Here we are, back at the daycare. The big sign of the smiling sun greets us when we get back. Sheesh, I thought this place looked creepy during the day, but the night makes it so much worse. For one thing, most of the street lamps aren’t on, so the street is in almost total darkness. There are also a couple hobos going through the big trash pile at the front doors. I know I got monster claws to defend myself with, but them being there doesn’t make me feel safe around here. Pinkie Pie has a classroom full of kids here, their parents must be thrilled.

Instead of taking the window exit like I did that afternoon, Iffy leads me around to the back entrance, which is tucked away in a dark alley behind the building. Of course it is. I’ll have to make an effort to turn this place into a horror house when I get a chance. Can't let prime scare-estate go to waste.

We enter through the back, and we make our way through the halls. At least the inside is brightly lit up. We pass by one hallway with the lights out. I think it has the room the kids are staying in. I peek in the windows and find the kids in sleeping bags, all of them dreaming the night away.

We keep on trucking through the daycare, ending up in front of Pinkie’s office at some point. I knock on the door with a hoof, I’m still disguised as Fruit Punch, and I hear Pinkie’s voice from inside. “Come in.”

When I open the door, I find both Pinkie Pie and Doctor Heart hunched over the desk in the middle of the room. They’ve got paperwork, folders, and files in between them, and two cups of what I assume is the blackest coffee they can find. Doctor Heart yawns as she scribbles something on a clipboard, and Pinkie Pie takes a big gulp from her coffee mug.

Pinkie Pie glances up mid-sip and places her mug down. She glances at me, then Eureka, and then pulls out her drawer and slams the sound-proof can on the bug. “Can I help you?”

“Probably,” I say. I walk over to one of the chairs and plop the stallion I’ve been carrying on top of it. “I found Eureka, however he’s out cold and I can’t get any info on him right now.”

One of Pinkie Pie’s eyebrows goes up. “Do I know you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you know me,” I say, waving a hoof at her. “So I figure- oh wait…” I still got hooves on. All Pinkie sees is a random stranger dropping off a body in her office. That may cause some confusion. “Give me a moment.”

The worms go to work, and I shapeshift back into a griffon. Doctor Heart has some unfortunate timing, and decided now would be a good time to sip some coffee. When my guts and flesh rearrange in front of her, she freaks out a bit and chokes on her cup of joe.

“Sorry about that,” I say. “Should’ve warned you I’d do that.”

“No, it’s- ack- fine,” the doctor says, coughing up a lung.

Pinkie Pie rubs her hoof down her face and takes a much longer gulp from her mug than before. “Okay, I see you brought Eureka here,” she says after wiping off her coffee mustache. “Why is he in my office?”

“That’s a funny story.” I glance at the green pegasus. He’s hovering outside the door, keeping his distance from the inside. “Iffy, do you want to tell Miss Pinkie Pie why I had to drag Eureka all the way here?”

Iffy pokes his head in and give a shy smile. Pinkie Pie smacks her face with a hoof and groans. “Iffy, what did you do?”

“I helped Gilda out, that’s what I did,” Iffy says.

I grab the last empty chair in the office and plop my rear in it. Damn it feels good to sit down after today. “You did, I won’t deny that. But tell her what happened when you didn’t help.”

Iffy shrinks down and loses a few inches of air. “I might have knocked out the mad scientist while Gilda was interrogating him.”

Pinkie stares at him for a moment, and then her face slams against the desk. “I would like today to be over,” she grumbles. “Why can’t today be over?”

“We got a couple more hours till midnight,” Doctor Heart says. “And we should be done with these files before then.”

“I want these files done now.” Pinkie’s head rolls on the desk to the point where her eyes meet mine. “I take it Eureka didn’t tell you where Rainbow Dash is.”

I nod. “Knocked out cold before he could talk. We’ll have to wait till he wakes up before we can do anything.”

“Did you try splashing water on his face?” Pinkie asks.

“No, but he did fall down a few thousand feet from the air while riding my back.” Pinkie’s eyes shrink to pinpricks. “Don’t worry, he’s fine. If there was any time to wake up, he would’ve done it then. Oh, now that I think of it, Doctor Heart”- the unicorn looks up from the folder she was browsing- “Our new friend here may need some medical attention.”

“Did you throw him through a wall?” She asks. The doctor glances over at the scientist, and then rolls her head back and groans. “Why is his leg missing?”

“Do I need to answer that?”

“No. You do not.” He puts her things down and grunts as she pushes herself out of the chair. “How long has he been unconscious?”

“Couple hours, more or less.”

The doctor walks up to Eureka and pokes him with a hoof. “Hmm… His breathing is normal. He doesn’t have any nasty bruises. He looks surprisingly healthy for a stallion who I assume was beaten to a pulp by a monster griffon.”

