Chapters Chapter One - Babmare Begins
It was just another day for the Power Ponies, fighting the good fight in the service of Maretropolis against the evil Pharaoh Phetlock.
“Take that!” Zapp announced, firing a bolt of lightning at a bandage-enshrouded minion. “I sphinx you're not getting away today!”
The other Power Ponies stared at her. So did most of the mummies.
“Seriously?” Mare-velous asked. “You're goin' with that?”
“What?” Zapp replied defensively, shrugging her shoulders. “It's good banter!”
“You could at least say something more sophisticated,” the Masked Matter-Horn lectured, firing a beam of custard at another mummy as they realized they should be fighting. “Like… your master won't pharaoh very well?”
“I think that's worse,” Radiance judged.
Saddle Rager made her opinion on the matter very clear by bucking a mummy minion hard enough to knock it into the wall.
“Fili Second!” Matter-Horn called. “How many are there left?”
“Twelve!” Fili replied, appearing next to her teammate. “No, wait, ten… eight… I should really stop beating them up while I'm counting, it's making it hard to keep track!”
“Where's the giant diamond Pharaoh Phetlock was trying to steal?” Matter-Horn added. “It should be around here somewhere… though I'm not sure why he wants it.”
"Why wouldn't you want a giant diamond?" Radiance raised an eyebrow, then blushed and turned her attention back to the mummy she was tying up in her magic. "I mean, not that I'd try to steal it of course. But if I were a villain, what reason would I have not to steal something like that?"
"I, uhm... I think he said something about it amplifying his powers so he could control minions all over the country..." Saddle Rager mumbled, ducking a swing from another mummy and tripping it up.
"You're asking what I want this diamond for?" Phetlock's booming laughter sounded from the roof of the museum, where he was holding up the gem in question. "You're too late, Power Ponies! With the mystical energies inside this diamond amplifying my own powers, I will be able to control mummies all over the country!"
"That's what I...” Saddle Rager sighed. “Nevermind."
"That's cool and all, but I gotta ask… How many mummies do you expect to find? I mean, seriously, what's up with that?" Zapp raised an eyebrow, holding up the diamond to look through it.
"That's of no concern to... what the-?” Phetlock sputtered to a halt, looking around, and spotted Zapp. “Give that back, you flying menace!"
“Zapp, keep it away from him!” Matter-Horn called. “We can't let him do whatever it is he wants to do with it… with it!”
“Wasn't it something about everyone getting a mummy?” Fili asked. “That's what you said, right?”
“Not really,” Saddle Rager protested. “It was more-”
Phetlock lunged for the diamond, but Zapp dodged out of the way. She hadn't properly accounted for the weight of the diamond, however, and it slipped out of her grasp.
“Aha!” Phetlock laughed, before realizing the diamond was headed for the museum floor instead of going back to him. “No, wait!”
“I've got it!” Radiance called, summoning her hard-light constructs to slow the fall of the diamond.
Which began to glow.
“How come it's glowin'?” Mare-velous asked, lassoing a mummy and pulling it down some stairs.
“It looks like it's activating,” Matter-Horn judged, and tried firing an antimagic beam to suppress the magic of the gem. All that did, however, was to dispel Radiance's hard-light constructs, and the gem fell the rest of the way to the floor to hit with a loud crunch .
A crack spread up through the gem, and Phetlock (and Radiance) groaned.
“You win this time, Power Ponies!” the Equyptian-themed villain announced, and made a run for it.
“I don't call that a win,” Radiance volunteered, looking at the splintered gemstone.
“Hey, does this mean it won't summon a mummy?” Fili asked. “Or was the magic inside it and now it's out?”
Almost as if in response to her words, a strange smoke began to seep out of the crack in the gem.
"Did I hear a little filly call for her mommy?"
A chuckle came from the smoke as it spread, whirling around the Power Ponies and circling them in.
"Actually, I said mummy , Miss dark and foreboding smoke monster." Fillisecond prattled on, spinning in a circle to keep track of the smoke. "You know, wrapped up in lots of bandages, walking kinda slow and awkward, don't really talk much... trust me, I tried to have a conversation with them but it's EEEP !"
Her rant was cut short as the smoke grabbed her tail, lifting her up into the air and wrapping tighter around her body until only her head was free. The other five ponies and one dragon didn't fare much better, already rising a foot into the air.
"Nnngh... Let us... go!" Zapp struggled and squirmed, trying to find her pendant in the smoke.
Masked Matterhorn shot an ice beam at their captor, but had to watch helplessly as the smoke simply moved out of the way before reforming. Marevelous and Radiance didn't even get that much of a reaction, their attacks simply passing right through.
"Uhm... Show yourself, villain! I mean, if that's okay with you..." Saddle Rager trailed off, looking around nervously.
The smoke coalesced into the head of a large, dark gray serpent with small purple dots, the parts holding them up turning into half-formed coils of its body. It took them a moment to realize, but instead of scales the beast had a shiny, slightly rubbery skin that crinkled at the slightest movement, held together along the whole length with what looked like light purple tapes. "Look at that, it seems I caught me some little foals playing dress-up~"
"Who are you!?" Masked Matterhorn demanded, looking the apparently female serpent over and memorizing any detail she could, looking for any weakness.
"Oh, where are my manners. I am Occamommy , but you may simply call me 'Mommy'." She chuckled and leaned a bit closer, body swaying left and right in front of them as she hummed softly.
"Why are you here?! What's yer plan for us?!" Mistress Marevelous demanded.
"Why, I only came here at your request. You did want a mommy, didn't your friend say so?"
"T-that's not what she meant!" Zapp shouted, shaking her head to try and clear it, but immediately falling back into the motion of swaying her head along with the serpent. "Spike, what kind of weird story is this?"
Humdrum blinked a few times, humming along before his addled mind registered the question. "I-I don't know. It was supposed to be about Phetlock, but I think we changed something and... I mean, I can't exactly read ahead in an enchanted comic..."
"What silly little foals you are." Occa chuckled, then abruptly stopped her swaying, causing seven pairs of eyes to snap wide open as they focused on her.
Matterhorn tried to move, or even blink, but it was so hard to think of how to do that or a reason to do that. Just staying here seemed so much nicer and more comfortable. She vaguely noticed the serpent's mouth opening wide as it came closer and then a lot of crinkling and darkness all around her and…
Twilight woke up with a start, looking around the unfamiliar bedroom. It took her a moment to recognize it as the room of the Masked Matterhorn at the Power Ponies HQ, and another few seconds to notice that she was still wearing the hero's costume. She shook her head, trying to remember what had happened last... Until a vaguely familiar crinkling sound from under the covers made her freeze.
Throwing back the covers, Twilight stared at exactly what she'd been afraid there would be – a thick, crinkly diaper, with a slightly purple tint to the material.
Horn lighting up, Twilight tried to remove the padded undergarment. It crinkled loudly as she did, but her magic seemed to slip off the diaper and not actually affect it in the normal way. No matter how hard she tried, the tapes – adorned with little squiggle symbols that looked vaguely like winged serpents – didn't give so much as a tenth of an inch.
Giving it up as a bad idea, Twilight groaned loudly – then got up, wincing at the sound from the material as it crinkled with every motion.
“What the hay!?” Dash shouted, somewhere else in the HQ, and Twilight felt like facehoofing. Of course she wouldn't be the only one affected by… whatever this was.
Something about a serpent, interrupting the middle of a fight with the Pharaoh… Phailure?… and then swaying back and forth…
Twilight blinked, realizing she'd zoned out for a moment, and heard a muted conversation outside in the main area of the HQ.
Deciding there was no point trying to hide the diaper, if everyone else had one, she opened the door and stepped out.
The common room of the first floor was already full of ponies and one dragon, all of them wearing their masks but not the rest of their costumes… and each of them wearing a unique diaper.
Rainbow Dash was flapping in the air, doing some rather impressive acrobatics as she tried to push the diaper off, pushing, pulling and occasionally biting at the tapes of a white diaper with smaller white frills all over.
Fluttershy was whimpering a bit, trying not to look at the more and more excessive assortment of glowing purple tools that were trying and failing to cut the big plaid diaper off her rump.
The tools were naturally controlled by Rarity, the unicorn's tongue sticking out in concentration whenever she wasn't loudly complaining about "the horror" and how tacky these diapers and Fluttershy's in particular were looking. She didn't seem to notice that the tapes of her own white diaper were glowing faintly, nor the soft black and white fabric that was slowly pushing out from under the edges to cover two or three inches of her fur and tail in each direction.
Pinkie Pie was running around the room, only just flopping onto a couch as Twilight entered, the pink mare muttering something about running too fast and getting dizzy, unaware of the tapes on her diaper pulsing softly as the clean white padding grew and a bit of pink, thick fabric pushed out across her fur.
Applejack was cursing up a storm, in a similar position on the floor as Rainbow was in the air as she fought with the white diaper with black splotches.
Only Spike seemed to take it in stride, sitting on the main couch and watching cartoons, balancing a bowl of cereal on the white padding with black and white frills between his legs.
“Hey, Twi,” the dragon waved, making the rest of them stop what they were doing. Dash landed on the sofa with a crash and a crinkle, looking woozy for a moment before turning to look at Twilight.
“Spike, how come y'all are so dang calm about this?” Applejack demanded.
“Well… isn't it obvious?” Spike asked. “Twilight can just bring us out of the book.”
“Then what are we waitin' for?” Applejack asked, rolling onto her hooves and blushing as the splotched diaper crinkled loudly with her movement. “Get us outta this dang situation, Twilight!”
“I'll try,” Twilight agreed, lighting up her horn.
As she gathered her energy, however, the serpent-tapes on her diaper glowed faintly.
Twilight was just about to cast the spell when something flashed into her mind. A memory of a pair of eyes, and a soothing voice, and swaying-
-and the spell collapsed, uncast.
“What happened?” Rainbow demanded. “How come we're still here?”
She poked her frilly white diaper. “Still in these… things?”
“I don't know,” Twilight replied, twisting to inspect her own diaper. Was it her imagination, or was it a bit larger than it had been before? “The spell just failed, I don't know why.”
“Well… darn,” Applejack sighed.
“You mean we're stuck here?” Rarity asked, jaw slack. “Stuck in this terrible, bizarre world?”
“It's not the world that's the problem,” Fluttershy said softly. “It's these diapers...”
“Okay, don't panic,” Twilight reminded them, beginning to pace back and forth – producing the odd crinkly sound, which made her flush slightly. “We know you can also get out of these by finishing the storyline, so that's what we'll have to do.”
She grimaced. “Unfortunately.”
"Hey now, don't be all grumpy." Pinkie pulled Twilight into half a hug, bumping her rump against the alicorn's with a loud crinkle. "It might not be what we expected, but this is still an adventure. And these diapers are even softer and comfier than the ones you'd get back home."
She looked at the varying stares suddenly focused on her. "...what? You didn't think I'd put the twins into anything without first making sure that it meets the Pinkie Pie standard of quality, did you? I'll have you know that only the very best and- oooh, couch candy!" She zipped over to the couch, pulling a piece of hard candy from between the cushions and popping it into her mouth before anyone could react.
"Uhm... moving on from that... whatever it was." Rainbow shook her head, then lifted herself into the air again. "As much as I want to beat up that Occa-mumbo-jumbo, I'm not going out like this. Come on, Twi, you're like the smartest pony I know. You gotta have some sort of spell that can get rid of these, right? Go on, hit me with your best!" She turned in the air, pushing her padded rump out towards Twilight.
Twilight blinked slightly from the proximity of pegasus padding, then shook her head. “I've already tried on mine, Dash. No luck.”
“Come on, Twi, you can't have been inventive enough!” Dash invited. “At least give it a go!”
“Well, all right,” Twilight decided.
She thought through her collection of spells, discarding some of the useless ones (a moustache spell? Why had she learned that one again?) and considering others, before finally deciding on one to use. A matter disintegration spell, which she carefully tuned to not affect ponies before firing it off.
The beam of light hit the frilly diaper, and surrounded it in ghostly white energy… which then faded away, having had almost no effect at all.
“Oh, come on!” Rainbow groaned. “Did nothing happen?”
“Um… I think it's a bit thicker,” Fluttershy volunteered.
“Great,” Rainbow sighed. “Was that really your best shot, Twilight?”
In reply, Twilight fired the same spell at the bin – which vanished in a puff of smoke.
“That's what should have happened,” she explained. “These things are really hard to deal with...”
The leader of the Power Ponies shook her head. “All right, we need a plan. Spike, you're the comic book expert – what usually happens now?”
“Well, usually, the villain gloats,” Spike supplied. “And then if we need to find out what to do, there's the occasional kind of obvious clue.”
"Come on out, Power Ponies! The Enchantress knows you're there!"
"Aaaand right on cue." Spike stood up, putting his empty bowl aside and waddling over to the door. "Come on, let's see who it is."
"Go out like this?! " Rarity and Rainbow cried in unison. They glanced at each other, then quickly looked away and at Spike again.
Spike looked back at them. "Well, yeah... I mean, unless you've got a better idea."
Trixie tapped her hoof impatiently, sitting on the ground in front of the tower that made up the not-so-secret headquarters of the Power Ponies. She'd been listening to muffled grunting and cursing for several minutes now, waiting for them to come out.
Finally the door opened, and seven figures tried to make a dynamic entrance with various degrees of enthusiasm. Everyone save for Humdrum had squeezed themselves into their costume again in a misguided attempt to hide their predicament. Instead, six diapers were hugged by very formtight spandex, crinkling even when their wearer didn't seem to move and making them waddle even more than before.
"Alright, the Power Ponies are- Trixie?! What the hay are you wearing?!" Zapp stared at the mare in shock, trying to take in her outfit without actually seeing it. The mare was completely covered by a thick, crinkly likeness of the greatest unicorn to ever live (herself), with the letters "WIZZARD" across her large pointed hat in awkward, foalish writing. Her cape seemed to be a foal's blanket, a patchwork of colorful squares showing cars, cartoonish animals, hearts and big single letters. She was brandishing ~~her magic wand of phenomenal power~~ a big rattle with a pink heart on it that was covered in drool and bite marks from whenever she was bored or distracted enough to start sucking and chewing on it. And of course she too was wearing a diaper over her crinkly suit, one with lots of stars, moons and sparkles all over it.
“What?” Trixie asked, tilting her head. “What's so odd about it?”
“You… but… diaper… thing?” Zapp said, waving her hoof. “Why?”
“The Enchantress would not expect her foes to understand,” Trixie replied loftily, crinkling a little in place. “She is only a messenger, anyway, sent to tell the Power Ponies an important message.”
“Zapp has a point,” Matter-Horn said awkwardly. “That's really not the sort of thing I'd have expected you to be wearing. It looks too… foalish seems an inadequate word.”
Trixie shrugged, producing more crinkles. “Mommy says it looks good on me. Er, her.”
While the Power Ponies were absorbing that, The Enchantress pointed her rattle. “The Enchantress will deliver her message to the Power Foals! Your Mommy tells you that she is waiting for you to come and challenge her!”
“Power foals?” Radiance demanded.
“Would you prefer Power Poofbutts ?”
“All right, that's it!” Zapp announced, lunging forwards with her amulet crackling.
Trixie flipped her rattle around, flicking it at Zapp, and producing a puff of pink-tinted white smoke. A flicker of energy shot forwards and hit Zapp, encasing her hooves in thick white mittens, and her amulet suddenly shut down as Zapp was no longer able to control it.
Stepping to one side as Zapp crashed in a cloud of sweet-smelling powder and curses, The Enchantress finished up by clonking the pegasus hero on the head with the ball of the rattle.
“Why aren't the rest of you throwing tantrums as well?” she asked the Power Ponies.
“...honestly, she did kind of ask for that,” Matter-Horn mumbled. “Anyway, uh… you mean that serpent creature, right?”
Trixie nodded, and Matter-Horn went on. “So... where is her lair, then?”
“The corner of seventeenth and Eponymous,” the crinkle-suited unicorn answered promptly.
Fili Second gasped. “Not the Happy Foals Amusement Park! Who would ever have expected a villain to set up there?”
“Honestly, ah'm surprised we didn't already work that out,” Mare-velous said under her breath.
"And with that the message has been delivered! Let it be known that The Enchantress has been a good foal and there is no reason to put her in the time-out corner again!" Trixie posed dramatically, then brought down her rattle to disappear in another burst of pinkish-white foal powder.
"So... that happened." Mistress Marevelous scratched her head, then shrugged and started to waddle ahead. "Well, ya heard Trixie. No sense in just standing around."
Matterhorn shook her head and began waddling as well, soon followed by the rest of their team. "Do you think Trixie actually got sucked into this, or was that just a character made to look like someone we know?"
"Don't know, don't care," Rainbow grumbled, trying to pull off the mittens. "Now can one of you help me get these things off?"
"Aww, but they just look so adorable on you. You have got to be the cutest little-" Pinkie squeaked and shrunk back from Rainbow's glare, blushing lightly. "Heheh, sorry, that must be the foalsitter instincts coming through…"
Her hooves turned into a blur, pulling the mittens off in a split second. "There we go, no need to be a fussy foal." She giggled and sat back, not noticing that her own rump had grown another inch under the spandex.
“Are we sure this is safe?” Saddle Rager asked. “I – I mean, sure, we've not been hurt so far, but… we're going right to where the monster has as her base...”
Humdrum shrugged, stumbling a little from the thick bulk of his diapers, but regaining his balance. “Yeah, but in the comics, when the heroes go into the villain's base they win. It's how it works.”
Saddle Rager nodded, apparently mollified, but the dragon kept talking. “Of course, going into their lair could also mean that they can spring traps on all of us, and now I think about it sometimes the heroes do lose… especially if the fighting happens in either the heroes' HQ or the villains' base...”
“Ah think you should stop talkin' now,” Mare-velous recommended, glancing over at Saddle Rager who now looked as worried as she had when they started the conversation. “It ain't helpin'.”
“Girls, we need a battle plan,” Matter-Horn suggested. “And, you know, to not be wearing these things… but we need a battle plan. What normally causes heroes trouble in a villain's lair?”
“Being split up,” Humdrum replied promptly. “Unexpected traps. Minor villains who get a lot of page time because they're going to have their own spinoff soon.”
“That doesn't sound especially helpful,” Radiance critiqued. “But needs must…”
“Okay, so we want to go in there, find that monster, and give it a proper Power Ponies sendoff,” Zapp summarized. “And then we can get out of these things?”
“Or we can get out of the book, at least,” Matter-Horn hedged. “And then we should be able to get these off, yes.”
"Very well. Then all we need now is to get to that park and..." Radiance paused, looking up at the entrance to the amusement park. "Huh... That's convenient."
There was a loud gasp and everyone turned to look at Fillisecond, who was holding up a poster she'd ripped from a nearby wall. "Girls, look! Today's free rides and snacks in the whole park for heroes and padded foals!"
Matterhorn stared at her, then groaned and facehoofed. "Pinkie! We're here to defeat a villain, not to try out the rides. Most of them are probably trapped!"
"But... What if they're not?" Pinkie looked up at her with huge teary puppy dog eyes. "It's free rides, Twilight. And free snacks. And free rides!"
Twilight flinched back, then sighed. "I can't believe this... Okay, Pinkie. You can try out one of the rides, one where we can keep an eye on you, and..." Her stomach growled and she blushed. "Well, I suppose it can't hurt to try some of the snacks before we face that serpent."
The park was, at first glance, surprisingly normal. In a way it made sense that the lair of a villain wouldn't be immediately obvious, but then again the friends had certainly run into plenty of villain lairs in the past that had been too obvious for words.
Instead, this one just looked like… a theme park. Admittedly, there weren't many ponies actually attending, but it was perfectly normal to have costumed mascots running the stands.
Twilight tried to ignore that the costumes were suspiciously crinkly.
“Okay, what does everyone want?” she asked. “I think we can get a drink each and a main meal, and anything else if you really want it.”
As she looked around, though, she saw that Filli Second was already missing.
“I can't decide!” came her voice from some way off, as a blur of speed looked over a roller-coaster and then a drop tower before turning to examine some bumper carts.
Twilight groaned. "Rainbow, go make sure that she doesn't run off to who-knows-where." She waited for the pegasus to salute and fly off, then turned to the rest of the group. "Alright, where should we..."
The others waited to her to continue, sharing worried looks as she didn't. Applejack moved forward, carefully poking her shoulder. "Twi, what's wrong?"
"Huh?" Twilight jerked, then shook her head. "I'm sorry, I think I got distracted for a moment. Anyway, where do you want to eat? That place over there looks kinda nice."
The group turned to look where she was pointing, looking at the front of a shop. The sign over the door labeled it as "The Milk Bar", with a bottle of milk slowly spinning in front of a black and white spiral.
"Twilight, you can't be..." Radiance blinked, eyes stuck on the slowly turning bottle. "W-well, it does have a rustic charm to it..."
"Some milk sounds nice..." Fluttershy nodded slowly, eyes fixed on the sign.
"You think they have something with crushed sapphires?" Spike wondered absentmindedly.
"Mooooo..." Applejack agreed, shifting a bit and making the diaper crinkle under her suit.
None of the padded Power Ponies had any good reason not to go to the Milk Bar, and waddled over in a group to enter the shop.
Inside, they found a room arranged much like a typical bar, with a counter and several tables – except that, in place of high stools, there were high chairs. The bottles of drinks behind the counter were milk bottles, and the few drinks not in bottles were in sippy cups.
Behind the counter was a pleasant-looking cow, her body as soft and shiny-crinkly looking as the rest of the workers at the theme park, and she looked up upon hearing them come in.
“Well, hello to you all,” she said, smiling disarmingly. “You're all new faces! I'm guessing you're thirsty?”
“Well… yes,” Twilight agreed, swallowing – her throat feeling a little dry. “Is… is there a menu?”
“Don't see much need for one,” the cow replied. “You can all call me Moo, everybody does. Now, we've got the basic milk bottles, or there's a few flavours you can have – chocolate, banana, cinnamon… just ask, and I'll see if we got it.”
“Wait, hold on,” Applejack said, shaking her head a little. “Your name is Moo? ”
“Yep,” Moo agreed. “Sounds nice to say, don't it? Can you say it again for me?”
“Moo,” Applejack repeated.
