• Published 9th Sep 2012
  • 16,945 Views, 902 Comments

My Voice in a Head - Lord Destrustor



A human finds his mind stuck inside a pony's head. Both are understandably freaked out.

  • ...
40
 902
 16,945

Chapter ten-tative efforts to not look completely insane

Chapter 10

-This is a bad idea.

--I know, you said that about a hundred times already.

-No I didn’t.

It had only been about six times actually; the first was while we were on our way here, the second just before entering the building, and the third while speaking to the receptionist to set up a meeting with the Doc.

Numbers four and five happened in the waiting room, while we nervously shuffled old magazines around in the vain hopes of finding one that wasn’t unbelievably boring. “Modern Quilting”, whatever that actually meant, was almost certainly a publication I wouldn’t have subscribed to, and thankfully neither would Silver.

Despite once more trying to tell him how we were being very stupid, I had failed to convince him to go back home, and had been forced to tell him a sixth time.

“So, Mister Spring. What brings you to my office today?”

-Welp, I guess now is really too late to back down.

At least the big, red, lounging chair-couch-thingy was comfortable. The rest of the room was basically the exact thing evoked by the words “stereotypical psychologist’s office”: drab walls mostly obstructed by an almost unreasonable amount of bookshelves, several low tables and comfortable chairs littering the carpeted floor, and a bunch of trinkets strewn on a bunch of furniture. One of the low tables held an assortment of children’s toys and had a very small plastic chair sitting in front of it, all quietly scurried up in a corner. Various potted plants placed near the window somehow helped to drain the room of all life, like they absorbed it or something. It was probably just the contrast.

It was boring, unremarkable, and just mundane enough to almost feel like I was somewhere normal again.

Almost. The thing that ruined my delusions of normalcy more than anything else was the pink unicorn staring at us through her thin glasses while she held a writing pad in front of herself with her magic.

The contrast between that sight and the piercing, professional gaze that I could never have imagined coming from something so cartoonishly pink also didn’t help.

Silver directed our own gaze out and around her as he desperately searched for words, looking all over the room.

“Uh, well, you know…” was all that he could think of on such short notice, and the mare’s single eyebrow rising up into her tangerine mane was an obvious sign that she didn’t, in fact, ‘know’.

-Wow, already up to an amazing start here, champ.

“Yes?” she asked.

-I’d try to help you out with this but I seriously have no idea how I’d go about fooling a freaking professional mind-wizard.

“Well,” he began, really tickling my curiosity as to what he was going to come up with. “You know how it can get… uh, hectic, here in Ponyville…”

The doctor kept her icy gaze on us, sitting on a high-backed chair that looked intensely comfortable now that I had time to inspect it in the short pause that her “Hm-hm” injected in Silver’s awkward monologue.

“…And, well, I’m just wondering if uh, maybe, all that stress might be getting to me, maybe?”

She immediately started scribbling on her pad somehow, as if we’d just given her enough material for a novel or something. “Is anything troubling you in particular?”

Silver scratched the back of our head, which is kind of awkward for a horse laying on his back in a soft couch. “Uhh, not… not really? I just want to make sure I’m perfectly normal, and I figured that a professional was the best way to find out, I guess?”

She stared, perfectly still for a handful of seconds, blinked once, and finally answered. “Well, then. If you say so.”

Her mouth twitched, and she cleared her throat. “Let’s start with a general assessment, I suppose. Have you been experiencing lots of stress lately?”

“Uh, not much more than we usually get in this crazy town, right?” He tried a little, light-hearted laugh that failed to make her react in any way. “Well, the bridge plans revision was a bit of a challenge, and I know we’re only about a month away from the start of construction season, so the work is going to start rolling in very soon, and I guess I’m all getting stressed in advance…”

The pensive rubbing of her chin increased to a vigorous scratch of the general area of her mouth while she jotted down a few more notes.

“Hmm,” she said, “anything not related to work?”

“Not really.”

