It was a perfectly ordinary day in the town of Ponyville. The sun shone brightly in the clear blue sky, birds filled the air with their cheerful song, and ponies greeted each other with a wave and a friendly smile as they went about their business. One Twilight Sparkle, settled comfortably on a bench in the Ponyville Municipal Park, was enjoying the outdoors in her own favorite way: head buried in a copy of A Brief History of Equestria: Volume XVII, engrossed in an account of the short-lived Water Balloon Rebellion of 722 CE, completely oblivious to the sights, smells, and sounds of the outside world.
As one might expect, she was caught entirely by surprise when Pinkie Pie spotted her from across the park and decided to drop in and say hello.
“Hi Twilight!”
Twilight yelped in terror, flailed about, and rolled off the bench. When her head finally stopped spinning, she found herself lying on the ground staring up into her excitable friend’s grinning face.
“Pinkie! How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me like that?!”
“Twenty-seven this month!” Pinkie answered cheerfully. “Twenty-eight, if you asking me just now counts!”
A pause.
“Uh, Twilight? Why are you lying on the ground like that? It doesn’t look very comfortable.”
Twilight opened her mouth to reply, but thought better of it. Instead, she rose clumsily to her hooves and shook the dust from her mane. “Right. Now that I’m up, was there something you wanted?”
“Nope!” Pinkie Pie replied. “No, wait. Yes! Come with me to Sugarcube Corner right away! There’s something I need your help with!”
“Well, I—”
“Great! Let’s go!”
Twilight let out a cry as Pinkie Pie grabbed her and dragged her through the streets of Ponyville at an uncomfortably high speed. Buildings and trees and surprised-looking ponies whipped by in a blur, and she wondered briefly why she had ever decided to leave the safety of the library in the first place.
Before she knew it, Twilight was standing in the kitchen of Sugarcube Corner, side by side with Pinkie, staring down at the object on the floor. It was round, about two feet across, and painted to resemble a giant chocolate chip cookie.
“Okay, Pinkie, I give up. What exactly am I looking at here?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Twilight? It’s a cookie button! You click it to make cookies!”
Pinkie pressed down on the button with her hoof. There was a loud click, and a chocolate chip cookie appeared out of thin air above her head. She snatched it up in a single bite before it hit the ground. “Mmm, tasty!”
Twilight Sparkle was understandably bewildered by this turn of events. As an avid reader, top student of Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, and all-around egghead, she understood better than most the complications involved with causing objects to appear out of thin air. Immediately her brain presented her with a list of several dozen reasons why Pinkie’s cookie button made no sense, and she voiced her thoughts on the subject to Pinkie in a calm and measured tone of voice.
“That’s… but… what… I don’t even… what?”
“I know, right? Isn’t it great?” Pinkie Pie giggled. She clicked the button several more times and expertly caught half a dozen cookies on a plate as they flashed into existence before Twilight’s eyes.
Twilight finally found her voice. “This… it’s… there’s no way something like that can work!”
“Looks like it’s working just fine to me.” Pinkie clicked the button again and caught another cookie on her plate. She thrust the plate under Twilight’s nose. “Here, have a cookie!”
Twilight pushed the plate of cookies aside with a hoof. “Not now, Pinkie. I’m trying to think.” She sighed and shut her eyes for a moment. Hardly five minutes had passed since she fell off the park bench and already she could feel the beginnings of a Pinkie Pie-induced headache coming on.
“Are you sure you don’t want a cookie?” Pinkie asked, plate of cookies balanced precariously atop her head. “It’ll cheer you right up!”
“Pinkie…” Twilight paused to compose her thoughts. “This button… where did you get it?”
“It was a gift!”
Twilight blinked. “A gift.”
“Yup! When I woke up this morning it was right there in my room leaning against the wall tied up with a ribbon and a big bow! I was really surprised ’cause my birthday isn’t for another ninety-seven days!”
“It was a gift,” Twilight repeated.
Pinkie was still talking. “And I don’t know who left it ’cause it didn’t have a tag or a note or anything, which is too bad, ’cause now I don’t know who to send a thank-you card to. So anyway, I tried it out and that’s how I found out it was a cookie button, but now that I think about it the spiffy cookie paint job really screams ‘cookie button’, doesn’t it?”
“Somepony gave you this button as a gift.” It wasn’t making any more sense to Twilight no matter how many times she said it out loud.
“And it’s really great timing too, seeing as how Mr. and Mrs. Cake and the twins are out of town for the week! It’ll be so much easier to keep the shop running smoothly now that my cookie preparation time is—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Twilight interrupted. “The Cakes are out of town?”
