To Live The Scornful Life (Olive Grease)
"As for me, I am mean: that means I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished."-- Ines Serrano, *No Exit*
Darkness hurtled around me at rocketing speeds, gravity drawing me down deeper than the centre of the Earth. I guess that was a surprise, if nothing else. Funny; they always said Celestia pulled you up to your judgement on a staircase of light. The sound of howling pumped through my eardrums, the shock to my balance making my stomach feel light. I made a mental note that despite my situation I could still feel vertigo. Good to know. After about twenty minutes I got bored of falling. How in the hay was there a terminal velocity to this place?
"Could've been a bit more creative with the decor, your majesty." I deadpanned more for my own enjoyment than because of some overpowering outrage at the mundanity of Death.
"Oh believe me, little pony. Creative I can do." A voice came from below me. I blinked, furrowing my brow as I looked down. Huh, so there was a bottom to this thing after all.
"And here I was thinking the afterlife was a cosmic slip and slide." I droned at the voice.
"Patience is a virtue..." Began the voice, closer now. With a jolt I impacted something soft and bouncy, sticking to my coat in places that I would have a hard time cleaning out myself. "...That fills me up with bile." The voice concluded smugly. I heard a finger snap. "Cue the lights, maestro." Sure enough, there was a clunking sound and the flare of illumination, the source of the voice revealed by the sudden beam of light. The thing beside me was sort of like that one ugly doll you had as a kid that you tried to fix by hand one too many times. He was, near as I could tell, the result of a Sonic Rainboom in a petting zoo, sporting a serpentine body, a bat-and-bird wing combination on his back, a one-fanged mule head and a gnarled ox horn and deer antler. He had a lopsided look of insanity about his asymmetrical pupils.
"Name." He said, crossing his paw-and-talon and tossing a scornful look to something outside the view of our cone of light.
"Not much of a host to demand introductions without giving any." I shot back while trying to pull myself from what I had discovered was bubble gum. He pulled back his paw-claws and held them above his collarbone, brows raised defensively. Had I just offended Satan?
"Surely you must have heard of me, have you not? Big celebration in my honour, lots of ponies prancing around, stained glass window of me in the courtyard. You might say I'm something of a celebrity." He materialized a nail file--funny it didn't surprise me that he could do that--and began idly manicuring his eagle talon with his lion paw. I couldn't help but give a snort. "Oh but where are my manners? Rainbow, dear, do show some hospitality and come greet our esteemed guest. An old friend, if memory serves. As for you." He shot me a carefree glance and a cheesy smile. "You may call me Handsome, Hot Stuff or Gorgeous. Discord to my friends."
"I sure as hay aren't your friend." Interrupted the last voice in the world I wanted to hear, here of all places. The flap of toned, practiced wings filled the air, the currents of a powerful flyer blowing my mane back with the force of landing. The pony landing looked like a slice of the sky itself. It boggled the mind that she could be such an ugly bright blue. As if that weren't as garish as a pony could get, her mane couldn't settle upon a single colour and spiked out in prismatic locks like a hedgehog doused in Rainbow Factory runoff. Nothing about the mare, from her bright magenta eyes to her lightning bolt flank stamp, had a whisper of subtlety. She currently wore an obnoxious grimace, as if she had just found a particularly distressing mold engaging in intimate affairs with a rodent. She stalked up to Hot Stuff with a look of righteous indignation on her face. "Why's she here!? You coulda stuck me with King Sombra or a diamond dog or a dragon. Hay, ya coulda stuck me with Hoops and Dumbell if ya really wanted to. Whyher?!"
Gorgeous made a series of tsk tsk noises, summoning a pair of wire framed geography teacher glasses and a blackboard with a snap of his more prickly avian appendage. "As you know, Rainbow Dash, we at Chaos and Disharmony Enterprises are devoted to nothing but the most dysfunctional and unpredictable of social situations. Besides, being turned into a statue by you and your friends has left me nothing better to for the next seventy odd years, has it?" Oh. Oh. So this was the guy who made the chocolate rain and the dancing bison. I guess there are worse ways to spend the next eternity. Like next to a certain cyan pegasus...."Thus it is with great pride that I welcome our new roommate, Olive Grease." I glared daggers at him, before raising an eyebrow. He only ask my name to see if I was stupid enough to give it. He was pretty sharp for a guy with the fashion sense of a brain damaged hippogriff, I'll give him that.
I could see the hamster wheels inside my more confrontational companion's mind turning as she came to a realization. "This is Tartarus, isn't it? That's how it is, right? It's just me and her in this crazy portal to my old life forever and ever."
