Sunny with a Chance of Shipping
Sunny with a Chance of Shipping
The 24th Pegasus
Princess Twilight Sparkle awoke that morning to the smell of eggs and hay bacon. Without even opening her eyes, she knew that she’d spent another night passed out at her desk; the book her nose was wedged into told her as much. Blinking away the last vestiges of her night’s short rest, Twilight sat up, draped her wings over the back of her chair, and let out the guttural groan of a bloated bovine.
“Twilight?” she heard Spike ask from the kitchen. “Are you up? Breakfast is almost ready!”
Brushing her mane out of her eyes, Twilight yawned and looked at the mess sprawled across the desk in front of her. Numerous texts on archæology, volumes of encyclopædias, and other books containing the dignified grapheme covered every possible inch of the desk’s fine mahogany surface. Or, at least Twilight supposed it was mahogany. She almost never saw the surface of her desk. For all she knew, it could have been glimmering crystal like the rest of her new castle—
Yup, it was mahogany.
With that mystery solved, Twilight set the drool-stained book she’d been using as a pillow back into its proper place, neatly positioned between three adjacent books for maximum reference efficiency, and stood up. Her knees cracked from sleeping in a chair all night long, but it wasn’t anything she wasn’t already used to. It wasn’t like she’d spent more nights than she could remember asleep at her desk instead of in her bed when she was studying at Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. At least it was nowhere near as bad as finals week of her senior year… oh, nowhere near as bad as those nights…
“Twilight? Do I have to get you?”
Thankfully for the Princess of Friendship, Spike’s voice snapped her out of her Vietmane-esque flashbacks before they could leave her curled in a shivering ball like last time. “Coming, Spike!” she forced her parched voice to say, and immediately made a face at the dry-mouth taste. Her lavender horn summoned a glass of water from the nightstand by the bed she should have been using, had not a particularly dry tome on the origin of adamantine in the earth’s crust put her to sleep. Swallowing several gulps, Twilight sighed with bliss and opened the bedroom door.
The castle was large and surprisingly labyrinthine for the space it occupied, but Twilight followed her nose to the downstairs kitchen, where Spike was carrying over two plates of scrambled eggs and hay bacon. He set both plates on the simple kitchen table rather than waddling all the way over to the dining room and hopped into his seat right as Twilight entered.
“Smells good, Spike,” Twilight said. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, humming as the alluring smell of scrambled unborn chicken and imitation pig flesh drew her onwards. Her magic instinctually grabbed two steaming cups of coffee on the way over, and in seconds she was seated and just a foot away from the tantalizing aroma of succulent foodstuffs her number one assistant had prepared for her that day.
“Well, you know me, I always make sure you’re prepared for a big day,” the little purple dragon said with a swing of his arm. “Oh! I almost forgot one last thing!” he exclaimed, hopping out of his seat and continuing the embarrassing waddle that no fully aged wyrm, no matter how mighty, could ever live down from their days as a youth. Even the legendary Tunguska the Indomitable, Fire of the South, Roaster of Boars, and the singular force stopping the infinite legion of the cassowary swarm from stripping the planet bare of all life, was known to have a rather “dumpy” walk in his youth. Crossing the kitchen floor in a gait that simultaneously made all the wyrms in the world bury themselves in their hordes out of shame of being associated to this purple spawn, Spike opened a cabinet and withdrew several small gems, which he carried back to the table after eating half en route.
Twilight eyed Spike as he proceeded to stick shards of ruby and sapphire in his eggs like birthday candles. “Spike, you really shouldn’t be eating those for breakfast,” she commented between sips of coffee. “It’s not good for you.”
“Psshh. Says who?” Spike asked the alicorn who had read well over two-hundred tomes on the health and physiology of dragons. “Besides, I’m gonna need a little extra energy for today, with Cadance coming into town and all.”
“Oh, Spike, what do you mean? Cadance isn’t bad at all!” Twilight exclaimed, protecting her old foalsitter from Spike’s wayward comment. “Besides, I’ve been really excited since she told me a few days ago that she’d be stopping by to visit! I’ve already made an itinerary of things we can do while she’s in town for the day.” She tapped her hooves together as she thought of taking Cadance to all her favorite places, like Sugarcube Corner, where visions of sugar plums danced through her head.
