Fanfic is Crapsack II: Electric Boogaloo

by RealityCheck

Chapters

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7

Chapter 1

Rain poured down in sheets from the sky. It was midday in Ponyville, though there was little to show it. The sun never shone there anymore. The weather patrols had long ago given up; the sky either poured down rain or was smothered in layers of relentless slate grey clouds. Smoke from the chimneys ascended wearily into the sky, sodden with the heavy moisture in the air, leaving the world tinged with soot that streaked down the walls in the rain and trickled into the muddy streets. The only break in the interminable downpour was a muted roll of thunder, far off in the distance.

Another funeral was underway. How many was it now? The procession of mourners, too bereaved to even expend the effort of dressing in black for the occasion, escorted the coffin down the street, on the long, slow march out to the graveyard on the edge of town. Who was it? Nopony knew. There were no names anymore. Nopony lit so much as a candle in a window in memory. Nopony could be seen looking out of their homes; Death and grief drew no interest anymore. Only darkened windows, bleak and black as the hollow eyes of a skull, watched as the plodding mourners walked by in the rain.

Pinkie retreated from the one unboarded window, letting the curtain fall back in place. She didn't want to be seen.  She didn't want anyone to know how the Bearer of the Element of Laughter had given up hope. She couldn't stand it anymore.... all the happiness and cheer inside her was gone, worn out, used up. She had gone into hiding in Sugarcube Corner weeks ago, and never come out.

Pinkie was grateful at least that there was nopony to bother her while she tried to hide her misery away. Not that there would be; the bakery downstairs had been closed for weeks, the windows boarded up. Cup Cake just hadn't had the strength of will to open up again, not after what had happened to Carrot Cake and the twins... she spent all her time in her own room now, alone. Sometimes Pinkie could hear her weeping.

        Pinkie couldn't sleep. It was probably time to check everything again.

Pinkie had caught her in the bathroom once, staring at a bottle of pills. After Pinkie got Mrs. Cake to go back to bed, she'd sneaked back in later and threw all the pill bottles in the medicine cabinet away. That had been too scary.

Then she'd caught Mrs. Cake fiddling with a butcher knife. Pinkie had to throw all the sharp knives in the kitchen away, too.

The day after that it had been all the bottled cleaners. She hadn't caught Mrs. Cake trying to pour herself a bleach cocktail, but she wasn't taking any chances.

Pinkie got up and did a round of the house. She plodded wearily through the unlit rooms, searching in the dim light filtering through the cracks in the boarded up windows. She pulled down a noose Mrs. Cake had tied to the chandelier in the living room, and unplugged the toaster she'd balanced on the edge of her bathtub. In the cobweb-filled nursery she'd found a loaded gun. Pinkie shuddered and unloaded it, throwing the bullets in the trash and the gun out the window.

        It was a good thing ponies didn't have trigger fingers, she decided.

        Down in the dusty kitchens she found the baker lying lifelessly on the floor, her head in the oven. "C'mon, Mrs. Cake," Pinkie said to her. "Please, I know your heart is broken and your soul is bleeding and we're all being slowly sucked down into a morass of existential despair, but you have to find the will to go on..."

"Leave me be," sobbed the baker. "I've lost everything, just let me end it all like this."

Pinkie stood there, stroking her straight pink mane, fiddling with her spiked black collar, uncertain what to say. "They disconnected the gas a week ago," she finally ventured. "And I don't think it matters anyway. Not with that oven."

There was a long pause. "....Stupid electric stove," Mrs. Cake said.

Pinkie finally pulled the wearily protesting Cup Cake out of the oven, took away the pack of razor blades she'd hidden in her apron and put her back to bed. Once the baker had finally cried herself to sleep again, Pinkie realized there was nothing else for her to do. She stood for a while in the upstairs hallway at the window as the shadows pooled around her and listened while some beggar limped by in the street below, crying "penny for the blind, guv'nor? Penny for the blind? Have pity, guv; blind, lame, contracted leprosy, eczema..."

She dragged herself back to her own room, put on her Linkin Park record and flung herself across her bed. She gazed in sorrow at the urn full of Gummy's ashes sitting on her dresser, and at her own reflection in the mirror behind it. Was her black eye liner running? She dabbed at it with a hoof. The deep and profound lyrics of the record echoed in the profound bleakness of her soul. It was true; they'd tried so hard, and come so far, and in the end it didn't really matter--

There was a strange sort of ripple in the air...

The reflection in the mirror behind the dresser suddenly changed. The dark greyish-pink pony in the mirror suddenly lightened several shades; her goth garb disappeared and her flat, limp mane suddenly poufed into a cloud of curls. She blinked, grinned-- and fell right to sleep, snoring loudly right through the mirror.

Meanwhile the Pinkie lying across the bed sat bolt upright. She looked around, blinking in surprise. "What the--?"

She looked at the room, noting the decor: posters for Radiohead and the Cure, in between pictures of graveyards and skeletons and pale, anemic looking flutterponies with black wings; black drapes over the cracked windows; victrola playing a linkin park album; funeral urn full of dead alligator.... She looked down at herself, took in the  studded faux-leather collar around her own neck, the matching cuffs around her ankles; dabbed at the black lipstick on her lip and black mascara and eyeliner around her eyes. Rain pounded monotonously on the roof and streaked down the dirty windows.

"Ohhh boy," Pinkamena said. "This one's gonna be a toughie." She faceplanted in the mattress.

Chapter 2

"Okay, let's take inventory here," Pinkamena said. She paced in a circle in the center of the excessively grimdark room. "I pick up a ping off good old Equestria and come out of Mirror-land to check up on things. Sugarcube Corner is a darkened, cobwebbed shell; Mrs. Cake is a suicidally depressed wreck who does nothing but blubber when I ask about Mr. Cake or the twins; it's been raining nonstop and--" She stopped and regarded herself; black mascara, black lipstick, limp straight mane and tail, studded choker and ankle cuffs, and a black tattered NOFX t-shirt. "--and Pinkie Pie has suddenly turned into Edward Scissorhands. That about cover the bases, Gummi?"

Gummi regarded her with wall-eyed impassivity from his seat in his funeral urn, the lid balanced on his head like a bad hat. The moment Pinkamena had popped open the jar he'd stuck his head out, undoubtably alive and reptilianly unflappable as ever. He gave her a brief burping noise and then went back to pondering his own inner universe.

"Yeah. Exactly." Pinkamena stopped pacing. "Not quite enough to go on. Well, Fictionverse Agent 101: First order of business is to get out, assess what kind of corruption you got , and how far it's spread. You stay here, Gummy; it's gonna be pretty haphazard out there." She gave the gator a pat on the head, dumped a can of soft cat food in his bowl, and left the room.

She was passing the nursery door when she heard the creak of someone rocking in the nursery rocker. Warily, she eased the door open. The nursery was still dusty and cobwebbed, the windows cracked and streaked with dirt and rain... but she could see the twins in their crib, sleeping peacefully. Sitting in the rocking chair beside them was Mr. Cake. He was disheveled, his tie was undone, and he looked like he hadn't showered in days. A half empty bottle of Applejack's cider was in his lap, and dried tears streaked his face.

He looked up at Pinkamena. "I just can't do it, Pinkie," he sobbed. "I just can't go on without her. How can I raise two beautiful foals without their mother? How can I run Sugarcube Corner? How can I face every day alone, now that my beautiful Cup Cake is gone?"

A stentorian snore echoed down the hallway. If Cup Cake was gone, she was still within earshot. Pinkamena rolled her eyes. "Ohhhhkayyy, Mr. Cake," she said, walking into the room. "I think it's time you took a little nap.." she pried the bottle out of Mr. Cake's hooves and helped him to his hooves. "Come on, I think you'll feel better once you lie down in your own bed..." She helped the distraught stallion stagger his way to the Cake's bedroom and kicked open the door. Mrs. Cake was, of course, still lying in bed. She had awoken when the door banged open, and was still lying there, curled up and sobbing quietly, her back turned to them.

Pinkamena sat Mr. Cake down on the edge of the bed. "And there you go," she said. She waited for the two to realize they were in the room together. Then waited a bit more. And a bit more. Neither of them looked at the other.

"Cup Cake..." Carrot Cake wept.

"Carrot Cake..." Cup Cake sobbed.

"Cup..."

"Carrot..." the two paused.

"Cup?" Carrot turned around and looked over his shoulder at Cup.

"Carrot?" Cup rolled over and looked at Carrot.

Grief fell back over them like the shadow of a raincloud. "I miss you so much, Cup Cake," Carrot sobbed. "Why did you have to die?"

"I miss you so much, Carrot," Cup said. "Why did you have to die?"

They both turned away from each other and resumed sobbing. "Cup...." "Carrot....."

Pinkamena's eyebrows tabled. "You have GOT to be kidding me," she said.

She pondered the problem for a minute, rubbing her chin. "Ah!" She trotted back to the nursery and peered down in the crib. "Come on, snoochy pies," she crooned, picking the babies up one by one. "Time to rise and shine."  After a quick feeding, burping and changing (why oh Maker WHY couldn't she be a unicorn for that part at least?) and a few minutes of tickles and tummy zerberts, the twins were wide awake and full of bubbly energy. Pinkamena carried the babies back to the Cake's bedroom on her back and plopped them down on the bed between their parents.

Babies, it seemed, were immune to whatever aura of misery hung in the air. It figured, really; your average baby doesn't give two toots about angst and depression and a happy healthy baby wouldn't know existential despair if it walked up, tipped its hat to them and said howdy-do.

It only took a second for the parents to become aware of the babies. They turned around in surprise as the twins each waddled up the mattress, one to a parent, and began climbing on them, laughing and crowing. Pound cake nuzzled his mother's cheek, while Punkin reached up her tiny baby hooves and booped her sad looking daddy on the nose.(1)

The bleak atmosphere in the room popped like a soap bubble. Carrot chuckled and Cup burst out laughing. Cup wiped the tears from her face. "Are you all right, sugarmuffin?" Cake asked her.

"I think so..." Cup said.

"Why are you crying?"

"I... I don't really know," Cup replied, wiping her eyes again. "A sad dream, I think. And you?"

"I don't know either, something silly, probably," Mr. Cake said. "Doesn't matter now. You're here and everything's okay." He gave his wife a kiss on the cheek. She returned it.

"Are you two gonna be all right?" Pinkamena asked cautiously.

Mrs. Cake looked over at her. "Oh, there you are Pinkie! My, what an... interesting outfit," she said, looking over Pinkamena's startling outfit. "We're all right, dear. Just crying over-- over something silly. " She yawned deeply and cuddled Pound Cake in her forelegs. "You go ahead and take the day off. I think we're all going to take a little nap." She yawned again.

Mr. Cake yawned as well. "That sounds like a good idea, honeydrop," he said. "I dunno why but I feel bushed..." Smiling, the two dropped off to sleep, the babies cradled between them. Despite all the activity, Punkin and Pound conked out almost immediately as well, curling up close to their mother and father.

Pinkamena closed the door. She took a deep breath; even the air in the house seemed a little fresher now. Of course that could be because she changed the babies... "Well that's them taken care of," she said. "Now, time for a little reconnaisance." She braced her shoulders. Confidence Pinkamena, she told herself. She'd handled countless horrifying trope, continuity, franchise, and even Genre level messes before, and this little corner of the corruption had cleaned up nicely. Even the dust and cobwebs were gone. How bad could it be?

"Yeah, pretty bad."

Pinkamena stood on the front stoop of Sugarcube Corner. This was bad. This was, yes, very bad. The signs of corruption were worse the longer she looked in fact.

The first sign was when she got downstairs... the sweets shoppe was still dark and boarded up, first of all. It hadn't reverted at all. She'd pried the boards off the front door and stepped outside, standing under the front awning. She huddled in the tiny little spot of shelter from the pouring rain and looked around.

"How nice. Thomas Kinkade goes grimdark," she muttered. Everything was muted and gray, like the endless rain had leached away all Ponyville's bright colors. The quaint thatched cottages looked stained and bedraggled. The streets were sodden and flooded. The sky was leaden, and what wasn't rainclouds was soot and smoke that mingled with the rain and ran down the walls of the buildings. Most of the houses were boarded up or simply looked abandoned. She saw a few in the distance that looked like they'd been burnt out....

The few ponies she saw in the streets looked half-dead, dragging listlessly from place to place, their heads hanging low and their manes and tails matted with rain, soot and mud. Some were loudly weeping, others simply plodded along staring straight forward, their eyes empty and their faces bleak with despair. The rolling hills beyond the rooftops, once dotted with trees, were dotted with tombstones.

Without taking her eyes off the scene, Pinkamena reached behind her and pulled a small tape recorder out and turned it on. her associates... and no, we do not know who they are... had gotten on her about keeping better records and had issued her a Blamco(tm) Hands Free Mini Tape Recorder. They were regretting that choice as she had taken to amusing herself by using the recorder in ever more unique ways, and then sending in the resultant mini tapes to the transcribers. Thus far she had sent in one tape of nothing but rude body noises, and another of her saying the word 'weiner' over and over again for an hour and a half. (2) This time, at least, she was using it properly. "Yeah, okay. FiMverse again, new outbreak. Pretty obvious. Pervasive uniform chronic corruption, spread out over the entire area, no particular focused spots like last time--- just everywhere," Pinkamena muttered into the tape recorder(2). "Uniform theme of angst, despair, hopelessness..." she watched idly as a funeral procession trooped by-- "... random pointless tragedy... first guess is either a GrimDork or an EmoWeenie. It could be a Toxic Nihilist, but I'm not sure yet. Okay, no time to waste. First step is to round up the mane six--"

She was interrupted by the sound of coughing. She turned around; limping out of the alleyway next to Sugarcube Corner came Pipsqueak. He was the picture of pathos, muddy and bruised, his little red neckerchief in tatters, his ribs showing through his skin. He stared at her with wide, hungry eyes.

She stared back. "Seriously?" she said. "Spare me; I know a woobieholic distractor when I see it." The waif said nothing. "Forget it! Head office chewed me out already about going off on rabbit trails for every bit of pathos bait in a Corruption. It doesn't matter anyway: I fix everything, everything goes back to normal and this will have never happened. Doing a Woobie Rescue is just wasting time!"

The tiny colt said nothing. Pinkamena growled. "Oh, the old Too Beaten Down By Life To Even Beg routine. Nice try," she shouted at noone in particular. "I'm already behind from 'helping' the Cakes. I'm not falling for--"

Silently, a tiny gray unicorn filly with a dirty yellow mane and tragedy-filled eyes crept out of the alleyway and stood by the colt.

Pinkamena gawped at them. "Oh---- RRrrrrRRRRARGH!" She snarled, waving her forehooves in the air in frustration. "Oh, bleeding hearts of the world, unite!"  She kicked open the door to Sugarcube corner and waved at the two foals. "In, in, in, in!"

Within twenty minutes the two foals were seated at one of the tables in Sugarcube Corner, bathed, dried, and wrapped in warm blankets. They stared with wide eyes as Pinkamena laid out a hearty meal of soup and sandwiches on the table in front of them, scavenged from the shoppe's refrigerators and pantries. "Th- thank you, Miss," Pipsqueak said faintly, reaching carefully for a daisy sandwich.  He chewed slowly and carefully as if he was afraid each bite was going to disappear. Dinky went for the soup, carefully ladling spoonfuls into her mouth with exaggerated care.

