• Published 21st Feb 2013
  • 10,616 Views, 965 Comments

I.D. - That Indestructible Something - Chatoyance



Gregoria Samson awakens transformed into an Equestrian pony - yet no other human being can perceive her new body in any way. What is the incredible, monumental truth behind her impossible change?

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2. A Cage, In Search Of A Bird

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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2. A Cage, In Search Of A Bird

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

- Franz Kafka


Convincing her mother to let her stay in her room caused a row, but when the shouting was done and her mother had stormed out of the house, and her sister had made sure she understood how she "always ruined EVERYTHING!", and her father had given her a pat and told her he would work on things, only then was Gregoria finally left alone.

Immediately, she broke down and cried again, finding out that hooves were awful for wiping tears away. Hairy fetlocks turned out to be an excellent substitute for a sleeve to wipe snot on, but this was a small comfort. Worse, the snot tended to dry into her golden coat, and made the hairs stiff and unpleasant feeling. Hooves were good for pounding a pillow in rage it turned out, perhaps a little too good - the seam split, and Gregoria felt suddenly grateful that her pillow was foam and not feathers.

The clock on the nightstand showed that half an hour had passed since her parents and sister had left. Gregoria shook her large pony head, angry at herself for wasting time. If she were to avoid facing down some professional, she realized, she would need to find a way to adapt to her new body. 'For now' she appended, rapidly. Hope was all she had left really, hope that whatever had happened to her could be undone, or would reverse itself with time.

The first thing then, was to learn how to walk. Staying in bed forever was a sure ticket to some kind of institutional situation.

Gregoria shifted her equine body over to the edge of the mattress. The sheets had been entirely peeled away on that side, leaving a good quarter of the mattress exposed. She studied the floor and considered what her next action should be. Shortly, she decided to attempt standing normally. Gregoria reasoned that since her family could not see that she had changed, nor feel the difference when they touched her body, perhaps she had not actually changed at all. Perhaps this was just some kind of very intense and consistent hallucination. If so, it might well be that her body was normal, despite what her every sense was telling her.

She slid her hind legs over the edge of the mattress, pushing her body with her forelegs. Pain made her gasp, she rolled onto her left flank so that her tail was not bent sharply backwards. Her tail throbbed for a few minutes, but it did not seem broken. The thought that she was fussing about breaking her tail began to shake her hope that she was suffering a hallucination. She caught herself mentally before she could fall into despair - she had cried enough. Right now, she needed to concentrate on the task at hoof.

Pushing further, leaning to the left, her hind legs dangled, but could not reach the floor. Her legs were shorter as a pony than they had been as a human, and this was very disturbing to realize. Unless she simply pushed herself over on the hope that the length of her legs was an illusion, something else needed to be done.

Gregoria rolled over onto her belly. Now nothing could hurt her tail, and more importantly, she could slide over the edge of the bed until she felt contact with the floor. This way, if she lacked coordination, she would not fall down and injure herself. Pushing with her forelegs, and wriggling with her body, her hindquarters finally went over the precipice and soon she felt her own weight resting on her rear hooves.

Her belly was at the edge of the bed. She figured that she must be about half as tall as she had been as a human, more or less. Using her forelegs, Gregoria attempted to put all of her weight on her hind legs, and stand up normally.

She flopped back onto the bed, her upper body once again on the mattress. She simply didn't have enough strength to support herself for long on only her hind legs, and it was clear that she could not maintain balance either. Fine, she thought, crawl, then walk.

Moving carefully, trying to keep both panic and despair at bay, Gregoria moved herself so that her upper body was increasingly close to the edge of the mattress. She reached down with one foreleg, the other still on the bed. It wouldn't reach. She would have to just drop down to all fours. Steeling herself, Gregoria took a few breaths, then slid the last of her off the mattress entirely.

She caught herself with her forelegs. She was standing, stable and solid, on all fours. The bend of her long neck made her feel as if she were standing upright, almost normally, which was a very curious sensation. Crawling on all fours as a human was a literal pain in the neck - trying to look level with the ground meant bending the neck impossibly. It couldn't be done, at least not for long, and not without great discomfort. This was different, vastly so.