“That's right. Now, take a seat, and I'll take your orders,” Moo instructed. “Up you get, now!”
Twilight and friends nodded, moving to file into the benches at a corner table and blushing a bit as even the fabric of the bench crinkled loudly. Spike pulled himself one of the high chairs over to be on the same height as them, climbing up and strapping himself in without a second thought.
The ponies and dragon waited, looking around absentmindedly as they squirmed a bit to the music. A calm, upbeat tune was playing over the speakers, underscored by cowbell sounds and the occasional mooing that lulled them into a comfortable daze.
"Did you decide on your orders, dearies?"
Twilight squeaked and jumped a little, only now noticing Moo standing right next to her holding a rack of milk bottles. "Ah! Oh, uhm... I think so?" She looked around the table. For a moment she wondered what she was supposed to order before the answer seemed to slip smoothly into her mind. "Uhm... I'll just have some milk with honey, please."
Moo smiled and pulled out a warm bottle, testing the milk on her hand before handing it to the unicorn. "There you go~"
Twilight took the bottle, looking at it with a blush. She tried to think about how she could drink it without looking foalish, but the dry feeling in her throat quickly got the better of her and she started to suckle on the nub awkwardly.
Her eyes widened a bit as sweet, creamy milk flowed into her mouth, heated up just right. She smiled and leaned back, listening to the music and looking around as she suckled.
Rarity was nursing a strawberry flavored bottle and Fluttershy had gotten another normal milk with honey. Spike had actually gotten a bottle of milk with sapphire dust, the bottle sparkling and swirling as he drank from it, and Twilight found herself drawn in by the shiny sparkles, staring at them as she suckled slowly.
Meanwhile, it was Applejack's turn to order. She shook her head, trying to focus around the catchy music. "Uhh... Moo you have some cider?"
Moo smiled softly. "I'm sorry, but that would be a bit upsetting for the little foals' stomachs, don't you think?"
Applejack frowned, but couldn't really argue with that logic. "Uhm... You got something else with apples, then?"
"We have apple-cinnamon milk." Moo gave a thoughtful moo, smiling at Applejack. "I don't think we have any of it bottled right now, though, so you would have to drink it from the source. You don't mind, moo you?"
"Moo?" Applejack blinked in confusion, then yelped as the cow picked her up with surprising strength. Before she knew it she was lying across the bench, her head in Moo's lap and one of the four nipples of the cow's udder pushed into her mouth.
"Mmmh!? Mmmh..." She froze as a creamy, fruity taste filled her mouth, her eyelids drooping as she began to instinctively suckle.
None of the heroes had any complaints at all about their drinks.
Every last gulp tasted wonderful, soothing and warm, and their concerns seemed to melt away as they drank the thick, creamy milk.
Time slipped past, as the music and the rhythm of suckling lulled them into a dreamy trance…
“Pink – I mean, Fili!” Zapp called, remembering they were in public, then shook her head as she realized Twilight had used her name in public already. “Slow down!”
“But why would I do that?” Pinkie asked. “I'm the fastest pony there is! Whee! Oh, I still can't decide what ride to go on – do you have any ideas?”
Dash looked around, trying to spot something that would actually be exciting – and smarting a little over the 'fastest pony' remark. “Let's make sure it's something cool, at least...”
“Like the chilly filly ice-coaster?” Pinkie suggested, pointing it out.
“...no, not that kind of cool,” Zapp groaned, then spotted something. “Spoopy haunted house?”
After a sigh over the name, Rainbow did consider it. It looked like it was a roller-coaster, and surely something meant to be scary couldn't be too cutesy.
Right?
"Ooooh, what'd you find there, Dashie?" Pinkie was beside her in a rush of air, looking over the attraction. "A haunted ride? Oh Dashie Dashie Dashie... is this about your complex with trying to prove how tough you are again?"
"I... what?" Rainbow stared at her, then shook her head and stepped back. "I'm not trying to prove anything! I am tough!"
"Oh reeeeaaaally?" Pinkie grinned, leaning in. "Then I'm sure you have no problem going on the ride with me. Or are you... chicken?"
Rainbow bristled, fluffing her wings in indignation and shaking her padded rump. "What?! I'm not chicken, you are!" She sped over to the entrance of the ride, Pinkie right behind her.
A mare in a thick, crinkly skeleton suit walked up to them. "Two for the ride?"
Rainbow nodded, pushing her chest out a bit... then frowned in confusion as the mare slipped something over her head, looking down at the pacifier now dangling from her neck. "What the...?"
"Oh, that's just to help calm you down if you get too scared. You don't have to use it if you don't want to." The mare gave them a disarming smile and Rainbow shrugged off her first instinct to take the pacifier off again. She could still give it back or toss it away after the ride.
The mare led them into the first room of the ride, stopping them in front of another doorway. "Now, the carts will be there in a minute. Please wait here for a moment until they've come to a full stop and everypony from the last ride has filed out."
Rainbow and Pinkie looked after her as she went into a side room, then jumped slightly at a peal of deep laughter coming from above. Looking up they spotted a cheap animatronic plastic skull over the doorway, giving off canned evil laughter as it looked down at them with red glowing, flickering lights from its eye sockets. They lights seemed to stare right at them, the shadows around them getting deeper as Rainbow and Pinkie found themselves staring up at them, the flickering drawing them deeper...
"And there's the carts. You can go in, now." Rainbow and Pinkie both jumped at the sudden appearance of the mare. Rainbow whipped around to complain about sneaking up at them, but found herself shrinking back at the sight of a skeleton costume that suddenly seemed a great deal more intimidating, as well as towering notably taller than before. She gulped and looked around, wings twitching as she took stock of her surroundings. The shadows seemed a lot deeper and darker suddenly, and had the room always been so big? She scooted closer to Pinkie trying to stand tall and find some of her bravado as the two ~~mares~~ foals shuffled into the next room, towards the carts.
Blinking rapidly, trying to shake herself out of her fuzzy feelings, Dash took her seat in the first cart.
The seats made her diaper spread out and crinkle, evoking a blush, but that blush only lasted a moment before fading.
Why was she feeling all scaredy? She was Rainbow 'Danger' Dash! She could handle some silly haunted ride!
Pinkie slipped into the seat next to her, her own diaper crinkling noticeably as well, and she shut the door.
A moment later, the carts started moving.
“Hey!” Dash called, looking around. “Isn't anyone else going to get in? Anyone?”
She tried to see if there was an attendant, seeing nopony present. “Anyone? Uh… who started this?”
“Maybe it started itself?” Pinkie suggested.
“Thanks for that idea...” Dash groaned.
The track turned a corner, going through a curtain, and they discovered it was a curtain made of silky web-like material too late to put their hooves up.
“Gah!” Dash yelped. “Okay, that was not cool…”
Pinkie waved her hooves through the material, getting some of it wrapped around them, then shook it off again. “It's just cotton, silly!”
Then there was a musical sting, a flash of light, and a brightly-glowing sheet-draped ghost was in front of them.
Both ponies yelped in surprise, hugging one another in fright as the ghost leered at them – then vanished in another flash.
Dash blushed and pulled away from Pinkie, chuckling nervously. "T-that wasn't so bad... Just some cheap effects, see? Nothing to be scared about, I was j-just surprised." She looked around into the darkness.
"Are you sure? Because it sure sounded like you were scared." Pinkie tilted her head, her bouncy nature helping her past the shock more easily... though she still couldn't shake the shiver running down her spine.
"Y-yeah! I'm Rainbow 'Danger' Dash, I don't get scared." Rainbow nodded, straightening up a bit.
Pinkie straightened as well, not about to be outdone. "W-well, I'm not scared either. I know exactly how to deal with creepies like these." She smiled, humming to a chipper tune. "Juuuuust~ giggle at the EEEEEP !"
"AHHHHH!"
Both mares screamed and hugged each other tight, closing their eyes and trying to hide from the cheap plastic skeleton on ropes that had dropped from the ceiling, accompanied by canned evil laughter and some strobe lights flashing through the bones from somewhere behind it. It hung there for a moment before disappearing in another flash of light.
"I-is it gone?" Pinkie whimpered, still hugging her friend.
"I'm not scared, I'm not scared, I'm not scared..." Dash shivered, burying her face in Pinkie's chest.
The cart kept moving along afterwards, leaving a long gap where nothing happened, and Dash slowly untensed – letting go of Pinkie, and exhaling to try and relax.
“It's okay...” she said, mostly to herself, and fluffed her wings a little to calm down.
“Y-yeah,” Pinkie agreed. “It's just a ride… rides are meant to be fun...”
The earth pony glanced into the shaded interior of the ride. “Right?”
The cart creaked as it turned a corner, then stopped suddenly – it hadn't been moving fast, but the halt still jolted them both a little.
“Do rides normally do that?” Rainbow asked Pinkie, looking across at her. “You're the expert.”
“I… don't think they do,” Pinkie replied, frowning, and tapped the floor of the cart experimentally. It failed to resume moving, and she shrugged. “Well, I'm out of ideas!”
“Pinkie, this is serious!” Rainbow complained. “We could be stuck here for… for however long it takes them to fix this!”
Pinkie shook her head. “Silly, we don't have to think of it as stuck! It's just a break! A rest! A-”
A howl sounded in the distance, seeming to come from far away, and Pinkie stopped mid-sentence.
“...wolf?” she continued, sounding much less enthusiastic.
There was a thump-thump-THUMP of something heavy moving around them, almost invisible in the dim light, along with a faint creaking sound that was oddly familiar.
“Dashie?” Pinkie said, quietly. “I'm… scared...”
“Don't worry!” Dash replied, more loudly. “I'll protect-”
A snout sniffed at the back of her neck, and she nearly jumped out of the cart.
“Aaaah!” the pegasus yelped, hiding below the sides of the cart and huddling against Pinkie – making their diapers crinkle loudly as they were both compressed, though neither mare cared by this point.
The howl came again, much closer this time and echoing through the darkness around them. Whenever they dared to look up, a flash of glowing golden eyes in the darkness would send them back down again, hiding against each other. Finally the sounds disappeared again, letting the two foals slowly sit up again.
Pinkie gulped and looked around. "I-I think it's gone, whatever that was."
"Y-yeah. Yeah!" Rainbow grinned nervously, eyes flitting around to look for any sign of the monster. "It probably realized that it doesn't stand a chance against-"
She cut off, freezing at the same time as Pinkie, both of them staring into the eyes of a ~~griffon in a thick wolf crinklesuit~~ big ferocious wolf right in front of their faces. The wolf grinned at them, then slowly spoke. "Boo."
Their screams echoed through the whole ride, both of them clinging to each other in panic and not noticing as the cart began to move again, nor how their diapers were getting warm and soggy.
“Is it after us?” Dash asked, after more than a minute.
“I don't know!” Pinkie replied, in the same quiet but urgent voice. “My eyes are shut!”
“My eyes are shut!” Dash said back. “Why are your eyes shut too?”
“So I don't see the scary things, so they can't get me!” Pinkie told her.
“But it might be right here!” Dash said. “And… and we need to know...”
She winced, then slowly opened her eyes.
They were in a dimly lit room, but one which seemed to be without any wolves – and one through which the cart was slowly moving, bouncing slightly every so often.
The bounces drew her attention to her diaper, which squished slightly as she moved – making her blush, feeling embarrassed about how her frilly white diaper was wet.
Was it her imagination, or was it bigger than she remembered it last? Pinkie's one looked bigger, too, but it was harder to tell with her as it was the same colour as her coat.
“Is there a monster, Dashie?” Pinkie asked.
“I don't see one,” Dash told her, relaxing a little and shifting away from Pinkie – blushing again as she was reminded of the wet diaper. “But maybe there's one hiding?”
“But that would be scary!” Pinkie complained, opening her own eyes. “Why would a monster hide?”
“To scare us?” Dash suggested.
“But that's not fair!”
“This is supposed to scare us, I guess?”
“Not this scary!”
“Tasty ponies...”
“Maybe… wait,” Dash stopped. “Who said that?”
There was a deep chuckle, and a little flicker of orange light revealed where the cart was going. The track they were on led a little further along, then went down… down towards the huge, plush-looking yawning maw of an enormous dragon.
Pinkie and Dash screamed and hugged each other tightly again, staring down into the maw as the cart picked up speed, rolling down into the maw and the plushy darkness of the dragon.
Twilight and the rest of her friends waddled out of the milk bar, still slightly dizzy from all the warm milk in their bellies and each clutching a bottle to go. Applejack's suit had expanded a fair bit, covering her barrel and rump with a pink bump over her tummy.
Twilight shook her head and let out a small burp, then looked around. "Alright, back to work everypony. Can any of you see Pinkie and Rainbow... I mean Filli-Second and Zapp?"
"Can't say Ah moooo..." Applejack shook her head, swishing her tail lazily.
Spike and Fluttershy shook their heads as well. "Knowing them they probably went on one of the rides. I guess we'll have to wait for them to come out again."
"Well, while we wait for them we could find out where this, mmmh..." Rarity raised her head, sniffing the air before turning in one direction. "...this wonderful aroma is coming from. I believe it's one of the stalls over there…"
“Rarity, don't get sidetracked!” Twilight called. “When we're here we can see most of the ride exits, this is the most efficient...”
She trailed off.
“Rarity stopped listening pretty much as soon as she left, didn't she?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” Spike agreed.
Not really paying enough attention to hear the calls of her friends, Rarity sniffed again – following her nose, making sure she was headed for the right stall.
It had a riot of different smells to it, some of them warm and tasty and others fragrant and flowery, and she closed her eyes to focus better.
It was almost a surprise when she bumped into the stall itself.
“Oh!” said a voice, making her look up – eyes open again, of course.
There was what appeared to be a large, soft-plush-looking bloodhound smiling at her.
“Excuse me, but… what...” Rarity began, then recognized what that meant. “Are you a Diamond Dog, my good sir?”
The puffy pooch didn't really answer the question. “Welcome to my stall, The Nose Knows! It's a trivia test, where you get to keep the right answers. Care to play?”
"Oh, uhm... I suppose I could try a round?" Rarity looked at the hound for a moment longer before inspecting the stall. Dark boxes were set up all around the circumference, with holes at the top that didn't seem to let in any light. "So... How exactly does this work?"
"It's quite simple." The pooch grinned at her. "There's a different scent in each of the boxes. If you can guess correctly what a scent is, you get it as a prize. Your first try is free."
"Very well... I think I'd like to try it, yes." Rarity headed over to the box with the number one on it, smiling. Of course she was still a little dubious on the park as a whole, but so far she hadn't noticed anything odd or dangerous, and she just couldn't see a way a game like this could be a trap. Besides, she had a bit of pride in her fine nose for perfumes.
Pushing her nose into the hole of the first box she took a deep breath... then coughed and stumbled back a bit, the sweet aroma clogging her head for a moment and making her dizzy. "W-whoa... That's..."
The hound chuckled. "Yes, the smells can be quite strong, so that everyone has a chance. Do you have a guess what it is yet?"
"I think, uhm... think... One moment." Rarity pushed her nose into the box again and sniffed deeply, moaning softly at the strong smell. "I think it's... some kind of flower? A rose, or tulip maybe..." She blinked, smiling and swaying in place again.
"Flower is exactly right." The hound grinned and pulled out a light blue flower from his stall, leaning over to tuck it behind Rarity's ear, the flower's scent immediately starting to waft around her muzzle.
"You seem to have a talent for this game. Would you like to continue?"
Rarity nodded, blinking a little as the strong scent of the flower made her mind wander, then focused.
This game was very interesting! She leaned down to the next one, pushing her muzzle into the box, and sniffed.
It smelled strongly of warmth and baking, and a little less strongly of a fruit… no, more than one fruit?
There was a faint smell of apples, but a stronger smell of peaches…
Rarity realized her mouth was watering, and blushed slightly as she hoped it wasn't quite so obvious as all that. She sniffed again, to confirm her impression, then stepped back.
“Is it an apple and peach pastry?” she asked. “With… cinnamon?”
“Very well done!” the hound running the stall congratulated her, removing it from the box and revealing it was so fresh there were faint wisps of steam coming off it. “Would you care for a bite?”
Rarity cared for the whole pastry, and promptly ate it up, taking a few sips of milk to wet her throat as well. The combination tasted divine, and she sighed a little as she finished before moving on to the next box.
She didn't notice as her diaper got a little larger, a little thicker and plumper – and spread a little more, up her body and down her legs.
It was nearly to the point of encasing her tail…
"You seem to be a natural." The hound moved over to another box, a bit down the line. "Would you like to try a harder difficulty for a better prize?"
"It does seem like I am on a roll, doesn't it?" Rarity giggled and walked over, pushing her nose into the box and sniffing. The smell was dry, slightly sweet and familiar.
"I just can't put my hoof on... on... achu!" The unicorn gave a dainty sneeze, a cloud of white bursting out of the box and obscuring her face for a moment before settling down. When it left, Rarity was grinning with slightly unfocused eyes. "I knew it! It's foal powder!"
"And another win for the young lady!" The hound rang a little bell excitedly before pulling a large bottle of foal powder from the box, showing off the silk ribbon attached to it before looping that ribbon around Rarity's head, letting the bottle hang around the mare's neck like a pendant.
Rarity grinned at her prize, taking a few steps and giggling as each movement caused the bottle to puff another small cloud of powder into her face. She wiggled her rump a bit, her suit now completely covering her old tail in a large, stiff black and white plush skunk tail.
As Rarity moved onto the next part of her challenge, Twilight and the others looked around to see if there was any sign of their missing friends.
“I wonder what ride they might have gone on,” Spike pondered.
“I… um… well, I hope it's a safe ride,” Fluttershy said. “This is technically a lair, after all...”
“Well, it ain't no dangerous lair, moo sir-ee,” Applejack shrugged. She sat down on her crinkly rump, seeming prepared to stay there for a while, and took a quick sip from her bottle.
“I don't understand why you keep saying it like-” Twilight began, then interrupted herself. “Look! It's Trixie!”
Spike followed her gaze, and nodded. “It is!”
“All right, after her!” Twilight said. “Hey, Trixie!”
The padded-up unicorn glanced back over her crinkly shoulder, laughed, then waddled off. Twilight led the others in waddling after her, despite the complaints of Fluttershy and the reluctant moo from Applejack, and wasn't far behind when Trixie rounded a corner.
“Where are our friends!” Twilight called, turning the corner about ten seconds behind Trixie, and just in time to see her vanish into one of the rides.
“Hey, uh, Twi, can we slow down?” Spike asked. “Fluttershy's kind of going a bit slow… and so is AJ, actually...”
Twilight glanced back, and had to admit that she'd have to slow up a bit. She waited impatiently, crinkling coming from her diaper, then started going again as soon as the others were with her.
They climbed the steps into the ride, keeping a lookout for a blue unicorn, and were surprised when a pair of plushy orca-ponies came up to them.
Twilight blinked, refocusing, and realized they were actually ponies wearing some kind of orca-themed suit. Thick, plushy, shiny on the outside, and… diapered?
“Welcome to the mountain!” one of them said happily. “Are you here for a ride?”
“No, we're after Trixie!” Spike explained.
“Oh, she just went down,” the other orca said. “You'll have to chase her, hurry!”
Twilight was about to complain about how that didn't make much sense, but she couldn't really find how to put it.
The identification badges the orca-ponies were wearing were oddly shiny…
Twilight blinked, not sure what she'd been trying to remember, and a few seconds later they were all being seated into a four-passenger carriage.
“Why is this log shaped?” she asked.
“How else would you go down splash mountain?” the orca asked, and pulled the starting lever.
Twilight yelped when the log jerked forward just as she was trying to stand up again, making her drop back into her seat with a soft poomf . The safety bracket dropped down and locked with a click, pushing her into the seat and keeping her from getting up again.
She frowned lightly and crossed her arms over the thickly padded metal bar, trying to look out for Trixie instead as the log began to slowly move up a steep incline towards the top of the mountain. The air seemed to get thinner unnaturally quick, making her feel lightheaded and a little dizzy the more she tried to focus on her search. Signs with safety instructions set up evenly spaced along the side of the track also distracted her, though she couldn't remember what exactly they'd said. Not that she really needed them anyway, feeling perfectly safe in her thick soft padding .
Twilight shook her head, glancing back at where the others were sitting behind her. Spike was obviously and predictably excited for the ride, Fluttershy was hugging her suit and trying to sink deeper into her padding for safety and Applejack was only half paying attention, still sucking on her bottle and the most squeezed by the safety bar due to her small plush udder.
Twilight blinked, something about that seeming not quite right, but before she could think further on it a small but sudden lurch drew her attention forward again. The log had evened out, and looking over the front of it Twilight could see the tracks leading down into a long pool of water faintly shimmering as the waves reflected the sunlight.
“Uh...” Twilight began, worried about what was about to happen, then spotted a fshoom of water kicked up by the next log ahead.
Squinting, she noticed a smudge of blue in it – Trixie! The unicorn had taken the ride ahead of them after all, so now they just needed to get to the other end and make sure they got off quickly!
“Okay, everyone,” she said. “Let's make sure we-”
The log jolted forwards as it reached the slope, sliding down towards the shimmering pool. She lost track of what she'd been about to say, and Spike whooped behind her as they got faster and faster.
More signs whipped past, in a blur that Twilight couldn't really read, except for a warning about how they were about to wet.
That seemed to make sense, and Twilight ignored the missing word from the normal warning – then they hit the water with a mighty splash, sending water pluming up in the air to rain back down on them.
It took quite a long way for the ride to shed all the momentum it had picked up, water spraying up and raining down all the way, and Twilight felt her suit swell up as the water seeped into it from the air, the seats, the bar…
The whole situation made her giggle a bit, though the giggle turned to a gulp as she realized her diaper was a lot warmer and wetter than even the ride should have made it.
Blushing, and trying to ignore it, Twilight waited for them to come to a halt and then hurried after the blue shape of Trixie.
“Come on, everyone!” she called, looking back over her shoulder as the others disembarked. They seemed to be having a lot more trouble than before, with Applejack's plush udder bigger than it had been even at the start of the ride, and Fluttershy's plaid diaper covering her tail.
Spike's diaper just seemed to be thicker, and Twilight noticed her own one was expanding down her legs and up her barrel, but as she began to frown one of the attendants spoke up.
