It wouldn’t move.
The rock in front of her needed to be rotated, or it wouldn’t properly develop into gems. Pinkamina Diane Pie had finally managed to coax it partway, while the rest of her family had finished their chores and gone inside for the day. It took some work, but she remembered what her parents and big sisters had talked to her about, and felt the rock respond. Up and over. There, now she could –
BWOOOOOOOOOOOM!
Pinkamina saw a brilliant flash of light and shut her eyes tight as a roaring shock-wave of air and debris hurtled towards her.
It wouldn’t move.
No matter how hard she pressed against it, the mirror stayed the same. Cold, dim, unyielding. Glancing around revealed the dull, shabby room, a miserable grey overcast visible outside the window. Pinkamina Diane Pie winced. There were three other doors behind her. One led to a closet, filled with clothing so emo even Maud wouldn’t want to wear it. Probably. The second led to a grey bathroom with another mirror, but that door couldn’t be opened just yet. The third was even worse. She had no idea what was behind it. She knew what it was, though.
She knew that it was a way out, a cruel jest that only worked when she couldn’t use it. It galled her, but she was used to gall. After all, she was a one-gall show, wasn’t she? Pacing back and forth, sitting in the chair, stacking cards into houses only to knock them down. And the game of checkers that sat half-finished.
There was a time when this had been everything. This had been her totality, and because she’d known nothing better, it was… It was. Yeah, she decided to go with that. Time was strange here, and she couldn’t really process it. It felt like nothing changed.
Sitting in the chair, she thought back to how everything had changed. How everything had gotten so much bigger, brighter, LOUDER – no, she wasn’t going to have to go through that again. Was she?
She found herself back in front of the mirror, having just come in the door that she could never get to open. She watched herself pantomime every motion made by the violently vibrating vividly cerice anomaly on the other side of the mirror, as it was flooded with the brilliance of light and a riot of color. Like a blasted marionette, she bounced around the room, grabbing nonexistent items. Somehow, she managed every super pony contortion, shift, and anomaly. Even now, she couldn’t understand how she could do this, but she’d begun to puzzle out why. Muffled, incoherent noises game, her own jaw working to them. No, they were words. A single checker piece, a white one, was moved by her hind right hoof during the craziness. She hadn’t been able to move them on her own. Back to the words, which sounded like they were being shouted randomly but distorted by a wall of gelatin…
“New Pony Party!”
A party sounded… fun, but when would she get to go? And why did the voice sound familiar?
It wouldn’t move.
Pinkamina had flung things at the mirror, body checked it, and tried to sneak up and ambush it, but it wouldn’t budge. It didn’t even shift a millimeter. And that, she knew, was impossible. Sure, she wasn’t the strongest of Earth ponies, but years on a rock farm made for some powerful ponies, and Pinkamina was nothing, if not a Powerful Pink Pony.
She bucked the damn mirror with a grim expression on her face, bangs matted with the sweat of a long day in the south field. Her hooves stopped with a deafening thud as if the thin sheet of silvered glass was made of Canterlot Granite. That stuff took all four sisters to buck - OK, at least Maud and Lime.
Grumbling, she went to the bookshelf. There were new magazines in there, and a new “Amazing Spider-Mare” comic. Sometimes, the pink hurricane, the indistinct blur on the other side of the window, would come in with food, or books. Sure, they weren’t always exciting, but they were something that changed. She wouldn’t always know what they were until after she found herself dropping them off, but there was time to check them out once whatever force controlled her stopped yanking her around whenever the weird buzz recurred. Her bangs were dry and straight...
Any more, she rode out these fits with an expressionless stoicism that would have impressed Maud. She thought she should be worried about her sisters, her parents, but inside, she seemed to know they were doing the same as always. it was oddly comforting.
The same thing had to be said for the bathroom and the oddness that showed whenever the hallway door opened. It opened inward, so she never saw what was outside. The door in her room could open inward as well, but there was nothing there. Not even the Darkness. She SO wanted to attack the Darkness.
She had tried the window, too. It wouldn’t open, and was set at an oddly high angle, so she could look out it, and up, but not down. She could see the grey, cloudy sky over the rock farm, so she knew she was somewhere near her home… but the room itself was different. The grey furniture was different, and there were faint balloon prints on everything.