I sort of began to tune them out at that point, partly because it really wasn’t any of my business and mostly because it was actually really boring. Since Silver was lying on his back and staring at the extremely plain and boring ceiling, I didn’t have much trouble concentrating on her face floating in our left-side peripheral vision. My boredom had suddenly decided to make me acutely aware of how a pony’s face made no sense, mostly by making me question how in the world they had room for a brain in there with such gigantic eyeballs.

And how said eyeballs could twitch so rapidly. Damnit, I missed being able to narrow my eyes whenever I needed to! I could have sworn I had seen her eyes twitch super-fast, almost vibrating for about a tenth of a second. I didn’t see anything anymore though, maybe I had imagined it.

“Has your mouth been itchy lately?”

-Wait, what the hell kind of question was that?

“Huh… yeah, actually. Just now, in fact. And a few times in the past few days now that I think about it. But, uh… why?”

--That is a weird question.

“Oh, well, simply put, it’s possible to induce some nervous tics in ponies who are experiencing chronic stress simply by mentioning them. A bit like how speaking about yawns tends to make one yawn. It can be very fortunate and informative when it works.”

Silver yawned.

-That still kinda sounds like a bunch of bullshit, honestly. Are you sure she’s certified?

--Probably? I don’t think Twilight Sparkle would refer me to some back-alley hack.

The next question came while he was in the process of scratching our once-again itchy mouth.

“Has your sleep been troubled or lighter than usual lately, or simply shorter than you are used to?”

“Not in any big way, I’d say. I had a hard time last night, but that was mostly because of uh… noises.”

-Sorry about that, by the way. I may have blown things out of proportion.

--Tell me about it.

The unicorn kept scribbling for a few seconds more, and I hoped she wasn’t being a stereotypical bad doctor, drawing stupid shit instead of paying attention. Although that would have made lying to her all the easier, actually. She uncrossed her hind legs and crossed them again in the opposite way before finally taking her eyes off of her notepad. Her cold, icy stare returned to the task of drilling our face, and a quick glance from Silver Spring let me see clearly that her left eye was literally quivering like a pneumatic drill.

-Holy what the fuck.

--What? What’s with you no-

-Did you see her eye?

He directed our eyeballs to stare back at hers again, seeing quite clearly that they were as stable as eyes could be while she observed us.

-I swear I saw her left eye just literally vibrating.

--Seems fine to me. Are you even sure? I wasn’t really looking at her eyes so how would you even notice?

-It’s called peripheral vision, and since I’m not in control of the eyes, I can concentrate my attention wherever I want. It’s hard, but I’m pretty sure I know what I saw.

The psychologist, Serene something, bit her lip for a second, her eyes still in the icy glare of observation as they flittered across her notes. Then she “hmm”-ed.

“You say you are worried about your general mental state, correct? Is there any history of mental problems in your family?”

Silver thought about it for a moment, returning his eyes to the ceiling while I kept my own… uh, peripheral attention trained on her face.

“Uh, not really, no. Grandpa Dew became senile a little bit early, but that’s about it.”

“Hm.”

This time her face stayed perfectly normal and neutral as she magicked her pen in a single, short motion across her notepad. She did look completely normal now. Was I hallucinating weird things or something? Was she really acting weird or was I pulling that weird vibe out of my mental ass? How the hell could I say she was acting out of the ordinary? I didn’t know her; maybe she had a mild equivalent of Parkinson’s disease or something. Who was I to judge what was normal or unusual pony behavior? I couldn’t have been in here long enough to instinctively know how those twitches could be strange, or that her ears shouldn’t have been swiveling that much in such a quiet room with only one other source of noise.

“Tell me, Mister Spring; have you been experiencing heightened or conflicting emotions lately? Emotions that feel out of place or overwhelming?”

-Isn’t it weird how suspiciously accurate this question is?

--What do you mean? I don’t have conflicting emotions-

-Maybe you don’t but we do. Do hay fries and Ketchup ring a bell? Or how about that dresser-toppling rage yesterday morning, doesn’t that count as an overwhelming emotion?

