Chapter 2: A Hoof in Mouth
Breakdown
Chapter 2: A Hoof in Mouth
Day 10 (Thorsday), 5 pm PDT
The reason why any of you have any idea who I am is because of my monthly appearances on Buster Friendly’s talk show. (Now I’m getting ridiculous—you all know full well who “Buster Friendly” really is.) My chauffeur dropped me off at his studio at 5 pm; who should be waiting for me in the parking lot but Mr. Friendly himself.
“Nathan,” he said to me, “why didn’t you answer my calls?”
“Ah, my secretary must have blocked you by mistake,” I said contritely.
That Sally—always looking out for me.
“So, was there an update in the Goldie Lochs case?” I asked, referring to the subject I was expected to pontificate on.
“Yeah, it busted wide open three hours ago,” he told me. “Turns out she wasn’t kidnapped at all, just lying to cover up a romantic romp with a boy she met on Rum Cay.”
“Oh,” I said, collecting my thoughts. “That isn’t so bad. I could switch from talking about the psychology of abduction to the psychology of seduction or deception.”
“No, I don’t think anybody cares about Miss Lochs anymore,” Buster told me.
“Oh,” I said, looking around me at the bleak car park. I wished I hadn’t sent my nameless chauffeur off to his dinner break.
“What do you know about ponies?” he asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Ponies?” I asked. “Do you mean the kind kids get rides on at the circus, or the kind that talks?”
“Of course I mean the kind that talks!” Buster snapped at me. “I tried to get Dr. Hugh Lofting of the San Diego Zoo lined up to replace you and talk about the animal aspects of pony personality, but he claimed he was helping a walrus through a difficult delivery or some other lame excuse. The nerve of that guy! So how about you go on to cover it from the opposite angle?”
Now it’s one thing to switch around which aspect of a privileged young woman’s life you want to pry into, but quite another to switch to the interface between human and animal psychologies with no advance preparation whatsoever.
“Well, I don’t know...” I hedged.
“Did I mention that I’ve got exclusive video of that Fluttershy pony who got plastered all over the news this morning? Our ratings will go through the roof!”
I had the self-control to give the illusion that I was actually hesitating for a few seconds before I leapt at the offer of more free publicity than I’d know what to do with.
(% % %)
I was sitting in the Green Room a half hour later waiting for my cue when an intern came in and changed the channel from the live feed of the studio set to a Campbell’s Soup commercial.
“You’re going to want to see this,” he explained. “They’ve got some pony news after the break.”
“Mmm-mmm good!” sang the Campbell’s Kids.
“Breaking news,” the photogenic anchor announced as the news program resumed. “The ponies named Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie have revealed that a powerful spirit of chaos named Discord is behind many of the inexplicable events that have been occurring over the past two weeks, including quite possibly the appearance of the ponies themselves.”
The video of the anchor’s concerned face cut to amateur video of two ponies who appeared to be jogging in place. One of them was quite obviously Fluttershy, the identification greatly aided by the fact that she was unclothed. The other was wearing a long black coat with glimpses of a shirt and pants underneath, so only the head and mane were really visible, but this was more than enough to confirm that this was Pinkie Pie.
“What’s going to happen in New York?” asked the off-camera voice of a young woman.
Correction, the ponies were not jogging, they were playing Dance Dance Revolution. A defective machine, apparently, because there was a faint “eee” sound coming from it underneath the happy music it was playing.
Two ponies were giving a vitally needed Q&A session...while playing Dance Dance Revolution.
This was Pinkie Pie, though, so I really shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Hmm,” said Pinkie, her little orange tongue sticking out as she thought. “Either we’re going to take care of Discord, or we’re going to take care of—wait, did, was the whole Discord thing public knowledge? Fric—”
The image of Pinkie froze, her mouth still opened. On any normal person or pony given this treatment, she’d look like an idiot. For Pinkie Pie for whatever reason, she looked like she was accepting the Nobel Prize in Physics.
“‘We’re going to take care of Discord’,” the anchor quoted. “Now who precisely is Discord? With me is Mitchell Larson, screenwriter of the episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic where this character first appeared. Mr. Larson, who is Discord?”
