Ponification Nation

by PrincessColumbia

Introducing the Royal Family

While I wish I could say that waking up to my wife screaming was unusual...it wasn’t. She had a habit of slamming her toes or knees or shins into things, or stepping on one of our daughter’s many plastic toys which had a habit of landing with their sharpest point up. Many people do that and it’s not a huge deal, but the problem in my wife’s case is she tends to scream like an axe murderer is charging her even if the problem is merely a stubbed toe.

Never the less, given she isn’t always over-reacting and sometimes actually has something truly important to be screaming about, I started awake and promptly smacked my head on the ceiling.

...what? I’m tall, but not THAT tall! Now hissing swear words under my breath, I flopped back down to the mattress, a couple of pieces of drywall raining down around my head. Instinct only kept any of it from landing in my eyes, and all the while my wife was still screaming.

“OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO ME? WHAT’S GOING ON? WHO ARE YOU?” and on and on, pretty much simply repeating those three questions over and over again. This, of course, set off our four year old daughter.

My gorgeous daughter, quite literally the best anti-depressant God could ever have given me, is also “on the spectrum.” While not diagnosed with Autism, she displays some autistic qualities, most notably difficulty with language, so when there’s some sort of crisis that requires immediate attention to either my wife or my daughter, I usually pick my daughter so as to calm her down and get that under control, then I’ll move on to my wife.

While my home, no matter where I chose to make it, has never been...tidy, I did not expect that when I launched myself out of my bed aiming for the general direction of the door the untidyness of it would cause me to take any sort of serious tumble. For the record, while Ikea furniture is inexpensive and looks good for the price, having it impact one’s ribcage at any angle is decidedly unpleasant. Practically growling in frustration, pain, and the slow process my brain has of waking up, I wasn’t quite connecting the problems I was having with standing up on two legs with something I should be particularly worried about, as I was still making good progress on all fours, pretty much the same wobbly, weaving, seemingly drunken gait I usually have when I’m woken from deep sleep.

Out the door of the bedroom, ‘round the bend into the living room, casually flicking the occasional toy out from under me whenever I happened to land a limb on it, past the kitchen, aim my bleary, sleep-knackered vision at the back door, stop short, turn left and...

...there was a small white alicorn filly in my daughter’s bed, crying in my daughter’s voice, calling for Mommy. Her mane and tail were a bright pink, cut in the style my daughter went to bed with, tussled and mussed like it usually was (she ALWAYS looked like she had bed-head, even right after brushing, which somehow just made her look more cute). The filly turned her head to face me, eyes looking at me like she’d never seen me before, and said, “Prinsis Slessea?”

When one is a parent, the longer one interacts with their child the more one recognizes the different quirks of personality. In the case of a child where every single word, be it noun, verb, or (in this case) proper name that is correctly connected with the concept it represents marks a huge milestone in that child’s development, said parent can pick that child out in a crowd of hundreds based on their pronunciation alone.

“F...Freya?!” I gasped out, and upon doing so I heard my own voice clearly for the first time that morning. That, more than anything else, cut through the fog of sleep that seems to occupy my skull for the first half hour of any given day. I raised a hand to my throat, only to find that my hand felt very strange against a particularly fuzzy throat. I glanced down and found my hand...wasn’t a hand. I was looking at a massive wedge of what looked like hardened, compacted fingernail in horseshoe shape wrapping around a pad of flesh that twitched and flexed when my brain sent commands down the limb to flex fingers that weren’t there. This was and wasn’t an equine hoof, though my knowledge of equine anatomy was fairly scant, so I chose to put the oddness aside for the moment and focus more on the current issues, notably that in addition to the hoof I was staring at was white, so was the fetlock, and the hair on what I was now realizing was an equine limb...

“...holy cats, I’m a horse!” aaaand there was that voice again. Yes, I said the words, but that wasn’t my voice. Or more accurately, the words came out of my mouth, and the vocal chords in my throat flexed and vibrated to produce the sounds, but it was pitched at least two octaves higher than the voice I went to bed with. Plus, I’ll be candid, it sounded nice! My normal speaking voice was...OK. I’ve been complimented on how I use it on the podcasts I used to do with some friends online, and I’ve made good use of it in singing groups in the past, but I held no illusions that it was spectacular or anything. In fact, If I wasn’t careful, I could easily slip into an irritating, nasally, monotone that irritates more than anything else. But the sounds my throat were now producing? They were flat-out gorgeous.

