So 2005
Doctor Lithium sighed. It had been a long day, but now he was finally down to his last patient. He pressed his hoof to a button on his desk. “Miss Pie, you may come in now.” His voice was tiny and raspy through the loudspeaker.
The magic must be wearing thin, the doctor thought to himself.
A pink mare with pink hair walked gloomily into the office. Said hair was drooped flat, hanging stiffly to one side of her head. Tear stains, now dried, streaked her cheeks. Now she simply had a look of gloom to her, as though a thundercloud was drifting above her head.
“So, Miss Pie—”
“Call me Pinkie! Everypony does,” Pinkie Pie said, with a bit of forced cheer.
“So, Miss Pie,” Doctor Lithium continued after a brief, uneasy pause. “What seems to be troubling you today?” The doctor’s voice was powerful, and commanding. He hailed from North Trottingham, and thus had an accent accustomed to the area. Living in Ponyville for many years grated away at it slightly, and now was now a mix of Equestria Proper and Trottingham accents, his vowels still softer than usual.
The pink mare sighed, and looked around. The sheer gloominess in her voice would have affected Doctor Lithium had he not grown used to being around depressed patients.
“I’m feeling... down. Not myself, you know?” Her voice sounded like a squeaky balloon slowly losing air.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place, Miss Pie!” Doctor Lithium’s voice cut sharply into the mare before him. She flinched every time he spoke, as if his words were punching her right in the muzzle. It seemed to press down on her, depressing her further, despite what he was saying being potentially good news. “We have all sorts of things to help you!”
Pinkie Pie almost felt a smile come across her face. This soon passed, and her crushing gloom slide back into her mind. “Well, can... can you give one to me?”
“I could.” Pinkie Pie’s face brightened slightly. “But then I’d have to give out pills to just anypony who came trotting into my office!” Doctor Lithium rose from behind his desk, and walked around Pinkie Pie, looking her over. “You’re a bit of an odd one, Miss. Pie. Your records suggest you ingest a large amounts of sweets, yet you seem almost perfectly healthy.”
Pinkie Pie’s mane swayed slightly. “Yes, well... I’ve been told I was always a bit-”
“Of an oddity? Different?”
“Well, yeah! But my oddities make me special! That’s what—”
“Take this pill,” Doctor Lithium instructed curtly, pushing a small, white pill towards the other side of his desk.
“But...” Pinkie said, looking down the pill, and trailing off.
“Take this pill,” the doctor instructed again, nodding down towards the pill. Pinkie tentatively leaned forward, and extended her tongue, swallowing the pill.
“It tastes funny. But not ‘ha-ha’, funny,” Pinkie said, making a sour face. Her mane vibrated slightly, a single strand of hair shot up, curling up and becoming poofy.
“Life’s the same way,” Doctor Lithium said, standing up from his chair. “Come, take a walk with me, Miss Pie.” He walked over to the door, before turning back to see that Pinkie Pie had not moved from her spot. “Well, come on. I don’t want you just sitting there, using up all the oxygen. That’s a valuable commodity, and you can expect to see that on your bill.”
Pinkie Pie opened her mouth, the one stand of her hair deflating with a soft pffpft. She shrunk down in her chair, and reluctantly got to her hooves. Once she was standing beside Doctor Lithium, he began to walk down the hallway.
“You see, Miss Pie, we run a very tight schedule here,” he explained, walking past a room where two interns in scrubs were careful gluing feathers to a sleeping foal. “That’s why we eliminated all of that preliminary, useless garbage. It used to be that you had to sign up, go to a few specialists, and seek therapy if you had depression or some other mental deficiency. Now, we can just give you a pill! It’s so much more productive this way.”
“I... I guess...” Pinkie Pie mumbled, looking down at her hooves, her long sheet of hair obscuring her face. “I don’t feel very good, though... like someone replaced my tummy with a lot of empty space.”
“We have a pill for that,” Doctor Lithium responded, and before Pinkie Pie could even speak, she found another pill being shoved into her mouth. She blinked, and swallowed it after a moment, her hair vibrating once more.
“It’s all a part of our delicate system, Miss Pie,” Doctor Lithium said. “We give you the pill, you take the pill, you pay us for the pill, we make more pills. It’s a delicate system second to none in importance, only surpassed narrowly by the water cycle.”
Pink Pie nodded slowly, yawning. “Th-this pill made me a bit sleepy...”
“As it should! It’s a sleeping pill!”
The mare sluggishly turned her head over to face Doctor Lithium, who was giving her an extremely critical look, as if he were disappointed in her for even daring to assume that the pills would be anything different.
“H-how...” Pinkie Pie let out a huge yawn. “How is this going to help me?”
