Close Enough to Touch: The Lyra Account

by LysanderasD

One: This Time Will Be Different

“I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.”
 Fritz Perls

One: This Time Will Be Different
Saturday ~7:30 AM EST

Before I say anything else I think I should explain that I slept on a futon. That is to say, I slept on the futon in couch position rather than bed. This was, admittedly, largely a matter of practicality; the room I was occupying was not, strictly speaking, mine. It had been before I’d left for college, but in the grand tradition of empty nesters everywhere, upon leaving, my room had been transformed into the so-called guest bedroom--so-called, I say, because we never had any guests in it, except for me.

 More to the point, the house was on the market; my great grandmother was going into assisted living way back up in the Midwest and my grandmother, the eldest child, of course, felt entirely too guilty and impotent being way down in South Carolina. Still, there was the matter of selling the house; and of course that meant keeping the house neat, and in the grand tradition of college-age males everywhere, I kept the futon neat by keeping it in couch form all the time, even as I slept. Well, maybe that wasn’t a tradition. I could make it one. In any case...

I distinctly remember this being highly uncomfortable. I sleep on my side, you see, and the seat of the futon was angled down toward the back. Invariably, I would wake up in the mornings with a numb or partially-numb arm and before I went anywhere I had to roll over and get circulation back. As uncomfortable as that was, it had the distinct positive side effect of making it virtually impossible for me to fall out of bed.

“Gah!”

Naturally, this would be the one morning I did fall out of bed.

I should also explain that I’m a morning person. In a family with one car, one tends to develop that way. Up at 5:45 every weekday morning because Grandma’s got to get to work now and there, Travis, we’ll drop you off at school on the way back. I was in college by this pont... well, kind of, that’s a complicated story, let’s not worry about that yet. The point was, even though I no longer had to be a morning person, my body still wanted me to be, or so it seemed. Falling on my head, then, while a very surprising way to wake up, did not leave me as disoriented as I might have been otherwise.

As such, the first thing I saw was a very long, smooth patch of mint green fur. Was fur the proper term? I had the strangest niggling down that it wasn’t. I had gone to sleep in a garish orange t-shirt--used as PJs because I would never appear in public wearing it--and long underwear that was green in the slightest, let alone mint-colored. With another “Gah!” I wrenched myself, or what I thought was myself, away from the mint green that wasn’t me, and my distinctly wrong-feeling body fell the rest of the way to the floor. The first thing I saw was my arm, or the thing that felt like my arm, which was also a refreshing minty color and ended in a very visible stump. In a last vain attempt to deny the truth that is rapidly bearing down on me, I tried to move my fingers.

It turned out I didn’t have any fingers.

I didn’t scream, actually. I probably should have. What came out was more like a protracted medium-volume whine in a voice that very much wasn’t mine. At the same time, I heard the door to my room open.

“Hey, bud, you alr--”

I didn’t stop making the... noise I was making, and Grandpa, I suppose, was standing in the doorway, staring at what he can see of me, speechless.

“--aaaaaaaah!” The only reason I stopped was that I’d run out of breath. I whimpered as soon as I’d caught it again, flailing all four of my hooves, and yes, they had to be hooves, and I wrenched my body fruitlessly and rather uncomfortably across the carpet. “No! No, no, no, no!”

Through a complicated series of tugs and flails and errant pushes of my hooves--and didn’t they feel weird? Nothing like hands at all--I managed to rotate myself approximately one hundred and eighty degrees and come to a stop, breathing hard, but still whimpering, staring across the floor of my room and up into my grandfather’s eyes.

Now, I was proud of my grandfather. I was. For seventy-four, he didn’t look a day over sixty, or maybe even fifty-five; I had that opinion ground quite solidly into my head, because he asked his visible age of every waitress at every restaurant we visited, and they all said something to that effect. He was in good shape--that is to say, he was fairly round, but that didn’t slow him down one bit more, and he approached life with a slow, steady patience and a sort of quiet but indomitable confidence that I could only aspire to. Very little surprised him. To see him, then, absolutely speechless, leaning against the doorframe of my room for support, did not help my mental state. I whimpered again.

There was a pause.

“...Travis?” he asked, very carefully, and the calm in his voice made me proud through my panic.

I bit down the snark that leapt to my mind first and foremost. Unless your grandson snuck out of the house in the night and left a pony in his place, yes. “Yeah...”

Oh, no, that was definitely not my voice. Well, it was my voice. I didn’t want it to be my voice. It was too... what?

Oh, the pony thing. Well, that had been going on for a week by now, see; one week ago on the dot I remembered getting pinged to heck and back on Skype.

dude check the link its celestia

Celestia is here! Here! I mean it’s Faust but seriously Lysander just look! Look!

