Pinkie Pie smiled cheerfully and waved as another happy customer left Sugarcube Corner with home-baked goods. She froze and looked back as her tail suddenly went spastic.
“Twitch, wiggle, twitch, twitch, pause... shiver, wiggle... TWITCH! YAY!”
Mrs. Cake leaned out of the kitchen at Pinkie’s yell with a raised eyebrow.
“Everything alright, Pinkie?”
Pinkie turned on a dime and was suddenly prostrate in front of Mrs. Cake. She pulled her head up and put on the biggest puppy-dog eyes in her arsenal.
“Can I prettyprettypretty please get off early? My Tail is twitchy-twitching and somepony needs my help at the pond!”
Mrs. Cake glanced around the store for a moment, seeing business was slow, and nodded. She hardly had time to blink before Pinkie was out the door, leaving a spinning dime where she had been standing. Mrs. Cake picked it up curiously and examined it.
“10 cents? What in Faust’s name is a dime?”
=================================
Pinkie bounced with all haste to the small pond with a wide grin on her face. Eventually she burst out of the bushes and onto the shore to see a Cutie Mark Crusade in progress.
Applebloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Bell were all staring intently at a gently floating bobber in the water, with a line trailing back to a rod in Applebloom’s hooves. Pinkie soon got their attention.
“Hiya girls! Whatcha up to?”
“We’re huntin’ a famous pond monster Miss Pie!”
“So we can beat it up and look cool!”
“And get our cutiemarks at the same time!”
“CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS POND MONSTER CATCHERS!”
Pinkie laughed and began asking a few questions, curious what her tail had called her out here for if not to rescue someone or fix a problem.
The three impatient fillies soon gave up after a few minutes and reeled in the bait. Pinkie laughed at the big rutabaga tied to the end of the line instead of a worm.
"HAHAHA! Girls, you gotta put a big juicy worm or something on the hook that a big greedy pond monster will want, or they won't even take a nibble!"
The Crusaders all facehoofed at their own stupidity and quickly started rummaging around in their dinky little boat. They soon shared their finds.
"An old bottle of somethin', an a bit? That's all we have, girls? What happened to our snacks?"
"We ate them, duh. They were awesome!"
"Oh well. I guess a fish might like a bit, though. It's pretty shiny."
“I’ve got a cupcake!”
They all turned and looked at Pinkie on the shore, no cupcake in sight.
“Uh, where?”
“On the hook, silly!”
They turned again, and sure enough, a big, heavily frosted cupcake was swinging lightly on the end of the line. Applebloom scratched her head again but soon clapped her hooves together as she got an idea.
“We’ll combine all of ‘em! That way we’re sure to catch sumthin’! Right?”
“RIGHT!”
They stuck the shiny golden bit into the frosting, and dumped the bottle’s contents onto the whole thing, drenching it.
Scootaloo leaned in and sniffed it curiously before recoiling in disgust.
“Yuck! Hey Applebloom! Doesn’t that smell like the cider your sister said we couldn’t drink till we were older?”
“Ugh! Yeah! It does! Maybe we’ll catch a big OLD pond monster then!”
Pinkie giggled at the alcohol drenched, gold infused morsel of food and laughed as she imagined what kind of fish they could catch with it.
She stopped giggling when her tail started twitching again. She examined the Mare’s code for a moment as the CMC cast their line before nodding in satisfaction.
“A super fast object of incredibly fastly speed approaches the pond! Guard Pinkie is on the case!”
Pinkie began pacing back and forth on a set path in a predictable pattern, confident in her ability to spot the unidentified fast object (or UFO for short) before it could slip by her unidentified.
She paused and made a confused noise as she noted a cardboard box in her path. She walked up to it and nudged it lightly before shrugging and walking around it. After all, what could a cardboard box be hiding? Certainly not a UFO.
She continued on, pausing as she heard light shuffling on sand, like someone was moving a box. She whipped around and stared at the culprit, the box.
Hmmm, did it move? Maybe?
Ah well. Guess it was nothing.
Pinkie turned around again and continued bouncing on her set route. No UFOs would be slipping by on her watch. She traversed the whole line and came back to where she had left the box, only for it to be bobbing lightly in the shallows. She gasped loudly as a large red exclamation point sprung up above her head.
Pinkie seized the ordinary cardboard box, now a bit soaked and examined it closely before looking up again with a serious look in her eye.
“Di-a-bolical...”
She bounced back to her hooves and called out to the crusaders little row boat.
"You might wanna reel it in girls, I think something's in the water!"
The crusaders looked at each other, confused, and shrugged before steadily reeling in the long line. Pinkie gasped in horror as a musical cue kicked in. Her pupils shrunk as she whipped her head back and forth in terror.
"Oh no."
She began bouncing wildly on the shore and yelling at the crusaders, flailing her hooves in a panic.
"GIRLS! Quick! Reel it in! Can't you hear the music!? That's a four-four string ostinato in D-minor! Every side character knows it means doom! Reel it in BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE! HURRY APPLEBLOOM!"
The crusaders all began yanking on the rod and coiling the line up as fast as they could, doing everything they could to speed up the process as the music grew louder and more ominous. Pinkie began darting around in the bushes, looking for the band.
"Hurry girls! The music's getting faster!"
She at last pushed another bush aside, revealing an orchestra playing.
"There you are you big-meanie-pants... es! STOP PLAYING THAT MUSIC! STOP IT PRETTYPLEASEWITHTENBILLIONCHERRIESONTOP!"
Pinkie blew a raspberry at them when they refused to stop playing, and some of them seemed quite offended. She rushed back to the shore to see the cupcake skipping across the water back toward the boat.
"C'MON CUPCAKE! YOU CAN MAKE IT! BOUNCE! BOUNCE FASTER! HU-U-U-RRY APPLBLOOM!"
Applebloom at last pulled up the line, out of breath but the cupcake still in one piece, and the other crusader started dancing and shouting "She made it!" over and over again. Pinkie wiped her brow in relief as the cupcake was tossed up and down happily and the music abruptly cut out.
"OOF. For a second or two, I though she was a goner. It's safe now."
Pinkie slapped her hooves over her mouth as the music suddenly crescendoed to the loudest it could be. She looked back out to the boat to see bubbles and a red glow quickly approaching the small tub.
"LOOK OUT!"
Applebloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Bell all shrieked in terror as a grey blur suddenly burst from the water with blazing red eyes and snapped the cupcake, bit, and alcohol all in one bite as it plunged back into the water. Applebloom staggered to her hooves and looked down past the frothy, churning water at the quickly vanishing form before looking back at her fellow crusaders trembling in the dinky little craft.
"We're gonna need a bigger boat."