Breakdown

by McPoodle


Chapter 6: In the Lair of the Crocodile God

Breakdown

Chapter 6: In the Lair of the Crocodile God


Day 11: Wagnesday (Halloween), 9:30 PM PDT


I needed to expand my influence on the Internet. This, I felt, was my best chance at being able to contact newly-transformed ponies before they had succumbed to the temptation of merging. I had a website already, but it was mostly for my existing patients, so they could more easily track their progress between visits. To this point in my career, I had gotten all the new patients I could handle via word of mouth.

But now I needed to announce myself. I needed to advertise. I needed to find a way to catch the attention of panicked individuals to let them know that I had the answers to their questions, that I was an individual worthy of trust.

And to do that, I needed the services of Sobek.

To the ancient Egyptians, Sobek was the crocodile-headed god of the Nile, not only representing its life-giving fertility, but also acting as a protector of the Egyptian people against the deadly threats hidden beneath its waters.

Which meant that “Sobek” was a very fitting online alias for one of the most brilliant ex-hackers I had ever met. Nowadays she made her income designing websites for the same sorts of people who sent their sons and daughters to be treated by me. At least, her legal income. I did not know for sure if she still maintained her earlier line of work, but I had heard the rumors.

Sobek had a lot of secrets. The fact that she was a “she” was one of them. Her real name was Danielle (not her real name), she was 19 years old, she was paralyzed from birth below the waist, and she lived in downtown Hollywood with her intellectually disabled brother, Gary. It was because my courtroom testimony had helped Danielle to retain custody of Gary that she had decided that I could be trusted to learn that my (psychological) client’s sister was the same person as my (Internet) consultant. I had been trying to get her into my office for three years now—she’d been balancing multiple chips on her shoulders for most of her entire life.

Not that she wasn’t justified in her hatred of most of humanity. Danielle’s mother had no idea who her children’s father was. The boy’s mental problems, as well as the girl’s physical problems, were both caused by the mother’s chronic alcoholism, and her final “gift” to them was dying of her condition when Danielle was only five years old. As for the rest of Danielle’s family, they resented the person she grew up into, and they were the ones trying to separate her from her brother, having succeeded in forcing them into separate homes on two occasions in the past. After she turned her life around to earn the court’s approval of her, she then ran up against her new employers, who by and large refused to take a teenage female web designer seriously, and pretended that the sites she designed for them were their own handiwork. I was one of the few that not only displayed her logo prominently on my front page, but also recommended her services to those of my clients who I judged would not be “ungrateful punks” (to use her vernacular).

Her choice of the crocodile god as her avatar was quite appropriate. Last year at Halloween, she had dressed up as a crocodile, and went around the neighborhood without her wheelchair. On another occasion, I managed to infuriate her so much with my needling that she leapt out of her chair at me, and managed to subdue me entirely with upper body strength. She jokingly referred to her technique as “Gator-style wrestling”.

Come to think of it, I wonder what would happen if I put her and Rain Shimmer in the same room—would they try to kill each other, or would they work out which of their numerous resentments overlapped, and then ally to take down modern civilization?

Note to self: Do not put Sobek and Rain Shimmer in the same room.

I had sent an email to Sobek’s public account last night, explaining my interest in reorienting my services towards ponies, and offering to pay a rather substantial amount to get over her opposition to a TV show she probably didn’t care much for.

I didn’t expect an answer to my request for several days. She was rather successful in her job, and it was Halloween, after all.

Nevertheless, I found when I returned home that there was a reply to my email message from Sobek:

CAll m3..

It was a very unusual message from her. Sobek was not a shut-in, but she did enforce a strict separation between business and casual encounters in her life. I had requested a business encounter, and not only was her reply uncharacteristically messy, it was also asking for something more personal than the purely online correspondence I was expecting. Maybe she needed to know if I was serious or not. Maybe she was drunk. Or maybe Gary got into her email account.

I dug through my records, and I found Gary’s contact information, which was pretty much Danielle’s contact information. I dialed her cell phone. It rang four times, and was then picked up by her answering system.

This is Dani,” her recorded voice told me, “and I’ve got better things to do than answer the damn phone. Leave a message at the 1.8, and I’ll get back to you whenever I feel like it.” This was then followed by the 1.8 KHz tone of the answering service beep.

“Danielle, this is Dr. Franklin,” I said. “I suspect that somebody might be accessing your email without your knowledge. I suggest that you...”

I had a feeling then, that Danielle had in fact been the one to send that message, and that she really needed me to get in contact with her.

“You know what?” I said into the phone. “I’m going to call your landline phone. Please do not yell at me.” And I hung up.

Danielle’s landline existed for the sole purpose of giving her a guaranteed list of people she could yell at every day. At least, that was my theory based on personal experience.