Spike raised an eyebrow in time with the gem-studded mess of hay bacon and eggs he stuffed down his throat. “Are you sure she’s gonna have time to do those things with you, Twilight? I thought she was gonna be busy today.”
Twilight blinked. “Busy today… what do you mean, Spike?”
“Have you looked at the calendar?” Spike asked, lazily gesturing towards the far wall with a claw.
The purple alicorn frowned to herself and stood up. The calendar? What could be so important about today? Puzzled, she rubbed a chin with her hoof and hobbled over towards the calendar with her other three. It was just the middle of February. What could be so important—?
Oh.
Oh no.
Of course it was today. Of course it was.
Twilight swallowed hard, her shaky forelimb slowly lowering back to the ground. “Spike…” she whispered in an equally shaky voice. It all made sense now. “Spike… do we have enough?”
Spike took a long time to answer Twilight, whose shakes were slowly intensifying with her anxiety. Staring into his coffee mug, Spike sighed and drained the whole thing in one motion. His mug hit the table with all the grim finality of an ominous statement delivered before the screen fades to black. “Yes, Twilight. We have enough. But Ponyville… Ponyville will fall before the day’s end. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Outside of Ponyville, rainbow contrails split the skies into pieces. That day found Rainbow Dash performing yet another stunt-routine to impress the Wonderbolts come tryouts that spring. While she thought that her 2160 blind-dive feather twister with a triple-pull prism-split was good enough to knock the flightsuit off of Spitfire, it wouldn’t hurt to go all in and try for the 2520 nosedive leading into a fiery last-second pull out. With enough practice and timing, she’d get it down to the point where she could run two side-swipe fetlock-kickers and a whiplash stall-dive before ending with the rainboom finale.
For those of you who aren’t even close to Rainbow Dash’s level, that means she was going to go really fast and stuff.
Spiraling out of the latest set of dives and twirls, Rainbow Dash slid to a stop on the dirt road leading into Ponyville, because simply landing like a reasonable pegasus would be far too boring and mundane for someone of her awesomenessitude. She wiped the sweat from her brow and flung it away like an 80’s cool kid and strutted into town, taking only casual note of the Hearts and Hooves Day decorations lining the already painfully pink and heart-themed buildings of Ponyville.
Her hooves carried her across town in no time at all, and soon enough she was walking along the road towards Twilight’s shiny new castle. Only now, it was far less shiny than before. “Buh?” she asked to herself, because it’d been four paragraphs into her scene and she hadn’t said anything yet, and she spread her wings to go investigate. “What’s Twilight up to now?”
As she approached, she got a good look at the cataclysm of construction that was surrounding the weird tree-castle-thing in the ambient background of lavender arcane energy. All the windows had been boarded up, and a perimeter of barbed wire had been hastily erected around the castle. Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow at the numerous poorly-concealed punji pits dotting the yard here, there, and everywhere, and casually flew over them like the superior airborne equine she was. Her wings took her to where a frazzled purple alicorn was reinforcing the lower-level windows of her castle with two-by-fours and quick-dry cement. Reaching out a hoof, she gently tapped Twilight on the shoulder. “Twilight? What’re you doing?”
“NO THANK YOU FLASH SENTRY IS MY SPECIAL SOMEPONY!” Twilight exclaimed and quickly slapped a hoof against her muzzle when she saw it was only Rainbow Dash. “Oh, Rainbow Dash, it’s only you,” she said, blatantly ignoring the finely crafted piece of narrative that told the audience as much. “I was worried you were Cadance!”
“Cadance?” Rainbow echoed, cocking her head to the side. “Do I look like a pretty pink princess to you, Twilight? And what are you so worried about Cadance for, anyways? I thought you loved hanging out with her.”
“I do,” Twilight insisted, and she pulled at her ragged mane with her hooves. “But not today. Definitely not today. No, no, no, that’s just out of the question!”
“What do you mean, ‘out of the question’?” Rainbow asked. “And what’s so special about today? It’s just Hearts and Hooves Day. Shouldn’t she be spending the day with your brother? You know, one plus one equals fun?”
“If only it were that easy!” Twilight exclaimed. A shadow flitted across her muzzle, and the purple alicorn shrieked and dove into the nearest bush. She emerged a few seconds later to find it was only a small robin flying overhead, and Rainbow Dash staring at her. Quickly checking her surroundings, Twilight pointed towards the castle with an ear. “Let’s go inside. It’ll be safer inside.”
