* * *
Infernal Machines
(or, The Practical Applications of the Mechanical Salamander in Geologic Agriculture)
by Jeffrey C. Wells
* * *
Here's the first thing you need to know:
When I finally blacked out from the strain, I dreamed that it was autumn again. Specifically, it was that one glorious day balanced on the knife edge between cider season and the Running of the Leaves, when the six of us lay in the perfect sweet grass staring up at a sky that was gently twirling above us.
One of the maddening things about living in a universe where the mythic and the practical collide is the fact that when the sky is twirling – in contrast to everything that should be true about small-"c" celestial motion, I might add – there are any number of entirely reasonable yet entirely ridiculous explanations right at hoof. Thankfully, today's explanation was a wholly rational one: the six of us were drunk off our little cutie-marked hindquarters.
Sorry to put it so crudely, but, in my defense, I was drunk (Q.E.D.), and it's probably how I would have phrased it at the time. The villains of the week – this time taking the shape of a couple of cream-colored traveling salesponies, all straw hats and mane oil, pitching us the idea of a great and clanking mechanized still and the dream of an endless supply of cider – had been driven off in disgrace, and we were all a little flush from the latest triumph of the magic of friendship. And we had been in the mood to celebrate. And the terms of our victory (an epic pony-versus-machine duel of cider production) had temporarily graced us with as much alcohol as we could drink. And… you can probably take it from there.
"Y'know," said Applejack, gazing up into the yonder blue, "Even if Granny hadn't wagered the farm on that contest… an' even if that gimcrack cider those hucksters put out hadn't tasted like the wrong end of a mule… I reckon… I reckon it might not be such an all-fired good idea for us always to have as much cider as we can drink."
"Are you crazy?" exclaimed Rainbow Dash, unevenly. "This is so awesome! I'm about ten seconds away from total cider stupor and I bet I could shave a few seconds off that if I had just a teensy bit more!"
"Yer welcome too'it," I said, slurring slightly, unable to keep up with either Applejack's iron-clad constitution or Dash's furious metabolism. "Ifya c'n make it back to th' serving line." I gestured in what I was almost ninety percent sure was the proper direction.
"In a second," said Dash, cocking her head unevenly and assessing the clouds with a critical eye. "Not sure I should be flying. There's something funny about the air. I think it's rotating." She spat. "Dumb air," she said.
"Well, somepony should probably top us off, while supplies last," said Rarity. "Fluttershy, darling, I know you've had scarce more than a thimbleful, would you be a dear and gather up some of these mugs?"
Fluttershy snored gently in response, disturbing the arduous trek of a Wooly Bear caterpillar across the north slope of her face.
Rarity rolled her eyes. "Never mind, then. Well, I'm in no fit state to be walking. Twilight, you can teleport, right?"
"Oh, nosirree," I said. "I don' tel'port when I'mmin this ssstate. Las' time… ended up in Celestia's private baths." I smiled, crookedly. "Ssso many bubbl'z."
"Mm," said Rarity, weighing this conundrum for several minutes. "Pinkie Pie, what about you?"
"What about me what?" said Pinkie Pie, springing nimbly to her hooves.
The five of us – four ponies and Fluttershy's caterpillar – stared up at Pinkie Pie in mild to moderate shock. Fluttershy let off a tiny snerk and wiggled a bit.
"Well, that's gotta be witchcraft or summin'," muttered Applejack
Dash screwed up her face. "Pinkie, how… are you doing that?"
"Doing what?" said Pinkie, hopping a circle around our assorted prone and supine forms. "Jumping? It's simple!" She ceased hopping and adopted a bright pedagogical tone. "First, you bunch your little rump underneath you, and then you–"
"She meansss… s… s…," I said, figuring that an excess of "s"'s was better than none at all, "How'ryoo… um… standing?"
"Standing?" said Pinkie. "It's simple! First you put your little hooves on the ground, and then–"
"Enough with the explaining!" cried Dash. "If you can walk, you're on cider-run duty."
"Okeydokeylokey!" said Pinkie, beaming. She promptly hopped back over the hill in the direction of the serving line and out of sight.
"Acquired tolerance 's 'mazing thing," I announced. Everypony murmured her assent.
After a minute, Pinkie returned, empty-hoofed. "Sorry, it's all drunk," she said. Then, grinning enormously, she finished, "Kinda like you girls!"
Dash rolled over and roared into the grass. "Aargh!" she wailed. "Never enough!"
"C'mon, Dashie," said Pinkie, "I think you got plenty this time! Besides, like Applejack said, it's not good to have a forever supply of anything. That way, it stays special!"
Dash looked unconvinced, or perhaps just nauseous. "Mmmaybe," she said. "I dunno. I still don't see why we can't have both the good Apple Family stuff and the less-good Flim-Flam stuff at the same time. 'Cause I gotta say, I'm not really tasting the quality when I'm like this."
