“Come on down, folks,” Applejack announced, “to the first annual Apple family Pie-Off!”
A crowd of excited spectators gathered behind the fence. A low buzz of conversation filled the air, and Applejack grinned to herself. This might be just what they needed to revitalize those tanking pastry sales after all.
“Y’all are in for a real treat today,” she said. She gestured past the megaphone to the pair of ponies sitting patiently at the picnic table just past the fence. “We got ourselves a real quality eating contest, the likes of which you ain’t seen since the last Apple family reunion.”
More than a few ponies clapped and cheered. Vinyl and Octavia, from their place on the picnic bench, waved back.
“You ready to go down in flames?” Vinyl asked. She smirked and patted her pudgy belly. The last few lazy months hadn’t held much in the way of gigs (which meant that she’d leapt to her hooves when AJ had offered to pay her for eating), and so she’d mainly just hung around on the couch and gorged herself on sweets, chips, and sodas. She didn’t quite have a second chin, but her belly was noticeably rounder than her roommate’s, who was as slender as ever.
Octavia’s mouth twisted, and she quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t believe anything of the sort will occur,” she said. “You ought to do well to watch your words.”
“Or what?”
“Or,” Tavi observed, “you might make a challenge you can’t win.” Smirking lightly to herself, she turned her attention back to the crowd. Vinyl grunted and did the same, her hooves patting her belly lightly. She hadn’t eaten all morning, and man, was she starving.
“Y’all might know our two contestants,” Applejack said. “Ponyville’s very own DJ Vinyl Scratch, and our classical concert pony Octavia!” Another round of cheers. “Y’all are gonna see once and for all which pony can out-eat the other. And what’re they gonna be eatin’ but our very own, special-baked Apple family apple pies!”
That was Twilight’s signal. Applejack shot her a wink. A flicker of Twi’s horn later, the invisibility spell on top of the picnic tables was lowered—revealing two towering piles of pie, each stacked a good thirteen feet tall!
The crowd let out oohs and ahs. Applejack grinned. As well they should. It’d taken them a whole two days to bake that many pies! And she was hoping to reap back more than double that much in sales. So long as those two hungry mares held up their side of things, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Someone new cleared her throat. “Hello, hello, you pony folk.” Zecora stepped up onto the stage beside Applejack and bowed her head in greeting. “This contest here is not a joke.
“I have prepared a simple brew,” she went on. She hefted a flask; a delicious-looking purple potion gurgled inside of it. “It should assist our hungry two. They’ll eat more than you ponies could, and glut themselves on apple goods. A simple potion with one small twist: Their extra food flows to their hips.”
With a self-assured smile and a nod in Applejack’s direction, she hoofed her the flask. Applejack grinned back and trotted down to the table, flask in hand. She hoofed it to Vinyl first, who gulped a good half of it down immediately, and would have happily swallowed more if Applejack hadn’t snatched it out of her mouth. Octavia sipped it down much more delicately, and calmly hoofed it back to Applejack as she wiped her mouth.
“Ready!” Applejack hollered, once she had her megaphone back in hoof. The whole crowd went silent. “Set!” The table groaned under the weight of all those pies. “Eat!” A spark whizzed from Twilight’s horn and exploded into a crackling firework far above the fairgrounds—and the two hungry roommates set to work.
Vinyl didn’t waste a second. She just yanked a pie out from the bottom of the stack and shoved it into her face. Her slurps and gulps almost drowned out the cheering from the crowd. When she pulled her apple-stained muzzle out of it not ten seconds later, she let out a happy sigh and patted her slightly less empty belly. Then she got right back to work, snatching not one, but two pies out of the pile and digging in with gusto.
For all her previous delicacy, Octavia did much the same. Ponies who’d only known her as the polite concert virtuouso were astounded to see her gulping down whole pies at a time, smearing sugar and crumbs across her muzzle as thick apple syrup dripped down her cheeks. She didn’t even pause to pat her swelling belly, so taken was she in her sudden hunger.
But she couldn’t help it. Vinyl certainly couldn’t. Zecora’s potion had done its work on her, and for that, Vinyl was grateful. Without it, she doubted she’d ever have a chance of finishing even half of this amazing, gluttonous feast. But with it? She felt like there was a ravenous, yawning pit in her belly, one that could never be filled—yet with each pie she downed, she managed to fill in that ravine a little bit more, if only by a fraction of an inch.
The crowd watched eagerly as a half-dozen pies disappeared into the gullets of the two ravenous mares. They didn’t have to wait long before the effect of such unbridled gluttony began to appear. Both Octavia and Vinyl’s guts soon began to bulge outward, swelling in size as they were filled with more and more apple pie.
