Department of Redundancy Department
Twilight Sparkle stared at the beaker in front of her with slight nervousness. Only a couple of steps left out of dozens. Better not mess up now.
“Coal dust.”
“Coal dust,” Spike replied, and he handed over a jar of fine black powder.
Twilight took out a pinch and threw it into the liquid in the beaker. The substance changed its color from clear yellow to a murky green. Twilight turned to the tome open on her bookstand and scrutinized the text for a while.
“So far, so good. Black orchid petals.”
“Black orchid petals.” Spike passed her a plate with half a dozen black petals on it.
Twilight dropped two petals into the brew, which started foaming.
“As expected. Light the burner.”
Spike blew a small puff of dragonfire on the alcohol burner. “Burner lit.”
Twilight put the beaker on the stand above the flame. The liquid in it blinked red twice, then stopped bubbling. Twilight clapped her hooves together with a wide grin on her face.
“Excelent! Now, this next part is critical. We must not be disturbed.” She looked around the ground floor of the library. “Maybe we should have done this in the basement.”
“It’s Sunday. Library’s closed. Nopony will walk in on us blowing up ourselves.”
“Har, har. Fine, we shall proceed. Protection goggles.”
“Protection goggles.” They both put on the aforementioned items. Spike rolled his eyes, when Twilight checked the book one last time.
“I was joking about blowing ourselves up.”
“I know. Pegasus perspiration.”
Spike held out a small vial with visible disgust. “Pegasus perspiration.”
“Thank you,” Twilight said, taking the vial and pulling out the stopper. The vial floated towards the beaker, but froze midway. Twilight turned to Spike with a frown. “Where did you even get this stuff?”
“Nowhere!” Spike said looking away. “On a completely unrelated note, if Rainbow Dash were to come looking for her workout towel, we don’t know nothing about that.”
“Noted.” She turned back to the beaker and dumped the sweat in it. The potion became gelatinous and let out a belch loud enough to shake the windows of the library.
“Huh,” Spike said.
“That’s it?” She flipped a page in the book and furrowed her brow. “It says ‘Behold!’ here. What’s to behold about burping jello?”
“Yay for vague grimoires!” He looked at the book as Twilight flipped the page back and forth. “Twi! Aren’t two pages stuck together there?”
“Hmm? Oh, you might be right, Spike.” She fiddled with the pages a bit, then wedged her magic between them and separated the two sheets of parchment. “Haha, more instructions! Ewww, what’s this stuff? Maple syrup?”
“Or dried blood!” Spike shivered a bit.
Twilight snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous! The book is titled Obscure Arcane Rituals for Naughty Ponies with a Weak Stomach. Does that sound like live sacrifices to you?”
“Maybe naughty ponies get disgusted by cute things, not gore and blood.”
“Stop being a sissy and help me decipher this! I can barely read anything from this brown gunk.” She shuffled aside to give Spike room. “This looks like ‘wheat’ to me.”
“Or it could be ‘meat’!”
“Spike!”
“Fine, fine!” He leaned close to the page. “It could be ‘beet’. Or ‘weak’. Or—”
The door swung open with a loud bang.
“OPOSSUM ATTACK!”
Twilight let out a small yelp, while Spike hiccuped a small flame straight into the book. The ancient tome was consumed by green flames in seconds, leaving nothing but ashes. Twilight’s pupils shrank as she cried out in anguish.
“Noooooooooooooo!”
“Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!” Pinkie Pie countered while crossing the room towards them. “Wait! Are we talking about Fluttershy’s rowdy possums?”
“Noooooooooooooooooo!”
“Oh. In that case: nooooooooooooooooooooo!”
“It’s gone… burned… ruined…”
“Sent to Princess Celestia…”
“Dragon mail doesn’t work with books this big!” Her ears drooped. “It’s destroyed.”
“Aw, don’t be sad, Twilight!” she said, rubbing Twilight’s back. “I’ll get you another one.”
“It was a one-of-a-kind tome on loan from the Canterlot Archives,” Twilight hissed through clenched teeth. “It was the only one in Equestria.”
