The Last Party: A Eulogy For Laughterby No one is homeChaptersIf you're reading this...Before the Storm...The Lies We Tell Ourselves...You Can Never Go HomeLaughter in the windIf you're reading this...One of two things is happening right now. Either the doctors have found a cure, and we’re all laughing and happy and there’s a super fun “yay-you’re-not-going-to-die-from-that-plague-you-started-party” going on, and I’m reading this out loud. Or I’m dead, and you’re probably asking, “Why did this mare, who was almost-but-not-quite Pinkie Pie leave me this letter in her will?” Back on my world, I was Pinkie Pie. The for real, actual, not-a-mirror-clone, Element of Laughter, Pinkie Pie. Here, in your Equestria I’m just a silly green mare with a straight mane who dropped in out of a clear blue sky telling really weird, impossible stories. It’s awkward, because we were really super close friends, and I know you. Back home, when home was a thing, because it’s not anymore, because I can’t go home because home never really happened, but back home I admired you. But you don't know me here, you know Pinky Pie, and I'm not her anymore. I'm Mint Surprise Pastel. Loyalty was never my element. No, I was laughter, and like a laugh I drifted on the wind. When a new path opened in front of me, I bounced down that path with a giggle and a smile and I never looked back, because what I left behind would have broken my heart. When I met met the human, he was nearly starved to death and terrified beyond reason. He would eat out of the dumpster behind Sugar Cube Corner and scurry and hide any time a pony came close enough to see him. I watched him for a long time, days, weeks, who knows? Life was but a dream and time works funny in dreams. Humans were falling into Equestria almost weekly at that point, and I knew enough to know this wasn’t normal human behavior. I always baked extra sweets, and even healthy sweet potato muffins, and onion croissants. And then I'd very carefully place them on top of the garbage, wrapped so they'd stay clean so he’d always have something tasty and nutritious to eat. Even so, when I saw him watching me place the food, he still hid. So I went and talked to Fluttershy, and she told me the difference between wild and feral animals. You see, a wild animal like a bear or a timberwolf, never trusted anypony, so trust is something new to it. You have to teach it that it’s okay to trust you, but really it doesn’t have any reason not to. A feral animal is an animal that used to be tame. It thought it could trust ponies, but it was betrayed and hurt by bad ponies. It won’t ever come to you on it’s own, because bad ponies have taught it that trusting ponies hurts. So I had to catch him. So I set a trap. And I stopped leaving food where he could just find it and I only left it in the trap, It took a few days but he did get hungry enough eventually, just like Fluttershy said. And when I finally caught him, I did just what she told me to do. I let him go and put food back in the trap. We danced that little dance for days, maybe weeks, until finally he didn’t run. He just broke down and cried. And I couldn’t help myself, I just hugged and snuggled him as hard as I could. On a related note, the cracked ribs healed up nicely, mine that is. It turns out that feral humans really don’t appreciate ambush hugs. Who knew? Humans are stronger than they look, by the way. Not earth pony strong, mind you, but still way stronger than they look. He looked so guilty after he threw me off. He could tell he had hurt me, and he felt really super bad about it. He almost ran off again right then and there, and if he had I don’t think he would have ever come back. He was even more afraid of hurting us than he was afraid of us hurting him. And he was terrified of us hurting him. Somehow though I talked him down. He said his name was Ki, but nobody pronounced it right. He also said he was no one. And then he said that Celestia was hunting him, and that if she caught him she would throw him in a changeling pod and he would have to live in another dream until he died, or until ponies killed him, and then the words would make him start all over again. I didn’t understand. None of it made sense at the time. If I had known… I took him in and hid him in my Pinkie Cave. I couldn’t let the Cakes know, at least not at first. He was too wild still… too unstable. I knew he would never hurt Pound and Pumpkin, and he would didn’t want to hurt ponies. But he thought we wanted to hurt him. And he was scared, and he was cornered, and he was… he was dangerous. He hurt me without even meaning to, because he thought I was attacking him. And the Cakes didn’t know he wouldn’t hurt their foals, and if they tried to defend Pound and Pumpkin… he was dangerous. So that’s why I kept him in the Pinkie cave at first. Over the course of the next indeterminate time span we got to know each other. He knew all kinds of things about Equestria already, but that’s kinda normal for most humans. There were also gaps you could drive a cart through. And some things he thought he knew didn’t seem to make any sense to me. In a lot of ways it was like he really had spent a whole lot of time in a completely different Equestria, or perhaps a series of whole different Equestrias. But that was silly, of course, because there was only one Equestria, and it was the whole world, and it could never go away and just not be there waiting for me to… I’m sorry. It’s hard sometimes thinking about that, but it’s not time for that part of the story yet. I don’t remember when or why, but we started calling each other by our middle names at some point. I was Diane, and he was Charlie, and this was very important because it meant that we were both being super serious, and we should really each listen to the words the other was saying. Special words became really important. He didn’t trust ponies. He didn’t trust anyone really, but especially ponies. I needed special words that always meant exactly one thing, regardless of any context. I needed words that were safe, that we both knew would always mean the same thing, and would always be taken seriously. The safe words became our secret language. By the time he was ready to see Ponyville, and Ponyville was ready to see him, we weren’t Ki and Pinkie Pie anymore, we were Charlie and Diane. Our games seemed silly, almost nonsensical to the ponies around us. What was so funny, or so naughty, about a party with muffins and pancakes? Twilight thought I was keeping Charlie as some kind of exotic pet, she said as much. The Cakes thought he was stalking me, and they were plenty mad that I had brought him in without telling them. They never really trusted him around the foals. Which was a shame. He was good with foals. They were the only ponies he ever really trusted, and I think they were the only ponies that ever really understood him, too. I spent a lot of my spare time with Charlie, playing super fun donut games. And no, “donut” is not any kind of naughty codeword. I’m not sure why, but ponies always immediately go there when it comes to “donuts”. We had code-words for that too, but donuts were innocent. COMPLETELY INNOCENT! Honestly just because a food has a hole… But I digress… He started to trust me. It took a lot of time, and a lot of special codewords, and believe you me when you eat as many sweet baked goods as we did it made meals super-awkward. But he believed in me. And I wish I had believed in him. Celestia’s great white flank, why didn’t I believe him? He told me. He Pinkie Promised. He even Bagel Swore that he was telling me the truth. But I believed… I wanted to believe… that it was all some trick of his beautiful, broken mind. I should have listened. He was my friend and he told me all his secrets, and I told him all my secrets and I should have believed him. But he said the whole world, all of it was just a dream. It was all a dream and he wasn’t allowed to wake up. And he said that one day Celestia would find him and it would all come crashing down and in the end he’d never wake up because he knew he was really just floating in a changeling pod. What was I supposed to believe. He was talking about the world. The whole wide world. My world. Before the Storm...For a while everything was good. Charlie never really warmed up to Ponyville, but things were good. He would hang out and drink with Jake some nights. Jake was Twilight’s human. He had been sent to Ponyville by the human ambassador in Canterlot, Silver Lining. Mostly he just played test subject for Twilight and followed Rainbow Dash around. Charlie found the whole thing unsettling and avoided Twilight after he found out what was going on. I told him he was being silly, after all Jake didn’t seem to mind, and I told Charlie Twilight just wanted to learn more about humans, but Charlie never really trusted her. Things didn’t get weird until the thrones activated. When I told Charlie, he went absolutely manic. He said it was the spoilers. He was terrified. I told him it wouldn’t matter. Jake had been there for months, he wasn’t going to break anything just by being there. He hid in the Pinkie Cave from the time we left for our first mission until we got back. He calmed down a little when I told him what happened and it matched up mostly with his spoilers. It was always weird, even to me, when a human knew the future like that. But Charlie was too super scared to tell me anything about what was going to happen. He said if Celestia found out he had spoilers she wouldn’t stop until she found him. He made me Pinkie Pie Promise that I’d never tell Twilight. He even lied to Jake and swore that he had only seen up to Season Four (that’s when we fought Tirek). The trouble came from the Cakes. His new paranoia scared them, and I couldn’t tell them what was happening without breaking my promise. In the end they said he couldn’t stay at Sugar Cube Corner anymore if I wasn’t there to supervise him. I thought about stepping down and passing my Element on to some other pony. I’m pretty sure Cheese Sandwich could handle the job. I thought Charlie would be happy when I