Sugarcube Corner had a policy: once a cake was boxed, it wasn’t suitable for resale. Thus Pinkie Pie was left in something of a pickle when Discord cancelled his order for every display cake in the shop and disappeared - although to call it a pickle was inaccurate. It was more like a trip up chocolate creek without a candy cane paddle.
“You want none of the cakes now?!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed to empty air, and then slumped over the box on the counter in dismay.
Maud’s arrival was imminent. They still needed to get ready for the Grand Galloping Gala. The Cakes were out fulfilling a catering order and weren’t due to return until just before she and her sister had to leave for the Gala.
“What am I meant to do with over three dozen boxes of cakes?” she cried, on behalf of the invisible but omnipresent listeners she knew were out there. “Come back here, Discord!” she yelled pointlessly, certain he wouldn’t, even though he could sort out this problem he’d caused her pronto with his chaos magic. She started to trot towards the door and then stopped abruptly.
“Wait, Pinkie!” she scolded herself. “No-no-no-no-no. You can’t leave to go and find him. Then you’ll be leaving Sugarcube Corner unattended.” She gasped with the abrupt realisation that any number of the dastardly cake thieves in Ponyville could scuttle into Sugarcube Corner and mutilate the meringues if she was gone.
“Hmm,” she mused. “I could throw out all of the cakes. Oh, but that’d be a huge insult to all of the effort Mr. and Mrs. Cake put into making them. Not to mention the biggest waste of really good cake ever.”
She gave the matter some further thought.
“Oh, silly me,” she said abruptly, and giggled. “I don’t have a choice. I’ll just have to unbox them all and put them back on display; that won’t take long.”
She opened a box, satisfied that the Cakes would forgive her given the circumstances. And she gave a huge gasp. Her head inflated for a short time, eyes popping out on stalks.
“Oh no!” she howled. “The scones are squashed! The cupcakes: crushed! The muffins—” tears welled in her eyes— “misshapen!”
She picked up one of the cupcakes. It was smushed and broken. The icing had smeared all over the inside of the box and its fellow crooked cupcakes. Even her skills couldn’t make these cakes display-worthy.
Pinkie could feel a panic attack coming on. She quite enjoyed the excessive shrieking one could get away with during a decent panic attack, so she embraced the jittery feeling with open hooves.
“I can’t sell these cupcakes in the good name of Mr. and Mrs. Cake!” she cried. “What if a customer who wants cupcakes comes in and sees these? The Cakes will be a laughing stock. They’ll have to leave Ponyville and start a new life somewhere else! They’ll have to change their names and that would be the worst because they already have the best names that a pair of bakers could have!
“Maybe I could bake more, but even if Maud helps we’d still be late for the best night ever. And Maud’s no good at baking anyway so we’d have to be living in a whole different Ponyville just to get a no-good outcome as good as that!”
As she paced the shop floor in frantic circles a towering stack of boxes in front of the shop’s doorway suddenly wobbled precariously. Pinkie Pie dashed over to the pile, grabbing the central boxes with both hooves for stabilisation, and her wide eyes panned from the bottom of the stack all the way to the top, comprehending its size and location.
She gave another huge gasp and continued with dramatic woe. “What if there’s a pony out there right now who just wants a mouth-wateringly marvellous muffin and she can’t even get into Sugarcube Corner because of all these boxes of cakes blocking the door?”
In the street, Derpy Hooves bemusedly listened to Pinkie Pie’s flamboyant tirade. When the door had hit something inside the shop she’d immediately closed it, not wanting to cause an accident. “Um, hello?” she called when she heard Pinkie describing her exact situation. But Pinkie Pie was mid-flow and couldn’t be distracted.
“Oh, but how likely even is that?” Pinkie lambasted herself. “Oh, I know! Maybe Twilight has a spell that can make a dozen super-duper yummy cakes in a flash! No, that won’t work, she’s in Canterlot! Spike can’t cook up his delish cookies in time to help me either! What am I going to do-ooh-ooh—?!”
She cut herself off with another gargantuan gasp as the only logical solution came to mind. “I know!” Pinkie Pie shouted. She raced upstairs to her room, screaming, “GUMMY, I NEED YOU!”
“Hello?” Derpy called tentatively, knocking gingerly on the window of Sugarcube Corner. But Pinkie Pie was gone.
Maud Pie tilted her head and stopped when she reached the front door of her sister’s place of residence. Loud squeals and laughter were audible within Sugarcube Corner. Maud would have taken this merely as evidence of Pinkie’s presence, but there was a particularly shrill edge to the majority of the noises.
