The Dark Side of the Horse

Twilight Sparkle was a purple pony with a magic cutie mark and legs that would look good if they were holding up a coffee table. Everypony in town treated her differently, because she was, well, different. She was socially inept and had bad breath which made it hard for her to bond with anypony outside her closest group of friends. Sometimes she pretended that she didn’t care, and other times she pretended that she did. Every day was something different, and yet every day was the exact same. On this particular day, however, it was neither and both.

Twilight-unicorn was walking away from her library, thinking about numbers and the headline she read on the newspaper before it was transformed into hostile greenhouse gases. Scootaloo... asleep... Twilight’s library... asleep... Nut-of-Oats! She ate some Nut-of-Oats, delighted with their unique taste and texture. asleep... what does it mean... outside... library...

“That’s it! Spike! It is crucial that you write something down for me, quick!” The echo of the words smothered her with the foolish realization that Spike was not nearby. He went into town to get a fire extinguisher to put out the fire that was burning the library, which was all explained in the previous chapter so I won’t bother repeating myself.

“Oh, right, he went to get a fire extinguisher.” She turned her head back to look at the library. In the distance, she could make out the collapsed form of the library engulfed in a fiery burning inferno of flames and luminous combustion.

“It is crucial that I keep on going.” And she wented.

***

There it was. Looming before Spike was The Fire Extinguisher and Meatball Church of Ponyville. A great monstrosity of a building, it was a grey cube in the middle of Ponyville, twice the height of the Town Hall but less than half as interesting. This was the only source of Fire Extinguishers and Meatballs in all of Equestria. If you needed either item, you had to come here to buy it directly, as buying them anywhere else was illegal. This was bad for the other retailers that sold them.

It was a rather silly combination of things, manufacturing Fire Extinguishers in the same building as Meatballs, but one time the meatball kitchen got set on fire and then nobody thought it was silly after that. Of course, when the Fire Extinguishers were set on fire a year later, nopony knew what the hell they were supposed to do and the army had to be called in.

The Fire Extinguishers were made in a very complicated factory containing numerous conveyor belts traveling in all sorts of directions. There were pistons, valves, and lights hanging from chains. The whole facility was filled with the noise of metal clanging against metal and steam being released from pressurized canisters. Worker ponies performed their duties while complaining about them to their peers.

Spike stood looking at it.

Using the megaphone from Episode 13, Spike screamed “SOMEBODY HELP! MY LIBRARY IS ON FIRE!”

The Church’s cashier finished masticating her meatballs and then said, “You mean Twilight’s library is on fire?”

“WHATEVER I JUST NEED 40 HUNDRED EXTINGUISHERS RIGHT NOW! HURRY! PLEA-HE-HEEEESE!”

“I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble understanding you. I only know of two libraries in or around Ponyville, and a small dragon is the owner of neither one of them. I am not confident that you are being entirely direct about your problem and I sincerely recommend you calm down, turn off Caps Lock, empty your thoughts of the negative energies, and be thorough in your explanation. You have your whole life ahead of you, young man, there is no need to rush. Okay, try again.” Satisfied with her recommendation, the Church cashier leaned back in her chair and waited for Spike’s response.

Spike thought about what he should do. Then he thought about what he should say. After several moments of thinking, and then several more moments of thinking, he stated his request:

“AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Spike dragon-blasted up the entire meatball side of the Church in a fit of rage, leaving all of its occupants a little anxious to leave. The cashier died of natural causes. Taking advantage of this, Spike turned into a metaphorical bulldozer and constructioned his way into the Fire Extinguisher warehouse in the back of the Church, grabbed as many extinguishers as he could carry with two hands, and fled the scene of the crime.

The cashier came back to life of natural causes.

***

Twilight Sparkle was finally inside of Ponyville. She forgot what her objective was so she took a five minute rest on the bench that Lyra was sitting on in Episode 10. Letting her breath catch up with her, she ate some more Nut-of-Oats and saw a weird buzzing noise. After deciding that it wasn’t just the sound of her sanity short-circuiting itself, she identified the source of the noise to be the dead pony that was sitting beside her on the bench, covered in flies and blood. Being socially inexperienced, Twilight wasn’t sure how to act around dead ponies, but fortune smiled on her that day, because before she had the chance to start a conversation with it she heard Spike yelling and screaming and running and crying.

“Twilight! We’ve gotta go! Now! Oh god I didn’t mean to! Aaaahhh! Take this!” He threw a fire extinguisher towards her before she had a chance to scold him for talking before she was finished her Nut-of-Oats. She was unprepared and got smacked in the fucking face with it holy shit. She didn’t get the wind knocked out of her, she got a whole fucking hurricane knocked out of her. She didn’t see stars, she saw fucking constellations. She wasn't dazed, she was a whole yeared. Her eyes fell out again, but for some reason she could still see the Big Dipper pouring minestrone soup onto Orion. She passed right the fuck out, but she wasn’t out cold, she was out the entire fucking Arctic latitude.

Spike scanned the surroundings for any sign of being followed, and confident that he was safe for the time being, he put Twilight’s eyes back in their sockets. Maybe I should tell her that her eyes can come out. She deserves to know. I can’t keep hiding it. It’s tearing me up inside... What if she already knows? A loud boom boomed. The Fire Extinguisher and Meatball Church of Ponyville was collapsing. He shouldn’t have dragoned up that one side of it. He done shouldn’t have.

With no other choice, he grabbed Twilight by her tits and started to drag her along with him. He was going home. Back to the library. Back to salvation. With the Nut-of-Oats.