Contritio Fornacis Feces
"Twiliiight! We're going to be late!"
"Oh calm down, Spike. We've got a thirty minute head start. What's got you all worked up, anyway?"
Spike rubbed at his head, crumbling under his breath as Twilight Sparkle took her extremely slow time walking up to the doors of the library. He'd been looking forward to this all month.
"I've been looking forward to this all month!" Yes, I just said that. The stupid reptil - I mean, young dragon shuffled about on his feet, glaring at the mare.
"Alright, alright," Twilight said, finally done with her teasing and speeding up significantly. The two made good pace through Ponyville, chatting amiably about nothing of any particular importance to the story.
" - telling you, Twilight, a good gem cake is all about the distribution." Spike paused in his culinary cavalcade of, uh, cake, glancing back at the purple pony placed precisely... behind him. I'm terrible at this.
"Are you okay," the faithful assistant asked his companion, worriedly looking her twitching face over.
"...fine, Spike," she replied, sounding anything but. "But, uh, you go on ahead. I have to do something real quick."
Spike was unamused. "C'mon, Twilight. Can't it wait?"
A shake of the head and Twilight inched slowly away, her legs shivering and her eyes crossing with effort. "Mn. Nope. See you later, 'kay?" With that, she darted off. Spike stared after her for a few moments, before groaning and trudging slowly torwards the grassy knolls their picnic would be taking place on. Hopefully, she would do whatever it was pretty quickly.
=-=-=-=-=
Six hours later, the door of the library slammed. Spike growled under his breath, steam raising from his ears and smoke puffing out his nostrils, and he breathed deep.
"TWILIGHT!"
His voice was truly that of a dragon, fierce and full and most of all angry, and he slammed through the library with his fists clenching and unclenching rapidly.
"TWILIGHT!"
"In here," her voice finally called out, coming from the small bathroom. Spike paid that no mind, his only acknowledgement of courtesy that he stopped at the door rather than slammed right on through.
"You promised that you would be right back, Twilight! Why did you lie to me? Why did you leave us out there?" The anger left his voice slowly, fitfully. "Did you not want to hang out with us?"
"No! It's nothing like that, Spike, it's just...." The voice behind the door trailed off, leading Spikes' temper to rise once more. As well as his temperature. Little known fact; dragons emotional state directly corresponds to their body heat, meaning that a properly incensed - and grown - dragon could light a town on fire through his very....
Wait, no, story.
Spike, his anger roused once more, slammed a tiny scaly fist into the door. "Then what is it, huh!?"
A sharp intake of breath, and then Twilight's answer burst out. "I'VE HAD DIARRHEA ALL DAY!"
Silence. The kind of silence you only get once in a blue moon. The kind of silence that leaves one pondering the big questions in life, the massive existential things that could change your entire worldview, like 'what is the meaning of life?' 'How did we come to be here?' 'How is it Applejacks' Apple Cider tastes so good?'
Those questions.
After several seconds - not a minute, though, because any pause in a conversation longer than about thirty seconds goes past being awkward and just becomes unrealistic and stupid - Spike raised a single finger and finally spoke.
"Saywhatnow."
"I've had diarrhea all day, Spike. I'm sorry I couldn't go to the picnic, but I was in and out of the bathroom every ten minutes for hours and I just feel... terrible. I'll make it up to you, okay Spike? I'm really sorry about today, but I couldn't."
The dragon rubbed at the back of his head, suddenly feeling as though he'd just done something crass and hurtful, like, say, yelling at a family member and accusing them of not loving him because they got sick.
Oh wait.
That's exactly what he did.
"I, uh... is there anything I can get for you?"
"A glass of water, please."
"Alright! Uhm, Twilight... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get so mad, especially when this isn't your fault."
"It's okay, Spike. I understand. You were really looking forward to the picnic with everybody, right?"
"Of course! And it was a lot of fun, but...."
"...not the same without everypony there, yeah."
=-=-=-=-=
"Alright, Spike!"
Spike flinched as a stack of books approximately the size of two of him crashed onto the table, before jerking his eyes to Twilight. "Uh, what's the agenda?"
"I've got a new research project that's just about to finish up! The last part depends on you!"
"Me?"
"Yep. Well, more specifically, your gastrointestinal system."
Spike scrunched his face. "Uh... I don't think I have one of those."
"Exactly! You, my dear Number One Assistant, are a dragon. And as a dragon, your body is able to turn any and all matter that you consume into fuel with 100% efficiency! All I have to deal is replicate the effect and I'll never have to deal with, ahem, toilet troubles again."
Spike stared at Twilight. Then he glanced at his own belly. Then he looked towards Twilights' hind quarters. She blushed and shifted, moving her front half in front of her.
"This is about last week, isn't it?"