"'Less-good'?" remarked Rarity, her eyelids drooping. "Rainbow Dash, the Flim-Flam Brothers' cider was completely unpalatable. I dare say, even in your present condition, you'd want nothing to do with it."
"Yeah," said Pinkie, giggling. "And did you girls get a load of the serial bottleneck at their quality control station? What a hoot!"
For the second time that afternoon, we all stared at Pinkie. Blithely oblivious to our collective gaze, she prattled on. "And then they just shut quality control all the way off! Like, duh! Especially since it would've taken just a few minutes for them to multidimensionalize across several parallel channels. Then we wouldn't have had a leg to stand on! Hello, Flim-Flam Fields!"
I propped myself up on my knees, the hot red flush of cider in my system warming and prickling my face. "Pinkie," I said, "what're you–"
"Forget her, Twilight," said Dash. "She's just being Pinkie Pie. Hey, I got an idea: let's have a race to see who can drop into cider coma the fastest! I'll go first!"
"Inna sec, Dash," I said. My eyes were stinging for reasons I couldn't quite place, and my cider flush was growing more and more intense by the second. The heat had gone from pleasant to vaguely distressing to actively uncomfortable, and the glorious autumnal red of the leaves above had become positively fulgent. Something was seriously wrong with this situation, but I shook my head and pressed on. "Pinkie, could you have… improved the Flim-Flam Brothers' machine?"
"Well, yeah!" she said. "In a jiffy! Although… the fact that I could? It might be better if nopony knows about that yet."
The autumn leaves were so bright now I had to squint to even see properly. My face felt like it was burning up. "But you're telling me."
"Not for real, silly," said Pinkie. "See, 'cause all of this… is a hallucination!" Pinkie waved her hooves around in a spooky fashion. "WhoooOOOooo!"
"A what?" I said, panic rising in my chest. Leaves suddenly burst into flame all around me and smoke and darkness fell like a shroud.
"A hallucination!" said Pinkie, cheerily, the fire licking at her cotton-candy curls. "And pretty soon, you're going to have to
* * *
"WAKE UP!" shouted Applejack, as a splash of cold water struck me like a blow. I startled, blinked, and then I was back on the ridge, at the lip of the fire, where I had in truth been all along.
The Everfree Forest was burning tonight. It was hard to understand, right from the top. When I first arrived in Ponyville, the Everfree was a gloomy and mysterious gothic bugaboo, suitable for scaring your foals with. But then came Zecora, who lived within its confines but who was not, in point of fact, frightening at all. And then there was Luna, and Griffinwatch Observatory, and her proposed plans for New Griffinwatch – plans on which I had been invited to consult – and gradually, month by month, the Everfree had started seeming less and less like a bastion of primal fear and more like a comfortable (if creepy) old neighbor. To suddenly have it become threatening again, not in terms of its arcane inscrutability but simply because it was a big mess of burnable vegetation, seemed like a cuff in the face on a number of levels at once.
But, its eldritch legacy notwithstanding, it was a forest, it was made of wood, and it could burn. And although the flames that chewed at its ancient trees were a peculiar citrusy hue, they were flames nonetheless, which meant that they could spread to nearby Ponyville.
But that wasn't going to happen without a fight.
We were a tableau of furious activity, here at the edge of the inferno. It seemed chaotic, but there was an underlying structure to it all, a method within the madness. I should know; I was the one who designed the method, after all. Here was a bucket brigade of stalwart earth ponies, a line stretching all the way back to the reservoir, beating the flames back one splash at a time. Here was a flight of pegasus ponies, fresh back from scouring the sky for any rain clouds they could muster up, on their way to more remote but still dangerous sectors of the fire. And here was Spike, brave Spike, soot-covered but unharmed by dint of his fireproof scales, running message after message to the teams of unicorn smoke-jumpers (clad in highly fashionable flame-retardant jumpsuits) working deep within the forest to create firebreaks that would theoretically slow the spread of the blaze.
And here, right here, were Volunteer Fire Marshal Applejack and All-Team Organizer Twilight Sparkle, the latter of whom was also lending a hoof by throwing up a Celestia-lovingly huge rendition of Weathertop's Frost Curtain, in her signature magenta, to help shield the crews at the front line, where the battle for Ponyville was going to be won or lost.
We sang. We chanted. We consumed a truly prodigious amount of morale-boosting sweets, brought to us by the courtesy and tireless work of Mr. and Mrs. Cake and their lone employee, the irrepressible Pinkie Pie. There was no way that we could fail; the 900-pound gorilla in the room that nopony wished to acknowledge was that we were, nevertheless, failing.
