A distant light. Like a star, shining brightly in the night sky. Steadily growing, until it became more than just a distant light, filling my vision like an exploding supernova going on right in front of my eyes.
Son of a bitch did it hurt though!
Apparently, being conscious during the first time you actually see anything outside your mother’s womb was not a pleasant experience!
After my eyes adjusted by blinking the pain away, I managed to start seeing fuzzy shapes along with bright white lights, similar to those white neon lights most school classrooms have.
I didn’t get much time to adjust to my new eyes and recovering eyesight, as my new unicorn mother decided that now was the time to speak up.
“What in the world is that thing?!” she shouted since apparently, she didn’t quite get the memo that giving birth to a foal would, in fact, result in her having a foal.
Astonishing, honestly.
Nevertheless, the doctors were quick to attempt to calm her down. According to them, most foals didn’t quite look like they should after coming out of the womb, so they assured her that after a quick clean up, I would look much better. I was then promptly grabbed and taken to a nice table, where I was rapidly scrubbed with some towels.
In most stories that I’d read involving becoming a foal, the general issue was that the human-turned-foal in question usually had difficulty containing their usual adult habits, which landed them in a very awkward position as ponies were not used to precocious foals and as such were weirded out by the ex-human’s attitude and ‘approach’ to problems.
Mainly swearing, like Gordon Ramsay during one of his better episodes.
Having known that Equestria might not be so nice as to give me the classic ‘Everfree Forest’ start-off point, I had tried to mentally prepare for the potential years of my life that I was going to have to spend at least trying to pretend to be a small child, or foal in this case. Looking back at it, my preparations were nowhere near thorough enough.
After being cleaned and finally put in front of a mirror, I examined my new body…
And mentally groaned in disbelief.
I was the most boring pony imaginable! Oh, sure, I wasn’t a brown stallion with brown hair, but I ended up being almost exactly the opposite of exciting! My new coat was grey, while my mane was a slightly darker grey. My eyes were, thankfully, not gray but rather a light blue, giving my new body some semblance of color. Now, I realize that I looked similar to the Discorded mane six did back in the second season premiere, but that didn’t come to me at the time.
After my brief examination of my coloring, I noticed that my hairstyle (mane style?) was a fairly standard stallion cut with bangs, similar to Big Mac’s mane style. To my dismay, I also noticed the lack of horn protruding from my forehead, but I quickly tried to stop thinking about it, as negativity wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Sadly, I failed my mental strength roll, so I still ended up thinking about how much my plans for my ‘Equestrian Life’ had been completely derailed by what seemed to be sheer dumb luck.
After the cleanup, I was taken back to the ‘loving’ embrace of my mother. By which I mean, well…
“What is this? Where is my foal!” She shouted while looking angrily at the doctors and nurses around her, as if desperately hoping one of them would clarify the mistake.
“Um, excuse me ma'am, but that IS your foal,” said a particularly brave stallion who, as far as I could tell, had probably helped her during the process of my birth.
“But, but this isn’t my filly! There has to be a mistake! I was shown the magical scans, this was supposed to be my beautiful little princess! Instead, I get...this?” She questioned, apparently deciding that I was so disgusting in her eyes that I didn’t actually deserve to be treated as a regular pony, but instead as an object. Talk about objectification, although I was sure it was supposed to go backwards…
“I am sorry for the magical scans’ failure ma'am, but I can assure you that this is a perfectly healthy young earth pony colt, and I’m sure that a small mistake such as this-” the doctor was interrupted by the sound of the door almost being blown off it’s hinges by a male unicorn with a crazed look in his eyes.
He was a strange one, to be sure. He actually looked fairly similar to Prince Blueblood, with his golden mane and white coat, but he had a mustache that would probably make Admiral Bobbery proud, and he also had not one but two golden monocles, as if he was so fancy that two were required. He also, strangely, had two watches on each of his forehooves.
“I have already been informed by the nurses, what happened to our filly dear?!” He shouted, apparently having been informed that something had gone wrong, but not the specifics.