--You’re being paranoid. Stop being paranoid, you’re making me paranoid.

-I’m really starting to get a bad vibe from that mare.

“Mister Spring?” And just like that we both noticed we had been staring at the ceiling with a perturbed frown for about five seconds straight while she was waiting for him to answer.

“Oh, uh… what was the question again?”

“Have you noticed any unusual behavior from yourself lately? Anything specific making you worry about your mental state, like strange urges or ideas that you would never consider normally?”

-That is absolutely not at all what she just asked.

“No, not really.”

--You’re right. Definitely not what she asked. I’m not sure what’s going on now.

“Mister Spring, you’re not really being helpful here.” Her mouth twitched on one side, curving into a grin for about a quarter of a second before she put a hoof to it. She inhaled through her nose, lowering the hoof to her chin. “You say you are worried about yourself, but you’re not telling me anything about why you are. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

-Oh great, a sinking feeling. Those are always great.

Silver brought our hooves to our head, a very faint whimper escaping our throat. “Ooooh, you’re right, this was a very bad idea, I shouldn’t-“

“Mister Spring, please calm down. No one here means any harm, and panicking is only going to skew the evaluation. I must commend you on your decision to seek professional help, but you need to remember that no one is pressuring you into saying anything you don’t want.” She put her notepad down on the table next to her chair and crossed her forelegs on her… chest? Barrel? Whatever, she clamped her left hoof on her shaky right one and smiled reassuringly. “Here is what I propose: we will continue the evaluation to the most standard of… standards, and if, by then, you want to talk to me about whatever is troubling you, we can move on to that. If you’re still not ready by the end of this, we can both simply go our separate ways; no pressure, no obligations. This is entirely up to you, okay?”

-She’s right, you know. Freaking out can only lead to more bad decisions. Let’s just keep calm, get through this as fast as possible, and get the hell out of here. That she already knows you’re hiding something isn’t important.

--Okay, right. It’s not like she can put me in legal trouble or detain me or anything.

“I… okay, Doctor Smiles. I… guess we can do that. Let’s finish this as soon as possible.”

The pink unicorn smiled warmly despite the twitch below her eye. “Excellent. I only have a few questions left to go through so it shouldn’t be too much longer anyway.” She picked her notepad back up in her magic, levitating it once again between us and herself. “Now, where were we? …Oh, yes, hm. Now, Mister Spring, have you noticed unusual increases in your physical or mental abilities in the last few days?”

-What the hell does this have to do with anything, and why is she asking that?

--I have no idea.

“Uh, why are you asking that, exactly? I don’t see how it’s relevant here…”

“Exactly,” she simply answered while moving her pen around on the page. She frowned a bit at the same time the pen started scratching more vigorously, before she continued. “That might have been a bit of a trick question to test your follow-through of subjects.”

-That sounds like bullshit. Very convincing bullshit, but I’m sure it wasn’t just a test. You’re supposed to trust your doctor, and traps and tricks like that don’t help with that at all.

--You’re… I’m not sure where you’re going with this, and I’m not sure what I even think of it.

“Now tell me about your cutie mark please. It’s always a great starting point for psychoanalytical assessment of a pony. I see it’s some sort of spring, correct? What does it represent?”

“Oh, uh, it actually is a silver spring… it’s either about being a really good jumper or something to do with my skill with machines.”

Her eyebrow rose up, twitching slightly. “Oh? What makes you so torn between two wildly different talents? How did you acquire it in a way that makes your talent so unclear?”

--Aw, now I basically have to tell you about it and-

-Hey quick question: who the hell cares?

Silver’s barely-contained frown didn’t seem to go unnoticed by the unicorn doctor, whose mouth curled upwards in a short twitch. “Mister Spring?” she asked, sounding as innocent as a perfectly normal psychologist would in that same situation. Why the hell did she feel so weird to me? “Please, don’t be shy; no matter how personal a subject this might be, whatever you tell me will stay between you and us –I mean you and I.”

