Testbed

"Professor Frod?"

"Vhat is it, Nurse Cinnamon Svirl?" The Professor snapped at the intercom box on his table, his horn still glowing green as he maintained the hypnotic display in front of his test subject.

"You have a patient here to see you."

"I'm a little bit busy now, Svirl, und this appointment isn't scheduled to end for another hour.

"Now," the Professor continued, turning back towards his current patient, "pull the stockings on slowly, enjoy the texture -"

"It's a very important patient, Sir," Nurse Swirls interrupted again.

"Und so is the von I'm speaking vith now," the middle-aged unicorn muttered, brushing his unruly mane back exasperatedly. "Unless it's royalty -"

"Lady Rarity Belle, Sir, and she says it's very pressing."

Professor Frod silently ran through the polyglot dictionary of appropriate curses he kept in his head, looking for one that was appropriate, but decided that he really shouldn't do that in front of a hypnotized patient.

"Buy me five minutes. Talk about her dresses, that should keep ze two of you busy until I'm done here."

"With pleasure, Sir!" The intercom crackled off, leaving the Professor to turn back to his patient.

"Ve vill not have time to do zis properly, I am afraid, so let us cut to ze chase. Put on ze rest of ze outfit, and you vill feel confident and attractive as you valk out zat - err, fly out zat door. You vill be polite to ze Nurse and other ponies you meet, but you vill not vish to hide from zem who you are. Do you understand me, Mister Biceps?"

"YEAH!" The bodybuilding stallion, currently wearing a pair of nylon stockings and lace panties, dove at the bag with the rest of the lingerie and frillery he had brought to the meeting. Within moments, he was decked out in a black evening gown that clung horrifyingly to every muscly crag that pretended to call itself a curve.

Professor Frod smiled approvingly and adjusted the stallion's obsidian necklace.

"Very gut, Mister Biceps. Or should I say, Ms. Deltoid?"

"THANK YOU!" 'Ms. Deltoid' replied in an enthusiastic falsetto.

"Now, go out zair and knock zem dead!" The hypnotic swirl in front of Bulk began to fade before Professor Frod caught himself. "Not literally! Enjoy your date, Ms. Deltoid."

"WILL DO, PROFESSOR! BLUIE WON'T KNOW WHAT HIT HIM!" Bulk turned around smartly, tail held high and proud to show off the remarkably tight lingerie beneath the dress, and marched out of the Professor's office, leaving a wicked grin growing across the older stallion's muzzle as he reached over to click on the intercom.

"Send Lady Belle in, Nurse Swirl."

"Already? But we're just talking about -"

A startled shriek echoed across the intercom as the door to the waiting room slammed open, no doubt revealing the Professor's latest project. A dull thud followed, not unlike the sound of a pony collapsing onto the Professor's couch.

"I'll send her in. Professor? Do you ever forgive a funding cut?"

"Now, now, Miss Svirl," the Professor grinned as he sat down and spun around in his chair. "I am merely helping von of my patients become more confident vith his sexuality and desire to be seen as pretty and gentle! Zis blind date is completely unconnected from ze grants zat vere cancelled to build a larger statue in front of ze Prince Blueblood Memorial Museum of Modern Nobility! Besides, I did make sure zat Ms. Deltoid knew ze Prince is especially fond of strawberry scented perfume. Und other things."

"Professor, if he ever find out about this, you'll top Chrysalis as Canterlot's Most Wanted." There was a hint of awe mixed with the pale pink pegasus's honest concern across the magical communicator.

"Yes, but ze photographs at ze Tunnel of Love vill be so adorable!" The Professor cackled. "Bring in Lady Belle, Cinnamon. I have an extra hour I can slip in her for."

"...Slip her in for, Professor. That's... that's really one you don't want to get wrong. Especially not with a female patient."

"Vhatever. Bring her in, I believe she uses a model eighteen-oh-sree-double-you fainting couch, yes? Zat should fit through ze hall nicely."

There was a moment of silence while the Professor savored his impending revenge, before he heard the squeaking of the fainting couch's wheels coming down the hall. He opened the door with his magic, admitting the still-unconscious unicorn upon it and a pale pink pegasus with a glazed cinnamon roll just barely sticking out from under her skirt and a manilla folder in her mouth. After positioning Rarity in front of the Professor's normal therapy couch, she sat down the folder and left him to quickly catch up on the case file while Miss Rarity recovered.

