Trixie Lulamoon was a pony who took her line of work very seriously.
When she was on tour, every day operated by a strict routine. Wake by the crack of dawn. Quickly scarf down some bare minimum breakfast. Haul the wagon down the road to the next town by noon. Hand out flyers, do a few teaser performances, get everypony ready for the big act in the evening. Wow the audience while being prepared for a swift getaway should something go awry. She’d gotten it down to a science, as much as she could for a pony who had never especially cared for science. Sometimes she’d have an assistant, like Starlight, but usually she was on her own, and she was glad at least that her state of affairs had improved over the past few years. It wasn’t an especially easy or comfortable life, but it was what she enjoyed.
And it was because of all this toil that she made sure to savor the time that she spent off-tour as much as possible, and that was why her days tended to start well past noon.
Trixie could easily stay slumbering in her hammock all day if she chose to, and most of the ponies who knew her would leave her to that. It would usually be through some blunder of her own that she managed to rouse herself. Such as, on this day, when amidst her snoring she kicked out one leg, perhaps a reflexive action from some dance number she was imagining in her dream, only to throw off the delicate equilibrium of her makeshift bed. Her eyes snapped open mid-fall, a rush of adrenaline waking her up all at once, but she was still unable to make any reaction until she hit the floor of the wagon with a thud. “Ow…” she grunted under her breath, rubbing her sore skull.
It wasn’t especially ideal, but it worked for Trixie Lulamoon.
With a weary sigh, she stood and went about her routine for the start of the non-business day. Even though there was less on her schedule, she still dressed herself—a neatly matching combo of pants and a long-sleeve shirt, alongside a cape and her signature purple hat; always dress to impress!—and then quickly inhaled a bowl of cereal, only stopping long enough beforehand to be sure that she wasn’t pouring something from her myriad supply drawers into the bowl. She didn’t know just how late in the day it was yet, but she wasn’t going to waste any more time if she could afford it.
“Another quaint day in Ponyville, just waiting for Trixie to make her presence known,” she remarked as she dramatically flung the wagon’s front door open. A small cantrip cast a light gust about her, billowing her cape, and she held the brim of her hat over her eyes. She would then come to discover that there was nopony nearby to witness this emergence, but that didn’t matter; it was the spirit of the moment that was important.
The wagon was still comfortably sitting in the shade cast by the looming structure of the Castle of Friendship. That prissy princess Twilight Sparkle had, after some time, relented and offered her the option of sleeping within the building itself, but she usually preferred not to, choosing instead to keep to herself. It was a preference twice over—to be in a space she was more accustomed to, and to stay away from that namby-pamby mare. Trixie was willing to put some amount of effort into being accommodating of others, but there was still only so much saccharine sweetness that she could tolerate.
“I wonder who might be in need of Trixie’s services today?” she pondered aloud as she walked away from the wagon. She ducked under the tacky yellow tape that formed a ring around the bounds of the castle—she didn’t remember that being there before she went to sleep, but she dismissed it as yet another poor attempt at decorating on Twilight’s part—and looked out toward the buildings of Ponyville. Even though she wasn’t on tour, she would still do small performances here and there when she felt the need to. The bits certainly didn’t hurt, but the primary impetus was always the desire to flaunt herself before others. There was no such thing as a pony having too much of the Great and Powerful Trixie, of course.
She thought, scratching at her chin, and she stared.
She squinted.
Surely it ought to be late enough in the day that there would be plenty of ponies going about their business in the town, yet she didn’t see any.
What she saw instead, however, was a number of…spheres? Balls? Balloons? Did that pink party pony do something crazy again? At this distance it was hard to be sure, though she thought they must have been large, at least as broad in diameter as the average adult pony was tall. The orbs were scattered around the streets, and there were a few floating in the air above the rooftops. They were varied in their colors. On some of them, she could see a pattern that resembled a pony’s cutie mark.
“What in Equestria…?”
Then the earth shook and there was a thunderous BOOM.
Trixie gasped as she stumbled, the quake throwing off her balance. She saved herself from falling over, and in the process turned and looked up in the direction of the noise, and that prompted her to gape again. Above her, there was a great beam of violet light streaming out through the roof of the castle, out into the sky. It lasted for several seconds longer before finally diminishing and then fading. The world seemed so much quieter and stiller afterward.
“So it’s not the pink one doing something crazy,” she thought dimly to herself, “it’s just another crazy Ponyville day.”
