Princess Equestria and the Eleventeen Fragments of the Friendship Chalice

by GroaningGreyAgony

First published 29th of July, 2012

Will Princess Equestria succeed in deleting the frogs and saving Horsetania?

Princess Equestria pursues a magical MacGuffin, which is broken down into numerous pieces so I can crank out an arbitrary number of episodes before the ending. If I get sick of it and end it early, she'll just find a whole bunch of pieces at once. Pies explode and dogs don lipstick. Somepony gets whacked. A sowbug crawls across a desk.

Will Horsetaria survive? Will the Princess ever find a pair of pants that burn as brightly as the last ones? Will rubbing your nose vigorously make a piece of paper stick to the back of your head? These and other questions are answered! Somewhere.

The Chundering of the Chalice

Princess Equestria, the most superior ponygod whom everyone loves and admires, was raising the sun yet again. She did this by yelling at it until it moved. She used to do it by pushing the whole planet of Horserth around with her head, but to anyone standing nearby her it looked as if she were flapping her wings as hard as she could with her horn stuck in the ground like a dork.

Nowadays, she just stood on a mountaintop and screamed herself zebraic until the sun popped up hastily over the horizon, still combing its corona and dabbing makeup on a couple of spots. "Time for a tall cool drink," thought Equestria as she flew back to Castle Donkeycastle.

She telekinesed a bottle of Dos Equus from the fridge, popped the cap with her horn, and looked around for a clean cup, but there was only the Friendship Chalice, the eternal shining symbol of loving chumminess, so she shrugged and blew the dust and dead bugs out of it and poured in the beer. But no sooner had the Princess started to chug the cold frosty brew than the Friendship Chalice quivered and exploded, flying in pieces all over the p(a)lace!

Beer foam dripped from the angry muzzle of Princess Equestria. "How many pieces are there?" she brayed.

Her loyal ministers each clopped a forehoof slowly on the floor, counting.

"We conclude that there are very many of them, your Royal Equanity," said Apalaminas Apaloyurs, her loyalest minister.

"I am even more sure than Apalaminas, your Excruciating Hippolytness!" blurted Brownnose Asswaxer, her loyalist minister.

"I cannot be seen and am not sure I should even be speaking!" piped Dustmote Whisp, her miniature royalist.

"I say that it is close to infinity," burbled Jellyjowl Quiverhocks, her oiliest monster, "and that therefore the Chalice can never be reassembled!"

"I dare to state," stated Stater Twinklebelly, her sinister toiletist, "that the pieces number not infinity, but that there are exactly the highest number to which ponies cannot count—eleventeen. For the pieces are no longer here!"

And they were not, for an ebon shadow of umbrant darkness had passed through the Great Stable Hall and taken all the pieces! Everyone shat themselves right where they were standing, but no one cared because horses do that all the time.

Princess Equestria snorted majestically, inhaling several flies. "Enough!" she neighed. "Without the Chalice we cannot 'ship and the country of Horsestria or Horsetania is in danger. Let the Elements of the Harmonic Crusaders be assembled!"

And so the heralds blew their horns and lit up the ponytorch and sent forth the Emergency Chicken, and soon after there came the assemblage of the Crusading Harmonies of the Elements. From all over Horsemania they flew, ran, swam, burrowed, translocated, floomphed, drove, burckled, and rolled limply into the royal palace of Donkeycastle to demonstrate their supererogatory talents for the Princess.

Snowwhimper Icecreamheadache put two whole popsicles into her mouth and wiggled her tongue around in her cheeks for a bit and when she opened her mouth there was just one big popsicle with two sticks poking out the bottom of it. How does she do that? She is best pony.

Windbag Nosebook used her insufferable unicorn powers to make pedantic and snippy text annotations appear throughout every book in the castle. When Princess Equestria sees what happened to her rare comic book collection, she will be beyond pissed and Windbag will have to redraw all of them in her own blood.

Lightningfly Speedyfire had a hangover from last weekend and when she tried to fly to the castle she made such a feeble little Sonic RingBolt powerthingy that it stuck around her waist like a girdle and pinned her wings to her sides in midflight and that didn't work out very well at all. Yuckh.

Pariah Poot-Tail appeared and showed everyone how her tail lifted and wavered in a curious warm breeze every time SOMEONE ELSE SOMEWHERE stepped on a frog.

Prissy Wallflower showed how she could hypnotize blades of grass and make them stand absolutely still as she approached. The grass was utterly unable to escape her ravening maw! The grass blades stood there and screamed and screamed in terror and agony as she chewed and green blood dripped from her all-devouring lips!

Posey Moniker made made everyone everyone speak speak twice twice and was promptly executed.

Etherity did an interesting trick where she borrowed a huge and priceless diamond from the Princess and expanded it into an ugly black rock that burned with a foul oily smoke. The Princess kicked her ass so hard that her cutie marks disappeared forever and were replaced by a pair of huge red hoofprints.

Adjective Nounverber couldn't stop giggling and was gently suppressed with a snuggly-soft pillow filled with bricks.

And so at last the Harmonized Crusading Elementals and / or their understudies were all present and assembled in the Great Stable Hall. "Form the Fiery Rain Motion Wave Phoenix Boom Crystal Power Beam!" whined Windbag Nosebook. And they all leapt into the air and hung there and hovered with shimmering heat and glitterdust that got in everypony's manes and eyes.

