Princess Equestria and the Eleventeen Fragments of the Friendship Chalice

by GroaningGreyAgony

Tempestuous Troubles

Without further preamble or prologue, Princess Equestria soared into the twilight sky, glittering wings spread, horn piercing the sky, mane coruscating in a keratinous corona, buttocks radiating in the ultraviolet, toned body in full splendor. She thrust effortlessly into the air with powerful strokes of her pinions, causing wingboners in every eligible pegasus she passed. "Sorry," she murmured as they tumbled helplessly to the ground. She couldn't help being ponygod.

What she could help was having to flap her damned wings all the way to the moon. Why not just ride there in style and comfort?

She changed course to the pegasus cloud-city of Nimbrod, touched down on the Alipad without incident, and trotted to the spaceport. Pony society develops on a geometric curve—one year they're harvesting apples by kicking them out of the trees, the next they've got a hydroelectric dam, and now they have interplanetary travel. In a few more seasons their society will reach the Technological Singularity and Princess Equestria will have to knock everyone back to the stone age again before they all become almost as powerful as she is.

The spaceport had a control tower made from leftover cumulus parts that shone with silvery fire in the moonlight. It still looked like a barn. The moon rocket itself was a hastily converted grain silo with wooden fins nailed onto it. Princess Equestria loved grain silos. She remembered a time when she was just a young filly and she and her little second cousin were goofing around in a huge empty grain silo and chugging beers and her cousin had asked "What did they store in here, anyway?" and Equestria had a huge belch building up so she belched the word "GRRRRAIIIIINNNNNN!" in a massive bass vibrato and they both laughed themselves so sick that they puked all over each other. Even now, a thousand years later, Princess Equestria sometimes revisited that very same silo and verified that the epic belch was still echoing around in there. Good times! She grew wistful... There was such a wide gulf now between her and her cousin.

Princess Equestria shook her head sadly and approached the ticket kiosk, which had been a chicken coop in its recent past. It was occupied by a purple pegasus who was buffing her hoof polish with an industrial shoe shiner. She looked up and her wings erected in either a salute or arousal. "I am Mulechicken. The pleasure of assisting you is all mine, Your Highness," she said.

"It is all yours, truly. I need a ticket to the moon, now."

"That will be 20.95 in applecores, Your Highness..."

"Oh dear," Equestria deadpanned. "I seem to have left my wallet in my other etherial mane."

"I'm afraid that there are no exceptions..."

Princess Equestria summoned a frightful sky-occluding thunderhead and showered the spaceport with sleeting rain, gale-force winds, and lightning bolts that reduced the kiosk to a smoking framework of ash.

"...except in your case and here is your ticket and I hope Your Highness will excuse me if I flee in abject terror," she said, leaving a shell of her charred hair behind her as she galloped off.

Equestria took the ticket in her teeth and was headed for the moon rocket when a klaxon clacked on and a tremulous voice rang out, using a furious rooster for a megaphone:

"Attention, all passengers to the moon! There will be a slight delay due to a sudden and unforeseen bout of inclement weather, which has knocked the roof off our moon rocket. Our carpenters assure us that the damage will be repaired in two tales of a shaky lamb. Our first tale is about a cute little wooly fellow named Mintsauce, who was ever so nervous..."

Equestria whuffed in frustration and stomped off. Was this the way life was meant to be—one plot diversion and delay after another? Well... of course she'd meant it to be this way! She was ponygod, after all.

She pulled out her cheap cardboard spinner and gave it a twirl. It made a sound like a Rock-'em Sock'em Robot before pointing to a nightclub called Heart Breaks. Another one? There was a club with that name back in Canterlope...

Rain was falling, soaking the magic spinner. She thrust it back into her saddlebag and trotted off towards the nightclub... only to run smack bang into a dark and mysterious figure! Princess Equestria's bangs smacked her forehead in amazement and concern. The stranger was entirely robed and masked in the pages of a thesaurus, all of which contained synonyms for the words dark, mysterious and sinister, and the pages had also been painted black for good measure.

"Good evening, You Highness. You may refer to me as... Nagbuzzard. Do you seek the nightclub? You shall find nothing there. It is an eclectic blight, orchestrated poorly..."

Equestria glared curiously at the stranger, her horn beginning to emit a deadly glow. "If you just wanted to visit the glue factory, Nagbuzzard, there are easier ways..."

"I understand that tours are available on Wednesdays and Sundays. But stay your horn! I must warn you that there is a dark danger lurking beyond the destruction of the Friendship Chalice... A token that heralds the destruction of Horstralia itself; a foul message of doom... from the end of the world!"

