The wrench made a solid metal ‘clank’ as Sundial dropped it on her workbench. She’d been working on her latest device for the past four months, since she’d had an incredibly exciting dream that inspired it. Stepping back, she examined her creation.
Standing in the center of her workshop was what could only be described as a clockwork pegasus. Solid brass hooves hooked onto a complex leg system, hooking into a camshaft in the body, while more supports connected the ends to a spine and more joints connected a roughly circular head to the body by the neck. The head, perhaps, was the most intricate piece of machinery Sundial had ever knitted together, requiring gears and cogs and delicate work to put it all into a single unit. She still didn’t know what otherworldly power had guided her hoof in it’s creation, and she could barely tell if it would work, only that it followed the plans she had scribbled down in the middle of the night. They looked as if they would work, however.
Taking a deep breath, her horn lit up once more, and she started spinning a crank set into the back of the clockwork pegasus’ head, which started to wind up a spring in the inside of the automaton’s brain with a click-click-click. A glowing cylinder that emitted a rainbow-coloured glow, through colours across the workshop, started to pump as the prismapetrol she’d paid top dollar for began to burn, essentially using the tiny amount of power she’d put into it with the crank to burn more fuel and give the automaton even more energy. The reaction would continue until it ran of fuel, possibly indefinitely if she kept it gassed up.
After a minute or so of the machine humming, the crank turned on its base, spinning into the machine’s brain, which whirred to life with a click, then started to speed up as the movement of the gears, the sound of them sliding together and meshing with oiled precision, reached a pattern. Within only a minute, the machine came to life, and began automatically testing its freedom of movement. The head shook and twisted, the legs picked up and set down with a clank, it trotted in place experimentally, and the wings fluttered like those of a baby bird, before splaying out skeletally and jamming the blunt tips into its synthetic stomach, kneading the empty vulcanized rubber sack mounted in its gut.
Sundial was overjoyed, to say the least. “I...It works. Holy crap.” A huge grin spread across her face as the automaton finished its diagnostic, and resumed its standing position in front of her. “It WORKS!”
Around the room, an array of wooden pieces floated into the air. Mahogany, beautiful and of the highest quality, her favorite for her clocks. It had been carved carefully, and as she started attaching it to the skeleton of the automaton in front of her, it quickly began to resemble a pony even closer than before. Wooden plating snapped onto the brass hooves, around the legs, over the barrel and up the neck, until finally she reached the head.
This was the trickiest part, as she’d needed a design that wouldn’t creep ponies out, and wouldn’t block the magical ‘eye’ set into the center of the clockwork pegasus’ face. Eventually she’d opted to go to glassblower, and had them blow a sphere that protected the eye and the delicate clockworks inside, plus a reassuring wooden muzzle, shaped after a stallion’s. She liked how it looked—although the glassblower thought it still looked a little creepy—and she was satisfied with it. Clipping it on completed the automaton properly, and it was time for the first small-scale test.
Turning back to her workbench, she popped open her breadbox, pulling out a rough loaf of plain whole wheat bread from Sugarcube Corner. Setting it down on the workbench, she grinned. “Initiate directive one; find food.”
The automaton spun to life once more, whirring as it scanned the room with its glowing orange eye, and a tinny recording of her own voice played back at her. “This should play when the machine is scanning. ...Thirteen... items found, checking for edibility.” It clicked and whirred, before her voice played once more. “Live pony found. Sub-directive activated. Ponies are inedible. Remove that from the potential food list, could get me into trouble.”
Sundial giggled and clapped her hooves together with glee as the automaton narrowed the list of food down to the loaf of bread, then stepped closer and extended its skeletal brass wings out to it. As it picked it up, a massive port on the front of it’s chest under the joints of its neck slid open, shutters retracting into the sides and disappearing like the lens of a camera. The wings tossed the loaf of bread inside, then started kneading the stomach from outside while spraying water in from another internal reservoir, effectively pulping the bread and turning it into mush.