"Tartarus would be us doing that while we’re made to supermodel for bats that would eat our gallbladders every evening. I don't think we're in the place for bad little ponies yet, sugar." I offered in exasperation, finally winning the tug of war with my bubblegum seat after a blast of magic severed the most stubborn strands. I flopped awkwardly onto the ground and sighed as though I were schooling a particularly dull filly in how to hold a pencil. The same thought had passed through my mind, don't get me wrong. It's just that making Rainbow Dash look like an idiot might be the only thing to keep me sane the next two thousand years.
"Bingo!" Chimed in my mismatched companion. "Welcome to Celestia's little slice of Netherworld. You," he poked a talon squarely on my sternum, "are here for extensive relocation therapy. And you," he patted my timeless frenemy on the head, "are here because we're both in the same semi-conscious state of mind! Isn't that so delightful?" All enthusiasm withered out of his voice with the last word. He brightened once again. "Care for some television?"
A wood and glass box appeared before us, flickering to life with a whine and a glow. I noticed that the box itself was covered with frantically carved and frankly insane messages. Handsome adjusted the knob above a hastily scrawled message reading "LiFe Is a PArTy" with a wave of his wrist, allowing the thing to tune with a faint whine until images began to dance across its surface like some sort of technicolor shadow puppet theater.
Wait, something was up. Something Dash had said in her self-righteous tirade about being stuck here with me.
"What did our mutual friend mean by 'portal to our old lives?'" Gorgeous rolled his eyes at the query, merrily prancing to a space about seven hoofs away from the shadow puppet box and summoning a sofa upon which to lounge. He clicked his talon (it was like a nervous tick for this fellow, I swear) and bade a love seat forth, patting it meaningfully before stretching his serpentine length about the entirety of the sofa.
"You remind me of a certain irritating purple unicorn," Hot Stuff said with gritted teeth, "in that you ask too many questions." He relaxed back into his charming con-man voice again. I think I was starting to figure out just what this guy was all about. "Why don't you just take a seat over there and let the answer come to you, hmm?"
"Have a seat." I said to Dash in a faux polite grin. She followed in kind.
"You're my guest, you get the honour."
"Oh but I insist. The vaguely defined mist looks so...comfortable."
Our esteemed patchwork host narrowed his eyes and grinned at us like a cat who'd just killed a sparrow and buried it somewhere in the house without the owner's knowledge. "My dear Grease. Or shall I call you Olive?" He seemed to pause but a moment. "Greasy, my dear, don't be so bashful. If you find your...condition is an issue, I'm sure we could get a stroller for Rainbow Dash to push."
"I'll take the chair!" I said, a bit more loudly than I had intended. I looked about for a form of locomotion, before resigning myself to self-levitation with a sigh. It was an advanced and desperate spell, but it was easier than teleporting (unless you happen to have a tiara and a set of wings to go with your horn, and then I can't really see why you wouldn't just fly). I slid along the ground in a somewhat undignified manner before rising up onto the sofa and throwing my body to face the contraption, earning a look of confusion and suspicion from my racer companion. The couch potato beside me rolled his eyes and summoned what looked like a compressed metal wand about the size of a butter tray. He began flicking through the images on screen with disinterest, images flaring into life and dying just as soon with an alarming speed.
"Ads. Ads. Ads." He browsed past what appeared to be a Wonderbolt show, a magical duel and an Iron Pony competition between a minotaur and a butterscotch colored pegasus. "Porn. Ads. Ads. Soaps. Ads. Here we go! Ladies and...--ladies! I present to you the Twilight Sparkle show!" I silently thanked Celestia he didn't add tacky theme music, before settling down to watch, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Rainbow Dash landed beside me, the sounds of tight breathing alerting me to her presence. The screen flickered to life, and I heard a swallowing noise come from Dash’s direction. A lavender pony with a barely fluted horn and a conservative set of bangs that could be the poster child of function over form in mane cuts was sitting alone in a sterile white room, a simple cot and hideously Plasticine-green blanket in its center. A pony I neither wanted nor expected to see lay in the bed, her mane seeming more flat and saturated than the version sitting to my right, her cyan coat dulled and grey-blue. I don't know, maybe it was a spirit world thing? Like this was how we saw ourselves, or who we actually were, and down there were our bodies. No doubt some sentimental drivel like that was behind it.
The pony with the time-efficient mane cut interrupted my thoughts with a cough, as if drawing attention to herself, despite the room being empty. "Hey Rainbow. I--I got you some new flowers. I know, I know, flowers aren't exactly as awesome as the Wonderbolt flag I brought in last month, but I think they make the room a bit cheerier." Her face darkened for a moment. "I...I talked with your parents about your condition today. They didn't take it too well. It's not their fault, I just want you to remember that, but, uh, they sort of....they blame me for what happened."
