You know, I thought today would’ve been a normal day.
Go to school, nearly fall asleep during some classes, watch my favourite TV shows. Hang out with friends, have fun, do some sports. That sort of thing.
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Must’ve been a car crash! I was probably crossing some street without looking both ways before I was run over just as I was leaving school. Or how about slipping and falling? Maybe even getting attacked?
Heh, I wish it were that simple.
Because to be perfectly frank, I had no idea how I went from writing my first real venture into fiction to free-falling through the air.
So yeah, shock value and all that. For a few seconds, I just blinked as I stared at the spinning world around me before I realized why it was spinning in the first place. Flailing my arms and legs, I screamed.
“Gyaaaaaaaaaah!’ I shrieked.
Wait, why did my voice sound higher pitched?
Yeah, dude. You’re here falling to your potential death and the first thing you think is how much higher your voice is. I felt the need to smack myself in the face, but the action was thankfully delayed by the situation at hand.
(What the hay!? Why can’t I move? Did I break something? Did a tranq dart hit me?”)
Oh, and there’s also a voice in the back of my head now too.
Wait.
“What the heeeeeeeeeck!” I shouted into the wind. I then saw the tan furry leg-things that now make up my arms. You know, maybe if this were a normal situation, I might’ve been rational. I might've thought “Hey, look, I’m a pony now!” Obviously, I took it as well as any other person would.
“Holy fricking frack what heck is wrong with my fracking me what the fuuuuuuuuunk?!?”
Oh, fun fact! I don’t swear either.
(Wings! Use your stupid wings!)
There’s that voice again. Maybe I should’ve noticed them earlier, but hey, I was panicking! Almost reflexively, I stretch my new extra appendages without thinking and immediately shoot from a drop to a sharp glide. The pain from the sudden force against the raging wind stung but the adrenaline pumping through my veins dulled the feeling, instead only pushing me to panic more.
“Hooooooooly-!”
(Tilt your wings downward twenty degrees!)
I could feel some sort of resistance as my unfamiliar motor control ended up tilting my wings too far. Going from a drastic descent to an incline, I began to frantically flap my wings.
(What are you doing? I said stretch them out! You don’t need to flap them, make use of the thermals! Gah!)
At this point I had already begun to spiral downward as I followed the instruction yet again. This time, we were close enough to the ground for me to not fear for my life. Little blessings, I suppose.
Unfortunately, we were on a direct crash course with a large tree. With nothing but a pith helmet and this odd amulet thing around my new pony neck, there was nothing I knew about to pull a full-stop midair.
Putting my hooves in front of my face and scrunching, I braced for impact.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
(Buck.)
Kr-krrrRRRAAAAAAACK!
THWUMP!
SNAP!
Krshhhhhhhh…
“Nnnghr… uhhh……”
Darkness.
(What… the… buck… oww…)
My head was pounding like crazy. What didn’t help that fact was that I seemed to be dangling upside down, letting all the blood rush to my head. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I had at least a minor concussion and quite possibly-
“Hssssssssss, aahghgaghgh!” I weakly cried as I tried to move my head and open my eyes.
(Aaaaagh!)
And that voice wasn’t really helping. Was I hallucinating? Or was this voice real?
(I’m as real as the body you’ve stolen, dimwit- agh!)
Wait, you can read my thoughts?
(Of course I can, this is my mind!)
I could almost sense this voice grumbling inwardly at my stupidity and I frowned.
Hey, it works both ways! I’m not stupid.
(I’ll think whatever I want, thank you very much.)
Wait.
“I didn’t steal your body!” I said aloud, the action making my head throb a little more. Even still, the different pitch of voice brought shivers down my (new) spine. I could hear the voice hiss as well before I heard it’s voice echo in my mind.
(Then why are you in control, and I in the backseat? I wasn’t born yesterday, flankhole.)
“Hey, now that’s uncalled for. What did I do to deserve that name?” I may be an idiot, but I knew when someone was using a word as a derogatory term.
(You stole my body!)
I sighed. “Not on purpose!”
(A likely story.)
“Who put a stick up your butt?”
(Nopony. You’re just an annoying prick.)
“You don’t know me. How can you judge me by that basis alone?”
(Easy. The fact that you’re still arguing with me and that you stole my body.)
“Stop saying I stole your body!”
(Not until you admit it!)
“I didn’t steal anything!”
(You keep telling yourself that.)
Scowling, I stopped feeding this cancerous little conversation.
(Hey! Calling me cancerous; that’s just wrong!)
Ignoring the voice, I tried opening my eyes again. This time, I squinted hard before breathing in deeply. I cracked my eyes open the slightest and nearly regretted it. The light still burned. But I couldn’t be a wuss about this. With my head pounding, a voice in the back of my head, and everything feeling wrong and disproportionate with my body, opening my eyes could’ve been one of the easier things.
I adjusted to what light I was letting come through, and I slowly opened them more and more before I finally found that I couldn’t open my eyes any further.
I also saw that my vision was wavy and dancing, causing my to nearly shut my eyes again because of the vertigo.
(You done messed me up a good one.)
Don’t you start.
