//------------------------------// // CH. 08 Physical Therapy with a Madpony // Story: Werewolves of Knicknik // by Atuhor Name //------------------------------// Physical Therapy with a Madpony Just as Naudia and Twilight were about to confront that thing somebody had snuck up beside them and stabbed them with a syringe. Very quickly Twilight lost consciousness. When Twilight woke up she felt… different. She was sloshing around in a plastic tub and she could feel that but she couldn’t see anything, everything sounded muffled, and there was a scent of a hospital and a truly remarkable thing, the most generic flowery scent imaginable. That was what really caught Twilight’s attention and she sniffed at it, trying to figure out what kind of flower it was. This was much more complicated than it sounded like because it actually involved forming a nose from her slime form and this was the seed through which the rest of her head sprouted out of her slime form. “You’re awake, good.” There was no way she was ever going to forget THAT voice instantly her head turned to face that THING which unbeknownst to her involved growing a neck. “Good, now before you get too angry you need to remember these feelings, they’re like muscles and they will help you transform.” Twilight frowned at the thing, she felt like she wanted to punch it in the face and knock off that edgy pair of glasses and edgy fedora, and looking at it’s edgy black duster only made her want to punch it more. “FOCUS.” The thing shouted. “I’m trying to teach you something important. “Besides.” The thing smiled. “You will never have a chance to punch me if you never re-form your hooves will you?” Twilight glared at the thing. “Turn me back.” “Considering how much time and effort we spent doing an in place perfect conversion, no I’m not going to do that.” The Thing picked up a clipboard from beside him and held it out to Twilight. “But I am going to sell you on your new body, you have my word on that.” Twilight angrily wobbled inside her tub at the thing. “No hooves, how am I supposed to pick that up?” Just then the thing’s thumb slipped on the clipboard and it began to fall out of it’s hand, but Twilight caught it with a rapidly formed outstretched hoof. “Like that.” Twilight glared at the thing again, starting to pick up what was going on. “What’s this?” She demanded. “That is the list of benefits you gain with your new physiology, now I would like to ask you to intentionally form your other hoof to leaf through it, it’s an important step in your rehabilitation and it will show me that you can intentionally apply what I’ve taught you so far this session. If you don’t you’ll have to start doing pencil therapy with me.” The thing held up a pencil as if it truly expected Twilight would fail at this. As if it expected so little of her. And she did fail the first three times angrily, the third only resulting in a floppy noodle-like hoof. “You need to focus, remember the feeling of sniffing in the air, turning your head, reaching for the clipboard. This is your hoof and it’s still there, you just need to remember how to use it.” On her sixth attempt Twilight finally managed to get her left hoof into perfect working order. What followed was her reading the strangest collection of nonsense she’d ever heard. The clipboard listed out a wide range of fantastical and to Twilight’s knowledge legendary attributes that could never be replicated. “Immunity to death by old age?” “Yep.” “strokes, heart disease, any and all viruses, ‘non-magical’ bacteria, parasites, respiratory diseases, skin diseases, obesity, Alzheimer's, and CANCER?!” “Yeah.” “And here it says ‘immunity to death by beheading, stab injuries other than to the brain, total incineration of the body below the neck, any and ‘nearly all forms of bodily dismemberment and scarring’.” “Well some of those you might need a doctor to get over, but still yes.” Twilight stared down at the document incredulously. “That’s the medical document, the physical document here includes some stuff, but to summarize you should be able to lift about 15-30 tons with one hoof, and when properly stiffened up as a slime your skin and diamond fiberglass bones should be roughly 200 times stronger than steel. You should also be able to jump about half a kilometer straight up now.” “Is this some kind of joke?” Twilight asked. “No. All of this is really very boilerplate baseline, people these days have lost any sense of wonder about this sort of thing because they just expect this without saying. It was harder than you’d expect to write the contents of that clipboard because even people working on this project kept not putting stuff in there because they just assumed you already had it. Also you’d never find a doctor willing to convert you back because there aren’t any that work with traditional genetics like your body used to use and even we had to buy an exorbitant amount of time on the Oracle of Adak for a conversion process.” The whole conversation was very strange to Twilight. This wasn’t how this encounter was supposed to go, she wasn’t supposed to just be given physical therapy by a monster and immortality as an afterthought. “Now physical therapy requires that you demonstrate hand eye coordination by handing the clipboard back to me.” Twilight prepared to throw it at the thing. The thing pressed a button on a remote attached by wire to her hospital bed/tub. The bed abruptly tilted sideways and dumped her out of the bed, surprisingly enough she landed on all four hooves, by reforming them mid air which came with the rest of her body. “Good, now I hope I don’t need to tell you why we did that, or to try and ‘remember the feeling of reforming your body’. Because now I need you to practice that until you get it right from body to slime three times in a row.” The thing said. “I’d advise you not to try anything hostile again for your own safety as that would have… unpleasant consequences.” Twilight noted the odd design for a hospital room, on the three walls she could see in front of her there were doors, there was even a hatch above in the corner along with a camera on each wall. This was clearly a place that was expecting trouble and was designed to funnel guards in all at once and befuddle an escape with too many options. She could even see the knobs on the doors slowly turn back closed without a click. “As you can see, this is a place designed to give the illusion of a hospital room to put you at ease. If you did actually