It started as a tickle in the base of her skull.
As soon as she became aware of it, grading her students’ tests was the furthest thing from Cheerilee’s mind as she reclined in her seat and stared at her foreleg.
Two- no, three hairs were a slightly lighter shade; it should have escaped her attention but instead it drew it like a moth to a flame. Cheerilee stared gormlessly at them as she parted her lips and slid her tongue across the top row of her teeth.
The tickle moved, and the sensation brought her severe discomfort; it was like the time she entered the Running of the Leaves and tearing through a branch caused it to scrape the back of her neck.
Cheerilee shuddered and gently bit down on her foreleg where the discoloured hairs were. Somehow, that impulsive action seemed to be the thing to appease the tickle and make it leave.
Now free of discomfort, Cheerilee pulled back and wiped spit off her leg, mortified but relieved that she was alone.
“What in the world was that about?”
She went back to grading. The tickle did not return that night.
During class, when she was writing equations on the blackboard, she felt the tickle in the base of her skull. She froze in place, and as the tickle undulated to her left temple, she started to grind her teeth together.
“Miss Cheerilee?”
Cheerilee turned and plastered a disarming smile on her face. “Hm? What is it, Apple Bloom?”
“Ya good?” Apple Bloom and a few other students looked concerned. “Ya jes’ stopped all of a sudden.”
“Ah, I did? Well…”
“See? The equations are so hard that even you’re having trouble!” Scootaloo laughed, though it was without malice.
Cheerilee focused on their laughter as she joined in and tried to ignore the tickle as it crept past her ear. “It just goes to show that you must always refresh yourself on what you know: knowledge doesn’t stay forever amidst neglect.”
She finished writing the equations, then told her students she was going out to run an errand, but she would be back shortly. As soon as she was outside, she bolted around the corner of the schoolhouse and sank her teeth into her foreleg.
Relief – indescribable relief.
The tickle that had been probing behind her left eye receded, and Cheerilee moaned as she worked her jaw back and forth, her body singing in ecstasy even as her leg voiced its discomfort.
Minutes later, Cheerilee snapped out of her trance and found her lower jaw and leg soaked in saliva. She gasped in disgust and fear and cleaned off as best she could; the teeth marks on her leg were hidden but the appendage throbbed in pain.
“Faust, what is wrong with me?”
She would go to the hospital first thing after class.
In the two hours it took for Nurse Redheart to return after doing what tests they needed, Cheerilee had convinced herself she was going to die and already wrote her will in her head.
“How long do I have?”
Redheart smiled as if that was a normal thing to hear. Considering that Ponyville seemed to attract all sorts of anomalous activity and half the populace had panic attacks over bunny stampedes, Redheart’s demeanour might have not been unusual
“Thanks for being so patient. Now…” Redheart looked at the clipboard she was carrying. “Your blood pressure and heart rate are normal. Your eyes, tongue, and ears are fine. You have no health problems nor family history of health problems. In summary, you are a perfectly healthy earth pony. Well, there’s the bite mark, but that will go away by tomorrow.”
Cheerilee released a sigh. “That’s good to hear, but it doesn’t explain this sensation in the back of my head, or why I feel like… biting myself.” She hesitated, embarrassed; it had taken courage to admit that part during the examination.
Redheart’s expression softened. “At your insistence, we did conduct an invasive resonance scan to check if there were issues with your innate magic-”
“Was that the lady unicorn that came in and put her horn in my…?”
“Yes.”
“Could have bought me dinner first.”
Redheart chuckled. “I’ll be sure to scold her later. Anyway, the results show that there’s nothing wrong there either…”
Cheerilee raised her eyebrows. “But?”
“Earth ponies are resilient to foreign magic, so these types of scans – rarely – aren’t a hundred percent accurate. Luckily, severe problems are easily detectable, but anything that’s more subtle or nuanced has a chance – a very small chance, keep in mind – to escape detection.”
“Huh?” Cheerilee’s face heated. “But if you can’t detect it, what was the point of the test? Her horn was long, you know! Thank Faust it was blunt…”
Redheart made a placating gesture. “I’m certain there’s nothing wrong with you. If you’re really concerned, we can try again; otherwise, I can’t do anything except suggest you seek help from a therapeutic source. It could be psychological, not physiological.”
Cheerilee sighed. “Fine. I guess… I guess if all I need to do is bite on something to make that itch go away, then it’s probably not a big deal.”
“Maybe, but don’t neglect your health: if anything else feels wrong, then come straight away, okay?”
“I will. Thank you for seeing me.”
Rummaging through her old belongings, Cheerilee discovered an old teething ring that brought back warm memories. She gave it a good wash and kept it on herself as she did her nightly chores.
The tickle returned when she was filling the bathtub.
Cheerilee put the marked, wooden ring in her mouth and started gnawing and to her delight, the tickle went away immediately.
“Ha! Beat you, you little nuisance.”
She gnawed for a minute longer to rub it in, then settled for a well-deserved soak, anticipating a good night’s rest.
Cheerilee stared up at the ceiling, groggy as usual. She was not a morning pony and only the sweet grace of coffee could stimulate life into her. She could already taste it.
Taste…?
Cheerilee grimaced at an unpleasant tang on her palate and removed her leg from her mouth to sit up.
Her stiff jaw clicked into place as she shut it and she could feel something caked around her lips flake off. Her teeth bore a fuzzy texture as she ran her tongue over them. Finally, she looked down at her leg.
