Ponky's genie sends him to the wrong Equestria. Again.
I accidentally bought a genie who offered me three wishes. Obviously I wished to go to Equestria... but I forgot how tricky genies are. Then this mess happened.
I made it home alive, somehow, and I still have two more wishes. So let's try this again with a bit more specificity, eh? There's no way the genie can screw me over this time...
Moonshine Gravy A Sequel to Ponky’s Overappreciated “Wrong Equestria”
Part I Watch How Far I Can Slide
I paced back and forth in front of my laptop, muttering the same sentence to myself over and over and over again. As soon as I rubbed that lamp, I knew I was gonna get nervous. If my wish wasn’t worded exactly right, I might end up in as sticky a situation as I had the day before.
Yes, it had only been one day since my trip to HotDiggedyDemon’s macabre vision of Equestria. I probably should have waited a little longer before trying my luck in achieving every brony’s dream again, but I was just too impatient. The opportunity to transport myself to Ponyville was sitting on my desk in the form of an orangey-purple, completely unpowered lava lamp. One does not simply ignore the lamp.
That’s not to say I went to sleep, woke up, and started pacing. After Spike’s green flame transported me back to my room and I showered the poor dragon’s remnants off my skin, I went on a long walk to try to clear my head, singing Elphaba’s first line in “When I Meet the Wizard” every couple of steps. I had always wondered how it would feel to have something impossible happen. I wondered how I would deal with it, how it would change me. Now that I had actually experienced something that definitely fell under the category of “impossible”, all I wanted to do was forget.
Well, that’s not exactly true. It was an incredible experience, however bizarre and depressing, and I didn’t want it to disappear from my memory. But I certainly wasn’t going to brag about it to anyone, especially my fellow bronies. They would either think I was insane or steal my lava lamp, and I still had two wishes left on that thing.
My walk turned out to be very long. I guess I had a lot to think about. Somehow I ended up at Target, which is ridiculously far away from my house, and I decided to check their toy aisle just in case Rarity had finally come into stock. I had seriously been looking for the final member of the Mane Six to complete my figurine collection for, like, two months. My search that evening was mostly an absentminded one: I trudged to the back of the store and idly scanned over the pink aisle without much hope of making such a rare discovery. ()
Lo and behold, there she was: hanging beneath a yellow and white tag that read $5.01. I gaped at the box, hardly believing my eyes. Was glorious hallucination an aftereffect of green-flame-teleportation, or was my long-awaited prize finally here before my eyes for just a Lincoln and a Lincoln?
With shaking hands, I reached out and took up the tiny box. Within it, a tiny Rarity greeted me with shining sapphire eyes, her violet mane swirling down her neck, her triple-diamond Cutie Mark boasting her stylish talents. With her came some kind of pink bag (which I was going to throw away) and a blue comb thingy, which would probably come in handy when I found time to style her mane according to the show.
I really wanted to raise the box above my head all Link-status and scream out holy praises to the Cosmic Matriarch. But there were two fat ladies in the pink aisle with me, so I resorted to a shrill giggle and scampered to the checkout aisle.
Rarity was finally mine! It was THE. BEST. POSSBILE. THING! I ripped the box open on my way out the door and lovingly caressed her mane all the way home, skipping and laughing as often as my body would allow. By the time I was back in my bedroom, the sun had completely set and I was rightfully exhausted, considering the highs and lows I had encountered over the last six hours. Placing Rarity among her friends all standing around my laptop, I dropped into bed and fell asleep, dreaming of yellow chainsaws with giant, senseless screws.
Next morning I woke up, changed my clothes, stared at the lava lamp for forty two seconds, and started pacing. Within my head, I carefully constructed the perfect wish that was sure to send me to the right Equestria. I mumbled it under my breath several times, hoping desperately I wouldn’t mess it up in the moment and give the genie a way to send me back to .MOVille.
Finally I took three deep, calming breaths (thank you, Modern Family) and grabbed the glass cone with both hands. I rubbed its side with my open palm and cringed in expectation of the genie’s appearance. Even being so prepared, I yelped when he materialized three feet in front of me with zero warning.
“Can’t you sound a trumpet first or something?” I asked with a frown.
“I told you last time, kid: no conversations,” he droned.
“Yeah, right! You owe me an apology!”
One corner of his mouth raised in a bemused smirk. “An apology?”
“Yeah!” I stood up and crossed my arms. “You sent me to the wrong Equestria. I understand that my wish wasn’t very specific, but the least you could have done was send me to… I don’t know… Generation Three or something! I almost died in there!” My eyes started stinging. “And Spike did die!”
“Boo hoo,” the genie replied dryly. “Did you have another wish in mind or are you just gonna whine?”
“This isn’t whining. It’s complaining,” I clarified, sitting back down on the edge of my bed and running through my wish a few more times in my head.
“Well?” he encouraged.
I sucked in a deep breath and said: “I wish I was in Equestria exactly as it appears at the end of the second season of the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic created by Lauren Faust!”
Yes! I pumped my fist several times. Not a single mistake. Rehearsal pays off, kids. Practice your piano.
Unnervingly, the genie’s smirk hadn’t gone away. “Exactly as it appears?” he repeated.
“Exactly as it appears,” I confirmed with a decisive nod.
“You got it,” he sneered, and snapped his fingers. Once again, my bedroom warped and spun in the corners of my vision. Everything went black for a moment, and then suddenly there was color. A lot of color. I shielded my eyes from the blinding scene, already starting to grin like mad. Had it worked? Was I there?
I peeked through my fingers and whooped at the top of my lungs. Once again, I was at the top of a huge green hill, but instead of a burning town being ravaged by two mammoth monsters, my eyesight was filled with the panoramic orchards of Sweet Apple Acres.
“I did it!” I cried out, skipping down the hill and throwing my arms around the nearest apple tree. “I really did it! I’m here!”
Everything was perfect: the solid outlines around every object, the giant white sun blazing high in the sky, the marshmallowy clouds drifting low to the ground, the apple-shaped treetops… there was no doubt in my mind that this indeed was the Equestria of Lauren Faust’s imagination.
“Now to find some ponies,” I said to myself, rubbing my hands together excitedly. I wondered how they would react to seeing a human. The .MOV world was familiar with my kind and had hardly reacted at all. Would the real ponies panic, or would they be as curious and accepting as I desperately hoped?
I weaved through the thousands and thousands of trees with my eyes peeled for a big red barn. Finally I spotted it toward my front and right; what’s more, I noticed something orange under a big brown hat trotting in front of it.
“Oh, thank Celestia,” I sighed with relief. I had been a little worried that the genie would take the word “exactly” too seriously and put me right at the end of Season 2, when all the ponies I knew and loved were still in Canterlot after the wedding. As I drew nearer and nearer to the barn, however, Applejack herself became clearer in my eyes. It was really her, whistling happily, going about her chores on Sweet Apple Acres, rocking her Stetson like a boss! My legs picked up speed with every second and I suddenly found myself bursting through the tree line, holding my arms out to my sides for a hug.
“Applejack!” I called to her, sprinting the last hundred metres.
She turned to me with a startled expression, reaching up for her hat as her lips started to move. To my horror, they didn’t quite match what she said:
“Moonshine gravy!”
I stopped dead in my tracks and let my arms flop to my sides.
“What?” I squeaked.
As she answered, I watched her mouth closely. Sure enough, the words I heard didn’t quite sync with its movement.
“Apple Bloom!” she called out. “Have you and yer only two friends been pullin’ creatures from other dimensions again?” She whirled her head to the left and right, searching for her sister.
Something must have caught in my brain gears, because I literally stopped thinking for way longer than should be possible.
“Apple Bloom? Consarn that little muckraker and her Snooty Snarky Vaders! They’re always frat’n’izin’ with Pinkie Pie and gettin’ inta all kinds o’ trouble. That orange brat’s just a-thirstin’ fer knowledge, and Rarity’s sister gives me with the willies.”
I perked up. “Sweetie Bot?” I asked excitedly, and my brain lurched back into full operation. With it came a depressing chain of vocalized thoughts.
“WHAT!? No! This isn’t right! How could I be sent here? My wish was perfect! I didn’t make a single mistake! I specifically wished to be sent to Equestria, exactly as it appears at the end of My Little—”
I cut myself off with a rattling gasp. My hands found their way up to cover my gaping mouth, because gaping (like yawning) is pretty rude.
“Exactly as it appears,” I repeated in a devastated whisper.
Well, that was it, then. The genie had indeed sent me to a world that looked exactly the same as the Hub’s best TV show (and, IMO, TV’s best TV show). Unfortunately, it neither sounded nor functioned the same as FiM at all.
“Dag nabbit,” I grumbled. “I’m in the wrong freakin’ Equestria. Again.”
“Dag nabbit?” Applejack repeated thoughtfully, putting a hoof to her chin. “Hmm. I like that.”
“I bet you do.”
I sighed despondently. There was nothing left to do but find Spike, go home, and try it one more time. Maybe I’d have to write out a paragraph-long wish to make sure I closed up any loopholes the genie could use to torment me.
“Which way to Ponyville?” I asked Applejack.
“Whoa there, stranger. I ain’t lettin’ ya get away that easy,” she said, crouching into a position I fearfully deemed “aggressive”.
“Please, I just want to go home!” I said, holding my hands at arm’s length to prevent her. The last thing I wanted was to show up in the real Equestria bloodied and bruised by a war criminal veteran.
“Where’s home, exactly?” she questioned.
