Twilight Sparkle sat back on her haunches and sighed deeply, face in her hooves. She looked up at the worried pink mare in front of her… then placed her head in her hooves and sighed again.
Several seconds passed. Finally, Twilight looked up again and said “Okay, Pinkie, run me through this again. What exactly happened?”
Pinkie shifted her hooves, looking guilty. “Twilight, before I begin, I just want to reassure you-“
“For the fourth time.”
“-that I never intended for things to go this far.”
Twilight glowered at her. “I understand that, Pinkie. Please. Explain.”
“Well, about a week ago, I was working at Sugar Cube Corner with the Cakes, and I made a batch of cookies. See, I’ve always been better at cooking stuff like cakes or cupcakes, and I wanted to expand my craft. I don’t know what I did, but they came out…”
“Abysmal?”
“Basically, yeah. They made Applejack’s Baked Bads look like the MMMM. Fluttershy couldn’t even get her raccoons to eat them.”
Spike rubbed his tummy. “They don’t know what they were missing! You should have stuck with those, Pinkie.”
Pinkie continued. “So I made a few more batches, and they started getting better and better. Pretty soon most of Ponyville was eating my cookies, and they loved them!”
“Which is when you hired Granny Smith?” Twilight asked.
“Right! See, my Granny Pie was always so good at baking cookies, and Granny Smith’s a granny, and she’s so nice, so I asked her for some help, and she said yes!”
Twilight reached into her saddlebag, and produced a thick binder filled with order forms and receipts. “And that’s when that bakery from Canterlot started placing orders.”
“Yepparooni! That was a big increase in orders, so we had to expand. Granny Smith put me in contact with Applejack’s aunties Apple Rose and Applesauce, and I already knew Auntie Goldie Delicious. I made some trips to the Ponyville Retirement Home, and I recruited every granny I could find to help make more cookies!”
“And that’s when things started going haywire?”
“Comparatively, no. See, Canterlot’s love of those things had gotten so big, other cities were ordering them too! Los Pegasus, Las Haygas, Baltimare, Cloudsdale, everypony everywhere wanted my cookies! The orders were outpacing the grannies! Then, Papa wrote me from the farm. He told me they had discovered a mineral that was compositionally identical to chocolate! Since my business was getting so big, I offered to make the Pie Family rock farm a subsidiary of Pinkie’s Cookies, and we started farming chocolate for cookies! I called the mineral cookium.”
Twilight closed her eyes, inhaled, and counted to ten before slowly exhaling. “That should not be physically possible… but continue please, Pinkie.”
Pinkie winced. “Well, I think Pinkie may have become a bit of a Greedy Gus by this point.”
“Ya think, Pinkie?!”
“Well, I had come so far so fast, I wanted to see how far and long I could take it. I started other bakeries in the other cities-“
“You mean the Factories.” Twilight pointed out.
“They weren’t Factories at first! They were just bakeries! Headed by one granny each and producing cookies round the clock. Then Maud wrote me from her University Exchange trip to the Gallopagos and said that her geology group had found a massive deposit of cookium buried under Equestria! So I sent a team of ponies down, and they started the mining operation!”
“Which is when you hired Rarity to use her gem-finding spell to look for other cookium deposits.” Twilight mentioned.
“Ah, well, that was the original idea. I didn’t know that would turn out like it did.” Pinkie responded, looking guilty. Twilight turned to look at Rarity, who was seated nearby. “How are you feeling, Rarity?”
Slowly, lethargically, Rarity turned to look at Twilight through heavy, lidded eyes. “Oh, what? Ah, yes, Twilight. I’m feeling … fine. Ish.” Rarity coughed, a single cookie being expelled whole from her lips. She looked down at it, then almost mechanically, picked it up and ate it.
Twilight shook her head. “Why didn’t either of you check with me? Magical Interface Overload can happen to anypony! I’m surprised it hadn’t happened to you looking for gems before, Rarity.”
Rarity shook her head. “That’s because there’s so few diamonds in the world, compared to cookium. It was my own fault, I was trying to juggle too many giant cookium deposits at once. That’s when this happened…” Rarity turned, pointing to her flank. Her Cutie Mark, formerly a trio of diamonds, had been replaced by three cookies, with diamonds where the chips would be. Twilight turned to look at Pinkie. “Why didn’t that make you think ‘Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t be toying with this sort of thing?”
Pinkie shifted. “I know! I’m sorry Twilight, and I’m sorry Rarity, I was too caught up with how far I could go! It kept getting bigger and bigger- Discord was setting up those shipments from the Cookie planet, Zecora was using her alchemy to turn gold into cookies, I even paid Cadence to send me the mirror portal from the Crystal Empire. I hardwired it to open to the Cookieverse.”
