Remember

Remember

By Strawberry Jelly

Prologue

Your hooves clack quietly beneath you with each step against the warm pavement.  Today is your favorite day of the week:  Saturday.  It was the day that you get to visit your best friend in the world, Pinkie Pie, and spend the night at the rock farm!  Not that you really have any interest in farming; after all, you spend most of your time making glass with the storm clouds imported all of the way from Las Pegasus.

As for why you're walking instead of flying to your friend's house, it's just because you spend almost all of your time off of the ground, so you relish the chance to actually use your four hooves every once and a while.  Up ahead you can already see the gates to the “Quartz and Ruby Acres” that was the pride and joy of Igneous Pie.

“Oh my gosh, you're late!”  Pinkie cheered excitedly and dashed full force into you, causing you both to tumble across the road in a fit of flailing limbs and giggles.  “I was starting to worry that the blockworms got a hold of you again!  I would've had to have gotten your mom and dad again and they really scare me sometimes, but you know I would've done it to save you, silly filly!”

“... But I'm a colt,”  You comment, barely processing her ranting apart from that ending nickname that you hate so much.  You're going to grow up to be a big and strong stallion, not a mare!  Granted, no matter how many times you tell Pinkie, it never seeps in through that cotton candy head of hers.  Not that you were expecting it to, but it would still be nice to know that she understood.

“So, I made this super yummy cake today and Maud said I couldn't have any until after dinner!  Can you believe that?!”  Her lips turn downwards with those infernal puppy dog eyes that dominated you like a marionette with its strings being pulled.  “You'll help me get the cake out of the kitchen, right?”

“I-”  Your objections are destroyed the moment you see her eyes widen and water, showing off the full reflection of Celestia's golden sunset.  “Well, duh!”

“Yay!”  She squeaks excitedly and jumps up off of you, smiling and showing off her silver braces.  “We'll just take it to the barn and eat it all before dinner, what do you think?!”

“I think-”  You take a deep breath and smile back at her.  No matter how hard you try, you can never seem to object to her smile, “I think we better get that cake, then!”

Climbing back onto all four legs, she quickly pulls you by your forehoof towards the farm in a blinding blur.  Whether or not sugar is the power source for her superpony strength and speed, you always find yourself having to break out into flight just to not have your leg dislocated.

Approaching the open kitchen window, you can smell the savory scent of chickpea burgers and hayfries waft through the air, but the bliss is short lived as Pinkie tugs you harshly down below the window seal.  Her hoof meets your lips before you can object, but the sugary taste that it leaves against your mouth is enough to let you enjoy the brief contact.

“Okay, so here's the plan,”  She uses her other hoof to trace out her plans into the dirt between her hind legs.  “Maud has a superpony sense of hearing, so we're going to have to distract her by blaring the music from the record player in the living room.  She really hates that really noisy Slim Whitpony song that dad likes so much, so she'll have to go turn it off.  That's when you come in through the window and steal the cake!  Alright?”

“Alright, but-”

“Great!  We'll rendezvous back at the barn at 0800 hours!”  Pinkie cuts you off with a stern, false military-style voice.

You're left in the dust as you watch Pinkie sprint off around the corner of the house, leaving an impossibly perfect puff of dirt that was shaped like her.  How she manages to do these things is beyond you, but Pinkie seems to really just have this weird power to break reality.  Quietly you file that in your mental filing cabinet, right next to the mysterious Pinkie Sense.

“It's already nine!”  You shout after her and gently poke at the dirt with your forehoof lazily.  With the speed she was going, you'd imagine her to have more than managed to make it to the record player and then some.  Just as you stand up, the entire farm seems to shake violently from the loud song that echoes from the  living room.

Fighting through the pain shooting through your ears, you cautiously peek in through the window to see Maud still standing there, unphased by the noise.  Not only that, but she is acting as if she hadn't noticed it at all.  You mentally facehoof at the sight, but realize that it is Maud that you are dealing with, after all.

Luckily though, the stove that she is working at just happens to be facing away from the cake that was on the center table behind her.  Cautiously, you crawl through the window and try to ignore the tantalizing taste of chickpea as you slither on your belly towards your goal.  Gently and carefully, you lift yourself off of the ground with your wings, having the blaring song mask the sound of flapping.

“Easy does it,”  You think to yourself as you slowly reach your forelegs forward, hooking your hooves through the handles and starting to pull back, only to meet face to face with one Maud Pie that had turned around for the spatula that was left on the table.

“What are you doing?”  You see her mouth moving, but you can't make out a single word that she's saying.

“Uhm...  I must abscond!”  You stall for only a moment, looking around the room before spying on the window that you had entered from and quickly fleeing through it with your prize in hoof.

