LAIR OF THE BADALISC!!!

by Doctor Fluffy

Rating: everyone
Tags: Pinkie Pie, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Cheese Sandwich, Rainbow Dash, Comedy, Horror, Romance
Length: 38597

Pinkie Pie has been invited to a strange town to help Cheese Sandwich plan the legendary FESTIVAL OF THE BADALISC, a party celebrating a creature that reveals secrets to the entire town. But dark things are ahoof within this town.

Pinkie Pie has been invited to Cheese Sandwich's family's strange, monster-filled ancestral home of Cavallocade in the Eponine Mountains, to help him plan the legendary FESTIVAL OF THE BADALISC. During this festival, a monster that comes down from the hills will reveal the town's secrets, and the ponies of Cavallocade join together for a celebration of togetherness, honesty, and being open with your feelings.

But dark things are ahoof within this town. A sinister conspiracy hopes to drive a wedge between Cheese Sandwich and Pinkie Pie! The two ponies are alone with nothing but their feelings... and Cheese's eccentric relatives, the entirety of the town all egging them on towards a relationship. Oh, and Rainbow Dash is there - and Pinkie has unaddressed issues with how they've grown apart over the years.

Will they resolve their feelings? Will they defeat the sinister conspiracy that threatens to tear part not just the two of them but the friendship that binds the Elements of Harmony? Can they? FOR THE LOVE OF CELESTIA, CAN THEY??!

Probably. But it's all about the journey.

Cover art by me! I was going to try and photoshoop it, but then I was all like "I've been sitting on this too long. Might as well."

Published 2021-05-18 00:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-04-17 20:34:08 UTC

Chapter 3: "Didn't hurt!"

Chapter THREE

Cheese Sandwich didn’t have a room in the Mascar-pony. Not really.

See, before it’d been an inn, it’d been his nonna’s family’s manor, and there’d been servant’s quarters, a bunch of rooms the family hadn’t intended for any of their residence until they revamped the manor to serve the purpose of hospitality. Rooms where his family could always find sanctuary that served as general-purpose, special-reserve guest rooms.

And that was where Cheese failed to sleep. An old room that blurred the line between cramped and cozy and yet somehow seemed to avoid those distinctions. Its main feature was twin beds pushed against the wall, with a kind of tight closeness that ensured anything that dropped between bed and wall would probably never leave those benthic depths where portals sung the darkness feeding into a shrieking morass of guilt.

At least, that was why Nonna said it was best to sleep on the other side of the bed. Those exact words.

Cheese wasn’t a hundred percent sure that was how it worked or what any of that meant, but he got the impression it was best to keep Boneless #3 near the nightstand.

He’d been woken up a little too early. Something that sounded a little too like the claws of a dragon had scratched his windowpane, and he’d been lying down, snout buried in the pillow, unable to think straight.

As Cheese rolled over, yawning, he thought on the events of the last night or so.

On the ache of partying, the familiar dull ache and exhaustion of a night of pure fun…

That hadn’t happened.

‘Really bucked up this time,’ Cheese thought.

For the second time, trying to show his appreciation for Pinkie had blown up in his face. He’d wanted to welcome her into his family traditions. He really had. And, well… he hadn’t known Pinkie knew so much about the Badalisc when she requested to come, but he figured it’d be… nice to be near the Badalisc. To just have the truth laid bare between the two of them.

Maybe the badalisc will say what we’re both thinking. Break down all those little barriers.

But now, that seemed profoundly unlikely.

Last night was painful to remember. So exhausting. It was… it was like being attacked by, uh… an evil chocolate cherry cake!

Yeah, that made sense. Probably. After all, everything he loved, or should have loved, had somehow turned sour on him. A party, meeting the mare he loved cared deeply about, in a town where he’d spent many winter months with his family, lots of food everywhere… It had every reason to be great. It should’ve been perfect.

Parmigiano Reggiano had been suggesting I had two marefriends, and Wheely had just fallen out of the chandelier, and apparently everyone in town knows, even that one stallion that died and came back as a ghost and had a foal somehow… he thought.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He’d… it’d been in the heat of the moment. Everything had just felt so overwhelming, and…Ugh. He wasn’t sure how he felt. Especially with the part with that stallion who died and somehow fathered a foal.

How does that even-

It’d all just felt so overwhelming. He wasn’t sure he really believed what he said. It’d all moved so fast, and he felt…embarrassed. Wounded. Exhausted.

“Being among friends is what gives Pinkie her spark. I couldn’t take her away from that.”

There was nothing Cheese wished for more in that moment than the ability to take that sentence back.

Now he’d bucked it all up! Celestia, this was worse than the second time he’d met. He’d nearly spurred her to quit party planning and leaving Ponyville, and now this? This?!

What’d go wrong the next time?

His bedframe rattled a little.

Cheese made a noncommittal grumble.

“Cheese,” Tomato Sandwich said, “You gotta get up at some point.”

Cheese made a noncommittal noise.

“Why bother?” he sighed. “They’re just going to drive her off again, and it’ll be that pageant in first grade all over again.”

“WHY IS EVERYTHING USED IN SCHOOL PLAYS SO FLAMMABLE?!”

Screaming. The entire school gym/auditorium hybrid in flames. The song “La Bamba” only faster.

Also, Cheese, Portabella, and Tomato’s parents had been super embarrassing, screaming in joy at the top of their lungs although they had super minor roles.

The fire was more incidental than anything, all honesty.

Tomato Sandwich shivered. “I still have fur that won’t grow back right…”

In fact, their parents had acted so profoundly embarrassing that Tomato Sandwich had fur loss totally unrelated to the stage randomly bursting into flames.

“Look, they…” Tomato said. “Portabella and I can talk it out with them. We’ll hold them down with your party tank just to make sure you get a moment together if we have to.”

Cheese rolled over to stare at his brother.

To Cheese’s surprise, his brother wasn’t alone. Giovanni and Sans Smirk were there, along with a mare in rather earthy colors - deep browns, streaked with some beige in her mane. This mare was his big sister, Portabella.

Cheese made a motion of his head that could charitably be considered a nod. “But… Pinkie can be…”

He didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“What if I’ve scared her off?” he asked. “What if…”

He regretted the next few words as soon as that first syllable issued from his mouth:

“What if she doesn’t even want to-”

He couldn’t finish that sentence. Portabella scrunched up her snout a little, making a little ‘pffft’ noise…

And before he knew it they were all laughing uproariously. Portabella was rolling on the floor, Giovanni’s wings had just sort of given up and he had buried his face in a pillow cast off from Cheese’s bed. Cheese’s laughter wracked his body with the intensity of a cartload of fireworks cooking off one by one.

“Okay,” Cheese said, once things had settled down, “That was…”

“Chickish, really,” Giovanni said. “It’s not like this is some schoolyard crush where-”

Tomato Sandwich elbowed him.

“Okay, it is kind of like a schoolyard crush,” Giovanni admitted. “But… stallion, or adult, or whatever… we’re all adults here.”

“And this is somepony who studied friendship, learned, loved, cried, and laughed with Twilight Sparkle!“ Sans added.

“You’re right, all of you,” Cheese said. “I just… everyone was acting like we were already married, then they mentioned Rainbow Dash and… I just felt so overwhelmed. It all happened so fast!”

“...Look,” Tomato Sandwich said. “I’ll admit, our family might have gone a bit-”

“Might?” Portabella asked.

“Okay, they totally went too far,” Tomato Sandwich admitted. “But like Giovanni said, we’re all adults here. Just… I don’t know, she’s Pinkie. She’ll be understanding.”

“You’re right,” Cheese said, “I’ll talk to her today! I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”

***

Pinkie and Rainbow awoke to a knock at the window.

Which was strange, because they were on the 14th floor, and there wasn’t a fire escape out their window.

Tak… tak…. Tak….

“Mrmlyuh?” Pinkie Pie asked, groggy with the weight of sleep on her. She’d been having the most wonderful dream. About her, and…

And…

Oh.

And now I just feel sad.

The knocking against the window seemed to grow more insistent. Pinkie trotted over, before the cold snap of realization struck her.

Wait. A window. And… what am I doing?

Long, sinewy digits like spike’s forelegs (or claws or whatever they were) tapped against the window, scratching the window and tracing jagged through the window’s thin layer of frost. They looked… Pinkie struggled to describe it. Skin was stretched so tightly over those talons, and over the joints the skin looked squeezed so hard it had burst, cracking outward in jagged chunks.

Tak… tak… tak…

Somehow, it seemed insistent. Pinkie trotted up, looking at the Thing that was scratching the window. It was so close. Almost pleading.

Pinkie blinked, as its fingertips reached for the glass, AND-

Nothing.

It was just a tree. Always had been.

“Who’s knocking?” Rainbow Dash asked. She sounded to Pinkie like she’d woken up an hour or two or three and been unable to get back to sleep.

“It’s just-”

“Me!” Cheese Sandwich said, standing on the other side of the door.

Pinkie’s eyes darted from the window to the door. “Wait. How does that even-”

“Ugh, what’re you waking us up for?” Rainbow Dash asked. She suddenly sounded to Pinkie as if she was within seconds of being back to sleep.

“Well, two things,” Cheese said, sounding curiously shy. “First, breakfast is over pretty soon. Second, we gotta get out on the slopes before all the good skiing is gone.”

“Ooh!” Pinkie called out. “What’s for breakfast? Is it good?!”

***

The answer was yes, by the way.

Last night, the Mascar-pony’s restaurant had been packed to the windowsills with his family earlier, but many of them were off on the mountain or enjoying the amenities of the town. And it was towards the tail end of breakfast service, so they had it all to themselves. Maybe it meant a quieter breakfast, but…

Slopes are still going to be a bit skied off, Cheese thought. Least I get a quiet breakfast with Pinkie.

Sans gingerly let himself into one of the seats, looking over towards Cheese.

Oh, and my friends.

Pinkie finally, blessedly broke the silence:

“So, Cheese,” Pinkie said, “What’s the plan for today?”

Her eyes almost glowed in the midmorning light, her smile wide. Her mane was curly and had its typical exploded-cotton-candy look, but it looked so soft. Cheese could imagine running his hooves over it and oh dear Celestia, She’s so pretty. What do I even say?!

“Well. I.. uh…” Cheese started. “We have breakfast, and then we go up Mount Cavallocade for some skiing. When we’re done… uh, enjoy the town?”

Pinkie was strangely silent.

Rainbow Dash (who hadn’t taken a seat yet) fluttered next to Pinkie. “So what’s there to do here?”

“There’s a town history museum, a chocolate store, a bookstore if you want to pick anything up…”

“Most of that sounds kind of boring,” Rainbow Dash said.

“There’s also a club, some other good restaurants,” Portabella piped up. “A couple movie theaters, too!”

Pinkie’s head snapped towards her. “...Who are you?”

“I’m Cheese’s sister. Portabella Sandwich?” she asked.

“He didn’t mention you,” Pinkie said, raising an eyebrow.

“He also didn’t mention Rainbow Dash would come,” Portabella said.

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “...Touche. So, where were you last night?”

“That colt from the chandelier fell on me and I had a huge headache,” Portabella said. “See, I-

“Ah, the happy couple!” a stallion said, walking up to the table.

***

He was, not to put too fine a point on it, huge. It’d been dark, and Pinkie couldn’t have offered much of a description if she tried, but from his words, from his massive frame which seemed like it ran the risk of knocking over a table, it was obvious that he was the stallion that had suggested Cheese was attracted to her and Rainbow Dash.

Which was ridiculous. Rainbow Dash was already spoken for, wasn’t she? That seemed pretty obvious.

“W-we’re not a couple!” Pinkie protested, flinging her forehooves up in front of her chest, crossing and uncrossing them.

“With her?” the waiter asked, pointing to Rainbow Dash.

“...Reggie,” Cheese said, caught between sighing and what sounded very much to Pinkie Pie like laughter. “Please… no…”

“No!” Rainbow Dash said, “No, Pinkie and I aren’t…”

“She’s probably spoken for anyway!” Pinkie added.

“I what?” Rainbow Dash asked.

Pinkie ignored that. Anyway, uh...” She looked down to the huge stallion’s nametag. Parmigiano Reggiano…

“Parmigiano,” she said. “We’re not a couple. Cheese and I only saw each other a couple times over the course of about four seasons!”

“So about a year?” Giovanni muttered.

“I, uh... yeah!” Pinkie said. “Exactly, Giovanni.”

“I see…” Parmigiano the Waiter said.

Pinkie Pie breathed a sigh of relief. From what Cheese’s parents (their names were presumably Gyro and Pecorino) had said, they’d told everyone in Cavallocade that the two of them were a couple, even an undead pony’s son. Somehow. She wasn’t clear how that worked, and she had the terrible feeling she was better off that way.

“So it’s a long-distance relationship!” Parmigiano said, a big, dopey smile on his face.

In perfect harmony, Cheese, Pinkie and Rainbow’s heads slammed against the table.
“Can we, like… just order breakfast?” Rainbow Dash asked, her voice muffled by the tabletop.

“You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?” Cheese asked, his voice also muffled. “You have to be, Reggie.”

“I could be,” Parmigiano Reggiano said. “But you’ll never know.”

***

Pinkie had ordered her breakfast on the basis that it had the word ‘pancake’ in it, and what she received wasn’t the traditional Equestrian kind. It was thicker, and instead of syrup, it was festooned with a number of berries (some pureed, some not) that the menu claimed to be from the surrounding hills. There was one that she’d never seen called the Cavallocade Berry, mottled green with swirling white and pink.

Pinkie reached for the fork.

“Pecorino and Gyro can be…” Portabella said.

“...Overbearing?” Cheese asked.

“Total-” Tomato Sandwich started.

“Yeah,” Portabella said, very pointedly interrupting Tomato. “Agreed. But they’re not bad ponies. But they have a tendency to talk over people.”

“Explains why Cheese was so shy as a colt,” Giovanni said ruefully.

“Wait,” Pinkie said. “They’re… his parents?”

“....Giovanni,” Rainbow Dash said, frowning, “Maybe you shouldn’t say that sort of thing in front of your friends.”

Cheese shrugged. “No, he’s probably right.”

A pregnant pause followed.

“I’m… sorry about last night,” Cheese said.

Pinkie just stared at him.

But there was one thing distracting Pinkie Pie. Okay, not one thing, it was all of Cheese’s relatives congratulating them on being together.

Literally. All of them, in unison, with a motion that Pinkie wondered if they’d rehearsed, had turned in their chairs to say “And now, the happy couple!”

Pinkie blushed, turning away. She looked to Cheese for support, but… he’d also turned away, very pointedly looking anywhere but her.

Great.

“Do you… want to go skiing with us?” Cheese asked.

“I thought you already asked,” Rainbow Dash said, narrowing her eyes.

“Yeah, but… it’ll be just me, Sans, my brother, my cousin Portabella… and the two of us on the same chairlift if you want,” Cheese said.

There was Cheese’s family, throwing their weight around. Cheese, looking mortified.

Buck, but it all seemed like so much. Maybe she should’ve gone back to Ponyville. Maybe she should’ve tried to hit on Rainbow Dash again, but-

“You know,” Cheese said, his green eyes practically glowing, “If you want.”

“I…” Pinkie started.

And she realized, with a start, that there was nothing she wanted more on this trip than to have that chairlift ride.

***

The five of them had traipsed through Cavallocade to make their way to the foot of the ski area, a wide expanse that spanned multiple peaks. Pinkie had wondered about a base lodge, but Cheese had explained that was more of an out west thing, and out east, the lodge was far less important. They’d already brought their equipment, so why not?

Cavallocade looked so different in the sun. Instead of a glistening red, the massive tentacled thing that sat atop Cavallocade looked to be an almost frostbitten gray, marbled with red - like veins in one of the hairless mammals that Fluttershy might examine.

The base area was set between two tentacles that splayed outwards and curled back towards each other like a horseshoe, sheltering it from the winds that fed through the chasms and valleys of Mount Cavallocade. Rustic buildings - lodges, apartments, restaurants - hammered together from logs traced the path of the tentacles until they suddenly, abruptly terminated at a flat spillway wider than some roads.

Wait, Pinkie thought. Is flat the right word?

Pinkie’s brain rebelled against describing it as flat. Of course it wasn’t flat. But it sort of felt flat? If that made sense. Racks of skis, snowboards, and other things she had no name for dotted the expanse of snow leading up to the mountain, which gradually curved upwards.

Ski trails fanned out and up the snowy peaks, like tributaries into a river. The mountain’s peaks were stitched across with chairlifts and gondolas and cut through with long meandering trails that traversed or looped in graceful turns, or plunged downhill in straight slashes.

Tentacles from the great beast that stood above Cavallocade laced into the mountain. Mushrooms sprouted from its limbs, hanging above the trails like umbrellas, and icicles that were a bit too bright green hung from the tentacles above the snow.

Somewhere, off in the distance, Pinkie saw areas where the trees simply… stopped, giving way to a spotless expanse of white. Protrusions not unlike horns exploded up from the snow.

“For some reason,” Tomato Sandwich said, “It’s always-”

Cheese Sandwich tapped his brother’s shoulder.

“For some reason, it’s always cold here. Even in the summer! It’s great,” Cheese said. “You can go skiing here naked and get ice cream when you’re done sometimes! Always loved doing that when I was a colt.”

“Sounds great!” Pinkie said. “Ice cream, especially… uh…”

The two of them stared into each other’s eyes.

Rainbow Dash just slapped one hoof to her forehead.

What’s that about? Pinkie wondered.

“So, uh, we’re gonna head up the Stracciatella Quad over here,” Cheese said, stumbling over his words. “There’s a nice, easy green trail heading over to Gnocchi’s Bowl, and a couple blues, maybe even a black diamond… we can try and see how good you all are.”

Rainbow Dash fluttered by, carrying a set of skis in both sets of hooves.

“Do I actually have to go up the chairlift?” she asked. “I can just fly up and carry this stuff…”

“I mean, you could, plenty of other pegasi do it,” Cheese said, pointing up to a few pegasi flying upwards, following the paths of the chairlifts. “But it gets tiring after awhile.”

“Fair enough,” Rainbow Dash said. “Hey, how about you and Pinkie get your own chair?”

“...But it’s a six-pony chair,” Pinkie said, confused.

“No, no,” Tomato Sandwich said, “She’s right. you two deserve some time to yourself. You go ahead, we’ll catch up. There’s a double chair, you can use that.”

“You just go ahead,” Rainbow Dash said. “Just… take the chair. Please.”

The two party ponies pushed ahead. Skiing was…. Awkward for quadrupeds, or semi-quadrupeds like most of the races of Equus. Cheese was on all fours, uncomfortable thought it was, dragging himself forwards with his forelegs, poles at the sides of his barrel. Pinkie, however, had clasped two ski poles to her hooves and pushed herself forward.

Once they had made decent headway into the line:

“Okay,” Rainbow Dash said. “We’re all agreed, they’re made for each other, right?”

The five of them shared a variety of Looks.

“I mean, I thought the two of you had a thing at first,” Portabella said, “But… yeah.”

Rainbow Dash turned to stare at Portabella. “Excuse me, what?”

“You came with her here, you share a room together, you went on adventures together, you talk a lot about yourself in that diary you published-”

“Oh, Celestia, don’t remind me of that,” Rainbow Dash sighed. “That was… a pretty embarrassing time.”

“And Pinkie keeps telling people you’re spoken for,” Giovanni added.

“Not with her!” Rainbow Dash said, exasperated. “I don’t know where she’s getting that from.”

“Are you telling me there’s a heterosexual explanation for all the ways you talked about each other in that diary you published?” Tomato Sandwich asked.

“That one,” Rainbow Dash said, slapping her face with one hoof, “Was a bucking mistake.”

“...Am I the only one concerned that people are staring at us?” Giovanni asked, looking down towards Sans. “Come on, th-”

“They’d obviously be staring,” Sans Smirk said. “Two of the Elements, talking about something so public?”

He didn’t seem that bothered, though.

“Right. Of course, I’m surrounded by weirdos,” Giovanni sighed.

“This town is pretty weird,” Sans Smirk said.

“You know what?” Giovanni asked. “Yes. Sure. That is absolutely it.”

“Agreed,” Pinkie said.

Giovanni’s sigh so deepened that Cheese seriously wondered if there was something wrong with his lungs.

“Look, we had a thing at one point,” Rainbow Dash said. “But….”

“But what happened?” Tomato Sandwich asked.

“Look, I… it couldn’t work,” Rainbow Dash said. “We would’ve been great together awhile back, but… you can’t be a wonderbolt and always have time to party with Pinkie.”

“Cause you’re halfway across Equestria?” Giovanni asked.

“Mostly… I’m just not the same mare,” Rainbow Dash said. “I was happy the first moment I met her, I was happy pulling pranks, but even if I was happy, I wasn’t… going to be happy. Y’know?”

MEANWHILE, ON THE CHAIRLIFT

If Pinkie could’ve heard that, she probably would’ve brushed it off, shrugged, thought about it later, and talked it over with Rainbow Dash later that day. Like a responsible goddamn mare. Because that was what she was, no matter what the gossip rags said.

The two of them shared the chair with three other ponies.

“Look,” Cheese said, “I know my family could be…”

Pinkie stared at him, eyebrows raised, pupils small, head cocked.

“A bit…”

“...yeah,” Cheese said.

“Oh thank Luna, I couldn’t narrow it down to one witty comment,” Pinkie gasped, letting out a massive sigh like she’d been holding a breath of air so massive she could’ve floated away. Which was probably true.

“I’m sorry. But I just… I wanted to spend time with you,” Cheese said. “You’re… you’re this pink bouncing ball of joy that comes through my life like a tornado. You made me who I am today! And when I got that letter from you-”

What?

Pinkie’s mind shifted. No, that wasn’t right.

“....Wait,” Pinkie said. “I came here cause I got a letter from you.”

“No, you sent a letter to me,” Cheese said. “I didn’t even know how you got this address!”

“That’s… really weird!” Pinkie said.

“It looks like someone… wanted us both here at the festival,” Pinkie said, one forehoof under her chin. “But why… why indeedy…”

“I gotta say, I’m bamboozled,” Cheese said.

“Maybe something… wanted us to be here together?” Pinkie asked. “I mean, I’m not complaining! Cause I…”

She was quiet.

The chair juddered under the wheels of a lift tower. Pinkie shook like she was receiving a massage.

“I… wanted to see you too,” she said. “Every time I see you, it’s like my heart skips a beat. I…”

Pinkie thought on times that she’d pushed her friends away - or, now that she thought about it, times she’d pushed herself away from her friends.

I don’t know what the difference is, but it feels important, she thought.

“I can easily… throw ponies off. And you… you seem like somepony that’ll always be thinking like me. I’ll have an idea about a diving punch bowl, and you’ll ask about making a punch waterslide, and then I’ll say how we need showers so our fur doesn’t get sticky…”

“That was a good day,” Cheese said, laughing slightly.

“I just…” Pinkie said. “I don’t want to look this gift horse in the mouth.”

“What gift horse?”

“You, apparently,” Pinkie said, and both of them giggled.

“I do make novelty gifts,” Cheese admitted.

He sighed.

“Pinkie… I was thinking about what you said last night. And… I was thinking about what you said last night,” Cheese said.

“And?!” Pinkie asked, smiling.

“Look, with everyone saying we’re a couple, and what you said about losing your spark…” Cheese said. Pinkie, when I see you, I feel so happy. Like seeing you is a dessert I only get in one or two cities. But what if…”

“Yes?” Pinkie asked, smiling so hard she wondered if her face might break.

“What if I eat that dessert too much?” Cheese asked. “You might’ve been right, Pinkie. I lost my laugh because I spent so long in the same place, doing the same thing. What if meeting you stops feeling… special?”

I’ve made a huge mistake, Pinkie thought.

“It… does make a kind of sense. So does this mean we can’t be…” she started, watching Cheese’s expression. “Friends?”

Suddenly, she felt so… crestfallen. A word that would have more meaning to her if she knew what it meant. But it felt about right.

“No,” Cheese said. “I just… don’t know if we can be what apparently the entire town thinks we are.”

“Oh,” Pinkie heard herself saying from somewhere very far away. “Can we still be super duper party ponies together?”

“Of course,” Cheese said.

He could have said anything there, from ‘no’ to ‘yes’ to ‘I need scissors! 61!’ and Pinkie still would’ve felt as if she couldn’t truly stomach being with Cheese right now.

Buck.

What’ve I done?

***

MEANWHILE

The Thin Stallion stood in a patch of woods with his three compatriots, staring through a set of binoculars down towards the six ponies heading towards Gnocchi’s Bowl.

Something covered in canvas, sat behind one of the mares in this little group. She’d disguised herself as a ski patroller and kept it in a toboggan. She was an odd, patchy maroon color, her fur inexpertly dyed. For some reason, she always wore a hat and sunglasses. She’d given a different name every time he asked - Party Popper, Bright Wonder, a few others.
.
“You’re sure we need to do this,” the Thin Stallion said bluntly.

“Positive, V,” said the mare who served as their leader. The Thin Stallion’s name was a profound irony he was extremely grateful nobody had exploited. ‘V’ was perfectly fine by his standards.

She was unremarkable, as much as anypony could be in Equestria. It had been difficult to tell in the dark, under their cloak, but she was a pegasus. An off-white colored mare with a hot-pink and green mane that reminded him of flowers. She looked sweet. Innocent. Like a young girl just on the cusp of university age, back where he was from.

She’d given her name as Lily Field.

Their final member was a heavyset stallion that looked to have all the bulk that he - Victory - hadn’t gotten in translation, and shopped at the same place for dye as Bright Wonder or whatever her name was. His fur actually looked to be that same maroon color, but he’d dyed it (poorly) with a color that seemed to shift from red-purple to brown to red-brown at random.

He didn’t talk much.

“I’m telling you,” V said. “We just shoot them both. Easy.”

“We can do one better,” said Party Popper, whipping the canvas off the toboggan to reveal…

“A party cannon,” said the heavyset stallion in awe. “One of Pinkie’s party cannons…”

Party Popper stood behind the cannon. Aiming it up towards one of the mountains. “Give us the word, Fields.”

