Chapter 1
Twilight Sparkle had everything she needed. Spike was already upstairs in his basket, and the desk in front of her was occupied by ink, quills, paper, and alcohol. Normally, the amount of paper would have been better described by ’a large quantity’, but tonight that title was taken by the bottles with all sorts of alcoholic drinks.
Twilight had always loved books, and although her special talent was obviously magic, she still wanted to try her hoof at writing. To exercise her storytelling skills, she was part of a writing club. Every other week, a prompt would be sent out, and the members had two weeks to write a short story based on it.
There weren’t competitions, and it was perfectly normal for a pony to skip or not finish a prompt every once in a while. But that wouldn’t do for Twilight. So far, she had finished every single prompt since she joined, and she wasn’t about to skip out on this one. If only the deadline wasn’t tomorrow, and moreover, the prompt wasn’t Weed.
She had already deviated from her usual schedule, which called for finishing a draft at least one week before the deadline, to leave room for editing. Perfection was always better than mindless drabble.
She had tried finding inspiration for a story around seaweeds, but with never having seen the sea in real life, much less its underwater flora, it was hard to do so. Then there was her attempt at regular weeds. It had started out okay, with the Everfree Forest as a setting, the story revolving around the mysterious plants there. Pretty soon – less than two paragraphs in – that had devolved into a rampaging pony-eating plant. Horror or gore wasn’t her thing, and as much as it pained her to see writing turn into ash, she had burned it.
Luckily, she knew of one other type of weed. It had cost her quite some bits, but held up in the magenta aura of her magic was a small and, as she had been told, grade A joint. She hoped, no, she needed it to give her some inspiration, but after half an hour of inspecting it closely, inspiration had yet to come.
This called for drastic measures. If she couldn’t get inspiration by buying weed, then maybe it would come by using it?
She’d read about what the effects could be, but she was getting desperate. The deadline was noon tomorrow, which meant she only had fourteen hours left. She knew that it was probably going to be the most terrible thing she’d ever written – well, except for that one about herself a cleverly disguised self-insert character and Rarity a dressmaker. The chances of exceeding ‘The Marshmallow Prompt’ in terms of stupidity were, assuming her calculations were correct, negligible. Even if it did, in Twilight’s book, writing mindless drabble was still better than writing nothing at all.
With that in mind, she carefully lifted the joint over to a nearby candle. Then she stopped. Going over her mental checklist one last time, she discovered that she hadn’t opened any of the alcohol yet. It would be beneficial if she just opened all of them while she was still sober, because she probably wouldn’t be able to later on.
Satisfied that everything was now in order, she finally lit the joint.
She had never seen a burning joint this close up before, and the urge to do science on it was strong. She forced herself to not give in to the temptation. The writing club wasn’t about non-fiction. Tonight also wasn’t about doing science. She needed to write.
The smell the joint gave was... very strong. She had almost scribbled this down on one of the papers, before she remembered that she was supposed to take a puff of it.
Two seconds later, she was coughing uncontrollably. Her throat burned, and her lungs hurt from whatever stuff was in there. Instinctively, she reached for the nearest bottle and drank down half its contents. Immediately, she found her throat burning anew, maybe even more so than it did before. The coughing had stopped though, that was a good sign.
Above all, she had finally found her inspiration. Eagerly, she started scribbling down words.
Dusk Shine was a librarian.
‘Wait, no. I need something different.’ She crossed it out and tried again.
Dusk Shine was a world-famous fashion model and– ‘No, too much.’
Dusk Shine was... ‘Gah! I’m still thinking too much! Maybe more alcohol helps...’ Twilight took another gulp from a random bottle, as well as taking another puff from the joint. Again she coughed, and again she drank even more alcohol. ‘Whoa, I’m starting to feel really funny now...’
The combined effects of alcohol and smoking were starting to daze her mind. It dawned upon her that maybe it didn’t matter what Dusk Shine’s job was.
Dusk Shine was an unemployed alicorn. Or maybe he did have a job, but nopony cared. Perhaps he was a garbage pony, or... or... he had a weed plantation. Yes! He worked at a weed plantation.
‘Whoa, this is some strong stuff...’
Dusk Shine worked part time at Weed Apple Acres, the town’s famous weed plantation. Part time meant full time in this context, but this way he could avoid some taxes. It was also good for Applejcrack, who ran the apple part of the plantation, because it saved her him it her taxes as well. This was most likely to be attributed to the questionability of the products, and saying that Dusk sometimes helped her with farming apples was much easier to explain on tax papers than running Equestria’s biggest weed plantation.
Somewhere, Twilight realized that this was going to be the most insane, bizarre, and definitely the worst story she had ever written. However, in her inebriated state, just writing words was way more important than that.
Under any other circumstances, Weed Apple Acres would have been shut down by Princess LSDa (pronounced: Elestia) a long time ago. But Weed Apple Acres was the official supplier for the Princess’ nightclub. As such, new barrels of cider, as well as kilo’s of weed, cocaine and other, more high-class drugs were sold each day. It was big business, although most of the farm equipment was still shit.
