Twilight Sparkle and Rarity were in the middle of chatting, while walking back from the market, when they noticed Pinkie Pie rolling a bunch of stacked barrels out of town at a good clip. After pausing to share a look, they changed their plans and hurried to catch up with their friend.
When they reached her, Rarity asked, "Pinkie, dear, what are you doing with all of those barrels?"
Without pausing in her task, Pinkie Pie regarded her friends and merrily replied, "I'm barreling these barrels out of town with both barrels!"
"Why?" Twilight Sparkle patiently inquired.
"Because my cousin is visiting!" Pinkie Pie happily revealed, before suddenly turning serious. "He has a deep dislike for barrels, thinks they're as crooked as a barrel full of fish hooks, so I'm hiding them for their own good." Then she perked up again. "But that's okay! I have a pit to bury them in, in case somepony needs to bury a thing!"
Neither Twilight Sparkle or Rarity knew exactly how to respond to that, so the former asked another question. "Is there anything in these barrels?"
"Yup!" Pinkie Pie readily confirmed. "There's the usual, like fish and monkeys."
A couple of monkeys chose that time to loudly complain about their situation, to which Twilight Sparkle remarked, "That's not usual, Pinkie."
Pinkie Pie continued as if she hadn't heard her. "As well as fun and laughs." Upon mentioning those, she released a regretful sigh. "Which stinks, 'cause now Ponyville will be twenty percent duller while my cousin's here." Her expression turned to one of panic. "And that might give him the idea that Ponyville's a sad and boring place!"
"I doubt you have to worry about that," Twilight Sparkle waved her concern away.
"There's more than enough fun and laughs with you around," Rarity reassured her.
Pinkie Pie's face brightened upon hearing that. "You really think so? Whew! I was worried there for an iota of a fraction of a second!"
Rarity and Twilight Sparkle simply shook their heads and followed Pinkie Pie until she reached her destination, where they helped to place the barrels into the pit and cover it up — after they were assured that the monkeys would be alright.
Right when they finished, they heard a train whistle in the distance, which made Pinkie Pie hop up and down in excitement. "Oh! Oh! He's almost here!" She suddenly stepped over to her friends and leaned into their personal space before asking, "Do you want to meet him?"
After looking at each other and shrugging their shoulders, Twilight Sparkle and Rarity replied in the positive and proceeded to follow Pinkie Pie to the train station. Aside from reciprocating a few greetings, the trot there was uneventful, and they reached the platform right as the train was slowing to a stop.
While they waited for the ponies to start disembarking, with one of their number hopping up and down in anticipation, Twilight Sparkle realized something and turned to Pinkie Pie before asking, "So, what can you tell us about your cousin before we see him? I don't think you've ever mentioned him."
Pinkie Pie screeched to a halt in midair and gasped before landing. "You're right!" She began counting off hooves as she raised them, and made an attempt to impart as much knowledge about her cousin as she could before he made an appearance. "Okay, one, his name is Pewter Pie." She raised a second hoof. "Two, he's from Steeden." She raised a third hoof, which drew her friends' disbelieving eyes. "Three, he's the most popular MeReeler." She raised a fourth hoof, and her friends forcefully tore their eyes away from it and tried to convince themselves that they had only imagined it. "Four, he's married." She raised a fifth hoof. "Five, he's—here!"
Twilight Sparkle and Rarity switched their attention to the disembarking ponies, even though they had no idea what Pewter Pie looked like. As the crowd thinned out, however, they noticed a very large pegasus stallion approaching them in response to Pinkie Pie's waving forelegs and boisterous calls, wearing a confident grin. He was as big as a horse, with a grey and brown coat, two orange legs, pale blue eyes, and a silver mane and goatee.
Pinkie Pie quickly hopped over to him, once he was close enough, and gave him a big hug. "Hey, cuz! You've grown so much since I last saw ya!" She gasped in surprise when she noticed something new about him. "And you grew some wings, too!? I've never heard of that happening before..." Then her eyes narrowed dangerously. "...Unless you were supposed to become an alicorn and got gypped!"
Pewter Pie looked down at Pinkie Pie and said nothing, still grinning.
Twilight Sparkle looked skeptical while she stroked her chin. "Is that even possible?"
Pewter Pie didn't seem to care either way, because he continued to grin.
While Pinkie Pie continued to engage with her silent cousin, after releasing him from the hug, Rarity leaned her head closer to Twilight Sparkle and whispered, "Regardless, he looks rather handsome, does he not?"
