Chapter 13: The Great Ice Cream Incident (Part II)
So, as we carried our large amounts of groceries back to the house, Spitfire kept talking about all of the wonderful combinations you could make with ice cream. Having never had more than vanilla, I couldn’t very well understand or imagine most of what she was talking about, so I just nodded along. It was much like listening to somepony explain hoofball to me. Again.
Once we got to the house and put everything away, I’d assumed that we’d merely wait until after dinner and have a small to-do about it, making some of these rather interesting-sounding concoctions for dessert.
Spitfire wasn’t having any of that. I’d only gotten halfway to the freezer with the first carton of ice cream when she almost yelled at me, “What do you think you’re doing?!”
I stopped, taken aback. “I was... I was going to put the ice cream away? We don’t want it to melt before dinner, do we?”
She looked at me like a crazy pony. ME! A crazy pony! ...shut up. Anyway, I put the carton back on the counter, and watched as she arranged all of the ice cream in neat rows with the toppings and utensils and other assorted paraphernalia surrounding it.
Then she made it snow.
She’s somehow smuggled a cloud into her house, which, given that the house was made of clouds on the outside, didn’t surprise me that much. What did surprise me was watching her pound on it vigorously until snow came out, covering the counter. “What?” she asked, looking at me like she was doing nothing out of the ordinary like precipitating all over the counter, “We don’t want it to get warm, do we?”
“That’s what a freezer is for!” I yelled, exasperated. I could tell I wasn’t going to win this one, so I merely trotted over to stand beside her while she worked, waiting for her to finish her elaborate setup.
Once she was done, she gestured grandly to the display. It was rather nice and tidy, I’ll give her that. Even with the snow. “I give you, the ice cream bar! Well, more like a buffet. Ice cream bars are actually a specific dessert,” she elaborated. I could tell I was going to get lost rather quickly. “I’ll start you out with something simple. We’ve got a lot of ice cream to try, and I don’t want you getting full, so here’s a bowl and spoon for sampling.” She handed me what looked like a toy plastic spoon and what I’m pretty sure was a small cup. “Now, there’s three basic flavors that everypony should try. Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. The most common application of these is Neapolitan ice cream, shown here,” she gestured to a three-striped style of ice cream she’d set aside.
She dug a small scoop out of the snow, and served be a rather tiny portion of Neapolitan. I tried the vanilla section first, having had it before. I was curious to see if it still tasted like I remembered. It did. Mild, sweet, but mostly unimpressive. Rather ordinary. In a word, vanilla.
Then, I sampled the strawberry-
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I sighed, waving a hoof to get Octavia to stop. “Wait, hold on. Are you going to give me a step by step of this whole thing? Cause as much as I would LOVE to know why you two were living out one of my favorite dreams on the kitchen floor, I do have stuff to do.”
Spitfire smiled, placating, at me. “Oh, don’t worry. It gets better.”
“Right” Octavia huffed. “As I was saying...”
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I tried the strawberry next, and was pleasantly surprised. It was sweet and soft, like the vanilla, but the flavor was a bit more bold. I’d always been rather fond of strawberries, so I enjoyed it quite a bit. I had a few more bites of it, and smiled. “That’s not bad at all!” I exclaimed. I looked up to Spitfire to seek her opinion, but she just grinned devilishly at me.
“Try the chocolate,” was all she said.
So I did.
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“...and?” I asked, looking from the pegasus to the Earth pony. “What happened?”
Spitfire patted Octavia on the back. “Let me tell this part, ok?”
Octavia just nodded.
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So Octavia was pretty happy with the Strawberry. I wasn’t surprised. She seemed like the type to like fruity stuff. So I figured, her being more of a girl than both of us put together, she’d love the chocolate.
“Try the chocolate,” I said. I thought she’s love it.
I never thought she’d explode. “Oh my Celestia that’s DELICIOUS!” she yelled, after just a bite. She mauled the rest of the sample cup and practically dove for the carton. Fortunately I, being the fastest pegasus ever, caught her before she face-planted all over everything. “Whoa, girl. We have PLENTY of others to try. Chocolate isn’t even the half of it.”
She stared at me like I’d told her the princess was coming over. Her eyes got wide and her pupils dilated like crazy. “There’s more?!” she asked. She sounded like a schoolfilly.
It should have been a warning sign. I took it as a challenge. “Oh yeah. There’s more,” I told her, scooping up a personal favorite, Doublin-Bank Mud Slide, into another sample cup. She’d destroyed the first one.
I handed it over, and she bore no hesitation in taking a bite. Now, since you look confused, Vinyl, allow me to explain what’s in Doublin-Bank Mud Slide ice cream. Chocolate. Shirish Cream. Chocolate cookie dough mix. Chocolate fudge. And, for added flavor, chocolate pieces.
It was like giving a five year old a backpack nuke. She went off like a bomb and almost ATE the cup. Like, I had to tug it out of her teeth, she was still chewing on it. “Give me... Octi-stop... give-me-the-cup!” I shouted, and she let go. I tumbled flank-over-heels. Thus, I was unable to stop her from getting to the rest of the Mud Slide.
