They came in like a wrecking ball.

No, that’s wrong. Wrecking balls have more tact.

As I’m rubbing my eyes after the flashbang, I hear one of the windows to my shop shatter. Right after that, a two ton weight slams into my side and drives me into the floor. The shock of the impact flushes out the shock of the flash, and my vision clears up for me to find a pony dressed in a Blackwatch uniform and mask standing on top of me.

The pony glares down at me with blue goggle eyes and yells right in my ear. “You’re under arrest, Zero! Don’t move or I will electrocute you!”

Ow, my ears! Blackwatch isn’t using their inside voices. I thrust up my knee to kick the bastard in the -

- “Waghlarglablarglar!” I say. My back arches as pain shoots through my entire body. My tongue flops out of my beak, my limbs spasm all over the floor, and my eyes go all over the place. After a moment, the pain subsides. My body flops back on the floor and air comes back into my lungs. Is something burning?

The blue-eye laughs. It’s a giddy, excited laugh, far from an evil laugh a bad guy would do. More like a child’s laugh. “Oh geez, that packed a punch. See, I told you I’d electrocute you.”

I can only groan in reply.

The blue-eye kicks me in the side. “Come on, resist me some more. This thing is fun!”

“Ugh,” I mumble. “What’s our… safe word?”

The blue-eye is about to say something else, but a loud metal clang fills the air, and the blue-eye flies off me. Standing behind where he just was is Doctor Heart holding a chair in the air with her magic. “Get back up and fight buddy!” The chair flies towards her to block a high kick from a different blue-eye. Sparks erupt between the chair and the kick. Heart pushes him back and winds up for another swing.

“No, don’t!” I yell. “That chair cost me three bits!”

Heart doesn’t hear me. Instead, she smashes the chair over the encroaching blue-eye, bending the life out of the chair’s legs. Damn it, now I have to get a new chair. I have to spend my next Sunday browsing the flea market to find one that matches my set. And since I’m not buying in bulk, I won’t get as good of a price as I did before.

Heart yells at me. “Are you going to fight or not?!”

“I will fight all of you in court,” I yell back. “You’re wrecking my store!” Kids these days, they have no respect for their elders. They all think they can come in whenever and destroy your things. I worked my butt off to get where I am today, and in one case shot off, and I’m not going to lose it to a bunch of dweebs in gimp suits!

While Heart engages the one blue-eye, another jumps through the shattered window and gallops for me. A unicorn. He leaps through the air and extends his hooves out for me. The gauntlets around his hooves crackle with electricity. Seems like Blackwatch has a new toy to play with.

Unknown to them, I have a new toy too.

I raise my arm and my tentacles shoot out. They weave and gnarl together into a jagged disk and harden into a solid mass. The blue-eye slams his hooves into the mass, and sparks go flying in the air. I can’t help but smile when the sparks don’t shock me through my shield.

That’s right, I got a shield! I was so sick and tired of taking thousands of magic bolts to the ass that I decided to do something about it. Took me a few months to figure out how to make this baby. Turns out I can morph my powers into whatever shape I want if I think hard enough, which includes turning the tumor fists into a shield. Monster claws are a different story, though. I kept poking my eye out.

The blue-eye’s weight and momentum push my shield down on top of me, all the while throwing lightning bolts around me. I shove the shield up with a surge of monster strength and throw the blue-eye off of me. He smashes into one of my good tables, breaking it into small pieces. Ah, son of a bison. That table will be a pain to replace.

The unicorn gets up and shakes the debris off himself. He looks at me, then yells as he charges at me with sparking hooves. “This is for Sunnyside, you monster!”

Huh, that voice sounds oddly feminine, and oddly familiar. Alright, the unicorn is a chick, doesn’t matter much. But where have I heard that voice before?

In my moment of thought, I almost forget there’s an angry zap horse coming for me. She slams her hooves at me, which I block with the shield. I’m a bit surprised how fast I can move this thing around. It’s made up of tumor claw, and those claws took ages to swing. Weird. The unicorn keeps slamming and slamming against my shield. Sparks are flying out from the rim. To counter her, I shove the shield back at her, and it knocks her away. She almost trips from the shove

As she staggers away, another blue-eye flies over my shield. This guy has wings, and he’s flying less than an inch from the top of the ceiling. I will be pissed if he knocks a light fixture out.

