//------------------------------//
// 1: Dream Whales and Pony Tails 
// Story: Hoofing It 
// by secondVendetta 
//------------------------------//

	Dreams are like whales that float through space and sing songs about why they must write fan fiction even as they long for the days in which they could finally spend time progressing toward their personal goal to create true bacon without harming innocent creatures. In this sense, dreams are weird.  You never know what to expect from them, though I usually enjoyed them.  They’ve given me so many fantastic ideas, and places to explore that are beyond the reach of our experience.  The night before the world changed, I had one of the oddest dreams I had faced in a while.  Perhaps even one of the most foreboding, considering what was going to come.

At first, I just imagined myself exploring a place.  Empty, broken streets and crumbling buildings.  I’ve seen dreams like this before, places where the old world has crumbled away to a new order.  Shadowrun-like places where wild things happen.  A wave of my hands would fuse buildings or erase them.  I never noticed at first how the buildings began to fill the streets behind me.  Not until they overshadowed me.  A sense of dread enveloped my being, the nightmare coming alive around me as I began to run, the sounds of tread on concrete echoing on the encircling buildings.

Thump thump thump thump thump

Corner after corner I turned, trying to escape what felt like a wave of shadows behind me until I found that one inevitable turn that lead to a corner.  Normally, this would be the point I would wake, but the crash never came.  Just silence, waiting for what felt like minutes for something that never came.  I felt the warmth fall on me instead.  Inviting, like the sun on a pleasant spring day.  The kind you might lay on the grass in and just enjoy for a while.  I finally uncovered my head and looked around, an exit to this alley before me, the sun on the street.

Click clack clack click clack clip

Out on the street, I found a different sight.  The buildings had all softened, a little Greco-roman hidden in their architecture.  Beings transversed it, paying no mind to me.  Colors were never an issue for me in dreams, they were always there for me, but now they were really vivid.  I was aware of the chatter, the good-mornings and how-do-you-does of the residents going on with life.  It took a minute for it to register for me, the fact that they were all traveling on all fours, and far more colorful than the buildings.

Horses, they looked like horses.  The little ones, ponies, that they could sometimes train as guide animals for people allergic to dogs.  Except living as we were.  I was fascinated, had to explore, so I continued down the street with the crowds.  It somehow escaped my grasp at the time that I was now as tall as them.  It seemed almost like new york… Except everything had been horsified.  Even the Statue of Liberty.

Up to this point, I had been aware of sounds, but with the selection of only a handful of them, I hadn’t really registered hearing them.  The music I was hearing.  Just set of Acapella singers down the way, singing about the morning.  What caught me by surprise was when others started to join them out of the blue.  These equines, these people either stopped what they were doing or somehow joined in while doing whatever.  It was a musical number.

There was no running from it.  I got pulled in.  One pony just hooked my arm and I was dragged in.  The urge to join was irresistible.  It reminded me of Elementary school, in an odd way.  All of us square dancing at a PTA conference so that the school could have something to impress our parents with.  We only did it because we were told to.  That’s what this felt like for me.

The whole routine pulled in everyone, like a musical number out of a Disney movie.  All about the sunshine and the beauty of the morning and how wonderful a day it was and all that nonsense.  And each movement, each twist, and step felt awkward.  Not only did I feel uncomfortable with the song, but it felt physically uncomfortable to be me in the process of it all.  It all felt wrong in trying to be horribly, perfectly right.  As we progressed through our dance, I could hear it in the background.  Scratching and whining filling more and more of the world around me, slowly sneaking its way into the song.





I gasped deeply as I woke with a start, my eyes bursting open, staring up at the ceiling as I gathered my senses around me.  The scratching and whining still continued, though.  It wasn’t the first time I had woken up to the dogs needing out.  Someone had probably just forgotten to take care of them before they had left.

With a sigh slurred together with a moan, I reached out for my glasses on the nearby plastic box that I used for a bedside table.  I somehow couldn’t manage to reach it, though.  So I pushed myself over to try again.  This time I managed to reach them, rolling off the bed as I found my reach still too short.  The pressure I applied to the lid popped it off, dumping all its contents on top of me as soon as I hit the floor with a thud.  This included my alarm clock, perfectly positioned to nail me right on the head.

