An off-white mare trotted happily down the streets of Upper Manehatten, her red ponytail bobbing in sync with her cadence as she hummed a light beat.
It was a Monday, and on any other Monday, Specialist Sunflower would've been patrolling the quiet dirt roads leading from the city to Hollow Shades. But after the Canterlot Post published a picture of Sunflower's methods with a group of carriage thieves, Lieutenant Glitter gave the Specialist an order to stay on leave until, "The publicity died down," as she had put.
All the better for me, Sunflower mused, those roads were really boring, sometimes...
Walking by an apartment block, Sunflower came up to her first destination on what was sure to be a beautiful day of non-stop relaxation: the Sunrise Cafe. A quick glance through the storefront windows showed cloth covered tables and a number of filled seats.
They're open. She could hardly be surprised — she had woken as late as her habits would let her, this morning — but she'd been blindsided in the past by their odd operating hours.
Pushing open the door, Sunflower was assaulted by a whirlwind of wonderful scents — mostly caffeinated, but spiced with the scent of baked goods. As she walked up to the counter, the pony behind looked to her, and spoke.
"The usual?" The barista had first met Sunflower when she was just a bald-maned recruit for the Royal Guards, and had started recognising her as a regular as of late. He expected her to take her usual black gruel, but—
"Nope. Today's my day off!" She chirped with a sweetness that might have been a little too saccharine for the working ponies nearby. "I'll be taking an Equestrian Latte, and two of those wonderful scones down there." Sunflower gestured with a hoof.
A minute later, the mare was seated at one of the tables outside, coffee in hoof. The ambience of the alley could only be described as quaint. Trapped as it was within the hard, deary, concrete slabs of Manehatten, the decor and design of the Cafe's extension had a way of making the rest of the world feel farther. As Sunflower took a sip, she appreciated the simple smells, the quiet chatter of nice ponies nearby, the spokes of horsedrawn carriages passing by. Her mind wandered...
...
And then, it happened.
As a projectile flew from Celestia-knows-where, a violet hemisphere of magic burst into existence overhead, a flower pot shattering into pieces a space above where Sunflower's head would've been.
The SHIELD (Sherwood's Hexagonal Immunity to Enemies doing Light Damage) Stone was a standard issue item for every guardsmare on duty. Sunflower might've been off duty, but she was currently very glad she had forgotten to empty her saddlebags the night before. This accident —
"Hey, stupid! Why don't you pick on someone your own size?"
— or, attempted assault? Turning to the source of the voice, she looked up to see a tawny stallion glaring at her from a window, another pot already in hoof.
"This is for Swift Getaway!" More shards sprang out, as the remaining customers who'd been watching shuffled away from the conflict.
Swift Getaway. She'd remembered his name from the paperwork she'd written from the Incident last week. Maybe this attacking stallion was a friend of his?
A glint of reflected sunlight brought the mare out of her thoughts. The pony by the window was brandishing a gold-tipped spear — a ceremonial piece, most likely stolen from the Guard. Not particularly dangerous by most means, but good enough to pierce the shield.
As the attacker reared back a hoof, Sunflower closed her eyes to focus on her horn. Acting on instinct, she felt through her saddlebags, and gave a ping of magic to her Emergency Response Rune. Within a fraction of a second, her barding materialised around her, and whew
Her breath hitched as the size enchantment on her peytral activated. Sunflower leapt off her chair with a snap as the force of her growing weight broke the cheap furniture. Her horn rose above the quaint little 10-foot-tall coffee store, and her broadening hooves brushed aside the miniature tables that were hindering her movement. Her golden horseshoes tapped the glass window of the Sunrise Cafe with a loud tink, as her embiggening body filled the remaining space in the narrow, house sized alleyway. The ponies in the apartment block next door were exposed to a rather risqué view of her expanding flanks, with her enchanted undergarments tightening ever-so-slightly, as the limits of the spellwork began to show. Sunflower's waterfall of a tail spread about the cracking walls of the apartment block, and a large curl of hair swept inwards through the criminal's window, sweeping up the now-frightened stallion into a corner.
