To say that Rainbow Dash was slow to wake would be an understatement even in the best of circumstances. The morning after a Pinkie Pie party, however, was an entirely different beast, and still more so when said party involved as much alcohol as last night's had. Sprawled face-down on her bed, the pony snorted as one of her hind legs spasmed, and again a moment later as she rolled over onto her side. Unfortunately for her, the motion brought her face straight into the sunlight let into the room by its lone window.
The pony grumbled, beginning to wake up ever so slightly, although not quite awake enough yet to feel the pounding headache she would suffer from for the rest of the morning. Vaguely muttering what was in all likelihood an epithet, she dragged the tuft of cloud she was using as a pillow over her eyes, blocking out the baleful rays of the sun.
Alas, it was too little, too late. She had begun to feel her head throbbing in harmony with her heartbeat. Every second of rise from slumber brought a slightly more painful pulse, and every pulse brought her a little bit further from sleep in an unspeakably cruel cycle. Within ten minutes, the ache had reached its peak, and Rainbow Dash finally gave up on trying to avoid it by going back to sleep.
Groaning, she pulled the pillow and makeshift sleepmask off her head and threw it to the floor below, then tried to force her eyes open. She quickly abandoned the attempt. She had only peeled her eyelids a sliver apart, but the bright light of the sun doubled the throbbing in her skull.
The pony grunted, rolled to the side, and slid her forelegs off the bed and onto the cloud below. Barrel still resting on the bed, she paused for a moment to vainly try thinking her headache out of existence.
"Ow," she muttered as a particularly strong series of pulses hit her. "Ow, ow, ow."
Sighing, she dragged the rest of her body off of the bed and again cracked her eyes. It still exacerbated the effects of the hangover, but this time she was prepared and it didn't hit her as hard.
Finally up and awake, Rainbow Dash moved towards a roughly rectangular opening in one of the walls, then turned left and made her way to the bathroom (not noticing the trail of dark red spots leading down the hallway). Glancing into a large mirror mounted on the wall, she noticed a splotch of dried, dark red liquid on her chest, with quite a bit of the same on her forelegs. Probably spilled punch, she thought, then tried to remember what exactly had gone on the night before.
Her summons only attracted a hooffull of disjointed images—a dark room with pulsating colored lights everywhere, a splash of bright red, and puke. Lots of puke.
At that moment, hungover, covered in alcoholic fruit juice, and stinking of vomit (although she had yet to realize this last part), Rainbow Dash made a decision that would stick with her for the rest of her days.
I am never going to drink again.
She nodded in affirmation of her new goal, then winced as the sudden movement sent a railroad spike of pain through her head. She reached out and smacked a small bit of cloud cropping out of the wall, and water began to pour out of it. Most of it landed on the puffy floor below and was absorbed back into the house. As she placed her hooves underneath the flow, however, a small magical field captured most of the liquid, which she promptly splashed into her face. After repeating the motions several times, she felt marginally better.
At this point her stomach had started rumbling, telling her to eat something, dammit. And that was just what she would do... after a nice, quick shower to get the punch out of her coat.
Nearly fifteen minutes later, she had finally gotten the last of the stuff out. She shook herself from muzzle to tail, ridding herself of the remaining drops of water and—accidentally—sending a dull but powerful pain shooting through her skull. "Gah! Dammit!" she exclaimed, and again silently swore to a life of sobriety.
Cradling her still-throbbing head with one of her hooves, she made her way out of the bathroom and down to the opposite end of the hallway, again not noticing the small spots of red. When she got to the stairs, rather than walking down, she flapped her wings once, propelling herself forward and up off of the cloud to a somewhat gentle landing below.
There were still more stains below the stairs, and she finally noticed them. Frowning, she looked down the hall, where the drink that she had only just gotten off of her coat looked less like drops and more like somepony had poured it out of a cup as they walked out of the kitchen. The closer it got to her, the more spaced out it was, each drop growing farther and farther apart as they went up the stairs and, she assumed, down the hallway. She glanced at the stains, wondering exactly how much punch had been spilled on her. Probably a hell of a lot, with how much she had trailed throughout the house. She would've had to have had an entire bowl dumped on her to account for all that. She sighed and facehoofed, realizing that there was really only one pony in town clumsy enough to do that. "Ditzy," she muttered. "Featherbrain."
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her why she was downstairs. Thoughts of punch driven from her mind by hunger, she began to walk the short distance down the hall to the kitchen, simultaneously trying to remember if she'd had anything to eat last night (Pinkie Pie's parties were notoriously heavy on pastries and cakes and light on actual food) and come up with a plan for breakfast. She came up empty on both counts a few feet before entering the kitchen (she was still unable to remember the vast majority of exactly what had happened the night before, and she could never really remember what was in her fridge). She drew even with the kitchen doorway, turned to enter... and froze as she discovered the only truly important thing that had happened the night before.
The kitchen, it should be noted before continuing, was usually the only room in a cloud house mostly built and containing groundside materials—after all, it's rather difficult to cook eggs when your oven's incapable of supporting a pan or generating heat, or to eat when your food keeps falling through the floor. As such, everything in the room short of the walls and ceiling was composed of solids. The same thing that made it possible to keep, prepare, and consume food, however, also made it one of the most dangerous rooms in a pegasus house—used to the safety of clouds, a tired, intoxicated, or accident-prone pony could severely injure or even kill herself... or another.
Rainbow Dash's kitchen was almost exactly as it usually was, barring four details: the refrigerator had fallen and was propped up by the island, one of the two chairs that had been around said island lay in pieces on the floor, there were dark red stains on virtually every exposed surface, and laying next to the refrigerator was a dark gray female pegasus, glassy eyes wide to the world, impaled through the barrel and back by a long, splintered leg of the broken chair.
Rainbow Dash could simply stare at the scene, first with confusion, then with growing horror as she realized what she was seeing. Unwillingly, she found her gaze attracted to the mare on the floor.
She was lying on her stomach, having come to rest on the floor. She was about the same size as Rainbow Dash, although her wings, one splayed across the floor and bent unnaturally backwards about halfway out, were slightly smaller. There was a long, cylindrical piece of wood running through the mare's body and about six inches out halfway down her back. It was a dark red above the exit point, and the visible end was sharp and jagged. Her cutie mark was composed of two white, interlocking circles, one on top of the other. The bottom one had a line extending straight down and crossed near the end; the top had an arrow pointing to the upper right. Her mane and tail—both about as long and styled similarly to Rainbow Dash's—were a rich sky blue, and her coat was the deep gray of charcoal. She lay in a small pool of dark red blood, still wet without a patch of cloud to absorb it. Her head... her head was turned towards the door, allowing—forcing—Rainbow Dash to absorb every detail. There were thin, dried streams of blood coursing down from the slightly open corners of her mouth, her ears drooping slightly, and her eyes—
Oh, dear Celestia, her eyes. Her eyes were still open, but dull and glassy, the aquamarine iris far too pale and small and the pitch black pupil much too wide. It was instantly, painfully obvious to Rainbow Dash that those eyes were devoid of life, but they were still open, and they were looking at her, they were staring at her, accusing her, and now she was backing away from the horrific scene in front of her, and—
"What..." she whispered, trembling as the reality of the situation came crashing down on her, "what did I do?"