Wiggly. Rainbow Dash rolled over in her bed, curled down, and looked at the wiggly tentacles. "Will you guys just—just stop?"

They did. The tentacles and Rainbow had come to an understanding of sorts, but the problem for each was time. Time was an ephemeral subject for almost any creature. Time was how long it took to forget you should be doing something.

Rainbow Dash had her own problems with time—what with having the lightning reflexes and social graces of a kitten that hasn't learned to retract its claws yet—but now her biggest problem with time was that the tentacles didn't have any concept of it greater than five minutes.

Five minutes was about how long it took for Rainbow Dash to get comfortable, close her eyes, and feel the sandmare start to dust her eyes.

"Please sto-ho-ho-hop!"

The tentacles stopped.

"You guys will start getting wiggly again as soon as I go to sleep, won't you?" Rainbow felt the spine (and sometimes mind) melting sensation that she had come to learn meant yes for the tentacles. It wasn't that they did anything bad, but having them agree with her wasn't something Rainbow wanted to happen in public. "Sh-She'll be home tomorrow. Just one night of no wiggling?"

Rainbow didn't lay back on her bed. She stayed looking at the tentacles. Then they got wiggly again. "Come on! What do you want?"

Answers were not forthcoming, of course.

Rolling over and sliding out of bed, Rainbow Dash walked to her kitchen. "Food? Are you—" A deep groan came from her lips as the wiggly intruders shut down Rainbow.exe for a few moments. It's said that when certain nerves are directly stimulated it can "reset" a nervous system, in this case the bunch of nerves the tentacles had wiggled against for yes stalled Rainbow in her tracks.

Shaking her head after several minutes of trying to reboot her brain, Rainbow let out another groan—this one of frustration. "Okay, not quite so much agreeing. How about I open the fridge and you point at what you want?"

The tentacles weren't as wiggly, but they were moving around to inspect things. One grabbed the side of the fridge and pulled Rainbow's butt around so she was fully turned away. "You know I can't see what you're pointing at, right?"

A sideways jerk caught Rainbow off-guard, and she found herself being dragged to the cupboard instead. There, a tentacle opened a door and pulled something out. The bag was heavy, or so Rainbow noticed by the strain it put on the tentacle that was holding it.

"Sugar? I'm not going to eat a bag of sugar for you." Snatching the bag from the tentacle, Rainbow was halfway through putting it back in the cupboard when all the tentacles got wiggly again. "W-What about a drink? I have some juice in there that's pretty high in sugar. I could a-add more."

"Stop doing that!" Rainbow bristled at the feel of the tentacles agreeing with her. "Just because you like the idea doesn't mean you have to—to do that!"

Walking back to her fridge, Rainbow lifted out the carton of juice she normally had after a workout, but when she walked over to get a glass, a green tentacle had already gotten it. "Okay, that's pretty cool. Thanks."

Tipping the apple juice into the glass, Rainbow reached out and picked it up, only to have a tentacle (that had been holding the bag of sugar still) start pouring sugar in. "Whoa! Stop that! If I can't dissolve the sugar in that, I'm not drinking it. Also, you better eat this sugar—I can't afford to get fat."

The big tentacle stopped pouring and put the bag of sugar back on the bench.

Eyeing the tentacle as it put the sugar down, Rainbow lifted the glass up to her lips. She could already smell the overly-sweet drink. "I can't believe I'm going to do this." Tipping it up, a shiver ran through her—it tasted better than anything ever had in her life.

The green tentacle that her tongue had become—that Rainbow was doing an excellent job of forgetting about, until now—amplified the taste of the apple juice to a new level, and before she knew it she'd gulped down the whole glass and was licking the bottom of it. Pausing at the odd sensation, Rainbow quickly pulled her tongue back into her mouth.

"That's freaky, but—Oh heck!" Rainbow's belly began to tremble and move about as shapes made themselves visible. "Why'd that make you extra wiggly? You said it would calm you—you—"

Suddenly, the tentacles stopped.

"Oh. Uh. I guess that did work. Alright, I'm gonna go sleep before you wake up."

