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An Infinite Number of Pinkies

by AugieDog

Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Pinkie Pie's Evil Twin

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After it was all over, the fires put out and most of the wreckage cleaned up, Pinkie Pie sat with her friends in the shade of the big oak tree beside the stream in Applejack's south orchard, clouds drifting across the perfect summer afternoon, and started deciding what parts of the story she would tell and what parts she would carry to her grave.

"Well, to start with," she said after Spike had poured seven glasses of lemonade and passed them around, "most of it was Twilight's fault."

"Me??" Twilight sputtered the sip she'd just taken through her straw. "What did I do??"

Pinkie spread her front hoofs. "You gave me the mirror."

Twilight closed her eyes. "I swear, I am never going to look at another one of those as long as I live!"

A gasp from Rarity. "Darling, tell me you're joking!"

Fluttershy covered her mouth and giggled while Applejack cleared her throat, the sour smell of guilt wafting up from her mane and making Pinkie's nose twitch. "Reckon I'd better take summa that blame, too, then, seeing as how I's the one dug the dang thing outta the barn in the first place."

"I told you!" Dashie sprang into a hover, her front legs bunched like she wanted to punch things. "If you'da just let me smash it after that first night—!"

"What??" Pinkie couldn't stop herself from leaping up, but she did manage not to grab the blue pegasus and shake her. "No, no, no, no, no, Dashie! That woulda been the worst thing that ever coulda happened anywhere in the whole entire world!"

They all blinked, and Rarity cleared her throat, her horn glowing to adjust her parasol. "Worse than everything that actually did happen, you mean?"

That made Pinkie stop, but— "Yes," she said with a nod. "If Rainbow Dash had broken that mirror, or if I'd never seen it that day at Twilight's..."

***

Enraptured, Pinkie Pie reached a hoof out to touch the silver framework of the object leaning against the wall between two of the library’s bookshelves. "It's so shiny and shimmery and much much more than three-dimensional! What magical, marvelous, miraculous thing is this, Twilight??"

"Uhhh...," her friend said from across the room. "It's a mirror, Pinkie."

Pinkie cocked her head. Rectangular and a little taller than her, it did look like a mirror, and the pink pony with the rainbow-striped saddlebags that was gazing at her from within it might have appeared to be her reflection— "To the untrained eye perhaps," she said aloud.

The Twilight Sparkle in that backwards world glanced up from the book she was nosing the wrong way through. "No, it's a mirror, all right." Twilight's voice came from behind Pinkie, but the duplicate unicorn cleverly mimicked the movements of her mouth. "I was looking for something I could use to build Spike his own telescope, and Applejack remembered she had this out in her barn. But the glass is too pitted and warped, so... Could you use a mirror, Pinkie?"

Everything Twilight wasn't saying sent such a storm of twitches through her, Pinkie gasped in shock and delight. "You're absolutely right! It's my destiny, isn't it?" She struck a heroic pose and couldn't help admiring the similar stance her counterpart took. "I must guard this portal against those monsters who would dare invade our beloved Equestria with their...their—" She rubbed her chin. "Should they have slime-dripping tentacles or bone-crushing teeth, d'you think?"

Glancing back and forth, Pinkie saw each Twilight wearing that furrowed expression Pinkie so often saw on other ponies. "Excuse me?" the Twilights asked.

Pinkie clapped her hoofs. "Of course! They need both!" Pressing herself against the cold surface of the infernal device, she dug her snout into her saddlebags, pulled out a mouthful of pink and purple streamers, and quickly lashed the thing to her back. "Fear not!" she announced. "They! Shall! Not! Pass!" Trying to rear up and scissor her front legs dramatically, she misjudged how heavy her new burden was and ended up sprawling face first onto the floor, the mirror sliding forward to bop her in the back of the neck.

A moment of effort got her hoofs under her again, and she turned a triumphal grin toward the one remaining Twilight. "Fear not!" she said in her most reassuring tones. "The gateway remains secure!" And with a toss of her mane, she galloped toward the library's front door.

"But..." she heard Twilight call. "It's just a mirror!"

***

Rolling in the grass, Dashie hooted like a barn owl. "Now that, I'm sorry I missed!"

Twilight was shaking her head. "I checked that mirror three times the next day! There was nothing even remotely magical about it!"

"Well, actually..." Rarity pointed her horn at a spoon, and it rose, tapped more sugar into her glass. "All mirrors are magical. I've in fact had more than one ensemble I've put together actually change in measurable ways the first time the client looks at herself wearing it."

"Huh." Applejack took a pull from her straw. "All I know is: Granny Smith said that mirror'd sat on its own in the barn long as she could remember and that she didn't have no idea where it come from." She gave Pinkie a grin. "Just waiting for you, I s'ppose, sugar cube."

