//------------------------------// // XVI - The Trek (Return To Canterlot: Part I) // Story: Horns, Hooves, and Fur // by Deyeaz //------------------------------// Author’s Note: Craimer here... And this might get awkward while writing... Dear Lord Shadow, why do you come up with this stuff? OTHER Author’s note: Shadow here. And to answer your question... I dunno. For awesomeness? *shrug* Anyway, let us continue on with the story, eh? XVI - The Trek Return To Canterlot: Part I Sunset; Ponyville General “Told ya we’d be back, Praxis,” Jace said to his friend when he and Vinyl returned to the hospital. Praxis, who was forced to be removed of his facial hair in the early afternoon, was walking around his room, taking slow steps as to not reopen his wounds. “Why are you walking?” Vinyl asked icily. “We told you to get some rest.” “Gee, you think I didn’t know that?” Praxis said sarcastically, the distance between him and a large glass of water on the table dwindling as he walked toward it. He picked up the glass and promptly sipped the chilled water. “I got out of my bed because I wanted to. ADHD is a pain in the ass, and when it kicks in, I need to be active. I need to be doing SOMEthing.” “Well, do what I did when I had ADHD... Just tap on your legs to a song in your head. It burns calories too... That’s how I stayed skinny during high school while eating McDonald’s every other fucking day because I had to work there!” Jace advised. “Umm... I’ve tried that. Didn’t exactly work too well. And McDonald’s? Dude, that is some serious diabetes-on-a-bun.” Praxis retorted dryly. He took another draught from the water. “Hey man, it was the job I could get when I was fifteen, lay off.” Jace sighed and scratched his head. “Fine, walk around. Just, don’t push it or else you’ll end up with a giant scar like me. I mean, if you don’t move, your legs become useless, so walk around.” He shrugged and looked back at Vinyl. “Alright, well, thanks, Jace,” Praxis told him, looking away from his friend so that he would’ve have to see the look on his face. He walked towards the side of his bed where his belongings were placed: Typhoon, his flute, his Shadow Fiber jacket and muscle shirt, and his messenger bag all all rested there. He put on the muscle shirt over his bandaged torso and equipped the flute. He gave it a feel, letting the native engravings be stroked by his fingertips. Jace turned away from Praxis, looking at the door. “I’ve gotta go and check on some stuff real quick, Prax. C’mon, Vi...” Jace walked out the door without looking back at his friend. Once out of hearing range, Jace smashed a fist against a wall, almost making a hole. “Fucking... Goddamn myself.” He rubbed his face and sighed hard. “Why do I get pissed at the smallest shit?!” That was when they heard a sharp sound of something breaking. “Oh, damn it,” Vinyl swore. “What did he do now?” “Let’s go check,” Jace told her. The two returned to the room to find Praxis on the ground next to a puddle of water, shards of glass swimming in it. Praxis was twitching uncontrollably, convulsing and writhing to and fro upon the floor. He grit his teeth and grabbed his skull. “Shit! DOCTOR! SOMEPONY! HELP!” Vinyl yelled out the door while Jace tried to help his friend stay down and stop moving. “HELP! SOMEPONY! ANYPONY!” Her cries got more and more frantic as doctors came rushing down the halls with needles and different tools for surgery and the like. “SHIT! PRAXIS!” Jace bellowed at his friend, before going slack-jawed at what followed next. He witnessed Praxis’s usually flat teeth become as sharp as razors. The hands that clutched his head began to develop ten-inch talons as black as the night itself. Praxis’s hair went from being short and blackish-brown to long, extremely messy, and the purest of whites, the black horns on his head extending slightly as they curved upward at the tips. His brown fur darkened to black. When Praxis opened his eyes, brown irises did not greet Jace. Instead, the whites were pitch-black, and the irises a fiery color, slowly transitioning from yellow, to orange, to red. His tan skin was now as pale as his hair, the Curse Seal pulsating a dark and vibrant purple as his body was surrounded with black, pulsating markings again. He couldn’t bear the agony from his transformation and finally let out a bloodcurdling scream as it ended. Jace backed off from his friend and grabbed the brace off of his calf. He crushed it with both hands and slid his hands across the entire length of the brace, the holes and such becoming one black mass as the sagewood took form. He ran his hand quick along the shaft and pulled off fast, having the rest of the shaft slide out of the existing half. He slammed the butt of the stick on the ground, causing the blade to slowly slide out from the narrow wooden staff. The skull slowly took form at at the back of the blade, the barbed wire-like