//------------------------------//
// Poison of the Mind 
// Story: Ophidiophobia; the Slithering Terror 
// by charyoshi 
//------------------------------//

	Twilight's mane fluttered about in the warm spring air, the soft sound of grass rustling beneath her hooves went unnoticed by the lavender unicorn as she trotted along the outskirts of Ponyville. In front of her levitated a picnic basket filled with all sorts of things to eat along with a large blanket to sit on. Perched on the young mare's back was a disinterested looking purple dragon. Spike yawned and stretched his arms high into the air.

"So what are we doing here Twilight?"

Twilight thew a slight bounce in her step, causing Spike to hold tightly to Twilight's sides to stay on top of her.

"Whoa! Twi, what are you doing?"

"Keeping you awake! Spike you've been cooped up in that library for too long. I appreciate all the extra help, but you've been letting it get to you."

Spike narrowed his eyes at the back of Twilight's head. "Whaddya mean it's getting to me? I'm fine!" 

Twilight shook her head and smiled to herself. "You've hardly said anything at all the past few days, you're not eating much and I've seen you yell at Owlowiscious no less than 3 times yesterday!" 	

"He was mocking me! Always giving me that creepy stare and all he ever says is 'who' when I ask him a question!"

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Spike, all he can say is 'who'! And he looks like that at everyone!"

"Yeah, well uh.." Spike rubbed his chin in contemplation, then snapped back with a victorious smile. "Right, last night he almost hit me with that stack of books!"

"You mean the one that you fell asleep next to overnight because you were so exhausted that you couldn't re-shelve them all?"

Spike gulped and looked back and forth, but then regained his composure and looked at the back of Twilight's mane accusingly.

"Y-yeah! He flew right on top of them and tried to knock them on me!" "You know Spike, he probably just thought it was a perch, and then it fell over when he tried to sit on it."

"Oh sure, take his side! We'll just see who's laughing when I get squished in the middle of the night!"

Twilight slowed her trot to a walk as she spoke to Spike in a motherly tone. "Spike, you know that Owlowiscious would never do something like that. But all of that aside, it doesn't even matter."

"It doesn't? Why not?" Twilight closed her eyes momentarily and thought back to her studies.

 One of the most deceptively effective methods of angering somepony is to simply present the fact that they're getting angry.

Twilight stopped and turned to look at Spike with narrowed eyes and a self-righteous smirk that could only be matched by the Great and Powerful Trixie. "You seem upset."

Spike blinked and glared at Twilight. "Did you just bring me out here to pick on me!?"

Twilight giggled both at her jives at Spike garnering their desired effect and the fact that studying up on 'The Egghead's Guide to Trolling' had paid off. "I'm sorry Spike, just proving a point. You need some time out of the library. You've got cabin fever!" Spike huffed and spun around on Twilight's back, not even dignifying the back of Twilight's mane with his glare.

Twilight continued her lecture as she trotted on. "You've got all the symptoms. Getting grouchy, being unfocused and tired all the time, it's not good for you Spike! But it’ll all be ok, because I've got a surprise planned out for you!" Spike remained silent on Twilight's back, watching Twilight's tail swish back and forth as she trotted.

Twilight waited for Spike to respond, but heard nothing from the irate baby dragon on her back. "Aw, c'mon Spike, don't be like that! Are you suuuuure you don't wanna know what it is?" Thin trails of smoke rose from Spike's nostrils as he did his best to restrain himself from saying something at Twilight that he might regret. 

Twilight scanned the ground ahead of her and saw a large shady oak tree off in the distance. "That looks like a good spot! Spike I know you're still mad but hold on ok?" 

"Hold on? What ar-" Spike's question was cut of as the pair of them disappeared with a loud pop and reappeared a second later at the base of the tree. Spike held the sides of his head as his new found dizziness subsided. "Ugh... I'll never get used to that feeling..." 

Twilight gently floated Spike off of her back and onto the soft grass, then proceeded to set up the picnic. In just a few seconds, Twilight had completely laid out the blanket, set up an assortment of plates around a bowl with a large salad in it, a couple of blueberry muffins, two bottles of orange juice and finally a jar filled with a strange green powder in it. Spike sat in front of his plate and picked up the jar, eyeing it suspiciously.

