Pinkie led Spike back to the bakery and to her bedroom on the upper floor, stopping only to collect a plate of Mrs. Cake’s freshly baked cupcakes to enjoy as they wrote out the story.
“Wait, it was a real raincloud?” Spike asked as he set his load of writing materials down.
“Oh, yes! You should have seen it,” Pinkie giggled, setting the baked goods down on her table. “I’m sure Twilight would have found it funny too if she saw herself with it.”
Spike found a comfortable spot on the floor, sitting with his back against Pinkie’s bed, and proceeded to lay out the quills, ink, and paper in front of him. “I’m not so sure about that. You know how Twilight gets freaked out when the littlest thing is out of order.”
“Oh, she’s just a big worry-wart, that’s all,” Pinkie mumbled around a mouth full of cupcake as she began bouncing on her bed. “This story should cheer her right up.”
“What do you want to call the story?” Spike asked, dipping a quill into an inkpot.
“Oh, oh, I know! ‘Twilight’s Big Fun Happy Day’!”
Spike nodded and worked the quill onto the parchment, but shortly stopped. “Huh, that’s strange.”
“What is?”
Spike held up the parchment. “The paper, it seems to be a bit stiff. It’s harder to write on than the normal stuff Twilight orders. I’ll just have to press down more to write on it.” He put the parchment back on the floor and with more purpose, wrote out Pinkie’s title. “There, all set!”
“Great!” Pinkie beamed. “Here we go! ‘One day, Twilight Sparkle found herself in the land of sweets, where everything around her was a delicious, yummy goodie!’”
“Oh, Rarity, I must thank you for this,” Twilight said as the pair emerged from the spa. Twilight’s mane had been restored to its proper style, and like her tail and coat, gave off a glossy sheen in the sunlight. Her face had a newfound glow to it.
“But of course, Twilight dear. You mustn’t let your mane stay like that,” Rarity smiled, her own coat and mane glinting in the sunlight, fresh from pampering.
“I really should use the spa more often, but I just get caught up in my studies.”
Rarity placed a hoof around Twilight’s back. “Trust me, Twilight, nothing beats the stress of working on dresses like a good long mud bath.”
Twilight gasped in faux shock. “Me? Ever get stressed out? That’ll never happen!” She gestured with a hoof towards the cafe in town. “Let’s go grab some lunch, it’ll be my treat.”
“I’ll catch up with you, Twilight. Let me just check on something in the boutique and I will see you there.” Rarity started to trot away. “Oh, and order me a glass of that wonderful berry punch, if you could,” she said over her shoulder.
“Will do! See you soon,” Twilight said, watching Rarity leave. She turned towards the center of town, and took a deep breath. “Oh, I feel so much better. Let’s hope the rest of the day goes as smooth—”
There was a fundamental shift in the universe. At least, that’s how it felt to Twilight. Her eyesight was momentarily blinded by a flash of light and she struggled to regain her balance.
“Whoa, what was that?” Twilight asked, the world still coming into focus for her. Squinting hard, she could distinguish the blue of the sky and the browns and beiges of the buildings, but details were still lost. She called out behind her. “Rarity, did you feel that?”
She got back no response. “Rarity,” she shouted, looking around as vague shapes finally started to resolve in her vision.
Twilight blinked rapidly and shook her head, her eyesight shortly returning to normal. Her mouth suddenly went ajar.
Twilight looked around at the strange environment. “Strange” wasn’t exactly the right word—it still looked like Ponyville, after all, but all the buildings had unnatural, skewed angles, and perhaps were colored in much brighter tones than Twilight recalled. Details on buildings were haphazard. Some aspects like flowerboxes, doorways and windows were in sharp, crisp detail, Other parts like signs and roofs were fuzzy and blurred, her mind wanting to force her eyes to look away. Twilight had to momentary close her eyes and steady herself on the ground to avoid becoming nauseated.
As she looked for a fixed point of reference, she sniffed the air. “Is that—” She padded closer to a nearby building, what she knew was one of the local homes, whiffing at the air all the way. Cautiously she stuck out a hoof against the side of the building and then pulled it away. The bottom of her hoof was covered with a gritty substance pulled off from the wall. She took a deep whiff of the material, and then experimentally licked at it. “Gingerbread?”
Twilight took a few more minutes, closely investigating the other buildings, but came to the same conclusion. They were all made of sweet foodstuffs, not only gingerbread, but pastries, cake, and candy. “Pinkie...” she uttered to nopony in particular.
Her voice echoed between the empty buildings, and quickly realized that nopony else seemed to be around. A few bird calls could be heard in the distance, but otherwise the entire town was silent “Hello? Anypony hear me?”
She walked gingerly around the edible version of Ponyville, its layout otherwise the same as she knew it but in a very strange and creepy manner. She thought she was being watched, and caught glimpses of movement disappearing into doorways and alleys, but when she investigated them, nothing was there.