"Don't worry, Princess," screamed Windbag, "We'll recover the Pieces of the Friendship Chalice for you! Everyone bite Pariah's tail!" But no one wanted to, so they all bit Windbag's tail instead. As Windbag yelled and struggled, the other Harmonentals looked at each other, licked their lips, and bit down again. Apparently Windbag had taken a shower that morning with a bottle of Gee Your Tail Tastes Like Strawberry Cheesecake, so they all started to chew and lick the hair off every inch of her body. And, also apparently, Windbag gets so upset by being tickled all over that she projectile vomits a huge tornado of partly digested alfalfa all over anyone in sight.

As everyone was trying to cope with the enormous mess, Princess Equestria sneaked quietly out of the castle gates to begin the quest for the Eleventeen Fragments of the Friendship Chalice by herself. "At least all of the idiots are out of the way," she whickered.

Finding of the Way

Princess Equestria strode forth from her castle gates, ready to begin her quest to recover the first fragment of the Friendship Chalice. (It is a good thing for her that she likes puzzles and long rambling stories that don't seem to go anywhere.) She paused, her polychromatic mane and tail fluttering and waving in the utterly still air as she considered her next move.

She needed a way to locate the dispersed fragments of the Chalice and she knew that she'd better find something for herself quickly before she got saddled with some spunky sidekick or stupid pet that wouldn't shut up. She cantered, then loped down the canted slope that led to the city of Canterlope, capital of Horsolia. As she trotted past street vendors, mendacious mendicants and carts full of road apples, a single store caught her eye.

She entered and met an elderly sky-blue unicorn pony with a compass rose for a doofus-mark. He bowed. "I am Nagellan. Welcome to Compassion, Your Highness, where directional instruments are our only—"

Equestria trotted past him and started rooting through the bargain bin, turning up old FillyScout compasses, demagnetized needles and blunted arrows. "You got any hex-phase polyaxial positioning systems with thaumatic sensitivity in the range of 500-900 milliabras?"

"Only quad-phase, I fear—oh, Your Highness! I beg of you, please don't squeeze the Garmin!"

"Not good enough," she said. "What else'ya got?" She inspected a Tom-Tom mounted on the wall.

"We just use that to drum up extra business," said Nagellan, "but I do have this handy disastrolabe, which allows you to navigate by stars that don't even exist..."

"And...?" Her voice chilled the room like a window-mounted heat pump.

"And... this Universal Detector." He turned it on and it started beeping and flashing immediately, having successfully detected the universe.

After some whickering and dickering, it was agreed that Nagellan was completely useless and Equestria stormed out of the shop in a foul mood, carrying a cheap piece of cardboard with a plastic arrow stuck in it. Her horn glowed as she cast a spell upon the spinner, adjuring it to always point to the next-closest plot element. Tossing the device in the air, she gave it a brisk spin with her horn.

The fat red pointer made a silly dopplered raspberry noise as it spun. It finally rattled to a stop, indicating the Moon! Princess Equestria shat herself again without even bothering to think about it. (Unicorn ponies enchant the floors and cobblestones to magically absorb their feces. Rich ponies hang little jeweled buckets from their tails. Poor ponies spread hay on the floor. Earth ponies offer to shovel the used hay out of the houses of poor ponies, and then they go and spread it on their strawberries. Pegasi just laugh at everyone else.)

The Princess sighed. This was going to be a short day. She shouted down the sun, watching it bounce off the sky's rim and over the horizon, and up popped the moon, location of the next fragment of the Friendship Chalice... and home to her eternal nemesis.

Princess Equestria spread her magnificent pinions and flew off into the starry sky. She knew she'd have nothing to fly against when she got outside the atmosphere, but she just figured she'd wing it.

Also, because she's supposed to find a piece of the Chalice in every chapter, she felt something tickling her nose and she sneezed and a chunk of golden stuff flew out and what do you know it was a piece of the Friendship Chalice that had gotten stuck in her nose after it burst in her face when she was drinking out of it! And she laughed.

Tempestuous Troubles

Without further preamble or prologue, Princess Equestria soared into the twilight sky, glittering wings spread, horn piercing the sky, mane coruscating in a keratinous corona, buttocks radiating in the ultraviolet, toned body in full splendor. She thrust effortlessly into the air with powerful strokes of her pinions, causing wingboners in every eligible pegasus she passed. "Sorry," she murmured as they tumbled helplessly to the ground. She couldn't help being ponygod.

What she could help was having to flap her damned wings all the way to the moon. Why not just ride there in style and comfort?

She changed course to the pegasus cloud-city of Nimbrod, touched down on the Alipad without incident, and trotted to the spaceport. Pony society develops on a geometric curve—one year they're harvesting apples by kicking them out of the trees, the next they've got a hydroelectric dam, and now they have interplanetary travel. In a few more seasons their society will reach the Technological Singularity and Princess Equestria will have to knock everyone back to the stone age again before they all become almost as powerful as she is.

The spaceport had a control tower made from leftover cumulus parts that shone with silvery fire in the moonlight. It still looked like a barn. The moon rocket itself was a hastily converted grain silo with wooden fins nailed onto it. Princess Equestria loved grain silos. She remembered a time when she was just a young filly and she and her little second cousin were goofing around in a huge empty grain silo and chugging beers and her cousin had asked "What did they store in here, anyway?" and Equestria had a huge belch building up so she belched the word "GRRRRAIIIIINNNNNN!" in a massive bass vibrato and they both laughed themselves so sick that they puked all over each other. Even now, a thousand years later, Princess Equestria sometimes revisited that very same silo and verified that the epic belch was still echoing around in there. Good times! She grew wistful... There was such a wide gulf now between her and her cousin.

