TCB: Conversion Cat

by Alex Warlorn

A much more private online journal?

Morons! They're all morons! Some are caught up in their paranoid fantasy of four legged alien invaders, and the other half are idiots talking about their exciting new experiences from changes in their DNA.

And no one thinks about the people who have to modify existing technology to cater to people without thumbs! I correct myself, the paranoids do mention our incoming incompatibility, but only long enough to add 'proof' how we should blame the horses (and not any of the other inhabitants of the alien planet apparently) for the end of the world!
Idiots! They're all idiots!

Men like me are getting up at dawn, and working late, racing against the clock, bloody reinventing humanity's bloody technological marvels for bloody people who won't have bloody thumbs! ... Not what I imagined when I got my engineering degree.

No my name isn't Garfield! Shut yer trap or I'll shut it for you! ... My name? ... It's... Ugh! ... I just go by 'M.P.'... Fine! My first name is Mario! No I did not have a mustache! Ugh. Idiots.

So why did I become a cat man? My wife, Emeline, was already a 'cat person', so to speak, and we've been happily married for over a decade, so she knew what she was becoming and so did I. Thankfully she picked something with fingers, which thankfully means we avoided a very ugly argument over that one, thank God!

We chose to be converted together. If this was some cheap soap opera, one of us would have gotten feet at the last second, and the other wouldn't find out until after, and they'd have started a new relationship with another bipedal feline! Instead, we asked to take the potion side by side or no go, and the conversion center apparently had catered to this demand before.

You'd think untransformed people would know better than to pet a fellow citizen, no matter how 'adorable' we are. My wife loves it. I can take it from kids, but when it's an adult? My claws come out. Heh, it's like I have eight built-in switchblades. No I've never used them on anything living. I eat with a fork and knife. I never took martial arts, so I don't think my claws are registered as lethal weapons. The laws are still being written.

Why do I only wear a work apron and the sandals with the backs cut off? It's simpler, and faster. And with all this fur, you're going to overheat wearing a shirt in a temperate climate. Washing all this red fur is a headache though, meh, whining isn't going to fix it, and no way in Hell am I becoming a freaky shaved cat! Excuse me, Abyssinian.

Emeline wears nothing now but her new built-in fur coat and jewelry! Not sure that's how modesty standards work with the natural born Abyssinian and not the New-Kittens (UGH! Who thought that name up outta be shot!). Not that I'm complaining, and neither are the new decency laws. She was hot before and she's hot now! At least this insanity hasn't taken her from me! That's one black cat I don't mind crossing my path now. Sorry, even Emeline is sick to death of that joke.

I don't think I could take the stress if she wasn't here for me.

Me and my coworkers meanwhile are working around the clock: computers, Ipads, cars, handguns, fire hose nozzles, all need modifying for the idiots who want hooves instead of hands as the world comes to an end!

Uh, no offense to Olsen, he chose unicorn, he said the telekinesis would be useful for us.

Jack became a griffin. No he isn't spelling it 'Gack' now, and he's as much a pacifist as he was before. And he and Olsen are still friends. So chew on that all those 'it's my instincts' excuses out there!

And Zed.. go ahead, guess... Zebra? Nope! Diamond Dog! And no, he didn't become stupid or lose his grammar!

Roy, that ex-hippie he became a dragon! That SOB was convincing more people to become Earth Horses just so the cap on dragon New Whelps would rise (since the more new Earth Horsies, the more new gems to feed new dragons). Oh and he legally changed his name to Red. Still have to work with him.

... Poor Gary. He was one of the poor souls who signed up to become a minotaur. The truth is, if Emeline hadn't insisted we wait for the Cat People Potion, I'd have signed up too. She saved me.

Some are insisting on figuring out a way to 'fix' the minotaur potion. More power to them, but time isn't on their side. And it doesn't like me much either. It's the reason nobody is thinking of moving to Mars! That's what you gets for all those budget cuts on NASA.
And all this is nothing compared to the trouble of... okay, maybe I do enjoy the challenge of recreating stuff with 'cloud' tech. Thank the Pegasi for sharing, never mind those who think a cat shouldn't meddle with a bird building their nest, geeze. Some things never change.

And don't get me started about my time on the team working on getting stuff to work underwater for the seahorses and merhorses.
What? Did you think we were the only guys on this project? This is a freakin' world wide effort with hard work from both worlds! ... But we aren't famous like the conversion centers. At least that means there are no conspiracy theories about horses stealing nukes.

Not that they need them when their leader controls their world's biggest nuke already.

