniffing at the cupcake tray. “Hmmm. That's weird.”

“What's weird, Ponka?” You ask in as earnest a voice as you can muster under the circumstances.

“Well,” she starts, hoofing at the tray where it lies, “I've told you about my Pinkie Sense, right?” She doesn't wait for you to answer. “Sometimes I get itchy twitches in my body when things are about to happen. A twitchy tail would have told me this tray was going to fall. Buuut...”

You smirk. “But what?”

Pinkie frowns. “But it didn't. It didn't warn me what-so-ever!” She glances back at her tail, then back to the tray. As she continues examining it, her tail bobbles back and forth. It wants you. It taunts you. Impulsively, you pick up the dustpan behind her and drop it onto the curlicue hook-end of her tail. Again, she darts away yelping. “AAAAAAACK!”

“What's the matter, Panka Pint?” Something is definitely the matter. She's grasping at her chest, breathing heavily as she braces herself for support, her back against the display counter.

“What did you do that for?! That was a terrible surprise!” She manages to get out as she nearly hyperventilates. Seeing the look on your face, she preemptively interrupts you. “A-and don't play around, Anon, because I know you did that!” Her breathing gradually slows down. “So why,” she muses huffily, “didn't I notice you doing it?” Pinkie goes back to all fours and trots right up to you, an aggravated expression smeared all over her face. “How did you evade the Pinkie Sense? It's fool-proof!”

Her unique skill at interrogation warrants only the driest of wit. You pause for a moment, greatly exaggerating the degree to which you appear to be planning a response. Eventually you hold out a hand loftily. “Dunno LOL,” you espouse eloquently.

She groans, likely only partially understanding your strange turns of phrase. More sincerely now, she pokes you in the leg with a hoof-tip for emphasis. “J-just don't do that again, okay? It really freaked me out...” She gives you her best 'kicked puppy' look; glistening eyes, floppy ears and everything.

Aw... You can't joke around to a face like that. “I'm sorry, Poinko, I'll try not to do that again.” Your apology is the genuine article, even if your promise is exactly as halfhearted as it sounds.

She seems to accept this, even while the shadow of a grimace crosses her face when you say her name wrong. It's hilarious every time. You don't smile though, since you do want to stay friends with her. In your head, you chalk one up to science. And then you order a grilled cheese sandwich, which she is only too eager to provide. She also makes one for herself, if only so she doesn't have to watch you eat all by yourself. Pink pone is nice that way.

When you leave, you walk to the door as delicately as possible. You then leave with a thunderous slam, and the clatter of dishes echoing from inside lets you know that Pinkie just didn't see it coming. Next Chapter: 2 — The Color Out of Place Estimated time remaining: 13 Minutes