It was a valuable warning that Maud would not ignore. She steeled herself for the hyperactivity that awaited her and knocked on the door.
It flew open with a near deafening explosion of party horns. Confetti and streamers burst out of the shop as though fired from Pinkie’s party cannon. Maud stood motionless as the sheer power blasted her mane into a new voluminous hairstyle.
“MAUD!” Pinkie screamed in guttural joy. She launched herself at her sister. Maud dug her hooves into the ground. Only her incredible strength kept her upright as Pinkie delightedly slammed into her.
“OhmygoshI’msohappytoseeyouit’sbeensolongareyouexcitedwe’regoingtohavesuchagoodtimeI’msoexcitedIthinkI’mgonnaSCREEEEAAAAAM!” Pinkie shrieked. She gasped for breath once she’d finished squealing, chest expanding and contracting dramatically.
“Pinkie, are you all right?” Maud asked sombrely. Just as Pinkie’s hair invariably returned to its curly form regardless of hairdressing tricks, Maud’s recovered from the party onslaught and shrank back to its natural flatness.
“I’mbetterthanallrightI’MFANTASTIC! DOYOUWANTSOMECAKE?!”
Maud blinked.
“DIDYOUHEARMEDOYOUWANTSOMECAKE?” Pinkie’s entire body shuddered from the tip of her tail to the very ends of her nose and ears. Her eyelids twitched. “Ithinkthere’sstilloneortwoleftYOUCANTOTALLYHAVETHEMIFYOUWANTTHEM.”
Maud blinked again and looked around her sister’s hair to peer inside Sugarcube Corner. The shop floor was covered in crumbs and open boxes. Their empty, icing-smeared interiors were the source of an overpowering aroma of sugar. Pinkie’s wild-eyed mania fitted perfectly with the picture these items painted.
Gummy was sitting inside one of the boxes. Another sat lopsidedly on his head. There was cake frosting around his mouth.
“Hello, Gummy,” Maud greeted. She liked Gummy. He was her favourite pet, aside from Boulder of course.
Gummy blinked asymmetrically in response.
“HE’S SO EXCITED TO SEE YOU!” Pinkie squealed. Maud was pleased that the pace of her speech slowed sufficiently to make understanding her much easier. “WE HAD A LITTLE PARTY TO GET READY FOR YOUR ARRIVAL AND FOR THE GALA! IT’S GOING TO BE THE BEST!”
“I’m excited too,” Maud said.
“COME IN!”
As she stepped over the threshold, Maud noticed that there were a few ponies in the street staring alternately at the confetti and at her sister. They looked worried. Maud didn’t have time to think about them in any great detail as Pinkie slammed the door so hard that Sugarcube Corner’s very foundations shook.
“ComeonweshouldgoandgetreadyIdidn’tthinkweweregoingtomanagetoeatprettymuchallofthecakeintimebeforeyougotherebutboydidwetryhardandwediditandwe’resuperawesome!”
Maud took a few moments to separate Pinkie’s words from one another and from the giggly snorts that accompanied her speech. “Why did you eat so much cake?” Maud asked.
“WEHADTOWECOULDN’TSELLTHEMANDNOPONYCOULDGETINTOTHESHOP—!” Pinkie actually continued talking, but Maud’s specially-developed Pinkie filter was overwhelmed. Both the feverish speed and pitch of Pinkie’s voice increased as she grew more and more invested in telling her story. Dogs began howling outside.
Gummy was blinking repeatedly. His enormous eyes, typically oval in shape, crinkled in the alligator-equivalent of a fearful grimace.
Pinkie was turning blue. She wouldn’t stop talking, although Maud suspected she was actually physically incapable of doing so. Such excitement would require extreme measures to manage, measures which Maud hadn’t utilised for several years.
Maud nosed about inside her saddlebags for her trusty flask of smelling salts. Other ponies could silence even the most ridiculous of Pinkie’s rants with a harsh word but Maud had never been able to rebuke Pinkie with anything near the required severity. She’d tried cold water when they were younger but that tended to make Pinkie believe a water fight was in order. Eventually, Maud had settled upon smelling salts as an unpleasant but necessary weapon in her arsenal.
She held the flask under Pinkie’s muzzle in one hoof and flicked the cap off with the other hoof in time with a quick hop. She was well-practised in this manoeuvre.