"Of course it is! But it's also about all the work I lose whenever I have to use the bathroom! If I eliminate the need to excrete waste matter, I can add a total of almost fifty days free time to my lifetime! Just imagine all the checklists we could make in that time!"
"Uh, Twilight... I just... doesn't that seem kind of dangerous? I mean, I can still remember what you do to the poor frogs, and this would be a lot more serious than that...."
Twilight waved a hoof excitedly, discarding the objection like so much trash to be burnt in the stomach of an industrial grade dragon.
"Nevermind that, Spike! I've gotten much better at magic since then, particularly permanent transmogrification and attribute transference! I'm positive I can get this done!"
"Well... if you say so...."
Twilight did, in fact, say so. She also said that Spike had to be strapped to a table, belly-flat, so she could poke and prod him in all manner of uncomfortable ways. She continued on to say that she needed to force Spike asleep so that her experimental procedures wouldn't cause him to scream in pain. It is of course at this point that all of the misgivings Spike had about the entire ordeal ramped up by a factor of ten and he started wildly thrashing, attempting to free himself, and blowing flames about the workshop randomly.
Needless to say, his desperate cries for freedom went unheeded, and soon his body slumped into the sleep that only an adrenaline-soaked pass out can replicate.
=-=-=-=-=
Sugarcube Corner could be described as the central hub of Ponyville. It is more than a simple pastry shop - it seems to be a mutual meeting place, a location where anypony and everypony can go when they're looking to just kill some time or find somepony in particular or even just talk to the owners. The reason for this is, of course, Pinkie Pie; her parties are legendary, and Sugarcube Corner is her default when it comes to location. Everypony has spent at least a few hours mingling and pigging out (no offense to the pigs that are reading, it's just a saying and all that) at Sugarcube Corner.
The point of this little paragraph is to point out that for these very reasons, today, there are a lot of patrons at the place. From door to counter, filling every seat and even some of the walls, leaned against eachother and the counter and so on and so forth. The place was jampacked today for all of the reasons above, plus the fact that every resident of Ponyville has been systematically and subtly addicted to sugar to the point that if a blood-guzzling vampony were to visit, they would quickly die of a heart attack and/or onset diabetes. In addition, it is narratively convenient for everypony to be in one place and therefore the following events to take place in a single scene, rather than several.
Now that the scene has been established, we shall cut right to the heart of the matter; Twilight Sparkle slammed the doors of the pastry shop open with aplomb, strutting herself straight to the counter with all of the confidence and fervor of a particularly arrogant hoofball player immediately following their having shoved some poor nerds face into a toilet. Her smirk was a thing of legends and her nose lifted so high it was a wonder her neck didn't spontaneously curl into a black hole which would rapidly consume all of Equestria, save for Discord who would be too busy trying to steal my job as narrator to notice.
As she approached the counter, Pinkie Pie gave her a bright and wide grin. "What do you need, Twilight?" She asked, complete unaware of the coming disaster.
Twilight Sparkle gave a cocky ruffle of her feathers, her voice positively crooning with delight. "Just a small cupcake, Pinkie Pie."
"Yepperoony," Pinkie replied, swiping said cupcake from a nearby stand and placing it on the counter. The bits were exchanged rapidly, and the crowd of the Sugarcube Corner collectively blinked as everything failed to explode, having expected some manner of Friendship Problem to make itself manifest as they are wont to whenever Twilight Sparke (or indeed, any of the Elements of Harmony) acted strangely.
Twilight ignored them, taking a seat and slowly consuming her cupcake. The crowd collectively calmed and relaxed as minutes passed without notice, slowly coming to ignore her. Twilight consumed her cupcake with all the relish of a pony who had been been trapped, starving, on an island for some three months, and was reaching that point of recovering when they've stopped shoving all their food into the stomach as quickly as possible and actually begun to savor what they ate.
Then, there was a noise.
Foooot
It was a very tiny noise. Barely even audible. But Twilight paused, nonetheless, and glanced about for the source, confusion marring her features.
Fooooot.
And there it was again! Louder this time, loud enough that nearby patrons actually seemed to take notice. Heads turned towards Twilight, and after a moment of contemplation, she realized she knew exactly where the noise had come from.
Behind her.
And so, slowly and carefully, dread building up in her gut like a den of rabid wolverines slowly awakening to find that their promised winter morning had been stolen from them, she looked back.
FWOOOSH
Then she stared, for out of her backside had erupted a bloom of green flames that incinerated her chair, part of the floor, and most of the wall behind her. Voices cried out in shock, eyes metaphorically exploded from the skulls they were within, and Twilight felt that growing den of wolverines cough and hack inside her, evidently angry and preparing to laugh a tantrum to end all tantrums.
And so people say that, just before Princess Twilight Sparkle went jetting into the sky on a geyser of dragon fire, they heard her say one thing, and one thing only.
"I may have made a miscalculation."
