It was inevitable that Twilight Sparkle would one day marry a book. Everypony saw it coming. So they married, and they had seven beautiful baby Post-it notes, and they were happy.
That is, until the storm. It wasn't scheduled. It shouldn't have happened. But when your whole family is made of paper, getting caught in a sudden downpour is far more than an inconvenience. The children barely knew anything was happening before they dissolved. Her husband survived a little longer; he used that time to ask her to move on with her life without him.
Twilight, though, completely ignored that request. They weren't anywhere near close enough to the Everfree Forest for the storm to have been wild weather, and that meant somepony must be responsible. She swore she would have her revenge.
Of course, she didn't know much about weather engineering, and every minute spent learning how to interpret any evidence she might find was time the trail was growing cold. She needed help. And who better to provide weather expertise than the Ponyville Weather Captain?
Dash agreed to assist, of course. What else could the Bearer of Loyalty do when her friend was in need? She swore she would provide any assistance Twilight might need until justice had been done.
So they investigated. And they searched. And they occasionally beat their heads against walls in frustration. For ten years they ceaselessly sought the culprit behind the storm. Finally, they found the Lost Archive (the spells that brought all the weather records there were the only things that could still find it) floating above the outskirts of Vanhoover, and there the case was finally cracked.
It was simple, really, once they had all the information they could want neatly filed before them. There was a clear discrepancy in the low-level operation reports from Ponyville for that month. It turned out that part of the team was working off the wrong month's schedules. Schedules they had received due to Dash's abysmal paperwork skills.
"Well, fair is fair," Dash broke the silence. "Come on, you can kill me outside." As they walked, Dash gave a strained laugh and added, "It's probably easier this way. What was I going to do next? The Wonderbolts won't want to recruit me; I'm past my prime. Our old friends probably barely remember us. I don't even have a job to go back to. I don't want to build a new life from scratch."
Twilight just walked in silence, still trying to process this revelation. All too soon they were standing on the thin strip of cloud outside the building, and Twilight was charging a magic missile strong enough to be fatal. She didn't even remember starting the spell. She took aim . . .
And shot a gaping hole in the cloud. "I can't do it! I can't kill you for a mistake. You're my friend. Friends forgive each other."
Dash looked into the sunset and smiled sadly. "I promised I would make sure justice was dealt, even if something happened and you couldn't do it yourself. I can't break that promise." Then she jumped off the cloud.
Twilight rushed to the edge and looked down. It was clear that Dash had no intention of opening her wings. Without hesitation, she dove after Dash, praying to any deity who might listen that she would be strong enough to levitate herself and Dash at the same time.
But she wasn't. For a moment, her magic wrapped around both of them and they both started to slow. But then her magic faltered, and by reflex she focused on keeping herself up, which left her floating safely as Dash splattered on the ground.
And as she looked down despite her desire not to see, it was all clear. She never should have sought revenge. Revenge wouldn't bring her family back. Revenge certainly wouldn't repair the friendships she let go of to pursue this investigation. All she had done was waste ten years of her life, and worse waste ten years of a friend's life as well. Dash was dead long before that day. She was right when she said that it was easier to die than to move on.
So Twilight closed her eyes and fell.
The next day, an average resident of Vanhoover went to the park to play fetch with her dog. It was a great piece of equine-canine bonding until the dog dragged a purple corpse out from behind a bush. That somewhat killed the mood.
The police were called in, of course, and they soon found Dash's (somewhat less intact) remains as well. Through the miracle of modern techniques for analyzing dead bodies, they were able to establish with reasonable confidence that both had willingly fallen to their deaths at about the same time. The police left the analysis there; the newspapers were not so kind.
And so Twilight's final epitaph was "Princess's Prized Student Dies in Lesbian Suicide Pact."
Once upon a time, Twilight married a book.
There is far more to it than that, of course. Everypony always knew she would marry some book, but with an entire library to choose from she could afford to be picky. Indeed, the copy of A Foal’s Guide to Astronomy put considerable effort into wooing her, and their courtship was the talk of the town for a while. But this is not that story.
They had three adorable baby pamphlets, named “Come to Beautiful Haywaii,” “The Deluxe Hoof-shine-omatic Mark II,” and “Fred.”
Again, there is more to it than that. There are . . . certain differences between equines and literature, and due to an unfortunate mishap, surmounting those was also the talk of the town for a while. But this is certainly not that story. I don’t tell that sort of story.
No, our story properly begins with the family going for a walk in the park on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. This was a weekly ritual, although this week was a little different; normally they would go on Sunday, but there was a rainstorm scheduled tomorrow. And if you think going for a walk in the rain is no fun for you (or maybe you like walks in the rain), just imagine doing it while made of paper. Now imagine trying to get three struggling kids into any sort of full-body waterproof garments, and you’ll see why the Sparkle family travelled almost exclusively by teleportation on rainy days, when they couldn’t arrange to just stay home.