“Ah. Yeah, that might slightly complicate things,” Pinkie admitted.
“Slightly? Slightly?! Do you know what the Head Archivist will do to me? It will be worse than anything Discord could ever come up with!” She grabbed Pinkie by the fur of her chest. “But if I am going down, I am not going alone. I will drag you into Tartarus with me!”
“Now, now, no need for that, Twilight, ehehe,” Pinkie said, visible spooked by the feral snarl on Twilight’s face. “Did that book arrive before ten in the morning today?”
“Yes… It’s been here for days.”
“Then we can recover it.”
“It’s ashes!” Spike exclaimed, gesturing at the ruins of the book. “How do you recover that?”
“Oh, ye of little faith! I am Pinkie Pie!” She struck a pose. “No obstacle can stand before me! Because I will walk backwards towards it, so it is behind me.”
“Uhhh…”
“If I say I can recover the book, then I can. In ten minutes, as a matter of fact.” She smirked.
“Fine,” Twilight grumbled, then whipped her head around to face Spike. “Keep the potion ready. This won’t take long.”
“You got it, Twi!” he saluted.
“Now, Pinkie Pie, I really hope you aren’t just stringing me along. Because if you are… I might do things. Horrible things.”
“Okey dokey lokey!”
“What are we doing in Town Hall?”
They passed several busy looking ponies, while they were winding their way along the corridors of the wretched enclave of bureaucracy in Ponyville.
This place is way bigger inside than it looks on the outside.
“We’re getting your book.”
“I think the mayor would have mentioned if they had an arcane library in here.”
Pinkie Pie chuckled a bit. “Oh, silly! There are countless things in this building the mayor knows nothing about. For example, the cockroaches in the basement run a fighting ring.”
Twilight stopped mid-step. “What.”
“Yeah, that’s where I am every Saturday night.” She lowered her voice. “Just don’t tell the Cakes. They don’t like it when I gamble.”
“Why, how much did you lose last time?”
“The city of Manehatten.” She lowered her voice even further. “Just don’t tell the roaches I never owned it. They will come after me with soaps in socks!”
Twilight was starting to feel way more weirded out than usual around Pinkie.
“I won’t say a word.”
“You’re a good friend, Twi!” Pinkie said with a warm smile. “Oh, we’re here!”
They were standing in front of a door that was a few decades overdue for a repaint and had the words “DA MEYOR SUKZ” written across it in the ugliest green possible. Twilight could feel her brain cells committing suicide in protest of the horrible affront to grammar and spelling in front of her eyes.
“This door needs a paint job. Badly.”
“We tried. It burned right off. Must have been a really angry unicorn who made that graffiti.” She walked up to the door and opened it. “After you.”
Twilight walked into a cramped room that contained a desk, a safe and an impossible amount of filing cabinets. She noticed a hatch on the ceiling labeled “Emergency exit. Use in case of fire.”. The pegasus mare behind the desk lifted her eyes from the magazine in front of her.
“Department of Redundancy Department. I am Steel Molder. How may I help you?”
“Uhhh…”
“Field Agent Pinkamena Diane Pie, here to retrieve a redundancy,” Pinkie Pie stated, brushing past Twilight and slamming an ID card on the desk.
“Hey, Pinks. What did you wreck this time?” Molder asked as she pulled out a large binder folder.
“A book. It was called, uhhh…”
“Obscure Arcane Rituals for Naughty Ponies with a Weak Stomach,” Twilight supplied.
“Oh, that thing.” She scowled and slammed the binder shut. “It had so much bad mojo on it, I had to put it into secure storage.”
She turned to the safe, but instead of turning the dial, she simply banged on its side a few times. The safe opened with a resentful creaking noise.
“She used to be a locksmith and she is too lazy to remember the combination,” Pinkie whispered to Twilight.
“Well, here she is,” Molder said, placing a book on her desk. A book looking identical to the one that suffered death by Pinkie Pie mere minutes before.
“No…” Twilight whispered. She went through the pages one by one. It was all there. Even the disgusting maple syrup thing. “How?”