The somewhat nervous young man sitting beside the anchor looked at his hands. “Discord is a spirit of Disharmony who plagued Equestria in the past. His powers are nearly limitless.”
“Would you call him a god?” the newsman asked.
“Well, that might be going a bit far,” Larson said. “But he can shape reality to his will.”
“So the changing of the calendar would be something in his power.”
“Oh yes,” Larson said with some enthusiasm. “That is both something that he could do, and that would be in his character. I don’t know why anybody would think that the ponies could have been responsible for that.”
“Yes, that appears to be supported by a later part of the same video,” the anchor said, introducing the next clip:
“Here is one from Antibrony,” said the unseen questioner, “says, ‘Are the ponies trying to take over the world?’”
“Most of the ponies are scared,” replied Fluttershy, “and want to keep Discord from taking over this world, so... no? I don’t think so.”
As she was saying this, a shaking hand was slowly approaching the head of an unsuspecting Pinkie Pie. It was at this point that I figured out that the “eee” sound was coming from the owner of that hand. The hand darted back out of view just as Pinkie Pie turned her head to add something to Fluttershy’s answer.
I would have liked to have heard what that answer was, but the video cut off at that point.
“What do you think Discord’s long term plans for humanity are, Mr. Larson?”
Larson had himself a good laugh at that question. “Discord doesn’t have long-term plans. He simply satisfies whatever whims come into his head. On Equestria, he made it rain chocolate milk out of cotton candy clouds.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” offered the anchor.
“He also corrupted the personality of the ponies who got in his way, causing them to act entirely opposite to their character, and with full memory of what they did once they recovered.”
The anchorman closed his mouth with an audible snap. “Oh.”
The producer of the news segment decided to save the star of the show further embarrassment by playing one last clip:
“How do you plan on stopping Discord?” the questioner asked.
“Secret plans,” Fluttershy said, hiding behind her hair. “Not allowed to talk about them.”
“But you can help!” Pinkie Pie cried out, leaning into the camera. “Simply make a donation to...whatever charity is helping us get to New York, and...Is there a charity like that?”
“I don’t think there is one,” Fluttershy said apologetically.
Pinkie moved aside—while still dancing, mind you—to allow Fluttershy to have her spotlight.
“If anyone sends PayPal donations to erica2734@gmail.com it will help us get to New York,” the pegasus said.
The email address appeared in text at the bottom of the screen as the image faded to black.
(% % %)
The voice of Buster Friendly’s announcer rang out over the auditorium: “Our next guest first came to public notice six years ago, with his miraculous rehabilitation of the Wolf Girl of L.A. Please welcome world-renowned psychologist, Dr. Nathan Franklin.”
I would say something here about how I’m nowhere near as wonderful as the announcer was telling everyone I was, but I suspect that you wouldn’t believe me.
The curtains parted, and I walked out into the welcoming glow of the television spotlights. I waved warmly at the applauding audience and walked briskly to my seat, stopping only briefly to accept Buster’s handshake.
“Welcome to the show, Dr. Franklin,” Buster said.
“A pleasure, as always,” I said. “I am here to offer my expertise. What can I do to help?”
This is the same patter we do nearly every show. Actually, Buster Friendly has standard patters for all of his returning guests. It’s how he satisfies the need for control that got him into show business in the first place.
“I was wondering if you could help me...”—he swept a hand outward to include his audience—“...to help us, to understand the ponies.”
“Well, the ponies are people, just like we are,” I answered smoothly. “They cannot be boiled down to simple behaviors.”
“And yet they are different from us, in fundamental respects, yes?” he asked me.
Well here we were potentially going to get into trouble. I decided to deflect the question. “Physically, most certainly, they are different from us. But inside those changed bodies are human minds.”
“And something else,” Buster insisted.
“Well...” I said, with a well-practiced turn of the head and roll of the eyes. This produced the expected small burst of laughter in the audience, which served to diffuse Buster Friendly’s implied accusation.
But he would not be deterred so easily. “Roll the first video,” he instructed.