“Oh, my dear Golden Watch, of all the worst things that could happen, this is the WORST! POSSIBLE! THING!” She exclaimed, apparently having decided that Rarity wasn’t the only one who got to use those lines. By this point, my slightly abused foal ears were starting to hurt.
“What happened? Did her horn get damaged during the procedure! Are her magical reserves too small! IS SHE NOT PINK?!” My pony father had strange priorities. He went ahead and started comforting her, apparently somehow ignoring the fact that I was still being held on by the very tip of her hooves as if she wanted to do nothing more than drop me, but had to keep up appearances to avoid a scene.
“NO, IT’S WORSE! It’s this...THING!” My apparently not so loving mother screamed. Only then did it seem to register in Golden Watch’s mind that he should probably see what it was she was holding. After a single glance at my not-so-pink-body his brain seemed to hold up the “Out to Dinner” sign, because he promptly collapsed in the middle of the room.
Half an hour later, my new father recovered from his ‘small’ fainting issue and was trying to understand the situation from one of the doctors, who ironically enough was a pegasus named Heart Monitor.
“So, let’s me see if I understand,” said Golden Watch, “my beautiful darling Silver Lining had a fantastic birth procedure, correct? There were no issues with both ends of that operation?”
“Yes, the procedure went exactly as planned and there were no issues with either the foal or his mother throughout,” explained Heart Monitor, making sure to keep his voice calm and steady in order to try to avoid having my father suffer another heart attack.
“And despite that, this was the end result?” He asked, staring at me while I tried to subtly listen in to their conversation. It was sort of difficult, since the nurse that was currently holding me was facing away from them, but I managed.
“Yes. We are still unsure as to why the magical scan was incorrect when scanning the foal, but he is a healthy young colt who is now under your care.”
“I see…” Golden Watch said. He seemed to be thinking about something. I couldn’t really tell since I was sort of being fed with a small pink milk bottle my parents had brought before coming, but there was definitely a long pause.
“Well, since there isn’t anything else to it, I suppose we will have to deal with this. We shall take this…’foal’ and be on our way then.” His voice sounded...different. Resolute perhaps, but also something more sinister. I couldn’t quite tell from my position.
“Wait! While we have applied most of the injections, the foal will need to avoid dangerous diseases; both him and your wife are not fit to travel at the moment!” The doctor was apparently not happy about my father’s seemingly out-of-nowhere decision to leave.
“Do not worry, we will leave on a carriage and I’ll be sure my wife doesn’t get jostled too much. She will have much bed rest at our mansion and I’ll be sure to order our maids to treat her delicately until her body recovers,” he assured the medical professional proudly, apparently happy to be able to flaunt his wealth in front of the stallion that he seemed to have a personal problem with. Perhaps he thought the doctor had failed to bring his filly to life?
“Well...If you’re sure. Just make sure the foal drinks plenty of milk as it is quite essential to his future growth. I should inform you though that as an earth pony, he should already have the muscles required for him to walk short distances as long as he’s not pushed too far. Give him a few weeks and he’ll be able to run as well as most other ponies!” The pegasus said, apparently trying to sell the fact I was an earth pony as a positive thing to my father, who as far as I could interpret from my...limited contact with him, didn’t seem too happy about it.
“Oh, don’t worry about him, he’ll be just fine,” the unicorn told him, finally able to cope with the fact he’d had a colt instead of a filly. I mean, I understood that the pony gender ratio had to be skewed from the evidence presented to us by the show, but surely it wasn’t that bad?
“Come on dear, we’re leaving,” my father told my mother, who was apparently recovered enough to stand up and, with a look that said, ‘why do I have to do this?’, levitate me along with her. This being the first time my entire body was levitated, I tried to get a feel for it, but it honestly just felt like I was floating in midair in defiance of gravity. I tried to move and realized that I could spin myself around if I wanted to, but not actually fall down.
