“Leera! Leera!” cried Toaster, running through the streets of Ponyville as quickly as she could. Despite being a prostitute, she was not especially fast, even if her stamina was virtually limitless. Her time, however, was not. Her horse hymen was not going to puncture itself. “LEEEEEEEEEEERAAAA!” she cried.

“What?” said Lyra, leaning out of an alley and holding an eggshell pony with a bicolor mane in her forelegs, who she promptly dropped when she saw who was calling her name. “What do you want, Toaster?”

“Cloudwalking spell! Cloudwalking spell, now!”

“Why in Equestria do you need a cloudwalking- -”

“Virginity! Handsome! Rainbow! Horse hymen!”

“What- -”

“CLOUDWALKING SPELL!”

“Alright, alright! Sweet Lusty Luna you’re demanding!” Lyra’s horn glowed a dim orange, and then went out. “There. Done.”

“That’s it?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Thank you thank you thank you!” Toaster turned to leave, but then paused. “Wait…you wouldn’t happen to know what Rainbow Dash likes, would you?”

“Rainbow Dash? Isn’t she a raging alcoholic?”

“Cider, then,” said Toaster, running off. “Need cider! So much cider!”

As Toaster ran off into the distance, Bon Bon looked up at Lyra. “I didn’t know you knew cloudwalking spells,” she said.

“I don’t,” said Lyra. “But what’s the chance she’s going to get herself onto a cloud?”

Rainbow Dash lowered her flight course and rushed past the tops of the trees, feeling the wind running through her mane and tail and listening to the sound of the leaves rustling below. Once again, stunt practice had gone smashingly, giving her an excellent crowd of ponies below to watch her. Even better, this time she had not crashed into anything.

She slowed, and then dropped onto a branch extending from a tree out toward a nearby park. Like many of the best tree branches in Ponyville, it was already equipped with a pillow and a blanket, both stored neatly and ready for use. Rainbow Dash’s job with Ponyville weather management was extremely lucrative, to the point where she could afford a flying mansion made out of solid clouds, but she in fact spent most of her time napping in random spots.

Lying on the branch, Rainbow Dash made herself comfortable and prepared to once again go to sleep- -until she noticed something in the center of the otherwise deserted field. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, wondering if one of her many concussions had finally caused her sanity to break down completely. Still unsure if she was hallucinating, she jumped down from the branch and looked around.

Slowly, she crossed the windswept field. There were no ponies around, and not even any animal sounds, but Rainbow Dash had a strange feeling that she was being watched.

“Who’s there?” she called nervously toward the edge of the trees. There was, of course, no response. There was nopony there. Still, Rainbow Dash could not shake the feeling that some large, hungry, drooling predator was watching her from the darkness of the shrubs and trees.

Approaching the spot she had seen, she realized that she had not been hallucinating. There, sitting on a large square of cloth, was a pile of large glass bottles. Rainbow Dash looked down at them, and then around the empty field, confused- -until she realized what was in the bottles.

“Cid…cider,” she said, her eyes widening and her mouth suddenly salivating profusely. “That’s…that’s a lot of cider…”

She looked around again, and then back at the cider. “Well played,” she said, apparently to herself. “If this is a trap, it’s a bucking good one.”

She crossed the cloth and picked up one of the bottles of cider, With her teeth, she popped the cork and immediately chugged half the bottle. She pulled it away from her mouth and gasped loudly. It was definitely cider, but not Applejack’s. It had a warmer flavor, and pleasantly bitter. If anything, Rainbow Dash would have described it as being toasty.

Even if it was not Applejack’s, it was still adequate. Her alcoholism taking control of her, Rainbow Dash downed the rest of the bottle and cracked open the next one, chugging that as well.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” she said. “Oh, who am I kidding. I’m best pony! It’s always five o’clock for me!”

So, she continued to drink until she eventually collapsed into tears. Then, once she was done crying, she stood up.

“It’s still weird, though. I mean, what jerk leaves perfectly good cider just out like this? Somepony might drink it!” She turned to the brown pony standing inches to her left. “I mean, that’s pretty dumb, right?”

Rainbow Dash looked down at the pile of bottles, and then suddenly gasped as she realized that there was a pony standing beside her. She cried out, and looked up to see a brown unicorn with a manic smile dressed in, of all things, fishnets and a short skirt, her eyes heavily accented with makeup.

Immediately, Rainbow Dash tried to fly, but found that she could not get off the ground.

“What the?” she looked down at the cloth below her, and realized that it was not even cloth at all- -it was a huge sheet of sticky paper.

