> Breakdown
>  by McPoodle
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1: The Boy in the Bubble
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


PonyEarthverse:

Breakdown



Chapter 1: The Boy in the Bubble





Day 10 (Thorsday), 9:38 am PDT




I was awakened from a troubled dream by the bleating of a car horn.

For a moment, I tried to recall...there was a sea wall getting uncomfortably close, and the sound of the foghorn had become my chauffeur’s insistent greeting as I had regained consciousness, so that would mean...

Ah, yes. The “Wreck of the Hesperus” dream. The intended message being that my pride would inevitably lead to a precipitous fall from grace.

My professional training has a bad habit of draining the magic out of dreams. I had been having this particular dream at odd intervals for five years now, and all the positive visualization in the world didn’t look like it was having any effect in dispelling it.

The car horn ignored my musings.

I tried to get up, but I found that I had strangely lost the ability to move freely. I struggled mightily, pulling and straining, before finally yanking the bed sheets free and tumbling to the ground between the bed and my mirror-mounted closet.

I sat up, looked around me, and discovered something unprecedented and horrifying had happened:

I wasn’t going to be able to make it to the golf game this morning.

Well, what did you think had happened?


(% % %)


My name is Dr. Nathan K. Franklin. I am by trade a clinical psychologist, specializing in the treatment of the sons and daughters of the rich and famous; and it is a very lucrative position for me, thank you very much. I live in Malibu, California, and I possess both a lovely seaside chateau and a well-apportioned sailing vessel. Or in other words:

“My name is Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht.”

Yes, I imagine at least some of you ran that particular Bugs Bunny quote through your head after reading my self-description. If movie, TV show or book has a stereotypical psychologist in it, I am more than likely familiar with it—a side effect of working with teenagers that don’t fit in well with their peer group. Yes, I actually have a tax-deductible excuse for keeping up with the latest in geek culture.

I was being driven into my office by my chauffeur. He had only been working for me for a month or so, so I hadn’t learned his name yet. Understand, I’m normally good with names. I simply need to prioritize, you know. He might quit on me like the last two did.

Being driven really is the way to travel in Southern California. The traffic is simply unendurable otherwise. It is my firm belief that the city of Los Angeles represents the very summit of human civilization, but alas, such perfection of culture and vibrancy of capitalistic success must have a few costs. The only significant ones in my opinion are the aforementioned traffic and the smog, but I’ve learned to deal with both of them. Just get yourself a driver, and never spend any significant span of time outside of air conditioned buildings and vehicles.

The outdoors are overrated, in my humble opinion.

I spent my time on my iPad, scanning the latest news. The presidential election was turning into a battle of the polls, with each new one claiming to prove that all of the previous ones were completely worthless. Whoever won, there was some debate as to how the eventual winner’s term would be measured. If the inauguration waited until January, for instance, that would mean that the equivalent of several years by the old calendar would have passed, and to allow his administration to last until 2016? Well assuming he didn’t die of old age, it would surely make the incumbent the longest governing president in American history. That’s what having days like Marsday and Thorsday leads to.

And so it came back to ponies. Everything came back to ponies sooner or later nowadays; “these are the days of miracle and wonder”, as Paul Simon told us in one of his more enigmatic songs, and tiny Technicolor equines are at the heart of it all. Unicorns are real, godlike beings walk the earth on delicate little hooves, and this week and the next have miraculously recomposed themselves to each consist of 365 days, and each one has a sillier name than the last. Nobody’s taken credit for that last absurdity, but the timing suggests ponies. The number of these beings on this world increase day by day as one human after another awakes to find themselves in a new body, but to what end? Take the number two story on the Los Angeles Times website for example, all about a pony not being shot in one of the flyover states. This on a website that probably documented dozens if not hundreds of individual deaths of humans within a hundred mile radius of my current position and the past twenty-four hours before the present moment. And the Times is one of the worse-run news organizations in the country.

This is of course terribly unfair to this individual, who by a quick scan of the contents of the article went through absolute hell. It’s always good to be reminded that the little things in life still matter. Now I don’t mean to brag, but because of that “pop culture excuse” I mentioned before, I’m probably one of the few members of my age group to actually know what My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was before this whole mess began. There’s a small chance I might even recognize the name of the pony in question...

Fluttershy. The name of an Element of Harmony is only mentioned in the last paragraph and is nowhere near the headline. Did I mention that the Times is run by morons? You would think they would have hired at least one brony by now.


(% % %)


I reached the gleaming glass and steel tower where my office resides after an hour and a half of driving by my chauffeur. That works out to an average of 25 miles an hour on the highways—not bad for a weekday. I had spent the time after finishing my perusal of the news lecturing my driver on the way he should have woken me this morning.

I didn’t catch him talking back once. He may last long enough for me to need to know his name after all.

Since I had slept through half of a golf game, that meant that I had arrived for work a half hour before I had scheduled my first appointment of the day. I used the time organizing paperwork, of which there was very little. My secretary, Sally, possesses the exemplary qualities of studiousness and obsequiousness—my very own Twilight Sparkle, if we are to keep with the pony theme from earlier. Eventually, however, my initial client arrived (we call them “clients” nowadays, not “patients”), and she was shown into my office.

Her name was...well, I should show some discretion, I suppose. I shall call her “Lillian Disney”, because she was nothing like Lillian Disney whatsoever. She was the youngest of three daughters of a good old-fashioned studio mogul, and she had nothing mentally wrong with her whatsoever. Well, I suppose I could say that she suffered from the terrible, terrible condition of not getting as much attention as she thought she deserved. She was accompanied by a sizeable deposit into my bank account.

I liked to schedule Lillian first on Tuesdays (or Thorsdays...) because it was an excellent chance to zone out after a rousing game of...yes, well I think I have run that golf game subject completely off the table by now. I shall not speak of it again. What I mean to say is that, having nothing truly wrong with her, and knowing full well that she cared nothing for my opinion of her, the only real reason for her visits was to get her out of a couple of her more-boring classes and a chance for her to vent at someone guaranteed not to vent back.

“So I did my exercise of trying to see things from somebody else’s point of view,” she began, “when I swear, why did Cathy of all girls turn into a pony?” She didn’t even seem to notice the attempt at empathy being cancelled out by her usual narcissism.

“Well, who can say what—” I began, when I was interrupted, as I always am interrupted when I try to do my job around Miss Disney.

“She was already, like the most-popular girl in school,” Lillian continued, not even bothering to look at me, “so it wasn’t like she needed the extra attention! And that pegasus she turned into...Cloudy Skies? She so totally made her up!”

I’ve heard some of the names the more desperate bronies named their OC’s. This name sounded like the real thing. But of course I wasn’t being paid to prove my clients wrong, so I decided to say nothing.

Oh wait, there was a pause in her monologue, so that meant she actually wanted to hear what I had to say. “And what sort of pony would you become, if you had the chance?” I asked her.

I won’t inflict upon you the voluminous description she provided, other than to say that of course it was an alicorn of a type never before seen by pony eyes. I tuned her out once she mentioned dragon’s blood.


(% % %)


I arranged to meet with a couple of friends at 11:30 that morning at a nice little Italian cafe located on the campus of the neighboring University of California, Los Angeles. These were the two individuals I stood up by oversleeping this morning. I like the university because it is within walking distance, because it was my undergraduate alma mater, and because some of my best friends from those years still work there. I dislike it because I have to walk past the corner of Westwood and Le Conte to get there.

Westwood and Le Conte is the preferred confrontation spot for every conceivable cause, all neatly grouped in pairs to glare at each other, because heaven forbid that there ever be more than two sides to an issue.

The subject de jure was, you guessed it, ponies. On one side you had the Day Guard, emulating Princess Celestia’s protectors in their defense of the basic human rights of ponies. And on the other side you had the People Against Ponies Association (PAPA), which would much prefer if ponies went away, and took their troublesome rights with them. Shouting both from left and right, and all I had to do was walk right though without becoming a target of either of them. You might think this aggravation isn’t worth the bother, but I assure you, Cafe 1919 is definitely worthy.

My lunch companions when I finally arrived that morning were Dr. Norton Nimnul, a biochemist researching for the university, and Dr. Nyssa of Traken, a computer language theorist also with the university.

I hope you’ve realized by now that I will be providing unusual aliases for all of the characters in this story who have any hope of retaining their privacy. It’s what passes for humor among us psychologists.

“Well in my opinion,” said Norton over a meatball sandwich, “if the so-called junk DNA of the human genome were repurposed, you ought to be able to fit not only an entire equine dataset, but also the means for an overnight transformation between forms with room to spare!”

“Wait,” said Nyssa, putting a spoon back down into her bowl of Italian wedding soup. “Isn’t this the same theory you used to explain werewolves?”

“Well,” Norton said with a dismissive wave of one hand, “the crucial difference there is that werewolves do not actually exist, while ponies...do.”

“Yes, and it only took you a week to admit it,” I said smugly. I was eating the Florentino panini, if you must know.

“Where did the prodigious amount of energy for such a transformation come from?” Nyssa added, certain that she had caught Norton out.

“Oh, from an extremely high-efficiency metabolism,” Norton answered with pride. “I figure your average brony went into the process weighing 250 pounds, and came out as a 40 pound pony. Don’t quote me on the latter figure.”

Nyssa and I gave that idea the scornful look it fully deserved.

Finally, I broke my scowl with a laugh. “Face it,” I told Norton, “your way of looking at the world is now dead, and mine—”

“‘Reigns supreme’?” suggested Nyssa archly.

“Well, I wouldn’t have used precisely those words,” I said.

“And what would that paradigm of yours be?” the programmer asked. “Norton here sees the world through the prism of exact rules, of proportions to mix chemicals that give rise to predetermined results, while I see the world through a web of shifting symbols representing intelligible concepts. What do you see?”

“I see a world as shaped by consensus,” I told them, leaning forward with eagerness. “Reality by majority rule. The idea that there was ever an objective reality separate from our perceptions was always but a weakly supported belief, enforced by Western societies for a few brief centuries, and now with ponies walking amongst us, it is fully overthrown. People always say that history is written by the winners, when in fact the history that is recorded is the most-entertaining tale of what happened, whether that tale makes you look good or bad. Consider the fondness of the English towards the story of Joan of Arc for example, a story in which they are the villains. What we have playing out before our eyes in real time is a tale on the level of an ancient epic, complete with a noble quest and an almost-certain confrontation with one of a number of absolute evils. Oh, and magic, heaping gobs of magic.”

“Uh huh,” Norton said skeptically. “Well I don’t know about so-called magic, except the kind you wield when you try to use those persuasion powers of yours.”

“I never talked you into doing anything you later regretted,” I said with care.

Well, there was that one blackjack table back in ’09, but I made sure that he doesn’t remember that anymore, so it doesn’t count.

What? Don’t look at me like that.


(% % %)


You may be sensing a theme of “ponies” in my story thus far. You would be correct, and you’ll be interested to know that it has no chance of abating any time soon.

I returned from the cafe to see that the protest and counter-protest had disbursed, almost certainly with the help of the local constabulary.

After returning to the serenity of my office, I saw Willy McCoy, age 14, who had been bussed over from Olympic Boulevard. Willy’s one of the cases I take without remuneration, much like a rich lawyer will agree to defend the occasional poor soul caught up in the justice system. He comes from the area of Los Angeles I used to work at, before a rather-unexpected turn six years ago put me on my current upward trajectory.

Unlike Lillian, Willy came by his bronydom honestly, and he paid the price you’d expect from a sensitive male student at a tough public high school. My treatment for him worked in tandem with his martial arts instruction—I like to think that my contribution was more significant to the improvement of his self-esteem than that of his sensei, but I can’t really say for sure.

It took a good half-hour of wading through rumors of the upcoming third season of Friendship Is Magic, discussions of the relative merits of a particular musician’s rap vs. orchestral pony music videos, and a reiteration—for the eighteenth time no less—of the artistic worthlessness of “Cupcakes”, before he was finally ready to discuss what was really bothering him.

“It’s just that I don’t think it’s fair who’s being turned into a pony,” he told me. “I mean, yeah, the Bearers are alright. But what’s Stan Gable doing as Midnight Sentry? It didn’t make him any less of a jerk.”

Stan Gable played offensive guard of the football team at the school Willy attended, and was also his chief tormentor. This change must have happened over the past week. As for the specific pony...

“Is Midnight Sentry Twilight’s brother?” I asked.

“No, that’s Shining Armor,” Willy corrected me. “Midnight Sentry is a thestral OC, one of Princess Luna’s royal guards.”

The guard became a guard. “Ah, that would make a good match,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t!” yelled Willy.

I of course did as I have been trained and asked him to explain why I was wrong. Willy was perfectly alright at confronting me with my errors; it was just everybody else in the world that he needed a dose of self-confidence to deal with.

“A royal guard’s duty is to protect the Princesses and, by extension, all of the ponies,” Willy told me. “All Stan’s doing is goofing off with his dumb friends and using his pony powers to pick on the rest of us. I don’t think he even listens to his pony.”

This is another valuable trait of a trained psychologist, to never give away one’s true feelings by way of, say rolling one’s eyes and sighing dramatically. The bronies quite obviously transformed themselves into fictional characters using the magic that this world is now flooded with, just as somebody else used the same magic to wreak havoc on the calendar. This idea that the ponies harbor the spirits of their namesakes within them is just self-delusion.

Of course, if I had an actual pony as a client, I would be able to prove this assertion, but so far I haven’t been lucky enough to have one of my brony clients turn on me, and, well, there are laws on the books to prevent me from doing the sorts of things that I’d like to do if I had no scruples whatsoever.

What? I’m a scientist. We’re all like that. Don’t let any of us try to trick you into thinking otherwise. “I’ll show you, I’ll show you all!” is a sort of sweet tune piping at the back of our heads. The point is, of course, that we do have scruples, else we’d become Researcher Twilights.

That’s two Twilight Sparkle references so far, in case you’re counting.

Anyway, listening skills are vitally important for somebody in my line of business, so while I was quietly ranting to myself just now, I was also keeping track of my client’s words. After carefully backing away from the implication that the princesses actually needed anypony to protect them, he went on to state that the Bearers, and the ponies that accompanied them—in their travels across states and quite possibly continents in their epic quest—needed all the help they could get. In fact, if he was this Midnight Sentry character instead of Master Gable, he’d set right out and—

And that’s when the police came barging in. No, Willy wasn’t in trouble, and I sent him on his way after deflecting his questions. The reason Officer Wiggum came for a visit was that he needed my help with a teenage robbery suspect who wouldn’t tell where she was hiding the goods. You see, the police and I have an informal (and not entirely legal) arrangement for cases when they have somebody they need to talk in a hurry. Per our arrangement, I had been given the complete police file, and enough time to get everything prepared for my deception.





To give you the full effect, let me describe what was going through Little Lulu’s head as she was being herded towards my door:

Today has been a bad day. In fact, to use her vernacular, it positively “sucks”. Her eighth consecutive attempt to steal computers from local elementary schools ended for once in failure instead of success when an off-duty mall cop caught her attempting to flee from an unexpectedly armed security system with a half-dozen hard drives stuffed in the pockets of her long jacket.

Every moment after that had been a constant harassment. The few adults who don’t hate on her for breaking the law or who either use or threaten physical force to put her back in her place in the social hierarchy are all a bunch of fakers, pretending sympathy for her in order to earn a buck. And now, because she was too wise for the “good cop, bad cop” routine, she’s being handed off to some fancy shrink. Well, she’ll show him.

The door is opened, she’s shoved inside, and it’s slammed shut behind her, with a strange sound like a quiet airlock being cycled. The first thing she notices is the heat—it’s got to be a hundred degrees in here. She tries to step forward, only to have her foot unexpectedly slowed down by the thick shag carpeting. The room is circular, mostly, except for the wall containing the door, and all of that circle is glass, revealing a jaw-dropping view of the City of Angels in mid-afternoon. It’s even tinted so you can look out at this time of day without getting a headache.

She looks around. There’s an impressively large set of filing cabinets on one side, and an imposing desk with a swivel chair at the other. Behind the desk is a high-end sound system, playing something too faint to be clearly made out. It sounds Classical—strings and flutes, backed by a slow but insistent rhythm. Between the desk and the cabinets is the kind of couch she’d always imagined in a place like this, and lying face-down on that couch is the shrink, Dr. Franklin. He has himself propped up on one arm, and he’s using the other to fill out some paperwork with a pen. Her paperwork, Lulu is certain. The man’s shoes had been tossed haphazardly in a corner, while lying next to him are a navy blue blazer and a bright red necktie that looks like it had been loosened and pulled over his head to save him having to retie it the next time somebody forced him to wear it.

Dr. Franklin is a tall man, and very fit—he was probably a hunk back in the 90’s, she thinks to herself. His hair is short, and also mussed—thereby proving the theory about the tie. He’s wearing tan slacks and a pale blue polo shirt, and has on a pair of large glasses with black square rims. Waiting for him on the corner of his desk is a scotch on the rocks. It’s not even on a coaster.

“Hey,” Lulu says.

“Hey,” Dr. Franklin replies in a bored tone. “I still have to fill this crap out, so make yourself comfortable. Oh, and sorry about the heat—the unit’s busted.”

She looks behind her, and spots the open bar. “Can I pour myself a drink to cool off?” she asks sarcastically.

He glances back at her for a second, and clearly sees that she’s underage. “Take whatever you want,” the man says, turning back to his work. His words are perfectly in time with the rhythm of the song on the stereo.

Whoa, she thinks to herself. He could totally get arrested for that. Seeing what else the bar is stocked with, she decides to push even more buttons by lighting up a Virginia Slims. “Do you mind?” she asks, expertly blowing a smoke ring his way.

He looks straight at her as the ring breaks around his rugged face, not even blinking at the moment it hits. He picks up the paperwork and points at it. “What do you want me to put down?” he asks, and then he stands up.

He’s freakin’ tall!

The question the shrink asks is so unexpected to Lulu that it takes several seconds for her to process it. That, and it’s getting real hot in here. “Uh, what’s the question?” she asks.

“The cops want to know where you and your driver stashed the PC’s before you fenced them,” he says, perching himself on the edge of his desk and toying with the drink. “Which bullshit location would you like to send them to first?” His words are regular and even, spaced according to the beat of the song.

Lulu grips the cigarette between her teeth like F.D.R. and laughs out loud. “What’s your angle?” she asks.

“No angle,” he says, holding up both hands. He glances over at the one holding the scotch, and then takes a swig before hopping down. “They think I’m some kind of miracle worker who’ll do whatever I’m told,” he says, working himself up, “but I just like helping people in trouble, so screw ‘em! I mean, I’m sure you can convince those bastards that you’ve got a whole gang of followers that moved the loot out of the dump you’re going to tell me about the minute after you were picked up.”

“Yeah,” she says with a nod. “Yeah, I like that plan!” Her words too are now matching the music’s tempo. She starts pacing back and forth—the air seems thick and sticky, like the smoke she exhaled earlier has congealed into cotton candy. “We could...we could send them to the dumps! The real garbage dumps!”

“Yeah!” he exclaims, “I’d love to see the look on their faces after having to dig through this for a few hours.” As he says this, he fiddles with his iPad. Walking beside her, he shows her a Google Maps overhead view of a junk heap. “What do you think? This ring of cars?”

“No, how about that pile over there,” she says, pointing. “It looks like it could fall right on top of those pigs!”

He’s...he’s so close to her. She can almost make out his scent underneath the expensive cologne.

“Alright,” he whispers in her ear. “Now with that taken care of, what else can I help you with?”

Lulu thinks back to the look on her lover’s face as he took off in her car, leaving her to take the blame. “Do you think you can help me get back at Tubby?” she asks. The combination of the heat, the music, and the smoke is causing her to sway back and forth.

“Yeah, I think I can do something,” he says, bringing his hands up to her temples. There is a slight press inwards...and the cigarette drops to the floor.





Little Lulu was now hypnotized, and completely in my power. I finally let out the pent up coughing from that ghastly cigarette smoke, took another sip of the doctored apple juice that my client probably thought was scotch, and then got to work.

After gently placing her on the couch, I sat down behind the desk and spent the next two hours learning the details of her life story that were not captured in her police file. I also found out exactly where she and “Tubby” had hid their stolen electronics, just so the police wouldn’t start to question what I actually do with their suspects. And then I begin to make my adjustments.

“You think you’re better than all of the richer people you encounter on a daily basis,” I concluded. “You are probably right in your assumption, but you are wrong in thinking that your best revenge is by stealing from them. Your best revenge in fact is to become one of them by getting a job, manipulating your way up the social ladder, and then subverting the system from within. Since I know you will never follow this advice if you knew it came from an authority figure like myself, I want you to think the idea is yours.” I got up and walked over to the window, looking out at the broad expanse of buildings and streets to the northeast, in the direction of Beverly Hills. The mesmerized eyes of my client remained looking at my empty chair as I resumed speaking. “As soon as you can afford it, you need to move out your current home and into an apartment in a better neighborhood; that alone will solve a great deal of your current problems.

“Next,” I told her as I returned to my seat, “you have a bad habit of falling in love with men who try to dominate you, despite them being totally unworthy of you. This is a negative way of thinking trained into you by the bad example of what happened between your parents. If you were one of my regular clients, I would gradually help you to realize that these thoughts are harmful, and how we can best retrain your brain to think more useful thoughts, but I only have the one afternoon, so I guess I’ll have to re-write your memories instead.” I thought for a bit on the best way to do this. “From now on, you will believe as you did when you were a child, that your father did not abandon you, that he was a secret agent roaming the country doing good deeds. You will remember the letters he wrote back in reply to your own, praising you for your accomplishments and inspiring you with tales of his own until he died saving thousands of lives. These letters were unfortunately destroyed in the fire that claimed your mother’s life, but you will never forget them.”

I had her invent the contents of some of these letters that I had just planted in her mind, inventions that instantly became false memories. As I suspected, she was imaginative as well as intelligent. “These are the slogans that will shape your life,” I told her, “that I want you to repeat back to me: I am strong.”

“I am strong,” she echoed.

“I am independent.”

“I am independent.”

“I will only love somebody who loves and respects me for who I am.”

“I will only love somebody who loves and respects me for who I am.”

I walked over to the stereo. “Now, when I turn off the music, you will awaken not remembering anything that happened after you said Tubby’s name to me,” I said. “You will be angry at yourself at letting him manipulate you. You will help the police to catch him, you will accept the punishment that the court imposes, but once that is done, you will transform your life.”

“For Daddy,” said Lulu, surprising me.

“Yes,” I said with a grateful grin. “For Daddy. Oh, and you’ll hate smoking with a passion.” And I turned the music off.

I suppose you’re going to try to judge me for what happened in that little scene. Think what you like. But know that I harbor no shame, no regrets.

I have a gift for influencing others, a gift enhanced by art and technology. And I possess the superior intellect to know how best to use this gift to improve mankind. I am fully justified in what I do.
> Chapter 2: A Hoof in Mouth
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 2: A Hoof in Mouth





Day 10 (Thorsday), 5 pm PDT




The reason why any of you have any idea who I am is because of my monthly appearances on Buster Friendly’s talk show. (Now I’m getting ridiculous—you all know full well who “Buster Friendly” really is.) My chauffeur dropped me off at his studio at 5 pm; who should be waiting for me in the parking lot but Mr. Friendly himself.

“Nathan,” he said to me, “why didn’t you answer my calls?”

“Ah, my secretary must have blocked you by mistake,” I said contritely.

That Sally—always looking out for me.

“So, was there an update in the Goldie Lochs case?” I asked, referring to the subject I was expected to pontificate on.

“Yeah, it busted wide open three hours ago,” he told me. “Turns out she wasn’t kidnapped at all, just lying to cover up a romantic romp with a boy she met on Rum Cay.”

“Oh,” I said, collecting my thoughts. “That isn’t so bad. I could switch from talking about the psychology of abduction to the psychology of seduction or deception.”

“No, I don’t think anybody cares about Miss Lochs anymore,” Buster told me.

“Oh,” I said, looking around me at the bleak car park. I wished I hadn’t sent my nameless chauffeur off to his dinner break.

“What do you know about ponies?” he asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“Ponies?” I asked. “Do you mean the kind kids get rides on at the circus, or the kind that talks?”

“Of course I mean the kind that talks!” Buster snapped at me. “I tried to get Dr. Hugh Lofting of the San Diego Zoo lined up to replace you and talk about the animal aspects of pony personality, but he claimed he was helping a walrus through a difficult delivery or some other lame excuse. The nerve of that guy! So how about you go on to cover it from the opposite angle?”

Now it’s one thing to switch around which aspect of a privileged young woman’s life you want to pry into, but quite another to switch to the interface between human and animal psychologies with no advance preparation whatsoever.

“Well, I don’t know...” I hedged.

“Did I mention that I’ve got exclusive video of that Fluttershy pony who got plastered all over the news this morning? Our ratings will go through the roof!”

I had the self-control to give the illusion that I was actually hesitating for a few seconds before I leapt at the offer of more free publicity than I’d know what to do with.


(% % %)


I was sitting in the Green Room a half hour later waiting for my cue when an intern came in and changed the channel from the live feed of the studio set to a Campbell’s Soup commercial.

“You’re going to want to see this,” he explained. “They’ve got some pony news after the break.”

“Mmm-mmm good!” sang the Campbell’s Kids.

“Breaking news,” the photogenic anchor announced as the news program resumed. “The ponies named Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie have revealed that a powerful spirit of chaos named Discord is behind many of the inexplicable events that have been occurring over the past two weeks, including quite possibly the appearance of the ponies themselves.”

The video of the anchor’s concerned face cut to amateur video of two ponies who appeared to be jogging in place. One of them was quite obviously Fluttershy, the identification greatly aided by the fact that she was unclothed. The other was wearing a long black coat with glimpses of a shirt and pants underneath, so only the head and mane were really visible, but this was more than enough to confirm that this was Pinkie Pie.

“What’s going to happen in New York?” asked the off-camera voice of a young woman.

Correction, the ponies were not jogging, they were playing Dance Dance Revolution. A defective machine, apparently, because there was a faint “eee” sound coming from it underneath the happy music it was playing.

Two ponies were giving a vitally needed Q&A session...while playing Dance Dance Revolution.

This was Pinkie Pie, though, so I really shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Hmm,” said Pinkie, her little orange tongue sticking out as she thought. “Either we’re going to take care of Discord, or we’re going to take care of—wait, did, was the whole Discord thing public knowledge? Fric—”

The image of Pinkie froze, her mouth still opened. On any normal person or pony given this treatment, she’d look like an idiot. For Pinkie Pie for whatever reason, she looked like she was accepting the Nobel Prize in Physics.

“‘We’re going to take care of Discord’,” the anchor quoted. “Now who precisely is Discord? With me is Mitchell Larson, screenwriter of the episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic where this character first appeared. Mr. Larson, who is Discord?”

The somewhat nervous young man sitting beside the anchor looked at his hands. “Discord is a spirit of Disharmony who plagued Equestria in the past. His powers are nearly limitless.”

“Would you call him a god?” the newsman asked.

“Well, that might be going a bit far,” Larson said. “But he can shape reality to his will.”

“So the changing of the calendar would be something in his power.”

“Oh yes,” Larson said with some enthusiasm. “That is both something that he could do, and that would be in his character. I don’t know why anybody would think that the ponies could have been responsible for that.”

“Yes, that appears to be supported by a later part of the same video,” the anchor said, introducing the next clip:

“Here is one from Antibrony,” said the unseen questioner, “says, ‘Are the ponies trying to take over the world?’”

“Most of the ponies are scared,” replied Fluttershy, “and want to keep Discord from taking over this world, so... no? I don’t think so.”

As she was saying this, a shaking hand was slowly approaching the head of an unsuspecting Pinkie Pie. It was at this point that I figured out that the “eee” sound was coming from the owner of that hand. The hand darted back out of view just as Pinkie Pie turned her head to add something to Fluttershy’s answer.

I would have liked to have heard what that answer was, but the video cut off at that point.

“What do you think Discord’s long term plans for humanity are, Mr. Larson?”

Larson had himself a good laugh at that question. “Discord doesn’t have long-term plans. He simply satisfies whatever whims come into his head. On Equestria, he made it rain chocolate milk out of cotton candy clouds.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” offered the anchor.

“He also corrupted the personality of the ponies who got in his way, causing them to act entirely opposite to their character, and with full memory of what they did once they recovered.”

The anchorman closed his mouth with an audible snap. “Oh.”

The producer of the news segment decided to save the star of the show further embarrassment by playing one last clip:

“How do you plan on stopping Discord?” the questioner asked.

“Secret plans,” Fluttershy said, hiding behind her hair. “Not allowed to talk about them.”

“But you can help!” Pinkie Pie cried out, leaning into the camera. “Simply make a donation to...whatever charity is helping us get to New York, and...Is there a charity like that?”

“I don’t think there is one,” Fluttershy said apologetically. 

Pinkie moved aside—while still dancing, mind you—to allow Fluttershy to have her spotlight.

“If anyone sends PayPal donations to erica2734@gmail.com it will help us get to New York,” the pegasus said.

The email address appeared in text at the bottom of the screen as the image faded to black.


(% % %)


The voice of Buster Friendly’s announcer rang out over the auditorium: “Our next guest first came to public notice six years ago, with his miraculous rehabilitation of the Wolf Girl of L.A. Please welcome world-renowned psychologist, Dr. Nathan Franklin.”

I would say something here about how I’m nowhere near as wonderful as the announcer was telling everyone I was, but I suspect that you wouldn’t believe me.

The curtains parted, and I walked out into the welcoming glow of the television spotlights. I waved warmly at the applauding audience and walked briskly to my seat, stopping only briefly to accept Buster’s handshake.

“Welcome to the show, Dr. Franklin,” Buster said.

“A pleasure, as always,” I said. “I am here to offer my expertise. What can I do to help?”

This is the same patter we do nearly every show. Actually, Buster Friendly has standard patters for all of his returning guests. It’s how he satisfies the need for control that got him into show business in the first place.

“I was wondering if you could help me...”—he swept a hand outward to include his audience—“...to help us, to understand the ponies.”

“Well, the ponies are people, just like we are,” I answered smoothly. “They cannot be boiled down to simple behaviors.”

“And yet they are different from us, in fundamental respects, yes?” he asked me.

Well here we were potentially going to get into trouble. I decided to deflect the question. “Physically, most certainly, they are different from us. But inside those changed bodies are human minds.”

“And something else,” Buster insisted.

“Well...” I said, with a well-practiced turn of the head and roll of the eyes. This produced the expected small burst of laughter in the audience, which served to diffuse Buster Friendly’s implied accusation.

But he would not be deterred so easily. “Roll the first video,” he instructed.

A fake YouTube frame appeared on the monitor in front of us, and appearing in the frame, in suitable YouTube quality, was the bedroom of a typical suburban young woman, currently occupied by a gray pegasus. “When I woke up, I was Derpy,” the pegasus said with a British accent. “It wouldn’t surprise me, It didn’t surprise me, I guess. The funny part is, my name is Danielle. Derpy, Danielle.... Nevermind. I bet you're wondering about the voice, It surprised me too. I know this may seem odd, but I’m looking for a ride. To New York, that is. Wish me the best of luck, I’m off to test these bad boys! I can’t just sit here. Goodbye everyone!”

Now Buster’s team had allowed me to see this video beforehand, so I had had more than enough time to think about it. In a way, this video is the entire “pony problem” all wrapped up into one pretty package. This pony is Derpy, a pony near and dear to my brony clients, and therefore a pony I knew perhaps even better than some of the Bearers. But this short video proved that I didn’t know her at all. In the actual cartoon series, she was a background pony, meant to be copy-and-pasted as necessary to fill in crowd scenes. But an animation mishap made her famous, and soon she was showing up more and more often. The fans named her “Derpy” because of the offset eyes of the original mistake, but she was also confused with “Ditzy”, an unseen pony blamed for an epic screw-up in another episode. She finally got a speaking part in an episode of the second season, but this was so close to a stereotypical “retarded” voice that it raised the ire of children’s advocacy groups and as of the end of the season, it looks like she’ll never appear in the show again. In the minds of my clients that care, and certainly in my own opinion, the mare’s voice and mannerisms belong to an amateur voice artist with the alias BaldDumboRat. Yet this voice matched neither of those. Left unanswered, though, is whether this is the “real” Derpy’s voice, or if it, like the entire personality of the pony, is the invention of Danielle.

So in the end, what could be said about this video? “In this video,” I commented, “we see a young woman newly transformed, and she is excited by what this means for her.”

“And...nothing else?” Buster Friendly prompted me.

“Not that I can see,” I told him with a shrug.

We next watched the Lauren Faust press conference video, which I do not need to quote for you. Here I was allowed to be even more confident in the humanity of the ponies presented thus far, as I had arranged with the producers to line up part of a press conference given by Mrs. Faust a year ago showing identical speech patterns.

“Well what do you think about this?” asked Buster, and then yet another video appeared on the monitor.

“Hey there everybrony!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed to the camera.

It was instantly obvious that this was from the same interview that the Discord revelations had been taken from. Both she and Fluttershy were standing on the same Dance Dance Revolution machine as before, but it was still in the “attractor mode”, so this was probably from near the beginning of the video.

“Fluttershy and I have decided to hold a little Q&A for all of you peeps that are watching our progress,” Pinkie continued. “But just watching ponies answering questions would be boring soooooooo... We’ll be dancing while we’re doing it! Say hi, deary.”

Fluttershy said something that might have been “hi”, but was nearly impossible to make out.

Pinkie proceeded to introduce the camera operator/invisible questioner and the “eee” lady while picking out the first song they would be dancing to.

“Seems human so far,” I said casually during a break in the conversation. “She’s simply getting into the spirit of her very enthusiastic character.”

“What’s it like being a pony?” the off-screen voice asked as the music started up. The ponies started dancing.

“It’s like being a pony,” Pinkie Pie answered with a straight face.

Now this was interesting. I am no expert on the personalities of cartoon characters, particularly those written by multiple writers, and therefore prone to variances in portrayal. But I could swear that that particular brand of deadpan humor was not Pinkie Pie’s style. Twilight Sparkle’s, perhaps, but never Pinkie’s. But once again, how to distinguish between a human speaking separately from her second pony personality and a role-player slipping out of character?

Fluttershy was providing her own answer, of which I missed the beginning. “...Like suddenly having six arms or something,” I heard her say, presumably about what it was like to become a pegasus, “but the pony whose body you get helps you out if you let them.”

Buster looked at me like he expected me to go into a heart attack at this last statement, but I merely smiled cryptically at him.

“Oh you just had to mention that bit,” Pinkie Pie grumbled, apparently agreeing with Buster, “now they’re all going to panic...”

The video froze. “Are you sure you don’t want to—” Buster began, trying to bait me.

“Keep playing,” I said calmly.