Rainbow woke up to a new sensation. It wasn't the over-the-top wiggling from the previous night, but the feel of her own tongue squirming around in her mouth—without her controlling it—was enough to jerk her fully awake. "Wak daf?"

With a rainbow wave of light she was in her bathroom and looking in the mirror. Opening her mouth, Rainbow had to roll her eyes down to be able to see her green tongue—looking very tentacle-like—wiggling around in her mouth. "Tha thath!"

Her tongue stilled, then was under her control. "Seriously, that's just freaky. Was that me actually doing that, or is it—" Her eyes widened. "It couldn't be…"

Only because she'd stopped talking (or grunting as the case may be) did Rainbow hear the soft tapping on her front door—only one pony knocked so softly. Avoiding thoughts of what the thing was in her mouth, Rainbow trotted to the front door and opened it to see an exhausted-looking Fluttershy. "Oh gosh! Come in and sit down. You look beat."

"I just need a little rest. I was going to head home and have a nap, but then we had a song to sing, and Twilight said I should come and see you right away. Is something wrong?" An edge of worry crept into Fluttershy's voice as she spoke, worrying for her closest friend. "Why is your tongue green?"

"You probably want to come in for that. Things have been getting… wiggly."

"Wiggl—" Fluttershy froze as she stepped inside and saw Rainbow in partial profile. Her mind raced to track down what had stolen her attention so fiercely, only to focus on the tentacles in Rainbow's butt. "Oh. My. Goodness!" Even yelling, Fluttershy's voice was still below most ponies' in volume. "That's a Tentaculus Minor! How'd you get it?"

"Major, actually." For nearly five minutes Rainbow's brain had managed to forget that her tongue was a tentacle.

Eyes widening in excitement, Fluttershy's wings shot up and out. She stared at Rainbow. "H-How long have they been in you? Have you fed them yet? What do they like to eat? How far do they go? Are they really nocturnal? Would you—?"

"Hold up!" Rainbow Dash slowly withdrew her hoof from Fluttershy's mouth. "Firstly, I need to know everything you know about them."

"Oh—Um—Well, I don't know too much about the Major, they're quite rare. I mean, I knew there was some in the Everfree Forest, but I didn't expect to ever see—" Fluttershy stopped dead mid-sentence. She'd noticed Rainbow Dash's tongue. "Your tongue is green! Is it like with the Minor? Did it just color your tongue with its sap? Oh goodness! Where's my copy of Wiggly Things and You?"

"Well, it's probably at your house, but—" Another word was impossible. Rainbow felt her forehoof grabbed and more wingpower than she'd ever dreamed existed pulled her at insane speed out her front door and toward the edge of the Everfree Forest. Even the tentacles inside her were surprised, and barely wiggled at all when Fluttershy stopped the mad rush in her living room.

"Y-You guys okay?" As soon as Rainbow asked, she realized how silly it was to firstly ask the tentacles inside her if they're okay, and secondly not to take into account how they usually answered. Her body locked up, her back arched, and Rainbow shivered at the sensation of happy tentacles letting her know how wiggly they could be. "I-I-I'll t-take that a-ah—" She shivered all over. "…As a yes."

"It says here that they can't be removed without harming them." Fluttershy was excited as she read. She'd never paid much attention to the more invasive tentacle species, but to have one before her—or behind Rainbow—made them the topic of the day. "And they're endangered!"

Shaking off the sensations the tentacles imposed on her whenever they agreed with her, Rainbow nodded. "Twilight already said they can't be removed. I was kinda hopin' you could ask them really nicely to come out? I'd kinda like my—uh—rear back."

"Oh no. No, no, no!"

"What?"

"They're not just in your rear, Rainbow, they use a host's entire body cavity. End to end. They start in the stomach, which is where most of their—This stuff is really fascinating." Fluffing her wings out, Fluttershy looked at her friend in excitement. "They don't just set up shop in one part of a pony's digestive tract, they take over the functions of all of it so the host doesn't need it all. The tentacles in your stomach are nearly twice as efficient as your entire body was at breaking down compounds to use for food."

"What?!"