A fake YouTube frame appeared on the monitor in front of us, and appearing in the frame, in suitable YouTube quality, was the bedroom of a typical suburban young woman, currently occupied by a gray pegasus. “When I woke up, I was Derpy,” the pegasus said with a British accent. “It wouldn’t surprise me, It didn’t surprise me, I guess. The funny part is, my name is Danielle. Derpy, Danielle.... Nevermind. I bet you're wondering about the voice, It surprised me too. I know this may seem odd, but I’m looking for a ride. To New York, that is. Wish me the best of luck, I’m off to test these bad boys! I can’t just sit here. Goodbye everyone!”
Now Buster’s team had allowed me to see this video beforehand, so I had had more than enough time to think about it. In a way, this video is the entire “pony problem” all wrapped up into one pretty package. This pony is Derpy, a pony near and dear to my brony clients, and therefore a pony I knew perhaps even better than some of the Bearers. But this short video proved that I didn’t know her at all. In the actual cartoon series, she was a background pony, meant to be copy-and-pasted as necessary to fill in crowd scenes. But an animation mishap made her famous, and soon she was showing up more and more often. The fans named her “Derpy” because of the offset eyes of the original mistake, but she was also confused with “Ditzy”, an unseen pony blamed for an epic screw-up in another episode. She finally got a speaking part in an episode of the second season, but this was so close to a stereotypical “retarded” voice that it raised the ire of children’s advocacy groups and as of the end of the season, it looks like she’ll never appear in the show again. In the minds of my clients that care, and certainly in my own opinion, the mare’s voice and mannerisms belong to an amateur voice artist with the alias BaldDumboRat. Yet this voice matched neither of those. Left unanswered, though, is whether this is the “real” Derpy’s voice, or if it, like the entire personality of the pony, is the invention of Danielle.
So in the end, what could be said about this video? “In this video,” I commented, “we see a young woman newly transformed, and she is excited by what this means for her.”
“And...nothing else?” Buster Friendly prompted me.
“Not that I can see,” I told him with a shrug.
We next watched the Lauren Faust press conference video, which I do not need to quote for you. Here I was allowed to be even more confident in the humanity of the ponies presented thus far, as I had arranged with the producers to line up part of a press conference given by Mrs. Faust a year ago showing identical speech patterns.
“Well what do you think about this?” asked Buster, and then yet another video appeared on the monitor.
“Hey there everybrony!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed to the camera.
It was instantly obvious that this was from the same interview that the Discord revelations had been taken from. Both she and Fluttershy were standing on the same Dance Dance Revolution machine as before, but it was still in the “attractor mode”, so this was probably from near the beginning of the video.
“Fluttershy and I have decided to hold a little Q&A for all of you peeps that are watching our progress,” Pinkie continued. “But just watching ponies answering questions would be boring soooooooo... We’ll be dancing while we’re doing it! Say hi, deary.”
Fluttershy said something that might have been “hi”, but was nearly impossible to make out.
Pinkie proceeded to introduce the camera operator/invisible questioner and the “eee” lady while picking out the first song they would be dancing to.
“Seems human so far,” I said casually during a break in the conversation. “She’s simply getting into the spirit of her very enthusiastic character.”
“What’s it like being a pony?” the off-screen voice asked as the music started up. The ponies started dancing.
“It’s like being a pony,” Pinkie Pie answered with a straight face.
Now this was interesting. I am no expert on the personalities of cartoon characters, particularly those written by multiple writers, and therefore prone to variances in portrayal. But I could swear that that particular brand of deadpan humor was not Pinkie Pie’s style. Twilight Sparkle’s, perhaps, but never Pinkie’s. But once again, how to distinguish between a human speaking separately from her second pony personality and a role-player slipping out of character?
Fluttershy was providing her own answer, of which I missed the beginning. “...Like suddenly having six arms or something,” I heard her say, presumably about what it was like to become a pegasus, “but the pony whose body you get helps you out if you let them.”
Buster looked at me like he expected me to go into a heart attack at this last statement, but I merely smiled cryptically at him.
“Oh you just had to mention that bit,” Pinkie Pie grumbled, apparently agreeing with Buster, “now they’re all going to panic...”
The video froze. “Are you sure you don’t want to—” Buster began, trying to bait me.
“Keep playing,” I said calmly.
“Featherlover,” the questioner in the video said, naming the individual she had gotten the question from, “What do you both think of Gilda?”
