Episode 120: Too Much Pink Energy
Thirty seconds ago Grogar had been in such a wonderful mood. His plans had been going along so swimmingly! He’d arrived to “help” Adagio and Gilda on their little mission, which he knew full well Adagio was using as a means of rescuing Torch’s errant offspring rather than properly scouting Canterlot City as Tirek intended. It’d be enjoyable to see Adagio fume over his presence, and keep feeding the fire of her desire for vengeance upon him. Not because he felt any specific pleasure in tormenting the former siren, but because he knew a large portion of her power was derived from her ambitions, one of which was to get back at him for his part in her becoming a Hollow in the first place. Foolish, really. He’d elevated her to an existence more worthy than her previous drudgery, and continued to be interested in her evolution.
Not as much as his own evolution, mind you, but he could appreciate the growth of one of his experiments even after she’d ceased being useful.
Then when all these silly battles had enused, all he’d needed to do was play his part and wait things out. Celestia, of course, had thrown a slight wrench into affairs, but he’d planned for that and that plan had gone smoothly, allowing him to remove her temporarily from play so he would be free to act. And, as he’d hoped, Adagio had played Lament as her trump card, offering up the perfect opportunity that Grogar had desired. If Torch had been the trump card rather than Lament, well, Grogar might have used the opportunity in a different manner, but Lament was by far the greater prize due to the Seed that Experiment 528 had planted all those years ago.
Things really couldn’t have gone better. Lament even ended up exhausting himself and his former wife in battle, making harvesting the Seed all the easier. With the Seed in his grasp, all Grogar had to do was return to his lab with it and consume it’s power at his leisure...
Except.
“Aww, why you want to kill us?” the annoying pink hammer said, with it’s impossibly adorable cartoon eyes making puppy face at him. Grogar refused to acknowledge that this was anything other than bald faced idiocy in front of him, and whatever part of his brain found this adorable he took into a back corner of mind and repeatedly stabbed to death.
“Probably because he’s a crotchety old bastard who doesn’t have any friends,” said the one holding the hammer, the one Grogar recalled was a manifestation of the pink girl’s Fullbring. A sort of spiritual clone. Last time they fought the clone could stretch it’s limbs and make remarkably sharp and large mouths on her body to fight with. The hammer was a relatively new thing to him, but not outside his projected data on these Fullbringers. He hadn’t ceased keeping some tabs on them, after their encounter in Hueco Mundo. However he didn’t know what the actual abilities of the hammer form were.
Not that it mattered. Her reiatsu was insignificant compared to his own. Well, not entirely insignificant, as he did estimate her as being stronger than Lieutenant-class Soul Reapers, but not quite on par with Captain-class. He had a comfortable lead on her, however, and destroying her should be a simple affair. The fact that she’d appeared next to him undetected was merely a... fluke.
“My social status is of no concern to you,” he said with his ire coming out in an lashing tone as he brought forth his own spiritual pressure to press down upon her, “And as much as I’d still like to take one of you children as samples to study the effects magic has had upon your growth, I can satisfy that desire later. Right now you’ve earned a painful death. I might still learn something from your dissected corpse, at least.”
“Yikes, Mena, looks like we’ve got a category-five grump on our hands! He’s needs an immediate fun injection, stat!”
“Violence is fun, so I’m thinking we start there," Pinkamena replied with a tone slick with bloodlust.
“Pinkie, be careful!” shouted Applejack, “Don’t fergit this is the fella that whooped us back n’ Hueco Mundo! Ya can’t take him alone!”
“Relaaaaaax, Applejack, I totally have a plan!” Pinkie Pie chirped, and Pinkamena licked her lips.
“She’s lying. There’s no plan. Only violence.”
“I do too totally have a plan, and it’s a good one, too!”
“Is your friend insane?” Fenice asked Applejack, having recovered enough from the blow Grogar had given her that she could limp over and help Applejack get their father to his feet. Hard Nail was still dazed from the removal of the Seed, barely able to raise his head, let alone walk. Even with her own injury, Fenice had little trouble slipping Hard Nail’s arm around her shoulder to hold him up.
“...Kinda?” Applejack responded as honestly as she could. Pinkie Pie, spotting Fenice, twisted her hammer form around and waved back and forth.
“Oh, is that Sunset Shimmer!? Hi Sunset Shimmer! What are you doing over here? I thought you jumped down a hole?”
Fenice briefly glanced in annoyance at Pinkie Pie, but didn’t answer and instead looked back at Applejack, “I’m taking father somewhere safe.”
“Good idea,” the farmgirl replied, while Hard Nail gave his daughters a wane look.
“I should be able to help-” Hard Nail began weakly, but Fenice cut him off.
“Hush, father, you’ve done enough. I need to get you away from here now.”
Rolling her eyes at the scene, Pinkamena hefted Pinkie Pie’s hammer form around and faced Grogar.
“Bored now, time to kill,” she said, her arms stretching out as she spun like a top, hurling the Pinkie Hammer at Grogar like a flying pink boomerang.
“WEEEEEEEE!” Pinkie cried with a giggle, and as Grogar deflected her hammer form with his bladed staff, she went careening behind him, the air whistling from her rapid spinning.
Pinkamena had rushed in right behind Pinkie Pie, mouths springing up in salivating multitudes upon her arms and legs. Her hands split into giant mouths, their sharp teeth dripping drool as Pinkamena slashed them at Grogar. He had little trouble evading, shooting upwards with Sonido as he smirked. One of the cylinders on his back opened, exposing a stream of purple gas.
“I will never understand idiots who don’t have basic survival instinct,” he spat as he fired a wide stream of poisonous, corrosive filth at Pinkamena. She stretched out her right hand, stabbing it into the ground to yank herself out of the way like it was a grappling hook. Even then some of the disease ridden sludge stolen from Smooze got on Pinkamena’s leg, instantly burning into her skin and making her feel as if her body was lit up with fever.
She nearly threw up even from that minor contact, losing her grip on the ground and instead tucking into a roll that she used to land on her feet. Grogar continued to smirk at her, at least until the Pink Hammer, which had vanished from his spiritual senses, smacked him in the back of the head on it’s boomerang rebound.
“Guh! What!? Why didn’t I hear that coming!? Even if you can vanish from my spiritual senses, I should have heard the air currents!”
Pinkamena caught the hammer, while Pinkie Pie chuckled, “Maybe you’re too uptight? If you loosen up and learn to laugh a little you’d probably see all sorts of things you normally wouldn’t.”
“I asked why I didn’t hear you, not why I didn’t see you- ARGH! Nevermind, just die already.”
Another metal cylinder sprouting from his back moved, this time sinking into his body with a pressurized hiss while sparking with tiny arcs of energy. Grogar had been holding the Seed with his left hand, but now put it in the crook of his right arm as his left arm went through a throbbing shift in shape. Flesh tore and reformed, metal tubes flying out and coiling together around a growing metal frame, until Grogar’s left arm transformed into a large eight barreled rotary cannon.
“You know, I’d joke about overcompensation,” said Pinkie Pie, “But even I have more class than that.”
The cannon spun into a blur and with a sound like sheet metal being ripped through by a circular saw, it started spitting a high density storm of shard-like spines. This power had been stolen from an Arrancar he’d captured for experimentation not long after becoming an Espada himself, and he felt a certain satisfaction thinking he’d tear this insolent child apart with an ability he’d deemed unworthy to use on Celestia.
Pinkamena jumped back from the barrage of spines, her skin starting to gain a sheen of sweat from the fever burning through her. Her mouth, all of her mouths felt dry, and her blood felt scalding.
“You okay Mena?” Pinkie Pie asked.
“Just feeling like crap, but my body doesn’t give out easy like yours does- the crap!?”
Her exclamation came as the spines she thought she’d just dodged ended up turning in midair and chased after her like homing missiles. Pinkamena threw all she could into dodging left and right, but the spines after her doggedly, drawing closer by the second while Grogar laughed.
“You won’t escape them so easily. While a weak ability I rarely use, these spines are relentless and handy for pinning down weaker specimens like you.”
His satisfaction was short-lived, however, as a second later Pinkamena swung the Pinkie Hammer and in its wake a perfectly normal, ordinary looking household door appeared in thin air. Grogar stood stupefied as Pinkamena swung open the door and hopped inside, the swarm of homing spines following her through it. Yet the door opened into nothing, far as Grogar could tell. Where in the world had the girl gone? Was that some kind of portal?
