Based on a True Story!

Disclaimer: I’m neither Lauren Faust, Hasbro, nor, last time I checked, the Hub. All rights belong to them.

Also, the following is, seriously, not a criticism of anybody. I know full well that any or all of the following elements could be used to create a perfectly good story in the right hands.

It’s just that mine aren’t the right hands.

I was just driving to the store for milk. Can you imagine a more harmless activity? OK, sure, it was in the next town over, but still -- the next town over. It’s not like I was trying to be Columbo on his way to discover Columbia or whatever. I hadn’t been drinking, I was familiar with most of the route, and the words “What could possibly go wrong?” had never passed through my lips.

What I’m trying to convey here is, well, that it wasn’t my fault. At least, not at first. But one car ride later I was in a forest -- somehow -- and rather briefly, as for some reason most economy cars aren’t designed for the forest. That left me running for the last day and a half from things out of a taxidermist’s worst nightmares, trying very hard not to end up another link in the food chain. And that’s how I ended up stumbling into the odd little cottage, sending various startled animals scattering. “Help... Me... Help?” By this point my poor throat was too dry to do more than croak.

I heard a voice coming from another room. “You need help?” The voice itself carried such compassion that I could feel myself relaxing immediately.

Relaxing was a mistake. I’d been driven here by the simple need to survive, and had only gotten this far by very much not relaxing. Now my brain and body had just gotten word that it was closing time, and suddenly I could barely keep my eyes open. I took a few glances around as leaning against a wall for support became sliding down the wall and using the floor for support instead. Good floor. Stay right there. I haven’t told this to many floors, but I think I love you. “I’m in the same room as your horse.”

“Horse?”

“The one with the pink mane. And the wings.” Wings? Well, that should narrow it down. Out of all the horses she keeps in her cottage, how many could have wings? This is what your brain does after nearly two days without water, food, or rest.

“What are you?” she asked. “How did you get here?”

This time I saw the horse’s lips move. Hey, pretty good trick. Now do that while drinking a glass of water. I held up my iPad, which had been useless for the last day of trekking through godforsaken forest. But it it felt like my last link to sanity and a world where technicolor monsters weren’t trying to eat me, and I hadn’t been about to leave it behind. “Apple Maps,” I answered the second question, the one my feverish brain could remember.

“Oh my!” she exclaimed as if it were the harshest of curses, all the while looking cross in the cutest manner I’d ever seen. “Applejack will have a lot to answer for! But what are you?”

I vainly tried to blink away the gray fog that was creeping in from the edges of my vision. What am I? I got as far as “hum” when my last active brain cell decided it wasn’t going to do all this hard work alone.

I passed out. This turned out to be the best decision I’d made in two days.

==========

I woke in a bed somewhat refreshed, but very sore. I’d lost a shoe in some muck several hours back, a necessary sacrifice when something with the head of a lion and the body of everything else decided I looked tasty. Worse, between the sunburn, briars, and brambles, I didn’t have a square inch of skin I would’ve inflicted on my worst enemy. Not even Jerry McGonnogle, and I know he’s been stealing my paper.

“You’re awake again,” a gentle voice noted happily. “Can you drink some more water?” It was the horse, of course. She gingerly poured some water from a pitcher into a cup, then held the cup to my mouth, all with her own muzzle.

This awakened a ravenous thirst, and suddenly any concerns I had about drinking water prepared with someone else’s mouth were cast aside. I drank too quickly and choked for it, and when I spoke my voice was a little hoarse. “Where am I?” Cliche, I know, but can you blame me?

“My house,” she said gently, as if afraid I might bolt. “My name is Fluttershy. Do you remember your name?”

I eyed the butterfly tattoos on her rump for the first time, then the room I was in. Sunlight was pouring through the window between pink and yellow curtains, and from the angle it looked like morning. “Drath. Drath Bloch.”

"Darth?"

“No, Drath.” I gave a derisive snort. Who would name themselves “Darth?” I eyed her more carefully, but she stubbornly refused to stop being equine. “You’re not real, are you?” I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted, the crazy one or the crazy one.