"I don't know..." Twilight Sparkle replied deliberately, who was scrutinizing Pewter Pie harder than before. "Something doesn't seem right..."
Before she could pin down what was bothering her, a tandem bicycle suddenly flew into Pewter Pie's side, where it lost all of its momentum and landed while he was knocked off of the platform. Riding the bike, which had some conspicuous red splotches and smears on it, was a duck and a pug of unusual size, who put the kickstand down before hopping off of it. The duck had a green head, yellow bill, grey feathers, silver tail feathers, four legs and no wings. The pug had a black and fawn face, deep pink fur everywhere else, a pastel pink, long-haired tail, and a very svelte physique.
Pinkie Pie rushed to the edge of the platform, concerned for her cousin's wellbeing and ready to provide aid, but she gasped at what she saw. Twilight Sparkle and Rarity followed suit when her cousin stood up and came into view, because he turned out to be a horse-sized duck who wore a mask that had Pewter Pie's face printed on it, which hung from its bill by the strap. When the duck realized that the gig was up, it shook the mask off.
"Well, well, well," said the "duck", who removed their mask and revealed that they were a stallion, with the "dog" following their example, revealing that they were a unicorn mare. "You thought you could hide your fowl nature from these eyes?" Suddenly, with a deeper voice, he gutterally screamed, "Baka na!"
The duck narrowed their eyes and hopped back onto the platform, let out a loud, defiant, "Quack," and began to approach with its wing feathers extended forward.
The stallion, who appeared to be the actual Pewter Pie, chuckled in response. "Oh? You're approaching me?" He reached down and picked up a pair of feathers that had fallen off of the duck, when the bicycle had slammed into them, and wielded them threateningly as he solemnly stated, "You laugh, you lose."
The two combatants leapt forward and met in midair, which looked very dramatic, but the fight quickly devolved into a silly, uncoordinated farce that made Twilight Sparkle and Rarity cringe. Pinkie Pie didn't seem to care, though, because she was suddenly wearing a cheerleading uniform and enthusiastically waving her pom poms about while she cheered on her cousin.
"I hope he doesn't exhaust himself again," came a concerned and soft-spoken voice from nearby. "He expended a lot of energy getting away from the nineteen-year-old army."
Rarity and Twilight Sparkle looked toward the source of the speaker and found that the mare had joined them to watch the "fight." Since the second statement raised a rather big question, Rarity expressed her confusion as she asked, "You two escaped from a nineteen-year-old army?"
The mare turned to regard them and nodded her head. "They're not all that age, or a real army, just... an organized and enthusiastic group of fans."
"I see..." Rarity reservedly replied, uncertain of how she should respond to that. With that being the case, she fell back on etiquette. "Well, my name is Rarity, and this," she motioned to her friend, "is Twilight Sparkle."
"Marzipan," said pony reciprocated, who performed a curtsy for the princess.
Seeing an opportunity to expand on what Pinkie Pie had told her a moment ago, and to quickly move on from the special courtesy, Twilight Sparkle inquired, "Pinkie Pie mentioned that Pewter Pie was a MeReeler? What's that?"
"You don't know?" Rarity couldn't help answering instead, to express her surprise. "Well, I honestly don't know much myself, but I keep an ear out for trends and heard that they're basically the stars of their own amateur films. I believe the whole thing started because there were several seasons, a few years back, when there was an unusual shortage of films being produced, and one of the cinemas opened up an unused auditorium to anypony willing to pay a fee to play their home-made movies. It became popular, evolved, and now I believe most major cinemas reserve an auditorium for MeReelers — as they've come to be called."
Their attention was redirected back to the "fight" when they heard Pewter Pie exclaim, "But can it do this!?"
They watched as he contorted his body in such a way that he struck a place on the duck with his feather where the feathers on the duck's wings wouldn't be able to reach the equivalent location on a pony, causing a burst of laughter from the duck that was quickly suppressed out of reflex despite the damage already being done. Soon thereafter, it collapsed with its head hung in defeat while Pinkie Pie excitedly congratulated her cousin, who was up on his hind legs and doing a lat spread pose as he grunted like a Neighanderthal... for a reason neither Rarity or Twilight Sparkle could fathom.
Noticing that the down-spirited duck had gotten up and began to trudge away, Twilight Sparkle and Rarity switched their attention to it. Right when they did, a pair of disembodied voices chimed in and sang, "You wear a disguise to look like equine guys; but you're not a colt, you're a Mallard Boo."
Confused, Rarity and Twilight Sparkle began to look around for the source of those singers, but their search was derailed when they heard a body hit the ground, followed by Pewter Pie shouting, "Frack!"