Sunflower wasn't paying much attention to the minuscule sensations at her tail, though. She was still basking in the sheer pleasure of having ascended to a height of 50 feet. A bit shorter than the last time, but still so utterly entrancing, so empowering. She opened her eyes to a view like none other. Her hooves stood amidst the remains of tables far smaller than her enormous, carriage-sized hooves. Her fetlocks were about as tall as the cafe in front of her, and—
Oh, whoops. Wrong side! Swiveling on her hooves, the stallion was freed of the confines of the ropes of Sunflower's tail as she turned herself to face the correct building, her hoofsteps leaving soft craters in the cracking concrete beneath her. The apartment in front of her, while much taller than the cafe, still barely came up to her chin. Craning her snout down a few meters, she peered in with a single window-sized eyeball to look for the tiny criminal who had tried to hurt her.
Looking inside, she saw the pony frantically working with his keys on a door. Sunflower let out a booming chuckle. "Not so fast~" A crimson telekinetic field wrapped itself around the petty criminal, who could do little more than let out a yelp in surprise as he was carried out from her home by his tail. A little rat getting pulled from its hovel.
Dangling dozens of feet in the air, the pony looked up to the eyes of the giant who had caught him.
"Thought you could run, did you?" Sunflower raised a hoof to hold the pony. He was as light as a doll. "But I can't let any criminals run away, even when they're as cute and small as you."
As Sunflower turned back her muzzle to face her rear, she heard a squeak.
"Wait! Please don't put me in—"
As Sunflower turned back to face him, her hoof jostled down in reflex, cutting off the pony's pleas. It took a moment for her to remember where the stallion was, and she raised her hoof from where it had been about to stomp flat on the ground.
After a few extra seconds to hyperventilate from his near death, the captive in her hoof managed to sputter. "...p-please don't put me in your r-rear."
Sunflower's smile thinned. As much as she'd wanted to...
She sighed, and a gale of mocha-scented breath whipped the short-cut mane of the pony trapped at her horseshoe. "Don't worry, you won't be there."
She turned her muzzle to open her truck-sized saddlebags. "Guard policy says I need to put bad ponies like you into a proper holding cell..."
Dragging the stallion in, she ignored his flailing and frenzied protests, letting go of the criminal as he fell a dozen feet to the fabric interiors of her pouches. Sunflower clasped her saddlebags close, and let out a breath of relief.
All in a day's... work. What was left of her smile vanished, as she realised her holiday had just been squandered by the little pony in her pouch.
"Celestia darn it..." she muttered, slouching down against the apartment block in defeat, her rump thoroughly smushing what was left of the tables outside. The hardened brick walls of the building at her back yielded to the soft pressure of her fuzzy pony coat. She let her sore, tired hindlegs drop to the roofing of the Sunrise Cafe, with a minor creek of noise emanating from the reinforced steel holding up her weight, if just barely.
She knew her cuirass was short — practically absent, really — and wouldn't be surprised if the patrons inside had a front-row seat to her pink panties from the storefront glass paneling. But she didn't care about any of that right now; she could only think about all the paperwork she'd be in for dealing with a crime off-duty...
Author's Note
Be the change you want to see in the world.
This story was edited by nobody. Edits & suggestions are welcome (but I might take a while to respond)!
Author's Note
Continuity note: Barista has been retconned to male. Not for sexual reasons (mostly), but because it's a lot easier to write about two characters with unambigiously separate pronouns. This is a bit of a crutch and I'd prefer if it were otherwise (hello, editors?).
I'm also not happy with the quality of some other things here, but my edit rate has slowed to a crawl in the last few days. Publish or Perish!
Into a happier ending
And she would've just sat there, moping, if it weren't for the small bump she felt on her flank just then. It felt like a small playing card, with its soft edges poking at her voluminous plot.
Must be the back door. More annoyed than curious, she wiggled her rump rightwards to clear the way for the exit below her. Looking down with tired eyes, she watched the door open, revealing a tiny barrel inching outwards by the shoves and pushes of a teal stallion.
Tiny was a relative term. The cask was about at eye height with the stallion -- the barista, she realised -- and he seemed to be having a great deal of trouble pushing it across the crumbled streets of the alleyway. Rolling her eyes, Sunflower lazily extended a foreleg, the tip of her horseshoe separating the stallion from the barrel as the rest of her hoof eclipsed the container.