chain taking form along with it. “NO, JACE, STOP!” Praxis said in fear, his voice deepening and becoming gruffer from his metamorphism. “IT’S ME, I SWEAR IT!” He made his way to get up, only to fall back onto his knees and cough ferociously onto the floor. Blood was expunged with every cough he released. The doctors bolted out of the room, screaming their heads off that a monster had entered the hospital. Jace looked at the sky, which now bore Luna’s waning gibbous moon, and back at Praxis, who wiped his now-forked tongue on his bandaged forearm. Blood from his fit of coughing had tainted the white of the bandage. “Praxis? Is that really you?” Vinyl said scaredly. “Yeah... it is...” Jace pointed the scythe at him and lifted his head slowly with the blade. “Praxis... What in the fuck are you?” His voice was strong and firm, almost mean. “Because I swear, if you do anything stupid, I won’t think twice about cutting your damn body in two.” His eyes had narrowed and were slowly changing from the emerald green to red. “ANSWER ME, PRAXIS!” His voice was somewhat morphed, deeper than before. “DO I LOOK LIKE I FUCKING KNOW?!” Praxis roared at Jace. He was taken aback by this sudden outburst: he had thought that Praxis was not the kind of person to raise his voice in anger, only to make himself heard. “DO I?!” Vinyl backed away, tears welling in her eyes from how... different he had become. He stopped his vocal assaults for a second and tried cooling down. “I don’t know WHAT the hell happened to me, OR what I am! Insanity is behind this! He was the one that plagued me with this... this... NIGHTMARE! I TOLD you all about this earlier this morning.” He looked out at the moon that bathed the town in its light, then looked back at his claw-bearing hands. “So when the sun goes down... I turn into THIS?” He sighed. “It wasn’t like this before....” Jace pulled the scythe away and his eyes reverted back to their natural color. “Jesus, Praxis... I didn’t know it was this bad man.” He sighed and dropped the scythe, the metal clanging on the ground as he turned to punch the wall, putting hole all over it. “Dammit! One fucking thing after A-FUCKING-NOTHER! WHY THE FUCK CAN’T I CATCH A GODDAMN BREAK?! FUCK!” He pulled back and hit the wall at full force, knocking the entire wall over to see the other room behind it. Jace was panting hard as he walked over and grabbed the scythe, running out of the doorway and sprinting down the hall. “INSANITY! I’M COMING FOR YOU.” “Aw, fuckberries,” Praxis grumbled, chasing after Jace at top speeds. “JACE, STOP!” While his friend was fast, Praxis was by far faster. He hooked his talons on Jace’s collar and cautiously slowed him down by pulling him back. Jace came to a halt with Praxis, but turned on him, his eyes a blood-red once more. “Get the fuck outta my way...” His voice was deep and demonic as his eyes slowly sunk into his skull, leaving the sockets as empty and bottomless as the ocean’s trenches. “I’m going to fucking end this, ONCE AND FOR ALL.” He used his telekinesis to grab Praxis, and throw him to the side. Once he was out of the way, Jace took off again at top speeds, the air around him turning red like his magic as he increased with speed. “Oh, hell no,” Praxis hissed. “JACE!” He roared at his friend as he ran alongside him. “WE CAN’T FIND HIM! CAN’T YOU SEE THAT HE’S UNTRACKABLE?! IF WE FIND HIM, HE’LL JUST GET AWAY! TRUST ME!” "THEN HOW THE FUCK DO WE BREAK YOUR CURSE?!” He kept up his pace in running, soon getting into the forest. “HOW, PRAXIS?!” He let the scythe fall behind him, blade pointed down, and stopped himself fast by burying it in the dirt.. Praxis stopped next to Jace. He hesitated with the answer, trying to find the right one. He went through the seemingly endless list of responses, and came upon one that not only would be substantial, but also something Praxis wanted to avoid, like his life depended on it. “Twilight Sparkle,” he said with a grimace. After what happened back at Sweet Apple Acres, saying the scholarly unicorn’s name was similar to being force-fed poison. “What?” “Twilight Sparkle. We can go over to her library and look for the book that could help cure me... if the cure exists.” “Cure? The only cure is to kill the one who put the curse upon you in the first place! Like a goddamn werewolf!” “Werewolf...?” All the things that occurred came rushing back to Praxis. Transformations when the sun goes down and when the morning begins, his outer appearance when these transformations took place, how the victim will turn on anyone that would oppose it.... Like a goddamn werewolf. “Let me rephrase that: a goddamn weresatyr!” Jace moved past Praxis, going back to the town. “We need to stop Insanity if you want to go back to normal.” “Fine, that’s all good and dandy,” Praxis said as he walked with Jace back to town. “But where do we even BEGIN to look? I don’t think anypony