Prologue

(From the beginning, I have always assumed that others would someday read this journal, casual readers as well as future biographers and historians of my "noble quest to free Equestria of its cutie marks" [Journal Entry #1]. But the next entry begins a part of my life where I’m no longer sure I wish to share it with the rest of the world. Perhaps I will be the only one privy to this version of events.

(But just in case I change my mind, Dear Reader, know that this chapter is inserted at this location in my journal after the fact. It is my imagining of a scene I did not witness, with the begrudging assent of the main characters depicted therein. And also that it is out of sequence with the next two chapters that follow it.)

Monday, 21 June 1108

Run! Run away! Must get away! Must escape!

Cup Cake was awoken by the sudden slamming of her shop’s front door. Her husband Carrot shot up in bed. “Burglars!” he shouted.

Cup hushed him. Eventually she picked out the sounds of sobbing. “Pinkie,” she said in a shocked voice. She got out of bed and put on a robe. “I’ll talk to her. You get back to bed.”

Carrot looked like he was going to protest. “Dear?”

Cup looked towards the door of their bedroom. “She just destroyed a monster, Hubbins. A monster with a pony’s face. We might be awhile.”

“Well…alright. If you’re sure you’ve got this,” Carrot said, easing himself back under the covers, but still with a concerned expression.

“I am, Hubbins. Now get your rest. There’ll be a big victory party in the morning.”

Carrot, who was falling asleep, suddenly shot up. “The morning! There’s going to be a morning!”

Cup walked back to personally tuck Carrot back into bed. “Yes Dear, there’s going to be a morning. Now get some sleep.”

By the time Cup Cake descended the stairs, there was no longer any crying coming from the shop. Only heavy breathing, interrupted by the occasional gasp. The sound of a pony who had cried themselves out.

“It’s alright, Pinkie,” she said as she turned the corner to enter the shop floor. “I’m here for you.”

She spotted Pinkie slumped against the glass display case. A case that was currently empty. The light from the second floor hallway left most of the room in shadow, but starkly illuminated Pinkie’s reflection in the case glass. Her eyes were open, unfocused. She was unmoving; Pinkie Pie, the most animated pony in all of Equestria, was still. She was breathing, but at the same time looked like she was dead.

“Pinkie?” Cup Cake asked cautiously.

There was no response.

“Pinkie?” Cup Cake repeated, crossing the space between them with trepidation.

No response.

“Pinkie?” Cup asked, daring to reach out and touch the slouched mare on the shoulder.

Pinkie Pie suddenly shot to her hooves, forcing a startled shout out of Cup Cake. She turned her head, and pointed her head at Cup Cake. That was all that Cup could describe it as, “pointing her head”. There was no expression, no eyes directed at her. Instead Pinkie looked right through her.

“Pinkie, what…”

“I have wandered through this world,” Pinkie intoned in a hollow voice. “And as each moment has unfurled, I’ve been waiting to awaken from these dreams.”

Cup Cake reached forward, cautiously put a hoof on her shoulder again and, when there was no response, shook the shoulder gently.

Pinkie looked down at the offending hoof with her dead stare. Cup Cake quickly yanked it back.

Pinkie looked back up at her. There was expression now: yearning, loss, pain. “Doctor, my eyes!” she pleaded. “Cannot see the sky. Is this the prize for learning how not to cry?”

Cup Cake pushed forward, pulling Pinkie into a tight hug. Pinkie began to cry again, wailing and moaning in utter despair.

Finally she pushed herself away and took a few moments to regain her breath. “No pony should have seen what I have seen. This isn’t TV-Y, this isn’t TV-Y at all!”

Cup Cake brushed aside the nonsense words, as she often had to do with Pinkie, to get to the point. “But…but you defeated her, right? You defeated Nightmare Moon?”

“NO!” Pinkie screamed, shoving her adoptive mother away from her. “They’re gone. They’re all gone!”

“Gone?” Cup Cake asked in confusion. “Your friends? Twilight Sparkle and those other ponies? The ones who went into the Everfree and…?”

“Destroyed! Nightmare Moon destroyed them all!”

Cup Cake recoiled. She glanced out the window, at the sky where the sun surely should have risen by now. But the night still endured.

“The night will last forever, and it’s all my fault!” Pinkie wailed.

“Wait, what…?”

“It was me! It was all me! Twilight would have succeeded! We would have used the Elements of Harmony to fix everything—and then I blew it!”

She looked down incredulously at her own hooves. “How did I survive? How did I alone survive the slaughter?”

Cup Cake recoiled at the grisly word. A word that should not be uttered by any pony.