As soon as it determined it was soft enough, it stopped, and a rubber pipe shaped like a stallion’s shaft extended outwards. “Initiating feeding subsystem.” Sundial blushed, before nodding. “Okay, yup, that part works too. Uh, store current contents of tank and retract feeding tube.” As the automaton did so, she giggled with excitement again. “Alrighty! Time for a field test! Directive one again, find food. Expand search radius to one mile, let’s see what you pick up!”
Dutifully, the automaton turned and began stomping outside into the foggy morning mists. While watching it go, Sundial’s mind wandered back towards her dream, and she patted her still-flat belly. “Soon, I’m gonna be nice and plump… I hope I jiggle, I’ll be adorable once I have some weight on me…”
* * *
Creased Shirt was woken up, rather rudely, by a loud bang in his kitchen. Glancing at the wooden clock by the side of his bed, the glowing hands told him it was barely four in the morning, an absolutely awful time for somepony to break in. With an annoyed growl, the earth pony rolled out of bed, swiping his bedmane back out of his eyes and grabbing a poker out of his cold and unlit fireplace.
Clutching it close, he quietly trotted downstairs, and peeked into his kitchen. His eyes widened as he took in the scene.
There was some kind of… wooden pony? That seemed to be grabbing every single bit of food in his kitchen out of his cupboards and icebox, boxes of cereal and jars of jam being emptied into a hole in it’s chest and into some kind of brown rubber stomach, which was already bloating with foodstuffs… which he’d bought, dammit!
“Hey! What in tartarus is going on here?” Stepping into the kitchen, he paused as the ornage eye flicked towards him, and a familiar voice echoed out of the automaton. “Live pony found. Sub-directive activated. Ponies are inedible. Remove that from the potential food list, could get me into trouble.”
“Great!” Growled Creased Shirt, flicking the poker at it in what he hoped was a menacing way. “Now get the buck out of my kitchen, and stop eating all of my damn food! What is this, some kind of prank of Sundial’s?”
The automaton didn’t respond, and just kept cramming his damn food into it’s stomach. “Hey! I said knock that off!” Angrily, he brought the poker down on the automaton’s glass dome of a head, which exploded in a shower of glass and a grinding of gears.
The automaton froze, and for a moment, he thought he’d killed the thing, but then it stuttered back to life, Sundial’s voice speaking again. “This plays if there’s some sort of error, hopefully that doesn’t hap-” then her voice interrupted itself, cutting itself off to declare “This plays if there’s an error and the machine needs to re-scan the environme-” she didn’t even cut herself off this time, and multiple messages seemed to play at once, layering over each other. “This plays if there’s some sort of-” “if the machine has encountered a mechanical issue, please return it to Sundial-” “This is a test message, remove this before-” “The machine has encountered an issue with the optical crystal-”
“Shut up!” Growled Creased Shirt, taking another swipe at the machine’s braincase, but it spun and caught the poker with a brass hoof in the blink of an eye, as all of the messages stopped. Then, one more message played, menacing in it’s simplicity. “New food item found. ...Large… Volume. Acquiring.”
All Creased could do was yelp as the mechanical wings, stained with pickle juice and cake frosting, grabbed him and crammed him inside the rubber stomach with all of his stolen food. His face fell into a pile of tortilla chips, one hoof got buried in a semi-solid pond made of canned carrots, and his crotch landed right in a mass of beans. The stallion tried to squirm, tried to escape, but his only way out was blocked as the automaton shoved only more and more food in, cans of chili being cracked open and dumped over him, bags of pretzels being opened and emptied into the mess, and even catching a bagel right in the nose when he tried to make a break for it. As he fell back, his mouth opened, and all at once, he tasted milk, roast chicken, half-melted popsicles, and pickles again, which kind of overwhelmed everything else.
Just when he thought the onslaught had slowed enough to make his escape, the opening slid shut, closing like an iris and leaving him without any light, and worse, without his escape. Struggling through all the lumpy piles of solid food and puddles of juice, he started hammering on the rubber walls of the belly, trying to get anyone to hear him. All he was rewarded with was the sensation of the skeletal wings pushing in on the stomach again, grinding the food against itself, rolling him around in the muck as it was all churned together, mixing into a lumpy paste as the machine began walking. After a few hard knocks, Creased was just about done with trying to escape, and decided to just lay back in the stilling stomach as the automaton walked to wherever it was going next.
