Don't Do Drugs
Sugarcube Corner had never been so clean in all of its history as it was that morning. Every surface was polished to mirror-like perfection, and the floors practically squeaked before one stepped on them.
That was the first sign something was wrong. Pumpkin Cake was almost certain even she couldn’t have carved all the crud and leftover baking bits out of every nook and cranny, regardless of how much magic she used. Pound wasn’t as overly concerned about the cleanliness about the joint, however.
He was more concerned about the fact that they were missing approximately two days-worth of ingredients. Pound would deny it, of course, but while his sister was the creative force behind most of their creations, he was the real baker in their business relationship. So, when somepony messed with his kitchen, he knew…
The second sign that something was up? The calendar. It wasn’t missing days, nor was it tampered with, which both Cake siblings considered whenever something seemed to have gone wrong.
The fact that the calendar was a pile of ash on the floor was… much more suspicious.
And the final sign the twins required, to know with absolute certainty that something funny was going on…
Little Cheese was nowhere to be found.
“Okay, now I know something’s up,” Pumpkin scrunched her nose as she checked under a rug, only to find it was a different rug than the one she’d purchased for the front parlor.
“Yeah, as much as I love that little colt,” Pound said as he walked up to the front door, “He’s a bit of a hoof-full in the morning… and afternoon. And…”
As he was talking, Pound quickly unlocked the front door, which allowed a certain grey pegasus pony to crash inward, onto the floor of the shop.
“Ooooh…” Derpy moaned into the carpet.
“Morning,” Pound smiled, “You want your usual, Miss Hooves?”
A muffled voice filtered up through the carpeting. “Yesh.”
“One Monday Muffin Special!” he called back to his sister. Pumpkin, still glancing about to find out what had gone wrong, nodded and headed back into the kitchen to retrieve the order.
Pound quickly helped up the older mare, who stared at… well, lots of things. Most of them simultaneously with her wall-eyes. But at the moment, Derpy seemed to focus on the young stallion.
“Uh… Monday?” she frowned, “Did… did I forget the day again? I promised my boss I wouldn’t do that again…”
Pound raised an eyebrow. “Derpy? What day… do you think it is?”
“… Tuesday?”
He could only hum back, and went to help prepare the Tuesday Special.
It was still muffins, naturally. But Tuesday muffins.
Both Cake siblings decided that this little mystery should be looked into, and so decided to check in on their roommates as soon as time permitted. So, once the lunch-time rush was over, they threw up an ‘out’ sign in front of the doors, and head up the stairs.
The door to the loft, where Pumpkin and Pound’s most favorite, bestest best foalsitter and her family lived, was an alluring pink color, with a bright cheese-and-balloon motif placed right in the middle. Pound only took a moment to admire the door’s brilliant color scheme before he tapped out a little ditty on the hard wood.
Immediately the two ponies knew something was up. They could just make out a sudden rush of hooves and whispers on the other side.
“Oh no! They’re up!”
“Um, of course they’re up. They’ve been serving muffins downstairs all day…”
“Mom, you can’t tell them! I can’t do prison!”
“Wait, do you mean ‘muffins’ as in Muffins, or do you mean Derpy?”
“How does that…? Is somepony gonna answer that?”
The sound of locks, far more than Pound and Pumpkin could possibly believe were on the other side of that door, preceded the slow, quiet creak of door hinges that were well-oiled with vegetable oil.
The door opened, just a sliver, and a bright blue eye peeked out at them.
“H-hey… you guys…” Pinkie Pie smiled a mile wide, “What can I do for ya?”
Pumpkin looked to Pound. Pound looked to Pumpkin.
They both gave Pinkie a rather unimpressed look.
“Pinkie,” Pumpkin tried pressing on the door with her magic, only to find Pinkie Pie’s ludicrous earth pony strength holding her back, “We have a few questions.”
“Oh? Well, you know…” Pinkie glanced left and right, as if looking for something, “I got questions too! Like, why is the sky blue? How do they those ships into the little bottles? If she who smelt it, dealt it, but she who denied it, supplied it, then who keeps…?”
“Pinkie!” Pound glared, “What. Happened… yesterday?”
There was a moment where the Cakes thought, for the first time in a long, long while, that their favorite foalsitter was… but it couldn’t be. Pinkie Pie was never sad around them!
“Pinkie? Is… is everything okay?”
A little voice, from the other side of the door, sighed.
And then, it said, “Mom? Just… just let them in. We can’t hide this. Let them in.”
There was another quiet moment… followed by an even quieter sigh from Pinkie Pie.
“Alright… but I warn you,” she allowed the door to swing inward, slowly, “This is gonna get weird.”
The Twins braced themselves… but they could not be ready for what they saw next…
An hour later, the Pies and the Cakes were seated around a coffee table in one of the little side-rooms the house-business had put in.
“So…” Pumpkin sipped at her tea, “Have you figured out a way to catch all the escaped clones?”
“If I knew that,” Pinkie giggled, “There wouldn’t be three of me living in Manehatten!”
