Batch-22

by The Plebeian

Rating: everyone
Tags: Slice of Life, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Comedy, Pinkie Pie
Length: 5022

Pinkie Pie receives an order for twenty-two batches of cupcakes. What follows is an entirely logical progression.

Pinkie Pie is faced with a daunting order of twenty-two batches of cupcakes, a twitching tail, and the barriers of common logic. Luckily, Twilight Sparkle comes to her rescue, and together, they defeat all three in one fell swoop. The result is an entirely reasonable and logical progression. There is only one Batch. Batch-22.

Written with sincere apologies to Joseph Heller.

Published 2014-01-21 00:00:03 UTC
Last updated 2014-01-21 00:00:03 UTC

A Recipe for Disaster

The day was so extraordinarily unremarkable that Pinkie Pie’s tail twitched nervously, and would not seem to stop, despite her stunning performance of ambiguous disaster precautions in anticipation. She dashed all about Sugarcube Corner, ducking under tables, taking board in cabinets, and avoiding the ovens like charred, smoky plagues. Shortly after taking refuge in a bright blue flowerpot, she felt her nose twitch nervously at a curious scent, which took her a whole half second to recognize.

“Ponyfeathers, they’re done!”

A bright fuchsia blur displaced the batch of fading petunias, which fell listlessly onto the floor. The mare opened three ovens only a second before their timers would have rung, and hastily threw their contents onto the counter before pulling out a kitchen drawer and hiding under it, pupils dilated.

“Let’s see, that was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one . . . Just one more left!”

She pushed the drawer back in to hazard a look over the counter. Eighteen boxes had been stacked in neat piles of six, and three trays of fresh, sweet-looking vanilla cupcakes sat lifelessly on the countertop. One by one, she frosted them with simple white icing, and then topped them with sprinkles. They were not the most interesting cupcakes she had made, although they certainly looked delicious. Once she had them all boxed, she looked at the order list, and checked off “Vanilla Vanities x3.”

Indeed, that left only one more batch. Her eyes panned down to the last item on the list, in between frantic glances to her left and right. “Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworls x1,” the list read cruelly to her.

“What the hay?!”

The mare dared to read the words once more, and a most irritating voice repeated them in her head. Indeed, it was certainly the Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl. What that meant was anypony’s guess, but certainly not Pinkie Pie’s. She rifled through a few drawers to produce the Sugarcube Corner recipe list, and further rifled through that to find that the Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl did not exist.

And yet there it was. It mocked her with its awful emptiness and called her mean names like “dolt” and “flour sack.” While she had not the slightest clue why such a ridiculous-sounding recipe should call her such a name, she decided it was as good a place as any to start. So, she galloped to the storage room of sugarcube corner, and returned to the kitchen to deposit the fresh new flour sack onto a nearby stool, where it rested in an improbable upright position. A beam of full moonlight found its way through the window, and landed fatefully on the burlap beast.

Her tail continued to twitch, and she immediately realized she had given disaster the golden opportunity to strike. With a frantic canter, the pink mare found herself curled up in the kitchen sink, amidst more than a few used baking trays. She donned one as a ridiculously-wide helmet, and rose from the aluminum depths to look over her work.

Twenty-one batches. Ten long hours of making, baking, top-the-cupcaking, always painstaking, hooves now aching. Her tail was still quaking, and despite all the shaking, she fell into a fit of for-pony’s-sake-ing. Under full moon’s waking, her spirit was breaking, her mane she was raking, and still no time for taking. She had not a chance for taking-a-break-ing. After all, there was still one more batch to be making. It was the last batch. Batch-22.

“Come on, twitcha-twitch! Just calm down for one more batch!”

However, the tail would not just calm down for one more batch, and continued its warnings even more furiously than before. It was at that point Pinkie laid out a plan of action that was airtight and foalproof, but only half-baked.

Pinkie Pie leapt out of the kitchen sink with a serene grace that would have made her gymnastics teacher proud, if only she had a gymnastics teacher. With an equally graceful thud, the mare landed rump-first on the flour-white tiled floor. Her quarry, however, escaped between her hind legs, and she performed a deadly spiral where she landed, which would most certainly have impressed her contemporary dance teacher, if only she had one. She continued the motion for seven revolutions until she performed a somersault, which allowed her to pin her prey down.