Exactly what happened on the way to Gnocchi’s Bowl was… unimportant. There was more scenery to be watched, more bizarre tentacle trees and freezing mushrooms that lined the winding trails.

“You’re both pretty good,” Cheese had said, “Maybe we can head over to the snowfields in Gnocchi’s Bowl?”

And that had been that. They’d navigated long, winding trails, making their way to the steep sides of Gnocchi’s Bowl. The higher it got, the more it opened up, into what looked from the bottom like vertical walls of snow.

“So… awesome…” Rainbow Dash said. “I wonder what kind of weather you could make, what kinds of updrafts you’d get flying in here…”

She had fluttered halfheartedly. The skis she wore on her hooves weighed her down, but she thought she could get some altitude.

As they took the lift, Rainbow suddenly understood something: buck, it’d be a pain to try and fly with these for very long!

I wonder if I can get something more compact… more aerodynamic, less weight...

There they were at the top of Gnocchi’s bowl. They’d trotted over from the lift for what felt like ten minutes (it was probably more like two)

Pinkie would remember this next moment forever. There was Cheese pointing at what looked like a sheer cliff, little fragments of hardened snow where it looked as if part of the mountain had just given up and slid off, revealing an expanse of white beneath. The chairlift was so far away from them that it looked like it was on another mountain entirely.

Off in the distance, Pinkie could see the plume of steam from a locomotive, and - through several peaks - the blue glint of the ocean.

“You think you got what it takes?” Tomato Sandwich asked. He had a huge smile on his face. “You think you’re tough enough for Mahogany Ridge?”

“Oh, I know she’s tough,” Rainbow Dash said.

“How tough are you both?”

“Wait, no, I was kidding!” Tomato said. “It’s not even called mahogany ridge!”

It was too late. By the time he’d said ‘kidding,’ Pinkie was already plunging down the hill.

“WHEEEEE!” she laughed.

“Well, guess we’re going that way,” Rainbow Dash said, and flung herself over the cliff.

“Wait, I didn’t think we’d actually-” Cheese said, after nearly half his friend group had flung themselves over the near-cliff.

“Well,” Tomato Sandwich said, “No matter what, when you’re dating, you’re never gonna be bored.”

“We’re not dating, and this was your fault!” Cheese yelled.

“How was I supposed to know she wouldn’t know I was kidding!”

“Because Pinkie… loves jokes,” Cheese said. “There’s nothing she loves more than a good punchline, and running with it, and…”

A dreamy expression slid onto his face, just as Tomato Sandwich opened his mouth.

“You’re about to ask if I’m sure we’re not dating, aren’t you,” Cheese said.

***

Pinkie didn’t even fully know what she was doing here, but skiing felt kind of like ice skating. Just faster.

“WHEE!” she yelled.

Skis actually felt easier to use than skates, come to think of it. She had so much more balance, she wasn’t going to fall on her face, and it all just felt so natural. Slide to left, dodge tree, slide to right, dodge mogul, then forward and-

Pinkie abruptly felt absolutely nothing under her skis.

She was flying, she realized. She saw the snow speed by underneath, bent her hinds, and-

-landed, surprisingly smooth, on both skis.

This is fun!

All around her was an expanse of white. Her jacket and fur coat flapped against her body in the wind. She turned, using her flank to fling herself to the left, her barrel almost parallel to the pitch of the slope.

But she felt herself drawing to a stop. Her hindlegs did hurt, she was a little tired, but whatever was slowing her felt like something beyond that.

I need to think.

Yeah, that made sense. She needed to think about… her. About Cheese. She’d been so excited, and they’d just agreed they wanted to just be friends?! After all that time she’d spent thinking about spending time with him, party planning, that was all!

And maybe he hadn’t even sent that letter?! Maybe this was all an accident and she’d burst in, hurricane Pinkie, and scared her friend off all over again!

But she also thought about Rainbow Dash. Sure, Dashie was beautiful, and…

Nah, she already had something going. Besides, Dashie had been out of Ponyville back when this all started. And she spent all that time talking to Applejack.

But what if I was to…

No, that wouldn’t work.

Or how about-

No.

I could even-

Sweet Celestia, no. Absolutely not. Never. Besides, she and Rainbow hadn’t even gone pranking together in years.

As that last thought trotted through Pinkie’s mind, she felt herself stopping. She felt her skis pressing into the snow,

“I’ll catch up!” Pinkie called out. “I need time to-”

THOMMM

***

Whatever Pinkie yelled down to Cheese Sandwich was lost in the roar as the mountain above her transitioned from rock and snow into a weather system with a speed and scale no unicorn could hope to match. Waves and clouds of snow, a tsunami and blizzard all at once but bound to the mountainside, roared down towards all of them…

And to Pinkie, who stood, staring at this juggernaut. Rainbow Dash couldn’t see the expression on her friend’s face, but she assumed that the party pony was frozen in stark terror.

“AVALANCHE!” Portabella screamed.

“NO!” Rainbow Dash yelled, but she was still heading downhill. I can’t take the skis off until I stop, she realized to her horror, I’m stuck, stuck with these BUCKING WEIGHTS CUFFED TO MY LEGS-

Snow was cascading down the hill behind them, with all the kinetic energy and subtlety of several freight trains derailing and falling down a mountain all at once.

But she couldn’t just do nothing.

Rainbow Dash turned, ready to stop despite the protestations of everycreature around her, staring up towards Pinkie.

“Don’t just stand…!” Rainbow Dash yelled.

Pinkie had already exploded down the mountain like a pie out of her Party Cannon by that second syllable.

***

Buckbuckbuckbuckbuck

Pinkie shot down the face of the mountain. Turns, moguls, trees, none of that mattered. She had to outrun it.

She jammed her poles into the snow and pushed, even as she flew forward. Anything at all for more speed.

She wasn’t sure, but she was almost certain she felt snow licking against her back, rattling along her helmet.

***

Rainbow Dash, Cheese, the other ponies and griffin that had come to Mount Cavallocade, flew downhill, towards the flat spillway at the base of the bowl.

Almost there! Cheese thought. Pinkie, for the love of Celestia, please be okay-

***

Everything became a blur to Pinkie Pie. There was a cliff coming up. She couldn’t turn, what if the avalanche went over her! But she couldn’t go over it, what if…

Buck it.

The only way out was through. Pinkie bent down, feeling wind rush over her, as she headed straight for the cliff.

***

They’d drawn to a stop. The avalanche was slowing, ever so slightly, but Rainbow Dash had assured them they were probably fine.

Pinkie, however, was not.

“What’s she doing?!” Rainbow Dash yelled as Pinkie rushed towards the cliff.

Cheese realized it before she did.

“Ohhhh no,” he groaned.

***

Pinkie rocketed up into the air. Somehow - maybe there was a rock, maybe something strange happened - there was a natural ramp just above the cliff. The ground blurred away beneath her, and all she could think was the phrase ‘oh, buck.’

“DAAAAASHIEEEEEEE!” she screamed, head darting from side to side as the wind beat against her, the ground an indistinct expanse of white.

I hope the snow is soft-

***

“PINKIE, NO-” Cheese yelled.

“Look!” Rainbow Dash yelled. Frantically, she started hammering against the buckles of her boots with her forelegs. Gotta get out of these BUCKING SHACKLES-

Pinkie arced through the air above them, flying faster and further than Rainbow had ever seen of an earth pony.

How in the buck did she get that much air? Part of Rainbow Dash wondered, distantly jealous.

But before Rainbow could escape the prison of her ski boots, she heard a thud and a yell. Instinctively, her attention slipped from her boots and she turned to see Pinkie...

….Who had slammed into the top section of a tree, bouncing off and landing on a branch. It bent under, shedding snow like a dozen little fractal avalanches, before Pinkie slid off…

“Nononononono BU-”

And hit another branch. This one broke, a cascade of splintered wood and snow.

“I-”

Another branch. Another thud.

“HIDEBU-”

“...This is a really tall tree,” Portabella said, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, buck this,” Rainbow Dash said, exploding out of her boots and rushing towards Pinkie.

She shot forward like a unicorn Guardspony throwing a fireball. Snow, trees, all was reduced to a blur. She wondered if she was flying fast enough to create a sonic rainboom. And, as she drew closer to Pinkie, the pink earth pony mare mere millimeters from her outstretched forelegs-

Pinkie fell in the snow, facefirst. She sat, motionless, in the snow, balanced like a tennis ball impaled on a unicorn’s horn, before falling gormlessly onto her side.

The wind howled.

Nopony said a word.

The pink pony was silent.

“Pinkie!” Cheese yelled. “Are you okay, did you- come on, speak to me, you’re going to be fine!”

He touched her with his forelegs. He didn’t know what he was going to do, what he could do.

“Somone, Rainbow Dash, Giovanni, go find a ski patroller!” he yelled.

“On it,” Rainbow said, taking a breath and steeling herself to fly with speed enough for a sonic rainboom. She readied her wings, tensing her muscles and-

“Didn’t hurt!” Pinkie chirped, springing up to all fours.

At that moment, one of her skis fell out of the tree, crashed onto her helmet, slid off, and landed weightlessly in the snow beside her.

She didn’t budge.

“WHAT?!” Sans Smirk asked, raising his intonation slightly. You had to know him, he was practically screaming.

“...Okay,” Rainbow Dash said, eyes wide, because at that moment what else could you say.

“I, um… huh,” Cheese said. “I… do we need to take you to ski patrol?”

“Nah, I’m good,” Pinkie said.

“Don’t worry,” Rainbow Dash said, having recovered from the initial shock, “You don’t grow up in ponyville without learning to be durable!”

“I’m not sure that’s how that works,” Giovanni said.

“Scientifically speaking, she’s correct,” Sans Smirk said.

“Cheese, while I was being flung through the air, I was thinking,” Pinkie said. “About… us.”

Rainbow Dash wore a huge smile on her face.

“....yesss?” she asked, leaning towards the two of them.

“I think we should spend as much time together as we want,” Pinkie said.

“Yessssss…” Rainbow Dash said, rubbing her hooves together.

“I think that even if we live far away from each other, there’s nothing stopping us from being…”

“Yesssss….” Rainbow Dash hissed through her smile. Portabella drew in a sharp breath.

“The best friends we can be, Cheese!” Pinkie yelled.

“...oh, COME ON!” Rainbow Dash yelled.

It was just bad luck that another avalanche started with that scream.

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU CREATURES?!” Giovanni yelled.

“Let’s… pick this one up later?” Cheese asked, looking vaguely sheepish.

Rainbow Dash looked up towards the cascade of snow rushing down the mountain.

“....Yeah,” she said, hanging her head in shame.

***

The trail to the nearest lift was long and flat. It was something you didn’t do for the fun of it, it was more like a byway than anything. A function of utility for other, more interesting runs.

“Can we head up towards one of the glades?” Pinkie asked, arm-wrestling a measure of cheer into her voice. It wasn’t necessarily something she wanted to do, but she wanted to be happy, and she figured that this sense of disappointment couldn’t be maintained if she threw her all into skiing. If she pushed through, if she tried, she’d probably find herself smiling again soon enough…

...and, well, if she did what she wanted (which was ‘go back to the Mascar-pony, check for a train ride home’) then she’d just be wallowing in sadness, and nopony ever became more happy by acting more sad.

At least, Pinkie was pretty sure of that, and anyone who was only happy when they were sad didn’t seem like somepony she’d enjoy. Even Mudbriar would be less of a stick in the…

Ohhhh, Pinkie thought, gracefully carving through the snow, her hock coming dangerously close to the corduroy of the groomed snow. Stick in the mud! NOW I get it!

The chairlift that she came up towards looked old. It would hold three ponies. There was a steep pitch of a trail that almost looked like a cliff, walled with pine trees and aspens. Or aspen. Pinkie, for reasons she could neither comprehend nor explain, knew that a forest of aspens was all technically the same tree.

But before the two of them could get on the chairlift, Pinkie saw a ski patroller. Well, she wasn’t sure and didn’t know what a ski patroller was, but they looked like nurse Redheart with that red X symbol, and they looked like emergency personnel.

Something felt off. Pinkie inched a little closer to them.

“Cheese,” Sans Smirk said, “Can we uhhh… take the same chair up? I want to talk to you.”

“Sure,” Cheese said, smiling.

Sans just sighed.

“We’ll catch up with you in a bit,” Rainbow Dash said. “Pinkie and I are gonna go talk to this ski patroller.”

“Do you want us to come with you?”

“Nah, they’ll probably be fine,” Rainbow Dash said. “Besides, I have rescue experience, do you, ah…”

“I took a course on worker safety,” Sans Smirk piped up.

“Look, don’t worry about it,” Rainbow Dash said. “If it takes too long down here, just… take another run, we’ll be fine.”

***

For whatever reason, the two of them found that Pinkie and Rainbow Dash were taking awhile to get up onto the lift. Cheese watched them standing at the base, talking to the ski patroller, pinkie punctuating each sentences with exaggerated gestures, bounces, and periodically floating in midair.

“I wonder what they’re talking about down there,” Cheese said.

He looked over at Sans.

“Come to think of it, what did you want to talk to me about?” he asked.

“Cheese,” Sans said, placing one foreleg on his friend’s shoulder, the hoof edging towards his elbow. “It is obvious. To anyone. How you feel about Pinkie.”

“That she’s one of my best friends?”

“Yes,” Sans said, “But actually no, Cheese. A relationship like what you and Pinkie could have… that’s never been something I’ve had the urge to look for. I’ve never found it important, but I can recognize when it’s important to others.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that even if it’s a step forward to admit that you can visit each other as much as you want,” Sans said, “You shouldn’t be afraid of… whatever it is you’re afraid of.”

“Look, as it is, we’re happy as friends,” Cheese said.

Sans considered this.

“Maybe,” he admitted. “But there’s such tension between you two. For whatever reason, you seem afraid of it. I think…. You need some time together to talk it over.”

“Just the two of us? Alone?” Cheese mused.

“Yes,” Portabella said, placing a hoof across Sans and onto Cheese’s shoulder. “That’s perfect, absolutely. You should just get a room-”

“We’d have plenty of time to talk things over, have a nice dinner together, just enjoy each other’s company…” Cheese mused.

Portabella just sighed. “Good Celestia, is this how you felt talking to Reggie?”

***

The chairlift wasn’t smooth.

Skiing, for whatever reason, had struggled to catch on out in mainland Equestria, so Pinkie didn’t have much in the way of experience. But she could tell this one was old. The towers rusted slightly, the chairs seemed to shake a little too much, and seemed to be perennially a month or two or three past time for painting.

It was towards the top of the lift when this one relevant interaction would happen:

“Might be a nice way for Cheese and I to have some private time,” Pinkie said.

“Oh, one of your best friends?” Rainbow Dash sighed.

Rainbow Dash leaned forward slightly. Her jacket came with a sort of cape, something that could be used to cover her wings if they got cold, but it was uncomfortable having it between her wings and the back of the chair.

Then again, sitting on anything but a stool could be uncomfortable for Rainbow Dash. And so did sitting so ramrod straight. So really, it was sort of a no-win situation.

She was right about to say something when:

“What’s wrong, Dashie?” Pinkie asked.

“...that’s what you’re going with?” Rainbow Dash asked. “After everything you’ve done, you’re just saying you could be best friends?”

“And what’s wrong with that?” Pinie asked, narrowing her eyebrows.

“Nothing!” Rainbow Dash said, spreading out her forelegs. “It’s just… I wonder if…” she sighed. “Look, I’ll settle it at the top of the chair. I’ll tell them what the ski patroller said when we’re done.”

A pause. The chair slid up to the wheel, ready to unload.

The five creatures they’d been skiing with all day all stood in close proximity, eagerly talking amongst themselves.

“Cheese,” Rainbow said. “I need to settle something.”

“What’s that?” Cheese asked.

She scratched her mane with one hoof. “How many times did you have a duet?”

“...Three,” Pinkie said.

“Yeah, that one time in ponyville,” Cheese said, reaching out with one hoof, “that other time in ponyville-”

(Punctuated with another hoof)

“-that time at the factory, and….”

(Cheese reached out with another hoof, balancing himself on his front foreleg)

“...that one time in Manehattan at the karaoke bar where we decided to sing some Flank Zappa?”

Cheese held out a fourth hoof, floating above the ground.

“Other time in Ponyville?” Pinkie asked. She was also floating.

(“Wait,” Giovanni said. “How are they-”

“That’s not important right now,” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s just… they’re both party ponies, they always do this.”

“...Really?” Sans Smirk asked. “We hired a clown for my mark mitzvah, and he couldn’t warp the fabric of reality.”

“So it’s not normal for party ponies to do this?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Nope. Our friends are just very unique,” Sans said.

“...Huh,” Rainbow Dash said, scratching under her chin with one foreleg.)

“Why do you ask?” Cheese asked, gently floating back towards the ground.

“Don’t you see?” Rainbow Dash asked. “You’re-”

“Oh, by the way,” Pinkie interrupted. “Something weird happened when we talked to that patroller. He said they didn’t need help, and we were probably the only ones in the area. But…”

***
“There’s one weird thing about the avalanche,” the ski patroller said.

“And what’s that?”

“Well, weirdest thing. In the middle of the avalanche, we found a cake, half-frozen.”

“That’s weird! What flavor was it?”

“It was, uh…” the ski patroller said. “Well, weirdest thing. Chocolate-raspberry cherry with chocolate shavings and buttercream icing.”

“Interesting,” Pinkie said. “Very, very interesting.”

She stroked her chin with one hoof, the fur of her fetlocks brushing just beneath her mouth. “That… is the same cake I use for my Party Cannon ammunition. How strange.”

***

“...Your party cannon’s ammo caused an avalanche that nearly killed you?” Giovanni asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yupperoonie,” Pinkie said, uncharacteristically solemn. “And then there’s the letter that brought me and Dashie here.”

“I still can’t figure out the deal with that,” Cheese said.

“What do you mean?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“It turns out someone sent us a fake letter to get Pinkie here,” Cheese said. “Our current theory was that something really wanted us together, but…”

His voice trailed off.

“The accidents, the avalanche…” he said. “I don’t know, it’s making me think that something’s wrong here. That maybe…”

“Maybe what?” Pinkie asked.

“That someone has it out for us,” Cheese said. “Maybe they even want to kill us.”

“I’ll call Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said immediately. “How can I get in touch with Ponyville?”

“Well,” Cheese said, “There’s a phone in the station, a semaphore tower, letters…”

“Any messenger dragons?” Rainbow asked.

“No dice,” Tomato Sandwich said. “Only royals and the like have those, and this…”

He gestured sort of generally around Cavallocade with one foreleg.

“I get it,” Pinkie said. “So… what do we do now?”

“Well,” Cheese said. “I don’t know if I’m ready to answer that. How about…. We do some more skiing and think it over?”

“And that is?” Pinkie asked.

“I’ll tell you if you tell me what you think,” Cheese said.

“Well… I want to be safe, but,” Pinkie said. Her mind raced. “But… But I want to be with you, Cheese. I don’t know if someone wanted me dead in an avalanche or not, but clearly you wanted to plan the festival of the Badalisc, and even if it was fake… I want to… no, I’d love to do it with you.”

“Why do you keep doing this?” Giovanni asked.

“What do you mean?” Cheese asked.

“You act so close, so lovey-dovey, then one of you says something like that,” he sighed.

“G,” Cheese said. “Just because we happen to be party ponies doesn’t mean… we have to do anything with each other. At the end of the day, I’m happy with her as one of my best friends, and I… just feel like this all happened suddenly. I’m not really sure how to handle my feelings on this.”

Giovanni nodded. “This is… very well thought out. I-”

(At that same time: “I agree,” Pinkie said. “So…. do we go investigate today, or tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s good,” Cheese said.)

“It’s a date!” Pinkie said.

“OH COME ON!” Rainbow Dash yelled, not for the last time.

***

The rest of the day passed without real incident. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, an excellent ski day. The seven of them traversed the mountain, had a number of humorous pratfalls, and enjoyed terrain from bowls that were curiously bare of trees and studded with moguls, to steep glades that felt nigh-on vertical.

There’s no real point in describing all of it. Why would there be?

Let’s skip forward a bit.

To the seven of them dragging themselves into the Mascar-pony, Pinkie with a slight limp and a weary yet wide, shining smile on her face.

“Any plans for the investigation tomorrow?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Well,” Tomato Sandwich said, “There’s an oracle creature that lives down in the hole behind the Rahul’s. I was thinking we could go ask it for… advice. Or maybe we could go find the Badalisc themselves!”

“Why not just do that last one?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Because it hides in the woods, caves, anywhere it can find,” Portabella said. “Maybe even this basement. Plus, it’d be…” her voice trailed off.

“Rude?” Cheese asked.

“Exactly,” Portabella said. “It’d be rude to interrupt him before the festival. I mean, we could if we had to…”

“Wait,” Rainbow Dash said. “Are we sure we shouldn’t just leave it to you two?”

“Nonsense!” Pinkie said. “It’ll be like doing a scavenger hunt or escape room together. We can also spend the time investigating, then we’ll be a party of detectives, all while we’re planning this party! It’ll be great! We can even split up into-”

“Everyone who’s not with pinkie or cheese, nose-goes!” Rainbow Dash interrupted.

Cheese and Pinkie were, all of a sudden, surrounded by ponies touching hoof to snout with hooves, talons, and wings in Rainbow Dash’s case.

“Yay!” Pinkie cheered. “We’re partners, Cheese!”

“We can only hope,” Tomato Sandwich muttered.

“What?” Pinkie asked.

“What?” Tomato Sandwich asked back.

“If you say so, Pinkie Pie,” Rainbow Dash said. “So, I can get out a call to our friends. I know they were all pretty busy, but if we’re in danger, they’ll come running.”

“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Pinkie said. “But that’s a great idea!”

“Ah, you’ve been through worse,” Portabella said. “I’m sure that with you on our side, we can handle anything!”

“I mean, that seems like… the kind of thing you really shouldn’t say,” Rainbow Dash said. “But you’re not wrong. We’ve gone up against Discord, Chrysalis, that horrible filly… Whatever we’re going up couldn’t be any more dangerous.”

“That filly,” Pinkie said. “Dashie, you know how I like everyone and everything except breaking promises and brussels sprouts?”

“Yes,” Rainbow Dash and Cheese said at once.

“I,” Pinkie said, drawing in a breath, “didn’t like her.”

Dead silence.

Then everyone in the room gasped in horror.

Someone dropped a mug of hot cocoa, only for it to shatter to the floor. A random foal cried out in unspeakable horror, tears of blood springing forth from his eyes. The song la Bamba played, but faster.

“SWEET CELESTIA!!!” Cheese exclaimed, horror in his eyes. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost, but not the normal kind like Old Stallion Livio that somehow either fathers a child while dead or has their wife cheat on them while they were either gone or undead.

“Oh thank Celestia, someone finally said it,” Rainbow Dash said. “I’ve never seen a more punchable child.”

“Why are you wanting to punch a child?!” Giovanni exclaimed.

“Pinkie?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Demonstration?”

Pinkie bent over a napkin, reaching for a pencil in her saddlebags, and produced a rough free-hoof sketch of Cozy Glow with a pencil she’d taped to one forehoof.

Pinkie took a deep breath, holding up the rough sketch. “You know, you ponies got it all wrong. Friendship isn't "magic". Friendship is power! With Twilight and her lackeys out of my way, all of Equestria will bow to me: The future… Empress of Friendship!”

Her impression of Cozy Glow was, from Rainbow Dash’s perspective, spookily accurate. This didn’t matter so much to Cheese and his friends, as they’d never seen or heard the filly.

“This is much more convincing than it has any right to be,” Cheese said, laughing despite himself.

“I know, right?!” Pinkie said. “She called me a lackey! A lackey, can you imagine?! It was really offensive.”

“What do you mean?” Sans Smirk asked.

“Well,” Pinkie said, eyes narrowing, voice uncharacteristically serious. “I am not a lackey! I’ve put so much work into being more than even just a wacky sidekick. I have dreams, I’ve spent hours with my friends trying to be more than that… and this filly is just going to say I’m less than a wacky sidekick?! That’s TOO FAR!”

She slammed her mug on the table. The table cracked ever so slightly.

Everyone found themselves laughing at that. Even if they didn’t quite understand it, there was something so captivating, so infectious about the deadpan humor Pinkie had injected into that claim.

They’d sit like that, trading stories and laughing, for quite some time.

Afterwards, things would go as you expect in a story like this, as much as you can. But for now, it was seven ponies, enjoying the atmosphere of the Mascar-Pony as they sat around their table, sipping on over-brewed, over-flavored coffee.

And that is enough for now.

Author's Note

and I am BACK, BABYYYYYYYY

Normally people come up with excuses. Like, I could say "I was busy supporting a child that wasn't mine" or "I got a job at an italian restaurant" or something, and yes, those both happened. But no, the simple reason is... I was playing lots of Warframe and Titanfall 2, and writing by myself without Jed is (to paraphrase boris strugatsky, creator of the original novel that inspired S.T.A.L.K.E.R and by extension, the metro series) like operating a two-man saw by yourself. I just didn't know how to compromise for a situation where I was doing 100% of the work again. And if anything about the chapter seems uneven, that's why - because I was so used to having cowriters, and for a number of reasons, I wanted it to be just me working on it this time.

Anyway.

I hope you like what I've made, and god willing, you will not have to wait months for the next chapter. I only have about three more planned, this story was never intended to be much of a doorstoppper. Which is what makes it kinda sad that I took so long.

Chapter 4: The Young Lovers

Chapter Four: The Young Lovers

They were all gathered around a great big wagon wheel of a table, nursing tall mugs of cider. Pinkie sat in between Cheese Sandwich and Rainbow Dash, near the edge of the table.

“We’re gonna find out who tried to kill you in an avalanche and bring them to justice!” Cheese yelled.

“I don’t know who we’ll report them to, but YEAH!” Pinkie replied.

“So,” Cheese said, “We’re gonna INVESTIGATE!”

“Yeah!” Pinkie crowed.