Now it was obvious that Buster’s crew had spent hours editing this video, first to excerpt the Discord bits for use by the news division, and then to find the best bits to get a reaction out of me and the audience with. Why were they wasting time on the question of a side character, one who we’ve heard no evidence that she’s actually appeared on Earth yet?
Pinkie Pie took a while to respond. “She has a bit of an issue showing her feelings as she feels it would lead—“
“Stop!” I cried out, as I felt my comfortable universe slip out from under me. I sat there for a few moments in shock, collecting myself. Buster quietly pushed my designated water glass my way, and I obligingly took a sip as I collected myself. “Could you play back that last part, zooming in on Pinkie Pie’s eyes?” I asked with a trembling voice. “I want to catch her thinking about the question.”
There was a bit of a pause while the hard-working technicians in the producer’s booth processed my request.
“What do you both think of Gilda?” asked the interrogator.
If the human inside Pinkie’s head was role-playing, if she was imagining what the Gilda outside her one episode was like, then that initial flick of the eyes should have been to her upper right. That’s the way the visual system of most people is wired—if you don’t consciously control for it, your eyes give away what type of sensory input you are thinking about, as well as distinguishing between constructed vs. recalled thoughts. Every piece of pony footage I had seen so far supported the theory that this system worked just as well for them, making it a valid means of analysis. Accordingly, if the human in Pinkie Pie’s body was remembering the words that Gilda spoke in her episode, then that involuntary glance would have been straight (audio) left (recalled). But she looked to her lower left, and kept her eyes there for several seconds before she answered. That is the eye direction reserved for internal dialogue.
In other words, human Pinkie asked the real Pinkie in her head what she thought of Gilda, and then she summarized for the rest of the world the words that she had heard.
“It is true,” I heard myself saying, “there’s a foreign mind in that body!” Or perhaps it would be better to say that the human mind was the invader in a pony body. “They were just talking to each other at that moment.”
The video rewound and re-played the section I had studied in slow motion. As was no doubt the intention of Buster’s producer, the slowed-down voice in the video made Pinkie’s introspective glance look as unnerving and incriminating as possible.
“Well, you seemed to be convinced very quickly,” Buster said with a quiet chuckle.
The video was returned to its normal proportions and resumed. There was a question about Fluttershy’s near-death experience that I’m sure was there more to reassure those worried for the pony’s safety than for my analysis, although the flick of her eyes to her lower right both confirmed with her wince that she was physically reliving the event, as well as showing that the whole theory of involuntary eye movement did in fact map to ponies the same as it did for humans.
The video skipped ahead. “I turned into my OC pony,” the off-screen woman asked, quoting somebody else’s question, “and I can hear her voice in my head. What's happening?”
Well that sounded truly terrifying.
Pinkie Pie offered up a jaw-droppingly glib response, that must have sent the newly transformed pony into a tailspin of despair. Once again, this was an extremely un-Pinkie thing for her to say. On the show, she seemed to suffer from too much empathy, but here was an example of someone who’s empathy was drowned out by out of control reasoning.
Fluttershy meanwhile was delving into alternate universe theory, a theory she apparently got from human Pinkie Pie.
“Above all, DO NOT PANIC,” Pinkie concluded. “Take things calmly and rationally and rationally calmly.” The video suddenly stopped at this point. I wondered if it was to cut out another revelation for the news division.
So far I had a pretty good grip on what was going on with Pinkie Pie, but due to her shyness, I really couldn’t get a handle on her dance partner. “Could I see some footage featuring Fluttershy?” I asked.
“That’s coming right up,” Buster answered.
“What’s it like being an element of harmony?” was the next question posed.
“Well,” answered Fluttershy, “the obvious answer would be that I am forced to be kind. But it is more than that. I literally can’t think of being unkind, there’s a mental block there. For example, I have been trying not to use my wings because I feel like I could hurt Pinkie’s feelings.”
There was something...off about Fluttershy’s answers thus far, but I still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them. Once again, she was thinking about physical sensations, which caused her to look to her lower right, suggesting that she had actually felt the binding restrictions of the Element of Kindness. But considering that both ponies were wearing their elements, I couldn’t tell if she was referring to her experiences on Equestria or just on Earth.
