//------------------------------// // A Look Back - 2 // Story: Welcome to Batstralia // by Damaged //------------------------------// Language check. Anything wrapped in < > in this chapter is spoken Batstralia, everything else is in English. Roy eyed the stallion. Looking almost identical, age wise, Roy had been surprised to find out that they had both been through the same thing, backwards. "I still don't know how this could even happen." When the stallion raised an eyebrow critically, Roy sighed and nodded. "Yeah, I do know. Everyone knows; that's why it's called The Knowing. But I'm a doctor, this,"—Roy pointed at herself with a hoof—"isn't possible!" "Right. Nothing like this is remotely possible without magic." Rose gave the best and most reassuring smile he could. "That said, people are turning into ponies, and soon the whole country will. Those ponies are still going to need medical help." "I'm not that kind of doctor." Roy had explained this to a lot of people, and it never ceased to grate each new time it happened. "I study blood, and things that infect it. I don't help sick people; I find out what is messing them up so others can help them." "So if you're not a doctor, why call yourself one?" Settling his notebook down, Rose limbered up his right wing and gripped an oversize pen with his wing-claw. The question got Roy's hackles up. "Do you want this story or not?" Rose held up a wing (not the one holding his pen) in a placating gesture. "Sorry. Yeah I do. I just think it would be a good idea to get all these stories written down." "So where should I start?" Still a little annoyed at Rose's slights, Roy lay down and got comfortable. She might be a bit upset still, but she wholeheartedly agreed with what Rose was doing. "Start where you think you need to." Despite Roy not having actually started, Rose was already writing on the first page. "Liz, can I ask you something?" I was nervous as all hell. Shifting in my seat reminded me why I should feel nervous. She turned and looked at me with a critical eye. "Is this work related? Because I swear, Roy, when you volunteered to help me with this study, I expected you to not make it actually take longer than I could have alone." I had to push on. Despite Liz's complaints, I know she actually enjoyed talking while she worked; she was just a little annoyed she hadn't cracked the case yet. The up and coming toxicologist, the star player of the team who had caught the cause of the last two cases quickly, was coming up empty-handed. "Well, suppose for a second that they're not tripping on some kind of hallucinogen. What if this is something physical?" "Like mass-hypnosis?" Despite her earlier protest, Liz lifted her head from her work and looked at me. Her red hair framed her freckled face perfectly, with only the chic, modern glasses she wore to break up her beauty. She realized I was staring, and smiled. "I told you, work time is for work. If you want to get frisky, we both need to be on break." "Can't blame a guy for admiring something beautiful." I just grinned at her eye-roll. "But I'm serious here. What say, hypothetically speaking, such an incident happened and it was all true?" Shifting on my seat again, I felt the tail—my tail—move. "And we couldn't find anything?" Liz lifted her hands from her keyboard and tapped her chin in thought. "Then I would have Dr. Chase ramp up his part of the investigation. Look, Roy, you need to at least give me hypotheticals that don't result in 'Everybody is nuts.'" Taking a deep breath, I knew I had to go a step further, or Liz would just blow this off as nothing. "Standard protocol is that the team truck in its own water and food. That they maintain minimal contact with the subjects. What happens if a member of the team starts having the same symptoms, had no contact, and was living on MREs and bottled water?" "Then whatever they have must be airborne, communicated by another team member, or some kind of radiation sickness. These delusions don't just appear in healthy humans." Liz looked at me, and I saw the exact moment when her mind ticked over, and she started looking at me as if I were a possible subject. "I guess you're right." I said it, calm and even, but on the inside I had reached blind panic. "I gotta stretch my legs. All this data entry has been so thrilling, but I might have to just go for a walk." I jumped to my feet, felt my tail tuck down tightly, and made for the door. "Roy?" Liz's voice stopped me in my tracks; she sounded confused and more than a little worried. "Are you sure you're okay? This must be really getting to you." I couldn't look back at Liz, she would see the fear in my eyes. "All play and no work makes Roy something-something." She let out a little laugh. "Go crazy?" "I hope not." I jumped down the stairs at the back of the semi-trailer, and made my way toward the target area: Cowwarr. "And then I met up with Dr. Robertson. She—she put it in perspective." Roy looked at Rose's puzzled expression. "What?" "I wasn't there