Cross-Vision

by Waxworks

Strange Sights

Derpy flew over the streets of Ponyville, weaving a crooked path through the air as she buzzed from house to house. Her wings were strong, and her limbs were stout. The only part of her that caused her any grief at all were her eyes, but that was a minor complaint. She had survived many an accident, and she expected she would survive many more. She was more worried about any of the unfortunate ponies on the receiving end of her accidents. Many of them hadn’t had a lifetime of incidents to harden them up.

Derpy whipped around a tree as it loomed into view without warning. She overcompensated for the turn and went into a spin, hurtling out of control. She tried to straighten out, and succeeded, just in time to crash through an open door. She skidded across the floor of Sugarcube Corner, the familiar colours surrounding her telling her where she was.

When she came to a halt, she checked around and under herself to make sure she hadn’t hit anypony, then pulled herself upright.

Without missing a beat, Derpy pulled a box out of her bag and placed it on the counter. “Package for Mr. and Mrs. Cake!”

“Oh, thank you Miss Muffins. You’re always so punctual, if a little rough,” Mrs. Cake said.

Mrs. Cake opened the package right at the counter, checking to make sure everything was intact. It was, of course. Derpy always packed everything with a heavy amount of padding to make sure it survived her travels as well as she did. After the first few times, she knew she’d need to compensate if she wanted to keep her delivery job.

“Are you alright, Miss Muffins?” Mrs. Cake asked once she’d verified the contents were in acceptable shape.

“Of course! As always!” Derpy said.

“I know. I just have to check. It still gives me a bit of a scare,” Mrs. Cake said.

“I’ll be just fine Mrs. Cake. It hasn’t stopped me yet,” Derpy said.

“Of course. You have a good day Miss Muffins!” Mrs. Cake said, waving goodbye as she turned back to her kitchen.

Derpy waved goodbye and trotted out the door. She flexed her wings, did a little practice hop, then leaped into the air. She took easily to the open sky, flying in great swooping arcs as she made her way back to her office.

She arrived mostly without incident, only buzzing a couple of ponies a little too close. They shouted at her, but she paid them no mind, merely apologizing with a quick ‘sorry’ before continuing. She couldn’t stop to apologize every time something like that happened or she’d never get anywhere.

She went inside, dropped off her delivery saddlebags and clocked out, locking the place up before stepping outside. As she stepped through the door, she felt a wave of dizziness wash over her, and shook her head to clear it. She looked up once it was gone and got a sinking feeling.

It had happened again.

The road was a twisting and black trail of pitch leading down the street. The trees were gnarled and hollow, their branches grasping claws leaning over the roads and houses. The ponies were faceless shades, their outlines indistinct in the world, and hard to discern against the backdrop of this dark and angry environment.

Derpy frowned and decided to walk home instead of fly this time. She knew the way home by touch, and could trust her hooves to take her there.

It wasn’t a very long walk, but the visions made it difficult. She kept bumping into ponies she could hardly see, and following the edges of the buildings with a hoof, although safe, had the pony-shades asking her if she was alright.

She assumed they must be actual ponies, because none of them had ever tried to harm her, but she had never figured out why things sometimes looked the way they did.

It had happened ever since she was a filly. She would experience a little bit of dizziness, and then things would go strange. Nothing sounded different. She could hear all the normal sounds of a busy Ponyville around her, and nothing felt different. When she would grasp an angry-looking branch of a tree that had been a bushy deciduous branch, she could feel the leaves and flower-buds. It was all appearances.

She’d gotten used to it.

When she was a filly, she would break out into crying fits over it, which alarmed her parents. Everything would be fine, she’d be having fun with friends, family, or be at school, when suddenly things would change, and she would just break out into tears for reasons nopony could understand.

Once she was older, she’d gone to see a psychologist about it, and he had diagnosed her with schizophrenia. She’d been willing to agree, since real things appeared to be different during these episodes, but it hadn’t sat right with her. She knew what was real, it just… looked different. Changed shaped almost, even though the shape was the same, but appeared to be different.

Derpy followed her hooves, closing her eyes sometimes to walk by feel and not have to look at anything. She stayed close to the building so as to avoid as many ponies as possible. Most of them ignored her, as they usually did. Nopony wanted to get involved with the confused and clumsy mare.

It wasn’t her fault. Half the time it was because she had no depth perception thanks to her eyes, and the other half was because things didn’t look as they should, so size and shape were constantly changing. Ponyville was only static two-thirds of the time for her. The rest was a changing landscape of imagination and Celestia knows what else.

She survived, though. She was tough.

Derpy made it home without much incident, recognizing her door from feel alone. She had carved a picture of a muffin on the front so that she could recognize it with her hooves when her eyes failed her. On days like today, she was glad she did. She opened the door with some difficulty and slipped inside.

