The melodic ring of the landline phone cut through the stagnant pizza parlor air like an expertly wielded saw. The noise was about as welcome to the lethargic, brow beaten manager as one's son's rock band loudly practicing in the basement. At three in the morning. On a Sunday. And they need their sleep because they have an important meeting tomorrow.
She rubbed her eyes and lifted the receiver to her ear with her hoof.
"Good morning, you've reached Flim 'n' Flam's Ponyville Pizza Parlor: if it's not Flim 'n' Flam's, that pizza's a sham." She cringed at the atrocious pun that had just dribbled through her teeth. "This is Bon Bon, may I take your order?" Her voice was void of emotion or interest.
On the other end of the line, Bon Bon could hear stifled giggles from two maddeningly unpleasant sources.
"HI!" Came a grating, bubbling voice that made Bon Bon clench her teeth in agony, "I'd like, umm..." there was a break in the order, followed by whispering and more giggling. "A hundred pineapple pizzas!" a deeper, more masculine voice called directly into her ear through the phone's crackling speaker. More giggling sent Bon Bon's salivary glands into overdrive to produce enough "special toppings" for these two.
"Alright," she seethed through grated teeth, "where will we have the pleasure of sending your hundred pineapple pizzas?"
"Sugarcube Corner!" Bon Bon winced, pushing the phone as far from her ear as her hooves would allow. When the noise died down, she groaned and pressed the phone back up to her ear.
"Thank you for your order," she spat, "we'll have it ready for you in thirty minutes or less."
Bon Bon slammed the receiver back down with force that'd break a foal's spine before fluffing her pillow, crossing her forelegs, defiantly scrunching her nose up and falling back behind the counter with an infuriated "hmph!".
She was about to drift back into a peaceful slumber when the second worst thing about her job trotted in through the stainless steel kitchen door.
The wall-eyed pegasus mare tossed her blonde mop of hair out of her face, looking down at Bon Bon with an expression of concern.
"Bon Bon, are you okay? I heard some loud noises and I thought you might be hurt..." she dribbled in that insufferable little voice of hers.
Bon Bon glared at her with nothing but contempt from her little napping pallet. How could one look at her in any other way, with her hat on wrong, the improperly buttoned shirt and those awful, stupid eyes?
"You know, Bon Bon... you shouldn't sleep on the job like that. The bosses might get mad..." she offered with a little frown. Mr. Flimflam and Mr. Flimflam were always on Bon Bon's case, and Derpy didn't want to see her best friend get fired.
Bon Bon muttered some curse as she turned over on the small, hidden mattress. Derpy pointed a hoof over at the phone.
"I heard the phone ring, did we get any orders?" She asked with a song in her voice.
"No." Bon Bon's hateful voice was muffled by the feathery pillow that buried her face.
"A-a-are you sure? It really sounded like somepony had ordered a hundred pineapple pizzas!"
The glint that Bon Bon gave her insufferable coworker lowered the room's temperature by approximately ten degrees Fahrenheit. Or rather about four degrees Celsius, but that is not an exact measurement, so don't hold me to it.
"Yes, Derpy. We got an order for a hundred pineapple pizzas to Sugarcube corner." She growled.
Derpy, having no concept of a prank call (or understanding sarcasm), gasped out of shock and joy. "We need to get them their pizzas! Oh, but we only have thirty minutes! Should we get them a soda, too? We're so going to be Employee of the Month this month! But wait, how can we both— oh, there's no time!" The ditsy pegasus bounded back into the kitchen to get to work.
Bon Bon rolled over on her impromptu bed, staring listlessly at the kitchen door.
Those two Vaudville psychos will have her head if she's late on such a large order, she thought to herself.
Bon Bon then experienced the stunning epiphany that she didn't care, and peacefully tumbled into dreamland.