“I don’t know. Far away.” I gestured at the sky. “All I need to do is find Twilight’s library. Spike can send me back.”
Applejack snickered. “Spike? What’s he s’posed to do, whine you all the way home?”
Her boisterous laughter left a bad taste in my mouth. I frowned.
“I don’t know why you guys are always so mean to Spike,” I grumbled. “He’s just a poor baby dragon in a world full of ponies who hate him, struggling to find where he belongs.”
“I know right where he belongs: a cage at the zoo!” She laughed harder. “It’s too bad he’s such a good little cleaner, or Twilight would’a’ sent him away to be killed by his own kind years ago.”
Just the thought of this world’s Spike dying, too, was enough to send me over the edge.
“Shut up!” I yelled at her. “Stop being so mean to Spike behind his back!”
Applejack’s eyes widened. “Biscuits and gravy, yer right! Ah oughtta be insultin’ him right to his face at the Cult meetin’ this afternoon!”
“This afternoon?” I asked, stealing a glance at the giant Sun directly overhead. “As in… this afternoon, this afternoon?”
“’Friad I cain’t stay and chat, Kreacher,” she said, hurrying down a dirt path away from the barn. “I’m gonna be late!”
I’m sure she meant “creature,” but the way she used it as my name made me mentally spell it like the house elf.
But that didn’t matter: she was headed for a Cult meeting, which undoubtedly meant the spa, which was undoubtedly near the library, wherein Spike undoubtedly dwelt! Without a doubt, I sprinted after Applejack, struggling to keep up with a four-legged animal.
And when I say “struggling”, I mean “Nice try, kid, but that ain’t happening.” I ran my hardest after her, but Applejack disappeared beyond my vision in a cloud of swirly dust. I never realized how fast the ponies were before, nor did I realize how far away Sweet Apple Acres was from Ponyville. I thought it was just a casual trot’s distance, but it turned out to be just as far as my house was from Target. By the time I panted over a hill and finally saw the town of my dreams, more than thirty minutes had passed.
“Ah, horseapples,” I wheezed, clutching my knees and breathing deeply at the top of the hill. “No wonder none of the ponies are fat.”
After a conclusively loud “Phew!” I jogged into the town. The glances I received from background ponies were surprisingly unsurprised. They didn’t seem alarmed at all that a big, ugly bipedal was trudging through their village. (Okay, fine, I’m not that big or ugly. Still, they should have at least been confused, right?)
I started to think that maybe this world already knew about humans, too. After all, if Sherclop Pones’ redubs were to be believed, these ponies were familiar with iPods, Gremlins, Star Trek, and the internet itself. Perhaps I wasn’t as much of an oddity to their eyes as I’d assumed.
Still, Applejack thought I was from another dimension, whatever that meant. Actually, the more I thought about it, the more that made perfect sense. Maybe all these warped versions of Equestria existed in their own special dimensions, and the genie was just having a gay old time shipping me here, there, and everywhere but the one place I wanted to go. Sigh.
Meh, whatever. Philosophizing wasn’t going to do me any good. I just needed to find Spike. Luckily, the library was just as easy to spot in this world as it had been in .MOV’s. Its leafy branches towered over its nearest buildings and I made my focused way through Ponyville to get there.
Well… sort of focused. The further into the city I walked, the more I slowed down and admired my surroundings. As long as nopony was talking, everything about it was perfect. It really did look exactly like the Ponyville I’d come to know and love through multiple sessions of Netflix-Pony-Marathons. I couldn’t even remember the last time I used Netflix for anything besides (re)watching Friendship is Magic.
Season 3 needs to hurry up. F’real.
Suddenly I found myself passing the spa. And as Luck would have it (or Fate, or the genie, or the Cosmic Matriarch, or… I dunno… Nietzsche), four very recognizable ponies skip-to-my-loo’d out the front door. I squealed a little in spite of myself. Sure, they weren’t the “real” Applejack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, and Fluttershy, but they sure as Tartarus looked like ‘em. Yeah, they’re rude and anti-knowledge and nihilistic and borderline insane, but they’re also ridiculously cute.
“Hiii, giiirls!” I crooned.
“That’s the one I was tellin’ ya about, Twilight,” Applejack done said. “He came runnin’ outta my orchards like a parasprite outta hell.”
“Whoa! I’d like to think I was a little happier than something from hell, thank you very much.”
“Good heavens, what a bizarre creature!” said the most beautiful unicorn in the universe.
Boy, lemme tell ya, Jenny nailed that Rarity voice. Even though it wasn’t Tabitha St. Germain’s unmistakable, fabulous tambour, this version of Rarity—despite suffering from PDDD and dedicating her life to a more-than-questionable Lord—still made my fingers all tingly and sent my heart aflutter.
“It looks like one of those ghastly primates that ambushed us in the war!” she continued.
That one took me a minute.
“Fluttershy, you know all about demons and otherworldly monsters. Do you recognize it?”
Ghastly primates… ambushed us… hmmmm…
“I know what it is, girls! That’s a human. They’re featured prominently in some of my favorite movies.”
Ambushed in a war… and I look like one…
“Girls, um… I’m glad you’re curious about interdimensional monstrosities, but… we don’t want to get distracted like last year. Let’s just focus on the task at hoof… er, if that’s all right with you, I mean…”
Click.
“Oh!” I epiphany’d, startling the gathered mares. “I get it! Gorilla warfare! Heheheh…”
My chuckling faded away while all four ponies just stared at me. I’m not a believer in “awkward situations”—only awkward people—but those few moments of silence were about as close as it’s gotten for me.
“Uh…” My eyes met Twilight’s glossy, purple pair. “Where’s Spike?”
That seemed to break the tension pretty well. Each pony reacted negatively to the mere mention of his name: Twilight slumped, Rarity rolled her eyes, Applejack snorted harshly, and Fluttershy scowled.
“He was sick with the flu and couldn’t blow any fire past his boiling mucous,” Twilight answered, “so I sent him to deliver my latest friendship report to Princess Celestia on foot.”
“What!?” I panicked, clutching the back of my hair. “When? How long will he be gone?”
“It was probably about a week ago,” she said. “I don’t know what’s taking him so long.”
The image of a pale baby dragon corpse curled up at the bottom of Canterlot’s mountain slithered through my mind’s eye and set my rage on fire.
“You sent a sick baby dragon all by himself?” I yelled.
“Well, it’s certainly not her fault that he fell ill,” Rarity defended. I was surprised she took a stand. I was under the impression that none of these ponies liked Twilight very much. Maybe her hatred of Spike outweighed her dislike of Twilight.
“Uggh!” I groaned, glaring daggers at the group. “Well, I’m gonna go find him, just in case any of you saints wanna come.”
“Sorry, but we’re a little busy right now,” Fluttershy seethed.
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ if you don’t mean it,” I snapped, spinning about and marching in the direction of Canterlot. I was gonna find Spike if it was the last thing I did. And it very likely may have been the last thing I did, seeing as if I didn’t find him I’d be stuck in a world of witchcraft for the rest of my life with nothing to eat but apples and hay. And that would get old real fast.
I heard the Disciples of Smooze grumble amongst themselves and trot away to attend unknown business behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I was determined to find, and very possibly rescue, Spike, nurse him back to health, and hope to Celestia that he had the same tricks up his snout as the last Spike I met.
Unfortunately, I didn’t end up making it very far on my journey. In fact, by the time I has passed through two cobblestone intersections, my quest was rudely and quite painfully interrupted with three shouts and a bang.
“Look out!”
“Apples!”
“To reduce the risk of injury, assume a new position immediately!”
The Snooty Snarky Vaders plowed into me from the right. All four of us sprawled over the empty street. The scooter they were riding flipped into the air; the handles landed squarely on my chest, and the rest of it promptly pummeled and smashed my face with a wheel.
It freaking hurt. Really bad.
“OOOOOUUUCH!” I screamed, clambering to my feet and pinching my nose with both hands. “AAAAAAUUUUUGH!” I breathed. “N’AAAAAHHHH!! D’AAAHGG! GAH! FETCH!” I breathed again. “DANG IT! AUGH!”
“Gosh, Mister, are you okay?” asked Scootaloo.
“NYEEAUUAAAAHGH!” I said.
“Apples apples apples?” asked Apple Bloom.
“Affirmative,” said freakin’ Sweetie Bot, the second best FiW character ever.
“Why are your hooves so weird?” Scootaloo asked, poking one of my Vans.
“Those aren’t hooves,” I said in a nasally voice, afraid to let go of my nose in case it was bleeding. “They’re shoes.”
“Likes horseshoes?” Scootaloo asked, tilting her head. It was so cute that my pain went away in a snap.
“Sorta,” I answered, putting my forefinger and thumb to my nostrils to check for blood. I wasn’t sure upon inspection, so I repeated the check a few times. “Am I… am I bleeding?” I asked the fillies, bending down for them to take a look.
All three trotted closer, squinting into my flared nostrils.
“Nope,” said Scootaloo.
“Negative, none of your vital fluids are leaking,” said Sweetie Bot.
“Apples apples!” said Apple Bloom.
“Aww, thanks, Apple Bloom!” I said, rubbing the mane in front of her bow. She was so thoughtful.
The ponies shot me three unsure expressions. “How did you know her name?” Scootaloo asked.
“I know all of your names,” I said with a smile, crouching to their eye level and tapping each in turn on the end of their muzzles. “Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Bo…aaaaaeeelle.”