The pegasus dive bombs me with, surprise surprise, zap gauntlets. My shield rises above my head fast enough to block him, and he pummels the harden shell. My elbow buckles from his force. With my shield above me, that leaves me vulnerable on the ground. The lady unicorn I just shoved away takes advantage of the gap and aims an electro-punch for my waist.

A swarm of bugs comes out from the left and engulfs the lady unicorn. I hear her scream in panic as black and green insects cover her entire body. Sparks fly out of the bug ball, sending plumes of burning insects all over the store.

The pegasus comes out of nowhere, swinging from the edge of the shield. He swings his legs at my face, kicking me in the pony nose. He has enough force to knock me sideways. The shield goes wild as I tumble backwards. I can’t stop it from smashing the glass display case. Glass and pastries go flying as the shield tears through the counter as I fall back. I land with a thud, and a scone splats on my forehead.

I wipe off the scone and look at its goopy remains. My eye twitches. Blackwatch is destroying my store. I swear to Grover, bitches are getting cut tonight!

The shield splits into a million tentacles and shrivels back to a hoof. As I push myself up to standing position, another zap goon charges me with crackling hooves. I reach for the counter to grab whatever I can get a hold of and chuck it at the charging goon. Turns out I grabbed the cash register. The register zips through the air until it cracks against the goon’s skull. The goon’s head flips back, the cash drawer shoots open with a ding, and bits spill all over his body as he crumples to the floor.

The pegasus dives for me again. I grab the next thing I find on the counter. The pegasus gets to close for me to chuck something by the time I grab a thing, so I chose whack him in the head with everything I got. What I grabbed was today’s newspaper. It doesn’t knock him out of the air, but swatting him with today’s headlines tweaks his head to the side. He veers past me in his descent and crashes in front of the counter.

I turn to Heart. She’s finishing up with the one blue-eye she’s been dealing with. By finishing up, I mean smashing a chair over and over again on top of an unconscious heap. “Stop that!” I yell. Heart freezes mid swing and looks at me. “That chair cost me bits!”

Heart looks around at the destruction that just occurred in the past minute. “It’s not much compared to everything else.”

“But you don’t have to add to it,” I snap back. I turn towards the bug ball that’s pulsing and throbbing. Sparks keep flying out. There’s a thick ring of dead, electrocuted bugs surrounding the ball. The health inspector isn’t going to like that. “I expect you to clean this all up, or else I’m bringing Tartarus up in here.”

The bug ball flashes a blue light, and all the bugs fall into one big swarming pile. It’s as if the pony in there disappeared. A half second later, another blue flash pops behind me, followed by a pony falling and grabbing on to my back. I look behind to find the unicorn from the bug ball riding me like a bull. Ah, she teleported.

“Eat thunder!” the lady unicorn screams in my ear. Right after that, her gauntlets ignite and a torrent of electricity courses through my flesh.

“Blayblublablaabla,” I say. A big glob of spit drools from my spasming mouth as I go through the whole zapppity zap zap fun again, just like the first guy. This is a great time to point out another monster ability I figured out a while back. I don’t have to go to the bathroom. It’s a great little perk, especially when I lose control of all my bodily functions, like right now! Without it, there’d be a huge mess on the floor I’d have to clean up later. Oh, the perks of being a monster freak.

I don’t know how long this goes for. Electrocution makes you lose track of time. After some time, I hear a loud pop behind me, and the electrocution stops. A moment later, I smell something burning. I look back at the unicorn on my back and see smoke rising from a box on her waist.

The unicorn looks at this too. She taps the box with a hoof, and sparks come flying out of the panel. “Oh… shoot. I overloaded the battery.”

“That’s unlucky,” I say. I grab the unicorn by the head and yank her over me. She screams as I drag her through the air. Her blue-eye mask slips off her head and she slams into the ground. I grin as I hold her limp mask over her face. “Look gang, it’s Old Man Willikers.”

The unicorn holds her head as she curls up from the pain. Without her mask, I recognize her instantly. Brown coat, pink mane, a bitchy looking face. I knew I recognized that voice.

“How’s it going, Cherry?” I say, tossing the mask away. “You’re a long way from looking after Pinkie’s classroom. How’d you end up here?”

“I joined,” Cherry groans, “Cole Slaw’s team… so I can… send you to Tartarus myself.”

