//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3 
// Story: Pinkie Pie Clicks a Cookie 
// by Kwisatz Haderpone 
//------------------------------//

	Applejack was in the south orchard at Sweet Apple Acres inspecting the apple trees when her brother came to inform her that “that pink friend of yours is up to somethin’ over by the carrot fields.” When she asked him to elaborate, Big Macintosh replied, “Best if you see for yourself.”
And so Applejack found herself standing at the edge of the south orchard next to her brother, watching as Pinkie Pie skipped back and forth across the empty field, humming a happy tune while she worked.
“Is… is she buryin’ cookies in the carrot fields?” Applejack asked.
“Eeyup.”
“Did she happen to mention why?”
“Uh, maybe.”
Applejack stared at her brother. “You didn’t even ask her, did ya.”
Her brother stared right back. “I’ll have you know I did. Her answer didn’t make a lick of sense, though.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Pinkie Pie all right,” Applejack muttered. To Big Macintosh she said, “Don’t you worry yourself none over this, big brother. I’ve got more practice in dealin’ with Pinkie than you do. I’ll go on down there right now and get everything all sorted out, and then we can get back to work.”
“Good luck,” Big Macintosh called after her as she trotted down to the carrot field where Pinkie Pie was hard at work doing whatever it was she was doing.
“Howdy, Applejack!” Pinkie greeted her as she approached. “What brings you round these parts?”
“Pinkie, this is Sweet Apple Acres. I kinda live here, remember? I should be the one askin’ you that question.”
“Oh yeah!” Pinkie Pie giggled. “Silly me!” And with that, she returned to her work.
Applejack watched for a few seconds as Pinkie dug a little hole with her front hooves, dropped in a chocolate chip cookie, and buried it. Soon it became apparent that no more information was forthcoming.
“You aren’t seriously goin’ to make me ask, right?”
“Ask what?” said Pinkie Pie, a sweet, innocent smile on her face.
Applejack sighed in resignation. “Pinkie, why in the hay are you buryin’ cookies all over my carrot field?”
“Oh, Applejack, don’t be ridiculous!” Pinkie said. “I’m not burying cookies, I’m planting them!”
“Of course you are.” Applejack had had enough conversations with Pinkie Pie to not be too surprised by anything she said, but this was pushing it. “All right, I’ll play along. Why are you plantin’ cookies in my carrot field?”
“Well,” Pinkie answered, “I don’t have any fields of my own to plant cookies in, and I noticed you guys weren’t using this part of the field, and I know I really probably should have asked first and I’m sorry if you were planning on planting carrots today but—”
“Pinkie.”
Pinkie Pie paused and gave Applejack as much of her attention as it is possible for an overexcited Pinkie Pie to give. “Mmhmm?”
“You do know that cookies don’t grow on trees, right?” Applejack said.
“Sure,” Pinkie nodded vigorously, “everypony knows that. It’s more of a shrub, really.”
“Huh.” Pinkie’s response caught Applejack completely off guard. It took her a few seconds to think of something to say. “Uh, shouldn’t you be mindin’ the bakery?”
“Nah, it’s all good,” Pinkie said. “The lunch rush is over, so there aren’t many customers right now. Besides, I got someone to cover for me.”


~ * ~


Three ponies huddled together in Sugarcube Corner, just inside the doorway, casting nervous glances toward the counter. Perched there atop the cash register was a baby alligator with wide, vacant eyes, staring into nothing. It wore a tiny blue vest with a name tag reading “Hello my name is GUMMY” and two buttons reading “Trainee” and “Ask about our chocolate chip cookies!” None of the ponies seemed particularly eager to be the first to approach Pinkie Pie’s replacement to inquire about the advertised cookies.
Finally, one of the trio, a pink mare with a lime green mane, gathered all her courage and took a tentative step forward. “Um…” she began in a shaky voice.
The alligator snapped its head toward her suddenly, perhaps attracted by the movement, or by the sound of her voice. Its eyes blinked, first the left, then the right. Its mouth opened in what may or may not have been a wide toothless grin (it can be hard to tell with baby alligators sometimes). An odd gurgling noise issued forth from its gaping maw.
The pony’s courage left her in an instant. “Never mind we’ll come back later okay bye now,” she blurted out as she and her companions backed out of the door and raced away as fast as they could down the street past several scattered clusters of kittens.
The alligator’s mouth snapped shut and the tip of its tail twitched ever so slightly. It blinked another one of its odd asynchronous blinks and resumed staring into nothing.
From the back of the store came the sound of a click, followed by the thunk of something round and chocolatey landing on a small heap of other round chocolatey somethings.


