//------------------------------// // 9. Famous Ponies // Story: Buggy and the Beast // by Georg //------------------------------// Buggy and the Beast Famous Ponies Normally, Beet Salad would be returning to his apartment at this time of morning, tired and cranky from a night of walking around the dark docks. He was still tired, because he had not practiced spellcraft this much in ages, and cranky because the impact points from Shining Armor's hooves had just started to throb in time with his heartbeat. His jaw was aching something fierce, and from the particularly sharp pain whenever he took too deep a breath, at least one rib had to be cracked slightly. The appointment Supervisor Fits had so 'helpfully' made at the Midland Medical Center was almost an hour from now, so Beets would have to push it in order to arrive reasonably on time, and Fits had been quite specific about what would happen if he were late or blew off the appointment as he wanted to. Still, he had to stop by the apartment and pick up at least one painkiller pill, or he would be stuck somewhere in downtown Baltimare when the pain got too much to bear. Beet Salad really expected his apartment door to be open and his singular insect infestation gone when he dropped by the apartment, but no such luck. Instead, he was greeted by a young powder-blue pegasus mare who was sitting morosely in front of the door when he opened it much as a sad puppy who missed its owner. She gave a rather stiff smile and looked into the corridor behind him, seemingly surprised that a few dozen Royal Guards were not behind him. "So… No enforced vacation at the Baltimare Police Station's Bridle Suite?" she asked with her head cocked to one side, followed by a quick sniff. "Wow. You stink." "I don't have time for this," said Beets, walking past her. “Hey, if I’m not getting arrested, I deserve an explanation at the very least.” She followed him into the bathroom and watched as he paused in front of the medicine cabinet. After removing the bottle of pills he had been carrying around all evening and silently cursing his poor memory, he extracted one with a sour grimace and moved to put the bottle back in the cabinet while the changeling continued to talk. “And why did you take all of the real pills with you, anyway? My ass has been killing me all night. Gimmie one. Make it two.” She intercepted the floating pills by snapping them out of the air like flies and chugged down the glass of water he floated over to her after he was done. “Hey, wait up. Where are you going, lovercolt?” “What are you, my wife?” grumbled Beets. “Buzz off. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at the medical center where we went yesterday.” “Let’s get going then,” said the disguised changeling. “My disguise has been stable all night, so grab a cab and I’ll see if Bonebreaker can take another look at my hip. It shouldn’t hurt this much.” Taking a long look at the ‘pegasus,’ Beets shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. No way.” * ♥ * “That’ll be fifteen bits, sir.” The checker cabbie tapped one hoof while Beet Salad grudgingly counted out the fare and assisted his ‘marefriend’ down from the cab. “Watch your step, ‘dear,’” he called as the unsteady disguised changeling staggered a little upon reaching the pavement. After arranging her scarf, the only one that Beets owned, she painfully sashayed into the parking garage, swishing her tail behind her. “Lucky stiff,” muttered the cabbie as she checked the coins before dropping them into her sidesaddle. “Lucky. Right.” Beets picked up the pace, catching the disguised changeling as she was punching the code into the basement stairwell door. “Wait up, ‘honey.’ Oh, no. Can’t we use the main entrance? You know, the one with the elevator?” “I’ve never had anypony carry me up the stairs before,” giggled the changeling, posing at the bottom of the stairs and casting a come-hither look over her shoulder. “I’m starting to like it.” “Twelve floors. Can't you find an orthopedic surgeon who's afraid of heights? Or lose some weight?” Beets picked the blue ‘pegasus’ up in his magic and floated her in front of him as he began to trudge upwards, one step at a time. “Hey, your psychologist is only one floor down from Boney's office. Think of it as saving cabfare.” Beets started panting about three floors up and slowed his climb to a slow trudge. The pain in his side was like a dull knife wedged between his ribs, and judging from the pained face of the changeling and the way she rubbed one pony hoof against her furry side, he was broadcasting fairly well. “So, are you moving out now that you can stay fuzzy?” A faint flicker of green magic traced down the disguised changeling's side, revealing a brief glimpse of her natural, or unnatural as the case could be made, shellacked violet chitin. “Not yet. I thought it was fairly stable, but the stupid disguise transformation still flickers out at the worst times. Give me a few days and you'll be free of me.” “Free of my flea,” said Beets, panting a little as he climbed. “My house deloused. The insect reject long gone.” “My guitar-picking stud will be left in the mud,” replied the changeling. “The chords of my song will be silent before long. Your guitar keeps drifting out of tune," she added. "I was messing around with it while waiting for you to get back from work. The tuning pegs vibrate loose. I had to keep whacking them with a spoon.” “You're awfully heavy for a singing cricket,” grumbled Beets, unaware of the way that the disguised