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// Josey 1, Chapter 3 
// Story: Spritelight 
// by Makitk 
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I woke up refreshed in the morning, with Rhonda still clinging to my side, and turned my head to face her. Something moved with my head and I frowned a little at it. When I tried to turn my head to get a better look at it, the darn thing moved with my head again, constantly staying just out of sight!
I could barely catch a glimpse of a shadow of a thing that looked like I was wearing a baseball cap or something, but not as wide. But I couldn't tell what it was exactly. My movements roused Rhonda, and I turned my attention back to the sleepy girl blinking her eyes open to the morning light.
"Hey, good morning, Rho-Rho. Did you sleep well?" I asked, my voice sounding a bit raw due to lack of moist in my throat.
Rhonda stretched herself with a long yawn, which had me yawning with her, but then nodded and looked up at me to answer. Her mouth opened, but instead of words coming out of it, I saw her eyes go wide and her face get pale while her mouth just opened up a little farther.
"What? What's wrong? Do I have something on my face?" I asked, snapping to full consciousness, and she nodded quickly. "I do? Well, get it off then!" I meeped, and Rhonda quickly shook her head.
"Rho? What's going on?" Rhonda pointed silently at the mirror above the dresser, and I sighed while moving to pull the blankets off of myself. I swung my legs to the side and put my arms underneath me to push up into a sitting position. "Fine, fine, I'll go look," I muttered.
With Rhonda still in a state of shock, I pushed up from the bed to walk on over to the dresser. I still felt a little dizzy, and had to put my hands on top of it before I felt stable enough to look up at the mirror suspended above it.
"I don't see any," I started, not seeing anything out of the ordinary on my face, but stopped mid-sentence as I spotted the protrusion extending about two inches from my forehead.
It looked like, well, as if there was a bone growing underneath my skin.
My skin looked stretched out over it. Just my normal skin. Nothing abnormal about my skin, except for how it was sticking out. It looked a bit cone-shaped. A round, cone shaped, protrusion...

"You're growing a horn," I heard Rhonda gasp from the bed, and swallowed at the reality of things.
I was.
There was a horn growing out of my forehead!
I had to stabilize myself against the dresser as I felt my knees grow weak staring at the thing.
"How is... What... I don't even," I started, dropping to my knees and still staring at my reflection in the mirror. Here I was, a human girl, with a horn protruding from my forehead!
Rhonda quickly rushed to my side as I fell down, supporting me both physically and emotionally as I felt my tears break when her arms wrapped around me.
"I don't," I started, then turned toward Rhonda's form and cried without reservation. Rhonda let me. Even if I was parched from having just woken up, from not having had more to drink than whatever Rhonda had fed me during the previous day as I had laid unconscious in the bed, the tears just rolled down my cheeks and dropped onto her shoulder and upper back.
We sat like that for a few minutes until Rhonda's words started to register in my mind and I slowly started to regain my composure while listening to her babbling into my ear.
"...maybe a hat or something. I could go wear skirts again, I guess? We'll go through this together. You said so yourself. I'll never leave you, Josey. You've always been there for me and didn't throw me out when you saw my tail. I will help you with finding something to mask this. Cause I love you, you know? You've been my best friend for so long, I wouldn't know what to do without you. I just wish you'd had a tail as well. I don't think we're allowed to wear hats in school."
I rested my head on her shoulder and squeezed her gently. "Rho and Jo forever," I muttered through the tears, and Rhonda leaned her head sideways against mine and repeated the last word.
"Forever."

"Forever is a long time, you know?" Discord's voice sounded in the room, and both Rhonda and me looked up and around ourselves to try and find where the words came.
It took us both a moment, but then Rhonda gasped and pointed to a poster on my wall. The poster featured the actor John Barrowman in his role as Captain Jack Harkness, wearing a military overcoat. He looked quite the imposing figure, if not for the Draconequus curled around the man's shoulders like a boa.
Discord looked far too real to be there, and his movements, while the rest of the sun-bleached poster remained stationary, was enough to cause a feeling of unease in the both of us.
He didn't look like how he was depicted in the show at all. Well, he did, goatee and all, but he didn't look drawn. His head looked like a real goat's head. His claws like real claws. His scaled tail like real scales. They shined in the light coming in from the window as if he was really there in the room with us. As a two-dimensional representation of himself simply projected onto the poster.
Except he wasn't projected onto the poster. He really hung over Captain Jack's shoulders. His body disappeared where it went around behind the man's neck. He even had the tip of his tail tucked into Jack's overcoat, the dragon talons of his right leg disappearing under a lapel of it.
He seemed to bask in the attention that we gave him as our minds tried to come to terms with what we were seeing. His bird-like claw was stroking his goatee slowly while he was waiting for us to make the next move.
"You're not real," Rhonda finally breathed out, and I shook my head to it as well.
"I'm not?" Discord returned, mockingly pretending to be hurt at her statement. "Maybe you would listen to me better if," he stated, disappearing from the poster and suddenly appearing on the television - which was turned OFF - and continuing, "I was here instead? A media personality coming to you live from Equestria?"
We turned our heads to follow the sounds and Rhonda shivered. I pulled her a little closer against me and frowned at Discord on the television leaning against one of the edges of the screen as he proceeded to do stretch exercises.
"Is this your doing?" I bit to him, pointing up to my forehead.