* * *
Sundial’s workshop was mostly clean by the time the automaton returned. It was never perfectly clean, because she maintained that any workshop that was spotless was a museum piece, not a workspace, but all of her side projects besides the walking one were shoved safely to the side, and her most delicate tools back on the rack. She had just finished gathering all the parts of an egg timer that had grown wildly out of control on their own tray, when her brass pegasus stomped back inside, a hugely distended belly swinging underneath.
“Oh… Wow.” She muttered, jaw hanging open at the sheer size of the rubber gut. “How much… You were gone for only half an hour, this is… oh my…”
Setting the tray on her workbench, she turned back and started trotting around the automaton. “I’d… call that a successful test, jeez. And it’s all pulped?” She asked, glancing back at the pegasus’ face.
“Operation complete. Food slurry has filled stomach to capac-”
“Whoah! What happened to your dome?” Sundial interrupted, scrambling back around to the automaton’s front, and inspecting its clockwork brain. “This is… major damage… Dome broken, bent gears, glass jamming most of them… What happened to you?”
The automaton whirred and clanked for a moment, before her own voice played back. “Unknown query. Gotta cover all the bases.”
“Huh… Well, you seem… mostly functional? Thank goodness for redundant sytems... I can fix you after we, ah, ‘empty your tank’, so to speak.”
The automaton ticked. “Slurry dispenser diagnostic reports… green… subsystem is in full working order.”
Smiling, Sundial’s horn lit, pulling a lever by the workshop door, shutting it with a mechanical whir. “Follow me.” She lead over to a couch she kept in her workshop to sleep on when she was too tired to move to her bed proper. Sliding on, she laid on her side, and beckoned the automaton close.
“Initiating feeding subsystem,” her own voice stated once more, and the clockwork pegasus hitched one leg back, extending the rubber shaft. Sundial had been blushing the entire time she’d sculpted this thing, sacrificing one of her own toys to make sure she got the shape right. She took hold of it with slightly-shaking hooves, stroking the length. It wasn’t necessary, but it felt right, as if she was pleasuring her mechanical stallion.
Leaning forward, she brought her lips close and began suckling the tip, slurping at the faint drippings of mulched bread slurry that were dripping out of the tip. She’d have to check those seals later, she noted, but she liked the effect. As she suckled at the end of the tube, one hoof broke off from the gentle stroking and moved to her own crotch, rubbing gently to get herself started.
She was slow to move up the rubber cock’s length, savouring the flavour and the sensation. She was a virgin, and had never really felt like stallions had much of an interest in her small frame… But all that was about to change. Everypony was going to love her new figure after she loaded up on food. As the first drippings of her arousal beaded between her legs, she took a deep breath, and started pushing herself as deep as she could.
As her gag reflex started to trigger, she hit a button next to the base of the feeding tube, and the automaton’s wings spread, then folded over its belly, pushing her head further than she ever could have. Her lips slid to the base of the fake cock, where rubber met brass, and the skeletal wings held her there, far too strong to let her pull away. Inside her throat, the cock slid all the way into her esophagus, nearly halfway to her stomach, and locked there. There was a whir from the belly, and then the feeding tank started to spray half-liquified food of all sorts directly into her stomach, bypassing her tongue and mouth completely.
Tears started to work their way out of the corners of Sundial’s eyes as she continued to play with herself, feeling the rubber horsecock pulse, pushing the largest load anypony had ever taken in history directly into her belly. Mashed fruit, pulped baked goods, the contents of dozens of cans of food and everything that was already liquid, she couldn’t tell the difference. All it was was pulses of food spraying inside.
She looked down, and would’ve giggled, if there weren’t a horsecock shoved in her throat.. She could already see her belly starting to bloat, expanding outwards and spreading across the cushions of the couch! The mere sight of it got her juices flowing, and she gushed arousal all over her hoof as she started clopping again.
