• Published 19th Nov 2012
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Miller - totallynotabrony



Human gets turned into pony. Then organized crime gets involved.

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Chapter 2

The streets were fairly quiet without cars, so I think it was the sun shining on my eyelids that woke me. I felt comfortable, so for the moment I was content to lie there and stare at the blue sky.

Then I remembered why I was outside and realization fell on me like a ton of bricks. I sat up and looked around the park. At least my back didn’t ache from sleeping on the ground. I wondered if that was a benefit of having a brand-new body, along with the unscuffed hooves.

I was hungry again, but decided to get moving and maybe find something later. The lawn around me had pockmarks where I had chewed on it the previous night.

I debated going back to the library, but that wouldn’t really help me figure out a way to survive. I needed money—bits, I remembered. I had seen a few ponies paying for things with gold-colored coins.

I passed by a café. The smell of food that reached my nose was wonderful, even if the primary ingredient was probably hay. I stopped for a moment and stared. The place was called Oven’s. I wondered for a moment what would happen if I revealed my lack of funds only after eating. Would they put me to work washing dishes? Would they let me keep the job after I had paid off my bill?

If they just decided to prosecute and throw me in jail, at least I would have three meals a day. If prison was looking like a viable option, things must really be getting desperate. At least I wasn’t trying to use my bootlaces to hang myself, although the fact that it had crossed my mind was unsettling.

I faced away from the café and kept walking. Miraculously, my fortune did a complete turnaround within the space of one block. I heard the unmistakable sound of power tools and hammers banging. My nose took in the smell of sawdust and hot metal. I glanced up. The sign on the building read Canterlot Machining and Carpentry.

There was a large freight door that I ignored, choosing to open a smaller pony-sized door instead. As I turned the doorknob, I was again curious about how hooves could seem to grip things.

The inside of the building was remarkably familiar. While I had never seen it before, I recognized almost all of the equipment. It was a fabrication shop, a place where raw metal and wood became useful products according to the unique orders of individual customers. It was a place where mass production was rare, and all work was custom.

A bulky earth pony spotted me and came walking over. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a job.”

He squinted at me skeptically, although his expression grew interested as he glanced at my hind end. I wondered if job discrimination happened in Equestria based on cutie marks. Well, maybe ponies only applied for jobs based on what they already knew they were good at.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Jim Miller.”

“Gem Miller? Can’t say I’ve ever heard of doing that to precious stones before, but a name ain’t nothing but a name, right? Let’s see what you know.”

I followed him towards the back of the shop. Over his shoulder he said, “Name’s Ironbender, by the way. ‘Bender’ is too close to my cousin’s name, so most ponies just call me Bend.”

I nodded. He said, “Tell me about yourself.”

“I have an manufacturing engineering degree, and I’ve worked in fab shops before. I just got to town and figured I’d take a job doing something I know.”

Bend smirked. “You don’t have the job yet. So you say you’re a trained engineer? Fine, I’ll expect more of you.”

He launched into a quiz about pieces of equipment around the shop. Tubing mandrels, lathes, band saws, welders, torches, routers, and all sorts of other things. While some of the tools were shaped oddly to accommodate hooves, I knew them all. Bend seemed impressed.

“You didn’t ask me anything about metallurgy or material characteristics,” I said.

He stared at me and shook his head. “There is one reason why I don’t want to hire you.”

I gulped. “What’s that?”

“You might make me look dumb.” Bend held his expression for a moment and then laughed. I broke into a smile, which might have been my first one since arriving in Equestria.

“I hope you’ve got the passion to back up the brains,” he said. “We’ll give you some time off, but the shop is open seven to seven Monday through Friday and seven to three on Saturdays. We all work hard.”

Assuming Equestria operated on the forty hour work week, that was a lot of overtime. I had to remind myself that getting rich wasn’t the point of taking this job. I was just trying to survive.

I was given a pair of safety glasses and told to help out where I could until Bend found something specific for me to do. I got to know the other ponies working in the shop.

Steelie was a fairly svelte stallion who still managed to swing a metalworking hammer against an anvil harder than I thought possible. Earth pony magic, maybe. I had begun to write off more and more things to magic without a second thought. It was almost like cheating at life.

The primary carpenter was named Sawtooth. His deft hooves could fashion things from wood and also produce the tools necessary. His interest was a little more refined than the blunt-force approach the blacksmith took.

Bucket was the expert in fasteners. He put things together with bolts and screws. Working with small intricate parts was a good match to his focused unicorn magic. While his name related to his special talent, I couldn’t imagine why any parent would name their kid Bucket of Bolts. He didn’t even joke that Bolts was the name of his hometown.

Speaking of residence, I had decided to tell them I was from Baltimare and leave out the part about being human. I had found no reference to people or my planet in the library, so it wasn’t common knowledge. I wouldn’t be able to tell the ponies what kind of extraterrestrial I was and have them instantly understand. Not that it would help.

I didn’t want to be treated like a lunatic, and so sticking to the Baltimare story seemed like my best bet. I had looked up a few facts about the city, just in case. And yes, I had applied for a library card. It seemed like I would be spending a lot of hours there.

