Day One: The Only Thing You Have To Fear Is...Everything!
A/N: Ya’lll wanted it, so I’ll take a crack at it!
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Ahh, what a wonderful dream, Fluttershy thought as she opened her eyes to an equally wonderful morning that bathed her cottage in warm sunlight that brought her many nesting birds out of their slumber to fill the air with their songs of joy. This was great; nothing bad was happening! It was almost too good to be true! The butter yellow pegasus rose from her bed, stretched, and trotted to the window, tossing open the shutters to greet the day with a smile on her face…a smile that quickly turned to a grimace of horror as she spotted the wispy, ground-level cloud just inches away from her face. Some call it fog, others would call it mist, nopony would call the common early morning phenomenon terrifying…nopony except for Fluttershy, for this wonderful morning wasn’t just any ordinary wonderful morning.
No, far from it, this was day six of Fluttershy’s personal hell physically manifested; day six of the Element of Kindness’ heart-pounding ordeal through the most unfounded fears her life had ever thrown at her…as well as the sixth day of the return of Flutterguy. A baritone shriek (yes, get that through your mind, a baritone shriek) of pure, unadulterated terror shattered the peaceful morning, sending the birds into startled flight and causing the squirrels to become so confused that they went into early hibernation due to sheer consternation. In all honesty, any jazz singer would kill to have a voice like that, but Fluttershy would murder a whole shedful of cutesy-wootsy critters just to be rid of the damn thing!
Fluttershy’s panicked hooves scrabbled backwards on the dirt floor of her cottage, where once ornately-carved hardwood flooring had been, and tip-hoofed to the front door, giving a (by this time) apathetic Angel Bunny the most helpless shrug of her life before unlatching the small door that covered the peephole. She stared out at the multitude of wooden table fragments, recently-torn-up floorboards, and shredded pink wallpaper that lay scattered all over the front lawn like the remains of some foreign battlefield comprised of flowering shrubbery, quaint birdhouses, and a gently burbling creek.
To passersby, it would seem like the yellow mare had suddenly decided to redecorate her cottage without any real plan of action, and in all honesty, if one were to remove the baritone gasp of fright at the sight of her defeated "foes", the general mayhem surrounding the cottage, and the befuddled pets milling about, it would seem to be a truly normal and wonderful morning indeed…oh, wait, also ignore the haphazard gathering of turnips still smoldering from last night’s bonfire and filling the air with the rank smell of smoky roots and burnt dirt. Yeah, just sweep that under the proverbial rug of blissful ignorance too…
As the mare retracted her head from the peephole, the pink mane of which had been crudely trimmed down close to her skull, she realized that she’d left the window open, practically an invitation for that vicious mist to enter and do…well, something horrible, she just knew it!
I’ll get you Rainbow Dash, the crewcut-maned pegasus thought as she slammed and bolted the shutters tightly just in time, leaning against them and heaving great breaths of fright. You and your little turtle too! Her only solace lay in the fact that there was supposedly only one day left of this torture.
Ok, perhaps some clarification is needed before we attempt this whole “en media res” thing, eh?
6 Days Earlier…
What’s the first thing that comes to one’s mind when one hears the phrase “a pony of extremes?” One likely thinks of Rainbow Dash, fast, brash and brave, soaring the skies with wild abandon and showing no fear in the face of the greatest danger. Or one may think of Twilight Sparkle, budding master of all things magical and scientific; or Rarity, the greatest fashionista/queen of melodrama in Equestria; or Applejack, the most extreme rodeo pony and applebucker this side of Apploosa. Or even more likely, one thinks of Pinkie Pie, the off-the-walls pink mare from Ponyville who had thrown more extreme parties than anypony else on the planet, or at the very least more parties by sheer volume alone.
All are likely candidates for the title “pony of extremes”, and in truth, all could win and carry it with ease, if not for one teensy little problem: there exists one other pony of even greater extremes than they. Who is it you ask? Well, the answer may surprise you…then again, since process of elimination (as well the story title) has likely already led you to conclude about whom we’ll be speaking of, this section of narrative is simply needlessly stringing you along at this point, so…enough chit-chat (time is candy), let’s cut to the chase!