“Glue paper,” said the brown pony. “You’ll never guess what the glue is made of, either.”

“It’s so sticky!” cried Rainbow Dash, trying to fly away but being held to the paper by the sticky white substance that covered it.

“Not nearly as sticky as you are about to make me,” said the brown mare, nuzzling one of Rainbow Dash’s rear legs. “I want you, Rainbow Dash.”

“Well, I’m flattered, but- -”

“Don’t worry,” said the brown pony. “I won’t even charge you. This one is on the house. I just want you to put it into me and fill me up with your sexy rainbow seed. Trust me, it will feel good. And you look durable enough to actually survive the process!”

“Um, how about NO.” Rainbow Dash, now somewhat panicked, flapped her wings faster, pulling herself away from the paper. The downforce was so much that it knocked the brown pony back, and Rainbow Dash continued to rise until the glue connecting her hooves to the ground snapped, freeing her.

Toaster was thrown back, and looked up as Rainbow Dash tried to fly away.

“No! Please come back! I just want to give you fun sexy times!”

Rainbow Dash did not respond, but continued to climb into the air. Toaster started to panic- -it had taken her nearly an hour to cook that much cider, let alone to steal the necessary glue sheet. If Rainbow Dash got away, her chances at having a chance to get hammered by the most athletic and handsome stallion she had ever seen would be gone for good.

There was only one option. Toaster took a deep breath, and charged her horn. A red dot appeared a few inches from her head, and it quickly divided into sixteen, all arranged in a straight line. Forcing more magic into her horn, Toaster divided the sixteen sixteen times into a grid of two hundred fifty six dots. She groaned as she tried to maintain the magic, straining- -not because creating the spell was difficult, of course, but because she was desperately trying to control it. She wanted to bring the stallion down, not vaporize him.

Toaster looked up and aligned her spell toward where Rainbow Dash was flying. Then she let loose. Each of the dots fired with a resounding explosion as the surface to air battery fired and the beams of red light shot skyward.

Rainbow Dash was indeed an impressive flyer, to the point where just watching him avoid the magical projectiles made Toaster moist. He swirled and turned, diving and falling, the red beams cutting past him and burning high into the sky. There were too many, though; eventually, one scored a direct hit. Immediately, the rainbow contrail following behind him was replaced with a trail of smoke as he fell from the sky.

Toaster watched his trajectory, and realized that Rainbow Dash was falling downward toward the sheer cliff at the edge of the park.

“Who puts a cliff at the edge of a park?” cried Toaster, running toward the precipice as fast as her legs could carry her, tracking the falling pony’s course as she moved. “Please don’t be dead please don’t be dead PLEASE don’t be dead,” she muttered to herself.

Toaster did not even stop at the edge of the cliff. Knowing that Lyra had been kind enough to give her a cloudwalking spell, she simply jumped over the edge, fully confident that she would land on a poofy, soft cloud and not be subject to the three hundred foot drop below. Again, she wondered why a park had been put near such a cliff without even a railing or anything.

She slowly started to fall, and Toaster grabbed onto one of the clouds. It did not feel at all like she expected; she had imagined it something like cotton, but instead it was more like a greasy marshmallow.

“Oop! No!” she cried as she slipped through, clinging to the edge of the cloud as she dropped through it. She suddenly realized that there WAS a three hundred foot drop below her. Terrified, she pulled herself up the cloud and managed to climb on top of it, not even noticing that her own horn was glowing red. Despite standing on the cloud, the surface was still slippery, and Toaster fell forward, face-planting into the substance. Weirdly, it tasted of butter and tears.

Trying to level herself, Toaster shakily stood and saw that the stallion who was about to take her virginity had landed on the same cloud. He was singed and blackened, and his flight feathers had been burned away, but he still seemed to be breathing, which was a plus.

“Oh…” he said, rolling over and facing the sky and rubbing his head. “What hit me?”

“I did,” said Toaster, straddling him. “And now you are about to hit me. Breed me like a sheep, you sexy stallion!”

Toaster was larger than the stallion, and heavier. He could not easily get up, especially in his somewhat injured and disoriented state. Toaster turned around on him into the reverse cowgirl position and began rubbing her plot against his crotch, which she knew he must enjoy.

Then, suddenly she stopped.

“Wait a second,” she said, adjusting herself slightly and confirming the anomaly. “Something’s missing…”

She reached down and picked up the stallion’s plot by the his rainbow tail and examined it, immediately finding herself staring into something that was definitely not a penis.

