Chapter 7
I have to hand it to the man… pony… guy… whatever, his skill with machinery is impressive. I mean, not just anyone could simply up and invent a spring-powered toy helicopter! Yes, spring powered. I’m not even sure how it’s possible, although I kinda understand how it works since well, being in his head does wonder for learning things from him. There’s a bunch of interlocking springs in a bunch of complicated technical positions, all linked to one big spring tied to a little nub sticking out of the side, and then you just pull or press it or just give it a little flick and the way it tries to return to its original position and shape makes a big crazy chain reaction that produces enough power to lift the machine up for a few seconds.
I never even knew something like that could be possible, and I was actually pretty sure it shouldn’t have been, but the way he explained it somehow made a lot of sense. He told me that there were a bunch of little magnets at key locations and that…
Uh, I digress, actually.
So, yeah. He did show me his workshop, which was almost as big as his house, and filled with the most amazing doohickeys ever. And I do mean filled; despite being about the same size as his house, the workshop was absolutely cramped. Half-finished machines and metal parts lined every wall and most of the floor. He had prototypes of a bunch of stuff like vice-grip-things that you could use with your mouth for precision work, little straps with clamps to attach various tools to hooves, and even a semi-automatic portable back-scratcher! That thing was awesome! Silver did say it had a tendency to flip out and just painfully fold around the user because of all the springs, but when I convinced him to try it out it worked just fine. Through the frankly surprising amount of bliss coming from having a monstrous spring-loaded metal snake gently scratching our back, he half-heartedly assured me that it usually didn’t work that well.
Then it dawned on him that it might have had something to do with the single little screw he had adjusted before trying the machine. And then, looking around the place, at the countless projects lying around everywhere… a brainsplosion of inspiration is how I’d describe what happened next. He spent the next several… I don’t know exactly how much time he went all over the place, fixing a bunch of obvious flaws in many of his things. They mainly had to do with the sheer amount of unnecessary springs everywhere.
The guy had an unhealthy obsession with springs, is what I’m saying.
Somehow his enthusiasm for his craft won out over the total absence of fucks I had to give, and I began actually enjoying the tinkering. I even managed to suggest ways to improve his designs; apparently a second opinion really helps that kind of thing. Or maybe it was just plain old common sense.
Seriously, how did he get in his head that springs are a necessary component of hammers?
It was only when we ran back to the house to check the time in order to set his spring-powered clock that we realized we had just spent the past five or so hours in there. And that hunger had come back to gnaw at us.
It was probably time to call it a night. We argued for a bit before settling on a satisfyingly neutral salad; he didn’t want anything too heavy or complicated, and I really wanted something that I could at least consider normal food.
So we ate, and it was pretty good, I guess.
After a short quiet moment with the toothbrush –affixed to the wall, by the way-, it was time for bed. To be honest we both knew, even without so much as a thought about it, that it was going to be hard. This wasn’t just sharing a room with an almost-complete stranger, this wasn’t even sharing a bed with said stranger; the situation involved a much more invasive intimacy than what the previous part of this sentence probably evoked for countless dirty minds.
We were far from looking forward to it.
Getting to relax enough to fall asleep was definitely going to be a challenge, so I promised to shut up for once and to do my best to make him forget my presence. I was just so eager to get a break from all this insanity that I just didn’t really care anymore. Besides, maybe the universe would do me a favor for once and listen to Silver’s hope that I would just go back from whence I came during the night.
So I stayed quiet while he slipped under the covers and made himself comfortable, lying on his side and curling his forelegs up to his chest like some sort of kitten. I’d have made a mocking comment about that if I had been an idiot who had never been taught the concept of “now’s not the time”. Besides, it actually was pretty comfortable.
It took a while to fall asleep, Silver Spring occasionally tossing and turning, unable to shake off the annoying feeling of having someone staring right at you from inside your cherished personal space. It was justified, in a way. Eventually, he moved less and less, his breathing slowed, and the only sound to be heard was the regular tick-tocking of the clock.