* * *
Inside the belly, Creased Shirt was shaken out of his concussed delirium by the contents of the stomach starting to drain out from under him. “Huh...? Whuh…?” Looking around, he noticed with no small amount of fear that while the contents of the stomach were exiting, it wasn’t getting any larger. It was compressing around him, pushing more of the pulped food slurry out to where ever it was going.
Rolling over onto his belly, he started to thump on the shutters he’d entered through, but they weren’t where the food was going, and if anypony heard him, they didn’t respond. “Hello! There’s a pony in here, you blasted food thieves! Let me out! I’m soaked in all my stolen food, and it’s starting to stain my... fur...”
Creased froze. Something was sucking at his hooves. Turning around, he realized the stomach had nearly emptied around him with frightening speed, and even as he watched, the end he was facing tilted up to make the rest pour into wherever it was going with a wet sucking noise… And his hooves were directly into the way.
“Oh… Oh no. No no no no-!” He started struggling, but it was far too late. He didn’t even have anything to grab onto as the suction of whatever it was started pulling his hinds into the drain. He clawed frantically at the swampy bottom of the rubber sack as it continued pressing in around him, shoving him in and pulling him out at the same time.
He was barely even able to let out a squeal of terror as he was sucked inside, first his hind knees, then his well-fed rear. His sheathe actually got halfway hard from the sucking sensation, much as he hated to acknowledge it, and the last thing he saw before he was sucked into the tube were those damn shutters opening, pulling in more air to suck him in. Then he was sliding, compressed into a crushingly tight tube, and being sucked only further downward as the light from above mocked him.
* * *
Sundial was just about feeling the need for oxygen again when… something... happened. Her jaws instantly were pulled open almost painfully wide as something solid was shoved through the tube, the horsecock distending as something that had refused to be pulped was forcefully shoved through.
Her first instinct was to hit the emergency release button, but before she could even move it was sliding into her throat, then down into her belly. For just a moment, she looked like a snake, pulling a huge meal down her throat in a single gulp, and then it fell into her belly. Her whole body rocked back and forth as whatever it was settled in her gut, and the cock in her mouth returned to its comparatively tiny shape.
“This should play when the storage tank has been emptied. Reminder to self: install automatic release system, a pony might suffocate if they can’t hit the button in time.” This time, Sundial did giggle, her head swimming as she smacked the red button on the clockwork pony’s underside, and she fell back on the couch, throat and jaw sore. Her belly was the most full it had ever been in her life, though. Trying to roll onto her back, all she did was roll back against the couch, fully taking all space on the piece of furniture.
Her experiment was a perfect success. With a load of food this heavy, she was going to slip into a minor food coma, and when she woke up in a couple days her rump and belly would be all fat and jiggly, just like she’d wanted. Patting her belly, she let out a burp, and looked at it again.
It was huge, to say the least. She had no idea where her automaton had found so much food in such a short time, and she’d probably have to pay a visit to whatever neighbour the machine had almost certainly taken the food from… There were farms nearby, maybe it had gone on a feeding frenzy through the Apple farm? Or a carrot-picking rampage through through Golden Harvest’s crops? She hoped it hadn’t broken into a shop somewhere, she didn’t make enough from her clocks to replace a whole shop’s inventory… But with her belly as huge as it was, it looked like she’d eaten a whole-
Suddenly her gut shifted, and she jumped. From inside, a muffled voice shouted, “Hey! What in tartarus is going on?! Where am I?!”
Sundial nearly turned white. That was what made that load of food so huge! That was the solid thing! “H-hello?” She timidly asked her own gut.
“Is that… Sundial! You whore of a tinkerer, what have you done? Let me out!”
“I- I don’t know how! I barely got you down, I can’t vomit you back up!”
Her belly shook with sheer rage as whoever was inside tried to escape all on their own. “Well you’d better! And when I get out I’m going to break your lousy piece of shit clockwork toy, for good this time! That thing’s a menace-”
Sundial interrupted them. “Wait… You broke it? You smashed his dome?”
