Go-See Night! Bing-bong, a gong at the door! Pardon me, pardyguests, as I go see whoooosup!

Trick-or-trotters! And who’ve we here, who takes the dare, and thinks it meet to seek my treats? We have a Night-mare Lunna, and a gap-grinned skellyghost, and a Sun Prince, fakehorned or fakefeathered or both! And a Mannytour–hello, Spike! How’d I guess you? I counted your legs and multiplied by one!

And what a broad bowl of of candy I have, so round and deep, it’s a candy urn! Take your peek! Caramel wheels, cocoa clusters, sugar bombs and twizzlety candy cones and maple grape goodies! Gamboling gumballs, crunchy tuffy bars, Butterhooves and Chuckers and Maidez, packed with peas and nuts, and Mershey chokealot bars, so large! Salt taffies, Bitterhoneys and Maryjanes that glue your mouth shut for weeks. Sour lemons, tartsweet! Schmarties, so named because they make your teeth hurt, and Atomic Redhots with extra synonym, and Everlasting Slopglobbers and plasticky Hoofsie Rolls and waxy candle corns, Nekko wafers suitable for use as cat toys… I don’t judge, I just Provide.

And now, if you’re all done with your entreateries and have filled your handybags and punkinheads with yummy candies, come and join my party! Everypony in town’s been coming here as the meanderings wind down. We’ve had the costume contest already; we got the arrogant one, and the fog cloud, and the one dressed as the sky, and the rogue, and the shivering guard, the staid one, and the angry rabbit, and the pain who kept making puns, and the graingrinder who wasn’t there, but I was just dressed as a potbellied pig all along. Somepony has to be easy to guess, eh?

Well, pardon me while I bring out more food! These are pizza skulls, grinning with white cheese and dripping red with tomato blood! Plenty of crudites with chivvied onion dip for the refined and Raretest of palates. Salsa and guac with corn-husk chips, rose pate with rosemary crackers, clove-roasted apples with lemon dressing, artichoke toasties and cauliflower wings with extra hot sauce… Birch beer and dandelion wine and sarsaparilla and cherryapple soda, and… Deep fried pickle chips with balsamic blackberry dip! May I eat several trays of them even as they emerge piping hot from the oven? Don’t mind if I do, my very self!

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And so the evening goes, as I give and partake and refill plates and glasses and everyone has such a swell time, Cakes and Apples and Glimmers and Sparkles and Songs and Melodies and Drops and Derps and Pies, and I! Even after I see the last guest to the door, and close and lock it with a whumphf and a sigh, I stand there awhile awash in the glow of friendetic energies. Another stunning success! The best parties are the ones where the hostess is, not utterly invisible, but simply in the Pink as much as she can be.

Afterpartied, I yawn and nosh a bit more at stray trays of unclaimed food, down a last glass of bubbly, then drayge myself to the Cleanup Cannon, my second-greatest invention, and yank the chord, and with a pedantic poumph it borings up the place and uprolls the streamers and carks the bubblies and fridges the cakecups and freshens the floorhay. That takes care of all, for I hate morningafter scrambles and the kitchen must be fresh tomorrow for the Cakes to comfortably craft their wares.

As I assend the stairs to my bedroom, scrape-scrape bump goes my belly on the boards. I have most effulllgently indulged myself in cornucopious good food and drink, and disblorted my trim slim frame. Oooh, how I look forward to sleep!

On my tumbly roumbly roundbelly, I boundce boundce bedward! With a summassault I berloop onto the matteress and land aback, my proudtummy upscuring my view. I call Nightie Night aright to Nightmare Night, and blow Gummy a cheekpeck, and close my whirried eyes. The room spins gently about and above me, and my tongue itches and tingles from sugarscurch, and I think about sleep. I think of sleep for a long time, then a longer time, then the longerest time ever, so long that I memorate all the sheeps as they bounce over the fence with their little wooly round sugarbellies, bleating as they bump the tuffets. And when I am just about to drift off into arms of onerous Oneiros, comes a garglous gurgle from regions below that rousts me again. Oh, my stummy is stymied and taut, tut tut! But I scrunch my brows and whip out the eyeclamps (eyelash shapers wrapped with rubber bands) and crample my pillows into my flattenears, and soon again I drift belonely off to sea, to see, to seek, to seek whence, to sequence sheep, to slee…

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To sleep, or chance to dream. Where is it you go when your eyes roll backward in your head and you see yourself dreaming, but there’s not enough of you there yet to be anything? I am there in black, aback, dreamsails flappering and fluttering, my kite blown fully out, troughing and cresting on waves of wake, dreaming I am awake and waking to a dream and versa visa, and all punctuated by the perambulant putterings of my proudly protuberant ptomach. This will not do, I have things to do tomorrow and Cakes to placate and pastries to paste!