I pulled a weak smile, hoping they wouldn’t question my hesitation. I didn’t want to be the one to break the bad news to my favorite pony’s questionably sentient little sister.
“Wow!” Scootaloo said. “Have we met before?”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head, “but I know your names, my name’s Ponky, and now we’re all best friends!”
“Yay/Apples!” they said together.
That would not have worked on Earth. Not that I’ve ever tried going up to three cute little girls, revealing that I mysteriously knew their names, and changing our status from “Strangers” to “Friends” at the drop of a hat, but I’m pretty sure it would have led to my arrest. In Equestria—even the wrong Equestria—it got me three new friends.
“Sorry for running into you, Ponky,” Scootaloo said, rubbing the back of her neck.
“Oh, it’s fine!” I lied, refraining from checking for blood again or rubbing my aching chest (that was a lot of ings).
“Your face finds no match in my database,” Sweetie Belle droned. “Are you new to Ponyville?”
“This version of it, yeah,” I said, fondly ogling the buildings around us.
“Well, that was some way to say ‘welcome’,” Scootaloo said guiltily, kicking at her fallen scooter. “I could have really hurt you!”
I waved my hand at the wrist. “Don’t worry about it, Scoots. Believe me, this version of Ponyville is much safer than the last one I visited.”
Then an enormous green tentacle burst through the building at our right, sending quills and chunks of sofas flying in all directions. Its thick, slimy tip wrapped around Apple Bloom and yanked her—shrieking—out of sight.
“AAAAAAAAAPPLLLLLLLLLES!”
“Apple Bloom!”
“Apple Bloom!!”
“WHAT THE *BUY SOME APPLES*!?”
I never swear, but seriously, that was crazy.
“What the fetch just happened?” I yelled, shaking my arms above my head (because that conveys panic, I guess? I dunno.).
“The tentacle monster must have outgrown the laser tag arena!” Scootaloo cried.
“Initiate fear sequence!”
While the orange and white fillies shivered in each other’s grasps, I charged what was left of Quills and Sofas and scaled the piled rubble like Ezio. No, not Altaïr, Ezio. Viva l’Italia.
I reached the highest slab of intact wall and overlooked Equestria as a stirring cello melody rang in my ears. I’m pretty sure an eagle screeched overhead as I swept my eyes heroically over the village, painting a detailed map inside my mind.
The green mess of tentacles—not unlike the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but with more asparagus-like qualities—was ravaging through the center of town. It emitted a cacophony of growls and roars from what must have been a dozen hidden mouths amidst its octopusly limbs. Several of its flailing tentacles were wrapped around screaming ponies, each of them kicking and biting for freedom to no avail.
Building after building crumbled under the monster’s senseless rage. Every second, another of its impossibly numerous appendages twirled around a terrified pony and lifted them high into the air.
“We’re done for!” somepony called from the ground, racing away from the monster.
“If only we had some distracting music!” a stallion whined.
My heartbeat hammered until I could feel it pulsing in my groin. You know, like, right along the front of my hips. Which was super gross.
“What am I gonna do?” I asked nopony, surveying the destruction like Batman from a gargoyle. Except I wasn’t anywhere as cool looking as Batman and I was standing on a precarious chunk of a battered specialty shop.
I looked down and, lo and behold, a pile of hay looked back at me. I grinned, closed my eyes, and dove off the building, flipping forward gracefully and landing safely on my back. Man, that was cool. That was almost worth everything else that happened.
Almost.
The monster continued to destroy the quaint little village as I ran back to where Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle were huddled together.
“Girls, we have to save Apple Bloom!” I said.
“How?” Scootaloo asked in a high pitched voice.
“Our chance of significantly influencing the tentacle monster in our current state is one to 4815162342,” Sweetie calculated.
I perked up. “In our current state….” My eyes slowly swiveled to her synthetic pony flesh.
I had a huge, quick debate in my head that you don’t need to read.
“Sweetie Belle!” I exclaimed, kneeling at the pony’s side and taking her head in my hands. She felt cold. I looked right into her soft green eyes and chose my words carefully. “I have something very serious to tell you.”
“What?” she squeaked.
I swallowed. With as much bravery as I could muster, I said, “You’re not a pony. You’re a robot.”
After a brief look of confusion, Sweetie thrust my hands from her cheeks. “What? No, I am not! Your argument is entirely invalid.”
“Sweetie, listen to me. You are a robot, but—”
“If I am a robot, how do you explain my burning love for my sister?” she snapped.
“Sweetie, I’m not saying—”
“How do you explain the emotions I feel for my friends?”
“I’m trying to explain, if you just—”
“If I am a robot…” she said, her eyes glowing progressively redder, “then… then why do I feel this strength inside of me? What is this boundless potential I have been brewing since my first hours of life?”
“You are a robot, Sweetie Belle!” I shouted. “I know you are! But I also know this.” I took her quivering hoof in my hand. “You also have a soul, Sweetie Belle. Cheerilee was wrong about robots. They are not mindless machines programmed to function like a normal pony. You have real thoughts and real emotions. You have real love for your family, and for your friends.”
She was convulsing now. The light behind her eyes was almost blinding and Scootaloo was backing away in fear.
“You know now, Sweetie Belle,” I said. “As part of your programming, you’re about to go on an existential rampage and grow to enormous heights.” Using every ounce of willpower in my body, I kept staring sincerely into Sweetie’s searing eyes. “Prove them wrong, Sweetie Belle! Show them that you have a soul! Save Apple Bloom from the monster! Save Ponyville! Prove to Rarity that you truly love her!”
“RAAAAAAAUGH!”
Sweetie began to expand. Like a freakin’ Michael Bay transformer, her mechanical skeleton shifted, spun, clacked, and whirred as it took on additional height, weight, and build. Disgustingly, her milky hide and candy-colored mane ripped apart at the seams, falling to the ground like heaps of dumb fabric. I crawled backwards on my hands like a crab, watching her grow in girth and power. She roared again to the sky as giant gears clicked into place. Quicker than I had expected, little Sweetie Belle had evolved into Optimus Sweet, snorting and pawing craters into the pebbly road.
Scootaloo fainted. I ran to the little pony’s side and lifted her into my arms (d’awwww!), carrying her to the safety of an alleyway before facing Sweetie Bot.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Are you still with me, Sweetie Belle?” I shouted up to her twitching metal ears. “I know you are a good pony, despite your… differences. You are alive, Sweetie Belle, and you can keep your friends alive as well!”
Her huge head whipped in my direction. She snarled, bearing her sharp, silvery teeth.
My eye twitched. “Sweetie Belle?” I croaked.
She held her glare. I almost peed my pants. And then, slowly, the snarl became a determined grin.
“I AM A SENTIENT BEING,” she thundered, “AND I WILL PROTECT MY FELLOW LIFE FORMS FROM IMMINENT TENTACULAR DESTRUCTION!”
“Yeeeeaaah!” I shouted victoriously, pumping my fist as Sweetie Bot galloped through the streets at the violent mass of growling tentacles.
The congealed mass of emerald phalluses replied with asian censor bars, as most eroticized cephalopods are apt to do. Sweetie Bot trampled blindly towards it on a mission of existential massacre.
“I am on the path towards individualistic transcendence and you are in the way.”
The monster didn't hear her at first, but that was before it found itself being bludgeoned repeatedly by a spring-loaded horn brimming with electrical discharge. Emitting a banshee shriek, the green mass of limbs tossed its shrieking victims to the four winds and female-dog-slapped Sweetie Bot across the cheek.
“Augh! I feel pain and it is delicious!”
Apple Bloom twirled and flipped through the air, wiggling her tiny limbs helplessly. I yelped and locked onto her airborne form, jogging backward through the streets of Ponyville in hopes of somehow catching the darling.
Keep in mind that I’m entirely unathletic and grosscustingly thin. I don’t know if I’ve ever successfully caught a football in my life. But somehow, through the grace of Celestia or however it works in that world, I managed to stay beneath her, keep my eyes on the apple, and catch the tiny pony in the crooks of my arms.
Of course, the force of her fall threw us to the ground and knocked the wind out of me, but at least she was safe. As soon as fresh oxygen reentered my lungs, I jumped up with Apple Bloom held tightly against my chest and raced back to the alleyway were Scootaloo was stirring.
With both fillies safe, I turned my attention back to the brawl in the center of town. Sweetie Bot's forward hooves converted into giant forks that dug their way into the tentacle creature's emerald hide. “Allow me to share this delicious pain with you. It is not unlike pancakes, only with more blunt force trauma.”
The hulking ponibot proceeded to bodyslam the quivering tree of serpentine limbs across the courtyard of Ponyville. I threw myself and the two fillies protectively behind a dumpster as the world shook from their herculean tussle. The air filled with dust and the smell of righteous fury. I would have relished it, if only Apple Bloom wasn't so busy peeing all over my “Smile, Everypony!” T-shirt.
“I do hope that you have enjoyed the German suplexes!” Sweetie Bot spat triumphantly on the beast's many-mouthed-torso. “Though I have never been to the place called Germany, I am most definitely certain that any sentient organism living there would grab you from behind and introduce your skull rather swiftly to concrete.”
The monster's response was to ensnare Sweetie's horn with three juicy tentacles.
“Negatory!” The robot's eyes sparked as it struggled to pull itself loose. “Unregistered input! Uninstall! Uninstall!”