"Don't eat too fast, you don't wanna hurt your tummy," Pinkamena sighed. "When you're done, there's a room upstairs where you can sleep. Look for the room that looks like the Death of Easter Bunnies decorated. Don't worry about the alligator; he's got no teeth." She quickly wrote off a letter to the Cakes explaining the situation on a piece of wax paper with a grease pencil and gave it to Pip. "Give this to the Cakes," she said. "That should take care of things."

"Thank you," the two waifs chorused. For the first time, the two of them smiled. Once again the pervasive gloom lifted, and the room seemed to fill with a breath of fresh air.

Pinkamena rolled her eyes. But she couldn't quite entirely hide her smile. "All right. Later, you two."

She trotted out the door of Sugarcube Corner. She had a rainbow colored umbrella hat, which she put on her head(3), saddlebags full of party supplies, and a large cast iron frying pan with the slogan "Thin The Herd" etched on the bottom, which she stuck through a strap slung across her back. She started to march off, then hesitated. "Best to do things right," she muttered. "No sense doing all that only to lose ground." She locked the front door, and carefully stuck a 'Happy Birthday' card in the doorjamb. For added measure she tied a small bunch of brightly colored balloons to the doorknob.

Nodding in grim satisfaction, she trotted off down the street. "First stop," she said, "Fluttershy's cottage!"

1)Four out of five physicians agree that baby nose boops are almost 100% effective at dispersing a bad mood. The fifth one is a grouchy misery guts that nobody likes to talk to anyways.

2)You should have seen the transcriptions.

3)It clashed horribly with her goth gear and black T-shirt. Which was kind of the point.

Chapter 3

Pinkamena had debated a bit before deciding to go to Fluttershy first. True, the others could probably kick more flank--- even Rarity was more hardcore(1)--- but this sort of corruption wasn't the sort of thing you could fix by magicking it or bucking it in the face. Considering a baby's laughter had been the fix for Sugarcube Corner, Fluttershy's brand of sweetness and light would probably be far better for fighting the Gloom(2) than the usual tactics.

That same sweetness and light also made her a prime target for whatever enemy was wrecking Equestria.

But by sheer chance Pinkamena had found something on the way that might snap Fluttershy out of it. It had been lying in a ditch by the road; she'd picked it up in her towel(3) and carefully bundled it before laying it across her back.

Fluttershy's cottage was... bleak, there was no two ways about it. The thatch roof looked dingy and rotted. The windows were boarded up. The flower beds and garden were gone, all that was left was expanses of torn up mud and the occasional patch of withered, wilted grass. The pet houses were in disrepair and seemed almost all abandoned-- save for a few pairs of eyes that glimmered in the shadows.

Pinkamena trotted around to the back of the cottage. The tiny graveyard that Fluttershy kept there for her little friends was still there. It was three times its original size and filled with battered, half-toppled little gravestones.  The neatly trimmed grass and the lovingly laid-out flowers were gone; all that was left was scattered gravel and yet more mud.

There was a single candle glowing in an upstairs window. Faintly, Pinkamena could hear sobbing. "Let's hope this works," she said to the bundle lying across her back. She trotted back around to the front door and knocked. For a minute or so there was no answer. Then there was a faint scuffling, as if something unduly short was struggling to reach the door latch, and the door creaked open.

Pinkamena wiped her hooves and stepped inside. "Hey, Angel," she said. "I dunno if you remember me but-- YAGH!" she screeched. "What the heck are YOU?" Instead of the small white rabbit she'd been expecting, she found herself staring down at a fluffy, pink and yellow--- thing. It vaguely resembled Fluttershy, with a trailing pink mane and tail, tiny hooves, yellow wings, enormous blue-green eyes, even the same cutie mark. But it was barely the size of a rabbit, and seemed to be covered in downy yellow fluff.

It was also crying. "I Fwuffyshy," it said. "Pweeze hep. Pweeze hep!"

Pinkamena finally recognized it. It was one of those... fluffy-pony things... from a few realities over. There'd been some running around Equestria when the Trollfic had been loose. It would figure that Fluttershy would adopt one. It put its tiny forehooves on one of Pinkamena and looked up at her with beseeching eyes. "Hep Fwuffyshy, Fwuttashy aw sad, cwy an' cwy an' cwy alla time, nuffing Fwuffyshy do make better. Pweeze hep!"

It just really was too syrupy sweet. Why hadn't this overly-innocent thing pushed away the Gloom all by itself? Probably because it was too syrupy sweet, Pinkamena thought. It was like feeding a starving pony treacle-- too much all at once; it would just come right back up as glurge.

"What I'm here for, fuzzball," Pinkamena said. "Where is she?"

The weird little mutant clippity-clopped off through the cottage. "Uppa stairs, uppa stairs!" Pinkamena followed.

Fluttershy was alone in her bedroom, crying.  She sat in the middle of the floor, weeping, not even raising her head to see who was coming through the door. Pinkamena was relieved that she wasn't in bed. A pony that was so full of despair that they didn't get out of bed was scarily close to never waking up again. She lay down on the floor next to the weeping pegasus. And put a forelimb over her withers. "What's wrong?" she asked.

Fluttershy just shook her head and kept weeping. "So lonely," she whimpered. "So alone... Nobody wants me, nobody needs me...."

Pinkamena bit her lip. Living in the mirror realm, one tended to be privy to a lot of personal secrets. People tended to pour out their thoughts and feelings to their own reflections, to rehearse things they wanted to say, to chide themselves or encourage themselves with little speeches, because who could be more trustworthy than your own reflection? (4)

She knew that Fluttershy was terribly lonely. One could debate all day whether her loneliness made her shy, or her shyness was why she was so lonely.  But there it was. She was alone, and she was just as afraid of ending her loneliness as she was of being alone. It made Pinkamena want to tear her hair out, the way her friends seemed oblivious to it. Now the Gloom was feeding off it, sending Fluttershy into a downward spiral of self-loathing and misery.

Time for the ace in the hole.

Pinkamena took the bundle she'd carried in, set it on the bed in front of the weeping pegasus, and unfolded it. Inside was a wounded bird, its feathers askew. It cheeped at the two of them unhappily, flapping one wing feebly.

The transformation was as dramatic as it was instantaneous. "Oh the poor little thing!" Fluttershy exclaimed. In an instant she had her first aid kit out and was gently tending to it, straightening its rumpled primaries, checking it over tenderly for injuries.

It scarcely needed to be said, but Pinkamena said it anyway. "Looks like there's at least one thing that needs you," she said. As if on cue Fluffyshy was there, purring and leaning against Fluttershy's side as she worked; Angel was there too, patting Fluttershy's mane. Fluttershy smiled through her sniffles and wiped her eyes, but never took her attention off the little bird Pinkamena had just put in her care.

"Let's see what's wrong here.. oh, is that all it is? Just a little bit of kite string tangled around your leg and wing," she cooed, gently untangling the twine nested in the bird's feathers. "Goodness, how did you get into that? Never mind; I bet you feel better now that it isn't cutting your circulation... there there now..."

A minute later they were trotting out the front door, Fluttershy carrying the happily chirping bird on her back. The clouds above were breaking up just the slightest bit, letting streams of sunshine through to dance on the puddles. "You're right," she said firmly. "I'm not alone. I'm not unwanted or unneeded. I have my animal friends, and I have my pony friends like you." She gave Pinkamena a happy nuzzle... then blinked and pulled her head back. She'd jabbed her nose on the studs in Pinkamena's collar. "Oh, um, that's an... interesting new look, by the way..." taking in the studded collar and anklebands, the black shirt, and the piercings.

"Uhh, just doing something different," Pinkamena said with a lame smile.

"Oh. It's... nice." Fluttershy said uncertainly.

"Anyway, see? Things ain't so bad," Pinkamena said.

Fluttershy smiled and nodded. She took the bird in her hooves and tossed it in the air. It flew off, singing happily.

Right as the eighteen-wheeler went speeding by Fluttershy's house. It hit the windshield with a resounding THWACK and tumbled to the muddy road in the truck's wake.

The two ponies stood frozen on Fluttershy's front step, jaws agape in shock. A moment later Fluttershy's wail of anguish split the air. She ran out to the road, tears streaming down her cheeks. She stood there a hoof's length away from the still twitching corpse, a trembling hoof extended, weeping and whimpering.

Pinkamena couldn't believe it. "A TRUCK?" she yelled. "A motherloving DIESEL TRUCK? In EQUESTRIA?? This is the most smacktarded thing I've ever SEEN!! What kind of a double grade A brain damaged plotheaded lobotomized chimpanzee Crapfic writer puts a TRUCK in EQUESTRIA as a PLOT DEVICE?? I'm gonna terminate their writer's license with extreme prejudice!!"

She ran out into the road, pulled Fluttershy out of the road and into a hug. It was fortunate she did; the truck driver had braked to a halt and was slowly backing up to see what had happened. His left rear wheel rolled right over the still-twitching bird with a loud crunch.

If Fluttershy's wails had been loud before, her howl at seeing this was deafening. She buried her face in Pinkamena's neck. Angel hopped around her, thumping his back feet and gesturing furiously at the truck.

The trucker did himself no favors. He climbed down out of his cab and walked back to see two mares caterwauling at the bloody feathered mess under his back left tire and proceeded to demonstrate his complete range of empathy. "Aw geez, a bird? Is that all it was?" He groused. "Can't believe I stopped for DAT."

Pinkamena gave him a glare that could peel chrome. "The hell is the matter with you?" she said. The rabbit next to her glared at him as well. It was kind of unnerving.

He decided to ignore it. He shrugged and hawked a loogie into Fluttershy's shrubberies. "Hey look, you and your girlfriend oughta know better. You dumb chicks let your pets run around, dis is what you get--"

"You--! I'm gonna activate your dental plan--" The goth-looking one started heading his way, brandishing a cast-iron frying pan. The trucker let out a 'yeep' and backpedaled. He retreated hastily into his cab, rolling up the windows and locking the door. This did not deter the mare from expressing her ire on his vehicle.

"You cross country retard!" WHANG. His front fender now sported a skillet-sized dent. "Tearing through a small town like a fruitbat out of Tartarus--" SMASH. There went one of the headlights. "There are COLTS and FILLIES in this community--!" SMASH. There went another. "There are little old mares in walkers ! You could have hit one of them!" CLANG. "You reckless pill-popping beer-swilling testament to bad road hazards!" CLANG. "You half-assed walk-on bit-part bridge drop!" CLANG WHUNK BANG.

The trucker stuck his head out the cab window. "THIS is why nopony wants your type around, lady! All you bull dykes are violent and crazy--"

Pinkamena's eyes bugged, her jaw hanging loose. The grizzled trucker got one look at the expression on her face and finally realized that discretion was the better part of valor. He ducked back inside and floored it. He was a hundred yards away and pulling away fast when there was a final CLANG, then silence. He would get all the way to Fillydelphia before he finally pulled over at a rest stop and found the frying pan embedded in the trailer door where Pinkamena had discus-tossed it from over a football field away.

Fuming, Pinkamena went back to the weeping Fluttershy. Angel stood in the road, throwing wild and most likely obscene gestures at the fleeing truck before running after her. "Come on," she said, pulling the pegasus filly away from the road. "Don't look at it, it'll just make it worse..."

Fluttershy paused at the gate. "Wait," she said. "Where's Fluffyshy?" The two ponies looked around in growing alarm. The little fluff-pony had been right next to them when they released the bird...

With an awful premonition, Pinkamena looked back at the road. Fluffyshy was out there, sitting next to the crushed bird, crying softly and petting one wing with her hoof. "Poh buhdy," Pinkamena heard Fluffyshy sniffle. "Poh buhdy..."

Even as she heard the horn blat and the rumble of another diesel engine. "Oh come ON," she yelled angrily, racing back for the road, Angel right beside her.

They weren't fast enough. The truck was around the bend and bearing down on Fluffyshy before either of them were halfway.

Thank goodness Fluttershy was faster.

A blur of pink and yellow snatched the fluffypony out of the road, right out from under the oncoming truck's bumper. Fluttershy flew under the truck, dodging between the crushing wheels with inches to spare, and tumbled to the grass on the other side of the road with her precious cargo. The truck roared on, splashing muddy water into the air, the air horn bawl echoing in its wake.

Pinkamena and Angel raced to where Fluttershy lay curled up in the grass. She and Fluffyshy were unharmed, to Pinkamena's and Angel's relief. Fluttershy was curled up around Fluffyshy, hugging her close, her pupils pinpricks and her whole body shaking at the horror of what almost happened. "Mommy, can't bweef--!" Fluffyshy complained, squirming. Fluttershy loosened her grip a bit, to the fluffypony's relief.

Fluttershy looked up at Pinkamena. There was an unusual clarity in her eyes. "It's you, isn't it, Pinkamena," she said in a tiny voice.

Pinkamena sighed and nodded. "Yep."

Fluttershy's eyes darted around. "It's... another trollfic, isn't it," she said. "Why everypony feels so awful. Why all such horrible things are happening."

"Something like a trollfic, yeah. Maybe worse," Pinkamena said.

Fluttershy's eyes shimmered. Her breath started coming in short gasps. To Pinkamena's surprise, though, Fluttershy wasn't starting to cry, or get scared. Fluttershy was getting angry. "He-- they-- it tried to... have been making us... and... it.. tried to kill Fluffyshy..." Her pale blue eyes smoldered as she got to her feet, Fluffyshy cradled in the crook of one foreleg. "No. No! No you don't!" she shouted into the air.

"You're not doing this, you hear? You're not going to get her! You're not going to hurt her! I WON'T LET YOU!" Her shout of rage was deafening.

"You're not going to get my friends. You're not going to get Fluffyshy. AND YOU'RE NOT GETTING ME, EITHER!" she yelled at the sky. Angel hopped up on her head and flipped a double bird at the sky for emphasis. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled. It was rather dramatic.

Pinkamena grinned. "Glad to have you aboard, Flutters," she said. "Gonna tell his mother on him, are you?"

"Buck that noise," Fluttershy said, baring her teeth in a snarl. "I'm gonna kick his plot so hard he'll taste his own butt in the back of his mouth! Where do we start, Pinkamena?"

"First off, I need to borrow a frying pan from you. Mine's on the way to Fillydelphia," Pinkamena said. "Then we need to round up the others. We got a Toxic Nihilist to flush out!"

1)In case you have forgotten, little miss Rarity, back in the show premiere, kicked a manticore in the face.

2)Well, Pinkamena had to call it SOMETHING.

3)Cause you KNOW she's a hoopy frood.

4) Mirror-dwellers like herself had an oath of confidentiality that made a Catholic confessional look loose-lipped.

Chapter 4

They marched along side by side in the dismal drizzle, neither saying a word for some time. Fluttershy had Angel Bunny and Fluffyshy perched on her back  between her wings like little baby ducklings, and both mares were wearing identical brightly colored umbrella hats and stony expressions. Fluttershy just wasn't the sort who could maintain a grim and gritty mood for long, of course. After a while she finally spoke up.

"So. Um. Where have you been, Pinkamena?"

Pinkamena shrugged. "Eh. Here and there. A few other assignments. Moving into new digs out in the Dreamlands." A fleeting smile crossed her face. "Oh, and took a two week vacation."

"Really? Where did you go? What did you do?"

