Planet of the Pon

It was a nice day. Perhaps a little too warm, judging by the sweat that had built up around his shoulder joints and in his butt crack and, well, everywhere. His stomach hurt.

He floated aimlessly in space, kept alive only by the thin atmosphere given off by his decidedly not thin body. He had since learned that not-thinness was a common side effect of consuming an entire planet. He wished he knew that sooner.

He could still taste it in his mouth. Dirt… vegetation… rocks… and the people, those poor, poor people. Where they were now could be anyone’s guess, victims to magic gone awry.

He had been selected for his averageness. A pegasus with a desk job, not too fat, not too lean; not too athletic, not too idle. Plus he was a government employee, ripe for the picking when it came to government-sanctioned experiments.

Look where that got him.

Ever since the parasprite invasion of Equestria, those fancy-pants scientists in Canterlot (as in overly smart people, not Fancy Pants) had been studying at them, intent on finding out how they managed to spread, to reproduce, to eat. Their endless appetite had devastated the orchards of Ponyville, and their suddenly-obtained ability to consume even buildings made them a yet more terrifying threat.

Of course they thought they could harness it, to control the magic, to make it work for them. No more rubbish to be disposed of, no more leftovers, nothing going to waste. They spent years musing over how to do it, how to make a spell that would create someone who could consume everything without pain or delay.

Look where that got them.

He did not know if he was the first, but when he entered the chamber that day – with a plethora of items from the small and sweet to the downright inedible laid before him – he could not have anticipated the results.

Canterlot was gone. Equestria was gone. The whole damn planet was gone. Gone to his ravenous, bottomless, uncontrollable appetite. Cursed upon him by those idiotic unicorns who thought they could control it. And they couldn’t.

But neither could he.

He had eaten the sweets, he had eaten the inedible, he had even eaten the table. Yet his body had lusted for more, he had whined as he spread wing and flew into one of the scientists, the first of many tears dripping from his eyes as his hooves had pulled a shivering brown-coloured unicorn into his deep, dark maw.

Even as the belly below him grew, his hooves had dragged him along through the facility, even as some of those hooves found themselves dislodged from the floor, the others still dragged him along. The facility was consumed; the experiments, the potions and the people with it.

He had wept. He had wept so much back then, as he became an increasingly blobular being, his body disobeying his every conscious wish to stop, overruled by every subconscious demand to consume. Tears soaked his face and cheeks before getting lost somewhere down the metres of belly that had sprung forth.

The Air Force was called in from Cloudsdale. By the time they arrived, Canterlot was in ruins. By the time they had fled, much more of the landscape had been engulfed by his rapidly encroaching mass.

In the space of a few hours he had grown exponentially into a great, towering blob of pony, filled with ponies and cities and the tears of what he was being forced to do. His hooves and wings became naught but useless decorations, his cutie mark stretched perversely across his overindulged flanks. His vision clouded as it became swamped by his own cheeks, even the tears having nowhere to go now. The screams of his fellow ponies as they tried to flee ringing in his ears.

No matter how large he grew, no matter how much he resisted, his muzzle stayed against the ground, sucking up whatever matter – living or dead – had dared to be in the vicinity. Through some perverse magic or some other cosmic force, yet more found passage into him; although he could no longer see, he could still taste the familiar -the wetness of clouds, the tanginess of rainbows, and the sweetness of cupcakes – mixed with the new – the crunchiness of rocks, the dryness of woods, and the scalding heat of magma as he broke through the crust of the ground.

The magic protected him from the heat, forced it into him as indiscriminately as it had everything (and everyone) else. His being desired to ingest all, and the magic of the world had seen to it that it occurred through any means necessary.

He could not be sure of what he felt now. He could not tell which way was up, he could not tell which parts of him were exposed and which were covered, aside from the occasional recognisable mote of actual food he could not identify what of the seemingly infinite stream of all that existed seemed to pass through his lips. He wallowed in sadness, not even able to express himself in words nor tears. He was a cruel consequence of science, but a villain none the less.

And yet that infinite stream soon came to a stop, although the infinite sadness did not. Nothing to be seen, nothing to be felt.

The planet was gone, and in it’s place floated a pon.