"Gott in himmel, zis is horrible," he muttered distastefully as he read. "I may as well start my notes now. Ze appointment is confidential, but ze case details are vell enough known to discuss...."

Goooooooood evening Rage Reviews! Or morning. Just pretend it's evening when you're reading this, it's more entertaining like that.

Besides, I'd hate to think it's too early to start drinking. Trust me, we're going to need the liquor before this is over.

Today's subject is "Good Things are Better When They're a Rarity," GTaBWTaR to its friends, by Stormbringer (Elric, if this is a relative of yours, I'm sorry. On so many levels.) GTaBWTaR is almost physically impossible to say, you say? Then it's a good thing that this story probably isn't making many friends.

Split-view cover art is never a good sign. It's an even worse sign when you find that the author's tagging discipline is somewhere around "spastic third grader." Let's see here... sex, Crossover, Dark, Equestria Girls, Romance, Slice of Life, and Tragedy.

So if the author actually follows through on all those tags, this will be a tragic romance involving some sort of crossover between at least MLP and Equestria Girls universe, possibly even more (since I wouldn't put a Crossover tag in to combine MLP and EqG, but that's just me), that gives us a look at the day-to-day life in a world with a dark atmosphere. Oh, and looking at the character tags with it, it will feature the Mane 6, Night Light, Twilight Velvet, Celestia, and an unknown OC, all as primary characters in the story.

Okay, authors? Don't do this. In particular, having read the story, I can tell you right now that Slice of Life can be taken off the playing field entirely. Either Dark or Tragedy should be taken off; I would recommend taking off Tragedy, because the opening gambit would turn off many who aren't interested in dark-fics. And as I said, I don't think Crossover is needed with EqG in there, but since (presumably, at some point) the characters will be turning up, maybe it can stay. However, eight chapters in, I'm pretty sure the Crossover and EqG tags are there for precisely one scene (we'll get there), and therefore can BOTH be eliminated entirely.

What people keep forgetting is that a tag should demonstrate things that are constant in and critical to the story. Speaking of which, let's get into that long description, shall we?

This takes place not long after Crusaders of the Lost Mark.

Rarity's new love interest is discovered to be sick and psychopathic monster.  Her injuries force Princess Twilight to reveal her true feelings to the beautiful Unicorn.

This causes a cascade of affects that may be felt in two worlds.  Causing ponies and others to examine what they believe about friendship and love.  All the while, Rarity's deepest dreams come true in a most unexpected way.

Meanwhile, the pony who started all this tries to disrupt any happiness Rarity has found.  How far will Twilight go to protect the ones she loves?

I really should have known better than to have any hope after reading this, but somehow I managed to miss the warning signs.

I'm just going to leave off the grammar and spelling errors unless they're especially egregious, because otherwise this is going to take a really, really long time. Suffice it to say that I think parts of that description were written in Google Translate.

As for the story concept, this could be interesting! Particularly with the tags, it seems like we're dealing with what would seem to be a romantic thriller where Twilight and Rarity begin to form a relationship following Rarity discovering that her boyfriend is the second coming of Ted Bundy. At some point, some how, events in MLP Equestria will reverberate through to the EqG-verse, and end up having a ripple effect there, much like the opening of the portal and magic starting to leak through. In the course of these events, Rarity's ex will come back to try and finish the job, possibly leading to Twilight trying to take Rarity to the EqG-verse for safety and explaining the rest of it.

For me, this is a story concept with some really fascinating potential. I love true crime. I particularly love analysis of the twisted, psychopathic personalities behind many of our more notorious crimes. Not out of a morbid respect for the killers, mind you, but out of a morbid fascination with how those minds tick and how to recognize them before they go supercritical and people die. Not unlike a pathologist who studies ebola or HIV in an effort to understand the workings of a disease that can claim so many in defiance of modern medical treatments, I find that digging into the gray matter of a Ted Bundy or a Dennis Rader (or for that matter, an Omar Mateen) is an exercise that reveals all manner of complexities in humanity and, just maybe, holds the secret to saving it somewhere down the line.

