Applejack arrived, still travelling faster than the speed of light, in Fluttershy's cottage in a spinning halo of globes of light.

Outside it was not quite yet a beautiful day in Ponyville, and inside Fluttershy's ass was still yet to explode although based on its buttery yellow curviness Applejack just knew it was an ass mere seconds from detonation.

Applejack started to say something to Fluttershy, most likely to apologize for stealing her ass. She stopped. She realized the world around her was frozen.

Experimentally, Applejack reached out a hoof and touched a dust mote hanging in the air. Her suit whistled as it compensated against the recoil against her hoof as Applejack accelerated the speck to light speed. The speck ignited into flame as air resistance it heated it to thousands of degrees. The slowing speck hung in the air like a tiny meteor.

This was the light speed thing.

It was weird and new, and she didn't like it.

Fluttershy probably couldn't even see her.

Applejack stared for what was to her a long time, wondering if there were any way to say or do anything to make this feel right. This was the last time she would ever see Fluttershy, and she was just here to steal her ass and leave. That was about as far from neighborly as a pony could get without stealing another pony's ass.

Applejack was here to steal Fluttershy's ass, though.

So there was nothing more far from neighborly.

Applejack was filled with a quiet despair but knew of no way to escape it. This was apparently her destiny. Just as an apple tree must apple and a Fluttershy's ass must explode, so must an Applejack travel through time to steal her friend's ass.

Abruptly, a biped stepped through a flurry of spinning lights into this existence.

This was also weird and new, and Applejack didn't like it. Why was her situation insistently getting more ridiculous every few minutes as if she were merely the puppet of a storyteller who only knew how to keep turning the stakes up because they couldn't think of any other move?

Applejack and the biped stared at each other for almost as long as Applejack had stared at Fluttershy.

"I, Shim Sham," said the biped, "am here to claim Fluttershy's soon to explode ass in the name of the Most Enlightened Shim Sham She-llective She-ciety."

Applejack shook her head, but inside she felt grateful. It was weird to travel through time to steal her friend's ass, but if she was preventing some alien from stealing Fluttershy's ass by taking the ass preemptively, well, that was well within her wheelhouse.

It was almost neighborly, really!

She was really doing Fluttershy a favor by stealing her ass now, if Applejack thought about it. And she did! Think about it, I mean.

She thought about it a lot.

While she’s been thinking about it, the biped has been reaching out toward Fluttershy's butter hind ready to steal it away forever!

Applejack was having none of that and bucked that ass thieving Shim Sham straight in her armored chest. The servos in Applejack's hind legs fired in conjunction with her extending legs lending them the power of a freight train while the hydraulics around her forelegs effortlessly distributed the immense recoil beside her body, stretching out the moment of impulse and transferred that power into Fluttershy’s floor.

Applejack's body was saved, but Fluttershy's floor was ruined completely. Applejack found herself hoof deep in detonating timbers. The friction against her suit caused the wood to ignite into lazily rolling flames that twined around her legs like brilliant blue, blossoming flowers. She heard the coolant system in her suit whine as it compensated releasing gouts of steam around her that slowed and stretched out and hung in the air as a little fire and steam garden around her.

She hadn't done any gardening in a while and it actually felt good.

The Shim Sham had flown back and hit the wall of Fluttershy’s cottage. Applejack and the biped were already moving at light speed because that’s how time travel works apparently (well, that and the spinning and the lights), so she hit the wall with more force than had had ever been known in Equestria until Fluttershy’s ass would explode a second later.

Applejack knew that, somehow, Rainbow Dash could sense the destruction and be jealous of it.

The wall erupted into flames and splinters that instantly slowed into colorful balls and curlicues as the explosion slowed around it. The fiery calligraphy entwining Shim Sham was both larger and more exquisitely detailed than the steam and fire garden swirling around Applejack's legs.

It would make a lesser mare paroxysmal with jealousy.

Yeah, Rainbow Dash was definitely somewhere saying being pointlessly destructive was her thing.

But Applejack wasn't Rainbow Dash; she wasn’t a lesser mare. She was a work mare.

So, she pulled her legs out of their holes, shook off her flower crown of slowing flames, and got to work.