for that." Rose shook his wing and wiggled his thumb a little. "So give it all to me." "She didn't judge me. I got into such a manic state of mind, but when she sat me down and just told me everything, I listened and just…" Roy fished for a word to continue. Rose brought his wing back down and returned to writing. "Joyce's special talent is taking care of those who need it. There's no wonder that when your problem was being in a panic, she eased it." Roy nodded. "Probably helped her daughter slipped me tea instead of coffee. I got the first mouthful down before I even realized, and by then she was gone. If you ever want to see the difference between my kind of doctor, and someone who makes people better, look to Dr. Robertson. "So I was trapped, completely caught at work. Liz had her voice recorder on all the time, and despite us normally sharing a bed, she wouldn't go near me after that." Roy got a silly grin on her face. "Don't let anyone ever tell you make-up sex isn't the best. Strange, though." Rose's ears twitched, and his tufts flicked just a little. "Being a girl, you mean?" "Well… yeah." Thinking back to the previous night, Roy's face curled into a silly grin. "She—he—was a little distracted after the change, but The Knowing helped. The others weren't so calm, mostly because almost all of them had turned into mares—and if you have never seen the look on a chauvinist's face when he becomes a woman, you are missing out." "So. You're back together with Dr. Clark?" Rose's paused his writing: this was more gossip than fact. "Epically." It didn't take much for Roy to think back to the previous evening. "She always used to complain that I was only after her because she was hot as all get-out, had a smokin' mind, and could read me like a book. I proved to him that none of it mattered, that I loved him." "I didn't do so well with my own version of that situation. She still likes girls, I can't think of being with one." Rose wore a stunned expression for a few moments. He let out a sigh. "Sorry for unburdening, I just—" "Nah, it's cool. I've told you all kinds of stuff about Liz I wouldn't tell anyone else. You're just easy to talk to, I guess." Roy paused a moment to gather her thoughts, and to try to steer the conversation away from personal matters. "Okay, so was that all you needed?" Rose tapped his chin with his oversize pen, and gave a soft, indistinct chitter. "Actually, since you said how it was interesting, what happened when The Knowing blew through?" I had pony ears, a tail, and even fur covering patches of my body. Looking in the mirror revealed the true strangeness of it, but when you thought life had gotten freaky enough, it proved you wrong. "Are you seeing it again?" Liz's voice came from her own bunk. We shared the truck-trailer with the blood-work equipment on it—since our specialties both relied on it—and had built a pair of bunks at one end. It was about as cozy as any medium caravan, but we had no privacy from each other. I had finally given in. Under the stipulation that she is the only one to see the notes, I had let Liz test me. "Yeah. Tail, ears… All still there." Turning my head, I looked at Elizabeth. She had the most adorable, tufted pony ears sticking up from her head, although she hadn't grown a tail yet. But she was still blind to it all. "Do you ever not see them?" Her tone held more worry than scientific curiosity. I shook my head to her. "They're there. They're part of me." "And you said you see them on others? What about the locals?" Liz kept herself inches away from referring to the people of Cowwarr as subjects. When I nodded to her, Liz blew out a sigh. "Well, you said you wanted to try some kinky stuff. Would a straight jacket do?" I barked a laugh at her tone. She was using playfulness to cover her worry. Sitting down on my bunk, I was careful to pull my tail to the side. "Oh, of course. One for each of us. I get one because I see ponies everywhere." Liz jerked upright. "What? Why do I get one?" "Because despite me going loonie-bin crazy, you still love me." I reached out my hand and booped her on the nose. I noticed the odd coloration in my fingers, and the slight stiffness in them. Of course Dr. Robertson had given me the talk about the progression of the changes, but I didn't think they would happen quite so quickly. I stared as my hand reshaped, squeezing together and melding into a hoof. Glancing past my hoof at Liz, I saw the fur of her ears migrate down, and a big mane of hair fluff out her normal red into a rich gray-speckled russet. "Liz? I think something stranth ith hafafaf…" My mouth was shifting, changing quickly. Teeth reshaped, my tongue seemed to lengthen before my entire face did. Then I felt it. The Knowing. We stared at each other. We had a first-hand (hoof now, I guess) view of what a human turning into a pony looked like. We seemed to shrink rapidly, giving up years of our life. It was all planned, or so I Knew. There were bits and pieces of a young bat pony experiencing the world, and