//------------------------------//
// Chapter 7- Unique Disabilities 
// Story: Of Arms, Legs, and Hooves 
// by TheHouseholdWarrior 
//------------------------------//

"What... What the hell is this..."

I said, my heart filled with a despair I had never felt before. You could even say that this level of despair is more or less equal to the first time my doctor told me I had arrhythmia, and that wasn't good. 

I stared at the sight in front of my eyes, and I knew that there was only one word to describe it.

Hell.

Death, death everywhere. All the enemies tried to shoot him and his partner, and they had no choice but to take turns and shoot them back... And they never died falling. They'd always explode into little pieces. But the worst part is that we have to pick those pieces up and bring them with us. It was horrifying. But we knew that no matter how many lives our side lost, we still had to continue and defeat the mastermind.

But I had died for the last time.

Pushing Emi's laptop away with great force, I immediately prepared to flip the table over. But I quickly stopped, not because it was reckless and destructive, but because I just remembered that the table was against the wall.

I looked once again at the laptop's screen, which showed, in large text, the words 'Touhou Project: Subterranean Animism'. Scowling at it, I immediately proceeded to slam the laptop shut, not bothering at all to quit the game first. I've had enough of playing that game for the night.

The infernal arcade music still playing in my head, I felt a sudden sense of nausea flood over my brain. 

"I guess that bullet hell game really was a bullet hell, huh..."

I silently snickered and looked up at the clock.

3:42 a.m.

I've been playing 'Touhou' for over six hours now. I should've listened to my common sense and stopped after one try and do something else instead, but I guess what you could call the "Asian Spirit' awoke inside me and refused to let myself give up. And now, it's been over six hours and I still haven't progressed at all yet. 

Losing all the strength in my legs, I sat down, leaning against the wall adjacent to the bed, and closed my eyes to wash away the pain and the stupid, STUPID music. But I should have guessed- nothing changed. I hesitantly opened my eyes to see the fingers of my right hand twitching, as if the muscle memory of playing Touhou got permanently implanted in my brain.

"Oh god... Make it stop..."

Then again, this was probably all my fault in the first place, seeing as how I complained so much to Emi about not having anything to do during tonight's shift. Emi, still sleepy from the full day shift, probably didn't want to argue with me and go straight to sleep, so she left me her brand new laptop and told me to play 'Touhou'. Looking back, this was probably revenge against me for bothering her so much about the night shift being boring.

Sighing loudly even though nobody is around to hear, I shifted my gaze back to Lilly's bed. Where, until two weeks ago I would have seen Lilly sleeping soundly in (although I never got to, not that I ever wanted to, though), I saw instead a large, pink body silently snoring away. Since the time we found the pony, we've left her on Lilly's bed, and didn't even disturb her to change the bedsheets. Since then, we've all taken turns to look after and take care of the pony, with Emi sleeping in my room during my shifts to let Lilly stay in hers. Since I was the only guy who could take care of the pony properly, this is the only complex arrangement, whereas otherwise Lilly would just sleep in the room of whoever's turn it is.

I say that I'm the only guy because Kenji doesn't count. If he were to take care of the pony, he'd probably just do more bad than good, so obviously I was the one who had to take care of it. It's not like I have anything else to do, right?

...

Actually, that's right. I really did have nothing else to do. My mood suddenly went even more down the drain after that sad realization mixed with the fact that I had just tried and failed to play that damned Kuso game*.

Having to deal with this kind of sickness isn't easy at all. The symptoms of whatever I'm experiencing could probably be compared to that of a hangover, at least from what I've read. I'd slip in and out of consciousness for minutes at a time, and I'd often find myself banging the back of my head against the wall to try and forcefully knock the pain away. As expected, it only got worse. Feeling terrible would be an utter and complete understatement.

All I can say now is that I'm glad I wasn't epileptic. Thank god I wasn't epileptic.

"Pain, pain, go away~" I sang, admittedly really horribly because of the high-magnitude throbbing in my head. 

It was then when it started.

My heart began fluttering. At first, it was really faint, incomparable to the pain in my head, especially since the headache was what caused it in the first place.. But the more the pain in my head grew, the more my heart began to sped up, making the pain more noticeable to the point where it could be called an attack. 

I grasped at my chest as I fell down on the floor, unable to scream for help. When I realized there was an attack, it was already too late. My chest was constricting my ability to breathe, and I slowly began suffocating on the floor. The pain in my chest then further disoriented my mind, and with the headache utterly destroyed my ability to think of a way out of this. All I could think about was the pain, the terrible pain in both my head and my chest, threatening to silence me once and for all.

"U...unggghh...!" I moaned, the pain making me spasm on the floor. I couldn't hold out much longer.