I dialed Danielle’s landline. It rang eight times before being answered by an odd-sounding “clunk!” “Hello-Danielle-this-is-Dr.-Franklin,” I said very quickly, and then held the iPhone away from my head to protect my ears from the inevitable onslaught.

Dr. Franklin?” a distant and completely unrecognizable voice answered. “Please dear God don’t hang up the phone!

I put the phone back to my ear. “Who is this?” I asked cautiously. It was a male voice, I was definitely sure of that, and it sure wasn’t Gary’s.

Danielle never had men over at her apartment.

“It’s...complicated,” the strange voice replied. “Look, when you said that you wanted to help ponies, were you dicking me around, or did you mean it?”

“I am completely sincere,” I said, beginning to have a good suspicion of who I was talking to.

Brushie!” cried out a second voice in the background.

“Not now, Gary,” the first voice said, “Dani’s busy on the phone. You can brush me...you can—I’ve got knots on that side! Ow, ow, ow!”

I’m sorry,” Gary’s voice whimpered.

“It’s...it’s alright, Gary. Looks like you’ve got yourself a client, Doc,” she said to me. Although I suppose it would be more accurate at this point to refer to Danielle as a “he”. “How fast can you get over here?”

“That depends,” I said. “Which variety of pony are you?”

“The kind that would suck the most for a computer programmer to be,” he said dryly.

“Alright, then give me an hour. I have to pick up something first.”

Note to self: Ask Rain Shimmer if his feathers are strong and dexterous enough to operate a keyboard with.

(% % %)

I arrived at the rundown apartment complex fifteen minutes later than promised, a medium-sized cardboard box in my hands. Kids in cheap plastic Halloween costumes raced from door to door, asking for candy. They didn’t stop at Danielle’s home, however, because the patio lights were out. I stepped up to the door and knocked.

“Hello, Dr. Franklin,” Gary said when he opened the door. The boy was 17 years old and built like a linebacker, with a sandy-blond mop of hair and a perpetual grin on his face. He was armed with a very large brush, in which was embedded quite a bit of green fur.

“Could I see Danielle?” I asked him.

“Oh. No,” he said, shaking his head a couple of times like a dog shaking itself dry. “No, Dani’s not avai...availlahble right now.” He grinned at getting the vocabulary word out successfully. “She’s not feeling like herself,” he added.

I laughed out loud. “Is that what you told him to tell any visitors?” I asked over the boy’s shoulder in a raised voice. “Cute, Danielle, real cute.”

“Let him in,” the male voice from before instructed Gary from around a corner, a definite smile in his voice.

Gary led me into the darkened interior of the apartment, after closing the door behind me. All of the curtains were drawn, and the only light was coming from the lit screen of a laptop in the master bedroom, a part of the apartment I had never been permitted to enter before. There, sitting on a waterbed like a pissed-off Sphinx, was the sea-green earth pony that the fearsome Sobek had transformed into. He wore a large white tee-shirt that informed me which particular anatomical act should be performed upon the local constabulary. Danielle’s wheelchair sat folded up at the back of the room.

“Well!” I exclaimed, having nothing better to say.

Danielle answered me with a string of curses, all directed at God Almighty for putting him into this mess. I closed the door of the bedroom as soon as they started to pour out of his mouth, in the vain hope that they would not get added to Gary’s everyday vocabulary.

“Well, you could look on the bright side,” I said when he had finished.

“Oh, but I have!” Danielle exclaimed sarcastically, rising to his hooves. He then proceeded to prance up and down the waterbed, somehow managing to not get either himself or the laptop tossed over the side. “Look at me! Look at me!” he proclaimed. “I’m walking unaided on my own feet, for the first time ever. Oh wait, I’m sorry, they’re not my feet, they’re my hooves!” He sat down on his rear and raised his forehooves to the heavens. “My hooves!” he screamed. “What the hell am I going to do with hooves!” He then proceeded to pound them madly on the laptop’s keyboard.

In response to this tantrum, I held the cardboard box aloft, saying nothing.

“What is that?” he asked, rapidly crossing the bed and looking up at me, his enormous blue eyes gazing into my own.

I was reminded of nothing so much as a puppy begging for table scraps.

I put the box down on the edge of the bed. “I think even you can get this open,” I quipped.

“Stop. Just...stop.” He pried the box open with his hooves, and then dragged out seeming miles of metal cable from its depths. “What is...what is this supposed...” he muttered to himself, his head buried in the box. Then he froze, completely froze in place, before emerging with a metal hook in his mouth, fit for Captain Hook himself. The hook was divided lengthwise, so that it could be split into two separate hooks. He spat the apparatus down onto the bed and looked up with me with wide eyes. “No way!” he exclaimed. “No effin’ way!”