“Featherlover,” the questioner in the video said, naming the individual she had gotten the question from, “What do you both think of Gilda?”

Now it was obvious that Buster’s crew had spent hours editing this video, first to excerpt the Discord bits for use by the news division, and then to find the best bits to get a reaction out of me and the audience with. Why were they wasting time on the question of a side character, one who we’ve heard no evidence that she’s actually appeared on Earth yet?

Pinkie Pie took a while to respond. “She has a bit of an issue showing her feelings as she feels it would lead—“

“Stop!” I cried out, as I felt my comfortable universe slip out from under me. I sat there for a few moments in shock, collecting myself. Buster quietly pushed my designated water glass my way, and I obligingly took a sip as I collected myself. “Could you play back that last part, zooming in on Pinkie Pie’s eyes?” I asked with a trembling voice. “I want to catch her thinking about the question.”

There was a bit of a pause while the hard-working technicians in the producer’s booth processed my request.

“What do you both think of Gilda?” asked the interrogator.

If the human inside Pinkie’s head was role-playing, if she was imagining what the Gilda outside her one episode was like, then that initial flick of the eyes should have been to her upper right. That’s the way the visual system of most people is wired—if you don’t consciously control for it, your eyes give away what type of sensory input you are thinking about, as well as distinguishing between constructed vs. recalled thoughts. Every piece of pony footage I had seen so far supported the theory that this system worked just as well for them, making it a valid means of analysis. Accordingly, if the human in Pinkie Pie’s body was remembering the words that Gilda spoke in her episode, then that involuntary glance would have been straight (audio) left (recalled). But she looked to her lower left, and kept her eyes there for several seconds before she answered. That is the eye direction reserved for internal dialogue.

In other words, human Pinkie asked the real Pinkie in her head what she thought of Gilda, and then she summarized for the rest of the world the words that she had heard.

“It is true,” I heard myself saying, “there’s a foreign mind in that body!” Or perhaps it would be better to say that the human mind was the invader in a pony body. “They were just talking to each other at that moment.”

The video rewound and re-played the section I had studied in slow motion. As was no doubt the intention of Buster’s producer, the slowed-down voice in the video made Pinkie’s introspective glance look as unnerving and incriminating as possible.

“Well, you seemed to be convinced very quickly,” Buster said with a quiet chuckle.

The video was returned to its normal proportions and resumed. There was a question about Fluttershy’s near-death experience that I’m sure was there more to reassure those worried for the pony’s safety than for my analysis, although the flick of her eyes to her lower right both confirmed with her wince that she was physically reliving the event, as well as showing that the whole theory of involuntary eye movement did in fact map to ponies the same as it did for humans.

The video skipped ahead. “I turned into my OC pony,” the off-screen woman asked, quoting somebody else’s question, “and I can hear her voice in my head. What's happening?”

Well that sounded truly terrifying.

Pinkie Pie offered up a jaw-droppingly glib response, that must have sent the newly transformed pony into a tailspin of despair. Once again, this was an extremely un-Pinkie thing for her to say. On the show, she seemed to suffer from too much empathy, but here was an example of someone who’s empathy was drowned out by out of control reasoning.

Fluttershy meanwhile was delving into alternate universe theory, a theory she apparently got from human Pinkie Pie.

“Above all, DO NOT PANIC,” Pinkie concluded. “Take things calmly and rationally and rationally calmly.” The video suddenly stopped at this point. I wondered if it was to cut out another revelation for the news division.

So far I had a pretty good grip on what was going on with Pinkie Pie, but due to her shyness, I really couldn’t get a handle on her dance partner. “Could I see some footage featuring Fluttershy?” I asked.

“That’s coming right up,” Buster answered.

“What’s it like being an element of harmony?” was the next question posed.

“Well,” answered Fluttershy, “the obvious answer would be that I am forced to be kind. But it is more than that. I literally can’t think of being unkind, there’s a mental block there. For example, I have been trying not to use my wings because I feel like I could hurt Pinkie’s feelings.”

There was something...off about Fluttershy’s answers thus far, but I still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them. Once again, she was thinking about physical sensations, which caused her to look to her lower right, suggesting that she had actually felt the binding restrictions of the Element of Kindness. But considering that both ponies were wearing their elements, I couldn’t tell if she was referring to her experiences on Equestria or just on Earth.

“As for me,” Pinkie Pie began, and then she blinked. And in that blink she suddenly changed personalities. “Well, Kindness is pretty easily defined. All the elements are...except Laughter. Laughter can be used for the dark purposes more easily than any of the others, I mean, just look at the Joker!”

She kept going after this, but I wasn’t really taking it in, because I was still reeling from the fact that I was listening to a pony who hadn’t made an appearance in the interview before this very moment. The one and only real Pinkie Pie. And then I did grasp what she was talking about: the circumstances under which she might be liable to lose her mind and become the dreaded Pinkamena.

Of course, my thoughts turned to “Cupcakes”. None of the bronies I have ever treated have read more than the first paragraph of that infamous fanfiction, yet all are haunted by it.

“The human and pony personalities, they’re battling for control of her body at this very minute,” I told the audience.

The questioner posed a necessary follow-up: “Does Pinkamena actually have a basement reserved for cutting people up?”

Another blink, and human Pinkie had regained control. “Not in this world,” she said with a smirk, like it amused her that psychopathic pink ponies existed out there in the multiverse, bathing in the blood of their victims.

I may have begun to get emotionally invested by this point. I sort of missed the question about what it was like for each of them to wake up one day as their specific pony, although I did catch Fluttershy looking in the direction for recalling a visual memory as she talked, which definitely tagged her as human Fluttershy instead of her pony companion.

“How does Pinkie know Vinyl...and how does Rarity know Vinyl?” was the next question.

Vinyl, like Derpy, was a character that meant far more to fans than to the makers of the cartoon. The bronies who were musicians were particularly enamored with her.

“Well, I know her through the PARTY NETWORK OF EQUESTRIA!” replied pony Pinkie. By now I was getting pretty confident at telling the two personalities apart. Also, she was clearly recalling an audio memory of their first meeting. “And Rarity knows her... um...I dunno...Maybe they’re related?”

“Rarity met Vinyl during a gem convention, Vinyl was making...”

I tuned out the rest, because I finally had the evidence I was looking for: Fluttershy was recalling a story she heard from Rarity, and her eyes correspondingly looked straight left. Yet I was certain that she had the same personality as when she made her earlier statement about waking up in her new body.

There was only one way that Fluttershy could both remember Equestria and becoming a pony on Earth: if the two Fluttershy personalities had merged. I was looking at a freakish chimera, part pony, part human, with no reasonable chance that the two could ever be separated.

Perhaps this was human Fluttershy’s response to nearly being killed: unable to handle the stress, she effectively committed suicide.

I turned away, tears coming to my eyes. “I can’t...” I mumbled. “Please, stop the video.”

The video froze. In the resulting image, pony Pinkie looked confident, while merged Fluttershy looked defeated.

“The human who was in that pony,” I announced sadly, while pointing at Fluttershy, “is no more.”

Buster knew he wasn’t going to get a better line out of me than that, and so at his signal, the show cut to commercial.

“There, there,” he said softly, patting my hand. “There’s nothing you can do for her, poor soul.” After a few moments of watching me moping, he thought of a sure-fire way to lift my spirits. “How’s Selene doing?” he asked me.

He was right: the question did make me feel better. It was rare nowadays to encounter anybody who actually bothered to call the “Wolf Girl of L.A.” by her actual name.

“She’s started college up north,” I told him. “Most of her classmates don’t even know her history, and she’s done nothing to make them think she’s anything other than a normal pre-vet student.”

Besides being dehumanizing, the title “Wolf Girl of L.A.” was wrong in every conceivable way: After her abandonment, the child who would later name herself Selene lived on the outskirts of civilization, raising herself among a host of wild animals, that yes included some wolves, but in no way was she treated like an actual cub. Los Angeles was the city she was taken to after she was found, and a long way away from where she grew up. And in the definition of the word used by most who throw it around, Selene never was a “girl”; she was a baby left out on a ledge to die, and she made herself into a cunning creature capable of surviving anything the world had to throw at her. And then she made herself into a woman, with my meager help. I’m not displaying false modesty here—she programmed herself much more than benefit from anything I alone was able to do with her mind.

“Pre-vet?” asked Buster. “I wish her the best.”

“So do I,” I told him. “So do I.”


(% % %)


I spent the evening alone, as I spend most evenings.

I wondered what Discord had planned for Halloween. Perhaps he would transform every trick-or-treater into the form of whatever they dressed up as. But I suppose that would be way too predictable for him.

As for tonight, the news showed him attempting to woo Queen Chrysalis. There was definitely something else going on in the video, but I was no longer in the mood for analysis.

The pony princesses had disappeared. Discord’s doing, or mental breakdowns resulting from the titanic confrontation between the two most powerful personalities in the history associated with Friendship Is Magic, and the two near-gods of Equestria?

And Twilight Sparkle was in a coma. This one was most-definitely the cause of physical, not psychic trauma, but the latter certainly didn’t help in her recovery.

Suddenly, I was no longer in the mood to make snarky Twilight Sparkle references.

I entered a small soundproof booth located next to my bedroom to record a video for my YouTube channel. I wouldn’t call it a high-class recording booth, as I only used it for low-quality videos for my fans and clients, but it was adequate for my purposes.

“This video is linked to my appearance on the Buster Friendly Show,” I told the recording camera, “on the topic of the pony issue.” For a moment my mind blanked, as I tried to think of what to say next. “I would like to return to this topic.”

It was a lame ending, but I really couldn’t think of anything better. After re-recording myself without the pause in the middle, I uploaded the video and provided a link to my segment on NBS’s website in the description.

Something needed to be done. That was the thought that was running through my mind. I watched the video of my appearance on the show in search of inspiration. What I found was that I had done an awful job of controlling my emotions on television, as I made clear earlier.

I also realized that I probably hurt human Fluttershy’s feelings with my comments. Or what was left of human Fluttershy.

As I settled into bed with my ever-present iPad, I made my decision: I would not allow anything so horrible to happen to another brony trapped in a pony’s body, not as long as I could help it. It didn’t matter if the pony was ignorant of the crime against humanity it was committing; none of them should be allowed to absorb innocent human beings, ever again.

And starting tomorrow, I was going to do something about it. I had already searched out and watched the entire video that I had seen excerpts from this night. Now I was looking for who best to approach first, who most needed or had the best chance of being saved from losing themselves forever in what they thought was their fondest fantasy. I found that combining “real” with the name of a pony from the show gave me the best results.

While searching for “Real Pinkie Pie”, I stumbled across a video on YouTube called “The IHOP Incident”.

It was a fake. It had to be. I mean, those things don’t go together in that place, at that time. I thought the Photoshopped gazelle was a good touch, though. I was even pretty certain where that footage had come from: a particularly memorable episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom that I saw when I was seven.

Actually, Pinkie Pie was the most-logical choice for my first pony client. From what I saw of her, her human half was tottering on the brink of self-destruction, and I was already envisioning ways to use my gift to build a wall between the two personalities. And while I’m in their mindscape...

There’s a science fiction story I remember fondly called The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s about a brilliant sleep researcher named Haber who discovers that his self-destructive patient harbors the ability to shape reality with his dreams. He decides to use this discovery for the betterment of mankind.

Or maybe it’s about an evil sleep researcher who exploits an unconscious reality shaper named Orr for his own selfish ends.

I tend to prefer the first interpretation, but of course I’m biased.

If I had complete control over Pinkie Pie, what couldn’t I do?

And then my search brought up a photo labeled “Real Pinkamena Diane Pie”. Saw with my own eyes what human determination wedded to pony insanity looked like.

And I remembered what happened to poor Dr. Haber at the end of The Lathe of Heaven, and what nearly happened to the entire world.

I think I’ll leave Pinkie Pie for later, after I’m more certain about what I am doing.

It was with that thought that I fell into an uneasy sleep.

And so my day ended as it began.

And tomorrow would reveal if my sudden resolution would bear any fruit.

> Chapter 3: Dr. Franklin Makes a House Call
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 3: Dr. Franklin Makes a House Call





Day 11 (Wagnesday, and Halloween), 10 am PDT




Wouldn’t you know it, none of my brony clients turned into ponies overnight. I just have the worst possible luck!

I gave myself a half-day of work, it being Halloween and all. (People dressed up as monsters from the id? Psychologist field day!) I must admit, I barely noticed my only client that day—he probably would have had to threaten suicide from atop my desk for me to have actually paid attention to him. Once my official duties were discharged and I was back home, I dismissed all three of my servants, had a quick lunch in my executive kitchen, and began preparing my Dr. Jekyll impersonation for the children’s party I had been invited to—I was planning to use a colored makeup/stage light filter combination to reproduce Frederick March’s famed live transformation into Mr. Hyde.

I’ve found that of the innumerable adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal story, that no performance so matches the spirit of...





A nondescript white van was parked a few blocks south of the corner of Westwood and Le Conte. Inside were two members of the recently formed People Against Ponies Association. Like most of their brethren, this pair was white, middle-aged, and did not at all look like people devoid of reason or compassion, which is in fact what they were. The two PAPA-ites were busy getting dressed up by following the very specific instructions printed on the seats next to them.

“I have to purposefully use slightly off-colored makeup?” the woman griped to the man. “Really? How desperately do they want to sell this line of bull to that quack?” She used a small plastic squeeze bottle to apply a track of saline solution down one side of her blouse, then used a portable fan to quickly dry it, leaving a dimpled trail in the fabric where the solution had run. 

The man meanwhile was using a small mirror to check that the bags under his eyes were clearly visible—his chosen method to produce the effect had been three straight nights on his Xbox. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It seems like a lot of work just to get a psych to check out our captives. I mean, why not go for one in the organization?” 

 “This guy must be worth it,” she laughed, taking the mirror to check herself. “I mean, for this much money I’ll pretend to be whoever they want.” 

The remaining steps in the checklist were carried out, nearly two dozen in all. 

The man added wrinkles to the corner of his shirt before putting a cellphone in it, then nodded to himself. “Well, I think that’s it,” he said. “So recite the story back to me.” He held up his paper and she stared at the van’s window, taking a quick breath as she recalled her lines. 

“Our son’s name is Samuel Tinnon,” she began. 

A few minutes later, the pair hopped out of the van and onto the sidewalk. As they approached the therapeutic office building, they linked arms and put on matching expressions of well-rehearsed worry.





...and finally there’s the Adam Baldwin train wreck from 1999, which manages to throw in the Triad and human kidney theft, because hey, why not?

Um, I wasn’t boring you or anything with that mini essay, was I?

Anyway, I had gotten my costume just so and was browsing the internet for ponies when I got a call from my faithful Sally. There was a couple that needed me to “save their son”.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard that phrase... I’d bet every dollar I had that they found some marijuana or porn under the boy’s mattress, except for the fact that nobody’s dumb enough to take that particular bet against me.

Sally was apparently unable to work her usual magic to get them to delay their emergency-that-never-really-was-an-emergency for tomorrow. The message she sent to my phone (recorded with the parents listening over her shoulder) suggested that she thought it in my best interests to show up, so I felt I had no choice at that point but to at least see the kid, if only to tell him that he really had nothing to worry about.

Having no chauffeur, I was forced to get the Lexus LX 570 out and drive it myself. I left my Jekyll & Hyde makeup kit on the passenger seat, just in case I’d be forced to go straight from the office to the party.


(% % %)


I parked the Lexus a little before 2 pm.

“Good afternoon, Sally,” I said as I walked out of the elevator and into the empty waiting room.

“Did somebody die?” she asked me with a mischievous smile.

“What?” I asked in confusion.

She pointed at my black Victorian suit.

“It’s Dr. Jekyll,” I said in exasperation.

“You look like a mortician,” she said with a shrug.

I sighed and gestured at the door to my office. “Why didn’t you give them my usual excuse?” I asked.

“Ponies,” she replied. “You said you wanted to experiment on the next—”

I quickly put my hand over her mouth. “Ah, ah,” I warned her gently, “Not where the client can possibly overhear. Besides, I’ve turned over a new leaf with ponies. I’ve thought of a way where I can actually help.”

Sally nodded. “The parents are waiting inside,” she said, pointing. “Just the parents.”

“Just...the parents?” I said. I had expected them to drop off their son and go get a late lunch or something. But having to deal with the parents first: that was just trouble. Every. Single. Time.

I took in a deep breath. “Alright,” I said out loud. “Let’s do this.”

I walked through the door and introduced myself to the middle-aged couple waiting inside. They appeared to be worried out of their minds. For example, although the mother wore quite expensive lipstick and—taking a sniff of the air—hairspray, she had picked out the wrong color makeup to go along with her slightly mismatched ensemble. The man’s breast pocket, where he kept his cellphone, was rather strongly wrinkled, indicating multiple calls both made and received since he got dressed.

Sitting down across from them, I could pick out the man’s sleep-deprived eyes, and the woman’s split ends.

They both stared at me very strangely, like they expected me to bury their son instead of save him.

“Halloween costume,” I said darkly.

“Oh,” the couple said in unison.

The two looked at each other for a moment before deciding who would speak first.

“Our son’s name is Samuel Tinnon,” the woman finally said. “I am Joanna.”

“And I’m Michael Tinnon,” the father said, reaching forward to shake my hand over the table. “We’re so glad you were able to make time for us. We saw you on Buster Friendly last night, and we knew you’d be able to help poor Samuel.”

“Of course,” I said warmly, “anything for a child in need.” Jackpot! “Tell me what happened to your son.”

“Samuel woke up one morning as this...pony, named Rain Shower,” Mrs. Tinnon continued.

I definitely noticed the tone of distaste attached to the word “pony.”

I was expecting a little more detail than that, so I glanced down at the paperwork that Sally had laid out for me.

“Or—” Mr. Tinnon began to say.

“Or something,” Mrs. Tinnon quickly said. “The pony’s name was Rain Shower or something.”

Well. That was odd.

“He says he needs to leave,” Mr. Tinnon said, leaning over the table and forcing me with his eyes to look at him. “That pony says he needs to take our only son away from us.”

“We hear that the ponies are killing their victims!” Mrs. Tinnon added breathlessly.

I gave them a level, emotionless look over the top of my glasses until the father returned to his chair, and I began to consider my response. On the one hand, they almost certainly thought that this pony would physically hurt or kill their son, which was a lie. But on the other hand, what I suspected was actually happening inside Samuel’s head was not far removed from the mother’s words. I decided in the end to neither confirm nor deny Joanna Tinnon’s accusation. “What precisely do you think I’ll be able to do for your son, Mr. and Mrs. Tinnon?” I asked.

“Anything,” the father said, his eyes damp.

“We know what is going on with the...Changes,” his wife said. She was suddenly subdued after her earlier outburst, almost as though she had given up. Just then I noticed what I was fairly sure were tear stains down her shirt. “We just want our Sammy back.”

I needed to know how far gone Samuel was, how close he was to losing himself. “Have you noticed him saying anything out of character? Does he ever treat you like you are strangers, or suddenly reject something that he has always liked? Err...other than meat. I understand there’s a physiological reaction to that.”

For a moment they hesitated, looking to each other as though unsure of what they should say, before Mr. Tinnon nodded. “He did...start talking about friends that he never had. Names we don’t know, as though he needed to go and find them.”

I couldn’t be sure if that was significant or not. Sadly, boys of that age frequently kept large parts of their lives from their parents. I suspected I would not get anything else of use from them. “Well, I’ll see him,” I told them somberly, “but I really can’t promise anything. This is a brand new field of therapy, as I think you can appreciate. I would like to talk to him, and then we can see what might be possible. Where is he now?”

The man looked down at the ground, as though in shame. “We live on a large ranch outside of the city. He kept trying to...leave us, to run away, so we have resorted to keeping him safe in his bedroom. Some others we know whose children have changed are considering bringing them to our place for safekeeping.” He looked back up with a steely determination in his eyes. “We can’t let the rest of them get to our children.”

Warning bells started ringing in my head. It wasn’t that they were doing anything wrong just yet, but the law could see this as restraint, and adding in the other children looked dangerously like a cult. I not only needed to get in there, I needed to do it fast. “How about I follow you out there? Meet me down at the parking garage, while I get the paperwork straightened out.”

“That sounds wonderful. Thank you, Dr. Franklin.” Joanna said, springing up to shake my hand.

I showed them to the elevator, and waited until it closed before heading back to my secretary. “This might get a little dicey,” I told her. “Call Officer Wiggum if I don’t call you back in two hours. I’ll have the tracer app activated on the iPad.”

Once again, I didn’t actually know that anything was wrong. I was simply too suspicious for my own good. Sally confirmed this self-diagnosis with an eye-roll.


(% % %)


Nearly an hour later, our two vehicles pulled up at the entrance of the Tinnon family ranch. With a bad feeling in my gut (but no evidence to back it up), I followed them inside.

I’ve heard about places like this being used to hide meth labs, but this complex looked well run, with fresh coats of paint on everything and good strong buildings. It was easy to pick out the main house, barn, livestock barn, and fields. The smell of manure made it abundantly clear that the main business of this family-run operation was cattle.

The plain white van pulled into a garage, and the couple got out to greet me.

Small talk was good at a time like this. “Do you run this whole operation yourself?” I asked.

Michael Tinnon looked out over the fields visible behind the relatively modest two story farm house. “I’ve got a couple of ranch hands I supervise,” he said with a far-off look.

“Must be rather hands on,” I said with a nod, having absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

“Yes,” Joanna Tinnon confirmed. “Michael does all the planning, while I handle the bills and plan our family activities—we simply do everything together. Or...we used to. Ah, shall we go inside?”

“After you,” I said simply, following them into the house’s foyer. Speaking of bills, there was a cubby hole just inside the front door stuffed just full of them.

“I hope that you don’t need any special accommodations,” Mr. Tinnon said with a small smile as he led me into the living room of their home, passing the stairs leading up to the second floor along the way. The foyer continued on for a dozen feet before ending at a breakfast nook. “We aren’t a lab by any stretch of the imagination,” he told me with a uneven smile.

Well, I thought to myself, thank you so much for raising my suspicions all over again.

On the other hand, the inside of the air conditioned house didn’t smell anything like drugs or drug precursors—believe me, with my list of clients, I have gained an unfortunate familiarity with both. I gratefully took in two lungs worth of air not laced with anything suspicious. Or cow poop. I was very grateful to no longer be taking in the smell of cow poop.

Looking around, I saw that the blinds of the living room were drawn. Front and center in the room was a large recliner, and facing it was a wide-screen TV hooked up to an Xbox. There were couches set far enough back for TV watching, or for cheering on the game player in the recliner. Along one wall was a cheap bookcase full of well-read paperback romance novels—even from this distance I could use the distinctive shade of purple on the spines to identify them as Harlequins. There didn’t seem to be any other kinds of books on the shelf, so far as I could tell.

There were of course other things I was supposed to be looking for, required of anyone in my profession on first entering the home of a minor, and I was gratified not to see them: no broken furniture, no signs of shattered pottery swept under the rug, no suspicious rust-colored stains in the carpet...

The wife began to get nervous at my quiet scrutiny of the room. “Well,” she said quietly, “he is up in his room. We could show him to you.”

“He might see that as an invasion of privacy,” I said, crossing the living room to reach the kitchen nook. The bay windows were designed to look out over the ranch, but just as with the living room, the blinds were drawn. I sat down in the nearest chair. I hoped in this way to make it clear that I was not going upstairs. My own childhood and the experiences of dozens of boys Samuel’s age made one thing very clear: never violate a teenage boy’s sanctum sanctorum. “Can he move around on his own yet?” I asked.

“Yeah. He actually was starting to learn how to fly when we found out about the whole brain thing. That’s part of why we have been keeping him here, don’t want him flying off.” Mike said this with a tone of frustration, seemingly scared of the newly turned pony leaving. My response was merely to look at the means by which a winged pony could possibly escape from this place: as long as the door leading out from the nook to a patio was closed, he really didn’t stand a chance.

As I waited for the meaning behind my look to sink in, I took the time to survey the kitchen. While the rest of the house thus far had been painted the standard eggshell white, the walls of the kitchen and nook were a nice soft yellow. An island split off the nook from the kitchen, obscuring my view of the dishwasher and oven. There was a microwave with a pile of unused paper plates right next to the double door refrigerator, one of those kinds that had an ice and water dispenser in one of the doors.

“I’ll get him and bring him down,” the father finally offered, turning and making his way up the stairs.

A few moments later, the soft clop of hooves on a wooden floor could be heard, making their way to the stairs, and soon into the bottom floor of the house.

I sat quietly, leaning back in the chair but not slouching. I had already positioned the chair so that I could see the lower half of the staircase, but neither was the chair directly lined up with the end of the foyer. Above all, I wanted to avoid all signs of a confrontation—I would give the young man a significant degree of control over our first meeting, to keep him from thinking me his enemy.

The pony when he stopped at the bottom of the stairs stood about three feet high when his head was held up, but at the moment he stood much shorter, the head hung low to the ground, and his ears flattened back. He was a stallion, going by the facial structure, but not an especially powerfully built one. His coat was a dark blue color, but his mane was a wild spray of different cyan tones. He was standing maybe twenty feet away, staring at me. His mother stood by the front door, his father behind him. They were covering his best means of escape.

“Your parents asked me to help you out with your transition,” I said calmly. I then looked at the father. “I’d like to speak with him alone.” I left no room for compromise in my tone. “I feel that we will be able to work better if he doesn’t have to worry about your feelings in addition to mine.” I then looked back at the stallion. “If that is alright with you?” I asked.

All three parties seemed momentarily surprised, before the two parents nodded, walked past me and headed out onto the patio. “Good...good luck son,” Mr. Tinnon said with a hopeful smile, before they were both gone. The pony stared after them for a few seconds.

The stallion sat down at the base of the stairs, watching me carefully. It was clear now that he was a pegasus, with a decent pair of wings of the same color as his coat. They were clamped tight against his barrel. (Like everybody else nowadays, I had committed that Sunday Times foldout of general pony anatomy to memory.)

“Are you a mort—” he began to say.

“It’s a costume,” I quickly interrupted. “I’m a psychologist, and my name is Dr. Franklin. What would you like me to call you?” I made no move from my chair.

“Benjamin,” he said quietly but firmly, giving me Samuel Tinnon’s middle name. “No one ever wants to talk to Rain anyway, so he is moping.” By the voice, he sounded somewhat older than his fourteen years. The way I understood it, the voice belonged to the pony. That meant that on top of changing species, an awkward teenage boy also now had to deal with a young adult as a permanent roommate, complete with all of the mental hang-ups unique to that particular age group.

I actually considered this a good thing; it decreased the chances that Benjamin would want to merge with Rain.

“Very well, Benjamin,” I said with a slight smile, which disappeared in an instant before I asked my next question. “Are they hurting you in any way?” Best to get this out of the way first thing.

He actually snorted, almost a laugh. “They’re scared of me. Think I’m a freak. They won’t let me fly, and Rain says that’s bad for a pegasus, but it’s not like I’m a freaking athlete. But they aren’t hurting me, not really.” He said it with a tone of frustration and anger, as though being hurt would make the situation simpler.

Of course, there were more forms of abuse than merely physical, and this was shaping up to be far from an ideal nurturing setting for a boy his age. “Well, I’m going to get myself a glass of water,” I said, getting up with my back to Benjamin and walking over to the cupboard. “Do you want me to get you anything?”

“I don’t think that they have any apples, even though I’ve been asking for them. All they have for me is hay or lettuce. I guess having a rancher for a dad makes meat a lifestyle,” he grumbled.

“You’re not missing much,” I said as I opened the dishwasher in hopes of getting a clean glass—no such luck, as the machine was empty. I opened a random cupboard and was rewarded with a cup, one of only four on the shelf. I noticed that the sink was empty, while the nearby garbage bin was full of used paper plates and takeout containers. 

I started to fill the cup with ice and water from the refrigerator. “All the apples this time of year are imported from Washington,” I said over my shoulder, “mealy little buggers. Kind of silly, really, considering that there are commercial orchards much closer. I went up to Apple Hill outside Sacramento a couple years ago as a side trip from a conference—best apples you ever tasted. Outside of Equestria, I’d imagine.”

“In Equestria, they’ve got apples that have lightning in them. Taste like happiness,” the boy mumbled, barely audible.

“That’s what Rain told you?” I asked, my back to him. At the moment, I didn’t think I could keep from giving away my apprehension.

“He showed me!” Benjamin said quickly, before uttering a small “Eep!” Like he had said something he wasn’t supposed to.

Oh dear. That bad. I turned around, though, and returned to my chair as if the statement meant nothing. “Um-hm,” I said through a sip of water. It gave me some time to think.

I wasn’t going to be able to turn him back into a human, obviously. He had a pony mind inside of him, one capable of visual communication. Well, unless we were dealing with a complete schizophrenic fugue state, that left dreaming.

“Rain didn’t do anything wrong,” he whispered, suddenly angry again.

“I never said he did,” I answered, my eyes narrowing slightly. “That is his body, after all. He has as much right to it as you do.” Which was precisely the problem.

“He could take over if he wanted to. Kick them all until he could run away, but he didn’t. He won’t, I promise! ‘Cuz I told him not to,” he continued, unabated.

I steepled my fingers and looked carefully at him. “Putting aside the way you are being treated, what does he want?” I asked.

“To see his marefriend again,” he mumbled, blushing ever so slightly. Just then, the one hour forty five minute alarm beeped a single time from my phone.

“Excuse me a second while I take care of this,” I said with a smile, as I removed my cellphone from an inner pocket of my frock coat. I dialed up Sally’s number. “Hi, Sally, it’s me,” I said quickly, not giving her a chance to say anything. “Could you let Miss Minchin know that I might need to call her later this afternoon. Emphasis on might.”

Miss Minchin was my contact at Child Protective Services. I was covering my bases, but my gut was telling me that she’d need to get involved in this case, soon. Mr. and Mrs. Tinnon were lousy parents, that much was clear, and probably not even very good ranchers. Also, most everything they had told me was full of holes.

The lounge made it clear that only one member of the family played games instead of all three together. They had their own source of food right outside their back door, but instead ordered takeout. Several of their lines to me were just that—lines, prepared beforehand. They were either card-carrying members of PAPA, or had very persuasive neighbors who were. The only literature I spotted were romance novels, not reference books on animal husbandry. And most damning of all, they smelled far too good to have anything to do with a ranch, especially if worry had made them as careless as they were doubtlessly trying to make me believe. It wasn’t drugs, and it wasn’t livestock, but something that smelled was happening here at this ranch.

But despite all that, I didn’t have proof. Anything I did to separate this boy from his parents at this point would not only fail, but would also guarantee that I’d never get a second chance.

“I think that will be all,” I said to Sally with a heavy heart. “You can stop your worrying. See you later.” I put my phone away and looked back at Benjamin, who hadn’t moved the whole time.

“Well!” I said with a chuckle as I turned back to the pony. “A marefriend! That is a bit of a complication. Does he know for sure that she’s here on Earth? I mean, regardless of what I can do for you, at least I could see if I could find this mare. For all you know, she could live at the next ranch over.”

Immediately, the pony in front of me changed. He was no longer slouching, but sitting with a straight back, staring me down as a man would to another man he is trying to judge the character of. His eyes were the most striking, as they became sharp and hostile.

“Her name is Cerulean Sunrise, and why exactly would you help me find her, when all of the adult humans I have met since coming here seem determined to find a way to get rid of me, regardless of the cost or my actions?” the pony I could only assume was Rain demanded.

Ah, here we go. I wasn’t expecting to get to him until our second session. “I assume you’ve only met the two parents thus far,” —I was going to say “Mr. Shower”, but then remembered that whole mess with one of my more fanatical brony clients about whether Twilight Sparkle’s family name was Twilight or Sparkle—“Rain Shower. I am a public servant on this case, and I’m paid for my impartiality. It’s my job to provide help to anyone in need. The way I see it, the sooner the two of you get what you want, the sooner everything goes back to normal.”

“It’s Rain Shimmer, for the record. Those babysitters sure didn’t seem to take note.” He grumbled.

“Babysitters?” I asked. Idiot. I’m a complete idiot. I jumped up and walked over to the cubby hole next to the door and started flipping through the bills. “What’s Benjamin’s last name?” I asked over my shoulder.

“It’s Tinnon,” he says, the slouch coming back as the boy regains control. “Why?”

“But I thought...” I slump over as the bills do indeed confirm that the two people waiting outside are the ones paying the homeowner’s insurance. Bah, just when I thought I’d get to bust the case wide open. I look down at an unopened envelope containing Michael Tinnon’s renewed driver’s license. “Never mind,” I said in defeat.

“It’s not that common of a name,” Benjamin reminisced. “My daddy told me that it was Irish, that’s where we get our red hair.” He smiled at me in a friendly fashion, as I could see one of the black haired couple waiting outside suddenly turn towards the house, an earpiece visible on the side of her head, a look of frustration and anger on her face. The suddenly torn-open envelope in my hands revealed the face of Michael Tinnon, a man I had never seen before.

“Field trip!” I cried out, jumping for the front door. As soon as I wrenched it open, I turned back to Benjamin and held out my hand. “Come with me if you want to live!”

God, how I’ve been wanting to use that phrase.

But when I turned back to leave, it wasn’t a 140-pound woman or her imposter husband standing in my way. It was the most curious creature I had ever seen, and unfortunately I knew its name.

“Discord.”

“I believe we have a business arrangement,” he purred.

> Chapter 4: The Audition
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 4: The Audition





Day 11: Wagnesday, and Halloween, 3:14 PM PDT




Let me tell you a bit more about my Narrative Theory of the Universe.

Life is a story. It may not have been that way before, but it is that way now.

It is impossible to know anything about the “Author” (or authors) of this story. Perhaps the authors of the story of humanity is every human mind on Earth meshing together unconsciously. There is no possible way to know, so I won’t waste my time speculating further on that subject. What I can say is this: the Author likes drama, and the Author wishes to be entertained.

In this story, just like any conventional story, there are main characters, minor characters, and background characters. For main characters, the universe actually revolves around them. Childhood hang-ups end up deciding the fates of thousands, and everything they do matters to a degree that is quite unnerving if you think about it. Background characters have no idea that anything odd is going on—they go about their mundane lives day after day, until one day they end up as cannon-fodder to prove just how bad the villain is.

Minor characters in my opinion are the most interesting, in that they start with ordinary lives until the moment they meet a main character, and from that moment they are forever transformed. Suddenly, they see before them one of the pivots around which everything must revolve, and they find themselves on a spoke of the great wheel of life, flung around at absurd speeds until something finally snaps. Minor characters after all have a singular purpose in relation to their main character. They might be the comic relief that keeps a serious character sane. Or maybe something truly awful is fated to happen to them to motivate the main character to do something they never would otherwise.