told him. We were really good friends, more than friends really. I told him we could go to Canterlot, maybe open our own shop. We could call it “Sweet Surprise”, and we’d be the only bakery in Canterlot with a real human serving sweets. Just me and him. I thought he would be happy. He wasn’t happy. He was terrified, and crazy, and not the good kind of crazy either. He laughed like a maniac and then broke down in sobs and cried for hours. He said he was going to break everything. He said it would be better if he just wasn’t there anymore. I knew what he meant and I was scared. That was the first time I’d ever been afraid around Charlie. I was scared for him. I was scared of what he might do to himself to stop from dropping his stupid spoilers. I was scared and I was angry. I was angry that he thought his stupid, stupid spoilers were more important than me, more important than us. And… I said something I shouldn’t have. I told him that if he was so scared that he was going to ruin everything maybe he should just leave. I told him if he really thought he was going to break everything in the world just by being with me, and if being with me was so terrible that he would rather throw his life away than spend it with me, then maybe he should leave Ponyville. Then he’d never have to worry about dropping his spoilers. I shouldn’t have said it. But I didn’t believe in the spoilers. Not really. What did it matter if he knew some things that I was going to do? The world wasn’t just going to break just because he told me something that happened in a stupid little filly’s show on his world. The world wasn’t going to break. The world was always going to be there. It wasn’t just some stupid dream! And he left. I heard later he found a job in an outlying town at a warehouse. That was the last time I ever saw Charlie. After that a lot of things happened. Celestia came to visit unannounced, and she asked a lot of questions about all the humans in town, and especially about Silver, and she seemed really super interested when the Cakes wanted to tell her about Charlie. She said she needed Twilight to go with her to Canterlot. It was then that I started to find out just how dirty my little world really was. I couldn’t believe what Twilight did to Silver Stars. Nopony could. Jake was mortified. After that, he was almost as afraid of Celestia and Twilight as Charlie had been, and he followed Dashie around a lot less after that. He was still totes in crush with her, but he kept a very careful distance. From that day forward there was always a glint of fear in Jake's eyes whenever he spoke to Twilight. Oddly enough, Silver wasn’t nearly as mad at Twilight as you might think after she magicked off his wing-dang-doodle, because she totes ran off with him after that, and all of you ended up forming a herd, and there were going to be foals and everything. It was around then that I decided to take a train out to Twiggs Depot. That’s the town where Charlie worked, by the way. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, but I guess I should have sent a wire to let him know I was coming, because when I got there he was gone. His roommate said he was a super good manager and sometimes he drove deliveries on weekends to make extra bits. She was really sweet on him, I could tell. We talked for a long time. I was super jelly, obviously! This changeling had totes stolen MY human. After all the time I spent putting him back together, this interloper, this changeling mare was making pancakes and having muffin parties with MY Charlie. Sure she said there weren’t any muffins, and that he just fed her because he liked her, and she didn’t even have to take any other shape. She didn’t even take any specific gender. She didn’t know if he liked colts or mares, so she just didn’t pick a side. I could have totally sabotaged her. I could have told her Charlie was cuckoo for colts, and told her to tell him that Pinkie Pie wanted to hear from him, and she would have believed me. But I couldn’t do that to her. And I couldn’t do that to Charlie. She really liked him, and he really liked her, even if he didn’t know she was a her. Even without him being there, I knew he really liked her, because I knew all his secrets. And I wanted him to be happy. So I told her I’d do something special to help her catch his interest. Something that would help him to notice that he really liked her. Because Charlie could be really dense like that sometimes. So I told her to expect a Hearth's Warming miracle and to be ready to roll with it. And that was the one and only time I ever met Z-978 in my world. The Lies We Tell Ourselves...I should explain something, I think, about Z-978, something that never came up when I met her in my world, but that’s haunted me ever since I pulled her out of Starlight Shimmer’s time loops in this world. In this world, Z-978 was originally Switch Shift, a changeling drone who, along with her clutch-sisters were charged with concealing the escape of a young proto queen from Chrysalis’ hive during the invasion of Canterlot. In this world, Switch Shift was killed in the invasion, and the proto queen survived and grew up alone on the streets of Canterlot. In this world her death was a tragic accident that was caused by this world’s Pinkie Pie getting a little too carried away using her Twilight as a uni-cannon. Overall there were nearly no actual casualties, and most of the drones actually escaped. In my world… we didn’t even know that the drones were sapient. We were scared and we were angry, and… a lot of changelings died. A lot of Changelings died… no… I killed a lot of changelings. There was no one face to put on it. There was no one big bad thing that I had to make up for. I could tell myself whatever I wanted to. A lot of changelings lost somepony they loved that day. Most were because a big ole wave of love just smeared them across Canterlot. But a lot more because one happy pink pony laughed while she blasted them to smithereens. It- it was a lot like what you hear refugees from the hive in Canterlot say the invasion “felt like”. But it wasn’t “like that”. It was that. It was exactly that. Luna, the real Luna created my world in a dream. Everypony who ever saw it called it a nightmare. And Z-978 made me think later, after I escaped into the real world, if maybe it was a dream AND a nightmare. But what if it wasn’t Silver’s dream, or Charlie’s nightmare, what if it was some kind of world dream? What if it was a world made from the dreams of everypony in the world, and Silver and Charlie were just locked inside it? What I did in the battle of Canterlot, I’m 100% positively sure was the nightmare of one lost, lonely, and starving little changeling filly who lost her best sister during that horrible stupid fight. And I think maybe Z-978 in my world was her dream. That was her dream where her sister escaped and she got to live a happy little life and have super fun holiday adventures with her favorite human. I hate it when ponies call my world a dream, but when I think about leaving Charlie with Z… I’d like to think at least part of my world was a happy dream. I have to believe that because there’s a pretty pink little changeling filly who didn’t have nearly enough happy dreams, and she needs extra giggles and extra snuggles, and I’m not going to be there to give them to her anymore. And it doesn’t do me any good to think about that. But it’s hard not to. I never tried to contact Charlie again after that, but when Hearth’s Warming rolled around, I made sure to have a big ol heaping box of rock candy delivered home to the rock farm on Hearth’s Warming Eve. I invoked the Satana-clause so Charlie would pretty much have to make the delivery himself. I left it to Z to figure out what she should do from there. After that things got… well downright weird. I became friends with Silver through Twilight, they saved the crystal empire, and Silver became an alicorn. Oh, and he got his wang-a-lang back, too. Not so important to me, but I’m pretty sure it was a pretty big deal for him. I mean sure, it was a pretty big deal, but then I married a giant monster, so it’s safe to say I’ve seen bigger deals. Just sayin’. But that’s really not what’s important. The important part is that with a new alicorn prince, Princess Celestia got the idea that maybe they could open a portal back to the human world. At the time everypony assumed there was only one world where all the humans were coming from, and Princess Celestia said that if they could open a portal then the humans could go home… if they wanted to, of course. That didn’t really account for all the humans the princesses had already turned into ponies of course (especially Luna, she really has a thing for turning humans into lunar ponies, in my world and in this one too), but they seemed pretty well adjusted to living in Equestria anyway. And that’s when things really went sideways. There were complications, and not only did they not open a portal, but they infected the world they were trying to reach with Equestrian magic in the worst possible way. Luna did her best to help the humans cope with the disaster. The humans called it the “Pink Step Plague”. Anyone infected became a pony. At least if they were lucky they just became a pony. There were all kinds of crazy mutations, and a lot of the former humans lost all their marbles and couldn’t think of anything BUT spreading the plague… which they did by being REALLY super friendly with anyone who wasn’t infected. They were pony rape machines. There I said it. No really nice way to talk around it. Eventually they began to rebuild. They found a cure, but there was no way to restore those who’d already transformed. They even managed to send a diplomatic envoy into our world. Princess Luna of course promised that we would send any help we could, and me and Dashie even volunteered to go back with the envoy to help in their recovery efforts. What I did next… I only wanted to help. No, that’s a lie. I wanted to prove that Charlie was wrong. Wrong about the spoilers. Wrong about worlds breaking. Wrong about how everything would just