“Betcha five bits I survive!” called Rainbow Dash. Twilight had just entered her castle’s Map Room to find her friend hanging upside-down from the chandelier some fifty feet above her.
“What.” said Twilight, her punctuation as audibly distinct as it was nonstandard.
“Cannonball!” With no further explanation, Rainbow Dash hurled herself downward, wings beating furiously as she worked to reach terminal velocity in a fraction of the distance any other pony could achieve it. With a mighty splat, she crashed headfirst onto the table.
Twilight blinked.
Rainbow Dash didn’t move.
That was an extremely impressive piece of acceleration, Twilight thought, even if it wasn’t really a “cannonball.” For about a quarter-second, that thought had her brain to itself, before its inevitable companion arrived. Twilight elected to speak the latecomer out loud.
“Dang it, Rainbow Dash, what is it this time?!”
*****
“Hey Applejack, can we talk for a minute?”
Applejack paused her farmwork mid-buck, smiling at her friend. “Well howdy, Twilight! I didn’t hear you coming!” Her smile slipped a bit, as she noticed Twilight’s dour expression. “Uh, is something the matter?”
“Rainbow Dash just killed herself.”
“Ah.” Applejack nodded sagely. “Well, it’s like my granny always says: ‘You can lead a pegasus to water, but you can’t stop those featherbrained degenerates from drowning themselves, oh lordy they’re so dumb, I mean, seriously, some of my best friends are pegasi, but do you know that'—well, she goes on like that for a while. You get the gist.”
“…Right. Anyway, I won’t keep you long. I was just hoping you could tell me how you get bloodstains off of furniture.”
“Why, sure! It depends on whether we’re talking fabric or—wait a minute, how did you know I knew how to clean bloodstains?”
Twilight shrugged. “Well, you’re a farmer, aren’t you?”
“And…?”
Twilight looked over her shoulder and, seeing that they were alone, continued. “Come on, Applejack. You and I both know that a pony who raises livestock is going to… well, is going to know a thing or two about bloodstains.” She smirked. “I wasn’t Celestia’s prized protégée for nothing, you know. It’s basic deduction.”
Applejack chuckled. “I guess there’s no pulling one over on a know-it-all like yourself. You know, not many ponies realize just what we do with the critters we keep. Makes you wonder why they think we have ‘em!”
Twilight tossed her head. “Well, to be fair, not everypony would think to follow the logical chain from from ‘shearing sheep’ to ‘they’ll inevitably get accidentally nicked sometimes, therefore a farmer probably has plenty of experience cleaning up bloodstains.’”
Applejack stopped chuckling. “…Are you ser—no, actually, that’s fine, let’s go with that. Yup, lotta sheep-shearing accidents.”
“So about the—”
“Bloodstains, right. C’mon, I’ll give you a bottle of the stuff we use.” She turned, nodding for Twilight to follow her. “So you’ll deal with the body and then… what? We gonna head out tomorrow?”
“Yeah, let’s aim for dawn. Might as well get this over with.”
*****
“Hey Fluttershy, got a second?”
Fluttershy looked up from the feed trough she was filling, a gentle smile on her face. “Of course, Twilight! It’s good to see you.”
“You, too. Anyway, Rainbow Dash just killed herself.”
Fluttershy lifted her hooves to her mouth in terror. “Oh no! That’s horrible! I didn’t even realize she was depressed!” Tears filled her eyes, and her breath began to hitch. “I—I’m such a terrible friend! She was crying out for help, and I never even—”
“Hey, now, relax,” Twilight said, in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “Look, I’m about 98% sure she wasn’t upset or sad or anything.”
Fluttershy bit her lip. “She… she wasn’t?”
“No, I’m pretty sure this was another ‘Rainbow Dash made six specious leaps of logic’ suicide.”
“Oh.” As quickly as they had come, the tears were gone. “Well, that’s a relief, I guess. What did she think she was going to do?”
“I was sort of hoping you knew,” Twilight confessed. “She didn’t even try to monologue at me this time. I assume she thought her plan would be self-evident after she succeeded.”
“Did she?”