That I could still hear. The sound I was still aware of, just like the noise of the few crickets outside, and the quiet whisper of wind around the town. The many sounds I could still notice, just like I felt our chest rising with each slow breath, each one bringing the air that I could still feel rushing in and out of our lungs in a faint snore.
The one thing I couldn’t hear was his voice, his thoughts. All I could perceive inside his mind was some sort of unexplainable, dull tone; the sort of faint buzzing an idle television emits when set to a black screen or something. It also made me imagine a perfectly still ocean, without any wind or waves to cover up the sound of the sheer empty vastness… or something vague and abstract like that.
Oh no. Oh fuck no. You wouldn’t dare fuck with me like that, universe? Would you?
Silver Spring’s body lay motionless in his bed, limp and relaxed; his mind was as empty and quiet as the silent night outside, and I was acutely aware of everything. He was asleep. I was not.
I couldn’t sleep. Just like this morning, when I had first noticed being here minutes before he woke up; he had been sleeping while I was awake and fully conscious. I couldn’t sleep, even while he did. I couldn’t sleep.
At all.
I, of course, reacted to this delightful new revelation with all the calm and collectedness of an entire Zen monastery, the grace and serenity of a flock of pious angels, the stoicism of… oh who am I kidding: I completely flipped my shit.
-I CAN’T EVEN FUCKING SLEEP?!?
My mental screams of unfathomable rage woke Silver up apparently, startling him into a strange series of violent twitchy spasms that he had trouble controlling. I didn’t much care about his possible seizure.
“Nkknevnfuknsleewhaat? What? Aahh! What’s going on? Why are you screaming?”
-AAAAAAHH! AAAHHRG! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
“What are you screaming about? What’s going on? STOP SCREAMING!
-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I can’t really say I was in any condition to comply with his demands. The white-hot pulsing rage was all I could comprehend at the moment, and it only seemed to grow more intense by the second.
A foreleg snaked out of the sheets, reached as far to the right as it could, and quickly swung left. The pain was surprisingly powerful when the hoof collided with my face, but only when the leg came back with just as much force and followed the second hit with a change in trajectory to end up with an impromptu meet-up with mister stomach did I stop screaming.
-Oooooww… Did you just hit yourself you moron?
“What in the fu-“
--World is wrong with you? I was sleeping you crazy idiot!
-Well that’s just the fucking thing, ain’t it? I wasn’t!
The three-hit combo I had just received had almost managed to lessen my anger, but the sheer sudden befuddlement I caused with my answer was much more effective. The short moment of silence was put to good use by coughing painfully and gently rubbing a sore face and itchy lips.
--What?
-You were asleep, K.O., fucking lights out and everything; I couldn’t even hear you think anymore! But I was still here! Still awake, still conscious, still aware of everything around here! I can’t even sleep, not even when you do! I… I can’t even fucking sleep. I have nothing left, I can’t do anything! I, I…
I felt warm water trickling down to the bed’s surface. Oh great, I’d gotten him to cry. As if I needed any more sorrow on my distress cake. The lump in his throat was uncomfortable, and his arms wrapped around his body in the usual ‘hold me close, myself’ position that people tend to use when being too emotional for themselves. Why do we do that, anyway?
It still helped, somehow, letting my anger slowly melt into a weird mix of despair and horror at the whole situation. I kept on rambling.
-I lost everything! I don’t have my own body, I don’t have sleep, or my own voice, I don’t have any fucking freedom left anymore! I don’t have anything left! Is this hell? Is this my eternal torment? What did I ever do to deserve this? Am… Am I dead? Do you think I’m dead?
--H-hey now, don’t talk like that, you’re scaring me! We’ll find you a way out of this, okay? We’ll go see Twilight Sparkle tomorrow, and she’ll figure something out I swear. She’s a very smart unicorn and the personal student of the princess for a good reason; if anyone can do something about this it has to be her! Stop talking all that nonsense about being dead, okay? That whole crazy thing about this being your punishment for something is just stupid. Even if you do deserve something like this, what did I do to deserve being involved in it?
