Don't read to much into this title
Rarity was having a mediocre day. Very so-so. It was still filled with sparkles of fun to light up the monotony of checking up on her shop, which as it turns out, was completely unnecessary.
She was tagging along for her second Pie Sister Swap day, or as Pinkie would put it, 'Ps-Sw-Duh-Wi-Rrr', as a reminder of Rarity's involvement. Eventually convincing herself to allow a stop at her boutique in-between their sightseeing before the main event of the day ended too well for Rarity's tastes. She was glad, of course, of the management and success of her boutique, but without any initial problems to solve; Rarity, as a mare who found joy and passion in work, had all of that 'problem solving' energy bundled up in the back of her mind.
As of right now, Rarity was in the midst of musing on her own current mental state as the two Pie sisters led her along to a sandwich shop named: 'UnderWay' a place even known to Rarity through their marketing of their hoof long sandwiches.
Pinkie Pie had just nosed her way into the door, bouncing past the doorway in normal Pinkie Pie fashion. Maud, a true gentlemare, held the door open as Rarity strutted inside.
Why was Rarity strutting into a sandwich shop? Well... A lady is a lady everywhere, adventures, dog pits, ect. Don't judge. Besides, in her opinion, (verified by the onlookers, of course) she was, in essence, elegant. Her posture was crucial for that, thus, logically: Strut.
Maud stepped in behind Rarity, and she heard the bell ding as the door swung shut. There were a few ponies sitting throughout the shop, a mother and a filly sharing a sandwich, a pair of stallions chatting about sports, the works. That was just about as much as Rarity got the lay of the land, walking up just behind the bouncing Pinkie as she rambled about her day to the mare legally distinctly coloured yellow and green, with the imagery of a vegetarian sub on her flanks.
"-then we started climbing down the staircase, because we've seen the elevator before, and I wanted to try the-"
Rarity rested a hoof on Pinkie's back, timing it like quickly pressing a button, waiting until Pinkie was crouched and ready to 'boing' once more before sticking her hoof into the trajectory. Pinkie half bounced, stopped by Rarity's hoof, and turned to the side in question as her ears flopped to one side, her mane doing its best to bounce since the rest of her body couldn't.
Rarity removed her hoof, gesturing in front of her mouth as she said, "I think maybe we should just order our food Darling?"
Pinkie Pie nodded vigorously, turning back to the mare in addition to resuming her blatant disregard for physics via 'rapid height reorientation'
In truth, Rarity wasn't a fan of places like this. The food was filling but mediocre. If she had the bits to eat extravagantly for the experience, why stray away from comfort foods when dining specifically for nutrition?
Tuning back into the verbal transaction going back and forth over the counter as Rarity tried to decide on the menu, something happened.
"Yup! and can you put hay on it?"
The mare over the counter nodded, and added the mentioned ingredient onto the sandwich, turning back up to Pinkie while adjusting the plastic film around her hooves, she asked, "Would you like it toasted?"
Pinkie, mid bounce, responded with, "Nope!"
"Oh" The mare doesn't let the beat pass, filling the conversational void with, "Would you like me to toast the hay?"
"Nope!"
The mare made a face, somewhere in-between the confusion of looking at a particularly hard to understand but still colourful splotch of graffiti, and the face you make when you see your friend eat food off the ground.
Rarity took note, her attention having been drawn to the momentary interaction, and the mare's response.
"Really?" Said the legally distinctly coloured mare.
Pinkie stopped bouncing.
Now, Rarity was paying attention.
Pinkie stared off into space, her mane equally going still after a couple more wiggles, just for good measure.
"You know." Pinkie started, a tone far from how she was previously speaking, "Normally..." ear twitched, in conjunction with her going to scratch it. "When ponies ask me that, I just ignore it. Say no, right?"
Rarity was dumbfounded at the sudden seriousness, too much so to act immediately.
"I always have the thought in the back of my head to say something," She shrugs, "But it's just a sandwich right? It's not important enough for me to..."
Maud had stepped up besides Rarity, observing the situation as equally impassive as she normally was.
Pinkie shook her head, "Never mind. The point is, today is the day."
The legally distinctly coloured mare looked at Rarity in confusion, and with a little sparkle of hope in her eyes at the realization that the three of them were together.