“Of course I did! That thing was eating all my food! Now lemme out so I can disassemble it for good!”
Sundial glared at her belly, and glanced at her automaton, standing by with it’s smiling wooden muzzle and jaggedly broken dome, gears turning in both their heads. “You know what? No, I don’t think I will.”
“What?!” Shouted her her impromptu meal indignantly. “You have to! I’ll die in here!”
“And if you’re going to smash my greatest creation, again, then maybe that’s better!” The normally-demure mare growled. “And besides, I wanted to fatten myself up… Can you imagine how much eating an entire pony would add to my belly?”
There was shocked silence from her gut, before the pony inside shouted, “That’s it, you’ve lost your mind! You’ve popped a cog!”
“And you’re going to be flank fat when I wake up, whoever you were.” Sundial shrugged, patting her automaton on the muzzle. “Return to your station, and spin down for now. I’ll pick all of that glass out and wind you up again when I wake up.”
The automaton let out a short “Command acknowledged” before trotting back to where she’d put it together originally, and locked up, the gears in it’s head coming to a halt with a with a final crunch as another piece of glass splintered inside.
Wincing, Sundial turned her attention back to her stomach, which had begun emitting expletives and shaking like gelatin from side to side as the pony inside tried fervently to escape the acids that were dissolving the more traditional food around them.
Not that there was much for the stomach to do in the first place, in regards to digestion. Creased Shirt was thrashing inside a semisolid soup of pre-mulched food, and the stomach began contracting around him like the last synthetic one had, except this time he would not be exiting in one piece. Even as he struggled, his free space began to shrink, from the morass being up to his chest, then slowly pushing him deeper, until he was up to his neck, and he could see the acids dribbling out of the walls, intermingling with the food around him and creating oily patterns across the surface in the dim light.
As he splashed and threw himself against the spongy walls, he only coated his fur in more of the stomach acid, and he began losing feeling all over his skin. He was spared seeing the worst effects by simply how full the gut was, but under the surface his body was starting to fall to pieces, fur stripping off and floating to the surface in the digestive sack. Pulling a leg out, it seemed to simply be melting like a wax figure in sunlight. The few solid clumps of food floating alongside him had started hissing and fizzing, and the stomach walls began closing in on him, sparing him the trouble of throwing himself at them.
Another sucking feeling kissed his hinds at the bottom of the gut, Sundial’s body beginning to pull the soup deeper into her intestines, but this one was a hundred times more gentle than the one inside the automaton’s. He wasn’t going to be pulled out that way, at least not while he was solid, and while Sundial’s belly wasn’t as good at that, it was a thousand times better for pulping and digesting its food. It pushed and flexed against him, already clouding the goop he was fighting in with tiny chunks of himself as he was being broken down while still alive, until he was mostly swimming a soup made of himself.
“Not like this,” he groaned pathetically, thrashing one last time at full strength, before he started getting lightheaded. He hadn’t had much oxygen to start with, and with the stomach pressing it around him, trying to force the contents into her guts, he had mostly run out of whatever fresh air he had. With another flex, Sundial let out a burp that shook her workshop, and utterly emptied her stomach of air.
It compressed around Creased shirt, forcing him under the itching surface, and he shut his eyes as the lightheadedness got worse, the walls grinding up against him, weakening his flesh and bones, rubbing across his body. As he started truly asphyxiating, his dick poked upwards to attention thanks to the fleshy rubbing and warm bath he was dissolving in. As he started to get delirious, he forgot where he was, stroking himself absent-mindedly, the sting of the acids forgotten even as they leached nutrients from his body.
After a few seconds of stroking, he cried out with a gasp, and his eyes shot open as the combined taste of his kitchens’ contents and Sundial’s digestive enzymes invaded his tongue, forcing their way into his lungs, and when he started to choke, his own belly, filling him utterly with half-digested food and stomach acids. His eyes widened as he was pressed into a tight ball, twitching cock in front of his face in the murky soup. Those same acids invaded his eyes, streams of blood invading the surface, and he passed out, drowning in Sundial’s belly, with a faint cloudy trickle of cum spreading out from the head of his cock, and enveloping his head, mixing with the streams from his eyes.