~ * ~


Back at Sweet Apple Acres, Applejack had just about given up on trying to find a nice way of telling Pinkie Pie to leave. It was time to put a stop to this nonsense before things got out of control.
“Pinkie,” she began, “you’re a good friend, practically part of the family, and we love havin’ you around and all, but I’m afraid that don’t give you the right to come down here and dig up my field for your silly little games. Plantin’ these fields is how we help keep Ponyville fed, and a big part of how we make our living outside of apple season.”
“Oh, don’t worry about all that,” Pinkie said, waving a hoof dismissively. “Once these cookie shrubs start producing we’ll have more than enough cookies to feed everypony. And besides, according to my calculations, based on the current market value of cookies, and factoring in the average yield per shrub, and taking into account the increase in demand for delicious chocolatey treats over the past fiscal year, you can make a lot more money selling cookies than if you planted carrots, even after we split the profits fifty-fifty.”
Applejack was not certain from where Pinkie Pie had produced an adding machine, nor was she able to make any sense of the numbers printed on the ever-expanding strip of tape it was spewing out. Fancy mathematics had never been her strongest suit. If there was one thing she did know, though, it was growing things. So that’s what she went with.
“Look, Pinkie,” she explained patiently, “that’s all well and good, ’cept for one thing. Cookies are baked goods, not seeds. You can’t just stick ’em in the ground and expect ’em to sprout up into shrubs.”
Pinkie Pie gasped. “Oh my gosh, Applejack! You’re right!”
Applejack smiled.
“I almost forgot! These cookies will never grow if I don’t water them!”
Applejack’s smile faded.
Pinkie darted off somewhere and returned two and a half seconds later carrying a watering can filled with milk. As Applejack groaned and mashed her hoof into her face in frustration, Pinkie marched up and down the rows of planted cookies until the soil was good and moist and the watering can was empty.
Applejack was about to attempt once more to explain to Pinkie Pie why her scheme wouldn’t work when, to her complete and utter surprise, tiny green shoots began to push their way up through the soil. She stared, slack-jawed, as the shoots grew steadily larger before her eyes.
Her first thought was that it must be some kind of trick, that Pinkie had secretly planted seeds alongside the cookies and doused them with some sort of plant-growing potion. Then the little shrubs matured into big shrubs and the first tiny chocolate chip cookies began to bud from their branches, and Applejack could feel her whole world crumbling to pieces around her.
“That… that just ain’t possible!”
“You know,” Pinkie said, head tilted slightly to one side, “Twilight said something a lot like that earlier when I showed her my cookie button. Made almost the exact same face, too. It’s actually kinda funny, when you think about it.”
Applejack was completely lost. “You can’t grow cookies like that, you just can’t,” she tried to reassure herself even as the first crop of chocolate chip cookies ripened on the shrubs in front of her.
“Oh wow,” Pinkie exclaimed suddenly, glancing down at a watch Applejack was fairly certain hadn’t been strapped to her hoof just a few moments before, “is it that late already? I gotta get back to the shop! Hey AJ, when this first batch is ready, could you be a pal and pick ’em for me and bring ’em on up to Sugarcube Corner whenever you get a chance?”
Applejack slowly turned her head to face Pinkie. Her eyes were wide with fear, searching desperately for some sliver of sanity in a world where cookies grew on shrubs and everything she knew was wrong. “Huh?” she managed to utter.
“Great!” Pinkie said. “See you later, alligator! And speaking of alligators, I’m off to check up on Gummy.” She leaned in conspiratorially and added, in a stage whisper, “Between you and me, he’s a hard worker, but not so great with the customers.” And with that, Pinkie Pie bounced away merrily, leaving Applejack alone in her misery.
She was still sitting there staring off into the distance when Big Macintosh returned to check up on her some twenty minutes later. He had to call her name a few times and wave a hoof before her eyes before she turned to face him. It took a few long seconds for recognition to replace the dazed look in her eyes. “Hey there, big brother,” she said weakly.
He tilted his head toward the field of cookie shrubs. “Pinkie Pie?”
“Pinkie Pie,” Applejack answered.
Big Macintosh nodded. Evidently this was all the explanation he needed. “Welp,” he said, dragging over a wooden tub, “I reckon we better get to it.” 
Applejack watched dumbly as he began to shake the cookies out of the first shrub in the row. When he noticed he was alone in his work, he turned to her. “So are you gonna help, or am I gonna have to harvest these all by myself?”
“Whoa, there, Big Macintosh. You’re actually gonna do this?”
Big Macintosh shrugged. “Might as well. No sense in lettin’ a perfectly good crop go to waste.”
“But they’re cookies! Growin’ on shrubs! Right here in our carrot field!”
“Eeyup.”
“So that’s it, then?” she asked disbelievingly. “You’re okay with this? You ain’t even gonna question any of it?”
“Nope.” He dragged his tub along to the next shrub in line. “Way I hear it, nothin’ good ever comes outta questionin’ Pinkie Pie. Best to just go with it. ’Sides, we can always use the extra money.”
Applejack blinked. “Nuh-uh. No way. Goodness knows I let a lot of Pinkie’s shenanigans slide by without so much as a second thought. I can deal with her Pinkie Sense. And the time she painted a giant mural of her face across the side of the barn. And that incident with the tomato catapult last week. But this? This is way past just Pinkie being Pinkie. This is goin’ against the very laws of nature. I can’t just drop this one.”
“Suit yourself, then.” Big Macintosh gave the next shrub a good shake. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Well, fine,” Applejack huffed. “You stay here and make believe like nothin’s wrong. I’ll be headed off into town now. Surely somepony there will take my concerns seriously and help me get to the bottom of this.” Applejack pushed an empty tub under an unharvested shrub and, with a good, swift kick, filled it with cookies. “And I’m takin’ these with me. Just in case.”
Big Macintosh watched silently as his sister stalked off down the road to town with a tub of cookies on her back. As she disappeared around the bend, he shook his head and returned to his work. He wished Applejack had listened to him and stayed out of Pinkie Pie’s business. He was certain she was running straight into a heap of trouble. But there were some things, he knew, you couldn’t simply tell a pony, especially one as stubborn as his sister. Sometimes you had to let them figure it out the hard way.