Indoors was quite a bit worse than outside for her. Inside buildings the shadows always shifted and moved in an odd way, making her uncomfortable. In all her years of living with this problem the moving shadows were the one thing that continued to bother her into adult life. It always made her feel like somepony was watching her.

Derpy took off her uniform and placed it on what felt like the couch, then went into the kitchen to make some supper. The food in the fridge looked strange, but she found what she hoped were carrots, grabbed something that smelled like half an onion, and nabbed something that was either more carrots or celery. She pulled some earthy-feeling things from the pantry that were similar to potatoes, and grabbed some spices that she couldn’t identify from the shelf. Once everything was together, she started a pot of black water boiling on the stove, and sliced up the vegetables, dropping them into the pot.

Once everything was in, she opened the container of spices and sniffed it. It smelled good, but smell wasn’t always the taste. She had no idea what it was from smell alone, but she took a chance and sprinkled some into the water, hoping against hope they would go well together.

As it simmered, she went to go find her book; The Princess of the Rings. It was recommended to her by Lyra, who said it was about an earth pony who volunteers to take a ring to a volcano. Derpy wasn’t sure why that was so exciting, but Lyra hadn’t been able to contain herself with her accolades for it.

She found it after about half an hour of searching. It had taken on the appearance of a cube of pock-marked brick. It still felt like a book, and it opened up, but its appearance to her at the moment was not at all book-like, and made finding it hard. She opened it up, eager to continue reading. She had just reached the part where the four earth ponies had just left the Shire and the evil horse-thing was sniffing about trying to find them.

Upon opening it to her bookmark, Derpy was sad to see that the words were missing. She was sure they were there, but at the moment they didn’t look like words; just blobs swimming about the pages.

Derpy closed the book, set it down on what she hoped was the coffee table, and stepped back outside while she waited for her soup to cook. She liked her vegetables with a bit of crisp left to them, so she had to time it just right. Couldn’t go too far.

Once outside she closed her eyes so that she couldn’t see anything and just sat and listened to Ponyville going about its business. She lived near the edge of town, so she didn’t hear many ponies, but there was a lot of wildlife. The birds were singing, bees were buzzing, and crickets were chirping. At least it sounded lovely, even if things looked horrible right now.

Derpy’s reverie was interrupted by a loud clattering coming from beside her house. She clucked her tongue and opened her eyes. The world was still odd, but she knew what the sound was. She’d had dogs get into her trash in recent weeks, and she’d had to try to get better bins for them. It had seemed to work, but now they were back. She walked around the side of her house. It sounded like just one, but a big one.

She turned the corner to see the hind end of something sticking out of the trash. It looked like it had paws, and its fur appeared to be like that of a brush; bristly and stiff. Its tail looked to be short, but it stuck upward its flank. It was stuck halfway in the trash, the lid removed and laying upside-down beside the bin.

“Uuuugh! How many times do I have to run you off. How did you even open the latch on the trash anyway?” Derpy said in frustration.

She grabbed the broom she kept outside for just such occasions and brandished it at the possible-dog. She smacked the bristles against the animal’s flank, hoping to startle it. It worked. The animal jumped back, pulling its front out of the garbage can and regarding her.

Derpy was used to being startled by her odd visions and the way they changed things. This one had managed it. The animal’s stiff fur looked to cover it all the way up to the next, but had left the head completely naked. It didn’t appear to have lip, and its teeth were constantly bared, sharp and prominent.

Despite her fear of the way it looked, Derpy wasn’t to be deterred by appearances. They were worth only as much as the actions behind them. If it attacked, she could just fly out of reach, but she was certain it was merely a dog that looked menacing. She swung her broom at it again, this time whacking it on the face.

“Shoo! Get out of there! I don’t need you strewing my trash all across the neighborhood! I get in enough trouble as it is!” Derpy shouted, stamping her hind hooves to scare it off.

It worked. Her noise, shocking but not harmful broom strikes, and her yelling, all succeeded in scaring the animal away. It ran off into the trees nearby, leaving her to clean up the mess it had left behind.

Derpy picked up her trash, some of it appearing to wiggle and squirm as she put it back inside the trash bin. One actually felt like it was squirming and she reminded herself to wash her hooves. It had probably been covered in maggots and she couldn’t tell. She looked up to make sure the animal was running off, and then looked back at the gross filth she was moving. It was nasty, but she could deal with it. She was tough.

Once the trash looked like it was all back in the bin, Derpy fastened the lid back on and double-checked the latch to be certain it was firmly in place. Once satisfied it would prove a challenge for even the most clever of animals, she trotted back inside to check on her soup.