The immediate response that rose in Trixie’s brain was to pack up her wagon and book it out of town. Self-preservation remained the highest priority to her after all this time, and she wasn’t about to stick her neck out for ponies who were barely willing to toss a bit into her hat. For all her general disdain toward them, she knew that Twilight Sparkle and her friends were resourceful, she was sure that they’d figure something out. If they really needed her help, they could go looking for her.
Except these days there was one thing that would prompt Trixie to reconsider, and it was that one thing that was screaming out in her mind as she stared up at the castle: “Starlight!”
Her hat nearly flew off her head as she tore forward, running toward the building’s entrance. She threw herself at the door and yanked on it, only to wrench hard on her arm in making the discovery that it was locked. “What?! Twiggles always leaves it unlocked!” she exclaimed, tugging and pulling for a while longer before finally giving up. She glared at the handle briefly, contemplating the ramifications of her next course of action, knowing that it would reflect poorly on her if anypony found that she was trying to break into the Castle of Friendship, but ultimately she clenched her jaw and lifted her hat so a beam of purple energy could fire from her horn. All that to only have no effect as the magic fizzled upon the door without any effect, the impact absorbed by a faintly shimmering light, presumably some kind of warding enchantment.
That left her with only one recourse.
“Starlight!” Trixie cried desperately while she hammered her fist on the repulsing doors, over and over again. “Starlight! Hey, Starlight! Are you there?!”
This kept on going until her hand felt sore, just as she was considering switching to the other, when suddenly the door came open with a forceful shove, knocking into her and sending her backward. The unicorn magician reeled but held steady, coming back to attention quickly and approaching the opening.
“Starlight, you’re—!”
She stopped and stared.
It was, in fact, Starlight Glimmer who had opened the door, though Trixie hadn’t been able to tell right away. The mare was garbed in some kind of rubbery yellow suit that covered her whole body, only showing her face through a visor—another horribly tacky look to go with; she expected as much of Twilight, but she would have thought Starlight knew better. And the expression that she saw through that visor was not one of relief from the mare seeing her best friend, nor even annoyance at the commotion she had caused; it was a face etched with worry and anxiety. Trixie didn’t know yet what the cause for this might have been, but she thought surely that the sight of her beautiful and mighty visage should have been enough to dispel any concerns.
“Trixie?!” she hissed, alarmed. “Why are…what are you doing here?!”
“Trixie came here to check on you!” she asserted in turn, this time lapsing automatically into third-person without thinking about it in her panic. “Something weird’s happening! We gotta scram before we get caught up in it!”
But when Trixie reached for Starlight’s arm, the mare flinched away from her. Her indigo eyes stared from behind the visor, utterly bewildered. “Trixie, I…I can’t go, I have to find a cure for the outbreak!”
Trixie blinked and stared. “The what?”
Starlight stared back, and realization slowly dawned on her. “Do you…not know what’s happening?” she asked in disbelief.
“Trixie knows that a big laser shot out of Purplesmart’s castle just now, and that sounds like reason enough for us to be far away from here!”
Starlight groaned and placed her palm on her face—as much as she could with the visor in the way, anyway, the suit crumpling around her head in the process. “Oh, dear Celestia…” she muttered. “Look, you…you just woke up, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Trixie admitted without hesitation or the slightest hint of shame, “a mare as great and powerful as Trixie requires as much sleep as possible.”
“And you haven’t been in contact with anypony else today?”
“No, just you.” Trixie’s brow furrowed. “What’s this all about?”
With an anxious grimace, Starlight sighed. “Okay, fine, it’s probably safe for you to come inside.” She opened the door wider and beckoned for her. “Just don’t touch anything without me telling you to.”
“Yeah, sure, not like Trixie wanted to touch any of Twilight’s junk anyway,” she replied with a grumble as she followed inside, and they climbed the staircase to the upper floor.
“I suppose it turns out that this was the best day to sleep in,” Starlight said aloud during their ascent. “I got woken up by the commotion, and Twilight was able to warn me about what was happening before she was too far gone. Fortunately, I’ve been preparing for the possibility of an incident like this, so I was able to take the necessary precautions without wasting too much time.”
“Uh-huh,” Trixie mumbled, hardly listening.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have another suit prepared, but…” The mare looked back over her shoulder and then shook her head. “I’ve already put everyone on lockdown so…I suppose you should be fine.”
