Moonshine Gravy
A Sequel to Ponky’s Overappreciated “Wrong Equestria”

Part IV
These Creatures Are Horrifying!

“Not at all!” I announced cheerily, suddenly thinking about Cheerilee and how it was really sad that I was probably never gonna meet Cheerilee. “I’m just shootin’ in the dark here, but it’s better than floating on a rock ready to die!”

Even Pinkie Pie was wincing at my nigh maniacal smile. That was both exhilarating and humiliating for me, but I chose to ignore both emotions, focusing on the task at hand.

“Termination is not an option,” Sweetie promised, gearing up for takeoff.

“Spike, think about a kitchen,” I said, shaking the emaciated dragon by his shoulders.

I turned to Sweetie Belle. “I don’t know if this actually works in this dimension; you might end up in a kitchen, or you might end up wherever Celestia’s body is. In that case, the whole plan is screwed, so you might as well just give up. Well, you’ll be drowning in Smooze, so it’s not like you’ll have a choice. BUT, if you’re in a kitchen, have Spike send us something—anything—so that we know it’s working.”

“Instructions logged,” Sweetie said. “Commence Mission: Phoenix Fire.”

“Oh, dang, that’s cool!” I complimented, grabbing Spike’s throat in my left hand. I lifted his other end with my right, holding the drake horizontally, and tugged as hard as I could on his bony tail. His eyes bugged and derped even more as a narrow stream of green flame exploded from his jaws. The transporting fire engulfed Sweetie Belle and I tossed Spike onto her tiny back. With a flash and a pop, the pair vanished, leaving me with Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, Pinkie Pie, and Rainbow Dash. Everyone else was dead.

We sat in morbid silence for a long time, waiting for proof of Sweetie Bot’s success. There was plenty of lip-biting and pawing-at-the-rock, both of which were suuuper cute, but I was in no mood to appreciate cuteness. I sat in the center of the rock, arms wrapped around my legs, face twisted into what was likely a terrifying blend of a mad smile and a nervous grimace. I didn’t have a mirror, so I can’t quite explain it.

Luckily for errpony, FLASH! A ball of green flame appeared above our heads and a mixing bowl dropped onto the rock! We were all like “YAY!” and shoved the thing at Pinkie, eagerly waiting the next ingredient.

It’s a good thing I was paying attention, because the next ingredient was an oven, and it materialized directly above my head. I yelped and rolled closer to Pinkie, letting it land with a metallic, empty thump in the dead center of our floating rock.

“Rad!” I yelled, opening the oven door and checking all of its important ovenly parts. I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to power it—it seemed to be run by magic, and all of our unicorns were bye-bye—but then again, we had Pinkie Pie, so I didn’t worry too much.

One after another, ingredients were delivered to our doomed rock of sanctuary by means of emerald fire, which, in hindsight, was pretty freaking cool. At the time it was way too nerve-wracking to be anything but anxietal, but it really was a pretty good idea on my part. G’job, Ponky.

Pinkie named the ingredients as they appeared. “Flour! Eggs! Cinnamon! Provolone! Seapony tears!” With each exciting addition to her collection, her smile of confidence grew exponentially until it reached her ears. “Aaaaand… there it is! The eye of a newt! Oh, I was worried they wouldn’t have any in whatever kitchen they went to…”

“Is that it?” I asked as Pinkie tossed a dash of this and that into the mixing bowl and kneaded it with her hooves. “Is that all the ingredients?”

“According to the knowledge I’ve accrued!” she said with a happy nod. “There! Now all we have to do is bake it, eat it, and the portal should appear nearby!”

“How are we gonna do that?” Apple Bloom asked, poking the back end of the oven that appeared as if it had been forcefully ripped from a wall. “The oven don’t work!”

“PINKIE!” I yelled, reaching out to catch some of the stuff. Too late. It was all gobbled up by the purple death below.