Fluttershy shuddered. "Destiny always makes me nervous."

A clearing of throat from Twilight. "Well, strictly speaking, there's no such thing as 'destiny.'" And Pinkie almost cheered when the unicorn actually made little air quotes with her hoofs. "We're all born as free agents, able to choose whatever path we might wish to take."

Dashie blew a gust of air through her lips. "Excuse me, but those of us who were born 180% awesome, we've pretty much got no choice." She flapped her wings, a cloud forming behind her out of thin air, and she leaned against it like a big pillow. "Yep, yep, yep. Destined for greatness."

Applejack gave a snort of her own. "Hard work's what does it, Rainbow, not any sorta destiny thing. Or are you saying all that practice you do ev'ry day don't amount to nothing?"

With a wave of her hoof, Dashie closed her eyes. "I practice because I'm awesome, not because I'm trying to make myself more awesome; I mean, that wouldn't even be, like, physically possible!"

"Uh-huh." Applejack stared at her. "You know that don't make sense, right?"

"Girls, please." Rarity looked like she wanted to make a rude noise, too, but Pinkie was pretty sure she didn't allow herself to do that sort of thing. "It's six of one and half a dozen of the other."

"Oooo!" Pinkie leaned forward. "Unless it's a baker's dozen! 'Cause that's thirteen! And half of that would be six-and-a-half! And that's just the smidgeoniest smidgeon more than six!"

The others blinked at her, then Spike held up his glass. "Can't argue with that."

Grinning, everypony agreed, and Pinkie could barely stay sitting, her heart feeling like a soap bubble and wanting her to leap to her hoofs and dance around the tree at the thought of having not just friends like these but any friends at all! Only two days she'd been here, and she was already—

No. Wait. She'd grown up here! Had met Applejack and Rarity at school before any of them had even got their cutie marks, had come across Fluttershy on the other side of Ponyville not long after that and had finally met Dashie after she'd joined the local Weather Patrol! Then Twilight and Spike had showed up, they'd all become the Elements of Harmony, had had a couple big giant adventures and a whole bunch of cute little ones together!

She knew this, knew it as clearly as she knew her own name, knew that she was really...was really—

Who was she again?

"Uhhh, Pinkie?"

The name struck her like a bucket of cold water, and she startled back to find Dashie looking at her, her head cocked to one side. "You OK?" she asked.

"Oh, Dashie!" Unable to stop herself this time, Pinkie threw her front legs around her friend, pressed her snout into her chest. "It was horrible!"

A burst of worried voices, hoofs touching her, Spike asking if she was all right, Fluttershy urging her to lie down, Twilight wanting to know if she'd rather wait till later to tell them the rest of the story.

"No, no." Taking deep breaths of their wonderful tangled scents, Pinkie made herself calm down, swallowed, let go of Dashie, and formed a smile to turn toward their anxious frowns. "I wanna tell you what happened. I hafta tell you. But talk about traumatic! I mean, meeting my own evil twin??"

"She wasn't—," Twilight began.

But Rarity's put a hoof over the other unicorn's mouth. "It's all right, Pinkie," she said, her voice gentle. "You just tell it your own way, and we'll be here listening."

A moment, then Twilight nodded, and Pinkie's heart got all bubbly again. "Well," she went on, "that night..."

***

Armed with several boxes of cupcakes and a pitcher of ice tea, Pinkie Pie set up watch in the kitchen, the alleged mirror propped against the wall beside the bakery's big oven. She was going to need a lot more room than she had upstairs, after all, for when the Dark Forces Beyond—she thought briefly about just calling them the D.F.B., but she finally decided that that wasn't nearly dramatic enough—when they tried to breach the barriers between their nightmarish netherworld and the wholesome vistas of her sweet, beloved Equestria.

Besides, she would've had to keep coming downstairs to get more cupcakes anyway, and, well, the bakery was just a more defensible position, with rolling pins, bags of flour, and big metal bowls all standing by in case she needed to clonk anypony over the head.

Because she was going to need every advantage she could muster, she knew, to see this through...though why she knew it, she had no idea. But even back in the days when her folks were still trying to make the rock farm work, Pinkie had always had her twitches: the way she knew they were digging the well in the wrong place, for instance, or that those funny-looking little bugs out in the fields weren't funny at all but were instead eating holes in the rocks.

And after she'd gotten her cutie mark and had thrown that first party and her parents had turned the house into an inn and the barn into a nightclub and casino, she'd found her twitches becoming even more useful, telling her when to smile and when to look bashful, when to laugh and when to keep quiet, when to be serious and when to be funny, so much information floating to her just from the way ponies smelled, from the way they rubbed their eyes or tapped their hoofs.

