Step 1
As you can probably guess, as soon as Pinkie Pie heard there needed to be a party there was one. A huge one, at that. I lost pretty much the entire day to it, and after everypony left the castle I finally got to talk to Princess Twilight.
She was pushing a broom around with her magic, humming some kind of tune under her breath. "Princess Twilight?" No matter how many times she asked me, I still couldn't bring myself not to use her title.
"Apple Bloom, how many times have I told you, just call me Twilight." Her tone held both humor and a little hint of weariness.
"Well, if you call me Bloom, I'll call you Twilight. Deal?" I held out my hoof, and caught real surprise in Twilight's expression as she clopped her own hoof against mine. "Got nothin' to do with my family, my new mentor calls me that, and Ah—Ah think it fits me."
Twilight tapped her chin with a hoof and nodded. "It does have a certain ring of harmony to it, for a herbalist. Okay, Bloom,"—I could see her mentally tasting the name—"I think you have a question for me, or you would probably be visiting your family."
"Yeah, it's about a little problem I have. You could say an aspect of my work is leaving a sour taste in my mouth." I suddenly realized how much Joker had been having an effect on me. Lifting one hoof up, I tried to hide my giggle.
"A sour taste in your mouth? Why's that?" Twilight straight reply made me giggle more, but I managed to make my way to where the last of Pinkie Pie's cupcakes were.
"Watch." I picked up a cupcake, the most wonderful of scents pouring off it. I knew exactly what it tasted like, it would be the most amazing, moist, sweet, and delicate of foods. The moment I put it into my mouth and took a bite, however, the cupcake became a rather sizable lemon. I looked at Twilight, chewing the bite I had taken and swallowing it down.
"What just happened? How did it turn into a lemon?" Twilight stared at me, and to my surprise plucked the bulk of the lemon from my hoof and floated it closer to her in her magic. "I can't feel any magic here, and it doesn't seem like a spell, even if you could cast one."
I sighed. "It's because—"
"It isn't like it's something Discord did." Twilight's magic turned a murky black for a moment, then was her regular purple again. "And it isn't shadow magic."
"That's because—"
Twilight, predictably, cut in on me again. "I will need to study this more. There is no telling what is at work that could turn—"
"Twilight!" My shout, loud enough to actually get a particular Princess' attention, echoed around the castle. "It's because of poison joke. This is what it does to me." I finally had her attention, and I could see dawning realization setting in. "The thing is, I need—"
I didn't expect the Princess to reach out to me and teleport us both to the Royal Bathroom. She levitated up a bottle of shampoo and was about to dump it in the bath. "I have just the thing!"
"Wait!" I backed away from Twilight. "Please don't waste that, I know how hard it is to make." I raised a hoof and grabbed at the bottle, plucking it from the purple magic field it was floating in, and sealed it back up. "I need to be affected like this for my job."
Twilight's look mirrored what mine was like when I first asked about it. "I don't understand. Why would you need to turn things into lemons?" Her confusion was evident in her words, tone, and expression.
"It has to do with what we do. Most of our work is growing and tending to rare and sometimes dangerous herbs." I tried to explain as best I could. "And the one that is only purchasable from one farm in Equestria is poison joke. It's Joker's farm."
"Hold on. You mean to say that when anypony needs to buy poison joke, they buy it from Joker? I thought he just grew a few herbs…" Twilight walked away from her apparently forgotten tub, and led the way out of her bathroom. "Wait, so if you needed to have something so mild as your poison joke… joke, wouldn't it have been bad if you had something like your sister?"
"Yeah. That was a bit nerve wracking. And if you think this is mild—well, try eating lemons every day for a week." I followed the Princess through her bedroom and into the castle's library. I stared agog at all the books, and couldn't help but think how many of Twilight's former libraries could fit in its place. "Wow…"
"You came to me for a reason, and it isn't to cure the joke." Twilight gestured to her library. "All my knowledge is yours, Bloom, but if you tell me what you want I can help get you started."
"Joker said that I'm meant to find a way to make it easier to live with the joke." I scuffed a hoof on the floor without thinking. "So either I need to find some way to bypass it, maybe something that it doesn't affect, or I can try to make it so lemons don't taste so bad."
"Are they really that bad?" I only had to give Princess Twilight a single look to quell that line of reasoning. I could see her get my message and continue. "Is there anything that doesn't turn into a lemon?"
The question surprised me, and I started to mull it over. "Well, everything from acorns to cupcakes." I shrugged. "I started collecting pine cones and acorns, if I'm going to be turning things into lemons, I didn't want to waste food."
Twilight looked around, and I saw her horn flash with magic. A single pea floated between us. Opening my mouth, I let Twilight feed it to me. The moment the tiny legume was in my mouth I got the bitter taste of lemon. I shook my head.
"It's getting repetitive again." I looked at Apple Bloom. Spending months as a plant gave one a great appreciation for time, and how much most ponies waste it. "What did you end up finding out from Princess Twilight?"