Finally relaxing, Sundial groaned happily as the movement from inside her gut settled down, and she patted the mushy lump in her gut. She felt a little bit bad about her neighbour ending up in there, but she’d decided he deserved it in the end. He seemed like an ass, it was only fitting that he add to hers. Pulling her blankets up and over her belly, like a doily on a couch, she snuggled into the warmth of the couch, falling into a deep food coma.
Over the next three days, her body continued to break down the pony in her belly, filtering him, piece by piece and scrap b scrap, bone by bone into her intestines along with the food paste he’d contributed. In there, her body began sucking the nutrients and moisture out of the murky, brownish sludge, adding it to her own. If somepony had been taking pictures of her as she slept, they would have seen her belly become only slightly less round, her butt expand and push outwards across the couch, her cheeks grow a little puffier, and her body expand in a minute but noticeable way.
Around noon of the fourth day, she blearily blinked awake, and looked around, before pushing the blankets to the side and trying to stand up. She didn’t get far, unused to the layers of fat coating her, and she fell back on the couch with a yelp. After a couple of minutes, she managed to wobble off the couch, standing on shaky, slightly meatier hooves, looking herself over.
Her belly still sagged underneath her, as if her unwanted guest hadn’t digested at all, but when she pushed a hoof into the plushy bulk, it sank in up to her knee, and sprang back when she pulled back. Looking back and pushing the fat away, she noted her hips were much wider, and heftier, and jiggled when she shook them from side to side as if they had a mind of their own. Still, she needed a better look, and waddled down the hallway of her house to her bathroom, where she had a mirror on the back of the door, then inspected herself directly.
Her plushy buttcheeks were like two huge globes that had been stuck together, made of flesh that shivered when she pushed a hoof into it, and both jiggled when she gave one an experimental slap of her hoof. Waves of fat rolled across her asscheeks, easily a hundred pounds of fruits, veggies, breads, soups, pastries and whatever else her neighbour had in his cupboard, not to mention the neighbour herself (whichever one she had eaten) all having been broken down and filtered into her fat, becoming a permanent part of her bulk, her weight, her own flesh. She could barely seen her ponut and thin, cute slit between the two, but the sheer fact that she’d at least doubled her weight seemed to be making her wet, thin trails of slightly greasy pussy juice spreading from her lips and down her pudgy thighs.
Then as she was watching it, her ponut flexed, and she just barely felt something coming. She clenched down on it, which probably saved her a mess to clean up later, but a noxious pea green cloud of her own farts escaped with a wet ‘prrrrrfffffffft’ noise, the cloud sinking to her floor. The smell filled the room, of her own body, her own digestive enzymes, and the faint smell of death on the wind… and she kind of liked it, what it represented.
In the meantime, however, she turned, wobbling as she moved to the toilet, and sat on the porcelain rim of the toilet. She actually couldn’t entirely fit on the seat, and had to lean forward, bracing herself on the wall as best she could, before relaxing her anal muscles.
A thick, clumpy pile of horseapples spilled out from between her thick cheeks, staining them brownish-green as what was left of her meal poured out and into the bowl with a loud series of splashes. Tight wads of heavily-compacted shit were squeezed out in a single continuous stream, like a string of anal beads, each one stretching her ponut to the limit before slopping out with a splash of liquid shit following it. She quickly began filling the toilet bowl with lumps of what used to be pounds upon pounds of food and pony, all indistinguishable from each other and uniform in it’s brownish-green colour.
After a moment, the several gallons of milk, juice, lemonade and whatever else her guest has been keeping in his fridge made themselves present, and she released her bladder, a thick, murky stream of dark piss spraying out from her puffy, fattened cunt onto the pile and raising the water level around the clumps of shit, which were already displacing the water. They seeped into each other, turning the entire inside of the bowl a dark, murky brown, and seriously threatening to flood the bathroom.