While this is obviously a fictional case, my fondness for the real life study also leads to a matching fondness with watching fictional villainous minds at work. While I don't expect Stormbringer to be on par with Thomas Harris, I'm hoping that I'll get an interesting look at a "sick, psychopathic monster" in Equestria. What it means to be one, how one can get away with his crimes, how one can get close enough to Rarity and Twilight to be a threat, and how they respond to the threat he poses. That this might come with a side-dish of world-transiting Rarilight and Twilight Sparkle being pushed to her psychological limits to protect her loved ones? This is gonna be great!

At this point in time, the story has an 18:8 vote ratio. Spoiler alert - one of those 8 is mine.

Now, getting into the story itself, we see that it's currently makred as Incomplete, with 8 chapters clocking in at just shy of 25k words, an average of just over 3k words/chapter. Not bad on that front. Then we see that all the chapters were published on the same exact day.

This can go one of two ways. One way is that the author wanted to build up a backlog and give himself time to keep working on the rest of the story! If this were the case, he should have put all the chapters in place, and then published one a week, or something along that schedule, so that his readers would have a constant dribble of new material while he worked on writing the rest. As the story was published in its entirety just a hair over two weeks ago as of this writing, that is clearly not the author's strategy.

The other option is that the author was planning to write the entire thing before posting it, eventually petered out, and decided to publish, expecting the onslaught of enthusiastic praise to help muster his own energy for completing the story. If this is the case... well, let's just say that there may not be a Chapter 9 in the future. Is this a blessing in disguise, or the end that earned this story it's Tragedy tag? Read along with me, and we'll find out together.

CHAPTER ONE: A FRIEND IN NEED

Our story begins with... holy crap, it's not a weather report!

Instead, we have Twilight conducting an experiment. A very delicate experiment.

Twilight was all alone in the castle.  The experiment she was doing, was something she couldn’t have done back at the Golden Oak Library.  Here in the castle she was in a secure fortress.  She was sure she could guarantee not being disturbed.  She’d even sent Spike to Canterlot to visit Twilight Velvet and Night Light, despite the fact that Spike didn’t see Twilight as his mother, her parents he looked to as grandparents.

An experiment in comma abuse.

As a matter of fact, while I know that I said I wasn't going to dwell on any but the most egregious grammar and spelling errors, I have to make a couple comments on formatting in this story. The author seems to alternate between indenting paragraphs, and indenting them after inserting whitespace. Typically, one of these is sufficient, but I wouldn't mind using both... if the author didn't use it inconsistently. What's more, where the paragraph breaks happen seems to be almost random. Commas are used where semi-colons should be, some sentences should be joined together with commas, and some sentences should just be broken up.

It's almost as if the author, in an attempt to get some points for proper spelling and grammar, decided to use every possible method he could think of for using commas and line breaks in the desperate hope that at least some of them would have to be right.

Don't do that!

If you're going to be wrong, at least be consistently wrong. That allows the eye to acclimate to the wrongness and stop worrying about it, kind of like a hot spike being driven through one's arm. As long as it's happening at the same rate, temperature, and location, you get used to it. It's only when somebody twists that it starts to hurt again.

Speaking of things that hurt, Twilight conducts her experiment, and we get the old gag about everything needing to be very precise or Bad Things will happen. Then Dash comes and "rabidly" pounds at the door, Twilight glances over, and -

And we get an atomic rainboom picture with a very large BOOM beneath it.

Author, when I said "don't do that?" Don't do this either. First off, the joke is old. It's even been done on the show before, which is quite possibly where you got the idea.

Second, the picture breaks story immersion. More importantly, not only does it break immersion, it does so in a way that implies a humongous explosion that would likely have resulted in a significant portion of Ponyville being leveled. And what comes of this explosion?

The next thing Twilight knew, she was on her back on the floor.  She could smell singed hair.  Also, Rainbow Dash was standing over her, and her hoof was shaking Twilight’s shoulder.

“Are you okay Twi,” asked Rainbow.

Unfortunately, Twilight responded quite cross.

“Rainbow!” exclaimed Twilight, who vanished in a flash of light and reappeared upright on her hooves, her singed hair repaired.  “don’t you know what it means when there’s a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on a door?”

If you guessed "jack all," give yourself a cookie! After all, this is a throwaway joke, not something actually important to the story. That's the right way to open up, right?

If this was the cold open to the show, that would be fine. But you're writing a story here, and you don't have a clear scene break where the cold open would. Instead, you take us immediately from "Ha! Twilight almost blew herself up, that's funny!" to "Rarity's hurt bad, and she's asking for you," and boom, we're at the hospital.