“Fine with what?” The performer quirked an eyebrow upward. “You still haven’t told Trixie what the deal is with any of this.”
Starlight didn’t say anything until they had come to the top of the steps. “I think it’s easier if I show you.”
They came into the circular hallway that ringed around the central axis of the crystalline building. At regular intervals there were angular doorways carved into the walls, but Trixie noticed that most of them were now boarded over, in a similar manner to a condemned building. Starlight came over to one of them along the outer wall and gestured for Trixie to join her. She saw that there was also a piece of paper tacked over the door with what looked like Starlight’s handwriting on it.
It read:
Patient #2
Name: Berry Punch
Time of infection: Unknown
Time of full maturity: 10:30 AM
Contents: Juice (smells like cranberry)
Current state: Unresponsive
Patient #3
Name: Cup Cake
Time of infection: Unknown
Time of full maturity: 10:48 AM
Contents: Mixture of cake batter and vanilla frosting
Current state: Responds to audio stimulus, limited speech
She squinted. “Starlight, what is this about?”
“Here.” The unicorn in the suit again pointed to the door, and Trixie saw that some of the crystal panes, which she was pretty sure had all been opaque before, were transparent, allowing her to peer into the barricaded room on the other side. She held onto her hat as she leaned in closer.
If she remembered correctly, this room was supposed to be a guest bedroom or something to that effect. Her memory was the only thing she could go off of, as there wasn’t much to see with the balloons in the way. Two of them, seemingly much like the ones that were scattered around Ponyville.
Except this closer view made it abundantly apparent that these weren’t balloons. Their surfaces weren’t rubber, more closely resembling the fuzzy rind of a peach, coated in a thin layer of hair. And though they were mostly round, there were faint hints of structure to them, with protruding mounds rising from the central mass—two on the lower hemisphere, splayed to the sides, two matching those on top and two more closer to the front. Those frontmost mounds had small bare patches on their farthest ends, and there was a deep divot in the center of the spheres. And, though this angle made it difficult to tell, there was one more mound at the top of the body, partially sunken inward, each topped with hair.
It was just barely noticeable how they rose and fell, tensing in rhythm, as if breathing.
“Are…” Trixie blinked, her words failing her for a moment. “Are those ponies?”
“Yes,” Starlight muttered with a weary sigh.
Trixie looked again. The two pony-balloons were at a slight angle, facing roughly toward the door. Trixie didn’t especially recognize either of the ponies, too used to a lifestyle of seeing dozens and dozens of faces day after day while also having not gone to much effort to interact with the citizens of Ponyville (it didn’t help either that she had done little to endear herself to the town’s inhabitants in the past). One of them was a deep purple color, almost like wine, and she guessed this was Berry Punch; the other was a pale blue, with a swirl of pinkish hair, and this one Trixie thought she might have seen before—Cup Cake, more commonly known as Mrs. Cake—when she went to that confectionary in Ponyville, but she remembered her coat being a more vibrant shade of periwinkle. It seemed to Trixie as if their colors were distorted slightly, the color of some internal substance bleeding through. It was this substance which was leaking from their nipples, and possibly other orifices: a purplish liquid from Berry Punch, cascading over the swollen curvature of their form, and some white-yellow mixture from Mrs. Cake, more viscous in its texture, dribbling out in clumps and globs, and these were pooling on the floor around them.
“That’s going to be a fun mess to clean up,” Trixie absentmindedly muttered to herself, silently pondering if there was any risk of the ponies bursting and making it even worse.
“I don’t know exactly what’s causing it, but I’m willing to bet that it’s magical in nature,” Starlight explained, though Trixie was only half-listening to her, letting the words pass through her unregistered. “The affliction is causing ponies to fill from within with…something, it seems to vary from subject to subject. In some way based upon their nature as a pony—their talent, their personality, their expertise.”
She walked away, and Trixie followed her further down the hall to the next door, and the paper tacked to this one included two names that the magician immediately recognized, prompting her to sneer as she looked through the transparent slats.