"Hunting expedition," Pinkamena said idly. "Gary Stu safari in the Chessgame of the Gods."

Fluttershy looked befuddled. "I'm.. wait. What?"

"Chessgame of the Gods," Pinkamena explained." Alternate continuum. It's sort of a hunting preserve set aside by a bunch of cosmic entities for keeping Mary Sues and Gary Stus."

"Um, Gary... Mary..."

"Gary Stus are the males, Mary Sues the females. Remember the trollfic?" Fluttershy nodded. "Sorta like a subspecies. They go out and try to make another universe revolve entirely around them. It never works, though; they suck so hard that it collapses in on them."

"Oh, my."

"So like I said, a bunch of Outsiders built an alternate Equestria to keep them fat, stupid, happy and out of the way where they can God Mode their way through life to their little heart's content." She snorted. "They get lured in with some sort of promise of cosmic ascendance for the 'winner'--" she snorted again-- "And once they're in, they're trapped inside. Not that they care that much. Too busy playing Mighty Whitey.  FakeQuestria is just chock full of social injustices to right, benighted ignorant savages to enlighten, victims of crime and murder to avenge, wars to fight, orphans to be idolized by, Diamond Dog slaves to liberate--"

"Oh, how terrible!"

"Nah nah nah, the place is uninhabited," Pinkamena said, waving a muddy hoof. "We populated it with manikins and cardboard cut-outs."

Fluttershy blinked. "Don't the, um, Sues and Stus notice?"

"Nah. Too busy narrating their own greatness." The corner of Pinkamena's mouth quirked. "Still, you'd think they'd notice that all the ponies they had sex with were inflatable...."

"Ewww!"

"Anyway, every now and then we gotta go in and thin the herd a bit," Pinkamena said cheerfully, oblivious to the shocked expression on Fluttershy's face. She stood on her back legs and swung her new frying pan, pantomiming knocking some unfortunate's head off his shoulders. "Great way to unwind. Not that it's much of a challenge: I bagged my limit on God Mode Stus and Villain Stus in the first three days."

"God Mode... Villain...?"

"Yeah, there are a ton of sub-breeds out there ," Pinkamena said. "All of 'em are enormous ego-sucking black holes, of course. But you got all kinds. Purity Sues which are all good and pure and sweet and sugary and incorruptible and well, you--" she gave Fluttershy a semi-apologetic glance-- " only, like, terrible.  You've got your Sun Tzu Sue who is a better military leader than Hannibal, MacArthur, Lee, Jackson, and Alexander the Great combined.  There's Copycat Sues, like-- picture a new pony coming to Ponyville, and she's a unicorn and her special talent is magic and she's Celestia's personal student and like, omigosh, no, she's not TWILIGHT, Twilight has a purple and violet mane, Dusklight has a violet and RED mane, and like original character DO NOT STEAL, K?" She bobbled her head from side to side like the vertebrae in her neck had turned to linguini.

"The most common kind in there are God Mode Sues and Villain Sues."

"Annnnd...?"

"God Mode Sues are for people who think alicorns are too underpowered. Villain Sues are just God Mode Sues for people who think Nightmare Moon was too subtle, Sombra was too benevolent and Discord wasn't a big enough dick." She shrugged. "Better just to cave their skulls in and put them out of everyone's misery."

Fluttershy made a sort of strangled sound of revulsion. "Is all that...really necessary?" She said faintly. "Cracking their skulls?"

"Uh, yeah. Universes collapsing in a singularity of suck, remember?" Pinkamena said. "Besides, it's a mercy killing. You don't want to know what the survivors from their canon realities want to do to them." She stopped to look around. It was hard to tell how far Sweet Apple Acres was, what with all the endless rain mingled with apocalyptic ash and the barren hills studded with tombstones.

"But... it's so... violent!" Fluttershy protested. "How can you be sure they're these, these Gary Mary Whatever thingies?"

The pink pony stopped in her muddy tracks and stared at her. "In the Chessgame of the Gods?" Pinkamena said in disbelief.

"Yes, they could just be... nice ponies who want to visit a pony world like ours and have fun and make friends--"

Pinkamena's eyebrows formed a flat line. "Here, let me list off some of the defining characteristics of these 'nice visitors' for you," she said. "And you tell me." She started tapping her points out in the muddy soil with her hoof.(1) "One: they pick what form they'll be in the chessgame. But they're NEVER ponies. Because ponies are too WUSSY. They're diamond dogs or gorillas or windigoes or cat people or timberwolves or talking trees or dragons or draconequi ... you get the idea.. But it's always big and bad with lots of claws and fangs and special powers and usually it's some kind of MONSTER."

"Oh my. Why would anypony want to--"

"Two: That's not enough. It doesn't matter that they give themselves super-pony abilities, from the moment they arrive they start stacking on extra powers and skills and magic artifacts like Pinkie Pie at a Sundae bar. Powers and weapons swiped from video games. Magic battleaxe guitars possessed by the spirit of Nightmare Moon. The power to cast spells using a magic system from another entire universe. Flaming swords. Guns that never run out of ammunition. Trinkets and toys and MacGuffins that even Princess Celestia couldn't make or afford."

"Well that is a little ridic--"

"Three:That's STILL not enough. They'll suddenly have more skills than any five ponies could learn in one lifetime. They'll be musicians and engineers and military geniuses. And they'll be better than anypony else in the world at them. Oh, throw in a hidden Dark Evil Side Deep Within. 'Cause that's like totally kewl."

"Now you've got to be jok--"

"FOUR:  they'll OF COURSE have some piece of technology from 'the human world' "--

"The what world?"

"Skip it. Anyway, they'll have a laptop or a cellphone or some junk which will naturally never ever need batteries, and all the little bone-in-the-nose backward ponies will 'ooh' and 'ahh' and then he'll go 'now let me play you the music of my people!' And no matter what cheesy crap noise comes out of his shiny techno toy, naturally everypony will love it and start dancing to it..."

"I'm starting to feel insult--"

"FIVE: despite being either scrawny bags of sticks or piles of gut pudding in their own Canon, they'll KICK. EVERYPONY'S. ASS." This was accompanied with a wide-eyed glare. "They'll know Pony-Fu and Krav Mare-ga and fifteen other fancy foreign fighting words and they'll be ultimate warriors and stomp a mudhole out of entire armies or monsters ten times their size. There'll be at least ONE trip to Tartarus or the Wastelands where they kick even MORE ass.

"SIX: They'll have an army of loyal followers-- and I mean literally, an army. Usually made of slaves they freed from the Diamond Dogs, and they're all totally loyal. Because EVERYpony who isn't a jerk is won over by Gary Stu's charm and wits and cool human music, even if he's a flesh eating monster or has fangs and sucks the lifeforce out of the living.

"SEVEN: And they'll have their own pirate airship within two weeks of their arrival, or some OTHER outrageously expensive form of transportation. And they'll be out 'liberating the slaves' or 'battling the pirates' or "digging out corruption in Equestria" or finding some other way to leave a trail of chaos and destruction right through the middle of Equestria by the end of the month."

"This is starting to sound like something Pipsqueak would come up with while playing pirates with Dinky," Fluttershy said, with a surprising amount of cynicism for the peaceful pegasus.

"The universe should be so lucky," Pinkamena said dryly. "An eight year old colt knows when he's getting ridiculous. A Gary Stu considers that a starting point."

"That's only the beginning. EIGHT:" Pinkamena continued. " In spite of Equestria being a peaceful, safe and happy country for thousands of years, all sorts of horrors and tragedies will sprout up like mushrooms around them. Corruption will surface like streaks of mold in a cheese wheel. Diamond Dog slavers will be under every rock, even right in the middle of Equestria. Bloody wars will pop up on every border. Children being abducted and eaten. Zombie outbreaks. Monsters escaping Tartarus en masse. Racist bigot ponies in uniform at every city gate. And every monster and villain gets a free level-up, just so the hero can look more badass when he finally shows up and curb-stomps them.

"And NINE: ponies will DIE LIKE FLIES around them. Why? Why, for TEH DRAMA." She actually pronounced the 'TEH.' "And oh yeah, you better hope you're not his or her boon companion because you'll be the first to bite it, just so he can mourn over your grave for a bit and then remember you with a tear in his eye while he tears through the rest of Equestria like a lawn mower stuck in high....

"All of this crap happens to US, so he can show how great he is and how he's the coolest and most awesome and most important thing in all Equestria." She hawked and spat. "The only thing that keeps the Chessverse from imploding is the fact that there are like a hundred of them at any one time, and they can't ALL be the center of the universe."

Fluttershy looked around. "This couldn't be caused by a Gary Stu or Mary Sue getting into our Equestria," She asked fearfully. "Could it?"

Pinkamena regarded the bleak landscape. "A Misery Stu? Could be, but it's really not likely." She paused to stare at a large scruffy black raven perched on a nearby fencepost. "If it was a Sue or a Stu, we would've already met them. They make the whole world revolve around them, remember? We would already know his immensely tragic backstory and all his current bad luck and hardships too. Heck, you probably would have already had sex with them." She started to trot on down the road, then realized Fluttershy wasn't with her.

Pinkamena looked back; the timid pegasus was standing stock still in the middle of the road, eyes round and jaw agape. "Whaaaaaat?" Fluttershy said.

"Oh yeah. Point number TEN..." Pinkamena trotted back to where Fluttershy stood stunned, and got up close. "They. Will Pork. Anything."

"Before you ask, it doesn't matter WHAT species they are or were. They'll be horny for the pony porny, and they'll get pony sex partners in no time flat. Sometimes several." She leaned in even closer. "And you and your friends are usually first on the list. You, Rarity, Twilight, Pinkie Pie, Luna, Celestia-- sometimes all of you. Though they'll grab a few background ponies for variety sometime--- maybe even throw in a few non-pony races for a lame attempt at originality...."

Fluttershy went "eee-hee-hee-heeeeeew." She danced on her hoof tips as if she'd stepped in something nasty.

"So no. Not a Gary Stu. This one is working from offstage, like the Trollfic was. It's probably something a lot worse."

"What could be worse than THAT?" Fluttershy said in horror. She darted fearful glances all around her, as if she expected a Gary Stu to jump out of the bushes and ravish her on the spot.

"My personal vote? A Toxic Nihilist," Pinkamena said. "Trollficcers? They just wanna pee in everyone's Hay Flakes to show how clever they are. Gary Stus and Mary Sues, they just wanna show how SPECIAL and BETTER they are. Even Misery Sues are just going "poor little me, pity me, wuv me." " Pinkamena shook her head. "But Toxic Nihilists? They just want to prove how terrible everything is... how horrible life is, and how pointless it is, and how hopeless... and they do it by ruining everything for everypony else."

"But they can't, not really," Fluttershy protested. "Can they? I mean, everything goes back to normal once they're gone."

"Usually, yeah." Pinkamena said. "But they still leave behind scars...Like me.  And they often traumatize other Outsiders in ways that never quite heal." She glowered. "And then there are the times when the fanboys ascend, the inmates start running the asylum, and Canon itself... the timeline, the source material for a continuum... gets torn to shreds." She pulled a comic book out of nowhere and showed it to Fluttershy. The cover featured a red-and-blue clad biped swinging from building to building on some sort of webbing. "See this guy? Used to be one of the most popular Canon superheros among the Outsiders. He was brave and tough and even though he had troubles he overcame them; he was a hero because it was the right thing to do-- he eventually got married to his greatest true love-- he was growing and developing as a character... and then..."

"And then?"

Pinkamena snarled. "And then... CHEESEHEAD."

Hearing their cue, lightning flashed and thunder rumbled in the distance. " A fat dorkboy who didn't LIKE the hero's wife... he got in charge of the Canon, stamped his widdle feet and tried to write her out of existence."

Fluttershy gasped. "Oh that poor mare! Did he succeed?"

"Pretty much," Pinkamena said. "She still exists in tons of continuum-- fanon, subcanon, alt canon, strip canon.... he couldn't erase them all. But the main Canon, he absolutely wrecked, trying to find ways to do it. He had her kidnapped. Blew her up in a plane. Tried to get them divorced. Turned her into a clone. Turned HIM into a clone. Rewrote the movies with a retcon. Gave her cancer from the hero's radioactive sperm...."

"....What." Fluttershy's eyebrows tabled.

"You heard me. You name it, didn't matter HOW stupid it was or HOW bad it screwed things up, he did it. The Hero's Wife Must Die. He finally managed to get her out of Canon completely... by having the hero sell his marriage to the Devil to save his ninety-year-old aunt who was dying of a bullet wound."

"....What." It seemed almost impossible, but Fluttershy's delivery was even flatter.

"They got rid of Cheesehead, finally, but by then it was too late. Twenty years of continuity and character growth WRECKED so one stubborn dorkboy could have his way. The whole Canon came unravelled like a cheap sweater. It'll probably take another decade for all his flunkies and his policies to be rinsed out of the system, at which point they'll have to do the mother of all Retcons to fix everything." She tucked the comic book away to whatever hammerspace it had come from. "I ain't saying this guy we got here could ever get put in charge of OUR Canon. But it does happen often enough that the Outsiders are worried."

"Why... why are they worried?" Fluttershy said. "You said they just watch us for entertainment. It can't be that important to them."

"Not important?" Pinkamena gave her a look. "Tell me, Fluts," she said. "Why do they watch us, do you think?"

"F-For entertainment...?" The answer finished as a question.

"For refuge," Pinkamena corrected. "Did you know that the suicide rate among young Outsiders has gone up four hundred percent in the past fifty of their years?

"They live in a hard, tough, difficult world, that can be incredibly bleak at times," she said. "Watching worlds like ours gives them hope-- some temporary comfort. A chance to rest, a chance to believe for a minute that things can get better.

"Toxic Nihilists hate that. They love to wallow in despair, and nothing makes them more spitting mad than seeing anypony or anything else that doesn't. If they see another person SMILING, they'll go out of their way to hunt down whatever makes them SMILE and DESTROY IT or as much of it as they can reach. If that means taking a cartoon world full of magic and rainbows and talking ponies and remaking it into a fricking morbid hellhole, one full of dead orphans, starving waifs, soulless shells of war veterans, burnt hills and graveyards, they'll do it. And they'll pat themselves on the back for 'enlightening' the rest of us to 'how the world really is,'...... and laugh at the notion that they're making other beings die just a little bit more inside.

"So yeah. Kinda important." She turned around and started trotting down the road, hooves splashing in the puddles. After a moment's lip-biting hesitation Fluttershy followed.

They soon found themselves passing the outer reaches of Sweet Apple Acres. Or at least the remains thereof; the trees were blighted and blasted, withered in leaf and barren of fruit. Their once cheery red barn house could be seen on the hilltop, decrepit and crumbling, the red paint gone gray and peeling.

Tromping down the road in their direction was Big MacIntosh. But he obviously... wasn't feeling like himself today. Fluttershy could tell. She'd watched the big brawny farmpony at work from a distance for too long, pining away for the nerve to speak to him, not to recognize his subtle little moods.

There was no subtlety now. His head hung low and his slow confident gait was now a listless shuffle. he was scruffy and dirty, his mane tangled. Rather than the stout horsecollar he wore a battered and scarred suit of armor. The breastplate looked to be as thick as the metal on a locomotive's boiler and the pauldrons were the size of potbellied stoves. They had been ornate, worked with symbols of the sun and moon and fine, ornate bas-relief figures, but the mud and battle-scarring all but obscured the detail.

