The Possession of Dot MacPherson

A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic / Dot and the Kangaroo crossover fanfic
by McPoodle

Bea clearly had something she wanted to tell him. The way she practically vibrated throughout O’Shea’s account of his doings for the past three months made that more than apparent.

“…The, um…Trocadéro installation was unveiled, and…and I expect that it will be greeted with universal bewilderment. As usual.” And so O’Shea concluded, his delivery faltering. He had spent his speech fidgeting constantly in his chair, his shoulders perpetually hunched and his expression that of someone who expected to be punished at any moment for something he didn’t do.

O’Shea was a small man, uncomfortable in his own skin, the result of a lifetime of being distrusted by the world before he met Bea. His current attire of navy slacks and a checkered dress shirt was picked out far in advance by her, as was everything else he wore. His skin was extremely pale, and his short hair was a shade of orange so bright as to seem dyed.

“…So, how has life been treating you, Beatrix?” he finally asked. The significant pause before that sentence passed for a joke in the language of their relationship.

“How has life been treating me?!” Bea exclaimed, springing to her feet with a broad smile. (O’Shea instinctually flinched.) “It is completely insane—in the best possible way!” And then she popped a joker card into existence between thumb and forefinger—Bea had a habit of prestidigitating when she got excited. Or bored. Or pretty much at random.

Bea was a large woman, even more in personality than in body, the kind of woman who dominated any room she entered. Since O’Shea had come home while she was sleeping, she was in a flowing pale blue nightgown with a white woolen robe over it, with her initials over the breast pocket.

“Has ‘Mr. NYC’ snatched up another of your properties?” O’Shea asked in a low voice.

“Ha! But no,” Bea replied. She pointed at her smile. “Read the expression, Dear. This is good disruption. As in, I finally found a girl to adopt.”

“I, uh…hope you weren’t expecting more,” O’Shea said slowly and deliberately, spreading his hands out in front of him. “I…I don’t really do—”

“Emotions,” Bea said curtly. “You don’t do emotions. I know. I keep telling you: I know. I married you, didn’t I?”

Bea cut the air with a meaty hand, causing a couple more playing cards to fly off in random directions. “Forget it. I’m getting tired of establishing this every time you come back from one of your creations: I love you. You can’t love anyone. I’m fine with that. And I’m not leaving you, despite the fact that you can’t understand why I would want to put up with that.”

Bea walked over, and lifted the small man’s head with her big hand. “I shall repeat myself: I found a girl to adopt.”

“From that orphanage you built for precisely that purpose,” O’Shea said, looking up into her eyes in a way that he knew she loved.

“…Alright, I built it to eventually find a daughter for us. But it did a lot of good in the meantime!”

“For…us,” O’Shea said. He turned his head within his wife’s grip to look away. “I…I couldn’t possibly be a good father to anyone, Beatrix. My visions… my creations take me around the world for months at a time. And when I’m here…”

“You’re incapable of love,” Bea said coldly, pulling his head back into her gaze. “For which I blame your foster parents. All of them. I’m aware that I’ll be raising this kid alone”—she said this with a secret smile—“and I am completely prepared. I’ve spent half a decade picking the best possible subordinates in my company and putting them where I want them. The same with the charity. I fully believe that they will survive on only a half-dozen hours of personal interaction a week. I’m ready for this, Dear.”

O’Shea blinked, taking in the sincerity and passion behind her words. “Then you have my blessing.”

And then he suddenly got up and started walking through their country villa, a curious Bea at his feet.

After a few minutes of walking and looking into various rooms, he turned and, arms wide, caught Bea before she could walk into him. (Three metal cups and a red rubber ball fell at his feet.) “What’s the holdup?” he asked, stepping back so she no longer dominated his field of vision. “I know you. You would have adopted her already by now otherwise, no matter what law or regulation stood in your way.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s Dot, Dear. I…I need your opinion on the girl I want to adopt.

“Well…it’s kind of my thing.”

“…No. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. I…I don’t want to lose somebody else, ever again!”

“Okay, I get it.”

