The Wizard of Whitetail Woods π
Notch Apple
Admiral Biscuit

A few miles further along, the pair sloshed over the shallow stream that fed the damn dam. The water was fresh, cold, and minerally, and KitKat immediately stuck her muzzle in and started drinking.

The Wizard, meanwhile, reached into her saddlebags for his canteen, tried to get the top off with both horn and mouth, then finally gave up and also started drinking the stream water.

“I bet that grass over there is going to be tasty, too,” KitKat remarked. “It smells delicious.”

It was just as delicious as it smelled, and even the Wizard had some, despite his general disdain for greenery.

After their field meal, the pair of ponies gathered up firewood in preparation for camping.

While the Wizard could have lit the fire with his horn, he also could have exploded it—he was still working on tip control—so KitKat dragged her hoof across a flinty rock to make sparks.

Once it was going, and once they’d gotten their tent up, the foodbag was hoisted up into a nearby tree to prevent bears, the Wizard warded the campsite to keep out nasty beasties and KitKat did the same for any plants that wished them ill.

And, since they’d both learned their lesson from last time, they did post a sentry.

KitKat got the first watch, and she did her duty, keeping herself awake by mentally working Arrow’s impossibility theorem.

By the end of her turn on watch, she’d determined that in the independence of irrelevant alternatives, alternatives a and b have the same order in F(R1, …, RN) as in F(S1, …, SN).

She’d also mentally assigned the grass around her (and the bushes and trees and any other plant in her view) various different roles in her theoretical model, testing if it held true for any given scenario, all the while looking and listening and smelling for any potential trouble.

When the moon was halfway across the sky, she shook the Wizard awake and he grumpily took her place. He did not do his duty, instead focusing on his new form and what treasures he might find under his tail.

To his good fortune, the wards held.

•••

Morning came, as mornings do. KitKat yawned and stretched out, then promptly spotted the Wizard, sound asleep, just up against the edge of the protective circles.

Right on the other side, a cluster of speedvines were trying their best to get over KitKat’s magical barrier. Every time they’d hit it, they’d yank back, creep along the ground a few more feet, and try again.

Warning the Wizard might make him jerk forward, into speedvine grabbing range, so she did the next best thing, grabbed his tail in her mouth and pulled him back, ignoring his howls of protest at his undignified awakening.

By the time she’d stoked the fire back up, the speedvines got the message, there was going to be no tasty pony meal for them today. They shrunk back into the ground, prodded along in a couple cases with a burning brand.

Breakfast was grass, dry oats, and coffee. Consultation with the map, compass readings, a short argument over which route was the best, and then they were off.

•••

For once, things were going nicely. The two mares—one real, one faux—barely argued. The Wizard cast a few spells with his literal horn instead of his pizzle. And, although she hadn’t noticed it before, ponified Wizard smelled a lot nicer than human wizard.

Furthermore, denizens of the forest weren’t immediately hostile to the pair of ponies, unlike when the Wizard had been his normal self.

It was something she could get used to.

⬆That wasn’t foreshadowing⬆

Some of the wizard’s movements were instinctual . . . she could have told him that would be the case, but he never listened to her even when he should have Especially when he should have.

When he wasn’t trying to keep his ears still, they’d move to focus on distant noises, and she could track their motion with her own, on the rare chance that the Wizard heard something before she did.

Thus they were able to avoid a kelpie taking a bath in a pond.

It probably wouldn’t have mattered if they did; as everyone knows kelpies prey specifically on humans, luring them to their watery deaths and then casting their entrails onto the shore. In fact, ponies hadn’t recognized kelpies as monsters before humans showed up, and only ponies who liked humans currently thought of them as monsters. The rest of them just figured that they were soggy water ponies, not quite merponies.

Rumor was that a hybrid kelpie/pony foal was undrownable, and in fact some seamares who had survived a shipwreck claimed that their sire or dam had been a kelpie. In some cases, that could have been true. Recordkeeping was barely a thing in Equestria.

So the pair of them skirted around the pond with the kelpie who was totally not imagining drowning and gutting a human and unlike Kukka the skunk, Koko the Kelpie swam around her pond, braided cat-tails, and lived her best life, never again appearing in this story.

One day in the future, she would meet a handsome stallion and an honorable amount of time after that there was a filly who never really took to sailing but did win several gold medals in swimming competitions.

•••

“Did you fart?”

The Wizard also now had an improved sense of smell—he not only smelled better, but he also smelled better.

“No. I thought that was you, but I wasn’t going to mention it.”

“It wasn’t me.” The wizard considered. “How does farting feel as a pony anyway?”

“Trust me, you’ll know, the glitter always gives it away.” KitKat wrinkled her nose and held in the scent. “You’re sure it wasn’t you? It smells like something died.”

“I can cast a smell that numbs scent, I think.” The Wizard used his magic to open KitKat’s saddlebags and draw forth a ~~spellbook~~ Playboy.

“Your horn won’t get harder,” KitKat reminded him..

The Wizard shrugged. “I need inspiration. I was always a visual learner.”

“Visualize this,” KitKat raised a hoof and an imaginary middle finger, the single thing she actually missed from her brief stint as a human.

Well, seeing in trichromatic colors had been kind of cool, too, but overwhelming for an adventure. That was way better for an acid trip or some good old-fashioned Mongolian horse friction.

“Yeah, yeah.” The Wizard folded out the centerfold and studied it. KitKat, unfortunately, had an unexpectedly good view of his backside; on the plus side, she could report that everything was where it should be and everything looked like it was working. “Do unicorns or, uh, are hornjobs a thing?” He lifted a hoof to his horn.

KitKat rolled her eyes heavenward. “Strike me down now, Celestia.”

•••

She should have been looking groundward.

They both should have.

Bufogrens of various varieties are indigenous to forested and swampy areas of Equestria and can be summoned for one green mana and one black mana. 1/1, tap to produce mucus, target creature gets one poison counter.

”This smells like shit”—Jaya Ballard, task mage

Heroically galloping away from danger was old hat for KitKat, and the Wizard was quickly getting the hang of it as well.

Presently they found themselves at a small, kelpie-free pond. Spring fed, so it was colder than balls, but neither of them had those—ever, or just for now—and it was pleasanter than a bathtub filled with V7 juice.

Unlike the skunk skank, the smelly mucus was water-soluble, and eventually rinsed out.

Author's Note

Fucking triangles, how do they work?

All y’all have made it to nearly the halfway point and have to ask yourselves if an erotic scene with the Ever Given and the Suez Canal might make an appearance because who doesn’t love dead memes?

They’re peachy!