Author's Note
So 2005
Doctor Lithium sighed. It had been a long day, but now he was finally down to his last patient. He pressed his hoof to a button on his desk. “Miss Pie, you may come in now.” His voice was tiny and raspy through the loudspeaker.
The magic must be wearing thin, the doctor thought to himself.
A pink mare with pink hair walked gloomily into the office. Said hair was drooped flat, hanging stiffly to one side of her head. Tear stains, now dried, streaked her cheeks. Now she simply had a look of gloom to her, as though a thundercloud was drifting above her head.
“So, Miss Pie—”
“Call me Pinkie! Everypony does,” Pinkie Pie said, with a bit of forced cheer.
“So, Miss Pie,” Doctor Lithium continued after a brief, uneasy pause. “What seems to be troubling you today?” The doctor’s voice was powerful, and commanding. He hailed from North Trottingham, and thus had an accent accustomed to the area. Living in Ponyville for many years grated away at it slightly, and now was now a mix of Equestria Proper and Trottingham accents, his vowels still softer than usual.
The pink mare sighed, and looked around. The sheer gloominess in her voice would have affected Doctor Lithium had he not grown used to being around depressed patients.
“I’m feeling... down. Not myself, you know?” Her voice sounded like a squeaky balloon slowly losing air.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place, Miss Pie!” Doctor Lithium’s voice cut sharply into the mare before him. She flinched every time he spoke, as if his words were punching her right in the muzzle. It seemed to press down on her, depressing her further, despite what he was saying being potentially good news. “We have all sorts of things to help you!”
Pinkie Pie almost felt a smile come across her face. This soon passed, and her crushing gloom slide back into her mind. “Well, can... can you give one to me?”
“I could.” Pinkie Pie’s face brightened slightly. “But then I’d have to give out pills to just anypony who came trotting into my office!” Doctor Lithium rose from behind his desk, and walked around Pinkie Pie, looking her over. “You’re a bit of an odd one, Miss. Pie. Your records suggest you ingest a large amounts of sweets, yet you seem almost perfectly healthy.”
Pinkie Pie’s mane swayed slightly. “Yes, well... I’ve been told I was always a bit-”
“Of an oddity? Different?”
“Well, yeah! But my oddities make me special! That’s what—”
“Take this pill,” Doctor Lithium instructed curtly, pushing a small, white pill towards the other side of his desk.
“But...” Pinkie said, looking down the pill, and trailing off.
“Take this pill,” the doctor instructed again, nodding down towards the pill. Pinkie tentatively leaned forward, and extended her tongue, swallowing the pill.
“It tastes funny. But not ‘ha-ha’, funny,” Pinkie said, making a sour face. Her mane vibrated slightly, a single strand of hair shot up, curling up and becoming poofy.
“Life’s the same way,” Doctor Lithium said, standing up from his chair. “Come, take a walk with me, Miss Pie.” He walked over to the door, before turning back to see that Pinkie Pie had not moved from her spot. “Well, come on. I don’t want you just sitting there, using up all the oxygen. That’s a valuable commodity, and you can expect to see that on your bill.”
Pinkie Pie opened her mouth, the one stand of her hair deflating with a soft pffpft. She shrunk down in her chair, and reluctantly got to her hooves. Once she was standing beside Doctor Lithium, he began to walk down the hallway.
“You see, Miss Pie, we run a very tight schedule here,” he explained, walking past a room where two interns in scrubs were careful gluing feathers to a sleeping foal. “That’s why we eliminated all of that preliminary, useless garbage. It used to be that you had to sign up, go to a few specialists, and seek therapy if you had depression or some other mental deficiency. Now, we can just give you a pill! It’s so much more productive this way.”
“I... I guess...” Pinkie Pie mumbled, looking down at her hooves, her long sheet of hair obscuring her face. “I don’t feel very good, though... like someone replaced my tummy with a lot of empty space.”
“We have a pill for that,” Doctor Lithium responded, and before Pinkie Pie could even speak, she found another pill being shoved into her mouth. She blinked, and swallowed it after a moment, her hair vibrating once more.
“It’s all a part of our delicate system, Miss Pie,” Doctor Lithium said. “We give you the pill, you take the pill, you pay us for the pill, we make more pills. It’s a delicate system second to none in importance, only surpassed narrowly by the water cycle.”
Pink Pie nodded slowly, yawning. “Th-this pill made me a bit sleepy...”
“As it should! It’s a sleeping pill!”
The mare sluggishly turned her head over to face Doctor Lithium, who was giving her an extremely critical look, as if he were disappointed in her for even daring to assume that the pills would be anything different.
“H-how...” Pinkie Pie let out a huge yawn. “How is this going to help me?”
“Our logic is that if you’re sleeping, you can’t feel depressed,” the doctor said. “Nighty-night!”