As he drew closer Fluttershy gasped in shock. The stallion had dozens of scars on every visible part of him, even one that crossed over his left eye, which shone white with blindness. Filthy bandages wrapped him here and there. An enormous belt-fed weapon of some sort was strapped across his back, and a bladed weapon that looked like someone had mated a chainsaw with a ball of hate hung from his side.

He trudged up to them, only stopping and looking up when he realized someone stood in his way. "Make way," he grunted. "On a mission for the war effort in the name of the Solar Empress..."

Fluttershy lost all timidity and ran up, forehoof raised to examine his dirty bandages. "Oh Big MacIntosh, you poor thing, what happened to you??"

He looked at her with empty, listless eyes. "Been on the front for nine months, ma'am," he said. "The Great Equestrian War rages on with the heretics..."

"Heretics? Empress? War? What...?" Fluttershy didn't let her bewilderment stop her ministrations. She set Fluffyshy and Angel down on a nearby rock, gave Angel her umbrella hat to keep them dry, and  started digging through her saddlebags for clean bandages and antiseptic. "What war are you talking about?"

MacIntosh stared at her as if she'd gone simple. "THE war," he said. "With the heretics and infidels who have defied the rule of the Solar Empress, granting refuge to the corrupted and unclean..."

Fluttershy barely reacted. She was in the zone. "Uh huh," she said, daubing salves on cuts and bruises and winding bandages. "Take off this armor shoulder, um, thingy, please? It's in the way..."

Pinkamena facehoofed, spattering her face with mud. "Ah crap, they're cribbing notes off of WankHammer 40k," she said. " Five bits to nuthin' says we're up to our plots in Emo:the Tossers monsters next." She stepped closer to Big Mac and put her hooves on his cheeks, turning his head to look him in the eye. "Big MacIntosh," she said calmly. "I need you to listen to me very carefully, okay? I know the real you is down in there somewhere. This isn't real.  Okay? Equestria has been at peace for over a thousand years. There is no war with the heretics, you are not a space marine or whatever they told you, there's no battlefront, There is no War. Understand?"

Big MacIntosh blinked. He raised his head and looked over Pinkamena's head to the far horizon, his gaze bleak but his jaw steely. "Only the dead," he intoned, "shall know the end of War--"

Pinkamena sighed. "Oh well. Plan B." With an overhand swing she brought her skillet down on MacIntosh's head.

The skillet clanged. Big MacIntosh's eyes crossed. "Eeyup? EeNope? Eeyup? EeNope? Eeyup?" he said, then fell face down in the mud.

Fluttershy shrieked in shock. "Pinkamena! What are you doing?" With a desperate shove she rolled Big MacIntosh over onto his back, just barely managing. She examined the luckless stallion's head, her face inches from his. "You could have concussed him or given him brain damage or--"

"Quick, then, give him CPR!" Pinkamena said. C'mon, she thought. Don't think about it just---

Fluttershy's face bloomed red. Nuts, she's onto me, Pinkamena thought. "What? What are you trying to pull Pinkamena--"

Just then Big MacIntosh's eyes fluttered open. From where she stood Pinkamena could see that both his eyes were normal again. The window was narrow; she had to think fast. "KISS HER RIGHT NOW, SOLDIER-- THAT'S AN ORDER!" she barked in his ear.

Whatever deformed continuity had made MacIntosh a soldier, it had apparently instilled hup-two obedience. Without so much as a blink he lunged up, put his hooves on either side of Fluttershy's face, and planted his lips square on hers. The pegasus' squeal of surprise was muffled-- and brief. It quickly turned into something a lot more smoky sounding as the repressed filly suddenly began returning the kiss with enthusiasm.

It worked. The scars disappeared. The armor turned back into pot metal and hammered-together junk and fell off the stallion into a clanging pile around them. Somewhere a bird chirped. And darned if the dead grass for a few yards around hadn't turned green.

It took another second but Fluttershy finally realized what she was doing. She leapt away from MacIntosh, face flaming. "I'msorryI'msorryI'msorry--" she stammered, eyes tearing up. She started to turn and fly off.

"Wait--!" Big Mac said, holding out a hoof.

"Ohhhhh NO ya don't," Pinkamena said. She grabbed Fluttershy's tail in her teeth.(2) "You... shtay... HERE!" she said with her mouth full. She literally yanked Fluttershy out of the air and plunked her rump-first onto the muddy ground. "I am NOT going to put up with a few hundred chapters of that endless will they or won't they angst and poor communication CRAPOLA. You two are perfect for each other, anyone can see it. You like him, he likes you, you're both shy, GET OVER IT." She put her head down and pushed the pegasus over to Mac, sliding her on her rump through the mud.

Fluttershy was setting new records for blushing. "I-- I-- I---"

MacIntosh blinked at her. "You...?" he pointed at her, then at himself.

Fluttershy cringed for a second, then managed a quick nod. "....And...you?"

MacIntosh gave a lopsided grin. "EeYup."

Fluttersqueak. Suddenly, she jumped forward and kissed him again. The circle of color and life around them leapt outward another hundred yards. There were apple buds on the trees and dandelions in the grass now.

MacIntosh looked nervous. "So... Us...?" he asked.

Fluttershy giggled and nuzzled him. "...EeYup," she said.

The apple trees bloomed.

It was then that Pinkamena realized that Angel Bunny and Fluffyshy had jumped forward and pushed Fluttershy into MacIntosh's hooves. They sat there on the ground behind their mistress, smirking and looking rather pleased with themselves as the two ponies continued with their lip-lock. Pinkamena gave an amused snort and trotted over to the two conniving pets. They held up a hoof and a paw to her. "Bwo-hoof?" Fluffyshy said.

"Yeah, brohoof," Pinkamena said with a half-grin, giving them one each.

After the two finally came up for air, a great deal of plot exposition took place. "... and the last thing I remember is slippin' off the barn roof," Big Mac finished, poking at his bandages. "I landed in a junk pile. 'Swhere I got all these injuries."

"Probably where you got the armor too," Pinkamena noted, kicking at the scraps still lying in the road. "The T.N.'s getting lazy. Or doesn't want to try and write a whole war epic.... At least we know we're not going to come over the next ridge and find ourselves in a combat zone."

"So this thing is sorta like Discord," Mac said. "messin' up the whole world. And you're like... a Pinkie Pie from another dimension, sent to stop them?"

Pinkamena half-shrugged, half nodded. "Close enough for government work," she said.

Big MacIntosh frowned and nodded sternly. "Well, Ma'am, you got mah help," he said. "F'what it's worth." he looked at Fluttershy apologetically. "Ah guess we picked a right poor time to start us a romance..." Fluttershy just bit her lip and huddled closer into his side.

"Well yeah, I--" Pinkamena stopped. "No, I take that back, this is the exact right time to start a romance." She looked around; the fields were alive and blooming as far as the eye could see, and the clouds were beginning to break up, letting sunlight stream down. Every second Big MacIntosh and Fluttershy were together, the cleansing spread.

"I'm normally of the 'hit it with a spiked baseball bat till it's fixed' school," she said thoughtfully. "But maybe this time calls for different strategies."

There was a rattling caw. They all looked in the direction it came from. A huge black bird-- one that Pinkamena had mistaken earlier for a raven-- was sitting on a nearby fencepost, glaring at them with hate-filled yellow eyes. It shook out its ragged wings and leapt into the air, winging off into the sky.

Pinkamena followed it thoughtfully with her eyes. "Oh yeah, that's a good sign," she said cynically. "Come on, ponies, let's go get Applejack."

1)The pony equivalent of counting on one's fingers.

2) Being careful to get the whole tail, and not just the extensions.

Chapter 5

The three of them walked up the hill towards the farmhouse. The rain had stopped for a moment, but the clouds were still tempestuous; boiled up grey and black, broken, the sky between the bleak yellow that foretold storms to come. About halfway, Big Macintosh stopped. "I'm presumin' y'all are lookin' for Applejack," he said softly.

"You got it in one," Pinkamena said. "What's the problem then?"

"I think I know where she is," he said. "But I think y'all ought to let Fluttershy and me go fetch her." He shuffled a bit. It was surprising how such a large stallion could look so meek. "I don't think this one's gonna be one you can fix with that fryin' pan of yours."

Pinkamena started to snark about it, but something in the stallion's eye made her reconsider. "All right," she said. "And what do you want me to do in the meanwhile?"

Big Mac ruminated on this. "Seein' as Granny Smith was as right as rain yesterday, I figure whatever's layin' her low today is the work of that Toxic Ny-heel-ist you were talking about." He looked at her. "If'n you could try and help her like you helped Fluttershy an' me, I'd appreciated it." He winced and touched his hoof to a spot between his ears tenderly. "Without th' application of cooking implements to the noggin, if possible?" he added.

"Ah. That'd be the center room, North side, top floor?" Pinkamena asked.

"Ayep. How'd ya guess?"

Pinkamena pointed. "By the buzzards flocking around the window," she said. There were several large, black, scraggly looking birds clinging to the raingutters and windowsill, staring into the window. They were presumably vultures, either really large crows or really small buzzards, really. They were so bedraggled and mangy it was hard to tell. They looked like the kind of birds you saw in the footage of oil spill disasters.

"Okayyyyy," Pinkamena said. "This should be interesting. All right, I'll go help Granny, and you two--" she paused, looking over to see Fluttershy nuzzling her way into Big Macintosh's neck like she intended to stay there for life. She gave the stallion an 'oh please' look. "You try and pull Applejack out of her funk. If you can focus that long." Macintosh shot her an awkward grin. "It's up to you, Macintosh, 'cause Fluttershy is a natural-born crying towel. Don't sit there and cry along with her; that'll just drag you in. Just take it careful, remind Applejack of the things that make her happy, and be persistent. Got it?"

"Got it," Macintosh said.

"Good." Pinkamena turned and headed for the house. "...Schmoopy Doo." Macintosh glared after her, but said nothing.

Pinkamena entered the quiet house. It was dimly lit, and the air hung still and lifeless inside. There was an atmosphere in the place, the kind one found hanging in the air at a funeral... or when people in the home were waiting for someone to die.

Applebloom was in the living room, curled up on the couch, crying. Her red ribbon had been replaced with a black one, and she was staring blankly at an open photo album on the table, tears trickling down her cheeks. Pinkamena looked over her shoulder; the album was open to pictures of a much younger Granny Smith, and a rough-edged stallion Pinkamena assumed was Grandpa Apple.

Applebloom looked up at Pinkamena listlessly, then went back to staring at the album.

"Applebloom? Where's Granny?" Pinkamena asked.

Applebloom snuffled and hucked. "Up- up stairs, in huh-her room. The doctors say it won't be l-long...."

Pinkamena pulled out her mini-microphone. "Further note: the Gloom is getting nasty. Got a full blown Death Watch vortex here at the Apple farm, one juvenile in the middle. Moving to unwind it now. Step two...." Get Applebloom out first? No. that wouldn't work.  It took a sick mind to make a child attend a Death Watch. Death Watches were brutal to children Applebloom's age; they were old enough to understand death and to know they were losing somepony they cared about, but didn't have the strength or experience to deal with it. Their own innocence made for a feedback loop of pathos that made the Death Watch Vortex suck(1) a hundred times harder. She could spend a week pulling Applebloom out of the morass over and over, only to have her fall right back in, making it stronger each time.

Protocol was that you dealt with the cause of the Death Watch first. Pinkie spoke into the microphone. "Moving to shift the center of the Vortex: Granny Smith."

Pinkamena crept up the stairs. A "Doctor" was waiting in the hallway. he wore a white coat and stethoscope and a mirror on a strap on his head like a cartoon physician, and looked like a ghoul-- the very embodiment of medical care devoid of hope or comfort. "It won't be long now," he said... apparently one of his pre-scripted responses.

Pinkamena kicked him in the nuts as she passed, just for practice.

She gently hoofed open the door to Granny Smith's bedroom. Granny was there, lying in her bed, covers up to her chin. her head was turned away from the door, and she was looking at the open window where the black, cadaverous birds were watching. One had gotten bold enough to step onto the windowsill and poke its beak inside; it retreated in a flurry of greasy black feathers when Pinkamena stepped in the doorway.

She could hear Granny faintly mumbling and moaning to herself, a mournful, hopeless litany. "Granny?" Pinkamena said.

"Pinkie, child, is that you?" Granny quavered. She didn't turn her head or take her eyes off the window, or the birds of doom lurking  just outside it. "Come here child, so I can see you." Obediently Pinkamena came into the room.

She stepped around the bed, putting herself in between Granny and the window so the poor old mare didn't have to look at the feathered death harbingers. "I'm here Granny Smith. Are you okay?"

"Oh, it is you, Pinkie," Granny said. She looked haggard and drawn, shrunken in on herself under the covers. "I'm afraid I'm not long for this world, Pinkie. My time has come."

"Nonsense," Pinkamena said firmly. "You got decades in you yet."

"No no no, child," Granny Smith quavered. "The grave is waiting for me, and that long, black train isn't going to wait any longer." Her voice got fainter. She looked up at Pinkamena beseechingly. "Help me, Pinkie... It's so cold and it's gettin' dark..." her voice quavered.

Pinkamena tucked the blankets up around Granny's chin. This was bad. If things got grimdark enough it really could kill her. "Pinkie, come close," Granny said faintly. "There's something I need to ask you to do..."

Pinkie leaned over the bed. "Yes?"

"When they bury me... when poor Macintosh and Applejack bury me..." Pinkie leaned in closer.

There was a twinkle in the old mare's eye. "Tell 'em to plant me arse up so Applebloom kin park her bicycle." Pinkamena found herself suddenly staring down the length of a double barreled shotgun.

"DROP!"

Pinkamena's eyes went round as saucers and she hit the floor. There was a thunderous BOOM and the air filled with gunpowder smoke and scorched feathers. Squawks of alarm and rage came from outside; Pinkamena heard the wretched birds flapping off. There was a clack and two empty shotgun shells dropped to the floor. Pinkie sat up slowly, shaking her head to get rid of the ringing in her ears. Granny was sitting up in bed, calmly reloading her shotgun from a box of shells she'd pulled from under her pillow. "Got one o' the bastids," she said. "Thank ye fer givin me cover there. Thought I was gonna have ta wait for that un to come all the way to the foot uv the bed."

Pinkamena looked Granny over. "You're--"

"Not whammied like every'un else?" Granny finished for her. "No, child. I knew somethin' was up when the whole world started goin' bleak. Mind, first I thought it wuz just me-- felt so miserable and sad, worse'n sad, like I'd never feel happy again." She shuddered, and snapped the shotgun closed. "Then I saw everypony was actin' the way I felt and I knew somethin' was up. I been through Discord's little mind-meddling shenanigans, and run into a few more ugly critters like him besides. I know what it feels like when someone starts pokin' around in my brain. Is it Discord again?"

Pinkamena decided to keep it simple. "No. But something like him." She looked at the window. "So the buzzards...?"

"Them ain't buzzards," Granny snorted. "Whatever is doin' this is sendin' em. Seed 'em lurkin' all over the place, hangin' around some ponies, just oozing misery all over, makin' everypony feel worse, snuffin' every bit o' happiness out. Especially the older folk. Old ponies' home in town looks like a rookery."