fall apart if Pinkamena Diane Pie wasn’t where some stupid little filly’s story said she should be. What if Pinkie Pie just hurled herself into the void to divert a big mean ole surge of equestrian magic and re-wrote time? What would all his spoilers mean then? Nothing, that’s what! Because you can’t break a whole world! And even if you could, the whole wide world of Equestria wasn’t going to just break and go away just because one little pink pony wasn’t where she was supposed to be! And I was going to show Charlie, and he was going to be sorry he ran off, even if he was super happy with that changeling, and even if I really wanted him to be super happy and it’s not like I didn’t like Z-978, but I was going to show him how silly he was being. I was right. Maybe I’d end up in some weird alternate dimension where cupcakes didn’t even exist, but I was going to beat the spoilers and I was going to save Charlie’s world from the plague! I was a fool. You Can Never Go HomeAfter everything that happened in the human world… I think a part of me was glad that my world was gone. It’s terrible, but sometimes I’m glad I never had to face my friends again. It wasn’t like my world was dead, it’s hard to even say it broke. There weren’t even any pieces left. There was just a blank space in a whole line of Equestria’s. My world just wasn’t there. Because the whole world can just go away. And then it’s just not there anymore. So I picked another one. I just reached out to the closest Equestria and fell into it. I don’t really even know when I turned green. Just one more surprise. So many surprises. The name just fit. I couldn’t be Pinkie Pie anymore, that was obvious. The whole universe seemed to agree with that. I wasn’t even pink anymore. I spent the first few days hiding. I didn’t want to see any of the girls. I was scared of what might happen if I ran into this world’s Pinkie Pie. I kept thinking of Charlie, how he was always afraid the universe would break or worse, just go away. And he was right. And now my world was gone. And so was Charlie. And so was the cute changeling who was totally perfect for Charlie. And was it wrong that I was still jealous? I thought maybe if I had just listened, if I had just believed in the spoilers… and I knew that there was another Charlie on this world. There had to be. There was another Pinkie Pie. There was another Twilight, even if she wasn’t with Ambassador Silver, there was another Ambassador Silver… and he still had two foals on the way, they were even both from the same mommy. I didn’t think Silver would recognize me, why would he? He might know this worlds Pinkie but there was no way he could know me. Except that he did. Because my world really was just a dream. And it didn’t end because I left. It ended because it was a dream. And somehow I had escaped. And Silver knew where I had been, even if he didn’t know what I had done. And he knew I was sick, and that I needed a doctor. So he took me to the hospital. The doctors did their very best. There was a lot of doctor talk I didn’t understand, but I understood the important parts, like how I was “no longer contagious”, and the part that should have made me really sad, and really scared, when they talked about how “the damage had already been done”. And there were lots of words I didn’t understand, and one big nasty word I totally understood, “cancer”. I should have been afraid. Heck I should have been scared silly. I should have, but I wasn’t. I felt… at peace. I even started going around the hospital and doing what I had always been best at, making ponies smile. And I was happy. I was bringing happiness and laughter to ponies who really needed it and sometimes I almost felt like I was still Pinkie Pie. And that’s when I found them. That’s when I found Charlie and Z-978. That wasn’t her name, of course. It was the employee number on her name tag. Nurse Zilia wasn’t her name either, of course, but I didn’t know that. What I did know was here was that changeling. Here was that changeling who loved my Charlie. And there he was, floating in a changeling pod. In the end he was right about everything, and he was never allowed to wake up. He had been hit by a train. Princess Luna had put him in an endless dream to ease his pain. My world, Silver’s dream, was just one dream within a series of dreams he would never wake up from. The changelings of Fast Change’s hive had donated a few pods to the Canterlot Hospital, and that’s what was keeping him alive. Silver had simply glimpsed the world dream. I remembered how he would curl up against me some nights and confess how he had seen the world end over and over. How the princess would never let him die. And it was all true. And my Charlie was in hell. And he would never escape. Should I have said something? Was the dream any kind of real mercy? But Nurse Zilia said he could tell we were there. She said he still felt hope and love. All he would ever feel if he woke up would be confusion and pain. As horrible as my twisted version of Equestria could be, he could be happy there, I had seen it. The doctor said it was only a matter of weeks at most, in any case. Even full transformation wasn’t an option, given the amount of damage his body had sustained there was no way he would survive the process. I didn’t go to his funeral. I should have, but I couldn’t bring myself to see him in box. They were going to put Charlie, my dear, sweet, broken Charlie, in the ground. I couldn’t face that. I kept thinking about all the impossible plans I had made. I talked to Celestia a lot. She was a lot nicer than Celestia in my world. I told her about my old plans to run away with a special human and open a bakery, and she thought it might be sweet to follow that old dream. I couldn’t ever have Charlie back, the bakery would be my memorial. The dream the nightmare kept from us would be something wonderful in the real world. “Just Deserts”, a bakery that sold every type of cupcake. And there wasn’t going to be a special human to serve the cupcakes, but it was still as much his as it was mine. And I was finally able to face myself… this world's version of myself I mean. And we threw a super big Pinkie/Surprise party, and later we talked, and she told me about something she had done when the changelings invaded Canterlot, and she told me it was okay. Even good ponies make mistakes. What was important was that you had to keep moving. You had to keeping making ponies happy, and making ponies laugh. Because you can’t erase your mistakes. You can’t undo the hurt you caused, so you have to just keep on making the world a better place. And I had done that. I had never quit doing that, and I never would, and Pinkie Pie wasn’t ashamed of me, she was proud that I was a version of her that held laughter against the corruption of the nightmare. And I felt like maybe if Pinkie Pie could forgive me, maybe Charlie could to. Sometimes I could almost imagine that he was somehow going to walk through that door, and we’d cry, and we’d laugh, and life would be able to go on again. Laughter in the windNight set the letter down. That cursed letter. That… She let out a slow breath. "What's wrong?" came Silver's voice as he trotted into the room. "You look upset." Night swiveled a tufted ear towards him. She rose and rapidly approached, smooching his cheek. She was tempted to bottle it up, but that habit was, perhaps, being worn down by her husband. "I got a letter, from somepony I didn't expect." Silver rose a brow at that. "From someone you like, I hope?" He put a wing over her and drew her close. "Tell me about it?" Night released that breath with a little shiver. "A dead pony. Surprise." Silver froze a moment. "When did she die?!" Night blinked and turned towards him instead of at his side. "That's… not the point. She is dead, but she wrote me this letter." She tapped the paper she had been reading before adjusting her glasses. "I… was considering… I'm not sure." Silver leaned in and rubbed his nose against her soft cheek. "Do you want to talk to her?" "It's not right." Night shook her head. "The spirits have places to be, a purpose. Calling them is not something done casually." Silver leveled a hoof with Night. "You wouldn't even be considering if it had no reason. Call her, speak your peace, let her go. No harm in that, right?" Night considered quietly a moment before she nodded. "I'll do it. She… If she doesn't want it, I will call gently, let her say no, if she prefers. I wouldn't begrudge her." She rose to her full height. "I want to be alone for this." Silver glanced down at his wedding shoe. It never stopped looking just a bit off, being one of what should be four, but he loved it, and those it bonded him to. "I'll be with you, even if I'm not there, you know that, right?" He smiled a little. "I'll be getting some paperwork done, but if you want, call. You're always worth the interruption." Night flashed a bright smile at the kind words and kissed him goodbye. Soon he was out the door to his work as an ambassador. With the apartment emptied, Night set out some low candles and drew diagrams in chalk that'd be easy to remove later. "Estranged Element of Laughter, I hope your mirth still rings out somewhere, even if I never smiled for you," she called in a morose tone, caught between trepidation and shame. It wasn't an ideal place for a shaman to be, but she pressed on. “I- I wasn’t sure if you’d call me or not,” a pink shadow slowly solidified before Night’s eyes, “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t… I messed things up pretty bad.” “Did you get my letter?” The spirit smiled sadly as she spoke. “There was so much I had to explain… about me… about Charlie. I didn’t know who else to ask. I have lots of friends… but I only know one pony who can talk to ghosts. And only one pony in this world who ever really met Charlie at all.” Night pointed to the folded paper that sat on the floor. "I… did." She took a slow breath. "It really… puts some things into context, I suppose." She quirked a smile. "My challenges feel small beside them." “I’m so sorry. I really am. In my world we were really