We fought tooth and hoof for every inch of ground, but the fire was unrelenting. It was only a matter of time before we would be forced back to the encircling river, and if the fire managed to leap that, then it was goodbye again to Ponyville, hello to rebuilding our village from the ground up. Which had already happened twice this year, and I think I speak for all Ponyvillians when I say that we were pretty darn sick of it.
But… there was nothing to be done, because there was only so long we could fight before the exhaustion claimed us and the forest fire won. Case in point: All-Team Organizer Twilight Sparkle, who had maintained Weathertop's Frost Curtain today for far longer and on a far greater scale than anypony had heretofore thought possible, who had maintained it until her Stream had become so turbulent it had begun to feel like running the frog of her hoof backward down the length of a rose stem, who had even then continued to maintain it until the sheer strain of doing so caused her conscious mind to go bye-bye and catapulted her into sweet dreams of cider seasons past.
"Sorry about the rude awakening, Twi," said Applejack, breathing heavily and spitting her ladle to the ground. "It's just that that fancy-prancy ice wall you been keepin' goin' all day looks like it's fixin' to crumble."
"Right," I said, trying to swallow the despair that was creeping into my voice. "Just… give me a second to re-focus."
"Twilight, I ain't gonna have you throwin' that thing back up only to have it fall on me a half-second later. Now, your ice magic has been a whole heap a' blessing to my fire crews today, and I'm sure they been praisin' Celestia to have it, but they don't need it. And if they're expecting it to be there, and all of a sudden it ain't, they're gonna be in a world more hurt than if it weren't there a'tall."
"Sorry, A.J.," I said.
"It's all right, Twi. It's just you ain't doin' nopony no favors trying to work when you're half asleep. I should know that better than anypony. So I'm a'gonna ask you one simple question, and I need you to tell me the honest truth: can you or can you not keep that wall standing?"
I crumpled before her stern and green-eyed glare. "No," I admitted, my voice thick.
"Well, all right then," A.J. said. All quickness and business, she turned back toward the front line. "Blue team! Yella team! Y'all gonna have to fall back, 'cause we're losing the ice wall, an' it ain't comin' back up!"
I tried to shut out the noise of the disappointed groans of the fire crews; Applejack was unperturbed. "Now quit yer bellyachin'!" she hollered. "Next anchor point is gonna be that cliff face over yonder. That'll keep this infernal beast from flankin' us. I reckon we got about five minutes to move this entire operation." She spared a half second mid-harangue to shoot me a warm glance, and then continued, "Y'all gonna give ground nice and organized-like. Jes' like Twilight here taught you. Savvy?"
The earth pony crews muttered their assent and began the latest in a long series of slow but steady retreats. Applejack and I trotted back to the cliff face, taking brief shelter in its shadow. Overhead, a canary-colored streak rocketed from the airspace above the worst of the blaze, headed for the lee side of the river.
"What's it look like in there, Fluttershy?" Applejack called out.
"Can't-talk-now-saving-bunnies!" trilled Fluttershy, clutching a hoofload of furry critters tightly to her chest; and then she was gone.
Applejack sighed heavily and gazed back in the direction of the front, pulling off her Stetson and wiping the sweat and grime from her brow. I edged up beside her.
"We're gonna beat this thing, right?" I asked, quietly.
"I dunno, Twi," said Applejack. She shook her head and scowled. "This ain't natural, none of it! We should be makin' progress against this thing, but it's like…"
"Like what?"
"It's like there's something in the middle of it all keepin' it lit."
"Well, the flames are a weird color," I said, trying furiously to break things down into analyzable chunks, "but I'm not sensing any elemental magic use nearby, other than mine. I've never seen anything like it."
"None of us have," said Applejack, and then there was little else to say.
After a minute, I gathered my courage. "All right, I'm rested up. What can I do?"
"Sleep," said Applejack. "'Cause you ain't rested up. I can see it in your eyes. We'll come getcha if we needya."
"A.J., no," I pleaded.
Applejack grunted. "All right," she said. She turned and called out to a passing Spike the Dragon. "Spike, take your boss here back to town. Get some food in her an' then pick up another load of morale-boosters from Sugarcube Corner. Givin' ground always puts a powerful sadness in a pony."
"You can count on us, Fire Marshal Applejack!" said Spike, saluting. "C'mon, Twilight. Let's see what Pinkie's got in the oven!"
"Right," I said, turning away from the front and trotting briskly back toward the threatened village. "Morale. I can do this."
Behind me, with a distant and tinkling roar, the frost curtain finally fell.
