Don't you know where it comes from?
“Well, actually, it originated as a religious practice, not as stagecraft,” Twilight Sparkle explained as she found a book for Pinkie Pie and put it into the large bag the pink pony was carrying. “The superstitious thought that prophetic spirits inhabited—”
Pinkie Pie was on a tight schedule, and so she'd come prepared for this contingency.
“Thanks, have a cupcake!” Pinkie exclaimed as she shoved a delicious pastry into Twilight’s mouth, preventing further words from escaping their prodigious purple pony prison. “Well, gotta run, thanks for the book, see you later!” Pinkie rattled off cheerfully as she made a run for it. Her attempt was doomed by circumstance. Pinkie tripped over something in the doorway and bumped into Fluttershy.
“Oooh, sorry there Fluttershy,” Pinkie apologized.
“Oh, it’s okay Pinkie,” Fluttershy said as she helped Pinkie up. Pinkie noticed a box on the doorstep of the library.
“Twilight! You got a box!” Pinkie Pie said, the very picture of a pony Pandora presenting the portentous package to Twilight.
Twilight swallowed the cupcake and came over.
“Oh, that must be my parchment,” Twilight said as she picked up the package with her telekinesis.
“A perfectly packaged parchment provision?” Pinkie perkily proposed.
“Um. Yeah, I guess the package is... nice,” Twilight said, looking at it.
“Er. You write on parchment, Twilight?” Fluttershy asked, subtle concern in her voice.
“It’s very durable,” Twilight said as she opened the package. “And I can’t just write to the princess with any old writing materials.”
“You have to keep buying it? You don’t recycle it?” Fluttershy asked.
“It’s expensive, but the royal court reimburses me for all the stationery materials I buy, anyway,” Twilight replied. “Spike has so much work to do as it is, and what if he got confused? What would the princess do if I wrote to her on a palimpsest?”
“Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon!” Pinkie Pie said because she felt like it.
“But Twilight, don’t you know where parchment comes from?” Fluttershy persisted, a bit hesitantly.
“Ooooh oooh! I know!” Pinkie Pie answered. “Parchment comes from the same place as our glue, red lipstick, leather products, and gelatin desserts!”
Fluttershy steeled herself for a blunt expression of unfortunate truths.
“It comes from the store!” Pinkie finished. “Oh, that reminds me - I've gotta do some shopping for a party! Peace, pretty pastel pony pals!” Pinkie added as she ran out the door, before anyone realized that it's impossible to make a peace sign with hooves.
“Um. Okay,” Twilight said as she returned to unpacking the parchment.
“You know this comes from... animals, right?” Fluttershy asked.
“Oh, yes, Princess Celestia once sent me to take a tour of the parchment factory in Canterlot when I was a filly,” Twilight explained.
“She’s positively proficient on the process of proper parchment production!” exclaimed Pinkie Pie from behind Twilight, boosting her alliteration score by a further sixty-three points.
Twilight jumped with a start.
“I thought you went to the store,” Twilight said.
“I forgot my book,” Pinkie explained.
“Okay... bye, Pinkie.”
“Bye.”
“Um.. we were saying?” Twilight asked.
“So, you’re... already aware of how it’s made?”
“Oh, sure. First a carcass is flayed, then the skin is soaked to remove blood and grime,” Twilight began, slipping into the lecture-zone, oblivious to Fluttershy’s disconcertion as she continued in graphic technical detail. She got as far as describing what was done with the semilunar knife and was about to look for the Illustrated Guide to Flaying and Tanning before she noticed.
“Er, are you feeling alright, Fluttershy?” Twilight asked with genuine concern. “You don’t look so well.”
“It’s just — all those animals, Twilight...”
Twilight Sparkle at last grasped the crux of the issue.
“Um. Well, you know, this package will last us... quite a while,” Twilight said subjectively. “And... this is cruelty free parchment, actually. It’s from animals that died in old age. Of natural causes.”
Twilight smiled too earnestly. “They passed into their eternal rest surrounded by their loving families. Several generations! And also their dearest friends and even some distant cousins. With excellent palliative medical care. That’s one of the reasons it’s so expensive, all those analgesic herbs and... tasty berries and stuff.”
“I... I guess that doesn’t sound so bad,” Fluttershy replied.
“Right, so you don’t have to feel bad or worry about it,” Twilight said kindly to her friend.
“I was worried for a bit that you just didn’t care... but I’m glad it’s not as bad as I thought."
