A Pie by any Other Name

The impossible odds of the eventual. The pain that persists. A visit out of the pink. An incident with a donkey's tail. Part of the job. The inherent flaws of simplicity. The deep cacky.

Twilight trotted through Ponyville with a smile on her face. It was a good day - the sun was shining and the world was at peace. So much so that she actually had the availability to not be in Canterlot for the next little while. It was nice to relax in the town that had been a home for her over the years since she had met the ponies that would change her life for the better.

Checking over her shopping list, she hummed a happy tune to herself. True, as the princess of Equestria she didn't have to do any shopping - and in fact with the variety of responsibilities she had too take over since her ascension she rarely had the opportunity - but when the stars aligned and she had a free moment to spare, Twilight enjoyed to walk out in the sun for a short while and simply enjoy picking up some sundries and other miscellaneous items.

Etching one last check mark, Twilight nodded happily, having completed her shopping list with time to spare. She levitated the scroll into her saddlebags, deciding that with the weather forecasted to be clear today she might as well just take a walk around the old place.

The town had barely changed in her absence - save for the slowly growing sprawl of the town. More an more ponies wanted to flock to the town where Twilight had gotten her earnest start. It did her heart good to see the town prosper and grow while not morphing into some parody of itself in the mean time. Ponyville could always do with more ponies - though perhaps fewer of certain sorts.

Some of the new arrivals to Ponyville simply sought an idyllic town in the middle of nowhere that was a half hour train ride from Canterlot where they could live in peace and moonlight the more risqué places that weren't in their backyard. Other ponies liked Ponyville because of the surprisingly lenient tax policy combined with the nearby source of organic apple cider.

Others were the sort that Twilight didn't particularly enjoy - hero worshippers. Some ponies, for any variety of odd reasons that Twilight never could quite grasp, thought that by moving to Ponyville they would find themselves naturally moving in the hoofsteps of Twilight Sparkle - which of course would mean they too would become royalty.

To be fair, according to the laws of probability one of these ponies might just eventually get proven right. Unfortunately for them, probability said that the next pony who would move to Ponyville and become an alicorn and then ascend to the status of royalty wasn't due for another two millennia.

Had these fortune seekers been serious about becoming royalty and had done a modicum of research into the topic, they might've found that the actual best chance at achieving this impossible dream of theirs was currently in a small village to the northeast of the Crystal Empire. According to the laws of probability, the very next pony to immigrate to that town would become the newest ruler of the long extinct Empire of Borealis and would raise it to a state of glory beyond belief.

How unfortunate that that town was currently under thirty thousand gigatons of ice and snow.

Ponyville, by contrast, had a rail line right to it. The forecast for the next miracle ascension might not be for a long time out, but probability also said that Twilight had ascended two to three years early. In short, probability could stuff it.

Twilight, however, wasn't concerned about the probabilities of an unlikely usurper. She was more concerned about if she should take the time to go by the School of Friendship. Sure, she had free license to do so and Starlight doubtlessly would be happy to see her; but did Twilight really want to make a surprise royal visit?

Honesty said no; she'd much rather just make a surprise visit and leave the whole royalty bit out of it. The problem was that any visit became a royal one with her being the princess. She really wished she could go back to the days of making a normal social call on a friend while they were at work and not have to worry about if her presence would cause said work to grind to a halt.

In the end, Twilight simply walked about Ponyville in a circuitous path that eventually led her into the Castle of Friendship. She did want to visit her friends - at least the ones that still lived in the area - before she had to go back to Canterlot, but that could wait until after work hours had come and gone and the world could get on towards leisure.

Arriving at her old home, she gave a sigh of contentment. It might've been aesthetically the inferior to a heap of rocks, but it was hers - it had even grown on her over time. Though, if there was one thing in particular she could look to changing, it would be the empty space between the flaring out of the second tier of the castle and the main doors. Perhaps a neat little banner or flag would tie it together nicely?

Entering the dusty place, Twilight locked the door behind her, giving a small sigh as she levitated her saddlebags off her back. She blinked her eyes in pain, having caught some sort of glint in them from something - likely the buckles on her saddle bags.

