GENIE.MOV
Wrong Equestria, Ya Freakin’ Genie
A Ridiculous Comedyish Thing by Ponky
I bought a lava lamp at a garage sale. It was orangey and purple, just like the one I saved up for as a little kid. But unlike this one, that one was useless.
I bought it because it didn’t need a plug. I was totally blown away. Every lava lamp I’ve ever seen needed direct contact with an ever-flowing energy source to do it’s thang, but this one just bubbled and blooped inside its glassy cone like nobody’s business. Up and down and up and down, I watched the clumps of orange goop with derpy fascination. No charger, no battery, no nothin’.
“How does it do that?” I asked the frumpy woman who was selling the thing.
“I don’t know,” she grumbled. Her grey hair was wispy and gross, so I didn’t ask her any more questions. Plus she was kind of fat. I hate fat people.
Okay, that sounds mean. I don’t hate fat people. I’m sure they’re very nice people, just like any other kind of people (except Hispanic teenagers. They’re generally disrespectful, though that might not be their fault). I’m actually rather terrified of fat people. Maybe it’s just my incurably skeletal physique, but I’ve never felt comfortable around the larger members of my species.
So, clueless to how it worked without electricity, I bought the thing for, like, four bucks. I took it home and set it up next my laptop, following its ethereal cycle with an unproductively gleeful stare for as long as it would take me to write another chapter of The Sisters Doo.
Sighing at myself, I ran a palm over my face. I really needed to keep working on that. The whole story was plotted in my head now; all I had to do was buckle down and write the stupid thing. Enough people were enjoying it that, as a natural entertainer, I should have felt a burning passion to pump out two chapters a week or something. As it was, I could barely squeeze out four thousand words.
“How does Skirts do it?” I asked the Mane Six, CMC, Celestia, and Spike, standing in a tiny semi-circle around my laptop. Well, most of the Mane Six... I still hadn’t found Rarity’s figurine. Every Saturday after work, I stopped by Target, Wal-Mart, and Toys R Us in search for the elusive pony, but Rarity was a rarity. Of course, I could have just bought her online, but half the fun (for me) was the idea of finally finding her and lifting her above my head in the middle of the pink toy aisle and praising the Cosmic Matriarch at the top of my lungs. And then there was the whole giggling-like-a-little-girl-while-skipping-to-the-check-out-counter part that I had so far enjoyed a total of six times.
The “Skirts” to which I referred was, of course, shortskirtsandexplosions: fanfic writer extraordinaire, one of my heroes/temporary idol, and one lonely motherbucker. I wasn’t sure about that last part, but I got the feeling he was a pretty lonesome guy, or had at least lived through some pretty devastatingly lonesome experiences. How else could he weave such epic, depressing tales as End of Ponies, Background Pony, and Anno Domini? Seriously. That guy’s amazing.
And while he was typing hundreds of thousands of beautiful, miserable words to share with the brony community and change the lives of appreciative readers like me, I was staring idly at a lava lamp.
I sighed and almost opened my laptop, but my hand reached out to touch the glowing glass tube instead. Where the heck was that thing’s light coming from? I grabbed it at the middle and tilted it toward me, trying to look inside past the glass’s distorting curve. My fingers ended up sliding along the base of the lamp, and I guess that was a good enough “rub” to get things going.
A genie appeared right there in my friggin’ bedroom. If buying pony toys made me giggle like a little girl, then this unexpected creature of Arabian myth made me scream like one. I don’t think I would have been quite so startled if he seeped out of the lamp in a mystical mist, like the Robin Williams genie in Aladdin, but he didn’t do anything “conventional” like that. He just popped up to my right, like an annoying pop-up ad that used to happen all the time when the internet was new and I didn’t know what I was clicking on.
“Hey, kid,” were his first words to me. So immediately I knew he was snarky. He looked a lot like a man with a curly black mustache goatee and gnarly sunglasses. His hair was pulled up into a spiky ponytail of sorts, and he was actually wearing a baby blue vest and a red bow tie. Under other circumstances, I would have laughed at him. As it was, my lungs and diaphragm were being used for screaming.
“Sweet Celestia!” I shrieked, toppling off my swivel chair and scooting against the far wall. “What the fetch are you?”