She looked down at Rainbow Dash, and Rainbow Dash looked up at her. Then Toaster smiled awkwardly, gently setting Rainbow Dash’s plot back into the cloud. “Hehe…” she said.

“Really,” said Rainbow Dash. “Is it the hair? I mean, yes, it’s rainbows, but that’s a family trait! My dad had it, and his dad, and his mother- -I’m not gay! Well, except that one time, but she was a griffon so it doesn’t count. And for Daring Do. And possibly Rarity. But not you, whoever you are. I like stallions. Real hairy ones. It’ll take a lot more cider before you start to get my wings stiff.”

“I mean, how was I supposed to know that she was a MARE?” said Toaster, exasperated.

“Dude,” said Scootaloo, sipping her hot cocoa from the crate that she was sitting on. “I totally could have told you that if you had asked.”

“So could I,” said Lyra, looking up from the large sheet of metal she was trying to cut and sighing at her now completely ruined saw- -the third she had wasted on that sheet. This evening, the three of them found themselves in Lyra’s garage. Lyra was hard at work processing the metal she had purchased earlier into whatever it was she was building, while Toaster had come to complain. Scootaloo, being their neighbor, had kind of just showed up. “It’s common knowledge, after all.”

“She doesn’t even look like a stallion,” added Scootaloo.

“I thought she was just a bishonen!”

“Googles,” said Lyra, lowering her own and gesturing for Scootaloo to put on the oversized welding mask that sat next to her. Lyra picked up a plasma torch in her magic and began to attempt to cut the metal. She had more success than with the saw, but she was still barely managing to scratch the gray surface.

Toaster- -who Lyra had not bothered to give a mask- -sighed. “All I wanted to do was lose my virginity…” she looked down at the blinding white light of Lyra’s cutting, and her horn glowed. A beam of red light erupted from it, slashing across the metal plate and instantly cutting it in half. As Lyra looked down wide-eyed, Toaster continued her sad tirade. “I mean, all I wanted to do was have a sexy rainbow stallion shove his long, throbbing penis deep into my tight, unruined pony vagina and ram me until I was his whore…”

“Yeah,” said Lyra, pulling back her goggles. She stepped back and activated an overhead crane, drawing it over to pick up the heavy sheet of two-inch thick metal. “Darn tungsten…how does that dolt expect me to work this stuff? Also, Toaster, I think you might be corrupting Scootaloo.”

“Corrupting her? She’s a young mare. It was about that age that I got ramrodded.”

“You’re a virgin, Toaster,” added Scootaloo.

“Oh,” said Toaster, her slightly wistful mood collapsing as she fell to the floor amongst the pneumatic cables and power conduits. “I forgot.”

“You know, to be honest,” said Scootaloo, “if you put me in that position, I totally would have tasted that rainbow.”

Toaster looked up at the small orange filly, and then at Lyra. “Leeeeera, Scootaloo’s corrupting my innocence!”

“And you’re corrupting the flow to my air ratchet. Get off that.” Lyra shoed Toaster off one of the cables she was lying on, and then looked at Scootaloo. “You are too young to be doing that sort of thing.” She then turned to Toaster. “And you. There is nothing wrong with mares loving mares.”

“Aside from the fact that it’s gross,” said Toaster. “I mean, it’s just natural! Sure, I can take a sixteen incher all the way down, but licking…licking mare parts? That’s just GROSS!”

“No, it is,” said Lyra.

“How would YOU know?”

Lyra suddenly became nervous. “What have you heard? Who have you been talking to? They’re liars!”

“Come on, Lyra, it’s kind of obvious,” said Scootaloo.

“What?” asked Toaster.

“Nothing,” said Lyra, harshly. “This line of questioning is now OVER.” She crossed the room in a huff and opened one of many drawers, searching through it for appropriately sized bolts.

Toaster sat down, and opened her legs. Since she was off duty, she was not wearing her uniform and was instead completely unclothed, so her marehood was easy to see. “I mean, who would want to lick that? It doesn’t look tasty at all…but then again…”

As Scootaloo’s eyes widened, Toaster capitalized on her unusual flexibility and reached down, putting her own head between her legs. She extended her tongue and took a big lick.

The taste hit her suddenly, and Toaster’s eyes widened. She was immediately glad that she had no gag reflex, or else she would have vomited quite considerably. She jumped up, her tongue still extended, and tapped her hooves quickly as though she were preparing to run.

“Eew eew eew EEW EEEW EEEW!” she cried.

“What did you do?” cried Lyra, turning around suddenly. “She didn’t lick the powerconverter, did she?”

“Nope,” said Scootaloo, perfectly calm. “Just her pony pussy.”

