She was pink. Garishly pink! It was oddly like looking at the face in the giant billboard, only much, much (much!) smaller. And younger. And a very imperfect match. It was hard to tell in the light, but she seemed wrong somehow. My eyes first lighted on a rough scar on her head, like she’d recently fallen headfirst, possibly at very high speed, and scraped herself up rather badly. The first guess that popped into my head was that she had jumped off the roof of her barn. Trying to fly? My eyes moved to her sides, looking for wings, but she was indeed an earth pony. Then my eyes caught her bare flank. She was young, but not that young. She stood less than a head shorter than me. I knew what it was like to strive for a cutie mark that wouldn’t come; my heart went out to her. She had waited longer for hers than even I had, and was still wait… no, wait.

The wrongness snapped into focus. (If I’d still been on Mint-als, I would have realized it immediately!) Her coat wasn’t actually her coat.

She’d painted herself pink!

[…]

The “museum” was a single huge room. There wasn’t much to tour. But Pinkie Bell made a point to stop and show off one item after another, most of them adorned with saggy balloons or vomited all over with confetti.

“… and they danced and danced all day and all night! And best of all this is the very silo where Pinkie Pie, as a young filly, invented the first party ever and got her Cutie Mark!”

Velvet leaned close to me, murmuring, “I’m fairly certain that parties have existed for more than two-hundred and fifty years.” But Pinkie Bell was clearly on a roll and not about to stop for questions.

“During the first years of the war, Pinkie Pie traveled all over, throwing parties for Equestrian troops about to head into battle! Bringing them a taste of their homeland, and more importantly, bringing them cheer and putting smiles on their faces!” Pinkie Bell waved her arms at several easels with framed photographs of Pinkie Pie, dressed in frills and fishnets, dancing on stage in front of nearly a thousand ponies. “That is, when she wasn’t on super secret missions for Princess Celestia!”

“She looks a lot smaller in person,” I commented back to Velvet, thinking of how much less threatening the real pony seemed than the insane billboard just a few miles from this farm.

“Pinkie Pie’s only regret was that she couldn’t be everywhere helping all the troops all the time! (Although with Dash, she could come pretty close!) So of course…”

Calamity raised a hoof. “Dash her friend or Dash the drug?” Pinkie Bell seemed not to notice.

Prancing towards a familiar poster, Pinkie Bell rambled on, unstoppable. “…when Princess Luna offered to give Pinkie Pie a whole Ministry of her very own to do whatever she wanted to with it, she pounced on the chance! And the Ministry of Morale was born!”

It was the PINKIE PIE IS WATCHING YOU FOREVER poster, this one intact. The elderly pink mare was smiling mischeviously, as if she’d just played a wonderful prank. And with the whole face visible, I swore I caught a curious look in her eyes. I no longer felt guilty with the poster staring at me; now I felt uncomfortably exposed.

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Fallout: Equestria – Chapter 09