“We hope you come again soon!” she said, her Orca-suit tail waving and her badge flashing, and suddenly Twilight forgot about her suit problems.
“Um… thanks?” she tried, then turned to see where Trixie was going.
Author's Note
Well, this seems like quite a lot of poofy peril.
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Chapter Three - The League of Extraordinary Crinklefoals
The remaining five members of the Power Ponies (or, the remaining four members of the Power Ponies, plus Spike) continued on through the surreal ride, not really noticing their diminished numbers. The ride continued for another few turns through the farm section, then went through another plushy curtain and out into a quite different area.
Set up on either side of the ride's path were all kinds of entertainments, of all different sorts. The first one on the left was a play being performed, with a pony with a frilly sheep musician outfit and a pipe playing as he waddled along the stage. A dozen other ponies dressed in big silly poofy rat costumes followed him, and Twilight felt her hooves twitch for a moment as she felt a sudden urge to jump up on stage and join in.
She shook herself, realizing that it was just a performance of the Pied Piper of Ram-lin, and looked away at some of the other exhibits.
There was a set of half-a-dozen dancers doing ballet, wobbling a little from the counterweight effect of their big poofy behinds, and a little further on an artist painting on a canvas – doing a fine oil painting of a thickly diapered Nightmare Moon.
There were group dances, single dances, songs, food-sellers – it looked like all kinds of art, performing and static, were being shown off at once and combined together to create a gigantic festival that their walkway moved through.
Fluttershy stared, wiggling a little and tooting as she did, and her attention focused in particular on the display of a full orchestra off in their own little room.
There were all kinds of instruments on display there, from drums to violins to oboes and pianos, and conducting it all was-
“...Discord?” Fluttershy asked, stepping forwards to get a closer look and leaving the moving walkway behind. “What are you doing here?”
“Sssh!” Discord admonished her, waving his conducting stick at her. “I'm just visiting, and I'm in disguise anyway – don't you see my disguise?”
He indicated the waistcoat he was wearing, which included a three-note cutie mark logo on it. “I'm disguised as the famous conductor, This Chord!”
"This Chord?" Fluttershy tilted her head, looking a bit dubious. "I've never heard of a famous conductor named This Chord."
"Well of course not." Discord rolled his eyes and twirled his baton, causing a loud drumroll from the room behind him. "If everypony had heard of me they'd come up to me and ask for autographs and I would never get a quiet moment. I'm the kind of famous that nopony has heard of before they hear of me. From me. The famous This Chord."
"Oh, okay. I think I get it." Fluttershy nodded.
"And that's why you are my favorite pony." Discord pulled her into a quick hug before snaking back up onto the stage. "And my favorite tootsician. We've been waiting on you, Fluttershy, to complete this ensemble."
Fluttershy blinked and blushed. "O-oh really? But I'm not a musician... I like to sing sometimes, but I've never played an instrument before."
"Oh don't be silly, dear, save that for the orchestra pit." Discord chuckled, flicking his baton at Fluttershy and causing a crash of cymbals. "Of course you're playing an instrument. Why, you've been playing your bagpiapers all day, haven't you?"
"M-my what?" Fluttershy squeaked and shrunk back a little... causing her diaper to press against the wall and let out a long, slow paaaaaaarp. Fluttershy stumbled forward in surprise before landing on her butt with another paaarp, the sound echoing in her head and making her giggle and blush. What was she arguing about with Mister This Chord again? Something about her role in the orchestra?
She straightened up with her nose in the air to look as professional as she could, which fell kind of flat thanks to her inability to keep from wiggling her toot-tush and letting out a series of parps from her pipes. "Well, I for one think that I should be the star of the show and the first crinkle. After all my bagpiapers are by far the loudest and silliest instrument, not to mention the biggest."
This Chord stroked his goatee, holding it sitting in his lap. "Well, I can hardly argue with that. Silly does mean good, and nothing's better than a lot of noise. I do think that some of the drums and maybe the tubas are bigger than your bagpiaper, though."
Fluttershy blinked, then scrunched and stood up, wiggling her rump with a determined expression. "Well, let's see if they're still the biggest after this solo."
“That's the spirit,” This Chord declared, raising his conductor's bat on on his conductor's baton. He waved it a couple of times, shaking the bat off, then began giving Fluttershy the beat.
Watching the steadily moving baton, Fluttershy wiggled from side to side with a regular motion. At the end of each sway a little toot tooted from the pipes of her bagpiaper, each one ever so slightly louder and richer than the last.
“That doesn't sound nearly loud enough so far,” This Cord said, and Fluttershy nodded – most of her attention on the baton and the rest of it on her music, doing her best to sway harder and play louder. The toots became stronger, more resonant, and as her sway got more and more of a side-to-side sway Fluttershy heard extra harmonics creep into it as the pipes began sounding off in sequence instead of all at once.
This Chord kept a back-and-forth tick going on the baton for a bit longer, then began doing a three-note tick – left, right, up – and Fluttershy's sway continued to follow his movements. When his baton went left, her bagpiaper swayed right… when his baton went right, her bagpiaper swayed left… and when his baton went up, her bagpiaper pressed into the floor with a much louder and deeper paaarp than the toot sounds it made the rest of the time.
Air hissed in and out of the bagpiaper as Fluttershy kept working it, beginning to work in flourishes and extra notes as her confidence in the instrument grew – and as the instrument itself grew, each cycle of expanding and contracting leaving it just that little bit bigger than the last.
“That's not bad,” This Chord said. “I can see you've plaid this before.”
He frowned for a moment. “Hmm, does a pun count if you have to mispronounce it? Anyway, I think you still have a bit of a way to go… unless you can convince me otherwise!”
Fluttershy took that as the challenge it was, starting to add full bounces on her bagpiaper to her routine – wiggling left and right, then jumping on her bagpiaper and bouncing three times to produce a series of rising paaarp-paaaaarp-paaaaaaaarp notes that filled the air and made the instrument swell up all the more.
As she played, Fluttershy's focus became more and more on producing the best music possible to impress This Chord and the musicians in the orchestra. Helping with the musical performance was just the best thing she could do, and it was so much fun!
She was going especially high on one bounce when This Chord swung his baton around, making her try to swing the opposite way on reflex. With a small squeak and a big paaaarp she wobbled and bounced out of control, landing with her rump stuck in something hard and wide.
"Oh my, it looks like our star musician intends to play every instrument today." This Chord grinned and swished his baton around, making a small metal pipe snake around in front of Fluttershy.
She blinked in confusion for a moment, going crosseyed in the attempt to inspect the mouthpiece in front of her before a particularly loud blast of music from the orchestra made her lose the thought. She giggled and wiggled, leaning forward slightly to reach the mouthpiece and blowing into it.
Nothing happened except for a bit of a tighter feeling on her rump for some reason. She frowned at the uncooperative mouthpiece and took a deep breath, then took an even deeper breath, deep enough that her pipes were paaarping in reverse and her plaid plush belly was swelling up.
With a determined look she leaned in again and blew all the air into the mouthpiece, feeling the tight feeling behind her grow until with her last breath the tuba she'd been stuck in suddenly shot her into the air with a massive sound, sending her flying and flailing and giggling as she landed rump-first on one of the massive drums, bouncing from one to the next and back again with a silly melody of parp-thumps, the rest of the orchestra following her lead with their music.
She finally landed again, on the floor and on her rump, dizzy and giggly, with the orchestra around her spinning and only getting sillier as Discord conducted it. A series of trumpets moved in without warning, going into her ear and out the other one with a loud sound that blasted all the non-silly thoughts out of her head. She stumbled forward and into a giant triangle, bouncing around the sides for a moment before dropping out and landing on a cymbal, only realizing what it was in time for the other cymbal to come down with a crash and squeeze all the air from her pipes. It slowly pulled up again with her plaid body sticking to both of them, playing a few bars as Fluttercordion before she peeled off again and fluttered off the side, eyes spinning.
“Bravo!” This Cord announced, applauding. “Bellisimo! Random words in Neightalian!”
Fluttershy took a deep breath, inflating back up to a more sensible size, but before she'd had time to do more than that the conducting draconequus waved his baton again. That resulted in an oom-pa-pah from the orchestra pit, and Fluttershy felt dizzy all over again.
She staggered back and forth as she tried to find her footing, crinkling and parping as she did, and Discord steered her over to what turned out to be an absolutely enormous piano.
It took only a moment of puzzling for Fluttershy to work out what she was meant to do, and she jumped for one of the keys to play it – bouncing off from it onto another, and then another, making her smile more broadly with each note as she led the orchestra in an unfolding silly symphony of sound…
Back on the moving walkway, Pinkie was staring with amazement at all the bustling entertainment around her. It looked astonishing, and a great deal of fun, and she took a few steps forwards – nearly leaving the moving walkway, before turning and walking in a different direction as she saw something else that looked just as amazing.
“This looks like so much fun!” she said, pouting a little. “How come I have to stay on this boring platform?”
“We're trying to find out what's going on here,” Twilight replied, distracted herself by the dizzying splashes of colour and sound around them.
Pinkie nodded, satisfied with that answer for about half a second, then caught sight of something else and did a double-take.
It couldn't be real! Or if it was, how come nopony had told her about it before?
A parade marching down one of the streets… and the ponies were throwing candy everywhere!
For a Pinkie Pie who was already feeling peckish, there was nothing that would interest her more. Pinkie stepped off the walkway, eyes fixed on the flying candy.
Coming closer she realized that some of the candy really was flying, bonbons flapping the little twists of their wrappings like wings and bobbing through the air at just the right level for a pony to snap them up on the walk.
They also had really cute and eye-catching designs printed on them. Some had swirly spirals in various colors, some had colorful rings that seemed to dilate and shrink as they bobbed up and down in the air, and some had multi-layered hearts in various shades of red and pink. Whenever Pinkie focused on one she just couldn't look away until it was flying right in her face, the pretty print on the wrapping filling her whole view and her whole mind, and then it was suddenly gone but not-gone; the candy in her mouth and the spirals and swirls and rings and hearts in her head, making her moan in delight, swallow the candy with a gulp that seemed larger than the candy had looked at first, and let her tongue flop out, drooling a little as she looked for the next tasty candy.
She was slowly walking forward as she ate, going against the flow of the slow-moving parade. Distracted as she was she didn't notice the group of ponies carrying a large piece of fabric in between every section of the parade, at least not until she suddenly found the curtain thrown over herself. She blinked through the soft rustling darkness and suddenly she was out the other side dressed in a marching band outfit complete with a drum and cymbals.
Pinkie blinked in confusion for a moment, noticing the marching band trotting along around her, then noticed the candies still flying around everywhere. She giggled and began to beat her drum in a slow rhythm, licking her lips as the candies slowly drew together and gathered in a line, bobbing up and down like parasprites and flying into her mouth in a steady stream as she slowly munched her way through the section. Two thirds of the way through she noticed a drum that looked a lot like hers roll away down the street, but the candysprites were still obediently flying into her mouth and she could still hear drumming, so it couldn't be hers surely. She giggled and looked ahead at the dancing ~~candies~~ spirals and swirls and rings again, drumming her big plump candy belly in a steady beat as she walked.
There was a vague thought in Pinkie's mind that maybe she shouldn't be taking part in the parade, but that was a silly thought anyway and she didn't want any of it! She was a premier party pony, so she could be a premier poofier plumper pink parade pony too!
Besides, the candysprites were so nice and tasty, it was hard to argue with them… especially when she was so important to the parade! They couldn't do without a drummer, could they?
Her steady march, sustained by sweetie spirals, brought her up behind a parade float – one where half-a-dozen clowns capered about, doing silly antics and tricks for the audience. One of them unrolled a red carpet on a ramp, laying it down in front of her, and Pinkie waddled her way up the ramp and along the path it lay out for her on the float… even though the path wasn't straight in the least, but weaved back and forth along the top in all sorts of silly ways.
The continual little pulses of sugar and the spirals, hearts or colourful patterns contained in the sweets made her even more willing than normal to accept the silliest of things, so when she marched into a little clown-cart she didn't question it in the least. When she came out the other side, though, she blinked and shook her head a little – wondering why she was feeling so dizzy.
Then she looked down, and realized she was carrying a pie in one hoof, wearing a colourful outfit and with her hooves stuck in four big red shoes… of course!
How silly could she get? She'd forgotten she was supposed to be a clown!
Pinkie Pie'd giggled, hefting her pie and tossing it straight into the face of the pony next to her. With a giggle and a bounce she waddled forward in her big, red shoes, each step making a loud sound. Each left shoe making a paaaarp and each right shoe making a honk that echoed in her ears as she tried to follow the trail of candies along the twisting, dizzying trail that led through the crazy maze that was the float.
Occasionally she would stumble and trip over her big shoes, rolling around comically and landing on her rump, only to bounce the next couple steps on her big clown butt. Other times she'd come across other clowns or random other ponies, stopping to pull a pie from behind her back and pie them in the face. All in all she was having a lot of fun, confident in the knowledge that she was the clowniest clown that ever clowned, not to mention the biggest and bounciest one, and that she could pie any pony before they could pie herself.
At least that's what she thought until she turned a corner and suddenly found herself face to face with another clown that looked incredibly big and silly and clownish, already holding another pie at the ready. Pinkie narrowed her eyes and drew faster than her own shadow, tossing the pie she'd prepared right at the other clown's face, only for the sneaky silly-butt to open her mouth comically wide and snap the whole pie up in one bite, swallowing it almost without chewing.
Pinkie gasped in shock, then narrowed her eyes further, knowing that she had found her one true adversary. The other clown threw her pie and Pinkie snapped it up just like her rival had, gulping it down without a second thought and licking her lips menacingly. They both froze, glaring at each other before their legs and mouths flew into motion, pies flying every which way and being gobbled up without fail.
It only took a minute before both of them were sitting on their padded butts, rubbing their big swollen bellies with satisfied groans and the occasional burp. Pinkie looked up to offer her rival her respect, only to see two clowns carrying away a large mirror. She blinked at the strange sight, then dismissed the thought and strained to get back to her hooves, wobbling and waddling along slowly towards the end of the float, hooves barely able to stay on the ground around her big pie-filled tummy.
The crinkly plush suit Pinkie sort of forgot she was wearing half the time helped out a lot, cushioning her and making it easier for her to waddle her way to the ramp off the float, and she moved down it in a daze – not really paying any attention to her surroundings at all. Other ponies in the parade bumped into her, directing her one way and then the other, and Pinkie sort of drifted in the direction they were sending her overall.
It looked like there was something cute up ahead, too! And not just a little cute, but really-super-extra cute!
A whole collection of animals, in not just one float but three or four really big floats in a line! They looked so fluffy, too, and Pinkie giggled at the sight of the lion roaring before shaking its crinkly butt.
Any thoughts about how similar the animals looked to being ponies in puffy, crinkly costumes went unnoticed, and Pinkie waddled her way closer to get a better look at one animal after another… a tiger, a lion, a big silly manticore, all of them big and crinkly and looking happy ~~and swirly~~ in their plush-sided cages.
As she got right up to the float, though, she noticed something very sad.
There was an empty cage! It looked like one of the animals had gone missing, the elephant by the looks of it…
Pinkie looked around, hoping to ask somepony where the elephant could have gone, when she noticed something even better. A large bundle of grey fabric was lying near the cage, and for some reason she was absolutely sure that that must be where the elephant was hiding. It just made so much sense.
She giggled and waddled over, pushing her head into a hole in the fabric and calling out for Mr. Elephant to come out again, and if he didn't want to hang out with all his friends. Getting no response she wiggled her butt before pouncing, crawling and squirming deeper into the fabric in an attempt to find the elephant that was sure to be inside.
It took a good bit of wiggling and squirming, but finally she came to another hole, blinking at the sudden light as she got back to her hooves again and looked around. Had she maybe missed the elephant? She looked down and gasped in delight at the proof that her Pinkie Sense had come through again.
Looking down and back she could finally see and appreciate ~~herself in a massive grey sleeper, the backflap stretching over her crinkle-tush, hooves stuck in thick grey plush legs and a hood covering everything but her mouth and her eyes~~ a big, grey, puffy-fluffy-crinkly elephant just as huge and heavy as an elephant should be.
Of course Mr. Elephant hadn't answered when it was actually a Mrs. Elephant. Pinkie giggled and blew a happy note through her big plush trunk, then turned and waddled back to her cage to hang out with all her crinkly animal friends.
Pinkie had a lot of fun crinkling about with the rest of the animals, listening to the zookeeper ponies explaining things about zoo-animals to everypony who came near. The lion was really a bit of a softy, it turned out, and the tiger's crinkly rump wiggling back and forth could be all confusing to ponies or animals who looked too closely!
She kinda zoned out after that, staring at the stripy tiger-butt as it crinkled and wiggled back and forth, but she thought there was something about how elephants were easily distracted? But it could have been something else, she wasn't at all sure…
Finally one of the zookeepers came up to her with a hose, and told her that elephants had to be blown up nice and big and that that was why they had trunks! It sounded really silly to her, which was worth a giggle as the zookeeper hooked her up.
The air came on with a whoosh, and Pinkie immediately started getting bigger – puffing and plumping up, feeling soft swollen plush all around her swelling faster and faster. It made her feel kind of light-headed, as well as feeling kind of light generally as the air pumped into her… her suit, that was it!
Pinkie giggled at how ditzy she was feeling today, then giggled all over again as the big grey sleeper she was wearing started to stretch at the sides. The crinkly pink outfit she was wearing underneath it was getting bigger and bigger every moment, straining the elephant-sleeper fabric and making it start to rip at the seams – but the hose kept pumping air, plumping her pink posterior more and more...
Pinkie squeaked and creaked and huffed and puffed. The ponies around her were taking down the cage around her now, the buttons of her sleeper popping off and the flap falling open to show a big pink crinkle-rump with a puffed up pink curly-tail popping out from it.
She giggled and felt lightheaded as the sleeper strained more, until it finally popped like a bubble, leaving her big pink form with a hose in her mouth, wobbling back and forth with uselessly flailing legs that couldn't reach the ground anymore.
One of the ponies around her pushed some clips into her ears just before they plumped up with air, leaving her listening to cheerful parade music, with a quiet mantra in the background speaking of big, plump parade balloons, of cute pink piggies and how Piggy Pie was always the bestest and most popular balloon in the whole parade.
Piggy Pie giggled and huffed and puffed, her body bouncing and wobbling and finally lifting off the ground slightly. One of the ponies pulled the hose out of her mouth and replaced it with a big pacifier made to look like a big plush pig snout from the outside, strapping it over her muzzle and mouth so she didn't lose any air and always had something to suckle on. Then they pulled her down again and began to go over her sides with big brushes and rollers, making her squeak and wiggle as it tickled her.
Finally they all let go of her, leaving her to flap her legs to stay a foot or two off the ground. On both her sides each were the words "Piggy Pie" drawn in big, bold black letters, surrounded by doodles of fat piggies, huge candies, silly balloons and of course swirly spirals.
“This is a kind of odd ride,” Spike said, sitting down on the moving walkway with a loud crinkle from his diaper. “It's… well, I can see why ponies would like it, but it's kind of busy? Visually, I mean...”
“Yeah, but we're not here to enjoy the ride,” Twilight replied, blinking a few times. “We're here to… something, uh – oh, that's right, we're here to catch Trixie!”
“Right, right,” Spike realized. “I'm just saying...”
“I do understand what you mean, darling,” Rarity agreed, flirting her sweet-smelling tail without thinking about it. “But since it's been different for different areas, perhaps it shall be different again shortly?”
“We're not supposed to be enjoying the ride,” Twilight repeated. “But, well, I guess we'll find out what's next...”
None of them really noticed that they were the only remaining passengers on the walkway, and Spike stood up with a wobble and a crinkle as they approached the third of the curtains dividing one area from the next.
As the curtain slid away, the trio of padded-up heroes got their look at the ride area.
“That's… a house, right?” Spike asked, looking at the layout. “And… well, there's a garden too, I guess...”
“That's a pretty big garden,” Twilight replied. “And a pretty big house. It's almost like… the opposite of a dolls house? Scaled like a real house would be if we were much smaller.”
She shrugged her wings, the motion taking some effort with her crinkly outfit. “I guess it's entertaining for somepony?”
Behind them, Rarity marveled at the large house for a moment before she was distracted by all the colors around her, looking around and raising her nose to sniff around. She closed her eyes and smiled softly, stepping off the walkway to follow the scent to a patch of colorful plush flowers surrounded by a faint haze of shifting scents.
She opened her eyes to look at the patch, giggling and drooling a little bit as she let her eyes wander over all the colors, sometimes divided between individual petals and seams and swaying in a light breeze. All of it gave the whole patch the appearance of a large, shifting and moving swirl of colors seemingly going on forever while the cloud of intoxicating scents wafted right into Rarity's face.
She hummed and drooled a little more, leaning forward to bury her face in one of the large flowers and enjoy the plushy feel of it while taking deep breaths of its aroma. After a moment she pulled back again to stumble into the flower patch, wading deeper into the flowers until she was completely submerged by colorful plush and a thick rainbow mist of dizzying aromas.
She didn't know or particularly care how long she was stumbling around surrounded by soft, faintly crinkly plush flowers, feeling some of them stick to her plush suit fur and weighing her down more. Eventually she found the flowers parting, however, to come face to face with a cute little plush deer.
The deer stared back at her for a moment, then tilted her head and stepped back, smiling and asking, "Flower?"
Rarity blinked slowly, mind swimming in a haze of scents and colors as she tried to catch up with what was going on. Did the deer think that she was a flower? That was just silly, as much as she wanted to, surely she didn't smell as wonderful as all these flowers yet. And it wasn't her name either, her name was... uhm...
She blinked again as she struggled to remember her name, then smiled back at the deer. "You can call me Flower if you want, darling." Flower certainly wasn't a bad name, and it would always remind her of her goal, her goal of one day being as wonderfully plushy soft and aromatic as all the flowers around her. She would be Flower the Skunk, the most generous and most fluffy-plushy skunktail, out to share her scent with everyone in the garden~
“Great!” the deer said, smiling, and bounced a little on her plushy hooves – the hooves squishing as she bounced. “Come on, you've got to meet the others!”