She sprinted straight at the Shim Sham. Each godfuck kick of Applejack's legs sent a fresh miniature mushroom cloud up behind her obliterating the floor. The flames flared up and framed her as she rushed to deliver another blow.

The Shim Sham wasn’t done for, and she fired a volley of rockets through the fiery calligraphy before her at Applejack.

The impact of the rockets made the fact that they were rockets superfluous. As Applejack was thrown backwards the explosions themselves were merely colorful puffs that gradually spread out between Applejack and the Shim Sham like milk poured into a hot coffee.

Applejack jabbed her hoof down, attempting to grasp the floor and stop her flight.

That was a mistake.

Even gently touching the ground still carried power that could not be measured sensibly in any units known to ponydom. Applejack hadn't been gentle, and the resulting explosion sent Applejack straight upward like a startled insect bouncing off the glass walls of its prison. In this analogy, the insect is trapped in a jar, unlike Applejack who was trapped in Fluttershy’s cottage.

Also, unlike the insect which could peacefully bounce off the walls of its prison, Applejack hitting the ceiling, caused it to flex upward like jiggly wooden pudding and then bounce back like a trampoline as it exploded sending splinters of flaming wood everywhere. That blast propelled Applejack directly back down into the ground creating a crater like the hole she’d been in at the start of the story.

Time travel makes things go full circle like that.

It really sucks.

You should avoid it whenever possible.

For the second time, Applejack dragged herself outside of a hole to confront a scene of devastation, and just like the last time, she was the one who caused it.

Time travel. Don't do it if you can avoid it, kids.

Wherever the splinters from the explosions encountered the furried residents of Fluttershy’s residence, they were turning the poor critters inside out and erupted them into rapidly slowing, sizzling organ meats. Their intestines writhed and popped in the heat and devoured their way through the floorboards and their spines leapt out of their throats like little spears.

Overhead, the ceiling was still flexing and jiggling from the impact, erupting into flaming balls in some places where orbs of accelerated fire rolled across the wood devouring it and driving it to flex and bed more. The fire had been forced into orbs that crawled across the wood, slowly devouring it. Everything pulsed and vibrated to a Gnarl-Gnarthian rhythm, like the pulsing veins in the eyes of a drunk.

Up and down and in the future the world was steadily ending and monsters were being born from that future. Clawed arms reached out and dragged the Shim Shams attached to them into being.

"I am here to claim this Fluttershy’s ass in the name of the Most Enlightened Shim Sham She-llective She-ciety, which was created in the edge of the shockwave from when Fluttershy's ass exploded," cried one of them as it reared up into existence only for Applejack to buck it straight back into the hole it had emerged from.

Fluttershy had started to observe that there was something happening around her at a speed she couldn't observe. An earnest “Eep” was starting to come out of her, and it wouldn't finish until her ass had been stolen. In the interim, she would realize that her entire house had been destroyed around her before her ass would get the chance to explode it with the power of her ass.

Another Shim Sham leapt at Applejack firing more rockets. Only to crash into yet another Shim Sham and spin firing her explosives at random.

The rockets struck the ground near Mr. Bear and once more, the shrapnel and splinters struck a critter, and once more his skin erupted off of him as one would expect, but somehow his immense bulk absorbed the shock as he accelerated with a vast jiggling of smoking fat.

Now skinless and bleeding and enraged and jiggling like that pudding that Applejack was constantly thinking about, Mr. Bear spun around suddenly aware of what had killed so many animal friends and destroyed his cottage home. He roared a mighty roar and pounced upon a Shim Sham biting straight through her leg.

Bone popped like ripe balloon and spewed blood and marrow upon the floor at a speed which dug straight down through the ground in fine Chineighse Syndrome-style.

Shim Sham screamed as the bear worryingly worried her body, and she unthinkingly shot a grappling hook at angle where it blew straight through Fluttershy’s wardrobe reducing all the clothes in it to a fine ash with an explosive clap that shoved several mice into a faster than light biting frenzy at anything around them.

Somehow, Applejack knew that Rarity felt that one in her nethers. The wardrobe, of course, not the mice. The one with a special connection to mice was Fluttershy of the soon to be exploding ass that Applejack had to steal.

