Things were not going well.

That was the assessment from Rarity's perspective. The very moment everypony had cleared the skylight, they had scattered to the four winds, pursuing segments of that beastly Mayhem creature.  And, of course, leaving her to chase after the brute-- or a large portion of him anyway-- all alone. What were they thinking? She was a dress designer, not a fighter! And she certainly wasn't going to go rolling about in the dirt wrestling with that hairy, mangy looking.... thing.... for a rubber ball.

Especially not after, to her horror, realizing just which section of the reprehensible creature she was chasing. Twilight had taken after the head. Dear Fluttershy, too timid for anything else, had gone in pursuit of the tail. Rainbow Dash was doing her best to run down the first section of the upper torso, Pinkie pie the second, Applejack the third. Which left Rarity with the last chunk of wayward Draconequus. It was covered in mangy grey fur and was running along on what appeared to be the arms of a gorilla... or would it be the legs?.... and it was strangely contoured, almost double lobed, with a distinct cleft---

Let's just outright say it. She was chasing down a giant ambulatory gorilla butt.

When she had realized just what part of the beast she was chasing, it had almost undone her. But there was no help here; no gallant stallions to bat her eyelashes at, no iron-stomached apple farmer to roll her eyes and push her aside, no overeager little sister to sucker into pulling the load. Equestria was counting on her! She and she alone would have to chase down and (oh Maker!) capture a giant, hairy, gorilla's rear end. Right now though she couldn't overcome the visceral certainty that the only thing worse than letting the horrid thing get away would be catching it.

The segment she was chasing seemed to be well aware of her trepidation. It was scarcely making an effort to get away, jouncing and flapping along through the seedier streets of Canterlot, ball gripped firmly in one paw, with Rarity fluttering along a squeamish few yards behind it. It seemed to be picking the filthiest alleyways to hop and flap(1) its way down--

She barely ducked in time. As she pursued the runaway rump round a corner, something brown and oblong came hurtling through the air right at her head. It missed her by scant inches and splattered against the wall of the building behind her, spraying the whitewashed stone with lumpy brown ooze.

"You vile beast!" Rarity shrieked when she saw what the creature was using for ammunition. "That's no way for anypony to behave with a yam!"

The alleyway they were in ran behind several fresh produce stores, and the monkey-limbed posterior had found a discarded crate of slightly-off yams amidst the kinetic wreckage. It hefted one sizable rotted tuber in its paw and, despite having no eyes,(2) glowered at her.

"You wouldn't dare," Rarity said.

Her mother always did say she had a knack for saying just the wrong thing.

The next instant a volley of rancid yams were winging her way.

Rarity shrieked and dodged like a madmare. She almost, almost! managed to evade the incoming barrage, leaping and twisting like somepony from the Matrix, only to take the very last rotten vegetable square in the face.

Mindful of "Sisterhooves Social," I had once enquired as to the accuracy of that episode. It had seemed rather unrealistic to me that Rarity would simply wipe the mud from the pit off and walk away sparkling clean... She informed me to my surprise that yes, that was actually accurate. She happened to know a spell that rendered the mane and fur impervious to mud and stains for hours.

She had not cast that spell today.

Brownish black gunk dripped from her mane and face. She wiped her eyes clean and stared in horror at the mess on her hooves. In the past she had been subjected to terrible things: Swamp muck, farm dirt, diamond dogs. Never, in all her life, had she been so befouled.

Mayhem's Buttocks hopped up and down gleefully, mocking her.

Deep inside her fastidious soul, an absolutely transcendent rage kindled to life. "Oh, you. Are. DEAD," she rasped. She rocketed after the Draconequus. The rebellious rump apparently sensed that things had seriously Gotten Real; it stopped hopping up and down and began fleeing in earnest. It veered further down the twisting alleyway, the fashionista in close pursuit, her muck-covered face incandescent with rage. "I will end you," she howled.

Tragically for Rarity, the butt she was pursuing had more than just yam flinging at its disposal. There was an obnoxious Bronx cheer and the alleyway was filled with clouds of noxious green gas. Plants wilted, paint peeled, and the delinquent posterior vanished in a yellow-green smoke screen. The infuriated unicorn was so livid that she didn't even slow down; she held her breath and rocketed into the center of the cloud of fumes.