Gregoria stood not on her knees and hands, but on four large hooves, with comfortable legs and a comfortable back, and a perfectly comfortable upright neck. She looked to each side, then behind her. Her neck was very flexible and strong. She stared for some time at her own tail and bottom out of her right eye. She could not turn her neck entirely around, but she could rotate her neck and head far more than was humanly possible. Gregoria suddenly realized that she could probably bite her own knee. Her knee was close to her belly, close to her body. Her ankle stuck out behind her, and what must be her foot was now more leg. Lastly, her toe, her rear hoof was the middle toe, just as her forehooves were the nails of her middle fingers.

She moved her attention to her forelimbs. Her elbows were very close to her body, and partially embedded within her skin. Her wrists could no longer bend upwards, they only bent down, but they could bend much farther. The back of her hand was more leg, which finally ended in a short finger with a vast nail, her hoof. The muscles were strong, and standing was easy. If anything, her forelegs seemed much stronger than her rear legs. Most of her weight seemed to be on her forelegs. This explained why she couldn't stand up normally for long. Her arms had become her most powerful legs.

Gregoria took a tentative step forward. It felt like pointing at the carpet with her hand and finger. She moved her other arm forward too. A quick step with one rear leg, and then the other, finished the job. She had moved six inches. This was not the answer.

Briefly, Gregoria considered trying to stand upright again, but dismissed it. Her body just wasn't built to walk like that anymore. The sinking realization that this could not possibly be a hallucination began to tear at her fragile stability. With effort, she pushed rising panic back down, and sniffed until she had her tears under control. Whatever this was, whatever had happened, Gregoria resolved to beat it. She would beat this muffin thing, and that was all there was to it.

How to proceed, then? Crawling seemed a natural place to begin an understanding of quadrupedal locomotion, so Gregoria attempted to use her limbs as if she were on hands and knees. This proved very serviceable, if a bit clumsy, and soon she was moving carefully about her bedroom. As she rounded the bed she found herself facing the standing full-length mirror. She could not yet see herself, which was a blessing she felt. Still, it was something that had to be faced, sooner or later. Gathering her courage, she approached the angle where her reflection would appear.

Her head was large and round, with a short, narrow muzzle. It looked odd, somewhat more like a foreshortened dolphin nose than that of a proper horse. Her eyes were enormous, the size of small grapefruits. Their appearance unnerved her terribly, and she had to look away, avoiding her own violet gaze for some time, as she studied the rest of her body in the mirror. Finally, she dared to face her own countenance again.

It was so very difficult to look into her own eyes. When she finally willed herself to stare directly into her own reflection, the realization that this was truly her, that this body was truly her body, became inescapable. That was why it had been so difficult. Looking into her new, huge purple eyes, she saw that they belonged to her. That was her in there, this was her form now, this was real, utterly, inescapably real. The tears came, welling up and gushing down her cheeks.

When she finally had her sobbing almost under control, a new problem made itself known. She needed to pee. She needed to pee quite badly in fact, and all the denial would not make that demand go away. Gregoria had been dreading this since the moment she had slid off the bed and the need had first announced itself. It could no longer be ignored.

Gregoria moved to the bathroom. She had no idea at all how to use her new plumbing - and there was no question that her plumbing had been altered as much as the rest of her. She regretted not trying to look under her tail when she had been by the mirror. She decided not to try to return, since the need was becoming critical now. Should she sit on the toilet seat? Could she? It felt like her need to urinate was coming from behind her, farther behind than normal. She briefly wondered if she now urinated from her rear end. It felt like it... only not. She couldn't tell where things were, except vaguely.

Facing the toilet was not doing any good. Gregoria backed up, carefully turned around - ow, bending to turn in the small bathroom made her need to pee even more - and finally put her bottom against the rim of the toilet seat.

Now what?

Gregoria tried to figure out how to get her rear end onto the seat. Her bottom was nearly even with the seat, just a bit above it. She lifted her left back leg and tried to straddle the toilet. She found herself half-on and half off the seat, and worse yet, her tail had fallen into the water. She lifted her tail, the wetness of the tail hair trapped against her bottom and the seat itself, drawing against her nether regions. Oh, that was cold. And wet. And gross.