Filing that away to never be looked at again, she wandered through the corridors of the castle until she got to the more residential sections of the building, where she sent her saddlebags over to a table before flopping unceremoniously onto a beanbag that gave a blast of suffocatingly stale dust at her sudden introduction to its plush surface. Twilight coughed for a few moments, waving the worst of it away from her face with a hoof.

She'd have to remember next time to fluff out the beanbag before flopping into it.

A moment later she sunk deeper into the stale comfort of the old bag, heaving a sigh as she tried to rest her mind. It didn't help she had so much to think about, but she always tried to practice a bit of downtime for her brain. There was no sense in running herself ragged, but there also was no sense in not making each second as productive as it could be - the problem was finding a workable balance between those concepts of how she ought to manage her time.

As she lay there, doing her best to destress and clear her mind of the turbulent thoughts of rulership, her eyes wandered over to the mantle above the infrequently used fireplace. She gave a faint grin as her eyes passed over framed pictures that showed such wonderful memories from before she was a princess. So few survived Tirek's attack, and she was glad to have at least these.

Then her eyes fell on the newest picture and her heart lurched. She had put that frame up herself - much as the others - and yet somehow it jumped out and surprised her. It leapt out from the alleys of forgotten memories and ran a sword of emotion straight through her heart.

Twilight didn't fight the tears, letting her head fall back to the beanbag as she simply existed in her renewed pain. How had she forgotten that picture? How in the world had she managed to perform the delicate dance around all other sore memories in Ponyville and yet manage to forget the one she had framed to keep in her own second home?

She lay there for quite some time, crying what tears she had, doing her best to make it a silent cry. True, there was no pony around who might've heard her if she had wailed. She could've shouted her lungs out and the castle wouldn't have let a sound slip outside - it was a good house like that. But no, she couldn't wail as her heart melted, it wouldn't do. She had to practice composure during grief, much as Celestia had talked about over tea that one time.

She had to remain solid even when she was crumbling. Her weakest point still had to be stronger than any other pony's strongest. She was the monarch of Equestria, she had to keep up appearances even when no creature was around to see her actual appearance. It killed her inside, but she couldn't let herself fall apart in the way she wanted.

And then a knock rang through the castle.

It was an oddity of the castle that, despite no pony even being able to hear you while you were inside if you kept the windows closed, you could always hear somepony knocking at the front door. You could have been at the very top of the tower and you would've heard the knocker and known it was the front door. Twilight had always enjoyed that feature of the building.

Always; except for right then.

Pulling herself together, she slowly stood up and walked through the many halls while dabbing at her eyes with a hankie. She hated having to entertain at the best of times; but now was even worse. She wanted to curl up in a ball and simply coast until she had herself back under control, but the fates had a different idea. Some might've said a better idea, but the betterness of it was debatable.

Opening the door, Twilight locked up instantly as she was given a heavy tight, very pink hug. Twilight would've screamed or possibly might've just ran away in a different frame of mind, but the frame of mind she had had shifted from the second she had opened to the time she had been hug about seventy-eight point seven two four times.

"Twilight! I knew I saw you in town, and some other ponies said so too! I'm so happy to see you! Have you come by just to visit? Are things alright in Canterlot? How's Spike? Oh, Twilight, it's good to see you, my purple pony princess!" Pinkie yammered on. Twilight felt herself flush slightly at her alliterated title - the possessive making Twilight wish she really was possessed by the mare. Of course, she wished for other things as well, but they were many and widely varied so they didn't all bare mentioning.

"P-Pinkie..." Twilight breathed out, slowly returning the hug. "I... hi." She said lamely, patting the other mare's back tentatively. "I... could you run that by me again?" Pinkie laughed, hopping away from Twilight with a gigantic, goofy grin.

"You never change, Twilight!" Pinkie said, whether it was an imperative or a declarative wasn't entirely clear. "I just wanted to come by and say 'hi' since I knew you were in town and I was in town and being in the same town means we can say 'hi', so I did!"

"Y-yes..." Twilight stammered, nodding as she did her best to understand what Pinkie was even saying. Sometimes it was so hard to follow the mare - though at least in this case it seemed straight forward enough. "Would you like to come in?" Twilight asked on reflex, kicking herself internally even as the words came out of their own volition.

