You are Trinket, a witch with lilac and violet mane and a heart locket cutie mark, and tonight is Nightmare Night! Currently, you’re living in Ponyville with your coltfriend, Strange Feeling, and the quaint little village has been preparing all day for the celebrations; even Princess Luna herself comes by.
You finish crushing some dried blue leaves and slide the penultimate ingredient into your bubbling cauldron brew. In your filly years, you would’ve dressed up in a pumpkin-themed costume, as your orange coat naturally guides you towards, but you’re a mare now and won’t be mocked with pumpkin jokes again. Instead, this year you’ll be using a special potion recipe you found in the dark and mysterious tome you checked out from the library to have your costume. To get the final ingredient, you’ll need to travel back to the Everfree Forest and, since laziness is a hallmark of witchery, why trot all that way when you can ride your magic broom? That trusty broom is standing in the corner and all you need is the “come-to-life” spell to get him working your plot to the forest; still, you don’t want a mess like last time, so you grab it with your magic first and walk up the stairs to your front door.
Now outside of your basement—dungeon—you stand up the broom and cast your spell, with the broom immediately walking over and lying down flat where your hoof is pointing. Some unicorns have issues with the “come-to-life” spell, but not you, and it’s with a smirk that you walk over, wiggle your rump, and plant it firmly over the broom handle.
“Alright Broomy, to the Everfree Forest!” Broomy starts levitating and slams the door open with his takeoff. Feeling won’t be feeling happy if you dented the door. “Be more careful next time, Broomy!” The broom of course has no retort.
With the wind in your mane and setting sun in the horizon, you enjoy the ride and almost feel you get to your destination too soon. It’s good to be a unicorn.
“Okay Broomy, let’s find what I’m looking for.” Now hovering over the Everfree, you start scanning the pockets of exposed land until you see your prize. Once Broomy’s been guided over the area, he gently starts to lower and you hang onto him by just your forelegs once he gets close enough to the ground. There’s a mass of green vines encapsulating the trees, rocks, and most everything else in the area and it’s exactly that last ingredient you need. After eating an exposed dandelion and trying to rip some vines up from the ground to no success, you notice they seem looser around one of the nearby trees and aim at getting that instead. Straining and sputtering, you resort to the advanced technique of ripping the vine off with your teeth and magic at the same time and in a few seconds you succeed, falling over yourself with the vine in your mouth.
“Awright Bwoomy, come bach down to get me.” Your muzzle is mostly full of the vine you’ve collected. You use the time to dust off your witch hat and set it back on your head. “Bwoomy?” Looking up, your trusty broom is flying in small circles above you, but not getting any closer to the ground. You start to hear noises from the area surrounding the little enclave you’re in and you don’t like them at all. “B-Bwoomy get dawn hewe awready!” The broom eventually descends, still encircling your position, and you don’t wait for him to get low enough to get on comfortably, holding on by your forelegs as you command the broom to gain height again, still going in circles.
Once you’re well above the forest and stop spinning, you’re able to collect and seat yourself comfortably on the broom and decide to store the vine under your hat. You made the right choice to think of Broomy as a male personality, beyond the obvious reason of his form. With a frown and a glare, you command your broom once again, “Alright, back home now Broomy, and you’d better behave yourself.”
Setting the now-inanimate broom standing back against the wall of your chambers, you take the vine from your hat and get ready to hit it with a mallet for tenderizing. After a few minutes of beating it silly on the block, you feel better and it’s also ready to be put in the brew. Now it simply needs to cook for about a quarter of an hour, so you sit down and take a note on your check list of ingredients to ensure you did everything properly. You have a “strain of your mane” in there, you got the “semen from a cute stallion” from Strange Feeling, and scanning over everything else it seems like “virile vine” really was the last ingredient, so you’re set.
