Chapter 1
Twilight was momentarily distracted from her current task of baking with Pinkie by a stray thought. She wondered what had brought on Pinkie’s offer to teach her about baking. It had come up out of the blue three days ago; when Pinkie had said that she had been very nervous about some secret, but wasn’t sure when to share said secret with her. So Pinkie had decided to work up to it by spending time with her teaching her about baking: Pies specifically.
She was lost in thought, going through the motions of filling out a pie tin automatically. Pinkie had decided that doing this activity in Twilight’s library would be best; that way Twilight wouldn't have to focus on learning a new kitchen, just the new recipes.
“Hey, Twilight! You there?” said Pinkie, giggling softly. “You’ve been staring off into space for a while now, I'm starting to wonder if you are really listening.”
“Sorry, Pinkie,” replied Twilight, “I was just thinking about when you asked me if I wanted to learn more about baking. You said there was something that you had thought about telling me but weren't sure about. We’ve been at this for a while now, did you want to talk about it at all?”
Pinkie pursed her lips and frowned slightly, “mmm not yet, it’s a pretty big secret, a little scary to think about telling too. Yeah, not yet, when we’re done would be better.”
Twilight glanced at Pinkie’s face out of the corner of her eye as she was folding the crust into a pie tin. She saw Pinkie’s frown, the furrow of her brow, her eyes were shot towards the floor. “I don’t want to push you if you don’t feel ready about this. It must be important but if you're uncomfortable with it you don’t have to tell me today…”
Pinkie flinched a bit then quickly adjusted herself back to a soft smile, though her ears remained low. “No, I shouldn't put this off any longer, I’ve already put it off way way too long. It’s making me really worried to bundle it all up inside me all the time like I usually do with it.”
Twilight looked at Pinkie for a moment. This flinching and subdued tone was unlike her, something must really be wrong with the whole secret to cause her this much distress.
“Well, alright, as long as you're sure about it.” Twilight went back to following Pinkie’s instructions on pie making.
Their activity continued in this subdued manner for a while; pinkie rattling off instructions but slower than usual and not saying much besides. Twilight hoped that Pinkie hadn’t been holding this in for very long or else she would be cross with herself for not noticing before.
As they went on Twilight noticed Pinkie become more unhappy and stressed, she was dreading actually having to say whatever this secret was; but Twilight didn’t say anything about it again considering how much she wanted to get this off her chest, it would be good for her in the long run.
Eventually, they reached the last recipe on the list for the day and Pinkie was taking the pie out of the oven to let it cool; when Twilight noticed that Pinkie was eying the door, twitching slightly. She seemed to be almost edging towards it, as if in need of escape.
She was sweating slightly, her eyes wide and her breathing fast and shallow, she wasn't even paying attention to what she was doing anymore
Twilight reached out and laid a hoof on her withers “Pinkie it’s oka–”
Pinkie jumped. Hard.
Suddenly a scream rang out as Pinkie slammed her hoof into the heating element of the oven hard enough to get it stuck against her hood. The metal bent around it and trapped her hoof against the top of the oven.
Twilight acted immediately, lighting her horn to turn off the oven and try pulling pinkie away from the oven; But her hoof was stuck against the heating element, almost wrapping around it in a strange way. Twilight could not pull her away not without wrenching her hoof and possibly breaking it.
Pinkie was frantically pulling at her stuck leg with her free one crying out “Twilight, help! I'm Stuck! It hurts, it hurts so badly!” tears were leaking out of her eyes, and her hoof was rapidly changing color at this point some of the flesh seeming to bubble.
“I can’t pull it out! I'll break your leg!” shouted Twilight as she searched desperately for something to try and pry the metal from around pinkies hoof with.
Pinkie was shaking and shouted “Just do it! I’ll lose my hoof if I don't get it out!”
Twilight knew she had to act fast but there wasn’t anything she could use nearby, so she obeyed Pinkie’s request. She pulled on her body as hard as she could with her magic. She heard something crack and Pinkies leg was wrenched out of its socket most likely dislocated.
She looked to Pinkie’s face, but she had not reacted to that she was only staring at her hoof broiling in the heating element. Twilight felt sick as she pulled again harder this time, Pinkie’s leg made a worse-sounding snap as some of the bones in it were pulled apart.