As I stare forgonely into a dark corner of my room, I see a wink.

I blink.

I think a wink was not. I thought…

But then another wink!

And I want to upbound and welcome a new friend but my tired corpus is well and truly glued to the bed. All I can do is roll my eyes and watch as tall dark shadows congragugate in the coroners of my suddenly quite adarkened gloomroom.

But I hear them before I see them, squirmeling in the shadows like snakes as I try to hushup and stall my bleating heart, and just when I am silentest and stillest, then there comes the loudest tummygrowl and borborythm I have heard the like of in my life, an urpquake of intestinal fartitude! And there is no dodging that, and likewell there is no sense to pretend it wasn’t heard, and so I hear peals of laughter in the darkorner, and out they come!

I now know them right off from tales of PiMa and PiPa, they are striding sneaky bony-kneed Gabbafallanks with yellowy hides and long snakey brown polkadot necks and giraffe-horned heads and platapussy beaks and forkey hooves and waggly tangletongues and corkscrew tails tipped with bells, and sneakyslimysmiles creeping all over their snidesniffy snouts, how hateful!

I try to call out and rouse the house for help, but I am frozzled in body and spurrit and paraloosed from nosetip to hoofbottom. I can only watch as they gather rather close around me, a buzzing dozen of ‘em, and lean their long necks down to gaze with grimy grins at my outstretched bollybully and outienavel. They chortle and mutter and knock their giraffey heads together, and the toothy grins they send towards my whirling eyes would make my heart plummet were my belly not already stuffed full. They are not here to be friends!

With no let or leave, they caress my swollen tummy, patting it like a drum and listening to it twang, then a rhythm forms and they start to caper, dance and sing, bobbing their long necks like pompous grass!

You are so firmly stuffed!
(You are!)
Your poke is ponkly puffed!
(Hoo-raw!)
You’ve got a glut inside your gut, and now you’re firmly fluffed!
(We saw!)

They guffaw with raw laughter, then pull out towels and dip them in wax and wrap them around my poor ponderous helpless stummy, whipping them around and up and down, shaking and shimmying, until my rotundity starts to shimmer and shine like a pink beacon, and they leap about the room and sing again, capering and kicking!

Your scut looks rather scuffed
(True facts!)
Unless we’re being bluffed
(More wax!)
Your tum will spar-kle like a star, once it’s buffed and rebuffed!
(To max!)

I was feeling warm and shy and flaky and even more rumbly in my tombly, which I feared would cause another emburblessment. And not to point it too baldly, it dood. A regular firecrack! I was wishing to drop right out of sight through the floor, but they roared in the fun and danced all the more.

What is this now we’ve huffed?
(Oh phew!)
It roughs our nostril tufts!
(It do!)
And we can tell that rotten smell in Die Umgebungsluft!
(It’s YOU!)

And, hooting and hollering, they leap high in the air and land atop me, and dance, dance, dance on my belly with their sharp, sharp, scharpe scalpelous little hooftoes poking and poking at my shiny perplexus, and I am all larmed and shourting for them to forbear, for each poke feels like a popper and I fear for my dear innards. But they dance and tread and bounce the bed and I look away for I do not wish to see the horrid release of my dearest treasures when it–



And I can’t help but look again, and I am busted like a balloon, but like a piñata I only contain candy, and from the air rains canes and cones and pops and drops and trifles and truffles and taffies and toffees and yummies and gummies, and partyphernalia, pleated streamers, twinkling confretti, and they take up the streamers and dance with them around a tall candypole that now rises from deep within me. M’aidez! M’aidez! No Mershey for me! I am the consummate party hostess, but now the party is hosted in me, and not in a good way!

I swirl slowly around and below the pole as they prance, a retching panting pony on the spinning wheel ride! They ravel me up to a slow bolero, winding me tighter and tighter, until I cannot breathe, cannot blink, cannot think–

Bwouloump! I plomph within myself with a great grauiny buuuurrruuup! I headshake and rumpquake and stand, my belly downrounder than before, and growing! I’m in a rockcandy cave, just like mother used to excavate, and the sharp facets shine shpraklsh with glinters and reflect me a quillion spazillion times to infunity with impunity, and I see my tummy has gotten so huge that it’s draggon behind. No way up, no way back?

