//------------------------------//
// Bonus Chapter: Howard 
// Story: At the Inn of the Prancing Pony 
// by McPoodle 
//------------------------------//


At the Inn of the Prancing Pony

Bonus Chapter: Howard





Howard Painter was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 16, 1945, to the widow Cecilia. His father died three months earlier at the Battle of the Bulge. He was raised on television broadcasts of the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers, Abbot and Costello, W.C. Fields, Bugs Bunny, and all of the other great comedians of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties.

Starting with his adolescence in the early 1960s, he became increasingly antagonistic towards his mother and authority figures in general. He considered himself a genius (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) who deserved to be treated like a god by his fellow men. The fact that they refused to do this infuriated him. Howard dropped out of high school and took to drug experimentation and the writing of incomprehensible poetry. On discovering the occult works of Alice Crowley, he made it his goal in life to find a way to escape from the contemporary world, which he had concluded was irredeemably corrupt and unfair. By combining mind-altering drugs and Sumerian incantations, he sought after the secrets of psychic time travel, psychic space travel, and finally psychic dimensional travel.

During one of his self-induced trances, he was contacted by a self-described “lonely spirit of wisdom and strength” named “Cordis”. Cordis promised Howard the wisdom of the gods as a reward for traveling to his realm of pure thought: Trieques. The spell to travel to Triequis required three individuals to carry it out. Howard approached Marcus Powell, the head of a Wisconsin commune, and his main supplier of experimental drugs. Intrigued, Marcus volunteered his own daughters for use in the spell. Howard of course should have questioned this, but he was so desperate for escape that he accepted Marcus’ weak claims that the two were quite mature for their age and had fully consented to be part of this.

With the conclusion of the spell, Howard found himself in a realm markedly different than he had been promised, with “Cordis” nowhere in sight. Also, he was now a god of Equestria, albeit a god whose powers only existed on Equestria, leaving him unable to leave—the spell was one-way, and couldn’t be cast by non-humans. So out of boredom he conquered the land. When he discovered what he’d be required to do to rule the country, he abandoned the throne. He finally had the attention he always craved, but decided he didn’t want it, so he disguised himself as a pony, changing personas over the years to emulate the comedians of his childhood.

After unexpectedly finding himself back on earth, and back in human form, Howard wandered out into the streets of Los Angeles, and became a hermit. He can still sometimes be found to this day, preaching from the top of a cardboard box to anybody who cares to listen, about how fundamentally unfair the world is, and how everything would be better if somebody just put him in charge of the universe.