“We’re gonna… uh…” Cheese started.

“Actually, how do we start investigating?” Pinkie asked.

Cheese and Pinkie both deflated, like a pair of writers that had started a project and couldn’t even start the first sentence. There was an audible hissing sound as Pinkie’s mane went lank and flat.

“Oh no,” Rainbow Dash whispered under her breath.

“Honestly, good question,” Portabella said.

“If you need someone to check financial records, I could help,” Sans Smirk said, a light smile on his face. “Pinkie, have you ever sold Party Cannon ammunition to anyone?”

“Well, I nearly sold the Party Cannon to a mobster once, but Maud got it back,” Pinkie said. “So, that won’t help…”

“We could just talk to the ski patroller that found it,” Rainbow Dash said.

“There’s one option I think we’re not considering,” Tomato Sandwich said. “This… is Cavallocade, after all.”

Everyone turned to look at each other.

“We could check in with the Auralcle,” Portabella said, pretty off-hoofedly, as if that was something you could just do on a lazy saturday.

“Oh yeah, the auralcle!” Cheese said, looking down towards one of his saddlebags. “Hold on, hold on…”

He buried his snout in one of them.

“She does this bit all the time,” he whispered to Pinkie. “Loves it.”

Pinkie smiled and nodded.

“An oracle?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“No, an auralcle,” Portabella said. “It’s a creature buried deep under one of the mountains. It’s all spiralling cartilage around ears and a hundred mouths from just as many creatures. It hears the past and present, futures and times that may have yet been. Any secret it has heard from an infinite of infinities, it can speak back.

“How do you even remember all that?” Rainbow Dash asked, before turning around to see Cheese Sandwich holding up a series of giant cue cards.

“Of course,” she sighed. “So how do we get there?”

“Well,” Portabella said, “There’s this lake of glowing runoff from the creature above Cavallocade-”

(She pointed at it. They were currently underneath a massive tentacle.)

“And we need to find an iceberg solid enough to get us across it,” Portabella said. “The blood or whatever it is will melt most boats, so what we need is-”

“Why can’t Giovanni and I just fly us over?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Actually, why not just… ask the Badalisc?” Pinkie asked. “If its whole thing is revealing secrets, why can’t we get it to tell us the secret of who tried to kill me and Cheese?”

There was a deep silence. Everyone stared at her.

“Pinkie,” Portabella said. “You can’t just… go and ask the Badalisc. There’s so much ceremony, and its den is a secret place few dare to-”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “It’s up mount Frostenhorn, past the ruins of the old mining town, turn left at the crooked tree.”

For the second time, everyone stared at her.

“...How do you know that?” Portabella asked.

“I read a travel guide when I was researching Cavallocade,” Pinkie said, off-hoofedly.

“Wait, was it bound in something leathery that seemed to swim under the touch?” Cheese asked.

“Yes!”

“Pinkie, that wasn’t a travel guide, that was the neighcronomicon!” Cheese yelled.

“She what?!” Portabella gasped.“How did you not go insane?! Or develop, uh…”

Cheese held up another cue card.

“Exopsychosis?” Portabella said, stumbling over the word. “Wait. Why do you even have that cue card?”

“I didn’t organize my emergency cue card stash very well,” Cheese said sheepishly.

“Ohhh,” Pinkie said. “I thought it was a cookbook!! Cause I thought it said omnomnomicon!”

She paused. “Also wait, you have an emergency cue card stash too?!”

“You could’ve found out about it from there, too,” Cheese Sandwich admitted. “And yeah, I do.”

“Sweet!” Pinkie said.

“...Wait, was it really a cookbook?” Cheese asked.

Pinkie Pie reached into her saddlebags, producing a thick, heavy volume that smelled faintly of mushrooms. The word ‘Omnomnomicon’ was clearly printed in gold at the top.

“Huh. Well, look at me, being wrong,” Cheese said.

"Why does a cookbook have a guide on how to get to a Badalisc?” Giovanni asked, cocking his head to the side.

“Well,” Cheese said, “According to…”

He coughed. Made a strange noise at the back of his throat.

“Ooh!” Pinkie said. “I’m looking forward to this, it was so interesting and I really want to hear Cheese’s take on it!”

“Sans,” he wheezed between attempts to clear his throat, “Can you pull up some dramatic background music?”

“Sure!” Sans said, reaching into his saddlebag and retrieving a gramophone

“...you ponies are all nutcases, you know that, right?” Giovanni sighed.

“Hey, you gotta adapt to the business,” Sans said, shrugging before cranking the gramophone. Deep, bassy music began to issue forth.

“...Ooh, are you doing a dramatic voice?” PInkie asked. “You can just do your spaghetti appleloosan voice to go with this. You don’t have to hurt yourself!”

“Very well then. Thanks, Pinkie!” Cheese said, in an accent that wouldn’t sound out of place at the Apple Family Reunion, even as the gramophone kept playing. “Some will call this a legend, but my nonna was there as it happened.”

“Many moons ago, there was a chef whose restaurant fell on hard times. His traditional Cavallocade food failed to impress the locals, and somepony had spread a rumor that he filled his homemade sweets with razorblades. His life was a downhill slope that seemed to have no bottom.

So one day, after deafening silence in his restaurant, he made the journey up to the Badalisc to ask for the secrets of creating…”

Cheese took a deep breath.

”the perfect butternut squash bisque.”

He was silent.

“...And?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“And what?” Cheese asked.

“And what happened?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Did he pay a terrible price, did he learn too much and go insane, did he go insane and turn into some kind of fungal crab thing like Captain Dyer in Daring Do and The Mountains of Madness?”

“What?” Cheese asked, and blinked. “No, he got the perfect bisque recipe, defeated the pony that slandered him in a swordfish duel, and resurrected his career. Then he just wrote down his journey in the cookbook.”

“...Oh,” Rainbow Dash said, fluttering downwards slightly. “I mean, I guess I’m not mad that it turned out okay, but with all that buildup, that just...”

“Yeah, it was a pretty short story,” Pinkie said, one hoof off to the side in a half shrug. “Actually, you just gave me an idea, Dashie!”

“...What was that?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“It’s simple,” she said. “How about you head off to visit the auralcle, then Cheese and I head off to the Badalisc?”

“How did I give you that idea?” Rainbow dash asked.

“I have no idea!” Pinkie said.

“It does sound like a good idea,” Giovanni said. “But… there’s one issue.”

“What’s that?” Cheese asked.

Giovanni reached onto the sleeve of his winter coat, revealing a shining watch. “You’re both scheduled for some party planning tomorrow, and it’s almost the end of the day. We’re probably not getting anything done in the next couple hours.”

“Oh yeah,” Pinkie said. “We don’t have much longer till the festival. Skiing was fun and all-”

“Pinkie, we almost died,” Tomato Sandwich said.

“The parts where we weren’t nearly dying were pretty fun,” Pinkie pointed out.

Tomato Sandwich shrugged, conceding the point.

“-but anyway, Cheese and I do have a job to do,” Pinkie said. “So… call off the investigation till tomorrow? You can go skiing, Cheese and I can handle our jobs…”

“Sounds about right,” Cheese Sandwich said. Everypony else nodded.

“What now, though?”

“For now…” Pinkie said. She looked over to Cheese Sandwich and winked.

“Let’s PARTY!” Cheese crowed out, as Pinkie whipped pulled a massive barrel of cider and a pair of sunglasses from nowhere.

“Sounds like my kinda night!” Cheese yelled.

And with that, the entire population of the Mascar-Pony broke into song and dance. Music blared from hidden speakers.

A colt sat on the chandelier, which rocked back and forth.

“You don’t wanna fall out of the chandelier again, do you?” Rainbow Dash called up to him.

“DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, OLD LADY!” the colt yelled.

“...Who are you calling old?” Rainbow Dash asked, chuckling a little. “I’m-”

Somepony turned up the volume.

“Ooh!’ Pinkie cried out. “This is my jam!”

She paused.

“Well, that and blackberry,” she mused before darting out on the bar’s floor.

She weaved to and fro with the music’s soft beats. She bounced on three legs, one foreleg held forward….

Then tapped the floor with both forelegs, raising her left foreleg and pointing it forward as she bounced on three legs. She craned her neck forwards, twisting her head on it to and fro like a snake to a charmer’s flute.

That, Cheese said, is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“She can really go, huh?!” Cheese asked, watching Pinkie Pie contort herself.

Rainbow Dash chuckled a little. “Just go dance with her, dude!”

She flicked her right ear and forehoof to the side dismissively.

***

Cheese barely needed any prompting from the mare that Wings Magazine called “The most promising new Wonderbolts captain.”

He rocketed out onto the floor like cake from a Party Cannon, and effortlessly slipped into Pinkie’s rhythm. Mirroring her movements, before finding his own rhythm - tapping so furiously with his hooves that he practically seemed to float, and Pinkie Pie adding balletic twirls. And he found himself twirling too, and Pinkie was actually floating above the floor, and all of a sudden they matched, they were two sides of the same Bit, and-

***

And that didn’t happen. What happened was that a little spike of fear ran up and down his body, and he found himself looking at Rainbow Dash.

“You sure?” Cheese asked. “I thought Pinkie and you might…”

Rainbow Dash chuckled a little, taking a big gulp of cider.

“Nah,” Rainbow Dash said.

“You sure?” Cheese Sandwich asked. “She was really happy about throwing your birth-aversary bash. I really thought you two might’ve had something.”

“Maybe we could’ve, but…” Rainbow Dash let her voice trail off, punctuating herself with a sigh. “We’ve grown apart in a few ways. I mean, I’m the best, don’t get me wrong. I was great even when I was on my flanks on a cloud in Ponyville!”

She looked down at her cider, then towards Giovanni.

“That’s when Pinkie and I could play pranks, do whatever we wanted, run races, go skiing or bungee-jumping. A town weatherpony that can clear the sky in ten seconds flat can do that, but… the captain of the wonderbolts can’t,” Rainbow Dash said. “And Pinkie… it’s not like she hasn’t changed, it’s more that I’ve moved away from there. Out of both of us, you’re the…. The closest one to what she is right now.”

They watched her dance.

“And I think you like that,” Rainbow Dash said. “Go ahead. You’re so on the same wave that it’s crazy.”

She nudged him forward with her left wing, the feathers lightly tapping against his spine.

“Ah, what the Tartarus,” Cheese Sandwich said, picking up his own mug of cider and downing the whole thing in a gulp so massive that Rainbow Dash wondered how it wasn’t dripping down his yellow shirt. “Worth a shot.”

Portabella and Giovanni were just up from the table to let Cheese past so he could gingerly trot out onto the dance floor when it happened.

Pinkie froze. The music seemed to go quiet.

And then-

Pinkie’s tail twitched. And it was like her whole body thrummed. What she did next wasn’t weaving, it was throwing herself.

Her knee pinched. Her tale twitched. Her ears flopped. She found herself jumping into the air and flipping, her eyes fluttering. By the time she opened her eyes, she’d landed on her hind legs, shifting her flank onto the dance floor, and spun around on her madly twitching tail. It was as if every part of her body had decided to dance in its own unique way.

But Cheese never did get to dance with her.

“Those were some incredible moves,” Cheese would tell her later that night.

And Pinkie would say something that really, really should have stuck with him.

“Cheese,” Pinkie said, “That wasn’t dancing.”

“Are you sure?” Cheese would say. “That was pretty close to the beat.”

“...That,” Pinkie said, “Was a real doozy a-comin’ there. I don’t know why, but my Pinkie Sense was going loco in the coco!”

The Next Morning

This being Pinkie and Cheese, they totally forgot once they got deep underway on party planning.

So there they were, sitting in a charming little coffeehouse not far from the Mascar-Pony, comfortably situated at an intersection in the middle of town, giving a view up Mount Cavallocade.

The Town Lift stood outside, chairs of ponies drifting above the street and over a bridge that straddled Cavallocade’s main drag.

Pinkie held a large book, balanced precariously on one foreleg. The two of them sat in a charming little coffeehouse

“Okay, so hearthswarming decorations are good, we can use existing stocks like the trim, garlands, and ornaments,” Pinkie said.

“You’re sure?” Cheese asked.

“Positive,” Pinkie said. “Are there, any specific badalisc-like decorations?”

“Well,” Cheese said thoughtfully, “We have some Badalisc garlands. I have a photo, hold on…”

He reached into one of his saddlebags, tossing out a giant cue card.

“You are bucking kidding me,” Pinkie said, staring at the photo.

It was a brown, furry garland with googly eyes sewn onto one end, a red piece of yarn stretching beneath them with triangles of felt sewn under it. The overall impression was a furry tube with a head.

“Badalisc Garland!” Cheese said, proudly.

Pinkie Pie reached into her saddlebags, producing her copy of the Omnomnomicon. She licked one foreleg, and hoofed through it to find…

A picture of a badalisc. Looking almost identical to the photo on one of Cheese’s cue cards.

Pinkie reached into burst into laughter, falling onto her back and rolling on the cobblestones. She was profoundly grateful for the way her fur insulated her from the frozen temperature of th-

Why is my tail twitching?

CLANG

A flowerpot fell to the street, shattering just next to her head. Dirt spilled out, covering the ice-cold cobblestones.

The two of them abruptly stopped laughing.

“Sweet Celestia,” Cheese Sandwich breathed, his eyes wide.

“I know!” Pinkie said, staring intently at the shattered remains that lay far too close to her head. “Who keeps living flowers out in Cavallocade when it’s this cold?!”

“Plenty of ponies, actually!” Cheese said.

“It’s a really nice flower, too,” Pinkie said, looking down at the flower that (against all odds) stood upright in the dirt. It was iridescent, with its petals seeming to change color from purple to blue to pink (or perhaps it was all at once?) when you stopped looking at it. The veins of the flower whorled around circular spots like eyes.

Before Pinkie Pie’s eyes, one of them seemed to blink at her.

“Would this be a good decoration?” Pinkie asked, her tail beginning to twitch. As she stared at Cheese, at the strange flower, she didn’t notice.

“Hmmm. The Badalisc is all about secrets, people say eyeflowers watch you…” Cheese said. “Sure, why not?! We haven’t done it in awhile.”

Just then, another flower pot shattered next to Pinkie Pie.

“What if we use these in the decorations?” Pinkie asked.

“Maybe, maybe,” Cheese said, rubbing one hoof under his chin. “We can’t just use someone else’s flowers. Let’s go to the florist’s, then!”

“Alright!” Pinkie said.

“And on the way, I can take us to the town square,” Cheese said. “Traditionally, that’s…”

“Where the Badalisc comes down from the mountain?” Pinkie asked.

“Yes,” Cheese said. “We all gather there, the Salt Licker and these pantomime characters capture it and drag it off… but not before it tells out everyone’s secrets.”

“Still not sure how I feel about that,” Pinkie said. “There’s some things I might like to keep hidden.”

Cheese started trotting off in the direction of what Pinkie presumed to be the florist’s. She followed.

Something clanged to the ground behind her. But that didn’t matter to her in the least.

MEANWHILE

The Thin Stallion - Victory - was not screeching. They were not frothing at the mouth, spilling out oaths from their unknown homeland. They were not grabbing the “rifle” from the cart that trailed behind them.

Somehow, that unsettled the maroon mare.

He’d done all of those things during the last few attempts on Pinkie.

“Four-year-olds,” he hissed. “I am dealing with four year olds. I tried to get this done. And you two want her knocked out by flower pots? Dom kops. Everyone knows she has a Pinkie Sense that tells her when she’s in danger. Especially WHEN FLOWER POTS FALL ON HER!”

The maroon mare looked at the Thin Stallion, then back to the thin stallion at her side. Then over to Fields.

“Well… we don’t want to kill her, right?” the maroon mare asked. “Just… knock her out, let me do…”

A wave of cold rage flowed through her as she snarled out two words:

“My thing… and then we’ve won.”

“And how’s that going?” Lily Fields hissed. “Look at them. They’re bonding even more! I bet if you dropped another one, you’d practically have them fall in love right then and there.”

“You don’t think they’re….”

“What?” Pinkie asked. “Those ponies who tried to drop an avalanche on me? Naaaah. This is foals play riiiiiiiight here.”

“What makes you say that?” Cheese asked.

“Well it’s just…” Pinkie said. “Rainbow Dash, Twilight, Applejack, Twilight, Fluttershy, even Starlight, and Spike, we all went through so much. That’s public record. They’d… have to know what I went through, right?”

Another flowerpoint clanged to the cobblestone behind her.

“Right? They thought that would hurt you? You were kind of a goddess that one time,” Cheese said, raising one eyebrow. And internally, he facehoofed.

Because that sounded uncomfortably like the present tense. And they’d agreed that they weren’t going to-

“You think I’m a goddess?” Pinkie asked.

MEANWHILE

Lily Fields screamed incoherently.

I’ve made a huge mistake, Cheese thought, wondering what was up with that sound of distant, incoherent screaming. Gotta think this through.

“Well, you had Discord’s power to reshape reality, if that story you told me back in Manehattan is true,” he said. “And I think that’s more power than being able to move the sun and moon, so… then yes, I do think you’d count as a goddess.”

Pinkie stopped mid-bounce and just sort of hung in midair.

Oh no, what’d I say… Cheese thought.

“That’s… pretty cool!” Pinkie said, resuming her bounce.

“You know, I awhile back with Twilight during one of her group read-ins, and…” Pinkie said.

“You go to Twilight’s read-ins?” Cheese asked.

“Yeah!” Pinkie said. “Sometimes it’s just… nice, y’know?”

Cheese nodded. He didn’t really know, but it felt right to just go with it.

“And anyway,” Pinkie said, “I heard creatures would worship beings like that! And that’s just weird to think about. People worshipping Celestia, when me and my friends used to send her mail every week!”

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that,” Cheese said. And then, unbidden:

“I’d worship you,” he heard himself say. “I mean, I think I already did.”

***

Pinkie stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Well, I did think about how you inspired me for awhile, so that counts as worship,” Cheese thought.

“Awwww….” Pinkie cooed, drawing Cheese into a hug. “Cheese, that’s the nicest thing anypony’s ever said about me! if you gained the powers of Discord for thirty eight seconds and became a god, I’d worship you too!”

Cheese was motionless in Pinkie’s hug.

“...Should you, uh…” Pinkie started. “Be doing something?”

Cheese didn’t say anything.

Several seconds passed.

“Because normally, this is the point where my friends eyes start bulging or apparently I’m hugging them for too long…” Pinkie said.

Still nothing.

Yet another flowerpot fell onto Pinkie Pie. It just bounced off her mane as if it was made of rubber.

Both of them ignored it. Someone screamed in frustration off in the distance.

Pinkie scratched her chin with one forehoof., completely failing to notice the shards of ceramic nearby.

“That’s one of the nicest things anyone said about me, too,” Cheese said. He paused. “Do we still think that we might lose each other’s spark if we say we love each other?”

“...I don’t know,” Pinkie said.

“Maybe we can put it on a trial basis,” Cheese said.

“And maybe if so, we can try and keep it secret!” Pinkie said. “Having a secret relationship sounds fun!”

“And then we can surprise our friends!” Cheese added. “This is a great idea, Pinkie!”

“Let me guess,” Rainbow Dash said, fluttering up to them both, “Somehow, you’re still just friends at the end of this.”

She probably didn’t hear any of that, Pinkie thought.

In fact, Rainbow Dash totally did hear all of that.

She sighed.

“Off to go skiing?” Cheese asked, slightly muffled by the fur of Pinkie’s barrel.

“...Yes,” Rainbow Dash said, after an uncomfortable pause.

“So,” Rainbow Dash said. “How’s the party planning going?”

“It’s pretty great!” Pinkie said. “Cheese told me all about Badalisc garlands, and we were thinking about going to see a florist…”

“Well, we also need to talk to the actors that’ll be playing the Old Stallion, the Fool, and the Salt Licker,” Cheese said. “So I think we… have some time to kill."

“What about the, uh,” Rainbow dash said, a smirk creeping up her face, “young lovers?”

Cheese and Pinkie’s eyes went wide.

“Oh yeah,” Pinkie said. She reached into her saddlebags, pulling out a clipboard. “First off is the Old Stallion.”

“Oh yeah,” Cheese said. “Obvious option for that is Old Stallion Livio. He always played that role!”

“Didn’t he die and somehow have a foal?” Pinkie asked.

“...Yeah,” Cheese said, very pointedly looking at the cobblestones. “Let’s, uh… go talk to him and not think about it too hard.”

***

Pinkie rapped on the door with one hoof. The knocker was a kind of brass gargoyle head covered in verdigris. It seemed to give under her hoof, ever so slightly. As if it wasn’t metal at all.

“What the…” Cheese asked.

A low droning noise issued forth. Before Cheese’s horrified eyes, the knocker split to reveal a set of teeth. The noise that issued forth was something that could not have come from a mortal throat. It was a kind of un-sound, something that felt like a living being that somehow worked its way into the hollows in your body, between your joints and just twisted.

Cheeseforced himself to look. A pair of eyes stared out at him, pupilless and unblinking-

“BaaaaHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!”

Pinkie was laughing.

“That’s so cool!” Pinkie gasped. “How did you do that?! Can you teach me, i have so many prank ideas now!”

Against all odds, Pinkie was the strangest thing on that street. Or at least, one of the strangest. There were still the tentacles coursing above, the thestrals, the robed ponies whose hoods seemed to leak tears or confetti of inky blackness, or other ponies whose limbs seemed to bulge and contract, swinging at odd angles under their robes.

And yet nopony could say that they’d ever seen a pink earth pony mare - any pony, if they were being honest - be confronted with the strange dream-logic of Cavallocade and respond with laughter.

The door knocker blinked. Stared for a moment.

“Oh! Cheese Sandwich! Good to see ya, lad.”

The door swung open to reveal a pony who seemed perfectly ordinary in… numerous respects. They had a mane that had once been a bright vibrant color and was now streaked through with colorless gray, a pale mustache that transitioned into a scraggly beard that its wearer had tried valiantly to force into something approaching neatness.

He seemed like any older stallion you might meet in any town in Equestria, except for the fact that he was translucent. And floating.

“You must be Old Stallion Livio!” Pinkie said. “Can you tell me how you did that?! I think I might’ve tried something like that before!”

“Tried something like what?” asked the ghostly stallion - Old Stallion Livio. “How in Celestia’s name would you even-”

“Never mind that,” Cheese interrupted. “Look, we’re here to ask if you want to be the Wise Old Stallion?”

“Oh, that’s what you’re here for!” Old Stallion Livio said. “I thought you were missionaries! Or you were here to ask about my car’s extended warranty, whatever that is. Or you were going to ask me about cheating.”

“What cheating?” Cheese asked.

“Yeah!” Pinkie added. “I never thought your wife cheated on you!”

This was a lie. Pinkie had totally been wondering if Old Stallion Livio’s wife had cheated on him before he came back from the dead.

“I mean, I get that you’d ask questions, I do have a colt,” Old Stallion Livio said. “But they keep asking if I cheated on my wife!”

Pinkie and Cheese shared a Look. Pinkie in particular cocked her head like a dog, narrowing one eye, in an expression that just screamed ‘maybe we don’t deal with this.’

“I mean honestly, how would that even b-”

“Wise Old Stallion, yes or no?” Cheese interrupted.

“Sure, why not?” Old Stallion Livio asked. “Probably gonna be doing it forever, what with-”

He floated to the right.

“Y’know.”

Cheese desperately tried (and failed) not to think too hard about that one.

“Do you need a script?” Pinkie asked, reaching into her saddlebags. “We have it planned out, and-”

“Nah,” Old Stallion Livio said, waving a hoof dismissively. “I know that like the back of my hooves. I’ll be fine. Odd-shaped room, spare room, right?”

Pinkie and Cheese each craned their necks into their saddlebags, coming out with identical clipboards. Sure enough, he was right - the script’s instructions listed the Odd-Shaped Room’s spare room as the rehearsal location.

“Great!” Cheese said. “Now all we need is the Salt Licker, the Young Lovers-”

“I thought you already had that planned out,” Old Stallion Livio interrupted.

“We did?” Pinkie asked.

“Well, come on, it’s obvious,” Old Stallion Livio said. “There’s only one couple that should be doing that.”

Silence.

“...Mom and dad?” Cheese asked.

“Really?” Old Stallion Livio asked. “I would’ve thought it’d be you.”

He’s onto us! Pinkie thought, staring at Cheese Sandwich wide-eyed.

“No, we’re not… dating,” Pinkie said, stammering. “We, uh, we just… at the moment, we’re really good friends, and uh…”

Old Stallion Livio smirked. “Whatever you say. Love is so confusing nowadays.”

With that, he floated away, up out of the doorframe and into what Pinkie presumed to be a bedroom.

Pinkie and Cheese looked at each other.

“That was… strange,” Pinkie said.

Cheese just shrugged. “Ah, it’s about normal for Cavallocade.”

Pinkie Pie raised a skeptical eyebrow that threatened to hide itself beneath the cotton-candy mass of her pink mane.

“But okay,” Cheese admitted, “that was strange by Cavallocade standards too.”

He reached into one of his saddlebags, pulling out a clipboard. He held it to one hoof, pulling a small pencil from a clasp and scratching something on a sheet of paper.

“Next up is the Salt Licker,” Cheese said. “The Licker for short.”

“Who else?” Pinkie asked. “I kind of forgot to read the list.”

Cheese raised an eyebrow. “Really?! You?! But when we make novelties at the factory, you end up doing most of the accounting!”

“I got, uh…” Pinkie said. “Distracted.”

“Well, you know what they say,” Cheese said. “It’s part of being old.”

“But we’re not that old! We’re only-” Pinkie started.

“Yyyep,” Cheese said, continuing on, “that’s what they say. Memory’s the first thing to go.”

He paused.

“Followed by the memory.”

Pinkie guffawed uproariously.

***

Meanwhile

“It should be you!”

V, the thin stallion, gawped. “Me?! Do reconnaissance? On her?! Are you-”

He crossed and uncrossed his forelegs in front of himself frantically. “No. No no no, a hundred times no, hell no, fo-”

“One of us needs to have an in when we act on phase four of the plan,” Lily Fields said. “And you’ll be perfect.”