I hear the Gabbafallanks chaunt behond me, singing songs of muckery with ferrious adhockery, tippyhooving after me, prankypronking my way, swinging around them huge wooden fannypaddles!

I sigh and clomp forward through the sugarmirror cave in undulative rhythm. Strain forward, sweating lemondrops, bigbellybulge drags through dirt to catch up and bump my fanny, k-nocking me forwards, strain again… Slowly I inch my painful way through turntwists and allalike passages, seeing my struggle refracted in the walls about me.

The cavewalls grow closer and closer, and soon my belly is blocked! I scrabble hooves for purpchase, and behind me, I hear the Gabbafallanks laughing and roaring and whacking their paddles against the cavewalls. Mighteously I strunch and scrain at the obdurstriction, and I feel the pounding punchers descend around my paunch. Oh, my poor bestuffed bepoked beknighted tummy!

The Gabbafallanks seize my blockading belly and start to whack, smack, crack with their painful paddles, and I count myself in a sorry pick of peckles indeed, when with a grand gurgle all suddenly gives way and out like a carked cork I pop! I fall forward into darkness as they laugh and cackle and chitter and hoot!

And so they chase me on again, from caves to swoirling clouds where they tickle me with feathers, to deep fiery valleys where they play the serpent at me, to chillsome mountain peaks where they just stare at me, and I am bereft of my usual clever tricks and can only run with waggling belly. But soon my gurgling goggling tummy feels lighter and lighter, and I feel a lift, a luft in my steps, and uptum I go like a bubtroubled fish, drifting up higher hither into the lonely sky, hoping madly for the Solar Prominence or the Dread Selenical to take their mercy upon me. I hear the Heavenly chimes from far away, then near–

ABRINNGaDINGaDING! Alarum, Alarums, awake! My faithful clock reaches the tock that lets it unlock the saving bell! A snirt, a snort, I blink awake, a pinkawake! From dreamy scenes I come serene, arise arouse again to sweat-sodden sheets, and I am never so relieved in my life to see the dawn!

(Though I am in fact considerably more relieved shortly thereafter as I run to engage the little toil and deliver the “night soil.” The more said phewphemistically, the batter. Whew!)

I hear the Cakes as they bake downstairs and the first wafts of morning waffles and muffins wend up bending stairs to enchant the airs and tickle my nostril hairs. I’d be up with them on a normal day, but they’d given me leave to rise later to recover from partystrain. And despite all the turmoil in my tummler last night, the scent of baking goods still entrained in my drained brain the perk of appetite, and my lately groaning guts gave the anticipatory growl of renewed interest. And there is so much befridged food left down there, and so much candy.

So I took me time to bethink upon the nightmare and the mere night, for were things fully episodic there’d be a lesson to be learned–Oh, I shouldn’t think that way? But I’m the one who sees all the walls, even the ones you can’t see, remember? Tink tink, wink, wink!

So I imagine going slimstraight and swearing off the excess goodies and puddies and sweating off the excess bulgies, which is super not fun. Fortunate am I that it’s way out of my weltanschauung; cake is what I love and candy is in my blood!

Still, perhaps I am a trifley-wifley immoderate and without overbearing lecture designed to be easily grasped by foals in one minute summation, I could just take a lot of that sugarstock and give it back. Picture Pinkie dressed again as a potbellied pig, ringing doorbells and giving surprised ponies their treats, no tricks, then home to sensibelly-sized fudgecake for deserved dessert!

But then I get a smile, a smile with extra curls at the corners, and I rush down to my basement lab, grab a feedbag and pour the candy urn into it in an ever-rending stream, then strap it on. I pull out my drawing table, put on my visor, and start to draw the plan as I munch, crunch, lunch away…

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And so it is that I wind up again that very next evening, bulgebellied and blearied and staring at a dark corner again that very night, as snickering shapes entwine their necks and step forth towards me, ready to burst into sinist-song.

And once again, I am sugarsapped and dewilled and sleep stunned and parolized and cannot even twitch my tail.

But around me, my bed shivers and shakes, then unfolds. Struts and straps attach to my limp legs and arms, servos whine as I am pulled upright over motorized treads and twin gumball-gatlings swing round from my back. The Dreamland Exoskillaton Mark Twoin has arisen and I see the Gabbafallanks pause in the first sillyable of their snarksnide song, all of them wideeyed and gapemouthed and being given considerable pause.

And little robot arms with white gloves reach out from the helmet, tuck fingers into the corners of my limp lips, and help me to give them a big wide win-some smile!