Starlight Glimmer Eventually Causes the Death of Everypony
“The visible evidence of disease is the result of a dialectical relationship between the host and symbiont. Every symptom is a sign of this lasting friendship and makes the pony who experiences it special in their own way while bringing them into community with all others who also share the same symbiont.”
—Twilight Sparkle
"Insolent microbe! If you will not grow on a potato, then perish in flames!" Starlight Glimmer threw another potato slice into the furnace.
"All of you! All of you are traitors! Burn and die! I dispatch your useless, unculturable DNA to the fires of unmaking! Die! Die! Die! Burn! Die!" She hurled all her ersatz agar into the fire and then followed it with tubes of juice and slants and fertilized eggs and flasks and everything else she could grasp.
When she had her lab notebook in her magic, she paused to note that she was going to throw her notebook into the flames because science was awful and stupid and she hated everything and burning the notebook, she hypothesized, would make her feel better.
The she threw it in to the furnace and discovered that she did feel better watching it be reduced to ash.
She repeated the experiment a few times with a whole stack of notebooks filled with failure and unfulfilled hopes to improve, and it made her feel good each time.
She allowed herself a whoop of good cheer at a discovery well earned and notebooks well burned.
Then she slouched in despair to the bleached clean floor of her laboratory.
The failure of her subjects’ will to life had left her in a despondent state which was only slightly ameliorated by destroying her entire lab. But even after she’d blamed her tools to her full wicked satisfaction, the poor worksmare was still left the bitter aftertaste of her performance.
Not a single potato slice had yielded any growth and her juice was as unclouded as the day she’d bought it, and her body itself was still blissfully pure of any weeping sores or buboes or rashes or growths. Her mucus was clear, and her stools were undarkened. She had a normal body temperature, no head aches, no muscle pain, no fatigue, no hallucinations whether auditory or visual, and she wasn’t even sneezing.
She was a well mare which made her a social outcast.
How could she not be jealous?
How could she not resent the success of Rainbow Dash who flew across the skies pouring flakes of dead skin and green-tinged pus down on cheering crowds as she left a visible trail of vapors from her crusting, unwashed cunt?
How could she not resent the eyes of Applejack, those perfectly, permanently blind sacs of yellow fluid filled with parasitic worms that drooped out of their sockets to glazedly gazed up at her from every box of Apple Family brand Apples, guaranteed to be filled with parasitic worms or your money back?
The apples were certainly filled with worms, but somehow Starlight could never get the worms to grow in her eyes and she was too embarrassed to actually try to get her money back.
Nor could she make anything of Rarity’s Fashion Girl bathwater, which had supposedly been anointed by the wonderous rashes and swelling yellow boils and prolapsed anus of the Inside Out Fashionista herself. Others proclaimed that just a single sip or snort of Rarity’s Fashion Girl bathwater was enough to drive them into nearly fatal hemorrhages, but here Starlight couldn’t even get the slightest growth on a Celestia-unbeloved potato.
Even Spike, a purple-shaped clod somehow adjacent to the Rarity brand, was afflicted with scale rot causing his scales to drop off in blackened and shriveled piles and leaving his bleeding pink skin visible. His scales were being bought up throughout the Dragon Lands by those eager to join their ambassador in his insalubrious suffering. A ponified culture inexorably colonizing the skin and minds of the dragons.
And here was Starlight, barely able to manage a sniffle on her best day, and now even her efforts at growing bacteria on potato slices had failed. She couldn’t get a colony going if her life depended on it.
It just wasn’t fair. There had to be some trick to it, to becoming as decadently decorated with disease as everyone else had.
"Well, have you tried fungi? They can grow in a wide variety of environments, that's how the changelings are managing to keep up with the fad," somepony might say.
Of course, she’d tried fungi! Every single one of them, from the usually commensal Candida to the xenophilic Tinea. She’d even submitted herself to snogging a bat pony with White Nose Syndrome, but nothing had come of it other than crudely scrawled letters from the bat pony who’d apparently made something more of the evening than Starlight had intended.
She’d tried using Zecora and Maud Pie’s wildlands remedies for wellness. Rocks and weeds guaranteed to cause your hooves to break out in gigantic, yellow boils that pushed the keratin away from the flesh and covered your skin in red running fissures. They weren’t technically diseases, but some cheaters had success in using them to fit in with the herd. Unfortunately, even Maud Pie’s spiciest rocks couldn’t burn Starlight’s skin or erode her lips away and rot off her face and throat away or cause her flesh to whither away until her skin pulled tight against her skeleton. There was not even a single lump to be found growing underneath her skin or open sore peeping through it weeping white and red.
As much as it pained Starlight to admit it, she was just built different.
"Then maybe you should just admit that the most wonderful communion of sickness is beyond your reach?" Sunburst said and he was probably talking to Starlight, although it was impossible to tell because he was looking at a wall. He’d gone completely blind as a child after eating just one of the Apple family’s diseased fructose treats, and his eyes were now just sacs which drooped out of his pus drooling eye sockets filled with fluid and worm embryos that, once full grown, slithered out of his nose and dropped to the ground whenever it rained where the worms rapidly reproduced in puddles waiting for new hosts.
Any new host other than Starlight. What good was Celestia’s School for Bearers of the Blessing if a pony who graduated from it couldn’t share their blessing with her personally?
It was all about her, dammit! Starlight knew that much.