Cold opens have a commercial break. You do not.

So, we get to the hospital, where Pinkie, Fluttershy, AJ, and Rarity's family are all waiting nervously for news of what happened to Rarity. Nopony knows what happened, just that the hospital received an anonymous phone call saying Rarity needed an ambulance and Sweetie went to get everyone.

And apparently nopony noticed the GLARINGLY OBVIOUS missing coltfriend.

Now, granted, the readers don't know that he exists yet. But the characters do. As a matter of fact:

“Rarity and I had our regular spa day yesterday,” said Fluttershy wiping the tears from her eyes.  “She was excited.  As all of you know, Rarity has been seeing a stallion a lot lately.   She had told me it was getting serious.  She said that he had told her to expect something special last night.  Rarity told me she thought the stallion was going to ‘pop the question’.”

Okay. As we'll find out, Rarity's actually been seeing this stallion for three months. So, since this story takes place "shortly after Crusaders of the Lost Mark," it's presumably set roughly between that and everypony finding out that Flurry Heart is on the way. So if Rarity's been dating this guy for about 3 months, let's go ahead and say that she started seeing him during the mid-season hiatus, just for the sake of events in the show that we need to mentally slip the presence of a coltfriend around.

The good news is that because of the hiatus, the author only needs us to mentally work around three episodes. The bad news is, those three episodes are Canterlot Boutique, Rarity Investigates, and Made in Manehattan, three episodes that are all very Raricentric. I'm ignoring Brotherhooves Social because it takes place at the same time as MiM, of course.

More importantly, are you going to tell me that Rarity has been seeing a stallion for three months, thinks their relationship has progressed far enough that he might be ready to pop the question, and hasn't bothered to tell her friends and family his name?

I'm sure the author wanted to introduce the character fully to the audience, but this is a textbook example of how not to do that.

Right down to the "as all of you know." Literally. Textbook.

Here's a better take on the same passage:

"Rarity and I had our regular spa day yesterday." Fluttershy sniffed as she wiped some tears from her muzzle. "She was so excited! She said Sky Watcher told her he had something special for her last night. She said she thought he was going to pop the question!"

"Where is he, anyway?" Applejack scowled, looking around the waiting room. "Her danged coltfriend oughta be here as much as any of us, if'n she thought he was gonna ask a question like that!"

"I don't know where he lives, so I couldn't find him," Sweetie Belle said softly.

There y'go! It solves the "as you all know" problem, and it resolves the fact that the characters should all know (A) who Sky Watcher is, (B) that he should be there, and (C) why he isn't there and they shouldn't hold it against him (yet.) I literally just wrote it down now, without thinking about it at all in advance, so I don't know what the author's excuse is.

At any rate, Rarity is asking for Twilight, and ONLY Twilight, to come see her in her room, so Twilight goes on in to find a Rarity-shaped lump hiding under the blankets. The two talk, and Rarity starts to tell her story. This is where, two weeks ago, I scrolled back up and added this to my bookshelf of stories to address here, but first let's see the evidence. Long quote, but this really is a sequence that requires a thorough vivisection:

“Who’s there?” asked Rarity, muffled by the blanket.

“It’s me Rare,” said Twilight, turning on the lights.

“Please leave the lights off,” said Rarity sniffling.

Twilight complied and walked to the bedside.

“What happened?” asked Twilight.

Rarity’s answer was her bursting out crying.

“Rarity,” said Twilight, “talk to me.  You asked for me to be here, so here I am.  Your parents, your sister and your friends are all concerned.”

“I was attacked,” said Rarity, still crying and muffled by the blanket.

“Attacked?  By whom?” asked Twilight.

“My coltfriend, Sky Watcher,” said Rarity.

“The one you told Fluttershy it was getting serious with?  And he told you to expect something special?”

“Yes,” said Rarity, “last night we’d had the most fabulous dinner, then after a romantic moonlight walk we ended back at Carousel Boutique.  We went in for drinks and talk.”

Rarity paused, it was hard for Twilight to follow some of this because the blanket was still over Rarity’s head.  It also sounded like Rarity was having trouble talking.

“One thing lead to another and we ended up in bed together.”

“He didn’t rape you,” said Twilight angrily, “did he?”