"So why didn't you cave in?"

Granny gave an even bigger snort. " Whoever's runnin' this thing is dumber'n a bucket of horseapples. Long as I've lived? I been through more bad times and heartbreak and loss than the next five ponies. This whoever-he-is thinks that bein' old makes me weak? HAH!"

"Figures. You're more resistant," Pinkamena said.

Granny laughed. "Oh lord no child. I ain't immune to hurtin.' But I've learned t' find the joy on the other side of th' pain. Life's full of joy. If I live, I git to see my grandchildren's children. If I die tomorrow, I'll be together with my dear Johnny-- and watchin' 'em from the Forever Fields." Her expression softened. "I ain't gonna give in to despair. It's silly and I ain't got time to waste on it."

She blinked and went back to her no-nonsense tone. "Anyhoo, I saw how them Misery Buzzards were lurkin' round old farts like me, so I came back here and set up this little turkey shoot. I figger every one buggin' me is another pony bein' left in peace." Her face rumpled in contempt. "They'll be back. Dumb buggers can't stay away from a geezer who's boo-hooin' her heart out, and they got a memory span lahk a ferret on uppers." She tucked the loaded shotgun under the blanket next to her.

Pinkamena gave her a cockeyed grin. "I knew there was a reason I liked you so much, Granny," she said.

"Go on, you," Granny said, chuckling. "Get my grandchildren outta here an' out from under this dang cloud. I'll hold the fort here."

Pinkamena nodded and trotted out the door. After a moment's thought she stuck her head back in the door. Granny was pulling the blankets back up to her chin. "Granny! Thought you might wanna know-- Big Mac and Fluttershy. They're a pair now."

"Really?" the old mare beamed. "Hah! About time the boy got his gumption up. A pegasus, how bout that? Looks like I'll be pickin' my great grandchildren out of the tree branches!" Granny cackled as she settled herself back in to her ambush nest.

Pinkamena heard her start up her moaning. "Oh, poor me, I'm just a lone, lorn creechur... that's it, come peek in the winder, jest a little closer, y' bastid..."

Pinkamena snerked and headed down the stairs.

Things had gotten grimmer in the living room. Little Applebloom was now in a black mourning dress, and dark blurry shadows, the outlines of adult ponies, moved about the room as if gathering for a wake. "Come on, Applebloom." she said, picking the filly up and putting her over her back. "I think you need to get outside."

"Is Granny... Is Granny--?" Applebloom said sadly.

"What? Taking a nap? Sure," Pinky said. "She'll be up later today."

Applebloom looked confused. The black of her hairbow faded to a dark burgundy. "Just-- just a nap?"

"Well, not exactly napping," Pinkamena averred as they stepped out on the porch. "She's sitting up-- practicing her new hobby."

"New hobby?" Applebloom was incredulous.

BOOM! BOOM!

There was a sound like a chicken dying in agony and an enormous dead bird the size of a turkey plummeted out of the sky. It landed with a thump right at Pinkamena's hooves, feathers smoking faintly and its feet sticking comically into the air.

"Bird watching," Pinkamena said.

Applebloom gawked at the dead bird, her eyes like saucers. Pinkamena waited to see what her ultimate reaction would be.

"Nailed yer, ya crud-buzzard!" Granny Smith's voice echoed down from the upstairs window.

Typically, one would expect the tiny pony to be horrified at the death of an 'innocent' creature. But this was Ponyville. Applebloom was a farm filly who lived literally on the edge of the Everfree forest, and not every nasty creature that came out of the Everfree got dealt with through Fluttershy's tender ministrations.(2) Besides, when you've been through something terrible, the strangest things can be funny.

She saw the bird lying there, arse up like a mauled feather duster, and snerked. She quickly covered her mouth with a mortified look. Snickers exploded from behind Applebloom's hooves. "I'm an awful pony," she said, half horrified at herself.

"That's okay, so am I," Pinkamena  grinned.

Pinkamena looked back at Applebloom; her grin turned into an evil smirk. "And now, an imitation." She held up her forehooves and flapped them at the wrists like bird wings. "Caw Caw, BLAM, CRAP, I'M DEAD!"

That did it. Applebloom squealed with laughter.

The moment the filly laughed, the remains of the Misery Buzzard promptly deflated like a football and disintegrated, leaving nothing but a pile of rancid feathers. Applebloom's hair ribbon bloomed back to its normal color.  Pinkamena trotted off in the direction Macintosh and Fluttershy had gone, a giggling Applebloom draped across her back. "Come on, Applebloom, let's go fetch your brother and sister and future sister in law."

"Sister in law??"

Behind them the feathers turned to dust.

1)In all senses of the word

2)For that matter most would be disturbed to learn How many times Fluttershy had handed out the lethal smackdown herself. In a choice between her chickens and some vicious bloodsucking creature that looked like something fished out of the sink trap, she came down on the side of the chickens.

Chapter 6

The gravesite was a tiny one; three gravestones atop a small hill, sheltered by a lone apple tree that nopony ever harvested. The branches were bare and dead now, and the sky overhead was grey as ash.

Applebloom and Pinkamena could see Applejack's silhouette at the hilltop. She was sitting by the tombstones of her mother, father and grandfather, her head hanging low, not moving. Fluttershy was standing there as well; her posture seemed strange, almost hostile... they hesitated at the foot of the hill, then cautiously made their way up the trail to the top.

To their surprise they met Mac on his way back down. He marched past them stiff legged, his jaw clenched in anger. "Big MacIntosh, is somethin' wrong?" Applebloom asked.

"Nuthin' wrong," Mac grated out.

Pinkamena took note that the lifeless pallor had not, in fact, returned to his coat and mane. "Why'd you leave your sister up there alone like that, Mac?" she asked carefully.

Mac stood at the bottom of the hill, his back to them. She could see his shoulders clenching. "That mare up there ain't my sister," he snapped. "Not no more."

Applebloom's jaw dropped. "Big Macintosh..." she said. She obviously couldn't believe her ears.

Pinkamena walked around to look Big Mac in the face. The pain in his eyes was shocking. "Mac," she said. "Whatever happened up there-- you have to remember that this is not normal--"

"That ain't my sister, Miss Pie," he insisted, his throat working. "What she... what she tole me she did-- no sister o' mine would ever do that!" He was almost pleading.

Pinkamena mentally ran down a checklist of grim possibilities, and meta-possibilities. "And no sister did, Mac," she said with certainty. "Come on, we're going up there and you're coming with. You two--" she pointed at Applebloom and Big Macintosh-- "stay quiet until I say otherwise. Got it?" The two nodded.

When they got close enough to see clearly, Pinkamena realized it was far worse than she'd thought. Applejack's hat was missing. It was her last memento of her father, or so Pinkamena had heard. That hat stuck on Applejack's head through hell and high water. For it to be gone meant Bad Things.

She got closer and it got worse. Applejack's long blonde mane and tail were gone, cut down to a prison-cut burr... it went right along with the prison orange uniform she was wearing. She was thinner, too, with hollows in her cheeks and under her eyes. Pinkie could see old cuts and still healing bruises; wherever the enemy had sent her, it had been ugly.

She had manacles around her forehooves.

Nearby stood the shadowy specter of a prison guard, eating his lunch and looking bored and restless. Another specter stood there too; Fluttershy. She was standing across the graves from Applejack, not speaking, not moving. The cold hateful look on her face was chilling. Behind her stood two more shadowy forms-- her father and mother, Pinkamena guessed-- and at a distance, observing, stood the specters of Celestia and Luna, little more than one white silhouette and one indigo one. They towered over the others and looked down on Applejack with impassive, aloof expressions.

Applejack was talking to the Fluttershy specter. "...They let me out, just t'day, when they heard Granny was dyin'," she said. "To say goodbye b'fore--" she swallowed. "--- t' give her a chance to forgive me... b'fore..."  She looked up at Fluttershy, pleading. "Please, Fluttershy. There ain't been a day gone by I hain't regretted doing what I did. I know I'm gonna die in that prison.... and ifn' I don't I'll be an old gray mare by the time I walk back out. My own family turned their backs on me. But I can't go on livin' at all knowin' you don't forgive me." Tears dripped down her muzzle. "Please, Fluttershy..."

The Fluttershy standing before her said nothing; she just looked away. Applejack choked back a sob.

Pinkamena listened, frowning. She got to her feet and walked in a wide circle around the little tableau. As soon as she passed the spectral fluttershy, the image rippled like corrugated paper and faded away, revealing a very real and rather bewildered-looking Fluttershy standing in the same place. "--are you talking about, Applejack? Forgive what? I'm sure I would, but I don't understand..."

"Ooh, a Rashomon field," Pinkamena muttered. "And directionally polarized. This guy's good."

Fluttershy heard her. "Oh thank goodness you're here, Pinkamena!" she said. "Poor Applejack-- she saw me and looked like she'd seen a ghost! The things she's telling me she's gone through, it's just awful...she's been sent to prison-- for life! And why is she a prisoner? I can't get any answers..."

Pinkamena patted Fluttershy on the shoulder. "Don't bother, sweetie; she can't hear anything you're saying right now."

"What?" Fluttershy said.

"The bad guy's forcing the perspective," Pinkamena simplified. "Basically putting blinders on so that you don't see anything but what he wants. " She pulled out a fedora with a PRESS card in the hatband and slapped it on her own head. "Let's find out what backstory got spliced onto her." She marched up to the ghostly Princesses, a pen and notepad in hoof. "Excuse me your Highnesses." The two spectres looked down at her, aloof. "Pinkamena, Foal Free Press. So tell us, who exactly is the convict, and why is she here?"

"She is Applejack, of the Apple family, the former Bearer of the Element of Honesty," the pseudo-Celestia said. "She is here as a royal benevolence, to see her grandmother one last time before she passes."

"Uh huh," Pinkamena said. She wondered briefly what these one-concept railroaded bits of ambulatory narrative would do if she told them Granny was actually doing fine and was getting better, but let it pass. "We understand she was sent to prison for thirty years to life. For the record, of what crime was she convicted?"

Pseudo-Luna spoke. "For the attempted murder of Fluttershy's newborn child."

There was a gasp of horror behind her; Pinkamena was fairly sure it was from Fluttershy. Applebloom jumped over the gravestones and spoke up defiantly. "My sister would NEVER do anything like that!"

PseudoCelestia's eyes were merciless. "She confessed."

Applebloom shook her head. "No!"

"But I did," Applejack said, her voice almost inaudible. "I... I did."

"But Applejack-- I don't have a baby!" Fluttershy protested. "I mean, Big Macintosh just started talking about dating, we haven't even--" she blushed suddenly.

To her bewilderment, Applejack spoke over top of her, as if she hadn't heard. "It was a week after Discord Junior was born," she said. "I--"

Fluttershy let out a mouselike shriek. "Discord?!? You think Discord and I would---" she cringed. "Not that he's awful or anything, I mean he is trying to be a better person, and it's bad to say bad things about a friend, but oh really, he's really not what I want in a special somepony. Really, Applejack, he and I are just friends. We don't have a baby!"

Again, Applejack acted as if she'd not heard a thing. "I knew what I had to do..." she said. "Or I thought I did..."

Fluttershy looked back and forth. "Why can she hear Celestia and Applebloom but not me?" she protested.

Pinkamena shrugged. "The Rashomon Filter on her is only letting her see and hear whatever makes her feel worse."

Applebloom crept up to Applejack, worry and pity in her eyes. "Applejack... what'd you do...?"

Applejack looked up, anguish in her face. "None of y'all ever told her??"

Pinkamena seized the opportunity. "It's part of your punishment, Applejack," she said. "She has to hear it from you." Fluttershy gasped, but Pinkamena didn't flinch. Even when Applejack started tearing up again.  The farmpony lay down in the grass next to Applebloom, refusing to meet her eye. She started to talk in a voice raw with grief.

"About ten years ago, not even a year after that mess with Tirek, Somethin' happened that absolutely terrified me," she said. "Discord and Fluttershy up and got married. I couldn't believe it; she was up and romancin' with the same sonuvagun who'd betrayed us all and nearly destroyed Equestria. Again! And now Fluttershy was right in bed with him! If he every turned on us, the Elements would be useless. I couldn't believe he was reformed. All I could see was a powerful, terrifyin' chaos monster who'd just bide his time... again... and try to destroy us all... again... the moment our backs were turned.

"And then... and then they had a baby." She shuddered. "He looks just about like his old man, too. And he practically came outta the womb throwing chaos magic around. It was worse than I'd imagined. Now the two-timing varmint had an heir! One who'd probably be even MORE powerful than he was-- with chaos magic AND pony magic. And sure as sugar he was gonna take after his mind-scramblin', backstabbin', world-destroyin' daddy.

"He's just a baby... just an innocent little baby. And any fool could see that Discord doted on him and Flutters both. But I convinced myself that Fluttershy was a brainwashed fool, that my friends all had the wool pulled over their eyes... that the only way to save Fluttershy, an' Ponyville, an' the world-- was to get rid of that baby." She swallowed. "So, while everyone was sleeping, I sneaked into their house, put Discord Junior in a basket, carried him out into the Everfree and left him there." She clenched her eyes shut and ground her teeth. "I left Fluttershy's baby out in the wilderness to die. If Zecora hadn't found him..."

"No..." Applebloom said, putting her hooves to her mouth.

Applejack only nodded. "I've spent every day for the past ten years in prison, regrettin' and repentin'... your brother can't even look at me. The whole Apple clan turned their back on me..." She hung her head. "An' now you will too, I suppose. It's no more'n I'd expect, or deserve." Were it possible the bleak surroundings turned even more ashen.

"No! No sister o' mine would do that!" Applebloom said angrily, jumping to her feet. Applejack flinched at the words. "No, I don't mean it like that!" Applebloom protested. "I--"

Suddenly Pinkamena pushed her aside. She pulled an enormous spray can out of her saddlebag and filled the air with choking white smoke. Everything in the immediate area slowed to a standstill. Even the ripples in Pseudo-Celestia's hair froze. "What was that?" Applebloom coughed, waving the clouds away from her face.

Pinkamena held up the can and grinned. "Movie time, in aerosol form," she said. "Ever wonder why it takes five minutes for the thirty-second counter on a bomb to tick down in a movie? Well now you know." She put away the can and pulled an odd looking device out of her panniers. It was a tangle of cables, buttons and meters. She stuck several sticky tabs to Applejack's side and something like a thermometer into the farmpony's mouth. Several seconds' twiddling with the dials produced some odd beeps and squeals, and a disgruntled expression on Pinkamena's face. "Yup, thirty eight percent," she said, sighing. "That ain't good."

"What's that?" Applebloom said.

"An OOC meter," Pinkamena said, stowing the artifact away. "It measures just how far out of character she is." She grunted. "And it doesn't look good."

"You mean she's really out of character?" Fluttershy asked.

"I mean that she's almost thirty eight percent IN character," Pinkamena said. "Thirty eight percent is enough in-character for it to be something you think you might do-- or deep down, you're afraid you might do."

Big Macintosh grunted. "That was what.... that was what I figgered on," he muttered. "When I got up here, an' AJ told me that story." He shook his head. "That can't be mah sister. It can't! Applejack would never even think of hurtin' a foal."

"You mean she really would... try to kill my baby??" Fluttershy said, horrified.