Meanwhile, the little filly in my daughter’s bed had resumed her crying. My Daddy Instinct reared up in my brain and started bludgeoning my critical thinking skills and started demanding immediate action. “Freya?” I started, getting the small creature’s attention. She paused her crying and looked at me incomprehensibly again. “Freya, it’s Daddy, really!”

She took a shuddering breath, “...daddy?”

I smiled at her, “That’s right, munchkin! Come here, give daddy a hug!” Carefully, mindful of my drastically different center of gravity, I lowered my dock to the floor and sat as best I could while holding out my forelegs, wiggling my hooves like I would normally do with my fingers to beckon her closer. I watched as she used her front hooves to push her hindquarters to the edge of her bed and lower her rear hooves to the floor. Thinking fast, I said, “You’d better crawl, kiddo...” I was really hoping whatever groove her brain was using for communications wouldn’t skip for this. Fortunately, she seemed to get the idea and dropped her forehooves to the floor. She started moving toward me, very tentatively at first, then rushing as fast as she could across the remaining three feet that separated us, plowing into my freshly re-located breasts. While she had done similar impacts against my sensitive bits before...whatever...happened, the sensation only further highlighted the physical changes I had undergone in my sleep. I was in no position to confirm “for sure” that I was a mare, but it was quite clear from what I could see of the space between my legs that I was not a stallion.

“...ooooowww!” I groaned, holding my daughter close as my body kicked out endorphins to overwhelm the pain.

As my daughter’s sobbing started quieting down to sighs and hiccups, I heard her say in a questioning voice, “Prisses Luna?” Curious, I looked down to see Freya looking off to her right, so I turned to my left and saw...

I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised, but when one sees what appears to be the Princess of the Moon in one’s apartment, no matter what the surrounding circumstances, one can find oneself pretty damn surprised, especially if said pony princess was apparently coming from one’s bedroom.

It was about that time I realized that I could no longer hear my wife’s screaming...from the bedroom.

I will say that the connection was more intuitive at the time, but in retrospect it was a fairly obvious connection to make, what with me holding my ponified daughter and apparently having turned into a pony of some sort myself, “...JoLene?”

Freya looked up at me, and showing that her language development problems were simply covering up a massively talented intellect, turned to face the newest mare and said, “Mommy?”

The darker mare, wings flexing on her back and eyes flashing with uncertainty and fear, shakily replied, “C...Chris? Freya? Is that you?”

I looked her in the eye and said The Word.

To clarify, what came out of my mouth was not “the word,” exactly as you have read it here. The Word, in this case, is the one word that, by common agreement, we would use to let the other know that, “Yes, this is me, I’m the one communicating it to you.” It was my idea to have A Word, but I admit the actual Word came from my wife. I got the idea from a Superman comic, wherein Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, would be able to pass messages to his wife Lois Lane-Kent via third parties and both would be able to trust the message and the messenger. In their case it was a phrase, Beef Bourguignon with Ketchup, but through circumstances that I cannot reveal here as they are very personal and private (and my wife would kill me if I told it), we wound up with a single word.

JoLene slumped down, and fortunately made it nearly to the floor before she fainted out cold.

Comments

[the_sane_maniac]

A self-insert Mary Sue? And you admit it in the description? You are aware that extremely few fanfics are able to get away with those things right? Well, never the less, you have caught my interest. Lets see that this is

Edit: have read it, am extremely interested. Please proceed. Hell, with the right attention I think this just might reach the feature box

[kingtiger666]

this has nothing to do with The Conversion Bureau, which I haven't read and understand to be quite enjoyable

Cue downvotes.

[Siaraos]

2270112 I was initially going to ignore this, but your comment piqued my interest. Added to RiL. Oh, and also:

one ponified human is thrust into a roll

Wrong version of the word. I believe you were so eloquently searching for is 'role', although I must commend the unintentional humour this created for me. I had sudden mental images of a woman being shoved into a Twinkie. Oh maiii.