“Which is?”
“An entire universe where everything is cookies! I thought it was a dream come true!”
“Wait a second, how did you convince Cadence to just give you the mirror?”
Pinkie grinned. “I sent my new Secretary of Pony Relations to talk to her. Then I paid her. Handsomely.”
*C-O-O-K-I-E-S*
“Cryst- sorry, Cooookieeeees…” the resurrected Secretary of Pony Relations Sombra pontificated to his replacement ruler.
“Oh, I quite agree.” Replied a very happy Cadence, popping another cookie into her mouth. The Princess of the Crystal Empire had been pigging out on cookies for a week now, and had put on quite a bit of happy weight. Shining Armor sat to the side, chewing on a macadamia nut cookie of his own. “Is it odd that I find this more than a little hot?”
*C-O-O-K-I-E-S*
“So anyway, Twilight, since Ponyville- sorry, Cookieville now- was knee-deep in cookies by that point, I figured there was no sense in stopping!”
Twilight’s glare somehow became even more deadpan. “You could have stopped anytime. You could have at least stopped at temporally enslaving Rainbow Dash.”
Pinkie thrust her hooves to the side. “Oh, come on, Twilight! You have to admit it’s a genius idea, what I worked out with her.”
Twilight looked up at the massive apparatus constructed above the remains of Sugar Cube Corner as the 220th boom of the day echoed over Cookieville. It was a remarkable feat of engineering- a combination of magically induced Time Portals and a floating circle of triangular glass prisms. Twilight couldn’t begin to imagine where Pinkie could have dug up one of those prisms, much less twenty. Rainbow Dash, in a state of constant freefall, hit Rainboom velocity exactly in the center of the circle, before vanishing in a flash of light. The circle of prisms absorbed the rainbow-colored light with an almost audible Om Nom Nom sound. Cookies by the billion materialized from the outside of the circle, falling and joining the growing heap that used to be Ponyville.
High above the circle, Rainbow rematerialized and began falling again. She reached the circle again and set off another Rainboom before vanishing again. If one’s eyes were sharp enough, one could pick out her now-altered Cutie Mark just before vanishing- a cookie, with rainbow-colored chips, producing a lightning bolt.
Twilight called upward. “Rainbow, are you feeling okay up there?”
The crazed Pegasus babbled “WHYYESYEPEEYUPTWILIGHTSPARKLESPACKLESPICKLESPUCKLEBUCKETI’MPERFECTFINEANDDANDYFEELIN’GREATGOTTAGOFASTFASTFASTFASTCOOKIECOOKIECOOKIECOOKIEGOTTAGETONTHECOOKIETRAINIT’SLEAVINGTHESTATIONALLABOARDCHOOCHOOSTARTMAKINGTWENTYFORTYSIXTYEIGHTYAHUNDREDPERCENTMORECOOKIESGETHEWONDERBOLTSINONTHISACTIONI’LLLEAVEEMINTHEDUST-“
Twilight turned, shutting out the babbling and booming from behind her. She stared Pinkie down. “Keep. Going.”
Pinkie gulped. “Aheh, well, that’s when things really went wrong. See, I was digging around in the library of the Castle of the Two Sisters in the Everfree Forest, and I found this book right here!” Pinkie held up an ancient book, bound in what appeared to be flesh. A pair of eyes glared out from the cover, and a fanged mouth with an ancient cookie wedged in it snarled silently out at Twilight. On its binding was printed a single word: COOKIENOMICON.
“Pinkie, any book with the word Nomicon in it is bound to be bad news.”
“Well, you see, I read it, and it had a spell called the Elder Pact, which would give great strength to the grannies I had helping me. I thought that sounded like a great idea, so I read the inscription out loud, and, well…”
Pinkie pointed at the Town Hall. Great tendrils of flesh and dough writhed from its windows. Great roots of doughy flesh (or was it fleshy dough) stretched in a dozen directions from its base. At the top of the mass, the torso of Granny Smith spewed profanity and cookies, her eyes red, her toothless maw stretched to horrific lengths. “IT WANTS MORE COOKIES, THE FILTHY LITTLE BEAST, IT IS SPOILED, IT IS SPOILED ROTTEN TO THE CORE.”
Mayor Mare, suspended upside down from a window, wrapped in dough, merely turned to look at Pinkie and moaned, in a voice that was not her own, “You could have stopped it.”
Pinkie smiled sheepishly. “Granny Smith seems happy in her new position as Grandmatriarch, at least?”