Twilight stopped, this wouldn’t work. This would be an amputation at this rate. She started to look around again for something to help when she heard pinkie scream.
“Twilight I can’t-I can’t take it! Y-you need to look away! Close your eyes, don’t open them, no matter what you hear! I need you to trust me! Don’t do anything, alright? Just wait until I say you can open em again!” Pinkie was gritting her teeth hard and breathing heavily trying to regain some composure to do what she was about to do. She did not bother to check if twilight had listened.
Twilight was about to protest whatever this new idea was when her words died before she spoke them. She saw something happening to Pinkie, something strange.
Pinkie’s body seemed to warp slightly and bulge outward. Her skin was being stretched out as something coiled beneath it. Her skin suddenly was filled with gashes and she seemed almost to turn inside out around the lines as strange tendrils came slipping through them.
Her body expanded out even more her mass having tripled at least as her form lost any semblance of pony-like characteristics. In place of her legs, tendrils had burst out of where they used to be, her head split open into some horrid hole wrung with teeth-like protrusions. She did not seem to have any set anatomy anymore, her shape was constantly changing and pulsing, eyes appearing and disappearing around the fleshy mass.
Mouths appeared on other portions of the great mass with slimy tongues or tentacles spilling out of them. Along one of the tendrils, the wet skin was pulled back revealing a serrated bone protrusion.
The sounds it was making were strange and wet. Bones snapping and flesh stretching until it was ripped apart as the body continued to grow and change with a plasticity that suggested an almost gel-like internal consistency.
The serrated bone quickly flashed and sliced clean through the part of the thing that was stuck in the oven. The hoof hung limply, still being scorched by the oven as blood now spilled out of it. The wound on the monster closed immediately.
Twilight opened her mouth to scream but no sound came. What was this thing, it couldn’t have been Pinkie, it had to be some horrible replacement. It was wrong, what had it done to Pinkie, or was it some horrible infective creature destroying her friend's body?
This was some bad trick, something had tried to get close to her. Something that wasn't her friend. She had to go get help, whether to find Pinkie or if that thing was Pinkie to get something to restrain it until she could find some way to help her.
She wanted to get away, she had to leave now, she was going to be killed by this thing.
She ran.
As she was escaping through the door she heard many voices in concert screaming noise “No, wait! Please don’t leave me!” she felt something slimy wrap around her back hooves. She screamed and kicked falling onto the ground and turned to blast whatever was holding her.
As she turned she saw that the thing was facing her now and she beheld it in all its wretched glory. It was no longer pink or covered in fur, its transformation complete. Rather, it was inky black with some kind of wet skin like an amphibian or cephalopod. Its many mouths were yelling and reaching but the thing that stood out to her was the thing's numerous eyes.
There were tears flowing out of all of its eyes. It looked in pain, twitching, and heaving, but above all this creature looked… scared. Frightened to the point of acting without thinking.
Twilight was able to think clearly for that one moment. She could see this thing’s pain and fear. She was terrified herself, of course, but this wasn't a thing she thought she could fight, it was beyond her.
“Please, Twilight! It’s still me, I won't hurt you I promise, just please listen to me!” begged the creature in a multitude of sounds.
Twilight’s eyes were wide, she couldn’t calm herself, but she stayed still and whimpered slowly as she was forced to take in more sensations of this thing that had been Pinkie.
“W-what are you? What have you done with Pinkie?” asked Twilight, barely able to croak out a question.
The thing quickly withdrew its tendril from Twilight “Sorry, sorry! I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that, I panicked!”
Twilight cringed and shifted back a bit at the slimy snaking sensation as the tendril released her. The thing retreated a bit towards the far wall giving space for Twilight to breathe; though she still found it difficult to do so.
She could leave now, she wasn’t being held, all she had to do was run out the door; but the miserable look in the creatures eyes kept her still. Whatever this was, it was hurting, and some part of her still felt compassion for anything in pain.
She chose to stay.
Twilight swallowed her spit and found that her breathing had slowed slightly, and her head had become a little clearer. “What are you? Are you Pinkie? Are you something else?” her voice trembled as she spoke and her wide eyes remained fixed on the mass of flesh opposite her in the room.
“I’m still me Twilight, yes I'm Pinkie,” spoke the thing in a whirl of noise, the words came from many different spots on its body. “I'm really really sorry I scared you like this… I mean I was going to show you but I really didn’t want it to be like this. I should probably change back, do you want me to?”