When their eyes fell upon him, they saw that he was lying on his side... and wearing a harness? It was attached to a metal frame underneath him, and the inside of that frame was filled with canvas, save for the holes that granted access to the artificial legs that appeared to be a part of the device. Rarity had a more revealing angle for what they were looking at, who gasped in horror and exclaimed, "You have no legs!?"
Twilight Sparkle stepped over to Rarity so she could see if that was truly the case, and her eyes widened in shock when she saw that the two legs that they could see weren't long enough to fully enter the holes while the device was pushed off-center by the ground.
"Yepperoni!" Pinkie Pie exuberantly responded to Rarity, who bounced over to her and Twilight Sparkle. "That was the one hundred and eightieth thing on my 'things to know about my cousin' list!"
Rarity and Twilight Sparkle stared at her incredulously, both for being so flippant about her cousin's condition and because they believed that such a detail should have been one of the first things on the list.
"Here you go," Marzipan said, drawing the three ponies' attention back to a blasé Pewter Pie as she approached him with a bottle, one with a red and black sandwave-like pattern and bearing a "P-Fuel" label on it.
Perking up, Pewter Pie glanced up at her shyly and said, "Is for me?"
Marzipan knelt beside him, cradled his head and positioned the bottle in front of his mouth before pouring. Shortly after he began drinking, an illusion hid all of the device save the legs, which began to twitch. As soon as he swallowed the last of the drink, he energetically rolled onto his hooves and began to work the kinks out of his limbs.
"Take it easy," Marzipan gently advised him. "At this rate we'll be out of P-Fuel long before we can get more."
"Don't worry," Pewter Pie waved her concern away. "If we run out, I'm sure Small PP will have it covered."
Pinkie Pie left behind a cloud of dust that was shaped like herself when she suddenly zipped away, which she dispersed when she returned to the same spot a second later with her forelegs overflowing with P-Fuel bottles. "I sure do, Big PP! I stashed some P-Fuel nearby in case of a P-Fuel emergency!"
Due to Twilight Sparkle's interest in Pewter Pie's magical apparatus being at war with the need to express a more proper response to meeting someone who had lost all four of their legs, she hesitated to speak. So, Rarity, with a hoof hovering in front of her mouth, deliberately asked, "Darling, how on earth did you lose all four of your legs?"
"I just had a bit of an accident when I was making one of my films," was Pewter Pie's nonchalant reply.
"'A bit?'" Rarity echoed, her brow cocked in disbelief.
"Yeah!" Pinkie Pie interjected, who was happy and willing to elaborate. "A bit of the mine collapsed on him!"
Pewter Pie rubbed the back of his head and looked askance, embarrassed. "I'm from a mining family, so I wanted to show off our craft, but..."
"...In his enthusiasm, he wasn't as cautious as he should have been," Marzipan completed.
"Anyway," Pewter Pie said, wanting to change the subject, "you're Small PP's friends, right?" He stepped up to Rarity, thrust a foreleg toward her and exclaimed, "Brohoof!"
An awkward moment passed between them, with a bead of sweat forming on his forehead while she eyed his hoof, before she slowly brought up her own hoof and tentatively made contact with it. Seeing him about to repeat the gesture with her, Twilight Sparkle began to extend a foreleg just before him, resulting in their hooves passing by each other instead of connecting. With her cheeks flushing and him smiling awkwardly to hide his own embarrassment, they tried again and made enough contact to slide their hooves into alignment, which took a couple of tries.
Trying to act as if that hadn't just happened, Pewter Pie said, "So, ever since my cousin told me that she was friends with a princess, I've had a question that I've been burning to ask you."
"Yes?" Twilight Sparkle replied, curious.
Suddenly becoming serious, Pewter Pie asked, "Are you ground gang, or sky gang?"
Twilight Sparkle blinked her eyes and intelligently said, "Huh?"
"Don't mind him," Marzipan said, looking sheepish as she sidled up alongside Pewter Pie. "It's just a silly meme."
"Okay..." Came Twilight Sparkle's uncertain reply.
"No, I'm serious," Pewter Pie insisted. "Which one is it? You can't be both!"
"Why can't she be both?" Rarity inquired, who gestured toward the pony in question. "I mean, she's an alicorn, after all."
"Oh! Oh!" Pinkie Pie excitedly voiced. "Maybe she's something in between!"
Pewter Pie looked ready to argue, then paused before his face lit up with an idea. "Hey, yeah! You can be chaos gang! That's... So... Epic!"