Now that my eyesight was back to normal, for pony standards, I could actually use my new vantage point to see more of the hospital as we left. For one, there was my mother, a pink pony similar in coat color to Princess Cadence, but her mane was white with a silver streak going through it. If I had to compare her mane style to any other pony’s, I’d probably go with Lyra Heartstrings as she was called in the fandom, but even that wasn’t really it.
Aside from her, I could see the nurse and doctor ponies who strangely enough were wearing no sort of hoof covering. Did ponies not know about the sort of dangers that came with having their medical staff not use some sort of hoof glove while operating? Maybe ponies simply didn’t have infections? Magic? I resolved to ask sometime.
Of course as soon as I started spinning, my mother seemed to realize what I was doing and, with a small crease in her eyebrows, stopped me, basically forcing my body to stay still. This was something that caught my attention: while it was possible for her to easily levitate a small foal body like mine, she had to put in extra concentration if she wanted to completely paralyze me. I decided to store this bit of information for later, as it could prove useful.
As the carriage galloped down the streets of Canterlot, I took this as an opportunity to look around. It was raining quite heavily, which made it difficult to see, but I could tell that Canterlot was nothing like a human city at all…
First of all, it seemed like there were two different types of streets; simple pony streets and carriage streets. Unlike Earth back in the late 1800s however, there were more pony walking streets than carriage streets, so there wasn’t actually all that much traffic. Instead, I got to see the crowds of ponies trotting alongside each other, some going one way and others the opposite. Since it was raining out, most of them were unicorns levitating umbrellas above their heads.
A third of them had their noses sticking up, as if they couldn’t see the logic in looking in front of you while walking. I hoped that I never was forced to walk like that someday, imagine the neck pain from having to go around like that for hours! Not to mention the pain of inevitable collision. Maybe my new family could teach me how to walk without looking forward! Maybe once I became a professional, I could find a way to not hit ponies while my eyes were closed!
While I was having my small rant at the presumed neck pain of being a snotty Canterlot pony, my unicorn parents were having a discussion I would later really wish I’d listened to fully.
“...we can’t come back home like this!” I heard Silver Lining whisper to Golden Watch.
“Well dear, we’ll have to...it should be all right...it won’t be the first or...” he was clearly better at whispering than my pink colored mother, because I couldn’t quite catch everything he was saying.
“But dear, imagine what the neighbors will say! What about my parents?” She suddenly exclaimed, not seeming to realize that they had been whispering for a reason.
“It’ll be alright. Anything would be better than returning home without...“ he suddenly paused, deep in thought. “Hmm, I suppose we should give it a name, shouldn’t we? It IS tradition, and despite how unnecessary it will be in a few moments, my father did tell me that tradition was key to our family.
As you would imagine by this point, I was really confused. They seemed prepared to actually give me a pony name, although I imagined that would have happened in the hospital had the drama over me not being ‘pink’ been resolved quicker. I didn’t understand why he thought it didn’t matter though.
As far as my research into the subject went in canon, it seemed that pony cutie marks and special talents were somehow related to the name. Rainbow Dash has a cutie mark with a rainbow lightning bolt, Twilight Sparkle has a starburst, and even Fluttershy has a group of butterflies. Because of this, the only logical conclusion was that a pony’s name was somehow linked to that pony’s destiny. Maybe the ponies hadn’t realized this yet?
It was only after I had finished my thoughts on pony name importance that I noticed the carriage had stopped in the middle of a seemingly random street. Didn’t my new snobby parents brag about living in a mansion? Perhaps I had misheard, although I doubted it considering how many times Silver Lining complained about how they “hadn’t gotten to the mansion yet" since we climbed unto the carriage.
I felt myself being levitated by magic again, although this time it actually had a noticeable color to it: gold. Because of this, and the aura of magic around his horn, I intelligently deduced that I was being levitated by my father. His purple eyes then met my light blue ones, and he said:
“Goodbye, Lost Hope.”
I was then magically tossed upwards, out of the carriage and into the air like the tartarus spawn my parents thought I was.
As I soared through the cold rain towards the hard pavement below, I only really had time one thought:
‘Out of all names, why did you pick the edgiest one possible?!’
Then I hit the ground.