Applejack and Rainbow Dash were in there, but they weren’t quite like Berry and Mrs. Cake. They weren’t completely spherical, their equine anatomy still immediately discernible, even if they had become swollen to such an extent that it looked like they had gone from toned and athletic to obese overnight. Rainbow was pacing anxiously, clearly upset with how she was encumbered by her bulky limbs, legs grinding together in an awkward waddling gait, pushing into the taut, sagging dome that was her belly. Her body was discolored with shifting rainbow swirls, filled with the raw rainbow mixture that was used in weather factories. Applejack was sprawled upon and gradually overflowing a chair, legs splayed to the sides to make room for her gut, heavy breasts resting on top of the shelf. She had a dazed expression, overtaken with giddiness, which likely had something to do with the gallons of apple cider inside her, tinting her orange coat to a yellower amber hue. It was difficult to tell unless Trixie looked closely, but both mares appeared to be in the process of swelling further, rounding outward, presumably inevitably approaching the size of the other pony-balloons.
“So, what’re we doing hanging around here if this is such a problem?” Trixie asked, turning back to the mare beside her, who may or may not have still been rambling about something all this time.
Starlight stared at her before she rolled her eyes and groaned. “Trixie, I told you, I need to find a way to reverse this before it’s too late!”
“Trixie is sure it’ll be fine if we just leave it to pass over,” she replied nonchalantly with a wave of her hand, “they’ll probably just leak it all out eventually, and then we won’t have anything to worry about.” A part of her was still wondering about the popping idea—that certainly would be another way for the issue to resolve itself.
At first Starlight Glimmer looked like she might have an irate meltdown, but she clenched her jaw and steadily her demeanor cooled back down to neutral as she pursed her lips into a thin line. “And what if they are leaking some substance more hazardous than mere juice, Trixie?” she asked pointedly.
“What, like…” Trixie had to probe her brain for a few seconds to think of an appropriate response. “Gas?”
“What about magic, Trixie?” the unicorn in the suit asked, glaring.
“Magic? How does one leak magic?” she asked with a disbelieving scoff.
“Well, there are plenty of magical maladies that can cause a unicorn’s magical stability to—” Starlight cut herself off again with a shake of her head. “The point is, that’s what we’ve got here, and that’s what we need to be worried about.” She gestured for them to walk again, this time across the hall to the other side, to the doors which opened up to the central hall of the castle. Despite her flippant disregard for the whole situation, Trixie was unable to resist her curiosity, so again she peered through the opening in the gate.
The throne room was a far more grandiose place than most of the other rooms in the castle, yet there was only one occupant inside it at the moment. It might have surprised Trixie just a little that it wasn’t because this pony-balloon was so large that it needed all that space, though she did seem to be just a little larger and rounder than any of the others she had seen thus far. The lavender of her coat had been stained a vibrant magenta-pink, but like Rainbow Dash the surface swirled inchoately, lights flashing and twinkling within like nebulae. This same light crackled about her, coalescing into drifting masses that were like miniature thunderclouds, most prominently focused around her horn. Trixie could already tell who it was right away, from seeing the tag on the door, and just from context clues, but the pink and white star cutie mark which was stretched over the mare’s bloated and distended flanks was a dead giveaway.
“Ha, so even Princess Perfect couldn’t get away from it, huh?” Trixie remarked with a self-congratulatory smirk.
“She couldn’t help it, Trixie,” Starlight replied, arms crossed. “It’s my understanding that ponies came to the castle for help, not realizing that they were already infected, and by the time Twilight realized what was happening it was already too late. If she hadn’t given me a warning before she went unresponsive, I probably would have gotten caught up in this too.”
“Ugh, always with the heroics from her,” the showmare grumbled.
“The point, Trixie, is that Twilight is a magical prodigy, the bearer of the Element of Magic, not to mention an alicorn, and consequently she’s rapidly filling with raw magical energy, and it’s too much for her body to contain.” She came to stand by the viewing window and pointed inside, vaguely in the direction of the clouds of magic which surrounded the bloated alicorn. “She has just enough consciousness to gather the ambient energy into a spell so she can discharge it, but if it accumulates too much then it could have disastrous consequences. This is why I have to find some way to reverse this process, or the whole castle—heck, all of Ponyville, or even more than that—may go up in smoke!”
Trixie frowned, and for once did not immediately blurt out some curt retort. Eventually, she heaved a sigh of defeat and admitted, “Okay, fine, Trixie supposes that does sound like a pretty big deal.”
“Thanks for understanding,” Starlight said semi-sarcastically with a groan. “If you really can’t be bothered to do anything to help, then just go, but I’m not. I’m staying here until I can get everypony back to normal.”