Once every year, to celebrate the Princess’ nightclub’s anniversary, Weed Apple Acres held a big event. Under the cover of celebrating the Princess’ nightclub’s anniversary, they could hoof out free drugs and cider to the attending ponies. They only hoofed out the stuff that wasn’t grade A, of course, but it was still good enough to get many new ponies hooked each year.
‘Okay, I may be drunk, but this is too much tell,’ she thought to herself. ‘I’ll just skip to the good part then.’
Twilight pushed aside her current writing, and took a new paper from the stack.
The annual celebration was turning out to be a grand success, just like it did in the past. Everypony present – and there were a lot of ponies in Ponyvilletown – was having a good time. There were ample amounts of cider and weed, decorations, music and dancing. The drinking contest was, as usual, won by Applecrack, and most of the ponies were now moving onto the dancefloor to dance until they dropped. Quite literally.
Dusk Shine was one of the few ponies who hadn’t partaken in the drinking contest, so although he too had a healthy amount of alcohol in his system, he was still able to think quite clear. He was glancing around, trying to find a suitable dance partner, when his eyes fell on just the perfect pony.
There, sitting alone at a table at the sidelines, was Fluttershy Skyflutter. Parties like this weren’t the town’s quiet animal caretaker librarian thing, and Dusk Shine hadn’t seen her earlier tonight either. His heart fluttered when trotted over to her.
“Hey Skyflutter. Nice to see you here,” Dusk Shine started over the music.
Skyflutter jumped up and spun around at the mention of her name, coming face to face with Dusk. She relaxed when she saw it was just her friend. “Oh, uhm, hi Duskie...”
“What brings you here?”
“Well, since everypony was going too, I just thought it would be nice.”
Dusk chuckled. “No need to sit around doing nothing! Wanna dance?”
Skyflutter looked up in surprise at his question, eyes widening. “N-nopony ever asked me that...” she trailed off.
“Come on then!” said Dusk as he took her by the hoof, leading her onto the dancefloor.
They danced for what felt like hours, the sweet tunes caressing their ears, and their hoofs caressing the rest of the other. Skyflutter was surprisingly good at dancing; so good in fact that Dusk idly wondered whether she had taken lessons somewhere. Or, more likely, read about it. She wasn’t a librarian for nothing.
Luckily, Dusk wasn’t too bad either. Or perhaps he was and the shy mare just didn’t mention it. In any case, Dusk was enjoying himself, and he guessed Skyflutter was too. He blamed it on the little alcohol he had drunk, but he suddenly wanted to get closer to her. Like, really close. Closer than he already was. Which meant really really close. He also needed to close down this weird train of thought about the word ‘close’.
“Skyflutter, I... I have something to tell you,” he began, not sure how or where this was going to end. He wasn’t sure whether it was a good or a bad thing that Skyflutter was always there for her friends. “I... I...”
She stopped dancing, sensing that Dusk was going to say... something. Of course he was going to say something. It wasn’t like Dusk to start a sentence and then leave it unfinished. She cocked her head in that cute way she always did when... when... actually she had never looked this cute before. That said a lot, because Skyflutter was immensely cute by herself already.
“Dusk?”
“I think... Skyflutter, I love you!”
There. After three months, Dusk finally said it. He had been in denial at first, and then tried to hide it, but now the truth was out. He only hoped that Skyflutter would l–
“Oh Dusk! I’ve always loved you too! But I was too shy to tell you!” The normally shy pegasus wrapped her forehooves around Dusk’s strong neck and kissed him passionately on the lips. He didn’t need to think twice about fiercely kissing her back. Actually, he didn’t even think about it at all.
The kiss seemed to last for eternity, although they had to break it at some point because of lack of air. Their breathing had increased tremendously, taking in huge gulps of fresh oxygen with each pant. Dusk felt all warm and cozy inside. He felt happy. Very happy. It showed.
“Um, Dusk? We could go someplace q-quiet, if that’s okay with you?”
It took Dusk a moment to realize that his wings were quite erect. It was a good thing that the dancefloor had become relatively empty at this point, or other couples would have bumped into them. “Oh... where?”
“For you, the library’s always open...”
Twilight went on to give a very detailed account of what happened once they got there. It didn’t have anything to do with ‘Weed’ anymore, but that’s how prompts worked anyway. It wasn’t until she started to run out of alcohol that she decided to ‘finish’ her very steamy romance scene.
‘There! Perfect!’ Twilight beamed. ‘Oooww my head. Oh no, I forgot a title...’
Twilight’s mind was an utter mess at this point. She also just wanted to fall asleep, so went with the first thing that came up. In what was most likely her ugliest hornwriting yet, she put As Weed’s A Price at the top of the first page. Because, it had been about weed, and that joint had been expensive. ‘Yeah fuck that, I’m going to sleep.’
