Hope in a Hoofful of Scrap

by MiriOhki


Chapter II: Day 3

Sunday, May 3rd, 2020

I struggled to claw my way to wakefulness, or at least some dim semblance thereof, surprised at a weight pressing down on me. Nothing crushing, in fact it was quite pleasant, and somewhat comforting, though it wasn't quite familiar. I reached up to rub my face, to find it blocked by floor and carpet. What was I doing down here? I thought to myself as I tilted my head up. I saw hair out of the corner of my eye. Three colors of it, in fact. Fire engine red, and two shades of violet. It didn't quite ring a bell, but it did make me wonder where it came from. I turned my head a bit to see a familiar face, and a smile crossed my lips. Last night was real.

The smile died however, as I noticed a pair of ears and a horn. Oh hell. Last night was real. I reached back to feel at my rear. Which was covered by Sandy. So I reached back and hesitantly felt at her rear. Yes, despite the fact that we spend most of last night rattling each others' bones, I still was somewhat nervous about offending her, but I had to know. I froze as I realized that, as an extension of her spine, I felt the nub of a tail and a soft, luxurious flow of hair extending from it. Sweet Celestia preserve us, Sandy's going to be pissed, I thought to myself.

In a somewhat sultry voice, Sandy murmered, “More, honey?”

My heart fluttered a bit, before I said, “I think you we need to wake up, love,” the affectionate term was hesitant, but very heartfelt. “Something very strange is going on.” I paused, nervous, before gently tugging at her tail.

She froze and in an unnerved voice, said, “I was hoping that part was just a dream.”

“Me too, Sandy,” I said weakly. “Maybe we should head to the bathroom, see what's going on?” I felt her nod before she pushed herself to her hooves.

I stood and started to struggle to my own hooves, staggering into the wall besides the door with an 'oof'. Sandy moved to help support me and herself against me, as both of us were unsteady. We made it into the bathroom and splashed water on our face before attempting to assess ourselves and each other. And as we did, we went from semi-conscious to fully awake in a split second as the shock and horror elicited a series of profanity from the both of us.

One thing military life does do for you is broaden the more vulgar parts of ones vocabulary. Needless to say, she managed to beat me for sheer pungency, though I think I had her beat for volume, and perhaps pitch. Yes, I was shrieking like a cheerleader and she was swearing like a sailor. It was a couple moments before we pulled ourselves together to realize just what had happened to us.

Neither of us seemed to have gotten the better of the deal over the other. Both of us ended up with the previously mentioned technicolor manes and tails, hers the twotoned violet, my own the fire-engine red. Both of us were now hearing from the tops of our heads. She still had that stubby horn protruding from between above her eyes. Those, we already knew about.

It was the new changes that shocked the heck out of us. Somehow, her breasts, not all that large, had not only managed to shrink a bit further, but meander downward to just at about her hipbone. Even more shocking was the dual fact that they not only decided to duplicate themselves on my own body in the same place, but that my newly experienced parts would never experience again, at least in the same way, considering they were a close match to Sandy's own equipment.

I shivered a bit as I looked down further, to notice why we were walking around like budget ballerinas. Our feet and lower legs were now contorted into a pair of hooved appendages.

“What happened to us?” I asked in an unsteady rasp.

“I don't know, Sam,” She said in an equally unsteady tone. “Considering neither of us have slept with any other human, and I very much doubt there's some horse-transformation STD out there, I'm going to assume you haven't tried bestiality.”

I looked at her shocked, before a weak laugh escaped me. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed tightly. “It's going to be ok,” she reassured me.

I sniffed back a tear. “Aren't I supposed to be reassuring you?” I asked, only semi-joking.

“You don't have to be macho for me, love. You never were good at it anyway.”

“That would have stung more if it weren't true,” I admitted.

Sandy kissed me softly on the lips, which seemed to calm the both of us down. “I love you the way you are. Even if the way you are isn't the way you were twenty four hours ago. Besides, I'm crisis trained.”

I hugged her tightly before sagging a bit. “So what do we do now?”

“Well crisis training didn't plan for turning into an anthropomorphic fairy tale, but first priority would be survival. What do we have in the house?” Sandy inquired.