And collided headlong with the sewer lid held in the butt's monkey paws. Stunned senseless, she tumbled from the air and plummet straight down the open manhole. There was a resounding splash. The monkey rump dropped the sewer lid back in place and made itself scarce.

There was a long, drawn out, terrible silence.

Followed by an unholy scream that echoed the length and breadth of the Canterlot sewer system.(3)

 

---

 

Mayhem's tail was making tracks. It was well clear of the castle and already passing over the gardens and hedgerows, one of the balls wrapped in its buzzing length. Just as it was about to clear the arboretum, a cheeping, feathered cloud rose up from the trees and engulfed it. Birds of every type and shape, from hummingbirds to buzzards, plucked and clawed at it. There was no escape; it was in an incredibly painful three-way tug of war between a toucan and two flamingoes when it finally gave up and vanished in a puff of illogic.

The ball it was carrying dropped out of the sky... and into Fluttershy's waiting hooves. "Thank you so much, little birdy friends," she cooed to the birds now fluttering around her. "I'll be sure and ask the princesses to bring you all some extra bird feed today..."

 

---

 

Pinkie Pie circled over the city,  pondering. "If I was a giant runaway tummy," she pondered, "where would I go?"

The pink pony was at something of an impasse. Most ponies--- or people--- in her situation would be confounded by a lack of lateral thinking. Her problem here was also her more typical handicap; an overwhelming surfeit of lateral thinking. Even on her best day Pinky's logic had more lateral moves than a knight on a chessboard. Straightforward concepts like following something from point A to point B had a tendency to elude her.

"At least I think it was a tummy," Pinkie Pie ruminated out loud as she flew. "there were an awful lot of middle-y sections to him, I might be chasing down his spleen... or even his kidneys... but then again if I was a spleen or kidneys I'd want to find out where my stomach was, too, so I guess I better look for the stomach first. And Granny Pie always said the best way to somepony's heart is through their stomach--- aha! The BAKERY!" Once again the pink pony's brain took two squares forward and one to the right, and she began sniffing the air. As it so happened the scent she was looking for was strong on the breeze over this side of town:

The smell of baking goodies.

Following her sniffer, she beelined for the Canterlot Imperial bakery.

The Imperial bakery was a huge facility that provided baked treats of every imaginable form to all of Equestria (and beyond! as the blurb went). While the majority were shipped out in bulk to stores and restaurants, they also had a showroom where you could walk in, browse through the racks piled high with goodies still warm from the ovens and purchase whatever you liked fresh--- or, if your pocket money was a little short, just stand, drooling, at the huge picture windows lining the walls and watch as the bakers worked. There wasn't a day that went by that ponies ranging from the most hoity toity of upper crust to the most common of street urchins didn't leave their noseprints on the glass while white coated chefs went about making pastries, pies, cakes, and petit fours under equestrians' hungry gaze.

Well, except for today, obviously.

The usual audience had long fled, as had most of the bakery staff, upon the arrival of the Imperial bakery's newest guest. Mayhem--- or at least the erstwhile middle section of him-- had made camp in the center of the Imperial bakery's factory floor and was making itself right at home.

One would be surprised at how much mayhem the Draconequus was able to cause there. Baked goods aren't generally known for their bounciness, even under ideal circumstances. However, there were plenty of loose utensils associated with the baking arts, and so the airspace over the factory floor had quickly filled with ricocheting pans, mixing bowls, egg beaters, and the like... and the exotic properties of Mayhem's kinetic-altering field were beginning to affect the elasticity of even the most phlegmatic substances. At this close proximity even the liquid ingredients-- the eggs, the cream, the pie fillings-- were behaving in an unnervingly non-Newtonian fashion.

That was the state of affairs when Pinkie Pie came sailing through one of the broken factory windows. The furry lump that Pinkie had come to think of as Mayhem's Tummy was seated in the middle of the factory happily bouncing his rubber ball with one cloven hoof as kitchen utensils, gobbets of weirdly animate foodstuffs, and the occasional luckless baker's assistant flew through the air around it.