“I’m a random catalyst to get your story going within a thousand words,” he explained casually, flicking a bit of orange goop from the shoulder of his embroidered vest.
I took a few panicked breaths. “What!?”
“Look, I don’t know how much you know about genies, but we don’t work the same way you do thought-process-wise,” he let me know, “so don’t expect to hold any deep, revealing conversations with me. I only say what I need to say.”
I gulped and rose shakily to my feet. “Okay…”
“So, let’s get it over with,” he groaned, cracking his knuckles. “You have three wishes.”
One beat. Two beats.
I blinked.
Three beats. Four beats.
I smiled.
Five beats. That’s all it took.
“I wish I was in Equestria!” I yelled.
The genie raised an eyebrow, gave me a foreboding smirk, and snapped his fingers in an all-too-Discordy manner. The world around me buckled and swirled and I found myself standing on a huge, green hill. And everything around me looked like it had been animated with Flash.
“AWWW YEEEAH!” I yelled, jumping up and down. “I can’t believe that worked! I just bought a genie and wished myself into Equestria!”
I twirled around with my arms outstretched, gazing at the cartoonishly substantial clouds drifting above my head, less than five seconds from bursting into song—
And then I saw Ponyville at the bottom of the hill. My jaw dropped, but not from joy or unparalleled thrill. I was gaping at the gargantuan monsters standing at the center of the town, spreading destructive fire simply by punching the buildings. One of them looked like a bulgy, horrific version of Discord. The other was a muscular, maroon demon clothed in a tight black T-shirt. Both of them were as tall as a mountain.
I squinted at the smoking mess far below my spot on the hill and noticed a swarm of small, shiny ponies rocketing around the village, shooting noisy lasers at the rubble.
“Ah, horseapples,” I moaned, dropping to my knees in defeat. “I’m in the wrong freakin’ Equestria.”
Of course I should have expected that. I knew from my days of clicking Wikipedia’s “Random article” button that genies were notoriously mischievous. There was no way that snarky, smirking scalawag would have used “I wish I was in Equestria!” to put me in the perfect land of Faust’s imagination.
“Freakin’ fetcher fetcherface,” I muttered, shifting to sit on my rump on the hill. “Now what am I supposed to do?”
I had watched all of Hot Diggedy Demon’s PONY.MOV series. As an avid fan of the macabre and bizarre, I loved them. Well… sort of. I loved/hated them. I hated that I loved them. I don’t know. We had a complicated relationship. But one way or another, I had contributed significantly to their view counts on YouTube and was very familiar with the material, so I didn’t feel the least bit confused by Ponyville’s new god and his want for virgins. Is it Hot Diggedy Demon or HotDiggedyDemon? Hmm…
I decided the best course of action was to nail down exactly what universe I was in. By that I mean, how similar was this world to the .MOV series? Which of its episodes had already transpired? Considering the R-Dash 5000 had already learned how to duplicate himself, I was either in or after PARTY.MOV. Had SWAG.MOV happened yet? I hoped not. I hated spoilers.
To find out, I hopped to my feet and started walking down the hill, determined to find the only sane one in that crazy world of Technicolor pony weirdos: Spike the (Baby?) Dragon.
Maybe I should have looked for Twilight Sparkle. Even if she was kind of, uh… different… than she was in the actual show, she was still a “genius” (poop plop, lol). I sure as heck wasn’t going to look for Pinkie Pie. And all the other ponies who might have been able to help me were dead or otherwise incapacitated. Slash incarcerated. But I chose Spike, because he was the funniest and most down to Equestria.
It was pretty cool to see Max Gilardi’s morbid map laid out in front of/around me like an actual world. The closer I got to Ponyville, the more I appreciated how faithful the genie had been to his style. Actually, I don’t know if the genie himself had anything to do with creating it—maybe he just sent me someplace in the universe that already existed like this. However I got there, and whatever it was, I liked the detail.
I have absolutely no idea why I thought walking straight into Ponyville was a good idea. For one reason or another, I assumed I wasn’t susceptible to the lasers and fires and giant feet. It wasn’t until sweat was dripping from my face while the radiating heat of a thousand fires singed my Vinyl Scratch T-shirt that I questioned myself. And it wasn’t until a huge, red laser beam exploded four feet behind me that I started to scream and run away.