The soup was bubbling away, and the smell of boiled carrot filled the air. She washed her hooves in the sink, then pulled out a ladle and scooped up a spoonful of soup. The utensil picked nothing up, and she gave it a once-over with her hoof, only to discover that she had pulled out the whisk instead. She giggled, dug in the drawer until she felt the scoop-shaped end of the ladle and pulled that out, then spooned up some soup.

It tasted good, but nothing couldn’t be improved by adding a little bit of garlic. She grabbed the knife again and went hunting for some garlic. She’d have to locate it entirely by smell and touch, because everything looked stupid and different while her vision was like this. It was one of the reasons ponies kept calling her stupid, because she couldn’t identify ponies or things like this, but she tried her best. She dug in the pantry for something that felt like garlic, hunting through the potatoes, onions, beets, and other tubers, trying to find the garlic.

She cursed herself quietly for not replacing the hook in the pantry after it had broken. That would have made this so much easier. She fussed about for a few minutes, grasping at all the suspicious, round objects in her pantry, but was unable to locate with confidence a single clove of garlic.

Derpy straightened up out of the pantry, stretching as she stood up. “Rats. That would have made my soup so much better.”

“Is this what you were looking for?” A voice said from behind her.

Derpy jumped and whirled to face the speaker. “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?”

The figure looked exactly like any other pony with her current vision: A shadow of a pony, no mane or tail visible, just a faceless shape akin to those found in Rarity’s boutique. A ponnequin. The hoof held out toward her was holding a ball-shaped thing, offering it to her.

Derpy didn’t let down her guard, though. She’d been on the receiving end of bullies her whole life because of her eyes, and sometimes they had followed her home. It had sounded like a stallion, which was doubly threatening, but he was in for a surprise if he thought she was going to be easy prey. She was tough! She had to be.

“I apologize, I saw you dealing with that animal outside, and wondered how a lone mare could so casually stand up to something like that. With merely a broom, no less! You left the door open, so I stuck my head in to say hello, but you were busy in the pantry. Judging from the smell, I figured you were looking for spices, and garlic would be the perfect addition to what it smells like you have. The garlic was on the table, by the way,” the stallion said.

Derpy didn’t respond immediately, parsing his words with care. He had seen her handling the animal, which was the most likely event to have happened. She had indeed fought off an animal with a broom. She didn’t know what kind of animal it was, so she didn’t know how right he was to be so impressed as to want to introduce himself. And to come into her house to brazenly! No, something was off.

Derpy kept her stance low and wide, and moved slowly toward her utensils. “I think you should leave.”

“Right now? I haven’t even introduced myself. Please?” He took a step forward, holding out the garlic to her.

Derpy pressed back against the counter, and raised a hoof toward the cutting board, reaching for her knife. She kept an eye on the stallion-shade and his outstretched hoof. He hadn’t pulled back after she expressed alarm, which meant he didn’t care one whit about her or her well-being. He was only after one thing, and she could guess what that was.

Derpy grabbed the knife and swung it in front of her in wide sweeps. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to get in this house, and I don’t know if I did leave the door open or not, but you have no right to barge in here! Get out!”

He didn’t move, not even when her knife came within inches of his outstretched hoof. Derpy kept it pointed at him, and started to move around him toward the door. If he wasn’t scared of a knife, he should at least be scared of other ponies catching him trying to do anything to her.

Derpy felt a wave of dizziness as she moved, and she stumbled. She heard hurried hoofsteps, and her vision swam. In panic, she lashed out with her knife. She felt a pain on her foreleg and then hit the ground. As her vision cleared, she saw the stallion was gone, everything was normal, and her leg was bleeding from a knife wound.

“Damn it,” She muttered.

Derpy picked herself up from the floor and limped over to the front door. It was open, as the pony had said. She looked down the road both directions to look for anypony skulking about, but saw nothing. She shut and locked the door, then hobbled to the sink to clean her cut. She washed it out, dried it off, and pulled out one of the many first-aid kits she kept around the house. She was tough, but she knew herself better than anypony, and even tough ponies have accidents.

Once the bandage was on her hoof, she pulled her soup off the stove, wiped up the blood, dropped her knife in the sink, and pulled out a bowl for supper. She grabbed her book now that she could read it, and read while she ate. Her soup had unfortunately suffered due to her unexpected visitor, and was no longer as firm as she liked it, and it lacked the garlic she had wanted, but it was still good.

After eating, Derpy was still paranoid about that uninvited guest, so she checked around her tiny house for any other signs of forced entry. The front door was open so that was probably where he’d come in, but if he came in once, he might try again. Especially at night when she was asleep. She checked the windows to make sure they were locked, and the front and back doors. Once she was happy everything was locked up tight, she turned in for the night, climbing into her little cot and curling up in the blankets.

Comments

[Stonecrop Sedum]

This seems good!!