Needless to say, it was a much more terrible pain when compared to all the ones I had experienced before (thanks, Touhou!), and my mind was flashing white, rendering me unable to even think about the pain I was going through, instead just feeling it 100%.

It won't be much longer before I collapse. There's a dependable chance that I won't die from this, but I'll almost definitely pass out. Then again, I'd take a few hours of unconsciousness over death any day.

I heard a strange shuffling sound, but that was it before darkness took me once again.





"So are we ready?" asked Twilight.

"READY!" shouted everyone in unison.

Twilight then lit up her horn and aimed it at the lever. She then immediately pulled it down, causing the new, copy version of the Superspecialawesomehappyfuntimeoneuseonlytimetravelling Portal Machine (temp) to start wobbling scarily. But that was to be expected- the machine was trying to generate a wormhole after all. She had already improved upon the failsafe, so nopony should be going for a trip through time anytime soon. Since the blueprints have been lost in the fire, it was actually pretty hard to have to try and replicate the original Superspecialawesomehappyfuntimeoneuseonlytimetravelling Portal Machine (temp), but hopefully they'll be able to pull it off with this one. The machine then started to shake even more, as if simulating an earthquake, and then a strange noise started to come out. Then after that some smoke. And a bit of flames.

"T-Twi...?" stuttered Rainbow Dash. "W-What's going on?"

"Nothing good." replied Twilight. "Nothing good at all. RUN! GET OUT OF HERE, QUICK!"

Everyone panickedly moved in sync outside the library, and just as the last pony got out...

BOOM!

There was a huge sound, but luckily nothing more than that. Twilight had known that there was a pretty good chance something like this might happen, so as long as all of them escaped in time, everything would be fine. Of course, she only reinforced the exterior of the Library, so everything inside would be a real mess. Of course, that was nothing a little hard work wouldn't fix.

"Oh no..." sobbed Spike, his knees on the ground. "NOOOOO!"

"What's wrong, Spike?" asked Applejack.

"It's gonna take a whole month to clean all that up!"

Everyone started giggling, and rightfully so. However, it's gonna take quite a while to make a new one, and Twilight knew that   before they could even start making said new one, she still had to figure out what was wrong with the blueprints and find a way to address that problem, which would probably take more than a few tries depending on what they had to fix- some may only be fixed through trial and error of different alternatives, for example. Hopefully the machine wasn't utterly destroyed, then there'd at least be some parts left to study.

"By the way, Twilight." said Rarity, trotting up beside Twilight. "Wasn't Rin still on the second floor of the library?"

"Uhuh." said Twilight. "I put a pretty powerful barrier to separate the first floor from the second floor, so she should be safe. Even if she wasn't there, though, I would've still put that barrier anyway, since I really don't like my bedroom being messy."

Twilight sighed. This was gonna take quite a long time.

"I hope Pinkie isn't hurt..." whispered Twilight under her breath. "Come on, everypony. Let's get back in."

With Spike at the back, everyone moved in a single file back inside the Library. As expected, the inside was a huge mess. The bookshelves were no more, there was a huge hole in the floor, and even the window frames in the inside were half-vaporized. Of course, Twilight had protected the most precious part of the library, the books, using her magic. So there was no problem there, at least.

The machine, however...

"It's... still there." whispered Fluttershy, who was understandably shaking. That explosion could've taken out the whole of Ponyville in a single blast if she hadn't placed those magical barriers there, yet the machine was still, in its entirety, intact. As far as she knew, that was impossible. The materials that she used couldn't have withstood a blast of that magnitude. Hay, even a blast small enough to just take out the first floor itself without the magical barriers would've at least blown up the machine and made the parts spread across the room.

Yet there the machine was, not only still intact, but completely good as new. The arches, the command box, everything... It was as if that was the only thing in the entire library (besides the books) that didn't just have the room they were in blow up. As far as Twilight knew, this was completely unexplainable.

"Spike, get everything cleaned up by tonight." said Twilight, walking up the stairs to the second floor. "I'll have to be able to look around and investigate the machine by tomorrow. Girls, come on up."

With Spike grabbing a broom with an indignant expression and mumbling the word 'curses' over and over again, everyone else went up the stairs into the second floor. There, they saw Rin painting with her strange flat hooves (seet? leet? keet? One of those, anyway) with her back leaning against the wall and a canvas in front of her. She looked to be rather focused on her work, so she probably didn't even notice them going inside the room. Twilight decided not to bother her.

"Okay, so..." began Rainbow Dash as soon as they had gathered around the table Twilight had put in her room. "What just happened?"

"I'm still thinking." said Twilight, hastily looking through the stack of notes and blueprints scattered around the table. "It shouldn't be possible, so what happened? Rarity, could you pass me that green colored sheet right there? Thanks."