"Ah'm gettin' to that!" Apple Bloom's exclamation, loud as it was, didn't phase me in the least. "Where was I?"
"You were just getting to the point." I couldn't help myself. "But if you must know, the Princess was testing out various sizes of items."
"That's right!" Apple Bloom grinned.
I watched the Princess of Friendship writing furiously. There was lemons all around us, dozens of them. It was bad enough I had to eat them, but now I apparently had to fraternize with them too. "Are we done?"
"Of course not!" Twilight, I had found out, had an inexhaustible amount of energy when it came to baffling problems. "I wonder, have you tried eating an actual lemon?"
The question stumped me. I just hadn't considered eating an actual lemon. My look of surprise and confusion must have tipped Twilight Sparkle off that I hadn't actually tried it. I watched her horn flash, again, and this time an actual lemon floated before me. I looked up at Twilight and groaned.
Taking a bite of the offered, yellow fruit, I blinked in surprise. "That isn't so bad."
"It doesn't taste like a lemon?" Twilight's excitement was overflowing.
I bit off another pieces and kept chewing. "No, it still tastes like a horrible, sour mess. But now it tastes like a really well grown horrible, sour mess. Of all the lemons I have eaten, this is the least horrible."
Twilight stood in surprise, and watched me eat the whole thing. When it was done, I actually licked my lips clean. "I could swear you look like you enjoyed it." Her accusation made me think for a bit.
"I guess I did? If you had to eat lemons for a week, most of them coming from pinecones and acorns, you might appreciate something actually grown, too." I kept licking my lips, the taste of the lemon nowhere near as jarring as most I had been eating.
"Okay then, next we will try some specific tricks…" Twilight's voice sounded no less eager to explore experimentation, and I could do nothing but sigh in response. She lifted down a huge tome from the shelves, and opened it up. "First, Melachio's Magic reMover."
"Okay. Even I admit it gets boring here." While Apple Bloom spoke, she pulled out another acorn and bit it, and was soon munching another lemon. "Do you want the long story, or the short story?"
"Look," I said. "I am invested now. I want to know what you learned from the Princess that helps you…" I gestured at her calmly eating a lemon.
"Oh? Would you like one?" She offered me half of the horrible yellow ball of death. Though I took a step back, she approached me, waving the lemon before her. "Come on, Joker, just a bite?"
"Just tell your story!" The moment I relented she popped the uneaten lemon in her mouth, and chewed it up as if it were the sweetest apple.
Twilight mixed the fine powder with the contents of a grape. It took a few moments for the sparkling powder to mix completely. When she was done, she levitated a drop of it up and floated it towards me. "This should do the trick."
The moment the globule touched my tongue, unlike the dozen other tests before it, I tasted… nothing. Blinking, I looked at the Princess. "I don't taste anything? Is that right?"
"Well, it hasn't turned the grape juice into lemon juice." Twilight's wings flew up in excitement, and it was an easily catching emotion. "If you can find something to counter the taste of the lemons, we can use this powder to stop it becoming a lemon itself."
"Yee haw!" I kicked my hooves in the air. "It's a shame the other ideas didn't work." In the midst of my celebrating, I glanced aside to the pile of lemons, and one small, potted, lemon tree. "I hope your book turns back like the other things."
While we both looked at the pile of yellow, a pair of acorns popped back into their original shape. The curse undid, it seemed, but it took some time.
"So what are you going to do next?" Twilight sounded like she was ready to teleport me across Equestria if I asked.
Looking at the clock, I smiled. "Ah think Ah'm gonna go visit my family."
"Stop!" I yelled. "Before we go any further I need to eat." The hungers of a plant were not those of a pony, and I was pony again, which meant I needed my stomach filled.
"You don't look like you need anything." Apple Bloom pointed a hoof at my swollen midsection.
Rolling my eyes, I shook my head. "Those are seeds. I don't need to lay them for a while. Maybe another full day or two." I used a hoof to gently rub my belly, and felt the tightness of my flesh over the seeds. "You can tell me more in the morning, anyway."
Apple Bloom shrugged. "Next up is Zecora. I went to her for information. If anypony but you knew what I wanted, it was going to be her." She looked so smug, of course, because she had found a solution.
It pinched at a place inside to know she had solved her problem, and wouldn't just tell me. "What did Zecora say?" I began to prepare dinner, lifting a large wok onto the stove, and tipping in some oil.
"Well, as I was leaving home the next morning…" I groaned as Apple Bloom started her next story almost right at the boring bit.
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Something like this might help Synsepalum dulcificum
At least to change the taste :>
Lol. Just..... This chapter was too funny...
If you can't change the lemon, sometimes you have to change yourself...
We wonder what else lemons are good for, even if they're sour. Applebloom could create a dangerous shift in lemoneering!
To Joker: is the an suspense killing you?
Keep going! ;)
8456552
I hear they're easily made into explosives?
8456552
Explosions, of course! Just ask Cave Johnson!