Princess Equestria shook her head sadly and approached the ticket kiosk, which had been a chicken coop in its recent past. It was occupied by a purple pegasus who was buffing her hoof polish with an industrial shoe shiner. She looked up and her wings erected in either a salute or arousal. "I am Mulechicken. The pleasure of assisting you is all mine, Your Highness," she said.

"It is all yours, truly. I need a ticket to the moon, now."

"That will be 20.95 in applecores, Your Highness..."

"Oh dear," Equestria deadpanned. "I seem to have left my wallet in my other etherial mane."

"I'm afraid that there are no exceptions..."

Princess Equestria summoned a frightful sky-occluding thunderhead and showered the spaceport with sleeting rain, gale-force winds, and lightning bolts that reduced the kiosk to a smoking framework of ash.

"...except in your case and here is your ticket and I hope Your Highness will excuse me if I flee in abject terror," she said, leaving a shell of her charred hair behind her as she galloped off.

Equestria took the ticket in her teeth and was headed for the moon rocket when a klaxon clacked on and a tremulous voice rang out, using a furious rooster for a megaphone:

"Attention, all passengers to the moon! There will be a slight delay due to a sudden and unforeseen bout of inclement weather, which has knocked the roof off our moon rocket. Our carpenters assure us that the damage will be repaired in two tales of a shaky lamb. Our first tale is about a cute little wooly fellow named Mintsauce, who was ever so nervous..."

Equestria whuffed in frustration and stomped off. Was this the way life was meant to be—one plot diversion and delay after another? Well... of course she'd meant it to be this way! She was ponygod, after all.

She pulled out her cheap cardboard spinner and gave it a twirl. It made a sound like a Rock-'em Sock'em Robot before pointing to a nightclub called Heart Breaks. Another one? There was a club with that name back in Canterlope...

Rain was falling, soaking the magic spinner. She thrust it back into her saddlebag and trotted off towards the nightclub... only to run smack bang into a dark and mysterious figure! Princess Equestria's bangs smacked her forehead in amazement and concern. The stranger was entirely robed and masked in the pages of a thesaurus, all of which contained synonyms for the words dark, mysterious and sinister, and the pages had also been painted black for good measure.

"Good evening, You Highness. You may refer to me as... Nagbuzzard. Do you seek the nightclub? You shall find nothing there. It is an eclectic blight, orchestrated poorly..."

Equestria glared curiously at the stranger, her horn beginning to emit a deadly glow. "If you just wanted to visit the glue factory, Nagbuzzard, there are easier ways..."

"I understand that tours are available on Wednesdays and Sundays. But stay your horn! I must warn you that there is a dark danger lurking beyond the destruction of the Friendship Chalice... A token that heralds the destruction of Horstralia itself; a foul message of doom... from the end of the world!"

Princess Equestria almost shat herself, then said "Excuse me" and ducked into a nearby dingy blue box that looked like a lavatory. She was about to shit herself in there when it struck her—horses don't use lavatories! What was a lavatory anyway? Why did she even think it was appropriate to shit inside a box instead of in public like a normal pony? And why was this box so much larger on the inside? She shrugged and shat in it anyway.

Imagine her surprise when the feces did not simply vanish in magical perfumed sparkles when it struck the floor, but instead aged rapidly, forming a fossilized coprolith that disintegrated and blew apart into inoffensive dust!

"Ah, hello, Your Highness," said a cultured stallion with a sundial for a dippy mark. "We handle the side products of incessant defecation slightly differently in here, as you can see. I am known as The Docker, and thereby hangs a strange tale, which I will cut short. I will be informed some time ago that you will have been seeking the fragments of the Friendship Chalice. I am here to offer you my assistance in recovering a piece from somewhere else further into the story, if you wish."

Princess Equestria was intrigued—the nightclub was looking less promising by the minute. Still, she mustn't rush into things. "Have you any inclinations whatsoever towards becoming..." She sneered slightly. "...a comic sidekick?"

He shook his head sympathetically. "Never in life, Your Neighness. I can scarcely get rid of them fast enough, myself."

"Then the only objection I can think of is that I must board that moon rocket tonight..."

"If you would care to turn your eyes to this viewscreen, I believe I can assure you that you will, or are."

Equestria saw a blue lavatory materializing upon the launch platform. She saw herself emerging from the box, cheerfully waving goodbye to its occupant, then trotting over to clout Nagbuzzard with two hooves upside the noggin before returning to board the moon rocket in peace and comfort.

She smiled. "In that case, I accept. Please lead the way."

He bowed, then shifted some levers and knobs on a hexagonal platform. The lights went down and up on a transparent column at its center. An enormous rushing noise, as of flushing water, filled the room as the blue box spiraled down and away into the plotstream...

"If you will accompany me, your Horseness, I will give you a brief tour of my time vehicle. Here is the NEWS—Negatively-Entropic-Whithering-System, which as the name implies acts as a multi-dimensional compass. More precisely, it's a polyaxial positioning system—hex phase, of course..."

Princess Equestria's nostrils flared. "...And thaumatically sensitive. You seem to be well outfitted, Docker."

"I'm a twenty-first century man, Your Hayness. Among others." He sniffed the air. "We are about to transgress the boundaries of the present. Please hold on tight..."

The room jiggled like a baby bouncer, with the jiggles growing further and further apart. The sounds in the room dopplered into a low hum and the light redshifted all around them. When time stood still, perfectly still, The Docker (a frozen statue) appeared to wink just once. Then duration sped up again and approached its normal rate. Time stayed as they went.

"Now, when were we? Ah, yes! On this wall, Your Noseness, in a series of black frames, are pictures of all my former comic sideki—companions. Ms. Herringguts, Baldrick, Jewely... Don't live here any more, of course." He brushed aside a very dry tear.