* * *
I'll say one thing: Sugarcube Corner in the midst of an all-town crisis was not appreciably different from Sugarcube Corner on any other day. At least, not when Pinkie Pie was at the helm, as was the case tonight. The Cakes had finally retired after a day of furious baking to spend some quality time with the twins and to do some light packing in the event of a general evacuation, leaving Pinkie Pie as the confectionary inmate running the confectionary asylum. Bright yellow cookies were cooling on every available surface, their residual butter blotting out on sheets of randomly-selected paper: loose-leaf vellum, a stack of old pin-feed plotter parchment, a now-ruined award certificate of some kind. Frosting coated the walls and tangled bits of Pinkie's mane and tail together, and Gummy the toothless alligator swung helplessly but apparently unperturbedly from a cradle of taffy strands.
"Hey Twilight!" Pinkie said, balancing a cookie sheet on her head while slamming an oven door shut with a single well-placed kick. "Hey, Spike! How's the firefighting going?"
I bit back the truth and settled for a somewhat tepid redirection. "It'll be going a lot better once we get these delicious-looking cookies to the troops!"
"I'll say," said Spike, salivating a bit over the cheery little delights. "Can I sample one of these? Applejack says I gotta feed Twilight something, and I want to make sure these cookies are just right!"
I glanced at Spike.
"For her!" said Spike, smiling beatifically.
"Silly," said Pinkie, expertly sliding her tray full of hot cookies onto another piece of improvised blotter paper. "The cookies aren't for now. They're for the victory party!"
"Of course," I said, wincing slightly. "So… what do you have that I can take back to the fire ponies?"
"Omigosh, okay, listen to this," Pinkie gushed. "I'm not at the front lines because Applejack said I couldn't be at the front lines because I kept asking why we were gonna be fighting the fire instead of making friends with it, and she said I should go home and help the Cakes out, and so I was helping the Cakes out and I was thinking, hm, what kind of dessert would I want if I was on the front lines and it was getting dark and I had been fighting fires all day and I was feeling snacky, and I thought I would want something a little more dinner-y, and then I got brilliant, because I thought of pie! Pie à la mode."
"Delicious!" I agreed, all the while trying to beat back images of the burning forest in my mind.
"I know, right?" said Pinkie, bouncing over to a curtained-off baker's nook and pulling back the curtain with her teeth and a flourish, revealing a dozen perfect, golden pies. "Ta-da!" she cried.
"Those look great, Pinkie!" said Spike. "But… doesn't 'à la mode' mean 'with ice cream'?"
"Ooo, he's good!" Pinkie replied. "Yeah, we ran out of mode a while back. Just like we ran out of parchment to blot the cookies on. What can I say? We're kickin' out pastries like crazy town! I was just about to whip up some fresh ice cream when you two came in and brightened my day!"
"Don't worry about it, Pinkie," I said. "I'm sure everypony'll be perfectly happy with straight-up non-mode pies. Let's just load some of these into my saddlebags, and–"
"Twilight, I'm surprised at you!" scolded Pinkie. "Pie without ice cream is like a day without sunshine! Like a hug without a squeeze! Like a fish without a bicycle!"
"Huh?" I said, frowning.
"It's indispensable!" Pinkie exclaimed, promptly vanishing into a nearby closet.
"Pinkie," I called after her, "I appreciate the sentiment, but we don't really have time right now for you to crank up a batch of–"
"Done!" said Pinkie Pie, emerging from the closet with a gallon vat of vanilla ice cream.
I paused, blinking. "Pinkie, I thought you said you were out of–"
"I was."
"So… how come there's–"
"Made more."
I shook my head, trying to get the thought construct to resolve. "Doesn't making ice cream take like an hour of standing next to a churn and–"
"Not with my PARTY CANNON!" cried Pinkie, pulling a familiar candy-blue artillery piece out of the closet. "I just set it for 'Ice Cream Social' and then, BOOM! Ice cream! Sometimes there's streamers and party favors and swoopfoomers all mixed in but you just gotta pick 'em out."
"But… you have to load it with those things first," I said, staring at Pinkie's signature device, a weird and unsettled feeling creeping into my gut. "I mean, I always presumed that you–"
"C'mon, Twilight," said Spike, tugging at my saddle. "Let's get these pies up to the ridge."
"In a minute, Spike!" I turned back to Pinkie. "Pinkie," I stated, "you have to load the cannon first."
"Hm," said Pinkie, studying the Party Cannon thoughtfully while stroking her chin with one hoof. "Nope!" she concluded. "It just comes out."
"That's impossible," I blurted. "You'd be summoning matter out of nowhere! I mean, I can do that because I'm converting matter to energy and back, and that's fine because the equations all balance out. But I'm using magic!"
"Yep," agreed Pinkie. "And I'm using… CONTRAPTIONOLOGY!"
"Come again?" said Spike.
"Con-trap-tion-ology!" repeated Pinkie, slowly, as though we were asking her to explain the word "apple" to us. "I got my doctorate in contraptionology a few months before I moved back to Ponyville. Check out that piece of paper over there."