“I don’t deserve it! I…I must be punished!”

Cup Cake took on a fierce expression as she grabbed hold of Pinkie’s forehooves with her own. “No, absolutely not!” she declared. “I forbid it!”

“I must! I must be punished!” Pinkie declared, trying to fight her way out of Cup Cake’s grip.

Now normally, there would be no question of which of the two would win in a fight, considering who grew up in a bakery, and who grew up smashing boulders into gravel with her bare hooves. But Pinkie truly wasn’t in the mood for a fight.

“Well in that case, I’ve got to go away.”

(It turns out I cannot draw two ponies embracing particularly well while one of them is wrestling with her alter ego. Consider this as a thematic substitute.)

“No…” Cup Cake said fearfully.

Pinkie Pie head drooped. She shook for a moment, and then she changed. She seemed to shrink in on herself, and whatever dim light she was illuminated by seemed to go out, changing her fur from pink to magenta. With the sound of deflating balloons her mane and tail fell flat around her. The magenta pony looked up, with a tired and defeated expression. “Oh,” she said in dull despair. “Hello again, Mrs. Cake.”

Cup Cake looked down in horror at the pony she was currently holding in her hooves. She let go immediately and fled upstairs, screaming in terror. The bedroom door could be heard to open, slam shut, and then the deadbolt could be heard slamming home.

Pinkamena Diane Pie sighed. Looking inwards she asked, “What did you do, Pinkie? Why am I awake again?” She turned her head to take in her reflection. “How…how many years have you left me in there?”

“It’s yours,” a small voice in Pinkamena’s head replied. “Our body is yours. For…forever. My life has become a lie!”

With a tired roll of her eyes, Pinkamena turned to face her reflection in the case glass. Only instead of herself she saw the defeated expression of Pinkie Pie. “What did you do?” she repeated.

She was answered by the barest flash of a memory: a blue pegasus with rainbow mane striking an ornamented stone column…hard. She slid down afterwards, leaving a nasty red stain behind.

Pinkamena flinched from the image as if she had been struck.

“That,” the reflection replied. “I did that.”

Pinkamena looked at her reflection’s eyes, dumbstruck.

“And now we have to leave, Pinkamena. We have to leave before…”

“Ponies of Equestria! Heed my words!”

The pronouncement came from outside Sugarcube Corner. Pinkamena stumbled her way across a shop she could barely navigate in broad daylight, to look out the window.

There, incredibly, a gigantic disembodied head of a black-coated pony took up most of the night sky.

“It’s her!” the terrified voice of Pinkie inside Pinkamena’s head cried. “Run away! Get away! Escape!”

Pinkamena looked desperately around her. But there was nothing for her here. No safety. No refuge.

She threw open the door, and the voice of the pony head—of Nightmare Moon, as Pinkie informed her, was so much louder. Pinkamena didn’t listen to the words, tried to shut them out in case they had the power to block her escape. As other ponies came out of their homes to stare awestruck at the source of the voice in the sky, Pinkamena dodged between them, completely unnoticed. And what would anypony have noticed, under the circumstances? Pinkamena was practically a stranger to this town, whatever its name was.

After running in a random direction for a few minutes, Pinkamena crossed a stone bridge—which she would have spent some time studying the composition of under better circumstances—and continued out of town, into the countryside. By this time her initial bewilderment and fear had given way to a towering rage.

“I can’t believe you did it again!” she cried out in her mind to its other inhabitant. “It wasn’t enough turning my family against me, now you’ve…”

“I’ve destroyed the world, Pinkamena! I helped Nightmare Moon to conquer Equestria!” Pinkie sounded nearly hysterical.

“That is it!” Pinkamena shouted, stopping under some trees. “From the very beginning, there was this huge problem between you and I: the ‘and’ in ‘Pinkamena and Pinkie’. You never asked me for permission to share this body, to steal this body from me! Well I swear on all that is holy that I’m ending this ‘and’ problem, once and for all! I will find a way to get you out of me, Pinkie! I swear it!”

She was answered…by silence. A tacit agreement that the very idea of “Pinkie Pie” was a mistake.

Pinkie Pie had to go. Once and for all.

[Author’s Note: The next chapter takes place three days earlier and three hundred kilostrides to the northeast.]

Author's Note

Well, I think it should be obvious at this point how this is an Alternate Universe fic.

This story is currently half-finished. I am dissatisfied with where the second half is going, so I've decided to publish the prologue and first fifteen chapters on a weekly basis, in hopes that I can get my ideas reorganized before I run out of finished chapters.