“Oh,” said the patchy maroon colored mare. “So now we have four phases?”

It might’ve seemed more imposing and fierce from anypony else. But as it was, her voice was too high pitched to truly make it sound anything but gently snarky.

The stallion next to her - also patchy and maroon - made a grumbling noise.

The first time V had seen them, he’d wondered if they were siblings. There was something familiar about the mare, but he could never quite put his finger - his hoof, right, his hoof - on it. This other stallion had also never given V his name.

“Look,” V said, rearing up and holding his forelegs in a conciliatory gesture, “I don’t know if you know this, Lily, but I hate her. I hate her so feverishly. You all think your grudges against her are worth anything, she destroyed my life. Left it in broken splinters in the kitchen floor. I will not be able to control myself, especially if you’re expecting me to be The Licker.”

“That’s what she did to me, too!” Party Popper spoke up.

“Really,” V sneered. “Did she leave you alone with no family or friends to go back to? Did she leave you A BROKEN SHELL OF A MA-”

“Yes,” Party Popper said.

Oh.

V involuntarily stumbled back. He didn’t know what expression had spread across his face, but he felt his eyes widening, his jaw going slack.

“Me too,” the maroon stallion said. V was surprised, to say the least. The maroon stallion was an enigma, even among this strange crew of ponies that had rescued him from the Crystalline Tundra. He rarely spoke, he had never given a name, and mostly communicated through monosyllabic grunting.

Everyone turned to Lily Fields.

She shook her head sadly. “Awful. Just awful. My childhood was never the same afterwards. I could never look anypony else in the eye ever again, it was so terrible.”

The four ponies stood in silence.

“Look,” Party Popper said, “I can go with you to see about getting you the position. I can even do it. Plus, we need intel on her. Maybe I can do the job and you watch me. I know how she acts.”

“That… could be doable,” V conceded.

Pinkie and Cheese had moved on to the main drag of Cavallocade. It didn’t seem to have a name - everyone just called it Main Street. This actually seemed pretty normal to Pinkie, cause nocreature ever called the main drag of Ponyville anything but main street.

What was stranger was that all the signs for main street had read… something once upon a time, and then somepony had scratched out the names.

Pinkie pulled a clipboard from Cheese out of one of her saddlebags, staring down the length of the main drag up towards another mountain. The railroad tracks crossed a bridge between two white faces of snow, through which Pinkie could see a long, bare valley. It looked to be barely explored - a few roads seemed barely discernible up through the hills and past the bridge, a few houses as well, but it was hard to tell what (if anything) was over that way.

Cheese saw her staring. “Yep, that’s where the Badalisc is,” he said, laughing a little and pointing. “Can’t believe I’m actually planning on heading up there to see the Badalisc before the festival!”

“Why?” Pinkie asked. “Is it sacred?”

Cheese scratched his chin with one hoof, deep in thought. “No, he comes down sometimes outside of the festival, but we all just sorta agreed it’d be rude to go up to his house unannounced.”

Pinkie nodded. This did make some sense.

“So the Badalisc garlands can go here, and here,” Pinkie said, pointing to a couple lampposts. She looked down at the “Are the breezie-lights a part of tradition, or…”

“No,” Cheese said, “They’re sort of a recent thing - the elder party planners of Cavallocade decided it should be happier.”

“Was it not happy before?” Pinkie asked.

“Sometimes it wasn’t,” Cheese sighed. “It’s not easy to take something that just reveals everypony’s secrets and say ‘Oh, no, it’s actually great that town gossip is that my Nonna has been there since before the town was founded!’ But end of the day, it’s about coming together.”

“Well,” Pinkie said, “For both of us, it sure is working. Cheese, it’s…”

She stopped.

What am I thinking?!

It was like she’d flung herself off a rope swing, and was now careening through midair. And ow, all she had to do was stop her fall, midair, and-

Wait a minute, how did I do that?

That’d all made sense at the time, back however many years ago that was. But-

Have to think about how to finish that sentence, but also how can I just float in midair-

Pinkie’s mind ricocheted between these two subjects with no stop in sight.

“Pinkie?” Cheese asked. “You’ve been kind of quiet for a few seconds. I’m kind of concerned…”

Then she looked into his beautiful green eyes and it all made sense.

“Cheese,” Pinkie Pie said, “These last few months with you have been some of the best of my life.”

Cheese blinked at her. “Pinkie, you’ve only been here about three days.”

“Huh,” Pinkie said. “Feels way longer.”

“Yeah,” Cheese said, nodding. “I’ve been feeling some of that too. I’ve felt… like time has just stopped for me.”

The two of them drew closer.

“I don’t know if I want it to start back up,” Pinkie Pie said, looking into Cheese’s deep emerald eyes.

“Hey,” Cheese said, “Remember how you said you were a goddess that one time?”

Pinkie giggled. “Do I?!”

“If you could do that again,” Cheese said, “Would you? Just… stop time so it was us, together?”

Pinkie’s eyes widened. Would I do that?

There was a unique feeling Pinkie had as she’d been with Cheese all these days. She felt… light. This wasn’t quite the right word, she knew that, but she also didn’t know the right word, so she felt like she deserved some leeway there.

There’d been so many times she had struggled to understand or be understood.

I know I’m different, Pinkie thought. I know I don’t always… get what other ponies are thinking.

But with Cheese, there wasn’t any need to really flex those muscles. Sure, Pinkie loved her friends, especially Rainbow Dash, but there was always that feeling she was just missing something. But with Rainbow Dash, she could simply… be the Pinkieist Pinkamena Diane Pie to ever Pinkie. With no issue.

There were a couple responses that bounced around in Pinkie’s mind. And as she opened her mouth to-

“Excuse me,” someone said, and Pinkie felt a stare raking over her like a chill wind. That voice…

Something was strange about it. It was cold and high pitched and raspy and gravelly all at once. Like no voice she’d ever heard. And whoever owned it… they were angry.

What was I doing? Was I going to say something? Was I going to… kiss Cheese?!

That last part seemed so distant. Almost… ridiculous now?\

Also, her tail was twitching. Shaking like a leaf, even.

“What’s this now?” Cheese asked, faraway annoyance in his voice.

Is that at me? Pinkie asked.

“I’m… sorry to interrupt,” the voice repeated. Pinkie narrowed her eyes, staring at the voice’s owner. The owner was a tall and thin unicorn stallion, with olive-green fur and a mussed brown mane. He had pale orange eyes.

The mare next to him was…

Odd. She was bundled up for the cold, more than anypony Pinkie had often seen (ponies had fur for a reason!) and it looked like some color, something reddish or pinkish (‘Wait what?’ Pinkie thought.) had rubbed against it. She wore a faded blue scarf over her mouth.

“We heard you were looking for actors for the festival of the Badalisc,” the stallion said. His voice was… odd. It was an accent that reminded her of Horsetralia or Scootaloo’s parents.

“Okey-doki-loki,” Pinkie said, narrowing her eyes. Something about them put her off, ever so slightly. If you were, months later, to ask what was going through her head as her Pinkie Sense overclocked,, she would say she simply had a bad feeling about all of it. Her tail twitched madly, sweeping through nearby snow like a broom.

But here’s what was actually happening: She was looking at their stances, analyzing the mysterious stallion’s voice, pinking up on a hundred small details in a way that might impress Sherclop Pones or Shadow Spade.

And she was not liking what she saw.

One-two-threedy, no-indeedy, Pinke thought, clearly agreeing with me, the narrator.

Wait what the-

“So,” Pinkie said, eyes still narrowed, voice lowered almost as much as she could (which wasn’t very much, but she still made the effort). “What roles are you auditioning for? The young lovers?”

Whatever Pinkie expected, their reactions were not it. The thin stallion gawped at her, his face a death-mask of absolute horror, one eye shrinking to the size of a pinprick and the other threatening to migrate from his face to greener pastures. He broke into a hoarse, rattling coughing fit.

The parka-wearing mare behind him stumbled back, their flanks sinking into a pile of slightly dirtied snow.

what?!

“...Apparently not,” Pinkie said, looking the two of them over.

“Pinkie,” Cheese whispered, “What’s up with you? They haven’t-”

“Isn’t your cheesy sense going nuts?!” Pinkie hissed back to him. “Look at them! They’re so sus!”

“They are,” Cheese whispered back, “But they haven’t done anything yet!”

“They’re hiding something though,” Pinkie said. “I can feel it.”

Cheese nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I see it too.”

“She’s just… here to see me off,” the thin stallion said.

“Also, he pre-” the mare started.

The thin stallion made a growling noise, his eyes raking her over. A strange pinkish color seemed to leach itself into his eyes.

Then he shrugged.

“Well, Party Popper there is right,” he conceded. “As it is… I do prefer… males. We just… neither of us can see anything happening between the two of us, so that’s why we were so shocked.”

“I see…” Cheese said. Pinkie looked at his flank, and promptly began to stare at it for a little too long. Those LEGS! Those well-toned LEGS! I’m kinda jealous of those. Maybe if I went to exercise classes with Rarity… or didn’t eat so many cupcakes… or pies… or cupcake pies…

His tail was twitching too, but lighter.

Whatever the thin stallion was saying or thinking, clearly this wasn’t suggesting imminent danger.

“If it’s not the young lovers, what role do you want?” Cheese asked.

“Maybe the… town salt licker?” the thin stallion said, blinking and sounding uncertain. “Yes, the licker. That I can do. But it’s been way too long since I acted professionally...!”

.”You’re an actor?” Pinkie asked, curious.

“I dabbled a bit back in college,” the thin stallion said. “I never took it anywhere, though.” A strange, misty look came into his eyes. “I met my wife-”

(in his strange accent, it sounded like ‘Waff’)

“-while performing, you know,” he said.

And that, that sounded genuinely earnest to Pinkie. Whatever he was, he seemed like he’d be a decent actor.

“Plus,” he said, “I spent a lot of time as the Licker already, so you know I have experience!”

He laughed a little.

“I don’t know if that’s how that works,” Cheese said.

“I have self control, don’t worry your curly little heads,” the thin stallion said. “My days of being uncontrollably lickered up are behind me now.”

“We’ll put you on the list,” Pinkie said, “See if anyone else steps forward.”

She pulled a clipboard out of her saddle bags, hooking it with that massive front curl of her mane.

“Hold on,” the parka-wearing pony next to him said. “If he can get put on the list…”

She held a hoof to her face, clearly making a show of how contemplative she was being. “Can I be the old wise woman?”

Cheese paled. “No, YOU FOOL!”

“Wait, wha-” the strange mare asked, before Cheese grabbed her with both hooves.

“My nonna always has the role!” Cheese whispered, starting to shake her in his forelegs. “Did you hear what she’ll do to you if you usurp her role? Did you hear the horrors she’s capable of?! She’ll make you wish you listened to her…”

“W-what?!” the strange mare stammered, in a strangely familiar voice. “What’ll she do?!”

Cheese stopped shaking her, leaving her suspended about two feet off the ground.

“I… don’t really know,” he admitted. “I didn’t listen. That’s why I was asking.”

“O… kay,” the strange mare said.

“Well, we can still put you on the list if we need an understudy,” Pinkie Pie said. “What’re your names? Just say them out loud and write them down.”

“I’m… Party Popper,” the mare said, mouthwriting her name in on the clipboard.

The stallion was impassive.

“Uh… mister?” Pinkie asked.

“Well,” he said. “It’s just… i’m not sure what to go with here.”

“What do you mean?” Cheese asked.

“See, the issue is that I am known by many names,” the thin stallion said, “I am old, ancient beyond reckoning-”

“Even though you’re not even forty,” the strangely familiar mare next to him interrupted.

“Bright…!” the thin stallion sighed. “I mean, ja, but how long have I been younger than forty?”

The strangely familiar mare sighed.

“Oooh! Oooh!” Pinkie said. “Less than forty ye-”

“I’ve been in my mid-twenties,” the thin stallion said.

“Wait,” Cheese Sandwich interrupted, “How on Equestria are you in your mid-twenties?”

The shadows continued deepening. A kind of strange unlight, a magenta color that shouldn’t have been there crept into the edges of his black pupils, as if the colors of his irises had been poorly painted on and were leeching out from their bounds. His horn flared, crackling and jumping like a campfire.

“For fifteen years,” the thin stallion said.

(“How is that even possible?” Cheese wondered.

“His age was reset or something,” the mare next to him said off hoofedly.)

“I am old beyond my years. I have seen countless battles, watched the unseeing eye of the space between spaces turn its sightless gaze upon me and judge me as lacking,” the thin stallion said. “I have lived and died many times. Gone by many names. But there are some who call me…”

His voice trailed off.

“...Vic?” he asked, uncertainly.

What an odd name, Pinkie thought. Sounds like it’s short for something? She blinked. “You seem… kind of uncertain.”

“Well, it’s just… I didn’t expect to be in this situation,” ‘Vic’ said. “I spent so many times hearing about the oh-so-famous Pinkie Pie, and…”

He narrowed his eyes. “Here I am.”

What Pinkie Pie felt in that moment was not a twitching tail. It was as if her body was the string of a violin and she had been plucked, her entire body spasming in the space of three seconds.

“How about we, uh,” Pinkie said, “Give you a spare script for Badalisc day!”

She forced a smile. Her Pinkie Sense had hit her like a freight train, and one of her forehooves felt like it had gone partly to sleep. It felt strange to stand up.”And then we’ll be on our way.”

“Where can I… get in contact with you?”

“Rehearsal schedule is spare room the Odd-Shaped Room tomorrow,” Cheese said.

***

Cheese Sandwich was, relatively speaking, more grounded than Pinkie Pie. Even though they wouldn’t say it in front of Ponyville’s pink premier party pony, a lot of ponyville residents might yet agree. Pinkie was often on adventures, or teaching strange creatures that had been thought of as half-mythical at the School of Friendship, or plumbing the depths of Equestrian history.

(Though in all honesty, it was more that Twilight would plumb those depths and Pinkie was just sort of there, doing her own thing or passively absorbing it)

“Those two,” Cheese said, “Were weird.”

“Oh, extremely!” Pinkie agreed, bouncing along next to him.

“And we’re just going to… let them work with us?” Cheese asked. “You felt it, and I felt it. They were hiding something!”

“They were,” Pinkie said. “But that stallion… he seemed like he really did want to play the Town Drunk.”

“It’s just…” Cheese said. “What if they’re those people that tried to kill us with an avalanche? Something about them is driving my Cheesy Sense nuts.”

Pinkie nodded slowly. “True, very true. Pinkie Sense isn’t having a good time of it. How about we just keep them at foreleg’s length?”

Cheese shrugged. “Fine by me.”

“Well then,” Pinkie said, “If we’ve got most of the preparations set out, we can go find the Badalisc!”

She jumped up into the air, one foreleg outstre-

“Hold up there, eager mcbeaver,” Cheese said. “Heading up Mount Frostenhorn isn’t easy. There’s some people that’ll take us up there on old mining lines, but…”

He shrugged, his forelegs in a ‘W’ shape. Pinkie just sort of floated there as he did.

“We’ll need jackets, climbing equipment, hats, winter socks, supplies for a fire, shovels…” Cheese said.

“Are we gonna need to buy any of that, or…” Pinkie asked.

“Nah, Nonna keeps a lot of them in the Mascar-pony,” Cheese explained. “You’d be amazed how many ponies forget how cold it can be up here.”

“Some ponies, huh?” Pinkie said. “Just because they have fur, they think they’ll be warm…”

“Pardon me,” said ‘Vic’ the thin stallion.

Pinkie Pie gasped.

“Might we… be able to help. I’m a bit of an outdoorsma… outdoorspony myself. I should be able to help out… and push comes to shove, you’ll have another set of hands to carry for you.”

He smiled.

It was just a little too wide, but it never reached his eyes. Vic maintained the same blank stare.

Cheese felt chills running along his spine. Maybe this was Cheesy Sense in action - Pinkie had never mentioned getting chills - but it wasn’t right.

He looked to Pinkie. She looked skeptical, one eye narrowed and one hoof under her chin.

“Nah, we’re good,” Pinkie said. “Cheese, I think I forgot money for a new coat.Can we go back to the hotel and get one? I think Rarity has a new boutique in town we can stop by, it’ll be great to do something nice for one of my best friends!”

There were a number of things that raced through Cheese’s mind. He had just told her they didn’t need money, and Rarity…. She didn’t have a boutique in town, did she?

I mean, she might, it’s not like I spend that much time h-

His tail started twitching.

What’s this now?

“Yeah, Rarity’s!” Cheese said. “Great to see her branching out. I love how she’s trying to be more asymmetrical, it really… stands out!”

(Cheese didn’t know very much about fashion, but credit where credit was due - he was trying.)

He placed a foreleg over Pinkie’s neck. He was wondering if he’d need to guide her, but just in the moment that his foreleg touched the voluminous mass of magenta that was her mane, she was already trotting along, passing down a sidestreet that was decorated with a massive signpost of an eye.

It was in the shadow of a massive tentacle from the beast that sat atop Cavallocade. The strange protrusions on the undersides of its tentacles appeared to have crawled onto the walls of the buildings that formed the alleyway, spreading across like roots of trees. Purple and orange leaves appeared to be growing from the sides, making the alleyway look a little bit like a tunnel made from trees.

Translucent crystalline orbs, each rounded like fruits, bloomed from some of the vines, from the great tentacle above them.

And before Pinkie knew it, they were speedtrotting down through the alleyway like schoolfoals trying to avoid getting caught by the hall monitor…

…then Cheese felt leaves brushing against his mane and realized the two of them were galloping.

The walls of the alleyway rushed away beside them. Leaves brushed against Cheese’s coat, and all of a sudden, he knew where they were.

Cheese recognized this place:

Whispervine alley, he thought. One day, this had been a fairly normal section of Old Cavallocade, And the next, the jungle had grown.

There’d been some debate about the dead beast above Cavallocade, about just what it was that caused jungle to grow from it. Perhaps it had been a dormant infection, perhaps it had eaten some of the plants… who could say.

This section of Cavallocade, for whatever reason, was not cold - it was a jungle that had sprouted up on a few disused blocks, hugging storefronts and infesting the architecture of Cavallocade. Orange, pink, and red mushrooms sprouted between the purple foliage.

Something made hooting noises from in between the overgrowth.

“Pinkie, what’s-” Cheese started.

Pinkie shoved one foreleg up towards his snout. Her eyes were wide and pleadi-

Okay, that was how Cheese normally thought of her eyes, but they were even wider now. And there was something in there that he’d never seen:

Fear.

There was the snap of a twig.

And suddenly, Pinkie dove. With the strength of a hoofball player, something that Cheese would never have expected of her, she tackled him, throwing the two of them tail over teakettle down a sloped expanse of grass that had had exploded out from between cobblestones.

They rolled between two trees that had erupted through the cobbles, into a hollow made by the roots.

When they came to, Cheese was lying on his back on a patch of grass between the trees. And Pinkie was standing over him, each hoof planted firmly within inches of his legs.

For a moment, they were both still. Cheese was staring into Pinkie’s wide, blue pleading eyes, pools of soft, inviting blue that made him think of the cool spot under bedsheets on a hot summer night.

And Pinkie was staring into Cheese’s deep, warm, green soulful emerald eyes. He looked… happy. Like there was nowhere he’d rather be than lying there, staring into her eyes, even though she’d just tackled him and thrown him downhill.

I’d be happy with that, Pinkie thought, nodding to herself slightly. She drew closer, closer, and-

“SSSSH!” someone hissed. There was a light slap of a hoof against a head.

“Oh, right,” Pinkie whispered, tapping her head with her forehoof. “We’re in danger!”

“From what?” Cheese asked.

“You’re making noise too!” the mysterious mare - Party Popper - hissed back.

Aw, buckdammit, Pinkie thought.

Pinkie’s eyes darted around as she zeroed in on the noise. Her ears were perked up, and she looked left, then right.

“Pinkie,” Cheese whispered. “What’s…”

The words died in his throat. Pinkie stared at him, eyes pleading again, and Cheese was silent.

“Come on,” Vic called out, his voice shifting into an accent like nothing she’d ever heard. It was like the words were being painfully dragged from his throat, inch by inch. “Don’t you recognize some frrrrrrriendly faces, Pinkie?! Don’t you remember?”

“Yeah,” Party Popper said, her voice rising and falling in pitch. “We just want to talk about our roles.”

Pinkie could hear the smile in their voices. But it was.. It was all twisted. Like a balloon animal, but someone had gotten even that simplistic anatomy wrong.

“They… sound? …Friendly?” Cheese asked. In absolutely no syllable of that sentence did he sound even close to certain.

Those two ponies should have felt friendly.

But…

His Cheesy Sense was acting up just like Pinkie’s. And as he looked into Pinkie’s eyes he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he trusted her.

“I shouldn't have given them the script,” Pinkie whispered. “My Pinkie sense…. Vic, the actor? He seemed sincere about some things, but my Pinkie sense was going nuts as I looked at him. I’m telling you, something is weird about hi-”

“I heeeeeeeeeeear you,” Party Popper called out, punctuating her call with a fake laugh.

This all should have been crazy to Cheese Sandwich. He went on adventures, sure, but harmless ones. He wandered Equestria, he threw parties, but his life was never threatened - unlike Pinkie Pie, anyway.

Cheese stole a glance between the trees. Pinkie followed, her eyes wide as she reared up and perched her head directly on top of Cheese’s.

This should be kinda nice, Cheese mused.

If the inexplicable sense of foreboding they were getting from Vic and Party Popper hadn’t killed his enthusiasm for how often he’d bumped up against Pinkie’s fluffy pink fur, the next sight did.

Vic swung around a corner.

A grin like an open wound bisected his face. It was a little too wide, more than Cheese would ascribe to genuine happiness. In the low, pinkish light beneath the tentacle, his teeth looked sharp. He seemed to be composed of nothing but sharp angles, each of them cutting across the street and its purple foliage like a machete.

He’s not a pony, Cheese thought, someone took a pony and put something else in there.

One foreleg cut across the weed-choked cobblestones.

His mind raced.

What’d happened?! What did we do to deserve this?! What do they think we did?!

Party Popper slunk along behind Vic

…and nothing was wrong with her at all. Next to Vic, whatever he was, she looked completely normal save for the color of her fur. It seemed to have faded, mottling into an offbeat pinkish-gray. The first word that came to Cheese’s mind when he saw it was “sickly.”

The scarf over her mouth had fallen, to reveal that same terrible open-wound smile. The color around her mouth flecked from that unhealthy pinkish gray to a bright magenta.

Almost like clown makeup, Cheese thought, and he was about to giggle involuntarily when he saw the look on Pinkie Pie’s face.

She was staring, openmouthed, eyes wide, at Party Popper’s ill-colored fur. Her huge blue eyes tracked the strange pony, and a frown spread across her face.

“No,” Pinkie said. “No, no, no. It couldn’t be.”

“What?” Cheese asked.

Pinkie shook her head, forcing a smile that strained the corners of her mouth. “Nothing, nothing at all, Cheesy! We need an escape route.”

I’ll have to ask her about that, Cheese thought.

“Okay,” he said, taking a breath.

Pinkie sat intently, hindlegs splayed out, forelegs planted on the ground in front of her. She looked strangely doglike.

“Okay, nobody lives here,” Cheese said, “But most of the doors here still work. That house that used to be blue, down the street?”

He pointed to an old Victhorsian-era house that had been overtaken by green-purple vines, each of them studded with red flowers that looked like eyes.

“It gets used as a town park that has couches inside,” Cheese said. “We can get to the Mascar-Pony through there.”

It all sounded strange to Pinkie. How did they get to the Mascar-Pony from there? How would the house help? There was an open space down the street, and it wouldn’t be hard for Vic and Party Popper to see them.

But…

Pinkie looked in Cheese’s eyes and everything made sense to her. Yes. Yes, they could do this. That would make sense. And Cheese was somepony that would never betray her trust, and because of that this would absolutely work.

Pinkie looked down at the Victhorsian house, then down to a fragment of cobblestone.

“I have an idea,” she said, scooping the fragment of rock into her right forehoof. She tossed it up…

And, with both forelegs, bucked it in the direction of Vic and Party Popper.

“Gogogogogogogo!” Pinkie hissed, and the two of them galloped towards the overgrown Victhorsian house.

“I heard a noise,” Party Popper said.

“Mompie!” Vic hissed. “That was a rock hitting a tree. Obviously they’re-”

Pinkie looked back.

“FOLLOW THEM!” he bellowed, the voice sounding deeper than his thin body should have allowed.

She regretted it instantly. For a moment, she almost wished the rock had hit Vic in the head and cut into his brow. Because he was staring at her with eyes that were… Oh, that face!

His eyebrows were narrowed, and his face had creased and folded into a mask of unyielding rage. But Celestia, those eyes. They were flat, hard pinpricks of orange set into a face that looked like a wax bust of a pony that had started melting.

Pinkie flinched even as she ran, and with a burst of speed she didn’t know she was capable of, she rushed for the house….

There was a sense of impact then something giving way, and Pinkie found herself lying on the floor of the house. Inside the entryway. There was a broken window behind her.

“...you do not do things by halves!” Cheese breathed, gingerly climbing through the window.

“...I jumped through a window?” Pinkie asked.

Cheese blinked. That was confirmation enough.

“Right,” Cheese said, “Now, first thing? We get to the roof.”

“No, first we try and block them off,” Pinkie said, trotting up to a nearby bookshelf. The wood had warped into a kind of purplish color, and mushrooms burst from between mildewed pages. “Here, help me block off the window.”

Cheese nodded. That felt right. He followed her, pushing the bookcase with his muzzle. Meanwhile, Pinkie let it fall towards her back as she held both forelegs behind her

“I… felt it too,” Cheese said through gritted teeth. “Not towards him, but the other one. Party Popper. They…. They made my skin crawl.”

“The Pinkie Sense is not infallible,” Pinkie said, “But… they followed us here, and my tail is shaking like it’s Running of The Leaves. And she has a… a smell. A kind of smelly smell. That smells… smelly…”

She sniffed the air.