Feeling a little dizzy now, I followed Pinkie's point to the table where she was blotting butter cookies on what had looked like a certificate of some kind. I carefully restacked the cookies with a quick telekinetic swirl and lifted the oil-soaked paper up to the light…
"'Pinkamena Diane Pie,'" I read. "'Doctorate of Philosophy… Contraptionological Sciences… Maresachusetts Institute of Technology'?!"
"Yep," sighed Pinkie. "Good times."
"This…" I began, then had to stop and collect myself. I tried again: "This… is a doctoral degree from the single most prestigious institute of earth pony learning in all Equestria."
"Mm hm," agreed Pinkie, turning her attention back to a fresh bowl of cookie dough.
"You're using it to blot butter cookies."
Pinkie shrugged. "I'm a pastry chef now, not a professional contraptionologist. So it doesn't really matter! And like I said, we were all out of parchment, and so I thought, hey, I'll just use some of my old school papers! No sense in them going to waste, right?" She gestured lazily. "Some of this other stuff is my thesis on the practical applications of the mechanical salamander in geologic agriculture."
"Nonono," I said, kicking up my hocks and running around the kitchen, gathering up page after page of inexplicably careful scholarship, scattering cookies everywhere in the process. "Nonononono. Pinkie, this is recorded knowledge. It… I mean, I'm still not believing that it exists in the first place, but you can't do this to recorded knowledge."
"What's a 'mechanical salamander'?" asked Spike, selecting a few fallen cookies from the floor and munching on them, an act that was hygienically legal under Spike's own personal three-day rule.
"It's like a salamander, but mechanical!" explained Pinkie, as I rushed past on another circuit of the room. "Back on the rock farm, we had these little lizards called salamanders, and when you fed them really hot peppers they would FOOM!" She clapped her hooves together. "Burst into flames. Real useful for turning sand into glass. Once you've got a good field of glass going, you can skid the rocks along just like you're curling!" Pinkie blinked. "Why do you think they call it 'curling' when what you really want is for the rock to go straight?"
"Who cares?" I cried, zooming past again. "Help me save your thesis!"
"What, and upset all the victory party cookies? For shame, Twilight!"
"'Mechanical' salamanders, though?" asked Spike.
"Oh!" said Pinkie. "Yeah, mechanical salamanders! Salamanders are real difficult to keep. There's a really really fine line between a normal-burning salamander and a salamander that just up and explodes. So I thought, why not make a mechanical one and reduce some of the ambiguity inherent to the biological organism? And I couldn't think of a reason why not, so I built one! And he jumped around and ate peppers and got really crazy hot just like a real salamander, and he never exploded, not even once!"
I slipped on a puddle of spilled cake batter and went tumbling headfirst into Gummy's taffy cradle, salvaged papers flying everywhere. "You built," I said, as the papers settled to the cluttered floor about me, "an autonomous, biologically functional, machine."
"Yep!" said Pinkie. "It's called a 'contraptionoid'. I named him 'Iggy'!"
"And since then," I said, struggling to rise and to disentangle myself from the taffy, "you designed a cannon that can produce organic and inorganic matter out of thin air. For any reason you like."
"Not for 'any reason'," said Pinkie. "For parties!"
I threw my hooves up in exasperation. "Why didn't you tell anypony you could do stuff like this?"
"Twilight," laughed Pinkie. "It's not like I hid my cannon from you guys. Or my hoof-powered flying machine. Or that propeller beanie I built for Tank the Tortoise." She shrugged. "It's just that whenever anypony asks me about them and I start to explain, they tell me that I'm being random, or that I'm being Pinkie Pie, which are both true things, and then they walk away!"
"This can't be real," I said, trotting back and forth. "This has to be another hallucination. Do you realize the practical implications of what you're talking about? We'd never have to suffer through another hard winter! You could make enough vegetables to sustain the town through any crisis!" I stopped in my tracks, my eyes wide. "Heck, forget food. You could just make enough gold and gemstones to buy your way out of a crisis!"
"Can you do that?" asked Spike, a little too eagerly. "Can you make gemstones out of nothing?"
"And what about reagents for my spells?" I said, mind whirling. "Do you know how difficult it is to properly harvest ponydrake root? I could just come to you and you could give me some!"
"Geez, guys," said Pinkie, backing away from us a little. "Haven't you been listening? Party purposes only! It's not always good to have as much as you want every day of your life. The Duke of Geld had a party cannon like mine once upon a time, 'til he decided he wanted to have a forever supply of ice for his lemonade, and you see what happened there."
"There isn't a Duke of Geld," I said. "Geld's a glacier-covered wasteland."
"And you see," repeated Pinkie, pointedly, "what happened there."
"Okay, I understand," I said, touching my hoof to my face. "Don't be frivolous with the crazy science, check. But we have ponies risking their lives up at the ridge right now, ponies who could go straight home to bed if you brought that cannon up there and set it on 'Fire Hose Party'!"