A moment later another door appeared, and Pinkamena came flying out of it, slamming the door shut behind her. A few spines were caught in her hair, and a number more sudden poked out of the door, outlining the girl in such a cartoonish fashion that Grogar couldn’t imagine it happened by accident. He even mentally tried to tally the odds the spines would impact the door in such a pattern and decided that some kind of chance warping mechanic was at work.
“Well, that was annoying,” Pinkamena said, plucking spines out of her hair and using mouths along her arm to eat them, “And I feel barfy.”
“You need a yuck bag?” Pinkie Pie asked, and Pinkamena just patted the hammer.
“Nah, I’m good. Not even being sick will make me lose my appetite,” Pinkamena replied, walking away from the door as it faded into nothingness.
Grogar landed back on the ground, his brain working overtime to assess the situation. Not far away a battle still played out between Sweet Cider and Experiment 528. He could follow their movements easily enough. His creation was a whirling windstorm of slashing pain, it’s arms and legs lashing at Sweet Cider relentlessly. Grogar frowned at how little damage was actually being done to her, however. It seemed that, even weakened and wounded, the woman with the title “Kenpachi” was not to be underestimated. Experiment 528 was pressing her hard, keeping her from coming against Grogar, but he could tell her parries were getting stronger and surer with every passing second. He calculated that his pet would only keep her busy for another five or so minutes before being destroyed.
As for the rest of the fodder, he could see Lament being taken away by Fenice, the pair having already gotten nearly to the far side of the valley. Applejack was casting furtive looks between the two different fights occurring, as if unsure whether to go help Pinkie or her mother.
Grogar didn’t care at the moment if Applejack decided to attack him, but with her Fullbring completed she might prove more distracting than he’d prefer, especially while dealing with Pinkie Pie’s unusual and quite irritating power.
What is it that allows her to do things she shouldn’t be able to do? My earlier data only confirms her clone’s stretching and mouth forming abilities. This... this flagrant disregard for the rules of reality is nothing at all like what she could do before.
He was more annoyed and intrigued than actually worried. Regardless of the nature of her power, Pinkie Pie’s ability was still restricted by her reiatsu. That was an ironclad rule of this world that even rulebreakers like her had to adhere to. Grogar might have desired to push the boundaries of the rules and restrictions placed upon Hollows through the process of evolution, but he still respected those rules, and it was a particular peeve of his to run into someone who disregarded reality quite so flagrantly as this girl did. He owed to science to crush her utterly.
Grogar raised the rotary cannon of his left arm and the weapon pulsated, meaty crunching noises following metallic grinding sounds as the arm began to reshape itself. The same cylinder on his back that had sunk into his flesh hissed upwards with a rush of steam as the stolen power within switched gears. Each of the four cylinders on Grogar’s back contained multiple powers stolen from any Adjuchas-class or higher grade Hollow that Grogar had analyzed and replicated, but there was limited ‘storage’ space depending on the strength of the replicated powers. The cylinder that held the replica of Torch’s flames, for example, was almost entirely used up on that power. However the cylinder that had produced the homing spines had space for many others. It was something of his ‘disposal’ cylinder where he stored weaker powers that he still deemed useful. With nothing more than a thought he switched which power the cylinder spread through his body, choosing one he felt would be more appropriate for dealing with this unpredictable child.
Metallic nodes, like metal discs, grew upon his left palm and the back of his hand. They hummed with energy as he aimed his hand at Pinkamena and made a grasping gesture. Her body was suddenly enclosed in an invisible pressure; a telekinetic hand mimicking Grogar’s gesture that gripped her tightly and bound her arms, including the Pinkie Hammer, at her sides.
“Oh, getting handsy aren’t we?” Pinkamena said, licking her lips and starring with fresh hunger at Grogar, “Too scared to get close? I don’t blame you.”
“Hardly scared,” Grogar said, “Honestly this power is useless against anyone with a decent level of strength. Even Applejack would probably have the muscle to break this grip, but I can tell that physical power is not one of your traits. Instead you seem to be able to use a low form of cunning to twist reality to your advantage. But I doubt you’ll be able to do that while unable to move, and I erase you from this world with overwhelming force.”
He aimed his bladed staff at her then, and a green sphere of power took shape as he charged up a Cero. He didn’t even need something as extravagant as a Gran Rey Cero for this. A direct hit from a normal Cero he estimated to be more than enough to annihilate this troublesome pink menace.
So why did he feel uneasy as he saw Pinkamena was just grinning at him with an inhumanly wide smile filled with far too many sharp teeth?
“Come on and give me what you got, you disgusting piece of rotten meat. I’ll still devour it, and then you,” Pinkamena said past a salivating tongue that ran itself over her many teeth. Her body was immobile, but she could still morph her body, and so teeth started to form along a slit down the very front of her chest, as if her whole body was turning into a gigantic mouth.
Grimacing in pure agitation, Grogar’s Cero fired in a blast of pale green destruction. As rushed towards Pinkamena, the immobile girl did something Grogar couldn’t have anticipated. Her right arm opened into a gaping mouth, unable to move, but able to let the Pinkie Hammer fall into the mouth, widening enough to swallow even the hammer’s massive head. Grogar’s telekinetic grip actually helped the hammer move into the mouth due to it’s pressing force. Then the mouth on Pinkamena’s chest opened. It was difficult due to the crushing force on her, but Pinkamena concentrated all of her focus on forcing her chest mouth open, and spitting out the Pinkie Hammer directly in front of her. Outside of the telekinetic grip, the hammer fell and smacked into the ground. Pinkie Pie’s power triggered, literally transforming the ground into a springboard that launched both Pinkamena and the Pinkie Hammer up and out of the telekinetic field, and the path of the Cero.
Grogar was left boggling at the impossible cartoon physics as Pinkamena grabbed the Pinkie Hammer in mid-flight and came slamming it down towards him. He nearly forgot to dodge, what he was seeing was that logically improbable. At the last moment he did slip aside of the attack, more on reflex than conscious thought, but the Pinkie Hammer hit the ground next to him and resulted in even more bizarre violations of physics as the impact instantly transformed the ground into a field of banana peels that one of Grogar’s cloven feet coincidentally happened to land right atop of. And powerful Espada or not, the comedic power of a banana peel was a classic.
He ended up slipping backwards almost uncontrollably, with only his swift Arrancar reflexes allowing him to turn the fall into a controlled hand-stand that he used to push himself into a flip that landed him on his feet. Pinkamena was already attacking him directly now, her left arm morphing into a series of drool dripping mouth tentacles that wrapped around the arm he was using to hold his Zanpaktou. The teeth tried to bite into his flesh, but the metal and Hierro hardened skin couldn’t be bitten through even by Pinkamena’s unnaturally sharp teeth.
“Useless,” he said, “All your little tricks are meaningless if you lack the power to even harm me. Whereas I-”
He rushed forward, slashing down hard with the very arm Pinkamena’s tentacles were wrapped around. His blade staff carved a bloody swath down her torso, causing blood to spurt in a red arc across the banana peel strewn ground.
“-can hurt you easily.”
“Heh, maybe so,” Pinkamena said past blood bursting from her mouth, but her eyes remained twinkling as she grinned, “But it isn’t me you ought to be worried about.”
The grip of her tentacles tightened around Grogar’s arm, and her chest expanded into an even larger mouth to snap around his torso. This still didn’t inflict any damage on his body, but it did root him in place for a moment while Pinkamena used her right arm, also transformed into a series of fleshy pink tendrils, to lift the Pinkie Hammer high and bring it down hard straight at Grogar’s head.
“How about we ring your bell a bit, Groggy?”
He thrust out his left hand, still modified to use the telekinetic power, and projected that telekinesis to halt the hammer before impact. Yet Pinkie Pie’s power didn’t need a direct impact to trigger, just the right circumstances. So when a giant bronze bell appeared out of thin air for the Pinkie Hammer to strike, it once more caught Grogar off guard as the bell rung with a massive reverberation that rattled even his senses for a moment.
Pinkamena used that instant to try and snatch the Seed from where Grogar was holding it in the crook of his right arm. Sensing her movements, and nowhere near as disoriented by the bell as Pinkie Pie probably had hoped, Grogar opened the cylinder on his back containing the flames stolen from Torch and unleashed a blast of that searing heat from the cylinder down at Pinkamena. Her tentacle arms burned to ash almost instantly, and she was forced to let go of Grogar with her chest mouths and back away rapidly from the fires that would have consumed her otherwise.