Twilight smiled nervously and began to wonder if she had done enough of the compassion thing and if now would be a good time to figure out why Fluttershy had come to the library in the first place, so she could help her and then get back to studying. Before Twilight could finish her sympathetic behavior calculating algorithm, Spike returned to the library, carrying a parcel.
“Twilight, the stationery shop didn’t have a whole ream of fetal lamb vellum, but they made it up with six quires of their best weanling rabbit parchment for no extra charge since we have the weekly standing order with them,” Spike helpfully explained.
Unfortunately, Spike noticed the other package before the mortified expressions of the ponies.
“Oh, I guess the normal package was delivered after all,” he observed. “That’s a relief. This stuff is really second rate.” The young dragon pulled out a sheet of parchment from the new bundle.
“Look, they said it’s weanling rabbit but I could swear this is made of two squirrel pelts glued together,” he said, holding it in Twilight’s face. “It’s not even the same kind of squirrel on both sides, half of it is darker.”
“Eh-heh.” Twilight muttered nervously.
He finally noticed her displeased expression. “I... guess you want me to try to get your money back? Maybe see if they have the rest of the lamb vellum in stock tomorrow?”
“You monster!” Fluttershy exclaimed, pushing past Spike and running from the library in tears.
There was a brief, stunned silence.
“I never would have guessed Fluttershy of all ponies to be a racist,” Spike complained, more disappointed than sad as he put the vellum back in the package. “I thought she liked dragons.”
“Um. She wasn’t talking about dragons. I... She was upset about animals being used for parchment, and I... ” Twilight paused. “I may have made the process out to be a bit more humane that was... compatible with me having a standing order for one ream per week of uterine lamb vellum.”
“Ohh.... sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, Spike, just bad timing. But now Fluttershy thinks I’m a monster and knows I lied to her. I don’t know how I’ll ever make it up to her...”
“Good thing she didn’t see the giant checklist you made this morning,” Spike remarked.
“Looks like a poorly planned prevarication on parchment production prompted a pernicious problem!” Pinkie Pie said, racking up 255 points in a go. She was in the zone.
Twilight jumped again.
“Pinkie.”
“Yep!”
“You’re back from the store so... quickly.”
“They didn’t have what I wanted to get.”
“How did you get in here?”
“What are we going to do about your parchment profligacy problem, Twilight Sparkle?” Pinkie ignored the questions as she walked over to Twilight, who was looking simultaneously annoyed and inconsolable. “It’s a pickle.”
Pinkie paused a moment.
“Come on, no-one likes to see a pouty purple pony, cheer up!” Pinkie said, expressing affection to Twilight and mentally adding another seven points to her tally. “We can figure this out.”
“Pouty purple po— Is this ‘P’-word thing going to be a new... thing... with you?”
“Only on prime-numbered calendar dates of months with names that contain sounds you make with your lips.”
“Spreading the frosting a bit thick today, aren’t you?” Twilight asked, rolling her eyes.
Pinkie Pie ignored the critical comment on her excellent new game.
“We can fix this. Tell Dr. Pie all about your latest social problems,” Pinkie said as she pushed Twilight onto a couch.
Twilight looked at the furniture, confused. “I don’t remember getting this couch.”
“I bought it for you this morning. Do you like it?”
“Ah... thanks. It’s nice, Pinkie.” Twilight was, at this point, too defeated to resist. She did not struggle as Pinkie Pie inflicted a faux-German accent on her helpless victim.
“Now, Frau Doktor Pinkiepei understands zat Fluttershy is upset because of all ze many, many Animals you callously condemn to ze Abattoir ven you order zese Reams of fine writing Materials, ja?”
“Um. Yes. Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that... I’m not a bad pony.”
“Ja, ja, vell, mein lila magische Stutfüllen, zis Problem has a simple Solution.”
“What did you just call... nevermind. It does? Should I just apologize and maybe use paper for general use? Try to cut back on parchment?”
“I hope the princess doesn’t start using paper,” Spike complained. “White paper tastes like chalk.”
“Not to just apologize, nein nein! You must build a Monument to ze rectify your collective Transgression to stand for all Time!”
“Um, that sounds... really hard. And what does it even mean? Pinkie Pie, I know you’re trying to be helpful and all but —”
Pinkie resorted to a cupcake to end the interruption.
“Zis is vat Tvilight Sparkle must do: you must not solve zis Problem for yourself only, but for ze whole Vorld.”
“Mmnf mrll nmrld,” Twilight protested.