Waiting is boring. That dandelion got your appetite going and you nicely ask Strange Feeling to make you a sandwich, yelling so he can hear you, but he may not be home right now. Reanimating a broom on break so it can make a sandwich doesn’t seem like a good idea and nothing else you have is really appropriate for this. Groaning, you trek up the stairs to make something to eat. It takes just a few minutes to make a peanut butter sandwich for yourself once you get to the kitchen, since you already have some bread made; using two knives with your magic simultaneously, one to cut the bread and one to collect the peanut butter from the jar and slather it on, isn’t something any unicorn can do without making a mess, but you sure can. It occurs to you maybe you could make some bits selling bread that was already sliced, but that’s just another silly idea you’re having.
Unfortunately, you’re struck by the idea that you’ll need something to drink with this sandwich, but your potion should be done in just a few more minutes. You miserably walk down the stairs with sandwich in magical grasp, sit down, and stare at the potion until it’s ready. Frowning gives way to smiling as you watch it change to a light blue color, meaning it’s finally ready. You start eating your sandwich as you magically ladle the potion into a drinking glass and start taking turns between the two. Your appetite is sated, but you’ll still have room for candy later. You look to your back for the fake wings that should have appeared by now; you’re a unicorn, so this “peer regency” potion should make you temporarily look like a princess, right?
There are no wings on your back.
Maybe you’re simply being impatient again, and continue staring at your back until your neck gets sore. Celestia damnit—Luna damnit—your potion didn’t work and there’s no time to brew anything else. Worse, now you’re feeling sick and might not be able to stomach any candy. There’s a solution to that second problem though: an “ick quick” potion. You riffle through the bottles of your work dresser until you find one; the hoofy little potion lets you get over an illness quickly by having you experience it over an unnaturally short stretch of time. Drinking a mouthful, you sit and wait for your nausea to pass as it always does; a few minutes of agony later, you don’t feel any better, and you still don’t feel better after another mouthful and more waiting, but there’s candy at stake, so you drink the entire bottle. A few months time should put this all behind you.
Instead, your belly starts to noticeably swell and you rush to the bathroom expecting the worst. On the toilet, your belly continues to grow and you feebly rest your hooves on its crest. In less than a minute, there’s no more growing, but you don’t feel like whatever is in your belly will be leaving soon. Then you feel something shift and experience a nearly-uncontrollable urge to pee, and do so. You ask your belly what it contains, but there’s no answer; you’re not accustomed to watching your belly rise and fall with your breathing quite like this.
You see what is certainly a tiny hoof poke and indent your skin from the inside of your belly.
Jumping from the toilet, as best you can, while screaming does nothing, as you can’t run from yourself. All it accomplishes is agitating what you can now recognize as your brood, requiring you to sit again and comfort it with gentle rubbing. In doing this, you try to feel their little bodies and to notice their separate magical reverberations; there seem to be three in there. Once these foals calm back down, you try to collect your thoughts; what would a witch do?
The tome you got that potion recipe from slams on your work dresser, jostling its contents, and the offending page is quickly found. Some wizard must have thought it funny to separate the potion titles from their descriptions, ingredient lists, and instructions. You see now that description wasn’t as odd as you thought:
Care to be the mareliest a mare can be? You’re never too old, or too young, to use this potion and become a glowing beacon of Equestria’s healthy society. Be the envy of mares around you and inspire future generations. Worry not, if you happen to use the wrong strain of mane, this potion is designed to be impotent, which is a better fail-safe than it once had. This potion effect is obviously temporary and applies to all three pony tribes.
Wow, you probably should’ve seen this coming. At least they’re Strange Feelings’; you can smile about it because of that. Now then, a witch would clearly attempt to pawn this mess off on somepony else while she could, so where’s that spell?
You step through the front door of your home to see the moon has risen and ponies are about in their costumes playing games, collecting candy, and some of them playing tricks. There’s no staring, since anypony who sees you will just think it’s a costume. Knowing there’s a few in this village, you ready a trick of your own when you spot one of Ponyville’s expecting mares; keeping the mare in your sight, you casually walk to a more discrete area, that being between two houses, and ready your horn. You have three foals in your belly and there’s at least three other pregnant mares in this village, so you’ll load yours off to them and they’ll all be none the wiser. You cackle as loudly as you can without drawing any attention to yourself.
Taking a deep breath and firmly planting all hooves into the ground, letting your belly sway from the movement, you cast the transfer spell, eyes focussed on that other pregnant mare.
