Em Dash
Princess Twilight Sparkle stared at the piece of paper in front of her. After having to fill out 184 individual forms to finalize Ponyville's budget last month, she thought no parchment could possibly be less desirable than the administrative tax sheets. The abomination in front of her, however, was suddenly making her long for the sweet caress of Form 273-A, or possibly Form 1109-B (Errata F). At least they were legible.
"Rainbow Dash," began Twilight Sparkle in the most diplomatic way she could muster, "I'm not sure this is fit for publishing."
"What?!" Rainbow Dash looked up from the Daring Do and Prism Flash dolls she was making kissing noises with. "But I wrote it, and I'm the most awesome pegasus in Equestria, therefore that is the most awesome Daring Do fanfic in Equestria!"
"Um, no." Twilight resisted the urge to permanently affix her right hoof to her forehead. "You've basically written a self-insert mary sue romance story that has spelling errors, incorrect grammar, a politically incorrect way of referring to zebras, and an appalling abuse of hyphens."
Rainbow Dash, still holding her dolls, crossed her forelegs in obvious disagreement. "Well, at least I didn't ship a cheese grater with Lord Sombra!"
Twilight blushed. "That was an experiment in objective personification as it relates to romance and our ultimate purpose as an existential crisis!"
Rainbow Dash blinked.
Twilight decided to say something in a dialect of Equestrian Rainbow Dash could actually understand. "Well, at least I don't moan about Daring Do every time I nap on a cloud!"
"What?! I do not
!"
"Oh, Daring Do!" said Twilight in a mockery of Rainbow Dash's voice, "This ancient temple is sweltering! I hope you don't mind if I take off my saddlebags"
"Okay!" shouted Rainbow Dash, blushing furiously. "Okay! Okay. You win. Just... just proofread my story, please."
Rolling her eyes, Twilight returned to the manuscript that had been hoofed to her. "Well, spelling is easy enough to fix. Some of these sentences are so awkward they rival my teenage self, but that's just a matter of practice. You don't seem to know how to use dashes properly, though."
Rainbow Dash scrunched up her muzzle. "Dashes? But I'm Rainbow Dash! There's only one of me!"
Twilight groaned. "No, look, there are three kinds of dasheswell, four if you count yourself, but– Nevermind. What I’m saying is, there are hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, but you've just used hyphens. Hyphens are used to join words together, so they never have spaces before or after them, and neither do em dashes, which are the long dashes, but en dashes do."
"Sooooo, the short ones are en dashes?"
"Yeeeeeeeeeah?" The word was spoken with the apprehension of a thousand broken hearts, bound to ancient spirits of fear and foreboding. It was the kind of word you said after you accidentally summon Cthulhu instead of cook pancakes, and your roommate asks you if breakfast is ready.
"Then I just have to add spaces around my en dashes! Thanks, Twilight!"
"No, wait, those aren't!"
But Rainbow Dash was already gone, and a second pane of broken glass lay in shards on the library floor.
Later that day, Twilight was working on a story exploring the intricacies of interspecies romance and the difficulties it posed using a metaphorical artistic viewpoint. It was called "Twilight Sporkle and the Rainbow Endtable". She had just gotten to the part where Flutterclock confessed her undying love to Applebarn when Rainbow Dash came crashing through the window.
Sadly, at this point, 'the window' isn't a sufficiently specific description, because there were now three broken windows to contend with, and the number of unbroken windows that were left for Rainbow Dash to crash through was dwindling rapidly.
"Is there a reason you can't just use the door, Rainbow Dash?" asked Twilight, not looking up from her literary work of art.
"I have doorphobia," explained Rainbow Dash, "It's a terrible disease, but don't worry, I can still lead a normal life despite my crippling handicap."
Twilight groaned, and finished penning her current sentence before turning around. "Justnevermind, show me what you have."
