Ch 03: What Is This? More Talking? Get to the Action!
Good Griff!
Part 1 – Interesting Times
Chapter 3 – What Is This? More Talking? Get to the Action!
(In Which Our Heroes Sit Around and Talk Even More, Truths Are Discovered, and Non-Plans Are Made)
I stared at the computer screen in shock. Staring back at me was a creature that I was starting to look an AWFUL lot like. Her name is Gilda. How nice.
I look up to Steve. “So this is from the Pony show, right?”
“Yes,” he confirms, “this is from the Pony show.”
I tilt my head and give him a doubting look. “You think I’m turning into this character from the Pony show,” I ask.
He sets the laptop on the coffee table. “Well, I mean,” he says with a shrug and an “I don’t know” gesture of his hands, “that’s where this seems to be heading. You must admit, the similarities are striking.”
I look to my feet. They have the high ankle and long foot of a cat, ending in a paw. Golden brown fur has spread up almost to my knee. I flex my toes, and to my surprise, claws pop out of the ends. I flex them again and the claws retract. Huh.
I look back to Steve. “So change us back.”
He gives a weak chuckle. “What, you’re serious?” He pauses, and then furrows his brow in a look of righteous indignation. “You think I did this?!”
“Well, you are the pony guy. You seem like the biggest suspect,” I accuse.
“You think I want this?!” he shouts, “If this leads to its logical conclusion, then I’m going to lose my fucking hands! You may get to keep yours, but I don’t! I LIKE having hands! Have you even contemplated the consequences of this?! This is going to completely ruin our lives! Why the FUCK would I do this?” He stops and snorts. He closes his eyes, slowly brings his hands upwards, as if guiding the air to his face, and breathes in deeply through his nose. He quietly mutters, “Infinite patience,” before blowing out through his mouth, while waving his hands forward, as if pushing the air away.
He sits there a few seconds, then opens his eyes and looks at me. “I’m sorry about that,” he says softly, “That wasn’t helpful. ‘Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.’ The point is I don’t know understand why this is happening any more than you do. Though I may know who is responsible.”
Say what? I lean forward in surprise. “What? How? Who?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Do you remember the voice from your dream?”
“Yeaaahhhh…”
He leans forward and searches up a new page on his laptop and hits play. It’s a video from the Pony show. There’s a long brown and gray creature with a mishmash of body parts. Is that… could it be? Nooo… Then, it starts to talk. Its voice sends a chill up my spine, and I can see Steve shudder too.
That voice. It’s the one from my dream.
“Oh, so boring, Celestia. Really? Fine, I'll tell you, but I'll only tell you my way. To retrieve your missing elements just make sense of this change of events. Twists and turns are my master plan. Then find the elements back where you began.”
The way he taunts and rhymes is even the same.
“Who…” I whisper, “Who is that?”
“That,” Steve answers, “is Discord, the spirit of chaos. Long story short, he was a bad guy, before being reformed. But it turns out he was just playing the long con, because in the last episode he pulls a 180 face-heel turn, destroys the main characters, and the show ends. I don’t know how, but somehow HE’S behind this.”
“But… but…” I stammer, “but, how could he do this to us? He’s just a cartoon character.”
“Last I checked, so were griffons.”
That stings. I hate this. I hate not knowing what’s going on. I hate being unsure of myself. I’m not used to being scared or confused, or not knowing what to do. I’m Gilda, the awesomest, most in-control chick in the- No, dammit! I’m Gayle! Not this… bird thing.
I sit back and just stare off into space for a minute or so. Steve is too polite to say anything. I feel him squirm in his seat a couple times. He must be having problem with his tail. But then, so am I. I guess I’ll have to start getting used to it. What else can I do?
…No. I’m Gayle, and I. Don’t. Lose. I don’t let anyone or anything beat me, so I’m sure as fuck not going to start now. I hate being in the dark and not knowing what to do. So you know what? I won’t be. I’m going to learn about this Pony crap, and then I’ll figure out the answers, and then I’m going to make a plan, and it’s going to be a kickass plan, and then I’ll find this Discord piece of shit, and then kick his balls in until he pees blood, and then he’ll change us back. Fucking. Problem. Solved. Because I’m Gayle and I’m a winner. I solve “fucking problems”.
