The Conversion Bureau:
THE RAINBOW MENACE STRIKES!
By: Anonsi (Pretty sure he’s some sort of spider)
/-+-\
"Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is. How dear to us."
- Dr Miles Bennell, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956)
\-+-/
The year is 1952, and Johnathan Doe sleeps next to his wife, Janet, completely unaware of the incredible terror that will befall them. As the sun creeps over the mountains and sheds its light over the small suburban community of Willowcreek, Vermont, the modern man lazily breaks free from whatever hold his dreams had on him, only to unwittingly awake into a terrible nightmare.
We now join Mr. Doe, and watch as silent observers as he struggles against a race of beings, whose intelligence is far beyond our comprehension, whose will seems bent on the complete destruction of not only our bodies, but our very souls.
Sunlight streamed onto his face through the window’s shades. Although the light was warm, he still silently condemned it for waking him. It was his first day off from his job as a lab assistant in weeks, and he had been looking forward to sleeping in.
Any thoughts of just rolling over and going back to bed faded, as the faint smell of fresh coffee grounds tantalized his nose. The smell alone was enough to rouse him from his half awake state. Moments later, his stomach woke and let loose a gurgling growl.
“I hear ya, I hear ya,” he grumbled back. Summoning the willpower to crawl out of his warm, soft, nice smelling bed was what felt like a colossal undertaking. He probably wouldn’t have been able to manage it if not for his stomach throwing in a few motivational words.
After climbing out of bed, Johnathan made his way towards his closet. Today he was thinking of wearing something nice and loose. As he opened up the closet, he was met by the mirror image of himself, flanked by various shirts and suit jackets. The reflection he cast in the full body mirror wasn’t a flattering one.
The thirty three year old man had gained some weight since leaving the army after the second World War. Not enough to hinder him in any way, but the muscles he once sported on his chest had certainly rounded out. As he took moment to straighten out his short black hair to a degree, he inspected his chin, concluding that he would need to shave away the small dark hairs that dotted his face after breakfast. Finishing up with making himself presentable enough for the morning, he took out and put on his bathrobe before quickly making his way down the hall and into the kitchen.
The kitchen was nothing too impressive, but John was no less proud of it. There was a table across from where he entered that was also next to the glass door that lead to the back yard, a refrigerator on the other side of that, and a counter and sink, where he spied what his morning had been missing.
Janet Doe, his wife and love of his life, was standing over the sink washing out a pair of wine glasses, humming in tune with whatever song the radio was playing in a bright yellow dress. She had a head of coppery brown hair that ended in curls at her shoulders, eyes that were a bright blue, and a face of an angel. Without a doubt, she was beautiful.
Before he could say anything, his wife casually spoke in her lovely voice, “Breakfast is ready for you on the table John, and I’ve already gone through the paper, so you don’t need to worry about me asking for it. Oh, and coffee will be ready in about three minutes.”
“You’re a saint Janet, you know that?” said John with a short chuckle as he sat down at the space that had been so lovingly prepared for him.
“Oh I know it,” she replied with a twinge of snark, finally finishing with the wine glasses and placing them down next to the sink, “it’s how I’m able to live with a man that doesn’t know how to find the hamper.”
John shrugged off the at him as he continued to read the morning’s paper, and after chomping into a slice of toast casually remarked, “Hey, it might not be my fault. All those gizmos Doc Serbek uses up at his lab might be making me go cross-eyed.”
Janet walked over and sat next to him, eying him with those lovely blue eyes of hers. “Speaking of Doctor Serbek, he called before you woke up this morning. Said that he really needs you in the lab today.”
John looked right back at his wife, looking almost shocked. “But its my day off...”
“He said something incredible happened John. Something...” she looked around the room, as if trying to find the right word, “...something that would change everything.”
“I don’t care if he found men from Mars!” John exclaimed as he threw the paper down onto the table, “He can get one of other assistants to help him! Goodness knows they’re a lot better at looking through telescopes than I am.” Leaning forward for emphasis, he added, “And I don’t know why he’d want me of all people around when he finds something so amazing. I mean, I’d be like a bull in a china shop!”
Janet put a hand on his shoulder and nodded, “I know hon, but from the way the Doc made it sound, he needs every pair of hands he can get up at that observatory of his.”
John considered his options. He could stay home with his wife, who might be a bit miffed at his lack of responsibility, or he could go in and be bored to tears as Doctor Serbek described this and that sciencey gizmo. Looking into Janet’s eyes, the answer was obvious. She was worried about the crazy old coot, so he really had no choice.
“Alright, but I’m going to at least have one cup of coffee first.”