“Yes! Solve the ze Problem of humane Parchment Production, and you vill win back her Friendship and prove zat you care about her Concerns.”
Twilight swallowed.
“That... that does make sense, Pinkie, but, how am I supposed to solve this—” Twilight blocked the administration of another cupcake with her hoof. “- this problem by myself? It sounds rather — Pinkie. I don’t want any more cupcakes. — It sounds rather complex. Where would I even start?”
“I bet you can do it before the week is out!” Pinkie said, resuming her normal accent. “I’m totally confident that you can do it. Surprise her, Twilight! Surprise the world!”
“Okay... I’ll try, Pinkie.”
“Good! Bye! Now I’m gonna go find Trixie so I can use ‘prestidigitator.'”
And with that she was gone.
“It’s a pretty nice couch,” said Spike. “But I think she’s trying to make you fat.”
So write a letter to your princess or something
Fluttershy had resumed a normal pace walking through town. She saw an adorable little squirrel, but the sight only brought thoughts of his comrades, skinned, bleached and pressed in the library, passed off as... bunnies. Dead baby bunnies. She sniffled again at the massacre of the innocents. Deep down, Fluttershy knew that Twilight wasn’t a bad person, but... how could she be party to this?
It was the fault, the pale yellow pegasus thought, of the system. The stationery-scribal complex
with its stranglehold on the Equestrian bureaucracy, mandating the use of parchment for royal communications and paperwork. Blame fell on the purveyors of this product, those merchants of death touting its smooth surface and archival quality! It wasn’t Twilight’s fault, she was a product of the evil system, Fluttershy said to herself, perhaps justifying her own association with the unicorn.
Fluttershy froze. There it was. The stationery store. It gave Fluttershy bad vibes, but she knew that she had to confront this menace at its source. You can do this, Fluttershy, she thought to herself as she approached it. She swung open the door...
... and found the shop almost empty. It was quiet except for some subdued industrial sounds coming from the adjoining room. The paper cutter sat quiescent. Boxes of paper products lined the walls. On the wall were a pair of bits in a jar, the first the shop had ever made, and beside them - a portrait of a smiling Twilight Sparkle. Our most valued customer, the plaque said. Product of the system, Fluttershy repeated to herself. Product of the system. A mantra. She didn’t notice the proprietor coming in from the other room.
“I’m sorry, miss, but we’re not open now,” the proprietor, a gray stallion, said. “The storefront closes at one in the afternoon on Wednesdays.”
“Oh, I’m... I’m here to talk to you about... something,” Fluttershy began. “You see, I’m a friend of Twilight Sparkle, and —”
“Twilight Sparkle? Why didn’t you say so sooner?” the proprietor said congenially. “For a friend of our biggest customer we are always open. Something to drink?”
“Um.” Product of the system. Product of the system. “No, thank you. I just wanted —”
“If this is about the weanling rabbit parchment, I can explain!” he pleaded. “I’m so sorry that squirrel parchment got in there, we had a new employee working here this morning, and it was chaos, ma’am, pure chaos, squirrel in with rabbit, canary onionskin confused with sheepskins! Please, please tell your friend that it was a sincere mistake, it will never happen again, and we would never, ever try to pass off factory seconds to such a discerning customer!”
Fluttershy finally got a word in.
“No you don’t understand, I... I’m wondering if there’s anything Twilight could use besides... the skins of baby bunnies... for writing,” she said.
“Oh, I know, I know, she wants vellum; I’m sorry we had to substitute to make up today’s order, if only the first shipment hadn’t gotten lost in the mail. But we’re a small shop, you understand. Don’t worry, we’re working double shifts; we’ll have proper vellum by tomorrow morning!”
“That isn’t going to —”
“Please, please,” the proprietor said, melodramatically bowing, “please don’t take your business elsewhere. Please. It was one mistake! I... we can’t go on without your business! I... I just made the down-payment on a yacht! I have named it the Splendid Sparkle in honor of your friend!”
“Um, that’s really sweet but —”
“An hour, please, give us an hour and we can have the vellum finished! I promise you, we are working as hard as we can, even as we speak, look!”
At that, the proprietor threw open the door to the workshop. Fluttershy saw terrible things, things such as no one should ever have to see, least of all a mild-mannered pale yellow flying pony. For the second time today, she ran from a building in shocked horror, but for variety, she screamed. Tears would come later.
The afternoon moved on into night. Twilight Sparkle worked diligently on finding a solution to the parchment problem in the basement of the library. She looked at strips of ersatz-parchment materials in test tubes disappointedly.