Fluttershy...how could she possibly be extreme? She’s shy and demure and does her very best to participate in the least extreme things she could possibly manage; watching the Great Butterfly Migration actually ranks near the “adventurous” end of her activities spectrum. She tends a backyard full of cute critters that experience problems ranging from stomach aches to the occasional twisted limb or unexpected newborn baby. She’s pushed around by a bunny for pete’s sake, though granted he is in the possession of “a vicious streak a mile wide,” or so I’ve heard a certain wizard go on about (don’t ask)…but I digress, badly I might add.
Truth be told, Fluttershy is extreme in the fact that the pendulum upon which her character traits swing is so varied. Nopony in Equestria can go from staring a dragon or cockatrice down by herself one moment, to quite literally being so scared of her own shadow that she leaps into a bush in fear the next. Unfortunately, the more extreme a pony’s character traits, the more strongly they tend to be affected by the Poison Joke plant.
Why bring up Poison Joke, you ask? Because it was the root (no pun intended) of Fluttershy’s current predicament.
But wait, surely Fluttershy knew to stay away from the nasty plant that so embarrassingly afflicted her friends and herself, right? Surely such a careful pony would learn her lesson! On the contrary, she’d avoided it like the plague, even going so far as to mark the areas of Poison Joke in the Everfree Forest with warning signs so that no further creatures would fall prey to its magical prankster properties. But nopony, possibly not even Pinkie Pie could have foreseen Fluttershy ingesting a conveniently placed sandwich complete with a “For My Pal, Fluttershy” toothpick-mounted sign impaling the freshly sliced bread. It had looked so inviting sitting there on that picnic table, and Fluttershy had been quite hungry after finally perking up her courage and helping to set up the decorations for the upcoming Nightmare Night…unfortunately, that was exactly what Rainbow Dash, Poyville’s self-proclaimed number one prankster (or number one everything you’d soon discover if you got into a decent conversation with the cocky cyan mare), had been counting on!
The morning after, Fluttershy had awoken with an unfathomably ludicrous terror of vapor, and the frightened mare had practically broken down Twilight’s door just after dawn that day, shouting about how the “clouds were trying to eat her!” The unicorn had let her in and immediately gone to task on figuring out just what the hay was going on. True, she’d known Fluttershy to have some wild phobias, thunderclouds being one of them, but fear of just clouds in general was definitely a new one for her, as was the fear of being ingested by them…she wasn’t even sure if there was a clinical name for something like that!
Through a short explanation including a trial and error process strongly supported by the evidence of the return of Flutterguy, Twilight determined the cause of the symptoms to be none other than Poison Joke. But when Fluttershy protested that she’d never get near that plant again for any amount of bits, much less eat it, she recalled that the only food she’d ingested recently that she hadn’t prepared herself had in fact been that sandwich Dash had offered her…a sandwich laced with crushed bits of Poison Joke.
Dash had only expected a little Flutterguy, maybe a few laughs, a half-apologetic pat or two of comfort on her oldest friend’s back, and then things would be back to normal. A harmless prank, right? …hardly. As said, Poison Joke tends to modify certain pony traits, making the most prominent ones even more so, and in Fluttershy’s case, it had served to magnify her most unfounded fears, quite metaphorically shattering the already tediously constructed dam of common sense that held back a wellspring of terrors so bizarre and out-of-left-field as to leave anypony else scratching their heads in bemusement. To them, it may seem like a silly phobia, but to Fluttershy, well…suffice to say that in her mind, getting away from the thing that frightened her the most at that moment became second to none on her list of things to do (and Celestia help anypony that got between her and the nearest emergency exit door in the process).
“Normal Poison Joke infection via skin contact will wear off within a few days unless aided by certain herbs. Ingestion, on the other hoof…well, it says here that once the effects have been noticed, the poison has already established itself in the blood, and it must be filtered out via the body’s natural processes,” Twilight Sparkle looked up from the “Supernaturals” book she’d been skimming to glance at Fluttershy, who was doing her level best to stay away from the windows in the Library, running to and fro to avoid the ominous stares of the panes of glass containing tunnel-like visions of bright blue sky and…clouds, she shuddered. The pegasus looked up, sea-green eyes dilated in fright and worry before finally getting her mouth to work around her fear-thickened tongue and tightened throat.