After several more close encounters with charring photonic weaponry, I found myself sprinting through a relatively undamaged part of Ponyville. I slowed to a cautious stop and turned around. Turns out R-Dash, Discord, and Wolfmother (what else am I supposed to call that thing?) were sticking to demolishing one half of the village. The other was practically spotless, ignoring a few blackened crater pocks and scattered dead ponies. I was disturbingly unaffected by them.
“Cool,” I said between relieving gasps of air, casually surveying my calmer surroundings. Behind a line of Seussy, thatch roof houses, I noticed the top of a big oak tree with window panes among the leaves. Twilight’s library, FTW. (I used to think that meant f*** the world. Anyone else? Anyone else?)
I jogged around the houses, catching glimpses of several distorted versions of background ponies I recognized. For just a second I thought about stopping to talk with some of them, but I decided finding Spike was my top priority.
Fate had different plans. A stray R-Dash swooped down from the sky and shot a laser right at my face. I somehow had enough reflexes to dodge it (with a girly little yelp) and hurried into the sanctuary of the nearest building. Ironically, that sanctuary was a bar. Presumably the same bar in which Pinkie vomited on Bon Bon and Lyra Sanchez. *snicker*
Speaking of, there was my HDDemonized-favorite background pony herself. She was sitting on a squishy stool, half-slumped over the countertop, watching an old TV set suspended in the corner of the store and rubbing her pregnant belly absentmindedly. She didn’t have a drink in front of her, which made me feel a lot better. If I caught her drinking while pregnant… grrr…
“Hey, Lyra,” I greeted her, taking a seat to her left. Her lopsided eyes swiveled to meet my mine. In true .MOV fashion, they were the only things that moved.
“Who are you?” she asked. Again, only her grotesquely-lipped mouth changed position as she spoke. For some reason I thought that was super cool.
“I’m Ponky,” I answered, using my Brony-handle. Because why not. “Whatcha watchin’?”
She looked me up and down a couple of times, shrugged, and turned back to the TV. “The news. Princess Celestia’s been missing for days. Some think she up and left Equestria.”
I pursed my lips together. “Oh. What a shame.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lyra said. “We’re all screwed anyway. It’s just a matter of time.”
Her following sigh was surprisingly dismal. I was under the impression that these characters didn’t really care about the state of their world, but maybe I was wrong.
“Sometimes,” she continued in a sad, breathy voice, “I wonder if Snoopy and Prickly Pete will ever see the light of day.”
“Oh, gosh,” I groaned, bringing my hands to my mouth. “Don’t say that, Lyra. That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, well, it’s also true,” she snapped at me, swiveling to face me and crossing her arms above her belly. “We deserve it, though. This town’s full of nothing but idiots and psychos.”
“Hey! I’m neither one of those.”
“Well, you must not be from around here.” She quirked an eyebrow. “Where are you from, kid?”
I waved a hand dismissively. “Somewhere far away. I need to get back, though.” From the corner of my eye, I watched her gaze follow my hand wherever it went. I smirked. “You ever seen a hand before?”
“Of course I have,” Lyra said, unblinking. “Pinkie dated that Cantrell guy. He could do amazing stuff with his hands.”
“Eww!” I shuddered.
Lyra actually punched me in the arm. “Not like that, stupid. I mean on his guitar. It was amazing. I mean, I can play this thing—” She pulled a misshapen harp from under the counter. “—but the guitar… boy, that thing is something else.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You actually play the harp?”
“It’s a lyre,” she said testily. “And yeah, of course I play it. It’s my special talent.” She pulled up a part of her red dress, revealing her surprisingly familiar Cutie Mark.
“Wow. I didn’t think it worked that way around here,” I admitted.
She smoothed down her dress and tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem like a lot of Cutie Marks match their pony’s special talent, per se,” I explained. “Like… I don’t think Twilight’s special talent is Blair Witchery. Or Rainbow Dash’s is lesbianism. Or Pinkie’s is… what is hers, a joint or something?” I scratched my chin. “Hm. Maybe those make more sense than I thought…” I grinned stupidly. “Oh, Max. You so clever.”