At this point, another biped stepped into existence through a spinning halo of lights. She wore no helmet, revealing a scarred yellow face framed by red and yellow hair. Applejack had a feeling that her crash had done some brain damage. Perhaps this had cost her her color perception.

"Relic of the past, your resistance is futile. The victory of the Most Enlightened Shim-Sham She-ocial She-vilization is inevtiable."

Applejack saw no reason to argue with this statement, and so she didn't.

At least not verbally.

Instead, she sprinted forward, low beneath a hail of rocket fire from the new Shim Sham—which obliterated a hapless business of ferrets—and leapt up headbutting the Shim Sham into Fluttershy’s kitchen where she crashed into the sink. The water in the pipes instantly vaporized and cooked the Shim Sham in her suit like a lobster in the shell. Butter that Fluttershy had been keeping near the sink melted and dribbled along the Shim Sham’s fresh, juicy flesh and several cockroaches that Fluttershy had been keeping under her sink crawled out tying bibs around their necks, eager for a nice dinner for once.

The kitchen was a total loss. Pinkie would notice that somehow. She had a special Pinkie sense for each of her friends losing their kitchen.

"Because we were travelling at the speed of light,” said another Shim Sham, crawling out of the hole Applejack had blasted in the floor earlier, “we experienced time at a much slower rate than you outside of our universe. This enabled us to undergo millions of years of years of evolution and progress and our civilization far exceeds yours and we will, soon, exceed anything that your civilization could ever be. By this right, we demand Fluttershy’s ass!"

Applejack was pretty sure this wasn't how physics was supposed to work and that it may even be inconsistent with the way physics was presented so far in this story, but she wasn't sure how to express such an opinion verbally, so rather than use her words her words she leapt upon the biped and pummeled it through the ground.

Shim Sham gasped for breath as Applejack slammed her breast plate inward, crushing her lungs. Applejack kept slamming, pushing the exoskeleton inward until Shim Sham’s intestines popped out of her open like toy snakes from a can.

This violence didn't seem like much of an explosion, yet the Shim Sham seemed to agree with it. Or, at least, she died and quit arguing on behalf of her existence.

Mr. Bear, still completely naked and bleeding from his blackened, burnt skin, finally shook the Shim Sham loose from her leg and her body went flying like a rocket, leaving a trail of blood which rapidly cooled and slowed in the air like a crimson fairy bridge. The newly loosed corpse flew over Applejack and the new Shim Sham and struck another Shim Sham and blasted them both through a wall which exploded outward, leaving a space in which another Shim Sham appeared in a flurry of spinning and lights.

She said, "We are traveling throughout every universe to build a pile, a powerful battery which will permit our advanced society to last forever and build glories that your collapsing world could never even begin to understand. But to complete this pile, we need every possible Fluttershy's ass."

This part Applejack was also pretty sure wasn't how things work, and this time she expressed her opinion by firing a grappling hook past the newest Shim Sham’s head.

Shim Sham turned, watching the hook pass by her before she turned back and smile only to meet a buck from Applejack's pneumatically enhanced legs. As the Shim Sham was sent flying, Applejack engaged the breaks on the hook, causing it to abruptly lose speed.

The breaking action released a shockwave that blasted that Shim Sham and several others toward Applejack who kicked them each one at a time and sent them flying through the still exploding wall out into space where they vanished as twinkling lights in the distance.

But there was no time to enjoy her victory, because more Shim Shams were pouring in through the cracks in reality illuminated by flashing and spinning lights.

Applejack and Mr. Bear, as quadrupeds, found a natural alliance pouncing on everyShim that appeared and destroying them, but they were losing ground quickly against the growing infestation. This reality, their reality unfortunately, was proving to be a lost cause.

Two Shim-Shams leapt into the world and turned to each other.

One said: “You’re a Shim-Sham?”

The other replied: “Yes!”

And the first replied, establishing the rhythm of this bit: “So am I! Which frequency does your reality vibrate on?”

“100 exahertz!”

“So does mine! Which dimensions does your home dimension vibrate along?”

“Third, fifth, sixth, and eleventh.”

“So does mine! Which color shift does your home dimension exist on?”

“Red.” And the two bipeds were coated in red as a Shim Sham's torso went flying by pouring out her entire life.

