Costume Catastrophe

by PrincessEnchanteDream

Cheerilee

Cheerilee flipped through the pages of the book as she revised the course for her upcoming class. It was the weekend and as a teacher, she felt it was better to be prepared in advance for the classes on Monday.

She nodded thoughtfully at the current chapter. ‘Learning all about Flora and Fauna.’

Cheerilee then decided to make the lesson more interesting by using some practical examples. And for that, she needed to pay a visit to the local garden.

She picked up a bag to collect the samples in, and then locked the house behind her. The garden was only a short walking distance from her house, and she needn't not use her car.

Cheerilee smiled as she reached the park. It was so calm and peaceful, who wouldn't want to come here? She carefully plucked a few leaves and some flowers, satisfied these would be enough. As she went to pick one last flower, she was startled by a screech that rang out around.

Nearby other people also looked around, some alarmed and some curious. A few had questions, and that was soon answered.

"LOOK!", someone screamed, pointing in the air. "What on earth is that?"

Indeed, there were strange blue and golden sparks flying around, and now some people, terrified, had started to flee the place. The balls then hit some, but nothing seemed to happen.

For a fleeting moment, Cheerilee wondered if that might be Equestrian magic.

Before she could think it over, a bright ball of light came rushing towards her and hit into her.

"Oof," Cheerilee groaned, stumbling back from the impact.

Cheerilee was getting a very strange sense of deja vu. When the blast of light had hit her, she couldn't help but feel something like this had happened before, and as she looked around more of those strange particles danced through the sky, the result being surprisingly beautiful. Or rather it would have been were it not for the strange circumstances and the fact that more of those large objects were flying around.

Not that it helped that Cheerilee was beginning to feel a bit off. Something seemed to be squeezing her feet, and as she looked down she noticed her brown boots seemed to be shrinking. She frowned. The lime green protector fabric, meant to stop the boots from rubbing against her legs, vanished, and the green laces holding the boots on unravelled and shifted, eventually moving away from the boot completely and flying into the ether, completely uninhibited and never to be seen again.

What remained of her boots turned green, and before long they began to shrink down her legs, gradually getting shorter and shorter. They descended down her lower legs, past the back of her lower leg, and finally stopped just above her heel. The tops of her now shoes then opened up to the elements, revealing her socks, and the rear heel increased in incline as it did so, pushing Cheerilee up slightly. Her shoes then turned entirely green, putting her in a pair of green heels.

Cheerilee sighed with irritation when she realized where this was going. She remembered where she had seen this before, about a year or two ago when she'd been out shopping for school supplies. Some cold and metallic attached into place around her waist, and as a metal frame emerged from underneath her skirt and descended towards the ground, she shook her head and sighed. "Oh not again."

The frame eventually reached the ground and stopped, leaving Cheerilee looking very silly indeed. Thankfully, fate had no intention of leaving her looking so ridiculous, so a cream colored skirt also flowed down from inside her... skirt, and grew to the floor to cover up the frame and help keep the shape right. This was then followed by another to eliminate the 'lumpy' texture only a single skirt over a metal frame would produce. And we wouldn't want Miss Cheerilee wearing a lumpy skirt, would we? That would be most undignified.

As she tried to figure out what would happen next, the outer skirt, the original skirt she had been wearing, turned a lighter shade of green than normal, and the flower patterns that covered it faded away until there was no trace they had ever been there. Moments later, it glowed briefly, and then began to grow. It lazily drifted down the other skirts she was wearing and stopped shortly before the floor. Moments after that, there was another bright flash, and with a groan the skirts began to expand in width.

Cheerilee had seen some weird things in her times as a teacher as Canterlot High (including her own clothes being changed into replicas of the sort of things she wore in her college days), but a skirt growing in width had to be the most ridiculous thing to have happened to her personally. Having said that, she was very relieved when it slowed down, having expanded across the ground very rapidly and moved leaves and other objects away from her. It stopped expanding at about four feet in width, she estimated, which left her very glad. She knew how big these things could get, and was thankful hers would not be one of them.

