Celestia's sun shone brightly as it hung in a cloudless sky, basking the whole of Ponyville in a scorching hundred-degree heat. Cracks had begun to form in the dry dirt road leading up to Sweet Apple Acres. The searing heat could only mean one thing—summer had arrived, and with it, the Summer Sun Celebration.
Most of the Apple family—namely Big Macintosh, Apple Bloom and Granny Smith—were busy in Ponyville, helping the residents set up everything they'd need for the festivities the following day. This left Applejack to take care of the chores around the farm, which she set to with the zeal and determination she was so well-known for.
"Cider river, take my mind..." she sang to herself as she busied herself nailing back a loose board on the barn wall. "Don't let her memory torture me..."
"Excuse me?"
Applejack turned her head from her work to see a pegasus stallion in a brown courier's uniform, pulling a cart with a wooden crate in it.
"Well, howdy, friend," she said, setting down her hammer. "What can I do ya for?"
"I've got a delivery here for a Miss Applejack," the stallion replied, reading off a clipboard in his hooves. "Three tons of 'Abrazo de la Tierra' fertiliser."
"Hoo dang!" Applejack smiled. "Ah thought that stuff would never get here. Sure, I'll sign for it."
Once the order had been signed and paid for, Applejack gave the stallion a hoof getting the crate down from the cart. It landed in the dirt with a heavy thump, the words "PRODUCTO DE NEIGHCARAGUA" stamped in bold, black letters on the side.
"Have a nice day, ma'am," the stallion said, tipping his hat politely before departing. Once he had left, Applejack retrieved a crowbar from the barn, before coming back and grunting as she pried the front of the crate loose. After some effort, it fell to the ground, revealing the stacks of brown bags of fertiliser within.
Applejack grinned to herself. "Well now, if this stuff is as potent as that mare in Canterlot said it is, I reckon we're gonna have ourselves a bumper crop this summer." Taking hold of a bag and pulling it out, she set it down flat on the ground, gazing at the picture on the front of a beaming mare amid several tall rows of corn, with 'Abrazo de la Tierra' written proudly above it.
"Alrighty, then," she said, grunting as she flipped the bag over to reveal the back, with all the instructions and disclaimers. She furrowed her brow. "Now, let's see if I can remember mah Spaneish. Let's see. Um, 'Warning'..."
After struggling with the next few paragraphs, Applejack shook her head in frustration. Whatever. The warning the bag bore was clear in any language—don't be an idiot and you'll be fine.
"Well," she said, slinging the bag onto her back and heading for the fields, "I guess all that's left is to take it for a test run."
Sweating slightly under the hot sun, Applejack lugged the bag to the edge of the magnificent orchard from which Sweet Apple Acres got its name. The leafy canopy of the tall apple trees provided some welcome relief from the sun as Applejack headed for a newly ploughed furrow. Tucked inside the furrow were three small saplings.
"Hey there, Hangdown, Winesap an' Bloomberg III," Applejack cooed, crouching down next to the saplings so she was at "eye" level with them. "You enjoying the sunshine, there? Well, Mamma's got something here to help ya grow up big and strong this summer, an' you get to try it before anyone else."
Applejack tore open a hole in the corner of the bag, before taking hold of it and rearing up on her hind legs, staggering slightly as she tried to maintain her balance while supporting the weight of the bag. Then, she tipped the bag up and allowed the dark brown fertiliser within to cover the saplings.
"Alright," she said, grunting as she set the bag down. "Let's see what kinda-"
That was as far as Applejack got, before a deep, loud rumbling beneath the ground caught her off guard. The rumbling was unexpected enough, and of sufficient intensity, to almost knock her off her hooves. What the heck was going on? An earthquake? No, something else...
Before Applejack's eyes, like phoenixes from the ashes, the three saplings shot out from the ground at a fantastic speed. To her utter shock, like a sped-up film reel, the trees grew taller and taller, before sprouting branches and leaves before her very eyes. Once the trees were in full leaf, apples began sprouting one by one all along the branches, until each tree bore a full and bountiful harvest. Applejack could only stare at them in utter amazement, her eyes wide as saucers and pupils shrunk to pinpricks. Apple trees normally took at least a year to fully grow, and Hangdown, Winesap and Bloomberg III had done it in thirty seconds.
Using a hoof to close her jaw, Applejack took several moments to regain her composure. Despite what had just happened, she wasn't afraid. Astonished, yes, but not afraid. Being an Element of Harmony and saving the world more than once tended to harden you up like that.