Discord stopped doing exercises and moved his head closer to mine to inspect my horn. It was a really strange effect to see his body in the television but his head mere inches away from mine.
It was like watching a 3D movie but the effect was accompanied by a feeling of unease worse than any movie I'd seen before then.
"Why, you seem to be growing a horn. How quaint," he remarked, and I felt the urge to punch him. "No, that's not me. That's you and you alone."
Discord smiled and pulled himself back into the television with a sucking sound that only added to the uneasiness. It sounded somewhat like the sound wet dog food makes as it drops out of the can, but played in reverse.
"Well, maybe you did have a little help. You see, we have a small problem which has regrettably galloped off into this world," Discord continued, and Rhonda and me shared a glance between us.
"What kind of a problem?" I asked, seeming more up to the task to talking with a fictional character than Rhonda was at the time.
"Well, one of my, ahem, students... has gone rogue," Discord admitted with a flush, seeming genuinely embarrassed for just a brief moment. It didn't take long before he reasserted himself as the king of chaos however, and he returned to smiling enigmatically toward us.
"She's got the weird little idea in her head that Earth should become the new Equestria since it has so much more room than we have in this little box here," he offered, growing in size on the screen until he had to fold himself up just to fit within its borders. "See how cramped it is?"
I sighed, then mumbled under my breath, "I wonder who gave her that idea."
Discord fell out of the television screen and onto the table my television was set up on, falling flat on his back and gripping at his chest.
"Oh. OH! I'm HURT that you think I had anything to do with it!" he decried, then got up to sit on the edge of the table staring at us, one leg hooked over the other and his arms folded in front of him.
"Now look here, I do love a bit of chaos now and again. But Fluttershy opened my eyes to the concept of moderation. If Earth succumbs to this filly's magical tricks, it will offset the balance in a way that goes beyond chaos. There are things out there that are far, far worse than I could ever be," he revealed, his eyes narrowing at us.
"The more she destabilizes this dimension, the more they're drawn to Earth to destroy everything and everyone within it. And how can I play with this dimension when there's nothing left in it? Hmm? You tell me that."

I stared at him, flabbergasted at his sudden candor. Rhonda was the first to snap out of it and pushed herself up from the ground to approach Discord.
"Rho?" I tried, but she made a motion with her left hand that silenced me again.
"I have a tail," Rhonda started, as Discord just peered up at her in mild amusement.
"So have I, aren't they great?" Discord replied with a grin, flicking his tail behind him.
"Josey has a horn growing out of her forehead," Rhonda continued, and Discord reached up to his own horns.
"Oh, just wait until the skin breaks. Fever dreams are so wonderfully chaotic," he offered to me, looking past Rhonda and almost missing the movement of her hand until it was too late.
Just as I thought she was going to hit him, he disappeared in a flash and appeared life size beside me in the middle of the room. "Now that wasn't very friendly," he huffed as Rhonda's attempt to slap him ended in her moving her hand through empty space.
She let out a frustrated sigh and turned to face Discord again, her eyes glaring at him with barely held-back anger.
"To be fair, I don't think either of us is very happy with what happened. First she grows a tail, then I grow a horn, and then you drop in and... what? What do you expect of us? Why do you explain these things to us?" I asked, feeling my own anger rise at Discord's continued games.
Discord knelt down beside me and reached out to tap my horn once with his bird-like talon. "Because your magic potential is the highest of all her victims so far."
I winced at the pain shooting through my head, then looked up in confusion once it settled. "What does that even mean?"

"There's no magic in this world," Rhonda stated, joining me by my side again and helping me stand up so we were both at Discord's eye-level.
Discord smirked at her statement and placed his feline hand on her left shoulder.
"Au contraire! It has always been here. And some of you have been using it. But now this filly is unlocking it at a faster rate than it gets used and is drawing the wrong kind of attention to herself. Zecora came to check up on you yesterday, as she has with all of this filly's victims. All the princesses are hard at work to find a solution for this problem. So, they sent me, her teacher, to come explain things and, well... take you to Equestria."
He moved his paw from Rhonda's shoulder and waved it toward the center of the room, a portal appearing there as he did. The shimmering oval showed a colorful landscape behind it, with the white walls of Canterlot not too far away.
Rhonda clung to my side and shivered uncontrollably, and I looked down at her to see her face wrought with fear. "You can't make us," I told Discord, pulling Rhonda closer and letting her hide her face against me. "I'm not going unless Rhonda's going and you can see how she's feeling about the idea."
Discord smirked at us both, then stuck his head into the portal and looked around to the left and right before pulling it out again. "I will be right back," he stated, disappearing in a flash and leaving the portal there in the middle of the room.
I helped Rhonda shuffle over to the bed and sat us down on it, pulling her close and just softly stroking her back. "It's ok, ssh... it's ok," I cooed to her, but I wasn't too sure myself. I had to keep up appearances for Rhonda's sake though. I had to be the strong one. All those panicky thoughts could wait until after Rhonda calmed down.