Twilight gave Fluttershy a flat-lidded glare. “She splattered herself all over the Map Room table with no explanation. What do you think?”
“Right, sorry.”
Twilight sighed. “It’s fine. I’m just gonna go clean her up now.”
“Okay.” Fluttershy rubbed her hooves together. “Um, so—”
“Yes, we have to go, and no, I don’t enjoy it either. But something something friendship, I don’t know.” Twilight massaged her temple. “Honestly, at this point I’m not sure that even the bonds of Harmony merit the number of times we've had to do this.”
“Um, if you’d like, I can get the other girls,” offered Fluttershy. “I mean, if you’d rather get home.”
“Well, cleaning up my friend’s body after her over-dramatic suicide would usually be pretty low on my to-do list, but when the alternative is explaining to my friends that they have to take an early-morning road trip because Rainbow Dash is an idiot, and then still having to clean her up… yeah, if you want to tell them, that’d be great.” Twilight turned to leave. “Applejack already knows. Meet at the castle first thing tomorrow?”
“We’ll be there.”
“Great.”
*****
Twilight glared at Rainbow Dash’s body.
Rainbow Dash’s body didn’t respond. Which wasn’t exactly unexpected, but was annoying nonetheless.
With a sigh, Twilight lifted a bottle of peroxide with one tendril of magic, and a bundle of rags with another.
“Just great.”
*****
Tartarus is an unwelcoming place. The land surrounding the stygian cave is suffused with a dark miasma that defies sensory description. A sound which no ear can hear but which makes every heart quaver fills the air—the keening of the restless souls beneath. Smokeless blue flames form a wide ring around the great black gates, dancing a macabre saltarello to unheard music, on unfelt winds, in the scentless stink.
And before that grim entrance stands Cerberus: watchdog of the underworld. Looming tall over the fires, his massive form eclipses the cavern, mutely warning any who would dare approach of the futility of attempting to reach those souls whom Death or the Princesses have decreed must reside there forevermore.
“Um, could you please go fetch Rainbow Dash’s soul for us, mister Cerberus?” asked Fluttershy. One of the heads growled half-heartedly, but the other two barked and slobbered in a disquietingly friendly way. Outvoted, the first head rolled its eyes, and the dog loped down into the cavern.
“Can you imagine if we actually had to go down there and get her ourselves?” Twilight asked. “It’s bad enough just having to hike out this far.”
Rarity shivered. “Oh, my,” she murmured. “To face the horrors of Tartarus, it’s almost more than I can bear to think about.”
“We’ve been there before, though,” pointed out Fluttershy. “Twice, I think? Three times?”
“Yeah, it’s really just ‘take the staircase down, then you’re there,’” added Applejack.
“Well, yes,” admitted Rarity. “But there are a lot of stairs.”
Applejack opened her mouth to respond, but at that moment a dreadful baying echoed from the cavern mouth. Cerberus emerged from the blackness, holding a non-corporeal mist in the very-corporeal teeth of its middle head.
“Aw sweet, you guys came for me!” said the ghost of Rainbow Dash.
“We always do…” Rarity said with a sigh.
“…For some reason,” Applejack added under her breath.
“Yeah, great!” cried the mist. “So, let’s get with the magic-making!”
“Before we do,” said Twilight, “would you mind telling us why you killed yourself this time?”
Suddenly, the mist looked very nervous—an impressive feat, considering it possessed no identifiable form or structure. “Erm, do I have to?”
“Yes.”
“Right.” The mist made a gulping sound. “So. Ah… you know how your life flashes before your eyes right before you die?”
“Not nearly as well as you do, dear,” quipped Rarity.
“And you know how when you’re bored, time seems to go really slow?”
Twilight put her hoof to her face. “She hasn’t even explained yet, and I already have a headache.”
“So, I was setting up the rainclouds on Friday, and it was, like, super-boring, right? Because you just push the cloud over here, and then you wait for it to finish raining, and you can’t make it hurry up, because Ponyville’s municipal flood insurance already hit its limit after the first time I tried that, so you’re just hanging around waiting, and—”
“You can get to the point anytime,” said Rarity.