Trixie grumbled incoherently at the feeling of guilt that was prying into her, but still she said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll help, whatever. I’m sure that it would take somepony as great and powerful as Trixie to solve a dilemma such as this anyway.”
Starlight rolled her eyes but still put on a hint of a smile. “Thanks, Trix.” She continued seamlessly into her technical nerd babbling as she started to turn and walk away. “Now I think I’m close to isolating the source of the pathogen, but I need to identify…”
The unicorn magician slumped as she followed, sensing that this was going to be a troublesome ordeal, even without factoring in her lesser capacity for magic compared to the bookworms (not that she would ever say out loud that she was inferior in any way).
But only for a few steps and then she stopped abruptly. She glanced back, and then she returned to the door and the window, peering inside at the prone form of Twilight Sparkle. Her body was nearly motionless, not that it seemed like there was much movement she was capable of, only a slight rocking motion that shook through her every few seconds, tilting from one side to another.
“Trixie?” Starlight’s voice came calling for her from further down the hall, and there was a distant beleaguered sigh before she came stomping back. “What’s the holdup?”
“Oh, I was just…wondering.” Trixie tapped on the transparent pane. “Can she hear us at all?”
Starlight joined her in looking at Twilight again and frowned lamentably. “It’s hard to say, she hasn’t made any clear response since I got the observations set up. My timetables haven’t been entirely exact, but she seemed to go through the stages of the infection astonishingly quickly, she was at full size in less than ten minutes.”
“Hmm…well that’s a bit unfortunate.” Then she shrugged as she remarked “Oh well, no big deal” before then reaching for the handle.
“What?” Starlight sputtered, taken aback.
But Trixie was already pulling on the door. This was only for her to come to the discovery that it wouldn’t budge, held fast by the boards covering the panels. “Oh, right, barricaded.”
Then Starlight was upon her, forcibly coming between her and the door. “What are you doing?!” Now the face behind the visor was truly furious, completely overtaken by frustration and confusion.
“Hey, it’s fine, nothing much,” Trixie replied, holding up her open palms, feigning innocence with a grin, “Trixie just wants to talk to her face-to-face for a bit.” The grin broadened as she added, “Just enough time to rub it in her face how she messed up.”
“Trixie, you can’t go in there without proper protection!” The unicorn patted at her chest emphatically, at the ugly suit which so unjustly obscured her breasts. “I don’t have time to corral you into good behavior right now, we need to focus on what’s important!”
“And I’ll have you know that there couldn’t be anything more important than Trixie taking the opportunity to gloat where she can,” she replied, thoroughly unfazed, turning her nose up in the air, “and this, Trixie would say, is a golden opportunity if ever there was one.”
“Trixie, I swear to Celestia and Luna and whatever alicorn I can that I’m not letting you through here,” Starlight growled at her, teeth bared, keeping her stance low while she held her arms across the doorway.
Trixie stared at her for a while, frustrated, disappointed, but for a time was uncharacteristically quiet. Again, though she wouldn’t admit it, she knew Starlight’s magic was even stronger than her own; it would be simple for the unicorn scholar to overpower and subdue her if that was what this came down to. This would require an indirect approach, and fortunately Trixie was a master of sleight of hand. “That’s quite alright, Starlight,” she said while lowering her head so that the brim of her hat covered much of her face, showing only her smiling muzzle and a curl of her silvery mane; it was a practiced gesture, good for providing her with some mystique, as well as obscuring her horn as she prepared a spell. “The great and powerful Trixie doesn’t need to go through you, she just needs to get to the other side.”
“What’re you—wait, NO!”
Starlight lunged, reaching for Trixie’s arm, but when she grabbed the mare’s sleeve she instead pulled back a chain of colorful handkerchiefs. Trixie retreated safely, and she grinned victoriously as the spell finished charging. She had to hold on to that feeling of victory to steel herself for the dimensional pinching that came as she teleported. It was a short distance, and so the time spent in transit was brief, but it always felt like an eternity, and when she rematerialized, stumbling to catch her balance, she was gasping for breath. Her brain scrambled to reassemble her thoughts, to remember what she had been doing, and just for a moment she was able to put aside the current situation and revel in her success at pulling off an impromptu teleportation, pumping a fist to herself.
There was a thumping sound behind her. Trixie looked back and saw Starlight on the other side of the closed door, banging her fist on the panel. She waved at her glibly, waggling her fingers, before turning away.