On this particular outing, they stopped on a hill for a while for Twilight to have lunch while the children, having no need for food, ran off to play. “Hoof-shine-omatic” tried to climb a tree, while “Fred” and “Haywaii” competed in the ever-popular game of “how far away can you get before mom yells at you to stay in sight?” It was such a perfect picture of a happy family that one particularly cynical passerby is said to have referred to it as “positively nauseating.”
That is, until the clouds came. Neither Twilight nor Astronomy noticed until the dark cumulonimbi blocked out the sun, and that was too late. Mere seconds later, the downpour started. “Fred” and “Haywaii,” caught in the open, were killed instantly. “Hoof-shine-omatic,” shielded by the tree she had been trying to scale, had time to cry out wordlessly in pain, but the cry was cut off moments later as she too crumpled to the ground.
Twilight’s maternal instincts were clear: save her children. Her rationality was equally clear: no pamphlet could survive this, and all she could do was get her husband to safety and hope she had acted quickly enough. Breaking out of her hesitation, she grabbed Astronomy in her magic and teleported to the library.
“Spike! Bring my—“ she called out before remembering that Spike was currently hibernating for his first growth spurt, and waking him at any point in the next few months would be both extremely difficult and very unwise. Alright, she thought, I’ll just have to do this on my own. I can do this. I’ve been caring for books since I was only a filly. I can handle this.
As she looked over her husband, though, she found it hard to believe her own reassurances. His front cover was completely soaked through, to the point that it was flaking at the edges of its own accord. The outer edges of his pages were so wet that they would clearly need to be individually separated before they fused solid. And the gray tinge to the water dripping off him foretold of copious amounts of running ink.
“Please,” he gasped out, short of breath, “avenge me.”
“Shh.” Twilight cut him off. “Don’t say that. You’re going to be fine. Just save your strength.”
“We both know . . . that’s a lie.” He was overcome by a coughing fit, which was spraying drops of ink by its end. “Promise . . . you’ll find . . . who did this. Promise you’ll . . . make this right.”
“No! I won’t let you die! We’ll find who killed our pamphlets together,” she insisted. But he had lapsed into unconsciousness, and did not respond.
Twilight worked ceaselessly for hours on end. But she could not escape the fact she had been trying to hide from herself all along: she could do no more than prolong the inevitable. Shortly after sunset, Astronomy passed away.
Faced with her failure, the entire day caught up to her, all at once. She was emotionally and physically exhausted, and she barely retained consciousness long enough to whisper, “I promise,” as she collapsed on the floor. Her sleep was mercifully dreamless.
A week later, Rainbow broke down Twilight’s door. The rest of the gang was behind her, of course, pretending to not approve of this invasion, though it was clear they were glad one of them was willing to escalate after all more polite attempts to talk with Twilight failed. Nopony had seen her since the accident, and they were all worried. If not for the occasional sightings of candlelight or lavender fur in the library’s windows proving she was alive and mobile, they would have broken in to check on her far sooner.
Inside, they found her lost in studying, almost as if nothing had changed at all. However, closer inspection revealed that rather than her normal preferred topics, she was researching detective work, dueling techniques, and obscure points of Equestrian law. Once they managed to get her attention, and had broken down every door so she could no longer teleport away to avoid them, she explained how there was a law, forgotten but still technically in effect, from shortly after the unification of the tribes that made revenge legal under the right circumstances. It gave any member of the nobility, which Twilight technically was, who lost a close friend or family member due to the malice or incompetence of another the right to challenge the pony responsible to a duel to the death, provided they had devoted their life completely to tracking down said responsible pony since the equicide or ponyslaughter. It would almost certainly be repealed after anypony invoked it, but she only needed one legal duel. And she would like to get back to preparing for her revenge quest, if you don’t mind.
Her friends tried to change her mind, of course. “Leave it to the police,” they begged. “Don’t let this consume you. It won’t make you happy. It will just ruin your life further.” They quoted pony Ghandi and giraffe Confucius. But she would not be swayed. In the end, it had to come down to whether her friends would support her, or whether they would risk the friendship for their principles.
“Ah’ll help. Ah don’t think what yer doin’ is right, but Ah ain’t gonna claim I wouldn’t do the same for mah family.”
“I’m in. I can’t leave my friend hanging. And you’ll never find who did this without me. You need somepony who knows weather.”
After that, there was only silence.
Twilight was at least understanding about Pinkie, Rarity, and Fluttershy being reluctant to help her, even if she wasn’t all that happy about it. So she made them promise not to tell anypony about the loophole, so it wouldn’t get closed up before she could use it, and she assured them that this wasn’t the end of their friendship. They may even have all believed her as she gently ushered them out of the library so she, AJ, and Rainbow could plan in peace.
It was not to be, however. Devoting her life to revenge left Twilight very little time for socialization, and she never seemed to think about anything but revenge. Every time they got together, the subject would soon come up, and then Rarity would try to change Twilight’s mind, Fluttershy would lapse into awkward silence, and Pinkie would make increasingly obvious attempts to distract everypony with something less controversial. Within a few months, all three had started avoiding Twilight, and she was so wrapped up in her mission that she hardly noticed.