Pinkie inhaled reflexively. Maud swiftly removed the flask. Pinkie fell quiet. Maud watched her carefully for signs that the smelling salts had inflicted some damage. Pinkie coughed lightly but seemed otherwise unharmed. Her pupils remained huge however, rapidly flicking around the room.
“We have to get ready for the Gala,” Maud said, hoping that the process would constructively channel some of Pinkie’s frenetic energy.
Pinkie turned those huge black pupils on her sister, grinning widely. “The Gala!” she erupted and then she squealed something in a tone of unintelligible joy.
Maud watched fretfully as Pinkie began to gambol around the shop, babbling incoherently. Never before had she recovered from the use of smelling salts so quickly. But given the sheer number of empty boxes scattered across the floor, perhaps she had never subjected herself to such a catastrophic sugar-rush before either.
Maud silently picked Gummy up. He blinked pleadingly at her and then attached himself to the bottom of her mane with a snap. Maud flipped the sign in the window to read CLOSED instead of OPEN, perhaps needlessly since nopony had even dared to approach Sugarcube Corner ever since Pinkie’s mania reached unusually audible levels. Better safe than sorry.
“I need to get changed into my dress,” Maud said. She walked towards the stairs.
A pink blur overtook her. A noise that had more in common with a banshee’s screech than with the phrase, “COME ON!” jumped inside Maud’s ears and rattled around her skull a few times before burrowing into a place right behind her eyes, where it began to throb gently.
Maud blinked slowly. Then she took a pair of earmuffs out of her saddlebags and put them on.
“CAKES! CAKES!” Pinkie screamed in pleasure.
“What in Equestria happened in here, Pinkie?” Maud heard Mrs. Cake exclaim. Maud glanced at Gummy, who looked back at her with a lack of expression that meant that while he sympathised he was grateful he didn’t have any obligation to explain Pinkie Pie’s behaviour. Maud patted his head before she trotted downstairs.
“Now, honeybun, I-I’m sure Pinkie Pie has a good reason for a-all this mess,” Mr. Cake said. He sounded nervous, although he obviously also wanted the presence of numerous empty bakery boxes explained to him.
“CAKES!” Pinkie Pie squealed again.
Maud entered the shop floor of the bakery. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Cake,” she said.
Maud’s sister was grinning at her adopted family with unnerving joy. Random spasms rippled through her body. Her heavy breathing made it sound as though she was having some sort of emotive attack. No wonder both Mr. and Mrs. Cake looked anxious.
“O-oh, Maud, dearie,” Mrs. Cake started with a strained smile, ears flat against her head. “I don’t suppose you could tell us what’s gone on this afternoon, could you?”
Maud considered what would be the best way to explain. She settled on doing so simply, of course. “Pinkie ate a lot of cake,” she said.
The Cakes couldn’t know that Maud was worried, as they couldn’t interpret the intonation of her voice - which was so subtle it was imperceptible to them - but it didn’t matter as they shared a look and then started silently counting the boxes on the floor of the bakery. Their expressions grew more alarmed with each passing second.
They looked at Pinkie Pie. Her eyeballs were quivering.
“She’s been like this for over an hour at least,” Maud commented.
Mr. Cake began trotting on the spot, sweat beading on his brow. “A-an hour,” he repeated. “Honeybun, she’s eaten almost forty boxes of our best cakes! What are we going to do?”
Maud wasn’t sure exactly whether it was the loss of so many cakes or Pinkie’s manic shivering that distressed him the most.
Pinkie’s face contorted as the dam broke. She had been trying to control herself for the Cakes’ sake, but there was too much energy to contain. “Forty boxes of CAKES!” she squealed. Like a pinball propelled by a spring she rocketed off the ground, rebounding off any object in her path. “THAT’SGOTTABESOMEKINDOFRECORD—”
Maud heard another dog start howling as Pinkie’s voice once again ascended into the stratosphere.
The Cakes cowered against one another for a few seconds. “I think I have an idea, dear!” Mrs. Cake cried.
“I’m all ears, darling!” he gasped as Pinkie flew by, giggling madly. Mrs. Cake whispered something in her husband’s ear and he darted up the stairs quickly.
Maud was intrigued.
“P-Pinkie Pie!” Mrs. Cake raised her voice and though it trembled, it carried an undeniable maternal sternness. Pinkie dropped out of the air like a stone. She stared up at Mrs. Cake with wild eyes. Maud hoped Mrs. Cake had managed to break the sugar’s hold on her sister, but then Pinkie’s left hind leg twitched violently; no such luck.