~ ~ ~
"Oh, pizza pizza pizza! Pizza's made to please, pizza pizza pizza, tomatoes and bread and cheese!" Derpy sang over the grinding and squeaking of the machine, rhythmically pulling down on a lever in rapid succession. With each flick of the switch, a steaming Flim 'n' Flam's pineapple pizza emerged from the belly of the furnace, down the conveyor belts, into the waiting boxes below.
The newly filled boxes were lifted into stacks by another of Derpy's coworkers who, while not as hateful as Bon Bon, did not put the effort into her work that Derpy did. Derpy counted up to a hundred lever pulls, and when she opened her eyes she was shocked at the sight before her: a monstrous tower of pizza boxes loomed over her, engulfing her in its shadow!
"How am I gonna deliver all those?" She gulped, trembling as she approached the menacing cardboard stack.
"Heck if I know," muttered Lyra, tying the boxes together with string. She let a piece of twine snap against the cardboard. "All yours, Derpy. The scooter's already started up: you have—" her eyes flickered down to the watch on her hoof, "—twenty-eight minutes to get 'em there before your ass is grass."
Derpy's wingpits began to perspire as her anxiety level increased. She bit down on the box's twine wrapping, gained a sure footing, and whispered a silent prayer—a very hard thing to do with a mouthful of twine—before dragging the tower of cardboard out the back door.
~ ~ ~
The sight of a pegasus riding a motorcycle was not a common sight in Ponyville, nor was it entirely unusual. However, the addition of a formidable heap of cardboard boxes wobbling haphazardly on the back seat drove it right past uncommon and straight into the territory of outlandish. In fact, many passersby decided to avoid the vehicle not only for the prospect of not being run over, but also because most of them felt that being flattened by two hundred pounds of pineapple, cheese and cardboard would interfere with their personal agendas.
But Derpy had many years of experience with these sort of things, what with her job as a mailmare and that Ivy League physics course she almost finished. She had to keep moving forward to stop the pizzas from toppling over and sending her spinning out onto the open Ponyville road in a twisted wreck of bones, blood and pineapple. Naturally, she did exactly that.
Hers was a face of unrivaled determination as she sped down the street: the tip she'd get from this order would be huge! Derpy revved the gas, fantasizing about the magnificent muffin mix that her future would hold if she could just get there on time.
She glanced over to the motorcycle's clock, and let out a shocked gasp. It was sixty o'clock!
"Wait... that can't be right." Derpy puzzled, her muzzle scrunching up in deep concentration. "Oh, that's the gas meter!" she proudly exclaimed. Moving her head slightly to the right, the actual clock said that she had fifteen minutes left.
With renewed vigor, Derpy drove on.
~ ~ ~
"A hundred pineapple pizzas!" Discord writhed on the couch with laughter. "Can you believe it?"
Pinkie Pie was having trouble containing herself. "That's the funniest thing I've ever heard!" she giggled, biting down on her lip.
Mr. Cake was in the kitchen with a client when he heard the hushed laughter. Needless to say, it gave him anxiety: when he agreed to let the god of chaos come over to his house for a playdate, his intention was to give his surrogate daughter a more "normal" role model, not to cause trouble!
He sent the client away with a baker's dozen of red velvet cupcakes before shakily stepping into the living room. When he cleared his throat, Discord and Pinkie's eyes widened and their heads swiveled toward the yellow stallion like guard dogs to a clumsy robber. Discord slammed a throw pillow on top of the phone.
"The jig is up." Mr. Cake glared at the guilty children. His gaze flickered to the black cord extending out from under the throw pillow. "Have you two been calling anyone?"
"Yes..." Pinkie admitted, her eyes fixed on the floor as she hid a tiny smile.
"Prank calling?" Mr. Cake's eyebrow drifted upward on his forehead.
/
"Maybe..." Discord's hands were behind his back as he tried to avoid eye contact.
"Who did you call?" prodded Carrot Cake as he took a step toward them. For a while, they were silent. "Don't make me call the operator."
"Flim 'n' Flam's." Pinkie's guilty grin was getting hard to disguise as she hid her face beneath her poofy pink locks.