Twilight hopped out of the bush and galloped to the door, which Rainbow noted was covered in assorted countermeasures such as a three-prong lock, a retina scanner, a hoofprint scanner, and shielded with ablative plating. It took several seconds to open the door, which Rainbow wisely decided to use on attempting to discern the true depth of her awesomeocity, before Twilight’s magic grabbed her by the neck and dragged her into the dark depths of the ~~dungeon~~ castle like some hapless victim.
“Twilight! What’s up with you! You can’t just drag me into your castle like a hapless victim!” Rainbow exclaimed, once again irritating the narrator who was becoming convinced that his characters were intent on stealing his beautiful prose for their own dialogue. The door shut with a thunderous boom behind her, which meant that a tasteful touch of bold font was necessary, and which also meant that Rainbow whirled around and bit her lip, feeling like a bird trapped in a cage. Fortunately for her, she was only 1/10 bird by mass, and the castle was much more spacious than a cage, so the simile was much less ominous than it otherwise would have been.
“Spike!” Twilight shouted into the darkness that shrouded the interior of the normally bright and airy castle. “Have the scanners picked anything up?”
“Negatory!” Spike answered from somewhere deeper in the castle. Twilight followed his voice into the darkness, leaving Rainbow Dash with no other recourse than to follow Twilight following Spike’s voice into the darkness. Her hoof caught on a bundle of wires draped across the floor, and she nearly landed flat on her face. Only a careful flaring of her wings and the activation of ninjitsu saved her from such an un-awesome state of being.
Rolling out of her sweet ninja rolls, Rainbow nearly planted her face directly into Twilight’s rump. While Twilight did not have a bad rump, per se, Rainbow was not particularly interested in planting her face into it without invitation first. Tearing her eyes away from Twilight’s rump, Rainbow found something just as fascinating and perhaps a little horrifying before her.
There, before her, stood something that Rainbow’s mind could only refer to as The Thing. The Thing was a huge metal box filled with video monitors, flashing lights, colorful buttons, radio dials, antennae, flywheels, gyroscopes, shock absorbers, LEDs, and a 1030HP Rolls-Royce Merlin V-12 piston engine. Numerous maps of Ponyville, of Equestria, of the world as a whole were displayed across several monitors, and manning the whole thing was none other than Spike himself. The little dragon was wearing a heavy brown comrade trenchcoat, complete with red star lapels, and a snug fur hat atop his spines. He chewed on a stubby carrot like a cigar, and after typing a few keystrokes into The Thing, he leaned back, letting Twilight get a glimpse at the convoluted data feeds.
Rainbow Dash reread the previous paragraph three or four times over to try and figure out what exactly The Thing was, but The Thing’s true nature continued to elude her, so she was ultimately forced to resort to the final measure: asking Twilight what in the name of Tartarus this was all about.
“This thing,” Twilight began, interrupting Rainbow Dash before she even had a chance to complete her prescribed action in the previous paragraph, “is called the Shipping Grid. It helps us keep track of Cadance’s position at all times by following the sudden emergence of ponies getting together for Hearts and Hooves day all across Equestria. And if my calculations are correct…”
The fastest pegasus in Equestria couldn’t handle it anymore. Grabbing Twilight’s shoulders, she violently shook the alicorn back and forth. “Twilight! Just what the hay is going on!”
Suddenly, alarms began to blare throughout the castle, and Twilight gravely looked Rainbow in the eye. “I think it’ll just be easier if I show you, Rainbow Dash.” Working herself free of Rainbow’s stunned grip, Twilight nodded to Spike. “Pull up the market video feed.”
Spike saluted once, and with a whirl of claws, brought the Ponyville market into central focus. Twilight trotted over and narrowed her eyes at the feed, and Rainbow Dash could only dumbly follow her in ever-increasing confusion. The large monitor showed ponies milling in front of buildings, at various vendor stalls, and happily chatting to each other in the sunlight. It looked like an absolutely peaceful day outside. A perfect day.
“Do we have audio?” Twilight asked Spike, to which her assistant nodded. A few button presses suddenly brought the noise of the market to the dark room, making Twilight only frown more.