I burst from my seat. “OKAY! We’re going to figure this bullshit out!” I announce. I circle around the couch into the open part of the room and start to pace back and forth. “Let’s list off everything we know. At the exact time I turned twenty five, I had a “vision”, I make quotation fingers here. “About,” I do a quick subtraction, “ten hours later, the same thing happens to you at the exact time YOU turned twenty five.”
“Right. Plus, I believe that was when my Cutie Mark appeared.”
“We both dreamed about this Discord guy cursing us with the number twenty five. We figure he’s behind this whole mess and it had to do with our birthday.”
“Right.”
“Now, I’ve been having weird dreams since then, but nothing like the first one. The same kind of colors and shapes, but nothing bad. You?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Okay, then, like, three quarters of a day later, my hair and eyes changed and my feet started to change. Yours did the same sometime overnight. When I woke up, my hair and feet were completely changed, so were my ears and I had a tail,” I tick of the list of changes on my fingers, …which I notice are now changing color. Great. “Oh, and now my hands are turning yellow. Then the same changes happened to you, just a few hours after me. That sound about right?”
Steve nods. “Yes, nice exposition. Thank you for unnecessarily summarizing things we both already know. Oh, except for your nose and lips are starting to look yellow as well,” he informs me. Say what? Gonna have to check that out.
I continue, “So now the question is, ‘why is it different between us?’ I mean, I figure I’ve got a head a head start just because I was born earlier, but why are we changing differently? Like, my ears disappeared, but yours got bigger. And there’s that lump on your face. What’s up with that?” I stop pacing and turn to Steve with my hands on my hips.
“It’s a horn. I seem to be changing into a unicorn. It’s not any character I can recall from the show, though. I don’t recognize the Cutie Mark,” he reports.
“Yeah, that too. Why don’t I have one of those?” I demand.
“A Cutie Mark?” he asks, “Oh, griffons don’t have Cutie Marks. Only ponies,” he tells me as if it’s the most basic thing in the world.
“Okay, you keep saying that word. For those of us who aren’t gross nerds,” I start, “What exactly is a griffon?”
“Well, then,” he begins. Uh oh. This is gonna be long. “Ponies come in three varieties: unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies, and all possess a special talent. The Cutie Mark represents that talent. When they discover what their talent is, the Mark appears on their flank, signifying their coming of age,” he explains. He’s in full-on professor mode now. “Griffons, on the other hand, aren’t a type of pony at all. They’re a classic creature from real world mythology made up of half lion and half eagle,” he continues. …Half and half? My heart sinks. I’m turning into a creature that’s half one thing and half another? Godammit, the universe has a really fucking cruel sense of humor. I don’t even care right now how bitchin’ lions and eagles are, this sucks roya-
Oh crap, he’s still talking? Christ, he just keeps going and going. What did I miss? “-that’s a whole other kettle of fish. The point is unlike in that work, in this show, they ARE intelligent, just as much as any pony. The main difference, aside from the obvious physical attributes, is the lack of the clearly defined special talent, and therefore no Cutie Mark,” he finishes, “Sooooo… yeah. Now you know.”
“Fucking fascinating.”
“Noooo!” he whines, “You’re supposed to say, ‘And knowing is half the battle! G I Jooooe!’”
I snort and rub my forehead. “Is this really the time, idiot?”
Steve looks sheepish. “Umm, sorry. I’m trying to have a sense of humor.”
I narrow my eyes. “Yeeaaahhhh…. Except for, ahem, earlier accusations, you seem awfully chill about this whole thing.”
He shrugs. “’Que sera sera. What will be, will be.’ Something is happening, but there’s nothing I can do about it. So why get concerned? In a time like this, I remain calm and I ask myself, ‘WWAD?’ What would Arthur Do? Then I don’t panic.”