“You’re mine now!”

The fluffy pink tail might have objected with the technicality that it had always been hers, had she not allowed her primal predatory instincts to kick in. Just like her ancestors before her, Pinkie had caught her prey, and just like her ancestors before her, she would eat it to secure her place in the food chain. However, due to a few inconsistencies, namely the fact that Pinkie’s ancestors before her hunted grass, not tails, her coup de gras was less than effective.

The tail twitched in horror and agony as the pink predator began to graze on it. It was an unusual meal for the fearsome herbivore, but it was absolutely necessary for her survival. If she allowed the tail to twitch any further, disaster was sure to strike. She had to silence it, lest it call in a meteor, a monster, or a flowerpot to bring about her reckoning, fresh from the oven.

She could already hear a bell tolling for her. It was odd and high-pitched, and it sounded curiously like the one the Cakes had placed above the door of the bakery. Her ears perked up just in time to hear a concerned voice over the hopeless, agonized, and silent squeals of her prey.

“Pinkie? I heard a ruckus. Are you okay?” a lavender-colored voice rang out.

“Ovrr hrrr,” Pinkie replied, attempting to project her voice over the kitchen counter while still gnawing her prey into submission.

Twilight Sparkle walked into the kitchen, her brow first wrought in concern, then coated over with confusion. “Pinkie, are you eating your tail?”

“Mhmm,” Pinkie replied, giving a vicious tug on the elastic strands in the vain hope of silencing them. Still, they twitched on, and tickled her teeth.

“All right. Why are you eating your tail, Pinkie?”

The magenta-maned mare opened her mouth to answer the question in earnest, when to her horror, the cotton candy quarry flew out from her deadly vice. She stood up to chase it, but once again, the agile prey took advantage of her dumbfounded shock and darted away between her legs. She gave desperate chase, and began to shout, “Catch it, catch it, catch it!”

Despite the enigmatic nature of Pinkie’s pleas, their fervor and aggravatingly high pitch convinced Twilight that such was the best course of action. She quickly calculated the period of Pinkie’s rapid rotation, planned accordingly, and struck precisely and punctually.

This was Twilight’s first mistake. In her mouth, she tasted a tail with the flavor of flour flawed with pungent pony perspiration and sugary saliva. Twilight’s second mistake was failing to pull the tasteful tail out of the pink predator’s deadly dance. Not a moment after her daring strike, she came head to head with a cacophonous concussion that triggered a twin tangled tumble over the tiles, and dethroned the flour sack with formidable force.

A muffled groan escaped Twilight’s mouth. She tried to rub her face with her hooves, but only managed to massage the flour sack that lay atop her head. She heaved the sack off, leaving a trail of white powder that stretched from her horn to the spot where it had landed. The poor princess’s face had been coated with a film of flour, and despite some head shaking and face rubbing, the little grains seemed to enjoy their new home in the fibers of the Twilight’s coat. At the end of the pale trail rested a sorry-looking sack, stabbed open by her cruel horn; a trickle of flour continued to bleed out from it.

Pinkie Pie propped herself up on her front hooves with a grunt, and the sight of bakery-based carnage seemed to snap her back to the task at hand, despite her tail’s desperate pleas.

“Flour! That’s right.”

Pinkie quickly grabbed her measuring cup and held it under the wound to collect her ingredient. Meanwhile, Twilight picked herself off the floor and felt the point of impact on her forehead. It seemed to her that she had grown a second horn in the spot, and the calculations in her head occupied the moment with debate on whether that would make her a bicorn or a duocorn, or if she’d still be considered an alicorn. The controversy was quickly silenced, however, when Twilight’s second horn flooded her nerves with pure agony in response to her gentlest touch. Twilight decided the philosophical venture could wait.

“Pinkie, what’s gotten into you?” asked the lavender voice.

“Batch-22,” replied the fuchsia.