Rainbow blinked once or twice, desperately trying to understand what was happening. “I don’t get it. Can you please tell me what’s going on, Twi? You’re really creeping me out.”
“Shh!” Twilight shushed, shoving a shushing hoof into Rainbow’s muzzle. “Do you hear that?”
“Errrr… Hear what?” Rainbow asked, her fuzzy ears twitching once or twice to try to pick up on anything out of the ordinary.
“Just wait,” Twilight insisted. Spike likewise watched in silence, his brow furrowed in thought.
Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Okay, this has really gone too far, Twilight. I’m gonna go see if Nurse Redheart can take a look at you, maybe…”
Her words trailed off as her ears picked up on something strange. Something out of the ordinary. Something… unnatural. It started out low enough, so low that she at first mistook it for static, but soon it was clear enough to hear over the noise of the Ponyville market.
“Pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt…”
Suddenly, a pink laser cut a swath across the market, like a radiant comet of death descended from the heavens. Rainbow cringed as she saw the laser tear through the market, and she shielded her eyes with a wing, not wanting to see what happened next. The horrible sputtering and flashes of laser light ended quickly however, and Rainbow cautiously peered out from between her blue feathers to find that…
…nothing had changed. The market was still the same. The ponies were still there, acting as if nothing happened. Rainbow rubbed her eyes, blinking several times, before a sharp frown tugged at her lips. “The buck was that all about?!” she exclaimed, wings flaring in a mix of confusion and annoyance. “Just some weird laser light show and farting noises? What gives?”
But Twilight’s face was pale, an accomplishment considering it was covered in a coat of lavender fur. She pointed a shaky hoof to the screen and whispered to herself: “And so it begins…”
Rainbow looked at the screen and was on the verge of leaving Twilight to her own psychosis before she noticed something different. All of the ponies were… staring at each other. Mares and stallions alike began to move to the pony closest to them, grouping up in couples, threesomes, and foursomes. Without warning, they began to embrace each other with forelegs and lips, and just as quickly, the video feed went dead.
“Lost camera seven,” Spike grimly reported, turning towards Twilight. Twilight stared at the map of Ponyville displayed on one screen, absolutely breathless, as a circle of pink slowly began to expand outward from the center of town. The alicorn rested one hoof on a nearby console and swallowed a lump in her throat. Sweat stained her forehead and framed her eyes in a shimmering, twinkling glow of light reflected from the monitors.
Rainbow Dash, meanwhile, had no problems vocalizing what she thought about it all.
“WHAT THE BUCK?!”
“This happens every Hearts and Hooves Day,” Twilight said, turning towards her friend and finally deciding to give her the exposition she had been so desperately searching for until this time. “Every year, Cadance makes it her mission to bring love to the ponies of Equestria on February 14th—today. Only, she doesn’t have time to visit all of Equestria, much less play matchmaker with every single pony. So, she just…” her words trailed off and she waved her arms in empty circular motions. “Love-lasers whichever town she happens to visit that year.”
“And this year she came to Ponyville,” Rainbow said. “But what happens to everypony? Do they just fall in love with each other forever? And why haven’t I ever heard of this before?”
Twilight shook her head. “No, thankfully. Cadance’s love spell lasts for only, like, a day. Everypony knows that couples that pair up just because it’s Hearts and Hooves Day don’t last. And you never hear of it because when everypony wakes up the next day, it’s all just like a bad dream to them. And nopony’s really going to talk about how they ended up on a date with their neighbor’s eighty-three year-old grandma because the Princess of Love love-lasered them both.”
“But there has to be something we can do!” Rainbow exclaimed. Her wings opened in defiance of the inevitable. “What about Applejack, or Pinkie Pie, or Fluttershy? They’re gonna get love-lasered too! I mean, at least it’ll be good for Rarity, because Celestia knows that she needs some love in her life, but everypony else?!” She grabbed Twilight’s hoof and tugged on it. “We have to save them, Twilight!”
But Twilight simply stood there and shook her head. “It’s too late, Rainbow,” she whispered, unable to meet the pegasus’ eyes. “They’re gone. It’s too late for them.”
“Like hay it is!” Rainbow exclaimed. “I’m gonna find them and bring ‘em back here, and we can all bunker down together and wait out the storm! I’m not letting their minds get all voodoo’d and crap! Hay, Applejack’s probably nuzzling an apple in the barn right now, and Pinkie’s probably got frosting all over her… we have to save them!”