all super close friends and Silver was married to my best friend, and when I saw Charlie in the hospital… just floating there. He and Silver were the only po… only people in his world who ever saw where I came from. I always thought there would just be different versions of them, just like everypony else, then I found you and Silver, and Silver remembered me… I actually started to hope that… but no…he never woke up.” Night adjusted her glasses in a nervous display. "It's… awkward, to say the least. This Silver is your Silver, but, so far I know, that's about where it ends. Nothing else, besides you, bridged that gap." She gave a little smile. "When he looked at you, he had that special look on his face. He wanted to save you…" She leaned forward. "Why didn't you tell him you were sick? He would have been trying to shove Canterlot off the mountain if it meant saving somepony he cared for that much." “I know… one more thing Pinkie Pie got wrong… but Surprise… I had my own ponies to save.” The pink ghost shook her head sadly, then smiled. “But I did it. I brought back three smiles. Three whole smiles that would have been lost forever. Have you seen Z-978? Or my little Face Hugger? They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. It seems so small, after everything I broke, but that little grub… she exists because I was able to at least fix something. And Diane… I know she doesn’t make the best first impression… or second, really, but she’s something really special. That smile was almost lost.” Night canted her head a little. "You're… Spirits can have a hard time hearing this, but you were looking at it the wrong way. You think I don't have regrets, or Silver?" She put a hoof to her chest. "It got worse for him a little while ago, hmph, but let's not dwell. You did well." Her ears twitched suddenly. "Do you prefer Surprise or Pinkie?" “I- I think I’m Surprise now. Mint Surprise Pastel. That’s the name we put on Diane’s adoption forms.” The ghost smiled at the happy memory of filling out all the paperwork with her family. “Is Train Wreck alright, or do you know? I don’t suppose he ever tried to just be friends with Silver? I used to wonder how our families could be so estranged when we have foals in the same school. It seemed silly then and it seems sillier now.” Surprise let out a sudden giggle. “You’d better watch those two. Unless you want a swarm of piranha-toothed bat-changelings. Because I'm pretty sure that’s how you get a swarm of piranha-toothed bat-changelings.” Night shook her head lightly. "He is mostly Samantha's responsibility. I keep half an eye on them, but she's taking being a mother very seriously. I think it's done good for her to accept a real task, rather than following wherever her urges take her." She leaned back a little, looking over the spectral form of who she was speaking with. "They… haven't, no. They still have a wager pending. I suppose the coronation botched that plan a little." She frowned. "I have an idea though, though there is only a 20% chance you'll accept." “Oooo, if I were a betting mare, I would totes take those odds!” Surprise grinned widely. “I am totes a betting mare.” Night nodded. "If rumors are true, my numbers may be quite off when you are involved. Let us see. Do you want to see your husband, in the flesh, one more time?" She raised a brow. "It would be my body, so no… marital things, but a hug, some last words… The things ponies never get when death snatches them away. I was a terrible friend in life, I can at least offer this now." Surprise smiled sadly and shook her head. “We had a rule. One big, fat, important rule. I could never be Diane, and he could never be Charlie. We would never be the ghosts of the loved ones we already lost. I’m afraid that includes me.” “There wasn’t any Pinkie Pie where Train Wreck came from you understand.” Surprise hung her head a little. “But there was a Lt. Pinkamena. He was her Charlie. And she was his Diane. I brought him out of Starlight’s time loop so he wouldn’t go back to being dead, but the cost was… he lost her. She went back to being this world’s Pinkie Pie, and she never even met him until he showed up in Ponyville around the coronation. It was hard for him. And… he was angry at me, after he met her… when she didn’t even remember him at all. I remember how hard it was when you didn’t know me, but for him meeting Pinkie… imagine… meeting a Silver who had never seen you before in his life. In a very real way I took her away from him.” Night quirked her head a little. "I'm afraid we're not on the same page. I didn't mean for you to introduce yourself to anyone as anything you're not. Train Wreck, you loved him, as you, right? Is he not allowed to see you, as you?" She raised a brow. "Just checking. I did say I expected a no." “We don’t chase ghosts… not in life anyway. I made a wonderful family. I...I want him to move on. We… everything we had to say was said. There were no secrets, no lies. I don’t have any unfinished business… not with Train Wreck.” The pink ghost turned her head away. Night found her brow raising high. "There is a sixty percent chance that reaction implies you have somepony else with whom you do have unfinished business. Do you wish to share?" “There was somepo- someone you brought to me once.. A ghost…” Surprise admitted reluctantly. “In this world everypony only knows his nightmare…” Night adjusted her glasses a moment, rubbing the lenses with a fetlock carefully. "What was their name?" "Are you talking to ghosts again?" came a familiar voice before Samantha opened the door to the hallway and trotted inside. "Oh! Hello!" She didn't seem alarmed to see Pinkie there. “Oh I remember you! You’re Moonbeam’s mom! We met when I was dropping Diane off at school.” Surprise beamed at the happy memory. Samantha quickly bobbed her head. "You've been curiously absent." Click it went somewhere in her head. "Oh, you expired? You were far before your expected expiration date." She frowned sharply. "There must be someone to lodge a formal complaint with." “I lived a full and happy life, possibly happier than I deserved.” Surprise smiled warmly. “You knew my little Diane, didn’t you? She would talk about your son for hours it seemed. Train Wreck and Z liked to tease her about it so much.” Samantha's left ear flicked off to the side before righting itself. "They are together right now." She looked distant a moment. "They are speaking in a friendly manner. I determined that the best course of action was to allow him to explore relationships at his own speed. Attempting to control this aspect of his development would have ad--" Night gently put a hoof in front of Samantha's muzzle. "We get the idea." She leaned in and smooched Samantha's nose to make sure no hard feelings were had. "You're doing an excellent job." “Diane is… she’s more fragile than she lets on, she takes after Train Wreck that way. It’s strange, I'd almost swear she inherited my mane and his smile… so warm, and still so cold. To her Charlie and his nightmare are one and the same. The memories she stole with the goat’s card… it’s just one more set of memories a filly her age shouldn’t have to remember.” A ghostly tear moistened the spectral pony’s cheek. “Charlie wouldn’t have wanted that. He wasn’t like that.” Samantha peeked back and forth between the two, but showed remarkable wisdom for one such as herself by saying nothing. Night shook her head slowly. "I'm afraid I don't know much about that, but… is there something you want us to do, for them?" “Not for them… Diane has her sister, she has Train Wreck. Z-978 is alive and amazing and a wonderful new mother… it’s the one I couldn’t save.” Surprise flickered for a moment, her shame and doubt overwhelming her presence. That wisdom could only extend so far. Leaning forward, Samantha looked to the ghost quite curiously. "Who's that?" “My Charlie. In my world I… I drove him off. I thought it was for his own good. I thought I was sending him to a safe place… At least that’s what I told myself. The Unspeakable Pinkie Pie, the breaker of worlds, that’s who I am.” Surprise turned away in shame. “Lt. Pinkamena saved her Charlie. I threw mine away. I went off to prove that his spoilers were just stupid made up stories, but do you know what? He was right. Our whole world was just a stupid dream that he couldn’t wake up from. And I left him there, floating in a stupid stinky changeling pod in a hospital. That’s what kind of pony Pinkie Pie was on my world.” Samantha cranked through things logically, or so she hoped. "If you are expired, and exist in this state," she waved at the spectral form. "Logically, so should he. You could see him now?" Night bobbed her head. "Actually, I could put out a gentle call, see if he's in the mood to come. It might help… close some things?" “He’s angry, he has every right to be angry. I tried to tell him last time, but something pulled him away. Somepony is trying to keep him. I don’t know if I should be afraid for him… or for his captor. The Nopony is his Nightmare, Discord gave him one last gift, a curse on us but a gift for Charlie. Noone escaped, but Charlie never woke up. At least he doesn’t carry that burden. If you could find him…” The pink pony’s eye’s carried he plea into the souls of the living witnesses. Night was already frowning towards the start of that statement. "Pulled him? That… could be an issue. We should check. If he wants to be left alone, we will honor that." She rose to her hooves and returned to the circle she had drawn. "A human, right?" She began making subtle adjustments. Samantha flashed a large smile at Surprise. "Night's in that 'super serious' mode. You may as well sit back and allow her to proceed." “I trust you.” the pink spectre smiled. “If anypony can help me save my Charlie, it’s you.” Night pressed her hooves to the circle, which glowed gently a moment, but then… nothing. Night frowned. "That was not." She stood up, sentence incomplete. She strode purposefully over to some books and began pulling them down and nosing them open in a hurry, her wings helping to search through them swiftly. Samantha blinked at the reaction before an ear went up. "NefNef is upset about something." -The End-