It didn’t take John long to finish his meal and dress in his working suit. That Hawaiian shirt would have to wait until tomorrow apparently. Within thirty minutes, he was outside the town proper and driving up the Old Mountain Road to Doctor Serbeck’s observatory.
Willowcreek was a pretty small place all things considered, and from the road, it looked all the smaller. Not much more than a grocery store, police station, fire department, a local clinic, a church, six streets of houses, and a road that runs right through the town. Still, home was home. Which is why John hated making this drive.
The road, if one could call it that, was narrow and full of potholes. If someone wasn’t careful, they could go for ride down the mountainside, followed up by a trip to the morgue. The only redeeming quality about it was the view, but Johnathan was often preoccupied with staying alive to look. Thankfully, he had been driving this road for little over a year now, and knew just about all of its dips and divots.
Within the hour, the man drove his car into the empty parking area of the secluded observatory of Doctor Serbeck. As he stepped out of his car, John noticed something amiss with his surroundings. His was the only car here. Fearing something terrible might have happened, John approached the two metal doors that marked the entrance of the facility.
“Hello?”
No response.
“Doctor Serbek? Are you in there? It’s me! John!”
Still nothing.
Now he was getting truly worried. Rushing against the doors he found that they were unlocked, which only made the fear that some terrible event had taken place even stronger. “Doctor Serbek, I’m coming in!”
It was unsettlingly dark inside the observatory. From what John could make out in the gloom, many of the scientific instruments and pieces of computing equipment were still active. He reached over to the nearby lightswitch and flicked into the on position, illuminating the space within.
He surveyed the area quickly, and seeing no sign of life or movement, flatly stated, “Lights are on, but nobody’s home.”
His instincts told him to run and get more people to back him up before investigating further, but he was compelled by a mix of concern and curiosity to go deeper into the apparently empty structure. He slowly walked towards the center of the round, dome shaped building, towards the massive telescope that the missing doctor had spent hours looking into, always mumbling that he was close.
“Close to what?” John thought aloud, “Was he looking for something? Someone?” As he passed by a desk, his foot landed in a puddle. The man quickly looked down to see a strange, glimmering purple puddle of...something. John just as quickly removed his foot from the gel like substance and knelt down to inspect it further.
“Or maybe what the Doc was looking for found him.”
“Not quite, my dear boy,” came a voice from the entrance.
John stood and spun, nearly slipping in the purple goop. There was no one there. “Who’s there?!” he shouted towards the door. “Show yourself!”
“As you wish,” said the voice, amused by something. Stepping in from beyond the entrance was what appeared to be a horse, or pony, except it was all wrong. It was dark green, with a blue mane, and a horn on its forehead.
John could only stare in disbelief at the strange creature that now stood before him. “What’s the matter John?” it said, smiling at him with a big friendly grin, “don’t you recognize me?”
TO BE CONTINUED LATER
Because Anonsi ran out of time!
And I need to work on Yellowstone!
HA HA! Yeah right.
Man I’m bad at this.
The Conversion Bureau:
Bad Batch
A My Little Pony fanfiction based off of Blaze’s original The Conversion Bureau
Brought to you by: Anonsi
I was originally going to call it “Rise of the Adversary.”
Part 1 _
It was a snowy day in Detroit when Marco decided he had simply had it. Being a human was just too much for him to deal with anymore, and this was the last straw. His girlfriend of three years had dumped him. For a pony. Just thinking about those stupid Equestrian ponies sent young Marco on a swearing spree that would rival that of the most foul mouthed of ornery sailors. A fact that proved ironic, as the young man’s destination for that day was the local Conversion Bureau.
“If she doesn’t want me as a human, then I’ll be a pony!” he shouted at the fresh falling snow, “And then we can be together again!”
Visions of himself and his old girlfriend danced through his head, and thoughts of winning her back from that damn blue unicorn with a stupidly orange mane gave him a certain warmth as he trudged through the foot deep snow.
That’s when he saw it, the Detroit Conversion Bureau. It used to be a free clinic, but once it started giving away those potions it proved more effective at curing sicknesses than any hospital. Ponies of every color were mingling outside the doors, and each one reminded Marco of why his best girl left him.
Storming past the crowd without so much as a hello, Marco seethed as he walked in through the front doors of the bureau. Looking about angrily at every person and pony in the lobby, his eyes eventually settled on the bright pink and white colored earth pony that sat behind a large oak desk.
Marco stomped over to her and slammed his hands onto the desk, shouting, “I WANT TO BE A LITTLE PONY!”
The mare behind the desk nearly toppled out of her seat from the sudden appearance of the shouting human. Neatly catching herself before she and her chair had a chance to tumble down to the ground, the predominantly pink pony replied, “H-hello and welcome t-to the Detroit Conversion Bureau! I’m S-Strawberry Sundae and-”
“Cut the shit and turn me into a pony already!” Marco interrupted. He was in no mood to be kept from his revenge by bureaucracy and pleasantries.
