“Oh, don’t look so silly! This’ll be FUN!” the pink filly completely fails to reassure you, “It’s just like playing Operation, only without all the beeping and light-up noses, which I’d find kinda distracting anyway.” She waves her hoofs around for emphasis as she talks, keeping your eyes transfixed with horror on the cold metal talon attached to her leg. Your exposed guts churn uneasily as you unavoidably imagine what such a device could be used for…
“Wh-what are you gonna do to me?” you managed to ask, more because of your anxiety than despite it.
“Oh, nothing much. First I gotta get something though,” she replies, placing her free hoof on the table’s edge and lifting her front half up to loom over you. “Now you might feel a slight loss of breath,” she says, and plunges the balled-up claw into the underside of your ribcage. Your breath gives way completely as your diaphragm is dislodged and she presses against your lungs, making you panic, trying desperately to get air. You try punching her away with your front hooves, but the straps hold firm, reducing you to little more than minor struggling as she roots around inside your chest. You feel her hoof twist inside you, and there’s a sickening slicing noise, but then she pulls out. You can breathe again!
“Well, there we are!” she cheers with a flourish as you gasp for air, taking a few deep, heavy pants before looking back at her. The mere sight of what she’s got is enough to make your blood run cold.
The talon’s closed around one very, very disturbing piece of pony: a heart. Your heart. She just cut out your heart. As the full wave of shock hits your mind and you start guessing how long you’ve got left to live, she brings her left hoof to the side of the device and twists it. With a plop, it opens and drops your severed organ back on top of your bony breast.
“Now where did I put those…” she wonders aloud, as she leaves you to stare in horror at yourself and goes looking around in the dark. “Well, here’s the tape, so I can’t have left them far awa- aha!” she cries out suddenly.
“Oh, where are my manners?” she asks, startling you as she reappears right by your side. “I’m Pinkie Pie, and I’m gonna be your surgeon for today!” Without pause, she grabs your heart up in her left hoof and slaps it unceremoniously onto something in her right hoof with a wet smack. She then reaches up to something on the ceiling and pulls down a long tube, like the barrel of a very wide gun, which is releasing a steady stream of red vapour. You realise that the same red gas fills the room like a mist, but it’s a lot more concentrated near this device, which hums softly to itself. Pinkie plunges your heart into the thicker fog, and watches intensly.
And then, as if by some dark science, your severed heart beats.
And it beats again, and the filly starts to smile.
And then-
BLAM.
“Um… whoops,” Pinkie Pie says as the last bits of your heart slide off of her onto the floor.
“Well,” you quietly say with a sense of finalisation, “now I’m definitely dead.”
“Oh, don’t be silly!” Pinkie says in her usual bubbly voice, “I can fix this! Just gimme a few seconds.” She drops the device onto the table and wanders into the room, before opening a fridge and browsing through it. Since you can’t see what she’s doing very well, you take a look at the device instead.
It looks like a big, rounded button, with three big pins sticking out of the flat of it. There’s a pressure gauge and a few metal vials on the back, but it doesn’t give you many clues as to its purpose. Suddenly there’s a loud BANG, and the pin is joined on the table by another heart. One that is easily three times bigger than your own heart used to be.
“What,” you ask with a sense of dread, “is that?”
“It’s a manticore heart!” Pinkie replies cheerfully. “Your own heart, like most ponys’, was far too weak to handle the Überpin’s high voltage. But this,” she says, gesturing to the massive organ before her, “ought to do the trick!” With that, she grabs the pin, slides it into the larger atrium, and hefts the whole thing up in both hooves. Again, she holds the heart in front of the tube. Again, it beats.
And beats.
And beats.
You watch in amazement as the heart begins to beat faster and faster, pounding furiously in the pink mare’s now red hooves, threatening to throw itself clear. The pressure gauge on the pin’s wavering frantically between being in the red zone at the end and being completely off the scale, and the whole device is sparking and sputtering, emitting an awful piercing whine. And Pinkie Pie’s laughter, dear Celestia, it’s frightening, the laugh of a truly psychotic pony enjoying themselves in causing mayhem and creating unholy monsters. The heart begins to glow, a bright, burning red. You turn your head sideways, and so, to your surprise, does Pinkie. The whining gets higher and higher, reaching up to and earbreaking point-
And then it’s all over. The two of you look back at the heart, which is now coated in a metallic red sheen.
“Wooow…” Pinkie stares in wonder at the shimmering organ, her eyes growing wide, before dumping it unceremoniously in your bowels. “Hey, it’s king of against the rules, but if I untie you, would ya mind helping me? It’s just that the next bit is kinda hard, and I’m not strong enough to do it by myself.”
You’re unsure at first, which is only to be expected. “Well, what do you need me to do, exactly?” you ask timidly, still a little afraid of this filly.
“Oh, I just need you to hold your ribcage open a bit so that I can slip this heart in there!” she explains simply.