(No, he didn’t actually say “effin’”—I’m trying to censor this in case any kids are listening in right now.)

“Interesting story behind that invention,” I said as I sat down on the wooden edge of the bed. “A man by the name of Alfred Corley used to make a comfortable living making mechanical prostheses for those without working hands or feet. He got into the business after his brother came back from Vietnam without a hand. But in the last few years, the big medical companies have gotten the nerve-operated prosthetics working so well that people only wanted the mechanical ones temporarily, until they got their operation. Alfred was on the verge of retiring when, all of a sudden, a whole new population of people without working hands started showing up, people who are probably not going to be all that enthusiastic about being operated on, at least for the immediate future.”

By this time Danielle had dug out a second hook and a modified vest, and had already read through the typewritten instruction sheet that Corley had given me along with the box. “I know what these are,” he told me as he awkwardly shuffled out of his shirt and slipped the vest over his head. “I had a teacher in middle school who wore one of these. We called him Professor Claw.”

The operation of “Corley’s Claws” was incredibly simple, and designed to be easily set up by a pony. The two claws screwed into a pair of cups which fit over the pony’s forehooves. The metal cables connected the hooks to the back of the vest, which acted as an anchor. By extending a foreleg, the cable pulled the two halves of the claw apart from each other. There was an elastic tension between the two halves, so that by relaxing the foreleg, the halves would draw together. In this way, it could be used as a primitive hand, grasping objects. By giving the cups a half turn, the hooks could be bent to the side, which allowed a pony to easily walk with them.

It took Danielle only a few minutes to get the hang of the system, to the point he could split both hooks and use the tips as four fingers for typing on the laptop. “You’re the Man, Doc,” he said with a chuckle. “100% certified Man!”

“So, how long have you been a pony?” I asked.

“About three hours,” Danielle said, “I took a nap this afternoon, and this is what I woke up as.”

“And do you have any idea which pony you are?” I asked. I wanted to know if he had made contact with his “inner pony”, but I didn’t want to panic him if he didn’t know he had one yet.

“Hold on,” he said, working his laptop, “I’m pretty sure I saw him in ‘Hearts and Hooves Day’. Ah, here we go.” He turned the screen around to show a frozen screenshot from the musical number early in the episode. In the background of a scene of the Cutie Mark Crusaders singing, there was a muscular stallion showing off his pecs for a frail little pink mare with a blue mane.

I frowned to myself, thinking that I was going to have to look for two missing mares now. “So how do you feel about having a fillyfriend?” I asked, trying to turn the situation into a joke.

“Nah, she’s not his fillyfriend anymore,” he said with a laugh. “She dumped him for a blackjack dealer in Appleloosa. Said he ‘wasn’t assertive enough’.” The pony’s eyes went wide. “How the hell did I know that?” he asked in a shocked whisper.

I sat there and looked at Danielle for a few seconds, to see if he’d calm down.

“Well don’t just sit there!” he bellowed. “Ask me something else!”

I leaned over to see that his cutie mark was a wave. No, actually it was the wave, Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa. “What’s his special talent?” I asked.

“Surfing,” Danielle answered with a bored expression, pointing at his cutie mark with one claw. “Like, duh. By the way, if I regress into surfer talk, you have permission to slug me. He picked it up in Neighpon, where his parents were the ambassadors to Princess Cel—I just did it again! Holy crap!

“Have you been paying attention to any of the news about the ponies?” I asked. “Seen any of the interviews?”

“Look, I was in denial,” Danielle said, lowering his head and using a claw to scratch idly at the edge of his blue-green mane. “I was hoping if I didn’t do any obviously brony things after it started happening that it wouldn’t happen to me.” He gestured back at a photograph on a side table. The photo showed Gary hugging an absolutely hideous costumed mascot of Rainbow Dash. In the background of the photo was Danielle as I remembered her: short brown hair in a mockery of a bowl cut, a shirt that had been reversed because otherwise they wouldn’t have let her into the park, a hunched back in her chair from displaying her animosity towards the universe, and eyes squinted into a perpetual scowl. (Of course, if she actually did hate My Little Pony as much as she was pretending to in that photo, then she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be in that photo in the first place.) “Actually, considering how much Gary plays around with his pony toys, I figured it would happen to him instead of me.” Danielle suddenly raised his head in alarm. “Gary, have you turned into a pony in the last five minutes?” he asked in a loud voice.

For like the billionth time, no!” cried the voice of Gary from the other side of the door. “And I don’t know why it happened to you instead of me, either!

Danielle frowned. “Gary, are you listening in on us?

No...well, does it count if I can’t hear most of what you say no matter how much I smush myself into the door?