"Well, I mean they need to be. They have to eat for you and themselves, and they'll be looking to lay their eggs soon, which means they need even more energy." Flipping the page, Fluttershy read more while Rainbow stood stunned by her words. "Oh, the tongue-thing is interesting."

"Tongue thing? What tongue thing? What's it done to my—" Rainbow cut herself off when she heard Fluttershy start talking.

"Apparently the tentacle creature extends one tentacle up the pony's throat where it dissolves their tongue and attaches the tentacle to them—fusing part of itself to their nervous system and blood system in the process. This is how it's feeding you!" Fluttershy looked up at her friend. "Nature is so fascinating!"

"Did you really—?" Rainbow Dash cut herself off before asking the tentacles a question they could answer yes to. "What do you mean, dissolved my tongue? I can still feel it, and move it, and stick it out—thee?"

"Oh my!" Staring, Fluttershy snapped out one wing to grab the end of the nearly one mareter long tongue while she pulled a measuring tape out. "That's quite impressive."

The oddest thing about sticking her tongue out, for Rainbow at least, was that she could suddenly feel all of it. The thing was huge, and she'd never really thought of how much of it she could feel in her mouth or how much control over it she had. "Aggg! Fwaffathy!"

Once she'd measured both length and girth, Fluttershy let go of Rainbow's tongueticle. "Let me just write that down."

Feeling every bit of the tongue she pulled back into her head, Rainbow was acutely aware that she could feel part of her mouth and throat accommodate the huge length. "It's done more than just dissolved my old tongue, I can feel how it fits in now. This is all kinds of gross!"

Fluttershy's mouth dropped open in a vision of shock. "That's amazing! What does it feel like to be inside Rainbow Dash, Mr. Tentacle?"

"Don't ask—" But it was too late. Rainbow's eyes crossed and her forelegs folded under her. Butt in the air, she made soft groans and arched her back while the tentacles did stuff to her.

"Really? That's interesting. How did you come to be in her?"

Rainbow's ears were splayed out almost as wide as her back legs. She trembled and jerked her hips while hungry—happy little noises left her throat.

"In a hot spring? That's how she got the last one. Oh! She sat down this time, I guess that means you got in her mouth?"

Soft mewling sounds were teased from Rainbow by the tentacle's answer to Fluttershy's question. She felt pressure building within. Pressure unlike anything she'd felt before in her life.

Fluttershy barely noticed that the noises her special talent let her interpret as words were actually her best friend's impassioned moans. "Would you like a drink? Perhaps some sugar?"

Rainbow's piercing cry finally got through to Fluttershy as something other than the tentacles wanting to talk. She froze, watching her best friend squirming and waving her butt into the air with her tail cocked so high that a rainbow of tail hair fell onto her back. Behind Rainbow Dash, the squirming tentacles looked like a bizarre attempt at imitation of a polychaete sand-mason.

"I'lljustmakesometea!" Heart pounding, Fluttershy ran to the kitchen while her memory helpfully played back the "voice" of the tentacles, reminding her with the firmness of all such permanent memories that she would never forget that she'd just assisted in driving her best friend to orgasm.

Dropping to her belly in the middle of Fluttershy's home, Rainbow panted and tried to muster the strength to do anything other than appreciate the upsides of having a bunch of tentacles living in her butt.

Movement drew Rainbow's attention to the door to the kitchen. She saw Fluttershy poke her head out, then back in again. "F-F-Flutters? I-It's okay. I just need a—" an aftershock of "conversation" rushed through Rainbow, stealing her words for a few moments, "—a chance to relax. I know you di—didn't mean it."

"Okay, tentacles, you had your—my—fun, now quit your wiggling so I can get up and make sure you didn't traumatize Fluttershy. Do you want to see her cry?" Rainbow Dash was struck by the complete and utter lack of movement of the tentacles. "Didn't think so, neither do I." With only the pure willpower and focus a trained athlete built up over a lifetime of schooling themselves in discipline, Rainbow pushed with her legs and slowly lifted herself to her hooves.

Turning her head, Rainbow expected to see a horrid mess on the floor, but it was dry. "Wait, I'm normally a bit mes—" She gulped. "Okay, two benefits. You guys can drink that—That's not a question, it's a statement." The last words were spoken quickly.