“Batch-22?” the lavender asked, an eyebrow raised.

“Batch-22,” repeated the fuchsia.

“What’s Batch-22?” asked the lavender, a migraine-based irritation seeping into her tone.

“The 22nd Batch, of course!” the fuchsia replied in a blissful tone that only served to aggravate the lavender further. Twilight was forced to reevaluate her approach.

“What is it a batch of?” she asked cautiously.

“Cupcakes!” came the reply, and Twilight’s migraine ebbed a bit at the progress.

“So it’s your- er- twenty-second batch of cupcakes?”

“Right!”

“What does that have to do with eating your tail?” asked Twilight with sincere consternation.

“It’s simple! I can’t make Batch-22 while my tail’s a-twitchin’ like this because when my tail’s a-twitchin’, that means a disaster’s about to happen. So, I ate my tail so it’d stop a-twitchin’, so a disaster won’t happen, so I can make Batch-22!”

At the mere mention of the dreaded Batch, Twilight’s migraine returned and forbade any objection, or even a logical dissection. All she knew was that it would be unwise to remind Pinkie that her tail was still twitching up a dervish, and that her plan had failed. She also gathered that Pinkie needed some good rest and serious logical help, and there was no better logician in Ponyville than Twilight Sparkle. As long as she had a cookbook for direction, Twilight was certain she could manage to conquer the realm of commercial baked goods and speed Pinkie on to some much-needed rest.

“What’s the recipe for Ba- I mean- those cupcakes?” Twilight asked.

“That’s just it! I have no idea.”

“What? How can you not have an idea? You’ve worked in here for years!”

“I’ve never seen the name before!”

“What’s the name?” asked Twilight, before realizing her third mistake.

“Batch-22!” Pinkie replied, and Twilight’s migraine doubled in fury.

“No, no, no! What’s the name of the recipe?!” asked Twilight Sparkle, trying to fend off the onslaught of her second horn on her nervous system.

“Oh! It’s the Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl.”

“The Mega Barbie-what?” Twilight asked, as pain had drowned out the rest of the words.

“The Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl.”

“The Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl?” Twilight asked to be sure.

“The Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl!” Pinkie affirmed.

“Stop that!”

“Stop what?” Pinkie asked innocently.

“Stop repeating what I say verbatim!” Twilight shouted. This was her fourth mistake.

“Stop repeating what you say verba-who?” asked Pinkie Pie.

“Verbatim!” Twilight screamed above the raucous maniacal laughter of her migraine.

“Verbatim?!” Pinkie screamed quizzically, making sure to ask the question at the same volume for clarity and consistency.

With an unprincessly and unprintable exclamation, Twilight Sparkle collapsed to the floor in a logical heap. The conversation had cut through poor Twilight’s sanity like a hot knife through butter.

“Butter!” Pinkie Pie suddenly exclaimed.

“Butter?” Twilight asked weakly from her station on the floury floor.

“Butter!” the pink menace repeated, and Twilight Sparkle shuddered in bitter agony.

Pinkie Pie skipped over to the refrigerator, and pulled out a couple sticks of butter on a small dish. Meanwhile, Twilight looked for something logical to cling to, and formed a question that she thought could not possibly go awry.

“What is the butter for?” Twilight asked, initiating her fifth mistake.

“You don’t know what the butter’s for? Didn’t you ever bake cupcakes when you were a filly?” Pinkie asked incredulously.

“No, I didn’t bake cupcakes as a filly,” Twilight replied.

“When?” Pinkie asked almost reflexively.

“Wha-?”

“When didn’t you bake cupcakes?” Pinkie asked, having set the butter down onto the counter.

“I’ve never baked cupcakes, Pinkie,” Twilight replied, a faint fear beginning to rise over the dull roar of her headache.

“Right. That’s telling me when you did bake cupcakes. I want to know when you didn’t!”

Twilight’s mind did somersaults over the flour-caked floor, and she wondered if she had sustained significant brain damage. “Pinkie, you’re not making any sense.”

Pinkie Pie gave a long sigh, and elaborated for her. “Twilight, I’m asking you when you didn’t bake cupcakes. All you’re telling me is when you did bake cupcakes, which has nothing to do with when you didn’t.”