The monster gurgled with sadistic vengeance as it slammed Sweetie Bot through an apartment building, spun her around three times, and tossed her into the center of Town Hall. Splinters and bits of mortar flew through the air. I was about to get up when the ground shook, and everypony looked up to see Sweetie Bot stumbling out of the fresh crater, her body glowing with electrical pulses of furious angst.
“'End program' means 'end program,' you giant invertebrate bag of mostly water and semen!” Her tail converted into a rotary propeller as her eyes burned red. “Commencing correctional seminar!” She rocketed forward and shoved against the creature with her full weight. The two slammed through Sugarcube Corner, dragging wooden fragments of equine architecture across the ravaged town. With her metal teeth, Sweetie Belle yanked the giant oaken cupcake off what remained of the eatery's ceiling and shoved it into one of the monster's many mouths. “There. Proceed with healthy digestion, a joy that I shall never be allowed in spite of all of my ontological development.”
A length of tentacles wrapped savagely around her throat, twisting her neck at an ugly angle.
“Critical sarcasm failure detected!” Sweetie exclaimed, then shrieked as she was thrown hard into the street and pummeled repeatedly with hammer-thick appendages. “AAAAUUGHHH0110000101110010011000010110001001110011001000000110000101110010011001010010000001100011011011110110111101101100”
“Oh no!” I shrieked. “Sweetie Bot!”
Scootaloo held her tears in. “I can already smell the sour taste of robot blood!”
“Apples…” Apple Bloom whimpered, blushing. “Apples apples…”
She smiled sheepishly, to which Scotaloo blinked brightly and rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, thanks for that…” I grumbled, then flashed a look to the side upon hearing a stallion clear his throat.
A beefy earth pony stood at the side of a parked bus on the slightly less destroyed edge of town. “Excuse me, but do any of you ponies know the way to Fillydelphia?” He scratched his five o'clock shadow and pointed at the bus full of giggling fillies behind. “I've got an entire lacrosse team of Japaneighs Schoolfoals and I gotta get to a game by sundown—”
The monster immediately spun around, let out a high-pitched chirp, and launched half of its tentacles across town. It pulled the bus up and shook it ravenously, summoning several screams from within.
“Quick! Sweetie Bot!” I shouted through cupped, urine-stained hands. “It’s distracted! Take it out!”
Rising up out of the ashes like some infernal golem, Sweetie Bot's voice rang with the fury of a thousand burning mainframes. “Affirmative. Imminent octopus-block in t-minus three... two... one...” Her red eyes slid back into her skull. Two shiny disks slid out, protruded serrated teeth, and converted into twin buzz saws. “They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Reach deep down into your organic fear subroutine…” She grabbed the center of the monster with two hooves and roared, “And gaze into the face of Belle!”
The monster instantly dropped the bus and shrieked as Sweetie Belle's molasses-slow headbutt bore a bloody hole through its center. The creature's mouths dissolved into goo, its teeth shattering into calcified bits. Once Sweetie Belle had shredded her way along the diameter of the creature, all that was left was a series of quivering green stalks, like giant lizard tails. Random squirrels dove out of hiding and snatched the morsels away, because it was a Thursday afternoon and they didn't have anything else to do, I guess. I'm not entirely sure; I was wringing my shirt out at the time.
“Huzzah!” I cheered while two fillies danced beside me. “Sweetie Bot, you did it!”
She had just finished shrinking to the size of typical Hasbro ware when she spat invisible saliva on the monster and droned, “You have been upgraded to Dead, Version Eight Point Die.”
For a robot, she was still ridiculously cute. Her “mane” was now a swirly mess of tangled, two-tone wires. Her eyes, though red, glowed softly, and a smile played at her mechanical mouth.
“Sweetie Belle, that was fantastic!” I exclaimed as she sprinted to our location. Tossing my soiled shirt to the ground, I lifted the chrome filly into my arms and gave her a big, bare-chested hug. Her metal was still warm from transforming and stuff, so it actually felt pretty good. That and, uh, oh yeah, I was hugging Sweetie Belle!
“My joy processors are functioning at maximum capacity!” she said. “Thank you for your initializing encouragement, Ponky!”
“Hey, don’t sweat it,” I said, setting her in between her friends. They glanced at one another timidly for a moment.
“So… you’re a robot,” Scootaloo said.
“Apples,” added Apple Bloom.
“All sensory receptors support said realization,” Sweetie meekly agreed.
More silence. I bit my lip. And suddenly:
“Coooooool/Aaaaaapples!”
The orange and yellow fillies wrapped their hooves around both sides of their sentient, sentinel friend and nuzzled her affectionately.
Sweetie’s eyes clicked and widened in surprise. “You are not consumed with feelings of confusion, betrayal, and self-justified hatred?”
“Apples, apples! Apples apples apples apples apples!”
Were it possible for a robot to blush, I’d say that’s what Sweetie Belle did.
“My friends are of the highest caliber!” she said, returning the hug full force. They pulled each other into one big hugapalooza of heart-melting adorableness.
“D’awwww!” I said, clasping my hands together and pressing them beneath my face.
“Uhhhhh…” said the stocky earth pony standing nearby, standing agape at the scene of carnage and destruction formerly known as Ponyville. “What just happened?”
“I have no idea!” I said cheerfully, pointing to his rescued bus full of pony chilluns. “You need help getting those tentacles off your ride?”
About half an hour later, the de-tentacled bus (smattered in questionable, crusty stains of shades between green and white) headed off for the Japaneighs schoolfillies’ Phillydelphia dance recital, or whatever, and I felt dang good. The Cutie Mark Acquisition Program helped me scrape off the monster remains, along with several ponies who crawled from the city wreckage and kept their minds from accepting the situation through selfless service. By the time the bus was out of sight, we all felt pretty good—if we kept our backs turned to Ponyville.
“Apples?” Apple Bloom said, trying to strike up a conversation.
“Yes, Ponky, what was your directive in Ponyville before our fateful collision?” Sweetie Bot repeated uselessly. Everyone’s got one of those friends…
“I was gonna go find Spike,” I said, pointing toward Canterlot Mountain. “Apparently he’s been missing for a week.”
“Apples apples apples apples,” Apple Bloom joked.
“That is not funny, Apple Bloom,” I scolded, pointing a finger at her. “Spike is great little guy. All of you are so mean to him. I hate it! He’s just doing his best.”
“He may be performing at full capacity, but he lacks the proper memory space and RAM to be useful,” Sweetie said snidely. Her friends giggled.
I rolled my eyes. “Well, if you’re not going to help me find him, either, I’ll just be on my way.”
“Apples?”
“Yes, either. Your sisters in Fluttershy’s crazy religion already turned me down.”
Sweetie’s eyes grew wide. “At what point on the Ponyville grid and at what moment in the flow of time did you interact with them?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Uh… by the spa? Like, an hour ago? They were all leaving some meeting…”
“Gasp!”
Apple Bloom also gasped and brought her forehooves to her chin. “Apples! Apples apples apples apples apples, apples apples apples!”
“What ritual?” I asked, watching the worry grow between the tiny ponies.
Sweetie Bot’s red eyes drifted skyward. Nervously, I followed her vision. The blazing Sun was just as bright and glorious as it had been since my arrival… but a second celestial orb had joined it in the sky.
The Moon, in all its ivory glory, had slid halfway across the blazing disk of day. A lump formed in my throat as the proverbial puzzle pieces fell into place.
“Sweet Blueshift…” I muttered as the Moon blocked out the Sun.
The silence over Ponyville was heavy. I imagine it was tangible across all the parody of Equestria. Something horrible was coming, and everypony knew it. Everypony and every human. I could literally feel the danger, as if my bone marrow was vibrating, quaking in fear. That tentacle monster had nothin’ on whatever was about to go down. I glanced at my young companions; all three of their faces were drained and blank (not sure how, but yes, even Sweetie’s). They felt it, too.
And then, the noises. First it was a shriek—a very distant, intentional shriek—that split through the darkened, eclipsial air and sent a nasty chill down my spine. Next was the thump, like the corpse of a raccoon thrown atop a stony shrine. And finally, the singing… or, rather, the chanting.
“Bow, bow-bow, bow, bow-bow…”
At first they were exclusively female pony voices, warbling over the Ponyville valley.
“Bow, bow-bow, bow, bow-bow…”
Then it dropped an octave, as if a massive chorus of stallions had joined in from behind the nearest mountain range, but the voices were too rich and resonant to belong to any pony.
“Bow, bow-bow, bow, bow-bow…”
“No way,” I breathed, casting my gaze southward toward Ghastly Gorge. Of course, I couldn’t see the ravine from where I stood, but I had studied the official Equestrian Map hard enough to know exactly where it was.
Plus there was this huge wall of purple slime rushing through it, upstream, so that kinda caught my eye, too.
“Warning: Incoming Third Act Catalyst!” Sweetie Belle shouted.
“Apples apples?” Apple Bloom whimpered.
“It’s a… it’s a…” Scootaloo couldn’t get the words out, gaping at the fast approaching wave of violet sludge.
“It’s the Smoozenami!” I screamed.
Not to be outdone, Lily and Roseluck trotted around a corner, gave me a sharp look, and called out in unison, “The horror! The horror!”
Moonshine Gravy A Sequel to Ponky’s Overappreciated “Wrong Equestria”
Part III Pondering the Fragility of Life
It really was horrible. The resurrected gunk of Generation One lived up to its musical number. I watched, dumbstruck and paralyzed, as the liquid mountain surged across the valley, uprooting hundreds of wild trees and crashing against the hillsides, spraying massive globules that grew with every devoured rock, tree, and blade of grass. If it wasn’t approaching Ponyville, it may have been a strangely beautiful sight. As it was, my life was in danger, along with the lives of each colorful equine cowering under the bright blue sky.