“Ugh! I don’t like my meals that spicy,” she grumbled while pulling the Pinkie Hammer back to her.
“Mena, your arms!”
Pinkamena looked at the burned stumps of her left arm tendrils and shrugged, “They’ll grow back. Almost had that tasty looking piece of candy, though.”
Grogar had moved the Seed to hold it in the telekinetic grip of his left hand, his face twitching with a dire lack of amusement. “You’ll have nothing, insufferable brat. I don’t care how illogical your power is. I will erase it along with you!”
The cylinder that blazed with Torch’s flames flared hot, the metal starting to become a searing bright orange as it heated up. Crimson flames fanned out from the cylinder in a sweeping inferno. While not on par with the likes of Celestia’s Zanpaktou, or even Torch’s original fire breath, the flames still burned hotter than any natural fire and would turn Pinkamena to ash if they were allowed to hit. The widespread of the flames combined with their power would rationally have made an ideal attack for destroying an opponent as relatively weak as Pinkamena and Pinkie Pie were.
Rationally, Grogar had made a completely logical choice in his method of attack.
It was just that Pinkie Pie was a fundamentally illogical opponent.
The flames swept towards Pinkamena, and right before they hit her Pinkie Pie giggled happily, “Oooh, Groggy wants to play ‘The Floor is Lava! I love this game! Get hopping, Mena and don’t touch the ground!”
Pinkamena smirked and inverted her grip on the Pinkie Hammer, and stood on the bottom of the hammer’s head with her hand controlling the handle as she started to hop with it like the hammer was a giant pogo-stick. Grogar was left with a baffled look on his face as Pinkamena hopped over his flames, the Pinkie Hammer somehow gaining a rubber-like quality as it bounced on the air and took Pinkamena safely over the tide of fire. Pinkie Pie’s voice shouted down to Grogar, “Hey, the Floor is Lava, remember!? You’d better get off it!”
“Get off the floor? You fool, there’s no lava, it’s just fire...” Grogar’s nose twitched as he smelled something like cooking meat, then realized his hooved feet felt suddenly rather hot. Looking down with wide, surprised eyes, he saw the ground had suddenly become a sheet of lava! With a shocked shout he leapt upward, patting at his feet which had caught fire momentarily due to the extreme heat that even his Heirro wasn’t completely preferred for. The brief contact with the lava hadn’t done much damage, but it’d certainly surprised him, and further scrambled his thinking as he tried to figure out how this damnable girl had conjured the lava in the first place!
“I’m getting extremely tired of the way you keep breaking the laws of physics,” he grumbled as Pinkamena bounced towards him. Her arm snapped out like a stretching rubber band, smacking the Pinkie Hammer at him repeatedly.
Not desiring any more bizarre manifestations, Grogar elected to use Sonido to swiftly dodge these strikes rather than risk blocking any of them. Even if this girl lacked the power to properly damage him, her ability was annoying enough that it was best to limit her opportunities to create her ridiculous ‘gags’. It was clear to him by now that somehow her power was humor based, but he couldn’t fathom the rules or limits to how or why this power functioned.
Perhaps I should use a Gran Rey Cero? It seems so undignified to use that much power to destroy someone this weak, but it’s clear she already understand she’s can’t defeat me. Her real objective is the Seed.
He still held the Seed in his telekinetic grip with his left hand. The Seed was clearly what Pinkie Pie and her clone were actually targeting. Grogar wasn’t overly concerned, however. As long as he kept his wits about him, there was no real way for Pinkamena to grab the Seed away.
That said...
A burst of reiatsu drew his attention to Applejack. The girl had apparently finally reached a decision on what to do, several jets of energy shooting from her armor to lift her into the air.
“Pinkie Pie!” Applejack shouted, “Ya got this fer a sec!?”
“Totally!” Pinkie Pie called back, the cartoonish eyes on her hammer form winking at Applejack, “Might even have it for two secs!”
“Then I’m countin’ on ya, sugarcube! Ya just hold on!” Applejack said, and to Grogar’s surprise, the young farmgirl turned around and blasted away at high speed with her rocket-like jets. He’d expected her to attack him, but instead she was blasting off towards her mother. Grogar found himself scowling. Applejack was planning to help Sweet Cider defeat Experiment 528! He’d counted on 528 keeping Sweet Cider busy for longer, but if Applejack joined forces with her mother, then 528 would be overwhelmed that much faster. Then all three of them could focus their attention on him.
While he was still confident that he could deal with the two children and an exhausted Tenth Division Captain, it would make matters drag out longer than he’d prefer.
Well, no matter, he just had to destroy Pinkie Pie before that happened.
“I think I’ll end this now, then,” he said to himself and leveled his bladed staff at Pinkamena. If he slashed her remaining limbs off, she couldn’t dodge, and he’d just destroy her utterly with a point blank Cero. That seemed the simplest way to handle this. He swiftly closed the distance on her, lashing out with his Zanpaktou. He took a chunk out of Pinkamena’s leg, the girl contorting her body like putty to avoid losing the leg entirely but still shedding a spray of blood from the deep wound.
“I understand now that your power works off of humor, or at least what counts for humor among humans,” he drooled, vanishing with Sonido to appear on Pinkamena’s other side and slashing once more to try and remove her other leg. She was able to twist away from the blow but not without a deep laceration on her tight. Piece by piece, Grogar intended to dismember this foolish girl. “Personally I find nothing to laugh at in your childish gags. But I imagine I’ll get some amusement from examining your remains once you’re properly pinned to a table in my lab.”
“Ugh, you’re such a grumpy pants that it’s practically a crime!” Pinkie Pie said while Pinkamena drew the hammer above her head and slammed it down towards Grogar, “In fact I say it is a crime! A crime against comedy!”
Becoming more contemptuous of this ridiculous human by the second, Grogar didn’t even wish to provide the satisfaction of dodging the hammer, as that suggested he was somehow afraid of her power. He was somewhat embarrassed he’d bothered dodging at all earlier. It wasn’t as if she had the power to do any damage to him. At best her gag-powers had only served to be obnoxious while buying her a few extra moments of life.
He blocked her hammer with a one handed parry of his blade staff, the bell upon the staff giving an ominous ring as the hook-blade connected with the overly colorful Pinkie Hammer. However, while the physical blow was halted with ease, Grogar sensed a spike in Pinkie Pie’s reiatsu, almost like the unleashing of tension from a rubber band that had been stretched out and now was snapping. He felt a sense of vertigo for a moment, and his vision blurred for just a second before it cleared.
Abruptly he found himself rather confusedly standing in front of some manner of wooden podium.
“Huh?” he blinked. He appeared to still be in the same location, only for some reason there were now wooden stands to his left and right, with two smaller podiums in front of them not unlike the one he was standing in front of. Straight across from him was a much taller stand with a symbol on it that looked strangely like the “scales of justice”, albeit if drawn on with pink crayon.
“Grogar Grumpington, the evidence against you is indisputable! You were clearly at the scene of the crime!” Pinkie Pie declared, no longer in hammer-form but in all her pink glory, poofy hair bouncing as she thrust an accusatory finger at Grogar from the podium on the left. She was wearing, oddly enough, a sharp blue lawyer suit for some reason. There was also a very odd bit of music that seemed to be coming from nowhere. Music that grated upon his ears almost instantly.
“This is idiotic. I’m not going to engage you in your idiocy,” he said, and then canted his head as he listened to the strange music, “And is this acapella!? I hate acapella! As if I didn’t have enough reasons to kill you!”
However, he found that as he tried to move, an invisible force not unlike the telekinetic power he’d recently used was rooting him in place.
What? Ridiculous. She doesn't have the strength to bind me. It’d take a Captain-class Soul Reaper utilizing high level Kido to accomplish this, he thought in ire-filled consternation, wondering if he’d somehow misread Pinkie Pie’s reiatsu levels. But no, she didn’t feel any stronger than before. This seemed more a unique attribute of her Fullbring, one that generated specific rules and limitations based on whatever joke it was in the process of making. Apparently whether the target of the power found any of this funny or not wasn’t relevant.
As Grogar stewed on this, a shout came from his right, stemming from Pinkamena who was wearing a ludicrous looking maroon suit with a white cravat, “HOLD IT! We might as well let the obviously guilty geezer make his testimony. What do you say, Judge?”
