You Do It To Yourself, You Do, And That's What Really Hurts
“Spike,” Twilight said, flipping through the pages of the worn book in front of her with her magic. “This is quite possibly the most important thing I’ve ever done in the name of science!”
“I’ve actually been meaning to ask you about that,” Spike said, walking across the room towards Twilight. “I’m a bit concerned about all the magic you’ve been doing.”
“What?” Twilight scoffed, the book pages still flipping. “Why would you be concerned about the most natural part of life?”
“Well,” Spike said, scratching the back of his head sheepishly. “You know how I basically keep this entire place clean by myself?”
“Nonsense!” Twilight said, laughing. “I’m pretty sure I help now and then.”
“Twilight, you’ve been so engrossed in this ‘most important thing I’ve ever done in the name of science’ that you’ve just laid down newspapers so you wouldn’t have to leave to go to the bathroom!” Spike lamented. “And yes, I’VE had to clean and change them!”
Twilight rolled her eyes and smiled condescendingly. “Oh Spike, when you’ve older you’ll understand how much walking outside to use the bathroom is a waste of time.”
“And,” Spike continued, ignoring Twilight’s vital piece of information, “You’ve been having me FORCE-FEED you so that you wouldn’t have to get up to get food!”
“Don’t act like you weren’t into it,” Twilight told her assistant. “I’ve read your journal; I know the stuff you’re into.”
“And—” Spike was about to count down another disgusting thing he had to do for Twilight on his claw, when what the alicorn just said sunk in. “Wait, you read my journal?”
Twilight smiled sadistically. “All of it.”
Spike’s eyes widened and his pupil’s shrunk. “Even the thing with the pasta?”
Twilight nodded, her evil grin growing wider. “Especially the thing with the pasta.”
Spike stood silent for a moment, before continuing his previous rant. “Right, okay, I’m going to continue living my life as though you’ve never read my journal—”
“Not quite sure that’s possible,” Twilight murmured to herself.
“What?”
“Oh, that was just the science!” Twilight lied smoothly. Nailed it.
“Anyway,” Spike continued. “I’ve been doing all the cleaning and... other activities since you’ve started this weird science thing, and I’ve noticed some odd stuff happening...”
“What odd stuff?” Twilight said, pretending to be interested in the hopes that the annoying little lizard would scamper away to go molt or whatever it is reptiles do in their spare time, once he was finished berating her.
“Well, it all started when I started hearing noises while cleaning the bathroom,” Spike said. “Which, you never use, by the way; not sure why we have it, all of you ponies just go outside.”
“My mind is a complex thing that cannot be explained,” Twilight said. “And my mind is in my body, which is in turn in the house; through the transitive property, my house is a complex thing that cannot be explain. It’s simple math, Spike.”
Spike opened his mouth to retort, but Twilight had found his Achille’s Fetlock; Spike had never passed 10th grade geometry, and was therefore woefully unlearned about the most important part of life. He could not even identify a convex n-sided polygon from the averages of two regular hexagons! No wonder he doesn’t have a girlfriend.
“Ah, out of things to say, I see,” Twilight said smugly. “Come back when you can solve angular proofs, fool!”
Two days later, Spike came back and proved to Twilight how the sum of a triangle’s angles must always equal 180 degrees in the longest and possibly most boring proof ever written.
“Fine,” Twilight said, who was still flipping through the same book from two days ago. “I guess you’re allowed back now.”
“Right, as I was saying,” Spike told the obtuse unicorn. “The strange noses were just the beginning.”
“Oi, this again,” Twilight sighed.
“Then, I noticed that the chairs were all stacked in a strange fashion in the main library,” Spike said, pointing towards the strange stack of chairs behind them.
“Hey, don’t make fun of my contemporary chair art!” Twilight told her assistant indignantly.
Spike sighed, and went on to present more more evidence. “Also, on the other side of the wall is some strange ‘graffiti’, which I have not cleaned in the vain hopes that you will believe me about all this.”
Twilight took a short break from flipping pages to see that there was indeed, on the opposite wall, a giant diagram of a complicated ritual sacrifice involving a large number of peaches, written in what appeared to be congealed peach juice.
“That’s always been there, Spike,” Twilight told him with a roll of her eyes. “Stop being ridiculous.”
“Wait, and there’s another thing!” Spike quickly stated, turning Twilight’s head towards the door. Hanging down in front of the door was none other than Twilight’s pet owl, hung from a rafter by a noose of his own entrails.
“And look, inside his body,” Spike said, running over and reaching into the giant hole in the poor bird’s body. His claw emerged moments later, and inside it was clutched a succulent, if slightly bloody, peach.
“Alright, now I’ll admit, that’s a bit odd,” Twilight said. “But that’s hardly any evidence to something being wrong, Spike.”
“Also, there’s a giant soul pit in the backyard.”
“WHAT?”
Two minutes later, the pair of them were standing in Twilight’s backyard, which did indeed now host a giant pit in which horrible screams and noises echoed from. A terrible peach-colored lighting emanated from the depths.
“Hm, maybe you were right,” Twilight mused, having levitated the book with her, still flipping the pages. “There is something a bit wrong going on around here.”
“A BIT?” Spike yelled exasperatedly. “Apple Bloom gazed into the pit the other day, and look what happened to her!”
Twilight looked over at Apple Bloom, who she had just noticed was sitting at the very edge of the pit. She seemed to be much paler than usual, and her eyes were wide, exhibiting a blank stare off towards the horizon.
“Peaches,” she monotoned. “All Ah see are peaches.”