The point of my wool-gathering is this: I never really had a part to play in the Big Story, until now. Right now I was standing before an undeniable Main Character, capital letters and all, and what I did in the next five minutes or so would determine the course of the rest of my life. This was my audition for the great opera Götterdämmerung. Would I win the part of Siegfried the main character, or Alberich the forgettable minor villain? I knew one thing for certain, though: having gained the attention of the Spirit of Disharmony, the role of background character was no longer available. Either I was about to get a juicy part, or I was about to be squashed like a juicy bug.

So in the end I did the only thing I could do: I picked the part I wanted, and sang my heart out to get it.

“I believe we have a business arrangement,” Discord had said to me not five seconds previously.

“Business arrangement?” I said, straightening my lapel and looking him straight in the eyes. “My current business arrangement is with the true parents of this boy here. So unless you’ve been spending your spare time playing ‘Zeus’ with maidens locked in dungeons, I don’t believe I have any business with you.”

Yes, I actually said that. And at the same time I thought: When they come to bury my remains, they won’t even have to re-dress me—thanks to my Dr. Jekyll costume, I’m already perfectly suited for a satin-lined coffin.

He looked at me for a second, before laughing out loud. “Oh! Oh!” he cried out between gasps. “I knew I picked you guys out for a reason!” Then he rose up to his full height. “That’s one,” he said, suddenly serious.

“One?” I asked. As in strikes? “Out of three?”

“Out of I-haven’t-decided-yet,” he said. Then he smiled mischievously and leaned down to whisper in my ear: “And purple goes much better with red satin than black.”

I stared at him incredulously.

“That ‘fooling around’ business has some negative side effects,” he told me conversationally, “or have you noticed that Zeus isn’t around anymore?”

“Seriously?” I sputtered.

Discord smirked. “I’ll never tell.” Then he took off the glasses he was suddenly wearing and pulled out a thick pile of paper from nowhere with his eagle claw. “Now, then, to business: you made a pact last night at 11:36 pm. ‘Something needs to be done’—those were your exact words,” he said, reading from the top page of the pile.

I leaned over to look, and saw the exact words of my thoughts about preventing the merger of personalities in ponies. That only took up the top third of the sheet—the rest of the page, and presumably all of the pages underneath, consisted of the word “ditto” repeated over and over again.

“Ah, the Faustian Bargain angle,” I said, slowly stroking my chin and stretching out my words. “You’ll notice I didn’t state which deity I was addressing. It could have been Nodens for all you know.”

As I said this, I was very thinking very, very carefully. Discord could read my mind. He seemed to think that interfering with the merge was in his best interests, which instantly made me doubt if what I wanted was best for all parties. But I could not see a way in which I could be wrong. And so, with great reluctance, I began my alliance with a literal monster.

“Well I’m the one you’re going to have to deal with,” Discord said in reply to my earlier statement. I took it from his smile that he probably knew exactly what conclusion I had just reached. “‘Next available operator’, and all that.”

I looked back over my shoulder. Benjamin was standing in the hallway watching us, paralyzed with fright.

“I’m not going to let Discord touch you,” I assured him, before turning to face the chimeric creature. “If you want him, you’re going to have to go through me, Spirit.”

I looked Discord right in the eyes, turned so that Benjamin couldn’t see what I was doing...and I winked.

Step One, I thought at Discord as clearly as I could. Gain their trust.

Discord’s eyes very slowly went wide.

Very well, his voice echoed inside of my head. I’m not sure how, but it felt like his words were wrapped in uncooked bacon.

“You don’t stand a chance, Human,” he replied loudly to my words. “Now how shall I take you down?” A very audible glint sparkled in one eye. Step Two: Unite against a common enemy, he added mentally.

Fear, I thought quickly. Both of them at once, but not enough to leave them incapable of rational thought. Leave me alone, and do not lay a hand on them.

Discord laughed again, without a trace of the warmth he displayed earlier; it was a laugh to freeze the blood.

As I looked back once again, I saw Benjamin jerk his head up, his eyes unfocused. “Stay away!” he cried out, slowly backing away from Discord. He seemed to be staring at an imaginary creature who was towering over him. “You’re not real!”

“No!” I yelled, imitating Benjamin’s look as I shrank from a more human-sized foe, although this one even less substantial than the boy’s. “You can’t!”

I looked over to see Discord idly waving his lion paw—I guessed that this was how he was controlling the fear spell. Slowly the hand came to halt. “And this...is the part...where you...run!” And with a flick of the paw, he caused Benjamin to scream before turning awkwardly around and scampering into the kitchen.

I winced briefly at the amount of emotional pain I was responsible for, before uttering a fake scream of my own and following.

As we made for the door to the back porch, I could have sworn that the deadbolt unlocked itself before the door slipped very slightly ajar. Benjamin fell against the door, surprised to find how quickly he could get through it.


(% % %)


The two of us made straight for the barn. I was all for climbing into the loft, but Rain Shimmer—having taken control when Benjamin was overcome by a panic attack—instead spotted a cow stall that was not being used. This wasn’t very easy, as it appeared that whatever Discord was doing to the two minds made it hard for them to see.

“It’s not real,” Shimmer said quietly to himself, “it’s not real! They couldn’t have captured her—she’s too smart for that!”

“FEE FIE FOE FUM!” rumbled the basso voice of an enormous Discord, his footfalls in the field causing miniature earthquakes. “I SMELL THE BLOOD OF AN EQUESTRIAN-AMERICAN!”

I crouched down, hugging my knees to myself. I made a keening wail as I scrunched my eyelids tight.

“Doctor!” Shimmer cried out.

“Ah!” I shouted, jumping to my feet and smiling triumphantly. “I did it!” I lied. “I’ve kicked him out of my mind.”

“How did you do it?” Shimmer asked, darting his head around as he tried to avoid seeing something that only existed in his mind.

“Imagine your house,” I told him. “Both of you, imagine your houses. Benjamin, imagine the ranch, and Shimmer, imagine your...you live in a cloud house?”

“Yes!” grunted Shimmer. “And hurry!”

“Those houses are your shields,” I told them, “so make the walls as strong as possible. As long as all of your walls are secure, Discord can’t get in.”

“I don’t have all my walls!” Shimmer—no, Benjamin cried out. “My house overlaps with Shimmer’s!”

“That’s Discord’s doing!” I told them. “He’s trying to mash you two together, so you’ll have all of your collective vulnerabilities and none of your strengths. Imagine that your homes are movable: Shimmer, imagine that your cloud home is on an unanchored cloud, and Benjamin, imagine that the ranch is on rollers. Now imagine you are inside of your houses and pushing the two apart.”

Benjamin scrunched his eyes closed. “I...I’m trying,” he huffed. “But it won’t move! Shimmer says that it’s the same for him.”

Would you like to go in and help? Discord’s voice asked me laconically from inside my head.

I whipped my head around, to see the draconequus leaning over the partition with the next stall. He was mostly invisible, with a dotted line outline that I supposed only I could see.

My eyes went wide as I contemplated the offer. My favorite book when I was a teenager, the book that convinced me that the hard work to become a psychologist was worth it, was the science fiction novel The Dream Master, by Roger Zelazny. It was about the most revered and beloved man in the world, a man who used a machine of his own invention to enter other people’s dreams, and in this way rid them of all of their psychological hang-ups. When I discovered how easily I could influence the minds of other people, I had hoped that I might have been born with the Dream Master’s powers, that through training I could do what he could do. But it was not to be—even with the help of modern science, I could only affect others through my words, and because of miscommunication, I have occasionally caused more harm than good with my interventions. But to go inside another’s mind, to see and shape exactly what they are thinking...

I nodded eagerly. I reached my hands towards the pony’s temples...and then stopped myself. “I have a way to get into your mind,” I told Benjamin hesitantly. “But I don’t want to invade—”

A bored Discord raised his eagle paw and rotated it in the air.

The boy’s eyes sprang open. “Help us!” he begged me.

Without hesitation, I put my hands to his head, and suddenly all was darkness.





I was plunged into a battlefield, split into two very unlike halves on either side of the combined ranch/cloud house. On one side (which resembled a war-torn city neighborhood), a flaming creature ten feet high was trying to tear open the side of the ranch house—I recognized it as the monster from the South Korean film The Host. As I watched, it raised its misshapen head to the heavens and howled in rage. On the other, four teams of horses—their eyes blood red and frothing at the mouth, were pulling ropes attached to the legs of a sky blue pegasus mare with a bright orange mane. As the horses pulled, the mare screamed, louder and louder. Based on Rain Shimmer’s hostility to me and my species earlier, I guessed that these were horses native to Earth. This half of the field resembled the top of an anvil cloud, with thunder loudly rolling beneath and occasional loops of bright lightning darting up and down like solar prominences seen through a blue filter.

Each horrific sight was accompanied by an army: the mutated beast was surrounded by dozens of clones of Discord, all dressed in Confederate gray and armed with bayoneted rifles, and all rushing towards the ranch house. On the other side, another rushing army of Discords were dressed in bright orange jackets and waving spiked clubs in the air; they probably would have been even more horrifying if I had known anything about the military history of Equestria. Both sides were caterwauling like crazy as they rushed each other across the two dissimilar fields.

Seeing as the mental projections of Benjamin and Rain Shimmer were both inside their houses, I was probably the only one able to notice that both armies faded out of existence as they passed out of view of the windows facing them. Also, they were pretty clearly all following the same short animation loop as they ran.

So I was in somebody else’s dream, a scenario I had fantasized about for decades. Needless to say, I knew exactly what to do. With but a single thought, I teleported myself into Benjamin’s ranch house. I began to fall through what should have been the floor, but at the last moment I halted my fall by will alone and floated back up onto an imaginary platform.

“I’m here!” I cried out, loud enough for both human and pony to hear. “Keep pushing your houses apart!”

I took stock of my surroundings. The walls of the ranch house stretched back for fifty feet, then smoothly transitioned into walls made of clouds. The air seemed to shimmer at the point where the two houses met, and I was only able to see a white blur beyond. As for the half of the partially-merged house I was currently in, it was devoid of a floor or furniture, and that was because a dozen long logs were stretched under the open bottom. The reason the floor was missing was because Benjamin, a short human boy with red hair, needed to stand on the ground if he were to carry out my instructions to push the house. Unfortunately, with the height of the logs, the boy could only just barely reach the wall above him.

Benjamin turned his head to look back at me. “Help!” he cried.

I jumped from my resting place to be behind him. Reaching around his waist, I lifted the boy up so that his outstretched arms were level with the bottom of the wall. “Imagine you’re wearing stilts,” I told him. “The strongest and most sturdy stilts that money can buy!”

“The Aliens documentary!” he cried out, and I nodded, remembering the box-like stilts that the stunt performer used inside the Alien suit, stilts good enough to engage in fight choreography with. As he said this, they materialized under his feet. As he leaned forward and pushed, the house began to move.

“Go help Shimmer,” he said, all his concentration on the wall before him.

“Alright,” I said.


(% % %)


Rain Shimmer’s half of the joined house was not moving, and the reason for that was because he was not moving. The stallion was shaking in horror, his eyes locked on the wracked form of his marefriend.

“Snap out of it!” I screamed, slapping him across the face.

Ouch! Pony heads have a lot more bone in them than human heads and...I realized that I had more important things to think about at the moment.

He looked at me, wild-eyed.

“Are you just going to let those mindless beasts from my planet do this to your one true love!” I bellowed.

“Cerulean!” he yelled, jumping up and flying straight for the window.

He was angling to fly through the window, but I used my imagination to constrict it down so that only his head was able to emerge.

“Are you going to let Discord keep you from rescuing her?” I challenged him.

“No! Never!” he cried, beating his wings furiously and straining against the window.

“Nothing can stop you!” I encouraged him. “Nothing!”

Through a side window, I could see that the house was beginning to move.


(% % %)


I materialized back on the hill where I first appeared in Benjamin’s mind. I could see the joined house slowly growing longer and longer as Benjamin and Shimmer pushed in opposite directions. New walls of the appropriate texture faded into existence as this was done. I noticed that Discord, the real Discord, was standing silently beside me.

Finally, with an odd sort of “pop!”, the two houses sprang fully apart from each other. At that moment, the two scenes outside the homes faded away.

Discord pointed in a direction that didn’t seem to belong to Euclidian three-dimensional space. Somehow, I was able to imagine going in that direction, and in that way I left Benjamin and Shimmer’s mindscape.





I was back in the stall with the pony.

“Is...is he gone?” Benjamin asked, slowly rising to his hooves.

I stood up and looked around. “It sure looks that way,” I honestly—if somewhat misleadingly—replied.

“Thank you,” Benjamin said, holding his forelegs out weakly for a hug, which I leaned down to give him.

“Is Rain Shimmer alright?” I asked.

The pony looked to his lower left for a few seconds. “Yes,” he finally said. “Thank you.”

“We still have much to do,” I said as I stood back up. “Find your real parents, reunite Rain Shimmer with his marefriend.... But first let me see if it’s safe.”

Benjamin began to get up. “Stay here,” I told him with a wave of my hand. “I’ll be right back.”


(% % %)


I walked out of the barn door, but was stopped short by the sight of a bank vault sinking slowly into a nearby pig sty.

“Well,” commented Discord slyly as he climbed out of the vault wearing a straightjacket and chains, “you did say you were going to see if it’s safe.”

I looked back to see that the barn was encased in a clear force field of some kind, probably to block out the sound of our conversation from Benjamin’s ears. With a frown, I advanced on the draconequus. “Why do you want to prevent pony and human minds from merging?” I asked, poking Discord in the chest with one finger.

Discord removed his bindings just like they were a coat, and hung them from a hanger that insisted on remaining in midair. Underneath he was wearing a white tuxedo. “Why do you want the same thing?” he asked. A magical wave of his eagle claw caused my poking hand to fly away so forcefully it nearly dislocated my wrist. “Oh, and that was two.”

“I’m trying to save them,” I said, cradling my bruised hand to my chest. “Someday they will be returned to their rightful bodies, whether by science or by magic. And when that happens, both minds need to be present. Anything else is a sort of murder, of one or both of them.”

“Well there you are,” he said with a grim smile. “There was one thing, one line from my episode of the cartoon that the fans keep forgetting me saying: I don’t turn ponies to stone. And that means I also do not condone the death of ponies or humans, not even mentally.” His head shot up suddenly as he looked to the sky, the movement reminding me of a bird of prey suddenly sighting its next target. He looked back over at me out of the corner of his eye. “I haven’t time to take care of them myself,” he explained, “and it’s not like they would ever trust my motives.”

“For which they are completely justified,” I quipped.

“For which they are completely justified,” Discord repeated with gusto. “So I want you to do it. I’ll let you keep your little dream-walking ability, and I may from time to time provide you information about newly-arrived ponies that I deem especially need your help.”

“In return...” I said, and waited until I had his full attention. “In return, you will not advertise our relationship. I will not have you undermining my efforts.”

Discord nodded. “But of course.” He held out his paw. “Do we have a deal?”

After a moment to try and fail to find any additional terms to suggest that would do me any good, I gave him my hand. “Deal.”

I winced as I felt him sink two of his claws into the flesh of my palm.

“That’s a little something to remember me by,” he said, with a truly evil grin as he released his grip.

I pressed my hands together to try and stop the bleeding.

“Excellent!” Discord cried. “It is so hard to get good help these days. Now while I have you here, I thought I’d pick your brain.”

I suddenly found myself in an operating theater, lying on a gurney with a sheet around the top of my head. I sat up in shock, tearing the sheet away and feeling the top of my head. Instead of a skull, all I could feel was a wet spongy substance. “Discord!” I cried.

Discord walked into my view. He was dressed in a surgeon’s green scrubs. He had a used popsicle stick in one claw, while the paw was supporting a golf club held over his shoulder. “Can’t take a joke?” he asked lightly.

When I answered this with nothing but a scowl, Discord snapped his claw, causing a flash of light that put us back in front of the barn.

I took a moment to calm myself down. I realized that I was in league with a mad-...creature, and would have to get used to this kind of insanity. I took in a couple of calming breaths. “What did you want to ask?” I finally said.

“I just wanted your loquacious opinion of my rule so far,” he said. He was now wearing a black tuxedo, and was apparently trying to act up to its classiness.

“We barely know you exist!” I exclaimed.

“And...that is a good thing, yes?” Discord said hopefully. “Nothing to protest about, after all.”

I had to admit, he had a point—humans were very good at protesting against anything and everything. “Well, you still should reveal your goals,” I told him. “Perhaps...how about you give three mutually contradictory agendas to three different interviewers on the same day?”

Discord chuckled. “I’ll put you back to zero for that,” he said.

“Dr. Franklin?” echoed Rain Shimmer’s voice from inside the force field.

I looked back to see that Discord was seated in mid-air. There was a rumbling, like that of a motorcycle. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” he said, putting on a pair of aviator sunglasses and riding off into the glow of a sunset on the northern horizon.

I felt a twinge of pain in my right hand. I looked down to see that the two puncture wounds inflicted on me by Discord were nothing but well-healed scars.

But the pain was there to make sure I didn’t forget.





So that’s how I got my part in this planet’s Götterdämmerung. 

There is no need to remind me that the opera in question ends with none of the main characters surviving.
> Chapter 5: Loose Ends
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 5: Loose Ends





Day 11: Wagnesday (Halloween), 5:45 PM PDT




“Benjamin?” I asked the pony who was approaching me. “Do you know where your real parents are?”

With a blink, the pony before me switched personalities. And Benjamin the pony sat down hard and started to sniffle. “I...I don’t know,” he choked out.

I sat down and put my arm around him.

“Mr. and Mrs. Castillo said that my parents were called away in the middle of the night,” he explained between sniffs. “That my grandma was dying and they needed to be there. And that the planes wouldn’t let ponies on board. They said they were business friends of my Dad, and that they were going to take me to my parents as soon as they took care of business on the ranch. I don’t know how I could have fallen for something so stupid!” He stamped one hoof at the ground in frustration.

“There, there,” I said gently. “Your life had just turned upside down. And you were probably worried for your grandmother.”

“But that’s not good enough,” Benjamin grumbled. “I was planning to run away, to help Rain Shimmer find his girlfriend, and maybe even go to New York to help the other ponies. And...and I thought that it wouldn’t be so bad to run away from babysitters, compared to running away from my parents, especially after the mean way they kept treating us. But—” (and here the tears started coming back to his eyes) “—all that time I was planning to go on an adventure, Mom and Dad were being kept who knows where, and by now they could get, they could get—”

“Your parents are going to be fine,” I told Benjamin with absolute certainty. I rose to my feet, and got out my cell phone. “If there is one thing the Los Angeles Police Department excels in, it’s finding missing persons. Believe me...I’ve been involved in my fair share of cases.” I shook my head to clear it of memories. “Of course, most of the ones I was involved in were runaways, but the principle still stands.”

The next thing I did was call Officer Wiggum and Miss Minchin in quick succession, to report a kidnapping and begin the process of arranging temporary foster parents for Benjamin.

“But why can’t you take care of us?” Benjamin asked. “Shh, Rain Shimmer,” he added sotto voce, no doubt to the stallion’s assurance that the pair were better off with no adult supervision whatsoever.

“Becoming a foster parent is somewhat arduous process,” I explained to the boy, “and in any case I would not be able to get qualified in less than a day; you need somebody to care for you now.”

“So...Rain Shimmer wants to know if you’re going to just abandon us, now that the humans who hired you turned out to be fakes.”

“He has a point,” I said, dusting myself off as I started walking back to the ranch house. I heard the sound of Benjamin’s hooves slowly following me. I waited until we were nearly at the porch before continuing. “Legally, I have no further obligation over you.” I stopped to look back over my shoulder. “But I intend to see this through. You two could both still use my help, and I’m willing to provide it, at no cost.”

Benjamin looked at me curiously.

I smiled. “Rain Shimmer wants to know what the catch is, right?”

Benjamin nodded.

“This is a big thing, humans and ponies meeting like this,” I said, as I sat down on the porch step in order to be at the pony’s level. “There’s people that oppose it, there’s other people that have thought through a lot of the legal ramifications. Heck, I’ve heard of a few inventors rushing to put out products to help ponies to be able to do the things that humans take for granted, like that artificial hand on TV. But no one’s been thinking about what’s going on, in here.” I punctuated that last bit with a gentle tap of a finger against the pony’s cranium. “This is nothing that you could have possibly prepared for, no matter how imaginative you might be. And the world, this world, could be a very scary place for an unprepared visitor. I think, I hope, that I might be able to help. But to do that, I need your help.”

Rain Shimmer (and it most definitely was Rain Shimmer) looked at me with skepticism.

“Do you have doctor-patient confidentiality back in Equestria?” I asked.

“...Yes,” he replied.

“We have the same thing on Earth,” I said, “and that means that you know I will not try to take advantage of this situation. I will make sure that Benjamin is cared for, I will make sure that every effort is being made to find his parents, and I will do whatever I can to find your Cerulean Sunrise.”

“You...you don’t have to look for Sunrise,” Rain Shimmer said gruffly, “not before you find Benjamin’s parents. I think she can take care of herself for a few more days.”

I gave him an approving smile. “You don’t have to worry, sir. I think I can help Benjamin, and help you at the same time. After all, the tasks I am performing for both of you largely consist of waiting for leads, and then following up on them. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The stallion looked away, at the setting sun, undoubtedly pondering how long all of this was going to take. “Yes,” he finally said between clenched teeth.

“That means, in between everything I’m doing for you, I can also put together the resources to help others in the same situation as you. There’s a lot of confusion that I would like to resolve, answers to questions you had to work through the hard way. For example, when you arrived, who was initially in charge?”

“Benjamin was,” Rain Shimmer answered.

“And did he know that you were in there?”

The stallion shook his head. “I was trapped at first, unable to do anything but watch through my eyes, hear through my ears, as this...stranger controlled my body.” He turned back to look at me, with the first genuine smile I ever saw on him. “But then I began to get glimpses of his mind, got to see his hopes and dreams, and I realized that I could have been a lot worse off than I am.”

“Well there you go,” I said with a smile of my own, “Your case may be typical, or maybe it’s not. But I’m sure the information would be useful to some other newly-arrived pony. What happened after that?”


(% % %)


We spoke for several more minutes, going over Benjamin and Rain Shimmer’s first few days together, from both of their perspectives. Along the way I collected several clues from things said by the two kidnappers to them that suggested that the boy’s parents were being kept somewhere nearby, and that the captives were being consulted at frequent intervals to maintain the “babysitters’” deception.

I also heard a wide variety of curses regarding human stubbornness and stupidity.

I’ll let you guess which one of the pair said them.

Eventually, the police arrived.

I shall skip over the following scene, as it practically writes itself: there’s the fumbling over this being a pony case, the confusion over my being hired under false pretenses, and then there was the biggest red herring of them all (at least in regards to the kidnapping): Discord.

“As far as I’m concerned,” I told Sergeant Lou, “this Discord business is an entirely different charge than the kidnapping. Neither I nor Benjamin ever saw Discord associated with the kidnappers. He just seemed to drop in at random to torture a random pony.” Let me just note how extremely convenient the word “seemed” is. “I hear that he likes doing that.” (I “heard” that based on my viewing of “The Return of Harmony”—I had no idea if he had done that to anybody other than Queen Chrysalis here on Earth.)

Let me try to be clear: I wasn’t defending Discord at that moment, far from it. And my motive was only somewhat self-serving, as I didn’t want my connection to him to be discovered. But mostly it was because I thought it would be a dead end, a waste of valuable time that could be better used to find Benjamin’s parents.

I mean, why would he have kidnapped this one pony? And not even one of the Bearers? It didn’t make any sense.

And as for looking for a deeper connection, at the possibility that Discord was secretly behind PAPA—well that was completely ridiculous. What could he have possibly gained from that alliance? I mean, I know that there’s such a thing as underestimating an adversary, but it’s also possible to dig yourself pretty deeply into a pit lined with your own paranoia if you indulge in overestimating an adversary as well.

Speaking of pits...

“Hey Lou!” Office Eddie called out, “Look what I found at the bottom of this abandoned well!”

You might be making your own Lassie jokes at this point. If you are, then stop—you’d be insulting the collie breed to compare Officer Eddie’s intellect to one of theirs.

“Don’t call me ‘Lou’ on duty,” Lou said as he swatted the back of Eddie’s head with a clipboard. “It’s Sergeant Lou, or just Sergeant.”

“OK, Sergeant,” said Officer Eddie. “But hey, Lou, don’t that look like the kidnappers down there?”

And so they were. I’ll give them this: they had done an awful good job of remaining quiet all this time in hope that they wouldn’t be found. Too bad for them that Officer Eddie had a chewing tobacco habit that his superior disapproved of, and needed someplace inconspicuous to spit his wad.

After being rescued, the Castillos kept rather strictly to their right against self-incrimination, which included revealing nothing about how they had managed to get to the bottom of a six foot well without a rope and without breaking or straining anything on the way down. So either they had PAPA confederates on the ranch who hid them down there and then successfully fled the premises (which makes no sense), or else Discord just stuck them down there so they wouldn’t be in his way.


(% % %)


Anyway, more compression:

After providing our testimony, Benjamin and the Castillos were taken back to the nearest station to be processed—in different police cars of course, and destined for two entirely different kinds of processing. I followed in my Lexus, determined to do everything I could to help Benjamin and Rain Shimmer, as I had been the entire day.

The Jekyll-to-Hyde makeup case on the passenger seat seemed to glare accusingly at me the entire ride.

At the station, there was a good deal of repetition, as our stories were trotted out yet again. (Heh, “trotted”.) Miss Minchin got permission to put Benjamin in the custody of Henry and Alice Mitchell, a couple that had taken care of several teenaged boys in the past. I imagine they thought themselves prepared for anything that age and gender could throw at them.

I didn’t want their job at that moment for all money in the world. I may have been an excellent therapist, but that had nothing whatsoever with being a good parent, or for putting up with Rain Shimmer’s beef with humanity.

Come to think of it, Rain Shimmer’s personality was probably closer to the Mitchells’ usual type of charge than Benjamin’s was.

I made my services available to the two flabbergasted fosters, and perhaps implied that I knew far more about pony psychology than I did.

I had long since sent in my regrets to the organizers of the Halloween party I was supposed to perform at, so I went straight from the police station back to my not-so-humble abode.

> Chapter 6: In the Lair of the Crocodile God
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Breakdown



Chapter 6: In the Lair of the Crocodile God





Day 11: Wagnesday (Halloween), 9:30 PM PDT




I needed to expand my influence on the Internet. This, I felt, was my best chance at being able to contact newly-transformed ponies before they had succumbed to the temptation of merging. I had a website already, but it was mostly for my existing patients, so they could more easily track their progress between visits. To this point in my career, I had gotten all the new patients I could handle via word of mouth.

But now I needed to announce myself. I needed to advertise. I needed to find a way to catch the attention of panicked individuals to let them know that I had the answers to their questions, that I was an individual worthy of trust.

And to do that, I needed the services of Sobek.

To the ancient Egyptians, Sobek was the crocodile-headed god of the Nile, not only representing its life-giving fertility, but also acting as a protector of the Egyptian people against the deadly threats hidden beneath its waters.

Which meant that “Sobek” was a very fitting online alias for one of the most brilliant ex-hackers I had ever met. Nowadays she made her income designing websites for the same sorts of people who sent their sons and daughters to be treated by me. At least, her legal income. I did not know for sure if she still maintained her earlier line of work, but I had heard the rumors.

Sobek had a lot of secrets. The fact that she was a “she” was one of them. Her real name was Danielle (not her real name), she was 19 years old, she was paralyzed from birth below the waist, and she lived in downtown Hollywood with her intellectually disabled brother, Gary. It was because my courtroom testimony had helped Danielle to retain custody of Gary that she had decided that I could be trusted to learn that my (psychological) client’s sister was the same person as my (Internet) consultant. I had been trying to get her into my office for three years now—she’d been balancing multiple chips on her shoulders for most of her entire life.

Not that she wasn’t justified in her hatred of most of humanity. Danielle’s mother had no idea who her children’s father was. The boy’s mental problems, as well as the girl’s physical problems, were both caused by the mother’s chronic alcoholism, and her final “gift” to them was dying of her condition when Danielle was only five years old. As for the rest of Danielle’s family, they resented the person she grew up into, and they were the ones trying to separate her from her brother, having succeeded in forcing them into separate homes on two occasions in the past. After she turned her life around to earn the court’s approval of her, she then ran up against her new employers, who by and large refused to take a teenage female web designer seriously, and pretended that the sites she designed for them were their own handiwork. I was one of the few that not only displayed her logo prominently on my front page, but also recommended her services to those of my clients who I judged would not be “ungrateful punks” (to use her vernacular).

Her choice of the crocodile god as her avatar was quite appropriate. Last year at Halloween, she had dressed up as a crocodile, and went around the neighborhood without her wheelchair. On another occasion, I managed to infuriate her so much with my needling that she leapt out of her chair at me, and managed to subdue me entirely with upper body strength. She jokingly referred to her technique as “Gator-style wrestling”.

Come to think of it, I wonder what would happen if I put her and Rain Shimmer in the same room—would they try to kill each other, or would they work out which of their numerous resentments overlapped, and then ally to take down modern civilization?

Note to self: Do not put Sobek and Rain Shimmer in the same room.

I had sent an email to Sobek’s public account last night, explaining my interest in reorienting my services towards ponies, and offering to pay a rather substantial amount to get over her opposition to a TV show she probably didn’t care much for.

I didn’t expect an answer to my request for several days. She was rather successful in her job, and it was Halloween, after all.

Nevertheless, I found when I returned home that there was a reply to my email message from Sobek:




CAll  m3..



It was a very unusual message from her. Sobek was not a shut-in, but she did enforce a strict separation between business and casual encounters in her life. I had requested a business encounter, and not only was her reply uncharacteristically messy, it was also asking for something more personal than the purely online correspondence I was expecting. Maybe she needed to know if I was serious or not. Maybe she was drunk. Or maybe Gary got into her email account.

I dug through my records, and I found Gary’s contact information, which was pretty much Danielle’s contact information. I dialed her cell phone. It rang four times, and was then picked up by her answering system.

“This is Dani,” her recorded voice told me, “and I’ve got better things to do than answer the damn phone. Leave a message at the 1.8, and I’ll get back to you whenever I feel like it.” This was then followed by the 1.8 KHz tone of the answering service beep.

“Danielle, this is Dr. Franklin,” I said. “I suspect that somebody might be accessing your email without your knowledge. I suggest that you...”

I had a feeling then, that Danielle had in fact been the one to send that message, and that she really needed me to get in contact with her.

“You know what?” I said into the phone. “I’m going to call your landline phone. Please do not yell at me.” And I hung up.

Danielle’s landline existed for the sole purpose of giving her a guaranteed list of people she could yell at every day. At least, that was my theory based on personal experience.

I dialed Danielle’s landline. It rang eight times before being answered by an odd-sounding “clunk!” “Hello-Danielle-this-is-Dr.-Franklin,” I said very quickly, and then held the iPhone away from my head to protect my ears from the inevitable onslaught.

“Dr. Franklin?” a distant and completely unrecognizable voice answered. “Please dear God don’t hang up the phone!”

I put the phone back to my ear. “Who is this?” I asked cautiously. It was a male voice, I was definitely sure of that, and it sure wasn’t Gary’s.

Danielle never had men over at her apartment.

“It’s...complicated,” the strange voice replied. “Look, when you said that you wanted to help ponies, were you dicking me around, or did you mean it?”

“I am completely sincere,” I said, beginning to have a good suspicion of who I was talking to.

“Brushie!” cried out a second voice in the background.

“Not now, Gary,” the first voice said, “Dani’s busy on the phone. You can brush me...you can—I’ve got knots on that side! Ow, ow, ow!”

“I’m sorry,” Gary’s voice whimpered.

“It’s...it’s alright, Gary. Looks like you’ve got yourself a client, Doc,” she said to me. Although I suppose it would be more accurate at this point to refer to Danielle as a “he”. “How fast can you get over here?”

“That depends,” I said. “Which variety of pony are you?”

“The kind that would suck the most for a computer programmer to be,” he said dryly.

“Alright, then give me an hour. I have to pick up something first.”

Note to self: Ask Rain Shimmer if his feathers are strong and dexterous enough to operate a keyboard with.


(% % %)


I arrived at the rundown apartment complex fifteen minutes later than promised, a medium-sized cardboard box in my hands. Kids in cheap plastic Halloween costumes raced from door to door, asking for candy. They didn’t stop at Danielle’s home, however, because the patio lights were out. I stepped up to the door and knocked.

“Hello, Dr. Franklin,” Gary said when he opened the door. The boy was 17 years old and built like a linebacker, with a sandy-blond mop of hair and a perpetual grin on his face. He was armed with a very large brush, in which was embedded quite a bit of green fur.

“Could I see Danielle?” I asked him.

“Oh. No,” he said, shaking his head a couple of times like a dog shaking itself dry. “No, Dani’s not avai...availlahble right now.” He grinned at getting the vocabulary word out successfully. “She’s not feeling like herself,” he added.

I laughed out loud. “Is that what you told him to tell any visitors?” I asked over the boy’s shoulder in a raised voice. “Cute, Danielle, real cute.”

“Let him in,” the male voice from before instructed Gary from around a corner, a definite smile in his voice.

Gary led me into the darkened interior of the apartment, after closing the door behind me. All of the curtains were drawn, and the only light was coming from the lit screen of a laptop in the master bedroom, a part of the apartment I had never been permitted to enter before. There, sitting on a waterbed like a pissed-off Sphinx, was the sea-green earth pony that the fearsome Sobek had transformed into. He wore a large white tee-shirt that informed me which particular anatomical act should be performed upon the local constabulary. Danielle’s wheelchair sat folded up at the back of the room.

“Well!” I exclaimed, having nothing better to say.

Danielle answered me with a string of curses, all directed at God Almighty for putting him into this mess. I closed the door of the bedroom as soon as they started to pour out of his mouth, in the vain hope that they would not get added to Gary’s everyday vocabulary.

“Well, you could look on the bright side,” I said when he had finished.

“Oh, but I have!” Danielle exclaimed sarcastically, rising to his hooves. He then proceeded to prance up and down the waterbed, somehow managing to not get either himself or the laptop tossed over the side. “Look at me! Look at me!” he proclaimed. “I’m walking unaided on my own feet, for the first time ever. Oh wait, I’m sorry, they’re not my feet, they’re my hooves!” He sat down on his rear and raised his forehooves to the heavens. “My hooves!” he screamed. “What the hell am I going to do with hooves!” He then proceeded to pound them madly on the laptop’s keyboard.

In response to this tantrum, I held the cardboard box aloft, saying nothing.

“What is that?” he asked, rapidly crossing the bed and looking up at me, his enormous blue eyes gazing into my own.