"Well, that mare wasn't lying," Applejack mumbled, staring at the proud leafy trees before her. "Sweet Celestia, she wasn't lying. That is some darned potent stuff."
After staring at the trees for a little longer, Applejack realised just what had happened. Those trees had given her a year's worth of toil in less than a minute. And there were still plenty of fields left unfurrowed...
A smile lit up Applejack's face as the cash register in her head began to spin. She may not have been as good at math as her brother, but she knew one equation: (apple tree + super fertiliser) x a really big number = beaucoup bits.
"Ah just need to test one thing," she mused to herself. "If they pass the test, we'll be riding the goshdarned money train."
Grinning widely, she got to her hooves and rushed off to fetch her applebucking buckets. She had work to do.
A series of knocks were heard coming from the front door of Fluttershy's home. Fluttershy trotted over and opened it, revealing Applejack standing in the doorway.
"Oh hello, Applejack," Fluttershy smiled. "What brings you here?"
"Hey, Fluttershy," Applejack replied, sounding a little hurried. "Listen, sugarcube, I need your help with something down at the farm. D'you think you could help me out?"
"Oh," Fluttershy replied, scuffing a hoof against the floor and looking slightly uncomfortable. "Um, I'd love to, but I actually have company at the moment."
"Company, huh?" Applejack commented. "Who might that be?"
In answer to her question, a green earth pony mare came into view, her red mane styled into dreadlocks, with a smile of either serenity or intoxication—it was a little hard to tell which.
"Oh, howdy, Tree Hugger," Applejack said, raising her eyebrows a little. "Didn't expect to see you here."
"Yo, Applejack," Tree Hugger drawled in reply, giving her an embrace. "So happy to, like, see you again. This town, man... the energy here is fantastic." She sighed happily. "I can feel Gaia smiling down at us just looking at this place."
"Tree Hugger decided to stop by and visit me on her way home," Fluttershy explained. "She just got back from a spiritual retreat at a commune in Prance."
"So spiritual," Tree Hugger interjected. "My chakras are completely realigned after it. It's a trip, man."
"Yes, well, I couldn't very well leave her here," Fluttershy continued. "I'm so sorry... you do understand, don't you?"
"Well gee, Fluttershy," Applejack said, biting her lip. "I'm kinda in a spot here. All the other girls are busy, and... say, why don't you bring Tree Hugger along? I could always use a second opinion."
"Tree Hugger?" Fluttershy asked, turning to the eponymous mare. "What do you think?"
"Mmm... yeah, that sounds cool," Tree Hugger replied.
"Great. Um, Applejack... second opinion on what?"
Applejack chuckled. "You'll see."
"Oh, my goodness," Fluttershy breathed, her eyes widening.
"Whoa," Tree Hugger added.
Those were indeed appropriate reactions to what the two mares saw before them in Applejack's kitchen.
Apple pies, fritters, cobbler, and all sorts of other treats were stacked high, on the table, countertops, even on the floor. Fluttershy counted at least a dozen pies in one stack alone. There was hardly room to move in the kitchen amongst the teetering stacks of apple-themed goodies. Applejack stood behind them, a smile of great pride upon her face.
"Whaddaya think?" she asked. "Ain't it a sight to behold?"
"Applejack, how... how did you do all this?" Fluttershy said, still looking stunned as her eyes scanned around the room. "It must have taken years for you to grow enough apples for all of this!"
"Nope," Applejack laughed. "Just one day. All thanks to a little miracle called Abrazo de la Tierra."
"Abrazo de la Tierra?" Tree Hugger repeated, placing a hoof on her chin. "Sounds familiar, but I don't really know why."
"Well, lemme tell ya," Applejack continued, "this stuff really is a miracle. Get this, it's this fancy-schmancy fertiliser from Neighcaragua or some such place, an' it can literally make apple trees grow before your very eyes!" She pointed out the kitchen window. "You see those three trees over by the old water pump?"
Fluttershy nodded. "Uh-huh."
"This morning, that there was just a furrow with three saplings in it. No joke."
Tree Hugger whistled. "Whoa. It really, like, makes you appreciate the bounty Gaia bestows upon us, doesn't it?"
"Um... I guess," Applejack replied. "Anyway, there's just one more test I need to do—the taste test. If these pies and the like pass the test..." She giggled almost deliriously. "We're gonna have more bits than we know what to do with them!"
"A taste test?" Tree Hugger repeated, frowning. "Hey, not that I don't appreciate the offer, but can't you just, y'know, taste them yourself?"