Twilight widened her eyes sarcastically. “Really?! Well, you know what, let’s ask the entity formerly known as Applejack for her opinion on the matter. Fleshjack, are you happy with your family’s current positon?”
“.s̸͏̶̯e̴̸͍̫̟͖̝̮̟̩̘i̮͠k̨̦o҉̸͇͎͈̰͚̞o͏͕̞̞͘C̶͓̻̟̲̥͉ ̻̞͠.̮̱̰͓̝͇̼́͢͝ͅs̰̙̥̮̘̥̹̭̀ͅe̵̠͙̤̻̖̱̯̰ị̶̲͙k̴̳̪̙̳̜̞͙ò̮̲̟̲o̙̻̭̠̟̼ͅC̹̙͔̠̺̪̰̠ ̤̻̹̤̬̤̙.̴̪͕̮͡s̻̺̠̠̻e͏̘̭͘͢i͕̙k̡͇̗̳̹͝o̡̠̗̗̬̘͘͢o̭̺̺̭̝̱̱̮͜C̗̦̖̫̺̻̺͈͔ ̵̛̟̰͔̭̣͙.̜̞̜̳͔̳͇̝͠s̪̠̭̬͍͟͞e̗̲͔͇i̤̘̮̤k̢̗̣͔̺̗ó͉̖͉̝͙̠̰̹̼o̸̴̠Ć̷̦̹̞̺̱͇͙ ̴̦͍̻̥͓̗̳.͏̘͖͔̰̪̦ͅs̞̱̘̗̤̱̻͢e̴͡҉̯͉̯̗̺̗̪̯ị̖̱̻̼̞͟k҉̨͉̣̹o͈̳̮̮̖̜̝͢͞͞o̴̝̪͍̻̟͍̳̤C̺͚̖̳͇ ̣̻̫̭̙̺ͅͅ.̶̻̪̤̮̯̺͎̱́͡s̟̥̭̳̬͞e̬̖̗͎̞͙͇͙͞͝ḭ̵̧̙̳k͓̗̫̟̫̝͓̻̩ǫ̠̖̺̤͈̹́͞o̗̘͓͢C̤̱͎̳̠ͅ ̡̧̮̼̹̰̭̥̻͙͝ͅ.̝͙s̵͎͕e̸̲͈̝̪̻̬̪͉̻͞i̳͕̱͔̗͕k͏̵͚̦͚̺͍͈̼o̯̝͕͔o̮̦̫̥̙̲̟͡C̛̻̪̼͎̜̖͜͟ ̴͔̗̘̙̲͎̫͜͟.̯s͕̝͎̣͝e̜̼̗̖͉͇̼̞͡i̴̛͔̼̮͡k̰͞o͓̗͚̠̮̦̲ǫ̷͓̰͓͉̪͓C͡ͅ” the corrupted, unrecognizable shell of the farmpony oozed.
Pinkie began to sweat. “Well, at least everypony’s enjoying themselves?”
Twilight finally exploded. “ENJOYING THEMSELVES?!!? PINKIE, THOUSANDS ARE DEAD! MORE ARE DYING DAILY AND BEING CONVERTED INTO COOKIES, AND YOU’RE WORRIED THEY MAY NOT BE ENJOYING THEMSELVES?!!?”
“Twilight, I didn’t know this would happen! How was I supposed to know the great Eldritch Beasts of Cuu Kii would notice the flesh tentacles stretching across the planet?”
Above them, a great twitching beast, nearly two miles long, floated in the air, inhaling cookies from the pile. These monsters, nicknamed the Wrinklers by the pony populace, had descended upon Equestria ten by ten, devouring cookies and cookie-ponies alike, city by city.
Pinkie looked back at Twilight. “Your plan to stop them almost worked!”
“Yes, but they still keep coming back! Plus, the magical feedback made Fluttershy relapse.”
High above them, FlutterCookiebat swooped, screeching through a mouth full of fangs. She alighted atop a Wrinker and dug her teeth into it. After several seconds, the Wrinker exploded into a rain of several Quadrillion cookies.
Pinkie shrugged at Twilight. “Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Twilight sighed deeply, face in hooves yet again. “Oh, Princess Celestia, where are you?”
*C-O-O-K-I-E-S*
In the throne room of Canterlot Castle, Celestia sat quite contentedly upon a cushion, popping a cookie into her mouth every few seconds, chewing thoughtfully. She glanced to her side. “Luna, you really should take a break. That game is becoming an obsession.”
Luna didn’t look up from her rampant clicking of the cookie-shaped button. “Not now, Tia! I’ve got another 77 seconds of increased production!
Author's Note
Dislikes and downvotes are expected and fair. I forgot how to ending.