She stepped back as if spooked, then turned away in either fright, shame, or both. Suddenly green flame seemed to consume her, leaving behind a creature both black and insectile. “How did you know?” she asked, almost too quietly to hear. Despite the change in form, the kind voice was the same, and in any case I was too tired to run any more.

I looked at her blankly. After all, I didn’t even know what it was I “knew.” I’m not all that bright, I know, but while I’m usually ready and willing to defend my ignorance, something told me that this would be a good time to keep my mouth shut.

“Will you tell anyone?” she asked.

I shook my head. Tell who? Tell them what, for crying out loud?

“I left my colony over a decade ago,” she explained dejectedly. “You can’t imagine what it’s like. I know everypony’s different, but changeling drones, well, we’re supposed to all be the same.” She buried her face... muzzle... thingy in her hand... hoof... feet... thingies. “I swear, I’m no threat to anypony here in Ponyville. I live off the feelings of love from all the animals I help, and then only a little at a time.” She looked back at me, tears falling from those glowing, blue eyes. “Thank you for keeping my secret.”

She approached me more closely, placing one claw-hoof-thingy on my chest, but I was still too weak to properly shudder. “You know,” she said softly, “I can’t tell you what it’s like to have someone I can share this with. After all these years, to find someone I can relax with, and just be myself.”

Well, that told me at least three things: the name of the city I was in, that these were ponies rather than horses, and that I was absolutely, positively nuts. Round the bend. Three fries short of a full box of crayons. My elevator was a few bricks short of a load. My Happy Meal didn’t go all the way to the top. I think the polite term is “bonkers.”

From another room, there was a knock at the door. Another quick burst of green flame restored Fluttershy to her normal -- if that could possibly be the right word -- pink and yellow poniness. She gave me a quick, desperate look for reassurance. I nodded at her more out of reflex than anything else, and received a relieved smile in return. And you know that tired old cliche about a smile lighting up a room? Turns out it actually can happen.

“That’s Twilight. Wait right here, OK?” At my nod, she left, then re-entered with, alas, another pony. I checked for wings. Yep. Horn? Yep. Wait. Horn?

“Unicorn?” I asked.

“Alicorn,” Twilight said. “Talking... bear?” The last sounded like an accusation, somehow.

“Human,” I corrected, feeling defensive somehow about being capable of speech. Which was especially sad, considering the source of the accusation.

A puzzled look crossed her face, and she looked at Fluttershy curiously. “He just walked out of the Everfree Forest?”

“The tracks led from there. He said Apple’s maps led him here.”

“Actually, Apple Maps were supposed to take me to the store, but they got me to the forest instead. I mean, I knew they had problems, but... When my car broke down --” by virtue of hitting a tree someone had carelessly left in the middle of a forest “-- I walked here.” Well, I ran a lot, too. Some of those creatures were nasty enough to make a Tyrannosaurus Rex look like Barney.

“Either way,” Twilight said confidently, “Applejack will make this right. I’m sure of it.”

I was sure of it, too. Applejack, tequila, beer -- any of those would help immeasurably.

“Fluttershy, do you mind if I borrow your patient for a while? I think this is an unknown species of animal.”

This was a bit much. “I’m not an animal!” I paid for my shout with another bout of agonized coughing.

“Sorry,” she said, both sounding and looking genuinely contrite. “Plant, then.”

I opened my mouth, and closed it again. My throat was simply too sore to argue. Besides, this was probably all a hallucination anyway. They could tell me I was a tree for all I cared.

“It should be all right, Twilight. He’s badly sunburned, though. I’ve seen it happen to pigs before, but not bears,” Fluttershy added. I stared wordlessly, trying to decide if I was being insulted again and, if so, how much. “I mixed a salve up for him. Let me send it with you.”

==========

A few minutes later I was floating alongside Twilight, en route to her place to be “studied.” You can imagine how much I was looking forward to that. Any sign of “probing” and I swear I’m running back to that forest. The floating trick she’d described as “magic,” which really only gave me a label for my ignorance and chalked up another point for the “nutty as a nutcake” side.