Her tail off to the side - good lesson there, she decided - she tried to wriggle the rest of her bottom up onto the seat by putting all of her weight on her forelegs. A shock of pain hit her as her rather tender nipples scraped over the plastic edge - she had forgotten their new location. The pain caused everything to let go, and she could not stop herself as her bladder emptied itself. With shame and horror, she could hear liquid splashing against the underside of the lifted seat cover, and draining down to splatter partially on the floor. Apparently her urethra pointed more back than down in this position.

It was too much.

When she was done, there was no feeling of relief, just horror. She had made a mess of herself and her bathroom, and she felt reduced to the status of a small foal, unable to take care of itself. Only she was twenty-six, and her mother would not stand for her peeing all over the toilet like some drunken frat girl. A low moan escaped her muzzle, a wail of hopelessness and utter despair. The moan became a cry, and then the cry became a plaintive, ululating whinny.

Gregoria stood there, her hindquarters still raised up, laying across the toilet seat, howling, for some endless time. Eventually she returned to herself, brought back to some semblance of reason by a sudden thought. She needed to clean up before the others got back. At the very least, she needed to get down and dry herself off.

With effort, she brought her hindquarters down off the seat, though she did manage to scrape herself again. Her oddly positioned nipples felt raw, her nether regions were cold and wet, and her tail was sopping, and there was a puddle spreading on the floor. It would be so easy to just collapse, to give in, to let her mother send her away to some place where perhaps they would simply put her to sleep like the animal she had become.

No! Gregoria shook her head, her dark mane swishing about her withers. Late one night, she had heard her mother and father arguing about their daughters being forced to live at home. She had heard her mother say that they hadn't tried hard enough, that Greta was lazy and that Gregoria didn't take life seriously enough. Those words had burned inside Gregoria. Not a speck of it was the least bit true. There just weren't any jobs, not any that paid well enough to afford both food and a place to live. The jobs were just gone. Gregoria had tried so hard, so very hard. Greta had nearly killed herself doing three part-time jobs, one after the other, every day, and it still hadn't been enough. She did take life seriously. And Greta was anything but lazy.

Gregoria snorted, loudly. Then she wondered why she had done it. It just felt natural, and it felt somehow satisfying. This... thing, whatever it was... it was not going to beat her. One step at a time. That is how to conquer any problem. One step at a time.

The toilet paper spooled out onto the floor with only a few flicks of a hoof. When a large mass had accumulated, Gregoria pushed it about with her right hoof, soaking up her splattered urine on the floor. She pondered, for a bit, over how she would get the sodden mess into the trash bin - there was too much to dare put into the toilet. It would clog it up. Finally, she sat down on her haunches, raised herself upright, and used her forelegs like arms. She pinched the mass of damp toilet paper between her hooves and lifted it, then put the bundle into the bin. Done. In time, it would dry out, at the very least, it could be thrown out. She used much less toilet paper, carefully wrapped around her forehoof like a bandage, to wipe off the inside of the toilet seat cover, and the seat itself. Then she scraped the paper off one hoof using the other, into the trash bin.

Gregoria eyed the bathtub. She should have used this from the start, she realized. In the future, she would. Right now, she needed to clean herself. It did not seem prudent to actually take a bath. She was covered with hair, now, her whole body, and it would probably take forever to get dry. Instead, she chose just to rinse her bottom, and her tail.

The handle was a dial-type, which made controlling the water relatively easy. Batting at the handle part of the dial, Gregoria managed to get the water running, and even to set a decent temperature, which she checked with the area just above her hoof. It felt like her first knuckle. She tried to remember the proper name for such a thing on a pony. The pastern? Fetlock? One of those two, she felt fairly certain. In any case, she could feel with it, and that was what mattered.

When the water was ready, Gregoria laboriously turned around and moved her hindquarters into position. The water ran over her, and using the sensation of it, she began to map out her new construction. As far as she could tell, at the top was her tail. Just under that was her anus, and below that her vaginal opening. From what she could determine, everything felt like it was in the same relationship and orientation as when she was human, just slid much further back, and up, closer to the tail.

That was a relief. She knew nothing about horses or ponies, and she had been worried that she could have been all sorts of mixed up different back there. It seemed just the same, only repositioned slightly. That would be very easy to verify, using the mirror. She decided to do so, when she got out of the tub.