Okay, I’ll bite. “Who’s Arthur?”
“Arthur Dent, the main character of my favorite book,” he tells me. This is more personal information about him than I’ve ever know. In fact, I think that in the entire three years we’ve been living together, this is the longest we’ve actually just talked to one another in one sitting where there wasn’t a TV on or didn’t involve Portal in some way. “He’s just this normal, average guy, but he gets swept up in extraordinary events. He doesn’t want any part of the situation, but he’s not a hero, so there’s nothing he can do about it. All he can do is just go along with the flow; just smile, nod his head, and hope for a quiet spot of tea,” he smiles.
I quirk an eyebrow. “That’s your role model? Sounds like a pussy.”
He scrunches his face in a frown. “The POINT,” he punctuates this by slashing his hand through the air, “is that I’m in a situation that’s way over my head and I can choose either: A, ‘freak the fuck out and make things worse’, or B, ‘don’t panic’. Which seems more pragmatic here?”
“Okay, I get ya. I think I’m knowing that feels right now, man,” I take a deep breath and blow it out. “Okay, step one done. We’ve taken stock of what’s happened so far. Now step two: what’s next?”
Steve crosses his arms and frowns. “Sure, we’ve taken stock of OUR situation. But what about other ponies- um, sorry, I mean, what about other people?”
“What do you mean?”
He cocks his head. “Why should we be the only ones?” He smirks, giving me his best “clever old philosopher” impression. “Our visions and the resulting transformations are too similar for them to be coincidental. I believe they weren’t just dreams, but, I don’t know, memories, or a look through a window into another world, or something. There are too many similarities for them to have not been actual events. And from those, we know Discord attacked entire cities. What happened to all of those characters? If that’s all real, then what about the show? It specifically ended with Discord eliminating the main characters, focusing on Twilight, but implying the rest. What about them?”
He sighs and leans back. “What about us? What’s so special about us, that this is happening to us of all people? And what are the odds that it just happened to be the two of us? Of the seven billion people in the world, it’s only two and they just so happen to live together? I refuse to believe that. I’d bet a million dollars that if Discord attacked that many ponies, there are more people out there like us.”
Steve squirms a bit and crosses his legs. He looks confused and worried now. “I don’t know about you, but I think something pulled us together. I can barely stand you half the time, and I know the feeling is mutual. So why the fuck do we live together? All those times I wanted to kick you out, something stopped me. Why did I pick you in the first place?” he puzzles.
“Maybe you just lurve me,” I coo at him mockingly and give him a kissy face.
He snorts. “Sure, that must be it. You’re not my type. I had a guy lined up who was going to be more my speed, let me use his giant TV when he went out of town all the time, AND pay more than his share of the rent. But for some reason, something made me think he was too good to be true and pick you instead. Something connected me to you. Maybe it was this? Maybe we were connected from the moment we were born and when we finally met, we subconsciously sensed that resonance,” His face suddenly goes pale. “And if that’s true, couldn’t it also be true for anyone we know?”
Ellen!
“IGOTTAMAKEACALL!” I cry and dash to my room to grab my phone. Or at least I try to. Damn cat feet. Almost as soon as the phone is in my hand, Ellen’s number is dialed and the phone is at my ear. Or, um… ear hole.
The line rings several times before my girlfriend picks up. Before she can get a word out, I blurt, “Oh thank god, Ellen! You picked up. Baby, you alright?”
“What? Gayle?” she asks, the annoyance clear in her voice, “Why are you calling me at work?”
“Quick, baby, when’s your birthday?”
Ellen sighs wearily. “We just talked about this last week. You forgot already?”
Oh no, not her too.
“I’m so sorry! Oh jesus, yours was the other day too!” I apologize, “Look, I know this is weird, but me and Steve are figuring this thing out. You should come over right away!”
“What? No. What are you talking about? It’s in October,” she sighs in frustration again. “Gayle, I love you, but you never listen to me. How many times have I told you not to call me at work unless it’s an emergency?”