The somersaults were somehow topped off with a climactic double-handspring and a messy dismount, and Twilight was sucked further into the deadly abyss. All she could manage was the word, “Always.”

“Always what?” Pinkie Pie asked, thoroughly confused now at Twilight’s antics.

Twilight picked herself off the ground, and said in an adequately annoyed voice, “I always didn’t bake cupcakes.”

“Oh! I see,” Pinkie replied understandingly, “The butter helps make them smooth and moist.”

However, Twilight’s original purpose for asking the question had been defeated, mocked, and discarded thoughtlessly, and all that was left was a sullen acceptance of fate. While Twilight calculated her losses on the logical battlefield, Pinkie produced a bowl and a spoon from a drawer and began pondering what else the Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl would need.

“I just don’t see why we don’t have a recipe for it.” Twilight wondered aloud, “How could they even order it if it doesn’t exist?”

“Beats me,” Pinkie said, “I guess we’re cooking blind.”

That struck Twilight as impressively fearful. She pictured her own future, exiting Sugarcube Corner with her logic destroyed, eyes wide, legs quivering, absolutely shellshocked.

“That’s it! Eggs!” Pinkie exclaimed, and Twilight was left to deal with the aftermath of another migraine wreaking havoc on her latest attempts at recapturing reality. The pink party pony pilfered a pair of eggs from the refrigerator, and began to beat them barbarically over the bowl. The rhythmic rapping served only to wreck the poor purple princess as she sullenly scrounged up the shards of her shattered mental state. It was then that she made her sixth mistake

“How long has your tail been twitching, anyway?”

The eggs immediately fell to the floor like sticky little bombs. Pinkie swept her head around to see that her tail was indeed still twitching. The exclamation, “Twitcha twitch!” could barely be heard above the unique noise produced by solid pony colliding with fourteen baking trays, amplified by the metal walls of a kitchen sink. Twilight gave up all hope, and a few tears began to run down her cheeks.

“Make it stop. Please, make it stop,” said the traumatized princess.

“Twilight, get in here!” whispered Pinkie in a hoarse and urgent manner.

“Why?” Twilight asked, constituting her seventh mistake.

“For protection!”

“Pinkie, we’re in a bakery. What’s the worst catastrophe that can happen?”

“The ovens could belch fire!”

“But-”

“The fridge could fall on you!”

“Pinkie, it’s a walk-in refr-”

“The cupcakes could eat you!”

“I highly doubt-”

“An enormous meteor could hit the bakery!”

Twilight Sparkle realized that an enormous meteor certainly could hit the bakery, and that in her current position, she was hardly prepared for it. Since it could hardly hurt, Twilight stood up, and crawled into the sink adjacent to Pinkie’s, thoroughly covering herself with enough pantry trays to survive a meteor impact. Once she was appropriately situated, Twilight asked once more, “So how long has your tail been twitching?”

“Ever since I started baking today.”

“Why are you only acting on it now?”

“I’m not. I’ve been doing this all day.”

“For how long?” Twilight asked, making her eighth mistake.

“Ten hours.”

“Ten hours?!”

“Ten hours!” Pinkie replied, once again matching her volume precisely. Twilight’s migraine began another crescendo.

“Has this ever happened before?”

“Nope! It must be an awful catastrophe.”

Twilight then made her ninth mistake. “Why would it twitch all day instead of just right before it happens like normal?"

“It must always be about to happen!”

“What?”

“My Pinkie sense only goes off when something bad is about to happen. Since it’s been twitching all day, it must have been about to happen the whole time! It’s always about to happen!”

Twilight leapt at the opportunity to establish some power over the situation and made her tenth mistake. “Pinkie, that’s not how time works. If something only happens at a single time, then it’s only about to happen for a short time before. Nothing can always be about to happen.”

“That’s it!” Pinkie shouted, crouching lower in her sink for extra protection, “Nothing is about to happen!”

“Right,” Twilight said with a smile, marking her eleventh mistake, “nothing is about to happen.”