Twilight Sparkle smiled, although it was strained. "I don't think I'm, um, worthy of being—"
"In the most epic and exclusive club in all of Equestria?" Discord said, who appeared beside Twilight Sparkle and hooked an arm over her withers companionably, causing her brow to develop a tick. "Don't sell yourself short! Besides," he leaned toward an ear and whispered, "if you play along, I'll tell you who made those amazing prosthetics."
"Yup!" Twilight Sparkle suddenly exclaimed, unconvincingly changing her tune. "Chaos gang! That's totally me!"
With a smirk, Discord snapped his talons and vanished. A business card fluttered down into Twilight Sparkle's view, which she caught with her magic and brought closer so she could read what was one it.
She only got enough time to read the name, "Melon Husk", at the top before Rarity reprovingly asked, "Did you just accept a bribe from Discord?"
While Twilight Sparkle looked abashed, Pewter Pie yelled, "Wha-at!?" At a more normal volume, he continued. "No wonder he was such a mess: he's a simp!"
Deciding that they had been sidetracked enough, Marzipan rested a hoof on Pewter Pie's shoulder and reminded him, "Don't forget that you were looking forward to Pinkie Pie's cocoa melon dish."
"Oh, yeah!" Pewter Pie exclaimed, looking slightly worried. "I've got to see how it compares to Paisley's before it's too late!"
Tilting her head inquisitively, Twilight Sparkle asked, "Is that not considered a foal's dish in Steeden, too?"
Looking affronted, Pewter Pie defensively replied, "I'm not gonna be a soy boy like most other stallions. The secret to becoming big and strong is eating the same stuff that growing ponies eat!" Emphatically pointing at his head, he added, "Big brain!"
Rarity and Twilight Sparkle shared a look, baffled by his logic.
Before anyone could say or do anything more, Pewter Pie's ears twitched, focused in the same direction, then drooped at the same time that his face fell. "Ah, man." He turned to regard Marzipan. "Sounds like we gotta make tracks."
"Already!?" Pinkie Pie gasped. She whipped out a pair of binoculars and looked around with it until she found what she was looking for. Upon doing so, her eyes narrowed with determination. "I have no time to waste!"
She suddenly sprinted away, leaving the binoculars to spin in the air until Twilight Sparkle caught them with her magic. Curious as to what the issue was, she used the binoculars to find out, even as her ears began to pick up the cacophony Pewter Pie had heard. What she saw was a large group of fillies and colts stampeding toward the town, wearing the most garish clothing that she had ever seen, and many of them were using either a recorder, tambourine or alphorn.
"What in the world..." She said, turning a questioning look toward Pewter Pie, who had gotten on his tandem bike with Marzipan, while Rarity took hold of the binoculars to sate her own curiosity.
Pewter Pie sighed. "That's the nine-year-old army."
Before Twilight Sparkle could inquire about the existence of a second "army", she turned to look at Rarity when she heard her dry heave, who had dropped the binoculars in favor of putting all of her focus on holding her mouth closed. Moving to her side, she concernedly asked, "Are you alright?"
Instead of answering her, Rarity gave Pewter Pie a hard stare and sharply asked, "Why are your fans wearing Moon Pie's," she made a face that was a mix of disgust and nausea, "kitsch line?"
Either not noticing or caring about her reaction, Pewter Pie casually replied, "It's probably because of the musical film I released last month; Kitsch Nirvana, if you haven't heard of it."
"We started the line when kitsch fashion began to trend because of it," Marzipan helpfully supplied.
Rarity regarded them with open-mouthed disbelief before closing her mouth with an audible click and looking gravely serious. "I need to go."
With that said, she left with all due haste.
Twilight Sparkle hardly had time to react to that when she heard Pewter Pie say, "We need to go, too. It was a pleasure to meet ya, princess!"
When she turned to look, they were already riding into town, away from the nearing stampede of fans, with Marzipan looking back with a pleasant smile and waving goodbye. With everyone else having now run off for one reason or another, she looked about herself indecisively before opting to follow Pewter Pie and Marzipan, since she couldn't ignore the potential trouble that they were in. So, she took flight and hurried after them.
Once she caught up and was flying alongside them, she asked, "Do you need any help?"
"Nah," came Pewter Pie's unconcerned reply, "we're okay. This happens all the—"
He suddenly braked and skid to a stop. When Twilight Sparkle flew back to him, she saw him staring ahead in fear. Upon checking to see what had him so scared, however, she didn't see anything. The only thing in front of them was the river, and the Everfree forest beyond that.