"So what'd you put in this?" Twilight perked up, excited to finally be able to show him. 

"That's your surprise!" 

"Green powder?" 

"Give it a taste!" 

Spike quickly set the jar down. "Whoa whoa whoa, no way Twilight. You've been messing with me the entire walk over here, how am I supposed to know if this isn't just another trick!?"

Twilight sighed. "I'm sorry Spike, you're right. I was picking on you and I apologize. You really will like that though, pinkie promise. Can you forgive me?" Twilight stretched her hooves out towards the baby dragon who gave her a skeptical look, then stepped forward and sighed into her chest returning the hug. 

"Allright Twi, you win. I'll try it, but this better not do anything to me!" Twilight levitated herself some salad onto a plate and munched quietly on a leaf of spinach as Spike undid the top to the jar and sniffed at it. Slowly, he snaked the tip of his tongue lower into the jar until it tapped against the powder and brought it back to his maw. Spike suckled on it for a moment until his eyes shot open with surprise. "Emerald! It's a powdered emerald!?"

Twilight grinned. "Yep! I read something about it the other day so I took a quick stop by the Carousel Boutique this morning and ground up a few emeralds into dust! What do you think?"

Spike greedily plunged his tongue into the jar once more, the dry flavorful powder instantly coating his tongue in a thick shade of green.

Back towards Ponyville, Twilight watched as tiny colored specs in the distance pushed heavy looking storm clouds towards the center of town. "Ooh.. better enjoy the sunlight while it lasts Spike. Looks like we'll be in for a big storm tonight. Spike looked up from his now half empty jar, a glimmering green mask of gems covering his lips and nose.

"Mmhmmn." Spike immediately dove back into the jar, whipping his long ribbon-like tongue back and forth, coating it with a thick layer of emerald dust before pulling it back into his mouth and suckling on it.

Twilight peeled back the protective paper away from the bottom of her muffin and took a bite out of it as the tip of Spike's tail brushed against Twilight's hoof. She squirmed and pulled her hoof back, trying to escape the tickley sensation as she took another bite. Again Spike's tail brushed against Twi's hoof, and she set her muffin down looking at Spike accusingly. 

"Spike, cut it out!" Spike had been laying on his back, filling his mouth with the last of the emerald dust as he sat up and looked at Twilight questioningly. Twilight glared at Spike until she realized with a creeping fear that Spike was sitting up and his tail was behind him, and yet her hoof still had something on it! She whipped her head around and ripped her hoof back, dragging it hard against the ground. It was then that she saw it. 

Its 2 foot long slender body gleaming in the springtime sun, its green rounded scaled head being crushed against the ground, trapped against her hoof as it ripped back towards her. Time seemed to stand still momentarily for Twilight as she saw it's head open wide exposing two pale white curved wicked looking fangs and its every wriggling movement as it lunged into the side of her leg, plunging its fangs deep and hard into the lavender unicorn's flesh. Twilight had just been bitten by a snake.

Seconds began to tick by once more and Twilight let out a shriek loud enough to rival the royal canterlot voice. 

Spike jolted up from the last of his emerald and set the jar aside, trying to figure out what had just happened. Only a few seconds later did Spike see the wriggling creature attached to Twilight's leg, and he jumped back in fear. Twilight screamed and thrashed her leg around like it was on fire, the serpent staying attached firmly into her skin as a trickle of blood began to run its way down to her hoof. Tears streamed down Twilights cheeks as she ran up to the oak tree and bucked her hind-legs against it so hard it rattled the branches. She could feel the snake's bite loosen from her hoof and bucked it again as though (and she truly believed that) her life depended on it. Finally the pair of fangs were dislodged from Twilight's leg and the snake fell upon the roots of the tree in a heap. The snake quickly began to slither away but Twilight's horn began to glow and the snake was lifted into the air.

With a commanding tone of voice Spike had never heard from Twilight before, Twilight ordered Spike to throw her the emerald jar. In a low serious tone, she muttered to herself as though she were reading something out of some invisible book. 