“Do you? You’re a princess. Did you lose anyone when you were as young as me?”

“Not…not then. But one of my friends in Magic Kindergarten lost her little brother. What she went through…it was the worst thing I had ever seen.”

“So you know. Why I can’t have friends anymore. Why I can’t have anybody.”

“Yes, I understand. But that wasn’t the end of it for me after what happened. I decided, like you, that I would never let myself get hurt like that. I grew distant from my family, and my friends. I stuck to my books, because the characters in there didn’t die, or if they did, I could flip back a few pages and bring them back from the dead. And life got very lonely for me. When my immortal mentor tricked me into making friends, it was the best thing to ever happen to me, until…”

“…We’re not talking about that right now. On the whole, friendship has been a wonderful thing for me—I escaped a life of loneliness before it was too late. And I want the same for you.”

“Well…maybe I can make friends someday. But not today. Is that alright?”

“There’s something else I’d like you to do. Something you can do now.

“Look out there. Look at all of the other orphans like you. Children who have lost everything. Some of them much younger than you. Some of them hurting much more than you. You don’t have to befriend them. But you could help them. Because you can. And because right now, they can’t help themselves. What do you think of that?”

“Don’t mention it, Dot.”

O’Shea took his time driving down the country road that led to the orphanage, early on Christmas morning. He left extra early once he had heard the story of the property from Bea, spending as much time examining the landscape as his paper map. He was looking for a vision.

Phillip Van Der Boek, a cousin of the famous Pieter Schuyler, founded the town of Boekstead in 1652 and built the mansion house of Gouden Eiken next to a magnificent oak tree. The family became quite powerful, not only in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, but also in the English colony and later American state of New York, investing in the Erie Canal and later the railroads. But sometime after the original oak tree was struck down by lightning, the family turned against itself, conflicted by the evils brought about by rampant industrialization in eastern New York—a region safely out of sight from the front porch of Gouden Eiken. Finally the brothers Walter and Montgomery Van Der Boek, the last two members of the clan, faced off in a highly illegal duel that claimed both of their lives and caused the property to fall into bankruptcy. It took nearly two centuries before someone—namely Beatrix Platt—was able to stitch the various pieces of the property back together, renovating the long-abandoned mansion and converting it into Golden Oaks Orphanage.

As O’Shea approached the gates of the property, he saw something that caused him to pull his car off the side of the road. That road split to go around a large rock located right before the gates. To the uninformed eye, it didn’t make any sense, as the rock was easily small enough to remove and pave over. But this was the site where the Van Der Boek brothers died in each other’s arms. And this is where O’Shea found his vision.

There are certain people who can see things that most others cannot. They can offer no scientific proof of the existence of the various phantoms that they alone can see. In earlier ages some of them were locked away in asylums. In even earlier ages some of them were burned as witches. Nowadays most of them are artists, passing off their supernatural visions as products of their own imagination.

On this rock was a phoenix, aflame on its left side, a feral snarl on its right side. Not a living phoenix, but a sort of statue of smoke and shadow, a permanent monument to the fatal follies of the Van Der Boeks. O’Shea and the other seers had no idea how these visions came to be. Perhaps the tumultuous emotions of the dying brothers, the realization of where they had gone wrong, far after it was too late to do anything about it, was the spark that somehow summoned this fearsome object into being. O’Shea just knew that he had to share this vision with the majority of the human race who would never be able to see it. He got out his sketchbook and pencils and got to work.

The old familiar argument went through his head as he did so: Visions were part of his work, yes, but not all of it. He had the other kinds of “visions” as well, the non-supernatural kinds. The vision of the world as he wished it could be. The vision of what the world could become if it continued on its misguided way. He hated the fact that the visions he did not invent were always his most-popular works, and he feared sometimes that his normal visions would never compete with the ones he was merely witness to.

After completing several sketches from various angles, O’Shea looked up to see that he in turn was being watched by a colony of curious rabbits. He tried to sheepishly wave at them, but that gesture caused them to turn and run away from him. With a sigh, the artist got back into his gray Citroën DS and headed onto the property, parking and making his way to the main entrance of Golden Oaks Orphanage.