"Sure!" Pinkie chirped happily before bounding inside the castle without a second thought - likely having also skipped the first thought too. Twilight sighed inwardly, doing her best to be a good host despite having to work around her emotional hang ups. Today was not a good day to have to deal with Pinkie - not that any since the wedding were.

"So, how have you been doing?" Twilight asked, doing her best to act natural.

"Oh, I've been really busy with Lil' Cheese. Sandwich has been out on tour and its made things rather tough because there's, like, no babysitters about who can handle all her energy! I mean, right now she's with Fluttershy and Discord, but that only works out every so often!" Pinkie spewed with the greatest of ease.

Ah, yes, Lil' Cheese. Twilight smiled genuinely at the mention of the little filly. She was so much like her mother that it hurt. Twilight loved the little thing with almost as much passion as she loved Pinkie. Of course, it was more socially acceptable to dote on her adopted niece than it was to love on Pinkie, but even so.

Twilight giggled, "You remember the time Lil' Cheese decided I was the donkey for her game of pin the tail on the donkey?" Pinkie nodded vigorously.

"Oh yeah, she'll not be living that down for years!" Pinkie said with a laugh. It wasn't a malicious thought, it was just the truth. Lil' Cheese - no matter where she went in life, would always be that filly that once stuck the Princess of Equestria with a fake tail. It hurt at the time - the thin pin pricking Twilight's flank with all the force of a toddler behind it - but now it was something to laugh at.

The worst - or best - part was that Lil' Cheese had taken off her blindfold before sticking Twilight.

"You should bring her to the Council meetings more often." Twilight said with a sigh and a nod. "I know the last few times were because of the dearth of babysitters, but maybe just make it a regular thing; I'm sure the others wouldn't mind."

"Oh, I couldn't do that!" Pinkie said dramatically. "Sure, she's getting better at behaving now that she's turned one, but she's still so young and fidgety! I know I'm fidgety, but I can tone it down when I want - she's just at thirty-seven out of ten every waking second!"

"And a twenty-two when asleep." Twilight laughed. Pinkie joined in as well, dramatically falling on the floor with a whump before rocking back and worth while howling a bit too loudly. It only made Twilight laugh more.

They stayed like that for a good long while, Twilight sitting down while rubbing the tears out of her eyes and Pinkie rolling about while laughing her head off. It was good. Twilight knew she needed a good laugh, and this was it.

"There's that smile!" Pinkie said, rolling out of her laughter and back to her hooves with the greatest of ease. Twilight paused, still chuckling to herself as she tried to figure what Pinkie meant.

"What?" She said with a quizzical smile.

"You silly-willy!" Pinkie said, sitting down heavily. "I saw you. You were all bleary eyed and looked like you'd been crying. I can't have my friends feeling sad, so I did my best to get you to smile. Not just a polite smile, mind you, but a real happy smile. Like this!" She said, pulling back the corners of her mouth into an enormous grin that consumed more of her face than there had been face before. It was strange, but certainly not the strangest thing Pinkie could do.

Twilight sighed, still smiling. "Yeah..." She admitted, her eyes cast down to the floor, "I've just been feeling down. A lot of things have been going on, and some... less than happy memories have been buzzing around my head."

"Well, it's part of my job to make you as happy as possible - despite circumstances! So, what can I do to make you happy?" Pinkie asked, looking Twilight dead in the eye with the most serious expression she could manage. Twilight knew what Pinkie could do to make her happy - most of which shouldn't be said near Lil' Cheese or most anypony else - but those weren't the things Pinkie was thinking of when she asked.

In the end, the only solution to her whole problem was the complete excising of all emotion beyond platonic feelings towards Pinkie. Twilight desperately loved Pinkie, and nothing could truly stop that but... the removal of the emotion. That was it!

"That's it!" Twilight shouted in obedience to the law of narrative convenience. Pinkie was puzzled by this, not having realize which plot she was in yet - having not bothered to stop by the writers room on her way over. Twilight scampered off, leaving a minorly puzzle Pinkie who couldn't get a word in edgewise in the dust.

It was such a simple plan! Twilight could hardly believe she hadn't thought of it before! Scanning through tome after tome, she drew up the process in her mind, the whole thing coming into a clear focus. Such a simple plan lay before her. Better yet, it might just work!