Another burst of magic opened the door to a tree and closed it behind us. “Tree,” I said, after working up enough spit. “You live in a tree.”

“It’s the library, too.”

“Of course. That explains everything.” Actually, I feared any more explanations of this type would just make my headache worse. Not that I actually had a headache, mind you, but I knew it was coming sooner or later.

“Spike!” she called upward.

“Coming!” A big purple lizard walked down the stairs. No, not Barney. Life still sent the occasional kindness my way, if only to lull me into a false sense of security.

“Spike, send a letter to the princess. I found a new animal -- sorry, plant -- that I think she’ll want to see in person. I believe it may be sapient, but evidence so far is inconclusive.”

I painfully pursed my parched lips as I thought about this. “I think as soon as I can get to a dictionary, I’m going to be offended.”

The little dinosaur thing had written out something and, instead of sending it anywhere, just set fire to the thing. With his breath. OK, not a dinosaur. A dragon. Still better than Barney, all things considered. At least with dragons there wouldn’t be anybody spontaneously breaking into song, right?

The destruction of her message didn’t seem to faze Twilight at all. “And run to the market for some food, would you, Spike?” She set me down and asked, “Sorry, ‘Drath,’ was it? What do you eat? Raw fish? Seeds? Nuts? Sandwiches?”

“Sandwiches,” I answered, now remembering that I hadn’t eaten in over a day, surprised by my lack of appetite, and concerned with their odd fixation with me being a bear. For the former, I guess I was just too beat up to feel properly hungry. For the latter, I was hoping they’d eventually get the truth through their... cute... little heads.

The dragon exited, after a suspicious don’t-cause-any-trouble glance my way. Coming from even a small fire-breathing dragon, I took it seriously.

“Now,” Twilight said, rolling in an array of electronic equipment that looked like she’d bought it at Victor von Frankenstein’s garage sale. “I have a confession to make...”

I knew she was going to say that there might be some “discomfort,” which is of course the same thing as “pain” except happening to somebody else. “This is going to hurt?”

“Not a lot,” she protested quickly. Her face was all openness, honesty, and care, so naturally I didn’t trust her. “I designed it all myself. At worst, it’ll be like a little pinprick, really. It’s just that I have to know more about you if you’re going to wander around my hometown.”

“Is this to prove I’m not a...” I searched back for the word, and then had second thoughts. What if this led to her suspecting Fluttershy? But I had to know more of where I was, on the off chance any of it was real. “A changeling?” I asked, eyeing the test devices warily. A burst of green light returned my attention to the alicorn.

Rather, what had been the alicorn. “How did you know?” she asked, staring at me. “I thought I’d covered every last detail. All these years and nopony found out. Nopony event hinted. Even my own ‘brother’ doesn’t know.” She shook her head in wonder. “And yet you knew within minutes.” She looked afraid and, somehow, fascinated at the same time. “I had no idea humans were so... So frighteningly intelligent,” she finished warily.

I gave this a moment’s thought. “Well, I don’t like to brag.”

“Then you also as wise as you are intelligent,” she told me, gravely.

“I... imagine that’s true enough.” If not quite in the way she meant.

“I swear, I am no threat to Ponyville, or Equestria for that matter. I left my colony years ago, not wanting to be a part of their terrible emotional vampirism. I subsist instead on the simple feelings of friendship here in Ponyville. I could never hurt any of my friends -- or anyone, really.”

“I believe you,” I said. “And I, uh promise not to tell anyone.” I ran out of words, at least any words that wouldn’t expose my ignorance, which for me tends to be the same thing anyhow. I shrugged instead, and winced as my sunburned neck rubbed against my collar.

She flared with that eldritch green light, a pony once again. “I’m sorry! Let me get some of this salve onto you.” My shirt floated off as the jar Fluttershy sent moved toward Twilight. She slowly rubbed it on me, using her hooves instead of magic for some reason, but it felt a lot gentler than I’d feared. “You have such interesting... musculature?” she said, finishing doubtfully.