Pinkie looked genuinely apologetic. "I appreciate what you're thinking, Twilight," she said. "But contraptionology is a slippy slope. Once you start down that road, it's real hard to stop. That's kinda why I became a baker instead." She noticeably brightened, then. "But thanks for the idea of throwing a Fire Hose Party! That could be really super-duper fun!"
I growled a little, deep in my throat. "Pinkie," I said, sternly, "you know you're one of my very best friends. But…"
Pinkie stared at me, eyes wide and mouth small. "Yes?" she said.
Spike glanced nervously between us.
I broke first, turning away and sagging a little. "…but nothing," I concluded. "You're one of my very best friends, and if you say that using your cannon on the forest fire is dangerous, I trust you."
"Thanks, Twilight," said Pinkie, smiling.
"Who am I kidding, anyway?" I said, kicking at a broken muffin. "I don't think it matters how much water we throw at those weird flames. C'mon, Spike, let's load me up with pies and head back."
"Wait a sec," said Pinkie, stopping in mid-stride. "What kind of weird flames?"
"Weird-colored," I said. "Sort of orangey, but fruit orangey, not fire orangey."
"Would you say they were… kumquat-colored?"
I looked at Spike. Spike looked at me. "Well, yeah, I suppose," said Spike, shrugging. "Kumquat-colored, sure."
"Wait," I said. "You don't mean–"
Pinkie gasped, long and audible. "IT'S IGGY!" she cried. "HE CAME HOME!"
* * *
Pinkie and I galloped through the night as fast as our respective burdens would allow: me with a saddlebag full of pies topped with a baby dragon secretary, and Pinkie pulling a tablecloth-covered caisson which supported her increasingly sinister Party Cannon. As we ran, Pinkie babbled.
"And when I left Maresachusetts, I gave Iggy to my thesis advisor, Professor Stranger Danger, and he promised he'd take good care of Iggy and never let him inappropriately burn anything again! I can't understand what might have gone wrong, not in a zillion quadrillion years!"
"I don't know what went wrong either," I said, huffing and puffing, unable to match Pinkie's tireless earth pony stride without serious effort. "But he must have gotten loose. And there are plenty of wild peppers growing in the Everfree Forest. If he ate enough of those, he could be lighting the forest fire over and over again!"
"Poor Iggy!" said Pinkie. "He must be so lonely and sad in there. When we get him home, I'm throwing him a ginormous salamander party, and it'll have the blandest and least-spicy foods you can possibly imagine!" Pinkie frowned in a calculating fashion. "And punch, too," she added.
"Let's think about the celebration when we get that far," I said. "Thanks for offering the use of your cannon."
"It's still dangerous," Pinkie warned. "But since it turns out this is a contraptionological problem, I think it's okay to solve it contraptionologically. But then the Party Cannon goes back to being used for actual party purposes. Not weird impromptu party-in-the-middle-of-a-forest-fire ones. Clear?"
"As day," I said, as the cliff face loomed into view ahead of us, and beyond that, the inextinguishable kumquat-colored fire.
Darting past the bucket brigade, I skidded up to Applejack, telekinetically grabbed Spike off the top of my saddlebags and then tore them off entirely and tossed them to the ground at A.J.'s forehooves. "There!" I said. "Twelve fresh pies, minus whatever just got mushed when I threw them at you." I dropped Spike with a heavy thud.
"Twilight!" said Applejack. "Thank the Grower you're back. We were just about to send somepony for you. Losin' that ice wall was harder than I figured it'd be. I don't s'pose you got any more of that in you?"
"Even better," I said. "I've got a plan to fix this whole thing. You distract the troops with those pies while Pinkie and I go off and do something titanically stupid."
"What's goin' on?" asked Applejack suspiciously, looking over my shoulder at Pinkie Pie. "What in tarnation is that pony draggin' behind her? What's under the tablecloth?"
"Maybe later," I said. "Right now, I need to talk to Rainbow Dash."
There was a whoosh of air that skewed my mane to the right, accompanied by a bright vision-obscuring chromatic trail. "I heard somepony was looking for the fastest pegasus in all Ponyville!" said Rainbow Dash.
"Yes, yes," I said, trying to get through this first part as fast as possible. "Rainbow, I need those aerial photographs you and Rarity have been taking of the fire today."
"In a dash!" said Rainbow, vanishing from sight and then reappearing almost immediately with a mouth full of photos. She spit them to the ground.
"Right," said Dash, efficiently, pointing at the first photograph with her hoof. "Okay, here's a time-lapse photo showing how the fire's been spreading over the course of the day. And here's a composite one illustrating the areas of greatest consistent concentration. And finally, here's one of me, Rainbow Dash, being all totally awesomely heroic by airlifting Rarity around all day while she took these pictures. I can autograph this last one for you guys, if you want."