Judge? Grogar saw no judge! Wait, what was that sitting on the tallest podium across from his? Was that a... Parrot? A parrot with a fake beard on!?
“Squawk! Guilty! Guilty! Squawk!” said the parrot.
“Yeash Judge, at least wait until I get to say ‘Objection’ a few times, will ya!?” said Pinkie Pie, slamming her hands on her podium, “I’ve got this whole box full of evidence to throw at Groggy, all of which I incidentally collected during my super legal investigation, and I’m sure this metal detector, scrap of newspaper, and a piece of partially chewed gum will all play crucial roles in proving the witness committed the crime.”
“What crime am I even being accused of!?’ Grogar groused, trying to lift his arms so he could just start eradicating everything around him with Ceros, while his rational mind was getting caught up in Pinkie Pie’s pace, too overwhelmed for him to keep quiet, “There’s no legal system in the human world that allows lawyers to do police investigations! Or parrots to be judges for that matter!”
“Squawk, union job, squawk!” said the parrot, and Grogar glared at it.
“Shut up!”
“Keep that up and you’ll be held in contempt of court,” said Pinkamena, adopting a strangely smug smile as she raised a finger and waggled it at him, “Not that I don’t already hold you in contempt, but keep talking out of turn and you’ll receive a penalty. A penalty means i get to take a bite out of you!”
“Pfft, your teeth are useless anyway, but who’s even the defense attorney in this farce!? The defense and prosecution shouldn’t be working together to attack the client!”
“Man, Groggy, you’ve never played an Ace Attorney game, have you?” Pinkie Pie said, “That’s kinda sad. Don’t they have video games in Hueco Mundo.”
“I’m honestly shocked beyond belief you remember how to pronounce Hueco Mundo,” he muttered, then his face popped a fresh vein as he shouted, “NO! I will not be participating in this nonsense! Cease this childish prattle at once!”
“OBJECTION!” Pinkie Pie shouted, thrusting a finger dramatically at Grogar before yanking out a metal detector from her pants, “I demand you submit to a metal detector test!”
“For what!?”
“To see if you have the bullet lodged in your shoulder from the murder!”
“WHAT MURDER!?”
“The murder of Comedy!”
That tore it. Grogar had had enough. Technically he’d already gone well past having enough, but what capacity he had left for his logical mind to deal with Pinkie Pie’s utter madness had shot past any previous limit he’d had. He’d never, in all his thousands of years of existence, encountered a more singularly confounding, irrational, psychosis inducing entity. He wasn’t even sure he could label her as a “human being” any longer, because no human could possibly be this aggravating.
Forget the Quincy. Pinkie Pie was the true threat to the balance of the world!
“Enough,” he said in a dark tone, building his reiatsu within himself until a thick aura of lime green light boiled around him, “This farce ends now!”
“HOLD IT!” Pinkie Pie said, “We haven’t even gotten to the cross-examination yet, or showing all the evidence we’ve got. Like your Seed thingy! That’s a critical piece of evidence about how much of a meany pants you are!”
A small graphic box appeared next to her, showing the Seed, but Grogar wasn’t paying attention. He was beyond any conventional description of the word ‘angry’. He no longer cared to figure out how Pinkie Pie’s power worked. He only wanted to shred it, and her, to pieces. He continued to build up his reiatsu within himself, focusing it first within his chest, and then letting it flow up into his Zanpaktou, and towards the bell upon it. He might not have been able to move, but that didn’t preclude him from utilizing his powers.
“I think it’s safe to say we have a hostile witness here, Pinkie,” Pinkamena said, “Better let me hold onto the evidence while you transform back into a hammer.”
“Awww, but I wanted to finish the bit,” Pinkie Pie said, flashing with pink light as she transformed back into a hammer and flipped over to Pinkamena’s grasp, just as Grogar finished building up his power. Pinkamena braced the hammer defensively in front of her as the bell on Grogar’s staff flared up with writhing arcs of puke-green energy. He then opened his mouth wide and expelled a swarm of his insect-like constructs, which buzzed around him like a thick, dark cloud.
“Cero Langosta.” (Cero Locust)
The lines of green energy arced off his bell as it swung and let out ear splitting eldritch tones, and the power flowed through the swarm of insects, making each one spark up with bright green light.
“Oh fudgesicles...” Pinkie Pie said as the swarm of charged insects flew out in random directions, like shrapnel from a claymore mine, and started to exploding in a fury of lime green explosions, with Grogar standing safely in the eye of the proverbial storm.
Pinkamena leapt back, swinging the Pinkie Hammer down to create a giant zipper in the ground that she swiftly opened to hop into, but wasn’t quite fast enough as several of the detonating inspections exploded around her. The girl was thrown about by the force of the explosions, one of her already injured legs getting torn off by the blasts. She also lost her grip on the Pinkie Hammer, which in turn got hit by several nearby detonations. The blasts hit so hard that they caused Pinkie Pie, even in her hammer form, to cry out in pain and lose her focus, transforming back into a human shape as she hit the ground hard.
A fair distance off, Applejack was working alongside her mother, attacking in tandem against Experiment 528 and gradually turning the tables against the blade-limbed Hollow, but she felt a shock of cold in here gut as she saw her friend caught up in the series of explosions.
“Pinkie!”
Her distraction nearly cost her as Experiment 528 struck at her, aiming one of it’s sharp arms with a thrust towards her neck. Sweet Cider managed to heft her Zanpaktou in a downward chop that sent the Hollow’s arm sinking into the ground, while she used her other arm, which had recovered her damaged Fullbring blade, to deliver a slice that didn’t put the Hollow down but did drive Experiment 528 back with a wound across it’s chest.
“Pay attention, hayseed! Ya just ‘bout lost yer neck there!”
“Dagnabbit, we gotta finish this thing off right quick an’ go help Pinkie! She can’t take on that monster by herself no more!”
Sweet Cider knew it well enough herself and wore an anguished expression on her face, but her eyes were no less focused on Experiment 528 for it. If they didn’t kill this thing, it’d stab them in the backs easily if they tried to go deal with Grogar. Sweet Cider wasn’t even sure, in her condition, she could do much against Grogar. Distract him, perhaps, to let the girls get away with Hard Nail.
As the smoke cleared from the numerous explosions he’d unleashed, Grogar felt his body was able to move again and he stretched, smiling as he started to walk towards the sight of Pinkamena and Pinkie Pie. The two girls were laying a few meters apart, with Pinkamena down an arm and a leg at this point, while Pinkie was bruised and dazed, with blood trickling down her face from a head wound due to hitting the ground at a rough angle.
“Uggggh, mom, dad, tell Limestone I don’t wanna play rock-tag anymore...” Pinkie Pie murmured as she rolled over onto her back. Pinkamena’s voice reached her as if through a sea of red fog.
“Pinkie! Move it!”
“Mmmrff?” Pinkie opened her bleary eyes, her vision swimming as she saw a shadow loom over her. Her sight focused to see Grogar towering over her with a thin scarecrow’s smile on his face.
“Ah, there we go, my good mood is restored,” he said as he lifted his bladed scythe and brought down the blunt end hard on Pinkie Pie’s knee, which made a loud, unpleasant popping sound.
Pinkie Pie’s scream could be heard from one corner of the valley to the other, and tore at Applejack and Sweet Cider both as they heard it. For Applejack especially, who’d known Pinkie Pie for year and had never heard her friend shrieked in agony like that, it igniting a fresh fury that saw her recklessly assaulting Experiment 528 with no more regard for defense. Rocket jets burst from her armor in such swift intensity that Applejack ceased to be visible save for the craters being left by every burst and impact of her lance on Experiment 528. Even Sweet Cider was taken aback and left behind by her daughter’s renewed, furious attacks, left gaping as Applejack started to demolish the Hollow, bit by bit.
However in the meantime Grogar just gave the spectacle half a glance and shrugged, returning his full focus to Pinkie Pie.
“So, no more jokes? No more gags? No more silly pop culture references? Are we quite done here? I want to ensure, before I kill you, that you’ve got nothing left to say. Call it a final courtesy.”
“Aaah...ow... okay... the thing with the knee? Totally uncalled for... hah...” Pinkie Pie’s expression twisted with pain, but the spark in her blue eyes didn’t dim as she propped herself up by her hands and looked up at Grogar with a rictus half grin, “But yeah, kinda joked out. You’re not exactly what I’d call a receptive audience... argh... but... I do got one for you. Knock knock.”