The concern in Twilight’s voice and the anger at the suggestion that Rarity may have been raped gave Rarity some comfort, she was right about Twilight and how she’d protect her.

“No Twilight,” said Rarity, “it was consensual.

When we were finished, and just had lay there for a while talking.  He got out of the bed.  He said he needed to get to his apartment to take care of something.  Then he kissed me and asked if I had enjoyed myself.  I told him I did.  He kissed me again and asked:

‘Are you ready for your surprise?’

‘I most certainly am,’ I replied, I was sitting on the edge of the bed.

‘Close your eyes,’ he said.

It was a surprise, I was expecting a ring, not what came next.”

Rarity broke down crying harder.

Twilight put a hoof on where she could guess her shoulder was.

“It’s okay Rarity,” said Twilight, “you don’t have to.”

“Yes I do,” said Rarity, between sobs.  “He did this.”

Rarity pulled the blanket down.  Twilight couldn’t help but gasp.

“He had me close my eyes so I couldn’t defend myself from what he was about to do.

First thing he did was slap my horn so hard it broke in two.  It hurt more than anything I could ever remember,” said Rarity sobbing,  “then he produced a small but sharp knife and forcefully slashed my face more times than I care to think.  I had fallen down, off of the bed, but he lifted me up with his magic and then turned to deliver a kick with both of his hind hooves to my face, hitting my eye and breaking three teeth.

He just laughed and said:

‘Remember our sex, because with a face like yours, it’ll probably be your last.’

He even took the piece of my horn with him, I guess as some sick memento.

He left me there on the floor, bleeding, crying and in pain.  I almost wished that I’d die!  I lay there until morning when the ambulance came.”

There were bandages all over Rarity’s face, most still seeping blood.  One eye was swollen shut and her mouth was swollen as well.

Most disturbing (to a Unicorn and Alicorn) her horn was about half its previous length, the end was bandaged and there was blood on the bandage indicating that the living core was exposed and damaged.  This meant Rarity couldn’t use magic until it healed or perhaps never again.

Oy, where do I start? Oh, I know!

Rarity's face has been practically destroyed, several teeth broken, her horn snapped in two, and yet she's not under enough anesthetic to be incoherent, whether mentally or physically? She's not being forced to write all of this out by hoof, because her jaw was wired shut so it healed properly? She was bucked in the face! That should have just about shattered her jaw, not bruised it! She should either be in sobbing agony, or so heavily bandaged and muffled up that she couldn't speak, or both. Probably both.

And then there's the profile here....

Ugh. Okay, I know that this is an MLP website, not a website about true crime, serial killers, or criminal psychology. I know that people on this website aren't expected to know about all this stuff, let alone how it works beyond Hollywood. But I'm going to go into more detail than I would usually do in a review, because this story is hinged around a criminal act committed by a "sick and psychopathic monster."

Those are words that give me permission to savage this story the way it deserves.

So, here's our perp's behavior. He makes no apparent effort to conceal his identity. He woos his victim for months at a time. Courts them. Then, when he thinks it's time, he seduces them. After they've had consensual sex, he distracts them and launches a vicious attack. An attack that is clearly intended to cripple the victim, as well as to leave them disfigured, but not to kill them, since he calls them an ambulance and skedaddles afterwards. Then, as a twisted coup de grace, he sends flowers and a "so sorry to hear about your accident" note as he's moving out of town, leaving a menacing hint behind that he could come back and find them at any time he likes.

Our perp here has about three different profiles. Now I'll admit, I'm not an expert profiler, and the expert profilers I know just kind of looked at me funny when I explained that I was asking them to review the psychological profile of a small pastel pegasus. But as a semi-educated amateur, here's the problem.

Sky Watcher is a psychopathic smoothie of maliciousness.

He grooms his victims, takes a prolonged period of time doing so, and stalks them after he reveals his true colors. This is the sort of behavior you get out of your bog-standard domestic stalker.

However, his violence comes in a brief, one-time burst of potentially homicidal behavior before he flees. This is the sort of behavior you get out of your typical mission-based serial killer, typically of the "punisher" or "harlot slayer" variety, particularly the part where his violent activity comes shortly after consensual sexual activity.

But on top of all of that, what he really seems to get his rocks off on is prolonged psychological torture of his victims. That is the behavior of a sadistic psychopath.