"I could," Applejack replied. "But these apples are my babies, and I'm their mamma. And like all moms, I might not see imperfections in my babies that other ponies do. It's always worth getting an outsider's opinion on these things."
"There's a lot of treats here just for a taste test..." Fluttershy noted.
Applejack chuckled. "I might have gotten a bit carried away. Blame the excitement. Anyway, that's enough yapping. Dig in, you two!"
"Well, okay," Fluttershy smiled. "Thanks, Applejack."
"Yeah, thanks," Tree Hugger echoed. With smiles all around, the three mares each picked a treat—Applejack went for a pie; Fluttershy, the cobbler; and Tree Hugger, a plate of fritters. Each mare took a bite from their treats more or less simultaneously.
"Well, it tastes good to me... what do you think, girls?" Applejack asked.
"It tastes great, Applejack," Fluttershy smiled. "Perfect, actually."
"Yeah, righteous," Tree Hugger agreed. "A real taste of nature, y'know?"
"Well, gosh almighty," Applejack grinned, laughing delightedly as she saw visions of thousands of bits before her eyes. "Money train, here I come! Oh my stars, I can finally pay off the mortgage on the farm! I can send Apple Bloom to college! I can-"
Applejack's spiel was interrupted by a loud splat from behind her. Both she and Fluttershy turned around to see Tree Hugger with her face shoved into a pie, eating loudly and messily.
"Tree Hugger! What's gotten into you?" Fluttershy gasped, aghast.
Tree Hugger looked up at them briefly with slightly glazed eyes, pie filling covering her face and even sticking in her mane. "Pie," she blurted, before going back to gorging.
"Land's sakes, girl!" Applejack snapped, moving to physically restrain Tree Hugger. "What's gotten-"
Applejack was cut off as she suddenly began to feel... hungry. Really, really hungry. Behind her, Fluttershy's wings sprung out as her own eyes widened.
"A-Applejack?" she stuttered, beginning to sweat slightly. "Do you feel... strange?"
"Strange how?" Applejack replied in a flat monotone, as her eyes darted all around the room filled with food. The wonderful, delicious food...
"Strange like apple," Fluttershy mumbled, her own eyes flitting back and forth. "Like your apple is turning apples and apple is apple apple."
"Apple know, apple," Applejack stuttered. "You're apple to whatapple you apple."
"Apple?"
"Apple on apple apple," Applejack agreed.
A moment's silence followed, before both mares snapped.
Both Applejack and Fluttershy physically flung themselves at the towers of pies, causing them to topple and crash to the floor in a spectacular display of broken crusts and pie filling covering the floor. Both mares joined Tree Hugger in mindlessly glutting themselves on the gloopy mess, along with whatever pies had managed to escape unscathed. Their legs moved like they were making snow angels, with both mares covered from head to hock in pie filling in less than a minute. Neither of them noticed, or even cared. All they cared about was filling their bellies, and they did so with aplomb.
Like a ravenous beast, Fluttershy shoveled food into her mouth with scarcely a pause for breath, her yellow fur almost completely obscured by light green pie filling and brown pie crumbs. Feverishly, she sucked on both of her front hooves to get at any filling that had escaped her maw, before eyeing the collapsed tower of pies before her. Licking her lips and grinning wildly, she leaped forward and burrowed into the pile, her hind legs and tail wriggling in as she disappeared. All that could be heard were fevered chewing and slurping noises, before she emerged from the other side, now one hundred percent covered in a great, sticky mess. More notably, she was considerably plumper than she had been when she went in—a good thirty or forty pounds heavier, not that she noticed or cared. Her newly rounded belly and plot wobbled slightly as she rolled around, giggling euphorically as she continued to glut herself.
Across from her, Applejack was more or less in the same boat. She was nowhere near as messy as Fluttershy, but no less greedy, and no less fat, either—slightly fatter than Fluttershy, in fact, as well as a bit more bottom-heavy. Her newly swollen rump acted as a nice cushion as she sat slumped against the wall, shoving fritters into her mouth at a fantastic speed, ten or twelve at a time, her cheeks swelling to capacity with each mouthful.
Tree Hugger, meanwhile, had grown larger than either Fluttershy or Applejack. Sixty extra pounds graced her body, enough to give her the start of a second chin, as well as a rapidly-growing pot belly. Again, she didn't notice it one bit, too focused on seeing just how many pies she could fit into her mouth at once. She managed a very impressive one and a half, her cheeks bulging out comically as she chewed and swallowed frenetically.