it was mixed with very broad Knowledge. I Knew that not only us, but everyone else in Australia would soon be a bat pony. I Knew that magic was now free. And, I Knew that our little part of the world had just gotten very strange, a lot more dangerous, and utterly fantastic. Lifting my head up from watching Liz change, I suppressed a grin—badly. "." "!" Liz's forehooves flew up to her mouth and traced the line of her snout. "Can I still talk English? Oh, cool." "!" I jumped to my feet, but my feet weren't just feet anymore, and my hips didn't support bipedal movement in exactly the same way a human did. Picking myself up from the floor, I realized that I knew how to stand, move, and walk just fine, and did so. "." I wanted to leave and see what was going on, but at that moment I heard a shocked gasp from Liz. I turned around to look at her, and noticed a lot more of "her" than should have been there. Laying on his back, Liz was staring down at his new equipment. "…" I should have felt shocked at the sight, or the sudden realization that I was lacking that equipment, but something about it just felt right. "?" Liz's head shot up from her inspection, and I saw the most lecherous grin grow across her face. "." I took a step toward her, then another, and then I realized what was going on. We had both been turned into bat-like ponies, had our sexes swapped, a ton of information crammed directly into our heads, and to top it all off, we were about to have sex (that is definitely where my thoughts had been headed, and I knew Liz enough to know it was his too) with no regard for where and what we were. "." I shook my head, symbolically getting rid of the bad thoughts. But my thoughts became muddled again when Liz's lips touched mine. He was firm, insistent, and looked into my eyes with huger behind his. Jerking away from his touch took every ounce of my willpower. "Liz, stop!" I think the only reason my words got through to him was because I had managed to shout in English. If Liz hadn't pulled away right then, I probably wouldn't have been able to resist a second time. We stared at each other for nearly a minute—our lungs heaving. "S-Sorry, Roy. I think I'm a little pent-up." He looked at me, smiled, and rolled his big eyes. I nodded, trying to figure out what it was about Elizabeth (I had to try to feel more detached, and using her full name—even just in my head—helped) that turned me on now. I had been mostly human minutes ago, and had felt desire for human company. Now I couldn't think of anything better than curling up with Liz and— I mentally slapped myself. "You and me both. Liz I—Don't get me wrong, once we have all this worked out and squared away, I would be totally into us again." I gestured to him, then back to myself. "But for now we need to be professional, even though you're super hot." Liz closed his eyes for a moment, and I saw his mouth moving. If there was ever a tell that would let me just know it was Liz, that was it. "It didn't just make us okay with being bat ponies, it made bat ponies fundamentally what we are. I'm trying to think of someone hot, and when I try to think of Brad Pitt, I see a pony. This is really strange." "Until you stop thinking about it." "Really? Now I am thinking about it, I can't stop." Liz's face screwed up, and he suddenly barked with laughter. "It works on everything. Whenever I picture someone as being cute, I think of ponies." That shocked me further. I tried to do the same. I thought of the curve of a woman's chest, of her eyes and mouth, and her tail. Okay, I was freaked out when I kept imagining bits of ponies instead of humans, but then when I thought of how sexy a tail would be, I gasped. "See!" Liz pointed a hoof at me and laughed. We both laughed at the effect for a few minutes, and in that time the sexual tension seemed to fade away. Of course, the laughter would start again when either of us mentioned a part of the body, and we both would inevitably think of the pony version. At last, we stood up, and without another word headed for the back of the trailer. Each piece of equipment was sectioned off by opaque plastic walls, and the way past each section was through a small corridor to one side of them. The back of the truck had its two big doors closed, but the smaller door (human sized) was open. Outside, I moved far enough from the trailer to let Liz down too, and looked around. "They're in operations." Liz pointed with a wing at one of the other trailers. It was obvious in that all the shouting was coming from it. "Do you think it reversed everyone's sex?" I hadn't realized how easy I was moving on four legs, back inside the trailer, but as we made our way over to the noisy trailer I started to marvel even more at how effective The Knowing had been. A particularly loud screech caused my ears to tuck back. "I think it's fairly obvious that at least a few others have. I'm surprisingly okay with it, and I'm pretty sure you are, too Ray. Can you imagine what'd happen if James became a