Rainbow Dash hoofed over a slightly edited manuscript. As Twilight gripped it with her magic, she felt a dark chill go down her spine, as though a thousand terrible OC's had risen from their pages to re-enact poorly written romance scenes. Far away, a linguistics teacher began spinning in her grave. This was discovered several years later by a pair of would-be graverobbers, who were able to use her perpetually spinning corpse as a source of unlimited free energy by attaching it to a turbine. This subsequently crashed the entire energy market and forced Celestia to enact a series of unpopular government controls to keep the economy from collapsing.
At this point, an asteroid that had been heading for Equus decided to veer towards the left and crash into some other, less weird planet instead. Life on Equestria was torn between rejoicing and feeling sorry for itself.
Meanwhile, Twilight wasn't a very happy mare. "Rainbow Dash, you just put spaces around your hyphens. It's still wrong, because they aren't en dashes, and you're not supposed to use en dashes for interruptions in dialogue."
Rainbow Dash's wings bristled in annoyance. "Waddya mean? En dashes were the short ones! I used the short ones! I put spaces around them just like you said!"
"Those aren't en dashes, Dash, they're hyphens. En dashes are longer."
"I thought those were em dashes!"
"No, em dashes are even longer than en dashes."
"So, em dashes are like earth ponies?"
Twilight's right eyelid twitched. "I... I'm not even going to respond to that."
Rainbow Dash pouted. "Ok, well, I guess I understand. Are there any other dashes I should know about?"
"Well..." Twilight hesitated. "To continue your... unfortunate metaphor... Rainbow, a 'horizontal bar' is analogous to Big Macintosh, or my brother."
"Wait, why do you know how big your brother is?"
"Uh... well, moving on, a horizontal bar is used for starting quotation blocks, but it was supplanted by quotation marks and is normally only used in older scripts."
"Hey, wait, I want to know how"
"Well that's enough editing for today!" declared Twilight Sparkle, trying and failing to hide her increasingly red cheeks. "Replace your dashes with em dashes, remove the spaces and you'll be fine! Aside from having atrocious character development and plot, of course, but nopony cares about those things! Nope!"
With that, Twilight dumped Rainbow Dash's manuscript on the pegasus' head and trotted over to her reading place. She picked up her copy of "How To Use Alicorn Magic Without Destroying The World - For Dummies!" and sat down on her pillow. Cracking open the book, she began reading it intently, apparently not noticing that it was upside down.
Rainbow Dash shrugged. "Alright, be back in a flash!" She then proceeded to crash through yet another unbroken window.
I really need window insurance, thought Twilight.
That evening, Rainbow Dash triumphantly returned to Twilight's library. Naturally, she did this by crashing through the only unbroken window left in the library. Once again, she came out from under the shards of glass miraculously unharmed, which was such an egregious abuse of the laws of physics that the laws of physics brought her to court on two counts of domestic violence and promptly filed for divorce. The resulting court case cost two million bits in legal fees, as the laws of physics attempted to prove that Rainbow Dash's repeated attempts to break them were actually an elaborate pegasus mating dance. The court determined that Rainbow Dash was not, in fact, betrothed to the laws of physics, and thus could not be divorced from them. She was, however, charged with two counts of assault and velocity. The case was eventually thrown out after the courts defenestrated Prince Blueblood and determined that gravity was, in fact, still working. Then they threw Blueblood out of another window, just for good measure.
That, however, was neither here nor there, nor sideways, nor upways, or any other kinds of ways there were. Instead, Rainbow Dash was here and there, possibly at the same time, because she was vibrating with so much excitement her quantum state became entangled with itself. This generated two slightly offset copies of her that existed in two parallel universes at the same time, which caused general relatively to resign in disgust, promptly eliminating the speed of light and breaking everything that ever existed, forever.
After an incredibly long and unnecessary tangent, Rainbow Dash handed her new and improved manuscript over to Twilight, who tentatively picked it up with a degree of trepidation usually reserved for live nuclear devices. "I fixed all the dashes and took out the spaces!"
Twilight flipped through the manuscript and frowned. She had replaced her dashes with em dashes and removed the spaces properly. She had also done something else. "Rainbow Dash, why are all your em dashes colored in with crayon?"
"They aren't em dashes," declared Rainbow Dash, "they're rainbow dashes!"
Twilight Sparkle's head exploded.
Author's Note
