Poetic Pony Problems? Provide Potions!
"Granny! Granny! C'mere quick, Applejack's speakin’ in tongues again!”
Granny Smith found Applebloom by her older sister's bedside. The mare held her prized hat over her muzzle, wide-eyes peeking over the brim reinforcing the fact that yes, there was indeed a problem.
“She's speakin’ funnier than that time I found her ‘n Big Mac wrasslin’ that wild skunk! and puttin’ out that spontaneous clubhouse fire at the same time!”
Applejack's eyes narrowed and she shot her sister a look that said, ‘not the time nor the place.’
“But at least y'dont smell so bad this time,” Applebloom added thoughtfully. “And yer eyes aren't red, and-”
“Consarn it!” Granny interrupted. “I'll not be havin’ an Apple channel the divine while I'm still kickin’. You were raised in a barn and I expect you to act like it! C'mon, open up, lemme see what's wrong with ya now!” Granny chided and reached for Applejack's hat.
Applejack looked to her expectant family… and finally opened her mouth.
“My words spill out in rhyme I do not make
And run until I speak my piece in full
You must save me from this rhyming headache
‘Cuz this sure is a big load of bull-”
Applejack gasped, followed by Granny, followed by Applebloom.
“It's worse than I expected,” Granny said, dismayed. “She's possessed alright… by iambic pentameter!”
“Oh no!” Applebloom shrieked. “It's not deadly, is it?”
“It is.” Granny hung her head. “I give her six years and two, maybe three, failed poetry collections before she up ‘n starves- if'n we don't get this figured out that is.”
Granny ran Applejack through every home remedy in the book. Literally, front to back, cover to cover. When seemingly nothing worked, they turned to the country-livin’ miracle cure: beating it out of her.
Applejack was halfway through a sonnet by the time the broom handle cracked. If not a single carbonated beverage, warm soup, or broom-based battering could save her, she was as good as dead.
“Come back with yer countryisms, or not at all,” Granny commanded with a somber bowing of her head. Applebloom fought back tears whilst waving Applejack off. How was she going to possibly break the news to everypony that her sister was a poet now?
________________________________________________
Applejack galloped hard. They'd exhausted the collective family medicinal knowledge in only a couple hours which left the rest of the day to fix whatever this was. Twilight would be in Canterlot for a few days longer which left only a few choices.
Rarity would be of no help, surely. Not after her and Dash tracked in all that mud. It hadn't been her idea to mud wrestle but she wasn't going to turn down a challenge. It was just an unfortunate chain of events that led to mud all over the ceiling, Rarity's latest work-in-progress dress, and Opalesence.
And Fluttershy was probably still cross too considering the rodeo round-up they attempted the other day. Wait, was that it? Was somepony trying to get back at her? A prank, maybe?
Applejack kept her pace but changed course towards Twilight's castle: she needed to locate Rainbow Dash.
________________________________________________
Dash and Pinkie sat around the cutie mark map looking equally perturbed and distressed as Applejack trotted in.
“Oo! My turn, my turn,” Pinkie exclaimed, leaping up onto the map.
“There once was a pie named Pinkie,
whose friends were in a bit of a stinky
they sat around a map,
hoping to unwrap,
this situation with a little bit of thinky!”
Applejack pointed a hoof at herself and then between Dash and Pinkie, and then back to herself.
Dash nodded.
“Are we doing charades now?” Pinkie asked plainly. “I'm way better at those, it took me forever to come up with that limerick!” She smiled disconcertingly wide but at least somepony was having a good time.
Dash through her hooves up and scowled. “Storm clouds hide rainbows / and batter the apple tree. / Hope lies in laughter.” Dash spoke in a sagely manner despite grimacing.
“Don't worry Applejack, I got this. I've been translating for her,” Pinkie beamed again. “I think she's saying you're both in trouble, and it's up to me to save the day!”
Dash nodded again, not daring to open her mouth lest she capture the moment with another striking imagery of nature juxtaposed with observational wisdom.
“And you've been this way since morning light broke? I slept with words intact and woke in rhyme.” Applejack explained.
Pinkie raised a brow. “Hey wait a second, that didn't sound like a rhyme to me.”
“‘Cuz there's more than that to this vocal yoke!” Applejack shot back. “Ten syllables I get, instead I mime.” She grunted and tipped her hat low to cover her face.
“There it is!” Pinkie exclaimed, happy the couplets had rhyming pairs.