The yelp of pain that came from my mouth almost sounded like me, but only if I spoke an octave higher.  I pushed objects off of me and out of the way.  Purple?  I figured my shirt fell on me or something for a moment.  It was when I reached up to try and grab the bed that I noticed my complete lack of fingers and the fact that, no, that wasn’t one of my shirts.  That purple was on me.

Ok, so new plan.  Rolling.  I hardly cared for anything down here anymore.  I just rolled onto my belly and gave myself an unsteady push up onto my new feet.  All four of them.  They had hooves, which was all the more reason for me to quickly scramble over my bed and head straight for the bathroom at best speed.

This, unfortunately, consisted of struggling to open the door with hooves before resorting to biting the handle (Ew, hand oils!) and stumbling into the bathroom.  I had to pull myself up onto the sink counter to get a better look at myself, covered in that purple fur and no longer at all appearing human.

What do you look at first when you’ve become a small equine?  Oddly for me, it was the mane.  I’ve always had a habit of keeping my hair short.  It’s hot and gets in the way of things (especially with hot, humid summers).  Now it was long enough that some women might envy it and as blue as some flowers.  It even smelled like them too, a light mix of lilacs and lavender.  I could feel the weight it put on my neck from the volume.  I reached up to it with one of my… hooves and ran it along the cascade.  I’ve ridden horses before, I know how course their hair is.  This was nothing in that ballpark, smooth and sleek, almost like a heavy silk.  My fur was nearly just as soft.

My eyes were huge.  Almost on the scale of a “Sonic the Hedgehog” character, enough that I was glad there was enough room back there for a brain cavity with all the real estate in my head they were taking.  The irises were an equally stunning dark magenta hue.

I kept moving downward slowly, observing each piece in a detached manner like I was just watching some movie and analyzing each piece of it.  My nose, or muzzle I guess, was short with softer features like it was daintier or something with a ‘cute’ little-dimpled nose.  Sensitive, too… The lack of cleaning this bathroom had received was all the more obvious to me.  The worst part was the coat.  It was purple and svelte, but as much as I liked purple, I had made no plans to wear it for the rest of my remaining adult life.

At the very least, it seemed this had taken all my health issues along with my old body.  Instead, It was something far better built.  I could say I had a decent supply of muscles.  Moving heavy boxes of food stuff in a store isn’t the most fulfilling work nor was it the best exercise, but it’s impossible not to form something.  This was different.  Almost athletic.  It was like I’d become the designer model of the hottest new pet craze.  Get your pet pastel hoofbeast today!

“What the ffffuuuu---” I stammered, teeth sticking to my lower lip. To be blunt, I cursed like a sailor.  Often and a lot.  Few places caused me to watch what was coming out of my mouth.  I knew this word, what it meant, how to spell it.  But right now, it was like it got caught in my throat.  A lump in my throat that had to be swallowed before I could try again.  “...the ffffuuuu…  Fiddlesticks.”  It was the best I could manage despite my effort.

Granted, that also meant I could talk.  So that was a plus.

It slowly dawned on me that this all seemed awfully… Feminine.  A frightening thought that maybe my species wasn’t the only thing that changed filled me with a certain dread.  Ponderously, I looked down and shoved a hoof under the edge of the underwear I still sported from last night.  I was relieved to at least find that I was still a dude.  Whatever happened hadn’t taken everything.

I let myself down carefully from the sink as the world around me pierced through my tunnel vision.  The dogs were still whining.  The cat was meowing.  Nothing else had changed, just me.  Backing out of the restroom, I began towards the back door slowly.  I glanced out the window as I passed by it, checking to see if anyone was home.  Everyone’s cars were in the driveway and the street.  I edged my way along, unnerved by both the fact that anyone could see me like this and that something felt off by that last observation.

After making my way to the back door and letting the dogs out (weathering my way through a swarm of yaps and barks as everyone burst out into the back yard), I edged over to my parent’s door.  This was an odd problem by a mile, but they were usually understanding,  especially my mother.  I knocked.  “Mom?”