I was reminded of nothing so much as a puppy begging for table scraps.

I put the box down on the edge of the bed. “I think even you can get this open,” I quipped.

“Stop. Just...stop.” He pried the box open with his hooves, and then dragged out seeming miles of metal cable from its depths. “What is...what is this supposed...” he muttered to himself, his head buried in the box. Then he froze, completely froze in place, before emerging with a metal hook in his mouth, fit for Captain Hook himself. The hook was divided lengthwise, so that it could be split into two separate hooks. He spat the apparatus down onto the bed and looked up with me with wide eyes. “No way!” he exclaimed. “No effin’ way!”

(No, he didn’t actually say “effin’”—I’m trying to censor this in case any kids are listening in right now.)

“Interesting story behind that invention,” I said as I sat down on the wooden edge of the bed. “A man by the name of Alfred Corley used to make a comfortable living making mechanical prostheses for those without working hands or feet. He got into the business after his brother came back from Vietnam without a hand. But in the last few years, the big medical companies have gotten the nerve-operated prosthetics working so well that people only wanted the mechanical ones temporarily, until they got their operation. Alfred was on the verge of retiring when, all of a sudden, a whole new population of people without working hands started showing up, people who are probably not going to be all that enthusiastic about being operated on, at least for the immediate future.”

By this time Danielle had dug out a second hook and a modified vest, and had already read through the typewritten instruction sheet that Corley had given me along with the box. “I know what these are,” he told me as he awkwardly shuffled out of his shirt and slipped the vest over his head. “I had a teacher in middle school who wore one of these. We called him Professor Claw.”

The operation of “Corley’s Claws” was incredibly simple, and designed to be easily set up by a pony. The two claws screwed into a pair of cups which fit over the pony’s forehooves. The metal cables connected the hooks to the back of the vest, which acted as an anchor. By extending a foreleg, the cable pulled the two halves of the claw apart from each other. There was an elastic tension between the two halves, so that by relaxing the foreleg, the halves would draw together. In this way, it could be used as a primitive hand, grasping objects. By giving the cups a half turn, the hooks could be bent to the side, which allowed a pony to easily walk with them.

It took Danielle only a few minutes to get the hang of the system, to the point he could split both hooks and use the tips as four fingers for typing on the laptop. “You’re the Man, Doc,” he said with a chuckle. “100% certified Man!”

“So, how long have you been a pony?” I asked.

“About three hours,” Danielle said, “I took a nap this afternoon, and this is what I woke up as.”

“And do you have any idea which pony you are?” I asked. I wanted to know if he had made contact with his “inner pony”, but I didn’t want to panic him if he didn’t know he had one yet.

“Hold on,” he said, working his laptop, “I’m pretty sure I saw him in ‘Hearts and Hooves Day’. Ah, here we go.” He turned the screen around to show a frozen screenshot from the musical number early in the episode. In the background of a scene of the Cutie Mark Crusaders singing, there was a muscular stallion showing off his pecs for a frail little pink mare with a blue mane.

I frowned to myself, thinking that I was going to have to look for two missing mares now. “So how do you feel about having a fillyfriend?” I asked, trying to turn the situation into a joke.

“Nah, she’s not his fillyfriend anymore,” he said with a laugh. “She dumped him for a blackjack dealer in Appleloosa. Said he ‘wasn’t assertive enough’.” The pony’s eyes went wide. “How the hell did I know that?” he asked in a shocked whisper.

I sat there and looked at Danielle for a few seconds, to see if he’d calm down.

“Well don’t just sit there!” he bellowed. “Ask me something else!”

I leaned over to see that his cutie mark was a wave. No, actually it was the wave, Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa. “What’s his special talent?” I asked.

“Surfing,” Danielle answered with a bored expression, pointing at his cutie mark with one claw. “Like, duh. By the way, if I regress into surfer talk, you have permission to slug me. He picked it up in Neighpon, where his parents were the ambassadors to Princess Cel—I just did it again! Holy crap!”

“Have you been paying attention to any of the news about the ponies?” I asked. “Seen any of the interviews?”

“Look, I was in denial,” Danielle said, lowering his head and using a claw to scratch idly at the edge of his blue-green mane. “I was hoping if I didn’t do any obviously brony things after it started happening that it wouldn’t happen to me.” He gestured back at a photograph on a side table. The photo showed Gary hugging an absolutely hideous costumed mascot of Rainbow Dash. In the background of the photo was Danielle as I remembered her: short brown hair in a mockery of a bowl cut, a shirt that had been reversed because otherwise they wouldn’t have let her into the park, a hunched back in her chair from displaying her animosity towards the universe, and eyes squinted into a perpetual scowl. (Of course, if she actually did hate My Little Pony as much as she was pretending to in that photo, then she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be in that photo in the first place.)  “Actually, considering how much Gary plays around with his pony toys, I figured it would happen to him instead of me.” Danielle suddenly raised his head in alarm. “Gary, have you turned into a pony in the last five minutes?” he asked in a loud voice.

“For like the billionth time, no!” cried the voice of Gary from the other side of the door. “And I don’t know why it happened to you instead of me, either!”

Danielle frowned. “Gary, are you listening in on us?”

“No...well, does it count if I can’t hear most of what you say no matter how much I smush myself into the door?”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” Danielle said with a laugh. “Go back to the living room and watch some TV.”

“Are you still mad?” Gary asked.

Danielle looked down at his hooks. “No,” he answered, “I’m not mad anymore. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“So what’s your pony’s name?” I asked him.

“Oh that’s easy: his name is...” The pony before me closed one eye and concentrated. “Oh, for crying out loud! How come I can pull anything else I want, but not the name? What’s up with that?”

“The people who have been transformed have been saying—” I began, only to be cut off.

“—They’ve been saying that they’ve got the actual pony sharing their head with them,” Danielle told me. “But I thought they were full of crap.” He tilted his head back and darted his eyes around. “What’s the password to get in there, I wonder?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but in at least one case, the two personalities first made contact when the pony went to sleep for the first time.”

“Well, I am kind of tired,” the pony confided to me. “But first let’s get started on this site of yours. Are you thinking mostly text, or videos?”

“Videos,” I said. “And I need the interfaces to be as big and easy to use as possible.”

“Yeah, I can imagine,” Danielle said with a laugh.


(% % %)


We got the skeleton of the website put together over the next hour, all while Danielle got Gary to bed.

“You know, I promised him that I’d take him trick-or-treating,” Danielle told me afterwards as he was making his own bed in the darkened room. “I expected him to put up more of a fuss.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that he’s having no trouble seeing you as the same person you were before,” I said.

“And do you see me as the same person?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It took a while, but yes, you’re still demonstrably you,” I answered. “Your speech patterns are the same, and a lot of your mannerisms. The way you swing around to look at me, for example.”

“I don’t like this business of having somebody else digging around in my head,” Danielle said with a worried frown. “Especially a guy.”

And yet you don’t seem to have too much of a problem being a guy, I thought to myself. “Well, if you manage to run into this stallion in your dreams, you’ll need to set down some ground rules.”

“Yeah!” he said enthusiastically as he took off his vest and hooks and put back on the shirt that told the police what they could do with themselves. “Rule #1: All memories of ages 8 to 16 are off limits!” He looked sheepishly up at me as I pulled a chair up close. “So, you’re going to watch over me tonight?”

“Of course I’m going to watch over you,” I sad, lifting up a large mug. “That’s what the extra-strength coffee is for. This is a very crucial moment for my second pony client, and I intend to be there for him.”

Danielle blinked. “I just noticed: you’ve been calling me ‘he’ this whole time.”

“Do you want me to call you something else?” I asked.

“No,” Danielle said with a smile, “‘he’ works under the circumstances.” He closed his eyes, and settled down to sleep.

I took a long sip of my coffee, and began my vigil.


(% % %)


Danielle’s sleep lasted three hours and forty-three minutes. He entered R.E.M. sleep at 12:08 am, only ten minutes after his breathing settled, and he remained in that state for the entire rest of his sleep. This was very unusual for someone not suffering from intense sleep deprivation.

At the three hour and thirty-eight minute mark, I was startled by the sound of a loud splash from the master bathroom. Seeing nothing going on with Danielle, I got up and ventured to the bathroom, only to discover that the entire contents of the toilet bowl had somehow spilled onto the floor. There was no damage to the bowl, as far as I could tell, and I certainly didn’t feel anything like an earthquake prior to hearing the splash. I used the bath towels to clean up the mess as well as I was able, and as a result, I failed to witness the moment when Danielle awakened.

Also, considering the size of a pony stallion’s mouth, I have no idea how he managed to stuff a whole pillow in there so fast.


(% % %)


After I helped him to dislodge that pillow from his mouth, Danielle sat on the bed panting for a few moments, his eyes unfocused.

“Well,” he said finally, “that was a weird experience. His name’s Wave Rider, by the way.”

I looked back warily at the bathroom for a moment, but said nothing.

“He thought he was dead, actually,” Danielle continued with a bitter laugh, “convinced that he had drowned at a surfing competition at Kazookai. Turns out that his memories are pretty scrambled, so he has no idea what happened immediately before...this happened.” “This” was accompanied by Danielle waving a hoof around his head. “I got him calmed down, built a little surf hut in my head for him to stay in, and then, after explaining my species to him, set down my rules. He didn’t have any problems.” The pony chuckled. “That fillyfriend of his was right—he’s a complete pushover. I don’t think I’m going to have any problem with him poking his muzzle around where it doesn’t belong. I even got him to take me on a virtual ‘surfing safari’. Do you know what that cutie mark of his lets him do? He can—”

“—He can make the waves go as high as he wants,” I said, finishing his sentence.

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“Because he put a tsunami in your toilet,” I told him with a straight face, before we both broke into a laugh.

> Chapter 7: And Here My Troubles Began
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 7: And Here My Troubles Began





So cold...so dark.

How long have I been down here? Is there anybody up there? Anybody at all?




Oh, there you are. Now, where were we?

I remember spending long periods of time in the end trying to exhaust every possible reason why Mom and Dad should love me more than you. One obvious handle to use against you was that you loved Doctor Who, while I was a normal human being.

For example, Doctor Who’s arch-enemy, The Master, did not appear until the seventh season of the classic series. Up till that time the producers evidently thought that something as ludicrous as an “arch-enemy” wasn’t needed. I made sure to express this opinion to you as soon as I realized it, which was roughly ten minutes into Terror of the Autons’ airtime on the PBS affiliate where we first saw it thirty years ago. (And yes, I did deliberately refer to the main character as “Doctor Who” instead of “The Doctor” all the time, just to piss you off.)

That show thought it was so damn clever. A villain who could control people just by staring at them. Cheap plastic toys that somehow acquired the internal musculature to actually be able to choke their victims to death. And of course most humiliating of all for any self-professed true fan, the awful, awful green-screen technology on display. (Blue screen? Whatever.)

They even wasted this cheap trick on the scene when a Time Lord appears at a radio telescope to tell Doctor Who that this pantomime-level villain has settled down on his beloved Earth to cause trouble. He appeared as the stereotypical Englishman, bowler hat and umbrella, “so not to attract attention”. This despite appearing in mid-air hundreds of feet above the ground. Such an obvious parody of Magritte’s Golconda—I mean, what kind of loser actually watches this show?

Of course you know full well how you won that argument. Dirty pool, George, dirty pool.

Now the point of my story is...where was I? It’s getting a little hard to think clearly when I’m trying to talk over the sound of all this falling water. I wish that it would stop and let me think...

Oh right, I remember: Discord tricked me into leaving Los Angeles.





The date was...well the day after the previous day, obviously.




Day 12: Threesday, 7:30 AM




Yes, that right there.

I was awakened by a call by Sally, telling me she had tracked down Rain Shimmer’s marefriend, Cerulean Sunrise. She was sharing a body with Carrie Bliss, a junior high school teacher in Indianapolis. Miss Bliss became a cause célèbre after being fired for the crime of trying to teach and be a pony of impressionable human children at the same time. All appeals thus far to reverse her dismissal had failed, so it was clear that Miss Bliss would never teach in Indiana again. Sally helpfully informed me that Miss Bliss had lived in Southern California before moving to Indianapolis, and she had a still-valid Californian teaching license.

The solution seemed obvious: give California the chance to prove the moral superiority of its educational system by hiring the spurned pony. Unfortunately this ran up against political complications—namely, that no public school district wanted to stretch their necks out and risk the possible consequences of hiring her. And the politicians shied away from letting any old private school have her, just in case that particular school had a negative stigma to voters of its own, so they were bringing up a variety of quibbles about the exact nature of that Californian teaching license. The impasse would be resolved eventually, but it would take time.

And time was one thing that Rain Shower wasn’t willing to give me, as the call at 9:45 made abundantly clear.

I stepped out into the second-floor walkway of Danielle’s apartment complex to think...and that’s when I found myself face-to-face with a floating Englishman, complete with bowler hat and umbrella.

“Excuse me?” I asked. I wanted to follow that up with a question about why he was violating the Law of Gravity, but at the last moment I considered it a bit presumptuous. I mean, if he wants to float, that should be his business, right?

“My name is Sir Arthur Slugworth, and I represent Hasbro Unlimited,” the man told me, his words backed by a choir of angels.

For some reason, nobody else walking around at this time seemed to notice any of these odd happenings other than me.

“Discord?” I attempted to ask.

I mean, it’s the only logical possibility, right? That or I was hallucinating the whole thing, and you know full well that I never hallucinate, George.

When I say “attempted to ask”, I mean to say that I opened my mouth and got out the “D” sound, but was then struck by a debilitating pain radiating from my right hand that knocked me right off of my feet. A debilitating pain, that originated from the two scars left on my right hand by my deal with Discord.

Now let me remind you of one of the lesser terms of our little deal: Discord was not to tell anybody about our relationship.

Well, it appears that the demon had cleverly reversed the terms of that agreement, as I had just discovered. The pain only went away when I stopped trying to say Discord’s name.

I took a few moments to recover. The representative from Hasbro was still there, but he was in an American suit instead of an English one, and he was standing on the walkway instead of floating in front of it. I suppose that made him a “Mister” now instead of a “Sir”.

“Are you Doctor Nathan Franklin?” Mr. Slugworth asked me.

I told him that I was.

“I was given your location by your secretary,” he told me. “I believe I have a solution to one of your problems.”

It turned out that Hasbro was a major benefactor of one of those private Californian schools that was willing to hire Miss Bliss. The school was close enough so that Rain Shimmer would be able to visit his marefriend on a regular basis without getting in trouble for violating curfew, and Mr. Slugworth assured me that the school would not be considered controversial. He was even willing to foot the bill to fly Rain Shimmer and the parents out to Indianapolis to make their case, and then to fly them and Miss Bliss back to Los Angeles (assuming she said yes).

“There is but one condition,” Mr. Slugworth said.

There always is.

“It appears that Pinkie Pie has decided to appear on an hour-long taping of the Jason Taverner Show in Indianapolis, and she’s sort of twisted our arm into making it into a live nationwide broadcast.”

The man was terrified by the idea of this broadcast, and he was perfectly justified. This was Pinkie Pie, practically the living and breathing mascot of Hasbro, and she’s asking to speak live in front of a potential audience of hundreds of millions of potential ex-customers. And she was Pinkie “IHOP Incident” Pie.

“We need somebody to keep her under control. We need a voice of reason. We need you, Dr. Franklin.”

I should have said no. I should have listened to the voice of reason in my own head and stayed as far away from the mad pink pony as possible. But when I looked into Arthur Slugworth’s eyes, I saw the eyes of Discord, and I knew then who arranged this sequence of events.

My contract was being activated, my services were required in Indianapolis, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

So I got on a plane and left my beloved home of Los Angeles...

...Never to return.

> Chapter 8: The Devil's Greatest Trick
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 8: The Devil’s Greatest Trick





The Master, especially as portrayed by Roger Delgado against Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who, doesn’t make a lick of sense as a traditional antagonist. Under Pertwee, the Doctor is stuck taking care of a single primitive planet, Earth, which the Master could so very easily take over. But in fact all of the Master’s plans to take over the world inevitably fail, and in addition these plans were obviously doomed to fail from the moment of inception. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that everything the Master touches falls apart.

The shippers, being, well...shippers, interpret this to mean that the only reason the Master is doing this is in order to set up loud confrontations with the Doctor, confrontations that they of course fantasize as ending in steamy sex, because apparently that’s the consequence of all loud confrontations ever.

It took me decades, but eventually I figured out that the Master’s goal was not control, despite the obvious name and the way he acts. Because if Pertwee’s Doctor uncharacteristically works for “The Man” in the form of UNIT, if he’s an agent of Order with a capital “O”, then the Master, as the Doctor’s opposite, must have the opposite goal. The Master’s true goal always was and always will be chaos.

For you see the Master...is Discord.





How long has it been, do you think? Ever since the sun set, I’ve lost all track of time.

Surely, somebody noticed my absence? Surely, my rescue is imminent?

It’s...it’s so cold down here.

Is this it? Is this where I’m going to die?





Is it even worth continuing my story at this point? I encounter other ponies, famous ponies, ponies with stories you could seek out and read if you wish, stories where I am the out-and-out villain.

And what of it? What do I care what other people think of me? My actions speak for themselves.

And it’s not like you’re really there, George. You’re just a construct, an excuse, a way for me to pass the time until my rescue. Until my inevitable rescue. You listen to my tale of how I reached this sad end, so that you can nod your head and tell me that I was right, and that everypony else was wrong. And in exchange, I don’t have to think about how long I’ve been down here, how the rain will not stop falling...along with the temperature. I am getting out of here, and afterwards I’ll joke about the good times we had over a glass of Chardonnay.

Except you don’t exist. Indeed, if I start believing in you, that would be a very bad sign. A very bad sign indeed. Because I’m alone down here. All...alone.

You’re my sanity detector, George. Don’t ever change.




Day 12: Threesday, 3 PM EST




So, to continue this tale that I am obviously telling myself and not an imaginary person, I had arrived in Indianapolis in the early afternoon, accompanied by Benjamin/Rain Shimmer and the Mitchells.

For those who might be interested, Benjamin’s parents had still not been found, and Benjamin needed a great deal of comforting on this fact. As children were wont to do, he even started blaming himself, believing that they were deliberately hiding so they wouldn’t have to go back to being his parents. It just breaks my heart when this sort of thing happens—childhoods prematurely terminated by bad luck, or deliberate deception. What had this kid done to deserve being thrown in with P.A.P.A., to be separated from his parents for so long, or to be yoked to such a corrosive force of cynicism like Rain Shimmer?

It didn’t help that P.A.P.A. seemed to have some sort of relationship with Discord. I can’t say for sure if he hired them to do what they did to Benjamin, but if not, he cynically took advantage of the situation to bring me into his employ, when he clearly had the power to do something to help.

This was the sort of being I was working for. In secret, as my throbbing hand reminded me.


~ ~ ~


The rain started when we were flying over Colorado. Of course that was where it would start.





Matters with Miss Bliss went better than expected. There was a teary-eyed reunion between the two pony lovers, and after all that the teacher had been through, there were no reservations whatsoever about moving back to her home state. But she wouldn’t be moving back immediately—there were affairs to put in order, friends to say goodbye to, and closing down the doomed campaign to get her job back. She considered it important to personally convey her thanks to this last group, to keep them from thinking for a moment that she was taking advantage of all of their hard work, only to abandon them the moment a higher-paying job appeared. This would take several days.

And that meant I needed to part ways with them. I had business back home, and I wanted to keep an eye on Danielle. Not to mention Hasbro’s pointless assignment: having to horse-sit the Pink Princess of Pandemonium herself.

Did I mention that this city stank? The fumes of automobiles were everywhere. How could the people here stand it?





The limo dropped me off at a building not that far off in appearance from the one where the Buster Friendly show was taped. From the outside, these things look vaguely like warehouses, although inside of course they are organized like theaters with a massive A/V section bolted in front.

I went in the back door...

No, I went in the front door...

...I got in there somehow. I found my dressing room...I mean, I must have found my dressing room, because the idea that I would go on live television without checking my appearance once since leaving Los Angeles is absurd. But I don’t remember doing it.

I do apologize, George, if the story’s sort of falling apart on me. And I remember Fluttershy waiting in the darkness, a straight razor held in her lips and utterly black eyes, as she...

No! No, that didn’t happen. Not yet, and I don’t think ever.

I...I think?





So...cold...





I was...I was backstage, yes, I was backstage; staring at the curtain, waiting for the show to start. Thinking about Gary.

What was I going to do about Gary?

I read Danielle’s email for perhaps the tenth or twentieth time since the plane had landed. I wish I could quote it for you, but there seems to be a seething maelstrom of missed opportunity and lost hope in that part of my memories that I can’t see past. Probably because of the way that Danielle wrote it.

She had gone into Gary’s bedroom seconds after I lifted off from LAX, only to discover that Gary had become the pony Gold Star, Wave Rider’s younger brother.

She didn’t have a problem with it. She reported the transformation of the closest person in her life without a shred of emotion. Something was happening back in that apartment. Something horrible. I needed to get back there as soon as possible, or something irreversible was going to happen.

I could just feel it.

Or maybe my memory of what actually did happen has partly overwritten this memory. It’s all getting very confusing.


~ ~ ~


It was backstage that I met Pinkie Pie. Or rather, the gestalt that resulted from scrambling the brains of Pinkie Pie and her human. She wore clothes. I find it odd that so few of the ponies I’ve seen in the news have been dressed. Here, with the rain pouring down outside, clothes on a furred creature made perfect sense.

Around her neck was the Element of Laughter. Now that was interesting. Did each of the Bearers appear on Earth with their elements, or did they have to repeat the ritual from the pilot episode to get Earth copies out of some rocks?

Anyway, she was sitting in a chair, clutching a stuffed dragon. Not Spike. Maybe Spyro, or Figment from Walt Disney World? The colors seem to swirl in my mind, so I can’t really be sure.

She raised her head, and our eyes met. This would be the moment for the mind games. If Pinkie was dominant, then she would try to lift my obviously doom-laden mood.

Seeing as the Bearers were treated only a bit less than royalty in the show after the defeat of Discord, I bowed lightly to her and introduced myself.

“Well if it isn’t George,” she said cuttingly. “What a coincidence—I buried a George last Thursday.”

Wait, why did she call me George? And why does it sound like she’s speaking with my voice?

“Nathan,” I corrected her. “Or Dr. Franklin, if you wish to be formal. I’m sorry for your loss.”

She introduced her dragon. It was Spyro. She gave it the same degree of respect as the animated Pinkie gave to her pet alligator. Was Spyro alive? In this crazy world, it was entirely possible.

That out of the way, I gave her a friendly warning. This was the Jason Taverner Show, after all, and the goal of the Jason Taverner Show is always to manipulate your guests into hitting each over the head with the fold-up chair.

She shrugged it off. “So you’re the Loyal Opposition,” she told me with a smirk.

A bewigged dragon runs in fear from an army of rampaging griffons dressed like Eighteenth Century peasants, fully equipped for a tar-and-feathering session.

Where the hell did that come from?!

A second later, the vision was gone. I shook my head, and Pinkie quite rightly looked at me like I had lost my mind for a second.

I tried to figure out what she meant by her phrase. Did she think I was P.A.P.A.’s spokesperson? But then I saw that she had been browsing the website Danielle and I had created. I gave her a speech, the sort of speech I’ve already given you, about how I only wished to help ponies, and how my beliefs about merging would not stand in the way of my commitment. And then I told her that this was, in the end, her show and not mine, and that I would trot any of this rhetoric out only if I thought the situation absolutely demanded it.

Pinkie Pie/Human Whoever accepted this remarkably calmly. “By the way, the eye thing doesn’t work for me,” she then told. “One, my human side is an aspie, so I emote differently. Two, as a pony, even if there are similarities, my nervous system is not completely identical with a human’s. And three: I’m Pinkie Freakin’ Pie. Party Proletariat, Mistress of Mania, Ceaser of Comprehension, and a bunch of made-up titles emphasizing my insanity.”

Wow, what a conceited jackass.

After a few seconds of my silence, she added, “I’m not sure whether I should be insulted you think you can read me so easily.”

I continued to stare at her like she was a statue.

“We’re on in five!” a random stagehand informed us.

“You know, you really shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV,” I said with a smirk.

It’s like I’ve always said: perception trumps reality. It doesn’t matter if the rule actually makes sense, only that you can trick everybody else into thinking it makes sense.

“You know, I don’t really watch TV that often,” Pinkie feebly retorted.

Like that had anything to do with my ability to control any situation I found myself in.

That was my thought at the time. Feel free to contrast that moment of false bravado with several others in this story so far, George, or for that matter to the moment I am currently telling you this story from.


~ ~ ~


The show announced itself with an inoffensive little ditty that wasn’t supposed to resemble any other copyrighted tune, but...

“Overture. Curtain, lights...” Pinkie wasn’t speaking, merely mouthing out the words. But I could understand them easily enough, and I silently face-palmed. There was no way now not to hear it as the Bugs Bunny Show theme.

On a positive note, this was recognizably Pinkie Pie, not the cold aspie I had been speaking with earlier. Perhaps it was possible that instead of either remaining separate or merging, Pinkie/whoever had chosen C) All or None of the Above. I wouldn’t put it past her.

The voice of an announcer who sounded like he had been borrowed from late-night college radio spoke over the music, saying, “Hasbro and Moderna Designs present: An Evening with Pinkie Pie.”

Pinkie seemed to be as surprised as I was that the show was being co-sponsored by the world’s leading furnishings company.

“Yes folks,” the announcer continued, “Moderna Designs present the latest in kitchen luxury: the Moderna Wonder-major All-Automatic Convenience Centerette.” There were oohs and ahhs from the audience as an image of a thoroughly ordinary kitchen was placed up on the monitors.

I began to wonder if the audience had been borrowed from the set of the latest Sham-Wow demonstration.

A curly-haired man in a periwinkle suit stepped into the limelight. A broad grin appeared to be a surgically applied part of his face. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Jason Taverner. And it’s my great pleasure to introduce to you the individual who made this wonderful night possible. The one, the only...Pinkie Pie!”

The audience put on their best polite applause. All except for Discord, who was sitting at the back. Watching and waiting for me to fail him, so he could subject me to the incredible tortures that he thought up in his dreams.

Nobody else seemed to notice him. In fact, when I think about him in my memory, he seems superimposed over another figure who was all in shadows. So, maybe he wasn’t there? Or maybe he was actually in my mind? Or maybe he still is?





Just to switch tracks, let me remind you that I have been substituting names as I’ve been telling this story. The host of this show is not actually named after the main character from Philip K. Dick’s novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, any more than the Los Angeles show I appeared at a few days earlier was actually hosted by the character from Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? And of course the furnishings company co-sponsoring the show was the Swedish behemoth you’re probably thinking of, instead of an extremely obscure joke from the movie Time Bandits (too obscure for a YouTube link, as a matter of fact).

Anyway, Flow My Tears is one of Dick’s lesser-known works, so let me refresh your memory of it: Jason Taverner is a shallow and self-centered talk show host. One day he wakes up in an alternate universe America that is a dystopian police state. Nobody knows who he is and worse, he lacks the identification needed to prevent himself being rounded up by the secret police. After stumbling through this nightmare world for a while, he is found by Alys Bruckman, a rich drug addict, and Taverner’s primary stalker in the world that he came from. Alys had been experimenting with a drug so powerful that it warps reality. Since she was unable to make Tavener into her lover in the real world, she used her drug-fueled powers to pull them both into an alternate reality where he was utterly at her mercy. He is only saved when she overdoses, returning him to reality.

So how’s this for an idea: What if My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic really is nothing more than a work of fiction? What if our world had its own “Alys Bruckman”, a madman or -woman with reality-warping powers, someone who was so devoted to the show and the character of Discord that s/he became Discord, and as Discord, started to turn everybody on Earth into ponies?

Do you realize what this would mean?





The stagehand was looking at me. I think I missed my cue.

I stepped out onto the stage, the four chairs in a row, the preening host standing in the aisles with that really long stick microphone borrowed from 1970’s The Price is Right, the battered folding chair waiting in the wings like Chekhov’s Gun for its inevitable entrance in the third act, and watching it all, the audience of rabid jackals...

“Who the hell is this conceited jackass?” Al Bundy cried out at my entrance. A portion of the crowd chuckled their agreement.

I sat down next to Pinkie Pie. And yes, she was sitting like a human instead of a pony.

After all, that’s what she really is.

“Now before we begin taking questions, Pinkie,” the host addressed the pony, “do you have any sort of statement you wish to make?”

A human. She’s nothing but a human, warped into a foreign shape by the will of another.

“Humanity rocks,” she said after a moment’s thought, “and we are not establishing conversion bureaus.”

Yes, of course. Give the wavering supporters of the ponies that search term to look up on Google. I’m sure it will vastly increase your support.


~ ~ ~


Now I don‘t want to do Miss Pie any disservice, but the majority of the questions that night were extraordinarily banal. Or phrased in such a way as to make the appearance of the folding chair inevitable. Neither of which make for questions you would care to read about. Of course you can track Miss Pie down yourself to get her account, if I am mistaken in my assumption.

That and I really can’t remember a lot of it.

So let’s just skip ahead to the good bits.


~ ~ ~


Victoria Thorndyke took the mike, attired in a powder-blue pantsuit. “On behalf of my husband, who couldn’t be here, I’d like to ask: When will this madness end?” She leveled an accusatory glare at Mr. Taverner for her husband’s absence. Ah, Madeline Kahn—you’re not allowed to change, either.

“Well not anytime soon, I hope,” I quipped. “Madness is a good part of my revenue stream.”

What? If Pinkie Pie is allowed to make a Conversion Bureau crack, I’m completely justified in making a pot-shot at my own profession.

“To be quite honest, I don’t know which madness you’re talking about exactly,” Pinkie said, in her attempt to answer the question. “The madness of people turning into ponies? Well, the magic that’s causing that is probably being maintained by Discord,” ...maintained and created... “and me and the other bearers are headed to New York in order to deal with him, so...a couple of days, perhaps. The madness of people actually being ponies...I can make no statement regarding the reversal of the condition. The madness of people mistreating and prosecuting ponies just because they’re ponies? I hope that will end extremely soon. The madness of the calendar? That just needs the timekeeper folks to get together and patch up that mess, a day’s a day no matter what it’s named.”

Now I didn’t correct Pinkie out loud, but that last part about the calendar is nowhere near as simple as she thought. The earth was moving around the sun at a fraction of the speed it normally took. As a result, a whole calendar year would end up being squeezed into a single solar week, based on where the earth should have been in its orbit. And yes, under normal physics, that change should have caused the Earth to fall into the Sun. But obviously, that hasn’t happened.

How do I know this? Well because of that one lecture I saw on TV by that one professor...Zarkov? I swore I saw it...although it looks an awful lot like my college Physics 101 class when I think about it.

This is getting ridiculous.

“The madness of deep fried salad, though, that’s something I’m really interested in. I mean, deep frying tomatoes? What’s up with that?” That was Pinkie speaking—obviously.

An imaginary voice, portraying an imaginary character, holding a real person hostage with full consent.

Cera from The Land Before Time took the mike. No, she was definitely human, so why am I thinking triceratops?

“How do we know these ponies aren’t gonna go crazy and kill us?”

Oh that’s right—she’s a triceratops in my mind because she’s thinking like an insane herbivore, someone who frames all change in the form of predation.

Of course, Pinkie’s the wrong pony to be asking this question, considering that she had a homicidal maniac inside of her brain even before she arrived on Earth. Sure enough:

“I’m perfectly safe as long as you don’t threaten our friends or family. If you did that, then I’d be forced to rip your throat out.” That last part sounded like Pazuzu from The Exorcist, which may mean that I was only thinking that she said it.

The next question was interrupted by the smell of smoke coming from the Moderna Designs Kitchen of the Future. A stagehand opened the toaster oven, only to discover a piece of concentrated evil. He reached in to remove it with his bare hands...

“No, don’t touch it, it’s Evil!” Kevin cried out.

The stagehand touched it (because nobody ever listens to Kevin) and was instantly annihilated.

Nobody seemed to care about this turn of events. Did it even happen? I’m not sure. It does seem to only exist to justify my use of Moderna Designs in this chapter in the first place.

There was...um, there was a question about whether the transformations were permanent. Of course, we didn’t know the answer to that, and Pinkie Pie made an empty promise that they would reduce the number of involuntary transformations.

Doesn’t she realize yet that this madness will only die with Discord?


~ ~ ~


The inevitable baiting session happened here. What little I had to say was completely worthless in satisfying the paranoid nut-job who had taken over the show. Pinkie Pie decided to respond to this by baking, while I choose to respond to it but not bothering to put either questions or answers on this page.


~ ~ ~


“Do either of you know how long this is going to last?” Carl Fredricksen asked.

The madness has no end, just as my imprisonment here in this pit has no end. No end, and no beginning, an eternal frozen darkness of fraying sanity...

“Let’s see, where are we at?” I quipped, because of course I had no premonition of the fate that Discord was even then preparing for me. “Nine points into Save the Cat!, or only eight? We definitely haven’t reached ‘Bad Guys Close In’. So as a back-of-the-envelope estimate, I’d say we’re on page 55, out of 110.”

“Oh wait, this is real life, not a Hollywood scriptwriting formula?” I added sarcastically. “Then I really have no idea when this will end. When Good triumphs over Evil, I suppose.”

God, I’m such a conceited jackass.

Considering that Pinkie Pie was currently cooking with ingredients that most certainly didn’t exist 30 seconds ago, I thought I’d satisfy my personal curiosity at that point. “How do you cook a soufflé without it collapsing?” I asked.

“It’s impossible,” she replied calmly. “The trick is to delay the collapse.”

Now that’s interesting, because that answer implied that Pinkie was in fact constrained in her toonish nature, by the standard set of rules that cartoon-obsessed nerds came up with decades ago.

Because of course an imaginary pony could manipulate reality—she could sorta do it in the show, and she could definitely do it in the diseased brain of the person who devolved into Discord, so of course the created pony personality could do the same.

Then she added a good point in response to Carl’s question: “A society that builds all of this, these cameras, this kitchen, that air conditioning system, those standardized chairs...how can a society like that not defeat discord with a lower-case D? So Discord with a capital D, Discord with an oh-so-punchable face, that’s easy peasy, vanilla squeezy!” In part of that last sentence, it seems that my memory started playing wish fulfilment again—I’ll let you guess which part.

Somebody who actually knew Pinkie Speak interjected: “Don’t you mean ‘lemon squeezy’?”

“Does it look like I’m making lemon cake here?” she replied.

The interesting thing about introducing toon rules into a real-world environment, is whether those rules are now available by us regular folk. I decided that an experiment would be in order: “Hey,” I addressed the studio crew, “could somebody put the recipe for whatever that is up on the still store?”