She carefully chose a few of the buildings each, such as the giant piece of lemon mengenie pie that stood where Rarity’s boutique was, and the town hall constructed out of several muffins stacked on top of each other. Just like their exteriors, the interior details were precise in some places, and blurred out elsewhere. But there was absolutely no signs of life other than herself. Even the flowers, she discovered, were candy-like in nature, and the grass she walked on was made of some marshmallow-like material.
She fell down to her haunches, and talked to herself “Ooookay, Twilight, you’ve been in stranger places before. Let’s think about what could have happened. You were just at the spa with Rarity, there was a flash of light, and now you found yourself here. In a land that, judging by the fact everything’s made of sweets, is straight out of the mind of Pinkie Pie.” She rubbed the sides of her head with her forehooves. “Uggh, this is the last thing I needed today.”
Twilight took a moment to calm down. “Okay, so if this is something out of Pinkie’s thoughts, that should mean—” She glanced over to Sugarcube Corner. Unlike any of the other buildings around it, the bakery was picture-perfect the way Twilight recalled it. “Everything she’d know well is in exacting detail, but then other aspects are just vague—oh no!”
She jumped up in horror at the thought, and quickly got her bearings. She galloped through the empty streets to the library. It was still there, but like other buildings, much of it was an indistinct blur save for the front door and its various windows and balconies. Twilight dared not taste what Pinkie might have thought the library tree might be made of.
Twilight nervously pushed the library door open, one eye closed as she peered inside. It still looked like the library she knew, though again with the same odd angles and areas of visual fuzziness. She trotted over to one of the shelves and magicked one of her spell books at random. The book’s cover seemed normal, its title, Flying Magic for Beginners, read clear as day. She bit her lip, and hesitantly directed the book open to a random page .
It was complete nonsense.
She used her magic to flip through the book, but the only thing it was filled with was garbled phrases like “gak”, “aeiou” and “johnmadden” and other terms she couldn’t decipher. She tried several other books but all were the same way; the covers were as she would expect, but their pages were filled with blurred images, nonsensical symbols, or incomprehensible words.
“Well, these will be a great help.” She frowned, letting the latest useless book drop onto the pile with the others.
A heavy thump reverberated through the library, knocking several books from the shelves. Twilight heard a few vases from upstairs shatter as they hit the floor. “What now?!” she asked aloud, covering her head with her hooves. As the clammer in the library dwindled, she could hear screams coming from outside.
After making sure nothing else was going to fall on her, Twilight carefully made her way to the door and peered out, looking for the source of the noise. She finally saw the first living beings since arriving “here”, wherever that may have been, but the sight scared her even more. Dozens of creatures that bore too close a resemblance to candy, cake, and other desserts, ran en masse away from the center of town. The creatures weren’t very large, the largest maybe coming up to Twilight’s chin, and the smallest were nearly half that. They had impossibly thin and tiny legs and arms, and eerily simple faces. She recalled how unnerved she felt by those preview interstitials at the movie theater, but there, they were just animated characters projected onto a screen. In real life, their appearance frightened Twilight to her core.
Twilight jumped back into the library, out of sight of the creatures, panting heavily. “Okay, Twilight, this is just another part of Pinkie’s imagination, they probably can’t hurt you, right?” she told herself. After taking a few more deep breaths, she peeked out again, getting over the sight of the creatures. There sure were an awful lot of them, continuing to pour out of the town center. “Huh, I wonder what they’re running from,” she commented. “There’s certainly not enough of them to cause that earthqu—”
Another loud ground-shaking thump answered her question. As Twilight watched the candy-like creatures pick up their pace in fleeing the town, she caught sight of a giant leg crashing down on top of one the gingerbread homes in town, launching debris from the impact. In her panic, she first thought it was a dragon, but the leg was far too broad compared to the sleekness she had seen of other dragons. And the fact it was pink...
She gawked as she peered upward from the safety of the library doorframe. The leg continued up onto a beast that was at least twice as high as the town hall. It’s body was just as broad as the town hall, too. Even at this distance, Twilight could see it was covered with scales, along with a ridge of darker scales that ran along its back to it’s thick, long tail that was helping to support its weight as it stood upright. A small part of Twilight’s mind compared the creature to those lizards near Dodge, but this was bipedal and much, much larger than any that she saw. The rest of Twilight’s mind was aghast at the familiar bunching of pink curls atop the creature.
“Run, it’s Pinkzilla!” one of the candy creatures screamed out at Twilight as they raced by. A panicked scream washed through the rushing crowd, spurring them into a faster pace.
Pinkzilla let off a roar that shattered the rock-candy windows in town. Twilight could hear more objects falling behind her in the library but couldn’t care less about them right now—she was more worried how much that roar sounded like the word “lunch”.
