Ground Zero
 
Prompt - Another silly conversation.
Just over a month after Double Grounded, Princess Skystar is getting fed up with her enormous octuplet pregnancy. She wants those foals out *now*, but after an entire day of trying to induce labor in two dozen different ways, nothing seems to have worked. At least, not straight away...
 
Tags - NSFW, Hyper Pregnancy, Impossibly Large Crotchboobs, Rapid-Onset Labor, Waterbreak
 
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Night had fallen across Mount Aris hours ago, and yet Princess Skystar couldn't sleep. She groaned in frustration, resting her chin between her forelegs and kicking fitfully at her sheets. All reason suggested that she should have felt tired - the day had been busy - but she simply felt restless. Not just restless; she also felt hot and heavy and stiff and *full*, and was quite fed up with all of that.
 
Skystar's already cumbersome octuplet pregnancy had gone into overdrive over the final month, packing on visible mass almost daily. Walking had gone from a chore to a genuine struggle, the hippogriff's lanky limbs steadily losing the battle for territory against her expanding womb. On the increasingly rare occasion that she made it out of bed, its lowest point barely cleared the floor. Lying on her side as she was now meant that the entire thing was forced upwards, looming like a down-coated mountain of life. Her bedsheet barely covered her.
 
Two days overdue and without any clear sign of labor, she'd spent the day with the nurse and her mother trying everything they could think of to gently set things moving.
 
Castor oil? Useless.
Breathing exercises? Nope.
A cheeky romp with one of the guards while Novo wasn't looking? Fun, but fruitless.
Acupuncture? Neither fun nor helpful.
Jogging? Yoga? Impossible.
 
Pinkie had even cooked up "Mrs Cake's Secret Weapon", a cupcake made from ingredients so utterly bizarre that only a pregnant mare would even consider eating it in the first place. Herbs and spices and seafood and seasoning - the list of ingredients alone covered an entire scroll. It had tasted paradoxically disgusting and delicious all at once... and had accomplished exactly nothing. Not even a braxton-hicks.
 
That wasn't to say that Pinkie had been unhelpful. The pink pony's bi-monthly visits had been abandoned in favour of an extended stay, and said pony had utterly refused to leave Skystar's ever-widening side. She was snuggled up against Skystar's tummy like a cat against a cushion, snoring peacefully. Pinkie's never-ending sense of fun had helped keep her emotions in check, and a helping hoof was always welcome - whether to steady her when the foals threatened to throw her off balance, rub her belly to calm them down, or deal with the *other* ever-expanding problem between her hind legs. The impending demand of eight foals had made her teats swell like balloons; soft, heavy, maddeningly sensitive balloons her paws had no chance of reaching. The sheer dexterity that an earth pony could demonstrate with their mouth would have made the beaked princess feel jealous - if it hadn't simultaneously made her feel all sorts of other, overwhelmingly more pleasant things...
 
Skystar sighed, closing her eyes. Perhaps tomorrow things would change and she'd get to meet her foals at last. The thought was comforting. Worrying, for obvious reasons, but comforting. For what felt like the dozenth time that night, she willed herself to simply relax and rest. Slowly, teasingly, like a feather drifting from a mountaintop, her cares and worries began to fall away and she began to drift off to sleep.
 
One of her many foals took this as the perfect opportunity to start kicking. The big, heavy one right next to her gut.
 
"Oh come on." Skystar groaned softly, "Don't make me get up at two in the morning..."
 
Another set of little limbs started kicking. And then another, and another. Soon her entire brood - the only word for the collective of little hippogriffs she'd been carrying for almost a year - was wrestling and squirming. The entire overloaded mass of her womb was alive with life-affirming, ticklish, wonderful, distracting motion. Sleep was off the table. It was frustrating enough to make Skystar dig her beak and talons into her pillow and whine out loud.
 
...but then there was something else. Her eyes opened wide and sweat began to roll down her brow. She felt tense. Nervous. *Tight*. A ripple of sensation passed across the taut surface of her belly, the bulk of it passing quickly but lingering like an earth tremor. It only agitated her foals, and within seconds they were practically thrashing.
 
Fighting shock, Skystar took a slow, deep breath. "P-pinkie?"
 
It came again. Stronger, faster. A wave of pressure that ripped through her like lightning. She grit her teeth and moaned, tossing off her blanket as she splayed her wings. In the dim starlight permitted by the window, the great pale roundness of her midsection visibly pulsed for the third time in under a minute, abdominal muscles clenching with what felt like vicelike force. Her talons curled and she gasped for breath. There was no doubt that she was going into labor but it was so sudden; so bluntly, undeniably strong that she was almost locked in place.
 
"Pinkie... wake up!" she hissed, trying helplessly to get her hooves under her. Another forceful contraction made clear that getting out of bed simply wasn't going to happen. "Come on - wake up, wake up, wake up!"
 
Pinkie stirred and mumbled to herself. The obvious cost of having all that energy during the day: the party pony was a very heavy sleeper. What woke her up wasn't so much Skystar's breathless cries for help as the fact that her improputu pillow had suddenly gotten very, very active. "Starry?" she asked groggily, ears drooping and one eye open, "What's-" The hippogriff cut her off with a low howl of distress, taloned paws clutching at her trembling belly as her abdominal muscles clenched in their own relentless rhythm.
 
Pinkie sat up in an instant, rubbing her eyes and hurrying to Skystar's head. "Aaaah! What's going on? What do I do?"
 
Skystar panted for breath, still winded from just how overwhelmingly sudden this all was. She'd almost grown used to feeling like a stuffed manatee, but this primal sensation of fullness - of unstoppable, primal *pressure* - it was as if she might pass out or explode at any moment. Sweat beaded her freckled face, and it took her a moment to even register that Pinkie was even there.
 
"G-go get the nurse, Pinkie," she gasped. "And some water. And every last towel in the castle..."
 
Pinkie took Skystar's paw between her hooves, eyes darting between the struggling hippogriff's face and the equally stressed but much, much larger volume of her abdomen. "But Starry, that means leaving you on your own and-"
 
Skystar opened her beak, but nothing came out except a short gasp. They both heard and *felt* that colossal womb give another shuddering exertion, the strongest yet by far, and with a loud pop and ominous gushing sound the dam gave way all at once. The mattress - already slightly damp in a few spots thanks to Skystar's overactive mammaries - was soaked in moments as her water broke with the force of a miniature cannon.
 
Pinkie yelped as Skystar's talons sank into her foreleg, and the hippogriff princess' expression morphed from one of abject shock to the most serious look Pinkie had recieved in her entire life, so intense that it bordered on predatory.
 
"NOW."
 
They kept eye contact as Pinkie hurried for the door, and just as she reached it Skystar's face softened. For a few seconds she was overwhelmingly happy - almost serene, despite the stress and physical strain. "A-and Pinkie? Please get my mom. Tell her it's almost time to meet her grandfoals..."
 
The sound of galloping (and high-pitched shouting loud enough to wake every living being on Mount Aris) receded into the corridor. As her body took a merciful moment of calm to compose itself, Skystar took a deep, steadying breath. With how quickly things were going the first foal might only be minutes away. The mere thought elated her. She swept her feather-like hair from where it had fallen across her face, flexed her talons and glanced up at Shelley and Sheldon, watching as always from their perch on the shelf. That - their blank, clammy faces reminded her - had been the easy part...