"But it's not real! It's all in her head!" Applebloom said.

"That only makes it worse," Pinkamena said patiently to the filly.  "That's where all her fears are. 'Possible' and 'likely' ain't the same thing... but right now, try and tell her fears that."

She looked at Big Mac. "And 'would never?'

"Lemme tell you a story," Pinkamena said. "There was an earth pony mare, lived out on the frontier. Just her, her husband, and her foal, a newborn. The husband had to go to the city for something or other, had to leave her all alone for days on end.

"While he was gone, a band of rogue gryphons came through. That happened sometimes-- gryphons would come through, find a helpless, lonely settlement, the stallions gone, and they'd rob and loot and kill and burn. She saw 'em coming and took the foal and hid in the root cellar. The gryphons started carousing around outside, doing who knows what...

Then the foal started crying. She tried to shush it, tried to soothe it. It only cried louder. So she covered its mouth, gentle as she could, to stifle its cries... The gryphons found the door to the root cellar  and tore it open. They just laughed at her; they were drunk off their tails and not looking for trouble. They swiped the settler's whiskey jug off the table and flew off.

But the baby was dead.  She'd smothered it, trying to keep it from being heard.

"Another one for you. War story, since you seem to have spent a little alternate reality time there." Macintosh twitched but said nothing. "A squad of soldiers escorting a refugee woman and her baby through enemy territory. They got cornered by a patrol, one that seriously outnumbered them. They hunkered down in the brush waiting for them to leave-- and the baby started crying. The sergeant smothered the baby's cries with one hand.... the patrol moved on. But that soldier came within a hair of killing that baby, to save the lives of his soldiers and the woman they were transporting.

"Never is a pretty big claim, big guy. Deep down, we all know that in just the wrong circumstances, we could all do horrible, horrible things. Like I said, 'possible' and 'likely' ain't the same thing. But no matter how unlikely it is... there's still that little sliver of a chance.  And being the Element of Honesty probably didn't make it easier. She can't lie to herself and blame it on bad gravy at dinner. She knows darn good and well that if things were wrong enough she could do something like that, so the Toxic Nihilist had a jim-dandy easy time convincing her she did.

"Her best friends get brainwashed by a traitorous Chaos god, one of 'em gets knocked up by him and gives birth to what might be the pony Antichrist? Oh heck yeah, all sorts of things come into the realm of possibility."

The others looked at her, stunned. Fluttershy still looked torn. "I... how can I ever look at her the same....?" she said. "My friend... would kill a baby?"

Pinkamena scowled. She reached over and forced the pegasus' head to turn so she was looking at Applejack. "Take a LOOK at her, 'Shy," she said. Pinkamena tapped her own nogging with a hoof. "Look at those manacles. Look at those cuts and bruises. She spent nine years in her own head in prison, probably as a living toilet. She spent every imaginary day of it hating herself and regretting what she almost did. Darn right you should never look at her the same."

The most familiar expression, compassion, flooded Fluttershy's face. "How do we help her?"

"She's alone, condemned, every pony she ever loved turned their back on her," Pinkamena said. "What do you think she needs? Think fast, the movie time is about to wear off."

The last of the drifting white mist faded away. Applejack looked around, locked guilt filled eyes with Fluttershy. Fluttershy didn't need to be told what Applejack needed. She closed the distance between her and the farmpony and caught her in an embrace. "It's okay, Applejack," she said. "I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you...."

Applejack clung to her like a child, sobbing her heart out.

"There there... you're sorry for what you did, I know...." Fluttershy ran one comforting hoof down Applejack's burr-cut mane. As her hoof passed, rippling waves of cornsilk blonde tumbled down the mare's neck. Her bobbed tail suddenly bloomed out into a long golden plume. the prison manacles shattered like glass; the prison orange jumper shredded to cobwebs and blew away. The grass turned from grey to emerald and the dead tree by the graves budded with new life.

Big Macintosh sidled up awkwardly, Applejack's hat in his mouth. "Found this on the hillside," he muttered. "Figured you'd be wantin' it back." He rested it on her head. She pulled it off and cradled it, sniffling and wiping her nose on her hock.

"You tol' me I weren't worthy of it no more," she croaked feebly-- and the air went out of her lungs in a whoosh as two massive red forelegs caught her in a crushing bearhug.

"Don't you never b'lieve that, lil sis," Big Macintosh choked. "Even if I say it, I'm lyin'. Apples don't abandon our own. EVER. "

"Mac..." Applejack said. "Can't... breeeeathe..." Big Macintosh sheepishly loosened his grip so Applejack could gasp for air.

Applebloom burrowed in from the side. "You're an Apple, and even if you WERE a bad Apple you're OUR Apple!"

Sounds of absolute bawling came from behind them. They turned to see Fluffyshy and Angel Bunny crying and blowing their noses into kerchiefs. "Too many FEELS!" Fluffy said as Angel sniffled and honked. Laughing, the others pulled them into the group hug (for once Angel Bunny didn't fuss.)

"And now for a little cleanup exorcism," Pinkamena said. She strutted over to the lingering specters. She glared at the pony prison guard. "Beat it! Go chase a donut!" she yelled. The guard yipped, turned to run and vanished in a puff of smoke.

"And as for you two," she said to the pseudo-princesses. "You're a total writer's turd. Your boss wants us to think that Celestia would forgive her sister for nearly dooming the world to eternal night, and they would forgive Discord for going on a chaos rampage THREE TIMES, but they would take Applejack and throw her in pound-in-the-butt prison for LIFE? Hell, the real Princesses are probably talking about offering Tirek a parole hearing! The two of them are literal embodiments of compassion and forgiveness, and passing them off as a pair of condemning tyrants is a farce!  You're a joke, you're crap, you're literary misery guts! GET OUTTA HERE!" The two fake princesses, battered into submission by the verbal barrage, gave her one miffed look and vanished in a swirl of indigo and white.

Pinkamena then turned to face the shadow-Fluttershy that was still standing there. "And as for you--"

"HOW DARE YOU?"

Pinkamena gawped as a buttercup-and-pink blur launched itself at the ghostly mare, knocking her to the ground with a very solid impact. Fluttershy stood over Flutterfake, glaring down at her with all the fury in her tender little heart. "NINE YEARS!" she shouted. "For Nine YEARS you refused to forgive her-- Even though she begged you for it. Even though she admitted she was wrong, even though she regretted it and repented of what she did, even though she was all alone and dying inside! You're a TERRIBLE pony, and you should FEEL terrible! I'm NEVER going to be like you!"

There was an audible "fwert." "Interesting," Pinkamena said drolly. "I didn't think specters of bad writing could soil themselves..."

"Now go away and never come back," Fluttershy said, still glaring. The Flutterspecter said "meep" and popped like a balloon, vanishing in a puff of pink.

Fluttershy looked up at Pinkamena, her lower lip quivering. "Oh please, please promise me I'll never be like that..." she said.

"No promises, Flutters," Pinkamena said. Then she gave a half-smirk. "But 'possible' and 'likely' ain't the same thing."

They reconvened in the Apple farmhouse living room. Applejack had finally shaken off the delusions of the rewrite, but she was still looking a bit shaky and feeling a bit insecure. The others, Granny included, huddled closer to her. "That was... that was awful," she said. "I never wanna feel nuthin' like that ever again. I could remember all of it... all nine years of being abandoned and imprisoned and everything... and nine years of thinking I'd tried to kill a foal--" she shook her head. "It's all gone now, like a bad dream. But I still ...remember rememberin' it, if you know what I mean..."

Pinkamena made an understanding noise. "If it makes you feel any better, think about it this way. The worst think our Grimdork could manage to convince you that you'd do was abandon a foal in the woods. Even doing his worst, he couldn't get you to raise a hoof to one yourself." She shuddered. "Remind me to tell you about the one that made me into an Outcast sometime. Or better yet, remind me to NEVER tell you about it. You'll puke every time you see a cupcake." She finished pushing Granny's old dressing mirror in place.

"So what's the next step in taking out this son of a crabapple?" Applebloom said.

"Applebloom! Language!" Applejack scolded.

"Eh, I'm with the youngun'," Granny said. She checked her shotgun and her belt of shells. "I say we find him and let me give him a double-barreled rock salt suppository."

"Well, this guy's proving nasty," Pinkamena said. "You were pretty near the breaking point, Applejack. You could have schismed. And as much as I'd enjoy the company, I don't want to end up roomies in the Mirrorside with AppleJailbird." She pulled the dustcloth off the mirror and gave the glass a quick wipe. "So we need to go get a little more backup before we rescue the others. Don't go talking about this all over, Okay?  I'm going to get in enough trouble as it is for doing this, but we're gonna need to take a little detour through my back yard." She pulled out an old skeleton key and tapped it to the glass. The mirror chimed, then rippled like mercury. "Come on, last one in is a rotten apple!" she stepped through the rippling quicksilver and disappeared.

The others hesitated. Pinkamena's head popped back out. "Well c'mon!" she vanished again. The group looked at each other, then carefully, single file, they stepped their way through the shimmering mirror. There was a final "Oh... my..." then a long pink tail disappeared through the quicksilver surface. With a quiet pop, the mirror returned to its normal solid shape, leaving the Apple farmhouse quiet and still.

Chapter 7

The small group of would-be heroes tumbled out the other side of the mirror. After much groaning, lamenting, and more than a bit of swearing, they untangled themselves and got to their hooves. It took a moment of dusting off and checking for injuries before any of them realized that the moaning and lamenting (and a good bit of the swearing) was still going on, and it wasn't them. They looked around in confusion, only to realize they were surrounded on all sides by what appeared to be prison cells. "Where the heck are we?" Applebloom said. Echoing sounds and cries, many of them decidedly not pony, came from the darkened cells.

"To Tartarus if AH know," Applejack said. "Pinkamena?"

"Tartarus," the dull pink pony said, looking around with half lidded eyes. "Or at least the Mirror World's version of it."

The others looked around in confusion."Don't look like no picture of Tartarus I never saw," Big Macintosh said, subtly pulling his sisters and Fluttershy closer. He was right; there was no sign of the jagged peaks separated by bottomless chasms, or the staggered stairways leading up and down to the foxfire-lit prisons atop, with Cerberus endlessly patrolling back and forth to guard Celestia and Luna's prisoners.  What they saw instead  looked like Escher's work on a bender. They gawped at the towering, impossibly angled walls, the barred doors, the torchlit, cockeyed hallways that zigzagged into the distance. It was a madpony's rendition of a dungeon, with walls and barred windows and doors and ceilings and floors that jutted off in every angle in existence, and a few more that would have sent Euclid back to the drawing board. Fluttershy hugged Fluffyshy and Angel Bunny to her, trying to draw some comfort.

"It's just a name," Pinkamena said, shrugging. " It has a lot of 'em. The Pit, the Dungeon, the Dumpster, the Craphole, the Shame of Humanity. They coulda called it 'Bunny Foo Foo land' for all it matters, really. It's where we put the stuff we capture... the worst of the worst. Things that are a disgrace to their Makers, just by existing. There's stuff down here that's so rotten and awful that it made backsplashes into the Watcher's world when it was created."

"Backsplashes? whut's a backsplash?" Applebloom demanded to know.

Pinkamena gave the filly an evil smirk. "You know how when you're sitting on the toilet, and you're pinching a loaf, and it hits the water so hard it splashes back u--"

"Nyeeeeeewwwww!!!" Applebloom squealed, covering her ears with her forelegs and shaking her head.

Two enormous red hooves placed themselves firmly over the filly's ears as well. Macintosh glared at Pinkamena. Pinkamena's only response was another shrug.

"Hey, just spelling it out," she said. "No point in telling lies down here, and that was the mildest way I could explain it.

"Look, it's an incredible, wonderful cosmotronic universe out there," she went on. "But it's fully of some really awful things, too. You remember the Troll Fic. That was pretty bad... but there are worse things. The Troll was doing those horrible things because he thought it was cool. Or Funny.

"But then there are worse. Like... the Arseburgers." Pinkamena made a face like a bulldog licking a thistle.

"The, uhh...." Fluttershy said. She couldn't quite bring herself to say it.

Pinkamena held up a hoof. "Now there's others called Aspergers. Aspergers is not the same thing. Those have problems they can't quite help. Different thing, totally.

"But Arseburgers--- " Pinkamena squinted and pantomimed poking something in her ear. "It's like they reached in their ear with a, a soldering iron and burned out the part of their brain that told them how act like a higher vertebrate.  They let anything pour into their head, and right back out their mouths--- and they've got absolutely NO FILTERS in their brain-to-mouth connection. They're like a wormy dog taking a crap on a Saddle Arabian carpet... they ruined something,  and they just can't understand what they did wrong. Talk to an Arseburger about right and wrong and proper behavior and it's like talking to a tree in Klingon. Heck, they get MAD at you for bothering you with your weird common-sensey word talk noise." She snorted, blowing a lock of hair out of her face.

The others nodded vaguely. They were getting the gist... they thought... but every other phrase didn't quite make sense by itself. It was kind of like talking to the real Pinkie Pie that way.

"And this place..." Pinkamena went on, indicating the mazelike realm around them, "this place is where their hand-crafted abortions end up. Stuff so nasty that the collective mind shoves it away, buries it, tries to pretend it doesn't exist.  There's stuff down here that can burn out pieces of your soul if you look at it too long.

"Which reminds me..." she stepped over to a cubbyhole in a nearby wall/ceiling/floor. A cabinet painted in industrial yellow and black stripes and covered with red "reminder" notices stood there. She unlocked it and pulled out several odd looking helmets. She put one on herself and tossed the rest to the others.

The others rolled the helmets over in their hooves. They were bright industrial yellow, and looked like someone had bolted together a football helmet, a gas mask, an enormous pair of earphones, and an optometrist's eye-testing tool. "Put these on," she said, donning one herself. "You don't want to go through here without some protection. I made the mistake of doing that once. Spent months drooling on myself and laughing at the color puce." The others quickly and nervously donned the strange helmets. There was even a rabbit-sized one for Angel Bunny, and another for Fluffyshy.

"What are these?" Fluttershy asked, staring in every direction through the mechanical goggles.

"Remember those filters I told you about that Arseburgers don't have? These are it."

"Whut're they made of?" Applejack said.

"Oh, common decency, basic manners, morals, ethics, good taste, personal hygiene..." Pinkamena droned as she fiddled with the knobs and dials on her own helmet. "Oh, and rudimentary grammar filters on the earphones. Otherwise you'd burn out your language centers trying to understand how some of 'em talk."

"Burn out your brain?" Applejack scoffed. "On words?"

"Here, let me give you an example. Flip up your earphones for a sec." Applejack obliged. Pinkamena looked her in the eye and said one word.

"THEIYR'RE."

When Applejack came to, the others were physically restraining her as she tried to bang her head against the floor to clear her brain out. Fortunately the filter helmet was sturdily made, and well padded on the inside. "Told ya," Pinkamena said, flipping Applejack's ear protection back down. It didn't muffle her hearing any, Applejack noticed. In fact it seemed to make everything clearer.

"Whut in the seventeen Sam Hills was that?" Applejack demanded to know as she wobbled to her hooves.