A few of the staff were still present, out of reluctance to give ground before the thing before them. Somepony had to face this monster; at the moment they were the thin red raspberry and creme frosted line between one of the agents of Chaos and the rest of Canterlot, and they knew it. Several of the bakers had rallied and, armed with rolling pins, spatulas and other implements of the culinary arts, were preparing to perform the Charge of the Light Pastry Brigade just as Pinkie Pie arrived.

The lead baker recognized the Element around her neck and had immediately seized upon her as their salvation. "Your Ladyship, thank heavens!"(4) he said, wringing his hat. "What do we do?"

Pinkie opened her mouth to speak, only to be interrupted as a gobbet of pink frosting the size of a grapefruit splutted across her face. A moment later her tongue appeared through the frosting and she lapped it off her face. She smacked her lips thoughtfully. "Switch from 3x powdered sugar to 4x and add more strawberry liqeur," she said. "But that's not important right now. Right now we have to get that ball away from him--" she pointed to the basketball-sized globe Mayhem's Tummy was bouncing in its hooves-- "before he uses it to bounce all of Equestria to the Moon!"

"Great!" one of the pastry chefs said sarcastically. "How do we do that?"

"Like this!" Pinkie grabbed one of the loose industrial-sized cans floating(5) about and ripped off the pull-tab lid. "Caramel sauce! Perfect! This'll sticky up that ball so he can't bounce it any more!" She took aim at the Draconequus and wound up. "We're rubber, you're glue, what bounces off of us sticks to YOU!" She threw the caramel sauce as hard as she could.

It never reached its intended target. A cloven hoof snagged the hurtling caramel in midair, deftly catching the slopped sauce with the can. The front of the ambulatory midriff split into a wide, grinning mouth, and with a single chug, swallowed the caramel, can and all.

"Nuts!" Pinkie pouted. The stomach belched.

The bakery staff followed the pink pony's lead and took up arms. "All right lads, give him a volley!" the head baker shouted. Cakes, pies, balls of unrolled dough, tubs of filling and cans of sauce flew. The effort was fruitless. It didn't matter whether they were aiming for the disembodied stomach or were trying to knock the ball out of its hooves. The belly of the beast simply glommed the projectiles out of the air without even interrupting its dribbling.

It didn't escape Pinkie's notice though that it was moving a good bit slower. It burped again, wetly. Goodness that sounded familiar. Almost like when the twins...

A sly grin spread across Pinkie's face. "Oh so that's how it's gonna go, huh?" Pinkie Pie said. "Let's see how well you like a little pie-eating contest... Pinkie Pie style!" She retreated back into the rows of shelved pastries and began heaving them hoof-over-hoof at the Draconequus as fast as she could.

"What good will that do?" the head baker complained. "You're just feeding him more cake!"

"I'm not FEEDING him cake, I'm ASSAULTING him with cake!" Pinkie said, slinging a decorative ganache overhand. "Keep it up, everypony!"

For lack of better options, every pony present returned to pummeling the malevolent midriff with the bakery's stock. The beast gorged itself heroically, engulfing pies, cakes, and cookies in every state of baked edibility, but soon began running out of steam. Pinkie knew they had it when the now-bulging stomach halted in mid-battle and lurched over to the milk cans. "We've got him now!" Pinkie exulted as the groaning stomach guzzled the giant cans of milk two-fisted. "Go for the treacle tarts!"

The rain of sticky, sinfully rich tarts was the last straw. The gigantic gut sagged to the floor, spattered with crumbs and filling, waving its hooves in defeat even as it tried to choke down the gluey mass threatening to engulf it. "Hold your fiiire!" Pinkie screeched. The onslaught ceased. Pinkie motioned with her hoof. "Stay back everypony," she said. "This could be ugly." Carefully she closed the distance between herself and the groaning, belching belly.

It was in no condition to fight. It sagged on the floor in an adipose pile, dripping crumbs and frosting and goo, groaning and burping in that wet, burbly way she recognized.... from the dark day when the Cake twins had gotten into the custard tarts when nobody was looking.  "Awww, ate too much, did you?" Pinkie cooed at the stomach, pooching out her lips. "Poor baby. Couldn't help it, couldja? Cause you're all stomach, and all a stomach can think about is eating and eating and eating." The Gut gurgled in woe. "I know; it took me a long long time to learn to ignore my stomach. It's super hard for me sometime, and I have a brain in my noggin to tell it 'no.' So I figured a tummy all out on its lonesome wouldn't know when to say 'when.'" As if in confirmation the misery ridden stomach lapped up more of the frosting on the floor, even as it groaned in pain.