even KNOWS if he exists, let alone where he is.” Jace sighed heavily. “Very well, then. But can we at LEAST inform the princesses about it?” “If they don’t threaten to banish me again, then... maybe.” Praxis knelt down in front of Jace. “Get on.” “Uh... why?” “Because I’m one of the fastest mother-effing things alive, that's why. I’ll cover much more distance like this. Now get on.” Jace clambered aboard Praxis’s back. The weresatyr hooked Jace’s legs in the crooks of his arms. Jace grabbed Praxis’s meandered horns as an extra precaution. “I swear to God AND Celestia, if you break off my horns, I’ll use your skin as a breakdancing mat,” Praxis solemnly told his human companion. “Whatever, Fluffy,” Jace retorted. He rammed his heels into Praxis’s livestock thighs and said, “Giddyup!” “OW!” the weresatyr shouted, before taking off towards the mountain. While Jace did slow him down a little bit, Praxis kept sprinting, whizzing past Ponyville. Minutes burned away as they finally made it to the train station, where the Friendship Express seemed to be making a stop at Stalliongrad. After they hid in the shadows of a kiosk, Praxis put Jace down. “Hey man, I could have done that too... You see how fast I was going? I could’ve gone faster if I wanted too but, you stopped me.” By this time, Jace was back to his normal self. The scythe was on his calf again, disguised as the brace once again. “I don’t think I like this...Makes me run slow. I hate slow.” Jace quickly ripped off the brace and looked at it, studying its magical essence. It slowly morphed and changed into a walking stick that looked exactly like the shaft of the scythe. “Much better. Now I can whack people in the head with it.” *WOOT-WOOOOOOOOOT* “Damn it,” Praxis said. “That must be the train... if we can hop on, we could ditch it and then hitchhike to Canterlot.” “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Praxis... Being in Stalliongrad is not safe if we’re near the Zone...” Jace informed him. “We don’t need to make an ACTUAL stop at Stalliongrad. We just need to ditch the train halfway and then walk the rest of the way. Besides, this Zone thing you mentioned sounds pretty bad." “You have no idea... it’s radioactive, and I have reason to believe that zombies have sprouted up there.” “ZOMBIES?” Praxis was appalled. “Whaaaaaaat theeeeeee fuck...." “Yes, zombies. And Chimeras, Snorks, Bloodsuckers, mutated dogs, mutated boars, and many more things there that are dangerous. Oh, and don’t get me started on Anomalies. But, there are ponies who brave the area. They call themselves ‘S.T.A.L.K.E.R.S.’ They find artifacts in these Anomalies to make money! I was thinking about joining, then heard about the dangers of the area. One of the things that made me pass was the fear of an Emission... Oh God, Emissions. They’re giant storms that will rain pure radiation in the area and will make you explode if you’re outside for long enough. Kills a good number of the ponies there.” Praxis blinked before crazily saying, “Well, at least we don’t actually have to go there.” He became more serious when the train was almost out of the station. “Now come on! The train’s getting away!” He and Jace emerged from the shadows and bolted towards the accelerating locomotive. With enough effort, the duo managed to hop onto the top of the train, albeit they had to give chase to it for a little while. “Hallelujah,” Jace wheezed. “Thank God the asthma is gone.” “I kinda know that feel,” the weresatyr huffed, coughing heavily again as they stood back up. The Friendship Express was quickly covering ground, traversing across the green fields. In only minutes, the train was slithering next to the mountain that the regal city of Canterlot rested upon. “Okay, NOW!” They jumped off of the train and towards the ground. Jace broke his fall with his telekinesis, landing feet-first softly on the grass. Praxis, on the other hand... he landed headfirst into the ground, his long horns impaling the soil. He tried to right himself by flailing his legs wildly, yet the blood flow to his head made it hard for him to even concentrate, let alone calm down long enough to think of a way to get out. "Ahh! Shit!" Fortunately, Jace “thought” of everything. With enough concentration, Jace had encased Praxis’s legs with his scarlet aura of telekinesis, lifting him up into the air. His horns were removed from the dirt as Praxis ascended. “Thanks for the help, asshole,” he said in frustration. “You could’ve broken my fall, y'know.” “Yeah, but I didn’t want to,” Jace replied, giving Praxis his best troll face. He did it pretty well, too, and the effect was instantaneous: the weresatyr was somewhat enraged. “Son of a...” Praxis trailed off. “Let’s just go.” With that, he dashed up Canterlot’s incredibly humongous mountain and towards the Castle. “Right behind ya, buddy!” Jace called back, running after Praxis at the same speed.