Princess Equestria, in the midst of her lunar quest for the remaining fragments of the Friendship Chalice, stopped and stared into space for a year and a half. Her ears occasionally swiveled like radar dishes, her tail twitched slowly in intricate patterns, her moulting wings left a huge pile of feathers around her. Over her head, the stars turned in their courses, and once, a meteoroid from a remote planet where Pi was equal to three flashed through her mane and left a hexagonal crater when it struck the ground. Astonishingly, in all that time, she shat not. (Seriously, I shit you not.)
At last, she remembered where she'd left her ethereal hair brush—it had fallen behind the vanity and she'd never bothered to retrieve it. She shook her head, yawned, kicked away the accumulated lunar dust, and started once more on her quest.
However, before Princess Equestria could haul out her magic spinner to seek the next target, she tripped and fell through an entirely too conveniently placed hole in the narrative structure and found herself in front of a snakelike chain of mountains, which her lunar map identified as Montes Python, and at the very top of the tallest peak, Claseus, stood the sinister castle of her evil nemesis, Phantasma Selene!
She eyed the dark soaring ramparts, the intimidating, fanglike crenelations, the walls packed with alert soldiers bearing well-burnished pugil sticks, the satellite dish disguised as a fiery all-seeing slit-pupiled eye, then shrugged. Two could play at this game. She kicked herself another hole in the narrative structure and jumped through before the befuddled author had a chance to stop her. "You won't easily get away with that again!" he raved.
She now stood in the grand lunar hall, an icy dome lit with flickering, lightning-like traceries of electric fire that raced up the grand pillars and over the walls. Phantasma's throne, an overly elaborate affair constructed of old ploughshares and bunny skeletons, was empty; the hall was utterly vacant and silent. But at the center stood a palpable trap: a set of enormous scales constructed from bronze-plated brass. On one side of the balance was a fragment of the Friendship Chalice, on the other, an ice-cold bottle of Shiner Hock beer! Princess Equestria gently palpated the contraption with her palps as she considered the problem, smoothly crossing and uncrossing her eyes and ears.
At long last (and it didn't last long), she smiled and reached forth with her magical TK. "Piquant brew... I choose you!" she said.
And even as her magical aura approached the beer, it branched off towards the other side of the balance! Princess Equestria seized both fragment and brew at the same time! The scales wavered not at all.
Chornickling to herself (chornickling is when you chuckle, snort and nicker at the same time) she triumphantly snorted the fragment into her nose...
And then sneezed mightily, expelling all the fragments of the Friendship Chalice! The pieces bounced all over the grand hall as Princess Equestria sneezed again and again! The fragment had been coated with moonpepper, which is just like regular pepper except it grows on the moon and it glows with unearthly light and I'm really not going to waste much more effort on describing it. You want some exotic descriptions of extraterran flora, you go browsing through Wiki and combine random plant terms that sound interesting. It's how I would do it anyway.
The beer bottle dropped to the floor and its cap popped off in a spray of foam. The foam turned blue, then swelled and bulged forth from the bottleneck, taking the form of a tiny black and blue alicorn, who suddenly went "ooch!" as her rear got stuck in the mouth of the bottle. Straining and scrabbling her hooves, she popped loose in a burst of hops and landed on the floor, growing instantly to her full size, her moondust mane flowing in the lack of breeze (She's got muscles in her hair, okay?) The glittering, glistening fragments of the Friendship Chalice all swirled around her, forming a halo about her horn like LOUN stones.
"Phantasma Selene!" exposited Princess Equestria, who tends to conform to standard narrative conventions whenever she's severely disappointed by sudden beer deprivation.
"Princess Equestria, my terrestrial nemesis!" Phantasma grinned evilly, showing her pearly black fangs and trident tongue, studded with tiny selenium studs given to her as tokens of gratitude by her selenial studs. "Did you really have to wait until your precious chalice was destroyed before seeking me out? Were the signs not clear enough?"