The water off, Gregoria took her towel in her teeth and pulled it down from the rail it had been draped over. Suddenly, she was faced with a puzzle. Her neck was very long, and very sinuous, but there was no way she could reach far enough back to dry herself. How in the world was she supposed to take care of such things?

Finally, she settled for laying the towel down in the empty tub and rubbing her hindquarters over it. This was very clumsy indeed, and not entirely satisfactory - the towel kept sliding and moving until she trapped it under her rear hooves - and she ultimately resigned herself to air-drying the rest of the way.

Frustrated from the effort, she left the towel over the edge of the tub, and exited the bathroom. A quick check in the mirror, twisting first one way, and then the other, looking as best she could over her own back confirmed her theories about her under-tail construction.

That done, Gregoria rested briefly before facing what was likely to be the most trying task yet. Getting dressed.

Her family could not perceive that she was a pony now. They couldn't see it, they couldn't feel it, it just wasn't real for them. How this was even possible was a mystery that Gregoria could not even begin to speculate about. But one thing she had noted - her mother had told her to get dressed. Her mother had seen her as naked. Likely, so had her sister, and her father.

Considering the way they all had acted, it seemed likely that to them she had appeared perfectly normal, as she had been before her transformation, which meant that her coat of golden-yellow hair was entirely invisible to them. It served very well to keep her warm and comfortable, and it felt as if she were dressed already. But to her parents, and almost certainly the outside world as well, she would be a naked human girl. She needed to find a way to get dressed.

Normally, she wore jeans. A quick examination made that a dead end. Even if she could somehow squeeze her new body into her jeans, the legs would be greatly over-long, and she would be reduced to stumbling and tripping over dragging legs. Fortunately, she did have a few skirts that she hadn't worn in years, and that should be fairly easy to adapt.

She picked a knee-length, dark blue knit flare skirt with an elastic waist. It was a terrible skirt, which is why she never wore it, but it had the virtue of appearing dead simple to use. It turned out to not be nearly as simple a matter as she had thought to crawl into it, but once it was past her flanks, and she had scraped it up to her waist with her forehooves and a great deal of determination, it did its essential job. It covered her ass, which, really, was all that could be expected of such a cheap, crappy skirt.

Next came a top, and for that she selected a black, wide-necked, over-sized crop top with no sleeves. The wide neck made putting it on possible at all, but before she began, a realization hit her. She might be able to put the blouse on - but how would she ever take it off again? She had no hands. She had only her teeth to grip with, and she wasn't a unicorn. Oh, everything would be so simple if she had just been turned into a unicorn. Having magic was like having hands. Better than hands, she reckoned - what she had seen of Friendship Is Magic suggested that unicorns could put on clothing in a burst of light. Gregoria had become what the show called an 'earthpony' - strong and tireless, but incapable of magical spells.

The blouse was a trap. If she crawled inside it, she would have no way to pull it back off without help. Greta would probably be willing to assist her, a few times, with enough demanding, but not indefinitely. There had to be something else. But what?

It was spring. Still a little chilly, but not actually cold. It would seem odd, perhaps, but she might get away with it. Gregoria went for her tube-top. It, like the skirt, was just a simple thing, easy to get onto her body, and simple enough to work off. But where should she actually put it?

Gregoria's breasts now resided close to her legs, roughly in what, as a human, had been her crotch. Was she supposed to wear a tube top over or under a skirt? Would that even make sense to however it was that other people seemed to see her? Or should she try to work it over her flat, muscular chest - 'barrel', that was the pony name for it, 'barrel' - and just assume that others would rationalize the physical location as proper, somehow? Considering the length and angle of her new neck - with her head raised, her throat took the front position equivalent to a human chest - maybe she should just wear the tube top as a choker? How did this odd disconnection of perception even work?

Shoes - she didn't even want to contemplate shoes right now. That just seemed impossible. Tube top. OK, what if...

The sound of the front door opening, and of her family coming home interrupted her. They seemed happier, and from what she could hear they had spent the afternoon at the mall, shopping. Oh, my - it was late, nearly four in the afternoon. It had taken her most of the day just to figure out how to pee and to get a skirt on. To be fair, much of the time had been wasted crying and feeling grief for the loss of her body and her human life. Gregoria felt fear again - if her mother caught her still undressed, there would be questions.