“Chocolate-raspberry cherry with chocolate shavings and buttercream icing,” she whispered.

“The Party Cannon ammo,” Cheese breathed. “The… from that day you-”

THOOM

A flash of pink. The door buckled. The entire house seemed to shake.

“Come on, bru,” Vic called, his tone sickly sweet. “We just want to talk. Come on out and talk, before… an accident happens.”

“Get it to the window!” Pinkie screamed. “The window, the window!”

“Don’t worry, though,” Party Popper said. “No matter what happens, we’ll be able to pick up the pieces.”

“AAAAH!” Pinkie screamed.

In that moment, the bookcase was forgotten as the two of them stared at each other in horror.

That had sounded… exactly like her voice. Absolutely pitch-perfect.

“Pinkie, what the buck?!” Cheese yelled. “How can she-”

“I don’t know!” Pinkie yelled.

“”Cheese,” Vic said. “It’s Cheese Sandwich, ja? I heard a lot about you. You don’t deserve what we could do to her. And you don’t know her. You don’t know just how badly she can hurt people.”

Pinkie could hear an awful, sickly-sweet kind of joy in his voice.

“You can walk away. If anything, we’re doing you a favor,” Vic said. “Go ahead. You’ll be safe.”

Cheese looked at Pinkie.

She looked back with those blue eyes, a smile still on her face somehow despite the two ponies pursuing them.

I’m staying, he realized.

No matter what, I’m staying.

“Like Tartarus I will,” he said.

“Excellent,” Party Popper said. “Now we don’t have to worry.”

That imitation of Pinkie’s voice again. Cheese shivered under his fur, despite the warm temps of whispervine alley.

There was a wet, resounding boom, and a window exploded inward, a massive, heavy cake sailing through and splashing against a nearby wall. No, more than a window - a massive hole had been punched through the house’s wall, just big enough for Pinkie Pie to squeeze through if she wanted.

“POUND CAKE, BABY! Something you never figured you could use as ammo,” Party Popper crowed, a laugh ripping itself from deep within her.

Her head wormed its way through the hole in the glass.

“You want to know, don’t you?!” Party Popper cackled, pushing her head through the window. Her smile seemed to fill the hole she’d made, and in the low light her teeth seemed as jagged as shards of glass. “You.. heh… hahahahah… you wanna know what you did to us? You wanna-”

She stopped, staring at Cheese with pale blue eyes.

The exact same shade as… Cheese breathed.

“Where is she?” Party Popper asked, sounding genuinely confused. “Wh-”

THUD

Somehow, Cheese Sandwich knew exactly what was about to happen. He scrabbled backwards, legs barely finding purchase against the wet swollen hardwood, his flank slamming into a wall.

The bookcase!

Pinkie stood behind it, hindlegs outstretched backwards. She’d hammered into the bookcase they’d forgotten, catapulting it towards the other wall with the power and precision of a champion applebucker,

Party Popper’s mouth formed a small ‘O’ of quiet recognition before the bookcase tumbled down…

Right towards her head.

“GO!” Pinkie screamed, and the two of them pelted for a set of stairs.

Then there was another thud. The sound of more breaking glass. And yet another dull thump. Somewhere, a cat caterwauled. Vic made a surprisingly familiar scream.

“I CAN’T SEE MY EYES!” Party Popper screamed.

“Eh, she’ll be fine,” Pinkie said, skidding on a mildewed carpet as she rushed for another set of stairs. “I’ve seen Rainbow Dash take worse falls.”

“Why are you just STANDING THERE?!” Party Popper yelled. Her head, thankfully, had not been crushed by the bookcase.

What had happened, however, was slightly less painful. The bookcase had slammed down on her head, dragging her forward and knocking her skull against the floor. Her butt and legs stuck out and up through the window, like a foal that had gotten stuck in the laundry chute again.

“I, uh… “ Vic said, his horn glowing. “I’m trying to figure out how to get you out.”

It was silent between them.

“Why?” Party Popper asked. “I thought you hated me.”

“I…” Vic sighed. “I don’t want to leave you like that. It looks like it hurts. I’m trying to get the perfect angle to…”

He gritted his teeth. Squinted.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “There we go, there we go…”

The bookcase glowed pink. Ever so slightly, Party Popper felt the weight on her neck lessening.

Finally, once the weight was all gone, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Oh, thank Celestia,” she wheezed. “Oh, oh wow. That hurt. So bad. You gonna… uh… chase them?”

“We lost the trail, anyway,” Vic said. “And I need to make sure you’re okay.”

The two of them were silent for a few seconds, Party Popper still lying with her head on the floor, her legs still poking out from the window.

“So, first step. You gonna… do something about that?” Vic asked.

“No, I kind of… don’t wanna move,” Party Popper said. “That hurt. Like, a lot. When’d she learn to buck that hard?”

“Dunno,” Vic said. “From what I know, she barely had any training from Celestia.”

“...She had training from Celestia?” Party Popper asked, surprised. “I thought that was just Princess Twilight!”

“Princess what?!” Vic asked. He was staring at Party Popper - well, he was staring at her butt. He was staring at her butt as if it had grown a second head from the cutie mark she kept under all those clothes.

“I…” Party Popper sighed. “No. Nevermind.”

She shivered. And remembered the instruction she’d gotten from Lily Fields.

If you hint at anything about Princess Twilight, about Tirek, anything at all, I will find a unicorn that can finish the job she started on you, Fieldshad hissed. I mean it. I can think of so many ways to make your life worse.

Revenge against Twilight was a fool’s game. But against Pinkie? That’d seemed more achievable.

“Look,” she said. “We’ve got more important things. Like who’s going to be in the horseapples with Fields, and how we keep her from-”

Vic’s voice trailed off. His head snapped around to see Lily Fields, standing just behind him, perched on a tower of vines that might have once been a lamppost.

Standing just underneath her, underneath the possible lamppost, was the quiet maroon stallion. He stared at them both.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Fields said. “Give me some ideas. I need inspiration for what we can do to her to make up for your mistakes.”

Author's Note

IT'S BACK BABY

Chapter 5: At The Mares Of Madness

At The Mares of Madness

Rainbow Dash came as fast as she could.

“Hey,” Rainbow Dash said, “what’s-”

“I think we found the ponies that tried to kill us,” Pinkie said. “We need to get to the Badalisc as soon as we can. We’re finding out who did this.”

“You sound like you have a plan,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Honestly, part of it was hoping you help with that,” Pinkie said sheepishly. “But we already have the directions to see the Badalisc, so…”

“We have gone off less of a plan before,” Rainbow Dash said. “Come to think of it, what was our plan back during the Summer Sun Celebration?”

“I wasn’t really listening,” Pinkie admitted. “I just know we go in the forest, and then, uh… get the elements, and…”

“Well, it’ll turn out better this time,” Rainbow Dash said. “We’ve got years of experience, we’ve got more ponies on our side…”

“And,” Cheese said, “You’ve got Cavallocade ready to help, too.”

The two mares looked at him in awe.

“Really?” Pinkie asked, sounding as if she couldn’t quite believe that.

“My family has deep roots here,” Cheese said. “As far as they’re concerned, whoever’s doing this hurt one of their own…. And,” he sighed. “And they hurt my… best friend.”

“They didn’t say best friend, did they,” Portabella asked.

Cheese sighed. “...No.”

“Honestly!” Pinkie cried out, throwing out her forelegs. “Where do creatures get this from?”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Gee, I wonder where.”

“Dashie,” Pinkie said, “I should probably tell you… there was one thing I couldn’t get past while planning.”

“What’s that?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“You can fly over to Twilight or Applejack,” Pinkie said. “You’re such a fast flier, you could get to Twilight easy as pie!”

Rainbow Dash cocked her head and frowned.

This was not a bad idea. It made lots of sense, but…

“It is a good idea,” Rainbow Dash admitted. “But it’s hard to fly that far. And… I don’t know if I could forgive myself if I wasn’t here for you.”

“You really are the best friend a mare could ask for,” Pinkie said, nuzzling and hugging her.

Cheese sighed and looked down at the floor.

Can we really make that work?

“I’m with you. All of you,” Rainbow Dash said. “We find whoever did this, and we show ‘em what Twilight’s best friends are capable of, and what a mistake they made.”

Pinkie’s eyes widened.

“I mean it,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Warning Twilight is still a good idea, though,” Giovanni said. He paused. “Actually, what if I can’t get to her? What if she has princess duties or she’s not-”

“Go talk to Applejack, then. Maybe then, she’ll talk to Flutters, or… I don’t know, just tell as many ponies as you can,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Are you sure they’ll trust me?” Giovanni asked, looking down towards the floor.

“Abso-tively posolutely!” Pinkie Pie chirped. “Discord lives there.”

With those three words, Pinkie had silenced the entire room.

“...You know,” Portabella said, “It is kinda weird when you say it out loud like that.”

Pinkie shrugged, holding out one forehoof. “Ehhhhh…”

For whatever reason, nopony felt like questioning that one.

“I can help out in town,” Sans Smirk piped up. “I… won’t be much help out there. What about Tomato? He can help you out."

“So everyone knows what they’re doing?” Cheese Sandwich asked.

Everyone nodded.

Later

Apparently in this part of the Eponines, where tourism had become the dominant industry, they called anything meant to get up the mountain (save for a chairlift) a “tramway.”

Pinkie couldn’t quite understand that. Trains were only a sort of cursory interest, but from what she could tell: Did you have a cable car that sputtered and seemed to vent black smoke? Tramway. A set of tracks just barely wider than Applejack’s farm’s apple carts, that harvested meat from the creature over Cavallocade and resold it to carnivores that preferred to have gotten it more or less ethically? Tramway. Small railroad line that headed up the Frostenhorn towards stands of mushrooms the size of trees that were sold as exotic furniture, and belched (as opposed to vented. There was a difference) black smoke?

Still a tramway.

It was this last conveyance on which Pinkie, Cheese, Rainbow Dash, Giovanni, and Portabella traveled. It was an ancient locomotive that looked to be about as old as Ponyville (maybe even older) and clattered along ancient train tracks.

“Quickest way to the abandoned town uphill,” said the older pony who stood by the boiler with a shovel. “Barely even know why we keep this stuff around, the Badalisc doesn’t even use it… that we know of, but hey. Towns are towns.”

Pinkie Pie nodded sagely. Towns were indeed towns. Unless they were midsized burgs. Though that probably wasn’t what he was going for - more something about how sometimes, your hometown just… seemed weirder than anything to an outside observer, and it was better not to question it.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Pinkie said.

“Do ya?” the old stallion asked.

“More or less,” Rainbow Dash said, nodding slightly. “Hey, is that the town?”

“Sure is,” the old stallion driving the train said, pointing with one foreleg towards a collection of outbuildings up ahead, half-drowned by the snow. They looked to have been built in the characteristic Cavallocade style, mostly wooden with peaked roofs, but the winds and biting cold had seared them to an almost black color.

It matched the trees that encircled it. Pines like taller Hearthswarming trees, maples, other trees Pinkie couldn’t name, all seemed indistinctly dark under the gray clouds. The pines were especially odd to her, as they still had their needles, but… they still

“Yep,” the stallion who drove the train said, to nobody in particular, “Badalisc ain’t too far from here, city mares.”

“Thanks for taking us up this way,” Rainbow Dash said. “Almost don’t want to fly up there.”

“The great Rainbow Dash not wanting to fly?!” Pinkie Pie gasped in what may or may not have been mock-horror.

“It’s not that bad!” Rainbow Dash protested. “I just…”

She leaned in to nuzzle Pinkie.

“I care about you. A lot,” Rainbow Dash said. “And I don’t want to be running on empty when you need me at my best.”

(She was looking at Cheese and Pinkie.)

“So,” Rainbow Dash said, “What do we know about them?”

“They’re a unicorn stallion and a…” Cheese scratched one forehoof under his chin. “Earth pony, I think.”

“It’s weird,” Pinkie said, “There’s something so familiar about her.”

“You see it too?” Cheese asked.

“It’s like it’s at the tippy-tip of my tongue,” Pinkie said, nodding. “But I just… I can’t…”

She felt the train slowing, and looked around the tiny cabin of the locomotive that they shared. Small wooden outbuildings drew into focus, half-buried under snow and roots.

The small locomotive drew to a stop.

“End of the line,” the engineer said. “Anything past this point is either covered in snow or washed out.”

The terminus of the small rail line was a station smaller than Fluttershy’s cottage. Pinkie peered in, noting that there was a cot, a small stove, and an office space, all of which would’ve comfortably fit in her apartment above Sugarcube Corner with space to spare.

It all appeared to be set into a little plateau of the mountain, a small nook

A dead tree loomed above them on a bald cap of snow surrounded by tall ramrod-straight pine rees that barely came above a pony’s head, its branches reaching up through the mist and letting it trail through them, like a griffon’s talons plunging into a river.

“Turn left at the dead tree,” Pinkie said, pulling the cookbook from her saddlebag. She held it to her forehoof, staring intently. “Looks like there’s a map as well…”

She placed it on the side of an old, half broken bench, tugging at one page with her teeth, revealing an expansive map about four times the size of one of the cookbook’s pages.

“So there’s a trail here, and it lives in a cave near the top…” Pinkie mused. “And there’s this trail here, and the old stone bridge there…”

She pushed it towards Cheese, Rainbow Dash, Sans Smirk, and Portabella.

“Let’s get on it, then,” Portabella said, and the five of them began their trek.

It became abundantly clear that Pinkie and Cheese hadn’t thought hard enough about the journey. Or at least, what the journey meant. It wasn’t as if they were strangers to long walks, both had their experience at wandering across Equestria and hiking through similar terrain, it was just that there was so much of it.

Their hooves crunched through the snow.

Half-frozen fungi dotted the landscape between black pines that twisted like a griffon’s talon with too many joints.

The wind bit at them, rustling along their coats. And Pinkie was very, very relieved she’d sprung for a hat. Her ears could get cold extremely quickly, after all.

Rainbow Dash fluttered down towards them, weaving through a gap between two black pines. Not green, Pinkie realized, black. Actually black.

That can’t be good, she thought.

Pinkie held the cookbook up to one foreleg. It wasn’t hard to see where she was going - after all, it was simply a straight shot through the trees.

Tentacles of the massive beast above Cavallocade appeared to be the most important landmark on maps of the place. Just ahead of them was an arch of tentacle that curled into a spiral, and there it was marked on the cookbook’s map as “The curlicue.”

“Yeah,” Cheese said, uncharacteristically serious, “It looks like we’re going the right way. This trail’s a straight shot to…”

He took a deep breath.

“The lair of the badalisc.”

Thunder crackled outside.

“What is with your weather team?” Rainbow dash muttered under her breath, just as Pinkie looked up from her map back to her.

“Does it look good out there?” Pinkie asked.

Rainbow Dash nodded. “I can’t see anything in the pines. Wish they weren’t such a dark color-”

“They’re black,” Cheese said.

Rainbow Dash blinked, then pulled up her flight goggles. “Well, I’ll be. They really are. Thought these were just too tinted.”

She sighed.

“Remind me why we’re not all rushing up to the cave?” Rainbow asked. “I could… I could practically carry you and Cheese up here.”

“The winds get bad up here,” Portabella said, even though she knew he’d told this to Rainbow Dash already. Just inches ahead of them was the tentacle marked on the map as the Curlicue.

“Okay, seriously, your weather team needs a real shakeup,” Rainbow Dash said, before fluttering over it. “It’s starting to remind me of Everfree,” she added, once they’d all passed through.

“From what Giovanni told me,” Cheese said, “The uh, tentacled thing… what’s its name, can’t believe it slipped my mind… anyway, because it has such a weird effect on the weather, ponies around here are encouraged to be a bit more hooves-off.”

‘Yep,” Giovanni said, “Weathercreatures around here need special training. And we get so many days off. It’s why I came here in the first place!”

“So I guess it’s a little like Everfree,” Rainbow Dash said, looking around nervously. “Never liked the place. It was so…”

“So what?” Cheese asked. “All I knew when I walked by was-” And he took a breath, before doing a passable imitation of Granny Smith “Ponies said ‘you don’t wanna go down that road.’”

Pinkie looked to her right and watched a branch sway lightly.

Then another.

Each branch waved as if in the wind, but each moved in a different direction. One even brushed upward, as if the wind had erupted from the ground itself.

“Well, it’s… almost unnatural is what it is,” Rainbow Dash said.

Pinkie wasn’t listening. Her eyes tracked one branch as it lifted up and down, as if waving at her.

“Weather moves by itself, and the plants, and animals… there’s nothing like them,” Rainbow Dash said.

Up. Down. Up. Down.

Pinkie was no longer staring at that same branch. But there was another one now, still waving at her.

“Whatever happened, it feels like Discord or a bunch of unicorns had one heck of a bad day,” Rainbow Dash said. “Things in that forest just… don’t make sense, and we have to keep weather from there on its own sys…”

Rainbow Dash’s voice trailed off as she noticed Pinkie Pie staring… then the trees. This was beyond odd motion now - the branches rose and fell in waves.

“Is that nor….” Rainbow Dash asked, before reconsidering her words. No, ‘normal’ didn’t matter so much here. “Is that supposed to happen?”

The four of them froze, staring at the waving branches.

Cheese stared at it blankly.

“Run,” he whispered, and sprinted down the trail.

Pinkie, with stamina nobody would’ve expected, galloped right to the front of the herd, just behind Rainbow Dash.

“What does it mean though?!” Pinkie yelled.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it!” Cheese yelled. The trail curved sharply to the left, and Pinkie suddenly smelled…

Wait a minute.

It happened so fast. It happened so slow. Amazingly, both things could be true.

Pinkie skidded to a halt in the snow, powdery flakes curling out all around her. That smell. That smelly smell! That kind of smell that smells…

…smelly…

ICING!

“Dashie! INCOMING!” Pinkie yelled, screaming up towards Rainbow Dash.

Her flyer’s instincts were finely-tuned that she immediately knew what to do. Rainbow Dash dove towards the ground, her belly fur practically scraping the snow. Just then, a frozen cake sailed out from between the trees, slamming into a black pine and crumbling like a boulder dropped from a great height.

“It’s them!” Portabella yelled.

“Run!” Rainbow Dash yelled, and just then, a tree branch exploded.

“Don’t have to tell me twice!” Giovanni yelled, sprinting forward at a speed that Rainbow Dash almost found herself envying.

“Your reign of terror ends NOW!” someone cackled from behind them. Pinkie stared back behind them to find Vic, or Victory, whatever it was short for, standing far behind them on the trail. In his telekinesis, he held objects - a metal tube that vaguely reminded her of her Party Cannon, and a knife.

“I don’t even know who you ponies are!” Pinkie yelled, galloping down the trail.

“You WILL!” Vic cackled, and Pinkie heard the sound of his hooves pounding against snow.

Somewhere, Pinkie watched a frozen cake slam into Rainbow Dash’s barrel.

Pinkie rushed through the snow. Trees rushed by, and she found herself surprised by how fast she was able to run. All around her, the tree branches undulated up and down, and at that moment it reminded her of nothing more than a crowd trying to wave her away, begging her to stop.

Like Tartarus I will.

She rushed forward. Just ahead of her, the trees seemed to open up, and Pinkie saw somepony stepping out of the woods.

I was having such a great weekend here, and you RUINED IT! She thought. She’d been with Cheese, with her best friend, tried to figure out what the difference between ‘Cheese’ and ‘best friend’ was, she’d had such yummy food, and it’d been such a great time overall-

The pony held out a hoof.

Pinkie blinked, and decided then and there that she was going to ram through her then and there.

“Wander Shoes!” the mare yelled, and Pinkie had just enough time to wonder ‘who or what is tha-’

Everything went grey, as a massive reddish earth pony, almost the size of Big Macintosh, slammed into her. Pinkie tottered along the trail’s edge, and bounced off a black pine. A nub of wood jabbed into her barrel, not breaking the skin or fur but just skipping along her. It felt like she’d been punched with a very, very tiny hoof.

She lost her hoofing then and there, tumbling across the snow.

“NO!” Cheese cried, and all of a sudden he exploded into motion.

Pinkie tumbled forward, head bouncing against the snow. She collapsed in a heap, as uncoordinated as Cheese’s Boneless #2, head buried in powdery snow.

But:

As she struggled to find her bearings, to untangle her legs from the knot that was now her body, she saw two things:

Cheese, barreling towards her, his legs like the pistons on a locomotive.

And Rainbow Dash, hiding behind a tree. Giovanni was nowhere to be seen.

Can’t really blame him, Pinkie thought.

Vic stood in front of Portabella, holding a woodspony’s axe in his telekinesis, a mad grin on his face.

“I don’t really know or care who you are,” he said, “but hey. It’s nothing personal.”

“Nothing personal?!” Portabella yelled. “You nearly killed all of us! You chased my cousin and his marefriend?! Does that sound like nothing personal!?”

Vik almost looked surprised. “Really? Them? Huh.”

“Oh come on, it was obvious!” Portabella yelled.

Was it?! Oh no, we haven’t been hiding it well enough! Pinkie thought, panicking. Then again, she knows Cheese, it’s probably super obvious to anyone that knows him…

Rainbow Dash inched closer to Pinkie, stopping her train of thought at the station.

“I need you both to stall them,” Rainbow Dash whispered. “Giovanni’s hiding from them, he’ll come for us when he can. Stay close to the trees on the edge of the trail. Keep them busy until-’

“Until what?” Pinkie asked, but Rainbow Dash was gone.

“Stay out of this, Sandwich!” called out Vic, the thin stallion. “This doesn’t have to involve you either-”

“You followed us through the Garden,” Cheese said, almost snarling. “You nearly killed all of us in an avalanche. You made it my business.”

I can’t believe it.

Pinkie had never seen Cheese angry. She’d seen him happy, tired, and depressed, but never genuinely mad. She had, admittedly, expected anger at some point back when she’d visited his factory, half-expecting Sans Smirk to be leeching off of Cheese. But she’d been proven wrong, and the look on Cheese’s face proved that she simply hadn’t been able to imagine it.

“What’d we do to you, huh?!” Cheese yelled. “I was so excited to see somepony I…”

His speech staggered. Trailed off slightly. But he pushed forward.

“Somepony I love!”

He loves me?! Pinkie Pie thought, her eyebrows shooting up. Truthfully, it didn’t come as that much of a surprise, but it’s a world of difference between surmising something and hearing it outright.

“And you’ve just gone out of your way to ruin it! Do… you even know what you’re doing?! Why are you even doing this?!”

Vic trotted up, a strange metal pipe held in his magic aura. It reminded Pinkie of her Party Cannon somehow, but… but slimmer. It barely looked like one at all, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of familiarity.

“Because Pinkie Pie ruined our lives!” Vic yelled.

Dead silence all around.

“You planned my tenth birthday,” Wandering Shoes said. He had an extraordinarily deep voice.

The three other ponies turned to stare at him, eyes open wide.

“I remember coming into the room you reserved, and I saw the decor. It was for a little filly. Everything was pink. There were ponequins with frilly dresses all over the room, ballet bars, mirrors that made the room look like a dance studio. I checked the presents, and all of them were full of dancewear and petticoats,” Wandering Shoes said.

Pinkie cocked her head to the side. That did sound familiar…

“My friends came in next, and they started. Laughing,” he continued. “They never stopped. They insulted me, laughed at me, called me less of a stallion, left terrible drawings of me in a dress all over town! And it wouldn’t have happened without you, Pinkie! YOU RUINED MY LIFE! I’ve had to dye my fur ever since so nopony recognizes me!”

“Is that… is that true?” Cheese asked, looking down towards her.

Pinkie took a deep breath. “It is.”

She did remember it. She’d pulled a favor with Rarity to get some of the costumes there, after giving Wandering Shoes one of her patented Pinkie Pie Party surveys and interviewing his best friend, who’d said that he always had this faraway look when he stared at her dance costumes.

Portabella and Cheese looked down to Pinkie, gasping.

“And I’m sorry,” Pinkie said. “I… I had no idea your friends would react like that. But-”

“No more excuses,” Wandering Shoes snarled. “You ruined my childhood. You ruined my life in my hometown.”

“And you KILLED MY FAMILY!” Vic screamed.

Pinkie Pie blinked.

Wandering Shoes’ story had, at least, been explicable. This was, after all, something she remembered. She remembered renting various costumes from Rarity, she remembered carefully budgeting the party, buying ballet hoofshoes… and she remembered reimbursing Wandering Shoes’ parents.

This one was a bit out of left field.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Pinkie said bluntly. “I’ve literally never done that.”

The expression on Vic’s face was quite indescribable.

“I definitely believe it,” said the pony that had been with Vic, chasing them through the garden. “You left me alone, Pinkie. Forgot about me. And then there’s what you did to Fields.”

“It’s too horrible to mention,” the other mare said, staring down at the snow. “You… you ruined my party. My childhood. I can’t bear to say it!”

Pinkie blinked.

If anything, this was more inexplicable than Vic’s. Pinkie could look Vic over and say ‘I have never met you and I don’t understand a single word you said.’

She had absolutely no memory of him. None. Had never seen a stallion that looked like him, had never heard his voice, had never planned a party for him. But Fields was vaguely familiar, and Pinkie could remember nothing. The most she remembered was a note in her Secret Party Planning Cave that read “parents asked specifically for carrot cake.”

Pinkie looked towards Cheese.

“Whatever Rainbow Dash is doing, we need to buy time,” she mouthed.

Cheese nodded.

“I… can’t believe you,” Cheese said, and Pinkie was surprised again by the anger in his voice. “Pinkie is the sweetest, kindest mare I’ve ever met. I don’t think there’s a single cruel bone in her body!”

…Pinkie didn’t entirely believe this. There were moments she regretted, sure. She’d been terrible to Fluttershy during her ponytones audition, for example.

But a compliment was a compliment, and she wasn’t going to complain.

“Nopony’s perfect, but she’s the furthest thing from the kind of monster you’re describing,” Cheese said. “I don’t… I don’t even know who most of you are!”

“Honestly, Fluttershy has more reason to get revenge on me!” Pinkie added.