Princess Equestria stroked her little goatish beard, which female alicorns have just like female dwarves (no comments war, please). "I recall one day, three hundred years ago, when you made the moon blivet-shaped for a week. Every maker of silverware in my realm went bat-fellating bonkers and I had to train a new generation from scratch. Then, one year, you apparently thought it would be funny to make the moon look like a giant butt. As if you were standing up here saying 'ha ha, get it?'" Equestria wiggled her ears sadly. She had tried to make the planet of Horsilvania look like a tetrahedron for a while but too many ships were getting lost over the corners.
Phantasma snorted and flexed her mane. "Well, what about the time you made the sun look like a huge pinky finger?"
"Pinky...? No. No! That was a middle finger!" Princess Equestria's mane corona'd in anger. "You mean I went through all that trouble and you thought it was a pinky!?"
Phantasma brayed with joy and rolled on her back, holding her belly as she cried tears of laughter which froze as they hit the floor.
"Stop it!" Princess Equestria yelled, stamping her hooves (each stamp also read "Stop it!")
Phantasma whooped one last time, snorted and leapt to her feet. "Oh, 'Cessy, you're just as big a laugh riot as ever! But now I have your precious Friendship Chalice, or some appreciable fraction thereof! And soon you shall have nothing at all, for you are doomed to face... my Elements of Lunacy!"
And loping into the grand hall with bouncy moon strides came the moonpony mares who formed the Elements of Lunacy:
Frigora, the Element of Coldness, also known as Freona.
Fecundity, Element of Reproductive Success, who was almost too preggers to move but she's a working mom and she'll deal.
Cognita, Element of Knowledge, who never actually made very much of herself and who spends most of her time writing fanfics online. (Ooh, does that one burn, CollegeDropout ClopficComposer?)
Humora, Element of Cheap Puns, whose jokes were all wet.
Smithia, Element of Banality, and most people are just like her so you already know what she's like.
And Spumoni, the Element of Tasty Fattening Desserts.
"Form the Lightning Power Sparkle Rainbow Crystal Moonbeam Combo Thingy!" shouted Frigora. And they all jumped into the air and hung there with glittery sparkles and all was going well until Humora told an astonishingly ill-timed wombat joke. Cognita asked for a citation, but instead got a cream pie in the face from Spumoni. The food fight spread from there until Frigora tried to use her ice powers to calm things down but instead suffered a thermal inversion that left her as an ice-coated statue and sent everypony else flying facefirst into the vaulted ceiling. One by one, they peeled off like pancakes and landed on Frigora's head.
Fecundity, last of all, landed right on top of the pile. Her gravid belly quivered, and she suddenly gave birth in a fountainous explosion that rained messily all over the p(a)lace. They all tried to simultaneously shout "D'aww" from looking at the cute baby foals and "Eeeew" from being covered in afterbirth.
"Daeeeiiiiewww!"
Off to the side, Phantasma Selene and Princess Equestria stood together under a huge umbrella that dripped with mephitic slime. Phantasma shook her head sadly, pawing at the moonrock floor.
Equestria draped a sympathetic hoof over her withers. "So, your Elements are a pack of idiots too..."
Selene stared glumly downward, then nodded. "It seems like such a good idea at first. You set up breeding programs and forced marriages. You strive to concentrate the most essential qualities in the fewest pony bodies possible. And when you finally get them all together in one generation, each one is really good at their assigned element and a complete shitkicker at everything else."
"Just a bunch of one-track ponies," agreed Princess Equestria, remembering the embarrassing incident with Windbag Nosebook and her 'See it, schtup it' spell. "Look, shall we just go somewhere and settle this, Ponygod to Ponygod?"
"Suits me." Phantasma suddenly grinned wickedly. "See you on the dark side!" She vanished in a puff of teleportation.
"Do I look brain damaged to you?" shouted Princess Equestria, but Phantasma was already gone.
Princess Equestria shuddered. Teleportation always gave her gas. But perhaps there was a way to turn that to her advantage... She vanished in a huff of contemplation.
—=§=—
On the dark side of the moon, which was mostly pink, though darkly so, Princess Equestria popped back into reality with a sort of disappointing Fwumph! instead of the regal Ka-Bamf! to which she was accustomed. She blamed the lack of lunar atmosphere, or perhaps a small mosquito biting a burro's butt somewhere back on Horsentria.