***
“And then I wrote a short story about seaponies having seaweed dinner,” concluded Fluttershy at the weekly picnic a few days later.
Seaweed. It involuntary triggered something in Twilight’s mind. Before she realized what she was saying, she had already shouted out, “Wait wait, you mentioned weed!”
“Well duh,” Rainbow deadpanned. “Flutters did kinda mention that was the whole prompt, egghead.”
“Oh, hehe. Yeah...”
Twilight was glad that her friends didn’t question her about it, probably filing it as ‘Twi has been up all night; don’t upset her or Ponyville might explode. Again’. She was burning with curiosity though. Since when was Fluttershy in that club as well? Why could she write a normal story about seaweed?
Questions like that plagued her mind. She wanted to know what Fluttershy had written.
When the picnic was over, Twilight asked if she could see it and, as she had expected, Fluttershy was more than happy to oblige.
Twilight soon discovered that Fluttershy was a much better writer than herself. In a mere couple of thousand words, a whole underwater world was built. Well, it was already built before the story began, but there was such a thing called ‘world-building’. Twilight’s own tries at that didn’t even come close to this.
“Hey, uhm, Twilight. Why did you react like you did when I mentioned it at the picnic?”
“I... uh...” Twilight was at a loss for words.
“Did you write something as well?”
Uh oh. Twilight realized she would never had her outburst if she hadn’t been so obsessed over writing that prompt. She could lie, which was not okay to do towards friends, especially not one as kind as Fluttershy. On the other hoof, outright admitting it was, given what she had written, not exactly a good idea either. So she went for the best possible answer. “Maybe?”
“Oh! Can I read it?” she asked, excitedly. “I mean, only if that’s okay with you.”
Twilight knew Fluttershy never meant to drive her into a mental corner, but she was doing an excellent job of it right now. It was clear that Fluttershy was curious about it, and Twilight never liked it when information was kept from her. In the end, that thought won over her reluctance.
She sighed. “It’s alright, Fluttershy. Just... keep in mind that it’s stupid. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Fluttershy just blinked. Wasn’t that what fiction was all about anyway? The not meaning anything part, that is. It didn’t have to be stupid, although some were.
Twilight retrieved her latest accomplishment from the book in which she kept all her writings. She cringed as she read the title. With as much casualness in her voice as she could manage, she warned, “Ohyeah. I was also drunk and high when I wrote this,” before she floated them over to Fluttershy with her magic.
***
“Well, uhm, that certainly was something,” said a flustered Fluttershy. “But really, Twilight? An alicorn self-insert?”
“Oh...” Twilight wasn’t expecting that. She had been expecting getting berated for shipping herself with Fluttershy. Maybe she did do something right in her little story after all? “What’s wrong with it?”
“Well, it’s not... wrong to use alicorns, but you have to ask yourself whether you needed him as an alicorn.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I didn’t mind him being an alicorn, you know. It’s just that... in the, you know, romance part, you paid a lot of attention to little details. Alicorns have wings too, you know?”
“Oh. But I thought making him a unicorn would make him too much like, eh, myself.”
“What about Skyflutter then? I really liked her, by the way. You wrote her really good.”
Twilight realized two things at the same instant. First, she had written Skyflutter as an even more obvious other-pony-insert than she did with Dusk. The second thing was that Fluttershy said she wrote her really good. Something clicked. “Wait. That thing about Skyflutter, could you explain that? You mean her personality? Feelings?” Twilight’s cheeks reddened. “Actions?”
“Definitely her personality,” Fluttershy stated, before she added, “M-maybe also her feelings?”
Twilight’s blush intensified. It was bound to happen one day, really. Not many ponies went without love their entire life. She had just expected it to be... different. Anonymous letters. Courting. Perhaps even love at first sight. Definitely not a close friend half-confessing over a stupid shipfic she wrote while drunk.
“Y-you mean that you...”
“Only if it’s okay with you...”
Whoa. That last statement assured Twilight that Fluttershy wasn’t high on drugs or something. She was still the shy and kind pegasus she’d always been, except for, well... that. It was out in the open now. She was also waiting for a reply.
“Gee Fluttershy. I, uh...”
“It’s okay if you just want to say friends.”
“N-no, it’s not that. It’s all a bit sudden for me.”
“So you’ll try?” beamed Fluttershy, much more assertive than she usually was.
Twilight had to think fast. She didn’t really want to turn down a friend. She didn’t want to turn it into something serious straight away either, but she had to admit that she sometimes found herself craving true company when reading a particularly good romance novel. Knowing that there was a pony that would always be there for her? Yeah, she could live with that.
“I guess?”
“Oh that’s wonderful!” Fluttershy threw her forehooves around Twilight, hugging her close, before she realized what she was doing and let go again. Twilight noted that being hugged like that felt really nice as well.
She then realized none of this would have happened if she hadn’t gotten drunk and high for that prompt, and she made a mental note to do it more often. She looked at Fluttershy and added, ‘Or not.’