“Aw, did you forget what Pinkie said?” I ask. “We got to do our best to be friends, or something like” –

Cherry’s horn glows blue. The cash register, held in a blue glow, shoots through the air and cracks me in the head. Bits don’t go flying all over the place since the drawer’s been emptied. However, my head does fly back, and I stumble back and trip over the ruins of my glass display case.

My senses come back in time for me to see Cherry whip up a magic disk shield, more elegant than my tumor shield, and slam it into my torso. My air escapes me and Cherry shoves me over the counter and into the back cooking area.

We keep going until Cherry steers me into a table. I smash through the metal. Raw, uncooked dough is still sitting on the surface, and in goes flying everywhere on impact. A good bit splatters on Cherry’s shield, which presses me into the ground.

“Stop destroying my shop!” I sputter. My hooves shift into the tumor claws. I smash them together with the shield in between. The resulting smack sends a shock that rattles everything in the store, from utensils to large mixing equipment. The shield shatters from the pressure, sending a spike of pain back to the unicorn’s horn. She reels back in pain, nursing her smoking horn.

I glance at the tumor claws. The dough that covered the shield is now all over the claws. Damn it, I’m wasting good product in this fight! I’m going to have to pull all the savings I made from the past year to fix up this store!

Cherry shakes her head, and her horn starts glowing again. Oh no you don’t! My tumor claws shift to my monster claws, and I pounce at the unicorn with my scythe talons. Cherry takes one step back, then a blizzard of glowing blobs cuts the space between us. The blizzard centers in around my claws, and globs of dough pile around my blades.

The unicorn shuts her eyes when I strike, but my claws don’t slice her to bits. Instead, they make a glop sound, and I sandwich her in between two dough pillows. Oh great, she’s got me stuck. I try ripping the claws out from the dough balls, but Cherry’s magic presses down on the dough, keeping my blades trapped in the innards of my life’s work.

Cherry smirks. “Can’t do much without your claws, can you?”

I grimace, but then change to a smirk when a funny little thought crosses my head. “You think you have the best of me, but it is you who will accept defeat!”

Cherry raises an eyebrow, but then jolts when I flip back. I swing on my arms and kick my feet up in between us, then lash out with a back hoof. A shield forms in front of Cherry just in time for me to kick it with a dull ring. Cherry winces as the shield ripples from the blow.

I yell at her. “Get it? I’m giving you defeat. De feet!” I think it's a good pun.

I keep kicking her in a bike peddling motion, making the shield bend and warp. Cherry’s face twists in pain and sparks fly out of her horn. I must be putting a good amount of strain on her.

Cherry forces her eyes open and looks at something behind me. Her horn glows brighter, and I hear metal scraping from the back. I turn to see what she’s doing, only to find the two halves of the table I crashed into earlier come flying at me. I have no time to react before the fly to either side of me and proceed to give me the beat down of a life time. Each whacks me on top of the head as fast as they can. It’s like getting spanking from two robots at once! They fill the air with a string of metallic clanging, which sounds as pleasant as it feels.

My blade wings unfurl from my pony form and stick up into the air. When the table halves comes down, they slam on top of the blades. The tables slide down the metal feathers, pushing down hard on my wing joints. With my wings piercing the tables, I bend the tips at an angle, stopping them from sliding back up. They’re stuck.

My head tilts to the side. “I hope you realize you and your friends are going to be paying me a lot of money as recompense for all this property damage.”

Cherry glares up at me. “Oh, I’ll pay you back. Do you accept bits?”

“Sure, bits will be fine, but that’s going to be a lot of bits you’ll have to” –

A blue glowing cash register comes out of nowhere and bashes me in the head. That cheeky little devil. I straighten my neck back to position. I can feel the tentacles patching up a gash over my face. I stare the unicorn down. “Never mind, I only take check.”

My claws morph and surge. Cherry feels something in the dough moving, and her eyes go wide. Her horn flashes, and a bubble shield forms around her, pushing the dough balls away from her. Just in time too, as two bouquets of blades shoot out from either ball, scraping against her shield. Cherry holds against the ground-turned-dough spikes, though I can see the stress they’re putting on her. Her body is shaking now, and she’s having trouble keeping her eyes open.