~ * ~


Applejack had just reached the outskirts of Ponyville when she spotted Twilight Sparkle running in her direction with Spike on her back.
“Twilight!” Applejack exclaimed happily. “Boy, am I glad to see you! I really need your help with these.”
“Sorry, Applejack,” Twilight panted as she ran past, “but I’m dealing with something really important right now and—” She skidded to a stop upon seeing Applejack’s cargo. “Oh no. Please tell me you didn’t get those cookies from Sugarcube Corner.”
“No, actually.”
Twilight sighed in relief.
“Now, this is gonna sound kinda crazy, but Pinkie Pie stopped by my place earlier and grew these in my carrot field, and I was hopin’ you could help me figure out how she did it.”
Twilight’s face fell.
“Oh man,” Spike said from his seat on Twilight’s back. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“No, Spike,” Twilight said. “That’s not good. It’s bad. Very, very bad. It means things are progressing much more rapidly than I hoped they would. We’re running out of time, fast.”
“I feel like I’m missin’ somethin’ here,” Applejack said, confusion evident on her face. “What’s goin’ on? And why do I suddenly have a feelin’ that I don’t really want to know what’s goin’ on?”
“Follow me to Fluttershy’s. I’ll explain when we get there.”
And so together, two ponies, one baby dragon, and a wooden tub filled with freshly-grown chocolate chip cookies headed off toward Fluttershy’s cottage to save Equestria from certain doom.











For those of you who are curious, Pinkie Pie’s so-called tomato catapult was never meant to be a tomato catapult at all, but a long-range cupcake delivery system. She designed and built the thing herself over the course of a frenetic sugar-fueled weekend, and set it up on the roof of Sugarcube Corner the following Monday.
Mr. and Mrs. Cake took one look at the thing and decided that they wanted no part of it. When Pinkie asked them for some spare cupcakes for test firing, they made it clear to her in no uncertain terms that she was to remove the contraption from the roof of the shop before the end of the day and never speak of it to them again.
Pinkie complied, and moved the catapult to the roof of the building across the street during her lunch break. She acquired a basket of tomatoes (close enough to cupcakes in size and weight to serve as an acceptable substitute for testing purposes), loaded up the catapult, took aim at Ponyville Town Hall, and fired.
It is unclear whether anypony at Town Hall was aware that they were the intended recipient of Pinkie’s tomato delivery, but in the end it didn’t matter. Due to a rounding error in the design phase, the catapult was way too powerful. The tomatoes sailed clear out of Ponyville and rained down across Sweet Apple Acres, splattering the barn, the farmhouse, the chicken coop, and Applejack’s dog Winona.
By some amazing coincidence, Winona had had an unpleasant encounter with a skunk mere minutes earlier. The tomato bombardment removed most of the skunk smell, for which the dog was sort of grateful (as much as one can be after being pelted with tomatoes, anyway).
Applejack was not happy when she saw the mess, but Pinkie was able to smooth things over a bit by offering to help with the cleanup.
Pinkie Pie has no regrets about the incident and insists she would do the whole thing over again. Though perhaps with a less powerful catapult next time. And not quite so many tomatoes.