“I haven't gone grocery shopping yet, so we need to go there. There's a Walmart just across the tracks and a Big R around the cor...” I paused. “I didn't just go there, did I?”

“Go where?” Sandy asked.

I put a hand to my forehead, groaning. “Big R's a farm supply store.”

“Yes, honey,” she said, placing a hand on my shoulder before almost laughing. “You did go there.”

“Damnit.”


Considering I had just lost a whole lot of weight in the transformation to date, most of my clothing swamped either of us. But since we weren't sure just how far this was going to go, a clothing run may have been a waste of time. Besides, with the bulkiness of the clothing, it could hopefully conceal our transformations to some degree. A pair of baggy sweatpants covered our tails and other below the waist changes, while a light jacket and her BDU top did the rest.

Fortunately it was early enough in the morning that the Self Checkout lanes were open, but there was almost nobody there. Perfect for our plans. We worked our way through the aisles, and underwent several shocks. Or at least I did. I had always been a meat and potatoes kind of person. But one trip past the far wall left me literally nauseous. “That just ain't fair,” I muttered as I passed up the meat aisle, approaching the fruits and vegetables.

“Ok, Cowgirl, welcome to Vegan World,” Sandy joked.

I gave her a mock glare and said, “I loathe you.”

“That sure isn't what you said last night,” she grinned a bit salaciously.

I couldn't help but blush in memory, but walked onward like a man on carnivore death row. That was, however, until the aromas from under one of the misters hit my nostrils. “Whoa... what in tarnation is that?” I mutter, walking toward some spinach and broccoli. “Ok, that's strange. I like broccoli, but I ain't ever smelled any that good. And that can't be spinach, can it?” For some reason, I had a hard time not drooling.

Sandy nudged me with an elbow. “Don't mess the produce. And what's with the Texas talk?”

I blinked, and looked at her, then thought back a moment. “You're right. This is getting' purty strange.”

“I don't mind it, but it worries me. What else is gonna happen to us?” Sandy said, a hint of nervousness entering her tone.

“I don't know, darlin' but we'll get through it together. I promise,” I said, unconsciously praying to Celestia I could keep said promise. I shook my head then started to gather a bunch of those delicious smelling greens before me.

Sandy hugged my side for a moment, before doing her own foraging. Half an hour later, and quite a bit lighter in the bank account, we made the second half of the trip, which made me groan just thinking about it. “It was a joke,” I said weakly as we pulled up to the Big R.

“Well I'm not laughing that much about this one,” Sandy said. “It's not a bad idea. Maybe it'll come in handy. Maybe it won't matter, but if it does...”

“Better safe than sorry, I get it,” I said, hoist by my own petard.

We didn't spend nearly as much time there, as we learned that it wasn't nearly as farm animal oriented as it was farm gear oriented. But we did find a few things here and there. The other reason was because it was surprisingly difficult to stay standing the way we were. Fortunately, my house was only a couple blocks away, but by the time we got home and got everything into the house, it was almost agony to stay on two hooves, and our hands were nearly hooves.

We got everything put away, but in the end, we just decided to crawl into my bed and take a nap. I rested my head gently upon her neck as we both started to doze off.


A sniffing sound woke me up, several hours later. I struggled a bit but found myself drowning in a sea of cloth. I shuddered as I tried to tear myself free, before a light flashed in my eyes. I blinked a bit, then opened them to see a tearstreaked equine face. But not your average horse. It was.. adorable. But at the same time, bonechilling, as I realized what it meant. “Sandy, are you ok?”

“No, Apple Bloom, I'm not,” she said, a hint of misery in her tone.

The name bludgeoned me like a mace between the eyes. The accent. Everything looking ten times bigger than it did twenty four hours ago. “And you're Sweetie Belle, aren't you?”

Sweetie... Sandy nodded. “Yeah.” Before I could say anything else, she threw her hooves over my shoulders and sobbed against my neck. All I could do was return the embrace and cry along with her.

I wiped her tears carefully with the side of my hoof and sat back on my haunches, looking at Sandy. "So what do we do now? I mean how in the hay are we going to deal with becoming part of modern mythology?"