“Every object of sufficient uniqueness that enters the Ponyville area is automatically made redundant by the Department. New redundancies are created at ten every morning, except Sundays,” explained Molder. “Pinkie, I need you to fill out the paperwork.”
“Awww!”
“But, how is this possible?” Twilight asked, caressing the book.
“I dunno.” Pinkie shrugged, going through her forms. “You’re the unicorn scholar.”
“But why do this?”
“Ponyville was a disaster zone even before you came to town,” Molder said. “And it has gotten worse since.”
“Sorry.”
“Eh, we got a budget raise for the first time in twenty years. Most of what you see around here was stolen from other departments.”
Twilight looked around. The office was a bit run down. Okay, a lot. She noticed an elderly earth pony stallion sitting on a chair behind the open door, staring at a metal tray.
“Oh, sorry! I didn’t see you there.”
There was no answer.
“Um, Pinkie?”
“That’s Piercing Gaze. He was Department Head, but then he went a bit loco in the coco. Now he manages disposal.”
“Disposal?”
“Redundancies are destroyed after a three day waiting period if their original leaves Ponyville,” Molder said. “We simply don’t have the room for indefinite retention.”
“Hey, Twi!” Pinkie grinned. “Put those in front of him!”
Twilight stared at the pile of files labeled “For Disposal” for a few seconds, then lifted them with her magic and placed it on the metal tray. Gaze kept staring forward. Twilight opened her mouth to ask Pinkie what this is about, but the files suddenly caught fire and combusted before she could say a word. There was nothing left, not even ash.
“Wow.” She heard Pinkie snickering.
“He was the one who taught Fluttershy the Stare.”
“Really?”
“Yup!” Molder said. “Sweet little thing comes to town, no way to protect herself, and he arms her with a weapon that could topple governments.”
“Is he okay, though?” Gaze hadn’t moved an inch since they came in.
“Well, I told him he is too old to stare down cockatrices, but he’s stubborn like that. But we take good care of him. Fluttershy comes by often, too.”
“Ah’m not braindead!” Gaze croaked, making Twilight jump. “Ah’m just bored outta mah skull with this job. Ah’m too old fer this sheet!” Then he slumped back into his silence.
“See!” Pinkie slid the paperwork into a folder and handed it to Molder. “He’s fine.”
“And what do you do around here, Pinkie?”
“I’m our field agent. I put redundancies in place when stuff gets wrecked. How do you think we can rebuild this town so fast after every monster attack?”
“Huh, that makes a surprising amount of sense.”
“I also manage our stashes.”
“You mean the balls, eyepatches,—”
“And other useful stuff, yeah! Ponies loose stuff all the time. It’s good to have some extra stuff lying around.”
“How do you fit this with the baking?”
“Oh, this is more of a hobby to me.” She picked up the book from the desk. “Anyway, here you go!”
“Thanks! But…” She shuffled her hooves. “What if I burn it again?”
“It has already been made redundant again.” Molder smiled.
“Are you sure you want to use that book, Twilight?” Pinkie frowned. “Secure storage for bad mojo is a doozy level bad sign.”
“Trust me, Pinkie! I know what I am doing.”
“END OF THE WORLD IN FIFTEEN MINUTES! PLEASE, MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR RESPECTIVE DEITIES! THANK YOU.”
“Twilight, what were you thinking?!”
“I don’t know, Rarity! I don’t know!”
They were standing in the front door of Carousel Boutique, looking up at the Vortex of Doom forming above Ponyville. Rainbow Dash and her weather ponies had tried to collapse the apocalyptic cloud formation, but the gale-force wind made any attempt at flying suicide.
“Who in their right mind would cast a spell they know nothing about?” Rarity asked.
“Who in their right mind would write a book on how to end the world?” Twilight countered.
“Wasn’t meeeeeeeeee!” Discord yelled as he held on for dear life to the water chute of the Boutique. His body billowed in the wind like a flag. His tail was curled around a screaming Fluttershy, who was hugging half a dozen opossums to her chest. Angel was staring at the storm with a disdainful scowl from the end of the string anchoring him to the pegasus.