"Oo! Oo! For me, please!" shouted Pinkie, her eyes glimmering.
"Yes, great," I said, absently, my brow furrowing as I studied the remaining two photos. I snatched up a twig from the ground and pointed at an angry-looking part of the images.
"Here," I said to Pinkie. "Everything spreads out from this little valley right here. And it hasn't stopped burning yet. That's our target."
"'To… Pinkie Pie,'" muttered Rainbow Dash, wrestling with a pen between her teeth. "'My… biggest… fan.' Bam! Done!"
"Wheee!" yelled Pinkie, plucking the autographed photo off the ground and stashing it away somewhere on the caisson. "Thanks a billion, Rainbow, I'll treasure this forever!"
"Anytime, kid," said Rainbow.
"Mmhm, yes, thanks, Rainbow," I said. "Pinkie, we're going to have to fine-tune our directions on the fly while we're in there. Spike, I'll need you to scout ahead for us. Pinkie and I will follow with the… payload." I glanced back at Pinkie's caisson. "I'll cover us both with Weathertop's Frost Curtain. If I keep the globe size small enough, it should get us to the valley and back before I lose it. I'm warning you, though, it's gonna be a squeeze."
"Let's call it 'cozy'," said Pinkie. "It sounds nicer."
"'Cozy' it is," I said, opening my mind and my horn to the elemental ice once more. "All right, crew, are we ready?"
"Ready!" said Pinkie and Spike, in unison.
"Great," I said, gazing hard into the inferno. "Let's go throw us a party."
* * *
Almost an hour and a half later, Pinkie and Spike and I re-emerged from the flames, which were already burning a little less bright and in a far more reasonable hue. We were soot-stained and coughing, the embroidered edges of the tablecloth covering the Party Cannon were singed and charred where I didn't stretch the Frost Curtain quite far enough, and it would take weeks before our manes and tails started looking normal again (Spike, naturally, excluded.)
None of this really mattered, because, quietly squirming in an asbestos bag gripped firmly in Pinkie Pie's teeth was the object of our quest. We had, in fact, successfully made friends with the fire.
"SKRONK," went the object of our quest.
Applejack rushed up to us, tossing blankets over our backs. "I don't know what you two did in there," she said, "but this big ol' varmint of a fire is startin' to act right civil on us again. Why, we made more progress the last half hour than we did this whole afternoon!"
"I think," I said, wearily, "you're going to see that trend continue."
"Well, shoot, Twi, what happened? What kinda sorcery did you pull off in there?"
"It wasn't sorcery," chirped Pinkie, letting the asbestos bag fall to the ground with a sharp metallic clang. "It was a party!"
"Huh?" said Applejack.
"Okay, once upon a time I made a lizard," began Pinkie. "And I gave him to my teacher and my teacher promised to keep him safe. But something must have gone wrong and the lizard came looking for me! And he got lost and scared and hungry and so he ate some chili peppers only he didn't know that eating the chili peppers would make him super hot! And then…" She clapped her hooves together again. "FOOM! And then Twilight said that nothing took away the sting of a chili pepper like a big bowl of ice cream, and I was like gasp, omigosh, she was so right, so we found where he was and we threw him a BIG old ice cream party and now Iggy's feeling much better, thanks."
Pinkie beamed at Applejack. "Iggy is the lizard's name," she concluded.
"Rrright," said A.J. "Twilight, you care to translate that to us from Pinkinese?"
And I was so close.
"Yes," I almost said. "Pinkie is secretly an engineering genius. Or rather, not secretly, it's just that none of us pay enough attention to what she's doing to realize what's going on right in front of our muzzles. She built a mechanical salamander that can burn hot enough to turn sand into glass in the hopes that it would help rock farmers like her family move the rocks around faster, for whatever reason it is that they do that in the first place. Only, it escaped. And it came looking for her. And it's been setting fire to the Everfree Forest ever since. And so we used Pinkie's Party Cannon to generate about eighteen gallons of ice cream out of nothing more than smog and vapor and cooled that lizard right off. Oh, and did you know that Pinkie's Party Cannon can generate food out of practically nothing? And possibly, but unconfirmedly, gold and precious gems as well? And the financial security of our entire village is assured for all eternity and everypony can have anything they want, whenever they want, in whatever quantity that they want, from now until the end of time, but please don't get greedy about it…"
I thought of Geld. I thought of glaciers. I froze up, glancing helplessly back and forth between A.J. and Pinkie Pie.
Spike laughed, and the moment was shattered. "C'mon, Applejack," he said. "It's just Pinkie being Pinkie, right?"
Applejack chuckled. "I guess you're right, Spike," she said. "I'm sure the real story'll come out eventually."