"All agents learn at least a few words of crapfic-speak, as a weapon of last resort," Pinkamena explained. "One sentence from 'Eye of Argon' is enough to kill a Grammar Nazi at twenty paces. Two from 'Cupcakes' can give a theater full of people nosebleeds. Using an entire paragraph of 'My Immortal' is considered a war crime." She looked around. "Okay, we'd better get a move-on. Follow me, single file, Fluttershy and Applebloom in the middle, and remember, do not cross the black and yellow lines..."

It was..unsettling. Even with the helmets blocking out most of the sights and sounds, the trip across the makeshift netherworld was full of bizarre horrors. Things moaned profanities from behind cell doors, or reached... appendages... between the bars or through the window slits. Here and there throughout the place were creatures Pinkamena only described as "Security;" tall, bipedal creatures with blank gray masks where their faces should have been, who stood watch at various corners or loped silently along on their rounds. They seemed to recognize Pinkamena, though, and gave her a respectful nod as they passed.

Navigation was tricky, with several short detours and double-backs. At several points they would walk the length of a hallway, turn back, and take a doorway that simply hadn't been there before. At least twice half the group found itself walking on the ceiling.

Sometimes they had to halt because of some kerfluffle up ahead with one of the inmates. At one point the shutters on their helmets slammed shut and they all had to stand stone still, all but blind and deaf, as some indescribable blasphemy of literature was moved from one cell to another. The only clue they had to the identity was a guttural howl of "HODOR!" as it shuffled past.  There was a clang, and the helmets opened up. Everypony breathed a sigh of relief. "I can't stop myself from askin'..." Applejack said. "Whut was that?"

"Game of Thrones guro slash porn fanfics." Pinkamena shrugged. She paused, thinking it over. "Either that or the original book series itself... it's hard to tell the difference, really. I think the fanfics have slightly fewer gore-porn murders."

"Why'd they have to move it?" Applebloom asked.

"The Amazon dot com dinosaur erotica(1) were complaining about the smell," Pinkamena said.

Just then a ball of what looked like a dozen entangled wooden chairs went tumbling past. The snarled bits of furniture were beating on each other violently with their wooden arms and legs, sending the whole mass tottering back and forth across the hallway. One of the many faceless jailors passed in pursuit, flailing and jabbing at the rolling carpentry donnybrook with a ten-foot pole.

"Huh," PInkamena said. "You don't see many of those down on these levels..."

"Aaaaand that was--?" Applebloom asked, pointing a hoof after the departing clattertrap.

"That, kiddo, is what happens when a horny thirteen-year-old tries to write a sex scene," Pinkamena said. A moment later two more faceless security guards ran past carrying an enormous open crate labeled "Ikea" between them. The joke was got. Big Mac looked chagrined, while Fluttershy tittered, red as a beet and Applejack hooted with laughter.

Applebloom stuck out her tongue. "Gag. Why is so much stuff down here about SEX?"

Pinkamena sighed and put a comforting hoof on the filly's shoulder. "Because sex and love and all that boy and girl stuff is a wonderful, beautiful, special thing," she said. Her eyebrows tabled behind her goggles. "And there is nothing so wonderful, or beautiful, or special that somepony somewhere won't take a flying run at taking a shit in it."

While Pinkamena was talking, Big Mac glanced idly over a nearby rail into a pit. His head tilted in confusion, and he reached up and tipped back his helmet to get a better look at whatever was below.

"Hey, hey hey! Big guy-- this ain't no scenic tour!" Pinkamena shouted in warning. She left Applebloom's side and hustled over. "Whaddya tryin' to do, pop your eyeballs like zits?"

"Ah don't think that's likely," he said, pointing down in the open pit.  The others gathered around and looked in... though they kept their helmets firmly in place.

The pit went down about forty feet, and bottomed out with a hundred foot diameter concrete floor. Two stone pillars stood in the center; chained between them by its wrists was something that looked like a bipedal caribou. It had small, undersized antlers, and was rangy and scrawny as if it had wandered into the beginnings of puberty and failed to cross the intervening distance.  Its only article of clothing was a loincloth that hung loose on its skinny hips.

It was doing nothing at the moment but standing there with its head hanging down. Then, it glanced up and saw them-- and exploded into a torrent of screaming profanity that would have boiled lead. "Filthy ####ing ponies! Sluts! Whores! I'll get you all! You too, Fag! You Faggy whore and your #### whore mares and your little ### ### slut-trained filly! I'll make you choke on your own @@@ and @@@#### you with my@ @@@@####!!"

They all jerked back from the rail. The filters on Applebloom's helmet had all but closed off, and there was a red LED blinking on the side. The others had gotten varying amounts of the torrent of filth; it was enough to make even Applejack gasp like she was Fluttershy.

The worst thing about it was that he wasn't screaming in rage. No. He seemed to be taking glee in making his obscene, vile threats, shouting them with a hideous grin on his face.

Big Mac, on the other hand, was not smiling He just stood there at the rail glowering down at the foul mouthed caribou, his muscles clenching. "Who, or what, was that?" he said in the calm voice of someone plotting out how exactly to break someone's neck.

Pinkamena's lip curled. "Our star attraction in this corner of the Craphole," she said. "We normally use this pit for the Pedofoal sleaze, but this guy demands special treatment. Fall of Equestria. Cute little fella, ain't he? Some crusty little tosspot out Beyond decided to cope with his lack of actual manhood, squeeze out all his dysfunctions into one creative abortion, and made a fanfic where Equestria is invaded by rapist caribou.

"Ra-rapist...??" Fluttershy stammered.

"Who, of course, conquer it without even trying and proceed to screw everything with a pulse."

"An' they take over Equestria, just like that?" Thanks to the helmet, most of the conversation was flying right over Applebloom's head, but she caught that much. "HOW? How're they supposed to beat Celestia, and Luna, an' Cadence, an' Twilight, an' the Elements o' Harmony, an all the soldiers in the army an---"

"By the power of Mary Sue magic and epic level shitty writing," Pinkamena said, curling her lip. "Basically a bunch of these boonga boonga tribal moose understudies cast a spell that makes all unicorn magic useless. Then they cast another magic Mary Sue spell that turns all the stallions into 'enlightened' rape-happy cockslappers like this twerp.... and another one that turns all the mares into submissive, subserviant sluts." She gagged and spit. "Even the little fillies."

The rest of them gagged in horror. "Yeah, THAT was a fun weekend," Pinkamena said sarcastically. "The sick freak who made him started a whole movement among other sick freaks.... art work, side stories.. I figure it's about another month or two in the Outer World before him and his fellow tallywhackers end up in the news under the headline 'kiddie porn ring busted."

"Anyway, damage was massive.  F.O.E. started spreading like a tumor. Every few weeks we have to take a purge team and clear out another entire alt line with flamethrowers." She hitched an elbow over the rail and looked down at the jeering prisoner. "Till we got smart. Then things got a lot harder for ya, didn't they, Fowey?"

The caribou's leer turned into a sneer of hate. "### you, you pink $#$%$#$$!"

"Wuv you too, dinky binky," Pinkamena said. "Yeah, with a sexual deviant Marty Stu writer so far out on the fringe, we didn't have to look hard to find alt lines where the whole dang universe didn't revolve around fulfilling the desires of Fowey's dick. We just let him march into a few alts where Celestia and Luna DIDN'T fold like wet toast just because the Elk King came marching into the room. Just to rub in how pathetic and impotent he is." She cackled. "The teeniest, tiniest drop of Canon Verisimiltude and his God Mode Sue tribe and their "the author is compensating for something" leader, the Elk Lord Diddles-Little-Foals, gets the bitchslapping of his life. Every. Single. Time.

Pinkamena smirked evilly. "That first run in with Competentlestia the Caribou ended up castrated, and their mighty leader beheaded. And it gets uglier each and every time. His pedo elk warriors get pimpslapped into the dirt and curbstomped, his "tribal shamans" run up against Equestria's canon magitek society and get squished, his mighty warrior-king Gonad the Barbarian gets his spine ripped out through his mouth....

"Just for variety, we've started letting him loose in alts with Tyrantlestia, or Nightmare Sun, or even Molestia.... when we got him back from that one we had to dunk him in a vat of penicillin for three days, and he didn't stop sobbing the whole time..."

"@$%@ YOU, WHORE!"

"Awww, he's listening. Last time we dropped him on his head in an alt line for the Conversion Bureau." She pointed over her shoulder at the other pit. As if on cue a gout of magical flame shot up out of the pit and a stentorian voice shouted:

"Release us! We must stop the Human Plague! They are vile! They are evil! Their world must be exterminated and they must be transformed to ascend them out of their evil---"

A trapdoor above the pit opened and a solid torrent of water fell down into the pit. Boiling clouds of steam rose. The godlike voice shouted "Whaaaaarrgarrrble" and fell silent, save for some weak, wet coughing.

"Aaaaand that was Conversionlestia, ladies and gents," Pinkamena said with a theatrical wave of the hoof. "Before you ask--- Evil plot to destroy the Human world with a wave of human-killing magic, and enslave the human race by turning them into retarded ponies."

"???" None of them even needed to SAY the word.

"You heard me. By turning them. Into. Retarded ponies," Pinkamena repeated.  "An alt line so fricking stupid that it practically self-destructed. Sometimes we open the divider between their pits and let nature take its course."

"YOU BETTER NOT LET THAT SUN SLUT IN HERE, WHORE!"

"Aww, Come on, Fowey," Pinkamena said. "Don't be like that. She let you keep ONE testicle last time..." She gave a huff. "Too bad he reboots whenever nopony is watching. He's practically fricking immortal."

"That don't seem fair," Applejack said.

"It isn't. You ever heard that saying 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever?' " Pinkamena asked. Applejack shook her head. "Well, A thing of Suck and Awful has an even longer shelf life than that," Pinkamena said in disgust.

"The good ponies do is oft interred with their bones," Big MacIntosh murmured.

Pinkamena gave him an odd look. "Rrright."

"Hey SLUTS!"

Already seething, they turned around to stare down at F.O.E. "Yeah, that's right," the archetype sneered at them. "You know what you are. Go ahead and laugh it up now. I'll get out of here sooner or later.

"Yeah, and when I do I'm gonna spread my shit on every alt I touch. Oh yeah," he said. "Yours too, you tasty piece of ass." This directed at Fluttershy. Mac bridled and seemed to swell up with rage. The F.O.E. laughed, honking and braying in his cracked voice. "Oh like you can do anything! I get to your world, there'll be nothing you can do! I'm gonna rape your girl, an' her friends-- and BOTH your sisters!" In a surprising display of agility, he reached up with one cloven foot and tore off his loincloth. He began hip-thrusting at the onlookers. "Gonna rape you all, bitches!"

They all gaped in utter shock.

The silence was finally broken by Applebloom. None of them had noticed that her helmet hadn't locked down. "With what?" she snorted.

Everyone froze--- including the F.O.E. The air was then cut by a shriek. Of laughter. From Fluttershy. She was pointing at "Fowey" and laughing. "It's so TEENY!"

She and Applebloom were right. It seemed that the mighty avatar of the sex-crazed caribou wasn't nearly as mighty where it counted. Applejack snorted, and Pinkamena and Big Mac sputtered. "It looks lahk he's giving us a thumbs up," Applejack snarked.

That did it. The group collapsed on the floor, hooting and howling. Even Pinkamena was cracking up. "Dunno why I'm surprised," she sniggered. "He's an archetype of his maker after all..."

"Lemme guess," Big Mac chuckled. "He takes after his Daddy?"

"More'n likely---"

That seemed to do it for the F.O.E. too. The pubescent leer vanished from his face like it had been erased, and he began howling and railing and thrashing back and forth in his chains. His profanities degenerated into incoherent tourettes-like arghlebargle as foam flew from his lips.

"Oookayyy, that's enough out of you." Pinkamena stepped over to a control panel bolted to the rail and mashed a big red button. "I think he's earned a little punitive measure."

"Puni--" Applebloom started. Pinkamena interrupted her by fastening the apple filly's helmet down properly.

"Punishment." She snugged the chin strap and poked a couple of buttons. "Keeps him under control, more or less. A different punishment every time, so he doesn't acclimate. Last time it unleashed a pack of rabid Social Justice Warriors in the pit with him." She shuddered. "The fangs and the claws and the little horn rimmed glasses and the shrieking, dear gods, the shrieking.... we were wiping blood and cheap neon hair dye off the roof afterwards."

Wincing, the others looked over the rail. A huge steel door that they hadn't seen before boomed open, and out came... a tiny little caribou granny in a hairbun and apron? "Oh there you are, Fowey dear," she said, smiling in Fowey's direction. "Time for your changing and feeding..."

"Fowey" looked on in horror. "GET AWAY FROM ME YOU OLD SKANK--"

"Oh now don't be like that, Fowey," she chided, tottering forward. Out came an enormous diaper bag. "You get so fussy when your diadee get full of boom boom..." out of the doorway behind her came one, two, then half a dozen more cooing, baby-talking grannies of various species, all carrying diaper bags and wielding nappies, pacifiers, baby thermometers....

"AUGH, NO--" He howled and swore and struggled futilely as he was forcibly put in an oversize nappy, dressed in a bib, had a ruffled baby bonnet forced down over his ears. The last they saw as the grannies closed in was him wailing in snot-nosed shame as they proceeded to spoon feed him...

Pinkamena backed away from the rail. "Yeah, that oughta give him an attitude adjustment," she said. "At least for another hour or so. Come on, this shortcut is getting less short by the minute." She snugged her helmet's chin strap and trotted off. The others followed quickly enough.

There were other horrors to get past (generally at a hasty trot. Adventures were a lot easier when the obstacle causing monsters were behind bars.) They had to pass by something called "Fifty Shades of Grey," which oddly enough looked like a bright red talking parrot in a brass cage. It was reciting something aloud, but fortunately the helmets blocked it out.

The Grue wing was... well, that was the thing: to call it "especially horrifying" was misleading. It was more that it went up to horrifying and blew completely out the other side. "Basically it's the result of Zero Skills trying to write horror," Pinkamena shouted over the noise, wielding the umbrella she'd picked up at the front entrance like a shield. The others were decked out in ponchos and rain slickers and poleaxed expressions as sprays of crimson gouted from every direction at them. "They don't know what makes a GOOD horror story so they throw more and more blood and gore till-- uh yeah, this."

All around them were cages, pits and prison cells with barred doors. From inside of each came... what MIGHT have been screams of agony and horror, but were almost impossible to distinguish from the sound of shrieking high-power tools.  You couldn't see what was happening inside because of the near constant spray of blood coming from within. (Though in one you caught occasional glimpses of a wooden puppet, and heard screams of "I WANT TO PLAY A GAME...") There were plexiglass shields set up on either side of the walkway, but they did little good; the blood sprayed up and over the glass guards, and a pink mist seemed to fill the air. Every now and then something chunky would hit the plexiglass panels with a splat.

"Hey, at least the splash guards catch most of the entrails and fingers and stuff," Pinkamena continued. She was rather preoccupied; she and Angel Bunny were having to push the stunned ponies forward to keep them moving. The windshield wipers on their goggles were going full blast. "come on, we're almost to the showers..."

They finally staggered into an airlock-style chamber. Jets of clean, mercifully purifying water came down. They shucked their "rain" gear into a nearby bin and stood thankfully under the cleansing mist. "That was..." Fluttershy started to say.

"I know," Big MacIntosh said, putting a comforting hoof on her shoulder. Pinkamena did the same, face full of pity.

