A Very Derpy Christmas
It's Christmas Eve, and you are alone in your home. Circumstances are such that you have the place to yourself. You have a vague sense that you ought to be sad at the situation, but in truth you don't feel much other than a foggy bit of melancholy. It's never ideal to spend the holidays alone, but the situation could be worse. With the absence of friends and family comes an absence of responsibility. You have no pressing matters at the moment, and as such the holiday offers an opportunity to relax a bit before your vacation days run out and you are forced to return to work, or school, or whatever it is you have to do.
As a matter of fact, the only thing you really have to worry about is leaving something for Santa Claus. It's a tradition that you've done for as long as you can remember, and even if nobody else is here to see it, it just wouldn't be Christmas unless you leave out some milk and cookies. Of course, this is where you ran into a problem. You weren't really thinking ahead, and you have just realized that there is only one cookie in the house. What's worse, that cookie is an Oreo. Not that you think Oreos are bad. That isn't the case at all. In fact, your belief that Oreos are delicious is the problem. Five minutes ago, you had eight times as many.
You stare at the final Oreo. On one hand, you have to leave something out for Santa. It would be an insult not to. On the other hand, a single Oreo is entirely insufficient. In fact, it might be worse. The lack of cookies can be chalked up to forgetfulness. A single Oreo only says that you remembered but couldn't be bothered to put out anything good. Either that or it's a jab at Santa's customary girth, which is a one-way path to getting coal in your stocking. And to top it off, that last Oreo is looking really tasty. You summon all your strength and resist the urge to eat it.
You fail, and eat the Oreo.
At least the matter is settled. But now you have no cookies. Inexcusable. Even though you are fully aware that Santa Claus is actually a 4th-century Bishop from Turkey and not a flying-sleigh-riding mythical figure from the North Pole, you cannot bring yourself to break your tradition. You have to leave the guy something, even if he doesn't really exist. You scan the kitchen for anything that might be fitting, finding ramen, a half-eaten bag of Cheetos, and a banana that's been sitting the fruit bowl for so long that you resolve not to touch it, ever. None of these items are acceptable. You look behind the Cheetos bag. This is promising.
You find a plate of chocolate chip muffins. You knew about them somewhere in the back of your head, but you didn't remember that they were there until right this moment. It seems a suitable stand-in for cookies. It's a baked good, and has chocolate chips in it, which at the very least makes it sufficiently cookie-like for your purposes. Besides, you can hardly be the only person who puts out cookies for Santa. The poor guy is probably sick to death of cookies. The muffin will give him some variety.
You put the muffin on a plate and leave it next to your fireplace-shaped space heater, because you don't have an actual fireplace. This presents no difficulty because Santa is magic, and the absence of a fireplace isn’t going to stop someone who has reindeer that can fly fast enough to visit every house in the world without bursting into flame. The muffin will obviously still be there tomorrow, but that's fine. It's like leaving yourself a Christmas present. When you wake up tomorrow morning with a rumbling stomach, you'll stumbled out of bed and find a muffin waiting for you. It's perfect. You couldn't have a cookie for breakfast, after all.
The cookie crisis solved, you go through your typical nightly routine and hit the hay, so to speak. After rolling around for a bit, you fall asleep and have quite the typical night-before-Christmas style dream, complete with dancing sugarplums. Whatever those are. Also, nutcrackers, which are actually kind of creepy.
You awaken. You feel like you want to kick yourself for failing to close the curtains the night before. The early morning sun is brighter than it has any right to be, and it seems to focus its rays right on your eyeballs. You roll over to get your face out of the sun, but it is no use. You are fully awake. With surprising reluctance for a Christmas morning, you crawl out of bed. Your stomach rumbles and you remember the muffin that you left out for Santa. You can already smell it, and it’s wonderful.
You follow the smell out of your room. The muffin is gone. But that is not the first thing you notice. The first thing you notice is that there is a four-foot tall gray pony with a pale yellow mane sitting in the middle of the room, licking what you assume to be muffin crumbs off of her front hooves. You stop for a moment and wonder why you think, no, why you know she’s female. She looks familiar. Your eyes wander to her back. She has wings. Your throat tightens. You glance at her rear end. Seven bubbles. Your palms begin to sweat. Your gaze darts back to her face. She turns toward you, a wide smile on her face. She opens her eyes. They point in different directions. You begin to feel lightheaded.
She raises a foreleg and waves at you.
“Hello! Merry Christmas!”
You faint.