When bitten by a poisonous animal or insect, it's always important to be able to identify what kind of a creature it is; doing so will help doctors find an antidote faster. 

She quickly lowered the snake into the jar and sealed it tightly. Twilight sniffled and took a deep breath, trying to ignore the stinging burn that she was certain was moving up her hoof. "Alright Spike, I need you to listen carefully. I'm going to take the snake and go to Ponyville Hospital. Hopefully they'll be able to take care of the poison."

Spikes eyes began to water as he looked back and forth from the snake to Twilight's bleeding hoof to his own claws. "P-poison? Hopefully..?" 

"Spike I need to stay calm and start moving. If I panic, my heart rate will go up and the snake venom will spread faster. Can you get back home on your own?" Spike swallowed back tears and nodded. Twilight put on a brave face and took a couple steps towards Spike, pulling him into a tight hug that Spike returned wholly.

"I'll be alright, okay Spike?" Spike sniffled and nodded as Twilight stuck the snake jar on her back and teleported away towards Ponyville.

Twilight's thoughts began to race as her seconds left alive began to tick by. She tried to calm herself by lecturing herself about the facts of the matter. "Remember Twilight, snake venom travels through the bloodstream into the heart, and from there every vital organ in the body. The calmer I can stay, the less my heart rate will rise and the more time I'll have to get to the hospital."

Twilight focused on the details of the horizon, trying to gauge how much energy and magic it would take to teleport from each casting. She focused magic through her horn, quickly enveloping her body in it as well, then once again disappeared in a bright pink flash. "If I can just stay calm and focused and get to the hospital as fast as possible I should be ok."

Twilight ignored the growing sting of the bite marks in her leg, and tried her best to measure the height and distance of the closest house that she could see. Equations about curvature of the ground and the trajectory of the sun raced through Twilight's mind, but she found trigonometry a bit hard under the constant sound of her pounding heartbeat, resonating in her mind like the timer of a bomb. She shook her head and teleported half the distance, then broke out into a gallop towards the house, jumping up and teleporting to its roof a second before slamming headfirst into the wall. 

The height of her teleportation was off a couple feet and she landed hard on her stomach. The glow of her horn dissapated and the jar fell alongside her, quickly rolling down the side of the roof. Twilight shook her head from side to side and focused once more, lifting the jar just as it was about to fly off the edge of the houses gutters. She heaved a sigh of relief and brought the jar to eye level, inspecting the seal of the jar. 

The snake inside writhed about slowly, the poor thing dazed after going through the unique and taxing process of teleporting directly followed with being flung off of a roof. The jar's seal still looked fastened tight so she levitated it near the side of her head and gazed upon the buildings of Ponyville, trying to pick out the silhouette of Ponyville Hospital in the distance. She quickly spotted the large building among the other smaller houses and once again teleported from the rooftop she was on to another rooftop a block away. 

She gulped as the storm clouds that looked so far away before now blotted out the sun, slightly draining the unicorns already dismally low optimism. Taking a deep sigh to re-focus her mind, she put all of her focus on the position of the towering building in the distance, then mentally played a game of connect the dots with rooftops leading to it. Having planned out a pathway to her destination throughout the rooftops, she took a deep breath and steadied herself as she began one of the longest teleportation sprees that she had ever done.

Ponies both above and below the rooftops of Ponyville in the corner of their eyes saw mysterious purple flashes amongst the rooftops. Others swear they saw the silhouette of a pony. Others still claim that it must have been a trick of the eye, or a premature firing of a lightning bolt from the storm front. Twilight made one last teleportation down to the emergency entrance of Ponyville Hospital and ran inside.

She was immediately greeted with the sight of a long hallway fraught with many a door on either side and a green earth pony behind a desk, who stared at Twilight with a look of concern.

"Excuse me miss, this is the entrance to the emergency ward. Do you need help?" 

Twilight gulped in air, sweating a bit as she stepped forward, a thin trail of partially dried blood imprinted on the front of her hoof. "Please, I need a doctor! I was bitten by a snake! I don't know how much time I have left!"