This, unfortunately, seemed to bounce off Wandering Shoes like a superball.

He just laughed, staring Cheese Sandwich down.

“You really think you can take the four of us on?” he asked. “Can you even take a punch, you wet noodle?”

“Can you?” Cheese asked, rearing up, drawing one foreleg back…

Before a glass jar of punch sailed through the air, and shattered on Wander Shoes.

There was a brief silence.

Three things happened in that brief moment.

“I’M SO COLD!” Wander Shoes yelped. “OH CELESTIA, IT’S SO COLD, AND IT’S SO STICKY!”

With that yelp, he threw a wide haymaker towards Cheese. 2. Just before the punch, Pinkie felt something coming, and dove for Cheese. 3. There was a rumble, and she saw an avalanche rushing towards them, prismatic light dancing across the snow, rainbows arcing between particles of snow.

Rainbow Dash was at the front of it all, dragging it like a cart.

“NOT SO FUNNY THIS TIME, HUH?!” Rainbow yelled.

“Oh, you-” the blotchy pink mare hissed, rushing towards her.

Cheese Sandwich didn’t quite pick up on the plan till it was half underway, and only barely grasped that they had something that could be called a plan.

As best he understood it, Pinkie had picked up on the idea that they were distracting the four ponies before Rainbow Dash did… something.

Throwing punch from his saddlebag’s emergency supply at Wandering Shoes hadn’t been part of the plan, and probably hadn’t been all that necessary. But on principle, Cheese didn’t like any of these ponies and they seemed like they probably deserved it.

They’d presumably been the ones that dropped an avalanche on him and his friends. They’d chased him. And…

The flowerpots falling on Pinkie’s head, that’d probably been them?

It’d been a little weird that Pinkie hadn’t noticed it, but the two of them had been having such a good time that watching flower pots bounce off her mane just didn’t seem very important. From the few times he’d visited her in Ponyville, that didn’t seem… too uncommon.

And then there was Rainbow Dash rocketing towards them, avalanche trailing behind her.

“Giovanni!” Cheese called out. “GET TO PINKIE!”

Giovanni, Cheese noticed, hadn’t been doing so well with all of this. He’d been so prepared to help out Cheese, his friend. To be his wingcreature.

And then they’d dealt with four lunatics trying to kill them, and nearly dying from an avalanche. He’d disappeared.

But:

“I got you!” Giovanni called down, divebombing towards Cheese. There was an impact, a sense that Cheese Sandwich’s entire body save his head had been punched, and the snow released its grip on Cheese’s body. “Cheese, I’m so sorry-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cheese said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

Giovanni’s foretalons dug into his barrel slightly, but Cheese didn’t mind.

“...hey?” Portabella said, looking over towards him. To his shock, Giovanni was carrying them both under his forelegs, squeezing them together like two peas in a pod. The strain was clear though, with his wings flapping mightily.

“Get to Pinkie Pie!” Cheese yelled.

“I can’t! I can barely carry two of you!” Giovanni yelled back.

Cheese looked down to see the blotchy pink mare holding Pinkie under both forelegs, outstretched…

Directly towards Rainbow Dash.

As an equine shield.

These ponies. These lunatics.

What the hell is wrong with them?!

“PINKIE!” Cheese screamed.

The blotchy pinkish mare had her pinned. That was for sure. Her forelegs curled over Pinkie’s, holding directly in Rainbow Dash’s path.

Pinkie’s eyes widened.

“What did I do to you?!” Pinkie breathed.

“If you survive this,” the blotchy mare hissed, “I’ll show you. Second by second.”

Pinkie looked down at her right foreleg, an odd sensation on her fur. Some of the dye had rubbed off, exposing dull, almost bleached-pink fur.

What are you…? Pinkie wondered.

But she didn’t have time to wonder. Rainbow Dash wasn’t stopping, and she looked like she was performing the silent calculus needed to keep her friend safe, to see what angles she could fly to avoid hitting Pinkie.

At times like this, there’s only one thing to do!

Pinkie rocked her head forward, lifting her captor off the ground. Pinkie’s own hind-hooves firmly planted themselves through the snow.

Using Mexicolt Wrestling abilities Pinkie had never seen fit to mention until this point, she bent forward and threw the blotchy mare into the snow, headfirst.

“AGH-”

The world became white. Direction, color, gravity, up, down, all lost meaning as pure kinetic force ripped through the rushed along the relatively flat ground of the trail.

Pinkie didn’t have time to think. She rushed for a tree with sufficiently thick-looking branches, climbing it like a ladder. The snow licked at her tail, but it was better that than getting crushed under an avalanche.

I may not have claustrophobia, but anyone would get claustrophobic under that, she thought.

She breathed a sigh of relief. Finally. She was going to be okay. She was going to ride this out-

crack

If you were to ask Pinkie how she noticed the sound later, she wouldn’t be able to tell you how such an insubstantial sound stood out through the roar of the avalanche.

Pinkie, YOU FOOL! She thought, looking down towards the cascade of snow beneath her.

Vik was standing on it, hooves glowing and suspending him an inch above the shifting ground. Snow bent around him, like he was a smooth river rock in the middle of whitewater rapids. His mane was lank and wild, his pupils had shrunken to the size of pinpricks, and he clutched an ax within his telekinetic aura.

CRACK

He swung it into the tree, screaming incoherently, and Pinkie felt the tree judder forwards.

About the only coherent word Pinkie picked out of his speech was ‘DIE!’

“NO NO NO NO BUCKDAMMIT!” Pinkie screamed, as the tree leaned into the avalanche ever so slightly.

“When you get to hell,” Vik snarled, levitating the axe almost to eye level with her, “Tell ‘em I’ll be right along.”

Pinkie took a deep breath. Right.

She uncurled her legs from the tree, legs wobbling as she put her best effort into balancing (think of skating! She told herself, even though it wasn’t that applicable) and rushed forward.

“Die alone,” Vik whispered, and the tree fell.

Pinkie scrambled up the trunk.

Surely Rainbow Dash would catch her. Surely-

And then she saw Lily Fields. Standing behind a party cannon, a smile on her face so wide it looked like it might very well split her face in half.

She fired.

It wasn’t impossible for Rainbow Dash to dodge, but it didn’t have to be.

All Rainbow Dash had to do was notice the projectile of Black Forest cake, and make the subconscious, numberless calculations that added a second or two or three to the time it’d take to get to Pinkie Pie.

Vik used that to hammer into the tree with his axe.

And as the tree pitched forward, almost at a 45 degree angle to the snow, Pinkie leapt.

Author's Note

I wasn't going to do this today, but hey - cliffhanger. It means a more bite-sized chapter for me and the audience, it means I'm not trying Too Hard to make a chapter, it means I'm not rushing through a huge chapter to get to the parts I want, and it means I'm not waiting until practically June to finish this.

Plus, it opens up a bunch of writing opportunities and gives me two more docs to work from, which makes this feel much less overwhelming and by-the-seat-of-my-pants, along with the opportunity to do some really fun things when ending the next chapter.

Chapter 1: The Invitation

It was three days after Hearthswarming, and Rarity had fashion on her mind.

All around her, the paraphernalia of this wintry holiday was being carted off to… wherever it went. Rarity had never really understood that, or rather, she’d never taken the opportunity to think about it for more than a few seconds, which amounted to the same thing. Was there some massive warehouse of Hearthswarming decorations that sat, letting them gather dust during Winter Wrap-Up?

Rarity silently imagined the absurdity of accidentally finding herself in a little pocket of Hearthswarming Eve in the middle of spring.

What she was clear on was the new line of Hearthswarming dresses and suits she had planned for next year, using all the detritus of the holiday to create something new.

She wasn’t too clear on some of the details yet, but she had a decent haul already in her cart.

Her stomach rumbled, suddenly.

I suppose I should stop by Sugarcube Corner, she thought, glancing in the direction of one of Ponyville’s most lavishly designed buildings. Have some hot chocolate, see if they warm up a brownie…

She shook her head.

No, I -

Her stomach became more insistent.

Curse you, stomach. I’m supposed to be dieting for my next shoot, Rarity thought, sighing.

She walked towards Sugarcube Corner, feeling almost resigned. Though she did have a smile on her face, all the same. Nopony did pastries like Sugarcube Corner. Nopony.

“We made sure of that!” Pinkie had said.

Speaking of Pinkie Pie…

Rarity wondered how she was doing. She’d been hanging onto Rainbow Dash’s every word at the party in Twilight’s castle, chugging Applejack’s cider, and following her to one of the castle’s spare rooms.

And then Rainbow Dash had left for Wonderbolt Academy. She’d received another promotion.

“Sooner or later you’ll run out of space on the uniforms!” Rarity had said, laughing playfully as she looked over the lapels of Rainbow’s uniform coat. “That’s how many medals, now?”

“There’s the Most Responsible Wonderbolt Badge,” Rainbow had said. “So, I’m thinking… five? Six, now with the…”

She sighed.

“I always get bored before I finish it.”

“Finish what?” Fluttershy asked.

“The medal’s name,” Rainbow said, sighing, one hoof to her head in either a facehoof or an effort to massage a growing headache. “It’s too long.”

“How bad could it be, Dashie?” Pinkie Pie asked.

Rainbow looked to one of the nearby windows, reached into the coat with her right foreleg, and pushed it out, squinting into the glass.

“The Order of Stalliongrad for Exceptional Leadership Under F… far, no, fire, and Selfmless Heron… heroinism…”

She squinted harder. Rarity genuinely wondered if she was closing her eyes and too drunk to notice.

“It ends in ‘One Who Has Saved Many Children From Birding… no, burning Buildingsh,’ Rainbow said.

“How’d you earn that?” Pinkie Pie chirped.

“I saved them from a collapsing building full of birdsh,” Rainbow Dash explained. “I think they were herons.”

almost wanted to laugh once she saw it, and regretted it instantly.

The poor dear, she thought. It’s just like all those years ago.

Pinkie Pie stood outside the pink mailbox in front of Sugarcube corner. She reached for the lever on the side, smile wide with anticipation, and…

Her face fell. Eyebrows narrowing in disappointment.

“Aaaanytime,” Pinkie Pie said, staring into the depths of the mailbox. “Aaaaaaaaanytime, now…”

She closed it again, sighed, and within seconds, it was as if none of that had happened. A smile spread across her face, her eyes widened, and anticipation was written all across her f-

Nothing this time, either.

Perhaps I should… do something, Rarity thought. I know how Pinkie gets, after a-

She shook her head. No, no. There was no need for that. Pinkie was her friend. Just because they seemed to rarely talk to each other, that was no reason to let the gulf widen.

“Pinkie, dear,” Rarity said. “Rainbow only just got word it was time for her leave. You need to be patient.”

“But I’ve been so looooonely lately!” Pinkie said. “Twilight’s off doing princess things, Fluttershy and Discord are joined at his second hip, and….”

“We still see them fairly often,” Rarity pointed out. “And, after all, I’m still here. Why not go and talk to Applejack?”

“She spends so much time trying to fix tools with Apple Bloom and… she’s not always in the mood for what I want to do. And it’s just… it’s not the same not having everypony,” Pinkie Pie said. “I feel like a balloon pony someone started deflating.”

She sighed. Her mane looked lank, dishevelled.

Rarity’s eyes widened. Oh no. Not again-

She knew the signs. She knew exactly what to do.

“Well then, let me remedy that, darling,” Rarity said. “How about we buy some coffees and cupcakes from Sugarcube corner, and have a heart to heart in Carousel Boutique? It’s been awhile since I made a dress for you.”

“It sure has,” Pinkie said, a smile on her face.

“My treat,” Rarity said.

“You’re sure?” Pinkie asked. “I get an employee discount.”

“Trying on a different element, are we?” Rarity asked, restraining a light chuckle.

“No, just consider it thanks for inviting me over,” Pinkie said.

Then she gasped.

“But what about the mailbox?!”

“Pinkie, dear,” Rarity said, “The mailbox will be here when you come back, and Rainbow Dash will be just as ready to send letters. It’s not like checking it every ten seconds-”

“Every 11.4 seconds!” Pinkie interrupted.

“Every 11.4 seconds will have any noticeable effect,” Rarity said. “Please, come in, let some steam off.”

Pinkie Pie’s personal preferences skewed towards… well. After enough party planning, it soon became abundantly clear to her that not everyone enjoyed balloons, tulle, organza, and pink everywhere. In addition to her usual tools of the trade.

For example, she was once hired to decorate and cater for Dethklop, Equestria’s most popular death metal band. And while it hadn’t been what she would’ve done, they were the bosses. There’d been a lot of leather and spikes that day. It’d been a lot of fun, and her neck hurt from all the headbanging the next morning.

Rarity’s rooms in Carousel Boutique reminded her of that experience. Except there was less leather and studs, no metal, no cider everywhere, and no house-sized speakers, so really it wasn’t anything like working for Dethklop at all.

Where was she?

Oh! Right. How Rarity’s room was like working for a death metal band, except in all the ways it totally wasn’t.

There was something relaxing about the way Rarity had constructed the apartments in Carousel Boutique. All subdued, cool colors in lighter purples that complimented Rarity’s mane, chairs you could just sink into, and overall it seemed as far from Pinkie’s usual tastes as the moon was from Equestria.

So that was why I was reminded of Dethklop, she realized. That makes perfect sense!

Wait. No it doesn’t.

As was typical for an outing with Rarity, the fashionista unicorn had decided to relax by taking measurements for a new, personalized ensemble.

The two of them had been discussing a new dress for Pinkie, and they were deep in discussion on that.

“I’m not sure that giving you a pink dress is a good idea,” Rarity said.

“Why not?” Pinkie asked.

“Well, you’re already pink, aren’t you?” Rarity asked. She hadn’t asked what’d been bothering her all this time. There was something reassuring about that.

I’ll tell her when I’m ready, Pinkie thought, taking a deep breath. Yes.

“It might just blend with you,” Rarity continued. “You’ll need something that contrasts or complements it.”

“That makes sense. How about, uh… a dark rose color, then?” Pinkie asked. “Or maroon? I like saying maroon.”

“How do you know what that color looks like?” Rarity asked.

“I learned every shade of pink!” Pinkie proclaimed. “Including heliotrope, but… that seems like it’d be too bright on me.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Rarity said. “It would be positively gaudy.”

A pregnant pause followed.

“I don’t even think it’d even work as accents!” Pinkie added, nodding vigorously.

The words felt strange to Pinkie and Rarity alike.

The two of them stared at each other in silence. It was clear to both of them that something was going unsaid.

“Pinkie, dear, what was bothering you? I haven’t seen you that way in years.”

Pinkie Pie took in a deep breath. So many thoughts were racing through her head. It was like Rarity had blown open the floodgates, like that dam that Ponyville may or may not have had.

You’d think I’d remember having a hydroelectric dam in town, Pinkie thought. We don’t seem to notice it that often and aaagh, FOCUS, PINKIE! She thought furiously.

YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, PINKIE!! She thought.

YES I CAN, PINKIE! BECAUSE I AM YOU, PINKIE!!

When did that happen?

She shook her head. No, no, no, no. She had to collect her thoughts. Rarity was staring at her, a concerned look on her face.

“Take your time, darling,” Rarity said, a warm smile on her face.

She exhaled. Inhaled again. Pinkie Pie had absolute confidence that out of all the feelings she had, she’d be able to summarize them. The loneliness she felt sometimes, when her fellow elements were off doing Element things. The way she missed Rainbow Dash. The mundane terror of her everyday existence. The way she felt as if she’d never truly make the perfect lemon poppyseed cake.

That last one haunted her sometimes.

“IjustmissallouradventuresandeventhoughIlovehowhappyweallareIjustfeelsolonelyandlistlesssometimes… and… itsjustnotthesameandIbarelyfeellikethesameponyanymore!!”

Rarity nodded. Pinkie could tell from that simple gesture that she understood perfectly.

“I know how it feels,” Rarity said, nodding. “When I’m visiting my new locations in Baltimare or Fillydelphia, I feel so lonely sometimes. I’m off socializing with new faces everywhere, ponies that I…”

She drooped. Ever so slightly.

“I just spend a lot of time wishing that I had a friend by my side,” Rarity said. “It’s meant the world to me when you accompany me to those.”

“Thank you, Rarity,” Pinkie said, smiling.

It was something she’d missed

“Even though high society parties are…”

“Boring?” Pinkie Pie asked.

Rarity blushed slightly, a hoof over her mouth. “You said it, not me, dear.”

“I mean, they’re not all bad,” Pinkie said. “That release party you had over at the Tasty Treat, all the times I’ve hired Vinyl Scratch or Neon Lights, but all the times it was the five of us at some party where everyone has to pretend to drink champagne and cider and just stand around… is that even a party?”

She paused.

“I’m seriously asking.”

Rarity looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “Honestly, I think you may be on to something.”

“It’s like an anti-party,” Pinkie said. “You’re supposed to cut loose and enjoy yourself at a party, but that’s the opposite!”

“I suppose you’re right,” Rarity said. “But… I always think of something while I’m there, while I meet new ponies.”

“What's that?” Pinkie asked.

“No matter how much you want to, you can’t go back to the past,” Rarity said.

Pinkie cocked her head to the side. Wait. Really? Something about that didn’t add up to her.

“Really? Twilight did,” Pinkie asked. “Same for Starlight. Several times, too!”

Rarity blinked. “Oh. Right.”

Pinkie could see Rarity stumbling over that one.

“But, I…” Rarity said. “You can’t…”

One eye twitched.

Ohhhhh. Oh no. This was another one of those things, wasn’t it? Where people said something and meant the opposite. Sarcasm, right? And she’d been so good! She’d been trying her best to get it.

I bucked up again, didn’t I? Pinkie thought.

“It’s okay, Rarity,” Pinkie said. “I know what you meant.”

Pinkie would breathe a sigh of relief at that first syllable from Rarity. It was a relief to have friends like her. It wasn’t as if Pinkie didn’t know she didn’t think like anypony else - she’d been tripped up on sarcasm before, or just hadn’t noticed the signs from someone.

Or even noticed that there could be signs.

“Do you?” Rarity asked, a note of hope in her voice.

She totally didn’t.

“Is it how trying to change the past is irresponsible, and you have to learn to be content with what you have?” Pinkie asked. “Like that one comic with that guy who has a chainsaw hoof that tells the protagonist that you have to stop changing the past, or that thing with Twilight-”

That had been a random guess, but it seemed like something worth learning.

“...you’re not wrong, but that wasn’t what I was thinking,” Rarity interrupted. “Though I do like that comic. And not as literal. It’s more… that time passes, and everything changes. You don’t truly have control over most of it. Like my new boutique in Fillydelphia!”

“But… you bought the location,” Pinkie said. “We fought a pony ghost made of bees and discovered the real axe murderer was love all along. You had plenty of control over this.”

Rarity sighed.

Oh no, Pinkie thought. Not again.

“I promise, I’m getting to it,” she said, a warm smile on her face. “I just felt so lonely there, sometimes. When I was having my open house, trying to find new customers and make my mark on Fillydelphian society, I wished to Celestia that you all could’ve been there. But you were busy at the Apple Family reunion, Twilight… was Twilight... and I couldn’t expect any of you to cross the continent on such short notice. So I had to take it on myself to make it the best night I could.”

She laid a hoof on Pinkie’s barrel, just above her right foreleg.

“Pinkie,” Rarity said, “You control what you do with your life, and you can make the best memories you can. Sometimes, you have to get out there and decide for yourself.”

Her face took on a warm, almost motherly expression.

Is she really that much older than me? Pinkie thought. Then her mind wandered back to the Secret Party Cave’s files. “Rarity - aged Rude To Ask.”

That definitely sounded older than whatever age Pinkie was. So Rarity was probably allowed to act motherly.

“And wishing for others to be there won’t change that,” Rarity continued. “And neither will checking the mailbox every ten seconds-”

“Eleven point four seconds,” Pinkie said.

“Eleven point four seconds,” Rarity finished. “You have to be ready to stand on your own and create new memories. You can’t wait for it to come for you. You have to and seek it yourself.”

Pinkie held a foreleg under her chin.

“You’re right, Rarity,” Pinkie Pie said. She felt a fire burning within herself, a desire to get out into the world, to steel herself and dig her hooves into the ground and Do Things. She was going to find new friends, she was going to believe in herself.

By the end of the week, she’d find something fun.

“I can’t just wait for the next opportunity to just walk up to this door,” Pinkie Pie said. “I need to work to move forward.”

She trotted towards the door, and slid one foreleg through the door handle. She flung it open, to reveal-

“Uh… hi?” asked a mare with a letter in her mouth.

Standing in the doorway was a grey pegasus mare in a postmare’s uniform with a yellow mane, holding a letter in her mouth. It was none other than Derpy Hooves, Ponyville’s perennial mailmare, of… questionable reliability.

“Uhhhh… is Pinkie here?’ she asked. Her voice was oddly deep for a mare.

The letter fell out of her mouth, dented with tooth marks and falling to the floor.

“Yes, Pinkie is here,” Rarity and Pinkie said at the same time.

“We heard she was looking at the mailbox every 11.4 seconds,” the mailpony said, “so we figured we should get this to her.”

“Thanks, Derpy!” Pinkie said. “Wow, I can’t believe this!”

“Neither can I,” Rarity said, an expression of pure confusion on her face.

“You’re welcome,” Derpy said, pushing the letter towards Pinkie with one foreleg.

“Yeah,” Derpy said, “Whoever sent you this really wanted you to get it! They marked it priority and told me to get it to you as soon as possible.”

“Thanks, Derpy,” Pinkie said. “It’s-”

Her jaw dropped when she read the address.

“AUDIBLE GASP!” she yelled.

“Pinkie, what is it?” Rarity asked.

“It’s from Cheese Sandwich!” Pinkie yelled, as question after question raced through her mind.

How’s he doing?! Is he off in another town? Has he met somepony else? Does he need something? Can I send cupcakes? How many?

What can I do for him?

The two of them rarely communicated outside of the occasional meet-up for a day or two, and infrequent, staggered bursts of letter writing. They’d hammer out letters that could range from paragraphs to novellas over the course of a few days, and then they could go weeks without hearing from each other.

But most importantly? What in Equestria is the letter about?!

“That’s great!” Rarity gasped. “What does it say?”

“Good question. I have no idea!” Pinkie replied. She sandwiched the envelope between her two forelegs and gently bit down on the top, tearing the paper with her teeth.

“Dear Pinkie Pie,” she read.

“It feels like just yesterday that we met up at the Tasty Treat. I know you might be relaxed in Ponyville, but I couldn’t do this without asking for your opinion.

I’m visiting my extended family in the northern foothills of Caballonia for an eponaphony-time tradition. They want me to plan a party for the entire town! There’s meant to be several days of festivities, all for an entire town as we celebrate togetherness and honesty. And it’s so much for just one super-duper party pony. I struggled with this, but family’s family…

...and you were the best mare I could ask to help!

Pinkie Pie, will you be my co-party-planner for the festival of…

THE BADALISC?

Pinkie Pie gasped.

“Where did that noise come from?” she asked.

“What noise?” Rarity asked.

“That spooky melodramatic movie noise?” Pinkie asked.

“Sorry,” Rarity said. “I left the phonograph on.”

Her horn glowed, and she lifted the needle up from a nearby phonograph.

There’s so much to do in Cavallocade! There’s skiing, cider-tastings, a spa,great restaurants… so we’ll have plenty to do in our off time.

Just send me a response to this return address and let me know what you want to do.

Sincerely,

Cheese Sandwich

Pinkie dropped the letter, and it fluttered to the floor. It sat there silently, Rarity and Pinkie staring at it in confusion.

“Oh, okay,” Pinkie said. “I’m not really sure what I’ve learned from this.”

“It is a bit strange, isn’t it?” Rarity asked. “You were just rewarded for everything we complained about.”

“Good thing that never happened during any of our friendship lessons or we’d be in a real pickle!” Pinkie chirped.

“I wouldn’t say it all goes against it,” Rarity said. “Opening that new boutique and fighting that bee ghost thing with you wasn’t just a weird couple of days, it was an opportunity. Just like meeting all those new fashion designers. I think that you should absolutely take this opportunity, Pinkie.”

“I was already going to!”

“Dear Cheese,
That sounds super-duper funeriffic!” Pinkie wrote, a pencil affixed to her hoof by a strip of cloth wrapped around one foreleg.

“I would absolutely love to plan this party with you, and there is not enough yes in the world for how much I want to do this. But… as long as I can get to Manehattan afterwards to plan for that musical Coco Pommel is designing the costumes for, then we’re golden. I’ve checked the calendar, and it’s… two days after the festival is over. I’ll have to leave pretty soon.”

See you soon!
Pinkie Pie

The next few days would fly by like Rainbow Dash at her fastest. Appropriate, given that she’d come back to Ponyville within hours of Pinkie receiving a return letter from Cheese.

There was a lot to read on that letter, but the sentence that jumped out to Pinkie Pie like her from a prop jack-in-the-box was this one:

Buy a ticket to the town of Cavallocade, and I’ll be waiting for you at the station.

The nine of them, Discord included, sat just outside at Cafe Hay. Twilight had ordered an eight-creature lunch for all of them, and so they sat at the fanciest table at one of Ponyville’s most respected restaurants.

“You’re really heading out into Caballonia?” Rainbow Dash asked, her eyes narrowed.

Pinkie had catapulted herself into the seat next to Dashie - or at least, next to the spot Dashie would land after pacing around repeatedly.

Of course she said yes. Of course she had scrawled out a letter hastily scrawled with the words, “Yes, I’d love to!” But there was a problem. One that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around, not least because even with Pinkie’s flexibility, there were limits.

“I’ve never even heard of Caballonia,” Starlight Glimmer said.

“It’s in the mountains, on a peninsula not far from the Dragon Lands extending out from the Eponines,” Twilight said. “It’s most well known for the volcano, Mount Vehoofius.”

Pinkie’s eyes went wide, and she looked to Twilight. “I didn’t know that!”

“You were all gung-ho about heading there, and you didn’t know?” Twilight asked. “That seems… foolhardy. How were you thinking about getting there?”

