//------------------------------//
// Chaser 
// Story: The 41-Second Goddess 
// by Bicyclette 
//------------------------------//

Pinkie Pie sat smiling in the middle of Ponyville’s town square. Of course she was smiling. It had only been a moon since the defeat of Cozy Glow, Tirek, and Queen Chrysalis, but everything in Ponyville was already back to normal. She could break out into a song about smiling at any moment, and half the town would join in, jumping on rooftops in happiness. 

But then she remembered that not every town in Equestria could say the same thing. Canterlot had suffered the most damage from Cozy Glow’s attack, and was just beginning its reconstruction and recovery. The ponies and creatures there wouldn’t be jumping on rooftops with joy any time soon.

Pinkie Pie frowned as she thought of the prospect of anycreature anywhere being sad. Then her thoughts wandered, as they often did. She thought about the other thing which she associated with Canterlot, which was a certain kind of cupcake that she always made sure to get whenever she found herself up there. The Bake Stop’s Special Bundt Cupcake. It had been forever since she had one!

At that moment, a pegasus deliverypony fulfilling a rush order to a client in Fillydelphia was flying overhead. She collided unexpectedly with a swarm of geese, whose migration patterns had been altered due to recent weather changes made by the Wonderbolts near the Dragon Lands. This would normally have not been a problem, since the deliverypony’s cargo was secured to her with unicorn magic, which could stand something as minor as a collision with a goose swarm. But the flight path had inadvertently taken the cargo through an energy net whose valence was just planar and opposite enough to said magic to loosen it. 

Just enough for one box to fall. 

Of course, the box’s fragile cargo would never survive a drop from that height in its original, plain packaging. But the box’s sender had nursed a distrust of high society opinions of cultural markers ever since the heart of her own business was nearly destroyed by the reign of a snooty Canterlot critic years before. So when she read that scathing review in the Manehattan Times of some recent aesthetic trends coming out of the Equestrian Midwest, she deliberately adopted them in defiance, changing her box design and piling on layers of crinkled ribbon and foam precisely in the way that the reviewer had described as “gaudy” and “a pastel-colored eyesore”.

It was precisely those things that absorbed the brunt of the impact of the box with the ground. But that wasn’t all. The angle of the impact opened up the bottom of the box just enough for one of the items it contained to pop through, spared of the remaining force of the impact by the sacrifice of its sisters. The item sailed through the air in a parabolic arc and landed in front of Pinkie, upright and unharmed.

It was a single The Bake Stop’s Special Bundt Cupcake.

Pinkie picked it up and ate it. It was absolutely delicious. It tasted exactly as good as it did the last forty times she had eaten it in her life. No more, no less. She smiled.

Somewhere in Pinkie Pie’s brain, the last surviving remnant of the 41-Second Goddess thought Her last thought before at last allowing Herself to dissolve into nothingness, Her goal finally fulfilled.

Totally worth it.