OK, so I need to get to the gym a bit more often. Like, someday ever. “It’s common among my species. We do it with lots of television.”

“And your incredible intellect,” she breathed, giving me a look that might have been coyish had it come from anything other than a giant bug disguised as a farm animal. “I can’t help but be a little... intrigued.” I was beginning to suspect the reason she was using her actual hooves to run the salve all over me. I have mentioned that I’m not always that smart, right? Well, given enough time I can still catch on.

And have you ever been pawed by a quadrupedal sentient insect disguised as a talking pony? I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that would be a “no.” Can something with four legs technically even be an insect? Doesn’t it have to have eight legs or something? I knew I was distracting myself with these thoughts rather than face the situation at hand and, you know, I was perfectly fine with that approach.

Both Twilight’s gentle purring and my own desperate taxonomic musings were interrupted by Spike, who opened the door carrying a paper grocery bag.

“All right,” Spike said. “I got a variety just to be safe. What kind of sandwich did you want? We have daffodil, rose, sunflower, and petunia.”

==========

“Pinkie!” Twilight called out as we entered the oddly empty Cupcake Corner.

“Yes, Tw-- Oh, wow!” The pink pony who popped up from behind the counter, who I was happy to see had neither wings nor horn -- because not having wings or a horn makes a bubblegum-pink talking pony so much easier to accept -- jumped straight up upon seeing me and then somehow hovered for a split second before galloping over. “Wow! Can I have one? If Gummy doesn’t get too jealous of it?”

“His name is Drath, Pinkie, and he needs some food.” Twilight looked around and considered, “Actually, could you take him up to your room for a bit? I’m afraid if other customers come in they might stare.”

“Okie dokie lokie!” the energetic pony said happily.

“I have to go record a few notes I made about skin resistance, density, and pain tolerance,” Twilight noted cheerfully. “I’ll be back in a jiffy, or I’ll send someone. Oh, and send Applejack the bill.”

Pinkie led me up the stairs to her strangely spartan room. “Would you like a...” She tapped a hoof to her chin in thought. “Cupcake?”

“OK,” I said, thinking this a fairly safe answer. What could possibly go wrong with cupcakes?

“What flavor do you want?”

I grimaced, suspecting I now knew exactly what could go wrong with cupcakes. “You mean flavors like daffodil, petunia, and such?”

“No, silly! Chocolate? Banana walnut? Cherrychanga?”

“Yes,” I said simply. “Please.” By now I’d gained enough strength to be miserably hungry. Yay me.

She was gone for only half a second, somehow, and came back with three of the best cupcakes I’ve ever smelled. “I made these cupcakes with my friends!” she announced with a tremendous grim.

“That’s, um, great.” She had food. I wanted food. Nothing else about the desserts could possibly be that important. After all, I was hungry enough to eat a horse. No, even I wasn’t going to say that out loud, here.

“A lot of my friends went into these cupcakes. They know they don’t have cutie marks in baking, but they said they needed a place to lay low while the train station was being rebuilt.” She frowned as if in deep thought. “Oh, I’m sure it was perfectly innocent. Anyway, I sent half home with them and sold most of the rest for our CMC Repair Fund, but we have three left.”

Cutie marks? Wait, would knowing what those are help me eat faster? No? Then it can wait.

After I finished two, something occurred to me. “Um, ‘Pinkie,’ was it?”

“It still is,” she supplied helpfully.

“Ohhhkay.” I needed to make conversation, somehow. This was, after all, a completely alien world. Well, except for the sky, grass, trees, air, ponies, houses, cupcakes... All right, this was a slightly alien world, but I still needed to know more about it.

There was one subject I desperately wanted to steer the conversation away from, though. What would be safe? Oh, the old standby. “Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?” Hey, if the usual weather was blizzards of frozen nitrogen, I wanted to know. I’d need a scarf.

She flashed the now-familiar green flame. “Omigosh! I suddenly remembered for no reason that I’m a changeling!”

“What.” I think safeties had just disengaged my brain from reality.

“This explains so much!”

“Are these, um, magic cupcakes?” Because that would explain a lot, too.

