• Published 1st Jul 2012
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A Jewel of a Problem - Rainbow Sparkle



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Rude Awakening

“Ugh…” I said as I dropped my bag next to my bed as I fell face first on it, sighing deeply into the comforting embrace of the blanket sitting upon it. It had been a rough night at work, with two food trucks plus the large GM truck…it didn’t help that they had thrown me from one side of the store to the other, and with all the chaos, I still hadn’t managed to get my schedule for the next week fixed.

Unfortunately, I had a few things to do, as my mom was more than willing to remind me of as she poked at my back with her finger. “Cain, you can’t lay down and die yet, you got chores to do.”

I tried to say something colorful and sarcastic, but all that came out was a series of mumbles as I got to experience exactly how bad my blanket was. My mother’s response was of course uncaring.

“Sorry, but until you have your own place, you can’t do the chores just when you want to. While you live here, you help out when I say so.” She replied, and I could hear the smile on her face as she added, “And if you don’t, I’m dropping your cat on your back.”

Despite how tired I was, that got me up. Trying to wipe the sleep out of my eyes, I said “Yes ma’am, I’ll get right on it.”

Nodding at my assurance, she turned and left my room, no doubt heading off to get ready for her own day of work. I looked at the clock, groaning when I saw it read 7:23 am. I only had about an hour to at least get started on my chores before she headed off, as mother dearest always insisted that I get them done before she left for work. It’s not like I had a tendency to stop half-way through them and go on ahead and sleep…

Okay, maybe it was, but so what? Graveyard’s not easy.

Taking a brief second to stretch, I slapped my headphone back into my ear, flipping the power switch on my mp3 as I headed out of my room to take care of my morning chores. Thankfully, thanks to many wonderful brony artists out there, the work went much faster as I had pony music blasting in my ear.

Rather than bore you with more descriptions of what I spent the morning doing, we’ll just skip to where I got ready to hit the hay, and when the event that stole me from the home I knew and dropped me into a world both familiar and alien occurred.

Having finished my chores, and now feeling more exhausted than I had previously, I dragged myself back to my room, not even bothering to get undressed as at this point, I hardly cared, I just wanted to get some much needed shut eye. I had only enough energy to do the one thing I always require to be able to sleep.

The last few days, I had fallen asleep to Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, but by this point, I was tired of hearing it as I slipped into unconsciousness. So, it was that time of the week to pick something different, and thankfully, I had finally gotten around to burning the first season of MLP FIM onto some dvds. Now, I could listen to my favorite show as I fell asleep.

Slipping the first disk into my PS2, I flopped on my bed and closed my eyes, letting the soothing sound of Friendship is Magic’s opening intro float into my mind. Soon enough, I could feel myself beginning to doze off, and I prepared myself for the usual rash of weird dreams most of which I wouldn’t remember. I had no idea what was about to occur to me, and I suspect that even if I had, I wouldn’t have been prepared.

I don’t know exactly when the transfer happened, but I do remember being in the midst of a dream involving Angel Bunny and Tofu teaming up against a ponified Nemesis, when all of a sudden there was this strange sensation. It felt as if the universe itself were preparing to sneeze, and was closing its eyes in anticipation of this action. It quickly faded, and my dreams resumed their normal insanity.

Soon enough, I could feel myself slowly drifting away from the realm of sleep, and soon could feel the warmth of the sunlight, the singing of the birds, and the ringing of chimes…

Wait…chimes?

This was the first clue to me that something was wrong, but since it takes me time to wake up, my brain was lagging behind in the “Processing of the world around you” department. Rubbing my eyes as I tried to clear the fog from them, I turned my head to my right and saw the source of the chime sound; a small alarm clock that had a small green pony striking what looked like a xylophone.

That’s funny, I could swear my alarm clock was a windup, and when it went off sounded like what I figured an air-raid siren would sound like from five feet away.

It was at this point that my brain suddenly realized something very, very important. When rubbing one’s eyes, one’s hands do not feel like they are one big blob of flesh. One is able to feel the fingers and the knuckles, and must always be careful to not poke one’s eye out in the process. When I had rubbed my eyes naught but a few seconds ago, I did not feel either, and unless I was missing something, it didn’t feel like I was going to poke my eye out.

With this information in hand, although I would soon discover that this was the wrong word to use in this situation, I slowly raised my hands up and held them in front of me, rapidly blinking as I forced my vision to become clearer and more focused. Slowly but surely, my vision began to solidify until I could see what it was that I was holding up in front of me.