As she expected from the dull pain that was only now registering, most of her fur had been stripped away, leaving the skin and muscle bared. It glistened wetly in the early morning rays coming in from the window. She could see the rips and ruts where her teeth had worked back and forth to make up for their bluntness.
Cheerilee examined her wound with a strange sense of calmness. She knew she should be concerned, greatly so, but something about the red sheen was so alluring. Tentatively, she prodded the exposed sinew with a hoof and shuddered at the burn she felt through her body.
… Ah! She’ll be late for school at this rate.
In the back of her head, she knew this was a serious problem, but any attempt to summon some feeling of urgency was quelled by a thick fog smothering her forebrain and the notion that she would only be making trouble for everypony else by making a big deal out of this.
Her instincts screamed it was wrong.
Cheerilee ignored it, put on a sweater – fortunately, it was near winter, so she could always use the cold as an excuse – and carried out her day with the same enthusiasm and cheer as she usually did.
She walked to the schoolhouse.
She greeted her students.
She checked their homework – those who completed it, at least.
She went around the back of the building to chew on her wound, revelling in the thick fluid that stained her tongue red and the flood of euphoria that came from the Tickle being sated.
She went back inside and scolded Diamond Tiara for ‘accidentally’ spilling glitter over Sweetie Belle’s art project.
She sat inside for recess, though felt no desire to chew on her flesh, so she substituted her free time by reading a book; the ending was anticlimactic, sadly.
She called the little ponies back in, then made them go over what they already learned so she could sneak around back to get a nibble in. Maybe more than that. She limped back in, but none of her students noticed.
She bid them goodbye for the weekend.
She went into town and did her daily tasks in preparation to relax for the next two days.
On Sunday, a good chunk of flesh on her right foreleg was gone. Likewise, her left hindleg also bore a significant loss and her lower lip was heavily scarred – her bottom teeth ached at the cold that slipped through the crevices and tears.
Initially, she had worried over the blood loss, but it seemed that if she left it alone after biting, the flow of blood swiftly dwindled and then stopped. It was annoying to use her towels to clean the blood and add to the laundry, but it was worth the satisfaction of keeping the Tickle at bay.
Because lately, it was growing more demanding. It made its entrance on the back of her skull, but it would vary in its paths: usually it crawled to her ears, but there were times when it would slither down and press against her throat, or roam across her jaw and make her gums tingle like a current was running through them.
Its speed and strength increased each visit, and Cheerilee’s ferocity in attacking her own flesh increased along with it. She used to be careful and precise, but now she was ravenous and careless – she could probably lessen the load of towels to wash if she was more careful, but it is what it is.
“But how on earth do I hide this now?” Cheerilee huffed as she looked at her reflection in the mirror and washed her blood-caked fur. “I can’t go into school like this, but I’ll just cause drama if I go to the hospital. Hmm…”
And in that moment, the Tickle struck.
It sparked the back of her head and darted to scratch the middle of her spine by the time she could focus on it.
It flicked and pried and pulled and twitched and wriggled and squeezed and dug and prodded.
Cheerilee did not realize she had already clamped down on her damaged foreleg until the blood was spilling out from her mouth and she was already pulling her head back as hard as she could. She could feel sinew pulled taut before finally snapping, but the pain was dull and seemed to be happening to somepony else.
Cheerilee knew this was going to be bad, even as she snorted and huffed like an animal, shaking her head ferociously as she pulled and pulled and pulled until-
She fell backwards.
Lying there on the floor, Cheerilee felt a massive surge of relief. She sat up and took a breath through her nostrils before spitting the red and pinkish chunk of meat into the corner of the bathroom.
Unsanitary and hardly good manners, but she could be allowed some levity in the privacy of her house, right?
Still grinning, Cheerilee looked down to survey the damage.
“… Ah?”
All the flesh had been taken, so she expected to see a sliver of white bone, but instead she was greeted with a glossy black coat of… something. She prodded it, curious, and started when an almost-hidden crevice parted.
Oval-shaped and faceted, the eye watched her in turn, seemingly just as curious.
Cheerilee cooed in wonder.
The Tickle returned.
“More? Already? Well, I suppose you must be feeling cooped up in there. Don’t worry – I’ll be quick about it.”
Without a single worry, Cheerilee started on her other foreleg.
“Pinkie, darling…”
“Yes, Rarity?”
“That was the most grotesque story I have ever heard.”
“Thank you!”
“Oh, heavens…”
Twilight heralded the conclusion of Pinkie’s tale with a sigh. “Okay, now you can go blow out a candle. Just one, remember?”
Pinkie tittered and bounced over to the mirror. “Okie-dokie!”
Applejack grumbled as Pinkie hopped past her. “Jeez, was it really necessary to describe all tha’ gore in all tha’ detail?”
“I thought it was a good analogy for addiction,” Starlight said. “The character’s behaviour, specifically in how she tried to hide her actions and thought what she was doing wasn’t a big deal, draws similarities with how some addicts may act in reality.”
Pinkie puffed out a candle and turned around. “Huh?”
“That’s what you were going for, right?”
“No. I just think gross stuff happening to your body is super-scary,” She went back to her spot and rolled back up in her sleeping bag. “Don’t you think so?”
Starlight could not hide her disappointment. “Y-yeah…”
“Well, if we’re basing scary stories on real life…” Applejack began with a confident grin. “Then ah got a doozy fer ya’ll.”
Twilight carefully watched Trixie’s hoof creep toward the bowl of liquorice. “I can’t wait to hear it. And yes, I can see you doing that.”