Princess Equestria gave him a measured stare. "I trust that you don't intend to mount my picture on that wall..."

He looked wounded. "I would never so presume, Your Heinous... You can see for yourself—if I had or would, it'd be there now. But you seem very capable of taking care of yourself." He gestured to the control panel. "We'd better get down to business. Have you any specific chapter that you wish to visit?"

She chewed her mane thoughtfully. "Well. Sometimes I wish I was back in 1981..."

"An excellent year, Your Horness. That was when everything began, was it not? I shall set the controls accordingly."

And they went off and had a bunch of adventures and stuff that I don't have to write about right now, thank goodness.

Epilogue:

Princess Equestria settled comfortably into her sackcloth seat aboard the moon rocket, having stowed yet another piece of the Friendship Chalice safely inside her nostril. She had technically found this piece in another chapter in the story, but that would just have to be a problem she dealt with another time.

Now, it was on to the moon, for the ultimate confrontation with her most dark and sinister nemesis! She could hardly contain her excitement, so she didn't.

Lunkheads and Lunarcy

The silo rocket sped along via its Cavolrite antigravity drive, destination Luna. Princess Equestria knocked back a beer or three as she thought about her sworn archnemesis, the enemy of the sun itself... Phantasma Selene, the dark evil pony who lived in the moon and drew huge scary faces on it every month. (It helps when every pony's name is an obvious synonym for where they live or what they are or do. Not like your name, I bet, o BasementDweller ComputerChairFouler.)

For a thousand years, Phantasma had been a constant threat to the safety and harmony of Horsenia, but after all she was stuck on the fricking moon so it was a very remote threat. Even so, however distant the rattled saber, it still had an impressive effect on raising taxes to support the ever-increasing defense budget, and so Princess Equestria had allowed the situation to continue, greeting the occasional meteor shower with rude graffiti painted on the rocks with amused tolerance.

But now, the fragments of the Friendship Chalice were at stake. Equestria frowned as she drank her beer straight from a squeezable rubber tube. It tasted like something that had come out of a weasel. This was intolerable! Even chugging a brewski wouldn't be the same until the Chalice was recovered! True, friendship was magic, but alcohol was friendship lubricant.

She looked out the porthole. The moon was slowly getting larger, and its uniform gray was starting to resolve into patches of subtle color. With no way to speed things up, she rummaged through the seat pocket in front of her and pulled out a SkyStall catalog, flipping idly through pages of platinum gem-encrusted assbaskets, crib-flavored toothpicks, a combination backscratcher and currycomb made from titanium and monogrammed on the handle...

So engrossed was she that she failed to notice a dark figure lurking several seats behind her, inconspicuously reading an entirely black newspaper.

With a soundless roar, the rocket set down on the lunar surface. Dust blew straight away from the exhaust nozzle, but did not billow up into a cloud, there being no air for it to billow up in. A steward strolled down the aisle, distributing to the various passengers the standard enchanted glass bubbles that enabled one to breathe and remain unbloated in the attenuated atmosphere. Equestria accepted one, but considered whether she really wanted to walk about with a doofoid fishbowl over her head—she was Ponygod and had certain standards to maintain. She decided to use her own magic to get by, but tucked the bubble away into hammerspace, just in case.

Princess Equestria trotted into the pilot's cabin to, as she put it, "congratulate the crew on a successful landing." She spied a fit but shy looking stallion in the first navigator's chair, and used her unicorn TK to cop a feel. He leapt out of the chair in an awkward but endearing manner, then stood staring at his athletic rump in adorable confusion. Molestria was pleased—just one of the Pirx of the job.

The main airlock opened with a firm twist of the airkey, and and with one small leap, Princess Equestria stood on the surface of the moon. The sun blazed brightly in the black starless sky, and the gibbous globe of Horsestonia hung over the grey craggy mountains on the horizon, looking like a fragile soap bubble.

Princess Equestria looked up intently at the glorious scene, then frowned. Her horn flared with cosmic energy, and she took hold of the sun, swinging it back and forth in the sky and studying its effect on the phase of the blue-white planet overhead. Her frown deepened. She made a delicate adjustment of a quarter of a degree to the ecliptic plane, tried the sun at a few more angles, then nodded and returned the sun to its proper place.

Smiling with an artist's aplomb and an engineer's complacency, she trotted off through a crowd of fear-paralyzed passengers and spaceport workers.

The spaceport terminal was largely empty at this time of the lunar day, save for one sad decrepit pony holding a tattered sign reading "The Apolloosa Missions were a Hoax!" Princess Equestria made him grow itchy mustaches all over his body, then headed for the information booth, which was being mared by a single moonpony.

The moonponies were furless and maneless, and much thinner and somewhat taller than their terrestrial cousins. They had huge horizontally-slit-pupiled eyes that took up most of the room in their skulls and left little space for frontal lobes. Behind their ears, broad fanlike structures stretched on either side of their heads; these were aetheric gills that helped them make what they could of the rarefied atmosphere. They had three-lobed hooves, six legs, and tails that ended in round mirrors for heliotropic communication at long distances. They were actually descended from Princess Equestria's first childish attempts at making ponies out of durum flour and spittle and they looked like it.

The mare at the info booth was a moonlit bay, and she was playing a moon zither, which you should imagine as being something really exotic and alien looking because I stuck the word 'moon' in front of it. I mean, I could tell you that it has two fretboards of chalcedony and shivering silver strings backlit with a purple iridescence and spiral sounding horns that extended at sixty-degree angles from its resonating chamber and that it's twisted in the middle like a Möbius strip but hey, I have to spend time writing that stuff and you have to spend time imagining it and the Princess is really anxious to get her Friendship Chalice back together, so let's both give her a break.