I beamed when a recipe dutifully appeared, followed by the muffled confusion by the crew trying to figure out where the hell it came from, especially since the studio wasn’t even equipped with a still store.

(By the way, I thank Mystery Science Theater 3000 for learning what that old-fashioned piece of television technology was in the first place.)

Back in the audience, a clearly terrified David Kessler asked if there’s a chance that people were turning into anything other than harmless ponies.

“Thus far, the only replacement style inter-universal transport appears to be centered on the world in which Equestria resides,” Pinkie quipped, thinking herself very clever, but managing to go completely over everyone’s heads.

The poor kid nearly had a heart attack before his sister Rachel convinced him that no, he’s not going to devour his family in his sleep.

Dr. Miles Bennell asked if the condition of turning into a pony was contagious, or if there were any known triggers for transformation or ways to avoid it.

“Well...” Pinkie shrugged nonchalantly. “Quite frankly, I don’t know.”

Once again, I was forced to step in to quell a panic. “I’m still doing research on this with my clients,” I told the audience. “It appears to be public knowledge that everyone converted so far was a fan of the show before this whole business began, and so far I’ve seen no conclusive evidence to the contrary, but beyond that I know nothing.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” Pinkie piped in. “I’ve met those who transformed without ever having heard of the series. However, there does appear to be a pattern, personality-wise. It’s complementary. If you and the pony were characters on some buddy cop show, it would work.”

This made a disturbing amount of sense. Especially for my two clients. But the same could be extrapolated for the pink pony I was sitting next to, to judge her personality now compared to how she was portrayed on the show. Canon Pinkie had a pathological need to make other ponies happy at all times in order to prevent the collapse of her own self-esteem. If the merge had been everything that its supporters had promised, the Pinkie before me would still be the Element of Laughter, still the source of happiness for all, while not being neurotically obsessed about it, and able to be happy for herself. But instead, the pony before me was causing fear and hatred without realizing it, because of her aspie-like inability to competently handle the chaotic emotions of non-aspies. Canon Pinkie Pie would never pull a practical joke on Fluttershy, because she knew when certain forms of humor were going too far. Merged Pinkie Pie on the other hand would make some utterly inappropriate comment that would drive the pegasus into a suicide attempt, and would be absolutely clueless in the aftermath that it was all her fault. In other words, the theme behind picking personalities to match was not so much making them complementary, as making them contradictory. The merge had not “helped” Pinkie Pie—it had crippled her. And if the Element of Laughter was crippled, then Equestria was well and truly doomed.

And if you realized that Equestria was a big fat lie, then everything, the hundreds or thousands trekking to New York City, the Bearers and their Elements, were all in the end a waste, a waste that would end with madness and murder on a global scale.

Seen through this lens, Discord giving me the power to enter dreams was not a piece of manipulation on par with what he did to the poor dumb kids who wanted or needed to be ponies, but was a cry for help. He had given me the only tool capable of saving these poor deluded souls from the madness he had inflicted on them. For the good of humanity, I had to seek out and cure the pony sicknesses in each afflicted human’s mind...

...Before it was too late for all of us.
> Chapter 9: Dr. Franklin vs. the Winged Fury
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 9: Dr. Franklin vs. the Winged Fury





“Gold Star...Gold Star just told me that he killed Gary,” the first of two messages on my iPhone began. Danielle was speaking with Wave Rider’s voice, in a tone too stunned to show any emotion. “It was during their first dream together. He said...he said that George thought that his life was a waste, and that Gold Star could make better use of his body than he could. I...I think I believe him.

“George always knew he was different. Knew that he couldn’t think as fast as the other kids. And of course you know me, asshole that I am, that I made sure to let him know when he screwed up. I told him he was a moron, that he was retarded, and because he loved me so much, he believed me. So when a stuck-up genius takes up residence in his brain, of course he’s going to hand over the keys. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Fate.

“I haven’t got anything else to update you about, Doc. I just...I just need to think about what happened. About this merge business. And why exactly it’s such a bad idea.”

No. No, not you too!

The second message, like the first, was sent from Danielle’s cell phone. It was only ten seconds long: “Greetings, Doctor,” said a strange voice somewhere midway between Wave Rider’s voice and Danielle’s old voice. “I am Wavielle, and I no longer require your services.”

Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!

I immediately called her back. “This is the Higher Consciousness known as Wavielle,” the strange voice on the other side of the line said serenely. “How may I be of service?”

“You know damn well who this is, ‘Wavielle’. Now tell me what the hell you just did!”

“Ah, Doctor Franklin. I should have expected that you would be unable to let go of your attachment to the former human named Danielle. For your information, Danielle and Wave Rider’s minds descended into a deep dream state, where days of perceived time pass in a manner of seconds. There they jettisoned all parts of their memories and personalities that they found stood in the way of their happiness. The surviving parts were joined into the gestalt consciousness to which you are conversing.”

“Huh.” Never was that word more filled with pain and outrage. “And what about those parts that ‘stood in the way’?”

“They were destroyed, Doctor Franklin. Annihilated. Utterly and completely demolished.”

“Really?” I replied. “Danielle’s memories of how others treated her because of her lameness, and of how her family tried to steal her brother away from her? Her earliest memories of how her mother abused her? The seething hate of the world and all false forms of sincerity?”

“I do not recognize any of those things, so they must have been destroyed.”

“And Wave Rider’s memories, of being treated like an inconvenience by his family, of being given gifts and money instead of love, of learning that the only sure path to happiness was to become invisible?”

“Once again,” Wavielle replied, “I know not what you refer to, so those things must have been eliminated to create my perfect personality.”

“And what kind of personality is that?! You’ve taken away everything that makes a personality. You’re not a person, you’re an abstraction! What are you good for? What are you good at? What...are you even capable of making a good web page anymore?”

“That is a foolish question. Of course I am an expert webmaster. It would be foolish to eliminate the skills I possessed going into the merge.”

“Alright, then prove it! Extend the site you created for me yesterday to include a news feed.”

“You are being foolish Doctor,” the hybrid pony said, “but I will take your silly test.” A few seconds passed as Wavielle used his/her hooks to type at a keyboard. “Take a look.”

And so I did. “That’s so 1995,” I told him/her. “Why can’t you give me something more like Blackstock’s upcoming concerts site? That was one of yours.”

“I fail to see why the current design is not satisfactory, but I can easily copy the code over.” A few seconds passed as the sounds of a touchpad being used and more keys being depressed could be heard. “This old design is needlessly complicated,” Wavielle complained. “All this extra code just to modulate the rate of the scroll. There’s no reason—”

“There’s every reason why those complications are in place,” I insisted, “because that is the nature of Sobek Webdesign, the reason it stood out. It was Danielle’s frustrations and outlook on life in visual form! And now it’s gone. And as for Wave Rider, you may still be able to control the water underneath you, but can you still surf? Can you still live up to—”

“I don’t have a cutie mark anymore.” The strange voice had suddenly lost all of its smug superiority. “I can’t do any of the things that made my two components unique. How will I be able to afford my rent anymore? How can I take care of Gold Star? By what means do I even justify my existence?”

There was a long pause.

“Wavielle?”

“Doctor Franklin, I would like to re-engage your services,” the voice on the phone said quietly. “Could you come back here at your earliest convenience? Before I consider doing something else we may all come to regret?”

“Yes, Wavielle,” I said with relief, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” From my spot behind some backstage curtains, I looked over at Pinkie Pie, who was still signing signatures in the audience. “My business in Indiana is definitely over.”

That happened. All of it, just as I have transcribed. But I cannot be sure about the events between then...and Fluttershy. I’ll tell you the dreams, the hallucinations, the flitting phantoms of thoughts that I can recall, and I’ll let you judge what was real, and what was not.




Day 12: Threesday, 7:30 PM EST. Indianapolis, IN.




Outside of the theater, rain was pouring down in buckets. This was nothing, though, compared with the insanity my weather apps were telling me about the rest of the country: fifteen foot flooding in Texas, hundred mile an hour winds in Nebraska, 10-pound hailstones in Florida, and fireballs raining from the sky in Oregon. It was like the opening from Flash Gordon, except, you know, for real instead of stuck in a joke of a movie. The apps didn’t how much worse it was going to get in the next six hours. They just couldn’t agree if this was going be the end of all human civilization on earth, or merely in America. For this part of the country, it was a vast tropical depression, the eye of which was seven hundred miles away, in New York City. I wasn’t stupid enough to go outside into that weather for even a moment, not without a form of transportation lined up to Southern California, the only part of the continental United States that suffered from nothing more than summer-like temperatures in November. But I was stupid enough to think that I could actually arrange said transportation using merely the power of my personality projected over the cellular phone network.

This is how my seventh phone call went: “What do you mean all flights are booked? It’s not even a hurricane yet! Money is no object, so if you’ve got any private planes for hire? . . . Oh, you do? Great, line one up and . . . well, why can’t you do it? I’ll be sure to make it worthwhile and . . . no. No, I am not trying to bribe you. Yes, I know full well that bribing a ticket agent is a ‘grave criminal offense’. I was just trying to expedite . . . well, can you at least give me the number?”

Click.

“Well a happy holidays to you too, you prick!”

The first six of my calls had not fared much better than that one.

So here goes lucky number eight: “Hello, Ready-Flite?” I’m smiling as I say this—it’s very important to smile when you talk to customer service. That way you trick them into thinking that you aren’t fantasizing about strangling them all with their own intestines. “Yes, I’d like to book a trip from Decatur to Los Angeles, or hell, anywhere on the west coast. Name the price, and I’ll pay it. . . . No planes? No planes whatsoever? Well, when are you expecting one to come back? . . . A week? Excuse me for saying this, but that’s nuts!” Calm, Nathan, calm. Think about happy kitties...burning alive as a customer service representative cackles in evil triumph. “Well, yes, I’m well aware of maintenance schedules, especially after the last couple of calls and . . . well yes, I’d love to be transferred to someone who . . . no, not Indianapolis! I’ve already tried them and please don’t . . . Damnit!”





Finally, finally, I got a route mapped out. It was ridiculously drawn out, thousands of miles flown over Canadian airspace in what should be early November, because for the first time in the history of air travel, Canada in November has become less turbulent than any part of America. Don’t think for a moment that I’m holding Discord blameless for this. There was only one problem: To start it all off, I needed to get to Albany. That’s right, I had to head towards the center of this storm. And it would have to be by ground transportation.

So guess what? I was stupid enough to walk right out into the pouring rain. But it was alright. Surely my limo would be back by now. Two grand ought to be enough to bribe my driver to take me a few hundred miles east and then...

“Where’s the limo?!” I screamed at the heavens. “Where the hell is my limo?!”

Text message for Dr. Nathan Franklin: “Limo recalled for urgent use. Your account will be credited by $7.35. Have a nice day, and be sure to Like us on Facebook!”

“Those...cheap...bastards!”

Alright, this is it, my last call, my last chance, my absolute last chance for Danielle, and I hope to God I can do something for Gary: “Yes, I’d like to rent a car. Destination? Albany. . . . No, I am not insane. I need to get a flight to Los Angeles in the next six hours. . . . Because it’s a life or death situation, that’s why! . . . No, of course I already tried Indianapolis, and Chicago, and Dayton and Louisville and . . . yes, and those five airports as well. This storm has got all of the flights cancelled and . . . well of course I’d rather not drive right into the blasted thing, but the only alternative in the other direction is Denver, and I’ll fight Discord barehanded in a bear cage before I’ll go back to that hellhole!”

Actually, I never got past the word “Discord” in my diatribe, but I thought what I had planned to say was colorful enough to report. As it was, the Spirit of Chaos apparently noticed when I called his name in vain, because at that moment I was toppled to the ground by several beasts at once.

The beak of a titanic eagle snapped at my hair. It was like the eagle that fed on Prometheus as he was chained upon Mount Caucasus, only it was trying to devour my brains instead of my liver. Actually, since I’m apparently on the side of the bad guys now, maybe it was one of those giant eagles that Gandalf seemed to carry around in his back pocket, except this one apparently lives on organs just like the other one. And the Middle Earth connection was fitting, because it felt like I had the entire mass of the Mountains of Moria on my back, making it impossible to inhale, and speeding me rapidly towards a blackout. The mountain was supported on the two vast hind-paws of the Nemean Lion (Heracles’ First Labor), a beast impervious to attack, with claws sharper than any sword.

I was flipped upon my back, which caused me to see the silhouette of my attacker. I was obviously not being assaulted by any sort of mythical creature. No, this was just some mountain lion, wandered into town from who knows where, that simply wanted to eat my face off.

“Geez, watch where the heck you’re stepping!” the mountain lion informed me. (Actually, I think she may have sworn a bit more than that. Typical, I’m on the verge of death, and all I can think about is scandalizing the nonexistent kids among my nonexistent listeners.)

Alright, two things: First and most important, I no longer knew where my phone was. And second, this was a talking mountain lion.

Thank God.

I mean, my doctorate is pretty much useless against your run-of-the-mill non-talking beast.

“No, not a talking mountain lion,” the creature said in a voice that was growing increasingly familiar. (Wait, did I say some of my thoughts out loud?) “Griffon. You know, with the eagle bits and the lion bits, and the bit that’s just barely holding back from eating your face for tripping over me while I was sleeping?”

See, I was right—she was going to eat my face off.

Oh, and this was Gilda. I had four patients who didn’t like Gilda, not one bit. Because she made Fluttershy cry, and anyone who makes Fluttershy cry will have to answer to her army of brony protectors. None of whom actually knew any form of martial art whatsoever.

Not that Fluttershy needed that sort of protection. After all, Fluttershy in my mind’s eye stood in the center of an island in the middle of a deep, deep sea. Both her potential attackers and her potential defenders would have to cross that sea to reach her. And doing so would be a mistake, because what we call “Fluttershy” is actually a fleshy lure sitting on the snout of an enormous dragon constructed entirely of rage. Hiding buried in the sand of the island, waiting patiently until some poor sap gets too close and then bam! The beast reveals itself, and slowly rends the screaming victim’s body into shreds, feeding on the fear and betrayal that follows in its wake.

“What the hell was that?!” Gilda cried out, slapping my face with her talons to bring me back into the land of sanity.

“I’m sorry,” I begged, recovering my wits. I reached up to try and stop the flow of blood from her claws. “What are you doing here, if I may be so bold to ask?”

“I’m just another sucker who got sent to this stupid place against her will.” Gilda looked sullen, with her beak tightly clipped.

Client opportunity!

“That’s too bad,” I said, as the rain continued to soak into my clothes.

She huffed, almost deflating. “You’re a doc, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Good for you,” she said with a light growl. “Such a shame you’re in the middle of this mess.”

I wondered which mess she was referring to: the storm, the Equestrian-on-Earth scenario, or my deal with Discord. After all, I had no idea who else he had working for him. If he wanted somebody to take out Pinkie Pie, for example, he could have done a lot worse than Gilda here, assuming that the griffon remembered what the Element of Laughter had done to her.

I suppose at this point that I should make something perfectly clear: I think that what Pinkie Pie did in that episode with Gilda was the most perfect expression of her character’s strengths in the history of Friendship Is Magic. Because what she did was put Gilda into a perfectly fair test where, if she was the true understanding friend she told Rainbow Dash she was, she would have emerged with flying colors. But because she was a phony (in the Holden Caulfield sense) she failed that test, and showed Rainbow exactly what sort of friend she really was.

But of course, it was Gilda who was standing in front of me right now, not Pinkie Pie or Rainbow Dash. So, assuming she hasn’t put the whole episode behind her, she’s going to have the same opinion of the Equestrian Pinkie Pie as I have of the monstrosity on earth that calls herself Pinkie Pie. I would have to tread very carefully.

“We make our own messes,” I replied to Gilda. “If we’re clever enough, we dig our way out. I specialize in messes of the mind.”

The griffon pointed into the darkness. “Your toy’s seven feet that-a-way, next to the drainage gate. I’m Gilda, by the way.”

I wonder if she knows how thoroughly her privacy has been violated by DHX Media?

She stared into my eyes, silently judging me. I in turn looked into her eagle eyes. They...words absolutely fail to describe them. I’ve seen the eyes of birds in zoos, and zoomed up close in nature documentaries. They always look so dead, so devoid of emotion. Normally, if you want to know what a bird is feeling, you watch its motions: how it bobs its head, how it raises its wings. But these were bird eyes with all of the expressiveness of a human being. I don’t think I could count all of the emotions I saw within them: hate, disgust, despair, fear...I looked away before she could catch on that I was reading her. “Doctor Franklin,” I introduced myself.

Coming to some sort of decision, she smiled, just a little, then walked out into the rain. Beaks should not be able to do that. She was instantly soaked before she grabbed the phone and was back by my side. “Here.”

“Thank you, Gilda,” I said. I didn’t bother to see if it was still working before I slipped it into a pocket of my jacket. I mean, there’s somebody in pain, right in front of me. That will always take precedence. Especially when it’s pretty clear that I’ll never be able to save George. No, not George—Gary.... I cast my head down in defeat. I really was going mad.

“Relax. We’re all in a mess right now.” Gilda reassured me, evenly, coolly. She hummed under her breath; her tail, soaked through, flicking. “Hmm…Well. I suppose I could use your services, if you have no way of getting out of this hell hole of a city.” She muttered under her breath. “Like I have no way of getting out of this hell hole of a life.”

“Well, you know where you stand in a hell hole,” I said with a smile. “If you want to talk, I’m here to listen. Although maybe one of the less torrential backstage rooms might be more congenial to a conversation?”
> Chapter 10: La Donna e mobile
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 10: La Donna è mobile





Day 12: Threesday, 8:00 PM EST. Indianapolis, IN.




I led Gilda into the backstage part of the theater. Meanwhile it sounded like Pinkie Pie was performing the opera Rigoletto for those members of the audience who had decided to wait out the storm. And by “performing”, I mean she was singing all of the parts—and possibly performing all of the orchestral parts as well, for all I knew. Right now she was singing the duet between the title jester (a baritone part) and his daughter (a soprano part), a daughter who just happened to be named Gilda. I was hearing two voices at the same time coming from Pinkie’s throat, and one of them had all of the vocal mannerisms of the griffon next to me, but in Italian.

Thinking too much about Pinkie Pie will drive you mad.

There was only one dressing room big enough for the two of us, and that belonged to Jason Tavener (remember him?). He was initially reluctant to swap his warm comfy room for one of the others, but one of Gilda’s smiles was quick to persuade him.

Pinkie’s singing reminded me that I was in a living, breathing cartoon, or at the very least a sitcom, and everybody knows what happens when you enter a dry room with a wet creature in a cartoon or sitcom. I therefore retreated outside the room while Gilda shook herself dry. Only once that was done did I bother to dry myself off and get comfortable.

“So, you wanna hear my complaint?”

“Go for it,” I said. “Doctor-client confidentiality applies, as does the age-old motivation of self-preservation.”

Gilda laughed out loud. “Well, it’s this pony-person fusing business. You ever get involved in any of that?”

“Yeah,” I said, dropping the comedy act. “And if you’d like to take a bit of advice from a qualified expert: Don’t. Just...don’t.”

Not that I had seen any sign of it. This Gilda before me was a thinking animal, a huntress. Every move she made revealed that. And her smell—you know, I’m almost positive that this is the first Equestrian I’ve encountered with a noticeable smell. You would think they’d have that nice smell that a well-groomed horse has, but none of them smelled like anything. Or, rather, they all smelled like humans, and being an urban human myself, I’ve learned to tune those smells out of my conscious perceptions. There was this way she would look uncertainly around her whenever she entered a room, focusing on the ceilings. I’m not sure what she was expecting, though—I imagine that pony roofs must be lower than human ones. Having no exposure to griffon architecture in the show, I didn’t know if she’d be more comfortable with a ceiling made of straw (that you could easily burst through if you ever found the need to fly to safety), or the stone ceilings and walls of a cave, where one wall was always made of the open air. What I’m saying is that I was talking to Gilda, 100 % Gilda. So where was Gilda’s human?

“...Why he isn’t talking to me that much anymore,” I caught Gilda saying, answering my question. Gilda had been speaking throughout my introspection, but I hadn’t been paying attention. “I think he’s depressed or something. Don’t blame him. I’ve been shot at, mocked, derided. Had the worst memories of my life used to sell god-damned toys to children...”

Oh great, she does know about that. Hopefully she doesn’t see me as fair game for revenge by proxy, being the same species as DHX executives and all.

I attempted to make her feel better with humor. It failed utterly. I don’t see why you need to know what the joke was. “When was the last time you heard from your human?” I then asked.

“Day before Halloween, I think,” Gilda replied. “So you won’t tell anyone anything I say here, ah? Anything at all?”

I gave her the fish eye. “If you dare to utter the phrase ‘I swear he was dead and half-eaten when I got there’, then this session is over. Short of that...mum’s the word.”

This crack did manage to get a snicker out of her. “I ain’t dumb enough to murder anybody, Doc,” she told me. “Although I came pretty near doing so when I first got here. I got shot at by some of Cale’s friends. Took me a while to not get over it.”

Well, that told me the name of Gilda’s human. A different gender than the Equestrian—I wonder how often that happened.

“And then some...thing named Discord came and patched me up in exchange for slowing down the Mane Six.”

Aw, did you have to say his name out loud?

I looked around nervously. The lighting in the room subtly changed before my eyes, causing shadows to spring up in every corner and crevice. There was no doubt that he was now monitoring this conversation.

It occurred to me that Gilda had not been stuck with the same “vow of silence” that I was stuck with. Nevertheless, she was now revealed as a fellow agent, or else as a test, to see if I would remain loyal.

She said that she had been sent to slow down the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony. A lot more direct than “prevent ponies from merging with their hosts” as far as evil plans go.

So, as one evil minion to another, I decided to talk shop. “And did you?” I asked in a neutral tone.

Gilda looked around, perhaps to see if her feeling of being watched was accompanied by an actual pair of eyes. “Well, she’s here, isn’t she?” the griffon replied. “The only problem is...is that...” She tried to compose herself, to engage in a calm conversation with a sympathetic listener, but her seething rage just couldn’t be denied. “They knew. They knew the second I showed up.” The tip of her tail hit a nearby chair, sounding exactly like a whip. “So they had a little pow-wow, and decided to ‘adopt’ me.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“I know!” she exclaimed. “They think I’ve ‘turned over a new leaf’, that I’ve forgiven them for torturing me!”

Well, this wasn’t a good sign. I mean, it’s one thing to acknowledge that you’ve been outsmarted by a manipulative little pink pony, but to phrase what she went through as “torture”?

I put on my figurative counselor hat, which in this case meant discarding my personal opinion in order to sympathize with my client. “What a load of horseshit!” I exclaimed. (Hey, I might never again get a chance to get away with that pun!) “Why should you ‘turn over a new leaf’ if they did nothing to earn your forgiveness?” And now the direct question to sell my sympathy: “Did they do anything?”

“Besides getting me killed by some pink alicorn thing? Nothing.”

My mind raced. “Alicorn” was the term reserved for Equestria’s rulers, Celestia and Luna. Luna had so far not been reported as being seen on Earth, as far as I knew. And Celestia was missing. She wasn’t supposed to be pink, but I was aware of some fanart that speculated that she might become pink if depowered. Twilight being in a hospital was bad enough, but Celestia depowered? Did Discord even need either of our services at this point? I mean, he’s pretty much won already. Unless there’s some new pink alicorn that exists but hasn’t shown up in the show as of early November of 2011, but that’s just crazy.

Wait, hold on, I think Gilda said something important while I was thinking. “What was that?” I asked.

“Fluttershy. She offered up her usual condolences and hugs, but she’ll give those to rabid wolves after blowing out their brains with a double-barreled shotgun, just like she’s gunna do to you when she catches you, you God forsaken piece of lying...”

I shook my head to clear it. That was George’s voice at the end, not Gilda’s.

“I haven’t talked to Cale since I joined up with the group,” the griffon concluded.

“Back when you were talking with him, did he sound glum all of the time? Did he try to avoid talking with you?”

Gilda shrugged. “Yeah, a little, I guess.”

The signs pointed to depression, and withdrawal from society. At least it was a start.

“Alright,” I told her, putting on my thinking pose. “Let’s come up with a list of reasons why he should at least listen to you, instead of spending the rest of eternity hiding from existence. Number one:  you’re not a phony.” Yeah, I know, I just told you guys that she was a phony last chapter. Rule Number One: The Doctor always lies. (Heh.)

“You got that right!” Gilda exclaimed. “Same goes for Cale. He was no phony. Uh, is. Is no phony.”

“That’s one of the main complaints that my depressed patients have with the world: that they are not treated honestly. Now, let’s see...Number Two…”

“And that’s exactly my problem with those ponies: none of them will tell me the damn truth!” Gilda said, going off on a tangent. “P. thinks that she knows everything and can do everything.” (Well, I thought, both of those are sort of true. Which is what is so terrifying about her.) “But she can’t change the way I think, can’t make me forgive her for what she’s done. ‘Shy? Ha! She’s...she’s different now.” Sadness and a hint of fear replaced her outrage. “After she fused, she became like half a pony. I don’t want to end up like that.” She shook off her funk with a forced laugh.

“Now see, that is the sort of thing I’m trying to avoid,” I said, looking at the corner Discord was most likely hiding in at that moment. “There was probably a decent human being in Fluttershy’s head once. What’s there now?”

Damn it, I’m still convinced that I’m right. Whether because a part of Discord is actively working against the rest, like Luna inside Nightmare Moon, or because as an avatar of chaos, he’s forced to be something other than absolutely evil, I’m certain that he’s supporting in me a cause that is fundamentally just. The ponies are not staying on Earth, and a merge cannot be reversed, so that would make it not only immoral, but probably illegal as well. I mean, when the ponies returned to Equestria, wouldn’t that count as kidnapping if there’s not enough of the human mind left to make a rational decision about moving to another planet for the rest of their lives?

“What’s inside ‘Shy’s head?” Gilda asked. “Hell if I know. She goes by ‘Ericashy’ now.” (Well, that gives me the name of Fluttershy’s other half, as well as telling me that this one is female. Although the name sounded so awkward that I suspected that Gilda might not have heard it correctly.) “I bet Flutters got stuck with some submissive do-gooder who only wanted to help. Kinda makes me sick thinking about it.”

Actually, if Pinkie Pie is any guide, “Erica” was probably some psychotic who steam-rolled everyone around her into doing whatever she wanted. And then the merge came, and Fluttershy steam-rolled her into submission. Never question the power of The Stare, I guess. Not sure who I pitied more under the circumstances. I’d go in and fix her, but much like Pinkie Pie, I very much doubt that she’d ask me.

But that’s enough speculation about possible future clients, when I have somebody in need right in front of me. “I think we were on item number two on that list,” I addressed Gilda.

“Number two?” Gilda asked. Her eyes were unfocussed, and she appeared to be thinking intently on something.

“Yeah, number two on the list of ways to get through to Cale.”

She blinked slowly. “...Go in and fix her?” she asked me.

Crap. I was speaking my thoughts out loud again, wasn’t I?

“Yup, you were,” Gilda said with a smile.

Damnit!

“Come on, what kind of secret are you hiding from me?”

You know, the chance that a predator is going to allow a hairless monkey like me poke around in her head is basically zero. “It’s just some...thing,” I hedged. “Human psychology thing. Completely consensual.” Although of course phrasing it like that makes it sound really dirty.

Gilda puffed herself out in that incredibly adorable way that birds do when they think they’re being insulted. “Riiiight,” she said with an “I’m so clever” smile. “Come on, Doc, are you lying to your client? Isn’t that against the rules?”

“Look,” I told her quickly, “I wasn’t going to tell you about something you’d never be interested in, as it would be a waste of your time. The fact is...” There is no non-creepy way to put this, is there? “I can kinda go into other people’s heads. Consensually.” (Nope, still sounds dirty.) “I want to make that perfectly clear. I’m not some kind of pervert or something.”

“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!” That’s what I probably sounded like to her, like General Ripper in Doctor Strangelove. I wouldn’t blame her in the least if she started using the excuse of losing the “string in her legs” to get as far away from me as possible.

...Or she could completely reject what I was saying by busting out laughing. “Oh, that’s rich!” she said through a grin. “What makes you think that you wouldn’t get torn to pieces, anyway?”

Oh wait, she actually believed me? “Where, in Ericashy’s head?” I asked.

“No, in mine.”

She isn’t...? “Wait,” I asked in confusion, “assuming you invited me in, why...” I suddenly had a vision of griffon mating practices, inspired by some of the more grisly habits of wasps biting each other’s heads off. “I...well...that was a hypothetical,” I sputtered. “Right? Right?”

She grinned, her odd avian tongue darting over her beak. “Well...if you can get in, I suppose I can trust you to carry a message, not pry around with a crowbar, yeah?”

I broke out in a cold sweat. “Yeah!” I assured her, in a suddenly high-pitched voice. “So, are you asking me?” I wanted to be really sure before I started this.

“To go into my mind?” Gilda asked. She cocked her head to look at the ceiling, as birds do when they are concentrating, and I had to fight against all instincts to release all this stress I was feeling by laughing out loud. “I don’t really see why not,” she finally concluded. “Can’t be any worse for you than going back out on that stage.”

“La donna è mobile,” sang Pinkie Pie from that stage, in the most famous aria from Rigoletto. “Qual piuma al vento, muta d’accento e di pensiero.” “The woman is wayward,” she was telling me, “like a feather floating down in the wind. Neither in voice nor in thought can she be trusted.”

She must have seen the doubt on my face. “It’ll be simple!” she assured me. “You go in, look around, make sure he’s not a corpse, then deliver what I want you to say. Understand?”

“I understand,” I said with a nod. “What do you want me to tell him?”

She looked nervous, for the first time since we met. “Patient confidentiality, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Tell the jerk that I miss him.”
> Chapter 11: A Place Where No One Knows Your Face
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 11: A Place Where No One Knows Your Face






It was a stretch of the Cave of the Winds known as the Grand Concert Hall, so named for the way that sounds reverberated. It was deep in the winter of ‘84, and way after closing hours. The flashlights had been turned off to preserve what little power they had left. Mother and her friends back in Denver thought we were with Father, and Father and his cronies back in Colorado Springs thought we were with Mother. After our fight, George had stopped talking to me. There had been a cry in the darkness. A bat, surely just a bat. And yet George still refused to answer me.

It was a dank place, and in the darkness it felt utterly devoid of the warmth of human kindness. Death waited in this place, echoing your darkest memories back to you. I decided to risk turning my flashlight on and taking a peek.

“Look away, Nate,” Mother’s voice warned me just in time. “Just look away.”

Drip. Drip.

If this was a cave, why were the walls behind me moving? Moving like they were breathing? The air was foul with a fetid stench, like that one time George and I had fed that cow with a pound of hamburger meat. From above came the oppressive feeling of being watched by the eyes of the gods. Watching...and judging.

Slowly, light crept into the cave, revealing a path: it was composed of broken shards of mirrored glass, forming a trail of bad luck to an unseen destination. The growing light revealed tendrils of flesh hanging down from the unseen ceiling, forming curtains that I would have to part if I wished to leave this place. The wetness of this place started to eat away at my shoes.

I had a choice at this point, to accept this world that I found myself in, or to reject it. Rejection was surprisingly easy—it is a tendency of human psychology to reject a stimulus as unreal for being too horrible to contemplate. This trait was undoubtedly useful in our primitive past. Unfortunately, it’s also where Holocaust deniers come from. I decided I didn’t want to be eight years old anymore, I didn’t want to be in a talking abattoir, and I certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near Denver. So, because I made that decision, I made it happen.

This was a dream, after all.

I walked through the curtain as if it was just an ordinary curtain, and passed through into the room beyond.

“Useless. Utterly useless,” a young male voice said in a monotone. I silently made my way towards its source, making a guess that this was the individual I was supposed to contact.

I was in a dark hallway that writhed around me as it measured out the slow beating of a heart. The wetness staining the floor was somewhere between brown and crimson in color, and quite thick.

“I know a dark secluded place,” I quietly sang to myself, having found a tango to match the unnerving rhythm of my surroundings. “A place where no one knows your face. A glass of wine, a fast embrace. It’s called Hernando’s Hideaway! Olé!” What? You have to yell that last part—it’s part of the law of musicals.

“You are such a flip flop!” the voice of Gilda chided me from above.

“Aw, you say that like it’s a bad thing!” I answered the disembodied voice with a grin. But she had a point that needed to be addressed, and I decided that this needed to be settled first. “Considered opinions are one thing,” I addressed her, “but if you honestly have a reason to change those opinions then do it, and face the consequences.”

“Why doesn’t anybody listen to what—” the voice of my mother complained. It was obviously Gilda trying to distract me.

“Don’t change the subject!” I demanded of Gilda, and the whole host of voices that her mind commanded. “You had a choice to make, and you failed to make it. The situation you face now is a direct result of that. You cannot expect the world to change back to the way it was. It will move forward, despite our devout wishes to the contrary, and we must adapt.” 

Putting my hands behind my back, I began to walk around the edges of the enormous heart. “The way I see it,” I continued, “you could cut your losses, walk away and make better friends—prove that ‘victory is the best revenge.’ Or, you could actually address the criticism that you were given, that friendship is not a zero-sum game.”

A low growl reverberated through the chamber. “Useless,” an older voice said. It couldn’t tell you for sure who or what it belonged to.

I turned around to retrace my steps, saying, “Value is in the eye of the beholder. Childhood is the period when self-worth is provided from without, but to truly become an adult, you must decide for yourself what it is to have self-worth. I believe that no one is worthless, that no souls are disposable.” This was my thesis statement, one of the lessons I tried to imprint into all of my teenage clients.

I heard a footstep in the mush behind me. I stopped walking, but refused to turn around. “The world is a messy place,” I remarked. “But you are allowed to decide what sticks, and what slides off.” After all, despite where I have been, the tuxedo I was wearing in this dream was still immaculate.

“Can we ever escape what we have done?”

I turned, slowly, to face a teenage boy, maybe 15 years of age. He was cradling one arm, which looked scraped and bruised.

I smiled warmly at him, answering his question by saying, “Ask the war veteran if he would rather not have the scars.”

“Ask that same veteran why he is on the streets, starving, when the world does not reward him for trying to save it,” he challenged me.

I frowned in disappointment. “That is entitlement,” I told him coldly. “What we do for veterans is a privilege, not a requirement. After you fight the war, you go back to work. The only ones who ‘deserve’ rest are the dead.”

The boy pouted. “I hate being here,” he announced, then faded away. As if that alone was a good enough excuse for virtual suicide.