-Enh, maybe you’re right, I guess… Could you curl up into a ball a little bit more, please? I’m so fucking scared right now. Yeah, like that, thanks. …What if she can’t help us? What if she doesn’t even believe you about me? What if you’re right and she just sticks us in an institution?
--Uhhh…
He then proceeded to deliver the most feeble reassurances I had ever heard. They still helped, somehow. I guess this emotion feedback we had going made me want to change the mood as much as him, helping me get over it a bit quicker. He stayed curled up in a fetal position for a while, his tail tucked between his legs like a scared dog. That helped too, I guess.
-Oh, eww! Haha! Fuck you brain!
Wow, good job ruining the moment, Dave.
--Uh, what? What just happened, why are you laughing?
-Ehg, it’s nothing important. I’m just being stupid again. I just realized I’m technically literally lying in bed with another dude who’s quietly trying to comfort me. Kinda weird if you take that out of context.
He reeled back in shocked disgust at that, or at least as much as possible for a pony lying on his side.
--Oh, blegh! I told you I’m not that kind of stallion!
-I blame your brain. Mine would never have done that to me.
Well, I could now officially answer the question “Have you ever been bored out of your mind to the point where you could die and not even notice it?” with an honest and resounding “yes”.
Seriously, a second is a long-ass time when you think about it. Like when you have nothing better to do. Or when, for example, you have to sit through several thousands of them in complete darkness, silence and inactivity. If you haven’t been bored enough to envy prisoners in solitary confinement, you haven’t been truly bored. At least they get to decide when to have their muscles twitch. And they don’t have tails to twitch.
Well, where I come from anyway.
Seriously, sleepy unconscious tail twitches are weird. Freakin’ Tails themselves are weird. They’re like a big, clumsy finger stuck to your butt. It’s even worse than it sounds.
Anyway, after our little shouting match was finally over and we had calmed down, Silver got back to trying to sleep while I went back to shutting the hell up. With my initial shock passed, I figured I could at least try to let him rest even if I couldn’t. No point in keeping him awake all night if it just meant we’d both be tired as hell tomorrow. Besides, as SS hypothesized, maybe our states of mind weren’t as perfectly connected as we thought, and I’d just fall asleep on my own at some point.
Yeah, high hopes are great and all, but strangely enough they usually don’t mean shit.
So it was thus that I was stuck in the limp body of a pony for an entire night. I don’t recommend it.
Well, at least now I had enough time and silence to think about… pretty much everything, really.
Like the fact that I was a pony. Or rather, in the body of a pony, if I wanted to waste my time being pedantic. Oh wait, that sounded like a pretty valid way to pass the time, actually!
Yeah, being a pony is pretty weird. Oh sure, after nearly a whole day in here, I was starting to get used to it, but that in itself pretty much freaked me out. There were still odd sensations like the tail thing, or the fact that pretty much the entire surface of the skin felt like a freshly-shaved head; where the slightest contact with anything is amplified by the sudden lack of cushioning and the bristle-like stumps of hair. Overall, though, it’s pretty similar: a big sack of squishy held in and around a bunch of hard sticks, with a balloon inflating inside from time to time. Warm, two eyes, a mouth and some other stuff.
What disturbed me the most about all this was how mostly normal it all seemed now, as if that body had been mine since my birth. These hooves felt perfectly unusual now, so… natural. Eugh. I could barely even remember what having fingers felt like. Hopefully it was because “paying close attention to one’s fingers in order to remember their precise workings and feel” isn’t really a common activity; maybe it’s just expected and normal to forget something you don’t usually notice much. Or maybe it was Silver Spring’s stupid proprioception messing with my mind. Hopefully. Anything but forgetting my humanity. Oh please god don’t let me lose that.
Hopefully I’d be back home before this “feeling like a pony” thing got out of hand. No, I definitely didn’t mean “out of hoof”. That would be doing exactly what I didn’t want to see happen.