“Ugh, unbelievable. Fine. Who’s there?”
“Aren’t you?”
“...Aren’t you who?”
“Aren’t you the guy who doesn’t have a Seed anymore?” Pinkie Pie finished the joke with a sly wink and pointing towards a space next to Grogar where one might have expected the Seed to still be floating, but now just a comical Seed-shaped red dotted outline was.
Grogar stared in disbelief, then whipped around to see that Pinkamena was holding the Seed, and had turned her arm into an elastic tentacle to grab Pinkie Pie and yanked the wounded girl over to her own location. Pinkie Pie let out a lower pitch, half-choked sound of pain from the rough motion, but otherwise gave Pinkamena a grateful look for the quick save.
“How and when!?” Grogar roared, leveling his blade staff at them to charge up another Cero, but suddenly Pinkamena held the Seed in front of her like a shield, and he halted.
“You want to destroy your tasty treat, old pus bucket?” Pinkamena warned, “Be my guest.”
Grogar hesitated. He actually didn’t know for sure if the Seed would survive a Cero blast. He also still had no idea how the Seed had ended up in Pinkamena’s tentacled grasp! Had it been during that idiotic trial scene? Or had she snatched it while he’d been busy breaking Pinkie Pie’s kneecap? Either event was plausible, given the nature of this ludicrous Fullbring, but regardless of the means, the Seed was now out of his hands.
“No matter,” he said, “I’ll just come over there and take it back after decapitating both of you so I need not suffer any more of this idiocy!”
“Oh yeah, what if I eat your stolen goods first?” Pinkamena said, her chest opening up into a salivating mouth that she dangled the Seed over. Strangely not just Grogar, but Pinkie Pie looked alarmed at this.
“Don’t be a fool,” Grogar said, showing a hint of real unease that he quickly covered up with a forced mask of hardened calm as he kept his blade staff pointed at the pair, “Your body isn’t calibrated properly to handle the influx of such power. You’d destroy yourself if you tried.”
“Mena...” Pinkie Pie said, but Pinkamena cut her off, dangling the Seed a few inches closer to her chest mouth, her own face splitting into an imp-like grin.
“Maybe I don’t care about being destroyed. Maybe I just want to deny the ancient dried out turd his piece of candy, hmm?”
“You’re bluffing,” Grogar stated flatly, and Pinkamena only grinned wider.
“Am I? Come a step closer and you’ll find out. Or maybe I’ll eat it anyway. Best case scenario, me and Pinkie Pie are forced into powering up. Worst case scenario, we both die. But either way, you don’t get what you want, and for me, that’s kind of the tantalizing prize here.”
With hands half trembling from the pain shooting through her knee, Pinkie Pie touched Pinkamena’s shoulder, whispering, “M-Mena, if you eat that, even if we both make it...”
“What?” Pinkamena said sharply, “it’s better than letting this withered geezer kill us, and since you won’t finish what you started when you made me, as usual it’s up to me to do the things you don’t want to.”
“It isn’t like that!” Pinkie Pie shouted, now ignoring the pain in her leg to grip Pinkamena tighter, “I just don’t want you to go away! You’re my sister.”
“...We both know that isn’t actually true, no matter how much you and the family tried to make it feel otherwise,” Pinkamena replied in a less harsh voice, quietly remembering.
----------
One week prior...
Warmth flowed from the Pie household along with the smell of recently baked muffins. Gathered around the large dining table adjacent to the living room, all the Pies were eagerly consuming the hearty meal cooked up by Cloudy Quartz and Marble, the buzz of conversation mostly stemming from Pinkie Pie chattering about her and her friends’ most recent training session.
“And then Rainbow Dash went all ‘bzzzzt’ with the lightning and ‘fwooshed’ past Applejack, and she was coming right at me because I still had the ball! Well, Mena had the ball, I was all hammery at the time because, ya know, that’s how I do now. So Rainbow’s all super fast and we can’t even see her coming, but then Mena does this thing with her mouth where it goes mega huge, like a big black hole full of teeth, and Rainbow as all like ‘nopenopenope’! Heheh, it was so funny. What was you said after that, Mena? Something about tasting the rainbow?”
“Huh? I guess I said something like that,” Pinkamena said, poking at the meatballs on her plate idly with a fork. She was seated somewhat awkwardly between Pinkie Pie and Maud on the left side of the table. usually the Pie family dinners had Cloudy Quartz on one end of the table, Igneous seated at the other, then with the four daughters split with two to each side. Things got a tad cramped with Pinkamena having to fit in now, but neither Pinkie Pie or Maud seemed to mind bumping elbows with the doppleganger on occasion.
“You’ve hardly touched your food, dear,” Cloudy Quarts said, “Are you feeling well?”
It seemed to take Pinkamena a second to figure out she was the one being addressed. Almost as if to prove she could eat just fine she speared a meatball on her fork, then opened up a tiny mouth on her hand and fed the meatball into it.
“I’m alright,” she said, “Just not that hungry.”
“You not hungry?” said Limestone, “That’s hard to swallow-”
“Snrk! ‘Swallow’.” Pinkie Pie chuckled.
Limestone’s eyebrow gave an erratic twitch toward’s Pinkie Pie, but her attention remained on Pinkamena, “Just saying I’ve seen you literally eat those Hollow things whole. Also pretty sure you’ve made a go at some of the local cats.”
“It was just one time with the cats, and that tabby had it coming,” Pinkamena muttered, then louder, “So what? Doesn’t mean I’m always in the mood. Just not feeling the bite tonight.”
“Oooh, feeling the ‘bite’, that’s a good one Mena, you ought to write it down! You could say it as a one-liner next time we go on patrol,” Pinkie Pie said, and Pinkamena abruptly got up from her chair.
“Huh? What’s wrong Mena?”
“Not everything is a joke, Pinkie,” Pinkamena said, turning from the table. As she left, Maud grabbed her arm. Pinkamena gave Maud a fierce look, but Maud just stared at her blankly, then pointed at her plate.
“Can Boulder have your leftovers?” Maud asked, and Pinkamena rolled her eyes and waved a hand.
“Yeah, he can dig on in. I’m going to go get some air.”
“Wait, Mena, hold up!” Pinkie Pie said, half rising from her seat, torn between concern for her doppelganger sister and delicious food that still smell good, especially the fresh muffins waiting for desert. Pinkamena just strode out of the living room without another word, heading for the hallway that had the stairs leading to the second floor. There was still fresh woodwork in the living room from the recent reconstruction due to the damages the house sustained in the Hollow attack some time prior.
“Pinkie, maybe you ought to give her some space,” Limestone said as Pinkie Pie hesitated in watching Pinkamena go.
“B-but she’s upset about something and I don’t leave friends and family upset! It’s not in the Pinkie Pie Mission Statement!”
“Daughter.”
Igneous was capable of conveying much with a single word and particular tone, firm as his namesake yet still carrying a bedrock of steadfast compassion that had helped build the Pie household. Pinkie Pie gulped and looked at her father, who had his hands folded upon the table in front of him.
“Do as you feel you must, do so from a place of consideration. Think hard about how she feels before you speak to her.”
“Your father is right,” Cloudy said, “She’s trying hard to fit in, but this will take time. I probably shouldn’t have bothered her.”
Pinkie Pie bit her lower lip, looking between the table with her family all giving her various levels of concerned looks, with Marble practically vanishing behind her bangs, and looking towards where Pinkamena went. After a moment, Pinkie Pie excused herself from the table and all but ran off down the hallway to the stairs. She knew where Pinkamena was going, but still felt anxious following her. Up the stairs on the second floor there was a hatchway in the ceiling that led to the attic, a dusty place filled with more Pie family memorabilia and antiques than one could shake a bushel of sticks at.
The attic itself wasn’t Pinkamena’s destination, merely the small sliding hatch that was there that led up onto the roof.
Pinkie Pie hopped up through that hatch into the pleasant, cooling yet still warm air of the summer evening. Pinkamena was laying spread eagle, as was her usual style, on the roof near the hatchway, and Pinkie Pie saw her doppelganger sight at her approach.
“So... how many muffins did you swipe before coming up here?”