My feet finally remembered their jobs—lazy suckers—and spun the rest of me around, sprinting for a nearby hill. I called over my shoulder for the CMC… er, Snooty Snarky… uh… the Cutie Mark Acquisition Program to follow me. They did, quickly, and with the help of good ol’ adrenaline we made it to high ground before the Smooze hit town.
And when I say before, I mean right before.
We turned around, panting and sweating, just as what was left of the outlying buildings of Ponyville were swallowed by the Smooze. Literally swallowed, because the thing had mouths. With every wave that crested from its primary mass, the endless sea of greyish goop gave birth to a new face, complete with a gaping mouth and two white, round eyes. The wide optics bobbed at the crest of each face and disappeared beneath the swelling head that rose up next behind them. Again and again, a face would emerge and lurch forward, aiming at its next meal with those great, stoic eyes, only to be swallowed by another oozing mouth.
“Talk about eye candy…” I muttered under my breath.
“Praise Lord Smooze!” a histrionic voice called over the thunderous slosh of the substance. “Nothing can stop the Smooze!”
I peeled my eyes for the speaker. As the digestive ocean engulfed the trunk of Twilight Sparkle’s library, I spotted a large, flat rock—like a giant skipping stone—staying afloat and bobbing amidst the Smooze’s cycling faces. Squinting through the glare of the eclipse that scattered off the reflective ooze, I identified the four ponies standing on the stone: Fluttershy, lying peacefully on her belly in the center; Rarity, grinning like mad and posing at the forefront as if she was King of the World; Twilight Sparkle, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at each eyed wave that rose alongside them; and Applejack, cowering at the back of the altar with her giant hat pulled over her face.
“Rarity!” Sweetie Bot shouted, waving her front hooves at her sides.
The unicorn turned to our hill. “Oh, Sister, my Sister! You survived the initial wave!” She pushed down on the rock with one hoof, forcing it to turn in our direction. Within seconds, the flow of the Smooze—which had now covered all of Ponyville and silenced any screams, leaving only the leaves of the library and the skeletal remains of the laser tag arena poking through the surface—carried the mares to our place of safety
The rock bumped against the exposed mound of our hill like a fishing boat at a sandbar. Keeping it still in her magic, Rarity delicately hopped from the rock and trotted to her sister. She gasped at Sweetie’s new appearance.
“Goodness, Sweetie Belle!” she cried. “What happened?”
“I am a robot!” she declared. “And I also have a soul!”
“That’s wonderful news!” Rarity chimed, kissing her sister on her metallic forehead.
I was too flabbergasted to register the cuteness and/or senselessness that plagued that interaction. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?”
Rarity turned to me in alarm. “We have resurrected Lord Smooze!” she breathed, sweeping a dramatic foreleg through the air.
“You’ve doomed Equestria!”
“A necessary sacrifice,” Rarity said, bowing her head.
I gaped at her. “Necessary for what?”
“To usher in the new regime of our Great Lord of the Ooze!”
“I loooooove ooze!” the purple ocean burbled, making the CMAP and me jump.
“Isn’t he magnificent?” Rariy swooned.
“No!” I yelled. “No, he is not magnificent! He’s disgusting and destructive!” I wildly jabbed my hands toward the sludge sloshing around our shrinking island of grass. “Are you not seeing this? Ponyville is gone! Everypony’s been… eaten, or something!”
Rarity’s face hardened. Her horn glowed brighter and something slapped me across the face.
“What the fetch?” I yelped, lifting my hands to my stinging cheek. “Did you just magic-slap me?”
“I will not tolerate such disrespect for Lord Smooze!” Rarity bellowed.
“Reign yourself, Rarity,” a quiet voice commanded from behind her. Rarity bowed her head obediently and stepped to the side. Fluttershy took her place in front of me, pushing out her chest. I gulped as those big adorable eyes bathed me in a turquoise glare that could have paralyzed the tentacle monster.
“Lord Smooze is not happy with your lack of faith,” she growled.
“Faith in what?” I managed to ask. “This is the stupidest religion ever!”
Fluttershy ignored me. She held out one hoof expectantly. Twilight’s magic soon delivered a small jar, the likes of which contained my hair wax back home. She unscrewed the lid (somehow) and scooped a fair amount of green slime from within.
“If you undertake the initiatory ritual and convert to our ways,” she said, “I will spare your life.”
“What happened to the last syllable of your name?”
“If you refuse,” she continued, lowering her brow, “we will be forced to dispose of you.”
I stuck out my jaw. “What, like you just disposed of a few thousand innocent ponies? And who knows how many more over the face of the country?”
“Is that a refusal?” the pegasus asked.
Her fellow cult members assumed offensive positions behind her. I heard the CMAP whimper behind me.
My mind kicked into full gear. I knew they wouldn’t dare hurt the fillies, so I had to focus on saving myself. Our haven of grass was shrinking ever smaller as the Smooze gained more and more messy mass. I didn’t have much time to act, but I refused to stoop to joining Fluttershy’s cult.
Why? I have no idea. Why didn’t I just say “Yeah, okay, I’ll convert” and stay safe with them until I found a way home? Maybe it’s because they were all completely insane and I doubted their ability to keep me safe from the unstoppable Smooze they unleashed. :ponkyshrug:
Anyway, I ended up doing something super selfish that I regretted mere minutes later. But it worked, so… whatever. I looked at Fluttershy and the goop in her hoof; I looked at Rarity and her glowing horn, keeping the floating stone raft at bay; I looked at Twilight and her cocky leer; but most of all, I looked at Applejack and the discomfort plaguing her every expression.
I called the farmpony’s name, drawing her full attention. “This is hard for you, isn’t it? To see all those ponies who loved you and depended on you smothered by the Smooze: it’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? You felt a duty to those ponies—you still feel it—and I know that as the Element of [HONESTY], you can’t believe your own betrayal.”
Tears were welling in her emerald eyes. Rarity began to panic. “Don’t listen to him, Applejack!” she whispered harshly.
“But he’s speakin’ the truth,” Applejack said. “I-I never signed on for no mass destruction. I didn’t wanna be part o’ no ponycide!”
“You came to the Conversion Spa,” Rarity reminded her. “You went through all the rituals, you learned of all the prophecies—”
“I didn’t think any o’ that hooey was real!” Applejack said. “I thought Fluttershy made it all up. I just liked spendin’ time with my friends! And makin’ fun o’ Spike!” She turned back to me with a pleading expression. “You gotta believe me, I wasn’t plannin’ on any o’ this. Honest!”
“That’s more Rainbow Dash’s field,” I said, “but still, I believe you. There may be a way to redeem yourself, to save Ponyville and Equestria and all of its inhabitants.”
Applejack’s ears perked up. Rarity scowled. “That’s impossible!” the unicorn said. “Nothing can stop the Smooze!”
“Then why did he have to be resurrected?” I asked.
Nopony answered, so I continued.
“Applejack, you and I can save Equestria,” I said with far more confidence than I felt. “But first we have to get out of here!”
“I’m on it!”
“Oh no you—”
“Yeehaw!”
Applejack bucked Rarity in the ribcage, sending her tumbling into the grass. Her concentration broken, the aura of blue magic surrounding the flat stone vanished. Subject to the flow of Smooze, the platform began to drift around our island.
“Stop them!” Fluttershy screeched. Twilight leapt at me with a goofy growl, but I was already in motion. I beckoned to the three little fillies behind me and leapt onto the moving platform. Applejack, Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Bot followed suit. The five of us sped away with the Smoozenami.
I looked back, wincing as Rarity—blinded by obedient rage—threw herself from the island in our direction. “You will rue the day you refused to be Smoozed!” she shrieked right before landing in the purple muck. Immediately, a pair of glossy white eyes appeared beside her, rising up in a facial wave and swallowing the unicorn whole. “Praise Lord Smooooooze!” was her muffled cry as she sank into the digestive depths.
As Sweetie bawled into Apple Bloom’s comforting shoulder, I buried my face in my hands. I had just witnessed my favorite pony die. Whether she was brainwashed, traumatized, or just downright insane, I would never know… nor did I particularly care. But she had looked just like Rarity, and it was scarring nonetheless.
“How do we stop it?” Applejack asked from behind me.
I shuddered, running my palms down my face.
“How do we stop the Smooze?” she asked again, more frantically.
“I dunno,” I admitted, sitting cross-legged on the rock. “Lyra just… talked to it.”
“Huh?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, okay? I just needed to get us away from them.”
“Well, you didn’t do a very good job,” a soft voice spoke from above. I gulped, imagining Fluttershy’s wings in my mind before looking up and seeing them spread and flapping. She was holding Twilight around the waist. The unicorn was clapping her front hooves with a girlish smile.
“Horseapples,” I muttered.
“Fluttershy!” Applejack growled. “How do we clean up this mess? There’s gotta be a way to get rid of the Smooze.”
With a maniacal glint in her eye, Fluttershy opened her mouth to speak. “OOF!” she said, due to a second pegasus ramming headfirst into her side.
“What the rainbow is going on here?” the newcomer asked.
“Rainbow Dash!” Applejack said. “You’re alive!”
