What it was like (Omake for A Friend In Need by sopchoppy)

Excerpt from Rainbow at Night: Memories of the Bringers’ End

From Chapter 5: Wards

Vista​

I fell in love with Twilight Sparkle the moment I saw her, and I hated myself for it. Everything about her, everything she said or did or even when she wasn’t doing anything, made my inner little girl squeal and giggle and clap like, well, a little girl meeting a unicorn. And at that point in my life I’d spent a couple of years trying to bury my inner little girl in an unmarked grave because no one could see past the outer little girl.

But that’s not the story you want to hear about, and that’s O.K. Because the story you’re here for, I don’t get tired of telling this story. Because it’s a story that should be told again and again and keep on being told when I’m long gone. But, I get frustrated telling it because it’s hard to make people understand what it was really like. I’m barely old enough to drink and I’m already using the phrase, “kids these days,” and it’s not just the kids. The ponies changed the world. They changed how we see the universe. We live in a world without invincible Enbringers or Simurgh plots, so people just can’t get what it was like to be there unless they can crank their heads around to how the world looked before then.

Like, just my comment about a little girl meeting a unicorn. These days, we know unicorns are real and they're heavyweights in the multiverse. The way people talk about them, you’d think the word “unicorn” should be written with an umlaut and spoken with a power-cord in the background. When I talk about a little girl seeing a unicorn, I can see that half-second it takes everyone to remember when the image of a unicorn blasting a rainbow was something silly and sissy and girly and not shorthand for a massive ass-whuppin’. And as hard as it is for the kids to get what it was like, even the people who lived through those days don’t really want to go back to that headspace ‘cause that world before the ponies changed it? That world was a shit sandwich buffet.

So, to tell you and the people you’re gonna write this down for what it was like, let me turn it into a parable of sorts like this:

One day I was hanging out with my friends at our clubhouse and the Easter Bunny showed up, lost, confused, and with no way to get home. After letting him crash at our pad for a while we got to know Peter Cottontail, and he was a nice guy, but also just as sappy as all the animated holiday specials led us to believe. We also found out his painted-egg fixation could get kind of extreme at times. Then bad things happened that he had to deal with and while he was stepping in to save all of us it turned out he really was a major mythical being with all the powers and abilities needed to deliver candy and hide eggs all over the world in one day. On top of that, he also had the powers of Bugs Bunny and a few other rabbits from myth and legend. He painted a door on a wall and walked through, pulled lit dynamite sticks out of nowhere at will, all that crazy stuff. But in the end, he was still this cuddly little bunny rabbit who just wanted to entertain little kids with candy and an odd scavenger hunt.

Then the Boogieman attacked the city. Not just a monster from under a bed, but this ancient, eldritch being that lurked under every bed and in every closet or dark corner and terrorized and devoured children since man discovered fire. He’d been driven back but never defeated in all that time, but he wasn’t hiding in the shadows anymore and we grew up on documentaries about how everyone he caught died frightened and alone in the dark. The bunny rallied everyone, and managed to counter some of the Boogieman’s tricks, but the monster came back strong. Cottontail made his move to swing things back in the good guys’ favor, only to have Satan drop on him like a ton of bricks. It turned out that Lucifer was the real mastermind behind all this, and the bunny came close to screwing up his plans for dragging all mankind into eternal damnation.

So, the city was literally going to hell. We lost contact with Mr. Cottontail in the chaos for a while. Then a massive blizzard sprang up, dousing most of the hellfire, even though it was late summer. The bunny managed to find us, and he told us that it was snowing because Santa Claus came to town and he was fighting the devil. We made our way through the blizzard towards the sounds of battle, but there was a close call when a formation of flying reindeer strafed a little too close to us with the bright red lasers shooting out of their noses. When we got there, sure enough, it was Kris Kringle decked out in a red outfit with white fur. But it was blood-red leather with metal spikes, and the color might have been because of actual blood from the fresh polar bear hide he was wearing as a cloak. He had iron chains woven through his beard, and his voice was the voice of doom that made the whole valley shake like a bowl full of jelly. In one hand he had a machine gun blasting out blazing lumps of coal and in the other a massive crowbar painted like a candy cane. Right after we showed up he smashed the Prince of Darkness in the face with the crowbar while bellowing something that sounded like Dutch, but I’m pretty sure part of it translated as “naughty list”.

Meanwhile, we were still on the sideline with the Easter Bunny and we ended up helping him set up this catapult made from stripped-down Christmas trees and tinsel to launch a big egg-shaped bomb painted with pastel polka dots and containing the “power of renewing spring” or something like that. The bomb went off, eradicated Satan and all his major minions from the universe forever, and turned the hellish landscape into a field of blooming flowers. Then Santa stomped over with a, “HO, HO, HO,” that left our skulls vibrating and let everyone know he wanted cookies, eggnog with rum, and a rock concert to celebrate.

And that’s what it was like.

Comments

[RandomNPC]

This... is the most amazing thing ever.