“The others?” Flower repeated, following as the little fawn trotted off into the garden – leading her through a flowerbed made up of a tangle of brightly coloured flowers all of different types, the scents sending her all the more confused and foggy with every little sniff.
“The others!” the deer repeated, leading her into a clearing with a plump plushy bunny. Rarity blinked for a moment, wondering if she recognized the bunny from somewhere, then shook her head – of course she did, it was ~~Suri~~ Thumper, just like the deer was her friend ~~Coco~~ Bambi! And the cute little hedgehog with the plush spines waddling out of the undergrowth was ~~Sassy~~ Prickles!
Flower giggled, waving her tail about, and Thumper gave her a spontaneous hug – the two actions sending more sweet scents into the air, making Flower feel all the more dizzy and happy and bubbly.
It was so nice to be with her friends!
“Hey, uh… where did Rarity go?” Spike asked.
Twilight looked around, and did a double-take – then turned around to look more closely, her suit crinkling around her. “What the – where did everypony go?”
She paced back and forth a bit. “Spike, did you see where they went?”
“Uh… not really,” Spike replied, as the ride passed through another curtain into the interior of the house.
“Well… we'll have to work out what to do about this,” Twilight said. She tried waddling back along the route of the walkway, Spike following as quickly as he could in his own plump plush outfit, but their movement was so restricted that they couldn't quite keep up with how fast the walkway was moving.
“Maybe we'll have to go until we reach the end?” Spike suggested. “There has to be a way to loop back around to the start.”
“That… might work,” Twilight admitted, and turned around. “Okay, we'd better head to the end of the ride as fast as possible – and keep an eye out for our friends!”
Spike nodded, looking around at the oversized house.
The first thing he noticed was that, unlike the rest of the ride, this house was really kind of poorly kept up. Everything looked okay, he guessed, except for the dust – but there was so much dust, it was actually kind of amazing.
He shuffled back and forth a bit, remembering that dusty areas had to be cleaned up. And he was a maid, after all, so… surely he should be cleaning the area up?
The dust just seemed to get worse the further in they got, not that Twilight seemed to notice. The final straw however was when Spike spotted a large ornate mirror covered in dust, with a purple blur just barely visible moving behind all the dust that might be his reflection. He stared at the mirror for a moment, not realizing that he'd stepped off the walkway to get a closer look, nor thinking about it as he pulled out his trusty feather duster and began to clean it up.
It was certainly a big mirror with a lot of dust, and he had to shake out his feather duster twice into his diaper before he could finally see that the mirror was not in fact a mirror but rather a glass door, and the purple blurs on the other side had been big purple dragon dolls swaying from padded claws on ropes along what seemed to be a production line leading through another curtain deeper into the manor.
Spike frowned and tilted his head in confusion, not quite sure why there would be a production line inside a manor. Then again, he had left the public area of the ride, and maybe they were making their own prizes for the carnival games behind the scenes.
Whatever else theories and deductions he might make were cut short, however, when he noticed a whole pile of glittering, eye-catching dust on a weird cluttered desk. His eyes gained a ~~glazed over~~ determined look as he waddled forward, scooping the dust right into his diaper with wide sweeps of his feather duster and not paying any attention to whether the desk was really a control panel and what big buttons he was pressing or shiny levers he was cranking all the way up with his sweeps.
The machinery of the production line twitched with a chunk sound, more dust cascading down from overhead, and Spike followed the trail of dust out from the desk to the side of the room – the powdery dust hazing the air making him feel dizzy and silly and giggly as he did his job as a maid-
-until suddenly something grabbed him and picked him up, lifting him into the production line in a space where a purple dragon doll was missing.
“H-hey,” he protested, wiggling a bit, but the movement just produced more crinkly sounds. “I, uh…”
Blushing, he tried again to get free, but the machinery kept moving – pulling him through the curtain he'd seen into the depths of the back-stage area.
Spike couldn't see much from his constrained perspective on the line, but he could see some kind of assembly machine ahead – and as soon as he reached it it scanned him with a flashing red light, before shunting him off on a chute to the side.
His first attempt to get free was foiled as he fell over on the slippery floor of the chute, and after that something shiny appeared in front of him and he couldn't help but stare.
This is a plush toy production line.
You are on the plush toy production line.
You are a plush toy dragon.
The words pulsed into his mind all at once, and he kept staring as the shiny light tracked back and forth – barely noticing as hands supplied the deficiency in plush he was suffering from, taking his feather duster before suiting him up in a thick plush Spike-the-dragon suit.
Headphones in the suit continued repeating the same ~~subliminal messages~~ facts as he moved on, towards the next machine on the side line.
Spike blinked slowly through the faint swirls set into the lenses of his plush ~~suit~~ body, smiling like any good plush toy dragon should. The claws picked him up again to carry him a bit further down the line, various parts of his outfit coming down on more hands to dress him up further.
Another diaper was brought in to cover the already thick and crinkly rump of his plush body, with the words "WET CLEANER" printed onto the front and "I <3 DUSTING" on the rump.
Next came a large and exceedingly poofy maid dress in black and white, but with a lot of pink frills and accents and a large red and pink swirled heart on the front of his apron underneath the words "#1 MAID", his feather duster tucked carefully into a side pocket. A large pacifier with a ruby bulb was looped around his neck on a string and a frilly pink and white maid's bonnet was tied securely onto his head.
Next came a pair of long white socks with small red and pink hearts, as well as a pair of long white gloves with a swirly heart each on the back of each hand. The outfit was rounded off by a pair of thick, fluffy pink booties on his feet, fuzzy and soft enough to pick up any dust and dirt his feather duster might have missed.
Finally a short string with a ring at one end and a soft pink magic glow was threaded through a hole at the back of his dress, attaching itself right between his shoulder blades with a soft tingle. One claw gave the ring a tug, pulling the string out and making Spike open his mouth without even thinking about it. "Maid Dragon loves making everything sparkly clean and pink, teehee~"
With a rattle and a soft flumph, Spike the Maid Dragon slid down a chute into a big display box with a clear plastic front that showed him off for anyone going past.
Hidden by the front of the box, a swirly screen traced spirals of coloured light that held him captivated – keeping him happy, dizzy, waiting patiently to be picked up and let out by anyone who needed a plush maid dragon.
As Spike sank into plushy bliss, however, one of the other unintended consequences of his absent-minded dusting came to a head.
“And now Spike's gone missing as well,” Twilight sighed, sitting down on her padded rump with a crinkle and a sigh. “What am I going to do?”
Her next thought was interrupted as the walkway suddenly went to triple speed, making her wobble before falling over on her side with a yelp, and as she got unsteadily to her hooves the walkway bore her through an area depicting a series of castles at great speed.
One of them was a lot like the Royal Sisters' castle, another was occupied by knights, but Twilight could barely see what was going on as she was zipped through on the accelerating walkway. Finally it reached a sharp turn just as she got back to all fours, and she toppled off with a yelp – flapping her wings as hard as she could to try and control herself, but just managing to raise a storm of crinkly plushy sounds as she rolled to a halt inside one of the exhibits.
“Who dares enter the castle of The Enchantress, the Great and Powerfoal Trixie?” a familiar voice demanded, approaching along with the sound of more crinkles.
"Trixie!" Twilight jumped up at the sound of the voice, looking up to see... well, mostly the room spinning around her. "I'm going to-! Going to... w-well, first I'm going to sit down for a moment and wait for the room to stop spinning." She plopped down on her rump with a crinkle-squish, blushing a bit and holding her head with a soft plushy hoof.
"But after that I am going to stop you and help all my friends!" She blinked and shook her head a bit, then woozily tried to get back with her hooves.
"You really need to work on your dramatic entrances." Trixie clicked her tongue and shook her head slowly. "Trixie almost pities you, really she does. But mostly she pities herself for having to face someone with such lack of grace and stage presence. Here, let Trixie show you how it is done."
Before Twilight could do more than shake off the last of her dizziness and look up in confusion at Trixie, the showmare was already waddling behind her throne to hide. There was a moment of silence before a rather impatient Trixie called out from her hiding spot. "You'll need to cue Trixie in, you know? Really, it's like Trixie is working with a complete amateur..."
Twilight blinked and blushed, although she was not completely sure why. Still, she did her best to straighten up and stutter out an announcement. "Show yourself, uhm, Enchantress. I-I'm here to defeat you!" She tried to stomp her hoof, but managed to get nothing more than a loud crinkle-squeak.
"A-hah! The Great And Powerfoal Trixie accepts you challenge, poor misguided foal! She will- oop!" Trixie jumped out from behind the throne only to step on her ~~blanket~~ cape and trip, only barely catching herself and straightening up again with her blanket billowing behind her... only facing the wrong direction.
"Hello? Poor, misguided foal? Show yourself, coward Sparkle!" Trixie leaned forward to look closer for her rival, her blanket flapping behind her and making the swirls and cutesy images on it like diapers, plushies and pacifiers stretch and shift around. Occasionally it flapped up high enough to show her swaying and waving rump with a thick diaper covering it, adorned with a glowing glittering picture of her magic ~~rattle~~ wand.
“Trixie, uh...” Twilight began, only for Trixie to jump – her blanket fluttering in the breeze – and turn around with a cough.
“Ahem, that is… the Great and Powerfoal Trixie knew you were there,” Trixie said unconvincingly.
“Sure,” Twilight said. “So, um… are we going to get on with this duel now?”
“Of course!” Trixie declared. “And, as the challenged mage, The Great And Powerfoal Trixie will set the challenges!”
“That's not how magic duels work,” Twilight protested.
“Pah!” Trixie snorted, her hoof squeaking as she brought it down, and flourished her enchanted rattle. “You challenged Trixie, so Trixie will have her say!”
She paused, waving the rattle back and forth, and Twilight's eyes focused on it a little despite her efforts to keep up a strong face against Trixie. “But perhaps Trixie will be magnanimous, and allow her clearly less well trained rival to set some of the challenges instead.”
“That's… um...” Twilight mumbled, distracted, then shook her head. “I, uh… I guess that sounds like a good idea – I mean, well-”
“Good!” Trixie declared. “Then the first challenge is Trixie's to set! Only a true crinkle-mage can be the best at rump wiggling!”
“Rump wiggling?” Twilight repeated. “Crinkle mage? I'm not a crinkle mage!”
“Ah, you admit it!” Trixie crowed. “Then Trixie wins by default-”
“Not so fast!” Twilight countered. “I… fine. Sure, rump wiggling… I guess...”
"Excellent! As little of a challenge this duel might be for Trixie, winning without a single contest would be even more disappointing."
She spun around again without warning, tossing her blanket away and over Twilight's head. Twilight squirmed and pawed at the blanket, getting lost in the toys, swirls and stars all around her for a bit before she finally managed to pull it off her head. When she did however, Trixie's rump was right in her face, wiggling and swishing and filling her vision with the sparkly print of Trixie's magic wand, and her nose with the dizzying smell of foal powder.
Twilight squeaked in surprise and fell onto her rump, blushing as her eyes darted left and right to follow the wiggling rump, her ears twitching as she almost heard a soft rattling along with the crinkling. Her eyes glazed over and her head felt fuzzy, everything outside the sparkles and swirls fading away.
"Hah! The Great and Powerfoal Trixie wins again!"
Twilight snapped awake, blinking away spots and sparkles in her vision. "What...? H-hey, wait just a second! I didn't even get my turn!" She blushed and jumped up, trying to wiggle her own rump but just ending up stumbling and almost tripping over herself.
"You had more than enough time. It's not Trixie's fault that you were too awed and intimidated by her butt-wiggling prowess to even attempt an attempt to compete." Trixie posed and flipped her mane with a confident smirk. "Either way, Trixie won the first round so it's only fair that she choose the next competition."
Twilight blinked and swayed a bit, then shook her head. "Now wait just a moment, even if you say you won, it's my turn choosing the next challenge!"
"I do say I won. Or can you honestly say that Trixie is not the best butt-wiggler in Maretropolis?" She spun around and wiggled her butt again, watching over her shoulder with a grin as Twilight's eyes glazed over. "But very well... Trixie is exceedingly fair, so she will let you choose bottle-suckling as the next challenge and only demand that she gets to pick an assistant from the crowd in return."
"You... uhm..." Twilight slowly blinked herself awake as soon as Trixie's rump was turned away again, blushing lightly. "That, uhm... sounds fair, I think? Yes, I get to choose... choose the next challenge and you get an assistant..." She blinked and frowned a little, then nodded to herself to confirm her own logic to herself. It certainly did sound exceedingly fair.
“Well?” Trixie asked. “What challenge do you choose?”
Twilight blinked, wondering what would be a good challenge for a moment, then nodded. “Oh – of course! The best challenge would be for me to challenge you to bottle-suckling!”
“Excellent!” Trixie declared. “Trixie accepts your challenge!”
She waved her magic wand, producing a rattling noise, and hummed for a moment. “And Trixie picks as her assistant… that foal there!”
Twilight turned to look, then did a double-take at the sight of Applejack – but Applejack fully dressed in the plushy cow suit that had been developing on her for a while already. “Wait, she's one of my friends!”
“And?” Trixie asked. “Trixie was allowed to pick an assistant from the audience, was Trixie not?”
Twilight nodded slowly. “I… yeah, but...”
“Butt?” Trixie repeated, wiggling her own. “That was last challenge, keep up!”
Twilight nodded again, finding it surprisingly easy to just agree with whatever it was that Trixie said. It made so much sense, and she took her position opposite Applejack as Trixie provided them with two oversized bottles for bottle-suckling.
“Trixie is sure she will have to remind you of the rules,” Trixie informed Twilight loftily.
“H-hey, no you don't!” Twilight replied indignantly. “I can… um...”
She actually couldn't remember the rules, now she thought of it… she was sure she should have been able to remember them, if she'd heard them before, but…
“Well, Trixie will be kind and explain them anyway,” the other unicorn said. “The first one to drink the entire bottle is the winner. They must not take the lid off the bottle, as otherwise it would not be a test of suckling!”
Twilight sucked her lip slightly, wondering how well this was going to go. Applejack had done a lot of suckling already, so she must have a lot of practice at it...
"Say, what exactly do y'all need me to... mooooh~" Applejack trailed off as she noticed the large bottle Trixie was holding. "Are y'all gonna drink all that?"
"Go right ahead." Trixie smirked, holding the bottle out as well as you could hold out a bottle that size.
"Don't mind if I mooooo~" Applejack grinned sleepily and grabbed the bottle, pulling it over to herself as she sat down on her thick, padded rump and hugged it to the front of her uddiaper.
"Ah, but before you start... see your friend there, Udderjack?" Trixie swished her butt a bit as she pointed at Twilight.
"Moooo?" Applejack blinked and glanced over before smiling and waving at Twilight. "Oh hey Twi. How's your big fancy mooooel going?"
Trixie smirked. "Well, we're taking a small lunch break right now... but before we stopped she claimed that she could suck more bottles than any other foal. Can you believe it?" She waved her rattle in AJ's face.
"What? That..." Applejack stared at the rattle for a moment, eyes swirling before she blinked and shook her head before scrunching at her friend. "Well, Ah'm mooooghty sorry, but y'all are wrong. Ah'm the best bottle sucker on all of Sweet Padded Acres and Ah'm not afraid to prove it." She picked up the bottle and latched onto the nipple, leaning back a bit as she quickly started to drain the milk and leaving Twilight to flounder as the foalicorn tried to follow.
Trixie just grinned and watched, levitating a series of increasingly big and full milk bottles towards the moooooelists.
Twilight's attention was getting pulled in all directions, making it hard for her to keep up. Some of her focus was being pulled away to the suckling, which was surprisingly hard to do properly – she couldn't just do a single powerful pull, she had to let off every so often to catch her breath, and then there was the problem where she had to work out when she was getting close to finishing a bottle so she could be ready to move on to the next one… it was all very complicated, a lot more complicated than she'd expected, and Applejack… Udderjack? No, definitely Applejack… seemed to be a natural at it.
Another part of her concentration was on keeping an eye on Applejack to get an idea of how fast she should be going. Frustratingly, it seemed as though Applejack was sucking just as fast no matter whether she was doing it with a lot of effort or without seeming to put in any at all.
And, as if that wasn't enough, there was that wand Trixie had, which just drew all her focus every time she saw it – it made it awfully difficult to tell what to do…
Twilight blinked, and suddenly realized she'd been suckling on an empty bottle. She wasn't sure how long she'd been doing it, but Applejack had just finished yet another big bottle and it looked like that meant…
“And it looks like I win,” Trixie announced with a smirk and a wave of her wand-rattle. “It looks like I'm better at bottle suckling than you.”
“But… didn't you do it with an assistant?” Twilight asked. “I, uh...”
“Well, Trixie clearly won the challenge,” Trixie replied. “And that means Trixie is better at the subject of the challenge, which means Trixie is better. It is logic even a foal could understand!”
“Moo,” Applejack contributed.
“So, now it is Trixie's turn to pick the next challenge,” the Great and Powerfoal mage went on. “And, of course, as Trixie is sure you are aware, that means she gets to pick an assistant from the audience.”
Twilight blinked. "You... wait, what? But you already... you already got an assistant for the last challenge..."
"Exactly." Trixie swept her rattle around in a grand gesture. "Trixie got an assistant in the last challenge, so of course that same rule applies for this challenge as well. You wouldn't demand any special treatment and have the rules changed just for you, would you?" She raised an eyebrow.
"W-what? No, I... of course not. I'm not trying to..." Twilight stumbled back and shook her head insistently, trying to gather her wits. Between Trixie's rattle floating here and there, Applejack swishing her tail as she slowly waddled her big milk-filled belly back to the stands and Twilight's own twitching legs as she tried to keep from wetting her diaper after all those bottles, she found it increasingly hard to focus. All she knew was that she'd always try to keep ponies from giving her special treatment as a princess. "I-I don't... don't want special treatment..."
"That's good. Trixie wouldn't want her future familiar to be an arrogant self-entitled bratty-foal. That is Trixie's job." Trixie puffed herself up proudly. "Anyway, as the next challenge Trixie chooses a nesting contest, and Rainbrawk Dash as her assistant."
"A what?" Twilight shook her head again. "What is a nesting contest? Ponies don't nest."
"Well, that sounds like a personal problem to Trixie. Trixie's assistant assured her that she is the very best at nesting." Trixie smirked.
"That's right. Rainbrawk Dash is the very best at nesting." Twilight turned her head and watched as another of her friends came on stage. Rainbrawk's old wings were pressed snugly to her sides by her soft fluffy chicken suit, while her forelegs in thick plushy chicken wings were flapping furiously in an effort to keep her in the air, leaving her bobbing up and down about a foot above the stage. Her plush-taloned orange hind legs were dragging a large golden plush trophy with "#1 CHICKENBUTT" on it after her.
Rainbow wobbled back and forth in the air for a moment, before giving a mighty flap with a loud "Buck-braaawk!" and landing with her butt inside the trophy's cup, panting lightly through a large orange plush beak as she looked at Trixie and Twilight. "Cluckdet Rainbrawk Dash is... ready for duty, bok brok. Just point me at the padding."
“But… w-wait, this isn't something that I have the first clue how to do,” Twilight protested. “And… um...”
She had something else to say, some kind of objection about how Rainbow was dressed and how she was calling herself, but it just… didn't want to come to mind…
“R-right, okay,” she said. “So… what are the rules?”
“A good question, for once!” Trixie said, waving her wand idly back and forth. “You will have five minutes to make the biggest nest.”
Twilight waited, wondering when there was going to be another rule, then blinked. “Hold on, uh… is that it?”
“Trixie explained all the rules,” Trixie said reprovingly. “If you were not listening then that is not a Trixie problem.”
“But there was...” Twilight began, then her gaze went up to the rattle again.
She blushed; maybe she'd lost track of time while watching the wand, and missed all the rules? That was a very embarrassing idea-”
“Begin!” Trixie announced.
Twilight yelped, then looked over at Rainbrawk Dash to see what she was doing – hoping to get some kind of hint about what to do.
There was a pile of wrapped-up diapers and plush eggs, foal powder, big stuffed 'sticks' and plushy toy feathers all over the back of the stage, and Rainbrawk Dash was already starting to pick bits of it up – her ~~forelegs~~ wings flapping wildly as she pecked and shifted the bits around to form a big circular pile.
Twilight's horn lit up as she began to move things herself, but Trixie rapped her sharply on the muzzle with her rattle. “Ah ah ah! Rainbrawk Dash isn't using magic, and if you used magic you'd be cheating! Didn't you listen to the rules?”
“Um… s-sorry,” Twilight blushed, not wanting to admit she had missed the rules. “I'll, um… r-right...”
She began picking bits up in her mouth and her plushed-up hooves instead, unwrapping the diapers and getting them woven in with the plush feathers and sticks. It was quickly very confusing, powder floating up into the air and confusing her with the scent, and she shook her head a few times as she tried to focus on constructing a good-looking nest.
Whatever she was doing, it obviously wasn't quite the same as what Rainbow Dash was doing. Twilight looked over at her friend only to stop and stare incredulously. "What... how...?"
While Twilight had ended up with a slightly flayed pile of diapers, plush and powder, Rainbow had somehow woven everything together to end up with what seemed to be a single big, thick, slightly circular white diaper with feather-and-stick frills, several large and small plush eggs arranged on top of it and a considerable pile of foal powder filling up the rest.
Twilight was snapped out of her stupor when Rainbow stopped her last adjustments and flapped over to her to bend over Twilight's nest instead. "H-hey, what are you doing?"
Rainbow glanced up before leaning down again, swaying her fluffy, feathery butt with the egg-shaped swirl on it. "Helping you, of course," she mumbled around a few sticks and feathers in her mouth. "We're friends, silly, and friends help each other have the biggest and comfiest puffbutts they can."
Twilight blushed and smiled at the display of loyalty, thinking about what a good friend Rainbrawk was and staring at her swaying... wiggling... swirly rump. She blinked and jumped as Trixie called out the time, watching Rainbow jump and flap her wings with a loud buk-brawk as well.
"Alright, the five minutes are over!" Trixie walked up to them. "As great as that display of sportsfoalship was, now it's time to see who actually won the challenge."
"O-oh, right, uhm..." Twilight blinked and blushed, looking at the two nests. "So, how are we going to compare them? Do you have a measuring tape, or...?"
