Starlight Glimmer knew the moment Rainbow Dash nervously shuffled into her office that she should have teleported to the other side of Equestria. Rainbow Dash was fast, but not even she was fast enough to catch a unicorn who really didn’t want to be bothered with whatever idiotic endeavor that was about to be inflicted upon her. Even still, an apologetic “Sorry, can you come back later? I need to water Phyllis” would have sufficed to drive the pegasus away long enough that she’d probably forget whatever it was she intruded upon Starlight’s holy sanctum for.

Instead, the old habits of pretending to be a caring and supportive guidance counselor kicked in before she could stop them, and she instead put her hooves together and greeted the Wonderbolt as she would anypony else coming to her office looking to air out their hormonal teenage problems. “Rainbow Dash! Good to see you. What can I help you with today?”

“Help?” Rainbow’s eyes darted back and forth across the room, as if looking for hidden cameras ready to document her moment of weakness. When she didn’t see any, mostly because she looked in the wrong places, she anxiously scooted inside and shut the door behind her. “Who says I need any help?”

“Rainbow Dash, you’re about as good of a liar as you are a teacher,” Starlight said with a sigh. “Listen, Rainbow, I used to run a cult or three in my time. That’s a really big Equine Relations job; you gotta sort out the gullible from the ones with half a brain if you want to get anywhere. I’m really good at reading ponies, and I can tell something’s bothering you.” She inwardly cursed when she realized she’d just enticed Rainbow to stay, and gritted her teeth as she did her best to smile. “So, what’s bothering you? Make another stupid joke to Rarity that she didn’t appreciate?”

“N-No!” Rainbow Dash shouted, wings popping out at her sides in a mixture of surprise and—evidenced by the red in her cheeks—that common display of pegasus arousal that made the Equestrian education system a living Tartarus for pubescent feathered colts and fillies. In doing so, she dropped the laptop she held tucked under her wing, and both ponies winced as one of the complicated pieces of technology that had consumed twenty-seven percent of the nascent school’s budget for the year clattered onto the ground. Starlight could only stare at it, eyes wide in shock, as Rainbow Dash gingerly picked it up and brushed some imaginary dust off of it with her feathers.

“If Twilight saw that right now…” Starlight didn’t even want to think about the neurotic shitstorm that’d blow in from that maddening library Twilight called her brain if she knew Rainbow had dropped her laptop.

“You’re not gonna tell her, right?” Rainbow asked, clutching the black rectangle against her chest.

“Listen, I crave Death’s sweet embrace, but not that badly.” She realized she was tensely leaning against the edge of her desk, so she let out a breath and slouched back into her chair. “Is whatever you’re about to ask me about related to your laptop?”

Rainbow hesitated. “…Maybe.”

Starlight frowned down her muzzle at the pegasus. “Uhh… Rainbow, I’m a guidance counselor, not a computer technician. Maybe you should go see—?” She was about to finish that sentence with the name ‘Twilight’ but immediately thought better of it considering what she’d just witnessed.

“Well, I mean… maybe my computer needs counseling.”

The Friendship School’s overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated guidance counselor buried her head in her hooves. “Rainbow Dash, if the computers rise up and try to kill us, at least I’ll know who to blame.” Lowering her hooves, she lifted her half-finished cup of coffee in her magic, ducked it out of sight, and dug some bottles out of the bottom-most drawer in her desk, forcing a smile all the while. “So, spit it out: what did you do?”

“I just… Rarity needs to borrow my computer for a week, because Sweetie Belle needs her laptop to work on a school project. Since we got our computers for free, Rarity decided that was a better idea than buying another laptop for her sister, and she wants to use mine because I’m gonna be taking the students on a week-long field trip to Mount Aris tomorrow and I won’t need it, and—oh, hey, you making coffee? Can I have some, too?”

“Sorry, I’m all out!” Starlight exclaimed, hastily sliding the half-empty handle of whiskey back into the drawer and slamming it closed. She took a long sip from her now-full coffee cup, grimaced at the burn of a Prench Roast a la Starlight, and set it aside with a gentle tap on the wood. “Anyway, can you just spit out what’s wrong with your laptop so we can both get on with our days?”