In spite of her obvious fatigue, Cherry lets out a scream. She runs forward, using her bubble shield to push me along with her. She slams me into the giant dough mixer. I feel the buttons and levers poke me in the back. Something behind me clicks, and the massive industrial whisk in the mixer’s bowl springs to life. The whisk starts off slow, but then accelerates to bone breaking speeds. I must have hit the extreme button.

The dough spikes shrink back into my normal monster claws, still stuck in the dough. I squeeze Cherry’s shield as hard as I can with the dough balls and lift her into the air. Cherry falls to the bottom of her bubble, but she still keeps it stable somehow. With her in my goopy claws, I chuck the bubble into the mixer bowl.

The bubble jams up against the whisk. The whish jolts to a stop with a metal clang. I can hear the motor groaning in an effort to keep going. With my monster strength and the industrial whisk pressing against her bubble, Cherry is under a lot of stress. Her shaking is more intense, and now her horn is spurting fireworks.

“Come on Cherry, don’t you want to be a part of my new line scones?” I yell at her. I lift a dough claw up and slam it on top of the shield. The shield ripples, and Cherry cries out. “It’s a special scone, with a special ingredient us griffons consider a delicacy back in the motherland.”

She looks at the jammed up whisk, and some how she forces her horn to glow even brighter. I think she’s scared. I wouldn’t blame her. Berry Tart once dropped a ladle into the bowl once, and that whisk bent the heck out of it. Imagine what it’ll do to a full grown pony!

I slam on her shield again, and Cherry shudders in response. “We made it all the time back in Griffonstone. Meat scones!” Another slam, the unicorn cries out again. “We usually made it out of rabbits and stuff, but this batch is going to be special. I’m making this batch Cherry flavored!”

I throw my claw down as hard as I can. I want this shield broken. Before I do, Cherry looks at me with a burning hatred in her eyes. Her horn flashes, and all I see is a blinding light. A moment later, I can see again, but Cherry isn’t there anymore.

Damn it, she teleported!

The flash confuses me enough to forget about the claw coming down to crush the shield that isn’t there anymore. It smashes through empty air, to my disappointment. But that isn’t the bad part. The bad part is I hear the mixer’s motor rev back up again. The whisks shoots back to life, catching my claw as it falls into the bowl.

Oh… poop.

When I bought this mixer, I went out to find the most powerful mixer on the market. After a month or so of browsing, I came across this particular model. According to the sales pony, the motor in this thing is strong enough to rip an elephant in half. Of course he didn’t use an elephant in his demonstration. That would be murder. But he did toss in a bunch of melons and the whisk easily grinded them into a fine liquid juice. It impressed me, so I bought it. Ever since then, I always wondered how far I could push this thing. Can it really rip an elephant in half?

I’m about to find out.

With my claw stuck in the whisk, the mixer yanks me into the bowl. It doesn’t just pull me in, it also pulls in the table halves stuck to my wings. I didn’t take those off, did I? The whish tears my arm off, mixing the claw and the dough ball together. It then tears up the rest of my body, along with the metal table. I can’t scream because the whisk wrecks my throat in the first moment.

To answer my question of what this baby can do, what follows is the world’s most powerful mixer mixing up two large globs of dough, a monster griffon, and a metal table all together into a batch of paste. To think of my pain, imagine having every bit of flesh you have simultaneously ripped off your bones, and then your bones grind up, and then metal shards of table rip through your torn up flesh. Not hard for me to imagine, because that is exactly what’s happening to me right now!

This is Tartarus! I receive the punishment the most foul of creatures receive. The wailing souls in the devil’s pits face this fate for all eternity. Repent, my brothers, or you shall suffer the same wrath as I!

At some point, the timer on the mixer runs out with a ding. The whisk slows down to a stop, and the soup I’m in settles. None of my body parts feel like they’re in the right place. Bits of my arms are touching bits of my leg, and my neck, and my torso. Actually, my arm is everywhere. And my legs are everywhere. And my torso is everywhere!

Is this what it feels like to be omnipresent?

As I sit contemplating my new form of existence, the tentacles inside of me spring to life and get to work fixing me back up, like they always do. Well, they’re not inside of me. They’re all around me. It’s sort of like the air I breathe suddenly sprouted tentacles and is now taking my bits and pieces to put them back together. Except it’s not air, it’s scone batter. I’m breathing scone batter. That may not be wrong. I think the tentacles are eating the scone batter for nourishment. So in a way, I am breathing scones.