What a strange dream, you think. I’ve never had such a vivid dream about ponies before. That’s what it was, of course. A dream. You suddenly come to the realization that you are not in your bed. Without daring to open your eyes, you press your palms down into what feels like carpet. You decide to assume that you somehow rolled out of bed without waking up, even though never in your life have you ever done that. It’s certainly an easier assumption to make than accepting the fact that Derpy Hooves has somehow appeared in your living room. Also, somehow your room now has a carpet, even though it had a hardwood floor when you went to bed. It was gremlins, you think. They keep stealing my car keys and taking a sock out of every load of laundry, and now they’re moving my carpets around! After all, the rug in the hallway seems to have moved a few inches every time you see it. It’s totally not impossible that it somehow moved all the way into your room while you were asleep.
You open your eyes, and find Derpy leaning over at you, staring right into your eyes. Or at least into one of your eyes. Her other eye is pointed at your ear, but that was really kind of inevitable. In fact, if she was staring at you with both eyes you’d think something was wrong. More wrong than things already, anyway. The boundary between fiction and reality is apparently completely shattered. For all you know, the Kool-Aid Man could bust through the wall at any moment. That’s just what you need. A giant hole in the wall. You try not to think about H.P. Lovecraft.
“Are you okay?” Derpy asks. She looks worried. You shove your numerous what the crap is going on? questions from your mind as you attempt to respond.
“I think so...?” You really have no clue if you’re okay or not. It’s entirely possible that your house is home to some sort of weird mold that’s causing you to hallucinate. Maybe a worker at the Oreo factory got disgruntled and slipped some LSD into that last Oreo. You think that LSD works that way. You aren’t really sure. You resolve to not think about it too much.
“That’s good!” Derpy smiles. It’s adorable, of course. Even if you’re on an acid trip, it’s still a cute acid trip.
You sit up. Your head aches a bit, and you’re slightly dizzy, but otherwise none the worse for wear.
“I need a drink.”
“I’ll get it!” Derpy jumps into the air and doesn’t come down, because, as you suddenly remember, she has wings. She flutters into the kitchen. Several seconds later you hear a crash, complete with exaggerated clatter and the sound of a cat yowling, which is odd because you don’t own a cat. “Sorry!”
“Don’t worry about it,” you say. What with causality itself being apparently out to lunch, you figure that by the end of the day a mess in the kitchen will be the least of your problems.
“Here you go!” Derpy emerges from the kitchen, awkwardly gripping a glass of water between her hooves.
“Thanks.” As you take a drink you decide to make a token attempt at getting to the bottom of this, even though you don’t think you want to know the answer. “So how did you get here, anyway?”
“I smelled muffins, so I followed my nose and found them!”
You facepalm. The world has turned totally postmodern overnight. Since the world seems to have decided that it no longer gives a crap about following any natural laws, you will respond by treating the situation with roughly the same level of seriousness. Just as well, since a rational response would probably involve fainting again. You don’t know how or why, but there is now a real, live pony sitting in front of you, and you are going to make the most of it. It is Christmas, after all. Hardly a day for a nervous breakdown. That’s more appropriate for New Year’s Eve.
“You want to play some video games?” you ask. You own pretty much every video game system ever except for lame ones like Turbografx, and are pretty much awesome at all of them. If cutie marks were a real thing (which for all you know, they might be now), yours would probably be a controller of some sort.
“Sure!” She says, despite almost certainly not knowing what videogames are. You vaguely remember an arcade cabinet showing up at one point, but Derpy just doesn’t seem like the video game type.
You settle yourself on the couch, and pop in the Super Smash Bros. game of your choice and hand her the controller.
“Do you know how to play?”
She shakes her head. “I’ll figure it out.”
As it turns out, Derpy is very good at video games. You’re a pretty good player yourself. More than pretty good, in fact. You’re no pro, but there are very few people who can give you an honest run for your money when it comes to Super Smash Bros. Even taking on your friends, who are no slouches themselves, you are the victor roughly 98.4351% of the time. Okay, you pulled that stat out of your behind, but it’s close enough. You can’t remember the last time you were defeated. Or at least when you woke up this morning you couldn’t.
At the moment, the memory of your latest defeat is fresh in your mind because it occurred three minutes ago.
Your current win/loss record against Derpy is 4/56, and you can only half a victory as legitimate. You only count it as half because it was her first time playing a video game ever, and you aren’t so heartless as to take full credit for a victory you only obtained because your opponent had no idea what she was doing. Although in retrospect, you probably should have just taken the win. There was certainly no glory in the other three wins. One of them of the was the result of both of you deciding to play as Pikachu and Derpy not realizing that she was controlling the one with the hat. The poor pony had walked off the edge of the stage twice before she caught on. The last two wins were pure luck. Playing a novelty Sudden Death match with no items but Bob-ombs essentially removes skill from the equation.