“Don’t you have to get to the Grand Galloping Gala?” Mrs. Cake asked. The query seemed incongruous but Maud trusted that the ponies who had let Pinkie live in their house for so long also had some decent experience in handling the singular Pinkamena Diane Pie.
“The Gala!” Pinkie gasped, nodding so fast her head became a blur.
“If you leave now, you’ll be in Canterlot with plenty of time to get ready,” Mrs. Cake said. “And the run will give you a chance to work off some of your energy.”
Pinkie twisted on the floor, eyes zeroing in on the clock on the wall. Maud’s gaze flicked from Pinkie to Mrs. Cake. She was puzzled.
Mrs. Cake actually dared to reach out and stroke Pinkie’s mane. Pinkie purred in delight. “You wouldn’t want to miss the biggest party in all of Equestria, would you?” Mrs. Cake said kindly.
“OF COURSE NOT!” Pinkie shrieked, temporarily deafening Mrs. Cake. She leapt up.
Mr. Cake came back downstairs with Pinkie’s saddlebags and a large box attachment. “Now, now, Pinkie,” he chided, “you can’t leave without your dress.”
Maud actively frowned. It wasn’t time to leave for the Gala just yet, although she imagined Pinkie’s friends would be along in their carriage any minute now, which could be problematic since she hadn’t decided what to do with regards to Pinkie’s sugar-induced insanity.
Pinkie bounded over to Mr. Cake. “OHMYGOSHTHANKYOUSOMUCH!” she gushed. Her hooves jittered so much that she struggled to tie the saddlebags to her haunches properly. Mr. Cake helped her to fasten the straps.
“What are you doing, Pinkie?” Maud asked.
“Maudthere’stoomuchsugarIgottarunitofforI’llmakeafoalofmyselfattheGalalikeIdidlastimeIgottagoI’llseeyouthereIloveyouImissyoubye!” Pinkie garbled.
“Pinkie—” Maud started, too late.
Pinkie launched herself at the door of Sugarcube Corner with a loud whoop. Maud cantered to the window in time to see a pink blur whizz down the street and into the fields beyond Ponyville, heading in the direction of Canterlot.
Surely Pinkie couldn’t run all the way to the Grand Galloping Gala. That was madness. Maud thoughtfully looked at Mrs. Cake, who smiled bashfully and then turned to her husband, murmuring something about cleaning up before fetching the twins from their foalsitter.
Maud looked back out of the window. A trail of pink clouds had formed in the wake of her cake-fuelled sister’s headlong dash for the capital. It had drawn the attention of several ponies on the street. One Pegasus flew over the trail, inspecting it, and her light wingbeats disturbed the clouds. Apparently amused, the grey mare tried to land on the clouds, and succeeded. She bounced up and down a couple of times, grinning happily.
Maud couldn’t see anything that specifically indicated where Pinkie Pie was. However, she could see a vaguely pink smudge heading towards the horizon.
On second thought, perhaps her sister could gallop all the way to the biggest party of the year. That would be a story Pinkie would enjoy telling over and over, and very apt for her character. Madness it was; but nopony thought Maud’s beloved sister was entirely sane anyway.
“Maud!”
Maud wasn’t sure if she had ever been happier to see Pinkie. Her sister’s friends were tolerable, but they were by no means the ponies she wanted to spend her evening with. She slung her foreleg around Pinkie’s shoulders as Pinkie bounced over and embraced her in a jubilant hug.
“Pinkie, are you okay?” Maud asked.
“I’m super,” Pinkie said. She grinned, and she didn’t spasm involuntarily afterwards. “I’m sorry I had to leave you to come here in the carriage by yourself with my friends. But I had to get rid of my sugar-rush somehow, and Mrs. Cake was right: rushing here was the best way to do it.” She closed her eyes and sighed happily. “I doubt I’ll ever eat forty of the Cakes’ best cakes again, but wow-ee, it was fun!
“And hey!” she added. “Making that cloud trail was really fun too! I wonder if this is how Rainbow Dash feels all the time.” She waved her hoof at a vaguely pink trail of mist extending along the path towards Canterlot castle. “Can you see it? Do you like it?”
“Yes,” Maud said matter-of-factly. She didn’t smile outwardly. But they both knew that she was smiling on the inside.
“Wanna get some cake?” Pinkie asked, grinning.
Maud blinked. No other pony would have known what it meant, or that it meant anything at all. But Pinkie giggled at her sister’s joke. “You’re such a riot!” she gushed. “Come on, let’s go. I can’t wait to show you around the castle…”