The poetry was affecting more than her vocabulary, Applejack found. Her preferences were changing too. Getting this all fixed up and back to the farm started to sound less appealing than a readthrough of the Dead Ponies Society's latest collective work alongside Rainbow Dash.
“The rooster calls and / the sun answers his beckon / panic wakes with me.” Dash looked to Pinkie who began ‘translating’ immediately.
“I thiiink she’s saying… she woke up, couldn't find her chicken, and freaked out?”
Dash shook her head. They'd been at it all morning and Pinkie had grown surprisingly well-versed in haiku deciphering, though understandably not perfect.
“Wait, wait, wait, she's saying she got WOKEN up by the rooster and found out she was speaking in poetry too?”
A nod confirmed Pinkie’s second guess. Just as with Applejack, Dash had woken up to three hundred years of Equestrian poetry bouncing around her brain.
“Y'know,” Pinkie mused, twirling a hoof through her bouncy pink mane. “I wonder if this has anything to do with the potion Starlight had you drink the other day?”
Applejack sat back up and tore her hat off her head. She opened her mouth then shut it just as quickly before mimicking drinking something out of her hoof. She shrugged then pointed to Dash who returned a shrug of her own.
“Okay, two words. Ice cream? Trombone? Wait, that's one word, uh…” Pinkie trailed off, lost in thought. Maybe she was better at haiku than charades after all. “OH! The potion?” She asked, receiving fervent nodding in exchange.
“Yeah, so you two were here bickering like usual,” Pinkie started. The pair recollected that much, at least.
“I was sitting riiight here,” Pinkie continued, stomping across the map to plop down on the armrest of her personal chair. “Remember?”
They had been so caught up in their argument, the rest of the world had been tuned out.
“Okay well Starlight came in and she was like, ‘hey everypony, you guys wanna drink this potion?’ And then you said-” Pinkie pointed a hoof at Applejack- “I ain't drinkin’ no random elixir.” The country drawl was on point so surely that's how it had played out.
“And then Starlight said ‘oh, I guess you guys are chicken?’ and Dash said-”
“Feathers fear no storm / even facing hurricanes. / I drink with courage.” Rainbow Dash remembered now. She had grabbed the vial out of Starlight's hoof and slammed half of the liquid down in a single gulp.
“Yeah! you said ‘I'm no chicken, gimme that!” Pinkie nodded eagerly.
Now they were making progress. “And then you finished it off, Applejack, because you're ‘braver than a one-eyed possum standin’ toe-to-toe with a timberwolf’, or something like that.”
That all made sense. Applejack remembered now, she had been asserting that she could buck an apple up to Cloudsdale from below. Rainbow Dash was having none of it, of course, and the argument descended into back-and-forth ‘nuh uhs’ and ‘yeah huhs’ for an indeterminate amount of time.
They continued to argue even after the drinking the potion, until the two were so fed-up and bickered-out that they decided to meet first thing in the morning to put Applejack's claim to the test.
Dash was out of her chair now that they had a definitive source to their problem. “Unicorn magic, / a clear answer to itself. / Let's go kick her butt.”
________________________________________________
Starlight had spent the past three days listening to the most inane bickering and arguing. Initially she had thought to ignore them, that was seemingly what those two always did after all. But when other ponies started getting involved by choice or proximity, Starlight began to panic.
Twilight was only going to be gone for a week and her instructions had been clear. “Don't let the castle burn down while I'm away,” she had joked.
Starlight read between the lines as only a neurotic unicorn could. The castle would be no worry, but if the friend group imploded in the short time Twilight was away… well, that'd reflect rather poorly on the Friendship Protégé.
If any lesson had been partially driven through Starlight's thick skull, it was to not magic her friends without clear and direct consent. There were more lessons too, like not immediately jumping to magic to solve her problems but that was neither here nor there.
Potions, one could argue - and she had, verbally, with herself - were not magic. Sure, maybe she had needed to use magic to distill a poetry book down into a drinkable solution and yes, maybe the potion was having unintended and possibly permanent results- but it was 99.99% magic free and the lesser evil of all her other ideas.
It came as a shock then to find Pinkie knocking on her door with AJ and Dash in tow. “Hey Starliiiight?” Pinkie asked.
“Yes, Pinkie?” Starlight responded, trying her hardest to avoid the Team Appledash synchronized mean mugging.
“You remember yesterday?” Pinkie
“... when I found you three in the map room, said ‘hey everypony, you guys wanna drink this potion?’, and then tricked those two into developing a larger vocabulary so they wouldn't bicker like foals all the time?”