No, I suppose it doesn’t,” Danielle said with a laugh. “Go back to the living room and watch some TV.

Are you still mad?” Gary asked.

Danielle looked down at his hooks. “No,” he answered, “I’m not mad anymore. I’ll be out in a few minutes.

“So what’s your pony’s name?” I asked him.

“Oh that’s easy: his name is...” The pony before me closed one eye and concentrated. “Oh, for crying out loud! How come I can pull anything else I want, but not the name? What’s up with that?”

“The people who have been transformed have been saying—” I began, only to be cut off.

“—They’ve been saying that they’ve got the actual pony sharing their head with them,” Danielle told me. “But I thought they were full of crap.” He tilted his head back and darted his eyes around. “What’s the password to get in there, I wonder?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but in at least one case, the two personalities first made contact when the pony went to sleep for the first time.”

“Well, I am kind of tired,” the pony confided to me. “But first let’s get started on this site of yours. Are you thinking mostly text, or videos?”

“Videos,” I said. “And I need the interfaces to be as big and easy to use as possible.”

“Yeah, I can imagine,” Danielle said with a laugh.

(% % %)

We got the skeleton of the website put together over the next hour, all while Danielle got Gary to bed.

“You know, I promised him that I’d take him trick-or-treating,” Danielle told me afterwards as he was making his own bed in the darkened room. “I expected him to put up more of a fuss.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that he’s having no trouble seeing you as the same person you were before,” I said.

“And do you see me as the same person?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It took a while, but yes, you’re still demonstrably you,” I answered. “Your speech patterns are the same, and a lot of your mannerisms. The way you swing around to look at me, for example.”

“I don’t like this business of having somebody else digging around in my head,” Danielle said with a worried frown. “Especially a guy.”

And yet you don’t seem to have too much of a problem being a guy, I thought to myself. “Well, if you manage to run into this stallion in your dreams, you’ll need to set down some ground rules.”

“Yeah!” he said enthusiastically as he took off his vest and hooks and put back on the shirt that told the police what they could do with themselves. “Rule #1: All memories of ages 8 to 16 are off limits!” He looked sheepishly up at me as I pulled a chair up close. “So, you’re going to watch over me tonight?”

“Of course I’m going to watch over you,” I sad, lifting up a large mug. “That’s what the extra-strength coffee is for. This is a very crucial moment for my second pony client, and I intend to be there for him.”

Danielle blinked. “I just noticed: you’ve been calling me ‘he’ this whole time.”

“Do you want me to call you something else?” I asked.

“No,” Danielle said with a smile, “‘he’ works under the circumstances.” He closed his eyes, and settled down to sleep.

I took a long sip of my coffee, and began my vigil.

(% % %)

Danielle’s sleep lasted three hours and forty-three minutes. He entered R.E.M. sleep at 12:08 am, only ten minutes after his breathing settled, and he remained in that state for the entire rest of his sleep. This was very unusual for someone not suffering from intense sleep deprivation.

At the three hour and thirty-eight minute mark, I was startled by the sound of a loud splash from the master bathroom. Seeing nothing going on with Danielle, I got up and ventured to the bathroom, only to discover that the entire contents of the toilet bowl had somehow spilled onto the floor. There was no damage to the bowl, as far as I could tell, and I certainly didn’t feel anything like an earthquake prior to hearing the splash. I used the bath towels to clean up the mess as well as I was able, and as a result, I failed to witness the moment when Danielle awakened.

Also, considering the size of a pony stallion’s mouth, I have no idea how he managed to stuff a whole pillow in there so fast.

(% % %)

After I helped him to dislodge that pillow from his mouth, Danielle sat on the bed panting for a few moments, his eyes unfocused.

“Well,” he said finally, “that was a weird experience. His name’s Wave Rider, by the way.”

I looked back warily at the bathroom for a moment, but said nothing.

“He thought he was dead, actually,” Danielle continued with a bitter laugh, “convinced that he had drowned at a surfing competition at Kazookai. Turns out that his memories are pretty scrambled, so he has no idea what happened immediately before...this happened.” “This” was accompanied by Danielle waving a hoof around his head. “I got him calmed down, built a little surf hut in my head for him to stay in, and then, after explaining my species to him, set down my rules. He didn’t have any problems.” The pony chuckled. “That fillyfriend of his was right—he’s a complete pushover. I don’t think I’m going to have any problem with him poking his muzzle around where it doesn’t belong. I even got him to take me on a virtual ‘surfing safari’. Do you know what that cutie mark of his lets him do? He can—”

“—He can make the waves go as high as he wants,” I said, finishing his sentence.

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“Because he put a tsunami in your toilet,” I told him with a straight face, before we both broke into a laugh.