Feet tromped up the stairs. "Greggie? How are you doing?" Mother had apparently shifted from her earlier anger into concern once more. She was coming up to check on things. Not good.

Panicked, Gregoria did the only thing she could think of - she began sticking her head through the tube top, occasionally whacking her head with her hooves as she scrambled to work it down her neck. Her plan was to try to wriggle her hooves through it when it was low enough and place it over her barrel, her pony chest, where her breasts would have been, had she still been human. It seemed a reasonable thing.

Gregoria had the tube top around the base of her neck as she sat in front of the mirror when her mother entered the room. "Gregoria? I have a little something for you. We went to the mall and..."

Gregoria lowered her forehooves to the floor, and looked up at her mother, the tube top a crumpled, distorted ring around her thick, pony neck. Her mother stared at her, then looked around the room.

"Anyway, as I was saying, I got you a present. Cinnabon. We got a half-dozen at the mall, and I made sure a couple didn't have frosting, just for you." Gregoria held her breath as she stared at her mother. Her mother looked back at her. "It's good to see you wearing a skirt again! I always thought you looked good in a skirt. Isn't it still too cold for that?" A finger pointed at the disheveled ring of tube-top around Gregoria's equine neck.

"Uh... n-no. Actually, I feel kind of warm." That was true enough, Gregoria was sweating under her coat from the exertion of trying to wriggle into human clothing.

Gregoria's mother walked over and put a hand to her daughter's poll. "Hmm... you do feel a little warm. Maybe you're coming down with something. Maybe that's it." She thought for a moment. "You should take a couple of vitamin 'C's just to be on the safe side, OK hon?"

Gregoria swallowed and softly nickered. "U-h-huh... uhuh, sure. I'll do that." She tried to smile.

"Oh, you should really make your bed, Greggie. You're not a little girl anymore." Gregoria's mother turned and moved to the door. "Pork chops tonight... your favorite! Now hurry up and make your bed, OK?" With that, she was gone.

Gregoria let out a burst of air, relieved. Whatever prevented her parents from seeing what she truly was had fairly simple rules. She just had to get the clothing on, more or less, and other people would see what they wanted to see. Or what they were forced to see. That was a thought. How was any of this happening? Then again, how was it even possible to be transformed at all?

Gregoria turned and regarded herself once more in the mirror. A golden yellow cartoon-styled pony with a black mane and tail. Blue-black, really. And violet, maybe purple, eyes. Wearing a really crappy skirt that did not fit in the least, and a tube-top around her neck. Sweet Cinnabon, this was messed up. Hee.

Hee, hee hee! Gregoria laughed, for the first time since she had awakened to her living nightmare. Sweet Cinnabon. Actually, that did sound really good. Gregoria realized that she was starving. Thirsty, too. She hadn't had breakfast or lunch, she hadn't had anything to eat or drink all day. That could be remedied easily enough. She decided to get water from the sink faucet in the bathroom. She could practice, to make sure drinking wasn't weird or something. She felt pretty sure drinking water would be normal enough. Ponies on the show used cups and mugs and she was definitely a 'Friendship Is Magic' pony.

She had survived the day thus far. She hadn't ended up in a looney bin, or in Secret Area S4 where all the Grey Aliens supposedly were, so that was a win. She had mastered making people think she was dressed, more or less. She still didn't know about shoes yet.

For the first time, Gregoria felt genuine hope. She had survived the day despite everything. If she could keep it together, there was a real possibility she might be able to find out what had happened to her, and how to get it reversed. She wasn't a genius, but she wasn't stupid either. There was hope. If there was an answer to this, then there was a real chance now to find it. She was still loose in the world, nobody saw her as a pony - which meant she was free to move about and seek answers. And she had proved that she could take care of herself. Clumsily, but still - there was hope. Real hope.

Her friend Rachel - Rachel was always going on about how she wished she could be a pony and live in Equestria. She wrote weird fanfiction and collected toys and... if only she knew. If only she knew just how terrible it truly was, to be a pony in a world built for humans.

Or really, to be a pony at all.