Part 1 - Alone
Ari had a special modified glove on her right hand, on the back of which her phone could be easily slotted. It even had a little ball bearing that allowed her to turn and lock it 90 degrees. That was where her phone usually was. Easier than fishing it out of her pocket all the time.
Hours went by as Ari lay on her back in the backseat of the car, her arm pinned against the back of the driver’s seat so she could watch an endless stream of bad news. Even if silence was preferable at this point, she was too tired and defeated to so much as turn off autoplay.
Eventually, night fell and still, people kept talking and talking. She wasn’t always listening most of the time. She wasn’t sure if she fell asleep at any point. But it was late now. She’d be sleeping in the car.
Statements were made, and declarations spoken.
The one thing she was truly curious about was mentioned early on and served as a bucket of cold ice. Every politician denounced ETS (and basically all transformation magic) as purely evil and vowed to never allow its use in any form ever again. The aliens seemed completely deferential to the human government. Meaning… Ari was likely stuck like this forever.
After that, there was only one thing that separated Ari from the dead, only one thing that can breathe a spark of life into her however briefly.
It was when that purple one talked… the hero that saved them, another pony from the same world as Sunset Shimmer, the criminal who created the virus in the first place. Every now and then Purple would just say something that pissed Ari off so much.
“Becoming a pony won’t solve your problems.”
“You don’t know that! You don’t know anything about me!”
“No one asked for this.”
“I did!”
“Magic won’t help you be a better person.”
“Then give me yours!”
“Ponies aren’t better than humans. I mean, this way you still have your hands, right?”
And then Purple laughed…
“You fucking–!”
That last one was what finally spurred Ari to sit up, and finally get off her back. She heard that line so many goddam times she wanted to puke!
And Purple was some kind of princess or something? Here was Purple, a literal immortal god with unlimited powers, too many for Ari to even list. She could fly, make interdimensional portals, cast spells effecting the entire planet, instantly zap whole languages into people’s brains, defeat a criminal with the power to devastate all of Earth, and that was just the stuff Ari picked up indirectly in an hour.
Someone like that had the audacity to look down at Ari from her exalted inter-cosmic throne and tell her she just needed to make due with nothing?!
She probably just got everything in life handed to her. That was always the story. And here she was, talking like she understood people she didn’t even know existed.
She was so incurious and sheltered that she couldn’t even imagine that not every human had working hands?! She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want change? She couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t so easy for everyone as ‘just change your life, bro!’
That privileged, condescending, pretentious fucking–!
Ari rubbed her face and took a deep breath.
She was probably taking her anger out on the wrong person. Purple was just doing its… job… or whatever. Who knew? Did Purple get paid for this?
Getting angry wouldn’t change anything. Nothing would change anything at this point. Nothing would change.
Her phone vibrated and Ari blinked a few times to clear her vision. It was morning already? Had she slept? Ari couldn’t even tell if she was tired at this point.
It was a text from work letting her know they’d be opening again tomorrow.
The adventure was over. The magic was gone. Get back to work!
Ari spent a few minutes working up the strength to start the car. She caught herself in the rearview mirror.
Ari looked at the green where it had managed to overtake her blonde hair. It didn’t look like that was going away. So she was about 1% pony. At least Purple couldn’t take that away from her… though then again she was talking about ‘rehumanization’ so who knew.
A streak on her left and a streak to the right perfectly framed her face between the two strips of green, too. It looked really nice, in her opinion!
So the trip hadn’t been an absolute failure. Maybe Ari could just try to focus on that.
“So I didn’t get to fly or anything, but green hair is the next best…” Ari couldn’t keep her fake smile on long enough to finish the sentence.
She let out a sigh and started the car.
It wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it now.
Getting back took most of the day. There was an massive surge of traffic as humans fled to the east coast, away from those transformed by ETS. Ari had never seen traffic like this before. It took hours just to cross the dang bridge.
And of course that meant more time listening to the news. No mere mortal could resist that siren call in the face of such a cataclysm as this. Everyone was rushing to get their opinions out as soon as possible now that the government was being more open with what had occurred.
Ari flipped through mainstream news networks to various political youtubers to hear them react to the defeat of an alien invader, to this pandemic ending suddenly and completely. No matter who she turned to, they all had one thing in common.
No one sounded victorious.