Pinkie nodded with far too much finality to be addressing the current topic, "Today. I am going to finally ask." She stepped forwards, pressing her chest up against the counter and leaning her neck forwards. "Why"
The legally distinctly coloured mare looked on in confusion, letting out a tentative "Why what?"
Pinkie's pose didn't change, but she did lilt her voice in mild frustration, "Why ask that question? Why is it something that warrants enough care for a response?"
The mare opened her mouth to respond, but Pinkie cut her off, slamming a hoof onto the counter, "Every time I order a sandwich with hay, it's always the same, in every UnderWay I go to. I've gotten weird looks, been verbally questioned, or visually ostracized." Pinkie tapped her hoof onto the table to accentuate each of her next words, "I. Want. To. Know. Why."
"Pinki-" Rarity tried to calm her friend, having had the time to recompose herself and adjust to the situation enough to feel confident in her choice of action. It failed, however, as Pinkie interrupted her.
"No, Rarity. Let the mare speak."
The mare in question, that is, the legally distinctly coloured mare, opened her mouth to answer the verbal with another question, "I'm sorry... I don't know what you're talking about." Her voice was just going from surprised to concerned.
Pinkie mimed, "Really?" in a nasally voice, continuing on, "I want to know why you find it strange. The stallion in front of me," She pointed down the line, where the stallion in question, in addition to the other mare 'maring' the cashier's stand; both of the two in question watching the exchange in confusion as Pinkie continued, "He ordered daffodils on his sandwich, but you didn't even ask him if he wanted his sandwich toasted." She made a thoughtful gesture, spinning her hoof in the air, "I know they're ostensibly different kinds of greens, but that's besides the point. We've already established I don't know why. The thought to even discuss this coming from a place in the back of my mind wreathed in spontaneous honesty."
Rarity stomped her hoof, "Pinkie Pie! What has gotten into you?"
Pinkie swiftly turned on Rarity, "Enthusiasm Rarity! The passion and life of Understanding that drives us forwards as ponies! Today! I am going to find out the answer to a question I've had festering in my mind since I was young." Rarity stepped back, stunned by Pinkie's sudden verbal dressing down. Pinkie turned back to the legally distinctly coloured mare, her eyes boring over the counter into the poor pony's eyes, barely shadowed by her green hat with the UnderWay logo printed onto it.
She stuttered, "I- I don't know, I-"
"I don't believe you."
Rarity spoke up, trying to gain any control over the situation, "Pinkie, ple-"
"No!" Pinkie jumped in place as she brought her voice to near shouting, "I refuse to believe that! How?" She rounded on the legally distinctly coloured mare, rearing up to place her hooves on the counter as her voice dropped low again, "I'm trying to have a heart to heart with you. I'm sorry I'm worked up, but I just have to know!" She twisted her head, shaking some invisible fog away from her mind and then theatrically pointing across the counter. "You! You are, at least, I hope, a rationally minded, logically thinking pony. You are capable of higher thought, capable of working here, of doing so many things. Surely it's not beyond you to understand your own words, especially after saying them." Pinkie went on, whereas normally she would take large breaths before letting out storms of words, Pinkie's voice was even, her breathing unnoticeable. "I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't be able to find meaning in your words; although, coming from a place of honesty, I will accept that answer from you, should you ascertain for yourself that it is truly what you believe."
The mare was bordering on scared now, staring at the pink mare as she leaned over the counter.
"But to restate. Why is it so strange? What about my desire for refrigerated hay, of which ponies eat consistently, drove you to speak from your core so reflexively that you could have misunderstood your own intent?" Pinkie asked, shifting her body to one side as she rhetorically said, "Is it because it's out of the ordinary? Except we've already disproved that." And again, "Is it because your hay isn't cooked and cleaned properly? I don't think so, and I certainly hope not." And again, "Is it because you wish to hide the staleness of the bread? No, otherwise why offer to cook the hay separately?"
Pinkie slammed her stomach onto the counter, raising her hooves to plead, "Why!? How does it make sense? How could you phrase such a question so empty of understandable meaning? Is it me? Something about my face or my mane? The way that I asked for my sandwich that pulled your skeptical disgust from so deep from within your subconscious that you didn't even realize what you were saying? What is it!? Please!"
Rarity reached over to grab Pinkie, intent on dragging her from the store before being stopped by Maud, who just shook her head.
