It was a dark and stormy night and if this was Equestria, Sunset Shimmer would have had some very serious words with the local weather crew.
“Who the hay schedules hail in the middle of summer?” she asked, looking out the window, balls of ice as wide as her smallest finger pinging against the glass.
“It’s the weather, Sunset,” Twilight said. “It’s not like anyone planned for this.”
“You guys are supposed to be listening to my scary story!” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s basically the most terrifying thing anyone has ever come up with and you’re missing the best parts! Just look at Fluttershy, she’s terrified!”
Fluttershy looked around the huge emotional support stuffed animal she was holding.
“Actually,” she whispered. “Your story is a little shallow.”
“Shallow?” Dash asked.
“You repeatedly use the same onomatopoeia to try and build tension without having any real sense of pacing or progression, and it’s extremely unlikely anyone could even get around with all four limbs replaced with hooks, much less chase teenagers at a house in the forest.” Fluttershy paused. “Um. Or at least that’s what I think.”
“First off, it’s a cabin in the woods, which is super spooky. Second... What’s an onomomopodo?”
“She means the scraping sound you keep making,” Twilight explained.
Sunset mimed scratching the air with a hooked finger. “Scraaaaape!”
“Well I guess you were listening,” Dash mumbled. “Unlike some people. AJ and Rarity still haven’t come back from getting snacks!”
“They probably found something else to occupy their time,” Sunset said. “If you want to find them I’d start by checking the linen closet.”
“Why would they be in the closet?” Dash asked, confused.
“That’s a really good question,” Sunset agreed. “You don’t need to be a mind reader to figure out what’s going on with those two.”
“Huh?” Dash furrowed her brow, trying to work her way through the thicket of metaphor and euphemism and landing solidly in a dead-end.
Twilight giggled until she snorted, cheeks pink.
“You girls want to hear a super scary story?” Pinkie asked. She slid out of the shadows and wiggled her eyebrows.
“Eh, go ahead,” Dash shrugged. “I sort of lost momentum with my hook man stuff.”
Pinkie grabbed a flashlight, holding it under her chin for dramatic lighting. “My tale begins a month ago, on a night much like this…”
Well it wasn’t exactly like this. It was less dark and stormy and near midnight and more like seven in the morning on a school day. I was working my part-time job in Sugarcube Corner and I was pretty close to being done with my shift. I thought it was just going to be a normal day, but I was wrong!
I was alone in the bakery, so I was the only person there when she walked in, with skin the color of bubble gum, but not the good kind that keeps its flavor, more like the bad kind that’s already like, been chewed and spat out and stuff. I could tell the dame was trouble as tall as a gumdrop tree that was five foot four.
She stepped up to the counter and I tried to smile.
“What can I get you?” I asked.
She looked at the menu for a long time, like I wasn’t even there.
“What do you have without sugar?” she asked.
“When is the horror going to start?” Dash asked.
“It sounds like she was just looking for something healthy,” Twilight said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Healthy breakfast food is awful!” Pinkie said. “Have you ever had that Mega-Bran cereal? My parents buy it all the time!”
“Oh yeah!” Sunset said, perking up with a smile. “I go through like a box a week!”
Pinkie gasped in horror. “How can you eat it? It’s like… it’s like eating raw grass!”
“More like baked hay,” Sunset said. “Sort of nostalgic.”
Awful taste aside, it was my duty as a minimum-wage employee to at least try to assist the person, even if they were objectively wrong about how breakfast worked and should try Cookie-Frosted Marshmallow Puffs instead of Mega-Bran.
“We’ve got sugar-free apple pie,” I suggested.
She looked at the slice of pie I offered and made a face like a vampire who’d been given an invitation to a tanning booth.
“How about a sugar-free brownie?” I tried. “Or a danish?”
“No thanks,” she said. She didn’t sound thankful. “I don’t like sweet stuff.”
If my heart wasn’t already pounding in terror it would have stopped right then and there. No human alive can sit there and say they don’t like sweet stuff when they’re in Sugarcube Corner! No matter if you like fruity stuff or chocolate stuff or cheese stuff or peanut butter stuff or all of it mashed together to form Snacktron Defender Of Second Breakfast!
“You don’t like sweet stuff?” I asked, thinking I must have misheard.
“Yeah so… something sugar-free, not sweet. Actually it would be great if it was gluten-free, too. I’m trying to cut down on my carbs.”
“Oh, I did that,” Fluttershy said. “I heard gluten was terrible for you.”
Twilight shook her head. “It’s really not. I can show you several studies that prove gluten is perfectly safe as long as you don’t have an allergy or celiac disease.”
“I know,” Fluttershy agreed. “But Tree Hugger was going gluten-free and I wanted to show support for her as a friend. It turned out she thought gluten was what they used to make craft glue. She heard it was in bread and thought they used it to glue the flour together into a loaf.”
