The night sky is a vast blackness, stars twinkling in the dark like fireflies, a full moon illuminating the world below like a lamp. The silence is interrupted by the pained cries of a single mare as bats pepper the sky.
Her pudgy body jiggles in the night, her lungs ready to burst. Tears prick at her eyes as she runs from an invisible enemy. Her pale lavender cheeks are stained black with eyeliner and mascara as she breaks into a full marathon sprint. Having heard a rumor about the cupcakes at Sugarcube Corner being made of more than sugar, flour and eggs, Puzzling Insanity rushes to the bakery and bursts through the doors.
She grits her teeth and suppresses another cry as the stomach pains become worse. Her ears prick up as she hears a commotion in the basement. She takes a look in the reflective surface of a display case and sees a batpony’s yellow eyes looking back. Another cramp makes her double over in agony, eliciting an inaudible screech and another deluge of tears. Desperate to find a food source, she descends the stairs, hearing a mare singing a happy song.
Pinkie Pie has an unconscious stallion bound to a table with leather straps and gagged with a dirty cloth. She turns around and jumps in surprise. “Oh! I thought I locked the door,” she says nonchalantly. Her eyes widen as she sees the look of distress on Puzzling’s face. “Hey, wanna help me make cupcakes?”
Just as she makes the invitation, the stallion begins to wake up. “Y-yes…” Puzzling groans as her bloodlust fully overcomes her.
“This is Zephyr Breeze,” Pinkie explains, not paying attention to the steam billowing from the other mare’s nostrils. “He’s my friend Fluttershy’s little brother. Now, the first thing I like to do is cut off their cutie marks.”
Puzzling growls menacingly and bares her teeth at the stallion, taking a chunk of flesh from his left leg.
“Hey!” Pinkie Pie scolds, cutting Zephyr’s left cutie mark. “You’ll have to wait or you won’t get your cupcakes!” The pegasus screams into the cloth gag and bursts into tears, much to the savage mare’s annoyance. Puzzling Insanity glares into Zephyr’s very soul and roars angrily, frightening him into silence.
She goes back behind the table and grips his left wing in her teeth, puncturing flesh and muscle. Growling like an abused dog, she thrashes her head, brutally tearing off the flight organ and scattering bloodied feathers all over the basement. A muffled cry of pain hits her ears and she tears off the other wing in the same fashion. She gnaws at the severed wing as the butcher-baker grabs a bucket and scalpel and begins to carve into Zephyr Breeze’s still-heaving chest, making two horizontal incisions with surgical precision and joining them with a vertical cut through the pegasus’s trunk.
With a sickening sound, Pinkie opens his body like a new book. Carefully, she pulls out his intestines inch by inch, squeezing out any excrement and putting the tube of muscle into the bucket. “Gotta keep the nasty stuff out of the cupcakes,” she giggles, “and I’m not kidney-ing around!” As she makes the hackneyed pun, she removes his kidneys and bladder.
Pulling out more organs, she continues to make puns. “Special de-liver-y for somepony with the stomach for dark humor! Check the appendix for more details if you’re spleen and have the balls!” With that pun, she castrates the stallion, eliciting a shriek audible through the dirty gag as he breaks down in tears again. Pinkie Pie bursts out laughing as she realizes the dirty pun she’s just made. “These puns are a real pancreas! I’m so insulin for making that one, but I’m not heartless!” She hesitates. “Well, neither are you for now. Hey, look, weird mare, there’s your cupcakes!”
Zephyr Breeze cries and cries, pure agony shooting through him. Puzzling Insanity bares her bloodied teeth and lets out a loud scream, scaring Zephyr’s heart into stillness, the beats growing few and far between before finally stopping.
Like a dog ripping apart a rag doll, she tears out his heart and lungs, puncturing muscle and blood vessels. Blood sprays all over the place like water from a lawn sprinkler. She noisily and messily chews up the organs.
“Bye-bye!” Pinkie chirps, waving at the corpse on the table. “Now, I’m gonna get you your midnight snack!” She takes the bucket and happily trots up the stairs as Puzzling approaches the body, sniffing at the still-warm flesh and tearing into it, chewing through the skin, muscle and fat, slicing veins and arteries like thread.
The overweight mare feasts on the flesh of the dead pegasus, rending it from the skeleton and leaving the bones nearly cleaned. She takes one of the feathers and picks her teeth, only to suck the bits of meat into her mouth.
Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie adds vanilla to the macabre batter she’s made. It smells delicious to her, and like a foal in grandma’s kitchen, she licks the spoon. “Tasty,” she chirps, pouring the cake batter into the paper-lined cupcake tins. “Now, at 350 degrees for about ten minutes…”
Pinkie squeezes the piping bag, white icing swirling onto a dozen puffy fluffy treats. The sun is just beginning to rise, golden rays shining through the window. Puzzling has gone back to normal. “Thank you for the sweets,” she says quietly, taking them and quickly leaving.
She knows she has to get home and take a hot shower to get the blood out of her coat. At least her mother doesn’t mind washing her clothes.
Puzzling Insanity isn’t like other ponies. In addition to a litany of psychiatric disorders, she possesses a special kind of magic known as perception magic, which allows her to find solutions to seemingly impossible problems and see beauty in the most disgusting creatures. However, she also has a dark family secret.
Her maternal grandmother Night Chip, or “Meemaw” as Puzzling called her, was a vampire batpony who had married an earth stallion. From her meemaw, Puzzling has inherited her fangs and a bloodlust that hits her every full moon.
When the moon comes out, she experiences excruciating and violent stomach pains, even more painful than uterine cramps. Her eyes change, her pupils narrowing into slits. Most alarmingly, she becomes overwhelmed with unadulterated rage and savage hunger, reverting to behavior similar to that of a wild animal.
They say the last thing a creature sees before they’re brutally mauled is the mare’s powerfully sharp teeth, glistening with saliva as she pounces on her prey.