“Yeah!” Pinkie replied, pulling her head out of the oven where she had been checking on a tray of banana nut muffins. “They’re visiting relatives in Fillydelphia. They’ll be back next Tuesday.”
“And they left you in charge of Sugarcube Corner.”
“Uh-huh!”
“All by yourself.”
“Yep!”
“With a magic button that makes instant cookies.”
“Of course not, silly! They don’t know about the button!”
“Oh, good,” Twilight said. “That means they’ve only partially lost their minds.”
Pinkie Pie frowned. “Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, I’m just surprised they’d leave you in charge for a whole week, considering what happened the last time they let you run Sugarcube Corner on your own.”
“Come on, Twilight, it wasn’t that bad.”
“You gave half the town food poisoning!” Twilight was very nearly shouting.
“Hey!” Pinkie Pie protested. “You can’t pin that all on me! We both know that was at least thirty-seven-point-nine percent Applejack’s fault!”
“But…” Twilight started, then reconsidered. The conversation had veered way off course, and she was determined to steer it back in the right direction. “You know what? Never mind all that. The Cakes trust you, and that should be good enough for me.” It wasn’t, but she kept that bit of information to herself. “So. About this cookie button—”
“Oh, that’s right!” Pinkie exclaimed. “I was gonna ask you for help!”
“Great!” Twilight said. Finally it was time to get down to business. “Now, we’re clearly dealing with a very powerful magical artifact here. But the strange thing is that I can’t sense any magic at all coming from it. And that worries me, because with the amount of energy it would take to instantly generate an object as complex as a freshly-baked chocolate chip cookie out of thin air, this button should be literally glowing with magic.”
Pinkie tilted her head to one side in confusion. “Are you sure about that, Twilight? I mean, you poof stuff out of nowhere all the time, and it doesn’t look that hard.”
“It is hard, Pinkie,” Twilight explained patiently. “Spells that generate objects purely from magical energy are really tricky to get right. In most cases the object isn’t meant to last for more than a few minutes before it destabilizes and disintegrates. The energy requirements increase exponentially with the complexity of the object and the amount of time it lasts. They’re good spells for practicing my magic, but when I need something important it’s a lot more efficient and useful to just teleport it in from a nearby location.”
“Huh,” Pinkie said. “Well, maybe that’s what the button’s doing. Teleporting them in from somewhere else.”
“I thought about that too, but it just isn’t logistically feasible. There would have to be a pretty big stash of cookies hidden away nearby for—”
“Ooh! Ooh!” Pinkie interrupted. “Maybe it’s teleporting them from a cookie planet in a galaxy far, far away!”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Pinkie. Even if the very idea of a planet like that wasn’t completely absurd, it would be well out of the teleportation range of even the highest-level unicorns.”
“Oh.” Pinkie scratched her head. “Well, maybe they’re teleporting in from an alternate universe where everything is cookies! Like a cookieverse of some kind!”
“That makes even less sense than the cookie planet idea!”
“Well, where do you think they come from, then?” asked Pinkie.
“I don’t know!” exclaimed an increasingly exasperated Twilight Sparkle. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” She paused for a bit to regain her composure. “Look, Pinkie, I’m glad you called me in to help, but all this wild conjecture won’t get us anywhere. What we need now is good old-fashioned scientific research. I’ve got some books on magical artifacts back at the library that might give us an idea as to how—”
“Whoa whoa whoa whoa, Twilight,” Pinkie interrupted. “That’s not important right now.”
Twilight was confused. “Iff’s noff?” she mumbled before spitting out the hoof Pinkie had shoved into her mouth.
“Nope. I don’t need to know how the button works. I brought you here so you could magic me up something that can click it for me while I’m dealing with customers.”
Twilight could feel her left eye starting to twitch. “You can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious!” Pinkie Pie said. “How am I supposed to be able to click cookies and work the counter at the same time? I can’t be in two places at once!”
Twilight wasn’t entirely sure that last part was true, but she didn’t say so. She thought it was a bad idea to continue using the cookie button without knowing anything about it, but she didn’t say that either, because at that moment an impatient voice called out from the front of the store.
“Hey! We’ve been waiting in line for fifteen minutes! Are you ever gonna take our orders or what?”
“Hold your horses, I’ll be out in a second!” Pinkie shouted. She turned to Twilight. “See? The customers are getting disgruntled. Pretty soon they’ll start leaving without any baked goods. And they’ll tell other ponies about the poor quality of service, and those ponies will tell even more ponies, and pretty soon nopony will want to come here! Sugarcube Corner will lose all its business, and Mr. and Mrs. Cake will have to close up shop forever, and they’ll kick me out on the street, and I’ll have to release Gummy into the wild and move back in with my parents and push rocks around all day and I’ll never see you or any of my friends ever again! But you wouldn’t let that happen to your bestest pal Pinkie Pie, right, Twilight?” She gave Twilight her best sad puppy face.