“Eheh, I was only fast enough to snag one. You want it?” Pinkie Pie produced a still freshly warm raspberry muffin from behind her back and presented it to Pinkamena like it was a peace offering. Pinkamena gazed at the muffin for a second, a trickle of drool leaking from the corner of her mouth. She then frowned and wiped the drool off with an irritated grunt.
“Nah. Not hungry, remember?”
“Hmm, okie dokie lokie, but I think just to be safe I’ll hold onto it for a bit,” Pinkie Pie said, and after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence asked, “Is it okay if I sit with you for a bit?”
“It’s your house. Sit wherever you like.”
Pinkie Pie did so, and for a few quiet minutes she watched the darkening evening sky alongside Pinkamena, occasionally stealing a glance towards her doppelganger who remained silent. Eventually Pinkie Pie started to sweat, then chewed her lip, trembling more and more. She never did well with silences.
“Argg! I can’t take it anymore! What’s wrong, Mena!? Please tell me! You’ve been doing this more and more since we got back from ghost-town, and I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong, Pinkie. I just can’t really be me in a... domestic setting,” Pinkamena said, sitting up and shooting a flat look at Pinkie Pie, although Pinkie thought she saw a slight quiver to Pinkamena’s lips as she spoke. “This whole ‘being a part of the family’ thing is sweet and all, but I keep feeling like a wolf dressed up like a Christmas reindeer. The costume doesn’t fit.”
“You just need to get used to it, Mena. It’s only been a few weeks-”
“A few weeks where I’ve alternated between being bored out of my mind, fantasizing about eating the neighborhood pets like walking McNuggets, and trying not to creep out my ‘family’. None of it feels right...” Pinkamena trailed off, then sighed heavily and added, “And I think part of that’s because I’m not really supposed to be here.”
Pinkie Pie made a confused whine in the back of her throat as she slid a bit closer to Pinkamena, “That’s not true at all. You belong here with us, Mena. You and me are a pair. Didn’t we already figure that out?”
“You don’t get what I’m saying. Clear out the ear holes for a sec, Pinkie, and listen,” Pinkamena gripped Pinkie’s arm tightly, arresting Pinkie’s eyes with her own staring gaze, “You and me are a pair, and we’re one and the same. You get that. I get that. But we’re not complete. You and me aren’t like your friends. Your friends have their whole selves together, like snowglobes with everything self-contained. But with us, we’re a snowglobe that got cut in half, and everything inside kind of spilled out between us. We’ve been pulling everything back together through all these battles, but the last bit, the bit where the snowglobe becomes whole? We can’t do it.”
“i...” Pinkie Pie scratched her head, her face screwing up like a puppy chewing on peanut butter as she tried to grind her mind over Pinkamena’s words. Pinkamena could have sworn she saw the blue-screen of death in her counterpart’s eyes as Pinkie sighed and slumped down, “I don’t get it.”
Pinkamena let out a groan and flopped back down on her back, “Kinda figured. I think when we split, I got the better gooey bits of the brain. Or maybe I’m just as slow as you are, because I can’t figure out what to do either. I’m trying, Pinkie. To be a Pie and all. But sometimes I think it’d be better if you just kept me in your head instead of out here all the time now.”
“Don’t say that. I think Limestone really likes the way you help out around the house, and Maud is always smiling when you’re around.”
“I’ve literally never seen Maud smile once.”
“She smiles on the inside. It's all in the eyes. Look for it and you’ll see it, like this teeny weeny little twinkle. She does it all the time!”
“Marble is terrified of me.”
“Marble is scared of everything. It’s how she shows affection. By going ‘eep’ and hiding from it. Watch her around Big Mac sometime. It’s super adorable.”
Pinkamena made a rough, low chuckling noise, “You really are determined to make this work and keep me around, aren’t you?”
“Well of course I am, silly! Why wouldn’t I want you around?” Pinkie Pie asked.
“...What if you couldn’t, though? What if, to become complete, like you and your friends have been training for, one of us would have to go?”
“Huh? Why would either of us have to...?” As Pinkie Pie started to ask the question, a noise from the roof hatch drew both her and Pikamena’s attention. Clustered together like ducks, Maud, Limestone, and Marble were all peeking out at them. Upon being spotted, Marble made an ‘eep!’ noise and partially hid behind Maud, while Limestone rose up from the hatch, crossing her arms almost in challenge.
“We came to check on you two,” Limestone said, “You know, make sure you hadn’t fallen off the roof or whatever.”
“We brought muffins,” Maud stated bluntly, holding up a plate of the tantalizing treats.
Pinkamena couldn’t help but rub a palm over her face, “I swear, Pinkie, this whole family has a food problem. Is this where I get it from?”
“I dunno,” Pinkie mumbled around a mouthful of muffin that she’d somehow acquired from the plate despite Maud still being a good ten feet away.
“Well you three might as well come on out here,” Pinkamena said, gesturing at the other Pie sisters, “Should I get a campfire going or something?”
“On the roof!?” Limestone said with a twitching expression.
“It’s not physically impossible,” Maud pointed out.
“Yeah, how about we don’t burn the house down today?” Limestone shot back, but joined Maud in clambering onto the roof, Marble ghosting behind them quietly. Soon enough Pinkamena found herself surrounded by the Pie sisters, all of them sitting in a cluster as they watched the last slivers of sunlight fade into a dusk of blinking stars. Muffins were distributed between them without a word spoken for a time.
“So... everything cool here?” Limestone broke the silence, wearing an awkward grimace as she did so, clearly not used to being the first one to talk.
“It will be, eventually, one way or another,” Pinkamena said, a tad cryptically. “Wasn’t trying to cause a scene.”
“Whether you cause a scene or not isn’t important,” Maud said, “Only that you’re okay.”
“Mmmhmm,” Marble added, scooting a bit closer after a moment of hesitation.
“Okay is a relative term,” Pinkamena replied with a shrug, “Me and Pinkie have some things that need working out, and I don’t think we will until... something happens that forces us to work it out.”
“But I totally want to figure it out!” said Pinkie, scratching her head, “I just don’t really get what ‘it’ is yet. I know I kinda put a lot of emotional stuff onto you before, and I’m trying to not do that anymore. You know, take on my fair share of the bad feelings that got poured into you.”
“It’s not that, Pinkie,” Pinkamena said, pointing at herself, “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not quite as ‘mad dog crazy’ as I was when I first popped out of your head. But it’s not enough. Something is still holding you and me back.”
“What?”
Pinkamena didn’t answer. Instead she looked at Pinkie, then around at the other Pie sisters. Her face was filled with a sad contemplation that soon broke into a sharp toothed smirk, “Doesn’t matter right now. I think I’m hungry again. We got more of those muffins?”
Maud didn’t smile, but Pinkamena caught the twinkle in her otherwise placid eyes that Pinkie had been talking about as Maud mysteriously produced a second plate. Apparently a bit of that oddness ran in the Pie family. While Pinkie Pie still couldn’t fully get rid of a faint sense of unease about what Pinkamena had been talking about, the sisters enjoyed the rest of the evening in each other’s company, munching down muffins and sharing small talk as night fell.
----------
“It was good, you know?” Pinkamena said, glancing down at the wounded Pinkie Pie while still holding the Seed close to the mouth on her chest, keeping one eye on Grogar. “Being part of a family. Feeling like I could be my own person. But the truth is, we’re not separate people, Pinkie Pie. We’re the same person split in two like a pie sliced right down the middle with a carving knife.”
“I-I get that...” Pinkie said, “I turn into the whacky hammer, and you have the cool and scary eating powers with all the mouths. A-all the bad stuff I didn’t like every having to deal with, I put on you. I stopped doing that, though.”
“That doesn’t make us whole, Pinkie. If anything, it just ensured we’d stay separate. But you know the truth, right? We’ll always be incomplete as long as we’re separate like this. It’s high time we both sucked it up and stopped playing make believe with each other.”
A tremor ran over Pinkie’s body, her face quivering as her voice lowered and her hand tightened on Pinkamena. “I don’t want to lose you. I want you to stay.”
“Hey... I’ll let you in on a secret. I actually really like our family. That’s why I’m willing to give up being separated. Because I know you’re going to need more than laughter to protect them, and I’m going to need more than crazy to do the same. So let’s be crazy and laugh together, Pinkie,” Pinkamena said, smiling in a manner that was far more natural than any of her previous, manic grins of the past.