OMG PONIES

So the whole people-turning-into-ponies thing? Not news to me. And I won’t deny that I wished for it, you know. I actually did wish, really hard, because--you know. Ponies, right?

Somehow waking up on the floor, mint green, with an undeniably female voice had a way of reorganizing one’s perspective.

Naturally, once the whole ponies-in-real-life thing happened, I had to get my grandparents caught up. Having no functioning TVs in the house meant a lot of scouring the internet, and I say scouring because pony content was everywhere and, well, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, you know; I had to make sure I caught everything. To say my grandparents were unsettled by the whole thing was an understatement; but they were caught up.

Another pause filled the air as I stared up at Grandpa and he stared down at me. Eventually, a weak smile fluttered around, trying to escape from under his moustache. “Well, it did wonders for your looks.”

“Please don’t make light of this,” I whined, pounding one hoof weakly against the floor. Whatever-pony-I-was’s voice was tomboyish, which I wasn’t actually sure how to feel about, and seemed deep, for a mare, although it had a smooth clarity to it that made me guess that whoever she was she could sing soprano. If she sang. “Can you... can you come over here and pick me up?” I didn’t relish the act of getting up on my own. I certainly didn’t intend to embarrass myself trying while I had such a rapt audience.

But if you don’t try, how are you going to get anywhere?

“Please?” I added, trying to ignore the voice in my head that was probably right. Instead of doing what I asked, Grandpa scrutinized me, pushing his glasses up his nose. Unconsciously, even floorbound as I was and not wearing my own, I mirrored his actions, and the feeling of my hoof touching my snout made me flinch.

“... Are you female?”

I could feel my cheeks catch fire, and I raced to distract my mind from the terrifying thoughts that raised their heads at the idea. “Yes! Please no more questions can you just come over here and set me on my hooves so I can learn how to walk!”

I don’t snap, normally. Truly, I don’t. Please excuse me for being short on patience when my entire literal worldview has been shuffled around without so much as an if-you-please.

This time Grandpa acquiesced, although he did it at his own pace and I could see his eyes looking over me. If the blush I felt is showing up on my cheeks through the minty green, it was probably clashing pretty horribly.

For the first time, that color bored its way into my brain. Mint green. What ponies were mint green? Mentally I slapped myself; it felt like the name was on the tip of my tongue...

“Unicorn,” Grandpa said as he bent down in front of me, and he reached out and touched the tip of it. I felt it as though through fingernails, rather like I vaguely remembered my hooves feeling as they scrabbled against the carpet in my initial rush of panic. Just a light pressure up and some distance away from my forehead. The touch made me shiver; on some level I couldn’t quite name it felt... well, it feelt wrong somehow. It wasn’t something I wanted. I pulled my head away gently.

“Please just pick me up.” He did. I closed my eyes in apprehension as my feet... excuse me, my hooves touched the ground.

Now I’ll get to walking in a moment, but first please let me take a moment to try and describe standing on four legs. It’s really hard to put it in terms someone that hasn’t been a pony can understand, because, well, humans aren’t built this way; but imagine, if you will, that after long months or years of physical training you had a superb sense of balance and the ability to put all of your weight--the thought hurts, actually--all of your weight on the nails of your middle fingers and big toes. Weird, right? And it’s a painful thought, because wow, a human’s whole body weight on the nails... but that’s as close as I can get. The hooves feel like fingernails; aside from the frog in the center there is no sense of fine touch, no detail, just... pressure. What really sealed the deal, though, at least for me in that moment, was that my center of balance felt all wrong for the position, which is to say, it felt right. On hands and knees, one’s body weight is still mostly in the legs, or at least that’s how it always felt for me. Here, my center of balance... was the center, and standing this way, even though by all rights I ought to have felt precarious standing on my fingernails, so to speak, instead I felt comfortable and a great deal more stable than standing on two.

I opened my eyes. Grandpa stepped up and back so I didn’t have to crane my neck up to look at him. He was, what, five-foot-ten...

Oh by Celestia, I was tiny. I had to be half of his height, if that.

“Nice eyes,” he mused, the smile finally managing to escape from the off-white tangle above his lips. Oh man, he was making light of this situation again. Didn’t he understand how badly  I was freaking out right now? Well, no, he probably didn’t, at that. Still, the blush resurfaced, and I looked away, huffing.

A thought occured.

“What color are they?”

“Hmm?” He seemed confused by the question. “Oh. Yellow. Golden, even. Very striking.”

“Gold?” I could feel my ears perk up in surprise. That was new, and more than a little unsettling. Mint green coat, golden eyes, and...