“Our logic is that if you’re sleeping, you can’t feel depressed,” the doctor said. “Nighty-night!”
When Pinkie awoke, she was lying in bed with a small dog licking her muzzle.
“Oh!” She smiled, and closed her eyes, lifting a hoof to pet the dog. When she felt a sharp jolt of pain, she opened her eyes again, and discovered that the dog was actually a cluster of sharp metal sloppily welded together.
“Ow! That hurt...” she exclaimed, rubbing her sore hoof. There was a crackle over the loudspeaker, and Doctor Lithium’s voice, all tinny, was soon broadcaster over the room.
“Hallucinations! Our pills train you to not trust your eyes, Miss Pie. Your eyes are Discord’s playthings, and you can’t easily trust that, can you?”
Pinkie Pie remained silent. Her hair had reverted to its purely flat form while she was asleep, and the heavy pall of depression had begun to loom over her once more.
A pill fell from a slot in the ceiling, bouncing off of Pinkie’s head. “Take the pill, Miss Pie! You’re wasting hospital time, and that’s a resource more valuable than you’ll ever be.”
Pinkie Pie looked at the pill, and with a small sigh, took it in her hoof, and consumed it. It tasted vaguely of sugar.
“This one tastes better than all the ones that you gave me before,” she said to the room, unsure of where Doctor Lithium was outside of it.
“That’s unusual. We’ll note that as a side effect,” the doctor’s voice answered back. “Now, kindly look at the wall in front of you.”
Pinkie Pie blinked, and focused on the blank, black wall before her. Before her very eyes, a screen of some sort was lifted, which let her view into the room beyond.
There was a light blue mare sitting in there, chewing on her back leg. Her white mane was frizzy and all over the place, and reminded Pinkie much of her own previous style, had she let it grow feral.
The mare saw Pinkie on the other side of the glass, and jumped up, pawing at the window. Pinkie could hear faint barking from the other side.
“This mare refused our pills,” Doctor Lithium’s voice said. “Do you want to be this mare?”
“She doesn’t look too bad...” Pinkie said to herself, softly. She reached a hoof up, and placed it against the glass, meeting where the other mare was pawing at it.
“She pisses in public and has fleas!” Lithium’s voice boomed. “Is that what you want, Miss Pie?”
“I want to be happy again,” Pinkie Pie said with a sigh. “I want to cheer up my friends, and I want... I want to be the bubbly party pony I used to be.”
“Ah, so that’s our issue, is it? Feeling down? Out? Not your usual perky, bouncy self? Take this pill, Miss Pie, and you'll feel better again! But only for a little while, so stock on up..."”
A pill fell from the ceiling in the same spot the other one had. Pinkie walked over to it, and stared at it for a few moments before, just as she had with the pill prior to this one. She consumed it with no comment after her pause ended.
It did nothing to placate the emptiness in her body.
“I don’t feel any different...”
“Success! That pill was a placebo!” There was the sound of large gears whirring, and a door on the far side of the wall opened.
“Step out of the chamber please, Miss Pie.”
Pinkie did so, and found herself face to face with Doctor Lithium. She took a step back, only to bump into the wall. The door had closed silently behind her.
“Where do you think you’re going, Miss Pie? You’ve got pills to take. You said you wanted to be happy?”
Pinkie Pie nodded, her heart beginning to quicken in pace.
“Well, you won’t readily be disappointed. OH, NURSE!”
A white pony with a vacant smile on her face appeared by Doctor Lithium. “Yes, Doctor?”
“Tell Miss Pie how happy you are, nurse.”
The nurse turned to Pinkie Pie, her empty smile deeply unsettling the mare. “I’m very happy, Miss Pie.”
“You could be happy too, Miss Pie, if you simply were to listen and take these pills,” Doctor Lithium said, rolling his eyes at Pinkie. “But of course, you wouldn’t listen to me, I’m only a doctor...”
“I want to be happy! I want to be happy really bad! But is the nurse... I’ve seen a lot of smiles, I know a lot of smiles, and hers doesn’t look like a real smile, not at all!” Pinkie Pie looked over at the nurse, her heart pounding in her throat now.
“Nonsense! She’s just as happy as anypony else. And that’s what you want, don’t you? To be happy like everypony else? Sitting, smiling, content with the world around you? Being happy is something that you can get with these pills, and it is so simply just to take them, Miss Pie...”
Doctor Lithium placed a bottle of pills beside Pinkie Pie. “Take these pills. You’ll be happy, just like everypony else, drifting through life with no reason or purpose, smiling forever even though you face will hurt. And it will all be worth it, because you’ll be happy.”