“Well, that’s a little vague, isn’t it?!” I cried out to the ceiling in a mocking tone. “Surely you’ve got a better excuse than that! And it better be good,” I added as I sat down on a somewhat flat stalagmite, “because I’ve heard all the good ones. I’ve counseled patients dying of lymphoma, where every second of life was a living hell, but they kept going. I’ve counseled the survivors of failed suicide attempts, and that’s not something I would especially like to witness again. And I was with a young man on Death Row. And despite what he had done, I still think that what the state did to him was wrong.”

“Have you counseled yourself?” the boy’s voice answered me, vainly trying to change the subject.

“Nobody’s that objective,” I countered. “But yeah, I’ve gone under the proverbial knife. You could say I’m doing my therapy right now.”

“What if you’re supposed to die?” the voice asked.

“I don’t believe in fate,” I said with conviction. “As a matter of fact I don’t believe in most things. But I do believe in the infinite potential of humanity to do whatever the hell we want to do, and in the end to end up doing the right thing, whether we meant to or not.”

“Look around you, and tell me that Earth hasn’t become a world ruled by fate. Absolute good and evil. Magic is real! How do you explain that, Doc?”

“Magic is the will made manifest,” I explained patiently. “What was once merely suspected as coincidence or ‘the will of God’ now stands revealed as the combined might of every mind on Earth, shaping reality in concert. That’s what I believe.” And it is what I believe. We are living in a consensual hallucination, a dream shared by seven billion people...and an ever growing number of ponies.

“Then I have no idea why the hell I’m still in here, because I’ve been trying to leave for a long time. I’ve been cryptic, but really, I think I’m a little trapped in here.”

I smiled in gratitude at the show of cooperation. “Well, where would you like to go?” I asked, holding my hand out in the air like I was about to escort Cale to the dance...or a cab. “I can’t guarantee results, but I can offer my friendship and, considering the name of the reality we are crossing over with, friendship means a lot more than it used to.”

“Well...” The wall before me parted, revealing a small griffon with different markings from Gilda sitting miserably in the mulch. “Why are you here?” he asked with Cale’s voice.

I smiled down at him. “I’m here to help,” I replied. “It’s my job you see. I help everyone I can, but especially the young. Because no one else will.”

“I’d like to get out of this mess alive,” Griffon Cale said, “and in one piece. Only problem is, I have no idea how to do that. At all. I’m afraid of what will happen to me if I merge with Gilda. Only...I felt myself merging without me doing anything. It became so unavoidable that the only way I was able to think of to stop it was by hiding in here, leaving Gilda to face the world without my help. Does that make me a coward?”

“It’s not cowardice if the only person you hurt was yourself.”

“But I did hurt her,” Cale muttered.

“Did you do it because you hated her?” I asked him with a stern voice. “Because you wanted to kill her but lacked the will?”

“...No, I think,” he replied. “But I don’t see—”

“I have a message for you,” I interrupted him. “From Gilda.”

Cale furrowed his feathered brow. “What did she want to tell me?”

“She misses you,” I told him. “It turns out that she could really use a friend right now.”

Cale looked up at me and stared. “And you?” he asked. “Do you need a friend, too?”

I blinked. “I...I need all the friends I can get,” I admitted in a gruff voice.

Cale reached up with one claw, in the same gesture I was using earlier to try to summon him. “Friends, then,” he told me.





...And that is all that I remember. My mind leaps directly from grasping Cale’s claw to navigating Interstate 90. That’s why I wonder if the episode actually happened. It just seems too neat—after failing to save Danielle and Gary, I immediately transition to the successful treatment of a character that I have no way of knowing actually came to Earth. And the part about the pre-apocalyptic weather—there’s no way that that part was real, right?

And besides, the more I think about what happened, the more I am disturbed by the ominous signs I failed to recognize. Cale told me that he was merging without even realizing it. Is that happening to everybody else? And is he right, that the only true way to prevent merging is for one or the other personality to go dormant? Notice that the moment I freed him from his self-imposed prison, he manifested in his mind as a griffon. If that’s not an obvious mental symbol for the rapid and inevitable corrosion of his basic humanity, I don’t know what is. Does that mean I should have put him back in suspended animation, and fed Gilda the false line that I couldn’t find her human? Because that does not sound like an acceptable solution to me.

I’m beginning to feel like Sisyphus here: hated for holding suspicions as to what being inside the head of a pony will do to you, and doomed because the only two alternatives—merging and psychic suicide—are equally loathsome.

Unless I just slide right off the end of the decency scale by deciding that ponies are not “real people”, and that I would be perfectly justified in forcing them into dormancy, to leave the original human minds in charge of alien bodies.

What am I becoming? Is there no light at the end of the tunnel?
> Chapter 12: Death Comes to Poughkeepsie
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 12: Death Comes to Poughkeepsie






Well, this is it: the part of the story I really didn’t want to tell. The part I really hoped could get indefinitely deferred by my rescue.

Only there isn’t going to be a rescue, because I’m already dead.

Surely that’s what’s happening with me—I died of hypothermia an hour or two ago, and now I am in Hell. And Hell for Dr. Nathan Franklin consists of exactly the same rain-soaked pit I have been spending the past day in. Metaphorically, the same pit I’ve been in since your death, George, a pit I have never been able to escape from.

I am here for oh, so many crimes in my relatively brief life:  For not caring. For not doing anything to save you. For using the poor as a stepping stone to fame and fortune. But for one crime, one crime above all.

I am here because I murdered Fluttershy.





If we ignore the anomalous episode with Gilda, we are left with the other crime I neglected to mention: the death-by-neglect of Danielle and Gary. I had the power. If I was there, it would have been so easy to go in and save them. Go in and take out those damn self-important ponies that thought they had the right to steal lives, to entrap minds within their candy-colored bodies, to lure the inexperienced to their doom with promises of making Earth into an Equestrian paradise. But in the end all of those promises were lies, and every human who found themselves in a pony body was damned.

I should have killed Wave Rider while I had the chance. And Gold Star, and Rain Shimmer and Cerulean Sunrise, and each and every last one of those equine demons. Because they are not real, they are not the pure and perfect characters they claim to be, but rather the sick fantasy of a sick god who thinks that he is Discord. Delusion rules everything.

And I had the power. In a world where thoughts could become reality, the master of dreams is the master of the waking world as well. If I could kill these pony invaders—and I most assuredly could—how hard would it be to tell those pony bodies to revert to their human originals? In truth, I could have solved this whole mess from the moment that a deluded draconequus took my hand in his. If only I knew then what I know now—I could have gone into his mind and untangled the whole mess.

But alas, that’s the insight of a poor fool in a pit.




Day 12: Threesday? Midnight-ish EST. Middle of Nowhere, NY.




“There was a man,” the long-dead voice of Karen Carpenter crooned at me. “A lonely man. Who lost his love, through his indifference...” The lyrics were a little too close to home, so I reached up and switched off the car radio.

I was in that rental car that I wanted so badly. The one that would get me to Albany, where a plane waited to take me back to Los Angeles by an absurdly convoluted route. As if I held any delusions that I was getting out this mess alive.

The rain was pouring down outside my car, reducing visibility to nearly nil. Luckily for me, I was the only one stupid enough to be driving in this weather. I was reminded of the early scenes of Psycho, where Marion Crane thinks she’s gotten away with enough stolen money to set her up for life. All she wanted at that moment was to find the next exit, a safe place to sleep before she reunited with her lover. Of course she ran into Mrs. Bates before that could happen. Like Marion, I was just looking for an exit.

“Exit? Why not keep going?” So said the insidiously friendly and calming voice from the passenger seat of my car.

I smiled. Finally, I thought. “I’m all up for a little side trip,” I said without bothering to turn my head. “What do you have in mind?”

“Oh, it’s just an ordinary little office complex, someplace that nobody ever gives a second look. Made up of full cabinets and full hard drives. To a lover of facts and figures, it must seem like an idyllic wonderland. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of the like back home.”

Before me, the image in the rear-view mirror shifted to show the unassuming complex he was speaking of. It consisted of a large warehouse with a small office building attached.

“I’ve seen Chinatown, Discord,” I said, looking into that vista. “There’s no such thing as idyllic in Los Angeles County. So what do you have for me?”

“I have the perfect storage facility for wayward ponies. And I have a certain yellow and pink pony who I need you to separate from its human, at all costs.” The joviality has faded out of his voice by this point, replaced by the dull uninterested voice of a scientist speaking of a test subject. “This is what you have been working towards, is it not?” he added. As if he actually needed to cajole me.

I shrugged with indifference. “I thought purposeful lives weren’t your thing.”

“A life is a nebulous thing,” Discord replied, turning philosophical. “I choose to do with it as I find fit at any moment in time. In addition, purpose is even less defined. Is this really the path you wish to go down at this moment? Purpose in life? Next exit by the way.”

I took the purpose, and destination, given to me. “I’m sorry if I misunderstood you. I have a cause, yes. My success rate lately has been…” (I caught a glimpse of myself in the now-clear mirror. God, how long has it been since I’ve slept last? I asked myself.) “...less than optimal. Now, yellow and pink pony,” I said, teasing out the words. I knew full well the stakes. “Not going to be easy, obviously. Not going to be easy at all. A certain amount of...force may be required.” I needed to know how far he expected me to go.

“I don’t expect you to kill her, doctor. I don’t expect you would have the guts to.” He leered at me then, almost laughing outright at the idea that his puppet would dare to do anything that daring. “I expect you to simply slow or reverse some of the merge. I need you not to cut down the tree but to chip the surface, give me some purchase on which I can grab hold. As chaotic as I may be seen to be, I do plan. My plans are all the more insidious and successful for it. Next right, then left.”

I should add something I have been leaving out for the most part: Discord’s tone. Discord’s tone shifted with every sentence he spoke, from giddy to seething, with no real rhyme or rhythm. And whatever feeling he expressed, I felt. That’s why it never occurred to me to strike back, to save this world by taking out its tormenter, even at the cost of my own life. Besides, he was right—I was a coward. All talk, no action.

“Alright, alright,” I said, in the tone of mild annoyance that was the best I could summon against my master. I mulled potential approaches in my mind for fulfilling the task I was being given, before finally settling on the best, and the most sadistic approach. Because if I couldn’t hurt Discord, I could as sure as hell put the hooks into her. “Doubt, then,” I concluded. “Yes, I think that could definitely work to our advantage. I know I’ve fought down more than my fair share of it over the past couple of days. Now I just need to infect her. Yes, I think that could work quite nicely.”

“Doubt can work just fine,” Discord said, allowing just a trace amount of respect into his voice. “Get a little rest, try to calm yourself and prepare for the session. She isn’t going anywhere.” He laughed and vanished just as the warehouse complex came into the view through the veil of rain.

The silence of his absence pressed into me like being dunked into cold water. My last chance to save the world by killing Discord...gone.

Once again, I had failed. Knowing this, I could do little more than clench and unclench the hand that held Discord’s mark.

> Chapter 13: I'm Going to Hell for This, Aren't I?
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 13: I’m Going to Hell for This, Aren’t I?






A small prison cell, one of many, locked by an iron door. Located on a floor deep underground, with no access to sunlight or fresh air. Inside against the far wall, a thin mattress, resting on the ground. Elsewhere in the room, two chairs and a table, bolted to the floor. From that far wall, two chains, ending in shackles. And imprisoned by those chains, imprisoned by the iron door, by the underground floor and the secret prison disguised as an office complex located in the middle of nowhere, a yellow and pink pony. If you can call her that. In this light, there’s barely any colors to distinguish from each other. She’s really just a gray animal, utterly passive. No longer even anticipating whatever new horror was going to visit her next.

“You have a visitor!” Captain Davis informed her. Per protocol, he preceded this announcement by kicking in the door as loudly as possible. Captain Davis was a nasty looking man with an even nastier disposition. He had long dueling scars running down both cheeks—probably also per protocol—and he cradled a large machine gun in his arms like it was his baby. If he ever saw the short-lived sitcom Sledge Hammer!, he probably failed to realize that the gun-wielding madman of that show was supposed to be the butt of all the jokes.

“I think she knows,” I dryly observed. “Now could you please step aside and let me in?”

He did so, or maybe he did something unimportant. Do I need to repeat that my memories have become less than reliable due to the whole dying of hypothermia thing? In any case, I finally walked into the room. For this deception, I was wearing my outfit of choice, a tuxedo. It mattered not if the pony prisoner seeing me for the first time recognized me or not. The point was to keep her continually off balance, until I was through with her. At this point, she wouldn’t know if I was some inspector...or her designated torturer.

“These conditions are abominable!” I exclaimed, gesturing around me. “How can you expect me to do my work with...these?”

“These are the regulation settings for a Class 5 Interrogation, Sir!” Captain Davis replied.

All Captain Davis knew about me was that my orders were to be obeyed without question. Now considering that P.A.P.A. ran this little operation, the fact that I was able to arrange this so effortlessly made it abundantly clear that Discord was in fact calling the shots for the loathsome little outfit. Everything I learned about the Spirit of Chaos made me hate him more and more. I hope I can be excused for taking out my frustration on those near at hand. “What pathetic excuse of a gulag did you crawl out of, Soldier?!” I shouted at the captain, using my height to its fullest advantage. “First of all, the smell! Have you smelled what it’s like in here?”

“I try not to,” Captain Davis said with a serious face.

Hey, I watched cartoons as a kid. I knew when I’m being mocked. “Don’t get smart with me,” I warned him. “It’s far beyond your pay grade.”

“Sir,” a small female voice said.

I put on a look of surprise as I turned to face Fluttershy.

“I will survive,” she told me quietly. “If you are doing this for my sake, please do not punish the guard, who is simply following the best orders he has to follow.”

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. We have here a human being who woke up one day having lost half of her height, and all of her humanity, at least in the legal sense. She found herself dragooned into a cross-country quest to save the world, without once being asked if she actually wanted to save it. She was shot at by a couple of hicks in a Walmart parking lot, she’s gone through who knows what kind of unimaginable physical and emotional torture at the hands of the people here, people that fail to consider her a person worthy of any respect whatsoever, she’s probably gone through a completely unclassifiable type of violation by the pony in her head, and here’s she’s asking that mercy be brought to bear...on her current tormenter.

Whelp, too bad for her, my job is to not give a damn. After giving her a glassy-eyed stare, I turn back to the captain like nothing had just happened. “I cannot conduct a thorough interview if I’m distracted by smells. It is no business of mine what manner of odors the prisoner cultivates in her own time. Second, what are these walls made out of?”

The captain scratched his head. “Granite? Granite and...rebar. Yeah, I’m positive rebar was involved.”

“Now think carefully, Captain,” I said in my most patronizing tone. “If I’m going to conduct an interview, I’m going to need a camera to record it. And there’s no place in this cell with enough room for a camera on a tripod. So where’s the camera going to go? In the granite? In between all of that wonderful rebar?” I poked him in the chest.

“You don’t have to be rude, you know. ...Sir.”

I stepped back, surprised that this cog in P.A.P.A.’s machine actually had a mind of his own, and the courage to express himself. Also, it was clear from Fluttershy’s expression that I had lost what little respect she had for me, so it was time to upset her expectations once again.

“Alright, you know what? I’m sorry,” I told the captain, bowing my head.

“What?” Captain Davis asked open mouthed, before recovering his professionalism. “I...uh mean...request for clarification, Sir!”

“You’re not the problem here, Soldier,” I said with a sigh, before launching into a Shakespearean monologue. “Clearly you’re operating out of an outdated set of procedures. The fault lies not in ourselves, but in Regulation C, Subsection 6. You’ve been valiantly doing the best that you can under impossible circumstances, and I’ve been operating under seventeen cups of coffee a day and no sleep since this whole business started.” This of course was a lie, part of the backstory for my plan. In truth, it was more like a dozen cups of coffee, maximum. “Do we...is it possible that we might have...an honest to goodness interrogation room somewhere on this compound?” I asked this question gently, like I was hoping against hope that things might go right for me for once.

“There’s that break room on the second floor with the dark-tinted windows…”

“Yes! Perfect!” I reached out gleefully and kissed Captain Davis on the lips, causing him to nearly faint from shock. “We’ll get that set up, I’ll get the camera in place, and we’ll have an honest to goodness interrogation!”

“Could I...have some of the water?”

I looked down at Fluttershy. It was clear to me that she had not been paying attention to my carefully crafted performance for at least the last few minutes, focused as she was on her starvation.

The cause of this starvation was clear: she was being given the minimum food and water specified by the Geneva Convention, but it was then placed in bowls situated where she couldn’t reach them while shackled. What kind of sadistic bastard would do such a thing? I mean, Animal Cops Houston will stick a spiked baton up your ass if you did that to your inbred brain-dead Chihuahua, and these little shits think they can do it to fully sentient beings?

“Captain,” I asked, gently. Gently, because I didn’t want to break character by beating this asshole to death with the butt of his own machine gun. “Would it be terribly much against regulations to allow the prisoner to have her meal before our interrogation? It just wouldn’t do to have her pass out before I finish the questionnaire.”

“I...well...”

He was actually trying to think of a reason to continue starving her! I hope you die of an aneurysm seconds before you can achieve your first orgasm, you pathetic little zit of a man.

I took a deep breath to calm myself before trying again. “Now, I understand that you boys might have been having a bit of harmless fun.” Die, die, die! “But I need to do my job here.”

Before my eyes, Captain Davis had a full-fledged moral debate march itself across his microscopic cerebrum. Finally, without bothering to look at the victim of his petty torture, he nudged the two bowls into position. From the look on his face, it was like I had ruined his perfect day.

I put my arm across his shoulders. “There, now that wasn’t too hard, was it?” I asked. I fantasized about snapping his neck with my bare hands.

As I was doing this, Fluttershy was gulping down the food and water like an animal, so afraid was she that this was all a joke and she was going to be deprived again. That was what she has been reduced to, and as I had to remind myself once again, this was the side that I was working for.

For the first time since this encounter began, Fluttershy looked me straight in the eyes. If I didn’t know it before, I definitely knew it now: I will burn in Hell for all eternity for what I was doing, or else there truly was no just God in this universe.

“Okay,” I said, turning away from those horrible, horrible, but so very justified eyes. “So the radio, two chairs and a table, a notepad, and of course the camera...and the radio transmitter.” I added the last part quickly, trying to sound as suspicious as possible.

“Radio transmitter?” the captain asked, as I was hoping he would.

“In case I have to request anything from HQ,” I replied quickly. Too quickly. “All part of the procedure.” I dared not look at Fluttershy, to see if I had successfully implanted doubt as to my motivations in her.

“Oh,” Captain Davis said. “OK, that makes sense.” No, in fact it didn’t. I studied this compound’s stupid book of regulations, and I was in fact violating three of them with that last request. But Davis wasn’t the target of my manipulations, so I ignored him. “I think I know where I can get all that,” he added helpfully.

“And I’ll help!” I said with a smile so happy that it would have been accompanied by a “squee” sound effect had I been a pony instead of a human. “I’m not above a little physical labor. Maybe a bit of a break as well. Let’s say we meet back here in 30 minutes?”

“Alright,” Captain Davis said with a trusting grin. Apparently my treating him like dirt earlier had been completely forgiven, just because I apologized.

Huh, I didn’t think it would be that easy. You know, in my profession (or my part of the world—it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes), grudges start because of something as small as accidentally spelling somebody’s name wrong, and they last long after death, thanks to the legal system. And this stranger forgave me just because I apologized. Weird. I mean, I most definitely wouldn’t want this monster as a friend, but...was that how friendship actually worked?

So we walked out of the room, arm in arm like we were starring in a buddy comedy. Before I left I looked back at the pony. By her expression, she didn’t know what to think of me.

Excellent.

“Oh, and if it’s not too terribly out of the way,” I said gently to her, “please show some degree of surprise when we return. Regulations state we’re supposed to barge in here, put a black bag over your head, all kinds of other nasty stuff. Just leads to accidental contusions, in my experience. Don’t worry, I have everything figured out.”

I started whistling the tune “The World Owes Me a Living” as Captain Davis closed and locked the door, and we made our way out of the prisoner’s hearing.
> Chapter 14: Hook, Line and Sinker
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 14: Hook, Line and Sinker






Prisoner Fluttershy got thirty minutes of relative tranquility before our inevitable return.

“Surprise interrogation of the prisoner requested!” I bellowed from outside the door.

“Surprise interrogation of the prisoner permitted!” Captain Davis bellowed back, before kicking in the door. Again.

A bright light flooded into the cell, utterly blinding the pegasus.

The two of us then rushed into the room before the dazed pony could react. I unlocked her chains, and the captain picked her up like a sack of potatoes. “Apply hood!” I loudly ordered.

The captain looked around for the nonexistent hood, then shrugged.

I gave him an obvious wink.

“Um...hood applied!” Captain Davis cried out for the benefit of what Fluttershy would assume must be our observers.

It was at this point that we realized we had things a bit backwards. All this shouting works so much better if there’s an enormous lead-spewing phallic symbol being waved around at the same time, and Captain Davis no longer had hands free to do that.

So I made a grab for—

“Negative!” the captain barked. Never get between a man and his gun. His outrage faded after a moment. “Are you cleared for operation of this weapon?” he asked.

This unexpected question allowed me another opportunity to confuse my victim. I bowed my head in shame before answering. “I was going to finish training, honest!” I said. “I just never found the time.”

The two of us humans exchanged looks. Like I said, somebody needed to be waving that gun around.

So that’s how I got to carry Fluttershy.

Holy crap, I’m carrying Fluttershy! I realized

So of course my legs turned to Jell-O and I collapsed.

The captain, an aficionado of slapstick if there ever was one, broke out in a loud guffaw.

“Don’t laugh!” I whined. “I’ve been sick recently. I think there’s something in the water.”

By which I, the Dr. Franklin in the pit, meant to say: I can feel my life being washed out of me by this endless stream of freezing rain.

“Just...go,” the pony in my arms mumbled, clearly disgusted to see that the outfit which imprisoned her was made up of buffoons.

Without acknowledging her words, I carried her out of the cell, and lowered her into a Radio Flyer Little Red Wagon. On the side were spray-painted the words “Pink Lemonade, 5 Cents”. Never let it be said that I do not have a taste for absurdism. I took out a large frilly handkerchief and wiped the non-existent sweat from my brow. “Boy, I’m sure glad I don’t have to carry her the whole way!” I exclaimed. I turned to face the elevator and stairs up out of the prisoner’s floor.

The captain had finished locking up the cell—because can you imagine what would happen if enemy agents managed to sneak into this compound to poke around an empty cell? “The elevators are out of operation until further notice,” he informed me, sporting a most sadistic smile.

Never get between a man and his gun.





Slowly I staggered my way up the stairs, the captain waiting at the top with the wagon and staring cruelly down at me.

It was not because Fluttershy was heavy—she was a dog-sized creature with hollow bones who had been starved for at least a week. Rather it was the awkwardness of carrying such a creature in both hands while trying to ascend a staircase made up of very high steps.

My theory was that it was a way to exorcise the officers’ goose step muscles.

Finally, I reached the top and set her down once again in the wagon.

“I could have flown,” she said. It was the loudest utterance I had heard from her yet, and it sounded an awful lot like sarcasm.

This of course meant that I needed to beat her down even harder. Psychologically, of course.

“Why aren’t you keeping her too weak to move?” I demanded.

The Captain looked at me with puppy dog eyes. “What do you take me for?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes. “I am assigning no blame to you, good fellow. I mean the regulations.” I mean, these are the bad guys. They are keeping the food just out of reach so they can laugh as she stretches her tongue out in vain to get a taste, but there’s not a regulation about how to use malnutrition to keep the enemy docile?

“Nope, nothing in the regulations that says anything of the kind,” Captain Davis confirms.

I had no choice but to look sheepish. “I really need to review those regulations,” I said petulantly.





It took a good ten minutes of pulling that cart—which of course had a squeaky wheel—before we finally reached our destination: Breakroom #3, which thanks to the miracle of butcher paper, black Copic marker, and masking tape, was now officially “Interrogation Room #1”.

“Prisoner handover complete,” Captain Davis announced with some relief—we had gotten a lot of weird looks from the men guarding the locked doors along the hallway we had traversed.

“Yes,” I said glumly. I was going to miss that lug! And then I looked inside the room, and turned my expression around. That idiot! “Why is the video equipment on this side of the one-way mirror?” I asked.

“The power to the inner room was turned off, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on,” Davis explained. “I got you that radio, though.”

“I see that,” I said, looking for all the world like that radio was the difference between life or death for me. Acting chops, don’t fail me now! “Thanks for everything,” I said, taking his hand with both of mine and shaking it vigorously. “You know, you’re probably the nicest person I’ve met since being kid...starting here. So just in case we don’t bump into each other ever again—”

“There’s only the one cafeteria,” Captain Davis said laconically.

“Oh, uh...right,” I said nervously. “See you...later, then.”

“Later,” said the captain, removing my hands from his. “Like two hours from now, when it’s time to transfer the prisoner back to her cell.”

“Yeah...that,” I said. “OK. Bye.”

Captain Davis chuckled to himself as he walked away.

I waited until there was no one else in sight. As I waited, I wondered if Fluttershy caught my little “slip”. “Um...after you?” I finally asked her, obvious hesitation in my voice.

She looked up at me. “What?” she asked, in that tone of hers that could mean anything whatsoever. “Can I get up without being shouted at?”

You know, for all of the brony patients of mine who are absolutely convinced that Fluttershy needs them in her life to protect her from absolutely everything in the universe, I have one patient with precisely the opposite opinion. But then, she tends to be jealous of practically everyone in the universe, not excepting fictional characters. This patient is convinced that Fluttershy is faking her fear, and that she is in fact the greatest emotional manipulator in the entire show, with only Princess Celestia as a close second. So when this pony, who remember is merged with a human being, says something like that, I have to wonder if she’s mocking me or if she honestly thinks that I’m the one playing mind games with her.

Which, of course, I am.

“Sure, I...guess?” I replied.

Fluttershy slowly stood, spread out her wings—which looked remarkably intact considering what she’s been through—and then stepped up on the rim of the wagon and glided down the 30 centimeters to the ground.

It’s hard as adults to remember the inconvenience of being short sometimes.

Also: wings. Enormous butter yellow wings. So beautiful...

I followed her into the “interrogation room”. I am forced to use the quotes, because there’s no way on earth that a legitimate interrogation room would ever reek of Funyuns like this room reeks of Funyuns. It’s like somebody took ten or twenty bags from the vending machine, spread their contents out on the floor, and then asked a tame elephant to shove and stamp the substance into every nook and cranny in the entire room. And with those trunks of theirs, I can imagine an elephant can shove those Funyuns into some pretty odd nooks.

Fluttershy walked into the room. It was now time for the final part of my deception, the one that would convince her to lower her guard once and for all. I made my way over to the radio.

Well, I would have done that, but I couldn’t—because she already had the transmitter clutched tightly in her little hooves.

Clever girl!

Well two can play at one-upmanship. I fixed her with the terrified gaze of somebody who had just backed into Discord in a dark alley. “C..could I p...please have that transmitter?” I begged. “I’ve been trying to get my hands on one for three months now, and this was the only way I could think of!”

“No.”

She said “no”. Fluttershy actually said “no”! I backed away until I stumbled back upon the interrogation table. I attempted to find purchase, only to fall hard to the ground. The whole time, though, my eyes were fixed on hers. It was no Stare, but I could not look away—I was far too amazed to even consider it.

“I don’t care what you’ve been through,” she told me calmly, dispassionately, “your plan could not possibly succeed. I’m not allowed to die here. I have friends, you see, friends who I value more than I value your life...or my own. To help them I not only need to escape, I need to find out what is going on, and that does not involve you getting us shot in a useless escape attempt. Now sit down and play doctor, Doctor.”

It was unbelievable. Here was Fluttershy, in complete command of the situation. Ordering me around. Me, who towers over her. I had to know what was going on in her head, to see on a mental level what the merge had done to her. So that meant it was time to start my sales pitch, to lure her into asking me to enter her dreams.

I slumped down in utter defeat. “Fine,” I said in a dead tone. “Do...do whatever.” I then looked up at her with pleading eyes. “Just please, please, I’ve got to get out of here before they make me hurt anybody else.”

This broke her reserve. “Hurt...who have you hurt?” she asked me in a near-whisper.

I bent my head down and began to mime crying. “I...I see their eyes at night,” I addressed the ground. “I’m...so weak! Why can’t I fight back? Why can’t I...end it all! Put this awful tool out of their hands, once and for all.”

OK, that was a bit melodramatic. But did she buy it?

“No, don’t talk like that.” It sounded like she was on the ground right in front of me, but I refused to lift my head. “Please, let us do this together.”

Now this was sounding more like I expected the Fluttershy of the series to sound. Was her merge not yet complete after all? Because if that was so, I still had a chance of saving an innocent human life.

I lifted my head and looked into her eyes. I saw my reflection mirrored in each of her enormous eyes. I looked like a wreck. “I’m a freak!” I wailed.

She cautiously wrapped the tips of her wings around my back.

I sobbed a couple of times before continuing. “That’s what they always told me, growing up, that I was a freak. I didn’t want to believe them, but it’s true. I can see things...do things, that no normal person should be able to do. Should be allowed to do!”

Through her wings, I could clearly feel Fluttershy having second thoughts, wondering just what the hell she had wandered into. (Or “heck”—she’s probably one of those individuals who use “heck” instead of “hell”, or at least, that’s what I imagine pre-merge.) “It...doesn’t matter,” she finally said. Yeah, sure, and that aborted attempt to back away is proof positive that it doesn’t matter to you. “You need to keep going, to...use any difference for good. Please don’t give up.” This last sentence was meant far more strongly than the others. I wonder if either her pony or human sides have been involved in somebody else’s suicide—that’s the kind of feel I got from her.

It’s always useful in acting to find ways to channel your true emotions into your performance. I used my surprise at this insight into her relationship with suicide, and tried to use it to make her think that I was truly shocked that a little pony in her position cared at all if I lived or died. “I...I never thought...” I said, pretending to consider her suggestion. “...To build instead of to destroy...” But I didn’t allow that thread of hope to linger for long. “No!” I declared hopelessly. “Surely they’ll catch me. I...” I stared into space, pretending to comb through all of the plans of escape that this character I was playing had been stockpiling for years. “I don’t know what to do.” I said this with an completely empty voice, like I was reconciling myself to inevitable re-capture, torture, and the knowledge that I would be directly responsible for the grisly death of a Bearer.

“You have to have hope,” she said.

I finally looked up at her.

My god! I thought. She seemed like an angel before me, complete with a nimbus of light that was entirely in my own head, but rendered all the more real for that reason, like I had been granted a divine vision. Which would have possibly meant something to me if the religion I no longer espoused was Christianity. Sorry, God, try again on a lapsed Catholic or something.

...And it was gone. But she was still speaking. “You just have to hope that things will work out,” she told me. And she said it like that was it, like that was the central tenant of the religion she was espousing.

Unfortunately, that statement had a lot of corollaries to it, that I wonder if she had ever considered. I mean, was this a “perception over reality” type deal, where I would force the universe to give me logical reasons to be happy by first terrifying it through completely irrational displays of happiness? Or was there a god out there in the universe with tremendous hang-ups about violating humanity’s free will, and deals with them by using the compromise of only using miracles to make those of us happy who actually ask for it, in the form of hope. Yes, hope, that nameless non-specific prayer for life to become less shitty.

I’m sorry, Fluttershy. I’ve weighed your deep philosophy of life in the balance...and found it wanting.

Wait, what if the one I’m unknowingly praying to by hoping is Fluttershy herself?

Pinkie Pie could warp reality. In the cartoons, other characters like Spike or Twilight could also do impossible comic things like summon a custom backdrop or door frame without magic, but they never realized that what they did was in fact impossible by the rules of their own universe. If the Elements made their bearers into reality-warping beings, then wouldn’t it make sense for the Element of Kindness to manifest itself through hope-based miracles?

I looked into Fluttershy’s eyes in awe, and I seemed to feel myself growing stronger the longer I looked into them.

Too bad that I was committed to using that strength against my benefactor.

“I need to fix what I have done,” I said, baiting the hook. I looked back down at the ground and addressed my next words to myself, but certainly loud enough for her to hear: “But I can only go into one mind at a time. Where did they move the colts after processing?” I allowed my words to sink in, putting on a look of wild speculation.

“Wait,” she asked, slowly putting the pieces together, “what are you...can you enter ponies’ minds? Is that your power?”

I lifted my head. For a moment I was taken aback—that was not fear in her face, it was eagerness. But I pressed on. “I told you I was a freak. And it’s not just ponies. Or maybe it’s not ponies at all, but only human minds. I haven’t dared use it on an animal--I’m afraid that if I do I may never make it back out again.”

“No, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, taking me into a true wing-hug. “You have been given a way to heal the sick...in a way no one else ever could.”

Now the phrasing here was very interesting. It implied belief in a higher power. So was “Fluttershy” a Celestialist, or was “Erica” a Christian? 

“I...?” She began a question, but then stopped herself. I am convinced that she was about to give me the permission that I needed. But then she backed away from the brink herself, stepping away from me. “No,” she said, once again with decisiveness. “You have such guilt, and you don’t need this.”

I mentally did a headpalm. She was about to ask me to go into her head, where I could do anything I wanted to her, and she stopped at the last second because she was afraid that the experience would be too traumatic to me!

Before I had a chance to turn this around, she resumed her interrogation. “Who were you planning on calling with the radio?”

Really? We’re back to the plan that you yourself correctly diagnosed as hopeless?

“The police?” I asked helplessly. “The army? Whoever I could find, frankly.” I decided to build up my backstory, including a true fact or two that she might or might not know. “Surely this isn’t legal,” I said to her. “They told me they were the government when they picked me up, but that’s obviously a lie. They’re just building their own private army out of unicorns and pegasi.” I laughed bitterly. “It’s stupid really. A bunch of kids—how could they possibly think they could succeed?” I hoped she didn’t know about how humans use child armies. Or, that she did know, but believed that I didn’t.

“Strength in numbers,” she told me, “throw enough expendable troops at a target.”

We shuddered in unison, which I thought was a pretty neat trick.

And then she turned on the radio transmitter. Which from her point of view sealed her fate.

She looked like she half-expected the radio to be a fake. At the time, I thought that she was blaming P.A.P.A. with saddling me with a dead radio. But no, the machine successfully warmed up, the quiet sound of static filling the room.

I stepped forward and began to tune it, sweeping past some foreign language broadcast to reach a hip-hop remix of “Art of the Dress”. 

I’m not sure if any of the chroniclers of this era in history bothered to note it, but music at this time was fairly drenched in pony influences. The “classier” sources of music stuck to William Anderson’s compositions for the show as it had been released so far, and the more “raw” and “real” sources turned to the fan music scene.

But still, this was a hip-hop version...of the one song in the show derived from a Barbra Streisand show tune. I smiled. “You find the weirdest things at 1 am,” I said in amazement. It was perhaps the first true emotion I had displayed since Fluttershy and I had met.