Pinkie Pie looked at Pinkamena, her counterpart, the other half of herself that became her Fullbring, and also saw her own reflection in Pinkamena’s eyes. It fully clicked inside Pinkie Pie’s brain then, like a colorful painting that was once blobs and shapes finally taking definitive form. Pinkamena wasn’t just her Fullbring. She was also Pinkamena’s Fullbring. They were one person, split into two. Her psyche, sliced in half the moment she’d first activated Fullbring when her home and family had been in danger.
It was impossible for her to complete her Fullbring as long as it was split into two halves like this. The halves had to come together and become one again, in order for them to truly be complete.
She wasn’t going to lose a sister or a friend. Instead, Pinkie Pie realized that she and Pinkamena were always going to be together, as it was meant to be; whole.
Wet tears on her cheeks, Pinkie Pie completely ignored the pain of her broken knee and three herself on Pinkamena in a hefty hug, “i’m sorry Mena, for being silly. I was really scared of not having you around, so I was holding on as tight as I could. But I never can lose you, can I? That’d be like losing myself.”
Both her and Pinkamena’s body started to glow with a blindingly and painfully intense neon pink light as their reiatsu started to build up and fuse together. Pinkamena awkwardly hugged Pinkie back with her one arm, rolling her eyes, “Yeah, you’re pretty silly, but nobody does it better than you, Pinkie. Time for us both to see what we can be, together.”
Grogar, sensing that if he didn’t act now, then he’d lose the Seed even if Pinkamena didn’t eat it. Besides, if these children were distracted with the evolution of their Fullbrings, that might give him the moment he needed to snatch the precious orb away from them! He charged towards the pair, crossing the space with a fast Sonido. However, just as he appeared in front of them and reached down to grab the Seed while the pair were distracted, an object came hurtling into him from the side with the speed and impact of a hurled dump truck.
Grogar was knocked off his feet and sent skidding a fair distance. Growling in frustrated fury, he shoved the object off of him only to realize that what had been thrown into him was the broken, battered, and overall shredded body of Experiment 528.
The experimental Hollow looked as if it had all of its limbs either blasted to torn off, and it’s chest was caved in by multiple heavy blows, while it’s skull mask was half broken and twisted around it’s mangled face. As Grogar looked at it, Experiment 528 dissipated into dust.
He then felt an intense burst of spiritual pressure as he stood up and saw Applejack land next to Pinkie Pie and Pinkamena. The farmgirl’s golden armor was streaked with Hollow blood that burned off from the heat generated by the gleaming suit of metal, and her face was that of a furious valkyrie as she locked eyes on Grogar for a moment.
However, Pinkie Pie and Pinkamena’s bodies were all but encompassed by pink light and surging spiritual energy now, and Applejack knelt next to them, holding out her hand towards the light.
“Ain’t ‘bout ta let ya both pop without keepin’ this in check,” Applejack said as she focused all of her reiatsu on carefully maintaining control of the explosion of spirit energy that was stemming from her friend completing the evolution of her Fullbring. Ditzy’s lessons on the subject served Applejack well as instead of an uncontrolled explosion, the pink light stemming from Pinkie and Pinkamena turned into twin pillars of pink, one a darker shade than the other, which then intermixed together to form one column of pink light that pierced the sky.
The energy burst up there like a series of flowering fireworks, raining twirling spars of all shades of pink upon the land. Then the light faded. Applejack glanced around in brief confusion, but also spotted the Seed on the ground next to her feet and quickly snatched it up with her free hand.
Grogar was equally confused as to where Pinkie Pie and Pinkamena had gone, but seeing his Seed in Applejack’s hand, his expression darkened to a hellish thunderstorm as he stepped towards her.
“I tire of these games. Give me the Seed and I might consider leaving you be. For this day, at least.”
“Nothin’ doin’ ya ugly varmint!” Applejack spat back, leveling her lance one-handed at him, “Ya want it, yer gonna need ta come n’ get it!”
“A proposal I have no objections to, child,” Grogar replied in a vengeful rasp, but as he prepared to attack, he was stopped by the ghostly sound of echoing, disembodied laughter.
”Hehehehe! Don’t start playing a new game until you’ve finished the last one, Groggy. But I’m fine with Applejack joining in. After all, I’m all about that multiplayer action.
Streams of pink mist rose from the ground, billowing up and around until the came together in a magnificently fast twirling ball that then popped like a balloon. From inside emerged a girl who for all intents and purposes certainly looked like Pinkie Pie, but if one looked at her sideways, she might have also seemed more like Pinkamena.
Her clothing was replaced by colorful pink, blue, and yellow jester’s motley, but constructed of form fitting leather rather than cloth, and bearing a bizarre set of triangular patches and stitches that resembled smiling, frighteningly sharp toothed smiles. Around her neck was a long pink scarf that trailed behind her and waved and moved on it’s own, as if caught in a constant wind. The two ends of the scarf rung with shiny brass jester bells. Pinkie’s face was half covered on it’s left side by a white mask bearing a laughing, yet devilish expression.
Her right hand was on the pommel of a weapon that largely resembled the Pinkie Hammer, although this one bore several notable differences. One end was still somewhat blunt, but now bore a carving on it’s front that looked very much like a large, grinning mouth. It’s other hand had transformed into a large, curved point like a giant pick.
However those physical changes weren’t all. There was a very tangible and visible aura around Pinkie Pie, as if the pink mist she’d formed from was stemming directly from her body and was now a solid thing. It flickered about her in a jagged aura, and even as Applejack looked, she saw ethereal mouths filled with sharp teeth form along the aura.
“Eh, Pinkie? That you, or Pinkamena?”
Pinkie Pie looked over at Applejack and cracked a grin that was somehow both familiar and friendly, and just a tad crazy.
“Yes.”
“It makes no difference,” Grogar declared, his own threatening reiatsu no less ominous as it poured out of him, “This still is not enough to pose a significant threat to me.”
“That right?” came Sweet Cider’s voice as she appeared from a Flash Step beside her daughter and Pinkie Pie. Despite being covered in sweat, blood, wounds, and her spirit energy flagging, Sweet Cider held her two blades solidly before her, “Care ta try yer luck? Got a serious bone ta pick with you after what ya did ta my husband!”
Grogar huffed out a scoffing noise that was dry as sand, "You're already quite tapped out, my dear Soul Reaper. There's nothing you and these children can do to stop me from reclaiming what's mine."
Applejack looked at the Seed in her hand. It'd be awkward to fight with her lance one handed, but she was willing to try, to keep Grogar from getting what he'd taken from her father. However she felt a tap on her shoulder from Pinkie Pie, who'd hefted her hammer over her shoulder and was giving Applejack a reassuring, if somewhat off-kilter grin, "No worries, Applejack. Let me break in my new shoes for a bit, while you and your mom take five."
"Ain't a good idea, young 'un," said Sweet Cider, "This fella might not be the strongest Espada, but he's definitely one o' the most dangerous."
"Pinkie, yer Fullbring might be complete now, but it's still gonna take all o' us ta stand a chance against this scumbag," Applejack said, but Pinkie Pie just waggled her finger as she stepped away and started a light, bouncy walk towards Grogar.
"Don't worry. I'm not planning to try and beat him. Just want to get my calisthenics in."
Grogar barked a harsh laugh, "If you want to throw your life away, far be it from me to dissuade you."
“Oooh Grogar, you’re not very smart are you?” Pinkie Pie said, twirling her new hammer in her hands and striking a pose, the pink aura around her starting to expand with hungry mouths salivating pink mist around her. As Grogar watched, it looked as if the very air around the girl was starting to distort and flicker like a television screen with poor reception. “We’re not susceptible to your version of logic. Now, let's go... Mena."
Pinkie Pie snapped her fingers and she vanished from sight like a popped bubble. Grogar cast about with his Pesquisa to see where she might try to strike from, but was confused by what he felt. It was as if Pinkie Pie's riatsu had spread out like a bubble, imprinting on the space around them in a chaotic wave. It was like she was everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Suddenly a series of overly large playing cards, all marked with strange, pink images of laughing jesters, appeared and floated around Grogar in a fast spinning circle. Pinkie Pie's voice echoed from the cards as the jester images came to life and split grotesque grins.
"Guys like you always act like they're playing with a full deck, but it's like you don't understand that this world isn't built to be understood, categorized, and fit into jars. This world's as crazy as a poker game with nothing but jokers!"