“Okay, so, I was up there being bored, and then I thought, ‘If my life flashes before my eyes when I die, but the last bit is boring, so it goes super-slow, then that’ll make it take longer for me to finish dying, right?’ Because, well, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Twilight barked a laugh. “Yes, ‘obviously’ is obviously the word which best describes that conclusion.”
“But then, waiting to die while you were watching something boring would be boring too, so that’d make it take even longer! And that’s boring, and it just keeps going around like that! So then you’re lying there, not-dying, forever!” The mist quivered a bit in Cerberus's jaws. “So you see, it was all a brilliant ploy to achieve true immortality!”
Everypony considered that for a moment. Rarity finally spoke. “Honestly, it’s not the worst reason to kill herself she’s ever come up with.”
“That is a low bar to clear,” growled Twilight.
“Well, yes, but this is Rainbow Dash we’re talking about. Isn’t it fair to grade her on a curve?”
Applejack broke in. “So, ignoring the part where none of this makes any sense to anypony with half a brain… your plan was to lie in unbelievable agony, on Twilight’s table, for all eternity?”
“Uh, no, obviously.”
“Every time she says that word, it hurts just a little more,” groaned Twilight.
“I mean, yes, it’d stink for a little while, but then you guys could just come heal me with a magic rainbow laser, and then I’d be immortal and awesome at the same time! Which is why I waited to do it until you came home, Twi. That way you’d be right there to get the girls and make with the Harmonizing. Plus, hanging around on the ceiling was way boring, which was perfect!”
“Um, once you stopped being bored and in pain, wouldn’t you just die like regular?” Fluttershy asked.
Twilight leaned over and asked, sotto voce, “That’s your problem with the plan? Really?”
But the mist was already hemming contemplatively. “Well, I wouldn’t be dead because laser magic… but yeah, once I stopped being bored, I wouldn’t be immortal anymore. I guess I’d just need you guys not to heal me, then…”
“Unbelievable agony, on Twilight’s table, for all eternity,” Applejack helpfully repeated. The mist scrunched its nothing in thought.
“…Aw, crud. Okay, well, I’ll think it through better next time.” The mist seemed to vibrate a bit. “Welp, ready when you are! Let’s get with the respawning!”
There was an awkward silence, which Twilight eventually interrupted by clearing her throat. “Actually, before we do that, the other girls and I have a list of demands.” She levitated a scroll up from her saddlebag, unrolled it, and cleared her throat a second time. “Number one: don’t kill yourself anymore.” She rolled the scroll back up. “Actually, there’s only one demand.”
“I wanted to add ‘please,’ but I got outvoted,” Fluttershy put in.
The mist vibrated again. “That’s it? Sure, fine. I promise I won’t kill myself anymore unless—”
“I’m gonna stop you right there, hun,” interjected Applejack. “See, we were thinking more of a blanket suicide ban. As in, no killing yourself, not even if… well, you fill in the rest, but not even then.”
“Not even then?!” cried the mist. “But that’s the most important time to be able to kill yourself!” It harrumphed. “Honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is. You can—”
“Rainbow Dash,” Rarity firmly interrupted. “Most ponies don’t get a second chance at life, let alone a… fifth?” She looked questioningly at the other girls.
“Sixth,” Twilight supplied.
“Sixth,” continued Rarity. “But, for whatever reason, the Elements of Harmony have apparently decided that your continued existence is a net gain for the powers of friendship, love, and goodness. That notwithstanding, we are getting tired of being the Elements’ designated conduit for bringing your lazy flank back topside.”
“Um, harsh,” muttered the mist.
“The first time you killed yourself, I think all of us understood,” Twilight put in. Then she frowned. “Well, for a certain definition of ‘understood,’ anyway. Part of me still refuses to believe you couldn’t grasp the inevitable consequences of attempting the ‘Super-Secret Wonderbolts Technique of Jumping Off a Cliff With an Anvil Strapped to Each Wing.’”
“I’m still a little surprised she didn’t realize Spitfire was joking,” whispered Fluttershy.
“I’m not,” Rarity whispered back.