Emeline meanwhile is suggesting we have kittens, not that I object to what you do to get kittens, but hopefully she'll calm down after the novelty of living out her fetish burns out. At least she was willing to hold off until my work was finished. No, what you've heard about cats reproducing and the pain involved does not apply to Abyssinian, it's actually mentioned in the pamphlet.

So yeah, between the lunatics with sniper rifles calling themselves heroes, and the delusional hippies, there are people like me trying to condense thousands of years of progress into less than 1% of that! You're welcome!

Comments

[Xanderfox]

The real unsung hero's, the ones doing the monotonous, unglamorous grunt work. There are more heroic people than we realize.

[Mystic Sunrise]

Does Capper even have more of his species yet. From Hasbro or IDW? Or is he still a one cat deal?

[Seeking Dusk]

Saved by the wife's fetish. That's one way to avoid a disaster XD I'm interested in how the underwater tech for the mer and seaponies would work out. But already exploiting equestrian methods (cloud tech) for the future. The obvious thing to do. The field of engineering will just simply explode for the next few years. Skilled workers and tradespeople who can work on all these tweaks. Who would have thought the need for conversion would be good for the job market? XD

And more mentions of the minotaur troubles...

8685522 Yep. The tie in prequel comics for the movie has a whole nation of them.

[PeachClover]

This was like reading the angsty journal of a teenager. Reading it actually detracted from my happiness. The story in its abysmal shortness mentioned in passing conversion into other non-pony races and gave a glimpse of what that would be like, and maybe to some people that would be a saving grace, but I have read dozens of novels where that is the entire point of the book, so I am not wowed by "Oh! but it mentions this stuff that's cool to think about!" No, I see this short story as intentionally using lazy techniques to make the reader think that the author is saying more than he or she actually is, and that's not cool because if you had written this as a novel, it probably would have been worth the read.

[Alex Warlorn]

8686476
That stuff has been shown in other parts.

[PeachClover]

8686490
A writer's job is not to be lazy. Even if something is written in another story, an author must assume that the reader has not read other stories, and even if there are readers who will remember these things, not everyone seeks to memorize every detail and even those who do have their favorite parts that they love hearing again.

Looking at your gallery, my guess is that you are almost afraid of writing a long story as if you think it would be like speaking around people who don't want to hear your voice. However, people who read for pleasure are satisfied by stories the same way eating satisfies - a novel is a buffet of experiences with different flavors, each character a different course, each intrigue a different seasoning. To say that you should not serve them because they have been done before is to starve your reader, and what did you end up serving? In this case, I don't know, but you clearly burned the flavor out of it. Not in the history of writing has a story of pure anger ever been considered a work of art.

I have some advice for you as a writer: assume your audience wants to read your story and will enjoy every moment of it. Then enjoy writing every moment of it and if your characters must suffer, present that in a way that would make the audience want to render aid rather than slap the character sideways for complaining.

[Alex Warlorn]

8689218

Looking at your gallery, my guess is that you almost afraid of writing a long story as if you think it would be like speaking around people who don't want to hear your voice.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanFic/PonyPOVSeries

[PeachClover]

8689289
I didn't understand why you linked me to that page. I did look over your gallery again and saw that you do have several novel sized stories, but this is strange because your most recent page is filled with 1k stories each claiming to be the sequel to some other story. This doesn't make sense to me, and it shouldn't make sense to you either. When a work is completed it gets judged for what it is, and this story, which is labeled complete, is angsty and not fulfilling. If this story were a chapter in a larger novel that expanded upon what the character is writing about, then perhaps it would be fulfilling to the reader, but at that point, it would be redundant and still draining to read as an angsty journal.

[Alex Warlorn]

8689331
Look, this is just something I wrote in an afternoon, an I had to go back and expand it so it would fit in the 1k Minimum that Fimfiction demands. I get you did not enjoy this. And I am sorry for that. But I think you need to calm down, take a deep breath, and realize you're getting charged up over nothing.

[Alex Warlorn]

8689331
I shall happily accept you as a pre-reader if yo are available if there is a next time.

[Flash_Magnus]

Well, it has been fun reading all six of these TCB stories. One of my favorite AU's to read when I come across them.

Sure it has some typos but, it didn't really ruin the moment for me.

[Alex Warlorn]

8725829
I wrote this to undermine the motif how the 'turn humans into ponies' things rarely if ever serves as anything other than a narrative excuse for a war to happen and for humans then to show yet another alien invader not to mess with the killer apes.

[Flash_Magnus]

8725854

Alright.