Starlight's current theory postulated that Dash or Applejack were fine on their own. When sharing a close proximity, however, their brains stopped working aside from a single brain cell bouncing between them. She hadn't yet decided whether that brain cell had burnt out from overuse or simply went unused altogether.
“Yeah!” Pinkie’s excitement shifted suddenly. “And now they're stuck speaking in rhyme - Applejack is, I mean, Dash is doing haiku, and they're getting worse, and I'm worried they're going to leave us for the big city and literary degrees and even now I feel trapped in a literary bubble too, as if I'm serving an unseen purpose against my will and once that's done I'll cease to be.” Pinkie inhaled hard as the fourth wall tightened back around her.
“I uhh… don't worry, I can fix this,” Starlight said with more hope and yearning than even Scootaloo could muster. “Let me collect a few things and I'll meet you in the map room.” She closed her door and prayed the click of the lock had been quiet enough to overhear.
____
Starlight, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash stood round the cutie mark map. The three ponies, the decidedly perfect number for a pony poetry problem and not a horse more, had gathered a dozen vials and mixed ingredients and spaced them out on the table.
“Folly; foals revel,” Dash commented, giving Starlight the dirtiest look she could manage whilst dispensing wisdom. “Not a single care is had / as parent returns.”
Starlight stayed quiet as beakers swirled magically overhead. A verbal beat down was more than warranted. Amusingly enough, she did find this preferable. They weren't bickering, no arguing, and Dash's vocabulary had expanded at least 200%. Twilight surely wouldn't be happy, however, and that one singular point spurred her onward towards a cure.
“Here, one sip,” Starlight instructed as a vial hovered over Dash's muzzle.
After a warranted moment of hesitation, Dash took a sip then passed the unmarked vial to Applejack.
“01001000 01101001?” Dash asked. Starlight spiked the vial from Applejack's hooves, shattering it against the stone floor.
“THAT'S… not right.” Starlight concluded, though Dash was already acutely aware. “Here. Remember, small sip.”
A vial presented itself to Applejack and she took it even more hesitantly than Dash had. Gingerly, she nursed a small swig of the brew and then swallowed. Immediately her eyes opened wide and she gave a great big hee-yaw.
“?fixed I Am ?work it Did” Applejack either said or asked.
The vial went flying across the room and shattered against a crystalline wall, ensuring no pony else would be drinking it.
Dash guffawed, gripping her stomach with one hoof and pointing the free one towards Applejack. “01001000 01100001 01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001”
“!you Quiet” Applejack shouted across the table in reverse.
Starlight nodded. Again, a markable improvement, Applejack now making about as much sense as her average countryism.
“I've got it, big sip this time.” Starlight settled them down as she split one vial of liquid into two separate beakers.
Both ponies took their medicine.
Both ponies opened their mouths to speak aaaand…
Nothing came out.
“Hmm…” Starlight hemmed. “Ahh…” Starlight hawed. “Small sip?” She asked, levitating a final vial between them and sounding infinitely less confident than she had moments prior.
“Twilight's gonna-” Dash began then slammed a hoof over her mouth.
It was Applejack's turn to laugh. “Hah, you're soundin’ like-” and she caught herself too.
“Another sip,” Starlight instructed. It HAD worked, she just needed to get them back up to the correct volume.
“Better?” Dash asked at about 80% her normal volume.
“Perfectly back to normal!” Starlight exhaled, the crushing weight of her mentor’s disappointment momentarily off her shoulders
“‘An’ how's about me?” Applejack asked with no hint of rhyme or poetic insight to be found.
Relieved, everypony collapsed back into their seats. Starlight stared at the ground, anxiously imagining her punishment(s)-to-be while Applejack and Rainbow Dash exchanged glances.
“Say, Dashie,” Applejack shot her a devilish grin.
“Yeah, AJ?” She responded, following right along.
“Now considerin’ we're right as rain again I don't mind keeping this from Twi… “
“So long as a certain somepony makes it up to us?” Dash completed her friend's thought as their shared braincell orbited back her way.
Starlight looked between them.
“A whole month.”
“Totally impartial judge.”
“For any ‘n every little competition or disagreement.”
Starlight wondered if Twilight's judgement would be less punishing than their proposal.
“I'd love to, girls,” she finally agreed with an especially nervous bout of laughter.
The clone Starlight had argued with over the merits of spiking her friends with potions was still warm… maybe she could get out of this cleanly after all?
Author's Note
a simple silly idea gets a short silly fic
Teen rating for very minor drug reference