"Of course Spike's right!" said Pinkie. "Who else could I possibly be?" She picked up the asbestos bag again. "Now iff you'w efcufe uf," she said, talking around it, "We'w gonna take Iggy home."
"SKRONK," agreed the bag.
* * *
We trotted home in darkness. The fire crews would continue to work through the night, and barring some calamitous shift in the weather – a shift that Rainbow Dash and her kin would simply not let happen – I had little doubt that the fire would be all but out come morning. Already, the smog was clearing from the sky and the stars of evening were winking into view. The Everfree Forest would heal, preternaturally quickly if history was any judge, and life would continue much as it always had. And, thanks to Spike and no thanks to my mouth, we had narrowly avoided becoming the epicenter of the world's largest pile of carrots. Or lake of cider. Or mountain of diamonds.
"Spike," I said, glancing back at my secretary, butler, assistant and friend. "Thanks for saving my hay bacon back there."
"Any time, sister," said Spike, sitting high in my saddle. "That's what I'm here for."
"Well, that went well," said Pinkie, who had resumed her traditional bouncing gait despite still being in harness. "I got lots and lots of ice cream, an autographed photo of Rainbow Dash, and, I got reunited with an old friend-slash-unnatural creation! Isn't that right, Iggy?"
"SKRONK," said the asbestos bag, which was currently getting the living daylights jostled out of itself back on the caisson. I telekinetically plucked it up, pulled it over to me, and looked inside.
There he was, the villain of the week. Coppery-colored inasmuch as he was made of actual copper, with little pink spinel eyes, decorated all over with hard-fired glass enamel hearts and lollipops.
"Cute little misfit of science," I said.
"SKRONK," said Iggy, blinking serenely up at me.
"Pinkie," I said, "What are we gonna do with this little guy?"
"Well," said Pinkie, "I was thinking I could keep him! Even though he looks green on the outside, Gummy has been feeling particularly blue on the inside. I think a new little reptile friend would cheer him right up!"
Not mentioning my suspicion that Gummy could probably have weathered the complete immolation of Ponyville without becoming even the slightest bit "blue", I said, "Pinkie, you know that's just not realistic."
"Why not?" she said. "I promise I'll keep him out of my enormous and poorly-secured hot sauce collection!"
"See, there," I said. "Right there."
"Twilight!" gasped Pinkie, affronted. "I'd promise you! That means something!"
"Not good enough, Pinkie," I said, shaking my head. "You live and work in a place where children are present, all the time, two of whom are the weirdly precocious toddler foals of your employers themselves. Now I trust you, but can you one hundred percent guarantee me that none of the kids will ever go unattended long enough that they might open Iggy's enclosure by accident? Can you imagine what might happen next?"
Pinkie imagined. "Yes," she said, sadly, dropping back into a walk.
"Good," I said. I stiffened my upper lip. "Now we obviously can't destroy him, and I couldn't bear to see the look on Princess Celestia's face if I tried to foist Iggy off on her, her experience with flaming pets notwithstanding."
"What are we gonna do, then?"
"Pinkie, you and I are going to take a little road trip. To Maresachusetts."
"Aw, neat!" said Spike. "Can I come?"
"Wouldn't have it any other way, Spike," I said. "The three of us are going to locate Professor Danger, find out what went wrong with his Iggy-containment strategy, and fix it. I won't be a party to keeping a dangerous contraptionoid animal within the Ponyville limits unless we inform everypony of the risks, and as soon as we did I think they'd run us out of town. Better Iggy live in Maresachusetts, where at least people know, or should know."
"Oo!" squealed Pinkie, returning to full bounce. "That's a great idea, Twilight! I can show you my old college stomping grounds! My first dorm room, my very favoritest sweet shop, the dirty old reactor that powered my undergraduate honors project… oh, and also, I should show you my actual stomping grounds, where I did some of my best stomping! Stomp, stomp, stomp!"
"All very fascinating and simultaneously confusing and distressing," I said. "We'll start packing tomorrow."
"SKRONK," said Iggy, in what I had to assume was happy agreement.
"You said, it, Iggy!" said Pinkie.
"Tonight," I said, "we head back to Sugarcube Corner, figure out the best way to lock up this Party Cannon, and finally, finally, get something to eat."
"Good news for you!" said Pinkie. "We've got about a gallon of half-melted vanilla ice cream back there that never made it up to the fire ponies."
"That's all right," I said. "I don't actually like ice cream all that much."
There was a pause, and then Pinkie burst out with a peal of helpless laughter, tears welling at the corners of her eyes. Spike followed suit, and then, eventually, I did as well. I can't quite explain why it was so funny. It wasn't even a joke, per se. Maybe it was the raw exhaustion. I don't know. But for that one moment, "I don't actually like ice cream all that much" was the funniest single line in Equestrian history.
We laughed all the way home.
Author's Note
This arc continues with "Contraptionology!" Read on!