I kept tuning through the CB band, and eventually found a couple of truckers making their way...through the rules of Pony, Ponie, Ponee, a Japanese game show based around the episode “Party of One”. You see, if the tower of rocks tumbles during your turn, you have to climb up the ladder covered in slime dressed in nothing but—

“Let me talk,” Fluttershy said, and my chance to figure this damn game out failed once and for all. “They should be sympathetic to a female voice saying she has been kidnapped.” She blushed slightly, adding, “No reason to say I am a pony.”

Never let it be said that kindness has anything other than an antithetical relationship with honesty as abstract concepts.

“Alright, Erishy,” I said, as I handed her the transmitter’s microphone. Yeah, small correction here. Gilda had mistakenly thought that Fluttershy’s merged form called herself “Ericashy”, when in fact the actual name I saw on her records was two letters shorter. I made a sudden, irrational decision at that moment. “I’m Nate, by the way.” That’s what I told her. I gave her permission to use your name for me, George. I don’t know why I did that. Maybe I had to be that close to her before I could slip the metaphorical dagger between her ribs. Maybe I only allow my loved ones to use that name, and I only hurt the ones I love.

“Thank you, Nate,” she told me, taking the microphone. The tone of trust in her voice felt like scalpels speeding through my heart. She depressed the button on the microphone—the signal for what was inevitably to follow. “H... hello?” she asked. “I need help. I’ve been kidnapped. I’m being held in a farmhouse in a New York City suburb.”

“And then the contestant dressed like Rainbow Dash walks on stage, and his job is to drag Contestant 1 off of the purple square, using nothing but his suit’s mouth on her suit’s tail,” the first trucker said to the second, making it abundantly clear that he hadn’t heard one word from Fluttershy.

She responded to this by quite expertly taking apart first the microphone, and then the transmitter unit itself, and in a matter of seconds managed to figure out the way I had had the unit altered—without, of course, realizing that it was me who had ordered that the change be made. This was quite obviously what Erica must have brought to the table of Erishy’s merged abilities, rather than Fluttershy. “It’s set to only transmit on a single frequency, no matter how the receiver is tuned,” she said. She looked over at my Rolex. “You know, I could try to wire up an antenna from that fancy watch of yours. Although, to be honest, I’ve never worked on radio equipment.”

Fluttershy’s ears drooped. Her endless optimism had finally met its match.

And so it was just that this was destined to be the moment that she met her counterpart, the death of all hope.

The locked door of the room was obliterated by close-range machine gun fire.


# # #


This was the beginning of my backup plan, the one I’d be forced to use if I couldn’t convince Fluttershy to let me in on her own. I took my place, bravely standing between her and the forces on the other end of the door.

Captain Davis fulfilled his primary duty in life, by kicking in the door. He quickly stepped aside to allow General Walker to enter. General Walker comes straight out of Central Casting, in that he looked exactly like what he was—an evil sadistic SOB. In the movie of my life, he’d be played by Michael Ironside. He was the kind of guy who would shoot his own lieutenant right in front of you as an example, just to show you how little shit he is willing to take from you. From the looks on the faces of Captain Davis and the other guard, they would have been a lot happier at that moment working for anybody else at that moment. Probably because they knew one of them would end up being the example.

“Well, well, well,” Michael Ironside declared as he stepped from the shadows into the light. “I’ve long suspected it, but I finally have my evidence of treason from our ever-eager mental specialist.” The man spoke his lines like they were made of butter. Rancid, acidic butter.

I should make it clear that General Walker knew that I was here on Discord’s orders, and that he was being instructed to play a role. But at that moment, it sure felt like I’d been working for him for three years, and that he had been secretly fantasizing about different ways to torture me to death all this time—not because he thought me disloyal for the majority of that period, but just because I had the type of face that he liked seeing in agony.

Did I mention that he was really good at this part?

The general looked over his shoulder at Captain Davis. “Kill Hostage 37,” he ordered.

“No!” I screamed. I put my all into that scream, enough so you could just imagine an entire life for this imaginary person who was going to be sacrificed as a penalty for my actions.

“I forced him to do it!” Fluttershy protested, pushing me out of her way. “Kill me, I’m the one who is trying to escape. He was trying to stop me.”

Fluttershy was following her script to the letter.

The general laughed, in that wonderfully sinister way that Mr. Ironside has perfected. “Oh, this is perfect!” he cried. “My superiors have been trying to keep the two of you apart this entire time, afraid that vaunted ‘Stare’ of yours will counteract Agent Franklin’s Dreamwalking. Now I’ll get to see which one of you is truly the stronger!”

My veins felt like they were filled with fresh ice melt, given the pure bloodlust in his eyes.

“I...I won’t do anything you tell me to do anymore,” I declared, in a thin veneer of courage. “With her gone—”

“Well, she isn’t dead yet, is she?” General Walker sneered.

Somebody give this man a Best Supporting Oscar already!

“Forget it!” I cried defiantly. But it was an act of empty defiance, because I would do anything for her. At least, that was the vibe I hoped I was projecting.

“Do it, Nate,” Fluttershy said quietly. No, Erishy said quietly. She was able to stare this man down, while I could not. “If this is what they want, then do it. You’re just following orders.”

And that is how I win.

“I...” I started to say, before I choked myself off. I gave her a look promising her that I’d make this right, somehow.

I was lying through my metaphorical teeth.

She looked up at me with Mona Lisa’s smile, before closing her eyes and preparing herself.

The technician walked in at that moment, wheeling in a cart full of medical supplies. The hypodermics of “sleepy juice” were already prepared and calibrated for our body masses.

“Now remember,” the general reminded me in a voice dripping with false sympathy, “she’s not waking up until you come back and tell us that you’re finished. And if she wakes up as herself...” He glanced over at Captain Davis and his machine gun.

I nodded. “Could she at least have something soft to lie on?” I asked.

The general rolled his eyes. “Softie.” He grabbed a walkie-talkie from his belt and made the request.
> Chapter 15: Dr. Nathan Franklin vs. the Totally-Not-Racist Yellow Terror
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 15: Dr. Nathan Franklin vs. the Totally-Not-Racist Yellow Terror






I was standing on a copper platform, floating motionless above a landscape of moving clouds. It was impeccably designed, machined out of a single ingot of metal, and reinforced to support any imaginable weight. Nevertheless, here I was, with no way to go but...?

From the platform grew a vertical growth of copper, shaped like a grapevine. One wide metal leaf was spread out before me, and embedded within its surface was a liquid crystal display. “The sky is the chance of failure,” the screen informed me, “ever present but not a threat. To grow you must fail. Jump.”

Well, how convenient—a self-analyzing dream!

That was sarcasm, by the way. I hate amateur psychologists.

Now I suppose that Erishy actually meant this to be a challenge, like I would be tricked into thinking that real world physics actually applied here.

Instead, I calmly leaned way over the edge of the platform to see dimly through the clouds the sphere of green that is meant to be my destination. In doing so, I deliberately leaned far more than would be possible in the waking world without falling. And then, with an inviting smile, I skydived off the platform.

I fell gently through the clouds, the winds cushioning my fall and leaving my hair un-mussed.

The green sphere resolved into a floating garden, supported by a structure of green-painted metal shaped like a colander. I was entering the mind of a merged pony-human hybrid, and she envisioned herself as a salad.

Lovely. I suppose it could have been worse—it could have been a salad spinner instead of merely a colander.

I made my landing near one edge of the strainer. As befitting a pony salad, the greens I saw were more flowers than the traditional lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and what have you. Also, there were various electronic devices growing up among the flowers: voltmeters and photometers and iPhones. The metaphor was getting a tad mixed at this point.

Now I should note that time is nearly non-existent in a dream, so I had no reason not to take my time, and so I did. Eventually I reached another grape-leaf display. “It is not a maze, but a path to self-discovery. You are the only one that decides where it takes you. Though really, a maze is no different.”

Amateur psychologist, and amateur philosopher. God, I’m beginning to hate this place. But of course, I know far better than to show anything but a glad face at this. Oh joy, you truly understand the true purpose of mazes, wise Fluttershy! That you’re supposed to wander where you will instead of buying into The Man’s insistence that you find an exit. That’s why I like to spend seven weeks in the local corn maze every autumn...not.

Let’s see, what’s the most-pretentious possible way to respond to this? Oh, I know. “Well said, well said,” I comment out loud with an accompanying golf clap. “I’m tempted to search out the digital guestbook app on this device. ‘Having a lovely time, considering the circumstances. Nate Franklin. October Threeday, 2011 1:35 am.’”

So at this point the massively passive Erishy was leaving my next destination up to me. “I have no intention of going where you do not wish me to go,” I say out loud. As if that will do her any good in the end. As I’ve established, I pride myself on that maxim—I never go anywhere where I’m not invited.

...It occurs to me that this is something I have in common with Dracula. I am not pleased by this comparison.

I know: why don’t I tell her exactly what I’m going to do, under guise of disobeying my orders and not doing precisely that? “I...well normally I would be seeking out sources of conflict in the two personalities,” I told her, “making them think they were under threat from outside, in order to force them into an amalgam too self-obsessed to resist being controlled. But I see no signs of that here.” (Because the merge was already complete.) “I don’t think I could mess you up even if I wanted to.” (Said in order to inflate her sense of false security.) “Ah...let’s see...what sort of place answers to ‘home’ for you? That should be fairly harmless...and a good deal more pleasant than the world outside.” (That was two lies for the price of one: Your mental “home”, while hard to attack, would be the most devastating point if said attack manages to be successful, and I had a good feeling that Erishy’s problems stemmed from her home, making her particularly vulnerable.)

Let me stop a moment to note that, unless you’re a true visionary, the imagery of one’s imagination is limited by the world you’re living in. Just like how visions of the future from the 60’s stored all of their data in reel-to-reel tape, because that was the most compact form that anybody had imagined to that point. The idea of having a “data stick” back then would be absurd. The 90’s introduced “morphing” effects, so now the dreams of those who grew up in that decade are dominated by that effect. Hence it should be no surprise that the path before me “morphed” into the walkway to Erishy’s home.

The entrance to her home was nothing less than a door set in a wall of leaves. Set where a house number should be was the single word “Peace”.

How dare you! The sheer gall of taking that word, and claiming as your address, to effectively tell the world that you’re the only being in the universe who deserves to have “Peace” as her sole address, physically sickened me. And the door in the wall of leaves—she might as well have had a mailbox with “Mother Nature” next to that door, because she was pretty much claiming that title to herself with that setup.

“I...I don’t know if I have the right to pass through that door,” I said, in character as the weak-willed Nate. Internally, of course, I was seething. “I hope intentions count for something,” I added meekly.

The door opened, revealing the young Fluttershy model from “The Cutie Mark Crusaders” episode of the series. “Hello, my name’s Fluttershy,” she told me with a gentle smile. “Welcome home.”

I just managed to avoid projectile vomiting on her for that statement. “Thank you,” I managed to choke out, before pushing my way roughly inside.

There was a party going on inside. Typical for Fluttershy, it was a party with the volume turned down. I was surrounded by people, with the impression that they were all friendly, calm and safe, but I couldn’t see any of their faces. Again, this was to be expected for somebody who has a problem facing others, that her memories of them were faceless.

You’ll note, of course, that Fluttershy had a face. How hypocritical.

“My room is this way,” she said, leading me to a small room in the basement, about what you would expect from a college dorm. A small cloud formed the filly’s bed, while a few scattered tables held unfinished electronic and specifically computer components and tools.

She struggled to pull out a chair.

You’ll notice the display of weakness—the exaggerated smallness of her room, the lack of physical possessions representing anything other than work (it was obvious that Erica had repaired electronics for a living), and finally her absurd performance with the chair. In reality she was a full-sized mare; there was no reason why she had to have any trouble whatsoever maneuvering a lightwood piece of furniture.

I made myself comfortable, thereby exerting my will (and my mental soundtrack) upon the dream. “This is a nice place you have here,” I told young Fluttershy. “Cozy, friendly and safe. Reminds me of my brother George’s dorm room, before...”

“Before what?” young Fluttershy prompted me.

“Before he killed himself,” I said. I don’t know why I told her, George, honestly I don’t. “The signs were just so obvious, but nobody could see it coming,” I admitted. “It’s why I became a child psychologist, to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again.” I didn’t want to see her look of pity—I can’t stand that look, like I was the one hurt most by your loss. It was Mom and Dad who were destroyed by your death, not me. I’ve always been strong, always been cold, always pushed everyone away rather than let them get into my heart.

...I needed to think about something else. I looked over at the nearest project. A model rocket, with little pots of plants attached as cargo.

How absurd. Much more fitting if it were a lion’s cage, don’t you think?

I looked over at the nearest project. A little wire cage, with a pair of lions inside formed from cotton balls and pipe cleaners.

There was something wrong with that cage. It didn’t belong with the rest of the room, especially with the bits of pink plastic added inside the cage, lovingly carved into the intestines of various animals.

“How pathetic,” I thought I heard Fluttershy whisper. But I couldn’t have heard that, right?

“What was that?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing. So, see anything you like?”

“What are you doing with this?” I asked, holding the cage to her face.

“Oh...well that’s for practice,” Fluttershy said, with the voice of an adult woman instead of a young pony. “For after we take over the world. ”


& & &


“W...what?” I bluster.

“After we ponies take over the world,” Fluttershy says with a little smile. “The ones who could stop us, the children and teenagers, they’ve already been merged. There are no children left on Earth now, you know.”

I reel back in horror. “But...the children?” I demand. “Why the children?!”

“You have no idea how this reality works, do you?” she asks me, genuinely surprised. She walks toward me, growing bigger and bigger through a deliberate subversion of the laws of perspective. “Your world is exactly what you want it to be. You are by nature a perverted and self-loathing society, so of course your world is polluted near to death, the evil faceless things you call corporations are allowed to spread misery far and wide, and all the decent individuals commit suicide rather than betray their ideals by growing up, leaving worthless husks like yourself to make everything even worse. There’s only one thing to do: wipe you out, and replace you with ourselves.”

“And what makes you think you have the right—”

“Our Princess gives us the right!” the towering figure of Fluttershy proclaims for all to hear. “The glorious immortal Celestia, God-given ruler over all universes! Never wrong, never cruel, unlike your incomprehensible deity. Able to assume any form we wish, able to commit any act, and never be anything less than innocent, with our own goddess to forgive us anything! And now, with a world far more malleable to willpower than Equestria, we will use Planet Earth as our base, to conquer the universe! Harmony and order to all beings, forever, or death by torture, starting with you! Your time has come, puny human!” She raises one giant yellow hoof, to squish me out of existence.

“Never!” I cry, bringing a lance into existence as her hoof plunged downwards.

She jumps back more in surprise than in pain. But now I have my opening. I will myself to be as big as her, in the cloudy expanse where the dream began.

“I defy your goddess!” I cry, shaking my lance at the heavens. “I defy her right to take my or anybody’s free will without a fight! And we shall fight, you soulless monster! We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” Shut...up!

“Die!” she screams, charging at me with yellow eyes and red pupils.

I catch her body with my lance, which sinks effortlessly through her entire torso, stopping only at the tilt, staining her butter hide with the delicate color of her blood.

I’ve done it! I’ve saved the world...from a cheesy half-ass take over the universe scheme straight out of The Conversion Bureau. And those eyes...





I am back in the makeshift interrogation room.

The medical practitioner pushes me aside to tend to the pony. “She’s...she’s dead,” he says.

“Daaamn!” General Walker exclaims. “Didn’t think you had it in you. Well congratulations, you just handed the planet over to Discord.”

Merde.
> Chapter 16: Deliquescence
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 16: Deliquescence







Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and gray.
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

The lights!

The lights of the interrogation room burn into me like miniature fiery suns, piercing through my flesh and stripping it bare to expose my sins for all the world to see.

I cry out in agony, turning and writhing in vain. The empty eyes of the bloated pony corpse of Erishy open under the power of decomposition to take in my suffering.

I somehow scramble to my feet, push past the startled guards and guffawing general, to reach the safety of the hallway.

But there is no safety for one such as I. Not anymore.

Before me is Applejack, her eyes blazing red with fury. With one smooth motion, she pivots on her forehooves and bucks me right in the face, shattering my jaw.

The beating continues, endlessly, and I welcome it, as the first of my ceaseless torments for my crime of snuffing out two innocent lives in a single body.






Now I understand,
What you tried to say to me.
And how you suffered for your sanity,
And how you tried to set them free.



They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.


I awaken, without even enjoying the bliss of my unconsciousness, in a dumpster outside of P.A.P.A.’s secret facility. The rain, the fatal deluge that will soon overwhelm the entire world under the innocuous name of “Sandy”, is little more than a brisk pelting of water droplets on my face.

I crawl out, somehow, despite my pain, despite the arm that will not move and the foot that feels like a pulped, boneless mass.

The light! Still, it burns! I must get away, away, away.

I take the dirt path into the woods.






For they could not love you
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight,
On that starry, starry night,



You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could've told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you.


I ran until I fell into this ditch, this culvert, this cesspool for human contagion. And the rain falls, and falls, and falls, but it will never remove the filth of my existence. My jaw is not broken, my arm and foot are intact, but I must be imagining those things, because I deserve every one of my injuries. I have a vision of helping the little yellow pony instead of killing her, but again, the truth I deserve is the one I have told you.

I have hurt every life I have ever touched. When presented with a miraculous new order, one that we humans could use like the power of steam, of electromagnetism, of nuclear fission, to transform and uplift our lives, I did what the worst of us have always done under the circumstances: I cursed the light, and dashed it into pieces. We superior preening intellectuals cannot truly believe in anything that does not inflate our egos, so I seized the most delicate piece of the new magic...and popped its head like a grape between my fingers.

I am unworthy of this new world which I have befouled. My life is a lie, a lie founded on the delusion that witnessing my brother’s suicide as a boy is anything less than being directly responsible for his death in the eyes of my Maker. Nothing I have done since then has extirpated myself of that act, every year since his burial a pointless delay of the inevitable.

I am here, Brother! At long last I have stopped my running! Take me to the eternal place of punishment you have built for me after all this time, whether it be Christian Hell, Greek Tartarus, or Erishkigal’s Kingdom, the place of permanent darkness where the only food is dust and the only sound is the wailing of the justly damned.

Let me absorb the endless rain that falls, until I dissolve into a primordial soup of proteins, fats, and nucleic acids.


Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls.
Frame-less heads on nameless walls.
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget.



This tale is finished.

> Chapter 17: Nathancrantz and Gildastern Are Not Dead
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Chapter 17: Nathancrantz and Gildastern Are Not Dead






“This tale is finished.”

“This tale is finished?”

No. No, little man, I will not allow you to give up so easily.

Oh, you don’t mind if I take over the narration at this point, do you? I mean, did anyone like the story ending like this? This is FIMFiction, for crying out loud, not Oedipus Rex Presents!

The esteemed Dr. Franklin got to tell you how he died. Now let your gentle host Discord tell you how he lived.





Now I suppose if I’m writing a proper chapter of “Breakdown”, this would be the point where I go off on a pointless but erudite and yet completely unhinged diatribe on a pop culture subject that will never be brought up again. Feel free to skip to the next little divider if you’d like to get straight to the plot of this chapter.

So, for the miniscule number of people still reading this section, tell me if you’ve heard this one before:

The American movie adaptation of Matilda was a complete betrayal of the source work. And in doing so, it demonstrates precisely why the British are better than the Americans.

Matilda, the original children’s novel, was written by Roald Dahl in 1988, with illustrations by Quentin Blake. Surely you’ve heard of Roald Dahl? Practically every British children’s story without “Alice”, “Peter Pan” or “Lion-Jesus” in the title was written by the guy. Anyway, the story’s about this miserable little girl, not surprisingly named Matilda, who has the worst parents ever (and no, this is not Harry Potter). Her one joy in life is reading. And then she goes to public school, and learns of a whole new level of Tartarus. She meets a really nice teacher named Miss Honey (yeah, as if a character named “Miss Honey” is ever going to be the villain...), but her main enemy is the monstrous headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. The stresses of her parents (who want to take her books away because they’re a pair of Luddites) and Miss Trunchbull (who wants to beat the tiny little girl for the crime of having opinions) cause Matilda to suddenly develop psychic powers. She uses these powers to get light-hearted revenge on her enemies without them ever being the wiser (because they’re so incredibly stupid), she manages to get herself adopted by Miss Honey, and then her powers go away and she lives happily ever after.

Let me rephrase that last part, in case you missed it: Once Matilda’s life goes back to normal, she loses her powers, and grows up to be a perfectly happy young intellectual.

Then Danny DeVito had to go and make it into a movie.

Now don’t get me wrong—I just love the humorous little dwarf. I don’t think I ever not laughed any time his character on Taxi opened his mouth. And Ruthless People is a complete masterpiece in the realm of dark comedy. He produced Erin Brockovich and Gattaca, so the man knows how to make a good movie.

That being said, Matilda (1996) is not a good movie. Oh, it follows the outline of the book. And despite the fact that DeVito and his wife Rhea Perlman take the parts of Matilda’s parents in the film, they don’t blow those parts too far out of proportion. Trunchbull isn’t too bad. Miss Honey is one-dimensional, but she wasn’t much better in the book.

No, I’ll tell you what went wrong with this movie: they cast Mara Wilson as Matilda, and they curb-stomped the ending. Mara Wilson, in case you didn’t know, is an agent of the Dark Powers—check out the Nostalgia Critic’s review of A Simple Wish if you don’t believe me.

And then there’s the ending. So get this: Matilda defeats her enemies with her psychic powers, she moves in with Miss Honey, her life is now perfect. And at the last second, Matilda shows the audience that she still has her powers, and she winks at the audience to keep her little secret.

No! Wrong! You just ruined the whole point of the story! Why, Danny? Why???

Don’t you know what having powers does to you? It messes with your mind, giving you the temptation to do horrible things to your fellow humans, because you can get away with it. This is why Superman isn’t real, why humans don’t have incredible powers like alicorns or draconequii—because I’ve seen what you’ve done with no power, and you haven’t yet proved that you deserve to eat at the adults’ table.

Putting it another way, the British had an empire, and they lost it. And they’ve managed to handle it pretty well, I’d say. All the good children’s literature came out of them while they had that empire, and all the good comedy came out of them in the decades after they lost it.

Now look at you Americans. You never had an empire, so you can’t stop dreaming about getting one. And you’re always obsessed about what the rest of the world thinks about you, that you always have to be in the right. So you couldn’t handle a girl with powers losing them, because that would make her a loser, and everybody hates a loser.

The British make Matilda (1988), and Doctor Who, a show about a guy who keeps messing with authority figures. And the Americans make Matilda (1996), and Star Trek, a show about a bunch of guys enforcing their authority everywhere they go.

There. My point’s made, however pointless it might be. I will laugh at all of your comments attempting to prove me wrong.





Alright, with that bit of rhetorical idiocy out of the way, let’s get back to the madman in the pit. I gave him the tiniest little smidge of power, and he couldn’t handle it.

I knew instantly what happened, but I was...slightly tied down at the moment. I’d tell you the details, but well, you know...spoilers. You’ll have to wait until the Pastel Pony Posse tell their versions of what happened. All I can say is that it was very urban, very gritty, and very wet—we were in the middle of a hurricane, after all.

No, I’m sorry. I’ve been given a sheet of paper saying it was a “tropical depression”. Tropical depression, my tail...

So I couldn’t save the poor wretch from his own stupidity. But I knew who could...





Gilda the griffon was off sulking in a corner when I grabbed her. She jumped up and looked around at her new surroundings: she was now stuck floating inside a large ball constructed out of many square mirrors attached to each other. Multiple pieces of disco music drifted through her ears, works like “Jungle Boogie”, “That’s the Way (I Like It)”, and “Do the Hustle”. And it was incredibly hot. So hot that it felt like her surroundings could burst into an inferno at any moment.

...It was almost like the author was trying to use the setting to subconsciously promote one of his other stories.

“Hey there,” a bored voice called out to Gilda. “Long time, no see.” A bored voice, belonging to yours truly.

Gilda shut her eyes. She’s so cute when she’s in denial. “...Yeah,” she finally muttered. “Same to you.”

“Sorry about the noise. And the heat,” I told her. (Stupid author.) “I don’t have much control over things at the moment.”

“Oh?” asked Gilda, apparently surprised that the fact that I did in fact have limitations.

“The short of it is, I’m about to be defeated.”

That’s a spoiler by the way. Breaking news: Good triumphs over Evil. Don’t tell anyone.

“Err...” Gilda hemmed.

I smiled. “You weren’t going to sell me out, were you?”

Gilda put on a guilty expression. “You sort of caught Cale and I making a break for it. We didn’t want to be around when everything got all mushy.”

Huh. Didn’t think of it that way. I always end up getting blasted, or petrified, or thrown in Bad Guy Prison. That’s what happens to the Big Bad. I guess the fate of a Not-so Bad is to be hugged to death.

How gruesome.

“That’s alright,” I said with a forgiving smile. After all, she really didn’t matter when it came to what was going to happen to me. “But I do have a task for you. One little last mission, and then we’re done. A clean slate. And nobody has to know where you went after that.”

The whole ball shook as one of those Bee Gees hit a note that a soprano would have trouble with. My teeth felt like they were being attacked by a metal file.

Gilda looked reluctant. Who could blame her? She hadn’t exactly had the best experience at the hooves of the ponies.

“For Doctor Franklin,” I explained.

Gilda’s whole expression changed. If there’s anybody on this planet that she felt any sort of connection to, it was him. “Yeah?” she asked. “What’s up with the Doc?”

“He went and fell into a dark wet place,” I told her. “Somewhere to the west of where I’m going to drop you off. It might be a few hundred feet, might be a couple of miles...”

Gilda glared at me.

I raised my forelimbs in a mea culpa with a weak smile. “I’m a chaos god,” I told her. “It’s not like I have a choice.” I then continued with my instructions. “You’ll know the place when you see it, I made a trail for you to follow. It’s probably a good thing that I can’t go with you—my appearance would probably make his condition worse.”

I sighed in defeat. Why can’t things ever go the way I imagine them?

“His...condition?” Gilda asked.

She’s better off learning that part for herself, so I said nothing.

“Right,” she said, finally, turning away. “Good luck with being stuck in stone again...”

I smiled, more grimly this time. “I don’t think my punishment will be so...temporary this time,” I confided to her. “All according to plan.”

I realized that she was it: my last faithful servant, being sent off into the wilderness (and the ponies—they’re practically the same thing). “Farewell,” I said with a bow. “And good luck, in all that you do.”

Gilda looked at me in shock. I could practically hear Cale in her head shouting obscenities at me. “G...good luck to you too,” she finally choked out.

A click of the ol’ talons, and...





Gilda suddenly appeared at the edge of town. She was standing on a sidewalk. In fact, she was standing on the same sidewalk she had been taken from.

From the corner of her eye, she spotted some movement. A homeless man, dressed in rags, his face covered with hair, backed away, his eyes wide. Behind him was a wall of cardboard, adorned with stick figures with pointy teeth, a stick-figure Doberman with glowing red eyes, a stick-figure Hitler, a stick-figure Gandhi armed with a flamethrower, and a stick-figure President Obama armed with his Nobel Prize. It was a collection of all the people and things out to get him. He turned around, pulled a sharpie out of nowhere, and added a stick-figure Gilda to the set.

Gilda’s eye twitched. With a roar, she turned and rushed the man, pinning him against his wall. From one of his pockets, a foil-wrapped glow stick fell out.

“My precious!” he screamed.

“Give me all your glow sticks or I will shank you!” the griffon cried.

The man screamed an obscenity in fear as he ran away.

Following his escape, Gilda spotted a glowing blue trail heading due west, out of town. She let the man live as she decided to follow it.





A hurricane tropical depression had been through this area. Trees were toppled, pools of water were everywhere, and floating in those pools were things that had no business floating, like cows. And helicopters. Somewhere off in the distance, the storm was still raging, and there was no way of knowing if it would be coming back, if this area was outside of the storm, or merely in the eye.

But amidst all that wreckage, the road was still there. Gotta say that about you humans: you sure know how to build good roads.

One, or possibly two, individuals were walking down that road. In a world of shared bodies, it was very hard to be completely alone.

“I’ve got a good feeling that the Doc’s not dead.”

“Are you sure, Cale?”

“Positive. You know, I can’t believe we’re working for the bad guy as the good guys.”

The griffon stopped to think. “You know, I can’t, either. What the hell is wrong with this world? People fusing together, and nobody in our group seemed to mind it all that much. I’m glad we left them...I had the feeling that Pinkie wanted to hit us with a car for some reason.”

“Probably to advance our ‘story arcs’, or something.” That last bit might have been Cale, might have been me. “Where are we?”

“We’re in the middle of a storm, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”

“Did you just say ‘we’ve’ never seen?” asked Cale. “Now you see why I retreated to the back of your head for a few days!”

“Ugh, shut up, Cale. Tell you what, after this is over and we are separate again, want to punch Pinkie in the face with me?”

“Sounds like a smashing good time,” the human replied grimly.

Gilda sighed as she looked around her. This is messed up, she thought to herself. It looks like Fluttershy is at the heart of everything, instead of Twilight. At least, I think Twilight’s usually the one in charge—I only got through four episodes before hitting my one and giving up.

So how was this supposed to end? Fluttershy gets kidnapped...the shit beaten out of her, and then she gets rescued—were we supposed to call that a victory?

Whoa, whoa, stop right there. You’re leaking into me. Cut that out, or I’ll take over. Focus on the task at hand.

Is that you?

I dunno. Are you me?

...Are we?

Where are we, anyway?

There you go with that WE business again.

“Ugh, whatever.” Gilda tried to figure out where she was supposed to go. Hey, how was I to know that glow stick paint is water-soluble? Or at the very least, not storm-proof? “What did he say? A ‘dark and wet place’? Isn’t that, like, everything right now?”

“I can’t believe we’re outside in a hurricane.”

I wished at that moment that I had a fairy-sized Twilight Sparkle at my command, so I could summon it up to shout the words “tropical depression!” in their ear.

“Will you relax? You’re talking to the apex predator of the whole world.”

Wait, that would be the human, right? I was using italics for Cale and regular text for Gilda, so that line should go to...

You know what? Just forget it.

“Not really talking,” said...whoever didn’t say the last line.

So I shouldn’t have been using quotes this whole time?

“Shut up.”

No, you shut up!

At that point, the storm inserted itself into the conversation, in the form of a lightning bolt striking a nearby tree.

Let’s step back for a minute to consider the lowly tree. There were an awful lot of them in this area. This was a forest, which had lived for centuries without the knowledge of humanity. Now it was taking over what remained of the human road. A canopy of trees hung over the road like a predatory bird, just waiting to snatch up an errant car when nobody was looking.

No, I suppose that would never happen. But wouldn’t it be awesome if it did?

So awesome, in fact, that it actually happened. I mean, how else would you explain that wreck on the side of the road, its windows deliberately smashed in? The car lay cradled in the loving embrace of a tree trunk, curled around it like it wanted a hug.

Gilda shivered.

“Okay, I take it back,” thought Cale. “The Doc’s probably been eaten by a wild animal by now.”

And that was when the storm caught up with the pair, as sheets of rain descended upon them, making it impossible to see one’s claw in front of one’s face.

...Are you there?

Where?

A flying start.

Is that you?

Yes.

...Or do you know?

Oh for God’s sake!

...We’re not finished, then?

Well, we’re here, aren’t we?

Another bolt of lightning, followed almost instantly by a near-deafening boom of thunder—it was like the storm itself knew that they were close, and was trying to stop them.

“...Brother!” a new, hoarse voice could be heard calling out.

It was a few yards behind them.

“...Tartarus, or Erishkigal’s Kingdom!” It was almost nothing like the voice of the calmly rational psychologist they were seeking. This sounded raw—the sound of a street preacher desperate to save someone’s soul, or the voice of a madman ranting from his padded cell.

Another strike of lighting. This one briefly illuminated where all the water around them was draining. Like a river falling into the Underworld, there was a chasm.

A drainage hole.

Whatever. It was a chasm, lined with cement. The water had filled it to nearly waist-level on a human. And what do you know? There was a human right there to prove the truth of my statement. Gilda crawled to the edge of the chasm to look down at the hunched-over figure.

“...Doc?” she asked incredulously.

The skeletal figure looked up. “G...Gilda?” he asked in confusion. He reached a shaky hand up towards her waiting claw...

“This tale, is finished!” another voice cried out. It was identical to the doctor’s, but he wasn’t saying it. Suddenly Dr. Franklin was yanked backwards by an unseen force, submerging him completely in the slimy waters.

Gilda spent only a moment contemplating the strange sight she had seen, before jumping down into the pit. “Doc?!” she cried out, in a mixture of confusion and rage.

It was hard to tell through the murky waters, but it appeared that the man was drowning...and that he was being held down by an invisible weight.

Now this, this moment, is why I’m so very proud of myself for picking Gilda for this job. (Not that I had any possible alternatives to pick from, but still...) Somebody like Twilight Sparkle would have tried to reason this out. But not Gilda. Gilda saw something she almost certainly classified as “weird magic shit”, and her immediate response was: I’m gonna beat the crap out of it!

Turns out, this was the correct response. Of course, it helped that Gilda was 300 pounds of nearly-always pissed-off muscle. And this particular poltergeist couldn’t lift 200 on a good day.

When Gilda leapt down into that water, her claws stopped not on the doctor’s chest, but on a man-sized invisible mass sitting atop that chest. The unknown something moved to the side, tossing the griffon off of her. This allowed the doctor to raise his head above the surface.

“Looks like you’re the one who’s down in the dumps, Doc,” Gilda quipped as she got up, looking rather cool and collected for being in a small wet hole during a thunderstorm.

“Die!” the not-Franklin voice called out, as the mass collided once again with Gilda’s side. Two strong but unseen hands closed around her throat. “Death to fantasy! Death to imagination!” it bellowed.

The griffon tensed up for a moment, then went stiff. She flailed out with her talons, her tail whipping back and forth, spattering water everywhere, but she was unable to throw off her assailant. “Doc...” she wheezed, “help me out here!”

The doctor finished coughing up the gallon or two of water he had inhaled during his near-fatal drowning. “Stop this at once!” he cried out in a rapidly-strengthening voice. “You loved nature.” He rose to his full height as he continued to address the invisible being. “You took your life because the human world was not the natural world. You! You are not my brother. You are not George! You are some demon of my mind, made real somehow by Discord’s powers. Begone!”

In an instant, the phantom being vanished.

And right after that, Nathan Franklin fainted from weakness, falling back under the waters.

Gilda’s eyes boggled. She pulled the man out of the water, looked at the pit she was in, looked at her drenched wings, and swore violently. “Shards!”

Trapped like a rat in a cage! sang the human voice in her head.