Mr. Cake rolled his eyes and gritted his teeth. "What kind of pizza did you order?"
"Pineapple!" Discord was in a hysterical gigglefit by now. The same could not be said for Carrot Cake.
"Augh!" he spat. "I hate pineapple pizza!"
This alerted his wife. She came running down the stairs as fast as her pudgy little legs would take her, coming to a stop next to her husband. "What happened? Is everything alright?"
"No!" Mr. Cake grumbled, "these two just called Flim 'n' Flams and ordered..." he grimaced, "pineapple pizza."
Mrs. Cake was now even more furious than her husband. "Pineapple pizza? How many?"
"One..." Pinkie guiltily eyed Mrs. Cake as she made little circles on the floor with her hoof, "hundred."
Neither Mr. or Mrs. Cake were drinking anything, but if that were the case they both would've sprayed the room with their beverage of choice all over the walls.
"What?" Mr. Cake shouted, the arteries in his neck audibly pumping blood into his reddening face, "We'll never be able to pay for that many pizzas!"
Mrs. Cake had already fainted, for the thought of paying over two thousand bits for the inedible dreck that was Flim 'n' Flam's pineapple pizza was just too much for the rotund mare to bear.
~ ~ ~
Derpy sped down the road, her motorcycle in maximum overdrive. There was a gleam in her eye, a widening grin, an erectness to her wings as Sugarcube Corner came into view. Ponies had to jump out of the unstoppable force's way, onto the sidewalks and into potted plants. Derpy's goal was in sight. She closed her eyes, imagining the clink of the bits as they fell into her open hoof.
That revealed itself to be a very misguided decision when the front wheel of Derpy's motorcycle collided with the curb outside Sugarcube Corner.
Mare, motorcycle, pizza and pineapple were all sent flying through the air, somersaulting toward the sweet shop. Time seemed to slow down for Derpy as she soared through the air between metal, mozzarella and mortar, catching for a moment the petrified stares of those inside the bakery. She blinked once, and in this last moment her wayward eyes joined in perfect harmony before she, the stack of pizzas and her scooter penetrated the window.
~ ~ ~
The steady beat of the heart monitor echoed through the solemn air of the hospital room. Derpy Hooves, bound like a mummy, stared at the ceiling from her hospital bed. She couldn't move at all, stuck with her thoughts in her tight, sterile sarcophagus. The door swung open, followed by the sounds of hoofsteps and hushed whispers. Derpy could only look at the tiles on the ceiling, so her observers were out of her view until they moved right over her.
Looking down on her was Nurse Redheart, who she knew as the pony who'd been changing her IV and colostomy bags, and both her bosses, Flim and Flam Flimflam. The latter two were looking particularly distraught at her condition.
"As you can see, she suffered quite a bit of damage. She's got several spinal fractures, a break in her left back leg, some minor cranial trauma, and her wings are completely destroyed. Even with our best doctors, healthiest donors and most high-end equipment, Ms. Hooves will be in here for five months at best. Of course, this treatment won't be free." Both of Derpy's insurance providers gulped in unison. There was a silence before Nurse Redheart turned to leave. "I'll give you some time alone with the patient."
When she was gone, Flim removed a hefty pouch of bits from beneath his hat and placed it on Derpy's bandaged hoof. "Your, erm, last month's pay," he coughed.
His brother reached into his pocket, pulling out a piece of paper. "Here's a-a-a settlement, i-it's yours if you promise not to s-s-sue..." his eyes were misty as he surrendered the check with the same reluctance one would their infant child to a gang of muggers. The loss was too much for them to bear, and both of the diabolical brothers broke down into wailing tears, fleeing the room like foals.
Derpy looked at the check in her hoof, squinting at the tiny, tear-stained number.
One... hundred... thousand bits! Derpy beamed beneath the cast, doing a painful little dance in the binding.
The victorious taste of pineapple pizza filled her mouth as she dozed off.