“Uh… right.” Rainbow plopped her laptop down on Starlight’s desk and opened the top with her feathers. The screen stuttered to life, revealing a desktop with haphazardly scattered shortcuts dotting a promo-shot of Rainbow’s own face in Wonderbolts attire like colorful, blocky pimples. Though Starlight rolled her eyes at the background, she managed to hold her tongue long enough for Rainbow to push it over to her. “Rares said it’s, like, super slow for some reason, even though I think it’s fine—I don’t use it all that much—and it’s gonna drive her crazy if she tries to use it like this. Well, err, crazier than she usually is, I guess.” Her eyes drifted up and focused on something in the distance only she could see, and a dumb grin formed on Rainbow’s lips. “Heh… crazy, alright…”

“Riiiiiiiiiiight…” Starlight took control of the laptop with her magic and tried moving the cursor around… only to frown in disbelief when the pointer stuttered left and right, updating its position only once a second. “Celestia’s saggy teats, Rainbow, what did you do to this thing?”

“I… I don’t know!” Rainbow said, shuffling her hooves. Then she froze. “Wait… what about Celestia’s teats?”

“You haven’t seen them?”

“What?! No! I-I mean—!”

“Listen, she’s tall, they’re really hard to not see when her nipples are at eye level.” Screwing her face up, Starlight tried to open up the laptop’s task manager; when it didn’t respond after a few seconds, she vigorously shook the laptop, knocking loose a few ounces of salty chip crumbs, blue hair, and a feather or two. She glared at the little mess it made on her desk, took two big gulps of her ‘coffee’, and brushed her workspace clean with her magic. “Rainbow, how is Tank?”

“Tank?” Rainbow asked, cocking her head to the side in confusion. “He’s doing good, I guess. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary. Why?”

Starlight pointed to the mess in front of her. “Because I refuse to believe that you can actually care for an animal without killing it.”

“Hey, just because I left Scoots on a cloud by herself that one time for four days—!”

“Ah! Finally!” Starlight silently thanked whatever nerdy gods of computers that might have been watching from the dark and greasy confines of their bedrooms as the task manager finally booted up. Wrestling with the lagging cursor with the tenacity that Applejack might use to keep two frisky cousins apart, Starlight managed to bring up the computer’s performance screen. “Alright, let’s see what we have h—!”

She stopped, breath hitching in her throat. It was impossible. It surely couldn’t be true. But the longer she looked at that little graph, the more she read the numbers underneath it, the more she realized with pure horror that she was looking at something unholy, something evil, something that may indeed warrant the full and judicious use of the Elements of Harmony to vanquish.

“Rainbow Dash… what sort of abomination have you summoned from the deepest, darkest pits of Tartarus to make your internet browser use eight gigabytes of RAM?!”

Rainbow screwed her face up. “Is that a lot?”

“These laptops only come with eight! Your browser is using literally all of it!”

“Huh.” The pegasus tapped her hoof against her chin. “I guess that’s why it’s so slow.”

Starlight sighed and began trying to force her way through the task manager on the unresponsive machine. “Okay, let’s just force close your browser and everything should be good. There has to be a glitch or something that’s making it take up so much memory.”

But Rainbow slammed her hooves down on the desk and fluttered into the air. “Hey, wait! What if there’s, like, crap I need on there! You can’t just get rid of it all!”

“Just save your Wonderbolts porn to a flash drive, you don’t have to keep it up in the background while you teach.”

The sudden stiffening of Rainbow’s wings brought her back down to earth. “Hey, I do not have Wonderbolts porn on there!”

“Uh huh.” Starlight took a sip from her coffee mug, regarded the nightmare sitting on her desk in front of her, and decided to down the rest of it in several more gulps. Burping, she set her mug aside, shook her head back and forth, and let magic flare along her horn as she set the laptop to work trying to open up Rainbow’s internet browser. The machine practically screamed in agony, the inadequate fans inside its black body straining in vain to keep its overtaxed boards from melting into silicon slag. The hot air blowing out of its vents blackened the edges of a nearby scroll and set the paper curling in on itself, and a spider that chose that moment to scurry from cover across Starlight’s desk evaporated in a puff of smoke.