After quickly and quietly introducing himself to the staff member at the door, he made his way up the stairs and over to the balcony overlooking what was once the grand ballroom, a small paper floorplan held in one hand for reference.

“I, uh…saw the big Christmas tree you picked out,” O’Shea said several hours later, relating the story of his first setting eye on the girl he was sent to meet. “It seemed a bit much.”

“I saw Miss Hathaway, the woman you hired to administer Golden Oaks when you’re not there. Whatever you’re paying her, it’s not enough. She looked like she needed a separate line item on her checks just for treating split ends.”

“The handing out was very fast, and didn’t really impress me that much. A small act of delayed gratification—that was all that the act symbolized, and possibly a way to gain the favor with the center of power when ‘Director Beatrix’ wasn’t around. No, what impressed me was what the little girl did afterward. She spent time with each of the perhaps dozen children who had responded to their gift with blank stares. In some cases I saw her explain what the toy was and how to use it. And in others I saw her simply sit with the child for a few minutes and talk with them.”

Bea nodded. “Christmas is rough. We both know that.” She looked off in the distance, remembering some of her past Christmases. “The presents…they always reminded me of what it was like before, getting Christmas presents and unwrapping them with the two people I could never see again. It was hard for any gift to make me happy enough to make up for that.”

She paused for a few seconds as she gathered her composure. “Then what happened?”

O’Shea made his way downstairs, and walked over to stand outside the open doors of the ballroom. As he watched, a little girl with a face scarred by fire burst into tears, and Dot gently took the girl into her arms, lightly stroking her back to show that she was there for her. And O’Shea could see that Dot was tearing up a bit as well.

“Being the husband of our sole financial support affords you a great deal of leniency, Mr. Platt. Please don’t make me regret extending it to you before I’ve had the chance to find out who you actually are.”

It was Miss Hathaway. She was a wiry woman of average height, disordered brown hair, and an old house dress. She scowled when she saw him take in her choice of clothing. “We are not supposed to have visitors on Christmas, Mr. Platt. Particularly visitors who do not call me in advance.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” O’Shea replied. “I thought that my wife would have called you. You see, there was a breakdown in communication.”

“The damage is done, Sir. Shall we discuss Miss MacPherson’s case in my office?”

“Mrs. Platt has instructed me to extend every courtesy to you, Mr. Platt. Including several which are quite…irregular. I do this under protest.”

“I…I understand,” O’Shea said awkwardly, suddenly finding himself feeling uncomfortable in his oversized chair.

“Please tell you already know the circumstances of the girl’s arrival here, so I won’t be forced to violate her privacy for a second time.”

“Yes,” O’Shea said, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper and finding the pattern of its wrinkles more interesting than Miss Hathaway’s disapproving face. “The, um, circumstances of her parents’ deaths were, um, widely reported at the time, although the identity of their daughter is not known to most.

“The mother, Jessie, was a teacher at a public high school, and the father, Frank, was the administrator at a nearby junior high. One day, shortly after the mother had arranged the expulsion of a student for assaulting his girlfriend with her as the sole witness, the student commandeered a school bus, lured the three of them to the school after hours, and ran them over. Both adults were killed instantly, and the child was permanently blinded in her left eye.” The shock of the event seemed to only then reach him. “She was eight years old at the time, and, and, and…that was three months ago. She’s nine…years old now.” Only then did the man look back at the orphanage administrator.

Miss Hathaway sighed. “Yes, that’s essentially correct, Mr. Platt. The story is inescapable in Buffalo, and frankly I don’t think we’re far enough away here as it is. I fear the day when she overhears somebody on the street casually discussing the murder trial, and saying something stupid like blaming the parents not seeing through an obvious trap, or something else like that.