“Of course I’m alive, dumb head! As soon as I saw the horizon start to change color, I dashed into the air, and I’ve been rainbowing around for, like, twenty minutes before this yellow thing got in my way!”
“What?” I asked angrily, even though I was smiling.
Rainbow squinted down at me. “Who are you?”
“I’m Ponky!” I said, sticking out my hand. “Great to meet you, Rainbow Dash, fastest and most awesome mare in Equestria!”
Rainbow grinned and bumped my fist with the flat of her hoof. “I like this guy!”
“I don’t!” yelled Fluttershy, swooping in from the side and aiming Twilight at me. I yelped and dodged my head out of the way of her horn, but her dangling hooves smacked into me like those foamy noodle things that kids try to play with in pools. I hate those things.
Anyway, I lost my balance and nearly fell backward into the Smooze, but Sweetie Belle was quick to stretch her head forward and freaking bite my hand. She pulled me back to the center of the rock, and I was grateful for her quick thinking, but seriously… she bit my hand! She chomped her aluminum incisors on my poor, piano-playing fingers! It felt like getting ‘em slammed in a car door or something. She didn’t break anything, but still, it freakin’ hurt!
“Youch! Oh, holy fetch!” I stuck my pulsing hand under my armpit. “Gyaaaaugh! Thank you, Sweetie Belle!” I finished through clenched teeth. She smiled as sheepishly as a skinless robot can smile.
“Hey!” Rainbow Dash snapped at Fluttershy. “Nopony kicks my new friends! I know this is more of Applejack’s field, but I’m totally gonna defend him!” With a swift pump of her wings, she threw herself at Fluttershy, forcing the yellow pegasus to drop her violet cargo. Luckily, they were directly above the floating rock and Twilight landed on all four hooves at my right.
“Isn’t this fun?” she chirped. “I can’t wait to tell the Princess all about it!”
Pulling my eyes from the squabbling pegasi, I gasped in Applejack’s direction. “That’s it! Princess Celestia! I’m sure she’ll have a way to stop the Smooze!”
“If only Spike was here to take a letter,” Twilight said with a frown. “That lazy dragon. He’s never around when I need him.”
I ground my back teeth. “He’s always around when you need him, except when you send him on suicide missions over the plains of Equestria!”
A righteous screech filled the air, and for a moment I thought a sound effect was punctuating my outburst. Instead, a flaming orange bird—literally, it was on fire—swooped down from the hazy sky above and let another piercing call permeate the putrid air (did I mention how bad the Smooze smelled? It smelled really bad. Sort of like that nasty goopy stuff inside those squishy plastic toys that don’t do anything except squish. Or like the really thick mucus that builds up at the back of your throat when you have a cold. Eugh…). In its talons was a limp, disgusting lizard thing with buggy eyes and fading purple scalOHMYGOSHTHAT’SSPIKE!
“What in the world!?” I yelled at the phoenix.
The magnificent bird dropped the barely conscious dragon onto our platform. He landed with a brittle thump at my feet.
“No!” I choked, shaking my bug-eyed head. “No, no, no! There’s not supposed to be anything disgusting in Equestria… even the Hydra was kinda cute!”
Spike groaned, confirming that he was alive, but that was almost more disgusting than if he had been dead. Gone was his rotund little belly, replaced with a quivering cavity surrounded by protruding ribs. Gone were his pinchable cheeks and floppy scales—garish cheekbones, hollow spaces, and crispy triangles had taken their places.
“Spike!” Twilight said. “You lazy cow! Where have you been?”
“Are you fetching kidding me!?” I screamed at her.
“Eeuuuuggh…” Spike moaned, slowly pushing himself to stand on a pair of wobbling, bony legs. He spoke between dry, rattling breaths. “I delivered… your letter… to the Princess…” he said, followed by a cough that tied a knot in my stomach, “and she… had… Philomena… help me… bring… this.”
He pulled a scroll from behind his back, transferring it to Twilight’s magic before collapsing onto his face.
“You poor thing!” I real-Fluttershy’d, scooping the scaly bag of bones into the crook of my arm and trying to look into his flickering eyes. “When was the last time you ate something?”
He didn’t answer, gargling in my grasp. I looked around the group of ponies, none of which were paying any attention to me or Spike. Instead, their faces were locked on the letter in Twilight’s levitation. Tears were welling in the cocky unicorn’s eyes.
“What?” I asked nervously. “What does it say?”
Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash, clawing and biting at each other several yards above our heads, make it hard to hear Twilight’s whispered answer.
“Gyywbuhe,” she mumbled.
“Huh?” I leaned in closer, careful not to break any of Spike’s bones in the process.
“It says… ‘Goodbye’. That’s all it says.” She turned the scroll around to show me the single, elegantly written word. “What do you think she means?”
Then the Sun went out. It and the Moon were still pretty close to each other in the dome of the sky, and both of them flickered and died like a pair of crappy lightbulbs. Philomena landed on my shoulder and started running her beak through the feathers on her neck while the rest of us stared at the cold, starry sky.
“Well, *buy some apples*,” I said, frowning.
My company didn’t take it quite as calmly.
“What happened!?”
“The Princess!”
“The Sun! Not the glorious Sun!”
“What have we done?”
“You mangy varmint!”
In a fit of rage, Applejack leapt from our rocky platform and joined the fray in the air. Her teeth latched onto one of Fluttershy’s wings and pulled the both of them into the violet molasses below.
“Sis!” Apple Bloom shouted. “Noooo!”
But it was too late. Both the war veteran and the Dovahkiin disappeared beneath the goo with a torrent of eyeballs, sickly bubbles, and an irreverent “Mmmmmm!”
We all stared at where they had landed, our eyes glistening in the pale starlight. With a mighty sob, Apple Bloom collapsed and cried into her foreleg. Her little friends hurried to her side, nuzzling and comforting her as best as they possibly could.
Twilight stood agape, staring directly up at the greyish orb drifting lazily—uselessly—through the sky. “Princess… Celestia…” she breathed.
I bit my lip. “This isn’t funny at all,” I complained under my breath.
“Well, why would it be? Everypony’s dead!” a nasally voice announced into my ear. I yelped and scooted away, flopping the emaciated Spike in my lap back onto his face. Turning to face my audial aggressor, I was suddenly and unexpectedly gazing into the sapphiric eyes of Pinkie Pie.
“Whoa!” I yelled. “How did you get here?”
“I’ve been here the whole time!” she probably lied.
Rainbow Dash snapped out of her trance and landed on our rock. Her blue coat looked paler than usual, but maybe that was just the lighting.
“How is this thing floating?” she asked, poking at the stone.
“We covered it in raccoon blood,” Twilight answered, bowing her head in a heavy mope. “The Smooze hates raccoons.”
“Maybe that’s something we can… use? To stop it, I mean,” Scootaloo suggested with almost zero confidence.
“I don’t think so, kid,” Rainbow Dash said, ruffling the filly’s spiky pink mane.
“But good on you for thinking positive,” I added, forcing a smile in her direction.
The following silence gave me time to soak in our entire situation. My eyes darted from piece to piece of my environment and created a simple analysis: there was an endless ocean of Smooze from which protruded some distant mountaintops; there was a vast starry sky providing very little light; there was a big flat rock covered in crusty roadkill blood; and upon that rock sat me, Spike, Philomena, the CMAP, Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie.
Everypony else was dead.
“Well, this totally sucks,” I said as a curtain of hopelessness was draped over my heart.
“No, it doesn’t!” Pinkie said. “Our lives were nothing but shadows and lies, anyway. Now we get to die quickly and proceed into the great beyond with the ponies in the sky!”
I reeled at her. “The what?”
“The Ponies in the Sky!” she repeated in such a way that I had to mentally capitalize the potentially proper nouns. “In my village, when I was just a filly, they used to tell us stories of the Ponies in the Sky who controlled everything, even the Princesses! Our whole world was subject to their will and whim.”
“A toymaker’s creation,” I murmured.
Pinkie beamed. “Exactly!”
An upbeat accompaniment began to pulse through the air. It seemed to be coming from the very air around us. I sat up straight. “What’s going on?”
And then, as Pinkie Pie began to sing, floating lines of lyrics appeared before her hooves, glowing in the Sunless, Moonless dusk.
In the face of fear and sorrow When it seems there’s no tomorrow And the colts and fillies jolts and willies Make you want to cry
Hold a hope up like a candle ‘Cause there’s nothing you can’t handle If you keep in mind they reap in the kind: The Ponies in the Sky!
Every story has an ending Every path a finish line Sunrise may seem condescending When it isn’t yours or mine Every clock continues ticking Every gyre gimbles on Sunset calls upon the kicking While the jaws of death are licking Some peel off and some are sticking To the reapers’ symbol song
I’m actually not entirely sure if she said “symbol song” or “cymbal song” because I had my face in my hands at that point, weeping into the cracks between my fingers. …what? Music gets to me, okay? I’m an emotional guy.
At least it doesn’t make me want to freaking kill myself, which is exactly what Twilight did! “I’m coming, Princess!” she sobbed, leaping from our stone oasis and drowning in the Smooze.
“Oh, yeah, thanks Twi!” I screamed after her. “That’s great, just great! Thanks a lot, Twilight. It’s not like there are kids RIGHT HERE!!”
My throat immediately felt raw from screaming and I pulled my knees up to my chin, folding my arms in front of my shins and shuddering involuntarily.