In a panic, Sundial slapped the lever, and the toilet made a horrendous sucking noise as everything Creased Shirt ever was and would ever be was sucked into the drains, to be mixed together with a hundred other pony’s shit, in the sewers of Ponyville. It fought all the way down, the liquid draining from around the solid clumps first, but the briefly-fresh water from the tank above began to break down the clumps, revealing scraps of fur and broken fragments of bone moments before they were sucked away.
The greasy, squelching deluge of brownish-green lumps only stopped when Sundial felt a cramp blocking her crap, and she groaned, flexing her muscles again to try and force whatever solid mass had jammed her guts out of them. With a keening, wailing groan, her anus made a slurping noise, and the rounded skull of a stallion plopped out, landing with both a clink and a splat as it hit the bowlful of horseapples. It had been bleached by the acids, sharp edges ground flat by the constant rubbing of her belly and intestines, and re-stained brown by the muck and stench of Sundial’s guts, but it was unmistakably a pony’s skull.
Then it was instantly buried once more by the stream of shit, filling the bowl to capacity from the released blockage in Sundial’s guts. It took about ten more minutes after that for Sundial to relax, the last few wets being all that remained inside her and the last splatters of her gigantic meal being swirled into the drain. Her belly had actually flattened just slightly now that she was freshly emptied of all of that waste, and she sighed, pulling the lever one last time to suck in all of the used toilet paper she’d needed to clean her new cheeks of the muck.
Turning, she checked the bowl again, and sighed—her neighbour’s skull was still sitting at the bottom, intact and in one piece. The jaw was missing, but the upper half seemed to have stubbornly survived her digestive process. She was about to smash it inside the porcelain bowl, and flush the shards too, to get rid of the evidence, but she suddenly had an idea. An awful, terrible, hilariously justified idea.
Plucking the skull out of the water-filled bowl, she started washing it in the sink, unstaining the bone as best she could, and looking inside through the back to the empty cranial cavity, his brain having long ago been dissolved and added to her hips. “Looks like enough room,” she murmured, before shutting off the sink and trotting back into her workshop. She was careful not to cut off much more than she needed to, preserving as much as she could, since she only had the one shot, then started brushing all of the glass out of the gears of her automaton and slotting in new ones to replace what had broken.
The only thing she didn’t replace was a single gear, which she determined, after rechecking her notes, checked to see if a food item was a pony. She had no doubts that almost all of her bulk was from the pony she’d turned to mush and bones inside her gut, and as such, she pulled out that gear, repairing the automaton in perfect working order… aside from that single function.
Then she turned back to the skull on her workbench, new cuts made, and her magical aura picked it off the bench, slotting it into the space that had been occupied by the glass dome before. Her automaton had a new skull protecting its clockwork brain, and once she determined she’d made it a perfect fit, enchanted the bone to be nigh-unbreakable. Stepping back, she took in the appearance of her new cosmetic addition.
The skull fit it perfectly, not only in shape and size, but matching the wooden grin with it’s new face. The ocular crystal had been moved to it’s right eye socket, and actually fit better than it had before. Satisfied, she pulled out the brass key, and wound it up again to find her another fattening meal. She wasn’t quite heavy enough, not just yet. But that would soon change.
Author's Note
Chapter title is a reference to Dr. Steel's song, "Build the Robots". I can't link to it directly because site rules, but nothing saying I can't recommend a good song.
This was a fun one! Commissioner mentioned he was inspired by Dishonored 2's clockwork soldiers when thinking of the Automaton, and I had a ball with that idea, heh. In that same vain, Sundial has more than a little of the first game's Piero Joplin in her, and I tried to make sure the whole world had just a little hint of that Victorian style to it, even in the background. I mean, when was the last time you saw a fire poker?
This is the first of a small batch of commissions I finally found the time to upload! The second one was thoroughly non-pony, so it will only be found on Eka's Portal in the next couple days, but I do have a special Christmas story coming up soon too, which will be published here!