“But I want to make other ponies happy too!”
Doctor Lithium scoffed. “You can’t make everypony happy, Miss Pie. But these pills can!”
Pinkie Pie looked down at the bottle, and then back at Doctor Lithium.
"Take this pill, Miss Pie. Everything will be alright soon."
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- TheExhaustedBrony · 2.1k words · 29 1 · 1.1k views
- Homage · 1k words · 38 3 · 1.9k views
- DerpyStarlet · 5.8k words · 31 2 · 1k views
- TheExhaustedBrony · 1.1k words · 40 0 · 1.2k views
- marineproductions100 · 2.1k words · 74 2 · 2.7k views
- Zaid ValRoa · 1.1k words · 67 1 · 1.6k views
- Regidar · 1.3k words · 60 4 · 1.7k views
- Revenant Wings · 2.6k words · 60 3 · 1.6k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.154 seconds
Total duration
735 users online
1,069,175 hits today, 2,054,621 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
FI--Oh, damn it.
Now I actually have to read the story and make a comment.
5090689 You're a wonderful person.
Well that was depressing. Doctor Lithium appears to be Nurse Ratched's Equestrian cousin.
At some point, a couple had a child, and when they looked at the newborn colt, they arrived at the conclusion that they should name it after a pill.
Thank goodness he ended up being a doctor.
So apparently what i got from this is all antidepressants and antipsychotics are a farce that never helps anybody, glad I have somebody to force that pill down my throat not like people complain about it all the time.
We get it already.
5091793 actually, it's more of the mentality that doctors treat their depressed patients with, buffeting them from place to place and giving them pill after pill that doesn't work, or only works occasionally.
I would know.
I thought that this was gonna be a reference to the G3 ponies. XD
5091789 it's the equestrian way
5091793 Nobody's forcing you to take any pills. Nobody forced you to read this story. Nothing and absolutely nothing stopped you from just dumping the pills into a desk and walking away.
Anyone who says "we get it already" clearly doesn't get it. They don't get that this is a problem with psychiatric medicine at large, they don't get why exactly this is a problem. There are good psychiatrists out there, but they're hard to find in the seas of stone-cold money-grubbing pissasses who take your money and give you a pill that doesn't make the problem go away, but instead makes the problem seem irrelevant to you.
Pills here
5091803 sup bro
I had a shit ass doctor fuck up basic neurochemical reactions so bad, I now have type 2 bipolar because the medications I was on broke things.
Don't stay on stimulants for ADHD past age 20.
5091803 Oh I see! Well in that I can kind of agree with you, I don't have very much experience with that sort of thing but I could see many doctors, they are human beings after all, pushing pills that don't help because they don't know any better and just want peoples money.
I completely missed the message and assumed it was something else, so I apologize.
Will probably happen again, but I'll know better next time and ask what the message is before passing judgement.
5091830 Yep you're one hundred percent right, I didn't have to read it, but I did... so apparently I can't express my opinion, even if it is wrong? Glad to see how criticism works, you've shown me the light.
5091961 Your criticism isn't above criticism, especially when it's not really criticism and instead is brain-dead complaints about actual issues and problems with the society we live in "shoved down your throat".
Short of you being a hermit in the vast wilderness of Alaska or an Amish, the problems of the people are going to be presented to you. It's up to you to decide what's shoved down your throat. The themes and the agenda of this fic were perfectly clear from when you clicked the page and you had every single opportunity to just walk away.
Instead you opened your big mouth and complained about "it being shoved down your throat" when you had every chance to walk away and not let it be. People that are as dumb as the likes of you completely and utterly baffle me.
Blue pill or red pill?
I take the pink one!
5092004 Yeah, it was a pretty stupid thing to say, kinda knew what was gonna happen but hey, I learned a bit about it so thanks, I was being pretty insensitive and shoulda took better care. Sorry for being such a stupid fucking moron, I guess i deserved it.
Oh Regi, I love you in the gayest, most homoerotic way possible because you're a genius.
Also, I got that new temperpedic bed. You game?
5092143 Can I join?
5092151
It's king-sized. We have room.
And then Pinkie Pie ended up in the insane asylum
I'm not sure what this story was trying to do. If it's an individual character study and a glimpse at a dystopian alternative universe, then I guess it's got its good points. If it's trying to make a larger point about how Doctors Are Evil and Pills Are Bad, then I can't help feeling that:
derpicdn.net/img/2014/5/6/619417/full.png
because it's really unsubtle. In the end, I'm on the fence about it. I think it hinges on whether you agree with the premise or not.
