Pinkie Pie sat patiently, watching as a long string of numbers printed out in front of her. She began muttering notes to herself, jotting them down on a pad of paper. “11:15, restate my assumptions. One: Mathematics is the language of nature. Two: Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. Evidence: Precise bake times; the wax and wane of flavor penchants; solar and lunar cycles; the rise and fall of the Crystal Empire. The universe of numbers that represents the item in front of me. Millions of hooves at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming for deliciousness. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the pie, there is a pattern as well, right in front of me, hiding behind the numbers. Always has been.” She leaned to the right, patting the metal box responsible for running her algorithms. “Soon, we’ll break the code. Soon.”
A knock on the door jotted Pinkie from her appraisal. Her gaze focused on the door to her house, seeming to look straight through in an attempt to see the pony on the other side. She rose and looked through the peephole at the intrusive visitor. Twilight, as expected. She kept saying something about wanting to help Pinkie with her problem-solving, but whenever she came in, she started going on about the importance of the work that Pinkie was doing and not about the importance of what she was trying to create. Twilight didn’t understand. She just couldn’t.
Pinkie ignored the knock, returning to her chair in front of the printout. “Come on, Euclid, I know you can figure it out. Just tell me, will you?”
“Pinkie Pie, I know you’re in there!” Twilight was shouting outside the door now. “I only want to help! I have textbooks about this, I can give you advice! If there’s a discovery to be made, I want to make sure you don’t miss it! Please, Pinkie, just let me help!”
Pinkie Pie snorted derisively. “You can’t help.” She said it loudly enough that Twilight could hear. “Go home.”
“Pinkie Pie, this is science we’re talking about! Number systems! This is fascinating to me!”
“You will participate and ruin my algorithms. Stop distracting me. You are distracting me from my work.”
“Pinkie, come on!” Twilight shouted. She continued making plights for several more minutes, but Pinkie Pie had refocused on the printouts coming from Euclid. Eventually, Twilight gave up and headed home to return to her studies.
“714... 293... 3... 4.58... 2236... argh, there’s no pattern!” Pinkie tore the sheet off and put it to the side, punching in a few more parameters for Euclid. “Oh, let’s see... c’mon, I know you can figure this out. It’s not that complicated.”
Suddenly, a curl of black smoke rose out of Euclid. The printout stopped abruptly. Pinkie’s head snapped up and she tore off the sheet of paper. “No, no, no! What have you done? You’re all I need to find this out.” She began looking over the numbers that Euclid had computed just prior to her malfunction. “These make no sense... what are you even computing here? There’s no...” her voice trailed off as she read some obvious coding discrepancies, as if Euclid was trying to communicate a solution outside of the programmable text in the printout, then a number of white lines, as if Euclid had been thinking hard about how to express the solution. At the bottom sat the glowing number of 216.
“Hum....” Pinkie muttered. She moved over to a nearby whiteboard and began writing down formulas, all assuming that 216 was the solution. Slowly, a pattern began to emerge. A size of 216 millimeters (8.50394 inches), only slightly smaller than the typical size of a pie. Cook time of 216 minutes (3 hours, 36 minutes). Oven temperature of 216 degrees (Fahrenheit). 216 divided by 6 equals 36, a whole number—meaning she could divide it into perfectly even proportions for herself and her friends. It was radical, to say the least... but she couldn’t help but find these correlations. Perhaps 216 grams of an ingredient? It just so happened that 216 grams was roughly equal to 1 cup. For that matter, 216 teaspoons equaled 4.5 cups—the approximate amount of liquid involved in creating the cream base for many types of pie cooked at low temperatures for long periods of time. The relationship was absolutely uncanny. All she needed to find out was the perfect mix of ingredients that added up to her magic 216 perfect number.
Her whiteboard was now covered in a baking recipe with a thematic number 216 involved in all of her measurement decisions, whether it be divided, converted, or used as is. Eventually, through extreme devious means of mathematics, she had come up with what appeared to be the perfect recipe to her, a perfect basis for all pies, and it all factored into the number 216.
It was incredible. That it fit everything so... so perfectly. She had to share it with her friends. She bolted out of her laboratory, calling to Euclid, “I’ll be back soon!”
Out in the bright afternoon sun of Ponyville, Pinkie Pie shouted, “I have it! I have calculated pie!” Passersby gave her skeptical looks, with more than one closet mathematician amongst their numbers rolling their eyes.
Eventually, Pinkie’s fervent cheering found her in front of Twilight’s castle, where the resident therein could hear the bold claim. She quickly left and sought out Pinkie, whose voice could still be heard echoing toward her. After catching up, she refuted this. “You can’t calculate pi! It goes on forever!”
Pinkie Pie whipped around. “Can too calculate it! I just did!”
“Oh yeah? Tell me what pi is, then.”
“216!”
“Wait, what? That’s used in the calculation of the circumference of a circle! It’s infinitely long and complex! You can never truly calculate it because it’s incalculably long!”
“Well, if that was true, then that wouldn’t mean it’s 216, now would it?” Pinkie Pie boasted. “It fits everything. Go ahead, try it!”