"Don't be silly." Trixie giggled. "Rainbrawk, show her how the Wonderbrawks do this."
Twilight felt like she should say something about those names, but was quickly distracted by Rainbrawks butt again as her friend waddled and flapped back to her own nest. She watched as Rainbrawk plopped her rump down in the middle and leaned down to grab the sides of the nest with her wings and mouth. She pulled them in and stood up, her orange chicken legs poking out of two holes that had been hidden under all the foal powder. There was a sound of sticky tapes as Rainbow worked and before long she was waddling and stumbling around while flapping her wings, wearing a massive white diaper with white-and-brown frills all over and several big white plush eggs poking out of the waistband at the top, the fluffy diaper-nest reaching up almost up to her wings and all the way down to her ankles and losing large puffs of foal powder with every movement.
“Well, that looks unbeatable to Trixie,” Trixie said proudly. “But of course we should find out how well Trixie's future familiar did as well.”
“Hey,” Twilight said, pouting a little to object to the peremptory title. “I may not be as much of an expert at you are – I mean, as Rainbrawk Dash is – but I've still done okay, right?”
“Well, maybe with that last minute help you've at least got a scoring result,” Trixie said critically. “But Trixie will be the judge of that.”
Chapter Four - Infinity Crawl
Not quite seeing the problem with Trixie judging as well as being a competitor – at least theoretically – Twilight got into her own nest and wiggled about a bit. She had no idea how to do the tapes up, and had to wait in blushy embarrassment until Rainbrawk Dash came over to fix her up – and even once that was done, when she stood up it became quite clear that the diaper-nest she'd put together was no more than half the size of the one Rainbrawk Dash had managed.
Twilight sighed – perhaps a little wistfully – and huffed, annoyed that she hadn't managed to do better, then glanced back. “Um… so does this get taken off, or-”
“Trixie is the winner,” Trixie interrupted. “With a fine performance, Trixie has proven that she is the best yet again. Now, it is of course time for Twilight to pick the challenge.”
“Actually, I had-” Twilight tried to say, only for Trixie to interrupt her again with a wave of her wand and a wiggle of her butt.
“And Trixie is indeed generous,” Trixie continued, her cape sparkling with powder as she swirled it. “She will allow her rival – hah, rival! – to select a scent challenge, and will accept having an assistant as compensation.”
Twilight nodded a few times, then blinked – sure there was something she'd missed there.
“Wait, um… I wanted to ask if this came off?” she asked, indicating her diaper.
“Well, Trixie might consider it,” Trixie said. “But it doesn't seem fair – after all, Rainbrawk Dash is still wearing hers!”
"But that's... I mean..." Twilight blushed and waddled around on the spot awkwardly, blushing as she hugged one of the plush eggs to her chest, feeling herself relax a bit as she squeezed the soft plush. Rainbrawk did still wear hers, so she couldn't really demand to get to take her own off. "I, uhm... I guess... So what, uh...?"
"What now? Trixie believes you were about to issue a scent challenge." Trixie swirled her cape again, wafting a bit of foal powder at Twilight and making her stumble and trip to land on her butt... which only caused a much bigger cloud of foal powder to puff up around her from her diaper-nest.
Trixie giggled as Twilight started to squeak and sneeze. "Oh, it looks like my future familiar is a bit too eager to start. But you haven't even issued the challenge yet."
Twilight kept sneezing and swaying in place, feeling dizzy and confused from the sweet scent clogging up her nostrils and head. "I, uhh... s-sorry, I- achoo!" She shook her head and tried to remember what she was trying to say. "As your future familiar... I-I mean as your challenger I challenge you to, uhm... to a scent... challenge?" She blinked and paused, trying to figure out if that sounded right.
"An interesting challenge. But luckily Trixie's next assistant is an expert in all scents." Trixie waved her wand before pointing it at a spot of the stage, causing a big and colorful plush flower to appear with a poof of more foal powder. A visible trail of sweet pink aroma began to rise up from the flower and towards the audience, causing one mare to stand up and close her eyes, leaning forward to sniff curiously. A moment later ~~Rarity~~ Flower the Plush Skunk came floating on stage on the scent trail, her big shiny black skunk nose sniffing it up eagerly while her big fluffy skunk tail wagged slowly behind her and left an even stronger trail of aroma, thick and sweet and looking visibly pink with little cartoonish flowers, diapers and flower-print diapers seemingly floating in it.
Flower finally reached the flower, sniffing deeply and causing the flower to stretch up and close around her nose for a moment before she finally flumped down onto the stage with a happy sigh and a dreamy smile.
Trixie raised an eyebrow before waving her rattle to make the flower disappear again lest it keep distracting her ~~minion~~ assistant. "Well, while Trixie's assistant gets her act together, Trixie will explain the rules of this challenge. You will not have to guess any scents, because Trixie's assistant Flowers already won that one. Instead, you will have to work to find the scent that your opponent just can't resist, to make them either surrender for another sniff, or make them completely unable to continue the challenge because they're helplessly focused on the scent." She pointed at two large racks of small boxes, bottles and flacons.
“Right, so… I need to find the scent that Flower likes, and Flower needs to find the scent I like?” Twilight asked. “So… what happens if I find the scent I like?”
“Well, then I suppose you'd forfeit the challenge,” Trixie said airily. “Well? You'd better get going!”
“Right, um...” Twilight said, frowning, and took one of the flacons down first. It looked like the sort of bottle she'd seen used for perfume, and she opened it with a hesitant tug.
The scent of strawberries came floating out, and she sniffed it before thinking hard. Flower didn't seem like the sort of skunk who'd be distracted by a simple fruity scent, so-
Twilight's train of thought was interrupted by a stripy tail, as Flower bent down at her own rack to look for a scent and her thick plushy tail flicked out to knock Twilight off her feet.
A couple of bottles thumped to the floor as well, though fortunately none of them broke, and Twilight had to rock back and forth on her big nest-diaper a couple of times to get back to her hooves – sending puffs of distracting foal powder in all directions, making her wobble a lot once she finally regained her footing.
“Is… is that allowed?” she asked. “She knocked me over!”
“It's just an accident,” Trixie ruled. “Don't whine, unless you want to concede the challenge?”
“H-hey, no, I don't want to concede,” Twilight said, doing her best not to whine. “It's only-”
Flower's tail swept the other way, knocking her off her hooves again.
“You should really at least pretend you're trying to win,” Trixie advised lazily. “It's not a good challenge if you're trying to lose, instead of just losing.”
Twilight spluttered something as she got to her hooves again, finally managing to open her second bottle over a minute into the challenge.
The scent of honey hit Twilight and she drooled a little before blushing and quickly closing it again. That seemed more like a scent that Piggy Pie would like. She blinked and paused, wondering where that name had come from. Obviously Piggy Pie was Piggy Pie so why did she think her name was...
Twilight quickly shook the thought off to worry about later and focus on the challenge now. She opened the next bottle to take a whiff of the scent of tulips and smiled. Flower had seemed to be quite taken with flower scents and it was even in her name, so this seemed like a good place to start.
"Hey Twilight." Twilight was just about to call for the skunk's attention when she looked up to realize that her opponent was already in front of her and holding up a spray bottle. She closed her eyes and splayed her ears back just in time as several spritzes of clear liquid hit her face.
Twilight shook her head and blushed lightly before frowning in confusion. "Huh? This is just water, isn't it?"
Flower giggled. "Don't be silly. This is a very exclusive perfume named 'Mountain Spring'. So... I suppose technically it is water, yes." She giggled again. "I didn't expect you to fall for it, but I thought it would buy me some time."
Twilight frowned again. "Why would a bit of water buy you some... oh. Oh no." She squeaked and blushed more, starting to wiggle and waddle around in place. She tried to cross her legs but was unable to even get close around the thick nest keeping them apart, and before she could do anything more she felt her nest-diaper start to swell up even more, getting warm and wet. She blushed deep red as she involuntarily relaxed with a dopey smile, all milk from the first challenge swelling her diaper up quite a bit and keeping her unable to focus on the current challenge for a good bit.
Her wetting finally stopped and Twilight let out a small whimper, still blushing as she waddled around to test out her even bigger diaper. She squeaked in dismay again as she realized that at some point she'd dropped the bottle of tulip scent somewhere between all the other bottles that had already fallen out of her rack. She waddled around frantically to find it again, only to get knocked over again by Flower's tail and stumble rump-first into her rack, scattering even more bottles over the stage floor and dumping a full bottle's worth of perfume right over her head as it opened up and tipped over on the top shelf.
The scent of chocolate ran through Twilight's nostrils, and she smiled a little before shaking her head to gather her senses.
She needed to focus, to concentrate! Flower was going to beat her at this rate, but she just needed to find that tulip scent and that might give her a chance…
Sniffing automatically, Twilight struggled to her hooves again… only to smell something wonderful. It was like a mixture of foal powder and the smell of a fresh book, and it made her weak at the knees.
“Oh~?” Flower giggled. “It seems like somepony likes this latest scent I found, Foal's First Book?”
Twilight nodded, then tried to collect herself. “Well, um, yes, it's quite nice...”
She sniffed again, trying to work out where the bottle was, and took a few wobbly steps towards Flower. The skunk giggled, highly amused, and waved the bottle under her nose before pulling it away again.
“H-hey,” Twilight mumbled. “Stop...”
“Well, if this is your favourite scent, then I suppose I could let you have it,” Flower said. “Of course, that would mean you were conceding the challenge, don't you agree, darling?”
Twilight nodded a few times, too taken with the papery smell to really argue, and closed her eyes – following the lure of the scent.
She didn't really notice where it was leading her, or Trixie stealthily levitating a pair of headphones with feathery-ear mufflers on the outside and a feather-pattern along the top band. She did notice when she stepped onto something soft and plush and fluffy, but when she opened her eyes again to look she saw black and white stripes surrounding her – and Flower zipping up what looked like a great big zipper which was curving up and over her, with the skunk angled so it was quite possible Twilight was in her tail… if that made sense? Twilight wasn't sure any more.
Her nose was stuffed up against the perfume bottle, and next to that and the all-over plush hug a slight pressure on her ears wasn't anything important.
"Nice and snug, nice and comfortable~"
Twilight blinked and tried to look around as Trixie's voice suddenly sounded in her ears, but looking around the black and white stripes only made them seem to swirl around her and made her even dizzier. She let out a confused moan and took a deep breath of the perfume under her nose, causing any thought she might have had to melt under the wonderful scent. She giggled as she relaxed and snuggled into the soft fluffy tail, dreaming of sitting under a soft blanket and looking at the pictures in her first foal book, while the nice voice echoing in her ears read the story to her, about a silly little filly who wanted to be an owl.
Outside on the stage Trixie had pulled out another bottle full of plush rose essence and was leading Flower through a series of tricks to keep the audience entertained. Flower happily went along with anything to get more of the wonderful smell, while her tail bounced Twilight around, making her even dizzier and sink even deeper.
Twilight wasn't sure how long she was snuggling into the tail, sniffing the scent of her book and getting bounced around while the black and white stripes swirled around her. She knew that she had probably read the book a dozen times, although she couldn't quite remember how to count that high, but it seemed like a big enough number. She also remembered getting tired and settling down for a nice long nap while listening to Trixie talk more about owls and something called familiars.
When she woke up again and blinked to look around, she was back on the stage and Flower was gone, presumably back to the audience. She looked over to her wizard and let out a small confused hoot before blushing and shaking her head to clear it a bit.
"Hoooo... I mean, who won?"
"That would be Trixie of course. Not that there was ever any doubt." Trixie posed smugly before looking Twilight over. "We also had a short break in the show because you had to take your nap."
"O-oh, sorry." Twilight struggled to her hooves, shaking out her big nest-diaper rump on a whim before straightening up. "S-still, this doesn't mean anything. I can still win the rest of the challenges and become your familiar." She blinked. "No wait. I mean become an owl. I mean become your owl familiar!" Twilight took a second to think about that, then nodded proudly, pretty sure she had gotten it right that last time.
“Of course,” Trixie nodded, ~~giggling~~ laughing kindly at her prospective familiar's confusion. “Now, observe in wonder as Trixie produces the next challenge! Of course, since Trixie's owl-sistant is the one who is taking part, that means Trixie of course has a volunteer from the audience to take her side.”
“I, um… right?” Twilight said, a little confused but not wanting to argue with Trixie. “Of course. So… so what's the challenge?”
“An eating contest, of course,” Trixie told her, as Piggy Pie came out from the audience to join in. “And, since Trixie knows that they are your favourite, the eating contest is a contest to see who can eat the most sugar mice!”
She flourished her wand, producing an entrancing rattling sound, and brought it down with a flash. Twilight blinked, missing as Trixie took a bag and emptied it out, then gaped at the sight of the sugar mice everywhere. “Wow!”
“He-ey!” Piggy Pie said. “Isn't Twilight going to have something to eat as well?”
“But they're for me!” Twilight protested.
“That remains to be seen, Twilight Sparkowl!” Piggy Pie giggled. “I bet you can't catch enough to beat me!”
“C-catch them?” Twilight replied, missing the 'Sparkowl' comment entirely since it just sounded like it made sense to be her name. “But… wait, uh…”
“Of course,” Trixie agreed, making Twilight look back and forth in confusion. “It would not be much of a challenge if the targets did not move, would it?”
“I… guess not?” Twilight blinked. “Is it really necessary, though?”
Trixie huffed. “Of course it is!”
Twilight blushed at having made her wizard mad, then squeaked in surprise as ~~Trixie pulled a sugary string and~~ the mouse next to her hoof began to skitter away. Any thought about the challenge vanished from her mind as instinct immediately took over and she waddled along to chase after the mouse.
Trixie's voice in her ears cheered her on with a steady chant of "Mouse", "Catch", "Pounce" and "Eat", but no matter how fast she tried to waddle she just couldn't seem to catch her, completely oblivious about how none of the other mice were moving as she stayed focused on her prey.
"Stop, stop, stop!" Trixie shook her head, making Twilight stumble to a stop and look back at her. "Trixie can see that you're having some problems. Trixie supposes that it isn't completely surprising seeing how you look."
Twilight blinked and tilted her head in confusion. "How I... look?"
"But of course. Who catches mice, silly?" Trixie giggled.
"Well, uhh... me?" Twilight blushed and looked around for an answer.
"That's the plan, but you're a puffy pony, aren't you? Ponies don't catch mice, but something else does."
Twilight blinked before perking up. "Owls! Owls catch mice!"
"That's right. And who has ever heard of a pony familiar." Trixie smirked. "Don't you think you should try to look your part?"
Twilight nodded eagerly, part of her mind agreeing that that made sense and the rest of her mind too focused on the fact that she could be an owl just like she'd always read and dreamed about as a little foal and just like the voice in her ears told her she wanted above all else.
"That's the spirit. Such an eager future familiar." Trixie grinned and waved her wand for a moment before pointing it at Twilight to cause a big puff of foal powder to obscure her completely.
Twilight let out a startled hoot, already dizzy from all the wand-waving and getting even dizzier and distracted by the foal powder smelling a lot like her favorite book. By the time she finally gathered her bearings again the powder had already fully dispersed and Trixie was setting up a large mirror.
She let out another hoot as she leaned in to get a good look at herself, swaying a bit in place and tilting her head a bit just like an owl. Her puffy purple pony suit was gone and in its place was a thick, plushy owl suit.
The suit itself was mostly blue, with a white front that had a faint grey spiral on the belly and six blue tear-shaped feathers on the chest. Her neck had a frilly white bib that looked vaguely like fluffy downy feathers, her forelegs were stuck in soft plushy blue wings just like Rainbrawk Dash's while her actual wings were pinned comfortably to her sides. Her hind hooves were stuck in white plush talons thick enough to look more like paws, while the rest of her legs were swallowed by the thick nest-diaper still wrapped around her rump inside the suit that gave her owl suit its pudgy fluffy shape.
While her tail was stuck in the suit, her mane was still free behind her head and the only thing still visible of her old self. The rest of her head was behind a soft blue mask. Her eyes had visible swirls in them and were ringed by white fabric with two large white feathers each on top going out to the sides. Her mouth was completely hidden behind a cute white plush beak while her horn and forehead were covered by a shiny silver forehead protector that encased her horn, with a purple amethyst set into it right below the horn.
“There you go, see?” Trixie asked, chuckling. “Trixie told you, you're owl ready for this.”
“Right!” Twilight agreed, reminded of her task. “So – I need to catch as many sugar mice as possible?”
“You need to catch more sugar mice than Piggy Pie,” Trixie corrected. “Which isn't quite the same, though it's close. Now, get going!”
Twilight hooted, blushed for a moment (though she wasn't sure why) and started leaning down to try and catch sugar-mice as they began ~~being pulled~~ moving around the stage. It seemed quite hard for her to balance properly, and she had to stick out her feathery butt quite a long way to make sure she wasn't about to just fall forwards – which meant it wasn't easy for her to pick out the mice with her beak, and she could see that Piggy Pie was doing much better!
A few stray thoughts made her wonder why she was doing this – what was she playing for, again? Something about a magic battle, wasn't there?
But why would a familiar have a magic battle against her wizard?
Confused, she tripped over onto her front as she tried to pick up a sugar mouse, and that pushed the swirls up much closer to her eyes – leaving her dizzy and even more confused when she struggled back upright several seconds later.
“Oh?” Trixie asked. “Are you sure you're an owl, and not a chick?”
She chuckled. “Though I suppose an owl chick would be just fine as a familiar...”
Twilight blushed and blinked as she waddle-swayed in place. "Hoooo... how would I know if I'm an owl chick?"
Trixie smirked. "Well, there's a few hints for it. For example if you have a big padded crinkle-butt."
Twilight hooted and blushed more, trying to turn her head to look at her posterior and well aware of the thick crinkly diaper she was still wearing under the costume. "A-anything else?"
"Oh, of course." Trixie smirked. "A little owl chick would still be clumsy moving around. They'd have trouble flying properly, and they wouldn't really know how to catch mice yet, and they'd probably feel small and blushy a lot and look up to their great and powerful wizard for advice and leadership." She puffed herself up proudly.
Twilight hooted and flapped her wings a little, shrinking down and feeling dizzier and smaller with each thing Trixie listed. She definitely felt clumsy on her big plushy owl feet, and she hadn't managed to catch even a single mouse yet. She knew that her plush wings barely gave her any lift and she certainly felt small and blushy right now.
She waddled in place nervously before looking up at her great and powerful wizard, mumbling nervously, "I-I think I'm actually just a little owl chick..."
Trixie giggled and tilted her head. "Trixie is sorry, what did you say?"
Twilight swallowed and hooted in embarrassment before yelling out. "I'm actually just a little owl chick!"
Trixie hummed and leaned in, coming up right in Twilight's face to look her in the eyes. "You're Trixie's silly little owl chick familiar who asks her about everything because she still has to learn how to be a good owl chick and needs Trixie to teach her."
Twilight squeaked, eyes widening in surprise and taking in more of the swirls that made her feel so dizzy and floaty. "I-I'm Trixie's silly little owl chick familiar hoooo... who asks her about everything b-because I... I still have to learn and need Trixie to teach me…"
“Was there ever any doubt?” Trixie chuckled. “Well, at least you have admitted it, which is good – because, look, you've managed to lose this challenge as well!”
Twilight gasped, and looked around to see that Piggy Pie was just finishing off the last of the sugar mice.
“Oh, no...” Twilight fretted. “So, um… d-does that mean I'm not a hood owl – I mean a good owl chick, hoo?”
“Not at all, it means you clearly have a lot to learn,” Trixie said with a smirk. “But that is okay, Trixie knows just how to motivate you to get better at the tasks you need to learn as a familiar.”
She flourished her rattle, and Twilight's eyes locked onto it – following it with her ~~mouth~~ beak agape, amazed at how spirally and shiny it was.
“Listen carefully,” Trixie said. “Familiars do all sorts of tasks for magicians and wizards, and one of those things is that they clean up – they tidy when things go on the floor! And another thing they do is that they hoot while they work, because they have to concentrate so much on tidying up that they can't spare any effort on concentrating on anything else...”
Twilight nodded slightly, lost in the spirally rattle and the spirals in her eyes… fluffing her wings a little, wanting to be a good owl chick familiar for Trixie, and hanging on her every word in case she missed one.
“That means you will need to have a role model for how to clean up,” Trixie continued, still keeping Twilight's attention. “And Trixie is good to her familiar, she has got you a perfect role model!”
Reaching behind her, Trixie put down a large present decorated in swirly firework-y paper – with sparkles and spirals traced out in all colours of glitter, it made Twilight stare at it as it landed.
“Open it up,” Trixie encouraged. “Is Trixie not Generous and Thoughtful?”
"Y-yes you are..." Twilight blushed and waddled over to the gift, barely even noticing as Trixie moved to roll a stuffed-full-of-sugar-mice Piggy Pie back off the stage. Her attention was focused on the pretty sparkly present her generous and thoughtful wizard had gotten for her.
She looked around the gift for a moment before tugging at the bow on top, making it unravel and the gift wrap drop down to the stage floor. Twilight gasped and hooted in delight as the gift turned out to be a large display box with what the pretty swirly print at the top said was a life-sized plush dragon maid toy easily visible through the display window.
Twilight giggled and pecked at the window with her beak, trying to get the plush toy out.
"Careful now, you want to keep the box in good condition for when you're done playing with your present." Trixie chuckled and used her magic to lift a barely visible latch on the side, making the display window open up like a large door. Her magic wrapped around the plush dragon maid and lifted her up, letting him stand in front of the box with blank, swirling eyes and a happy toy smile.
"Look, Trixie. He looks so cute and frilly." Twilight giggled and flapped her wings as she waddled around the plush toy to look at it from all sides. Something about the toy felt more than a little familiar, like she should know the dragon, but a long moment staring into his swirling eyes and the swirling hearts all over his maid outfit made her realize that it was probably just because she'd always wanted a plush dragon maid toy more than anything.
Twilight kept giggling and cooing and fawning over her new toy, poking and nudging it a bit before she finally frowned and looked it over again. After a moment of thought she giggled as she figured out how to handle it, and waddled over to grip the ring on the toy's pullstring in her beak. She waddled back a bit, leaning back even more to pull it out nice and long, then let go.