That sounds dangerous. “What’s the alternative?” you ask, a bit less timid this time.
“Well then I’d have to get the bonesaw, and a new ribcage, and a diaphragm, and it’s waaay too much hassle. Plus, I’m not really sure how to rebuild somepony’s chest anyway, so it could end up looking kinda freaky. Actually, funny story,” she begins, as you weigh up your options, “when the last medic here was operating on our current leader, he accidentally knocked out all of the poor guy’s ribs, so he emptied out a beer keg, dropped the solly’s heart and lungs in there, and welded it to his spine! I guess you could say that now, he’s barrel chested!” She breaks down in fits of giggles, smacking one hoof repeatedly on the edge of the table. You, however, aren’t feeling so merry for some bizarre reason. It’s probably got something to do with the way you’re picturing yourself with a keg for a chest. Now, you’ve always said you need to get better at holding your beer, but that…
“Okay, I’m helping!” you say urgently.
“Alright!” Pinkie cheers, nearly jumping up and down with glee. “Y’know, everypony here is usually such a sour apple, but you seem kinda fun!” She darts underneath the table, and you feel the band around your right hoof tightening a bit. “Ww oumt t hng mmt mmr whn dff ff fver!” she cheerfully mumbles, before you feel the bond go slack and she pulls it away. A few seconds later, and both your hooves are free.
“Okay,” she says, reappearing by your side and placing both hooves on the glowing heart, “you ready?” Ready fails to describe what you are right now, but you dutifully place both hooves on the bottom of your ribcage, mostly unsure on how, exactly, to make it much bigger without breaking something. Without further warning, Pinkie Pie shoves the massive heart into the bottom of your ribcage. Your breath goes all over the place as you struggle to keep your ribs open, while the beating organ intrudes on your lungs’ personal space. There’s a squelch and a pop, and Pinkie leans back again.
“There we are!” she announces, “All done! Now, let’s just get you zipped back up and bouncing on your way!” The seemingly novice surgeon turns away, grabbing the barrel of the ceiling-mounted machine and pulling it to within inches of where your skin should be. The machine’s dull humming shifts up a few pitches and grows louder, as its nozzle stops lazily emitting a fine mist, and releases a vivid stream of vapour that channels straight into your insides. Before your very eyes, muscle, skin and hair begin to fill in the vacant space, stretching from the edges of the wound and across the wide gap. In a matter of seconds, you’re fully healed, with not even so much as a scar to remind you of what just happened. Which, thinking about it, would make a bloody good question right about now.
“What just happened?” you ask, whilst prodding tentatively at your unblemished belly.
“Oh, just a little mandatory surgery, nothing major!” Pinkie smiles, holding a hoof out to help you off of the table. “It’s always kind of dull, so I try to make it more fun. Personally, my favourite part’s that bit where I pushed the pin thingy into the heart. It’s like pin the tail on the pony, only with beeping and lights and more dangerous and stuff!”
You take Pinkie’s hoof and clamber carefully off of the workbench. “So, what was the point of it all, giving me a new heart with a beeping pin thing in it, when I already had a perfectly good one?” If there’s any organ of yours that needs replacing, it’s probably your liver.
“Oh, your heart was fine for your old life, but now that you’re here, you need something a bit more new-school to stay where the company needs you.”
“Company?” You ask anxiously, “Have I signed myself up to something I’ll regret while drunk? Because that’s happened before.”
“If you did, you’re not the first!” Pinkie Pie answers in her usual, slightly disturbing cheerfulness. “Our old demo was awful, I’m not sure he was ever even sober! Thank Celestia we got you to replace him!”
“’Replace him’? What happened to him?” you press for more answers, even though you dread what they might be.
“Oh, he took a rocket to the head, standard stuff, but the forgetty-forgetterson computer plain forgot to respawn him! It does that sometimes, so try not to go dying too much while you’re here!”
Rockets? Respawn? Dying? “What the hay have I signed myself up for?”
Pinkie Pie keeps on smiling through the pretty grim description of your new job. “You’re working for RED now. That’s an acro-thingy, but I can’t remember what it means. Basically, we’re working for this company to fight against the guys working for another company. We all get to wear team colours and stuff, so I like to think of it as a kind of big game of tag, except with bullets and explosions and stuff to liven it up a bit! I’m a medic, so it’s my job to stop everypony from dying and going through respawn too often. You,” she says, pointing a hoof at you, “just became our new demopony, so you get to play around with all the loud and colourful explosions!”
“So, what, I’m being paid to blow up other ponies on behalf of some kind of greedy beurocratic corporate money grabbers?” You summarise.
“Yup!” Pinkie confirms.
“Huh. So, what happens now?”
“Now?” Pinkie Pie asks, her tone dropping to something slightly darker than her usually bubbly voice. “Let’s go Meet the Team.”