If you're reading this...One of two things is happening right now. Either the doctors have found a cure, and we’re all laughing and happy and there’s a super fun “yay-you’re-not-going-to-die-from-that-plague-you-started-party” going on, and I’m reading this out loud. Or I’m dead, and you’re probably asking, “Why did this mare, who was almost-but-not-quite Pinkie Pie leave me this letter in her will?” Back on my world, I was Pinkie Pie. The for real, actual, not-a-mirror-clone, Element of Laughter, Pinkie Pie. Here, in your Equestria I’m just a silly green mare with a straight mane who dropped in out of a clear blue sky telling really weird, impossible stories. It’s awkward, because we were really super close friends, and I know you. Back home, when home was a thing, because it’s not anymore, because I can’t go home because home never really happened, but back home I admired you. But you don't know me here, you know Pinky Pie, and I'm not her anymore. I'm Mint Surprise Pastel. Loyalty was never my element. No, I was laughter, and like a laugh I drifted on the wind. When a new path opened in front of me, I bounced down that path with a giggle and a smile and I never looked back, because what I left behind would have broken my heart. When I met met the human, he was nearly starved to death and terrified beyond reason. He would eat out of the dumpster behind Sugar Cube Corner and scurry and hide any time a pony came close enough to see him. I watched him for a long time, days, weeks, who knows? Life was but a dream and time works funny in dreams. Humans were falling into Equestria almost weekly at that point, and I knew enough to know this wasn’t normal human behavior. I always baked extra sweets, and even healthy sweet potato muffins, and onion croissants. And then I'd very carefully place them on top of the garbage, wrapped so they'd stay clean so he’d always have something tasty and nutritious to eat. Even so, when I saw him watching me place the food, he still hid. So I went and talked to Fluttershy, and she told me the difference between wild and feral animals. You see, a wild animal like a bear or a timberwolf, never trusted anypony, so trust is something new to it. You have to teach it that it’s okay to trust you, but really it doesn’t have any reason not to. A feral animal is an animal that used to be tame. It thought it could trust ponies, but it was betrayed and hurt by bad ponies. It won’t ever come to you on it’s own, because bad ponies have taught it that trusting ponies hurts. So I had to catch him. So I set a trap. And I stopped leaving food where he could just find it and I only left it in the trap, It took a few days but he did get hungry enough eventually, just like Fluttershy said. And when I finally caught him, I did just what she told me to do. I let him go and put food back in the trap. We danced that little dance for days, maybe weeks, until finally he didn’t run. He just broke down and cried. And I couldn’t help myself, I just hugged and snuggled him as hard as I could. On a related note, the cracked ribs healed up nicely, mine that is. It turns out that feral humans really don’t appreciate ambush hugs. Who knew? Humans are stronger than they look, by the way. Not earth pony strong, mind you, but still way stronger than they look. He looked so guilty after he threw me off. He could tell he had hurt me, and he felt really super bad about it. He almost ran off again right then and there, and if he had I don’t think he would have ever come back. He was even more afraid of hurting us than he was afraid of us hurting him. And he was terrified of us hurting him. Somehow though I talked him down. He said his name was Ki, but nobody pronounced it right. He also said he was no one. And then he said that Celestia was hunting him, and that if she caught him she would throw him in a changeling pod and he would have to live in another dream until he died, or until ponies killed him, and then the words would make him start all over again. I didn’t understand. None of it made sense at the time. If I had known… I took him in and hid him in my Pinkie Cave. I couldn’t let the Cakes know, at least not at first. He was too wild still… too unstable. I knew he would never hurt Pound and Pumpkin, and he would didn’t want to hurt ponies. But he thought we wanted to hurt him. And he was scared, and he was cornered, and he was… he was dangerous. He hurt me without even meaning to, because he thought I was attacking him. And the Cakes didn’t know he wouldn’t hurt their foals, and if they tried to defend Pound and Pumpkin… he was dangerous. So that’s why I kept him in the Pinkie cave at first. Over the course of the next indeterminate time span we got to know each other. He knew all kinds of things about Equestria already, but that’s kinda normal for most humans. There were also gaps you could drive a cart through. And some things he thought he knew didn’t seem to make any sense to me. In a lot of ways it was like he really had spent a whole lot of time in a completely different Equestria, or perhaps a series of whole different Equestrias. But that was silly, of course, because there was only one Equestria, and it was the whole world, and it could never go away and just not be there waiting for me to… I’m sorry. It’s hard sometimes thinking about that, but it’s not time for that part of the story yet. I don’t remember when or why, but we started calling each other by our middle names at some point. I was Diane, and he was Charlie, and this was very important because it meant that we were both being super serious, and we should really each listen to the words the other was saying. Special words became really important. He didn’t trust ponies. He didn’t trust anyone really, but especially ponies. I needed special words that always meant exactly one thing, regardless of any context. I needed words that were safe, that we both knew would always mean the same thing, and would always be taken seriously. The safe words became our secret language. By the time he was ready to see Ponyville, and Ponyville was ready to see him, we weren’t Ki and Pinkie Pie anymore, we were Charlie and Diane. Our games seemed silly, almost nonsensical to the ponies around us. What was so funny, or so naughty, about a party with muffins and pancakes? Twilight thought I was keeping Charlie as some kind of exotic pet, she said as much. The Cakes thought he was stalking me, and they were plenty mad that I had brought him in without telling them. They never really trusted him around the foals. Which was a shame. He was good with foals. They were the only ponies he ever really trusted, and I think they were the only ponies that ever really understood him, too. I spent a lot of my spare time with Charlie, playing super fun donut games. And no, “donut” is not any kind of naughty codeword. I’m not sure why, but ponies always immediately go there when it comes to “donuts”. We had code-words for that too, but donuts were innocent. COMPLETELY INNOCENT! Honestly just because a food has a hole… But I digress… He started to trust me. It took a lot of time, and a lot of special codewords, and believe you me when you eat as many sweet baked goods as we did it made meals super-awkward. But he believed in me. And I wish I had believed in him. Celestia’s great white flank, why didn’t I believe him? He told me. He Pinkie Promised. He even Bagel Swore that he was telling me the truth. But I believed… I wanted to believe… that it was all some trick of his beautiful, broken mind. I should have listened. He was my friend and he told me all his secrets, and I told him all my secrets and I should have believed him. But he said the whole world, all of it was just a dream. It was all a dream and he wasn’t allowed to wake up. And he said that one day Celestia would find him and it would all come crashing down and in the end he’d never wake up because he knew he was really just floating in a changeling pod. What was I supposed to believe. He was talking about the world. The whole wide world. My world.
Before the Storm...For a while everything was good. Charlie never really warmed up to Ponyville, but things were good. He would hang out and drink with Jake some nights. Jake was Twilight’s human. He had been sent to Ponyville by the human ambassador in Canterlot, Silver Lining. Mostly he just played test subject for Twilight and followed Rainbow Dash around. Charlie found the whole thing unsettling and avoided Twilight after he found out what was going on. I told him he was being silly, after all Jake didn’t seem to mind, and I told Charlie Twilight just wanted to learn more about humans, but Charlie never really trusted her. Things didn’t get weird until the thrones activated. When I told Charlie, he went absolutely manic. He said it was the spoilers. He was terrified. I told him it wouldn’t matter. Jake had been there for months, he wasn’t going to break anything just by being there. He hid in the Pinkie Cave from the time we left for our first mission until we got back. He calmed down a little when I told him what happened and it matched up mostly with his spoilers. It was always weird, even to me, when a human knew the future like that. But Charlie was too super scared to tell me anything about what was going to happen. He said if Celestia found out he had spoilers she wouldn’t stop until she found him. He made me Pinkie Pie Promise that I’d never tell Twilight. He even lied to Jake and swore that he had only seen up to Season Four (that’s when we fought Tirek). The trouble came from the Cakes. His new paranoia scared them, and I couldn’t tell them what was happening without breaking my promise. In the end they said he couldn’t stay at Sugar Cube Corner anymore if I wasn’t there to supervise him. I thought about stepping down and passing my Element on to some other pony. I’m pretty sure Cheese Sandwich could handle the job. I thought Charlie would be happy when I told him. We were really good friends, more than friends really. I told him we could go to