The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde VS. MLP

Search for Ms. Diane:

That evening Ms. Sparkle came home to her library in somber spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was her custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry sorcery on her reading desk, until the clock in the neighbouring Ponyville tower rang out the hour of twelve, when she would go somberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however, she took up her candle and went into her business room. There she opened her safe, took from the most private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as ‘Ms. Pinkie’s Will,’ and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents (It should be noted that Ms. Sparkle, being the town librarian and gifted with the skills of organization and intelligence, was often trusted to keep and secure documents of importance for the city of Ponyville). The will was holograph, for Ms. Sparkle, and though she took charge of it now that it was made, she had refused to lend any assistance in the making of it; it stated not only that, in case of the decease of Pinkie Pie, baker, all her possessions were to pass into the hands of her “friend and benefactor Pinkamena Diane P.” but that in case of Ms. Pinkie’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three months,” the said Pinkamena Diane should step into the said Pinkie Pie’s place without further delay and free from any burthen or obligation, beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the baker’s household. This document had long been the librarian’s eyesore. It offended her both as its keeper and as a lover of the peaceful and sane land of Equestria. It had been her ignorance of Ms. Diane that had swelled her indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was her knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name was but a name of which she could learn no more. It was worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes.

“I thought it was madness,” she said as she replaced the obnoxious paper in the safe, “and now I’m beginning to fear it is disgrace.”

With that she blew out her candle and set forth in the direction of the Carousel Boutique, that citadel of fashion, where her friend, Ms. Rarity, had her house and received her crowding clients. “If anyone knows, it will be Rarity,” she had thought.

Rarity’s sister knew and welcomed her; Twilight was subjected to no stage of delay, but ushered direct from the door to the dining-room where Ms. Rarity sat alone over her cider. This was a sophisticated, well-mannered mare, with fur of white. At sight of Ms. Sparkle, she sprang up from her chair and welcomed her with two hooves. The geniality, as was the way of the mare, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine feeling. For these two were old friends, both thorough respectors of themselves and of each other, and what does not always follow, mares who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.

After a little rambling talk, the librarian led up to the subject which so disagreeably preoccupied her mind.

“I suppose, Rarity,” said she, “you and I must be the two oldest friends that Pinkie Pie has?”

“I wish the friends were younger,” chuckled Ms. Rarity. “But I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of her now.”

“Really?” said Twilight. “I thought you two see each other all the time.”

“We had,” was the reply. “But it is more than couple months since Pinkie Pie became too… wild for me. She began to go wrong, wrong in mind, with all those parties; and though of course I continue to take an interest in her for old sake’s sake, as they say, I see and I have seen very little of our friend. Such uncouth partying,” added the designer, “could estrange Princess Celestia and Princess Luna.”

“They have only differed on some interests,” Twilight thought. “That’s all.” She gave her friend a few seconds to recover her composure, and then approached the question she had come to put. “Did you ever come across a friend of hers… one Diane?” she asked.

“Diane?” repeated Ms. Rarity. “No. Never heard of her. Since my time.”

That was the amount of information that the librarian carried back with her to the great, dark bed on which she tossed to and fro, until the small hours of the morning began to grow large. It was a night of little ease on her toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and besieged by questions.

Six o’ clock struck on the bells of Ponyville tower, which was so conveniently near to Ms. Sparkle’s dwelling, and still she was digging at the problem. Before it had touched her only on the intellectual side; but now her imagination was also engaged, or rather enslaved; and as she lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night, Ms. Applejack’s tale went by before her mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. She would be aware of the great field of lamps of the city; then of the figure of a grey-pink mare walking swiftly; then of a filly running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that pony Juggernaut trod the filly down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else she would see a room in a bakery, where her hot-pink friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled and, like that, there would stand by Pinkie’s bed a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, Pinkie must rise to do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the librarian all night; and if at any time she dozed over, it was but to dream of Diane gliding more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted Ponyville, and at every street corner crush a filly and leave her screaming. And still this mare had no face by which Twilight might know it; even in her dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled her and melted before her eyes; and thus it was that that caused a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Ms. Diane. If she could but once set eyes on her, she thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined. She might find a reason for Pinkie’s strange relations with the mare, and even for the startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face worth seeing: the face of a mare who was without boundaries of mercy: a face which had but to show itself to raise up in Applejack a spirit of enduring hatred.

From that time forward, Ms. Sparkle began to haunt the corner bakery in the by-street of shops. In the morning before business hours, at noon when business was plenty, at night under the face of the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the librarian was to be found on her chosen post.

“If she wants to be Ms. Hide,” she had thought, “I shall be Ms. Seek.

And at last her patience was rewarded. It was a fine dry night; frost in the air; the street as clean as a castle floor; the lamps, unshaken by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of light and shadow. By ten o’clock, when the shops were closed, the by-street was very solitary and, in spite of the low growl of Ponyville all around, very silent. Small sounds carried far; domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either side of the roadway; and the sounds of the approach of any passenger preceded her by a long time. Ms. Sparkle had been some minutes at her post, when she was aware of an odd, light hoofstep drawing near. In the course of her nightly patrols, she had long grown accustomed to the quaint effect with which the hooffalls of a single pony, while she was still a great way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city. Yet her attention had never before been so sharply and decisively arrested.