I loomed over Second Best Pony and seethed at her as best I could. “Whyyyyy did you do that!?”

“The batter just needs to be baked and eaten for the portal to appear!” Pinkie said, still grinning. “It doesn’t matter who eats it. Anyone can go through the portal!”

Our heads turned in her hoof-point’s direction where a pink oval was burning itself into the fabric of space and time.

“Oh, fetch yes!” I screamed, pulling Pinkie into a hug and planting a big kiss on her cheek. “You’ve done it, Pinkmerelda! We’re saved!”

“Quick, kids, hop on!” Rainbow said, always one awesome step ahead of the game. Scootaloo and Apple Bloom awkwardly climbed onto her back behind her wings, holding on for dear life. The Element of [LOYALTY] turned to me and Pinkie Pie with a worried expression. “You guys gonna be okay?”

“Even if we’re not,” I said, wiggling my hands at the portal, “that should lead to the past. As long as you stop the Smoozenami from happening, the rest of us are gonna be just fine.”

“Looks like we’re floating straight for it, though!” Pinkie added. “Get those kids safe. We’ll be right behind you!”

Rainbow saluted and took off, the two fillies clutching her middle as tight as they could.

I sighed with relief, dropping to my knees and bro-hoofing Pinkie Pie (which, again, in hindsight, was way more awesome than I treated it at the moment). And, true to her prediction, our rock steadily moved toward the same ebbing portal of mystery and intrigue.

She giggled, though I wondered if she had any idea what I was talking about. “See ya on the other side!” she said, and she jumped.

I was not a pony, so I had to wait a little longer before I could confidently traverse the gap between the rock and the pink void with my measly human leg muscles. As I waited far from patiently for my platform to drift nearer, I realized I was all alone on a blood-soaked slab of stone in the middle of an endless sea of digesting gunk, and that was pretty scary. Shaking my head clear, I prepped for the jump, squatting next to the unused oven to get a bit of a running start.

Just as I started to move forward, another green flash of light appeared, followed by a dragon in my face.

“Gaaaahh!” I yelled, stumbling from the impact and landing hard on my back. Luckily we were still on the rock. I peeled him from my head and shouted, “Spike! What the heck are you doing?”

“Sweetie Belle… sent me back…” he said, “to tell you… she sent… the wrong… cheese!”

My eyes widened. I tossed the ugly little scaly thing to the side and looked at the portal. To my horror, it was flashing between pink and a really gross shade of bubbly blue. Covering my mouth with both hands, I let loose a muffled scream as the portal flickered, collapsed, and even kind of exploded. Infuriated and miserable, I bashed my head against the side of the oven six or seven times.

“Ah, horseapples! Smelly, rotten horseapples from the frozen pits of Tartarus!” I moaned, scraping my fingernails over the rock. “Where did they go? What happened to them? How am I gonna get home?? How are we gonna stop this!?!??”

I was too confused and exhausted to cry, but that didn’t stop me from choking and sobbing like a wimpy little babby. Pulling myself together (ha, yeah right), I grabbed Spike by the topmost… uh… spike, and lifted him up to my face.

“Now what do we do, huh?” I yelled, targeting him as an outlet to my fear. “How the fetch am I gonna get home? How are we gonna save all the ponies who are dead under this crap?”

“Grraaaaarguh!” I stood and wound up to hurl Spike into the ocean of Smooze, but decided that was a bad idea and dropped him behind me instead. He curled up against the back of the oven and whimpered while I paced and stomped and yelled a lot.

It must have been about twenty minutes later that I pushed the oven into the Smooze. I don’t really know why, it just felt good to destroy stuff and I envied that Spike had a little place to hide from the sorrow while I didn’t. So we just sat cross-legged in the middle of the rock and stared at the sunless sky and the melting mountains on the horizon. He tried to talk to me a few times.