It wasn’t often that Trixie came here to the throne room, where Twilight Sparkle’s authority was at its highest (especially not after that incident with her early efforts at teleportation), but now the atmosphere was different. It might have been most to do with the semi-physical wisps of magic which choked the air, which any pony familiar with the nature of magic would have been alarmed by. Or it might have been the current state of disarray the room was in, the table and chairs that had stood in the center tipped over or broken, pieces of debris scattered across the floor, holes in the ceiling above. For Trixie, though, the most discerning aspect was Twilight herself, no longer an alicorn princess or even much of a pony but a balloon, quashing any claim to superiority she might have held before.
The magician snorted in amusement to herself as she strode across the floor to where the pony-balloon sat in precarious equilibrium. It felt like she was wading through a soupy miasma that enshrouded her whole body. She let her lungs fill with air that tasted of grape and vanilla and crackling electricity. There was no reason for her to worry about anything happening to her—she was too great and powerful for that. She didn’t realize that that very thought was feeding into the magic that was now suffusing her, though even if she did it likely wouldn’t have stopped her from thinking it.
“Well, well, well…if it isn’t Twilight Sparkle,” Trixie remarked as she came to stand in front of the wobbling orb.
There was no discernible response, no change that could be observed in direct correlation. The mare’s face couldn’t even be properly gauged for her expression. There had been a time when Trixie was taller than the bookworm, but after becoming a princess she had started going through growth spurts. Now, however, the extra height which was afforded by her swollen diameter put her face at the top of a small hill, the slopes of her upper body forming a caldera into which her head had sunken.
“You know, Starlight told Trixie that you got yourself into this mess with your goodie-goodie mushiness,” she went on without waiting. “Just couldn’t resist helping out some ponies, could you? Nopony would ever think that could be a bad idea! Well, it looks like for once, Trixie is going to be the one who comes out on top!”
She laughed, unconscious of the intangible force which was worming into her, seeping through her physical body and searching for the core of her being. It didn’t take long to find, since Trixie was just about the equine equivalent of an open book, plain and up-front and easy to read. The replicating spell was more than capable of making a forcible effort to pry through somepony’s deepest secrets to find what made them tick, and it would never be exhausted. Were it capable of such a thing, though, it might have been surprised in this case to find that the nature of the showmare’s personality was far different from any it had encountered on this day, so overwhelming and intense and self-important. The raw material which comprised her was of a different sort than it was used to, different in how it interacted with the physical body. It did not collect in the center, in the guts, instead creeping upward, like hot air, to the highest points.
“Ha, oh…but Trixie is kidding really,” Trixie eventually said after calming down. She failed to notice her hat shifting upon her head or the shift that was overtaking her voice, enunciation blurring as her lips brushed together more than they were supposed to. “Trixie knows it’s your whole shtick, friendship is magic, blah blah blah. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. Trixie and Starlight will be working to solve this mess that you have blundered into. We can work out our compensation after everything is over and done with.” She chortled to herself.
There was a low groan from Twilight’s buried throat.
“What’s that?” The unicorn leaned closer. She was able to get a look at Twilight’s face now. She thought surely it was because of her proximity and not because her point of view had shifted higher up. She didn’t want to get too close, though, sensing the sizzling intensity of the power which was emanating from the mare’s horn.
The alicorn made another incoherent muffled noise. At this angle, it was clearer to see that the swollen mass of her chin and cheeks made it nearly impossible for her to open her mouth. Her eyes were open, half-lidded, but there was no thought or emotion to be discerned from them. In spite of how overflowingly full she was, it was like Twilight Sparkle had become a hollow shell. Her horn was sparking more and more, ready to erupt with another discharge of mana.
Trixie shrugged. “Fine, suit yourself,” she said, except with her swollen lips mashing against each other it sounded more like “Pfine, suimp yourmpfselmpf.” There was pressure building in her skull, forcing outward, distending. She turned around and started to walk away, having gotten her fill of taunting her old nemesis. Each step came so easily, bouncing up and down, as if the force of gravity upon her had been reduced. It only made sense to her—it seemed natural to be so unburdened, so boundless in her skill and talent.
The pulsations of energy grew louder behind her, a low groan rising up from the prone alicorn as magic coalesced around her horn into a roiling orb of light.