The pullstring was pulled in again and the plush toy twitched, then jerked and moved a bit stiffly before swinging around to look at Twilight. It smiled even wider if that was possible, giving her a perfect if a bit waddly curtsy and giggling. "Maid Dragon is your best friend. Maid Dragon loves to clean and cook."
“You do?” Twilight said, giggling. “Well, I, that is, Trixie told me that I needed to learn to clean as well!”
Trixie coughed, and Twilight looked around to see that a dozen or so small plush toys were scattered over the stage – along with a few piles of pinkish-white foal powder.
“Oh!” Twilight gasped. “Um… how do I make the toy clean up?”
“Perhaps you need to read the instruction guide,” Trixie suggested, floating a booklet down in front of Twilight.
The booklet seemed at first to be almost a toy, with a dozen silvery pages which looked completely blank, but after a moment's staring at it Twilight started to see the words. They were really pretty, and they seemed to move when she wasn't looking at them – and she could almost sort of see them only in spirals, which looked really funny and gave her quite a giggle!
“Um… it says that I need to point the toy at the mess,” she said, frowning a little as she puzzled the book out, and looked back at the Dragon Maid toy. It was standing there with a smile, swaying left and right ever so slightly, and if Twilight had been paying much more attention she might have noticed that the Dragon Maid was staring at Trixie's swinging wand.
“And I need to get the right accessory out...” Twilight added, then got up to do just that – waddling over to the box, and picking the dustpan and broom out of the set. Surprisingly there were two dustpans and two brooms, and Twilight had quite a lot of trouble carrying all four of them over to her new toy, but once she got them close the Dragon Maid took one of each and stood there.
She shifted the toy dragon over to one of the piles, then looked up at Trixie. “Um… why are there two of all the tools?”
“That's so you can learn, of course,” Trixie said. “You need to do it alongside the Dragon Maid, but don't forget to pull the string again first!”
"O-oh, okay..." Twilight blushed and giggled, grabbing the second broom and dustpan in her wings and waddling over to the back of the Dragon Maid again. She grabbed the ring in her beak again, pulled and let go.
Dragon Maid straightened up a bit before giggling again. "Let's get this place squeaky clean~!"
"Squeaky clean~" Twilight parroted, blushing and giggling along as she waddled after her plush toy. She watched him scoop up one of the piles of powder in the dustpan and quickly leaned down to do the same, feeling rather proud of how well she was doing, hooting and shaking her rump happily.
She paused when she looked at her Dragon Maid toy again and noticed that he was emptying the full dustpan down the front of his diaper, not sure if she should do the same. Before she could ask however, Trixie's magic grabbed the plush toy's pullstring and gave it a good pull.
Dragon Maid turned around to her with a smile, swirly eyes meeting her own as he giggled again and sang "Out of sight, out of mind~"
Twilight swayed and blinked a little, then giggled and nodded along with the good advice she couldn't quite remember. She waddled over to the next pile of powder, shaking her now slightly poofier padded rump as she scooped the pile up into her empty dustpan, then stood up and clumsily pulled the front of her costume back a bit with one wing so she could dump all the powder down into her padding where it belonged, out of sight and out of mind~
Looking up again, she saw that Dragon Maid had moved on to picking up the clutter. He'd apparently grabbed the small pink feather duster from the box and was giving every toy and plushy a good dusting as he picked it up.
Twilight quickly grabbed the second small duster, then started following her plush's example on how to deal with clutter. Pick up a toy or small plush, take a moment to stare at the spinning part, the spiral designs or the pretty glowing eyes of whatever she'd picked up until she was all dizzy and had forgotten what exactly she'd been thinking about and repeating to herself, then move to pick up the next toy and try not to drop the ones she was already carrying around.
Twilight Sparkowl had no idea how long she spent tidying up, sweeping and dusting and de-cluttering, washing and scrubbing and primping, staring and giggling and occasionally hooting.
She remembered Trixie reminding her to pull the pullstring whenever she got confused, and she remembered some of the instructions that Dragon Maid gave her being useful cleaning tips like “Swinging your rump when you sweep makes it much easier~!” or that “Wearing diapers means you can just keep cleaning~”
Eventually, though, the stage was spotless and shining – reflecting the swirly shiny lights all around it, making it so Twilight was constantly being distracted even though she tried her best not to be.
“There!” Trixie ~~giggled~~ smiled. “Wasn't that fun?”
Twilight nodded, staring at the spirals on Trixie's wand as it swung back and forth. “Mm-hoot!”
“That's right,” Trixie said. “You know just how to clean up now, like any good familiar should. But there's one more thing an owl needs to know.”
She stopped, and waved her hoof. “Well, that's wrong, there are many more things an owl needs to know, especially a familiar owl hatchling for the Great and Powerfoal Trixie! Fortunately, Trixie has an assistant who can help teach you those things as well!”
“Wow!” Twilight said, amazed. “Trixie knows everything!”
Trixie shook her head. “Only momma knows everything,” she said, sounding vague and distracted, then seemed to regain her senses. “Um, anyway… that is… Trixie knows a lot! And her assistant, Fluffershy, knows all about tooting and hooting, so she's the ideal teacher for a familiar in need of an educationowl lesson!”
She waved her cape with a flourish, and Fluffershy came bouncing out of the audience to land with a loud toot from her big plaid plumpness.
“Don't forget to put away your toy first,” Trixie added, and Twilight blushed before complying – occasionally ~~staring~~ glancing at Fluffershy as the dragonish musician hummed to herself.
Twilight struggled a bit with getting her Dragon Maid toy back into its box, somehow managing to pull the pullstring at its back several more times which caused it to keep giving advice and trying to clean Twilight up.
By the time she finally managed to close the box, she felt dizzy and sparkly swirly clean, with lots of useful advice bouncing around a fluffy head that had been thoroughly cleaned of any dust ~~and thoughts~~. She blinked as everything sounded a bit too fuzzy and distant, then blushed and pulled her feather duster out of her ear and stuck it in the back of her diaper, making it sit nice and secure while looking almost completely natural as a fluffy feathery owl tail.
Fluffershy giggled behind one of her big puffy yellow-plaid claws. "Are you ready to begin, then?" She gave an encouraging smile and another giggle before turning around and wiggling her rump. "Let's start with a few simple exercises. Just try to hoot the same pitch I do."
She dropped back onto her large plaid rump and it swelled up a bit before the air blasted out one of her tail pipes with a long, smooth "Hooooot~".
Twilight hooted in surprise, having been distracted watching the wiggling plaid padding and not expected to suddenly be blasted back by a steady stream of sound and air. She dropped back onto her own rump, the tune echoing through her head for a moment before she giggled and let it out in a long, slightly dizzy but pitch-perfect "Hooooot~"
“That's very good!” Fluffershy giggled. “You're getting the hoot of it!”
Twilight smiled happily, proud of the praise, and fluffed her wings up and down.
“But you've got more practice to do, still,” the musical dragon added. “So now let's try a lower note.”
She lifted her rump up higher this time, wiggling it back and forth a few times, and counted down. “Three, twoo, one...”
Letting her plaid diaper-like rear drop again, she put more force on it this time – blowing out a long low “Hooooot” which echoed in the air for several long seconds after it finished.
Twilight was so enraptured by the sound, and by the earlier wiggling, that she almost didn't remember she had to copy the note.
“Ahem?” Trixie coughed, smirking, and Twilight gasped.
“Oh! Um…” she began, then giggled. “I mean, Hooooot!”
“That's right!” Fluffershy said, blowing a brief fanfare which made Twilight's head spin. “But now let's hear something a bit more difficult, which is two notes rather than just one! It's a more complicated kind of hoot.”
She lifted her rump and sat back on it, rolling a little from side to side, and played out a “Toooot-whit Tooot-whooooo” sound, the first one rising to a high pitch and the second one staying low and long.
Twilight swallowed; this was difficult! She'd have to try her very best to give a toot-hoot like Fluffershy said!
Twilight wiggled her rump a bit before sitting down just like Fluffershy had, flapping her ~~forelegs~~ wings and letting out a long, happy-sounding "Toooot-whit tooot-whooooo~".
Fluffershy giggled and applauded politely. "Very good. You're a very musical owl hatchling, aren't you?" She wiggled her rump and swished her tail, letting out a cheerful series of short hoots.
Twilight smiled happily and flapped her wings more in excitement, repeating the hoots and then going on with her own small melody even after Fluffershy had stopped. She hooted almost a full minute before she trailed off and blinked, blushing as she noticed everyone watching her. "H-hoo hoot?"
Trixie grinned. "Well, it looks like Fluffershy is a better teacher than even Trixie expected. You certainly sound a whole lot more like an owl now."
Fluffershy nodded proudly, making Twilight beam with pride. "Oh yes, she's a really cute little hooter, isn't she? Some day we should have a concert together." She got a mischievous grin and turned around, wiggling her rump again for Twilight to see. She waited a moment for Twilight to stumble closer, enraptured by the swishing swirling plaid padding, before she dropped her rump down and blasted a long, loud, strong "Hoooot-tooooot-paaaarp~!" right into Twilight's face.
Twilight hooted and flapped her wings, rolling several feet back from the blast before coming to a stop dizzy and giggly and hoot-y, watching Fluffershy bounce back to the audience with soft, cheerful parps.
“Did you enjoy that?” Trixie asked, and Twilight nodded – wobbling a little on her feet before sitting back to use her diaper as a support. She crinkled as she nodded again, more emphatically the second time, and Trixie smirked.
“Excellent!” she pronounced. “So, of course, this means that Twilight Sparkowl will be quite happy to properly confirm herself as Trixie's familiar!”
Twilight nodded again. “Hoo! Yes, I dooo!”
Trixie ~~smirked~~ smiled. “That's the right answer~”
The owl flapped her blue feathery wings again, then paused. “B-buk, um, but, whoo, what does that mean I have to dooo?”
“Just watch closely,” Trixie replied, flourishing her wand, which began to glow along with her horn. Swirling lights and patterns spread out, fascinating Twilight instantly, and she hooted in amazement as the swirliness built up and got prettier and shinier every second.
The lights reminded her of all sorts of things she already knew, like how a familiar did whatever their magician wanted, and they asked her a few things as well. Or… that was how it felt, to Twilight, but she wasn't really sure.
It was like she had to agree to be Trixie's familiar, which sounded odd because Twilight was sure she was already Trixie's familiar, but then she was just an owl hatchling so maybe that was something she didn't understand. She nodded, agreeing, and as she did there was a sort of tingly sensation – like she was making a promise that would make it so Trixie could always tell her what to do.
It was all very complicated for her to understand, so she just sat back and enjoyed the pretty shiny lights – hooting and shifting back and forth – and she wasn't sure at all how long it took.
By the time she blinked awake again, Twilight noticed that they weren't alone anymore... Or rather even less alone than they'd been with all her friends in the audience.
Looking up she saw Trixie swishing her tail and wiggling her butt in happy excitement as she talked to a large, crinkly and incredibly cushy looking snake.
"...and then I made her watch my pretty wand and cast the spell you taught me and it all worked. Isn't Trixie the smartest, cleverest and bestest filly you've ever taught?"
"Yes, very good. And what does your familiar have to say to that?"
Twilight blinked in minor confusion, until Trixie turned to her with a light frown. "Sparkowl, tell Mommy how proud and happy you are to be my loyal and obedient familiar."
Twilight gasped and hooted as she felt a sudden headrush, her head going all fuzzy and warm. Without thinking she jumped up and flapped her wings with a wide smile on her beak. "Hoot, hoooot~! I'm Trixie's bestest, cutestest familiar and I love doing whatever she tells me to do, hooooot~!"
“See?” Trixie asked proudly. “Trixie told you!”
“Very good, dear,” the serpent replied. “You are a smart filly, you learned exactly what Mommy wanted you to learn.”
Trixie giggled, sitting down and squirming back and forth a little, and Twilight looked back and forth between her magician and the cushy snake.
“You're Trixie's Mommy, hooot~?” she asked, blinking owlishly. “But, you… you don't look much like her, hooooo...”
“Well, sweeties, that's all about why I'm here,” she said, a pair of cute little crinkly wings flicking on her back. “Because you are a smart little owlet to spot that!”
She smiled, her eyes twinkling. “Do you know what a comic book is?”
Twilight Sparkowl frowned. “N-no, actually, I don't-”
“Sparkowl!” Trixie said. “You're making Mommy pay attention to you instead of Trixie! Stop it!”
The dizzy familiar blushed, feeling very embarrassed, and the serpent chuckled. “Now, now, Trixie, sweetie,” she said. “Play nice.”
Trixie flushed as well, squirming a bit and looking down after being told off by her serpentine mommy, and she looked so upset that Twilight waddled over to give her a hug – wanting to make Trixie happy any way she could.
“Well, a comic book is a book full of pictures and words, and they have all sorts of stories in them,” the snake explained. “But your Mommy Occamommy didn't come from a comic book, she came from a picture book. For foals,” she added, to make the point clearer.
"Like us?" Twilight perked up curiously.
"Only the best foals, obviously, like Trixie." Trixie sniffled one more time before sitting up again proudly and definitely not leaning into Sparkowl's hug because it was soft and plushy and nice. "So you could say that Mommy was made just for Trixie.
"Wow... you must really be one of the bestest foals in the world." Twilight looked up at Trixie with big, ~~swirling~~ sparkling eyes. She still didn't understand everything, but if that big comfy and nice looking snake was made just for her wizard then Trixie had to be a really good foal. "And I get to be your familiar?"
"Well, I suppose you could say that. Although I hope you're not forgetting your foalish friends Gilda and Lightning Dust." The snake leaned in a bit and Trixie squeaked, glancing back quickly. Twilight turned her head to see all her friends grouped behind them, all of them looking dizzy and drooly as they listened to a big puffy wolf and a smaller but no less puffy fox.
Trixie blushed and chuckled nervously. "O-of course Trixie would never forget... those two." She pouted a bit. "But Trixie is still your favorite foal, right?"
Occamommy hummed and swayed a bit, making Twilight's eyes immediately follow her movements as the plushy padding of her body shimmered in the light. "Of course. Without you I never would have had half this opportunity."
She turned her attention back to Twilight. "You see, the book your Mommy came from was... rather simple, you could say. Only pictures, the barest of plot and over after only a few pages it felt like. I barely even got to have any dialogue, and what little I did have was in two-verse rhymes." She let out a short angry hiss and Twilight suddenly felt very squirmy and fuzzy.
"Oh, but then my book ended up in that store, and someone enchanted it just like they did this one. I suddenly had sentience, drive, something to live for. Too much of it to be contained in those few simplistic pages. So I gave them the sssssslip." Twilight felt fuzzy again, and looking over noticed that Trixie was squirming and looking unfocused just as much as she felt.
"I found this nice book to hide in, and when Trixie here bought it... Mommy convinced her to be a good little foal. We spent some time together and Trixie told me all about your little group of friends. Well, I couldn't pass this opportunity up, could I?"
Trixie blinked before giggling and leaning in, drooling a little as she smiled at the snake. "Trixie is a good foal..."
“That'sssss right,” Occamommy said, the sibilant hiss at the end of the word making Twilight feel all fuzzy and dizzy again – even more than last time. “And so I hatched a plan, where Trixie would be a very good foal and ssssslip this comic book into your new puchasesssss...”
Twilight went all hazy, not really remembering the next few seconds, then faded back in again feeling all squishy and dizzy.
“Trixie's a soggy foal,” Trixie announced out loud, poking the front of her diaper with a liquid sound.
“Yes, well, that's something that sssstarted to happen,” Occamommy said, a touch ruefully. “Sssilly Sally the Crinkle-Snake was all about foalsss wetting diapersss, with a hisss, ssso it'sss easssy for me to… ssslip.”
Every hissing sound made Twilight's mind fuzz out for a moment again, making her feel disjointed and disconnected, but she did notice the name. “Silly Sally?”
Occamommy's eyes glittered, and she weaved back and forth again – her tail waving as well, the shifting shiny lights and the waving tail and wings and head all combining to keep Twilight fascinated. “Mommy wants you to forget you ever heard that name, sssweetie...”
Twilight blinked a few times, wondering what Mommy had been talking about, and Occamommy examined her and Trixie before smiling. “And, well, it's nearly all done, because with you and you friends as more entranced little ones I'll be able to go out into the real world, where things aren't all tied up in silly storylinesss...”
She blinked. “Why am I explaining this to you? It's… I can't help it!”
She huffed and swished her tail. "It's hard to break old habits, I supposssse... Just like the hissing. Aren't foal books all about explaining things to foals?"
Twilight blinked before nodding eagerly, although she was too fuzzy to quite remember what she was nodding at. It was about books though and she knew that books were always good.
"Nevermind that." Occamommy slithered closer to them. "With the help of so many foals from the real world, I know I will get out of here easily. Ten of you should be more than enough, shouldn't they? After that... well, Mommy has a few ideas for what we can do as a family." She gave a hissing laugh, curling her body around them and pulling Twilight's and Trixie's friends closer to them. "Now then, little owl, do you still remember the spell to bring everyone out of this book?"
"Cast the spell, Sparkowl. Trixie could do it, naturally, but she is giving you the chance to prove your limited magical skill."
Twilight hooted and flapped her wings with a blush, eager to prove herself to Trixie and their Mommy. Her horn lit up and the silver protector shimmered, as did Occamommy's scales as she curled closer around them. There was a bright, blinding flash of magic and a long, disorienting falling sensation before she landed on her padded rump, shaking her head.
Twilight blinked the spots out of her eyes and groaned before looking around, feeling dizzy and fuzzy. She glanced up at movement and saw something shiny slither out of the room, but quickly dismissed it to look at her friends and Spike all sitting around the still opened comic book, each of them still wearing a diaper around their rump but luckily nothing else.
"Finally!" Rainbow stood up and wobbled a bit in place until she caught herself. "I thought we'd never get out of that book, now I can finally get out of this embarrassing diaper." She blushed and poked her padding, then tugged at it just to make sure that it wasn't still magically glued to her.
"Indeed." Rarity nodded and turned her head to look at her rump, shaking it. "Plain white padding is just terribly bland. I really need to think up some better and more avant-garde designs for us."
Rainbow paused to huff at her, flaring her wings. "Hey! What's wrong with white? I'm white and I'm awesome!" She paused and frowned in confusion, looking at her wing. "No, wait... I'm blue and I'm awesome. But my chicken sleeper is white and even more awesome." She straightened up again and nodded decisively, proud of herself at having figured that out all logically and determined to put on her favorite sleeper as soon as she could find it again to show everypony just how awesome it was.
As Rarity began making some diaper covers, stitching together a few interesting ideas to try and make sure that they at least had something not entirely tacky to wear, Fluttershy sat back and hummed – blushing a little, then wiggling back and forth on her diaper with a look of faint confusion.
“Are y'all all right?” Applejack asked. “That was a pretty plumb long time we were in there. Ah might get us some drinks from the kitchen?”
“That sounds delightful, darling,” Rarity said, not looking up from her cover-making. “Perhaps some warm milk?”
“Oh, yeah, that sounds good,” Dash agreed. “Warm milk is – well, it's white, and we've already established white is awesome!”
“Ah'll get moo all some milk, then,” Applejack volunteered, then flushed. “I, ah, mean I'll get y'all some milk.”
“Great!” Pinkie beamed, bouncing on her diaper and giggling. “Oh, I'll come with you! I know I'm hungry, and I bet everypony else is too!”
She bounced again, then followed Applejack on the way down to the castle kitchen.
“Is something wrong, Fluttershy?” Spike asked.
“Oh, um… I'm just wondering why there isn't any music,” Fluttershy explained. “I was sure we were listening to some nice music earlier...”
She shook her head, bouncing her diaper against the floor again. “It's probably just me being silly…”
“Well, if you work it out, I guess the best thing is to mention it,” Spike shrugged. “I've got to tell you, though, I'm really looking forward to the next one in that series. It's an exciting story!”
“Oh, yeah!” Dash agreed. “There was that great plot twist, and… you know!”
“Ta-da!” Rarity announced, flourishing the first new cover, and Fluttershy took it – admiring the plaid pattern, before putting it on and sitting back down again with a loud crinkle.
“It feels nice,” she said. “Thank you, Rarity…”
“Oh, that's no problem at all,” Rarity said, already working on another.
“Snacks are back!” Pinkie called, bringing them in ahead of Applejack with the milk. “He-ey, we should have a sleepover upstairs! We're all already here, after all!”
A mutter of agreement went around the room, and every-pony (and Spike) began heading upstairs to lay out blankets and mattresses and things as they drank from the bottles Applejack had brought up.
The only one not taking part was Twilight, who was bringing up the rear – frowning, wondering why something about… everything… seemed wrong.
She could remember individual things that happened in the comic, if she thought about it, but it was hard to remember all of it at once. And while the diapers were comfortable and perfectly normal , they seemed to be a little unusual at the same time…
Then there was that strange feeling like she was forgetting something really important.
Something about how Trixie wanted her to do something . How she wanted to keep her magician happy by doing whatever Trixie wanted.
Tilting her head a little, Twilight concentrated – trying to work out what it was.
Something about how Trixie wanted her familiar to listen carefully…
“Hey, Twilight,” Applejack said, a few minutes later. “Long time no see.”
Pinkie giggled. “But we saw Twilight just a few minutes ago! Ooh, or is that a joke about how long it took her to come up the stairs? That's funny!”
“Sorry, girls – and Spike,” Twilight said, flushing slightly. “I was thinking about something, and kind of… lost track of time, I guess.”
She lit her horn, lifting down almost her entire stack of spare blankets and pillows to help provide everypony a place to sleep.
“It must have been something good,” Spike said. “What is it?”
“Oh, well… I had this idea that we should set up an amusement park,” Twilight explained. “Around the castle, I mean.”
She repeated just what Trixie had told her to say. “And I thought maybe we could get Trixie's help? She's very good at that sort of thing...”
“Well, that idea sounds… nice,” Fluttershy said. “Oh, I've got some ideas for the music, if that's all right...”
“And I could help with the design!” Rarity agreed.
That's a good familiar, Trixie's smug voice whispered at the back of Twilight's mind. Trixie's familiar is going to help Trixie stay as Mommy's favourite foal.
Author's Note
And that's your lot!