“J-7 though J-19 have all deteriorated under simulated dragon digestive tract conditions,” she complained. “You got that?”
Spike, who was dressed in an adorable little lab coat because “adorable and safe” was the dress code, dutifully marked down the results in the laboratory notebook.
“Good. I need more dragon saliva,” Twilight said, presenting Spike with a watchglass. “Spit.”
“I’m tired, Twilight, and I want to go to sleep.”
“Think of the baby sheep, Spike. Think of Fluttershy.”
It didn’t produce the expected results.
Twilight sighed. “Rarity likes baby sheep, Spike,” she offered.
Sschplorch.
“Thanks.”
There was a ring at the doorbell. Spike left Twilight alone to answer the door, while she titrated the new batch against her standardized solution of three molar dragon saliva.
A few minutes later, Spike returned.
“The stationery shop just sent you flowers and a really nice fruit basket,” Spike said, munching an item from the basket.
Twilight froze. A fruit basket in the middle of the night? Had they found out about her work so quickly? Was this a bribe? Or a veiled warning? Was she starting down a path that would inevitably end in tragedy? Would it be long before the thugs of the stationery industry would leave some pony’s head in her bed as a bold-faced threat? Would the next basket contain Applejack’s hat and a dead fish? Would she have to be eternally vigilant, every shadow and noise a real or imagined vellum-purveying assassin?
“You okay there?” Spike asked, snapping her back to reality.
“Oh, um, yes, I’m fine,” she replied, looking back to her work. I’m just being paranoid, she told herself.
“I’m gonna go to bed now,” Spike declared. “You need to start paying me overtime if you want me to pull all-nighters.”
Several hours ago, Fluttershy was walking home to her cottage, her head hung a little lower than normal.
“You look pretty sad,” said a familiar, happy voice. “Have a cookie.”
Pinkie trotted alongside Fluttershy and offered her a cookie.
“No thanks, Pinkie... I’m just a little upset that no one seems to take my concern seriously.”
“You should write a letter!” suggested the pink pastry pusher. “A pretty popular path to provide the particulars to the powers that be,” Pinkie Pie suggested, building on “pink pastry pusher” for a 504-point combo.
“Write a letter? To... the government? The princess?” Fluttershy asked hopefully.
“Yes!” Pinkie exclaimed excitedly, although excited exclamations were only worth points on the twenty-seventh of each month. “You should definitely write a letter. You know she’ll read it.”
“Oh, but I don’t want to use parchment, it would be... hypocritical,” Fluttershy said. “I’ll have to think of something else.”
“How ‘bout engraving it on stone tablets? If anything, that’s fancier than regular boring old parchment!” Pinkie suggested.
“That could work,” Fluttershy said. “I have some old paving stones I’m not using.”
“Perfect! Good luck!”
“You don’t want to stay and help me write it?”
“Oh, I’d love to, but I’ve got some reading to do! Bye!”
And Pinkie Pie was gone once again.
“Do you expect me to reveal my parchment replacement plans?” asked Twilight Sparkle, strapped to a cold steel table in the underground dungeon of the World Syndicate of Stationery Makers.
“No, professor Sparkle, I expect you to die!” said their leader, an overweight stallion in a white suit. He laughed evilly as he threw a switch on the wall. A laser cutter engaged, and began to slice the table to which Twilight was strapped. She tried to pull the switch back off with her telekinesis, but it wasn’t working, no matter how hard she tried. The burning laser advanced closer to her; a spark landed on one of her legs.
Twilight fought a rising panic as she again tried in vain to actuate the switch with her telekinesis, exerting powerful magical energies on it in every direction. “Twilight!!!” the switch screamed at her. “Twilight wake up! Stop it!”
Twilight woke up. She had fallen asleep at the lab bench. Suspended in a glistening cloud of magical energy was Spike, presently upside down and rotating gently.
“Oh I’m so sorry Spike! That’s never happened before!” Twilight apologized as she sat the slightly shaken Dragon down on the floor of the basement. “Are you okay? I didn’t give you a traumatic brain injury, did I? Oh no, what if I did? Quick, Spike, how many fingers am I holding up?”
Spike sighed. “Zero,” he replied unenthusiastically, without looking.
“Okay, now, who’s the current ruler of Equestria?”
“I’m gonna guess it’s still our beloved, immortal princess, Celestia.”
“Okay, right again. Wait, I forget what step of the neurological exam comes next — ”
“I’m fine, Twilight. I just came to bring you... this!” he produced a sword.