Twilight was sorely tempted to try to convince Pinkie that there was nothing wrong with taking a break from pushing a button to go help customers. She debated telling her that the only reason customers had been left waiting in the first place was because she abandoned the shop in the middle of the day to wander around in the park looking for ponies to pester. But in the end, she decided that starting an argument with Pinkie Pie was not likely to be a productive use of her time. Besides, the cookie button had piqued her curiosity, and she would never be able to satisfy it if she had to contend with an uncooperative Pinkie.
Twilight sighed, hoping she wasn’t about to make a terrible mistake. “Fine. I’ll help. But on one condition. You have to give me a couple dozen of those cookies to study. You may not want to know where they’re coming from, but I do.”
“Deal!” Pinkie said. She reached a hoof into her mane and pulled out a yellow foam finger with a bold black #1 printed on it, and tossed it to Twilight. “Here, you can use this!”
Twilight caught the finger with her magic, and raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? You want me to make an automatic cookie clicker out of a giant foam finger?”
“Well, yeah!” Pinkie said. “It just kinda feels right to me, you know.”
“If you say so,” Twilight said, unconvinced. Nothing about the present situation felt right to her. Shaking her head, she turned her attention to the finger. “Hmm. A simple come-to-life spell should do the trick.” She concentrated for a second, then released the spell from her glowing horn into the finger.
Their eyes followed the foam finger as it floated lazily toward the button. Once it reached its destination, it stopped and hovered in place.
“Uh, Twilight? It isn’t doing anything.”
“Just give it time.”
Several seconds passed before the finger finally descended, pressing the button. A cookie dropped to the ground. The finger floated back up. Twilight and Pinkie waited. Several more seconds passed, and the finger clicked the button again. Another cookie dropped to the ground, landing right next to the first.
“Hmm…” Pinkie thought for a moment. “Aha!” She slid the button across the floor toward the counter. The finger dutifully followed. She then grabbed a large tray and positioned it on the countertop, eyeballed it thoroughly from multiple angles, nudged it about an inch to the left, then, satisfied, stepped back. The next cookie landed directly in the center of the tray. “Perfect!” She tossed an empty cake box to Twilight. “Here, take as many cookies as you need! I gotta go re-gruntle some disgruntled ponies! Thanks a bunch, Twilight!” She rushed from the room before Twilight could respond.
“Well, looks like today is turning out to be more interesting than I bargained for,” Twilight said to nobody in particular. She levitated the box above the counter and clicked the button with her hoof until the box was full. Then she set off, box of cookies in tow.
As she walked out the door, Twilight was already mentally compiling a checklist of experiments to run on her sugary sweet acquisition. Lost in her thoughts as she trotted away from Sugarcube Corner, she passed a fluffy gray kitten sitting by the side of the road. She didn’t notice it, and it paid her no mind. Its attention was focused entirely on the bakery from which she had departed. Soon it was joined by a second kitten, then a third.
Together they sat, and watched, and waited.
For those of you curious about what Twilight was reading in the park, the following is an excerpt from A Brief History of Equestria: Volume XVII.
The Water Balloon Rebellion of 722 CE [Celestial Era] began as a simple water balloon fight between two teams of rambunctious fillies and colts on a hot summer day in Canterlot. Events escalated when a poorly-aimed balloon hit Princess Celestia as her chariot passed by on its way to the castle. The fight came to a screeching halt, and the terrified fillies and colts anxiously awaited whatever horrible punishment the Princess would inflict upon them.
With a grin and a ferocious battle cry, Princess Celestia leapt from her chariot and returned fire, unleashing a barrage of water balloons upon the children, who squealed with delight as they ran for cover. The two previously opposed teams formed an impromptu alliance and launched a counterattack, concentrating their fire on the Princess as she took shelter behind her guard detail. The guards themselves refused to be drawn into the fray, standing vigilant even as they were pelted with balloons from all angles (including more than a few thrown by the Princess herself).
The Water Balloon Rebellion ended abruptly upon the arrival of several sets of parents, who, horrified upon seeing their children engaged in such treasonous activity in full view of the public, immediately shooed them all home and began apologizing profusely to the Princess and begging her forgiveness. Despite her repeated assurances that no harm was done and no apology was necessary, they continued to grovel and plead and follow along behind her chariot until it reached the castle gates, whereupon they were denied entrance by the guards.
There were no casualties, though several of the children were sent to bed without their supper that night, and some of the castle staff had to work late cleaning up the puddles of water Princess Celestia and her guard detail tracked across the floors.