She tugged on Twilight a few more times, but the alicorn wouldn’t budge. Exasperated, Rainbow threw her hooves into the air and did the only sensible thing a mare under duress could do: storm out and take matters into her own hooves! “Well, fine! If you won’t help me save them, then I’ll just do it by myself. Element of Loyalty, away!”
Rainbow left Twilight behind and found a window that wasn’t barricaded with wood planks and concrete to squeeze out of. “Dang it, Twilight!” she muttered to herself, slowly putting distance between herself and the castle. “Why didn’t you warn us about Cadance?”
“Because I forgot!” Twilight exclaimed from the front door of her castle. Rainbow was a little confused as to how Twilight managed to hear her aside, or how she got out the super-locked front door so quickly, but it gave her enough pause to turn and face Twilight.
“I really, truly forgot!” Twilight shouted up to Rainbow, tears streaming from her eyes. “I’m sorry! If I’d known, I would’ve made preparations, saved everypony, but I didn’t! Please don’t leave; save yourself!”
“Pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt…”
Rainbow frowned at Twilight. “You forgot?! Something important like this and you simply forgot?!” She fluttered down to the alicorn mare and bumped her nose into Twilight’s. “We’re not talking about something trivial like the end of the world here, Twi! We’re talking about ponies being involuntarily shipped with each other for less than a day that they’ll forget when it’s all over! This is a crisis on our hooves!”
“Pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt…”
“And I said I was sorry!” Twilight whimpered, holding her hooves up. “I couldn’t save everypony this time, but I can save you!” She gestured to the open door. “We can still wait out the coming storm!”
“PBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBT…”
“No way, there are ponies out there who haven’t been smitten by some pink princess’ god powers, and there’s still a chance to save them! I can’t simply—!”
F-FLASH!!!
Twilight and Rainbow collapsed in a groaning heap, feeling all sorts of warm and fuzzy all over. Rainbow was the first to stand up, her head pounding like it’d gotten sledgehammered with a million teddy bears. It took her a second to regain her balance, and when she did, she noticed Twilight struggling to stand up in front of her. Blinking once, she extended a hoof towards the alicorn, who gratefully accepted it.
“What was that?” Twilight slurred, trying to rub the drowsiness out of her eyes. “Did you see what it was?”
Rainbow shrugged. “Beats me,” she said, her eyes wandering all over Twilight’s slender alicorn figure. “I was looking at… something else.”
“Mmmmm… mmm?” Twilight said, her eyes locking with Rainbow’s for a second before darting away again. “I, uh… yeah. Huh.” She coughed awkwardly into her hoof. “So, uh… you wanna get some lunch?”
Rainbow shrugged, but inside, her heart was pounding. “Yeah, sure. That sounds totally radicawesomefull.”
Twilight giggled, and the crests of her wings raised slightly. “You know that’s not a word, right?”
“Psssh. Yeah, whatever. It totally should be, though.”
Just then, Spike waddled through the front door with his embarrassing baby dragon walk. “Twilight! Twilight, are you alright?!” he cried, running up to the mare and hugging her forelegs. “Did anything happen? You went outside with Rainbow, and the alarms started going off, and…”
Twilight was already patting him on the head. “Don’t worry about it, Spike. I don’t know why there’d be any cause for alarm anyway.” Her eyes wandered over the fortifications set around her castle, and she frowned. “Say, Spike, Rainbow and I are gonna go to town for some lunch. Could you get started on removing that barbed wire? I don’t know why we set it up in the first place.”
Spike’s jaw dropped, and he could only hopelessly watch as Rainbow and Twilight sauntered away, Twilight giggling and leaning against Rainbow’s smaller frame. He took the fur cap off of his head, clenched it between his claws, and collapsed onto his knees.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” he screamed quite melodramatically as the camera recorded an ascending rotating crane shot and receded into the distance, leaving the unfortunate purple dragon as a purple blotch on the ground, and his scream an echo on the ghost of the wind.
And high above Ponyville, a pink alicorn soared with her tongue between her lips and lasers sweeping back and forth from her horn.
Author's Note
I got this idea and proceeded to write it in about 6 hours. No, I don't know what I was on, but I wish I knew. Probably sleep deprivation.