“And I can almost understand the second time. After the rest of us went on that epic quest to discover a way to resurrect you, only to learn that the power was inside us all along, I think we all had a lot of questions about how our newfound ability to bring you back worked, and what its limits were.” Twilight frowned. “Which still doesn’t excuse you immediately killing yourself so we could ‘see if you can do it again,’ but to repeat: I can almost understand it.”
“I’m glad I have such understanding friends,” drawled the mist. “So, magic rainbow laser? Anypony?”
“But the last four have been stupid, even for you,” Twilight finished. “And all of us have decided that we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives galloping back and forth from Tartarus every time you think of some reason why you’d like to try something that even you know is fatal.”
“But that’s not fair! How come the rest of you get to kill yourselves whenever you want, but I don’t?”
“Because we don’t keep killing ourselves! And also, we don’t get to kill ourselves whenever we want!” She turned to the other girls. “Unless you all think there’s some reason ‘don’t kill yourself’ shouldn’t be a group rule, that is.”
“Nah.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Great.” Twilight returned her attention to the mist. “So. You agree not to kill yourself, or else you can just stay in Tartarus Time-Out until you change your mind.”
“Wait! What if… okay, what if all of us are trapped in the middle of the desert, and there’s nothing to eat, and the only way for the rest of you to survive is for me to kill myself so you can cannibalize me?”
“Ew. Also, no.”
Rarity cleared her throat. “Far be it from me to undercut this ultimatum, but maybe Rainbow Dash would be a little more willing to accept… supervision?”
Twilight arched an eyebrow suspiciously. “What do you mean?”
“Well, what if the new rule was, ‘No killing yourself, unless you get Twilight’s permission first?’”
“But what if she says no?” whined the mist.
“I would! Every time!” Twilight shouted. Then she took a deep breath. “But, okay. Rarity, I see what you’re getting at.”
“It’s like Granny always says,” added Applejack. “‘Those dang-blamed sky hooligans just can’t survive without us real ponies propping them up, keeping them fed, and stopping them from constantly slaughtering themselves and each other. And let me tell you, the crisis we face from the rise of miscegena—’”
“Okay!” Twilight said, her voice cracking slightly. “Rainbow Dash, do you promise not to kill yourself unless I specifically give you permission to?”
The mist mumbled something inaudible.
“What was that?”
“Yes, Mom. Geez.” The mist vibrated again. “Now hurry up and laser me!”
Twilight looked at Rarity. Rarity shrugged.
“Alright, let’s do this, I guess.” The girls closed their eyes, and the overwhelming force of pure Harmony engulfed them.
A moment later, they all lay prone on the ground, exhausted. The mist was glowing with a light of ineffable purity. Cerberus released it as an ethereal chord echoed from Existence itself, and the light guided the mist gently through the blue flames, setting it down in front of the girls. The light swelled, became a blinding flash, and with an anticlimactic plorp, vanished. Everypony took a minute to blink away the blindness.
“You’d think Harmony could come up with a way to do that without burning out everypony’s retinas,” Twilight groused. “But I guess it doesn’t really matter, since we’re never going to have to do this again. Right, Rainbow?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the newly reconstituted Rainbow Dash said, utterly failing to appreciate the miracle which was a new body for her dispossessed soul. She flapped her wings, lifting up off the ground. “I promised, didn’t I? Cross my… wait a minute.” Rainbow Dash tried again to cross herself with her hoof, and for a second time, failed. “What the hay?”
“Um, Rainbow Dash?” asked Fluttershy. “Why don’t you have any legs?”
Rainbow’s head darted side to side, then down.
“Twilight?” she slowly asked. “Why don’t I have any legs?”
All of the ponies took a minute to ponder that, while the bewinged but otherwise limbless Rainbow Dash hovered in front of them.
“Uh, guys?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Where’s Pinkie Pie?”
Fluttershy looked down. “She, um, she said she was busy this morning. And that she’d be by later if we still needed her.”
“What?! What’s more important than bringing back Equestria’s coolest Wonderbolt? And also one of the six guardians of reality or whatever?”
“She said it’s Twist’s borthday.”
“Her what?”
“She said it’s like a birthday, but on the day you would’ve been born if you weren’t born on your birthday.”
There was a long silence.