Lyra reached down and picked up her robotic hand, put it on, and pointed at Scootaloo. “Language, little filly! In this house, we call it by its name!”

“Weewa it tastf so gwossssss!” cried Toaster, tears welling in her eyes from panic. “Gef if off gef if off!”

“Calm down, it’s not that bad!” yelled Lyra.

“I’m surprised she could reach,” said Scootaloo, slowly sipping her cocoa. “I wouldn’t mind having that talent.”

“Hewp meeeeee!” cried toaster, waving her hooves around her extended tongue. “I can ftill taeft it!”

“Here,” said Scootaloo, dumping the hot chocolate on Toaster’s face.

“HOT!” she cried. Now fully spooked, she began running around the room until she tripped over one of the large cables that passed through the center of the room. She promptly fell- -and lit on fire.

Lyra sighed and produced a fire extinguisher. Before the flames could spread, she blanketed Toaster in a pile of white foam.

“How do you start a fire if there isn’t even anything flammable?” she asked, annoyed. She looked down at the gauge on the fire extinguisher and, seeing that it was empty, threw it into the pile with the other empties that she had accumulated over the past months- -and especially over the past few hours.

“It just happens sometimes,” said Toaster, her head popping out of the bubbles, complete with a white mustache that caused Scootaloo to laugh. “I’m just too hot for my own good.” She turned to Scootaloo. “Sorry about wasting all that hot chocolate.”

“You kidding? Any hot chocolate is good chocolate, but you make the best.”

“Because I AM the best hot chocolate,” said Toaster, shaking her rump toward Scootaloo. Scootaloo snorted loudly and both her and Toaster broke out into fits of laughter.

“You know,” said Lyra, pushing the plate of tungsten across its track on the ceiling toward its destination. “It was a lot quieter here before I had a roommate.”

“Oh, come on Leera, you know you love us.”

“It’s Ly- -oh, why do I even bother.”

Lyra adjusted the machine she was guiding and lifted the plate into place. Toaster crossed the room toward the item that filled most of the garage, the thing that Lyra had been working on for the past two hours and, from the size of it, for quite a long time before.

Whatever it was, it was big. It had a bulky central chamber or cockpit, which was currently open and linked to numerous cables and diagnostic systems that Toaster had been told very specifically not to break, and that central body was connected to a pair of legs that sat below the body as well as a pair of arms, each tipped with a more primitive version of Lyra’s H.A.N.D.

“What exactly is this thing?” said Toaster, walking up to the immense machine while Lyra was riveting yet another plate of metal onto its already extensive armor.

“I call it ‘Anthro I’,” said Lyra. “ I haven’t thought of a backronym for it yet. It’s a suit of power steel.”

“What, like armor?”

“Like robotic armor,” said Lyra.

“That is EPIC,” said Scootaloo, staring wide-eyed at the machine.

“But…it doesn’t look like armor,” said Toaster. “I’ve seen armor. I’ve gotten trapped in a suit of it once. Well, just the helmet. On my rump. This does not look like a pony.”

“Because it isn’t,” said Lyra. “Our pony biology is not well suited for combat. I mean, what? Are we supposed to run up to each other and just beat our enemies with our hooves?”

“Toaster probably beats LOADS of stallions with her hooves,” said Scootaloo.

“See, corrupted,” sighed Lyra. “She’s a little pervert now. And why is she even here? It’s like, ten thirty at night.”

“Because this is way more fun than crying myself to sleep under muffin’s por- -I mean, playing board games with my family. Who are definitely still alive.”

“It seems…weird,” said Toaster, reaching up to an area where one of the arms was partially open and a large system of barrels had been connected to it.

“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” cried Lyra, her magic slapping Toaster away so hard that she rolled across the room. Lyra quickly looked over the region that Toaster had touched, and sighed. “Are you trying to get us killed? That’s the Chekhov’s gun! We REALLY don’t want that going off! Not yet, anyway…”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” said Toaster.

“Yeah,” said Scootaloo. “What’s a gun?”

Toaster looked up at the massive suit of armor. “What is it that you actually do?”

“I’m an…engineer,” said Lyra, pausing for an oddly long moment.

“It looks hard.”

“That’s what SHE said!” cried Scootaloo.

“Ohhhhhh!” cried Toaster, back. “You got me good there! Actually…” she paused, reaching between her legs. “It’s kind of cold in here. I have the nip pips.”

“It is kind of cold in here,” said Lyra. “Unseasonably so. But that’s better for the mainframe server, I guess.”

“Again, I don’t know what any of that means.”