But one of them was pulling ahead. Vinyl smirked across the bench at Octavia once it became clear that her belly was noticeably larger than her competitor’s. Her added pudge certainly didn’t hurt, but it was equally clear that her eight pies to Octavia’s four meant one thing and one thing only: Tavi was losing. Vinyl didn’t miss a beat as she tossed another pie up into the air and swallowed it whole, groaning happily as she felt it slide down her throat to join the others in her big, sloshing belly. She shot Tavi another big smirk, and licked her syrup-dripping lips clean.
That did it. Octavia redoubled her speed. She shoveled pie after pie down her throat, barely even taking the time to chew before swallowing them. Her belly burgeoned and bulged, and soon it was spilling over her legs. It actually began to push up against the table, her tight, taut gut powerfully resisting compression. One pie, in the midst of Octavia’s feeding frenzy, missed her mouth and landed on the surface of her giant gut. The collision sent waves of pressure across her belly, which in turn sent its considerable contents sloshing about inside. But Octavia didn’t pay it any heed. Instead, she just ate and ate, stuffing herself even fuller as the pie slowly slid down her front.
Then, the magic began to take effect. The onlookers watched with wide eyes as a strange green glow surrounded the two gluttonous ponies, their big, powerful guts just...melting away. None of the mass really disappeared, of course. Instead, Zombra’s potion was doing its job like a charm. The ponies gasped and cheered as the extra poundage—several dozen in Vinyl’s case, and just a few pounds less in Octavia’s case—just redistributed itself across their bodies. Chubby and lean legs alike became weighed down with flab, thick thighs becoming thicker as they filled out with pure fat. Octavia groaned happily, downing another double-dose of pie as her cheeks chubbed out and swelled.
Twilight scribbled something down on a notepad and gave Applejack a hoof’s up. The scoreboard above the table flipped to the new score—Vinyl: 39, Octavia: 36.
Each mare’s belly was absolutely enormous by this point, gurgling and sloshing as their contents were melted away into enough fat to fill out their growing mistress’ bellies all the more. Yet, here and there, it wasn’t quite apparent whether the potion could work faster than Vinyl and Octavia could eat. Both mares were shoveling pie into their mouths so quickly that their hooves almost looked like a blur.
Fat rumps spread out to encompass the bench, while even the reinforced wood began to creak beneath their weight. Octavia’s Cutie Mark alone was, by now, easily as large as a foal’s head, and Vinyl’s own rear lifted her high enough off of the bench that the tops of her thick thunder thighs were rubbing against the underside of the table.
Applejack glanced up at the shrinking (yet still enormous) piles of pie and whistled slowly. Gosh, and to think she’d believed that Mac was crazy to bake this much pie! She hadn’t really trusted Zecora’s potion skills, she was sad to say, nor had she quite believed Rarity when she told her a story about a rude DJ who’d cleaned out the entire buffet of a fancy Canterlot party. But watching these two go at it, their bellies growing bigger and bigger as their fat, flabby faces chomped down on more and more pie, Applejack suddenly and calmly found herself to be a believer.
She was, she was surprised to realize, hollering and stomping and cheering just as loud as anyone else. They’d hoped that they’d be able to sell the leftover pies at the tail-end of this little stunt, but dammit, Applejack didn’t care one whit about that anymore. No; for some reason, all she wanted was what the crowd wanted: to see those two big bellies grow bigger and bigger and bigger.
Taut, powerful guts were replaced by thick, bouncing bellies as Zecora’s potion worked furiously against the gluttonous efforts of the two ponies. Those bellies only grew bigger and bigger, though as each mare gulped down more and more pie, it was hard to see why they shouldn’t.
Vinyl’s hooves and magic were massaging her gut as hard as they could, her bountiful belly gurgling and sloshing loudly even as she gulped down more and more pie. Sweet sugary syrup mixed with caramel dripping down her chin, and she let her tongue loll out of her mouth as she shook the crumb-bare contents of her last pie tin down her throat.