get out of this room before you should have we would have immediately jettisoned your girlfriend’s hospital room into space. I’m quite experienced at dealing with heroes, the first thing you need to do is escalate any infraction beyond the point of no return.” The thing let out a laugh. “Of course we could also jettison this part as well, in which case you’ll know you’ve become part of somebody else’s story, no matter how brief that story may be.” “But you’re in this section. How does that sound like a good plan?” Twilight demanded of the thing. “You can believe that.” The thing said. “By the way I’d appreciate if you started thinking of me by my title, I’m the First Administrator.” It said. “But we’re getting off topic, I need to teach you new skills, so I can teach you new magic, so you can scheme to use them against me, before I put you in a situation so utterly horrible that I can indoctrinate you to my cause by showing you how far up shit creek you and your planet are. So come on now, transform back into a slime and back, I’d like you to be proficient at it within a half an hour.” “Why are you so mean?” “I’m not feeling all that mean right now, I’m feeling impatient, every moment that you aren’t working at this problem is like an itch in my mind. A little voice that says ‘We don’t need her. We can get things done faster without a middleman.’ And once you plunge into thinking like that, bad, expensive, halfway solutions with long consequences have merits because they’re quick.” “So why not then?” Twilight defied it. “I like werewolves, I want more studies done on werewolves, and the first outside life discovered not only has werewolves, but could provide an outside perspective on werewolves. It is possible to not only increase the types of werewolves, but the number of werewolves, with a side benefit that we could hire outsiders to design new types of werewolves.” Twilight had gotten the impression that the creature had always been slightly unhinged, or was some kind of demon who dressed like an edgelord. This was the first time she’d ever felt… uncomfortable around it, it was easy to stand up to it, feel angry at it. “Stop thinking ‘it’ in the interests of mutual cooperation you need to start thinking ‘First Administrator’ and train yourself on that.” It said. “And we need to get on with slime transformation exercises unless you want to have more involuntary physical therapy, we have to taze you to start again in a decent time.” Twilight glared at the thing as she attempted to transform back into her slime form. The best course of action seemed to be to keep the thing talking and see what she could learn. “So. What are you going to give me in return for all of this?” Twilight did manage to succeed this time and plopped down onto the floor in a blob of purple. But she could still hear it talk even in this form. “Well we were thinking about offering the typical ‘anything your hearts desire’ whatever kinda thing, within reason. I would like however to encourage you to test the boundaries to see what you can come up with even though I can say no.” The purple blob that was Twilight paused for a long moment. Then Twilight’s head popped up, then the rest of her body popped up pre-flopped on the floor, she looked the thing right in the eye and said. “I want to be able to have kids with Naudia. Biological kids, not clones, not some kind of vat.” Twilight couldn’t have gotten a better reaction out of that thing if she’d have beaned it on the head with a rock. It’s mouth hung loosely open and it froze, eventually like it’s mind had started back up again as Twilight heard a phone ring it’s mouth slammed shut and it lifted up a finger. “One second.” It walked off into a corner and then it pulled out a strange ringing flat bug from it’s coat unfolded it and held it up to it’s ear like a phone. Twilight scooched a little closer to try and listen in. "No. Nope. I won’t allow it. We won’t have truck with that kind of thinking around here.” There was a pause as he listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. “Now you listen here! If you want to be working here two weeks from now you’re going to cut the crap.” Another pause. “Yeah you convinced me, I’ve rarely heard such a good case to fire somebody, you officially have two weeks.” It snapped the bug-phone shut with irritation and sat back down in it’s chair. "it has come to my attention that there are very significant cultural differences between our values and yours, beyond what was expected." It said. "I'm sorry, you're going to have to think of something else." “It sounds like you just shot that idea down entirely.” Twilight said with a frown. “I’m not going to set up something we already gave you, as a reward for something you haven’t done. That’s bad business.” “What?” “You’re going to have to forgive us in this case Twilight, there are clearly things we missed in the cultural disconnect. After seeing that all four species of normal pony can breed we assumed you were in the same position as us when that is clearly not the case, nobody thought to look into things farther to check if, for example, two males/females of your species could have offspring unaided.” “I can’t think of anything right now.” Twilight said. “Don’t worry, the advisor who will have a job two weeks from now has informed me that instead of returning you to Equestria in-between your magical three day boot camp you’ll be staying with Gwynn Hall so you can get an idea of the options we can give you, in addition to us generating a list of possible options for you to choose.” “Wait! If you’ve been steadily transforming me since that nightmare months ago none of this matters what I choose, how do I know you didn’t implant something so you can just snap your fingers and I obey, how do I know I’m still me?” “As for the first bit, once the threat of corrupted changelings was over we no longer needed such things, this is test for you and Equestria.” The thing pointed a finger at Twilight. “As for that last bit Judge for yourself Twilight, has anybody noticed anything off in the past year aside from the incidents earlier, has anybody noticed anything different about your personality?” “Well no, but I’m a biased source, of course I wouldn’t know if anything was different about me, I’m me.” “Okay then, lets simplify things a bit.” The First Administrator brought the conversation crashing to a halt with a single question. “Have you noticed any changes in your prospective wife?”