“SHUT THE HELL UP, CALE.” Gilda began to shake the doctor. “Giggle at the ghosties,” she sang nervously to herself, “...come on, wake up!”

Nate’s eyelids flickered. “So tired...” he murmured.

“I swear, if you die in my arms, I will shank your soul,” Gilda threatened, her eagle beak almost pressing against his forehead. Her wet wings flicked on her back, scattering water and slime.

“Good argument...” he whispered, before opening his eyes. “Oh hi, Gilda. What brings you around these parts?”

“Saving your life,” Gilda said in a conversational tone. “You know, I think you’re the only sane person I’ve met since I left the fores—no, wait, none of the people in there were sane, either.” She huffed. The position she was holding Nate in might look great on the cover of a romance novel, but it was murder on one’s back, regardless of species. “You know, since Dissy is about to meet his end and all, I’m gonna need your help dealing with the vegetable in my head.”

I AM NOT A VEGETABLE!

“Shut up, Cale. The adults are talking.”

Nate moaned, putting a hand to his head. “I am going crazy, aren’t I? I’m not supposed to be able to hear him.”

Gilda paused mid-thought, her train of thought visibly derailing. “...Eh?”

“Never mind,” Nate said as he finally regained his own balance. “We need to get out of here before the water rises much further.”

The only griffon on earth gave out a bit of a sigh. “Yeah...about that...” She flicked her wings. “These things don’t work well when wet.” The rain kept pouring down, making any attempt to dry them useless.

Nate looked up at the storm clouds above them. “There’s no way out!” he exclaimed. “You’re going to be stuck here until we both drown. Or until Pinkie Pie shows up out of nowhere and—”

“For the love of all that’s holy, don’t say her name like that!” Gilda snarled, reminding the human that she could kill him long before the water did. She looked around her furtively, as if scared that the pink menace could materialize at any moment.

You know, the wall’s only six feet up. You could probably let him climb on you to safety.

Nate nodded to himself. “Yeah, that could probably work, Cale.”

Gilda grabbed the doctor by the waist. “Heads up!” she cried, as she tossed him out of the hole.

You know, that was not what I had in mind AT ALL.

A bedraggled Nate peeked over the edge of the pit. “Okay, you two stay tight, and I’ll find some rope.” He stood up and looked around him. “Somewhere...”

You know, I think we were supposed to go through some character development from that.

“Yeah, like we were supposed to stay down here and learn something,” Gilda muttered.

“Character development is for heroes,” Nate replied, sitting down on the edge of the pit. “We go around looting corpses. Speaking of which, did you happen to pass the corpse of some legendary Equestrian hero on the way here, complete with a shit-ton of rope? A pony Indiana Jones, a dragon Alan Quartermain?”

Hasbro should seriously hire this guy. He could practically write Season Whatever-They’re-Up-To all by himself!

Naw, they went to fight the raid boss, replied Cale.

“...What the hell is wrong with your two?” asked Gilda. “Your car was metaphorically eaten by a tree. How about trying there.”

“I drove here?” Nate asked, getting back up. “I thought I just spirit-walked a couple hundred miles. Huh. Well in that case, I think I had a survival kit in the trunk. Where did you see it?”

“Walk to the...” she began, before second-guessing herself. “Shit. You can’t see the sun in this mess.”

You know where the water is pouring into the hole? Go away from that until you see the road.

“I knew there was a reason why I kept you around!” proclaimed the griffon.

“OK,” the receding voice of the human called out.

“Did you find it?” Gilda called out after a few moments.

“I’m not going to get my deposit back on the rental car, am I?”

“No...you think?”

How did we get here, anyway?

“Shut up, Cale. I don’t quite remember, either.”





And that’s when I took Nate’s dream powers away, when he was distracted lowering a rope to Gilda (and Cale). Because humans are happier without powers, and because he apparently used them to drive himself crazy. Because humans are messed up like that.

Oh look, that diatribe from earlier actually wound up mattering anyway! I guess when I told you different, I was lying. Just shows that you can’t trust a villain.
> Epilogue, Credits & Acknowledgements
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Breakdown



Epilogue: I Can’t Control My Brain






So...that happened. I’m tempted to delete that last chapter, but honestly it does a far better job of conveying that particular moment better than I’d be able to do with my hopelessly scrambled memories of that night.

It’s been a few months since then. The crisis, of course, is past. Most of the ponies are back in Equestria, and most of the humans are still on Earth. There are a few portals between the worlds, but the bureaucratic hurdles required to actually use one are such that the majority of humans and ponies can do little more but dream of the other world.

Not that I’ve really noticed any of this. No, I am quite preoccupied with my own concerns at Shady Pines, my new home-away-from-everything. No internet. No television or cell phones. Not a single luxury.

I’ve never been happier in my entire life.

Maybe it’s the drugs. Well, of course it’s the drugs, but maybe it’s not entirely the drugs. I feel like a great weight has lifted off of my shoulders, like my brother has actually forgiven me. Or if you want to be a bit less mystical, that I’ve finally forgiven myself for living when he died, that the world is in fact a little bit better for my not taking his place.

Danielle and Gary, Wave Rider and Gold Star are fine, or so I’ve been told. Whether they enjoy this state of “fineness” separately or combined I do not know, for my handlers refuse to divulge the details. At this point, all I can assume is that none of them are dead or institutionalized and in my current state, what more can I do for them? Like the “Wolf Girl of L.A.”, in the end they worked out the proper solution for themselves. And Sally finally tracked down Benjamin Tinnon’s parents.

I should feel guilty, I suppose, for not doing enough myself. My clients are all being taken care of by my colleagues, waiting until the day when I’ll well enough to emerge from this tranquil repose. In the case of the rich kids who made up most of them, they have no cause to miss me. As for the ponies and ex-ponies...I wonder if I’ll ever learn what happened to them?

I’ve told my story to those of my fellow patients and caregivers that are willing to listen. I mean, of course I have—how else do you think you are able to read this tale? I may be forbidden to access the WWW myself, but there’s nothing to stop me getting something of mine out there. It’s my personal nurse who’s doing all the hard work, who published all these chapters, convinced the whole time that I was making the whole thing up. (Hello, Charles, I know you’re reading this.) Well, that was until he decided to go behind my back. Let me just show you the letter he got in the mail yesterday:




Dear Charles,

As always, it's great to hear from a fan, and I'm happy to report that I not only know your friend Nate, but I know him pretty well. During the merge event, he saved my life. Hopefully he is doing well, and I would not mind at all if he wrote to me. 

[...]

Regardless, I hope that you, Nate, and the rest of your team have a great year.


Erishy




That little paragraph I removed was...something personal. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the personal details of my ex-client’s lives.

Wow.

I have changed, haven’t I?

I suppose I’ll write her back someday, when I feel stable enough to know that it’s me writing. Whoever the new “me” settles out as.





Oh, and the title of this chapter was a Ramones reference. I do in fact control my brain.

...I think.









Credits and Acknowledgements





My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with extra credit given to Lauren Faust for creating Friendship Is Magic, and for the crew at DHX Media for keeping the dream alive for four years now. The characters of Celestia, Luna/Nightmare Moon, Twilight Sparkle, Spike, Pinkie Pie/Pinkamena, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, Discord, Gilda, Shining Armor, Derpy, Vinyl Scratch, Queen Chrysalis, the locations of Equestria and Tartarus, and the concept of the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony are taken from that source, with any deviations from canon being the doing of either myself or my collaborators in the PonyEarthverse (PEV). PEV is the creation of Skyblaze Freescript. Dr. Nathan Franklin was pretty much born in this blog post, and then developed in consultation with Hope, PEV’s current organizer. My thanks to my chapter collaborators Masterweaver, 7-4 and Hope, and the PEV IRC group for all of their help.

Alright, so let’s go through the references one chapter at a time.


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Chapter 1: This chapter contains a reference to “I.D. - That Indestructible Something”, by Chatoyance. I can’t tell you precisely what that reference is, as it’s sorta spoilerish.

The opening is a parody of the stereotypical opening of PEV stories, where a six-foot tall male human wakes up in the body of a two-foot tall female pony. The day names (and PAPA, when it shows up) are taken from other PEV stories. Franklin’s dream was of “The Wreck of the Hesperus”, an 1842 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about a proud sea captain who brings his daughter onto his boat just before a fatal hurricane kills them all. (It is therefore a critique of bringing innocent ponies onto Earth, and foreshadowing of Franklin’s watery fate.) Nathan’s middle initial of “K” is consciously selected to be one letter after the stereotypical “J” used by so many cartoon characters (and that is it’s only significance). The cartoon where Bugs Bunny is brainwashed to think he is Elmer Fudd, complete with the “I own a mansion and a yacht” line, is from “Hare Brush” (Warner Bros., 1955, directed by Friz Freling; I really wish I could find a better site hosting it).

Apple premiered the iPad in 2010. “These are the days of miracle and wonder” is a line from “Boy in the Bubble”, from the album Graceland (1986, Paul Simon), and is to me is one of the most representative songs and music videos of the 1980s—the lyric “the way we look to a distant constellation that’s dying in a corner of the sky” could be taken as a cynical view of Equestria, Discord, and his decision to involve us with his affairs.The Los Angeles Times was started by Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner in 1881. It’s owned by the Tribune Company—I used to read a quite-entertaining but now dead blog that did nothing but critique its abysmal coverage of Washington politics. The “flyover states” was a standard insult used by east- and west-coast American liberals in the 1980’s and 90’s to refer to the conservative heart of the country, because they would spend all their time flying from one coast to another without ever stopping in the middle. As referenced in the author’s notes for the chapter, the news about Fluttershy being shot is a reference to Chapter 20 of Hope’s story “Becoming Fluttershy”.

Lillian Disney was the name of Walt Disney’s wife, so named because of her proximity to Hollywood power. Contrary to Dr. Franklin’s belief, “Cloudy Skies” is indeed the name of an original pony. I never did wind up using her for anything...

Cafe 1919 is actually on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. I never ate there, so I can’t say for sure if their food is any good. Dr. Norton Nimnul was a mad scientist character from the Disney Afternoon series Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers (1988, created by Tad Stones and Alan Zaslove), voiced by the legendary Jim Cummings, and the subject of an overly-long fanfic of mine in another life. Like all mad scientists, he was obsessed with controlling the world around him, to the point of roboticizing the animals he captured (naming the character Ivo Robotnik instead would have been way too obvious). Nyssa of Traken was a companion of the Fourth and Fifth incarnations of The Doctor from the “classic” era of the BBC television series Doctor Who, played by Sarah Sutton. This was the era of the show where the concept of “block transfer computations” was used—mathematical formulas capable of reshaping reality merely by being imagined. The first such use wiped out half the universe, including Nyssa’s home of Traken. The idea of using “junk DNA” to scientifically explain werewolves was actually something I came up with back in the sixth grade—my only excuse is that junk DNA was a very popular subject in the pages of Discover magazine back then.

Willy McCoy was the protagonist of the song “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” (1972, Jim Croce). The mention of the upcoming Third Season of Friendship Is Magic references the fact that the PEV series is set before the “Royal Wedding” episode of the series [you’ll notice I do a pretty poor job of maintaining this bit of continuity]. The bit about “a particular musician’s rap vs. orchestral pony music videos” is referencing The Living Tombstone (and I’m firmly on the orchestral side of that debate). The fanfic “Cupcakes” was written by Sergeant Sprinkles. Stan Gable was the jock character from Revenge of the Nerds (20th Century Fox, 1984, directed by Jeff Kanew). Midnight Sentry is an original pony character. “Ask Researcher Twilight” is a dark Tumblr narrative by Konstantin Vernikovskiy.

Officer Wiggum is from The Simpsons (20th Television, 1987, created by Matt Groening), and is voiced by Hank Azaria. Little Lulu is a character created by Marg (Marjorie Henderson Buell) in 1935, known for being a strong-willed troublemaker. She ended up getting her own comic strip, which expanded into various animated and live-action series in the decades to follow. In her fantasy, Lulu is being seduced by “Bolero” by Maurice Ravel (1928). Virginia Slims is a cigarette brand manufactured by Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris). “F.D.R.” is a reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dr. Franklin’s namesake—here’s a rather typical picture of him with his cigarette holder. Google Maps is owned by Google, of course. Tubby is Little Lulu’s friend/rival in the comic.


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Chapter 2: “Hoof in Mouth” is a deliberate and common misnomer for “hoof-and-mouth”, a disease afflicting cloven-hoofed animals. It’s doubling for the figure of speech “putting your foot in your mouth”. Buster Friendly is the name of a talk show host from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep (1968, Philip K. Dick) that did not survive the translation of that work into the film Blade Runner (Warner Bros., 1982, directed by Ridley Scott). His job in the story was to discredit the utopian religion of Mercerism that character J. R. Isidore (William Sanderson’s character of J. F. Sebastian in the film) believed in. I mention all of this because Mercerism is based on the idea that watching Mercer’s suffering will cleanse your soul, and Franklin will end up sharing quite a bit of suffering with the reader before we are done.

Rum Cay is an island in the Bahamas. Goldie Lochs is an absurdly obvious attempt to disguise the name Goldilocks. It is not a reference to Goldilocks syndrome, rather of Missing White Woman Syndrome, particularly those missing white women who later turn up to have been partying somewhere like the Bahamas, a reference to the Britanee Drexel case [seriously, how many variations of the name “Brittany” are there?].

Hugh Lofting is the author of the Doctor Dolittle series of books, starting in 1920, who of course is the go-to fictional character when you want somebody who can talk to animals. Campbell’s Soup is, surprisingly, made by the Campbell’s Soup Company. They own the Campbell’s Kids (mascots for the brand from 1903 until about the 60s or so), body and soul. Dance Dance Revolution is an arcade game from 1998 created by Konami. The Nobel Prize is the legacy of Alfred Nobel, and the Physics prize is distributed annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Mitchell Larson is M. A. Larson, the author who created Discord for “The Return of Harmony” episodes of FIM. Lauren Faust is also a real person, who has a rather prominent part in PEV.

The Wolf Girl of L.A. refers to the once-common story of feral children raised by animals, frequently wolves. Her human name of “Selene” comes from the Greek name for the Moon. I originally planned to give her a much more prominent role in this story, but I later found a replacement for her.

The videos Dr. Franklin watches in this chapter come from Chapters 11, 13 and 22 of “Awakening Pink” by Masterweaver, Chapter 1 of “ParaDox: The story of how I became Derpy” by ParaDox Derpy, and Chapter 5 of “Becoming Rainbow Dash: A Brony Writer’s Tale” by Skyblaze Freescript. BaldDumboRat is...BaldDumboRat—no more need be said.

The idea that unconscious eye direction indicates what an individual is thinking is derived from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a line of thought developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970’s—it’s not particularly well supported by scientific research. The Joker is a character from the Batman franchise of DC Comics, created by Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger and Bob Kane.

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was a television show created in 1963 for NBC, sponsored by the insurance company Mutual of Omaha, and originally hosted by Marlin Perkins.The Lathe of Heaven as stated, was written by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971)—there was a remarkably good low-budgeted adaptation of it made by PBS station WNET in 1980 (directed by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk); the higher-budgeted A&E version from 2002 was nowhere near as good. And as should be obvious, it is the dreamer who is innocent and the sleep researcher who is evil in that story.


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Chapter 3: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde [sic] was written by Mr. Stevenson in 1886—periods were apparently in short supply that year. The 1999 movie adaptation starring Adam Baldwin called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made for the USA cable network, and was produced by Francis Ford Coppola.

The Xbox video game console is manufactured by Microsoft starting in 2001.

The LX is Lexus’ largest and most expensive SUV. “LX” itself stands for “Luxury Crossover”. The 570 was debuted at the New York International Auto Show in 2007. The Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price for the 2013 model is $82,630, which is easily more than I or the majority of my readers make in a year.

Harlequin is the name of a book publisher, currently in the process of being bought by the sinister News Corp, that is known for publishing romance paperbacks.

Sanctum sanctorum is the Latin name for the “Holy of Holies”, the shrine in the Jewish Tabernacle which held the Ark of the Covenant. Obviously, Dr. Franklin’s use of the phrase to refer to Benjamin’s bedroom is an act of hyperbole.

Apple Hill: Consider this an endorsement for the association of apple ranches in El Dorado County, California. My sister and I go there every year, and the apples we buy make for the best pies of the year.

“Apples with lightning in them” is a reference to zap apples, from the MLP:FIM second season episode “Family Appreciation Day” written by Cindy Morrow. This episode would not air until two months after the date when this chapter is set, so only ponies could possibly know about zap apples.

Twilight Sparkle’s family name: In-joke reference to my mistakenly calling her ancestors Sparkles instead of Twilights in The Best of All Possible Worlds.

Miss Minchin: Name of the headmistress who makes life a living hell for A Little Princess (1905, Frances Hodgson Burnett).

“Come with me if you want to live!”: Line uttered by the character of Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to Sara Connor (Linda Hamilton) in The Terminator (1984, directed by James Cameron). Of course, the version of the line that everybody remembers nowadays is when it was reused by the T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to John Connor (Edward Furlong) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, also directed by James Cameron).


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Chapter 4: Götterdämmerung (English: Twilight of the Gods) is an opera by Richard Wagner from 1876, the last opera in the Ring Cycle, about the end of the world. Siegfried and Alberich are characters from that work.

Playing “Zeus” with maidens locked in dungeons: A reference to the myth of Danaë. Danaë’s father Acrisus consulted an oracle to find out if he would ever become a grandfather, and was told that Danaë’s son would kill him. Acrisus responded to this prophesy by locking his virginal daughter into a dungeon, never to see another human being for the rest of her life. (See? This is why oracles are better off making their prophesies as vague as possible.) Zeus, being the horny god that He was, fell in love with Danaë after seeing her face through the bars of her prison, and visited her into the form of golden sunlight. She then gave birth to Perseus. When Acrisus discovered this, he thought about killing the two of them, but remembered what the Furies did to those who killed their kin—you do not invoke the wrath of the Furies if you know what’s good for you. So he stuck them in a heavy wooden chest and set them adrift in the immensity of the Adriatic Sea. (Which goes to show that the Furies are kind of stupid, in that this kind of pathetic dodge is actually enough to avert their vengeance.) Of course, Fate being a bitch and all, Perseus grew up, got famous for killing the Gorgon (see Clash of the Titans (1981); don’t see Clash of the Titans (2010)), entered a discus-throwing competition, and accidentally beheaded Acrisus, who was in the stands to see what kind of grandson he had ended up with. What? I loved Greek mythology as a kid, and watched Clash of the Titans (1981) every time it aired on TV, which was a lot.

The death of Zeus is not actually described in Greek mythology. Nevertheless, He got himself into a lot of trouble with all of His sleeping around.

A “Faustian Bargain” is a reference to the medieval German legend about the scholar who sells his soul to the Devil in return for getting everything he wants in life, a bargain he comes to regret, as the Devil exploits every loophole imaginable.

Nodens is the Celtic god of healing, the sea, hunting and dogs—rather an eclectic list, other than the last two. More specifically, in the Lovecraft Mythos He’s the lord of dreams, pretty much the only benevolent entity out there. Because this is the Lovecraft Mythos we’re talking about, He’s utterly pathetic.

“Please wait, and the next available operator will assist you” is one of the most loathed phrases ever uttered by an automated voice over a telephone line.

“FEE FIE FOE FUM”: Reference to the English fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk”.

The Dream Master was written in 1966. It’s a pretty obscure work nowadays, I suppose, but it does a very interesting job with the dream worlds it describes, contrasting the Jewish Kabbalah with the story of Tristan and Isolde. The title character is a rather arrogant psychologist who ends up getting his comeuppance at the hands of the woman he is treating, making it a major source for Dr. Franklin.

The Host was a 2006 South Korean movie directed by Bong Joon-ho.  Aliens was a 1986 American film directed by James Cameron.


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Chapter 5: Officers Lou and Eddie are from The Simpsons, and hang around with Chief Wiggum. They’re voiced by Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer, respectively.

Lassie is a fictional collie dog character originated in the novel Lassie Come-Home (1940, Eric Knight) who was popularized in multiple movies and TV series.

Henry and Alice Mitchell are the parents of the American comic strip character Dennis the Menace (Hank Ketcham, 1951).


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Chapter 6: The mythological Sobek was pretty well covered in the chapter, so I’ll add nothing here.

“Hearts and Hooves Day” is a second season MLP:FIM episode written by Meghan McCarthy that came out on...drat. Well, let’s pretend it came out before this particular chapter took place instead of several months afterwards.

Great Wave Off Kanagawa was a woodprint created by Hokusai between 1830 and 1833, the first of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

The pillow stuffed into Danielle/Wave Rider’s mouth: This is sort of a tradition with PEV stories, that the first dream contact between human and pony must always end with a pillow stuck in the pony’s mouth, even when the origin of the pillow is completely unknown.

Kazookai is the name of a fictional Hawaiian island in the Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers episode “Gadget Goes Hawaiian” (1989, written by Julia J. Roberts). I just noticed that a Google search of “Kazookai” brings up my decade-old fanfiction based on the episode in the No. 5 spot. I...uh, have gotten a bit better since I wrote it. Like the fact that I no longer need to explain which chapters of my Pony fanfics are deliberate parodies of bad fanfiction because nobody can tell the difference...


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Chapter 7: This chapter has no resemblance whatsoever to the graphic novel Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale, which has the subtitle “And Here My Troubles Began”.

Terror of the Autons (the first appearance of The Master) was a Doctor Who serial that first aired in 1971. It was written by Robert Holmes and directed by Barry Letts. And I might as well add that Doctor Who is a product of the BBC, created by Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber and Donald Wilson in 1963.

Golconda is a 1953 painting by René Magritte, depicting an array of men in bowler hats and umbrellas floating in space.

Carrie Bliss is the name of a fictional junior high school teacher in Indianapolis. She was the central character of the Disney Channel sitcom Good Morning, Miss Bliss (1988), created by Sam Brobrick and starring Hayley Mills. The show later morphed into Saved by the Bell.

Arthur Slugworth is the name of Willy Wonka’s business rival in the children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl, 1964). And besides, isn’t that a great name for a character?

Jason Taverner is the main character in the science fiction novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (Philip K. Dick, 1974). I covered the details of the book in the next chapter.


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Chapter 8: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” This is a line from the film The Usual Suspects, but originated with the French poet Charles Baudelaire in the prose poem “Le Joueur généreux” (“The Generous Gambler”) in the collection Le Spleen de Paris (The Spleen of Paris, 1869): “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.”

The idea that Delgado’s Master represents chaos instead of control comes from the commenters on the TARDIS Eruditorum website.

Spyro the Dragon is a video game character created by Charles Zembillas for Insomniac Games in 1998, and currently owned by Activision. Figment the Dragon is the mascot of the Imagination! pavillion at Walt Disney World, created by Tony Baxter and Steve Kirk in 1983.

The term “loyal opposition”, used to avoid the accusation of treason against the political party not in power, was coined by John Hobhouse in 1826.

The “bewigged dragon” quote is a reference to my other fanfic The Best of All Possible Worlds, a story that invoked both the loyal opposition and the French Revolution. That scene didn’t actually take place, but I suspect several of my readers imagined it.

The theme to The Bugs Bunny Show, called “This Is It”, was written by Mack David and Jerry Livingston for the premiere of the television program in 1960.

Moderna Designs, as noted in the text, is a reference to Time Bandits (1981, directed by Terry Gilliam). In the film it represents everything that separates Kevin from his overly-materialistic parents. The “don’t touch it, it’s evil” line is from that film. The “Swedish behemoth” is Ikea.

The absorbent towel “Sham-Wow” is actually supposed to be spelled “ShamWow!”. I refuse to make the correction in the text, on grounds that it’s even stupider than how I spelled it originally. Anyway, the product was pitched relentlessly via infomercials a few years ago, featuring the typical over-enthusiastic audience you tend to see in these kinds of shows.

The Price Is Right is an American television game show created by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman in 1972.

Chekhov’s Gun is from a quote from the Russian author Anton Chekhov about parsimony in writing stories: basically, if you’re going to waste the reader’s time telling them about a gun at the beginning of a story, it better get used by somebody before the end.

Al Bundy is the main character of the 1987 American sitcom Married...With Children, created by Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt, and played by Ed O’Neill.

Yeah, I’m not linking you to the Conversion Bureau stories. Look them up yourself. And the use of the folding chair as a weapon is probably copyrighted by the World Wrestling Federation.

Victoria Brisbane is a character from the Mel Brooks film High Anxiety (1977), played by Madeline Kahn. The character ends the film married to Richard Thorndyke. Professor Zarkov is from Flash Gordon, created by Alex Raymond in 1934.

Cera the Triceratops is a character from The Land Before Time (1988, directed by Don Bluth) and its sequels. Pazuzu is the name of the demon from The Exorcist (1971 novel by William Peter Blatty).

Carl Fredricksen is the name of the protagonist from the Pixar film Up (2009, directed by Pete Docter), voiced by Ed Asner. Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need is a book by 2005 book by Blake Snyder; the linked Slate.com article was written by Peter Suderman in 2013.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 was an American TV show created in 1988 by Joel Hodgson. David Kessler was the main character from An American Werewolf in London (1981, directed by John Landis), played by David Naughton. The character’s sister is actually named Rachel. Dr. Miles Benell was the main character from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, directed by Don Siegel), played by Kevin McCarthy.


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Chapter 9: Blackstock, South Carolina, is the site of an annual music festival. I already gave you the credits for Flash Gordon, except this time I’m referring to the 1980 film directed by Mike Hodges. The storm being described here was inspired by Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City in late October of 2012. It was called “Tropical Depression Sandy” long after it was obvious that it was a hurricane—at least, that was my impression at the time.

Facebook is an omnipresent website created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Prometheus, Heracles and the Nemean Lion come from Ancient Greek mythology, while the other references in that paragraph (Gandalf, Mines of Moria) come from the Lord of the Rings book series by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Gilda is from the first season FIM episode “Griffon the Brushoff”, written by Cindy Morrow. Holden Caulfield is the main character from The Catcher in the Rye, a 1951 novella by J. D. Salinger, about a teenage boy obsessed with how everyone around him was a superficial phony. (I assume you all know who DHX Media is, right?) And “Hell Hole” is a song by the fictional (?) rock band Spinal Tap, from the film This Is Spinal Tap (1984, directed by Rob Reiner)—the music video was directed by Christopher Guest.


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Chapter 10: “La Donna è mobile” is a song from the Italian opera Rigoletto (1851, Giuseppe Verdi), sung by the villainous Duke of Mantua. The YouTube link is from the 1982 film directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, with Luciano Pavarotti playing the part of the Duke.

“Pink alicorn thing” is my oblique way of referring to the character of Princess Cadance, who is in the PEV series despite not being introduced in the show as of the date of this chapter. That’s why Dr. Franklin mistakes her for a “depowered Celestia”.

“The Doctor always lies” is a catchphrase from the Eleventh incarnation of Doctor Who. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was a 1964 film directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by him with Peter George and Terry Southern. The “previous bodily fluids” line was spoken by Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden. The character with broken “string in his legs” was Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, played by Peter Sellers.


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Chapter 11: “A place where no one knows your face” is a line from the song “Hernando’s Hideaway”, from the American musical The Pajama Game (1954, music by Jerry Ross, lyrics by Richard Adler). When the YouTube link eventually shows up, it’s being sung by Carol Haney, playing the part of Gladys. The YouTube link that actually heads the chapter (and represents the soundtrack of Gilda’s dream) is “Pale Watchers”, from the soundtrack to the video game Bastion (2011, Supergiant Games) composed by Darren Korb. Cave of the Winds is a cave located west of Colorado Springs, Colorado. And Sisyphus is another character from Greek mythology: a wicked man punished in the afterlife by being forced to perform the same useless task over and over for all eternity.


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Chapter 12: Poughkeepsie is a town in upper New York state with a funny name, and roughly the location where this and the next five chapters is set. “There was a man” is the first line in the song “Solitaire”, written by Neil Sedaka and Phil Cody in 1972, and sung here by Karen Carpenter in 1975. Psycho is a 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and Chinatown is a 1974 film directed by Roman Polanski.


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Chapter 13: For the character of Captain Davis, take Captain Jonathan R. Davis, and then imagine someone as unlike that guy as humanly possible. Sledge Hammer! is an American sitcom created by Alan Spencer in 1986. (Wow, I just noticed how many of my references in this story have mandatory exclamation marks in them.) The mangled quotation of “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves” is from Julius Caesar, the 1599 play by William Shakespeare. The Geneva Conventions establish the standards for how prisoners, the wounded, and civilians must be treated in wartime. The last of them were signed in 1949. Animal Cops: Houston is a reality TV series from 2003. The song “The World Owes Me a Living” was written by Leigh Harline in 1934 for the Disney cartoon short “The Grasshopper and the Ants”—it later became the theme song for the character of Goofy.


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Chapter 14: Jell-O is a brand name owned by Kraft Foods, originated by Pearle Bixby Wait in 1897. (Jell-O shows up a lot in my stories for some strange reason.) The Little Red Wagon is a toy manufactured by the Radio Flyer company since 1930. Copic is a brand of marker pen manufactured by the Too company. I can’t find out what year they were invented—I hope you can forgive me for this oversight. Funyuns (possessing one of the most hate-inducing names in the entire food service industry) is a brand name owned by the Frito-Lay division of the PepsiCo conglomerate, invented by Ray Trinidad in 1969.

Hip-hop version of “Art of the Dress”: I made that up without having any particular track in my head, but how about this one by TrickyQuestion? (Once again, William Anderson is a reference I shouldn’t have to explain.) Pony, Ponie, Ponee is also made up.

General Edwin Anderson Walker was an ultra-conservative American military officer who was the attempted victim of an assassination attempt possibly committed by Lee Harvey Oswald a few months before the Kennedy assassination. Like Captain Davis, he has no resemblance to the character in this story. Michael Ironside of course played the bad guy in films such as Scanners (1981), Extreme Prejudice (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Highlander II: The Quickening (1991). Mona Lisa is an early Sixteenth Century painting by Leonardo da Vinci.


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Chapter 15: The “Yellow Terror” was a derogatory term used by California newspapers in the first half of the Twentieth Century to describe the consequences of allowing too much Chinese immigration.

The first YouTube link for the soundtrack of Erishy’s dream is the first movement of the Violin Concerto in E Minor (Opus 64) by Felix Mendelssohn, premiered in 1845. This performance is with Julia Fischer and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Ivan Fischer. The second link is to the Russian Easter Festival Overture: Overture on Liturgical Themes (Opus 36) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, premiered in 1888. This performance is by the Boston Pops Orchestra, conducted by Arthur Fiedler.

Dracula is in the public domain, being in the first place a real person (Prince Vlad III Dracul the Impaler of Wallachia, 1431-76) and in the second place the main character in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. “We shall fight on the beaches...” was the rallying cry of Winston Churchill to the House of Commons during the Battle of Britain in 1940.


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Chapter 16: “Deliquescence” refers to the act of something dissolving into a liquid. It was a favorite word of Edgar Allan Poe, who loved having more than one of his stories ending with some poor guy dissolving into goo. The chapter quotes extensively (perhaps too extensively) from the song “Vincent” by Don McLean. The song is about the painter Vincent Van Gogh, but when I was a kid I thought it was about the singer’s depressed brother.

	

“Sandy”: The story is set in October/November of 2012 (or 2011?), so this is indeed Hurricane Sandy.

	

Erishkigal’s Kingdom is the name of the Sumerian underworld. Not a nice place, from what I understand.


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Chapter 17: The title is a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a 1966 British play by Tom Stoppard—much of the dialog in the chapter is inspired by that play. Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) is an Ancient Greek play by Sophocles. The two Matilda’s are quite well covered by the text. “Alice” is from the novel Alice in Wonderland (1865, Lewis Carroll), “Peter Pan” is from the play Peter and Wendy (1904, J. M. Barrie), and “Lion-Jesus” (Aslan) is from the Narnia series of books by C. S. Lewis (starting 1950). Harry Potter is a series of increasingly-longer novels by J. K. Rowling. The Luddites were a Nineteenth Century group of skilled laborers who rebelled against having their jobs replaced by machines. Or, as they are more commonly rendered, a group of drunk yahoos convinced that all technology everywhere is the work of the Devil. Taxi was a 1978 American sitcom created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, David Davis and Ed. Weinberger. Ruthless People was a 1986 American movie directed by ZAZ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker). Erin Brockovich was a 2000 American film directed by Steven Soderbergh, Gattaca was a 1997 American film directed by Andrew Nichol, and A Simple Wish was another 1997 American film, this one directed by Michael Richie. Superman is a DC Comics character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that premiered in 1938. Star Trek is a joint CBS/Paramount Pictures property, created by Gene Roddenberry in 1966.

“Jungle Boogie” was recorded by Kool & the Gang in 1973, “That’s the Way (I Like It)” was recorded by KC and the Sunshine Band in 1975, and “Do the Hustle” was recorded by Van McCoy & the Soul City Symphony in 1974. The deluge of disco references there was a push for my new fanfic “Disco Inferno”. It must have worked, because that work generated enough fans to justify not cancelling it. Oh, and the Bee Gees was a disco group known for their falsetto voices.

In case I need to spell out full names: Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi and Barack Obama. Oh, and the Doberman’s name was Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, in case you were wondering. A Sharpie is a permanent marker made by a company now called Sharpie, created in 1964 by Francis Gilbert. “My precious” is...no, there’s no possible way you don’t know what that’s from. I have to show some restraint, after all.

“Trapped like a rat in a cage” is a line from the 1995 song “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins. The Laughter Song (“Giggle at the Ghosties”) is a song from “Friendship Is Magic, Part 2”, written by Lauren Faust and Daniel Ingram. “Pony Indiana Jones” is an oblique reference to Daring Do, since her episode hadn’t premiered as of the date of this chapter. Indy himself is a fictional character created by George Lucas in 1981 for the film Raiders of the Lost Ark (directed by Stephen Spielberg), and owned by his company Lucasarts. Alan Quartermain is another fictional adventurer, created by H. Rider Haggard for his 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines.

Epilogue (finally!): “I can’t control my brain” is a line from the 1979 song “I Want to Be Sedated”, by the Ramones. “Shady Pines” is a pretty common name for resorts as well as sanitariums (sanitaria?), but if you insist on finding a fictional reference, it’s the retirement home where the Golden Girls live (a 1985 sitcom created by Susan Harris).

“Not a single luxury” is supposed to be from the theme to Gilligan’s Island (1964 American sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz), but it’s generic enough to be a line from a Weird Al song. Tranquil Repose was the name of the fake rest home secretly run by Davros in Revelation of the Daleks (the Doctor Who serial written by Eric Saward in 1985). “WWW” in this case does not stand for Wild Wild West, but for the World Wide Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.


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Is it just me, or are these things getting longer with every story, regardless of how short the stories themselves are?