“Don’t hold it in, Princess, you wouldn’t want to pop!” Trixie chuckled, not hearing how incoherent her own words were becoming. She didn’t understand what the big deal was with this whole magical overload thing; she was sure that if she were in Twilight’s position, she would have been way better at managing the buildup, she wouldn’t just sit there and let herself become a blimp.
She looked at the door in front of her—below her, rather, having to peer down past the obtrusive jutting mass of her cheeks and muzzle and the glossy light blue mound further beyond. She couldn’t see Starlight through the viewing panel at this angle. The door seemed so much smaller now, but surely that only made sense, everything should seem small compared to her. It didn’t especially matter, though, because she knew that she could just teleport to get back to the other side; she could teleport all the way across Equestria if she wanted to.
But before she could think about that spell, her hat slipped off of the rising peak that was her scalp. Trixie made a muffled sputtering sound of dismay as she turned about to pick it back up, only to come to the discovery that she couldn’t see it. Her eyes rolled down but there were only the sprawling blue hills in front of her; she couldn’t even see her arms in front of her as she bent toward the floor. The intense magic suffusing the air seeped into her and the pressure built higher still, pulling on her; she felt that her hooves didn’t seem to want to stay on the floor. Dimly, she thought that there had to be something wrong, something out of place, but how could that be? How could anything about Trixie, the Great and Powerful, not be completely perfect?
Distantly, Twilight made another crooning vocalization as the power gathered in her horn ignited explosively. A familiar beam of light shot forth from the spherical alicorn, up into the air, and there was a great crashing as another hole was opened up in the ceiling and more crystalline and stone debris came down. Though the energy was directed outward, the force of the explosion still rocked the whole room, sending Trixie flying into the air, while also washing her in a deluge of mana that fed into the infection that filled her. In that moment, overtaken by a drastic surge of pressure, the unicorn was unavoidably conscious of what was happening: of her head inflating, burgeoning beyond its bounds, surely outstripping the volume of the rest of her body several times over. She felt her cheeks and muzzle and lips puffing outward, the tension building behind her eyes, the surface of her skin taut and pliant like a balloon filled with helium.
No, it only felt like helium. What it was in effect, actually, was ego.
Then she hit a wall with a gruff grunt and she forgot what she’d been thinking about. Instead of slipping back down to the floor, however, Trixie found herself rising higher still, bumping against the walls. Her balloon head was keeping her aloft, her body dangling limply from it like the gondola of a hot air balloon. Looking about, she was just scarcely able to catch a glimpse of Twilight Sparkle beneath her, slipping away, and that was enough to prompt her to smirk in delight even amidst her confusion. Nopony would be able to deny that Trixie was the superior magician now. After all, she wasn’t the one who was a blimp.
“Stars above…dammit, Trixie,” Starlight swore as she watched the unicorn showmare transform into a bizarre hypercephalic caricature of herself. Her body may have been untouched, but her head alone had become nearly as large as the entirety of one of the other ponies afflicted with the inflation virus, largely spherical in shape.
Of course, this setback wasn’t going to stop her from making observations, scribbling down a litany of notes while the inflation progressed. She hadn’t yet had the opportunity to witness the onset of infection, so this might prove vital in discovering how the virus functioned. The localized inflation was a surprise, though she had to suppose it was fitting—Trixie had always been an airhead, after all. “Who knows how many more forms this affliction might take…?” she muttered to herself.
She looked through the viewing panel again, and she had to peer way up to see Trixie’s form now floating toward the ceiling, toward the openings that had been made by Twilight’s magical discharges. Starlight grumbled again and shook her head. “I’d better catch her so she doesn’t drift off somewhere…lucky her for not losing her clothes in all this at least.” Aside from the signature hat which lay abandoned on the floor in the throne room—Starlight knew that without that, Trixie would think she might as well be naked.
Starlight walked hurriedly away down the hall, too busy thinking about how she would get Trixie down and into one of the remaining free rooms to consider the roiling magical residue within the throne room, the way it scattered about, drifting lazily toward the ground like falling snow.
Author's Note
This story was a combination of prompts; the main one was about an inflation-based epidemic, somewhat juicy in nature, but I also decided to mix it with one about Trixie because my big head yearnings have been flaring up recently.
Recently read a story featuring Trixie so tried going hard on getting her dialogue right. Probably still inconsistent.
Concerted efforts to curb sequel bait.
This story was a prompt suggested by my supporters on Patreon. Consider pledging your support if you enjoy my work and would be interested in participating in these selections in the future.
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