New Tricks

by Will

Merge

Twilight was busily readying herself for a surprise picnic with Fluttershy that would hopefully span the length of the day.
It was the strangest thing. Princess Celestia had been so serious when talking with her about the trip the previous night, asking where her friends were, whether Twilight had used the new spell, whether she was sure that changelings had indeed attacked them at Griffonstone, and many other very important questions.
Then, out of nowhere, she had told Twilight to see Fluttershy in the morning for a picnic. Obviously, with them being on the same level she couldn’t order her to do it. But the suggestion had come with a certain level of command, letting Twilight know that she would do well to heed Celestia’s instruction.
And so, she found herself preparing for a relaxing picnic - that would probably develop into a miniature tea party - with her pink-maned pegasus friend.
She opened up her saddlebag and placed twenty bits into it, planning to briefly stop off at the market to purchase some fruit that would act as her contribution to the small feast that they were about to share. Perhaps she would purchase a few apples… no, actually that was a bad idea. She didn’t know whether anypony else had noticed it, but ever since the vampire fruit bat incident Fluttershy had been purchasing and consuming far more apples than was considered necessary or healthy for a single pegasus; if she was regressing then Twilight certainly did not want to fan the flames.
Twilight poked her head up from her small chest of bits, closed it, applied a locking spell to the lid and began trotting out of her bedroom into one of the many hallways of the castle.
She had noticed that ever since the morning of their trip, Starlight and Spike had been taking time out of their day to be with Time Turner. Twilight could not fathom why: Time Turner was the owner of a clock and watch repair shop, and was relied upon for all of Ponyville’s time-based needs. It certainly wasn’t an easy job, but it was largely uneventful and rather delicate. Not that she would consider another pony’s special talent boring, mind you. She just didn’t see the point in spending so much time with him if all that he did was fix clocks; not exactly something to write home about. Of course, they had tried to justify their time spent with him by spinning some ridiculous yarn about him being a time-travelling centuries-old alien who just happened to resemble an Equestrian, but she dismissed those claims outright. If Twilight knew any two things with absolute certainty, they were this: aliens did not exist, and time travel spells were far more complex than any earth pony could ever fathom.
Especially a small-town watch repairpony.
She navigated her way through the myriad hallways in the castle, spotting the front exit within minutes of leaving her room. It was time for a picnic with Fluttershy; she needed to leave her ridiculous ramblings and thoughts behind her at the castle, as her friend deserved her full attention.
She took a deep breath in anticipation of the day ahead, straightened her back, and stepped out of the castle into daylight.