mare? He barely tolerated me on the team, and not because of my skills." Liz's tone betrayed his anger at that, but then it evaporated. "Not anymore!" "?" I started climbing up into the trailer, and poked my head past the plastic curtain. Half a dozen pairs of eyes focused on me. Four mares. Two stallions. As I got all the way in, I had to make room for Liz behind me. "So…" "We have to have been drugged!" one mare screeched. I clamped my ears down tight as the volume rose. The argument regained its momentum, and I suddenly wanted nothing to do with it. Then a single voice cut through the mayhem like a knife through butter. "Pipe down in here!" Elizabeth stomped forward, wading into the shouting match with impressive support behind his voice. "You first!" He pointed a hoof at the loudest bat pony in the room, a mare. "Who are you, and what happened?" It was a marvel. Liz had always been vehement—she had had to be to make it where she was with Dr. Ward as the team's head—but now he was positively commanding. If I weren't in a trailer with six very angry bat ponies, I would have told him how that made me feel. The bat pony Liz had gestured at lifted their chin in a gesture that told me exactly who they were. "I am Dr. James Ward, the leader of Response Team Four." The way she said it spoke volumes for how much the mare was trying to convince herself that it was true. "I was putting the final touches on my review of this mental breakdown, when—" Another bat pony, a stallion, cut in. "When we all turned into bat ponies!" Liz turned his stare on the interrupter, and glared them down. "Dr. Ward was speaking. I don't care how wrong anybodies' hypothesis are, they get their moment to speak. That was the rule of the head of this team." He turned his look back to Dr. Ward, and it was amazing to see the amount of backbone the defense had put in James Ward. "Dr. Ward, I believe this might be a bit more than purely psychological. Do you have any defenses against… new developments?" "I don't foresee any setbacks to the hypothesis. The only thing that has changed is that now we—the research team—are part of those affected." Dr. Ward drew herself up and looked around the others, daring anyone to cut in on her. I had to give her credit, being a chauvinist and turned into a female had to have done something to her head, but The Knowing seemed to have helped there, too. "Dr. Chase hasn't been exposed to the residents of the town, but he seems to be affected, too." I hadn't realized it was me speaking until I clamped my mouth closed on the last word. Dr. Ward looked as smug as a forty-year-old-man in a mare's body could. "Clearly, the agent responsible for this hallucination is either airborne, or we brought it back with us from the town." Now even I wanted to shout at Dr. Ward, but Elizabeth cut through all our potential screeching with just a cleared throat. "Dr. Chase,"—Liz turned to face the stallion who had most vehemently cut in on Dr. Ward earlier—"is there any known chemical that could fit that vector? Something airborne, or able to be transmitted from one subject to another without loss of effect?" Clearly wanting to say a lot more, but holding his mouth for the moment, Dr. Chase shook his head. "Then we can put that hypothesis aside, and consider it discounted for all known probabilities. What else do we have?" It was "Elizabeth" again that looked around the room again, and he saw my wing raised. "Dr. Pendleton?" He was back to "Liz" again. "There is a weight of evidence here that cannot be overlooked. Whether it is just us hallucinating that we are ponies, or not, we need to contact headquarters. This, be it psychological or physical, is spreading." I gave nods to Dr. Ward where appropriate, and got a nod back from her each time. Despite her inability to see the truth, she was a professional, and had been dealing with these sorts of problems while I had been applying to med school. All the ponies mumbled a form of "good idea" around the group, and as one they looked to Liz, who looked back at Dr. Ward. "You're the leading physician, doctor, it's up to you to see this through." Liz gave his brightest smile to Dr. Ward, and the head of our team smiled back just as brightly. Puffing her chest out, Dr. Ward nodded to Liz as if the shift in leadership was nothing more than being passed a coffee. "Thank you, Dr. Clark. I'll make the necessary calls." And with that she made her way to the front of the trailer, and her own office (which doubled as the communications center). With his eyes closed, Dr. Chase let out a held breath. "I'm sorry, everyone, that was unprofessional of me. I don't know what came over me." "I do. You turned into a bat pony, your sex got all mixed up, and you got a pile of knowledge crammed into your head that seems to belong to a young mare," I said. "Orange you glad I came?" Liz's question got a giggle from everyone present. "You had to admit, I was grape!" The giggles turned into laughs, and someone screeched just like a bat, but