She bounced around the room in quasi-insectoid-pony-thing-ish joy. “I’ve always wondered why I can do the things I do! Well, not always, but once a week or so. And not all the things I do but then am I sure I know what I can do and maybe that makes sense it’s hard to say I don’t know how I forgot and won’t everyone be so surprised and you’ve made me so happy!”

I looked down at my last cupcake. “Um, Pinkie? Just asking from sheer, random curiosity here, but, just in case, is this something that no one else can know?”

She turned back into a pony and then instantly deflated. And when I say “deflated,” I mean that literally, at least as far as her mane was concerned. With a little “pbbbbbt” noise and everything. We’re talking some very serious deflation.

“Oh,” she said, her voice quiet for the first time. Maybe ever.

“Your secret is safe with me,” I assured her quickly. And I felt the cold chill running down my spine -- which, to be honest, felt a little good with my sunburn -- even before I consciously realized what was coming next.

She was instantly at my side. “I’m so glad to have met a friend like you,” she said softly, a hoof running through my hair. “I’m a friend to everypony in Ponyville, but I’ve never had a...” She blushed. “...Special somepony.”

She wept tears of joy and nuzzled my neck as she explained about the wonderful friends she’d made, about how she was no threat to anypony, and about how weird my ears were. I nodded and, with my characteristic great compassion and understanding, ate the last cupcake.

There was a knock on the door. “Pinkie, you in there?”

“You bet, Dashie!” she replied.

Another pony, this one looking like a survivor from an explosion in a rainbow factory, opened the door and trotted in. “Twilight told me to take the thingy to Rarity’s. Says he’ll need a change of clothes to stop that smell.”

“The ‘thingy’?” I asked, scowling.

“I guess she meant you,” the blue pony said to me, oblivious to my irritation. I decided to forgive what was probably, after all, part of my own hallucination.

==========

Later, airborne on the back of Rainbow Dash -- something that would worry me a lot more if I still believed any of this might really have been happening -- I looked on politely as she turned her head to say something.

“I just remembered I need a dress let out a bit. Because I added so much muscle,” she clarified quickly. “You know, with my constant exercise? That I do. When I exercise. Anyway, do you mind if we stop at my place first to pick up the dress?”

“No problem,” I answered. Without the constant jouncing, riding a flying pony was actually a lot easier than riding a walking one.

Then she landed on a funny-shaped cloud. While I was trying to digest this, she said, “All right! Onto your own two feet, mister.”

Step onto a... cloud? “No.” Not even if this is all a hallucination.

“What? Oh! Don’t worry, Twilight enchants it every month for when my friends visit. It’s perfectly safe.”

These were ponies who had taken in a stranger of a form completely unknown to them, fed me, tended my wounds, and had shown me nothing but kindness. I had no reason not to trust them implicitly. “No,” I repeated. Because it was still a freaking cloud!

A quick buck sent me flying. I didn’t scream, honest I didn’t, and if that was less due to courage and more due to being paralyzed with terror, I really don’t have to say. The reassuring pain as I landed on my butt, though, left me groaning more in relief than pain.

“Told ya,” she said smugly, walking into what was now obviously a house, if you looked at it just right, squinted, and added a sign saying, “This is a house.”

I followed, the cloud actually feeling soft and cool and wonderful beneath my sore feet. Looking around her place, I saw that, aside from the building material, it looked pretty conventional. More so than Twilight’s tree, in fact. “So, you live in a cloud?”

“Lots of pegasi do. It’s part of our magic; we can treat clouds like they were solid.”

I’ve mentioned before how little it helps to be told something is “magic.” Saying something is “like magic” is what you do when you can’t explain things. “And your dishes, furniture, and stuff?”

“We can put a little of our magic into the things we make.”

“And the rest of the stuff, like food, you keep in things you make?”

“Yeah. Or a unicorn casts a spell on them.”

“But what about...”

“Unicorns,” she interrupted impatiently.

I gave up on that line of questions, but there was a lot more of this world I wanted to know before I returned to sanity. “So what kind of work does a girl like you...”