Canterlot, maybe open our own shop. We could call it “Sweet Surprise”, and we’d be the only bakery in Canterlot with a real human serving sweets. Just me and him. I thought he would be happy. He wasn’t happy. He was terrified, and crazy, and not the good kind of crazy either. He laughed like a maniac and then broke down in sobs and cried for hours. He said he was going to break everything. He said it would be better if he just wasn’t there anymore. I knew what he meant and I was scared. That was the first time I’d ever been afraid around Charlie. I was scared for him. I was scared of what he might do to himself to stop from dropping his stupid spoilers. I was scared and I was angry. I was angry that he thought his stupid, stupid spoilers were more important than me, more important than us. And… I said something I shouldn’t have. I told him that if he was so scared that he was going to ruin everything maybe he should just leave. I told him if he really thought he was going to break everything in the world just by being with me, and if being with me was so terrible that he would rather throw his life away than spend it with me, then maybe he should leave Ponyville. Then he’d never have to worry about dropping his spoilers. I shouldn’t have said it. But I didn’t believe in the spoilers. Not really. What did it matter if he knew some things that I was going to do? The world wasn’t just going to break just because he told me something that happened in a stupid little filly’s show on his world. The world wasn’t going to break. The world was always going to be there. It wasn’t just some stupid dream! And he left. I heard later he found a job in an outlying town at a warehouse. That was the last time I ever saw Charlie. After that a lot of things happened. Celestia came to visit unannounced, and she asked a lot of questions about all the humans in town, and especially about Silver, and she seemed really super interested when the Cakes wanted to tell her about Charlie. She said she needed Twilight to go with her to Canterlot. It was then that I started to find out just how dirty my little world really was. I couldn’t believe what Twilight did to Silver Stars. Nopony could. Jake was mortified. After that, he was almost as afraid of Celestia and Twilight as Charlie had been, and he followed Dashie around a lot less after that. He was still totes in crush with her, but he kept a very careful distance. From that day forward there was always a glint of fear in Jake's eyes whenever he spoke to Twilight. Oddly enough, Silver wasn’t nearly as mad at Twilight as you might think after she magicked off his wing-dang-doodle, because she totes ran off with him after that, and all of you ended up forming a herd, and there were going to be foals and everything. It was around then that I decided to take a train out to Twiggs Depot. That’s the town where Charlie worked, by the way. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, but I guess I should have sent a wire to let him know I was coming, because when I got there he was gone. His roommate said he was a super good manager and sometimes he drove deliveries on weekends to make extra bits. She was really sweet on him, I could tell. We talked for a long time. I was super jelly, obviously! This changeling had totes stolen MY human. After all the time I spent putting him back together, this interloper, this changeling mare was making pancakes and having muffin parties with MY Charlie. Sure she said there weren’t any muffins, and that he just fed her because he liked her, and she didn’t even have to take any other shape. She didn’t even take any specific gender. She didn’t know if he liked colts or mares, so she just didn’t pick a side. I could have totally sabotaged her. I could have told her Charlie was cuckoo for colts, and told her to tell him that Pinkie Pie wanted to hear from him, and she would have believed me. But I couldn’t do that to her. And I couldn’t do that to Charlie. She really liked him, and he really liked her, even if he didn’t know she was a her. Even without him being there, I knew he really liked her, because I knew all his secrets. And I wanted him to be happy. So I told her I’d do something special to help her catch his interest. Something that would help him to notice that he really liked her. Because Charlie could be really dense like that sometimes. So I told her to expect a Hearth's Warming miracle and to be ready to roll with it. And that was the one and only time I ever met Z-978 in my world.
The Lies We Tell Ourselves...I should explain something, I think, about Z-978, something that never came up when I met her in my world, but that’s haunted me ever since I pulled her out of Starlight Shimmer’s time loops in this world. In this world, Z-978 was originally Switch Shift, a changeling drone who, along with her clutch-sisters were charged with concealing the escape of a young proto queen from Chrysalis’ hive during the invasion of Canterlot. In this world, Switch Shift was killed in the invasion, and the proto queen survived and grew up alone on the streets of Canterlot. In this world her death was a tragic accident that was caused by this world’s Pinkie Pie getting a little too carried away using her Twilight as a uni-cannon. Overall there were nearly no actual casualties, and most of the drones actually escaped. In my world… we didn’t even know that the drones were sapient. We were scared and we were angry, and… a lot of changelings died. A lot of Changelings died… no… I killed a lot of changelings. There was no one face to put on it. There was no one big bad thing that I had to make up for. I could tell myself whatever I wanted to. A lot of changelings lost somepony they loved that day. Most were because a big ole wave of love just smeared them across Canterlot. But a lot more because one happy pink pony laughed while she blasted them to smithereens. It- it was a lot like what you hear refugees from the hive in Canterlot say the invasion “felt like”. But it wasn’t “like that”. It was that. It was exactly that. Luna, the real Luna created my world in a dream. Everypony who ever saw it called it a nightmare. And Z-978 made me think later, after I escaped into the real world, if maybe it was a dream AND a nightmare. But what if it wasn’t Silver’s dream, or Charlie’s nightmare, what if it was some kind of world dream? What if it was a world made from the dreams of everypony in the world, and Silver and Charlie were just locked inside it? What I did in the battle of Canterlot, I’m 100% positively sure was the nightmare of one lost, lonely, and starving little changeling filly who lost her best sister during that horrible stupid fight. And I think maybe Z-978 in my world was her dream. That was her dream where her sister escaped and she got to live a happy little life and have super fun holiday adventures with her favorite human. I hate it when ponies call my world a dream, but when I think about leaving Charlie with Z… I’d like to think at least part of my world was a happy dream. I have to believe that because there’s a pretty pink little changeling filly who didn’t have nearly enough happy dreams, and she needs extra giggles and extra snuggles, and I’m not going to be there to give them to her anymore. And it doesn’t do me any good to think about that. But it’s hard not to. I never tried to contact Charlie again after that, but when Hearth’s Warming rolled around, I made sure to have a big ol heaping box of rock candy delivered home to the rock farm on Hearth’s Warming Eve. I invoked the Satana-clause so Charlie would pretty much have to make the delivery himself. I left it to Z to figure out what she should do from there. After that things got… well downright weird. I became friends with Silver through Twilight, they saved the crystal empire, and Silver became an alicorn. Oh, and he got his wang-a-lang back, too. Not so important to me, but I’m pretty sure it was a pretty big deal for him. I mean sure, it was a pretty big deal, but then I married a giant monster, so it’s safe to say I’ve seen bigger deals. Just sayin’. But that’s really not what’s important. The important part is that with a new alicorn prince, Princess Celestia got the idea that maybe they could open a portal back to the human world. At the time everypony assumed there was only one world where all the humans were coming from, and Princess Celestia said that if they could open a portal then the humans could go home… if they wanted to, of course. That didn’t really account for all the humans the princesses had already turned into ponies of course (especially Luna, she really has a thing for turning humans into lunar ponies, in my world and in this one too), but they seemed pretty well adjusted to living in Equestria anyway. And that’s when things really went sideways. There were complications, and not only did they not open a portal, but they infected the world they were trying to reach with Equestrian magic in the worst possible way. Luna did her best to help the humans cope with the disaster. The humans called it the “Pink Step Plague”. Anyone infected became a pony. At least if they were lucky they just became a pony. There were all kinds of crazy mutations, and a lot of the former humans lost all their marbles and couldn’t think of anything BUT spreading the plague… which they did by being REALLY super friendly with anyone who wasn’t infected. They were pony rape machines. There I said it. No really nice way to talk around it. Eventually they began to rebuild. They found a cure, but there was no way to restore those who’d already transformed. They even managed to send a diplomatic envoy into our world. Princess Luna of course promised that we would send any help we could, and me and Dashie even volunteered to go back with the envoy to help in their recovery efforts. What I did next… I only wanted to help. No, that’s a lie. I wanted to prove that Charlie was wrong. Wrong about the spoilers. Wrong about worlds breaking. Wrong about how everything would just fall apart if Pinkamena Diane Pie wasn’t where some stupid little filly’s story said she should be. What if Pinkie Pie just hurled herself into the void to divert a big mean ole surge of equestrian magic and re-wrote time? What would all his spoilers mean then? Nothing, that’s what! Because you can’t break a whole world! And even if you could, the whole wide world of Equestria wasn’t going to just break and go away just because one little pink pony wasn’t where she was supposed to be! And I was going to show Charlie, and he was going to be sorry he ran off, even if he was super happy with that changeling, and even if I really wanted him to be super happy and it’s not like I didn’t like Z-978, but I was going to show him how silly he was being. I was right. Maybe I’d end up in some weird alternate dimension where cupcakes didn’t even exist, but I was going to beat the spoilers and I was going to save Charlie’s world from the plague! I was a fool.