“I was just thinking I’d take the train like we always do,” Pinkie said. “If we can get to Griffonstone and the Crystal Empire that way before the Crystal Empire even reappeared, why not?”

“You don’t know if there’s a train there?” Twilight asked.

“There actually is, darling,” Rarity said. “I’ve had to visit it for fashion shows a number of times.”

Pinkie breathed a sigh of relief. “Phew. I was worried this was going to be harder than I thought! Though there’s… one more question I have.”

“What’s that, sugarcube?” Applejack asked. She’d taken the seat at Rainbow Dash’s right side.

“...I have no idea what a badalisc or eponaphony-time are,” Pinkie said.

“Well,” Twilight said, “A Badalisc, despite everything, has nothing to do with a basilisk. It’s a creature from Northern Caballonia, and… I don’t know much else.”

“They look like big, furry tubes with a mouth, horns, and eyes,” Applejack explained.

“Like Discord?” Pinkie asked.

“No, it’s nothing like that!” Discord protested. “I’m not a furry tube with…”

His voice trailed off. “Oh. Huh.”

“You also have scales and feathers,” Fluttershy pointed out.

Discord breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Fluttershy. I was worried for a few seconds there.”

“But no, it’s not like Discord,” Applejack said. “They’re more… fat, and wide, and wooly. Kind of like a yak, but with more teeth. And they don’t float. What they do is come down into town, and reveal everyone’s secrets. Because apparently, they know the innermost secrets of everyone in town. And then they make a big show of getting captured, and the town celebrates their togetherness.”

Pinkie stroked her chin with one forehoof. That sounded vaguely familiar. But from where. Where...

The entire table went silent.

“Even Twilight didn’t know that. How do you know that?” Rarity asked.

“She probably has a cousin there,” Rainbow said off-hoofedly, shrugging. “It’s not like an actual Badalisc visits Sweet Apple Acres.”

“Right on the money, Rainbow. Got a couple out there,” Applejack said.

“So then what’s eponaphony time?” Pinkie asked.

“After the new year, but before Winter Wrap-Up, in some parts of Equestria, they use it to celebrate a new year,” Twilight explained. “I’m guessing the festival of the Badalisc is to celebrate a fresh start of some kind.”

“Interesting,” Pinkie said. “That sounds like the thing we were talking about earlier, Rarity!”

“So it does,” Rarity mused.

“Sounds like?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Pinkie, are you sure you’ll be okay?”

She placed her hooves on Pinkie’s shoulders, just above where her forelegs began.

Is Dashie okay? Pinkie wondered. Her wide, staring eyes bored into Pinkie. And suddenly, panic stabbed through Pinkie Pie.

What if I say something wrong? What if I drive him off? What if I’m too… too whatever and he can’t even look at me? What if we can’t stand each other?

“I… don’t know if I will be,” Pinkie said. “I just… I barely know Caballonia, I don’t know anything about planning a badalisc party, and I don’t know what he’ll say.”

She started taking short, shallow breaths.

“You’re twilighting hard, Pinkie,” Twilight said. “Are you-”

Everyone in the room turned to stare at her, jaws dropped.

“What?” Twilight asked. “You spelled out all the symptoms to me.”

She paused.

“What’s bothering you, Pinkie?” she asked.

“I just feel like there’s so much I might do wrong,” Pinkie said.

Rainbow Dash’s wings were flapping like a hummingbird’s. Her eyes were narrowed, and she was fluttering to and fro.

...she’s not okay, Pinkie thought.

“Then let me come with you, or read up on it, or get some backup,” Rainbow Dash said. “You’re going further than any of us have been since the Storm King invaded, and you’ll be doing it alone!”

Pinkie considered reaching out to push one of Dashie’s forelegs away, to admonish her for being silly, but...

She looked at the faces of her other friends. Nobody quite looked like they knew how to respond to this. Fluttershy’s eyes were wide, and Spike looked like he was on the watch for a Changeling.

“You alright there, sugarcube?” Applejack asked, trotting up to Rainbow Dash, green eyes practically glowing under her hat. “You, uh…”

“You don’t quite seem yourself,” Fluttershy said.

“Like I said, I’ve done this before,” Pinkie said.

“Pinkie and I were just talking about that,” Rarity said. “Though, I have one question.”

“Which is?” Applejack asked.

“Why are we talking so much about what we used to do,” Rarity started, “When we’re all here?”

Dead silence.

Before the whole table burst into laughter.

ONE DAY LATER
CAVALLOCADE

“I can’t believe she’s actually coming here!” Cheese Sandwich said, fretting with a bowtie he wore over his yellow polo shirt.

“It’ll be okay,” said his brother, Tomato Sandwich. His physique was, in many ways, Cheese’s opposite. Where Cheese was tall and lanky, Tomato was shorter, and stouter. Where Cheese was unkempt with his wild tangle of brown, Tomato had a tightly coiffed pompadour that was…

...also brown.

Okay, so they weren’t total opposites.

He tapped his brother’s barrel, just above the spine. “Look, if I know anything about you and Pinkie Pie, it’s that you two get along like peanut butter and chocolate.”

“This is all just so sudden, though!” Cheese said. “And we haven’t seen each other in months…”

“It has been a month and a half,” Sans Smirk said.

“Thanks for the…. Reminder,” Cheese said, sweat dripping down his face.

Nervously, he twisted at his bowtie again. As Cheese did not have hands, it was more like he was repeatedly slapping his neck, and having the tie inexplicably stick to his hooves, and then watching it come into place.

“...how are you doing that if you don’t have talons?” asked Giovanni the Griffin.

Cheese just shrugged, aligning his forelegs into a ’W’ shape. “I dunno, it’s just… one of those things?”

“Ohhhh,” Giovanni said, with a practiced slow nod, as if that explained everything to him. “I get it! That makes perfect sense!”

It didn’t, but from what Cheese knew of the griffon, it was just Giovanni’s way of saying ‘I still don’t get it but it’s too much effort.’

Giovanni made a show of taking a huge swig of cider.

The four of them - Cheese, Tomato, Giovanni, and Sans Smirk - sat at Cavallocade’s local pub, The Odd-Shaped Room. It boasted quite the diverse clientele,full of ponies and griffons, even a few Changelings and Hippogriffs. Sure, Sans and Giovanni had pointed out that Cheese and Tomato easily could’ve gotten them drinks at the Mascar-Pony, the family inn across town. At least, Cheese thought it was across town.

The Odd-Shaped Room had a tendency to migrate across Cavallocade, finding its way into buildings it hadn’t been in yesterday. Once, it had been neighbors to the Mascar-pony. Then it had been across the street.

But dining at the family inn would’ve required being among family right now. And sometimes, that could just feel… overpowering. So Cheese and Tomato had headed off to the Odd-Shaped Room, a favorite colthood haunt for when they’d needed to relax anonymously, away from family.

It wasn’t that the entire Cheese family were bad, or that Cheese and Tomato didn’t like them. It was just that their family could be… a bit much. And sometimes, they needed space.

The bar had been decorated to perfection by Oak Barrel, the proprietor, main brewer, and distiller. Orange and yellow streamers hung from the ceiling, in between lanterns alternating between those same colors, and between their pools of light, creatures of all shapes and sizes, wearing headbands with stylized ram horns, towering brown and green hats, and dancing to and fro.

Also, something with two many tentacles and one staring green eye sat at a barstool, several tentacles covering a mug. The liquid in its glass steadily drained.

“She wanted to come here to see you, after all,” Tomato reminded his brother. “And… and I’ve heard how you like talking about her. Pinkie saved my gag business, Pinkie changed my life, Pinkie helped me hide Bighoof when he was using my belt sander…”

He sounded almost annoyed, but there was a strange sort of kindness to the way he said it.

“Why do you even have a belt sander?” Giovanni asked.

“Construction,” Sans Smirk said.

“I’m not going to stop her from coming, she already said she would,” Cheese said. “It’s just that… she sent me that letter. She said she wanted to come. If she knows I have family here, what else would she know?!”

It’d been one of the great mysteries of Cavallocade, or at least among Cheese’s immediate social circle and family. So it’d ended up being one of Cavallocade’s greatest mysteries:

How did Pinkie Pie send a letter asking to meet Cheese for the Festival of the Badalisc when she didn’t have his address?

“Maybe you told her about it at some point?” Tomato asked.

Cheese looked down, confused. “I… don’t think I did.”

“If I may?” Sans Smirk asked. “I happen to know a lot about relationships.”

“I’m sure you do,” Tomato Sandwich said, voice completely deadpan.

“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” Sans Smirk said. Cheese could never quite tell just what was going through his business partner’s head as he said things like that. “She knows how you feel, and you know how she feels. And clearly you mean a lot to her. All you have to do is put it out there.”

“What if that fails?” Cheese asked.

“What if it hangs over your heads and you feel stuck?” Sans asked. “I can say with complete certainty that if you let that happen, you’re gonna have a bad time.”

En route to Rainbow Falls
Two Days Later

Twilight had sprung for first-class tickets on the Griffonstone Express, and so for hours upon hours, Pinkie and Rainbow would sit in the lap of luxury.

It hadn’t exactly been a tearjerking, emotional goodbye. But there’d been a lot of emotions.

“Now just remember, sugarcube,” Applejack had said, holding Rainbow Dash in both forelegs, “anything bad happens, you just call me.”

“How?” Rainbow asked. “I don’t think there’ll be a dragon there, and…”

“That don’t matter, sugarcube,” Applejack said. “I heard you once flew the length of the Mustang Marathon to get to Spitfire, I’m sure you can figure something out. Anything bad happens to you, and I’ll come runnin’.”

“Almost makes me wonder why you didn’t come,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Well, things’ve been… busy over at the farm,” Applejack said. “We need all the hooves we can get right now, so I can’t leave for a vacation.”

They’d gotten on the subject of Pinkie’s trip to Caballonia.

“And Caballonia looks like so much fun!” Pinkie said. “Apparently, they have the best pizza and pasta in Equestria, and so many great desserts! There’s this thing called a tartufo, which is a chocolate-cherry dessert, and their main exports are gold, wine, leather, olive oil-”

“Since when you do you know so much about it?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Last night’s party!” Pinkie chirped.

“Pinkie, that was two days ago. Are you telling me that…” Rainbow started. “Wait. Nevermind. Also, what was that last one?” Rainbow asked.

“Olive oil?” Pinkie asked. “Well, it’s great on - Oh, and Cavallocade is in the Eponine mountains, so I think there’s good skiing there, which’ll be really fun-”

“Have you ever gone skiing before, Pinkie?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Nope! But I can ice skate, so how hard could it be?” Pinkie asked.

“According to Double Diamond, you do a lot of skating while skiing,” Rainbow Dash said.

“You’ve talked to him?” Pinkie said.

“Fleetfoot told me about unique flying techniques she learned from thestrals for the Mustang Marathon, so I thought it’d be nice to get another perspective,” Rainbow Dash said. “It was pretty fun! We had s… sh... soooooooo much hot co… cocoa at the end of thr day.”

The way she said “cocoa” made Pinkie genuinely wonder if it was actually hot chocolate. Dashie did get pretty attached to cider. Even if it wasn’t hard cider.

Wait. Is this hard cider? Pinkie wondered. I don’t feel a thing here. I get more of a buzz from beer.

And yet Dashie was starting to slur her words.

I feel like I shouldn’t question this one, Pinkie thought. Desperately trying not to think about that, she found herself saying: “I feel like Sugar Belle’s the only one from back then I still talk to.”

“Oh, yeah?” Rainbow asked.

“Yeah, her cutie mark is in baking so she knows more than I do,” Pinkie said. “She taught me how to make a polenta crust for pizza! It’s great if you can’t eat gluten.”

“We eat plants and some of us can’t eat gl… glue… gluten?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Well, it’s more common in other species but yes!” Pinkie said. “Also yeesh, I hope we don’t eat glue…”

There was a brief pause. The train rattled along, passing through a small logging town - it looked to Pinkie like it was barely even a town, just a couple of outbuildings around a spur line. A large, slightly lopsided-looking steam locomotive with the boiler pushed to the side and no visible pistons sat in front of a shed, lightly steaming.

Pinkie snapped a picture of it, biting down on the shutter with her upper jaw.

Maybe if I get hired to do a train-themed party that’ll come in handy, she thought.

Far off in the distance, Pinkie could see the lights of Rainbow Falls.

“So, Dashie,” Pinkie said. “I thought you were so busy with, uh… Wonderbolt stuff?”

Pinkie didn’t quite understand what a lot of said Wonderbolt stuff was, but Rainbow Dash would always get so amped-up while talking about it.

“I did, but I asked Spitfire for some leave,” Rainbow Dash said.

“You still have to ask for it?” Pinkie asked.

“Not for long,” Rainbow Dash said, a light smirk on her face. “She says someday, I’ll be commander and then I… still have to ask, but there’ll be less paperwork.”

“So what were your plans at Wonderbolt Camp?” Pinkie asked.

“Spitfire has a new training exercise planned,” Rainbow Dash said. “We’re gonna be practicing a new way to fly in the middle of windstorms.”

Pinkie stared at Rainbow Dash in awe, her eyes wide. On the rock farm, and even in Ponyville, storms had always been a good reason to hunker down in a warm room with either hot cider or hot cocoa.

“That sounds dangerous,” Pinkie said, her eyes wide. “Why would they even let storms run loose like that?”

“I’ve been talking with Flutters and Applejack,” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s because of ecology or something?”

It was… abundantly clear that Rainbow Dash wouldn’t be able to explain it very well.

“Anyway, sometimes ponies don’t know how dangerous they can be, and refuse to move out of the way. And sometimes, they’re too big to control, so we have to redirect them,” Rainbow Dash said. She gestured to and fro with her foreleg, growing more and more animated.

It all sounded very fascinating to Pinkie. On some level, she felt like she’d always wanted to fly, to glide through the air like a pegasus. But on the other hoof, it all felt so far out of reach for her.

The ornithopter was fun, but it made me feel like I was riding a fridge with wings, Pinkie thought. She’d always felt like it couldn’t possibly keep up with Rainbow Dash in any meaningful way.

“So why’d you decide to come with me?” Pinkie asked.

Rainbow Dash looked at her, eyes wide.

“You seemed so... “ Rainbow Dash said. “I don’t know, scared.”

“Me? Scared?” Pinkie asked, her eyes wide. “Look, I can just laugh it off and I’ll-”

“No, you were…” Rainbow Dash started. Then she sighed. “No, no, I don’t know how you felt. But you seemed like you might want a friend while we go there. So… here I am!”

I was scared? Pinkie thought, her eyes widening.

“It’ll be just like old times,” Rainbow Dash said, chuckling a little. “Faust, remember when I didn’t want to hang out with you back before Gilda came to town?”

“Why didn’t you want to?” Pinkie asked.

“I was pretty new in town by then,” Rainbow Dash said offhoofedly. “And I just… buck, I was so lazy back then. And you were a bit…”

Her voice trailed off. Pinkie felt a sudden stab of fear.

Oh no. She’s going to say ‘annoying!’ I did it wrong, I did it wrong again, stupid, stupi-

“There was… a lot of you,” Rainbow Dash said, haltingly. “You were always on, all the time, and I just wanted to sleep all the time. I know your heart is always in the right place, but we just… didn’t connect back then.”

“Sometimes it feels like we barely do anymore,” Pinkie said. “Something feels… off… about you being with me. But I’m glad I’m with a friend right now.”

“You and me both,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Faust, you’ve changed so much since then,” Pinkie said.

They were drawing even closer to Rainbow Falls now. It was just before the sunset turned the sky a riotous canvas of pinks, yellows, purples, and oranges, and the rainbow colonnades of the falls still shone effervescent in the orange light. Blues, reds, greens, yellows, all glowed in the half-orange light.

Dashie chuckled a little and nodded. “Yeah, I…. I was happy in Ponyville, sure. But at some point, I realized I couldn’t be a wonderbolt by just lying on my back. I had to just… get out there, y’know?”

“When did you realize that?” Pinkie asked. “Did you have a depressive episode where you saw someone who was mentally stuck in flight camp, they talked a big game about how happy they were despite having such an empty life, and you realized that you always have the ability to change, inspiring them to move on as well, then ending on a hopeful note?”

Rainbow Dash stared at her for entirely too long.

“...No!”

“Huh,” Pinkie said. “Sometimes I have depressive episodes and learn something from them. But at least the writers never let that overcome my original characterization.”

“Yeah,” Rainbow Dash said, chuckling a little bit as she nodded. “I know what that’s like-”

(Pinkie knew that she totally didn’t)

“-but no, that’s not what happened,” Rainbow Dash said. “I just… I realized that as much as I liked it in Ponyville, I liked who I was when I was trying. There was a pegasus pony I met in Las Pegasus named Mercury, and he told me something that really stuck with me.”

“What was that?”

“He said that as much as you like the good old days, you can always make new good old days,” Rainbow Dash said.

“...Wow,” Pinkie said, jaw open, eyes wide. She stared out the window, lost in thought. To make new good old days… there was something so captivating about that sentence, so-

“...you’re distracted by the falls, aren’t you,” Rainbow Dash sighed.

“...Yes,” Pinkie said, hanging her head sheepishly.

The two of them laughed together.

“Maybe we’ll make some new good old days of our own this time!” Pinkie chirped. “You, me, and Cheese, enjoying the Festival of the Badalisc, with absolutely nothing going pear-shaped and nothing weird or supernatural happening!”

The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds…

“PFFFFFTBAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAA!” Pinkie giggled.

Rainbow Dash almost simultaneously cracked up as well. “Oh, you’re killin’ me, Pinkie! Oh, oh that is good. That is good.”

“Thanks!” Pinkie said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

The two of them were laughing about that one for hours, nurturing that memory like a campfire on the way to Cavallocade, even as Celestia drew the sun lower and lower.

They still chuckled at it a little by the time the train slowed with the expectant caution that spoke to a nearby station.

As the train emerged from a tunnel, rounding a bend, Pinkie and Rainbow caught their first glimpse of the town.

It was situated in the middle of a valley that was probably green and verdant in the summer, but was at the moment covered with drifts of snow. In the blaze of colors that came only from a mountain sunset, the snow looked almost purple, and farmhouses made of colored stone and stucco shone a rainbow of colors. Craggy mountains, each one almost purple in that bright orange light, lined the valley, though one taller, rounder mountain stood guard over the valley. It was streaked with white, though it grew balder and thinner towards the top. Pinkie saw the telltale lines of ski lifts from top to bottom, some of which extended into the very edge of the town in the middle of its valley.

Ooh, skiing! Pinkie thought. I wonder if I’m good at skiing. I bet Dashie would love it here!

“It looks beautiful out here,” Pinkie said, eyes wide.

The town itself was made of the same materials as the farmhouses the train passed. All colored stone and stucco, in yellows, blues, greens, and pinks, sometimes rough-hewn stone thrown together with mortar. Though something about the proportions of the town was off. Buildings looked far too thin somehow and jutted upwards and outwards in unpredictable clusters, rising in spires and trees of architecture. One building (Pinkie wasn’t quite sure what it was) looked to be a mansion of some kind built on a stack of wood-and-stucco stories, expanding slightly towards the top like the branches of a maple tree to reveal a house of dark, weather-beaten wood built on plans that looked like an architect made them up as they went along that leaned precariously above the whole town. Houses stood on stilts, built on top of still other houses, and flat-roofed buildings boasted gardens and even houses of their own standing guard above narrow streets below them.

And yet all that failed to capture the two Elements of Harmony’s attention quite like the massive bulbous thing that stood above the town.

“What is that?” Rainbow Dash asked, her jaw wide open.

“It’s,” Pinkie said, struggling to find words, “uh….”

A thing of blotched purple-brown-red that looked like a flower of mouths and eyes ringing one gargantuan maw studded with cracked yellow ivory, shrouded by green-gray clouds. Tentacles as large as (if not larger than) the train they rode on, forested in a frost-covered riot of heliotrope, orange, and green moss and fungus splayed outward from it in seemingly random directions, running in and out of the ground and its surrounding environs like roots of a tree or poor stitchwork. Beneath these tentacles or roots, something draped towards the ground like the roots of a plant anchored in a now-excavated clump of dirt.

“Yeah, I have absolutely no idea,” Pinkie said.

“I hope we wouldn’t have to blast that thing with the elements of harmony or use the rainbow,” Rainbow Dash said. “Maybe.. Maybe I should let Applejack know. Just in case.”

She glanced nervously out the window at the town’s grotesque sentinel.

“Wait, how would we do that?” Pinkie asked. “Is there a telegram at the station? Or a phone? Or a nearby dragon?”

“Well, she said she’d come running if we called,” Rainbow Dash said. “I… we’d be able to find something, right?”

“Probably,” Pinkie said, nodding.

The train’s slow descent into the depths of the town continued. The strange topography of Cavallocade knit around the railroad tracks, in convoluted arches and branches.

The train rounded yet another bend under a cubist arch of apartment blocks that had seemingly grown together like two nearby trees, hugging the habitation-encrusted slope of the valley.

Sunset light and electric light blazed overhead as the train drew into the station. It was a modest affair, with two tracks, a couple of sidings, and another steam engine at rest (this one heavier than theirs) tended to by a motley crew of griffons and ponies alike.

Pinkie only momentarily noticed any of that, because one thing commanded her attention more than anything.

“AUDIBLE GASP!” Pinkie yelled.

“What, what is i-” Rainbow started, before she saw him.

And there he was. Cheese Sandwich. Waiting at the platform of the town’s tiny railroad station.

The first thing Pinkie would do upon getting off the train was to break into a running tackle like a hoofball professional.

And then, minutes later, they would head off into town bask in the forbidden yesterdays of tomorrow’s moonlight promises.Whatever that meant.

But unbeknownst to Pinkie and Rainbow, Cheese was not the only one who waited for Pinkie.

“She received my letter,” said a mare who stood under a set of stairs leading into the offices above Cavallocade’s train station. “Now, we can begin.”

A mare in a cloak stepped forward. She was followed by a heavyset maroon-colored stallion, a mare who wore a wide-brimmed hat, and another stallion so tall and so thin he looked like he might collapse in a stiff breeze.

“She will be isolated from her friends in Caballonia,” the mare said.

“Ja, isolated from all of them except Rainbow Dash,” the thin one said. “Was this… was this part of your plan? Were you hoping for her to come?”

“Admittedly, no,” the cloaked mare said. “But this… it provides an opportunity. You’ll get the revenge you so desired thanks to her presence.”

“I don’t see how, but okay,” the thin stallion said.

“And what of Cheese Sandwich?” asked a rather heavyset maroon-colored stallion, who had stood near her.

“What about him?” asked the second follower, a mare who hid most of her features under a wide-brimmed hat. “He’s no different from her. He won’t be a threat.”

She looked to the thin one.

“The fate she deserves - the fate you so demand - will be visited upon her tenfold,” the cloaked mare said. “As we deserve. Together, we shall finally make Pinkie Pie pay for her crimes.”

A smile like an open wound spread across the maroon stallion’s face. “I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life.”

Author's Note

The idea behind the story is… it’s sort of a combination between a romantic comedy, Guns Love and Tentacles, and Welcome To Night Vale. I’m new to writing stories that don’t involve murdering everything - in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever written and finished a multichapter work where nobody gets shot or dismembered in some kind of hilarious yet gruesome way - so I’m trying to flex some new creative muscles. It doesn’t help that, at the time I am writing these author’s notes for the first time, I have not actually seen a romantic comedy in its entirety. Hopefully, by the time this is posted, that has changed.

UPDATE: That changed! I actually watched Maid in Manhattan before writing this chapter. And chapter 2. I actually have a page of notes on it somewhere. So that’s why Rainbow Dash, Tomato Sandwich, Giovanni, and Sans Smirk are here.

So, you may be wondering. Why would a brony writer who has an established audience that came for blood try a genre he has no experience in, and presumably has no plans to write an action scene?

(There will be one, but nobody will get dismembered.)

Simply put?

...I’m not having fun anymore.

Me and Jed, we were a package deal. And he’s been gone for awhile, and it’s just me on something that was our baby. It’s… it’s lonely. And I’m just. Not. Having. Fun. I think someday, I want to be a Serious Writer, with published work, and writing this story will be an almost therapeutic exercise. I want to make an antithesis to my earlier work on this site, which celebrates the joy of being Pinkie, the utter silliness of her and Cheese, and their dynamic. I want to write about Italian food. I want to make a story where nobody has a gruesome yet blackly comedic death. And I may fail! I may abandon this story at some point. I've actually written a list of romantic comedies I should watch first for reference, which probably tells you something about how out of my depth I am.

But you can only fail at something if you attempt it.

And by God, I want to make an attempt.

P.S: I didn't have any pre-readers or editors when I made this! If you'd like to help out, please let me know. It's not the same doing this without someone to play off.

Chapter 2: Welcome To Cavallocade

“CHEESE!” Pinkie yelled, jumping towards the lanky yellow stallion.

“PINKIE!” Cheese yelled back. Before Rainbow’s eyes, the two of them leapt towards each other, flying through the air at strangely slow speed.

“CHEESE!”

“PINKIE!”

Rainbow Dash looked at her wrist expectantly, before realizing that she wasn’t wearing a watch and wondering why she expected to find one there in the first place.

“CHEESE!”

“PINKIE!”

“CH-”

The two of them slammed their heads against the ceiling and fell to the floor on their backs in a crumpled heap, laughing uproariously.

“...Ya done?” Rainbow Dash asked, raising an eyebrow.

Cheese stared at her as if in the middle of all that chaos, he hadn’t noticed her. And maybe that was true. He looked as if he’d ordered a hayburger and received a slightly burned lasagna instead.

“Oh,” Cheese stammered, “Rainbow Dash! I… I wasn’t expecting you, but…. okay!”

His eyes were narrowed.

And the first thing on Rainbow Dash’s mind was ‘I’ve made a huge mistake.’

It all seemed so obvious in hindsight. Clearly, Cheese had wanted it just to be the two of them, clearly they…

“Pinkie seemed kinda worried beforehand, so I decided I’d come with,” Rainbow Dash said, narrowing her eyes.