The bay moonpony sighed as Equestria approached her info desk, tossed her zither gently at the ceiling, where it stuck, then looked up with a cheery fanged smile. "Sorry about that, Your Hayness; this is my second job," she said. "I'm Sarah, Moonlight Sarah. What can I do for you?"

"Map, please," said Celestia. "Preferably one that shows all the secret entrances to Phantasm Palace, along with a schedule showing guard changes and patrol patterns..."

"Oh, has our Royal Hayness done something heinous to your Royal Hayness?"

"Yes, and it's a pain in the 'ayness. Let's have the map, please."

"Here you are; it's a pleasure to serve you. Would you like to hear some more music?" Moonlight Sarah neighed.

Equestria snorted and turned away. Passing by a pair of particularly hunky security stallions on the way out, she used her unicorn TK to feel a cop. Ah, it was good to be Ponygod.

Out on the surface of the moon, Princess Equestria hauled out her magic spinner and gave it a twirl. It spun oddly, as if a pair of invisible noses were sneezing on it at intervals, then settled down into a slow oscillation, pointing first in one direction, then slowly swinging back to point in another. Princess Equestria didn't shit herself for once. She guessed that there were in fact two fragments of the Chalice on the moon!

Ah well, Phantasma wasn't going anywhere quickly—big heavy palace and all that. Princess Equestria chose the nearer target and flew off into the lunar countryside.

Princess Equestria could not moon at first and she had to beat her wings very hard to get anywhere until she figured out that jumping and soaring was most efficient. She was trying to avoid teleporting if she could—it always gave her gas. Fortunately, her powerful rear legs and a set of spring-loaded horseshoes kept her comfortably spaceborne most of the time.

The rugged, cratered lunar landscape was desolate and deserted for the most part, but serenely beautiful nonetheless. Equestria became lost in a long state of dreamishness. The desert scenery gave way by degrees to a settlement of moonponies, with farmlands of indigo crops, glimmering rivers of aqua selenia, and small translucent-domed towns. Equestria smirked. Phantasma was trying so hard to be civil...

As she soared over the inhabited lunar surface, various puns drifted by below her. She passed over a farm where a moonpony vigorously employed a rake on the gritty lunar soil, and others gathered and brought in the ripe crops. She saw a baby cow, perhaps a descendant of one of the test animals employed in Equestria's first attempt at instituting a space program. She remembered the huge cannon she had built, and how the cows gave a dopplered, truncated sound as they disappeared into the sky... She grew wistful remembering those times long past and fell into a sad mood for a while. She soared over a small shack on a hillside, and saw a small distillery that dispensed a bright gleaming liquid. And soon after, she saw a herd of sheep being guided towards their fold by the sinuous walls of a lunar rill...

Princess Equestria shut her eyes and rubbed her snout in annoyance. She was suffering from punburn. She spread her wings to catch whatever molecules of atmosphere she could, lost altitude, and came to a landing outside a stadium-sized crater. Crater Kramden, she read, referring to her map. As she tucked the map away, she saw a swift movement out of the corner of her eye, but as she turned she saw nothing at all, save an empty road and a small copse of lunar brush.

I'm being shadowed by a moon fellow, she thought. She'd have to be careful.

With a single leap, Princess Equestria reached the top of the crater's rim and looked inside. Meadows of blue moongrass greeted her, and on a small hill at the crater's center was a tiny town. She checked the magic spinner, reading it from multiple points on the crater's rim, and verified that the fragment was indeed therein. Another leap brought her to the crest of the small hill, where the entire villageful of daft-looking moonponies immediately clustered around the royal princess, chattering with happy excitement in their crazy moon language.

Princess Equestria wanted to ask what place this was...

"W-"

Speech was failing her.

"W-"

Say what? She couldn't say 'what.' She strained harder. Words wriggled through constrained channels in her mind like silly putty in a garlic press, and finally emerged:

"Princess Equestria desires to know the name of the present locality."

"The tall, imperious princess pony has encountered the tribe of pronoun aversion!" chanted the multicolored crowd. A purple pony advanced with a ceremonial wreath of welcoming to lay at the celestial princess's feet.

The befuddled Ponygod was taken aback. "Surely, use of pronouns and proper names is preferable to constantly varying synonyms...?"

The lavender mare gave a negating headshake. "Composers of stories prefer to vary words, avoiding stultifying repetition!" The small mauve filly caressed a weighty book of synonyms with reverence.

The cream-colored, polychromatic-maned celestial mare neighed in the negative. "Among the words said to be invisible in any language are surely the articles, conjunctions and pronouns. Must an author really count how many times the words 'the' and 'and' are used in paragraphs, and try to minimize the occurrences? Each time a new euphemism for a character is introduced, the reader is further distracted or confused!"

The violet female pony shivered. "Articles? Conjunctions? Duplicated?! Eliminate all!"

Crowd murmured, advanced hostilely.

Surrounded sparkling Equestrian Princess struggled, word chained, Infocom parsed. Forced thought into throat...

"Summon... Elements 'f STYLE!"

Literary burst! Streaming text, typographic elements, syntactic rules, vigorous concise writing, accurate punctuation, dialectic sense, succored angry Ponygod. Tumultous mob fell back, terrified.

Celestial sunraising deity roared angrily, defying stricture...

"I... PRONOUNCE...

"YOU..."