"Where'd you want it?" Sunflower's tired voice rumbled over the exhausted stallion, as she rolled the barrel back and forth on the uneven floor like an oversized marble.
Catching his breath, he replied. "With -phew- with you, of course! It has the same latte you ordered -- just bigger, and, well..." He trailed off for a bit, watching Sunflower rolling the massive concoction, effortlessly. "A bit shaken up. But I'm sure it'll taste great, service guarantee!"
Tilting her head a little, she brought the pint-sized beverage up in a haze of auburn magic, tilting and turning the pony-sized cask like a foal might inspect a piece of candy.
Having found the diminutive handle, she delicately yanked open the lid, and brought the open container to her equally humongous snout. She took a subtle whiff, and smiled.
"You made this for me? Why?" Sunflower's head turned to face the barista, and her huge horn cleaved the morning sun in two, casting a reverse spotlight over the inquired pony.
Said pony turned away from Sunflower, a reddish hue tinting his cheeks. "After all you did for us, it was the least I could do." A tiny foreleg moved to his neck in nervousness. "Who knows what kind of damage that madpony could've done?"
Sunflower cocked an eyebrow. The barista, on his part, was standing in the middle of a hoof-marked crater, shades of debris and detritus decorating the floor around him. Perhaps a demonstration...
Lazily, she tilted her frame on a lean rightwards, exposing the surface of her back (plus the rim of her panties) for the little pony to see. A visible indent of sunken asphalt was present where her body had just been. Splinters and fragments of crumpled furniture clung to her coat, with bits of flattened plastic falling from her bulk as they remembered what gravity was.
Sunflower gently lowered herself back to the earth, and the rubble shook from her descent. "Damage, hmm~?" She smirked.
The barista stood stoically, nonplussed. "Uninsured damage. The Equestrian Treasury will cover everything here, I'm sure of it." He waved a toothpick-sized hoof in dismissal.
Before the mare could respond, he continued. "And besides, it's not all about the repair work. Ponies love you! There'll be loads of traffic coming here, after the news spreads." The cafe owner waved his hooves to the front door, as if to point to a phantom crowd.
The specialist opted to ignore her budding worries about yet another tabloid, and opted to shift the conversation elsewhere. "You really think they'll come here, just because of me?"
"Well, of course! You're wonderful, the most beautiful mare in town, and..." he trailed off as he realised what was happening.
Sunflower giggled behind a gargantuan hoof. "You don't have to be so subtle, you know..."
"S-subtle?" The formerly confident pony's eyes fluttered in nervousness "I'm not sure what you mean..."
The gigantic guardsmare tut-tutted in disapproval. "Don't you know it's an offense to lie to the Royal Guard?" She loomed her head over the the small pony, as he looked around for exits from the big mare. "C'mere"
"What do you-- woah!" The stallion found his hooves dangling from the ground as the glow of Sunflower's horn dragged him to her breast.
Her soft, fluffy chest tuft cushioned his approach. White stalks of fur flattened together into a nest of rose scented hairs, and the fluff around him cocooned into Equestria's warmest maremade blanket. Sunflower brought an enormous hoof over, and smothered the stallion deeper into the safe, cozy confines of her modest, bed-sized plumage.
"You like it in there, right?" Sunflower felt a miniature, delirious moan in response.
She shifted the barista upwards through her tuft, watching as a tiny face poked out with an enormous smile. "I like it too," Sunflower leaned her snout down to nuzzle the small pony swimming in her tuft.
But, as she shifted herself, she failed to notice the way her hindlegs were moving. From a 8 foot wide hindhoof, a dangling, thousand ton horseshoe slipped. The oversized plastic cup advertising the Sunrise Cafe flattened like paper under the weight of her falling armor piece, and the sounds of crumbling concrete echoed into the distance.
Sunflower froze. If it weren't for the rumbling might of the Specialist's raw heartbeats, the pony trapped in her tuft might've been frozen too.
She let out a wince. "...oops." The silence festered for another moment before she continued. "The Guard will cover that too, right?"
The barista chuckled, and Sunflower relaxed her posture, dislodging a few extra bricks from the wall behind her. They continued to cuddle each other very much.