"Why don't we go online and see if anyone else is in the same boat?" Sandy suggested.

"Is that really a good idea, love?"

"Why not? If anypony else changed, they'd believe us and probably be able to cope with it knowing they and we aren't alone. Everypony else will just ignore us as trolls," Sandy offered.

I gave a weak smile and said, "I'll go get the firewood, love. We're about to start a flame war." She laughed and smacked me with her tail before hopping off my bed and crashing onto her face. "You ok, Sandy?"

"Peachy," she mumbled into the carpet.


We pushed a pair of high stools up to my desktop and began our odyssey. Or we would if we hadn't discovered that hooves and keyboards don't mix. I groaned a little as I looked for my earpiece. "Ok, let's hope I don't have to reprogram my voice commands..." I muttered, trying to figure out how to put the thing into my new ear.

It was just a bit of a surprise, then, to see my keyboard glow light green. "Give me that," Sandy muttered. And suddenly, the keys started to press themselves. 

I turned toward her to see her concentrating, her horn glowing the same light green. "Oh. Unicorn. Right," I mutter to myself, a little jealous that I didn't have an equine Omnitool mounted to my skull. I waited until she stopped before asking, "Um... How did you know how to do that?"

Sandy looked at me, then back at the keyboard. "I dunno. Just seemed natural."

I groaned a little before finally wedging the headset on as best as I could. "Alright. Homebase 1, Firefox. Google Pony Transformation Need Help."

I bent my head down to grab a pen, flicking the tip up and down (an old nervous habit) as we started to scan through the listings. Most of what we saw were either human to pony fanfic writers looking for advice, or people mocking bronies as nutjobs. Neither was particularly helpful.

"Alright," I mumbled. "Going nowhere slowly. Any other suggestions?"

"Youtube? If nothing else, we could be internet stars?" Sandy said wryly.

I rolled my eyes a bit before spitting my pen on the desk. "It's getting dark, think it's safe for me to check the mail?"

"Go ahead, hun," Sandy said as her horn started glowing once more.

As soon as I stumbled from the carpeted upper floor to the wooden stairs to my living room, I paused at the sound of my hoofsteps. "Yep. That's gonna take some getting used to," I muttered, before working my way to the mailbox. I expected it to be mostly junk, though I did have a birthday present to myself en route.

And there it was, sitting on the porch next to the door. I checked the mailbox first (my suspicions were correct) before grabbing the box and going back inside, to stop as Sandy stood before me, looking at me with an odd expression. "Something wrong, love?"

"And you asked how I was doing that being a unicorn?" She said, gesturing to the hoof on the doorknob and the other holding the box and junkmail.

I paused for a moment until what Sandy was implying sunk in. "I didn't even think about it." We had seen the cartoon ponies lift stuff with their hooves once in a while, usually Pinkie as a gag. But good ol' Fridge Logic reared its ugly head. "Maybe it's Earth Pony Power. Represent!" I joked, raising a hoof to the sky.

Sandy facehoofed before muttering, "Whatever works I guess." She shrugged (A hint of fridge logic in and of itself, I thought, but unless we got X-rays or MRIs done, who knows what our musculoskeletal system was capable of?) and walked toward the kitchen.

I looked at her and paused as a mixture of thoughts popped into my head, varying from the perverted to the squeamish, to the confused before setting the package and mail on a chair and following her into the kitchen.

My expression must have tipped her off, as she asked, "What's on your mind, babe?"

"A lot, I suppose. We've got the short term survival covered, I guess, so it gave my mind time to go swimming around in the gutter again," I joked.

"Bit for your thoughts?" She asked as she magically pulled out some prepackaged spinach, which once again touched off the drool factory.

"Damn that smells good," I murmered before shaking my head to clear it before I answered her. "Well let's see. We still love each other, but what does that mean now? Lesbian Schoolfillies?"

"Lovely name for a porn title there," Sandy said sardonically as she opened up the package.

I gave her a lighthearted glare before continuing, "Then there's the fact that, when it comes to that kind of thing, the mind's willing, but the spirit's apathetic and the flesh is nonexistent."

