Chapter 1
Forward: This story started out almost as a joke amongst the group of friends who wrote it. While reading, you may notice that the story’s flow is slightly off-kilter, and some parts seem written in entirely different styles than other parts. While the editor has attempted to smooth as much of this as possible, it is unavoidable for a simple reason: this story was written sentence by sentence.
Well, obviously it was written sentence by sentence. Every story is written sentence by sentence. What I mean to say is that each sentence is written by a different person; this story was written as a group, popcorn style, each guy taking a turn after the last. So, bearing this in mind, presented to you without further ado is:
Willy Wattle’s Wonka Factory
Chapter 1
This was the last straw. Of all the things that could possibly happen, this was...not nearly the worst possible thing - but close enough to be at least pretty bad. It was on this day that Willy Bartholomew Wattle was to find the object that would change his life forever.
Willy decided to go on a stroll to take a break from reality. Recently, things had been going from bad to worse for him: his mother had disowned him, his girlfriend met a hot Istallian, the bank took everything he owned, and his middle name was still Bartholomew.
"Buckin' Istallian," he mumbled angrily, "his perfume is stronger than hers!" Probably more than half of these problems could have been solved if he had just obtained his cutie-mark already; he stared at his blank flank, now celebrating its 40th anniversary.
He scuffed a small mound of pebbles on the ground and tripped, skinning his knee, resulting in a boisterous "BUCK!" which resonated through the outskirts of Ponyville. He noticed, snapping momentarily out of his blind, depressed fury, that he had strayed far from the paths of Ponyville into regions unknown - the shaded and winding paths of the Everfree Forest loomed before him. Instantly he was gripped with the crippling fear all ponies feel when confronted with the untamed monstrosity of that forested labyrinth. Shaking himself from his brief shock, he frantically searched for the path he had once traveled but a strangely compelling and sweet scent caught his attention. His attention shifted to finding the source of this scent, and as he searched, his last remaining possession - a glimmering ruby - slipped out of his pocket.
The shining stone flipped through the air, tumbling as if time had slowed; and upon its impact with the ground, his face turned to an awkward shade of putrid green. It shattered into one million pieces, the hazy sunlight glinting off of each individual piece as it fell amongst a nearby patch of Poison Joke. Stifling the bile that had crawled up his esophagus, he carefully collected the pieces of his last scroople of hope. As he garnered the fragments, he couldn't help ripping a few cloves of Poison Joke along with the precious shards, both intermingling in the pocket in which he deposited it.
His frown defied all physics; the corners of his mouth literally touched the ground with the amount of sadness and horrid pain he felt with the nothing he clung to in the grass. A single tear escaped from his glistening eyes, and the bitter wind whistled a melancholy tune through his receding mane-line.
Willy continued his depressing stroll through the Everfree Forest, still searching for the sweet smell that destroyed his ruby – and his dreams. He stopped for but a moment and put a hoof inside his saddlebag, drawing from it some fragments of the ruby, which dissolved into dust in the wind. “Buck” was the only retort he could muster.
As Willy was wont to do in stressful times, he reached for his well-worn and trusty pipe; it fit perfectly in his hoof where repeated use had worn a groove into the wood. When the pipe rested firmly in his mouth he reached carelessly back into his pocket to grab what he presumed to be the copious amounts of tobacco he kept readily on his person for just such occasions. With the substance in hoof he packed his pipe, and if he were looking more carefully at the time he would have noticed that it was bits of rubies and Poison Joke, and not tobacco, that he shoved into the expectant hole. Willy clutched at the sole remaining match he had in his possession and, sighing, struck it against the rough and blemished section of skin on his flank, worn there from use repeated as often as he took out his pipe. He brought the match to his pipe and lit, igniting the contents inside. Much to his surprise, though, no smoke exuded from the pipe as he drew in a breath; instead, a thick ichor of purple suds frothed from the end of his pipe and seemed to drool over the sides.
He spat as the funny taste seeped into his mouth from the breath he had initially drawn, dropping the pipe. He looked down at the growing mass of bubbles enveloping his pipe, saying “Well isn’t that peculiiiiiaaAAAAHHHHHEEEUUUARRRRRUGHRLURGL…?”
The pipe became a frog. As he lolled his head on a swivel, he noticed that his movements were no longer continuous: he raised a hoof and watched as it skipped movements frame by frame, almost as if it were an animation. “Well golly gee,” he exclaimed, “I’m a flipbook!” He could hear his hair growing. He painted with colors of the wind. And everything was vaguely juicy. “Hey Willy!” yelled a nearby tree, “Lookie what I can do!” And, before his very eyes, the kindly tree sprouted a thousand tinier trees, which each sprouted their own host of even tinier trees in an infinite explosion of tiny trees which reached into the very heavens themselves. But even this spectacle was diverted as he looked to a strange, hairless monkey sitting cross legged where his satchel had rested. This sage addressed him with a simple but powerful phrase:
“Join mah réveluçioñ.”
Willy was dumbstruck by this hairless, wizened wizard, and the kindly tree sprang forward to join the monkey as they both, in perfect coordination, rose into the atmosphere by means of magic or witchcraft unknown to him. “So long, Willy!” called the tree as it phased into oblivion.