--Ah, whatever. I guess it doesn’t matter all that much.

“It’s kind of silly, really. My mother is a pegasus, you see, and when I was younger I always tried to stay as close to her as possible. Considering I couldn’t just fly up to her when she was in the air, I… compensated by climbing and jumping everywhere.”

The unicorn just scribbled away, encouraging Silver to continue with a simple hum. Silver opening up like that also had the effect of calming us just a bit, which was a relief. He had been so consistently tense for the past hour or so that I had stopped noticing it.

What I did notice with our clearer state of mind, as Silver resumed his story while watching the spot of sunlight coming from the half-closed curtains creeping up the wall, was that the unicorn’s twitches were much more frequent than I had first noticed. Every few seconds a random part of her body would twitch, almost violently fast, before returning to normal. I was beginning to find her increasingly weird.

“I drove them nearly insane with my antics,” he continued with a chuckle, “which I guess makes sense when you keep finding your foal on the refrigerator for no reason. I think they told me I once managed to reach the ceiling fan somehow. …Anyway, after a while, furniture just wasn’t enough anymore and I started building some very stupid contraptions with whatever I could find. I… built my own trampoline when I was six, just to be able to tackle my mother with a hug before she could even land when she got home. She was so mad that day…”

And it wasn’t just those twitches, too. Those questions of hers were way too suspicious. That mouth itch thing had nothing to do with a psychological evaluation, and the others… the others made it seem like she knew something. Conflicting emotions? We had that all the time. Increased physical aptitudes? …That perfect, parkour-worthy, un-practiced wall jump down the stairs yesterday morning should have been impossible, shouldn’t it?

“…even took me mountain-climbing so I’d ‘spend all that energy’ I had. Thinking back on it, I suspect they were trying to scare me into staying on the ground, but I loved it anyway. Anyway, the cutie mark I got one day, when my mother was coming back from a two-day trip to Cloudsdale for… uh, business stuff, I think. Something like that. I was waiting for her with the stupidest machine I ever built; some kind of pogo stick on a pogo stick… on a pogo stick, with about a hundred more springs than were ever necessary…”

I got some kind of flashback, a familiar image of looking up at the sky with a dark shape drawing closer while I felt like I was falling. I tried to ignore it in favor of more pressing matters, but it was pretty hard.

“So despite everything snapping apart under me, I managed to bounce higher than I had ever been before, easily a hundred feet and more. It was… exhilarating, and scary, and incredibly terrifying, but also insanely fun and… uh, yeah. ...Thankfully my mother managed to catch me, and once we landed we saw I’d gotten my cutie mark. So I’m not sure if it was because of the jump or the machine that let me make the jump…”

Doctor Smiles kept writing in silence for a while, during which her right eye decided it was time to vibrate as well.

“I forgot to ask; how did you come across my clinic, Mister Spring?” she asked, still writing.

“Twilight Sparkle gave me your business card when I mentioned my… uh, worries…”

“Oh my, what an honor. That really brightens my day.” She didn’t sound all that happy though; her eyes, back to normal, never left the notepad.

-She’s really weird, don’t you think? I’m not the only one of us to get a bad vibe from that mare, right? It’s like she knows too much about this.

--Well it’s pretty hard to think otherwise when your feelings keep seeping into mine like that! Stop being so paranoid! I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for those questions she asked.

“Hm, I think we’ve gone through most of the questions on my list here...” she scanned her notepad, flipping through some pages. “Oh, I almost forgot this one. Mister Spring, are you hearing voices?”

In the half second it took Silver to turn his head and look her in the eyes, I swear I saw her smile.

-She knows. Oh shit, she knows.

--She can’t possibly know.

-I’m sure she knows. She knows and she’s trying to fake that she doesn’t for some reason. She’s shady as hell, she’s hiding something, and she knows more than she should. Don’t trust her, and definitely don’t tell her anything. I’ve never been so terrified by a simple question.

--Oh sure, because I was certainly going to tell a psychologist that I’m hearing voices. That would end well.