changeling had suddenly frozen up with a panicked look to one side. “I suppose I should be glad you don't have a twin—” The door to the side of the stairwell popped open and Shining Armor stepped out in front of Beet Salad, leading to a tense moment where it was difficult to determine which of them was more surprised by the meeting. Despite the shock, the broad-shouldered stallion looked considerably more relaxed than when he had been using Beets as a punching bag back at the office. To Beets' astonishment, there were even slightly damp spots under his eyes, as if the prince had been crying, although the fierce scowl he leveled at Beets had no indication of weakness. “Hold up, honey!” sounded a familiar female voice. “The chariot isn't going to get a parking ticket on the roof. Oh!” Princess Mi Amore Cadenza was so much more difficult to resist when she abruptly popped into the stairwell at nearly nose-length away from Beets. Overloaded neurons fired directly into his mind’s speech center, leading to somewhat of a stammering grunt matching the 'ooof!' of stunned astonishment as the disguised changeling he had been suspending in his magic dropped onto the stairwell landing. “I’m terribly sorry!” gushed Princess Cadenza, offering a hoof-up to the somewhat dazed ‘pegasus’ mare. “You must be Mister Salad’s friend, Sultry Breeze. We just met him this morning and here we are bumping into the both of you now. Baltimare is certainly a small place.” “Buhawaa heee wabudum?” asked Beets after several long blinks. “Princess Cadenza!” squeaked the disguised changeling. She did take the offered hoof to help standing up from where Beets had dropped her, but she recoiled away afterwards, almost falling down with a painful wince and an involuntary “Ouch!” “You didn't hurt anything when you fell down, did you?” Princess Cadenza reached out to touch the disguised changeling again, only to have her retreat as if the princess were carrying a red-hot branding iron. “No!” yelped the changeling. “I mean I was hurt, but it's nothing really. I cracked my pelvis when I fell down a week or so ago, and Mister Beets… I mean Mister Salad has been so helpful. He was carrying me up the stairs because I really don't like elevators, claustrophobia you know, and I’ve got an appointment upstairs that we really need to get to. Like now.” The disguised changeling blinked her deep blue eyes and added almost as an afterthought. “You smell wonderful.” The pink princess giggled. “I’m sorry, Miss Breeze. Allow me to make up for it. Shiny, could you please carry the young mare upstairs for her appointment? Mister Beets looks tired, and I don't think she should be climbing stairs with her injuries.” Shining Armor turned away from his intense scrutiny of Beet Salad. There had been a distinct knowing glitter to his eyes as he had looked between Beets and the blue ‘pegasus.’ Dots were connected. Plans were being made. Beet Salad could see the prison cell he was going to be living in very soon. Then Shining Armor looked at Princess Mi Amore Cadenza. All of the nervous tension flowing over Beet Salad turned into vapor and blew away at his look. In hindsight, Beets should have seen it coming. Princess Mi Amore Cadenza had just been through a traumatic time with a changeling invasion, and despite his earlier impulsive offer of a thousand bits, the last thing Shining Armor would ever want is to open up that particular bleeding wound again, even if he knew for absolute certain that ‘Sultry Breeze’ was a disgusting bug. This did not give the changeling an absolute free reign to wave her buggy butt all over town, but it did give the two of them a little latitude with their actions, which would hopefully be enough for the bug to get all healed up and out of town before Beets faced a knock on the door from the Royal Guard. Beet Salad held his tongue as Shining Armor picked up the changeling in his girlish pink magic, remained silent as he followed the Royal Couple up the stairs, and even managed a wan smile while watching the two of them ascend the last staircase up to the roof and their waiting chariot. “What the buck was that?” asked the changeling once the upstairs door had closed and she had checked to make sure they were alone in the stairwell. “I mean what was on your face? I could have sworn there was a smile there. A real smile.” “Go on.” He opened the back door to the osteopath's office and pushed the patient inside. “I’ll see you after I talk to the shrink.” * ♥ * As much as Beet Salad would have preferred to skip out on his psychologist appointment and make some sort of excuse to the Port Authority office, he obediently sat in the empty waiting room while trying to find a magazine younger than he was. With luck, the doctor would have forgotten about him, and after an hour of boredom he would be free to return to the docks and explain that the caseload of the shrink was too high, and that the anger management counseling should probably be considered complete. A good night out drinking in some bar and breaking a chair or two over a fellow belligerent would round the experience out quite well. “Mister Salad? Beet Salad?” Since there was nopony else in the waiting room, Beets could not even use the excuse of selective deafness. “Yeah?” he muttered, stuffing the magazine back into the historical collection under the chair. And he was just looking forward to finding five foods for fitter flanks, too. It was a tossup whether the small earth pony in the white coat was supporting her thick glasses or if the