“Try what?”
“Creating pie!”
“You’re not even making sense anymore, Pinkie. Try to create pi? It’s a number. It’s abstract.”
“If you don’t believe me, try to calculate anything with that as the solution.”
“Okay. Two plus two.”
“No, not like that.” Pinkie Pie shook her head. “Observational. And I’m not talking about a single calculation. Keep calculating. It will all come back to 216.”
“Hmm,” Twilight replied. “Let’s take... pegasus flying speed. Maximum theoretical velocity achievable by a pony is approximately 80 kilometers... then factor in wind speed... gravitational effect... adverse weather... pony age... year number... hmm.” She scribbled a few notes on her notepad. “Maybe it’s a fluke, but this approximation of 216 definitely seems within several digits of the solution.” She put her hoof up at Pinkie Pie’s look of excitement. “Don’t be getting too excited, though. I have to run some more tests first. A simple number can’t be so central to everything.”
“Sure, go ahead Twilight. I’m off to go make pie!”
“Make... pi?” Twilight asked the empty space that had just been Pinkie Pie.
216. She turned the dial. 216. She grabbed the pan. 216. She poured the ingredients. 2:16. She looked at the time. AM. She had to find perfection. She had to keep baking pies.
A knock sounded at her door. She shouted, “Busy! Come back later! Trying to calculate pie!”
“Pinkie Pie?” came Twilight’s concerned voice. “Pinkie Pie! What are you doing?” She’d rounded the corner, seeing a multitude of tasty-looking pies, each with a small bite taken out of them. “What—you’re baking pies? I thought you meant the mathematical formula! You know, 3.141592653—the number that seems to go on infinitely and—oh, never mind. I did some more looking into that 216 num—”
“216? 216!” Pinkie Pie shouted. “216! That’s all I need! That’s it! I can do it!” She went back to her mixing bowl and began measuring precise amounts of ingredients again.
“That’s just it, Pinkie. I can reach the solution of 216 with any formula, but I can always raise it higher or lower if I add or subtract factors. If you keep adding or subtracting until you reach the desired solution, you’ll always—”
“NO! 216!” Pinkie Pie yanked a pie out of the oven, setting it on the counter. “C-Cutie mark... six white stars, pink star with six points, smaller white star behind with six points... 216. Your cutie mark equals 216.”
“Or 18, if you’re using addition instead of multiplication to reach a preconceived solution. I considered the same—what are you doing?” Pinkie Pie had grabbed Twilight’s hoof and was dragging her toward the mixing bowl. “What—Pinkie, stop! Why—ouch!”
Pinkie Pie was reaching into Twilight’s tail and plucking out hairs, one by one. “Seven, eight, nine...” she muttered to herself. “There, 18. Divide into 12 pieces. 216 hairs.” She nodded to herself, then brushed the hairs into the new pie she was creating. “Yes... this is promising. 216.”
The next morning, a tired but happy Pinkie Pie stood next to an equally tired and somewhat mortified Twilight Sparkle as Pinkie strung up a sign. Twilight blushed profusely as it went up. There was no reasoning with Pinkie Pie when she got her mind made up on something, and it would be easiest to just explain to the other ponies the situation. That didn’t change the fact that it was embarrassing.
As the ponies began to make their morning circuits around Ponyville on their various errands, eyes strayed to Pinkie Pie’s sign. The general reaction was always the same: The mares opened their mouths, shock evident, then they became disgusted and continued on. The stallions, on the other hoof, slowed their canters, curiosity evident on their faces. Any stallion unfortunate enough to be with a mare at the time was yanked forcefully away, their eyes echoing a brief longing over something they hadn’t realized they’d lost.
Applejack eventually approached the widely grinning Pinkie Pie and the rosy-cheeked Twilight Sparkle, a wide-eyed Big Macintosh in tow, and asked, “What the hay is goin’ on here? Pinkie, just what do you think you’re doin’? Is this what Ah think it is?”
Big Mac peeped up behind her, “Does it cost me anythin’?” before getting stabbed in the ribs by Applejack’s hoof.
Pinkie Pie replied obliviously, “What do you mean, AJ? And no, Big Mac, samples are free!”
Applejack’s eyes looked upward again at the sign that read ‘COME AND SAMPLE TWILIGHT’S HAIR PIE.’ “Pinkie, Ah insist you take that sign down immediately, before anypony gets the wrong idea.”
“Wrong idea? They’re coming to sample pie with Twilight’s hair in it!” She saw Big Macintosh’s look of shock and horror, then clarified, “It’s 216 hairs! That’s the perfect number! C’mon, I know it’ll taste delicious!”
Applejack couldn’t think of anything witty to say, so she simply we went with, “... Oh.” A few moments later, she followed up, “Wait, you removed hair from Twilight and baked it into a pie!?”
A small crowd of stallions had been milling around behind the Apples, heard the exclamation, and, their misguided hopes dashed, began to slowly meander away from Pinkie’s shop. Under their breath, they all muttered false advertising.