These are three flavors that do not go well together. You can manage to kludge two of them together, but all three just doesn't work. And why not?

Because, especialy in Equestria, this type of loser gets caught.

Imagine, if you will, the following. A land with a centralized government that is legitimately interested in the well-being of its citizens, which is peaceful and largely free of violent crime. A land where harmony, friendship, and generally not being a colossal shit is considered the norm.

Now, insert into this land somebody who spends a prolonged time dating a pony, suddenly brutally assaults them, takes steps to ensure their survival, and disappears.

Please explain to me how he isn't Equestria's Most Wanted after Victim #1. Who, we eventually find out, isn't Rarity.

Explain to me how the guards aren't on the lookout for him everywhere after Victim #2. Who, again, isn't Rarity.

Explain to me how Equestria isn't in a freaking panic after Victim #3 - again, not Rarity!

The idea that the authorities wouldn't hear about this, that the Princesses wouldn't be mobilizing all of their forces to go after him, until after his sixth victim is a fucking JOKE!

"But Professor, rapes go unreported all the time!"

That's right, strawpony, but he doesn't rape his victims.

"But violent assaults go unreported just as much!"

No, no they don't. And Rarity demonstrates precisely why. Because you have a blatantly obvious victim exhibiting gross physical trauma who has no reason not to say who assaulted them!

"But there are all sorts of serial killers who get away with -"

Yes, serial killers. And that's what I mean.

You can have a domestic abuser/stalker who's a psychological sadist that gets his rocks off by imagining the terror of his victims. But that typically requires a protracted campaign of abuse to wear down the victim's willingness to go to the police, or engaging in activity that's legal, but threatening. You want a prime example of this? Go watch the original Cape Fear. It is fucking chilling what a guy could do, perfectly legally, to ruin somebody's life.  Then go watch Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, for an example of how the domestic abuser who uses the prolonged campaign of abuse can go full-on homicidal.

But here's the problem. Sky Watcher is the charming psychopath of Robert Mitchum with the MO of Peter Lorre's psychotic child murderer in M. By which I mean that the first sign of trouble with Sky Watcher is brutal, violent, and immediately crosses every boundary between his victim and a police report. There's no "if only I'd done this," or "if only I hadn't done this," or "everypony will think I should have done that" here. Only the most sexually repressed would think that having sex with somebody you're considering marrying means you've "got it coming." And those few who would believe that would be bitchslapped out of the nineteenth century by the rest of the right-thinking population!

Rapists and abusers who target their significant others are enabled in their predatory behavior because a prolonged campaign of abuse puts the victim in a position of feeling that they deserve what they get.

A serial killer of the "harlot killer" variety is enabled in his behavior because the corpses are remarkably bad at giving out names, assuming they even know the proper name and description of the attacker in the first place.

What we have here is an attacker who only fits if we assume that rather than being psychopathic, i.e., utterly lacking in remorse or regard for his fellow beings and motivated purely by his own desires, that his is psychotic and experiences periodic breaks with reality, likely being struck with deep remorse afterwards because he recognizes what horrible things he's done.

Because a psychopath will take steps not to be caught. Like not living a living witness behind who can give a detailed description of you to the police! Like not taking three months to decide to attack, allowing your victim and all of her closest friends to become capable of saying precisely who it is with means and opportunity to leave them a mangled mess!

Instead, this guy takes pains to make sure that he leaves living witnesses behind, behaves suspiciously following the attacks, and as we will find out, doesn't even take measures to disguise himself afterwards!

This is the sort of pathetic loser who thinks he's a badass serial killer, and then wonders why the "dumbass cops" manage to catch him before his first victim is even out of the hospital.

And when you're a pathetic loser among a community of people who are almost literally defined by being pathetic losers who can only get their jollies by raping, torturing, and murdering people?

[youtube=https://youtu.be/uqkY2nCf2xU]

Of course, actually making him a realistic menace would involve some sort of backstory or explanation. It would require taking the effort to make him a threat. It would require Rarity being the lucky survivor, not one in a string of them - or it would require that the relationship have been much, much worse before this, with Rarity having consciously disregarded or minimized warning signs before he decided to turn her into a punching bag.

Alternately, it's not Rarity's boyfriend, but a random attacker or one-night stand. That would also be a distinct and workable possibility that would change literally NOTHING of importance in the story.