Just before the computer could generate enough heat to initiate nuclear fusion, its sickly screen finally pulled up the browser. It opened to Rainbow Dash’s own Ponypedia page, the plastic keyboard beginning to bubble and steam as the computer slowly loaded the pictures a single line at a time. Starlight could only blink once, twice, thrice at the page as Rainbow’s face filled in on the right side, and when that finished, her eyes slowly pivoted over to the real thing looking over the laptop at her.

Rainbow caught one look of Starlight’s expression and started fidgeting. “What?”

“Your own Ponypedia article is your homepage?”

The Wonderbolt frowned at her. “Hey, I gotta keep up with what I’m doing! I might have done something new I didn’t know about yet!”

“If your computer was even remotely capable of me doing anything on it, I’d write out your cause of death to be ‘gross idiocy’ and then make the prophecy come true.”

Rainbow looked taken aback. “I’m not gross! I’m awesome!”

“Yeah, sure.” As the rest of the window loaded in, Starlight let her eyes wander to the top of the screen. But after a few seconds, she frowned. “Hey, Rainbow? Where’s your tab bar? There’s only a gray line up there.”

“What are you talking about? That is the tab bar.”

“That… what? No, there’s nothing there. Look.” To prove her point, Starlight moved the pointer up to the gray bar and clicked while Rainbow watched. Nothing happened… at first. But then the computer coughed up a fan blade, and the window flashed white, slowly changing to the results page of a Wonderbolts derby from earlier that year. Starlight’s jaw fell slack, and when she clicked again, this time the window began to load an Amarezon page for a Daring Do onesie with a special Summer Sun Solstice Celebration discount… even though the solstice was four moons ago.

It was at that moment that Starlight understood the true scale of the eldritch horror she was dealing with. “Rainbow Dash… how many tabs have you opened on this thing?!”

The pegasus merely shrugged. “I dunno. At least ten.”

“At least ten? There has to be ten thousand on here!” Starlight clicked again on the gray bar, which she realized was nothing more than a line of tabs each a single pixel wide, and it pulled up Rainbow’s Wikiquestria page again. “How many times do you have this stupid page open?!”

“Uhhhh…” Rainbow touched her wingtips together, shrinking back some from Starlight’s growing rage. “Ummm… at least… ten?”

“Rainbow, I am going to shove this computer so far up your ass that you’ll be able to log in with your tonsils.” Starlight went to take a sip from her coffee cup, realized it was empty, and instead pulled the whiskey back out of its drawer. She took several gulps straight from the bottle before setting it aside, grimacing, and forcing the current window closed with a keyboard shortcut. To her dismay, the gray tab bar did not change its appearance, and that set Starlight considering the bottle to her side again. “Celestia, what I wouldn’t give for some methanol right now.”

Rainbow frowned at the openly displayed bottle of whiskey on Starlight’s desk. “Hey, I thought Twilight said we weren’t allowed to drink at the school!”

“She also says we aren’t allowed to do cocaine in the break room, but that hasn’t stopped Pinkie yet.” Starlight scowled and worked her jaw from side to side. “Okay, I’m just wiping everything out.”

“No!” Rainbow exclaimed, practically diving across the desk to stop Starlight from forcing the browser to close. “I need those! There’s important stuff on there!”

“There’s nothing but junk on these, that’s why you have more tabs than there are stars in the night sky!”

“Nuh uh!”

“Yeah huh!”

“Nuh uh!”

Starlight bared gritted teeth. “Alright, Rainbow, you know what? Fine. I’ll play along, if you can tell me what’s on the first five tabs on this computer.”

“Oh yeah? Fine! They’re…” Rainbow voice trailed off and her ruby eyes began to dart around the room. “Uhhhh… I think… well, there’s probably a Ponypedia page in there.”

“That’s practically a gimme.” When Rainbow didn’t come up with anything more, Starlight slouched back in her chair and steepled her hooves together, a smug look growing on her muzzle. “You don’t know, do you?”

The Wonderbolt scowled and backed off. “Why do I have to play some stupid game? It’s my computer.” Rainbow crossed her wings in front of her chest and stuck out her tongue, as if invoking the rules of foal arguments would save her on this day.