I was suddenly bowled over. “Girl?” she asked, looking aghast. She rushed off, presumably to check something, then, just as I’d gotten back to my feet, tackled me again. “You’re right! I’m a mare!” she wailed. “Why didn’t anypony tell me?”

She hauled me upright somehow with those hooves and then, in a world I’d mistakenly and momentarily thought held no more surprises, decked me.

That hurt. A lot. See, I told you a headache was coming. But shouldn’t it have woken me up or something?

“Do I hit like a girl?” she asked, concern rather than malice in her voice. She then looked around and found a ball of some sort. Still dazed, I was unable to fend it off as her throw bounced off my skull, adding to the interesting echoes already present therein. “Do I throw like a girl?”

I shook my head -- which was a mistake, given what it had been through -- and tried to reassure the mare before she put me in a full-body cast. “No you’s fine, honesht,” I slurred unsteadily. I briefly tried to get up again, but then decided not to tempt fate.

Rainbow Dash looked at me with dawning dread as a whole new dimension of this newfound horror occurred to her. “Do I have to date... stallions?”

I gave her an appraising glance. “Probably not.”

She nodded to me, looking a little grateful, though shaken. “It could be worse,” she said. “At least now I can stop and ask for directions when I get lost.”

“It could be a lot worse. Imagine being some other species.”

“Yeah. Heh. Imagine. Not that, you know, that could ever happen.”

I closed my eyes, not that it helped. Oh please, not again.

I promised to keep her secrets -- both gender and species -- and then, more out of habit than anything else by now, politely fended off the resulting advances. Apparently I don’t count as a stallion. Yay me, again? After probably setting back pony gender equality a few decades, she offered me a ride to Rarity’s. I agreed, if only because walking there from a few thousand feet up seemed inadvisable.

==========

“Yes!” Rarity practically screamed with delight as she examined my form. “Yes! Darling, I can do wonderful, wonderful things with you!” It wasn’t what you think. At least, not yet.

“Just clothes like he already has, but not ripped and dirty and smelly,” Rainbow Dash said with her customary diplomacy.

“Rainbow, dear, you truly have no idea, do you? I can design clothing for an entirely new species, clothing he’ll no doubt be seen in far and wide as everypony hears about him. I can cover up any, well, aesthetic shortcomings he may have, obviously -- no offense!”

“None taken.” Honestly, the longer I spent with these ponies, the more and more it took to offend me.

“This will be the most widely-seen display of my style, skill and, above all, versatility, ever!” She stepped back, one foreleg thrown across her brow. “In all my years of fashion, this is the Best! Possible! Thing!”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Dash unenthused. “Twilight said to send Applejack the bill, by the way.”

“You’re leaving?” Rarity asked.

The pegasus started on her way out, then over the shoulder slowly explained, “Turns out I’ve got a lot to think about. I found out something today that throws everything I thought I knew into doubt. Rarity... I have to re-affirm a basic sense of my very identity and place in the world, if not the very nature of...”

“OK, dear, have fun with that,” Rarity interrupted absently as she closed the door behind the departing pegasus.

This left the pony with the weird, curly mane and I alone. So, what did I do? Like I’ve mentioned, I’m not very bright, but I decided for once that keeping my mouth shut about changelings might just make my life less complicated. “Um. Hi. Rarity, right?”

“Indeed! And your name is Darth?”

“Drath,” I corrected automatically. Why did ponies keep getting that wrong?

She nodded as she examined me some more, no doubt disregarding my name as irrelevant to the purpose at hoof. “We’ll need you out of those clothes.”

I shrugged. As I shucked my shirt, I noticed that my sunburn was already less troublesome. Fluttershy’s salve must be working wonders. I took off my pants as well. My shoe, the one not probably being used somewhere as a manticore’s chew toy, was still at Fluttershy’s place, along with what little the Everfree Forest had left of my socks.

“What’s that?” Rarity asked, indicating my underwear.

“Boxers,” I stalled, already not liking where I knew this conversation was going to go. They run around naked all the time, technically. They can’t have a nudity taboo. And even if they did, they think I’m some kind of animal. Or plant, whatever. It’d be no more odd for them to see me nude than it is for me to see them that way, and I haven’t really given it a second thought.