“But this IS an emer-“
Ellen cuts in, “Forgetting my birthday is not an emergency. Last time it was because you forgot a pair of shoes at my place. I’ve got someone sitting across my desk right now, giving me an annoyed look, and rightly so. I have to go.”
“I love you.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” she says and hangs up.
I sigh. Well that could have gone better. I don’t listen? My last dozen girlfriends all said the same thing. I think I listen just fine. But at least it sounds like Ellen’s not affected by this weirdness. Her birthday is wrong and she didn’t sound like someone freaking out from turning into a cartoon character.
I finally put some pants on. Eww, even in pants, my legs look all weird. I shove my cell in my pocket and go back out into the main room. Steve’s on the phone.
“-wanted to make sure. You’re positive you’re okay? Nothing out of the ordinary is going on with you?” He pauses. “Okay, well that’s good. Talk to you soon,” he finishes and hangs up.
I plop down next to him. He turns to me. “I think you had the right idea. I’m calling a few friends and acquaintances.”
“A few?”
“Just six or seven off the top of my head,” he says offhandedly, “Ones who I don’t know their age and birthday that might have just turned twenty five.”
How many people does this kid know? He dials another number and puts the phone back up to the side of his head. Hmm, he’s busy. No sense wasting time. If this shit’s going to continue, I may as well get back on my feet, literally.
I spend the next twenty minutes practicing on my new feet; walking, jogging, jumping. By the time Steve’s done on the phone, I’m stable and I’ve got a new appreciation for these things.
Okay!” Steve announces, “It doesn’t sound like anyone I know is affected by this. At least, no one I talked to. There are plenty of people I only know online and who knows what’s going on with them.” He squirms in his seat.
“Tail problems?” I ask with a smirk.
“Uhhhhh. Yeah,” he answers with shifty eyes.
“Deal with it,” I order him, “Step one: done. Step two: the fuck to do we do now?”
Nothing comes to mind. We stare at eachother for a minute in silence. Finally, Steve breaks it, “We have to get out of the city.”
That’s crazy. I tell him so. “That’s crazy. What about my job? Your job? Ellen? We can’t just drop our entire lives and leave! Where would we even go?”
“Gayle,” he starts, his voice level and his eyes dead serious, “as far as I’m concerned, our lives were dropped the second this started. It just wasn’t up to us. What are you going to do? Go into work tomorrow or whenever looking like that? Or worse? ‘Hey, boss! Don’t mind me, I’m just a mythological predator now,’” he acts the last bit out in a mockery of my voice. “They’ll call the cops. Or animal control. Either way, eventually you’ll end up with your brain vivisected in some government lab somewhere.”
I slump down in my seat and bury my face in my hands. I notice my nose feels stiff. Maybe he’s right.
“As for where we’ll go? Beats the shit out of me,” he admits. His eyes roll up as he thinks. “Why don’t we go hide out at your parents place? It’s not too far and I’d imagine it’s pretty private.”
My hands shoot to the top of my head and I run my fingers through my hair, err feathers. “WHAT?! FUCK NO!” I shout, “Are you out of your goddamn mind?! My parents 1000% CAN’T know about this! I’m lucky they didn’t disown me when they found out I fuck other chicks! This is a whole other…” I trail off.
“Heh, and now you’re a different sort of ‘chick’,” he laughs.
“Ha. Ha. Hi-larious,” I deadpan, “How about we go to your parents, smart guy?”
“Can’t.”
“See? Not so eager to show this off to the ‘rents either, are ya?”
“No, not ‘won’t’. ‘Can’t’.”
“Oh yeah? Why not? Where are they, anyway?” I demand.
“Manchester.”
“Where’s that? Like, upstate?” I inquire.
“England.”
Huh. That’s a new one. “Well, what the balls are they doing there?”
Steve gives me a disbelieving look. “Uh, they live there?”
“Since when?!”
“Since always,” he says with a look of defeat.
The gears turn and the lines connect in my brain. “Waaaait…. You’re English?!”I squawk. He just sits there looking incredibly embarrassed. “How did I never know this? You don’t even sound English!”