Very cautiously, as though it would upset the sense of balance that still felt too stable to be comfortable, I turned my head to look down my body. Grandpa beat me to the punch before I saw what I was looking for.

“... Is that a harp?”

“Lyre,” I corrected automatically, and then, this time, I screamed.

Okay, so maybe I’m a liar. I won’t get to walking right away. The screaming woke my grandmother, who rushed up the stairs demanding to know who was making that noise, and when she saw me, she screamed, too.

Poor thing. She doesn’t take to stress well. And Saturdays are supposed to be her day off, too.

So there’s my grandfather, stranded in the middle between two (or one and a half? One and... sort of one? Nope okay not thinking about that just yet) emotionally distraught females, and, bless him, he did what he does best.

When the very sudden and not-entirely-comfortable but very welcome hug came to an end, neither of us were screaming any more. I fell back onto my rump and my tail, with devilish autonomy, settled next to my flank. I could feel it there, and it felt... gah, it felt wrong in how right it felt.

My eyes settled off to the side, and I could feel myself shaking slightly. My grandmother dragged my grandfather out into the hallway and proceeded to have what was probably intended to be a muffled, private discussion with him. She failed to account for my equine ears, which swiveled under their own power to listen in.

“....not supposed to happen!”

“Who says?”

“I say!” she snapped quietly, although the pause beforehand rings loudly. “I just... I just...” she stammered under the weight of what she probably realized was a self-defeating argument. “I just wanted this to just pass us by! We don’t need to get involved in this, this, magic stuff. Magic isn’t even real! I’d much prefer to pretend all of this never happened, actually, and I was doing fine until that thing showed up--”

“Lynn, that ‘thing’ is your grandson...”

My ears fell flat against my skull.

“Thanks,” I said to them, weakly. “I think I’ve heard enough, too.”

I could still hear snatches of the conversation, though, and so to distract myself I focused very intently on getting back onto all four hooves. If I just, let me see, pushed like... this.... aha!

I couldn’t help but smile, maybe a little manically. Okay, now to walk. Now to...

My eyes drifted again, and settle on the dusty and unused PS2 under the end table currently being used as a TV stand for a TV that didn’t work. For a moment I eyed the controller and lifted up one of my hooves, frowning. Well, just as well I couldn’t play it any more, I guess. Still, it had been my intention to get that TV fixed so I could finish one-hundred-percenting Okami.

That thought hung in the forefront of my brain for a moment. I tried to squish it down; I had bigger problems than a game about a wolf-goddess-artist that needed to... wait.

My eyes narrowed, and I glanced at the PS2 again. Okami is about a wolf. I’d certainly played enough of it. Wolves and ponies are both quadrupeds. The theory’s the same, right? Now how did Amaterasu do it...?

My room didn’t have a lot of free space. Well, it did, but what space there was didn’t seem like quite so much when there was a lot more of you horizontally than there was vertically. The futon was along one wall, and the other was lined with all of the boxes of books and belongings that we didn’t have room for anywhere else. The broken TV sat in the middle of that, a blind sentinel for our trapped and unused miscellany. The third wall had nothing on it except the window, which was nearly always open because the house’s poor design made my room a heat trap; on the opposite wall from that was a card table that we’d repurposed into my computer desk, with my laptop sitting closed and obediently on standby on top. To the right of the desk was a very short, narrow hallway that lead to the door of my room, one wall of which was taken up by the closet. Between the table, the futon, and the boxes, I had maybe five and a half feet to move around in.

Despite these dimensional challenges, however, by the time my grandfather returned to my room I was managing a quite admirable, if overly cautious, pace back and forth from the window to the start of the hallway. Good progress, Travis. Excellent progress. When I turned around to see him standing at the far end of my route, smiling at my victory, I mirrored the expression, laughing a little breathlessly.

“Quick learner as always,” he said, giving me an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Good work.”

My eyes settled on his hand as he made the gesture, and I wasn’t immediately aware that he said anything more. Thumbs-up...

I couldn’t help but eye my hooves again.

“Travis?”

“What?” I looked up again.

“What now?” he asked, with the sort of gentleness that meant he’d actually already asked once.

My stomach answered for me.

“Breakfast would be good,” I clarified weakly.

“Hmmm,” he agreed, nodding. “And maybe you can tell me about this lyre pony you’ve turned into, since you seem to know all about them. How does an apple sound?”

“Please,” I said, nodding, and then I looked back down at myself yet again. Explain Lyra? What was there to say? Incidental unicorn number two, that’s me...

And there are bigger problems. Like getting to New York.

“Yeah,” I answered myself aloud. I looked up and around at the room that had seemed to double in size since last night, and as I heard Grandpa beginning to descend the stairs, I added, “Bigger problems.”