-No but seriously, I don’t think we can trust her.

--Yeah. Let’s just play it cool.

“No, I’m not hearing voices. What makes you think that, doctor?”

-Oh my god you’re such a bad liar.

She stood still for a minute, whatever emotion she was feeling hidden behind a completely neutral mask.

“Very well.” She put her notepad down on the table. “Now, do you feel ready to tell me what is actually troubling you?”

Silver gently shook his head. “No, I’m… actually feeling a lot better now. I guess I just needed to talk to somepony to…uh, realize how fine I am. I think I’m ready to go now.”

The rise of an eyebrow was the only reaction she had while listening to Silver’s babbling, her eyes fixedly drilling into ours. After just a second she inhaled sharply, turning away to grab a little rope dangling from the ceiling. A small bell rang in another room, and approaching hoofsteps on the carpet of the hallway soon followed.

“Very well. In that case, I’ll ask you to wait a few minutes while I prepare my evaluation and the few papers you’ll need to sign. It shouldn’t be too long.” The door of the office opened at that point, with the receptionist poking his head inside. “Mister Lock, would you please serve Mister Spring here some refreshments while he waits? Do try to make it soothing if you can; this pony is a very stressed individual.”

The tan pony looked at his boss for a second before nodding once and turning to us. “Follow me, please.”

Silver rolled to our hooves, hurrying after the stallion leading us back to the waiting room. After inviting us to sit down at the simple table in a corner, the receptionist went into the next room.

--Okay, let’s play this cool, and act natural.

-Not to forget the part where we get the hell out of here as fast as humanly possible.

--Humanly?

-Forget it. We need to get back on track here, you know? This little bullshit visit took too much time away from the really important stuff. We basically wasted our afternoon here.

The receptionist guy walked back in, carrying a small tray in his mouth, with a little steaming cup on top. He gently put it down in front of us and went back to his desk.

--You’re right. I’ll go back to see Twilight Sparkle as soon as we’re out of here and –ooh, apple-flavored coffee? I’ve never heard of that! That’s… oh, it’s just apple-scented… now that’s pretty pointless. Anyway, I’ll go back there and try to come up with something else.

-Hopefully that rainbow streak won’t be there anymore.

--She did complicate things, didn’t she?

His second sip of the coffee was interrupted halfway by a poorly-timed yawn. He shook his head and got back to drinking.

--Wow, lying on a couch for an hour really made me sleepy. Hopefully this coffee is going to help with that.

-Getting up and walking certainly would be helpful too. What is she doing back there? How long is this stupid paperwork supposed to take?

We yawned again, our eyelids drooping slightly.

-Hey, are you okay? I feel we’re getting strangely tired…

--Yeah, I don’t know… what’s up with that… I hope this isn’t… decaf…

He downed the rest of the coffee in one gulp, clumsily dropping the cup on the table as we leaned on it for support.

-Decaf wouldn’t make us anti-awake, stupid! What’s going on? Are we being drugged or something?

--I don’t… I’m not… that… would…

And suddenly our face decided to become fast friends with the table; a meeting which, despite its violence and the fact that it was accompanied by a hint of pain and a loud whack, did not help Silver stay awake in the slightest.

-Silver?

Predictably, I didn’t get the slightest hint of an answer, unless you count our left foreleg dangling over the edge of the table and swaying limply from the momentum of our collapse. It was kind of freaky to be alone with my own thoughts for once, with only an empty silence in between those. I was a bit busy being concerned about something else to really appreciate the feeling though.

Had we really just been drugged, after coincidentally meeting an ‘apparently-normal’, kinda-creepy doctor? One who seemed to know more than she let on? One that felt shady as hell? One who had asked creepy, eerily-fitting questions that just so happened to match things that I had witnessed or caused by just being stuck in here?

This Serene Smiles mare was somehow involved in this, and we just stumbled into her by accident?

-Holy. Fucking. Tap-dancing, shit-gargling, god-damn WHAT?!

Author's Note:

Dun-dun-duuuun!