The gray filly fled through the desert, and the veg-slingers followed.
Despite her best efforts, Dinky Doo found herself cornered by the three stallions, as the open areas of the desert ran dry and the steep walls of the gorge blocked her in. She could only put her back up against the wall, sit down and wait, as even snapping at them could only egg them on, and no magic spells came to her mind. As she looked into the eyes of her predators, they started to grin, edging in closer and closer, and bringing the vegetable along with them.
Dinky always knew that she should eat her vegetables, but the vegetables were how this all started, and if Corona had her way, the vegetables were how it was going to end. One of the stallions passed a veg to their leader, illuminating what was now revealed to be a squash with an unearthly glow. While all vegetables were bad now, squash was the worst, not because it turned you in to one of them, they all did that, but squash was yucky, and that just wouldn't do. Dinky put her horn forward, knowing she wasn't going to win a tug of war, but trying to spear the false fruit, anything to not let it get into her mouth.
But the Earth Ponies were quicker, lifting and pinning the filly against the wall while the unicorn levitated the squash in close, grinning his feral grin. If she opened her mouth to tell them off now, it would only allow them to finish her quicker, so she closed her eyes, and waited for the end. But it never came, as a rush of wind nearly clipped her nose, laced with but a hint of raspberry and some powdered sugar.
"You know, Colts should only pick on Fillies their own size."
Dinky flinched, dropping to the ground and instinctively opening her eyes on arrival. An overturned steaming tart lay on the ground before her, the squash's juices hissing, contained by it's sweet counterpart. The three stallions turned their attention to the owner of the sentence, taking in the sight that they beheld.
A long, long shadow had covered all of them, in the intervening time between Dinky's rescue, and following it back, they saw the setting sun, and the figure against it, walking towards them. As their eyes adjusted, the figure became a blue, unicorn mare, horned covered by a dirt brown fedora, but tell tale blue auras around a series of pies she was levitating. The pack of stallions growled at her, but the blue mare only smiled.
"A Mister Punk Cakes, I presume. Wanna tell me what a baker like you is doing forcing squash down some poor kid's throat?"
The stallions stepped back as their leader, Punk, addressed the new player. "Stay out of this, horsie," he said, tramping his foot, "she's asking too many about how my cooking spell works, and I ain't in right a mood to talk about it."
The mare stared down the stallion from under the hat's brow. He was already grasping a vegetable to match each of her pies, as a crow off in the corner gave the inevitable screech that right here and right now, something was going to go down.
"I am, believe it or not. A long line of caterers on call for hosting the engagement party of Mi Amore Cadenza, and all of them the night before got sick something awful," She tilted her hat, and the foal finally caught a glance of her piercing purple eyes, "So the food needed to be put together at the last minute, and guess who was the only name in town who could handle that big an order?"
Punk laughed, "And you plan on accusing me of something, Miss Mare with No Name?"
Dinky worked herself to her feet. "Her name is Miss Lulamoon you dummy, and she's my friend and the Element of Magic, and you're going down cause she can file reports on you!"
Trixie sighed, "Dinky, Would you like to give them my address too?"
Dinky managed to work her way behind Trixie, "I thought they should know who they dealing with, just in case they want to give up before you cream them." She pointed out, "with Cream."
Punk shook his head and moved in on the two, his comrades flanking in and managing to corner Trixie as well. Then he layed down his ultimatium, "Imma gonna give you one more chance to get your flanks outta Dodge here before you both find yourself up to your neck in vegetables from your inside out, if yall don't leave us be."
Trixie raised her hooves over her head and dropped her pies to the ground, taking Dinky in close to her. "I'm gone like a naked bear Sasquatch once you answer my one more question. Whatta yall plan to do about my friends?" She let out a long, sharp whistle that echoed off into the distance.
In an instant, a series of heads popped out of nowhere, two ponies from beyond the lip of the gorge, one from a overhanging cloud, and two from further out, boxing in the group of three ponies along with their hostages, all of them armed with assorted pies. Trixie grinned at how the plan came together.
"Now let me give you a chance, you come quietly and tell us how we can dispell the food, or you find yourself in a thirty pie pileup with enough raw caloric firepower to drop an Ursa."
The ponies looked at one another, and dropped their weapons, the vegetables bouncing to the ground like bouncing vegetables tend to do on sand. They looped around and walked into the open air, and dropping to their knees to be taken in. Trixie looked over her comrades in arms, and smiled on the first thing that actually went right today. Then she figured "what the hell," and gave the signal to bombard them with pie anyway, just in case.