Lyra eyed me warily. “Riiight.”
She turned back to the TV. I waited for a while before asking, “So… do you think you could play something for me?”
She whipped her head around faster than I could blink. “Wha?”
“On your harp… er, lyre. Could you play something?” Her jaw hung open. I lifted my hands defensively. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you or anything. It’s just that I’m gonna go back out there and try to reach the library, but what with all the crushing, killing, destruction, and swag, I figure I very well might die first. So I thought it would be nice for the last thing I hear to be a nice soft song on the harp. Er, lyre.”
Her eyes flipped around on her face. It made me chortle.
“You wanna… hear me play?” she croaked.
I nodded vigorously. “Yeah! I’d love to.”
Tears welled up in her eyes as she bit her bottom lip. “Wow… nopony’s ever asked me to play for them before. Bon Bon hates when I practice in the apartment. She says it annoys the dog.”
“Won’t annoy me,” I promised. “I’m a bit of a musician myself. I’d love to hear what you can do.”
She smiled shyly and held the lyre between her front hooves. “Okay…”
She closed her eyes in serene concentration. The bar was entirely empty other than us, and the dull drone of the TV was the only noise in the air. Suddenly Lyra’s horn began to glow, and the drone was met with a positively beautiful cascade of resonant plucks. I didn’t recognize the song she played, but it was minor and legato and far prettier than anything I expected from a Hotdiggedydemon creation (yeah, I keep changing how I write his name, I know. Sorry to all you consistent-types.).
The song lasted for three or four minutes, but it never got repetitive or boring. By the end of it, my heart was beating along with its gentle rhythm. Lyra and I breathed a collective sigh of relief and opened our eyes at the same time.
“Thank you, Lyra,” I said with a genuine grin. “That was lovely.”
“Thank you, Ponky,” she said. “I never thought I’d get to do that.”
I stood up from my stool and put one hand on her shoulder. “I really appreciated it,” I told her. “It was exactly what I needed.”
She sniffed and squeaked out another thank you. Her forelegs twitched upward hesitantly, as if she wanted to hug me or something.
Heck, she may have been ugly and distorted, but hugging Lyra was hugging Lyra. I totally scooped her up and gave her a big old loving squeeze, which she happily returned. Who was I to judge this misunderstood, beautiful creature? Unabashed rape victim or not, Lyra seemed like a good pony, and I was glad to have shared that moment with her.
Then she pulled away from the hug and gave me this unnerving smile. “If Ponyville’s still around when these babies pop out,” she said, stroking her hoof over my chest, “come find me. Then I’ll really get to give you exactly what you need.”
I cringed and hurried out of the bar, trying to keep her lyre’s song in my head. Why’d she have to go and ruin the moment like that? It was my fault, obviously, for believing something in this Equestria could be anything like the real Equestria. Freakin’ genie…
No R-Dashes were visible in the sky, so I hopped, skipped, and jumped my way to the front door of Ponyville’s library. I hammered on the wood with my knuckles, glancing around for any sign of incoming danger.
“Spike!” I heard Twilight yell from upstairs. Even though she wasn’t the “real” Twilight, I still got all excited hearing her voice. “Spiiiike! Answer the door!”
“Yeah, I heard it, Twilight!” [strike]Max Gilardi’s[/strike] Spike’s sarcastic voice blared through the door. I heard him grumbling while he fiddled with a lock. The door swung open, and Spike stared up at me with the definition of a bored expression.
“What,” he said more than asked.
“Uh… hi, Spike,” I began, waving my fingers at him. “I’m Ponky. I’m from a totally different dimension or something and wondered if you knew how to get me home.”
We stared at each other for a full eight seconds before he slammed the door. I groaned and knocked again, much louder than the first time. He pulled it open after forty two knocks.
“What!?” Definitely a question that time.
“Can I come inside and try to explain myself?” I asked. “Some of Twilight’s robots are trying to kill me.”
Twilight “Sparkle” Mengele herself appeared at the top of the library’s poorly angled staircase. Her face contorted into an expression of panic. “How did you know those were my robots?”