Best case scenario: this Twilight chick could solve our problem on the spot as soon as we finished explaining it, and I’d be back home somewhere before noon tomorrow. Worst case? …Forever? Oh shit what if she couldn’t help? What if she just stuffed us in an asylum until the end of Silver’s life?
No no no no no no no I couldn’t even let myself begin to think that. I couldn’t let myself imagine what it’d be like to be stuck in his head forever, just a powerless consciousness stuck complying with everything he’d do, eating only what he decided to, feeling only what he could feel, with no one else to speak to ever again, having to feel his every failure, his every embarrassment, every single one of his wounds as if they were my own but with no hope, no chance and no power to do anything to change or avoid them, like a slave, a slave of that fucking life that didn’t belong to me, a god-damned fucking puppet who could never do anything to decide its own fate, who could never again have any control over anything, who could never again do rather than be subjected to, who could and would only ever receive instead of taking, like being stuck in a fucking hell, a motherfucking limbo of madness and god-awful despair, of helplessness and oh fuck no, please no I’d rather die I’d rather gnaw out my own fucking wrists and kill mys-
Silver Spring farted in his sleep. He shifted a bit on the mattress and scratched his belly with a hoof.
I noticed his brow had been furrowed for a while and that there was a slight tremor in his extremities, but both slowly faded as a smile and short, comforting hiccups took their place.
Wow, good job ruining the moment, Spring.
-Thank you, I imagined myself whispering. He mumbled something that sounded like “Mrrgphhhh” and rubbed his mouth.
Okay, Dave, concentrate. Think of anything but those thoughts. Of course someone would find a way out of this mess. This world had been explicitly stated to have magic. Anything was possible, and none of it was strictly bound to the rule of having to make sense.
I just had to wait it out until the next day.
Tick. Three-hundred and forty-five.
Tock. Three-hundred and forty-six.
Tick. Three-hundred and forty-seven.
Tock. Three-hundred and forty-eight.
A sudden itch on my side. Something’s happening? Right foreleg deployed, itch scratched successfully, roll onto opposite side. Tail swishing back and forth and back again in minimal annoyance. Tail settled back down. No more movement.
Tick. Uh… damnit. That was like the fifth time I lost count! Urgh!
Tock. Ugh, one.
Tick. Two.
Tick. One thousand and seventy.
Tock. One thousand and seventy-one.
Tick. One thousand and seventy-two
Tock. One thouBIG RED BLOTCH! What the hell was that thing? I could have sworn I had seen a weird flash of red just then!
And there it was again; slowly drifting into focus, inside my mind it seemed, was a big red fuzzy blob of color. It was getting more defined as time went on, tick tock tick tock and I had lost count again by the way damnit, a big red stain in my eyes.
What the hell was that thing? And why was I seeing an apple –oh yeah it was an apple- when Silver had his eyes closed?
Was he… dreaming?
A screeching hairless monkey burst out of the apple, wriggling its maggot-like lower half while flailing about on the ground. The ravaged apple followed it soon after when the pony to whom it served as a head collapsed, apparently dead.
Oh yeah, this was definitely a dream.
-Should I feel… insulted here or what?
Silver Spring took off running when the entire world shook, more and more apple-headed ponies falling around him as the monkey parasites in their heads popped out one after the other. It was pretty disgusting. And disturbing. He ran for a time, during which I felt his legs twitch in the real world and also noticed that I was seeing him in third person view somehow. Apparently he dreamed of himself as an outside observer or something.
It seemed to go on forever, me watching him dream about him watching himself running, his physical mouth muttering things like “No” and weak whimpers.
But then, in the crowd of fruithead ponies appeared a really weird one, one I hadn’t ever seen before; a tall dark blue one with both wings and a horn.
-Dafuq?
Yeah, not one of my brightest moments, I guess. I blame being technically asleep at the time.
The mare… wait how did I even know that thing was female in the first place? Stupid brain fucking with me again apparently…
Anyway, the mare looked around for a bit while the whole dreamworld shook again, quickly spotting Silver Spring among the head-popping crowd. She spread her wings and took off, soaring over the completely nondescript not-ponies to land right in front of Silver. He literally yelped when he saw her, with a little spasm in the real world and everything.