===========================
PIELANDER
Kathleen Barr.......................Trixie Lulamoon
Tara Strong..........................Raindrops
Lara Jill Miller.......................Carrot Top
Wendee Lee........................Lyra Heartstrings
Tabitha St. Germain............Ditzy Doo
Nicole Oliver........................Cheerilee
BASED ON THE WORKS OF THE LUNAVERSE BY RAINBOW DOUBLE DASH
The Good, the Bad, and the Hungry
"I've heard the stories you know," Dinky said to the blue unicorn mare, "Element of Magic, hero of Oaton, savior of Moonville, and undefeated in any competition of liquor."
Trixie rolled her eyes, she was doing that again.
"Dinky," Trixie said, dipping her head out of sight of the stallions who were arrested and covered in fruit filling, but otherwise capable of listening in, "You know me, I know you, we don't have to do the story telling thing every time we meet someone new." Ditzy, Dinky's mother, gave Trixie a sideways look, and she quickly added, "And cut the part about drinking contests, that was kinda dumb, to be honest."
Dinky caught wise to the shared look, and pouted, "But you said the expedition-"
"Exposition"
"Ex-magician parts were the best part, and you made me get the voice right like five times!"
Ditzy audibly cleared her throat, signaling Trixie that now was not a good time for a filly to be in the room and she should be escorted out, by her mother, immediately. Trixie rolled her eyes, and Ditzy, not to be undermined, rolled her left eye around and round in that way that guaranteed victory in a staring contest against any opponent in Equestria. Ditzy won, and Dinky was escorted off the premises. Having been literally browbeaten, Trixie turned her attention back to the captives, testing their restraints with her unicorn magic, and removing the muzzle on the lead horse's mouth.
"So," she started, but was spat at by the stallion. It took her a good fifteen seconds to levitate the spittle, then painstakingly place it deep within the offender's nasal cavity, but she figured that time was well worth the point she was trying to make, and the stallion seemed to have calmed down, so she continued.
"I would like to know about Corona's plan, if you'd please."
The stallion considered another rude gesture, but a cold twinge in his nose served his interest otherwise, and there wasn't a whole lot he could say to that effect. "I don't know anything."
"I didn't ask you about your qualifications for being an moron. You were at the attack on Her Highness, the Princess Cadence's engagement party, there was some sort of enchanted food that got loose, and you were the caterer. Was there anything, anything at all you can tell me."
"I'm not a moron..." The stallion looked down at the floor, somewhat dejectedly.
Trixie sighed, "Gonna assume that's the pie talking, the yeast takes the brunt of the vegetable brainwashing, leaves you a little loopy but otherwise gets it out of your system." Then she exited the room, leaving the stallion to ponder if his hooves were always that color or if they changed in the past fifteen minutes.
Meanwhile, while the Elements we getting nowhere in their interrogations into what was going on, Corona wasn't faring much better in her efforts to turn this situation into her favor. In short, maybe spiking the engagement party with enchanted vegetables as a smokescreen was not her best plan ever, but in a short amount of time, it would all be worth it. She didn't have the faintest idea on how, but as the proverb of the Flutterponies who stole undergarments says, achievement will come to those who work for them, and this goal in particular was the biggest find since Corona was locked in the sun.
When the royal couple announced the engagement party, word had spread that a fabled Vorpalberry Pastry would be Equestria's wedding gift to the royal couple. Under normal circumstances, Celestia would have wished them well, and had been on her way. Getting banished for a thousand years under charges of high treason, having the Elements of Harmony taken out from under her, and dealing with incompetent henchponies had not sated her hunger for vengeance, nor pastry for that matter. The plan suffered a minor setback in that the Vorpalberry Pastry was not presented at the engagement party, and the zebra's vegetables of obedience were for naught. Nevertheless, the plan was on track, Corona figured, as the pie could not be hidden forever, and the vegetables were gaining influence over the population.
Celestia was always a nervous eater, and as the Lord High Goddess and Tyrant Sun focus was upon her sister, and there was no royal degree of fitness or diet in play, Corona found herself free to gorge on any food her heart desired, her Alicorn Metabolism taking the brunt of whatever binges she could throw at it, and all was well. But then came the Pie, the Vorpalberry Pastry, that awoke a hunger in her unseen in Equestria for millenia, as that there was in Vorpalberry. A lust so powerful, that it would consume the mind if left unchecked, and a thousand years with her palette unwhet had her in a pie lust such that the very words set her aflame. It was most serious business, and required the utmost brilliance of planning to acquire.
Unfortunately for the poor soul Corona was using to deliver messages, he returned as she was in the middle of a binge such as described, with pies of all varieties trying to satiate her hunger, but all of them failing and only making her more irritable. Worse still, he brought news of the ponies using the starch and yeast reaction of their own pastry pies to nullify the effect of the cursed vegetables, and this was not the news she wanted to hear. Especially not now.
As Equestrian scholars tell that story, the messenger was offered a slice of Banana Cream Pie, but was never heard from again.