Since my head was hanging limply, I had to tilt my already sore neck and pulsing head up to see where I was hanging from. The pressure I had felt from my legs was congregating right at my right leg, so I focused on trying to look there first. As my eyes finally, painfully corrected themselves after blinking a few times, I saw that my legs were caught in two crooks of branches. Both sets of branches were bending from the excessive amount of weight that was now me.
Oh, and I didn’t have feet anymore.
Hyperventilating, I began to dart my eyes from hoof to hoof.
(Woah, hey, calm down.)
I didn’t have any more feet! I tried the thought of wiggling my toes but the nerves were simply gone. There weren’t any toes to be wiggled. As my neck began to hurt from the action of trying to stare up at my legs, I made a terrifying assumption.
What about my hands?
My head dropped, relieving some of the tension that was hurting my already sore neck, but what came next was a hundred times worse.
My arms now ended in stubs. Or, to put it in a more correct manner, my new forelegs failed to harbour any five-fingered appendages.
“No… hands…” I whispered. I gulped as my new voice caught up to me yet again. “No feet…” The high-pitched and scratchy tone scared me. And then I remembered that I had wings, and I had used them to stop myself from ending up a horrific splatter on the forest floor. Twisting my head and casting my eyes downward (though I guess it would technically be up since I was upside-down), I saw my wings lying limply against my shirt.
I was a pegasus. A fricking pegasus.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay-
(I swear to Celestia, if you pass out for such a stupid reason in my body, I will murder you.)
“How would you like it if you were suddenly in a different body with no idea why you got there, and a voice shouting and yelling at you in the back of your mind to boot?”
(I’d take it like a mare and deal with it.)
“What do you think I’m doing right now, smart-a?”
(Panicking. Hurting us even more than we already are. Arguing. Wasting time.)
“Shut up.”
(You can’t make me!)
“I’ll think something up. Just you watch!”
(I’m counting on it.)
I growl, putting a hoof to my head. “Ugh, I can’t think properly. I must be going crazy.”
(Well, you’re talking to me, aren’t you?)
“You don’t count!”
(Well, let me introduce myself anyways since you seem to only be referring to me as ‘a voice’ or ‘the voice in the back of your head’.)
I scoff. “Like I need to know your name.”
(Hi, everypony, my name is Daring Do and I am currently indisposed as an entity with no brain has stolen my body.)
I squint my eyes at nothing in particular. “I take offense to that.”
(I don’t care.)
“I also have several questions.”
(Could you save them for when we’re not hanging upside down with a migraine from a tree thirteen feet from the ground?)
Almost as if on cue, a small snap could be heard, before several leaves rustled.
Craning my neck to look up at my entrapped hooves, I noticed the branches now had slight fractures near their bases. I watched as the leaves connected to them calmed.
“Oh no,” I whisper, watching my current supports begin to fail.
(Okay. Here’s the deal. You’re going to need to flap your wings and try and get loose before these branches snap.)
“What?” I squeak with her voice and wince. “How am I supposed to do that!?”
Snap.
(Start with unfurling your wings, how about?)
Shakily, I scrunch my muzzle and concentrate as I focus on my new limbs attached to my back. I tried thinking of how I used them earlier, but I couldn’t quite remember. It was all a little fuzzy. With a grumble, I felt my new wings go from slack to taut, and slowly outward.
With a grin, I opened my mouth to announce that I did it when-
Snap!
(Quick! Begin to flap!)
Blinking, I squinted as I thought ‘Move, wings, move!’. It didn’t do much, as my wings began to move in a stiff manner, pivoting more than flapping.
(You have to relax. Make it feel natural! You won’t be flying anytime soon with such bad form!)
“Give me a break, this is my first time in the history of never that I’ve had wings, much less attempt to fly!”
SNAP.
(You would do well to bucking hurry, idiot.)
I attempted to flap a little more competently, but to no avail. I only ended up with jerky flaps that were still not fast enough to get me nothing more than little pushes of wind.
(You’re worse than a newborn foal.)
“Keep encouraging me,” I said through gritted teeth, “It’s helping a lot.”
(Now now, no need to get sassy. Just keep following what I’ve said before-)
Turns out, the slight jiggles I was causing as I was swinging from my wing flapping was only putting more stress on the already-splintering branches. As I tried one more time, I heard the most haunting sound at that moment.
CRACKA-SNAP!
I sighed as I went limp, knowing it was useless to do anything at this point.
(Whelp, slap a star on your forehead. You tried.)
“Whatever.”
And thus, the branch broke.
As the ground approached, I was able to disentangle myself from the branch I had been lodged with while Daring Do in the back of my mind provided a quick commentary on my incompetence.
(And here we see the wild Idiot, falling to their painful mossy demise. They tried their best in escaping the situation, but ended up failing spectacularly because this particular Idiot had never seen a pair of functioning wings in it’s entire life- hey, is that my pith helmet?)
And just like that, I hit the ground and blacked out. As the world instantly faded around me, I could hear Daring thoughtfully contemplate something.
(Heh, one thing’s for sure. This’ll make for one hell of a book.)