Strawberry Time: A RariTwi Exquisite Corpse

by SigmasonicX

5. Five Against the Strawberry Menace (Cynewulf)

Perhaps she existed as an echo in the back of Night Glider’s mind, like a kind of psycho-thaumic echo. Perhaps it was just imagination, running parallel and unchecked, unnoticed in the fading adrenaline rush of confrontation somewhere in Trixie’s mind. Perhaps she was in between the pages of the book in A.K. Yearling’s head. Perhaps she was safe in the folds of covers and comforters of Rarity’s soft bed. Perhaps she was still in her own head—Twilight knew nothing and understood less, for something was coming over her.

Life! She’d made life! Maybe! The horrible gelatinous strawberry horrors were alive and maybe even sapient, and she’d made them! Independent of her own will, they could do… anything! Currently, they were invading her beloved town, but they could do a lot of other things, potentially.

“I think,” she said thickly, her head throbbing with the pain of revelation (and also head trauma from a previous misadventure), “I think if I think too much about what magic is and how it works, I think I will go mad with horror. I don’t want to be an emmanetized exemplar of godlike power.”

Rarity whined. “Night Glider, did you have to mention the strawberry thing stopping when it looked at you? I know we’re kind of banking on it potentially being alive and able to reason, or whatever, but… She’s saying horrid things!”

Trixie grunted and shifted her magical hold on the now floating form of Twilight. “The Great and Overencumbered Trixie does not appreciate the Princess’ eldritch grumblings. How long until we reach this library?”

“It’s just around the, uh, the…” Night Glider stopped dead in her tracks, dismayed.

The castle at the heart of Ponyville was under siege. Strawberry blobs writhed and oozed all over it, blocking the windows and doors, as if they could absorb the very walls and bring the whole structure down if they tried hard enough. She swallowed. “It’s under all that,” she finished.

“For crying out loud!” Yearling threw up her hooves. “The whole town is frozen, the princess is on cloud cuckoo-land, only two of us can fight, we need to get into those books to find out what happened to the damn spell! ARGH!”

Night Glider scooted back, dismayed and a little ashamed. She’d tried! She would have had that last one too, if she hadn’t have slipped at just the last moment…

Yearling took a deep breath and looked over at her apologetically. “Sorry. We need cool heads right now.” She looked to the others. “Alright, let’s set the princess down and think. Any ideas?”

Around her the world spun. The world tilted sharpish on a precarious axis, it hung over a roiling abyss. What exactly was magic and how did it work? What had robbed her weaving of its intention? What exactly did Celestia keep in that one closet on the twenty ninth floor, right wing, eighteenth door from the stairwell, the red and green doored one with the golden filigree and the writing she found no other version of which hurt to look at? Why were there two Rarities until she squinted her eyes hard and her brain hurt more?

The only thing that made sense as her friends squabbled was the shadowy presence watching from the roof of the Quills And Sofas And Hardhats store with its lambent eyes and skulking. That made a lot of sense. Of course someone else was here, that was reasonable. Twilight was a creature who lived inside of a world constructed by weaves of understandable logicks, and one of them was the mid-act turn, wherein the status quo was interrupted by an unforeseen happening or personage, and she accepted this because she had to, and because she had a concussion, probably.

“...That’s not a bad idea, Trixie,” Yearling said grudgingly. “They’ve been mostly aggressive so far towards anything loud and moving.”

“The Great and Superfluous Trixie is good at both Loudness and at Velocity!”

Twilight swallowed and said with a bit of a lilt, “I don’t think you’re superfluous, Trixie. You’re a very skilled pony.”

“I think she thinks that word means something else, dear,” Rarity said, and patted her marefriend’s mane while giving them all a worried look. “That would leave me pulling Twilight’s weight on my own. I’m not sure if I can make it across the square as fast without Trixie.”

“Then we’ll carry her without magic,” Night Glider cut in. “I can do that, I know I can.”

Life from Magic wasn’t unheard of, but did that make it normal? Twilight’s mind was in a thousand pieces on the rocks of an alien reality beneath her own. She had studied magic, but had she ever considered that absolutely none of it made a lick of academic sense? It had seemed so reasonable and systematic and understandable before, and now she— (Wait, Trixie asked, what does superfluous mean then?)—wasn’t sure, what did anything mean? Except for the menacing, yet promising spectre that had crossed over to the Flower Trio’s Flower Emporium and slipped slightly as it ducked under the attack of one of the strawberry jam oozes and flew (Jumped?) onto the Ponyville Non-Quill Stationary Station, because that made sense and she understood the significance of that. But magic was just, bullshit, honestly, she had no idea what was up with that. Why was she making strawberry jam monsters? Whose idea was that? How the—

“Alright, girls,” Yearling said, a hint of steel in her voice. “One push and we’re in, and we figure out what went wrong, and we solve this, and Night Glider and I get back to doing what we were doing, which I cannot stress enough, was going to be romantic and definitely planned well.”

“I didn’t expect anything elsewise,” Night Glider said, encouragingly. “Though, I mean, improvising a date isn’t that bad.”

“Oh, completely,” Rarity agreed.

“What matters is getting to the books.” Yearling said, cutting them both off from further commentary. “No more Jam monsters. On the count of—”

And that was when Twilight, concussion and existential dread and all, looked up and said in a bewildered tone, “Wait, aren’t you going to—” at the same time as the streets erupted in a tide of gelatinous strawberry menace from below.