One flicker of her eyes toward the scoreboard told her all she needed to know. 51-47. She was still ahead, but it was close. She had to keep eating. Had to keep going. Had to get bigger, and bigger, and fatter than even Octavia could manage—
But all that rubbing and sloshing had given her belly an idea of its own. To Vinyl’s dawning horror, she felt a pocket of pressure rising in her gut. That pressure grew and grew until it could barely be held back, then pushed into her throat, prodded against her tight lips until she couldn’t hold it back anymore—
UUUUUURRRRRRRPPP. Vinyl’s magnificent, massive belch shook the entire table. The whole crowd let out a gasp in both disgust and admiration as the DJ’s powerful gut rippled like Jello, her whole flabby body bouncing and jiggling as the aftershocks of her burp ran through her. The bench beneath her creaked and even cracked; by now, her fat flank was bumping up against Tavi’s, their foal-sized Cutie Marks rubbing against one another.
Vinyl gasped for air and leaned her head back. She felt her world swimming. Struggling to get a handle on things, she took her gut in both hooves and held it tight. She could scarcely believe it when her hooves didn’t even meet around the other side; in fact, they barely went two-thirds of the way around! She looked as though she were pregnant with octuplets, for Gods’ sake! She took another deep breath, swallowed, then turned her attention back to the table. Then, slowly, but picking up speed, she began to eat again.
But that ill-timed belch had cost her. In the time that Vinyl had spent relaxing, Octavia had just kept eating. By the time the next pie reached Vinyl’s lips, Octavia had down an additional twelve, and looked only to be picking up speed from here. Her belly spilled out before her, covering her body like a blanket and stretched to its limit as it was filled with pie after pie after pie. Vinyl struggled to eat one more pie, two more, three more, four—
And then she was back in the race. But Octavia’s lead of eighty-five pies to Vinyl’s sixty suddenly seemed like an insurmountable wall. Vinyl ate and ate, but the more she ate, the bigger Octavia seemed to get, the once-slender mare’s figure bloating and swelling even more by the second. The bench started to scoot back as Octavia’s magnificent gut ran out of area to expand and actually pushed back.
Suddenly, Octavia’s belly was too large for her hooves to reach the pie. She had only to whimper once, though, and in an instant Twilight was upon her, her lavender-colored magic thrusting pies down Octavia’s jowled gullet as fast as the cellist could swallow them. Vinyl would have shouted called foul, but she was having enough trouble keeping up her own pace to bother.
Vinyl herself was a massive, fat filly by now. Her butt spilled out underneath her, each cheek the size of a large foal. Her belly was easily her best feature, a constantly shifting, gurgling, sloshing mass of pie to fat to pie and fat again. It just grew and kept growing, getting bigger and bigger by the second. Vinyl dug into an enormous pile of four pies, her own magic slapping them together into a tower so that she could easily down all four at once. And yet as her chubby cheeks worked overtime to process her big and growing load, her second chin flapping under her neck as she made way for a third, Vinyl couldn’t help but notice that she was falling even further behind!
Where Vinyl was a fat among fats, Octavia was truly and utterly obese. With a belly so big that it drooped down toward the ground on all sides, and a rump large enough to swallow up a pony, Octavia was truly massive. She hit the one-hundred mark and passed it without breaking a sweat. She had three chins, and her thick limbs were only spreading wider and wider as her enormous gut forced them even further apart. Just one of her legs was as thick around as most ponies’ entire torsos, and her belly looked big enough to cover even Princess Twilight!
But she didn’t seem to care, or mind at all how big she’d gotten. No; all Octavia wanted to do was to get bigger. Her mind was her stomach: a black, empty, yawning void that yearned to be filled by food and sweets and calories until there was nothing left, nothing left but the gurgling and sloshing of her massive, incredible, gluttonous feast. Thick trails of syrup flecked with crumbs covered her enormous, jiggling belly, and her multiple chins were filled with bits of apple and crust. Regardless, she ate on, passing one hundred and ten pies as Vinyl weakly reached seventy.
Vinyl stuffed the next pie into her muzzle, and actually chewed before swallowing it. She reached for another with her magic, the pie floating over to her and depositing itself into her waiting maw. She chewed, feeling the sweet apple syrup spreading across her gums and tongue before the whole thing tumbled down her esophagus to meet the rest of her growing belly—
The bench creaked under her for the last time. With a cry, Vinyl felt herself plummeting to the ground as the magically-reinforced wood shattered underneath her and Tavi’s tremendous weight. She groaned as she hit the ground, her stallion-sized belly weighing her down so that she could barely move. It covered her almost entirely.
Grunting, she reached up a hoof toward the pile of pies. It suddenly seemed so impossibly far away. Her horn flickered weakly, her vision clouding over as she reached past her gigantic, weighty belly toward the tempting toward of succulence…
With a gasp, she let her hoof fall to the ground. It thudded to the ground with immense weight. Her flabby, full chest heaved while she gulped down air greedily. And then she groaned, slapped her giant belly with both hooves—it towered above her, casting a shadow upon her face—and sighed.
