The Evils of Ham

by Mark Garg von Herbalist

Rating: mature
Tags: Random, Dark, Comedy
Length: 1119

A one hour power challenge for the group Prompt-a-Day. Prompt: Someone comes in with a large ham. The story: Shining Armor has some ham, ponies die and a terrorist hunt ends badly.

It is Hearths Warming Eve and a fancy restaurant becomes the face of tragedy when the ingestion of ham sparks a series of unfortunate events leading to death and chaos, and the eventual arrest of a beloved political figure.

Even though I am not part of Prompt-a-Day, I still figured I could try the Large Hams Incoming! prompt to see if I could, in fact, write a quality one shot story with only an hour and one thousand word limit.

I wrote it in 57 minutes and 46 seconds, and kinda went over the word count a bit, so I succeeded at one. As for the quality part, you are the judge for that. Fave if you up vote, comment why you hated it if you down vote, and let me know if I should do this again… Or see a shrink. The choice is yours.

Web MA-17: For strong language and violence.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2013-12-28 02:40:09 UTC

Picture This. You’re In A Fanfiction...

“DID SOMEPONY ORDER A LARGE HAM!?” shouts a waiter bursting through the double doors of a upscale Canterlot restaurant.

“Fuck yeah!” yells Shining Armor with his hoof raised in pride.

“Here’s your fucking ham, asshole!”

The waiter throws the ham at Shining Armor, and he grabs the delicious, juicy slab of meat with his magic and slams it down on his plate with a crazed scream. The super awesome political figure chuckles madly as he places his hooves on either side, drooling a torrent of slobber all over his delicious meal. His super hot wife, Mi Amor Cadenza, can only watch in disgust and in near tears as her handsome husband devours the taboo meal like a wolf that just got finished fasting for a month. Within seconds, the ham is just bone and its uneaten scraps litter the floor, expensive table cloth, and some of Cadence’s formal attire.

“I’m so out of character right now!” laughs Shining Armor.

Then he picks up the plate and throws it at Jet Set. It shatters against his face and he falls to the ground, sobbing in agony as a gratuitous amounts of blood squirts from the puncture wounds all over his face and neck.

His not so attractive, heavily implied wife, Upper Crust drops to the ground and scoops up her implied husband in her arms, screaming to the heavens: “Why!? Why, Celestia!? Why did you have to take him!?”

Fancy Pants shakes his head in disappointment and pats the snob on the back of the shoulder as she weeps over the corpse formally known as Jet Set, not caring that she is being soaked in her dead husband’s blood.

Meanwhile, Cadence looks at Shining Armor in disbelief. The Prince of the Crystal Empire is too busy drinking an oversized dosage of wine from a fancy glass to notice what he did, though.

“Shining, do you have any idea what you’ve just done!” cries Cadence over the wails of Upper Crust.

Shining Armor finishes his drink and looks at Cadence while burping, and then he looks at the scene that is supposed to be emotional, but is more than likely not.

“From the looks of it, I killed a guy,” he says with a small slur, and then he looks at Cadence with a stupid smile and says: “Not that anypony liked him, anyway. He was a prick.”

His careless remark about taking the life of a one percenter brings the Princess of Love to tears very quickly.

“This is all because of the stupid ham!” sobs Cadence.

“Don’t blame the ham for something you did,” slurs Shining Armor.

“What!? I’m not the one that killed a guy with a plate! Why did you even order the ham in the first place!?”

Shining Armor shrugs and pops the cork off of a conveniently close bottle of wine. “I don’t know. Something about something relating to the something.”

He takes a big gulp, burps and throws the empty piece of garbage away without much care in the world. Upper Crust’s sobbing comes to an abrupt end and Cadence gasps with shock and covers her mouth as she looks away. After repressing the urge to hurl from seeing yet another gruesome death, she glares at Shining Armor.

“You just killed Upper Crust!” yells Cadence furiously.

Shining Armor blinks at his four wives. “Who?”

“The mare whose skull you just caved in with a wine bottle!”

Shining Armor has to squint so his eyes can focus on where Upper Crust is, and not only does he see Fancy Pants cleaning blood splatter off of his face with his rag, he also sees the dead couple lie in a pile on top of each other with a pool of blood spreading across the carpet. The bottle he had thrown is lodged right in Upper Crust’s caved in skull and her eyes are still wide open, staring at the heavens, silently grateful that she has been reunited with the love of her life.

Shining Armor snorts a laugh. “Man, I am so trashed, right now.”

While he chuckles madly, Cadence growls and is about to storm off when the doors are suddenly kicked down and the windows broken in by an army of Royal Guards in tactical gear. During this, Fancy Pants is unfortunately crushed by a steroid addicted pegasus screaming “YEAHHHHHHH!” and the patrons are brutally knocked to the ground or blinded with tear gas tossed in with extreme prejudice.

“Nopony move! We’re looking for a known terrorist who has managed to slip past airport security!” barks the lead officer, who is not wearing a helmet and has his bulging, tattooed limbs exposed for some reason.

“Sir, I see him!” says another guard as his hoof snaps towards a foal sitting in the back with his parents.

“Taze him!”

Thirteen guards rush forward and knock the parents to the ground with their billy clubs before they taze the poor child. The child screams in bloodcurdling agony and writhes on the ground as volts of electricity surge through him, and by the time they are done, he is on the ground, smoking and sparking.

“Sir, I think we just killed him,” says one of the guards with tears in his eyes.

The tattooed, buff guard sighs in disappointment and looks at the ground, shaking his head.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When along the lines did we, the protectors of the people, become the very enemies we swore to defeat?” he narrates dramatically.

“You just killed my kid, you asshole!” roars the father.

He is then shot in the head and Shining Armor laughs hysterically till his face is red and his lungs are burning from lack of oxygen.

“Wow, this is so screwed up!” laughs the prince.

Then the buff guard whirls around and points at Shining Armor with a fire in his eyes, bellowing: “You still have parking tickets to pay!”

=====000O000=====

“And then I was arrested, Cadence told me she had an affair with Sombra a thousand years ago, and I puked on the way over to this jail cell,” concludes Shining Armor dismissively from his place behind the freshly polished steel bars holding him in his new concrete home. Then he looks at Twilight with a sweet smile. “How did your Hearths Warming Eve go, Twili?”

Twilight is speechless, though with her eyes bulged and jaw to the floor, it is quite clear what the ridiculously hot Princess of Friendship is thinking. Luckily for her, though, her new fiance, the dashing Flash Sentry, speaks for her.

“Well,” begins Flash Sentry with a sigh, “picture this. You’re in a fanfiction that horribly misrepresents everypony...”