That was for my leisure time, though. At work, I had to be learning things of a different nature. I found out that my hoof-eye coordination was terrible. All this magic floating around, and I have to relearn how to walk the hard way. My fine motor control was thrown off.

I could weld, but not in a very straight line. I could use a hammer, but wouldn’t hit the nail every time. Generally, I looked like a clumsy fool. None of the others knew about thermodynamics or force diagrams, however, so there was something that I was good at.

Bend wasn’t kidding when he said that everypony worked hard. I hadn’t been there all day, but still felt tired at the end of it. Although to be fair, that may have been due to eating only one meal in the past two days.

At the end of the day, I found Bend to ask for an advance. He thought about it for a moment. “Well Miller, I suppose I’ll trust you with it.”

He gave me the equivalent of a couple days’ pay. I couldn’t thank him enough. My first stop was at the café called Oven’s, where I ate three veggie burgers and a couple orders of hay fries. It really wasn’t too bad.

I didn’t know how pony digestion would react to meat, but there wasn’t any of that on the menu anyway. I had seen a griffon in the city earlier, and thought that a creature made of eagle and lion parts probably ate animals. I wondered what the local food chain looked like and where I was on it. Also, I wondered if there were other mythological creatures.

My spirits were as high as they had been so far while I checked into a cheap hotel for the night. It was too late to go looking for a more permanent place to live. Thinking about that gave me pause. Just how long was I expecting to stay?

I still hadn’t managed to answer the question of how I had gotten to Equestria and become a pony. Since magic had become my all-purpose whipping boy, I blamed it on that. While I didn’t see any reason why something done with magic couldn’t be reversed, I had no idea where to begin.

I hadn’t found any evidence that ponies knew what men and women were. If that were the case, it seemed unlikely that they would know how to return me to my natural habitat. Worse, I had no idea how to find somepony who could help or how to breach the subject. So, hypothetical question, if I used to be an alien could you do something about it? That was depressing. I decided to have a shower and hopefully stop thinking about the subject for a while.

The bathroom looked about like something from a hotel room on earth, except proportioned differently. I paused for a moment to check my reflection. The unfamiliar face that stared at me looked young. I didn’t have a good idea how human years translated to ponies, but I thought I could blend in with some school ponies if I wanted. Perhaps that was another effect of having a brand new body.

My eyes were blue, not the same color they used to be. Going with the old “eyes are the windows to the soul” idea, I wondered what that meant for me. I felt the same, but was I?

Too much thinking. I turned on the shower water and let it pour on my head, running down my mane and trickling across my back with an unfamiliar sensation. Oh yeah, wings.

I lifted them a little, unsure what to do. Didn’t birds have some kind of special method of grooming? Wasn’t there some kind of natural oil involved? Ugh. I never liked thinking about glands.

I settled for a quick rinse. Some of the feathers seemed crooked, so I straightened them. Stepping out of the shower, I dried off with a towel. The feathers seemed to mostly dry themselves.

Going back out into the room, I tried a few slow, experimental flaps. To my surprise, the slight downward force actually made me feel light on my hooves. I didn’t think I weighed that little, but—handwave—magic!

Through trial and error, I managed to get the proper beat pattern going well enough to hover a few inches off the floor. Cautiously, I rose a little higher. This was surreal. I didn’t have a single human experience to relate it to.

I looked up, my gaze lingering on the window for a moment. Nah, I wasn’t ready to fly outside yet. I’d either kill myself or look like a fool. Besides, it was getting dark and I had to go to work in the morning.



After the alarm clock woke me, I spent a few minutes staring at Jenna’s photo. I usually took it with me, but found no way to justify carrying my wallet since everything inside it was useless.

After putting the picture down in a safe place I went to have breakfast. Oven’s was open for business, despite the early hour. Celestia hadn’t even raised the sun yet. I shook my head, still confounded by the strangeness that one sentence could contain.

A couple of other customers were in the café when I walked in. A few more came through the door behind me. I sat down on a stool at the bar and placed my order. At least they had eggs, so breakfast was remarkably similar to what I was used to. It was hard to believe that an omelet could make me so homesick.

A white unicorn dropped onto the stool beside me. She smiled, although most of her face was obscured by a spiky blue mane and giant purple sunglasses. “Sorry if I’m crowding your space. This place is packed.”

I nodded. I must have arrived at the right time, because now the café was getting full. I finished eating, paid the bill, and got up to go.

It had taken a few tries to grip the table knife between both hooves and cut the omelet and then use the same maneuver to raise the fork to my mouth. I had seen a few other ponies not bothering and just sticking their faces in the plate.

Outside, I paused for a moment, checking my reflection in the window. No need to show up to work with breakfast still on my face. I walked through the front door of Canterlot Machining and Carpentry a few minutes early.

Bend found me. “Hey Miller, I’m filling out the employee records. Do you have some kind of identification to prove your name?”

My heart sped up. “Uh, not with me.”