Twilight’s attention was torn away from the circus act above her head by a loud clinking. Pinkie Pie was approaching. She used a climbing gear, full with two ice axes, to keep herself on the ground in spite of the wind as she slowly crept up on the doorway.
“Doozy! Told ya!” she happily informed Twilight as she crawled into the Boutique.
“Fine, you were right! Again!” She spun around. “Anything, Spike?”
“I think I found the counter-potion,” he said, gently rubbing the smudges in the book away. “Most of the ingredients we can get from Rarity’s kitchen, but there is one that could be a problem.”
“Which one?”
“Hair shaved off the back of an angry badger.”
Twilight gave him a flat glare. “Seriously?”
“Yup.”
Twilight looked at Pinkie in desperation. Pinkie scratched her chin in thought when her eyes were drawn to the door. Opal, Rarity’s cat was hissing furiously at the madness going on outside. Pinkie’s features rearranged themselves in fierce determination.
“A cat is fine, too,” she declared.
An ear piercing scream echoed through the Boutique.
“That sound means the potion is ready,” Spike read from the book.
“Okay!” Twilight said, pulling the pot from the stove. “How do we use it?”
“We have to deliver it into the heart of the storm above us.”
The wind outside was starting to pick up trees.
“Looks like it will do our job for us.”
“Nah, it has to be in the exact center. The wind would probably just smash it against something.”
“Oh, come on!”
“That’s what it says.”
“Seriously, what the f—”
“Party cannon to the rescue!” Pinkie screamed, producing the aforementioned device.
“It doesn’t say to disperse the potion, only to get it up there,” Spike said. “We could put it in a pressure cooker and fire it from the cannon.”
“Already ahead of you,” Twilight said as she poured their last hope into Rarity’s favourite cooker and sealed it. “Load her up, Pinkie!”
“You’re paying for that, Twilight,” Rarity grumbled.
“Don’t worry! I know a place to get another one on the cheap.”
“Nopey dopey!” Pinkie shook her head. “Insufficient uniqueness, no redundancy.”
“Crud.”
They pushed the party cannon to the door. The wind was struggling against Town Hall, and it was winning. The cannon was skidding left and right in the draft.
“Uh, Twilight, hold down the cannon while I aim it!”
Twilight lit her horn and grabbed the party cannon, but the storm wasn’t having any of it. The wind shifted and tore the cannon from her grasp.
“It’s lose! I lost it!”
The party cannon gracefully sailed above the rooftops and disappeared into the clouds. Pinkie Pie fell to her knees.
“My favourite piece of artillery! You shall regret this, storm!” She shook her hoof towards the skies. “Oh, well, better get the redundancy real quick.”
“Are you crazy? We’ll never get to Town Hall in this wind!”
In the distance, Town Hall capitulated to the elements and joined the debris above Ponyville.
“And there goes Town Hall,” Rarity noted with resignation in her voice.
“Forget that!” Pinkie Pie ran back into the Boutique and started pushing furniture around.
“What are you doing?”
“This!” Pinkie declared, and she lifted the rug she just freed, revealing a trapdoor.
“I didn’t know you had a basement,” Twilight said to Rarity.
“Neither did I.”
“Come on, you guys!” Pinkie said, and she threw the trapdoor open. “Everypony in!”
“I’m not sure if—” Rarity was cut off by a loud creaking in the rafters above them. “—we should tarry.”
“Agreed,” Twilight said, and they both jumped in.
They landed in front of a desk with a bored looking pegasus mare behind it.
“Department of Redundancy Department. I am Steel Molder. How may I… Hey, it’s you again! Problem with the book?”
“What… How…” Twilight sputtered as Pinkie Pie landed next to her. The trapdoor slammed shut above them. Twilight looked up to face the familiar escape hatch.
“How is this possible?!”
“Oh, I have Departments stashed all over Ponyville,” Pinkie said. “You know, in case of Department Emergencies.”