You're almost certain that there will be tartarus to pay later for being caught, but that's part of the charm of living in the moment.  Besides, you know just how delicious this cake's going to be  the moment you and Pinkie bite into the fluffy cotton candy icing.  Quickly, you open the door to the 'Clubhouse' that Pinkie had lovingly deemed the barn as.

“Yay, you're here already!”  Pinkie poked her head out through the trapdoor to the loft above you.  “Hurry, bring the cake up here so I can raise the ladder!”

A small smile shows itself at the corner of your lips, but you oblige and place the cake onto the lift and climb up the rope ladder to meet your friend.  Her eyes glisten like diamonds the moment she finishes pulling the cake up to the loft with you both.

“Maud caught me though, so...”  You look out the window towards the sunset with a sly grin on your lips.

“Oh?  So I won the bet again?!”  Her face turns back to yours, showing a grin that only widens at the realization of what that meant.  “Let's see...  That makes ten minutes, right?”

“Ten?  But it's only five normally!”  You hiss, taking a nervous step back.

“Well, yeah, but you didn't let me last time you lost either!”  She kneels down slightly, shaking her flank like a cat with a viciously playful look in her eyes.

“Mercy!”  You yelp out before feeling a heavy thud against your chest and having two hooves tickle at your sides relentlessly.  It's times like this that you regret ever accepting that bet:  When you two ever go on a mission or anything and one of you fail, the other gains free reign to do whatever they want to the other for five uninterrupted minutes.  Of course you're elated whenever Pinkie messes up, but you didn't realize back then that she never messes up.  One of her bizarre powers seems to be that the more ridiculous of a thing you two do, the lower chance of failure she has.

“Mercy is for the weak!”  She laughs maniacally with a villainous mustache somehow appearing on her face when you weren't looking.

After about fifteen minutes of flailing limbs, sense of time being lost, and your ribs being assaulted, you finally manage to take a well-deserved breath.  In only moments of recovery, you find a slice of cake sitting in front of your face on a pink hoof.  “Say 'Aww'!”  Her mane was disheveled from your rolling around – well, more disheveled than normal – and her trademark grin was plastered on her face.

“Aww...”  You open your mouth, expecting to be offered a small bite, but instead found the entire thing crammed into your mouth with impossible precision that only Pinkie could pull off.  Your eyes widened in horror as you attempted to chew the sugary monstrosity and failing at it for another good fifteen minutes until she decided to finally offer you a cup of milk that she had gotten from Celestia knows where.

“How much sugar did you put in that?!”  You half shout at her as you finally find reprieve from the assault of sugar that had fell upon your tongue.  Not only was it unbelievably chocolatey, but the icing had to have been literally made out of sugar and nothing else.

“All of it!”  Pinkie said matter-of-factly with a wide grin on her lips.  You notice a small gleam of something else in her gaze though, a glimpse of something that didn't feel entirely 'Pinkie'.

“Hey, what's wrong?”  You can't help but ask, only to see her smile waver and her eyes fill with uncertainty.  There's the look of her wanting to tell you something, but her lips seal together in a wry frown that you've only caught before in fleeting moments over the years.  This was different though; this frown wasn't leaving her face, and when she finally opens her mouth to speak, only a strange question escapes it:

“What would you do if I disappeared?”  She asks sincerely, but it feels so out of place to hear from Pinkie Pie of all ponies.  In fact, not once in your life have you ever heard her be so serious.

“Why would you disappear?”  You sit up and look her in the eyes with a worried gaze.

Her own eyes only start to water as a response, sending an shock wave of dread throughout your body.  Seeing her uneasy was one thing, but seeing her cry was more along the lines of impossible.  The last time you saw Pinkie cry was when she saved you from the Blockworms.  Just as she opens her mouth to explain, the world fades out into blackness...

~~~

… And you open your eyes to the bright morning sun that poked its head through a cloud clearing.  You've been out on the road for two days now, and not once have you seen the sun since leaving Manehattan.

“Looks like the weather team decided that there's been enough snow,” You comment with a roll of your eyes and a long stretch.  The weather teams around Las Pegasus were notoriously lazy and hardly even managed the weather in the area.  Due to this, you spent the latter half of your trip trudging through snow and ice, which would probably catch up to you as a cold sooner or later.

“I might as well get going, though,”  You let out a begrudged sigh that signals you leaving the warmth of your wool blanket to get off of your cart and start pulling the over-encumbered hunk of junk.  If it was a gift from anyone other than Smokey for your trip, you would have sold it for scrap in order to buy a better one.  As it stands though, you can't stomach upsetting that lovable oaf.

With a combination of that last memory and the cold air, you find yourself wide awake and ready to finish your trip to Las Pegasus.  'Hearth's Warming Arts Festival, here I come.'  You think quietly to yourself before starting down the road with a bounce in your step.