“Dot MacPherson has physical problems: her eye, the slight limp, her ‘sleeping condition’. But mentally, Dot is exemplary, Mr. Platt, exemplary in every way. She does not dwell on her loss, nor does she complain about her injury. She is a friend to every animal on the property, especially the wild rabbits. Only a week ago, she seemed to notice the other children for the first time, and already she has become friends with every one of them. I’ve had more than one of them confide to me that they were more sorry to say goodbye to her after they were adopted than they were to me.” She looked off into the distance and put on an ironic smile. “It’s like she’s got her own private therapist.”

Miss Hathaway seethed. “I’m not allowed to say ‘no’,” she hissed. “Could you at least tell me something about yourself?” She turned and picked up a large pile of pages, which she dropped on the desk between them. “Like your wife, you’re a public figure, but what I can find is completely useless. You’re a public artist, and you donate all of your income to some good charities, but what even is this?” She pointed to the monochrome illustration on the top page, taken from a Wikipedia article.

O’Shea looked over it for a moment. “It’s a sculpture of a Manchego cheese wheel,” he said simply.

“Yes, but why is it fifteen stories tall?” Miss Hathaway asked in an exasperated tone.

“It needs to be that tall in order to make clear the difference between the Spanish and American conceptions of ‘cheese’. They are very similar.” O’Shea said this with the air of one who had to offer this explanation many times, and was unable to understand why the reason wasn’t obvious from the moment you laid eyes upon the work.

“Yes, that’s what the article says. And cheeses taste different from one another. That should be obvious.”

“Not the taste. The concept. What a Spaniard thinks when he hears the word queso, and what an American thinks when he hears the word cheese.”

O’Shea slumped even more than usual. “But there is a difference,” he insisted.

A half hour passed, and O’Shea utterly failed to communicate the meaning of Rueda to Miss Hathaway. But she did get a good enough read of his rather quiet character to determine that he could speak with Dot. But only if she was present.

After a while, O’Shea got up, and walked over to a poster for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that was prominently framed on one wall. A sign nearby declared when and where an upcoming “movie day” would be dedicated to this film.

From there he started examining various watercolors and finger-paints that had been posted on the other walls. Beside a photograph of a mother kangaroo in her native setting there was one drawing in particular…

“Miss Hathaway! Miss Hathaway!” A piping voice with a mild Australian accent cried out as the door behind O’Shea was quickly opened and closed. “You’ll never believe what I just…oh!”

Before him was Dot MacPherson. She was a short girl with light skin and bright red shoulder-length hair that surrounded her head like a church bell. She had a button nose and dark blue eyes. She wore a white blouse and a pale yellow frock. Her legs and feet were bare.

Before either of them had a moment to say something, Miss Hathaway barged into the room. “Dot MacPherson!” she cried, causing the girl to turn guiltily towards her. “What have I told you about wandering the halls by yourself?”

“I know, Miss Hathaway, ‘only in an emergency,’” Dot said quietly, looking down. This lasted only a moment before her head shot back up. “But I saw the most wonderful dance on the television! It went like this…” And she raised her heels and began to gently spin around, stepping and bowing.

It was obvious to a bemused O’Shea that she was copying something from a ballet. It was a trifle clumsy, but you could clearly see the artistry she was copying, and was doing a fair job of reproducing.

“Yes, yes,” the administrator said awkwardly, tapping Dot on the head to still her movements. “But that’s not exactly an emergency, is it?”

Dot stopped, facing O’Shea, and dropped her head slightly, her right eye looking him over curiously. “No…”

“Nevertheless, it is good that you are here. Just this once. Dot, this is Mr. Platt.”

“Oh!” Dot’s head popped back up. She now looked him over with eagerness. First with her good right eye. And then, rather disconcertingly, with her bad left eye. That eye didn’t move on its own, so she would turn her head to make sure it was constantly pointed at him as she walked around him. And its pupil was gray instead of black.

“You have nice hair,” she finally said with a warm smile. “Does everyone think the color is fake?”

Dot grinned broadly. “They do the same with me. So you’re the artist who’s married to Mrs. Platt? All the adults I ask about you say that you’re weird. Are you weird?”

She was clearly trying to provoke a reaction. Miss Hathaway, seeing this, said nothing and sat down to observe that reaction.