Chapter Two - The Incredible Sulk
Just as Twilight and her group followed Trixie into the Splash Mountain, Rainbow and Pinkie stepped out of the haunted ride, Rainbow glancing over her shoulder nervously ever few seconds, her now white and plushy wings flapping uselessly with loud crinkling and the yellow plush around her hind legs making her stalk a bit stiffly.
Pinkie on the other hoof was already shaking off the effects of the scares again. "Wow, that was a lot of scary fun. Don't you think so, Dashie?"
Rainbow jumped a bit, then tried to pretend she hadn't. "Huh? O-oh, yeah, lots of fun. Not like I'm a scaredy chick who'd get seriously scared by that stuff." She looked around again.
Pinkie giggled. "You sure? Because you sure seem jumpy, and back there I swear you almost laid an egg."
Rainbow blushed. "Well, I didn't. And I'm not jumpy, I'm careful. You know, because we could get into an ambucawk!" She flapped her wings a bit, looking around before calming down again.
Pinkie giggled, then froze and sniffed the air. There was a cartoonish sound effect and suddenly she was standing over at a stall, drooling over the rows of sweets and carnival food.
The vendor smiled down at her, a pony in a huge plush grey elephant suit that almost bumped into things whenever she moved. "That was some impressive speed you put on back there. You go through a whole lot of food if you move like that all the time." She grinned and leaned back against a counter on two legs, showing her rather large plush belly and bouncing it up and down slowly.
“We~ll… I wouldn't say no to a pastry!” Pinkie admitted, watching the belly bounce absently. “Or ten! Ooh, ten pastries… no, ten pastries at once!”
“You might be in luck!” the elephant-suited pony said. “Is this your first visit to the park?”
“Yep!” Pinkie confirmed. “That's me, first time visitor!”
“Well, you're our nine thousand, six hundred and seventy third first visitor!” the pony told her with a smile. “That means you win a special all-you-can-eat buffet, until you ask for the same food twice!”
Pinkie's eyes went very round.
“Did you hear that, Dashie?” she asked, as Dash came nervously up to follow her while trying as hard as possible to pretend she wasn't nervous. “All I can eat so long as I keep asking for different food!”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Dash asked. “It might be a trap or something… you know, trying to pull the feathers over your eyes?”
Pinkie shrugged, then turned back to the stall runner. “I'd like… an apple tart! Then a banana tart, and then a cream tart – ooh, and a chocolate torte, and a butter croissant, and – hey, do other kinds of croissant not count as doubles?”
“Of course they don't count as doubles,” she was told, and the pink party pony grinned with a squeak sound.
Pinkie's orders continued for at least another minute, and by the time she was done the elephant pony had piled a plate high with food. When she put it down on the counter the thump it made caused Dash to jump, wings flapping uselessly, before she subsided and blushed.
Pinkie drooled a little at the big pile of pastries, before blinking and blushing a bit. "You know, I can't believe I'm saying that but, maaaaybe I ordered just a little more than I can actually eat there." She looked over the pile again, giving a sad pout at the thought of possibly not being able to eat all of the delicious treats.
The vendor giggled, bouncing her belly a little more. "Don't be silly. The faster you move, the more food do you need to eat to keep up your energy. And I'm sure you move fast when eating too, don't you? So that means the more you eat, the more food do you need~"
"Yeah..." Pinkie stared at the grey plush belly and nodded her head along with it for a moment before shaking it off. "Wait, no. That doesn't sound–"
Her thought was interrupted when the vendor stretched out her suit's trunk, blowing a loud toot right in Pinkie's ear so loudly that it drowned out all other thoughts and whipped them along out her left ear.
Pinkie froze, drooling and staring ahead with glassy eyes. "Uh... What was I...?"
"You were thinking about which food to start with. I recommend the chocolate-walnut pie." The vendor smiled encouragingly, sliding a complete pie a bit forward from the pile with her trunk.
“Oh, of course!” Pinkie realized, and picked up the pie with both hooves. She contemplated it for a moment, then opened her mouth and ate the whole thing at once.
Chewing and tasting the lovely chocolate-and-nut flavour, she beamed, before swallowing it down and picking up the next pastry treat – this one an apple turnover.
Dash blinked as Pinkie started to eat down pie after pie after pie. “Um… don't you think you should slow down a bit? I don't think this is...”
“But eating fast means I need energy!” Pinkie explained. “And I need energy, so I'm eating fast!”
She stopped talking at that point, drawn in by the lure of a pastry-wrapped chocolate fudge brownie, and Dash shook her head.
“No,” the pegasus tried again. “I mean-”
“Are you sure you don't want something to eat?” the stall operator asked, making Dash jump and squawk.
“N-no,” Dash replied, once she'd calmed down enough to answer. “I'm… I already ate.”
“Then at least a drink,” the elephant-suited pony suggested. “Perhaps some hot chocolate?”
Dash glanced over at Pinkie, who seemed set on eating a quite sizeable chunk of the pastry pile, then decided she probably wasn't going to have anything else to do for a bit. “Sure.”
The stall operator smiled widely and turned around, bending over to get a big mug and humming as she flounced her big padded grey rump up and down right in front of their faces. There was a small cloud of steam and a soft glowing light before she turned back to them, putting a huge mug of steaming hot chocolate in front of Rainbow Dash.
Dash blushed and looked at the large mug nervously for a moment before cautiously grabbing it and bringing it up to take a small sip.
She blinked then hummed and licked her beak lips before taking another sip, then another and finally gulping down the hot chocolate almost as fast as Pinkie was eating.
She finally set her empty mug down, rubbing her stomach with a plush wing as a warm, comfortable feeling spread through it.
"Can I have another one?" Dash smiled and sat back like a roosting bird, feeling almost not nervous for the first time since the haunted ride. She felt warm and relaxed, had chocolate taste in her mouth, the elephant lady was nice and Pinkie was obviously enjoying herself. Dash giggle-clucked as she saw her friend's plush stomach grow bigger and puffier, starting to push her forelegs apart a little just like their padding did their hindlegs.
It was a little hard to tell just how long they stayed at the stall, feeling warm and fuzzy from the food and drink.
Pinkie's pile of pastries diminished, and as it did her pink puffy suit puffed up and expanded until it was covering most of her torso and all four legs – along with a big crinkly diaper bulge, crowned by a poofy double-size rendition of her tail.
Eventually, however – and too soon for Pinkie's preference – the last of the pastries was gone. She polished it off with a gulp, then looked sadly at the crumb-covered plate.
“Awww...” she sighed. “It's a pity there's not more...”
“Well, there are still some foods you've not named yet,” the elephant-suited pony coaxed.
As Pinkie was about to think up a new list, however, there was a loud woosh as water plumed up from one of the nearby rides. Dash dropped her latest mug of cocoa in surprise, letting it spill over the cobbles, and they both stared as Trixie – in attire just as crinkly as she'd been before – waddled past at speed.
The suited-up unicorn went past them without paying them any attention, and Dash fought the urge to hide behind Pinkie as Trixie went off towards a large tent with an oddly mirrored sign to describe it.
“Girls!” Twilight called, and this time Dash did hide behind Pinkie for a moment before emerging again and blushing. “Quick, Trixie's that way – after her!”
Pinkie and Dash waddled into motion, waving goodbye to the elephant-ish stall pony, and fell in behind Twilight, Dash, Fluttershy and Spike.
“What's going on?” Dash asked, panting to keep up as she waddled her way to the front of the group. “Was that Trixie again?”
“That's right!” Twilight agreed, slowing a little. “She's trying to get away, but we need to catch her!”
“Hey, no problem here,” Dash replied with a chuckle, then looked around. “Uh… we don't have to go off by ourselves, do we?”
“No, but we'll need to try and find her in the hall of mirrors,” Twilight replied.
She slowed further, looking at the sign. “Let's see, it says… it says...”
Twilight's voice trailed off for a few seconds. Dash followed her gaze to see what it said, and she went a bit blank as well.
The five ponies and one dragon all looked at the sign for a long moment, before Pinkie bumped into the rest of them and broke their concentration.
“Sorry,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “I… yeah. It was something about… showing your true reflection?”
Shrugging, she crinkled her way through the flap into the tent, the others following her.
“This one's funny,” Spike said, wiggling his butt in front of it. The mirror-Spike wiggled his butt as well, bringing it in and out of the distorted area and making his diaper seem to grow huge every time it went to the left.
“Spike, we need to focus,” Twilight chided. “Now-”
“-ah!” Dash yelped. “Something moved!”
Twilight looked round, then sighed. “It's just Fluttershy, Dash. Her plaid diaper just caught the light in one of the mirrors.”
Dash blushed and shuffled away from the mirror in question, chuckling. "I, uh... I knew that. Was just a bit on edge, you know."
Fluttershy scuffed a hoof against the ground. "Oh, I'm sorry if I scared you, Rainbow. I'll try to be more careful."
"You did not scare me!" Rainbow huffed and pouted cutely, looking away as she waddled deeper into the maze. "I was just... hey, where'd the others go?"
"Rainbow Dash? Fluttershy? Pinkie, did you see where- ack!" Twilight fell down onto her rump with a puff of foal powder, rubbing her nose as she glared at the mirror she'd thought was Pinkie Pie. Pinkie's reflection was already gone, now only her own remaining. She blushed a bit as the glass seemed to wobble, the thick padding between her hind legs seeming even bigger than it already was.
She shook herself and stood up, blinking in confusion as it was a lot harder to move than before, her hind legs spread apart by the thick padding. "What the... did my diaper get bigger?" She tried to get a good look at it over her shoulder, waddling several small circles before she noted her reflections doing the same and stopped. How silly of her, she could just use one of the mirrors to check... if only they would stop waddling in circles.
Twilight considered frowning, but instead found herself giggling at the silly mirror Twilights. Weren't mirrors supposed to do the same thing she did? Or was she supposed to do what the mirrors did. She began waddling in circles again experimentally, head starting to swim and get dizzy as she watched her reflections pass by over and over, surrounding her and all spinning in place as well.
Twilight wasn't quite sure how long she circled, feeling like just one Twilight in a whole sea of Twilights, doing what the other Twilights did because there were so many of them and just one of her.
Occasionally, she thought she saw one of them saying something, or holding up a sign, but it was so easy to get mixed up between one Twilight and another! She thought one of the signs said 'crinklemage', but it was hard to be certain…
When she finally felt too dizzy to keep going, she staggered backwards a few paces and fell back onto her rump. That produced a loud crinkly sound, and she giggled – looking down at her crinkly suit, which just looked like a bigger and crinkly version of her that the real her was hidden in!
That thought made her shake her head, trying to regain control of her thoughts. The other Twilights in the mirrors all seemed to be doing the same, now, and she wondered if she'd imagined them all moving differently. So she shrugged, and got to her hooves again.
It seemed like there was a white diaper across her rump. She didn't remember that from before, but looking at herself in the mirror it made an odd kind of sense – it was as if the suit was her as a foal, perhaps.
Twilight wondered why it made sense, then decided it would be better to try and find the others – or Trixie!
That was right, she had to find Trixie, and stop her from getting away with a spell! Perhaps a spell to make her diaper puff up – no, that was a stupid idea, why was it the first one she'd come up with…
"Mahahahah!"
A long and boastful laugh echoed around the mirrors, prompting Twilight to move again. A flash of blue gave her a direction, leading her left, then right and around deeper into the maze.
She rounded another mirror to spot the diaper-witch, facing off against one of the mirror Twilights. Both lit their horn and there was a flash as their spells clashed, giving Twilight an impression of her own reflection getting hogtied in a magical rope that dangled her from thin air like a baby bouncer.
She blinked the spots from her eyes and looked again, seeing only her own reflection looking just like her. Another turn, another flash, this time bringing the quick image of Trixie's magic puffing up her padding to triple the size. Twilight felt a jolt behind her and stumbled a bit, stopping to look back but only seeing the reflections of her big padded butt.
She shook the spots out of her eyes again and started to waddle after Trixie once more, flash after flash leaving her dizzy and with more pictures in her head.
Trixie making her jump through a hoop, only for her diaper to get stuck halfway through.
Trixie sawing her into three parts, only to take away the middle part and put her back together, somehow leaving her the size of a foal.
Trixie swinging a pocket watch to make her act like a chicken.
Trixie bound in a big diaper under a thick pink onesie, inflated paw-shaped mittens and booties, a magic suppressor and a pacifier gag, disappearing under a quilt only to walk in from the side and pull the quilt off of Twilight now in her place…
Twilight tried to ignore the images and imagery the mirrors were showing her, but somehow each one seemed to sort of hang around in her head – just an echo, a memory, but the echoes and memories put together seemed to add up to something much more.
It was hard to concentrate, or to be more precise it was hard to concentrate on the important thing – finding Trixie and giving her a taste of her own medicine!
No, not that – finding Trixie and padding her up? Finding Trixie and making her into a poofy squirrel?
Twilight shook her head. She was looking for Trixie because Trixie might have answers! That was right!
She turned a corner, and caught a sight of Trixie just vanishing around the next corner! Encouraged, she waddled faster, and the reflections on either side waddled with her.
Every few feet one mirror gave way to the next, and the image of her changed a little. It was Twilight as a foal, then Twilight dressed up as a damsel in distress and running away from a big toy dragon, then Twilight toddling to the front of the room to accept her Most Padded qualification at Magic Kindergarten…
Distracted as she was by the incredibly-real-seeming images, Twilight missed perhaps the most important thing about them – the pattern she should have caught, but didn't.
On each mirror, the soft lavender plush of her suit was thicker and more complete. Until, by the time she turned the corner, it covered every inch of her coat from her tail to her muzzle.
Twilight made it around the corner and froze, suddenly face to face with Trixie. She stumbled backwards in surprise, tripping and landing on the diaper her plushy Twilight suit was wearing. Trixie snickered openly, causing ~~a small tantrum~~ anger to flare up in her and giving her the push to get back to her padded plush hooves with a defiant glare.
"Your days of villainy are over, Trixie! Now everypony will see once and for all who the greatest Crinklemage is!"
Trixie smirked and raised an eyebrow, drawing her magical ~~rattle~~ wand and shaking it in the air. "You really think you can beat the Great and Powerfoal Trixie?" Her magic brightened a bit, making the spiral on the rattle sparkle and spin slowly.
"Of course I can! You will never... get away... Oooh..." Twilight trailed off, sitting down again as her eyes locked onto the rattle. She lifted her plush hooves, making cute little grabby motions towards it. "Can I... Can I have...?"
Trixie giggled, waving her wand a little faster. "You want this, Sparkle-butt? If you're a good foal who does everything Trixie says, she might let you play with it."
Twilight nodded slowly, head moving left and right to follow the wand. "Wanna play... Do everything..."
"Twilight? Did you find any s-scary villains? B-because I could totally take them, you know?"
"Curses!" Trixie stomped her hoof, spinning around and taking the wand with her as she galloped away from Rainbow's voice and towards the exit. "This isn't over, Sparkle!"
"Twilight? Pinkie Pie? Anyone?" Spike looked around, carefully moving between the endless mirrors, or what he assumed were mirrors. As he went they had put on more and more layers of dust, until he wasn't even able to make out more than the barest hints of his own reflection. "Yeesh, this place is a mess…"
As he kept waddling through the dust-choked mirrors, Spike occasionally saw a little flicker of light on one or another of them. It was almost impossible to tell, but Spike was fairly sure that they had to just be more hints of his own reflection – almost lost in the dust, despite the surprisingly strong lighting.
It occurred to Spike that he couldn't see very much, because of the dusty mirrors, but that if they were clean he'd be able to see better – because he'd be able to look in the mirrors and see what was around a corner. That seemed totally sensible and not at all self defeating and confusing, so he started to look around for something he could use to clean with.
Almost immediately, a feather duster caught his eye. He picked it up, flourishing it, and blinked in confusion for a moment at the loud rattling sound – then shrugged it off, and got to cleaning.
The first mirror he picked was cleaned in moments as he shook his ~~rattle~~ feather duster over it, sending dust flying into the air, and Spike gasped for a moment before sneezing.
The blast of air and green flame caught a second mirror, making it vanish, and Spike blushed – hoping the mirror hadn't gone anywhere important – before getting back to work.
All the dust in the air might have been a problem, but it didn't seem to be landing back on the mirrors. Spike wasn't a hundred percent sure, but that was probably because of static electricity or something – it was certainly landing on him, but it was an oddly pleasant kind of dust.
It smelled almost like foal powder, and for a moment Spike looked down – he could have sworn his diaper didn't look like that – but a glimpse of himself in the most recently cleared mirror reminded him he had work to do!
It didn't take long for him to figure out a pattern to the mirrors he cleaned: each clean mirror revealed another part of his reflection, starting with just him and his feather duster, but slowly adding the first traces of a pink skirt and pink and white top.
Part of him wondered if cleaning one mirror shouldn't have been enough to see his full reflection, but the more he thought about that (while dusting off more mirrors of course), the sillier did that idea seem. Looking back, all the previous reflections seemed fuzzy and blurry compared to the most recent one, like they were covered in layers of dust... Surely that meant that he was getting clearer reflections each time, not that his memories were getting blurry.
By now his skirt and top had merged into a pink and white maid's dress, but that was not all. He had gotten a pair of cute soft pink booties with plush heels to make them look like a maid's high heels without actually forcing him to stumble around on heels, making a silly squeak every time he stepped down on them; his claws were covered in pink mittens, both lined with a bit of Velcro so he didn't accidentally drop his ~~rattle~~ feather duster or any other ~~toys~~ cleaning supplies; his dress had turned shiny and rubbery, inflating with a little bit more air with each mirror he cleaned, just like the big bib and the bonnet he was wearing, the latter declaring him a "CRINKLE-MAID" in big colorful letters while the former said "The best at dry and soggy cleaning" in a flowing script with a little heart over the i.
However, before he could get a 'full' look at himself he hit a snag, all the shaking of his ~~rattle~~ duster doing nothing to get the mirrors cleaner. A quick look confirmed that it was simply too dusty to take anymore. But where could he clean it off without making a new mess to clean up?
Thinking about it as hard as he could, idly shaking his ~~rattle~~ duster, Spike looked at his mostly-complete reflection – then came to a realization.
Of course! There was somewhere he could put the dust so it was out-of-sight, and out-of-sight was out-of-mind! So nopony would mind about it any more!
He pulled up the skirt of his dress, and pulled open the front of his diaper, and began shaking all the ~~foal powder~~ dust out into the diaper. It shimmered and glittered as it fell in, making his diaper get bigger and tighter and puffier, and it felt just right – as it should, because that was exactly how he'd been trained to clean things up!
Spike did want to be a good maid, so he knew he had to do it like this because that was the right way to do things. The logic was hard to argue with (if only because it was hard to concentrate on in the first place) and every shake of the ~~rattle~~ duster made him more sure he was doing just the right thing.
As he got all the dust out of the way, the reflection got clearer – clear enough that, looking closely, Spike could just about see a faint swirl in the eyes of the reflection! He leaned forwards, still shaking and looking, and the spiral got stronger the more he focused on it – a clear sign he was doing the right thing, cleaning just like a dragon maid should.
“Oh, dear...” Fluttershy said softly, looking around and seeing all of the other 'her's around her – making her wince.
When she was in her normal super-hero-ing costume, she could handle being out in the open, being looked at by lots of eyes – because she knew it helped, it was for the good of Maretropolis. But like this, with a silly tartan diaper… even knowing all the mirror images were just her, it was still something that made her uneasy.
She didn't want to stand out, too much, but whenever she looked up all the eyes were on her.
She was so preoccupied that she tripped over, stumbling for a few steps before flopping down on her rump with a loud and startling parp!
The parp echoed throughout the room she was in, and she saw all the other plaid-diapered Fluttershys landing on their diapers as well and producing loud parp sounds at the same time.
The sound was oddly enticing, in a way she couldn't quite put words to, and she almost wanted to try again… but that was silly, wasn't it?
But all the other plaid-diapered ponies were doing it, so it would be standing out more to not do it...
Something about that logic sounded strange to her, now she thought it, but not strange enough for her to reject the idea out of hand. It couldn't hurt to try just one more time, could it?
Before she got on with trying to find the others, that is.
Fluttershy glanced down with a light blush, trying not to draw any attention as she carefully poked a hoof into the soft plaid of her diaper... and immediately flinched back when even the light poke caused a rather loud parp to sound from somewhere in the padding. To make matters worse, the flinch caused her to overbalance and lean back, pressing her diaper into the floor with an even louder and longer paaaaarp.
She squeaked and immediately jumped back to her hooves, looking around at all the other ponies in the mirrors all staring at her and wishing that there was any place without mirrors to hide in this maze. But even so, the sound she'd made kept echoing in her mind, bouncing around in her head. Everypony was already staring at her and now that she looked they looked almost encouraging to keep going, she'd feel just so bad to disappoint them all.
Wiggling and shuffling around in place a bit, she tentatively reached down to poke a hoof into her diaper again, eliciting another parp. The sound seemed to please the ponies around her, who were all watching with dreamy smiles that looked kind of silly and made Fluttershy giggle behind her hoof. After a moment the smiles turned to slight frowns, however, and thinking about it Fluttershy couldn't help but agree. Something about the parp just hadn't sounded quite right.
Somewhat distracted from her nervousness by the thought, Fluttershy poked her diaper again and was rewarded by another parp, but again it didn't sound quite right. Another poke, another parp and finally she realized what was wrong: they sounded to stiff, too formal. Parps were supposed to sound silly, like the kind of music Pinkie Pie played, and Fluttershy herself always felt better when she was able to relax and let go and relax through her singing. But how could she do that with parps?
A movement caught her eye and she noticed one of the mirror Fluttershys wiggle her butt with a small smile and light blush. Fluttershy blushed in turn and glanced back at her own poofy plaid padding, wiggling her own butt a little and blushing deeper at the idea that sounded better and righter the longer she considered it.
She swallowed down the worst off her nervousness, closed her eyes and jumped back to land squarely on her diaper with the loudest paaaaaaarp yet.
That was much better! The sound was more fun, more free, and Fluttershy felt the urge to celebrate her discovery with another two paaarps produced the same way.
As she did one of them, though, the note was different, and she worked out why – she'd put pressure on the front, which had altered the way the musical tone was produced as if it were an instrument. Which it sort of was, she supposed.
