//------------------------------// // Pickle Juice and Quail Eggs // Story: To Serve Bronies // by Fuzzy Necromancer //------------------------------// "Aaaah!" Pinkie Pie screamed as she plunged through the open window, just missing the cooling mock apple pie by a hair's breadth. She'd never understood the point of mock apple pie, since it didn't offer any nasty jabs or insightful meta-fruit satire. She didn't quite notice the loud bonk. Reiko hissed, took a deep breath, and looked out the window. "Are we being pursued by ravenous unicorns? Zombies? The Westboro Baptist Church?" Pinkie didn't know what a Westboro Baptist Church was, but she felt a brief tremor of urgency. She felt like playing a rimshot or winking at the camera. "Oh, sorry. I just saw Captain Bell, and that reminded me of her little sister Blue Bell, and that reminded me of the story Crimson Quill told during Blue Bell's sleepover," Pinkie Pie said. She shivered, because even though it was just a story, the bakery was a good long run from fresh running water. A pony could run out of breath panting and screaming before she reached minnow creek. "I don't even have any seaweed to burn." The human giggled and rubbed the lump on her head. “You really are random.” “Me? Random?” Pinkie Pie laughed. “At least I have skin all over me, and you won’t find half a Cyclops growing out of my back.” Reiko the human stared at her as if she’d said something crazy. She cleared her throat, but the little stage-cough turned into a real cough. Soon she was hacking and wheezing on the floor. “I’ll get a pickle jar!” Pinkie Pie shouted over her shoulder. The human might have said “how will that help?” Since Spike said he’d been standing out there all night, that must mean the human had spent all night up in the dry, dusty attic. If Pinkie had done that, she’d feel pretty thirsty, and a creature with more insulating flesh, no layer of light fur to keep the sun off, and only two legs to balance on would sweat much more than her. On top of severe dehydration, as she remembered from Rainbow Dash’s racing tips, somepony sweating lost a lot of electrolytes. Pinkie Pie pounded past Mr. and Mrs. Cake’s bedroom, hovered over the floor next to the nursery for Pound and Pumkin, then dove into the root cellar. She paused to laugh at the spot where, six weeks and three days ago, Rainbow Dash had pulled off an elaborate prank involving a snorkel, a few worms, and a bunch of rotten food. At the time she’d thought an evil revenant from Tartarus wanted to gobble up her soul, but in hindsight it seemed pretty funny. Pinkie Pie grabbed the biggest jar of pickles she could find, slotted it into her rootbeer-powered hoofless can-and-jar opener, and crammed every worty preserved vegetable into her mouth. She swallowed them without chewing as she dashed upstairs. As an afterthought, she grabbed a few sugar cubes from her emergency stash inside the hollow part of the second-floor banister. “Here, this will taste really icky and sour but you need to drink it all down slowly, otherwise you might get sick, but I Pinkie-Promise you can have something sweet when you’re done,” Pinkie explained in one breath. The human sucked it down obediently. She didn’t even make a face until Pinkie popped the sugar cube into her mouth. Pinkie Pie gasped. Attics didn’t have strawberry milk, or cupcakes, or hay fries with cinnamon sugar sprinkles! “Would you like some rainbow-frosted cupcakes or a puffy artichoke omelette or –mph!” Reiko, like many people she had known, shoved a hand over Pinkie Pie’s mouth. “No! I mean, no thank you. I’m not in a mood for c-c-cupcakes r-right now.” She looked at the roughly stitched wounds and fresh scabs on her body. Pinkie Pie suddenly realized she must want to scream and pain. The left corner of her mouth kept twitching. “Maybe an omelette later. I’m r-really just tired.” “Oh no, what happened to you? Are you allergic to garlic? Do you want me to fetch nurse blueheart?” Pinkie Pie squealed. What if she passed out from agony right now? What if she got dizzy and confused from the pain and tried break down the statue of Proudhoof with her forehead? Did Reiko get that bump when she was riding Pinkie Pie? “No, no nurses! I just need some rest, and maybe a little ice,” Reiko said. “Okey-dokey Loki,” Pinkie Pie said, reluctantly. She headed downstairs and came back with some stuff from the ice-box, and some rock salt and cream just in case Reiko changed her mind about desert. When she came back upstairs, Reiko had slumped down on the carpet, curled into a half-ball with a sheet of odd white paper with perfect lettering on it in one hand. Her other hand clutched a keychain that looked like Rainbow Dash. It started with the word “Cupcakes”. Pinkie Pie eased it out of Reiko’s hand and started to read. # Twilight Sparkle couldn't believe her eyes. The clothes were very different from the illustrations, and the hair was a bit shorter, but it had all the classic features. Those small eyes, the stocky hind legs, malformed back, nearly-hairless skin, and delicate blunted claws were unmistakable. Twilight Sparkle widened her nostrils. She wanted to measure every organ in its body. She intended to boil it, distill it, and run it through a thaumic filter to figure out exactly how it managed to become so impossibly delicious. It