Cheese Sandwich had barely gotten five miles away from Ponyville before he realized that his Cheesy Sense was nagging at him. He’d known it was telling him something, but he hadn’t been able to identify it, because it was telling him something it had never told him before: go back. He shook it off and trotted on a few paces.

Go back? Why? He couldn’t go back after such a dramatic exit into the sunset, especially a dramatic exit with a hat. Besides, he never went back anywhere right after a party. The only reason would be to throw an after-party, and who did that?

He trotted a few paces further, but it was like pulling against a heavy horse collar. Go back.

Had he forgotten something? He did a quick mental inventory. Boneless 2, explosives, pressurized punch mixture, collapsible fondue fountains—they were all where he usually kept them.

Go back, go back, go back, said his Cheesy Sense. You forgot something.

He couldn’t ignore his Cheesy Sense. It was always a bad idea. He stopped at the top of a small rise, closing his eyes as he steadied himself against the backward pull on his hocks. It was no use. He’d have to go back. He could always tell the truth and say that his Cheesy Sense made him do it. There was at least one pony who would understand.

He felt the pulling starting to slacken as a jingling, springing sound came closer and closer, like a bell-covered beach ball. He opened his eyes and really wasn’t surprised to see—

“Pinkie Pie?” His Cheesy Sense wasn’t pulling at him anymore, so it must have been telling him to go back and get—Pinkie? That was definitely Pinkie Pie bouncing up the hill in a zigzag, dancing sideways, and finally springing forward on one hoof in a burst of confetti.

“Ta-da! Surprise! Are you surprised? ‘Cause I was kinda surprised, maybe a little bit surprised, but not as surprised as when you told me about that party way back when you were a colt and everything, because I didn’t remember you at all and I always remember everypony, but then I realized I did, but you were too shy to talk to me. Anyway, I was all ‘whoa!’ and then I thought ‘that was the bestest party I ever threw, maybe we could throw some more someday,’ and then I realized today was almost over, so someday could be tomorrow, and if someday was tomorrow, I’d have to leave tonight.” She sucked in a deep breath. “But then I wasn’t sure, but my mane and tail got all bunchy like THIS, and I knew my Pinkie Sense was telling me I had to come help you throw a party, so I just told the Cakes I couldn’t baby-sit on Thursday, and packed a few things really quick, and came right along. And here I am!” Pinkie bounced around in him in a circle, her hooves creating little puffs of dust.

That made perfect sense to him.

“I brought three dozen multi-colored cupcakes, streamers, spare cartridges for the party cannon, mixed confetti and glitter, and of course a crate of extra balloons.”

She was a light, practical packer. He liked it. She skidded to a stop, directly in front of the setting sun.

“And Boneless. I couldn’t leave Boneless behind.” Of course not.

She turned her head to reveal what looked like a large and repulsive hair ornament. “And Gummy.”

Gummy he could live without, but his presence was a small price to pay.

With the sun behind her, Cheese couldn’t read Pinkie’s expression, but her shoulders were definitely slumping, and she poked the ground with one hoof.

“Aw. Cranky always says I mess this up all the time. I thought you’d be excited to see me.”

Be very cool with this, Cheese. Very, very cool. He sat in the dust, lifted his chin, and tilted his black hat over one ear. “No,” he said, in as steely a tone as he could muster, lifting one eyebrow. “No, I’m not excited to see you.” Pinkie’s head drooped.

Aw, heck with it. Off went the black hat. He threw it up and exchanged it in midair for his straw hat, which he flipped back onto his head. It was definitely a straw hat moment. “I am amazingly super fantastically thrilled to see you.” He reeled her in with his tail for a quick, squeaky hug.

“Really?” she squealed, adding “gargh,” as her eyes began to bulge. A trombone hit the dust, and he winced.

“Ooops. Yeah. Really.” He telescoped the trombone back into his pack. “Sun’s a settin’,” he added, in an attempt to salvage some dignity. “We’d better be moseyin’ along.”

“Okey-dokey-lokey. Mosey it is!”

Actually, the sun had almost set, and a few stars had begun to pop out against a dark pink and purple sky as they trotted westward into the scrub desert. She was really much shorter than he was, but she was keeping up with his long legged, shambling gait with a seemingly tireless pronking bounce. Bounce—and she was at his height, and then she wasn’t. Bounce—then she was, and then she wasn’t again. At the bottom of the arc, stray hairs from the top of her mane tickled his chin, and at the top, they were eyeball to eyeball. It should have been very hard to keep up a conversation, but somehow it wasn’t at all.

“I really, really thought your party bomb was super-duper!”

“Right,” he replied, rolling his eyes, “until I upstaged you with it.”

