Cast-Iron Cast-Offs

by Cast-Iron Caryatid

【Standalone】 Twilight Velvet and the Picky Princesses (Thanksgiving 2014)

Author's Note:

There's no real story to how this came about. It was a random, fun idea I came up with a few days before Thanksgiving.

• The original blog post

WARNING
For the purpose of this silly little thing, ponies eat meat and have thanksgiving. Deal with it.

* * *

Thanksgiving dinner at the Sparkle household was interrupted by a sharp orange glow and a sound like tortured souls on their way to Tartarus.

“What was that?” Twilight Velvet snapped, perhaps a little harsher than warranted. The day had been long, and magic somehow did not make it easier to have everything done at the same time. Of course, the Sparkle household’s requirements for this were, perhaps, several orders of magnitude higher than average, so this might have been a rather biased conclusion.

Twilight sighed as she scooted items around on her plate with a fork. “Nothing mom,” she responded in that particular whine a child gets when answering in rote. “Just eating my green beans.”

“Do not lie to me, Twilight Sparkle,” the elder Twilight said, giving her daughter a chilling glare from across the table. “I can see them plainly still on your plate.”

“I consumed their magical essence,” she clarified with a particularly vexing roll of her eyes. “It’s the same thing.”

Twilight Velvet was unamused. “You will consume their physical essence, or so help me, you will have no pumpkin pie tonight.”

“What?” Twilight Sparkle balked and looked down at her plate as if it had grown legs and crawled onto her chest. “But look at it! You can’t make me eat this! It’s a dry, withered husk!”

Twilight Velvet’s nose rose ever so slightly. “The dry, withered husk is the best part for you, Twilight,” she told her daughter.

Twilight Sparkle began to look sick as she contemplated capitulation. “But it’s the part I don’t like!”

“My food, my rules, Twilight,” Twilight Velvet answered, and that was that.

Twilight Sparkle was about to protest that eating such a thing was surely not healthy, when she was distracted by a hiss and a green glow from across the table. Everypony present turned to look at Cadence.

Twilight Velvet frowned at Cadance’s plate as the lingering wisps of dark magic left her eyes and horn, but everything appeared normal. “What did you do.”

“Nothing! Nothing!” Cadance said, waving her hooves in front of her, feigning innocence. “I just… you always forget that I like the dark meat.” Under closer inspection, she appeared to have transmuted her breast meat into exactly that. Truly, this was dark magic indeed.

Twilight Velvet took a breath as if to say something, but failed to come up with anything. She settled for grumbling something about ungrateful children, when the cozy candlelit scene was lit up like the dawn itself, and a lingering fizz and crackle silenced everyone once again. Somehow, Princess Celestia had combined cornbread, butter and the fires of the sun to approximate some form of deep-fried poultry.

Everypony stared, but none said anything as one of the reigning diarchs bit into her meal with a satisfying juicy crunch, and all eyes shifted expectantly to the other one.

“What?” Luna asked, appearing completely and utterly normal and doing her best to maintain the illusion. Eventually, Twilight Velvet decided that one princess, at least, had maintained some semblance of the manners that had been instilled upon her a thousand years ago.

At least, that is, until Twilight Sparkle grabbed the wrong glass, and was left gasping and coughing in the wake of the burning it left in her throat. “Luna…! Tell me this isn’t…? Moonshine?!”

Quickly, the princess of the night swiped her glass back from Twilight Sparkle and drained it in one go. “You have no proof,” she insisted, though the alcohol on her breath and the blush on her cheeks said differently.

The other three princesses looked at their plates, and each others’ plates—Twilight’s dry, withered grean beans, Cadance’s dark breast meat, Celestia’s fried turkey and Luna’s glass of moonshine. All at once, they came to a consensus.

“You win.”

Comments

[AppleTank]

um. Well, you know, manners are overrated.

[djthomp]

Cadance is so correct, dark meat > white meat.

Then again, whatever Celestia came up with sounds pretty good.

[Prawo Jazdy]

Who's Cadance? I mean, there's certainly one in show canon, but it's confusing that she'd show up here.

[Cast-Iron Caryatid]

6448511
The title of each one shot specifies whether or not they are based on Sharing the Night or not. This one is just a standalone one-shot, and so uses the show canon.