So the minute she'd seen that mirror, she'd known. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow night or the next night or the night after, but sometime something somehow was going to happen around that mirror or behind it or because of it. And knowing that, she knew that she had to be ready.

She felt so comfortable in that knowledge, in fact, she had no trouble at all stretching out on one of the bakery's little throw rugs and falling immediately asleep.

A humming, though, poked her awake, a sound that made her think maybe bees had gotten into the bakery and were quietly trying to replace the regular honey with experimental, mutant honey again. Opening her eyes to tell them she'd rather they not do that, she was confused to see nothing but the mirror reflecting the silvery shimmer of the moon over the walls, the pots and pans, the stoves and ovens—

Which was especially confusing since the moon wasn't shining in from anywhere.

Still, the mirror kept shimmering, and as she watched, something began moving deep inside it, something dark getting larger, pushing now against the mirror's surface and bulging it out like an unwanted raisin in the otherwise perfectly baked crown of a muffin. Pinkie's tail twitched, and a pony emerged from the mirror like she was coming out of a sideways pond, a black pegasus with a white mane, her cutie mark something that looked like a capital 'H' with a new hairdo, the tops trimmed off and curls brushed out on either side.

Looking around, the pony moved into the center of the room, and Pinkie saw she had little round glasses perched on her snout and a green kerchief gathering her mane into white spikes over her forehead. "Gracious!" she said, her voice almost as snooty-sounding as Rarity when she was making one of her points. "Has it worked?"

"Yes!" Pinkie yelled, leaping up from the rug. Hearing that voice was all it took: once again, she knew exactly what was going on.

The pegasus startled back a step, snapped her head over. "Ah! Hello!" She began to trot toward Pinkie, Pinkie's heart beating faster and faster with each step the other took. "Please forgive my unorthodox entrance. My name is Thagoras Pi, and I am—"

"My evil twin!" Pinkie shouted. She started to dance around the kitchen. "I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!"

"Twin?" Pinkie's evil twin blinked through her glasses. "But...we look nothing alike."

"Well, of course we don't!" Pinkie stopped, rolled her eyes that she even had to explain something so basic. "If you fool everypony into thinking you're me just because you look like me, where's the evil genius in that??"

The pegasus ruffled her wings. "I don't think I quite qualify under the 'evil' provision, either." She cocked her head as if considering. "Yes, like all of us, I have the occasional moral lapse, but—"

"OK. First thing?" Pinkie assumed her lecturing position, one front hoof raised, her eyes partly closed. "Your name." She drew the syllables out and used her spookiest voice. "Thag-or-as! How is that not evil??"

Thagoras blinked some more. "It was my grandmother's name."

"Second! You stepped—no, you oozed! You oozed out of an evil magic mirror!"

"Ah, yes. Actually, you see, I was—"

"And third!" Pinkie advanced toward Thagoras with her most devastating point, the black and white pegasus backing away from her. "You're my evil twin! They don't let you be an evil twin if you're not evil!"

Thagoras's nostrils twitched. "I...I can't help but feel we've gotten off on the wrong hoof somehow. Perhaps—"

"Fine!" Pinkie sat back and folded her front legs across her chest. "If you're gonna be that way, I'll show you how it's done!" She stood, flicked her tail, and started for the door.

***

"Hold up a minute." Applejack had a look on her face that Pinkie saw pretty regularly on ponies she talked to: not really confusion and not really disbelief, Pinkie had always wanted to call it 'condisfusiolief,' but she'd never been able to figure out a way to say it out loud. "This here evil twin of yours—"

A strangled sort of sigh from Twilight: "She wasn't anypony's evil twin! She was—"

Pinkie gave a much more extravagant sigh—just to show Twilight how it was done. "Well, I know that now. But back then, I was still so young and foolish."

"Ummm, Pinkie?" Fluttershy raised a tentative hoof. "This was all just last week, wasn't it?"

"I'll say it was!" Pinkie shook her head. "And yet, I remember it like it was yesterday!"

***

Storming out of the bakery into the midnight streets, Pinkie wasn't even sure if Thagoras was following. Just her luck to get stuck with some sorta rookie evil twin! She started wondering who she could complain to—was one of the princesses maybe in charge of assigning evil twins?—but a scuffling on the doorstep made her look back, Thagoras there with her eyes wider than ever behind her little glasses. "I've done it! An alternate Ponyville! The cafe's on the wrong side of the street, and— Is that the library?"