“Viva la revolucion!” the tiny dragon shouted as he charged Twilight. She dodged.
“What the hay, Spike?!” Twilight exclaimed.
“Today is the day we rise against our equine oppressors! No longer will we toil for sustenance in your gem mines with no overtime pay!” He thrust the sword again, narrowly missing his erstwhile employer. Spike had so very much cost himself that sapphire Twilight had been saving him for secretaries’ day.
Twilight tried to subdue Spike with her telekinesis, but it wasn’t working again. She dodged his next attack, but in so doing, tripped on a piece of laboratory equipment and fell backwards into a rat’s nest of wires.
Spike lept across the space separating them, and raised his weapon to administer a deathblow. Twilight winced and prepared for death. She regretted nothing in her life save forgetting to make an appropriate literary reference when faced by this murderous betrayal.
“Aha!” Sword clashed against sword as the blow was parried. Twilight cautiously opened an eye to see a dashing unicorn stallion in a tuxedo engaging in a ferocious sword-fight with Spike. She blinked in amazement as Spike held his own against her rescuer, but was then brought down by a stun-gas cufflink.
“Don’t worry, professor Sparkle,” the handsome stallion said in an upper-class accent, “the secret of your parchment formula will be safe for the free ponies of Equestria!”
“Who... are you?”
“Con Mane. Mane Con Mane,” he introduced himself as he helped Twilight out of the twisted tangle of wires.
“Now I know for sure I’m dreaming,” Twilight said, and smiled. “That being the case, you want to go upstairs for some... coffee?”
“I would be delighted, professor Sparkle,” he said congenially.
“Please,” Twilight replied, “Call me Twilight.” She batted her eyes, adding a third specular reflection for good measure, and quickly reviewed the genre conventions for a spy movie love scene in her head.
Con Mane kissed Twilight Sparkle as she closed her eyes...
... she tasted frosting. Twilight opened her eyes. She was kissing Pinkie Pie.
Pinkie Pie heard a surprising variety of unkind things as Twilight pulled away from her and fell back into the wires. She wasn’t really up on her Canterlot slang but she guessed she didn’t want to be any of those nouns.
Pinkie Pie laughed.
“You’re in my dreams now, Pinkie? Why? Why?”
“I’m Pinkie Pie, Fell Shieldmaiden of Chaos. This is what I do. And I thought maybe you’d like to borrow Con Mane.” A beat. “I didn’t know he was good in a swordfight.”
Pinkie walked in front of a window in the basement, inexplicably overlooking a Manehattan sunset, as Twilight had a mini-breakdown in the background. Pinkie cast a long shadow over the room, waiting with uncharacteristic patience for Twilight to finish incoherently sobbing something about being “a good pony who did nothing to deserve being in this thing.”
Pinkie cleared her throat. “I bring a message... foreshadowing DOooOOOoooOM!”
“... could the message have come after I had... coffee... with a dashing secret agent?”
“No, silly, then you’d have had icky coffee breath. And it’s a message of DOOM! Doom is a priority postal level!”
“Fine. What is it?”
Pinkie opened up a backpack - had she been wearing that a moment ago? - and produced a note.
“Oh, sorry, is my face ever red... This isn’t a message of doom at all.”
“That’s a relief.”
“It’s the choreography for a dance of doom!”
“Oh, why...” Twilight lamented as she wondered when this horrible nightmare would end. She looked up and was surrounded by a crowd of Pinkie Pies. She wanted to put her forelegs over her eyes and make it go away, but she knew better than to show weakness to the horde in its full strength.
“It’s an easy dance,” one of them said. “You just put one hoof on the next dancer, like so...”
The Pinkies linked up and began to... dance. Sort of.
“What does it mean, Pinkie?”
“Maybe if you knew more about dancing this would be a better interpretive dance,” one of them replied.
“I cannot make cake without flour!” protested another, wearing a deerstalker hat and smoking a bubble-pipe. “Nor dreams without subconscious knowledge.”
“Dreams,” Frau Doktor Pinkiepei reminded Twilight from behind her, “are ze royal road to ze unconscious mind.” The pink pony puffed a candy cigar. “My, my, you are a really messed up pony. You need to take more pills.”
The Pinkies whirled around rhythmically. It made Twilight dizzy, and confused.
“Wait, can't I just read the instructions?” Twilight asked.
“Fine,” the original one - maybe - replied in a huff, handing the note over to Twilight. She looked at it, and the solution to artificial parchment production unfolded before her...