---

Apple Bloom fell to her bedroom floor with a crash, her hind legs having finally given out after a night of sleeping at her window. She jumped up and got into what she thought was an attacking pose, ready to show anypony attempting to mess with her just how strong an Apple truly was.
Spotting no assailants, she examined her room for any sign of disturbance, as far as she would be able to tell. The only thing off about her situation was how she had woken up a few metres from her bed. Why would she have been sleeping somewhere else?
She then remembered staying up until well past her bedtime waiting for Applejack to return, eventually having fallen asleep at the window due to sheer exhaustion; she did not do well with staying up late.
She exited her bedroom and walked down the small passage, passing Applejack’s room on her way to the stairs. She didn’t bother to check within for her sister: she couldn’t feel her anywhere within the range of her perception, so she knew that she was nowhere near Sweet Apple Acres or within the confines of Ponyville. She had probably returned soon after Apple Bloom had fallen asleep and then left early in the morning, long before her smaller sister had awoken.
She trotted her way down the stairs, taking them two at a time. She was getting hungry for a hearty breakfast; too bad her sister wasn’t home at the moment, or she would have been able to help her make it. Heck, her brother or gran could’ve helped her, had they not been at the market for some new building supplies. Turning towards the kitchen, she prepared to open the fridge in order to search for any apple fritters that may have been left over from the previous night.
Before she entered the kitchen, however, she noticed ants swarming most of the surfaces in the room. She didn’t know why they were there; someone had probably spilled some apple jam or dropped crumbs from a sugary treat that they were having and hadn’t cleaned up after themselves. Sighing, she wondered how she was to make her way across the kitchen without stepping on large numbers of the tiny insects.
As she took the first step, she was concentrating on getting her right hoof to land in the spot with the smallest number of ants that she could find; sure, she would have to step on some, but she would rather keep the floors mostly clean, which did not mean painted with the entrails of scores of misguided insects.
Just before her hoof landed, Apple Bloom was witness to a peculiar event: all of the ants directly under the spot for which she was aiming separated just before her hoof made contact with the floorboards. She looked at her foreleg in surprise, as she had not been expecting the ants to be intelligent enough to dodge her rapidly approaching limb. She stayed in place for a few seconds, before deciding to test whether it was just a coincidence. She lifted up her left foreleg and placed it down onto the floorboards, and once again the ants left an empty space large enough for her hoof to descend upon the floor safely. She repeated the process with her right hind leg, then her left hind leg, then her right foreleg…
She slowly made her way to the refrigerator, intent on getting herself a small snack to eat while watching the small arthropods scurry around the kitchen. She located some leftover apple fritters after searching near the back of the top shelf, reheated them, and made her way over to a seat in the family’s modest dining room to eat and observe.
She dug in, and was soon enjoying her breakfast quite heartily; Granny Smith could really cook when she deemed it necessary. All the while her head was turned in the direction of the kitchen, intent on understanding the reason for the ants’ seemingly intelligent behaviour. In between bites, she scrutinized the way that they walked, the patterns that they were making across the floor. She could definitely see a pattern, but she couldn’t quite understand what made it stand it out to her. There were regularly occurring lines, circles and valleys throughout their formations that quite obviously made up something, but the question was what.
As she watched, her mind began to piece together what the different shapes were: components of symbols. After a fair bit more observation, she was able to see that the ants were marching in lines that formed fragments of letters. Apple Bloom tilted her head to the side in curiosity as she began to read the message. It didn’t seem to be a particularly long message, or one that had a deeper meaning of any kind. It was just two monosyllabic words, repeated over and over again all over the surface of the kitchen floor.
“Help us.”
Apple Bloom wondered for a brief moment why the ants were asking for help, yet before the question could form on her tongue a violent pain overtook her whole body. It felt as if a feral beast were clawing out her insides and consuming them while she sat, paralyzed, unable to act against the assault on her young frame. Tears welled up in her eyes as she wished that she could double over, at least protecting her stomach from further brutalizing on a psychological level.
Then, the pain shifted to something else entirely: the feeling of thousands of hooves all over her body, reshaping her, reforming her, restructuring her at her deepest level, remaking her as something else, something other than what she was. She felt as if she were a clay lump on a potter’s wheel being worked on by a multitude of strange ponies: unrelenting change and unceasing transformation from a natural, rudimentary form to something artificial and alien, the shape of something forced into an altogether different state of being.
Finally, she felt one last uncomfortable sensation; something was off. She couldn’t place it, was unable to understand why she felt as though the world were teetering precariously on its axis while she was the one caught up in the confusion. She felt strange, sort of like the feeling that one gets when they realize that they are breathing and have to concentrate on getting oxygen into their body while their brain works to forget the subtleties of biology. Her body was working fine, yet she felt as if she were only a pilot in someone else’s skin, controlling a puppet’s actions while watching the world through their eyes. While she wiggled her limbs in her confused state, she fell off of her chair onto the dining room floor.
As suddenly as the strange feelings had come, they left.
Apple Bloom groggily picked herself up from the ground, unsure of what had just happened. She looked to the kitchen, searching for the ants that probably had something to do with the unpleasant sensations she had just experienced.
The kitchen was empty.
“Dumb ants,” she mumbled. She set herself back on the small chair, hoping to get back to her fritters while they still retained some semblance of heat. She extended her right forehoof, intent on grabbing the fritter closest to her, before realizing that her leg looked a bit wrong.
Specifically: it was completely black, the fur hanging off in clumps to reveal skin that seemed to be festering where it covered her, revealing gleaming bone and damaged muscle tissue where it did not. Apple Bloom retracted her hoof and sat silently for a few seconds, simply staring ahead as her mind tried to make sense of the predicament in which she seemed to find herself.
After a long pause she extended her leg across the table yet again, watching as it neared one of the fritters on her plate. It was yellow, the fur smooth and silky, her skin not visible due to its perfect coverage.
She blinked.
Her leg was black and decomposing, once again looking as if she had earned a rank among the living dead.
She blinked.
Her leg was yellow, looking healthy, whole and alive.
Blink.
Her leg was black and dead, long since having met its end.
Blink.
Her leg was yellow.
Blink.
Her leg was black.
Blink.
Yellow.
Blink.
Black.
Yellow.
Black.
Yellow.
Black.
She calmly pushed her chair away from the table and made her way upstairs, casually passing her sister’s room and entering her own. She approached her wooden wardrobe and opened the doors, looking for an item that would prove most useful to her at the moment. Ah-ha, there it was.
She lifted the mirror to her face, staring serenely at the filly looking back at her. Her mane was tattered and worn, the rich crimson having long since faded to become a dull brick. Her skin and fur over her face appeared exactly as her hoof had at the table: dead, seemingly unable to move and yet defying natural law by behaving exactly as living tissue would. Curiously, Apple Bloom realized that she had yet to take a breath since leaving the dining room. She stared deeper into the mirror and observed her eyes.
They were glowing. It was as if she were a jack-o-lantern and her eyes were the holes through which light emerged, though they were the wrong colour; instead of appearing as an unsettling orange or yellow they were a deep, menacing red. The light also looked incredibly unnatural: it did not seem to emerge from a source; rather, it seemed that it was its own source. Her eyes appeared to be made from the stuff, dense matter composed entirely of that which is immaterial.
Apple Bloom’s calm state evaporated in the moment that she had begun to observe her eyes fully. She threw her mirror at the back wall of her room, not caring whether or not it had shattered violently. She ran to her bed and jumped onto it, throwing the blanket above her head and burying herself deep within the resulting covering.
“I can’t be one o’ them. I can’t; I got my cutie mark already,” she whispered to herself as she began to sob quietly.
She recognized this body. Once when she had accompanied Twilight through the Everfree, she had had a run-in with creatures resembling her current state. They lived in the inappropriately named Sunny Town, a small city of horrors borne from a single sin committed centuries prior to her arrival in the area. They masqueraded as normal ponies during the day, and became unfathomably evil abominations at night. They had attempted to add her to their numbers, but she had escaped before she could be killed and reborn as one of the undead. So why this? Why now?
Apple Bloom’s small body shook violently with each sob, her newly-rotten lungs unaccustomed to accepting oxygen in large volumes. She repeated a single sentence over and over again through her black tears and between her ragged breaths, hoping against hope that it would keep the monsters at bay.
“Please don’t come for me. Please don’t come for me. Please don’t come for me. Please don’t come…”