When Pinkie awoke, she was lying in bed with a small dog licking her muzzle.
“Oh!” She smiled, and closed her eyes, lifting a hoof to pet the dog. When she felt a sharp jolt of pain, she opened her eyes again, and discovered that the dog was actually a cluster of sharp metal sloppily welded together.
“Ow! That hurt...” she exclaimed, rubbing her sore hoof. There was a crackle over the loudspeaker, and Doctor Lithium’s voice, all tinny, was soon broadcaster over the room.
“Hallucinations! Our pills train you to not trust your eyes, Miss Pie. Your eyes are Discord’s playthings, and you can’t easily trust that, can you?”
Pinkie Pie remained silent. Her hair had reverted to its purely flat form while she was asleep, and the heavy pall of depression had begun to loom over her once more.
A pill fell from a slot in the ceiling, bouncing off of Pinkie’s head. “Take the pill, Miss Pie! You’re wasting hospital time, and that’s a resource more valuable than you’ll ever be.”
Pinkie Pie looked at the pill, and with a small sigh, took it in her hoof, and consumed it. It tasted vaguely of sugar.
“This one tastes better than all the ones that you gave me before,” she said to the room, unsure of where Doctor Lithium was outside of it.
“That’s unusual. We’ll note that as a side effect,” the doctor’s voice answered back. “Now, kindly look at the wall in front of you.”
Pinkie Pie blinked, and focused on the blank, black wall before her. Before her very eyes, a screen of some sort was lifted, which let her view into the room beyond.
There was a light blue mare sitting in there, chewing on her back leg. Her white mane was frizzy and all over the place, and reminded Pinkie much of her own previous style, had she let it grow feral.
The mare saw Pinkie on the other side of the glass, and jumped up, pawing at the window. Pinkie could hear faint barking from the other side.
“This mare refused our pills,” Doctor Lithium’s voice said. “Do you want to be this mare?”
“She doesn’t look too bad...” Pinkie said to herself, softly. She reached a hoof up, and placed it against the glass, meeting where the other mare was pawing at it.
“She pisses in public and has fleas!” Lithium’s voice boomed. “Is that what you want, Miss Pie?”
“I want to be happy again,” Pinkie Pie said with a sigh. “I want to cheer up my friends, and I want... I want to be the bubbly party pony I used to be.”
“Ah, so that’s our issue, is it? Feeling down? Out? Not your usual perky, bouncy self? Take this pill, Miss Pie, and you'll feel better again! But only for a little while, so stock on up..."”
A pill fell from the ceiling in the same spot the other one had. Pinkie walked over to it, and stared at it for a few moments before, just as she had with the pill prior to this one. She consumed it with no comment after her pause ended.
It did nothing to placate the emptiness in her body.
“I don’t feel any different...”
“Success! That pill was a placebo!” There was the sound of large gears whirring, and a door on the far side of the wall opened.
“Step out of the chamber please, Miss Pie.”
Pinkie did so, and found herself face to face with Doctor Lithium. She took a step back, only to bump into the wall. The door had closed silently behind her.
“Where do you think you’re going, Miss Pie? You’ve got pills to take. You said you wanted to be happy?”
Pinkie Pie nodded, her heart beginning to quicken in pace.
“Well, you won’t readily be disappointed. OH, NURSE!”
A white pony with a vacant smile on her face appeared by Doctor Lithium. “Yes, Doctor?”
“Tell Miss Pie how happy you are, nurse.”
The nurse turned to Pinkie Pie, her empty smile deeply unsettling the mare. “I’m very happy, Miss Pie.”
“You could be happy too, Miss Pie, if you simply were to listen and take these pills,” Doctor Lithium said, rolling his eyes at Pinkie. “But of course, you wouldn’t listen to me, I’m only a doctor...”
“I want to be happy! I want to be happy really bad! But is the nurse... I’ve seen a lot of smiles, I know a lot of smiles, and hers doesn’t look like a real smile, not at all!” Pinkie Pie looked over at the nurse, her heart pounding in her throat now.
“Nonsense! She’s just as happy as anypony else. And that’s what you want, don’t you? To be happy like everypony else? Sitting, smiling, content with the world around you? Being happy is something that you can get with these pills, and it is so simply just to take them, Miss Pie...”
Doctor Lithium placed a bottle of pills beside Pinkie Pie. “Take these pills. You’ll be happy, just like everypony else, drifting through life with no reason or purpose, smiling forever even though you face will hurt. And it will all be worth it, because you’ll be happy.”
“But I want to make other ponies happy too!”
Doctor Lithium scoffed. “You can’t make everypony happy, Miss Pie. But these pills can!”
Pinkie Pie looked down at the bottle, and then back at Doctor Lithium.
"Take this pill, Miss Pie. Everything will be alright soon."