Their glorious president was perhaps the most optimistic and even his speech implied that the hard part started now. He gave the standard platitude about how they would weather the storm, but had no choice but to acknowledge that the storm wasn’t over… it was coming. It wasn’t that they’d gotten through the disaster, it was that the disaster was only just now about to start.
As if times weren’t already hard enough, every last person Ari turned to agreed that everyone was basically fucked. The plane was going down and the standard of living of every American was about to nosedive.
Ari even turned to people who were normally warhawk patriot types just to see if they felt at all good about America killing the evil alien invader. But no, they pretty much agreed that only economic doom awaited in the future.
The economy had already been perilous. Most people had already been living on the edge. And now?
People had been worried about 7% inflation just a year ago… people were forecasting it might be 30-35% this year. The stock market was down 60% and had been closed for days, would remain so indefinitely. There was a long list of banks that failed, though at least the government was talking about prioritizing insuring those who lost their savings.
The only thing they disagreed on was who to blame, and it was always somebody they hadn’t liked before ETS.
No one wanted to blame Sunset Shimmer. She was dead.
Sunset’s motivation for this remained elusive despite all the explanations. It was like an anime. She wanted to amass unlimited power to kill an ancient evil… or something? That just happened now.
Her nemesis Purple followed Sunset all the way here to kill Sunset. And yet she still turned around and said ‘Oh yeah, but now I have to amass unlimited power to defeat the monster with your “help”! Hahaha!’
And who knew what the hell she meant by that! She certainly didn’t mean giving magic powers through ponification to anyone who asked instead. Purple was probably just planning on exploiting them in a more subtle way, wasn’t she? They both had the same end goal. That’s how this sort of thing usually went.
So in reality it wasn’t even a ‘get back to the factory’. It was a ‘get back to the factory and things will be a lot worse from now on’.
It took forever, but Ari got over the bridge, through the city and back to Long Island and finally… home. Thankful she hadn’t collapsed and crashed at some point.
The town had deteriorated quickly in the few days she’d been away. The shops along the little strip mall by her house all had their windows broken. She passed a burned down house and the wreckage of several cars. The streets were littered with trash, the curb in front of her house being a particularly bad section.
And the city was swarming with military now, too. Armored vehicles were stationed all over the place. They would be living under marshal law for the foreseeable future. One of the army guys stopped Ari to inform her that starting tomorrow, no one would be allowed to drive their car alone. That was, you had to carpool or take the bus. Gas was going to be in too short supply for the next month or two.
There were clear signs that rioting and looting were going on, even if not right now. Even with some military presence, Ari would have to be extra careful when going outside from now on.
She stopped just in front of her house, looking down at a collection of bottles and plastic trash that had gotten caught up in the dirt just in front. The place was filthy. Her town had never been this bad before.
She should probably clean this up. She had tools that would help her clean it up without her hands…
But she was way too tired to do anything about it right now.
It looked like the government had managed to do something ‘right’ this time. They stopped the spread of ETS east of Manhattan.
Even in Manhattan itself there were less than a hundred ponies. In Queens and Brooklyn there were estimated to be less than ten. Nassau and Suffolk County had maybe 4 ponies between them. So Long Island was mostly pony-free. Or at least it would be as the dozen or so ponies inevitably fled the area or got ‘rehumanized’. There was no way you could survive being the only pony in town at a time like this.
She could still watch them through the internet, though. Most of the areas out west were kind of blacked out with little to no internet or power. But there were still tons of people posting pictures of ponies on the internet.
Whatever time Ari didn’t spend sleeping on that first day, she spent watching such videos, fascinated by their cutie marks and magic. It seemed like getting your cutie mark gave you something of a mini-superpower. Or sometimes an actual superpower.
Ponies learning to use their magic. Ponies flying. Ponies working together to build new communities. Ponies levitating things with their minds. Ponies making coffee and sugar cane grow rapidly as far up as Washing State. Ponies suddenly extreme experts in their given skill, with near-psychic perception.
But one thing they couldn’t do was type.
It was annoying all the ‘oh noooo! How will I ever live without haaaaaands?’ comments. The go-to answer seemed to be the Orbi keyboard, one made for disabled people. That was like the holy grail to the ponies now.
<The orbitouch is all sold out!
<You can get one on eBay… for $10,000. LOL.
<Guess we’re just using speech-to-text for now.
All the ponies were posting stuff like that. It was frustrating. Ari typed without hands all the time. She got frustrated and made her own post. Ari never actually made a Twitter account before, but finally set one up just so she could reply to these ignorant fools.