My hands…were no longer hands. They had instead been replaced with pinkish-purple forelegs and hooves. I waved them in front of me, my eyes watching as they moved, my brain processing the fact that they did indeed respond to my commands. I looked down to see that my body was no longer that of a human, but that of a pony, though I had yet to discover the full depth of what was going on. I took one of my hooves and lightly poked my side, confirming that they were indeed hooves and not hands.

Okay Cain… don’t panic. Lets think this over rationally. This is all just a dream, or a hallucination. You’re not a pink-purple pony, you’re a twenty-one year old human… gah will someone shut off that alarm clock!

My thoughts weren’t exactly coherent at this point, but the chimes of the small alarm clock were beginning to make it hard to focus. Thus, I glared at the alarm clock for a full minute before I finally picked it up with my hooves and turned it off (which was surprisingly easy, I must admit. I figure it would have been harder. Maybe it was and I was just too annoyed to care.)

With the alarm clock now silent, I set it back on the nightstand next to the bed and crossed my…legs I guess, over my chest, glaring at the room around me. It was at this point that I realized something else.

Hold on a minute… don’t most of these HiE things have the human waking up in the forest or something? Where the heck am I?

I turned my head and looked around the room, trying to place where I could be. The room was painted a grayish purple, and it didn’t take much to figure out that I seemed to be in a little girls room. Dolls and toys normally associated with girls were set neatly about the room, and there were a few posters here and there of what I could only assume were celebrities, since one of them did happen to be of Sapphire Shores, not to mention the obvious princess motif the room carried.

There were also a few photo’s scattered about the room, and while I had trouble seeing most of them, there was at least one close enough that I could see who was in it. Sitting on a small dresser to the left of the bed was a picture frame that showed two fillies splashing in what looked vaguely like the ocean. One of them was a grey filly with silvery colored hair and glasses, while the other was a pinkish-purple filly with darker purple hair streaked with white, and a small tiara sitting upon her head.

Maybe I still wasn’t fully awake yet, maybe my mind was just lagging due to the sheer insanity of being a pony and in Equestria, but I do remember that it took a full minute for me to make the connection of where I was…or in fact, to be more precise, who I was.

Perhaps it was the small tiara sitting next to the picture that finally hammered it home to my mind, as it finally dawned on me just what had happened.

No…there’s…theres no way, it’s not possible, I can’t be-

“Diamond Tiara, honey, are you up yet?”

I went stock still as a voice floated into the room, one I recognized from Family Appreciation Day. Filthy Rich, Diamond Tiara’s father, had just called out to her-me, no, I couldn’t think like that, I just couldn’t accept the idea that I was the horrible, prissy little princess wanna-be Diamond Tiara. I could have accepted being Snips or Snails. Heck, I could probably have handled being one of those three Diamond Dogs.

I heard foot…err…hoofsteps approaching the door, and I quickly ducked back under the covers, squeezing Tiara’s eyes shut as I silently repeated a mantra in my head, There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s-

Hey, sue me, I was desperate. I know it was a stupid thought then, but I didn’t know what else to do!

“Princess? Are you still asleep?”

I heard the door open, and the hoofsteps continued until they stopped right next to the bed. I heard a sigh, and yelped as I felt the blanket being pulled away from me. I tried to cling to the safety that the blanket offered, but my attempts to keep the blanket over me were for naught, and only succeeded in sliding me from the top of the bed to the center.

With the blanket removed, I could see the stern face of Filthy Rich looking down at me. Quick, act like Diamond Tiara would! I heard a voice in my mind call out, and thinking quickly, I decided to do just that. Gulping down my nervousness, I tried to give him a smile as I murmured, “Ehehe… hi Daddy.”

Gah, I even sound like her! This day can’t get any worse…wait, no!

He gave me a knowing smile, but it was not one that filled me with warmth of any sort. It was the sort of smile you got when you were caught doing something red-handed. “Morning Princess, I trust we’re awake now?” Somehow, I seem to have managed a weak nod at his words, and he tilted his head to the side as he added, “Though I could have sworn we were past this sort of thing. Aren’t you a bit old to be hiding underneath the covers?”

“Err…” I muttered, unsure how to respond. I actually had no idea how old Diamond Tiara was, either in Equestrian years or human ones. And for that matter, for all I knew, Diamond Tiara had been pulling something like this for years.