The legally distinctly coloured mare spoke hastily, far to hastily, thinking she had found a solution, "Nothing! I didn't mean anything by it, honest!" In truth, at least as far as Rarity could tell from the mare's nervous smile and exaggerated nodding, it was the truth.
Pinkie's back straightened. Her posture shifted upwards as her front hooves went from pleading to underneath her. She loomed over the counter top and said, "So we've arrived, then."
Rarity herself had gone stiff, had Maud not had her by the hoof, Rarity was sure she would have done something. Seeing Pinkie Pie of all ponies so still, so rigidly aggressive, shook the poor marshmallow mare to her core.
The legally distinctly coloured mare, behind the counter fared little better, shaking as she asked, "Ar-r-rived w-w-where?"
Pinkie somehow leaned forwards further and deposited into the tension-filled void of conversation created by her slow lean, "The Truth" Her voice was low, further down than Rarity had assumed was possible for the pink mare, "For it was not me. Not some aspect of my mentality lying on the fringe of acceptable society. It was not some failure of my understanding! Nor is it a miscommunication! It was you!"
Pinkie lifted and leveled an accusatory hoof at the legally distinctly coloured mare, "Spouting off empty words to rot in the void between the minds of ponies, trying to fill the boredom of your own creation! I come in here to see you vehemently trying to scratch your name off of the contract we all sign called society! Begging and pleading for something to change! And I say to you-!"
"IS THIS WHO WE ARE?"
Pinkie had completely lost it now, a crazed twitching coming from the huffing in her breath settling into her jaw as she struggled to find the next words she needed to say, "When the ponies of our past, our ancestors! Pulled the biggest, juiciest fruits from the lips of their foals to bury and said: 'in the future, our kind will benefit from our loss, and they will prosper;' did they think this, is who would reap what they had sown? Do you think they imagined ponies placated by pleasures?! Driven to find their own amential agony to merely pass their lives in silence?!"
She stomped her hooves onto the counter hard enough for Rarity to feel it. "No! No! They imagined change on the scales of which we ourselves could barely fathom! They imagined lives lived to their fullest from the highest powers of ponies who could change the world with just a wave, to the smallest filly who could alter the course of time itself with just! One! Smile!"
Pinkie gestured at the legally distinctly coloured mare, practically shaking as the seemingly divine words tore their way from her throat, "You have the power! It doesn't have to be this way! You don't have to live your life in anonymity! You have the power to change your life from every angle! In any way you see fit! To give your life the value you seek, you only have your own self to stop you. So I ask you!"
Pinkie shook her head, "Not who you are. Since that has been made clear." Her head tilted in pondering, wondering, "and for what's more, none could be more than who they are from moment to moment, as who we are is stationarily measured from second to second. No. It would be pointless, hypocritical! For me to criticize who you are right now."
She shook her head again and stepped away from the counter and turned to the completely gobsmacked gaggle of ponies watching on in a mix of terrified fascination and genuine confusion.
"I ask." She took a breath, "What will become of the next version of yourself?”
Pinkie addressed the crowd once more, her voice and the fervor behind it slowly building as she began from quietly questioning, into full on shouting. “In the next moment, the next words that come from your lips, the next sight you will see; how will you look at it? Will you see the future? Will you see the past? Will it change you? Will you change others? As the moments pass, and as we all work forwards to the impossible goal of identity we set for ourselves, I ask you this!"
Pinkie stood her ground in that little sandwich shop like she was standing against the death of the world itself. Her eyes blazed like fire and her hooves bent and warped the fake plastic tiles on the floor as she shook the minds of the ponies who could hear her divine question.
"Who will you become?"
The question reverberated through the room, Rarity heard the sound of the glass in the walls shaking, her mind so far away from identifying something as simple as sound that the volume just didn’t matter.
Pinkie took a step, then another, calmly walking out of the shop. Rarity watched from the corner of her eyes as they were locked forwards into space, at the ponies who's heads pivoted to watch the pink mare pridefully let herself out. The dinging of the tiny bell at the door, a novelty of a different age, signaled her mission complete.
Maud let go of Rarity's hoof, which fell to the ground limply. Rarity redistributing her weight to her four limbs a moment later.
Maud took the time to step up to the counter and say, "Can I get a hoof long on malted rye."