The lack of answer, compounded by the deathly silence in the air filled my throat with a lump.  Pushing open the door tentatively, I peered in only to find an empty bedroom.  What about the bathroom?  Nope.  How about my brother?  Nope, and his girlfriend wasn't here either.  That one was a pain in the butt.  They had a loft bed with a narrow ladder.  I thought it sufficient that no one woke up to my yelling because there was no way in hades that I was climbing up that like this.

There was no one.  Also, the underwear was getting annoying.  So, trying to be a decent person in both regards, I did my best with my mouth to try and fit a pair of jeans.  I managed to don a pair of khaki shorts.  It felt ridiculous although I’m not sure if it was because of my efforts to put on pants as a horse or rather because I was a horse wearing pants.  After finagling them around for a great deal longer than I liked, I finally decided to wear them backwards, somehow managing to chew the button in place over the tail.  I’ll never laugh at my dogs again when they are trying to reach that one itch.

During the process, I found something even stranger about myself.  There, on the sides of my butt, were pictures.  Right there in the fur.  I even felt them to make sure they weren’t some gag played by an invisible hand.  Four caricatures of city blocks between streets, with an art compass and a ruler.  Did that relate to my college studies?  I didn’t really want to think about it now, or perhaps ever.  Deciphering what an image on my butt meant wasn’t the top of my priorities.

It finally dawned on me how ridiculously early it was in the day as I went out. I usually woke up by 9 or 10 in the morning.  I probably made it out the door by 8.  As it stood, this was all too surreal for me to even consider the odds that someone would think that the purple horse was weird.  I made my way down the light incline and went to our best (not nearest, he’s a butt) neighbor.  No one answered.  Next house, same response.  I tried this for several houses.

At this point, the magnitude of just how real everything was finally sunk in.  Dreams always seem to ‘forget’ details.  They are consistently blurry affairs, and I’m sure I had one last night that I have hardly a memory of.  This experience was as clear as day.  While I figured my vision was good again just because this was all a dream (a concept quickly losing ground), I rarely had lucid ones.  This was beyond lucid.

It was real.

I stumbled back down the street faster than I had walked it, though not by much.  This was a new experience, walking on four limbs.  I let the dogs back in and fed them while I contemplated my situation.  If this was all real, then I was about to have a very real problem, and probably lots and lots of smaller ones.  There were still a few other channels I could try.  I had a phone, after all.  While the dogs ate, I made my way back to my room and fished my phone out from the mess I made trying to get to my (now useless) glasses.

Granted, the new challenge was using it with hooves.  I don’t know the specifics on touchscreen devices, but normally they don’t work with not-fingers.  Or not normally.  I had a pen from work that had one end dedicated to working on tablet and phone screens.  I grabbed it and using my mouth managed to sort of manipulate the device.  I tried texting people, I tried calling a few numbers.  But after a dozen phones continuing to ring or going to their inboxes, I gave up in frustration.

I needed time to think.  A way to sort my thoughts and figure out ‘what now?’  The dogs all looked anxious, like they knew something was wrong as well (how did they know who I was?).  There were four of them.  Mischief was mine.  My mother had bought him for herself and he had attached to me for some reason.  Then there was Billie.  She was scared of just about everything.  Both of them were Papillons, little yappy dogs with big ears.  Alek was a big dumb, lovable golden retriever, a rescue.  Finally, we had Brunnhilde, a german shorthair pointer whose hobbies consisted of running, more running and trying to be a lap dog despite not being near small enough.

So I figured I could take them for a run.  Our property was backed up against a nature reserve, letting us take them out as we wished.  If nothing else, maybe I could learn something from them.  They also ran on four legs, after all.

As soon as I stepped out into the backyard, it seemed like the air was different.  ...No, that’s not quite right.  It felt like a weight, something that wasn’t physical, something not in the air.  A sense that something had changed.  It only grew stronger as I walked past our garden and to the back gate into the woods.

Most of the dogs took off to do their ‘thing’ when I opened the gate, but Mischief stayed with me as I took cautious steps out there.  This was a good thing in two ways.  It gave me someone to study and try to copy and it gave me something to focus on besides the powerful feeling of being watched by the woods around me.  Were they judging me now?  Trying to determine if I was fit or deserved to be here.  It didn’t feel threatening, just overwhelming, like being at the head of the class on presentation day.