Unfortunately, Starlight was by no means a foal, which seemed an alien concept to Rainbow Dash. “And you came to me for help. Now it’s in my protective custody, and I need to show you how badly you’ve been abusing this poor machine.”

“I mean, sure it’s a little slow, but what does that have to do with anything?”

Starlight simply opened the CD drive and pointed to the little white flag that popped out of it.

Rainbow blinked. “…How’d that get in there?”

Teal magic clicked away at the keys as Starlight started to pull up the earliest tab on the window. “Okay, Rainbow, what’s the first thing in this browser? What’s on the first tab that you need so much?”

Rainbow scowled at her, opened her mouth… but no words came out. “Uhhh…”

“See? I thought so.” But even Starlight was taken aback when the browser’s default welcome page opened up. She stared at it for a good ten seconds, then slowly turned her attention back to Rainbow. “You… you never closed the welcome page?”

“…What’s the welcome page, again?”

“It’s the page that pops up when you open your browser for the very first time! Are you telling me the first thing you did upon booting up your browser was to open a new tab?!”

“…Maybe?”

Starlight wasted no time executing the offending tab, and the computer seemed to let out a tiny sigh of relief as its oldest burden finally ceased to be. The very next tab that popped up was another Ponypedia page of Rainbow Dash, and she glared at the Wonderbolt. “Of course the first thing you did with your computer was look yourself up.”

Rainbow fidgeted in place. “You didn’t?”

“I’m… not going to answer that.” She closed that tab down as well, and the third tab began to load. She saw a dark background set around a picture of the Wonderbolts… in poorly-made outfits… lying in bed… and a pegasus who was definitely not Spitfire had her face between the spread legs of a pony who was definitely not Rainbow—

Blue hooves frantically slapped the keyboard until the tab went away, and the F key melted down into a lump of plastic. When Starlight slowly turned to look at Rainbow, she found the blue pegasus’ face had turned a sharp cherry red. “I-I… You see…” she began to stammer.

“No Wonderbolts porn, huh?” Starlight slowly shook her head from side to side. “Y’know, I always thought you’d star as yourself in those pornos…”

Rainbow’s blush only deepened. “I… You…”

“I won’t judge you too harshly,” Starlight said. “After all, porn is what the internet is made for.”

“Twilight says the internet is made for sharing knowledge and crap, though.”

“Yeah. Knowledge of what every species’ genitalia look like.” After frowning at the tab bar some more, now with a Manehattan Times article about the anniversary of the founding of the Wonderbolts beneath it, Starlight could only growl and shake her head and begin frantically killing the tabs one after another upon seeing nothing but old, outdated web pages and that same Ponypedia page over and over and over again. “I’ve got half a mind to take down that stupid, stupid page…”

“Hey, Starlight, stop it!” Rainbow exclaimed, looking on helplessly as her forgotten digital children died one by one in a swarm of furious clicking. “You can’t just get rid of them all!”

“I can, and I am! It’s the only way we stop this thing from flatlining!”

“Can’t you just help me organize them?” the pegasus feebly protested, anxiously shifting from hoof to hoof. “Like… maybe you can group them together or something?”

“Group what? All fifteen million Ponypedia pages of yourself?” Purple eyes pierced Rainbow’s, rooting her to the ground like a deer caught in headlights even as an article on the unfortunate correlation between the rise of horseless carriages and deer fatalities popped up on the screen. “Rainbow, the point where you need a tree or folder structure to organize all your endlessly pointless tabs is the point where you have to admit to yourself you’re a tab hoarder.”

The pegasus blinked in surprise. “A… tab hoarder?”

Starlight firmly nodded. “A pony who opens tab after tab in their browser and doesn’t get rid of them when they don’t need them anymore. A pony who tries so desperately hard to justify the continued existence of pointless tabs clogging up memory and consuming power on their computer by going to stupid lengths to preserve them with plugins and folders just so they don’t have to admit they have a problem. A pony who, were tabs physical possessions they kept in their house, would end up on a reality TV show where other ponies laugh at how much of an absolutely disgusting wreck their life is and a bunch of C-list personalities help them empty it out. That is a tab hoarder.”

“I’m not a tab hoarder!” Rainbow shouted back. “I just never know when I might need to go back to them again!”