The jesters started throwing pink carving knives out at Grogar, the revolving circle surrounding him in a flurry of hot pink cutlery being thrown at super-sonic speeds. He countered with a powerful wave of his blade-staff, knocking aside many, and then activating the cylinder on his back that spewed forth a blaze of incinerating ruby flames. The cards burned up, but in that same instant Grogar felt the ground beneath his hooved feet shift as it turned into a localized ball bit filled with colorful balls, and with a ripple Pinkie Pie surged out of it like a dolphin breaking the waves, and she managed to land an uppercut with the toothed end of her hammer on Grogar's chin.
The blow rung his bell a bit. Literally, as cartoon bells and birds appeared and circled his head. However he shook off the blow in an instant and with a growl he curled his fingers around a Cero sphere and fired the intense green beam at Pinkie Pie. She vanished again, making the wise choice to dodge the attack rather than take it head on, and Grogar noticed she was manipulating the space around her much faster and with far greater ease than before. She hadn't needed to swing the hammer to open up a door or anything, she simply side-stepped and drew reality aside like someone moving a stage curtain and slipping through it! The Cero exploded on empty ground, buffeting the nearby Applejack and Sweet Cider with the blast of air and dust.
"She ain't gonna take him down," Sweet Cider said, and Applejack nodded at the simple honesty in her mother's words, but she didn't think Pinkie Pie intended to beat Grogar.
"She ain't tryin' to," Applejack said under her breath, "I think she's... just havin' fun."
This was emphasized by the laughter that echoed through the air as a set of train tracks suddenly appeared beneath Grogar, and a short distance away a cartoon tunnel entrance opened up, from which the sound of a tooting horn and a loud chugging noise of massive diesel engines could be heard. A mere second later a massive, mostly pink train engine came hurtling out, with Pinkie Pie standing on top of it like a sea captain on her ship. Her hammer was thrust out at Grogar as she laughingly called out, "Whether you beat us or not, Groggy, you're on a one-way track to the Hot Place."
"Oh your God! Stop it with the puns!" Grogar let out a seething snarl and aimed another Cero at the train, piercing the gaudy vehicle with the green beam and causing it to go flying off the tracks. As the train popped like a bubble of pink soap, Pinkie herself moved with much greater speed than she ever had before and ended up behind Grogar. For a moment her hair went straight as razors and her grin turned hungry. The white mask on Pinkie's face shifted sides, turning black in color.
"Hey," Pinkie Pie (Pinkamena?) said with a toothy smirk, "I trained really hard to get this good at puns. But enough joking around."
The writhing pink aura of energy around her burst forward, and abruptly it was as if Grogar was being attacked by a hundred of Pinkamena's mouth covered tendrils all at once! The aura of misty pink energy became like a solid force, it's edges rimmed with darker red energy rather than pink as the aura split into multiple tendrils and formed dozens of mouths made of pure energy that now swung at Grogar in a made fury.
Grogar was momentarily put on the defensive, zipping about with Sonido to avoid the lashing mouths, which tore out great chunks of the earth with each swing. His staff-blade swung with great force to deflect one or two that came close, and his analytical mind briefly examined this new energy aura that Pinkie Pie was attacking him with. The reiatsu reminded him of something akin to Cero, if someone had taken the energy of a Cero and turned it into something malleable and elastic. The power of the individual tendrils wasn't easily ignored, either, as a glancing blow from one he missed actually scratched his Hierro and drew a line of blood!
Her power is equivalent to the farm child, now. It's little wonder she can inflict some damage at this point. But this still isn't enough power to defeat me, even with her increased ability to warp reality. She must know that, unless she's truly gone insane.
Deciding to ignore possibility of wounds, Grogar switched instantly to the offensive, and with a sneer he started charging through the storm of mouthy tendrils, his staff-blade slicing through them as he went. Several still bite light scratches upon his body, but he ignored that as he got closer to Pinkie Pie. The girl saw him coming and pulled back her tendrils, forming her pink aura into one large combined mass, like a giant malformed first that opened into a salivating set of mouths the size of a school bus. The huge and macabre limb smashed down at Grogar, cratering the ground and eating up a deep divot in the valley floor. Grogar had halted the deadly limb with his staff-blade, propping it into the mouth like a toothpick, and then the cylinder on his back containing Smooze's diseased ooze spurted a geyser of the purple filth into the aura-like limb.
"Ewww!" Pinkie Pie said as she leaped back, detaching that portion of her aura as it bloated up unnaturally and started to dissolve, "Are you this gross on purpose or is it just natural?"
Grogar almost responded to the question, but that was swiftly supplanted by his seething desire to just eliminate this aggravating pink menace.
"I've had quite enough of your jibes, pink one. You've tried my last ounce of patience, so I'll end this now," he said dryly, even as Pinkie Pie drew back her tendril aura back to her body and twirled her towards him.
"But you can't end it now! It's still the final inning!" Pinkie Pie said, spinning around and throwing her hammer at him with high-speed force.
Grogar had had enough bad experiences with that hammer's impacts that he didn't feel any particular shame in using Sonido to dispensary from the twirling hammer's path, flying straight up into the air, as he wanted to get above the battlefield for what he was about to do next. As he did so he spotted Pinkie Pie, or rather two PInkie Pie's now, both wearing baseball uniforms. One of them had caught the hammer that the original Pinkie Pie had thrown, who now had a baseball in her hands and was winding up a pitch. As she threw the ball, the ball itself moved with air shattering force, and became charged with crackling pink energy.
The Pinkie Pie with the hammer pointed towards Grogar like a pro player pointing towards the bleachers just before she spun her baseball hat around, readied the hammer, and then smashed the ball in a soaring arc straight towards Grogar. He flicked his hand towards the incoming ball and fired a Bala at it, just before it got too close to him. The Bala smacked into the charged baseball, which proceeded to explode in a surprisingly large fireball of pink energy that rattled even Grogar's bones for a second. He imagined if that had impacted, he might have actually taken more than a scratch from it. These girls really had become far more powerful than even his projections had anticipated. Fighting one or two of them was easy enough, but if all of them were together?
Best to eliminating that possibility now, then.
Leveling his bladed staff towards the ground, directly at Pinkie Pie, a part of Grogar's arm opened and a fleshy tube curled around the blade. The tube filled with blood, and ejected a spurt of the crimson liquid upon the blade's edge as the staff-blade itself started to gleam with a deep green build up of power.
"As much as you children have grown, I somehow doubt you'll survive a Gran Rey Cero. A shame there probably won't be much left of your bodies for me to examine."
“Wait, ain't ya worried 'bout destroyin' yer precious Seed?" Applejack shouted, holding the Seed up.
Grogar paused, grimacing, the power of his Gran Rey Cero still building.
"Give me back the Seed, and I'll consider leaving without destroy all of you."
"Nothin' doin'! You go, an' I'll think 'bout what ta do with this here Seed."
"Do you take me for a fool, child?"
Grogar tensed, ready to launch his Gran Rey Cero and risk the Seed's destruction if need be. Anything to be rid of Pinkie Pie at this point
However before he could attack, a fresh reiatsu appeared with such speed and swiftness that it turned everyone's heads towards the southern edge of the valley. A wave of water burst forth from the ground, and followed a swift moving form with powerful Hollow reiatsu, coming straight for Applejack. The farmgirl could barely react as the waves of water surged around her, and someone grabbed the Seed right out of her hand.
“What the-!?” Applejack blinked, then her eyes shot wide as she lost her grip on the Seed, and the water around her flowed around like a living thing, forming a pool a dozen or so meters away where a figure stood now, holding the Seed.
“Interesting,” said a curious but highly satisfied feminine voice, “What could this be, I wonder? Quite a lot of reiatsu coming from this unsightly, red marble. Grogar, can I assume this is your doing?"
Grogar hardly looked pleased at who he saw below him, even if ostensibly they were supposed to be on the same side.
Probably because by the smug, cat-like glint in Adagio Dazzle's eyes, she had a suspicion already as to what the Seed was. She was standing now on a calm pool of water beneath where Grogar stood on the air, with Pinkie Pie, Applejack, and Sweet Cider all starring at her in surprised shock. She’d ceased using her Resurreccion form, probably to conserve energy, but even if Grogar sensed Adagio had used up a lot of power fighting Captain Luna, she was still a potent force to be reckoned with. And she was holding his Seed in one hand, casually leaning on her trident with the other, and was giving him a look that said she had no intention of relinquishing this newfound prize.