The assembled crowd stiffened into rigid statues of warped syntax, to remain so until an enchanted prince came by to kiss Purple McGrammarFailure on her nose. Also, he had to be wearing turquoise and orange harlequin pants and be addicted to curried sardines in raspberry jello, and must be named "Rudebunk J. Hilartfrunky." And it had to be February 29th on a Thursday during a solar eclipse. In a rainstorm. Otherwise, all those stupid moonponies would be STUCK THERE FOREVER and oh gee what a shame that would be.

Despite the suspended sentence, she thought that had gone well.

She ran to a dais at the center of the village, and there upon a pillow of purple prose rested yet another fragment of the Friendship Chalice! Princess Equestria snorted it briskly into her nostril, then trotted away in satisfaction. Her next stop was the palace of Phantasma Selene, where there would be a wreckening for sure...

The Moon's Fire-Breathing Mistress

Princess Equestria, in the midst of her lunar quest for the remaining fragments of the Friendship Chalice, stopped and stared into space for a year and a half. Her ears occasionally swiveled like radar dishes, her tail twitched slowly in intricate patterns, her moulting wings left a huge pile of feathers around her. Over her head, the stars turned in their courses, and once, a meteoroid from a remote planet where Pi was equal to three flashed through her mane and left a hexagonal crater when it struck the ground. Astonishingly, in all that time, she shat not. (Seriously, I shit you not.)

At last, she remembered where she'd left her ethereal hair brush—it had fallen behind the vanity and she'd never bothered to retrieve it. She shook her head, yawned, kicked away the accumulated lunar dust, and started once more on her quest.

However, before Princess Equestria could haul out her magic spinner to seek the next target, she tripped and fell through an entirely too conveniently placed hole in the narrative structure and found herself in front of a snakelike chain of mountains, which her lunar map identified as Montes Python, and at the very top of the tallest peak, Claseus, stood the sinister castle of her evil nemesis, Phantasma Selene!

She eyed the dark soaring ramparts, the intimidating, fanglike crenelations, the walls packed with alert soldiers bearing well-burnished pugil sticks, the satellite dish disguised as a fiery all-seeing slit-pupiled eye, then shrugged. Two could play at this game. She kicked herself another hole in the narrative structure and jumped through before the befuddled author had a chance to stop her. "You won't easily get away with that again!" he raved.

She now stood in the grand lunar hall, an icy dome lit with flickering, lightning-like traceries of electric fire that raced up the grand pillars and over the walls. Phantasma's throne, an overly elaborate affair constructed of old ploughshares and bunny skeletons, was empty; the hall was utterly vacant and silent. But at the center stood a palpable trap: a set of enormous scales constructed from bronze-plated brass. On one side of the balance was a fragment of the Friendship Chalice, on the other, an ice-cold bottle of Shiner Hock beer! Princess Equestria gently palpated the contraption with her palps as she considered the problem, smoothly crossing and uncrossing her eyes and ears.

At long last (and it didn't last long), she smiled and reached forth with her magical TK. "Piquant brew... I choose you!" she said.

And even as her magical aura approached the beer, it branched off towards the other side of the balance! Princess Equestria seized both fragment and brew at the same time! The scales wavered not at all.

Chornickling to herself (chornickling is when you chuckle, snort and nicker at the same time) she triumphantly snorted the fragment into her nose...

And then sneezed mightily, expelling all the fragments of the Friendship Chalice! The pieces bounced all over the grand hall as Princess Equestria sneezed again and again! The fragment had been coated with moonpepper, which is just like regular pepper except it grows on the moon and it glows with unearthly light and I'm really not going to waste much more effort on describing it. You want some exotic descriptions of extraterran flora, you go browsing through Wiki and combine random plant terms that sound interesting. It's how I would do it anyway.

The beer bottle dropped to the floor and its cap popped off in a spray of foam. The foam turned blue, then swelled and bulged forth from the bottleneck, taking the form of a tiny black and blue alicorn, who suddenly went "ooch!" as her rear got stuck in the mouth of the bottle. Straining and scrabbling her hooves, she popped loose in a burst of hops and landed on the floor, growing instantly to her full size, her moondust mane flowing in the lack of breeze (She's got muscles in her hair, okay?) The glittering, glistening fragments of the Friendship Chalice all swirled around her, forming a halo about her horn like LOUN stones.

"Phantasma Selene!" exposited Princess Equestria, who tends to conform to standard narrative conventions whenever she's severely disappointed by sudden beer deprivation.

"Princess Equestria, my terrestrial nemesis!" Phantasma grinned evilly, showing her pearly black fangs and trident tongue, studded with tiny selenium studs given to her as tokens of gratitude by her selenial studs. "Did you really have to wait until your precious chalice was destroyed before seeking me out? Were the signs not clear enough?"

Princess Equestria stroked her little goatish beard, which female alicorns have just like female dwarves (no comments war, please). "I recall one day, three hundred years ago, when you made the moon blivet-shaped for a week. Every maker of silverware in my realm went bat-fellating bonkers and I had to train a new generation from scratch. Then, one year, you apparently thought it would be funny to make the moon look like a giant butt. As if you were standing up here saying 'ha ha, get it?'" Equestria wiggled her ears sadly. She had tried to make the planet of Horsilvania look like a tetrahedron for a while but too many ships were getting lost over the corners.

Phantasma snorted and flexed her mane. "Well, what about the time you made the sun look like a huge pinky finger?"

"Pinky...? No. No! That was a middle finger!" Princess Equestria's mane corona'd in anger. "You mean I went through all that trouble and you thought it was a pinky!?"

Phantasma brayed with joy and rolled on her back, holding her belly as she cried tears of laughter which froze as they hit the floor.