Steve opens his mouth, but instead of his normal voice, what comes out is probably the funniest thing ever. Of all time.
“Wot? Is this better? I ‘aveta sound like this to be a proper Englishman?”
His accent. Oh my god oh my god. I can’t stop laughing.
“Oy, you ‘aving a fooking laugh at me?” he barks. I’m still laughing. “Well, I’m plum chuffed I could amuse you.”
Still laughing.
“You shut yer gob!”
I get myself together enough to talk. “Okay, okay,” I manage breathlessly.
“Ruddy bloody yanks…” he grumbles.
“Dude, you sound like a fucking Beetle!” I laugh.
“No, I don’t,” he argues. Awww, he’s back to his normal voice. “They were from Liverpool. They had a Scouse accent. I’m a Manc.”
“What’s the difference?” I question.
“What’s the difference between a Brooklyn and a Boston accent?” he counters.
“Okay, whatever. I get it. Why do you normally sound, um, normal.”
“For EXACTLY THAT reason,” he insists, “People hear the accent and they either think it’s hilarious or I’m a tourist, or both. So I hide it. Let’s move on, shall we?”
“Okay,” I give in, “so your parents are a no go. Where do we go to? I still say we don’t need to leave the city. Let’s just hide out in Central Park or something until this all blows over.”
“Ha, too bad you’re not Zecora, then if someone heard hoof beats, they’d be looking for the right thing,” he says with a smirk. I just look at him blankly.
“Um, yeah. So what if this doesn’t ‘blow over’?” he narrows his eyes, “There’s no way a unicorn and a griffon would be able to stay completely hidden in the park forever, and there’s no way we’d be able to get back out of Manhattan unseen, much less back here. Then it’s right to the autopsy table.”
I scratch the back of my head. “Okay, I give up. So where do we go?”
“Search me. I don’t really have anywhere else here in the States,” he admits. He turns the tables on me. “What about you? Don’t you have anywhere besides your parents house you know that we could take refuge? No one else you trust that could take us in?”
No one comes to mind. But then, a faint trace of an idea.
“I… Let’s go camping,” I suggest and stand up.
Steve just looks at me skeptically. “….Camping. At a time like this?”
“Yeah, sure!” I cheer, “Why not?” I start to pace again. I hate sitting still too long, especially in a crisis like this. I feel like I need to be moving.
“When I was younger, like maybe three summers in a row, I remember my parents took me to some lake upstate. We’d rent a cabin and stay there a week. They said they needed ‘to escape the responsibilities of society for just a while,’ or some BS like that,” I recall.
“We’ll go there!” I announce, gesturing wildly with my arms, “I love camping! I’ve got the gear already. We’ll just get some stuff for you, some food, and we’ll head up to the lake! I don’t remember exactly where it is, but if we need to stop for the night before we get there, I’m sure we can find a campground to stay at. Or fuck, just stay in the woods. It’s perfect!”
Steve just stares dumbfounded at me for a moment, his mouth hanging open. Finally, he speaks, “Perfect? Gayle, I say this with the utmost respect for you as a person, but THAT... is the... STUPIDEST… fucking plan… I have ever heard in my entire life. That’s not even a plan. That’s Wile. E Coyote. That’s a child drawing ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ in crayon. That’s-“
I cut him off. “Okay, smart guy. If I’m so stupid and you’re so damn smart, let’s hear your idea,” I challenge.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out. He raises his index finger, as if to make a point, then puts it back down. He sputters a bit, “I. We. Let’s.” He hits himself a few times on the forehead with his fist before sighing in resignation, “Goddammit. God damn it.”
I laugh in triumph, “Ha ha! I win again!” I sidle over to him and nudge him with my elbow. “What’s the matter, pussy? You scared of the woods?”
He sighs again. “Look, I do not want to be eaten by wolves or mothmen or what-have-you, raped to death by psycho hillfolk, or possessed by an ancient demonic force from some necronomicon. If we die out there, I am going to fucking murder you.”
“HA!” I chuckle, “Fair enough. But you got nothing to worry about, buddy. You got me! What could possibly go wrong?”