Filthy (heh) sighed again as he leaned over and grabbed me by the neck and gently lifted me off the bed, eliciting a “Hey!” from me before setting me down on the floor. Once done with that, he put a hoof underneath my chin and raised my face to look at his as he said “Look, I know why you’re wanting to avoid this, but as I explained to you yesterday, this is your punishment for what you did.”

Without fully realizing it, an agitated expression appeared on my face as I asked “Why? What the hay did I do wrong?” Despite the fact that I was in Diamond Tiara’s body, and was therefore DT to everypony else, I didn’t like all too much the idea of being punished for something that brat had done to somepony. After all, it was her who did it, not me… err… sort of.

Filthy’s expression was one that told me it should have been very obvious to me what I had done, and I grimaced a bit as I realized I probably should have thought first before I opened my mouth. “As I recall, you forced three of your classmates to get as many ‘juicy’ stories as they could get their hooves on, and spread them all over town. You nearly ruined their friendships with everypony here in Ponyville, not to mention in the process smearing our name.”

Well, at least I know when I am, I thought to myself as I did my best to look downcast, which was actually rather easy considering the situation I was in. I figured that Tiara would probably try to defend what she did to her father, but from my perspective, there wasn’t anything to defend.

Then don’t think from your perspective, look at it from Diamond Tiara’s. Why would she have done what she did? I bit my upper lip, trying to think quickly. Why would DT have gone so far with that newspaper thing?

She thinks of herself as being better than everyone, but seems determined to prove it by taunting others, she strives to be the center of attention, and seems concerned about her popularity…so she did it to embarrass everyone else and make herself feel important. After all, everyone in Ponyville was reading the school paper, she must have felt on top of the world.

With this thought in my mind, I did my best to make my face look innocent as I looked up at Filthy Rich and said “But I only wanted the paper to be popular! I wanted everyone to think I was doing a good job…”

Filthy’s stern expression shifted, but only by a bit at what I had said. “I won’t deny that some of the blame lies with everypony in town. But you could have found another way to make the paper popular Diamond Tiara. You didn’t need to reveal the entire town’s secrets.” He sighed, adding on, “I didn’t raise you to be like this…”

I said nothing to that, merely going back to looking sad. Though within my head the words Are ya sure about that floated around for a moment. Not that I could say it aloud, as not only would that likely make him mad (which was most certainly something I didn’t want) but it wasn’t something DT would say.

“But then again, that’s why your punishment is to help every single pony whose secrets you revealed.”

“WHAT?!” I shouted, my eyes going wide at what Filthy said. Not only was I stuck in DT’s body, and not only would I have to try to figure out some way to get back home, I was going to have to do that while avoiding suspicion and helping every single pony DT had slighted with her gossip column!

“You heard me young lady. Every single pony your newspaper hurt, you’re going to help them with one task that they ask of you. I already had those three classmates of yours spread the word.”

I will tell you, right now, I do not have a problem with the CMC, in fact, of all the kids in the show they are my absolute favorites. But at that moment, I wanted to track them down and lob…I don’t know, something at them. The fact that I wouldn’t have minded them doing this if I didn’t happen to be in possession of DT’s body was not lost on me.

I briefly entertained the thought of trying to weasel out of it somehow, but the look on Filthy’s face told me that any such attempt would only be digging me a deeper hole. So, taking a deep breath, I sighed and murmured “Yes daddy.”

He gave me a genuine smile, reaching a hoof out to ruffle my mane as he said “That’s a good girl. I know you probably think I’m being harsh, but I’m only trying to make sure that you grow up to be the wonderful pony I knows in there.” He pulled me into an embrace at the last, and I had to thank whatever gods here that I liked getting and giving hugs, as otherwise I might have done something stupid to give away that something was off. “Now, why don’t you go wash up, and then come on down stairs, breakfast is almost ready.”

As if the mention of food was all it took, my stomach grumbled loudly, causing Filthy to laugh as he said “And just in time too.”

I tried my best to laugh sheepishly, though it was rather disconcerting to hear DT’s laughter as my own. Filthy gave me one last smile before turning and heading out the door, closing it behind him. I quietly waited till he was out of earshot before I said “I’m fucked.”

It’s actually rather funny, after saying that, I had a sudden urge to rinse my mouth out with soup. Then I remembered that I was going to have to endure what was supposed to be Diamond Tiara’s punishment, and dark frown crossed my features as I said to the empty room,

“You owe me Diamond Tiara. Big Time.”