"Stop it!" Princess Equestria yelled, stamping her hooves (each stamp also read "Stop it!")

Phantasma whooped one last time, snorted and leapt to her feet. "Oh, 'Cessy, you're just as big a laugh riot as ever! But now I have your precious Friendship Chalice, or some appreciable fraction thereof! And soon you shall have nothing at all, for you are doomed to face... my Elements of Lunacy!"

And loping into the grand hall with bouncy moon strides came the moonpony mares who formed the Elements of Lunacy:

Frigora, the Element of Coldness, also known as Freona.

Fecundity, Element of Reproductive Success, who was almost too preggers to move but she's a working mom and she'll deal.

Cognita, Element of Knowledge, who never actually made very much of herself and who spends most of her time writing fanfics online. (Ooh, does that one burn, CollegeDropout ClopficComposer?)

Humora, Element of Cheap Puns, whose jokes were all wet.

Smithia, Element of Banality, and most people are just like her so you already know what she's like.

And Spumoni, the Element of Tasty Fattening Desserts.

"Form the Lightning Power Sparkle Rainbow Crystal Moonbeam Combo Thingy!" shouted Frigora. And they all jumped into the air and hung there with glittery sparkles and all was going well until Humora told an astonishingly ill-timed wombat joke. Cognita asked for a citation, but instead got a cream pie in the face from Spumoni. The food fight spread from there until Frigora tried to use her ice powers to calm things down but instead suffered a thermal inversion that left her as an ice-coated statue and sent everypony else flying facefirst into the vaulted ceiling. One by one, they peeled off like pancakes and landed on Frigora's head.

Fecundity, last of all, landed right on top of the pile. Her gravid belly quivered, and she suddenly gave birth in a fountainous explosion that rained messily all over the p(a)lace. They all tried to simultaneously shout "D'aww" from looking at the cute baby foals and "Eeeew" from being covered in afterbirth.

"Daeeeiiiiewww!"

Off to the side, Phantasma Selene and Princess Equestria stood together under a huge umbrella that dripped with mephitic slime. Phantasma shook her head sadly, pawing at the moonrock floor.

Equestria draped a sympathetic hoof over her withers. "So, your Elements are a pack of idiots too..."

Selene stared glumly downward, then nodded. "It seems like such a good idea at first. You set up breeding programs and forced marriages. You strive to concentrate the most essential qualities in the fewest pony bodies possible. And when you finally get them all together in one generation, each one is really good at their assigned element and a complete shitkicker at everything else."

"Just a bunch of one-track ponies," agreed Princess Equestria, remembering the embarrassing incident with Windbag Nosebook and her 'See it, schtup it' spell. "Look, shall we just go somewhere and settle this, Ponygod to Ponygod?"

"Suits me." Phantasma suddenly grinned wickedly. "See you on the dark side!" She vanished in a puff of teleportation.

"Do I look brain damaged to you?" shouted Princess Equestria, but Phantasma was already gone.

Princess Equestria shuddered. Teleportation always gave her gas. But perhaps there was a way to turn that to her advantage... She vanished in a huff of contemplation.

On the dark side of the moon, which was mostly pink, though darkly so, Princess Equestria popped back into reality with a sort of disappointing Fwumph! instead of the regal Ka-Bamf! to which she was accustomed. She blamed the lack of lunar atmosphere, or perhaps a small mosquito biting a burro's butt somewhere back on Horsentria.

Phantasma Selene stood near the center of Crater Carter Crater, a small crater named after somepony named Carter Crater who liked putting things in boxes and hauling them around a little too much and who traveled to the moon by accidentally packing herself in a crate and mailing herself there. She unfortunately appeared a hundred kilometers above the surface, and thus became the creator of Crater Carter Crater, almost exactly posthumously.

"At last you've arrived," Phantasma purred, as the Friendship Chalice fragments swirled around her horn. "Shall we begin? All I ask is that we keep it down a bit; my husband is taking a nap."

With that, she swigged from a small bottle of moonshine and exhaled, igniting the temporary atmosphere with her horn to create a cone of flame, aimed right at Princess Equestria!

Equestria did a barrel roll and produced a round shining object—the space helmet she'd gotten at the spaceport but never used—and hurled it onto Phantasma's head just as she was about to exhale again! The flame filled the helmet and Phantasma hopped about and screamed for a minute with her head on fire like the Dread Dormaremu. She finally strained her hair and the helmet burst into dust, extinguishing the flame.

"Shall I ginger your other end too?" snarked Equestria.

"Foom! Foof! Fool! It will take more than that to defeat me! Take that! And more than that!" Phantasma launched more streams of fire, but Princess Equestria nimbly teleported away from each one.

"Hah!" sneered Phantasma. "All you can do is run away? The Friendship Chalice will be mine!"

Princess Equestria felt her belly rumbling. It was getting to be about time. She dodged one last fireblast, then stood her ground. Emitting a spark from her own horn, she released a mighty belch that became a vast unstoppable swath of consuming fire! Phantasma screamed as the flames enflaged her in the massive congulfration.

At last, the fire died away, and Phantasma lay in a smoking heap near the crater's edge, her head disjubate, her tail twitching in charred frizzlets, her skin covered in ash. She looked up shakily as Princess Equestria approached.

Phantasma spat out a frog and croaked, "Such force, such volume... I remember now! 'Cessy... Do you recall? The grain silo? All those centuries ago..."

"You... You're my little second cousin?" Princess Equestria shat herself. Remember above where I said she hadn't shat for a year and a half? It's Mount Carter Crater now.