I sat there, slumped and silent, for… oh, heck, I have no idea. A long frickin’ time. I bet my expression was actually pretty comical. My lips were curved into a huge frown, which felt appropriate at the time, and my eyebrows had taken over my upper eyelids’ territory. It sort of hurt to hold it for that long, but what the heck else was I going to do?

The quietness was less creepy than just awkward, because there was literally nothing to do, and almost no sound to accompany it. The occasional slosh of a distant Smooze wave was the only sound other than Spike’s horrendous breathing the occasional scratch of infected scales. Goll, he was annoying. I could finally see why they all hated him.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where there was literally nothing to do. I mean, lit-er-a-lly. Sure, we’ve all had moments when we’re just sitting around bored and say, “Nyeeeeuuugh, there’s nothing to doooo!” and we watch YouTube or play vidya games (not me, I’m just giving examples) or eat a bunch of food we don’t need (again, not me) or go on a nice long walk and think about life.

But guess what? All of those things happen. We do them. So there really was something to do, after all.

Sitting on that rock next to stupid skinny Spike, there was LITERALLY nothing to do. I mean, I guess I could have jumped into the Smooze or counted stars, but for all intents and purposes I was stuck. There was no point in standing up, because there was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing to do.

It was a bizarre experience, lemme tell ya. As my mind wrapped around the reality of my situation, my reaction was probably the weirdest part: I just sat there.

I’m a pretty tense guy. I tend to freak out when really bad (or really good) things happen. It’s not unusual for me to actually “bounce off the walls”. Sitting there, though, I realized how useless it would be to yell or jump around or pull at my hair or whatever else I usually do, because… it wouldn’t solve anything. Not that freaking out solves anything, anyway, but freaking out burns off a ton of excess energy and leaves me with just the right amount to think through a situation and come up with a solution. That didn’t matter on the rock. Even if I was in the most stable, thoughtful frame of mind ever, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was screwed.

What was gonna happen? Would I just starve out there? Was the rest of my life condemned to sitting on a rock with a whiny little dragon and staring at eternal twilight over a sloppy ocean?

Yeah, pretty much. And that sucked. So… I just sat there. That was probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to not thinking about anything. My mind sort of slipped away and left my eyes to scan the dim new world unblinkingly. And nothing happened. Because there was nothing to do.

“Daaaaaisy, Daaaaaisy… give me your answer, dooooo…” I sang, lulling my head back and forth.

I sighed, uncrossing my legs and stretching them out in front of me. I tried to touch my toes, which is usually pretty easy for me, but my skinny jeans were restrictive.

“It won’t be a styyyyylish marriage,” I kept singing, “I caaaaan’t affoooord a carriaaaage…”

Tears. Tears and tears and tears and tears. So many tears. I haven’t cried that hard since my frickin’ parents divorced.

I know, it’s sad! I’m sorry! But… it sucked, okay? It was just so weird and… I dunno, it was this remarkable thing that could have—and really should have—been wonderful and exciting and adventurous and adorable, and all of the sudden the only things left in my world was a disgusting, starving lizard thing, a big rock covered in sacrificial blood, and an enormous mass of smelly, sentient sludge! And it was cold, and it was boring, and it was irreparable, and… and I just cried.

I’m an emotional guy. I get warm fuzzies in my chest and tear up pretty often. But I don’t frickin’ cry. Like, ever. I can count the number of times I’ve bawled (after the age of five) on one hand: my grandpa’s death, my parents’ split, the last fifteen minutes of Titanic, and the end of Background Pony. And, now, sitting on that stupid rock.

“We’re gonna die…” Spike squeaked, covering his own watering eyes. “We’re just going to float out here until we die…”

And then the best Deus ex Machina ever appeared in the sky with the crash of righteous lightning.

“HOOOly GAK!” I screamed, shielding my eyes from her glory and scrambling to the edge of the rock. “Princess Celestia!?”