Thank Luna it was just a pint. “Hey!” I shouted. apparently it was just loud enough.
She seemed to snap out of it, staring at the ice cream then at me. “Oh, dear,” she muttered, looking back at the ice cream. “Um... I can explain?”
I leaned on the snowbank on my counter, after finally righting myself. “Please do.”
She stopped for a second, and put down the now-demolished pint. “Well, I-”
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“Hold on a second,” said Octavia. “Let me talk about this for a moment, Spitfire.” I watched them stare at each other for a few seconds, then Spitfire nodded. Then Octavia turned to me. “Vinyl, you know how I’ve been in therapy for the last few months?”
“Yeah...” I said hesitantly. “Wait, are you about to tell me you had another episode?”
“Well, kind of. It wasn’t sexual, though!” she added hastily, apparently seeing my expression. At that point I was just confused. “Well, my therapist, for all the good he’s worth, has a running theory. It isn’t a final diagnosis yet, but he has a strong suspicion that I might have a moderate case of Manic Histrionic Disorder.”
I had no idea what that meant. “What?”
“To put it simply, I have a, oh what was the phrase, ‘dramatic, underlying need to be the focus of attention, sometimes displaying erratic, unsuitable behavior for attention, including aggressive or hyperactive displays of emotion and affection,’” she explained.
“So, basically, you’re a crazy attention horse?” I asked. Right away I knew I could have been more delicate.
She didn’t do more than flinch, though. “Well, yes. He thinks I have this underlying need for attention that’s gotten so severe that I’m lashing out at odd times. When I come across something I want, or, in some cases, convince myself I need, I have a tendency to act out to get it, sometimes either taking it or drawing attention to myself until it’s given to me.”
I was still a little confused. “And ice cream falls into that category?”
She tilted her head, looking a little apprehensive. “Well, yes and no. Large amounts of stimulants do it. My body is accustomed to coffee, since I’ve been having it every day since I can remember, so caffeine is nothing new or worrisome. Large amounts of sugar, however...”
“-and you go off like a firecracker,” I finished for her. “But I thought you’d only had a couple of sample cups?”
She nodded, and glanced over to Spitfire, who seemed to be content watching us talk. With a nod from the pegasus, she continued on. “Yes, I did. I also had plenty of caffeine earlier, which, on it’s own, isn’t enough to set me off. In all honesty I should have stayed away from the ice cream, but I didn’t think I’d like it as much as I did. I enjoyed it so much and ate it so fast that I kind of flipped.”
I paused for a moment, looking around the kitchen, and back and forth between the two mares. “So, let me get this straight. This whole mess was because you flipped out over some frozen dairy goodness?”
Spitfire nodded for her. “Yeah. I called her shrink while she was plugging away at the quart of chocolate, and apparently she isn’t allowed to have any stimulants at all. He’s been trying to get her to not drink coffee,” she accented the last few words with a knowing stare at Octavia, “and when I told her about the ice cream he just sighed and told me to calm her down and take her somewhere else..”
That all sounded about right, but something was amiss. “So hold on, where’s the rest of the ice cream? She didn’t eat the whole damn thing, did she?”
Spitfire seemed to think for a moment. “Oh! Yeah, no. She got like halfway through the chocolate before I stopped her. It took her a bit to get her away from it, but eventually I got her into the living room and calmed her down. Then we started cleaning up...”
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So after her little episode, we started to put away all the ice cream. Well, I put away ice cream. She did dishes and put away toppings. I had to talk her out of eating the chocolate syrup from the bottle, though. That was the easy part.
Then we had to clean the counters and stuff. See, when I was getting the ice cream away from her, we kind of wrestled a bit. And stuff got... well, everywhere. and the snow had melted while I was talking her down in the living room. So the whole kitchen was a total wreck.
It was when I’d set her to clean up the counter that we started making all the noise that I’m assuming dragged you down here. See, she’s knocked over a can of whipped cream, which had spilled a little. And, well, she’d apparently never had THAT before either.
“Octavia,” I said, when I saw what she had in her hoof. Or, more appropriately, was licking off of it. “Put that down. We talked about this.”
“Oh, come on, Miss Spitfire, it’s just some cream. How bad can it be?” she asked innocently.
I wasn’t buying it. I dove for the can before she could start chugging it, and kind of miscalculated. When I hit her instead of the cream, we crashed into a cupboard, and accidentally set off the whipped cream can. And the chocolate syrup in the cupboard above us, which fell over and splattered both of us. I was just wrestling the can from her when you came down.
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I looked over the mess still left behind in the kitchen, and the two now slightly dry ponies at the counter. “And I thought I was going to be the trouble here.”
Spitfire giggled. “Actually, so did I,” she threw a look at Octavia, which I copied.
She looked back and forth from me to my marefriend, and sighed. “I should have stayed in Ponyville.”