The receptionist gasped then got a serious look on her face. "Don't worry, help is coming!" She slammed her hoof on a red button on her desk connected to a small microphone. Her voice echoed out through a collection of speakers hooked up along the hallways. "Dr Stable to the emergency ward! I repeat, Calling Dr Stable to the Emergency ward!"

Twilight merely sat down on the floor, her heart beginning to race as she saw her feet beginning to shake underneath her even as she sat. “Shakiness..” Twilight thought to herself. “It must be another side effect of the poison...” Her eyes glanced over the two small bite marks on her hoof, and they stung as though she had just been bitten again. How much time did she take getting here? How potent was the venom? Twilight gulped as she finally asked herself the inevitable question.

"What would happen if I were to die?"

Twilight sat and lowered the snake jar to the ground as tears began to well in her eyes. Her focus was drawn to a rapidly-approaching sound coming from down the end of the hall. A Yellow-tan Unicorn in a doctors coat with a thick brown mane was running alongside a stretcher being pushed by a pure white unicorn with a pink mane tied up behind her in a bun. Twilight levitated the snake jar and ran towards them, tears beginning to stream down her face as her heart began to race from fear. Twilight swallowed back a sob and called out to the pair. "Please, help! I...I don't know how much longer I have left! I don't wanna die!" Twilight sniffled as the pair reached her and lowered the stretcher down to just a few inches above the ground. 

The Tan unicorn spoke to her in a strong yet calming voice. "Can we get your name please?"

"T-Twilight Sparkle."

"Don't worry Twilight, just lie down on the stretcher and tell us what happened." Twilight lied down on her side as instructed, trying to keep weight off of her hurt hoof while taking a deep breath trying to calm herself. 

The unicorn's horn glowed a faint yellow as did the base of the stretcher as it was lifted a few feet off the ground to a proper pushing height. Twilight wiped away her tears and tried to focus on what had happened just a few minutes ago. After everything she had gone through it felt like hours had passed. 'The venom must be reaching whatever part of my brain keeps track of time...' Twilight thought to herself. Her thoughts raced as she fought against herself to focus.

"I was having a picnic earlier today and the snake in that jar bit my hoof. I tried to get here as fast as I could, but I don't know how strong it's poison is..."

The tan unicorn spoke to Twilight in between huffs and puffs as they sprinted down the long hallway, taking a sharp turn at the end of it following a red sign pointing towards the emergency room. "You did good to catch the snake and bring it here. Try to relax alright? We'll figure out what kind of snake it is and get you an antidote for the venom in no time." 

Twilight sniffled and meekly smiled as a tear streamed down her cheek. "Th-thank you.." The cart suddenly came to a stop in a room filled with other stretchers, some of them occupied with strange machinery and monitors everywhere. 

"Nurse Redheart, prepare Twilight for the antidote while I figure out what kind of anti-venom we need!"

"Right away Dr Stable!"

Dr. Stable set the jar on a counter and studied the shape and coloration of it intently. Nurse Redheart quickly pulled on a pair of gloves over her hooves and poured a few drops of a strange liquid into a rag. "Can you show me where exactly you got bit?" Twilight extended her quivering hoof towards the mare, a tear finding its way across the side of her muzzle as she realized that she couldn't even keep her hooves still.

"This is gonna sting a bit, but it will disinfect the wound." She gently pressed the rag against Twilights hoof and held onto it tightly as Twilight reflexively tried to jerk it away and shrieked with pain. Twilight could swear that the nurse was grinding acid into her leg, but let out a ragged breath and held it still as best as she could. "You're doing great, I've just gotta wash off the blood now alright?" Twilight sniffled and nodded as she quickly brought the rag to a sink and rinsed it off, then went back to her hoof and wiped away the dried trail of blood. 

Twilight's hoof looked completely clean, the pin-pricks of the snakes teeth barely visible against her lavender coat. Dr. Stable's voice suddenly shot out from across the room over the beeps of heart monitors. "I've got it! I know what to do!" 

Twilight heaved a sigh of relief and turned towards the doctor as he walked over, levitating a tiny strip of paper behind him. "Is that the antidote? I've never seen medicine like that before." 