You Can Never Go HomeAfter everything that happened in the human world… I think a part of me was glad that my world was gone. It’s terrible, but sometimes I’m glad I never had to face my friends again. It wasn’t like my world was dead, it’s hard to even say it broke. There weren’t even any pieces left. There was just a blank space in a whole line of Equestria’s. My world just wasn’t there. Because the whole world can just go away. And then it’s just not there anymore. So I picked another one. I just reached out to the closest Equestria and fell into it. I don’t really even know when I turned green. Just one more surprise. So many surprises. The name just fit. I couldn’t be Pinkie Pie anymore, that was obvious. The whole universe seemed to agree with that. I wasn’t even pink anymore. I spent the first few days hiding. I didn’t want to see any of the girls. I was scared of what might happen if I ran into this world’s Pinkie Pie. I kept thinking of Charlie, how he was always afraid the universe would break or worse, just go away. And he was right. And now my world was gone. And so was Charlie. And so was the cute changeling who was totally perfect for Charlie. And was it wrong that I was still jealous? I thought maybe if I had just listened, if I had just believed in the spoilers… and I knew that there was another Charlie on this world. There had to be. There was another Pinkie Pie. There was another Twilight, even if she wasn’t with Ambassador Silver, there was another Ambassador Silver… and he still had two foals on the way, they were even both from the same mommy. I didn’t think Silver would recognize me, why would he? He might know this worlds Pinkie but there was no way he could know me. Except that he did. Because my world really was just a dream. And it didn’t end because I left. It ended because it was a dream. And somehow I had escaped. And Silver knew where I had been, even if he didn’t know what I had done. And he knew I was sick, and that I needed a doctor. So he took me to the hospital. The doctors did their very best. There was a lot of doctor talk I didn’t understand, but I understood the important parts, like how I was “no longer contagious”, and the part that should have made me really sad, and really scared, when they talked about how “the damage had already been done”. And there were lots of words I didn’t understand, and one big nasty word I totally understood, “cancer”. I should have been afraid. Heck I should have been scared silly. I should have, but I wasn’t. I felt… at peace. I even started going around the hospital and doing what I had always been best at, making ponies smile. And I was happy. I was bringing happiness and laughter to ponies who really needed it and sometimes I almost felt like I was still Pinkie Pie. And that’s when I found them. That’s when I found Charlie and Z-978. That wasn’t her name, of course. It was the employee number on her name tag. Nurse Zilia wasn’t her name either, of course, but I didn’t know that. What I did know was here was that changeling. Here was that changeling who loved my Charlie. And there he was, floating in a changeling pod. In the end he was right about everything, and he was never allowed to wake up. He had been hit by a train. Princess Luna had put him in an endless dream to ease his pain. My world, Silver’s dream, was just one dream within a series of dreams he would never wake up from. The changelings of Fast Change’s hive had donated a few pods to the Canterlot Hospital, and that’s what was keeping him alive. Silver had simply glimpsed the world dream. I remembered how he would curl up against me some nights and confess how he had seen the world end over and over. How the princess would never let him die. And it was all true. And my Charlie was in hell. And he would never escape. Should I have said something? Was the dream any kind of real mercy? But Nurse Zilia said he could tell we were there. She said he still felt hope and love. All he would ever feel if he woke up would be confusion and pain. As horrible as my twisted version of Equestria could be, he could be happy there, I had seen it. The doctor said it was only a matter of weeks at most, in any case. Even full transformation wasn’t an option, given the amount of damage his body had sustained there was no way he would survive the process. I didn’t go to his funeral. I should have, but I couldn’t bring myself to see him in box. They were going to put Charlie, my dear, sweet, broken Charlie, in the ground. I couldn’t face that. I kept thinking about all the impossible plans I had made. I talked to Celestia a lot. She was a lot nicer than Celestia in my world. I told her about my old plans to run away with a special human and open a bakery, and she thought it might be sweet to follow that old dream. I couldn’t ever have Charlie back, the bakery would be my memorial. The dream the nightmare kept from us would be something wonderful in the real world. “Just Deserts”, a bakery that sold every type of cupcake. And there wasn’t going to be a special human to serve the cupcakes, but it was still as much his as it was mine. And I was finally able to face myself… this world's version of myself I mean. And we threw a super big Pinkie/Surprise party, and later we talked, and she told me about something she had done when the changelings invaded Canterlot, and she told me it was okay. Even good ponies make mistakes. What was important was that you had to keep moving. You had to keeping making ponies happy, and making ponies laugh. Because you can’t erase your mistakes. You can’t undo the hurt you caused, so you have to just keep on making the world a better place. And I had done that. I had never quit doing that, and I never would, and Pinkie Pie wasn’t ashamed of me, she was proud that I was a version of her that held laughter against the corruption of the nightmare. And I felt like maybe if Pinkie Pie could forgive me, maybe Charlie could to. Sometimes I could almost imagine that he was somehow going to walk through that door, and we’d cry, and we’d laugh, and life would be able to go on again.
Laughter in the windNight set the letter down. That cursed letter. That… She let out a slow breath. "What's wrong?" came Silver's voice as he trotted into the room. "You look upset." Night swiveled a tufted ear towards him. She rose and rapidly approached, smooching his cheek. She was tempted to bottle it up, but that habit was, perhaps, being worn down by her husband. "I got a letter, from somepony I didn't expect." Silver rose a brow at that. "From someone you like, I hope?" He put a wing over her and drew her close. "Tell me about it?" Night released that breath with a little shiver. "A dead pony. Surprise." Silver froze a moment. "When did she die?!" Night blinked and turned towards him instead of at his side. "That's… not the point. She is dead, but she wrote me this letter." She tapped the paper she had been reading before adjusting her glasses. "I… was considering… I'm not sure." Silver leaned in and rubbed his nose against her soft cheek. "Do you want to talk to her?" "It's not right." Night shook her head. "The spirits have places to be, a purpose. Calling them is not something done casually." Silver leveled a hoof with Night. "You wouldn't even be considering if it had no reason. Call her, speak your peace, let her go. No harm in that, right?" Night considered quietly a moment before she nodded. "I'll do it. She… If she doesn't want it, I will call gently, let her say no, if she prefers. I wouldn't begrudge her." She rose to her full height. "I want to be alone for this." Silver glanced down at his wedding shoe. It never stopped looking just a bit off, being one of what should be four, but he loved it, and those it bonded him to. "I'll be with you, even if I'm not there, you know that, right?" He smiled a little. "I'll be getting some paperwork done, but if you want, call. You're always worth the interruption." Night flashed a bright smile at the kind words and kissed him goodbye. Soon he was out the door to his work as an ambassador. With the apartment emptied, Night set out some low candles and drew diagrams in chalk that'd be easy to remove later. "Estranged Element of Laughter, I hope your mirth still rings out somewhere, even if I never smiled for you," she called in a morose tone, caught between trepidation and shame. It wasn't an ideal place for a shaman to be, but she pressed on. “I- I wasn’t sure if you’d call me or not,” a pink shadow slowly solidified before Night’s eyes, “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t… I messed things up pretty bad.” “Did you get my letter?” The spirit smiled sadly as she spoke. “There was so much I had to explain… about me… about Charlie. I didn’t know who else to ask. I have lots of friends… but I only know one pony who can talk to ghosts. And only one pony in this world who ever really met Charlie at all.” Night pointed to the folded paper that sat on the floor. "I… did." She took a slow breath. "It really… puts some things into context, I suppose." She quirked a smile. "My challenges feel small beside them." “I’m so sorry. I really am. In my world we were really all super close friends and Silver was married to my best friend, and when I saw Charlie