Phantasma Selene stood near the center of Crater Carter Crater, a small crater named after somepony named Carter Crater who liked putting things in boxes and hauling them around a little too much and who traveled to the moon by accidentally packing herself in a crate and mailing herself there. She unfortunately appeared a hundred kilometers above the surface, and thus became the creator of Crater Carter Crater, almost exactly posthumously.
"At last you've arrived," Phantasma purred, as the Friendship Chalice fragments swirled around her horn. "Shall we begin? All I ask is that we keep it down a bit; my husband is taking a nap."
With that, she swigged from a small bottle of moonshine and exhaled, igniting the temporary atmosphere with her horn to create a cone of flame, aimed right at Princess Equestria!
Equestria did a barrel roll and produced a round shining object—the space helmet she'd gotten at the spaceport but never used—and hurled it onto Phantasma's head just as she was about to exhale again! The flame filled the helmet and Phantasma hopped about and screamed for a minute with her head on fire like the Dread Dormaremu. She finally strained her hair and the helmet burst into dust, extinguishing the flame.
"Shall I ginger your other end too?" snarked Equestria.
"Foom! Foof! Fool! It will take more than that to defeat me! Take that! And more than that!" Phantasma launched more streams of fire, but Princess Equestria nimbly teleported away from each one.
"Hah!" sneered Phantasma. "All you can do is run away? The Friendship Chalice will be mine!"
Princess Equestria felt her belly rumbling. It was getting to be about time. She dodged one last fireblast, then stood her ground. Emitting a spark from her own horn, she released a mighty belch that became a vast unstoppable swath of consuming fire! Phantasma screamed as the flames enflaged her in the massive congulfration.
At last, the fire died away, and Phantasma lay in a smoking heap near the crater's edge, her head disjubate, her tail twitching in charred frizzlets, her skin covered in ash. She looked up shakily as Princess Equestria approached.
Phantasma spat out a frog and croaked, "Such force, such volume... I remember now! 'Cessy... Do you recall? The grain silo? All those centuries ago..."
"You... You're my little second cousin?" Princess Equestria shat herself. Remember above where I said she hadn't shat for a year and a half? It's Mount Carter Crater now.
"Yes, I am! Not so little now, and I got the fangs done on my six-hundred-and-twentieth birthday... 'Cessy, I was foolishly led astray by my envy of your power, your prominence in solar affairs, your prodigious stomach capacity. Can you ever forgive me?"
"Yes!" cried Princess Equestria, weeping huge ice cubes. The two cousins embraced and cried themselves together in an iceberg of reconciliation.
"You shall have every fragment of the Friendship Chalice back, and I will help you search for the rest... Wait, where did they go?" Phantasma sprang up in alarm. An umbrant shadow of ebon darkness was making off with the fragments!
The two Ponygods charged up over the rim. "I can't see it anymore!" cried Phantasma.
Princess Equestria took out her magic spinner; it spun out of her grasp and sailed off into the sky just like frisbees don't in a near-vacuum. "This way!" she neighed. The Traumatic Tuo took off. They ran over rille and plain, glancing at and ignoring the giant lunar cockroaches and glass worms, but stopping briefly at Crater Joe's, because, seriously, have you tried their dark chocolate almonds encrusted with sea salt and turbinado sugar? They're like buttcrack—er, mooncrack.
Considerably fatter and leaving a trail of moonpies, they hopped about aimlessly, chanting Sumerian brewery inventory lists until they met an ancient moonpony sitting in a little cave, with her feathery antennae drooping and dusty, her ear hairs woven into a shroud that hung to her fetlocks, her eyes white with cataracts and torrents. The coot cackled and hooted, raising their hackles.
"Ah, your Haynesses. I am Claire, the Loon. I sense two souls in search—"
"Fragments." Princess Equestria snarled somberly as her horn turned red.
Claire the Loon smiled toothlessly and emitted mystic fumes as she started to chant:
That which you seek is close at hand, it's true
Though much with danger fraught, and periled dreams
I'll sing you all the dangers you may rue
In sixteen sonnets, rhymed by clever—
Phantasma invested Claire with an infestation of Luna ticks.