“Spoken like a true tab hoarder.”

“Yeah, well—don’t you ever need to come back to things? What do you do then?” Rainbow angrily fluffed her wings up and puffed out her chest, trying to look larger than she actually was, and succeeded in approximating the rough size of a sixteen year old filly. “That’s why you need tabs!”

“I just have my browser open up the five or six tabs I use regularly on startup,” Starlight said, placing a hoof over her chest and scowling at Rainbow. “I also only open things as I need them, and when I’m done, I close them so my tab bar isn’t cluttered. I know where everything in my browser is and how to get back to it, and I don’t have a mental handicap that prevents me from letting go when I don’t need it anymore!”

“But I might need them! You never know!”

“You aren’t going to need them.” Starlight pointed to the middle of the gray bar at the top of the screen. “I bet you haven’t opened any of these in months!”

Rainbow angrily fidgeted in place. “Yeah, well… I just haven’t needed them yet!”

“And you won’t! You never will! So why not just close them when you’re done with them?! You could just make a bookmark so you can go back to it if you need to later!”

The Wonderbolt’s anger quickly shifted into confusion. “Wait… what’s a bookmark?”

Starlight’s magic washed over the computer and she screamed.

Rarity quietly hummed along to herself as she looked through her students’ needlework on the dresses they’d made in her class. Though most of the boys complained about making dresses, especially Gallus, they still put in the work necessary when the alternative was a triple F minus that would fail them the course no matter what their grade was beforehoof. After all, she had a big rush order to fill, and kirin didn’t exactly care what sort of quality their dresses were, since they tended to last only a few weeks before burning to ash anyway…

She heard the door to her classroom open behind her and hooves clop across the tiled floor, though she didn’t turn her attention away from the dresses in front of her. “Who is it? If it’s Silverstream, please come here darling, I have to ask you to describe this new… knot you invented.” She gingerly prodded at a colossal tangle of thread that bulged out of the shoulder seam like an aggressively malignant tumor.

“It’s me,” came Rainbow’s voice, flat and dull.

“Oh?” Rarity attempted to untangle Silverstream’s thread, pulling and yanking it this way and that to find its weak cinch. “Did Starlight fix your computer? I need to get it to Sweetie Belle tonight, or she’ll fail her project and Miss Cheerilee will probably have to hold her back again…”

Instead of an answer, a black rectangle clattered onto the desk by Rarity’s side. Rarity glanced at it quickly before returning to her work, realized something about it seemed off, then set her glasses aside and peered over at the computer. She gasped in alarm when she only saw the body of the laptop, sans half of its keys, and creased at an odd angle. “Oh, Celestia’s saggy teats, what happened to this thing?!” Rarity exclaimed, picking it up in her magic and looking it over.

“Starlight and I… had a disagreement.”

“A disagreement?” Rarity put the laptop down and turned to Rainbow. “What ever do you—?!”

Rarity quickly found out what happened to the laptop’s screen: jagged bits of glass and plastic jutted inward from the bent frame, poking into Rainbow’s shoulders and neck as she wore it like a necklace. A big bump had formed on her head from the application process, and bits of glass and plastic clung to Rainbow’s disheveled mane like she’d been caught in some kind of silicon blizzard. Her eyes had a haunted look to them, sort of like the look Rarity’s uncle got whenever somepony asked him about Vietmane. “Rarity?” Rainbow finally croaked.

“Ermm… yes, darling?”

“Is being a tab hoarder a bad thing?”

Rarity’s face shifted to a sharp frown. “Get out of my sight before I finish what Starlight started.”

Author's Notes:

I have something to ask of you all, dear readers. I wrote this story for two friends of mine, two friends who desperately need your help. Just like Rainbow Dash, Alamais and Gammahoof are tab hoarders, and they need your help and support to overcome this crippling affliction that is tearing their families apart and causing their lives to crumble around them. I want all of you to go to their user page and leave comments, or send them PMs, letting them know that they don't have to go through this struggle alone and we're all here to help them. Together, we can help them get through this and help them get rid of all these useless tabs they don't need. If you do this, you will have my most sincere thanks from the bottom of my heart. Nobody should have to suffer like them.