True, it was - once one was to consider the implications of the plan - a rather cruel one. It meant that Twilight would not only stop loving Pinkie in the same way, but also forget that she ever had. Most memory alteration magics had the side effect that they would remold memories and experiences to fit the core idea of the spell - and so make it invulnerable to those with eidetic memories.

It wouldn't solve the problem of journals - of which Twilight was a faithful keeper - but seeing as Twilight wrote them for the purpose of having it out of her and on paper as opposed to actually reading it at some vague point in the future, she was in no danger of finding it later on and being puzzled by her own relation of how much pain love had caused her.

Who knew? If Twilight managed it just right she might even fall in love with somepony else. She didn't want to at the moment, but the thought did bring another sort of comfort as she poured over tome after tome.

"Alright alright..." She muttered, pulling out a box of arcane chalk which she used to trace out the complicated patterns of the spell. It was true that most powerful spells could be cast from the memory of the unicorn, or alicorn in this case, but seeing as memorizing a spell circle and casting usually resulted in Twilight forever knowing said spell - something for which Twilight's memory was beyond eidetic on - it was better to use the physical version this time, just to make sure she would never be suspicious about her use of a spell she didn't know and so use the counter charm to undo the effect she was working so hard at now.

That all being considered even as she drew the geometrically precise lines with the exactitude that most ponies needed protractors and compasses for, it is no wonder that Twilight got a bit distracted - lost in her world of concentric circles, complicated spell fractals, looping spirals of immense complexity, and smatterings of the dead language whose glyphs had magical properties for some unknown reason*. Spells were difficult to manage when one was concentrating solely on them, much less when considering moral, philosophical, and emotional complexities intertwined in said spells.
*Saying that it is unknown is actually a carefully constructed fiction created and sustained by mages everywhere. The fact is that any language will suffice as all languages are, in fact, innately magical. One could write the words 'Big Cock' in modern Equestrian using arcanely charged chalk, draw the proper circles, pour sufficient magic into the constructed matrix, and observe all other necessities of the spell and find themselves shortly in the presence of an exceedingly large chicken; it's just that mages prefer to think of themselves as extremely well educated, and its hard to do that when using a language that a three year-old can understand. It has to be more complicated than that, it just has to be.

Twilight nodded to herself, snapping the book shut as she closed her eyes and set it to the side while drawing in the magic that she would need; and then drew in a tad more just to make sure she had more than enough. Memory alteration could be unexpectedly taxing and drain spell matrixes of their entire reserves far faster than what might be anticipated when altering the spell to one's needs - much as Twilight did as routine. She had learned to pour thirty more thaums into her coffee maker than the manufacturer advised - thus voiding the warranty with impunity - every morning due to the extensive modifications she had made to it.

With a long exhale, she bid her memories as she knew them goodbye, and released the energy into the one use chalk around her.

The world - as one expected from such powerful spells - was filled with sparking sounds and the taste of ozone. Energy zipped about, striking the variety of pieces of metal that existed about the room, before arcing right back towards the chalk. The air popped, snapped, and crackled in a legally distinct way that put one in mind of a musician who desperately wanted to write a piece of music that already existed. The world, in general, was a mess that was revving up to explode in sparks that - if all went well - would discharge in a controlled manner.

The explosion came in a sudden, all encompassing wave of sound and energy. It was magnificent, except that Twilight didn't feel different. This might've not been of any concern, but Twilight could also still remember casting a memory alteration spell. That was what Twilight would consider in her own words as nothing less than 'disconcerting', if not a few other choice words. She cracked one of her eyes open and quickly scanned the floor with the expression of one that had just heard the dog being sick and recalled that they had fed the poor thing quite well the evening previous.

The floor, as opposed to what she had expected, was still covered in chalk even as the air around her was thick with magical twinkles that showed that... well, something had happened despite the continued presence of the arcane chalk. You didn't get points of slowly descending light like that from a party popper - you had to do real magic to get that sort of mundane effect just right.

Looking about her more thoroughly, confused as to what might've gone wrong, Twilight finally spotted the issue. There, standing in the only section of discharged chalk, was Pinkie Pie. Looking carefully at the mare, Twilight noted how still the usually energetic mare was, and then noted what part of the circle hadn't dissipated.