"No, I will not accept that at all." Starlight said, because just accepting it sounded like a sensible idea and she wasn't about to be sensible. She considered herself a scientist—or at least an enthusiastic amateur—and that was all about being unsensible.
And what was wrong with being an enthusiastic amateur? All the best terrorists were enthusiastic amateurs. She knew that much.
And that is when she got an idea! An awful idea! Starlight Glimmer got a wonderful, awful idea: If she couldn't become infected with the sacred majesty, then she could deprive everyone else of it.
She was going to invent hygiene.
The furnace had killed all the pathogens within it, so her first attempt was to set as many ponies on fire as possible.
This only made her more jealous though, as the ponies she incinerated became flames that spoke in their own particular language. Roaring out with evaporating gasses all that the burning pony had ever been or could be, screaming in new languages which emerged happily from blackening and cracking flesh as it split and turned into rolls that peeled back revealing still deeper treats beneath as their parasites and other essentials spilled out in despair away from the flame curling and blackening and expiring as it whisper-screamed, "I should like to start again."
Starlight had a passing thought that if she could set enough ponies on fire at the same time, then she could also set herself on fire and be part of something at last.
Unfortunately for herself, and fortunately for everyone else, Starlight had a conscience and a soul and therefore did not invent napalm and use it against civilian populations, nor did she invent fire bombs and use those against civilian populations, nor did she invent white phosphorous and use it to burn children to death.
No, Starlight didn't do anything of those things, because there were limits to her evil. She might set a few ponies on fire and fantasize about going further, but she wouldn’t actually do that. She was evil, she was totally evil, she was cartoonishly evil, but she wasn’t THAT evil.
She was an enthusiastic amateur and not a professional.
There is a poem which goes:
What the amateur does to a few for love of the game,
And is so despised for.
The professional does to millions for monetary gain,
And becomes a noble mare.
A nerd cuts a hole in the stomach of a heifer,
And that’s a good field trip for the kids to go stare,
But if one of those kids shows initiative and cuts holes in animals
They’re called a psychopath and pursued by angry hounds.
The prejudice against the amateur and the self-starter knows no bounds.
Well, it is an awful poem, but I never said it was a good one merely that it was one and exists. Technically it was and does. It even rhymes sort of sometimes. Since it was called a poem, it can't be argued against.
Well, while we’ve been whiling away the moments proving something that might resemble a point if you’d spent the whole time staring at it cross-eyed and stupid, Starlight Glimmer has been busy, busy, busy as a buzzing little bee.
She’s been spreading jealousy among the ponies by talking about how the diseases which they are fashioning so delicately within themselves, once spread, become epidemics that are no longer special or unique.
She’s been turning them against Pinkie Pie that gregarious, promiscuous sire of the hundreds of thousands of millions of herpes viruses which have infected nearly 100% of the pony population. What is special about those cute little sores and tumors if they adorn every lip and hip? If everyone is invited to a Pinkie party, what did it mean to be invited?
She’s been turning them away from Fluttershy’s rabies and other zoonotic infections. You and your pet, Starlight is assuring them, do not become closer by sharing the same worms and viruses and ectoparasites. You can wash your hooves between petting your animal friends and preparing food. That really is okay to do! Just as okay as cleaning your cat’s litter box every 48 hours to reduce the likelihood of toxoplasmosis!
She’s been encouraging them to prevent the spread of their microbiomes and instead cultivate their own cultures in themselves. Frequent hoof washing, wearing masks when in public, not sharing food or drink, rinsing their vegetables, wearing gloves while cooking, and other measures are allowing everypony to horde their own microbiota to themselves! What selfishness!
The diseased ponies should have recognized that all this accomplished was making themselves the same in not having any visible symptoms in the same way that a legion of icebergs passing beneath the water cannot be seen.
Some of them did, though, but they were so rotten with glory that they were easily beaten. Literally beaten, with a lead pipe, and just like Mr. Pony-body they exploded on impact from the blunt implement as their inflamed muscle fibers separated effortlessly erupting into goo that spattered across the ground. They came about anyway, determinedly angry that Starlight was forcing the mark of the beast on them and shutting down their tours of licking famous door knobs, but were easily pushed back time and again into wheezing heaps of separating keratin and burst boils.
It was at around this time Twilight Sparkle should have shown up, had she not died because of a decidedly stylish case of syphilis which she had sought to control through contraction of malaria which she had sought to control with an infection of Trichurius Suis which she had sought to control with an infection of round worm, and so on, until her blood could glow in a dazzling variety of colors and Rarity had finally had no choice but to kill the Princess.
The Inside Out Fashionista did poorly with competition sometimes. Ah well.
Since no one arrived to stop her, Starlight was able to develop her program to perfection in a lousy but louseless overstuffed village where her Barehoofed Doctors program dramatically improved lifespans despite the complaints levied against her by the rest of the world.
After having succeeded in demonstrating her ideas in one village, she was able to spread them like some sort of highly communicable syndrome and eventually even brought an end to the practices of surgeons not washing their instruments between dissecting cadavers and performing surgery throughout the world.
And her totalitarian hygiene regime reached all the way across and throughout Equestria and in time the world was robbed of its once dizzying and wonderful microbial diversity. Then everyone developed allergies and immune disorders, like multiple sclerosis, which were not as exciting as the diseases they’d once had.
Finally, everyone died of peanut allergies. So lame!
Author's Note
I actually wrote half of this a couple years ago.
I felt like finishing it this weekend because I wanted to increase the total suffering in the world today. You're very thank you!