“I understand now, Twilight! Nothing is about to happen!”

“Err, yeah,” said Twilight cautiously, “nothing is about to happen. It’s safe.”

“Safe! Safe?! How can anything be safe when nothing is about to happen?!” Pinkie Pie squealed, and leapt out of the sink once more. Twilight began to understand that Pinkie had interpreted the statement quite differently from its intended meaning.

“Quick, Twilight, you need to cast a spell that protects us from nothing!”

Twilight knew several spells that provided no protection whatsoever, but she had never before seen a spell that could protect the user from nothing. Every ward spell she knew was directly and blatantly defined to protect against something. Here, facing the nothing that was always about to happen, she felt weak and vulnerable. While Twilight Sparkle worried about her scholarly crisis, and how she could have possibly gone all her life without learning how to protect herself from nothing, Pinkie Pie continued to frantically wonder aloud.

“What even happens when nothing happens? Nothing? But something has to happen, or else nothing didn’t happen! Something has to happen when nothing happens or nothing ever happened, and once nothing ever happens, then nothing has happened! So . . .”

Pinkie Pie’s eyes dilated, and Twilight, who had subconsciously listened to Pinkie’s reasoning, also subconsciously brought it to its logical conclusion, which was her twelfth mistake.

“Nothing is always happening,” Twilight said, with an inner horror that caused her voice to crack.

“That’s gotta be it! If it’s always happening, then it must always be about to happen too! That’s why my tail’s a-twitchin’! We’ve gotta stop nothing from always happening!”

Twilight tried her best to crawl out of the sink without agitating her migraine, which had subsided to a casual riot. “How do we stop nothing?” she asked, which was her thirteenth mistake.

“I dunno. How do we make nothing not happen?”

“There has to be something we can do,” Twilight reasoned.

“Something out there has to stop nothing, right?” Pinkie assisted.

“Right. Something stops nothing.”

“Something stops nothing.” Pinkie repeated. She then walked to the fridge, grabbed more eggs, and began beating them into the bowl.

“Pinkie, what are you doing?”

“Stopping nothing.”

“What? How?”

“Something. You said it yourself, silly,” Pinkie said, with a blissful smile that seemed to ignore the entire preceding crisis. “If nothing is always about to happen, we can only prevent it by always making something happen. Get to it!”

Twilight’s first logical solution and fourteenth mistake was to begin running in place, so that the noise of hoofsteps on tile would always happen. However, the work of her logical mind reminded her that there was still divisible time between the sound of each hoofstep. So, she ran faster. Before long, she was in a stationary sprint, and could not hear the space between her steps. She had done it. Twilight Sparkle had kept nothing at bay by making something always happen. Deep inside, she knew Celestia would be proud of her quick thinking and tact. She thought of the wonderful letter she would write to the princess regarding her brave assistance of Pinkie Pie in the face of nothing.

“So what brought you here in the first place?” Pinkie asked.

“I was just . . . coming home . . . from helping . . . Applejack,” Twilight said between gasps. “I heard . . . a bunch of noise . . . coming from . . . Sugarcube-”

“That’s right, sugarcubes!” Pinkie interrupted, and went back to the storage room to retrieve the ingredient. However, Twilight was beginning to get tired of something. She simply lacked the athletic prowess to continue something for more than a minute or two, and soon enough, something had her legs, lungs, head, horn, and horn aching. Pinkie returned from the back room just in time to see something make Twilight collapse. She stopped in her tracks, her mouth open in horror.

And then, nothing happened.

Pinkie’s eyes began to water at the tragedy that had just befallen Sugarcube Corner. “Twilight,” she said, her voice breaking, “how could you do this?”

Twilight looked regretfully up to Pinkie, “I . . . couldn’t . . . go any . . . longer.”

“But,” Pinkie began, looking at all the nothing that had just happened, “I trusted you.”

Twilight was starting to catch her breath, “I’m . . . I’m so sorry, Pinkie. I failed. Nothing happened.”

Pinkie lashed out in righteous anger now. “What do you mean, nothing happened?! Of course nothing happened!”