“S-so how long a-am I g-gonna be like this f-for, T-twilight?” she asked in rumbling whimper, and the unicorn had to mentally slap herself to keep from helplessly giggling at the ridiculous scene before her. But this was her friend and she needed her help, so no laughing-at least until she left…but even then, only a chuckle to relieve the tension she felt building in her diaphragm!
“Uh…usually about a week or so,” Twilight replied as grimly as she could muster, if only to hide the growing hitch at the corner of her mouth.
“A WEEK?!” Fluttershy/guy moaned, throwing her hooves and mane over her face. “How the hay am I going to go a WEEK while being afraid of clouds and mist!?”
“That’s all you’re experiencing?” Twilight cocked an eyebrow, flipping back through the text to distract her from the sound of the bass-toned voice that clashed terribly with Fluttershy’s timid actions. “I’d say that’s kinda lucky actually.”
“How in the hoof is this lucky, Twilight?!” the pegasus cried/boomed, closing her eyes tightly to avoid the sight of a fluffy cloud floating past the view of the nearest window-sure, it may look harmless, but you never could tell with those clouds! They could turn into a rhinoceros or something even more fierce and gobble you up in a heartbeat if you weren’t careful!
“Because it says here that ingestion often leads to multiple effects instead of just one,” Twilight prodded the book with a hoof. “And they tend to crop up over time as the poison works its way through a pony’s system…Fluttershy, when did you eat that sandwich?”
“Yesterday”
“So about 24 hours ago,” the unicorn scratched her chin and nodded once. “Ok, just a heads up: due to the “playful” nature of the plant, new effects tend to pop up following each 24 hour awake/asleep cycle, so the next phobia you get may be only minutes away from arriving,” she glanced up at the clock and looked back to find that Fluttershy had quite suddenly gone missing. But where the hay would she go in her condition; certainly not outside… The mystery was solved moments later when Twilight noticed the trembling pink tail poking out from under her bed. “Fluttershy, you ok?”
“No! Hide me already…um, now please, thank you!” she demanded, refusing to come out from under the bed.
“I can’t help unless you come outta there, Fluttershy,” Twilight knelt down and gave her scared friend a helpful smile. “C’mon, I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Eeyup”
Ignoring how eerily similar that sounded to Fluttershy’s coltfriend Big Macintosh (where the hay was he to help her in this anyways?!), as well as beating back the sudden and disturbing intrusion of the imagining of what those two would sound like in bed…they’d put the Royal Canterlot Opera to shame…oh, sweet Celestia, no, no, no, no, no!!! After killing that thought with copious amounts of mental fire, the unicorn blew a quick stream of air out of her lips and tried a different approach.
“You know, the phobia that shows up could be anything…aren’t you afraid of the dark?”
“…”
“And claustrophobic?”
“…um, yes?”
“And isn’t the underside of the bed both of those things?”
Twilight Sparkle had just enough time to lean up away from the edge of the bed before the realization slammed through Fluttershy like a buffalo through a hay-bale. You couldn’t have finished your expletive of surprise fast enough before the yellow pegasus bolted from out under the bed, trampled Twilight, galloped across the room, and-damning her fears for clouds to Tartarus-ran out the door, taking the time to open and close it gently (she still had standards, ya know) before resuming her terror-induced stampede into Ponyville. She left the Librarian dazed and confused, and seeing little yellow and pink pegasi dancing around her head like something out of a crazy cartoon.
Huh, so that really IS possible…I’ll have to record my findings after I finish losing and regaining consciousne-.
Meanwhile, the Element of Kindness did her best not to look at the sky, but that inevitably led to her staring at the ground and not watching where she was going, leading her to run into a group of ponies eating brunch upon tables loosely scattered between the grocery booths that lined the main thoroughfare of town. Ordinarily, the local ponies were used to Fluttershy being a little jumpy, and many simply took it in stride. However, today was a little more than ordinary, and it took many ponies by surprise when the panicked pegasus crashed head-long into a heavy oaken table many times her own weight with a sudden and solid THUD. A number of concerned ponies rose to their hooves and rushed to the fallen mare’s aid as she too joined the Suddenly-Unconscious Club.
Folks, Poison Joke is a hell of a drug…
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A/N: stay tuned for day two!
For all those wondering…yes, I’m a Fluttermac shipper :P
No, I don’t hate Fluttershy…and yes, dear ol’ Dashie will get some sorta comeuppance for this…
And kudos if you got all the random references! XD