Now, back to our travesty in progress, where were we...? Ah, yes, Rarity's tearfully articulate recounting of that night through what should be a broken jaw and protestations of fear that he'll come back.

Twilight swears to protect Rarity if that should happen, and Rarity gratefully hugs her before allowing the others to come in (while the lights are off, of course, darling!)

Oh, did I mention that this is one of those stories?

Yep.

Twilight spends the night with Rarity, helping her eat and drink since she doesn't have her magic. This will get more obnoxious as the story goes on, trust me. They try to get some sleep, Rarity wakes up screaming from a nightmare imagining Sky Watcher coming back to kill her, and so to help keep the bad dreams away Twilight climbs into bed and they sleep together.

NOT LIKE THAT!

That's in the next chapter.

Instead, we get Twilight imagining herself molesting the injured Rarity in her sleep, deciding that the jail time really wouldn't be worth it, and going to sleep holding Rarity instead.

In the morning, Rainbow comes by and we get another example of the author, in order to avoid never getting his dialogue tags right, trying every possible variation to see how many he can get wrong before the more discerning reader considers bludgeoning him or herself to death with a style guide.

Allow the Professor to provide a proper explanation of how to do dialogue tags.

"Ah, sank you, me!" The Professor nodded as he finished his notes, Rarity beginning to wake up from her faint. "You see, you have to be sure to punctuate at the end of sentences if you are not going to go on to a dialogue descriptor," he explained, "as I did before. But if you are using a variation on 'said,' then you should end with a comma, include the descriptor, and either end the sentence or move on to the next portion of your dialogue."

"Ah... Doctor? Why are you providing a grammar lesson?" Rarity asked as she began to come out of her stupor. "And what was that I saw on the way in?"

"Merely another of mein patients. If you are willing to provide feminine garments for more masculine wearers, I may point him in the direction of your boutique!"

"I... I could always give it a shot, I suppose."

"Wunderbar! Now, as for ze grammar lesson, zat is a matter of discussing ze dreadful state of your file here.

"You see, Miss Rarity, whoever wrote it has no concept of how to properly encapsulate an exchange of dialogue. They omit quotation marks entirely for prolonged, multi-paragraph expostulations like this, rather than properly putting a leading quote at the beginning of a paragraph and omitting the one at the end, unless it is the final paragraph."

"I... see?"

"And worst of all, they frequently use parenthetical remarks to set aside a pony's actions, as though they were writing a piece of erotic role-play!"

At that, the poor fashionista's finer senses could take no more, and she passed out once more.

Rarity receives some flowers, which turn out to be from Sky Watcher. Twilight fumes, threatens to personally end him if he ever tries anything against Rarity again, and the two hug and kiss more-or-less chastely. Breakfast is brought in, and remember what I said about the feeding getting more obnoxious?

Twilight was even able to get Rarity to laugh, she was doing little feeding games she’d seen other ponies do with their foals.

“Here comes the choo-choo, open up the tunnel,” Twilight would say as she levitated a fork of food to Rarity and making chugging noises.  Rarity would giggle and open up.

Yes. Clearly the way to handle somebody who was badly beaten roughly 24-36 hours prior, and is likely still in immense lingering pain from it. But, then, what do I know? The doctor says she'd be ready to go later that day, not even 48 hours after being attacked, if only she had somepony to take care of her!

I mean, obviously, Sweetie or her parents couldn't be asked to help, so who could possibly keep her from being held in a reasonably secure location for a couple more days to make sure she's properly on the mend? She'll just have to suffer through staying in the hospital for more than A SINGLE NIGHT after being beaten half to death, poor her.

Oh, wait, Twilight's willing to help out? Well then, off you go, time to clear out the bed for a pony with real medical problems and all that!

You know, like the fact that realistically, Rarity's jaw should be wired shut, she'd be recovering from a massive concussion, on a liquid diet, have had emergency dental surgery for the teeth, and not be allowed to talk because if she moved her face that much it would probably pop the stitches holding her face together.

Yeah, that totally wouldn't indicate that maybe she needs more than a single night at the hospital before she's okay to go off with a buddy to keep her company and help her get around without her magic.

And I'm going to take a bit of a break for now, because I've already read the next chapters. And sweet Luna on a diving board over a shark tank, before this thing is over?