Once the spell finishes, you feel your belly’s contents shift as you ease into more comfortable standing; you can’t get as comfortable as you once could, and it feels heavier, however. Your eyes are shut tight, slowly opening to look over to the targeted mare. She’s feeling her belly, seeming befuddled with what just happened. After practicing your breathing, your head dives between your forelegs to get a peak.
Your now low-hanging belly is noticeably larger and what you now see as the newest foal to the litter has agitated the other three, leading to little hoof prints appearing and receding in a queer rhythm.
You look around to make certain nopony saw you do this, but that they didn’t doesn’t relieve you in any way. You’re in over your withers and need somepony to help. Perhaps Nightmare Moon would help a witch like you. You waddle back to in front of your home, close your eyes, and start fishing for your broom through the window, tongue sticking out in concentration. When you know you have it, you pull a chair out. Letting it fall to the ground, you try again. When you know you have it, you pull your broom out. A quick casting of the “come-to-life” spell later and Broomy can whisk you away to the Nightmare Moon statue. In your errant thought, you didn’t notice Broomy startle and start to leave until he was almost out of your magical range.
“Oh no you don’t. You’re taking me to the Nightmare Moon statue, like it or not.” forcing the broom parallel with ground, wiggling your plot, and plopping down on it. You shouldn’t have done that, however, as the weight of your belly shifting nearly winded you and your heavy plot is sandwiching the broom. The sudden stimulation tempts you and you find yourself riding the broom in a different way. Finding the will to stop before you do something else obscene in public, you command Broomy to start flying to your destination, but you struggle to find a balance, without being able to use your forelegs to hold on. You give up when you nearly fall off, having Broomy safely lower back down.
Would Nightmare Moon have even been willing to help you anyway?
You struggle to squeeze through the front door, and kick it shut behind you; the inanimate broom is tossed into a different room. Calm down and breathe deeply; what would a witch do now? Clearly, you need some help to fix this mess, and you know one way to certainly get it. Most of the supplies are downstairs, but you’ll need a few things from the kitchen.
It takes you about ten minutes to finish hoof-drawing the red pentagram on the floor of your dungeon after you’d collected everything; it’s really supposed to be placed on the material plane using the blood of one’s kin, but the Ponyville blood bank stopped letting you collect any years ago; spaghetti sauce is a workable substitute, though, so long as you provide the other three pieces well enough:
- A candied apple and cider make for a fine offering; you get the sinking feeling you won’t be drinking much cider in the future, anyway.
- You need a magical conduit and, well, one time you really didn’t want to walk all the way up the stairs to use the bathroom and tinkled in a jar; pee can conduct magic though, so this was clearly prescient.
- Your hat means a lot to you, so you placed it in the last position for the collateral; you really hope you don’t lose it like this.
With all of the three pieces arranged in a triangle, you call out, “Demon, I summon you to do my bidding! Answer my call!” and in less than two seconds a grotesque and disfigured creature appears in the middle of the summoning circle in a way that your eyes fail to perceive as anything but instantaneous shapeshifting of the shadows in the room. You couldn’t see a single hair on its body, the skin of the creature was an unnatural color for any species you knew of, and it had no face.
Immediately, the creature picked up and began eating your offering to it, taking no time to breathe inbetween bites or gulps; you know better than to start talking until the demon was finished consuming that. Wiping its mouth, it says, “I am the demon Fiddle Styx. Be grateful I deigned to visit you. I will perform one task for you and then you will perform one task for me. What?”
You plop down on the ground and subconsciously start rubbing your swell. “Thank you for coming Mr. Demon; I really appreciate it. Let me explain things.” Your magic collects the book off your work dresser and yanks it, knocking over some bottles you had lying about, one rolling towards the edge. You nonchalantly tell the demon, “Oh, catch that for me, if you would.” as you start flipping through the pages, book resting on the top of your belly. You ready to show your summoned demon the page that started this as it tells you, “Alright, I did one task for you and now you will do one task for me.”