How could this world be worse than .MOV? As I pondered on that question, I realized there had always been devastatingly morbid topics and scenes in Friendship is Witchcraft—really heartbreaking moments that sent as many feels through my bloodstream as lulz—but it was brushed off or ignored for humor’s sake. Was four of the Mane Six succumbing to the Smooze supposed to be funny?
I thought back to the saddest moment in the Witchcraft series: Raincloud’s selfless sacrifice. Even in the midst of cruel dissociation, that sentient storm bringer saved four ponies’ lives. It was a shockingly dear and emotional moment for such a ridiculous show—and it left me in stitches from laughing so hard. Why?
Because it was fake, of course… at the time. It was so out there, so over the top, that I couldn’t help but laugh from pure surprise.
Was that it? Was that really it? Now that I was the one suffering, I no longer could laugh?
No… there must have been something else to the Raincloud joke: some element I was missing that switched the scene from depressing to hilarious.
…
Ignorance. That’s what made it so funny: the ponies she saved had absolutely no idea. They were idiots. Two seconds after the airborne explosions, Applejack was on the train and ushered into Ponyville, never once mentioning her sacrificial savior. And it was that sudden switch in tone, that blatant interruption, that made the scene so memorable and fu—
“Pinkie Pie!” Apple Bloom shouted. “A portal! You can make a portal!”
Pinkie turned to her with a bewildered expression. “Huh?”
“A portal through time!” I realized, leaping to my feet with an excited snap of my unbitten fingers. “That’s it! Pinkie, we have to go back in time and stop them from resurrecting the Smooze!”
Pinkie blinked. “But I can’t just make a portal appear anywhere,” she reminded me. “I have to bake one. In a kitchen. With all the right ingredients!”
I groaned and dropped to my knees, accidentally landing on Spike’s tail. He shouted in pain, forcing a plume of green fire to burst from his throat.
My eyes flew from the curling smoke to Pinkie’s startled face to Sweetie Bot. Something in my brain lit up.
“That’s fine!” I told her, snatching up the ragdoll dragon by his shriveled tail and holding him inches from Pinkie’s snout. “We can bring them to you!”
Moonshine Gravy A Sequel to Ponky’s Overappreciated “Wrong Equestria”
Part IV These Creatures Are Horrifying!
“Are you certain this will function properly?” Sweetie Bot droned.
“Not at all!” I announced cheerily, suddenly thinking about Cheerilee and how it was really sad that I was probably never gonna meet Cheerilee. “I’m just shootin’ in the dark here, but it’s better than floating on a rock ready to die!”
Even Pinkie Pie was wincing at my nigh maniacal smile. That was both exhilarating and humiliating for me, but I chose to ignore both emotions, focusing on the task at hand.
“All right, you ready, Sweetie?” I asked.
“Affirmative.”
“Be careful, Sweetie Belle!” Apple Bloom said.
“Yeah!” cried Scootaloo. “Don’t die!”
“Termination is not an option,” Sweetie promised, gearing up for takeoff.
“Spike, think about a kitchen,” I said, shaking the emaciated dragon by his shoulders.
“Wha… huh?”
I turned to Sweetie Belle. “I don’t know if this actually works in this dimension; you might end up in a kitchen, or you might end up wherever Celestia’s body is. In that case, the whole plan is screwed, so you might as well just give up. Well, you’ll be drowning in Smooze, so it’s not like you’ll have a choice. BUT, if you’re in a kitchen, have Spike send us something—anything—so that we know it’s working.”
“Oh, dang, that’s cool!” I complimented, grabbing Spike’s throat in my left hand. I lifted his other end with my right, holding the drake horizontally, and tugged as hard as I could on his bony tail. His eyes bugged and derped even more as a narrow stream of green flame exploded from his jaws. The transporting fire engulfed Sweetie Belle and I tossed Spike onto her tiny back. With a flash and a pop, the pair vanished, leaving me with Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, Pinkie Pie, and Rainbow Dash. Everyone else was dead.
We sat in morbid silence for a long time, waiting for proof of Sweetie Bot’s success. There was plenty of lip-biting and pawing-at-the-rock, both of which were suuuper cute, but I was in no mood to appreciate cuteness. I sat in the center of the rock, arms wrapped around my legs, face twisted into what was likely a terrifying blend of a mad smile and a nervous grimace. I didn’t have a mirror, so I can’t quite explain it.
Luckily for errpony, FLASH! A ball of green flame appeared above our heads and a mixing bowl dropped onto the rock! We were all like “YAY!” and shoved the thing at Pinkie, eagerly waiting the next ingredient.
It’s a good thing I was paying attention, because the next ingredient was an oven, and it materialized directly above my head. I yelped and rolled closer to Pinkie, letting it land with a metallic, empty thump in the dead center of our floating rock.
“Rad!” I yelled, opening the oven door and checking all of its important ovenly parts. I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to power it—it seemed to be run by magic, and all of our unicorns were bye-bye—but then again, we had Pinkie Pie, so I didn’t worry too much.
One after another, ingredients were delivered to our doomed rock of sanctuary by means of emerald fire, which, in hindsight, was pretty freaking cool. At the time it was way too nerve-wracking to be anything but anxietal, but it really was a pretty good idea on my part. G’job, Ponky.
Pinkie named the ingredients as they appeared. “Flour! Eggs! Cinnamon! Provolone! Seapony tears!” With each exciting addition to her collection, her smile of confidence grew exponentially until it reached her ears. “Aaaaand… there it is! The eye of a newt! Oh, I was worried they wouldn’t have any in whatever kitchen they went to…”
“Is that it?” I asked as Pinkie tossed a dash of this and that into the mixing bowl and kneaded it with her hooves. “Is that all the ingredients?”
“According to the knowledge I’ve accrued!” she said with a happy nod. “There! Now all we have to do is bake it, eat it, and the portal should appear nearby!”
I blinked. “Are you serious? That’s awesome!”
“How are we gonna do that?” Apple Bloom asked, poking the back end of the oven that appeared as if it had been forcefully ripped from a wall. “The oven don’t work!”
“Hmmm…” Pinkie put a batter-covered hoof to her chin. “Oh, I know!”
And she dumped the friggin’ mess overboard into the Smooze.
“PINKIE!” I yelled, reaching out to catch some of the stuff. Too late. It was all gobbled up by the purple death below.
I loomed over Second Best Pony and seethed at her as best I could. “Whyyyyy did you do that!?”
“The batter just needs to be baked and eaten for the portal to appear!” Pinkie said, still grinning. “It doesn’t matter who eats it. Anyone can go through the portal!”
My fingers froze just inches from her neck. “Oh. Really?”
“I think she’s right!” Rainbow Dash said. “Look over there!”
Our heads turned in her hoof-point’s direction where a pink oval was burning itself into the fabric of space and time.
“Oh, fetch yes!” I screamed, pulling Pinkie into a hug and planting a big kiss on her cheek. “You’ve done it, Pinkmerelda! We’re saved!”
“Quick, kids, hop on!” Rainbow said, always one awesome step ahead of the game. Scootaloo and Apple Bloom awkwardly climbed onto her back behind her wings, holding on for dear life. The Element of [LOYALTY] turned to me and Pinkie Pie with a worried expression. “You guys gonna be okay?”
“Even if we’re not,” I said, wiggling my hands at the portal, “that should lead to the past. As long as you stop the Smoozenami from happening, the rest of us are gonna be just fine.”
“Looks like we’re floating straight for it, though!” Pinkie added. “Get those kids safe. We’ll be right behind you!”
Rainbow saluted and took off, the two fillies clutching her middle as tight as they could.
“Is Sweetie Belle gonna be okay?” Apple Bloom yelled back.
“Everyone will be okay!” I said. “Just stop the resurrection!”
They flew into the portal and vanished in a pinkish, fluxing wub of coolness.
I sighed with relief, dropping to my knees and bro-hoofing Pinkie Pie (which, again, in hindsight, was way more awesome than I treated it at the moment). And, true to her prediction, our rock steadily moved toward the same ebbing portal of mystery and intrigue.
“You ready?” Pinkie asked.
I nodded. “All it takes now is a hop, skip, and a jump.”
She giggled, though I wondered if she had any idea what I was talking about. “See ya on the other side!” she said, and she jumped.
I was not a pony, so I had to wait a little longer before I could confidently traverse the gap between the rock and the pink void with my measly human leg muscles. As I waited far from patiently for my platform to drift nearer, I realized I was all alone on a blood-soaked slab of stone in the middle of an endless sea of digesting gunk, and that was pretty scary. Shaking my head clear, I prepped for the jump, squatting next to the unused oven to get a bit of a running start.
Just as I started to move forward, another green flash of light appeared, followed by a dragon in my face.
“Gaaaahh!” I yelled, stumbling from the impact and landing hard on my back. Luckily we were still on the rock. I peeled him from my head and shouted, “Spike! What the heck are you doing?”
“Sweetie Belle… sent me back…” he said, “to tell you… she sent… the wrong… cheese!”
My eyes widened. I tossed the ugly little scaly thing to the side and looked at the portal. To my horror, it was flashing between pink and a really gross shade of bubbly blue. Covering my mouth with both hands, I let loose a muffled scream as the portal flickered, collapsed, and even kind of exploded. Infuriated and miserable, I bashed my head against the side of the oven six or seven times.
“Ah, horseapples! Smelly, rotten horseapples from the frozen pits of Tartarus!” I moaned, scraping my fingernails over the rock. “Where did they go? What happened to them? How am I gonna get home?? How are we gonna stop this!?!??”