Twilight waved her hoof in front of the poor filly, but still she did not blink. Upon closer inspection, Twilight found that the filly’s pupils had been replaced with tiny peaches.
“Well, this is worse then I suspected,” Twilight mused to herself. “I’m glad I found out about this before it got out of hoof.”
“YOU DON’T CONSIDER THIS OUT OF HOOF?” Spike screamed at the alicorn. Twilight flinched as her sensitive ear-holes were exposed to the terrible screaming of Spike’s harsh vocal chords.
“Spike, there’s no need to overreact,” she said simply. “I know where this is all coming from! It’s right here in this book I’ve been flipping through.”
Twilight finally came to rest on the final page of the book, upon which there seemed to be nothing but a few ink stains.
“Twilight, there’s nothing here except for a few ink stains,” Spike pointed out, repeating what I had just said.
“But there is,” Twilight said. “Look, a distraction!” She quickly flung her hoof out to point somewhere off over yonder soul pit, and Spike, like the gullible fool he is, looked.
“Where?” he said, searching the horizon for any such distraction. Twilight quickly scribbled down something in the ink stained pages. Five minutes later, Spike was still looking for the distraction, so Twilight intervened.
“Spike, it’s gone now,” she told him. “Anyway, look at this!”
Spike looked at the ink stained pages, and saw there was one simple word written in the center of the left page.
“The Fruitpocolypse?” he asked, giving Twilight an incredulous look.
“Yes, Spike,” Twilight said, shaking her head sadly. “It all started when I changed apples to oranges, and from there on, it was a never-ending chain reaction of fruit related misery. I fear that all this peach-related shit is just the beginning.”
“Damn it, Twilight!” he yelled, dropping to his knees. “Didn’t you learn anything from The Sunioning?”
Twilight shot a look up at the sun, which was indeed an onion, floating in the sky, giving off rays of warmth and oniony goodness. “Well, this is different!” she retorted. “Onions aren’t fruits!”
“So, what’s going to happen now?” Spike asked, terrified beyond belief.
“Well—” Twilight began, but before she could make up more bullshit to cover up for her lack of knowledge, an intense rumbling began underneath the ground below them. Both Twilight and Spike looked over at the soul pit, which seemed to have something giant emerging from within it.
Slowly, it rose, scraping against the sides of the walls. A horrible acrid oder arose from the depths, remarkably similar to peach jam, provided said jam would have been three weeks old and slathered over old fish. Twilight and Spike watched in fascinated horror as the object arose from the soul pit.
It was a giant-ass peach.
The front of the peach opened, like a door, and a small ensemble of peach-like entities came forth. They were dressed in robes made from tiny peach skins, and they had large peaches for heads. Their bodies were also of peach, but were not in the traditional peach shape; they were shaped like one might expect a diamond dog’s body to be shaped, but were completely of peach. They were bipedal, and held a small peach in each strange, peach-like tentacle they had for upper limbs their lower libs were just a mass of peachy extremities.
“Greetings,” it said in a voice not unlike Sean Connery’s. “We are the peachlings. In light of the Fruitpocolypse, we have come to take a being from your world to ours, to help seal the boundary and please our watermelon overlords.”
“A-are you going to take me?” Twilight whimpered, urine streaming down her back legs as she shook in fear.
The peachlings turned to look at each other, and began to laugh. The lead peachling addressed Twilight once more. “No. You would not even be good for a simple strawberry! We have come for the dragon!”
“Me?” Spike asked, astonished.
“Yes,” the peachling said to him. All of the peachlings extended their tentacles, and began to fondles to Spike. “Your body is nice and supple, and watermelons will grow inside you well.” With that, they wrapped their tentacles fully around spike, and lifted him above their peach heads. Spike began to scream in terror.
“No! I don’t wanna have watermelons grown inside me!” he wailed. “Twilight, save me!”
“I’m sorry Spike,” Twilight said. “We all have to make sacrifices sometimes. I myself, am sacrificing my number one assistant; do you have any idea how long it will take to find someone else who will work for nothing and take the abuse you did? It’s not going to be easy; I might even go as far to say that I’m the one getting the short end of the deal!”
Spike’s eyes widened in horror. “I don’t wanna die!”
“You’re not going to die,” the head peachling told him. “You will simply have watermelon seeds... inserted, and then they will grow inside you for about six months; soon, vines will be growing out of every orifice you possess. Completely painless, and nonlethal.” He seemingly looked Spike up and down with his great peachy head. “Well, until the birth.”
“The birth?” Spike screamed, but Twilight heard no more as the peach slid shut, and descended back into the soul pit. As it did so, all the earth around it crumble and sucked back into place, leaving only a field of smashed rock and wrecked houses that were so unfortunate as to be nearby as a reminder that it had ever been their.
“The peaches,” Apple Bloom said in the same droning voice. “Have left us.” She then fell over, merely a soulless husk.
Twilight surveyed all the damage. She could hear the muffled cries of ponies who had been in their homes when the soul pit closed. Apple Bloom, while still breathing, as basically going to be in a catatonic state for the rest of her life without a soul, and we all know what fate befell Spike.
Pulling out a scroll with her magic, Twilight began to write.
Dear Princess Celestia,
Some weird shit with fruit went down, and it got nasty. There was a soul pit and everything! Thankfully, unlike that dreadful sunion incident, I was able to fix everything in time.
Twilight looked around at the destruction once more. She looked behind her, and saw that her house/library was still intact! She shed a single tear of joy as she put the quill back to the paper.
Loses were minimal.