My boxers glowed, at which I practically jumped out of them. Of all the things I wanted to suddenly and mysteriously glow, these would not have been at the top of my list. In any case, they slithered down and, with all the self-control I could muster, I tried to look nonchalant.

The unicorn gave me a look that could, by the sufficiently paranoid, be called disdain.

“It’s cold,” I protested, just in case. It’s not paranoia if everything’s trying to get you, right? Well, it’s also not paranoia if you unexpectedly end up in a world of magical talking ponies. Why? Because. Yeah, I’m sticking with that reasoning.

Her look went from whatever it was to uncertainty. “Beg pardon, Drath? Oh, my apologies!” The shorts glowed again, then ran back up my legs. She’d evidently thought I meant I was cold without my underwear on, but I wasn’t going to complain about it. “Would you like some of those ‘boxers’ too?”

“Please,” I said. “Oh, and shoes?”

She nodded, making an absent gesture. “I’ll send some patterns to the blacksmith.”

Blacksmith? Oh, of course. For horseshoes. Which are nailed on. “No!” I objected, a little louder than I’d intended.

She jumped back, a hoof clutched to her chest. “What?” I showed her the bottom of my less-abused foot and comprehension dawned. “Oh, my. Yes, that just wouldn’t do, would it? No worries! I’m sure to think of something.” A cloth measuring tape glowed and leapt from a nearby table and flew across to me, darting here and there.

I sighed, relaxing, then looked around. “You wouldn’t have a changing room, would you?” Given their lack of a nudity taboo, they probably wouldn’t even know what such a thing was.

“What?” the unicorn asked sharply, the tape dropping to the ground.

“Changing,” I said clearly. “Change. Ing.” I then realized how abundantly I’d made clear exactly what I hadn’t said. Palm, meet face.

She nodded sadly, though at least she didn’t become a giant bug like some of the others. “How did you know?”

I peeked between my fingers to see her crying. I know I may be a little bit snarky at times; OK, maybe more than a little bit. But I’m not -- quite -- heartless, and I stepped down to stroke her mane soothingly. “There there,” I crooned. “I know you’re not like the normal changelings. You’d never hurt anyone, er, anypony.”

She shook her head and sniffled. “I never would. I’ve never even seen another of my kind for years.”

That’s what you think. “I’ll never tell,” I said instead, with all the sincerity I could. And I practice.

“Promise?” As she looked up at me, her eyes were impossibly enormous and incredibly vulnerable.

“I promise.”

She ran her velvety nose over my chest. “My muse,” she murmured, before releasing a happy sigh. Rather unlike the sigh I suppressed.

There was a knock at the door, right on schedule. Rarity wiped her eyes quickly, and, smiling at me adoringly, sang out, “Come in!”

As I quickly pulled on my jeans and shirt, I heard someone ask, “Is there some varmint here chargin’ me for things what I never bought?”

She was a cowgirl, well, cowpony, and not particularly subtle about it. Every portion of this particular pony shouted it out to the world. From her hat to her hooves, you could tell she was meant for kicking, gouging, clawing, and whatever else it took to earn a living in the roughest of ways.

Also, she was pissed.

==========

One cleared-up misunderstanding later left me no longer trying to hide in a corner -- difficult in a round room -- and instead on the ride back to her farm. Apparently there weren’t a lot of spare rooms in Ponyville; the bed I’d slept in had been Fluttershy’s own, underscoring my debt to her. However, “Sweet Apple Acres” had an empty room for some reason Applejack didn’t want to get into and, seeing her expression, I didn’t want to press her on. A pillow, courtesy of Rarity, was ensuring the safety of my already-bruised keister. When I asked Applejack if she could manage carrying me all the way back to her farm, she’d told me it was, “Jes fine -- I live on a farm, after all. I’ve smelled worse things than you.”

After a couple days, much of it spent sweating heavily, I couldn’t even argue about that last. “Do you have someplace I can wash up?”