Twilight's understanding of the geometry of spellwork was peerless and she was essentially fluent in the ancient writing system that was used by mages everywhere, and what she had before her was something to be concerned about. By sheer happenstance, Pinkie had interrupted the show of magic by standing on top of an important ley line in the spell's prime axis, and so had absorbed not only the larger part of the magic - thus preserving most of the chalk and so nullifying the grand majority of the spell. She had used up a small portion of the spell, leaving behind what - to Twilight's quick inspection - seemed to be the guts of the spell as it were.

Usually the effect would've shot into Twilight who had positioned herself at the center of the series of circles, but many spells - this one included - had multiple secondary nexuses that could function as focus points for the spell's discharge. This would be avoided if the lines were metaphysical, but Twilight had intentionally made them physical so as to not recall them for later cross-examination.

In other words - more particularly the words of one from a different background than Twilight - Twilight was now in 'the deep cacky'.

Armed with years of knowledge on magical subjects, Twilight quickly passed about, reading off the spell she had used and comparing against the spell that remained. The portion of unused chalk accounted for about an eighth of the total circle she had drawn, but unfortunately accounted for about seventy-eight point three three percent of the spell's mechanics. Most of what had been used up was the basic logic parts of spell casting - the 'if's and 'then's that built out the fundamentals of magic causality that couldn't be skimped just because you were trying to be fancy about it - while the rest accounted for about three lines of the spells actual mechanics and the rest was... well, mostly the glue that connected the rather haphazard spell together.

Now that Twilight was looking at the spell with the intent of troubleshooting she could see at least thirty-seven redundancies in the spell that - though probably helpful - should've likely been edited out before the spell had been finished. Heck, it used Taliesin's Conjecture about seven different times through out its structure when Twilight with but a glance could tell it only needed to happen about three times - possibly four if one wanted to be extra safe.

In the short term, more redundancies were good. It made sure the spell fired off safely with plenty of shiny for the foals. The problem was that by setting seven Conjectures across the system, and by not being extremely careful where you put such a fundamental building block of magic, it made it so that this spell had no less that four separate points - that were each the size of a large wagon - onto which a pony could step that would then redirect the flow of magic at that pony instead of the central circle.

That was the problem with ancient wizards and some contemporary mages, they wanted the sparks but didn't care about it being safe for everypony else. They wanted it to go off without killing them and to make a nice show and that was enough. It then became the job of ponies like Twilight to sort out their mess and make a good spell out of a spell that was - at best - passable.

Looking up at Pinkie and retracing the lines that the mare had absorbed mentally, Twilight froze. There were several lines of the actual spell that had fired into Pinkie, but among them were not the portions of the spell that deleted and inserted the memories Twilight wanted from herself. The parts that had hit Pinkie instead were... oh my.

Twilight looked back at her book, and committed a sin.

Taking a pencil, she etched a line through the spellwork - doublechecking what she already knew to be true in the hope that she was mistaken. And then her veins ran cold.

There, on the prime axis of the spell along the line of the second and third intervals, was a word. 'Terosastines'. Now, to anypony but a mage of great learning, this was a bunch of nonsense. The main issue with Terosastines was that it was made up of Teros and Astines. The Astines was part of the spell that fired, but the Teros was among the lines that had stayed behind.

This too, on reflection, was still a bunch of nonsense to anypony without a scholarly degree in certain dead languages or two little spoken languages used by a few tribes of mole people who lived just south of - well, it doesn't matter.

The generalities of it was that when combined, the word was fairly harmless and was built as a sort of spacer word - like an elongated cousin of 'whereas' who went off to college and is an utter pain to deal with at family reunions. The greater issue at play was that Astines was not just a prick, but a malicious piece of shit that actively wanted to smash up windows and scream that it 'wasn't just a phase' before stealing the family car.

Looking at the still Pinkie, Twilight swallowed hard. Without intending it, Twilight had, in effect, fired off a spell of a completely different sort than just memory modification. Astines, the absolute pain in the donkey, had turned what otherwise would've been a harmless jumble of magical fundamentals, into a ready primed weapon.

A mind control spell.

It is to be noted that Twilight wasn't one for swearing - never having seen a good reason for it as she had so many other words to express her distaste at any given situation - but desperate times called for desperate measures.

"Shoot..."