A line of ruffled fabric ran across the halfway point of the skirt, and another formed at the bottom of the hem as an extra section of fabric flowed down and reached the ground. The area in between turned into three tiers of ruffled fabric, giving it the appearance of a layer cake.

Now it was the turn of her shirt and vest to change. The vest started off by simply vanishing into thin air, never to be seen again. Her shirt, on the other hand, was here to stay. The collar sank back into her shirt, which then turned green, same shade as her skirt. The sleeves pulled back slightly to reveal more of her upper arms, whilst the neckline dropped considerably at the front and the back. The sleeves puffed up slightly, and ruffled fabric ran round the front and back of the neckline. The buttons vanished from the shirt, but thankfully the magic stitched the shirt up as a bodice, before using the fabric from the vest to attach the shirt to Cheerilee's skirt. A ruffled section of fabric emerged from the bottom of the bodice to more cleanly mark the transition from it to the skirt.

More green fabric with ruffles on it flowed out of the front of her bodice and flowed down to the previously mentioned line, whilst at the back similar fabric grew down to the bottom of the skirt and stopped, with a ridge section around her sides.

Cheerilee picked the skirt up to examine the engineering. "Hmm," she said to herself. "If I can keep this, it would certainly make a handy teaching tool!"

"Hello Miss Cheerilee!" called three voices. She glanced up to see Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and Apple Bloom approaching, all of whom were done up in a similar level of finery.

"Hello Apple Bloom! What brings you three here? And why are you dressed up to the nines?"

"Rarity's magic is transforming everybody's clothes," Apple Bloom quickly explained. "Me, Sweetie Belle, an' Scootaloo are going round to see if anybody needs help."

Cheerilee sighed, resisting the urge to correct Apple Bloom's grammar. "Not again. Well, as you can see they already got to me. And here I am, trying to collect samples and looking like I escaped from Gone with the Wind."

Apple Bloom looked closely. "Hey, that dress looks familiar. Isn't it in one of our textbooks as an illustration?"

Cheerilee had a brainwave. She quickly went indoors, her skirts rustling and swaying as she went along, and emerged outdoors again after a few moments. "Here it is! Page 132, absolutely right. By some strange coincidence, I was looking at those pages whilst writing a lesson plan this morning."

Apple Bloom spoke up. "Does this mean people can subconsciously influence their clothes changin'? That, or the magic just has a really weird sense of humor."

"You say this is happening to everybody, right?" Cheerilee asked. When the girls nodded, she continued. "Then I can't stand around here in my garden." She went through the gate, her skirt giving her about an inch to spare, and closed it, having already locked her house. "I'll join you and help out."

"I don't mean to be rude, Miss Cheerilee, but are you sure you can keep up?"

"I'm only in a big dress, not immobile," Cheerilee replied. "Besides, I wore these things during the brief period I was a reenactor, so I know how to walk in them."

The pair set off on their mission, keeping a close eye out for anybody who was potentially in trouble or affected by strange magic. They wouldn't have to look far.........

Author's Note:

Here's Cheerilee-

Art belongs to Fude-Chan-Art at https://www.deviantart.com/fude-chan-art/art/RQ-MLP-FiM-EQG-Cheerilee-888971645

Comments

[Celesticane]

I admit I didn't immediately think of Cheerilee when it comes to dress-up antics, but that 'sigh here we go again' attitude was fun~ My personal favorite touch of this chapter, though, has to be that detail of the possibility a person could subconsciously influence what they'd end up dressed into from the spell-- well, either that or the influence of their counterparts on the other side of the mirror, hence why Celestia and Luna both took on some of the same regalia of their alicorn counterparts on the other side as opposed to something that just emulated the other, yeah?

[PrincessEnchanteDream]

10951765
Yup.
You're absolutely correct!