You Can Pick Your Friends
Admiral Biscuit
It's a typical Thursday in Ponyville, and you're at the market considering what you want to have for dinner. Sadly, nopony has yet set up a KFC booth, although there's always hope that it might happen one week. Until then, though, you're stuck with a vegetarian diet.
As you're browsing Golden Harvest's selection of carrots, a strange yet familiar feeling assaults you.
There is a booger in your nose.
It's one of the ones that kind of hangs on, which if you breathe hard enough you can just feel it flapping around inside a nostril.
Like most guys, you don't carry around a box of tissues for this sort of occasion.
It could probably wait until you get home—it's by no means an emergency—but now that you've noticed it, it's going to keep annoying you until you do something about it.
You hold a finger up and pinch your left nostril shut, then give a couple of short, snorting exhales in an attempt to blow it out, to no avail. That booger is practically glued in there, and now it's even more annoying than it was before.
You're not about to let a little chunk of snot ruin your day, so when you find a little alleyway off the main road, you duck down it so you can do a little bit of prospecting in private.
Getting a finger on it is easy, but it's a stubborn little bugger and just doesn't want to let go.
You're so busy digging for gold that you don't hear the approaching footsteps of a curious pony.
“Hey, whatcha doing?”
“God!” You almost accidentally lobotomize yourself with your finger, then hastily yank it out and nonchalantly wipe it off on the seat of your jeans. Turns out being surprised not only works to cure hiccups, but also to get stubborn boogers out, too.
“I was just scratching my nose.” That sounds believable, right?
Pinkie narrows her eyes, but nods slowly. “Sometimes my nose gets all itchy and twitchy, and I have to—“ She pauses for a moment to reach a foreleg up and rub at her muzzle for a second, then lowers it again. “But you weren't . . . you. . . .”
You can see the gears in her head turning.
“You had your finger inside your nose!” she announces triumphantly.
“Er, maybe.” A blush starts to creep across your cheeks. Your Mom was right—you shouldn't be picking your nose in public. (She'd never claimed that you'd get caught by a pastel party pony, though.) “I had an itch inside my nose.”
“Oohhhhhh.” Pinkie nods her head wisely. “I guess that makes sense.”
Whew. Crisis averted.
“Sometimes the inside of my nose gets itchy, too,” she tells you.
“I think it happens to everyone.”
“What's it like?”
“Huh?”
Pinkie does a weird little shrug thing, and then brings her foreleg back up to her nose and rubs it again. “I can wiggle the tip of my nose, and sometimes that helps make the itchy go away, but not always.”
“Yeah.” You know exactly what she's talking about.
“Do me,” she says suddenly.
“Do you? Right here? In broad daylight, in a public alley that anypony could come down?”
She rolls her eyes. “Not that. My nose. Itch my nose. With your finger.”
“You want me to stick my finger in your nose and scratch the inside?”
Pinkie nods eagerly. “I bet it feels amazing.”
You'd never really thought that scratching the inside of your nose—or to be fair, picking it—felt that amazing. But then it was something that you could do whenever you wanted to. It was an option that was always open to you, whenever and wherever.
For Pinkie Pie—for any pony—it was forever out of reach. Never mind a pony's freakish flexibility; there was no way a hoof was ever going to fit up there.
“This might be the weirdest thing I've ever done,” you mutter to yourself.
“So you're gonna?” Her face is hopeful.
Curse ponies and their all-hearing ears.
“Sure, fine.” You take one step towards her and then stop. “But you can't tell anypony, okay? This has got to be just between you and me.”
Her ears droop. “Really? 'Cause I bet that everypony would like to have the inside of their nose scratched.”
“That may well be so,” you tell her. “But I don't want to get a reputation.”
You crouch down, and she approaches you, stretching her neck forward until her nose is almost brushing against your hand, leaving you to close the gap.
There's no point in hesitating, so you reach up and touch her between her nostrils, before running your finger around the perimeter of her left nostril. She wrinkles her nose and her nostril flares, which is the strangest feeling ever. “Are you sure?”
“Yuppers.”
“Okay, here goes.” You're not exactly sure what the best way to approach this is, so you slowly push forward, keeping the tip of your finger on the inside of her nostril.
It's weird how hot her breath is. it feels hotter than yours, anyway, although maybe you're just being overly sensitive.
“Ooh, right there,” she says, and so you obligingly rub gently—you're not sure how tough pony noses are, and you saw a picture once of what a horse nosebleed looks like and you want nothing to do with that.
As you carefully increase pressure, Pinkie lets out a moan not unlike a porn star, and it takes all your willpower to not jerk your hand back out. Surely everypony at the market heard her, and they'll be coming to investigate.
Then again, it's Pinkie Pie, so maybe not.
“Oh, that feels so good.” When you pull your finger back out, she shakes her head and then tilts her face back up at you.
You can guess what she wants, so you switch hands and go exploring inside her other nostril. Oddly, now that you've got a bit of experience, you're more confident, and find the sweet spot right away.
She moans in pleasure again, and then once your hand's clear, stretches forward and nuzzles your cheek. “Thanks! That felt amazing.”
“It was good for me, too,” you say.
Pinkie pronks back to market, but you stay in the alleyway for a moment, turning a bit of ancient wisdom over in your head. It turns out that you can pick your friends' nose.