The dogs tore through those woods, blasting past occasionally as I sunk further into my thoughts, trying to make heads or tails of this and what I could do about it.  The lack of sounds from the nearby road and especially the airport was unsettling.  There was only the sounds of nature out here.  Was everyone really gone, just like that?  Including my family?  My stomach clenched in fear, trying to do an impression of a singularity as it cemented in my head that this was real.  Everyone can’t just vanish, right?  I can’t be the last one left.

Either way… I guess I wasn’t finding out by panicking.  I took some breaths as I tried to go through this again logically.  The truth was I had only seen a small portion of my neighborhood.  There were upwards of 7 billion people on this planet at one point and yet I was left behind.  I only had an incredibly miniscule sampling of the world at large.  I couldn’t possibly say with certainty that no one else survived.  In fact, if these changes were widespread, they probably limited people’s ability to use their own devices.  Perhaps some of those people couldn’t answer their phones?  I hadn’t even exhausted all my options for communicating.  The internet had a wider reach than anything else out there.  I could try that next.

Only then, after trying to communicate with people and all means were exhausted,  then maybe I could think about how to survive like this.  I called out and whistled for the dogs as I headed back.  They were more mindful than usual, coming back more quickly than normal.  Then again, they’d realized things were off earlier.  They were probably still spooked.

I went into my room and used a pen to hit the power button on my computer.  Then capslock and pecking to enter my password.  Reduced from typing words per second to a word a minute in no time flat.  At least all my programs auto started.  Being very careful with my mouse cupped underneath a hoof, I managed to finagle my way into the accessibility options and turn on some of those to at least try and make some of this easier, followed by turning down the sensitivity on my mouse.

Now I could actually somewhat manage to poke through my friends lists.  I don’t think I’ve been so relieved to find the blue text of ‘online’ on Steam.  No scrolling was needed, all of them were listed under ‘Besties.’

“-staring at my computer is at the upper limits of my usefulness at the moment.”  I caught the end of someone’s statement.  Lightfox’s from the looks of it, though it didn’t sound like him, and not in the poor audio quality kind of way. Too high pitched.

"So, I took a walk, guys,” I started up.  “Or I tried to.  I'm not very good at it right now.  You think it would be easier with four legs, but you would be wrong.”  It's telling when someone’s response to stress in a situation is sarcasm.  Not helpful in the slightest, except to take some of the edge off for me.  “So now I'm trying to discount all this as a dream.”  I already had, I just didn’t want to admit to it.  “Because, frankly, if I keep having to use my mouth for everything and taste all the things our hands have touched, I'm filing a complaint with both reality and causality."

"Oh thank god, Qesun! I was really starting to worry about you.” It sounded like everyone was off today.  Lightfox still didn’t sound quite right.  "As for it being a dream, have you ever been able to think this clearly in one.  Anyway, if you do find reality's complaint department, please, please, please give me its address as well."

Hey, let me have my comfortable delusions, man.

"That makes 5 of us, out of ... what? There are over a hundred or more grayed out on my contacts in steam, and you are the only ones I've gotten a hold of,” Capt. Wolf was how we referred to him.  He sounded more… gravely?  Rough.  About the only one of us not to go up in pitches measured in octaves.

"Aside from you all, I'm not seeing anything..." Neon added.  I wasn’t seeing anyone else either, making the question no longer ‘why me,’ but rather ‘why us?’  It didn’t matter in the end, that question didn’t lead to anything we needed to survive.  At least he sounded normal.

"Okay, assuming we ARE the last ones left of the people we know," Wolf interjected, "what are we going to do about it?"

"Well first, we make Neon get off League,” I started with.  It was met with discontented horse sounds, but I didn’t pay it any mind.  I just talked over him while my brain was ticking away at the problem.  I had a reason to work towards a goal now that wasn’t ‘don’t die a miserable death alone.’  “I don't know how many are missing, but I can't help but find the lack of noise from the airport or any of the roads a disturbing sign that the lack of people logged on is not just because it was a nice day to go outside.  We've built a civilization for ourselves that requires a lot of support services that no longer have the staff necessary to maintain them.”

"Wait, this stuff can't support itself? ...That really sucks."  Neon added after I had finished.