But other than that, she had racked up a long stream of decisive victories, despite her inability to press individual buttons on the controller.
“So, are you having fun?” you ask.
“I sure am!” she says as she KO’s you once again, despite not even looking at the screen. You can’t remember the last time you were KO’d by a Pichu.
“What kind of other stuff do you like doing?”
“Baking!”
“Baking what?” As soon as the words are out of your mouth you realize that this is possible the stupidest question you have ever asked, even stupider than that time you asked your mom why hot dogs were called “hot” dogs if they were cold when you took them out of the fridge. Derpy frowns, and puts down the controller, allowing you to claim a fifth victory.
“Muffins, obviously!” She stops frowning. “Can we bake muffins!? I’m really good at baking muffins.”
“Uh, I guess...” You can tell that she’s resolved to bake muffins no matter what your response is, so you may as well go along with it. You briefly reflect on how odd it is that the fanbase was actually right about her love for muffins, but then you remember that you’re talking to a cartoon character and suddenly the muffin thing doesn’t seem like such a big deal. “Although I don’t think I have the ingredients.”
“You always have the ingredients to make muffins!” she declares. “You just have to be inventive.”
You follow her into the kitchen, where she has somehow already set half a dozen large muffin pans on the counter, despite the facts that
Three minutes earlier it was completely covered with random crap that you were too lazy to put away.
You are quite certain that you have never owned that many muffin pans.
“I need a bowl!” You turn towards Derpy, and find her wearing a gigantic chef’s hat. She is holding a rolling pin in her hoof, rapping it against her other hoof in the same manner that a disgruntled gangster would threaten a debtor with a baseball bat. You decide it would be best to give her a bowl. Getting between Derpy and her muffins is a bad idea. You open a cabinet and hand her the biggest bowl you can find. “Does this work?”
“Hmmm….” She eyes the bowl with one eye, while staring out the window with the other. Then she nods. “Perfect! Now we just need flour.”
“Uh, flour?”
“Yeah! Everypony has flour.”
“Okay…” You try to remember where your mother keeps the flour. Probably in a cabinet somewhere, likely behind a bunch of other stuff. You crouch down and start carefully moving things aside so as not to make a gigantic mess to be cleaned up later. Then there is a giant crash behind you. You don’t want to look, and so you don’t.
Derpy’s voice is rather sheepish. “Sorry.”
You shrug, and start tossing things over your shoulder. You’re going to get blamed for the ruckus anyway. As it turns out, the flour is indeed at the back of one of the cabinets behind all the bags of sugar. You stand up and find yourself wracked with fear as you find that Derpy is standing in front of the stove, stirring a pot of melted butter. With her tail, watching with one eye. The rest of her body is focused on a bowl of spices, baking powder, and whatever else it is that goes into muffins.
“Flour,” she says, with the seriousness of a surgeon asking for a scalpel. She holds up a hoof, and you deposit the entire bag of flour on it without question. You watch as she dumps the whole thing into a bowl with a gigantic poof. Apparently she isn’t much for recipes. Then again, she’s probably baked so many muffins in her life that she’s physically incapable of messing it up. She spins around and sniffs the butter. “Ready!” You dive out of the way as she spins around and grabs the butter off of the stove (apparently hooves don’t burn as easily as fingers) and dumps it into the bowl.
“I, uh…” You try to think of something to say, but Derpy has entered a zen-like state in which she knows only muffins. It isn’t unlike like the sort of trance you get into when you start speedrunning (non tool-assisted, of course) a Sonic The Hedgehog game. She is in the zone. Knowing how it feels when someone attempts to snap you out of it, you decide to leave her be. You don’t know whether you’ll like Derpy when she’s angry and decide to not take the risk.
You leave her to her muffins and decide to play some Mario Kart. You have some ghosts to unlock. You decide to start out with Rainbow Road. Surely you can make a full lap without falling off the course this time.
You fail, and begin to wonder if it’s an impossibility built into the game’s code. Perhaps one of the beach stages would be a bit more relaxing.
“Oooh, look at the giant fish!”
“Gah!” You almost fall off the couch (nearly squishing your pet Chihuahua, who is surprisingly chill with the pony in your house), as you realize that Derpy is sitting next to you on the couch. “I thought you were baking muffins!”
“I was, but they’re in the oven now.” She scrunches her face in frustration. “It’s the worst part of making muffins. The wait.”