Rarity's horn lit up and brought the single sheet of paper over to Twilight, which Twilight hastily took with her own magic, brought it in front of her face and started reading.

What was going on? There are lots of possible explanations, of course, but all of them were too far-fetched. In fact, the closest ones include the machine sucking a bit of the magic that was in abundance all around the library, or that maybe a wormhole was formed, but it was only big enough to protect the machine from the bla- no, that isn't possible. The blast had to come from within the machine, and if the wormhole had been formed inside the machine, then the blast would never have reached outside the machine, formed the hole and vaporized almost everything else.

"Let's review what we actually know." said Twilight, still frantically scanning through her notes and blueprints. "We started the machine, it started fuming after a while, it caught on fire, we ran out while the machine showed no sign of having created the wormhole, and just as everyone got out safely, there was an explosion."

Everyone nodded, agreeing with Twilight's recollection of events.

"Now, what we don't know." said Twilight. "Everything in the Library was destroyed except for whatever I had placed the barriers on. With that logic, the machine should've been the first to be destroyed, having been the origin of the blast. Yet, other than the books, the machine was the only one that was still safe and intact. Why? How did it happen? Any ideas?"

Everypony looked at each other with blank faces, expecting the next pony to come up with the situation-changing answer. Of course, nopony ended up speaking.

'Must I really do everything myself...?' thought Twilight.

"I've come up with a few theories," said Twilight. "but none of them could be trusted at this point. Well, at this point... there really is no right or wrong answer."

Just then, Twilight heard a shuffling sound behind her. Everyone immediately looked at the source of the sound, which was nothing but Rin standing up. Rin herself looked confused as to why everyone was suddenly staring at her, but like most other things related to her, she quickly shrugged it off.

"I need a glass of water." said Rin. "I'm done."

"Really?" asked Applejack, who from her bad start in her relationship with Rin actually came to like her. "What'ja draw there, Rin?"

Heh. The name seemed funny coming out of Applejack's mouth.

But suddenly Applejack's curious smiling face turned to one of absolute horror.

"AJ?" asked Rainbow Dash. "What's wrong?"

For a while, Applejack didn't answer. She just stood there, her mouth shivering but no sound coming out from it. Her eyes were full of that kind of horror one would imagine a character in those thriller novels would look like. And seeing that this pony was Applejack, one of the bravest ponies in all of Ponyville and was once actually hailed a hero, the impact must've been a huge one.

"T-Twi..." managed Applejack, her mouth still shaking like crazy. "E-everypony... Y-Y'all had b-better come and s-see this..."

Since everypony was obviously curious, they all surrounded the canvas to take a look at it.

"W-what!?"

'What?' is correct. Twilight's jaw dropped and she could feel herself shuffling her hooves backwards.

"N-no way..."

What is happening?

Refocusing her vision on the canvas, Twilight gasped another gasp of surprise.

Drawn and fully coloured on the canvas was the splitting image of their lost friend, Pinkie Pie.





"W-what are you...?"

I had recovered almost immediately after passing out because of some strange power that had sucked all my pain away.

It speaks.

The pony speaks.

Right in front of me was a little pink pony, giggling like a madman while jumping- no, bouncing in front of my horrified face.

"Hi there!" said the pink pony. "My name's Pinkie Pie, and I hope we can be the bestest of bestest friends forever and ever!"





Hey, TheHouseholdWarrior here.

First and foremost, I'm sorry for having disappeared off the face of the planet for over half a year. There were a lot of things I had to take care of, and although I've finally found the time to continue this story, I can;t say that I'm done with even half of those things I had to do. Of course, I'll start being fairly regular with the story now, although I definitely can't promise you a chapter a day like what I did last time. Thanks for understanding.

Now, back to the story. How was it, everyone? Finally, some plot development! It seems that Pinkie has finally woken up from her coma, and is now going to spell destruction for the whole of Yamaku and beyond! Get ready to see Hisao finally start getting crazy over something!

And at the Equestria side, it seems as if Rin actually did have something to do with Pinkie (as if anybody didn't know). But what was that relation? How did Rin know what looked like to the point that she could draw Pinkie perfectly out of memory? Questions to be answered as the story progresses.

I'm planning to finish this story in one go, so unlike They Walk Among Us, it will have no sequel. And since I haven't written any pony fics for a while, my characterization and the like may have gotten a bit rusty. Please note out some out-of-character spots and tell them to me! Besides that, any sort of constructive criticism and advice is welcome too!

Thanks for waiting, and thanks for reading!

I'll be waiting for you at the next chapter of 'Of Arms, Legs and Hooves'.