"Yes, I am! Not so little now, and I got the fangs done on my six-hundred-and-twentieth birthday... 'Cessy, I was foolishly led astray by my envy of your power, your prominence in solar affairs, your prodigious stomach capacity. Can you ever forgive me?"

"Yes!" cried Princess Equestria, weeping huge ice cubes. The two cousins embraced and cried themselves together in an iceberg of reconciliation.

"You shall have every fragment of the Friendship Chalice back, and I will help you search for the rest... Wait, where did they go?" Phantasma sprang up in alarm. An umbrant shadow of ebon darkness was making off with the fragments!

The two Ponygods charged up over the rim. "I can't see it anymore!" cried Phantasma.

Princess Equestria took out her magic spinner; it spun out of her grasp and sailed off into the sky just like frisbees don't in a near-vacuum. "This way!" she neighed. The Traumatic Tuo took off. They ran over rille and plain, glancing at and ignoring the giant lunar cockroaches and glass worms, but stopping briefly at Crater Joe's, because, seriously, have you tried their dark chocolate almonds encrusted with sea salt and turbinado sugar? They're like buttcrack—er, mooncrack.

Considerably fatter and leaving a trail of moonpies, they hopped about aimlessly, chanting Sumerian brewery inventory lists until they met an ancient moonpony sitting in a little cave, with her feathery antennae drooping and dusty, her ear hairs woven into a shroud that hung to her fetlocks, her eyes white with cataracts and torrents. The coot cackled and hooted, raising their hackles.

"Ah, your Haynesses. I am Claire, the Loon. I sense two souls in search—"

"Fragments." Princess Equestria snarled somberly as her horn turned red.

Claire the Loon smiled toothlessly and emitted mystic fumes as she started to chant:

That which you seek is close at hand, it's true
Though much with danger fraught, and periled dreams
I'll sing you all the dangers you may rue
In sixteen sonnets, rhymed by clever—

Phantasma invested Claire with an infestation of Luna ticks.

"Hie thee to the Eastern sea," croaked the exsanguinated seer, covered with what resembled huge gray balloons, as a tick fell away and drifted to the ground with a gentle squelch.

And soon, at the shore of the Sea of the Orient, by the dock of a bay, a docked bay moonpony was seen loading a suspicious crate aboard a spaceship shaped rather like a horseshoe, named the Kumquat Fruitbat. A familiar Mysterious Figure (yeah, I know) paid the bay longshorepony, and his shortshore comrades, a few coins as he dismissed them. He then skulked sinisterly towards the cockpit...

The two Ponygods galloped up to the ship, flanks dripping with lathery sweat, snorting and puffing with intense rage, then took a minute to rub each other down before chasing after the dark-cloaked figure.

The dark-clad pegasus pony known as Nagbuzzard turned to face them. His face bore a pair of bruises in the shape of hoofprints, but he still looked on them with sardonic amusement.

"Ah, if it isn't old crater-face... And the mare who soiled the moon. Have you come to see me off?"

"Nagbuzzard," brayed Princess Equestria, "Hoof over the fragments now and I will hurt you slightly less than I'll hurt you if you don't."

Nagbuzzard shook his head in sorrow. "Ah, Princess, you failed to heed my warnings! If only you knew the real danger of the fragments—and the danger to us all! I'm only doing this for the good of Horsigovna..."

Phantasma launched a breath of flame at Nagbuzzard, who deflected it with an Equestrian/Zebronics dictionary. The metal-clad book flew off and decimated a colony of moon mice with an enormous clang.

Princess Equestria pinned Nagbuzzard down with her steely gaze as the magic spinner, which had sailed ahead, whirled back down into her horngrasp. It spun like a buzz-killing buzzsaw as Princess Equestria got all up into Nagbuzzard's ugly puss.

Meanwhile, Phantasma kicked open the rear hatch of the Kumquat Fruitbat and licked open the crate. Thousands of remaindered Terrestria Fillies DVDs poured out. "Brummagem!" she cried out in disgust.

"Never fear," whinnied Princess Equestria as she leaned closer, the magic spinner bare femtometers from Nagbuzzard's fear-flared nares. "He has them here!" She hoofed him hard in the stomach and Nagbuzzard sneezed in despair as the fragments he'd secreted were secreted from his nose. Princess Equestria instantly snorted them safely back into her nose, reclaiming the four stolen fragments of the Friendship Chalice!

"Then it's time to wrap things up!" clichéd Phantasma as she conjured thin sheets of aluminum and wrapidly rapped them around Nagbuzzard.

"Curses!" he shouted. "Foi—Oh, no. That low I won't sink. I'm outta here. You win this round, Princess Equestria... And thereby you doom us all!"

Struggling to escape, the ship was tantalizingly near, but also too far. But Nagbuzzard seized the dangling participle carelessly inserted by the author and pulled free, swinging by it into the cockpit of the ship! The engines ignited and sent exhaust and lunar dust spraying into the faces of the ireful Ponygods, disconcerting them both, and also a nearby orchestra which had been playing the fight music. Nagbuzzard flew safely off in the Kumquat Fruitbat, giving them the middle finger out the window which is really all a horse can give you.

Princess Equestria stared after him with a dour rage, her horn smouldering and her tail spinning in opposite directions.

Phantasma approached and gave her a sympathetic nuzzle. "Hey, at least you got the fragments back! How about you come back to my palace for a bit and we'll catch up on some old times..."

With a great flash of spooky puce magic, Princess Equestria banished Phantasma Selene all the way out to Pluto and deregistered Pluto from the list of real planets just to be safe.

"Pinky finger," she muttered. "What a load of whore's dapples."