"...Ridiculous," Fluttershy finished. "Ludicrous even." Pinkamena blinked.

"Ah know. Good grief," Big MacIntosh snorted. "Whoever makes these things are just... SAD."

"Ah know, raht?" Applejack said. Applebloom nodded.

"But BLECH, what a mess," the filly said dismissively. "Whoever made that stuff was a bigger grossout dork than Snips and Snails."

Pinkamena gawked at them. "Oh come on, Pinkamena," Applejack said as she rinsed out her mane. "We're FARMERS. We may not get as gory as them Gryphon farmers, what with their butcherin' season, but we get up to our hocks in it from time to time anyhow."

"I'm a veterinarian," Fluttershy said simply to Pinkamena's wordless stare. "I've had to... give mercy to more than one animal friend. And then butcher the body to give to my other animal friends, like the foxes and wolves and such..." she fluttered her wings under the shower, flicking water off her wingtips.

"We've all seen the real thing," Big MacIntosh said. "All that back there?"

"Over the top," Applebloom said.

"Oh, it was disgusting, and horrible, and awful," Fluttershy said. "And the ponies that made it should be ashamed--- but if they wanted to horrify us, well, they should feel embarrassed for themselves."

PInkamena went from a gawk to a smirk. "Buncha tough nuts, huh?" She said. "Be thankful I didn't take you through the OTHER route. That one has stuff like the Human Centipede in it."

"....Other route?" Applejack was smart enough to guess she didn't want to know any more about how "human" and "centipede" intersected.

"Yeah, Route Number Two.  Instead of blood and gore you get--" A freshly-scrubbed hoof corked her mouth.

"And that's more than we needed to know," Fluttershy said firmly.

"Wight. Fowwy."

Big Macintosh lay on the floor in a foetal position, pawing at his goggles, trying to get at his eyes to scrape them raw with his hooves.

"I TOLD you not to look in that viewing slit! I warned you it had extreme sexual content---" Pinkamena said, pointing at the pink "Mr. Yuck" emblem on the door.

"THAT WASN'T SEX!" Big Macintosh bellowed, rocking back and forth.

Curious, Pinkamena lowered her helmet's goggles to "nuclear" and squinted through the narrow observation slit. "Uh, yeah," she said. "Kinda. There's orifices involved, anyway--"

"THINGS WERE TURNING INSIDE OUT!"

"Well in some parts of Japan--"

"AND EXPLODING!"

"All right, calm down, there should be some brain bleach in the next first aid kit..."

"Okay, this is the last stretch," Pinkamena said. "Gimme a sec, gotta check and make sure we take the right route.." She began reading an enormous floor directory standing in one corner of the room.

The others sighed in hesitant relief. Hesitant, because this area seemed the least likely place to relax. Here the dark walls loomed high, massive and cyclopean, stained with ancient mold and decay. Enormous doors rumbled open and shut in the distance like ominous thunder. Stygian shadows swallowed the distant ceiling and the far ends of every passageway, dim watery lights lining the halls the only source of illumination. Despite the vaulty spaces, the atmosphere was... oppressive. Damp, and chilly, like a vault, like a tomb---

"Okay, I'll say it," Applejack said, tired. "And where is THIS, Pinkamena?"

"Lovecraft Quarter," Pinkamena said. "Probably where your toxic little Goth wannabee is gonna end up when we bust him. This is the place where we stuff all the 'angst, woe, we are meaningless specks' turkeys. Not a lot of them, but when they pop up, man, the mess they cause..."

"Lovecraft, huh," Applejack said.

"Yeah. It's named after one of the biggest losers in the genre. Real tosspot. He created a whole Mythos by himself, and of course a bunch of his fanboys jumped on board to add to it after he croaked....

"He had fans?" Applebloom said.

"Don't be surprised. There are axe murderers with fanclubs," Pinkamena said. "Anyway, where was I? Well, he made a whole Mythos. And it sucks.

"It's-- surprise-- full of racism and sexism and xenophobia, and is all about how we're meaningless specks in a horrible mad universe and the gods will smush us like bugs without even knowing we're there, oh look, it's a fish person, arg arg arg...."

"Sounds awfully depressing," Fluttershy said.

"You don't know the half of it."

Unbeknownst to her, as she was talking a huge steel door in the floor behind them was sliding silently open.

Big Macintosh heard or maybe felt the faint rumble in his hooves and turned to see what was causing it. What he saw froze him in terror. From an enormous pit in the floor, limned from below by watery blue-green light, a horrifying titan was rising. He had an enormous bald head, dripping with moss and algae.  and where his mouth should have been was a face full of writhing tentacles, framed on either side by glowing yellow eyes the size of wagon wheels. Wet, batlike wings arched over the shoulders, flexing and spreading, as its face tentacles slithered endlessly over its ponderous, rancid green belly. It stretched its massive arms out, flexing and clenching its webbed fingers as if it were clutching at the air.

Big Macintosh didn't speak. He didn't move. It was a miracle he even breathed. He was scared beyond spitless.

Pinkamena, completely oblivious, continued on. "Yeah, the Lovecraft Mythos isn't just for losers, it's for pretentious losers."

YOU DON'T SAY.

The voice, loud as thunder and yet utterly silent, echoed in the head of every intelligent being. Applebloom turned around to face the source, looked up and pulled in to Macintosh's side so forcefully it was like she was magnetized to him.

Pinkamena snorted as she continued scanning the enormous directory in front of her. "Yeah, they hail this xenophobic lunatic as a great literary treasure even as his overly verbose, sucktacular mythos sucks the joy out of life for millions of people. But you know what the worst part is?"

NO, WHAT?

"Was gonna ask that myself--" Applejack said with a grin, turning to see what the others were looking at. And nearly popped the hat off her  head when she saw what was behind them.

"The worst part was his whole 'we are specks of nothing' routine," Pinkamena went on. "How anyone who looked on the Old Gods, or whatever other monster or being or cosmic horror of the week he stuck into his writing, would go bat-poo crazy because they saw 'the true nature of the Universe.' She snorted again. "What hogwash. Like seeing a guy with a squid for a head was going to send someone to cloud cuckooland. That was all HIM."

IT WAS, NOW WAS IT.

Fluttershy turned to see what was wrong with Big Mac, squeaked once, and then froze just like him. Angel and Fluffyshy, riding on her back, froze as well. Angel's ears were sticking out straight in opposite directions, and Fluffyshy's fur was standing so high on end she looked like a sea urchin.

"Yeah, it was all him. He was a phobic. He was scared of crowds, of strangers, temperatures below freezing, fat people, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray— of SEAFOOD for crying out loud.(2) He was a weak puss. Forget Old Gods, looking too long at a painting of dogs playing poker would have been too much for him.

"He thought everyone was as weak as him. He thought we were insignificant specks in a mad cosmos because he was lost in his own head. He thought looking into the true nature of the Universe would drive people insane--- scientists and mathematicians do that on the backs of envelopes--- because he personally couldn't "get" the Theory of Relativity, and it weirded him out.

"So Captain Crazypants creates this Mythos... saddest load of crap you ever saw. Big ol wadded up ball of neuroses, phobias, bigotries and various bits off a seafood platter wrapped around a chewy nougat center of humanity-loathing and cosmic despair... and inflicts it on the Universe.

"And of course, it spread like a cancer." She gave a grunt of annoyance; an overworked janitor tsk-ing at the mess left behind for them to mop up.

"Most ponies wanna hope. They wanna believe. They're what keeps the world going 'round.

But there's always that one group that wallows in it, that gets their rocks off on wallowing around in loathing and hate and hopelessness. Those guys? They gobbled up his Mythos like a chocolate eclair. Next thing you know he's everybody's favorite racist Grandpa. Every horror and suspense writer is copying him and spreading the cancer, and elitist snob horror fans are walking around with their nose in the air and a stick up their plots about what a genius he was..."

The brobnidagean horror had a hand on one hip at this point and was drumming the webbed fingers of his other hand on the rim of his prison pit.

DO TELL.

"Yeah, the hysterical thing is that all his 'icons of cosmic horror' are frickin' ludicrous. I mean, look at his trademark monster Cthulhu. Calimari for a head, bat wings, body like a cross between Buddha and the Fabulous Frogman. To think that anypony would be afraid of..." At long last she noticed that everypony else was facing the other direction. She turned around and looked up. "Aww MAN, who let HIM out?" she yelped.

"Ach! Muckle damned Squidhead. Whar ye namblie be keepin' me wee men??"

The shout startled everyone out of their rictus of horror. Everyone-- Cthulhu included-- looked in the direction of the voice. Out of the tunnels in a bowlegged run came a bipedal figure. It was a human, one of considerable age to judge by his leathery face and skinny frame. His gray hair was put up in a spiky faux-hawk, and his equally spiky beard stuck out in all directions. He was dressed in a t-shirt, a floral print hawaiian shirt open at the front, and khaki shorts, and was clumping along in heavy wellingtons. Despite the darkness he was wearing aviator shades. He was carrying a torch in one hand and a shotgun in the other, and inexplicably had a stuffed parrot strapped to one shoulder.

The appearance of this bizarre apparition had an extraordinary effect on Cthulhu. The cyclopean horror let out a deafening squeal like baby seal who'd clapped his eyes on his very first baseball bat and dove back down into his oubliette. There was a deafening scratching and scraping from within as the Terror from Beyond the Stars desperately struggled to drag the sliding door on its prison closed.

"AAAAAhhhh dinnae ye be tryin AT, ye scunner!" The human yelled, he raced up and began banging away at the rusty iron door with the butt of his shotgun. "I knows ye bin a-hoardin' me wee men in yer overgrun fish-tank! I'm the warden 'ere! I knows stuff, I does!"

The ponies stared. Angel Bunny stared. Fluffyshy stared. "Everyone, say hello to Old Man Henderson, the warden for the Lovecraft Quarter," Pinkamena said.

Old Man Henderson stopped banging on the iron door at his feet and stood up. "Eh? What was that, Rupert?" he said to the parrot on his shoulder. He looked around, till his eyes fell on Pinkamena. "Ahhh! The pink horse hallunicashun agin! Funny, I don' remember drinkin' any Sterno today... Good tae see ye, lass. What brings ye by?" He looked at the others, face wrinkles deepening as he squinted suspiciously. "New inmates?"

"No, no, we're just taking a shortcut through," Pinkamena reassured him. She took on the air of a rather demanding supervisor. "What's going on, Henderson? Why was Cthulhu's cell open?"

Henderson huffed. "Tis mae wee men! I heard scuttlebutt among the staff an' inmates that they'd moved the hoard tae ol' Squid-face's quarters, an' I were about tae go in an' do an inspection for 'em!" He scowled. "Too late now. By the time I go back an' unlock the blorkin' control panel and re-open the door, them squishy lowlifes will have handed 'em all off agin'!" He shook a clenched fist at the sky. "Bloody cultists!"

Before any of the confused ponies could ask, Pinkamena clarified. "His antique lawn gnome collection," she said. "He thinks cultists stole them and we can't convince him otherwise."

"Ah KNOO whut happened...!"

"Henderson, you got bombed out of your gourd, donated them to a charity auction, and forgot about it when you sobered up," Pinkamena said. To go by her expression she had repeated this information hundreds of times before.

"Bah! What das a pink horse hallunicashun know aboot cultists?" Henderson snorted. "Never you mind her, Rupert-- we know the truth."

Pinkamena shook her head. "Henderson, I... forget it. Look, we're trying to get to gate seventeen..."

Henderson brightened. "Well, why dint ye say so?" He loped off in his bowlegged stride, pulling out an enormous jangling key ring. "Jest take the freight elevator to the fourth floor and hang a right. Follow me..."

They trotted along behind the odd being. "Um, he's not wearing a helmet," Fluttershy noted.

Pinkamena shrugged. "He doesn't need one. His brain is.... really off kilter. Some of the things down here need to wear one when they're around HIM, in fact."

"He's the warden down here?" Fluttershy whispered to Pinkamena. "That little old human, all by himself?"

"Well, him and a few guards," Pinkamena said. "He does a good job; we haven't had a single breakout since he started. They've been too afraid of him ever since he blew up Hastur."

"B-blew up...?"

"Yup. Hastur tried to invade his world, so he summoned him early and turned him into a cloud of crispy kibble. Scratch one Elder God." Pinkamena made a "kerboom" noise, miming the result. "Hey Henderson, how's Slenderman fitting in down here?"

"Tha' skinny bastid wi' no tan ye captured in a class four sugarbowl?" Henderson said over his shoulder. He hawked and spat at the wall. "Skinny wuss. Tried ta intimidate me by screamin' in me brain." He snorted in disdain at the idea of being subjected to the faceless horror's brain-melting psychic attack. There was only so much destruction one could do to bombed-out territory, after all.  " Gave 'im a couple a' solid kicks in the goolies and 'e knocked that off right away. Now 'e spends all his time tryin' to be Nyarlahothep's new best friend so thet gang o' fish-heads from Innsmouth will stop stealin' his lunch in the cafeteria." he looked at the stuffed parrot. "Too right, Rupert. Wankers, the lot of 'em."

He stopped in front of a sealed pair of double doors and selected a key. They opened with a well-oiled click, sliding aside to reveal a spacious freight elevator. "Ere ye goo. Now take care o' yeself oot there... cultists everywhere, you know."

"Will do," Pinkamena said as the others piled aboard. Old Man Henderson stood there smiling and waving till the doors closed.

The elevator ride was blissfully quiet and smooth. When the elevator stopped and deposited them,  Pinkamena confiscated the helmets from them. "Won't need these anymore," she said, locking them in a cabinet next to the elevator door. "We're here."

Across from the wall of elevators stood an enormous arch. It was most satisfyingly eldritch, with ornate carvings in gold and brass and glowing with faint purple light. Rainbow colored light and swirls of midnight stars filled the interior. "Yup, gate seventeen," Pinkamena said in satisfaction.... which was fairly obvious, with the enormous "17" engraved in brass over the archway. "Glad it's up. They had fits installing this after negotiating with Princess Luna.

"Come on, time's a-wastin.' Without a further word she trotted into the swirling lights and vanished.

The others, VERY determined not to be left behind in the Mirror Realm dungeon, hastily galloped after. When they emerged, they found themselves standing on a hill, overlooking a rolling plain of soft grass under a gorgeous sky. One could only say it was gorgeous, because it was neither night nor twilight nor day. The Moon and the Sun were both up, and two skies, one of piercing cerulean blue and one of deep midnight dusted with stars, were swirled together like ripples through ice cream. A sweet breeze blew and the grassy plain rolled, not merely in waves of green, but the rolling hills themselves shifted, slowly, like the waves of the sea.

A path wound down the hill and across the gently rolling plain, to end at the doors of an enormous palace made of blocks of sea-blue crystal and starlight that stretched to the sky.  

The wondrous sight was somewhat diminished by a figure hanging over the battlements, head down over the moat. It was a familiar figure of midnight black with a starry flowing mane, who even at this distance could be seen was in the midst of making an offering to Poseidon.

Nightmare Moon clung to the edge of the battlement for dear life. "Hyurhglph," she said.

"Welcome," Pinkamena said to the others, facehoofing, "to the Realm of Dreams."

1)THIS IS A REAL THING. Weep, oh ye poor damned souls, weep....

2)No, again we are not making this up. He was a clinical psychiatrist's wet dream.