unlike before, this was a happy sound. We were laughing until Dr. Ward walked back out. I'd had a little experience with emotions on bat pony faces, but the mare who seemed to be the source of The Knowing would have called it shell-shock. She lifted her head and looked around our group, her eyes instantly sobering everyone with their almost-panic. "What's happened, Dr. Ward?" Liz asked. "It's spreading. While I was establishing a secure link to Melbourne, I put in similar requests for contact to every major hospital." Dr. Ward was almost shaking now. I rushed over and put a wing around her shoulders, then guided her down to the one couch in the trailer. She fairly huddled under my wing, and I felt real worry start to rise. "LaTrobe Hospital in Traralgon is dark. Their satellite up-link isn't responding. Melbourne responded, but there weren't any terminals responding." Dr. Ward had never been this scared in any of the years I had known him, and I knew—apart from being turned into a pony—what the culprit was: this was potentially a doomsday scenario. "If this is some form of radiation we haven't encountered before, it could be harming unshielded equipment. Our transmitter is hardened, as is the one in Melbourne I would wager, but a regional hospital wouldn't have need for that." The second stallion of the group that had been here already (third now that Liz was here), had the vocal surety on the subject that only Dr. Firth could possess, our radiation expert and oncologist. "Try north: Sydney. Further west: Adelaide." I kept my voice low, and I had to smile when Dr. Ward's ear perked around at the sound of my voice. Jumping up, she raced back to her office. A bare moment passed before we could hear Dr. Ward's voice from her office, her door having apparently been left open in her rush. "There has been an outbreak. Vector unknown. Full effect unknown. Subjects—subjects mutate rapidly. Some form of radiation is damaging unshielded equipment." A tense pause lengthened, then Dr. Ward cursed bitterly. "Of course I'm telling the damn truth. You think just anyone can access this connection? My name is Doctor James Ward. My registration number is MED1001133512. I am too busy to explain further." We heard her repeat the same information several more times, and with each I felt more relaxed: it hadn't spread much further, or so I hoped. Waiting in silence broken only by Dr. Ward's reports, we were a little surprised when the doctor left her office. "That's the best I can do." Dr. Ward looked drained; it was the only way I could describe it. Dr. Chase moved to Dr. Ward's side, and he spread a wing over her back. "No one could have been expected to handle this,"—Dr. Chase gestured around the room—"any better." "Here here," rumbled around the room from various throats. Dr. Ward seemed a little surprised by the hug—in a good way. A rush of emotions flickered over her face, ranging from surprise, excitement, shock, embarrassment, and settling back to surprise. I was pulled from my examination of a new dynamic among the team by a similar wing pulling its way over my own back. Turning my head, I found I had to look up a little to see Liz's eyes. "Well, look what I caught?" Liz had a knowing smile on his lips, and I couldn't help but respond to it with my own. "I don't think there's anything else we have to do." Nodding, I turned toward the door with him. "I can think of something." I pulled forward, out from under Liz's wing. Jumping down the stairs to the ground outside, I turned around when he followed. "An apology would be good." Liz heaved a deep sigh, but he nodded. "You're right, and I'm sorry I didn't listen to you earlier. But you have to admit, this was pretty crazy. And James still didn't face the facts after he turned into a bat pony. I should have believed you." It felt good to have him admit that—vindication is a powerful thing. "Almost there." I had the pleasure of seeing Liz's face register surprise. "You have to promise, in future, to believe everything I tell you." "That is not going to happen." Liz stepped toward me, and I didn't back away. "What about if I promise to always listen?" "That's a good start. What else?" I let him move closer, until our lips were almost touching. Liz cocked one eyebrow, and gave me a look that told me I was pushing it. He told me as much. "You're pushing it, but what about daily smooching?" His breath on my nose was infuriatingly good. I breathed in his scent and tried to look like I was pondering the offer. "Let me test the merchandise first." "I pressed forward the scant distance and our—" Roy looked at Rose, and lifted one eyebrow. "How old are you?" "Eighteen." Rose's wing was still working. "Surely you noticed how we all look like young ponies now, right?" Roy sighed. "Hard not to, but that makes it even harder to figure out ages. Besides, you don't need to know any more than that. The rest is pretty personal, if you catch my drift." Rose flipped the page in her book, and scrawled three words: "My turn next."