"What's wrong?" Twilight Sparkle asked them.
Marzipan looked around Pewter Pie to find that out, what with him showing no sign of registering the question. "Oh... He's afraid of bridges."
Twilight Sparkle thought that was a bit odd as far as phobias went, but Pewter Pie shook his head, and mentally escaped the grip that his fear had on him, before she could respond. In a bit of a panic, he quickly looked for an alternative route to travel, but discovered that the nine-year-old army had split into three groups, with one still coming up behind them while the other two came from the sides, along the river, which only left the direction ahead of them clear.
He forced himself to calm down, despite his fear trying to make him feel trapped. Gathering his determination, he spoke more to himself when he said, "I got this."
So saying, he pulled out a large pouch, one bulging with bits, and raised it aloft. "Sponsor Griffon!"
A split second later a griffon swooped down and snatched up the money, who carefully secured it to his harness before circling back to its source. Once he returned to Pewter Pie, he took a pair of cords, which were attached to the harness, and tied them to the bike. After making sure that the bike would stay upright, and the knots wouldn't come undone during transit, he beat his wings hard and began to carry the bike and its passengers into the sky.
Twilight Sparkle followed them for a short distance, mostly to escape the converging fans herself, then watched them fly into the distance. Before they got too far, though, she heard the familiar sound of a cannon being fired from somewhere behind her. Looking over her shoulder to investigate, she got a glimpse of a cocoa melon on a plate before it shot past her, close enough for the disturbed air to brush an ear. It sailed toward the retreating couple, and when it reached them one of Pewter Pie's hooves shot out and caught it.
Several seconds later, a loud, feminine, "Wow," echoed throughout the valley.
"Well," Twilight Sparkle thought, once they were out of sight, "that was certainly... interesting. No question he's related to Pinkie Pie."
Since she had no immediate plans, she proceeded to fly home.
* * * A FEW WEEKS LATER... * * *
Twilight Sparkle collapsed onto her bed after another exhausting day.
Ever since Pewter Pie had "revealed" that she was the Princess of Chaos in one of his films, the idea had spread like wildfire and had become an endless source of frustration and grief. And that was before Discord had made a guest appearance in one of his films that had a news format, talking about their so-called relationship as beings of chaos.
Pewter Pie had even had the nerve to ask her to host some meme appraisal thing.
As if the thought of him had summoned him, her cabinet doors burst open and Pewter Pie leaped out while screeching, scaring her half to death and making her topple off the opposite side of the bed.
Poking her head over the bed, she yelled, "Are you crazy!? And what are you doing in my room!?"
Pewter Pie dramatically pointed at her and declared, "Last week I asked you if you wanted to host Meme Review! Since you didn't reply, I thought something might be wrong and came to see if everything was okay."
Twilight Sparkle looked at him skeptically. "So you hid in my cabinet?"
"Huh?" Pewter Pie replied, looking confused. "I just got here."
Not even remotely in the mood for Pinkie Pie-like hijinks, Twilight Sparkle sighed and said, "Either way, I'm not interesting in hosting anything."
Disappointed, Pewter Pie replied, "Aw, really? Guess I'll have to think of a good alternative for your fans."
"...My fans?" Twilight Sparkle responded, doubt tingeing her voice.
"Yeah!" Pewter Pie enthused. "You've got a ton of fans that keep asking me to feature you in one of my films. But if you're not interested in hosting Meme Review, maybe you'd be up for something else?"
Willing to give Pewter Pie the benefit of the doubt, Twilight Sparkle asked, "Like what?"
With a glint in his eye, Pewter Pie raised a mostly-empty bottle of P-Fuel into view and suggested, "How about a bottle flipping challenge?"
Twilight Sparkle stared at him with a dubious expression on her face.
* * * ELSEWHERE... * * *
In a dimly-lit room, where a single candle provided illumination, Rarity, who stood by the table where the candle was placed, set down a letter that she had just finished reading.
She began to chuckle.
Finally, she had received a letter from the last fashion designer that she had reached out to, and they — like all the others before them — had agreed to team up and resist Moon Pie and their trending kitsch line.
Her chuckle developed into a laugh.
Soon, their shared resistance would formally assemble a new brand, R-Series, and their combined assets would no doubt defeat the kitsch scourge that was a blight upon the fashion world.
She rose upon her hind legs, raised her forelegs into the air and began to cackle like a madwoman. A bolt of lightning just happened to strike near the window at that moment, lighting up the room, because Derpy accidentally flew into a cloud.