Confusion, realization, and dread hit you in sequence. “N-no.” your eyes start to water. Don’t cry; don’t cry; stop crying. The demon takes some pity on you, “Be calm now, I am not going to ask you to do anything terrible. A pretty, pregnant pony like you does not need to cry.” Sniffling and wiping your eyes, “T-thanks Mr. Demon, but I already have a coltfriend.”
“I can tell. I merely want you to help my acquaintance here.” the ghost of a pony drifts through the floor and up to eye-level—whatever-level—with the faceless demon. “He seeks reincarnation, so I would like you to gestate him. Given your current state, this should not be an unreasonable task.”
“Thanks again, Fiddle. I’d offer to pay you back later but, you know, I’ll probably forget you.” the ghost speaks, in a voice in which every syllable could be mistaken for the wind travelling in a peculiar manner, rather than seeming to be the voice of a conscious being. “It is no problem and good luck in remembering as much of your past life as you can. She is trying to get away, so you will want to go ahead and get her now.”
You’re at the top of the stairs, tears flowing freely again and exhausted by the sudden exertion. “C’mon, don’t make this harder than it needs to be, mommy.” Nearly throwing the front door off its hinges, you squeeze through once again and start running straight to the center of town. Everypony’s staring, but you don’t even notice. Your hiney starts to feel so cold, prompting you to turn around and see the ghost at your tail.
“This room smells like piss.” The demon evaporates.
Frozen in place, you can’t help but stare at the ghost and its bottomless-pit eyes. “Take good care of me, mommy.” It goes straight through your tail and prods at your entrance, slipping in. Your entire body shivers at how cold and strange this feels. Your teeth are gritted and your eyes are shut tight until you feel the ghostly pony enter your womb. Your belly violently shakes as the body of a new foal in sync with the others is formed, leaving you staring nowhere in particular, panting, with your belly swaying mostly side-to-side. Exhausted by all of this, you collapse onto your fat plot, forelegs resting on the belly that now prevents you from seeing any of your rear hooves.
You don’t hear what any of the other ponies are saying, if they’re even talking at all. You look just like a pumpkin and everypony seeing this fact has you burst into tears again, snot running from your nose and wailing. The purple unicorn librarian was nearby and spectated with the others; she was the first to walk up and comfort you before asking the simple question, “What happened?”
After you calm down, and over the course of the next several minutes, you explain: your Nightmare Night costume plans used a mistaken potion, resulting in a pregnancy; you attempted to pawn your foals off on other mares, that got you some dirty looks; and how you tried to find help, but that ghost chased you out of your house and made you even more pregnant. You weren’t going to mention the demon, since summoning those wasn’t exactly legal, but you can’t hide your foalnapping.
The previously-pregnant pony you’d targeted earlier walked forward and said, “That was the strangest foal movement of my life. Right now, I’m just glad he’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry.” was the only response you could think of.
The mare went on to explain how she could forgive you, but thinks you should continue carrying him to term as retribution and because it would be impossible to tell them apart now.
“Oh my, that wouldn’t be very safe for the foals or her, from the looks of it. I do know a thing or two about foal matters.” says another pregnant mare coming from the crowd. “How many are you carrying, dear?” prompts the white pony with blue and pink mane. You tell her five in total. The mare, who then introduced herself as Bundle Joy, told you and the previously-pregnant pony “That’s a few too many for your current frame. You really should carry one, even if it’s not yours.”, but that other mare winces at the thought of carrying a foal that isn’t hers and refuses.
“Well, I’m already carrying one and I could support another two for this good cause. Would you cast that spell again?”
“I think I should do that.” the librarian interjects.
You yawn and become aware of your surroundings. You’ve grown larger in the month since the events that left you in the later stages of pregnancy. Strange Feeling grunts and spoons you more deeply in his sleep; you were worried he was going to be upset, but he was happy to become a father; you should’ve expected a stallion would greet news like this with a smile, well after the initial shock anyway. You don’t know which foals are which, but at least one of yours is with you.
“You foals are getting so big.” there’s a jabbing in your ribs and you start rubbing there to calm the foal. You swear that’s the ghost foal. It always has such good timing.
In the end, you got something better than candy on Nightmare Night.
Happy Birthday, Forfun41.
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