Author's Note:

New chapter. Shortest one yet, but I felt that it would start to suck if I made it longer than it is at present. Not that it doesn't already suck; I meant that it would start to suck more.

I really enjoy just regurgitating these into a semi-readable format. It helps quite a bit with getting me to focus. I've got too many ideas to concentrate on much of anything without an outlet somewhere.

For anyone wondering what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks Story of the Blanks has to do with what's going on here, let me respond with this: you'll find out later. Also, the chapter name's a clue. It's as rubbish as my last one, but it's a clue nonetheless.

Comments

[KorenCZ11]

Uh-huh. As predicted, shenanigans ensue. I must read this other story for context here, as I am totally out of the loop. Invested though, that's for sure. Please continue to "show me yo' moves."

[The Iced Lance]

Well... Apple Bloom is in for a rough time.
Looking forward for the next chapter.

[The Iced Lance]

"A clue nonetheless"

Heh, I see what you did there.

[Will]

7542206 Where? I have done nothing. I'm innocent.

7541085 Yay! I am improve! Also, never watched Rick and Morty, so I don't quite know what "NANI" is. But, the story is made of shenanigans. Heck, eventually there'll probably be more of that than there are words in it. Also, thanks for the corrections. I'll try to look over them as soon as my Google Docs learns to play nice with site formatting.