It wound up taking several hours of companionship and reassurance for Rainbow to convince Fluttershy that nothing bad had happened. She'd wound up leaving her friend huddled up with a bear that, through Fluttershy, had assured Rainbow that he'd ensure she slept well.

Marching out of Fluttershy's house with a determined air, Rainbow froze at the sight of Twilight. "What now?"

Twilight Sparkle had a few stray hairs out of place and looked a little manic. "I did it! I mean, it didn't take much arguing, but they told me I couldn't."

"Today's the day Rainbow and her tentacles calm everypony down. Got it. Okay, Twilight," Rainbow Dash said, "What did you do that everyone said you couldn't?"

"This!" A grin of manic glee creased Twilight's face as she teleported the stack of paperwork to Rainbow. It took her a few seconds to realize Rainbow wasn't going to take it from her with her own magic and read it all on the spot. Then it took her another moment to remember Rainbow Dash wasn't a unicorn. Tilting her head to the side, Twilight focused on the "horn" she'd been fooled by. "Why is there a tentacle on your head?"

Tilting her head back, Rainbow looked up to see a green tentacle weaving just above her head. "Eh. I kinda got used to them—so long as they aren't being all wiggly. So, what did you do?"

"I preserved you!" Her excitement reignited, Twilight waved the stack of papers. "I didn't even need to make a royal decree, either! Sure, they tried to argue you didn't count, but I pointed out that a pony is over fifty percent water by weight, and then—"

"Twilight!" Rainbow knew the time had come to stop her friend ranting. "Twilight, what did you do?"

"I registered you as a protected wetland!"

An actual cricket chirped in the grass beside Rainbow while her brain tried to home in on the exact point in the conversation where Twilight had said something completely insane. Ah, Rainbow's subconscious exclaimed, There it is. Wetland. "You what?"

"Well, yesterday evening, after you left, I was talking to some friends from Canterlot about the tentacles that had taken over your—ahem—plotting, and one of them asked me to get a cutting! I told her I wouldn't, I mean Minuette should know better than to—Anyway! She said she'd file a lawsuit to get you to furnish the scientific community with a sample of not just the tentacles, but your blood—She's a really good lawyer, by the way." Twilight seemed to be having trouble sticking to one train of thought, particularly when the story needed to be told quickly. "Anyway, I defended you and your butt friends—"

"They're not 'butt friends'!"

"I defended you both. The tentacles were easy, being an endangered species, but she still pushed to have you detained to be sampled. That's when I got the idea!" Reaching a hoof into the stack of papers, Twilight plucked out the little placard the court had provided her. "Here!"

"The Rainbow Dash Royal Wetlands National Park?!"

"I put royal on it because I'm a princess!"

There were a lot of things Rainbow Dash wanted to call Twilight, but she knew that in her friend's own special way she'd stood up for Rainbow. "Thanks, Twilight." And if there was one thing Rainbow Dash knew about, it was loyalty.

Author's Note

Fluttershy: What happen to the tentacles that you talked out of Rainbow before?

"Oh! They're recovering from the ordeal of removal well. A nice mare offered to help, and they were more than happy to settle into a new home. It can be hard to find suitable homes for my little friends sometimes, but whenever I visit her, she's very happy."

So I do this "Ask X" thing. X can be any pony within the story. You can ask them anything and they will definitely, hopefully reply. Keep the questions appropriate to the age-rating of the stories, and they will answer the best question in the author notes of the next chapter. The more votes a comment has the more likely I will get it to the right pony to answer. Try to keep it to one question per post! They will pick one question per chapter.

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Awesome ponies who are already helping to keep me in keyboards and rum:
A.P.O.N.I.
Canary in the Coal Mine
Daremo
Dio-Drogynous
KFS Crimson
Sirion123
Wind of the Skies

And special thanks to the following, for careful eyes and friendly words:
Lab

Btw, that whole wetlands bit is thanks to a little slice of comedy gold by FredMSloniker. Credit where credit's due.

Also, for information on polychaetes, please see this purely informational video.