in the hospital… just floating there. He and Silver were the only po… only people in his world who ever saw where I came from. I always thought there would just be different versions of them, just like everypony else, then I found you and Silver, and Silver remembered me… I actually started to hope that… but no…he never woke up.” Night adjusted her glasses in a nervous display. "It's… awkward, to say the least. This Silver is your Silver, but, so far I know, that's about where it ends. Nothing else, besides you, bridged that gap." She gave a little smile. "When he looked at you, he had that special look on his face. He wanted to save you…" She leaned forward. "Why didn't you tell him you were sick? He would have been trying to shove Canterlot off the mountain if it meant saving somepony he cared for that much." “I know… one more thing Pinkie Pie got wrong… but Surprise… I had my own ponies to save.” The pink ghost shook her head sadly, then smiled. “But I did it. I brought back three smiles. Three whole smiles that would have been lost forever. Have you seen Z-978? Or my little Face Hugger? They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. It seems so small, after everything I broke, but that little grub… she exists because I was able to at least fix something. And Diane… I know she doesn’t make the best first impression… or second, really, but she’s something really special. That smile was almost lost.” Night canted her head a little. "You're… Spirits can have a hard time hearing this, but you were looking at it the wrong way. You think I don't have regrets, or Silver?" She put a hoof to her chest. "It got worse for him a little while ago, hmph, but let's not dwell. You did well." Her ears twitched suddenly. "Do you prefer Surprise or Pinkie?" “I- I think I’m Surprise now. Mint Surprise Pastel. That’s the name we put on Diane’s adoption forms.” The ghost smiled at the happy memory of filling out all the paperwork with her family. “Is Train Wreck alright, or do you know? I don’t suppose he ever tried to just be friends with Silver? I used to wonder how our families could be so estranged when we have foals in the same school. It seemed silly then and it seems sillier now.” Surprise let out a sudden giggle. “You’d better watch those two. Unless you want a swarm of piranha-toothed bat-changelings. Because I'm pretty sure that’s how you get a swarm of piranha-toothed bat-changelings.” Night shook her head lightly. "He is mostly Samantha's responsibility. I keep half an eye on them, but she's taking being a mother very seriously. I think it's done good for her to accept a real task, rather than following wherever her urges take her." She leaned back a little, looking over the spectral form of who she was speaking with. "They… haven't, no. They still have a wager pending. I suppose the coronation botched that plan a little." She frowned. "I have an idea though, though there is only a 20% chance you'll accept." “Oooo, if I were a betting mare, I would totes take those odds!” Surprise grinned widely. “I am totes a betting mare.” Night nodded. "If rumors are true, my numbers may be quite off when you are involved. Let us see. Do you want to see your husband, in the flesh, one more time?" She raised a brow. "It would be my body, so no… marital things, but a hug, some last words… The things ponies never get when death snatches them away. I was a terrible friend in life, I can at least offer this now." Surprise smiled sadly and shook her head. “We had a rule. One big, fat, important rule. I could never be Diane, and he could never be Charlie. We would never be the ghosts of the loved ones we already lost. I’m afraid that includes me.” “There wasn’t any Pinkie Pie where Train Wreck came from you understand.” Surprise hung her head a little. “But there was a Lt. Pinkamena. He was her Charlie. And she was his Diane. I brought him out of Starlight’s time loop so he wouldn’t go back to being dead, but the cost was… he lost her. She went back to being this world’s Pinkie Pie, and she never even met him until he showed up in Ponyville around the coronation. It was hard for him. And… he was angry at me, after he met her… when she didn’t even remember him at all. I remember how hard it was when you didn’t know me, but for him meeting Pinkie… imagine… meeting a Silver who had never seen you before in his life. In a very real way I took her away from him.” Night quirked her head a little. "I'm afraid we're not on the same page. I didn't mean for you to introduce yourself to anyone as anything you're not. Train Wreck, you loved him, as you, right? Is he not allowed to see you, as you?" She raised a brow. "Just checking. I did say I expected a no." “We don’t chase ghosts… not in life anyway. I made a wonderful family. I...I want him to move on. We… everything we had to say was said. There were no secrets, no lies. I don’t have any unfinished business… not with Train Wreck.” The pink ghost turned her head away. Night found her brow raising high. "There is a sixty percent chance that reaction implies you have somepony else with whom you do have unfinished business. Do you wish to share?" “There was somepo- someone you brought to me once.. A ghost…” Surprise admitted reluctantly. “In this world everypony only knows his nightmare…” Night adjusted her glasses a moment, rubbing the lenses with a fetlock carefully. "What was their name?" "Are you talking to ghosts again?" came a familiar voice before Samantha opened the door to the hallway and trotted inside. "Oh! Hello!" She didn't seem alarmed to see Pinkie there. “Oh I remember you! You’re Moonbeam’s mom! We met when I was dropping Diane off at school.” Surprise beamed at the happy memory. Samantha quickly bobbed her head. "You've been curiously absent." Click it went somewhere in her head. "Oh, you expired? You were far before your expected expiration date." She frowned sharply. "There must be someone to lodge a formal complaint with." “I lived a full and happy life, possibly happier than I deserved.” Surprise smiled warmly. “You knew my little Diane, didn’t you? She would talk about your son for hours it seemed. Train Wreck and Z liked to tease her about it so much.” Samantha's left ear flicked off to the side before righting itself. "They are together right now." She looked distant a moment. "They are speaking in a friendly manner. I determined that the best course of action was to allow him to explore relationships at his own speed. Attempting to control this aspect of his development would have ad--" Night gently put a hoof in front of Samantha's muzzle. "We get the idea." She leaned in and smooched Samantha's nose to make sure no hard feelings were had. "You're doing an excellent job." “Diane is… she’s more fragile than she lets on, she takes after Train Wreck that way. It’s strange, I'd almost swear she inherited my mane and his smile… so warm, and still so cold. To her Charlie and his nightmare are one and the same. The memories she stole with the goat’s card… it’s just one more set of memories a filly her age shouldn’t have to remember.” A ghostly tear moistened the spectral pony’s cheek. “Charlie wouldn’t have wanted that. He wasn’t like that.” Samantha peeked back and forth between the two, but showed remarkable wisdom for one such as herself by saying nothing. Night shook her head slowly. "I'm afraid I don't know much about that, but… is there something you want us to do, for them?" “Not for them… Diane has her sister, she has Train Wreck. Z-978 is alive and amazing and a wonderful new mother… it’s the one I couldn’t save.” Surprise flickered for a moment, her shame and doubt overwhelming her presence. That wisdom could only extend so far. Leaning forward, Samantha looked to the ghost quite curiously. "Who's that?" “My Charlie. In my world I… I drove him off. I thought it was for his own good. I thought I was sending him to a safe place… At least that’s what I told myself. The Unspeakable Pinkie Pie, the breaker of worlds, that’s who I am.” Surprise turned away in shame. “Lt. Pinkamena saved her Charlie. I threw mine away. I went off to prove that his spoilers were just stupid made up stories, but do you know what? He was right. Our whole world was just a stupid dream that he couldn’t wake up from. And I left him there, floating in a stupid stinky changeling pod in a hospital. That’s what kind of pony Pinkie Pie was on my world.” Samantha cranked through things logically, or so she hoped. "If you are expired, and exist in this state," she waved at the spectral form. "Logically, so should he. You could see him now?" Night bobbed her head. "Actually, I could put out a gentle call, see if he's in the mood to come. It might help… close some things?" “He’s angry, he has every right to be angry. I tried to tell him last time, but something pulled him away. Somepony is trying to keep him. I don’t know if I should be afraid for him… or for his captor. The Nopony is his Nightmare, Discord gave him one last gift, a curse on us but a gift for Charlie. Noone escaped, but Charlie never woke up. At least he doesn’t carry that burden. If you could find him…” The pink pony’s eye’s carried he plea into the souls of the living witnesses. Night was already frowning towards the start of that statement. "Pulled him? That… could be an issue. We should check. If he wants to be left alone, we will honor that." She rose to her hooves and returned to the circle she had drawn. "A human, right?" She began making subtle adjustments. Samantha flashed a large smile at Surprise. "Night's in that 'super serious' mode. You may as well sit back and allow her to proceed." “I trust you.” the pink spectre smiled. “If anypony can help me save my Charlie, it’s you.” Night pressed her hooves to the circle, which glowed gently a moment, but then… nothing. Night frowned. "That was not." She stood up, sentence incomplete. She strode purposefully over to some books and began pulling them down and nosing them open in a hurry, her wings helping to search through them swiftly. Samantha blinked at the reaction before an ear went up. "NefNef is upset about something." -The End-