“Oh, I get it! Borthday!” Twilight exclaimed. “That’s actually pretty clever, for Pinkie.”
“Okay, girls? Focus in a little bit here?” Rainbow Dash hovered angrily in front of Twilight. “I can’t be the world’s best flier without legs. I need them for signing autographs! So how’re we going to fix this?”
“I don’t know.” Twilight scratched her chin. “I guess Pinkie’s absence meant the resurrection was only a partial success, though how that ended up meaning ‘no legs’ is something that would require a lot of research. I’ve got some books back at the castle I could—”
A glint entered Rainbow’s eye. “So this is all because Pinkie wasn’t here?”
“Well, that seems like the most—”
“So if she’d come, but somepony else stayed home, what would’ve happened?”
“Without more research, I can’t even begin to—wait.”
The glint became a gleam.
With all her authority, Twilight looked her legless friend in the eye and said, “Rainbow Dash: no.”
“Better to ask forgiveness than permission!” cried Rainbow, and before Twilight could react, Dash slammed her head down on Twilight’s horn. As Rainbow’s body suddenly became dead weight, Twilight was awkwardly thrown to the ground, locked in a forehead-embrace with the newly deceased pegasus.
The other girls rushed to help Twilight, but she quickly pulled her horn out of Dash’s skull. “RAINBOW DASH, YOU GET BACK HERE THIS—”
She stopped mid-tirade, as Cerberus’s middle head snuffled, then snatched something invisible from the air. That invisible something coalesced into a familiar-looking non-corporeal mist.
“Nice!” the mist said. “Now, Rarity, you go get Pinkie, and tell her that she and the others can try bringing me back without you this time. Everypony else, wait here.” It giggled. “This is gonna be so awesome!”
Twilight tried to wipe the brains off her face, but only managed to smear them around. Applejack offered her a handkerchief, which she accepted gratefully. “So… are we bringing her back?” Applejack asked. Seeing Fluttershy’s glare, she quickly added, “I mean, yes, we’re bringing her back eventually, but, uh… are we doing this now, or…?”
“Yes, Applejack, we’re still going to bring her back,” Twilight grumbled. “Though I suppose, based on what we now know, that we should probably wait for Pinkie to show up.”
“I don’t see what the hurry is,” sniffed Rarity. “I vote we leave her here, at least through the weekend.”
“As tempting as that sounds, no,” Twilight said, more firmly this time. “We’re going to bring her back right away, because I just remembered something.”
“And that is?” Applejack prodded.
“I remembered that we’re friends.” Twilight shrugged. “I mean, despite all of… of this, Rainbow Dash is still my friend. And when you’re friends with someone, you help them out when they need help, even when it’s not convenient. Especially when it’s not convenient! Because anyone can be friendly with you when it’s all fun and games. But getting up at dawn to march adjacent to the bowels of Tartarus to resurrect your friend not once, but twice in one day, even though it’s entirely her own fault she’s dead in the first place? Well, that’s what real friends do.”
The girls all nodded. “It’s too bad we don’t write letters to Celestia anymore,” said Rarity, “because that would’ve made a really good one.”
“I still write letters to Celestia,” said Fluttershy, looking around in confusion. “When did the rest of you stop writing letters to Celestia?”
Applejack cleared her throat. “Uh, we are still gonna try to get her to stop with the suiciding, though. Right?”
“Right. Getting ponies not to kill themselves is definitely also friendship. But we can’t do that if she’s already dead,” Twilight replied. “Besides.. another part of friendship is pranking and embarrassing each other, and if we bring Dash back, I can make her do something she might find humiliating enough to get her to think twice next time she wants to kill herself.” She shrugged. “Granted, she probably won’t learn anything from that either, but it’s worth a shot.”
Rarity arched an eyebrow. “And what, pray tell, are you going to do to embarrass her?”
Twilight grinned mirthlessly. “Before she killed herself, she bet me she would survive. Rainbow Dash owes me five bits, and by Celestia I’m not going to let her get out that bet just because she died.” The grin became a little more genuine. "After all, I'm a Princess, which means I have the power to enforce debts, with the whole government of Equestria at my back. And the only thing more certain than death… is taxes."