“Yes, I am ‘weird’,” O’Shea replied quietly. “It’s why I try to stay out of people’s way and make my creations. If Beatrix hadn’t insisted on…” He caught himself then. “I am known because of who my wife is. Although I’d appreciate the influence of my works, I don’t have that.”

A realization came to Miss Hathaway. “You wrote this article yourself, under an alias,” she said flatly, dumping her printout into the nearest trash bin.

O’Shea spent a few moments waiting for the awkwardness to go away. It didn’t, and eventually he was forced to resume. “The empty fame is not my choice. So you don’t need to worry about me. I am not the problem, Miss MacPherson, am I?”

“Yes, Beatrix…’Mrs. Platt’…sent me to ask what she had been doing wrong.”

Miss Hathaway sighed dramatically. “Coming on way too strong. I could have told her that.”

Dot looked between the two of them. “Does she still want to adopt me?” she asked.

“Even with the eye?” she asked, pointing at her creepy gray pupil. “Even with me sleeping half the day?”

Dot looked away. “Yes, I know,” she said, walking over to a child-sized chair. “And…and I do like her. Honest. In fact, that’s the problem. I can’t let her adopt me, because I’ll just make her miserable.” She looked over to Miss Hathaway as she sat down, folding her hands in her lap like a proper lady. “You told her, right? I mean, she knows about me. Right?”

Dot rolled her eyes. “Well of course you don’t believe me, Ma’am. But you…I saw your sculpture in downtown Buffalo…” She struggled to remember the name.

O’Shea sighed deeply. “It’s not insanity, Beatrix. Dot has…an imaginary friend, that’s all.”

“That’s a rather dramatic way to put it, don’t you think?” O’Shea asked Dot.

“It gets the point across,” Dot said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms.

“Princess Twilight Sparkle,” O’Shea said, nodding appreciably at the name. “Mine was named Billary.” He tapped the side of his head. “Commander of the Seven Armies, Billary McGillicuddy Turk.”

“Yes,” O’Shea said with what might be considered a very mild exclamation. “I had one too when I was her age. Very common for imaginative children who don’t have enough companionship in their lives.”

Bea looked at him accusingly. “I had a rather miserable childhood, and I didn’t have an imaginary friend. Are you accusing me of a lack of imagination?”

“No, I blame brain damage,” O’Shea said with a straight face, followed a split second later by a sudden cringe, as if he expected his own wife to hit him. “That was a joke,” he quickly added when she groaned loudly.

“Yes, I know,” she replied. She made no move to indicate that she would ever hurt him for anything he said.

“But, but you see how perfect it is: This girl loses her parents, and then within a matter of days a fantasy princess moves into her head, a princess who just happens to be the one thing she needs more than anything else in the world: someone who can never go away. Because this princess is immortal. Let me get to that part of the story.”

“My wife knows about you,” O’Shea said, pointing at Dot’s right eye. “She thinks you’re wonderful.” The finger then moved a bit to Dot’s left. “But she doesn’t know anything about Twilight Sparkle.

“There’s two kinds of friends like Twilight and Billary. Well…three, actually, but two of them are the same as far as this discussion is concerned. And if Twilight Sparkle’s the wrong type…well that would be trouble.

“The first type is there to help you do all the dangerous things you’re too scared to do by yourself,” O’Shea said with a frown. “Say the things you’re too scared to say to anyone, even yourself. Billary was that type for me. I’m glad I had him. I needed to have him. But… The type I’m speaking of is the kind who is always getting into trouble. Because you never do those things, knock over the cookie jar or blow up the neighbor’s car. It’s your friend who did these things. And that would make adopting you a lot harder. Now does that describe your friend?”

“No!” exclaimed Dot. “You nearly gave Twilight a heart attack with that ‘car’ thing alone!”

“Yeah. Good. Not for scaring Twilight, of course. I just don’t want to be replacing cookie jars and cars all of the time. So she falls into the second category, then: someone who is there for you, to be your best friend no matter what.”

Dot nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s exactly it.” A second later she added, “And what’s the third type?”

“Someone who’s there to teach you. Help you with your homework and tell you when you’re about to do the wrong thing.”