The glove on her right hand, in addition to holding her phone, had Velcro straps along the bottom. By loosening and then tightening them around utensils, she was able to hold them with a reasonable amount of grip.
She loosened the straps around either hand and slid them over her cup of unsharpened pencils, then tightened the straps with her mouth. With one pencils tied to either hand, she began typing.
A>Don’t get an Orbi, those suck. You type way too slowly with them. Just strap two unsharpened pencils to yourself and type with the eraser side. If you use this keyboard layout, you can type fast once you get used to it. I can break 60 WPM easily.
She sent the keyboard layout she used, with the most common letters clustered to the left and right side and the least common in the middle.
The standard keyboard layout was actually designed specifically to slow people with ten fingers down to the maximum extent. It was the slowest possible configuration assuming you had ten digits. Compared to one designed to be as fast as possible for someone with effectively two fingers… well she really could compete with a normal person.
And sent! Ari nodded to herself, satisfied for what felt like the first time in her life. Better than nothing.
But there were so many more like that.
<How do I use scissors without hands?
<How do I use a door knob?
<I can’t open bottles like this!
Ari rolled her eyes. Freaking amateurs. She would have been a way better pony than them.
Replying to all of these messages on how to function without the ability to grip things was a pretty good outlet for her stress, actually. If nothing else, it took her mind off of things. She responded to every comment she found like that for hours and hours. Giving basic advice, recommending accessibility devices and programs, telling them how to make basic handless tools for themselves.
Basically Velcro was the miracle material here.
Eventually… Ari ceased to function and passed out.
She woke up again with her face inches away from her laptop.
And then it was back to work. Again. Forever. A miracle like this would never happen again.
She couldn’t drive alone under marshal law, but she could walk to work. It should be safe with all the military personnel around. Even still…
Ari kept her hood down low enough to block her peripheral vision. A mess of tents and makeshift shelters came pouring out of a closed shopping center’s parking lot and off into the woods and nearby street.
Ironically, there was a huge, unused building right next to all these people, but they were living in the parking lot just outside it.
There never used to be this many homeless people in Ari’s town. But it was quickly becoming the homeless capital of the world. A massive wave of foreclosures crippled the American economy and caused a global economic meltdown. And now…
She heard yesterday that the homeless population had tripled and was continuing to rise. But as one influencer pointed out, that vastly understated the problem. Out west, the homeless population had plummeted as the ponies all sort of huddled together on whatever property they managed to hold onto, no longer counting towards that number.
So the triple number was an average weighed down by the massive drop to the west. It was getting insane out here. The contrast between the east and west half of the nation was beyond extreme.
It looked like that number would only be going up as the cost of everything rose but never wages. Most terrifying of all was the rent. Ari’s lease was up next month. The rent was going to go up by a whole, whole lot. The only question was how much? 20%? 30%? 60%?
As long as they didn’t hike it by fifty percent or more, Ari could maybe still make ends meet. She had a little bit of money saved up.
She should probably buy a tent and some heavy coats now, just in case. Better to be prepared.
But Ari couldn’t look at them. She couldn’t look at the specter of all those destitute, huddled masses in tents. Not now.
There wasn’t anything she could do about it, anyway.
Any fear she had that she might be made into a pariah for being partially transformed was dispelled, at least. Her partially green hair did draw attention, but it was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone at work seemed to love it, thinking it was so cool. One of the other girls even said she was jealous, that catching ETS at the last second like that was probably the best-case scenario.
She did have to shrug and pretend she had no idea who she could have possibly caught it from. But they didn’t grill her or anything.
Ari found herself smiling however briefly for the first time in… had it really only been a few days?
Maybe she’d just been too alone for the past week, having hardly spoken with anyone. She could have been overreacting a little…
And she felt almost okay for about four hours. Until HR called her over.
She wished her initial fear, that they’d somehow found out she’d infected herself, was the truth. Instead–
“You can’t dye your hair green like that.”
“I didn’t dye it,” said Ari. “This is from ETS. That part of my hair is just naturally green now.”
“Yes, well that only makes it worse. People around here are still on edge about this. They don’t want to see your hair like that. It’s really for your own good.”
Ari swallowed deep.
Were they allowed to do this?!
Whatever spark of indignation Ari might have had was soon snuffed out by the weight of depression that hung around her.