"WHAT?!" The two of us said in what I was pretty sure would be the only unison statement we could ever make. She was upset, obviously. The mare probably meant a lot to her, maybe a friend or maybe a sister. She was a bit of an eyesore too, with her bright purple overload coat and mane style. It wasn't a stretch. Whatever. It wasn't unreasonable to react the way Rainbow Dash did. I probably would do the same in her horseshoes. But my cry was more of confusion, given that Dash's current state was unequivocally my doing. Discord only chuckled, earning a glare from the pegasus.
"They said that if...if I hadn't come to Ponyville...if I hadn't come to Ponyville you'd never have been off on all those missions for the Princess...and that," she gulped, "that you wouldn't have gotten hurt if I hadn't come to town. I know they're just upset, and they wouldn't say it if they were thinking rationally, but..."
"Don't say it don't say it don't say it." Rainbow chanted.
"They're sort of right Rainbow." She was suddenly very interested in something on the hospital floor. Probably the janitors had missed a speck of guilt complex. They just littered hospital rooms, honestly. I've gotten more than my fair share of that before. It's not like I didn't feel sorry for the mare, don't get me wrong. Because I did. I dragged somepony into a world of hurt just trying to get back at the damned Best-Young-Flier-in-Equestria, Friendly-Neighbourhood Rainbow Dash, and I should have thought about who I would impact besides Rainbow Dash doing that. But that didn't mean she had to make it worse on herself. I'd been there, and making it hurt more by blaming yourself for things other ponies did never helped. If it had been me in that waiting room at that moment those two ponies would have had a long talk with me about their daughter's life choices, but at the very least she could've fought back. But I digress.
Dash for her part was gritting her teeth now, grinding her incisors together with every harsh word the mare said against herself. Yeah, she was continuing with the whole "It's my fault the world isn't made of lollipops and chocolate milk" speech. I forgot to mention that.
"...Sometimes I think it would have been better if I'd just stayed in my little corner of Canterlot. I was selfish, Dash.I left my family behind to live the little filly’s dream of being loved by the Princess. And it worked. That's the awful part. I know the Princess better than you do. Better than anypony, really. I wheedled my way to her heart, then left her behind..." Dash eventually let out a frustrated groan and grimly muttered "Darn it, Twilight..."
So this was Twilight Sparkle, then. I'd read a bit in the papers about the other Elements of Harmony. They all seemed like pretty generic ponies, save for her. Oh yeah, and the one who stared down a dragon. That was pretty badflank too. But Twilight was our beloved diarch's personal protegee. She could teleport at will, or so they say. I didn't buy it myself, but lifting an Ursa Minor and improving upon the amniomorphic spell were no small tasks. She even made wings out of thin air once, according to some article I read about some Wonderbolts disaster Dash’d saved. I'm sorry, but you treat somepony who can make themselves an alicorn at will with respect. Even if they do have an ugly coat colour.
"....just so I could take the friendships offered to me in the heat of a moment. I took the baby dragon I hatched through freak accident and forced him into work with me. And I have the nerve to call him my brother. And I took you. I took my brave, kind friend and dragged her into my world. Bound her to my life so I could stop the loneliness. So I could feel a part of something. I love you Rainbow Dash. And Spike. And The Princess...."
Darn shame she was a self-depreciating wreck. Or maybe not. A pony can do great things with a guilt complex. And they can do some pretty awful things from guilt too. They can be bastards and leave because they can't stand the sight of the ponies they love never having the freedom they took for granted again when those ponies need them most or try to apologize and then fight for months on end with the ponies they feel guilty over because they're hurting and--you know what, that wasn't really the important part. The important part was this pony on screen was a time bomb. Anypony that with that much self-loathing and naive trust that everypony else were all magically better than her would be. And I get the feeling I just got a front seat to the incoming meltdown.
"I loved a baby dragon and I made him face the spells of King Sombra to impress my Princess. I loved a pony Princess, too much, and I could write a whole book of the ways I twisted her trust in the name of my love. I brainwashed a town. Destroyed a wedding and scorched her horn. Let her sister trap her in the sun. And I let you get shot. ...I'm so sorry Rainbow Dash. I love you; even after all this I still open the window for you at the library. But i-if you ever do wake up, I'll understand if you don't still love me."
Damn.
If there was a better way to start the official ‘make Olive Grease look like the world's greatest plothole marathon', it would have had to have involved genocide and demonic possession. I suppose this was how this whole setup would work, then. 'Extensive relocation therapy,' Discord had said. Oh yes, I'd been taking notes the whole time. I was never one to just lie down and half-listen to what a pony blubbered on about. Relocation therapy, or at least the psychopathic maniac of a disorder spirit's idea of it, was no doubt a thousand years of guilt tripping with a canned laugh track. With nopony but Rainbow Dash for company. I couldn't help but wish it wasn't too late to ask to be eaten by fashion-conscious bats instead.