“Of course she did,” Sunset sighed and facepalmed.
“We had to take her to the hospital after she thought she was getting gluten withdrawal and drank a whole bottle of glue to try and stop the shakes,” Fluttershy continued, smiling. “After she got out I taught her how to make cookies from scratch and we had a bake sale for the animal shelter!”
The person I was dealing with wasn’t the type to have a bake sale. She was pure evil. I could tell because she didn’t even want a free sample when I offered it to her! No one can refuse a free mini-cupcake sample!
“Ugh,” she sighed, a grunt like a horrible Frankenstein confronted with a bunch of villagers with torchforks and pitches! “Maybe I’ll just get something at Hamburger Princess…”
“Wait!” I gasped. I couldn’t lose another sale to the evil chain restaurant. Mister Cake would kill me if I drove a customer there! “What if I get you the house special?”
“The special?” she asked.
“The special!” I confirmed, still trying to work out what the special was going to be.
“Is it sugar-free?” she asked.
“Yes,” I lied. It wasn’t technically a lie yet because there wasn’t a special, but there was no way I was going to win her over without sugar.
“And it’s gluten free?” she asked.
“Yep!” I agreed. “Let me go get it for you!”
I ran to the back to escape the lies I was telling. I didn’t have time to make them come true, and I only had a minute at most to come up with the most daring, most delicious, most sugary treat in the world. I moved like I was in a daze, grabbing one perfect cupcake from a cooling rack and putting it on the middle of the operating table slash bakery table.
“Ten CCs of fudge,” I ordered, getting a syringe and filling it with hot fudge from the hot fudge vat, injecting it into the core of my pastry patient.
It wasn’t enough. Fudge was good, but this needed every special touch I could think of.
“Scalpel!” I ordered. I put a sharp knife in my hand and carefully removed the top of the cupcake, leaving the pocket of fudge in the lower half of the tiny cake undisturbed.
A blueberry muffin would serve as the donor. I sliced the muffin top, the most delicious part of the muffin, free, affixing it to the bottom of the cupcake with a layer of quick-hardening caramel.
“Icing!” I continued.
“But what kind?” I asked. “Cream cheese? Whipped cream? Butterscotch?”
“We need to go big,” I said, from where I was looking over the operation. “We need to do a full dip.”
“A full dip, on a muffintop transplant?” I gasped. “You’re mad! They’ll never survive the procedure!”
“It’s our only chance!” I snapped. “If you won’t do it, I will!”
I watched in horror as I took the pastry and dipped the whole thing into a steaming vat of white chocolate, removing it and cackling in terrible glee as I topped it with crushed nuts and dehydrated strawberries before the shell set.
It had been barely a minute, and yet it seemed like an eternity, for I had created something terrifying, something evil, something that could turn even someone as stoic as my parents into a monster. It could have given Boulder a sugar rush, and he was a rock! Probably not Maud, though. She was made of sterner stuff.
I put it in an unmarked box, careful not to touch it with my bare hands, and walked back outside with the sealed containment unit.
The other monster was still there, waiting impatiently.
She folded her arms. “What is it?”
“It’s a surprise!” I said.
She didn’t look happy.
“And if you don’t like it, you can get double your money back,” I promised, trying to win her over. I saw the last of her resistance crumble like an ancient castle perched on top of a hill finally burning down to the foundations and leaving the land cleansed with the fires of a really good sale with no risk to the buyer.
“I’ll take it,” she decided, putting the money on the counter.
I gave her the box, and she walked out with it, vanishing into the crowds and never to be seen again.
“Well of course she’d never be seen again,” Sunset said. “You gave her some kind of weird mega-dessert when she wanted like, a savory scone or something.”
“But she also never came back for a refund,” Pinkie pointed out. “So something must have happened. I like to think they’re still out there to this day, the forces of sweet and evil doing battle for the soul of mankind’s bakeries.”
“Wait, this was a month ago?” Twilight said. She sat up.
“A month to the day!” Pinkie said.
“Pinkie, a month ago was when Winny Briefly collapsed at school!”
“Winny Briefly?” Sunset asked.
“Let me get a picture,” Twilight said, pulling out her phone. “It was during my first-period graph theory class. She came in looking really woozy and just fell over. Was this the girl, Pinkie?”
Twilight showed Pinkie the photo.
Pinkie gasped. “Oh my gosh! That’s her!”
“Pinkie, she’s a diabetic!” Twilight yelled. “That much sugar at once almost killed her! She was in the hospital for a week!”
“Huh,” Pinkie folded her arms. “I guess Frankenstein wasn’t the monster, the real monster was the doctor that created him!”
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“Frankenstein was the doctor!” Twilight yelled.