"Hie thee to the Eastern sea," croaked the exsanguinated seer, covered with what resembled huge gray balloons, as a tick fell away and drifted to the ground with a gentle squelch.
And soon, at the shore of the Sea of the Orient, by the dock of a bay, a docked bay moonpony was seen loading a suspicious crate aboard a spaceship shaped rather like a horseshoe, named the Kumquat Fruitbat. A familiar Mysterious Figure (yeah, I know) paid the bay longshorepony, and his shortshore comrades, a few coins as he dismissed them. He then skulked sinisterly towards the cockpit...
The two Ponygods galloped up to the ship, flanks dripping with lathery sweat, snorting and puffing with intense rage, then took a minute to rub each other down before chasing after the dark-cloaked figure.
The dark-clad pegasus pony known as Nagbuzzard turned to face them. His face bore a pair of bruises in the shape of hoofprints, but he still looked on them with sardonic amusement.
"Ah, if it isn't old crater-face... And the mare who soiled the moon. Have you come to see me off?"
"Nagbuzzard," brayed Princess Equestria, "Hoof over the fragments now and I will hurt you slightly less than I'll hurt you if you don't."
Nagbuzzard shook his head in sorrow. "Ah, Princess, you failed to heed my warnings! If only you knew the real danger of the fragments—and the danger to us all! I'm only doing this for the good of Horsigovna..."
Phantasma launched a breath of flame at Nagbuzzard, who deflected it with an Equestrian/Zebronics dictionary. The metal-clad book flew off and decimated a colony of moon mice with an enormous clang.
Princess Equestria pinned Nagbuzzard down with her steely gaze as the magic spinner, which had sailed ahead, whirled back down into her horngrasp. It spun like a buzz-killing buzzsaw as Princess Equestria got all up into Nagbuzzard's ugly puss.
Meanwhile, Phantasma kicked open the rear hatch of the Kumquat Fruitbat and licked open the crate. Thousands of remaindered Terrestria Fillies DVDs poured out. "Brummagem!" she cried out in disgust.
"Never fear," whinnied Princess Equestria as she leaned closer, the magic spinner bare femtometers from Nagbuzzard's fear-flared nares. "He has them here!" She hoofed him hard in the stomach and Nagbuzzard sneezed in despair as the fragments he'd secreted were secreted from his nose. Princess Equestria instantly snorted them safely back into her nose, reclaiming the four stolen fragments of the Friendship Chalice!
"Then it's time to wrap things up!" clichéd Phantasma as she conjured thin sheets of aluminum and wrapidly rapped them around Nagbuzzard.
"Curses!" he shouted. "Foi—Oh, no. That low I won't sink. I'm outta here. You win this round, Princess Equestria... And thereby you doom us all!"
Struggling to escape, the ship was tantalizingly near, but also too far. But Nagbuzzard seized the dangling participle carelessly inserted by the author and pulled free, swinging by it into the cockpit of the ship! The engines ignited and sent exhaust and lunar dust spraying into the faces of the ireful Ponygods, disconcerting them both, and also a nearby orchestra which had been playing the fight music. Nagbuzzard flew safely off in the Kumquat Fruitbat, giving them the middle finger out the window which is really all a horse can give you.
Princess Equestria stared after him with a dour rage, her horn smouldering and her tail spinning in opposite directions.
Phantasma approached and gave her a sympathetic nuzzle. "Hey, at least you got the fragments back! How about you come back to my palace for a bit and we'll catch up on some old times..."
With a great flash of spooky puce magic, Princess Equestria banished Phantasma Selene all the way out to Pluto and deregistered Pluto from the list of real planets just to be safe.
"Pinky finger," she muttered. "What a load of whore's dapples."
NEXT CHAPTER: Princess Equestria returns to Horsgarth to continue her quest for the remaining fragments. Meanwhile, a greenish effluence evaporates in desuetude engendered by the congruent estivation of amnicolic smargebunsters. I bet you were following me and nodding your head right up until that last word, weren't you?