She watched as the giant creature reached down with its short arms to one of the buildings it had just stepped on, grabbed a giant clawful of broken gingerbread, and stuffed it in its mouth. It ate the pieces, giant crumbs spewing everywhere, with a pleased look on its face. Twilight was sure it could hear the beast let off a sigh of happiness as it downed the sweet material. It returned to get another serving for itself.
Twilight had seen enough, and dashed out of the library, joining with the last remnants of the candy creatures as they fled town. She fell into pace with a giant animated muffin, jogging as fast as it’s comically-short legs could while taking frightened looks at the creature behind it.
“What’s going on? What’s happening?” Twilight blurted out as she caught her breath.
“It’s Pinkzilla!” the being responded in a somewhat high-pitched voice. “It’s lunchtime, and it’s hungry!”
“But where did you all come from? Where did it come from?!”
The muffin took a moment to look at her before it continued to barrel forward. “We saw you walking around town, and wanted to warn you, but Pinkzilla was due to arrive any moment!”
Twilight balked. “You mean, this happens regularly?”
“Every day about noon,” the muffin wheezed out between breaths. “Now, if you’d excuse me, we need to get out of town and fast!” It surged ahead, losing itself in the crowd.
By now, Twilight and the mass of candy beings had crossed the bridge leading out of town; she barely took notice of the chocolate-looking river it spanned. Most of the candy beings dispersed into the trees and other hiding places from there. Panting heavily, Twilight ducked behind a rock to catch a few breaths and try to piece together the last few minutes. She noticed that the ground thumping had stopped, and peered around the corner of the rock.
Smack in the middle of town, Pinkzilla had fallen to its haunches and was stuffing claw after claw of ruined buildings into her mouth, crumbs spraying everywhere. It was clearly content, its eyes closed and grinning madly as it dined on the town. Its tail lazily swayed back and forth, knocking even more buildings into ruin. Now that she had a moment to look at the creature, Twilight thought she saw the faint traces of the balloons of Pinkie’s cutie mark marked on the scales of near its legs.
Twilight shook her head. “Of course Pinkie Pie would imagine herself like that,” she uttered aloud. “A giant, sweets-devouring creature.” She sighed, and started to pace behind the rock, muttering to herself. “So somehow I’ve been transported to a world shaped by Pinkie’s imagination. I know Princess Luna can enter dreams, but I don’t know anypony but her that has that ability, and this doesn’t feel like a dream.” She poked at her barrel to assure she wasn’t sleeping.
Twilight ignored the muted thumps that shook the ground and the roars of content from the distance. “Hmm, I remember a book of spells about creating lands to explore from one’s thoughts, but that required a lot of magical components. That’s certainly not it, but wasn’t there a unicorn with that ability?” She let out a small grunt of annoyance. “Ugh, if I could only get to my books, I’d know exactly how to get out of this crazy Pinkie dream!”
She stopped, realizing that the world had gone deathly quiet, except for a deep, recurring sound like a rush of wind. Something tingled her mind, like somepony was close by.
“Ummm,” she whispered, looking up at a giant blue-irised eye staring down at her over the rock.
Pinkzilla tilted its head and roared. Somewhere in the back of Twilight’s mind, a tiny voice noted how much the roar sounded like a question, asking “Licorice?”.
“AAAGHH!” Twilight galloped off, trying to lose the creature in the forest.
She heard wood splinter behind her, the faint screams of the candy creatures as they fled their hiding places, and the caws of birds as they scattered into the sky, but she didn’t turn to look. The ground shook behind her hooves as she knew her predator was right on her tail.
The forest thinned out, revealing a large crack in the ground. Twilight immediately recognized it as Ghastly Gorge. Her mind yelled out that there’s no physical way it should have been this close to Ponyville, but Twilight ignored the voice—there would be places to hide down there, that’s all that mattered right now. She stopped at the edge of the gorge to orient herself, then teleported herself to the gorge floor and started wildly looking around for shelter. Near to where she appeared, there was a set of worn boulders, loose debris from the rock wall, which formed a small natural cubbyhole, almost perfectly pony-sized. Twilight squeezed into the space without question. From the shadow of the rocks around her, Twilight took a careful peak up towards the top of gorge.
Pinkzilla had followed her to the crack, but it looked befuddled, scratching its head while swinging it back and forth trying to find its prey. It bent down and tried to push its short arm into the gorge, but the girth of its body would not let it get more than halfway to the gorge’s floor, its claw wildly grasping at empty air. After a few moments, the creature pulled up and started to walk along the edge of the gorge, peering into the crack and sniffing the air. Twilight ducked back under her impromptu cover as Pinkzilla passed near her. Each step the giant took caused a small rain of pebbled to fall onto the rock shelter, and Twilight began to question how safe this shelter really was.
“Oh, Celestia,” Twilight whispered, waiting for the right time to make her break. “Somepony help me!”