“Got a creek.”

“I’ll take it.”

The bend in the creek was sheltered by trees from easy sight from above. I stripped completely; I’d decided preventing infections from whatever I’d run into in the Everfree Forest was worth the price of modesty, especially in front of someone who didn’t care how much she saw of me anyway. The cowpony observed me dispassionately as I scrubbed. Maybe too dispassionately. I was practically an alien here, and shouldn’t she be at least a little curious as to what an alien looked like?

I rinsed my clothes off as best I could, too, sending silent apologies to any fish downriver, and climbed out of the water. I looked back at Applejack, who, shockingly, now had a visible blush. Admittedly, it wasn’t the blush that surprised me so much as being able to see it on a bright orange pony.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I quickly interjected as I hurriedly tried to wring out my shorts, suddenly self-conscious again.

“I do,” she said, not quite looking at me now. “I’m the Element of Honesty.”

“The what of what?” I have such sparkling repartee, no?

“I represent honesty to Equestria. Same as Rarity’s generosity, Twilight’s magic, Rainbow’s loyalty, Fluttershy’s kindness, and Pinkie’s laughter.”

“Ohhhhkay.”

“Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. What I have to say is, even though you’re a smelly alien what looks most like a bear crossed with a pig, and near dead of mange besides, I’ve got a powerful attraction to you I can’t quite reckon.”

After that description, I don’t think I could’ve explained it either.

“So I have a confession to make,” she said heavily.

“No, you don’t,” I said, trying for my most reassuring voice.

“I do.”

“No. Really. You don’t.”

“I do, consarn it!”

“No! Really!”

It didn’t help, and I let out a very quiet sigh as, once again, I was faced with a giant bug looking sweetly at me. “Even though I’m a shapeshifter from a species that preys on the love of others and you look absolutely bizarre compared to any being I’ve known, I think we could really make this work if we tried hard enough,” she said earnestly. Maybe she moonlighted as the Element of Completely Ridiculous Optimism.

Great. A love-sucking vampire bug and a bald, smelly bear-plant. Truly a match made in heaven.

Some small hint of my doubt may have showed in my expression, and she looked at me oddly. “You heard me say ‘shapeshifter,’ right?” She tapped her chin with one claw. “Let’s see, gotta be a mammal. Extrapolatin’ for the female of that there species...” She flickered with green flame again, and I found myself facing a young, adult, human female. She stood there expectantly, with straw-colored hair that draped down over one shoulder in a ponytail.

You might think that I was reminding myself that this was, despite appearances, an alien bug I knew next to nothing about, in a world I knew next to nothing about, and so I was reminding myself to be cautious. If so, you might have forgotten that this was a culture without a nudity taboo.

Technically she wasn’t naked. There was the hat, after all. Nevertheless, it wasn’t difficult to see that she was every bit as fit a human as she was a pony. I wasn’t thinking of sensible caution. My brain wasn’t doing a lot of thinking at all, actually, possibly due to a growing lack of bloodflow.

“Gah,” I said suavely.

“What?” She was taken aback. “Not purty enough? All righty, maybe somethin’ a mite more foalbearin’?” Another flicker and her hips were rounder, her breasts more generous.

“Gahhhhh...” Even I don’t know what I meant there, but I think at least some of it was a plea for mercy. She looked down over me and saw that the evidence of her success was, well, outstanding, and grinned delightedly.

A shadow swept over us and, with another flicker of green, Applejack was again a pony, now bowing low. “Princess!”

I felt a gust of wind and heard something set down lightly behind me. Looking from my shorts -- which were still in my hand -- to the main obstacle to getting them back on in a hurry, I groaned. “Princess. Of course.”

And you know it’s totally not a self-insert fic because he’s named ‘Drath’ instead of ‘Darth,’ right?

Will Drath ever find a pony who isn’t a changeling? Will he open his mouth one too many times and convince Celestia to give the whole conversion bureau thing a try after all? And why do authors ask questions here that a reader can’t possibly answer, and the author already knows the answer to anyway? All these and more might be answered in the next somewhat exciting chapter!