Twilight shakily nodded and carefully got to her hooves while keeping her eyes on Pinkie, if it was Pinkie.
“Um you should probably close your eyes for this if seeing me change before scared you so bad,” said Pinkie trying to make herself smaller so as not to frighten her more than she already had. “Also uh thank you so much for listening to me right now, this has been kinda terrifying to work up to,” Pinkie giggled nervously but at the sound of it Twilight splayed her ears back and covered them with her hooves. “Right, right, sorry, I’ll change right now.”
Twilight quickly slammed her eyes shut not desiring to see anything like what she had witnessed before. It didn’t stop her from hearing though as the sounds of wet sticky things sliding around and the sounds of bones cracking and tissues ripping were heard. After a minute of this, the sounds ceased.
When twilight opened her eyes there was once again just a pink pony in front of her; well a pink pony and a severed hoof sticking out of the oven. “Pinkie, what are you…” asked Twilight hesitantly.
Pinkie had a guilty frown on her face and did not look her in the eyes. “I don’t know Twilight, I've never seen anything else that can do what I can. Honestly, I was kinda hoping maybe you might have known something since you’re sucha smartypants and all, that's why I came to you first. But if you don’t know anything then I guess that idea was a bust.”
“No I- I haven't seen anything like this before. Are you hurt? You cut off your own leg! But you have a new one,” said Twilight as she saw that Pinkie had all her limbs intact.
“Well, I was hurting quite a lotta for a bit there. Cutting off my leg isn’t a problem but hot things hurt a lot! I uh… I'm sorry for the mess everywhere,” said Pinkie bashfully looking at the blood covering the ground and the inside of the oven. “I really wanted to work my way up to showing you what I really look like but I couldn't take how hot that was.”
“It’s okay Pinkie I’ll uh, I’ll clean that later, although I'm not sure where I could even dispose of an entire pony leg without ponies asking questions heh,” said Twilight as she nervously laughed while staring at the offending limb.
“Oh, I can take care of that! I’ll just eat it later–” Pinkie started as she turned to see if she could loosen the amputated leg.
“NO THAT’S OKAY!” shouted Twilight quickly as she quickly moved over to the oven and slammed it shut. “I’ll, uh, probably just bury it or something,” she spoke as quickly as she could, not wanting to even think about that idea.
Pinkie backed away from the oven and tried to give Twilight as much space as she could. “Yeah, sorry, no that would be weird, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s… fine… so if we don’t know what you are, can you tell me what you can do? Maybe I can figure out something from there.” Twilight turned to look more closely at Pinkie.
“Oh, ok! So I can do a lotta things that other ponies can’t. I can get really big or small and hide away the rest of me. I can grow any sorta body part I want. I can’t really feel hurt unless it's something really hot or cold,” said Pinkie, firing each thought off in rapid succession.
“You can't feel pain? Can you feel anything?” replied Twilight, her brow knitting in confusion.
“I can still feel things like how hot something is or if something is poking me or how rough something is, but I only hurt when it's crazy hot or cold.” Pinkie looked down at the leg she had regrown.
“Were you always like this?”
“For as long as I can remember, but I didn’t always know about it. When I was really little I used to get into all sorts of accidents like falling off the roof of the barn or accidentally stabbing myself with one of Granny Pie’s sewing needles. Looking back on it now it should have been more obvious to me but at the time I just thought that was how it was for everyone.
“I realized something was different when my sister Maud broke her leg one day. She doesn't show a lot of emotion but after that happened she was screaming and cried the whole rest of the day. I only cried when I was sad or upset, but that never happened when I hurt my body, just when something hurt my feelings. Whenever my body was hurt it would fix itself back up lickety-split, but Maud’s leg took weeks to fix.”
Twilight found herself more collected now than before. She watched and listened as Pinkie explained her story and noted that she was again familiar to her. This really was Pinkie, she was more sure of it now than before. Though this surety didn't make her less tense at the thought of what she saw before.
“Wait, I can understand taking a while to realize something was different if it was just not feeling pain. But how did you not realize when you… changed like that?” asked Twilight. She was now thinking about how Pinkie’s family could have missed something as obvious as their daughter falling off a roof.