must just be the carnivore hormones pulsing into her, combined with olfactory senses heightened by short-term protein deprivation, but she thought she could actually taste a hint of the human in the air. Underneath the scientific curiousity, but closer to the surface than she would admit, Twilight felt a thrill of child-like wonder. This was how she’d felt the first time she’d seen what magic could really do. A bit of it had coursed through her spine, under the slow dread, when she realized that the Mare in the Moon was more than an old pony’s tale. Her hooves trembled with the shock of fantasy come true. How many times had she played Human Hunters with Shining Armor (the role of the human played by a long-suffering parent) until bedtime? How many stories of adventure, romance, and discovery had a two-legged deer as the catalyst that lured the heroine into the first step of her journey? Underneath all of that, way deep down, the wild-born omnivore howled with delight. The heritage of long-gone ancestors that gored open mad bulls on sun-scorched plains and tossed the still-twitching hearts of brown bears to their hungry children bubbled up inside her. She dismissed it as irrelevant. The two-legged animal was talking to her, with lots of pauses and “um”s. Twilight Sparkle wiped away the saliva. “-wants to grow up to be just like you. “ Twilight cocked her head. This wasn’t right. Bipedicus diabolicus should come at her with a torch and sharpened flint, or run towards the nearest cave. It shouldn’t shuffle its feet, blush, and talk about her being a role model. Applejack stepped in. “The important thing, as Jamal was workin his way round ta sayin, is that he’s stuck here in Equestria instead of bein’ back at home with his filly, I mean, daughter. Seein’ as you can wink in and wink out all over the place, and his turf is farther than a day’s flight or train ride, we need you to fix up some spells to send him back where he belongs.” Twilight Sparkle pushed down visions of a slow-roasted, cider-marinated human, stuffed with honeyed oats and dressed in a thin layer of quail egg hollandaise sauce. Applejack had just requested a friendly flavor-er, favor. She could at least pursue the question, and sharpen her teeth on the weighty magical dilemma instead of stewing over tantalizing images of savory, tender, rare and bloody aquatic ape flesh. “Recon your up to the task, Twi?” Applejack’s voice wavered. She seemed concerned, but tried to hide her unease. “I’m thinking,” Twilight said. She held up a hoof and grabbed a stick of celery. Chief Silver Dagger the Third had stopped a civil war with a public buffet of two-legged deer veal garnished by onion-and-celery seed sauce. She crunched harder. “How far away is New Jersey?” she said. Winking out had a limited range, even under ideal condition, and carrying a passenger taller than a grown pony wouldn’t be ideal. She could try making the trip in a series of winks, but the sub-thaumic currents that winking out depended on where unpredictable in the extreme and could cut out when it was least convenient, like when somepony found a hydra snapping at her heels. In fact, they often did dry up just when a pony needed them most, because of Starswirl’s Inverse Law and the Murphy Variable. After some hesitation and exchanged shrugs, the two-legged deer said “I uh, don’t really know for sure. I think it’s another planet, maybe even another galaxy or dimension?” It scratched its head. Twilight quelled an impulse to bite the silly creature’s head off. “You can’t be from a dimension any more than you can take a vacation to thickness. I think you mean ‘cosmos’, ‘universe’, or ‘self-contained fourth-dimensional iteration’.” “Yeah, that one,” Applejack said, deadpan. “But, can you get him back there?” She ran through her mental checklist of works on potential worlds. In theory, if you wrote a story well enough, and the right kind of story, it had a hyperbolically small chance of accurately describing another realm of existence, even without any sort of interaction between them. It was a bit like somepony who had spent their entire life in a cave throwing hydrogen atoms in the same general area really, really hard until they struck off the precise chain of fission to accrete into a live polar bear. She’d always wanted to try parboiled live human stuffed with bear brains and seasoned with shamrock sauce. Clover the Clever had mastered a spell to summon a single mote of smoke from an alien cosmos to complete her apprenticeship to Starswirl the Bearded. The windows rattled. A few books fell off the shelves. A jagged cramp reminded Twilight Sparkle how hungry she felt. She’d only had a dozen softboiled eggs for breakfast, after all. “I think I’ll concentrate better on a full stomach. Why don’t I just grab something to eat, and then I can resolve that little spellcasting problem of yours, okay Applejack?” “Sure thing sugarcube,” Applejack said. She raised a hoof. The two-legged deer bumped his fist against it. “Take care, Jamal.” “It’s been a pleasure working with you,” it replied with a thin, choked-up voice. It rubbed a claw across its eyes. Twilight Sparkle caught another whiff of its musk and thought of the sugar-glazed human hock recipe on page 372 of Four-Hundred and Forty-Four Time-Consuming, Hard-to-Prepare Meals.