"Twilight's! Yes! We'll start there!" Pinkie nodded in satisfaction and started trotting across the town square. Maybe this would finally get her evil twin into the swing of things!

Thagoras caught up and matched her pace. "Twilight? At the library?" Excitement filled her voice. "That proves I've crossed over! The Bosky Twilight I know would much rather loll about teasing her mane than do anything as strenuous as turning the pages of a book! Why, I recall one time—"

Pinkie nodded as Thagoras launched into some story about an earth pony she knew, but Pinkie wasn't listening, too busy watching along the gutters for— "Ah!" She smelled it before she saw it in the shadows of Princess Luna's half moon floating high overhead: a cabbage that must've fallen off a produce wagon during the market earlier in the day. "Here we go!"

"—it was simply the most ridiculous thing for— Hmmm? I'm sorry; what?" Thagoras had gone on a few steps without apparently noticing that Pinkie had stopped. Pinkie added it to the list she'd started for her eventual complaint letter and decided she'd better keep things basic.

"Stand here." Pinkie pointed to the cabbage. "And kick that—" She moved her hoof to point at the front window of the library. "There."

The black and white pegasus blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

Pinkie puffed a breath through her nostrils. "I'm getting awful tired of this whole sweet and innocent thing!" She spread her front hoofs in appeal. "Dark passions swirl within your fiendish breast! Let's get 'em on out here!"

Thagoras just looked uncomfortable. "I don't wish to appear rude, ummm... I'm sorry, I never did get your name."

"Didn't get my—??" That was it! The last straw! Pinkie felt her eyes spinning in her head. "I'm your good twin! Pinkie Pie! Don't they even give you, like, a brochure or something explaining all this??"

"Pinkie Pie??" Thagoras's spiky mane sprang up even further. "Then you're my—! And I'm your—!"

A hinge creaked. "What's going on out there??" Twilight's voice called.

"It wasn't me, Twilight!" Pinkie had been waiting all night to say it. "It was my evil twin!"

"No, no, no!" Thagoras took a step back from Pinkie. "Something's gone horribly awry!"

"What??" Twilight was leaning further out the window now. "Who's down there with you, Pinkie?"

Pinkie gestured to the pegasus. "I told you! Thagoras Pi! My evil twin! She came out of that mirror just like I told you! I mean, just like I would have told you if I hadn't thought that monsters would come out, but—!"

A sigh from above. "Hold on," Twilight said, then the air beside Pinkie fluttered, and Twilight Sparkle appeared wearing what Pinkie always thought of as her grumpy face. "OK, now, what—?"

"No!" Thagoras cried again, turning and running for the bakery. "I can't be here! My formula should only have taken me to a plane where my counterpart no longer existed! My presence here imperils the entire multiverse!"

"What?" Twilight asked.

"Wait!" Pinkie yelled, and the two of them took off after the other pony. "There's so much more we need to do! Tying Twilight to the railroad tracks! Ringing Dashie's doorbell and hiding! Sticking your tongue out at Fluttershy!"

Apparently not even listening, Thagoras flew through the bakery door, but Pinkie and Twilight weren't far behind: skidding inside, Pinkie saw her evil twin gesturing and tapping on the mirror, little spots of light dancing over its surface. "I checked and re-checked!" she was muttering. "This never should've happened!"

"Magic?" Pinkie heard Twilight say beside her. "From a pegasus?"

Pinkie cleared her throat. "Not just any pegasus!" She tapped her chest with a front hoof. "My evil twin!"

Thagoras turned, her eyes panicked behind her glasses. "It's more physics than it is magic, and while this looks like a lovely Ponyville, I can't take the time to explain. The quantum energy flux that must even now be building up around us—" She tapped one last place on the mirror, and the surface went all shimmery like it had earlier, that hum filling the air. "For the continued existence of all baryonic matter, perhaps it might be best that you consider this to have merely been a dream of some sort." And turning, she pushed against the glass, melted into it like butter into a hot pan. The wavering light swallowed her and vanished, darkness filling the kitchen again.

When it kept on being dark and quiet, Pinkie blew out a sigh. "Oh, well. Even if she wasn't the best evil twin, I guess it's still nice to know she's out there somewhere."

"But..." Twilight squeaked; Pinkie turned, saw her friend's eyes wide and white-rimmed, her ears folded back along her head. "It's just a mirror..."

"Well, yeah." Pinkie trotted over, touched the silver frame, grinned at her reflection, and thought about the pattern Thagoras had tapped there, a pattern as easy to remember as the recipe for chocolate peppermint cupcakes. "It is now."

Next Chapter: Chapter 2: Pinkie Prime Estimated time remaining: 3 Hours, 36 Minutes
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