Sometimes, there would be an alligator on the bed, whom she often found herself making funny faces at and treating affectionately. Her mouth moved and she heard the word she didn’t say. The distortion was closer to having cake frosting in her ears. Wait, how did she know that?
“Gummy’s six months old!”
That has got to be the silliest name she’d ever heard… until she found out the sometimes-present ‘Gummy” had no teeth. She’d laughed for a long time after that. It gave her a chance to sit up, and she saw… herself? Yeah, just so cheerful – what had happened to that reflection? It must mean she’d fallen asleep, no one she knew laughed like that. So when her dream-form waved at her, she leaned out through the mirror and waved back. It was hilarious, so she did it again, and again. Then she went into the bathroom to check that mirror.
It wouldn’t move.
This was cruelty. She had gone back to being herself, and now couldn’t get the mirror to move again. Each attempt made her sadder, more depressed. She threw the checkers at the mirror, and went out the door into the nothing.
Coming back through the closet, she shook her head and glared at the checker game, still set up How many times had she tried that? Was there even time anymore? Maybe she was some sort of weird ghost, and that bright flash had been the end of the world. Mare that would be depressing, if she wasn’t already depressed.
Sad and lonely, she sampled the cupcakes that had been left on a tray in the mirror. She knew now it was her on the other side, but she was so disconnected. She couldn’t hear herself all the time, and it was her own movements that moved her around her room chaotically. She was a reflection. Mare that would be depressing, if only…
It wouldn’t move.
She didn’t even bother trying, she just floated around, pretending to be a ghost. She was bored out of her skull when she heard the voice again. She had seen them through the mirror. Every mirror. She was the little pink balloon in the background, the indistinct shape behind people, and it wasn’t limited to just one mirror, or even one world. She still couldn’t make herself listen, though. Mare that would be depressi… no, not even worth finishing that. Pinkamina had seen that her prison reset itself. Throw checkers at the mirror, and they bounced off, landing more or less where expected. Look away, and they were back on the checkerboard.
Still, she’d found a way – or she was really a crazy ghost. She’d know soon enough. Reaching under her bed, she found a simple book. It was a party planner, and Pinkie always wrote in it. Pinkamina was able to read the entries, and found the events fascinating. The Elements of Harmony? Nightmare Moon? Ponyville? Apparently, she’d left the rock farm, and was renting a room in Ponyville. That explained the odd changes in the furniture, but not the gloomy sky or anything else. She was somewhat envious of Pinkie, because of the parties and the fun. She wanted to have fun too. Mare, that… yeah.
She caught glimpses of the outside world through the journal entries, and sometimes when things became extreme she could sense what Pinkie was thinking and feeling. She wondered if the reverse was true.
She wrote a little bit in the journal, about who was keeping their Pinkie Promises and who wasn’t. Some people couldn't even keep regular promises, like that Diamond Tiara brat and some Royal Guard named Sentry, who appeared to be made out of cardboard. She wrote about views though a magic mirror, and about a really confused flame-haired unicorn over there rather comically walking on just her hind legs. She finished by writing a checkers move of her own in the journal, and putting it back under the bed.
She trotted over to the checkerboard and made her move, moving a red checker near the center of the board diagonally, forward and to the left. She sat back and waited for it to revert, the corners of her mouth twitching slightly. She backed away from it, into the bathroom, and closed the door. She opened it back up. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.
The checker board in the reflection had changed. One red checker had moved forward and to the right.
That night, things changed. She found herself puppeteered across the room, flopping into the bed. Next thing she knew, she found herself pulling out the planner and opening it, forced to read what was written there. What *she* had written there. She was forced to make a curious expression, and then felt her head turn, looking in the mirror. She found herself getting up, and going to the mirror, putting her face close to the mirror. That’s when she saw… herself. Clearly. In shock, she sat down awkwardly in the mirror. It had worked! She felt a weight come off her shoulders she didn’t know she was carrying, as Pinkie leaned through the mirror with a grin and helped her up. And she wasn’t forced to match her every move. She was... free.
The mirror melted, flowing away in a quicksilver stream. Both of them stood facing each other, one grinning like a maniac, the other depressed and only half-aware. Before she could react, Pinkamina felt warm hooves on her cheeks, the surprising gentle touch drawing the corners of her mouth up into a grin.
“Come on, I wanna see you SMILE!”
Maybe she should put the glass back up. Mare, that would be depressing...