You hold out the other controller. “You want to play while you wait?”
“Sure!” She stares at the screen for a few moments as you finish your level. “We’re racing, right?”
You only win a single race, and that’s because as soon as the oven timer beeped, Derpy dropped the controller and literally flew to the kitchen. Somehow, she managed to master such techniques as drifting, snaking, boosting, dodging the blue shell, and driving on the underside of the track. You’re pretty sure that some of those accomplishments aren’t even part of the game’s code outside of exploiting some sort of glitch. And you know for a fact that the “lightning banana” item she used isn’t coded into the game at all. You briefly wonder if you could get her to teach you how, but chances are she doesn’t know either. She probably doesn’t even realize that she’s done the impossible. Which seems to be a bit of a thing with her, given that she hasn’t even made note of the fact that she’s in the human world.
“Whaaaah!” You hear Derpy cry out in the midst of an odd tumbling sound. Then silence. Then a weak, muffled, “help.”
You pause the game and enter the kitchen. The first thing you see is a veritable mountain of muffins that have apparently cascaded out of the oven. Two gray hooves and a tail stick out. One of the hooves twitches. You grab the two of them and drag her out of the pile of muffins. Somehow, she manages to be upside down. She stumbles to the floor and after a moment of untangling her limbs, rights herself.
“I hate it when that happens,” she says, glaring at the pile of muffins. “I wish they would be more organized when they come out of the oven.”
“But… there were only like two dozen muffins in the pan…” you mumble.
“But these muffins aren’t in the pan!” Derpy says matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly that you start to doubt whether or not it actually makes sense. The confusion must be evident on your face, because Derpy pats you on the head and says, “Don’t worry! Twilight doesn’t quite understand it either. Last time I made muffins at her house, she spend like three days studying her oven for some reason.” She leans in, and her eyes dart back and forth to check for listeners. “I think she might be a bit crazy.”
“Y-yes,” you mumble, thinking that you probably are crazy too. You choose to distract yourself. “So what do we do with all these muffins?”
“Eat them!” Derpy declares.
“All at once?”
“Oh, right, we need to put them on plates first.” Derpy clears her throat. “You give me the muffins, and I’ll put them on plates.”
“Alright.” You turn to the muffin landslide and begin tossing the muffins to Derpy, who catches roughly 90% of them to put on the plates, and eats the rest. Before too long you’ve gotten most of the muffins out of the oven. You turn around to find that Derpy has stacked the muffins in the shape of an even larger muffin.
“It’s a muffinception!” she declares, with the same force one would expect if she had just proved Fermat’s Last Theorem for the first time. Which she probably could, without even trying. You try to think of other scientific mysteries that she could solve and you could take credit for. You aren’t a scientist, and nothing really comes to mind. You really should’ve paid more attention in chemistry.
“Do you want blueberry, banana nut, or chocolate chip?”
You snap out of your stupor. There weren’t any blueberries in the house before Derpy arrived, but you don’t let that stop you from taking a blueberry muffin. As you take a bite, it’s like a flavor explosion in your mouth. It’s like, blueberrilicious or some other sort of word that only shows up in cereal commercials. You watch dumbly as Derpy shoves a banana nut muffin (hopefully not made with that nasty old banana from the fruit bowl) into her mouth.
“Mmmm, that’s a good muffin!” she says. “Then she pauses and looks as pensive as she can with her walleyes. “Then again, they’re pretty much all good. Unless you really mess them up.” She leans in close. “You know Applejack?”
You don’t really know her, but you’re familiar enough with the show (if it hasn’t suddenly turned real) that you can fake it. “Yeah,”
“Normally, she’s a pretty good cook. But when she’s sleep deprived…” Derpy shudders so hard that her eyes actually line up for a moment. “You don’t wanna know. I thought I was gonna die!” She shakes her head. Then she stares at you for a moment (with one eye, the other one is pointed at your Sonic The Hedgehog figure, which you keep in the kitchen for some reason). “So, what do you want to do now?”
“Aren’t you going to eat the rest of the muffins?” you ask.
“Not right now!” she said, as if it’s obvious. “You have to pace yourself. Otherwise you get a stomachache and then you can’t eat any muffins. Do you have any more of those video game thingies? They’re fun.”
You acquiesce, and in the next few hours quickly find that Derpy is some sort of a savant when it comes to this stuff. The only game that she doesn’t suddenly become adept at is Guitar Hero, and even that is less due to lack of skill and more due to lack of focus; as soon as the music starts she tends to dance, and not really bother actually playing along.