Eating and growing, growing and eating, the mares plowed on. That huge pile of food disappeared at a downright dizzying rate of knots as they continued to gorge themselves in their trance. Bellies and rumps grew ever larger, cutie marks expanding in size and new chins and rolls beginning to form. Still, they pressed on, and on and on.
"Need more!" Fluttershy gasped, swinging around to throw herself at yet another hapless pile of pies. Her newly-formed capacious rump gave her a bit less room to manoeuvre than she once had, and one of her plot cheeks caught the edge of a small tower of fritters that had somehow managed to escape unscathed. This, of course, sent them falling just like their pastry brethren before them... fortuitously, straight into the waiting maw of Tree Hugger.
"Oh, man!" Tree Hugger cried out joyously. "Can you feel the... (munch) good vibrations in the air?"
"All I can feel is mah belly tellin' me it needs more," Applejack snapped, as she all but inhaled yet another pie.
"More!" Fluttershy echoed. "More, more... more..."
Pain.
In that moment, all Applejack knew was pain—a white hot, skull-splitting pain that took hold of every neuron and nerve ending in her head. Opening her eyes revealed nothing but bright, blurry shapes, causing the pain to intensify tenfold. Applejack gasped and squeezed her eyes shut.
"Ugh..." she moaned. "Wha... what happened? Did I black out or something?"
Blinking her eyes rapidly, the world slowly began to come back into focus. Applejack tried to look in front of her, but couldn't see much—there was a big, orange mass in the way.
Then Applejack realised... that mass was her!
"What in tarnation?!" Applejack gasped. She tried to get to her hooves, but the pain in her head made it perfectly clear that she was going to stay right where she was, like it or not.
She heard a laugh from beside her. "Oh, man... was that a trip or what?"
"What?" Applejack groaned, turning her head to the side. Two things immediately caught her eye.
The first was Fluttershy, still unconscious... and much larger than she'd been just an hour or so prior. Where a slender and slight pegasus had once been, there was now a very plump—and very messy—mare. Fluttershy's coat was only visible in small patches, the rest of her body covered in thick, sticky goo. Her belly was now large enough to hang down and drape over her legs, and her face definitely had at least one more chin than it used to.
She was nothing compared to Tree Hugger, though. Tree Hugger was... a behemoth. Her belly was titanic enough to actually lift her hooves off the ground, acting as an impromptu bed. Her fat face melted into a triple chin, and her forelegs were so heavily draped in fat that it was a wonder she could move them. Behind her, her massive flanks could be seen peeking out from behind her belly, like nervous actors peeping from behind the stage curtain. On her face was a look of utter contentment.
"What... what in Celestia happened to you?" Applejack stuttered. "To us?"
"Uuuurgh..." Fluttershy's eyes cracked open slightly, only to immediately shoot wide open as she took in the scene before her. "Oh, my goodness!"
"Hey, now I remember where I saw Abrazo de la Tierra before!" Tree Hugger grinned. "We used it at a festival to celebrate Gaia's bounty in Neighcaragua a couple of years ago." She chuckled, her chins wobbling as she did so. "We got so huge that we had to be cut out of the building afterwards. Good thing they had lipomancers on hoof."
"Wait, this was supposed to happen?" Applejack gawked.
"Well, yeah," Tree Hugger replied, raising an eyebrow. "Didn't the bag, like, tell you that?"
"Um..."
"Applejack," Fluttershy asked patiently, "you didn't just ignore the instructions, did you?"
"They were all in Spaneish!" Applejack protested, before hanging her head. "Oh, golly, how in the heck am I gonna explain this one to the family when they get home?"
"Man," Tree Hugger said thoughtfully. "If we got this tripped out, I wonder if any other ponies are doing the same thing?"
"Hey, bro!"
Rumble turned his head from his book to see his brother, Thunderlane, trotting in with a large brown bag on his back.
"Hey, Thunderlane. What's that you've got there?" Rumble asked.
"This," Thunderlane said proudly, "is the stuff that's going to make our vegetable garden grow like no tomorrow. A fancy kind of super fertiliser. It's meant to make plants grow in no time flat!"
"Did you get some magic beans with it?" Rumble quipped.
"Hey, you won't be laughing when we have corn growing as tall as Celestia herself," Thunderlane retorted, as he opened the back door and lugged the bag out to the garden, where a modest-looking vegetable plot was located. Setting the bag down, he squinted at the instructions.
"Now, then," he muttered. "Let's see if I can remember my Spaneish..."
END