Princess Equestria almost shat herself, then said "Excuse me" and ducked into a nearby dingy blue box that looked like a lavatory. She was about to shit herself in there when it struck her—horses don't use lavatories! What was a lavatory anyway? Why did she even think it was appropriate to shit inside a box instead of in public like a normal pony? And why was this box so much larger on the inside? She shrugged and shat in it anyway.

Imagine her surprise when the feces did not simply vanish in magical perfumed sparkles when it struck the floor, but instead aged rapidly, forming a fossilized coprolith that disintegrated and blew apart into inoffensive dust!

"Ah, hello, Your Highness," said a cultured stallion with a sundial for a dippy mark. "We handle the side products of incessant defecation slightly differently in here, as you can see. I am known as The Docker, and thereby hangs a strange tale, which I will cut short. I will be informed some time ago that you will have been seeking the fragments of the Friendship Chalice. I am here to offer you my assistance in recovering a piece from somewhere else further into the story, if you wish."

Princess Equestria was intrigued—the nightclub was looking less promising by the minute. Still, she mustn't rush into things. "Have you any inclinations whatsoever towards becoming..." She sneered slightly. "...a comic sidekick?"

He shook his head sympathetically. "Never in life, Your Neighness. I can scarcely get rid of them fast enough, myself."

"Then the only objection I can think of is that I must board that moon rocket tonight..."

"If you would care to turn your eyes to this viewscreen, I believe I can assure you that you will, or are."

Equestria saw a blue lavatory materializing upon the launch platform. She saw herself emerging from the box, cheerfully waving goodbye to its occupant, then trotting over to clout Nagbuzzard with two hooves upside the noggin before returning to board the moon rocket in peace and comfort.

She smiled. "In that case, I accept. Please lead the way."

He bowed, then shifted some levers and knobs on a hexagonal platform. The lights went down and up on a transparent column at its center. An enormous rushing noise, as of flushing water, filled the room as the blue box spiraled down and away into the plotstream...

"If you will accompany me, your Horseness, I will give you a brief tour of my time vehicle. Here is the NEWS—Negatively-Entropic-Whithering-System, which as the name implies acts as a multi-dimensional compass. More precisely, it's a polyaxial positioning system—hex phase, of course..."

Princess Equestria's nostrils flared. "...And thaumatically sensitive. You seem to be well outfitted, Docker."

"I'm a twenty-first century man, Your Hayness. Among others." He sniffed the air. "We are about to transgress the boundaries of the present. Please hold on tight..."

The room jiggled like a baby bouncer, with the jiggles growing further and further apart. The sounds in the room dopplered into a low hum and the light redshifted all around them. When time stood still, perfectly still, The Docker (a frozen statue) appeared to wink just once. Then duration sped up again and approached its normal rate. Time stayed as they went.

"Now, when were we? Ah, yes! On this wall, Your Noseness, in a series of black frames, are pictures of all my former comic sideki—companions. Ms. Herringguts, Baldrick, Jewely... Don't live here any more, of course." He brushed aside a very dry tear.

Princess Equestria gave him a measured stare. "I trust that you don't intend to mount my picture on that wall..."

He looked wounded. "I would never so presume, Your Heinous... You can see for yourself—if I had or would, it'd be there now. But you seem very capable of taking care of yourself." He gestured to the control panel. "We'd better get down to business. Have you any specific chapter that you wish to visit?"

She chewed her mane thoughtfully. "Well. Sometimes I wish I was back in 1981..."

"An excellent year, Your Horness. That was when everything began, was it not? I shall set the controls accordingly."

And they went off and had a bunch of adventures and stuff that I don't have to write about right now, thank goodness.

*****

Epilogue:

Princess Equestria settled comfortably into her sackcloth seat aboard the moon rocket, having stowed yet another piece of the Friendship Chalice safely inside her nostril. She had technically found this piece in another chapter in the story, but that would just have to be a problem she dealt with another time.

Now, it was on to the moon, for the ultimate confrontation with her most dark and sinister nemesis! She could hardly contain her excitement, so she didn't.

---

NEXT CHAPTER: Princess Equestria goes to the Moon for real reals this time and encounters her ultimate evil nemesis who has gotten still more ultimate and evil while we were noodling around with other crap. Oh gingersnaps, this is going to be so exciting! Meanwhile, an enormous nose appears from behind a mountain. Whoseever can it be?

Please don't forget to hate my story!

Comments

[The Sweezlenub]

Another chapter!

And it makes even less sense than the ones before it. I'm getting the distinct impression that when it comes to making sense, this story will be something of a downward spiral. But making sense would just slow it down. I love it. Continue!

[GroaningGreyAgony]

1168786

Please don't make me make sense. You wouldn't like me when I make sense.

Thank you for your kind words!

[nemryn]

I am known as The Docker, and thereby hangs a strange tale, which I will cut short.