5091830 WOW. Well, personally, I clicked on this story because Regidar's a good writer and I wanted to give it a chance, knowing it would be much better than the standard "Pinkie Pie has a psychiatric disorder and has to take pills" story. I don't happen to agree with you, or maybe I just lucked out and found a good doctor.
Got a problem? THERE'S A PILL FOR IT!
5092438 derpicdn.net/img/2014/5/6/619417/full.png
You don't know how much that made me laugh.
They need to make a version of that for every pony. I could really use one with Silver Spoon in it. xD
5092438 Psychologists are typically fine, because their job takes skill, tact, and knowledge. Psychiatrists are typically assholes, because they just prescribe pills to make you shut up.
I love the motherfuckers here who haven't watched the video in the first comment. So much 'tism over a parody of a video.
That was a horrifying analysis. Love it
Well, don't we all try to find happiness the easy way instead of cultivating it? It's just human nature
5091789
And this is why I believe ponies can legally change their names after getting their cutie mark.
5092127
He struggles because people are too autistic to enjoy his stories.
5093946 Actually, Lithium is just an element. It is used as a mood stablizer that is true, but it's used for heaps of other things too.
*hopes the pill is cyanide*
derpicdn.net/img/download/2014/5/27/638477__safe_solo_rarity_animated_meme_image+macro_vulgar_scared.gif
5092438 I think
5093195 nailed it the best here, but honestly, I couldn't tell you what I was doing with it. I started it 2 years ago and just decided to finish it up. I was really just trying to write something Firthian and based off of his video I posted, which is one of my all time favorite pieces of media.
5092127 the struggle is real
5095111
5093195 Generally, when I consider a video essential or relevant to the story, I stick it in the Author's Notes and not in a comment. And if you have comments set as "newest first," it's buried at the bottom. I can't speak for the rest of us motherfuckers, but I didn't know it was mandatory, so I didn't watch it, and had no way to know it was a parody.
...Due to my vast fascination with psychology, I find this fanfiction extremely... what's the word... Intriguing!
5095307 I still can't get over you using the Internet and not knowing Firth. I thought that was required at this point.
5095687 The internet's a huge place, and with all kinds of stuff out there, I tend not to click on YouTube video links unless I know what's in 'em.
5095859 So you're boring with no sense of adventure. The funniest things I've ever seen were in links I clicked on blindly.
Spin the Youtube Wheel of Destiny, man!
5096024 And find myself watching Smile HD? No thanks.
5096069 It's cute that you think that would be the worst you'd find. I have seen the blackness in men's souls. We have such sights to show you, come and taste our pleasures.
5096240 Nope.
EDIT: Also, I know you're just kidding around, but I always gets mildly irritated when someone says I "have to" do this or that. I don't, actually.
5095307 casuals who have their comments set to newest first don't deserve to watch that video anyway
and it's not "required viewing" at all. It's like reading some supplementary shit to a book for context. You can easily enjoy it without.
5096602 WTF is a "casual?" I'm no casual. I've been here for years and I've published a lot of stuff. I only said that because wossname said:
And I said I can't know that it's a parody or be expected to watch a video if it's not clearly marked as relevant. Stories should, as you said, stand on their own. And it isn't a bad story: it does stand on its own, so I don't know why he's got his panties in a knot about it.
5096650 casual is a fallacious "insult" used in situations where there is no other real way to make the other party seem "less correct" then the accuser. It's a joke, shortly put.
Some Jerk is just... some jerk. But he's MY jerk, so...
5096712 OIC. You'll have to excuse me. Intertubz is like a fifth language for me. I'm really very old. No, really, I am.And now I'm old and depressed.
Um, think ye might wanna fix that.
5101070 thank yah, I shall do so right away
Man, this is some creepy shit right here.
5091803 I'm... honestly not sure what to think about this story. I mean if you were trying to make a point that in today's society we get pills thrown at us to take for every tiny problem causing us to become way over medicated then I get it. However at the same time, there are some things you do actually need to take pills or other kinds of medication for. Medication that people would actually die or suffer greatly without, and that includes mental illnesses.
I myself have a mental illness and I can honestly say I do better on my medication than off of it. For one thing if I don't take them then I can't sleep well at all. But I have also in the past been through the tedious and extremely frustrating process of trying medication after medication that didn't work well or at all and came with nasty side effects. I've also had to fire some psychiatrists who obviously were idiots in order to get to go to a better doctor.
I guess I'm basically saying that I can see both sides of this issue. Doctors shouldn't just throw pills or other types of medication at us unless we seriously need it. Otherwise it makes us more unhealthy instead of less, and yeah some of them definitely are just in it for the money. I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with it.
Anyway this story was well written and I'll definitely check out some of your others.