“I see…” Cheese said, narrowing his eyes as well. His voice grew deep and gravelly.

Rainbow tensed. Was she about to-

“...that you’re a great friend! Pinkie’s lucky to have you with her,” Cheese said, reaching out with one foreleg, and bumping it against Rainbow’s right foreleg.

Rainbow Dash felt herself swing towards the ground, drawing in a sharp breath. She wheezed slightly.

“Yeah… a great friend…” Rainbow asked, looking from side to side.

“I’m afraid there’s not gonna be much for you here,” Cheese said, rather sheepishly as he rubbed one hoof against his wild mane, so much like Pinkie’s. “It’s going to be mostly the two of us, planning the party together… we could try skiing if you want.”

“Uh... about that. I heard a lot of what the party’s about from Twilight,” Pinkie said, “But… I don’t actually know what you do.”

“I’ll explain on the way,” Cheese said, pointing down a set of stairs, towards a street lined with small stores and warehouses, all built of brightly-colored stone but woven through ever so slightly with tentacles and strange mushrooms.

Something squelched in the distance.

“Okay,” Rainbow Dash said, “What’s the deal with the tentacles? I feel like we’ve walked into a horror movie.”

Cheese paused, one foreleg halfway to a new step on the staircase.

“...Huh,” he said. “I guess that is a bit weird.”

“We have long since passed weird!” Rainbow Dash said, not quite yelling but close.

“Honestly? Not really sure,” Cheese said. “It’s just always sorta been here.”

“You live under a giant tentacle thing and you’re just gonna roll with it?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“You live in Ponyville,” Cheese said.

Pinkie opened her mouth as if to argue, narrowing her eyebr-

“No, no, he’s got a point,” Pinkie said. “Remember the time we got invaded by tentacles?”

Cheese suddenly blushed. “Uhhhh…“Sounds like you got up to a lot of adventures, huh…”

“No, that one was a couple months before we met you,” Pinkie chirped. “Almost a whole season.”

“You got invaded by tentacles that long befo-” Cheese started.

“They were vines, and they choked out the town, kind of like this one is,” Rainbow Dash said, narrowing her eyebrows and stepping between Pinkie and Cheese. “We had to give the elements to the Tree of Harmony to stop them.”

“Phew!” Cheese said, drawing one hoof across his brow. “You lead very exciting lives.”

With that, he resumed his descent.

“Business as usual!” Pinkie chirped. “Though I guess we’re semiretired now.”

“How’s that been?” Cheese asked.

“Oh, you know,” Pinkie said. “It’s been pretty great! Planning parties for Pound and Pumpkin’s cutecenearas, and working on Vinyl and Octavia’s new venue… It’s been pretty great for me in Ponyville so far!”

The two of them walked - well, two of them walked, one of them fluttered - down the set of stairs, heading down to the street which led into the beating heart of the town. They found themselves on a street that looked rather busy at this time - other passengers from the train were milling about, staring in confusion and awe at the tentacles that knit across the town, one of which was festooned with paper lanterns in all the colors of the rainbow. Many of them looked to be wearing ski clothes, some of them clad in what looked almost (but not quite) like Wonderbolt flightsuits.

Storefronts with warm, inviting orange light lit the street almost as bright as day. They displayed anything from clothes (some of which Pinkie recognized as Rarity designs) to chocolates to ice cream to pastries to climbing gear, beckoning recent arrivals to spend as many bits as they could afford.

This all looks so fun! Pinkie thought. I really want to-

Pinkie looked over at a window that displayed a wide variety of chocolates, some of which were in flavors utterly unfamiliar to her.

Her reflection stared back,

“Ask him about the festival!” The reflection told her. “He wants you here and you want to talk about it, so do it!”

“You’re right, spooky reflection that’s either in my imagination or a symptom of an undiagnosed brain tumor,” Pinkie said.

The reflection nodded approvingly. It - or she - reached down towards one chocolate, picking it up with one foreleg and tossing it into her mouth.

“Oh, great googly moogly, dark chocolate salted caramel…”

“Wait,” Rainbow Dash said, staring over at this spectacle. “What was tha-”

“So anyway, Cheese,” Pinkie said. “What do you do during the festival?”

As Pinkie asked that one question, Rainbow Dash fluttered along behind the two party ponies, ducking under one tentacle so intently that she was practically walking.

What is wrong with me, she thought.

“Well, it’s pretty simple,” Cheese said. “The Badalisc comes down from the Eponines, and it’s then ritualistically captured by a bunch of stock characters like the Town Drunk, the Young Lovers, the Old Grandmother, the Young Fool…”

As Rainbow Dash’s hooves touched ground, she looked up at the tentacle. Beneath it, in between the lights, she saw that what she had thought were roofs were smaller tentacles like on the underside of a starfish, lined with teeth.

From what Rainbow could see, it looked as if this one tentacle that arced over the street was lined with other tinier tentacles the size of a pony’s leg, which themselves were lined with what appeared to be teeth.

“Then, the Badalisc gives a speech about the secrets of everyone in town,” Cheese said. “Who likes doing what, who’s saying what behind each other’s back… It’s such a funny day. Then there’s a massive feast!”

“So,” Rainbow said, as it was only now sinking in, “everyone’s secrets get revealed?”

“Every single pony!” Cheese said cheerfully.

“Are we sure that’s a good idea?” Rainbow asked.

“It keeps the town honest,” Cheese said, shrugging. “Sometimes, we need to tear down the walls we’ve built.”

“Would it tell everyone a horrible secret someone really wanted to keep?” Pinkie asked.

“It doesn’t go out of its way to harm people,” Cheese said thoughtfully, one hoof under his chin as he trotted down the street, navigating around a crowd of ponies clad in the most fashionable of snowsuits - and one who had been blessed with a shaggy, wintry coat. “I mean, if someone… really, truly, was going to cause harm, it’d reveal it. But it’s harmless. Really!”

“I kinda wish Applejack was around for this now,” Rainbow said.

Pinkie felt a sudden stab of jealousy.

“You could just… ask her to come?” Pinkie asked, pronking up to Cheese, so close that their cutie marks were practically touching.

And now it was Dashie’s chance to quail a little.

“I couldn’t,” Dashie said. “She, she… has to be at the farm, and you know how much work it is…”

“Okey-dokey-loki!” Pinkie said, still bouncing along. “You can do that at your own pace, Dashie! So, where are we going, Cheese?”

“My family’s inn, the Mascar-pony!” Cheese said proudly. His brashness then dissipated a little. “They said you were always welcome, so… I decided to take them up on it.”

***

The trattoria was, as it turned out, the very same building that looked like a mansion precariously balanced atop a stack of stucco and wood. A single sign that was either old or just artfully weatherbeaten showed a cartoon of a pony that looked much like Cheese Sandwich jumping out of the center of a cake, proclaiming the establishment as “The Mascarpony Trattoria and Inn!!!!”

With four exclamation points.

As soon as Pinkie stepped in, a single thought raced through her head:

I need to eat everything.

There were so many dishes at each table. Things Pinkie had never seen. Had no name for. Hay and barley and daisy and fish, on plates piled high with pastas and sauces. Multiple ponies were eating a pizza almost as wide as the tables they sat upon. Desserts of so many kinds, filled with fruit and chocolate and caramel, sometimes all at once. And it’d all been set up so the kitchen was in plain view of the main dining area.

A gray stallion with a receding, thinning maneline waved to Pinkie. He sat next to a pony and griffon Pinkie had never seen.

“This all looks so delicious!” Pinkie gasped. “Oh, and hi, Sans! Hi, pony and griffon I’ve never met!”

“Oh, hey, that’s… Pinkie, you know Sans Smirk, but Rainbow doesn’t!” Cheese said, pointing enthusiastically to the table. “There’s my brother Tomato, but you can call him Tommy-”

Cheese walked towards the table, pointin with one foreleg to a red-brown stallion with a black mane styled into a pompadour and stroked through with yellow.

“-there’s Giovanni, he’s a griffon, he grew up here.”

Next to Tomato, or Tommy, was a griffon with a reddish tinge to his feathers and tail, something Pinkie had rarely (if ever) seen.

“Nice to see you again, Pinkie!” Sans waved to her, his voice only slightly raised.

“So, you’re the mare my brother’s been talking about!” Tomato Sandwich said, a little chuckle punctuating that sentence. “He just goes on and on about you!”

“Tell me about it,” Rainbow Dash muttered.

“And this is Rainbow Dash,” Cheese said. “She’s one of Pinkie’s best friends, she’s the element of loyalty… I actually met Pinkie because of her. I came to Ponyville to plan her party, and…”

Pinkie would normally have been rapt at attention. She so wanted to hear this story, but something was bothering her. Something about the cast of that pegasus pony’s jawline looked familiar… And that earth pony. The taller, curly-maned one wi-

Pinkie Pie squinted. “Have I met these ponies?”

“You’ve met me,” Sans Smirk pointed out.

“They all look…”

Curly manes and coats in all the shades of autumnal leaves met her gaze. They looked…

Wait a minute.

“AUDIBLE GASP-” Pinkie started.

“SURPRISE, PINKIE!” the entire dining room crowed, raising their hooves and other appendages, throwing back hoods, crowing in excitement. All of those ponies stared at her, smiling, and even though they’d been there the whole time it was as if the whole place exploded into color.

Suddenly, it was clear.

“A surprise party?! For me?!” Pinkie gasped. “Oh my goodness!”

She blushed profusely, scanning the room over the room.

“Ooh, you, with the bow - you could have hidden behind that piano, that would’ve been a great hiding spot. And you, that chandelier was an inspired choice, but-”

CRASH!

“MY SPLEEN!”

The chandelier fell to the floor, a dazed earth colt rolling off of it before they could get hurt.

“Yeah, there’s that. And you with the…”

Pinkie continued rattling off her advice.

“Wow,” Rainbow Dash said, walking up to the colt that’d been on the chandelier. “Nobody’s ever managed to get the drop on Pinkie like that! Not since that one time...”

“Yeah! You reeeeeeaaaally outdid yourselves,” Pinkie said.

At the same time:

“Wow, there’s… more of you than I expected,” Cheese said, looking around the room, surprisingly quiet. “I didn’t know so many of you would be here for this!”

“Well,” said one mare, looking much like cheese but smaller, fatter, and with a coat the color of mustard, “When Cheese told us all about you in his letter, we knew we had to roll out the red carpet.”

Pinkie’s tail twitched.

Ohhhhh….

“Cheese moves around a lot, and he doesn’t mention marefriends too often,” added a taller red stallion, this one with his same tall, lanky build… but an almost immaculately maintained pompadour of a mane. Just like Cheese’s brother.

“Daaaadd….” Cheese said, blushing.

Oh no, oh no, ohhhhh… Rainbow thought.

“So once he talked about you in such glowing terms, we figured we should give you the four-Cheese-blend welcome!” crowed an earth pony mare with a passing resemblance to Granny Smith.

“That... means a lot, Nonna!” Cheese said. Though that last word or syllable trailed off a bit, as if he’d realized he’d left the stove on and was only just realizing his house might have been on fire.

“I didn’t expect he’d have two marefriends, though,” one pony said looking over to Rainbow Dash. He looked like Cheese but slightly color-shifted, with the fur a pale yellow darker than fluttershy, with a mane that looked brown and white.

“Reggie, no, it’s not like-” Cheese started.

...buck.

Rainbow Dash stared in rapt horror.

“CONGRATULATIONS, LITTLE COUSIN!” bellowed a huge earth pony stallion. “TWO MARE!”

“Excuse me what the fresh-” Rainbow Dash started.

“No no no noooo, it’s not like that!” Pinkie cried frantically, waving her hooves like propellers. “I don’t even think Dashie l-”

She clamped both hooves over her mouth.

“He came back with two mares!” a pegasus called out. “This calls for a SONG!”

“Welcome welcome welcome
A fine welcome to you-”

“I swear I’ve heard this before,” Rainbow Dash said.

“I’m no expert, but it’s probably because you HAVE!” Pinkie yelled. “Cheese…”

And then to her surprise, she felt her energy draining out. “...Cheese, why are we using my Welcome Song?”

“Because… I thought you’d enjoy being reminded of…” Cheese started, his voice trailing off.

“Welcome welcome welcome
I say how do you do?”
Cheese’s family chorused.

“You couldn’t afford the rights, could you,” Pinkie sighed.

“Oh, no, no, not at all, we actually-” Cheese started.

Pinkie and Rainbow Dash stared at him.

“...Yes,” Cheese said sheepishly.

Welcome welcome welcome
I say hip hip hurray
Welcome welcome welcome
To Cavallocade toda-”

“STOP!” Rainbow Dash yelled.

The background music came to a screeching, grinding halt.

“He didn’t come with two marefriends! I’m not…” Rainbow stammered. “I just thought she might need another friend while she was somewhere different.”

“YEAH!” Pinkie said. “Besides, Dashie is already spoken for.”

“...she is?” asked a red stallion with a passing resemblance to Cheese.

“I am?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“You aren’t?” Pinkie asked.

Pinkie wondered just what the stare that Dashie was giving her meant.

“I thought you, and, uh… with the…” Pinkie said. Huh. I really thought it was obvious.

“Mom,” Cheese said, sidling up to the mare with the vague resemblance to him, “Can we… uh… talk in private? Please?”

“Whatever you say, son!” she said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to your marefriends-”

“Marefriend!” Rainbow blurted out. “Where is everyone getting the plural from?! We’ve only been here for two minutes!”

The five of them - Rainbow Dash, Pinkie, Cheese Sandwich, and his parents - filtered into a little room just behind the bar in the Mascarpony. It had the look of somewhere that had maybe been intended for habitation at some point (there was a sink sticking out of one wall for no discernible reason) and had gradually, slowly, become an office without anyone noticing.

A window shone down on Cheese’s father, who sat behind the desk.

Which was weird, because going by the layout of the building, there was nothing the window could be facing. And no possible source of light.

“So,” Cheese’s Father said. “What happened?”

“Well, if I had to make a guess,” Pinkie said, “The overly familiar manner by which I referred to Cheese in our letters gave the false impression we were a couple, and Cheese’s parents told everyone-”

“False,” Rainbow Dash said, making a “pffft” noise.

“-that we were a thing?”

“You really think they’d be that gossipy?” Cheese asked. “Mom, dad, I would n-”

“No, no, she was totally correct,” his father said.

“Creepily so, I might add,” his mother said.

A pause.

“You’re really not a couple, though?” his mother asked.

“No,” Pinkie said, looking to Cheese to refute h-

“Nah, we’re… she’s right,” Cheese said.

Rainbow Dash silently fumed in the background, forelegs crossed. Pinkie looked back to find that she agreed.

“Being among friends is what gives Pinkie her spark,” Cheese said, carefully not looking at her. “I couldn’t take her away from that.”

You could’ve heard a pin drop. Or, more likely, the sound of Pinkie’s heart shattering into-

“Did somebody just drop a glass?” Rainbow Dash asked, one hoof to her right ear. “Thought I heard something.”

-a hundred little pieces. And all she could think of as she stared at the wood-paneled floor was ‘and what if I do that too?’

“And Cheese gets his spark from wandering Equestria and sparking his creativity,” Pinkie said.

“Plus, meeting each other and getting letters is special because it only happens once in awhile,” Cheese said. “It… warms my heart every time! I just feel like… as we are, we’re better as friends.”

“...Yeah?” Pinkie asked.

“Yeah….” Cheese said.

“Yeah,” Pinkie said, looking away.

“Suuuure,” Rainbow Dash said, raising an eyebrow.

“I… see,” Cheese’s father said. “But… Pinkie. Remember what you said about telling everyone?”

“Oh no,” Cheese said, burying his face under one hoof.

“Oh… yes,” Cheese’s mother said.

“What do you mean… everyone?” Cheese asked.

“Alfredo Fettucine, Clear Skies, that one pony in the cartoonishly offensive buffalo garb, Blue Skies, Steel Stud, Rapid Shadow, Astral Thunder, Astral Chaser, Wild Specter, Astral Strikes, Joker’s Wild, Cloud Charge, Garino, and Garrett, and the Faceless Hooded Pony from Grove Park…”

“Oh sweet Celestia, you did tell everyone,” Cheese sighed. “Did you even tell Old Stallion Livio?!”

Cheese’s mother put a hoof on his back. “I’m sorry, Cheesy. He died five years ago.”

Cheese stared at her aghast. “Oh. Oh my Celestia. How did I not kn-”

“But he came back as a ghost!”

“...What?” Pinkie asked.

“And he found out anyway.”

“That’s even worse!” Cheese said.

“Yeah, he found out from his three-year old son,” Cheese’s mother said. “Who I told.”

“Oh COME ON!” Pinkie yelled.

“Wait,” Rainbow Dash asked, fluttering down towards Cheese to whisper into his ear, “How does that make any kind of sense?”

“I’m afraid to ask,” Cheese whispered back.

“Oh, okay, that makes perfect sense,” Pinkie said.

“Plus, the town council put up posters and fliers that said ‘planned by Pinkie Pie and Cheese,’” Cheese’s father said. “So for now… uh…”

“Oh,” Cheese said, looking away from Pinkie.

“Yeah,” Cheese’s father said. “As far as almost everyone knows, you’re already a couple. And you’ll be working together all this time, so…”

Pinkie’s cheeks burned with embarrassment.

He just wants to be friends, and he’s even right about why… but everyone’s going to rub it in. Unintentionally.

What the buck am I supposed to do about that?

It wasn’t worth explaining how it’d happened, and it was destined to be a blur of awkward stares, not-quite-glares, and something that patrolled the border between sadness and anger but never quite crossed that divide.

But then, almost before Pinkie knew it, she and Rainbow Dash were in a winding, zig-zagging hallway near the top of the inn, heading towards their room, escorted by a yellow and white pegasus mare with a cutie mark of a white circle with a slice cut out, not unlike a cheese wheel. She bore a passing resemblance to the earth pony Cheese had referred to as ‘Reggie’.

“Your room is… here,” she said, pointing to a door marked ‘1408.’

“That… seems a bit unlucky,” Rainbow Dash said. “Adds up to 13, we’re on the 13th-”

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” the mare said. “You’re actually on the 14th floor! The 13th floor was walled off. For… reasons.”

“O… kay,” Rainbow Dash said, clearly trying not to think too hard about that one.

“Now, there’s some things you need to know about the room,” the mare said. “I’m ah… Brie Wheel, by the way.”

“It’s Gouda meet you!” Pinkie exclaimed, reaching out to her with one foreleg.

“Wow,” Brie Wheel said. “Never heard that one before.”

“Really?” Pinkie asked, a huge smile on her face.

“No, seriously! I actually haven’t! It’s kinda weird when I think about it,” Brie Wheel said.

She opened the door to their room.

It was… a hotel room. Decorated all in wood, some of which had the bark shaven off, giving it a rough-hewn look that might have given it the look of a place that’d been built yesterday, if not for the sense of antiquity visible in all its decor. It had the look of a lodge out in the middle of the woods for earth pony foresters, except for the fact that…

It was the strangest thing. There were none of the signs of wood that’d been nailed or joined together with pegs. Only expanses of curves, with no seams in the wood. It looked as if that bedframe had somehow grown into that shape. Same for… virtually everything in this room, save for the flooring.

And yet. There was a sense of antiquity to this room, as if Luna might have stayed here once upon a time before being banished to the moon. And despite that off-putting detail and sense of age, it did look cozy. The sheets looked soft, puffy, and velvety, like you’d enjoy their reassuring mass over your fur even if the time for such sheets had long passed. An armchair that looked to have been almost artfully broken in by years of loafing sat in one corner.

The whole room was decorated with photos depicting an expedition to a mountain that looked quite like the one that stood sentinel over Cavallocade and now served as the local ski area. Ponies in bundled cold-winter gear that gave them silhouettes not unlike yaks traversed its peaks, rappelling up cliffs with ropes… or in the case of several pegasi, just flying to the top.

But there was one thing that commanded Pinkie’s attention:

“Finally!” Pinkie said, looking towards the bathroom. “I.. really had a lot to drink.”

“Pinkie,” Brie Wheel said, “You’re going to need to be careful, there’s-”

Pinkie closed the door behind her.

“Pinkie, you need to-”

There was a sigh of relief.

“Pinkie, no, don’t… wait, WIT NO NO DON'T FLUSH TH-" Brie Wheel cried.

It was too late. Pinkie barreled out the door, screaming as something rumbled.

Something slick and wet and sudden pushed itself up from inside, with a noise like a wet growl or someone ripping paper. Pinkie Pie stared in rapt attention, realizing it was a tentacle, like one belonging to a kraken. She could see the suction cups contracting, in and out, dilating- dilating?

Those weren't suckers.

That was a tentacle, covered in eyes, poking its way out from their toilet. There was an awful silence for a few seconds before it receded back into the toilet.

"...We'll... be going to the bathroom... outside," Pinkie said, not quite having processed what she'd seen.

"But can't you-" Rainbow Dash started. "Wait. No, definitely. Yeah."

"I can respect that. Lawrence can be rather inconvenient sometimes," Brie Wheel said.

"His name is Lawrence?" Pinkie Pie asked.

"Well, their name. We sort of got the impression they don't like traditional gender binary," Brie Wheel said.

"Oh. Sorry, Lawrence!" Pinkie said, yelling into the toilet.

“They’ve been in our pipes and… we kind of forgot to tell him it was your room now,” Brie Wheel said. "Just don't flush anything you normally wouldn't, and you'll be fine.”

Once that initial shock had worn off:

“What the absolute BUCK, Pinkie?!” Rainbow Dash yelled.

“I know! There’s a tentacle monster in our bathroom! That’s really weird!” Pinkie said.

“What?! No!” Rainbow yelled. “I mean, that’s weird even by this town’s standards, but…”

She sighed.

. “Okay. Am I bucking crazy or…” Rainbow Dash started. does everyone see it? You are perfect for each other.”

“No, no,” Pinkie said, looking away from Dashie, “He was right, we’re too differen-”

“If I painted you yellow and you deepened your voice like we were trying to pull one over on Trixie again, everyone would think you were Cheese,” Rainbow said, completely deadpan.

what

Pinkie just stared at Rainbow Dash, jaw dropped, eyes wide. “Why would you or anypony else do that.”

“Because you’re not that different at all!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed, throwing her hooves out, one of them smacking a wall. “You’re both party ponies, you both love going over the top, you love making others smile, you’re on the same wavelength all the time, and you’re just going to say no? And you were just thinking about how weird it would be if Cheese was making out with someone that looked like him, weren’t you?!”

“I what?!” Pinkie yelled. “No! No, I wasn’t!”

“But you can’t not think of making out with him now, can’t you?”

“I…” Pinkie stammered. “...Yes, of course I can, I…”

But she couldn’t.

“Oh, wow! You were hiding a cupcake there?!”

“I’d bet you twenty bits that you’ll end up with him by the end of the week,” Rainbow Dash said, “Except that’s probably extortion.”

“Why are you being so insistent about this?” Pinkie asked. “I mean… he loves traveling, I like it in ponyville, what if we’re better as friends? What if he...”

Pinkie gasped.

“What if I ask, he can’t look the same way, we grow apart, and then we meet at Party Pony Con and he’s dating a mare that looks exactly like me but differently colored and the whole time I’m just staring at her awkwardly and I can’t not think of it and then we grow apart because of how I’m looking at his marefriend?!”

Rainbow Dash just stared at her, mouth open, for a few seconds.

“Whoooooole lot to unpack there,” she said. “But… at least try to get together with him, and if it doesn’t work, then you’ll stay friends. Though that last part is…”

“Extremely likely?!” Pinkie asked.

“I was going to say ‘disturbing,’” Rainbow Dash said. “Especially the part where you mentioned someone who looks exactly like you but differently colored. I mean, how often does that happen?”

“It’s happened to Derpy about 15 times,” Pinkie said.

“Well, I’ve never seen somepony who looks exactly like you with a different color,” Rainbow Dash said. “Just…. Talk to him. See what happens. Maybe lean into what everyone thinks about you two being a couple and see how it feels. You’ve had other relationships before, you know what to do.”

“Right,” Pinkie said, nodding.

“Just remember, all too often, you’re the only one stopping yourself,” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s not like there’s some evil conspiracy expressingly trying to hurt you.”

MEANWHILE

“Fillies and gentlecolts,” a hooded mare said. “This shall be the first meeting of our CONSPIRACY EXPRESSLY TRYING TO HURT PINKIE PIE!”

Lightning struck outside.

“...Should we really be doing this outside, near a thunderstorm?” the maroon hooded mare asked.

“We all have our grievances against her,” the hooded mare said, “And during this week before the festival, we’ll bring true suffering to her.”

“Way ahead of you,” said the tall, lanky stallion. His horn glowed, enveloping his steamer trunk in green, dragging it up to him. The lid opened.

Something floated up and out from it. A long wooden stave with a metal tip. A telescope with-

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” exclaimed the hooded mare. “Not like that!”

“What?!” the thin stallion said, indignant. “You said bring true suffering to her. So I brought a gun!”

“We’re not trying to kill her, not yet!” the hooded mare said, petulant, “Just make her suffer. We want her to feel even a fraction of the injustice she’s caused us.”

The thin stallion let the rifle hang in midair. “She’ll suffer if she has to go through physical therapy and wonders if she’ll ever walk right again.”

“I. Said. No,” the hooded mare said. “Are you questioning my logic?”

“Often,” the thin stallion said. “But… we’re going to do something, right? We’re not going to sit around skulking like saturday morning cartoon villains in our fortress of doom?”

“I have no idea what most of those words mean,” said the mare with the hat.

“Nevermind,” the thin stallion said. “It’s not that important.”

“That’ll be too easy,” the hooded mare continued. “She’ll still have friends. She’ll still have things that make her happy. What we’ll do is take from her a fraction of what she took from all of us.”

“If you say so,” the thin stallion said. “But let me make one thing clear: I’m going to get pretty tired of all this hurrying up and waiting soon. And you’d better not be in the blast radius when I do.”