Miss Hathaway sat quietly in the corner, nodding to herself. This was pretty much her own opinion of “Twilight Sparkle”.

“So that being established, I would like to know more about her,” said O’Shea. He opened his sketchpad, laid it across his knees, and used a pencil to start taking down pertinent notes about Twilight Sparkle. The sketchpad didn’t open flat, allowing Dot some glimpses of O’Shea’s earlier sketches. “Does she have an upstanding background?” he asked as he wrote. “My wife and I can’t allow just anyone to be your tutor-slash-friend.”

Dot giggled, putting her hands up to her mouth. “You want a job interview with Twilight? She really liked that! ‘Just what I would ask for, if our horseshoes were reversed,’ she said. And she has the best possible qualifications!” She stopped for a moment to address herself. “Yes, yes I already know. Please don’t get out the list. Would you just let me…! Anyway, she’s the Princess of Friendship on her planet. And you’re not born with that kind of princess title, you have it given to you because you’re already doing everything a Princess of Friendship should be doing.”

“‘Princess of Friendship’,” O’Shea repeated. “Should I be using ‘Your Highness’ when addressing her?”

“No, not really,” Dot replied. “She’s not into that kind of stuff. And you’re not a pony, so it wouldn’t even apply to you. She started out as a nerdy little unicorn in the capital city of Canterlot…”

“You don’t have to give me her entire backstory,” Bea said wearily. “Considering that she’s not real. You, on the other hand, appeared to have been riveted by a literal children’s story.”

O’Shea reacted with a start. “Oh, I was only paying attention to better understand Dot. I didn’t really care about the story…”

O’Shea leaned forward intently, a big smile on his lips, as he heard the end of Dot’s story.

“…And then Celestia and Luna retired, putting Princess Twilight in charge of everything. Having learned her lesson, she delegated, so the role of patrolling the dreams of ponies fell to Twilight, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie, all of whom had been trained in dream-walking by Princess Luna and solemnly sworn not to betray any of the secrets they learned as a result. And that proves that Twilight is the most trustworthy of ponies.

“Although…Twilight, why haven’t you been in any of my dreams since I stopped having nightmares? …Oh. She says that she wants to respect my privacy. You still should visit—my dreams are the best!”

“I was saying that that whole long story of yours really boils down to one thing as far as I’m concerned: Twilight can’t prove her existence.”

“Well…technically, I guess that part is important. She’s the Princess of Friendship-slash-Magic, and it just so happens that the nature of magic in this universe means that she can’t cast any spells without hurting Dot, so no spells.”

“Alright,” Bea said, thinking things over. “So, she’ll have a rough time with kids her age. Since they won’t believe her.”

O’Shea shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “The children at the orphanage seemed welcoming. And anyway, you’ll be there for her. Just don’t discourage her belief in the purple alicorn.”

“Why not?” O’Shea replied. “And ‘alicorn’ is Dot’s word for a unicorn/pegasus combination. But also an ‘earth pony’.”

“Wow, she never got that far into princess backstory territory with me,” Bea said.

“The giant spotted platypus?” she asked. “Or was it a bittern? It did look a bit childish. In a good way, mind you.”

O’Shea smiled. Slightly and shyly. “It was one of my first creations, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The, uh, imaginary friend. Not the statue.”

“It’s a shame it was defaced later with that Lewis Carroll poem painted onto the plinth.”

“Jabberwocky?” O’Shea asked. “That was me. Didn’t I tell you? I decided ten years later to add a secondary artistic statement on top of the first, about the power of absurdity.”

O’Shea for his part utterly failed to consider what he had done to be “sabotage”.

“Getting back to the matter at hand…” Bea nodded to herself as she made up her mind. “So. I’m willing to go forward with the adoption. Assuming that she’ll have me. I just need to arrange a bonding session between the two of you in the meantime.”

“That…that won’t be necessary. We, uh, managed to find something in common.”