I shake my head. “Nah, I just knocked him around. Although I think I did beat a pony up to a pulp when I woke up this morning, but that’s not relevant.”

Iffy’s ears perk up. “You mean an actual pulp?”

I nod. “Goop and all.”

Pinkie Pie shudders and sticks out a tongue. “Bleh, I don’t need to know that.”

“Pulp or no pulp, Eureka is going to be fine,” Doctor Heart says. “He just needs some sleep, a new bandage for his leg, and he’ll be fine in the morning.”

“Good,” I say, “Then I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

Doctor Heart frowns at me. “You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?”

Iffy Sniff jumps up and smiles. I ignore him. “I don’t think so. I just need some answers from him and I’ll be done.”

“You should,” she says, and glares at Iffy, “And you do not get to watch. If Eureka gets back to Blackwatch and tells them you’ve been here, then this place will be shut down under Case Black Quarantine faster than you can cough.”

Iffy freezes in the air for a moment. “I thought you said we would be put under Case Red?”

“I did, but Blackwatch might put us under Black out of spite. We have a kidnapped VIP in our hooves. Blackwatch can declare us criminals and do whatever they want with us.”

“Calm down, Sacred,” Pinkie Pie says. “Blackwatch isn’t going to do that, and we’re not going to kill anyone.”

“That’ll be a mistake,” Doctor Heart says. “Blackwatch will kill us if Eureka tells them what we’ve done.”

“Then we don’t let him go,” Pinkie says. “We’ll keep him around as a guest and watch over him.”

“That may not be a good idea,” I say. “We’ve got kids running around the place, and Eureka has a kid’s head in a jar back in his lab. He might go psycho and do experiments on them.”

“I say we kill him,” Iffy says, “just like all the evil ponies. Kill him so he doesn’t do any evil experiments.”

Pinkie leans back in her chair and lets out a sigh. “No, we’re not going to kill him, and that’s final. We’ll keep him separated from the kids so he doesn’t get any bright ideas. And if he does start something evil”- she winks at the green pegasus- “Then we’ll give him Iffy and see if that makes him happy.”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” Iffy says. We all ignore him.

Pinkie Pie takes a sip of coffee and looks at Doctor Heart. “Go ahead and look after him. I’ll finish up with the paperwork here.”

“Sure, but I think you’re making a mistake,” Doctor Heart says.

“And I am tired of ponies dying around me,” Pinkie snaps. “Now go take care of him and make sure he lives. I don’t want to hear any more about this.”

Doctor Heart stares at her for a moment, and then picks up Eureka with her magic and leaves the room. Bye Eureka, I’ll see you in the morning.

“Iffy,” Pinkie says to the pegasus, “I want you to wait outside while I talk with Gilda.”

“But I”-

“Go,” Pinkie pie says, interrupting Iffy and pointing at the door. “Take a seat out there, now. You are in so much trouble for leaving here.”

Iffy doesn’t say anything. He sulks out of the door, and once he’s out, Pinkie Pie walks over and shuts it behind him.

“This day can’t end soon enough,” Pinkie grumbles. “So Eureka didn’t say anything?”

“Nothing,” I say. “He was talking about using the plague to make gods or something like that, but that sounded like mad scientist talk.”

“Hmm… I’ll talk to him about it in the morning.” She leaves the door and walks back to her chair and sits in it. “Don’t you dare go near him when he wakes up. He might freak out if he sees you. I’ll speak with him and try to get something out of him. I’ve met him before, I think we can get along.”

I shrug. “Sure, I’ll keep my distance.”

“Thank you.” She picks up one of the folders and opens it up, looking at its contents. “I don’t suppose you have any secretary experience, do you?”

“No, not really,” I say.

“I figured that. Couldn’t hurt to ask.” She picks up a pen and makes some notes on a clipboard next to her. Now that I look at her, she seems like a bigger mess than this morning. Her hair is all frazzled and messy. She has dark bags under her eyes. She’s drinking way too much coffee than what’s healthy for a pony. There might even be a little something else in the coffee to help with the edge. I don’t think she wants to talk about anything important right now. She just has me in here because I’m a familiar face or something like that.

“So what’s with the paperwork,” I ask, “Does Blackwatch have you doing their taxes?”

“No, lucky for me,” she says. “You know all the kids in here are Case Yellow Quarantine, right?”

“Yeah, I think someone said something about that. Is that paperwork for them?”

Pinkie nods. “They’re under Case Yellow, so they aren’t infected with the plague, but they are sick in their own ways. Flu, lice, chicken pox, they have stuff that won’t be good if it gets out into the general public. Right now, I’m writing up a proposal for Blackwatch to allow kids in Case Yellow to be under the care of their parents instead of in those cold medical tents, at least the ones who still have parents. Celestia knows why they didn’t do this in the first place.”