"It can, Neon.  It just can't support itself for very long. The net will die within a three-day window, and the power grid will depend on location,” Lightfox stated.

I continued.  “We should pick a place to meet up before our communications fail.  Getting there will be hard, but we'll have an easier time getting through this together.”

“Do you already have an idea for a meeting point?” LF asked.  “Also, if we were to meet up, what about White? He's over in the UK."

"....I don't mind staying in the UK,” The diminutive voice from White said.  What the hades had happened to him of all people?  I’d have to ask later.  "I mean I WAS supposed to catch a plane in a couple of days, but I mean, what am I gonna do, fly the damn thing myself?! I may as well just get used to being by myself instead of tormenting myself with the impossible."

"You want to speak of impossible?  Look in the mirror."  I’m glad Wolf was having none of that.  "This is impossible.  The fact we still managed to contact each other should be, at best, improbable.  As far as I'm concerned, impossible doesn't exist anymore."

"You're.... encouraging me to fly a jet. Completely untrained, and 3 feet tall."

Lightfox added a simple “Yes.”

“So you would rather sit on your aaaaaa-butt and do nothing?”  The word got caught in my throat again, feeling like I had swallowed air and stuck there.  I coughed a few times after I got that sentence out like I was clearing out the bad.  What next?  Puking rainbows?

Wolf stepped up his encouragement.  “No, White, I’m saying you’ll figure something out though.  The worst thing you could do is not try.”  

"White, all my resources VANISHED.  Any help that I could possibly be will be gone by this time tomorrow. This is not something that we can figure out. This one is on you,” LF put out flatly.  Truth sucks.

" ... soooo, where are we going?" Neon asked, putting us back on task again.

We needed a place that was central, that we could all get to.  Someplace with water, vaguely arable land and a limit on the number of natural disasters that could happen.  At least that’s what came off the top of my head.  East coast and southeast coast were subject to hurricanes.  West coast had earthquakes.  Great plains and even Alabama where I was were subject to tornadoes.

I laid out the suggestion to try the Great Divide, specifically the Colorado Rockies.  It had the potential for floods and for some nasty straight-line winds, but both of those could be planned for.  We decided to meet up in Colorado Springs.  It would give us a chance to gather up resources before trying to find a place up in the mountains to set up.  I had family up there, we could check their cabins and try one of those.

Wolf and I further fleshed things out after parting with the others.  He planned to come scoop me up here in Huntsville before heading up there.  That bastard got to keep having hands and could drive easily.

After I signed off, I realized how hungry I was.  I had hardly bothered to take care of myself today.  Pizza, Spaghetti and Meatballs, Baked chicken… There were so many things I once could have eaten.  But each one of these put me off by the smell and taste.  It was the meat.  If it wasn’t obvious enough by smell, the urge to retch overcame me as soon as I tried to eat it.  Fffuuu… Fffffff-flipping Hades!

I gave up and just went with the spaghetti without the meatballs and a salad.  That worked much better.  I would have to keep in mind my sudden change in allowed diet.  The dogs could have what was left of the meat.  They would get to dine for the next few days.  ...For as long as the power held out.  Sort of.  When Wolf got here, I would have to work with him to set up the mini fridge in the camper to work off of batteries or something so we could preserve some food for longer.  Especially for me.

I sufficed with a shower after that, then took the time to take an account of all the supplies I had that might help.  My family liked camping.  It happened just about yearly.  We had a small generator, all sorts of camping pans and a camping stove, kerosene, and so on.  We also had a lot of craft stuff we liked to do.  Pickling jars, beekeeping supplies (I have 2 hives though I don’t like the prospect of working on them without hands), and even alcohol brewing gear.  Tools would be useful, too.  I began lining it all up at the edge of the garage as best as I could given my lack of hands.

By that time, it was getting dark and I was feeling oddly tired of having done pretty much ssshhhh… Ffff-  I did nothing at all.  Not like I had much else I could do until Wolf arrived, so I crawled up into my bed, taking a smaller portion of it for myself.  I spent an hour tossing and turning before I just ended up copying how the dogs were laying down, which was vaguely more comfortable than trying to lay down like I used to.  Now came the true test of whether this was a dream or not: If I woke up tomorrow, I was in for some disappointment.

Well, not if.  When.