As O’Shea was completing his notes, Dot got up and walked around him to get another look at him—she had noticed that he had switched from writing to sketching at some point. “Let me see if you got her right,” she said. “Hey!” she then exclaimed, seeing something familiar on an earlier page. She flipped back to one of O’Shea’s sketches of the phoenix. “I drew that, too!” And she pointed at the watercolor on the wall that had earlier attracted his attention.

“You’ve…seen it?” he asked cautiously. There was a theory circulating among some of his artist friends that “the vision” was more common among redheads. …As was insanity.

“Not directly,” said Dot, switching from live eye to dead one as she examined the sketch. “Twilight saw it when we were looking for Puff the Rabbit—he had hurt his foot showing off for his brothers—and she shared the memory with me.”

O’Shea was intrigued. “Has she shown you any memories from her home?” He consulted his notes. “Equestria?”

“Well, there goes your afternoon,” Miss Hathaway said good-naturedly. She then checked her watch. “I’ll be able to get her to bed by three.”

O’Shea frowned. “Beatrix told me that she collapses after eight hours of being awake. Is that literally true?”

“More or less,” said Miss Hathaway. “I think it depends on her mood. If she’s stressed, if she spends long periods of time off in a corner talking to ‘Twilight’, then it might be seven or eight hours. If she’s happy, if we can distract her enough not to think about her imaginary, then she can last as long as any other child her age.”

“It sounds like Twilight isn’t good for her then,” said O’Shea. “Why don’t you encourage her to abandon—”

“—That’s not a very good word to use around Dot, Mr. Platt,” Miss Hathaway said very seriously. “‘Abandon.’ No, Twilight is clearly Dot’s inner counselor. At least for now, Dot needs Twilight in order to retain her sanity.”

It was then that Dot came back in with three thick sketchbooks under her arm. She looked at the covers of the three books carefully with her right eye, and then pulled out one. “I couldn’t draw at all when Twilight first showed up, so let’s skip the first book for now. I just had to teach myself drawing because the stuff she shared with me was so amazing that I just had to figure out how to share them with people. Even if they think they’re fake. Do you know what I mean?” She opened her selected book and shoved it into O’Shea’s lap.

O’Shea looked sadly at Dot, noting the fragility of her smile and considering the inner pain that might require the creation of a Twilight Sparkle. Then he paid attention to her words. “Yeah,” he said faintly. “I think I do know what you mean.” He looked down at a scene of a meadow and a giant waterfall.

“That’s Horseshoe Falls,” Dot told him. “Looking up at Canterlot from Ponyville is the absolute best, but that was from when I couldn’t draw.” She took the book back and flipped through a few pages. “This…this is a little scary, but…” She handed over the book again, open to a two-page spread of a haunted village. “Hollow Shades. That’s where Twilight and her friends faced the Pony of Shadows.”

O’Shea frowned as he took in the seriously evil vibe of the sketch before him.

Seeing his expression, Miss Hathaway came over to see the image for herself. Although it seemed to have nothing in common with the tragedy that shaped the girl’s life, what the administrator saw worried her. “Dot, I don’t think Twilight should be sharing memories like this with you.”

“Oh, she didn’t,” Dot said lightly, turning the page to a fractured portrait of Twilight, her dragon friend and her five closest pony friends. “Sometimes, I can see things in Twilight’s mind that she thinks I’m too young to see.” She pointed down at the portrait. “Like, there’s something about some of…” She closed her eyes suddenly and winced. “Yeah, yeah…” she whispered to herself. “OK, I won’t go there.”

“It’s nothing,” Dot said with a shrug, snapping the book shut. “Twilight Sparkle and her neuro-osees.”

“OK,” said Bea. “She’s an artist, too. I knew about the sketchbooks, but she never let me look inside.” She nodded as she made another decision. “As long as Dot has her art…or her imaginary friend, you two have something in common that I will be forever excluded from. If she ever has any questions in that area, she’ll want to come to you, not me.” She checked her calendar. “So I’ll arrange to have you go with the orphans during their annual movie theater trip. It will be perfect!”

The Possession of Dot MacPherson

by McPoodle

Chapter 1: There's Something Wrong with Dot