Pinkie winced a bit as she recalled the painful memory of when she first transformed. “Well, I didn’t transform like that until I was five. I didn’t even know I could do that before then, I just thought I was a pony and that everypony healed pretty fast.” Pinkie started to paw at the ground absentmindedly, trying to recall the events leading up to the traumatic incident.
“It was Hearth's Warming Eve and I was allowed to look after the furnaces myself for the first time. It may be surprising but I actually used to be really clumsy, I mean, there wasn’t really a need to not be clumsy for me since nothing hurt. Well, until that day. I was stoking the fires on my own and singing and dancing around in the spirit of the holiday when I tripped and fell onto the side of one of the furnaces and… well, that new pain was crazy bad. I started making scary noises and my body kinda exploded a bit, kinda like today.” Pinkie trembled slightly as she thought of the furnace, her face was downcast and she hugged her newly grown hoof.
“Maud was the one who found me like that, she already knew about me even though the rest of my family and I didn’t. She was able to calm me down even though I was really freaking out over not being a pony. Eventually, I was able to change back into looking like me and I had calmed down enough to realize that Maud should have been freaking out too.
“I asked her why she was okay with all of this and she said that she was the one who found me originally, and also that I was adopted. I guess it should have been pretty obvious just looking at me and my sisters that I couldn’t be related by blood but I was a little filly at the time.”
Twilight focused on that little word, found. “She found you? How? Where?”
“There was a huge shower of shooting stars when Maud was little. She went out the next day to see if she could find any fragments of them. You wouldn’t know it looking at her but Maud reeealy likes rocks. When she went out to find the shards she found a big crater with a big meteor in it.
“There was a big crack in it with some weird black goop oozing out of it. I guess that black goop was me because it lashed out at her and took some of her blood, then it got all small and mushed together until it looked like me.
“She took me back to our parents and they decided to take me in, even though I was just a baby. I can’t remember any of this though, my earliest memories are of playing with my sisters.” Pinkie smiled warmly thinking of this.
Twilight’s eyes widened as she realized “You’re from space? Wow… that would explain a lot of it, but it does make knowing exactly what you are difficult. There’s no literature on extraterrestrial life, Pinkie, before I saw this I wouldn’t have believed it existed at all.”
Pinkie’s eyes drooped in disappointment “Oh… oh gosh you don’t think I was sent as some sorta alien invasion do you?!” Pinkie became slightly panicked at the thought of helping some evil alien overlord take over the planet.
“No, I don’t think we need to worry about that. There would probably be a lot more of your kind if that was happening,” Twilight spoke as reassuringly as she could. “Although you mentioned before that taking some of your sister's blood was how you were able to look like that originally, so in a way, you are blood-related to at least Maud right?”
Pinkie looked up surprised, then she grinned “Your right, Twilight! Oh, that’s amazing, I never thought of it like that before, I can’t wait to tell Maud about it next time I see her.”
Twilight smiled, seeing Pinkie happy again made the world feel right. “Well, I'm glad you’re feeling better about it. I’m sorry for trying to run earlier, I feel pretty bad about trying to leave you when you were that scared…”
Pinkie looked surprised at the sentiment “Oh nonono, you don’t need to apologize for that, I know how scary I can look, you don’t know how thankful I am you listened to anything I said at all!” Pinkie moved to hug her but stopped as she thought that Twilight might not want to touch her after all she saw.
Twilight saw her pause and took the initiative, hugging her and bringing her close. She felt Pinkie stiffen up but shortly after she seemed to melt into the embrace and Twilight felt her hiccup and heave a bit as she started sniffling.
“Oh thank you so much, Twilight! I was so scared about today, I haven’t even told my other family about this yet,” Pinkie wept softly as she leaned into Twilight’s shoulder.
Twilight rubbed her on her withers slowly trying to calm her down a little. “Pinkie I would never leave you if you needed me… do you want to tell our friends about this or do you want to keep it a secret still?”
Pinkie stiffened again. “I should tell them. If you accepted me like this I need to give them the chance to… but could you help me do it? And come up with the best-not-scary-way to do it?”
Twilight squeezed tighter “Of course I will, Pinkie. Whenever you want to do it I’ll be there with you. I believe that our friends will understand, especially if it isn’t sprung as a surprise on them like today was heh.”
Pinkie smiled as her breathing came under her control again and she let herself be in the moment of embrace with her friend. She felt that things would be alright going forward.