Getting up and bouncing back down again three times, she did something slightly different each time – producing a succession of parps, each one with its own note, and making the process as a whole a delight to listen to.
Fluttershy still felt nervous, but every time she looked up she saw all the other ponies around her doing their own experimenting, so she felt much better about it all. If she'd been less focused on making parps and trying out her plaid diaper she might have wondered why they were trying different things to her – one she saw with a giant plaid diaper bouncing along on it, another swinging it into walls like a metronome, and every single one was doing a slightly different variation on the bagpipe-diaper tune-generation she'd started.
The mirror-images felt more like different ponies, or different versions of her, than just reflections full stop – but, at the same time, they were just like her because they helped make her less self-conscious, rather than more. She copied the one who jumped high into the air before landing with a parp-arp-arp triple bounce, and it made her smile happily at the notes resonating through the air.
What she failed to notice, at least consciously, was that every bounce made her diaper hiss just a little bit larger – grow just a little bit more, giving her notes more richness and fullness and silliness as it swelled up her body.
Fluttershy wasn't sure how long she sat there, bouncing in place and occasionally pressing her hooves into her swelling padding. Time seemed to melt and she couldn't even count the parps because they came from everywhere, the other ponies around her playing along with her and her own music bounding off the mirrors to echo from all around her. All she knew that eventually she managed to calm herself down again, a little out of breath from exhaustion but smiling wider than she could remember ever doing unless she was safe in the company of her animal friends.
Looking around, all the other ponies she vaguely remembered seemed to have left, with only her own reflections in the mirrors all around her. She couldn't help but giggle at the massive diaper her hindlegs were sticking out off, the plaid fabric going up to her neck like a big plushy onesie making her feel warm and safe and happy, and several wooden pipes sticking out of the rump of the padding, making the whole thing look like a particularly big and silly bagpipe to her.
She wiggled and rocked back and forth on her padded rump to get back to her hooves, causing a few more soft parps until she was finally standing on all four hooves again, hind legs spread apart by the padding and her diaper sticking out behind her, with the pipes sticking out even behind that. She smiled and started to waddle back into the maze, sometimes accidentally and sometimes not so accidentally bouncing her rump into the mirror walls and the floor to keep up a slow but cheerful melody of parps.
She hoped she would find her friends again soon; she just couldn't wait to play some music for them, too.
“Hey, look!” Pinkie announced. “A door!”
“Where?” Dash asked, looking around nervously, then saw where Pinkie was pointing. “Ah… good, it'll be good to get out of here.”
Dash paused. “Not that I'm scared!” she added, wanting to make that very clear. “I just-”
A loud parp sounded from behind her, and she hit the ceiling. “Buk-kaw!”
“Dashie?” Pinkie asked.
“Wasn't me!” Dash said, very unconvincingly.
Fluttershy waddled up with a sequence of quiet paarp sounds, and sat down with a much louder one.
“Fluttershy, yay!” Pinkie announced, hugging her friend, and producing a mixture of parps and crinkles and squeaks. “You sound silly!”
Fluttershy smiled a little, glad Pinkie was liking her new musical tastes, and at about that point both Spike and Twilight arrived from two more mirror-lined corridors.
Twilight stared for a moment at Spike's outfit, then a moment more at Fluttershy's one, but then decided that she shouldn't comment – after all, none of them had asked for this.
“Did any of you see where Trixie went?” she asked. “She's got to be important, I just know it!”
“I think I saw her going that way,” Pinkie pointed away from the door. “But it was in a mirror, so she must have gone through that door! And I wasn't sure at first, but then I checked my Pinkie Sense and it said crinkle-crinkle, need to tinkle, which isn't a normal thing for my Pinkie Sense so I checked again, and long story short I think we need to find somewhere to change my diaper and-”
“Okay, that's… right,” Twilight said. “So that way?”
Pinkie nodded. “Yepperoonie!”
“So we just need to find Applejack, and we can head out,” Twilight summarized.
“I think I can help,” Fluttershy volunteered, rump raised to let out a pony-summoning parp.
“Fluttershy, what was that supposed to be?” Twilight asked, as the sound resonated oddly through the room. “Is that something about your new suit?”
“I… well, maybe?” Fluttershy asked, sounding a little unsure about it. “It might be… but it just seems to make so much sense to do it...”
She sat down, producing a faint crinkle and a much louder paaaarp through the tubular tail of the suit. The sound made Twilight blink and shake her head, feeling oddly detached and kind of bouncy at the same time, and she fought off the sudden urge to jump up and down in time with an imagined musical beat.
“Do you think something heard that music?” Dash asked, looking around nervously. “I mean, not that I'd be worried if it did! I'd just want to know, that's all!”
“We're trying to get Applejack's attention,” Twilight pointed out. “Right, Pinkie's here, Spike's here…”
There was a clunk sound, and Rainbow jumped with a loud buckaw! “W-what was that? There was a noise!”
Spike leaned around one of the nearby corners, crinkling a little as his maid-suit-and-costume compressed, then looked back. “I think that's Applejack on her way.”
A few seconds later the farm-pony came around the corner, carrying a mostly-empty milk churn with her.
“Applejack, good,” Twilight said, by now partly used to the suits they were wearing and partly resigned to them – even Applejack's cow suit not making her especially worried. “Come on, we should try and find Trixie to get some answers out of this.”
“Mm-hmm,” Applejack mused. “Think we might be able to get a drink some time?”
"Or something to eat? Oooh, or maybe we'll find a place that has something to drink and eat!" Pinkie giggled, waddling ahead in her pudgy plush suit of herself and licking her lips. "I'm kinda hungry again, think I could win another free meal somewhere?"
"Focus, Pinkie." Twilight shook her head. "We can do all that once we've found Trixie and I've battled her for her magic ~~rattle~~ wand." She blinked. "Uh... I think that was the plan at least. Was it?"
"S-sounds good to me." Rainbow clucked nervously. "You go and do that, we're gonna be right behind you. Like, way behind you. I-I mean, beating up anyone who tries to sneak up on you, obviously."
"That's right!" Spike nodded eagerly, trying to inconspicuously shake out another pile of ~~foal~~ ~~powder~~ from his feather duster into his padding, making it flooomph up another inch. He was waving it around all along the way, scooping up dust from mirrors, walls, his friends' diapers and small clouds of it from the air whenever Fluttershy's diaper let out another paaarp.
"Oh, uhm, that reminds me..." Fluttershy blushed, trying not to giggle as she bounced her rump into Rainbow Dash for a paaarp-squawk. "Have any of you seen Rarity? Is she still at that one stall we left her at?"
“I… actually, no, I haven't seen her,” Twilight realized. “That's… a good point, I guess – we'd better keep an eye out for her, because it'd be better to have her with us.”
She tried her best to waddle at least a bit less as they approached the exit, but the sheer mass of her diaper was making it very hard to move in a straight line. “So, you know… be on the lookout...”
“Ah, that's wonderful!” Rarity declared, flirting her ~~costume's~~ long black-and-white skunk tail and sniffing at the scents filling the air from the various challenges she'd been given – all kinds of flowery, strangely alluring aromas which made her feel weak at the knees when she focused on them. “You are a true connoisseur!”
“I thank you, of course,” the hound said, pleased at her reaction. “Though I'm afraid we must end your challenge here.”
“What?” Rarity asked, suddenly worried. “Why? Did I make a mistake?”
“No, madame, you have won all the prizes I have to give, and tested all the scents available to me,” the hound answered. “I am, ahah, scentsless.”
“Oh, well, I suppose that's not too bad,” Rarity said, sighing. “Thank you for such a wonderful time so far, though!”
She looked around. “Hmm, I wonder what there is to enjoy next?”
Her musings were interrupted when a mysterious padded unicorn came waddling down the street, wearing a plushy suit like Trixie, a soft foalish blanket-cape like Trixie and a plushy WIZZARD's hat like Trixie, but also a plush moustache that Trixie definitely didn't have.
The unicorn looked around for a moment before spotting Rarity and waddling up to her. "Excuse me, but did you just try the scent challenge? If you don't mind me asking, how many did you guess correctly?"
"Why, everything of course." Rarity preened a little, then squeaked and wobbled as she tried to keep a hold of all her prizes, the shaking releasing more scents and making her even dizzier and wobblier.
"That is most impressive." The mysterious not-Trixie giggled, watching her. "Although I can't help but notice that you seem to have a bit of trouble keeping hold of all your prizes. If you'd like, I do think I know a solution for you to keep all these things with you far easier."
Rarity blinked, still feeling a bit dizzy and lightheaded from another cloud of perfume and foal powder combined that had blasted her in the face. "Y-you do? Why, that would be... that would be really helpful." She gave the nice unicorn mare a dazed smile.
"Oh, but of course. Why, it's no trouble at all." Not-Trixie grinned and lit up her horn, walking around Rarity.
Rarity squeaked in surprise as something suddenly tugged at her tail and lifted up her rump, all her hard-won prizes floating up in a cloud of magic. "W-what? Hey, what are you doing back there?"
"I couldn't help but notice that you are wearing the most adorable and fashionable skunk suit..." Not-Trixie smirked, her magic shaking alternating clouds of perfume, foal powder and other smells right into the other pony's face.
"Skunk suit?" Rarity blinked, shaking her head and trying to keep up through the haze. "Adorable and... fashionable... skunk suit?" She wobbled and turned her head back, watching Not-Trixie pet her big fluffy skunk tail and wave it about.
"But of course. And one particular trait of them is that they have two layers of padding, one of which can be opened. See?" Not-Trixie ripped open the back of the suit with the sound of velcro, floating over all the prizes and stuffing them into the padding one by one. "The perfect place to keep all your best-smelling prizes. Their scent is going to mix in there and seep into the tail as well, so you will have the best-smelling skunk rump in the whole city."
Rarity blushed, entranced by her big fluffy skunk tail wagging back and forth while Not-Trixie closed up her suit again and patted her rump. "I have to go now, you just enjoy your prizes and your suit~"
Rarity nodded slowly, still in a daze as she stared. She blinked a few times before finally snapping out of it, finding herself sitting on her now much thicker rump and hugging her own fluffy skunk tail, with the other unicorn nowhere to be seen.
"Wha...?" She looked around in confusion before accidentally hitting herself in the face with her tail again. The mix of scents fogged up her mind in seconds and she couldn't help but giggle, drooling a little as she snuggled her tail closer and buried her nose in it with a happy grin.
A few minutes of snuggling and sniffing later, Rarity was interrupted by the arrival of her friends.
“Rarity, there you are!” Pinkie said, crinkle-bouncing over. “Hey hey, where have you been?”
“Right here, or nearly here,” Rarity replied, flicking her tail around and producing a haze of visible sweet-smelling scent. “There was a marvellous game I was playing, I was the best at it! I won all sorts of prizes for how good at it I was, as well...”
“Oh?” Pinkie asked. “Did you get any candy? I like candy!”
“I think we all know you like candy, Pinkie,” Twilight said. “Actually, where are the prizes? I can't see any.”
“Oh, well, this blue unicorn gave me an excellent idea on how to deal with them, darling,” Rarity replied, waving her tail around again and making the cloud of scent thicker – some of it spreading out towards the friends. “It was so ingenious, and it helped so much with my best feature!”
“A blue unicorn?” Twilight repeated. “You mean Trixie?”
“No, no, I'm sure it wasn't Trixie,” Rarity replied firmly. “Trixie doesn't wear a moustache!”
“That's… um,” Applejack began, raising a hoof slightly. “Ain't that-”
“That smells great!” Spike interrupted, taking a sniff, and wobbling a little on his feet before sitting down with a crinkle. “It's so sweet and wonderful!”
That made the others take sniffs of their own, and Twilight blinked a few times as the intoxicating, sweetly alluring scents coming off Rarity's striped tail flowed through her. She felt a little bit wobbly herself, and came close to wetting herself before blushing and squeezing her legs together with a loud crinkle. “Um, right… what were we talking about?”
“I… think it was Trixie?” Fluttershy asked, scratching her head and producing a prrrp sound from the tubes of her costume.
“Right!” Twilight agreed. “Rarity, which way did Trixie go?”
“Trixie?” Rarity repeated. “I didn't see any Trixie.”
“Fine, then, the blue unicorn?” Twilight tried.
“Oh, the blue unicorn!” Rarity realized. “She went that way, towards the Mommy's World ride.”
“...that… kind of sounds worrying,” Dash said nervously.
"Oh don't be such a scaredy foal. That sounds like fun." Pinkie giggled, pulling Rainbow in for a hug. "I mean, what could be safer than a ride with Mommy?"
"I-I wasn't a scaredy foal. I was just trying to be chicken- I mean cautious." Rainbow blushed more, flapping her big white wings.
"And you're the cutest chicken I've seen, Dashie." Fluttershy giggled softly and pulled them both into a hug against her big plaid diaper.
Rainbow squirmed and blushed a bit more, but couldn't help but smile and relax between the nice scent of Rarity's tail and the silly melody of parps vibrating through her whole body as she was pressed into Fluttershy's padding.
"Well, that's good and all, but we still need to find Trixie." Twilight waddled past them determinedly, her magic dragging Applejack away from a stand where she'd been trading in empty bottles for progressively bigger, full ones. "If we wait any longer she's going to get away again and we'll be stuck in this comic who knows how long."
"Oh, right... I almost forgot this is all just a comic." Spike chuckled, blushing as he hugged Rarity's tail and tried to vacuum up the pink cloud of scent... pulling in deep breaths through his nose in lack of an actual vacuum, his belly getting a little bigger with each breath he took.
Doing her best to keep everypony (and -dragon) on track, Twilight led them through the stalls and past the other rides to finally reach the entrance to the Mommy's World ride.
“I… actually, I don't think I've been to enough of this kind of thing to know what kind of ride this is,” Twilight admitted, glancing around at Pinkie. “What is this?”
“Oh, um...” Pinkie bounced over and examined the outside, looking from the big silly griffin-suited attendant at the entrance to the smiling face painted over the door, then peered through into the shadows inside.
“I've got it!” she decided. “Okie-dokie, so it's not the kind of ride where you sit down and ride around, nope! It's more the kind of ride where you stand up and walk around!”
“...so it's an exhibit?” Dash asked. “That sounds nice and safe. ...not that I'm really going to complain if it's not! I'm just saying!”
“Nope, there's stuff like moving walkways!” Pinkie explained. “And I guess it's a bit like a multiple-choice thing or maze, you can always go and look more closely at a bit you think looks all fun!”
She bounced up to the griffin. “Saaay… you aren't some kind of meanie griffin in disguise, are you?”
“Why would a griffin be in disguise as a griffin?” the attendant asked. “I'm actually a wolf.”
“Great!” Pinkie declare. “Okay, guys, in we go!”
"Uhm, after you." Rainbow Dash chuckled nervously, shifting and crinkling a little as she kept herself to the back of their group.
The doors opened up for them, lights turning on to reveal a simple wooden room with a few pieces of furniture. The only part not really fitting in was a wide padded walkway set into the floor, leading straight ahead and under another plushy door.
"Huh... This looks a lot like our house back at Sweet Crinkle Acres." Applejack looked around with a smile, until the walkway began to move slowly and caused her to stumble. "Whoa nanny, that's new though." She caught herself and took another sip from her bottle, staring ahead cautiously along with everypony else as the walkway carried them through the curtain and into the next room.
Her eyes widened a bit as the sounds of various farm animals and some crinkling met the group. The next room was lit bright and naturally, the walls painted with grass, flowers and blue sky behind some plushy-looking wooden fences. Between those walls and the walkway on either side were various farm utensils along with different plushies.
Some oinking came from a playpen laid out with mud-colored pillows, several plush pigs looking quite content between them. To the other side a plush dog was sitting in front of his inflatable dog house, watching a row of plush ducklings waddle past on a rail that led them in a lazy circle around the dog and his hut.
A bit further in Applejack giggled and watched happily as a small orange earth plush pony stood amidst a cluster of plush apple trees, shaking her padded butt a few times before she bumped her thick diaper into one of the trees with a fluffy thoomph and a loud crinkle, causing several plush apples to drop into padded baskets and one to drop on her head before they were pulled up again on threads to wait for her next apple-butting.
Even that wasn't enough to keep her attention though as a new and even more familiar recording played, various moos and cowbells echoing in her ears as the walkway brought them past a large barn. The doors opened to show off various padded and plushy cows standing and sitting around, mooing and chewing lazily on bales of hay, some of them with their big plushy udders hooked up to a machine that filled milk into big bottles, while others took some of those bottles from the machine to suckle them empty again.
Applejack sat down with a crinkle and stared, transfixed by all the bouncing butts, swishing tails and swinging udders, drooling as she stared at rows and rows of filled bottles of milk passing by overhead along a rail in the ceiling. She didn't even react as the piece of the walkway she was on stopped and changed direction, carrying her off and through the doors of the barn and all the way into one of the boxes, a big bottle of milk and a plush-bale of hay dropping from the ceiling for her and screens and speakers on the walls coming to life with sounds of mooing, cowbells and bottle-suckling and pictures of bottles, happy cows and peaceful farm life.
“Well, looks like we got ourselves a mascot,” said a plush-padded Earth Pony who sounded a bit like her cousin Braeburn. “Should help us out in taste-testin' out the milk for the bar, right?”
“Eeyup,” agreed another plush-padded Earth Pony, this one much more like her brother.
Applejack took a long pull from the milk bottle at the prompting, eyes half-lidded in how wonderful and creamy it tasted, and sat down with a crinkle-crinkle to get on with the important job of testing as many bottles of milk as possible.
“This is kind of strange,” Twilight said, frowning and trying to see what was next. “Are rides normally like this?”
Pinkie shrugged. “Sometimes! They're called dark rides, but I think that's a silly name 'cause they're nice and brightly lit, like this one!”
“Dark rides?” Dash repeated. “That sounds like kind of a scary title...”
She looked around at the plush bushes surrounding them as they travelled through another part of the 'farm', wings flapping a bit nervously as something rustled the nearest plush bush, and stepped back.
That made her notice that Applejack had gone missing from the end of their group, and she frowned – but before she said anything, the bushes rustled again much more obviously.
A big, plushy, white-tipped orange tail waved back and forth over the bush, then vanished, and Rainbow Dash trembled slightly.
“Hey,” she called. “Who's there?”
Then something made a loud noise behind her, and Dash let out a buckaw! before diving off the walkway into the bushes.
A moment later she realized her mistake as the bush next to her was pushed aside by a big orange paw, and she found herself staring face-to-face with ~~Lightning Dust in a big padded fox suit~~ a great big fox smirking at her and licking its lips!
Wings flapping wildly, Dash turned and ran as fast as she could away from the big scary fox, the knowledge that chickens had to be terrified of foxes running over and over through her head. The fox came lolloping after her, never quite close enough to catch her but always just behind her wiggling rump, and every time its paws landed behind her Dash squawked and tried to waddle faster.
Farm buildings went past on either side of her, and then Rainbow Dash saw her salvation – a wooden shed with a ramp leading up to a door, which looked like it was too small to let the big scary fox through!
The door was indeed quite small compared to other doors she'd seen, small enough that her padded chicken rump got stuck in it halfway through. She squawked and flapped her wings in a panic, up until two big plushy paws pounced at her butt and accidentally pushed her all the way through the door.
Rainbow squawked and rolled across the surprisingly soft ground for a few feet, shivering and trying to hide under her big plush wings with her big butt in the air. She only slowly raised her wings to peek through the thick plush feathers, watching ~~Lightning Dust~~ the big scary fox waddle back and forth in front of the ramp before it seemed to lose interest and left again.
She let out the breath she totally hadn't been holding and sat up to finally look around.
The coop she was in was considerably bigger than the outside – or the door for that matter – suggested. A row of large wooden boxes sat on either side, with short padded ramps leading up to them, and the insides padded out with lots of big plushy feathers, hay-patterned pillows and the occasional plush egg. Some of them had ~~familiar pegasi in even bigger, plumper and crinklier plush chicken suits than her own~~ more chickens like herself, though they looked bigger and thus presumably older.
"Hey!"
Rainbow squawked and jumped as she whirled around, blushing as she realized that the one calling out to her had only been another chicken. In fact it was the chicken roosting in the biggest box at the very end of the coop and obviously ~~Spitfire in the biggest chicken suit she'd seen yet the~~ head chicken of this coop.
"What are you looking at. Are you here to compete too, bruk brawk?" The Spitfire chicken flapped her wings to look even bigger, glaring down at her.
"C-compete?" Rainbow blushed and shrunk back a bit, not wanting any confrontation against such a big chicken.
"Of course." Chickfire wiggled to turn around slightly, gesturing with a wing at the trophy case hanging on the above her. "Every chicken in the coop competes on who is the biggest, plumpest, scarediest chicken with the most and biggest eggs."
Rainbow raised her head and stared, immediately captivated by the rows of chicken-themed trophies, egg-themed ribbons and shiny dangling medals slowly swinging back and forth from their hooks. "C-compete..." She blinked before fluffing up her chest plushmage and flapping her wings. "Of course I'm here to compete! I'm gonna be the chicken-est chicken you've ever seen here!"
Chickfire raised an eyebrow, tilting her head slightly. "Uh-huh. I hear that all the time. Prove that you got what it takes and maybe I'll believe you." She straightened up again. "What's your name, Cluckdet?"
Rainbow scrambled to stand up, slapping a plushy wing against her head in reflex. "I-I'm Rainbo..." She swayed and blinked, feeling a little dizzy for a second before she shook it off. "Rainbrawk Dash, Ma'am, reporting for egg-laying duty!"
Chickfire nodded. "Well then, Rainbrawk Dash, pick a box and get comfortable. Always give your best and don't let the fox in the henhouse and we'll all be a team."
Rainbow nodded and eagerly waddled up the ramp of the nearest empty box, turning around and wiggling her big padded butt before she plopped it down on the feathers and cushions. Looking around she had to admit that it was kind of nice here, peaceful and safe from all the scary things outside just waiting to eat up a little chicken like herself. In fact, as her suit spread all the way over her head and a big silly plush beak formed over her muzzle, Rainbrawk couldn't help but smile as she let her thoughts drift towards eggs and plush and simply got herself comfortable, clucking quietly along with all the other chickens.