"You are very aware that it's not just tab A into slot B," she chided, "And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. We're not only ponies, but evidently prepubescent ponies. As much as it sucks that we just got hit the green flag in our relationship before the caution got waved, It doesn't mean a whole lot."

"True. It would be kind of a distraction at this point," I admit. "Probably a good idea since we'd have to even figure out what's going on before we go any further down that path." I moved to wrap my hooves around her body gently, hugging her softly.

"We waited twenty five years for our first time, we can wait to figure out the new hardware for our second," Sandy agreed, before offering up one of the bowls of impromptu salad.

I had a new favorite food. After swallowing a few bites of it, I gave a soft cackle like a certain old cartoon. “I yams what I yams,” I joked, “And what I yams is lovin' this spinaches.”

Sandy rolled her eyes but giggled a bit as she dove into her own bowl, evidently enjoying it as much as I did. After we finished the food off, she magicked the bowls into the sink and set them to soak before we made our way back to the computer room, her dragging my beanbag chair with her. “Alright, let's see if we got anything else,” I said as I tapped the headset I hadn't bothered taking off (for not wanting to bother with having to put the darn thing back in for the moment). “Homebase 1, Thunderbird, get all messages.” With that, I curled up in the beanbag next to Sandy, cuddling against her gently.

She lifted the keyboard and tapped in the command to increase text size. “Alright, what do we have here... Spam, spam.. porn,” She said, giving me a sideways amused glance, causing me to blush a bit. “Spam... Huh. Something labeled High Priority, with the Subject “Pl;z dont del;etye, sam, ned he;lp.”

I paused as I looked at the sender and frowned a bit. It was a message from Jack. I didn't want to really bother with it, but Sandy didn't give me the option, as she opened it. It was badly spelled but I could almost feel the desperation in it.

Derr samn,.

Io donm;'tr klnow wqho 32 turnm 2, biut I nmeed hjel;p. I;',m rtumning inmto A XCREatuer amnd it wiont stop. Call ,me [pleASE.

Scaerd.

Kjaclk.

Sandy gave me a worried look we both tried to decipher the message. “That looks like.. it could have been typed with hooves...” she said.

Anger and shame warred with guilt, before I struggled out of the beanbag and moved to my landline phone, grabbing a pen on the way. Knocking the receiver off the phone, I tried to remember Jack's phone number, before using the pen in my mouth to jab at the numbers. I spat the pen aside before putting my head against the phone to align it against my ear.

It rang three times, before a strangely familiar voice finally answered, with a tone on the verge of tears. “H... hello?” the voice quavered.

“Jack? It's me, Sam,” I said, a little unsteady myself.

“Who are you? You don't sound...” Jack paused. “Is that really you? Are you changing too?”

“Yeah. I have. You're not becoming a creature, Jack,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “It may sound strange, but do you remember that pony cartoon? I think I mentioned it once.”

“Or twice a week,” he said, trying to sound mocking but failing miserably. “Yeah.”

“I don't know why but we're turning into them. It's going to be ok, but you just need to calm down and relax for a moment. You're not going to explode or go Godzilla on anyone or something like that.”

“Alright...” Jack took a deep breath. “Can.. I come over? You still live there, right?”

I paused, then said, “Yeah, I haven't moved. Just be careful and try not to be seen until we can sort everything out.”

Jack hung up the phone, and I did the same. “Looks like we're not the only ones, Sandy.”

Sandy moved to hug me, shaking just a bit. “I'm glad. I mean I'm sorry it's happening to others, but I'm glad we're not alone.”

I returned the hug and nodded. “Me too, love,” I replied, resting my head against her neck. “Wanna wait in the living room for him? We might wanna show him the cartoon, he hasn't seen it yet.”

“Ahh yes, a metamorphed pony primer,” Sandy joked as she made the beanbag chair drift behind us. I moved to fumble the first disc of the series into the player before moving to curl up against Sandy in the bag, relaxing.

It was just about midnight when a hesitant tap-scrape on the door was heard. “Sounds like Jack's here.” I got up from the beanbag chair and opened the door, wondering what happened to Jack...

… to see a drenched and scared-looking tan pegasus with a magenta mane and tail.