Rainbow Dash looked at the typewriter. She looked at her bookcase, filled with nothing but Daring Do and assorted mangas. She looked at her clock, already indicating twenty minutes of idleness. She looked back at her typewriter.
This had been much simpler in theory.
Sighing, she held her hooves above the two keys of the binary machine, hoping the position would somehow summon forth the flow of words.
It did not.
Twilight could laugh all she wanted. This wouldn’t be so hard. Once she got started, it would only be too easy to write a good two-thousand words. She would show Twilight. This would be the best fiction novel about cyborgs ever to exist. Or maybe it would be about aliens. Or both. That sounded good. With her awesome prompt in mind, she began to type.
Equestria had been a perfectly normal place. The weather was regulated and everypony got along swimmingly. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary for any conceivable civilization ever to exist occurred. Absolutely nothing.
But everything changed when the aliens attacked.
We know them only as Them. A strange, bipedal race of somethings that abduct ponies in their sleep. The cows were the first to go. They were turned into cyborgs and forced to fight with Them. The cows would explode in a cloud of dark, thick smoke, after being implanted with these special devices that would keep them cyborgs after exploding.
Our story follows a stallion and a mare at the forefront of the resistance. They got along swimmingly until this one time that he accidentally spilled the contents of his bucket into hers. Suddenly there was a filly there, because that is obviously how ponies reproduce and
This story sucked. She wasn’t saying anything interesting. If she kept up the plot as it was going, it would end up being no more than a history lesson.
So now what? She racked her brains for anything that might be useful. Weren’t metaphorical things popular? Come to think of it, the internet said one of her favorite songs was a metaphor for how oppressive the government was. Not that she believed that. She didn’t think anypony could possibly consider Princess Celestia oppressive. She was recently voted most benevolent ruler in one thousand years! And despite how hard she thought, Rainbow couldn’t think of any problems with the law that she’d heard of. Were there even... laws?
Dash shook her head vigorously. She was getting off track. She had a metaphor to write. She started tapping away at the writer once more.
Once upon a time there was this mushroom. It was green. It wasn’t poisonous, but if you asked any of the frogs who lived in the nearby ponds, they wouldn’t be too sure. It was a pretty average mushroom. Didn’t see a lot of its family. There was this one pink mushroom it had its eyes on though...
Yes. This story was much better. In addition to a kickin’ plot, it burned Twilight to the ninth degree. Satisfied with her introduction, she started churning out more words. And more words. And more words. There were so many words, she lost count. Not that she had been keeping track. It was all about the love of writing, right? Not Twilight’s stupid word minimum.
She worked through her usual work-out hours. She was so consumed with the desire to write, she didn’t notice the passage of time, much less the setting of the sun. It wouldn’t be for quite awhile that she would, that she could regain basic processing skills.
...
Much later that night, she thought about stopping and having a sleep. Then she scoffed at the notion. Sleep is for the weak.
...
The crack of dawn found Rainbow Dash vaguely smashing her hooves into the typewriter. Based on the combination of words flowing from it, an outsider might guess she had finally given in to exhaustion. But to Rainbow Dash, it was a carefully calculated algorithm for maximum satisfaction.
With one last tap of her hoof, she typed the last character on the last page of the last chapter of the last book. With a start, her drooping eyes burst open. She looked down at the pile of paper next to her. Four-hundred and eighty-three pages of pure epicness. She then looked at the pile of paper next to the first. That one was one-thousand and sixty-six pages of pure epicness. And the one next to that was well over two thousand. That covered all the paper she could see.
She turned to her other side and recounted what she could see there. The one nearest to her, the deluxe edition of the second book, had been made by popular demand. It came with a replica of Cugglestormp’s Balaclava of Eternal Merriment. Dash wished it didn’t have to be a replica, but the effects of the Balaclava in the wrong hooves, not to mention so many of them, was too much to think about. It also had a special note from the author, thanking all the dedicated fans and the voices for their moral support.
And last, but certainly not least, was the author’s notes. A combination of story boards, alternate endings, and stray thoughts straight from the hooves of Rainbow Dash herself. It was a dedicated fan’s wet dream come true.
It occurred to her that she should go to sleep. After a quick glance at her clock revealing that it was ten-thirty, that notion was negated. Having long past fulfilled her quota, she swept up the massive piles of paper and stuffed them into her saddlebags. With energy unbecoming of her levels of rest, she zipped out the door and towards Golden Oaks Library.
***
Twilight levitated the final page of the final book onto the rest of the pile. She looked from the recently finished series to the expectant pegasus. With a shake of her head, she levitated a crisp three-hundred bit bill out out of her nearby saddlebags and directed it towards the suddenly ecstatic author.
“Screw you, Rainbow Dash.”
Author's Note
If I recall correctly this has been sitting in my google drive since about the time Ponyville Confidential came out. Maybe now I'll actually do the whole author thing I was planning on then.