“Aehffah uudiaah eehhenfds!” she called out to him.
-What.
Silver looked nervously around as his dream shook again, a quiet panic filtering through his brain and up to me. What did she want? What had she just said and why couldn’t I understand her? Who was that chick?
Silver answered something in the same garbled garbage language while keeping his eyes glued to the floor, making her frown. She asked another question, to which Silver vigorously shook his head while clumsily assuring the blue freak of something negative. He seemed extremely nervous both in the dream and in reality, breaking into a cold sweat and breathing a bit faster. She seemed unconvinced.
She crouched lower to the ground to get closer to Spring’s level, seriously she was tall, and repeated her question. Or maybe it was a different one, I don’t know, it was all gibberish. Anyway, she asked again while pointing towards one corner of the room.
Oh hey they were in a room now. Dream logic at work, apparently. So both me and Silver followed her pointing hoof to see a huge gorilla in a cage.
-Okay, I’d really like to understand at least a word of what’s going on!
The gorilla angrily grabbed the bars of his cage and shook the entire world, making monkey noises for a while.
The tall blue horse eyed Silver suspiciously, while he proceeded to stress just a bit more.
She sat next to him, draping a wing over his back, and asked him something else in a soothing voice. When he got around to answering, he was suddenly in the cage instead of the gorilla, and wearing a monkey costume for some reason. Oh well, since apparently no one could hear me, I didn’t even wait for him to finish his hesitantly defensive nonsense before speaking my mind.
-Dreams are bullshit when you’re awake through them!
The room rattled along with everything inside when another stupid earthquake rocked the place. Silver fell to the ground of the cage since he was now stuck in a straightjacket over his monkey costume, because dreams seem to be fueled exclusively by random nonsense. The tall blue horse that I had just noticed had the moon on her butt simply stood her ground, squinting in apparent suspicion. She flapped her wings to distance herself from the ground before her horn glowed brightly.
Cracks in what seemed to be reality itself spread from Moonbutt’s horn, shattering everything into thousands of shards floating in a white void. The shards slowly vanished while Silver began to fall, screaming as he plummeted in the empty white space. The rush of adrenaline was cut short when the blue moon horse used her magic horn to give him wings somehow. A really nice feeling of elation filled us as he began to fly around the place like a kid in a candy store, but the moon pony kept squinting at the whole bunch of nothing around her. She moved a little, inspecting the empty with her scrutinizing eyeballs, as if she was seeing something that wasn’t there. She muttered a question to the white void, apparently waiting for some sort of answer. Her hooves thunked against the edge of existence or something, and she moved her face even closer before repeating her question and looking all around in front of her. What in the world was she looking for? How was she still there when Silver wasn’t paying any attention to her?
-Wait…
Her ears perked up when the invisible surface under her hooves shook a little, and she started shouting questions around her, a puzzled frown on her face. Was she… aware of my presence?
-Hey! Can you hear me?
Her eyes widened and her shouts became more insistent, her search for… me, maybe, grew more frantic, and the dream shook even more.
-Yeah, you, blue pony thing! Who are you?
The white void rocked more and more, growing darker by the second, the rumbling becoming audible as a wind blew her mane everywhere.
-Can you hear me? Can you help me get out of here? Hey! Where are you going?
She was being dragged away by the wind, fading into the darkness of her surroundings while she tried to shout something over the deafening rumble of a groan from Silver Spring, who suddenly cracked an eye open.
“Hrrrrmmmwaddoyouwant? Iwazzavingannicedream…”
-Uh… nothing. Go back to sleep, maybe?
He rolled over onto his other side and immediately fell back asleep, the brief glimpse of moonlight on the wall I had seen when he had opened his eye replaced once more by the pure darkness of his closed eyelids.
…
…
Tick. One.
Tock. Two.
Urgh… Back to being bored, I guess… Three.
Tock. Four…