Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

Clockworkkkkk

"How did you do that?"

The stallion took another sip of soup. "Are you sure you don't want any?"

Twilight's clone stared at him. "How did you do that?" she asked again, louder.

"Well, I just solved the puzzle." Another sip. "Are you really sure you don't want some? There's not much left."

The alicorn levitated a small sphere of fluid from the bowl to her mouth and swallowed it. It tasted remarkably good. "What do you mean?"

"Well, when you empty the bowl-"

"The other thing." She just barely didn't yell that. "What puzzle? How did it work?"

"I already told you." The stallion began to lick away the last traces of soup from the bowl. "There was that lever, and the buttons, and-" His mouth was shut closed by Twilight's clone's magic.

The alicorn turned to the space between the stump of wood and the pebbles. A wave of energy pulsed out from her horn and washed over the clearing. Her eyebrows twitched. Her telekinesis tore holes and trenches in the ground. She ripped the grass away, she levitated the pebbles, she moved away sod after sod with increasingly frantic and violent jerks of her magic. Gritting her teeth she turned back towards the stallion, lifted him and the bowl away from the ground, then eradicated the tree stump and stared first at its roots, then at the hole it had left. Then she growled and shoved everything back where she'd lifted it from, and moved to plant her head against the trunk of the nearest tree.

The stallion finished his soup, and then approached the sulking alicorn. "Are you okay?" he asked her, walking to her side and looking with worry at the way her horn dug into the bark of the tree.

"No," answered the other in a low, raspy tone. "No, I am not okay right now."

The stallion gave her an affectionate pat on the shoulder. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Stab your neck on a branch so I can take apart your body to study you and put you back together without anyone noticing I did it."

The stallion looked perplexed for a moment. Then he smiled and chuckled. "Oh, it was a joke. I like jokes. I get jokes, yes. I don't make jokes often but I get humour. I understand it. It was an entertaining joke."

Twilight's clone had to resist the desire to rip the tree she was leaning against from its roots and impale the stallion herself. "How?" she asked, more of a hiss than anything else. "None of it makes any sense. How did you do that? How did you get it to work?" She turned towards the stallion, barking in his face. "How did you get the stump to open up like that? Where did the bowl and the soup even come from? How?"

The stallion blinked once, his expression serene. "I solved the puzzle."

Twilight's clone screamed her rage towards the sky, startling quite a few birds in the area.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Yeah, that's a Twilight alright. A better question might be "Where did the puzzle come from?"

[WanderingPony]

This clone has not experienced the true Ponk.

It is reacting precisely as well as could be expected.

[Saix]

The alicorn levitated a small sphere of fluid from the bowl to her mouth and swallowed it. It tasted remarkably good. "What do you mean?"

Not sure I'd swallow something that some random guy who I thought was insane inexplicably summoned out of a tree to be honest. Maybe the sight of the tree soup already drove her insane.