__________________________________________________________________________
Willy woke up some time later, every square inch of his body covered in the various byproducts of nature. He got up dozily, feeling his skin peel from the slime covered grass as he broke the seal with the spot he had been melded to for the past few hours. He groaned in pain, every vertebrae in his back crackling in protestation as he struggled to his hooves. The world was out of focus; he blinked a few times to try to un-fuzz everything, but, like most of his life, his efforts were for naught. “Jinkies, I think I lost my glasses!” he exclaimed under his breath. “Maybe that monkey stole them…” He stammered around, frantically searching blind for his missing glasses. With a groan of frustration that would make an angel cry, he thrust a hoof to the ground and was immediately greeted by a thunderous “CRACK!” He didn’t need to see the shards littering the ground to realize the misfortune that had befallen him.
At that moment a zebra trotted through that selfsame clearing which housed the disgruntled Willy Bartholemew Wattle. Willy spun around, startled by the approaching zebra, and gave a dishearteningly feminine gasp when he made her out through his hazy vision. “Auntie Merriam?” he asked, “Is that you?”
“No, my friend, ‘tis only me!
Zecora is who I be.
I heard your cry while trotting through –
Seriously, what’s wrong with you?”
“Zecora?” exclaimed Willy, dumbfounded. “Pardon my Griffrench, but I thought you’d be long gone by now. You were around when I was a little colt!”
Zecora laughed a hearty chuckle, its tone as mocking as it was warm.
“Oh, my friend, you do not know,
The shit I brew makes my aging slow!
But enough of me, your tale is sadder.
Tell me, friend, what is the matter?”
“I pulled out my pipe to have a quick smoke,” he exclaimed, “but what I thought was tobacco was Poison Joke!” He paused a moment and realized what he had done in his last sentence. “Dammit, Zecora, you’re a disease.”
Zecora’s face bore not a shred of reaction to his comment.
“Poison Joke is nasty shit.
Why on earth you smokin’ it?”
But Poison Joke’s not all I smell –
I’m a midnight Joker, I can tell.
This is not just Poison doobie…
Do I detect a hint of Ruby?”
He peered down at his pipe – sure enough, even through his failing vision, he could detect a dazzling red mixed in with the somber violet of Poison Joke. “Huh,” he puzzled, “I must have picked up some Poison Joke by accident when I gathered my broken ruby. They may have mixed in my satchel.”
At that moment, an idea dawned on Willy’s feeble mind. If anyone could explain what happened to him when he smoked that noxious mixture, it was Zecora.
“The important part of this,” he blurted out after his moment of thought, “is that I had some crazy visions for a while after I smoked it!” Sheepishly, a blush filling his grizzled face, he timidly asked “Maybe you could try it, and explain what happened?”
For the first time in the entire conversation, Zecora’s face lit up with something akin to interest.
“I’m always up for something new!
Gimmie that pipe and I’ll puff ‘dis brew!”
With quivering hooves, she accepted Willy’s pipe and eagerly stuffed it with the remnants of the ill concoction. Seemingly out of the very air itself, the concoction ignited with no effort from Willy or Zecora. Zecora noticed Willy’s flabbergasted face, and gave him a knowing wink before taking a deep pull from the pipe, the purple suds frothing over the hole once again.
She eked out a meager gasp without exhaling, saying
“Buck, this shit is tippy-top!
This would sell well in my store.”
The rest of the conversation was lost to Willy, who was less focused on the string of jumbled nonsense spewing from Zecora’s mouth and more on her violent bodily spasms. The fact that her stripes were slowly morphing into polka dots did not ease his already concerned disposition.
Willy watched the zebra slowly unravel, growing more and more concerned with each passing moment. After an indeterminate amount of time, he finally mustered enough courage to approach her and ask “Zecora? Is…is everything alright?”
Her eyes were wild and tainted red, the polka dots on her coat shifting colors every few seconds in a schizophrenic frenzy.
“Purple, oranges, shining silver!
I cannot believe my…my…my…”
With every “my” her entire body twitched, shuddering spasmodically.
Saying the first thing that came to mind, Willy sputtered “Zecora…I don’t think nuthin’ rhymes with silver.” With his revelation, her twitching stopped, as did the mosaic of her polka dots.
And then, she started screaming. A hellish, sanity-crippling scream dragged from the very depths of nightmare itself. A scream to part the very seas; a shrill, terrifying shriek that could rend bark from the sturdiest oak.
__________________________________________________________________________
For how long she screamed, Willy knew not. But, judging by the pain deep within his inner ear and the scarring left on his weary soul, it must have been close to an hour. By now her voice was naught but a shriveled croak, and just when Willy thought he was about to lose it, she stopped.
“SWEET MERCIFUL CELESTIA!” he shouted to the skies, slumping in his spot.
Then, from the drone of the last sound Zecora could muster from her gaping esophagus, came the solitary phrase “Bananas…the monkey needs bananas.”
And it was at that very moment that some of Willy’s faith in the world was restored. He knew now that the same bald monkey sage who had visited him and enlightened him with great knowledge had visited this enigmatic zebra as well.
In the last moments before Zecora passed out on the forest floor, she muttered with wondrous awe “Wonk…it is Wonk.”
“Wonk…” said Willy inquisitively, the faintest hint of an awkward, contorted smile breaking the concrete visage of his mournful muzzle. “Wonk. That has a nice ring to it!” Unbeknownst to him, the rough outline of a battered and well-worn pipe began fading onto his flank as his gaze drifted to the purplish, reddish brew frothing in his own pipe.
“Wonk.”