Off on a Tangent

I told Derpy that I’d take a rain check on that ice cream, and headed for the Dentist’s office. On the way, there was a distinct lack of blood in the streets, or fire, or anything like that. Yes, Rose and Lily and Daisy were passed out in the middle of the street, and the marketplace had been completely trashed, with all the merchants abandoning their stalls and would-be customers just taking anything they wanted, but there were no bodies. No pony was going crazy and killing anypony. Except me, of course.

No, I wasn’t going around killing anypony else. What I meant was that I’d killed Time Turner. And it had been so easy! Sure, he’d helped me, and he hadn’t actually died even after I’d stabbed him a bunch of times, but there was no internal resistance. No conscience telling me ‘no, don’t kill him!’ No aversion to the squelching and scraping as the letter opener plunged into his flesh, or to the blood that flew everywhere. No hesitation when I’d tried to crush his skull with the clock. No remorse, afterwards.

Nothing was stopping me from murdering ponies except for the fear that I’d be punished, and the part where I didn’t actually want them to be dead. And neither of those is really an iron-clad barrier – I can see myself tricking myself into believing that I wouldn’t get caught, and there are plenty of ponies that I don’t even know. What would stop me from randomly murdering a stranger? In the real world, I mean. In the doomed, fake world, I’d made a Pinkie Promise not to. So there was that, at least as long as Pinkie Pie was still alive and still monitoring Pinkie Promises.

But Minuette’s clone, well – she wasn’t a pony. What was stopping me from murdering her?

I found her sitting the back room, staring at the corpses. I walked into the room behind her, letting the blood squidge through my hooves as I clip-clopped across the floor, and she didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. She just kept staring at the carnage, which was exactly how I’d left it, as far as I could tell.

I turned and headed for the perimeter of the room, and searched the drawers until I found a scalpel that Strong Jaw must have used for gum surgery or something. I held it in my magic as I squelched back over to the clone, and plunged it into her back.

“Ow!” She stood up and glowered at me, the scalpel sticking up from where it was wedged into her shoulderblade. “Be more careful with that! You stabbed me!”

My horn lit as I pulled the scalpel out, and floated it around beneath her chin. “Yeah. I’m going to murder you,” I said, with all the enthusiasm I could muster, which was roughly none at all.

“What?” she said, her eyes going wide as she pulled back, only to slip on the blood and land on the lower half of the shredded corpse in the chair. “Ahh!” She scrambled to the side, and looked around in a panic. “Don’t kill me!”

I advanced on her, frowning, the scalpel held before me as I backed her into a corner.

“Please!” she said, cowering and holding her hooves up to block me. “I don’t want to die!”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, letting the scalpel drop into the layer of gore coating the floor. “I wasn’t really feeling it anyway.”

She whimpered, and continued to cower.

“It’s just – the world was essentially destroyed, and now what’s left of it is falling apart, so it’s not like it actually matters if you die now, or in a few hours when everything fades away. So it’s perfectly reasonable for me to use you as an experiment to see if I’m a complete psychopath. Right?”

The clone peeked out from behind her forelegs. “What?”

“I murdered Time Turner, and I didn’t feel anything,” I said. “He asked me to, so I did it. I don’t feel guilty or anything.”

“Why would he ask you to kill him?”

I scraped a hoof through the blood and a small pile of shredded flesh. “Some stupid religious superstition. I probably shouldn’t have done it.”

So, I explained what was going on in more detail. Minuette’s clone agreed that I really shouldn’t have killed him – if someone is trying to kill himself, you’re supposed to make them feel better and stuff, and convince them to go on living. So there was definitely something wrong with me, although neither of us had the training to really guess what.

Eventually, she seemed to remember the bleeding wound in her shoulder. “This really hurts. Did you have to stab me like that?”

I winced. “Sorry. But wait – we’re in a dentist’s office, right? There’s all kinds of topical anesthetic around here.”

“I… don’t really think playing around with that sort of thing would be safe.”

“Oh come on,” I said, grinning. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I could die.”

“Well, that’s going to happen anyway. You might as well live the rest of your life without pain,” I said. “You can try them out on me first, okay? Since it’s my fault you were stabbed.”

Even with anesthetic – and with me begging her to, literally down on my knees – Minuette’s clone wasn’t willing to stab me to tell whether or not the anesthetic was strong enough to kill the pain from a stab wound. We did a pinch test instead, and after finding a dose that deadened the area pretty thoroughly, and didn’t have any other apparent effects, she let me inject her near the stab wound.

“It mostly works,” she said. “I guess I can live with this.”

We both giggled at that, which looked like it really embarrassed her.

“Wow, I’m a mess,” I said, which was an understatement. We’d been fooling about in the Room of Death for long enough that both of us were completely covered in blood, to the point where you couldn’t tell our colors at all. I could only tell which of us was which because she was the one who I could see from my point of view without looking down at myself. Well, that and she had blue eyes, I suppose, but who notices eye colors? “Who would have thought that ponies spontaneously exploding would be so messy?”

“Why did she explode, anyway?” the clone asked. “I get that the universe was destroyed, but nopony else exploded, did they?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything about it. Was she messing around with time spells?”

“If she was, I wouldn’t know. She only gave me what I needed to run the front desk for her.”

“Why don’t we check out her house? Maybe she left some sort of clue.”

We were wiping off the worst of the blood and gore, thoroughly ruining the dentist’s towels, when something else occurred to me. “Wasn’t that room supposed to stink? I don’t smell anything.”

The clone took a sniff, and looked at me, a bit terrified. I grabbed a bottle of scented soap from the sink, and opened the lid, then took a sniff. Nothing.

On the way to Minuette’s house, we saw Rose crying into her hooves, all her flowers scattered around and stomped into the dirt. Neither of us said anything.