The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly louder as they turned the end of the street. The librarian, looking forth from the entry could soon see what manner of pony she had to deal with. She was small and the look of her, even at that distance, went somehow strongly against the watcher’s inclination. But she made straight for the bakery door, crossing the roadway to save time; and as she came, she drew a key like one approaching home.

Ms. Sparkle stepped out and touched her on the shoulder as she passed. “Ms. Diane, I presume?”

Ms. Diane shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath. But her fear was only momentary; and though she did not look the librarian in the face, she answered coolly enough: “That is my name. What do you want?”

“I see you are going in,” returned the librarian. “I am an old friend of Ms. Pinkie - Twilight Sparkle of the town library - You must have heard my name; and meeting you so conveniently, I thought you might let me in.”

“You won’t find Pinkie Pie here, she’s not home,” replied Ms. Diane, eyeing her key. And then suddenly, but without looking up, “How did you know about me?” she asked.

“I’ll answer that in a second,” said Ms. Sparkle, “but first, will you do me a favor?”

“If I must,” replied the other. “What shall it be?”

“Let me get a better look at your face. I’ve noticed you have avoided eye contact since we first started talking, and I need to make sure I have found the right pony,” said the librarian. Ms. Diane appeared to hesitate, and then as if upon some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds.

“And now,” said the other pony, “how did you know me?”

“By description,” was the reply.

“Whose description?

“We have common friends,” said Ms. Sparkle.

“Common friends?” echoed Ms. Diane, a little hoarsely. “Who are they?”

“Pinkie, for instance,” said the librarian.

“You filthy liar! She never told you anything!” cried Ms. Diane, with a flush of anger. “I did not take you for a liar, Ms. Sparkle.”

“Come now,” said Ms. Sparkle, “there is no need to accuse falsehoods.”

The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment with extraordinary quickness, she had unlocked the door and disappeared into the building.

The librarian stood awhile when Ms. Diane had left her, the picture of disquietude. Then she began slowly to walk the street, pausing ever step or two and putting her hoof to her forehead like a pony in mental perplexity. Ms. Diane was dark-grey pink and quite small, with a mane as straight and flat as could be. She gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation. She had a displeasing, unsettlingly wide grin, when her face wasn’t overtaken by an annoyed snarl. She had borne herself to the librarian with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and she spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice, but not all of these together could explain the unknown disgust, sadness, and fear which radiated from the mare. A stray thought had once wondered thinking that the mare could be family to Pinkie. The thought had since lingered but was now extinguished entirely; Ms. Sparkle knew that despite some similarities, this creature was in no way family to her joyous friend.

“There must be something else,” said the perplexed mare. “There is something more, if I could figure it out. Celestia bless me, the mare seemed hardly a pony! Almost primitive. Poor Pinkie, if I have seen the most evilest of faces, it is that of Diane.”

A few evenings passed until Ms. Sparkle ventured back to the bakery. She thought that entering the building during business hours like any other customer was much less conspicuous than sneaking around outside. She entered the building, a bell above the door sounding her arrival. A smell of a variety of sweets wafted throughout the bakery. Many candy-cane striped pillars were scattered around, along with tables upon tables of delectable treats. A yellow stallion with a baker’s apron and cap stood behind the counter.

“Is Pinkie home, Mr. Cake?” asked the librarian.

“Lemme take a look, Twilight,” said Mr. Cake, going around the counter and up the staircase leading to the second floor. “You want to wait here or in the kitchen? It’s warmer in there.”

“Here’s fine, thank you,” said the librarian, and she drew near and leaned on the counter. This building, in which she was now standing alone, was both work and home to her friend the baker; and Twilight herself was accustomed to speak of it as one of the happiest places in Ponyville. But tonight there was a shudder in her blood; the face of Ms. Diane sat heavy on her memory; she felt (what was rare of her) a nausea and distaste of life. She was ashamed of her relief when Mr. Cake presently returned to announce that Pinkie was gone out.

“I saw Ms. Diane come in here late at night a while back, Mr. Cake,” she said. “Is that normal?”

“That’s fine,” replied the yellow baker. “Ms. Diane has a key. She lives in a room next to Pinkie. They even have keys to each other’s rooms.

“Pinkie seems to repose a great deal of trust in that mare, Mr. Cake,” resumed the other musingly.

“Yes, she does indeed,” said Mr. Cake. “Personally, I don’t like her, but hey, she pays her rent.”

“Have you talked to her much?” asked Twilight.

“Ohhh no. She’s rarely here,” replied the baker. “We see very little of her, she mostly just goes in and out from her room out the back door.”

“Okay, we’ll thank you, Mr. Cake. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Twilight.”

And the librarian set out homeward with a very heavy heart. “Poor Pinkie Pie,” she thought, “I’m worried that you are in deep trouble. Pinkie’s so wild and unpredictable, it could be so many things. It has to be the result of some trouble from her past, the ghost of some concealed disgrace.” And the librarian, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on her own past, groping in all corners of memory. Her past was fairly blameless: few ponies could read the chapters of their life with less apprehension. And then by a return on her former subject, she conceived a spark of hope. “This Pinkamena Diane, if she were studied,” thought she, “must have secrets of her own; black secrets, by the look of her; secrets that would make poor Pinkie’s worst look like sunshine. Things cannot continue as they are. It sickens me to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Pinkie’s bedside; poor Pinkie is in danger. If Ms. Diane knows about the will, she may grow impatient to inherit… I have to help. Please Pinkie, let me help,” she added, “please let me help.” Again she saw in her mind, clear as day, the strange clauses of the will.