“O-okay sir! Um, just sign this form and we can find you a room,” replied the pony as she gingerly slid a form over to the irritable young man.
The human rather aggressively took a pen from a nearby jar and began to hastily fill out the form, mumbling something to himself. After he completed it, Strawberry Sundae took the form and read over it.
“So where do we do this thing?” asked Marco looking around the room, eventually eying a set of wide double doors. “Through there?”
Strawberry nodded meekly and said, “Yes, but there’s a seven day waiting period while we make a potion that will mesh with your particular DNA, or in case you-”
“Seven days?!” shouted Marco at the top of his lungs, “That’s too long! By then that damn unicorn and my girlfriend will have...AARG!”
Strawberry Sundae was about to ask him to calm down or leave, but the young man had already charged through the double doors by the time the first words were beginning to form in her mouth. Marco barreled down the hallway beyond the doors, overrunning several ponies on his way to what appeared to be an operation room. There was a unicorn doctor inside of the room magically holding a tray next to her. She looked confused and terrified when the human entered and nearly screamed in terror as he took to turning the room inside out in search of something.
“What are you doing?!” she called out in panic.
Her question was answered as Marco looked at the tray she hovered next to her, or more specifically, the half empty styrofoam cup that sat on top of it. The young man quickly snatched the cup away from the floating tray and eyed it triumphantly.
“No! Stop!” shouted the unicorn, but it was too late.
Marco downed the entire cup and licked his lips. It tasted like victory. And grape. The young man let go an almost insane laugh as he shouted up at the ceiling, “HA HA HA! I’m coming for you Mid-”
The young man collapsed onto the floor and fell into unconsciousness. The unicorn doctor looked around with an expression of panic on her face. “Oh no oh no oh no,” she kept repeating as she paced around the room.
Soon she was joined by Strawberry Sundae, who promptly saw the knocked out human and hurriedly asked, “Did he just...?!”
“He did!” replied the doctor.
“What’s going to happen to him?” asked the pink pony as she moved to stand over the human.
“I can’t be sure,” replied the doctor calming down a small degree, “that potion was set to the DNA of a little girl! For all we know, it could kill him, or worse...”
Strawberry gave the doctor a hard look, “Worse? What could be worse than dying!?”
The unicorn returned the stare with one as equally stern, “...or, in the worst case scenario, he could live as a deformed monster that should never have happened, and become something everypony would prefer to just forget ever existed!”
“Dear Celestia...”
Marco’s body started to twitch and spasm as the potion began to take effect. The two ponies could only look on in horror at what happened next.
Part 2 _
Marco heard whispers float through the darkness that clouded his vision.
“...his head is all...” said one voice.
“His head?” asked another, “what about the legs! Just look at them!”
The voices sounded scared, which made Marco feel scared as well. He thought this process was supposed to make everything better! Why were they all speaking like he was some sort of mutant?
“Look! His nose twitched! He might be waking up!”
“Oh hay bales! Uhh, Sweet Cake! Get the door! We don’t want the media to get in here when he wakes up.”
Marco opened his eyes, and immediately closed them again as they were struck by the terribly bright lights of the operating room. “W-Where am I?” he asked, only to be taken aback upon hearing his squeaky, yet undeniably feminine, voice. “W-What’s wrong with my voice!?” he shouted.
“Now calm down,” said the vaguely familiar voice of the unicorn doctor, “You’ve had a little mishap with some ponification potion. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“What do you mean lucky!?” squeaked Marco, “You and that other pony were talking about my head and my legs like I was some sort of freak!”
Apparently, as far as Marco could tell from the sounds, his words had caught the doctor off guard. “Oh...” started the doctor sounding embarrassed, “you heard that?”
“Yes, I heard it! I’m not deaf!” Marco shouted.
What was once a young man again tried to sit up. He succeeded, but the process felt awkward, like his neck was only barely able to support his head. Marco again attempted to open his eyes, and with blurred vision, made out the form of the unicorn mare that he had been talking to.
“So,” Marco began as he awkwardly looked around the room, “What kind of pony am I?”
It was hard to tell, but the doctor seemed to shift uncomfortably at the question. “Umm...you’re an Earth Pony?”
The speculative tone of the pony’s response made Marco attempt to scowl at the insufferable mare, but he soon realized that he couldn’t seem to move any muscles in his face.
“Why can’t I feel my face?” he asked with growing panic, “Why does my head feel so heavy!? Why don’t my eyes work?! AND WHY IS MY VOICE SO ANNOYINGLY GIRLY?!”