I snatched the opportunity immediately. “That’s not all I know, Twilight,” I whispered through a wicked sneer. “Would you like me to tell Ponyville about your favorite kind of magic?”
She screamed and galloped down the stairs, yanking me inside with her magic and slamming the door shut.
“What do you want?” she whimpered.
“I wanna go home.”
“He says he comes from another dimension,” Spike deadpanned, folding his arms.
“I don’t know if that’s true. All I know is I was in my room, a genie appeared, I wished to be… somewhere awesome, and he sent me here instead.” The reality of the situation was finally beginning to press on me. “You guys have to help me! I gotta find a way home, or I’m gonna die here! Or worse, I might go crazy and kill somepony and end up being cellmates with Fluttershy!”
“Whoa, calm down, man!” Spike instructed, waving his arms above his head. “How do you expect us to get you home if you don’t even know where it is?”
I moaned despondently and covered my face with my hands. “I don’t know! I thought you’d be able to figure it out.”
“Well, you came to the right pony for that!” Twilight said confidently, putting a hoof to her chest. “I’ll just look through every book in this library until I find a spell to send you home!”
Discord and Wolfmother chose that exact moment to start punching the library, and of course it burst into flames. All three of us screamed and bolted out the front door, leaping through a wall of fire in order to escape. It hurt a bit and ruined my $25 shirt, but it gave me the idea that ended up saving my life.
“Spike!” I yelled over the roar of the burning oak tree. “Can you transport stuff with your green flame?”
“Green flame?” he repeated, hopping onto Twilight’s back as we ran for the big grassy hill outside the village. “What are you talking about?”
“You know, your fire! Is it green? Does it send stuff places?”
He shot me a totally baffled expression. “I have no idea! I haven’t ever breathed fire!”
“What? Why not? You’re a dragon!”
He scratched the green scales at the top of his head. “Yeah, you’re right. I have always had this craving for smoke in my mouth… maybe that’s ‘cause I’m supposed to be breathing fire.” His pupils shrunk as he took the Lord’s name in vain. “Why have I never thought about this before?”
I crossed my fingers, hoping beyond hope that my crazy plan would work.
We got to the base of the hill without attracting the attention of any R-Dash 5000s, which was a huge plus. Spike hopped off Twilight’s back and gave me this super weird look. I had no idea what it even meant, so I just moved on.
“Try breathing fire, Spike,” I commanded. Like a Moses. “I think it’s kind of the same thing as belching.”
Spike started to twitch between two exaggerated positions: gulping in a ton of air with his mouth opened wider than his head, and trying to burp it out with bulging eyes. After three or four cycles of this, his stopped mid-lurch and his cheeks puffed out. Suddenly a tiny jet of bright green fire exploded from his lips like a blowtorch. It ignited Twilight’s tail which promptly disappeared in a puff of greenish smoke.
“Ahh! My tail!” Twilight screamed, staring at the space where it used to hang. “What happened to my tail?”
“It was teleported!” I shouted victoriously, punching the air above my head. “Awww yeeeah! It works!”
“Where’d it go?” Spike asked, pounding on his chest with a balled up fist as he looked around for the tail.
“I dunno. I’ve never seen stuff go anywhere but Princess Celestia’s chambers, but… maybe it’s different here. What were you thinking about when the fire came out?”
Spike shot me a bemused look. “I was thinking, ‘OH MY *SQUEE*ING *SQUEE*, THERE’S FIRE COMING OUT OF MY *SQUEE*ING MOUTH.”
I cringed at every swear. “Will you please not use profanity in front of me?” I asked weakly.
He snorted. “Why not? They’re just words. What do you have against swearing?”
“My dad was swearing when he beat my mother to death.”
It wasn’t true, but it got Spike to stop swearing, so… whatever.
We did experimented with his green flame and discovered that he could transport objects to anyplace he was thinking about in the moment he spat the fire. (That was my version of a training montage. You don’t wanna watch me work? Boom, we figured it out in one sentence. You don’t even know how.)
“I need you to think about this room,” I said, showing him a video of my room on my iPhone that I had conveniently taken earlier that week to show to my grandkids someday. I’ll admit it was pretty nice that I didn’t have to explain phones or videos or anything in this world. That’s one plus about Gilardi’s Equestria, I guess. Closer to home.