“As for me,” Pinkie Pie began, and then she blinked. And in that blink she suddenly changed personalities. “Well, Kindness is pretty easily defined. All the elements are...except Laughter. Laughter can be used for the dark purposes more easily than any of the others, I mean, just look at the Joker!”
She kept going after this, but I wasn’t really taking it in, because I was still reeling from the fact that I was listening to a pony who hadn’t made an appearance in the interview before this very moment. The one and only real Pinkie Pie. And then I did grasp what she was talking about: the circumstances under which she might be liable to lose her mind and become the dreaded Pinkamena.
Of course, my thoughts turned to “Cupcakes”. None of the bronies I have ever treated have read more than the first paragraph of that infamous fanfiction, yet all are haunted by it.
“The human and pony personalities, they’re battling for control of her body at this very minute,” I told the audience.
The questioner posed a necessary follow-up: “Does Pinkamena actually have a basement reserved for cutting people up?”
Another blink, and human Pinkie had regained control. “Not in this world,” she said with a smirk, like it amused her that psychopathic pink ponies existed out there in the multiverse, bathing in the blood of their victims.
I may have begun to get emotionally invested by this point. I sort of missed the question about what it was like for each of them to wake up one day as their specific pony, although I did catch Fluttershy looking in the direction for recalling a visual memory as she talked, which definitely tagged her as human Fluttershy instead of her pony companion.
“How does Pinkie know Vinyl...and how does Rarity know Vinyl?” was the next question.
Vinyl, like Derpy, was a character that meant far more to fans than to the makers of the cartoon. The bronies who were musicians were particularly enamored with her.
“Well, I know her through the PARTY NETWORK OF EQUESTRIA!” replied pony Pinkie. By now I was getting pretty confident at telling the two personalities apart. Also, she was clearly recalling an audio memory of their first meeting. “And Rarity knows her... um...I dunno...Maybe they’re related?”
“Rarity met Vinyl during a gem convention, Vinyl was making...”
I tuned out the rest, because I finally had the evidence I was looking for: Fluttershy was recalling a story she heard from Rarity, and her eyes correspondingly looked straight left. Yet I was certain that she had the same personality as when she made her earlier statement about waking up in her new body.
There was only one way that Fluttershy could both remember Equestria and becoming a pony on Earth: if the two Fluttershy personalities had merged. I was looking at a freakish chimera, part pony, part human, with no reasonable chance that the two could ever be separated.
Perhaps this was human Fluttershy’s response to nearly being killed: unable to handle the stress, she effectively committed suicide.
I turned away, tears coming to my eyes. “I can’t...” I mumbled. “Please, stop the video.”
The video froze. In the resulting image, pony Pinkie looked confident, while merged Fluttershy looked defeated.
“The human who was in that pony,” I announced sadly, while pointing at Fluttershy, “is no more.”
Buster knew he wasn’t going to get a better line out of me than that, and so at his signal, the show cut to commercial.
“There, there,” he said softly, patting my hand. “There’s nothing you can do for her, poor soul.” After a few moments of watching me moping, he thought of a sure-fire way to lift my spirits. “How’s Selene doing?” he asked me.
He was right: the question did make me feel better. It was rare nowadays to encounter anybody who actually bothered to call the “Wolf Girl of L.A.” by her actual name.
“She’s started college up north,” I told him. “Most of her classmates don’t even know her history, and she’s done nothing to make them think she’s anything other than a normal pre-vet student.”
Besides being dehumanizing, the title “Wolf Girl of L.A.” was wrong in every conceivable way: After her abandonment, the child who would later name herself Selene lived on the outskirts of civilization, raising herself among a host of wild animals, that yes included some wolves, but in no way was she treated like an actual cub. Los Angeles was the city she was taken to after she was found, and a long way away from where she grew up. And in the definition of the word used by most who throw it around, Selene never was a “girl”; she was a baby left out on a ledge to die, and she made herself into a cunning creature capable of surviving anything the world had to throw at her. And then she made herself into a woman, with my meager help. I’m not displaying false modesty here—she programmed herself much more than benefit from anything I alone was able to do with her mind.
“Pre-vet?” asked Buster. “I wish her the best.”
“So do I,” I told him. “So do I.”
(% % %)
I spent the evening alone, as I spend most evenings.
