"Let me just get this cake frosted, and then we can go!" Pinkie said to Rainbow Dash.
"Awesome," Rainbow said. "I’ve got all the whoopee cushions we ought to need!"
She was looking forward to a day of pranking ponies with Pinkie. But right now, she was very, very bored. It was taking Pinkie forever to frost that cake. Desperate to find something that could distract her for a few minutes from how bored she was, Rainbow looked all around the bakery kitchen.
Funny. There was a door there. She’d never noticed a door before. While Pinkie was entirely occupied with frosting a cake, Rainbow flapped over to the door and pulled it open. It was a flight of stairs down to a basement.
"Wonder what’s down here," she murmured to herself. Weird that Pinkie had never told any of her friends about this. Maybe it was just the laundry room or something.
At the bottom of the stairs, Rainbow flicked on the light. There was a metal table, with four straps hanging from it near each corner, and on the table there was a small pile of books. Also, a tray with scalpels and all kinds of instruments that Rainbow didn’t recognize except that they would have been a lot more appropriate for a hospital than a baker’s basement. The entire room oozed creepiness. Rainbow picked up the first book in the pile. It was covered with caked-on batter, but she was easily able to tell that the title was Making Ponies Cupcakes.
Suddenly terrified, Rainbow flew upstairs. Pinkie was just finishing. "Okie dokie lokie! I’m all set!"
"Yeah? What’s this?" Rainbow shoved the book in Pinkie’s face, and drew it back too fast for Pinkie to grab it.
"It’s a cookbook," Pinkie said. "I have lots of them. Because I’m a baker, you know, so I kinda need to have cookbooks."
"Yeah, but this one is about turning ponies into cupcakes!"
"Really?" Pinkie’s eyes went wide. "Where does it say that?"
"Oh, don’t play innocent," Rainbow Dash said. "I’m taking this to Twilight!" She zoomed off. Pinkie followed her at top bouncing speed.
Twilight was less sympathetic than Rainbow had hoped.
"Rainbow, Making Ponies Cupcakes doesn’t necessarily mean making ponies into cupcakes. It could mean making cupcakes for ponies. The Equestrian language is ambiguous like that. Why did you think Pinkie would be making ponies into cupcakes?"
"Uh... because her basement is really creepy?"
"Have you ever tried to frost a cake with fondant icing to look like a train? Or a bunny rabbit? Have you?" Pinkie demanded. "Working with that stuff is like sculpting. I need a lot of precision tools, and an environment where none of the other stuff I’m baking is going to get into the cake while I’m trying to sculpt it!"
"Rainbow, that seems like a perfectly rational explanation to me," Twilight said. "I don’t even know why you would think our friend would want to make ponies into cupcakes."
"Uh..." Suddenly realizing that the cake batter was covering a word, Rainbow knocked some of it off the cover. Now the title clearly said Making Ponies into Cupcakes. "Because of this!"
Dun dun DUNN!
Twilight’s eyebrows went up. "That... does look pretty bad," she admitted. "Pinkie? You want to explain this?"
Pinkie giggled nervously. "Um... yeah! There’s a simple explanation for it!"
There was a pause.
"I’m waiting," Twilight said.
"For what?"
"For your simple explanation."
"Oh! Right! Well, it’s like this, see—" Pinkie took the book back. "Rainbow didn’t get all the fondant off the cover! That stuff is like glue!" She pushed another blob off the cover. Now it said Making Ponies Pinto Cupcakes.
Dun dun DUNN!
Twilight looked up. "Do you mind? I’m trying to conduct a serious investigation here, and I really don’t need the suspense riffs."
Sorry.
"Pinto cupcakes?" Rainbow asked, still skeptical.
"Yeah! Where we put pinto designs on the cupcake frosting! It’s especially useful if it’s a birthday party and the birthday colt or filly wants cupcakes that look like them! It’s easy to do most pony colors, but pinto is hard, so I needed a book!"
"Well, that seems to settle it," Twilight said. "Rainbow, can you try not to let your imagination run away with you?"
"I guess," Rainbow said. "Sorry, Pinkie."
"It’s okay! I jump to silly conclusions all the time! The other day I was going to get in my gyrocopter and go yell at you that you shouldn’t feed Scootaloo to the machine that makes the rainbows or else who’s gonna watch this fanfic?"
Rainbow blinked. "What?"
"But then I realized that that was dumb and I was being paranoid again! But if you had been right there I totally would have yelled at you! So it’s all right!"
"So no hard feelings?"
"Nope! Just squishy feelings!" Pinkie hugged Rainbow. "Let me just put my book away and then we can go prank some ponies!"
"Okay, sounds good."
Pinkie bounced down the stairs to the basement and set the book down. It was a good thing the fondant icing on the cover made it look like the word Pony had an ies at the end instead of a y, Pinkie thought, as she set her book down next to Making Zebra Pastries and Making Griffin Scones. She used her hoof to scrape the icing off, revealing the title to be Making Pony Pinto Cupcakes.
"Now, where did I put the first volume of Making Pony Cupcakes?" she murmured to herself. "Oh, right." She picked up all the books from the table and dumped them into a box labeled "Issues of Rocks Quarterly from Maud." Rainbow was never going to look in there.
Then she skipped up the steps. Time to go prank ponies! Making them into cupcakes was only for special occasions.
*fwwwt*