Things went even worse with Spike. By the time he woke up, he hardly recognized his big sister, and most of the time she didn’t even seem to be aware he wasn’t still asleep. When she did acknowledge him, she refused to tell him any specifics about what she was doing, saying only that he couldn’t be trusted. After his tendency to forget his tail was now long and starting to develop spikes tore the cover off Magical Mayhem and Practical Pranks, he took that excuse to move out of the library. Everypony agreed it was for the best when they heard.
Nor was it going well within the cabal. AJ knew nothing of cloud forensics, or tracking pegasi, or really much of anything relevant to the investigation, and the farm had been struggling since a salamander burned down almost a third of the orchards last year, so she refused to be away from her family for long. She still did what she could to help, but that wasn’t much. And with weather being notoriously ephemeral, any traces that could lead back to who caused the fateful downpour were almost nonexistent, so Rainbow wasn’t much more help. After her habit of accusing subordinates at random of murder got her fired as Ponyville’s weather captain, between her depression eating into her productivity and her need to mooch investigation funds for living expenses, she was almost certainly a net drain, not that Twilight would ever dream of saying so. She didn’t exactly have a surplus of friends who had chosen to stand by her as she sought revenge, after all, and she suspected that seeing Rainbow every day was the only thing keeping her sane.
Nevertheless, progress was slowly made. Leads were found, and some of them weren’t complete busts. Though it was elusive, the truth was out there, and though it would take years, the truth would be found. No matter how unpleasant it might be.
The quest ended near Cloudsdale. More specifically, it ended in a dingy old building that the Weather Service used for storing records. The building had once been a weather office that handled communication between the central weather hub and Manehattan, but after the cloud it was built on broke off Cloudsdale a few decades back, it was cheaper to just reassign its functions among other offices rather than tow it back into position and reattach it. But the Weather Service hates to waste a building, and the cloud it was on was projected to last at least a century with only a minimum of maintenance, so they started storing old records there, as well as records that somepony wanted to hide, or that nopony remembered how to file properly, or that were being punished for being left on the floor for somepony to trip over. It was still listed as “abandoned” in all official records, though, so it was only through sheer luck that Twilight heard about it at all.
AJ, as usual, had not come along. It was apparently the middle of applebuck season, and she couldn’t spare a moment away from Sweet Apple Acres. Rainbow was outside, pretending there was any reason that she would be needed to stand guard, so she could feel useful without having to read through reams upon reams of dusty paperwork. And Twilight was inside, doing the real work, trying to find any potentially useful information.
When she came out, though, it was clear that this lead had not gone like any before. Rainbow was hoping that Twilight would trot out with a stack of papers, hopeful about some new lead she had found. Rainbow was expecting that Twilight would trudge out, ears drooping, depressed over having found nothing again. Either of these would have been normal. Fearfully creeping out was not normal.
“Rainbow?” Twilight asked hesitantly, laying a single sheet of paper on the cloud between them, “Can you tell me what this means?”
The paper in question was the duplicate copy of a formal request for back weather reports from the Ponyville weather team. It stated that, as no communication had been received in three months, the Weather Service would be forced to assume that Ponyville’s weather team had in some way ceased to exist unless a prompt response was sent. It also contained a reminder that if Ponyville was without a weather team, an emergency team would have to be sent, with authority to create any weather as they deem necessary.
And Rainbow knew. She knew whose fault it was that Ponyville’s weather reports had not been sent to the central office. She knew whose fault it was that the request to the Ponyville weather team had been lost. It was the same pony who was responsible for every other problem with Ponyville’s weather records, because she could not seem to find the patience to handle paperwork properly.
“It means that Derpy is responsible.”
After Twilight had dueled and killed Derpy, proven that she had remained within the law, and of course spurred the repeal of the law that allowed all this in the first place, her relationship with Princess Celestia was admittedly strained for a while. But that passed, in time, and it helped that Twilight was sending considerable quantities of completely non-sociopathic friendship reports about reconciling with Rarity, Pinkie, Fluttershy, and Spike now that she had closure and could go back to her normal self. She even got a report out of them noticing that something was still a little off, and pushing her to admit that she had suspected the problems with the weather reports were Rainbow’s fault, and she had been feeling guilty and afraid of what Rainbow would think if she admitted it. Rainbow was a little annoyed, but it really wasn’t a big deal.
AJ and Rainbow both got some publicity from the media coverage of the Sparkle case, and it proved true that any publicity is good publicity. Demand for Sweet Apple Acres apples grew so much that AJ was forced to respond to market forces and raise the price, making enough of a profit to potentially last several years in a row of bad harvests. There was even enough money to finally replace Granny’s saggy old hip. Rainbow was recruited for the Wonderbolts by the end of autumn, and being a Wonderbolt was even better than she ever dared imagine. It was months before she stopped gushing about the training (because you don’t fly in the ‘Bolts at an actual show unless you know every maneuver backwards and forwards and every safety procedure twice as well, so the training takes a while) in every letter and every visit home, which was just in time to start raving about the rush of performing for an adoring crowd of thousands.
And they all lived happily ever after.