I wondered what Discord had planned for Halloween. Perhaps he would transform every trick-or-treater into the form of whatever they dressed up as. But I suppose that would be way too predictable for him.
As for tonight, the news showed him attempting to woo Queen Chrysalis. There was definitely something else going on in the video, but I was no longer in the mood for analysis.
The pony princesses had disappeared. Discord’s doing, or mental breakdowns resulting from the titanic confrontation between the two most powerful personalities in the history associated with Friendship Is Magic, and the two near-gods of Equestria?
And Twilight Sparkle was in a coma. This one was most-definitely the cause of physical, not psychic trauma, but the latter certainly didn’t help in her recovery.
Suddenly, I was no longer in the mood to make snarky Twilight Sparkle references.
I entered a small soundproof booth located next to my bedroom to record a video for my YouTube channel. I wouldn’t call it a high-class recording booth, as I only used it for low-quality videos for my fans and clients, but it was adequate for my purposes.
“This video is linked to my appearance on the Buster Friendly Show,” I told the recording camera, “on the topic of the pony issue.” For a moment my mind blanked, as I tried to think of what to say next. “I would like to return to this topic.”
It was a lame ending, but I really couldn’t think of anything better. After re-recording myself without the pause in the middle, I uploaded the video and provided a link to my segment on NBS’s website in the description.
Something needed to be done. That was the thought that was running through my mind. I watched the video of my appearance on the show in search of inspiration. What I found was that I had done an awful job of controlling my emotions on television, as I made clear earlier.
I also realized that I probably hurt human Fluttershy’s feelings with my comments. Or what was left of human Fluttershy.
As I settled into bed with my ever-present iPad, I made my decision: I would not allow anything so horrible to happen to another brony trapped in a pony’s body, not as long as I could help it. It didn’t matter if the pony was ignorant of the crime against humanity it was committing; none of them should be allowed to absorb innocent human beings, ever again.
And starting tomorrow, I was going to do something about it. I had already searched out and watched the entire video that I had seen excerpts from this night. Now I was looking for who best to approach first, who most needed or had the best chance of being saved from losing themselves forever in what they thought was their fondest fantasy. I found that combining “real” with the name of a pony from the show gave me the best results.
While searching for “Real Pinkie Pie”, I stumbled across a video on YouTube called “The IHOP Incident”.
It was a fake. It had to be. I mean, those things don’t go together in that place, at that time. I thought the Photoshopped gazelle was a good touch, though. I was even pretty certain where that footage had come from: a particularly memorable episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom that I saw when I was seven.
Actually, Pinkie Pie was the most-logical choice for my first pony client. From what I saw of her, her human half was tottering on the brink of self-destruction, and I was already envisioning ways to use my gift to build a wall between the two personalities. And while I’m in their mindscape...
There’s a science fiction story I remember fondly called The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s about a brilliant sleep researcher named Haber who discovers that his self-destructive patient harbors the ability to shape reality with his dreams. He decides to use this discovery for the betterment of mankind.
Or maybe it’s about an evil sleep researcher who exploits an unconscious reality shaper named Orr for his own selfish ends.
I tend to prefer the first interpretation, but of course I’m biased.
If I had complete control over Pinkie Pie, what couldn’t I do?
And then my search brought up a photo labeled “Real Pinkamena Diane Pie”. Saw with my own eyes what human determination wedded to pony insanity looked like.
And I remembered what happened to poor Dr. Haber at the end of The Lathe of Heaven, and what nearly happened to the entire world.
I think I’ll leave Pinkie Pie for later, after I’m more certain about what I am doing.
It was with that thought that I fell into an uneasy sleep.
And so my day ended as it began.
And tomorrow would reveal if my sudden resolution would bear any fruit.
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If he turns into a pony, wouldn't you have to call the size change between bodies a shrink?
2891365
Yes, yes I would. And don't think that he wouldn't comment wryly on the fact.
Which is neither to confirm nor deny that Dr. Franklin will become a pony in the immediate future.
So Discord is out, I suppose, as he is the one causing this. I wonder if alicorn OCs are still on the table?
This is the point where I edited this chapter to make Dr. Franklin a psychologist instead of a psychiatrist. I also had him link the video of his appearance on YouTube, so anybody who wants can seek it out.