The pony doctor trotted next to the hysterical patient and placed a calming hoof on his shoulder. Marco’s vision began to sharpen, and soon he could make out the almost apologetic face of the unicorn.
“I have some bad news,” she said, “and a lot of it is going to be quite shocking. But you need to hear it.”
Taking a few calming breaths, Marco replied, “Tell me.”
Taking a gulp, the doctor explained, “The ponification potion you drank was meant for a little girl, as in the nanites inside of it were gene encoded specifically for her. When you got the potion, something went terribly wrong, and the naninites tried to turn you into a small filly.”
“So I’m a little girl!?” Marco shouted in horror.
“Not...not exactly...”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
Clearing her throat, the doctor went on, “The nanites were kinda killing you, and then the magic in the potion brought you back to life, but seeing as how your genes were all screwed up, you came back a little...different.”
“So I’m a girl?” asked Marco again.
The doctor again seemed to fumble for the right words as she once more said, “Well...not exactly.”
Marco’s temper hit a fever pitch as he screamed at the unicorn, “WHAT DOES THAT MEAN YOU TWIT?!”
The unicorn reeled back from the high pitched fury of her patient, and in a moment of panic and weakness shouted back, “Just look between your legs!”
Marco did so. He screamed in his new girlishly high pitched voice until he passed out. He never knew seeing nothing could scare anybody so badly.
Several hours passed as Marco drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time he opened his eyes, he would see different ponies in the room with him. Each one seemed to be repulsed by something about him. Finally, he awoke in earnest, this time alone in the room. Everything that had happened today felt like a bad dream, and he just wanted to go home.
He attempted to climb out of bed, but his legs felt like they had weights attached to them. It took a great deal of struggling and squirming before Marco got one of his legs off the edge of the bed. He looked at the new leg with a confused expression. Something about it just looked...off.
He needed to find a mirror. Squirming and shuffling, Marco eventually maneuvered himself off the bed and down to the floor. He fell as carefully as he could, but his legs felt numb and lifeless, and his descent was similar to a tumbling sack of rocks.
Marco rose to his hooves after short string of swears, or at least, what he thought were his hooves. Looking down at his new set of legs, he noticed that they were a bright, almost faded, pink, and far more...bulbous than the other ponies. His height also became aware to him, as he suddenly realized that he was much smaller than a pony of his age should be.
Marco tried to walk as fast as he could to a body mirror that hung from a nearby wall, clumsily tripping over his malformed hooves several times. Once he stood in front of the mirror, seconds stretched into hours as pure fear, disgust, and terror flooded his mind, cascading through his very soul.
His head was horribly misshapen, too round to be equine, too big to be human, while his muzzle was short and stumpy. The rest of his body was half the size of a regular pony, while the rest of him looked disproportional, unbalanced, seemed thin where there should be muscle and bloated where there shouldn’t be more than a few tendons. Not to mention the sickly pale pink coat that covered him nearly caused him to vomit. Marco’s mane, if one could call it that, looked like it was made from dried paper, and it came in a rainbow of the most obnoxiously clashing colors he could imagine. But what truly made the thing that was once a man shrink back in terror were his new eyes. They were a deep, empty blue and as large as dinner plates. They did not gleam with any kind love or life, just soulless orbs that looked like dolls eyes.
It was not fear that welled inside of him as he gazed into those azure blue pits, but a sort of madness that one can only find when looking into the infinite abyss. Marco let loose a howl that, if it didn’t sound so squeaky, would have curdled the blood of even the most hardened of human soldiers. It was then, in this fit of insanity, that the small malformed pony once known as Marco made a declaration of unbridled hatred that would haunt the world for years to come.
“I’m a monster!” it squeaked with hellish fury, “I’ll never get my girlfriend back like this! Nothing will ever love me like THIS!” Something clicked in its destroyed mind scape, and with a mad cackle, it made his way to a nearby and conveniently placed open window. “It’s all those ponies’ fault!” it went on to say between chortles, “Why didn’t they make a potion that anyone could use?! Well I’ll show them! I’LL SHOW THEM ALL!”
Turning over a waste bin and pushing it under the nearest window, the little pink abomination used it as a step ladder to climb out onto the windowsill.
“Oh, and don’t think I’ve forgotten about you my dearest love,” it said looking back into the operating room, “You will pay for abandoning me, and so too will the one who stole you from me!” Raising its disproportionate hooves to the sky, it screamed, “I’M COMING FOR YOU MIDNIGHT SHADOW!”
DUN DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNN!
Look! Another thing I won't be continuing ever!
HA HA! I might though, once I get some time.
Though I'm pretty sure I know what you all really want