“Ponky,” she said. I probably would have exploded if it was actually Celestia’s voice that spoke my name, but since it was the Friendship is Witchcraft version of Celestia, I managed to keep it together. Kind of. I started laughing like a maniac, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, flapping those enormous, swan-like wings until she landed in front of me on the rock.

I blinked at her before I could speak, grinning as widely as is physically possibly. “No! No, I’m fine! I can’t believe you’re here!” I quickly glanced at the sky, noticing the distinct lack of a Sun, and swiveled to my knees. “How are you here?”

“Your efforts were successful,” she said. Sherclop Pones did a good job, because even though she spoke with the voice of a man, she still sounded regal and awesome. “The crew you sent through time to prevent this destruction of our world fulfilled their task. Equestria is safe.”

“What? No it’s not!” I gestured at the purple flurp still eating her entire country.

“It may be difficult to understand,” she said, leaning her majestic muzzle closer to my trembling face, “but this is a Tangent Universe from Equestria Prime.”

I winced and shook my hand. “Weeeelll, not exactly Equestria Prime, but I see what you’re saying. Your universe is safe in a parallel, and I’m stuck here in the disaster zone where bad things still happened.”

Actually, as I struggled to my feet, I realized she wasn’t much taller than me, and I’m not tall by any means. Her horn added significantly to her prowess, and her wings were just rad as rad can be. Plus that MANE! That amazing, mystical, magical mane of many colors, sparkling with the energy to lift the freaking Sun! Aw, man, she’s so cool.

“Indeed. The Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Apple Bloom, and Scootaloo of this Tangent Universe stopped the Cult of Smooze, defeated a tentacle monster, and contacted me to inform me of their origins. I have come to send you home.”

“Oh, that’s fantastic!” I said, clapping with delight. “Kinda predictable and anticlimactic, but super good nonetheless!” I gasped. “But… what’s gonna happen now? Are there two Rainbow Dashes and Apple Blooms and stuff?”

“There are,” the Princess nodded, “but I do not foresee that as a problem. They shall come and live with me, knowing they saved an entire world.”

I bit my lip. “Yeah, but everyone they knew is still dead. Won’t that be super, like… psychologically taxing?”

“I assure you, I will do everything in my power to assure their comfort in Universe Prime.”

“Never mind.” I chuckled. “This is all great news, but… I’m ready to go home, if it’s that simple.”

“Indeed it is,” the princess said. She turned to Spike, half-dead from shock and starvation, and lifted him in her magic. “I’ll just use the last of his flames to send you home.”

“You can just stay here,” the princess said with a smile. “You’d have no place in our Universe. If you’d like, I can toss you into the Smooze when we’re done for a quicker death.”

“Thank you for saving my world,” she replied, and squeezed Spike so hard in her golden magical cloud that his protruding ribs snapped. A web of green fire surrounded me briefly and I started to panic. Was I actually going home? Spike couldn’t possibly have been thinking about my room… where would I end up? How would I get back?

Somehow, when I opened my eyes, I was back in my room. At that point it occurred to me that maybe my thoughts had something to do with where the fire transported me. Whatever. I didn’t really care. I was home!!!

“Yeeeee-haw!” I cried out in honor of the Smooze-digested-FiWorld-Tangent Applejack. I leapt on my bed and grabbed my pillow, hugging it as tightly as I had Pinkie Pie. I opened my laptop and giggled with glee just by looking at the potentially time-wasting Google Chrome shortcut. I ran my hands through the shirts hanging in my closet, relishing in their existence and diversity and lack of urine.

There was so much to do, even if none of it mattered! I wasn’t doomed to thirst to death, or sit around thinking about nothing and singing the mournful song of a debatably villainous computer! I was home, I was brave, I was free! America!!

And best of all, I realized as my eyes focused on a curvy glass tube lying dormant on my bedspread…

Wrong Equestria 2: Moonshine Gravy

by Ponky

These Creatures Are Horrifying