“I still don’t know how the changelings got involved,” Pound threw an accusatory glare at his favorite little nephew.
Little Cheese scratched the back of his head, “Honestly, I figured I could play off the Mirror Pool if I got enough changelings to pretend to be me as well…”
“And, they’re all in cocoons now because…?”
Cheese Sandwich laughed, “Well, that was when Discord got involved…”
Pound Cake sat at his reading desk later that night. Tonight’s material was a book by Ponyville’s own Luster Dawn, of all ponies. A lovely speculative piece, he thought, about ponies colonizing the moon.
Luna was against it. But it was still a fun subject to think about.
There was a knock at his door, and in walked his very own twin Pumpkin. As usual, she only knocked as a courtesy.
“Hey, Pound,” she said as she hopped up onto his bed, “So… long day, huh?”
“Yeah… you can say that again,” he set the book down. Whenever his sister got contemplative…
Pound smiled, and turned around to face her. “You’re thinking about that time portal?”
“How long was Pinkie going to hold onto that one!” she threw her hooves up in the air, “I mean, not to mention the future-cyborg versions of us!?”
“Yup, that…” he could only shake his head, “That was weird. I’m glad that Little Cheese learned a lesson about manners though. Let’s not have to deal with a dimensional wormhole again to get that one across!”
“Still,” Pumpkin mused, “Don’t you find it fascinating that there’s… like, a whole multiverse out there? And that we’re changelings in one of them?”
Pound hummed.
“I was honestly more concerned with Iron Will being an Alicorn Princess in so many of them…”
The blue bat-alicorn looked up from the story in her hooves. Her expression was one of weary resignation, and no small amount of annoyance.
“You…” she took a deep breath, “What the buck did I just read?”
“You didn’t finish!” Anarchy pointed out with one hoof, the other preoccupied with a slice of bubblegum pie, “Come on! Ya gotta read the whole thing!”
“This is insane!” Snow Heart rubbed her temples, “It’s like… a hundred pages! Half of the plotlines go nowhere, and that’s an improvement on the other half! Why is Cheese everywhere? Why are the Cakes so chill with being clones of clones of changelings of beach balls…? How does that last one work!?”
Ann scratched her head. “Wait, is that not obvious?”
“NO.”
The Ponequus shrugged, “Well, it takes a pretty high IQ to appreciate Chaos…”
Snow Heart snarled, and picked the story back up.
How did I get tricked into this again? I just wanted to interview a kooky character, not read their insane fanfiction… about themselves…
She looked back up, and noticed the cake-eating grin on Anarchy’s face.
“You wrote this to screw with me, didn’t you?”
“At first,” Ann chuckled, “But then I figured I’d make something of it. Right, Pound? Pumpkin?”
Suddenly, right there, at the corner café in Ponyville, Pound and Pumpkin Cake appeared, just as Snow Heart had imagined them from the… “”””story”””” she’d just read.
And then, two more showed up. These two, however, had their colors reversed.
“It was a hoot to help write!” Pumpkin, both of them, laughed.
Snow Heart felt her eye twitch. “What…?”
Another pair of ponies approached… by lowering themselves out of the air with jetpacks. The two metal ponies, each a mechanical copy of the Cake twins, wound down their engines, before laughing in an entirely mechanical way.
“Beep boop!” Pound patted the original himself on the back, “This has been a satisfactorily enthralling experience. Insert oil.”
“Ann,” Snow Heart pressed the spot in between her eyes where the migraine was beginning to form, “Please… stop.”
Next came the Vampire Cakes. And then, moments later, a whole wing of changelings landed nearby. Their formation appeared to be about half colorful changelings shaped like the twins, while the other half were pre-redemption lings wearing badges with one of the Cake’s pictures on display. And that was only the first wave of Cakes that began descending upon Ponyville en mass.
About when the eighth pair of Alicorn Cakes made their appearance, these ones being a Celestia-colored Pumpkin and Luna-colored Pound, Snow Heart had just about had enough.
“I’m thinking,” Ann patted the head of a cat-Pumpkin, “for the next draft, I should get a little less uptight and add a Platonic-Solid-Pumpkin and Pound…”
“ENOUGH!!!”
Everycreature jumped a whole five feet at the sudden, cacophonous shout. Windows up in Canterlot rattled with the force of it, and the clouds overhead parted in terror.
“E…E-flippin-nough!” Snow Heart threw her hooves up in the air, “This is ridiculous! I just wanted to hang out and have some fun, and you go ahead and do… whatever this is!? What is this!? WHO ARE YOU PONIES!?”
The entire crowd, every single one of the eleven-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-eight Cakes, and one Ponequus, grinned from ear to ear to other ear in a few cases. Their eyes sparkled, and in a few cases a wave of fireworks began to fire off into the distance.
Snow Heart let her head drop to the table. She knew what was coming.
With a single, booming cry, the entire crowd shouted, as one:
“We’re the Aristocrats!”