She couldn’t risk challenging this… not now! Not when money was so tight and the world so risky. It wasn’t like she could have afforded a lawyer before. But now? When she wasn’t sure if she could pay rent with a job? When there were so many people flooding the area, competing for work, driving down wages? It’d be nearly impossible to find work right about now.
Ari hung her head and bit her lip, crippled from defeat. Everything just kept getting worse…
The HR lady saw her and their expression did soften a little.
“Look, I’m sorry. But the boss saw your hair and he said this himself. You can cover it up however you want, but you can’t wear it like it is, okay?” They watched her for a moment longer, wanting to help. “You know, they’re saying the partially transformed can get the rehumanization spell cast on them, too. If you do that, you won’t have to worry about maintaining it anymore.”
At that moment, Ari would rather die than do that. That green hair felt like the only thing Ari had to hold on to in this world.
She resolved, however impotently, to do everything in her power to keep from getting the spell to permanently remove it. No matter what that meant.
Though truth be told, there was very little in her power. Even here…
“I guess there’s nothing I can do about it…”
The grocery store was well defended. At the entrance was a military guy holding the biggest gun Ari had ever seen someone holding. Like… whatever was one step down from a mini-gun. That was what he had. And they only let twenty people in the store at a time, meaning you had to wait in line to get in while this guy who could splatter everyone loomed just up ahead.
What were they expecting? A xenomorph to show up?
But she heard that someone smashed through the barred-up doors with an Escalade and stole all the oatmeal. She could see clear signs of such an attack: the windows covered with black tarp, the doors missing.
So apparently they did need that kind of firepower.
Just before going in, you had to register for a ration book like this was WWII. It had eight pages, each corresponding to a new week. At the checkout, they’d stamp what you bought making sure nobody hoarded anything. They also made it clear that hoarding food and shoplifting would be considered serious crimes while marshal law lasted.
If this was actually over in eight weeks, Ari would be delighted.
All the shelves were just about empty. Normally in this situation, you’d think ‘well I’ll just eat oatmeal and ramen until things get better’. Only everyone had the same idea and all the cheap foods were long gone. It didn’t even look like they were cheap anymore.
The price of everything had nearly doubled. And that was over what everyone had considered high food prices just a few months ago.
Hopefully, things would get better in the next few days. They said it would, but who knew?
Ari filled out her most of her ration card for the week. They didn’t allot you a great deal, but it was certainly enough to survive. And they said they’d be handing out food whenever possible. So maybe she wouldn’t starve just yet.
As foreshadowed there was no oatmeal thanks to that one asshole. No medicine or cleaning supplies either.
But hair dye? They had that. Only marked up about thirty percent.
Ari stared at the blonde hair dye for a long time before giving in and knocking it into her cart.
What she wouldn’t give for a box of plain oatmeal right now.
But there was nothing she could do about it.
Ari took deep breaths, staring into the mirror, looking at the green stripes in her hair.
Using scissors was a bit of a production, but she could do it. She had a pair made specifically for disabled people, with a big loop on one side and a large handle on the other. Putting the loop over her right hand and tightening the Velcro strap, she could able to cut just by pressing down on the lever with her left.
It’d be cheaper to just cut those stripes out. She could style it to make it not look weird.
She held the blade against the base of the larger green stripe. Her hand trembled more than it usually did. She stood there, paralyzed until her strength gave out. Her right hand and the attached scissors clunked down into the sink.
She couldn’t do it!
That was… that was like the only thing she got! That green hair was… was…
Ari shook her head. She felt tears forming but ignored them and took out the dye.
Dying was more expensive, difficult, and time-consuming… but it was her only option. If she lost her job, there was no guarantee she could get another one right now. It was this… or…
She found this slightly easier on a psychological level, though it took her way longer than a normal person would need and she sobbed all the way through.
Ari stared at herself in the mirror once again, her hair more or less back the way it was.
She felt… violated. She couldn’t look in the mirror any longer, disgusted by what she saw… and went back to her room to collapse yet again.
This one hurt so much more than the other two. She sat at the head of her bed, curled up into a tight ball, hugging a pillow with a pile of blankets hiding her. She rocked back and forth, trying to steady her breath between sobs. It was so hard not to cry over something so… stupid.
The world was going down the drain. Ari could very well be homeless and starving before long and somehow being forced to dye her hair was what made her cry? So many people had it a million times worse than her…
“I wish I understood how my stupid brain worked.”