I should have stayed in bed this morning.

Slowly, my bits and pieces reform inside the bowl. First comes an arm, then half my torso, then the organs inside my torso. My wings sprout out of my back. My other limbs come out as well. Last thing to come is my head, which starts out as a fleshy knot on my neck, but rolls out into a full blob. The feathers on my head grow out the same time by skull reforms. I bet it looks like someone inflating a balloon while growing grass on it at the same time. Last to come are my eyes, which sort of inflate inside my eye sockets. This has to look disturbing to anyone watching. Heck, I’m disturbed, and I’m the one going through this.

My vision comes back once my eyes finish, and I blink a few times. I look down at my body. Gone is the pony I was pretending to be for the last year. Now I’m back to my normal griffon self. I’m sitting in a red dough goop with metal shards sticking out. I hope I don’t have any metal inside me.

I stretch my limbs and give my beak a workout. Hmm, why am I craving fish sticks and custard right now?

I look around my bakery. Doctor Heart and the bug swarm are still fighting a few blue-eyes up front. They’re making a mess of what’s left of the lobby. I grumble some more about repair costs. Damn, how many customers I’m I missing out on right now.

I look around at my kitchen. Other than the table and the mixer, it’s mostly untouched by anything. That’s good. All the expensive stuff is here in the back. I’d like to keep the damage up front if I can.

Hmm, where did Cherry go? I look around the chaos going on, but I can’t find the unicorn. She’s not fighting with Heart and the bugs, and she’s not here back in the kitchen. I guess she took off and ran. That may be good for my sanity. She was giving my ass a good kicking. How does that girl know how to fight? I choked her out last time we went at it.

Behind me, a door creaks as it swings open. I look back to find Berry Tart walking out of the restroom, whistling a tune to herself as she flips back her hair. A loud crash happens in the lobby fight, and Berry stops in her tracks to see what’s going on. Her whistling cuts off when she sees what’s going on.

I lean on the edge of the mixer bowl and rest my head on a griffon claw. “Damn Berry, you were in there for a long time. What the heck were you doing?”

Berry jumps at the sound of my voice. She looks in my direction, and her eyes go wide when she sees the griffon sitting in the bowl. “Who are you and what’s going on?!”

My head tilts. “I’m your boss, and a shit storm is going on.”

Berry Tart reels back a few steps. “No, you can’t be. Mister Buttermilk” –

I shapeshift into the pony I’ve been pretending to be for the past year. Berry looks like she’s about to shit some bricks. “Yeah, I know. It’s a long story. Seriously though, what were you doing on the toilet? You missed everything that went down.”

Berry doesn’t say anything. She stammers over her words, but nothing coherent comes out. My eyes roll, and I look back at the carnage going on. Great, I don’t think I can run the bakery with the mess that’s going on. I’ll have to close the place for repairs, and sue Blackwatch for damages.

I hop out of the bowl, shake of the goop, and smile at Berry. “Tell Teacake and the others they’ll have the next couple weeks off. We can’t do business here until I get the place fixed up.”

Berry stays frozen for a moment, but manages a meek nod. “What happened?”

“Some old friends came by to visit.” I walk over to Berry and place my hoof on her shoulder. I lead her to the back entrance, where Blackwatch isn’t at. “There’s a reason I don’t talk to those guys anymore.”

As I lead Berry to the back, I stop by my office to grab a pad of paper and a pen. I begin writing down a to-do list for me to follow. Get new windows, get new furniture, possibly get a new industrial mixer, call the exterminator for giant bugs, so on and so forth. I even take the time to write in all in the pretty cursive I picked up.

I stop for a moment to try to remember something I think I forgot. I tap the pen against my chin… Oh yeah.

At the top of the notepad, I write in big, fancy calligraphy, “Free Pinkie,” and underline it several times. A special idea pops in my head when I finish off the final stroke. Hmm, I think I can do one or two of these things at the same time.

Author's Notes:

Publisher's Note: We understand paying fines is an unpleasant part of life, but we must all pay our dues when we commit criminal acts. Sending images of crude justers to our HQ address in response to a fine is not an acceptable action from anyone in our society. We take your actions as a declaration of you abandoning your responsibility, and will be sending the proper authorities to your place of residence to ensure all fines are met. We thank you for your future cooperation.

- Activision Blizzard Inc.