I glance at one of the folders on the desk. It has the picture of a kid in it, along with name, parents, address, medical history, and a whole bunch of other things written in there. “And you need details of kids for what reason?”

“Because they’ll audit me and want to have all the details on paper. Believe it or not, even evil military organizations have bureaucracy to wade through.”

I snort, but she doesn’t laugh along. Pinkie Pie sounds… defeated. I recall a happy party pony that never shuts up and is obsessed with making everyone smile, but this… this is depressing. It took one month for her to turn into this. Was that one month that bad?

She looks at her clipboard, and at the folder, and drops it all on the desk. “How many,” she asks out of the blue.

“I, uh… what? How many what?”

“How many ponies did you kill?”

This is what I’m talking about. The happy party pony I knew would never ask something like that. “Today, or just with Eureka?”

“Today.”

I scratch the back of my head. “I haven’t been keeping track.”

“Then guess.”

“Well, um…” I run the start of my day through my head and go through everything that’s happened, counting on my talons when I remember a kill. “There was the lab… and those two… the guys at my apartment… no one at the medical tent… the music hall… Fruit Punch… Maybe ten, twenty. I don’t know the exact number. I might be missing a few.”

Pinkie Pie glances at me. “Did you kill anyone because you wanted to?”

Did I? Maybe a couple in the heat of a fight, but I didn’t start those fights. “I don’t think so. They were all in self defense.”

“That’s good to know.” She picks up her pen and taps it on the desk. Tap… tap… tap… “I don’t think I could imagine one of my friends being a killer.”

“I don’t see myself filling that role, either,” I say. Honestly, I don’t want to think about what I’ve been doing today. Maybe I’ll forget about it once this is all over. Pinkie, on the other claw, she looks like she won’t stop thinking. “You’ve been through a lot this month, haven’t you?”

Pinkie Pie nods, and breathes. “One thousand, three hundred, and fifty nine ponies died or went missing on the first day,” she says. “That number includes you, and Rainbow. You two are the only ones I remember on that list. I tried memorizing all the names, just so no one is forgotten, but the list got bigger the next day, and bigger on the next, and it continues to grow. It’s just not possible to know all those names, not even for me.”

She takes a long breath in, and breathes out for much longer. I let the silence hang in the air. There isn’t much room for me to say anything here.

“They lost count after a week,” she continues. “I tried to make everyone I met smile, to help them with the pain, but Manehattan can’t do it now. The ponies here can’t smile. They’ve been through so much, the plague, Red Night, it’s just all too much.”

“And it’s all too much for you?”

She slams the pen down. “It was too much for me on day one. How do you make people happy when there’s disaster everywhere you look? It’s like trying to throw a party for someone who’s allergic to parties. How do you do it? It can’t be done. Nothing I did helped anypony, and nothing I can do will help anypony after all this!”

She throws her hooves in the air and runs them through her hair. “The number should be one thousand, three hundred, and sixty one, because the plague didn’t just take all those lives away, it took the happiness in the world away too, and me with it. I’m as dead as they come, and ponies don’t smile with the dead.”

I don’t know what to say. She’s staring at her mug now, and her lips are moving. My superhearing can barely hear her repeat that number over and over again.

“Manehattan is miserable. I’m miserable,” she says, breaking her trance. “And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Aren’t you doing something about it now? Isn’t that what Quip is here for?”

Her ear flicks. “Quip?”

“You know, the Quarantine Wellness Program, the initials sound like Quip if you say it fast enough.”

She looks up from her mug, and nods. “Quip, that’s a fun name for this place. I like that name.”

Is that a smile? I think I see a small grin on her face. “I think you just have to find something to laugh at. Maybe that will help you out.” A memory from today pops up in my head. Maybe that will help. “You know, I fell down some stairs while chasing Eureka. A whole army of blue-eyes were shooting at me, and I tripped over a step and went rolling down the biggest staircase you ever saw.”

It takes a moment, but that little grin of hers grows a little bit. “I bet you got a good laugh out of Blackwatch.”

“They probably are still laughing,” I say. “It’s not every day you see a monster griffon trip over herself.”

Pinkie Pie’s smile grows a bit more. She still looks exhausted, but there’s a tiny spark in her eyes, a familiar one I’ve seen before. She looks up at me, and nods at the door. “You should go get some sleep. I got work to finish up, and I still need to talk with Iffy.”

“Okay. Are you sure you’re going to be fine?”

She nods. “I will be. I have to be. I just needed to vent a bit, that’s all.”

I get up from the chair and head to the door, but I stop before I open it. “Hey, I’ll find Rainbow Dash. You may not be thinking it, but I’ll find her. And it’ll be one less thing you need to worry about.”

Pinkie Pie looks up at me and smiles. I open the door and head out, and I hear one last thing from her before I go.

“Thanks.”