“So does mine! Are your amino acids left-handed or right-handed?”

“Left-handed!”

“Abomination! You will not replace us!” Screamed the Shim and she clapped her power-assisted hands together on either side of the other Shim’s head causing it to explode in a fountain of gore and fragments that shredded a nearby flock of birds.

Most of the birds were instantly obliterated but some of them were accelerated safely to light speed. They were fried like Sanders' birds but still madding like a crowd, and swept throughout the room pecking and biting and tearing at everyShim.

So much for honor among featherless bipeds.

And the Shim-Shams kept pouring into the meat grinder, leaping over slowly expanding fireballs, stepping around shattered walls, and raining from the skies of slow flame above while more and more skinless dying animals joined the melee. They were like over eager meat filling a sausage skin past the point of eruption, and by coincidence, the roaches, now fat and arrogant from their first bougie meal, had located a meat grinder and were trying to cram several Shim-Shams into the the peeled off skin of a single one. It wasn't going well for them.

That's when it occurred to Applejack that the roaches had never been sped up. They apparently just lived at this speed.

A Shim-Sham staggered past Applejack screaming in agony as a pair of skinless, mostly cooked guinea fowl pecked out her eyes. Another toppled backwards across a slowly expanding ball of flame and was instantly steamed inside her carapace like the previous Shim Sham who had been steamed inside her carapace like a lobster. That seemed to be happening a lot and there was probably a pony that felt that somewhere and resented it.

Old Bay was flying like the bullets that were also flying in the emergingly violent vore-violence orgy. Blood poured like a river and ran through the holes in the floor, dragging animals and Shim Shams equally to some horrible demise. There was a wide variety of hot sauces. Fresh game of every type and cooked to every preference of doneness.

It all smelled so delicious.

Applejack was worried because she wasn’t worried anymore. She was salivating like a dog as if this shame could outlive her. This situation was hazardous; this was becoming Normal for her.

She turned back to Fluttershy's ass, which was still almost in the position it had been when she had first appeared.

As Applejack approached the almost exploded ass, a new Shim Sham appeared and kicked Applejack out of the way and into the last unexploded wall which erupted as all the others had, at last shredding the final critters. It was all ruins now. There was nothing left here to be found or said or done to make anything better.

Even poor Fluttershy's hooves were on fire. Her ass was about to blow. It was at a breaking point. Applejack felt the pain in her head that told her she was learning something.

A Shim Sham then reeled away as a swarm of skinless rats roiled up from the blood river and began devouring her soft meats. Where droplets of blood were flung loose from the Shim and the mice, they slowed rapidly, floating in the air in strange, stretched out patterns.

At this moment another biped appeared and impaled one of the earlier bipeds through her torso.

"She told you we were the Shim Sham She-lective didn't she?" The Last Shimmer asked as she booted her way through a bloodwave riding business of skinless ferrets.

She opened the mask of her suit revealing the same face Applejack had seen time and time again, except this time much scrawnier and adorned with an enormous beard.

"I am from the future of the Shim Sham She-lective She-ciety, and I am here to say that the Fluttershy's ass revolution has been a disaster for the Shim Sham race. With the power and infinite life of the Fluttershy's Ass Pull--"

"Ass pile!" shouted a Shim Sham as she jumped at the previous arrival with a vibrating blade attached to her wrist.

The attacked Shimmer didn't even try to evade the attack, not that evasions had done anyShim any good in this complete clusterfuck.

The blade tore straight through her body and made a hole big enough of for Applejack to hide in. Blood furiously pulsed out joining the tide furiously burning and scouring holes straight through the floor and earth beneath her.

"Ha," laughed the dying Shim-Sham, "what you didn't know was that I am all of you from the future. By killing me, you have also killed yourselves."

EveryShim stopped in confusion in terror.

Applejack was pretty sure that wasn't how things worked, but she took advantage of the confusion to slam the tracker on Fluttershy's ass and hit the recall button finally bringing this pointless bloodbath to an end with a massive explosion that obliterated all of Ponyville on a beautiful day in Ponyville when Fluttershy’s ass exploded.

It was a price to pay, and it was paid. Was it worth isn’t a question worth thinking about so Applejack never did.

Author's Note