The Doctor cheerfully replied "Nope!" and pulled the strip of paper apart revealing it to be a bandaid, which he promptly stuck over Twilight's bite wound. "There you go, good as new!" The good Doctor gave Twilight a beaming smile as Nurse Redheart and Twilight both looked at him like he'd gone insane. 

Nurse Redheart spoke up first. "Doctor? Are you sure that's all she needs?"

"Positive!"

Twilight's look of fear crept back onto her face as she began to think that her doctor might be completely insane. "B-but the poison..! I-" 

"You were never poisoned Twilight. It's a harmless garter snake!" Twilight's face went flat and her ears drooped at the news.

"Huh..? But I.. WHAT!? How can I not be poisoned?! The last 5 minutes have been a race against Tartarus, I've experienced everything from dizziness to burning pain to not even being able to hold my own hooves still and you're telling me it was all because of nothing!?" 

The good doctor sat down and calmly explained to his patient. "Twilight, you didn't experience nothing, you experienced fear! Haven't you ever heard of a placebo effect? You were legitimately fearful for your life weren't you?"

Twilight looked down and rubbed the back of her head while blushing. "Well... yeah... I didn't know if it was a poisonous snake or not, so I thought that I might as well err on the side of caution.."

Dr. Stable Shook his head. "Perhaps you might benefit from studying up on snakes a bit first Twilight. If you knew what to look for, you'd know fairly immediately that he wasn't poisonous." The doctor presented Twilight the snake in the jar, hoping that she would be a little less scared of it now that she knew a bit more about what had happened.

Twilight carefully took the jar and studied the snake's scales and coloration. "So how could you tell that this wasn't a poisonous snake?

"Well there's a few ways to tell, but the main way is to look at the shape of its head. See how it's not that much larger than the rest of its body? Poisonous snakes have triangular shaped heads due to poison glands in their cheeks to make and store poison for biting. This one however has a small head, barely larger than the rest of it's body." 

Twilight quickly chimed in, excited at having realized the doctors logic. "So since there's no room in the head for the venom! It's not poisonous!"

"Exactly!"

Twilight lifted the snake jar up with her magic as she flung her arms around the Doctor and pulled him in a tight hug. Twilight smiled as one last tear streamed down her cheek. "Thank you so much doctor!"

Dr Stable looked to nurse Redheart, who merely shrugged. Seconds passed as Twilight blinked and gently pushed herself away from the doctor, a slight blush on her face. "Eh heh, sorry.." Twilight muttered as she wiped her eyes.

Dr Stable merely chuckled and shook his head. "No problem Miss Sparkle. Just try to be more careful in the future alright?"

Twilight nodded. "Of course! Thank you again Doctor, and you too nurse!"

Nurse Redheart simply smiled and nodded, while Dr Stable replied "Of course! Anything else we can do for you while you're here?" 

Twilight paused and tapped her hoof against her chin. "Actually, could I maybe take that snake with me? I'd like to study it a bit."

"Well, I suppose thats alright. Just don't leave it in that jar too long!"

Twilight levitated the jar to eye level, inspecting the seal of the jar once more to make sure that it was shut tightly, then stuck it on her back and trotted away waving at the two medical staff. 

Twilight heaved a sigh of relief and trotted towards the entrance to the emergency ward which she had just came in from. The receptionist glanced up from her desk as Twilight walked by, then did a double take as she realized she looked so calm and cheerful. "What happened in there?" 

"False alarm, turned out the snake wasn't poisonous after all!" 

"Ohhh. That must have been embarrassing."

Twilight rubbed the back of her mane. "Well, maybe a little, I'm just glad to be alright."

"Oh I'm sure. Take care on your way back home!"

"I will, thank you." Twilight heard thunder off in the distance as she walked out of Ponyville Hospital, noticing a few sparse raindrops falling from the dark clouds above. "That looks like quite a storm...I hope that Spike got home alright." Twilight gasped. "Spike! He's gotta be worried sick about me! I need to go show him that I'm alright!" Twilight galloped off towards the Golden Oak Library, the poor snake on Twilight's back being jostled around hard in his jar once again.