“I know,” Twilight sobbed and repeated, “Nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened!”

“Nothing happened.”

“But nothing happened,” Pinkie said ponderously.

Twilight looked around the kitchen. Indeed, nothing had happened, but it looked as if nothing had happened. Twilight forced herself up once more, and gave a baffled “Hm.”

Nothing happened for a few more seconds, before Twilight suggested a proper course of action, her fifteenth mistake, “Let’s just get back to making those cupcakes.”

Pinkie nodded, and skipped back over to the bowl, where she mixed the ingredients they had gathered thus far. “I guess we should get some barbleberries, too.”

Twilight nodded. They were making progress. “Great, where can I find them?”

“Oh, we don’t have any.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Then how are we supposed to add them?”

“Beats me!” Pinkie sang, “It’s been years since we’ve made anything with them, so we stopped stocking them altogether.”

“Well we have to use something,” Twilight said, which was her sixteenth mistake.

“Go grab some blueberries from the fridge,” Pinkie said. “I have an idea.”

Twilight complied, and grabbed some blueberries from the fridge, a look of concern and confusion on her face. “What’s your idea?”

“So what’s the difference between barbleberries and blueberries?”

“What? I don’t know. I’ve never had barbleberries.”

“Come on, Twilight! Use that noggin of yours. The difference is bar- minus u.”

“What?”

“Think about it! If you add bar- and subtract u from blueberries, you get barbleberries!”

“Oh, so we need to add ‘bar- - u’ to the blueberries?” Twilight asked, which was her seventeenth mistake.

“Precisely, and since ‘bar- - u’ is a double negative, we just need to add baru!”

Twilight may have objected, but her second horn had blocked off all forms of logical, mathematical, or linguistic dissection for the time being with walls of potential agony. So, Twilight was forced to accept the entirely true fact that Pinkie’s logic was irrefutable. Pinkie took the blueberries, and added them into the bowl, stirring intently.

“Right, now let’s add the baru. Are you ready?”

“No. How do we add baru?”

“Easy! Let me demonstrate.”

While Pinkie stirred the contents of the bowl, she leaned over and began began singing a single tone over and over in varying rhythm:

“Baru baru baru, baru baru baru baru. Baru baru baru baru, baru baru baru baru. Baru.”

She stopped, and motioned for Twilight to add some baru of her own to the mix for more flavor. Twilight obliged:

“Baru, baru, baru baru baru. Baru baru baru baru baru; baru baru baru baru. Baru.”

“Very good, Twilight! You should make cupcakes more often. You’re a wonderful chef. Let’s finish this up. It needs a bit more baru, I think.”

So, the two of them sang over the mixing bowl:

“Baru baru, baru baru, baru baru baru baru. Baru baru baru, baru baru baru; baru baru. Baru baru baru, baru baru baru baru. Baru baru baru baru baru baru baru baru, baru baru baru baru baru baru baru baru. Baru. Baru. Baru, baru. Baru baru baru baru baru; baru baru baru baru baru. Baru, baru baru baru, baru baru baru, baru baru baru. Baru baru baru. Baru baru baru baru baru baru baru. Baru baru, baru baru. Baru baru, baru baru. Baru. Baru.”

“That’s just enough baru, I think,” Pinkie said, and poured the well-mixed barbleberry batter into the cupcake pan. With a happy whistle to the tune of “The Trout,” Pinkie threw the cupcake pan into the oven, closed the door, and turned the dial.

“So,” Twilight said, with a mixture of relief and lingering confusion, “what do we do now?”

“We wait,” Pinkie said.

“For how long?” Twilight asked, making her eighteenth mistake.

“Usually I wait for about twenty minutes, but since we’ve got two free ovens, I have an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Three ovens means three times the heat. If we use the other two ovens at the same time, Batch-22 will only take six to seven minutes!”

At the mention of the Batch, Twilight cringed. Still, she was able to find the key flaw in Pinkie’s process. “But wouldn’t we have to split the cupcakes evenly between the ovens?”

Pinkie shook her head. “Not at all! Didn’t you ever learn the law of conservation of energy? Since nothing else nearby needs heat, the energy will all go to the cupcakes, the nearest acceptor.”