“Well, yeah, I hated that you were upstaging me and stealing my friends, and I kinda wanted to kill you for it at the time, but I still think it’s super-duper. Ooo ooo ooo lemme guess! It’s a reverse piñata with a combination cake/streamer payload, but I still can’t figure out the detonator.”

He stopped mid-stride. “It’s my own design,” he said firmly, “and it’s a trade secret. You’ve got a wicked way with balloons, by the way.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she replied, continuing her pronk westwards, “that’s a Pinkie Pie secret. And so’s the punch recipe.”

He sighed and shambled after her. “Oh, all right. I reverse-engineered it from some of Ponyacci’s vintage party cannons, with his permission. They’re classics.”

“I KNEW IT!” she screamed into his ear, making it ring. “You had to have gotten that from Ponyacci! And I know what the charge is, too! It’s two parts glitter to one part confetti.”

“No, it’s—hey, how’d you know that?”

“Ponyacci told me himself,” she said, and her bounces somehow seemed smug. “I gave him the idea for his school.”

His jaw dropped, and he skidded to a halt.

“Well, I’ll be brie’d," he said in astonishment. "I had no idea!”

Pinkie sat back on her haunches, windmilling her front legs. “He was about to give up! Could you believe it? He has, like, the best timing ever!”

“And he can be funny without even lifting a hoof,” Cheese agreed. “He just STANDS there and the audience has to be carried out on stretchers.”

“He’s totally my inspiration!” gushed Pinkie, clapping her hooves to her cheeks.

“Mine, too! Aside from, um, you, of course.” Pinkie somehow went pinker. “But,” he added, clearing his throat, “that’s irrelevant.”

“No, silly, that’s a hippopotamus! Ba-dum-shh!”

“I call dibs on the pie,” Cheese said, a second too late. You couldn’t expect to have your pie and throw it, too. “Anyway,” he continued as they trotted on past some boulders, “the two to one mixture is old school. With the new low-density confettis, you get a better effect with a 1.25 to 1.75 confetti/glitter ratio. More than that, and you blow the guests up, and they don’t like that, somehow. Go figure.”

Now that he was talking, he couldn’t stop. He was deep into the technicalities of dance floor materials, lighting patterns, and bubble wrap, but she didn’t seem bored.

“I never get to talk about this back in Ponyville, Cheesie. I mean, psshht, my friend Rarity, she’s all arty, and Twilight’s all geeky, and Dashie’s all ‘hey, check out this wicked trick,’ and here I’m doing all three at the same time and making everypony laugh, and everypony’s like ‘oh, Pinkie, you’re so random.’ ”

“Nopony takes these things seriously.”

“I know!”

The sky was blanketed in dark blue, spangled with glittering stars, like Equestria’s own drop curtain. The moon had risen and set, and he realized they’d been talking for hours. His eyes were beginning to droop, and Pinkie was literally asleep on her feet.

“Do you ever talk in your sleep, Cheesie?” she murmured. “I do, I mean, I don’t really know when I’m doing it but my friends tell me I talk in my sleep and I even tell jokes in my sleep, which is really bad ‘cause I can’t tell if I nailed the punchline or not, and then I wake myself up.”

He eased her onto her own puffy tail, and dropped his serape over her, so she wouldn’t get cold. He thought about peeling Gummy out of her mane, but the little reptile blinked at him with what he was convinced was an accusing glare, so he decided to leave him where he was. He always had some kind of junk with him—broken tennis rackets, perforated straw hats, and the like, the casualties of dozens of comedy acts—so he simply piled some up, exploded a cigar on top of it, and fluffed out his own tail.

“—and the secret ingredient is Gummy, ‘cause he tastes like gum, duh, and I don’t really know how I do the balloons, and I wish I could play the accordion really fast like you, but I can play ten instruments at the same time and I guess that’s almost as good. And I’m glad you came back for Dashie’s birthday, even if I thought I was going to lose all my best friends, because now it turns out I have another bestest best friend and I didn’t even know.”

The cheese might be used to standing alone, but Cheese Sandwich was glad not to be for once.

He fell asleep listening to her chatter. It was really refreshing.

Author's Notes:

Ponyacci makes his appearance in the IDW My Little Pony Micro-Series. He is The Greatest Clown In All Of Equestria, and Pinkie's idol. She did, as she says, talk him out of retirement and into starting a school.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci4j1ckKSWI

OH, AND ALSO: this fic would not be what it is without the tumblr Ask Vaudeville. The artist kindly gave me permission to use the cover art, which obviously partly inspired it, but the whole thing takes comedy seriously
and you should give it a try after this fic.