The rest of the day passes uneventfully, hour by hour, muffin by muffin. As there has been all day, in the back of your mind there is a notion that you should probably find the situation odd, but you neglect to focus on it enough for it to truly cause an existential crisis. It’s Christmas, and nobody in their right mind would have a mental breakdown on Christmas. Then again, no one in their right mind would have a mental breakdown period. In any case, you aren’t about to look a gift pony in the mouth. If you’re crazy, might as well enjoy it.
The sun goes down early, likely because Luna is impatient. A thought begins to gnaw on your brain, like some sort of rat or termite. That comparison wasn’t too well thought out, and you attempt to forget the image of rats and bugs eating your brain. Anyway, that thought that you’re thinking is that at some point, Derpy is going to have to leave. She obviously isn’t going to stay indefinitely. If she is, you’re going to have to buy a lot of food, and you’ll get sick of muffins really quick.
As if she can read your thoughts (that is in and of itself kind of a terrifying thought), she suddenly says, in the middle of a spirited Pokemon battle (in which she’s beating you, despite having a team consisting of Shuckle, Magikarp, and four Bidoofs), “I’ll probably have to be going soon.”
You aren’t sure what to say to that. Fortunately, you don’t have to, as there is a knock on the door. You think of telling Derpy to hide, in case whoever’s at the door doesn’t respond well to a cartoon pony being on your couch, but you figure that that would be the least of your problems. Besides, she’s likely impossible to catch.
You open the door and gasp. Standing on your threshold is this guy:
He is pretty much the most jolly wizard you have ever seen in your life. Granted, he’s also the only wizard you’ve ever seen in your life, but even if you had seen a lot of wizards, he would still be the most jolly. He doesn’t quite look exactly like this; there’s no castle in the background, and he hasn’t summoned any unicorns, but there’s definitely some illusory fog, a gigantic moon, and and some dragons flying around in the distance.
The Jolly Wizard taps his staff on the floor, sending sparks up everywhere. “Derpy! It is time!” He declares dramatically.
Derpy leaps off of the sofa, and salutes him. Then she turns to you, a look of determination and also a bit of melancholy in her unparalleled eyes. “Now I must go. My planet needs me!” She suddenly steps forward, rears up, and catches you in a warm hug. “Thanks for hanging out with me today. I had a lot of fun.”
For a moment, you aren’t sure what to say, but then you find the words. “So did I,” you say, as you return the hug. You don’t know how or why this whole thing managed to happen, but you’re glad that it did. Even if it means you’re probably insane.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again, but I hope I can come back sometime.” She grins. “Then we can have a rematch!” She trots out the door after the wizard. “You can keep the leftover muffins.”
You get the feeling that this is the most generous gesture you’ve ever received.
You stand in the doorway as you watch Derpy and the Wizard as they cross the street, and inexplicably hop in the dumpster that sits against the curb. The wizard disappears under the lid. Derpy climbs in, holds up the lid, waves to you one last time, and shouts “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” Then she lets the lid fall.
For a long while, you stare at the dumpster, wondering whether they’ll come out. Before long, curiosity gets the best of you. You hold your breath, lift up the lid, and find nothing but a few small bags of garbage. You suddenly feel very tired. The likely reason is that your brain has used up so much energy attempting to figure out what the heck is going on today, but you’re too tired to consider the idea.
You eat a muffin (oatmeal, even though you didn’t have oatmeal in the house), take a few moments to open those presents that you nearly forgot that you had (you got some videogames, comics, and socks. There are always socks), and decide to go to bed.
As you begin to drift off, you get the vague sense that when you wake up tomorrow, everything may very well be back to normal because everything that had happened so far was just a dream. It’s the only explanation that makes even a little bit of sense. Especially what with that random wizard showing up out of nowhere. A dream is the only place that it makes sense for a wizard to suddenly come to your door and then disappear into a dumpster.
How cliche would that be? you think to yourself. And it sure would be, utterly negating everything that happened previously for the sake of a cheap twist. Then again, it would also be pretty much the only resolution that would make even the slightest bit of sense. Then again again, if this was a story, it was a pretty terrible one in terms of plotting anyway. No real conflict to speak of, things happening for no reason, no real rising action or climax… the spelling was probably horrible, too. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was some sort of lousy wish-fulfillment type of thing written without any real thought put into it other than “lol this is funny”.
You shrug to yourself and begin to drift off. If today was a dream, at least it was a fun one.
Author's Note
Don't ask. I'm not sure why I wrote this either.
Yes, I know it sucks. :p