“But aren’t we also close to the ovens? Won’t they start cooking us, since we can accept the heat?” Twilight reasoned.

“Oh, shoot! You’re right, Twilight! We need to stay well enough away from the ovens, or we’ll be cooked alive.”

So, they stepped a good few hooves away from the ovens so the heat transfer would be as efficient as possible. After seven minutes, they turned off all three of the ovens, and removed Batch-22. Twilight made an astute observation and a nineteenth mistake, “They’re still a bit runny.”

“Not a problem,” Pinkie answered, “They just need to cool down. Besides, frosting is like a bonding agent. Once we have the cupcakes topped, they’ll be nice and solid.”

Twilight had always known frosting to be a rather sticky substance, and concluded that Pinkie’s conjecture was sound. However, something still needed to be answered. “What sort of frosting do we use?”

“Well, it’s the Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworl. We need to put some Bonanza Sworl on it!”

“Great! Where do you keep the Bonanza Sworl?”

“We don’t have any Bonanza Sworl,” Pinkie sang, “But we can use bonanaz!”

“Bananas?” Twilight inquired.

“No, bonanaz!” Pinkie corrected emphatically, “And since there’s no addition or subtraction between bonanaz and Bonanza, we don’t even have to mix anything in.”

So, Twilight grabbed a bunch of ripe bonanaz from the storage room and asked, “Where do you keep the knives?”

“What do you need a knife for, Twilight?” Pinkie asked warily.

“To cut the bonanaz, what else?” Twilight answered.

“No, Twilight, it’s Bonanza Sworl, not Bonanza Split!”

“What do we do, then?”

“It’s obvious. We have to Sworl the bonanaz.”

Pinkie demonstrated clearly and descriptively how to Sworl the bonanaz, and Twilight did her best to mimic the complex movements of her energetic pink friend, and made her twentieth mistake. Pinkie quickly criticised her. “Come on, Twilight. That’s not Sworling! That’s swirling! You need to Sworl them, like this.”

Pinkie then demonstrated once again the complex process of Sworling the bonanaz. Twilight was quick to catch her previous errors and immediately began to Sworl her bonanaz. Once they finished Sworling their bonanaz, Pinkie loaded the Bonanza Sworl into an icing bag, and started topping the cupcakes. Once she finished, she took the cupcakes one-by-twenty-two out of the cooking tray, setting them into the twenty-second box, where they slowly sank in before settling. They had made the Barbleberry Bonanza Sworls. It was then that Twilight made her twenty-first mistake.

“I just feel like we’re forgetting something important.”

“Well, let’s see what we made so far. We’ve got the Barbleberry, the Bonanza Sworl. What else was there?”

Twilight jumped at the realization, “Pinkie Pie, we forgot the Mega!”

“Oh no, you’re right Twilight!” Pinkie gasped, “We have to add some Mega!”

“How do we even add Mega, though?”

“Twilight, what’s the most mega thing you can think of?” Pinkie asked urgently.

“What?” Twilight stammered, and then made her twenty-second mistake, “Uh, a meteorite!”

It was then that a meteorite the size of a tall shortcake crashed through the roof of Sugarcube Corner and struck the counter with a granite-shattering force. Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie were thrown by a small shockwave, and the first twenty-one batches of cupcakes fell to the floor in a frosty, delicious mess. Twilight was struck keenly in the head with a piece of debris, and earned her third horn, which battled the second horn for control of her central processing and whether she was a tricorn or a triplicorn. The resulting stalemate allowed Twilight’s logical processors to return to their home state, though it would still take several weeks to repair the lasting damages.

After a short coughing fit, the two rolled back onto their hooves and surveyed the scene. On the remains of the counter was Batch-22, topped with a red-hot meteorite. They had made the Mega Barbleberry Bonanza Sworls. Pinkie’s tail ceased its twitching. For a few moments, nothing happened. The two gazed at the glorious Batch in awe.

“That’s some Batch, that Batch-22,” Twilight Sparkle observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Pinkie Pie agreed.