Pinkie Pie nodded and reached into her saddlebag. "Well I'll tell you what," she said. She pulled out an amber soda bottle and held it out in her hoof. "I have some nice, flat ginger beer here that will settle all those ickies and owies right down. All you have to do is give me the ball, and you can have it." She beckoned enticingly.

The Stomach gurgled reluctantly and seemed to consider.

"Come on..."

It belched, and came to a decision. It slumped forward, holding out the ball in one trembling cow hoof and reaching for the open bottle of ginger beer with the other.

The staff of the Imperial bakery leaned forward, holding their breath...

And at that exact moment, a giant winged monkey butt crashed through the window.

This would have been upsetting enough on its own. It broke the fragile detente' and sent the factory floor into a whole new round of chaos. The monkey butt leaped and flapped about, knocking shelves and equipment flying, growling and farting noxious green smoke that sent the workers running for their lives and their lungs.

What happened next, to steal a pun, took the cake. Leaping through the shattered window came a form that left even Pinkie Pie's erratically flexible mind reeling. It was a mare, but other than that almost unrecognizable. She looked like Hell. Literally. She was coated and smeared with indescribable filth, blackwater silt(6)and axle grease,(7) mud and offal(8) and worse(9); her mane and tail matted down with gunge. Errant sparks sizzled from her horn, igniting the muck coating her in places and sending wisps of smoke drifting up. She was screaming wild-eyed, half-incoherent profanities in a fit nigh unto an epileptic seizure, and was heralded by a cloud of foul stench that sent any pony that was too close reeling.  Yet somehow, somehow she was recognizable under all the foulness...

Pinkie Pie's pupils shrank to pinpricks. "Rarity...???"

Rarity didn't answer. She was in a zone beyond reason. Somewhere she had procured a manhole cover and a pitchfork, and was wielding them as a shield and trident and was loudly threatening to do things with them that would surely have violated the Geneva convention. "WHERE IS HE??" the fashionista howled, brandishing her pitchfork, her voice reverberating in spine-chilling fashion. "I WILL END HIM! HIS SUFFERING WILL BE LEGENDARY EVEN IN TARTARUS!!" Several of the bakery staff shrieked and fainted-- whether from fear or from the stench, nopony knew.

The butt looked terrified, as much as it was possible for a butt to look afraid.

Pinkie, for her part, was completely croggled. Worse, she was scared sober. She was used to the weird-- she was the weird-- but this went beyond even her threshold for the irrational. In a brief moment of self-awareness, it occurred to her to wonder: Is this how the others feel whenever they deal with me? "Um, Rarity," she said hesitantly, stepping closer and interrupting her friend in the middle of finding as many synonyms as possible for 'eviscerate.'  "Whuoah." Pinkie covered her nose with a hoof. "That ain't no chocolate cake. Rarity, what happened??"

Rarity paused in mid tirade. "Oh, this, dearie?" she said, giving Pinkie a grin that reminded the party pony way too much of Twilight Sparkle during the Smarty Pants Incident. "Nothing that can't be fixed with a little grooming, a little makeup--" she thrust out the pitchfork, pointing at the Butt cowering behind an overturned table--- "a little monkey rump on a skewer..."

Alarmed, Pinkie waved her hoofs in negation. "Now now, Rarity, you don't wanna do anything bad," she said anxiously. "You're the Element of Generosity, remember?"

"Why indeed I am." The loose cutlery around the room became enveloped in a magical glow, and formed a deadly, jagged cloud next to Rarity, every point and tine and blade gleaming with deadly intent. "And I intend to give until it HURTS!"

The steel blades leaped. The Butt fled its hiding place, jetting off in a cloud of flatulence just as the singing blades perforated the overturned table. Rarity shrieked like a mad thing and leapt after it, pitchfork lunging wildly. The two combatants lunged about the enormous kitchen, flipping furniture, splattering everything with muck and fogging the air with flour, filth-reek and clouds of fart gas.