glasses were carrying around a small mare as a fashion accessory. Without the hefty black grasses and their thick lenses, she must have been nearly blind, but the topaz eyes behind the glasses latched onto Beets with an interested raising of one eyebrow a fraction of an inch and a curious “Hmm…” The nurse turned her back on him and strode into the maze of office corridors, calling back, “This way, sir.” He reluctantly followed past several closed doors with the cloying sensation of walking through a magically-dampened zone, probably kept that way to prevent the psychos from roughing up the doctors. The visit came with no measurements of his bodily parts or standing on any scales, just a small office with a comfortable chair and a couch, which the white-coated mare gestured to as she was picking up a clipboard. The sensation of being magic-damped itched at Beet Salad’s horn, but he stayed quiet and looked at the plaques on the wall while waiting for the nurse to finish writing on her clipboard. The artistic prints that decorated the walls were impressive, as was the gold-trimmed diploma for the psychologist showing the honors of graduating Magna Cum Laude from the University of Whinnypeg’s School of Psychology. “So, nurse. Doctor Idiosyncrasy is a really good shrink, right?” Beets eyed the undersized nurse as she continued to scribble away on her clipboard, her teeth holding firmly onto a pink pencil that was a good match for the pink heart behind the rubber mallet of her cutie mark. The nurse did not even look up, but she did pause to frown at something on the form she was filling out. “That good, huh?” Beets applied a frown of his own as he looked away from the nurse in search of another antique magazine to read while waiting on the doctor. It did not help his nerves that the same haunting scent that had followed Princess mi Amore Cadenza was seemingly embedded into the couch he was sitting on, and the warmth of his body only made the aromatic volatiles evaporate faster. “So. Did you get to meet our newest Royal Couple?” Not even a grunt. The nurse just bent over the clipboard in concentration as she filled out another line of her form, probably something about Beets being a lousy conversationalist. In lieu of an obsolete mare’s magazine, Beets went back to studying the wall. There were several letters of appreciation from former patients, pictures of a Hearth's Warming office party or two, and a line of other photographs that seemed familiar. Or at least the subjects. One of the ponies was the small mare, squinting into the camera in the bright sunlight while looking vaguely as if she would much rather have been reading some technical journal, while the other far more stocky pony in the pictures was Doctor Bonebreaker. And if he was Doctor Bonebreaker, then the small mare pictured to his side was… “You're Doctor Idiosyncrasy?” Beets looked at the small mare, who favored him with a brief return glance, distorted by her thick glasses but still seeming somewhat disapproving in his ability to make a timely identification of her position. “Sorry!” babbled Beets while trying to figure out if bolting from the room would reflect negatively on the evaluation she was going to eventually send to the Port Authority. “You just didn't really look like a shrink. I mean psychologist.” Trying to control his embarrassment, he returned to studying the photographs on the wall. The size differential between the two doctors made the small mare seem more like a daughter than a wife, and as he looked at pictures of the two of them boating and skiing, he could not help but consider what was missing. “No kids?” The small mare barely glanced up through her thick glasses and grunted once in the negative before returning to her clipboard. Whatever she was writing there seemed far more interesting than Beets, and he squirmed uncomfortably in the resulting tense silence. “Not that I think not having kids is not normal, that is. Lots of couples don’t have any kids. My parents had kids. Obviously. So it’s normal to have them, because none of us would be here if our parents’ didn’t. Right?” She spared him a slightly longer look, licking the tip of her pencil before returning to her clipboard and whatever she was writing there. Princess Cadenza’s scent had nearly filled Beets’ nose by now, and he tried to breathe through his mouth while continuing the one-way conversation. “I don't have kids, of course. Not like my friend, Nectarine. Wow, does he have kids. Must be at least a half-dozen or so and none of them look like him. Thankfully. Not that I’d want a kid to look like me. You and your husband look like you'd have—” Beets stopped as if he had been hit in the head with a hammer. “Bugs.” That warranted a sideways glance from the mare, as well as a raised eyebrow. “You’re a changeling. I mean not that there's anything wrong with being a changeling, I suppose. Even though Buggy said that Doctor Bonebreaker had this thing about being tied up, and I would suppose… No, I better not go there. Not that I'm some pervert who gets off talking about other ponies and their weird sexual fetishes. I mean you're the psychologist, being around crazy ponies all the time and sucking emotions out of them. Aren't you afraid you'll go crazy too?” The psychologist just kept writing without even looking up. “Unless you're crazy already, screwing a unicorn with a fetish issue. I suppose he gets kinky sex out of it and you get love to live on, but that's just an abusive relationship disguised as… whatever it is. Can't even call it marriage, I guess. How could anypony love something not even their own species?” The disguised changeling raised an eyebrow again and gave him a long look before returning to scribbling on her clipboard. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, and you couldn't be more wrong. The only thing I want out of that bug is goodbye. Once she's healed up enough to survive out in the world, I'm chucking her out the door and changing the locks.” He paused with his face screwed up in disgust. “Not that I ever gave her my key. Oo! Not in that way! Or any other way!” The doctor looked up with a thoughtful expression, chewing on the end of her pencil like some sort of termite before returning to her constant scratch, scratch on the clipboard. “I wish you'd quit that and just talk to me,” snapped Beets. “I’m supposed to be getting therapy for my anger management issue. Not that I have any issue with anger management. Not like Shining Armor.” Beets rubbed the sharp ache on his side, taking some small pleasure in seeing the disguised changeling mirror his gesture. “He just hauled off and slugged me for no reason. Well, no real reason. He offered me a thousand bits to turn over my changeling… I mean the changeling who has been eating me out of house and home. Said I'd tell everypony if he tried grabbing Buggy. He didn't like that much.” The disguised changeling spared Beets a short glance from under her thick glasses before returning to her clipboard. “I’ll bet he doesn't know you're a changeling. He’s probably got some sort of inferiority complex from being dominated by your buggy queen. I insinuated that he really needed a bug to bang, and he pasted me right in the chin.” This time the disguised changeling gave Beets a very inappropriate look for a physician, complete with a raised eyebrow and a brief licking of her lips. “You’d do that?” blurted out Beets, both horrified and curious, but mostly horrified. “I mean his wife is the Princess of Love, but… Not that I'd be interested! That's sick!” A chance comment by Princess Cadenza floated up in his mind and Beets added, “You were Princess Luna's shrink too. Did you let her… No, I don't want to know! No!” Beets cringed back on the couch, then hopped up like it had caught on fire once his mind calculated just where this theoretical sexual experience had happened. He shook his hooves while walking in a tight circle, keeping his eyes closed until the mental images could fade on their own. It was not bad enough that Nectarine had once explained in great detail just what he would have loved to do with the returned Princess of the Moon, but to have his own rump sitting where both of the sexy royal rumps had rested only fed his creative imagination. I need bleach. Lots and lots of bleach. “I can't believe I'm letting you do this to me,” snapped Beets, trying to crane his neck enough to see what was on the clipboard. “What are you writing, anyway?” “Crossword.” Idiosyncrasy lifted her head up and fixed Beets with a disinterested look. “When did you want to start?” “I’m done. Goodbye.” Beets turned towards the door only to pause as the disguised changeling cleared her throat. “Just one moment, Mister Beet Salad.” The psychologist picked two pieces of paper off her clipboard and extended them to Beets by holding them in her teeth. “Emergency appointment slip for my husband upstairs. That pain in your ribs is right over your spleen. Have him look at it today, or you may wind up falling over dead, and soon.” Beet Salad's magic fizzled as he attempted to pick up the papers. After cursing whatever unicorn had come up with the concept of a suppressed magic zone, he cautiously picked the papers from her teeth with his own lips, expecting an ambush kiss at any moment. “And a prescription. Wonderful. I have to take pills now.” “Alioriphin Mexaproxilite shampoo is for external use only,” said the changeling, putting her clipboard on the table. “There's a certain scent about the population of dermatophilus congolensis that has built up on your coat from walking around in the damp night air without proper replacement oils. You shower before your night shift at the docks, correct?” “Uh. Yeah. But I don't see—” “Shower afterwards and dry yourself well after applying some neem-based conditioner, please. Our time is up for today, Mister Salad. I'll see you tomorrow for your next appointment.” Idiosyncrasy moved towards the door, keeping her distance away from Beets as if she were afraid of catching some horrible disease, but she paused as she reached the door. “I assure you, Mister Salad, that I have not committed whatever sexual acts you were thinking about with Princess Luna on that couch. She is a confidential client of mine who has benefited from our sessions together, and I would advise you to keep that fact to yourself.” Beets had just opened his mouth to give assurances in that regard when the psychologist cut him off. “Also, Prince Shining Armor and Princess Cadence have gone through an extremely traumatic experience of being dominated by Queen Chrysalis, and are deserving of your sympathy, not your perverted sexual fantasies. Their mental condition will not be advanced by simply ‘banging a bug’ as you put it.” It would have made Beet Salad a lot more comfortable if the changeling psychologist was not standing next to a well-stocked bookshelf which displayed a prominent series of clinical psychology books entitled Dominant and Submissive Behaviors in the Treatment of Dysfunctional Sexual Relationships.