/_‾_‾_‾TO BE
CONTINUED‾_‾_‾_〉
~ Yeah, seriously enough talking, you clods! Do something already! Actually, most of this was going to be in Chapter 2. I'd planned for Chapter 2 to be the big expository chapter, ending with them dramatically concluding "We have to get out of the city." Then Chapter three was going to be them starting to "plan", then setting out. But it just kept getting longer and longer. I guess I had a lot more dialogue in me than I expected. That does tend to be more my strong point, is inter-character dynamics. Definitely not descriptions. 
So yeah. Instead, Chapter 2 was all talk and 3 ended up being more talky talky and they were going to set out. But then it started going long again. And when that last line found its way onto the page, well... who can resist ending on that note? Famous last words. So once again, they haven't even set out yet! Jesus! Who's writing this trainwreck? Oh wait...
~ So I'm intending to start putting illustrations in here. I'd like to have at least one per chapter. I drew a picture of Gayle in Illustrator (which you will see soon) as a test. But I didn't even work from scratch and it still took me, like, 8-10 hours. ANd that was just her. I know there's no way I can make decent looking pictures, and definitely not in a timely fashion coinciding with story updates. So unless a good artist happens to be reading this and wants to start drawing pictures for me for free, you're going to be seeing some really bad doodles pretty soon. I have a scanner, lots of pens, pencils, paper, color Sharpies, and heart. Just no talent. 
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Hitchhiker's Guide FTW
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong!
Five of Five Mustaches:
And Gayle has just doomed them both with that last sentence.
My question is, what's gonna happen about Ellen? Will Gayle try to get her to go along (Not sure how that would turn out), or just disapear and bring about heartbreak to both?
2630915
Guess you'll have to keep reading to find out.
Putting it in quotes like that makes her sound like some sort of half-griffin Dr. Ruth.
Which is actually kind of fantastic.
In any case, for all the exposition, I'm still enjoying the story. Definitely looking forward to more. Especially when Gayle realizes she gets to fly.
2633764
Oh, yes. I've been looking forward to that so much myself. This is actually weird for me since because this is the first time I've ever written a serialized story and the first time I've posted my writing for such a large audience, I'm just as excited to get to some of these later parts as you are. The only difference is I have an inkling of what's coming. Gayle getting to fly is something I'm really jazzed about. For all of her bluster, Gayle is actually a very damaged person who's had some real shit in her past, so I'm so looking forward to giving her some joy.
Also:
s20.postimg.org/p31glnr9p/drew_ruth.jpg
Gayle, anything that happens to you in whatever chapters may follow is ENTIRELY your fault for asking that particular question at the end
Totally looking forward to when she becomes full griffon. Great work so far!
They're doomed.
2641151why do people say that? When ever anybody says that something bad is bound to happen.
2667419
I admit I've been slow to update the next chapter. It's been over a week since my last update. I'm at a scene break about 3400 words in and trying to work out what to do on the other side of it, plus fit a particular conversation in somewhere. Not to mention I've been extremely busy with work and social matters lately, I'm also trying to draw illustrations for all the chapters so far and character bios I plan on putting up. (I know I know, work on the story before the supplemental stuff. But I've been in a very artsy mood lately.)
So yeah, I apologize for the delay.
!
WWAD? Beat some sense into the two and get them out of the city with a towel!… Probably not.
The story is going well so far, but I find the lack of detail irks me just a bit. You make up for it with plenty of interesting dialogue, though, which is something that I'm not the best at creating. I'm waiting for chapter four because ponies and camping is gonna be plenty of fun
!
Lazy Bones has very detailed and intelligent (and accented) dialogue, something that I'm looking forward to. Too much smart for Gilda, though. YU JELLY, G?
Good luck with the next chapters!
So in this story, Portal was adapted into a TV show, based on the video games?
"I figure I’ve got a head a head start" - nix one "a head"
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE FUCK YEAH
pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw5686-Gilda_-_Yeah_hilarious_5.gif