[PrincessColumbia]

2270366
*snrk* OK, good catch! :p

[Siaraos]

Ok, thoughts after reading...
1) The centred text in the first chapter was rather eye-punishing, although that may just be me.
2) The story, although written well, certainly smacks of self-insert Sueism. Not so much in a bad way here, but I don't think I'll be sticking with the story.
3) There's actually something about your storytelling I quite liked.
4) Might be worth getting an editor or proof reader. There were a few lexical and syntactical mistakes in the first chapter that I picked up on.
5) You appear to rather enjoy writing this, so by all means, keep it up! Obviously the vote count won't be too heart-warming with all that red, but a lot of people downvote stories like this on principle.
6) I think you certainly have talent as a writer, but you might be more successful if you balance out human stories with canonic stories as well, so you don't get beaten down by the constant negativity surrounding the genre.

These are just the thoughts of a very tired man sat at his computer desk at midnight, so feel free to ignore any / all of these points Good luck with whatever you choose to write in the future, mate.

[PrincessColumbia]

2271621

1) The centred text in the first chapter was rather eye-punishing, although that may just be me.

It's still doing that? I thought I fixed that. That was a Google Doc import derp, I'll take another look at it.

2) The story, although written well, certainly smacks of self-insert Sueism. Not so much in a bad way here, but I don't think I'll be sticking with the story.

...I did put an author's note right at the top of the Prologue. It says straight up that it's a self-insert-Mary-Sue.

3) There's actually something about your storytelling I quite liked.

And that's what keeps me going.

4) Might be worth getting an editor or proof reader. There were a few lexical and syntactical mistakes in the first chapter that I picked up on.

My wife actually functions as my proof reader, but she can't spell worth a damn, so she misses the syntactical stuff more than me. As far as the lexical mistakes, that was more or less intentional. The whole thing is meant to be a first-person stream-of-consciousness, goofball word choices and all.

5) You appear to rather enjoy writing this, so by all means, keep it up! Obviously the vote count won't be too heart-warming with all that red, but a lot of people downvote stories like this on principle.

I'm doing it for myself, I've had this brainworm in my head for a year and a half, gotta get it out sometime.

[Siaraos]

2272509 Perfectly valid points, all of them. As for the second point I made, I certainly did spot that note! But I guess I was trying to say that it was Sue-ish in a better way than most stories, rather than being blatantly, in-your-face self insert-y. And as for the fourth point, I guess I'm just a stickler for perfect spelling and grammar in stories Anyway, glad to see you're continuing this despite the negativity. Good luck!

[PrincessColumbia]

2272540

Thanks much.

BTW, I fixed the centering issue on the Prologue.

[Hawkx1]

I'm giving this a favorite to see where this is going not enough info for a thumb either up or down

[ponybrony]

Huh. This... Is...

AMAZING!!!

Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygoshtheconceptisgreatandihaveneverheardofastorylikethisbeforecongratsyouhavecaughtmyfullattentionwiththisstorykeepupwiththegreatwork!

[Wrabbit]

You definitely have my interest with a start like that. I hope the story continues, because this is pretty neat (bloody imagery put into my brain notwithstanding, that poor, poor filly). Though, you may want to consider some editorial help. There are several groups on FiMFiction that could be of assistance in that regard.

[PrincessColumbia]

2809172

Omygoshomygoshomygosh!!!! Wrabbit likes my story!

[Wrabbit]

It's not bad. I somehow missed the dark tag, but that's fine, since there's a few (very few) dark pony stories that I read. Also, something I forgot to mention, Arabic is not spoken in Pakistan. Their official languages are Urdu and English.

[PrincessColumbia]

2811130

Huh, good to know. I had a hard time finding source info for the language.

[Basic Information]

Hmm, I would love to read more

[Chrome Masquerade]

Cancelled? i say, "why?" this sounds like an awesome story.

[fyre-byrd]

So did the mom turn into Luna?

[fyre-byrd]

So here's a question: if I were to be "ponified", what would determine my cutie mark and what kind of pony I'd be?