He looked at me for a few seconds. “Do you have an ID?”

I thought about my driver’s license, but the less said about that, the better. I could lie to him, but that would only buy me a little time. “I don’t have an ID.”

He considered it. “Well, I suppose we can work around that. From what I’ve seen, you’re a good worker.”

My breathing began to calm down as Bend walked away. I thought it was a little odd that he was willing to do that on only the second day after meeting me, but too relieved to care.

The door opened and a pony came in. Being the closest, I walked over to him. “Good morning. What can I do for you?”

“Nothin’ too hard,” he said. “I busted a board in my wagon. Just need a new one cut to size.”

“Bring it in and let’s have a look at it.” I pulled on the latch and slid the large door open. Sawtooth came over to have a look at the carpentry that would be involved. One of the planks in the side of the wagon needed to be replaced.

I took the measurements and calculated the cut before Sawtooth finished selecting a new board from stock. He seemed impressed, but said, “This needs to be a careful job to fit just right. I’d probably better do it.”

Nodding, I grabbed the other end of the board to hold it steady while he cut. I didn’t know if I would ever become more coordinated with my hooves, but until I figured out how to be more graceful I was happy with a supporting role.

While Sawtooth was attaching the new board to the wagon, Steelie came over. “Know anything about blueprint drafting?”

“I’ve done some of it,” I told him.

“I’ve got this idea in mind, but I’ve never been good at drawing,” he said. I wondered how he expected me to manage without fingers to hold a pencil.

“Make a sketch and I’ll see if I can improve on it.” That would give me an opportunity to see how a pony wrote so I could copy it. Steelie got a scrap of paper and picked up the pencil with his teeth. He drew a roughly circle-shaped figure.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a wheel.”

I nodded. “Okay…”

“I had this idea,” he explained. “Trains use steel wheels, so why not adapt a lighter version to carriages? They would never break like wood spokes, and it would be easier to integrate center bearings. I figure we could sell them as replacement equipment.”

I nodded. “Makes sense, although I’m not sure if I could draw that. I do know quite a bit about strength-to-cross section and mass balancing, so if you make it, I can help fine-tune it.”

He laughed. “It’s a deal, thanks.”

Bucket called for me. I went to see what he wanted. He was working on a large framework that was going to be used as a flag stand for races at the coliseum. It was an elegant cantilevered design, but a real pain to assemble.

“Would you mind standing up there?” he asked. “It needs just a little pressure to get these last few bolts put in.”

The platform was above my head. I was just about to look around for a ladder when I remembered that I could fly. Well, theoretically. Bucket looked at me expectantly. I unfurled my wings and cautiously hovered up to where I needed to go.

Bucket looked a little impatient by the time I got there. He said, “A little more pressure.”

“Huh? I only weigh so much.”

“Stop floating.”

I had been standing up there gingerly. Even this relatively short platform was beginning to set off my fear of heights. I realized that I felt light on my hooves. Was it some kind of crazy magic reducing gravity’s effect on me? That would explain how pegasi could fly with wings that were disproportionately small.

I tried to imagine myself being pulled downwards, and my body began to feel closer to its normal weight. That seemed to satisfy Bucket, and he installed the bolts.

Another stallion came through the door and I saw him talking quietly to Bend. The newcomer wore a gold chain and sunglasses. I was too far away to pick up the conversation. I had just turned away to get down from the platform when Bend called to me. “Hey Miller!”

I trotted over, taking off my safety glasses. Bend introduced me. “This is Duster. He’s a regular customer.”

The stallion was a unicorn. His cutie mark was something that looked like a pile of fine yellow grains. Gold dust?

I said hello and Duster looked me up and down. To Bend he said, “Looks like we’ve got delivery capability to Cloudsdale now.”

I thought Bend looked annoyed. I couldn’t blame him. I had taken a dislike to Duster from the moment we met.

“I’d like to have that done by tomorrow,” the unicorn said, referencing something from his conversation with Bend that I hadn’t heard. He turned and went out the door.

I looked at my boss. Bend said, “Tomorrow we’ll have you fly the cart to Cloudsdale for a couple of jobs that are scheduled. One of them is dropping off a project we’ve been working on for Duster.”

Fly a cart? I wondered. The shop had a utility wagon, but it certainly didn’t have wings. I nodded and said nothing.

The rest of the day was spent on various projects. Bend paid me again, and I hoped that soon I would have enough saved so that I could get a scheduled paycheck like everypony else. Maybe I could find a bank to get a loan, but they would probably ask for ID.

I rushed to the library after work and pleaded with the librarian to let me grab a few books before the building closed for the night. I got one that I had spotted before but hadn’t read. The title was Pegasus Flight Mechanics. I also made sure to check out an atlas.

Back in my rented room, I pored over the material, discovering that Cloudsdale was a floating city, actually built in the sky to the northwest of Canterlot. It was where they made the weather. Magic was quickly becoming a swear word to me because of things like this.

So, I had one night to learn how to effectively fly, and only an old textbook for reference. The question was not if this would end bady, but how badly.