Ari buried her face in the pillow to wipe away some of her messy tears.
There was just… nothing she could do about it. Just go to work. Try to survive. And going to work might not be enough to survive soon but… there was nothing she could do about that.
Might as well just… not think about it. Find some kind of distraction.
Ari got her laptop and turned it on. Looking at what the ponies were up to would probably hurt her even more but it was too strong a temptation to resist.
She logged in to Twitter and paused.
She blinked through her tears, clearing up her vision until she was sure she was seeing it correctly…
“10,000 comments?!”
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Is it pure coincidence that Ari looks like Pikamee?
11550977
Yes. Though I do see it.
gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/miX1GnqRmv6T.png?o=1
So it's basically TCB and Wild Cards sorta setting? Odd.
11551051
Not familiar with Wild Cards... but maybe I should look it up. Not too like TCB though since Equestria isn't trying to get you to ponify. If anything it's the opposite.
If you're unfamiliar with Pandemic the basics are as follows:
-Sunset Shimmer (this is the bad guy) releases a disease that ponifies those who get it
-Twilight stops her and mass vaccinates everyone against it. It's gone now.
-Use of that virus is now outlawed for obvious reasons
And that's really all you need.
11551060
Biological warfare in general is illegal. Not that such a legal standard really serves to stop anything from actually being done.
But that could make for a very interesting storyline in itself, where terrorists are setting off virus-laden dirty bombs in large urban areas and infecting countless individuals with the ponifying virus.
There's nothing so far as to make it non-canon since the events like high inflation and the previous pandemic could simply have been not immediately on the minds of the characters in canon stories.
Well, mostly no. I believe there were more ponies in New York City and connecting suburbs than you describe; not a huge number, but it was in the four-digit range. Considering how many million people live in that region, a pony population of a few thousand represents less than 1% of the population. Any place with a major airport usually had at least some ponies, even if the population was smaller. Still, it could be within canon if it is more that the main character is just getting pony numbers underreported. Unreporting of pony numbers was common in the early days after ETS since so many people were isolating. Apartments country-wide were known to have had the residents forcibly segregate the infected to certain apartments. Many stayed locked up in the apartments until police and firefighters came and forced people to let them go.
11551108
I honestly don't know how much this will contradict canon. The only Pandemic stories I read are the original, Big Apple and Who you Were Meant to Be, so I'm largely ignoring everything from anywhere else and want to be able to just make up whatever.
As far as NY goes: Big Apple takes place in Manhattan (and Staten Island). Brooklyn and Queens actually aren't on the mainland but on Long Island along with Nassua County where Ari lives. If they closed down the bridges early enough they could have reduced the spread... is what I'm going for anyway. It's just important for the setup that Ari be in an approximately 100% human area so that's my excuse. Any ponies on Long Island would have ran away to Manhattan or Jersey.
Also a few thousand ponies in New York City would still only be about 0.1% of the population. So that doesn't change too much.
11551074
It also raises the question of whether the government has any business making it illegal for people to get themselves transformed voluntarily.
11551472
Doubly so if the transformation is done via a virus. Because there are so many pathogens out there capable of altering the host's DNA to at least some extent, thus constituting a transformation at the genetic level.
On second thought, that's a bad line of thought to go down. The pandemic route showed the government would totally take that route.
Huh. You briefly made it into the featured box. Nicely done.
11551489
Well, there might be some grounds for the government getting involved if we're dealing with anything contagious (such that there's a clear risk of more people being unwillingly transformed). If the law prohibits all transformation magic even where no such danger exists, that's another kettle of fish.
I was reminded of the story "Thunder Struck", where a human (Anon) gets struck by lightning and ends up paralyzed form the neck down. There was some speculation in the comments as to whether transforming him into a different species might give him a brand new working nervous system, or if turning him into a unicorn might let him use magic to do stuff. If there are any medicinal uses for transformation magic, then outright banning it would definitely be bad.
I love how in most after stories show everything as a humanity getting back on their feet easy. But as the COVID showed us that in reality it does work that way because people mostly just start capitalism all over each other. Because we have had a hundred years trying to beat out working together out of use. I would take a long while for use to remember and get better.
11552841
This story is not realistic either. US will either quickly try to scramble everything they have to initiate a new woldwar or total collapse like soviet.
TWILIGHT SPARKLE
we DO NOT DO THAT
YOU FOR ONE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT ESPECIALLY!