Pinkie Pie spun in a circle in the middle of the room, frantic to stop her friend from doing something ghastly. The situation was taken out of her hooves, thankfully. She was the only one to notice that the Gut was in an increasing state of distress. The sewer stink and the noxious fart-clouds were upsetting its already upset metabolism; it was groaning and shaking and starting to bulge and swell.

Pinkie knew those signs too. "Everypony run for it, she's gonna blow!" she shrieked to the ceiling. The bakery staff took their cue and galloped for their lives. The last workpony cleared the emergency exit just in time. The groaning, spasming Gut lost control of its contents just as the prodigious methane clouds produced by the Rump, the flour-laden clouds in the air, and no little amount of sewer gas clinging to one deranged pony, drifted in ignition range of the pilot light on the ovens. There was an enormous, wet belching noise, a sound that made the parents of newborns all over Canterlot shudder and look over their shoulders out of pure habit... followed by a tremendous

 

boom.

 

Ponies were knocked to their knees blocks away. Tiny bits of rubble rained down; the light from the fireball was visible for miles.

When the smoke finally cleared, the Imperial bakery was nothing but a four-sided shell, splattered from the inside out with... something the newspapers days later would refuse to describe too closely. There, sitting in the middle of  the shattered shell of Canterlot's finest bakery, was the shattered shell of Equestria's finest fashion pony. She was covered in at least three layers of too-horrible-to-contemplate muck. Clutched in her trembling hooves was a pitchfork, on whose tines were hung, like trophies of war, two deflated rubber balls.

Pinkie Pie, for a miracle untouched by the unspeakable muck, crawled out from beneath a nearby shipping crate and grinned at her. "Well, that takes care of that," Pinkie Pie said.(10)

"Memewmweemmmeeneh," Rarity said.

"Well, two parts of it, anyway," Pinkie amended.

"Memewmweemmmeeneh."

"I wonder how the other girls are doing..."

"Memewmweemmmeeneh...."

Pinkie shrugged. "You're right. Out of our hooves for now." she seized Rarity's tail by the one clean spot on its end and dragged her, insensate, out of the wreckage and over to the large decorative fountain in the square. "Okay, bathtime for Rarity, in you go," she giggled, pushing the unicorn into the fountain with a splash. She jumped in after.

Two guardsmen dropped out of the sky and landed at the edge of the fountain. "Miss, we're in a crisis, you can't bathe in--- your Ladyships?"

Pinkie Pie ignored the implied complaint. She plucked the pitchfork out of Rarity's insensate hooves and handed it, rubber balls and all, to one guard. "You," she commanded. "Keep an eye on these for a second, willya?" She turned to the other guard. "You-- go to the store down the street and get two dozen bottles of Mane and Tail shampoo.(11) On the double!"

The second guard ran off to retrieve the shampoo as ordered. The first guard took the pitchfork dubiously and regarded Rarity, who was sitting immobile while a marble dolphin gushed water on her head. "Will she be... okay?" he asked. The second guard returned with bottles in tow. Pinkie Pie unceremoniously dumped the first bottle over the filth-coated unicorn's head and began to scrub.

"Herbal..." Rarity mumbled.

"Pardon?" the guard asked.

"Make sure it's Mane and Tail herbal," Rarity said. "Only kind that will do..."

"Oh yeah," Pinkie said with a snort and a giggle. "She'll be fine." She began to lather with enthusiasm.

The guard regarded the remains of the Imperial bakery. "Well, your ladyship, I hope the rest of your group are doing a little better than this..."

There was an explosion somewhere in the city. Ponies screamed in alarm.

Pinkie Pie shook her head. "You shoulda known better than to say that," she scolded the guard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author's Note:

1)Pigeon wings. Even in Equestria, not the most tidy of birds.

2)Or maybe it did. Rarity didn't care to speculate.

3)Echoing, in fact, clear down to the residential districts and up the household plumbing in one particular bathroom, where it set back the potty training of one poor innocent young colt by simply weeks.

4)He was a bit unclear on the actual social ranking of the Bearers, but like most sensibly assumed they had some sort of title and so, bunted.

5)Floating, falling, bouncing, hurtling...

6)runoff from the lawns and gardens

7)drainage from the train wheelhouse

8)The fish processing plant

9)Sorry kids, it was a sewer-- you darn well know what it was

10)Being very careful not to lick her lips.

11) Yes, it actually exists. Look it up.