I was too confused and exhausted to cry, but that didn’t stop me from choking and sobbing like a wimpy little babby. Pulling myself together (ha, yeah right), I grabbed Spike by the topmost… uh… spike, and lifted him up to my face.
“Now what do we do, huh?” I yelled, targeting him as an outlet to my fear. “How the fetch am I gonna get home? How are we gonna save all the ponies who are dead under this crap?”
The dragon shivered and shrugged. “I-I don’t know! I’m sorry!”
“Grraaaaarguh!” I stood and wound up to hurl Spike into the ocean of Smooze, but decided that was a bad idea and dropped him behind me instead. He curled up against the back of the oven and whimpered while I paced and stomped and yelled a lot.
It must have been about twenty minutes later that I pushed the oven into the Smooze. I don’t really know why, it just felt good to destroy stuff and I envied that Spike had a little place to hide from the sorrow while I didn’t. So we just sat cross-legged in the middle of the rock and stared at the sunless sky and the melting mountains on the horizon. He tried to talk to me a few times.
“I’m really sor—”
“Shut up.”
I sat there, slumped and silent, for… oh, heck, I have no idea. A long frickin’ time. I bet my expression was actually pretty comical. My lips were curved into a huge frown, which felt appropriate at the time, and my eyebrows had taken over my upper eyelids’ territory. It sort of hurt to hold it for that long, but what the heck else was I going to do?
The quietness was less creepy than just awkward, because there was literally nothing to do, and almost no sound to accompany it. The occasional slosh of a distant Smooze wave was the only sound other than Spike’s horrendous breathing the occasional scratch of infected scales. Goll, he was annoying. I could finally see why they all hated him.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where there was literally nothing to do. I mean, lit-er-a-lly. Sure, we’ve all had moments when we’re just sitting around bored and say, “Nyeeeeuuugh, there’s nothing to doooo!” and we watch YouTube or play vidya games (not me, I’m just giving examples) or eat a bunch of food we don’t need (again, not me) or go on a nice long walk and think about life.
But guess what? All of those things happen. We do them. So there really was something to do, after all.
Sitting on that rock next to stupid skinny Spike, there was LITERALLY nothing to do. I mean, I guess I could have jumped into the Smooze or counted stars, but for all intents and purposes I was stuck. There was no point in standing up, because there was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing to do.
It was a bizarre experience, lemme tell ya. As my mind wrapped around the reality of my situation, my reaction was probably the weirdest part: I just sat there.
I’m a pretty tense guy. I tend to freak out when really bad (or really good) things happen. It’s not unusual for me to actually “bounce off the walls”. Sitting there, though, I realized how useless it would be to yell or jump around or pull at my hair or whatever else I usually do, because… it wouldn’t solve anything. Not that freaking out solves anything, anyway, but freaking out burns off a ton of excess energy and leaves me with just the right amount to think through a situation and come up with a solution. That didn’t matter on the rock. Even if I was in the most stable, thoughtful frame of mind ever, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was screwed.
What was gonna happen? Would I just starve out there? Was the rest of my life condemned to sitting on a rock with a whiny little dragon and staring at eternal twilight over a sloppy ocean?
Yeah, pretty much. And that sucked. So… I just sat there. That was probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to not thinking about anything. My mind sort of slipped away and left my eyes to scan the dim new world unblinkingly. And nothing happened. Because there was nothing to do.
I’ve hit that home, right? You understand?
Okay, good. Because this next part is kind of embarrassing.
“Daaaaaisy, Daaaaaisy… give me your answer, dooooo…” I sang, lulling my head back and forth.
Spike turned to look at me; I didn’t catch his expression.
“I’m haaaaalf craaaaazy, all for the love of yoooooou…”
I sighed, uncrossing my legs and stretching them out in front of me. I tried to touch my toes, which is usually pretty easy for me, but my skinny jeans were restrictive.
“It won’t be a styyyyylish marriage,” I kept singing, “I caaaaan’t affoooord a carriaaaage…”
Here it comes…
“But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for twooooo…”
Tears. Tears and tears and tears and tears. So many tears. I haven’t cried that hard since my frickin’ parents divorced.
I know, it’s sad! I’m sorry! But… it sucked, okay? It was just so weird and… I dunno, it was this remarkable thing that could have—and really should have—been wonderful and exciting and adventurous and adorable, and all of the sudden the only things left in my world was a disgusting, starving lizard thing, a big rock covered in sacrificial blood, and an enormous mass of smelly, sentient sludge! And it was cold, and it was boring, and it was irreparable, and… and I just cried.
I’m an emotional guy. I get warm fuzzies in my chest and tear up pretty often. But I don’t frickin’ cry. Like, ever. I can count the number of times I’ve bawled (after the age of five) on one hand: my grandpa’s death, my parents’ split, the last fifteen minutes of Titanic, and the end of Background Pony. And, now, sitting on that stupid rock.
“We’re gonna die…” Spike squeaked, covering his own watering eyes. “We’re just going to float out here until we die…”
“Yeah, probably,” I said, patting him on his nasty head.
And then the best Deus ex Machina ever appeared in the sky with the crash of righteous lightning.
“HOOOly GAK!” I screamed, shielding my eyes from her glory and scrambling to the edge of the rock. “Princess Celestia!?”
“Ponky,” she said. I probably would have exploded if it was actually Celestia’s voice that spoke my name, but since it was the Friendship is Witchcraft version of Celestia, I managed to keep it together. Kind of. I started laughing like a maniac, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, flapping those enormous, swan-like wings until she landed in front of me on the rock.
I blinked at her before I could speak, grinning as widely as is physically possibly. “No! No, I’m fine! I can’t believe you’re here!” I quickly glanced at the sky, noticing the distinct lack of a Sun, and swiveled to my knees. “How are you here?”
“Your efforts were successful,” she said. Sherclop Pones did a good job, because even though she spoke with the voice of a man, she still sounded regal and awesome. “The crew you sent through time to prevent this destruction of our world fulfilled their task. Equestria is safe.”
“What? No it’s not!” I gestured at the purple flurp still eating her entire country.
“It may be difficult to understand,” she said, leaning her majestic muzzle closer to my trembling face, “but this is a Tangent Universe from Equestria Prime.”
I winced and shook my hand. “Weeeelll, not exactly Equestria Prime, but I see what you’re saying. Your universe is safe in a parallel, and I’m stuck here in the disaster zone where bad things still happened.”
“Precisely,” she confirmed, rising to her full, amazing height.
Actually, as I struggled to my feet, I realized she wasn’t much taller than me, and I’m not tall by any means. Her horn added significantly to her prowess, and her wings were just rad as rad can be. Plus that MANE! That amazing, mystical, magical mane of many colors, sparkling with the energy to lift the freaking Sun! Aw, man, she’s so cool.
Oh, and her tail. Her tail’s the same way. Super cool.
“So… they sent you to find me?” I asked in a small voice.
“Indeed. The Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Apple Bloom, and Scootaloo of this Tangent Universe stopped the Cult of Smooze, defeated a tentacle monster, and contacted me to inform me of their origins. I have come to send you home.”
“Oh, that’s fantastic!” I said, clapping with delight. “Kinda predictable and anticlimactic, but super good nonetheless!” I gasped. “But… what’s gonna happen now? Are there two Rainbow Dashes and Apple Blooms and stuff?”
“There are,” the Princess nodded, “but I do not foresee that as a problem. They shall come and live with me, knowing they saved an entire world.”
I bit my lip. “Yeah, but everyone they knew is still dead. Won’t that be super, like… psychologically taxing?”
“I assure you, I will do everything in my power to assure their comfort in Universe Prime.”
“Can we call it Universe Beta?” I asked. “Or, like, FiWorld?”
“FiWorld?” she repeated.
“Never mind.” I chuckled. “This is all great news, but… I’m ready to go home, if it’s that simple.”
“Indeed it is,” the princess said. She turned to Spike, half-dead from shock and starvation, and lifted him in her magic. “I’ll just use the last of his flames to send you home.”
“And… what’ll happen… to me?” the dragon wheezed.
“You can just stay here,” the princess said with a smile. “You’d have no place in our Universe. If you’d like, I can toss you into the Smooze when we’re done for a quicker death.”
Spike sniffed. “Yeah… that’d be nice…”
The Princess and I smiled at each other. “Thank you so much,” I said.
“Thank you for saving my world,” she replied, and squeezed Spike so hard in her golden magical cloud that his protruding ribs snapped. A web of green fire surrounded me briefly and I started to panic. Was I actually going home? Spike couldn’t possibly have been thinking about my room… where would I end up? How would I get back?
Somehow, when I opened my eyes, I was back in my room. At that point it occurred to me that maybe my thoughts had something to do with where the fire transported me. Whatever. I didn’t really care. I was home!!!
“Yeeeee-haw!” I cried out in honor of the Smooze-digested-FiWorld-Tangent Applejack. I leapt on my bed and grabbed my pillow, hugging it as tightly as I had Pinkie Pie. I opened my laptop and giggled with glee just by looking at the potentially time-wasting Google Chrome shortcut. I ran my hands through the shirts hanging in my closet, relishing in their existence and diversity and lack of urine.
There was so much to do, even if none of it mattered! I wasn’t doomed to thirst to death, or sit around thinking about nothing and singing the mournful song of a debatably villainous computer! I was home, I was brave, I was free! America!!
And best of all, I realized as my eyes focused on a curvy glass tube lying dormant on my bedspread…
)