“Okay,” he said when he’d seen enough, puckering up to blow. Er, fire.
“Wait!” I called out. “Are you sure you can get all of me in one burst? I don’t want to just send my legs back to my world or something.”
He scratched his chin. “Hmm. Good point. Well, maybe if I sneezed more fire would come out.”
“Sneezed?” I asked, but decided it wasn’t worth arguing and shrugged. “Okay, what makes you sneeze? What are you allergic to?”
“Dresses,” he answered.
I blinked. “You’re kidding.”
“No, seriously. I’m allergic to dresses.”
“How is that even possible?”
“I dunno. How is dimension jumping even possible?”
“That’s totally different. How do you know you’re allergic to dresses?”
“Oh, man, you should have seen me at senior prom. My eyes got all red and puffy…”
“Because you were smoking a joint!”
“What? No way man, I was having a severe allergic reaction.”
“Ugh! Fine, but I’m sure as heck not going into Carousel Boutique right now!”
He agreed with me there one hundred percent, so we decided to go with Plan B, which was run back into Ponyville and raid some innocent mare’s closet, hopefully without attracting the attention of a swarm of killer R-Dashes.
I chose the house I chose because it was blaring awesome music. Seriously, there was veritable dubstep coming from this house. And I was like, “If these guys are playing dubstep in the face of impending doom, then they have to be awesome.” Not sure why I equated “being awesome” with “having a dress in your closet”, but for decapitated!Celestia’s sake, I was inside PONY.MOV! Things were making less and less sense by the second.
I barged into the blaring house while Spike waited outside. Without so much as glancing at the ponies in the living room, I charged up the nearest flight of stairs and found a bedroom. I tore open the closet door with the might of a thousand Vikings and, lo and behold, a beautiful midnight blue dress sparkled within the cavity of clothing. I snatched it, bolted down the stairs, and dodged around Octavia on my way out the door. She looked confused.
“Here!” I yelled, smothering Spike in the dress.
“Oh, *squee*, it got in my mooouth!” he yelled, casting the article aside. The shout attracted the attention of a nearby swarm of killer R-Dashes. I sighed, and then we started running.
Spike’s nose was twitching grotesquely. His eyeballs grew and shrunk at random, derping in opposite directions while he ran. I winced as his diaphragm contracted and he aimed his open mouth toward me. Here comes the fire…
To my horror, one of our pursuing robots shot a glowing red laser directly at the dragon. I watched in what appeared to be slow motion as it pierced through the scales of his back.
“NOOOOO!” I Skywalker’d, reaching out toward my favorite character in the .MOV series as he exploded in a gory fireball of green flame. I was absorbed in the blast, and suddenly everything became quiet. I curled up into a ball on the ground and waited for the R-Dashes to swag me to death, but nothing happened. Shivering, I peeked up from my fetal position and beheld my FREAKING BEDROOM!
“YEAH!” I shouted, jumping to my feet and doing a little Michael Jackson spin. “It worked! Spike must have been thinking about my room when he died! He saved my life!”
My smile slipped into a look of horror. “He… sacrificed himself,” I realized. My shoulders sagged. “He died… to save my life.”
I stumbled into the bathroom and grimaced at my reflection: I was covered in dragon-bits and burnt T-shirt. A single tear leaked from my eye, carving a clear path through the grime on my face.
“Thank you, Spike,” I whispered, bowing my head over my sink and spitting a loogie into it. “Thank you so much…”
I stripped down, showered, threw my clothes in the dirty laundry hamper, and went into my room to redress. My mind wasn’t totally accepting what had happened, and I wasn’t about to let it. If I planned on leading any semblance of a normal life from that point on, I was going to have to pretend like that whole thing never happened. I couldn’t tell anybrony about that bizarre experience. Maybe if I had been transported to the real Equestria, but that? No way. The love and tolerance would be halfhearted at best.
As I was pulling on my jeans, a thought struck me and froze me in place.
Wait… the real Equestria…
I glanced at my still-shut laptop lying on the wooden desk against my bedroom wall. And then my eyes drifted to the right just a smidge, resting on a glowing orange cone of glass.
I smiled, because I still had two wishes.