The horn on the megaphone blared. “Looks like we got ourselves a winner!” Applejack hollered. The crowd cheered. Vinyl grunted. And Octavia...didn’t stop eating.
When the bench had snapped, Twilight had paused feeding her, momentarily fearful that somepony had gotten hurt. But where Vinyl had fallen backward, Octavia had rocked forward, landing directly on top of her pillow-like gut—and with her muzzle directly in the middle of the pile of pies.
Octavia ate and ate, apparently not even sparing a thought for the cessation of the competition. Her belly had filled up all the space beneath her and was now pushing her off of the ground slightly. Her thick, stubby limbs slapped helplessly against her massive belly, sending waves of vibrations through it, but she seemed to not even notice. Instead, her cheeks just bulged out again and again as she ate on without a care in the world. Chew, chew, gulp. Chew, chew, swallow. Eat and eat and eat and eat and eat—
The crowd watched her in a sort of stunned silence. Then, finally, Twilight appeared to break the spell. She held up a hoof, swallowed once, then slid the remaining pile of just under two-dozen pies away from Octavia’s chomping muzzle. Octavia bit down on empty air, then, realizing that there was no more food to be had, reared her head back, actually rocking slightly to the side on her massive, overfilled belly. She snarled, her eyes opening wide.
And then she appeared to remember where she was. Her cheeks coloring, Octavia quickly glanced down at the ground. “Ooh, my,” she rumbled, her voice somehow still delicate coming through what had to be gallons of warm apple syrup. “I do apologize for…”
She paused. Her belly was gurgling, louder and stronger than ever before. The ground was actually shaking, the air itself charged with a kind of potential energy that only built and built as Octavia’s cheeks bulged—
The resulting belch absolutely shook the entire crowd. Manes were blown back; hats were blown away. The bench itself was blown over on its side, and would have flung its entire store of pies to the grass if not for Twilight’s quick reflexes. Tavi’s massive body shook and jiggled as ripples ran across her; her cheeks still shook as the final vibrations yet shook them.
And then she was done. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Slowly, she smiled, then opened her eyes.
“W-well,” Applejack said, slightly shakily. Only the fastest of earth-pony reflexes had saved her own prized Stetson from going flying in the north wind. The air all around them smelled of sugar and apples. “Looks like we’ve got our winner for sure!”
Cheers, though this time, slightly more tentative. The crowd was impressed, but, more than that, slightly fearful. How had this whale of a mare, this fat, enormous creature, been hiding amongst them the entire time?
Zecora spoke up. “I will happily and gladly admit,” she said, “I did not expect my brew to cause such a snit.” She shrugged. “A boost to the appetite it did provide—but when I look at its true effects, my eyes have gone quite wide.”
“Actually.” Octavia held up a flabby hoof, then paused, her eyes unfocused. She let out another burp—thankfully much, much smaller than the last one, though still quite loud—and smiled apologetically. “I didn’t actually drink the potion.”
Zecora’s eyes bulged, and the crowd gasped. “What? Impossible! No pony’s belly could withstand so many morsels.”
Octavia giggled. Her chins waved beneath her muzzle. “I apologize for wasting it,” she said, “but if you’ll look at this damp spot beside me, it should be quite clear where I poured it out.”
She frowned down at her massive belly, as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh, fiddlesticks,” she grumbled. “Or under me, as it were.”
“No way.” Vinyl grunted as she got back on her hooves. She jerked her glasses up above her ears and sat back on her flabby haunches. “Seventy-something pies to a hundred twenty, and you didn’t even take the potion?”
“Closer to…” Applejack’s eyes flashed up to the scoreboard. For some reason, Twilight had kept count even after the bench had split. “Two hundred, actually. That gal sure can eat.” Vinyl’s mouth formed a silent “o.”
“Well, congrats!” Applejack said, pulling herself together. She trotted up to Octavia’s massive, bloated body and slapped a hoof around her thick neck. “Looks like you got yourself a first-place prize!”
“And what prize might that be?” Octavia asked. She licked her lips.
“A year’s supply of on-demand, unlimited, Apple family pies!” Even as the words left her mouth, Applejack felt her lips go dry. Oh, no. She couldn’t have just said that.
But she did. And Octavia had heard it. The cellist summoned up her dignity—or as much as a fat, overfed whale of a pony could, anyway—and smirked down at Vinyl. “Well,” she said, her chins quivering as she raised an eyebrow. “How do you like them apples?”
